Hey Kids! Comics! #2 - Image Comics

HEY KIDS! COMICS! No. 2, September 2018

Shifting 5,481 copies in September 2018, and resultantly becoming the two hundred and fifty-fourth best-selling book of the month according to “Diamond Comics Distributors”, Howard Chaykin’s narrative for Issue Two of “Hey Kids! Comics!” must have thoroughly entertained any bibliophiles with either a long memory or deep interest in the early years of the super-hero led story-telling medium. In fact, considering that the twenty-four page periodical’s New Jersey born writer openly admitted at the time of its publication that "much of it really happened” and “the names have [simply] been changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike”, this "behind-the-scenes” account of Silver Age shenanigans arguably reads more like a historical adaption of true events rather than a piece of imagined fan fiction for a creative era long gone.  

For starters, the American author’s marvellous sequence depicting Senator Eustis Cleghorne and the “renowned cartoonist” Pete Sawyer haranguing horror comics in Washington DC during the mid-fifties is clearly little more than a repackaged recapping of the 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings. “Foisted on innocent American boys and girls by publishers making illicit fortunes off this filth” and crammed full of “graphic depictions of unspeakable acts”, readers familiar with the formation of the Comics Magazine Association of America will instantly recognise the self-same prevalent public concern regarding the grisly contents of comics actually leading to the creation of the Comics Code Authority in the real world, and clearly a similar stringent set of self-regulations is imposed upon the artists of Chaykin’s narrative.

Likewise, this book contains a rather disconcerting scene at the Big Apple Gotham Con during the start of the twenty first century, where an aged Ray Clarke venomously attacks the work of upcoming popular penciller Tom Hollenbeck for “swiping my stuff since he got into the business” and demands “half your royalties.” The utter frustration in the elderly artist’s face as he publically speaks about spending “fifty years bouncing between hiding what we did and desperation for the world to know” only to see the younger generation carving a successful career out of ‘copying’ his work is genuinely heart-wrenching, and it is all-too easy to then see the late legend Stan Lee in the shape of Verve Comics editor-in-chief Bob Rose acting as peacemaker by stepping in between the two irate men and asking them to “bury the hatchet and keep smilin’ for the folks?”

The regular cover art of "HEY KIDS! COMICS!" No. 2 by Don Cameron