The Caped Crusade: Batman And The Rise Of Nerd Culture
by Glen Weldon
Buy on Amazon"Since his debut in Detective Comics #27, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop Art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim ninja of the urban night, cycling through eras of dark melodrama and light comedy and back again. He is constantly changing, jumping from page to screen and beyond, and yet he remains one of our most revered cultural icons. In this witty, wise, and fascinating history, NPR critic and self-proclaimed nerd Glen Weldon expalins why we've continued to look to this masked man in the night--and what that devotion tells us about ourselves.…
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"“Batman is an inkblot; we see in him what we want to,” writes Glen Weldon in The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. It might as well be the book’s mantra. His hilarious, incisive history of the Dark Knight focuses equally on the character, his creators and his hordes of diehard fans as they have all changed over the decades — for better and for worse. Under that iconic cowl, Weldon sees ugliness, wonder and the undercurrents of pop culture in all their conflicting glory."
NPR Books We Love — 2016 · apps.npr.org