History

So, just to recap where we left off last time: it looks like Alan Moore has based all the big hits of his career on ideas he stole from Robert Mayer’s 1977 novel Superfolks. Various people, including Grant Morrison, Kurt Busiek, Lance Parkin, Joseph Gualtieri, and even Robert Mayer himself, have claimed at one point or another that Moore based a lot of his superhero work on various aspects of the book, specifically Marvelman, Watchmen, Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, and his proposal to DC Comics for the unpublished cross-company ‘event,’ Twilight of the Superheroes. But is any of this true, or might there be another explanation? To answer that, I’m going to go through the individual allegations or suggestions, and deal them one by one, to see how they hold up.

One of the events we missed last week was Steve DIitko's 85th birthday, so a belated birthday greeting, and a link to Michel Fiffe's...

In 1977 Dial Press of New York published Robert Mayer’s first novel, Superfolks. It was, amongst other things, a story of a middle-aged man coming to terms with his life, an enormous collection of 1970s pop-culture references, some now lost to the mists of time, and a satire on certain aspects of the comic superhero, but would probably be largely unheard of these days if it wasn’t for the fact that it is regularly mentioned for its supposed influence on a young Alan Moore and his work, particularly on Watchmen, Marvelman, and his Superman story, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? There’s also a suggestion that it had an influence on his proposal to DC Comics for the unpublished cross-company ‘event,’ Twilight of the Superheroes. But who’s saying these things, what are they saying, and is any of it actually true?

If the juicy, fact filled excerpts aren't getting you to run down to the bookstore to pick up a copy of Sean Howe's MARVEL: THE UNTOLD STORY, you must be dead to comics. io9 has a lengthy excerpt that goes right to the heart of the glory days of Lee and Kirby. I cut and pasted five different revelatory paragraphs before to settled on this one, regarding Carl Burgos, the original artist on the Human Torch, and his thoughts back in the 60s of trying to get the rights back.

Lost Art Books' Joe Procopio has a gallery of The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley which explains that the German illustrator (1863-1945) had a...

Marc Tyler Nobleman wrote Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman, which came out a couple months back.  The book is about Bill Finger,...

Via the Comics Journal's excerpt of the book everyone is talking about, Sean Howe's MARVEL: THE UNTOLD STORY. On February 17, 1992, the day the...

Former Marvel assistant editor Scott Edelman riffles through the memory bag for this 1976 plane jumping exploit with then Marvel E-i-C Jim Shooter. What's really...

Danny Best rolls out the relevant documents to show that Marvel now seems to own the Miracleman trademark. Does this mean the way is clear for the finale?

Well, this is really cool. It's a little more than a year ago that comics lost one of its greatest friends, mentors and publishers in Dylan Williams. Although his spirit lives on with the company he founded, Sparkplug, a new way to remember him has just been announced by The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the repository of Ohio State University's comics-related archives: The Dylan Williams Collection.

While the finding of the check for $130 which National presented to Siegel and Shuster might have been a high point of this year's comic history, here's a strong contender for another: the actual audio of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings on comic books.

Comics Scholar Jess Nevins is all the way up to Doctor Doom (I) in the Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes which is...just what it sounds like, and already has hundreds of entries. Best known for his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen annotations, and other detailed annotations for revered comics series, this encyclopedia looks to be even more time consuming.