Word: mike
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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 star as Hammer, even directing a short film with Stang in the role, but it didn't take.) He also gave Hammer a contact...
...That gave him the makings, and suddenly he had a motive. "I had to get out of New York City," he says in Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane. "I couldn't stand that place." So he moved up to Newburgh and, when told a home he wanted to build would cost $1,000, speed-wrote I, the Jury. The hardback version, published by E.P. Dutton, sold OK, nothing special, about 20,000 copies. But when issued in paperback in late 1948, the book stoked a furor. (The year's other literary sensation that year was Spillane's polar opposite...
...fact, Mike loves to hate, to beat, to kill. From Mi>Vengeance Is Mine!: "I loved to shoot killers. I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do than shoot a killer and watch his blood trace a slimy path across the floor." The fights he gets into are manuals for barroom brawlers. Here's a how-to from My Gun Is Quick: "I jammed four big, stiff fingers into his gut right above the navel and he snapped shut like a jackknife. I opened him up again with an openhanded slap that left a blush across his mouth...
...libido, more likely). "If anybody kicks my cat," he explains, "I'm gonna whack him on the ear, see? It's somewhat like kickin' his [Hammer's]cat, so to speak." Actually, it's more like someone's saying, "That's not much of a cat you got," and Mike pulls the guy's guts through his nose. In Spillane, nearly every charged conversation between males escalates pronto into a fight. Hammer hits first. And, as J. Kenneth Van Dover notes in his astute, fairly critical Murder in the Millions (about Gardner, Hammett and Fleming), Hammer's pugilistic repertoire relies...