I love this book. It's taken me two nights just to get to page 32--it's that detailed and dense--and I'm already learning new details about a period I find fascinating. This is the earliest days of comics--its origins. Mitchell starts in 1934, even touching on the pulps, magazines and radio, and tells how comics came to dominate popular culture. Here's the inside story of the "shops," the eccentric publishers, the trials and errors of the early days. The great editors, the young spunky creators, And then year by year, starting in 1940, what was happening throughout the comics world during its meteoric rise to being part of nearly every kid's world.

We see early on how Superman changed everything, and comics went from anthology titles imitating the pulps, to putting super-heros front and center. But not all of the time, as publishers like Dell and DC kept pushing the evelope, with humor, funny animals, movie comics, Real Fact comics and much more. But best, he puts it all in perspective of the world at that time, and also examines ALL the top and all the secondary publishers, creators and heroes, too-often overlooked in company-centric histories or less careful general histories. Wonderfully illustrated with rare photos of creators and publishers, inside pages, panels and covers.