Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

I won’t say much about Gabrielle Bernstein’s Super Attractor. There is something about it that turns me off. I suspect my biases are usually clear, though I don’t often state them as explicitly as I do here.

Much of what you’ll find in term of advice is in Super Attractor is similar to what you might find in other self-help books. It has the New Age perspective that is common among many books of this genre, especially in the wake of Oprah’s popularizing of books such as The Secret.

Bernstein goes a step farther in reviving Spiritualism. She essentially claims to be a medium (though she doesn’t use the word) who is in touch with a spirit guide—and you can be, too. I do not know if she is a sham or if she is playing with fire, but it is a path I cannot take or recommend on either scientific of religious grounds.

“Fear is a gentle reminder of what you don’t want, and therefore it helps you clarify what you do want,” Gabriell Bernstein, Super Attractor

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

Acres of Diamonds by Russel H. Conwell

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

Make Miracles in Forty Days by Melody Beattie

Night of the Ghouls (film)

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

The Secret of the Ages by Robert Collier

Bernstein, Gabrielle. Super Attractor: Methods for Manifesting a Life Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2019.

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.

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Readers of Sherlock Holmes stories may recall that the detective clipped stories from newspapers related to crimes, or unusual stories in which Holmes detected the hint of a crime. Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, did the same thing, and he had a collection of books related to crime. This is just one aspect of himself that Doyle put into the fictional detective.

Doyle’s interest in crime, and particularly in defending those he felt were unjustly prosecuted, sometimes led him into investigating crimes. Peter Costello describes some of these crimes and investigations in The Real World of Sherlock Holmes.

Perhaps the most celebrated case, and the case in which Doyle conducted himself as a Holmes-like detective, was the case of George Edalji. Edalji, a solicitor born to an Indian father and English mother, was convicted of a series of animal mutilations. Doyle believed the case against him was week, based mainly on poison-pen letters accusing the young man. As he began to investigate, he found sloppy investigative techniques, openly racist police leadership, an incompetent counsel contributed to the wrongful conviction. Doyle investigated further and even collected evidence indicating that someone else was the culprit. Through his investigation, along with pressure he brought through the media and influential acquaintances, he won a pardon for Edalji.

When Doyle became so deeply involved in a case, he was usually motivated to correct what he saw as a miscarriage of justice. He was not so active in his investigation of other crimes. Doyle studied crimes he found interesting. More often than not, these were inquiries at a distance as he read books and newspaper accounts, and discussed crimes with other interested people. He was even a member of “Our Society,” a secretive crime club that discussed the details of crime and developments in criminology in its after-dinner meetings. Some of the members were lawyers and forensic scientists (still a new profession) who were actively involved in investigating or prosecuting crimes.

Costello suggests that some of these crimes inspired Doyle’s stories. It makes sense that they would. Doyle always made significant changes when he adapted a true crime to a fictional story, so no Sherlock Holmes story could be described as a close, though fictionalized, recreation of a true crime.

Doyle remained interested in crime throughout his life, but by the 1920s he was focused on promoting spiritualism. Even when he investigated a crime in this era, it was usually because of an element of spiritualism touching the case. He encouraged the use of clairvoyants and mediums by the police. When Agatha Christie disappeared, his investigation consisted of a consultation with medium Horace Leaf. (Journalists, passing on clairvoyance to use more Holmes-like detection, found Christie staying at a resort under an assumed name.)

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

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Fic by Anne Jamison

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Costello, Peter. The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The True Crimes Investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Carrol & Graf, 1991.

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

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

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

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Lee, Stan, Peter David & Colleen Doran. Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir. New York: Touchstone, 2015.

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.

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917, picked up the nickname King when he was young. That is not the only reason Mark Evanier applies the title to him in Kirby: King of Comics. Kirby was one of the most influential creators in comics over the course of his long career, beginning in 1938 at the Eisner-Iger shop, which began in the early days of the medium.

Kirby is a coffee table book, full of images from Kirby’s work. Though Evanier’s biography of Kirby is interesting, I suspect these images, some of them large, full-page reproduction were always conceived as a major selling point of the book. Kirby was a professional artist, mostly in comics, his entire career, which was long, so it only makes sense that you need to see a selection of his drawings to understand why he had such an impact on comics.

You can see Kirby’s influence everywhere in comics, especially superhero comics. He worked for both Marvel and DC at different times, and had a hand in creating or co-creating many popular characters and settings.

More than that, he had an influence on the style and visual language of comics that writers and artist still used today. He was one of the first comic book artists to break away from strip layouts (carried over from newspaper comics) to designing for a full page. His characters busted through the panels. His drawings were dynamic and suggested powerful motion; this is a striking characteristic of his work that is discussed by nearly everyone who writes about Kirby. I find his drawings can seem strangely flattened out and dimensional at the same time.

Because Kirby worked for so long, on so many comics, for so many publishers, and had such an influence on the artists who grew up reading his work, you’ll still see many Kirby touches in current comics. I see them in the depiction of technology, the design of characters and costumes, the framing of action scenes, and even the continued use of Kirby dots (especially at DC, no doubt because they just look so cool).

He was an innovator who introduced new types of images into comics, such as collage, and new genres, such as romance. He even foresaw the future of the comic books, pushing his publishers for better quality material and printing, new formats, longer stories, and new ways to market and sell comics. Publishers balked at the cost of such innovations at the time, but many of the changes Kirby predicted and sought for the industry eventually came to pass.

Kirby is known mainly as an artist, but he was also a writer. It may be fair to say that Kirby couldn’t leave a script alone and regularly modified scripts he was adapting to drawings. His solo writing was packed with big ideas and wild concepts and sometimes had trouble finding large audience in his day, though these comics have often done well when collected and reprinted. I do not think it unfair to say that some of his best work was collaborations with other writers. For much of the first half of his career, he partnered with writer Joe Simon, with whom he created Captain America and romance comics. In the 1960s, he collaborated with Stan Lee at to co-create much of what is now the Marvel Universe.

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

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

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

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

Fic by Anne Jamison

Have you ever finished a book, or series, or experienced the cancellation of a television show, and wanted more? Have you loved something you read or watched, but found some aspects frustrating or missing? That feeling has motivated people to write their own stories of characters or settings originated by other authors. This is fanfiction, or fanfic, or as English professor Anne Jamison puts it in the title of her book, simply Fic.

Fanfiction has a long history. Jamison starts her history with the first hugely popular, serial character in English literature, Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories inspired others to write their own tales of ratiocination, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, featuring the consulting detective and his physician companion, John Watson. Those with means sometimes had their works printed and circulated among friends. Other may have changed the names and sought to publish their stories.

Sherlockian fanfic introduces one the themes of the book, the relationship between authors, and their works, readers and publishers. Jamison traces how attitudes about these relationships have changed over time.

Another thing that changed over time, with significant effects on fanfic, is technology. The rise of television inspired fanfic based on media, rather than exclusively on written sources, particularly the in relation to Star Trek. Access to mimeographs and photocopiers allowed the community of fans to communicate, and distribute fanfic, through ‘zines.

The medium of choice for fanfic is now clearly the internet because it allows for such inexpensive and easy distribution. As an example of how the internet changed fanfic, Jamison turns to the example of Harry Potter, whose ascendancy in popular culture corresponded with the development of the internet as we know it. Twilight fanfic, in contrast to many others, was born in the age of the internet, and has been home to views that put it at odds with other fandoms, though such conflicts have been common as fandoms have expanded.

If you are unfamiliar with fanfic, you should probably be warned that a lot of it involves romantic and sexual pairings between characters who were not romantically involved in the source material. There is a lot of sex. There is every type of sexuality you can imagine, and possibly a few you’ve never heard of. Fanfic communities have provided an outlet for people to explore alternatives to the mainstream, often from the safety of some anonymity, especially in relation to sexuality. Interestingly, fanfic has been less adventurous in other areas, such as racial and cultural diversity, sticking close the relatively narrow diversity of the source media, though some fanfic attempts to depict a more diverse world.

Though I have only spoken of Jamison as the author of Fic, many contributed to the book. Most are writers with some connection to fanfic, and a few are academics. I would describe the book as semi-academic. It has the form of an academic book that describes the history and various aspects of a topic (fanfic) through a collection of related works by various authors. It is unlike typical academic books in that the style of all the contributors is personal and informal. Like fanfic is to its sources, Fic takes and academic form that is familiar and loved (at least by an academic) and brings to it something else that is loved, and even transformative.

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

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

Case Closed by Gosho Ayoama

Histories and Fallacies by Carl R. Trueman

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

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Jamison, Anne. Fic: Why Fanfiction is taking Over the World. Dallas, TX: Smart Pop, 2013.

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.

Google

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

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Will Eisner was a great innovator in comic books who spent his entire adult life working in the field. Michael Schumacher’s biography of the man, Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics, is a chronological review of his life and major works. Several things set Eisner apart as a comics writer and artist. From the beginning of his career, he thought comics could be serious art that could be more than cheap entertainment for kids. Unlike many comics artists, he was also a savvy businessman. He expanded the scope of comics from entertainment to education. Though his early work in comics is of high quality and displayed great creativity, he pushed himself to do more and better things with his chosen medium. Comic books were held in low regard in their early days, even by the writers and artists who created them. Most of the creators who worked in the field were just biding their time and making ends meet until they might move into more lucrative and respected work in books, magazines, and commercial art. It was also a market open to Jews, like Eisner, and other minorities who had a hard time breaking into other markets. In contrast, Eisner always saw potential in comic books to be serious art that could communicate to people in unique ways. While publishers were interested in gimmicks and characters that sold magazines, and Eisner provided them with that kind of material, Eisner’s desire was to focus on great storytelling through comics. He got his chance when he produced The Spirit, a comic made to be a weekly insert for newspapers. He negotiated a level of creative control over the comic that was uncommon in the industry. Eisner enjoyed the process of negotiation. This had much to do with his success as a businessman. For most of his career, Eisner ran his own shop producing comics for other publishers rather than working as an employee for freelancer. He was intelligent and flexible in his business dealing. He reaped the financial reward of his artistic work in a way few comics artist of the time did. Schumacher attributes this dual nature as artist and businessman to his parents. Eisner’s father was a painter who barely scraped through the depression; his mother wanted to see her children to something practical and have stable jobs. When comics began to face troubles in the postwar years, Eisner was already moving on to the education market. He had proven the concept of educational comics while he was in the army and created comics that supplemented preventative maintenance programs. He expanded this work later, contracting to produce a preventative maintenance magazine for the army during the Korean War, and expanding educational comics to other customers. In the last decades of his life, Eisner returned to telling stories through comics. Rather than returning to the genre stories he told earlier, he told longer, deeper, more personal, and sometimes autobiographical stories. Though not the inventor of the term "graphic novel," he was an innovator in telling longer stories through comics, tackling subjects that previously were the realm of mainstream literature and nonfiction. He developed relationships with publishers and editors that pushed him to produce great work. Schumacher doesn’t find all the work of this period to be great, though some is incredible. It seems to be a complaint that not all of Eisner’s work was as good as his best work. Though their may be something to this, we see in Eisner a man who is pushing into new areas of the art and publishing of comics when most of his contemporaries had long retired. 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) Maus by Art Spiegelman Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu Will Eisner’s The Spirit by Darwyn Cook

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Earlier this year, the last of the major comics publishers to use the Comics Code Authority dropped it in favor of their own rating standards. The seal of approval was one almost ubiquitous on newsstand comics. It lingered as sale shifted to comic book stores and older readers.

What led to the industry self-censorship represented by the little square seal is an interesting combination of social, political, and economic forces in American history. David Hajdu tells the story. (When The Ten-Cent Plague was published, major comics publishers were still using the seal.)

When comic strips first appeared in newspapers, the intent was to make the papers more appealing to the lower classes and immigrants who might not speak English, or even read. These cartoons appealed to the interest, problems and culture of this audience, along with other minorities, often thumbing their noses at the cultural establishment, the wealthy, political elites and others who had or represented power. As you might expect, the funnies had many detractors among the defenders of decent society.

This same countercultural element was transferred to comic books when they were invented in the 1930s. By the post-war years of the 1950s, the main countercultural was youth. People had been criticizing comics for their possible effects on children almost from the start, but the growing concern about juvenile delinquency (and possibly Communism) led to a successful campaign against comics. Rock and roll hadn’t been invented, so there wasn’t much else to blame.

Actually, a lot of the more reasonable explorations of the connections between comics reading and juvenile delinquency found it to be tenuous if it existed it all (delinquents read comics, but so did nearly every kid who could get an occasional dime). Detractors of comics thought they had evidence enough, especially Frederic Wertham, who’s Seduction of the Innocent added a sense of scientific respectability to the anti-comics camp.


The comics publishers reacted to save their industry from the wave of parental discontent and pending legislation. The Comics Code was a self-censorship standard like the film industries Hays Code, except much more restrictive. The code, and the forces that led up to it, almost killed the comics industry. It mostly eliminated the crime and horror comics that inspired the most ire through their excesses.

While Hajdu agrees that the crime and horror comics of the 1940s and early 1950s often had material that was unsuitable for children, he finds the roots of the anti-comics movement to be in the fundamental shift in culture between generations that occurred during the cold war. He also exhibits a lot of sympathy for the writers and artists that created comics, some of whom who left the arts altogether after the industry contracted.

Hajdu’s style is journalistic, like other works of popular history. The bibliography is extensive for those who are looking to make a study of comics. There is a touch of humor, which is bound to come up given the sometime goofy nature of comics and the ironies that abounded in the arguments both for and against the medium.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Golden Age of DC Comics by Daniels, Kid and Spear
Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Ed Wood Double Feature

Ed Wood is famous as one of the worst filmmakers of all time. That is an overstatement. Wood made some decent films (for the time, budget and type of films he was making) and some find even his bad movies to be entertaining. A couple of my favorite Wood films are illustrative.

