The Image episode is unique -- you're on camera for it quite a bit, and obviously in your career you've been closely involved with many of the primary folks involved. What was producing that episode like for you?

Winner of the Popular Culture Association's Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular or American Culture

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Originally, Commercial made political comic books. The first, prepared for the 1948 election, was The Story of Harry S. Truman. This was followed by a number of pro-segregation comic books made for Southern governors seeking reelection. At the same time, Ater produced comics for the State Department denouncing international communism. While the government discouraged foreign distribution of commercial comic books, some did occasionally serve official purposes. An issue of T-Man: World Wide Crime Buster anticipates the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that deposed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Patty Jenkins, the director of 2017’s Wonder Woman which broke the record for the biggest grossing live-action film directed by a woman and became the highest grossing film of the summer. That kind of narrowed things down for us a little bit. I really wanted to do a Steve Ditko episode, for instance, but that's very problematic, because he is so extremely press shy. We couldn't really figure out a way into that that wouldn't have been just copying Jonathan Ross's brilliant In Search of Steve Ditko piece that he did for the BBC. It was a long process, but in certain cases, it was, "Hey, we can get this person, or we can get that person, and it'll be really fascinating to have them talking on the subject."

Taylor adds, “Shuster and Siegel’s fight for justice resonates with what Superman stands for. I really believe people are going to watch this and see Superman from a more informed perspective.” The comic book’s disruptive potential ran parallel to its popularity. Comic book circulation had been 17 million in 1940; by 1953, there were 650 titles with a combined circulation of 70 million. Before television saturated American society in the mid-1950s, comic books were the key cultural form consumed by kids and, despite their numerous adult readers, were still considered a form of juvenile entertainment. Hence the moral panic precipitated by the crime and horror comics. Did you know that the first ever comic book was created in Glasgow?". Archived from the original on 2013-12-27 . Retrieved 2012-12-17. The British Resistance, every bit as noble as the French Resistance in World War Two. Writers like E.D. Morel and Sylvia Pankhurst and activists like John Maclean and the Red Clyde movement. The legendary Alice Wheeldon and her family, and John S. Clarke who were part of an ‘underground railroad’, a secret network throughout the country that enabled deserters and conscientious objectors to make ‘home runs’ to safety. The Battle readers who were into Charley’s War when they were just nine or ten years old but who had the foresight to recognise its importance and make it a success long before it was ever noticed by adults.

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The new, six-part documentary series takes a deeper look into the many stories and creators that make up the world of comic books. Featuring interviews with comic book icons such as the legendary Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel and many of our most popular Marvel superheroes including Spider-Man, Superman, Hulk, X-Men, The Avengers and countless more popular characters. Two books stand out above all the others I consulted. Hidden History: The Secret History of the First World War and Prolonging the Agony: How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WW1 by Three-and-a-Half Years by Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor. Ignored by the media and the establishment, their books are game-changers. There is no answer to the charges against the establishment they raise, except ‘guilty’. And their books and documentaries about their work are now known world-wide. When I wrote Accident Man with Tony Skinner, we were often lying in a wilderness amongst the bluebells and congratulating ourselves that we didn’t have a ‘real job’.

However, Goodman does not appear to have conceived of content as “intellectual property” in the sense that we now use that term. To him it was just words and art that he could print on paper again and sell again; it was still merely available content for print publication. In the 1960s he gave away the TV rights to Spider Man, thinking of it as free advertising for his comic book. All of this book’s research and content is very welcome, and it comes at a good time. Sean Howe’s recent Marvel Comics: The Untold Story(2012) provided an authoritative history of Marvel comic books; this book expands our understanding of the publishing industry context in which those comics were produced, and it gives us an unprecedented portfolio of non-comic book art from some notable comic book artists. It's really just a matter of keeping things interesting. I think once you see these episodes, every one of these stories has fascinating twists and turns, and things you wouldn't expect. It's great because it's all true. There's definitely a dramatic narrative to the lives of these people. In some cases, it's a lot of tragedy. But that does make for a very compelling story.Magazine-like compilations of newspaper comic strips first appeared in the early 1930s, around the time that newspaper strips increasingly became vehicles for action and adventure tales. The mid-’30s saw the emergence of original comic books with titles like Thrilling Wonder Stories. These began to flourish, and the year 1938 brought their apotheosis with the creation of Superman. Soon, each monthly installment of his adventures, published in National Periodical’s Action Comics, was selling nearly 1 million copies. Writer Robert Kirkman has become one of the comic book industry’s most important creators over the past decade and a half, and not just because of the massive success of his creation, The Walking Dead, but also his work on books like Invincible for Image Comics , and for Marvel Comics, several years of Ultimate X-Men. Now Kirkman and AMC have teamed up once again, this time producing the six part documentary series Robert Kirkman’s The Secret History of Comics. The Trials of Superman” episode examines the comic book origins of Superman and the legal aftermath that plagued its creators, Joe Shuster (Blaine Anderson) and Jerry Siegel (Brendan Taylor). I’d like to first thank the artist co-creator Joe for his genius art and supreme professionalism in maintaining such a constant high standard throughout the original ten Titan volumes of the story. And now the three larger volumes from Rebellion. Especially for the humanity and humour Joe brought to the saga. And Joe’s family for their fantastic ongoing support. In particular his daughter Jane Colquhoun, who is also an artist. For Kirkman, his favorite part of making this series “was just seeing all the things our research team had dug up, how the episodes came together, and seeing some of the things in the episodes that surprised me. Because I didn’t think for an instant that there would be times in the show where I found out new information that I didn’t already know, or any secret history that I wasn’t aware of. But it actually happened more than a few times, and it was pretty great every time it happened.”

For Anderson and Taylor, “The Trials of Superman” represents a new milestone in their unique and diverse careers. In 1843, Töpffer formalised his thoughts on the picture story in his Essay on Physiognomics: "To construct a picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master craftsman, to draw out every potential from your material—often down to the dregs! It does not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is it simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a pun. You must actually invent some kind of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory whole. You do not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a book: good or bad, sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense." [14] [15] [16] Panels from the illustrated story Some of the Mysteries of Loan and Discount, featuring Ally Sloper (1867). Other areas of the comics world have managed to get past attitudes like Bondoux’s. The Eisner Awards, awarded at the San Diego Comic Con since 1988 and often referred to as “the Oscars of the comics industry”, had its first female winner in 1992, when Karen Berger won for her work as editor on Sandman. But they’re also written because I like to hang out with readers, tell them what was going on with my stories, what to expect or not expect in future, and hear what you have to say. Examples of early sequential art can be found in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek friezes, Rome's Trajan's Column (dedicated in 110 AD), Maya script, medieval tapestries such as the Bayeux Tapestry and illustrated Christian manuscripts. In medieval paintings, multiple sequential scenes of the same story (usually a Biblical one) appear simultaneously in the same painting.Hirsch ends his history with the rise of Marvel. The saga has continued into the present day, however, with the superheroes invented by Marvel and its rival, DC Comics, dominating Hollywood, once again offering the world a questionable image of the United States and perhaps the way our culture views itself. Pulp Empire does not elaborate on this latest chapter. Rather, its alternately admiring and adversarial—not to mention obsessive—comic book history documents, with passion and disappointment, one fan’s discovery that his idol has two faces and feet of clay. Or, if you want to argue that Captain America, The Human Torch, and The Sub-Mariner (three different creators) are intrinsically better than the 179 early masked heroes that we’ve forgotten, then maybe Martin Goodman knew how to choose winners. Maybe he is the indisputable “creator” of Marvel Comics. Interesting evolution, the name "comics" was derived years ago from strips in newspapers being funny, or "comic." As a kid in the 1950s I recall looking forward to the Sunday paper each week to read the comic strips. And then came comic books, again with the focus on funny stories. J.K. Simmons, the iconic actor who has had roles in both Spider-Man as the incorrigible editor-in-chief of the Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson, and in Robert Kirkman’s Invincible as Omni-Man. They deserve the highest accolades and prizes for their important and very readable books which are changing the way we see the Great War.