The official page for Gotham City 14 Miles is now up at the Sequart website and will be in the next Diamond Previews catalog. The book is not yet available elsewhere, so I call your attention to this fun volume.Editor Jim Beard invited me to write for this in the spring of 2009 and I delivered the essay in July of that year. The publishing process is a mercurial thing, and there were some delays from its initial spring 2010 release date.The book will be available by the New York Comic-Con and there will be a panel featuring several of the contributors, including yours truly.The contents will include a handy episode guide plus the following essays:”
Bats in Their Belfries – The Proliferation of ‘Batmania'” – by Robert Greenberger. Covering the genesis of the show and the explosion – and quirky substance – of Batmania. From the show’s popularity to the spinoff products and beyond, he characterizes this particular form of insanity that gripped the country — the world — from 1966 to 1968.”Batman – From Comics Page to TV Screen” by Peter Sanderson.”Such a Character – A Dissection and Examination of Two Sub-Species of Chiroptera homo sapiens” by Jim Beard.”Notes on Bat-Camp” by Tim Callahan.”Aunt Harriet’s Film Decency League” by Becky Beard.”POW! – Batman’s Visual Punch” – by Bill Walko.”Known Super-Criminals Still at Large” by Chuck Dixon.”May I Have This Batdance?” by Michael Miller.”The Best Dressed Women in Gotham City” by Jennifer K. Stuller.“Holy Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor!” by Michael D Hamersky.”Gotham City R&D” by Michael Johnson.”Theatre of the Absurd – Batman: The Movie, 1966″ by Rob Weiner.”Jumping the Bat-Shark” by William Patrick Murray.”Some Days You Just Can’t Get Rid of a Bomb” by Paul Kupperberg.
I wonder if Peter Sanderson’s essay will mention something I learned about a few years back but which doesn’t seem to be generally known.Namely, if things had worked out just a bit differently, we would’ve had an anthology series set in the world of one of Robert Heinlein’s stories instead of Batman. Turns out that in the Heinlein Archives (then only available at UC Santa Cruz, now online), there’s a pilot script he wrote for what would’ve been a series called The XXIII Century (if I recall the number right and aren’t mixing it up with Max Headroom’s Network 23) that adapted his Gulf short story about a secret society of mentally advanced folk.Said pilot was done in the early-mid-60s for William Dozier, who of course was the force behind/producer of Batman. From what I recall XXIII Century didn’t end up airing because of a change of network administration, but I had to assume that if it had gone to series, Dozier would’ve been too busy with it to develop Batman shortly after.
Don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this to you before, Bob, but Did You Know That if things had gone differently, Melbourne (Australia) would have been named Batmania? The best known founding father of our not-so-sunny city was John Batman (pronounced BATmn) and there was a suggestion that the city be named after him instead of after Lord Melbourne! (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Melbourne, the paragraph before the heading “Early Settlement”)