From his debut in a six-page comic in 1939 and to his most recent portrayal by Christian Bale in the blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises, Batman is perhaps the world’s most popular superhero. The continued relevance of the caped crusader could be attributed to his complex character, his dual identity, or his commitment to revenge and justice. But, as the contributors to this collection argue, it is the fans who, with the patience of Alfred, the loyalty of Commissioner Gordon, and the unbridled enthusiasm of Robin, have kept Batman at the forefront of popular culture for more than seven decades.

Fan Phenomena: Batman explores the unlikely devotion to the Dark Knight, from his inauspicious beginnings on the comic book page to the cult television series of the 1960s and on to critically-acclaimed films and video games of today. Considering everything from convention cosplay to fan fiction that imagines the Joker as a romantic lead, the essays here acknowledge and celebrate fan responses that go far beyond the scope of the source material. And, the contributors contend, despite occasional dips in popularity, Batman’s sustained presence in popular culture for more than seventy years is thanks in no small part to his fans’ ardor.

Packed with revealing interviews from all corners of the fan spectrum—including Paul Levitz, who rose through the ranks of fan culture to become the president of DC Comics, and Michael Uslan, who has executive produced every Batman adaptation since Tim Burton’s blockbuster in 1989, as well as film reviewers, academics, movie buffs, comic store clerks, and costume-clad convention attendees—this book is sure to be a bestseller in Gotham City, as well as everywhere Bruce Wayne’s alter ego continues to intrigue and inspire.

Few could have predicted the enduring affection inspired by Joss Whedon’s television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. With its origins in a script Whedon wrote for a 1992 feature film of the same name, the series far outpaced its source material, gathering a devoted audience that remains loyal to the show more than a decade after it left the airwaves. Heralded for its use of smart, funny, and emotionally resonant narrative; subversive and feminist characterizations; and unique approaches to television as an art form, the show quickly developed its own unique fan community, who built on existing narratives through fan fiction, media manipulation, and performance.

Fan Phenomena: Buffy the Vampire Slayer explores how this continued devotion is internalized, celebrated, and critiqued. Featuring interviews with culture makers, academics, and creators of participatory fandom, the essays here are a window into the more personal and communal aspects of the fan experience. Essays from critical thinkers and scholars address how Buffy inspires the creation of, among other enduring artifacts of fandom, fan fiction, crafting, performance, cosplay, and sing-alongs.

As an accessible yet vigorous examination of a beloved character and her world, Fan Phenomena: Buffy the Vampire Slayer provokes a larger conversation about the relationship between cult properties and fandom, and how their interplay permeates the cultural consciousness, in effect contributing to culture through new narrative, academia, language, and political activism.

Since its premiere in November 1963, the classic British television program Doctor Who has been a cornerstone of popular culture for half a century. From the earliest “Exterminate!” to the recent “Allons-y!,” from the white-haired grandfather to the wide-grinned youth, the show has depicted the adventures of a time-traveling, dual-hearted, quick-witted, and multi-faced hero as he battles Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, and all manner of nasties. And, like its main character, who can regenerate his body and change his appearance, Doctor Who fandom has developed and changed significantly in the fifty years since its inception.

In this engaging and insightful collection, fans and scholars from around the globe explore fan fiction, fan videos, and fan knitting, as well as the creation of new languages. As multifaceted as the character himself, Doctor Who fans come in many forms, and this book investigates thoroughly the multitude of fandoms, fan works, and fan discussions about this always-surprising and energetic program.

Featuring full color images of fan work and discussions of both classic and New Who fandom, this book takes reader on a journey of discovery into one of the largest worldwide fan audiences that has ever existed. Thoughtful, insightful, and readable, this is one of only a few—and certainly one of the best—guides to Doctor Who fan culture and is certain to appeal to the show’s many ardent fans across the globe.

Winter is coming. Every Sunday night, millions of fans gather around their televisions to take in the spectacle that is a new episode of Game of Thrones. Much is made of who will be gruesomely murdered each week on the hit show, though sometimes the question really is who won’t die a fiery death. The show, based on the Song of Ice and Fire series written by George R. R. Martin, is a truly global phenomenon.

With the seventh season of the HBO series in production, Game of Thrones has been nominated for multiple awards, its cast has been catapulted to celebrity, and references to it proliferate throughout popular culture. Often positioned as the grittier antithesis to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Martin’s narrative focuses on the darker side of chivalry and heroism, stripping away these higher ideals to reveal the greed, amorality, and lust for power underpinning them.

Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones is an exciting new addition to the Intellect series, bringing together academics and fans of Martin’s universe to consider not just the content of the books and HBO series, but fan responses to both. From trivia nights dedicated to minutiae to forums speculating on plot twists to academics trying to make sense of the bizarre climate of Westeros, everyone is talking about Game of Thrones. Edited by Kavita Mudan Finn, the book focuses on the communities created by the books and television series and how these communities envision themselves as consumers, critics, and even creators of fanworks in a wide variety of media, including fiction, art, fancasting, and cosplay.

Nineteen years later . . .

Even as a new generation embraces the Harry Potter novels for the first time, J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world continues to expand. Rowling herself has created a five-film spinoff, a two-part stage play, and an immersive online universe. The fictional sport of Quidditch now has a real-world counterpart, complete with an international governing body and a major league. Fans have adapted the series into role-playing games, crossover parodies, musicals, films, dances, art, and real, published fiction. There are new mobile games, toys, theme parks—even a complete line of Harry Potter–inspired home décor from Pottery Barn.
 
More than ten years have passed since the end of the series, and Potterheads still can’t get enough. In this addition to Intellect’s Fan Phenomena series, enthusiasts and scholars explore the culture of the fandom, its evolution, and how it managed to turn a boy wizard into the international icon we see splashed across lunchboxes, printed on t-shirts, and enshrined in tattoos. Harry Potter: Fan Phenomena is a journey—yes, a magical one—through one of the largest fanbases of all time and their efforts to ensure that The Boy Who Lived would live forever.

The mere hint recently that British actor Idris Elba might take up the mantle of James Bond in future installments of the film franchise was a major international news story—a testament to the enduring interest and appeal of Bond, a figure who has become a true global icon.

Fan Phenomena: James Bond explores the devoted fanbase that has helped make Bond what he is, offering a serious but wholly accessible take on the many different ways that fans have approached, appreciated, and appropriated Bond over the sixty years of his existence from the pages of Ian Fleming’s novels to the screen. Including analyses of Bond as a lifestyle icon, the Bond brand, Bond-inspired fan works, and the many versions of 007, the book reveals a fan culture that is vibrant, powerfully engaged, and richly aware of the history and complexity of the character of Bond and what he represents.

Whether your favorite Bond is Daniel Craig or Sean Connery (or even George Lazenby!), Fan Phenomena: James Bond is sure to go down as smooth as a shaken—not stirred—martini.

Nearly two hundred years after her death, Jane Austen is one of the most widely read and beloved English novelists of any era. Writing and publishing anonymously during her lifetime, the woman responsible for some of the most enduring characters (and couples) of modern romantic literature—including Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley—was credited only as “A Lady” on the title pages of her novels.
It was not until her nephew published a memoir of his “dear Aunt Jane” more than five decades after her death that she became widely known. From then on, her fame only grew, and fans and devotees, so-called Janeites, soon obsessed over and idolized her. Austen soon found an appreciative audience not only of readers but also of academics, whose scholarship legitimated and secured her place in the canon of Western literature. Today, Austen’s work is still assigned in courses, obsessed over by readers young and old, parodied and parroted, and adapted for films.
Were she alive today, Austen might not recognize some of the work her novels have inspired, such as a retelling of Sense and Sensibility featuring sea monsters, Internet fan fiction, or a twelve-foot statue of a wet-shirted Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy depicting a scene that doesn’t even appear in her novel. But like any great art that endures and excites long after it is made, Austen’s novels are inextricable from the culture they have created. Essential reading for Austen’s legions of admirers, Fan Phenomena: Jane Austen collects essays from writers and critics that consider the culture surrounding Austen’s novels.

Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, Marilyn Monroe was an actress, singer, and sex symbol whose influence far outlasted her short life. Contributors to Fan Phenomena: Marilyn Monroe situate the platinum blonde starlet’s omnipresent cultural relevance within the zeitgeist of current popular culture and explore the influence she has had on numerous elements of it. Her aesthetics and images have been reappropriated, recreated, imitated, and emulated by such celebrities as Lindsay Lohan, Jayne Mansfield, Drew Barrymore, Anna Nicole Smith, and Madonna. The quintessential American sex symbol, Monroe was an influential style icon for a spectrum of designers, including Dolce and Gabbana, Betsey Johnson, and Nike, all of whom have named lines of clothing, shoes, or accessories after the star.

The essays here explore representations of Monroe in visual culture by looking at the ways she is reimagined in visual art while also considering how her posthumous appearance and image are appropriated in current advertisements. With an inside look at the universe of Marilyn Monroe impersonators and look-alike contests for both males and females, the book also explores numerous homages to Monroe in music, from the 1979 opera Marilyn by Lorenzo Ferrero to Nicki Minaj’s song “Marilyn Monroe.” The definitive guide to one of the most famous women who ever lived, the book will be essential reading for any scholar of twentieth-century American popular culture.

Disney’s Princess Ariel would give anything to be “where the people are,” but little does she know there’s an ever-growing fan base of humans dying to be down in the ocean where she is. Movies like the Little Mermaid and Pirates of the Caribbean have sparked the interest of newer generations of mermaid fans, but our enchantment with these mythical creatures of the sea goes back for centuries. Fan Phenomena: Mermaids takes a deep dive into these fascinations and the cultural creations that mermaids inspire among fans of all ages.

Mermaids, and merfolk more generally, are everywhere you look. Merfolk devotees march in themed parades and practice mermaid-ing—swimming with a mermaid tail. There’s mermaid fiction and mermaid virtual reality; mermaid art and #mermaid trends. You may not know it, but transgenerational merfolk fan communities stretch around the world—from sea to shining sea. And their popularity is only growing.

In Fan Phenomena: Mermaids, Matthieu Guitton assembles a star-studded cast of scholars and popular culture insiders to decode the mermaid phenomenon. The book explores how merfolk have evolved in popular culture and what it is that grants them their privileged status among fantasy creatures. Illustrated throughout with fan photographs and stills from a plethora of films and TV shows, this new addition to the Fan Phenomena series promises to both fascinate and delight readers—earthbound and ocean-going alike.

Few could have predicted the enduring fascination with the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. From the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the recent BBC series that has made a heartthrob out of Benedict Cumberbatch, the sleuth has been much a part of the British and global cultural legacy from the moment of his first appearance in 1887.

The contributors to this book discuss the ways in which various fan cultures have sprung up around the stories and how they have proved to be a strong cultural paradigm for the ways in which phenomena functions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Essays explore the numerous adaptations, rewritings, rip-offs, role-playing, wiki and crowdsourced texts, virtual realities, and faux scholarship Sherlock Holmes has inspired. Though fervid fan behavior is often mischaracterized as a modern phenomenon, the historical roots of fan manifestations that have been largely forgotten are revived in this thrilling book.

Complete with interviews with writers who have famously brought the character of Holmes back to life, the collection benefits from the vast knowledge of its contributors, including academics who teach in the field, archivists, and a number of writers who have been involved in the enactment of Holmes stories on stage, screen, and radio. The release of Fan Phenomena: Sherlock Holmes coincides with Holmes’s 160th birthday, so it is no mystery that it will make a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on this timeless detective.

