Heroes and Villains

Heroes and Villains is the first collection of essays by David Hajdu, award-winning author of The Ten-Cent Plague, Positively 4th Street, and Lush Life. Eclectic and controversial, Hajdu takes on topics as varied as pop music, jazz, the avant-garde, comic books, and our downloading culture. The heart of Heroes and Villains is a daring new piece on the transformation of American film through the rise of the comic-book movie. Have comics made movies more juvenile, more sensational, more violent? And if so, are all those things necessarily bad? Other essays in the book deal with topical and surprising subjects like Kanye West, Woody Guthrie, Will Eisner, the White Stripes, Elmer Fudd, Elvis Costello, Harry Partch, John Adams, Marjane Satrapi, Bobby Darin, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell, and more.