The Classic Era Of American Comics
(2000 - Prion Books)

(by Nicky Wright) While being an ideal size and scoring roughly 'average' amidst this site's population, this book still seems to me less than you are going to want it to be. First, it's one of those rare books that presents its art on matte pages, rather than the glossy you are much more used to - and I think the presentation suffers, in this particular instance, because of that. Then, there's a lot of negative space, frequently occupied by some seemingly miniscule exhibit of something. For example, each of the book's 13 divisions are opened with two entire white pages with on them only a mash-up of a few excerpts of representative comic characters. Speaking of excerpts, a good number of in-chapter art displays are simply a severely excerpted & isolated portion of a comic cover that has already been presented. Also, ten times their design lays an image over the central gutter - most of the time it's still 'o.k.', but my point is that it was almost never necessary, every image being of a size to fit just fine on a single page. Anyway, the chapters of the essay here are: Come On The Clowns, Up-Up-And-Away, A Superhero Frenzy, The Comics Go To War, Let's Go Girls, Animal Crackers, Give Me A Home Where The Buffalo Roam, Horror And Crime At A Dime A Time, More Good Girls-A Bit Of Romance And War Too, Horror We-How's Bayou?, and It's All Over Now. This classic-era is defined as being from the 1933 beginnings of reprinting the Funny Pages in a magazine form, through its growth & evolution, to the incredible scrutiny brought on by governmental hearings and Wertham's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT that ended this phase in 1955 with it's creativity forced into retreat and all comic publication reduced to a cowardly pablum - a period of time roughly analogous to what's called the Golden Age of Comics. The focus here is more on the movers & shakers that brought these publications into being and fortunately a good number of artists are in that group, providing entrepreneurial & organizational skills, in addition to the illustration abilities that would usually relegate them, in the eyes of many, to being just 'jobbers'. Where the artists really get the short end of the stick is the almost total lack of identification in regards to all the covers & panel-art presented here. The captions for the gatherings of small displays (usually cluttered . . .) are mostly just short generic commentary about the grouping and a list of the copyright holders involved there. Numerically, this 240-page book has 213 'art-heavy' pages with 149 of those being those gatherings of multiple images and 64 that feature a single uncluttered image. I've been dismissive, but I should note that the gatherings themselves are frequently dominated by additional large-ish cover images in the scrumble. Those artists getting a 'well-presented' showing are: Matt Baker, Carl Barks, C.C. Beck (2), Dave Berg, John Buscema (2), John Celardo, Pete Costanza, Johnny Craig (4), Reed Crandall, Jack Davis (2), Bill Everett (4), Creig Flessel, Fred Guardineer, Russ Heath, Don Heck, Bob Kane, Gil Kane, Walt Kelly, Everett Raymond Kinstler (2), Jack Kirby, Bernard Krigstein, Howard Larsen, Norman W. Marsh, George McManus (2), Irv Novick, H.G. Peter (2), Fred Ray, Don Rico, Jerry Robinson, Alex Ross, Syd Shores, E.C. Stoner, Mike Suchorsky, Vin Sullivan, Al Ulmer, Bill Ward, and UNKNOWN ARTIST (15).