Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Author:Gerard Jones [Jones, Gerard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2004-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

9

The Whirlwind

Suddenly there were a dozen comics publishers, then two dozen, then more, popping up all through midtown Manhattan. In his attack on comics Sterling North had called them a “mushroom growth.” The description applied better to the businesses that made the things—the pulp houses, printing companies, sheet music publishers, small-time distributors, toy makers, and rooms full of art school dropouts who plunged into the business. Superman and Action stayed on top of the heap for a while, but then Captain Marvel and its companion magazine, Whiz, slipped ahead, and Batman and Detective rose quickly behind. New comics—titles like Flash, Hit, Crack, Pep, Zip, Speed—came out of nowhere to become hits. Several comics were selling over a million copies an issue by 1941. Pap that hardly anyone in the business noticed was selling 100,000 or 200,000.

Production was limited not by the market but by time on the printers’ schedules and the availability of paper. Sometimes a sudden windfall of paper or cash brought a comic book into existence out of nothing. Lev Gleason, former printing salesman newly flung into the ranks of publishers, found himself with a chance to reserve a few million pages of pulp one day in early 1941. The catch was that he had to stake his claim for it immediately or someone else would get it and that he had to turn it into something salable immediately or the distributor wouldn’t advance him the money to pay the bill. So Gleason bought the paper with the promise that he’d have his comic’s pages at the printers on the following Monday. Except that it was Friday, and he didn’t have a comic to print.

Gleason turned to his favorite cartoonist and packager, Charlie Biro, and said, “Get me sixty-four pages by Monday morning.” All he asked was that his one name superhero, Daredevil, have the lead story. How they filled the rest of the pages would be up to them. Biro shared a cheap art studio on 52nd Street, among jazz clubs and strip joints, with his best friend, Bob Wood, and Batman’s star artist, Jerry Robinson. Wood brought in his brothers, Dick and Dave, to help. Robinson brought in his roommates, Bernie Klein and Mort Meskin, and a fellow ghost artist for Bob Kane, George Roussos. They were all nineteen or twenty years old and had already been published comics artists for at least a year.

They had two drawing tables in the place, one of them big enough for two guys to squeeze onto. Whoever wasn’t at a table worked on the floor or propped a board on his knees. They plunged in with loud jokes and insults, making up stories and characters, breaking down pages in pencil, flying through Friday night smoking and drinking coffee. Robinson created “London,” a newsman covering the London blitz who puts on a mask to fight the Nazis. He didn’t know it, but it was the first comic book story to tackle the real events of the war. Roussos liked the

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