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.

We interrupt this broadcast

I don’t receive many comments to the Bowleg, and I’m rather draconian in my moderation of those few comments that come my way. I can’t imagine censoring comments that disagree with me, so long as such comments are interesting, challenging, or creative in their challenge to my point of view. As I see it, disagreements implies that a reader not only read what I wrote, but was sufficiently affected by it to express an opinion. That’s all to the good.

Disagreements that bore me, on the other hand, aren’t worth my time or attention.

In realty, such disagreements as arise are few and far between. Most comments that I receive and subsequently delete fall into two categories: obvious spam and advertising/self promotion. I don’t have ads on the Bowleg, and I don’t see a need to let someone else use my soapbox to sell their soap.

Earlier this week, I received a comment from the author of a recently-released novel inquiring whether I ever did book reviews for local authors (presumably on the basis of the fact I occasionaly write about Berkshire County). My first impulse was to consider this gentleman’s query more soapselling and delete it out of hand. On reflection, though, I decided his comment deserved more of a considered response.

Having pondered the matter, I’m disinclined to review this book for several reasons:

1) I write about books, not very well. I write about food, not very well. I write about movies, and comics, and current events, and art, and museums, and life in the Berkshires, not very well. As you can see, while the subject matter of my writing tends to vary, there is a common theme that ties it all together: it’s not very good.

For an author, it’s hard enough to actively promote your own work without having to also do damage control because some pinhead with a blog completely missed the point of what you were trying to accomplish with your work.

2) While I have written reviews in the past, I don’t consider the things I currently write, which are primarily for my own edification, to be reviews. They’re observations, opinions, and digressions, with limited critical benefit. By and large, I try to capture a quick impression of the books I happen to read, without much effort or thought put into coherent analysis.

Again, I feel it would be a disservice to this author to subject his work to my usual half-assed and slapdash criticism. Besides, a review written at the direction of the author is fraught with pitfalls. Write a glowing review, and I’ll seem like a shill. Write a negative review, and I’m picking on someone who never did me any harm. Write a balanced review, and I’m too chicken%$#@ to commit to an opinion. Any way you slice it, it doesn’t end well for me.

3) When I have written reviews in the past, they have come about in one of two ways; either an editor has assigned me a particular book to review, or the editor has provided a list of advance reader copies or new releases they happen to have on hand, and asked their reviewers to claim treasure from the trove. Without an editor, my book selection is based largely on whim and word of mouth. While this author’s communication arguably qualifies as word of mouth, we’re back to the whole question of soapselling.

4) Bart Modern is demonstrably not an opinion maker. On its best day, the Bowleg received 63 hits. As of this morning, it has received just over 3,650 hits over the course of almost 18 months. Contrast this with a popular blog like John Scalzi’s Whatever. In May of this year, Mr. Scalzi received just shy of one million hits to the Whatever (999,808 to be scrupulously exact). That’s an average of over 32,000 hits per day, over 1,300 hits per hour on average. To put it another way, John Scalzi attracts more visitors in three hours than the Bowleg has received in its entire life to date.

This is not to suggest that this author should necessarily run straight to the Whatever to promote himself and his work, merely that anyone in his position should focus their effort on maximizing the ripple effect by making sure they throw their stone into the right pond. There are only so many hours in a day, and limited opportunities to reach a potential audience. The puddle maintained by a guy who gets a handful of hits a day is to shallow to produce meaningful ripples.

Still, I admire this gentleman’s tenacity. He wrote a book, and that counts for something in my book. He obviously believes in his work, and is putting in the effort to get it in front of as many people as he can through as many channels as he can. I don’t think I’m the best person to help him do it, but I also believe his effort deserves some acknowledgement.

So, Bowleggers, at the risk of selling some soap, here’s the deal: there’s this guy name of Peter Clenott who wrote a book called Hunting the King. Make of this information what you will.

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.

Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell

Follow along; this one takes some explaining.

A few weeks back, a friend of mine mentioned he was involved in a community project. He indicated that my name had come up among the group responsible for the project as someone who should be involved in the organization of the project.

I thought about it for a while, both because I would like the project to succeed, and because I have a tendency to be so flattered by invitations that I fail to give sufficient consideration to what I’m being asked to do. Or, to put it more theatrically, “I’m jest a girl who cain’t say no.”

Fortunately, in this case, I spent enough time in reflection to realize that: a) I don’t have the time to get involved in another project right now; b) I lack the skill set required for the role I was being asked to play, and; c) while I have every expectation that this undertaking will succeed, the person in the position about which I was approached would be the obvious fall guy should anything go wrong.

I shared these conclusions with my friend. He responded by saying in effect, “The fact you put thought into the reasons you don’t want to do X is part of the reason I think you ought to do Y.”

This reminded me of the sequence in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential about people who got into the restaurant game for all the wrong reasons. In particular, my friend’s encouragement (gratifying as it was) was reminiscent of the budding restauranteurs who were flattered into the business with praise for their ability to throw wonderful dinner parties, or their extensive knowledge of French wines, or their antique collections. In these cases, people who emprically have no business running a business allow ego, flattery, and the machinations of friends hoping to cadge free drinks and meals to blind them to reality. I have just enough understanding of reality to understand why my friend’s suggestion would be a Bad Idea, but enough ego that it’s hard to ignore that little, “Weeellll, maybe,” voice in the back of my head; the voice that would almost assuredly lead me to ruin.

Reflecting on this part of Kitchen Confidential compelled me to reread the book, which in turn brought me to Down and Out In Paris and London, a novel which Mr. Bourdain recommends.

In the first half of the book, Mr. Orwell’s nameless, autobiographical, narrator lives on the boundary between poverty and homelessness. He manages to pay rent, but must often go wthout food to do so. He pawns his clothes to pay his basic expenses. Eventually, he ekes out a subsitence living as a plongeur, or kitchen slave (dishwasher, and general factotum) in a Paris hotel. His insights about the inner workings of restaurants are a product of their time in many ways, but the social, cultural, and economic divide between the people who prepare restaurant food and those who consume it has a truth that transcends time and setting.

The second half of the book recounts the narrator’s experiences as a homeless tramp in London. As presented, this is a bleak existence bounded by nights in shelters, and endless cups of tea with bread and margarine, the diet of those whose welfare comes from the state. While Mr. Orwell’s surrogate views his fellows with a humanist’s eye, there is no denying their existence is dehumanizing.

Both the Paris and London sections are rich in detail, and demonstrate a keen understanding of the realities, and inequities, of class in society.

Lasagna, demystified

“Anyone who has tried to bake a serious lasagna at home knows the truth about this intricate family dish. It’s laborious, time consuming, and fraught with all sorts of potential disaster.”

— New York magazine, “Best of New York” issue (cover date March 10-17, 200

The unattibuted New York magazine contributor who wrote the above introduction to the wonders of the lasagna served at New York’s Insieme restaurant misses an important point.

There is nothing intricate or laborious about lasagna. It’s pasta sheets, sauce, and cheeses — and meat, if you’re so inclined — baked into a wondrously bubbling mass. I know the pros introduce bechamel to the mix, but I’m of the opinion that’s an enhancement, rather than a prerequisite. If you can master a few basic moves — none of which is appreciably more complex than, you know, boiling water — you can make a serviceable, even exceptional, lasagna.

Pretending there is more to it than that is disingenuous. Food can be transcendent, but the reasons for that transcendence usually derive more from craft than from complexity. In general, good food writing does one of two things. Some writers clear the obscuring mists that make the preparation of food seem like the work of divine, or at least heroic, hands. They demonstrate that the application of the chefly arts rests on skills within the reach of any cook. The chef hones these skills over time to a degree of mastery, but it is possible for the home cook to employ the same techniques, if to a lesser degree.

Others demonstrate that food we think of as simple — preparations of a few basic ingredients, employing basic techniques — can be elevated through skill into something that makes you look at food, and the world, in entirely new ways. This is the difference between the mass produced loaf, and bread worthy of the staff of life label.

The challenge for the food writer lies in knowing which approach to take. In the case of Insieme chef Marco Canora’s lasagne verde, the New York magazing correspondent went the wrong way.

“Canora makes his sheets of pasta with fresh spinach, and mingles his beef Bolognese with milk, butter, and plenty of pancetta. Instead of three or four layers, he constructs seven, each one wafer-thin, and oosing with a rich bechamel seasoned with nutmeg.”

There’s that pesky bechamel again.

I’ve not dined at Insieme, but I’ll go out on a limb and opine that the wonder of Mr. Canora’s is not that he did something difficult well, but that he did something simple with skill and imagination. That’s an admirable feat in itself. Pretending he avoided disaster in the process is unnecessary, and may even diminish the achievement this dish represents.