Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

As you would expect from a medium that has survived decades, comic books have changed with time to adapt to changes in culture.  In Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright describes that history from the birth of comics as a new medium in the 1930s through the 1990s. Though the book was published a decade ago, it still provides a good perspective on where comics are. He mentions the advent of electronic publishing at the close of the book. I think it is fair to say that electronic publishing and distribution has not radically changed comics, though there may be potential for that in recent developments in the business of self-publishing comics electronically.

Bradford is an academic historian. Comic Book Nation is intended to be a cultural history of comics. Of course, Bradford can’t help but cover some the same ground that other writers cover, though this book predates many of the more academic or journalistic books on the subject. Some publishers, creators, and titles are just too important and influential not to mention. Even so, he tries to stick to his purpose and show how the times were reflected in comics.

I think it is fair to say that comics, and popular media generally, reflect cultures more than they influence them. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be popular. This reflection isn’t always simplistic, even in comics. Comics writers and artists, like other producers of popular media, tried to address the concerns and interests of their audiences, sometimes realistically, sometimes idealistically, and sometimes with cynicism.

Of course, it was Superman who sparked the immense popularity of superhero comics, and comics generally. That popularity spawned imitators, as it does today. The early Superman, created by Cleveland high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was a reformer. He battled gangsters and crooked politicians. He was a New Dealer. Many comics supported New Deal policies to address the Great Depression.

Superheroes made the transition to World War II with ease. Writers had to address why the costumed crusaders weren’t enlisting or bringing the war to a swift end. They must have succeeded, because superhero titles were very popular, even among American soldiers. Comics were pro-war, and many costumed heroes were battling foreign menaces, especially the Nazis, even before America entered the war.

Superhero titles floundered after the war, but other genres did well. Comics generally supported American policies of intervention in smaller nations and containment of Communism. The medium reflected the post-war hopefulness that there could be peace and international cooperation with America leading as a benevolent superpower.

The post-war years had troubles, too. People feared the misuse and spread of nuclear weapons. The Korean War was a doubtful venture that many felt lacked the clear and good purpose of World War II. This applied to Viet Nam, too, where the additional problems of guerilla warfare challenged notions of heroism.

Comic books faced other challenges. The excesses of crime and horror comics brought about industry-operated censorship. Television competed for the time and money of children.

Much of the latter part of the book shows how the comics industry found a way to survive these problems. The 1960s introduced a resurgence of creativity and superheroes, especially the flawed fantasy men of Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics. New models of distribution were introduced in the 1980s. Electronic media has the potential to reinvigorate comics.

Because my adolescence was in the 1980s, I’d like to mention a few things about it. Unlike some comics historians, Bradford spends a fair amount of time on that decade, especially in a book that covers more than 60 years. He provides a pretty good description of how Frank Miller and Alan Moore challenged the superhero model and brought a lot of new interest to it. If anything, Miller and Moore were too influential. A lot of comics are still derivative of their best works.  Imitation of success is common in comics, and too often the imitators do not have the skill or understanding of the masters.

What I’d really like to mention is that Bradford acknowledges John Byrne’s contribution. Byrne was a very popular writer and artist in the 1980s. He did some pretty good stuff, too. He also indulged in excesses that presaged the excesses of the 1990s, but at least he did it with a self-aware wink. Byrne brought fun back to comics. Then as now, I like comics with a good dose of fun.

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

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

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Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Viking, 2006.



In Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick writes about the Plymouth Colony from the Pilgrim’s flight from Europe to the end of King Philip’s War. It is mainly a story of how the settler’s and their descendants related to the natives.

It was by no means certain that the Pilgrims would get along with the Indians. They were chiefly concerned with building a community on their religious convictions, strong beliefs they held on to in spite of persecution in England. In the New World, they would do things their way.

Even so, they were surprisingly humble. The hardships they faced in America were enough to humble anyone. They quickly realized their dependence on the sufferance of the native populations. Unwittingly, they had upset the political balance of the Indian tribes.

Massasoit was the leader of a tribe that was weakened by disease and other setbacks. Once one of the leading tribes in the regions, the Pokanokets were in danger of being subdued by their rivals. Massasoit, their sachem, built and alliance with the Pilgrims at Plymouth that kept him in a strong position.

This is only the beginning of the political intrigues that run through the history of the Plymouth colony. Many native leaders and would-be sachems used the English, their technology, and the fear many Indians felt to carve out a place for themselves in the dangerous world of inter-tribal politics.

Against this backdrop, the Pilgrims cultivated allies amongst the Indians. Though their desire for religious purity may caused them to separate themselves from the churches in England may have tended to isolate them, the discipline, self-control, humility, and justice required by their faith made them more palatable to the natives than other European settlers.

