A witty, intelligent cultural background from NPR book critic Glen Weldon explains Batman’s rises and falls through the entire ages-and what his story tells us about ourselves.

Since his creation, Batman continues to be many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop-art feeling; a pointy-eared professional spy; and a grim and gritty ninja from the metropolitan night. For a lot more than three quarters of a century, he provides cycled from a physique of darkness to 1 of lightness and back again; he’s a about The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who takes on the many meanings our changing culture tasks onto him. How we perceive Batman’s personality, whether he’s delivering dire threats in a raspy Christian Bale growl or trading blithely homoerotic double-entendres with partner Robin in the comics page, speaks to who we are and how we wish to be seen by the globe. It’s this endlessly mutable quality which has made him therefore enduring.

And it’s Batman’s fundamental nerdiness-his gadgets, his obsession, his oath, even his insufficient superpowers-that uniquely resonates with his fans who feel a fiercely protective like for the character. Today, fueled by the internet, that breed of interest for components of well-known culture is almost everywhere. Which is what makes Batman the perfect lens through which to understand geek lifestyle, its current recognition, and social significance.

In The Caped Crusade, with humor and insight, Glen Weldon, reserve critic for NPR and writer of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, lays out Batman’s seventy-eight-year cultural history and shows how he has helped make us who we are today and just why his legacy remains so solid.