Tag Archives: Jack Kirby

Voices From the Archive: Matt Thorn on Jack Kirby

Posted on by

Translator and manga scholar Matt Thorn replied to some of my thoughts on Jack Kirby a while back. I thought I’d reprint his comments here (I’ve added some markers just to make it clear who’s speaking.

[Noah:] He [Jack Kirby] draws awesome monsters, though. Which is no small thing, and which I really appreciate about him.

Matt Thorn:What you said. Kirby was much, much better (IMHO) at drawing the ugly and grotesque than at drawing the beautiful, which is probably why D.C. took the embarrassing step of having someone re-draw Kirby’s Superman. I prefer Kirby’s take, but the whole thing about Superman is that he’s all shiny and handsome and sparkly, right? Kirby’s Superman looks like a college wrestler with a chip on his shoulder. Which is very cool, but, yeah, not the image of Superman D.C. wants to convey (then or now). The Thing is probably the character that is most iconically Kirby in my mind. Grotesque, and yet sympathetic, and somehow just very cool, in a very anti-Superman kind of way.

[Noah:] Haney’s not subtle, and the quality varies obviously. But he’s way more attuned to a world outside his skull than Kirby is.

[Matt Thorn:] Noah, I think you nailed it there. Kirby seems unable to successfully step outside of the world inside his own skull. His half-hearted attempt to write “groovy slang” illustrates that he didn’t know much about or really care much about the world outside his skull, at least not after WWII. And that is of course fine. As others have noted above, many great artists are enormously successful at being what I controversially characterized as “self-indulgent,” and what Mike more generously characterized as doing work that is “personally meaningful to them.” Whether you see it as a feature or a bug, I think it’s fair to say that Kirby’s worlds are more or less self-contained, and while they may speak to “the human condition” at large, he was never one whose work really reflected the world outside his door.

Which, AGAIN, is PERFECTLY OKAY.

 

images-1

Oddity: Jack Kirby

Posted on by
mickeymouse
Pencils by Jack Kirby; inks, Mike Thibodeaux; colors, Craig Yoe. Copyright Walt Disney Company

The late, great cartoonist Jack Kirby (1917-1994) is chiefly remembered for his epic superhero and awe-inspiring science fiction creations. But over his long career he dabbled in every known popular genre — often to surprising result.

What to make of this, for example?
 

valleygirl

 
It’s a strip proposal for a Valley Girl series, loosely based on the early-eighties hit song by Frank Zappa (1940-1993). A case of an old-timer trying to muscle in on the latest thing?

Not quite. It turns out that Kirby drew it at the suggestion of Zappa himself; the two California residents were friends.

2007-08-15_200811_frankjack
Frank Zappa and Jack Kirby

Despite belonging to the ‘greatest generation’ that came of age in the Depression and fought WWII, Kirby was very much open to the pop culture of the young. In turn, pop artists often hommaged or appropriated his work. Case in point: Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band, Wings, produced a ditty titled ‘Magneto and the Titanium Man’.

Jack, the creator of Magneto, was delighted. And it came to pass, in 1976, that Kirby met McCartney backstage at a Wings concert:

kirbymccartney
Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney, and Jack Kirby

Kirby later portrayed Paul, Linda and the band alongside Magneto, as a gift for the singer:
 

kirbydrawsmccartney

 
The cartoonist Jim Woodring reports that Kirby was part of a rock band at the animator Ruby-Spears back in the ’80s.

**************************************************

Kirby was also involved in an extremely bizarre case of international intrigue.

A Hollywood producer hired him to design the costumes and settings for a film based on Roger Zelazny‘s myth and SF novel, Lords of Light. Kirby was also retained to conceptualise a grandiose theme park for the same party:
 

scifiland

 
Like most such megalomaniac ventures, the twin projects came to nothing.
 
image-9

 
But the enterprise had a strange aftermath.

In 1979, a mob of Iranian students occupied the United States embassy in Teheran, taking all its personnel hostage. Six employees of the American consulate, however, managed to escape capture and were hidden by the Canadian embassy.

The CIA, in cooperation with Canadian authorities, devised a plan to exfiltrate the Americans by having them pose as location scouts for a fictional upcoming Hollywood movie. The agency chose for the non-existent film project the Lord of Light script, retitled Argo.

And so, along with the script, Jack Kirby’s numerous pre-production drawings were flown into Iran, where they were issued (along with fake Canadian I.D.’s) to the beleaguered Americans, who were able to fly out of the country to freedom.

This bizarre story was the subject of the well-regarded 2012 fictionalised film, Argo, directed by Ben Affleck; alas, Kirby’s drawings were not used.

I’m still mourning that awesome theme park.

**********************************************

In May 1972, Kirby published a strip in an unusual genre (reportage) and an unusual venue (the slick Esquire magazine) for him: a three-page re-telling of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s assassin, by Jack Ruby. Here’s the third page, with inks by Chic Stone:
 

jackruby3a

 
Kirby’s career encompassed so many genres, though, that perhaps it’s inaccurate to describe any of his work as an oddity. It’s still a trifle jarring to encounter the following work from the beginning of his career: a political cartoon.

jack-kirby-portfolio-1971-8
All drawings by Jack Kirby — under various pseudonyms.

The image at the top of this column is from Craig Yoe‘s The Art of Mickey Mouse. Here’s a rejected Kirby drawing for the same book:
 

sorcerersapprentice

Truly a Jack of all trades!

Matthew Brady on Kirby, the King

Posted on by

Matt Brady left a stirring defense of Jack Kirby on Domingos’ recent post. I thought I’d highlight it here.

I love, love, love me some Kirby, and “Himon!” is one of my all-time favorite comics stories (it’s the one I wrote about in the Team Cul de Sac zine), so I feel like I’ve gotta argue against this piece somehow, but I doubt anything I say will have much impact or change anybody’s mind. Still! I feel like every argument against the King here is a reason I like his work so much, and I see complexities and fascinating art where Domingos sees loud, violent simplicity. The take on good and evil might be black and white, but there’s depth to it, a reflection of how Kirby saw the world. Darkseid is more than just an evil dictator, he’s THE dictator, the very face of Fascism, wanting to subjugate and control everyone and everything. Mister Miracle is Kirby himself, learning to live through oppression and escape to inspire others, and his love for Barda is what keeps him going. Orion (a counterexample to the good=pretty, bad=ugly divide, given that he hides his Apokaliptian visage behind a Mother Box-created facade) is the warrior struggling to use his power for good and fight the evil that spawned him. Yes, it’s all loud, brash, explosive, but it’s pitched at the level that suits the conflicts, stirring the heart with the primal battles of good and evil.

And there’s more depth in the use of violence too. A scene in which Orion loses control and savagely beats an evil fiend to death while laughing maniacally is powerful in its evocation of the way the urge to violence can be seductive. In “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin!”, a regular human gets in the middle of a fight between Orion and another New God, and he is nearly beaten to a pulp, the damage to his frail body evident and monstrous, a horrible reminder of the way war chews people up and spits them out. This stuff isn’t just punches and explosions for kicks; Kirby examined the meaning behind his bombast and made us feel it on an emotional level as well as a visceral one.

Even the glorification of technology is far from universal; most of Kirby’s cosmic machines were impossibly huge contraptions that loomed over characters and landscapes, frighteningly incomprehensible in their functions. As much as he might have reveled in the coolness of futuristic machinery, Kirby demonstrated how it can and will be used for control and death.

I dunno, I hope Charles Hatfield or somebody will show up and mount a better defense of this stuff than I can. I agree that most superhero comics can be dismissed as “corporate-owned dreck”, but not Kirby. He’s got so much more going on than black and white morality, simplistic characters, technological fetishism, and glorification of violence. I might not be able to do it very well, but I’ll defend him to my dying day.

