Now!

It’s here!

As you can see from this image, our cat Rosie carefully inspected the author copies of Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia that arrived from the University Press of Mississippi last week. After she determined that each copy was ready for the public, I began mailing them out on Christmas Eve. Once I get over the holiday bug that struck me down over the weekend, I’ll begin adding regular updates and new material to this site about the book.

In the meantime, here are a few quick updates:

My fellow Irishman Emmet O’Cuana has the book’s first review up at the site Hopscotch Friday.

I wrote an article for the new issue of Alter Ego/Fawcett Collectors of America about Steamboat. The article is based on Chapter 4 of the book. You can read a short preview here or order a copy from the TwoMorrows website.

Meanwhile, you can order the book from Barnes and Noble or directly from the UPM website. Amazon should have it in stock by the first week of January. Please also support your local bookstore! Here in Chicago, places like Unabridged Books and the Seminary Co-Op, two of my favorite shops, would be happy to order a copy for you. Or why not try Quimby’s or Chicago Comics or Third Coast Comics? Diamond should have it in the next couple of weeks two–despite the fact that there’s an error on their site listing it for June 28, 2017! (I am a perfectionist, believe me, but I have my limits). And, of course, if you’re here in Chicago, I will be happy to sign your copy. I might even draw something in it.

Like Alan Moore, I believe very strongly that, as he puts is, writing “is literally magic.” One of my goals, especially in the second half of the book, is to conjure the Utopian spaces that filmmaker Jack Smith imagined in his work. Those radical, welcoming, open, and loving spaces, like the ones Smith imagined at the center of his ideal city, might, especially now, seem as distant and strange as Billy’s subway tunnel or the legends that Bill Parker and C. C. Beck had in mind when they came up with the idea for Captain Thunder in 1939. But I believe that the kind of world Smith describes here is necessary, possible, and inevitable:

” . . . I can think of other types of societies . . . Like in the middle of the city should be a repository of objects that people don’t want anymore, which they would take to this giant junkyard. That would form an organization, a way that the city would be organized . . . the city organized around that. I think this center of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a center of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it.” –from Jack Smith, Meet Me at the Bottom of the Pool (Eds. J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell, New York: High Risk Books, 1997)

Thanks for reading. More updates to come.