Plane trips offer some of my most productive time for reading, especially on travels to and fro Tucson where my folks live. A few days prior to taking to the friendly skies this year I stopped by the library to peruse the new non-fiction shelves. The tome of choice for the holiday flight ended up being Give Our Regards to the Atom Smashers! Edited by Sean Howe, a former editor at The Criterion Collection, it's a slim-bound colorfully-covered anthology of writers waxing nostalgic about comic books. Howe, an inveterate comic freak himself, cherry-picked a broad round table of writers that includes: Greil Marcus, Luc Sante and, much to my surprise, Gary Giddins among about a dozen others.
The seventeen essays run a fairly wide gamut in terms of subject and voice. Howe left the latitude largely up to those he tapped asking only that their prose be related at least peripherally to the four color medium. Many of the authors capitalize on the freedom and end up covering lively creative ground. There’s a bit of now-moot stumping for the art form’s worth as serious literature along with occasional hand wringing over its historic marginalization. But Howe and the writer’s wisely rein it in. Some of the best essays include:
On the flip I found Tom Piazza’s fanciful encounters with Bizarro and Mxyzptlk at a comic convention fairly trite and humdrum, too much forced cleverness in the Similarly, Giddins’ lengthy reminiscence of his youthful obsession with Classics Illustrated falls a bit flat in needlessly prolix exposition of the plots and literary license taken by the antediluvian ‘comics’ series. Lydia Millet’s fluffy recollections and readings of Little Nemo in Slumberland also leave a little to be desired.
Along the way all sorts of threads weave through and stick together the disparate essays. There’s the recurring theme of outsider status ascribed to both readers and their heroic objects of adoration, the easy correlation between the misfit characters on the page (X-Men, Spider-Man, The Doom Patrol) and lonely boyhoods spent in search of selves; the influence of luminaries like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby on the emerging worldviews of the authors when they were kids. King Kirby actually comes up repeatedly as a conundrum for several of the thirty something authors, ping-ponging between personas as a rickety throw back to Silver Age times and the gleaming gold standard by which other then-newer artists were indelibly judged). Andrew Hutkrans even stacks Kirby up against that other Silver Age prince of the pencil pushers Steve Ditko, delineating polar distinctions between the two stylists (ie. Kirby’s cosmic grandiosity to Ditko’s neurotic humanity) through a series of savvy tangential comparisons.
Reading back over the past few paragraphs I see that I’m really not doing the book a bit of justice with these pocket-sized snapshots so perhaps another tack is order. Once my flight touched down in the desert and a short drive to Rancho de Taylor later, I made a bee-line for my folk’s garage. Rooting around for a few minutes I found my comic boxes, untouched for the better part of twenty years. The thousand or so issues were still sealed in their Mylar sleeves. The Chris Claremont/John Byrne/Paul Smith runs on Uncanny X-Men. Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Dark Knight, the Marv Wolfman/George Perez dynasty at the New Teen Titans, Tim Truman’s Scout. So many others. It was great fun revisiting stories and artwork long since relegated to the back filing cabinet of my memory. Trying to recall how the issues were acquired. Remembering my father’s open chagrin when I informed him that I intended to spend the weekly book allowance he’d given me on comics instead of novels (he himself a comic collector as a kid whose step-mom had burned his holdings when he flew the coop for college- how quickly adulthood co-opts the mind into such erroneous thinking.). This book is a seductive catalyst in the service of such nostalgic excavations, one that I easily recommend to any comic fan former or current.
Posted by derek on January 16, 2005 4:44 PMGreat writeup, Derek. I'd heard of this collection a couple times, and I'm glad to get the seal of approval from you. Nice George Perez pic, by the way.
Posted by: Jason at January 17, 2005 7:13 AMOver the holidays I read Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay", which should prove enjoyable for anyone who likes comics and WWII-era immigrant/arty NYC.
Posted by: mwanji at January 17, 2005 11:14 AMJ, have you heard anything about Ronin Ro’s TALES TO ASTONISH: JACK KIRBY, STAN LEE AND THE AMERICAN COMIC BOOK REVOLUTION? Looks intriguing on the surface, but it attracts a fair share of mud pies on the Amazon review page.
I had a bit of trouble getting through Chabon’s K&C, picking it up & putting it down at least a dozen times before flipping the final page. But he seems to be the “IT” guy in comics screenplays these days. And iirc, His ESCAPE ARTIST character recently became an actual title on the racks. He also has a pretty entertaining website:
www.michaelchabon.com
Other than a few of the ESSENTIAL Marvel series (phonebook-sized collections of Silver and Bronze Age issue runs on staple titles like FANTASTIC FOUR and SPIDER-MAN along with more obscure fare like HOWARD THE DUCK and TOMB OF DRACULA) I really haven’t plunked money down on comics in over a decade. Howe’s collection rekindled the itch & I’ve been mulling over dabbling in a few titles.
Trouble is I’m about as illiterate toward the current comics ‘scene’ as I am toward current alt rock. Also, it’s amazing how much the product has changed. I mean $2.99 per issue seems pretty steep, especially when my (admittedly antiquated) point of reference is one-sixth that princely sum.
Posted by: derek at January 18, 2005 7:33 AMChristopher Sorrentino -- any relation to Gilbert Sorrentino?
Will definitely be picking this one up, though I do feel like as though it is stealing thunder I first heard rumbling (in my head) in '96 or so.
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at January 18, 2005 3:24 PM"I had a bit of trouble getting through Chabon’s K&C, picking it up & putting it down at least a dozen times before flipping the final page. But he seems to be the “IT” guy in comics screenplays these days. And iirc, His ESCAPE ARTIST character recently became an actual title on the racks. He also has a pretty entertaining website: www.michaelchabon.com"
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. Just to nit-pick, it's The Escapist :). The moments in the book I most enjoyed were those about comic book creation, the feverish rush of excitement and immersion. Who doesn't wish to experience that?
yshax!
Posted by: mwanji at January 18, 2005 3:52 PMDerek, I've eyeballed Tales to Astonish a couple times but haven't heard anything - positive or negative. Loved, loved, loved Kavalier & Clay though.
Posted by: Jason at January 19, 2005 5:51 AMThanks for the correction, Mwanji. Escapist is even more apropos given its frequent adjectival ascripton to comics themselves, plus there’s the Steranko connection ;)
The NYTimes recently ran a lengthy article on graphic novels. The author draws the typical angle of artists as socially-damaged geeks, but there’s some cool background info on guys like Art Speigelman and their comparative creative processes.
Posted by: derek at January 19, 2005 6:01 AMAnswered my own question...
http://www.altx.com/int2/christopher.sorrentino.html
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at January 19, 2005 6:58 AMSpider-Man 2. He was on the team for Spider-Man 3, but got dropped at some point during the screenwriter-shuffling process. Also, I think read somewhere that he was courted for the upcoming Bryan Singer Superman project.
What’s “yshax”? Is that Mxyzptlkian? Oh, wait... I get it.
Speaking of which movie, it looks like Kevin Spacey will be playing Lex Luthor.
Posted by: Jason at January 19, 2005 6:28 PMI think Spiderman was the first super-hero film I saw in which the costume looked really good.
But, of course, The Incredibles is best super-hero film of all time!
Still... yshax!
Posted by: mwanji at January 21, 2005 3:36 PMI see my assertions were, as I thought, indisputable.
Been re-reading Kurt Busiek's "Astro City", a fantastic celebration of comics, and "Marvels" (a collaboration with Alex Ross). From there, maybe read "Preacher" again, some "Sin City", "Hellspawn"...
dhyag!
Posted by: mwanji at February 2, 2005 1:24 PM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................