HEY KIDS! COMICS! takes its cue from nearly a century of turbulence and triumph, despair and drama in the comics racket.
Artists and writers, con men and clowns, ganefs and gangsters create the foundations of today's biggest entertainment business-or at least the tail that wags the dog.
Some of it really happened, and the names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty...
...although in the end, everyone was guilty of something.
HEY KIDS! COMICS! takes its cue from nearly a century of turbulence and triumph, despair and drama in the comics racket.
Artists and writers, con men and clowns, ganefs and gangsters create the foundations of today's biggest entertainment business-or at least the tail that wags the dog.
Some of it really happened, and the names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty...
...although in the end, everyone was guilty of something.
HEY KIDS! COMICS! takes its cue from nearly a century of turbulence and triumph, despair and drama in the comics racket.
Artists and writers, con men and clowns, ganefs and gangsters create the foundations of today's biggest entertainment business-or at least the tail that wags the dog.
Some of it really happened, and the names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty...
...although in the end, everyone was guilty of something.
Collects HEY KIDS! COMICS! #1-5
Digging deeper into the sordid, seedy, and always-entertaining lives of the men and women who built the comic book business, volume two of HOWARD CHAYKIN's acclaimed comic à clef tells the story of those who pushed the boundaries of the lowest common denominator-at their own peril-and those happy enough to ride the waves others created. Along the way there's exploitation, Blaxploitation, custom toilet paper, death at the dinner table, and plenty more, as fans turn pro and pros turn bitter.
It all begins with a generation of artists who view their life’s work as dismal failures and a waste of that life…in service to a medium that refuses to die, grinding its way through generation after generation…until it collides with creatives who can’t even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to do anything else.
This is the history of comic books, alongside the misbegotten midwife whose growth, whose refusal to truly grow, serves as its decades-long and distorted mirro...