I am indebted to Will Eisner, to Stan Lee, and in particular to the late Gil Kane for sharing their reminiscences of the Golden Age, and also to Dick Ayers, Sheldon Moldoff, Martin "Green Lantern" Nodell, and to Marv Wolfman and Lauren Shuler Donner for providing introductions to some of those brilliant creators. Thanks also to Richard Bensam and Peter Wallace for their expert judgments. Roger Angell, Kenneth Turan, Cy Voris, Rosemary Graham, Louis B. Jones, Lee Skirboll, and the heroic Douglas Stumpf all kindly gave me the benefit of their generosity and intelligence by reading drafts or portions of this book along the way. I'm grateful as well to Eugene Feingold, Ricki Waldman, Kenneth Turan, and Robert Chabon for their memories of New York childhoods; to Russell Petrocelli, group rail-trip coordinator of N.J. Transit; and to the past and present members of the Kirby Mailing List (
I would like to thank the MacDowell Colony for providing the magical gifts of space, time, and quiet, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund for its support.
The research for this novel was undertaken primarily at the Doheny Memorial Library at U.S.C., the U.C.L.A. College Library, the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley, the McHenry Library at U.C. Santa Cruz, and the New-York Historical Society.
I have tried to respect history and geography wherever doing so served my purposes as a novelist, but wherever it did not I have, cheerfully or with regret, ignored them.
I have relied on the prior labor of many writers here, but above all on that of the collective authors of the 1959 W.P.A. New York City Guide (John Cheever and Richard Wright among them), and on the work of E. J. Kahn, Jr., Brendan Gill, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, St. Clair McKelway, and all the other great urban portraitists, many of them anonymous, who never failed me when I went searching for their lost city in dusty old bound back issues of The New Yorker. Other helpful or indispensable books were: Letters from Prague: 1939-1941, compiled by Raya Czerner Schapiro and Helga Czerner Weinberg, The Nightmare of Reason, by Ernst Pawel, and Elder of the Jews, by Ruth Bondy; The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1941 edited by E. Eastman Irvine, No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Glory and the Dream, by William Manchester, The Lost World of the Fair, by David Gelernter, and Delivered from Evil, by Robert Leckie; The Secrets of Houdini, by J. C. Cannell, Blackstone's Modern Card Tricks, by Harry Blackstone, Professional Magic Made Easy, by Bruce Elliott, Houdini on Magic, by Harry Houdini, Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls, by William Lindsay Gresham, and Houdini!!!, by Kenneth Silverman; Little America and Discovery, both by Richard E. Byrd, A History of Antarctic Science, by G. E. Fogg, The White Continent, by Thomas R. Henry, Quest for a Continent, by Walter Sullivan, and Antarctic Night, by Jack Bursey; New York Panorama, by the Federal Writers' Project of the W.P.A., The Empire State Building, by John Tauranac, The Gay Metropolis, 1940-1996, by Charles Raiser, and The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson; The Great Comic Book Heroes, by Jules Feiffer, All in Color for a Dime, by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, The Great Comic Book Artists and Great History of Comic Books, both by Ron Goulart, Superhero Comics of the Golden Age: The Illustrated History, by Mike Benton, The Art of the Comic Book, by Robert C. Harvey, and The Comic Book Makers, by Joe Simon with Jim Simon; On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, by Gershom Scholem, and Gates to the Old City, by Raphael Patai; The Big Broadcast, by Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, Don't Touch That Dial, by J. Fred MacDonald, and The Book of Practical Radio, by John Scott-Taggart; as well as the following sites on the World Wide Web: Michael Norwitz's Lev Gleason's Comic House (
I have sought to meet the high standards of the amazing Mary Evans for nearly fifteen years, and only to the extent that it meets them can I be satisfied with this work. Kate Medina blessed this voyage when I had no more than a fictitious map to steer by, and lashed me to the wheel when the seas turned rough. I am grateful to Scott Rudin, for his patience and faith, to Tanya McKinnon, Benjamin Dreyer, E. Beth Thomas, Meaghan Rady, Frankie Jones, Alexa Cassanos, and Paula Shuster. And, everlastingly, to Ayelet Waldman, for inspiring, nurturing, and ensuring, in a thousand ways, every single word of this novel, down to the very last period.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the deep debt I owe in this and everything else I've ever written to the work of the late Jack Kirby, the Ring of Comics.