It was more than three years ago when Hill & Wang publisher Thomas LeBien told me that he wanted to do a graphic history volume that told the story of America through its most important documents, and asked me if I was interested in taking on the assignment. Of course I said “yes.”
I knew that I wanted to narrate the stories with a character, mostly because history books with omniscient narration are, basically, textbooks. This was to be an ancillary text, enrichment on the subject, and so I wanted someone to tell the stories and walk the readers through the living corridors of our history.
Initial false starts included using a bookworm or a mouse to narrate, the idea being that one was stuck in the Library of Congress and bored, and so begins to read some of the vast trove of historical documents the LoC contains. But that skewed too young; the book is aimed at students in grades 9 through 12, as well as a general adult audience.
I asked longtime comics historian and illustrator Arlen Schumer to do some spec work for the project. We batted a few ideas around, and then I said, “You know what, give me Uncle Sam bursting through the Declaration of Independence, looking at the readers, like he does in James Montgomery Flagg’s famous recruiting poster, and saying “Read this book!” Arlen ran with the concept and did a brilliant series of cover roughs. (Unfortunately, H&W decided not to use them . . . but that’s a different story for another time.)
Now I had my embodied narrator to take us through American history. I spoke with several agents about writers and illustrators, and a couple of young, talented people were recommended. I even sent one a contract, but ultimately it didn’t work out—we had differing visions for the book.
So I told the publisher I was thinking of asking Ernie Colón to illustrate. Ernie had already done a bestselling volume on the 9/11 Commission Report for H&W with Sid Jacobson. And to script, I suggested Ernie’s wife, author and teacher Ruth Ashby (who was my first editor in books when I made the switch over from periodicals). Although Ruth had never scripted a graphic continuity before, she is intimately familiar with the field, and had already done many books on various aspects of American history.
Ruth and Ernie had never worked together on a graphic project before. How did it all work out? Well, the simple answer is “Buy the book and see.” But the short answer is “Splendidly!” And the reviewers seem to agree.
I spent time over the Memorial Day weekend catching up on the current genre films. I saw Spider-Man 2 and the latest remake of Godzilla. Here in New York, to see these in a first-run house, it cost $17.50 per seat. Yes, the seats were reserved in advance online. And yes, the showing was in 3-D. But, really.
Go and find a digital version of the original Japanese film (Gojira), where the monster is a metaphor for the horrible evil of unleashing atomic weapons on innocent civilians—which had happened to the Japanese only a few years before. The film was recently remastered, restored, and released into the American market. It’s like seeing the original Hong Kong versions of Bruce Lee’s early films. It’s the real deal.
Okay, there you have the 7 scariest moves that I ever saw. They were meant to scare us, and they succeeded brilliantly. But there is one other movie I have not mentioned. It was not a horror movie, or a thriller, or sc-fi or, God help us, a slasher film. It is a Disney work—one of the early, wonderful, fully painted animateds. No, I’m not talking about Bambi, which surprised a lot of mothers around the country when their kids went to Saturday matinees and came home hysterical, totally traumatized by the scene in which Bambi’s mother dies in the forest fire. That was terrible, but I saw Bambi with my mother, so the fear of losing her was not scary to me. I mean, there she was, sitting right next to me, holding my hand.
No, the Disney movie that scared the bejeezus out of me was Pinocchio. At that time, Disney would periodically bring back their animated feature films for kiddie matinees, smart enough to realize there was a new audience for them every few years. I was seven when I went to see Pinocchio with my sister on a Saturday afternoon. She was bored. I was horrified.
In this one, there are only three people trapped together, in the mountains, for an entire winter—one of which is a little boy. The other two are his parents. I’m referring, of course, to the cataclysmic combination of America’s best storyteller and one of America’s best filmmakers of all time: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, adapted from the novel by Stephen King. With the passing of Ray Bradbury, I think it’s safe to say that King is our greatest living teller of tales. And I think Kubrick was the apotheosis of American filmmaking in the second half of the twentieth century.
In The Shining, Kubrick takes a brilliant ghost story by Stephen King and makes it scarier, more personal. We find out early on that Danny Torrence’s father has previously done physical damage to the boy, a combination of frustration and alcohol. And those were the good days for this family. Jack Nicholson’s descent into madness, along with the fact that the Overlook Hotel is haunted, let’s you know fairly early on that this won’t end well. The inevitability of doom is palpable, almost unbearable. King reveals in Doctor Sleep, the new novel that is a sequel to The Shining, that the Overlook is not just haunted; it is a place of evil. Kubrick got that in a heartbeat . . . and lovingly shared it with the viewers from that first overhead tracking shot of the family in its little car driving up to the mountains and away from civilization. You can almost see the sign floating above the hotel’s entrance, “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter.”
Part of Menzies’ genius was to tell the story from the point of view of the little boy, played by Jimmy Hunt, who later discovers to his horror that his parents have been taken over by the aliens. Then he discovers that most of the other adults in his life have also been turned into emotionless zombie tools of the Martians.
I’ve just completed work on a project that has taken three years to see through from start to finish. It is a remarkable graphic volume on American history that will be published by Hill & Wang this May. It is called, simply enough, Uncle Sam Presents: The Great American Documents, Volume One.
It is gloriously illustrated, in full color, by veteran comics artist Ernie Colon. Ernie’s is a long and brilliant career. He worked at Harvey Comics for a couple of decades, doing Casper the Ghost, Richie Rich, Little Lotta, etc. If you have ever read any of those wonderful titles, you’ve seen some of Ernie’s work. He also worked for the major superhero houses, but the grind-it-out system and in-house politics were never to his liking. He has been doing graphic novels for a while now, making a big, bestselling splash with the graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report. More recently, Ernie illustrated a beautiful, insightful graphic biography of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.
The volume is written by longtime editor and author Ruth Ashby, who has more than 30 books to her credit, many of them dealing with history and historical figures. Ashby, now a teacher of English at a small Long Island college, is uniquely qualified to write the stories, as she is also married to Ernie Colon. AND, she was my very first editor when I began working in books, at Byron Preiss Visual Publications.
Eisner created “The Spirit”—as well as “Blackhawk” and numerous other titles. “The Spirit” was a separate, 16-page section that was inserted into Sunday newspapers. At its height, over five million copies of the section were sold every week. When Eisner was drafted into the Army in World War II, he created the illustrated Army Manual—the first time a graphic pamphlet was used to inform and instruct adults on very serious matters … like how to clean your rifle so it won’t jam when you need to use it. Yes, among many other innovations, he created the educational comic. In the 1970s, he also created some of the first and most innovative graphic novels.
