Nietzsche contra Superman: An Examination of the work of Frank Miller

Peregrine Dace
School of Philosophy and Ethics University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban, 4041, South Africa

Abstract This paper investigates the work of Frank Miller, particularly his Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, in light of Nietzschean aesthetics and social commentary. A graphic novelist, and thus nominally an entertainer of the masses, Miller uses the comic medium to challenge, aesthetically and intellectually. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns explores the struggles of an ageing Batman to redefine the relationship between the dictates of the government and his own will and capacity to control his environment. Through text and image, Miller emphasises the personal impotence of those agents of order who are working to restrain Batman, and the essential similarities between Batman and the criminals he fights, both of whom exist outside of that social order. Quintessentially Nietzschean themes sickness and health, self-created and imposed identities, and irresolvable conflict between the true individual and society recur throughout the work. Miller's work is triply subversive. First, it subverts generic expectations that the superhero will uphold the social order; second, it both challenges and supports Nietzsche's contention that art was the province of the noble singular artist and a product of high culture, rather than of the masses; thirdly, it repositions Nietzsche within popular culture, subverting his expectations of his reception. This phenomenon of at one appropriating and challenging Nietzsche makes Miller an instructive example of an alternative way in which we can confront Nietzschean ideas about art and life.

According to McCloud (1993), elements of the comic can be seen in church stainedglass windows, but the history of the printed comic in the modern tradition can most likely be seen in Francis Barlow's 1682 narrative combination of text and image, entitled A True History of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot. The elements characteristic of the comic medium are defined by Eisner (1985:5) as sequential art, conveying narrative or dramatizing an idea.1 The French term bande dessine (drawn strip) does not have the implication of frivolity that comic does, but comic is the term more familiar to readers of English, and will be used throughout this paper. The superhero comic, the genre perhaps most identified with the medium, does not however make any significant appearance until the twentieth century. The action genre really started with
1 Eisner's definition excludes single-panel works, but other writers disagree that the distinction is substantive.

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Buck Rogers in 1929, and in 1939, this gave rise to the superhero genre, with the first appearances of Superman and Batman, the subject of this paper. Batman is one of the best-known characters of the superhero genre, and is the best known of the few who have no superhuman abilities. Instead he is possessed of significant natural talents and the discipline to train those talents towards the extremes of human capacity. There have been several versions and re-inventions of the character and several attempts to integrate them, resulting in a small number of canonical versions (largely distinguished by the time period in which Batman lives and thus his age and the world events around him, although there are some other differences) and several non-canonical ones. The commonalities are that the young Bruce Wayne witnesses the mugging and murder of his parents, which drives him to fight crime by learning assorted theatrical, combative and detective disciplines, and donning a dark, forbidding costume to frighten the supposedly superstitious and cowardly criminals he would face. First given his own title in 1940, Batman's early appearances were based on pulp novels and generally follow darkly toned detective plots. The 1950s and 1960s saw the character lightened in tone: as well as rejecting his earlier use of firearms, Batman's recurring antagonists especially the Joker2 were also made more comical and less violent. For Umberto Eco (1979:107-124), the nature of the comic medium is such that it necessarily upholds the social, economic and political status quo. Key to this in his estimation is the abandonment of linear time in any meaningful sense. While there is some sense of memory, there are no major progressing life events, few marriages or funerals, nothing progressing towards the hero's death or any change in the world. By eliminating personal or social change, Eco claims that the comic medium encourages a view of the world in which what is now must ever be so. As such, the comic medium would be completely unsuitable as a Nietzchean vehicle, although perhaps it would offer us some scope for Nietzchean criticism. However, a close examination of the history of the comic medium suggests that this is not an essential characteristic either of the medium, or even of the superhero concept itself, which is the subject of the main thrust of Eco's argument. In many ways, support for a socio-moral and economic status quo was a function of the regulatory framework in which the comic operated for much of the twentieth century. To understand the essential stasis of the medium, particularly between 1950 and 1980, one must look at several issues, including the regulatory framework in which the medium operated, as well the nature of genre fiction, of which the comic is perhaps an extreme example. Regulation of the comic medium in the United States was largely the result of Wertham (1954), who made a number of anti-comic assertions. Notably, these included the claims that comics eroticised violence, that they normalised homosexuality and paraphilias, and that they were the major factor contributing to juvenile delinquency. This led to pressure on the industry from the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. To prevent legislative intereference, the Comics Code Authority was formed by major publishers, and the industry pared down as those companies who specialised in the more graphically violent or sexual titles were unable to satisfy
2 The Joker is Batman's most enduring antagonist. First appearing in Batman #1 in 1940, he began as a serial killer in jester disguise. The lighter, mid-century Joker changed into a laughable trickster and thief, in keeping with the decision to keep recurring villains non-murderous so that serious evil should not be seen to endure. Recent years have seen the Joker return to his roots as an insane killer.

