REVIEW: We’ve been serializing Arlen Schumer‘s baby, but you really should get a complete copy of your own.
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I’m a Bronze Age baby.
I was born in the late ’60s and came of age as a comics fan in the ’70s. But I was still exposed to Silver Age comics since they weren’t that old. Y’know, they were still around.
I got my first stack of them from my parents’ friends, the Sperlings. I remember a visit where I left with a bunch of comics that had belonged to their son. I can’t remember all of them, but these were two of them:
I fell in love with them, of course. Comics like these were the closest you could get to the Adam West TV show, though I was quickly aware of the differences.
As time went on, I built a healthy Silver Age collection, though the term itself was generally foreign to me. They were ’60s comics and I loved them.
Because of Batman, I was a DC fan. Marvel Comics seemed a little too weird, a little too off. They were a little intimidating. It wasn’t until much later that I learned to appreciate them, even if they didn’t reverberate so intensely with that child inside the soul of every comics fan.
This is all a long-winded way of saying you should go grab Arlen Schumer’s The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, which is doubtlessly the most profoundly felt love letter to the artists of the Silver Age I’ve ever seen.
We’ve been serializing it over the last two months and we have two segments to go, including the one I’ve been waiting for the most: The column on Neal Adams, which will debut here Monday.
I’ll tell you now, I’m going to miss running the pieces because each week I’ve been able to soak up the likes of Carmine Infantino or Gil Kane or Jim Steranko.
The pages are saturated with color and excitement and only a truly passionate person could have put together a book like this in just this way. Comics history books tend to be beautiful anyway, but they sometimes feel a little antiseptic.
Not this book. This book is as garish a comics art book as you’ll ever find, and I mean that in the best way. I curled up with my copy and made sure to check out every page.
The Silver Age of Comics Art not only celebrates an era, it feels like it’s a part of it.
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To order a signed hardcover from Arlen directly, hit up www.arlenschumer.com. There are also links to Archway Publishing (an offshoot of Simon & Schuster) for the unsigned hardcover and an e-book edition.
