American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960-64

It’s DC’s success with the JLA (a revamped version of an earlier company team, the Justice Society of America) that sparked comics publisher Martin Goodman into charging writer Stan Lee with the task of creating a new super-team that would become the Fantastic Four. With the FF’s debut in 1961, the Marvel Age of Comics was beginning, though it took many comics fans time to actively notice: understandable since, as Wells points out, the cover to the premiere issue looked indistinguishable from the rampaging monster comics that Lee and collaborator/artist Jack Kirby had been cranking out to a modestly loyal readership since 1959.

Lee and Kirby’s biggest storytelling innovation at the time was to do something that DC – who had built its team with already established characters – didn’t dare do: make its team fallible and frequently bickering. In so doing, they established the Heroes with Problems template that would arguably find its greatest symbol in the Amazing Spider-Man. The only way that DC could force its super folks to break their mold at the time was through alternate world “Imaginary Stories,” a ploy that many slightly older comics fans pooh-poohed. Marvel’s flawed figures had an air of “realism” to them that the canny Lee hyped to the company’s benefit.

Chronicles doesn’t limit itself to the Big Two’s super-hero titles, though. Wells’ overview examines all the other comics publishers of the day: Dell and its successor Gold Key, Archie, ACG, Harvey, Charlton – along with the cape free titles produced by DC and Marvel: romance, western, war comics. If a few lines don’t receive as full a focus as others, it’s generally because their titles were largely inflexible: a 1959 Caspar, the Friendly Ghost wasn’t much different from one in 1964, after all. Wells does capture the story innovations that some long-standing characters experienced: the establishment of a non-imaginary DC multiverse in Gardner Fox and the recently deceased Carmine Infantino’s “Flash of Two Worlds,” for instance, which gave DC’s writers the opportunity to place modern versions of their super characters alongside their Golden Age incarnations.

Wells notes those current events that were reflected in comics of the day: appearances by John F. Kennedy and the Beatles in sundry titles (including the quirky superhero satire, Herbie, the Fat Fury), Cold War references that were particularly prevalent in Marvel’s early series like Iron Man.. He even considers the somewhat anachronistic sixties era pleas for racial tolerance that appeared in both DC and Marvel’s war comics: mild fare today but commercially risky at the time.

Chronicles also considers comic magazines spin-offs like Mad (originally a four-color EC comic book) and Creepy, the first and most successful attempt to transplant pre-code horror comics storytelling into a black-and-white format. To a comics reader too young to have caught the original Tales from the Crypt and its ilk, Creepy and its spin-off title Eerie were as profound an influence as the original demonized ECs. In 1960, Wells notes, Mad was the highest selling comics title in the U.S., just ahead of Dell’s best-selling titles Uncle Scrooge and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories with a yearly average of over a million copies sold per issue. Both Dell and Mad managed to bypass the strictures of the Comics Code Authority set up to appease parents worried by the Eisenhower Era comics scare: Dell because its affiliation with family-friendly companies like Disney carried its own tacit seal of approval (“Dell Comics Are Good Comics.”), Mad because its status as a black-and-white magazine set it outside the bounds of code authority.

Along with the comics themselves, the early sixties proved a fertile period for the comics fandom that was starting to come into its own. Befitting TwoMorrow’s status as a fannish publishing company, Chronicles also documents the first appearance of the first big name fans and their zines – which would have an impact on the industry in the years ahead. Some might argue whether the “fanboy” voice, which certainly was heard by attentive editors at DC and Marvel, helped or stunted the industry over time, but the fact remains that names like Alter Ego’s Roy Thomas would themselves find a place as comics creators in the years to come.

“It is our intention,” Marvel voice Stan Lee wrote at the end of the period covered in this volume, “here at Marvel, to produce comics which are so well-written and well-drawn, that they’ll elevate the entire field in the minds of the public!” Within that characteristic bit of bombast was a sentiment that spoke for the industry. After a period of the creative and economic doldrums, the comics industry was starting to revive – Wells' Chronicles does an admirable job capturing that era.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: comics history

EBERT: My senior year at Illinois State, I and a batch of my fellow ISU Film Society officers had dinner with Roger Ebert before an on-campus presentation. I remember him as being convivial and approachable, willing to talk about any movie that we brought up. I also remember several of us considered bringing up Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a movie that none of us had seen at the time but knew by its exaggerated reputation. None of us did, though, because the man was just a nice guy to sit at the dinner table with.

