Masters of the Imagination is yet another in a series of canny publishing ploys by Taylor Publishing to recycle the research of Mike Benton.

Mike Benton is an extraterrestrial who landed on this planet in the mid-1980s, did a lot of research on comic books while working in a Houston bookstore, and has been sifting through that research ever since, re-packaging it again and again for different books from Taylor Publishing.

Surprisingly, perhaps — considering that these books are transparent attempts to cash in on the current interest in comics — all of Benton’s books are good books. They suffer occasionally from their author’s other-worldliness, but mostly they’re pretty decent history.

And almost all of the foregoing outrageous assertions will be successfully defended in the paragraphs to follow. That’s how these review things work: First, you perpetrate a couple of hysterical utterances; then you spend the rest of your life explaining them.

But first, some purely descriptive information so you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Masters of the Imagination is 184 8x11-inch pages long, all of them gleaming coated stock. Every page contains at least one illustration in glowing full color; frequently, two or three. These display the artistry of the 13 cartoonists whose lives and works are catalogued: Will Eisner, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, C. C. Beck, Jack Cole, Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, Basil Wolverton, Harvey Kurtzman, Wallace Wood, Bernard Krigstein, Alex Toth, and Steve Ditko.

Each artist gets a full chapter to himself. And Benton prefaces the lot with a short discussion of “the art of the comic book” in which he describes for the layman how a comic book page is created and briefly outlines the history of the medium. His description is succinct and informative; ditto, his history.

The book concludes with an “Artist Guide and Checklist” which lists the major work by each artist, year by year, in alphabetical order by artists’ names. At the end of each listing is a short bibliography, citing (presumably) Benton’s sources for the chapter on that artist.

All in all, a nifty package. Informative, concise, colorful. Exactly the sort of book that will sell in bookstores all across the fruited plain.

So much for dispassionate description.

One might quarrel with Benton’s selection of artists, but one wouldn’t get very far. Benton pre-empted disagreement over his choices simply by not making any. Instead, he turned to the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame and to the Will Eisner Hall of Fame and wrote about the comic book artists enshrined there.

His book’s subtitle, “The Comic Book Artists Hall of Fame,” qualifies the import of the overall title and helps explain why he leaves out Milton Caniff (who did comic strips not comic books), Jerry Siegel (who wrote but didn’t draw comic books), William Gaines (a publisher), and Robert Crumb. All of these fellas are enshrined in one or the other of the two halls of fame, but none of them drew comic books. Except Crumb. But Crumb, who is in both halls of fame, did not draw for mainstream comic books and is therefore “not within the scope of this book.” (What’s more, many of his pictures would probably not survive the censorial scrutiny to which Taylor would subject them in order to secure the PG rating that is essential for coffee-table style books.)

Well, you have to stop somewhere: You can’t include everybody who ever did anything worthwhile in comics.

Still, I’m tempted to wonder what possessed the Kirby Hall of Fame folks when they voted to include Basil Wolverton in 1991. I think some of Wolverton’s work is inspired nonsense of a very high order; I love it. (And “Bingbang Buster” is probably the all-time best name for a cowboy hero.) But Wolverton made it into the Kirby Hall of Fame ahead of Walt Kelly, Joe Shuster, and Jerry Siegel, a circumstance that betrays a curious lack of proportion in the judgment of the curators of the hall.

I should think that any of the medium’s halls of fame would have inducted Shuster and Siegel pretty early — certainly ahead of such a relative lightweight as Wolverton. However adroitly Wolverton may have deployed the resources of the art form, he didn’t blaze trails like Kirby and Eisner and Shuster and Siegel and Kurtzman. Nor was Wolverton’s excellence of the same sustained long-running quality as Cole’s or Barks’ or Beck’s.

But that’s beside the point. Benton’s book is our subject for today, not the whimsical preferences of the keepers of the flame in halls of fame.

Benton’s book offers very little new information on his subjects. Each of the artist chapters rehearses the professional biography of its subject and discusses his work in the order it appeared. Most of this information (if not all of it) is derived from other published sources rather than fresh interviews or primary documents.

But this is scarcely a fault. Most history books are but recitations of facts assembled from other sources. The signal virtue of a book like Benton’s, if it is well done, is that it collects in one place much information that was previously scattered in scores of other places. And Benton’s book performs this service for the most part admirably.