__________
Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Funky Flashman

Posted on by

DC Comics’ “Himon!” by Jack Kirby (Mister Miracle # 9, Jul.-Aug. 1972) is not the comics story that I hate the most. That dubious honor, if I remember correctly, goes to Pedro and Me (2000) by Judd Winick, but since there’re 100 miles between yours truly and my copy of said “graphic novel,” “Himon!” will have to do as a target for my participation in the 5th Anniversary Hooded Utilitarian Hate Roundtable. “Himon!” isn’t even the worst Jack Kirby story… on the contrary, Charles Hatfield, in his book about Kirby Hand of Fire (2012, 206), included it among “the most deeply personal comics Kirby ever made.” Since Charles did such a good job analyzing “Himon!” I must agree with him that said story has its merits. This is good because I don’t want to incur in the same fault I accuse superhero comics artists and writers of (i. e.: of being Manichean). Then again is it fair to judge an artist for a really small amount of his input while most of it is big corporation owned dreck produced in a work-for-hire situation? In any case I’ll use other aspects of Boy Commandos, New Gods, The Eternals and the aptly titled Mister Miracle Super Escape Artist series to illustrate my points.

1 – Manicheism:

“Mystivac!,” Mister Miracle # 12, Jan.-Feb. 1973.

Jack Kirby’s superhero comics are Manichean. Reality is seen in black and white in these primary colored comics. From a purely visual point of view this means that the baddies are ugly (as seen above) and the goodies are mostly good looking. We can find the roots of this line of thinking in the ancient pseudoscience of physiognomy: the absurd idea that one’s outer appearance is a mirror image of our personality. To further examine how Jack Kirby used physiognomy we just need to compare Mister Miracle and Big Barda…

“Apokolips Trap!!,” Mister Miracle # 7, Mar.-Apr. 1972.

…two young athletes owning handsome physical appearances… with Granny Goodness and Darkseid below…

“The Pact!,” New Gods # 7, Feb.-Mar. 1972  (as reprinted in Jack Kirby’s New Gods # 4, Sept. 1984). Scott Free (Mister Miracle) arrives in Apokolips. (Stupid! Stupid! Garish colors! Give me old Benday Dots anytime! And yet, need I say it?, this is still thousands of times better than today’s gradient-ridden computer coloring.)

The former is an old woman and the latter is a stony faced Neanderthal. The baddies’ mugs are more masks than proper faces; their facial expression (it’s mainly one) shows that they’re always in a bad mood. In a Manichean war of good vs. evil Jack Kirby equated good with youth and good looks and evil with old age and other species or subspecies. We can’t also forget that young people were the reading target for these comics (Kirby’s clients) and our shallow hedonistic media revere youth and good physical appearances. Instead of choosing racist stereotypes like Ming in Flash Gordon (fortunately Jack Kirby may be accused of many things, but not of being a racist – Mister Miracle # 15, for instance, is there to prove it), Jack Kirby, as I mentioned above, advocated speciesism. His bad guys were surely insect-like and reptilian (with the occasional furious cat, mad dog, and devilish goat thrown in for good measure).

Insecto-Sapiens! Untitled, Mister Miracle # 16, Oct.-Nov. 1973.

(Below is an intelligent attack on physiognomy – I know, it’s an easy target, but still…)

James Gillray, “Doublures of Characters or striking Resemblances in Phisiognomy. “If you would know Men’s Hearts, look in their Faces.”,”  Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, November 1, 1798. On an unrelated note: look at the hand-coloring and weep!

Manicheism, of course, is part of an us vs. them ideology in which we, obviously, are always the good guys. Listen to Jack Kirby himself (in “Kirby on Survival,” Jack Kirby’s New Gods # 6, 1984):

They are evil, we are good. They are plotters and traitors, we are loyal and clever.

In “Himon!” Manicheism is still a problem, but at least it is aptly used to show how, in a dictatorship, almost everyone (Auralie, for instance, is an exception) is infected by the ugliness of the leader.

To paraphrase Charles Hatfield in Hand of Fire (219), everyone’s infected… “Himon!,” Mister Miracle # 9, July-Aug. 1972.

