Induction of the Sycophant by Tiger Moody

by Tiger Moody

Hard boiled fiction with a noir slant on comic books and pulps

Paperback

First published April 11, 2015

Reviews

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This year's book that kicked my head in the MOST. Now I know what to give those hard-to-please readers on my holiday gift list this coming purchasing season.

Kicks DO keep getting harder to find. Thrillseeking desperados, get in line for your dose of hardboiled jabs of pulpy horror, history, comics, grit and twisted takes on archetypical characters. Tiger Moody delivers.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had hopes for this book but found it more annoying than entertaining. A barely disguised cast of characters based on comic book professionals -- Jack Cole, Wally Wood, Bill Gaines, Will Eisner, Mort Meskin, Al Feldstein -- interact in mostly believable ways while the Kefauver hearings are signaling the end of the world as they know it. Fredric Wertham and a young kid named Lester fill out the cast. The problems I had with the book, other than lackluster writing, mostly came from its scarcity of discernible point. Is the author making the case that crime comics are as bad as Wertham made them out to be? Or is it society and the general uncaring nature of urban society? Or does stuff just happen? The reader can pretty much reach any of those conclusions based on the downward spiral of all the lives here. I was also troubled by the many pages of text lifted almost verbatim from Wertham's actual books, especially Seduction of the Innocent, without attribution. Amusing enough if one isn't familiar with the original but not so much to me. On the plus side, the book is fast reading and I liked the sequences that involved the inexplicable appearances of Archie and some of his friends as, perhaps, some kind of trickster spirits, kindred maybe to the horseflies that recur throughout the text. The chapter headings are fun too.

[Michaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tiger Moody will blow you away