The Silver Age of Comic Book Art

by Arlen Schumer

Book Overview

Carmine Infantino. Steve Ditko. Jack Kirby. Gil Kane. Joe Kubert. Gene Colan. Jim Steranko. Neal Adams. Some of the greatest comic book artists of their generation, who created some of their greatest... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1888054867
• ISBN13: 9781888054866
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Collectors Press
• Length: 175 Pages
• Weight: 3.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 9.3" x 13.3"

Customer Reviews

High Voltage

This book is a milestone--an audacious take on book design and a great read. Of course I'm a fan of the subject, but this was a new way to look at the art and the period. Arlen Schumer presents the Silver Age in the sprit of the time: sensory overload. Don't expect the usual historical presentation or conventional layout--that's been done before. Schumer has collected a wealth of surprising connections between Silver Age comics and the tumultuous times that inspired them. I was particularly interested in the influence Ditko and Kirby had on 60's poster art. Having worked at the Fillmore East I treasured the work of Stanley Mouse, David Bryd and the other Bay area poster artists who clearly were fans of the comics. Schumer's insights are a tribute to both.I have a shelf full of histories of comic book art and have read many more that I don't own-THE SILVER AGE OF COMIC BOOK ART stands out for the turned on layouts and the author's passionate text.

Elevating the Art to its Rightful Place

This book was of particular interest to me, as it covered the comic book era I grew up in. So many of the lushly reproduced pages in this superior collection were taken from comic books that sat on my nightstand as I grew into a teenager, so I relished looking at them with fresh eyes and reliving those youthful emotions again.Author Schumer is a true comic book scholar. I've heard him speak on the subject more than once, and he is particularly interested in elevating the appreciation of comic book art to a place we might only reserve for museum-quality pop artists like that of Warhol. And I must say Schumer makes some excellent points to support his beliefs in this wonderful book.Many of these illustrators he features, like Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko and Neil Adams, were far more than cartoon storytellers. They were true graphic designers working in fresh ways to reinvigorate a medium that was ready to be taken to a new level.They consistently tried to push the craft into radically different areas, many of which had me scratching my head as a teenager. "Why doesn't this comic book look like all the others?", I would ask myself.Well, Schumer answers it in way that made me spend more time looking at the artwork in the last 2 weeks than I have in the last 20 years.Many of the popular art forms of the age were reflected in the works Shumer highlights in this book. Pschedelic, Op Art, collage, all were used by these pioneers to push their work outside the square borders most comic books were constrained to.And Schumer goes to great lengths to show the different places each of the illustrators took their craft to. Even those illustrators I had no great love for as a teen were elevated by the author's plentiful use of classic comic book art panels to demonstrate their unique contributions.All in all, this book will sit on my coffee table for many months. I've already bored several guests by pointing out the classic art panels I used to trace over as a kid, hoping someday to draw like these masters did.5 stars for Schumer and his homage to the Silver Age.

Artists Doing Their Jobs

I recently acquired the excellent book The Silver Age of Comic Book Art by Arlen Schumer, and have been joyfully looking it over ever since.The timing is interesting, since I just finished incorporating several thousand newer comics into my main comics collection, something that gave me the opportunity to revisit comics from the 1930s to the present time, with a lot of the material being from that same 1950s/1960s era that is covered so well in Arlen Schumer's book.I've tried to stay away from the type of thinking that elevates the things of the past and denigrates current works, and I do realize that great things exist in all time periods. Still, I've found that the comic books of that time period (and especially the examples that are covered in Schumer's book) have an honesty and a lack of pretension about them that exemplify true artistry and offer a timeless quality, while contemporary examples of the same type of stuff seem cold and calculated and so blatant in their attempts to be "on the cutting edge" that they are often hopelessly dated by the time they see print. A lot of current comics material seems to be a more cut-throat version of the lesser works of the latter 1960s wherein misguided and inept ... but straightforwardly innocent ... attempts were made by forty-year old comics creators to speak to their assumed young readership in what they mistakenly took to be those readers' own "fab" and "groovy" language.It's wonderful to contrast that artificiality with the examples that Schumer offers in The Silver Age of Comic Book Art. He introduces the uninitiated to ... and not-too-subtly reminds the long-time devotees of ... a group of men who, in the process of simply "doing their jobs," wound up creating important and lasting art.It can be hoped that the book will do well. So many recent books, either made up of cobbled-together "graphic novels" or hurriedly written commentaries on the form and its interesting history, have been foisted on the public (since its been found that there is some interest and, thus, potential sales among bookstore denizens), and it would be a real shame for the superior Silver Age of Comic Book Art to be lost among them.This book is a precious gem amid a plethora of worthless baubles.

Top-of-the-line Coffee Table Art Book!

Arlen Schumer is perhaps the perfect person to step back and write about the ART of comics from a historical perspective. Not only is he a fan of the medium (and it shows) but he trained under the legendary Neal Adams himself. Mr. Schumer has also presented several lectures about the art of comics, as well as having published a few books (Neal Adams the Sketch Book) and written several articles about specific artists (including Comic Book Artist, Print, Comic Book Marketplace, and others). His commercial work (as half of the team "The Dynamic Duo" constantly evokes images of comicbook superheroes.However, in this work, he goes beyond himself by graphically displaying several of the acclaimed masters of the field from the medium's Silver Age. In this book, he visually presents us with the works of Infantino, Adams, Kirby, Ditko, Kane, Kubert, Colan, Steranko, and more showing us just how these men took an already extraordinary filed, and turned it on its collective ear, while simultaneously catapulting it into the stratosphere.Simply stated, this is THE book to own if you are interested in Comics (especially the Silver Age)!