America’s Urban Nightmare: Gotham City

By |2019-05-03T22:57:53-05:00May 3rd, 2019|Categories: Batman Series, Bradley J. Birzer, Civilization, Culture, Senior Contributors|

Behind all the sin and the struggle for good is the all-important backdrop, Gotham City, perhaps Robert Kane and Bill Finger’s second greatest creation after the Batman himself. If Batman represents the action hero and ultimate humanist, Gotham is the ultimate surrealist, expressionist, nihilistic noir city and stage. Gotham is a nightmare city, once glorious—at [...]

The Dynamic Duo: The Controversy Over Batman’s Creators

By |2019-05-03T11:23:03-05:00April 26th, 2019|Categories: Batman Series, Bradley J. Birzer, Culture, History, Senior Contributors|

Exactly how much of The Bat-man came from Bob Kane and how much came from Bill Finger remains in doubt and, fascinatingly, remains a point of contention among historians, biographers, and, especially, comic fans. In his 1989 memoir, Batman and Me, Kane presents himself in the narrative as the main creator, but after describing the [...]

Batman and the Rise of the American Superhero

By |2019-04-05T14:00:06-05:00March 29th, 2019|Categories: Batman Series, Bradley J. Birzer, Character, Heroism, History, Senior Contributors, Western Civilization|

Against the suffocating world of Nazism, communism, Holocaust camps, and gulags, imagination found a new life in the 1940s and 1950s, as artists strove for a renewal of beauty, goodness, and truth. It is only in this context that one can understand the rise of the “superhero,” among whom none have endured as well as [...]

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