Roberta Pearson - Many More Lives of the Batman

British Film Institute 2015

Introduction and editorial arrangement Roberta Pearson, William Uricchio, Will Brooker 2015 Individual essays their respective authors 2015

The Many Lives of the Batman published in 1991 by Routledge, an imprint of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 29 West 35 Street, New York, NY 10001, USA Published in Great Britain by BFI Publishing

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Cover artwork: Clay Rodery

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ISBN 9781844577644 (pb)

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CONTENTS

Roberta Pearson, William Uricchio and Will Brooker

Paul Levitz

/ Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio

/ Christopher Sharrett

/ Will Brooker

/ Anthony N. Smith

/ Eileen R. Meehan

/ Mark Gallagher

/ Iain Robert Smith

/ Phillip Bevin

/ Will Brooker

/ Jim Collins

/ Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins

William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson

Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio would again like to thank Dennis ONeil for taking the time to share the secrets of the Batcave with us, for his generosity with his scripts and the Batbible, and for his interest in the project. Thanks to Denny and to Frank Miller for allowing their interviews to be reprinted in this volume and to contributors Henry Jenkins, Lynn Spigel, Jim Collins and Eileen Meehan for providing postscripts to their chapters. We are also grateful to Anthony N. Smith for consultations concerning the update to our chapter. Will Brooker would specifically like to thank Grant Morrison and Kristan Morrison for their generosity and time, and Roberta and William for, respectively, supervising and examining his PhD on Batman in 1999. Thanks also to Phillip Bevin, who has just completed his PhD at Kingston University on Superman, for the inspiring and provocative tutorials over the last four years.

PHILLIP BEVIN completed his PhD on the cultural and political history of Superman at Kingston University, Surrey, and is an assistant editor of Cinema Journal.

WILL BROOKER is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University and editor of Cinema Journal. He is the author of several books on popular culture, including Batman Unmasked and Hunting the Dark Knight.

JIM COLLINS is a Professor at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches courses in digital culture and postmodern studies. His most recent book is Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture.

MARK GALLAGHER is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood and Action Figures: Men, Action Films and Contemporary Adventure Narratives, and co-editor of East Asian Film Noir.

HENRY JENKINS is Provosts Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His many books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.

PAUL LEVITZ is a comic fan (The Comic Reader), editor (Batman, among many titles), writer (Legion of Super-Heroes, including two New York Times best-sellers), executive (thirty years at DC, ending as President & Publisher), historian (75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Myth-Making) and educator (including the American Graphic Novel at Columbia University). His many awards include Comic-Con Internationals Inkpot Award and the prestigious Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award.

EILEEN R. MEEHAN is a Professor in the Department of Radio, Television and Digital Media at Southern Illinois University. Her research has addressed the commodity audience, corporate synergy, gendered economics and, most recently, Dog the Bounty Hunter.

ROBERTA PEARSON is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is one of the editors of The Many Lives of the Batman. Among her many other books are Star Trek and American Television (co-authored with Mire Messenger Davies) and the edited collection Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Exploring Screen Narratives (coedited with Anthony N. Smith).

CHRISTOPHER SHARRETT is Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Seton Hall University. He is author of The Rifleman and editor of Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media and coeditor of Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, the first academic collection on the horror film

ANTHONY N. SMITH is Lecturer in Television Theory at the University of Salford. He has published articles in the journals Television and New Media and Critical Studies in Television and is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Exploring Screen Narratives.

IAIN ROBERT SMITH is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. He is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations of American Film and Television and co-chair of the SCMS Transnational Cinemas Scholarly Interest Group.