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READ IT. JUNIOR—IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!
Pictures 'n' Words: This one is about comic books. Do a search
on Amazon for recent releases by the novelist Jodi Picoult
and you'll find her new novel Change of Heart is a hardcover
bestseller, her last book Nineteen Minutes a paperback best
seller, and Wonder Woman: Love & Murder doing decently in
the graphic-novel category. Picoult, an author of emotionally
charged character studies, is the last person one might expect
to be a comics fan, and yet there she is among a current crop
of mainstream authors taking a detour into the world of fun-
nybooks. Bestselling legal-thriller author Brad Meltzer writes
Justice League of America for DC, African-American cult nov
elist Eric Jerome Dickey
and crime novelist Charlie
Huston write for Marvel.
Filmmakers Kevin Smith,
Joss Whedon and Reginald
Hudlin... actors Seth Green
and Rosario Dawson... all
people who have better
things to do, are coming out
as unctoseted comics fans.
I don't say this in some
kind of attempt to legiti
mize comic books'—with
rare exceptions, they're still
the same disposable mental
cotton-candy they always
were—but rather to suggest
that even bad superhero
comics won't necessarily
turn kids into maladjusted,
basement-dwelling mouth-
breathers or worse, colum
nists for hippie socialist
alternative newspapers. It's
actually possible to read
comics and still make some
thing of oneself.
This was not, however,
the prevailing opinion in the
1950s. In the years between
the fall of Hitler and the rise
of Elvis, America was briefly
gripped by a national hyste
ria over the effects of comic books on the hearts and minds of
the country's youth. David Hajdu, author of the excellent book
about Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Positively 4th Street (Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux, 2001), essays this period of nationwide
madness in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare
and How It Changed America (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,
2008).
In the first half of the '50s, comics were a major industry,
with some 800 titles cramming the racks at drugstores and
soda shoppes at its zenith. From a comics reader's perspective
it was a Golden Age, with journeyman artists producing some
of the best and most influential work in the medium's history.
From anyone else's perspective, however, the comics were a
cavalcade of depravity, tasteless, gory, and catering to the
worst parts of the adolescent psyche. '
Enter psychologist Fredric Wertham, author of a shoddy but
sensationalistic book on the link between comics and juvenile
delinquency, and Senator Estes Kefauver, eager to grease his
presidential aspirations with televised crusading against soci
ety's ills, and suddenly funnybooks were as much a menace to
our children as the godless Commies. Public burnings of com
ics became a daily occurrence, publishers circled the wagons
to create a self-censoring
body, and the Golden Age of
Comics came to a crashing
end, along with the careers
of literally hundreds of writ
ers and artists as comics .
companies folded or were
driven out of business.
Even if one bears no
love of comic books, Hajdu's
book, drawn from count
less interviews and pains
taking research, is worth
reading for its fascinating
glimpse of a peculiar period
in our nation's cultural
and political history. We
have an obligation to take
notice whenever creative
expression, even in forms
as lowbrow as Tales from
the Crypt, comes under fire
from people who presume to
save us from it. The Ten-Cent
Plague is a well-crafted and
poignant wake-up call.
*< Due Recognition: At the
same time that David Hajdu
reminds us of the villains of
comic-book history, com
ics writer and historian
Mark Evanier gives long-
overdue props to one of the medium's true heroes, artist Jack
Kirby, in Kirby: King of Comics (Harry N. Abrams, 2008). From
the 1940s, when he and partner Joe Simon created Captain
America, until his death in 1994, Kirby was the preeminent
comics artist of the 20th century.
Evanier, one of Kirby's assistants during his most fertile
period in the '60s, traces the life and career of the man widely
known as "The King of Comics" from his humble beginnings as
Jacob Kurtzberg, a tailor's son from a Brooklyn slum who real
ized a talent for drawing and spent the rest of his life produc
ing and peddling his art to keep his family fed. Throughout the
'40s and '50s, Kirby worked in every genre known to comicdom
until coming to work as the house artist for Atlas Comics,
where he was paired with Stan Lee, who had once been his
office boy but was now the editor. Atlas became Marvel Comics,
and the Lee-Kirby team created the Fantastic Four, the Hulk,
the X-Men and dozens of other heroes that went on to make
the company millions.
None of those millions made their way to Kirby, however.
As good an artist as he was, he was never a businessman. The
more flamboyant Lee got the credit for the work while Kirby
continued to eke out a barely adequate living through a per-
page rate of pay, and was even forced by Marvel's lawyers to
disavow any claim to creative input. The situation improved a
bit when Kirby moved on to Marvel's competition and created
his Fourth World saga for DC, a sweeping and bizarre epic of
cosmic gods, interstellar hippies, and Superman's Pal Jimmy
Olsen—at least Kirby's name was used to sell the comics, even
if Kirby himself continued to receive sweatshop pay for his
vision.
But while Jack Kirby may not have gotten the respect
he deserved from his employers, his fans knew better, and
Evanier's book is one for the fans. It's a coffee-table-sized
book, and while the $40 price tag may seem a bit steep, the
book's format is ideal for showcasing the master's work, includ
ing original pencils, a gatefolded poster, and a lot of work
never before seen by the reading public. Best of all is Evanier's
prose, which is affectionate but never obsequious, and gives
us a vivid picture of Kirby's passions and prescience, his fierce
determination to keep working even as his health and eye
sight began to fail him, and his sheer boundless decency. It
comes highly recommended to anyone interested in watching
the art of comics evolving in the hands of one of its greatest
practitioners.
New in Novels: If anyone reading this is a true geek, then I can
describe S. M. Peters' debut novel Whitechapel Gods (Penguin
USA, 2008) as evoking an exciting and horrific mix of Alan
Moore and early Clive Barker with shades of Grant Morrison and
Terry Gilliam and you'll immediately bum a ride from Mom to go
buy it. For those less receptive to name-checking, Peters' novel
is an impressive entry in the recent subgenre of science fiction
known as steampunk. Though no less techno-fetishistic than
its older cousin cyberpunk, this sort of story concerns itself
with imaginative technology of the Victorian era. all gears and
levers and shiny brass rivets. Peters' novel, however, takes all
of that and plunges it deep into hell.
At the close of this novel's 19th century, London's notorious
Whitechapel slum (in our world, home of Jack the Ripper) has
been enclosed in an impassive wall and taken over by a pair
of all-powerful entities: Mama Engine, whose colossal furnace
belches ash into the sky, and Grandfather Clock, a gear-driven
Big Brother. A small contingent of humans have formed a resis
tance movement, but how can mere flesh-and-blood hope to
rise against an enemy that lives in every inch of the city and
the very air itself?
For a first novel, Peters' book is beyond impressive. From
the first page we're drawn into incessant nightmare, a psy
chotic fever-dream of horror and violation that makes us grasp
at the faintest glimmers of hope as eagerly as any of the pro
tagonists do. There are definitely shudder-inducing and often
nauseating elements here, but as in any good horror tale, you'll
gladly take them as part of the ride.
John G. Nettles
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