Comics: Between the Panels

by Mike Richardson, Steve Duin

This lavish volume takes an in-depth look at the history of comics in a manner decidedly unlike the dry timelines and profiles of most reference-style titles. Via alphabetical entries, the authors take an irreverent, often hilarious, behind-the-scenes look at creators, companies, characters, collectors, and conventions, pulling no punches when exposing some of the darker sides of the industry.
Containing countless stories gleaned from over 150 interviews of comics industry veterans, Comics Between the Panels is loaded with more than half a century of insider information on the talented and eccentric creators who forged the comics industry and art form.
Features 670 illustrations and photos — including dynamic and bizarre cover art compiled under such curious headings as Atomic Bombs, Death with Indignity, Gorillas, Headlights, Hooded Menaces, and Skulls.

Genres: Comics, Nonfiction, History

500 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 1998

About the author

Mike Richardson is an American publisher, writer, and Emmy-winning producer. In 1986, he founded Dark Horse Comics, an award-winning international publishing house located in Milwaukie, Oregon. Richardson is also the founder and President of the Things From Another World retail chain and president of Dark Horse Entertainment, which has developed and produced numerous projects for film and television based on Dark Horse properties or licensed properties.
In addition, he has written numerous graphic novels and comics series, including The Secret, Living with the Dead, and Cut as well as co-authoring two non-fiction books: Comics Between the Panels and Blast Off!.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Serious journalist Steve Duin, who has been writing for my hometown rag, the Portland Oregonian, since 1980, has also written a book about comic books? Yes, he has—along with the founder of Dark Horse Comics, Mike Richardson—and it's a damned good one. Based on some 150 interviews with artists, writers and publishing industry figures—many of whom have since passed on—this 1998 compendium is lively and entertaining as well as informative.

I ran across this book at Ink Spell Books, a spacious and well-stocked bookstore in the town of Half Moon Bay, California, and now regret not purchasing that copy for myself. (Note: I have no connection with Ink Spell other than having spent some pleasant time and a little money there; this is a free plug.)

It's a well-made volume, too, with large glossy pages and artwork well-chosen to illustrate many of the pieces. The entries are chatty and anecdotal, often idiosyncratic; this is not so much an encyclopedia (despite its format and ostensible purpose) as it is a collection of essays and anecdotes, pointers, lists, and gossip, cataloging the oral history and visual splendor of this American art form. I read it straight through; you may want to skip around.

The most consistent lesson to be drawn from the biographical sketches that make up so many of these entries: don't go into comics unless you have a love both for drawing and for penury. Most of these people, even the greats, died poor.

But then we knew that. It's only in recent decades that the marriage of text and drawing, whether you call 'em graphic novels, comix or funny books, has become at all respectable, and it's still within living memory that Fredric Wertham cast such a pall over the industry with his 1954 screed, Seduction of the Innocent. Duin and Richardson's book takes the comics seriously, but it has a lot of fun with 'em along the way (there are entries for "Penis Envy" and "Headlights" alongside the sober articles on guys like Jack Kirby and Will Eisner).

I'm even in there, kinda—the Green Lantern's original secret identity (see p.172), before that upstart Hal Jordan came around, was... Alan Scott.

The book does seem oddly truncated, looking at it from more than a decade farther along... there's no reference to manga, for example. Comic strip artists, even ones as influential as Charles Schulz, don't rate a mention. Recent stars like Warren Ellis aren't here, nor are the film versions of Moore's Watchmen or Frank Miller's Sin City. The reverberations of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were still resounding, and the big splash of the time seems to have been Todd McFarlane's Spawn. I'd kind of like to see an updated edition, assuming that Duin and Richardson would be at all interested in revisiting their achievement.

But as a landmark snapshot of an art form with a rich and not previously well-documented history, Comics: Between the Panels remains an excellent resource, as well as a lot of fun.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great coffee-table book which, while not being an exhaustive encyclopaedic account of the history of comic books, is chock-full of great anecdotes on the subject. These include:

-Vertigo editor Karen Berger explaining to Neil Gaiman that "there is no masturbation in the DC universe."

-Bob Kane's never-ending love affair with himself

-Bob Kanigher's thoughts on Bob Kane & Julius Schwartz's appetite

-an entry devoted to Alex Raymond's '56 Corvette, which killed him

-the party held at John Byrne's house, where Marvel's then-Editor in Chief Jim Shooter was burned in effigy

-an entry devoted to the comics biz' history of suicides (Wally Wood, Jack Cole, Vaughn Bode, and others)

-Jean "Moebius" Giraud using a Sharpie to deface a convention sketch that he'd just drawn for a fan, after being asked by that fan to ink it as well

...and many more!

[Kenneth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've rarely read anything on comics history that gets so deep into the nitty-gritty of what it was like for the classic comics creators to maintain careers and just plain do their jobs on a day-to-day basis. Lots of insider gossip that I doubt you could find anywhere else in such encyclopedic density. Covers so many bases, I started to feel surprised when there was an artist or title that it DIDN'T devote an in-depth article to. A thoroughgoing pleasure for an old comics geek such as myself.

[Keith Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent encyclopedia style reference book on the history of comic books, focusing on the creators rather than the characters.