In a comment on The New York Times’ coverage of 26/11, a reader exclaimed in whimsical anguish: ‘I think humanity is evolving toward a global alliance of highly trained, enthusiastic, bright and athletic young men and women who fly to the aid of local police in terrorist attacks such as these current horrors in Mumbai.’

Our heroes always fail us. In the same week as Mumbai burned, Batman died. In the same year as the most powerful film adaptation of the Caped Crusader’s story was released, DC Comics killed off Bruce Wayne, Batman’s alter ego. Truly trivialised in the face of disaster, cultural differences, and the knowledge that no one ever really dies in comic book universes, the coincidence was nonetheless noticed and remarked on.

Comic-book superheroes are a modern American invention. Born as they are of individualism and romanticism, in the absence of community folklore, the greatest ones have become inextricably linked with cities; and Batman belongs to the greatest city in all comic-book land. Superman, with his alien origins and small-town beginnings, cuts an all-American figure as a saviour of the world and immigrant white-collar worker to Metropolis, but to Batman, Gotham City is one of the very cornerstones of his being. A dark, Dickensian monstrosity of twisting, turning alleyways, crime and decay, blinding lights and glitter, with the chilling spectre of Arkham Asylum located at its moral centre, Gotham is the dark, insane döppelganger of the American metro. In its multi-faceted depiction of the biggest and baddest city of all, Gotham is both an intimate speculation on the innards of New York City and a delimited, pulpy reflection of every great modern city in the world. All heroes are dreamed up by societies longing for order and identity, and Batman is the demi-god of city dwellers caught in the grip of nameless terrors. He is a superhero who tries – and doesn’t always succeed – to make sense of civic life as he battles alienation and loneliness, like every other vertiginous metro dweller.

In his 2001 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon tells the story of two young Jewish comic-book artists in the 1940s who create a superhero and liberator of the oppressed called the Escapist, as their response to the Nazi terrors besieging Europe. In creating an explicit parallel to Siegel and Shuster’s production of Superman in the 1930s, Chabon’s novel is a tribute to superhero comics, and a fine, moving exploration of the urban connection to the masked vigilantes of pop culture.

Our yearning for heroes, battered, betrayed and flawed though they may be, is always alive and flourishing. If anything, in a year that produced two of the finest and most successful superhero films ever to come out of Hollywood, The Dark Knight and Iron Man, it seems like that desire has only increased in a world that fragments further and further, even as it comes closer to a shared popular imagination.

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