R.I.P., Roger.

(I've since seen and grown to love Dolls, by the way.)

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Wednesday, March 27, 2013
      ( 3/27/2013 06:35:00 AM ) Bill S.  

“THERE WAS NO RATIONAL EXPLANATION FOR WHAT HE THOUGHT HE SAW.” Mention the term “steampunk,” and the first thing that’ll come to my mind are mildly irritating cosplayers in Edwardian garb – unfortunate because as a literary sub-genre, “steampunk” has produced some damn fine entertainments. Among the acknowledged originators of the form, James P. Blaylock is one of the best-known, and his latest offering, The Aylesford Skull (Titan Books) shows him at the top of his game. Subtitled “A Tale of Langdon St. Ives,” the rousing yarn reads like something that could have been serialized in The Strand at the end of the 19th century. Not for nothing does one of its supporting characters turn out to be a young Conan Doyle.

The book concerns a battle of wits between scientist/explorer Langdon St. Ives and his longtime nemesis, the loathsome hunchback Dr. Ignacio Nardondo. Narbondo has retrieved the skull of his young brother Edward, murdered by his own hands as a child, to use as an otherworldly projector. When he kidnaps St. Ives’ four-year-old son Eddie from the professor’s idyllic home in the English countryside, a chase ensues that leads to the darkest streets of London and an assassination plot designed to frame the British prime minister Gladstone. Hovering around the proceedings: the ghost of the young boy Narbondo killed, who not incidentally shares the same name as St. Ives’ son.

Much of the book is devoted the search and rescue of Eddie St. Ives, the action divided between the professor and his chums (among which includes the aforementioned creator of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger); Mother Laswell, a matronly figure who runs a nearby commune named Hereafter Farm, who shares a biological connection to both ghost and villain; and Finn Conrad, a scrappy former circus boy familiar with the Dickensian streets of London. Blaylock keeps the action – a series of near fatal encounters and escapes – diverse enough to keep you reading even if the Lovecraftian specifics surrounding the titular skull never fully gel. His period details and non-ironic use of 19th century imagineering (Is there an airship in the story? Of course there is!) prove engaging, while his straight-faced heroes and more-than-dastardly villains are colorful and distinct. Though at core a peril-packed actioner, Aylesford Skull also displays a concern with the nature of family and friendship which also provides its heart. And when young Eddie also effects his own (short-term) escape, you can’t help cheering for the little scaper.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

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Tuesday, March 26, 2013
      ( 3/26/2013 06:33:00 AM ) Bill S.  

SO WHERE'VE I BEEN? After several weeks being unable to get into the Blogger template following some sort of Google apps upgrade at my ISP, I finally was able to wend my way back. Wotta pain . . .

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      ( 3/26/2013 06:27:00 AM ) Bill S.  

OF MAUS AND SUPERMEN Originally published in 2003 and revised to accommodate the decade since, Stephen Weiner’s Faster Than a Speeding Bullet (IDW) is a slim 74-page consideration of “The Rise of the Graphic Novel.” Written as an intro to “how the comics industry grew up, took itself seriously and made enough noise so that mainstream readers were finally forced to pay it serious attention,” Weiner’s book is bound to stimulate comebacks by the cognoscenti ever eager to pick nits or bemoan any “major” omissions.

For this reader, for instance, I couldn’t help noting the absence of the noir-y Truman Era “picture novel,” It Rhymes with Lust or the later publication of underground giant R. Crumb’s Yum Yum Book in 1975 (three years before Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, typically acknowledged to be the first modern graphic novel.) Too, while Weiner discusses the role of comic strip collections in leading the way in the sixties for later trade collections of comic book material, he fails to single out Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” paperbacks – which frequently featured extended storylines every bit as “novelistic” as later superhero collections (cf. Prehysterical Pogo (In Pandemonia), which took much of the strip’s cast to a dinosaur inhabited lost world in Australia) – a glaring omission to this fan’s eyes.

