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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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