The Masks of Power in Batman Across Ages From the Great Depression Through the Cold War

Comics have long been considered low literature, and one of the main reasons they were classified as such was the audience they primarily targeted: the commoners, the ordinary middle- and lower-class citizens, rather than the elites or pretentious readers of sophisticated literature. Consequently, comics enjoyed greater popularity, appeal, and – therefore – distribution, which rapidly turned them both into reflections of the people’s needs, struggles, concerns, interests, and imagination, and efficient vehicles of wartime and patriotic State propaganda and manipulation. This tendency can be identified in the Batman comics and imaginary, and the purpose of this paper is to closely examine how this pop culture phenomenon has evolved from a medium of official propaganda in the Golden and Silver Ages of comics (mid 1930s – late 1960s) to an instrument for subverting state policies and discourse in the Bronze Age (the 1970s and first half of the 1980s). We shall focus on a brief history of thematic representations in the Batman comic books between 1939 and 1985, the theatrical serials from 1943 and 1949, and the television series from 1966-1968, and, at the same time, illustrate how character portrayals and evolutions articulate the paradigmatic shift driven by ideological changes at a global level and by the political, social, economic, and cultural practices within American society.