NEWS FROM THE COMIC-CON: BOOKS, PART 1

Sandy Eggo is the place where announcements are made and new projects flogged mercilessly. Here, for instance, is a news release from Abrams ComicArts announcing that it will publish Harvey Pekar’s last book, Yiddishkeit, which had been completed by the time he died earlier this month. The book’s title means “Jewishness” in Yiddish, an expression generally used to refer to Yiddish culture, and that, not surprisingly, is what the book is about: following an autobiographical section at the beginning, the main narrative of the volume consists of stories on different aspects of Jewish and Yiddish culture. Paul Buhle, who edited a number of books written by Pekar, assembled the book; at approximately 240 pages, the volume is slated for publication in the fall of 2011.

Forthcoming tomes for the fall include Jerry Robinson’s biography, subtitled Ambassador of Comics. Robinson is the only cartoonist to have served as president of both the National Cartoonists Society and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, and among his other accomplishments is working out the pension deal for Siegel and Shuster with Warner Bros. His watershed history of comics will also be reprinted this fall.

And Chip Kidd has another of his fancy-footwork books on deck, Shazam: The Golden Age of the World’s Mightiest Mortal, touted here as a 250-age “finely designed coffee table book.” That means, no doubt, that Kidd’s book design, as is almost always the case with him, will be more prominent than the content of the volume. The irony here is that the artist whose style formed the image of Captain Marvel, C.C. Beck, was famous for his irascible objection to the modern tendency to draw heroic bodies with every tendon delineated in detail. My guess is that Beck would favor a simple-looking tome.