Still, Faster than a Speeding Bullet does capture the recognized landmarks of the modern graphic novel: Contract (less a novel, as Weiner notes, than a thematically connected quartet of short stories a la Winesberg, Ohio), Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor and much that followed. Though its title gives the impression that the book’s focus will be on superhero GN fare like Knight or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Weiner provides a broader view of comics’ maturation as a storytelling form. If at times he comes across a bit timorous when dealing with some of the more challenging sources of graphic novels (discussing Maus, for example, he bypasses the work’s nascent version in an underground comix book), he doesn’t downplay their significance.

As with too many American comics fans, Weiner is overly brief in regards to European albums and manga (perhaps a better subtitle for this book would be “Rise of the North American Graphic Novel”), but considering the book’s length this isn’t surprising. He does manage to pull in some of the extraordinary recent GNs by women artists (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home) in this new edition. More than just speeding bullets, in other words.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: comics history

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Monday, February 18, 2013
      ( 2/18/2013 10:10:00 PM ) Bill S.  

“YOU WANT TO GO ON A QUEST?” Collecting the first arc of his funny animal post-Apocalyptic web comic into two print packages, Aaron Neathery's Endtown Volumes one and two (Jarlidium Press) provides a welcome intro for those readers who prefer to see their comic art slapped down on bright white paper. The format suits Neathery’s expressive cartoon style and makes lingering over his artwork all the more enjoyable. Call me a twentieth century geezer, but, dammit, comics work best on paper.

For those unfamiliar with the science fantasy strip (now in its fourth year and currently running on Go Comics), “Endtown” is set in a future world decimated by an arm race catastrophe which resulted in most its of survivors being transformed into either anthropomorphic or monstrous mutations. The former look like funny animal characters down to their three-fingered hands; the latter turn out to be well-fanged, multi-robed nightmares with no trace of their humanity intact. A few humans survived without changing – most of them seemingly turning toward a neo-Nazi obsession with genetic purity – and take control of the “topside.” The mutant animals and their few still-human allies take refuge in an underground city, the “Endtown” of the title, occasionally sending out foraging expeditions topside to look for canned goods.

The series opens topside with Albert Anderson, a bespectacled human, and his companion scavenging through a trashed-out corner grocery where they run into the genocidal top-siders and Albert has a fateful confrontation with a Godzilla-sized mutant. The majority of Albert’s story arc centers on his girlfriend Gustine, transformed into a cartoon rhino in the catastrophe, who seeks to find a way to transform back into human form. The duo’s relationship (for those looking for subtext beyond the obvious racism concerns) reflects a size acceptance theme that definitely spoke to this reader: most notably in a comically disastrous attempt by Albert to romance his super-sized sweetie in a gondola. (Yes, the underground city is apparently like Venice.)

Told by an oracle to seek a dying mutant tree aboveground, Gustine and her loyal lover head up to a decaying city where they’re confronted by the maddened scientist responsible for the disaster and swarms of mimicky pixel creatures called Dittos. The latter recreate a flashback to the Apocalypse, resulting in a memorably grim sequence: Neathery’s ability to switch from whimsical Carroll-ian satire to more disturbing fare is reminiscent of Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” during that strip’s memorable Simple J. Malarkey/Joe McCarthy takedown.

Since the story arc in these two volumes, “Endtown” has switched its focus to other animalized denizens of the underground outpost, providing some clues into the origins of this mysterious hideaway along the way. As a fan of the Albert/Gustine partnership, I have to admit initially being a bit hesitant in embracing the newer cast, though the big-hearted mouse Holly has since won my heart. Recently, the online strip concluded an engaging second arc featuring our girl and Wally, a feline newcomer to Endtown. Here’s hoping the first two books do well enough to encourage print editions of the second story line. And now that we’re in a new ‘un, maybe we could get a glimpse of how Albert and Gustine are doing these days?

