Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book; by Gerard Jones
published 2004 - read 2005

I was an enthusiastic superhero fan for much of my youth, and I retain a vague but unconsuming interest in the doings of a few favorite heroes. So, in the way of fans, I've read more than a few histories of the comics medium and the industry. They're typically enjoyable for fans and disposable otherwise, chock full of factoids and gorgeous illustrations but lacking in narrative force and general interest.

Men of Tomorrow isn't like that. This is actually a great, general-audience work of nonfiction. I just want to get that out of the way, because most of the people I want to recommend this to are not comics fans. It tells the story of the men (no women) who drew, wrote, and published the superhero comics that eventually took America by storm in the 1940s and settled down into a minor part of the culture industry after that. And sure, it lingers on specific moments in the development of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and their ilk. But it works because it's devoted to understanding the creators through their times and their values.

The originators of the superhero were overwhelmingly Jewish, shaped in different ways by immigration experiences, the clamor of the 1920s, the hunger of the Depression, the first pop culture, organized crime, socialism, fascism. Jones tells their stories primarily as Jewish stories, as American stories, and gradually fills in the picture of the world around them, providing fascinating details on fads and cultural shifts largely forgotten or taken for granted today. He takes us back to when Superman's creators were doing high-school-newspaper gags making fun of popular bodybuilders in middle-class suburban Cleveland - and more racily, to when Superman's publishers were mob racketeers scraping out a niche publishing smut and smuggling bootleg hooch.

All this delicious social history keeps the book going for its first third, when the superheroes haven't even shown up yet. Things become a little less arresting when the milieu becomes more familiar, as we reach the Fifties, as Jones begins trying to cover too many threads at once (for a while, a whole lot of names are floating around that don't quite attach to personalities - Will Eisner especially comes across as irrelevant to the book's narrative). But the focus returns as the fight between Superman's creators and his publishers over credit for the character takes center stage. I'll admit I actually shed tears when this saga reached its climax. Jones's prose, just overcooked enough to fit the subject matter, builds a profound admiration and affection for these men and their dreams. You don't even need his narration to tell you how much it stung for these men, these Jews, to be accused of closet fascism for the Supermen they'd given the world, or how much it would mean to them simply to have their names printed in their characters' comics. All in all, a truly excellent fusion of history and biography.

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