The Caped Crusade Quotes

“Holy Adam West!”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“Detective Comic #27: The very first glimpse we get of the guy and already he looks pissed.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“The Joker as sadistic chaos, the Batman as merciless order. This mirror-image theme would come to define the two characters' relationship in the comics and across all media for the next forty years.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“From that moment on, Batman Returns was destined to become what it ultimately turned out to be: un film de Tim Burton...with Batman in it.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“...the performative online biliousness that has come to be known as trolling...”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“The world has accepted hard-core fans' argument. Batman, this children's character who dresses up in a costume to effect the change he wishes to see in the world via face punching, is serious.
And awesome.
And definitely not gay.
And, most importantly, now and forever, badass.
This is the Batman narrative that now permeates the culture—the narrative that doesn't like nobody touching its stuff and doesn't want any of you homos touching it, neither.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“I always had trouble with the Bruce Wayne in the comic book," Burton said. "I mean, if this guy is so handsome, so rich, and so strong, why the fuck is he putting on a Batsuit?”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“The final two issues of the Englehart/Rogers/Austin collaboration, Detective Comics #475 and #476, are now esteemed alongside the greatest Batman stories ever created and would provide the seed for Tim Burton’s 1989 feature film. In”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“Batman could be square, but he shouldn’t be boring.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“There was also this inconvenient truth: everything about Batwoman was presented as so kitschily überfeminine that she could have passed for Batman’s fierce drag queen persona.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“Well—er—Batwoman—I thought we were going to die—and I wanted to make your last moments happy ones!” he says. Jerk.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“Anyone who remembered the grim, gun-toting, thug-murdering Batman of 1939 could see that he’d become a fundamentally different guy: a grinning, lantern-jawed, wisecracking adventure hero who’d left that emo “creature of the night” shtick far behind.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“Nothing about the character was new. He was simply a combination of tropes from many sources: even his origin story itself was full of swipes. Kane”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“This homicide proves only the beginning of his murderous spree. In just the first year of his existence Batman will send some twenty-four men, two vampires, a pack of werewolves, and several giant mutants to their ultimate ends, occasionally at the business end of a gun.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“We were the first generation without a draft,” he says matter-of-factly. “We didn’t need to worry about life and death, so we channeled all that time and energy into obsessing over this TV show or that comic book.” This”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“He believes himself to be an agent of change; he is the living embodiment of the simple, implacably optimistic notion Never again.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“McCarthy himself said repeatedly to millions of Americans during the spring and summer of 1954, homosexuals represented a moral cancer that posed a security risk to the United States second only to the Communist Menace. “Better Dead Than Red”? Perhaps, but McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations wasn’t crazy about lavender, either; the specter of homosexuality was a frequent guest in the Senate’s hearing rooms.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“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 either 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.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“We were the first generation without a draft,” he says matter-of-factly. “We didn’t need to worry about life and death, so we channeled all that time and energy into obsessing over this TV show or that comic book.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“If you were casting the part of the evil scientist who would prove the Caped Crusader's deadliest nemesis, you'd likely glance at the headshot of German-born psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, with his owl-like glasses and severe Prussian features, and think, "Nah, too on-the-nose.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“I couldn't stand boy companions," he [Jules Feiffer] wrote in his 1965 essay " The Great Comic Book Heroes. "Robin was my own age. One need only look at him to see he could fight better, swing from a rope better, play ball better, eat better and live better...He was obviously an A student, the center of every circle, the one picked for greatness in the crowd—God, how I hate him. You can imagine how please I was when, years later, I heard he was a fag.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“writers to explicitly posit that the Joker embraces the chaos of insanity and death, while the Batman instead channels his pain into an endless crusade to impose order.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“According to Finger, the panel in which Batman mows down his enemies from on high led to an editorial crackdown on firearms. “I was called on the carpet by [editorial director] Whit Ellsworth. He said, ‘Never let us have Batman [use] a gun again.’ ”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“Dick is determined to go to the police when the Batman appears to him, warning the boy that if he does so, Zucco’s men will find him and kill him. “I’m going to hide you in my home for a while,” he says, because 1940.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“The really odd, unsettling thing was that Batman was smiling. Not”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“This oath, which resides at the core of every iteration of Batman that has ever or will ever exist, from pulp antihero to TV buffoon, is much more practical and matter-of-fact. It is a declaration of war. The”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“Over and over, throughout this first year, he faces down those who would threaten the lives of millionaires to extort their millions from them. Of”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“Thus the film seems to posit that what empowers her transformation into Catwoman is not any choice Selina Kyle makes, but the abuse itself. That’s messed up.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

“Having seen his parents gunned down before his eyes, wee Bruce Wayne makes the following vow by candlelight: “And I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.” This oath is ridiculous on its face, so laughably grandiose and melodramatic that only a kid could make it. Which is exactly its power. That oath is a choice. An act of will. A deliberate reaction to a shattering injustice. More crucially, it is an act of self-rescue. It’s these twenty-four words, after all, that give his life purpose and launch him into an existence entirely devoted to protecting others from the fate that befell him. This is why, for all the character’s vaunted darkness, he is now and has always been a creature not of rage but of hope. He believes himself to be an agent of change; he is the living embodiment of the simple, implacably optimistic notion Never again.”
― Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture