The DC comic book superhero Batman, whose existence spans the larger part of the 20th century, has probed this critical underside of American culture since 1938, but it would take Frank Miller’s darker, more complex Batman character in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Batman: Year One (1987), and Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-02) and his more distinctly noir vision of Gotham City to fully express the dystopian in its critique of contemporary American culture.
The anticipation of possible negative consequences of collective action has thus shifted even further towards the center of America’s cultural identity, in both its affirmative and self-critical expressions. In the 20th century in particular, the success and crisis of America’s future-oriented cultural narrative has pushed its utopian dimension to fully reveal its dystopian underside, while its orientation towards the future remained intact. i American cultural history has been significantly shaped by visions of the future, both in their utopian and dystopian modes (cf. O’Sullivan defined America as “the Great Nation of Futurity,” supplying the young republic with a rationale and a justification for its unimpeded expansion, and with a forward-looking narrative center for a unified national identity. We identify three levels of risk representation in the two graphic narratives: apocalyptic riskscapes, individual risk-taking as edgework, and the staging of global risk in the media. It is our contention here that Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns begins a deliberate engagement with how the sense of global risk shapes social cohesion at the height of the cold war, and The Dark Knight Strikes Again brings this engagement to the twenty-first century.
Our focus on risk is based on Ulrich Beck’s articulation of “reflexive modernity” and reveals the specific ways in which Miller’s Dark Knight series signals a transition in American national, racial and gender identities since the 1980s. With their sustained and systematic confrontation of risk discourses, the two graphic narratives can be seen as key examples of what we call risk fiction, that is fictional engagements with and expressions of global risks that are the products of late modernity. This essay argues that Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-02) are grounded in a specific type of anticipatory consciousness that we read as risk consciousness.
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