In his introduction to The World of Twomorrows: Celebrating 25 Years of the Future of Fandom, Mark Evanier rewrites a quote from playwright George S. Kaufman to declare, “If you want to get revenge on a publisher, convince them there’s an audience out there for books and magazines about comic book history.”
What would Evanier say about the audience for books about comic book-historian history? I’d imagine the audience for The World of Twomorrows is limited to the fans who have been dedicatedly following Twomorrows Publishing for the past quarter century, devouring mags like The Jack Kirby Collector, Alter Ego, Back Issue, BrickJournal Lego ®, and most recently (and most near and dear to my own heart) Retro Fan, as well as fab books about Kirby, Alan Moore, and comic collecting in the seventies and eighties. There are also (again, most near and dear to yours truly) Mark Voger’s hardcover odes to monster kids and groovy sixties/seventies pop culture.
As you’ve probably sussed, I am one of those folks who’ve been following Twomorrows, though not for the entirety of its 25-year history. Having read the works of Twomorrows voyagers such as Voger, Michael Eury, George Khoury, and main men John Morrow and Jon B. Cooke, I appreciated the opportunity to get to know them better through the interviews and autobiographies that make up The World of Twomorrows, particularly since personal style and friendly tone are among the publisher’s distinctive traits. Reading any Twomorrows publication, you get to feel like you’re having an informal yet extremely informative chat about comics or pop culture with the writer. The World of Twomorrows feels like the next phase in that chat when topics move from mutual interests to more personal matters, and you learn about Eury’s experiences with hearing loss and his activism for the hearing disabled, Morrow and Cooke’s falling out and reunion, and Morrow’s general status as super-nice guy.
Another distinctive trait is the requisite cavalcade of full-color artwork that crowds most Twomorrows publications, and The World of Twomorrows delivers on that too. Hardly a page goes by without some terrific splash of art from some past Twomorrows publication depicting Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Spiderman, Captain America, or some other hero who has drawn readers into the world of Twomorrows.
