STATE-SANCTIONED: THE POLICE AS INSUFFICIENT, IN PRACTICE
Over the last twenty years, the logo of the Marvel character the Punisher has become closely associated with military veterans, police officers, and white supremacist militias: groups that have historically shared personnel, purposes, ideologies, aesthetics, tactics, and resources.19 As Brian Cronin points out, this association was popularized during the US invasions and subsequent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, writes celebrity-soldier Chris Kyle, soldiers painted the logo on their "Hummers and body armor, and [their] helmets and guns. We spray-painted it on every building or wall we could. We wanted people to know that we're here and we want to fuck with you."20 Mirroring the journey of Sojourner Mullein, many of these veterans returned home and became police officers who, in the post-BLM era, drew upon the long-standing figuration of the police as the "thin blue line" between civilization and barbarism to forge a reactionary politics organized around Blue Lives. As much as its formulation reflected a constituency of Americans who viewed themselves as police by culture rather than merely profession, "Blue Lives Matter" has helped construct such a constituency that sees its values reflected in/by cultural productions, such as the Punisher. Or, as Cattlesburg, Kentucky, police chief Cameron Logan put it when asked about the logo's use on official police vehicles: the "decal represents that we will take any means necessary to keep our community safe."21 The means employed by the Punisher, writes Rebacca Collard, include "torture, murder, and kidnapping."22
While the people of Cattlesburg were initially horrified that the police would suggest willingness to use or endorse such violence despite their duty to "protect and serve," the widespread self-identification with the Punisher does not represent an emergent desire for the police to transgress the law. Rather, we might best think of it as the dropping of a pretense, the removal of a mask, or a kind of rhetorical disrobing, which signals the explicit assumption of attitudes, desires, and means that have long characterized the police. The institutionalized nature of these means and ends has been well established by scholars, journalists, and artists, and it explains the group-differentiated vulnerability to and abandonment by those empowered to serve the prevailing social order and protect a public narrowly circumscribed by it. This uneven protection and service / vulnerability and abandonment, as well as the general social degradation precipitated by it, are reflected in characters like the Punisher, who often come into conflict with the police. Such stories figure the police as lazy, stupid, corrupt, racist, incompetent, or impotent, and consequently legitimate targets of the Punisher's warfare. After all, it is their failure that created him and their continued failure that, so far as he sees it, necessitates his existence. They are his antagonist and his condition of possibility. Inversely, he is their antagonist, and his campaign of extralegal warfare serves as the narrative justification for their necessity.
This contradiction reflects a structure common to all copaganda, which has to acknowledge the widely felt effects of police (in)action to get off the ground. This has become increasingly true in the post-BLM era, which has saturated public consciousness with a liberal critique of policing satisfied by new regimes of professionalization and administration. Because it is underpinned by a reformism that cannot ameliorate the problems it identifies, the realization of this critique at the level of policy and rhetoric provides a social basis for conservative reaction. In fiction, these reactionaries emerge as a putatively natural response to a perceived failure by the police and courts to deliver justice. Corruption has run rampant, as these stories go; or liberal rhetoric has rendered society soft and vulnerable; or overweening bureaucracies are weighted in favor of criminals; or the police are not outfitted with the resources, training, and personnel to fulfill their duties. Sometimes featuring all the above, these stories advance a conservative critique of the police, but the solution they offer is romanticized vigilantism, which mystifies the historical appearance of vigilantism. Though American vigilantes typically arise as conservative reactions to state and market failure, they do not undermine the legitimacy of the state's monopoly on violence. Instead, these vigilantes perceive these failures as the result of liberal-imposed limits on the state and capital, and they supplement both by deputizing themselves: a sanction the state gives by directly participating in, ignoring, valorizing, and/or acquitting it.23 Operating outside it in order to supplement it, these deputies project the state's will beyond its formal ambit and serve as a justification for the expansion of it. Those rare vigilantes who do genuinely contradict the state's administration of justice—the social bandits or primitive rebels, as Eric Hobsbawm has called them—are met with civil derogation, lawfare, and warfare.24
This structural tendency of vigilantism to conserve the object of its critique has not been overcome by even the most accomplished vigilante-superhero comics, which take seriously the premise of the genre and explore it in a realist mode. This failure is a function of the contradiction between realism and superheroes, which operate through the semiotic valorization of iconic figures: symbolic ideals locked in abstract, mythological struggles fought as a physical conflict between individual avatars. Seriously questioning the contradiction between these ideals and the nature of their appearance represents a very dangerous thread for the superhero genre to pull on. "Pull the wrong one," writes Tegan O'Neil, "and the whole tapestry comes undone, and you're left with stories about dudes who dress up in leather and beat up neighborhood toughs basically because they feel like it."25 A thoroughly realist vigilante-story would, in other words, dissolve the superhero genre by reconciling its contradictory aspects. For the genre to function, this contradiction has to persist—a limit that the best examples of the genre, including Dennis O'Neil and Denys Cow-an's The Question (1987–92) and Mike Grell's Green Arrow (1987–94) run up against and are defeated by.
Perhaps the most popular and fraught example of this vigilante mode is Bruce Wayne: Batman, whose "war on crime" prefigured that of the US by twenty-five years. Like most superheroes, Wayne is typically depicted as a morally upstanding individual who prioritizes the well-being of others—even if he is sometimes a victim of human errancy. He safeguards his community (variously figured as family, friends, city, country, planet, dimension), and he does so through the persistent application of his indomitable will. Though other characters sometimes chafe at his characteristic paranoia, his intuition is nearly always proven right. When it is not, such failure is attributed to some external interference (love, drugs, illness, injury, etc.). His defining goals are to repair the trauma of losing his parents to crime by attacking it as Batman and to use the wealth inherited from his murdered parents to transform the social conditions that produce crime.26
However, the end of crime would mean the end of Batman, which is, as countless Batman writers have suggested, implied, or outright said, an identity Wayne is addicted to. After all, being Batman allows him to reenact his trauma in a textbook example of repetition compulsion, which is not to psychoanalyze the character so much as it is to redescribe a well-established psychological dimension of him. This dimension reflects a self-conscious conflict between the character's post-pulp camp origins and the pop-psych realism with which he has become most closely associated. Buttressed by sedimented layers of Gothic and noir signifiers, whose affective associations help foreshorten the character's psychological depth and economically convey verisimilitude, Batman is sustained by the tension of this unresolvable psychological contradiction, which is merely a diegetic expression of the contradiction that structures the character as a concept. Namely, that Batman treats crime as a highly individuated phenomenon while Wayne addresses it as imminently social. For the former to be true, the latter must be false and vice versa.
This structuring contradiction is manifest not just in Batman's characterization, but in his relationships to other characters as well. While he famously goes where the law cannot, for example, he operates according to the same contradictory logic of anticipatory reaction as the police. Though he is frequently at odds with the Gotham Police Department, most iterations of the character enjoy a close relationship to individual police officers. In those instances where Batman does come into direct conflict with law enforcement, he only does so to better enforce the law. Often his allies in this conflict include "clean" cops, who are self-interested in rooting out corruption: a dynamic that animates Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli's Year One, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, and Christopher Nolan's and Matt Reeves' respective film adaptations. Gotham Central, however, remains the most complex depiction of Batman's relationship to the police; though, the admonitions of police imperfection, which are required for its impressions of reality to get off the ground, are ultimately buttressed by a valorization of the police—first as workers then as guardians. This is acutely evident in the conclusion to the recent GCPD: The Blue Wall (2023), which serves as a sequel to Gotham Central and updates its critique and rescue of the police for a post-BLM audience. Against these (un)critically impure police stands Batman, whose moral purity is symbolized by a willingness to "play by the rules," even if they are rules one makes for oneself. Batman's fitness to evaluate these rules is narratively secured by his steadfast refusal to kill under any circumstances. Despite this vow, however, he famously employs extraordinary violence against street crime and has no compunction about state violence, even the death penalty (see figure 3).
Figure 3. A detail from page 51 of Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga (vol. 1) (2014), by Jiro Kuwata.
While the latter is predicated on and reproduces a popular consensus on the legitimacy of state-sanctioned violence, the former is authorized by casting Batman's enemies as "super" criminals who pose threats of a nature and scale that only Batman—with his hyperintelligence, moral fitness, freedom from the law, and unlimited resources—is equipped to handle. Of course, no such criminals exist in reality. Nonetheless, these conflicts provide the narrative appearance of Batman's necessity and situate crime on a gradient plane where harm, terrorism, crime, and psychopathy blur into one another. Accordingly, the street crime that created Batman, and with which he is still closely associated, comes to appear analogous to terrorism and universe-ending threats. Indeed, when Batman does confront street crime, it often takes lurid forms that misrepresent the nature and overrepresent the frequency of murder, rape, the sale of drugs, human trafficking, and gang activity. Rehearsing the sociologically dubious logic of broken windows policing, these representations give aesthetic form to the ongoing moral panic about crime, which provides the social basis for an intensification of policing in the name of public safety. In this way, Batman stories reflect and reconstruct popular perceptions of harm, crime, and vigilantism, which valorizes direct violence in excess by the state but in accordance with its own logic. In doing so, Batman offers a powerfully romantic vision of vigilantism, which is performed under ideal circumstances, by ideal individuals, in concert with the law, whose spirit (if not its letter) must be defended. Despite the utopian qualities that have made him durable as a heroic figure, he consequently offers ideological cover for real-world violence that serves the interests of the police even as it appears to counter them.
These contradictory qualities of Batman are arguably best explored by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley in The Dark Knight Returns (DKR). The series was originally published during a period of spiking antisocial activity and interpersonal violence, and these social conditions are cast in a critical light: corrupt and spineless politicians have left the city to rot; waves of capital flight have led to urban blight; and social predation—simultaneously cause and self-exacerbating effect of these worsening social conditions—effloresces in the highly individuated form of street crime, which is embodied by sexual violence and met in the mass media by liberal rhetoric of appeasement and accommodation. This response merely exacerbates the interpersonal harm and social alienation, which is reduced to the random, but also organized, and spontaneous, as well as pathological, violence of a subhuman youth gang called The Mutants: an acute, allegorical prefiguration of the rhetorical figure (the so-called superpredator) that would come to organize criminal-legal discourse in the 1990s.
Echoing the mass approval of contemporaneous vigilantes such as Bernhard Goetz and the Guardian Angels, who emerged organically as a popular reaction to neoliberalism's fraying social fabric, DKR expresses a structure of feeling that regularly reemerges during periods of social crisis, and it does so with particular intensity and charisma. Adopting a way of seeing that signifies "the way things really are," the series gives form to this structure of feeling, which is organized by and through stochastic, reactionary violence. Comparing Miller's comics from this period to the novels of James Ellroy, Mark Fisher notes that this historical form of realism mystifies the source of social discontent by selling a solution to it that conserves its conditions of possibility. Miller and Ellroy "pose as unflinching observers," he writes, "who refuse to prettify the world so that it can be fitted into the supposedly simple ethical binaries of the superhero comics and the traditional crime novel."27 Or, in other words, Miller casts Batman in shades of gray but only so that his reclamation of moral virtue might be more readily accepted as truthful, and his forceful embodiment of that virtue might be more readily accepted as necessary.
This state-sanctioned mode of anti-anti-police realism is best illustrated by a scene that resounds throughout various iterations of the characters across various media. Building up to the series' first in-costume appearance by Batman, Miller, Janson, and Varley home in on two police officers in pursuit of a fleeing criminal. As Batman overtakes them off panel, the officers see him before the viewer does, and the subsequent shift from viewing them to viewing as them hails readers into a subjectivity that perceives the vigilante as a fetish of noble strength. "Holy …," says one officer, sanctifying the icon. Clearly old enough to remember Batman, his face is enchanted by the sight. "You're slowing down," his young partner tells him in the following panel. "Heh," the older officer responds. "Yeah. We're in for a show, kid."28 The older officer, in other words, recognizes Batman as someone who will do what he wants to but cannot; he refuses to enforce the law so that he and his partner might revel in the spectacle of Batman's violence. This spectacle, we suppose, will give voice to the officers' desires, which they are proscribed from realizing. With this moment DKR suggests a popular sentiment among rank-and-file officers: they know that law enforcement is the application of brute force, and Batman allows them to enjoy it in its most unadorned, unpretentious, naked form.
This is not, however, to reduce DKR to the mere equation: law enforcement = violence = good. If it endures as a classic of the genre, it is precisely because it features ambiguities and ambivalences that exceed the explanatory power of partisan interpretations.29 Punctuated by the romantic image of a revolutionary underground, DKR nonetheless offers an appealing narrative reconciliation of vigilantism's contradictions that reiterates and redoubles the series' organizing themes. Specifically, that right and wrong are transcendental values whose transgressions are obvious and manifest as "crime," which should be justifiably confronted by any individual courageous enough to do so. Though this confrontation brings the vigilante into conflict with law enforcement, the former merely arises to fulfill the unmet promises of the latter: the fighting will end in peace, violence will produce safety, caging will produce health, and social problems can be repressed through the disappearance of their individuated symptoms. The horizon of superhero vigilantism is thereby established as the restoration of the police to a "proper" functioning that it has never enjoyed in practice, and the grounds for real-life vigilantism and its public embrace are fertilized.
Crystallizing Batman's essential qualities and animating him with particular artistry, the series represents a hinge on which a discussion of his past and future might pivot, or a window onto the past that illuminates the present. Indeed, we can locate similar logic structuring in present instances of the character as a concept. Vincent Haddad, for example, makes a consonant argument in his more recent discussion of Batman: White Knight (2017–18). However, while he reads the series as trading on its giving outlet to abolitionism before betraying and delegitimating those politics, and as therefore a failure, my argument above is that this betrayal actually represents a success: the successful operations of a narrative procedure constitutive of the character as a function of its conditions of production, which determine the upper limit for the politics of superhero comics.30 It is this same limit that regulates Far Sector, though both series are merely symptoms of mass culture's contradictory efforts to make digestible and metabolize the antagonisms characteristic of a more general social crisis. It is not a coincidence then that these series, and the countless others like them, appear when they do and bear such striking resemblances to one another. In an effort to sketch out the conditions determining these typical narrative procedures, I turn now to the mode of superhero comics defined by its self-conscious address of them.
