For those of you who listen to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, you know who Glen Weldon is.  He writes about “books and comics books for the NPR website,” per the intro, and he’s a giant comic book nerd. He’s been excitedly, in his Weldonian way, talking about this book for the past year or so – writing, editing, recording the audiobook, selecting the author photograph – and now it’s here. It is everything he promised it would be.

This is a concise history of Batman: it’s not a comprehensive listing of every storyline that he’s ever been through, but a history of his creation and the writers and artists that presented him for the world. It’s also a tracing of how the evolution of nerd culture both had an affect and an effect on the world of Batman as a whole.

My own history with Batman involves seeing the 1989 Tim Burton movie in the theater (I was 11) and I got the VHS and watched it every day one Christmas break. I loved that movie, and unironically loved the 60s television show when it was on in reruns. I read some of the Robin and Nightwing comics; I waited breathlessly for future Batman movies until I got burned.

Weldon is proudly a nerd. It’s clear that he’s always been one, and while he functions in the world of “normals” (his word), he’s not a part of it. (I am a geek, but I straddle the worlds of nerdery and normalcy, and find myself often translating between the two and getting constantly frustrated with both.) When you listen to him on PCHH, he has a quality to his voice that marks him as a nerd – over-enunciated “r”s, for one thing.  I’m not saying anything that he hasn’t said himself, and there’s a vocal quality that marks our people. I can hear the cadence from half a block away.

So when he’s talking about the rise of nerd culture, he knows what he’s talking about, from a dude nerd perspective. When the concept of Batman moved from the comic book shop to television in the 60s, there was an uprising of rage among the comic book fans of the time that the show in all of it’s candy-colored, ridiculous, pop-art glory wasn’t the “real” Batman, and suddenly all these people who hadn’t put in their time appreciating the “pure” Batman of the comic felt like they KNEW Batman.

Nerds disagreed.

And this thing of “Batman is accessible to the people,” much to the dismay and distress of “pure” Batman fans everywhere, has played out over and over again, and Weldon traces that, along with the effect the rise of the internet had on that culture. Suddenly instead of gathering in groups at comic book stores or writing into fan magazines, they could gather in large virtual groups online without even putting on pants (full disclosure: I’m writing this review in my PJs. Fuck pants).

When large groups can suddenly shift the narrative from “yay we’re getting a Batman movie!” (1989…..kind of….) to “Joel Schumacher is a fake nerd who doesn’t know shit about Batman and Batman and Robin is gonna suck!” that shift has a distinct effect on how pop culture even functions.

(To be fair, Batman and Robin DID suck. I watched it twice, and the second time was because I couldn’t believe that it was as bad as I remembered. It was.)

Weldon’s thesis isn’t that “Batman created nerd culture as we know it” but “here’s a case study of how this societal shift happened in this particular subculture.” What’s really interesting to me is how Hollywood has learned to manage the nerd-rage game. Joel Schumacher was seen as an outsider, while Christopher Nolan managed to position himself as “One of Us.” What that did is made the Batman nerds protective of the Nolan movies – to the point of making death threats to critics who give the movies bad reviews.

Weldon also touches on the ways that men and women tend to engage when they celebrate their nerdery. Men tend towards curation: collecting things and exacting replicas. Women tend towards creation: fanfic and  cosplay. There’s always been tension between these two approaches, and Weldon sums it up thusly:

Nerd culture is often open and inclusive, when it is powered by the desire to seek out others who share common interests and enthusiasms.  But nerdish passion is strong and unmindful; its very nature is to obliterate dispassion, nuance, ambiguity, and push human experience to the other edge of a binary extreme: My thing is the best. Your thing is the worst.

Moreover, if you do not love my thing in the same way, to the same degree, and for exactly the same reasons that I do, you are doing it wrong.

That’s pretty much the crux of it.

As a history of Batman, this is pretty good. As a discussion of how nerd culture weaved its way in and amongst the BatCycles, this is fascinating. Weldon knows what he’s talking about, and he knows it because he’s lived the past 40 years as a nerd. He was there on the inside, but he’s smart enough and has enough self-awareness to be able to see the bigger picture.

I’m still pondering what implications this has for Romancelandia.