Howard Chaykin writes and illustrates a roman à clef graphic novel of the comic book industry from the 1940s to 2015 with a Mad Men gloss, telling truths, tall tales and urban legends about lightly disguised figures like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and more. There's corporate malfeasance and personal foibles galore -- so much infidelity! -- as well all the racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and sexism one would expect of the times involved.

I've enjoyed Chaykin's work in the past, but this one just sort of bored and occasionally lost me as it repeatedly jumped through back and forth through many decades in short, choppy scenes with its large, mostly unlikable or barely sketched cast. It didn't help that I had already heard most of the stories and gossip through my many years of reading about the comic book industry.

There's a second volume available in this series, but the only reason I might read it is to play a game of picking out all the real people and characters Chaykin is satirizing. I'm on the fence right now. ( )

Howard Chaykin’s Hey Kids! Comics! focuses on comic book writers, artists, and publishers at several fictional companies between 1945 and the early 2000s, tracking the history of the medium from the postwar slump through the 1960s resurgence of the Silver Age, ending with the new talent of the 1990s re-inventing the classics while film adaptations turned what was published as a disposable medium into mainstream culture. In an afterward, Chaykin writes, “I wanted to do a roman à clef about a healthy chunk of the history of our curious and intimately tiny industry…based on common and private knowledge, salacious rumor, comic anecdote and frankly, unsubstantiated gossip too delicious to disregard, regardless of any measure of proof” (pg. 148, ellipses in original). He continues, “We invest the material with a dee-seated and occasionally unconditional nostalgic love. This is despite the fact that many of its most creative and fabled practitioners – certainly those men and women who created the language and bult the foundations in the decades before comics achieved a measure of popular appeal – spent lives of disappointment, working in an industry that treated them with contempt, nagged by the reality of simply being not good enough to find a more legitimate way to make a living” (pg. 149). In this, Chaykin challenges his readers to understand what comics creators went through during the years of struggle and what they now experience seeing the work they produced at six pages a day on pulp paper become a massive industry that dominates the entertainment world, while they continue to receive little if any recognition or share of the sudden profits. In terms of its topic and verisimilitude, Chaykin’s story resembles Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, though Chaykin benefits from his perspective as an insider in the medium and is primarily focused on the comics industry, rather than using it as a backdrop for a larger narrative. His keen insight will be of interest to those considering the field or who have ever been curious about what it was “really” like during the Gold and Silver Ages of comics. ( )