From a decidedly inauspicious start as a low-rated television series in the 1960s that was cancelled after three seasons, Star Trek has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry of spin-off series, feature films, and merchandise. Fueling the ever-expanding franchise are some of the most rabid and loyal fans in the universe, known affectionately as Trekkies. Perhaps no other community so typifies fandom as the devoted aficionados of the Star Trek television series, motion pictures, novels, comic books, and conventions. Indeed, in many respects, Star Trek fans created modern fan culture and continue to push its frontiers with elaborate fan-generated video productions, electronic fan fiction collectives, and a proliferation of tribute sites in cyberspace.

 In this anthology, a panel of rising and established popular culture scholars examines the phenomenon of Star Trek fan culture and its most compelling dimensions. The book explores such topics as the impact of the recent “rebooting” of the iconic franchise on its fan base; the complicated and often contentious relationship between Star Trek and its lesbian and gay fans; the adaptation of Star Trek to other venues, including live theatre, social media, and gaming; fan hyperreality, including parody and non-geek fandom; one iconic actor’s social agenda; and alternative fan reactions to the franchise’s villains. The resulting collection is both snapshot and moving picture of the practices and attitudes of a fan culture that is arguably the world’s best-known and most misunderstood.

Striking a balanced tone, the contributors are critical yet respectful, acknowledging the uniquely close and enduring relationship between fans and the franchise while approaching it with appropriate objectivity, distance, and scope. Accessible to a variety of audiences—from the newcomer to fan culture to those already well-read on the subject—this book will be heralded by fans as well as serious scholars.

In October 2012, the Walt Disney Company paid more than $4 billion to acquire Lucasfilms, the film and production company responsible for Howard the Duck.  But Disney, despite its history and success with duck characters, wasn’t after Howard; in buying Lucasfilms, it also bought the rights to the Star Wars franchise. Soon after the purchase, Disney announced a new Star Wars film was in the works and would be released in 2015, nearly four decades after the first movie hit big screens around the world and changed popular culture forever.

The continued relevance of Star Wars owes much to the passion of its fans. For millions of people around the world, the films are more than diversions—they are a way of life. Through costumed role-playing, incessant quoting, Yoda-like grammatical inversions, and scholarly debates about the Force, fans keep the films alive in a variety of ways, and in so doing, add to the saga’s cultural relevance. The first book to address the films holistically and from a variety of cultural perspectives, Fan Phenomena: Star Wars explores numerous aspects of Star Wars fandom, from its characters to its philosophy. As one contributor notes, “the saga that George Lucas created affects our lives almost daily, whether we ourselves are fans of the saga or not.” Anyone who is struggling to forget Jar Jar Binks can certainly agree to that.

Academically informed but written for a general audience, this book will appeal to every fan and critic of the films. That is, all of us.

Supernatural premiered on September 13, 2005, on what was then called the WB Network. Creator Eric Kripke was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, putting his heroes, brothers Sam and Dean Winchester, in a big black ’67 Impala and sending them in search of the urban legends that fascinated him. The series attracted a passionate fan base from the start and was described as a “cultural attractor” that tapped into the zeitgeist of the moment, reflecting global fears of terrorism with its themes of fighting unseen evil. The chemistry between the lead actors, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, contributed to the show’s initial success, and Supernatural found its niche when it combined demon-hunting adventures with a powerful relationship drama that explored the intense, complicated bond between the brothers. Supernatural is as much a story of familial ties, love, and loyalty as it is of “saving people, hunting things.”

Fan Phenomena: Supernatural explores the ongoing fascination and passion for a show that developed a relationship with fans through eight seasons and continues to have an impact on fan culture to the present day. Essays here explore the rich dynamic that has developed between fans and producers, actors, writers, directors, the show creator, and showrunners through online interactions on Twitter and Facebook, face-to-face exchanges at conventions, and representations of fandom within the show's meta-episodes. Contributors also explore gender and sexuality in the show and in fan art; the visual dynamics, cinematography, and symbolism in the episodes as well as the fan videos they inspire; and the culture of influence, learning, and teaching in the series.

From box office flop to one of the most successful cult films of all time, The Big Lebowski has spawned a multicity festival, college-level courses, and its own religion. Fans of the Coen brothers' masterful dark comedy (collectively calling themselves “Achievers”—and proud we are of all of them) gather in movie theaters and bowling alleys across the county to quote along with the film, imbibe white russians, and admire the Dude’s rug (which really tied the room together).

Fan Phenomena: The Big Lebowski examines how this quirky movie evolved from its underwhelming debut to attract a mass following on par with that of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Contributors take a close look at the film’s phenomenal impact on popular culture and language and examine the script’s rich philosophical implications, whether it is the nihilism within the film itself or the Dudeism that Jeff Bridges’s God-like character  has bred (the “Church of the Latter-Day Dude” has attracted more than 70,000 official adherents through its online ordination process). Covering issues concerning gender and sexuality within the film, such as Maude’s feminist art and Jackie Treehorn’s Malibu garden party, the essays here also explore the gender divides the film has created in today’s society, such as male versus female fandom rivalry at festivals. These gatherings—part costume contest, part bowling tournament, part trivia contest, part fan meet-up—have, since their debut in Louisville, KY, in 2002, sprung up all around America and have even expanded globally, and the book takes an inside look at these events and includes interviews with Lebowski festival organizers and authors of other fan books and academic treatises.

In all, these essays are an essential companion for one of the greatest films ever made, in the parlance of our times.

An exciting dystopian fantasy thriller series, The Hunger Games began its life as a trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins, the first released in 2008. An immediate success, the first installment had a first printing of 50,000 hardcover copies, which quickly ballooned to 200,000. Spending one hundred consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the book was put into development for release on the big screen. The first two films, starring Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence, broke box office records, and the final installment is expected to follow suit.

Fan Phenomena: The Hunger Games charts the series’s success through the increasingly vocal online communities that drive the young adult book market. Essays here consider the fashion that the series has created and how the costumes, memorabilia, merchandising, and branding have become an ever bigger part of the fandom experience. Issues explored include debates over the movie stars’ race and size, which tap into greater issues within the fan community and popular culture in general and the current argument that has divided fans and critics: whether or not the third book, Mockingjay, should be split into two films.

With this scholarly compendium, navigating the postapocalyptic landscape of Panem will be as effortless as Katniss Everdeen’s archery and ensure that the odds will be forever in your favor.

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s television series Twin Peaks debuted in April 1990 and by June of 1991 had been cancelled. Yet the impact of this surreal, unsettling show—ostensibly about the search for homecoming queen Laura Palmer’s killer—is far larger than its short run might indicate. A forerunner of the moody, disjointed, cinematic television shows that are commonplace today, Twin Peaks left a lasting impression, and nowhere is that more clear than in the devotion of its legions of loyal fans.

Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks is the first book of its kind to revisit Lynch and Frost's groundbreaking series and explore how the show's cult status continues to thrive in the digital era. In ten essays, the contributors take a deeper look at Twin Peaks' rich cast of characters, iconic locations, and its profound impact on television programming, as well as the impact of new media and fan culture on the show’s continued relevance. Written by fans for fans, Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks is an intelligent yet accessible guide to the various aspects of the show and its subsequent film. Featuring commentary from both first generation and more recent followers, these essays capture the endlessly fascinating universe of Twin Peaks, from Audrey Horne's keen sense of style to Agent Cooper's dream psychology.

The first non-academic collection that speaks to the show's fan base rather than a scholarly audience, this book is more approachable than previous Twin Peaks critical studies volumes and features color images of the series, film, and fan media. It will be welcomed by anyone seduced by the strangeness and camp of Lynch’s seminal series.