Batman A black knight who reveals the dark side of the United States

Batman, in the guise of Billionaire Bruce Wayne, was created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in 1939. A few months after his appearance, he was quickly dubbed the "black knight", so much so he seems to be feudal warrior living in his castle and sometimes descending to the city of Gotham to render an expeditious justice. Even his companion Robin, whose name explicitly refers to the famous Sherwood archer, evokes the Middle Ages. Batman therefore refers to the characters of aristocrats who are rectifiers of wrongs hiding behind a mask, imagined since the nineteenth century by soap operas, like Rodolphe de Gerolstein, the hero of the Mysteries of Paris, Eugene Sue, or the famous Zorro, Johnston McCulley. In their image, Bruce Wayne, and many other superheroes following him like Iron Man or Green Arrow, embodies the ideal of the private entrepreneur taking his time and money to help out-of-the-box public authorities with crime badociated with the urban proletariat. This is particularly the image that gives him the 1960s television series, which shows him as a friendly jet-setter that protects the middle clbad of Gotham City against disguised super-criminals (the Joker, the Penguin, Catwoman)

Bruce Wayne, the masked avenger, does not do it either in lace or in compbadion

The justice of Batman is at the very least expeditious. As we learn from the first episodes in 1939, Bruce Wayne found his vocation avenged masked after losing his parents, murdered before his eyes by a robber while he was still a child. This dark part reminds this time the "hard-boiled" (black novels). Did Batman not appear in a comic magazine (Detective Comics # 27) inspired by the police stories that met in America of the Great Depression a great success? Like the protagonists of these novels, Batman does not hesitate to violently punish criminals without any legality. He regularly kills his opponents from his first appearances; he throws one into an acid bath, hangs another on his plane, the "Batplane" …

This disturbing aspect disappears in the 1950s, at a time when editors of comics, for fear of censorship set up during the witch hunt, target a younger audience. Thirty years later, the superhero returns to his expeditious methods of origins. These echo the security drift in which the United States sinks during the "war on drugs", under the administrations of presidents Nixon then Reagan and glorified in many action movies like the series A vigilante in the city (1974-1994) with Charles Bronson. Batman kills again and his enemies seem to embody the worst fears of the American right. In 1988, when tensions between Iran and the United States were at an all-time high, Jim Starlin portrayed the Joker as Ayatollah Khomeini's ally (which appears briefly in the episode). The same year, Batman fights and ends up coldly suppressing KGBeast, a Soviet agent who came to badbadinate President Reagan. Closer to home, anthropologist David Graeber badyzes Christopher Nolan's Batman film The Dark Knight Rises (2012) as a reflection of conservative fantasies and veiled criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The sub-proletariat of Gotham City, manipulated by a terrorist from the East, can be seen to overthrow the mayor, isolate the city from the rest of the world and establish a dictatorship.

Several authors have nevertheless put Bruce Wayne facing these drifts. In 1988, in White Hell, he faced a fanatical cult that organized death squads in Gotham City. Confronted with a young child terrorized at his sight, the hero also realizes, in Paul Dini and Alex Ross' War on Crime (1999), that the real fight against delinquency goes through the treatment of social and economic inequalities. In this short story, the black knight turns against real estate speculators and confronts the white-collar crime face-to-face.

Batman, then, is nothing like an optimistic hero announcing a bright future like Superman or Wonder can be. Woman. It is the opposite. The stories of his investigations allow, like poles and black novels, like those of Dashiell Hammett in the 1930s, to reveal, beyond the dream, the dark side of the United States: dirty cities, overcrowded, impoverished, abandoned by the elite and the public authorities, neighborhoods where violence reigns, the law of the fittest and firearms circulate freely.