Cultural Impact
Batman has become a pop culture icon, recognized around the world. The character's presence has extended beyond his comic book origins; events such as the release of the 1989 Batman film and its accompanying merchandising "brought the Batman to the forefront of public consciousness." In an article commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the character, The Guardian wrote, "Batman is a figure blurred by the endless reinvention that is modern mass culture. He is at once an icon and a commodity: the perfect cultural artefact for the 21st century." In addition, media outlets have often used the character in trivial and comprehensive surveys — Forbes magazine estimated Bruce Wayne to be the 8th-richest fictional character with his $6.9 billion fortune, several places after Iron Man, who is at 5. BusinessWeek listed the character as one of the ten most intelligent superheroes appearing in American comics. Entertainment Weekly named Batman as one of The 20 All Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture. He also was placed on AFI's 100 Years…100 Heroes and Villains from the 1989 feature film by the American Film Institute. The character was the focus of the 2008 non-fiction book Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero by E. Paul Zehr.
Read more about this topic: Batman
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or impact:
“If we can learn ... to look at the ways in which various groups appropriate and use the mass-produced art of our culture ... we may well begin to understand that although the ideological power of contemporary cultural forms is enormous, indeed sometimes even frightening, that power is not yet all-pervasive, totally vigilant, or complete.”
—Janice A. Radway (b. 1949)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)