Word: comicly
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...fiction. His blockbuster status, along with his sex-and-violence plots and the muscular, almost steroidal, power of his imagery, made him ripe for satire. Sid Caesar played a Hammer character on Your Show of Shows. Al Feldstein led off the first issue of Panic, the sibling of Mad comic book, with a story called "Me, the Verdict," an acute burlesque of Spillane tropes. The highest compliment was paid by Fred Astaire, who in 1953's The Band Wagon devoted an entire ballet, called "The Girl Hunt," to the Hammer mystique. (A decade later, Spillane tipped his fedora to Astaire...
...Crime writer Lawrence Block believes Spillane did more than spice up a genre; he created a format that bridged midcult and low art, print and picture. Block notes that Hammer "was originally intended as a comic-strip hero. The fast cuts, the in-your-face immediacy, and the clear-cut, no-shades-of-gray, good-versus-evil story lines of the Mike Hammer novels come straight out of the comic-book world. Mickey Spillane was writing something else - comic books for grown-ups." I, the Jury, then, can lay claim to being the first graphic novel, just without illustrations...
...connection not lost on some of Spillane's excoriators. Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent was an indictment of comic books and their supposedly toxic influence on kids; the only novelist Wertham mentioned was Spillane. In a way, that was acute. The kids who read comics before World War II were ready for stronger stuff, but with the same bold, obvious, shall we say cartoonish verve. And Wertham was right in fearing that the comic-book worldview was one that would not fade, like acne, as the kids grew up. They would demand adolescent popular art forever...
...divided in halves: for the first 50 years, middle-class pop culture imitated the upper class; in the next 50, it aped the underclass. (Still does.) The first period tried for elegance, the second for outlawry. Astaire; Spillane. This change could be gauged seismographically in the movies, music and comic books of the 1950s. But Spillane was there first, as pioneer or prime corrupter...
...born Frank Morrison Spillane, the son of a Brooklyn barkeep. Raised on the wrong (indeed, only) side of the tracks in Ellzabeth, N.J., he wrote for slick magazines, then shifted to comics, composing the two-page prose fillers that were oddly required by law. During the war he spend four years teaching pilots how to fly and left a Captain, returning to New York. Before the war he had peddled a comic-book character named Mike Danger, the Hammer prototype. Now he updated it, fleshing it out with traits of a Marine friend, Jack Stang (whom he later proposed should...