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: modern comics

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Wednesday, January 30, 2013
      ( 1/30/2013 10:05:00 PM ) Bill S.  

“HOW CAN WE GIVE YOU A DISCHARGE WHEN WE DON’T EXIST?” The hardest boiled of the Cold War spies, Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm has long languished in undeserved obscurity, mostly remembered for a series of cheesy spy “comedies” starring a thoroughly tiresome Dean Martin. But the pulp connoisseurs at Britain’s Titan Books (who have also been aligned with Hard Case Crime) have sought to bring the real Matt (a.k.a. “Eric”) back into the searchlight – and good for them. First two books in Hamilton’s 27-volume series, Death of a Citizen and The Wrecking Crew, are being published by the company, with the next five titles also announced throughout the next year.

As a teen in the sixties, I read as many of Hamilton’s Helm novels -- initially released in paperback by the legendary pulp line Fawcett -- as I could. The character debuted seven years after James Bond, but he quickly established himself as a grittier alternative to the dapper secret agent. For one thing, he took his role as a government sanctioned killer more seriously, ever aware of just how much the act changes a person. In the novel which introduced Helm, Citizen, there are no grandiloquent criminal masterminds for our hero to best; if anything, the affair in which our temporarily retired ex-spy finds himself reads more like something one of Dashiell Hammett’s p.i.s might have encountered. In fact, from the way that he describes himself it’s easy to visualize the man as a physical mirror to the Continental Op.

When Helm’s debut opens, we see him as a softened married man in New Mexico -- the author of a series of western novels (which Hamilton also wrote) -- who has done his best to forget his history as a ruthless American agent during the Second World War. That past returns to bite him on the ass, however, when his old spy partner, a fur-bearing babe named Tina, shows up at the cocktail party of a neighboring Los Alamos researcher. When our hero finds the body of a self-proclaimed fledgling authoress in his writer’s studio, he’s forced to deal with Tina and her thuggish new partner Loris. Unsure if he is being pushed back into the spy biz by his former boss Mac, he leaves his wife and child to re-partner with Tina, who may or may not have his best interests at heart.

Pursued across the New Mexico and Texas desert, our hero faces two big questions: why was he brought back into his old life and can he trust a single word out of his sexy ex-partner’s mouth? Lovers of noir fiction already know the answer to that second question, of course, but watching the formerly settled Helm slip back into his old self is a treat. As a narrator, Helm is mannishly opinionated: his take on the styles and mores of the Eisenhower Era are engaging at times, though a few of his thoughts on married life and what used to be called the Battle of the Sexes may bring some modern readers up short. This ain’t cuddly ol’ Dean Martin “slaygirl” territory by a long shot: Helm is the real bloody pulp deal.

Great to have him back.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: pulp fiction

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Sunday, January 27, 2013
      ( 1/27/2013 03:04:00 PM ) Bill S.  

“DARE SHE EVEN CONSIDER A LIFE WITH A HUMAN?” A contemporary fantasy romance, Constance Phillips’ Fairyproof (Crescent Moon Press) centers on Monique, a fairy princess who has fled her world to escape a forced marriage to a slimy piece of work named Eero. Pursued by her Protector brother Keiran, who is beholden to the duplicitous Eero, she winds up in Elgin, Illinois, where she meets handsome, if somewhat OCD, financial planner Daniel Elliot. Expecting to be able to use her fairy charm to immediately win him over, our heroine is startled to discover that Daniel appears to be resistant to her magic. Accustomed to surviving on the human plane by using her magic to control humans (“especially the men”), she finds Daniel’s unknowing immunity both challenging and frightening.

Though impervious to her paranormal magnetism, the recently jilted Daniel is of course intrigued by our girl’s seemingly human attributes. Though he presents as a button-down type, we quickly realize (thanks to his taste in jazz) that he’s more than an emotional match for our heroine. As their romance blossoms, Keiran and his Protector partner Veronica get closer to uncovering Monique’s whereabouts. Behind all this, the villainous Eero is engineering a coup against the fairies’ governing council, as an increasing number of fairies visiting the human realm appear to be disappearing.

