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
Google
