New Pop Culture Books: Buffy! Batman! Wandavision! More!

Our picks. Click the links to order from Amazon.

Over the course of its seven-year run, Buffy the Vampire Slayer cultivated a loyal fandom and featured a strong, complex female lead, at a time when such a character was a rarity. Evan Ross Katz explores the show’s cultural relevance through a book that is part oral history, part celebration, and part memoir of a personal fandom that has universal resonance still, decades later.
    Katz—with the help of the show’s cast, creators, and crew—reveals that although Buffy contributed to important conversations about gender, sexuality, and feminism, it was not free of internal strife, controversy, and shortcomings. Men—both on screen and off—would taint the show’s reputation as a feminist masterpiece, and changing networks, amongst other factors, would drastically alter the show’s tone.
    Katz addresses these issues and more, including interviews with stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter, Emma Caulfield, Amber Benson, James Marsters, Anthony Stewart Head, Seth Green, Marc Blucas, Nicholas Brendon, Danny Strong, Tom Lenk, Bianca Lawson, Julie Benz, Clare Kramer, K. Todd Freeman, Sharon Ferguson; and writers Douglas Petrie, Jane Espenson, and Drew Z. Greenberg; as well as conversations with Buffy fanatics and friends of the cast including Stacey Abrams, Cynthia Erivo, Lee Pace, Claire Saffitz, Tavi Gevinson, and Selma Blair.
    Into Every Generation a Slayer Is Born engages with the very notion of fandom, and the ways a show like Buffy can influence not only how we see the world but how we exist within it.

In 1934, a friend brought fledgling actress Vivien Leigh to see Theatre Royal, where she would first lay eyes on Laurence Olivier in his brilliant performance as Anthony Cavendish. That night, she confided to a friend, he was the man she was going to marry. There was just one problem: she was already married—and so was he.
    TRULY, MADLY is the biography of a marriage, a love affair that still captivates millions, even decades after both actors' deaths. Vivien and Larry were two of the first truly global celebrities – their fame fueled by the explosive growth of tabloids and television, which helped and hurt them in equal measure. They seemed to have it all and yet, in their own minds, they were doomed, blighted by her long-undiagnosed mental-illness, which transformed their relationship from the stuff of dreams into a living nightmare.
    Through new research, including exclusive access to previously unpublished correspondence and interviews with their friends and family, author Stephen Galloway takes readers on a bewitching journey. He brilliantly studies their tempestuous liaison, one that took place against the backdrop of two world wars, the Golden Age of Hollywood and the upheavals of the 1960s — as they struggled with love, loss and the ultimate agony of their parting.

Bob Odenkirk’s career is inexplicable. And yet he will try like hell to explicate it for you. Charting a “Homeric” decades-long “odyssey” from his origins in the seedy comedy clubs of Chicago to a dramatic career full of award nominations—with a side-trip into the action-man world that is baffling to all who know him—it’s almost like there are many Bob Odenkirks! But there is just one and one is plenty.
    Bob embraced a life in comedy after a chance meeting with Second City’s legendary Del Close. He somehow made his way to a job as a writer at Saturday Night Live. While surviving that legendary gauntlet by the skin of his gnashing teeth, he stashed away the secrets of comedy writing—eventually employing them in the immortal “Motivational Speaker” sketch for Chris Farley, honing them on The Ben Stiller Show, and perfecting them on Mr. Show with Bob and David.
    In Hollywood, Bob demonstrated a bullheadedness that would shame Sisyphus himself, and when all hope was lost for the umpteenth time, the phone rang with an offer to appear on Breaking Bad—a show about how boring it is to be a high school chemistry teacher. His embrace of this strange new world of dramatic acting led him to working with Steven Spielberg, Alexander Payne, and Greta Gerwig, and then, in a twist that will confound you, he re-re-invented himself as a bona fide action star. Why? Read this and do your own psychoanalysis—it’s fun!
    Featuring humorous tangents, never-before-seen photos, wild characters, and Bob’s trademark unflinching drive, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama is a classic showbiz tale told by a determined idiot. 

