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| Monday, August 6, 2007 10:01 PM |
| Knowing Your History |
 by Fëanor |
Shortly after my obsession with comic books began in earnest, I felt the need to learn their history. Not just the fictional history of the characters (although that was certainly important to me, as well), but also their real history - the history of their creators. So I ended up getting a bunch of random books on the subject out of the library. They were:
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones
The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer
Over 50 Years of American Comic Books by Ron Goulart
I tried the last one first, and nearly fell asleep. It's a great big heavy coffee table book that consists of an incredibly dry play-by-play of the history of comics publishing, essentially saying stuff like "this guy published these many books in this year," etc. It just didn't grab me. I'm still keeping it around with the intention of giving it another shot, but I don't know how much further I'm going to get. It does at least have a lot of gigantic color pictures of vintage comics and comic covers, so it's at least worth a flip through just for that.
The Great Comic Book Heroes is what I read next, and I liked that a lot better. It's essentially just a short, multi-part essay on the history of the comics, but this time written from a more personal, emotional perspective - the perspective of someone who grew up with early comics and comic strips, and got into the business himself as a young man. It's a lot of great stories about those comics, the heroes in them, the people who made them, and the way they were made. Sometimes his opinions and analyses feel a little overbearing and wrongheaded, but it still makes for a fun read.
But easily the best book of these three is Men of Tomorrow. This is a history of the birth of comics, which also ends up being a history of geeks, fandom, science fiction, and even America itself. But more particularly it's a biography of the men who gave birth to the comics. Specifically, the Jews who gave them birth, as the book centers on the fact that the major players were all Jewish immigrants, and that the way the art was done, the stories were written, and the businesses were run came out of their experience as Jewish immigrants.
This book, besides having a fascinating premise, is loaded with fantastic stories of intriguing people who had crazy adventures, and is told in a completely engaging, funny, and moving way. I learned a lot of interesting things about unions, the newspaper business, and the immigrant experience, besides all the stuff I learned about the creators of Superman and the growth of DC Comics and so forth. The book very rarely takes sides or judges its characters, either; although I did get a little tear in my eye when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster finally got recognized and got their reward for the amazing character they created, the book is also careful to point out the flaws of those same men, and the fact that they themselves in many ways threw away with their own hands that recognition and that reward.
There's no doubt that everyone in the book is human, and deeply flawed. But that's what makes the stories so very interesting. There's an incredible amount of drama, tragedy, comedy, triumph, violence, and joy in this book. There's also sleaze and crime. Jones brings to light all kinds of weird and surprising connections amongst comics, organized crime, pornography, bootleggers, and "sexual deviants."
In other words, it's a fantastic book. Not really a great resource for facts and figures, or long lists of who created what and when, but some of that information is here, layered liberally amongst some truly great stories about some truly interesting people. |
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