Excerpt from the introduction to
Kings In Disguise re-issued by W. W. Norton in 2006.
I highly recommend the book!
[...] The histories that we were taught in school were gold and ermine histories, the self-penned chronicles of church and state, of kings and generals, of misjudged wars, successful persecutions, hamstrung dynasties, that all too often seemed like a list of mankind's stumbling blocks more than a proud recounting of its progress. When we look back at our culture's high points, at its noblest achievements, we do not in general count coronations, bloody feuds or holy wars amongst that company. The things we generally cherish as a species, unsurprisingly, seem not to be the grand and glorious campaigns that waste us in our thousands, in our millions, but instead the things that make the often-gruelling human trail sweeter: music and art and writing, medicine and learning, and those fruits of science that are not poisonous and do not too severely disadvantage us. [...] When we search for names to make us proud of our humanity and of our heritage, the likelihood is that the name we seize upon will be a person born to modest circumstance.
The poor, we're told, are always with us, although one would never think so from the reconstructed dramas we call history. History turns the poor into a nameless herd of unpaid and uncredited film-extras with no speaking part, to cannon fodder or to scabby Bastille mobs, to people whose lives came and went and never merited a cameo from Winslett or DiCaprio. To people like our parents or our grandparents or great-grandparents or however far one has to scramble arse-first down the family tree before one reaches hard black dirt. Didn't their lives, their stories, count for anything? Are they to be excluded from the homo sapiens account simply because they were not born into a noble lineage most likely founded upon murder, incest, treachery, decapitation? [...]
Instead, perhaps we should attempt a different history, a different narrative where even those not blessed by ruthlessly acquisitive blood-genealogies may be included. We should count small human victories as dearly as we count the sinking of armadas, and elect our own dishevelled heroes and aristocrats, our monarchies without a pot to piss in, our own vagrant kings.
In this astonishing and heartfelt graphic novel, James Vance and Dan Burr have rescued a lost butt-end of discarded history, an edited-out sequence from the Souza pageant of the great American success tale. [...]
In America, the moment that has come to be iconic as an image of rock-bottom destitution is the Great Depression of the 1930s: sepia lives, dust-saturated, frozen into sepia pictures, newsreel breadlines, but of course that's only half the story. [...] During the Depression, quite a lot of it was going to the entertainment industry, especially those sections of the entertainment industry that dealt in fantasy. [...]
Kings in Disguise closes the circle, the direct descendant of an industry whose boom years were those times that people were most desperate to escape from into dreams of romance and empowerment, using comic strips to tell a story that portrays the grim realities that underlay the times when comic strips were born.
James Vance writes with a naturalism, with an honest voice that doesn't wear its research on its sleeve, and with a finely tuned eye for the human nuances on which his story rests. [...] Dan Burr's compelling art, as masterful and unassuming as the best of, for example, Harvey Pekar's worthiest collaborators, is the writing's perfect complement. It has an earthy strength and functionality, just as the writing has, that doesn't leave room for the least manipulative smear of sentiment, but which leaves all the open space for poetry that anyone could wish. [...]
This is simply one of the most moving and compelling human stories to emerge out of the graphic story medium thus far. [...]
Alan Moore
Northampton, England
July 2005