Alternative comics are shortchanged, European and Japanese comics don’t even exist in this Marvel-centric account, but it...
Evenhanded and readable biography of comic maestro Lee and, through him, a history of the genre.
In 1940, 18-year-old Stanley Lieber—smart, ambitious, raised in poverty—went to work at cousin Martin Goodman’s Timely (later, Marvel) Publishing. Goodman had moderate success imitating the pulps and comics of market leaders, and Lieber, now Stan Lee, was soon running the comics division. An accomplished and well-liked hack, his hucksterish self-promotion was smiled at until characters like Spiderman and the Fantastic Four became hugely popular in the early ’60s. Working with now-legendary artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Lee revived the anemic superhero genre using the “Marvel Method”: he supplied outlines instead of detailed scripts, and the artists freely changed plots and characters, leaving Lee to write in dialogue afterward. Everything appeared under the rubric “Stan Lee Presents,” and Lee often took credit no matter who thought of what; in the small world of comics, years of controversy ensued. As the Marvel Universe became a money-making machine, Lee wrote less and promoted more. Company policy made him its sole public representative; he was management, the artists were freelancers, so it was in Marvel’s copyright interest to have all characters credited to Lee. Spurgeon and Raphael fondly but firmly supply all the details, correcting some of Lee’s own accounts and assigning credit to others where due. (Non-fanatics will find this occasionally lends a—possibly unavoidable—tempest-in-a-teapot tone.) On Lee’s watch, the comics gained a self-aware sense of humor, and superheroes revealed feet of clay, but seen here in context, he was more manager than creator of these genuine innovations, more huckster than genius.
Alternative comics are shortchanged, European and Japanese comics don’t even exist in this Marvel-centric account, but it will probably stand as the definitive history of this particular slice of American popular culture.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55652-506-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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