Tag Archives: Stan Lee

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!!”

 

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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

The Original Iron Man and Other War Machines

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Eisenhower warned about the War Machine. He called it the military industrial complex, and three days before handing the Oval Office to Kennedy, he said we must guard against its acquisition of unwarranted influence and the disastrous rise of its misplaced power.

Stan Lee wasn’t listening.

Or if he was, he took it as a challenge.

“I gave myself a dare,” says Lee. “The readers, the young readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military. . .  So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the Army . . .  I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats . . .”

Thanks, Stan.

Marvel later retooled Iron Man into a literal War Machine with James Rhodes, a high tech soldier taking orders in the military’s chain of command, something Tony Stark weapons manufacturer steered clear of.

But Tony wasn’t the first Iron Man.

Neither was the 1939 Bozo the Iron Man. George Brenner built him for Quality Comics. Originally a mad scientist’s robot minion, he was dubbed “Bozo” by Hugh Hazzard, the playboy detective who ended his crime spree and reprogrammed him into a sidekick. DC pulled his plug in 1956 when they bought Quality.

Bozo the Iron Man

Stan Lee pulled the name off the scrap heap and handed it to Marvel second-string artist Don Heck in 1962. Bozo was big enough for Hugh to crawl inside, but Heck drew a modern-day knight in a suit of electromagnetic armor. Like the Tin Man of Oz, he also has heart problems. Remove the chest plate, and Tony’s stops. Heck liked to draw the playboy industrialist sitting around hotel rooms, plugged into wall jacks as he unglamorously recharged.
 

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He eventually upgraded to an implant, which makes him a cyborg too. Like the Automaton.  The first movie cyborg, from Harry Houdini’s 1920 silent serial The Master Mystery. A mad scientist removes his brain and wires it into a robot. It was supposed to be a scary, Frankenstein-like monster, but based on the photo stills, the costume designer could have worked for Sesame Street.

Also, the cyborg thing is a hoax. The Automaton is just a clunky metal suit, same as Heck’s, before Steve Ditko refurbished it.

If the 1920s seem like a long leap to find the original Iron Man, then charge your rocket boots. Next stop is the 1590s.

The first Man of Iron was soldered by Edmund Spenser in his epic poem The Faerie Queene:

“His name was Talus, made of yron mould,
Immoueable, resistlesse, without end.”

If you’re rusty on Renaissance English, that’s “iron mold,” “immovable,” and “resistless,” all War Machine synonyms.  Talus’ other superpowers include speed (“him pursew’d so light, / As that it seem’d aboue the ground he went”), invulnerability (though a bad guy “streight at him with all his force did go,” Talus was “mou’d no more therewith, then when a rocke / Is lightly stricken with some stones throw”), and strength (“But to him leaping, lent him such a knocke, / That on the ground he layd him like a senseless blocke”). And that’s just from his first adventure.

Like Bozo, this yron man is also a sidekick. The executive half of Spencer’s dynamic duo is Artegall, the Knight of Justice. Talus originally worked for his mentor guru Astraea, “to execute her stedfast doome,” before she “willed him with Artegall to wend, / And doe what euer thing he did intend.” She also gives Artgall a nifty sword “Tempered with Adamant,” same as Wolverine’s claws. Together “They two enough t’encounter an whole Regiment.”

But Art prefers words over swords. He’s a diplomat at heart. He throws a Solomon-like puzzle at a serial killer squire to expose his guilt, and talks a tyrannical Gyant into recognizing the flawed logic in its false hero rhetoric. Of course all this word-mincing is made possible by his trusty page who carries “an yron flale,” the proverbial big stick for Art’s foreign policy.

It’s the dogged Talus who has to hunt down and retrieve the rogue squire (“Him in his iron paw he seized had”), and then “forced him” to obey Art’s punishment: to wear the murdered Lady’s head around his neck like an albatross.

Thanks, Talus. Good boy.

