STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES: THE TUMBLR HOME OF AUTHOR TIM HANLEY

Hi Max,

Thanks so much for ordering the book! I hope you enjoy it!

I’m very honoured to announce that Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale has won a 2025 Independent Publisher Book Award gold medal in the Audiobook: Non-Fiction Informational category. I’ve never won a gold medal before, so this is a real treat! But to be honest, I had little to do with this prestigious prize. All the credit goes to Colby Elliott, who produced the audiobook,…

During the initial run of Batman: The Animated Series in the 1990s, Barbara Gordon only appeared in five of the original 85 episodes, two to establish the character on her own and three more as Batgirl. All five episodes were written by Brynne Chandler, credited at the time as Brynne Stephens, and while researching Never A Sidekick I was lucky enough to get to chat with her about creating this…

First things first, my copies of Never A Sidekick have arrived and they look so nice. Rowman & Littlefield always does such a great job putting my books together, and this one is no exception. I’m delighted with how this one turned out, and I hope all of you who pre-ordered a copy have it now and that you’re enjoying it as well. I’ve seen some folks on social media post about reading it, and it’s…

Gang, have I got a deal for you. After some delays from the title change and whatnot, Never A Sidekick is all done and printed, and the books arrived in my publisher’s warehouse yesterday! Now, Rowman & Littlefield are big on online sales, and you can get the book through all the usual means, Amazon or Barnes & Noble and the like. But you can also order from them directly, and to celebrate the…

Getting blurbs for the back cover of your book is always a daunting assignment. You have to email people out of the blue, many of whom you’ve never spoken to before, and ask them to read your book and say nice things about it. It’s a big ask! But I’ve been so lucky over the years to have amazing endorsers for my books, and Never A Sidekick is no exception. First up, we have Babs Tarr, the artist…

We’re nearing the release date for Never A Sidekick, my tour through the histories of all of the Batgirls, and so the promo continues to roll out! Here are a couple updates on where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing so you can learn a little more about the book. First, I got to chat with Rob at Comic Book Chronicles about my history as a writer, my favourite Batgirl, and all of the fun things I…

We’ve got a new cover to go with our new title! I mean, not brand new. We swapped out the title and chopped off the ears for some cautious legal reasons we don’t need to dive into here. But now we’ve got the whole package! New title, new cover, new book, all coming to you very soon. The book also got a lovely review at Booklist! It’s a paywalled site so I can’t link to the full piece, but…

Big news on the Batgirl book front: We’re changing the title of the book! What was originally titled Batgirl and Beyond: The Dynamic History of the Heroines of Gotham City has now become Never A Sidekick: Exploring the Dynamic History of Batgirl. The why of it all is a long story involving legal concerns over trademarks and the like, but suffice it to say, we’ve got a new title for this deep dive…

My new book, Batgirl and Beyond: The Dynamic History of the Heroines of Gotham City, is coming out very soon, and that means it’s time for promo to ramp up and for me to talk about it constantly. The release date’s a little wiggly at the moment – the original plan was November, though it seems we may be slipping into December now. But the larger point remains: The book is coming! And you can…

It’s a sad time in the comic book world, which is poorer today after the passing of the iconic and influential cartoonist Trina Robbins. She began making comics in the late 1960s, writing and drawing strips for the alternative newspaper the East Village Other, before moving to San Francisco in 1970 and making a splash in the underground comix scene. Her book It Ain’t Me Babe Comix was an…

I broke the news in my post last week celebrating the tenth anniversary of Wonder Woman Unbound (for which, egregiously, I have yet to receive ANY gifts, even though I was expecting a plethora of tin and/aluminum presents, as is customary for a tenth anniversary), but now I have spent the day updating my website with fun new purple graphics so it’s time for an official post: I wrote another book!…

Today in “posts designed to make me feel extremely old,” my very first book, Wonder Woman Unbound, came out TEN years ago on this very day! I mean, sort of. Unless your book is famous, release dates are kind of amorphous. It just comes out around then. But April 1, 2014, was the official date, and now it’s been ten years, somehow. Getting Wonder Woman Unbound published was the culmination of a…

It’s always fun to recommend books, and when the folks at Booklisti asked me to make a list doing just that, I jumped at the chance to talk up some of my favourite characters of all time. I decided to take a broad, historical perspective, as I am wont to do, and the result is a fun list spotlighting some amazing female superheroes! I went decade by decade, picking a heroine from each era that I…

Over at Shepherd, I’ve joined 1200 different authors (yeah, 1200!) in discussing our favourite reads of 2023. When asked, I knew I had to go all comics because that’s the kind of nerd I am. Also, there were some amazing comics out this year. My top pick was Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons by the amazing team of writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artists Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott. If…

It’s me, back on another podcast! And this time I’m returning to Queer Spec‘s Patreon, chatting with the always excellent Sara Century about all things Betty and Veronica. We talked about Not All Supermen a few months back, but when we got to the end of that conversation we realized we hadn’t touched on my Betty and Veronica book at all. As luck would have it, the audiobook was due to come out…

It’s been a week since Riverdale wrapped its seven season run for good, and hopefully you’ve stopped weeping now and are beginning to move on from the loss. It was a ridiculous program, to be sure, but so much fun, and I’m definitely going to miss the unpredictable chaos it brought each week. Even more than that, I’m going to miss the fantastic portrayals of some of my favourite characters ever,…