The Superhero Book

Modern mythology leaps into the popular culture from the pages of comic books and now propels the astounding growth of the graphic novel. Aimed at the genesis, The Superhero Book is the ultimate A-to-Z compendium of everyone’s favorite overachievers in the pitched battle between good and evil. With 300 entries examining more than 1,000 high-powered icons and their place in the popular firmament, The Superhero Book is the first comprehensive profile of superheroes across all media, following their path from comic-book stardom to radio, television, movies, and novels. It’s good to be super-great. With more than 150 full-color illustrations (including dozens of classic comic covers), The Superhero Book covers the best-loved and most historically significant superheroes – mainstream and counterculture, famous and forgotten, best and worst. Each significant era of the superhero is explored – the Golden Age (1938–1954), the Silver Age (1956–1969), the Bronze Age (1970–1979), and the Modern Age (1980–present) – providing the reader with unique perspective of the hero over the twentieth century and beyond. Readers will delight in the mountain of trivia, never-before revealed facts and finds, and insider information, written with insight and enthusiasm by a devoted team of comic-book, film, and pop-culture experts. Gina Misiroglu is a fourteen-year veteran of the West Coast publishing industry, specializing in the development and editing of popular culture, reference, and women’s studies. Misiroglu has edited and developed hundreds of books in her publishing career for a number of presses, including Price Stern Sloan/HP Books, New World Library, Lowell House, Visible Ink Press, Macmillan Reference USA, and Adams Media Corporation. Misiroglu is the author of Girls Like Us: 40 Extraordinary Women Celebrate Girlhoods in Story, Poetry, and Song (New World Library, 1999), winner of the New York Public Library’s “Best Book for Teens” Award, and Imagine: The Spirit of Twentieth-Century American Heroes (New World Library, 1999). She lives in Los Angeles, California.