Though her initial start-up reads like something you might find in a romantic comic fantasy (something that Thorne Smith might have concocted in his heyday), former Blogcritic Phillips takes her story seriously. If we don’t see as much of the fairy realm as we might like, Fairyproof depicts a believable modern fantasy world with sufficient recognizable subtext to ground her story. The fairies inhabiting our realm, we learn, have differing degrees of attachment to the humans that they live alongside: Keiran, we quickly see, is scornful toward humans, while other fairies have managed to successfully intermingle with them. One of these, a hipster-esque club owner named Billy, proves a dubious ally for Monique. Apart from the Machiavellian plotting in the realm, the world of fairies is facing a larger crisis as the number of its folk has been dwindling. The attempts of one of its council members, Leal, to increase contact between the fairy and human worlds have seemingly resulted in the deaths of Monique and Keiran’s parents, which has added to the Protector’s bigoted perspective.

Also figuring into the plot is a mysterious piece of jewelry once owned by our hero Daniel, but apparently taken by his ex-fiancé. Not everybody is who they first appear to be in the story: more than one character from the realm has a prior connection to the “fairyproof” Daniel, and at least one who you expect to betray our heroine doesn't. While Phillips isn't as explicit with the anti-fairy crime subplot than this urban fantasy reader would like, she is deft in laying out the political machinations that fuel it all. And for those readers coming to this book primarily for its romantic elements, be assured that author Phillips lets it build with plenty of believable evocative detail. If heroine Monique shows perhaps one too many flashes of jealousy in regards to the clearly loyal Daniel, let’s just chalk it up to time spent in the Chicago ‘burbs. I've lived there; it could throw anyone off their stride.

Phillips leaves room in her book for a sequel: good news for readers wanting to see the unresolved fairy population crisis get addressed – preferably with one or two hot sequences.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: fantasy romance

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Saturday, January 12, 2013
      ( 1/12/2013 08:06:00 AM ) Bill S.  

“IF YOU WANT TO BE APPRECIATED, DIE OR TRAVEL.” At turns whimsical and melancholy, Renaud Dillies and Regis Hautière’s Abelard (NBM/ComicsLit) is a French “magical graphic novel” about innocence lost and the immigrant experience. Its title protagonist, Abelard (any connection to the tragic lover is there for the reader to find), is a small bird who ventures out of his cloistered Russian marsh after he is smitten by a beautiful girl named Eppily. Told that the only way he will be able to get her attention is to offer her the moon, he decides to travel to America after he learns that the Wright Brothers have successfully invented a flying machine. “I’d like to gather a bouquet of stars for her,” he explains.

Though repeatedly warned that the object of his affections is unworthy of this quest, Abelard sets off on his road trip, anyway, first accompanying a band of gypsies, then teaming up with a surly bear named Gaston. Along the way, he encounters bigotry and dishonesty and experiences the punishing steerage voyage to America, regularly engaging in philosophical debates with Gaston and reading aphorisms that magically appear in his hat. Though he doesn’t usually comprehend their meanings/warnings, the bird gets pleasure from reading them, anyway. “I like that,” he tells a gypsy companion at one point. “It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s pretty.”

Abelard is a wide-eyed naïf, and we know early on from the tears in a gypsy fortuneteller’s eyes that his quest is not going to end happily. But Dillies, bringing the same sense of “Krazy Kat” fancy that he brought to his earlier graphic novel tone poem Bubbles & Gondola, makes it all a visual treat. His scripting collaborator brings a high level of wit to the proceedings: one of my favorite moments is a two-page map showing Abelard’s meandering progress toward “the rest of the story.” Among the stops along the way are the “happy memory of a sunny afternoon” and “a circumlocution in the story.” Hautière’s dialog between our title hero and the cynical Gaston is particularly engaging.

If the cartoon images of birds and bears – and the addition of the word “magical” to the book’s front cover – give the impression that Abelard is a children’s fantasy, be assured that it isn’t. Think of it more as an anthropomorphic piece of magical realism in the manner of Joanne Harris’ Chocolat, a reflection on hope and dreams that may surprise you by just how affecting it all is.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: art comics

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Thursday, December 27, 2012
      ( 12/27/2012 04:11:00 PM ) Bill S.  

GIRLS AND LADIES: Mention the name Matt Baker to most generations of comic book fans, and chances are you’ll only get a blank stare. But to those readers enamored with what has become somewhat condescendingly known as Good Girl Art, Baker is the Man. Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour (TwoMorrows Publishing) is a fannish attempt to bring this unduly neglected artist back into the spotlight.

Good Girl Art flourished in the late forties/early fifties and focused on heroines who were strong but also gorgeous in the manner of WWII pin-ups. Two of the foremost practitioners of this art were Baker and Bill Ward (who would later go on doing his distinctive penwork for men’s magazines and Cracked). Baker, initially working for a comics shop known as the Iger Studio, drew a variety of spunky heroines, some with “girl” affixed to their title (Sky Girl, Tiger Girl). The Art of Glamour includes sample stories from this period, including two featuring a scantily clad crime-fighter known as the Phantom Lady. If the stories ultimately prove slight, the art is anything but. Baker had a knack for rendering his leggy characters with a sensual naturalness that was unmatched by any other artist of his day.

That the man isn’t better known today can be attributed to several factors: the studios he worked for typically peppered their stories with pseudonyms in place of legitimate credits, while the comics fandom that would work at unearthing so many uncredited artists didn’t really burst in full-blown action until after his untimely death from a heart attack in 1959. Too, much of the work that he did in the early fifties was for comic book genres – romance titles and westerns – that wouldn’t receive much fannish attention for years. An anthology of fifties romance comics, Romance Without Tears, which featured a hefty selection of Baker art is unfortunately out of print.

Baker himself also had several personal strikes against him in the early days of the industry: an introvert who was one of the few black artists in early comics, he also (though The Art of Glamour soft-pedals this suggestion) appears to have been gay. Whether any of these factors kept him from working more high-profile projects, one thing is clear: he inspired an army of imitators even as he was still working. Baker’s natural way of draping clothes on his voluptuous femmes was especially noteworthy.

His way with (comic art) women led to his involvement in one particularly intriguing project: one of the first graphic novels, a paperback “Picture Novel” written by fledgling comics pro Arnold Drake and Les Waller entitled It Rhymes With Lust. The story of a ruthless redhead named Rust Shannon who schemes to take control of a copper mining town after her corrupt politician husband dies, Lust was a crisp little noir, a project for which Baker was admirably suited. Drawn on graftint paper with plenty of shaded backgrounds, the 1949 novel looks like a B-picture from the era, but since those weren’t getting much critical respect at the time, it’s not surprising that the paperback comic with the seemingly dirty title didn’t either.

Matt Baker’s editors, Jim Amash and Eric Nolen-Weathington, structure their appreciation by opening with a quartet of color stories: two featuring the vigilante Phantom Lady, two centered on more comic dames like waitress Ginger Maguire, a former ferry pilot in the Pacific theatre who gets demoted to waitress “serving mustard to the better class of pilots.” An opening essay by Alberto Becattini provides a chronological overview of the man’s career with appreciative commentary by some of the artists who worked with him in the forties comics shops. One interesting snippet for fans of EC comics: both the line’s editor Al Feldstein and mainstay artist Jack Kamen worked as inkers on Baker’s work – you can definitely see Baker’s influence in the latter’s work for EC’s crime comics, though I don’t think that Kamen ever drew a woman as provocatively as Baker’s.

A series of reminiscences with family, friends and colleagues follows, the volume concluding with three more reprinted stories, two of which are presented as the original pencil and ink pages. Throughout the rest of this lavishly packaged book, of course, are Baker covers, panels and pages from both his comics and short-lived attempts at newspaper syndication work, as well as illos that he did for men’s magazines. (In this last, he and fellow Good Girl Artist Bill Ward followed similar paths.) While some of the remembrances focus more on the mundane aspects of the artist’s life than necessary, the art speaks for itself.

Now where’s the full-blown Baker anthology?

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: comics history

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Sunday, December 23, 2012
      ( 12/23/2012 07:03:00 PM ) Bill S.  

“WEIRDOS, GRIFTERS, HUSTLERS” . . . AND STORYTELLERS: Ingeniously conceived and executed, Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s The Comic Book History of Comics (IDW) charts the history of comics utilizing the medium itself. Originally published as a six-issue mini-series as Comic Book Comics, the trade collection depicts the medium’s storytelling evolution, its rocky course as a business, as well as its creative touchstones. Throughout the book, attention is paid to both the creative talents who added to the medium as well as the occasionally more dubious types who bankrolled what was first seen as a “fly-by-night” business. Certain figures, familiar to most longtime comics lovers, regularly appear in the book – Siegel and Shuster, Jack Kurtzberg/Kirby, Will Eisner, and a young hyperactive kid named Stan Lieber (who would later, of course, shorten that name to Lee) – first seen scrambling to make a place for themselves in a profession that was initially considered “a couple of steps below digging ditches.”

Van Lente and Dunlavey follow the art and industry from its earliest Depression Era days as a cheap collection of reprint comic strips through its Golden Age blossoming with the creation of Superman and the development of various post-war comic book genres (romance, crime and, ultimately, horror comics) then into the fifties Silver Age which brought a rekindled interest in superheroes. If there’s any area where the duo fall short in the first half of their volume, it’s in the scant mention given to actual funnybooks: animal comics that brought us the work of Carl Barks and his cohorts as well as the earliest incarnation of Walt Kelly’s classic Pogo – and the teen funnies like Archie – though I suspect for many mainstream fans this isn’t an issue. I do wonder why there’s no mention of Jack Cole’s revolutionary wise-guy superhero Plastic Man, though.

The second half of the volume moves us into the sixties, with both the Marvel Age and the underground comix movement, then into the development of the direct market distribution system and the graphic novel. The growth of European comics and Japanese manga are also given their own chapters, but these prove relatively slight. The focus of Comic Book History remains on the American industry. Fair enough: a Manga History of Manga would provide enough material for its own full volume.

Where this book excels is in using its own medium to depict the changes in art and graphic storytelling that occurred through comics history. The book’s opening chapter cannily demonstrates how sequential panel-to-panel narrative developed using the classic Abbott and Costello dialog “Who’s on second?” while a later entry shows Dunlavey beautifully parodying and explicating the development of Jack Kirby’s groundbreaking style. Writer Fred Van Lente also has a sharp eye for the shady mistreatment that so many of these “work-for-hire” creators received over the years. He doesn’t, for instance, let Stan “The Man” Lee off the hook for lapping up the “auteur’s” credit for “creating” the characters in the Marvel Universe when in fact the work was a collaborative one with artists like Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Both writer and artist present their material fairly and with a large amount of verbal and visual humor. An accounting of the infamous Air Pirates case (where a rag-tag group of counter-cultural artists were sued by the Disney Corporation for producing underground comics that used their characters) depicts both the Disney and Air Pirates’ versions of Mickey Mouse facing off against each other with Roy Orbison and the members of Two Live Crew standing in the background, for instance, illustrating how different the copyright infringement case might have gone in the aftermath of more recent music sampling decisions.

Comic Book History’s greatest achievement, though, lies in humanizing a creative community that historically has been obscured through company hype and fannish mythologizing. (Recently, while watching an episode of Ken Smith’s Comic Book Men on television, for instance, I watched both Smith and his cohorts blithely echo the assertion that Stan Lee was entirely responsible for the Marvel Universe.) Paying attention to a group of inventive storytellers who frequently worked in crappy conditions for insufficient credit or money, this book provides an invaluable and engaging history. Both loving and knowing, it's one that the medium well deserves.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: comics history

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Monday, December 17, 2012
      ( 12/17/2012 06:54:00 PM ) Bill S.  

“WHEN YOUR LIFE GETS ‘RESET’” A decidedly odd blend of philosophical fantasy and cat-lover’s whimsy, Risa Motoyama’s Start With A Happy Ending (DMP) is a teen-rated shojo collection of fifteen short pieces following the same basic formula. In each story, the protagonist passes on suddenly and is reincarnated as a cat for the space of a week. These poor souls have been granted this brief respite by a bearded benevolent cat god for having once shown kindness to a needy feline. Seeing their past lives from a cat’s-eye view, each character is given the chance to either complete some unfinished business or get a fresh perspective on the life they’ve led.

Thus, in the opening story, “Limited Time,” a young girl who has lost her love of life rediscovers it when she comes back as a kitten. In the second, “Complex,” an office girl too closed off to let the rest of her co-workers know her, learns the advantages of opening yourself up to the world (“The only person didn’t appreciate me was me.”), a lesson that she presumably will be taking into her next life. “Just as life is an accumulation of days,” the wise cat god tells a newly departed game developer, “the soul is an accumulation of the lives it has lived.”

If Motoyama occasionally moves her stories along by giving her host cats’ abilities that extend beyond the believable (in “Complex,” her kitty is able to tap out the password to the deceased soul’s work computer), she still manages to be cleverly use their essential cat-ness to ground her fantasies. In ”Freedom,” for instance, a deceased mother who had been overly controlling in her daughter’s life learns a lesson when her host body’s owner throws away the clothes basket that she had learned to love as a resting place. “You didn’t even ask me?” the stunned kitty says, appalled at her owner’s presumptuousness.

Motoyama’s art is flatly cartoonish – at times to the stories’ detriment – though I have to admit it won me over by the end of this charming opening volume. Looking like the work of a talented young girl who’s been doodling with her pen to avoid thinking too much about an unrequited crush, it’s well suited to a work so ruefully focused on the pitfalls of the introvert life. As an entertainment which coaxes its readers to reconsider the paths their lives might take, Start with a Happy Ending seems wholly apt for this time of year: It’s a Wonderful Post-Life.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: sixty-minute manga

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Tuesday, December 04, 2012
      ( 12/04/2012 10:11:00 PM ) Bill S.  

HAIKU
I dreamed God told me
That he cannot empathize:
Too much shit to do.

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Saturday, December 01, 2012
      ( 12/01/2012 05:23:00 AM ) Bill S.  

THE SILHOUETTE KNOWS. If parlors were still in fashion, Olly Moss’ Silhouettes from Popular Culture (Titan Books) would definitely make for an amusing end table accessory. A collection of laser-cut silhouette profiles (frequently framed as if taken off a 19th century cameo) of figures from movies, television, cartoons and other modern entertainment media, Moss’ book cunningly contrasts an archaic mode of craftsmanship with nerd culture icons. The book’s front cover provides a good taste of what the artist is going for here: a black silhouette of Elsa Lancaster as the Bride of Frankenstein, which includes the white steak in her trademark hair.

Moss typically lays his 7-x-7 inch volume with a single unlabeled profile on each page facing each other – though in a few cases (three pages devoted to consecutive Doctor Whos, a bevy on Bonds, the three kidnappers from The Princess Bride), he’ll cram more on a page. Though most of the cartoon and computer game heads are easy to identify, some of the others may require more than one pass. I didn’t initially glom onto the Whos, for instance, until I saw the Dalek silhouette facing them on the fourth page, but then that show has never had the same nostalgic cachet for this Yank as it would for Britisher Moss. Have to admit I felt dumb for not immediately catching the Jay and Silent Bob silhouettes, though.

Many of Silhouettes’ two-page face-offs are fun by themselves (sixties era Batman versus Dark Knight Bats, ninja turtle versus Prince Valiant, alien versus Ripley) though occasionally they come across a bit puzzling (Don Corleone versus Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s Black Knight?) But to see Bogey and Bergman, Marty McFly and Emmett Brown, Statler and Waldorf, on opposite pages is to be reminded of the enduring nature of great pop partnerships.

A fun volume to peruse by the flickering light of the flat screen.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: pop nerdery

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