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One of the major events in the world of comics in 2008 is certain to be Harry N. Abrams’ publication of Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, a combination of a biography of the late Jack Kirby and a coffee table art book devoted to his work.

In the last installment of this column, just before Christmas, I began my advance review of this book, covering the section about Kirby’s early life and career, just before he entered the comic book industry, then itself young. In this section Evanier includes “Street Code,” a late work by Kirby about life in New York during his boyhood in the Great Depression. Comics writer Peter B. Gillis recently told me that he considered Kirby’s extraordinary double-page panorama of a Lower East Side Street in “Street Code” to be as good as the work of George Bellows or any other member of the “Ashcan School,” the group of New York City realist painters of the early 20th century. He may well be right.

This week I pick up Kirby’s story in the year 1938, when he entered the comic book business by going to work for the studio jointly run by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. As Evanier explains, earlier in the 1930s comic books had consisted of reprints of newspaper comic strips. “No one had yet really thought how to design a comic book page in any way other than to replicate the reconfigured newspaper reprints,” comments Evanier. “But then, Jack Kirby hadn’t started drawing comic books yet” (Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics, p. 40). Almost immediately, Evanier adds that Eisner, who would soon go on to create The Spirit, would “be the other great innovator of the form–the guy besides Kirby leading the way, making comic books different from strips” (Evanier, p. 40). I’d put more emphasis on Eisner, who achieved greatness as a comics artist and innovative graphic storyteller in The Spirit years before Kirby reached his own peak. But notice that here Evanier, in an understated way, is asserting that it was Eisner and Kirby who effectively invented the modern comic book medium, in that it was they who discovered the means of differentiating comic books from comic strips. (I added the word “modern” since there were early forebears of graphic novels, notably Rodophe Topffer’s, that preceded the rise if the American newspaper strip.) I’m reminded of how Picasso and Braque simultaneously devised cubism. Kirby isn’t just one of the great masters of the comic book art; he and Eisner were the foremost creators of the graphic language of the comic book medium.

Eisner and Kirby got along well, but Evanier doesn’t explain why Kirby left what seems to have been a good job with the Eisner-Iger studio only to end up working for the dreaded Victor Fox, whom Evanier already introduced to the readers in the book’s preface. (How would comics history have been different had Kirby done a backup feature for Eisner’s Spirit sections in Sunday newspapers?)

But at Fox Kirby met its editor in chief, Joe Simon, and they soon formed a creative partnership that lasted sixteen years. They soon left Fox and went to work for Martin Goodman, publisher of Timely Comics, the company that evolved into today’s Marvel.

Again in understated fashion, Evanier nonetheless devastatingly critiques Goodman in introducing him. He quotes another comics veteran, Don Rico, as saying that Goodman “usually arrived on the tail end of a trend. Martin got into pulps just as the pulps started to lose popularity” (Evanier, p. 47). Thus Goodman becomes the representative of the sort of corporate mentality that clings to old ideas and fails to recognize the cultural shifts pointing to the future. This is the sort of businessman who fails to recognize the true value of the artistic visionary, the man who can see and create the future, and Kirby, the visionary, would run up against this kind of blind opposition time and again throughout his career.

Well, at least Goodman knew enough to get into publishing comics as early as 1939, though even he could hardly have missed noticing the immediate, extraordinary popularity of Superman, who had debuted only a year before.

So at the beginning of Chapter Two, Evanier delves into the creation of the Simon-and-Kirby team’s most famous character, Captain America, for Timely.

In another book I recently critiqued at great length, Disguised As Clark Kent, author Danny Fingeroth examines the creation of Captain America as a reflection of Simon and Kirby’s Jewish-American background (see “Comics in Context” #202: “Stung”). In Fingeroth’s view, Simon and Kirby meant Steve Rogers, a. k. a. Captain America, to be “a kind of surrogate Jew” (Fingeroth, p. 58) who battles the anti-Semitic Nazis. It’s interesting, then, that in Evanier’s telling, Simon’s conscious motivations in co-creating Captain America were commercial. “‘Writing super hero comics,’ Simon recalled, “˜we were always looking for that great villain. It was becoming hard to think of a better villain than Adolf Hitler” (Evanier p. 49). Peter Coogan argues in his book, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, that Hitler was a real life “super-villain” (see “Comics in Context” #165: “The Supervillain Defined”); Simon apparently would agree. “Kids on the street, he [Simon] told the publisher [Goodman] were already playing soldiers, firing pretend weapons at a pretend Hitler. Why not put that into a comic book?” (Evanier p. 50). This indicates that Simon was acting–consciously, anyway–not so much as a Jew who was opposed to Hitler even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, when most of America was isolationist, but as a perceptive businessman who recognized growing anti-Nazi sentiment in this country, even among children, and wanted to capitalize on it in the comics.

This may be misleading.  Danny Fingeroth has informed me that Simon has been repeatedly quoted as saying that he and Goodman intended Captain America as a means of propagandizing against the Nazis.

Moreover, Evanier reports that Simon and Kirby received anti-Semitic hate mail and threats over Captain America, but the team bravely continued (Evanier p. 54). Presumably it wasn’t just bigots in 1941 who recognized Simon and Kirby’s Captain  America as the protest of two Jewish-Americans against Nazi tyranny.

And so Evanier and Abrams provide a reproduction of the celebrated cover of Captain America Comics #1 (1941), which deservedly takes up a full page of the book, and in which the iconic figure of Captain America lands a powerful punch on the jaw of Adolf Hitler. Both Simon and Kirby were artists, but Evanier credits the cover to Kirby and inker Syd Shores: in other words, this cover is a pure example of the sheer force of Kirby’s early superhero artwork.

That dynamism, captured on the printed page, is even more palpable in the Kirby-Shores cover to Captain America #9 (1941), which serves as the chapter’s frontispiece: an enraged Captain America hurtles powerfully through a window at the ghastly villain, the Black Talon, who holds Cap’s partner Bucky at bay with an outstretched arm, while an underling recoils from Cap, and a hooded figure fires a bullet at Cap’s shield. The entire cover explodes with energy.

Any biography of Jack Kirby must address certain controversial issues, and the creation of Captain America is the first of these. Evanier writes, “Simon would later claim to have had the initial notion for the star-spangled hero and to have worked out the format and costuming before Kirby was involved. Jack would recall contributing from the outset” (Evanier, p. 50). Typically in this book, Evanier is evenhanded on such matters, giving both sides’ versions of the case.

But who actually did create Captain America? This is the book’s first major example of the Rashomon syndrome, in which each party involved has a different story of what happened, and may actually, honestly, remember the events differently. Moreover, in contrast to the Kurosawa film, there was no objective observer to present the truth. No one in 1941 knew how important the matter of who created Captain America would be over sixty years later, and there is no evidence apart from Simon and Kirby’s differing recollections, which may well have been distorted by the passing years.

On his website, discussing the even more controversial question of who did what in the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby collaborations, Evanier writes that “Messrs. Lee and Kirby both have/had notoriously poor memories. You also have the fact that, when two creative talents get together and come up with an idea, each of them might honestly believe that he suggested at least the core of the concept if not the entire thing. This happens in any collaboration anywhere and, ultimately, you usually have to just say that they both had the idea”.

Recently I saw another new and important biographical celebration of a major comics artist, the BBC’s documentary In Search of Steve Ditko (2006), presented by Jonathan Ross, a leading British television host and personality. (Ross doing a show about Ditko seems to be the British equivalent of Johnny Carson hosting and producing a show about whoever his favorite cartoonist was.) A knowledgeable comics aficionado, Ross infuses the documentary with his passion for Ditko and American Silver Age comics. The show has an amazing roster of interviewees, including Stan Lee, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, John Romita Sr., Jerry Robinson, and even Silver Age Marvel secretary Flo Steinberg (who has clearly overcome her past aversion to interviews); the reclusive Ditko does not show up on camera, of course. Wittily and intelligently written, without a trace of condescension towards comics, this program is a model of what documentaries about comics should be like. It’s too bad that the program is not commercially available in the United States. It’s also a shame that art from news, BBC America runs mostly commercial comedies, crime dramas, and reality shows. Why can’t BBC America run In Search of Steve Ditko? Doesn’t anyone at the network think that there might be some popular interest in a show about the co-creator of the title character of the biggest grossing movie of 2006, Spider-Man 3?

Before watching the show, I had already read reports that in it Stan Lee laid claim to being sole creator of Spider-Man. How, I wondered, could Lee say such a thing? He scripted the first Spider-Man story, but he didn’t draw it; Ditko did. It was suggested to me that Lee, as a Marvel employee, had to say what he did for legal reasons, and that Marvel did not want to give Ditko, a freelancer, legal grounds for claiming to be Spider-Man’s co-creator. On his blog Evanier has observed that “What it says on the Spider-Man movies is, “˜Based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.’ Unless something has changed – and I don’t think it has – Marvel’s recent position is that Stan Lee created Spider-Man. What they are acknowledging with the credit is that Steve Ditko worked on issues of the comic from which the movie drew material”.

Watching In Search of Steve Ditko, I thought Stan Lee made a more reasonable case for his position than I had expected–even if I still disagree with it. In the documentary Lee states that Ditko contributed a great deal to Spider-Man, readily acknowledges that Ditko contributed to the plots from the beginning, and says that if Ditko wants to be called Spider-Man’s co-creator, that’s fine with him. Lee reveals that he sent Ditko a letter stating that he “considered him to be the co-creator of Spider-Man,” but says that he heard that Ditko was dissatisfied with this. Hearing that, I first thought Ditko was being unreasonable but perhaps he had a point. Ross then presses Lee to say whether he really believes that Ditko is Spider-Man’s co-creator.

JONATHAN ROSS: Do you yourself believe that he co-created it?
STAN LEE: I’m willing to say so.
ROSS: That’s not what I’m asking you, Stan.
LEE: No, and that’s the best answer I can give you.
ROSS: So it’s a “˜no’ then, really?
LEE: Pardon me?
ROSS: It’s really “˜no’?
LEE: I really think the guy who dreams the thing up created it. You dream it up and then you give it to anybody to draw it.

(See transcript of this exchange here)

Through all of this, Stan Lee comes across as open and friendly, apparently saying what he indeed believes about the subject, has only praise for Ditko, and makes clear that he was willing to let Ditko be called Spider-Man’s co-creator out of generosity, “because I could see it meant a lot to him.”

As Evanier’s book shows, there is a question as to whether Stan Lee actually was the first person to propose that Marvel do a spider-themed superhero. But for now I’m going to give Lee the benefit of the doubt. Ditko himself has credited Lee with originating the name “Spider-Man.”

The question of who created Spider-Man therefore depends, as Bill Clinton would say, on the definition of the word “create.” I know that the issue of who created Marvel’s classic characters inflames tempers, but let’s play devil’s advocate (and no, I’m not accusing anyone of being the devil).

Lee’s definition of the creator as the person who conceived of the initial idea is a reasonable one, and possibly most people (outside of comics) would agree with him. By this definition, Ditko, in designing the visual appearance of Spider-Man and, quite possibly contributing to the plot and characterization in the first Spider-Man story, was developing and helping to execute an idea initially conceived by Stan Lee.

This is also relevant to the controversy over who created Batman (see “Comics in Context” #94: “Back to Brigadoon”). It now appears clear that writer Bill Finger came up with most of the core Batman mythos, even making important suggestions about the design and colors of Batman’s costume. But if Bob Kane was the one who had the initial idea of a bat-themed superhero, then by Lee’s definition, he is Batman’s sole creator, and Finger elaborated on Kane’s basic concept.

But as the comics industry evolved, it became generally accepted that the writer and artist of the original story in which the character first appeared were the character’s creators. This makes sense, too. Comics is a medium that combines words and pictures. The visualization of the character that the original artist devises is therefore equally as important as the writer’s concept for the character.

Think of collaborations in other media. No one questions that, say, W. S. Gilbert came up with the ideas for the story and characters in comic operettas like H. M. S. Pinafore and The Mikado, wrote the scripts and lyrics, and then handed the completed libretto over to Arthur Sullivan, who then composed the music. But no one would claim that Gilbert is the sole creator of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. Sullivan’s music is judged to be of equal importance to Gilbert’s scripts.

In fact, in some other collaborative media, it is the writer who often gets insufficient credit. Gilbert gets more attention in the world of opera and musicals than most librettists, since the composers are generally believed to be of more importance. All operagoers know that Puccini write the music for La Boheme, but I suspect the majority of them can’t name the librettist off the top of their heads, and I’ve seen various interviews with lyricist/composer Stephen Sondheim in which he reminds his interviewer that he didn’t write the books of musicals like Company and Follies and gives credit to the men who did.

And then there’s the world of film, in which directors get far more attention, even from movie critics, than the screenwriters who may have conceived of the idea for the film being reviewed.

Perhaps one reason why the mainstream media have repeatedly given Stan Lee more credit than Kirby or Ditko for his collaborations with them is that in other media–books, plays, movies, and even operas and musicals–people are used to thinking of a single author, or auteur, a primary creator, for the work. But in comics the tradition has developed of giving writer and artist equal credit.

It also makes sense to me that in a collaboration between two people, one of the partners will get the initial spark of an idea, but that both partners deserve credit as co-creators for their roles in developing the creative work into the form in which the audience first experiences it.

Earlier in Ross’s interview with Lee, the latter recounts that Ditko thinks along these lines. Lee recalls that Ditko “had complained to me a number of times when there were articles . . . .which called me the creator of Spider-Man. I had always thought I was, because I am the guy who said, “˜I have an idea for a strip called Spider-Man and so forth.’ Steve had said, having an idea is nothing, because until it becomes a physical thing, it’s just an idea. He said it took him to draw the strip and to give it life, so to speak, and to make it actual, something tangible; otherwise all I had was an idea. So I said to him, “˜Well, I think the person with the idea is the person who creates it,’ and he said, “˜No, because I drew it.'”

But Lee also developed the initial idea for Spider-Man. We don’t know how much of the plot of the first Spider-Man story in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) is Lee’s and how much is Ditko’s. But Lee scripted the dialogue and narration, using them to define the personalities of the characters and the themes of the series. Does anyone doubt that Lee composed the line “With great power there must also come–great responsibility”? If the initial concept is not as important as the way in which it is molded and developed, then both Lee and Ditko deserve credit for creating Spider-Man, for making the “idea” into something “actual.”

Ross could have gone still farther in questioning Lee about his definition of creating a character. At another point in In Search of Steve Ditko, Paul Gambaccini, one of the early contributors to comics letters columns, talks about a letter that Lee sent him describing a new story about a magician that Lee, in the letter, states is entirely Ditko’s idea. This turned out to be the first Doctor Strange story, from Strange Tales #110 (1963), and Gambaccini notes that Marvel even printed that letter in its Marvel Visionaries: Steve Ditko collection. (Somehow I doubt that there was any high level discussion at Marvel about the implications of printing that letter in the book, and thereby seemingly officially crediting Steve Ditko as the sole creator of Doctor Strange.) So, shouldn’t Ross have asked Lee if he was the co-creator of Doctor Strange? By Lee’s definition of creating a character, the answer would be no.

But I’d say the answer should be yes, because, even if Ditko entirely plotted that first Doctor Strange story, it was still Lee who created the way in which Doctor Strange speaks, thereby helping to define his personality.

By his own definition of character creation. Stan Lee is the creator of Spider-Man but not a creator or co-creator of Doctor Strange. But I believe that the people who plotted, scripted and drew a character’s original appearance should all be credited as the character’s co-creators. By that definition, Lee and Ditko were the co-creators of both Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. For that matter, Larry Lieber, who scripted the first Thor story in Journey into Mystery #83 (1962), should be listed alongside Lee and Kirby as co-creators of Marvel’s Thor.

On his website Evanier concludes that “the Lee-Kirby creations are Lee-Kirby creations”, refusing to credit either man as sole creator. Similarly, in Kirby: King of Comics, Evanier notes with regard to the Simon-Kirby partnership, “To the eternal question of who did what, Jack had a simple answer: “˜We both did everything'” (Evanier, p. 45).

Therefore, the perspicacious reader of Kirby: King of Comics should conclude that, inasmuch as Simon and Kirby collaborated on the graphic stories that appeared in Captain America Comics#1, they should both be credited as the co-creators of Captain America.

Evanier includes a two-page sequence from Captain America Comics #3 (1941) with art by Simon and Kirby, featuring a confrontation of Captain America and his sidekick Bucky with their perennial Nazi nemesis, the Red Skull (Evanier pgs. 52-53). The figure drawing is crude compared to Kirby’s later standards; later in the book Evanier offers a page from another Captain America-Red Skull battle in Tales of Suspense #80 (1966) that demonstrates how far Kirby had progressed as an artist in a quarter century (Evanier p. 150). But in the 1941 story, Kirby already conveys a sense of movement, energy and power that is still startling in panels in which the Skull swiftly strikes Bucky over the head with a fallen chair, a low shot of the Captain and Bucky racing through a cavern, and a brilliant explosion that hurls the bodies of the two superheroes in opposite directions.

Evanier then runs a quotation from the late Harvey Kurtzman, who explains the revolutionary impact of Kirby’s work: “There was such fury and energy in the work that it couldn’t be contained, Kirby was an absolute force.”

Kurtzman continues, “Before Simon and Kirby, the super hero was, in a sense, realistically oriented. Despite the characters’ superhuman powers, they were not drawn in action in ways that suggested how extraordinary they were. When Simon and Kirby drew Captain America, though, they depicted his super-action through opposing lines that clashed and exploded all over the panels. Alongside of Simon and Kirby’s work, everything else was static, pale, anemic” (Evanier, p. 56).

In other words, Joe Shuster may have drawn the first superhero, Superman, but it was Simon and Kirby, with Kirby as what Kurtzman terms “the critical element,” who invented the way to draw a superhero to look truly superhuman in action.

This is an important quotation that illuminates the importance of Kirby’s work. I wish I knew where Evanier got it from. This book needs footnotes, since it will surely be used as a source for future books and academic papers about Jack Kirby. Evanier has plans to do a far longer, far more detailed biography of Kirby for the hard core Kirbyite. Perhaps in that book he’ll provide a list of sources for all the quotations and other information he has gathered about Kirby’s life and career.

Simon and Kirby came to realize that they were being cheated by Goodman in ways that Evanier aptly compares to “Hollywood accounting”: “”˜Martin was making a fortune and bragging about it,’ Jack recalled. “˜At the same time, he was claiming his best selling book [Captain America Comics] was making only a tiny profit'” (Evanier, p. 58). It also seems apt that Kirby: King of Comics is being printed during the current movie and television writers’ strike. in which Evanier is involved, and which revolves around similar corporate behavior.

So Simon and Kirby ended up at DC Comics, where they proved prolific indeed, revitalizing the Golden Age Sandman, rebooting Manhunter, and creating The Newsboy Legion and the Guardian (obviously drawing on Kirby’s own Lower East Side boyhood as well as the movie exploits of the Dead End Kids) and Boy Commandos. Though one DC editor, Mort Weisinger, resented Simon and Kirby’s status as “outside suppliers” beyond his control, “Jack would later recall the period as one of his happiest: “˜They tried for a while to control us, but we knew how to do comics. Finally, they let us do whatever we wanted. They were thrilled with everything we did, and the readers were thrilled. Weisinger was the only one not thrilled” (Evanier, p. 60).

Simon and Kirby’s four Golden Age DC series may not hold up to today’s more sophisticated standards as Eisner’s Spirit does, but they are nonetheless classics of their period, showing vitality and imagination. My first professional comics gig came when DC hired me to read through their library of back issues in the early 1980s and take notes. So believe me when I tell you that most Golden Age DC stories are dismally mediocre and dated, but the Simon and Kirby series are delightful exceptions to that rule.

For example, take the two page Boy Commandos sequence that Evanier reprints (Evanier, pgs. 64-65), which begins with Simon and Kirby in their studio, working on the next story. Enter three self-important DC executives, who seem to share Weisinger’s attitude towards Simon and Kirby: one of them sneers, “Hymph! Them and their ideas!” The DC execs show Simon and Kirby a newspaper that alleges that the Boy Commandos were killed in action (It’s not true, of course; these are the days before DC and Marvel mowed down characters on a regular basis.), and Kirby breaks down in tears. (And why not? One of the teammates, Brooklyn, “sounded and acted a lot like Kirby,” according to Evanier.) Then the Sandman shows up to help Simon and Kirby out.

This is an amusing and inventive foray into what nowadays academics would call metafiction and postmodernism: a comics story about writing a comics story, with the creators interacting with their characters long before Grant Morrison met Animal Man or She-Hulk harangued John Byrne. You wouldn’t see something like this in any other comic book series of the time, except Eisner’s Spirit sections, of course. Later in the book, Evanier reproduces the original art from a page of Fantastic Four #10 (1963), in which Doctor Doom visits Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at the Marvel office (Evanier, p. 120). I think it’s fair to deduce that since Kirby had already dabbled in metacomics in Boy Commandos, that this FF sequence may have been his idea.

By the way, Mark Evanier has informed me that the splash page from Fantastic Four #51 (“This Man, This Monster”) was not reproduced in Kirby: King of Comics from a stat: he located the original artwork, and Abrams shot from that.

So Kirby regarded this period at DC as “the best time in my life apart from one minor detail,” namely being drafted to serve in World War II (Evanier, p. 62). But what strikes me is how very short this period of creative freedom and fulfillment proved to be. Simon and Kirby started doing work for DC in 1942 and turned out a backlog of material that could be run while they were serving in the military. But when Kirby left the army in 1945, “Things had changed at DC Comics. The Simon-Kirby features were losing steam. . . “ (Evanier, p. 69). Well, then, why couldn’t DC trust Simon and Kirby to come up with new ideas to reenergize their series once they were both back in civilian life, or to devise new series? Hadn’t they proved themselves to be successful and brilliantly inventive comics creators?

But then there’s this: “Worse, there was little enthusiasm [at DC] for letting anyone, even Joe and Jack, be outside suppliers any longer. The editors there now wanted everything to go through them” (Evanier, p. 69).

This reminds me of the “writer-editors” at DC and Marvel in the 1970s and early 1980s: creators who had proven themselves to be commercial successes, including Kirby himself, who were given virtually free rein over the comics they did. Writer-editors were considered to be Good Things until the mid-1980s, when suddenly they became Bad Things, and they were stripped of editorial power, which reverted to the hierarchies at the main offices. This may have been a necessary step as the major comics companies expanded and grew more corporate. But certainly the creative freedom of the 1970s and early produced many classic runs of comics that express more personal visions than the corporate “event” comics of the present decade.

Following World War II not only war comics but also superhero comics started declining in popularity. Perhaps DC pigeonholed Simon and Kirby as capable only of working in those genres; it wouldn’t be the last time that a company was blind to the full range of employees’ talents. So Simon and Kirby went off to work for other, smaller companies, like Harvey and Hillman, and scored another major success by inventing a new comics genre. But I’ll have more to say about that when I continue my commentary on Kirby: King of Comics next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Every January the Beat runs a survey to determine what was the “big story” in comics during the previous year and what will be the “big story” of the new year.

In my opinion the leading story in comics during this current decade is the major paradigm shift in American cultural attitudes towards the medium. As the Beat recently commented on her blog, it’s no longer surprising that Entertainment Weekly, Salon and Time all ran lists of the top ten graphic novels of 2007. Yet ten years ago, or even five, how many of us would have imagined this would happen?

So this year, as my contribution to the Beat’s survey, I’ve identified six number of major comics-related news stories, past and future, many of which deal with the growing mainstream acceptance of comics–including Kirby: King of Comics. And you can find what I wrote about them here. But I’ll have more to say about that when I continue my commentary on Kirby: King of Comics when it comes out in March.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson