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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(See transcript of this exchange here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

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

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

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

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

For this last installment of “Comics in Context” before Christmas, I was considering a good number of possible topics. There is the wonderful new Disney film Enchanted, which combines live action, computer animation, and good old traditional hand-drawn animation. There’s the new DVD set Walt Disney Treasures: The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, collecting the cartoons featuring Disney’s cartoon star before the creation of Mickey Mouse. There’s Fantagraphics’ new second volume of their Popeye reprint series, featuring the debut of my favorite E. C. Segar character, J. Wellington Wimpy, and IDW’s first volume of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates. And now that the Broadway stagehands’ strike is over, I could go see the stage version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

I promise you that I will get to all of these subjects early next year. But last week, I unexpectedly received a review copy of a book whose publication will be one of the landmark events of 2008 in the world of comics. This is Mark Evanier’s long-awaited Kirby: King of Comics, a beautifully produced art book devoted to the career of the late Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Captain America, and so many more, that also serves as his biography, which Harry N. Abrams, Inc. will publish in February, 2008. For me, Christmas came early this year.

The visual excitement begins even before you get to the book’s title page, with several pages of art showing Kirby’s work at its peak, that serve as the equivalent of an overture to a longer piece of music. The initial page, showing a determined, powerful Captain America, his fist clenched, hurtling towards the reader, from Captain America #112 (April 1969), carries the balloon, “And so, a legend lived again!!”, which is equally applicable to this book about Kirby. Across from the title page is one of Kirby’s astounding collages, this one showing Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four entering the otherdimensional Negative Zone in Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966). (Evanier reveals later in the book that Kirby originally intended to portray Negative Zone sequences entirely through collage, but this proved to be impractical; see Evanier p. 171). Reed marvels that “I’ve done it!! I’m drifting into a world of limitless dimensions!!” and this seems an apt description of the incredible worlds of fantasy that Kirby envisioned and captured in his art. And at the bottom of the title page is a small picture of the Thing, whose personality, as the book later tells is, Kirby based upon his own. The text hasn’t even begun, and yet the reader can already see how much careful thought went into putting together this book.

It was wise for numerous reasons to select Neil Gaiman to write the introduction. As regular readers of this column know, Gaiman wrote the recent revival of Kirby’s Eternals (see “Comics in Context” #194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199), such demonstrated both his admiration and his genuine understanding of Kirby’s work (as opposed to those who claim to be Kirby admirers and then proceed to twist his characters out of shape). Moreover, Gaiman, with his high standing among readers of graphic novels, can attract the attention of those among them who may know little about the superhero genre in which Kirby spent most of his career, or even disdain it, and alert them through this introduction that Kirby deserves their attention.

Gaiman starts his introduction by protesting that “a thousand other people” would be more qualified to write the introduction, since he never met Kirby, and recounts how he once could have spoken to him in a hotel lobby, but had to catch a plane, and never got another chance to meet him (p. 11). Yet this too makes Gaiman a good choice to write the introduction. Evanier knew Kirby better than nearly anyone; Gaiman represents everyone–comics professionals and fans–who only knows Kirby through his work. Since Kirby passed away in 1994, there is already an enormous audience of fans of Kirby’s work who will never have the opportunity to see or meet him at a convention, especially when one considers the higher profile that comics have been receiving in mainstream culture in the early 21st century and the extraordinary commercial success of recent films based on Kirby co-creations, notably the X-Men and Fantastic Four movies. Though Gaiman is a Boomer who grew up reading Kirby’s Silver Age comics, anyone who has discovered and come to admire Kirby’s work over the last dozen years or so can identify with the feelings he expresses in this introduction.

