*The Comic Book Heroes* by Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs
Every now and then someone writes a retrospective on comics or a critical book of some kind on graphic novels. I was going to survey a whole bunch of 'em, even read more than I perhaps should have, but here I am, left with one for now. Why? Because the others are cheerleading, and this one is a goldmine.
*The Comic Book Heroes* by Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs is by far the best written and most astute observation of the comics industry I've seen. The "heroes" of the title, Jones and Jacobs tell us, are not the characters but the creators behind them. Jones and Jacobs' book takes the reader from 1956 and the dawn of comics' Silver Age through the publication of Mark Waid and Alex Ross' *Kingdom Come</> forty years later. Along the way we meet the players and schemers behind the industry, always narrated with style, educated criticism, and wit-- a formidable wit that sneaks up on the reader. These guys tell it like it is, good bad and ugly.
And what a ride! I confess eagerly searching the book for comics I remember buying, wondering if they'd make the cut or whether or not the authors had some contextual insight I was unaware of. I experienced great mirth when they get to the birth of the New Mutants during one of several *X-Men* booms. Jones and Jacobs tell us about Bill Sienkiewicz, who had started by imitating Neil Adams:
"His art was challenging, but for a moment still superheroish enough to please *Moon Knight* fans. The moment he took over *New Mutants,* Bill Sienkiewicz went nuts... there were broken and indistinct panels, figures reduced to jagged ciphers, and sweeps of aggressive black... he overwhelmed both writer and characters, left Claremont and all his words helpless, brought storytelling to a standstill, but burned images into readers' brains."
Heck, yeah. I remember that. Note the comment about all Claremont's words; Jones and Jacobs will continue to track Claremont, whose "just shameless" soap opera tactics kept fans riveted until he met artists like Jim Lee who essentially crowded him right out the door.
What I didn't remember, couldn't have, was Jim Shooter being sacked from his editor in chief post at Marvel, and the fear about the man's legendary temper. (Shooter left quietly, to resurface again and again.) Jones and Jacobs dish the dirt *and* critique the works, and put it all into context.
1986, that mysteriously fertile year, gets its own chapter, what with *Watchmen* and *Dark Knight* coming out alongside such catastrophes as *The New Universe*, which of course was Shooter's final coffin nail. I've never thought of mid-eighties comics as storehouses of recessionary urban fear, but come to think of it, that makes sense. Remember when every hero ran into a mohawked bad guy in an alley? Jones and Jacobs do, and they can track the icon's origins.
See! The best recap of Denny O'Neil's rescue of Batman from the post-TV blues by calling him "The Batman" while Neal Adams took *the same costume* Batman had worn for years and made it *scary.* But Jones and Jacobs have news for us: most of the actual dark mood was in our fannish heads, and rarely in retrospect lived up to what O'Neil tried to do.
See! DC try again and again and, by golly, again to pull back on Superman's powers, only to unreel them with every new cast. See them somehow forget to have anything of interest on the shelves when *Superman: The Movie*, an utterly unique phenomenon at the time, came out. ("And what did DC have?" they ask. "*Superman Meets Muhammad Ali.*")
Hear! The sad story of the birth of the comics speculation market, which created some of the most bizarre catastrophes in the business, such as the complete buy-up of 1973's *Shazam!*, only to leave them sitting in twenty-cent bins until, someday, they may well protect us from nuclear destruction. Jones and Jacobs wring their hands over comics speculation at its worst-- since of course, speculation only works where there's a shortage, and popular new comics can be pumped out with abandon.
Watch! As Jones and Jacobs narrate the strange implosion of comics as it's taken over by comics fans, who may be able to create beautiful candy, but know nothing about life: Lee and Kirby, Gardner Fox, Steve Ditko and the like, were artists and writers, they remind us. Hacks, maybe. But when Nick Fury wore a suit in the 60's, as he often did, it looked like a *suit.*
One of my favorite sections of the book are the latter few chapters, in which Jones and Jacobs detail what appear to be the last gasps of an industry. The return of Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld to Marvel with *Heroes Reborn* is a case in point:
"At the same time, Lee and Liefeld signed a deal to take over production of some of Marvel's most venerable characters... Both sides played it as a victory. 'They tried to leave but they came back,' went the Marvel implication. 'We not only beat them, we're taking over their universe,' went the Image one. But the impression left was of two drowning sailors grabbing for the same piece of flotsam. Early orders on the Lee titles were solid, nothing more, on the Liefelds, not even that."
And on. And on. Jones and Jacobs grapple with the future of super-hero comics in a post-modern world, and report on the death of fantasy, calling the "realization" of heroes "concretizing the myth," a Joseph Campbell term meaning "how to kill a good fantasy." The report they give is of comics folding in on themselves while storytellers like John Byrne shriek and howl at the ballsy hucksters making a mint on brutality sans story.
The book ends more or less with *Kingdom Come,* which Mark Waid wrote to tell about how true heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman had stood the test of time "without bazookas." In Jones and Jacob's report, the comic may have been a hit,
"But Mark Waid knew better than anyone that *Kingdom Come* wasn't the next great breakthrough for superheroes. Like *1963, The Golden Age, Astro City,* and the most touching of Waid's *Flash* stories, it was a last visit, a toast, a sigh of resignation. It was goodbye."
Ah, but what a ride. *The Comic Book Heroes* is an incredible piece of work that deserves reading by anyone who wants to see the story behind the stories unfold.