This was a five-issue series in 2018, collected in one book early in 2019. It's mature Chaykin - maybe even somewhat mellowed and ruminative Chaykin - with a complicated structure that becomes repetitious but firecracker Chaykin dialogue and great Chaykin faces and figures (and he's back in the mid-20th century, so he can draw leggy dames in tight dresses and dapper fellas in double-breasted suits a lot of the time).
It's one of those projects where all of the pieces are done well but you start to wonder: both what the point of the whole exercise was, and if doing it this way was a good idea.
Chaykin has an afterword where he insists that he really did fictionalize more than you, the reader, thinks. And that may be true for the central characters - I'll get to them in a minute - but the background details are all entirely on-the-nose and obvious to anyone with even a vague knowledge of the real history. Yankee Comics is DC; Verve is Marvel. Bob Rose and Sid Mitchell are Stan and Jack. Ron Fogel is Bob Kane; Siegel and Shuster are Irwin Glaser and Ira Gelbart. Dan Fleisher is Will Eisner. We see covers of the comics from this fictional world, with Powerhouse (Superman) and the Astonishing Tarantulad (guess) and Our Pal Percy! (teen humor a la Archie, down to the red hair).
Admittedly, Chaykin is telling a story of three composite characters - Black Ted Whitman, woman Benita Heindel, and Jewish Ray Clark, to be really reductive about it. Ted, Benita and Ray are friends, in as much as we see them being friendly to each other, and we follow them through the ups and downs of the comics industry from WWII through their own deaths in the early 21st century. But the point is to cram in references to as many scandals and events and market changes as possible, so they stay pretty much Everypeople, each with a couple of easily signposted traits (mostly their identities) and different career paths so that Chaykin can have scenes in all of the permutations of the comics industry.
So let me get to that structure. Chaykin opens in 1967, with the Broadway debut of a musical which is his fictional version of It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman. And it ends in 1939 with Siegel and Shuster Glaser and Gelbart excitedly signing the contract that doomed the entire industry to focus on long-johns characters owned by big corporations. There's also a scene somewhere in the middle set in 2015.
But, otherwise, and overwhelmingly, each of the five issues is made up for four long scenes: 1945, 1955, 1965, and 2001.
In 1945, the war has just ended, and the industry is shrinking. Work is hard to get for the GIs coming back and trying to jump back into their drawing careers. Crooks and more traditionally shady (I'm not saying "Jewish," Chaykin isn't exactly saying "Jewish," but some of his characters are comfortable being that bigoted) business types dominate the companies that have work available.
In 1955, things are getting bad again, after a minor boom in the in-between years. Seduction of the Innocent and the related moral panic is happening, exactly as in the real world, and the comics industry is once again contracting.
In 1965, Marvel Verve is booming, with Bob Ross making speeches on college campuses and its line expanding. Ross is of course minimizing the contributions of his major collaborator Sid Mitchell, and is a mildly slimy glad-hander at best to boot. The gang is scattered, doing different things, to show the depth of the industry - advertising, the Eisner Fleisher comics-for-the-government operation, Bob Kane's Ron Fogel's crappy animation studio, and so on.
In 2001, we mostly see funerals, because everyone is old. Ted, Benita, and Ray show up to all of these, mostly, as they say, to make sure the bastards really are dead. The eulogies are contrasted with their pointed whispered remarks to each other of what the dead men really were like.
All five issues follow that structure. They have slightly different focuses - I think Chaykin would say that each issue has a very different central theme, to be honest, but I didn't think that was a distinction with a difference - but in practice, reading this as a single volume, it's basically the same thing five times in a row.
Chaykin has never been a particularly subtle maker of comics: you don't come away from his stories wondering what his point was. And he's been fond of formal structures before - Hey Kids! Comics! is very Chaykin-esque, both in tone and style, and will bring a lot of enjoyment to any Chaykin fans who missed it the first time around. But, like a lot of Chaykin stories, it's overly complicated - this time structurally - and spends a lot of time saying the same things over and over again.
