Review – Comic Book Confidential

Or “A Hipster’s-Eye View of Comic Book History.” If you genuinely know nothing about the subject, you’ll walk away a little less clueless than when you started. But don’t expect an in-depth examination of the business as a whole. Rather, this starts out with the typical early history, golden age, Comics Code Authority and the like. But it seems like it just can’t wait to break free of the mainstream and start digging into 60s undergrounds, 80s small press and other counter-culture divergence from the mainstream. Normally I’m grateful to avoid spending a ton of time basking in the glory of Stan Lee. But when big figures such as Lee and Jack Kirby get just a few minutes of screen time, yielding to loving recitations from the likes of Bill Griffith and Harvey Pekar, you start to get the idea that the focus isn’t on comic books in general as much as it is on the Crumb-obsessed, comics-as-art-to-the-exclusion-of-entertainment crowd. I appreciated the effort to include Lynda Barry and some of the other often-neglected women who make their livings in this corner of the world. Beyond that, the documentary is a little too navel-gazing for me. Mildly amusing