Book Review: DC Super Heroes: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book

reviewed by Gene Kannenberg, Jr.
[Full disclosure: I am the paper engineer of Here Comes Charlie Brown! A Peanuts Pop-Up published by Abrams ComicArts, which is affiliated with Abrams Books for Young Readers.]

Matthew Reinhart (paper engineering); Brad Walker, Marco Santucci, and Tom Derenick (pencils and inks); and Paul Mounts (colors). DC Super Heroes: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book. New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2024. USD$49.99. ISBN 9781419769450. https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/dc-super-heroes-the-ultimate-pop-up-book  

 

Prolific master paper engineer Matthew Reinhart’s DC Super Heroes: The Ultimate Pop-up Book stands as a companion to his 2022 book Marvel Super Heroes: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book (also from Abrams Books for Young Readers). However, it’s impossible not to compare it to Reinhart’s identically titled DC book published by Little, Brown in 2010. In both cases and in many respects, unfortunately, the newer book, while certainly an impressive achievement, comes up lacking.   

 

First off, let us look at the book on its own terms. The wrap-around cover art by Dan Mora contains a baker’s dozen of DC characters, with the front cover prominently featuring DC’s “Trinity” -- Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, the first two in the “trunks-less” mode they no longer sport in the current comic books (no doubt owing to the long lead-time books like these need for production purposes). The back cover lists the book’s credits and publication information, including, admirably, DC’s standard creator credits for Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. 

 

That Trinity corresponds to the first three openings (double-page spreads) in the book, each devoted to one of the characters and their respective casts and milieux. As with nearly all of Reinhart’s pop-up books, it pays to open each spread slowly, paying careful attention to how each element unfolds and resolves into its final form. The Wonder Woman opening is the only one not previewed on the book’s Amazon.com page or provided as a promotional image, perhaps because it’s the most impressive of the three; Diana Prince is posed dynamically, her lasso extending above and behind the top edge of the pages, while her left leg extends far beyond the bottom page edge. In contrast, Superman is overly barrel-chested and blocky; Clark Kent’s upper body does break the top edge, although—at least in my copy—his right arm remained trapped when unfolding and needed to be oh-so-gently teased out and into place, repeatedly.  

 

The Batman spread includes Robin (Damian Wayne) and Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) as well as Bruce Wayne, with the architecture of Gotham city (and Batman’s fan-folded cape) somewhat overpowering the characters. And, similarly to my copy’s Superman figure, Batman's left arm arrived mis-folded, resolving into a backwards-facing, shoulder-out-of-joint position. Again, I was able to coax it into a semblance of normality, but two mis-aligned elements in a book of this price is not a sign of excellent quality control (although I have not seen other copies for comparison). 

 

However, the impressiveness of the Wonder Woman figure comes with emblematic lost opportunities.  Surrounding the figure is a field of clouds, parts of which are covered with two text blocks, one of which conceals an additional pop-up opening flap. The clouds represent empty visual real estate which begs for more supplemental information or action. The additional pop-up reveals a ritual battle between Diana and Nubia, with Wonder Girl (Donna Troy) in the background. However, the accompanying text only gives a brief description of the island of Themyscira. Neither Nubia nor Donna Troy is named or even referred to. 

 

We see this lack of reference more drastically on the spread devoted to super-villains. The pop-ups depict five characters—Black Manta, Sinestro, Darkseid, Ares, and Lex Luthor—metaphorically standing above and around the Earth (which Sinestro is bathing in his ring’s yellow beam). The Earth presents a nice use of paper globe construction on a small scale. However, the accompanying text is terribly sparse, with neither Luthor or Ares being discussed at all. (As an only occasional reader of current DC comics, I had to do a little research to verify that one character was, in fact, Ares.)   

 

An additional opening on this spread reveals an intricate pop-up Joker face (complete with impressively animated eyebrows); the brief text discusses the Joker but ignores the five other Batman villains featured prominently in the background.  

 

Another spread focuses on Green Lantern (John Stewart), The Flash (Wally West), and Aquaman. Green Lantern’s figure is suitably architectural in its construction, while Aquaman dives below the bottom edge of the page, his glutes prominent. The Flash’s running figure is a marvel to watch unfold; I found myself repeatedly returning to this spread just to admire the ingenious mechanisms at play. Two additional openings reveal Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes) and Hawkman & Hawkgirl. 

