This first full-scale history of superhero comic books reveals how ambitious crooks and adolescent dreamers created a new art form and forever changed the entertainment business In the depths of the Depression, out of bustling cities and crowded tenements, the comic book superhero leapt into being. A strange collection of young men from working-class Jewish neighbourhoods and shady backgrounds transformed a mix of geekiness, science fiction and outsider yearning into blue-eyed, chisel-nosed crime-fighters and adventurers who quickly captured imaginations young and old. Within a few years their inventions had spawned a new genre in movies, radio and television that still dominates youth entertainment seventy years later. Animated by the stories of some of the last century's most charismatic and conniving artists, writers and businessmen, Men of Tomorrow brilliantly demonstrates how the creators of the superheroes gained their cultural power and established a crucial place in the modern imagination.