This is a book of observation and comment about comic books, in particular the Marvel hero comics of the early 1960s and the influence those stories and drawings had on the lives of the young people that grew up with them. The topic is not brought under hard analysis: the comics were originally written for entertainment, and the author's views on them in turn are offered through conversational letters, addressed to two of the founders of the art-form at Marvel.
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Editorial Reviews
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The text deftly evokes the monumental significance of small things to children and youths, and the heady feeling of building an inner world within a newly discovered shared culture of like-minded people. --Paragraph
Davies possesses a probing intelligence with insights and ideas. --Quill & Quire
Davies possesses a probing intelligence with insights and ideas. --Quill & Quire
About the Author
Paul Davies has been employed in consulting, commercial art, publishing, technical writing, business management, and computer programming and application design for thirty-seven years, with eleven books published and available at Amazon. More recently, Paul has been involved in the transcription of Tibetan language liturgical texts, producing twenty-six prayer books and a number of large flags since 2005.
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More About the Author
These books are remembrances, confessions, apologies, explanations, and complaints. They all arose from a single event which took place twenty-two years before any of them were written. Walking out in the early morning sun one day at midsummer in 1969, I was overcome with a tremendous resonance. It was a song, the Song of Amergin, which haunted me every day thereafter and (I discovered) brought me the memory of experiences long past. I tell this story in "Exactly 12 cents and other convictions."
I tell people now I could swim in those waters and not drown, but, while that may have been the case later, I struggled for many years before I began to understand its process. The essentials of that struggle I tell with added pathos in "The Truth"; later all the remembrances in a single stream in "Some Sunny Day," both of which sold well and were well-received critically. As were "Grace: A Story," my most engaging book, I think, which enjoyed a college course adoption in the U.S., and my first collection "Oblique Litanies: Nine Conversations and an Afterthought."
I'm grateful to have had many insightful reviews in magazines and newspapers over the years, from many distinguished critics. There's always one or two who don't like some particular book, of course. A well-known poet used to come out for each of my books, to stone me in one of the Halifax papers, but I was happy for his attention also. Oh, I will add one retort for the reviewer of "The Truth" in The Toronto Star: Yes, if you own a 1957 Pontiac you can start it up on a cold January morning in Alberta by blowing in the carburetor. A hair dryer would have been better, mind you.
The only one of my books that did not have any good reviews to speak of was "Pig Iron," a story in several voices written for film. Really, it is a complaint about what I perceived to be wrong with Christianity, but I did not have the schadenfreude to make my objectives plain so it did not ring true for the critics. Another, "A Dialogue for Five Voices," was not reviewed, apart from a passing notice in The Globe and Mail. It is not a remembrance of the past, but of the future, stirred by someone I knew years ago. My friend was among the soldiers trapped and starving on the mountainside for many months during the siege of Monte Cassino. He only volunteered a few words to me. The episodes of this career could not be told.
A memory of my own future, the episodes of my life now as it happens. The song still resonates, but one finds oneself so much older so very suddenly, and out in the cold somewhat. The conversations cannot continue. I am assured at least that my experience creating this writing (the journey, if you like) was the maximum possible experience that the activity as a category can provide.
I've had worse than this, mind you. I was a school patrol on December 15 1964, in Grade 6 at Crestwood Elementary School in Edmonton, Alberta, the day it was colder than it had ever been before, or has ever been since. The radio announcer didn't say "Crestwood" reading his list of school closures, so my friend Grant and I went on our way, fulfilling our duty at the 96th Avenue crosswalk along the way, unaware that thousands of beef cattle were that moment freezing solid on their feet in their shelters. The blizzard raged with much snow, high winds, and bitter cold. I saw on the front page of the Edmonton Journal that evening, delivered by another boy indifferent to the crisis, a chart showing the windchill temperature of -90*F. Back then the transit bench by the crosswalk on 96th Avenue was painted with the slogan "Rest and Read the Journal", but there was no one relaxing there with the newspaper that day.
If you like, you can read all the episodes of All the Realms (sampled here in the blog) in a PDF at my old portfolio site, www.pauldavies.net.
I tell people now I could swim in those waters and not drown, but, while that may have been the case later, I struggled for many years before I began to understand its process. The essentials of that struggle I tell with added pathos in "The Truth"; later all the remembrances in a single stream in "Some Sunny Day," both of which sold well and were well-received critically. As were "Grace: A Story," my most engaging book, I think, which enjoyed a college course adoption in the U.S., and my first collection "Oblique Litanies: Nine Conversations and an Afterthought."
I'm grateful to have had many insightful reviews in magazines and newspapers over the years, from many distinguished critics. There's always one or two who don't like some particular book, of course. A well-known poet used to come out for each of my books, to stone me in one of the Halifax papers, but I was happy for his attention also. Oh, I will add one retort for the reviewer of "The Truth" in The Toronto Star: Yes, if you own a 1957 Pontiac you can start it up on a cold January morning in Alberta by blowing in the carburetor. A hair dryer would have been better, mind you.
The only one of my books that did not have any good reviews to speak of was "Pig Iron," a story in several voices written for film. Really, it is a complaint about what I perceived to be wrong with Christianity, but I did not have the schadenfreude to make my objectives plain so it did not ring true for the critics. Another, "A Dialogue for Five Voices," was not reviewed, apart from a passing notice in The Globe and Mail. It is not a remembrance of the past, but of the future, stirred by someone I knew years ago. My friend was among the soldiers trapped and starving on the mountainside for many months during the siege of Monte Cassino. He only volunteered a few words to me. The episodes of this career could not be told.
A memory of my own future, the episodes of my life now as it happens. The song still resonates, but one finds oneself so much older so very suddenly, and out in the cold somewhat. The conversations cannot continue. I am assured at least that my experience creating this writing (the journey, if you like) was the maximum possible experience that the activity as a category can provide.
I've had worse than this, mind you. I was a school patrol on December 15 1964, in Grade 6 at Crestwood Elementary School in Edmonton, Alberta, the day it was colder than it had ever been before, or has ever been since. The radio announcer didn't say "Crestwood" reading his list of school closures, so my friend Grant and I went on our way, fulfilling our duty at the 96th Avenue crosswalk along the way, unaware that thousands of beef cattle were that moment freezing solid on their feet in their shelters. The blizzard raged with much snow, high winds, and bitter cold. I saw on the front page of the Edmonton Journal that evening, delivered by another boy indifferent to the crisis, a chart showing the windchill temperature of -90*F. Back then the transit bench by the crosswalk on 96th Avenue was painted with the slogan "Rest and Read the Journal", but there was no one relaxing there with the newspaper that day.
If you like, you can read all the episodes of All the Realms (sampled here in the blog) in a PDF at my old portfolio site, www.pauldavies.net.
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