![]() ![]() 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. This fruitful contamination on the one hand “play with reader assumptions about genre” (Baetens and Frey 2015, 46), while on the other hand deconstructs the ideological underpinnings of the archetype, as the moral dichotomy and the alienation of justice from the law. Hammet) with narrative and aesthetics elements appropriated from the culturally-received concepts of terrorism and terrorists. It will be in fact demonstrated how the novels hybridise the latent generic links to hardboiled pulp novels (R. In this regard, Reaganism and 9/11 are polarized as historical discontinuities triggering the need for a new kind of a criminal (super)hero. The Dark Knight Returns (1986), The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2002) and Holy Terror (2011) constitute an ideal Batman trilogy that charts the character’s evolution as political counterpoint to the perceived crisis of American identity. In particular, it will take into account three graphic novels by American cartoonist Frank Miller (1957 - ), one of leading figures of the mainstream comics renaissance, whose ideas have indelibly influenced the artistic development of both medium and genre. This essay analyses the literary and cultural contaminations that have engendered an unprecedented revision of the paradigm since the 1980s. Conceived in the late thirties as “bold humanist response to Depression-era fears of runaway scientific advance and soulless industrialism” (Morrison 2012, 6), the superhero has flourished as one of the most resilient archetypes of American popular culture. ![]()
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