ABSTRACT
Batmania hit hard in the summer of 1989, bringing with it a wave of nostalgia that superceded the dark postmodern text projected on the nation's cinema screens. Looking backward is a major preoccupation of historians, but it is also something that people do in personal daydreams and everyday contexts as a way to understand their present-day lives. The community activist work of Britain's History Workshop and America's Massachusetts History Workshop are exemplary of this use of oral sources within an explicitly political activist agenda. In addition, popular memory is grounded in notions of personal identity. The camp sensibility gave adult readers, who had previously displayed disdain for mass culture, a comfortable distance from the show's comic book materials because it reworked the aesthetics of Popism in a way more in line with the firmly entrenched "wasteland" critique. Television critics often had trouble reconciling Popism with their own cultural hierarchies and expressed highly ambivalent sentiments.
