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It’s an unusual sight for James Bond fans. Standing in a gloriously green Technicolor field by a California stream intended to pass for Ireland, Sean Connery cuts a more rugged approximation of Walt Disney masculinity, taking breaks between a swing of his scythe to sing, “She’s my dear, my darling one, my smilin’ and beguilin’ one, I love the ground she walks upon my darling Irish girl.”

To be charitable, Connery’s attempt at an Irish lilt was no more convincing in 1959’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People than it would be three decades later for his Oscar winning turn in The Untouchables. Nevertheless, there was something charming, beguiling even, about both performances, with the musical one proving strangely important to Connery getting the role of Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007.

That might be in large part because Dr. No producer Cubby Broccoli anticipated Fleming,...

A quarter century after its release, Batman Forever remains perhaps the most divisive of the Caped Crusader’s 10 big-screen appearances to date. It is certainly the fulcrum on which the entire history of the series balances: the point where the franchise changed course in pursuit of instant gratification and success, only to pave the way for abject failure and supreme rebirth.

The back story of Batman Forever has been well documented before, so here it is in brief in case you were napping: following the less than stellar box office returns of Tim Burton’s 1992 Batman Returns — a Gothic fever dream which frightened not just children but Warner Bros. Pictures’ corporate partners like McDonald’s — the studio brain trust decided a change was in order.

Burton would not be back to direct a third Batfilm; that task was bequeathed to Joel Schumacher, who was mandated to bring a lighter, more playful vibe to the proceedings.

Batman may have reached the end of his current journey on the big screen in The Dark Knight Rises but he was around a long time before Christopher Nolan's trilogy and he will no doubt return to cinemas at some point in the future.

Charting the character's journey in film, radio and television since he was conceived by Bob Kane in 1939 is the book Billion Dollar Batman.

It's an in-depth study of the caped crusader by Bruce Scivally, who examined Superman and James Bond in previous publications.

Scivally, a media expert and professor at the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago, goes behind the cape and cowl for an exhaustive look at the character and how he has been interpreted over the decades.

With occasional black-and-white photographs of the various iterations of the character, this 446-page paperback is jam-packed with information and revealing insights.

We discover how Batman first...