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the demands of the Code. This environment controlled the thematics of the comic medium in such a way that the content could not present any challenge to established authority or social norms. For example, Part A of the Comics Code states that: Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals... . Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority. In Part B, we find that: Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader. And later, we see that: Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behaviour shall be fostered (Daniels, 1971). It is this framework that creates the tendency of the comic to support the status quo, as Eco maintains that it does. However, far from being intrinsic to the comic medium, this supportive tendency is an externally-imposed characteristic. It is true that traditionally, the comic falls strongly within the ambit of genre fiction, and that it thus requires a treatment rather different to literature outside the popular domain. In Roberts (1990) and Cawelti (1976), the ratio of the unique or invented to the conventional or formulaic is different for popular and classical works of literary fiction. The relative importance of the conventional in the popular means that the typical approach of literary theorists examining individual literary artefacts in order to determine the meaning of a body or work is not appropriate. On the contrary, says Roberts (1990:17), it is only by understanding the shared conventions of the genre within which the work sits that one can interpret the invented text. I emphasize here of course that one should by no means understand that popular or genre fiction has no inventive grace, but only that such invention occurs within shared and shifting rules and conventions, with which the author must engage. A wonderful example is Dickens, who used stereotypical melodramatic form and blended it with novel social commentary (Cawelti, 1976; see also Young, 1992). It is within this tradition that Miller's work, and particularly his Dark Knight Returns falls, and within which it must be examined. This tradition is one in which stock characters and well-defined conflicts are presented in a novel fashion, in order to say something fresh. Frank Miller began his career in the industry as a freelance artist before beginning to do a significant amount of work for Marvel. His work for Marvel began with John Carter: Warlord of Mars (a character who perhaps best exemplifies the pulp era of SF comics), and also included significant work on both Spiderman and Daredevil, in many ways defining the current incarnations of those characters. It was in the 1980s that Miller started to work with DC Comics on the piece of work that will be the focus of this paper: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a cacotopic tale of an aging and, ostensibly, tenuously sane Batman coming out of retirement for what at first seems to be one last hurrah. Following his further work on the title and disagreement over content management and self-censorship, Miller then become more involved with Dark Horse

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Comics with whom he published the Sin City series, part of which was made into a film in 2005. The early 1980s was largely a time of stasis in the comic medium, described by Eco and caused by the influence of the Comics Code.3 While there were unquestionably innovative writers at work during this time, such as Alan Moore and Chris Claremont, neither major characters nor the nature of the superhero concept itself had received major shake-ups in a long time. Between 1986 and 1987, both would be done by Alan Moore in Watchmen and Miller in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. This text is especially important for my discussion, because it so strongly exemplifies the model that Cawelti (1976) uses to define the aesthetics of the popular: that of combining the stock genre expectation with the novel and inventive. The idea of the aesthetics of the popular inevitably brings us to Nietzsche. Sweeney-Turner (1997) points out that Nietzsche makes a number of attacks on the composer Richard Wagner, thereby reminding us of Nietzsche's opinion that: He won the crowd, he corrupted taste, he spoiled even our taste for opera! Julian Young (1992: 91) explains that this is because Nietzsche believed that Wagner was a panderer to the low tastes of the present. More generally in Nietzsche's writing, there is a suspicion of the idea that anything with mass appeal could be of real artistic value. For example, Nietzsche (1990: 57) writes that: The highest caste I call them the fewest being perfect, also has the privileges of the fewest: among them, to represent happiness, beauty, and graciousness on earth. Only to the most spiritual human beings is beauty permitted: among them alone is graciousness not weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum: the good is a privilege. As Young (1992: 77-79) argues, Nietzsche's understanding of good art is often reminiscent of an aesthetic Stalinism, in that for him, good art is didactic, creating beautiful images of souls that are capable of creating the future; furthermore, as Young shows, Nietzsche often seems to suggest that the only works of art capable of doing so are neo-classical artworks, thereby pointing to Nietzsche's neo-Hellenism. As his remarks on Socrates attest (1990a: II, 5, 7), Nietzsche objects to the defeat of noble taste and to the rabble [coming] out on top. There is an obvious similarity here to the sentiments expressed by Wertham (1954) with regard to the comic medium, and to the construction of the Comics Code. To a liberal, however, this is a distasteful position. Much as we may appreciate what is typically classed as high culture, the suggestion that there is some inherent lack of value in the entertainment forms of the plebes is not one that sits comfortably with a liberal philosophical approach to class relations or indeed to a corresponding aesthetics. This is not to suggest, of course, that we abandon the idea of quality, or of intelligent or thoughtful entertainment, or indeed that we should seat shoddy second sequels of indifferent action movies (interesting insights though they may give into the target audience and the relationship of such an audience to the creative process) next to a da Vinci cartoon or a Kubrick film. Rather, it is to suggest that a thoughtful approach to creativity can, within the conventional forms of low or popular culture, produce work that can create the future as Nietzsche desires. The comic offers an interesting entry point to this question. It is perhaps the least classically literary of the popular forms, to such an extent that accusations have even been made that the format itself
3 In the parlance of the industry, this time-period is called the late Silver Age.

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prevents the development of reading skills in terms of both physical eye co-ordination and the ability to comprehend (Wertham, 1954). Can we then find Nietzschean merit in this form, so far outside the traditional canon? The immediate temptation, of course, for reasons of pun if nothing else, is to look at the Detective Comics flagship character, Superman.4 However, while interesting writing has been done with this character, Superman was not a title character in the 1980s re-imagining of the comic medium, which is of particular interest to our present discussion. The only dominant characters recreated during this period was Batman, in Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In Miller's work, Batman has been missing for a decade, retired by Bruce Wayne after the death of the second Robin5 at the hands of the Joker. He has been funding the rehabilitation of one of his recurring antagonists, in an attempt to prove to himself that one can escape one's demons. This treatment fails, and after he later encounters members of a violent and sadistic youth gang at the site of his parents murder, Bruce Wayne is inspired to resurrect his alter-ego. The Joker, partly catatonic but partly cured, suffers a massive relapse after seeing Batman's return on the news, and escapes to seek his nemesis. Batman pursues his quest against the Mutants (the dominant gang) and his old enemies Two-Face and the Joker. Pursued and ridiculed by the city and the media, Batman, accompanied by the new, female Robin, eventually chases down the Joker and paralyses him. The Joker manages to break his own neck to frame Batman. The government then sends a co-opted Superman after him, leading to a significant showdown in which Batman defeats Superman, but fakes his own death. He returns to destroy the last remnants of his identity as Bruce Wayne, and to lead Robin and his new army of former Mutants. Eco believes that the superhero represents order, and the socially-accepted virtue of the modern good, while Nietzsche's view of the aesthetic good is linked to the ruling classes. The old money of the American Northeast fulfils a similar role in the context of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: as the co-creator of the character, Bob Kane says, Wayne... was a man of gentry (Kane and Andrae, 1989). This provides a background of privilege, self assuredness and separation from the plebes and anything base for Bruce Wayne. Wayne's parents are murdered after taking him to watch Zorro, another tale of a nobleman imposing his will on his surroundings and rendering a corrupt, obedience-driven government impotent. This leads to one of the most interesting parts of this examination: the Nietzschean motives underpinning Bruce Wayne's crusade. First, Wayne has a desire to re-form his city according to his wishes: specifically, into a society in which events such as the murder of his parents will not occur. While this could be seen as Wayne falling into Christian morality, his actions have no redemptive quality or application beyond his immediate environment. The second motive, however, is vengeance born out of a sense of what Nietzsche (1969, 1990) terms ressentiment. From childhood through adulthood and into his retirement, Bruce Wayne does not have the ability to forget that which Nietzsche (1969) demands of truly noble souls. He is driven by the memory of
4 5 However, the presence of the character of Superman in the comic medium may have influenced scholars views of Nietzsche's bermensch, which can be translated into English as Superman. A character introduced in the 1940s, in order to enhance the title's appeal to children. Robin is Batman's youthful sidekick. The first Robin was an orphaned circus performer adopted by Bruce Wayne, and served as Robin until leaving for college; the second Robin was killed by the Joker. It is the relationship between Batman and Robin that sparked some of Wertham's (1954) accusations concerning representations of homosexuality in comics.

