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In writing about Mark Evanier’s new book Kirby: King of Comics (2008, Harry N. Abrams), I’ve expressed my astonishment at the blindness that so many people in the comics industry showed towards Jack Kirby’s amazing talents from the 1940s onward. Just look at all the magnificent illustrations with which Evanier has filled this book, from throughout the entire length of Kirby’s career. Wasn’t his greatness as an artist obvious?

In my last installment, I didn’t have a chance to describe the extraordinary artwork in the chapter devoted to Kirby’s work at Silver Age Marvel. For instance, look at the splash page for “A Monster at My Window!” from Tales to Astonish #34 (August 1962) (Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics p. 113). As you might expect from that title, there’s something humorous about this grotesque monster clinging to this apartment house wall. But nonetheless the image is simultaneously both comical and genuinely eerie, like a nightmare set down on paper.

My favorite illustrations in this chapter are the reproductions of Kirby’s pencil art, before it was inked, of four pin-ups of members of the Inhumans Royal Family from Fantastic Four Special #5 (1967). There’s the regality of Black Bolt, conveyed through a simple pose with his arms raised as if in benediction (Evanier, p. 142). There’s the power and speed of Karnak splitting a machine in half, a perfect example of Kirby’s prowess in capturing a sense of energy and movement within a static picture (Evanier, p. 145). Then there are portraits of the two sisters, Crystal and Medusa, which radiate different sorts of sexiness. Crystal leans forward and looks and smiles enchantingly directly at the audience, as if forming a personal bond with the individual reader (Evanier p. 143). Her big sister Medusa stands further back from the “camera,” and seems more mature and independent in attitude, but even more physically impressive (Evanier, p. 144).

Immediately after these Inhumans pictures comes another extraordinary portrait which resembles a pin-up in that it is another full-length depiction of one of the FF‘s cast of characters. But in this page Kirby turns the full-length portrait to dramatic purpose, providing the unforgettable splash page introducing his and Stan Lee’s single greatest issue working as a team: Fantastic Four #51, featuring “This Man. . .This Monster!” (Evanier p. 146). There stands Ben Grimm, the Thing, whose monumental figure incarnates power, and yet his pose and the expression on his face convey bewilderment and melancholy, as if he has no purpose in life for his power, as if he does not know where to turn. Torrential rain pours down around and in front of him, creating a three-dimensional effect. The downpour might be a visual metaphor for the harshness of Ben’s fate. It could also signify Ben’s own inner melancholy, or even the heavens weeping for this man trapped in a monster’s body.

The “Masters of American Comics” museum exhibition had to resort to displaying a printed version of this iconic splash page (see “Comics in Context” #155: “Two American Masters”). At first I assumed that Kirby: King of Comics’ reproduction of this page was shot from a photostat (as indeed the Inhumans pinups were), which might explain the black border and the notations on top. But Mark Evanier has informed me that he and Abrams used the original art for FF#51’s splash page, and that, indeed, most of the illustrations in Kirby: King of Comics were shot directly from the original art.

Then there’s a page from Tales of Suspense # 80 (August 1966) pitting Captain America against the Red Skull in single combat (Evanier p. 151). Compare this to the relatively primitive but promising Cap vs. Skull sequence from Captain America Comics #3 (1941) that Evanier reprinted earlier in his book (Evanier pgs. 52-53) to see the vast strides that Kirby had made as an artist in twenty-five years. It’s not just that by 1966 Kirby was drawing handsomer, more powerful figures with a heightened realism to them, but also that Kirby had so greatly grown as a dramatist. Look at the characters’ facial expressions, body language and movement, the composition and staging, and the pacing of the battle.

This page also demonstrates Stan Lee’s mastery of dialogue. Lee conveys Captain America’s deep commitment to his ideals without making it seem dated or hackneyed. Look at the Captain’s speech to the Red Skull, vividly voicing the hero’s hatred of tyranny and contempt for cowardice and hs fervent respect for “the forces of freedom.” (Could this be the same Captain who passively underwent that tongue-lashing from that reporter who claimed he was out of touch with America in the aftermath of Civil War?) Look at how Lee shows us Cap’s anger at the Skull, but also how Cap–unlike the Skull–controls his anger: the thought balloons (which have fallen from favor with today’s writers) provide a running subtext to Cap’s dialogue, showing us the professional soldier in action, continually formulating and evaluating his strategies. As for the Skull, nowadays writers would claim that everyone rationalizes his own actions and would therefore consider it unrealistic that the Red Skull would consciously, even proudly, align himself with “evil” and the “forces of bigotry, greed and oppression.” But even though he added so much psychological realism to the superhero genre in through the Marvel revolution, Lee must have realized he was still dealing with the mythic. Stan Lee endows the Red Skull with a skill with language as great as the Captain’s and makes the Skull’s glorying in his own evil dramatically persuasive. In defiantly declaring that “so long as men take liberty for granted” that “the forces of the Red Skull creep ever closer to the final victory!” Lee powerfully makes clear that the Skull is as passionately committed to his ideology as his eternal rival, Captain America, is to his patriotic ideals.

Kirby: King of Comics also reprints the splash page from Lee and Kirby’s “The Silver Burper!” (Evanier p. 156), probably the funniest story from the entire run of Not Brand Ecch, Marvel’s version of the sort of superhero comics parodies that Harvey Kurtzman put into the early issues of MAD. Kirby is so good at this surreal visual slapstick that I wish he’d had more opportunities to draw comedy. Wacky as this page is, the rest of the story is way funnier (such as the page I located and displayed in “Stan Lee: A Retrospective” last year at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art). When is Marvel going to get around to publishing an Essential Not Brand Ecch paperback?

Later in his book, Evanier devotes a two-page sidebar to Kirby’s experiments with combining drawn figures with photographic collages to create astonishing effects in his comics (Evanier pgs. 170-171). This is yet another instance in which this visionary creator was ahead if his time: comic book printing was not yet sufficiently good to convey the effects he intended his collages to convey. If only Kirby were able to create and publish his collages now.

Even when I saw my first Kirby Fantastic Four as a boy, I was impressed by his artwork, which was more powerful and dynamic than any comics I’d ever seen previously. As I looking through Kirby: King of Comics, it seems to me that Kirby’s greatness as an artist is clear to anyone who has eyes to see.

But are there comics readers today who, like DC’s editors in the 1950s and 1960s, just don’t “get” Kirby’s work? Will there be comics aficionados who look at Kirby: King of Comics who won’t appreciate the extraordinary art within?

I was struck by the Beat’s recent comments on a debate at Blogarama about the tumbling sales for Mark Waid and George Perez’s revival of DC’s Brave and the Bold. Quoting comics artist Ryan Dunleavy’s comment, “I don’t like George Perez’s artwork,” the Beat exclaims, not entirely ironically, “”˜Don’t like George Perez’???? Wha”“? That’s heresy!” Perez, after all, has had a long career as one of the top artists of the superhero genre, going back to the 1970s, perhaps peaking with his work on The New Teen Titans in the 1980s, and experiencing a resurgence of fame in the last decade with projects like the long-anticipated JLA/Avengers (see “Comics in Context” #14: “Continuity/Discontinuity”). And now he’s suddenly fallen from favor?

The Beat then quotes Ed Ward’s comments that “The fact that it reads like older, pre-decompression comics is, I’m pretty sure, one of the reasons it’s a tough sell to contemporary readers. . . .

“I know that it definitely takes a lot more effort for me as a reader to find an “˜in’ to a book by George Perez than it takes me for almost any other contemporary books, and it it’s more work for me to stay involved. The adjustment in my headspace feels very similar to the adjustment in headspace I need to make as a film viewer when I’m watching something from the silent-era as opposed to something contemporary.”

The comparison to film is important. When I entered college, I quickly became a cineaste, not only going to see contemporary American movies, but also foreign language films, and classics from the past, from Buster Keaton to Ingmar Bergman, at the many revival film theaters in New York and boston back in the days before home video. I never had any difficulty adjusting to the different looks and styles of films from different countries or decades: the basic principles of cinematic storytelling remain consistent. So I have always been somewhat baffled by people who refuse to watch black and white films or movies with subtitles and by the people who, as Roger Ebert put it, act as if film history began with Star Wars.

But I certainly can’t deny that these people not only exist but comprise the vast majority of today’s movie audience. I may know plenty of people who share my devotion to Turner Classic Movies, but I am well aware that even though it shows so many films that were popular with the mass audience in their time, TCM has only a small niche audience now compared to scores of other TV networks. For me the downside of the collapse of the Tower Records chain was that its stores sold DVDs of classic films from the first half of the 20th century whereas most video stores do not.

Similarly, as faithful readers know, in this column I write about comics and cartoon art from throughout the 20th century into the 21st. The recent explosion of books reprinting classic comic strips and comic book stories from the past demonstrates that there is substantial interest in the classics of the medium. A classic, after all, is defined as a work that remains vital and relevant despite the passage of time.

But classics don’t necessarily appeal to the mass audience. Far more people are going to watch American Idol than a telecast of a play by Shakespeare. The mass audience is usually drawn to more contemporary work that fits the tastes and fashions of the time. Some of this may endure, much of it will not. Recently Fox reran The Simpsons episode titled “That 90s Show,” which drew much of its humor from pointing out just how silly various fashions and fads of the 1990s already seem less than a decade later.

This dispute about George Perez’s comics allegedly being hard to read reminds me of anecdotes I’ve heard about people simply being unable to read comic books. The visual language of comics may seem intuitively obvious to you and me, but apparently it bewilders other people. They haven’t learned how to read comics. Are there people who don’t know how to read Jack Kirby comics?

George Perez, like so many other comic book artists who began their careers in the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s, was greatly influenced by Jack Kirby’s work. If the current mainstream comic book readership finds it difficult to “adjust” to Perez’s art, what would they think of Jack Kirby’s work? Is it possible that a generation of comics readers has arisen, most of whom do not “innately” respond to Kirby’s artwork?

The aforementioned Ed Ward wrote in a comment to The Beat’s blog that “I didn’t like Kirby’s work as a kid either! I’ve only been able to start appreciating his work over the last few years, and I’ve still got a TON of friends who grew up the same time I did who can’t stand his stuff and dismiss it as “˜ugly,’ “˜old,’ and “˜unreadable.’” (“Ugly”?! Did they see those pin-ups of Crystal and Medusa?)

You, the reader of this column, may protest that you’re in your teens, twenties or thirties, and you love Kirby art. Good for you. There will be plenty of exceptions to the rule, just as there will continue to be a substantial number of teens and twentysomethings who become aficionados of classic movies, as I did. But I’m talking about the tastes of the majority of the audience.

The Beat asserts that “there is no denying that the Ultimate/Identity Crisis/52 generation of superhero comics readers IS a generation of superhero comics readers, and not just the lingering survivors of an older tribe.” She continues, “While old timers like The Beat turn up their noses at this “˜decompressed’ storytelling–rejecting what seems like plotlessness and a lack of pacing, for today’s readers, this is what they expect from comics.”

Regular readers know that I am no admirer of “decompressed” storytelling, either. I believe that this style straitjackets the artist, preventing him or her from realizing the visual potential of a story. The Marvel revolution was not just in writing but in visual storytelling. Before, comic book artists worked from full scripts, and so the writer was dominant. Through his “Marvel method,” Stan Lee came up with basic plot ideas, often in collaboration with the artist, and then let the artist draw the story, filling out the plot; the Lee would script the dialogue and captions to fit the visuals. This method allowed Jack Kirby and other artists much more freedom in co-plotting (or entirely plotting) the story, conceiving it in visual terms, and establishing its pace. As a result Marvel developed a new, dynamic firm of visual storytelling.

For decades the “Marvel method” was used not only at Marvel but at DC and throughout the American book industry. But in recent years the fashion has apparently shifted back towards writers doing full scripts, plotting and dialoguing the story before the artist starts drawing it. So it should be no surprise that writers have self-indulgently resorted to “decompressed storytelling,” turning out dialogue-heavy but visually static sequences. If Lee and Kirby launched the “Marvel revolution,” then this is the Decompressed Generation’s counterrevolution. (So first the Baby Boomers were succeeded by the “MTV Generation” that wanted their entertainment to move faster, like the rapid cutting in music videos, and now, somehow, we have a generation of comics readers that prefers a tediously slow pace. How did this happen?)