You can find out an awful lot about Walt Kelly’s comic book career here — more than I’ve ever found anywhere else. And Benton’s history of Shuster and Siegel’s early comic book and comic strip efforts prior to the publication of Superman is the most complete and coherent I’ve run across.

And he adds a few scraps of insightful information to the record of Eisner’s early career — his brief stint as art director for Eve, a magazine for the modern Jewish woman, for instance.

I mention these three because I’ve done considerable research recently on all of them. (Kelly, for introductions to the Fantagraphics series reprinting Pogo; Superman and Eisner, for a book of my own, The Art of the Comic Book, due out in the fall of 1995.) So on these three at least, I consider myself expert enough to evaluate the accuracy and completeness of Benton’s effort.

While he provides some new tidbits, he misfires sometimes, too.

I was delighted to discover, for example, what it was that Walt Kelly learned from his experiences at Disney’s “mouse factory” during the time he worked there (1936-1941). “I carried over the good things I did learn there,” Kelly is reported as saying, “like how to make a line come around from under another line and how to make lines which create figures in the round.”

According to Benton, “The two most valuable things [Kelly’s] years at Disney taught him were a sense of comic timing and a contrast of characters.”

It’s this kind of remark that leads me to conclude that Benton is an extraterrestrial. An alien life form might well mouth such an utterance — presumably in imitation of a native’s remark — not realizing that “a contrast of characters” is a meaningless statement, standing all by itself.

I assume that the phrase really means something like this: Kelly learned that the personality of a character can be revealed and developed by contrasting it to the personalities of different characters. Or, alternatively, that comedy is often created in the clash of different personalities. Something along those lines.

“A contrast of characters” does not, actually, say either of these things. But someone not familiar with the languaging mode of communication might well suppose that it does.

With similar nonchalance, Benton fails to record that the reason Kelly went to Los Angeles at the end of 1935 is that the object of his affection, Helen DeLacy, had been transferred there by her employer, the Girl Scouts of America, from her (and Kelly’s) native Bridgeport, Connecticut. In other words, Kelly followed his heart. Not a crucial fact about his life, I suppose; but worth noting, I think. And Benton doesn’t.

A more significant error, however, is committed when Benton says that “there was a year gap between the first and second issues of Animal Comics,” the publication in which Pogo first appeared. No so. I recognize the error because I made it myself once.

The first issue of Animal Comics was dated December 1942-January 1943; the second issue, February-March 1943. But if you assume that Overstreet’s Price Guide gives the correct first issue date (December 1941-January 1942), you could well suppose that the next issue (dated February-March 1943) took a year to produce.

Probably Overstreet is wrong, but the error is reflected in much of the literature on Kelly. Doubtless it is the first issue’s year-straddling date that is the source of the confusion. That and the fact that Kelly left Disney in the summer of 1941, and we don’t know much about what he did until the first issue of Animal Comics, which he couldn’t have worked on until almost 18 months after leaving California.

This huge hole in the continuity of Kelly’s life disappears almost entirely if we suppose that Animal Comics #1 appeared in December 1941: Kelly could have started work on it almost as soon as he returned to the East Coast. But he didn’t. And so that yawning hole remains: What did he do from, say, June 1941 until about September or October 1942, when he presumably began working on Animal Comics? Dunno.

Whatever the case, there was no year-long gap between #1 and #2 of Animal Comics.

In retelling the story of Superman’s debut, Benton leaves out the role played by Sheldon Mayer, the teenager who was Max Gaines’ editor on Popular Comics and who saw Superman in comic strip form and urged Gaines to consider it for publication. Benton tells the story in his first book for Taylor, The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History, but he inexplicably leaves Mayer out when he retells the tale in Masters of the Imagination.

Probably since he is concentrating on Shuster the artist rather than on the history of Superman, the omission is justifiable. Still, considering that it was Mayer who first recognized the potential in the Man of Steel, it seems odd to leave him out altogether.

Speaking of the first Benton book for Taylor, though, let me correct an error being perpetuated in that tome. Benton, relying (as most of us do to some extent) on the work of other historians, maintains that the “first published collection of an American comic strip” was “a short-lived publication called The Yellow Kid Magazine” which appeared in March 1897.

Since the first comic books were magazines that reprinted newspaper comic strips, if The Yellow Kid Magazine did, in fact, reprint a collection of the historic newspaper strip by R. F. Outcault, then The Yellow Kid Magazine would perforce be the first comic book.

But The Yellow Kid Magazine didn’t reprint any of Outcault’s comic strip. At least, not in the first issue, which I’ve held in my hands and inspected, page by page. The Yellow Kid appears on the cover but nowhere else.

Inside, we have the usual hodge-podge of humorous drawings and witty paragraphs (jokes) that comprised the traditional fare of the humor magazines of the period — Life, Judge, Puck, and others of that ilk. The Yellow Kid Magazine was just another of the same breed — but it sought to stimulate its sales by using the name and face of a popular newspaper comic strip character on the cover.

I suspect that the other two or three issues of the magazine were similar. No comic strip reprints at all. Hence, The Yellow Kid Magazine was not, as widely rumored these days, the first comic book. It was just another humor magazine.

But, I divaricate (to coin a phrase). Back to Masters of the Imagination.

It’s nice to find a coherent write-up about Jack Cole. Although his work in comic books and in Playboy qualifies him as a cartooning genius (master of both the comic book form and the magazine single-panel cartoon), it isn’t generally recognized that he was at least as innovative in the newspaper strip format.

Benton mentions Cole’s 1958 comic strip, Betsy and Me, but includes no examples of it. Probably just as well. Over the years, I’ve seen isolated samples of the strip, but that’s not enough. You have to see a considerable run of it in order to appreciate just how innovative Cole was. Recently, I was lucky enough to be able to read the entire 15-week run of the strip, and I found the rhythms of its humor and the novelty of Cole’s treatment irresistible.

Drawn in a simple stylized manner (somewhat in the same vein as the UPA cartoons about Gerald McBoing Boing and Mister Magoo that became so popular in the early 1950s, revolutionizing the animated cartoon), the strips record the domestic tribulations — all in a minor key — of Chester Tibbits, his wife Betsy, and their genius son, Farley.

The innovative part, however, arose from Cole’s decision to let his protagonist, the intellectually challenged Chet, tell his own story. The first-person narrative device opened up doors for comedy: The pictures we see before us belie Chet’s bland pronouncements, revealing him to be a thorough-going bumbler despite what his words seem to say.

Cole may be one of the few cartoonists to master the medium in three forms — books, panel cartoons, and daily strips — and to achieve a measure of fame in each department.

In the chapter on Steve Ditko, I was happy to see Ditko himself quoted. Despite his undeniable stature as the first artist on Spider-Man, Ditko has remained resolutely silent about his art and his attitudes. Benton quotes him by way of explaining the silence:

“When I do a job,” Ditko says, “it’s not my personality that I’m offering the readers but my artwork. It’s not what I’m like that counts; it’s what I did and how well it was done… I produce a product, a comic art story. Steve Ditko is the brand name.”

In the same chapter, Ditko’s connection with Eric Stanton, noted for his adult comic books on bondage, is at last acknowledged: They were classmates in the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and shared a studio for 10 years, beginning in 1958.

Any author is bound to make some mistakes when rehearsing the history of aspects of our cultural life that are as poorly documented as comic book history is. Judging from the portions of the history of comic books with which I am most familiar, Benton’s errors in this regard are pretty infrequent. But some of his statements can be explained only if we suppose that he really is a visitor from another planet, wholly unfamiliar with life as we know it.

Examples of his extraterrestrial oversights start with the very first sentence in the book: “The early American comic book artists created the most popular storytelling medium of the twentieth century.” Gee, and here I’ve been convinced that motion pictures alone qualified for that distinction.

In discussing Krigstein’s early career, Benton notes that for two years he did illustrations and “painted self-portraits” with little financial success. I suppose he had difficulty selling all those pictures of himself.

And when he asserts that Wally Wood was “America’s best science fiction cartoonist and the greatest inker of all time,” I wonder what became of Alex Raymond, who was no slouch of a science fiction cartoonist and inker himself.

Sometimes Benton is just flat wrong. He says John Held, Jr., “found fame depicting the young sheiks and flappers of the roaring twenties for The New Yorker magazine.” Nope. Held found fame drawing sheiks and flappers, but he didn’t do it for Harold Ross’ New Yorker. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Ross had met Held when both were young men in Held’s native Salt Lake City, and so when The New Yorker was a-borning, Ross naturally turned to his old chum, by then wallowing in celebrity and fortune as the Jazz Age’s most adept delineator, to help him launch the new magazine. But Ross didn’t want just more of the same from Held — more sheiks and flappers. Instead, he commissioned Held to do cartoons of the Gay Nineties in a woodcut style, something startlingly different from the usual Held cartoon as it appeared in most of the other humor magazines of the day.

