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SUPERMEN! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-41

By Jessica Schneider Mar 6, 2009, 8:58 GMT

In the wake of Fantagraphics\' I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks comes Supermen!, a collection of never-before-reprinted oddities from cartoonists working at the dawn of the comic-book format. Featuring such luminaries of the field as Fletcher Hanks, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Basil Wolverton, Jack Cole, Ogden Whitney, Lou Fine, Charles Biro, Dick Briefer and many more! ...more

This should get all comic fans excited. “SUPERMEN! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-41” has been released by Fantagraphics.

The NYT describes the book as: “a rambunctious anthology of the earliest superhero stories — gaudy, crude, infernally potent things, cranked out by scrappy young cartoonists who were more concerned with what the likes of Silver Streak, Yarko the Great and Skyrocket Steele could do than with what they might mean.”

Edited by Greg Sadowski, the product description states: “In the wake of Fantagraphics' I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks comes Supermen!, a collection of never-before-reprinted oddities from cartoonists working at the dawn of the comic-book format. Featuring such luminaries of the field as Fletcher Hanks, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Basil Wolverton, Jack Cole, Ogden Whitney, Lou Fine, Charles Biro, Dick Briefer and many more!”

The NYT also notes: “Their stories have the same frantic tumble of calamities and grotesqueries, the same orphan-threatening menaces and square-jawed, tough-talking heroes, the same prose so overheated it threatens to singe its readers’ eyeballs.”

Read the review here. More info can be found on Amazon.