2 – Formula:

It’s no secret: superhero comics are formulaic. If you let me indulge in a personal note for a sec. I must say that this is reason enough to stop me from enjoying these stories: if the comic is Manichean and it’s just an endless row of fights why should I bother reading it if I know beforehand who will win? This is exactly what happens in most of the boring issues of the Mister Miracle Super Escape Artist series: Mister Miracle vs. Steel Hand; Mister Miracle vs. Overlord and Granny Goodness; Mister Miracle vs. Doctor Bedlam; etc… etc… ad nauseam… Trying to understand why people like these comics and films I suppose (and I use the word advisedly because this is no scientific conclusion) that readers and spectators like to feel the epinephrine of violent action (without the consequences produced by violence in the real world, of course). They also like to root for the righteous good guys… It’s kind of a sports thing, I guess…

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in self-referential mode. Boy Commandos # 1, Winter 1942 – 43 (as reprinted in Mister Miracle # 6, Jan.-Feb. 1972).

In the image above two characters that stand for Joe Simon and Jack Kirby explain how “[They]’ve been getting [their] characters in and out of jams.” That pretty much sums it all up: in these formulaic comics the heroes get in a jam and, then, they get out of it. In Mister Miracle # 5 the baddie, Virman Vundabar, says to Mister Miracle, after he got out of yet another jam (to quote the fanboys when talking about art comics: “yawn!”):

I know! A mother box! [everything is emphatic in these stories] With the aid of a mother-box, you thinned your atomic structure and transferred yourself out of the coffer!!

To which the latter answers:

Not so! […] I play it fair — and you know it!!!

Mister Miracle won by three exclamation marks to two. On the other hand I reckon that he was wrong and the baddie was half right: it wasn’t the mother box that saved Mister Miracle, but he was far from playing it fair. He escaped because of the formula imposed by the author, Jack Kirby. The game is definitely rigged. In “Himon!” the same thing happens to ruin my enjoyment of the story. The dei ex machina are an easy solution to every problem: Scott Free (Mister Miracle) is blinded by the ideology imparted in Granny Goodness’ school?, no matter, Metron and Himon will put him out of his wrong ways; Himon is killed by an angry mob?, of course not, he has the ability to replicate himself (it was one of those replicas that seemed to be assassinated); Scott Free fights some of Darkseid’s minions?, piece of cake… he easily wins… etc… In conclusion: Everything is too easy for yours truly’s taste.

“Himon!,” Mister Miracle # 9, July-Aug. 1972: you bet that’s not him.

3 – Cardboard Characters:

These characters are as thin as the paper they were printed on. Mister Miracle barely exists. At the beginning he’s just a strange being who came from another world. We know nothing about him except that he’s a super Houdini. From Mister Miracle # 4 (Nov.-Dec. 1971) until Mister Miracle # 7 (Mar.-Apr. 1972) a series of short stories (two and four pages) give us some feedback to understand Scott Free a little better, but is that enough? He was born in Goodiesland (aka New Genesis), but because of some kind of pact between Darkseid and Highfather (a kind of Moses) he was transferred to Baddiesland (Apokolips) where he grew up in Granny Goodness’ orphanage to become part of Darkseid’s military elite. The truth is that no real characterization exists. If the hero (the main character) is flat what can we expect for the other characters? Nothing at all…

At the end of “Himon!” we find the melodramatic panel below:

“Himon!,” Mister Miracle # 9, July-Aug. 1972. Is that eye leaving stage left? 

That’s OK, by me, but… who are you exactly? How can one find something that doesn’t exist?

These cyphers can only be used as personifications in allegories, but we all know how heavy handed that can be. Plus: a Manichean one can only achieve kitchy results… Certainly not the status of great art that some claim for Kirby’s work…

4 – Glorification, Glamorizing, Sanitation of Violence:

This is the part in which my love/hate relationship with Jack Kirby’s art reveals itself. Not being completely blind I can see how (see above when I guess why people like action comics and films) the drawings are powerful. That’s exactly the problem: they’re too powerful. So much so that Art Spiegelman put the topic in the following terms (in The Comics Journal # 181, Oct. 1995, 106):

[…] the triumph of the will, the celebration of the physicality of the human body at the expense of the intellect, is very much an impulse in Fascist art. It has a lot to do with the motor for Kirby’s work, even though I understand that his work is filled with characters who fought the Fascists.

