Customer Reviews

The Silver Age of Comic Book Art

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Take heed. The softcover omits 16 or so pages from the hardcover, so you don't get the mini-features on Wallace Wood, Curt Swan, Nick Cardy, Murphy Anderson, and John Buscema which I really wanted to see. I think it's a really cheap move on Collectors Press' part. Why couldn't they have included those 16 extra pages? If they are trying to entice people to buy the hardcover, why bother making a softcover edition at all? Otherwise, a beautiful book.

Some of the reviews praise this compliation, and others attack it. If you know what this book is, it can be very interesting and a spur to seek out more information on Silver Age artists.

First of all, what this book is: a visually interesting collage of artists from the 60s. Each page is designed differently and, with my untrained eye, I'd say visually engaging. Along the way you're given samples of the most famous covers and images that the various artists produced. He does reproduce (and enlarge) the original art which I liked (if I want enhanced art I'll check out the Marvel Masterpieces or DC Archives).

What this book is not: an indepth look at the artists or their influence on other artists. There are a number of intriguing quotations from the various artists--excellent sound bites--but not enough to let us know what made/makes them tick. Also a few figures (i.e. Doc Strange), when "blown up" became large pixels that--yes, visually interesting--but not as interesting as they would've been a bit smaller with more space for another graphic. What irritated me the most about the book was (in the interest of "design"??) some text was unreadable (see the bibliography for the worst example), and some art was unviewable (see Kirby's "self-portrait" that is totally obliterated by gray background and text.) Was the publisher so hard up on pages that we couldn't have a page of text as well as the Kirby (and Colon) self-portraits?

Overall, if you know what you're getting with the book, it's a nice addition to other 60s comic collections. I wouldn't pay for it in hardcover: it's too expensive for what you get--personally, I found it at an outlet bookstore at a fraction of the cost and felt it was a good buy.

After reading the gushing reviews here, I bought this book sight unseen (a personal rule I resolve never to break again, as returning these books to Amazon is a royal hassle). The beauty of the so-called "Silver Age" of comics (mainly, the 1960s) is the elegance and harmony of the art and story. This book is another one of that endless invasion of in-your-face, sliced-and-diced compilation pieces that seek to razzle-dazzle the viewer who doesn't think. Everything is piecemeal, with montages overlapping other montages, fragments of recognizable works blown up to Roy Lichtenstein proportions and overlaid with small, cluttered, unrelated tidbits. It reduces the work to Pop Art, like printing comic book panels as wall paper, or on kid's bedsheets, for a "campy" effect. I expected an insightful presentation of what made that decade's comics so meaningful; something coherent, at least. This book is for people with no attention span (maybe people addicted to video games), who don't even try to understand a story or appreciate a composition, they just want frenzied details flying everywhere so you can't sort it out, like a kaleidoscopic segment of "Entertainment Tonight" compiled by a "hot" editor. I especially hate magnified images that go off the page with no border, trying to give a "hip" look to the layout. The value of Marvel comics, especially, was their accessibility, their clarity, their visual solidity. The comics industry went into a tailspin in the '80s when it was overrun by immature artists who tried to confuse the viewer by losing the center of interest and get by on pyrotechnics. The text, consisting of a snippet of catty gossip about Stan Lee here, a fragment of anonymous, truncated, corny dialog there, is sprinkled throughout with unrelated "factoids" no more than two or three sentences long, often in the gimmicky type you see in "trendy" magazines about pop music. It has nothing to say except how smirky and post-modern it is to chop up pieces of the past in a pop-culture blender and splash out a meaningless jumble of images for people to idly glance at, without context or narrative direction. For the distracted amusement of superficial illiterates only, not for knowledgeable people who like the beauty of an image that hasn't been tampered with, or seek a legitimate history of those creative years.

I recently acquired the excellent book The Silver Age of Comic Book Art by Arlen Schumer, and have been joyfully looking it over ever since.

The timing is interesting, since I just finished incorporating several thousand newer comics into my main comics collection, something that gave me the opportunity to revisit comics from the 1930s to the present time, with a lot of the material being from that same 1950s/1960s era that is covered so well in Arlen Schumer's book.

I've tried to stay away from the type of thinking that elevates the things of the past and denigrates current works, and I do realize that great things exist in all time periods. Still, I've found that the comic books of that time period (and especially the examples that are covered in Schumer's book) have an honesty and a lack of pretension about them that exemplify true artistry and offer a timeless quality, while contemporary examples of the same type of stuff seem cold and calculated and so blatant in their attempts to be "on the cutting edge" that they are often hopelessly dated by the time they see print. A lot of current comics material seems to be a more cut-throat version of the lesser works of the latter 1960s wherein misguided and inept ... but straightforwardly innocent ... attempts were made by forty-year old comics creators to speak to their assumed young readership in what they mistakenly took to be those readers' own "fab" and "groovy" language.

It's wonderful to contrast that artificiality with the examples that Schumer offers in The Silver Age of Comic Book Art. He introduces the uninitiated to ... and not-too-subtly reminds the long-time devotees of ... a group of men who, in the process of simply "doing their jobs," wound up creating important and lasting art.

It can be hoped that the book will do well. So many recent books, either made up of cobbled-together "graphic novels" or hurriedly written commentaries on the form and its interesting history, have been foisted on the public (since its been found that there is some interest and, thus, potential sales among bookstore denizens), and it would be a real shame for the superior Silver Age of Comic Book Art to be lost among them.

This book is a precious gem amid a plethora of worthless baubles.

Arlen Schumer is perhaps the perfect person to step back and write about the ART of comics from a historical perspective. Not only is he a fan of the medium (and it shows) but he trained under the legendary Neal Adams himself. Mr. Schumer has also presented several lectures about the art of comics, as well as having published a few books (Neal Adams the Sketch Book) and written several articles about specific artists (including Comic Book Artist, Print, Comic Book Marketplace, and others). His commercial work (as half of the team "The Dynamic Duo" constantly evokes images of comicbook superheroes.

However, in this work, he goes beyond himself by graphically displaying several of the acclaimed masters of the field from the medium's Silver Age. In this book, he visually presents us with the works of Infantino, Adams, Kirby, Ditko, Kane, Kubert, Colan, Steranko, and more showing us just how these men took an already extraordinary filed, and turned it on its collective ear, while simultaneously catapulting it into the stratosphere.

Simply stated, this is THE book to own if you are interested in Comics (especially the Silver Age)!

This book is a milestone--an audacious take on book design and a great read. Of course I'm a fan of the subject, but this was a new way to look at the art and the period. Arlen Schumer presents the Silver Age in the sprit of the time: sensory overload. Don't expect the usual historical presentation or conventional layout--that's been done before. Schumer has collected a wealth of surprising connections between Silver Age comics and the tumultuous times that inspired them. I was particularly interested in the influence Ditko and Kirby had on 60's poster art. Having worked at the Fillmore East I treasured the work of Stanley Mouse, David Bryd and the other Bay area poster artists who clearly were fans of the comics. Schumer's insights are a tribute to both.

I have a shelf full of histories of comic book art and have read many more that I don't own-THE SILVER AGE OF COMIC BOOK ART stands out for the turned on layouts and the author's passionate text.

This book was of particular interest to me, as it covered the comic book era I grew up in. So many of the lushly reproduced pages in this superior collection were taken from comic books that sat on my nightstand as I grew into a teenager, so I relished looking at them with fresh eyes and reliving those youthful emotions again.

Author Schumer is a true comic book scholar. I've heard him speak on the subject more than once, and he is particularly interested in elevating the appreciation of comic book art to a place we might only reserve for museum-quality pop artists like that of Warhol.

And I must say Schumer makes some excellent points to support his beliefs in this wonderful book.

Many of these illustrators he features, like Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko and Neil Adams, were far more than cartoon storytellers. They were true graphic designers working in fresh ways to reinvigorate a medium that was ready to be taken to a new level.

They consistently tried to push the craft into radically different areas, many of which had me scratching my head as a teenager. "Why doesn't this comic book look like all the others?", I would ask myself.

Well, Schumer answers it in way that made me spend more time looking at the artwork in the last 2 weeks than I have in the last 20 years.

Many of the popular art forms of the age were reflected in the works Shumer highlights in this book. Pschedelic, Op Art, collage, all were used by these pioneers to push their work outside the square borders most comic books were constrained to.

And Schumer goes to great lengths to show the different places each of the illustrators took their craft to. Even those illustrators I had no great love for as a teen were elevated by the author's plentiful use of classic comic book art panels to demonstrate their unique contributions.

All in all, this book will sit on my coffee table for many months. I've already bored several guests by pointing out the classic art panels I used to trace over as a kid, hoping someday to draw like these masters did.

5 stars for Schumer and his homage to the Silver Age.

For me, reading "The Silver Age of Comic Art" was a wonderful experience. If you're going to buy this book, chances are you already love the "Silver Age" of comic art, which lasted from the early Sixties to the mid-Seventies. That being the case, you've probably read all or most of the stories referenced in this book. Thankfully, the author dispenses with tiresome plot summaries and sleep-inducing biographies in favor of a strong focus on the ART, as the book's title indicates.

Numerous comic history books use COVERS to illustrate their stories. Back before the Internet, that was great. But now, every cover to every book is available on-line, so seeing them in history books becomes very boring. "The Silver Age of Comic Art" includes lots of covers to be sure, but the INTERIOR art gets just as much if not more attention.

The text in this book is not lengthy, and it is, as some other reviews have indicated, somewhat hard to read in places. The font used duplicates the lettering in comic books, and the author should probably have used a more common font. That said, I managed to read every word, and found the writing knowledgeable and insightful.

Each artistic giant gets their own chapter, Carmine Infantino, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, etc. Get the hardcover, as other editions delete a whole section of the book on other artists. Bottom line: "The Silver Age of Comic Art" is a unique and deeply-felt analysis of the artistic giants of the comic industry, and a treasure-trove of fun for lovers of Silver Age comics.

Oh, and to those who complained about the book's quotes from Neal Adams, you should know that Neal Adams revolutionized comic book art, and that is a fact. He can say whatever he wants to. You go revolutionize an art form, then you can complain about others.

A fantastic book! Every amazing page is scintillating, pulsing, vibrating, churning, swirling, swooping, writhing, and exploding with visual energy. Arlen Schumer combines comic book images, history, quotations, bibliography, theory, criticism, and his own indefatigable enthusiasm, to create a stunning evocation of an dazzling cultural era and the artists who created it.

I should make a disclosure. Twenty-five years ago at the Rhode Island School of Design, I was supposed to teach Arlen Schumer modern typography and he was supposed to learn it. I knew he loved comics - it was impossible to know him and not know that - but I didn't want to distract him from type, so I didn't mention that I, too, loved the comics of the 60's, particularly Steve Ditko's phantasmagoric "Dr. Strange" and Jim Steranko's cinematographic "Nick Fury".

Arlen's RISD senior design thesis was a wild blend of corporate image design with super-hero personality cult. It was like, "How to portray yourself as a super-hero, graphically speaking". When Arlen gave his presentation to the design faculty and distinguished visiting critics, he had apparently gone without sleep for several days to finish his thesis - maybe that's what super-designers do - and he did seem like a character recently arrived from another world, dazed but ambitious to tackle daunting tasks as soon as he swam up from his subconscious. One of the visiting critics said he didn't understand any of it, but I said that someday we would. And now that day is here.

I haven't seen Arlen for a quarter-century, but in December I read John Strausbaugh's superb New York Times review of "The Silver Age of Comic Book Art", and I knew that Arlen has now put his enthusiasm, his insights, his research, and his selections of the silver age comics into a book that shows the rest of us not only the images and the history, but the dynamism of comic book art, ranking it with the other lively and popular arts of America.

I don't know Arlen Schumer from Adam, but I know that if I were to have someone design my book, this is the guy I'd go to...Now I don't want to seem like some kind of Comic Book Degenerate...But this book is the equivalent of Fan Boy Porn...When I started reading this tome, my palms began to sweat and my heart started beating uncontrolably, and my breathing...well, I can't go into that. This book is like holding a multimedia documentary on Silver Age comics...It's bold, colorful and each page jumps out at you like a perfect frame from the documentary on this subject you've always dreamed about...but instead of disappearing in a rapid succession, this book allows study of each frame until your eyes get tired, and then with the turn of a page, Boom! the sensation starts again! All the artists covered in this book are the ones I grew up with, and collected so I'm there, right from the beginning! But unlike the Marvel and DC Archive/Masterworks books where the designers think they're doing everyone a favor by cleaning up the artwork, and re-coloring the art...this book somehow looks like a real comic...dots and all! Therein lies it's real charm! From the moment I opened it I could not take my eyes off of it...Hell, I want to sleep with this book! This is what a history of Comics should look like, and I can't wait for it's sequel...if you buy the Hardcover, the extra pages seem like they could be taken as a preview of such...Well worth the extra 20 bucks! This might just be the book you've been waiting for!