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the murder of his parents and, particularly within this text, by his own failures to protect the victims of his enemies, especially Robin, whose costume is kept as a constant reminder of that failure. I never kept count, says the Joker of his victims, but you did, and I love you for it. So in some ways, these figures are mutually enabling: Batman provides the Joker with recognition and affirmation (to the extent that Batman's return from retirement forces a relapse in the recovering Joker) and the Joker feeds the force that both drives Batman and breaks him down. This problem of vengeance does not simply render Batman useless as a literary vehicle for Nietzschean sentiment. For it is these memories that drive him to the limits of his physical and intellectual ability and give spur to his will-to-flourish.6 The answer to these problems can be found in the Nietzschean concept of Selbstberwindung (self-overcoming). While the bermensch is in some ways the ideal of nobility, understood as an ideal, it is unreachable; a more accessible bermensch is someone who is constantly involved in the process of Selbstberwindung, of reaching beyond one's sickness. For according to Nietzsche, health is not simply the absence of sickness, it is a measure of the strength one has to overcome and contain one's sickness: the great health: that one does not merely have but also acquires continually, and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up (1974: 382). In the case of Bruce Wayne, sickness is the combination of the inability to forget with the desire for vengeance. In this context, let us examine Batman's behaviour in pursuing his goals. Despite the continual desire to do so, Batman never fully submits to his desire for vengeance, even resisting the urge to kill his arch-nemesis in extreme circumstances. He manages to transform his vengeful desire to kill into his desire to improve his environment, including those miscreants to whom he attempts to give the strength to overcome their own sickness. This is done by committing them to mental institutions. The relationship between Batman and the city authorities is also of interest. During the reign of the Comics Code, antagonism faded to the background, but during the early days and the modern period, it proves far more interesting. The Dark Knight Returns series returns to the antagonism of the early days, and to new extremes as a new city hierarchy strives to bring Batman down. Their publicity campaign, for example uses psychologists to claim Batman as a dangerous lunatic. The psychologists are drawn as pale, sickly, stooped individuals, sometimes visually juxtaposed with the hale but agd Wayne. Their closed eyes, and those of government spokesmen, emphasise their metaphorical blindness. Behind-the-scenes plotting by these characters is filled with jealousy and resentment of the aspersions that Batman's actions cast on the capacity of the government to maintain control. Their value inversion of sickness over health is emphasised by their release of the criminally insane to demonstrate their own curative skills. Thus, just as Nietzsche (1969) maintains, the ressentiment-filled priest elevates sickness above health, in order to elevate himself above the noble type. All this until, in the midst of chaos and riots, and as Batman surges through the city on horseback uniting the fractious rabble behind him, the new police chief sees that this figure is too big to judge, just as her predecessor had warned her.
6 I prefer to use this term rather than the usual Nietzschean will-to-power here, as the sense of flourishing has greater consonance with the particular motives underpinning the action of Dark Knight Returns.

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This relationship with authority is most clearly expressed in the interactions with Superman. Having given in to the fear and resentment of the government, Superman has decided serve in silence, having pleaded with Bruce Wayne to toe the line and either to serve the government or disappear. Finally, speaking to Superman, Batman expresses much of the sentiment of this series, a sentiment truly applicable to the link between Nietzsche's conception of great strength and his understanding of freedom: You sold us out, Clark. You gave them the power that should have been ours. Just like your parents taught you to. My parents taught me a different lesson... lying on the street, shaking in deep shock, dying for no reason at all. They showed me that the world only makes sense when you force it to (Miller 1986). Here it is useful to compare Batman's sentiment with the following claim by Nietzsche: First principle: one must need strength, otherwise one will never have it. Those great forcing-houses for strong human beings, for the strongest kind there has ever been, the aristocratic communities of the pattern of Rome and Venice, understood freedom in precisely the sense in which I understand the word freedom: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers ... (1990a: IX, 38). The counterpoint to Batman's accusation is provided by two lines from Superman, explaining his own submission to the laughably-presented President (who is a caricatured Ronald Reagan in a grotesque flag motif suit) and government: They'll kill us if they can Bruce. Every year they grow smaller. Every year they hate us more. We must not remind them that giants walk the earth. And, after he is caught in a nuclear blast: ..now there is only blackened glass, endless flame. Our people, Bruce. You laugh at them. They can do this and you laugh at them (Miller, 1986). Eventually, Superman will be dispatched to kill Batman for fear of what the weak will do to him and the other surviving superheroes. For, just as Nietzsche understood all too well, Superman knows that the weak and the sick can wield a terrifying power when roused by fear. The final expression of Nietzchean sentiment in these texts that I wish to comment upon is the question of identity. At the beginning of Dark Knight Returns, Bruce Wayne is an ageing man who had turned away from his other identity many years ago and has since been engaged in a constant struggle to suppress the predatory, warrior drives that his other identity embodied (and which is personified by a great bat-like beast in his mind). He has come to fear these darker parts of himself and rejects them in favour of the conformist, albeit socially active and politically involved, playboy Bruce Wayne. During the early part of the series, he regains his early contempt for the ability of the government to deal with various crises with which they are presented and threaten his vision of society. Through the course of this saga, he increasingly adopts his self-created identity, eventually adopting it completely after faking his own death, and the force driving him is no longer the external predator from which he spent so much time and effort fleeing. He is a new man. Ultimately, Batman goes underground to lead his new army, fully adopting this new

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identity and abandoning his faith in society as a whole. He expresses his will to power so strongly that the easily led former gang members he scattered flock to him, turning him into a significant force to reshape his environment. From a liberal perspective, we can see that the distinction between populist and high culture should not be of fundamental significance in what Nietzsche (1997: II, 99) requires of art and the artist; which is that the poet or artist act as a guide to the future: the great and beautiful soul is still possible, still able to embody itself in the harmonious and well-proportioned and thus acquire visibility, duration and the status of a model, and in so doing through the excitation of envy and emulation help to create the future. Full appreciation of this work does of course require an educated approach, but the medium itself is perfectly suitable. However, a problem remains in the illiberal portions of Nietzsche's message. The vast majority of the population of Gotham are an easily led and unthinking collection of self-deceiving bourgeoisie and petty thugs, who are functionaries of their leaders wills. This is the case whether those leaders are the pseudo-priestly psychologist and bureaucrats of the city, the massively powerful gang leader who almost destroys the city, or even Batman himself (the last two being narratively and visually juxtaposed in Dark Knight Returns, as equivalent warriors with different goals). This is emphasised after the defeat of their leader by the gang members turning to other strong individuals such as Batman, the Joker, and others as models to emulate almost totemically, in a particularly mindless fashion. There are, however, a number of escapes available to us here. First, the matter of art as tied to high culture: this is comparatively simple. This text (among others) has clearly shown that the value of the philosophical content of fiction is not necessarily a function of its literary form. This use of a form and set of artistic conventions that are so strongly associated with das Gesindel (riff-raff) to convey Nietzschean themes is deeply subversive as far as Nietzsche's anticipation of his own reception is concerned. I am convinced that Nietzsche never anticipated (or could have anticipated) any sort of release of his thought in the format of the rabble. The use of the comic medium allows these themes to be accessed and re-interpreted by a popular audience, who are not part of the High Artistic tradition. This new blend is therefore far more like Nietzsche's ideal poetry than a conception of art as belonging to high culture, following the conventions of this culture (even where the convention is to shock). Miller's is truly a work for all and none in the sense that it uses the medium of das Gesindel, but requires a thoughtful approach if it is to be properly understood. Second, Miller's use of Nietzchean themes in the comic medium subverts the characterisation and expectations of the superhero that are formed and sustained by the traditional readership. The significant drive to prevent the spread of revolutionary thought in and through the comic medium, as discussed at the beginning of this paper, has made it seem that an inability to conduct meaningful social criticism is part of the nature of the comic medium itself. My reading of Nietzschean themes in Miller's work supports the view that such an inability is a matter of historical contingency, rather than a genuine property of the comic medium. If this is right, then the perception of the comic medium as intrinsically frivolous should perhaps be set aside. And indeed, once we understand how Miller's work is subversive in this sense, it may also be possible to extend this notion of subversion to the reception of other popular artistic media.

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Finally, we should pay closer attention to the matter of both Superman's submission, and Batman's eventual turning to his disciples and living among them. Das Gesindel are not irredeemably weak at all. Foolish perhaps, cowardly perhaps, but they are nevertheless capable of great and terrible acts, depending on the influences upon them, just as the mighty are. The riff-raff warrant Batman's eventual irrevocable downgoing. Miller's Batman does not only leave his mountain, he destroys it, and in so doing, he becomes a man for all and none, in a manner that Nietzsche's Zarathustra might have appreciated. References Cawelti, J. 1976. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daniels, L. 1971. Comix, a History of Comic Books in America. New York: Outerbridge and Deinstfrey. Eco, Umberto. 1979. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press Eisner, W. 1985. Comics and Sequential Art. New York: Poorhouse Press. Kane, R. and Andrae, T. 1989. Batman & Me. Forestville, CA: Eclipse Books. McCloud, S. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northhampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. Miller, Frank. 1986. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann, trans. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1978. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Walter Kaufmann, trans. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann, trans. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1990a. Twilight of the Idols, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich.1990b. The Anti-Christ, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1976. The Case of Wagner, Walter Kaufmann, trans. New York: Vintage Books. Roberts, T. 1990. An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Sweeney-Turner, Steve. 1997. Pulp Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Transvaluation of the Popular, Critical Musicology: A Transdiciplinary Online Journal. www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/critmus/ Wertham, F. 1954. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart. Young, Julian. 1992. Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.