The Great Comic Book Heroes!

As a youngster just getting into comics and hungry for anything comics related, finding this Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroesat the local library was like discovering the tomb of King Tut or finding Blackbeard's treasure. It was filled with comics stories featuring heroes almost like the stars I followed on the stands.

I enjoyed Superman's origin, I was impressed by the spare style of the Batman's conflict with the Joker, I was intrigued by the glimpse of the Big Red Cheese, I was amused by the chaotic art on The Flash and the Human Torch, I was taken aback by the energy of the Captain America origin story, and I was amazed by the detail of the Hawkman story. The Spirit story left me cold and I wouldn't get the Eisner thing until Warren's reprints many years later. The comics, the color, the history, it was all so magnificent.

And Feiffer's essays about his feelings a boy and then as a man about the heroes and heroines was revealing and not unlike Stan the Man's prose connected with me, suggesting a kindred spirit. He spoke with a candor and a wit that was uncanny and uncompromising. He spoke his truth, and you knew it. It is a great book, and I checked it out time after time after time.

These days I keep three copies. I've a hardback I found somewhere long ago which is at home, and I've a vintage paperback version which I keep at my workplace, and I've a copy of the much more recent reprint from Fantagraphics around here somewhere. The essays are intact in that one, but alas the glorious reprints are not included. This trove was an atomic bomb of comics creativity for my young mind, and I despair that youngsters today awash in media can't really savor the joy of such a find. Or maybe they can in their own way.

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