Comic book collections were featured once again in this week's New York Times Book Review, in the lead article written by Douglas Wolk, who has become the Book Review's go-to-guy for comic book material.  Wolk begins with an appreciation of the Fantagraphics’ anthology, Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes (1936-41), a yeasty collection of early superhero tales; and then discusses Jonathan Lethem, Karl Rusnak and Farel Dalrymple’s Omega the Unknown; and Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman Vol.2.

 

Wolk clearly enjoys most of the selections in what he characterizes as Fantagraphics’ Supermen, “a rambunctious anthology of the earliest superhero stories,” which was edited by Golden Age comics historian Greg Sadowski.  Sadowski pays particular attention to Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s “Dr. Mystic,” a two-page story published a full two years before the Man of Steel appeared in 1938, and to the wildly hyperbolic visions of Fletcher Hanks, some of whose works Fantagraphics previously collected in the aptly titled I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets.

 

It makes sense for Wolk to turn his attention next to Lethem’s Omega the Unknown from Marvel Comics, which the author calls “a serious parody of old superhero comics.”  Omega is also a very adventurous superhero project—Lethem finds a way to include a comic-within-a-comic drawn by Gary Panter.  Wolk concludes his evaluation of Omega by noting that “of all the prose writers who have tried their hand at comics in the past few years, Lethem has the greatest sensitivity to the capacities of the form,” and marveling that “the final 22-page chapter includes only eight words of dialogue.”

 

If Lethem is Wolk’s favorite novelist-turned-comic book writer, then Grant Morrison is clearly one of his favorite scribes to rise from within the genre.  Wolk characterizes Morrison’s All-Star Superman from DC Comics as “full of mad, cartwheeling invention and airy open spaces.”  According to Wolk, Morrison and Quitely don’t subvert the familiar tropes of the superhero genre, they “simply execute them with elegance, wit and atomic precision…nearly every visual detail and line of dialogue has some subtler implication or resonance that emerges on re-reading”—high praise of a kind that just might induce some civilians to sample the delights of this trio of superhero comic collections.