Gotham

I have to assume that Bob Kane and Bill Finger intended for their character and his adventures to be something of an answer to Action Comics' Superman stories.  The early Bat-Man comics take place in a city that is identified only as 'a metropolis.'  Though this calls to mind the name of Superman's home city, the location is almost immediately identified as quite different than 'Metropolis.'  Superman appears to live and work in an American city like any other.  He battles relatively benign crime and is surrounded by people that resemble real world Americans.  Batman's unnamed metropolis is a decidedly uncanny locale.  The comics are not only drawn in more detail than Superman's early adventures, but this detail is also typically unusual.  Kane's characters and locations are often expressionist in ways that reminded me of the EC Crime Comics.  Especially evil characters are drawn with exaggerated features that seem to emphasize their villainy.  The evildoers plans are also far closer to what modern readers might expect of 'supervillains.'  I was struck by how boring most of Superman's early adventures were.  For the most part, Batman's escapades involve more heightened happenings and are far more interesting.   Wild Art-Deco architecture (20), garish costuming (120 and elsewhere) and oddly-colored backgrounds (14, 52, 133) are a fixture.  Such distinctive qualities continue to define Gotham and help to differentiate it from other locations within the DC Universe.  Batman's world, whether campy (the 60s television show and Schumacher's films), oppressively dark (Miller and Nolan), or somewhere in-between (Burton) is always outlandish.

On an unrelated note, I think it's only a matter of time before The Dark Knight Returns suffers an especially harsh critical backlash.  Given Miller's recent antics and the poor responses to work like The Dark Knight Strikes Again, the backlash seems to be underway.  Along with the fascistic bent of his recent output, Miller is largely responsible for superhero cinema's recent reliance on all things gritty.  It is unlikely that films as blandly dark and ashamed of their source material as Man of Steel or the new Fantastic Four would have come to fruition without Miller's tortured take on Bruce Wayne.  What was originally a novel take on Batman has become a crutch for superhero fiction of all types.