114 thoughts on “Funky Flashman”

1. I’ll admit that I’ve had a hard time loving the 4th World stuff. That said, your attack on Kirby’s Manicheanism seems ironic given what seems to be the Manichean underpinning of your entire argument (which surfaces explicitly in a couple of places: corporate comics vs. (implicitly)art comics, art comics vs. fan boys)

2. Domingos explicitly says that Kirby isn’t all bad, though. The argument isn’t so much a Manichean, this is evil, and more an argument that the material is overrated. (Or at least that’s the sense I got.)

3. Yes, and you can’t say “corporate comics” leaving the word “dreck” out. I said “big corporation owned dreck” in the same way as (you imply wrong amassing straw for your straw man) I can say “creator owned dreck.” As for the fanboys reference I admit that that one is a direct answer to all the times that I’ve seen the “yawn” card played against art comics. As if their fun is somewhat more legitimate than other people’s fun.

4. I’m not really a Kirby fan…but I guess where I don’t entirely buy the argument here is in what seems like a general dismissal of allegory. There’s lots of worthwhile art — from fairy tales to Iago — which doesn’t rely on depth of characterization.

5. I thought that I was careful enough in that part, but apparently not. I used the words “can be”: “we all know how heavy handed that can be.” This means that I leave the possibility open for a great use of the allegory to exist (I will even cite one: The Noise of Frost by Lorenzo Mattotti – I read it long ago though…). What I don’t think results is a Manichean allegory. That’s what dictators did countless times and it’s not a pretty sight to see.

6. Fair enough!

7. One other thing I was just thinking about…I understand where you’re coming from in your point about Kirby’s enthusiasm for/fetishization of violence. What I’m wondering is whether it makes sense to call that “fascist”. In the first place, fascism is, of course, a particular historical movement to which Kirby was specifically and (ahem) violently opposed. In the second…there are no shortage of other movements which are enthusiastic about and fetishize violence. Communism does, for one. Stanley Hauerwas argues that the US does (and I think he’s got a point.)

   I think the charge of fascism tends to detract from the main point too…fascism is seen as such an ultimate evil (for good reason) that people just see the charge as outrageous. I guess my argument would be that fascism is a particularly extreme (not to mention racist) form of the belief in/faith in force, which is a ubiquitous modern (though not only modern) ideological staple. Wouldn’t it make more sense to see Kirby’s love of force as linked to America’s investment in hegemony by force (not least through the atomic bomb) rather than with fascism per se?

   We need a better word, is the bottom line. Hauerwas calls it Constantinianism…maybe that’d work?

8. That word is way too complicated to catch up. I use “fascistic” above in an aesthetic context, not in a political one. On the other hand I’m trying to split the un-splittable, I guess… I could have used fascist-like, or something, but that is awkward too.

9. Also, I may be wrong, but I didn’t use the capitalization of the word “Fascistic” to mean: a generic atemporal use of the same aesthetic principles.

10. FWIW, I enjoy superhero comics in part because the world I inhabit has so many moments where the good are essentially powerless to battle the bad, and I enjoy occasionally dipping into the fantasy where things end better.

    However, I’m pretty picky about which ones do this well and which ones are gross power fantasies. I also need stories that acknowledge how often the weak but good just get trampled upon.

    As an artist, I just don’t like Kirby. I find his art too conscious in its use of line weight and too blocky. It feels like mecha art, even when it shouldn’t (ie, when it should be softer things). I’ll probably get blasted for that opinion, but that’s just how I react on a gut-level to it. It does show lots of skill in many ways, but it doesn’t move me.

11. I understand what you mean. That’s why I say that everything is emphatic in these comics (one of these days I will count the exclamation marks in one of these comics). I must also add that I just say that the endless battles are boring after writing: “let me indulge in a personal note for a sec.” I mean to imply no one else and I even try to understand those who like this sort of thing (millions, I’m sure) doing a poor job at it, of course…

12. If I’m not mistaken there are 301 exclamation marks in “Murder Missile Trap!” (yup, that’s one): Mister Miracle # 1.

13. Wouldn’t a generic use of Constantinianism have the same problem as a generic use of fascism? Especially given it’s explicitly Christian/Roman roots?

    Superhero comics in general, and Kirby comics in particular, are obsessed with pecking-order among males. I never read the Fourth World stuff, but from my vague memories of his “Fantastic Four” half the comic was about the alpha male (Mr. Fantastic) establishing his dominance over the beta challenger (The Thing). It’s more about primate dominance rather than a particular ideology.

14. This is what you could direct your energies to, to contribute to the festival of hate? Pathetic.

15. Fascism is all about alpha male dominance too, I guess… But that’s not all. There are at least two more details: the celebration of youth (the young athletic body) and all things modern: speed and machines.

16. War too, of course.

17. To be fair, I think I suggested Kirby to Domingos. He was talking about doing a superhero comic, and Derik (who was initially going to do Kirby) had ended up doing Dragonlance instead.

    Also…this isn’t all that hateful. More in the vein of, even Kirby doesn’t escape the problems with superheroes (which you can agree or disagree with obviously, but isn’t especially antagonistic as these things go.)

18. James: I could direct my attention to Tintin or Corto Maltese, but this being an American blog, and all…

19. Also, you already did Tintin.

20. “I know! A mother box! [everything is emphatic in these stories]”

    “…by the early 1970s, exclamation points were mostly used because comic writers wanted them, not because they had to. It was useful in making comics seem dynamic.”

    “Stanley Hauerwas argues that the US does (and I think he’s got a point.)”

    He’s got more than a point. After all, didn’t we save those poor Nicaraguans from Communism? And the Vietnamese. And the Iraqis. etc. etc.

    Good essay.

21. Yes, but that was just a couple of pages because of a very specific reason. Tintin has lots of other problems. For instance:
    Hergé did a very commendable self-criticism when he met Tchang. He understood that, until, then (The Blue Lotus) he reveled in ethnic stereotypes. This is the origin of one of his best gags. And yet, he couldn’t help himself. In the same album he did hateful caricatures of the Japanese.

22. And we helped the Filipinos out a hundred years ago so they could get a chance to govern themselves….

23. Hmm. Maybe the word we’re looking for is “imperialism.”

24. Noah, you’re forgetting the aesthetic implications. I’m not to blame if the word “fascism” has been demonized. To tell you the truth I prefer “futurism,” but that word has problems too because it leaves more conservative aesthetics (Nazi art, for instance) out.

25. On the other hand if we were talking about architecture “imperialist art” would do perfectly.

26. I love, love, love me some Kirby, and “Himon!” is one of my all-time favorite comics stories (it’s the one I wrote about in the Team Cul de Sac zine), so I feel like I’ve gotta argue against this piece somehow, but I doubt anything I say will have much impact or change anybody’s mind. Still! I feel like every argument against the King here is a reason I like his work so much, and I see complexities and fascinating art where Domingos sees loud, violent simplicity. The take on good and evil might be black and white, but there’s depth to it, a reflection of how Kirby saw the world. Darkseid is more than just an evil dictator, he’s THE dictator, the very face of Fascism, wanting to subjugate and control everyone and everything. Mister Miracle is Kirby himself, learning to live through oppression and escape to inspire others, and his love for Barda is what keeps him going. Orion (a counterexample to the good=pretty, bad=ugly divide, given that he hides his Apokaliptian visage behind a Mother Box-created facade) is the warrior struggling to use his power for good and fight the evil that spawned him. Yes, it’s all loud, brash, explosive, but it’s pitched at the level that suits the conflicts, stirring the heart with the primal battles of good and evil.

    And there’s more depth in the use of violence too. A scene in which Orion loses control and savagely beats an evil fiend to death while laughing maniacally is powerful in its evocation of the way the urge to violence can be seductive. In “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin!”, a regular human gets in the middle of a fight between Orion and another New God, and he is nearly beaten to a pulp, the damage to his frail body evident and monstrous, a horrible reminder of the way war chews people up and spits them out. This stuff isn’t just punches and explosions for kicks; Kirby examined the meaning behind his bombast and made us feel it on an emotional level as well as a visceral one.

    Even the glorification of technology is far from universal; most of Kirby’s cosmic machines were impossibly huge contraptions that loomed over characters and landscapes, frighteningly incomprehensible in their functions. As much as he might have reveled in the coolness of futuristic machinery, Kirby demonstrated how it can and will be used for control and death.

    I dunno, I hope Charles Hatfield or somebody will show up and mount a better defense of this stuff than I can. I agree that most superhero comics can be dismissed as “corporate-owned dreck”, but not Kirby. He’s got so much more going on than black and white morality, simplistic characters, technological fetishism, and glorification of violence. I might not be able to do it very well, but I’ll defend him to my dying day.

27. You did a great job, Matthew, thanks a lot for your thoughtful comment! (I even use a proverbial exclamation mark in the honor of the king!)

    What happens in the end with these discussions is that those who are pro just see the good things while those who are against just see the bad. I tried to show some of the good too and I accept that your great examples are also there to those of us who want to seek them.

