Exactly 12¢ and Other Convictions

Dennis Blake is a visual arts teacher with the Halton Board of
Education.

Commercial artist Paul Davies’s Exactly 12ў and Other Convictions is
the slimmest of literary tomes. It is a collection of four
“imaginary” letters written to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the creative
duo behind the early 1960s comic-book renaissance that was the Marvel
Comics Group. Davies grew up in the early 1960 and, as with so many
other young boys of that period, his creative imagination was fed by the
colorful superhero fantasies written by Lee and penciled by Kirby.

The book is not really a history of the comics of that period; rather,
it is a childhood reminiscence tinged with adult philosophical musings.
The letter form provides focus to Davies’s reflections, with Lee and
Kirby acting as sounding boards for understanding life in terms of both
the mundane and the apocalyptic. In the “Canadian Cataloguing in
Publication Data” entry on the copyright page, the recommendation is
to catalogue under “Comic books. History and criticism,” but Exactly
12ў is very thin on comic-book history and much richer in the vein of
pop culture.