Supermen: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 - Softcover

Sadowski, Greg; Lethem, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560979712 ISBN 13: 9781560979715

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2009

Synopsis

The enduring cultural phenomenon of comic book heroes was invented in the late 1930s by a hungry and talented group of artists and writers barely out of their teens, flying by the seat of their pants to come up with something new, exciting, and above all profitable. The iconography and mythology they created flourishes to this day in practically all visual media. Supermen! collects the best and the brightest of this first generation, including Jack Cole, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Gardner Fox, Lou Fine, Fletcher Hanks, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Basil Wolverton. Readers expecting to find an All-American group of altruistic do-gooders are in for quite a jolt. As Jonathan Lethem writes in his Foreword, “A collection like Supermen! works like a reverse-neutron bomb to assumptions about the birth of the superhero image: it tears down the orderly structures of theory and history and leaves the figures standing in full view, staring back at us in all their defiant disorienting particularity, their blazing strangeness.” Handsomely designed and produced in full color, Supermen! contains twenty full-length stories, ten full-sized covers, a generous selection of vintage promotional ads, and comprehensive background notes by editor Greg Sadowski. This anthology is indispensable to anyone interested in the origins of superheroes and the history of the comic book form.

About this title

About the Authors

Greg Sadowski is a writer, editor, and designer (Creeping Death from Neptune, Brain Bats of Venus, B. Krigstein, Supermen!, Four Color Fear) living on the Jersey shore.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1560979712
• ISBN 13: 9781560979715
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176