Gerard Jones

Gerard Jones wrote Men of Tomorrow, which took an Eisner Award and remains the standard account of how the comic book began. Its argument is that the form came out of two things at once: immigrant Jewish boys in Cleveland with nothing to lose, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster among them, and the pulp and racketeering end of New York publishing, in the person of Harry Donenfeld. The two collided in 1938 in Action Comics number one, and Siegel and Shuster spent the rest of their lives trying to get credit and money out of what they had made. Jones had written comics himself, including a long run on Green Lantern, and earlier books arguing that violent play does children less harm than adults fear. He pleaded guilty in April 2018 to federal charges and was sentenced that August to six years in prison.