The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Glen Weldon takes us through Batman’s history and evolution and how it was affected by the culture in which it was written. I knew bits and pieces of the story from other histories of comics, but this was the first time I’d read one focused on Batman. There are many ways to tell this story and I think Weldon’s is a very good strategy.

Recently I was thinking about cataloguing my comic books.  Recent family events convinced me to get on with it and so I spent all weekend putting the information into the KDE collection database Tellico.  It had lots of useful fields to fill out, so I figured I was probably only going to do this once and so I may as well do it correctly.  I entered in the names of the writers, pencillers, inkers, and so on.  And I learned some interesting stuff.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“If Bloomberg can ride the train, so can Batman”] [/caption]

Sometimes jokes can be very misleading to outsiders. For a few months after hearing jokes about how gamey it was that Joker’s henchmen lost track of Batman as soon as he went up onto a gargoyle I didn’t have any inclination to play the game. It just seemed like it would be too jarring to have enemies shooting at me and suddenly be unable to follow the fact that I went up onto a gargoyle. The truth turned out to be a good compromise. But it brings to light an uncanny valley of a different sort. As games become more and more realistic, how do you represent super heroes in a way that doesn’t destroy the video game?