“It was grand and huge and magnificent,” Gaiman enthuses about Kirby’s imagination (p. 12). You can sense the excitement that Kirby’s work inspires in Gaiman from the way that these adjectives burst forth in rapid succession. Gaiman’s comparison of the visceral power of Kirby’s art to rock music is well taken. As a student of Gaiman’s oeuvre, I was pleased by his unexpected revelation that Kirby’s Thor series is “where my own obsession with myth probably began” (p. 11). Gaiman also notes his fondness for the 1974 Joe Simon-Jack Kirby version of DC’s Sandman, and its “influence on the rest of my life” (p. 12). And, yes, the main illustration for Gaiman’s introduction is a handsome 1981 Kirby drawing of the 1940s version of the Sandman. Its not the 1974 Sandman, who was the ruler of a dreamworld and thus had a clearer influence on Gaiman’s own Sandman series: you can find the cover of 1974’s Sandman #1 on page 184. But the “˜40s Simon-Kirby Sandman had a dream motif, as well, so his presence on the page is appropriate.

Within a relatively short piece Gaiman manages to sound themes that will resurface in the rest of the book, such as the lack of appreciation Kirby’s creativity received from some of his publishers. Notably, Gaiman directs the reader’s attention to the “small, human moments” in Kirby’s work, that contrasted with the epic scale of his fantasy, particularly “Moments of people being good to one another, helping or reaching out to others” (p. 13). Now take a moment to try to think of any similar moments in new superhero comics from 2007. I drew a blank, too. Many artists attempt to copy the visual flash of Kirby’s work, but how many contemporary comics pros match the emotional substance?

The best part of Gaiman’s introduction comes in a postscript at the end, in which he wishes there were a museum of Kirby art and that Evanier would be there to give you a guided tour. (There is the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, mentioned in Evanier’s acknowledgments page, but so far it exists only online here). Gaiman notes that a physical Kirby museum does not exist “yet” but that Evanier’s book will serve as a substitute till then (p. 13).

When I interviewed Evanier about Kirby: King of Comics for Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week, he also compared the book to a museum exhibition of Kirby’s art. I like to think of Kirby: King of Comics as the coffee table book published to accompany a museum retrospective of Kirby’s work that exists only on the printed page. Every phase of Kirby’s artistic career, starting with childhood sketches, is visually represented. Drawings of his world-famous characters are here, but so are relatively obscure creations like Stuntman and the Western hero Bullseye. Whereas other writers might have given short shrift to the period between the Golden and Silver Ages of superheroes, Evanier demonstrates how creatively productive a period the 1950s was for Kirby. Many of the celebrated iconic images that one would expect are here, like a cover reproduction of the cover of Fantastic Four #1 (November 1961) (p. 115) and, amazingly, the original artwork for the monumental splash page to “This Man, This Monster” in Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966) (p. 146), with the quietly distraught Thing, standing with sculptural stillness amidst a driving rain that serves as a metaphor for his inner grief. But so are other familiar pages from comics of the 60s and 70s, reproduced from Kirby’s original penciled artwork, as well as art from every decade of his career that even a longtime aficionado like myself finds new and surprising. Unlike the authors of other Abrams coffee table books on art, Evanier does not delve much into critical analysis. But as the reader moves through Kirby: King of Comics, he can see for himself how Kirby’s art evolved over time from brilliant promise to unquestionable mastery of his artform.

Catalogues for museum retrospectives are also usually written in academic prose, but not this one. A writer for television, film, comics and more, including his popular blog (http://www.newsfromme.com/), Evanier is a well practiced, witty and skillful storyteller, an artist of anecdotes. In Kirby: King of Comics Evanier quickly sets an informal, entertaining tone, establishing a personal bond with the reader. Gaiman is right: reading this book is very much like having Evanier escort you through a Kirby show, spinning the tale of the great cartoonist’s life.

Indeed, Evanier sets the tone as early as his masterful preface, which starts out recounting an anecdote about the days back in 1939 when the twenty-one-year-old Jack Kirby saved away in the comics sweatshop of publisher Victor Fox. Then, suddenly, it’s as if Evanier had caught the reader in a judo hold and flipped him over, because the tale of the tyrannical Mr. Fox unexpectedly transforms into an explanation for the title of Evanier’s book and of why Jack Kirby, however much he deserved it, could never take his nickname as comics’ “King” entirely seriously.

