Gotham City Living: The Social Dynamics in the Batman Comics and Media, by Erica McCrystal

Erica McCrystal’s Gotham City Living: The Social Dynamics in the Batman Comics and Media is an illuminating tome that chronicles the dimensions of Batman’s Gotham City, in film, television and print as a playground for the popular imagination where competing standpoints on identity and villainy play out. McCrystal’s scholarship largely focuses on popular culture vis-à-vis Victorian and detective literature, the gothic and the nature of heroics and villainy, the latter of which is a subject of her podcast series Villains 101 . Readers unfamiliar with Batman will appreciate McCrystal’s cultural study of the fictional urban city in the popular imagination, one that simultaneously thrives on and is eroded by its own degradation. McCrystal deftly moves across a vast number and variety of texts in crafting her analysis and in the process she seamlessly bridges her readings of text and illustration to the nuanced meanings underlying filmic/televisual cinematography, direction and performance. McCrystal’s take on how the apocryphal environs of Gotham produces the characters and content of the Batman franchise is as much about the project of forging a united and multicultural America from the Second World War onwards as it grapples to reconcile the disenfranchisement of its many marginalised citizens against the unchecked privilege of its elite. McCrystal’s approach, which looks at how the city of Gotham is signified as a microcosm of dynamic social change in America, differentiates her work from other books that examine Batman mainly in terms of character study and/or audience analysis (e.g. Will Brooker’s Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman ).