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 Spirit by Darwyn Cook

The Spirit. Written by Darwyn Cooke and Jeph Loeb and drawn by Darwyn Cooke. New York: DC Comics 2007.

This book collects the first six issues of DC’s new line of The Spirit with writing and penciling by Darwyn Cooke and the one-shot Batman/The Spirit written by Cooke and Jeph Loeb with pencils by Cooke. The Spirit was created Will Eisner and originally ran as newspaper insert in the 1930s and 1940s.

I think Cooke handles The Spirit well. To fans, the character is almost as iconic as the likes of Superman. However, Superman has been continually published since his creation with contributions for many writers and artists. The Spirit ceased publication over 50 years ago and has only appeared in reprints. This could pose a problem for some. Do you keep the character historical, do you modernize him, and how do you make it work?

Cooke handles it the way most comics with such long-lasting character do, he ignores it as much as possible. He has kept what is distinctive and great about The Spirit and his supporting cast and simply written and drawn very good new stories.



The Spirit stories are hardboiled detective tales with a touch of superhero adventure and a big dose of humor. The stories cover a wide emotional range, but the tendency is toward the lighthearted. This is in keeping with Eisner’s work and done well by Cooke, who seems to be involved in several detective-oriented comics projects.

Cooke’s drawing style differs from Eisner’s, though I suspect he could imitate Eisner well if he wanted to. Where the new Spirit resembles the old is in it use of design and layout. This is one of those things Eisner brought to The Spirit that made it great and that Cooke does very well. The layout and design element produces two things. First, it results in some stunning and interesting images. Second, and probably more important, it creates a strong integration of image, action and story. This is something all comics should do, but it is done especially in Eisner and Cooke’s Spirit tales. A great example is the first few pages of Batman/The Spirit. A visually interesting device smoothly transitions an opening dialogue to an action sequence. The action builds to an image that cleverly integrates elements from previous frames that is both a dynamic part of the action and static graphic that serves as something like title page. The effect is magnified because it is presented after the turn of a page.

The fans of the original Spirit stories will find much to enjoy in the new ones. For someone unfamiliar with The Spirit, but liking action-filled detective stories, you’ll find some of the finest here.

The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook

Cook, Darwyn. Richard Stark’s The Hunter. San Diego: IDW, 2009.
ISBN: 978-1-60010-493-0

Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark) introduced hardboiled thief Parker in a series of novels in the 1960s. The novels have been adapted to film, but Darwyn Cook’s comic book adaption is the first authorized to use the name Parker.



Parker is not a gentleman thief, which is an oxymoron anyway. He is probably a sociopath. At the least, he has no regard for human life, property, law or much of anything else. He is as heartless and hardboiled as they come.

In The Hunter, Parker is on a cross-country mission of revenge. He narrowly escaped being killed, at the hand of his beautiful but week-willed wife, in a double-cross after a job to rob gunrunners. He cut was to e $90,000. He walked from California to Chicago and killed his way through a gaggle of gangsters to claims his cut and drive away with a price on his head.

Parker is horrible, but he is interesting and The Hunter is full of action. It’s understandable how the character became popular.

In this adaption, one can enjoy both a classic hardboiled story and the art of Cook. Cook is one of the greatest hardboiled illustrators in comics. His drawing conveys the sensibility of this type of story. In this book, he makes the bold choice of using just two colors, which conveys a sense of the graphic design of the ‘60s. The style is both simplified like a cartoon and complex, carefully designed, even painterly.

Many comic adaptations are not very good, just abridgements with colored drawings, but this book delivers. Cook tells the story with art and words. His drawings don’t just illustrate events; they convey the action information about the characters. There is a long sequence at the beginning of the book that that tells the reader a lot about Parker without words or even showing his face until the end, like a shot from a movie. Even the opening page, with just a few words and a composition reminiscent of Will Eisner, shows a lot about what kind of man is Parker.

Darwyn Cook also wrote Will Eisner’s The Spirit.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

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.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Wonder Woman is one of most popular comic book characters. Because she is about to be featured in a film that will bring Batman and Superman together in epic battle, and is expected to be featured in a film of her own, the Internet is already beginning to buzz with concern over how badly she may be portrayed and hopes that the filmmakers will get her right. She has starred in some great stories, but often the stories about her have disappointed for various reasons. The difficulty of depicting a woman superhero has its roots in sorting out the roles of women in society, something we’re still working on. It is a struggle Wonder Woman was born to fight.

Jill Lepore explores the birth of this female superhero in The Secret History of Wonder Woman. In one of her various comics origins, the demigoddess was formed from the mud of Paradise Island, but Lepore describes how she was formed in the suffrage and feminist movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and an unusual family with strong ties to these movements.

Wonder Woman first appeared in print in 1941. When she became the title character of her own comic, her creator came from behind his pseudonym, with some fanfare, and revealed himself as psychologist William Moulton Marston.

Marston’s lifestyle is known now, but it was a closely held secret during his lifetime. For all practical purposes, if not legally, he had two wives. Surprisingly, both women were feminists. They both loved Marston and found in this arrangement a way to live the lives they wanted. They had a pragmatic, flexible feminism that was accepting of the unconventional. I can hardly do it justice in a few words, but Lepore explores the early days of feminism that shaped the arrangement Marston had with these two women.

Marston met Elizabeth Holloway while they were undergraduates, he at Harvard and she at Mount Holyoke. They were both advocates of women’s suffrage. They married in 1915. Marston received a doctorate and Holloway a master’s degree. Holloway claimed to be deeply involved in Marston’s early research. The Marston household became full of writers and editors, and overtime attribution became a matter of convenience or marketing rather than identification of individual authorship.

Olive Byrne met Marston as an undergraduate at Tufts, where she became his research assistant. She quickly became more and moved into the Marston household. Eventually they worked out the arrangement that Holloway would work full-time (over time she had several jobs as an editor) while Byrne raised the children (each had two children with Marston). Byrne eventually felt the need to contribute the finances and in the 1930s wrote for Family Circle as Oliver Richards (Richards from the marriage and widowhood she faked to obscure the parentage of her children). Byrne, like the Marstons she joined, had ties to the feminist and birth control movements. She was the daughter of Ethel Byrne  and her aunt was the more famous Margaret Sanger.

Holloway, Byrne, and even Sanger, were to varying degrees the models for Wonder Woman. She was to be feminist propaganda, and under Marston’s pen she was. One would guess that this would have attracted criticism, but it was not the feminism of Wonder Woman that most stirred up critics.

Bondage was depicted on almost every page of Marston’s comics. In addition, Wonder Woman’s costume was skimpy. Lepore links the bondage in these comics to the use of bondage as a symbol used by suffragists and feminists. Sometimes Marston drew very consciously on images associated with these movements. In addition, the bondage represented notions of domination and submission rooted in Marston’s theories of personality and the relationship between the sexes. Bonds, and the breaking of them, represented the misappropriation of power by men and the power of women to free themselves and take their place as leaders in society. Similarly, Wonder Woman’s bare limbs were emblematic of her athleticism, strength, power and essential equality to make heroes. It’s hard to say that the depiction of Wonder Woman is completely free of sexual undertone, Marston wanted her to be beautiful. Lepore shows the clear link between the symbolism of Wonder Woman and the symbolism  of suffrage and feminism that Marston consciously referenced.

When Marston passed away in 1947, Wonder Woman fell into the hands of writers and editors who did not share his vision. She hasn’t been the same since. After World War II, the feminism she represented was not welcome in the broader culture or by the men who wrote her comics. Even after the second wave of feminism adopted her as an emblem in the 1970s, she’s not been quite at home. Perhaps we’ll have trouble getting Wonder Woman right as long as we have conflict about the roles of women in our culture.

If you’re interested in either comics or feminism, I recommend Lepore’s book. It is thoroughly researched and thoroughly readable.

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

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

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.

Stan Lee by Bob Batchelor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon 

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

The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

In Memory Yet Green by Isaac Asimov

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Spider-Man

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

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

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness by Bryan Lee O'Malley

O’Malley, Bryan Lee.  Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness.  Portland, OR: Oni Press, 2006.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness is the third in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s epic series of graphic novels of the title character’s journey from immaturity to—well, so far just being slightly less of a self-centered jerk.  In some ways, this book is the story of Envy Adams, ostensibly Scott’s evil ex.

Envy is the girl that broke Scott’s heart.  To make things worse, she is the lead singer of an awesome band, The Clash at Demonhead.  It turns out Scott broke her heart, too.  She moved on to date another jerk.  Todd Ingram isn’t a shlubby, mooching bassist for a little band like Scott.  Todd is a bassist for a famous band, and he’s handsome, powerful, attractive, secretly womanizing, and endowed with superpowers acquired through veganism—he is a total jerk.  Oh, and he’s one of the evil exes Scott must defeat to date his new girlfriend, Ramona Flowers.

It sounds like a soap opera.  It’s better because it has kickass fight scenes.  It also has character development.  It’s not an easy arc for Envy.  She comes in with the upper hand, ready to exact revenge.  She leaves in defeat.  It’s not all bad.  Vengeful Envy was very much in touch with her anger.  Defeated Envy was also in touch with her sadness and regrets, a sense of her losses and mistakes.  She gained perspective.

This is a middle chapter for many of the other characters in the series.  They don’t change much.  The book provides some of Scott and Ramona’s history.  Some subplots take a step forward.

Based on the close of the book, I suspect Envy will return.  It would be okay if she didn’t.  She reached a point where she could move on.  She completed a pilgrimage, essentially going from one place to another, though it may not have been where she planned to go.  She can find a new bassist and start another journey.

I’d like to mention in my last few words on Infinite Sadness something about the setting of the book.  It takes place in Montreal, actually a fantastical, magical version of the city in which vegans are telekinetic.  The setting is urban and the characters are all young.  It is an alien world to me.  I grew up in a rural area.  When I was a young man in the city, I was in college or working professionally.  At 24 years old, the age of Envy, I was working as an environmental engineer, writing permits and inspecting wastewater treatment plants.  The world in which a guy like Scott plays bass in a band, squanders his days with a high school, mooches of his roommate and still dates a woman who is out of his league is nearly as fantastical one in which a delivery girl uses the space in his head traverse space at supernatural speeds (he’s not using the space much).

Bryan Lee O’Malley also wrote

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

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

American Splendor (Film)

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

Case Closed by Gosho Ayoama

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Film)

Will Eisner’s The Spirit by Darwyn Cook

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Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins takes the name of his book, Seduction of the Innocent, from the title of a notorious book by psychologist Frederic Wertham. The original was anti-comics propaganda that falsely linked comic book reading to juvenile delinquency. Collins’ novel is a pulpy crime story in which a stand-in for Wertham is murdered.

Fans of comics or pulp culture will find a lot to enjoy in this book. There are many ways to experience the frisson of recognition because many of the characters are based—to varying degrees—on real-life comic book artists, writers and publishers from the 1950s, when Wertham’s screed was published. Even the senate hearings headed by Estes Kefauver are featured in the course of the book.

The real Wertham was not murdered. Collins is careful not to make his stand-in too repulsive He acknowledges that Wertham did a lot of good work, even if his research tying comics to youth crime was bad.

The tone of the book is often silly, as you might expect from a tongue-in-cheek fictionalization of silver age comics publishing. It is still hardboiled, so there is plenty of sex and violence to go around.

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

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

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

The Big Con by David W. Maurer

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook

In Memory Yet Green by Isaac Asimov

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner’s The Spirit by Darwin Cook

Collins, Max Allan. Seduction of the Innocent. London: Hard Case Crime, 2013.

What's New April 27, 2011

Alternative Fuels and Energy Resources Articles and Links (Updated)
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Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Do you use or enjoy the What’s New posts? Do you hate it? Let me know your opinions on the usefulness of this feature by commenting. Thanks.

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett, Dashiell. The Dain Curse.

The bearer of the Dain Curse described herself as being in a fog, grasping for something solid to hold on to, but finding that everything fades just as it comes within reach. Her morphine addiction might have had something to do with that.

The Continental Op, Hammett’s nameless protagonist, argues that everyone is that way. Everybody is grasping in the fog, piecing together wisps of reality from what they can pick out. He makes a similar argument earlier in the book when he avoids the truth he’d like to find and settles for a story that explains the few things he knows.

I felt like I was in a fog as I read the book. Hammett seemed to wrap up an interesting little pulp mystery, but two-thirds of the book was ahead of me. Every new clue unraveled the ties I’d made. The explanations I’d accepted no longer fit. I was reeling, as dizzy as the drug addled and insane characters in the book.



Even so, I anticipated the identity of the criminal before it was revealed. I didn’t do this through the careful accumulation of clues or rigorous reasoning. I came to me by intuition and some sense of the story’s structure. I suspected this is how the Continental Op must have worked it out, too. He stumbled upon what must have been and tied it all together with a neat explanation afterward.

Dashiell Hammett also wrote
Red Harvest
The Thin Man

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook
Will Eisner's The Spirit by Darwyn Cook

Comic Art in America by Stephen Becker

Cartoons did not originate in the United States, but Americans were innovative in the art, and its artists invented the newspaper comic strip and comic book. Stephen Becker wrote a survey of American comics of all types from their origins until his book was published in 1959: Comic Art in America.

Becker covers every type of cartoon in the book. Comic strips get a lot of attention because that is where a lot of the development occurred and gave rise to something distinctly American. Though comic strips are a thread throughout, Becker devotes chapters to editorial cartoons, single-panel humor and even animation.

Many of the comics Becker discusses are still published today, such as Beatle Bailey and Blondie. Others are well-known because of their former popularity or lasting influence: Krazy Kat, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon. Others are largely forgotten, even if they were pioneers of their time that shaped the work of others or the popular taste. Fans of particular types of cartooning may notice omissions that seem glaring, at least in hindsight; the chapter on comic books makes no mention of Will Eisner, though perhaps his fame stems more form later work.

Of course, the intent was not to be exhaustive. It’s a single volume, not an encyclopedia. As a survey for a general audience, it works very well. At the time, it probably reminded readers of old favorites that had fallen out of print. It might introduce modern readers to those old masters for the first time. Necessarily it does not address some of the great work that came out after it was published; I suspect Becker would have been delighted by Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, as many of us are.

Becker was primarily a fiction writer. Comic Art in America is very informative, but it is not primarily an academic book. Neither does Becker come off as entirely fan-ish, though he certainly has the tone of someone who enjoys comics and finds them interesting, especially humor and editorial comics from newspapers and magazines. He mixes commentary with history and spices things up gossipy tidbits.

The book was published in a larger format to accommodate reproduction of comics that originally appeared in an even larger broadsheet newspaper. Though it has the look of a coffee table book, it is not dominated by images. The images are an accompaniment to the text. Even so, one can enjoy it for the comics reproduced in it, though many are of their time and may not make much sense without the context provided by Becker.

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

American Splendor (Film)

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

The Spirit by Darwyn Cook

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

Becker, Stephen. Comic Art in America: A Social History of the Funnies, the Political Cartoons, Magazine Humor, Sporting Cartoons and Animated Cartoons. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959.

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

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