But there’s lot more to this preface. On his blog and elsewhere, Evanier has made clear his disagreements with David Michaelis’s biography of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts (see “Comics in Context” #204: “Was It a Dark and Stormy Life?” and I recommend that you read Schulz’s widow Jeannie’s recent criticism of the book). Nonetheless, in Kirby’s case Evanier seems to agree with one of Michaelis’s basic premises, that the artist’s body of work expresses his personality. At his book’s close, Evanier writes that “The stories of intergalactic visitations–of subterranean civilizations and small g gods striding across terra firma–they were all autobiographical, in emotion if not in deed” (p. 218). In contrast with Michaelis, Evanier does not delve deeply into his subject’s psychology. Yet, far more effectively than Michaelis does with Schulz, Evanier vividly portrays Kirby’s personality on the printed page.

Thus, for example, the preface depicts Kirby as a “truly modest man,” “embarrassed” at first by being hailed as “king of comics” by his admirers. In the description of Kirby’s time working for Fox, Evanier shows how Kirby and his fellow artists would find relief from the pressure their dictatorial boss exerted by doing impressions of him in his absence. I’ve been in a situation like that and known people who reacted similarly. This little story gives us an insight into the kind of guy that the young Jack Kirby was, like someone we might have known in our twenties, someone who would have been fun to be around, and, significantly, someone who had the resilience not only to endure a bad situation, but to rise above it through humor. And yet the immensely talented Kirby didn’t turn his resentment of his oppressors into arrogance, but remained “truly modest.”

The preface even provides sharp cameo appearances by its supporting cast. This is the first time I’ve read something about Bill Everett, who went created the Sub-Mariner that same year of 1939, that allowed me to feel why people liked him. And the preface is Evanier’s first step in his book’s generally sympathetic portrait of Stan Lee as a man who genuinely recognized and valued Kirby’s talents–an attitude that was less common from the 1940s into the 1970s than you might have imagined–and yet repeatedly seemed unable to read Kirby’s feelings, thereby exacerbating the rift that grew between them.

Moreover, in the preface Evanier introduces one of the major themes that runs throughout his book. Having grown up in New York tenements during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Kirby knew what poverty was like, and was determined not to let his wife and children fall into it. “He wants to do great stories and express himself and share his incredible imagination with the world, and all that is fine,” writes Evanier. “But being a good provider is still Job One for him and always will be” (p. 17).

Yet standing in the way of Goal Number One for most of Kirby’s career are the likes of Victor Fox, who, Evanier scathingly writes, felt “that since he’s paying [his artists], he’s going to experience the joy of treating them like dirt every day” (p. 15). Evanier’s book shows that for nearly his entire career in comics, Kirby was continually contending against clueless executives and close-minded editors who failed to show him or his work the respect they deserved. In the 1970s even much of the comics readership seemed to desert him. As the book recounts, for much of his life Kirby was struggling simply to support himself and his family. By the mid-1970s Kirby was no longer able to find work in comics. It’s like reading that Vincent Van Gogh only sold one of his paintings during his lifetime. How could this be? From the vantage point of 2007, when Kirby is widely recognized as one of the foremost artists in the history of American comics, this blindness to his greatness seems astounding. How could so many people not see what was right in front of their eyes?

There was something else that was astounding at the start of the first chapter: as artist and writer, Kirby was wholly self-taught. “As he later explained,” Evanier writes, “The pulps were my writing school. Movies and newspaper strips were my drawing school. I learned from everything'” (p. 19). Over and over I’ve seen the admonition that comic book artists shouldn’t just look at comics in learning how to draw, but I suppose that one difference was the illustrative style of comics like Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon in that time. Certainly it’s significant that Kirby said that he learned to draw from the movies: this certainly helps explain his emphasis on action and movement.

On page 20 are nine sketches of famous people of the 1930s that Kirby drew as a boy, ranging from Stalin to Katharine Hepburn. The sketches vary in quality, some are better likenesses than others, and in some one can see Kirby experimenting with caricature. All. the sketches are striking, but they are juvenilia, nevertheless. But on the opposite page is another boyhood drawing, portraying Andy Clyde, a now forgotten comic actor who adopted the persona of an old man. (I know who Clyde is because I dimly remember seeing his Columbia theatrical shorts on TV in my childhood.) This drawing captures Clyde’s screen likeness (complete with old man makeup) realistically, while creating appealingly semi-abstract patterning in much of the linework, and, best of all, conveying through subtle means the personality of a serious, contemplative man behind the comedic facade. This is really good! Later in the book Evanier shows us sensitive, naturalistic portraits that Kirby did of himself (p. 66) and his wife Roz (p. 67) during his military service in World War II: they show a different stylistic path that Kirby could well have pursued, had he not chosen instead to do comics in which there was less time or room for detailed portraiture.

I never expected Andy Clyde, whom I hadn’t thought about in years, to turn up in a book about Jack Kirby. So, too, it is surprising to discover from Evanier’s book that, from boyhood on, Kirby was friends with Leon Klinghoffer, who was infamously murdered by terrorists in 1985. I already knew of Klinghoffer because of something that Evanier does not mention: he posthumously became the title character of an opera: John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer. How strange that two boyhood friends who worked together on a club newsletter ended up as the famous subjects of very different biographical works.

Next Evanier runs “Street Code,” a brief story that Kirby wrote and drew late in his career, in 1983, for the short-lived revival of the pulp magazine Argosy. The story is placed here since it deals with life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the period of Kirby’s boyhood. In introducing it, Evanier observes that Kirby ordinarily “wrote and drew what others wanted” and had to confine “moments of autobiography” to the subtext” (p. 23). “Street Code” is another marker showing an alternate path that Kirby could have taken, perhaps, had he lived long enough, and not suffered physical problems that handicapped his drawing skills, in order to attempt the kind of autobiographical graphic novels that his former boss, Will Eisner, pioneered in the final decades of the last century. Another benefit of placing “Street Code early in the book is that, amidst the many examples of Kirby’s early, immature work, when he was still developing his craft, “Street Code” allows the reader to see Kirby work at his peak, both as artist and as writer. This is where the crude early work, as Kirby learns in the job, is heading, so the reader should study the early work to find glimpses of the greatness that is to come.

The boy protagonist of “Street Code” is never named, but we first see him, pulling on a sweater, reflected in a mirror: it’s a clever signal to the reader that this story is autobiographical, fictionalized though it may or may not be.

I was likewise impressed with the large panel atop the following page, depicting the boy and his mother in their tenement apartment. Kirby shows us the cramped quarters of this impoverished pair, with food cooking atop the same stove used for heating the room, which also holds not only the dinner table but also a bathtub in which the mother, in the foreground, is washing the laundry. Simultaneously Kirby conveys a sense of confinenent and a paradoxical sense of space, filled with detail: this is the private world of these two characters.

Later in the book Evanier will describe Kirby’s scripting of his series from the 1970s onward as being done “in a florid, theatrical voice that did to linguistics what his art had always done to the rules of anatomy and physics” (p. 165). Actually, Stan Lee continually used heightened, operatic language in his scripts; the difference is that he was far better at it than Kirby was. Even so, as I mentioned in my recent columns about The Eternals, Kirby’s scripting is better than he is given credit for. But, apart from his weird mannerism of unnecessarily putting words into quotation marks, “Street Code” shows Kirby’s writing at its best: simple and emotionally evocative.

The first person narration, presumably delivered by the protagonist as an adult, looking back on his boyhood, describes how his mother’s “odd, lingering glance,” which he can nevertheless feel “warm my back” as he leaves the apartment (p. 25). And Kirby shows that glance on her face, too, understated and perhaps weary, but prompted by his description, one can see it is loving, as well. One is so used to Kirby’s prowess in devising spectacular effects that his skill in subtle facial expressions and body language can come as a surprise. But not, perhaps, to Neil Gaiman: this is an example of one of the “moments of tenderness” he mentioned in his introduction.

At the bottom of the stairs the protagonist encounters two bullies, one of whom calls him a “cockroach” (p. 26). I was reminded of Forager in Kirby’s The New Gods, who belonged to a humanoid race that the gods of New Genesis once disparagingly referred to as “bugs.” Later in “Street Code,” when a “block fight” begins, one of the combatants addresses the other side as “y’lice” (p. 30).

A fight ensues between the protagonist and the bullies, that Kirby resents with the same palpable energy and violence as any of his superhero battles. I suspect that through the many fight scenes he drew in superhero comics, Kirby may well have been drawing upon and channeling the rage he would have felt in situations like this in his actual boyhood, and perhaps his anger at the bullies and oppressors he encountered in his adult career, as well.

Over the following two pages, 28 and 29, is an incredible double-page spread depicting the world just outside the protagonist’s tenement: cars race past a wagon slowly being drawn forward by two trudging horses, kids play catch anid the puddles in the street, while along the sidewalk, packed with pedestrians, customers peruse the goods at fruit stands, and a formidable-looking policeman angrily raises his nightstick, apparently shouting at the unseen malefactor responsible for a hurtling bag from above, its contents about to rain down upon the head of an unsuspecting man, seated on the sidewalk, reading his newspaper, while the tenement buildings loom towards the sky, linked by clotheslines that span the length of the street. This panorama of a Lower East Side street, suffused with activity, has just as much epic quality as any of Kirby’s science fiction vistas.

On the following page the protagonist’s battle against the bullies segues into a “block fight.” “Invasion from the adjoining street!” proclaims the narrator, as if he were describing a war between nations. “The face of the enemy was different! His speech was different! His roots were different! All we shared was American birth and clothes–and a fiery hate imported from the “˜old’ country!” (p. 30). Those lines would not seem out of place in X-Men, the superhero series that Kirby co-created that famously centers on the theme of racism. In his book Disguised as Clark Kent (see “Comics in Context” #200, 201, 202, 203), Danny Fingeroth shows how the immigrant experience and the accompanying sense of being an outsider influenced the work of Kirby and other early superhero comics creators. Here is yet another example.

Then comes time for the protagonist and his alliues to perform their combat ritual of rubbing the “misshapen spine” of a boy naned Georgie for good luck. Georgie does not appear to mind, but the ritual troubles the protagonist for reasons he has difficulty defining: “Something inside me was spilling. . . something the Street Code couldn’t touch. . . something only God and my parents knew about. . . “ (p. 33). Was it that the rubbing hurt Georgie, as it certainly does when the protagonist, overcompensating for his sense of guilt, does it? Does the protagonist realize that he and his allies are treating Georgie as some kind of freak? Or does the protagonist sense that Georgie’s deformity–“the terrible thing that nature had done to Georgie’s back”–was a sign of something immense: the universe’s capacity for cruelty? Georgie is actually far from lucky in life.

“Street Code” concludes with the narrator linking his own participation in gang violence to Georgie’s lot in life, as the narrator’s younger self stares directly out of the panel as if looking straight at the readers, confronting us with his epiphany: “I was hurting,” the narrator tells us, “hurting for Georgie and me–and the lousy things we had to do for the Street Code. . .” (p. 33). (Why, look: another reference to lice.) It is as if he feels that by participating in gang violence, he collaborates in the cruelty in the world that Georgie’s misshapen back symbolizes. Through this reminiscence about life on the Lower East Side nearly a lifetime before, Kirby succeeds in finding cosmic significance.

Next come two bits of information in the book to be filed under the heading, “If Only They Had Known.”

