On covers, I felt that ... one way to irritate the eye is by creating negative space with shapes. You can put things off-angle. Or you can put a large object in with a tiny object, and that would force the eye to look. And it would offend it, it irritates it a bit, but it takes you in... once you get the person in, you hold them."

This sounds like Russian formalism. The aim of the artist is to defamiliarize. You take something the reader/viewer knows well (like 1950/60's suburbia!) and "make it strange"... To me that's a lot more interesting/challenging than taking a fantasy character like Green Lantern and rubbing his hyper-realistically rendered nose in squalor! Clearly, Schumer disagrees. Implicit in the structure of his book is an argument in favour of a qualitative progression (or, at least, a progression towards "seriousness") from Infantino to Adams...

Schumer gives Neal Adams the last word on the Silver Age, and I think most of us understand that the "promise" he speaks of was, in fact, more like a prophecy of doom, and the "road" leads right off a cliff, with Jim Lee at the wheel:

You have to think of Kirby's impact in a general sense. Kirby's a phenomenon as well as an inspiration. But nobody says they want to draw as well as Kirby. His work is like this kind of wall; it will never get better, it will never get worse. It's just there--it fulfills itself.

My work is more like a promise. My work says, 'here's the road Here are some of the things you can see along the road. And there's no end to it'

My impact, I think, is on a very personal, individual level. If you do good work and you succeed, the things people take away from it are as individual as they are. The depth of the work was sufficient to reach different sparks in each person.

In a sense, my work said you now have permission to do great art in comic books. That if you think you're only worthy of producing fine art or becoming great in another field, I now present comic books as potential. The challenge is, this is what I've done; what can you do?"

Obviously, Neal Adams' project did, in a sense, signify the end of the Silver Age... But then, so did Steranko's, and I have to say I would have preferred to see the book culminate with J.S's design-revolution, rather than N.A.'s "gritty photo-relevance". Isn't a work of art supposed to be a "Wall", i.e. unique, "Other"? Memorable for what it is, rather than for what it teaches? Gene Colan or Neal Adams? Who's more interesting? Can there be any doubt? Who the hell wants to go to drawing school when they open up a superhero comic?

Still, it's an interesting book and very much worth your time!