Things changed quickly within a couple of generations. The Pilgrims were chiefly interested in their religious community, but their immediate descendants were interested in land and the wealth it brought. This inevitably led to competition for resources. The Indians became resentful and the English shed humility as they gained power.

Massasoit’s grandson, Philip, doesn’t seem like a fighter. In fact, he was generally a runner. Even so, he was the spark that set ablaze a war in New England. The sachems before him sold much land to the settlers and Philip found himself without the resources to support his people. He strung things along for a while using threats and capitulations to get what he needed from the English, much like today’s small nuclear states do to the Western countries on a global scale. Plymouth officials became too high-handed with Philip and soon events and the resentments of his young warriors pushed the sachem into war.

The action of the war chapters makes them more interesting reading, but they tell an awful tale. The English killed, enslaved or displace half the native population of southern New England. The land they coveted was theirs for the taking, though Plymouth was so indebted after the war, it couldn’t afford the expansion.

The expulsion of Indians made the frontiers more dangerous. Friendly natives had once buffered the settlers from hostile tribes. Now a settler clearing the frontier was likely to be surrounded by hostile tribes and have no hope of help if they decided to purge foreigners.

As the United States expanded, the Pilgrims and King Philip’s War became lost history outside of New England. When they were brought back to popular knowledge, it was as stories transformed to be suitable for new times. Philbrick puts aside the romanticized tale of Thanksgiving not to debunk it, but to present the Pilgrims and Indians more as they were.

Nathanial Philbrick also wrote
Sea of Glory

If you’re interested in this book, you may might like
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

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Planck by Brandon R. Brown

German physicist Max Planck was one of the most famous and well-respected scientists of his day. His work formed the foundation of quantum mechanics and is still relevant to physics today. He lived through both world wars, and these resulted in tragedy for his family.

Planck is a brief biography of the man by another physicist, Brandon R. Brown. Brown focuses his book on the last years of World War II, but from there reaches far back to his subject’s birth in 1858 and forward a little to his death in 1947. It is interesting that Brown did not choose to take a chronological approach given that entropy and the irreversibility of time were subjects of great interest to Planck. Perhaps he wants to readers to be somewhat unsettled, no doubt the way Planck must have been unsettled by events of his lifetime and the conclusions younger scientists drew from his own theories.

Brown presents Planck and as a flexible thinker who contributed to physics and accepted new theories at an age when most of his contemporaries were ready to shut the books on what could be learned. Apparently what most of us like to think of as middle-aged (at worst) is ancient for a physicist. His own work on thermal radiation established fundamental concepts of quantum theory, though he didn’t use the term “quanta.” When a young Albert Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, Planck quick promote and build on it. He was slower to come around to general relativity (as wild as it is to us, it was insane to many in that time), and both men suffered philosophical heartburn from the quantum mechanics served up by the generation that came up under them.

Planck was very loyal to his country. His brother Hermann died in the Franco-Prussian War, and the family became intensely patriotic. At the start of World War I, he was hopeful that the war might strengthen and unify Germany. His oldest son, Karl, died at Verdun, and Germany fell on hard times.

Things were more complex when the Nazis took power. At times, his reputation as the nation’s most prominent scientist gave him leeway to resist anti-Semitic policies. At other times he acquiesced, hoping that the excesses of Nazi policies would be smoothed out or even reversed by the necessities of governing and the needs of the nation. He was so hopeful he even encouraged Jewish colleagues to stay. The Nazis saw no need for moderation, so Planck’s influence quickly waned. His son, Erwin, became involved in a resistance movement that hoped to topple the Nazis. He was implicated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Though the Planck family appealed to every ear in and around the Nazi regime that might have sympathy, Erwin was convicted and eventually hanged. (Planck survived his first wife and four of his five children).

Brown doesn’t judge Planck too harshly, though some might. He had no love for the Nazis, but perhaps too much love for Germany, its scientific achievement, and its international standing, may have made him reluctant to boldly oppose them. This led to a break in his relationship with Einstein, though the younger eminence spoke very kindly of Planck even many years later. Because of he refused to embrace the Nazis, and he was well-liked by many foreign scientists, the Allies gave him a place in rebuilding the German scientific establishment after the war. The British, French, and Americans reorganized scientific institutes into the Max Planck Society, which is still active in supporting all manner of scientific endeavor.

I think the book is approachable for most adult readers who may have an interest in Planck or his times. Brown does not get so deep so deep into the science that he loses readers; he tries to explain it in a way that will make sense to a general audience. The structure of the book may make it difficult for a young reader to follow.

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

Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison 

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Brandon R. Brown. Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

On February 5, 1946, The Adventures of Superman radio program opened with a new introduction:

Yes, it’s Superman.  Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities farbeyond those of mortal men.  Superman, defender of law and order, champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice!

