Sunday's NY Times Book Review had a very positive review of several comics, I mean graphic novel, related tomes, particularly, SUPERMEN! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes.An excerpt from the review follows...
In the tense, murky years before America entered World War II, its young couldn’t get enough tales of costumed mystery men. SUPERMEN! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-41 (Fantagraphics, paper, $24.99) is a rambunctious anthology of the earliest superhero stories — gaudy, crude, infernally potent things, cranked out by scrappy young cartoonists who were more concerned with what the likes of Silver Streak, Yarko the Great and Skyrocket Steele (and SkyMan, as seen above) could do than with what they might mean.
The book’s editor, Greg Sadowski, has compiled vivid early work by Will Eisner, Jack Kirby and Jack Cole, among others who went on to be the medium’s great stylists. So it’s surprising how similar their work was in the days when they were inventing the superhero concept. Their stories have the same frantic tumble of calamities and grotesqueries, the same orphan-threatening menaces and square-jawed, tough-talking heroes, the same prose so overheated it threatens to singe its readers’ eyeballs: “Seven million wide-eyed souls glance skyward as one! Rearing his ugly head above Manhattan, casting a shadow over all — the Claw!” (read the review for the rest of the rave!)
We at Atomic Kommie Comics™ are ecstatic that some of the "lost" classics of the Golden Age of Comics are being made available to a graphic novel-hungry audience! (And Fantagraphics has done absolutely spectacular work with previous 1930s-40s reprint albums!)
We believe that Supermen! would make a great gift for the graphic story aficionado in your life, especially when combined with one of the Golden Age-themed goodies from our Lost Heroes of the Golden Age of Comics™ collection, which feature some of the very same heroes on t-shirts, mugs, messenger bags, and other assorted items!
As they'd say back in the 1940s: "Gosh, they'd make a swell birthday or graduation present for a comics-loving guy or gal!"
