Jones releases 3d edition of ‘Classics Illustrated’

Most of us are generalists, who know — or think we know — a little bit about a lot of things.

Although I can talk about the technical aspects of golf clubs, and the history of American popular music in the 20th century, and have strong opinions about writing, there are plenty of people whose knowledge and scholarship far outstrip my own.

William B. “Bill” Jones Jr. is probably the world expert on Classic Comics, which was renamed Classics Illustrated in 1947. He is the authority on this American cultural phenomenon, who knows the most about these comic books that presented world literature to “young and reluctant” readers, panel by panel. Over the course of more than 30 years Bill has compiled and written three editions of the definitive reference work “Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History,” (Macfarland, $75) the third edition of which was published on May 1.

Jones began working on the manuscript that became “Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History” in 1993, shortly after I joined the staff of the then-fledgling Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He had been one of the first people I’d met when I first came to Little Rock in 1989; he was a regular contributor and essentially the arts editor of the alternative newspaper Spectrum, which was soon to become Spectrum Weekly. He was the first Arkansan to have me in his home, and we’ve been friends ever since.

Which presents me with a quandary. Ethically I shouldn’t review the new edition of Jones’s book, although I think it is a title in which many readers will be interested in, and that it’s a development that newspapers ought to notice. The problem with reviewing one’s friend’s work isn’t simple logrolling, but that in striving to be honest, a critic might be tougher on a friend’s work than a stranger’s. Serendipitously, as I was writing this piece, the great music critic Tim Page wrote on Facebook:

“I became a writer to explain the world to myself, to conquer

the chaos in my head and create a couple of paragraphs that might sum it all up, fixed and unassailable as a logical theorem …

“There came a time when I thought I was being too tough on people I knew personally in some dubious attempt at ‘fairness.’ Philip Glass has been a friend since I was a college kid begging for tapes of his music to play on the radio. In the mid1980s I found myself unresponsive to several of his works in a row and said so in print. Trouble was, when I heard one of the pieces I hadn’t liked a few months later, I decided that my initial assessment was wrong, and I started to question my impartiality, with the fear that I had been too determined to be coolly objective and missed the music.”

I understand how it is possible to miss the music, and that it’s impossible to achieve anything remotely like “cool objectivity.” Critics respond how they respond and write their way to an accommodation of that response. The lunches I’ve had with Jones over the years where he described his delight at tracking down one of the obscure artists who painted a Classics Illustrated in 1963 or his frustrations at the declension of comic art in certain eras cannot help but inform my opinion of his work, which is erudite and meticulous and relevant to anyone interested in 20th-century American popular culture.

Jones is a fluid, captivating writer who understands words and the connotations that haunt them. As fine a writer as he is, he is an even better researcher and archivist of Gnostic intelligence. If you are interested in comics in general or Classics Illustrated in particular, his work is indispensable.

NOT A COMIC BOOK GUY

I probably know more about Icelandic cinema than I do about comic books.

I went through a brief period where I spent my allowance money on them, buying single issues of Marvel and CD titles for 12 cents each at comic book stores just outside the front gate of Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina when I was in the third grade. By the time we moved to California, I’d given away my collection; my prime comic book years were when I was 7 and 8 years old.

Yet certain images still punch through the fog of decades — I remember Bucky, Captain America’s kid sidekick, hospitalized in some creepy castle where the Red Skull served as the chief medical officer, Bruce Wayne confronting Joe Chill, the mugger who murdered his parents, and Sydney Carton, mounting the guillotine in place of Charles Darnay at the end of “A Tale of Two Cities.”

Jones tells me that most of the readers of Classics Illustrated tended to read only Classics Illustrated, while mainstream comic readers would read Classic illustrated only “under duress.” Aside from that, I don’t imagine that experience is atypical, for many baby boomers, Classics Illustrated were part of the mix.

Their appeal was not much different — from the end consumer’s standpoint anyway — from the superhero adventures or high jinks stories offered by other titles. And, like rock ’n’ roll, Classics Illustrated was an opportunistic start-up, an attempt by Russian-born publisher Albert Lewis Kanter to cash in on what in retrospect has been called the “Golden Age of Comics.” (In 1945, Yank, the Army Weekly published by the U.S. military during World War II , cited market research studies estimating that 95% of boys and 91% of girls between the ages of 6 and 11 read comic books. Roughly 41% of men and 28% of women age 18 to 30 read the books.)

In 1941, Kanter, who’d made a fortune in Florida real estate, created Classic Comics for Elliot Publishing Co., with its initial releases “The Three Musketeers,” followed by “Ivanhoe” and “The Count of Monte Cristo.” Kanter’s primary idea was to bring stories “by the World’s Greatest Authors,” a rubric flexible enough to admit not only Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” but Frank Buck’s 1930 bestseller “Bring ’Em Back Alive,” a sensationalized nonfiction account of the author’s adventures capturing exotic animals, to comics readers.

Unlike most comic books, however, the shelf life for a Classics Illustrated title was not limited; its comics were often kept in print, and when an issue sold out, the publisher would do a new press run. Older titles could always be ordered directly from the publisher. So those titles published in the early ’40s were available in the mid-’60s — my personal collection of comics was never large, but I had the three initial titles, along with Jack London’s “White Fang,” Alexandre Dumas’ “The Man in the Iron Mask,” Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” and maybe a dozen others.

There are obvious problems with adapting literature to 48-page graphic novels (originally the books were 64 pages), and some educators were quick to dismiss Classics Illustrated as a kind of CliffNotes-type cheat. (Though there was often, if not always, an admonition at the end of the issue urging readers to seek out the original in their local book shop or library.)

Anti-comics crusader Fredric Wertham took aim at Classics Illustrated in his infamous book-length screed “Seduction of the Innocent,” writing at one point about an 11-year-old boy “of superior intelligence, from a good social and economic background, who exhibited the ‘classics’ comic-book version of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ with these words: ‘Why should I read the real book if I have this? If I had to make a report I could use this. It would leave out all the boring details that would be in a book.’”

Later, Wertham makes a more compelling case against the Classics Illustrated version of “Silas Marner,” which, he writes, lacks “the flavor of George Eliot, the warm human touches, the scenes of matchless humor.” Other educators, though, especially liked the “Silas Marner” adaptation.

Still, by the mid-1950s, Classics Illustrated had become part of the American cultural landscape, a temporal signifier similar to contemporary coonskin cap and hula hoop crazes. They were ubiquitous, and because, as Jones writes, children instinctively fashion their own mythologies from whatever cultural artifacts they encounter, their influence on the modern world is immeasurable.

There are stories I know not because I’ve read the original novels but because I read the Classic Illustrated version. And there are those in which the images from the CI version — which I read first — have primacy over whatever I gleaned from reading the novel later.

Soon they were being published in 26 languages, available in 36 countries. Sales peaked at nearly four million copies a month in the mid’50s. And while they were no doubt employed in their time in the same ways lazy students employ artificial intelligence these day, others read the books because they enjoyed them. And, as Jones makes clear in his books, because some of them were extraordinarily realized pieces of recombinant popular art.

But if they weren’t warmly received by all educators — some did realize their value in attracting young readers to “real” literature — they weren’t accepted by the comic industry either. Much like today’s Hollywood, Classics Illustrated relied on existing intellectual property (much of it in the public domain) for its stories. The writers were adapters, not the creators of original tales set in purpose-built universes.

Still, a lot of the artists and writers who worked on the Classics Illustrated series also worked in mainstream comics. Jones includes a chapter on Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, editor-in-chief of the series during its peak years, who was a stickler for historical accuracy in the text and illustrations. Henry C. Kiefer, Alex Blum and Norman Nodel were the primary inhouse artists; other contributors included Matt Baker, Ann Brewer, Dik Browne, Joe Orlando, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers.

The first edition of “Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History,” came out in 2002; it was hailed as one of the best explorations of any comic book genre ever. When the second edition came out in 2012, it had added more than 100 pages of text and dozens more color plates. This third edition expands the story even further and includes twice the number of color plates as in the second edition.

I’m deep into my copy now —

I know how much work has gone into revising and expanding this third edition of this exhaustive book; how Jones worked to track down artists and collectors and editors and issues. It took way more than 10,000 hours to become the man who knows about Classics Illustrated comics. I’m just proud to be his friend.