This announced the beginning of the radio Superman’s struggle with post-war social issues, especially a campaign against racial and religious intolerance.  In this adventure, Jimmy Olsen infiltrated the Guardians of America, a fictional stand-in for pro-Nazi groups that were operating in the United States at the time.  This was only the beginning.  Later that year, Adventures would feature a 16-episode story in which Superman took on the Clan of the Fiery Cross, a stand-in for the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Behind these fictional stories of Superman were real-life adventures.  The KKK was attempting to launch a new national membership drive, playing on the insecurities people felt after World War II.  There were real infiltrators of the KKK and other organized hatemongers who exposed the workings of these organizations in the media.  Rick Bowers tells the story of these men and the producers of the comic book and radio Superman in Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan.

Superman had been dealing with cultural concerns from his beginning.  When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jewish high-school students in Cleveland, created Superman in the 1930s, they pitted him against criminal gangs and crooked politicians.  As Nazi Germany began to rise as an aggressive European power, the hero opposed Nazis at home and abroad.  During the war, he protected the home front.   Though it is not the focus, Bowers describes how Superman has changes with the concerns of the times.

The Klan has roots going back to the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.  It started as a jokey order of former Confederate Army officers in Tennessee who imitated the mystery religion-inspired fraternal orders that were popular at colleges, with mysterious rituals and strange names.  It spawned imitators that secretly gathered in Nashville to organize themselves in 1867.  Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard, who lead the Klan in opposition to Reconstruction, including domestic terrorism against blacks and white proponents of racial equality and Reconstruction policies.  The violence of the Klan members, called Ghouls, eroded the organization’s popularity.

William J. Simmons launched a campaign to revive the Klan, taking it national in 1920.  For Simmons it was largely a moneymaking scheme, though he seemed happy to promote intolerance of blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants and anyone else who wasn’t a white, male Protestant.  (I’m a white, male Protestant and I find nothing in Protestantism, or Christianity in general, that justifies the intolerance promoted by the Klan.)  Successors led the Klan to political activism in the 1920s, and it became very powerful, but front-line violence and leadership hypocrisy undermined their position.  The post-war membership campaign, led by Samuel Green who was Grand Dragon of the Georgia Realm, was thwarted by law enforcement and equal rights advocates with help of medial like Adventures.

The library helpfully labeled Bowers’ book with a sticker that reads, “TEEN.”  I suppose it is a young adult book, though I think it is within the grasp of many middle school students.  It is an unusual introduction to the history of bigotry in American and the movements that promoted equality, but the tie to a popular superhero might make the subject more appealing to kids in school.  It made me pick up the book, and I’m far passed my school days.

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

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Bowers, Rick.  Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan.  Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2012.

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The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

World War II was a time when secrecy was often a necessary part of security. The secrecy surrounding the development to of the atomic bomb was particularly thick. Since that veil was lifted, Las Alamos, Nevada, has become strongly associated with the bomb, as it should be. However, there were other locations critical to the project. Denis Kiernan discusses one of them, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in her book The Girls of Atomic City.

The Clinton Engineer Works was part of the Manhattan Project. Its purpose was the enrichment of uranium to supply the research, development and construction of an atomic weapon. When it was built, the Army took over thousands of acres of farmland in Tennessee, displacing the residents. Oak Ridge did not exist before the project.

As the title suggests, Kiernan focuses on the role of women at the Clinton Engineer Works, as the area was known when it was a military reservation. The book draws on her interviews with women who worked at the site; the experiences of nine particular women serve as guideposts for the story. These women served in a variety of roles: statistician, chemist, inspector, equipment operator, nurse, secretary, and janitor. Some became wives and mothers as well during the war years. It was an interesting time when there was space for women in science, technology and manufacturing, but not a lot.

Kiernan reaches outside of Oak Ridge to mention other notable women who played a part. German physicist Lise Meitner coined the term nuclear fission; she had Jewish ancestors and fled to Sweden as the Nazis came to power in her homeland. Earlier, Ida Noddack was the first to suggest that the atomic nucleus could split, an idea that was initially rejected by many scientists studying radioactivity and the inner workings of the atom.

The growth of families in a place designed solely for one purpose suggested a result that had not been considered when the Army started to build the Clinton Engineer Works. Oak Ridge was becoming a community and it eventually became an incorporated city (in 1958 by a vote of the residents after federal and state laws opened the opportunity). Though the population dropped dramatically from its war-time peak, Oak Ridge remained a center for research in nuclear energy and the peace-time use of radioactive materials as it transitioned to civilian control. Today the Oak Ridge National Laboratory continues research in energy and computing. The city of Oak Ridge continues as well, still connected to its past as a unique factory town, but in many way a city like any other.

