Spring Round-Up: Superman to Sandman

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on May 23, 2006 Sign up now!

by Peter Sanderson, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/23/2006

With summer comes the release of new superhero movies and major comics conventions. So it is no surprise that late spring paves the way with the publication of several new books about well-known comics series and their creators.

In anticipation of the new movie Superman Returns, DC Comics has released Superman Cover to Cover ($39.95, ISBN: 1-4012-0770-7), a survey of comic book covers featuring the Man of Steel throughout his history. (DC previously published Batman Cover to Cover, a book with a similar format.)

This is a handsomely designed volume, and many comics enthusiasts will be satisfied with the nostalgic rush of once more seeing familiar covers from their childhood. Yet this book had the potential to be so much more than that.

Can this be considered a serious art book? There are many strikingly conceived covers in this book, but there are plenty of mediocre ones as well.

There is no biographical information about any of the artists. Nor is there any attempt to analyze the changes in comic book art styles over the decades, or influences upon them. One reproduced cover, from JSA #54, is unmistakably based on Norman Rockwell's famous Freedom from Want, but, remarkably, this goes unmentioned.

Many covers that are undistinguished as art nevertheless earn a place in the book for their subject matter. But there is very little to enlighten readers who are not expert in comics history as to why such subjects are significant. The book offers a cover from the 1992 Death of Superman without bothering to explain how the character returned to life.

Why present 1960s covers in which Superman and Jimmy Olsen undergo weird transformations without explaining why such odd stories were popular at the time?

Oddly, no specific author is credited with organizing the book or writing its captions. Instead there are sidebars written by various people connected with the Superman mythos in comics, television, and film. Some these are revealing, like artist Alex Ross's analysis of a World War II Superman cover, and especially Silver Age writer Alvin Schwartz's explanation of how he intentionally created Bizarro to be Superman's Jungian "shadow." If only the book had more of this sort of insight.

In time for the new X-Men 3: The Last Stand movie, former Marvel editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco conducted the interviews for Comics Creators on X-Men for Titan Books ($17.95, paper, ISBN: 1-84576-173-1). DeFalco did previous Titan interview books about Spider-Man and Fantastic Four.

The best sections of this new book correspond with the most imaginative periods in X-Men history: interviews with X-Men co-creator Stan Lee and the men who revamped the series in the 1970s: Roy Thomas, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and John Byrne. A more recent writer, Grant Morrison, intriguingly propounds his theory that mutants represent the younger generation that will inevitably supplant their elders. Many of the other interviews shift the focus to less inspired storylines and Marvel office politics. Hence this book is for comics readers who already have an overall grasp of the whole history of both the X-Men and Marvel, not newcomers.

Even the knowledgeable X-Men fan will find surprising new nuggets of information. Did you know that Stan Lee intended to reveal Magneto was Professor Xavier's brother? Find out just how Dark Shadows inspired The Age of Apocalypse and Doctor Who influenced the storyline Days of Future Past! One can also trace through the interviews how Marvel's sensibility grew increasingly corporate over the decades.

The latest in another series of books is TwoMorrows Publishing's Modern Masters Volume 6: Arthur Adams by George Khoury and edited by Eric Nolen-Weatherington ($14.95, paper, ISBN: 1-893905-54-3), surveying the career of this comics artist whose work ranges from X-Men to Godzilla to Gumby. The book is filled with handsome artwork, and a lengthy interview captures Adams's cheerful, unpretentious personality. But there is no attempt at serious analysis of Adams's work.

By far the most serious of these new releases is Fantagraphics' The Sandman Papers, edited by Joe Sanders ($18.95 paper, ISBN 1-56097-748-5). This is a collection of academic essays concerning Neil Gaiman's now classic Sandman comics series, and demonstrates the intellectual depth that comics can achieve as literature.

Whereas many other comics professionals might resist literary analysis, Gaiman contributes an introduction in which he welcomes it, acknowledging that academics can make valid discoveries about his work of which not even he was aware.

As one might expect, several of these literary critics are fascinated by Gaiman's use of Shakespeare. The subjects range over a wide territory, from Orientalism and the use of Asian dress to the depiction of lesbian and transsexual characters to connections between Sandman and the works of Jorge Luis Borges, even to Gaiman's interaction with Sandman readers via personal appearances and his blog.

Sometimes the essayists betray insufficient knowledge of the comics traditions Gaiman draws on. For example, B. Keith Murphy argues that Alan Moore's Watchmen is a gothic horror story "disguised as a superhero comic" since, among other reasons, he unconvincingly claims Ozymandias is based on Jekyll and Hyde. (So what about the Hulk?)

On the other hand, the essays often illuminate mysteries in Gaiman's works. For example, Sanders provides a revealing reading of Gaiman's graphic novel Mr. Punch, and insightfully compares Shakespeare's attitude toward the uses of storytelling in Gaiman's Sandman to that of characters in two other Sandman tales, Calliope and even A Dream of a Thousand Cats.

Most of all, various essayists anatomize Sandman's overarching theme of the inevitability and necessity of change, in the world and in one's own life.

The essays do not necessarily fully answer the questions they raises, but as Gaiman says in his introduction, this book is a starting point for further analysis. The Sandman Papers is not for casual readers, but it will reward Sandman aficionados willing to explore further. Of these new books about comics, this is the only one that genuinely deepens one's understanding of the comics themselves.