Thursday, January 13, 2005
I loved Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and I knew enough about the lives of the artists from comics' "Golden Age" to know that a lot of the background was spot on. The story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster-- the creators of Superman-- is an interesting Jewish parellel to the treatment African-American blues and jazz artists received during the same period. I've said for a long time that I would like to read a history of jazz told though the analysis of the record labels' business practices. Gerard Jones' Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book is that book about comics.
Jones does a particularly good job of bringing all the threads together. The ties between the pulps and comics are pretty well known, but I did not know about the pulps' link with organized crime-- the paper came from Canada, and so did, inter alia, bootleg liquor; both shared distribution channels. The link to porn is also close, and, interestingly, the link to contraception devices. In an information age, perhaps control of the chanels of distribution means more than control of the means of production-- there are a lot of old socialists in this book too. In any event, it is intersting to know about this connection and knowing it gave me a new insight into the Kefauver hearings. (It'd be a better subtitle if they'd included "Gonifs"-- there are plenty of those in the book too.) The book is also good, without being heavy-handed, on the way that the artists upbringings adn social backgrounds colored the charactors they created, and the stories they told. Finally, it does an excellent, even-handed job of laying out the intellectual property aspects of the story. Too often the default is to say that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster got screwed, but there is more to it than that, and Jones explains both sides.
Best of all, the book is written as well as Chabon's book, and is just about as hard to put down. There is entertaining gossip, and well wrought character development, and more about comics than I ever knew. It is a geeky read, to be sure, but that didn't stop me from reading it on the plane, on the monorail, on the LIRR, standing on line-- just about everywhere I went yesterday. What's not to like about a book where Susan Sontag and Paul Krassner rub elbows with Meyer Lansky, Superman, the Beatles, Margaret Sanger and Frank Sinatra? Great stuff
Jones does a particularly good job of bringing all the threads together. The ties between the pulps and comics are pretty well known, but I did not know about the pulps' link with organized crime-- the paper came from Canada, and so did, inter alia, bootleg liquor; both shared distribution channels. The link to porn is also close, and, interestingly, the link to contraception devices. In an information age, perhaps control of the chanels of distribution means more than control of the means of production-- there are a lot of old socialists in this book too. In any event, it is intersting to know about this connection and knowing it gave me a new insight into the Kefauver hearings. (It'd be a better subtitle if they'd included "Gonifs"-- there are plenty of those in the book too.) The book is also good, without being heavy-handed, on the way that the artists upbringings adn social backgrounds colored the charactors they created, and the stories they told. Finally, it does an excellent, even-handed job of laying out the intellectual property aspects of the story. Too often the default is to say that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster got screwed, but there is more to it than that, and Jones explains both sides.
Best of all, the book is written as well as Chabon's book, and is just about as hard to put down. There is entertaining gossip, and well wrought character development, and more about comics than I ever knew. It is a geeky read, to be sure, but that didn't stop me from reading it on the plane, on the monorail, on the LIRR, standing on line-- just about everywhere I went yesterday. What's not to like about a book where Susan Sontag and Paul Krassner rub elbows with Meyer Lansky, Superman, the Beatles, Margaret Sanger and Frank Sinatra? Great stuff
// posted by Bill @ 10:50 PM 
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