The British TV Streaming Guide includes more than 2400 British shows from 23 US-based streaming services (both premium and free). For each streaming service, we tell you which shows are available, when they came out, and what they’re about.
    Looking for a specific title? Flip to the index in back and you’ll find all the shows and their streaming services in alphabetical order.
    Each quarterly guide also includes bonus sections - a “movie night” section with curated recommendations, a section on Scottish TV shows, lists of recent cancellations and renewals, and a few lined pages for your own notes.
    Whether you’re a loyal Doctor Who fan, an IT Crowd and Friday Night Dinner addict, or a lover of period dramas like Outlander and Bridgerton, you’re sure to find more to love in the British TV Streaming Guide.
    Streaming services covered in the guide are: Acorn TV, BritBox, PBS Masterpiece, BBC Select, Inside Outside, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, Sundance Now, AMC+, HBO Max, Starz, Peacock, Epix, Showtime, Topic, Apple TV+, Pluto, Tubi, IMDb TV, Crackle, Vudu, and the Roku Channel.

The cult classic science fiction series Space: 1999 has legions of fans around the world and has been researched and documented in comprehensive books and documentaries, so fans can be forgiven for thinking there’s nothing new under the ‘Black Sun’ … But they’d be wrong.
    Did you know …
- That actors on casting lists for Commander Koenig included Larry Hagman, Doug McClure, Robert Culp, and even William Shatner?
- The first title for the pilot episode was ‘The Last of the Earth Men’?
- The Chief Medical Officer was going to be male, and Professor Bergman could have been Professor Danilo Sabatini?
- That life on the Moon was intended to be a powder keg of fear and dissatisfaction, with Moon City constantly at war with alien races?
- That there were indeed discussions about a possible spin-off series?
    This book takes you back to the beginning, to the genesis of the series, and to early themes, characters, and story outlines. It uncovers a treasure trove of previously unknown information, correspondence, casting lists, production information, and long-lost documents charting alternative realities of what might have been had the series taken any multitude of different forks in the road. And throughout, this book features extensive input from series story consultant and scriptwriter Christopher Penfold.

Wanda Maximoff and the Vision, two of the world-famous Avengers, find themselves living a charmed existence in a sleepy suburb. But although their new life has lots of love and plenty of humor, it also comes with vintage outfits, a laugh track and a live studio audience! What is going on? And when the cracks in Wanda and Vision’s too-perfect world start to widen, it will soon become undeniable that that not all is as it seems. Now, go behind the scenes of this tale of magic, love and sitcoms with this collectible volume — packed with exclusive concept art and interviews with the creators behind Marvel’s first Disney+ TV show!

'The Hollies: Riding The Carousel' is the first full biography of the British music legends. This extensive project, researched in detail, covers the story from their early 1960s formation, playing the small clubs and coffee houses in and around Manchester, right up to the current day. 

A Concise Dictionary of Comics provides clear and informative definitions for each term. It includes twenty-five witty illustrations and pairs most defined terms with references to books, articles, book chapters, and other relevant critical sources. All references are dated and listed in an extensive, up-to-date bibliography of comics scholarship. Each term is also categorized according to type in an index of thematic groupings. This organization serves as a pedagogical aid for teachers and students learning about a specific facet of comics studies and as a research tool for scholars who are unfamiliar with a particular term but know what category it falls into. These features make A Concise Dictionary of Comics especially useful for critics, students, teachers, and researchers, and a vital reference to anyone else who wants to learn more about comics.

It’s 1975 and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez doesn’t care. She’s an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn’t have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it doesn’t matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book.
    That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call “The Lethal Lynx,” Triumph's first female hero. But her colleague is acting strangely and asking to keep her involvement a secret. And then he’s found dead, with all of their scripts turned into the publisher without her name. Carmen is desperate to piece together what happened to him, to hang on to her piece of the Lynx, which turns out to be a runaway hit. But that’s complicated by a surprise visitor from her home in Miami, a tenacious cop who is piecing everything together too quickly for Carmen, and the tangled web of secrets and resentments among the passionate eccentrics who write comics for a living.
    Alex Segura uses his expertise as a comics creator as well as his unabashed love of noir fiction to create a truly one-of-a-kind novel--hard-edged and bright-eyed, gritty and dangerous, and utterly absorbing.

In Batman's Batman, Michael E. Uslan, executive producer of the Batman movie franchise, offers an insider's look at Hollywood and the process of how movies and television shows go from the drawing board to your screens.
    Continuing the delightful tale of his adventures begun in The Boy Who Loved Batman, Uslan draws on both his successful and less successful attempts to bring ideas to the screen, offering a helpful, honest, and breezily told guide to producing films. From passion to promotion, from the initial pitch to selecting the best partners and packaging, Uslan reveals the 13 qualities essential to would-be producers.
    A lively memoir and a valuable glimpse inside Hollywood rarely seen by the public, Batman's Batman is sure to please fans of Michael Uslan and the Batman franchise, but will also prove to be an invaluable resource for any aspiring producers, as he guides readers through the Land of Bilk and Money.

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