Although the “Masters” show is dominated by the actual drawings by the artists it celebrates, there are many printed comic books and pages from actual newspaper comics sections on display as well. In the Brooklyn Museum show there are printed comics that are half a decade old or less. In other words, I realized, any printed comic book in my personal collection–or yours–should it be judged to be of sufficient artistic merit, is potentially the museum exhibit of tomorrow. (However, I doubt that the Brooklyn Museum paid more than cover price for the two comics it is exhibiting.) Art museums attempt to persuade important collectors of fine art to donate their collections to them in their wills. Will the time come when museums and libraries seek to become the heirs of longtime comics collectors, too?

Only last year the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) in lower Manhattan staged “Will Eisner: A Retrospective,” a far more complete survey of his career than the “Masters” show currently provides. (MOCCA published a catalogue of the show, so you can see for yourself.) The MOCCA retrospective was roughly evenly divided between The Spirit and Eisner’s pioneering graphic novels from the last three decades of his life. Some of the same pieces of original art have now turned up in both shows, including the notorious splash page of the Spirit spanking Ellen Dolan, which should give pause to anyone who claims to detect a feminist sensibility in The Spirit. But I was surprised to find that the “Masters” section on Eisner is entirely devoted to The Spirit, with the sole exception being the opening pages of his first graphic novel, A Contract with God (1978) (see “Comics in Context” #69), with its near-Biblical deluge of “Eisnerspritz” (Masters p. 257). According to “Masters” co-curator Brian Walker, the show emphasizes visual design over story content. It is in the Eisner section that this divergence becomes most clear. Carlin states in the catalogue that “Eisner developed the language of comic books in much the same way that McCay perfected the formal language of comic strips” (p. 94). The show appears to be arguing that it was in The Spirit that this development took place and Eisner proved to be a visual innovator in the comics medium. By implication, Eisner did not make further visual innovations in his graphic novels; that seems to me to be a reasonable judgment. Yet by virtually ignoring Eisner’s graphic novels, “Masters” likewise ignores Eisner’s continuing evolution as a writer in the latter part of his long career. Significantly, Kimmelman dismisses Eisner’s graphic novels in his review: “Mr. Eisner’s later career as a graphic novelist. . .led him toward maudlin stories ruminating on God, but before that, he set a standard for the industry.” (Though Kimmelman seems unaware of this, most of Eisner’s graphic novels are not about theology. Oddly, Kimmelman also calls Eisner the “master of the sweatshop,” as if he had spent his career helping to run the Eisner-Iger studio, although neither The Spirit nor the graphic novels were created via such impersonal assembly line methods.) I wonder if, eventually, it will be The Spirit, not his graphic novels, that will emerge as Eisner’s primary legacy to the artform.

Despite the emphasis on visual style over literary content, the “Masters” show includes the original penciled and inked pages for several complete Spirit stories, including perhaps the most famous, “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble” from September 5, 1948 (pgs. 98-99). (See “Comics in Context” #68.) Now, since comics art is designed for mass reproduction, you may wonder, as I have, what the point is in seeing the original artwork rather than the printed pages. There is certainly an advantage at seeing the artwork at the size at which it was drawn, not the smaller size at which, so often, it has been reproduced. The overhead shot in which Shnobble leaps off a roof into a virtual canyon formed by towering skyscrapers gains in vertiginous power when viewed in its original dimensions.

Although Carlin misses the obvious analogy between Milton Caniff’s visual storytelling and the cinema, he sees the connection in Eisner’s work: writing in the catalogue about “Shnobble,” Carlin observes that “Eisner’s arrangement [of panels] conveys the sense of drama and movement in the rooftop the same way editing would in a well-crafted film.”

My favorite Eisner piece in the show (which, alas, is not reproduced in the Masters book), is the splash page for the 1949 Spirit story “Dolan Walks a Beat.” Temporarily demoted, Commissioner Dolan, wearing a police officer’s uniform, walks past a billboard. The billboard contains its own comic strip, a narrative sequence of three panels, each featuring the Spirit; in the last panel, the Spirit stares in shock at the demoted Dolan. It’s another case of a comic strip within a comic strip, but in a different sense than Fearless Fosdick, who is merely a fictional character in the “reality” of Li’l Abner’s world. The Spirit is a real character in his series, and so is Dolan. Yet in this splash, the Spirit appears to be confined to a reality that exists merely as a comic strip on a billboard within which Dolan exists! This is an effect that one could only achieve in the comics medium.

Though Carlin wrote the main text for the Masters book, various other writers were invited to contribute appreciations of specific Masters. The only failure among these fifteen essays is Raymond Pettibon’s incoherent piece about Eisner. Pettibon rants about comics fans (“Although comic books are made for reproduction, while comics fans are not”) and even The New York Times’ coverage of the Iraq war, while managing not to provide the least insight into Eisner’s work. When Pettibon submitted this essay to the editors, their proper response should have been “No.”

Kimmelman concludes his “Masters” review with accolades for Jack Kirby (1917-1994): referring to Kirby’s Marvel series of the 1960s, Kimmelman writes, “Their radicalism was plain to see. Being visual space busters, they have done more or less for the art of comics what Cubism did for painting.”

That’s high praise indeed, but justified, given Kirby’s dynamic reinterpretations of the human figure moving through the space within comics panels. Pablo Picasso was the co-creator of Cubism, but elsewhere in his review, Kimmelman declares that “As for Mr. Crumb, he’s still the Picasso of comics. . . .” Crumb wasn’t a revolutionary “space buster” like Kirby, so in that regard the comparison of Kirby to Picasso makes more sense. However, Kimmelman is claiming that Crumb is “the Picasso of comics” specifically in the sense that he believes Crumb is “the unavoidable influence on all younger artists” in comics, as Picasso is in painting. But Kimmelman is making an unjustified supposition about comics. Crumb probably is an “unavoidable influence” on alternative cartoonists who follow in the tradition of the underground comix of the 1960s, and perhaps even on contemporary newspaper humor cartoonists. But how much influence does Crumb have on the action-adventure comics published by DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse and the rest? In this realm Kirby has long been the “unavoidable influence,” although that influence seems to be waning somewhat due to the strong influx of manga into the American comics market. But Kimmelman’s error is understandable considering the “Masters” show’s implicit thesis about comics history, as we shall see.

In the Masters book Carlin sometimes goes overboard in praising Kirby. Carlin states that in his comics Kirby was “creating heroes and myths that were the cornerstones of American pop culture from the 1940s through the 1970s” (p.101). One problem with this assertion is that Kirby collaborated with Joe Simon and Stan Lee in creating most of these characters and stories. Later in the text Carlin explicitly refers to the Lee-Kirby collaboration and declares that “It influenced not only other comic book artists but sixties culture as a whole” (p. 104).

As someone who grew up reading Lee-Kirby Marvel books, I can assure you that they were not “cornerstones” of pop culture in their time. Can Carlin really mean to suggest that Kirby’s comics had more influence on American pop culture over those four decades than movies or rock music or television? Millions of people, mostly kids, read those comics, but the culture at large disdained superhero comics. If you were still reading comics in high school and college, you risked being mocked by your classmates, who considered them to have “outgrown” the medium. Whatever influence Marvel Comics had on the culture remained under the radar until the recent explosion of movies based on Marvel characters. It’s wonderful that Carlin, Kimmelman, and other scholars and critics are starting to treat comics as an artistically significant medium. But let’s not get so carried away that we indulge in revisionist history without factual foundation.

Carlin also contends that Kirby’s The New Gods influenced “George Lucas’s Star Wars series, which combined Kirby’s cosmic space opera with complex Westerns, notably John Ford’s The Searchers” (p. 104). Kirby has Darkseid and the Source; Lucas has the “dark side” and the Force. Kirby’s Orion, like Lucas’s Luke Skywalker, turns out to be the villain’s son. So that connection seems clear. But just how does Luke Skywalker resemble The Searchers’ protagonist, the racist, violent loner Ethan Edwards? Or is Carlin possibly talking about Anakin Skywalker’s devolution into Darth Vader (who is, of course, a lookalike for Kirby and Lee’s Doctor Doom)? Note to Carlin: Lucas has acknowledged the influences of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958) on the Star Wars movies.

Even worse, in briefly discussing Steve Ditko in the Kirby section of his text, Carlin not only excludes Stan Lee from any part in creating Doctor Strange, but asserts that the Doctor Strange series “dealt directly with drugs. . . .” (p. 104). Just where in any of Lee and Ditko’s Doctor Strange stories do drugs appear? Can it be that Carlin subscribes to the assumption, devoid of proof, that Lee and Ditko had to have been taking drugs to come up with the surreal worlds pictured in Doctor Strange? Was Winsor McCay high on rarebit? (And couldn’t one draw an analogy between Doctor Strange in Ditko’s occult dimensions and Little Nemo visiting Slumberland?) Is there any evidence that Lee or Ditko regarded Doctor Strange’s journeys into occult realms as metaphors for drug trips?

Then Carlin asserts that “some people recognized that Ditko took the baroque elements of Spider-Man’s distinctive red-and-blue costume and webbing and developed them into free-floating, psychedelic designs.” So Dormammu’s Dark Dimension is based on Spider-Man’s webbing? Isn’t it more likely that Ditko had seen work by Salvador Dali and other Surrealists?

Carlin also stumbles into the familiar mire of attempting to divide the credit for their collaborations between Lee and Kirby. Carlin declares that “Stan Lee wrote the story outlines and some of the dialogue, but Kirby created the casts and the conceptual layout for each title” (pp. 101-102). What does Carlin mean by “some of the dialogue”? Perhaps Carlin has learned that Kirby wrote border notes on the pages he drew, describing the action and often what the characters were talking about. But really, the dialogue for the books Lee did with Kirby reads no differently than the dialogue for books that Lee did with Ditko or any other artist. The style of dialogue is consistent throughout the books that Stan Lee is credited as scripting; that’s the proof that he came up with more than “some” of the dialogue.

Stan Lee has long admitted that Kirby came up with the Silver Surfer on his own (although Lee surely deserves credit for creating the Surfer’s style of dialogue and hence much of his personality). But that does not mean that Kirby “created the casts” for all the comics he did with Stan Lee. And what the hell does “conceptual layout” mean?

The Kirby sections of both the “Masters” show and the book suffer from insufficient comprehension of the collaborative process in creating mainstream comic books. For example, in describing part of the “Galactus Trilogy” (from Fantastic Four #48-50, 1966), Carlin points to a panel featuring the “radiating effect of feathered lines and brilliant colors that was one of the hallmarks of Kirby’s style.” Feathered lines, yes, but did Kirby have any influence over the coloring? As editor Lee would have assigned the colorist. And who was the colorist anyway?

This leads to a serious problem with the “Masters” show. The first piece on display is a handsome portrait of Captain America from Captain America #109 (January 1966), credited on the accompanying label to Jack Kirby and Syd Shores (Masters p. 259). Presumably Kirby drew it and Shores inked it, but this division of labor is not explained either on the label or in the Masters book. Neither the show nor the book ever explains the role of the inker. Worse, most of the labels for the Kirby pieces at the Jewish Museum do not list the inker. Of course, that information is easy to find, either in the original comics, or online, or from asking authorities on Kirby’s work. In some cases, the artwork on display is a splash page, complete with credits, and the inker’s name still doesn’t make it onto the label! The forgotten man of the “Masters” Kirby mini-retrospective is inker Joe Sinnott, although he and other inkers do get credited in the attributions in the Masters book. One could also argue that Stan Lee as scripter and co-plotter and the various letterers of the Kirby pages on display should also be credited on the labels. Since there are also numerous printed comics on display in the show’s Kirby section, perhaps the colorists for those pages and covers likewise deserve credit.

While there are many original Kirby pages on display at the Jewish Museum, there are also numerous printed comics pages on display from the Galactus Trilogy and from Lee and Kirby’s finest single issue story, “This Man, This Monster!” From Fantastic Four #51 (1966). Presumably the original art from these stories was unavailable. Not only does the show display original printings of Lee-Kirby stories, but it also exhibits copies of Marvel Treasury Edition, which reprinted their Fantastic Four tales in larger, tabloid size. Having expected to see only original artwork, I found myself wondering, does this mean that a longtime comics collector could stage a museum exhibit about Kirby or another Silver Age artist, simply by using original copies of 1960s comics? In the Masters book I see reproductions of printed comics pages attributed to “Private collection.” Most of the comics artwork in my book Marvel Universe for Harry N. Abrams was reproduced from books in my own collection. In retrospect, maybe I should have listed each picture as being from “The Peter Sanderson Collection.”

Despite my various qualms, I am favorably impressed by the treatment of Kirby in the “Masters” show and book. As he did with Eisner, Carlin praises Kirby’s cinematic style of storytelling, commending “his ability to link individual panels into a unified effect, unfolding like an action sequence in a well-made movie” (p. 101).

In discussing the Galactus Trilogy, Carlin rightly states that “Kirby and Lee raised this simple story into a great contemporary myth by doing two things that greatly influenced later comic book adventures. First, they grounded their characters in a world that was tangibly real and morally complex.” This is true of all of Lee and Kirby’s work in the 1960s, and indeed of Lee’s work with Ditko and his other collaborators during that decade. Carlin continues, “Second, they experimented with a number of new visual devices, including a higher degree of intentional patterning elements than previously found in comic books” (p. 102). This implies that Lee and Kirby actually sat down and consciously thought out and discussed how to work abstract visual elements into their stories. I suspect that Kirby worked more intuitively than that, and that Lee simply had the good taste to appreciate and accept Kirby’s visual innovations. Nonetheless, I am grateful that Carlin draws the reader’s attention to just such visual patterning in the pages from Fantastic Four #49 and 50 showing the Human Torch’s journey through space to Galactus’s worldship and back (pp. 103, 107). The book (p. 105) also runs one of Kirby’s amazing photo collage pages (from Fantastic Four #48, 1966) without comment, though it certainly deserves some (as well as providing another link with Picasso, who also worked with collages).