Allegedly “decompressed storytelling’ is more “cinematic.” But I recall Frank Miller saying, at the time that he was doing Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, that in writing comics he sought to pare away any panels or dialogue that weren’t necessary. He believed in dramatic economy. There was important meaning in every shot and every line of dialogue; otherwise, Miller would have deleted it. This seems much more like a genuine cinematic storytelling to me. There are now movie and TV writers who perpetrate “decompressed” scenes in comic strips, perhaps because if they tried to inflict such longueurs on screen, the scene would hit the cutting room floor.

According to my “Rubber Band Theory of Cartoon Art” (see “Comics in Context” #75), this state of affairs will not last. The Image “look” of the early 1990s eventually largely fell from favor, and someday some new young artists will rediscover the lessons of the great visual storytellers of the 1960s, like Kirby. The Beat observes that “The average Oni, D&Q or Top Shelf book has more “traditional” storytelling than corporate comics these days, and are created by young cartoonists with completely different sensibilities.” It’s as if “corporate comics,” by their very nature, saturate themselves in the excesses of current commercial fashion, while an even younger generation rebels against the current establishment by rediscovering “traditional” visual storytelling.

One of the miracles of Marvel in the 1960s is that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, et al. were consciously experimenting with new ways of doing comics. They didn’t have the “corporate” sensibility that now seems to dominate DC and Marvel. Indeed, Stan was continually making jokes about DC, which he called “Brand Ecch” (hence the title of Not Brand Ecch): he saw Marvel as the innovative, visionary rebel and DC as the stodgy establishment, following a conventional wisdom that was quickly growing outdated.

Might there be another, perhaps more disturbing reason why some readers might not properly appreciate this book devoted to the life and work of Jack Kirby?

Recently the Beat also ran a blog entry on the “fallout from the court decision granting the heirs of Jerry Siegel partial ownership of the copyright to his mythic co-creation, Superman. She wrote this moving commentary:

“Obviously, this case will go to appeal, and the legal battle will go on for years and years. I couldn’t find any mention anywhere of the age of Joanne Siegel, the original inspiration for Lois Lane, but she has to be in her 90s. Begin to ponder the years of fighting this woman has gone through, and this legal victory–one that has come not through any groundbreaking legal precedent, but through the application of established copyright law–and you can’t help but think the good guys have won, at least for a day.

“With that in mind, the attitudes displayed on many message boards accusing the Siegel family of “˜greed’ or worrying that this is a terrible decision for the character of Superman are stunning examples of ignorance and selfishness. . . .the case of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel–living in poverty for years even as a character no ever denied they created made hundreds of millions of dollars–is infamous as one of the most unfortunate examples of financial disparity in the history of intellectual property.”

One of the comments for this blog entry noted, “Fandom has really embarrassed itself this go-round.” I’ll say. This is followed by a debate in the blog entry’s commentary section over whether Siegel should be blamed for bringing his bad fortune upon himself by signing a bad deal (the only one he was offered) for Superman in the first place.

One of the primary themes of Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics is to show how Jack Kirby, a man of creative genius, one of the people most responsible for Marvel’s spectacular financial success, had to struggle for recognition of his achievements and even to make enough money to support his family. Does the ignorance and selfishness of many people’s reactions to the Siegel court decision mean that there are people who will read Kirby: King of Comics and will not sympathize with Kirby’s struggle? Are there readers who will argue that since Marvel had no legal obligation to give Kirby the credit and financial rewards he deserved, that they had no moral obligation to do so?

How different is this from the circa-1968 Marvel executives’ attitude that Evanier so bitingly describes in his book? “Not only was Jack refused [such credit and financial security], but he was lectured like a child with no sense of the world in which he lived” (Evanier, p. 153).

So, if Jack Kirby were still with us, still doing important work and still underpaid, would the Decompressed Generation of comics readers care?

Although my own generation of comics aficionados regards Kirby as an icon, much of that audience also turned against him and his work thirty years ago. Those who don’t already know the basic narrative of Kirby’s career may be shocked to learn from Evanier’s book that in 1978, his career in comics seemed finished, and “Readers of the day didn’t seem to notice” (Evanier, p. 197). By then Kirby felt “hostility from the Marvel editorial staff,” who, the decade before, had been such passionate admirers of his work. But by that point he was being referred to as “Jack the Hack” (Evanier, p. 187).

Hard as many of you may find that to believe, it was true. By that time I had gotten to know various people at Marvel, even though I was still years away from turning comics pro, and I heard people disparage Kirby with that nickname. I didn’t, but I found myself disappointed with Kirby’s mid-1970s work, although I’ve learned to appreciate some of it more with the passing decades, as you can see from my lengthy appreciation of his Eternals series and Neil Gaiman’s Eternals revival that ran in this column last fall (starting with “Comics in Context” #194: “Eternal Verities”).

By 1970 Kirby left Marvel and went to work as editor, writer and artist for DC Comics; his former nemeses Jack Schiff and Mort Weisinger were no longer there. This was when Kirby began work on his amazing “Fourth World” family of comics–The New Gods, The Forever People, Mister Miracle, and a radically revamped Jimmy Olsen–centering on the war between the “new gods: of the planet New Genesis and Kirby’s greatest, most monumental villain (next to, or arguably greater than Doctor Doom) Darkseid, master if the planet Apokolips. Bursting with astonishing creativity, continually spawning brilliant new characters and concepts, the Fourth World books are now rightly regarded as classics.

Evanier notes the parallels between The New Gods (in the first half of the 1970s) and George Lucas’s Star Wars (starting with the first film in 1977): “In New Gods, Orion had called upon a power called the Source in confrontation with his father, Darkseid. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker called upon a power called the Force when he battled his father, Darth Vader” (Evanier p. 177). Evanier could have tweaked that line to make the comparison even stronger: Darth Vader, after all, draws power from the “dark side” of the Force!

For whatever reason, the “Fourth World” books did not rival the sales of Marvel’s top books, as DC presumably expected, and instead came to be regarded, correctly or not, as commercial failures. Another Kirby creation, Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth, proved to be a moderate success. (Oddly, Evanier says the series had “a young human protagonist and a lot of people with animal heads” [Evanier p. 181]. That may be what they looked like, but characters such as Tuftan really were animals who, following “the Great Disaster,” had evolved the abilities to talk and to stand upright like humans.)

But Kirby ended up returning to Marvel, by which time Stan Lee had moved up to the position of publisher and was no longer scripting comic books on a regular basis. Now Kirby edited, wrote and drew his own comics, including Captain America and Black Panther, as well as his new creations The Eternals, Machine Man and Devil Dinosaur. But these too were commercial disappointments, and the ambitious Eternals, which I regard as Kirby’s last great series, was canceled. “Jack wasn’t connecting with the [then] current Marvel readership,” Evanier concedes. And thus, startlingly, the man aside from Stan Lee who was most responsible for the Marvel revolution found himself treated as a has-been only seventeen years after Fantastic Four #1.

Why did the audience turn against Kirby? In his book Evanier suggests that one reason might have been the “florid, theatrical voice” of Kirby’s dialogue and captions (Evanier, p. 165). But Stan Lee also often wrote narration and certain characters’ dialogue in an operatic, larger-than-life style, and it worked for him. It’s not that readers resisted a “theatrical” style of scripting back then; it’s that Stan did it far better than Jack did. (Again, compare Kirby’s suggested dialogue in the borders of his original art for Silver Age Marvel with the way that Lee reworked it.)

I wonder if in part Kirby was a victim of his own previous success at Marvel. Stan Lee had urged artists to draw more like Kirby, and by the mid-1970s a new generation of artists who had grown up reading the Silver Age Marvels, and who had incorporated Kirby’s influence into their own work, dominated mainstream comics. So perhaps Kirby’s own mid-1970s work no longer looked as distinctively different to the readers of that time.

My hypothesis is that comics readers of the 1960s expected–or–hoped–that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, each operating on his own, would produce work that was on the level of their great collaborative work of the 1960s. Stan Lee, who had relied so much on Kirby’s concepts and plot input, retired from writing comic books on a regular basis only two years after Kirby quit Marvel in 1970. On his own Kirby was capable of doing some remarkable work with characterization. For example, it strikes me that through Orion, in The New Gods, who hid his true, bestial features and his savage temper behind a handsome outer facade, Kirby anticipated what Chris Claremont and others later did with Wolverine. But Kirby’s tendency was to depict his lead characters as rather one-dimensionally good and heroic, as demonstrated by Ikaris in The Eternals, Mister Miracle, and his mid-1970s depiction of Captain America. But Stan Lee had accustomed readers to heroes with multidimensional personalities, who had character flaws, who engaged in introspection and self-doubt. A new generation of writers were arriving at Marvel and DC who would attempt to push the envelope on characterization yet further. Again, Kirby could come up with intriguingly complex characters in this period, like Kro and the Reject in The Eternals, but I suspect that the bland one-dimensionality of so many of his 1970s characters seemed dated to readers of that time.

But from this nadir in the 1970s, Kirby’s reputation would take a considerable upward turn only a decade later, as I shall examine in the final installment of my commentary on Kirby: King of Comics in the near future.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I will be appearing on four, count “˜em., four panels at the third New York Comic Con. which is being held at Manhattan’s Javits Convention Center from Friday, April 18 through Sunday, April 20.

On Friday, April 18 at 6 PM, I will moderate the panel “Comic Artists Talk about Drawing,” with an eclectic lineup including Colleen Doran (A Distant Soil), Dean Haspiel (Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter), Jim Lee (All Star Batman and Robin), Leonard Starr (the classic comic strips Mary Perkins On Stage and Annie), and maybe more.

Then if you just stay put in the same room, you can watch me moderate the 7 PM panel “Marvel 1958-1968” featuring Silver Age artists Dick Ayers and Stan Goldberg, writers Gary Friedrich (co-creator of the Ghost Rider) and Denny O’Neil (who began his comics career at Marvel in the mid-1960s), Fantastic Four inker Joe Sinnott, and perhaps some surprise guests.

Then on Saturday, April 19 at 1 PM I will moderate the “Legion of Super-Heroes 50th Anniversary Panel” featuring Keith Giffen, Paul Levitz and Jim Shooter.

Later that day at 5 PM I’ll be at the first ever Quick Stop Entertainment panel, as will Fred Hembeck, where we’ll finally get to meet our longtime editor Kenneth Plume for the first time, and the audience will find out more about Quick Stop proprietor Kevin Smith’s next movie.

And on Sunday at 1:30 PM, I’ll be at the Simon and Schuster booth signing copies of The Marvel Comics Travel Guide to New York City.

Back in “Comics in Context” #200 I remarked that I still hadn’t written about Herge, whose centennial was last year, and his celebrated creation Tintin. Well, now I have, in an article in the March 25, 2008 edition of Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week, “Herge at One Hundred” (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6544443.html?nid=2789).

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

You can order Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics here. And Mark will preside over a “Kirby: King of Comics” panel at the New York Comic Con on Sunday, April 20.

In the 1980s I co-wrote four different versions of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, not counting the Update mini-series: the original; the Deluxe Edition with double-size issues; a multi-volume paperback version of the Deluxe Edition (which incorporated a small amount of new writing); and the Master Edition. Though Marvel has been publishing new Handbooks over the last several years, back in the 1980s the sales of the Handbooks were in decline. So Handbook editor Mark Gruenwald tried a new format: the Master Edition entries consisted not of text articles but of lists of basic data and statistics, with pictures of the characters to serve as a reference guide for artists, printed on looseleaf pages to be collected into binders.

Now, to my surprise, Marvel is now reprinting the Master Edition as two paperbacks. You can find the first of them here over at Amazon. Strangely, Amazon did not see fit to credit me or another of the principal writers, Murray Ward (though they have informed me that they will correct this), but you’ll find my name and Murray’s on the credit pages in the back of the book.

So now all of my past work on The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is back in print! And will that be all the Handbook work I ever do? Stay tuned for further developments.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Now, in my continuing commentary on Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, published by Harry N. Abrams, I arrive at the peak of Jack Kirby’s career: the 1960s, in the Silver Age of Comics, when Kirby collaborated with Stan Lee in creating the Fantastic Four and so many of the other classic characters of the Marvel Universe. As Mark Evanier reminds us in this book, Lee and Kirby launched a “revolution” in heroic fantasy comics with Fantastic Four #1, which he rightly says “changed the rules” more than any comic book since Action Comics #1, in which the superhero genre was born (Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics, p. 122). Fantastic Four #1 marked a true renaissance of this genre, which has not only thrived ever since in comics, but found new popularity in film and television.

But this is also the period in Kirby’s career that stirs the most controversy. As Evanier explains, Marvel’s editor and principal writer, Stan Lee, collaborated with Kirby and other artists in what was then an unusual way. Burdened with the duty to write so many comics, Lee devised the “Marvel method” to draw upon the considerable talents of artists like Kirby and Steve Ditko to create story ideas. Typically, Lee and Kirby would hold a conference to devise the basic plot of a story, then Kirby would draw the story, elaborating upon and adding to that plot, and then Lee would script the dialogue and captions.

But what actually happened during those plot conferences? What elements of the plots were Lee’s and which were Kirby’s? Which man first conceived of which of the scores of characters who emerged at Marvel during this amazing period of creativity?

In his book Mark Evanier carefully attempts to be fair to both Lee and Kirby in treading through this mine field. At one point Evanier sagely assets that “Among those who worked around them at the time, there was a unanimous view: that Fantastic Four was created by Stan and Jack. No further division of credit seemed appropriate. Not on that, nor on all the wonderment to come” (Evanier, p. 122). That strikes me as correct. It is the combination of Lee and Kirby’s individual talents, the synthesis of the words and the pictures, that made these characters and series so successful, both commercially and creatively. We have seen plenty of work that Stan Lee has done with other artists, and entire series that Jack Kirby both wrote and drew himself. It’s hard for me to imagine that a Fantastic Four by either man without the other could have achieved the heights they reached in that series together.

Yet in the 1960s and 1970s Kirby’s role in co-plotting–and in some cases, entirely plotting–his collaborations with Stan Lee was known to very few. (As a Marvel reader during those years, I was certainly unaware of it.) Kirby understandably felt unjustly deprived of both his rightful credit for co-creating a stable of such commercially valuable characters and the financial rewards that should in a more just world have been his.

So the question of who did what did become an issue. As Evanier recounts, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby each claimed to be the one who first came up with the idea for the Incredible Hulk. Lee asserted that he originated the idea of doing a series about the Norse god Thor as a superhero; Kirby contended that it was his own idea. Lee says he first conceived of the X-Men; Kirby contended that the credit belonged to him instead. And so it goes. Lee and Kirby each had notoriously bad memories, and they were trying to remember who came up with which idea decades ago.

And there are no witnesses and no physical evidence to settle the disputes. Nobody made records of the plotting sessions at the time. That suggests that, at the time, nobody thought it was important to do so. After all, back then there was little money in comics and no prestige, and no one could have anticipated that Marvel would grow into a multimillion dollar media empire.

Reading this section of Evanier’s book set me wondering about many aspects of this controversy. Is it possible that in the early 1960s not even Kirby or Ditko fretted about getting more credit or compensation for their work with Lee? Evanier states that it was “later” that Kirby and Ditko would claim that Lee contributed little or nothing to the plots. “Since he received the total writing fee and (usually) the total writing credit, that would be a sore point in years to come” (Evanier, p. 112).

Did Kirby, Ditko and the other artists ever confront Lee about this? If they did, how did he respond to their arguments? Or did they just stew in silence, believing that Lee should have known enough to give them money and credit for writing without their asking him? Ditko eventually was billed as sole plotter on his later Amazing Spider-Man work. Why did Ditko get credit when Kirby did not?

What was Stan Lee’s position at the time? Lee has always praised Kirby and Ditko as artists, and certainly in recent years he has acknowledged their plot contributions to his collaborations with them. When Lee and Kirby co-plotted as a story, did Lee assume that Kirby’s fee covered both drawing and co-plotting, and that his own covered co-plotting and scripting? Was Lee somehow blind to the reasons for Kirby’s growing resentment? Or, again, did the subject never come up at the time? Evanier suggests that was the case, writing that “But at the time, everyone was happy just to have work and the “˜Marvel Method,’ as it would come to be known, produced some fine comics” (Evanier, p. 112).

Surely if Lee and Kirby had realized at the time there would have been such a mess over who did what, they would have tape recorded their plotting sessions or had someone transcribe them!

(I know what this is like. Looking back at entries for The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in the 1980s, I sometimes find myself wondering if I wrote the entry or the series’ editor and creator Mark Gruenwald did. Mark probably kept records, but where are they now? Complicating the problem is the fact that I often revised and expanded entries that Mark had originally written. But how can one tell twenty years later which sections of an entry are Mark’s and which are mine?)

Indeed, no one kept proper records of what one day would be regarded as significant history. Evanier recounts the “industry legend” that Marvel publisher Martin Goodman learned about the sales of Justice League of America from DC’s Jack Liebowitz during a golf game, but Evanier then points out that Liebowitz denied he ever played golf with Goodman.

In any event, Goodman instructed Stan Lee to start a new superhero book to compete with DC’s Justice League, and Fantastic Four #1 was the result.

I was surprised that Evanier claims that the FF discovered their new super-powers on the moon in their first issue (Evanier p. 114), though he has corrected the mistake at his website. Once their spaceship was hit by the unexpectedly intense radiation, they turned back and returned to Earth, where their powers first manifested. Furthermore, it’s a common error that in their origin story the FF were heading to the moon. The story actually states they were journeying “to the stars”; hence, the real-life moon landing in 1969 hasn’t dated the origin story.

The most revolutionary creation among the members of the Fantastic Four was Ben Grimm, the Thing: the monster depicted as semi-tragic hero. I had assumed that Kirby and Ben Grimm’s personalities had much in common, but Evanier quotes Kirby spelling it out: “the Thing is really Jack Kirby. . . .He has my manners, he has my manner of speech, and he thinks the way I do” (Evanier, p. 122).

But wait! Even if Kirby made notes in the borders of the original art pages, suggesting what the Thing was saying, it was Stan Lee who wrote the Thing’s dialogue. As Evanier points out, sometimes Lee followed Kirby’s border notes and other times he didn’t. Certainly Lee reworked Kirby’s suggested dialogue, and as Evanier acknowledges, Lee is superb at depicting characterization through dialogue.

So is the Thing really purely an expression of Jack Kirby? Did Stan Lee think that in scripting the Thing, he was portraying a version of Kirby? Or is it more likely that the Thing we see in the Lee-Kirby FF issues expresses parts of both creators’ personalities?

The biggest puzzle is who came up with the idea for Spider-Man. Evanier reports that Stan Lee claims that, inspired by the pulp vigilante called the Spider, he came up with the idea to do a character called Spider-Man. Kirby claimed that he and Joe Simon had devised the name Spider-Man (or “Spiderman” minus the hyphen), and that he–Kirby–suggested doing a character by that name at Marvel.

Evanier notes that Simon contends that his “Spider-Man” was a different name he had devised for his character the Silver Spider, but that Kirby had nothing to do with its creation. Simon and Kirby had reworked the Silver Spider into the Fly, an orphan boy who used a magic ring to transform into an insect-themed adult superhero, for Archie Comics.

So Kirby began drawing the first Spider-Man story for Marvel, in which the title character was a young boy who used a magic ring to transform into a spider-themed adult superhero. After he’d finished the first few pages, Lee decided to reassign the story to Steve Ditko. Lee has long claimed that Kirby made Spider-Man look too muscular and traditionally heroic. Evanier casts doubt on this story, pointing out that Kirby could easily have redrawn the few pages to make Spider-Man look less muscular, and that, after all, Kirby drew Spider-Man on the cover for Amazing Fantasy #15, his first appearance (Evanier p. 126).

This is true, but I wonder if Stan Lee’s explanation still points to the real reason for the change in artists, even if it wasn’t perfectly phrased. I’ve heard John Romita, Sr. say that when he took over drawing Spider-Man from Steve Ditko, he initially attempted to draw Spider-Man in a Ditkoesque style, but proved unsuccessful at it; instead, Romita followed his natural tendencies as an artist and made Peter Parker/Spider-Man a much more handsome figure than the one Ditko had drawn, and Stan Lee went along with this. Lee may well have recognized that Kirby’s natural tendency was to draw superheroes with heroic builds, and that whatever their original intentions, a Lee-Kirby Spider-Man would inevitably evolve away from the concept of a normal-looking guy with super-powers. Even on Kirby’s Amazing Fantasy #15 cover, Spider-Man looked more massive and conventionally heroic than the typical version drawn by Ditko.

Besides, the difference between Kirby and Ditko doesn’t just lie in how muscular they make their superheroes look. Kirby and Ditko portray very different visions of the world. Think of Jack Kirby’s superhero art, and you imagine godlike heroes in spectacular action scenes set against fantastic landscapes. On the other hand, Steve Ditko’s strength is in depicting ordinary-looking people in mundane, everyday settings (or else sorcerers in hallucinatory, surrealistic environments, but that’s another series). By saying that “Jack could never draw Spider-Man the way I wanted him to look” (Evanier p. 127), maybe Stan Lee was referring not just to the way Kirby drew Spider-Man the character, but the way that he drew the entire environment of the Spider-Man series–the supporting cast, the neighborhoods,

Moreover, it wasn’t just that Lee changed the way Spider-Man was drawn; he also tossed out the original concept of who Spider-Man was. In the revised origin story that Ditko drew, Spider-Man was no longer a small boy but a high school student, there was no magic ring, and he did not transform into an adult but was an adolescent superhero.

Evanier convincingly argues that the Spider-Man concept was radically revised in order to make the character different from the Fly. That would also provide another reason for taking Kirby off the series, since Kirby had drawn the Fly. As Evanier states, Marvel would have wanted to avoid a lawsuit from Archie.

Furthermore, was it fair to Joe Simon for Kirby to be recycling elements of The Silver Spider into Marvel’s new Spider-Man series? I’m going to assume that Kirby had no bad intentions in this case. Rather, I wonder if this recycling is simply a sign that in 1961 and 1962, comics professionals simply didn’t care as much about issues of originality and credit as they would later on. There wasn’t that much money in comics back then, and comics writers and artists rarely got their names on a story; Stan Lee pioneered regularly giving writers (including himself, of course), artists, and even letterers credits.

Moreover, for decades Lee has stated that in 1961 he was frustrated with comics and was ready to quit, but his wife urged him to start writing comics he would want to read himself; that suggestion inspired the Marvel revolution. It’s clear from looking at these early Silver Age Marvel stories that Stan Lee was consciously breaking new ground. He must have taken pride in this radical new direction he and his collaborators were setting for the superhero genre. As Evanier notes, it was Ditko who informed Lee about the resemblances between the Kirby version of Spider-Man and the Fly. I wonder if it was a matter of pride for Lee, now that he was attempting to raise the level of the superhero genre, not to be seen as imitating another comics character.

Or was it that, once he had embarked on the process of creating a new kid superhero, Lee began to envision ways of making him as different as the Fantastic Four were from previous superhero teams. As Evanier points out, the original version if Spider-Man also resembles the original Captain Marvel–a little boy who magically turns into a superhero. Isn’t it possible that once Lee saw Kirby’s first few pages, he realized he wanted to go in a different, more realistic direction, one for which Ditko’s grittier, quirkier art style would be more appropriate?

The Lee-Ditko Spider-Man is older than the previous Lee-Kirby version, has a different costume, and has nothing to do with magic (at least not until J,. Michael Straczynski recently established that Spider-Man draws his power from the “spider-totem”!). Evanier reports that Kirby “felt he’d at least contributed something” to Spider-Man’s creation, “for which he received neither pay nor acknowledgment” (Evanier p. 128). But the two versions are so different that I wonder if it’s credible to claim Kirby was one of Spider-Man’s co-creators. Rather, it seems that Kirby contributed to a proposed “Spider-Man” character that Lee ended up rejecting. Even if it was Kirby who proposed the “Spider-Man” name, that was based on Joe Simon’s Silver Spider. And certainly one thing that Marvel has shown is that there is a lot more to a superhero character than his name.

Evanier reveals that Kirby disliked another early Marvel super hero, Ant-Man, asserting that “No one fantasizes about being the size of an ant” (Evanier p. 128). “Years later,” Evanier goes on, “Jack would be both incensed and amused by a scholarly article that suggested that because he was not tall, the Marvel hero with whom he most closely identified had to be Ant-Man” (Evanier p. 128). I fear that as comics increasingly receive academic and critical attention, we’re going to see many more cases of scholars and reviewers making these sorts of unfounded assumptions. A proper critic would probably steer clear of committing the “intentional fallacy” in any event. But now asserting that people will doubtless speculate that Kirby hated being short and that’s why he so disdained Ant-Man–and joined with Stan in turning him into Giant-Man, as if overcompensating!

The character with whom Kirby did identify strongly was Nick Fury, saying that the invincible war hero turned superspy “Nick Fury is how I wish others saw me. Ben Grimm [The Thing] is probably closer to the way they do see me” (Evanier p.131). Does that mean Kirby thought others regarded him as bad-tempered? Or comical? Or monstrous? And again, did Stan Lee think of Nick Fury as an avatar of Jack Kirby? Or did Stan put some of his own personality into Fury? And did Jim Steranko think of Fury as an idealized Kirby surrogate when he took over the Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD series?

You might think that today’s comics pros might have already figured out that Fury has a lot in common with Kirby. But considering that Marvel’s Ultimates line depicts Nick Fury as a lookalike for Samuel L. Jackson, perhaps not. Think of Fury as Kirby’s idealized self-portrait, and Fury’s use of profanity in Marvel’s MAX line becomes even more offensive. But the writers who really don’t get it are the ones who, over the decades, insist on portraying Fury as a Machiavellian spymaster, defending an authoritarian reestablishment. What does this have to do with Jack Kirby’s idealized self-portrait? Or with the running theme of Kirby’s career, in which he struggled against corporate power rather than aligning himself with it?

Evanier describes how Kirby participated in the creation of Iron Man: even though it was Don Heck who drew the original story, Heck was following “some concept sketches” and a cover that Kirby had done. To my surprise, Kirby even had a hand in the genesis of Daredevil, apparently contributing plot ideas to Daredevil’s early issues and even coming up with the design for his billy club. Kirby drew the first Daredevil covers: does that mean he designed DD’s original yellow-and-black costume? “Often, on a comic where he did not do the interiors,” Evanier states, “he’d draw the cover and, in so doing, design a villain or other new character who’d appear within” (Evanier p. 133). Is there any way at this point of compiling a list of how many Silver Age Marvel characters Kirby thus designed, whom comics historians have presumably been crediting to other artists instead?

How much compensation did Kirby get for this helping to create characters in series and stories that he did not draw? It doesn’t appear that anyone at Marvel kept official records of Kirby’s contributions to creating characters in such circumstances. Again, it seems that in the early 1960s, before anyone realized that someday this would be of historical and financial importance, there was a much more lax attitude about apportioning credit for creating characters and series or contributing to plots. No one was getting royalties in comics back then, and it was assumed that the companies owned everything. Why would Kirby design characters for series he did not draw, and got no credit for, even a lead character like Iron Man, unless he thought at the time that it wasn’t a matter of importance?

Perhaps Kirby’s dissatisfaction with the status quo grew as Marvel became more successful and the commercial value of the characters grew considerably. Evanier writes that “Almost nothing about Jack’s working relationship with Marvel was on paper–not even, at the time, any delineation of what rights he had or was giving up to the material. Jack didn’t much like that, but he didn’t see an alternative” (Evanier p. 136).

Evanier doesn’t think much of Lee and Kirby’s revelation in Avengers #4 that Captain America had been in suspended animation, frozen within a block of ice, since the end of World War II: “The science was ridiculous,” complains Evanier, adding that “Stan and Jack would each later blame the other for it” (Evanier p. 131). But regardless of its scientific validity, Lee and Kirby concocted a brilliant image: Captain America as the blonde sun god, trapped in the realm of winter (and symbolically death), until he is resurrected by the warm waters of life. This may not make sense in terms of science, but it makes perfect sense in the metaphorical language of myth, and that is far more important to the superior genre.

Evanier disputes the familiar notion that Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” in Fantastic Four #48-50 was founded on the premise of the FF fighting God: “it’s hard to see how Galactus, who consumed life instead of creating it, resembled either’s notion of the Almighty” (Evanier p. 138).

But Lee and Kirby had already done stories about evil “gods,” notably Loki in Thor. Kirby would go on to create The New Gods and his other “Fourth World” series at DC, in which the most memorable figure is Darkseid, the evil god who rules the hellish planet Apokolips and seeks the “anti-life formula.” in the 1970s Kirby returned to Marvel and created The Eternals, which featured the “space gods” known as the Celestials who might annihilate the Earth in fifty years for reasons that are utterly inscrutable to humanity. Lee and Kirby may have believed in a more benign God, but that doesn’t mean they could not imagine a malevolent or destructive deity.

Moreover, as I’ve argued in my column here (see “Comics in Context” #184: “Clobbered Again”) and here (“Comics in Context” #185: “Get Off of My Cloud”), the Galactus trilogy can be read as dealing with three different aspects of God. Galactus is the God of Wrath, who has sentenced all living beings to inevitable death, and who cares nothing for inferior beings like humans. Uatu the Watcher is a benevolent, fatherly God, who nevertheless ordinarily refrains from intervening in human affairs, preferring to help mortals to succeeded through their own efforts. Then there’s the Silver Surfer, who, whether or not Lee and Kirby consciously intended it, acts as a Christ figure, sacrificing himself to save humanity. Ultimately the good aspect of God–the Watcher–makes it possible for humanity–Reed Richards–to assert their right to exist, overcoming the destructive aspect of God.

Evanier contends that Kirby thought of Galactus as a metaphor for “corporate raiders” who would “drain” a company of “its assets, and move on, “leaving a hollow, inert shell” (Evanier p. 138). Might Kirby have subconsciously expressing a fear that Marvel or the comics industry in general was draining his own creativity, leaving him a “hollow shell” without either credit or sufficient compensation? Indeed, Evanier reports that Kirby was concerned about his own health, and was seeking “health insurance and maybe a pension” from Marvel at this time, but in vain (Evanier p. 138).

Stan Lee has repeatedly acknowledged that when he received the original art pages for Fantastic Four #48, he was surprised to see the Surfer for the first time. He and Kirby had not discussed the Surfer beforehand; Kirby got the idea to give Galactus a herald and inserted him into the story. So now the Silver Surfer is generally regarded as having been created solely by Kirby.

But is that quite right? In the BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko (see “Comics in Context” #208: “Creative Differences”), Stan Lee explains that since he came up with the idea for a superhero called Spider-Man, then he should be acknowledged as the character’s sole creator. For the sake of argument, let’s assume here that Lee’s memory is correct and he did originate the idea. But comics is a visual medium. and Ditko devised the visual aspect of Spider-Man. Shouldn’t Ditko then be credited as Spider-Man’s co-creator?

Now let’s apply a similar argument to the Silver Surfer. Kirby introduced the character into Fantastic Four #48, designed his visual appearance, and gave him the role of Galactus’s herald: Kirby plotted the Surfer’s role in the first comic in which he appeared. But the Galactus trilogy is a three-part story. Once Kirby had introduced the Surfer, did Stan Lee co-plot the Surfer’s scenes in FF #49 and 50, including his meeting with Alicia Masters and his rebellion against Galactus, both of which defined the Surfer’s characterization? Does anyone know? Even if we assume that Kirby is solely responsible for plotting the Surfer sequences throughout the entire Galactus trilogy (And why should we?) and did border notes suggesting what the Surfer was talking about, it is still Stan Lee who wrote the Surfer’s dialogue throughout the Galactus trilogy. And one of Stan Lee’s greatest talents is the ability to delineate characterization through dialogue. Lee is ultimately responsible for creating the way in which the Silver Surfer speaks, and in defining his personality through that dialogue, in his initial appearances. Doesn’t Lee therefore merit credit as the Surfer’s co-creator? If Kirby created the pictures, Lee created the words.

Evanier draws a distinction between Kirby’s vision of the Surfer as a truly alien being, to whom human emotions are new concepts, and the origin that Lee gave him–without Kirby’s participation–in Silver Surfer #1 (August 1968) as a being who had once been a man like ourselves, but had vowed to serve Galactus in order to save his home world and the woman he loved. “That may have been the Surfer that Stan had been writing,” comments Evanier, “but it wasn’t the one that Jack had been drawing” (Evanier p. 141). That’s an interesting way to phrase it. It suggests that Lee and Kirby were indeed co-creators of the Surfer as he had appeared in previous stories in Fantastic Four, with Lee endowing the Surfer with a personality that contradicted Kirby’s intentions for the character. Since Lee was in charge, his interpretation of the Surfer’s personality won out. (Was Lee even aware that Kirby interpreted the Surfer differently? Had they discussed the subject? I’ve seen Lee recently say that Kirby considered the Surfer a “throwaway” character, and that he therefore adopted him. So it seems that even nowadays Lee is unaware of what the Surfer meant to Kirby.)

The Surfer’s origin was perhaps the most blatant case of Lee overruling Kirby’s intentions for a character or story. By the end of the 1960s, Evanier states, Kirby was completely plotting the stories he did with Lee, but “Sometimes Stan would deviate wildly from what Jack had intended. . . . [Kirby] loved the stories he developed. and would often feel that Stan’s word balloons stripped some issue of its meaning or inverted a key concept” (Evanier p. 147). It’s easy to see why Kirby would feel frustrated by this. He had obviously reached the point at which it was necessary for him to break off his collaboration with Lee and, if he could find the opportunity, either write his own stories or find a scripter who would more closely follow his ideas.

But I find myself sympathizing with Lee, as well. He was not only the credited writer but also the editor, the boss responsible for the entire Marvel line of comics. I imagine that Lee regarded his role as not simply to follow Kirby’s instructions in the border notes, but to mold the material in ways that he felt would make it better and more appealing to readers. Lee and Kirby weren’t equals in their collaborations in terms of their roles at Marvel: Lee was the editor, so that meant he had the final word.

Marvel recently published Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure #1, containing one of the final FF stories that Kirby drew, which Marvel had not previously published in complete form. The original artwork is reproduced with Kirby’s border notes; then you can read the “restored” version of the story with new dialogue by Stan Lee. And you can see for yourselves that Lee’s scripting consistently improves upon Kirby’s suggestions in the borders.

By the late 1960s Marvel was making money from merchandising superheroes that Kirby had co-created, putting his artwork on toys and such, there was a Fantastic Four TV show in 1967, and the year before there was a Marvel Super Heroes television series that reproduced Kirby artwork on screen. But Kirby wasn’t seeing any money from any of this.

Evanier reports that around this time Kirby learned that Bob Kane, the officially credited creator of Batman, had just made a “million dollar deal” with DC, but that DC had just fired a number of its veteran writers, including Bill Finger, who had written most of the early Batman stories and conceived most of the character’s basic mythos (see “Comics in Context” #94: “Back to Brigadoon”). “The lesson was not lost on Kirby,” Evanier writes: “Bob Kane, who’d been recognized as the creator of a successful property, had gotten rich. Bill Finger, who hadn’t, had gotten fired” (Evanier p. 150)

But was that the real lesson? Wasn’t it not just that Kane was recognized as Batman’s creator, but that DC wanted to make sure that Kane didn’t claim ownership of the copyright on Batman and take this valuable property away from them? Having been employed by Kane to write Batman, Finger presumably couldn’t pose that kind if threat to DC, so the DC Comics administration of that period obviously felt they could get away with treating Finger like dirt.

Did Kirby have any legal claim on the Marvel characters he co-created? Apparently Marvel didn’t think so back in the 1960s. Kirby kept hoping that Marvel would give him a better deal out of a simple sense of fairness. But the corporate mindset doesn’t believe in giving money better deals unless its forced to do so. Evanier writes that “All he [Kirby] wanted was a little more money, some kind of long-term financial security for himself and his family and an official acknowledgment of his status as co-creator” (Evanier p. 153). These are miniscule prices to pay for everything that Kirby had done for Marvel in the 1960s.

But Marvel’s new corporate owners saw no reason to pay for what they already possessed. Rewarding loyalty isn’t a reason that made sense to them. Unlike Kane, Kirby had no leverage, or did not think he did. All that Kirby could do is threaten to quit, depriving the company of his talents.

But, according to Evanier, Marvel’s new owners in 1970 believed that Stan Lee, presumably since he was the writer and editor, generated all the creative ideas at Marvel, and that the artists were interchangeable and simply implemented Lee’s ideas. Marvel had gone corporate, and the new bureaucrats were characteristically willfully blind to any reality that conflicted with their preconceptions. They apparently neither knew about the “Marvel method” of creating characters and stories, nor cared to find out, nor felt any need to learn enough about the comics business to discover why Jack Kirby was an irreplaceable creative resource. Back in 1970 it’s likely none of them considered comics to be anything more than crap to sell to kids. Marvel’s owners did not feel threatened whatsoever by the prospect of Jack Kirby quitting.

And so in 1970 Kirby did quit rather than suffer further mistreatment. He went to DC, where he created a masterwork, his “Fourth World.” But beyond that lay an astonishing downturn in his career, as we shall see next time.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of copyright challenges, as I was above: shortly after I finished writing this installment of my column, I discovered this March 29, 2008 article in The New York Times revealing that the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel–including his widow Joanne, the model for Lois Lane–has just been granted partial ownership of the character by a federal court. Well, well, well. I didn’t realize just how formidable Lois Lane can be. . . . .

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

Here’s a new feature that I should have thought of long ago. From now on, I’m going to supply links to Amazon for any books or DVDs that I review in my column. Here’s where you can go to order a copy of Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics for only $26.40, discounted from the list price of $40 (CLICK HERE TO ORDER).

Not only that, but I’m going to start rotating links to my own books at Amazon. com. The proper place to begin is with my most recent book, The Marvel Comics Travel Guide to New York City from Simon and Schuster (CLICK HERE TO ORDER). This is a handbook to the real, fictional, and fictionalized locations in stories throughout Marvel history: everything from the United Nations complex (site of appearances by Magneto and the Sub-Mariner) to the Daily Bugle building (both the comics and the movie versions, which are in very different sections of town!). If you’re a Marvel fan and you’ll be visiting New York City, this book will serve as your guide both to the Manhattan of real life and the Manhattan of the imagination, where superheroes swing high among the skyscrapers.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Just before Christmas I began my extended commentary on Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, his eagerly awaited book that serves as both a biography of Jack Kirby, the greatest adventure and fantasy artist in 20th century American comic books, and as an art book showcasing his work (see “Comics in Context” #207: “Royal Retrospective”), Right after New Year’s I did another installment of this column about the Kirby book, though half of it was actually about the BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko (see “Comics in Context” #208: “Creative Differences”). Then I agreed to postpone the rest of my commentary until Harry N. Abrams published the book in late February.

In the meantime I’ve devoted this column to other worthy subjects, such as Bob Clampett (“Comics in Context” #213), Steve Gerber (#214, 215 and 216), Darwyn Cooke (#217), Stephen Sondheim, of all people (#218), and Mephisto’s marriage counseling (#210). But now it’s March, Kirby: King of Comics is in stores, and I’ve received to go-ahead to resume what I consider not so much a review as my series of critical annotations on this landmark book.

Those of you who have read my contribution to the Beat’s annual survey this year know that I am interested in seeing how much coverage Kirby: King of Comics receives in the mainstream media. This would be a useful sign of just how wide and deep the mainstream culture’s new interest in the comics medium actually is.

So far I haven’t found much. But on Sunday March 23 The Washington Post ran a review by novelist Glen David Gold, a Kirby admirer who had already written about him in the catalogue for the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition (see “Comics in Context” #155: “Two American Masters”).

In his review Gold refers to David Michaelis’s recent biography Schulz and Peanuts that portrayed cartoonist Charles M. Schulz as a deeply troubled man (see “Comics in Context” #204: “Was It a Dark and Stormy Life?”). “Evanier, in contrast, presents Kirby as a decent and generous soul with some understandable fits of frustration. . . .but a reader”–by which Gold really means a specific reader, himself–“hungers for something deeper to explain his violent and angry imagery.”

Evanier refers to the nightmares that plagued Kirby after his return from World War II. Alluding to these, Gold continues, “Kirby seems to have had post-traumatic stress disorder after World War II, and I suspect that certain recurrent figures in his artwork came from his unconscious attempt to work out the horror of the battlefield.”

Well, perhaps the last part of the statement is true, although all one need do is look at the Captain America artwork from the early 1940s in Evanier’s book to see that Kirby was already creating explosively violent imagery before he ever entered the army. Gold may be overstating the case by claiming that Kirby had “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Yes, his nightmares were a symptom, but is there any evidence that Kirby’s behavior when he was awake was altered by his war experiences? The National Institute of Mental Health’s website states that people afflicted with this disorder “avoid situations that remind them of the original incident” that induced the severe mental stress. Then why did Kirby continually draw on his war experiences in his stories, as Evanier points out in the book?

On the other hand, Gold may be underrating Kirby’s “fits of frustration” as a source for his anger. In his book Evanier pointedly reprints Kirby’s full-page close-up of an enraged Silver Surfer from Silver Surfer #18 (September 1970) as an expression of the intensity of the feelings that led Kirby to quit Marvel for DC (see Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics, p. 162).

Moreover, I should think that Kirby’s childhood as a gang member on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, continually getting into fights, as Evanier describes in his first chapter, and as dramatized through the book’s reprinting of Kirby’s story “Street Code,” easily provides part of the explanation for the “violence” in Kirby’s comics.

Certainly Kirby, the co-creator of the Hulk must have known what it was like to feel anger, even rage. But to characterize Kirby’s visual imagery as “violent and angry” seems to me misleading. I wonder about the mindsets of various contemporary comics editors, writers and artists who inflict rape, mutilation and murder on longrunning characters. But I never have the sense that Kirby inflicts unwarranted cruelty upon his characters. (Even violence inflicted upon “Terrible” Turpin in The New Gods, unusually brutal for a Kirby book, ultimately serves to heighten the courageous cop’s heroism.) Ben Grimm’s battle cry, “It’s clobbering time!”, is more often than not an expression of joy. There is an exuberance about the heroes’ fight scenes in Kirby’s work, like Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn dueling in swashbuckler movies. Captain America’s action scenes embody the classic American spirit, striving for freedom, triumphing over oppression. Other Kirby heroes may not be explicitly patriotic in theme, but they represent a similar spirit.

Besides, if you pay attention, Kirby doesn’t draw that much actual violence. He characteristically takes an abstract approach to it: he draws a flash of light representing impact, rather than actually showing a fist connecting with a jaw, as we shall see in the course of my commentary.

In other words, whereas recent superhero comics, at their worst, exhibit a sadistic fascination with pain and suffering, Kirby’s comics use images of the human body in action–running, leaping, flying, and even fighting–to convey sheer, uplifting joy. Far from exuding anger, Kirby’s comics communicate a positive outlook on humanity and the prospects for the world.

At the point in Kirby: King of Comics where I left off in January, World War II had ended, and DC Comics’ editorial had lost interest in having anyone–even the brilliant team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby–act as outside suppliers for them. So, after a few commercial misfires at Harvey, Simon and Kirby launched the romance comic genre by creating Young Romance, which became a tremendous hit. So much for the foresight of the DC bureaucracy circa the late 1940s.

Although Evanier doesn’t make a point of this, the illustrations in this section of the book show that Kirby was rapidly growing as an artist in the postwar years. Look at the stoical face of the figure in the electric chair in the cover from Justice Traps the Guilty #8 (1948) (Evanier p. 73) and the classically handsome build of the half-crouching diver (as a school of fish drift past him, in a lovely grace note) in the cover of Black Magic #189 (1952) (Evanier p. 77).

An impressive page by Kirby and Simon from Boys’ Ranch #2 (1950) (Evanier p. 81) demonstrates their skill in enabling their characters to “act.” One usually thinks of Jack Kirby as drawing situations, emotions and characters that are larger than life, on an operatic scale. But consider the subtlety he shows on this page.

In the second panel a Native American, Running Bear, races from a burning cabin, carrying a white boy he has rescued. There are no words in this panel, nor the speed lines so often used to indicate motion in comics. The figure of Running Bear is positioned as if running, but has a stillness about him as well. His face concealed, pressed against the baby, to shield both the child and himself from the flames, his arms firmly wrapped around the boy, Running Bear seems like an iconic figure of parental concern. Pieces of wood are falling from the cabin, yet they seem to hover around Running Bear, as if time has stood still for a moment as he makes his escape. Rather than give us a conventional look at flames, Kirby takes a nearly abstract approach. as if Running Bear has emerged from a portal of light and shadow. In the right foreground we see the back of another Native American’s head, with his left hand raised, watching. Again, we are shown no facial expressions, and read no dialogue, yet the onlooker’s sense of concern comes across simply from the position of his hand and the tilt of his head. He stands in for the reader, reacting as we should, with a certain awe, to the sight of this heroic rescuer of the child escaping this inferno.

In panel three the rescued child wails silently, venting emotion as openly as an infant, but his rescuer is far more reserved, looking outward, presumably at the burning cabin, as he states that the child’s parents are dead. There is a look of quiet melancholy in hs eyes, reinforced by the darkness beneath his eyebrows and the thin lines indicating shadows along his cheeks.

Running Bear declares he will adopt the white child, but another tribesman insists that he return the boy to the flames. This is a serious clash, but Kirby and Simon continue to underplay effectively: in panel five Running Bear looks grimly at the other Indian, clenching his jaw in quiet anger, as he states, simply but firmly, “I keep the papoose!” Bawling only a moment (and two panels) before, the baby is now quiet, looking warily at the other Indian while seeming comfortable in Running Bear’s grasp, apparently recognizing him as his new protector.

The final panel of the page is a little masterpiece of “acting,” as running Best looks down at his newly adopted son, with parental warmth, the child responds, smiling up at him, and the other Indian watches, his jaw set in a tight frown, clearly resentful of Running Bear’s decision.

Longtime Marvelites may realize that Kirby later restaged this scene of a warrior adopting an orphaned son of his enemies, in the Tales of Asgard story in which Odin found and adopted the infant Loki (in Journey into Mystery #112, 1964).

Then there’s the cover to Simon and Kirby’s war comic Foxhole #1 (1954) (Evanier p. 85). Recently a friend and I were leafing through a copy of Kirby: King of Comics at a bookstore and came across this page, whereupon my friend declared it to be one of the greatest comics covers ever. (In his Washington Post review, Gold says he was stunned by it as well.) In the foreground is a soldier, his face wrapped in bandages, save for one eye, and his mouth, holding a cigarette. The bandages on the side if his head are stained with blood. He wears a helmet with two thick dents caused by bullets. He looks something like DC’s later war comics character, the Unknown Soldier. But the man on the foxhole cover is another of Kirby’s iconic figures, this one representing both the horrors suffered in war and the survivors’ ability to endure. The soldier is writing a letter to his mother, and we see part of it floating above a scene of the aftermath of battle, with corpses on a shore and medics attending a wounded man. The letter provides easy irony: the war is “a day on the beach.” But the soldier isn’t smiling or even looking at what he’s writing. His single eye stares emptily, as if he is lost in his own thoughts about the war, disconnected from the brave, witty front he is putting up for his mother back home. This cover is an entire story in itself.

Simon and Kirby and their studio kept busy and prospered during this period, but Evanier quotes Kirby as saying it was “too good to last” (Evanier p. 80) and it didn’t. I’ve learned from my own experience and observing those of others that when you–and your colleagues–are in a successful period in your life and career, it may seem as if it will last forever, but everything changes, and success can be surprisingly fleeting. Kirby had enough insight to realize this even this early in his career, with greater triumphs and equally great disappointments still lying before him.

Apart from “Street Code,” the only complete story reprinted in Kirby: King of Comics is “The League of the Handsome Devils!” from Simon and Kirby’s Fighting American #2 (1954). Fighting American and Speedboy were variations on Captain America and Bucky: the patriotically-themed hero and his kid sidekick. Evanier points out that by 1954 the superhero genre was mostly “passe.” Indeed, as I noted two weeks ago, except for the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, superheroes had virtually vanished from comics, and the superhero phenomenon must have seemed like a passing fad that had run its course. Hence, Simon and Kirby thought that taking a tongue-in-cheek approach might breathe new life into it. However, Evanier points out that “Fighting American. . .just got sillier and sillier, prompting one critic to suggest that Joe and Jack were deliberately screwing with the formula they’d invented, just to see if anyone would notice” (Evanier p. 88).

A sign that a genre has run its course in its current form is when it degenerates into self-parody. Hence, for example, Universal”˜s versions of Dracula and Frankenstein originated in serious horror films in the 1930s, but were reduced to playing villains to Abbott and Costello by the late 1940s. I’ve also seen it said that you know when a genre has run out of steam when Mel Brooks gets around to parodying it. With Fighting American it seemed that not even two of the foremost creators of the Golden Age of superheroes could take the genre seriously any more.

But thinking about Fighting American, I realized that in one way Simon and Kirby were once again ahead of their time with that series. Didn’t Fighting American in 1954 anticipate the “camp” treatment of superheroes in American pop culture a dozen years later, most notably through the 1966 Batman TV show? Wasn’t the Batman show really a parody of the superhero comics of the 1940s and 1950s, viewed from the ironic perspective of the 1960s, as if the genre had failed to adapt to changing times?

But I don’t believe that any major genre truly dies. Rather, it may languish until an inspired creator finds a way to revitalize it for a new generation and time, as, say, George Lucas did for the “space opera” with Star Wars or the adventure movie serial with the Indiana Jones movies.

When Simon and Kirby created Fighting American, the birth of the Silver Age of Comics, with the debut of editor Julius Schwartz’s revamped Flash in Showcase #4, was only two years away. But the true revolution in the superhero genre would come about in the early 1960s through Stan Lee’s collaboration with Kirby, Steve Ditko and others on “the Marvel Age of Comics.”

Thus Kirby would be in large part responsible for the resurrection and reinvention if the superhero genre which transformed it from a wartime fad into an enduring component of American popular culture that has now spread from comics into novels, cinema and television.

But, it appears, it was Stan Lee who was the essential catalyst in the Marvel revolution. Simon and Kirby were content in Fighting American to mock a genre that had seemingly run its course. They did not come up with a way of revitalizing the superhero genre for the postwar era. It was Stan Lee who instigated taking the superhero genre in a new direction that led to its great success in many media today.

Evanier explains that the particular Fighting American story he reprints was originally published just before the institution of the Comics Code Authority, the comics industry’s self-censorship board, and was subsequently republished in 1966. He provides “before” and “after” versions of the first panel after the introductory splash, showing a murder victim being seized from behind, as his hat falls off to one side. In Kirby and Simon’s original, a menacing hand extends from the right, holding an ice pick, about to thrust it into the victim’s chest. A hand from the left grips the man’s throat. The victim’s eyes are tightly shut, and his tongue extends outward as he screams: “AAAA!” In the Code-approved 1966 version, the ice pick, the sound effect for the scream. and even the hand that gripped the victim’s throat have all vanished. The man’s eyes are now open, and his tongue is no longer visible (Evanier p. 88).

But I find I prefer the second version to the first. Kirby puts such anguish into the murder victim’s face, and creates such a vivid sense of movement –the way the man’s head tilts back, the way his hat falls away–that he creates a powerful image of desperation, pain, and distress. The hand on the right may no longer hold a weapon, but clenched into a fist, it remains both ominous and mysterious. The deleted scream, ice pick and tongue seem like gilding the lily. The later, simpler version is perfectly sufficient, again demonstrating Kirby’s ability to capture iconic imagery on the page.

The rest of the story has some striking visual images. Take panel four of page two (Evanier p. 90), in which the two gentlemanly murderers bow, hats in hand, to an elderly lady. The two men do not look alike, and yet their identical poses and expressions make them comical mirror images of one another. The top of a skyscraper rises above each man’s head, adding to the sense of duality.

The topmost panel of the story’s fourth page might be the archetypal Kirby image of a punch (Evanier p. 92). Kirby doesn’t actually show Fighting American’s fist connecting with the bad guy’s jaw; rather, Kirby has created a picture of the sheer energy of the punch. Fighting American’s left arm is at the bottom of a half-circular arc tracing the movement of his fist. There is a flash of light, signifying the energy released by the force of Fighting American’s blow. The villain is catapulted away, so powerfully that he seems to fly through the air, and collides with a wooden post, which snaps and shatters from the impact. Kirby and Simon have given us not the punch itself but its immediate aftermath, which provides the more dramatic image.

The most remarkable visual sequence in the story comes in the bottom tier of the fifth page (Evanier p. 93). On first glance it seems to be a cinematic sequence in which a single villain pulls off his face mask over the course of three panels. Look again and you’ll find that each of the three panels depicts a different man, each ugly in a different way. But Kirby and Simon have staged the sequence so that in the first panel a man begins pulling off his mask, which still covers the top of his head; in the second, a different man has pulled his mask entirely off, and in the third, an unmasked man grotesquely smiles in triumph as he lifts his mask up high. It looks like a single continuous action divided among three men. This serves a thematic purpose, as well, linking the three men together as members of the “Handsome Devils” by having them act in unison, just like the handsome bowing murderers on the second page. But this tine the effect is not comedic but eerily bizarre.

In the middle tier of the next to last page of the story, Kirby and Simon devise a variation on the classic pyramidal composition in art. This time the pyramid consists of the three bad guys, bunched together, framed in either side by Speedboy and Fighting American, each delivering knockout blows. The plots in Fighting American might not have been serious, but Simon and Kirby’s devotion to the craft of visual storytelling was.

But despite Simon and Kirby’s mastery of their artform, the comics industry was in sharp decline, in large part due to the widespread allegations in the 1950s that comics fomented juvenile delinquency. Simon and Kirby’s own company, Mainline, went under, and Simon became an editor at Harvey. One of the greatest artists in the business, Jack Kirby, who had been riding high only a short time before, was now on his own and out of work. World War II aside, it was the scariest time of his life,” Evanier recounts, literally giving Kirby nightmares about being unable to support his wife and children. This man of extraordinary talent found himself figuratively on the edge of an abyss. Considering the economic news in the papers lately, and commentators likening the present day to 1929, perhaps it is easier for many of us today to comprehend what that must feel like.

Some of us might also identify with Kirby in that, like many creative people who are best suited to working in their art, he was temperamentally unsuited to networking and self-promotion. Simon had been the businessman in their partnership; “as skillful as he [Kirby] was with stories and art, he was still weak in the area of salesmanship” (Evanier p. 99).

People in today’s comics industry might further see parallels in their own lives with Kirby’s dilemma in looking for work outside comics. “No luck,” reports Evanier. “His skills only seemed marketable in one line of radically diminishing work. If he could do anything else, he didn’t know what it was” (Evanier p. 99). Kirby was one of the greatest masters of his chosen artform, yet the rest of the world regarded him as useless.

After a short stint doing the Yellow Claw for Stan Lee at the company that would later become Marvel, Kirby briefly reunited with Simon to create Challengers of the Unknown at DC. Silver Age artist Gil Kane asserted that the DC production department “kept demanding Jack strip his work of all the sharp edges and stylistic innovations that gave it its power and energy” (Evanier p. 101). This is an example of corporate conventional wisdom at its worst: unable or unwilling to perceive Kirby’s true artistry, these champions of mediocrity demanded that Kirby reduce his creative standards to their level. Evanier quotes Kirby as saying, “They kept showing me their other books–books that weren’t selling–and saying, “˜This is what a comic book ought to be’” (Evanier p. 101). This is the measure of their blindness: they would rather go down with the ship rather than try something different that might save them in a changing market. Yet Kirby, who had had so many hits over two decades by this point, was hardly a radical newcomer! And, to pose a rhetorical question, just how do the artistic reputations of the majority of DC’s pencilers of the 1950s compare to Kirby’s nowadays?

Perhaps you are telling yourself that the world of comics is much more enlightened now, a half century later. Is it? Ask yourselves which of your favorite artists or writers–newcomers or veterans–isn’t getting enough work in comics right now, perhaps because his or her work doesn’t fit the conventional wisdom at the major companies about “what a comic book ought to be” in today’s market. Who’s being unjustly ignored now?

Next came Kirby’s remarkable collaboration with another legend, Wally Wood, on Sky Masters, a newspaper comic strip about space travel: Wood’s inking endowed Kirby’s visions of the fantastic with the look of precise, detailed realism.

It might have seemed an ideal project, except for the fact that Kirby was getting paid so little for it. The real life villain of this piece was DC’s Batman editor Jack Schiff, who demanded an undeserved cut of the earnings. It’s bad enough for Schiff’s reputation that he presided over Batman during the series’ creative nadir, but that merely makes him guilty of having bad taste. The Kirby book casts Schiff as a greedy, vengeful man who did his best to sink Kirby’s career; Superman editor Mort Weisinger also comes across quite poorly in Evanier’s telling.

A half century ago Schiff and Weisinger doubtless thought that no outside party would ever learn about their mistreatment of Kirby, and even if anyone did, no one cared about people who worked in comic books. But today’s comics company executives and editors should take notice. There will be more biographies about major figures in American comic books, and autobiographies by some of them as well. Kirby: King of Comics will be far from the last book that probes the history of the American comics industry. If film histories provide an example, these scholars are far more likely to take the side of the creative artist in a dispute with one or more of the “suits.” Today, for example, who defends the RKO studio’s corporate decision to take The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) away from its director Orson Welles, severely cut it, and shoot a new ending? People at comics companies should now ask themselves: how will their decisions look to historians ten, twenty or fifty years from now? The present administration at Marvel had nothing to do with the company’s poor treatment of Kirby in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, yet that still stains the company’s reputation, and probably will continue to do so for years to come.

In 1959 Kirby briefly collaborated again with Simon on two projects, including Adventures of the Fly, a revision of a previous series concept of Simon’s, The Silver Spider. Since Schiff had slammed DC’s doors sit on him, Kirby had only one place left to find work: the company once called Timely, then known as Atlas, and that would soon take the name Marvel. Kirby, it seems, would have preferred not to work for Lee, who had been his former office “go-pher.” But Stan Lee recognized Kirby’s greatness as an artist, and, however obvious that may seem to us today, it appears to have been a rare insight back in 1960. Give Stan Lee credit as a visionary who could see back then what the editors at DC–and, indeed, the world at large at that time–could not.

Back then, Marvel, now this corporate monolith, was so small that, Evanier remarks, “some felt that he [publisher Martin Goodman] only kept the comics going so Stan Lee would have a job” (Evanier p. 111). Goodman had nearly shut the comics line down in 1957, and Kirby recalled Goodman briefly terminating the comics in 1961, although Evanier casts doubt on this.

What would have happened if Martin Goodman had closed down his comics line for good? If Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had never had the chance to collaborate on the Marvel revolution? If instead Lee and Kirby had both ended up leaving the comic book business–although what they would have done instead is a good question–and had never teamed up again? Would there be superhero comics today? Would there be superhero movies today? Would there be comic books of any kind, or the specialty stores that sell them? Would the graphic novel revolution of the last few decades have occurred without the comics shops and a prosperous American comics industry? Or would American comic books have simply died as the “mom and pop” stores that sold them to kids faded away. as did the 1960s head shops that sold the undergrounds?

Without Lee and Kirby’s Marvel revolution, which redefined and reenergized the superhero genre for a new generation of older readers, this column would not exist, nor would most of the Internet sites about comics, and most of us in America who have devoted our careers to comics as an art form would be doing something else.

How easily the course of American popular culture would have been different if Martin Goodman had given up publishing comics as a dead end, or if Stan Lee, feeling creatively frustrated, had quit comics in 1961 as he once intended, or even if Jack Schiff had not blackballed Jack Kirby from DC. How many lives would have been changed over the last four decades?

These are questions that Mark Evanier does not address in his book. What if circumstances had been different and Jack Kirby had taken a different path when he reached this crossroads in the history of popular culture? Now there’s a “What If?” story for Marvel!

But Lee and Kirby did come together at the right time and the right place, and in 1961 they jointly created Fantastic Four #1, the Big Bang of the Marvel Universe. Look at the familiar final pages of the FF’s origin story reprinted in this book (Evanier pgs. 116-117). We’ve ready seen in Kirby: King of Comics that Jack Kirby could masterfully draw action scenes, visually render characterization, and even draw monsters like the FF’s Thing. But in this collaboration of Lee and Kirby, both in the words and in the pictures, there is a sense of drama, rooted in character, expressed through dialogue and action, that is unlike anything Evanier showed us earlier in his book. Here at the crossroads, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby laid out the new road for the superhero genre and for American comics, as we shall see next week.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

People who aspire to become actors want to be on stage or on television or in the movies. Even those of us without that particular career ambition may fantasize about being “in the movies” in a different sense. In the silent comedy Sherlock, Jr. (1924), Buster Keaton’s character falls asleep in a movie projectionist’s booth, and in his dream sees the figures on the movie screen. enacting the tale of a jewel robbery, transform into people he knows. Keaton’s dream self proceeds to walk up to and into the screen, interacting with the characters on-screen. After being catapulted from one movie location to another by a series of edits, Keaton’s character eventually returns to the first setting, this time having metamorphosed into a character in the story, the detective, Sherlock Jr., who sets out to find the thief and recover the jewels.

Travel between reality and illusion goes in the opposite direction in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a heroic figure from a movie steps down from the screen and enters the real world.

In animation there is a long tradition of attempting to break down the barriers between the real world and the cartoon world. In Max and Dave Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell cartoons, the animated Ko-Ko the Clown repeatedly escapes and wreaks havoc in the “live action” world of Max (see “Comics in Context” #190: “Pop Eye-Con”), while in Walt Disney’s early Alice shorts, a real girl appears within a cartoon environment (see “Comics in Context” #211: “The Silent Rabbit”). Over succeeding decades filmmakers continued to experiment with mixing live action and animation, as in conductor Leopold Stokowski shaking hands with Mickey Mouse in Fantasia (1940), Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry (of the Tom and Jerry team) in Anchors Aweigh (1945), the “Jolly Holiday” sequence in Mary Poppins (1964), complete with dancing penguins (see “Comics in Context” #158: “Jolly Holiday”), and Robert Zemeckis’s visually astounding Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Since then, advances in computer technology have resulted in the creation of animated characters that blend seamlessly into “live action” environments. While watching the films, it is easy to forget that Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies or the title character in his 2005 King Kong (see “Comics in Context” #121: “The Once and Future Kong”) are merely digital constructs interacting on-screen alongside real people. Zemeckis’s The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007) seek, not entirely successfully, to fuse live action and animation, utilizing real actors; performances as the templates for digital characters (see “Comics in Context” #66: “A Christmas Potpourri” and #205: “Identity Theft”).

You could argue that this same desire to mix cartoons with reality underlies the live action screen adaptations of comics properties from Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980) and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990) to the current wave of live action movies featuring Marvel and DC superheroes.

And then there are the attempts to adapt cartoon properties to the stage. Victor Herbert wrote the music for a 1908 operetta based in Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, and the classic Broadway musical of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner premiered in 1956.

The Walt Disney Company’s first effort to adapt one of its animated films to the Broadway stage was Beauty and the Beast in 1994. With its talking animals, it might have seemed impossible to translate The Lion King to the stage. Rather than attempt the hopeless task of persuasively disguising her cast as realistic animals, director Julie Taymor triumphed in her 1991 Broadway production by imaginatively emphasizing theatrical artifice. Some members wore animal masks or costumes that did not conceal their real faces. Other animals, including various principal characters, were represented by puppets, yet the puppeteers remained clearly visible. Through such means Taymor openly acknowledged that she was dealing in make-believe and was inviting the audience to participate in the process by using their imaginations to pretend that the puppets and masked figures onstage were real animals. It worked brilliantly, and the Broadway Lion King was and remains a tremendous artistic and commercial success. (Taymor is reportedly currently working on a Spider-Man stage musical, which will include a group of singing comics fans known as “the Geek Chorus” who recount Spider-Man’s history. I do not feel complimented.)

Walt Disney Theatricals has launched other stage versions of past Disney animated or partly animated films, such as Tarzan (see “Comics in Context” #133: “Swinging down Broadway”) and Mary Poppins (see “Comics in Context” #158: “Jolly Holiday”), but each time has fallen short of the standards set by Taymor’s Lion King. The latest of these is the new Broadway musical version of The Little Mermaid, and I did promise a while back to review it for this column. Unfortunately, I’ve decided against it. In large part this is due to my current financial straits, and also, thanks to my recent software upgrades on my computer, to the encyclopedic video resources of the Internet. On YouTube it’s easy to find videos of the Broadway Mermaid‘s versions of the best known musical numbers from the animated film, but the stagings are in each case disappointing. For example, in the film “Under the Sea” is sung to a rollicking montage of dancing fish that builds to a climactic spectacle. In the Broadway Mermaid performers move around on skates in order to convey the impression of swimming, and following the Taymor mode, their costumes do not conceal their faces. Even so, in this Good Morning, America clip of “Under the Sea”, the performers seem to ne no more than they really are–weirdly costumed humans performing surprisingly conventional choreography–rather than somehow, through movement, costume and acting, conjuring a world of frolicking fish in the imagination. And if I can tell from the videos that the Broadway Mermaid can’t pull off the big musical numbers from the animated film, then odds are that I’d find the show as a whole disappointing. It would cost at least to but a ticket for Mermaid, and in my current financial state, the gamble doesn’t seem with it.

But a while back, before my current situation arose, I purchased a less expensive advance ticket to another current Broadway show, which provides an amazing new twist on the theme of combining the world of animation and the world of reality. This show employs computer animation directly on stage. Most of you are surely aware of how movie actors perform in front of “green screens” so that CGI animation or computer-generated backgrounds can be inserted later. Imagine attending a Broadway show in which the actors perform against projected CGI backgrounds and interact with CGI characters!

In “Comics in Context” I write about comics and cartoon art in their various forms, and any related subjects: for example, a live action film adaptation of comics material is fair game. Sometimes it may seem like a bit of a stretch to include a particular subject within this column’s purview. Longtime readers may recall that one week in my column I wrote about waiting outside Manhattan’s Symphony Space to see a panel discussion with Buffy the Vampire Hunter creator Joss Whedon and the great Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim; I never got in, but the panel discussion was broadcast outside through speakers, so at least I got to hear and report on it (see “Comics in Context” #77: “Gone with the Steam”). Now what did this have to do with comics and cartoons? Well, Whedon has written extensively in comics, including Astonishing X-Men for Marvel (see “Comics in Context”#42: “Joss Whedon’s Comics and Stories”), and his current Buffy “Season 8” comics series for Dark Horse. But Sondheim? Well, if I push a point, he did write the songs for the 1990 Dick Tracy movie and even lyrics for a song for off-Broadway’s The MAD Show, inspired by MAD Magazine, back in 1966. But now I’ve got a better answer: it is the Roundabout Theatre Company’s new production of Sondheim’s and book writer James Lapine’s 1984 musical Sunday in the Park with George, at Manhattan’s Studio 54, that employs animation so astonishingly onstage.

(Yes, that’s right. I can now claim to have been to the notorious Studio 54 three times, albeit long after its days as a notorious discotheque. Before that, it was a CBS radio and television studio that was once home to The Jack Benny Program, What’s My Line? and even Captain Kangaroo. See here.)

The first act of the musical is about the 19-th century French neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat and the creation of his masterwork A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Un dimanche apres-midi a l’Ile de la Grande Jatte), which now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. (Back in the 1980s, I attended the Chicago Comicon several tines, back when it was held in Chicago, not Rosemont, Illinois, and before Wizard bought it. By Sunday afternoon I would feel saturated with comics and would walk a few blocks up Michigan Avenue to the Art Institute, where I would spend most of my time in the museum’s world-class Impressionist collection, including La Grande Jatte.)

The scenes shift between Seurat’s studio and the setting of the painting, a park on an island in the Seine River in Paris. But the set looks like a large indoor room, complete with doors, but all in white, like a new canvas for a painter, or the blank white page that is supposed to intimidate the writer who is trying to get started, or even a blank computer screen. Seurat enters, makes verbal commands or gesture with his hands (like that archetypal figure, the conductor), and the room around him begins to change. A huge streak of black materializes on the walls, running across the set. An oddly tied white curtain, wide at the top, narrow below, suddenly bursts into colors, and thus transforms before our eyes into a tree. Before long, the walls of the set have transformed into what seems to be one of Seurat’s studies for La Grande Jatte in conte crayon, all in black and shades of gray. Rightly impressed by this opening coup de theatre, the audience burst into applause. But there was more to come: eventually, perhaps without the audience even noticing exactly when it happened, this preliminary version of La Grande Jatte blossomed into color.

This opening suggests that, even when the story is literally taking place within Seurat’s studio or on the island of La Grande Jatte, the real setting of the first act is Seurat’s imagination. Just as the evolving work that will become La Grande Jatte covers the walls of the set enclosing Seurat, Seurat is, figuratively, within his own painting. Seurat is consumed by his passion to create art; everything else, even his lover Dot, must take a secondary place. No matter where Seurat is physically, psychologically he exists within the world of art he is creating.

At two points during the show, the same point is made through simpler, less spectacular means. We see Seurat standing behind a semitransparent screen on which the evolving La Grande Jatte appears, as he works on it. The figure of Seurat–or, all of it that we can see–is completely contained within the frame of the painting. So Seurat looks as if he is inside the painting, working on it from within, while Dot, his neglected lover, can only gaze at them both from outside.

So the setting is ambiguous. Indeed, at one point Seurat decides to remove a tree from his painting (another curtain with projected color, which proceeds to move offstage). Shortly afterwards, Seurat’s mother, whom he uses as a model for one of the figures in La Grande Jatte, enters, presumably on the real island. But she then wonders aloud what happened to her favorite tree. It’s as if Seurat’s decision to dispose of the tree in his painting somehow altered the landscape of the real island.

The identities of most of the first act’s supporting cast of characters are similarly ambiguous. They are primarily supposed to be the real people who Seurat used as models for the figures in the painting, including Dot and Seurat’s mother. But at times these actors are playing not the models but the figures in the painting, as in the first act finale, when Seurat, acting as conductor or director, maneuvers them into the places they occupy in his finished painting. The second act opens with the song “It’s Hot,” in which the figures in the painting complain about having to remain frozen in place in the painting for year after year, as if they retained the personalities of their models.

Not every figure in La Grande Jatte is represented onstage by an actor. In the original 1984 production, the other prominent figures were represented by life-size three-dimensional cutouts. (The original production was shown on PBS in 1986, was made available on home video, and, chopped into over twenty sections, has been posted in YouTube, probably in violation of copyright.) In the course of the Roundabout production, animated sailboats sometimes pass along the river, and occasionally an animated human figure appears and moves in the background. There are two soldiers standing side by side in La Grande Jatte. In the Roundabout production one soldier is played by a live actor but the other is a CGI animated figure, which interacts with actors onstage. Seurat brings out small screens on which animated dogs appear, one of which scampers about merrily. (You can get some idea of what the production looks like from The New York Times‘s audio slide show here.)

The second act takes place a hundred years later, in the 1980s, and centers on Seurat’s (fictional) descendant George (played by the same actor who portrayed Seurat), an artist who finds himself in a creative rut. In the song “Putting it Together” this George explains how life in the modern art world forces him continually to network and schmooze with wealthy collectors, museum executives and art critics in order to obtain the commissions he needs to finance his work. In the original production the actor playing George moved life sized cutouts of himself into position on stage during a party scene. The idea was that these doppelgangers represented George’s public self, chatting away amiably with the people he needed to impress at the party, while the actor playing George represented his true, inner self, singing about his disdain for the necessity of having to sell himself in this manner. (You can see the original staging for “Putting It Together“.)

But in this new production George’s doppelgangers are moving, projected figures of himself. There is even a point at which the actor playing George pours a drink into a glass held by one of the projected George dopplegangers!

The reviews and articles about this Roundabout production put such emphasis in the animation that I expected more of it than there was. Still, I was impressed with what I saw. This production originated at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a small company in London, before transferring to the West End. In all three of its venues, the production was directed by Sam Buntrock, who was formerly best known as an animator. (See his February 2008 interview in The New York Times). Buntrock explains in a video on the Roundabout website that animation has been used in stage productions before (though it’s the first time I’ve seen it onstage) but what makes this production different is that the animation is integral to expressing the meaning of the show. Sondheim told The New York Times that “The play is about perception, and here we see the work as George perceives it,” as it evolves.

I’m surprised that I haven’t seen anything about this Sunday revival on animation websites I visit. Now that CGI animation has been used so effectively in a live stage production, where will it go from here? I would be surprised if Disney Theatrical Productions–and Disney Imagineering–were not studying Buntrock’s use of animation onstage and planning how to take it further, both in theme park attractions and onstage. I would have supposed that creating computer animation for a stage production is expensive, but maybe not, considering that this Sunday revival started out in such a small venue with a presumably low budget.

Would “Under the Sea” have worked better onstage with live action performers interacting with CGI fish? Is it possible that a future live action production of Mary Poppins could have a live action Bert dancing with animated penguins, recreating the number from the movie right in front of us? The animation in Sunday in the Park seems to me to be only the beginning of a new stage technology. How much further will it have advanced ten years from now?

Sunday in the Park with George is not simply about Seurat and his fictional descendant, but about the life of the creative artist, a theme that I’ve found in other works I’ve discussed in past installments of this column. Critics find autobiographical themes in Sunday: The New York Times‘ Ben Brantley wrote in his February 22, 2008 review that “As a portrait of the artist as an embattled and rejected man Sunday has been read as a sort of apologia pro vita sua by Mr. Sondheim”. If so, then perhaps Sunday also has autobiographical meaning for James Lapine, who wrote the show’s book and directed the original production. Seurat was a painter, but Sondheim the composer and Lapine the playwright can identify with him because they are all creative artists.

And I think of writing criticism as an art. I saw the original production in the 1980s and, though I admired it, I felt no emotional connection with the work. But perhaps that was because back then I thought of myself as a student. Now that I’ve been a professional writer for decades, upon experiencing Sunday again, I see all these connections to my own experience. If Seurat created his paintings from dots if color (using the pointillist technique he devised), and Sondheim creates music from individual notes, then each week I start with nothing–like the white set at Sunday‘s opening–and assemble one of these columns out of individual words, studying the works I review (as Seurat studied his models), forming ideas, developing them, discovering connections, and fitting my concepts together into an overall structure.

The show describes Seurat as having a “mission to see.” That captures the artist’s sense of duty to his or her art, to follow the muse wherever she takes him or her. (In the second act, when Dot appears to Seurat’s descendant to encourage him to pursue his art, she is not so much the “real” Dot as she us the personification of the muse.) As this musical shows, that sense of mission is so strong that it can outweigh practical concerns and even reduce personal relationships to secondary importance. Dot leaves Seurat, and his descendant George parts from his wife, probably in both cases because the artist’s devotion to his art takes first place. I can understand this sense of isolation as well; writing is a solitary task. Brantley’s reference to Seurat and Sondheim as “embattled” may be too strong a word, but in the show Seurat has to contend with people–a successful fellow artist (who, of course, is now forgotten) and even hs mother–who do not comprehend what he is attempting to do. (Why, it’s like people who are bewildered at the idea that someone would take the comics medium seriously and spend his life writing about it.)

Yet the show demonstrates that the artist’s life of devotion to his “mission” is a noble quest. One of the show’s songs is titled “Children and Art”, asserting that these are the proper legacies for any person to leave behind him. Seurat only inadvertently fathers a daughter, but his true legacy is his art, both through its own merits and as an inspiration to future artists (like Seurat’s descendant George) who will build upon this heritage. The first act of Sunday ends with Seurat arranging the other cast members into the positions the figures take in his finished composition, fixed “forever” as an enduring work of art, achieving transcendence. In the finale of the second act the figures from the painting reappear and bow to the 1980s George, encouraging him to follow his ancestor’s example and pursue his own new creative path.

In the final moments, the supporting cast leaves the stage, and the projections vanish, returning to the production’s original image of the blank white room. But this is not an image of emptiness; rather, the 1980s George gasps with joy, seeing possibilities for creating something new out of this blank slate. It’s like that famous saying of Michelangelo’s, that the sculpture he created was already in the block of marble he started with, and he merely had to uncover it.

Should a writer or a creative artist of any kind need reassurance that he or she has embarked in the right path, and need inspiration to go further, that person should see this show.

My only qualm about Sunday is that it seems to insist that the creative artist’s life must be a solitary one. (In Seurat’s darkest moment in Sunday, he agrees to let Dot and her new husband care for his–Seurat’s–own daughter because he “cannot look up from my pad” to be a proper father.) I may live by myself, but certainly I know plenty of creative people who have kids and significant others. Indeed, one of the main points of Mark Evanier’s new biography and art book Kirby: King of Comics is that Kirby had two principal motivations in life: to pursue his artistic goals, but also to support his wife and children. In Sunday Seurat speaks of “balance” as one of his artistic virtues. Jack Kirby evidently found the balance between art and family that the Seurat of Sunday was incapable of achieving.

I began my commentary on Kirby: King of Comics months ago, but agreed to postpone the rest until after the book had come out and you all had a chance to read it. If all goes according to plan, next week I will resume my Kirby review.

Last fall’s Disney musical film Enchanted, which came out on DVD this week, provides yet another clever variation on the themes of mixing live action with animation and forging links between the cartoon world and the world of reality. I’ve read some negative comments to the presentations of the three nominated songs from Enchanted at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony. Granted, the songs may not work well out of the context of the film, but this should not stop anyone from seeing the movie, which is a delight.

Like DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek movies, Enchanted satirizes the long tradition of Disney animated features, especially those adapting classic fairy tales. But unlike the increasingly crass and unfunny Shrek movies (see “Comics in Context” #186: “Le Petit Chef”), Enchanted is not only genuinely witty and imaginative, but also succeeds in revivifying that sane tradition for a 21st century audience, demonstrating that it isn’t outdated after all.

The movie opens in a cartoon world that evokes Disney’s Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and yes, it is presented in traditional, “2-D,” hand-drawn animation. Not long ago, the conventional wisdom was that hand-drawn animated features were dead, having been supplanted in the public’s affections by computer animated movies, and Disney even disposed of its old animation tables and other tools for making hand-drawn animation. Let’s hope that Enchanted, along with last year’s Persepolis and The Simpsons Movie (see “Comics in Context” #188: “D’ohme!”), signals that “2-D” animation isn’t a dead and obsolete artform in the realm of feature films after all.

Within the land of Andalasia in this cartoon world lives the film’s young heroine Giselle, who falls in love at first sight with a handsome prince, Edward, after he rescues her from a troll. But Edward’s archetypal wicked stepmother Narissa believes that if Edward marries, his bride will displace her as queen. Employing her sorcery to transform herself intro an old crone, Narissa pushes the unsuspecting Giselle down a well (rather like Snow White’s wishing well). Plunging through darkness (rather like Alice falling down the rabbit hole), Giselle emerges in the middle of Times Square in the real, “live action” world. What’s more, she has been transformed into a real, live action human being herself. Eventually other characters from the cartoon world will follow Giselle into the real world, including Prince Edward, Queen Narissa, her henchman Nathaniel, and Giselle’s chipmunk friend Pip. (In the cartoon world Pip could talk; in the “real world” he can’t, though he retains his human -level intelligence. In Andalasia Pip is a hand-drawn animated character, but in the “real world” he becomes a computer-animated figure, since CGI, in this film, reads as “real.”)

Last November I saw Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf and Enchanted only one week apart, and I’ve come to think of them as opposites. The epic poem Beowulf, as it has come down to us, depicts an ideal hero. As I wrote in my review (“Comics in Context” #205: “Identity Theft”), one of the anonymous Beowulf poet’s themes “is to describe and commend the behavior of the “˜good king,’ the good leader of men, and, perhaps, the good man in general.” Zemeckis’s film reveals this supposedly good man as a fraud, a liar who succumbs to his lust for an enemy and who literally fathers the evil that later plagues his kingdom and brings about his own death. The Beowulf movie seems to suggest that the truly good man does not exist and never did, that stories of noble heroes are falsehoods, and that the high ideals of the Beowulf poet are merely delusions.

You might expect that Enchanted would similarly demolish the Disney fairy tale tradition. Once Giselle lands in New York City, the film puts this unworldly innocent though misery until she finally is taken in by the story’s leading man, single parent named Robert, whose profession, divorce lawyer, indicates that he doesn’t believe in anyone living happily ever after with his or her one true love. The movie continues to mock Giselle’s childlike naivete, gently but nonetheless pointedly. It seems impossible for her to fit into the real world. We associate the world of Disney animated features with childhood, so the real world must be that of adulthood. Giselle’s plight is a comic metaphor for someone struggling with the transition from childhood innocence to adapting to reality as an adult.

And yet Giselle not only succeeds in fitting in, but does so while remaining true to herself, and even triumphantly changes her new world for the better. Although she comes from a world in which magic is real, Giselle lacks any magic powers. Yet somehow her innate optimism, her capacity for joy, and her sheer goodness have a positive influence on the people-and even the animals–around her. In the musical number “Happy Working Song” Giselle enlists animals to help her clean Robert’s apartment, just as friendly animals aided Disney’s Snow White and Cinderella in their chores. In this case, though, since it’s in Manhattan, Giselle’s animal assistants include rats and pigeons. Visiting Robert’s office, Giselle weeps over a couple who are seeking a divorce and who seem to think she’s crazy, yet by the end of the movie the couple happily report that they’ve reconciled thanks to Giselle’s influence. In the movie’s musical high point, “That’s How You Know,” people in Central Park spontaneously form into a singing and dancing parade, with Giselle at their lead, inspired by her infectiously cheerful presence.

Giselle dies adapt to her new world by “growing up” in certain ways. She comes to recognize that she didn’t truly love her bubbleheaded suitor Prince Edward. A turning point comes when, in a clash with Robert, she realizes she has become angry for the first time in her life. Jungians would say she has tapped into the “shadow” side of her personality; having gotten in touch with her anger, she will no longer be simply the passive potential princess, waiting for her prince to rescue her. Indeed, towards the film’s end, Giselle even pulls out a sword that had been struck into the floor (thereby mimicking the future King Arthur in Disney’s The Sword in the Stone) and goes to rescue her true love, Robert, from Narissa’s clutches.

But while Giselle rises above her naivete and passivity, she retains all of her many virtues: her empathy, her idealism, her great capacity for love, and her sheer goodness. If Zemeckis’s Beowulf contended that its epic hero was a fraud, Enchanted maintains that its heroine’s virtues are not only real but are viable even in the supposedly cynical world of the 21st century.

Amy Adams’ performance as Giselle is absolutely essential to the success of Enchanted. Although she brings out the comic side of Giselle’s childlike innocence and enthusiasms, she never ironically comments on the character. rather, Adams pulls off the miraculous feat of making Giselle’s unworldly goodness and innocence completely credible. Not only that, but in this role Adams exudes a sheer, irresistible lovability appropriate for a classic Disney heroine. As Manohla Dargis so vividly put it in the November 21, 2007 New York Times, “Ms. Adams doesn’t just bring her cartoonish character to life: she fills Giselle’s pale cheeks with blood and feeling, turning a hazardously cute gimmick into a recognizable, very appealing human confusion of emotion and crinoline. ”

In a December 13, 2007 interview for London’s Times Online, Enchanted director Kevin Lima explained that “With this movie I set out to make Mary Poppins. With that in mind, I had to throw away the mean tempered mockery. It has been done so much. The Shrek movies were very successful in turning the screws on Disney in that way. So I was looking for a new way.” Hence, as the reporter put it, “he managed to persuade the company that there was a way to make the film as a love letter rather than a cynical pastiche. The result is a film that, although a departure for Disney, also has a charming, old-fashioned innocence.”

Moreover, the Times states, “according to its director, Kevin Lima, it is effectively Disney’s first postmodern movie.”: Enchanted is filled with references to classic Disney features. Lima said “it became an obsession. Every single name had to somehow have a relation to Disney, every image had to relate back to the Disney iconography.”

Some of the references take the form of archetypal plot elements. For example, Narissa is a wicked queen who, like the one in Snow White, has a magic mirror, magically disguises herself as a crone, and administers a poisoned apple to the heroine. Longtime readers know that I’m an admirer of Susan Sarandon, who makes this wicked queen surprisingly sexier than her Disney prototypes. When Sarandon wears heavy old page makeup as the crone, I was struck by how recognizable her distinctively large eyes remain.) Robert proves himself to be Giselle’s true love–and surmounts his cynicism over “fairy tales”–by reviving this sleeping beauty with a kiss.

Watching the movie I spotted other references. Most viewers will recognize the voice of Julie Andrews, Disney’s Mary Poppins, as the narrator. But i was pleasantly surprised to see Jodi Benson, the voice of the animated Little Mermaid, turn up in the role of Robert’s secretary (complete with a fish tank in the office). Of course I noticed that the couple seeking a divorce in Enchanted were Mr. and Mrs. Banks, named after the dysfunctional parents in Poppins (see “Comics in Context” #160: “Banks’ Holiday”). There are numerous other allusions as well, many of which are catalogued in Enchanted‘s Wikipedia entry; it’s rather like decoding all the references in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I received a big surprise when I discovered that throughout the film Lima and company duplicated visual compositions from classic Disney animated features. (You can find some examples here) Might this have a subliminal effect on viewers, especially those well versed in the Disney canon? It’s as if Lima and company are saying that these archetypal stories and characters still underlie modern reality, even if we are unaware of it.

That may be the ultimate lesson of Enchanted. We may live in an age disposed towards realism and irony, and yet, as Robert comes to learn in the course of the film, the archetypes of these great fairy tales still survive and continue to carry psychological and emotional power, even in the early 21st century, and even into our adult lives.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone who hasn’t yet seen Enchanted that Giselle and Robert end up living happily ever after together (presumably as husband and wife, though this is, surprisingly, not made explicit). I was amused to see that for two other characters in the film, their equivalent of living “happily ever after” is writing a book and getting to do a signing! Well, yes, I’m proud of being a published author, and I always enjoy doing signings of my new books. But as I well know, in most cases, unless you’re J. K. Rowling, a single book doesn’t pay the bills for very long. But I still appreciate the fact that Enchanted regards the publication of a book as a cause for celebration!

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson