I still got more gift recommendations for the comics fan in your life. Today, we’re going to look at PS238.

“PS238” is comic book created by Aaron Williams, creator of the fantasy spoof “Nodwick” and writer of the recent Wildstorm horror title “North 40.” It’s currently published by Do Gooder Press. I’m a huge fan, as you might be able to tell by reading through my archives.

Imagine you live in a world with superheroes. If they’re anything like the ones in the comics, they’re always falling in love with each other and sometimes even getting married to each other. Every once in a while, one of them will have a child. So what do you do with an eight-year-old with the power of an Asgardian thunder god? Send ’em to a school where they’ll eventually end up incinerating their classroom in a temper tantrum over not getting to use the green crayon? No, you send ’em to PS238, the School for Metaprodigy Children.

Constructed three miles beneath a normal public school, PS238 is designed to teach superhuman children how to use their powers and how to maintain a secret identity. Since many of their classes are taken alongside normal children and teachers, the kids are required to pretend to be perfectly normal kids. For some, this requires only a change of clothing — others need elaborate holographic disguises. When it’s time for metahuman-centric classes, the kids are transferred by high-tech conveyors to the subterranean facility, where, on an ideal day, the kids learn a little more about what it means to be super. Of course, on most days, simple mayhem breaks out.

The comic features a rotating ensemble cast of teachers and students, including Principal Alfred Cranston, a former holder of high office who resigned under mysterious circumstances to head the school; Cristina Kyle, formerly known as Micro-Might, the only teacher at PS238 to have teaching experience prior to the opening of the school; Vashti Impiria, who used to be known as the magic-wielding Spell Syrin; Herschel Clay, the school’s director of maintenance, who used to be a powersuit-wearing hero named Mantium; Captain Clarinet (Ron Peterson), a shy but immensely strong kid who would prefer to spend all his time playing his clarinet; Suzi Fusion (Suzanne Finster), a bespectacled six-year-old who throws radioactive temper tantrums; Zodon, an evil genius whose countless schemes have prompted the school to fit him with devices that, among other things, convert his tirades of profanity into rousing show tunes; Tyler Marlocke, a completely normal kid whose superhero parents are solidly convinced that he’ll be manifesting powers any day now (and who, despite his lack of powers, is now fighting crime in secret as the football-helmeted Moon Shadow); and many, many more.

“PS238” is very light-hearted and fun — Williams has a pretty good grasp of what makes kids and superheroes funny, and he does a great job of combining the two, as well as crafting interesting and distinct personalities for the major characters. The kids aren’t written as short adults — they’re children, through and through. Zodon acts like the most mature of the kids (despite being the youngest), but that’s because he’s hyper-intelligent, evil, and makes cutting remarks about everyone. The rest of the kids freak out when they lose their capes, get afraid of heights, look forward to macaroni pie day in the cafeteria, and try to make friends with older snooty kids. Trust me, if Superman and Spider-Man were eight years old, they’d act just like these kids do.

The comics are collected into a number of trade paperbacks. They’d make great gifts for younger readers, teachers, and any comics fan who enjoys fast and funny superhero comics.

PS238 by Aaron Williams. Go pick it up.

Time to take another look at my annual holiday gift recommendations. Sure, you could go pick out any random comic book for the comic fan in your life and call it a present… or you could try to find them something that’ll really impress them with your gift-giving mojo.

Today, let’s talk about Fun Home.

“Fun Home” is cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s memoir of her childhood and her memories of her father. Bechdel was, prior to this book, best known as the creator of the “Dykes to Watch Out For” comic strip. And like her comic strip, “Fun Home” is meant for grownups. It addresses, very frankly and seriously, themes about homosexuality, gender, suicide, dysfunctional families, mental illness, and much more. Don’t get this for your ten-year-old and try to blame me for it. Get this for the serious grownup comics reader in your life who’s looking for something smart and outside of the mainstream.

What’s it about? Well, you’ve got Alison, her siblings, her mom, and her dad, Bruce. They all live in a big Victorian house in Pennsylvania. Bruce is an English teacher and runs the local funeral home — the title of the book comes from the family’s joking nickname for the funeral home. Bruce was a dead-serious man, often angry, a rabid reader and book-collector, equal parts artistic and practical, obsessed with rebuilding the family home into perfect, pristine condition. He seemed to see his family as free labor to help him fix up the house. He died when Alison was almost 20, not long after she’d come out to the family as a lesbian, and only weeks after his wife announced she wanted a divorce. Alison believes his death was a suicide, though it could have been an accident.

All that, plus Bruce Bechdel was hiding one heck of a secret, too.

The art style is really cool — part cartoonish, part realistic, with beautifully rendered backgrounds and details. Alison actually took photos of herself posing as each character so she could use them as references when she illustrated it. If you haven’t heard me say it before, good cartooning is more engaging and more emotionally affecting than more realistic artwork any day of the week, and that’s doubly true for “Fun Home.” Even if you don’t like all the characters, you want to learn more and more about them.

I think this is a book you should read, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Back in 2006, Time magazine named it their best book of the year. Not the best comic book — the best book, period. Salon called it their best nonfiction debut, the New York Times, Amazon, New York magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, and the Times of London all put it on their best books lists. It won an Eisner, Entertainment Weekly put it on their “New Classics” list, and the Guardian put it in a list of “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read.”

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Go pick it up.

Oh boy! It’s the biggest shopping day of the year! Thousands of people at the malls and the discount stores, taking up all the parking spaces and hitting each other with purses and axes and pontoon boats and whatnot! But it seems like a good time to kick off this year’s “Holiday Gift Bag” series — over the next few weeks, I’m going to offer you some ideas and recommendations for holiday gifts you can give the comics fan in your life. So if you’re tired of getting crushed and pushed around at the mall, head on over to your friendly neighborhood comic shop!

Let’s start off this year with All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. This was originally a 12-issue series that ran from 2005-2008, designed to boil Superman down to his essence in continuity-free stories.

It starts off with a shocker — Superman is dying, poisoned by excess amounts of solar radiation by Lex Luthor. On the bright side, this means that, for as long as he lasts, he’ll be more powerful than ever. But he still has to worry about his legacy, about wrapping up his life’s loose ends, about saying good-bye to friends without letting anyone know that the Earth will soon be without its strongest defender. We get all the familiar supporting cast — Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Lex Luthor — plus a few new characters, like mega-wealthy super-genius Leo Quintum. And the Man of Steel has plenty of new challenges to face — he gets exposed to Black Kryptonite, gets stranded on Bizarro World, and faces attacks from Solaris, rogue Kryptonians, and a super-powered Luthor.

This one is really something else — it may be the best take on Superman ever, with epic storylines and beautifully humanizing characterizations. Lex is an arrogant, self-absorbed genius, Jimmy is the king of the amazing, mad scheme, Clark Kent is a bumbling, doughy wallflower who no one ever suspects is really the Man of Steel. Even minor characters like macho blowhard Steve Lombard and Lex’s niece Nasthalthia get their moments to shine. Morrison and Quitely turned in some of their best and most enjoyable work ever with this one. It’s great fun for longtime Superman fans, and it’s accessible enough for non-comics readers, too. If you know a comics fan who hasn’t read it yet, or a Superman fan who doesn’t read a lot of comics, they might like this one a lot.

“All-Star Superman” is available in two volumes — the first one is out in paperback, but the second is still only out in hardcover. Go pick ’em up.

Only a few shopping days left before Santa’s Birthday, so let’s get one more gift recommendation out of the way so you’ll have time to make it out to the mall.

Today, let’s talk about Art Spiegelman’s Maus (available in two volumes). Although most of the characters are either mice or cats, it’s not a kids’ comic. It’s a no-punches-pulled biography of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, with emphasis on his experiences as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. At times, it’s a funny work — Spiegelman has a good eye for satire and the madness of everyday life. Sometimes, it’s a frustrating work — Spiegelman spends much of the story writing about his interviews with his father, and Vladek often comes across as a vastly infuriating man.

But on the whole, it’s a story about the Holocaust, and so it’s a very human and very sad horror story. The brilliance here is that Spiegelman draws you in with a seemingly simple story of Jewish mice and Nazi cats, and then all of a sudden, you’re neck-deep in Nazi oppression, in hidden bunkers, in Aushwitz. Vladek makes hair’s-breadth escapes from death squads, repeatedly buys his way to freedom only to get recaptured, gets betrayed by people he thought he could trust, and loses vast numbers of friends and loved ones. It’s a harrowing story, and it’s completely engrossing, and you should read it.

A lot of y’all are probably already familiar with this one — it’s one of the most famous graphic novels out there, and it even won Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992. A lot of comics fans haven’t read this one, partly because it’s got a reputation for being a really depressing story, so ask the comics fans in your life if they’ve read it before you buy it for them. In fact, you might also consider it for the history buffs you know — it’s an extremely accessible story, with lots of historical details, and anyone interested in WWII history should enjoy it. Even more than Alan Moore’s Watchmen, this comic is just about the best proof out there for comics and sequential art is literature, not mere throwaway reading.

This probably isn’t the merriest gift you could get someone. It doesn’t come decked out in candy canes and pine garlands and festive songfests. But the people you get it for will thank you for it.

Maus by Art Spiegelman. Go pick it up.

This isn’t so much a recommendation for something you can get the comics fan in your life — most comics fans out there either already own this or they’ve at least read it somewhere in the past. Instead, this is a recommendation for new comics readers and for movie fans. Because 2009 is definitely going to be the Year of Watchmen.

Watchmen was originally published as a limited series in 1986-87 by DC Comics and later collected as a graphic novel in 1987. It was written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. It told a story of an alternate universe of costumed but unpowered vigilantes, how a single godlike metahuman changes the world, and how one person decides to bring the whole world together in peace. Is that telling things a bit too vaguely? Maybe so, but it’s also fun for new readers to discover the intricacies of the plot for themselves.

Our lead characters include Nite Owl, a gadget-using hero; Silk Spectre, a beautiful martial artist; the Comedian, a doomed government agent; Rorschach, a conspiracy-obsessed — but still badass — lunatic; Ozymandias, the smartest and richest man on the planet; and Dr. Manhattan, a man gifted with near-omnipotent powers but entirely detached from human emotions and concerns.

Like I said, most comics fans are very well aware of how great this story is. It also makes a great jumping-on point for new comics readers, because it demonstrates what many critics consider to be the very peak in comics storytelling — it’s a deeply nuanced and complex story, jam-packed with symbolism and bleak foreboding. It’s also a very adult story — and not just because it includes sex, nudity, swearing, and violence — this is a story told by grown-ups to grown-ups. I’m sure particularly smart kids can handle it easily, but it’s not something you wanna drop in your third-grader’s lap because it’s “just a funny book.” Alan Moore has now generally disowned the book because of his long-standing disagreements with how DC has treated him and his work.

And movie fans will probably be interested because Zach Snyder, director of “300,” plans to release a “Watchmen” movie next year, and it’s quickly become one of the most heavily anticipated films around. When the first trailer made its debut in July, demand for the graphic novel skyrocketed, and DC had to rush hundreds of thousands of new copies to print. In other words, when people see info about this movie, they want to read the comic it was based on. So if you’ve got a movie fan on your shopping list, they might appreciate getting to read the comic before the movie comes out in March.

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Go pick it up.

Is it a comic book without pictures? Is it a superhero spoof? Is it a postmodern critique of modern American mythologies and media? Is it a cyberpunk re-imagining of popular power fantasies?

Soon I Will Be Invincible is a novel by a guy named Austin Grossman, published in 2007, about a world where superheroes and supervillains exist and behave pretty similar to how they do in the comics. The bad guys try to conquer the world, the good guys try to save it. Our main characters are Dr. Impossible, a megalomaniacal super-genius who suffers from Malign Hypercognition Disorder, and Fatale, a cybernetic fighting machine who is the newest member of the New Champions, Earth’s most powerful superteam. Will Dr. Impossible’s latest scheme finally succeed where so many others have failed? Does Fatale have what it takes to be a superhero?

I know some comic fans who really don’t like this book much, but I thought it was great fun. The action sequences are fairly few and far between, but when they hit, they’re very, very good. Dr. Impossible’s scheme is appropriately byzantine and complicated, too. The real fun in this one is the characters. They’re simultaneously cliches and intriguingly unfamiliar. Reading about them, what they do, and what makes them tick is a lot of fun.

Let’s take a look at a couple quick excerpts. First, Dr. Impossible reminisces about his own origin:

There are moments in life you just can’t take back. In the terrible slowness of the accident, I got halfway across the room before realizing what I’d done. I had time to look back and read the controls, to see the glass begin to bulge and craze before it shattered, time to notice the sound of my foot scuffing on the floor, and an urgent musical whine from one of the generators sliding up the scale.

A dozen people have gotten themselves killed trying to replicate the effects of that explosion. I turned and saw my future crystallizing out of a volatile green compound, written out in invisible ink. All my life, I’d been waiting for something to happen to me, and now, before I was ready for it, it was. I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings. I was going to declare war on the world, and I was going to lose.

And second, Fatale meets the members of the Champions for the first time:

“We’ve got some new faces here, so let’s make some introductions. I’m Damsel.” The famous face is carefully neutral behind the mask.

They all know one another, but we go around the room anyway. I can’t help but feel it’s a courtesy to me.

“Feral.” It comes out as a breathy cough.

“Blackwolf.” He nods, looking just like his GQ cover. In costume, his black bodysuit shows up that perfect musculature. Almost forty, he looks twenty-five. Genetically perfect.

“Rainbow Triumph.” Rainbow Triumph’s is a bright chirpy cartoon of a voice.

“Mister Mystic.” Mystic’s is baritone perfection, crisp and resonant. I wonder if he used to be a professional actor.

“Elphin.” A child’s whisper but somehow ageless; the voice that once lured naive young knights to their doom.

“Lily.” The glass woman. Her name brings an unmistakable tension into the room. She worked the other side of things for a long, long time. She’s stronger than almost anyone here, and some of them know that firsthand. Now she’s come through the looking glass, into the hero world. I wonder how she got here.

When it gets to me, Damsel says a few polite words about my work on the sniper killings. No mention of the NSA. I stand awkwardly to say my code name, conscious of my height.

“Fatale.” There’s a digital buzz at the back of my voice that the techs never managed to erase. When I sit back down, one armored elbow clacks noisily against the marble tabletop. I don’t wear a mask, but I fight the urge to hide my new face behind the silver hair they gave me. Most of it’s nylon.

It’s a good story, a fun read, and a nice gift for comic fans with a taste for new and interesting prose.

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. Go pick it up.

It’s time to start thinking about Christmas shopping, and that means it’s time for me to start recommending some stuff you can get for the comics fan on your gift list. We’re gonna start off with something I recommended last year — Marvel’s Essentials and DC’s Showcase Presents.

These are, without a doubt, the best bargains in comics, hands down. You get about 500 pages of comics, all for about $17. They’re often called “phonebooks,” ’cause that’s about how thick they are. They’re black-and-white, and the paper quality isn’t top-notch, but these are comics that are designed to be read, not just collected and stored away in mylar.

Even better, these collections can be divided between early works, like the first appearances of the Flash, the Punisher, Green Lantern, or the Fantastic Four, and rarities that haven’t previously been collected due to low demand, like “Tales of the Zombie,” “Enemy Ace,” “The Astonishing Ant-Man,” or “Aquaman.” The variety of comics offered in these is really astounding — you get superhero comics, war comics, Western comics, horror comics, sci-fi, fantasy, you name it. You get major characters and minor characters, and some of the greatest artists and writers in the biz. They don’t have many romance comics yet, but whenever some flunkie at Marvel remembers how many romance comics Stan Lee and Jack Kirby worked on back in the ’50s, we’ll probably get some collections of those, too.

Let’s face it, the economy is in the dumper, and folks are looking for good ways to trim down their holiday spending. These collections are perfect for that — they’re extremely affordable, and each one has more than enough reading to keep comics fans happily reading for weeks. The comics fan on your list gets some classic stories they’d never get to read otherwise, and you get a nice little break for your pocketbook, too.

Marvel’s Essentials and DC’s Showcase Presents. Go pick some up.