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

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman

The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

Kiernan, Denise. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. 2013. New York Touchstone: 2014.

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

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London Under by Peter Ackroyd

London is an ancient city. The Romans established a settlement their a thousand years ago, but they weren’t the first inhabitants of the valley. It sits on soil into which everything slowly sinks. Rivers that brought life to the valley became choked with filth and were buried. The ground under London is thick with history, and the infrastructure of a modern metropolis mingles with the remains of its ancestors. Peter Ackroyd describes what is beneath the surface of that great city in London Under.

Ackroyd goes back to the earliest settlers of the area and the archeological remains of their lives. Their holy places were overbuilt by Roman temples. The temples dedicated to Roman gods were overbuilt by churches. Old paths became Roman roads. The filth of a city covered these roads and turned them back into dirt paths. Modern people paved them anew with brick, and later asphalt or concrete. It’s all still there, though, one thing layered over the other, but often still following the outlines ancient paths.

As you might expect from a man with who has worked with water, some of my favorite chapters relate to the rivers and sewers. London was built around rivers. As the population grew, these rivers became open sewers, carrying away all manner of waste until they were too filthy and stinking to bear. These rivers were enclosed and became underground sewers. As the city grew, it overwhelmed the sewers and turned the Thames into a stinking mess. Eventually it inconvenienced Parliament enough that they engaged the problems seriously in the 19^th Century, putting in place interceptor sewers that carried the waste away from the city. Many of the sewers that are now more than a century old are still in use.

Another feature of London that fascinates my engineering side is the Underground. The city has the oldest underground railway system. The first lines are more than 150 years old. It was built in bits and pieces by competing private companies, though now it is a unified system. The Underground has become such a part of London life that a literature related to it has developed. The tunnels have been the settings of novels and the inspiration for poems.

World War II and the Cold War were another significant phase of buried construction. The British government built many tunnels and bunkers to protect government resources threatened by war. During World War II, so many people sought shelter in the Underground that the government was forced to provide shelter space for people escaping the bombs.

Like any modern city, London now has an extensive underground infrastructure. Pipelines carry drinking water, sewerage, electric and telephone wires, fiber optic cables and all the other things that connect people to services in their homes and workplaces.  These important systems are hidden underground, out of site and possibly too often out of mind, where their work apparently does not disturb the sleeping remains of the many things that had come before.

If you are interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Ackroyd, Peter. London Under: The Secret History beneath the Streets. New York: Anchor, 2011.

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Washington Roebling spent 14 year of his life designing and building the Brooklyn Bridge. Though originally conceived by his father, John A. Roebling, almost every aspect of the bridge conceived of and constructed from 1869 until it opened in 1883 was from the imagination and under the supervision of Washington Roebling, the chief engineer.

A lot has been written about the bridge. In Chief Engineer, Erica Wagner provides a broader picture of Roebling’s life from his youth to his productive old age.

Roebling grew up in Pennsylvania. His boyhood home was still on the frontier of settlement even in the 1830s. His formally schooling was varied, and much of his education came from assisting his father in bridge building. Though John Roebling was a successful engineer and businessman, and immigrant success story, he was abusive to his wife and children. Washington Roebling grew up to be a man who could bear hardship, but he long resented the abuse he, his siblings and especially his mother suffered in his father’s house.

Engineering was not Roebling’s only area of success. He joined Union forces during the Civil War.  Though he joined a private, his engineering experience won him an appointment and an officer and he eventually rose to the rank of colonel. His rise to the officer corps did not remove him from danger in that bloody war. Antietam, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg were just some of the battles he was part of.

The war was hard on his health, but good in other ways. It was during those years that he met his wife Emily, sister of General G. K. Warren. Emily was a vigorous, capable person who proved to be a great partner to her husband and successful on her own.

The war was not as hard on Roebling’s health as hard as the Brooklyn Bridge would be. Roebling spent a lot of time in the caissons as they sunk deeper, seeking firm foundations for the bridge towers. Prolonged work in compressed air damaged his health, possibly permanently. Though he remained in charge of the bridge, his health prevented him from being at the bridge during much of its above ground construction. Emily became his secretary and agent during this time. She was involved to such a degree that rumors spread that she was the actual engineer. There no support for the rumors that Emily was a designer of the bridge, but it is fair to say that Roebling leaned on her and her ability to organize and communicate with tact and she made important contributions to the success of the bridge.

Roebling lived a long life, surviving Emily, two of his younger brothers and even some of his nephews. Though he left an active role in the wire company his father founded, he eventually took over management of the company when his brothers who ran it, Ferdinand and Charles, and later their sons died. He seemed to relish the work and the challenge well into his eighties.

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

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury 

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The Johnstown Flood by David McCollough

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Wagner, Erica. Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.