Reboot Culture

“William Proctor interrogates reboot culture like he’s leading a courtroom drama: marshalling evidence, challenging assumptions and exposing the careless thinking of previous work (including my own) through a series of fascinating case studies. […] Passionate, provocative and pedantic, this book provides an invigorating experience and a fierce, focused argument that should inspire media students and set a spark to scholarly debate.” — Will Brooker, Professor of Film and Cultural Studies, Kingston University, London “A very enjoyable, readable ride on the history of film and comic reboots from an engaging academic perspective, including related phenomena like retconning, re-launches, spin-offs, and more.” — Mark J. P. Wolf, Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University, Wisconsin Since the release of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins in 2005, there has been a pronounced surge in alternative uses of the computer term ‘reboot,’ a surge that has witnessed the term deployed in new contexts and new signifying practices, involving politics, fashion, sex, nature, sport, business, and media. As a narrative concept, however, reboot terminology remains widely misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted across popular, journalistic, and academic discourses, being recklessly and relentlessly solicited as a way to describe a broad range of narrative operations and contradictory groupings, including prequels, sequels, adaptations, revivals, re-launches, generic ‘refreshes,’ and enactments of retroactive continuity. Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach that fuses cultural studies, media archaeology, and discursive approaches, this book challenges existing scholarship on the topic by providing new frameworks and taxonomies that illustrate key differences between reboots and other ‘strategies of regeneration,’ helping to spotlight the various ways in which the culture industries mine their intellectual properties in distinct and novel ways to present them anew. Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia is the first academic study to critically explore and interrogate the reboot phenomenon as it emerged historically to describe superhero comics that sought to jettison existing narrative continuity in order to ‘begin again’ from scratch. William Proctor is Associate Professor in Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK.