Creators of the Superheroes by Thomas Andrae

Creators of the Superheroes Interviews and Commentary about Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Jack Kirby, and Will Eisner by Thomas Andrae

This book gives a very close look at the personal stories behind the creation of the first superheroes; Batman, Superman, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and others.  It is more than just about the art of the comics, it is about how the comic business was created.  The book fits in with other books printed by Hermes Press which has many reprints and biographical works on early comics.

The life stories in this book are often tragic.  Bill Finger one of the first writers of Batman got very little credit and died destitute.  The artists often got very little money from doing comics, most of it went to the publishers.   Most of the artists worked on a commission per page.  Unless you were Jack Kirby and had a solid business sense and a huge readership, or Will Eisner who ran his own company, there was very little money as a comic books artist.

There are many interesting details in the book.  I like the photographs and drawings of the women who inspired the creation of Lois Lane.  The book has over 400 illustrations in it.  It is also a coffee table size book.  Many of the images are photographs of the artists life, original comic book panels, and pictures from movies or films.  Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, and Joe Shuster were movie buffs.  Also Batman and Superman were made into films.

The majority of the text in this book is interviews. A lot of this is about the creative process in making comics.  It also has quite a bit about the artists personal lives.  Thrown in are interesting tidbits like the name Clark Kent is a combination of the movie actors, Clark Gable and Kent Taylor, and Batman's cape was designed after Leonardo's DaVinci's flying machine.

I especially liked the section on Will Eisner.  Will Eisner is considered the creator of the first graphic novel, A Contract With God.  He is also credited with making strong efforts to turn comics into an art form for adults.  He wrote comics as instruction manuals for the army.  This makes his approach different.

This is a fantastic book with beautiful illustrations, excellent interviews, and unique content.  If you are interested in the history of comics you should read this.

Al Jaffee's Mad Life A Biography by Mary-Lou Weisman Illustrated by Al Jaffee

Al Jaffee's Mad Life A Biography by Mary-Lou Weisman Illustrated by Al Jaffee

Al Jaffee is a cartoonist for Mad magazine.  He also has over sixty cartoon books he has written.  He is best known for the fold-ins at the back of Mad Magazine.  He illustrated this biography with a mix of slice of life comics about his own life and light humor comics.  I like the slightly exaggerated style of the cartoons.  They remind me a bit of a kind of slightly guilty pleasure.  This book covers his whole life.

The story starts with his childhood which is quite poignant and hard.  It starts with him moving from Savannah Georgia to live with his mother in a Lithuanian shtetl (small jewish town).  Then it covers his return to live in New York city.  The story is one of hardship and suffering.  He ends up leaving his mother behind as the Jewish holocaust starts.

This biography has quite a bit of mature themes in it; his brother going mad, another brother having extreme disabilities, and being separated from his mother.  He often describes himself as a cut up and a bit out of control.  This is illustrated by a variety of escapades throughout his life which can be both ridiculous and shocking

The thing which ultimately saves him is humor.  He describes reading comics his father sends him as a child and deciding that there is a career for him in comics when he sees advertisements by Dr. Seuss.  There are quite a few cartoons from Al Jaffee's early career in this book including many from Mad magazine.  The juxtaposition between everyday life and silly humor fits well with the writing.

In what I consider the second half of the book, he gets his break when he is accepted for the New York High School for Music and Art as it is first opening.  There he meets Harvey Kurtzman and some of the early figures in comics.  This biography describes his work for many important people in the comics industry.

The second half of the book touches on the history of comic books.  It is quite entertaining.  I rather liked a few of the wordless comics on page 180.  I also like the inventiveness in this book. Al Jaffe attributes this to having very little when he was a child.  He had to make his own toys.  There are interesting cartoons of home made fishing poles, rafts, a toy truck and other toys.

This book is not in the least bit academic in style.  It is full of anecdotes, humor, and sad stories. There is no index and no lists of recommended titles.  There are some photographs from the authors life, many cartoons in full color from both the auhor's life and Mad magazine.  The book is printed on heavy stock paper.  It is published by Harper Collins under the itbooks imprint.  This is a story that makes you think.

Bat-Manga by Chipp Kidd and Jiro Kuwata

Bat-Manga by Chipp Kidd and Jiro Kuwata

During the 1966 and 1967 first run of the television show Batman starring Adam West in Japan, it was decided that a comic based on batman would be produced in Japan. Jiro Kuwata wrote the manga during these two years.

This book is a unique story using a Japanese style manga to create stories on batman. Many of the stories are original with new characters like Doctor Faceless, Lord Death, and Go Go The Magician. The style and feel is slightly different than the original batman. I still like it very much.

There are a few original characters adapted from the western market, Clayface being the most prominent. I like that Clayface turns into a giant mantis in one scene. There is also a focus on the villains stealing art work. One of my favorite scenes is a fight at the Bat Monument which is batmans face on the side of a cliff. I did not know there was one before.

Batman has a few devices that we don't see in his western incarnation. He has tranquilizer shuriken which he throws at the villains. Also in some of the pictures of the advertising posters for the comics we see batman in bat scuba gear as well as Robin riding in the sidecar of a motorcycle with missiles attached to it which I found to be really neat.

The book has many full color photographs of original batman tin toys from Japan. They range from cap pistols, batarangs, bat flashlights, toy airplanes, to little batman robots. The colors are striking and the pictures are really interesting to look at.

This is a really interesting book. I found the drawing to be entertaining and lively. It switches between plain black and white, and a kind of brown, orange, and black earthtone background. It is worth reading. I read it this morning while I was sitting in Barnes and Noble. The book is a large coffee table book.

Comics Value Annual

An Earthman on Venus (Public Domain)

I went to my local library and dropped off a few books. Then I picked up the 2007 copy of Comics Values Annual. I generally am not looking to find super expensive books. In fact, I try to find the quality stories that are still affordable. Books like Love and Rockets (The Brothers Hernandez) , Groo the Wanderer (Sergio Aragones) , Usagi Yojimbo (Stan Sakai), Ms. Tree (written by Max Allan Collins author of Road to Perdition), and The Official Modesty Blaise are still very modestly priced compared to comics in the same time period. They are also good quality stories.

What will happen with me is I will buy comics for the stories until they become way too expensive. For a while, I was buying the old Fantagor (Richard Corben), and Junkwaffel (Vaughn Bode) comics at reasonable prices. Now they are too expensive to buy at reasonable prices. This usually happens with a lot of the comics I buy.

I also like to buy comics for their writers. I am probably going to buy the Dark Horse comic, Dead In The West by Joe Lansdale because it is an excellent western horror story. I'll also be looking for the Eclipse comic, Seduction of the Innocent, and Eclipse comics version of Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey. Even the reprints of the older comics like Cosmic Heros Buck Rogers are getting hard to find because they are affordable versions of very expensive quality comics.

I buy comics and I read them. Then I put them in storage boxes. I would have much rather read them than not. I am not going to wrap them in plastic and assume they are going to be worth a fortune later on. There aren't a huge amount of comics that I like.

I like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore because of the writing. I want stories that are both well written and well illustrated. I like P. Craig Russell, Frank Frazetta, Berni Wrightson and many other artists who draw well. I don't want to spend a fortune on them either. I also like Frank Miller's superhero comics, especially his version of batman. I also like Osamu Tezuka's manga. I can be very picky.

I use Comics Values Annual or the Overstreet Price Guide to create a list before I go to a comics shop. There are so many books right now, that it is very easy to get distracted, and very hard to find what you want if you just wander around.

Black and White Tekkon Kinkreet All In One, Taiyo Matsumoto, Review

Good Morning

I was reading Tekkon Kinkreet Black & White All In One by Taiyo Matsumoto on the train in from work. It is a really incredible manga. Some of the content defies definition. It is about an orphan pair of children who look to be about ten or eleven years old in a run down city, Black and White. There are some very unusual things about them. They are extremely violent, they also can fly which makes for a very strange story. In an odd way, they are almost super powered.

They are in conflict with various denizens of the city including the yakuza, foreign criminals, and other street gangs. They seem to be the spirit of a city which has turned into a rather nasty slum. The characters are interesting. They get help from a drunken old man sometimes. Interspersed with their violent dealings are various episodes like visiting a video arcade, eating apples, going to the public baths, pickpocketing money during a boxing match, and mugging people for their watches.

The art work is stunning. It has an odd feeling, somehow. It is mostly drawn in black white. The drawings are not traditional, they have a rough quality to them which makes them both childlike and at the same time very dark. Towards the end of the story, Black gets separated from White and takes on the spiritual aspect of the Minotaur, the destroyer of men. He fights two assassins who also can fly and kills them. At moments there are pictures of a good Black and a Black that is the essence of evil.

White weres a kind of a weird outfit with a lion mask, and regular all white childrens clothes, Black wears a necklace of a big skull, aviator goggles, and black clothing. This makes them odd. They also sometimes carry big metal pipes.

There is a lot of strangeness in this story. For example, Black and White meet another pair of street children, Dawn and Dusk with powers. You see them on top of buildings, sitting on telephone wires, jumping on moving cars. The two children are completely without fear. Also, they sleep in an old rusted out car. There is a little plot of land where White has planted an apple seed.

The villain is a foreign asian man with rings on his fingers and in his ears. He is trying to build an amusement building for children and take over the town. The villain wants to change the whole character of the city into something like Disneyland. He wants to unite the yakuza and tear down the old strip mall which they hang out at.

Sometimes the police talk to them. They don't know what to make of the children. They have a record of violence. In one scene they attack another little kid and take his backpack. The whole story is very surreal. The story at least ends with peace in the city.

This story is definitely not for children. It is an adult story despite having super powered street orphans as the main characters. The main characters, Black and White sing naughty childrens rhymes, swear, and cause mayhem. The villains are violent. There is some nudity and sexuality. One of the yakuza is depicted talking to his wife while he is in bed about having a child. There is an odd mix of real life and otherworldly powers.

The book is an odd size 7 inches by 10 inches making it very large for a manga. The panels are also larger than usual. They are not laid out in a traditional manner and vary from page to page. The book was turned into an anime film in 2006. It is very avant garde. I am surprised that this was published. It is very unusual.  There is a parental advisory symbol on the front of the book which says "Parental Advisory, Explicit Content."

Thoughts for the Day

I am looking at a new series called Best American Comics, it is c2007, the series is in its second year. The editor is Chris Ware. Last year in 2006, the editor was Harvey Pekar. This is a comics lit book collecting high quality samples of works by alternative comic artists. Some of the artists are Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Adriane Tomine, Kim Deitch, Charles Burns and others. The books is very colorful.

I also have a copy of Richard Matheson, I Am Legend, the vampire novel which the new film starring Wil Smith is based on. I noticed that Richard Matheson renewed the copyright in 1995, the original copyright is 1954. The book which is a trade paperback is perma-bound, coated in plastic to make it last longer.

I am Legend is also printed on acid free paper so the paper will not brown. It looks like the glue holding in the pages will dry out before the paper and the cover goes. This is what seems to happen with trade paperbacks with acid free paper and high quality covers. The pages come undone fairly quickly, but the cover and the paper stay in perfect shape.

Anyways, SCORE Service Corps of Retired Executive did a free sales and marketing seminar last night at the library. I went and got groceries for light refreshments, mini-muffins, a vegetable platter, apple cider, and a jug of water for the attendees. We had ten people attend. These kinds of things are always kind of hard to do. I did the rough draft for the flier and the press release to the local papers. The lady in the office did the final editing for release to the public. It is impossible to know how many people will attend these kind of workshops.

I am going to prepare a film today, something out of copyright, The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring Lana Turner. I'll end up getting individual bags of popcorn, they have big bags with little bags of popcorn inside them, and juice. We have a projector for presentations that can be rigged up to a dvd player and a fold up movie screen so we can show films.

I am still thinking of Rumi. Some of the poems are very short stories. My favorite of these is the story of the Ocean Frog. The Ocean Frog lives in the wide ocean while the ditch frog lives in a small ditch. The ditch frog tells how huge his home is which is two feet by three feet while the ocean frog listens. The ocean is seen as a metaphor for living in the presence of god or the universe having wide vistas of perception.

Librarianship, Bookselling, and Publishing

The library of the Nautilus with a picture of Captain Nemo.

Creating The Customer Driven Library Building on the Bookstore Model by Jeannette Woodward is about how to improve libraries by understanding how retail bookstores work. The central tenet of this book is that the best way to improve libraries is through better customer service. The book claims that many of the customer service practices of bookstores can be adapted by libraries. Jeanette Woodward says that libraries need to look at their bottom lines and see how statistics and qualitative surveys on what library patrons want can be used to improve service in libraries. Serving the patron and the community become the central goal of the library.

There are detailed sections on how to display materials, improve signage, and generate positive publicity. It challenges the traditional idea that the librarian knows best and claims that what the patron wants is more important. If the library patron doesn't get what they want, they go elsewhere, usually to the local bookstore. Things like how to run a cafe in a library setting, adjust hours so they meet patrons needs, and use staffing so that technology is used effectively are written about.

It claims that the library patron needs to feel safe, have fast service, feel good about their visit, and be informed about what happens in their library. This should be written into the mission of the library.

This is an excellent book that tackles many thorny issues in the public library. It is well worth reading for both librarians and booksellers.

This post is particularly about the relationship between libraries, bookstores, and publishing. One of the review links I have posted is to Bookweb, the newsletter of the American Bookselling Association. Bookweb has quite a few news articles as well as information on what the best books are for selling in the independent bookstore.

The ABA, American Booksellers Association, also sponsors, Bookexpo America, the trade show for American publishing. This show occurs every other year in New York City at the Jacob Javits center. It will be in New York in 2009. I try to go every year it is in New York city, http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/ . The price is incredibly cheap $75.00 in US dollars three days. Close to the same time as the Bookexpo, there is the Day of Dialog between librarians and publishers. You have to register several months in advance to get tickets for the Day of Dialog. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6457224.html . I easily pay for the cost of the event in the amount of free sample books which I end up sending back to where I am working, about sixty pounds of free new books.

Quite a few librarians attend the event in addition to booksellers and publishers. Most of the librarians are either collection development or reference librarians. I usually meet several different people who I have worked with at one point or another when I go there. It takes about a day and half to just walk around all the booths in the Jacob Javits Center. There is every kind of book, comic book, ebook, and book related material there.

Last time I was at this thing in 2007, I got to here a panel by publishers on science fiction in the library setting, as well as pick up a few free books like Armageddon Reef by David Weber, and the graphic novel, Invincible for myself. During the Day of Dialog, George R.R. Martin, the science fiction writer, was one of the invited speakers.

In April 2008, I will be going to the New York Comic Con, http://www.nycomiccon.com/ which offers free admission to professionals, librarians are considered professionals so I get to go free. Last time I was there, there were professional discussion panels on anime, manga, and graphic novels in the library setting. What is different about the New York Comic Con from other comic conventions is that the main purpose of the convention is to meet and talk with all the different comic book publishers like Fantagraphics, DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, and others.

I am a big fan of comics lit, that is things like Maus by Art Spiegelman, the comic book adaptation of the Ring of the Nibelung by P. Craig Russell, the Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick, a biography of Kafka by R. Crumb, and many other works. I don't read a whole lot of superhero comics.

I collect what are called "ground level" comics, things that are not quite underground comics, and not quite mainstream comics. People like Vaughn Bode, P. Craig Russell, and Richard Corben. My focus in collecting is mainly science fiction, fantasy, and horror comics.

Another convention I will attend is the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival on June 7 and June 8 in the Puck Building in Manhattan. This convention once again is very affordable to attend. Once again, this convention is not like most other comic book conventions, it focuses almost entirely on independent comic book publishers. There are tables from people like Fantagraphics, Soft Skull Press, Last Gasp, Drawn and Quarterly and illustrators like Craig Thompson. Last time I was at the festival in 2005, I got to meet Sara Turner of Make Like a Tree Comics. She has a really excellent free science fiction web comic caled File 49 http://mlatcomics.com/file49_index.html . This really satisfies my fanboy urges.

I haven't had a chance to visit MOCCA-- Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art in New York, but I recently looked at their listing of comic books on the internet. http://www.librarything.com/profile/moccany . They also have a catalog. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/moccany . Maybe, on my next vacation I will get a chance to visit.

I have plenty of thoughts on the more low brow aspect of the librarians and booksellers. One of these things is the public library fundraising booksale which usually comes with cupcakes, cookies, and coffee which is done by the "Friends of the Library." At almost every such event, you will see pickers, or bookscouts who are trying to find special books to sell either on ebay, or to their local bookstore. Most are older gentlemen or ladies who have experience with this kind of thing. It is a hobby for them which brings in some extra money. For the most part they are curmudgeons with a slightly grumpy hands off my stuff attitude. They also attend church rummage sales, flea markets, used bookshops, second hand goods stores and other such venues.

Anyways, this is a piece of my post for the day.

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Another link which I am posting is http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/ this is a news aggregator for the alternative energy industry. If you are interested in alternative energy, this gives very up to the minute news.

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I really haven't thought of anything new to post about improving my site statistics. I'll come up with some more later today.

Alright, I posted a few comments by myself to myself in the comments section. Right now, I am not worried about comment spam and link dropping. Please comment-- remember no porn, no truly gratuitous violence, no super hateful spews, flaming and different opinions are welcome. I like a little debate. It makes the world go around. If you want to put in a link to your blog please do. I will gladly post a comment in return on your blog. Thanks. Talking to myself. Wow.

Anyways, there is so much that is so easy to miss. I just updated my complete profile. It is so easy to miss stuff on this site.

While I was looking at Google Groups help for blogs, I found several blog review style groups in Google, Blogger Review, Blogger Help Group, and Blogger General Discussion where you are supposed to post your URL and ask for comments. I then looked for some web sites that reviewed blogs, there is Bloggeries Blog, and The Weblog Review so far.