Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
JEFF RUBIN: I never got a PhD, so I don’t totally understand the process. Along the way, was
there someone you had to go to and say, “Just so you know, I’m going to be writing my thesis on Batman”?
WILL BROOKER: Yeah, there sure is. What happens is you have to find yourself a supervisor who is an expert in the area you want to study. There are quite a lot of checks and balances. My PhD was just as rigorous as someone doing a PhD on something more traditional.
JR: So writing a paper on Batman is just as much work as writing a paper on the Iliad. Why is that? Is it because there’s just so much more Batman? There’s only one volume of the Iliad, but there’s essentially an infinite amount of Batman out there.
WB: The challenge isn’t “Can you read every word that Shakespeare ever wrote?” and it’s the same with Batman. It’s not like a pop quiz where someone’s going to ask you a detail of something that happened in 1943.
JR: So when you say, “I’m writing about Batman,” which Batman are you writing about?
WB: I regard Batman as a concept. He’s like a mosaic. Batman is everything that Batman has ever been. You might not like the ’60s Batman or the 1939 Batman or even the Joel Schumacher Batman, but without that, the character would not be the kind of rich, multifaceted, complex thing that he is. If Batman had carried on the same as he was in 1939, I don’t think he would have continued -he’d be kind of a flat, pulpy, plastic character.
To me, Batman is interesting because he’s so many contradictory things -he’s very, very complex.
JR: I get that you don’t have to read the entire printed history of Batman to get all of that, but how much Batman did you read?
WB: I was very lucky,…
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