 

The final spread presents a surprisingly impressive, multi-tiered battle royale between dozens of heroes and villains, utilizing an x-shaped extension at the midpoint for additional support, and with two smaller V-shaped pops to the front. You will want to turn the book around to view the back of the structure to see more characters and situations. Here the additional unillustrated text block tells the story of the Justice League’s first battle, with Starro the Conqueror. Upon opening the flap, we see the JLA pop up around their round table. The text highlights the Trinity of Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, but in the pop-up, the three center figures are Superman, Batman, and Black Canary – a strange choice given the text’s focus.     

 

All in all, DC Super Heroes: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book offers approximately sixteen pop-ups (depending on how you count/separate them) over its six openings. In contrast, the 2022 Marvel book has only ten—but nearly all of these ten are augmented by pull-tabs to create secondary pops, transformations, or other motions. These secondary motions all move beyond what you might expect from a traditional pop-up book. For example, in the Avengers tableau, Tony Stark stands in front of two suits of Iron Man armor; pull a tab, and suddenly he is covered in a third suit which rises from the floor. Bruce Banner is trapped in a radiation chamber; once you find and pull the hidden tab, the Hulk bursts open the chamber. Similarly, each member of the Fantastic Four is initially depicted by a pre-rocket-flight headshot; a subsequent tab pull reveals each character in powered pose. In short, the Marvel book’s secondary motions highlight action and transformation through user interaction in a way that the DC book does not. 

 

The Marvel book also uses a smaller typeface for its text (perhaps two points shorter), allowing for a much denser, description- and fact-filled reading experience. We do not experience the descriptive gaps in it which we do in the DC book. In fact, the X-Men spread includes not just a two-page pop-up, but also eleven small doors with character portraits; opening the doors reveal names and powers (the latter in an even smaller typeface). However, unlike the DC book, the Marvel book includes no creator credits for any of its characters. 

 

While the 2024 DC book is not as sophisticated or as fact-filled as its 2022 Marvel counterpart, its contents also fall short of 2010’s identically titled DC Super Heroes: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book, also by Matthew Reinhart (and which, one imagines, served as an inspiration for these newer volumes). A side-by-side comparison reveals that the 2024 book is in large part a re-working of the 2010 book. While all of the art is new and by different artists, many of the paper engineering elements are substantially similar, particularly Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the final battle. The 2024 versions do contain some structural advances—although, as noted above, a couple of these enhancements led to difficulties in execution when mass-produced. 

 

While still consisting of six primary openings, the 2010 version contains thirteen additional openings, seven of which are two or more layers deep, compared to seven single-layer additional openings overall in the new edition. It also uses a smaller typeface and has more text boxes, here reaching out closer to the margins than in the new version, leading to more text overall. There are no unidentified characters. Indeed, even the final battle is accompanied by a numbered legend which names every character in the enormous construct. Granted, the 2024 final battle’s art is more detailed and contains more characters, but the point still stands. More layers and more text contribute to a greater sense of history and scope for the DC Universe. 

The 2010 book also contains special enhancements beyond paper engineering: In the Batman spread, the Bat signal lights up, thanks to an embedded battery. Wonder Woman’s lasso is made of string, and part of it twirls as you open the page. Further, in one of the additional openings, her invisible jet (not included in the present volume) has clear plastic parts, ironically adding further dimensionality to the cockpit.

 

Two images from the 2010 book

 

On its own, 2024’s DC Super Heroes: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book by Matthew Reinhart et al. represents a solid example of paper engineering, visually featuring a broad array of DC heroes and villains, with the text (admittedly, something that often gets glossed over in pop-up books) leaving something to be desired. When compared to its much more intricate precursor from 2010, or even to the similarly themed but mechanically more complex Marvel book from just two years ago, it seems like a lost opportunity from the otherwise reliable Reinhart. 

Graphic Novel Review: Thomas Piketty’s Capital & Ideology: a graphic novel adaptation

reviewed by Liz Brown, Outreach & Instruction Librarian, Kraemer Family Library, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Claire Alet and Benjamin Adam. Thomas Piketty’s Capital & Ideology: a graphic novel adaptation. New York City: Abrams Comic Arts, 2024. https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/capital-ideology-a-graphic-novel-adaptation_9781419777059/

Thomas Piketty is a French economist whose works, such as Capital in the 21^st Century and A Brief History of Equality, focus on wealth and inequality. Capital and Ideology is a comics adaptation of his work originally published in 2019. It examines over two centuries of capitalist influences in Europe, from 1789 to 2016, using one fictional French family as a case study for how wealth is distributed and privatized over time, and under the influence of political movements, social reform, and personal wealth management choices. The family depicted begins as members of the French nobility whose business expands into the slave trade, colonizing efforts in India, and industrialization, which carries them through both World Wars. This narrative approach juxtaposes the economic theories being discussed with the actual choices people make when managing their capital. The creators take an expansive, nonlinear approach when constructing the narrative in order to compare the choices the family makes with those of their peers and the effects of those choices on the others around them, especially those of the lower classes. The culmination of this lesson is to see how the privileges wealth affords have been passed down to contemporary generations and impact laws and economic policies that are in place today.

