Book notes: Barry Crimmins Never Shake Hands With a War Criminal and Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book

This week we present two books worth reading. One is a comedic look at the state of our nation and our national mind, the other offers a look at the history and sociology of American comic books.

Barry Crimmins is a comedic voice we know from Air America. Seven Stories Press published his book Never Shake Hands With a War Criminal in November of last year. If you haven't picked up the book yet, we recommend that you do. As with his verbal comedy, his writing will make you laugh and think.

From "American Tragedy As Cool Photo Op:"

We've all heard about the Republican National Committee's direct-mail piece offering donors three photographs of court-appointed President Bush, including one of him on Air Force One on September 11 as he hightailed it out of harm's way while his nation was under attack.
[. . .]
The Air Force One shot is a rare photo. In the background, actual Bush spin doctors are concoting the very lies they told us on September 12 to explain why Bush went Barney Fife on September 11.

From "2001 Con't:"

I might have given Bush a pass on going Barney Fife that morning except for a few things. During a time when even Rudolph Giuliani rose above venal political considerations (albeit briefly), the Bush administration's apparent top priority was to propagate alibis about why the president headed for the Grain Belt while the Northeast Corridor burned. This included telling us about a call to the Secret Service stating that the president was in imminent danger. Problem is, no such call was received. Bush was supposed to be a hard-ass Texas Republican naturally inclined to fly to D.C. climb to the roof of the White House, and wave pearl-handled revolvers, yelling, "Try me, motherfuckers!" Instead the Incredible President Limpet headed for a bunker in the Central Time Zone.
On September 12, while uncounted victims lay trapped under piles of rubble, several administration officials spent the morning telling us about the mythical phone threat, along with other prevarications that must have taken much of September 11 to prepare.

The book is funny and pointed. Check your libraries and bookstores for this amusing and thoughtful read and prepare to laugh.

We'd also like to note Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. This book was published in October of 2004 by Basic Books. This is an entertaining and lengthy read (the text alone is 340 pages) detailing the history of comic books in this country. The book is worth picking up just for the 16 pages of photos and illustrations which contain vintage panels from the early days of comic books.

In addition, you'll learn all sorts of background you never knew. Such as this from pages 191-192:

Busy Arnold needed material for his new Police Comics and asked [Jack] Cole to create a superhero. Cole's mind went where no power hungry geek or pulp melodramatist or imitator of Siegel and Shuster had ever gone. Instead of a hero tougher and stronger and faster than any normal man, he created one more free and absurd. "India Rubber Man" could bend and bounce and flatten himself like a rug and transform himself into a red-and-yellow divan. What Superman was to bodybuilders, India Rubber Man was to contortionists. The publisher liked him, but his promotional instincts were sharper than Cole's. Make him futuristic, Busy said, name him after a new miracle substance so your readers feel like they're experiencing freedoms yet to come. Call him "Plastic Man."

You'll learn about Martin Goodman and the early days, 1940, of Marvel comics (Goodman was the publisher of Marvel Comics). From page 199:

The pages he bought from Marvel Comics were filled with the market's most idiosyncratic and least heroic variations on the superhero. The Human Torch was an adroid who burst into flame, escaped his maker, and spread terror through the land. As the stories went on, he came gradually around to fighting crime, but he remained volatile and inhuman, still more of a science-fictional curiosity than a wish fulfillment. The Black Widow was a horrifying woman with magical powers who killed criminals, but only to deliver their souls more quickly to her master, Satan. The Sub-Mariner, by a hard-drinking Irish cartoonist from Massachusetts named Bill Everett, was the cantankerous king of an undersea race who hated surface people for their exploitation of the sea. Supremely neutral in the coming world war, he despised any nation that used submarines, depth charges, and floating mines, and he launched an invastion of New York just to make us leave him alone. It was a romance of superhuman violence without good guys or a hope of a happy ending, a supreme Irish barroom fantasy.

As a history of comic books and as a sociological study, the book works. But note to all X-Men enthusiasts, the book mainly focuses on the early history up through the 50s (with a round up of where-are-they-now, a discussion of the first Warner Bros. Superman movie and of the Batman TV show). You will learn details you never heard of and facts you may wish you didn't know. (We'll avoid spilling secrets.) But you won't put the book down until you reach the end.