We’re running short of shopping time before Christmas, so this’ll be our last look at the gift bag for the season. If you’ve got a comics fan on your shopping list, there’s a pretty good chance they already own these next two comics… but if they don’t have ’em yet, it’s a fairly sure bet that they want them.

Alex Ross, a comic-book painter who actually grew up here in Lubbock, has produced a lot of great comics, but these are some of his best.

 

Marvels

Ross exploded onto the comics scene in 1994 with “Marvels,” which focused on a newspaper photographer named Phil Sheldon and his views of Marvel’s superheroes. The comic, written by Kurt Busiek, let Sheldon take a front row seat at battles between the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, at the Fantastic Four’s epic battle against Galactus, and at the death of Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy.

Sheldon is a bit of a hero-worshipper — he’s constantly frustrated by the cynical view most citizens have of superheroes. In the Marvel Universe, superheroes are celebrities, and they get a lot of celebrity media coverage. One week, everyone loves the Fantastic Four and loves the fairy-tale wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm — the next week, everyone hates ’em and thinks they made up the battle against Galactus to boost their Q-ratings. Sheldon sees the heroes, a bit unrealistically, as the greatest, most noble people in the world, and public reaction to heroes drives him up the wall. But he’s also dead terrified of mutants, and in the best chapter of the book, he has to confront his own prejudices about mutants when his daughters meet and befriend a mutant on the run.

The artwork Ross produced was certainly a revelation for folks used to normal comic book art. There’s no painted-on spandex here — the clothing is realistically rendered, with wrinkles, folds, and everything. Faces are just gorgeous, expressive and realistic. And the lighting — Ross understands light sources, and some of his most beautiful paintings — the Silver Surfer reflecting blasts of fire, mutant-hunting Sentinels hovering over a city at night, Dr. Octopus sitting in a dim jail cell — are so striking solely because he uses lighting effectively and dramatically.

“Marvels” is available in softcover — you should be able to pick it up at your friendly neighborhood comic shop or at your average chain bookstore for about twenty bucks.

 

Kingdom Come

After “Marvels,” DC really wanted to get Ross on board for a miniseries of their own. So they got him to collaborate with Mark Wait to produce 1996’s “Kingdom Come.” Where “Marvels” was rooted in Marvel’s early comics, “Kingdom Come” focused on a possible apocalyptic future for DC’s heroes. About 20 years in the future, Superman and other superheroes retire as more violent heroes start to take over. The Spectre, foreseeing the end of the world coming soon, takes Norman McCay, a minister (based on Ross’s own father), as his human anchor to help him view the final days and render his judgment.

Just about everyone in the DCU gets some major changes — Batman has to wear an exoskeleton to move, the Flash is a constantly moving blur, Hawkman is a bird-human hybrid, Captain Marvel has been brainwashed by Lex Luthor, etc., etc. The forces are divided between multiple different factions, including Superman’s Justice League, the new violent superheroes, Lex Luthor’s Mankind Liberation Front, and a few others. Every step, no matter how well intentioned, moves everyone closer to the metahuman war prophesied to destroy the world.

“Marvels” is the book with the stronger emotional impact, but “Kingdom Come” is all about epic, world-shattering action. I always find myself comparing it to epic, big-budget, widescreen action movies.

“Kingdom Come” is also available in softcover. It’ll set you back about 15 bones.

And if you’d like something a bit more traditionally Christmasy, you might try to track this next one down.

 

Superman: Peace on Earth

This is an oversized coffee-table book about Superman trying, with only limited success, to feed all the hungry people in the world. It’s basically a great big, lushly painted Christmas card. Unfortunately, it’s out of print right now, so there’s not much of a chance of you being able to buy this one before the holidays are over.

If you can find ’em, go pick ’em up.

Ya know, I tried out the “World of Warcraft” computer game when it was in beta testing. It may be the biggest MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) on the planet, but it just wasn’t for me. Loved the scenery, got dead-bored with the fantasy elements. Loved the Night Elves, got dead-bored with killing wild pigs. I found something better instead.

 

City of Heroes and its companion game City of Villains let you play as a superhero (or, if you’re feeling sociopathic, a supervillain). You like comic books, right? You’ll like this game.