This graphic novel is a great example of how comics can bring increased legibility and accessibility to complex prose works, using visual modes of information. It makes use of numerous types infographics including maps, data visualization, timelines, and more. There is strategic use of color- using limited palettes to color code chapters of the book, which groups specific decades and economic concepts. The artists also reproduce relevant historical artefacts such as campaign buttons, historical documents, and antique currencies. The resulting comic is densely packed with information, which can feel overwhelming at times to more casual readers. Similarly, the focus on French economics means that the subject matter has a fairly narrow focus, although there are definite correlations to the way other Western countries have developed. The final chapter contains six proposals of different ways capitalist economies could develop. It takes into account the way society has changed in light of the COVID pandemic and changes in the makeup of the European Union, drawing on interviews and media the original author, Piketty, has done since the original text was published. However, the proposals are directed towards the uppermost echelons of power, covering large-scale policy decisions which makes the solutions feel alienating and out of reach of those of us on the ground. Ultimately, this comic is best directed at those interested in studying wealth at a scholarly level, best suited to libraries and courses in business and political science. It could make good background reading for future politicians who will be steeped in decision making power.

 

Graphic Novel Review: Big Jim and the White Boy, an Important and Insightful Reimaging of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

reviewed by Matthew Teutsch, PhD, Director of the Lillian E. Smith Center, Piedmont College

David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson. Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined. New York: Penguin Random House, 2024. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/621145/big-jim-and-the-white-boy-by-david-f-walker-and-marcus-kwame-anderson/

Multiple thoughts come to mind when I think about Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). I think about the ways that Twain, through the novel, interrogates language. I think about the ways that the novel falls short of condemning white supremacy. I think about the ways that the novel, through Huck, shows the transmission of white supremacy from generation to generation. I think about the ways that the novel obscures Jim and his family, even though Jim is an integral part of the novel. I think about E.W. Kemble’s racist illustrations throughout the novel which subvert any progressive elements that Twain placed within the narrative. I think about the ways that Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), published ten years after Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is, even with its problems, a better exploration of the social constructions of race and white supremacy. 

This year, two critically acclaimed books that reimagine Twain’s novel have debuted: Percival Everett’s James and David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson’s Big Jim and the White Boy, a graphic reimaging of Twain’s classic. Each of these works provides a new representation and depiction of Jim, giving him his dignity and humanity. They correct Twain’s portrayal of Jim which, as Ralph Ellison writes in “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1963), stems from “a time when the blackfaced minstrel was still popular, and shortly after a which left even the abolitionists weary of those problems associated with the Negro.” Ellison continues by stating that Twain placed Jim in “the outlines of the minstrel tradition, and it is from behind this stereotype mask that we see Jim’s dignity and humanity emerge,” but that mask also presents Jim with a “‘boyish’ naїveté,” placing Huck as the adult.

Big Jim and the White Boy removes the minstrel mask that Jim wears in Twain’s novel, and, as Walker puts it, “centers the character of Jim and attempts to offer him the dignity he deserves while emphasizing his humanity.” Walker and Anderson move back and forth in time, from Jim and Huck’s experiences in the 1850s and 1860s to Jim and Huck telling their story to a group of kids in the summer of 1932 to Jim’s great- great-great-great granddaughter, Almena Burnett, teaching about her ancestor and Twain’s novel at Howard University in 2020. As well, they use the facts that Twain modeled Jim partly on Daniel Quarles, a man whom Twain’s uncle enslaved, and that he drew inspiration from reading about Glasock’s Ben, an enslaved man who ran away and murdered a family, during his time at the Missouri Courier as a way to foreground the narrative within Twain’s construction of the novel and the finished product. Through these interconnecting narratives, Big Jim and the White Boy drives home, as Almena’s grandmother tells her after showing her pictures and telling her about Jim and Huck, the importance of stories, the importance of generational stories, and how those stories counter the fictions of movements such as the Lost Cause.

In an author talk at the end of the book, Almena stresses the importance of telling Jim and Huck’s story as a counter to the ways that media and historians perpetuated the Lost Cause and “effectively shaped public perception of the Confederacy, the Civil War, and slavery.” She tells the audience that even as Twain sought “to portray Jim with some degree of humanity, he did not tell Jim’s story.” Instead, he perpetuated, through Jim’s minstrel mask, the Lost Cause narrative that had started to take shape during the latter part of the nineteenth century.  Almena continues, narrating above panels that depict Jim and Huck on the Mississippi River, riding through Missouri and Kansas, during the Civil War, and in 1932, by saying that she needed to share the story with the world because the story of her ancestor “is more than a runaway slave traveling down the Mississippi River with a young white boy named Huckleberry Finn.” Jim’s story is one of a man who fought for others to be free and a “story of a man who loved his family.”         

While the narrative moves back and forth in time, the decision to end the book with a metanarrative of Almena writing her great-great-great-great grandfather’s story and then having a book signing drives home the ways that culture creates stories and myths to acquire or maintain power and the importance of narratives, based in reality, that counter the mythological constructions of the past. This framing, juxtaposed with the begging which focuses on Twain’s creation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn points out the importance of sharing one’s stories with the world. Big Jim and the White Boy ends with Almena passing along encouragement to an audience member who tells Almena about her family being from Vietnam and her grandfather’s and grandmother’s experiences during the Vietnam War. Annie Nguyen, introducing her grandfather to Almena, says that Jim reminds her of her grandfather and that she wishes “someone would tell his story.” Almena simply responds, “Maybe you could write the book?” Our stories are important, and the ways we tell those stories are important. Walker and Anderson allow Jim to tell his story, to counter the narratives of his life that Twain tells in the novel. They give him a voice. Dignity. Humanity.

I do not have enough space to tackle everything that Big Jim and the White Boy provides readers. That would take a review or essay much longer than this one. I do want to conclude, though, by sharing a few thoughts that I had as I read the graphic novel. As I read it, I kept getting the narrative conflated with Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and even Everett’s James, asking myself, “Did this happen in one or both of those novels?” This uncertainty, at times, added to the ways that Big Jim and the White Boy works in conversation with Twain and Everett, commenting and expounding on those works. It’s a weird sensation to think about this as I read a book, but I find it extremely engaging because, again, it works into the focus of stories and the ways we tell and remember the past.       

Along with this feeling, I constantly thought about Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and the graphic novel adaptation by Reginald Hudlin, Denys Cowan, R.M Guéra, and Danijel Zezelj. Specifically, as Jim searched for his family and him and Huck encountered and killed slave traders and Confederate soldiers, I thought about the thematic connections but also the Blaxploitation connections through some of the action. Anderson’s artwork is in no way akin to the violent illustrations of something like Django Unchained, but some of the panels, where Jim stabs individuals or other violence occurs, even when Pap whips Jim, carry the same weight. Jim’s journey to find his family grants him his humanity and serves, in a lot of ways, as the connective thread that links him with Almena as well as Huck.

The final aspect that stands out to me is, again, something that Everett does in a similar manner in James. In Big Jim and the White Boy, Huck is legally “Black” because his mother was Jim’s sister, Hennie. She gets pregnant after Pap rapes her. Jim keeps this knowledge from Huck, and Almena’s grandmother asks Jim, after Huck’s death, why he chose to keep the secret from Huck. Sitting in a wheelchair next to Huck’s grave, Jim tells her, “I didn’t tell him none of that ‘cause life wis easier for white folks.” In this panel, and in other panels, Anderson shows the anguish and hurt in Jim’s face. After the funeral, Anderson has a nine-panel page. Jim’s face appears in each panel, moving from expressions of gratitude and respect to sadness, as he wipes tears from his eyes. Jim concludes this section by saying he regretted not telling Huck his true identity because he was family.

While Walker and Anderson’s The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History (2021) provides a strictly historical narrative and framework, Big Jim and the White Boy uses fiction to teach history, highlighting Bloody Kansas, John Brown, Nat Turner, the Civil War, the horrors of enslavement, and much more. As well, it examines the ways that culture perpetuates white supremacy through the products it produces and the stories it tells itself and future generations. Walker and Anderson’s work counters these narratives by creating, as Joel Christian Gill puts it in his blurb for the book, a “beautifully and superbly written” graphic novel that truly “expands and American classic by adding rich and important cultural nuances.” Walker and Anderson achieve what that set out to do, providing readers with a work that strips away the minstrel mask that Twain placed on Jim and reveals reality.