Fascism in Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s “The Dark Knight Returns”

Constructing my syllabus for “Who Watches Superheroes?”, I knew I wanted to include early turns in the superhero genre towards self-reflection by including two seminal works from the mid-1980s: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s The Dark Knight Returns. It has been a while since I read each of these books, and looking at articles and discussions about The Dark Knight Returns, I came across an interview where Alan Moore called Miller’s work, specifically The Dark Knight Returns, “sub-fascist,” comparing it to D.W. Griffin’s Birth of A Nation. As I’ve reread The Dark Knight Returns for class, I’ve really been thinking about Moore’s comments, and I want to explore them some, specifically in relation to Miller and Janson’s book, not anything beyond that.

If you’ve read me over the past few years, you know that I have been reading and writing a lot about fascism in various contexts. I don’t think that The Dark Knight Returns is overtly fascist or that Batman is overtly fascist. However, I do think there are some undercurrents of fascism at work within the series, especially if we consider the end where Batman organizes a group of Sons of Batman as a sort of vigilante army to “protect” Gotham or of Superman’s role in the narrative. The Dark Knight Returns doesn’t meet every aspect of Umberto…