And then Benton has the first issue of Simon and Kirby’s Captain America appearing “two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.” The cover date of that issue was March 1941, so it probably hit the newsstands in January or February, almost a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

And E.C. Comics is called “Entertainment Comics” instead of “Entertaining Comics.” A proofreader’s momentary lapse, no doubt.

These gaffes will presumably be corrected when Taylor issues a second edition of the book. And I assume a second edition is inevitable: Benton books on comics are a cottage industry by now, probably Taylor’s most lucrative line.

Masters of the Imagination is the seventh title that Benton and Taylor have produced by mining again and again the vein of ore he struck in generating the first in the series, the aforementioned Comic Book in America. The series might well be a model of what happens in commercial publishing when an author submits a manuscript that is too ambitious for a publisher’s habitually conservative imagination. If the manuscript is too long for a book of an economically viable dimension, the author is advised to make drastic cuts — usually without regard for the sense of the book’s content. It’s a little like saying, “Well, we have only one glove that’ll fit you, so you’ll have to chop off one of your hands.”

And then, if the first book sells, the publisher comes back and says, “Have you any more of the same sort of stuff that we can publish?” And, of course, you do: It’s all the stuff that was chopped out of the first enterprise.

(I’m pretty sure about how this happened at Taylor because I was approached in a roundabout way after Benton’s first book was a success. I submitted a manuscript but the folks at Taylor wanted a book with lots of pictures and not very many words; and I, as prolix as always, couldn’t curb my tongue.)

A second edition will afford Benton the opportunity to note, perhaps, that when C. C. Beck critiques the work of artists outside his shop who did the first issue of his Captain Marvel Adventures — saying, “The results were awful… the drawings were typical superhero-type artwork with arms and legs sticking out of panels, lots of tricky perspectives, and no attention paid to composition, anatomy, or storytelling” — he is talking about Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, who had made their mark in the history of comic books with Captain America by doing just exactly the sorts of things Beck was highly critical of.

Benton might also correct the impression he gives that Simon and Kirby’s 1954 invention, Fighting American, was intended as a “satire on Captain America and the Red Menace” of the Cold War era. Not at first it wasn’t.

I’ve seen this statement in other places — often enough, now, that I’m going to surrender to the temptation to set the record straight.

Although Simon and Kirby in the post-war years were making good livings as comic book creators and producers, they were in the not unprecedented situation of knowing that their most celebrated creation, Captain America, had earned great pots of money for other people. Like Siegel and Shuster (and every other comic book creator of the time), Simon and Kirby had given away ownership of their creation for a page-rate fee.

Now, in the anti-Communist fervor of the early ’50s, they saw echoes of the anti-Nazi sentiments of pre-war America. The time was ripe, they thought, for another comic book superpatriot. While much of their motivation for creating Fighting American was rooted in an entrepreneurial instinct to cash in on public enthusiasms, they also saw an opportunity to repeat their earlier success with Captain America — but this time, as Simon said, “the copyright would belong to Simon and Kirby.”

It was the work of but a few minutes to create and name the new superhero with a kid for a buddy. “Guess where we got the idea?” Simon asked in the introduction to Marvel’s book reprinting all of Fighting American (1989).

“Fighting American was the first commie-basher in comics,” Simon said.

Caught up in the patriotic spirit of Senator Joe McCarthy’s crusade against the Red Menace which was unfolding all about them at the time, he and Kirby produced the first issue of the new comic book in deadly earnest. Cover-dated April-May 1954, the inaugural issue probably hit the stands in February.

Shortly after that — on March 9, to be precise — Edward R. Murrow eviscerated McCarthy on CBS television. Suddenly, everyone could see that the crusading senator had no new clothes at all. His entire wardrobe was a fiction, a naked display of demagoguery. McCarthy, Simon realized, was “the lunatic fringe… [he] was unmasked as a hysterical clown.”

Feeling uncomfortable and perhaps a little foolish about Fighting American’s grimly serious war on communists, Simon and Kirby quickly changed the direction of the comic book. “We relaxed and had fun with the characters,” Simon explained.

In the second and subsequent issues of the book, Fighting American and Speedboy are plagued by an assortment of villains that looked and behaved more like graduates of Max Sennett’s Keystone Comedies than targets of McCarthy’s commie hunt.

Just as the senator’s fall from power revealed that his fearsome communists in government were more akin to children’s bogeymen than threats to national security, so did the commies in Fighting American become equally ineffectual bogeymen — or, rather, ludicrous buffoons. Thus, the threat of communism as conjured up by McCarthy was seen as something to laugh at.

And with that, Fighting American achieved some modest stature as a satire.

But the comic book was not entirely successful as a satirical work. Neither Simon nor Kirby was suited to this kind of effort. They continued to play Fighting American and Speedboy perfectly straight but placed them in situations that were ridiculous in the extreme. In effect, the stories parodied superhero comics rather than communism and commie-bashing. The humor was very broad and elementary, laced with juvenile jokes and punning names for villains.

And not all of the stories were humorous. Doubtless they’d built up an inventory of stories based upon their initial premise before deciding to abandon that direction; rather than discard work already completed, they salted these stories in with the others.

After seven issues, though, Simon and Kirby gave up trying to make something of their abortive revival of a superpatriot, and the title was discontinued.

And that, for the record, is the story of that.

Another Kirby story that doubtless deserves telling is the one that compares the contributions of Kirby in the creation of the Marvel Universe to the contributions of Stan Lee. Benton quite politely skirts the issue, but someday someone won’t. (That day is just on the horizon: I plunge into the fray in that book I mentioned before, the one due out in the fall of 1995. But I won’t cover the ground here for reasons that, in the context of such a self-serving plug as this, are surely obvious.)

Notwithstanding all the quibbling I’ve been committing about Benton’s Masters of the Imagination, I like the book. As I said earlier, it gathers together in between one pair of covers a lot of information that you’d otherwise have to scour the countryside for. So it’s wonderfully handy to have.

One might wish for more precise discussion of the techniques and innovations that these hall of famers introduced — the reasons, presumably, for their induction in the first place. Benton mentions such things as Kirby’s energetic page layouts and rendering style, for instance, but doesn’t take the next step, which would be to demonstrate how those innovations set the pace for superhero comic book artists for generations to come.

Despite such shortcomings, the book, considered as a whole, does much to introduce the reader to an art form whose subtleties are often overlooked.

Although the book is mostly a plain, straightforward recitation of biographical and bibliographic facts, we can glimpse between these lines of pedestrian assertion some of the drama and tragedy of the history of the medium. In the chapters on Krigstein and Toth, we meet the fine-tuning technicians of the craft, both of whom left comic books in frustration.

And when we put their stories next to Wood’s, we have a sad commentary on the shallow artistic expectations of the industry.

The numerous illustrations in the book are among the best things in it. They often display samples of the artists’ work that are not readily available for inspection any place else. Regrettably, too many of the pictures are too small to do the artwork justice. But that, like the number of pages in each of Benton’s books, is undoubtedly a fact of publishing life that we all must live with.

Meanwhile, we have this handy and handsome compendium of information on 13 of the medium’s champion performers.

I don’t pretend to know what is going on the comics scene of New Zealand, so I’m not exactly sure how these things work. It may just be that a book like Maui: Legends of the Outcast is simply one of those amazing flukes that is occasionally tossed by the capricious gods of sequential art into the hands of unsuspecting comics readers as a test of the faithful. In the case of a book like this one it is tempting to believe in divine providence because it is too difficult to believe that a book this elegant, bold and mature could simply materialize out of nowhere.

Maui: Legends of the Outcast is a European-style hardcover album produced by artist Chris Slane and writer Robert Sullivan which tells a number of bound-together tales of Maui Tikitiki-a-Taranga, an outcast trickster of Maori mythology. There are a number of different myths told here (including a confrontation with the Goddess of Fire to the capturing of the Sun in a giant net) and it is a credit to Sullivan’s skill at telling these tales that the book holds together remarkably well as a single cohesive narrative line encompassing the life and death of Maui in just forty-eight pages.

What is most remarkable about the book, however, is the art by Chris Slane. Chock full of thick and heavy blacks that seem to rage across the page, it is all aggression, energy and power. Yet the sharp kineticism of the rendering is tempered by the subtlety of the colouring which is predominantly defined by muted greens and browns, highlighted by pastel monochrome purples and blues.The combination of frenzied linework and muted colour palate is just delicious. It may turn out not to be a gift from the gods after all is said and done, but it is the work of a supremely confident cartooning duo. And sometimes that’s just as satisfying.