28. I’m back after looking at “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin!” (those damn exclamation marks) and I must say that I’m not convinced. Turpin is badly injured, yes, but he survives to tell the tale which is, again, kind of sanitizing the whole thing, isn’t it? Turpin is resilient: as Art Spiegelman put it, he represents “the triumph of the will.” As for Orion, he’s as athletic as Mister Miracle or Big Barda or Lightray.

    Your take on the technological sublime is indeed interesting. I particularly remember the Celestials’ space ship and the Celestials themselves (which are robots of sorts). There’s a feeling of menace, sure, but there’s also a an unmistakable fascination and awe.

    I think that what’s maybe more interesting in these comics is a tension between the man who saw war (the man who saw what war does to people) and the artist dealing with a violent genre.

29. I’ve highlighted Matt’s comment over here.

30. Domingos wrote: “Fascism is all about alpha male dominance too, I guess… But that’s not all. There are at least two more details: the celebration of youth (the young athletic body) and all things modern: speed and machines.”

    So ancient Athens was a fascist city-state?

    I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

31. Did they have automobiles?

    Sorry couldn’t resist!

    That was Sparta though. Why do you think that Frank Miller did 300?

32. Athens celebrated machines?

    I don’t think it’s crazy to see ancient Greece as proto-fascist. See Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.”

33. Seriously though, let’s not be anachronistic.

    It’s also obvious that ancient Rome was an important source of inspiration for the Fascists.

34. Gee Domingos, I just think there are oodles of douchebags out there that you COULD have gone for, like maybe any one of the useless productions by the scumbags like Stan whatshisface who robbed Jack, enrich themselves beyond reasonability and hold American comics back in the underwear dark ages by piling mounds of regurgitated yet watered down versions of the many silly concepts Kirby came up with on top of each other, but no, you had to come up with a silly reason to compare Kirby’s work with fascism. Fucking ridiculous. And the alternative to this was an attack on Corto Maltese, one of the few other older comics I enjoy? But why?

35. Well, because what’s the point of attacking some shitty comic?

    You substitute Stan for Hugo and Kirby for Oesterheld and… voilà!… (Minus the silly part.)

36. I think for a lot of people in the hatefest, the decision of what to write about is in part in response to critical consensus — or it’s about what work is overrated as much as about which is “the worst.” I think that’s pretty understandable…there are so many bad comics out there, there has to be some reason to target something in particular.

37. Bah, it just makes me realize yet one more time that as far as I am concerned, life is too short to dwell on all of the things I don’t like, I have passed the time of wanting to rip new bungers to all the stupid crap out there, when there are genuinely interesting efforts that deserve attention and underappreciated stuff that still hasn’t found its audience. So knock yrselves out, HUers. Looking forward to this fest to be over.

38. Again, if I’m not mistaken, there are 98 exclamation marks in the images above.

39. Most, if not all of classical Greece, including Athens, celebrated youth, alpha males, the new and the modern (via architecture and engineering), and speed (manifested through Olympiad foot, chariot and horse racing).

    Sparta doesn’t count, because it was an anomaly — nothing like the city-state of Athens, which was far more influential to overall Greek culture in almost every respect. In addition, while the Spartans were arguably facist-like in some ways, they certainly did not celebrate technology, science and engineering.

    Thus, your “there’s facism everywhere” thesis has a hole in it big enough to drive a Whiz Wagon through.

    The frickin’ Third Reich single-handedly killed the art deco movement, the bums!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

40. I seem to recall Kirby being ambivalent towards technology in the later fourth world stories. If I remember correctly, Apokolips was increasingly automated and even Darkseid was beginning to feel oppressed by the drab predictability of this new, mechanized Apokolips.

    Interesting essay, thank you. I thought there were some interesting ideas in the fourth world stories, as well as powerful art but certainly nothing to justify the esteem it’s held in. Actually, that’s true of any superhero stories not written by Morrison or Moore. It’s probably also true of superhero stories they wrote, excluding Seaguy. OMAC was fun though, did you read any OMAC?

41. Nope.

    And thanks, Evan! (another exclamation mark, jeez).

42. Who cares if there are exclamation marks!!? I like exclamation marks!!!!!! I like how Kirby uses exclamation marks!!!! I like how he bolded some words, too!! He drew muscles bigger than they might be found in nature, too, no doubt he should be cast out from the academy of great drawrers as well. Obviously a fascist, since Nazis worship big muscles. Kirby’s Jewish, but well, there’s a picture of a Jewish guy on the front of the NY Times with a Wily Coyote bomb and he seems to be a fascist, so….ahem. A lot of the least literate comic fans complain about Kirby’s bolding and exclamation marks and claim them as evidence why he is a much worser writer than the genius Stan Lee. And now, you have thrown your lot in with them, Domingozzles. Excelsior!! Who died and left you the god of punctuation?!!! Forsooth.

43. Where did I say anything about Stan Lee? This is becoming a little (to be charitable) silly, so, that’s all for now, folks!…

44. Claiming that an artist who personally battled Nazis hand to hand is a fascist, and complaining that a writer of stories for comic books uses too many exclamation marks…that’s silly.

45. Oh, Domingos, you scamp.

    I’m puzzled by this, though: “a Manichean [allegory] can only achieve kitchy results”. Surely you mean specifically in comics? It’s been a while since I read them, but I remember the Commedia, Faerie Queene and Pilgrim’s Progress as being pretty Manichaean and, well, your mileage may vary (as the kids say) but they didn’t seem too kitschy to me. (Maybe Pilgrim’s Progress, I guess)

46. Domingos- Hello, nice to see you properly engage with this stuff, I was often annoyed by your sometimes dismissive comments but I’m glad you really arent just throwing shit from a distance and not seeing the target properly.

    Power fantasies can take many forms, like the power of intellect or the power to fly or the fantasy of someone or something having power over you.
    I dont think the fights are always about violence or aggression. I think sometimes fights are one obvious way in which to enjoy the spectacle of the body in action. Like a lot of Hong Kong action films feelings weirdly not violent at all, but like dancing. Has there ever been a comic that revolved around images of dancing?

    Who wins the fight? I think these type of comics fail when they dwell on that. Ayo said on his blog a while ago that the strength of old DC comics was always the odd situations…

    http://comixcube.com/2012/06/17/the-superhero-genre-will-never-attain-the-thematic-purity-or-unaffected-honesty-of-1950s-70s-jimmy-olsen-stories/#more-2400

    …Jojos Bizarre Adventure and Savage Dragon excel at insane situations. In Jojo, the pleasure is of seeing Araki’s insane imagination at work, the good guys often win by the skin of their teeth, by sheer luck or sometimes win unknowingly. All the suspense is in wondering how it will play out, less to do with strength and moral superiority.

    Savage Dragon is often seen as part of the decline of the superhero genre because it is by an Image founder. Some eventually gave Erik Larsen respect because how long he has stuck at it. But I honestly believe Savage Dragon is the real fulfillment of what Marvel Comics always wanted you to believe they were.
    As a visual artist, Larsen is no Kirby or Ditko for imagination and design, nor even Gene Colan for solid drawing chops and movement; but he makes up for it in so many other ways. Like Jojo, the comic can be thrillingly bonkers, lots of funny stuff, but he often takes the long and hard way out of difficult situations, there are consequences to everything (even if they dont show up for years, they do eventually, lots of complicated circumstances) and it might be the most unpredictable story I’ve ever read.

    I also think that maybe Larsen adds a little complexity to Kirby the way Pratchett is said to do to Tolkien (I havent read either of the last two): superfreaks are turned to crime because nobody will employ them for regular work or even give them a place to live in because they look so intimidating. There was a recent scene of a skull headed man trying to work in an office in suit and tie getting fired and being infuriated by the employers not being up front about the discrimination. But Savage Dragon always keeps a funny balancing act between cartoon simplicity, real world complexity, veering between extremes of both quite successfully I’d say.

    I think absurdity is one of the best keys to making superheroes work.

    I’ve gave a lot of thought to my enjoyment of violence, I’m still confused by it. I wouldnt say I’m a big fan of violence and big muscles, but somehow they turn up so frequently in the things I like. Right now one of the Mangas I want to read most is Rapist Monk/Defiler Monk, not really because of the violence, but the madness and intensity that goes along with it.
    Despite all its flaws I’m quite a fan of the Hokuto No Ken franchise. Again, absurdity. I found the comic and animated versions too tedious to finish but something about the intensity, mad violence and overblown epic drama moves me still. There are many more accomplished intellegent works, but sometimes something even as flawed as this seem infinitely more compelling and powerful to me than most of the acclaimed alternative comics I’ve tried.

    Director Peter Jackson was once questioned about his old gore movies and he responded that he does not make violent movies, he described films that make people have violent angry feelings towards a bad guy as truly violent films. This has always stuck with me. In Martial Arts movies, the manipulation of the audiences anger always seemed so much more troubling than the action.

    I was shocked that Spiegelman cheerily endorsed Che by Spain. Especially because it celebrates a real once living murdering madman whose violence will still be felt by so many today. Underground Comix were often a critique of the worst things about the mainstream comics but now Spain surpasses Frank Miller in sinister work.
    DC Vertigo published Cuba: My Revolution a while ago, about the darker side of the revolution, written by a woman who lived through it. I havent read it yet, but it is said to present a nice counterbalance and she said she wanted to give a voice to the many voiceless Cubans.

    It is interesting what you say about sanitized violence. I really think this tension exists in most art, at least from the way I experience these things. I always get the sense that however daring an artist is, there are always certain things that they would rather not let happen, things they would never feel comfortable depicting that could happen in reality.
    It might be an aspect of OCD, but I used to draw really unpleasant thoughts that plagued my mind as a way of coming to terms with them. I think that maybe a lot of clumsy and offensive stories about rape are done for the same reason. Maybe superhero writers have characters raped because they are so horrified by the idea that they need to make it happen like they way we press a sore tooth to see how much it can hurt. That is the reason I stopped drawing these things, I dont want to draw the artistic equivalent of pressing a sore tooth, or a sore thought; I just think about it a while and then let it go away when it stops hurting so much.

    Why are Darkseid and the alien ugly? They might look intimidating but they could easily be good guys.

    My general thoughts on Kirby: I love his art but I could rarely push my way to the end of a story. Although as a designer he really came into his own in the 60s/70s, I think his most beautiful drawings were with Joe Simon in 40s/50s. I dont think it is just Simon’s inks, I really think his rendering was better in those days. I think Kirby would best be done justice by a huge book of some panels, illustrations and explanations of some of the ideas, characters and concepts. That would be a far better experience than any of his stories.
    I love his Simon era double page spreads, the collages, the drawings of God and Noah, the watercolor drawings.

    Some general thoughts about Domingos, canon and “cultural detritus”:

    I must have joined the Comics Journal forum after you left (I doubt anyone remembers me from then, the most fuss I ever caused is when I said how much I hated Eternal Sunshine and Angels In America) but people often referred to you as if you were this stereotypical elitist boogeyman. I now know they were wrong.
    I genuinely admire most of what you are trying to do, I think sacred cows really sorely do need to be lowered and even more importantly do hidden treasures need to be raised; but I think your dismissiveness gives people an excuse not to take you seriously and a bit more measured criticism like the piece above would give you more converts.

    Three examples…

    – Calling Druillet’s work “slick piles of nothing”
    – Dismissing Corben as adolescent
    – Calling Brinkman’s influences “cultural detritus”

    … I’m not sure how to streamline this argument, I may go in circles.

    If a Fanboy is someone who often denies there are flaws in his favorite works, I think the elitist who denies there are powerful virtues in a very flawed work( or that the virutes are negated by the flaws) is also guilty of anti-intellectualism. Both want to make the situation simpler than it is and their intellect suffers for that.

    Druillet’s work is always been mostly driven by the artwork and I find that sort of grandeur immensely deeply satisfying. It may not be the sort of work you look for but it certainly isnt “nothing”. I’ve always wondered why some people cant enjoy bombastic grandeur but it is a quality I’ve always sought after, whether walking in countryside sight seeing, looking at John Martin or Kirby pictures, listening to prog rock and classical.

    I read a Bill Griffith interview from around 10 years ago and he said that when he accused Corben and company of being bad for alternative comics, he mainly meant to say that they worshipped Feldstein’s EC to the point they could not move beyond it. But he also said he wished he had read those comics more so he might have had a more informed opinion about it. I think he was right about the worship thing. I once read Corben say that he had a lot of doubts about the meaningfulness of his work.

    I dont find many of Corben’s stories that great. Most of his really complete experiences are with Bruce Jones. But Corben’s art by itself is full of virtues. Den, for example, I dont think the story was up to much but is filled with love, awe, fear and disgust of the body, its variations, transformations and its vulnerability. Corben’s people are drawn with a rare sensitivity, whether mighty or weak, whether armored or naked, they are often full of a compelling vulnerability. Someone once said Corben’s main concern was savagery, but I’d say it might be a fear of conflict physical and emotional.
    He gender bends and species bends very often, negative judgement by appearance are minimal. Although there are so many muscular men and voluptuous women, I’d say he is one of the few comic artists that has a really meaningful and adventurous relationship with physical beauty. That is something I find sorely lacking in so many artists.
    He can do amazingly convincing actors (comics also lack many artists who can draw believable emotions) and can do amazing drama when he gets the chance. I think he could do the drama that alt comics artists need far better than most of them can. He did a short American Splendor part but didnt really get the material to shine.

    The “cultural detritus” thing bothered me most because I dont care about high or low culture, all I care about is quality and power. I’m mostly a horror/fantasy fan, and these genres are victims of the fanboys who wallow in their complacency about quality and the elitists who dismiss the genres unless they are sufficiently gentrified for their accommodation.

    Like Brinkman, I’m influenced by toys, videogames etc, but despite the low position in culture (which I dont care about anyway) and the severe flaws in a lot of these things, they can still be very powerful and meaningful, just like a flawed yet powerful book. For example, Mighty Max toy franchise pandered to kids who wanted to be Bart Simpson or Macauley Culkin, it was a “collect em all” thing, but some of the toy designs were phenomenal, enormous influence to me to this day. No extent of low cultural position changes the quality of these fascinating intricately crafted grotesques. A writer doing a novel about “serious issues” shouldnt automatically have a higher standing, the quality of the finished piece is all that matters. QUALITY IS EVERYTHING!

    I have to make do with a lot of comics on just the strength of the art. Steve Ditko is my favorite comic artist, but there isnt a single story I would recommend anyone read, I’d urge people to get Essential Dr Strange purely for art. EC Comics are other fiftues horrors are mainly for the art, Graham Ingels did some of the most gorgeous comics art but I wouldnt recommend anyone read them. Fifties horror comics are best enjoyed by their covers.

    What I’m getting at is that a lot of my favorite things and a lot of the most worthwhile things are very flawed. I understand why you would want a canon without such flawed works but it would probably be less interesting and lacking a lot of the things that have made comics worthwhile. I dont think I’ve ever read a comic deserving of a top 100 canon, maybe comics arent ready for it yet (films too, I cant think of 10 films I’d put in top100), so a canon of creators seems more sensible to me right now. Kirby might never have done a masterpiece but he has certainly enough brilliance among all his work to say he is one of the things that made comics worthwhile.

    I might sound like I’m totally fine with my art/entertainment being so flawed but I’m not. I feel an immense rage, disgust and bitter resentment that these things got such a bloated exaggerated reputation. I hate that people let it get like this, I hate that I have to make do with the best things still leaving so much to be desired, I hate that my fellow horror/fantasy fans are fine with this. THIS SUCKS!

    All these things badly need to be taken down a few pegs, people need to learn that something being severely flawed does not make it shit and just because you love it doesnt mean you should deny how flawed it is.

    I grew up with all the hype and believed it, and because people couldnt be more realistic, it has all been one big depressing comedown; always think back to how I read pro-zines and found myself enjoying reading about comics more than I actually enjoyed reading the comics I was reading about, I tried to silence that scary thought. The more unmoved I was by them, the more I started to think I must be at fault for not enjoying them. So I spent more time trying to enjoy them and that helped OCD come on, so I ended up spending 4 hours reading a regular comic because if everyone else says it is amazing, I had to try and get that amazement too, and it ended up taking forever.

    I remember I gave a friend Essential Hulk 1, he was saying the art and ideas were good but the writing was terrible. At the time I couldnt accept hearing Stan Lee was a bad writer because I had been trained not to question his brilliance. I tried to rationalize it as if he didnt know what he was talking about, but deep down I knew he was right.

    After spending stupid amounts of money on these overrated comics eventually I couldnt take it anymore and the full realisation of how hype and lack of honest critical standards had turned me into an idiot spending hundreds on stuff that was mostly leaving me empty. This is happening to thousands of people and its DISGUSTING. Yeah, Ditko is an amazing artist, but dont be irresponsible and tell people his books are masterpieces. Has our need to label everything either “Masterpiece!” or “Shit!” let us come to this?

    I sometimes think because a lot of us are artists and enthusiasts, we go easier on this work than a newbie would, we know how hard it is to make this stuff, we come to be affectionate for the people who make it, so we critically go easier on them.
    With the growing resentment I felt towards all this hype and so little satisfaction, I taken perverse glee in hearing casual comic fans say “meh” or be completely unimpressed by comics of elevated status. A confirmation that some of the best still aint good enough.

    This depressing comedown happened with films and is currently happening with books as I’m finding out how overrated most horror/fantasy is. These genres should be overwhelming me with wonder and terror, but complacent criticism has let them be so much less.

    So Domingos, thanks for being honest with yourself even if you are excessive at times. I think promoting your buried treasures is what every comics fan should be doing, I might not be interested in most of your taste, but thanks for recommending Pierre Duba, I like the look of his books.

    Noah- I dont know if you remember me, I’m one of the Eaten By Ducks guys. I’d be interested in what you thought of my work now, if you feel like it. Aeron said you left because you were getting so little feedback, but you produced so much that there wasnt much we could say that was helpful. Are you still drawing?

    Like I said to Domingos, your more extreme comments damage your credibility. I almost wanted to stop coming here after you said Pop Art was better than all comics (I’m no expert but pop art always seemed visually and intellectually shallow to me, but I love Vaughn Oliver and I think he was influenced by it, so I cant judge too much) and that slasher films were better than all of sculpture (Bernini and Rodin are not less than the anal warts of the horror genre, Black Christmas is the only worthwhile slasher I’ve seen). I’m not convinced you really believe these things and I’m not convinced you really like pop music for young girls all that much. But I forgive you because you like Teenage Filmstars.

    If you want to support something for young girls, widen awareness about Ron Embleton’s girl comics. I’ve wanted a reprint collection of them so badly, for artwork only of course…

    http://idemandreprints.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/ron-embleton.html

    Do you ever write about Sam Kieth? His work is full of feminist stuff, especially My Inner Bimbo.

    Are you adamant about writing about mega popular culture? I’d really rather hear about stuff that is underrated or unknown, think of all the artists you can help, we need to stop comparing opinions about the latest media sensation and give our time to the artists who deserve it.

    I liked your articles on I Spit On Your Grave and the porn documentary( thanks for realising the word “degrading” should not be restricted to sexual contexts, we are degraded constantly in so many areas of life).
    I’d love to see you write about Hong Kong Catergory 3 films. They were nasty and extreme but often had a message. Pure exploitation but also well meaning but they wanted it both ways. When I first read about Red To Kill, I couldnt believe such a film existed, nasty and sad but worth watching.

47. Jones, I’d vote for Pilgrim’s Progress as kitschy. Also unreadable.

    Robert, of course I remember you. Nice to see you stop by here. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say pop art was better than comics or that slasher films were better than all of sculpture…I really don’t think either of those things is true. I like pop art pretty well, but not as much as Peanuts, certainly — and while I love slashers, there’s lots of great sculpture too.

    And…I honestly can’t remember why I left Eaten By Ducks…? I think I was just ready to give something else a try, probably?

    Anyway, thanks again for coming by. Good to hear you’re well.

48. Thanks for your thoughts, Robert.

49. I guess I made that comment too long (I think I was 4 hours writing it).

    Really, you have nothing to add? I was looking forward to being contradicted by you both.

50. Sorry to disappoint you Robert, but no, I agree with everything you say about me. I did that self-criticism myself. I just want to add that the kind of text that I wrote above is a very different animal from a comment. In the latter I don’t engage with the material. But, really, why should I engage with something that I dislike, anyway? When I first arrived on the www, silly and naive old me, I thought that I would finally be discussing the comics that I like. Naturally I directed my web surf board to TCJ’s messboard. Imagine my dismay after finding out that it wasn’t much different from Comicon.com. I could have disappeared completely from the web (now on retrospect maybe I should have done that), but there were good things too, so I have no regrets…

    As for other things I don’t agree completely with the lack of great comics (there are a few), but I strongly disagree with the lack of great films. My top ten goes more or less, as follows (in no particular order):

    Greed, Erich von Stroheim
    Young Mr. Lincoln, Ford
    The Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami
    L’Atalante, Jean Vigo
    Stromboli, Rossellini
    A Man Escaped, Bresson
    Sansho the Bailiff, Mizoguchi
    Tokio Story, Ozu
    The Red Desert, Antonioni
    Husbands, Cassavetes

    I could add a few more films by these directors or add some by others, of course: Pickpocket by Bresson, Senso by Visconti, Early Spring by Ozu, The Life of Oharu by Mizoguchi. Kenji Mizoguchi is my favorite director (the ending of The Empress Yang Kwei Fei is unforgettable).

51. Talking about Mizoguchi and horror movies… This is an horror movie.

52. I love Ozu, but have not warmed to Mizoguchi, though I don’t now remember what of his films I watched. Maybe I should try him again.

53. That scene has really fascinating music. My first encounter with Mizoguchi was Ugetsu because it was listed in a horror film guide. I quite liked it.

    Part of the reason I cant list so many great films or comics is because I stopped trying to be an expert. I grew frustrated with trying to get into so many things that werent clicking. Since I’m so slow at everything and my art is extremely time consuming, I just had to admit that I only have time for the occasional branching out from my usual tastes. I’ll see those films someday (written them down), I havent tried that sort of stuff in ages, I find it quite difficult to watch a lot of social realism without visual flourishes, I’ll probably start with Cassavettes.

    My favorite directors being Lynch, Ken Russell, Shinya Tsukamoto, Gregg Araki, Sion Sono, Shozin Fukui, Kim Ki Duk, Cronenberg, Gilliam, bits of Murnau, Zulawski and Hitchcock. I’ll probably call myself a Shuji Terayama and Sogo Ishii fan eventually. Kim Ki Duk being the most realistic, but somehow as austere, long and quiet as his scenes are, I’ve never found him boring. Since I’m no cineaste, I’m not really sure when I’m at fault for being bored or when it’s the directors fault. So many people said In The Mood For Love was overwhelmingly emotional but I was just bored, I dont know who is wrong. And I can easily enjoy atmospheric surreal visual nonsense that other people find boring.

    I found Conte Demoniaque on amazon, I think I’ll get it.

54. Domingos, I agree with you on one thing at least, about L’Atalante’s status. But, I read your Kirby piece again, yet remain unconvinced. Insofar as Kirby’s work goes, I do think in many ways he “hacked” out a lot of his work….he was in a furious rush with most of it and it is done to satisfy certain conditions that he saw as market prerequisites, i.e. mostly young people in good physical condition in combat with villains who are drawn to indicate their evil natures and to be clearly distinguishable from the handsome heroes. Huge amounts of Americans and Europeans alike worship young, strong athletes who play ball games, I’m not one of them but I wouldn’t get far if I accused them all of being fascists. I do think that glamorizing violence is a bad thing and if you read solo, late Kirby more carefully you would see him exploring these issues purposefully.
    I think a lot of people underestimate the level Kirby’s drawing skills, with all this “cubist” and “rivitive” crap—it jut makes me think they have no clue of his command of composition, of his ability to draw figures with weight interacting with an incredible sense of momentum within deep space etc—and regarding his depiction of women, for instance he does not draw from templates as so many artists do, one will see quite a range of body types indicative of human diversity in any given story. His worst in other words is better than a lot of peoples’ best, but there are relatively few very strong works over his career. Even in the 4th World…he didn’t necessarily go into that thinking it would be his masterpiece, he was trying just to gain control over his work after being horribly exploited—-he actually intended for other artists to draw the books after he got them off the ground. But as it progressed he put his heart and soul into it, until it was yanked away….so books such as Mr. Miracles 12 and 16 that you cited above are particularly formuaic, dispirited comics done by a man who has lost his way, coming as they do after the hammer.
    Yes, even in his generally acknowledged masterworks like Himon there are some sort of predictable bits, the Mother Box as a easy way out etc, but I never thought they took away so much from the whole…and picking on the punctuation is really beneath notice. I thought it was just fine.
    There is also some sort of assumption that Kirby’s supporters are of one mind and believe EVERYTHING he did to be the utmost genius. But that is simply not the case…he was human, a guy who did a LOT of work, some that was corrupted by others, some which while it had its virtues was basically just junk and some of which was brilliant. I mean, you pick out contradictions in your own critique but you treat them as if they are accidents….you seem to refuse to think Kirby did anything purposefully….but in those few instances where he took the time to work out what he wanted to say carefully, he did make the points he wanted to make. With Kirby, it is the few brilliant exceptions that are the rule.

55. Derik: You definitely need to do that. You may start with the two films that I mentioned above. The ending of The Empress Yang Kwei Fei is like Shakespeare directed by Rembrandt.

    Robert: It’s great that you remembered Conte Demoniaque. Aristophane was hugely influenced by Jack Kirby in that one.
    You will not like Husbands I’m afraid; it’s brutally raw and honest. Sometimes even painful to watch. I liked In the Mood For Love alright, but somehow I found it underwhelming. We find a work of art boring when we can’t connect with it. That’s not the director’s fault or our fault; it’s just how things work. The reasons vary: from our moment in life, to our interests at the moment, to our mood, etc… That’s why following the lead of other people is impossible sometimes: they’re not us.

    James: I find very little to disagree with in your comment above. Just a couple of things: you acknowledge everything that I said it’s just that you discard Kirby’s work weaknesses while I underline them. Judging his work from an aesthetic point of view I couldn’t care less for his working conditions (and I’m sure that there’s a serious academic paper in there). His work and nothing else is what I have in front of me. The following disclaimer “Conclusion: After probing into a small part of a huge corpus” is to be taken seriously. What I wrote is mostly about the Mister Miracle series. My somewhat rhetorical question: “is it fair to judge an artist for a really small amount of his input while most of it is big corporation owned dreck produced in a work-for-hire situation?” may be answered: yes, it is fair; Kirby published 25.000 pages in his career, but I’m going to judge him for 40 or so. I don’t think that Kirby’s best stories were accidents. I recognize his control of the comics medium and his ability to draw (even if his rush lead him to draw Mister Miracle’s left eye above completely out of its proper place). What I do think is that his stories contradict each other. While “The Pact” is against war, he reveled in violent depictions. Ultimately what I think is deeply wrong is the superhero genre. The exclamation marks are important to recognize the emphatic nature of the stories, but I joked a bit about it, sorry about that!…

56. I also think that the genre weakened even his best work.

    Oh and the fascist part of this affair was blown completely out of proportion (as Noah predicted, by the way). Some words are just too charged, I guess…

57. One word that you don’t use, Domingos, but goes along with your points 1 though 3 is ‘tedium.’ You probably have more of an appreciation of Kirby than I since you can at least make through an entire comic book of his. I do love looking at his splash pages, but it really does amaze me that intelligent adults can spend hours upon hours thinking his narratives are anything but the most simplistic nonsense. Good essay.

    On the other hand, I’d probably disagree with about half of your film list as being any more “honest” or “realistic” than Kirby. Cassavetes is emotion porn, as cheap as the endless use of dei ex machina. He and Kiarostami are about as bad as cinema gets for me. So lacking in any humor about their overly constructed miserabilism that it provokes laughter. Just kill yourself already, so I don’t have to hear that fucking tire on gravel noise! Maybe Antonioni is the same way, but his films are such great eye candy that I don’t care and love them anyway — which is probably the best defense of Kirby, too.

58. “You will not like Husbands I’m afraid; it’s brutally raw and honest. Sometimes even painful to watch.”

    That makes me want to see it more. A few directors I liked mentioned him favorably. My lack of enjoyment watching social realism is often that the drama felt perhaps too distanced; you understand the emotional states of the characters but dont feel involved, but words like “brutal” and “painful” suggest something different.

    What do you think of Kim Ki Duk?

59. “(even if his rush lead him to draw Mister Miracle’s left eye above completely out of its proper place)”

    I kind of like that, honestly.

60. Charles…we agree on something! I can’t stand Cassavetes either….

61. Charles: I used the word “boring.” If not for this post I would never touch a Kirby comic again.

    I understand what you’re saying about Cassavetes being emotional porn. That’s exactly the painful part to watch that I mentioned. Frankly I want to stop looking. And yet, I couldn’t disagree with you more when you say that he wasn’t more honest or realistic than Kirby. Re. Husbands That’s exactly what a male midlife crisis looks like.

62. Hate brings people together.

    I’d second the recommendation of The Isle, at least, but nothing else of Kim’s has come close to that. I like my existentialism on the fantastic side.

63. Domingos, I guess we hang out in different circles. Cassavetes depicts what “artistic types” think life is like.

64. Robert: I have no opinion about Kim Ki Duk. I’ll have to check him out.

    Re. The Red Desert: my favorite Antonioni is this one (starts at 1.30). The Red Desert is in my list since my days as an art student. Now I largely prefer Rossellini. Rome Open City should be in my top ten instead of Red Desert, maybe, but that’s OK.

65. I’m glad that you don’t socialize with jerks, Charles.

66. The Isle is great, some people found it really boring but I was never bored. Ng mentioned Bad Guy recently, which is really good, as is Breath, Samaritan Girl, 3 Iron, The Bow.
    Time and Spring Summer Fall Winter & Spring are the essentials I think. The latter is probably his most famous one and the visuals and music are a mark above his usual.
    Coast Guard is really good but the weakest of all I’ve seen, it maybe goes too far to prove a point and eventually becomes near funny because of that.

    Somehow he often gets called a misogynist but that baffles me. He deals very often with horribly oppressed women so I think it is inevitable that someone would call him that.

67. Oh and Kiarostami: what I like in Asian cinema is that religion is never very far. I’m excepting Japan here; I mean Iranian and Russian (yeah, I know, they’re part of Europe, except that culturally they’re not; for some odd, mysterious reason I don’t like Tarkovsky though – Sokurov, maybe…).

68. Here’s another one that I’m sure you would hate, Charles (from Turkey this time). I remember visiting his site to watch his great photos huge. Now one can only see them very small. What a shame!… His early photos are ugh!…

69. A lot of interesting commentary here (most of which I’ve not read yet); but, to start with the beginning…

    What a gigantic load of hogwash! (Apologies to those who actually wash hogs, a useful and beneficial task.)

    As I’ve said earlier, Domingos is most astute and erudite in what he finds deserving of praise (a rare exception is his including the massively overrated — if not wholly untalented — Adrian Tomine in his pantheon of worthiness).

    However, when he attacks, we’re talking major myopia; and his arguments are based upon manifestly dishonest premises, the better to maintain his More-Highbrow-Than-Thou attitude. (Why, to him, Gary Groth is just another brainless, drooling fanboy!)

    To recycle an old comment o’ mine…

    ————————-
    Am reminded again of that friend of critic John Simon, who upon leaving a performance of “Macbeth,” would loudly announce, “It’s good, but it’s not ‘Oklahoma!'” Then, exiting a performance of the famed musical, would call out, “It’s good, but it’s not ‘Macbeth’!”

    …does it make sense to criticize a gloomy drama by the exact same standards one would a rousing musical? To expect, say, “Where the Wild Things Are” — about as perfect a work as one could ask for — to have the character complexity, sweeping portrait of a society, the range of humanity, of a “War and Peace”?
    ————————

    Thus does Domingos regularly “prove” that comics are an utterly worthless art form that deserves to go extinct; by picking assorted admired works, then cursing them to eternal perdition because they fail to rise to the utmost heights of literary or artistic achievement, that works which have far greater esteem, acclaim, profit, and thus attract a far greater pool of talent, have done. Never mind that — like “Oklahoma!” vs. “Macbeth” — were created with different aims and audiences in mind.

    ———————–
    Domingos Isabelinho says:

    Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote the following about kitsch…

    “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”

    Also…

    “Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”
    ————————

    A perfect set-up! For the foundation of his argument, Domingos quotes as revealed wisdom some authoritative-sounding lines by an Acclaimed Literary Figure…

    …which are utter malarkey.

    Let us dissect:

    “…kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”

    Oh, so Kundera is saying that shit and death are “essentially unacceptable in human existence“? Why, he must be one of those purely intellectual, bodiless entities like Poe’s in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” dwelling on some celestial sphere far beyond the dross of materiality.

    Amongst us mud-grubbers, farmers throughout the world employ poop (even the human variety) to fertilize their crops; parents deal with mountains of diapers sodden with the stuff; we each excrete our share, and, as some wit wondered, “Before we flush the toilet, why do we always…look?”

    Still, for some utterly incomprehensible reason, we don’t see artists, writers, documentarians, both talented and mediocre, making fecal matter a focus of their artistry, “going to the bathroom” a routine activity frequently dwelt upon. Why, I’m old enough to remember when hearing the loud sound of a flushing toilet in Archie Bunker’s household was a shockingly transgressive, decorum-shattering bit of hilarity! (And for years, the “throne” couldn’t even be shown…)

    Thus, to condemn as kitsch-meisters any creator who acts like BMs don’t exist, is to razz Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Bernini, Rodin, Ingmar Bergman, and so forth. But, what better way to act “more highbrow than thou”?

    (Some exceedingly rare exceptions: in a scene of Christ preaching, Rembrandt included a dog taking a crap. As with his inclusion of a boy distractedly drawing in the dust — instead of listening reverently, like a Victorian artist would have set the scene — the message was clear: the Divine can exist in this far-from-exalted world, is not to be buried in solemnity. And Dali, more on the kitschy end of the spectrum, featured some nicely-painted turds in his canvases. And then there’s the elephant-dung Madonna sculpture, the canned Artist’s Shit, in the sadly declined, “anything is art” modern times.)

    Technological moderns certainly do their damnedest to avoid dwelling on their own forthcoming death, yet are fascinated by celebrity deaths, terrorists’ slaughters, the walking dead, real-life murder cases, eat up TV shows where corpses are dissected to discover causes of death, the threat of death propelling countless thrillers and horror tales, and wallowing in events such as “Remember 9/11” or the mass ballyhoo over the passing of the “People’s Princess.”

    “Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”

    Actually, there is plenty of “kitschy” work, from borderline to full-fledged, that dwells upon death:
    http://webartacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Death_of_Marat_by_David_art_academy.jpg ,
    http://blog.marcusstuartvannini.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/6-25-custerlaststand1.jpg ,
    http://askmarion.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/christ-has-risen1.png ,
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/anselpixel/7354652596/ ,
    http://www.stellamaternity.com/cccfsd.html?gclid=CJ-5tu6W27ICFQKCnQod8XEAZw ,
    http://www.customfirefightertshirts.com/details.php?design=FD-Skull.21074&product_type=A-Line-Baby-Dresses.905&gclid=COqav4KX27ICFQaFnQodYykAyA ,
    http://www.babyrebellion.com/proddetail.php?prod=BNIE0001 .

