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Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Men of Tomorrow
Gerard Jones’s book not only informs us of new things about the birth of the comic book it also gives us some of the best takes on the stories everybody has heard of. The birth of Superman or Fredric Wertham’s crusade of comics are two stories that are familiar with anyone who has paid even a little attention to comics history but Jones fleshes out the people behind them and connects the stories to history and the rest of the world. Jones puts every event in context of what was going on at the time and profiles many of the people involved in bringing the comic book to life. The story of Siegel and Shuster’s fight for their own creation is the story that holds the book together but from there Jones explores the chaos, corruption and debauchery of that “Golden Age” of comics.
Jones represents the men of the day as characters just as big and lively as the characters they published. Harry Donenfeld is a guy with a big mouth and big ideas on how to get rich and who is more interested in hanging out with gangsters like Frank Costello than doing right by the people below him. Jack Liebowitz started out as a champion of the working-man only to become a master of American capitalism sitting on the board of Warner Communication. Jerry Siegel is a kid with a lot of ideas but often time filled with righteous anger over how he and his partner Joe Shuster got screwed out all that Superman money. The book is like a lightning bolt to the brain with all these characters bustling around creating a new art form (although few would consider it as such). There are these fantastic stories like the creation of the first issue of Daredevil (not Matt Murdock, the older one). There’s even a twist suitable for an old Republic serial in the way Bob Kane tries to get out of the original contract he signed. These descriptions and anecdotes also raise suspicions of how accurate these characterizations are. In the Notes on Sources section we see that Jones relied on many interviews from those who were there and those who knew those who were there. Some of the stories, especially the ones about Donenfeld, become a mixture of legend and fact. It also exposes how slippery comics history can be, certainly in the late ‘30s and ‘40s, but it wouldn’t be a true illustration of the time if it didn’t include all those far-out tales based on the very real unruliness of the time. It often feels like we learn of the way things were by tying this mix of what is real and what is half-real together to sort through the mindset of so many poor Jewish kids making their way in the new world with a new medium.
Jones doesn’t spend much time thinking about the comic book form, it would have surely slowed the book down, but because this is a book that is about a certain segment of America as much as it is about comic books it becomes easier to understand the comic medium’s present. The world of comics and graphic novels is getting real respect now but we see how easy it is for the American public to consider the medium and adolescent superhero stories as one of the same because America had to learn to read both at the same time.
Action Comics #1 was ground zero for a type of storytelling that was ready to be told to millions of people who felt the same way the two kids from Cleveland did. Jones writes about all the aspects of the ‘20s and the ‘30s that led up to it: the bodybuilding craze of Bernarr McFadden, the importance that Hugo Gernback attributed to science-fiction, the pulp stories of Doc Savage and The Shadow and the fan community that was absorbing it and discussing it. Siegel and Shuster crystallized it in these larger-than-life stories and characters that that lived in picture after picture combined with this loud, excited writing style. The comic book form was already invented by then. Jones believes that there can’t be one true creator but instead Charlie Gaines, George Delacorte, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and others combing their ideas in pursuit of profit all played a part. It was the brash superhero appearing in these magazines as opposed to a newspaper strip, which would happen later for Superman and others, or written as prose for the pulps that made an impact for an America that was going through a depression at home, a war in Europe that America would have to get into and a future that would see it become a global superpower (even the name of the term tells you why these comics were so of their time). It’s why heavy metal bands or movies like The Warriors were later seen as “comic book” material when they weren’t actual adaptations of any comics. They just celebrated that same sensibility of big, primal figures displaying their power through physicality and teenage sexuality (sometimes only found in subtext). There’s a certain romance to it even though there’s enough there to turn people off as there is to turn people on. Creators like Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware would have to fight an uphill battle against it although other artists like Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns would take this aesthetic and subvert it for their own creative goals. It isn’t the only way to make good use of the comic book but Jones gives us reason why it is an important one and why so many young kids were so attracted to reading them as well as creating them.
Jones does analyze many of the important comics and does a wonderful job of it. The early Superman strips are cut-and-paste jobs with an overeager imagination to hold the whole thing together. Bill Finger is proven to be comics’ first great writer, someone who could carry book with his own visual imagination (hello giant typewriters) even with Kane’s lack of skills. Of particular note is the way Jones connects the real emotional insidiousness in the stories Siegel and Otto Binder wrote for Mort Weisinger and the turmoil Siegel, back to working on the strip as an underling after fighting so hard to make his co-ownership known, and Weisinger were going through. It presents these stories now as a disturbing undercutting of traditional superhero story grimmer than what Stan Lee, Kirby and Steve Ditko would do only a few years later.
The most satisfying thing Men of Tomorrow does is make you want to read all the comics Jones writes about. Even if you’ve read the contents of certain DC Archives or Marvel Masterworks before, you’ll want to look at them again and think about the passion mixed with corruption that gave birth to this bizarre art. Here comics tell us about the Jewish experience and about how America real works. Jones writes “The comics business was not a meritocracy. Call it an opportunocracy, a fluke-ocracy, a dumb-ass-luck-ocracy. The truest kind of American enterprise.” Now ask yourself, how much has changed?
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