Popular Comic

How is it that comic books - the once-reviled form of lowbrow popular culture - are now the rage for Hollywood blockbusters, the basis for best-selling video games, and the inspiration for literary graphic novels? In Demanding Respect, Paul Lopes immerses himself in the discourse and practices of this art and subculture to provide a social history of the American comic book over the last 75 years.

In this insightful and provocative book, comics-industry veteran Danny Fingeroth explores the backgrounds of the most well-known superheroes and their creators—largely young American Jewish men from Eastern European backgrounds. These innovators include Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Will Eisner, and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. In Disguised as Clark Kent, Fingeroth explores how the creators’ Jewish backgrounds helped make superheroes the most familiar popular-culture icons of all.

When it comes to superheroes of the silver screen, nobody knows more than the masterminds behind the wildly popular Comicstorian YouTube channel. This definitive guide to comic book films divulges behind-the-scenes secrets and the hidden history behind these must-see movies including how, after very rocky beginnings, they shot to the top with DC and Marvel as two of the most important franchises in the industry.

Comic-Con International is the world capital of fandom. Every year 130,000 people flock to San Diego for a five-day marathon of Hollywood star power, sensory overload, gigantic shopping bags, grand feats of imagination, tacky nostalgia, very long lines, and people dressed up as Princess Leia. It's the place where people who love the fantastic side of culture go to express that love and where the companies that want to sell them fantasies in every possible medium try desperately to woo them.