Pages of Justice are also handy for castle storming (“at the length he has yrent the door”), mob dispersal (“hid themselves in holes and bushes from his view”), and executions (“And down the rock him throwing, in the sea he drouned”). He has no qualms dispatching women either (“Over the Castle wall adowne her cast, / And there her drowned in the durty mud”). In fact, he has no qualms of any kind. It doesn’t matter if his target offers prayers, cash or sex, “he was nothing mou’d, nor tempted” and “Withouten pitty of her goodly hew.”

Basically the guy is a drone.

Like our Commander-in-Chief, Artegall just has to give the lethal nod. Talus, “swift as swallow” and “strong as Lyon,” is well-suited to Obama’s “light footprint” military strategy. “At the end of the day,” writes David E. Sanger in The New York Times, “Mr. Obama’s favorite way to use force is quickly, secretly and briefly.” The yron drone is his perfect war machine:

“And lastly all that Castle quite he raced,
Euen from the sole of his foundation,
And all the hewen stones thereof defaced,
That there mote be no hope of reparation,
Nor memory thereof to any nation.”

But drones are under fire themselves. In the Showtime series Homeland, they convert a loyal U.S. marine into a Muslim suicide bomber when collateral damage includes 72 children.

Since “for no pitty would he change the course,” a drone like Talus has a tendency of “burning all to ashes,” and so can, according to Ben Emmerson, cause “disproportionate civilian casualties.” Last month, the special investigator for the United Nations Human Rights Council started looking at “drone strikes and other forms of remotely targeted killing” to determine “whether there is a plausible allegation of unlawful killing.”

This could be bad news for Obama, Artegall, Hugh Hazzard, Tony Stark and any other Knights of Justice using heartless Bozos to do their dirty work.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Avengers aren’t wild about Iron Man either. General McChrystal says drones are “hated on a visceral level” and create a “perception of American arrogance.” New Secretary of State John Kerry wants to make sure “American foreign policy is not defined by drones and deployments alone.” Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wants a court to oversee targeted killings. Commentator David Brooks, even while lauding Obama’s not so “perfectly clean hands” as a Machiavellian necessity, wants the same. I’m not sure how John O. Brennan, our new CIA director and the man who’s been holding Talus’ leash for the last four years, feels, but protesters shouting at his confirmation hearing were very clear: “Drones Fly Children Die.”

Feinstein puts the annual number of accidental drone deaths in “single digits.” The war machines have been at it since 2004, so you can do the math. The Council on Foreign Relations counts over 400 total strikes, with a death toll over 3,000, most of them Al Qaeda.

Ed Craun, a colleague in the W&L English department, tells me Talus represents the Law of Retaliation, lex Talonis, the biblical eye-for-an-eye. The merciless shove-it-down-their-throats mentality you would expect from a military industrial complex. So Artegall spends Book 5 learning to temper that unwarranted influence. By the end, Artegall still employs his Iron Man for military operations (Ed likens one adventure to a search-and-destroy mission in the caves of Afghanistan), but when the War Machine wants to attack an insolent hag, Artegall reins him in:

“But Talus hearing her so lewdly raile,
And speake so ill of him, that well deserued,
Would her haue chastiz’d with his yron flaile,
If her Sir Artegall had not preserued,
And him forbidden, who his heast obserued.”

Artegall knows when to listen to General Eisenhower.

Does Obama?
 

War Machine

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.

Dr. Strange! Explained by a Nine-Year-Old

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My son has been really into the Lee/Ditko Dr. Strange recently. So I thought I’d ask him what he liked about it. Here’s what he said.

I like the art because it’s really colorful and I like how he gets different cloaks through the series. I like the plot too. I like how Dr. Strange runs around and does things and goes into different dimensions a bunch. I like how everybody talks to themselves a lot because it’s funny when they’re just saying things to themselves. I like the way they talk about the writers. For example, “written at twilight by Stan Lee.”

That’s kind of all I have to say.

And here’s a drawing of Dr. Strange he did.
 

Dr. Strange

The Erasure of Steve Ditko

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I think I first read Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s story “The Challenge of Loki” in a black and white reprint edition when I was around 8 or so. It’s originally from Strange Tales #123, August 1964.
 

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It’s not exactly right to say that it hasn’t held up — I wasn’t necessarily all that into it even as a kid, though it does have its virtues. Chief among them is a kind of self-contained inevitability; plotting that opens and closes with a satisfying “click.” In the story, Loki decides to use Dr. Strange to destroy his old enemy, Thor. He convinces Strange to cast a spell to rob Thor of his hammer while Thor is in flight. Without the hammer, Thor starts to fall to his death. Dr. Strange realizes he’s been tricked, and he and Loki battle. Strange is losing, but manages to reverse his spell, winding time backwards and returning the hammer to Thor. His life and hammer restored, Thor sets out in search of Loki, arriving at Dr. Strange’s sanctum just in time to scare Loki off and save Strange. The end.

I guess it sounds convoluted in the telling, but, again, the thing I sort of liked about it, and still sort of like about it, is the neatness of it — the way the story so swiftly and so unapologetically sets itself in motion, and then resets, or erases itself. Loki has an evil plot; it is discovered; everything goes back to normal. It’s transparently unmotivated, and then gratuitously rubbed out — pulp piffle which revels in its own greasepaint-daubed inconsequence. The gaudiness of the lack of pretense is refreshing — though also, admittedly, a little unsettling.

That hint of wrongness, might, perhaps, be tied to some of the characteristic tensions in Ditko’s work. Specifically, Craig Fischer argues in this lovely essay, in which he connects Ditko’s obsession with eloquently gesturing hands to the anxiety and unease which pervades the artist’s oeuvre — and then (obliquely) connects both the hands and the anxieties to repressed themes of abuse.

Certainly, hands are very important in “The Challenge of Loki.” Dr. Strange steals Thor’s hammer from him by generating a giant, blue/black hand.
 

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In part, the hand can be seen as pointing directly to Ditko himself; the elaborate motion lines an excuse to show the squiggle of the pen line — the diegetic hand as artist’s hand drawing the diegetic hand. The comic is showing you its own grinding mechanisms; it’s showing you the man (and the hand) behind the curtain.

What the man behind the curtain is doing, of course, is wreaking havoc. Thor is sadistically thrown to his death by the mystic hand — or, if you’d prefer, by the hand of the artist. There’s no motivation, other than Loki’s almost pure malevolence — which both is a plot device, and can be seen as characterizing pulp plot itself. The narrative almost figures artist as supervillain.

But then, of course, the artist relents.

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It’s interesting that the hand does not return the hammer, but instead fades away. Time is wound backwards (though, again curiously, this is not really visualized). Thor’s hammer is returned to him; the supervillain artist erases his own work. Not only is recompense made, but, apparently, the evil was never done. It effervesces, like a dream — or an instantly forgettable chunk of pulp detritus. There’s almost a wistfulness there — a fantasy that those hands (my hands? whose hands?) had never been or done; that they could just vanish with a wave of (the same?) hand.

I’m sure some folks will say that it’s a stretch to read into this story trauma or guilt or a confused identification/repudiation of an abuser. And I’d actually agree with that. “The Challenge of Loki” isn’t about abuse. It’s not about anything. It’s a stupid little story about Dr. Strange fighting Loki, with Thor thrown in for cross-promotional purposes. It’s well-constructed, and mildly entertaining, and that’s all that can be said for it, really. It’s inconsequential genre product. If there was ever anything more there, it has been scoured out by some violent or gentle hand.

Spider-Dove

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This first appeared on Comixology
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Spider-Man’s origin story, as most everybody knows, hinges on a moment of moral turpitude. In Amazing Fantasy #15 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, nerdy, put upon Peter Parker, having been bitten by that pesky radioactive spider, gains (dum ta da!) super powers, and starts a successful career as a professional wrestler. Basking in his newfound fame and bucks, Peter (in Spidey costume) is standing in some random corridor when he sees some random schmo fleeing from a cop. Cop yells to Peter to stop schmo, but Peter refuses ; schmo gets onto high-speed elevator and escapes.

