Pre-Order "From King Arthur to Captain America" Today

The preliminary cover for From King Arthur to Captain America: The Shared Origin of Comic Book Superheroes, available for pre-order.

You'd think that, as a writer, I'd have the appropriate words for a day nearly 20 years in the making, but here I sit, fingers resting on keys, not knowing quite what to say.

Today, you can officially pre-order From King Arthur to Captain America: The Shared Origin of Comic Book Superheroes from McFarland Publishing, and if you would have told 22-year-old Gorcey that as he turned in his 189-page senior honors thesis at U.C. Berkeley (Go Bears!), four days after "Iron Man" came out, he'd probably ask why his first book wasn't about sports. After all, that's where I spent the next 12 years, as was always the plan. I was going to be the next great sportswriter, the next Jim Murray or Rick Reilly. After all, Peter Coogan -- author of the book that served as the cornerstone for that thesis -- told me himself that you could write yourself out of a job by writing about superheroes and comic books.

And yet, here we are. This morning, when I woke up, I got ready for Rosh Hashanah Day 2 at Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles, knowing that one of my authorial mentors, Rabbi Zoë Klein Miles, was going to call me up to the bimah for an aliyah -- along with the congregation's other authors -- as part of the introduction to the synagogue's year-long theme: People of the Book. It was the first real unofficial promotional event for the book, you could say. I didn't expect anything more than a name check, but Rabbi Zoë turned it into a true promo for what was, when she read it, still titled In the Name of the King: The Arthurian Origins of Modern Superheroes.

I was stunned, humbled, and so thankful that my beautiful wife and mother were there in the audience to see and hear it. And then, I came home to an email from Michael Torregrossa, one of my amazing Earth's Mightiest Expert Readers. He had just seen the pre-order page, and he immediately had blasted it out to his blog and discussion lists. Well, that was certainly news to me, so I jumped on here to get this first post ready to go.

In the coming weeks and months, you will read more about the book, including excerpts, superheroic current events, manifestations of King Arthur in pop culture (especially as it relates to comics), the authorial process, and what I'll call the "DVD Extras" -- essays and meditations on lines of inquiry and discussions that, while certainly a part of the larger story, didn't quite go with the flow of the final manuscript (or, as is often the case, had to be cut for length, so that the book didn't become so long as to be prohibitively expensive! Let it never be said that I didn't think of my audience first).

So, if you're a fan of King Arthur and superheroes, I invite you into, as Obi-Wan Kenobi said, a larger world, where knights in shining armor and flying men in tights urge us to look inward, to look up, and to look out for one another. Pre-order here.