    In what way is a skeletal Marylin Monroe resin statuette or skull-and-crossbones bedecked beanie-cap for Baby “curtain[ing] off death”?

    What about the massively-popular EC and lesser horror comics; the “classic” “National Enquirer,” which before turning more “family-friendly,” featured front-page stories like “Mom Boils Baby on Kitchen Stove”?

    And if it’s not “kitsch” — because there’s hardly a curtaining off of death — then it must be ART; all far better than Kirby’s work, following Domingos’ formula.

    ———————–
    Giving us not only a fascistic glorification and aestheticization, but also a sanitized version of violence Jack Kirby’s work is the perfect embodiment of kitsch.
    ———————–

    Re the second part, one could accurately say that 99.99% of art, movies, writing, photojournalism offer a “sanitized version of violence.” Where are all the spilled innards, bodies shitting and peeing themselves as sphincters relax in death, maggots frothing in eye-sockets? (I recall an amusing account — in “TV Guide,” I think — of a writer watching a cowboy-movie saloon fight accompanied by a physician friend. The doc saying, as one cowpoke got a chair broken over his head, shook his head, then waded back into the fray: “Fractured skull, cerebral hemorrhage, probably paralyzed for life”; as he later — accumulating further injuries — continued fighting, “This man is obviously dead.” [Quoted from memory.])

    Where do we see heroes suffering crippling injuries, years of agonizing rehabilitation, brain damage from blows to the head? Why, you’d think there would be entire hospital wards dedicated to head-injured hard-boiled dicks, who can’t seem to cross a doorway without getting whacked on the noggin from behind. No, at worst they either die heroically, or suffer an injury (the arm and shoulder favorite targets) more decorative than crippling.

    And this is work aimed at adults I’m talking about. Exceptions like some scenes in Goya’s “Disasters of War” ( http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldr1noiMqT1qd384p.jpg ) or Tom Lea’s 1944 “The Price” (he saw this: http://www.tomlea.net/images/ThePrice.LG.jpg , or Tardi’s great WW I comics, exceedingly few and far between.

    In comics mostly aimed at kids, as far as can be as the gruesomeness from EC, Kirby likewise doesn’t splatter shredded human bodies all over the place. How dare he not! The outrage!

    To summarize: we get a smugly self-righteous, sneering condemnation of Kirby for offering “a sanitized version of violence,” while 99.99% of work aimed at adults does the same.

    About the psychological effects of violence, this by “Life” WW II artist Tom Lea: http://www.tomlea.net/works/2,000-Yard_Stare.html

    By WW II artist and soldier Jack Kirby: http://latimesherocomplex.files.wordpress.com/2030/04/foxhole-4.jpg?w=309&h=450

    (Yes, Lea’s is the more powerful work; but Kirby’s can hardly be condemned as “sanitized.” Unless, that is, by the More-Righteous-Than-Thou crowd.)

    And it’s hardly a common sight, but Kirby’s featured heaps of corpses — not disemboweled or dismembered, but hardly glamorized, thrown in ungainly stacks — in various of his comics stories.

    Further, I love how people who’d have been mightily trying to get a draft deferment had they been around in WW II, would’ve loosened their bowels had they had to go toe-to-toe with the Third Reich, smugly condemn Kirby’s art as “fascist,” criticize him — someone who actually fought the Nazis, who personally saw violence most of us can never imagine — for featuring “good versus evil” narratives, for shying away from depicting the full horrors he experienced.

    (Many WW II vets likewise telling their family little or none of that; so unlike modern-day braggarts who strut like kings after performing a slam-dunk or making it to the next level in a video game.)

    Re the tossed-around “Manichean”: what an outrage that Kirby features “good versus evil” conflict! Which not a single serious artistic creator would ever think of doing; which virtually never occurs in art or literature…

    And the “glorification and aestheticization” of heroes, conflict, violence — which routinely is part of the vast majority of art — gets called “fascistic.”

    Art Spiegelman, you’d have gone up in smoke if not for people like Jack Kirby; who put their lives on the line in kill-or-be-killed situations, physically fighting Fascism, instead of following the preferred approach of moderns on left and right, whining and pointing condemnatory fingers from a safe distance.

    Never mind that with countless villains from Granny Goodness to Doctor Doom, Kirby showed fascistic behavior as a detestable evil. By far Kirby’s most comprehensive exposition of the evil appeal of Fascism, the methods by which it works, is the Glorious Godfrey tale.

    Where we see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32377634@N02/4091330551/

    Far more, in pictures and essay, at http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/365fourth/2011/01/day-95-glorious-godfrey/

    And: http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/365fourth/2011/01/day-96-justifiers/

    But then, we get that sort of stuff around here all the time; if Alan Moore has a woman character being sexually assaulted, even if he shows it as a vile, brutal act rather than taking the slimy Manara approach of exploitatively depicting it as sexily titillating, he gets condemned for making a “misogynyst” comic. The term repeated overandoverandover until the widespread attitude is, misogyny = Alan Moore.

70. Charles: “[…] such great eye candy that I don’t care and love them anyway — which is probably the best defense of Kirby, too.”

    That’s not a defense at all in my book.

71. “I liked In the Mood For Love alright, but somehow I found it underwhelming.”

    Wong Kar-Wai is more than an acquirred taste. I don’t care for his work too much myself. Like latter-day Kieslowski, it’s all texture.

    “Cassavetes is emotion porn, as cheap as the endless use of dei ex machina”

    What really annoys me is not so much his work but the adulation his work receives. Always good to hear some naysaying about it.

    My favorite Antonioni will always be L’Aventura & The Passenger. I leave the rest of it.

72. I think I prefer L’Eclisse to L’Aventura.

    Time for an Antonioni roundtable!

73. I think the otherwise thoughtful Art Spiegelman hasn’t been able to bring himself to actually read much of Kirby’s work. When I took his class at Columbia he really went into overdrive with the Kirby hating. He “conceeded” that Kirby was an “idiot savant,” mostly because he decided it had something to do with the disturbed Henry Darger’s pederastic efforts, but then, after showing us a film of Kirby rambling on about myths and legends in response to some interviewer’s leading questions, the man obviously tired at the end of a con in a time late in his life when his health wasn’t good, Art then crowed, “see, he’s an idiot.”
    So likewise, I also don’t take much note of the opinion of someone who can’t read an entire Kirby comic, which were after all written to be read by children, yet still feels qualified to judge it as “simplistic nonsense”.

74. Derik: I second the Antonioni roundtable.

75. Good grief; and here I thought I might’ve been too hard on Art Spiegelman…

    —————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …I guess my argument would be that fascism is a particularly extreme (not to mention racist) form of the belief in/faith in force, which is a ubiquitous modern (though not only modern) ideological staple. Wouldn’t it make more sense to see Kirby’s love of force as linked to America’s investment in hegemony by force (not least through the atomic bomb) rather than with fascism per se?
    —————————

    Sheesh; so if “faith in force” is an ubiquitous modern ideological staple, then fascism is just a “particularly extreme” form of Capitalism, Communism, Radical Islam, fundamentalist Christianity?

    Check out what the boring ol’ dictionary definition says:

    —————————-
    fas·cism

    1. a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
    —————————–
    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fascism?s=t

    There’s “force” there, but it’s hardly the sole or quintessential factor.

    —————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Wouldn’t it make more sense to see Kirby’s love of force as linked to America’s investment in hegemony by force (not least through the atomic bomb) rather than with fascism per se?
    —————————

    No. First, in a body of work overwhelmingly devoted to adventure/crime-fighting (the latter what superhero fare is, in spandex drag) comics, inescapably the use of “force” is involved; is an utterly necessary narrative factor.

    Which hardly makes Kirby a gun-waving, violence-loving warmonger.

    And, consider…

    —————————-
    he·gem·o·ny

    1. leadership or predominant influence exercised by one nation over others, as in a confederation.
    2. leadership; predominance.
    3. (especially among smaller nations) aggression or expansionism by large nations in an effort to achieve world domination.
    ——————————
    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hegemony?s=t

    Was a “self-identified New Dealer and a lifelong liberal” like Kirby — not to be confused with the wussified, spineless modern variety, that expends more energy fighting allies who don’t toe the Party Line rather than the true enemy, or in endless bickering by every petty-minded faction — in favor of an Imperial Amerika, conquering, exploiting, bleeding other nations dry? Hardly.

    The quote above from this article:

    ——————————-
    It remains the most memorable blow ever struck for liberty in the history of American popular culture. When the first issue of “Captain America Comics” appeared on newsstands 70 years ago, the cover depicted a flag-draped symbol of young American manhood administering a crushing uppercut to Adolf Hitler’s jaw.

    It was a knock-out blow to fascism delivered by the giddily idealized embodiment of American virtue. And it gave vicarious expression to the impulses of a country where the public mood had been on a war-footing for months.

    Cover dated March 1941, the crude but galvanizing imagery amounted to a declaration of war on Hitler, a full nine months before the Führer declared war on the U.S. in the days following Pearl Harbor.

    At a time when isolationist voices were still cautioning against American involvement in another European war, this was FDR’s pro-war case rendered in four primary colors and reduced to its essentials…

    In 1943 Kirby was, as he said, “handed an M-1 and a chocolate bar and told to go kill Hitler”. He followed in his most enduring creation’s footsteps, putting on a uniform sporting an American flag shoulder patch rather than wrap-around red and white stripes, and marched off to war. He arguably never took those army fatigues off again until the day he died in 1994.

    A member of George Patton’s Third Army, PFC Kirby landed on a body-strewn Normandy beach ten days after D-Day and spent the next year under fire as Allied forces pushed towards the German frontier. He came to hate war as only a combat veteran can. He witnessed both battlefield carnage and the atrocities which had taken place behind the wire-fencing of a concentration camp. He was haunted by nightmares about World War Two for the rest of his life…
    ———————————
    http://www.frumforum.com/americas-greatest-hero-turns-70/

76. Although I would prefer a Kenji Mizoguchi roundtable. I can dream, can’t I?…

    I rewatched the ending of The Empress Yang Kwei-Fei. The travelling shot (the king of camera movements) at the end is just 30 seconds (I did count), but it must be the most beautiful travelling shot in the history of cinema.

77. I’d be open to an Antonioni roundtable…but I don’t know anything about him, is the problem. If you wanted to organize it, Derik, I’d totally support you though (along the lines of what Caro did with Godard…?)

78. “No. First, in a body of work overwhelmingly devoted to adventure/crime-fighting (the latter what superhero fare is, in spandex drag) comics, inescapably the use of “force” is involved; is an utterly necessary narrative factor.”

    But saying a predominantly genre-oriented creator is in part determined by his genre is the point, not an objection to the point. As Domingos said earlier, I think you can see Kirby struggling with and thinking about issues of violence in his work…but that doesn’t mean you have to conclude that he came out on top of those issues, or that the genre he worked in for most of his career wasn’t also in some ways determinative of his art.

79. I’m backed up to all get out, but I’d be on board for an Antonioni roundtable as well.

80. James,

    I’d rather read a 4th World comic than sit through an Art Spiegelman lecture, if that’s any consolation. Domingos is pretty much right about the content, kids’ comics or not. I have similar problems reading Gardner Fox comics — it’s all so blandly mechanical at the same time as not making a lick of sense. Some of Barks’ comics, which I recently read for the first time, actually had some depth to them. When I read intellectual re-descriptions of what Kirby was doing with his narratives, they never remotely resemble the actual comics.

    Domingos,

    Here’s my own top 20 films for you to dismiss.

    I don’t have a problem with eye candy. A well-crafted thing is a well-crafted thing. I also can appreciate the aesthetics of action/violence — few people do it really well, so why is that less important than depicting relationships, or whatever?

81. There’s much for me to dismiss there, but the film posters are great.

    I remember liking High and Low and a couple of other films in your list though (who doesn’t like Kubrick, for instance?).

82. —————
    Robert Adam Gilmour says:

    Domingos…I’m glad you really aren’t just throwing shit from a distance and not seeing the target properly.
    ——————-

    Well, the first one, anyway…

    ———————
    I was shocked that Spiegelman cheerily endorsed Che by Spain. Especially because it celebrates a real once living murdering madman whose violence will still be felt by so many today.
    ———————

    Must say, I wasn’t surprised; funny how people can overlook or excuse evils done by “their side.” Having lived under Castro’s regime in Cuba, I was astonished when living in Miami saw a newly-arrived Cuban refugee, with characteristic Cuban self-assurance, state with a sweeping gesture: “This country has too much freedom!” (It’s no wonder that, after a mass swearing-in American citizenship ceremony at the Orange Bowl, 85% of these refugees registered as Republicans.)

    That woman actually supplied one of the great political insights of my life: that it’s not so much dictatorships, or prejudice, or injustice, that people are against; it’s that they should be subjected to that treatment which rankles.

    Persecuting others, trampling them into the dirt; as long as it’s the “right” group, that people are all for!

    And — though very much enjoying and appreciating Spain’s work since encountering it in the first underground comic I ever bought — I wrote a lengthy post in the TCJ message board, pointing out the countless ways in which he propagandistically distorted Che’s story.

    ———————
    If a Fanboy is someone who often denies there are flaws in his favorite works, I think the elitist who denies there are powerful virtues in a very flawed work (or that the virutes are negated by the flaws) is also guilty of anti-intellectualism. Both want to make the situation simpler than it is and their intellect suffers for that.
    ———————-

    Yes; they allow that the work is lacking in certain areas, or missing virtues they consider essential, to taint their admiration of the entire work. Never mind that today’s “essential virtues” — as in-your-face moralizing would’ve been to Victorians — are anathema in later eras. That what in some cases would be valuable (realistically believable situations, complex characterizations) can be detrimental for creators like Poe, striving after different effects.

    ———————–
    …people need to learn that something being severely flawed does not make it shit and just because you love it doesn’t mean you should deny how flawed it is.
    ———————–

    Indeed, blinkered idolatry can be as harmful as the opposite. (Kirby is by far overall my favorite comics creator, yet I’d hardly consider his work Great Art, fit to stand alongside Rembrandt’s canvases or Shakespeare’s plays.)

83. Domingos, you cannot possibly dismiss The Sweet Smell of Success

84. ——————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    “No. First, in a body of work overwhelmingly devoted to adventure/crime-fighting (the latter what superhero fare is, in spandex drag) comics, inescapably the use of “force” is involved; is an utterly necessary narrative factor.”

    But saying a predominantly genre-oriented creator is in part determined by his genre is the point, not an objection to the point. As Domingos said earlier, I think you can see Kirby struggling with and thinking about issues of violence in his work…but that doesn’t mean you have to conclude that he came out on top of those issues, or that the genre he worked in for most of his career wasn’t also in some ways determinative of his art.
    ——————————-

    Did I say that Kirby’s work wasn’t “in part determined by his genre”?

    Looks to me that I indeed said that, for the most part, it was — just like commercial considerations, such as taking his audience into account, making his heroes good-looking and heroic rather than passive, homely whiners — was a defense for his work and its genre-determined limitations, in terms of lack of greater complexity.

    Which is why — as with attacking “Oklahoma!” for not being “Macbeth” — it is absurd and grossly unjust to find fault with a creator of genre stuff, overwhelmingly aimed at kids (or adults not exactly looking for the next Henry James) for not being ultra-arty and sophisticated; for using genre tropes like good-looking heroes, ugly villains, perilous situations, violence which is more exhilarating than stomach-churningly horrifying.

    Which was, if not simply Domingos’ “point,” certainly the tactic he used for his “Kirby’s oeuvre = morally simplistic, fascistic, violence-glorifying kitsch” argument.

    And did I say “he came out on top of those issues”? Nope. Again, ’cause of the necessary genre limits, Kirby was indeed not (or virtually never*) able to feature, say, “heroes” whose motivation is mightily muddled instead of righteous, who end up acting like monsters in their quest to “defeat evil”; whose usage of violence is morally ambiguous, who might end up leaving things worse off after they defeat the “bad guys.”

    But then if he had, then tons of people would be piling on Jack Kirby, stomping on him as was done to Alan Moore here for “V for Vendetta”: “How dare Kirby feature as a ‘hero’ a character who can do such horrible, coldly manipulative things??!!”

    …Y’ just can’t win!

    *One exception is that son of Darkseid who was raised in New Genesis in a truce arrangement; who ends up turning monstrous as he gets enraged when fighting…

85. You’re really not understanding Isaac’s critique of V if you think that’s what he said. The criticism is really much the same as Domingos’ of Kirby; that is, that the genre (violent vigilatism) trumps and undercuts the putative effort to oppose fascist authoritarianism.

86. Oh…and the idea that you can’t win (or that there’s no way for the superhero genre to be used to oppose violence) seems wrong to me, inasmuch as there are a number of comics in the genre which do it in one way or the other. Moore’s Watchmen and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow are both examples I think; so is Marston/Peter Wonder Woman (though Charles would disagree); so is something like Mazing Man, which isn’t necessarily that great in all respects but which definitely uses superhero tropes to tell nonviolent stories. I’m sure there are other examples. Just because a couple of people (arguably) didn’t manage it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

87. Jones: I didn’t see all the films in Charles’ list. I’ll watch that one and I’ll come back here.

    Another thing: I accept old genre films more easily than I accept today’s genre films or genre comics. The reason is simple: old genre films were addressed to adults. So were old Brit newspaper comics westerns like “Matt Marriott.” I’ll write about this in my next monthly stumbling.

88. who doesn’t like Kubrick, for instance?).”

    Plenty of people. Kubrick is a lot like Antonioni in at least a few respects. The earlier films were better. The latter ones quite pompous.

    Charles, those are some great, great movie posters. Love ’em.

89. Charles likes one of the pompous ones. Or does this pompous problem start with A Clockwork Orange?

90. Yup, I liked The Sweet Smell of Success alright: “You’re so immersed in the theology of making a fast buck.”

91. His problems started with “2001.” Tarkovsky was right about that one.

92. Are you sure you’re not talking about Jack Kirby’s ‘2001’?

93. Never read that one. Though I do like some of those double-page spreads he did from that time period.

94. That’s what I said, then, surprisingly Charles likes one of the pompous ones. Me, my favorite Kubrick film is Paths of Glory.

95. ———————–
    Yours truly:

    …’cause of the necessary genre limits, Kirby was indeed not (or virtually never) able to feature, say, “heroes” whose motivation is mightily muddled instead of righteous, who end up acting like monsters in their quest to “defeat evil”; whose usage of violence is morally ambiguous, who might end up leaving things worse off after they defeat the “bad guys.”

    But then if he had, then tons of people would be piling on Jack Kirby, stomping on him as was done to Alan Moore here for “V for Vendetta”: “How dare Kirby feature as a ‘hero’ a character who can do such horrible, coldly manipulative things??!!”

    …Y’ just can’t win!
    ———————–

    ———————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    You’re really not understanding Isaac’s critique of V if you think that’s what he said.
    ————————

    I was not referring to Isaac’s critique, which is why I didn’t name him. I recalled there were were plenty of others who, in effect, said “How dare Alan Moore feature as a ‘hero’ a character who can do such horrible, coldly manipulative things??!!”

    …But skimming through “V is for Vile” and the responses again, how ironic that it was you who made by far and away the most “V is presented as a hero and yet he does these bad things” arguments, with every attempt by others to explain (and show) how he was at best a highly dubious, ambivalent figure brushed aside. We got, “The pulp supertropes lead [Moore] to make V so cool and awesome and superior that the moral ambiguity ends up being flattened,” so if anyone sees moral ambiguity…they’re’re hallucinating.

    And what an exceedingly, inaccurately genteel word is “critique,” in this case! Might as well say Rush Limbaugh and Fox News “critique” liberals and Obama. Isaac said, “All of Moore’s bad habits as a writer are on display in V, from its misogyny…V For Vendetta[‘s] hatred of women…”

    What a putrid mass of smugly arrogant, utterly shameless character assassination!

    ———————–
    Oh…and the idea that you can’t win (or that there’s no way for the superhero genre to be used to oppose violence) seems wrong to me,
    ———————–

    Well, I thought it was exceedingly obvious that the “…Y’ just can’t win!” was referring to the damned if you do, damned if you don’t, reaction we see here from the Perpetually Outraged Gang.

    I certainly think the “superhero genre [could] be used to oppose violence,” but the results would doubtless be far from felicitous; it’s just too “going against the grain” of the genre.

    Come to think of it, one example (which proves my point): Roberta Gregory in one of her comics told how, if she could have a superpower, it would be “empathy vision.” A gay-basher (or some other such noxious bigot) was depicted by her about to attack; he gets zapped, and then thinks, “I wouldn’t want to get treated like that; why should I do that to others?” (Quoted from memory.)

    Personally, I’d prefer the Midnight Mink’s approach to those scumbags…

    ———————-
    Domingos Isabelinho says:

    …Or does this pompous problem [of Kubrick’s] start with A Clockwork Orange?
    ———————–

    I usually like Kubrick, but after the avalanches of praise that film received, I was flabbergasted at how clunky, astonishingly heavy-handed “Clockwork” was. (Cool production design, though…)

96. I love all of Kubrick’s films. He’s the best. Tarkovsky is the pompous one, not the other way around. Kubrick is actually funny … and intentionally so.

97. And, yeah, there is an increasing amount of good posters out there on the web.

98. Kubrick certainly thinks he’s funny. For what that’s worth. I love Tarkovsky though. But I prefer metal to punk in general.

    That Blade Runner poster is amazing.

99. Umm, is there anything more metal than Penderecki?

100. Check out what that Blade Runner artist did for a performance of Beethoven’s 5th. Sure as hell beats those ugly Deutsche Grammophon labels.

101. ———————–
     Noah Berlatsky says:

     Kubrick certainly thinks he’s funny. For what that’s worth.
     ______________

     Terry Southern, who collaborated with Kubrick in the script for “Doctor Strangelove,” provided the affectionate put-down of describing the filmmaker’s sense of humor as “Teutonic.” (Accurately so, I think.)

102. Read the Clockwork book not that long ago…and it’s kind of clunky and heavyhanded itself. Could be problems with the source material.

103. I suppose that I gave the impression above that I agree with the idea that Kubrick’s films after 2001 are pompous. I don’t; like Charles I like all of Kubrick’s films. He’s far from being one of my favorite directors, but I like his films just the same. On the other hand I don’t have much patience to the American post-colonial complex which vilifies art as “elitist,” “pretentious, “pompous,” etc…

     Anyway, since this thread fell out of view I guess that this is a wrap.

104. I agree that they’re overused, but they sometimes fit, too. Don’t you (and others wary of the elitist charge) use ‘kitsch’ as something of a replacement term for some of those words? For example, Malick could be called pompous, pretentious, or kitsch (at least, I’ve called his movies all of these).

105. You have a point up to a point, Charles. The difference between “kitsch” and those other words is that I can use the former to mean “pretentious” and “pompous,” no doubt (not “elitist” though), but I can also use it to mean “trashy” or something like that. It’s this populist part of kitsch that’s never acknowledged by the American post-colonial complex. At least when applied to mass culture.

     Just in the dubious case that you are wondering, I invented the expression “American postcolonial complex” in the comment above.

106. It’s never a wrap when people still feel the need to beat on Kirby even though he spins perpetually in his grave while all slimeballs continue to reap huge profits from his work while sharing not a penny with his family and Stan Lee even in his dotage seems determined to withdraw such faint praise as he gave to the man who made him rich.
     And while we’re at it it takes some pretty hard core nonproductive overly critical types to beat on Kubrick as well. I like pretty much everything he did, more in fact by percentage than what Kirby did.

107. Also, those words seem, to me at least, more like insults to the creator than criticisms of his/her work.

108. Surely you understand James that re. the way in which the industry mistreated him I side with Kirby?

109. Oh okay Domingos. Of course….only fools or monsters would side with corporate slimeballs. Whoops, most comic fans buy Marvel comics and pay to see their movies

110. If I like an artist working for Marvel, then I’m going to buy a Marvel comic, I suppose. We were born into the sin of capitalism, and it’s damn difficult to get out of it. Is there really anything you can buy in life that doesn’t rest on someone getting fucked over at some point in the history of that product? Lots of people drive cars, for example. We’d be a better society if no one drove a car than if no one bought a Marvel comic. I don’t have much of a solution here, but maybe: good artists, don’t work for Marvel. That seems to be working most of these days for me. But I’m a fan of Whedon’s so …

     By post colonial, I figured you meant revolutionary America and after, Domingos. Makes sense.

111. At one point I think the entire Speigeleman interview from TCJ 181 was online, and I maybe misremembering the context of the quote. My memory is that Spiegelman was praising and talking about his affinity for the work of Carl Barks and Groth asked Spiegelman for his thoughts on Kirby.

     Some of the features you find in writing of apologists/propagandists for Western imperialism/colonialism:
     -mistaking cynicism for realism,
     -treating colonialism as a cynical intellectual exercise—denying that colonialism is an act of violence
     -dehumanizing and denying the importance of the colonized physical labor class
     -seeing the specter of totalitarianism underneath the violent/physical labor class

     I’m not accusing Spiegelman of being John Derbyshire. I was/am a huge fan of RAW, I don’t much care for Maus, never read Maus II, and liked Shadow of No Towers (well, I liked it as a supplement in London Review of Books, it kind of makes no sense to me as an oversized art book).

     But when Spiegelman goes from praising the racist, sexist colonialist work of Carl Barks to then expressing discomfort with optimism; discomfort with art where violence and physicality isn’t hidden but rather put in foreground, and the assumption that totalitarianism lurks underneath that combination—– it’s a conversation that says a lot more about the reactionary nature of Spiegelman’s aesthetics than it says about Kirby.

112. Nope, no Barks on sight. I think that’s called a straw man.

113. Straw man?
     You’ve never seen Spiegelman praise Barks, cite as influence, describe warmth towards?

     From the excerpts of the TCJ interview in 181:
     http://web.archive.org/web/20080224225945/http://tcj.com/2_archives/i_spiegelman.html

     Spiegelman talks about feeling an affinity for the “sober”ness (what I described as cynicism masked as realism) of Barks as a contrast to the optimism/exuberance of Kirby which leaves him cold.

     I had forgotten the section where Spiegelman discusses being more comfortable with stories of the individual than Kirby’s stories of the collective.

     I stand by earlier point, Spiegelman has warm feelings for racist, sexist colonialist propaganda and feels that optimism, the collective, foregrounded violence and physicality to be threatening. These things are linked, and probably say more about Spiegelman than they do about Kirby.

114. Following what you said I searched the interview when Gary Groth first asked Spiegelman about Kirby. That’s three pages before Spiegelman mentions Barks in a couple of phrases (after talking about Kirby for a 1000 words).

     That being said, if you think that’s everything that Barks is, fine…

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