Kirby: King of Comics, by Mark Evanier

I’m not sure I can remember the first Jack Kirby comic I ever read. It was probably in a mass market paperback sized reprint edition of the Fantastic Four, but maybe I’m overlooking a standalone issue of something. For years after that, I was aware of Jack Kirby among the pantheon of comics greats, just one more name among a group of legendary names. Not fully knowing why he was special meant that I didn’t comprehend how much of the visual architecture of the comics I read during my first great comics awakening in the 1970s and 80s was sunk into the bedrock of Jack’s Kirby’s work.

It wasn’t until I read the Kirby tribute issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that I began to understand that he was a breed apart within his field. I know that the first time I read a Jack Kirby comic and really got it was in my early 20s when I got my hands on a copy of a Marvel anthology that included “This Man…This Monster” from Fantastic Four #51.

I also know this makes me a bandwagon jumping poseur — it’s sort of like acclaiming Groucho as one’s favorite Marx Brother, as though 95% of the world didn’t share that view — but there is a reason that certain things are acknowledged for their greatness.

There is a lot of greatness on display in Mark Evanier’s oversize biography of Mr. Kirby. First of all, the dimensions of the book, more coffee table book than traditional biography, allows the reproductions of Mr. Kirby’s work to be shown to great effect. Showcasing early comic strips drawn under a series of aliases in a range of styles to pin ups, commissioned pieces from late in his career, and countless stops in between, the art in Kirby: King of Comics almost makes the story of Mr. Kirby’s life and work superfluous. Almost.

Mr. Evanier, Mr. Kirby’s former studio assistant and friend, writes something more akin to a biographical sketch than to an exhaustive exhumation of every facet of Mr. Kirby’s life. It is a narrative that seeks to illustrate the illustrations it accompanies, or perhaps the illustrations are intended to narrate the narrative. Either way, like great comics, the text and image complement each other and convey a more comprehensive sense of story than either alone might have accomplished.

Because this is a book written by an interested party, it is largely favorable, but also seems largely honest while still doing honor to its subject. If Mr. Evanier avoids putting Jack Kirby on a pedestal (if only because Mr. Kirby’s drawing table is a more appropriate venue) he similarly refrains from casting a cartoonishly villainous light onto any of Mr. Kirby’s collaborators and employers. While Mr. Kirby failed to share in the financial rewards his work generated for his employer, especially in the area of derivative and licensed work, Mr. Evanier is honest that this resulted not only from ungenerous business practices on their part, but also from Mr. Kirby’s lack of business acumen. But these controversies, while noteworthy and significant, are in some ways extraneous to the powerful, dynamic work Mr. Kirby produced, or the ways that work defined — and continues to define — a medium.

The Jack Kirby story as presented by Mr. Evanier seems tailor made for the sort of biopic treatment Hollywood has given to individuals such as Ray Charles and Bobby Darin. His life had the arc on which such films so often rely; humble beginnings, personal drive, early struggles paving the way for tremendous success, mastery of chosen profession conflicting with the unkind realities of the biz, the ebb and flow of the later career culminating in acknowledgement of the proper place in the history of his craft. The only difference is that Mr. Kirby seems not to have needed to tame his personal demons in the same way as these performers.
While his life would be fodder for a film, I personally hope such an endeavor does not come to pass. Perhaps the recent success of films based on Marvel Comics properties (with more to come now that the success of Iron Man validated the profitability of the Marvel Studios financing endeavor) will limit interest in such a project. To tell Mr. Kirby’s story in the Hollywood way would necessitate exploring his relationship with Marvel, and the — how to say this diplomatically? — disproportionate nature of his compensation relative to his contributions. Such a story carries with it the sort of controversy that large companies seek to avoid in order to ensure or improve profitability. Thus, were such a film ever proposed, it’s not difficult to imagine Marvel’s owners attempting to derail the effort in order to keep the grazing pastures for their herd of cash cows verdant.

If superhero comics are a form of modern mythology — at its best, Mr. Kirby’s talent certainly elevated the characters and stories he depicted to that level, both explicitly (Thor, New Gods) and implicitly (X-Men) — it is equally the case that Mr. Kirby’s own life and work embodied a uniquely American mythology. As work, his career reflected the defining ethos of the 20th century: work hard, make money, provide for your family, don’t rock the boat too much, ensure your family’s security after you’re gone. As art, his work continues to fuel the production and articulation of new mythologies. Not bad for a kid from Yancy Delancey Street.

I resemble that remark

Recently, someone referred to me as a heckler. That reminded me that this…

…was a fun comic that was canceled too soon. Granted, it was no Ambush Bug, but then what is? Aside from, you know, Ambush Bug?

“With moderate power comes moderate responsibility”

Rich Burlew’s The Order of the Stick is one of my favorite web comics.

It’s funnier if you are now or have ever been involved in a dungeon-crawling based fantasy role-playing game, but aside from the occasional meta-reference it also scans well as an epic fantasy adventure story.

This strip encapsulates a philosophy of life I can get behind:

And so I’ve come to realize that I have a duty to use my limited competence to have a partial effect on the world, from time to time.

Well played, Mr. Burlew. Well played.

Lit Graphic

Richly visual and intimately understood, graphic novels — with their anti-heroes, narrative appeal, and storylines sometimes off-limits in other modes of expression — may be prepared to usurp the role that novels currently play.

I call bull%$#@.

Didactics are an important component of the museum experience. Good wall text provides museum visitors with background, context, and history. It illustrates something about the relevance of a particular artist or work in their medium or relative to their position in the history of art. It also explains how a given artist or work reinforces the theme of they exhibition in which they appear.

But oh my; didactics also become a channel for curatorial excess, overreaching, and pretension. Case in point: the above text from one of the introductory didactic panels included in the Lit Graphic: The World of the Graphic Novel exhibition currently on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Comics (or “sequential art” if you prefer) are (or is it “comics is?”) a wonderful storytelling medium. The form is dynamic, flexible, and capable of rendering everything from the birth of an idea to the death of a god, and all stops in between.

But “storylines sometimes off-limits in other modes of expression?” What the heck does that mean? The melding of word and image creates a singular vehicle for exploring all manner of stories, but comics are no more boundary-breaking than any other medium. The closest comparison to comics is film, which is also about presenting visual ideas sequentially. But as with any comparison between print and film, there is a level on which reading is always the more active process, watching the more passive. Regardless of how the information gets into our brain, however, the fact is that neither comics or film (or poetry, or painting, or sculpture, or any other creative endeavor) is constrained by storylines.

Anti-heroes? Narrative appeal? Is there a form of storytelling that can’t include anti-heroes? I’m hard-pressed to think of one, and that’s a good thing. Anti-heroes are usually more interesting than heroes. Is there some sort of narrative that isn’t, or at least can’t be, appealing? That’s a qualitative issue, and not one related to the inherent nature of comics, or any other narrative medium. Some stories are appealing. Some stories aren’t. Good storytellers can take the most mundane story and make out of it something that makes the audience reevaluate the very nature of the world around them. Bad storytellers can take great ideas, strip them of all originality and vitality, and regurgitate them in a way that makes the audience feel debased and insulted.

A mode of expression is a box. Whether that box contains diamonds or dog%$#@ says something about the skill of the creator, not about the structural limits of the box.

And usurping the novel? What the actual hell? Again, any comparison that assumes an absolute scale of comparison between two narrative forms is misguided at best. If cinema has not entirely usurped the novel, comics won’t be the ones to knock the novel off its perch either.

Grandiose and unsupportable claims notwithstanding, there is a lot to like in this exhibit. There was also much that I found either flawed or frustrating.

The gallery featuring pages from Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner was simply amazing. Looking at these selections, there is no doubt why two of the biggest awards in the comics field are named after these creators. The Will Eisner Spirit story on display in the gallery is a revelation; The Spirit barely appears in the story but his absence creates the suspense that drives the story.

Then, the scale of many of the pieces on display was impressive. As a comics reader, I’m used to seeing art on the typical comic book sized page, or smaller. Many of the pieces in Lit Graphic were original art, rendered on illustration paper. When published, the camera-ready art is reduced to the appropriate size. As with any reproduction, the process eliminates some of the texture and detail of the drawn work. Seeing it as the artist intended showed off the skill, and the effort, and made these works all the more impressive.

Case in point, the selections from Dave Sim and Gerhard’s Cerebus. In particular, the cover illustration from the collected Church and State I is phenomenal when seen in a larger scale.

As anyone who has read Cerebus knows, Gerhard’s backgrounds are terrifically detailed, with intricate cross-hatching and meticulous shading, while Mr. Sim’s characters are designed down to the last wart and unfortunate hairdo. The reduced image on the “phone book” collection of the story simply can’t do justice to the amount of effort it takes to produce a piece like this, or the level of detail it contains.

Indeed, this may be the most meaningful contribution exhibitions like Lit Graphic make to the comics field. It’s not that showing comics in museums legitimizes this art form and allows people to play the “Comics aren’t just for kids!” card. Rather, these showings demonstrate that comics are (comics is?) art. Comics don’t need to be legitimized, they merely need to be seen from a different point of view. By displaying these works at the scale at which they were created, by showing every pen line and brush stroke, Lit Graphic demonstrates beyond any doubt the artistry of comic book art.

For me, this great strength was also part of Lit Graphic’s greatest weakness. While the artistry of the creators exhibited is diverse, taken in the aggregate the show feels like overkill. Howard Cruse and Jessica Abel, to pick two names from the exhibition group, are both wonderfully talented, incredibly engaging storytellers with unique artistic styles. Put them side by side (or in the case of Lit Graphic, in the same gallery) and the work of each creator remains distinctive and recognizable. Put them in a gallery with other (and in some cases, lesser) artists whose work encompasses slice of life narratives and the unique style of each artist begins to give way to a certain sameness of convention and form. Taken collectively as representative examples from larger works, these individual panels and sequences become, if not repetitive, then at least somewhat familiar. The similarities start to overshadow the differences in a way that does not happen with a collection of, say, portraits.

But no exhibition is perfect, especially those organized around a particular theme. Large group shows invariably include things that will resonate with some individuals, and leave others unimpressed. What I like may not appeal to everyone. What someone else likes, I may loathe. That’s part of the museum going experience. So long as the these works revolve around a curatorial idea that has the gravitational pull to hold the pieces together, the exhibition can work, regardless of the subjective preferences of any given visitor.

By presenting comic book art as art first and comics second, Lit Graphic does a great service to this unique and important art form. It is both interesting and appropriate for the Norman Rockwell museum to present an exhibition like this. Mr. Rockwell’s career and reputation embody the often dismissive tension between the respect afforded to the artist by the elite, and their dismissal of art with commercial appeal as mere illustration. Just as the museum (rightly) insits on Mr. Rockwell’s artistic legitimacy, so too Lit Graphic helps to legitimize comics.

That’s achievement enough without attempting to stake out exclusive narrative territory for comics alone.

Lit Graphic is on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum (9 Glendale Road, Route 183 Stockbridge, Massachusetts 01262; 413-298-4100 ) through May 26, 2008.

All-Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder #9, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee [Haiku review]

The goddamn Batman!
Robin kicks Green Lantern’s ass
Then the heroes cry

Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes, by Christopher Knowles, with illustrations by Joseph Michael Linsner

Mr. Knowles has strong opinions. Show me a comic book fan who doesn’t. Like too many fans, Mr. Knowles often mistakes his opinions for facts. He falls into the trap of investing his blanket statements (particularly statements of subjective judgment) with the force of fact and truth.

In discussing the X-Men, Mr. Knowles writes,

Later in the 80s, The Uncanny X-Men became nothing more than a revolving showcase for the hot artist du jour. This process reached its apotheosis with the arrival of Jim Lee. Lee’s tendency to disregard Claremont’s plots rendered the book completely unreadable, but no one seemed to care because the art was so gorgeous. (page 176)

The tail end of Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men was weaker than his reputation-making collaboration with John Byrne. While the elevation of the comic book artist during the 1990s changed the storytelling balance, there are quality moments throughout Mr. Claremont’s later run. A larger problem with the coherence of later X-Men stories was the number of multi-title crossover stories that became common during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Writers like Mr. Claremont had to not only advance their own storytelling vision, but also advance plot threads inherited from other writers. This tension, combined with the increased prominence of marquee artists, worked in tandem to dilute, but not eclipse, coherence and creativity.

When Mr. Knowles isn’t grinding his numerous critical axes (against Rob Liefield, Image comics, and comic books in the 1990s generally), Our Gods Wear Spandex is rife with factual errors. In particular, Mr. Knowles has a problem with chronology. Consider:

Batman and Robin, the nearly unwatchable 1997 film directed by Joel Schumacher, brought the Batman franchise to its knees and nearly took the Warner Brothers empire down with it. This was followed by a string of superhero flops like Judge Dredd, Tank Girl, and The Phantom that threatened the future of the entire “comic book movie” genre.(page 7)

I have no objection to a bit of hyperbole in the service of making one’s point. Batman and Robin was both a bad Batman movie and a bad movie, period. The problem is, whatever cinematic crimes can be laid at Mr. Schumacher’s feet, inspiring “a string of superhero flops” is not one of them. Both Judge Dredd and Tank Girl were released in 19954. The Phantom disappeared from screens as quickly as it appeared in 1996.

Later, in discussing Alan Moore’s career, Mr. Knowles writes,

Rejuvenated by his occult awakening, Moore reentered the industry mainstream, hijacking Rob Liefeld’s Superman knockoff Supreme and turning it into a paean to the innocence of the Silver Age heroes. He followed this with a mini-series that paid tribute to the Silver Age called 1963. (page 201)

Again, that old devil linear time plays havoc with Mr. Knowles’s assertions. Mr. Moore’s 1963 commenced in 1993. Mr. Moore took over Supreme (which launched in 1992) with issue 41.

While I admit a preference for The Comic Book Heroes by Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs, Our Gods Wear Spandex is perfectly serviceable history of the American comic book. When Mr. Knowles sticks to the facts, his work is solid. When he stretches to make a point, shore up a pet opinion, or to force the facts to fit his occult thesis, the book suffers.

Bone (The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume edition), by Jeff Smith

It took me slightly longer to read this entire series than it took Mr. Smith to write and illustrate it. I believe I picked up the first trade collection in 1994 or 1995, enjoyed it quite a bit, followed book one with books two and three in rapid succession and then just sort of petered out. I believe that book three was as far as the story went in collected form at that time and somehow I never came back around to the series once subsequent volumes were released. It wasn’t for lack of interest so much as due to competing interests.

Fast forward a few years to the release of the One Volume edition. Friends of mine who owned a bookstore carried the omnibus, and while I was tempted to throw the business their way, the $40 price point was always daunting. I never had objections to dropping a double double sawbuck on them at any given time, but faced with the choice between one big book or five to six smaller size books at the same price point, I somehow always opted for a diversified literary investment strategy.

Fast forward again. The store is gone (moment of silence), the One Volume edition has gone out of and back into print, and the recently completed gift card giving season changed the value proposition for this book. Between the largesse of friends and a deep online retailer discount, that $40 book set me back a grand total of $1.37. At that price, how could I refuse?

The story of Bone concerns the (mis)adventures of the three Bone cousins: Fone Bone (the hero), Phoney Bone (the rogue) and Smiley Bone (the not so holy fool). Physically, the Bones stand out among the largely human cast of the novel. They are the most cartoonish characters in the story. They are short, bald, pure white, with large bulbous noses and no externally visible ears.

Exiled from their home and lost in the desert, they find themselves in a valley (cleverly called The Valley) where they encounter dragons, monsters, magic, warriors, royals, and cows, among other things. They get caught up in a war, go an various quests, get separated, regroup, and (like good viewpoint characters since time immemorial) both witness and influence epic happenings.

While I remembered the general shape of the first three books, I was light on specifics, so I approached the story in something approaching a state of grace. The first three books encompass Act One of a larger story. There is a lot of set up, introduction of characters, establishment of the general characteristics of the players, hints at the larger plot, but the tone is lighter than what comes later. There is humor throughout the book, but in general, Mr. Smith limits the broad comedy and the outright slapstick to this first section.

As the book progresses, the tone gets more serious, and the art style gets more detailed. At the same time, there is a simplicity, even a gentleness to the story. Bone isn’t a fairy tale, exactly, but it’s also not a ponderous high fantasy. It exists somewhere in the middle, engaging and accessible and familiar. It’s appropriate for children without being childish. This is a strength; the story covers a lot of territory, both geographic and narrative, but moves at a good pace without getting bogged down with minutia and pretention.

This is also a weakness in some places. Bone is a Hero Story; in fact it is at least two Hero Stories intertwined with one another, specifically those of Fone Bone and his friend Thorn. One, Fone Bone’s, is a story about doing the right thing. The other, Thorn’s, is a story about identity, and about applying the lessons of self-knowledge and revelation to world-changing situations. The lighter tone and fast pace serves the first type of story well. Applied to the second type of story, this light tone occasionally results in a sort of narrative shorthand; if you know the storytelling beats of the standard coming of age/quest fantasy, it’s possible to fill in the blanks. If not, the story may feel like a gloss. On the other hand, readers who are not familiar with the conventions of the form may not recognize that they’re missing out on anything.