The Boy Who Loved Batman

August 8, 2011
Film producer Uslan tells of how a New Jersey kid turned his youthful obsession with the 1950s and ’60s superheroes of DC and Marvel Comics, like Batman and Captain America, into a “lifetime career”—culminating in his current role as executive producer of all the Batman movies, from 1989’s Batman to the Dark Knight Rises, scheduled to premiere in 2012. The problem is that Uslan spends too much time on the details of his youthful and college-era obsession and not enough on his current peak. Three-quarters of the book is a highly detailed account of the author’s life in Jersey, his work at Indiana University teaching one of the first college-level courses on comic books, and a stint as a young writer at DC Comics. Only in the book’s last quarter does Uslan tell some fascinating stories about the difficulties he had in convincing Hollywood film executives of the potential success of a movie based on the original comic book’s characterization of “a dark and serious Batman,” as opposed to the “1967 pop version” found in the Batman television show. Uslan’s writing is friendly but conventional, but his relentless linear reporting style keeps his focus all too narrow.

September 15, 2011
Eagle-eyed movie fans will recognize the author's name as a producer of the Batman movies since 1989 (and also as producer of 1982's Swamp Thing, among other non-bat-related projects). As he explains in this enjoyable autobiography, his love of Batman and comic books in general began when he was a boy, and grew to the point that, by the early 1970s, he was teaching the first accredited college course in comic books. He went on to law school, but he never lost his love for the comics, writing for DC Comicshome of Batmanand, as a movie-studio employee in the late seventies, teaming up with veteran producer Benjamin Melniker to buy the rights to Batman. The 10-year odyssey to get his first movie made constitutes a fascinating story. Uslan writes with a childlike quality, peppering his prose with words written in LARGE CAPS and plenty of exclamation marks, giving the book the feel ofwhat else?a comic book. Full of anecdotes and illustrations, this is sure to please Bat-fans everywhere.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)