Author Description

Product Description<br/><br/><br/>This cultural analysis of visual and narrative elements within Batman comics provides an important exploration of the ways readers and creators negotiate gender, identity, and sexuality in popular culture. Thematic chapters investigate how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and interpret gendered and sexual representations by focusing on one of the most popular and heated fictional rivalries ever inked: that of Batman and the Joker. The monograph provides critical insights into ways queer reading practices can open new forms of understanding that have generally remained implicit and unexplored in mainstream comics studies. This accessible and interdisciplinary approach to the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime engages diverse fields of scholarship such as comics studies, critical theory, cultural studies, gender studies, literature, psychoanalysis, media studies, and queer theory.<br/><br/><br/>About the Author<br/><br/><br/>Chris Richardson is associate professor and chair of communication studies at Young Harris College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. He is also program director of the popular culture minor and curator of the Andy Rowe Comics Collection there. His publications include Covering Canadian Crime: What Journalists Should Know and the Public Should Question, coedited with Romayne Smith Fullerton, and Habitus of the Hood, coedited with Hans Skott-Myhre. He also hosts This Is Not A Pipe Podcast, where he interviews authors of new books in critical theory, cultural studies, and philosophy.<br/><br/><br/>George Newbern is an Earphones Award-winning narrator and a television and film actor best known for his roles as Brian MacKenzie in Father of the Bride and Father of the Bride Part II, as well as Danny in Friends. As a voice actor, he is notable for his role as Superman on the Cartoon Newtork series Static Shock, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited. He has guest starred on many te