Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book - Tapa dura

This first full-scale history of superhero comic books reveals how ambitious crooks and adolescent dreamers created a new art form and forever changed the entertainment business In the depths of the Depression, out of bustling cities and crowded tenements, the comic book superhero leapt into being. A strange collection of young men from working-class Jewish neighbourhoods and shady backgrounds transformed a mix of geekiness, science fiction and outsider yearning into blue-eyed, chisel-nosed crime-fighters and adventurers who quickly captured imaginations young and old. Within a few years their inventions had spawned a new genre in movies, radio and television that still dominates youth entertainment seventy years later. Animated by the stories of some of the last century's most charismatic and conniving artists, writers and businessmen, Men of Tomorrow brilliantly demonstrates how the creators of the superheroes gained their cultural power and established a crucial place in the modern imagination.

Gerard Jones, comic book writer and author of The Comic Book Heroes and Killing Monsters, draws on exhaustive research to portray how the immigrant experience and the collision of Yiddish and American culture - forged in the crucible of two world wars - shaped the vision of the make-believe hero. He chronicles how the comics sparked a frightened counterattack that nearly destroyed the industry in the 1950's, and how later they surged back at an underground level, to inspire a new generation to transmute those long-ago fantasies into art, literature, blockbuster movies and graphic novels.