Rating: 
Summary: Poorly assembled
Review: This book is virtually worthless to those of us who are iunterested in owning a quality collection of the silver age comics we remember from '66-71. The writing is printed in a fake "comic book" lettering style that is impossible to read against the jumbled mess of cluttered color underneath. Extremely amateurish in layout and design, it has nothing to offer the art lover. The choices in artwork are not the classic images one would hope for, and have nothing to do with the most important developments in the medium. I would not have bought this book if not for the rave reviews here, and now I regret it. Bad on all accounts, I will porobably never open the book again. An insult to the great creators that contributed so much to my youth, this book is virtually a total rip-off.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly assembled
Review: This book is virtually worthless to those of us who are iunterested in owning a quality collection of the silver age comics we remember from '66-71. The writing is printed in a fake "comic book" lettering style that is impossible to read against the jumbled mess of cluttered color underneath. Extremely amateurish in layout and design, it has nothing to offer the art lover. The choices in artwork are not the classic images one would hope for, and have nothing to do with the most important developments in the medium. I would not have bought this book if not for the rave reviews here, and now I regret it. Bad on all accounts, I will porobably never open the book again. An insult to the great creators that contributed so much to my youth, this book is virtually a total rip-off.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly done mish-mash
Review: This book is visually confusing, because they don't print the artwork the way it was in the comic book, they make a montage of a bunch of different panels with photshop, so there's always parts of pictures laying over other pictures, and they don't relate. They do the same thing with the writing, so you can't follow what they're saying, like a cut-and -paste job. Real ugly graphics. I used to love comics in the '60s and '70s, but they hacked them up and tried to make them look like modern comics where your eye can't tell where you're supposed to look. Just a hatchet job by somebody who went crazy with photoshop. And no good history of the comics or creators, either, just tiny short blurbs, which seem more like one-liners. Very disappointing. I'd rather read re-prints of the comics themselves.
Rating: 
Summary: Elevating the Art to its Rightful Place
Review: This book was of particular interest to me, as it covered the comic book era I grew up in. So many of the lushly reproduced pages in this superior collection were taken from comic books that sat on my nightstand as I grew into a teenager, so I relished looking at them with fresh eyes and reliving those youthful emotions again.Author Schumer is a true comic book scholar. I've heard him speak on the subject more than once, and he is particularly interested in elevating the appreciation of comic book art to a place we might only reserve for museum-quality pop artists like that of Warhol. And I must say Schumer makes some excellent points to support his beliefs in this wonderful book. Many of these illustrators he features, like Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko and Neil Adams, were far more than cartoon storytellers. They were true graphic designers working in fresh ways to reinvigorate a medium that was ready to be taken to a new level. They consistently tried to push the craft into radically different areas, many of which had me scratching my head as a teenager. "Why doesn't this comic book look like all the others?", I would ask myself. Well, Schumer answers it in way that made me spend more time looking at the artwork in the last 2 weeks than I have in the last 20 years. Many of the popular art forms of the age were reflected in the works Shumer highlights in this book. Pschedelic, Op Art, collage, all were used by these pioneers to push their work outside the square borders most comic books were constrained to. And Schumer goes to great lengths to show the different places each of the illustrators took their craft to. Even those illustrators I had no great love for as a teen were elevated by the author's plentiful use of classic comic book art panels to demonstrate their unique contributions. All in all, this book will sit on my coffee table for many months. I've already bored several guests by pointing out the classic art panels I used to trace over as a kid, hoping someday to draw like these masters did. 5 stars for Schumer and his homage to the Silver Age.
Rating:
Summary: Jumbled Crazyquilt
Review: Too many pictures overlaid with other pictures. You can't see anything, cos its too cluttered. The writings are hard to read too, because they use small handwritten letters trying to be like the comic books, but it looks bad. Other review make it sound good, but they must be fake ones. Bad choices for pictures, cos there not the best ones from the comic books, just ones that you idn't see before. The way they lay them over each other and put fake shadow under the top one makes it look bad, like you eye cant tell whats going on. They should re-do this one or take it back and have somebody else do it good.
Rating:
Summary: Jumbled Crazyquilt
Review: Too many pictures overlaid with other pictures. You can't see anything, cos its too cluttered. The writings are hard to read too, because they use small handwritten letters trying to be like the comic books, but it looks bad. Other review make it sound good, but they must be fake ones. Bad choices for pictures, cos there not the best ones from the comic books, just ones that you idn't see before. The way they lay them over each other and put fake shadow under the top one makes it look bad, like you eye cant tell whats going on. They should re-do this one or take it back and have somebody else do it good.
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