This week’s recommendation is not a comic book but rather a good ole fashioned REAL book. I recently finished Forgotten All-Star: A Biography of Gardner Fox by Jennifer DeRoss, and I can highly recommend it.
With all the interest on creators these days you would think there would be more biographies or at least autobiographies out there. There are if you know where to look. But many usually have small print runs and are hard to find. Not so with this book and a good thing too.
When we think of comic books today, especially when we look at many of the super-heroes from DC comics, we are basically looking at Gardner Fox. Fox had such an influence on the genre and many of the heroes that we know today came from his pen and typewriter and still are active today. Just to name a few:
The Flash (Jay Garrick)
Hawkman (Katar Hol)
Justice League of America
Adam Strange
You get the idea. And it wasn’t just the characters that he helped develop but also the plotting styles, the idea to split teams up and to try to have a moral in the story. Fox started in the Golden Age and then helped usher in the Silver Age. He was a big deal and what’s important is that it does look like he took comic books seriously.
DeRoss does a wonderful job of not only exploring his life but also analyzing his contribution to the medium. She takes a very academic approach, which is quite appropriate, and she handles some of the themes such as gender and the treatment of females characters during the period very well. Plus, you get a big more insight into the comic book industry and some of the tragedies that ensued that upended Fox’s career, such as when Fox took a stand for more pay and better work conditions that resulted in a massive firing of creators. DeRoss covers it all.
And as mentioned above, the book is very accessible and you can order it from your country’s Amazon, no problem. I find this period of comics particularly fascinating because it really was the period that started it all and all that came after had a very rich foundation to build off of. And the creators couldn’t have done it without Gardner Fox.
I do know Jennifer DeRoss has been toying with the idea to do more biographies on Golden Age and Silver Age creators. And I do hope she does because these legends should not be forgotten and need to be kept alive not only in our memories but also in the conversations we have with each other, as lovers of the comic book medium.
-Franka