Hey Kids! Comics! Volume III #3 // Review
A code is created that puts an entire company out of business. Later on, there’s a fateful conversation between publishers at a golf course that changes the course of pop cultural history. A legend is born in a company that comes to dominate a rejuvenated industry. All this and so much more make it to the comics page in Hey Kids! Comics! Volume III #3. Writer/artist Howard Chaykin frames some classic moments from the dawn of the Silver Age of Comics with thinly-veiled characters based on beloved comics creators. It’s really sharp stuff for people familiar with that end of the history of the industry. For everyone else, it’s going to be kind of confusing.
The business is crashing and burning. Artists and writers are being offered the same work for FAR less pay. There’s a talented guy named Sid Mitchell. He has a great work ethic and a hell of an eye for framing action in a panel, but is having a hell of a time selling himself and his work. Things are turning around, though. Yankee Publishing is still on top, but there’s this new company that’s starting up called Verve. Bob Rose is going to start working with Sid Mitchell. It’s going to change everything.
Chaykin has the look and feel of the era down perfectly. The narrative moves around with a clever swagger as it illustrates some key moments in the Interregnum Period and the Silver Age. Chaykin’s framing of EC’s response to the Comics Code is sharp as hell. The golf game between Martin Goodman and Jack Liebowitz that created Marvel comes across with straightforward intensity. Chaykin does remarkably subtle work with his characterization of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby...who aren’t actually shown working together, but man...Chaykin has done such a good job of framing legendary events in the history of comics that it’s impossible to read the dialogue of “Bob Rose” without hearing the voice of Stan Lee.
Chaykin’s art has a way of delivering depth to the page in a way that also remains true to the spirit and form of the comics medium. There are moments in the layout that come across as sheer genius--amplifying and augmenting the idea of sequential art while simultaneously showing the repetition of it all through stacking the drama vertically and composing the action on the page in a way that draws a tremendous amount of impact from even very, very subtle moments of drama.
One wonders how easy it might be to do something really, really similar to this that DIDN’T thinly veil everyone’s identity. It might not work as well, though. Any history of the comic book industry (and there have been A LOT of them over the years) tends to focus on companies, characters, and personalities. What Chaykin is doing with this incredibly clever series is…telling history with a focus on the people. Names like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Marvel and DC and EC are way too big. Taking away the names, the fame, and the legend allows Chaykin to focus his history on the people who built an industry that has had a profound impact on pop culture.
