Batman

Batman: The Brave And The Bold first issue The Panic Of The Composite Creature

Batman is a fictional character created by the artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. A comic book superhero, Batman first appeared in Detective Comics (May 1939), and since then has appeared in many of Comics’ publications.

The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero (Audiobook, AAC)

Using exclusive access to newly uncovered archives, Kalush and Sloman reveal the clandestine agreements in which the British and Americans recruited Houdini to be an active secret agent. In exchange for his cooperation, the governments of these two countries facilitated his rise to the top of the world stage. The authors give thrilling accounts of his assignments, such as his participation in early aerial surveillance and his use of his own magic magazine to communicate espionage-related information. After the war, Houdini embarked upon what became his most dangerous mission when he took on the Spiritualist movement. 

The Superhero Book

The Superhero Book is the ultimate A-to-Z compendium of everyone’s favorite overachievers in the pitched battle between good and evil. With 300 entries examining more than 1,000 high-powered icons and their place in the popular firmament, The Superhero Book is the first comprehensive profile of superheroes across all media, following their path from comic-book stardom to radio, television, movies, and novels. It’s good to be super-great. With more than 150 full-color illustrations, The Superhero Book covers the best-loved and most historically significant superheroes

Through the combination of text and images, comic books offer a unique opportunity to explore deep questions about aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology in non-traditional ways. The essays in this collection focus on a wide variety of genres, from mainstream superhero comics, to graphic novels that exercise social realism, to European adventure classics.
Included among the contributions are essays on the existentialist ethos present in Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World, ecocriticism in Paul Chadwick’s long-running Concrete series, and the inherent political philosophies espoused in Hergй’s perennially popular The Adventures of Tintin. Modern political concerns inform Terry Kading’s "Drawn into 9/11: But Where Have All the Superheroes Gone?," which discusses how superhero comics have responded to 9/11, and how the concerns of the genre reflect the anxieties of the contemporary world.
Along with comics themselves, essayists explore the issues surrounding the development and appreciation of the medium. Amy Kiste Nyberg examines the rise of the Comics Code, using it as a springboard for discussing the ethics of censorship and child protection in America. Stanford W. Carpenter’s "Truth Be Told: Authorship and the Creation of the Black Captain America" uses interviews, memos, and other documents to analyze how a team of Marvel artists and writers re-imagined the origin of one of Marvel’s most iconic superheroes. Throughout, essayists in Comics as Philosophy show how well the form can be used by its artists and its interpreters as a means of philosophical inquiry.