So there were stories in here I loved. GRRMs story about The Turtle was a lot of fun, and I thought the one about the Four Aces during the Red Scare was pretty compelling. The last story of the book, "Comes a Hunter" was absolutely fantastic.

But then some of it seems like filler. Some of it, like "Strings" seems to exist for shock value and to make the world seem darker. That story in particular isn't necessarily badly written, but the content was pretty dark/edgy and a bit out of my personal comfort zone. YMMV.

I remember reading this before and really liking it, but now I'm a little less in tune with it. It very much reads like a ode to an era of comics I never really experienced (Silver/Gold age) seen through the lense of the grimdark comics of the 80s/90s (aspects of which haven't aged well, there is a contant and unironic undercurrent of toxic masculinity that gets pretty tiresome). I might read the second, but I'm not in a hurry.

Since I listened to the audiobook: Luke Daniels does a FANTASTIC job as the whole cast. His chapters as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson were spot on. He manage to give each character a uniqueness that made it fun to listen to.