Tag Archives: Jack Kirby

Undisputed Title to a Hill of Dung

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The Comics Journal has an extensive piece up by Robert Steibel in which he looks at two pages of original art from Fantastic Four #61 and argues exhaustively, passionately, and convincingly that Jack Kirby was responsible for most of the ideas and plot. There’s a divisive and extended back and forth in comments as well.

Here’s the two pages.

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Those images are a lot of fun to look at; as with any art by Kirby, there’s a lot of energy, and it kind of only improves things that you can’t really figure out what’s going on in the draft form. Andrei Molotiu has talked about how Kirby can be viewed as an abstract artist, and I think that makes sense especially in these original pages. You can even see Kirby almost working to turn his characters into abstraction, with all the smoke and mist and debris and Kirby krackle covering everything, turning individuals into forms. Reed opening that negative zone is almost a way to breach the wall between form and nothing, with Kirby and everyone else rooting for the gloriously meaningless nothing.

And everyone is rooting for the nothing over the narrative because the narrative is incredibly stupid. Steibel talks about how “wonderfully creative” it is to have the Sandman freezing and turning into chemicals etc. etc. — but come on. It’s not “wonderfully creative” unless you’re standards for wonderfully creative are amazingly lax. I mean, just to stick with work for children, is the writing and plotting wonderfully creative by the standards of this?
 
nemo4
 
Or this?
asterix-in-switzerland-page

Or, if you want to compare fight sequences, with this?
 

 
All of those have wit and grace; the action mischievously escalates (in Nemo and Asterix) or ping pongs elegantly back and forth (in the Princess Bride). There are beats and timing built into the development, like that lovely moment where Asterix freezes and looks at something off panel before the crazed descent begins. There are winking hidden easter eggs, as when the tiny horse bucks in time to the giant bed in the Nemo page. There’s a use of visual action and dialogue to create characterization all through the Princess Bride. In comparison,the Kirby pages are just ponderous blaring; people screaming about how they’re trying really hard and are going to do something spectacular, over and over. There’s a super battle and yelling and things flying around, but there’s not any particular wit or style or even through line to the narrative. There’s just fight, setback, solution to setback, more chaos. It’s puerile, and mostly unreadable, even for two pages, even when you’re just looking at notes and don’t have to drag yourself through all the speech bubbles.

And yet, people are angrily, violently arguing over decades about who wrote this. Steibel thinks he’s doing Jack Kirby some sort of favor by declaring that the credit for the writing should virtually all go to Kirby. He even lists all the story elements/ideas to show that most of them belonged to Kirby — inadvertently demonstrating that the narrative is basically just a series of stuff happening without any real coherence or guiding vision. And, yes, okay, Steibel convinced me — Kirby is responsible for this incredibly stupid story as well as for the bizarre and interesting art.

Maybe, possibly, the reason that the Marvel method worked, the reason that the artist could make the story and Lee could just bubble it in, the reason that there’s so much uncertainty about who did what, is because the attention to story-telling and narrative was, on everybody’s part, incredibly half-assed. The only interesting thing in those comics is Kirby’s drawing, and they are most interesting, I am convinced, when you see them as formal exercises rather than as narrative.The death match over whether Lee wrote the thing or Kirby wrote the thing — it’s like arguing over who’s responsible for composing a spam email. It just always amazes me that anyone can manage to make themselves care.

The 8 Greatest Superheroes You’ve Never Heard Of

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Ha ha, no, that title’s just clickbait

Fight Man

Jack Kirby and the Visual Logic of Superheroes

Part 2: Bif bam pow etc.

In Part 1, I talked about the fundamental structure of a fight scene. To recap, a fight scene is

a sequence of events caused by the aggressive and defensive (and other) actions of two or more combatants

To which the only sensible response can be: duh.

In this second part, I was going to get to Kirby, but that’s going to have to wait until Part 3. Here, I’m going to talk about how the demands of the fight scene constrain the imaginative space of superhero comics. So, a question: how many possible superpowers are there, and how many actual superpowers have appeared in comics?

To answer this, we first need to have a rough understanding of what makes a superpower, so:

a superpower is an agent’s ability which is (either explicitly or implicitly) the product of some non-natural cause

By “non-natural cause”, I mean some cause which either isn’t recognised by current science or is beyond current technological capability. That pretty much covers it, I think: Dr Strange uses magic to fly around and zap folks, the Hulk’s strength is caused by gamma rays, Thor is a god, Iron Man uses advanced technology, Spider-Man gets bitten by a radioactive spider and also invents his own advanced technology in the form of webbing, the Fantastic Four are transformed by cosmic rays, etc.

All right, so how many possible superpowers are there? Answer: infinitely many.

Let’s just start with one of the superpowers just mentioned — the Hulk’s superhuman strength. The Hulk is strong. Like, really, really strong. His strength is linked to how angry he is; the angrier he gets, the stronger. Various Marvel comics have even suggested that his strength is practically limitless (on the assumption that so is his anger). So that’s one superpower from one character.

Here’s another superpower, from a character that I just invented: he’s called the Thulk, and he’s just like the Hulk except that he only has superhuman strength on Thursdays.

Here’s another guy: the Wulk, who only has superhuman strength on Wednesdays.

Here’s another: the Fwulk, who only has superhuman strength on every fifth Wednesday.

And another: the Cfwulk, who only has superhuman strength on every fifth Wednesday, providing it was a crescent moon six nights ago.

And one more: the Rcfwulk, who only has superhuman strength on every fifth Wednesday, providing it was a crescent moon six nights ago, and the current US President is a Republican who has never eaten haloumi cheese.

Or we could generate possible superpowers a different way:

The Rulk, who has superhuman strength only when fighting Republicans

The Chulk, who has superhuman strength only when fighting chickens

The Dchulk, who has superhuman strength only when fighting chickens that are disco-dancing

I could go on all day, but you get the picture. We can generate infinitely many superpowers using just the idea of superhuman strength as our starting point. But most of these superpowers are also trivial and, well, silly. As a character, Rcwfulk probably has less storytelling potential than his more famous counterpart; Rcfwulk stories would quickly become as predictable as an episode of Knightboat. Must defeat the evil plan of my arch-nemesis — but *choke* can I stop him before President Jeb Bush enters that cheese shop?!

So let’s try and open our minds in a different direction. The Doom Patrol of Grant Morrison and Richard Case (et al.) was one of the more outre superhero comics by a “mainstream” publisher, and featured plenty of offbeat powers. One of the more offbeat powers belonged to the Quiz, whose superpower was to have every superpower you haven’t thought of yet.  Among her powers were the power to turn people into toilets filled with flowers, and to make escape-proof spirit jars, but presumably she could also rewrite the complete works of Pierre Menard, read the minds of radiator heaters, and transform into a fifty-foot giant J. Wimpy Wellington with the wisdom of Stephen Hawkings and the strength of Nicolas Sarkozy. The Quiz belonged to the Brotherhood of Dada, which also included (inter alia) Mister Nobody — who could only ever be seen in the corner of people’s eyes, Alias the Blur — who ate time, and (my own favourite) Number None — who, in the words of Mister Nobody was “the person who bumps into you when you’re late for the train; the chair that collapses underneath you when you’re trying to make a good impression on your girlfriend’s parents; that man who seems thin but somehow you can’t get past him because he takes up the whole sidewalk”.

The worlds of superheroes are worlds that operate by different causal laws than our own universe. Sometimes those worlds have super-science, sometimes they have magic, but they all have characters that can do things we cannot. They can, potentially, do anything — so why do so few superheroes have the range of powers shown by the Brotherhood of Dada?

Let’s take a look at some superhero comics Marvel and DC will be publishing in August  — what superpowers do the protagonists in these comics have? (1)

***

Marvel

Nova — flies, shoots people with energy beams

Captain Marvel — flies, punches people, shoots people with energy beams

Superior Spider-Man — swings on webs, crawls on walls, punches people, shoots people with webs

Ultimate Spider-Man — ditto

Carnage — ditto, plus stabs people by changing his hands into knives

Venom — ditto, plus shoots people with normal guns

Scarlet Spider — as for the Spider-Men, plus burns people with his hands, stabs people with spikes in his arms

Morbius —  flies (kind of), punches people, bites people, scratches people

Captain America — punches people, throws shield at people, sometimes shoots people

Thor — flies, punches people, hits people with hammer, throws hammer at people, shoots lightning at people, fails to understand really quite simple principles of middle-English speech

Iron Man — flies, punches people, shoots people with repulsor rays

Hulk — punches people

Punisher — shoots people, sometimes stabs or explodes them

Daredevil — actually has interesting powers, usually just punches people anyway

Hawkeye — shoots people with arrows

Wolverine — stabs people with claws

Gambit — throws playing cards at people

Deadpool — stabs people with swords, shoots people

Kick-Ass — I assume ironically fails to do so

***

DC

Pandora — shoots people with magic guns

Phantom Stranger — does  ill-defined magic stuff

Constantine — ditto

Aquaman — swims, punches people, stabs people with a trident

Green Arrow — take a guess

Katana — see if you can guess this one, too

Justice League of America’s Vibe — shoots people with vibrations

The Flash — runs fast

Wonder Woman — flies in invisible plane, punches people

Superman — flies, punches people, shoots people with laser beams that come out of his eyes

Supergirl — ditto

Superboy — ditto

Batman — flies in Batcopter and Batplane, drives Batmobile, super-detective, still spends a lot of time punching people and throwing bat-shaped boomerangs at them

Batgirl — similar to Batman

Catwoman — punches people, scratches people

Talon — too much effort for me to find out, but I’d guess it’s the same as Catwoman

Batwing — similar to Batman

Nightwing — similar to Batman

Green Lantern — flies, has magic ring that can theoretically create anything from magic green energy, usually just shoots people with energy beams

Larfleeze — ditto, but coloured orange instead of green

Jonah Hex — shoots people

Animal Man — various animal powers, often does not punch or bite or stab people with them

Swamp Thing — as for Animal Man, but replace “animal” with “plant”

***

What do we learn from this brief survey? Three things:

(a) I have too much time on my hands, and am borderline OCD.

(b) Unexpectedly, DC’s superheroes are somewhat less punching-and-stabbing focussed than Marvel’s.

Then again, perhaps this is not so surprising when you consider some of the respective superhero highlights of the period that ultimately defined their respective worlds for later decades, the period from the late 50s through the 60s that myopic superhero fans generally call the “Silver Age” (2). Marvel has Kirby and Ditko, whose characters spend a lot of time punching each other. By contrast, DC has the Swan/Boring/Schaffenberger Superman group, whose hero does almost no punching, but instead spends an awful lot of time pulling elaborate hoaxes, working through gimmicky set-ups, or otherwise using his goofier superpowers such as super-ventriloquism and super-breath (3); the Forte/Swan Legion of Superheroes, whose members include Matter-Eater Lad — he does exactly what it says on the tin; and Infantino’s Flash, who also spends little time punching or hitting, instead using his powers in creative, non-aggressive ways. Then there’s DC’s second or third-tier (in terms of quality if not sales) comics from the period — e.g. the Haney/Fradon Metamorpho, “Bob Kane’s” Batman, and the Fradon Aquaman — a character so proverbially lame that his current writer felt the need to directly address this lameness in his new series, and who was made EXTREME in the 90s by chopping off his hand and replacing it with a kind of hook/trident thing.

He used it primarily to stab people.

On the other hand, let’s remember that two of their current comic books are about characters named after what they hit people with, part of a noble tradition of how to name your comic book — cf. Iron Fist, Savage Sword of Conan, Sword of the Atom, 100 Bullets... The TV show based on Green Arrow even drops the “Green” and is just plain Arrow. This is really quite weird when you think about it — why not call your comic book Punch or Gun?

And, even granting that there are some superheroes at DC whose powers are not primarily punching, zapping, or shooting, it’s worth noting that those are still the powers for most of them. And the highlights of “Silver Age” DC did also include the Anderson/Infantino Adam Strange, the Kubert/Anderson Hawkman, and Kane’s Atom and Green Lantern, all of whom spent a lot of time hitting people. Not to mention Kubert’s and Heath’s war characters such as the Haunted Tank, Enemy Ace, Unknown Soldier and Sgt. Rock.(4)

(c) Despite the theoretically infinite number of possible superpowers, the superpowers of most of the headlining characters are various ways to hit people. And if they’re not ways to hit people, they’re ways of not being hit, or not being hurt when they’re hit.

And this is just what we’d expect if we accept (the obvious fact) that the fight scene is the raison d’etre of superhero comics. For fight scenes, you need an Attacker who can

i) touch their opponent, in ways that

ii) hurt

and a Victim who can

iii) avoid being touched, and/or

iv) not be hurt

The vast majority of superheroes and supervillains have superpowers that fall into one of these four categories. And, generally, if they’re a superhero with their own comic book, they will have a combination of Attacker and Victim powers. If we take another quick look at the lists above, we generally have characters who, in addition to their attack powers, can also

  • avoid being touched by Attackers’ attacks, as per (iii). One method is to have some kind of protective force that stops attacks from directly hitting you: Iron Man’s suit of armour, Captain America’s shield, the force fields of Green Lantern and Larfleeze. Another is to have some special way of not being touched at all: the Flash’s superspeed, the acrobatic skills of the Spider-Man and Batman characters.
  • and/or not be harmed by attacks that would harm a normal human being, as per (iv). Many characters are just tough, impervious to even very powerful attacks: Thor, Superman, Hulk. Or they can recover quickly from attacks, with vastly accelerated healing, like Wolverine or Deadpool.

The fight scene determines everything in superhero comics, ultimately distilling all superpowers into two binaries: touching/not-touching and hurting/not-hurting. In the third, and final part of this essay, I’ll finally talk about how these two binaries dominate Kirby’s X-Men.

PS: No, fuck it, Thulk, Wulk, Fwulk, Cfwulk, Rcfwulk, Rulk, Chulk and Dchulk are the 8 greatest superheroes you’ve never heard of, copyright Jones, one of the Jones boys. Look for them soon in an upcoming series from Image Comics, where they’ll be, oh, let’s just say, retired assassins, or thieves who only steal from other thieves, or members of an age-old secret society, or spies for some marginally conceptually clever imaginary government agency.  Image Comics: where basic-cable pitches come to die.

PPS: This was only going to be a two-part series, but I thought I’d ape contemporary “mainstream” comics themselves and not show the guy whose name is in the title until the very last moment, nor explain what he has to do with it all. In other words, Part 3 is just going to be a final splash-page of Kirby showing up in a dramatic pose.

(1) I’m only using comics with a single protagonist here, because it would take way more extra effort to figure out who’s who and what they can do in the comics with more than one protagonist (e.g. Avengers, X-Men, Justice League).

(2) I discussed two obvious problems with this classification schema here.

(3) Really, super-ventriloquism is used as a major plot-point way more often than you’d think.

(4) Oddly, Rock and Easy Company — a unit in WWII — do much more punching than shooting, presumably due to the strictures of the Comics Code. The diegetic justifications for this are generally pretty feeble, along the lines of “Those goose-steppers can’t open fire for fear of hitting their own men, so let’s get ’em, Easy!”.

Image Attribution: Fight-Man, by Evan Dorkin, image from comics.org. Fight-Man created by Evan Dorkin, owned now and until the end of the universe by Marvel Entertainment, LLC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.

Jack Kirby and the Visual Logic of Superheroes

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Stan the Man

Part 1: What Is A Fight Scene?

Fighting is to superhero comics what fucking is to pornography, or singing to musicals: the raison d’etre, the sine qua non, the whole kit and kaboodle. It’s why skeevy guys creep around in trenchcoats with a box of tissues, bottle of lube, and a very special life-sized doll named Candy; or why other people watch porn or musicals.

All three genres demand that character, motivation, theme, incident and conflict be expressed in distinctive forms. In musicals, it’s song; in porn, it’s, well duh; and in superhero comics, intra- and inter-personal conflict above all else must be expressed and resolved through physical conflict. In other words: the fight scene.

Few cartoonists have understood this more than Jack Kirby, whose superhero comics, especially from the 1960s and onwards, are positively drenched with fight scenes. We can see this by comparing Kirby’s 1960s work for Marvel with some roughly contemporaneous superhero comics published by Marvel’s chief competitor, DC. Take, for instance, the Superman comics produced by Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, Wayne Boring and others, under the tyrannical editorship of Mort Weisinger. There are vanishingly few fight scenes in these comics; Superman himself rarely gets to punch anything, which makes a certain kind of sense — since he is, after all, essentially invulnerable and nearly omnipotent, how could he possibly get into a fight that lasted more than three panels?

Panel one: bank robbers running out of Metropolis First.

Panel two: Superman swooping down to punch them into submission.

Panel three: Metropolis’ streetsweepers and janitors scrubbing splatters of brain and flesh off the street.(1)

It’s surely no coincidence that, of Superman’s cast of recurring villains, only a handful are memorable, and of those, two are defined entirely by their intellect — evil scientist genius Lex Luthor and evil alien genius Brainiac (!).

By contrast, the superpowers of many of Kirby’s chief 1960s characters are  desultory, a thin excuse to motivate fighting, fighting, and more fighting. Consider: Thor is a strong guy with a hammer that he uses to beat the crap out of people. Captain America is just a normal guy (more or less), with a shield that he uses to beat the crap out of people (2). The Hulk is a strong guy with a, well, he just uses his own fists to beat the crap out of people. The  Hulk’s whole power just is beating the crap out of people.

But we can say a little more about the visual logic of superhero comics than just “there is one”, and we can do so by thinking about the structure of a fight scene as abstractly and generally as possible. For what, exactly, is a fight scene? A scene with a fight, of course, but what does that actually mean? At the most abstract level, we can conceptualise a fight scene — in the narrow genre of superheroes, or any other kind of comic — as a sequence of aggressive or defensive actions and their effects — more precisely, a fight scene is

a sequence of events caused by the aggressive and defensive (and other) actions of two or more combatants

This needs some unpacking, so I’ll take you through it, in reverse order.

of two or more combatants

250px-Brave_bold_28

the Justice League battle Starro the giant starfish, from Brave and Bold #28 by Mike Sekowsky

 

The participants in a fight scene can be people, but they can also be animals, robots, zombies or anything else that can act — that can take action of one kind or another. In the simplest case, we have just two participants fighting, but superhero fight scenes — particularly so-called “team books” like The Avengers or Justice League of America — routinely feature three or more combatants. Where there are more than two participants, they can be distributed in any number of ways; that is to say, it could be one versus two, one versus three, two versus two, two versus one versus one… In principle there is no upper limit to how many combatants can participate in a fight scene, but in practice there are vague limits imposed by constraints like the size of a page, the quality of reproduction in printing, and the reader’s (and the artist’s!) patience.

events caused by the aggressive and defensive (and other) actions

In a fight scene, at least one participant is trying to damage, somehow or other, at least one other participant, who may be trying to damage the other in turn, or to flee, or merely to avoid damage, or to do any number of other things (but usually one of those three — fight back, flee, or avoid damage). At each stage, what happens depends on the actions of both combatants — what each of them is doing.

When somebody is trying to damage somebody else, let’s label the respective parties Attacker and Victim. In a fight scene, the Attacker makes an attack on the Victim — that is, Attacker takes some kind of aggressive action against Victim, such as throwing a punch, shooting a gun, firing a laser… The Victim also does something — dodges, projects a force-field, just stands there… What happens to Victim depends both on what Attacker has tried to do and what Victim tries to do (where doing nothing counts as a kind of doing something).

If Victim tries to dodge, then Attacker’s kick might miss. If Victim throws up her shield in time, Attacker’s laser might bounce off. If Victim does nothing to defend himself (perhaps he doesn’t know he is under attack, or perhaps he tries to retaliate without trying to avoid Attacker’s attack), then the attack might make contact. But even when an attack “lands”, what  that actually means will depend, again, on the nature of Attacker’s attack and on what Victim is like. If Attacker has fired a bullet that hits Victim, it will have very different effects depending on whether or not Victim is wearing, say, a Kevlar vest.

a sequence

Fight scenes typically involve more than one thing happening — Batman punches the Joker, who then squirts back with acid from his trick flower, which Batman dodges while kicking out at the Joker, who topples… This is the prototypical kind of fight scene, in which two participants alternate between the roles of Attacker and Victim. First A attacks B, then B attacks A, then…

In principle, each action taken by Attacker and Victim could be depicted in their own panel, but usually an artist will collapse the panels (3) to one of four patterns:

1) Attack-Effect Dyad. Two panels, the first showing Attacker’s attack, and the second showing Victim’s action and the attack’s effect on him — e.g. panel one shows Attacker firing a gun at Victim, and panel two shows Victim successfully jumping out of the way so that the bullet whizzes past.

2) Attack Monad. One panel showing Attacker’s attack, with the resulting effect left off-panel, to be inferred by the reader as following this panel  — e.g. we see Attacker firing a gun at Victim, who may or may not be shown (as yet unaffected by the attack) in the same panel.

3) Effect Monad. One panel showing the effect on Victim, with the initiating attack by the Attacker left off-panel, to be inferred by the reader as occurring before this panel — e.g. we see the Victim successfully dodging the bullet, which we infer to have been fired by Attacker immediately beforehand.

4) Attack-Effect Monad. One panel showing both Attacker’s and Victim’s actions, and the resulting effect on Victim — e.g. we see Attacker’s punch making contact with Victim within a single panel.

Naturally, an artist can use any combination of these patterns over the course of a fight scene, sometimes using one pattern and sometimes another. I’d guess — but I don’t have any figures to back this up — that the most common pattern, at least in American comics, is the Attack-Effect Monad, especially with fight scenes involving direct melee between combatants. Most fight scenes simply don’t parse action finely enough to differentiate between the moment when Attacker throws (say) her fist out in front of her at Victim and the moment when her fist actually makes contact with Victim. Instead, the easiest solution for most fight scenes is just to show everything all together.

As with the number of participants, there is no upper limit to how long a fight scene can take. The Cerebus volume Reads has a remarkable fight sequence lasting for dozens of pages; Takehiko Inoue’s samurai manga Vagabond notoriously teases fight scenes out for hundreds of pages (although, to be fair, much of that does not involve actual fighting so much as flashbacks or other representations of the combatants’ streams of thought).

vagabond-04

Kirby’s fight scenes can sprawl as long as an entire issue of twenty pages or more, although usually there will be some interruptions, such as a crosscut to a separate scene elsewhere. A fine example is the fight between Thor and the Absorbing Man in the main stories of  Journey Into Mystery #121-#123. The entire sixteen pages of #121’s main story is given over to the fight, with a brief interruption in panels 3-6 on page 5 and panels 1-2 on page 6, in which we cut to Asgard and Loki (who has orchestrated the fight). The fight then continues in #122 from page 1 to the second-last panel of page 3, where we cut again to Loki who magically transports the Absorbing Man to Asgard. There the Absorbing Man fights basically the whole of Asgard, and eventually Thor again, until roughly page 10 of #123 (4).

JIM122_AbsorbingMan

As an illustration of this formal structure, let’s do a quick close-read of another Kirby fight scene, and specifically a single, famous page from Tales of Suspense #85, inked by Frank Giacoia and lettered by Sam Rosen, with two captions by Stan Lee. (The comic doesn’t credit a colourist, and the listing at comics.org leaves it unknown). In this sequence we see a fight scene between Captain America and Batroc the Leaper (or, to give him the pantomime-French title favoured by Stan Lee and his later epigones, Batroc zee Leapair), which breaks down as follows:

cap v batroc

Panel 1: First panel in an Attack-Effect Dyad. Batroc and Captain America are, each of them, both Attacker and Victim.

Panel 2: Second panel in the Attack-Effect Dyad, showing the effects of their respective attacks in panel 1. Again, each character is playing the role of both Attacker and Victim.

Panel 3: Attack-Effect Monad. Captain America is still Attacker but no longer Victim, while Batroc is now just Victim. We see Captain America’s attack and its effect on Batroc.

Panel 4: Attack-Effect Monad. Roles are reversed, with Batroc now Attacker and Captain America Victim.

Panel 5: Attack-Effect Monad. Roles reversed again, Captain America attacking and striking Batroc.

Panels 6-8: As with panel 5.

Panel 9: A breather — no attacks.

So I think this is a helpful way to think about the formal structure of a fight scene, in any genre: it’s a sequence of events caused by the aggressive and defensive (and other) actions of two or more combatants. But  I really don’t know anything about proper comics theory, so please let me know in comments whether I’ve reinvented the wheel with my formal description of a fight scene above. If anything, I’ve probably reinvented the wheel, only this time it’s square and doesn’t turn very well…

In Part 2 of this essay, I’m going to talk about how this structure constrains the imaginative space of superhero comics, using Kirby’s The X-Men as an especially vivid case-study. So, come back next time, true believer, for more hot fucking action the Marvel Way. Excelsior!

ENDNOTES

(1) Although this scene doesn’t occur in any actual Superman comic, it does occur in roughly 98% of post-Watchmen superhero revisionist comics.

(2) Well, Captain America was actually created by Kirby and Joe Simon in 1941. But the 1960s revival was Kirby’s third-longest work in that decade, after Fantastic Four and Thor, so he certainly counts as one of Kirby’s chief characters of that decade.

(3) Just for the sake of convenience, I’m assuming that fight scenes are drawn in a standard panel lay-out, with one moment per panel. Things are a little more complicated when you have panels showing more than one moment in the same space, or ill-defined panels, but the basic idea is the same.

(4) I say “roughly” because it’s debatable whether the fight proper ends there, or three pages later when we see the final result of Odin’s magically expelling both Loki and the Absorbing Man into space. Debatable, but not really debate-worthy, you know?

IMAGE ATTRIBUTION: Stan Lee centerfold from Sean Howe’s tumblr for his book on Marvel. Captain America v. Batroc, credits as above; I took the image from Eddie Quixote’s Campbell’s post “The Literaries”. [Other images grabbed by Noah, who is less careful about documenting these things — so blame him, not Jones.]

The Blind Men and the Elephant

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1

Hanabusa Itcho, Blind Monks Examining an Elephant. Itcho, by the way, not Hokusai, contrarily to popular myth, coined the word “manga.”

Speaking of stories… you know the parable: the blind men feel different parts of an elephant’s body and, afterwards, they disagree on what an elephant looks like. Such is the nature of truth; knowing only part of it we can’t grasp… speaking of pictures, the whole picture. In another version the men and the elephant are in a dark room, so, as the great Mevlana Rumi put it in this version: “If each had a candle and they went in together/ The differences would disappear[.]” If you didn’t get it already, and there are absolutely no reasons for you to know where I’m heading, I’m referring to the Eddie Campbell vs. Suat Tong or the “picturaries” (as I called them) vs. “literaries” controversy. I guess that the differences of opinion can be extended in an “us vs. them” kind of way to The Hooded Utilitarian (the non-essentialists) vs. The Comics Journal (the former Comics Comics – a great name to describe their philosophy echoing Eugeni Dors’ “painting-painting”). As I see it there are really two disputes, not just one: the aforementioned “various ways to look at an elephant” (Eddie vs. Suat) and the essentialist debate (THU vs. TCJ). I’ll try to address the two.

I’m worlds apart from Rumi’s greatness and I don’t believe that the differences will be solved by my saintly intervention, but, in a true meta-critical stance, I’ll try to do my best. I’ll state from the start that, obviously, I’m an interested part in this debate. Coming from a “picturaries” background, I graduated in Studio Art, I pass as one of the literaries. I don’t see myself as one, though. To explain why let me examine the core (as I see it, of course) of the text that started the whole thing: Eddie Campbell’s “The Literaries” at TCJ’s website:

What appears at first to be taking a more stringent view is in fact applying irrelevant criteria. It dismantles the idea of a comic and leaves the parts hopelessly undone.

See that elephant over there? Besides, this is where the two debates converge: essentialist Eddie views literary criteria applied to comics as misguided because the true applicable criteria must be about pictures. And yet, what does Eddie consider to be literary specifically? The story or, the plot. The only problem is that in comics the drawings are the story too. To prove it I don’t need to go any further than Lee and Kirby’s (et al.) case in point below, given to us as an example of non-literary excellency in the aforementioned “The Literaries” blog post:

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 Stan Lee (w), Jack Kirby (p), Frank Giacoia (i), Sam Rosen (l), anon. (c), “The Blitzkrieg of Batroc!,” Tales of Suspense #85, January 1967 (page # 8).

Curiously enough in the above example it’s the words that are self-referential and non-diegetic while the images tell the whole story: two characters beat the crap out of each other. If story equals literature who’s a literary now? Eddie Campbell himself inadvertently acknowledges this when he says:

Now, I am cognizant of the fact that the multitude of kids reading that Captain America were just thinking about what Cap and Batroc were doing to each other.

Exactly so because they were reading a story (the use of the word “reading” is, if you ask me, a co-option by the literary field because those putative kids were interpreting images). Why did this co-option of everything narrative by literature occur? Eddie Campbell didn’t invent it. It’s one of the dogmas of Modernist art of the Greenbergian kind. But Clement Greenberg didn’t invent it either. Here’s what Paul Cézanne said according to Joachim Gasquet, writing in 1912/13 (not exactly a reliable source, but still…):

I don’t like literary painting. […] [T]o want to force the expression of nature, to twist the trees, to make the stones grimace like Gustave Doré, or even to refine like da Vinci, that’s all still literature.

And yet Eddie Campbell doesn’t go that far. What he likes in the above page is clearly the expression (here’s what he says about a performance by Billie Holiday; we can’t compare comics with literature, but, apparently, it is OK to compare comics with literature if in a song; Eddie isn’t much of an essentialist, after all, even if he used the very word “essence” below):

I’m not talking here about technique, a set of applications that can be learned, or about an aesthetic aspect of the work that can be separated from the work’s primary purpose. The performer’s story is the essence of jazz music. The question should not be whether the ostensible “story,” the plot and all its detail, is worth our time; stories tend to all go one way or another. The question should be whether the person or persons performing the story, whether in pictures or speech or dance or song, or all of the above, have made it their own and have made it worthy.

So, Eddie Campbell wants us to pay attention to the artist’s expression (Cézanne/Gasquet would call him a literary I’m afraid). That’s one blind man feeling the elephant and I don’t deny his importance and value. But what about the other blind men? Don’t they feel equally important parts of the beast? Why this rage against the story?

I can’t talk for others, but what I value in a comic isn’t the story per se. What I really value is the meaning. This may be clichéd, but so be it: I believe that great artists reach some kind of truth. (They may be as blind as Itcho’s monks, but they’re very good feeling the little part of reality that interests them.) Doing so I considered already that the technical skills of the artists and writers, their ability to convey feelings (their expression or lack thereof because an artist may choose to convey ideas mainly) were capably handled. This isn’t an either or kind of situation. That’s why the claim that we literaries value Fun Home over Cliff Sterrett doesn’t make any sense (it’s an obvious straw man). Besides, meaning can be found in every mark that the artists and writers create on the page. I don’t see why meaning has to be associated with story and why story has to be associated with literature. By claiming meaning for my main criterion am I calling it the whole elephant? Maybe I am, but I’m as biased as the next guy. Why choose this elephant instead of that one is my next question? 

That leads us to the essentialist problem (counseled reading: Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone): why can I compare a comic with another art artifact? Because meaning is something that we can find in every work of art. Exalting the comicness of comics to us non-essentialists doesn’t make much sense: yes, a comic is not a piece of music, but can’t we find cadences, internal rhythms in a comic? Again, why do we accept that those qualities are in music alone and not everywhere? Yes a drawing in a comic may be read in a narrative context (so, now the story is important again?; Eddie goes in and out of his philosophies as it suits his arguments), but aren’t these drawings lines and textures and compositions as all other drawings?

I could go on, but I prefer to analyze Lee and Kirby’s (et al.) page above from my point of view. I must acknowledge first the fact that it is a segment of a larger story (ten pages). I never write about stories that I’ve never read or are in progress, so I’m breaking one of my rules here… for now… This is wrong because, I don’t know?, judging a comic by one of its pages is the same thing as judging a book by its cover, isn’t it (that’s what Eddie kind of did in Kurtzman’s case)? Also, doing so, it seems to me, dismantles the idea of a comic and leaves the parts hopelessly undone, right? Gérard Genette said that there are two readings in a comics page:

in [visual] forms of narrative expression, such as the [fumetti] or the comic strip (or a pictorialstrip, like the pre-della of Urbino, or an embroidered strip, like the “tapestry” of Queen Matilda), which, while making up sequences of images and thus requiring a successive or diachronic reading, also lend themselves to, and even invite, a kind of global and synchronic look—or at least a look whose direction is no longer determined by the sequence of images.

(As a side note: it’s interesting to realize that the great critic and theorist, one of the literaries if I ever saw one, acknowledges the existence of visual narratives while Eddie doesn’t or tactically avoids acknowledging them.) The successive diacronic reading (what Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle called the linear reading) of words and images gives the reader the succession of events, the narrative. The global synchronic look (what Fresnault-Deruelle called the tabular reading) gives the viewer more of an aesthetic feeling. Both readings exist in all comics and the latter is what Eddie and Noah are talking about when they speak of “something else” and “ab ex.” I doubt that many will read the above page in a linear way (what’s the point: it’s just two guys in funny costumes fighting), but I will do just that:

What we have here is a nine panel grid, a static page layout if there ever was one, which isn’t bad for the intended purpose: the page layout contrasts with the action going on inside the panels. The first panel shows Batroc in one of Kirby’s famous foreshortenings. Another of Kirby’s tropes is the character invading the gutter as seen subtly here. What’s interesting in these three panels is Batroc’s leg in the air pointing up. In the second strip what’s pointing up are Captain America’s hand (when he receives a blow) and, again, Batroc’s arm and hands. Those who have limbs pointing up are losing balance and, hence, are losing the fight. The last strip is pretty much the consummation of the scene with Batroc falling on his back. The last panel depicts post-action fatigue and domination if you know what I mean. The guy who fell into the passive role in the missionary position was feminized and lost the fight. Also interesting is the back of Batroc in the second panel mirroring Cap’s back in the 7th, but with opposite meanings: powerlessness in Batroc’s case and absolute power for Cap. So, not only do these images tell a story, maybe it’s not exactly the story intended for the frantic one (i. e. the infant reader). 

What does the global synchronic look tell us, then? First of all there’s a rhythm of circular speed lines and straight shock lines (notice how Cap’s are a lot more powerful than Batroc’s sissified ones) constructing a texture that gave Noah the ab ex aspect that he mentioned. These are there to underline the violence and speed of the actions, but, more than that, to unify and create a relentless cadence in the page design. Here, again, the page functions differently in the three strips: a vertical thin speed line is counteracted in the next panel by a more powerful also vertical one. Things begin to change in that very panel though because the rhythm becomes horizontal until, at the end, returning to vertical completing a full circle with Cap’s might (in crescendo) replacing Batroc’s frailty. The full shot is consistently applied, but the feet deny that on panels one, two, five, six, seven, eight (it’s a device used by Kirby frequently: the characters don’t fit – as a curio see here the same effect used in 1109!). Cap starts on the viewer/reader’s opposite side to end up near his/her standpoint inverting positions with Batroc, in a kind of dance, as we have seen above. The 180 degree rule is broken from panel two to three. The point of view changes around the fighters. There’s a curious symmetry in the page with a kind of knot at the center. The last panel has no gutter (or has a virtual gutter) to show that something changed: the positions are now the same as those in the first panel, but Cap circles his prey in triumph (the symbolic order was restored; citizens may calmly eat their freedom fries again – Batroc, if you don’t know, is French and speaks with a heavy French accent – notice also the stereotypical pencil moustache and beard; I know that Europe was a female, so, it’s only natural that Batroc had to lose in combat against a macho American hero). The colors are loud and out of sync at some places. The background colors divide the page in, more or less, a dynamic diagonal. (If you allow me a personal note I always liked the imperfections of the old coloring.) Cap is garbed in white and primary colors (red and blue), Batroc is secondary colored (orange and purple). Looking at their colors alone no one can deny who will win. All this may seem exhilarating to Eddie, but I suspect that nostalgia plays a role also: “for me this page, and others of a similar stripe, opened up a whole new different way of thinking about comics (I was nine; I’d been thinking about them for quite a few years).”

Who are these people though? From now on Eddie will call me a literary, I’m afraid, but I insist, how come?, I analyzed drawings until now, nothing else! When Eddie asks and answers quite absurdly “how does that Marvel comic stand up if you take away the pictures? It doesn’t.” I say it does, a bit, but not that page above and why is that? That’s right: because if the pictures disappear the story disappears too. Storywise it’s interesting to note the micro-use of the known formula of popular tales (identified by Propp) “win-lose-win.”  

“The Blitzkrieg of Batroc!” is a superhero ten-pager with the usual macho boasting, dick waving contest and misogyny of old comics. The plot (oops!) is simple enough: Cap fights Batroc to save Agent 13 of Shield (aka Sharon Carter). After a plot twist Batroc and Cap team up against agents of Hydra to save the mam’selle who, obviously, has an infatuation for the gallant Nationalist hero. How many times do we need to read another damsel in distress kind of story? I want my time back! See how those nine pages did lack for a full appreciation of the comic?

Am I denying all the good compositional things that I said above about page 8? Of course not, but why should I forget everything else either? And isn’t the final product more important than just an aspect of the whole thing? What’s the meaning of this comic according to your truly? Woman, even if they’re agents of Shield, are frail little creatures who need the strong Nationalist hero to save them from the bad bad guys (that Manicheism again! Jeez!). Jack Kirby may have made the superhero genre his own, but he certainly didn’t make it worthy.

Even worse: the apparently good things said above about page 8 aren’t ultimately in the service of a formula as noted already? (As I said elsewhere, the game is rigged: the dashing Nationalist hero always wins.) And how about the innocuous violence? Isn’t it going to give the impression to the frantic ones that it’s OK to beat the crap out of the bad guys (violence is an abstraction, after all)? Are the frantic ones, or their modern day descendents, doing it right now somewhere, on this poor planet Earth, in the holy name of the plutocracy?

Marvels of Metafiction

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bookcover

 
Google “jennifer egan” and seconds later the term “metafiction” will attach itself leech-like to the side of her postmodern head.

I know this because members of my university have made the possibly foolhardy decision to ask me to give a talk on the Pulitzer winning author for our 2013 Tom Wolfe Weekend Seminar. I’m to place A Visit from the Goon Squad into “the context of contemporary American culture” with “a discussion of Egan’s special skills as a writer,” keeping in mind she will be “sitting right there in front of you.”

I regularly tell my first year comp students that even if we could materialize authors in our classroom (usually during a discussion of Henry James’ mind-blowingly ambiguous The Turn of the Screw), their opinions would be completely irrelevant. Readers and only readers determine the meaning of a text. Except of course in this case. Because that will be the actual Jennifer Egan. In the front row. Listening. To me. Blathering. About her book.
 

Jennifer Egan

 
Poetic comeuppance aside, the author’s physical presence will be especially apt for a discussion of Goon Squad. Chapter one opens: “It began the usual way . . .” and before you’ve waded in a dozen pages you’re knee deep in self-referential story-telling, overt comments about symbols and plot arcs and collaborative writing. Ms. Egan is pulling off her metaphorical mask and yelling: Look at me!

So now, after stretching to pluck David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction from my office book shelf, let me flip to Chapter 46: “Metafiction is fiction about fiction: novel and stories that call attention to their fictional status and their own compositional procedures.”

Apart from a requisite nod to the 18th century’s Tristram Shandy, Lodge spends most of his time chatting with John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut. William Gass coined the term in 1970, after Barth demonstrated the style in his 1968 novel Lost in the Funhouse. Slaughterhouse Five was published a year later. Add Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and a couple of short stories by Robert Cover, and there’s your course syllabus for “Goon Squad: Founding Fathers of American Metafiction.”

Except, wait, here’s that inevitable moment, my weekly plot twist, where I veer to where I must always veer:

Superheroes!

No, no, no, NO. American metafiction did NOT begin in the late 60s. It was not a highbrow literary phenomenon. It was the lowest of the lowbrows, the pulpiest of the pulps, that ultimate literary stepchild, the comic book.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby beat Pynchon by a half-decade. In Fantastic Four #2, on newsstands in 1961, Reed Richards convinces an alien race not to invade Earth by showing them drawing of monsters. “Those are some of Earth’s most powerful warriors!” he tells them, while thinking, “I pray he doesn’t suspect that they’re actually clipped from ‘Strange Tales’ and ‘Journey into Mystery!’” Two other Marvel titles sharing newsstand space with Fantastic Four.

Two issues later, the Human Torch chances onto a stash of old comics. “Say! Look at this old, beat-up comic mag! It’s from the 1940’s!!” It features the Golden Age Namor on the cover. “The Sub-Mariner! . . . He used to be the world’s most unusual character!” And guess who shows up two panels later?

In issue five, Johnny’s reading habits have expanded. Reed asks, “What are you reading, Johnny?”It’s The Incredible Hulk #1, out the same month. “A great new comic mag, Reed. Say! You know something—! I’ll be doggoned if this monster doesn’t remind me of The Thing!” Because he’s supposed to. Marvel created Hulk because of the Thing’s popularity.

The cover of FF #9 asks: “What happens to comic magazine heroes when they can’t pay their bills and have no place to turn?” But #10 is even bolder: “In this epic issue surprise follows surprise as you actually meet Lee and Kirby in the story!!” The authors stare up at the action from the front row.

Stan: “How’s this for a twist, Jack? We’ve got Doctor Doom as one of the Fantastic Four!!”

Jack:  “And Mister Fantastic himself is the villain!! Our fans oughtta flip over this yarn!!”

 

Fantastic-Four-10

 
As promised, Dr. Doom uses the Marvel duo to lure Reed into a trap.

Johnny: “Phone call for you, Reed! It’s Lee and Kirby! They’d like you to go to their studio to work out a plot with ‘em!”

Reed: “Strange…we just finished discussing a new plot yesterday!”

Thing: “Tell ‘em if they don’t stop makin’ me even uglier than I am, I’m liable to go up there and wrap this two-ton weight around their skinny necks!”

Issue 11 goes further still. The team has to stand in line to get a copy of their own comic book, and then they go home to answer fan letters, shattering the last remains of the fourth wall. Mr. Lumpkin, their mailman, laments in the final panel: “Blankety blank fans and comic magazine heroes, and letters to the editor pages! Ohhh my achin’ back!”
 

Stan Lee

 
The trend dies a quiet death in the next issue when the Hulk shows up with no mention of that comic mag John had been reading. Marvel traded in metafiction for multi-title continuity. That brings us into 1962, still eight years before Barth coins the term.

And does all of this put Jennifer Egan into “the context of contemporary American culture”?

Um, no, not really.

So you’ll forgive me if I sign off now and finish reading Goon Squad.

‘Nuff said.
 

Jack Kirby

Batroc! Fights! Billie Holiday!!!!!

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In his recent piece decrying the comparison of comics to literature, Eddie Campbell, somewhat surprisingly, argues that it might be better to compare comics to jazz.

By way of a comparison, think of the great Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit”. It is a fine literary poem, set to music, and its author could have found no better singer to put it across. But a die-hard fan of Billie Holiday, the kind who has most of her recordings, is more likely to put on something from her earlier Columbia series of recordings, like “You’re a Lucky Guy” or “Billie’s Blues” (“I ain’t good looking, and my hair ain’t curled.”). A good number of the songs she had to sing during that period weren’t particularly good songs by high critical standards, and she didn’t have much choice in the matter, but the important thing is the musical alchemy by which she turned them into something precious. That and the happy accident of the first rate jazz musicians she found herself playing with, such as Teddy Wilson and Lester Young. Every time she sang she told her own story, whatever the material she was working with. I’m not talking here about technique, a set of applications that can be learned, or about an aesthetic aspect of the work that can be separated from the work’s primary purpose. The performer’s story is the essence of jazz music. The question should not be whether the ostensible ‘story,’ the plot and all its detail, is worth our time; stories tend to all go one way or another. The question should be whether the person or persons performing the story, whether in pictures or speech or dance or song, or all of the above, have made it their own and have made it worthy.

The truth is that this analysis is a little garbled. “Strange Fruit” is a mediocre song in no small part because the lyrics are lugubrious — the song’s lurid imagery and emotion sink into a clogged and ponderous earnestness. On the other hand, while it’s true that some of Holiday’s early sides weren’t especially great lyrically, many of them were. She sang “Summertime,”by Gershwin, arguably one of the greatest lyrics in the American songbook. She sang “A Fine Romance,” which means you get to hear Billie Holiday declaim, with great relish, “You’re calmer than the seals/In the arctic ocean/ At least they flap their fins/To express emotion.” She sang “St. Louis Blues” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It”. And, again, even a piece of fluff like the song “Who Wants Love?” is, in its simple unpretension, a good bit better lyrically than the overwrought “Strange Fruit.”

In other words, Campbell takes one of Holiday’s worst written song, declares it one of the best written, and then says that other tracks were better despite the writing rather than because of it.

But be that as it may. Let’s take Campbell’s contention at face value. We can look at “Who Wants Love?” which, as I said, doesn’t have especially great lyrics. “Love is a dream of weaving moonbeams in patterns rare/Love is a child believing/Stories of castles in the air” — that could be worse, but anytime you’re comparing love to moonbeams and having children build castles in the air, you’re not exactly in the realm of great poetry. So I think it’s fair to see this as an instance of a great artist trying to make mediocre material her own.
 

 
Campbell in his discussion seems to be suggesting that the content of Holiday’s songs is entirely beside the point; that the story, or lyrics, can be put aside, and the song can become purely about the artist’s achievement. But the achievement isn’t separate from the content…and Holiday doesn’t ignore the lyrics, or their slightness. Rather, her performance is in no small part about acknowledging and using the nothing she’s given. In her first words, she draws out that title, “Who wants love?”, putting more weight on it than the offhand phrase can bear — and so suggesting an intensity that can’t be contained in the song. That’s continued throughout; her exquisite sense of timing — swinging phrases so they stretch out against the beat — doesn’t ignore the song so much as emphasize her distance from it. She doesn’t mean what she’s saying, because what she’s saying doesn’t have enough meaning — not enough joy,not enough sorrow, not enough life.

The slightness of the song, then — its weak writing — becomes, for Holiday, a resource. And, as such, the weak writing is no longer weak. Holiday makes the writing mean more than the writer meant; it is not, as Campbell says, that she is telling her own story whatever the words say, but rather that her interpretation of the words is a great story. Campbell suggests that the song is not literary, but that Holiday makes it great anyway. What I’m saying, on the contrary, is that part of how Holiday makes the song great is that she transforms the words into great literature. And again, she does that not by ignoring what the words tell her — not by eschewing the literary — but by paying closer attention to what the words are saying and doing than the writer did, or than almost anyone can. Holiday’s triumph as a singer is in no small part her triumph as a reader — and as a writer. To deprive her of her literariness is I think in no small part to denigrate her art.

So let’s turn now to the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby page that Campbell presents as an example of counter-literariness and “improvisation” — a word that, coming as it does shortly after the discussion of Billie Holiday, can’t help but suggest jazz.

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Campbell argues that this page is shaped importantly by the fact that it used the Marvel method. The art came first, and then the writing was done afterwards. Thus, Campbell argues, the Lee/Kirby collaboration “tends to elude conventional literary analysis.” For Campbell, the anti-literariness of the page is a result of process, and so the most important aesthetic content of the sequence, its most essential comicness, is dictated not by the creators, but by what are basically commercial logistics.

As I said,Campbell’s fear of, and misunderstanding of, conventional literary analysis reduced Holiday’s achievement. By the same token, his eagerness to place comics formally beyond the bounds of the literary denigrates the conscious artistry of Lee and Kirby. That’s in no small part because the conscious artistry in this page is precisely about addressing the literary.

Like the Billie Holiday song, the page’s narrative is pretty much empty genre default. Holiday used nuance and subtlety to explore the distance between her and her tropes. Kirby, on the other hand, employs stentorian volume to belligerently bash down the distinction between speech and noise altogether. The fight scene occurs nowhere in no space; the actors throwing themselves together in a series of almost contextless poses against a background of expressionist, blaring lines.Towards the end, Batroc starts to disappear altogether into the sturm und drung; his hands floating in an explosion of purple, his body returning to the white space that bore it.

Lee’s captions here, are, then, not mere filligree — they actually show a remarkable attentiveness to what Kirby is doing. As Campbell says, the captions establish additional characters — not just Cap and Batroc, but Jack and Stan, as well as the reader as audience. Moreover, Lee’s winking text boxes present the page not as a narrative about the battle between Cap and Batroc, but as a performance by Kirby (and, indeed, by Lee himself.) Thus, the heroic narrative is not about Captain America’s victory, but about Kirby’s Ab-Ex dramatic self-assertion — not about the triumphant outcome of battle, but about the triumphant rush of forms across the page.

Campbell, then, is right that Lee and Kirby are sidelining the superhero narrative. He’s wrong, however, to see that sidelining as formal or default. It isn’t that the comics form naturally or automatically eschews literariness. It’s that Lee and Kirby on this particular page are, very consciously, eschewing the literary. Campbell is in effect taking the particular achievement of Lee and Kirby, and ascribing it to comics as a whole. It’s like reading Moby Dick and concluding that literature is awesome because it has whales in it.

Moreover, while I think it is right in some sense to say (as I do above) that Lee and Kirby are turning away from the literary, it’s pretty important to realize that that turning away presupposes and requires a quite thorough investment in, and understanding of, the literary and how it functions in their art. In fact, I think that you get a better sense of what they’re doing if you see it, not as pushing aside the literary entirely, but rather as substituting one story for another.

Specifically, Lee and Kirby substitute for the story of Cap the story of Jack. The page is not about Cap’s feats, but — deliberately, insistently — about Kirby’s. Thus, the story Campbell tells about this page — that it is about Kirby and comicness rather than about Cap and his story — is itself a story. And it’s a story that Lee and Kirby are quite aware of, and which they deliberately chose to tell.

Which, since Campbell has raised the issue, brings up the question — how does the story Lee and Kirby are telling compare to the story Billie Holiday is telling?

For me, at least, the answer is clear enough. While the Lee/Kirby page has its virtues, the Holiday song is a much greater work of art. This is again, in large part, because Holiday and her band accept, understand, and then work with, the inconsequentiality of the song. Listen, for example, to the Bunny Berigan solo — all bright, brassy good spirits, until that final, wavering, hesitant dropping note reveals the cheer as a bittersweet facade. Berigan isn’t using words, but he’s absolutely telling a story — and that story is about how what the pop song can’t say is a song in itself. Tied up in the vapid tune, Berigan slips free by acknowledging that he can’t get free — his capitulation, his vulnerability, is his triumph.

Kirby’s insistent triumph, on the other hand, is his capitulation. There is no space in the Batroc battle for vulnerability or vacillation. Instead, the art booms out the greatness of Kirby without qualification — which is a problem inasmuch as the greatness is thoroughly and painfully qualified. The story Kirby is telling may be about his own mastery of form, but that mastery can’t escape from the stale genre conventions — and, worse, seems oblivious to its own hidebound inevitability. If Kirby is truly such a heroic individual, why does the individuality seem to resort to such half-measures? The art seems to boast of its thoroughgoing idiosyncrasy and extremity — but when it comes down to it, it won’t and can’t abandon the by-the-numbers battle for full on abstraction. Why can’t we just have bursts of colored lines in every panel? Why not turn the forms actually into forms, rather than leaving them as recognizable combatants? In this context, Lee’s captions almost seem like taunts, praising “Jolly Jack’s great actions scenes” as beyond words, when they are, in fact, perfectly congruent with the hoariest narrative clichés. The hyperbolic indescribable fight scene is, after all, just a fight scene. Holiday knows and uses the fact that her pop song is just a pop song, but Kirby the uncontainable doesn’t even seem to realize how thoroughly he has been contained.

You could certainly argue that the Batroc battle is more successful than I think it is. You might insist, for example, that Kirby’s struggle with the stupid superhero milieu is a kind of tragedy, and that the interest is in seeing him pull something worthwhile from the dreck. Again, that’s not exactly what I get out of it, but if you wanted to do a reading that told that story, I’d be willing to listen.

Whatever one’s evaluation of Kirby, there does in fact have to be an evaluation. If the point of art is to reveal whether the artist performing a story has made it their own and has made it worthy, then there has to be some possibility that the artist in question has not done either. But Campbell’s refusal to countenance comparison, his insistence that (following R. Fiore) comics are comics and that that is there main virtue, comes perilously close to making the comicness of comics their sole virtue. Comicness becomes the all in all — so that the production method of the corporate behemoth in whose bowels Kirby toiled becomes more important than whatever Kirby was doing within those bowels. In an effort to put Kirby beyond criticism by bashing literariness, Campbell paradoxically ends up elevating the genre narrative, with no way to praise Kirby’s efforts (successful or otherwise) to leave those narratives behind. If literature has nothing to do with comics, then Kirby’s efforts to blow up genre narrative into abstraction and form become meaningless. If Kirby can’t fail, then he can’t succeed, either.

The truth, of course, is that art simply isn’t segregated the way Campbell wants it to be. There is literariness in comics, just as there is rhythm in prose and imagery in music. Artists — even comics artists — don’t fit themselves into boxes. Why shouldn’t a singer or an artist tell stories and think about narrative? What favor do you do them by pretending that they can’t or won’t react to and use the words and the narratives that are part and parcel of their chosen mediums? I like Kirby less than I like Billie Holiday, but both of them are greater artists than Eddie Campbell will allow.
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You can read the entire roundtable on Eddie Campbell and the literaries here.

Peter Sattler on What Influenced Kirby

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In a recent thread on Jack Kirby, there was some speculation that Darkseid may have been influenced by Nixon. In comments, Peter Sattler wondered about that and about Kirby’s influences more generally.

I know that this thread is fairly unraveled by now, but it seems that I find myself siding with Russ on simple matters of history. These two things seem likely (with a third question added on):

1. The Nixon of 1970 was not perceived in the same way — even by his opponents — as the Nixon of 1973 and after. That year, Nixon’s approval ratings hovered around 60%. He was viewed (domestically) as a political moderate/pragmatist. Yes this was the time of Cambodia, Kent State, and CSNY’s “Ohio.” But this was also the Nixon who publicly supported the ERA, attempted price controls, backed environmental enforcement (and Earth Day), regulated Big Tobacco, and did not try to stop the progressive agenda of the Democratic Congress.

This is before the Imperial Presidency, the enemies list, and of course Watergate became associated with the man. Sure he was a Cold Warrior, but he was not — I think — seem as a Goldwater or a second-string McCarthy.

My point is not that he’s a liberal — or that’s he’s *really* anything. But I am curious how he was viewed back then. Were other political cartoonists viewing him as a ruthless dictator and power-mad autocrat? Was Kirby — if you accept his version of events — the only one? It seems unlikely.
 

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2. It seems to be a fact that Kirby’s stories about his creative process in the 1960s and ’70s tended to evolve as he grew older, growing more elaborate and even inflated. I am no Kirby exert, but I can recall plenty of doubtful stories about his intentions or thoughts behind The Hulk, Galactus, Dragon Man, and even his own later work — stories that seemed to become embellished with time, making things sound more serious, more poetic.

Again, is that the case here? I don’t know. But Russ seems to indicate such a timeline. Has anyone made an effort to track the ways in which Kirby’s stories changed over the decades?

3. I would, finally, like to here what evidence we have for Kirby being a “voracious reader.” I’ve heard this many times, but I am not sure why we think that it is so. (Indeed, if I recall correctly, his wife said that she had few memories of Kirby reading.)

Once again, I have no problem believing Kirby did love to read. I simply wonder how we know this. Do we see evidence of deep reading in his comics? (I, for example, don’t see a deep understanding of evolution in his little essays for, I think, Devil Dinosaur — just a pretty standard, Life Magazine-level images of life and energy and what ‘science now tells us’…. Of course,that is just one subject. fantastically inflected.)

I honestly do not know. But I do know that this blanket claim is often made to link Kirby to other writers or to vouch for his historical accuracy/acumen. On what grounds is it made?

None of these comments is meant to disparage Kirby, for whose work I have no great feeling either way. (Heck, I love Charles Schulz, but I don’t believe that he loved Tolstoy, no matter how many times he said it — and in part because of the number of times he said it.) But the facts behind the discussion interest me nonetheless.