I think Bride of the Monster (1956) is the first Ed Wood film I saw. I recall it showing on the Creature Feature, a late night film show broadcast out of Cape Girardeau and hosted by Misty Brew. Bride is not a bad movie. It’s about as good as a lot of low budget, sci-fi horror films from the 1950s.



In Bride, Bela Legosi plays an outcast scientist who intends to create a “race of atomic supermen” that will usher in a new age of his making, under his rule. His human experiments have not been successful and keeping ahead of the law and spies from his homeland led him to a remote American swamp. His animal experiments have been more successful, and his gigantic creation proves to be a useful way to dispose of the corpses of his unwilling human subjects. Mad science, nosy reporters, police, and spies crash in an atomic explosion of mayhem.

By contract, Night of the Ghouls (1958) has everything in it that is the worst of Wood. To start with, it seems to be a sequel to Bride, except that any continuity is accidental. Many of the actors are the same, but only two of the characters could are the same, Lobo (Tor Johnson) and Kelton the Cop (Paul Marco). There are constant reference to setting of the story and that strange things happened there once before, enough for me to think it’s referring to Bride, but they don’t exactly make sense and certainly aren’t necessary. I don’t know if issues with rights prevented Wood from making an outright sequel. I suspect his write-fast, film-fast style didn’t leave room for the careful checking of continuity a real sequel would require.



Another Woodism is the overuse of voiceover. The film begins and ends with soliloquies delivered from a coffin by newspaper psychic Criswell, which is entertaining in its goofy bombast. Criswell’s narrative continues through the film, though it is largely unnecessary. Wood is good enough to tell the story without the voiceover, but bad enough to use it anyway. Criswell delivers the lines with gusto, and possibly with thanks, for their better than most of the dialogue the other actors have to deal with.

Criswell narrates a section built on stock footage, which was a staple of low-budget and exploitation films and frequently used by Wood. The bad, and oddly entertaining, thing about this section is that it has practically nothing to do with the rest of the film. It’s an exploitation-style harangue on juvenile delinquency that depicts many young people dancing to rock and roll, racing cars and committing mostly petty crimes.

In Night, at least, Wood is not a good storyteller. He remains a great plotter though. A fake psychic set up shop to con wealthy clients who disparately desire to reach diseased spouses. It turns out he is actually very powerful medium who is unwittingly raising the dead from a nearby cemetery. These ghouls can’t stay in the realm of the living for long and they’re not going back to their graves alone. That could be an awesome horror story, but in Wood’s hand it doesn’t quite make it.

By the way, the malevolent medium of Night is named Dr. Acula. That is right, Wood straight up names a character Dr. Acula.

If you like old sci-fi horror films, you may like Bride of the Monster, which is typical of its low-budget ilk. If you want to see a bad movie that entertains in spite of, or possibly because of, its myriad flaws, look at Night of the Ghouls.



If your interested in these films, you may also be interested in
Bedlam
Isle of the Dead

Writing for Comics with Peter David

David, Peter. Writing for Comics with Peter David. Cincinnati, OH: Impact, 2006.

Peter David brings his more than two decades of experience as a comics writer, including a well known stint as a writer of The Incredible Hulk, to bear on the subject of writing for comics. David’s book is mainly a guide to writers who want to break into comics, but it’s also written to appeal to comics fans who want a better understanding of their favorite medium.

To some degree, good writing is good writing, so much of the advice David provides could be useful to fiction writers in general. Conflict, character, setting, plot and pacing are things all fiction writers must handle. David draws on examples from other media, especially movies, to illustrate his points.

Even so, comics have there own conventions, traditions and techniques. David deals with some of the unique elements of comics directly such as script style, speech balloons, continuity and writing instructions for artists. Mostly, relevant techniques are dealt with as they arise in discussing writing for comics.

The main audience of the book is writers, so it deals with art, editing and other elements of comics from the standpoint of the writer’s place. All writers need to understand the craft of writing; comics writers also need to understand the craft of making comics since he not only writes a story, but also a script that gives shape to the final product, often page-by-page and frame-by-frame.



David’s advice can be taken more as guidelines as rules. One of his repeated points is to do what works. Even in his own writing, he adapts his script style and level of detail according to the story he is telling, the artist he is working with and the expectations of his editor.

Even though David doesn’t lay out one way, he does show the better ways and the danger zones. Someone wanting to write for comics will find a lot to help him do it well and possibly break into the tight market (including advice from a Marvel editor on pitching a story and detailed script guidelines from Dark Horse).

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card