I'm not going to try to catch up on all the pop culture learning I've done since I last posted. Instead I'll just pick up from where I am now. I've been watching and reading a lot of superhero goodness during the last few months and so for the next few weeks, I'll be looking at the most interesting points on that pop culture journey. This week I'm going to look at Glen Weldon's new book, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture.
I first came across Weldon's superhero commentary via the NPR podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour. He's also a regular contributor as a reviewer of books and comics on NPR's pop culture blog, Monkey See, as well as the NPR website at large. His biography of the Man of Steel, Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, came out in 2013.
In The Caped Crusade, Weldon not only presents a thorough and thoughtful history of DC's Batman but also an examination of how fans -- of Batman, of comic books, and of popular culture in general -- have responded to change. In particular he shines a light on their responses to changes to their beloved objects (especially Batman) and to their own power to shape the things they love. Fans of Batman will find a lot to like in this text, particularly when Weldon begins discussing their Batman. Pop culture scholars can also learn a bit from this text about the changing perceptions of the nerd community as Weldon examines "Batmaniacs" both from a space inside and a space outside the community.
Perhaps what I enjoyed most about The Caped Crusade is Weldon's tone. In my life as a teacher I read a lot of scholarly essays; they tend to be information dense and often a bit dry. This examination of Batman is information dense too but is anything but dry. Weldon's tone throughout the text deftly mixes the playful with the insightful and the serious with the sometimes incredulous. Some of my favorite moments are the more scholarly sounding ones like this passage from the discussion of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Weldon is discussing the critical feedback to Miller's work and ends with this observation of the critics' views: "This is Batman-as-inkblot, an endlessly interpretable figure who accepts the meanings projected onto him by authors and audience alike" (139). And later there's this passage on the impact of Miller's work as well as Alan Moore's The Killing Joke that is evocative and just a bit snarky. Commenting on how The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke brought Batman out of the realm of childhood and into the nitty-gritty adult world, Weldon pulls on another staple of childhood and bends it: "It was as if Winnie the Pooh had escaped the Hundred-Acre Wood and run amok on the mean streets of New York. Where he brutally mauled Piglet" (146). Oh bother indeed.
Weldon's coverage of the scope of the Batman story is impressive, and working my way through each chapter lead to some interesting discoveries. Batman has always been a fixture in my comic book landscape -- there was Adam West, of course, but there were also the animated versions, the Superfriends' Batman who sometimes hung out with Scooby-Doo and the gang and the Bruce Timm/Paul Dini Batman. They shared space with the Batman from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's The Long Halloween and from Brian Augustyn, Mike Mignola et al's Gotham by Gaslight. Weldon's thorough research helped me fill in the gaps in what I knew about my favorite Batmen, but it also helped me better understand those portions of the Bat-universe I had never really known, had forgotten about, or has simply chosen to opt out of.
Weldon's deep dive into the history of Batman reveals a character who began life as a riff on the popular character The Shadow. The men who brought the Bat to life, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, created a character who was more likely to slug it out with the bad guys than out-think them. This early propensity for violence was a bit of a revelation for me and helped me make sense of later Batman incarnations. Dangling bad guys off buildings? Check. Villain falls to his death in the midst of a chase? Whoops. These sorts of moments are fairly run of the mill in the early years. Fast forward to the 1980s and Frank Miller who came to DC after a rather successful run with Marvel's Daredevil.
The chapter covering the initial Miller run in the Bat-verse, "Bat-Noir," made two things very clear to me. First, Miller didn't seem to be all that interested in appealing to hard-core fans with The Dark Knight Returns although he did that in spades; instead in Weldon's estimation he "engage[s] with, and update[s], Batman the Idea, not Batman the Character" (135). It's important to stop for a moment and think about this notion that Dark Knight Returns isn't really about a character but an idea. If that's true, all the iterations of Batman that come after Miller's four-issue run make a lot more sense. They aren't all necessarily meant to be representations of a familiar character but instead ruminations on this new idea of the character. Second, from the publisher's perspective at the time, The Dark Knight Returns provided "an ending, not the ending" to the Batman adventures (140). This tidbit is valuable to remember as we see more and more Miller-inspired films involving Batman work their way onto our screens. "An ending" means whatever vision is out there is merely a possibility not a certainty. Miller's call back to the tougher, more violent Batman of the Bob Kane/Bill Finger/Gardner Fox-era might have felt new to me, but it wasn't really.
Why do these through lines and connections matter? Because like a lot of the comic books nerds Weldon talks to and about in this book, I care about continuity. I like my heroes (and villains) to be dynamic certainly but, to borrow a term from fanfiction, out-of-character moments make me cringe. Any character who has existed in the popular consciousness for as long as Batman has will certainly have those OOC moments, but to watch the OOC behaviors turn from small moments to seemingly all-consuming and endless stories can be disheartening for a fan. Because Weldon pulls back the layers and reveals the darker elements of Batman's character, I get why this new Batman appeals to so many folks, and I can acknowledge that many of the changes to his character aren't solely driven out of a need to part a fan from her money. I appreciate the notion of "Batman-as-inkblot" (139) and that Batman writers, directors, creators sometimes look back to go forward.
What this all comes down to is that Weldon's book is definitely worth the read. There's also an audiobook for those who don't feel they have the time to sit down with a text.
For more Batman goodness around the web, check out:
Batman News which bills itself as the "Premier Source For All Things Batman and DC"
The Ultimate Batman Comics Website
and then there's this: Batman Live! which was apparently a stunt show extravaganza from 2012.
And while not a Muppet Moment, I offer this as yet another take on the Bat:
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