Kirby claimed that he enrolled in the Pratt Institute, a New York art school, but had to quit after only one day; Evanier casts doubt on the story (p. 34). Longtime readers may recall that last year the Pratt Institute held an exhibition of the work of nine contemporary alternative comics artists (see “Comics in Context” #122, which I originally titled “Gallery of Gloom”). I wonder if any comics aficionado at Pratt has any idea that Jack Kirby may have just barely qualified as one of their alumni.

Atop page 35 is a delightful surprise: a drawing of Popeye, that forebear of the superheroes, that Kirby did when he tried out to be an assistant animator at the Max Fleischer Studio. Evanier writes that the first Popeye cartoon on which Kirby worked in that capacity was “A Clean-Shaven Man” (1936) (You can see it here). That’s the cartoon for which Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini did the commentary track in Warner Home Video’s recent Popeye Vol. 1 DVD set (see “Comics in Context” #190: “Pop Eye-Con”). If only Paul had known about Kirby’s involvement, he could have mentioned it!

I also quite like the 1939 editorial cartoon that Kirby did for the Lincoln Features Syndicate, demonstrating his opposition to Hitler years before America entered World War II (something else that Danny Fingeroth will find interesting): it shows British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, now infamous for his policy of appeasement, petting a large serpent with the head of Hitler who has just swallowed the nation of Czechoslovakia whole (p. 37).

It seems that when he was at Lincoln, Kirby believed that if he did right by the syndicate, doing the best work he then could, the syndicate would do right by him. Evanier comments, “It was his spin on the American Dream. You make your boss rich and he’ll take care of you. All Jack’s life he believed in that, no matter how many times the bosses got rich and he didn’t” (p. 37).

I can understand why Kirby thought that. It would seem to be a basic rule of human interaction that if you show loyalty to someone, he or she will show loyalty to you. Treat people fairly and they will treat you fairly. Isn’t that the Golden Rule: do under others as you would have them do unto you?

But Kirby’s idealism continually clashed with the real world of incompetence, insensitivity, and greed. Evanier observes that “Either he’d work for men who didn’t know how to exploit what he gave them”–which seems to have been the case at Lincoln– “or for men who did and wouldn’t share” (p. 38).

Treading his biography of Jack Kirby, I keep thinking if Mark Evanier’s continuing reports at his blog on the Writers Guild of America’s current strike against movie and television studios and producers. The latter side, subscribing to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” has been simultaneously arguing that (A) distributing movies and TV shows over the Internet will be the cash cow of the 21st century, and (B) they can’t pay royalties to the writers of said movies and TV shows because no one will make money distributing them over the Internet. Maybe it depends on which side Two-Face’s coin comes down on.

Well, at least the movie and TV writers have a union that looks out for their interests and can challenge the policies of management. But there was no union for comic book professionals in Jack Kirby’s day, and still isn’t. He was on his own: the man who may be the one true genius in the history of American comic books, continually forced to struggle just to support himself and his family.

Kirby: King of Comics is so full of riches, both in artwork and in biographical information and insights, that it demands more than one week’s installment of this column. So I’m leaving off here, with Kirby in 1939, just about to enter the new comic book industry, and I’ll resume my review at the start of 2008.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

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I am also pleased to announce that New York University’s School of Continuing & Professional Studies will be offering my course, “The Graphic Novel as Literature” in the spring 2008 semester, starting in February, and my new course, “The Superhero as American Icon,” in the summer 2008 semester, beginning in May. But if not enough people sign up for them, NYU will cancel the courses. Let’s prove to them that there really is academic interest in the comics medium!

I’m currently collaborating on another book, and I am working on several book proposals in various stages of development. However, books on comics history pay less than you may think, and teaching a course at NYU for semester doesn’t quite cover a month’s rent. My New Year’s resolution for 2008 is that, partly due to new medical expenses in my family, I will renew the search for a steady full-time or part time job. If you know of any opportunities for a comics historian, reviewer and teacher, preferably in New York City, with Boston as my next choice, please let me know here at comicsincontext@aol.com.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson