Gotham and the gothic city: Gentry’s heroes and working-class villains in a marginalized society

Abstract

The objective of this article is to discuss the representation of the working class and poor people as villains and monsters in two 1980s Batman comics, stemming from social and economic issues in the real New York City of the period. Through the article, I connect these elements with late nineteenth-century Gothic texts, especially The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and with 1930s and 1940s Batman comics, examining the representations in the fictional Gotham City in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke (1988).