The Boy Who Loved Batman Came Home — and His Friend Held the Mic
Deal Park, Ocean Township. A wooden lectern on wheels. A handful of empty blue seats. A woman in a black-and-white patterned jacket standing with a microphone and a yellow legal pad. A man in black, glasses, chin in hand, listening the way only an old friend listens.
Toby Shylit Mack was introducing Michael E. Uslan on the night he brought The Boy Who Loved Batman back to the room that sits a short ride from the pharmacies and soda shops where the story actually started.
That is the picture. The rest is origin story.
Uslan was born in Bayonne and grew up in Township of Ocean, New Jersey — first Wanamassa, New Jersey, then Deal Park. He graduated Ocean Township High School in 1969. By then his parents’ garage no longer held a car. It held shelves of comics, tens of thousands of them, stacked floor to ceiling. Wednesday was the best day of the week. Batman was not a punchline. Batman was an orphan who made a vow and kept it.
The 1966 television series turned that vow into Pow! Zap! Wham! Teenage Uslan made a counter-vow of his own: one day he would put the real Dark Knight on screen — a creature of the night, a detective who survived by wits more than fists.
He went to Indiana University, taught what is widely cited as the first accredited college course on comic-book folklore, worked summers at DC, became an entertainment lawyer, and in 1979 — when Warner and almost everyone else thought Batman was used-up camp — he and Benjamin Melniker bought the film rights. The price was modest. The wait was not. Ten years of no. Then Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989. Then every major Batman film that followed: the Nolan trilogy, Joker, The Batman, and the rest of the universe that now looks inevitable only because one kid from Ocean Township refused to let the character stay a joke.
He wrote the memoir. A play based on it has already had a life onstage, with Broadway still in the conversation. He chairs the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission. In 2025 he was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. The boy who rode his bike to Wanamassa Pharmacy and Deal Soda Shop became the producer who changed how Hollywood treats capes.
Toby Shylit Mack is the person who stood up that night and said so out loud.
She is a longtime force at the Axelrod Performing Arts Center — on the board, and director of the Axelrod Jewish International Film Festival and Film Education. The festival she stewards brings Israeli and Jewish international films to the Shore with the same mix of heart, argument, and craft that the theater itself tries to put on its main stage. Introducing Uslan was not a booking. It was a friend handing the room to someone who had come home.
The Axelrod Performing Arts Center itself is easy to miss if you only know the Shore as beaches and boardwalks. It sits at 100 Grant Avenue in the Deal Park section of Ocean Township — an intimate, professional nonprofit theater named for Dr. Herbert and Evelyn Axelrod, longtime Deal residents and JCC supporters. The building opened in 2005. In 2010 it became its own 501(c)(3). It now produces Equity-caliber musicals with Broadway directors, designers, and casts; it houses a professional ballet company; it runs concerts, new-work readings, education programs, and the film festival. A second space at Bell Works in Holmdel expanded the footprint. The mission is blunt and local: high-level work at prices that do not require a trip into the city, in a room small enough that you can see the actors think.
That is why the photograph works. It is not a red-carpet premiere. It is a hometown introduction. The man who spent a decade convincing studios that Batman was serious is sitting in the seats of the theater that grew up in the same township he did. The woman with the microphone is the one who knows both the work and the person.
On this day, LIKE® Magazine looks at the picture again and sees the whole arc in one frame: the garage full of comics, the ten-year fight, the films that followed, the friend who still gets to say his name first, and the little Shore theater that made room for the homecoming.
The Dark Knight never needed superpowers. Neither, it turns out, did the boy from Ocean Township. He just needed a vow, a legal education, a partner who believed him, and — on at least one night in Deal Park — a friend willing to stand up and introduce him properly.
(Michael de la Force, LIKE® Magazine, 9.22.2026)
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