Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes, 1936-1941

The enduring cultural phenomenon of comic book heroes was invented in the late 1930s by a talented and hungry group of artists and writers barely out of their teens, flying by the seat of their pants to create something new, exciting, and above all profitable. The iconography and mythology they created flourishes to this day in comic books, video, movies, fine art, advertising, and practically all other media. Supermen! collects the best and the brightest of this first generation, including Jack Cole, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Lou Fine, Fletcher Hanks, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Basil Wolverton. If the reader is expecting to find an All-American group of altruistic do-gooders, he in for quite a jolt. As Jonathan Lethem writes in his Foreword, “A collection like Supermen! works like a reverse-neutron bomb to assumptions about the birth of the superhero image: it tears down the orderly structures of theory and history and leaves the figures standing in full view, staring back at us in all their defiant disorienting particularity, their blazing strangeness.” Beautifully designed and produced in full color, Supermen! contains twenty full-length stories, ten full- sized covers, and a generous selection of vintage promotional ads, and is indispensable to anyone interested in the origins of superheroes and the history of the comic book form.

Comic book historian Greg Sadowski has produced more than a few books for Fantagraphics, including landmark volumes on Alex Toth, Bernard Krigstein, and Basil Wolverton. He resides in Asbury Park, NJ, where he looks after the B. Krigstein archives and plays the music of Django Reinhardt with his acoustic trio, OG Swing.


Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.