Who is that masked man?

Note: I wrote this a while ago. It's a condensed version of a 20-page paper I wrote earlier this year on a topic that I thoroughly enjoy. Hope you do, too!

I’m lying on the bed in my brother’s room staring at a giant BATMAN poster. I gave him the poster last year for Christmas because it matched his newly-painted color scheme. And, of course, because you can’t go wrong with Gotham’s Dark Knight.

In fact, it seems that no one can go wrong with the caped crusader. Introduced to the world in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics, the dark knight recently turned seventy—yet still ranks near the top of the “cool” charts, if the success of Jonathan Nolan’s 2005 and 2008 Batman films are any indication.

Think of the other seventy-year-olds you know. How many of them can boast a fan base to compare with Bruce Wayne’s? To be fair, Bruce doesn’t show his age in the same way that great-aunt Millie does. And Bruce Wayne to Millie is probably not the same as the Bruce Wayne you know. Batman’s seventy years have not been consistent, except in one respect: he has always been there to help his readers cope with their particular brand of reality.

Superheroes were born in the 1930s, and Batman was at the front of the wave. His only predecessor is Superman, who made his debut in 1938. It is not a coincidence that these icons were born concurrent with what is arguably the greatest economic crisis in American history. Bradford Wright, author of Comic Book Nation, defines these early superheroes as a literary fanfare for the common man. “The new heroes in Depression America turned out to be the American people themselves,” he writes. The economy’s massive heart attack brought out the best and worst in Americans, both in reality and in fiction.

In the case of the worst, Gotham City’s antagonists started out as realistic thugs: robbers, mob bosses, the usual crowd of miscreants down at the station. However, as the depression years gave way to World War II, Batman grew too big for petty thieves. When America outsourced its enemies to faraway countries like Germany and Japan, Batman outsourced his villains, too. Or rather, upsourced. Instead of trading out for evildoers from Zimbabwe or Estonia, the caped crusader traded in dozens of regular villains for a few super villains. Americans could identify with Edward Nygma’s insane motives about as well as they could identify with the Axis powers: i.e., not at all. Yet in the midst of the crackpot chaos that emerged to tromp through Gotham, Batman was a beacon of light, reassuring citizens of both Gotham and America that an unfathomable enemy is not necessarily an undefeatable one.

But as crisis resolved and security returned, heroes fell by the wayside. According to Bradford Wright, “superheroes after World War II had far less to say about their world than ever before… victory ushered in an era that seemed to fulfill all that superheroes had fought for.” Batman of the fifties and sixties seems farcical compared to the modern, solemn caped crusader. The world was getting more complicated—McCarthyism, Korea, eventually hippies. A simplistic superhero fighting villains from outer space let comic book readers take a break from the world around them and enjoy, for a little while, a story in which good and evil were clearly defined.

Batman’s campiness hit its pinnacle in the 1960s television series: The Adventures of Batman and Robin. But the series didn’t last long. The escalating political turbulence of the 1970s preempted a reinterpretation of the dark knight. In the words of Dennis O’Neill, one of the men who reinvigorated Batman for the audience of the 1970s, “The world has changed… and Batman has changed with it.” In his new incarnation, O’Neill and his partner, Neal Adams, redefined Batman’s roots as the dark knight, renewing his relevance to the world that created him.

O’Neill and Adams’ reinterpretation of Batman set the stage for Batman’s depiction in the next decade. Frank Miller’s six-part 1986 comic series The Dark Knight Returns depicts an older, jaded vigilante; Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman is a dark, stylized interpretation of the caped crusader.

The 1990s brought mixed images of the dark knight. Tim Burton’s subsequent Batman film, Batman Returns, continued an eerie portrayal, and Batman: the Animated Series presented a dark-colored cartoon with content suitable for adults as well as children. Its dark images betray a theme deeper than good-beats-bad: it acknowledges, in no uncertain terms, the dark side of justice and the dark sides of life.

Meanwhile, Joel Schumaker’s Batman and Robin and Batman Forever fit the happy-go-lucky mold of the 1990s, an upbeat version of a hero still coming down from the 1960s camp-heaven high.

Batman of the 2000s has been defined to this point by Christopher Nolan’s grim Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Nolan portrays Batman in the tradition of O’Neill, Adams, Miller, and Saturday morning cartoons: a dark force for darker justice in a world that hopes, one day, to see a light.

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Unlike the case with many superheroes, it’s not just nerds and preteens who admire the bat. What is it about the dark knight that speaks to us as a cultural collective? There must be a reason that we have held on to the caped crusader through the years, molding him to fill the needs of each generation. Is it because he is just a normal guy? No radioactive spider, no parents from Krypton. He is a person who has been wronged, and who now uses his power to combat evil—yet is not exactly the flawless force of Good.

The thing is, Batman has spoken to us since long before superheroes hit the scene in’38. He has gone in different guises—the guise of a red wildflower, the mask of a fox—but has been working on the people’s behalf for centuries. He is Emma Orczy’s 19^th-century Scarlet Pimpernel: by day a drawling aristocrat, by night a daring resistance fighter against the atrocities of the French Revolution. He is Zorro, the masked man of Mexico, slashing his Z to scare off the bad guys. The hero of the people.

It’s all there: wealth, double lives, dashing heroics, vigilante justice. Secrets. Lies. But underneath, a thread of good. Despite the pain and suffering they cause, Batman and his forebears work to deter future pain and suffering, especially of the innocent—even if it means sacrificing themselves, in any number of ways. Perhaps this is why this type appeals to the West: these men are modern mythology’s version of a Messiah. Batman is of the people and not of the people, man yet Infinite incarnate. He is the best and the worst, the leader and the follower, the beginning and the end. He shows us that hope still runs in the dusty California desert, or seaside Calais, or the seedy streets of Gotham. Someone is willing to save us from ourselves. A man and more than a man. A paradox hidden within a strange suit and a cryptic name. Jesus Christ for the pulp masses. And don’t we all need a savior, by whatever kind of name?

Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Batman!