So what’s the hook? You play one of several different archetypes — including fire-slinging blasters, brain-blasting controllers, ninja assassins, undead masterminds, and many, many more. You start out fighting opponents that make you feel like a hero (or a villain) — even in the tutorials, superheroes get to help stop an outbreak of a drug-fueled disease, while villains break out of prison.

From there, you can fight dangerous gangs of opponents on the streets of your chosen city, or you can talk to your contacts, who will send you on special missions against evil robots, the disgusting Vazhilok zombies, mutant snakes, or the global villain organization Arachnos.

As you defeat your enemies, your powers improve, and you move on to fight more dangerous enemies, including the mystical Circle of Thorns, the cybernetic Freakshow, and even the invading aliens called the Rikti. And of course, if you’re a villain, there are cops to beat up, heroes to destroy, and banks to rob.

One of the coolest things about the game is the costume creator, which is considered the best of any computer game out there. I’ve been playing the game for several years, and I’m always amazed by the wide variety of costumes you see people wearing in the game. Just about any look you want, there’s a good chance you can create it, from the traditional patriotic hero…

 

…to the dark, brooding avenger…

 

…from mad scientists…

 

…to zombie pirates…

 

…from angels…

 

…to demons…

 

…and even normal schlubs…

 

…or your grandmother.

 

If you’ve got a comics fan who also loves computer games, there’s a pretty darn good chance they’d enjoy this game, too. You can pick up the “Good vs. Evil” edition either online or in an electronics/computers store, and you’ll get “City of Heroes” and “City of Villains” for about $30. Like most MMORPGs, there is a monthly subscription fee — about $15 a month. You’ve still got time to pick it up for the holidays, so jump to it!

 

Believe it or not, if you need to buy a comics fan a present, you can get them books other than comic books.

Astounding, yes, but absolutely true. Comics fans read lots of different kinds of books — science fiction, fantasy, horror, history, science, politics, computers, you name it. But if you’re looking for some comics-themed books they might enjoy, check these out.

(Preliminary note: This list includes several books that I haven’t read yet, but they’ve at least been highly recommended to me in the past. In addition, some of these books aren’t in print anymore, but all can be obtained through used book sellers. I’m linking to Amazon’s descriptions for these books because I buy from them regularly — if you prefer another online bookseller, search for these books on their site.)

Fiction: I’m not a big fan of licensed comic book novels — you know, prose novels about Iron Man and Batman, etc. But superhero fiction about original characters is a sub-genre that I’ve seen a lot more of in recent years. Here are a few that you might find entertaining.

* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. This Pulitzer-winning novel follows the lives and careers of a couple of young comic book creators in the 1930s and ’40s.

* Those Who Walk in Darkness by John Ridley. In a world where all super-people have been outlawed, Soledad O’Roark is an MTac — a cop who hunts down and executes metahumans for the crime of being alive.

* Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. Dr. Impossible is an evil genius. Fatale is a crimefighting cyborg. Can Fatale and Earth’s other heroes stop Impossible from destroying the world? Or will this be the time he finally gets away with it?

Non-fiction: Histories of comics, cultural studies, biographies. There are tons and tons of these kinds of books.

Here’s a sampling of what’s available.

* The Great Women Cartoonists and The Great Women Superheroes by Trina Robbins. Just what they sound like. Lots of illustrations, lots of references, lots of good reading.

* The Comic Book Heroes, Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book and Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones and collaborators. The first two are histories of the comic book industry; the third is a argument in favor of letting kids indulge their natural love of comics, fantasy, and let’s-pretend.

* Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis. A new biography of Charles M. Schulz, creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip.

* Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America by Bradford W. Wright. Another history of comics, told with an emphasis on how comics and superheroes have impacted American culture.

* Up, Up, and Oy Vey!: How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero by Simcha Weinstein. Yet another comics history, focusing on the multitude of Jewish writers and artists who created comics and superheroes.

* Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way edited by Tom Morris and Matt Morris. A collection of essays by philosophers and comics writers, including Mark Waid, Jeph Loeb, and Denny O’Neil, examine morality, ethics, and philosophy through a comic book lens.

Go check ’em out.