Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Douglas Wolk’s book Reading Comics has two major sections. In the first section, outlines a framework for comic book criticism. First, he makes it clear that the comic book (or graphic novel) is a distinct medium. Comics are not half-assed attempts at some other media such as film or prose.

Next he draws a distinction between mainstream comics and art comics. Mainstream comics have always been an corporate effort. It is corporate in the sense that it has been controlled by publishers. It is also corporate because most mainstream comics are the product of a team (a writer, an artist—sometimes separate penciller and inker—a colorist, and a letterer). Both of these types of corporate authorship give rise to a house style.

This gives rise to one of the major points of distinction between mainstream and art comics. Mainstream comics are dominated by a house style. Art comics are an expression of the style of the cartoonist. There is an element of auteurism in this understanding of art comics. An art comic, to a much greater degree than a mainstream comic, is a single artist’s interpretation of what he sees or envisions. Art comics are valued as an expression of their creators’ visions. The more skillful the cartoonist, the more likely he is to produce good comics.

There is more to Wolk’s framework of comics criticism than this, but it seems to me to be the central element. Wolk does not claim to be making a comprehensive system of criticism. Comic books are too new a medium for that, especially because comics criticisms is necessarily younger.

In the second section of the book, Wolk discusses the works of particular cartoonists. Some of these work heavily or mostly in mainstream comics, but the focus remains on how the artist interprets and expresses his vision in comics, with or without the expectations of mainstream comics.

One of the great examples of this is Alan Moore. Moore’s work for mainstream publishers had turned the mainstream, and especially the superhero genre, on its head while still producing comics that work excellently as mainstream comics. Moore bucks the trend of artsy cartoonists by being a writer only; all of his comics are mainstream-style collaborations with an artist. Wolk mentions several works of Moore, but the grand example is Watchmen. Moore, and especially Watchmen, has cost a long shadow on mainstream comics. He has pushed the mainstream to be much better, and eager imitators have unfortunately produced some horrible comics by learning all the wrong lessons.

Several cartoonists receive attention: the dark, strange visions of Steve Ditko (cocreator of Spider-Man), the epically deep world-building and beautiful drawing of Jaime Hernandez, the epic opus of Cerebus comics by Dave Sim, the artistry of Will Eisner, the power of Frank Miller (sometimes overpowering), and the consciousness-expanding ouvre of Grant Morrison (another writer, but not artist).

Even though the book is not new, it introduced me to cartoonists and comics that were new to me. It was worth the read for that, though Wolk’s perspective on the development of mainstream and art comics is interesting, too.

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

American Splendor (Film)

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

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

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Writing for Comics with Peter David

Douglas Wolk. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2007.

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

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

American Splendor (Film)

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Google

My Inventions by Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla’s autobiography, collected under the title My Inventions, originally appeared as six articles in issues of Electrical Experimenter in 1919. It is a surprisingly thin book, especially in light of the several biographies that have been written about him, and the possibly greater volumes propounding the mythology of an almost demi-god genius.

To be fair, Tesla was a very creative and productive inventor. His AC motors, and the power systems that support them, enabled a new level of industrial power and automation. In many ways it was the technological foundation of the power grid we have today.

Tesla was ahead of his time and he realized it. He knew that the success of AC motors was greatly aided by coming about at the right time. Even so, it took many years from Tesla’s design to become a prototype and for that to become a commercial product with an infrastructure to support its use. At the time he wrote My Inventions, the value and practicality of his later inventions were still hard for many to see.

One of these later inventions was the radio. Tesla didn’t use that term “radio.”  It’s probably fair to say that he misunderstood the phenomena he was working with. Even so, he could produce radio transmissions and put them to practical use. As a demonstration, he built radio-controlled boats. It’s a stretch to say that Tesla envisioned smart phones, but he foresaw the possibility of using radio to transmit many kinds of data and signals, sometimes to devices “not bigger than a watch.”

“The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness thru all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways,” Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

These articles were written at the end of World War I. Tesla reflected on the potentials of technology in peace and war. He imagined that wireless communication could shrink the world, leading to the kind of cultural exchange, common ground and commercial connections that would reinforce peace. He also imagined a rocket that could be guided to its target by radio control or internal mechanism; we could call it an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Though visionary, he was not an infallible genius. He held to notions of physics that were not supported even by the science of his time. He had some wild ideas about psychology, biology and other fields, though some of these were no more far-out and off the mark that many that were popularly accepted by his contemporaries.

Tesla wrote very much from his own experience and perspective. Though he speaks of his upbringing in eastern Europe, his education and his career in Europe and the United States, he spends little time reflecting on the places, cultures and broader events he experience. You’ll learn more about Tesla’s peculiar ailments than about the life of youth in late-19^th Century Croatia. Perhaps that wouldn’t have sold many issues of Electrical Experimenter.

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

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. 1919. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995.

Loving in Flow by Susan K. Perry

The concept of flow has become popular over the last couple of decades. According to social psychologist Susan K. Perry, couples can experience flow in their relationships. She describes how in Loving in Flow.

Couples who experience flow are engaged, often in everyday things. The take pleasure in their relationship and want to keep it going. The lose self-consciousness and develop a sense of “us.”

Flow is not a state you can stay in all of the time. You can learn to fall into flow more easily and stay in it longer. Ordinary couples with ordinary problems can experience more flow.

Perry covers a log of ground in this book. She gives advice dealing with conflict, better communication, a happier sex life, protecting your relationship from an affair and other potential areas of problems or improvements.

Along the way she shares stories of her own marriage and of couples she interviewed. She and her husband overcame things that have broken other marriages and moved on to something much better. You might find something to connect to, even hope, in the experiences of these couples.

Because she covers a lot of ground, I sometime lost the thread of flow. Attention seems to be an important aspect of flow working in a relationship. By focusing on you connection to you partner and the value of your relationship, you can keep other things in perspective. You can see what is going on around you and inside of you that may be a trigger for arguments. You attention to and care for your partner’s feelings will make you more empathetic. Focus on your partner can intensify connection during moments of intimacy, such as when you’re having sex. You magnify what you attend to, so give attention to what is best in your partner and the life you share to enjoy it and to fall in love again and again.

Perry provides a lot of practical advice. Readers will likely find several things they can do. The may also find encouragement in the tales of couples that overcame obstacles and gained a source of great satisfaction.

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

The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman

Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs

Perry, Susan K. Loving in Flow: How the Happiest Couples Get and Stay that Way. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2003.

Underground by Will Hunt

Will Hunt has been fascinated with underground places since his childhood discovery of an abandoned tunnel in his hometown. Perhaps abandoned isn’t quite right; Hunt found signs of occasional human occupation in the old tunnels. He pursued his interest in underground places and the way people used and experienced them around the world. He describes these experiences, and what these hidden chambers mean, in Underground.

Hunt’s explorations took him into both manmade spaces and natural caves. He retells adventures from the Paris catacombs and a trip across the city that was almost entirely underground. He entered mines and saw shrines miners created for the spirits (or monsters) that live in them, beings that are sometimes generous and sometimes dangerous. Perhaps these are relatives to the spirits, strange creatures and gods reputed to live in natural caves.

Caves and tunnels are important to varying degrees to almost all religions. Shamans, priests and philosophers have long traveled under the earth to seek insight or communication with other worlds. Hunt ties this to the hallucinations and distorted sense of time humans experience when they are deprived of sensory stimulation. He does not denigrate these experiences, but sees them as something universally human. The altered state of consciousness one might enter in the utter darkness of a cave is simply another way the mind works, and possibly the root of all religion.

People did not always understand what was underground, and we are still making discoveries. Even two centuries ago, the world under our feet was a mystery. As a fan of Missouriana, I was attracted to Hunts telling of the life John Cleves Symmes. A St. Louis-based trader and former Army officer, Symmes was a proponent of a hollow earth theory. We were not living in the inner world, but he imagined there were worlds within ours existing on a series of concentric spheres. From 1818 until his death in 1829, he traveled the country lecturing on this theory and raising money to mount an expedition. He never made that trip to inner worlds, but he was an inspiration to the authors of hollow earth stories such as Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank L. Baum.

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

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Second Chronicles

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Hunt, Will. Underground: A Human History of the World Beneath Our Feet. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Why Science Does Not Disprove God by Amir Aczel

New Atheism is a movement that arose after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Proponents of the movement blame religion for nearly all the violence and disorder in the world, and they aim to eliminate it and any belief in God. Many New Atheism writers call upon science for proofs that there is no God, such as biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence M. Krauss. These arguments have been picked up by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet and old-school atheist Christopher Hitchens.

Amir D. Aczel, a mathematician and science writer, argued that these authors misappropriated science for this purpose, sometimes misapplying it, misrepresenting it, or propagating misunderstandings. He presented his arguments in Why Science Does Not Disprove God.

Aczel’s perspective is very scientific, though he respects religion. He accepts the prevailing theories of cosmology that our universe began in the Big Bang. He accepts that evolutionary processes have produced higher and more complicated life forms from simpler ones though natural selection.

Aczel begins by addressing the archeological support for Biblical history. While he does not suggest that there is evidence of Biblical miracles, there is a lot of evidence supporting the historical narratives of the Bible. While New Atheism argues there is no archeological evidence to support the Bible, Aczel shows that there is abundant support for the history described in it.

Another popular argument of the New Atheists is that quantum theory demonstrates that the universe arose spontaneously out of nothing. Aczel describes how quantum theory actually shows that we cannot know some details about the earliest moments of the universe following the Big Bang and that it cannot at all address what was before the Big Bang. No theory of physics supposes it came from nothing. Some argue that it arose spontaneously, but it still occurred in due to physical process in a medium that existed before the universe, which itself raises many of the same questions of origins.

This points to the crux of Aczel’s argument. Science, math, and logic all point to their own limitations. There are huge unanswered, important questions in science, not the least of which is what is consciousness and how it came to be. We may not be able to answer such questions and there is certainly some knowledge that is not accessible to us. New Atheism proponents present science as having firm answers to these questions when it sometimes only has speculation or no real answers at all. Science may someday uncover some of this knowledge, but in can’t uncover all of it.

While he demonstrates that science doesn’t, and cannot, disprove God, he does not suggest that it can or will prove the existence of God. Aczel believes that God may be outside of what can be known through science, mathematics or even the human mind.

Aczel still has a great appreciation for science, and he wants others to appreciate it, too. His argument with New Atheism is that its proponents misuse science and misdirect people. He would rather we engage science for all the great knowledge it can bring us, not coopt it in a crusade against religion or a debate about God it may never be able to answer.

Why Science Does Not Disprove God is not written in a technical style. Most people should be able to understand it even if they have very little scientific education.

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

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Amir D. Aczel also wrote

Chance

Descarte’s Secret Notebook

Aczel, Amir D. Why Science Does Not Disprove God. New York: William Morrow, 2014.