The cop chews Peter out, “All you hadda do was trip him”! Peter, though, is unrepentant: “Sorry, Pal! That’s your job! I’m through being pushed around!” Peter walks off and then on the next page his uncle is murdered! And two pages later, Peter learns that the guy who shot his uncle is the same guy he allowed to escape! Oh, the irony! Peter has learned too late that “with great power there must also come — great responsibility!”

Anyway, back to that moment of moral turpitude. What exactly is Peter’s failure here? The cop says that Peter should have tripped the guy or stopped him somehow. He even threatens to arrest Peter for failing to help. But… arrest him for what? Do citizens really have a legal obligation to throw themselves in the way of fleeing criminals? Do cops even really want citizens to throw themselves in the way of fleeing criminals?

On the contrary, if you’re a cop chasing a perp, the last thing you want is for some civilian in goofy red tights to get in the way. What if the perp has a concealed weapon (and in this case, we know that the villain did have a gun by the next page)? What if the civilian tackles the perp and then gets shot? What if the civilian tackles the perp and somebody else gets shot? At the very, very least, from a police perspective, that’s an exponential increase in paperwork.

Of course, we know that Spidey could have taken down the baddy without anyone getting killed or even hurt. We know this in part because he’s got super powers. Mostly though, we know it because — Duh! — he’s a super-hero, or even just a hero. Heroes like Spider-man or Batman or Dirty Harry leap into action and save people. That’s what they do. And if they didn’t do that, there wouldn’t be much of a story, would there?

Indeed, Spiderman’s real sin here is not against morality or society, but against the tropes that keep the genre afloat. Super-heroes have to act. They’ve got to fight crime. If they don’t, you don’ t have a narrative. Super-heroes have “great responsibility,” but it’s always the responsibility to do something. You could conceivably have an origin story in which Wombat-Man decked a baddy, the gun went off, Cousin Joe got shot, and the hero decided “With great power comes great responsibility!” And so Wombat-Man decides never to mess with crime again, and instead uses his phenomenal digging powers solely to aid with infrastructure projects! Again, you could have such an origin – but what you’d end up with would not exactly be a super-hero comic.

In real life, of course, and as this suggests, the responsible, way to use your “great power” might conceivably in many circumstances be to sit on your ass and do nothing in particular. Certainly, if George W. Bush had done that in 2003, America and Iraq would both be a good bit better off today.

What I’m talking about here is essentially pacifism. Pacifism is about as massively discredited as a major philosophy can be. Pacifism is appeasement, or it’s treason, or, (more kindly) it’s a nice idea but not really practicable. You can’t just sit by and watch that guy escape, Spidey! Hit him! He’s got weapons of mass destruction!

I can’t say that I’m a pacifist myself, exactly. But I think that people can be way too quick to dismiss it, essentially because reality is rigged just like that Spidey origin story. For whatever reason, probably having to do with our reptile hind-brains and/or a steady consumption of revenge narratives, the negative consequences of inaction tend to seem to us infinitely more insupportable than the negative consequences of action. If we step aside and something bad happens, we say, “Oh no! I should have done more!” On the other hand, if you wade in and things get completely fucked up, you often feel like, “Well, at least I tried. And think how bad it would have been if we’d done nothing!”

Which brings me to Amazing Spider-Man #184, published way back there in September 1978. My friendly neighborhood Internet tells me this was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Ross Andru. I must have read this when I was 8 or so; and I don’t think I even liked it all that much at the time. But I’ve remembered it all this time, in part because it is, rather bizarrely, one of the only super-hero comics I’ve ever seen that makes any effort to address either pacifism or the anti-pacifist assumptions at the core of super-hero comics. (The alternate-world Amish Superman in The Nail does not count. We will not speak of him again.)
 

 
Anyway, I haven’t seen ASM#184 in probably twenty years, but if memory (and a Web capsule summary) serves, the plot was a Bruce Lee rip off. Phil Chang is an awesome martial arts master, but he’s taken a vow of non-violence. Inevitably the evil Chinese gang wants him to join them. Their leader is the White Dragon, who is not only a martial artist extraordinaire, but also wears a white (natch) costume with a Chinese dragon style mask that looks staggeringly impractical, even by super-hero costume standards. Despite said mask, though, the Dragon is fully able to beat the tar out of the non-resisting Chang, and so he does – until Spidey comes to the rescue. Thank God someone is willing to fight, huh kiddies?!

That’s what you’d think the message would be anyway. In fact, though, Marv Wolfman’s script is surprisingly subtle. One exchange in particular has really stuck with me. I can’t quote exactly, alas, but to paraphrase, it went something like this:

Spidey: What in tarnation are you doing, anyway? The White Dragon is beating you to a pulp! He’s going to kill your family, you dope! Show me some of that kung-fu everyone’s been on about, won’t you? Are you a man or an amoeba? Come on, Phil! With great power comes great responsibility!

Phil: (and this I remember much better) There are failures in non-violence just as there are failures in violence.

I think that’s pretty profound. Yes, pacifism won’t necessarily solve all your problems. But then, fighting often doesn’t solve your problems either. Indeed, fighting can quite easily make things worse. You wouldn’t know that necessarily from reading super-hero comic books, of course — nor, perhaps, from public discourse in general. Which is why it might be worthwhile, sometimes, to remember that the power to right the world’s wrongs is given to neither man nor spider, and that we are all every bit as responsible for what we do as for what we don’t.
 

So what is pacifism? It is the uncompromising realization that we as humans are incapable of bringing about justice through violent retaliation. Hence, we relinquish all such acts to God in his sovereign and eschatological plan of judgment, justice, and mercy. Indeed, God have mercy on us.
—Mark Moore

Spider-Man: Wordless Destiny

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There were a lot of great story arcs written during the Silver Age of Comics, which most comics historians agree spanned the years 1956-1970. But the best one, in my opinion, “If This Be My Destiny,” was published as a three-part story in “Amazing Spider-Man” issues 31-33, cover-dated December 1965 through February 1966.

But before we can analyze exactly why the story was so special, we first need to identify who the key player was in its creation, layout, pacing and overall story.

Stan Lee was attributed as the “writer” of the story in the credits, but he, as I discuss below, had nothing to do with the story arc’s creation. For while he wrote the dialogue after the pages were laid out and drawn, he did none of the plotting, and had zero input on the pacing, basic character interaction, mood, and story direction. All of that was done by artist Steve Ditko.

The “Marvel Method” of creating comics during this period was peculiar in that regards, especially for Lee’s top bullpen artists Ditko and Jack Kirby. When the process was first implemented by Lee in the early 1960s – ostensibly to save him the time of writing a full-blown script – he and the artist of a particular comic book would have a story conference, work out a plot, and the artist would go home and draw out the entire issue. The finished pages would then be given to Lee, who proceeded to add the dialogue.

But by the mid-1960s, Kirby and Ditko were so good at creating and plotting stories that Lee himself admitted in a number of interviews that he often had little or no input for story arcs. In fact, he often would have no idea what the story for a particular issue was going to be about until after the pages were delivered by the artist.

Lee himself details this Marvel Method process in an unusually candid interview he did for “Castle of Frankenstein” #12 (1968), a magazine that covered popular culture from that era:

“Some artists, of course, need a more detailed plot than others. Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean I’ll just say to Jack, ‘Let’s make the next villain be Dr. Doom’… or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He’s good at plots. I’m sure he’s a thousand times better than I. He just about makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing… I may tell him he’s gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I’ll give him a plot, but we’re practically both the writers on the things.”

This was also true with Ditko and his early Marvel Method process on “Amazing Spider-Man.” He and Lee would have a story discussion, after which Ditko would leave, pencil out the story and then, inside the panels, write in a “panel script” (suggested dialogue and narration). He would then bring the pages back to Lee and they’d discuss the story from start to finish. Ditko would annotate any changes outside of the panels, and then he’d leave the penciled pages with Lee. Lee would then write in the final dialogue and the book would be lettered. Ditko then picked up the lettered pages, and made any of the annotated changes during the inking process.

But Lee really had no long-term vision for Spider-Man. He never thought about what he would do with the characters from one issue to the next. He’d just say, “Let’s make Attuma the villain,” and Ditko would have to talk him out of it. The glue that really held the Spider-Man direction and continuity together in those early days of the character was Ditko.

Over time, Ditko received more and more story autonomy and character development latitude that by about issue #18, he was doing the sole plotting chores with no input from Lee. But it took time for Lee to give Ditko what was then unprecedented plotting credit, beginning with “Amazing Spider-Man” #26 (July 1965), and ending with Ditko’s last issue, #38 (July 1966).

As with many aspects of those murky creative days at Marvel, Ditko’s credits raise questions. For example, why did Lee agree to give Ditko plotting credit, but not Kirby, whose “Fantastic Four” and “Thor” plotting autonomy was apparently quite similar? And why did Lee, when he finally did start giving artist and plotting credit to Ditko, suddenly, after one issue, expand his own credits from “writer” (his standard credit line for the first 26 issues of “Amazing Spider-Man”) to both “editor and writer”?

Around the time Ditko began receiving plotting credit, a rift between the two arose and, according to several Marvel staffers, was so acute, Lee would not speak to Ditko. It was during this year-long communication blackout period that Ditko wrote his Spider-Man magnum opus, “If This Be My Destiny.”

Additional evidence that Lee had no story input during this period can be found in “Amazing Spider-Man” #30, which set the stage for Ditko’s historic three-issue story arc. In that issue, the villain is a thief named The Cat, but Ditko also introduced, in two different parts of the story, henchmen for The Master Planner – the surprise villain for the “Destiny” story arc that was to start in issue #31. Yet because communication between Lee and Ditko had ceased, Lee had no idea who the costumed criminals were and misidentified them as The Cat’s henchmen – which, upon close examination of the story, makes no sense. It’s not until the next issue that the error becomes obvious to Lee and he gets a better grasp of Ditko’s storyline.

So, now that we have a better understanding about who created what for this historic story arc, exactly what is it that makes Ditko’s “Destiny” so great from both a literary and artistic standpoint?

How does one go about measuring greatness? After all, there are no established standards for greatness in comics, or, for that matter, the two creative disciplines that are merged to create them: art and literature.

Some argue that great art or literature is timeless, and that it appeals to our emotions in a compelling and riveting way. Others argue that it is something that breaks new ground.

Ditko’s three-issue story arc easily accomplishes all three, and a lot more.

We can glimpse Ditko’s personal, objective views about what constitutes art from his recorded statements for the 1989 video, “Masters of Comic Book Art.” Ditko said that based on Aristotle’s Law of Identity, “Art is philosophically more important than history. History tells how men did act; art shows how men could, and should act. Art creates a model – an ideal man as a measuring standard. Without a measuring standard, nothing can be identified or judged.”

It’s clear to me that Ditko, through his stories and art in “Amazing Spider-Man,” was striving to do just that: mold Peter Parker/Spider-Man into a positive heroic model.

Throughout his career, Ditko has always been a creative, experimental, thinking-man’s innovator. It was evident in his costume designs, character portrayals, settings, lighting, poses, choreography, etc. – literally every aspect of the comic book creative process. For example, no one before or since has created anything like Ditko’s multi-dimensional worlds for his Doctor Strange character. And his creative depictions of Spider-Man’s costume, devices, movement through space, and overall look set the standard for every single Spider-Man artist who has followed. I’ve been a fan of his work for 45 years, and to this day, I still marvel at how Ditko was able to take the totally fantastic and make it seem like it could actually be real.

Ditko was innovative in other ways as well. Unlike many of his contemporaries back then, Ditko had an eye on continuity, and started meticulously planning story arcs and sub-plots many months or even years in advance. Such was the case with his slow and methodical development of the Green Goblin‘s secret identity over a multi-year period, and his tantalizingly slow introduction of Mary Jane.

Ditko’s development of his “Destiny” story arc in “Amazing Spider-Man” #31-33 was no different. Ditko planted the initial seed for the arc way back in issue #10, when Peter Parker provided blood during a transfusion of his seriously ill Aunt May. As regular readers eventually found out, Parker’s selfless act of kindness turned out to be a ticking time bomb for his frail aunt, who began suffering ominous fainting spells in issue #29, and again in issue #30.

As I mentioned above, the mature, heroic side of Peter Parker and Spider-Man had been building for many months before the “Destiny” story arc kicked in – a steady drumbeat that would soon reach a deafening crescendo. At the same time, Parker was enduring important emotional lows and highs. For example, his long relationship with Betty Brant had been pulled wire taut in the months preceding “Destiny,” and was at the breaking point. Likewise, Parker graduated high school in issue #28, and was about to go off to college and enter what he hoped was a new and exciting chapter of his life. But despite his emotional roller-coaster rides, it was clear to the regular reader that Parker was growing more mature, determined and focused both as a normal person and as Spider-Man. He was no longer the silent doormat for his boss, J. Jonah Jameson, his high school nemesis Flash Thompson, or any other negative influence in his life.

It was at this convergence of events where “Destiny” began, and the reader soon found out just how mature, determined and focused Parker and his alter ego would be under the most harrowing of circumstances – circumstances that would have the highest emotional stakes imaginable for the character.

As the three-issue story arc opened with issue #31, the stage is set for what’s to come when Spider-Man stumbles across the Master Planner’s men fleeing, via helicopter, a location where they have just stolen some radioactive atomic devices. A battle ensues, but they escape. It is during this escape that the Master Planner’s underwater refuge – a key location later in the story – is revealed.

The scene shifts to Peter Parker’s home, where he waves goodbye to his Aunt May before heading off to his first day of college. The reader can see that she is gravely ill, but she’s doing her utmost to hide it from her nephew so he doesn’t worry. When Peter returns later that day, she can hide it no longer and collapses in his arms. Her illness is so serious, their family doctor admits her to a hospital. Peter is by her side until she falls asleep, and heads for home. Here the emotional roller-coaster starts its journey again as Peter tries to juggle college, lack of sleep, mounting bills, and Aunt May’s illness all at the same time. But Aunt May’s illness overshadows everything else and his new classmates find him aloof and distant.

As his money pressures mount, Peter changes to Spider-Man so he can look for news photo opportunities around the city – as taking news photos for “The Daily Bugle” is his only source of income. He gets a tip that a robbery will be taking place at the docks that evening, and when he arrives, he once more finds the Master Planner’s men attempting to steal a ship’s radiation-related cargo. Another battle ensues, and they escape again – this time into the water using scuba gear. As the issue comes to a close, an unseen Master Planner, in his underwater lair, mulls how Spider-Man is thwarting his attempt to use radiation secrets for nefarious purpose. But the final three panels are far more ominous: the doctors caring for Aunt May have finished their tests, and conclude that she is dying.

Issue #32, “Man on a Rampage,” opens in the Master Planner’s underwater hideout, and we quickly find out that he is actually none other than Dr. Octopus, one of Spider-Man’s most dangerous foes. The scene then shifts to Peter, whose relationship and money problems keep mounting. But things get even worse when he visits the hospital and the physician attending to Aunt May informs him that her terminal illness is being caused by an unknown source of radioactivity in her blood. Peter immediately realizes that the radioactivity must have come from his contaminated donor blood which Aunt May received during a transfusion many months earlier for a different illness.

And while the radioactivity is harmless to him, it is having a devastating effect on Aunt May. So not only was young Parker responsible for the death of his Uncle Ben when he first became Spider-Man, he may soon be responsible for the death of Aunt May. This emotional realization is perfectly portrayed by Ditko, along with Peter’s vow that he will not fail at saving a loved one again.

Parker then gets an idea. He tracks down Dr. Curtis Connors (aka The Lizard) – a blood specialist who he hasn’t seen since issue #6 – and, as Spider-Man, gives him a stolen vial of Aunt May’s blood, and begs him to see if he can discover a cure for his “friend.” Connors agrees and after some tests says that an experimental serum called ISO-36 might help – but it will cost money. Parker leaves, hocks all of his personal laboratory equipment, gets the money, and returns to Connors’ lab as Spider-Man. While they wait for every available bit of the rare serum to be express-delivered from across the country, Parker, a budding scientist in his own right, helps Connors with some preliminary lab research. Suddenly, Connors gets a phone call informing him that the ISO-36 was stolen by the Master Planner’s henchmen, and Spider-Man explodes into action.

In an effort to find the precious stolen serum, Spider-Man literally does go on a rampage, snatching up criminals and stoolpigeons, smashing down doors and rooting through every underworld nook and cranny across the city for any possible leads. As the clock ticks, we see Aunt May slip into a coma, Dr. Connors patiently waiting, and a desperate Spider-Man becoming more and more frantic.

Suddenly, after swinging into a blind alley, his Spider-Sense points him to a hidden trapdoor leading to the underground tunnel entrance for the Master Planner’s underwater hideout. Battling through dozens of henchmen, he slips through a sliding doorway into the tunnel. Alerted by one of his men that Spider-Man is searching for the stolen ISO-36, Dr. Octopus decides to use it as bait so he can kill Spider-Man, once and for all.

He places the serum in the middle of the cavernous domed main room of his underwater lair, and waits. Spider-Man enters, and despite a last-second warning by his Spider-Sense, the trap is sprung and a raging battle ensues. But Dr. Octopus soon finds out something is different this time, as Spider-Man is fighting like a man possessed. Startled, Dr. Octopus quickly shifts from offense to defense, and within minutes is no longer fighting, but trying to find a way to escape the madman he is facing. A main support beam is shattered during the fight, and as the machinery inside the dome begins collapsing, Dr. Octopus slips away. But Spider-Man is trapped.

For the last three pages of issue #32 and the first five pages of issue #33, Ditko creates the most masterful bit of sequential art of the Silver Age, and possibly ANY age. It is an artistic tour de force that needs no words to convey the story. The drama, stakes and emotional tension of the main character could not possibly have been wound any higher as issue #32 came to a close. And I don’t think there was a sentient reader alive back then who wasn’t gnawing his/her fingernails to the bone waiting to find out what was going to happen in issue #33.

As issue #33, “The Final Chapter,” opens, the powerful visual sequence begun in the previous issue continues. After a four-panel recap, we see a hopelessly-trapped Spider-Man buried under the weight of an enormous mass of machinery as the main room of the underwater hideout of Dr. Octopus begins to flood. Aunt May is dying, and the serum he needs to save her lies on the floor in front of him, just out of reach.

And just when you think it’s over for Spider-Man, and that he’s doomed to die, he once more thinks of Uncle Ben and Aunt May, taps a latent reservoir of sheer will and determination from his innermost being, and attempts one last time to break free. Ditko captures the agonizing struggle pitch perfectly, with sequential pacing that rivals that of the best comic book or film. And with one last mighty heave, he’s free (See Figures 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11).

But Ditko’s not finished. During the next 15 pages, Spider-Man must overcome even more physical and emotional adversity to save his aunt. But I’m not going to spoil the entire story arc. Grab a reprint of issue #33 and finish it yourself. You won’t regret it.

A few final points about the “Destiny” story arc and Ditko’s often underappreciated creativity.

First, the reason I showed wordless versions of the story’s pages was two-fold: to show how visually powerful Ditko’s storytelling abilities were, and to highlight just how crucial artists like Ditko and Kirby were to creating stories using the Marvel Method during the Silver Age.

Second, I want to make sure everyone understands just how much responsibility the artist had back then. In cinematic terms, Ditko not only co-wrote the screenplay, he was the storyboard artist, director, film editor, casting director, cameraman, cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, art director, stunt director, and set designer. Lee, on the other hand, co-wrote the screenplay, and did the “sound” editing.

So, while Lee’s dialogue certainly enhanced the story, Ditko was the creative force behind almost everything else. In that regards, if the story were a Corvette, Lee applied the paint job, pinstripes and some of the detailing, but Ditko designed the car, crafted all the parts, and assembled it.

‘Nuff said!