Keenan's Book Reviews

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Evanier, Mark. Kirby: King of Comics. New York: Abrams, 2008.

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Stan Lee by Bob Batchelor

Stan Lee is the face of comic books to many and has become a sort of celebrity in his more than 70-year long career as a storyteller. He began to hone his image on the college lecture circuit in the 1960s while he created a new type of superhero, typified by the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, in collaboration with artists including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. It was a role Lee was ready for; he had been trying out ways to promote comic books and himself since the 1940s.

Bob Batchelor presents Lee’s life in Stan Lee: The Man behind Marvel. Though not a long biography, it starts with Lee’s childhood in New York City and runs through his 95^th year, when he is still producing ideas for comics and television.

Lee was present nearly at the beginning of comic books. He started as an assistant to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the creators of Captain America. When they moved on after contentions with Timely Comics, a forerunner to Marvel, Lee stepped up to become editor while still a teenager.

Lee was ready to quit comics by the time the 1960s. He craved to work in a respectable field and was tired of chasing trends. The right combination of opportunity and encouragement from his wife pushed Lee to write the kind of comics he would want to read, and it became a sensation.

Though Lee will always be associated with Marvel comics, by the 1980s his focus was shifting to television and film. It was a rough transition for Lee, but he had some success, especially in the production of animated adaptions of Marvel characters that were popular in the 1990s.

Lee has stumbled some in his post-Marvel career, notably the debacle of new media company Stan Lee Media. He seems to have recovered somewhat with POW! Entertainment.

Lee has detractors, which Batchelor acknowledges. Batchelor doesn’t refute those detractors, but his take on Lee is overall very positive. Lee appears to be someone who tries not to be tied down by his past, neither dwelling on his failures nor being content with many successes.

Lee was a central figure in creating some of the most popular characters and stories in the world. Well into his 90s, he is still working and coming up with ideas that find their way into print, television and the Internet.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

In Memory Yet Green by Isaac Asimov

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Spider-Man

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Batchelor, Bob. Stan Lee: The Man behind Marvel. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Reviewing Gerard Jones’ history of the comic book industry makes me feel like I’m pitching a new show to the cable networks. It’s a little like Mad Men. There is less suavity, but plenty of smoking, drinking, and womanizing. There is room for some gratuitous nudity. Many of the comics publishers came from got started in spicy pulps and nudie mags. They were hustlers from the street, too, many with mob connections. So we can have a touch of Boardwalk Jungle, though the violence is contained to the muscular fantasies of young men wanting to overcome a sense of powerlessness. Of course, there may be comparisono to The Big Bang Theory, especially when you have scenes of young men working side-by-side at typewriters and drawing boards, helping and competing with each other. Most aren’t geniuses, but plenty are awkward and pretentious. It even has a great name: Men of Tomorrow.

The book is a mostly chronological look at the development of comics. It starts with the pulp publishers. As the pulps declined for various reasons of economics and taste, the comics rose their peak in World War II. Patriotic superheroes were depicted punching Hitler in the face before America entered the war. Superhero comics declined after the war, especially due to competition from television, though other genres did well. Some of them, especially crime and horror, attracted the attention of reformers who wanted a clean and upright media safe for children and a culture longing for conformity and peace. Comics found a new life as baby boomers came of age, partly because of interest in new dysfunctional heroes of Stan Lee and his collaborators and partly because cheap underground comics were exploring the youth counterculture. Finally, comics became an almost mainstream medium, especially superheroes who successfully moved into film and other media.

There are almost too many people discussed in this book to mention. Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz built a shady distributor of sex stories and porn into a pillar of a major media corporation. Along the way, their conflict with Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster became the stuff of comics legend that occasionally broke into mainstream consciousness. In many retellings of this story, Donenfeld and Liebowitz are demonized and Siegel and Shuster lionized. Jones mostly resists this urge, treating the New York publishers with some fairness and showing how the cartoonists from Cleveland were the cause of some of their own trouble. There is a host of other notables from trash publishing (Hugo Gernsback and Bernarr McFadden), organized crime (Frank Costello and Mayer Lansky), failed teachers and academics (Charlie Gaines and William Moulton Marston), and finally from comics (Charlie Biro, Bob Kane, Jack Cole, Jack Kirby, and many more).

Many of these people grew up in Jewish immigrant families. Their successes and failures in the 1920s and 1930s, their readiness for war in the 1940s, and their search for an identity both American and Jewish in the postwar year reflects the journey of a larger community. In addition to being a story of comics, it is a story of how Jews, immigrants, science fiction, and geeks moved from the edges of American society toward the mainstream—or maybe the mainstream widened to encompass them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

American Splendor (Film)

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

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Sunday, March 27, 2016

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

When a book is entitled Amazing Fantastic Incredible, Stan Lee must be involved. That is the title of Lee’s graphic novel memoir, co-written with Peter David with art by Colleen Doran, about his long career in comic books.

Lee has a career in comic books going back the Golden Age. He started working in comics soon after they became a popular medium. Few people have had a career in comic books as long as Lee’s, partly because he is still working. No one has been the public face of comic books, or a spokesman and promotor for the medium, as much as Lee.

Because Lee’s career in comics is well known, at least among fans, some of the more interesting parts of the memoir deal with other aspects of his life. He depicts himself as being crazy in love with his wife, Joan, even after decades of marriage. He recalls himself as a lonely kid during the Great Depression, who took refuge in books and the world of his own imagination. He retelling of his army service during World War II, mostly serving as a writer stateside, is mostly humorous.

I suspect Lee’s humor has a lot to do with his popularity. He comes across as self-aggrandizing with a self-deprecating wink.

Even so, Lee’s status as a comics celebrity has sparked criticism in some circles. He was the face of Marvel Comics, and so has taken the heat for the way the publisher treated the artist who worked for him (comics publishers treated artists shabbily for decades). Maybe he could have done more for the artists who worked for him, and maybe he would have been unemployed if he tried. Lee doesn’t get into this matter much, but when he does he shifts the blame to publisher Martin Goodman.

Lee addresses some of his most famous characters and the artists who co-created them. Some might see his recognition of co-creators as a defense against detractors who say he has claimed too much credit. I think the book presents the situation the way Lee would like to remember, and the way he would like others to remember it. I think he genuinely liked and admired many of the people he worked with. Throughout the book, Jack Kirby is depicted as handsome, powerful and dynamic, almost like a superhero, even when there was a rift if their personal and professional relationship.

This is a memoir, not an autobiography. Lee and his collaborators do not attempt to independently confirm memories, though they straightforward about some memories being fuzzy. A few scenes a clearly constructed to present information in a manner more interesting than direct exposition, though they may have had some root in an actual event. Lee’s conversations with his boyhood self are plainly fictional; I thought they tended to be the weakest parts of the book, though they were functional.

Fans of Lee will probably enjoy the book. Someone who wants a brief and easy history of comics, and isn’t too concerned about the lopsidedness that would naturally come with Lee’s perspective, might also like it. Lee would know, he was there.

Stan Lee also wrote Spider-Man with Steve Ditko. Peter David also wrote Writing for Comics with Peter David.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore