Sam Leith
Heroes on the Breadline
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book
By Gerard Jones
William Heinemann 384pp £10.99 order from our bookshop
Comic-book superheroes are now so huge a part of the corporate cultural landscape that it’s amazing to remember that they are less than 100 years old. Will Eisner, ‘the father of the graphic novel’, died only last year. Spiderman’s creator Stan Lee, who enters Gerard Jones’s story as an ingratiating teenage office-boy, is still alive. Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the men who invented Superman (and whose long struggle for recognition from the cash-soaked industry he went on to spawn forms the spine of this book), lived into the 1990s. Their story is, as Jones’s subtitle suggests, just one of multiple tales of betrayal and bankruptcy; of shifting alliances between fanboy artists and the semi-criminal hucksters who ran publishing and distribution businesses; of fast bucks and sharp practice; of myth made on the hoof.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad