Is Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns Fascist? Resolving the Paradoxes of Heroic Violence

ABSTRACT The Dark Knight Returns traces the polarizing paradoxes seen between the political left and right in the United States—the right at once advocating for distributed networks of self‐defense in widespread firearm availability and keeping the “thin blue line” of state power intact while the left simultaneously rejects both personal defense and policing as viable forms of mediation from bad actors—and then reimagines Batman as a metaphor by which these paradoxes are resolved.