Source: amazon.com
4. The Great Comic Book Heroes
Jules Feiffer is easily one of the most important people in the history of comic books.
In the Fifties, the editor for DC comics was in love with the out-of-fashion comics characters from the Golden Age, and he wanted to bring them back. He combined those old-school characters with his deep love of science fiction, and birthed the Silver Age of Comics.
Barry Allen? Hal Jordan? Ray Palmer? All of them exist because of Feiffer’s love of comics. In 1965, Feiffer wrote a long-form essay about the superheroes of the Forties. It’s one of the earliest critical pieces on superheroes and was written by a guy who reinvented the genre.
It’s a fascinating cultural artifact, and one of the few histories of the genre written before the pop art revolution of the late Sixties brought superheroes back to relevance.