Kirby’s double-page spreads are particularly good examples of the above. With them Kirby aimed to grab the reader by the guts from the beginning. To do so he knew that he needed to create the most spectacular images that he could muster. This meant huge battle scenes with lots of what Charles Hatfield called Kirby’s technological sublime and the clash of titans. 

“Earth — The Doomed Dominion,” New Gods # 10, Aug.-Sept. 1972 (as reprinted in Jack Kirby’s New Gods # 5, Oct. 1984). The mannerist composition dividing the realm of the gods from the realm of the humans (or… whatever they are) is quite interesting.

We have seen that there are a few problems with Jack Kirby’s superhero stories, but enlightened readers tend to value the drawings and the drawing style instead of the narratives. As if the former can be, in comics, totally separated from the latter. It can’t: both the iconical content of the drawings and the lines as such are a unit, a meaning generator. The Manichean content, for instance, is in the text, but it is also in the narrative drawings, as we have already seen. Plus: it’s the lines, colors, and textures that convey the physicality and the powerfulness of the images; marks have meanings. Kirby’s graphic style is a cubo-futurism that underlines and glorifies, technology, youth and violence. In the above panel, for instance, extreme violence is given to us in awesome spectacle. Being a children’s comic the nasty consequences of such a shock are spared to us because these are super beings and nothing can really harm them. What escapes my reckoning is why do they attack each other if there are no consequences of the attack? Logic doesn’t matter though, what really matters is that the kinetic and colorful show must go on.

Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote the following about kitsch (in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984, 248):

Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

Also (253):

Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.

Giving us not only a fascistic glorification and aestheticization, but also a sanitized version of violence Jack Kirby’s work is the perfect embodiment of kitsch.

Again, “Himon!” is a bit different. In the below panel we don’t see them exactly, but innocent people die (my question is: aren’t Jack Kirby’s readers so inured to violence that they couldn’t care less? Besides, who cares about cyphers?):

“Himon!,” Mister Miracle # 9, July-Aug. 1972. 

5 – Feminism?

Of course not. Even if Big Barda is a physically empowered woman (as we have seen, there’s no intellect in Jack Kirby’s comics) look below to see who the only scantily clad character is:

“The Closing Jaws of Death!,” Mister Miracle # 4, Sept.-Oct. 1971.

On the other hand the panel below could be a poster to announce a SlutWalk, so, I may be wrong…


“Mystivac!,” Mister Miracle # 12, Jan.-Feb. 1973.

In conclusion (a):

(After probing into a small part of a huge corpus):

On the mass culture side of things Jack Kirby not only contributed enormously to the superhero mythos, he also inspired ideas for films like Star Wars, Man in Black, or Pure Steel (more than dubious feathers to wear in one’s cap, but anyway…).

Jack Kirby’s superhero stories are Manichean formulaic romps performed by cardboard characters. His drawing style and visual imagery are an emphatic cubo-futurist fascistic glorification and glamorizing of violence, youth and technology. On the positive side he was particularly good creating complex panel layouts and used the comics medium to great effect sometimes; for instance (note the sequence of the archers’ movements from left to right):

“Apokolips Trap!!,” Mister Miracle # 7, Mar.-Apr. 1972.

Jack Kirby could also surprise the reader from time to time breaking, for example, the dichotomy handsome/good vs. ugly/bad:

“Mother!,” The Eternals # 10, Apr. 1977.

Other times he committed crass mistakes. Probably because of an excess of work and deadline pressure:

The final sequence of “Paranoid Pill!,” Mister Miracle # 3, July.-Aug. 1971.

The continuation of the sequence above in “The Closing Jaws of Death!,” Mister Miracle # 4, Sept.-Oct. 1971. Where did those ropes come from?

Being such a loud comics artist Jack Kirby’s work seems to have been created by his character Funky Flashman. Even if said character is a caricature of Kirby’s, by then, rival Stan Lee…

Conclusion (b):

What about “Himon!,” then? It’s as simplistic and Manichean as all the other stories, but, at least, Kirby used Manicheism to show how the dictator’s ideology infects the people (the “lowlies”). The narrative formula is also there (the use and abuse of the dei ex machina, Metron and Himon, is too facile a device; on top of that Scott Free can’t lose a fight and he can’t be killed – even if “in a jam” we know that he will end up all right). The characters are flat, but, at least, there’s some internal conflict in Scott Free (that’s a slight improvement over other, more pedestrian, stories). Apart from the above there are some pursuits, fights, and explosions (yawn!) and the usual glamorizing followed by sanitation of violence. The sequence in which Willik orders the burning of the “lowlies” may go against the grain (up to a point, as we’ve seen above), but that’s one exception, not the rule. So is the story “Himon!” in Jack Kirby’s oeuvre.

__________
Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Voices from the Archive: Chris K in Defense of Kirby

Posted on by

After I wrote a post about my disappointment with Jack Kirby’s run on Jimmy Olsen comics, Chris K wrote a lovely defense of Kirby, which is reprinted below.

I would pretty unhesitatingly call Kirby my favorite comic artist of all time, but I freely admit his limited-to-nil appeal to anybody who hasn’t been completely marinated in his approach.

A lot of the writing on Kirby has a “drunk the Kool Aid” quality about it, and, to some degree, I think that’s kind of unavoidable. If you haven’t already internalized all of the style and eccentricities of Kirby, if you haven’t attuned yourself to his rhythms early and often, if you haven’t adjusted to the fact that his ADD is a feature, not a bug… well, you probably just aren’t going to. If I sat down and really tried hard to articulate what it is I love about Kirby’s work, I could probably come up with something that sounded reasonably convincing on paper to a neophyte, but I strongly doubt it could convince one to actually like Kirby upon reading it.

I don’t disagree with anything you say about the Jimmy Olsen comics; I’m just more forgiving than you, but I’m inclined to be.

You’re absolutely right about the flaws. I was actually just thinking about this the other day, having read the Team Cul-de-Sac “Favorites” zine (hey, I love that Brave and the Bold, too!) and Matt Brady’s review of Mister Miracle #9, which is my favorite Kirby comic,(and one of my favorite comics period) starring my favorite Kirby character… yet paradoxically, Mister Miracle is probably my least favorite Kirby series overall. (Which is to say, it’s pretty good…) It’s mostly because the same syndrome you describe in the Olsens is also present in the MM series, and while I find it charming in Olsen, I think it hurts MM. The premise of the series – “Super Escape Artist” – really needs to have some perfunctory tethering to reality to work, and the flights into Cloudcuckooland undermine it. As a result, I always found myself wanting to like Mr. Miracle’s comic as much as I liked him.

But, that’s the price of admission for Kirby. Pretty much all of his comics really are unsatisfying on a fundamental level – unfinished, poorly sketched out, compromised… I know, I’m making a great case, right? But that’s the appeal for me, seeing Kirby strain against the constraints of the industry, the medium, his own talents — and fail as often as not. His work’s a little capsule of comics at the time when he was working: the personality of the artist pushing back against the formulaic patterns of the artform, win or lose. That’s a big part of why Mr. Miracle is such a resonant character to me. But I get that it’s a lot to buy into for someone wanting to, you know, get a story and shit. But for me, there just aren’t a lot of experiences like this in comics, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

 

Rorschach, Superstar

Posted on by

A bit back, Sean Michael Robinson talked about a production of the Diary of Anne Frank that interpolated the music of the Carpenters. Sean noted that the production was wonderful, moving, inventive…and also illegal.

Anne Frank’s words, however, and the translation of her words on which we were relying for much of our text, were a different matter, as was the authorized play (Diary of Anne Frank), which provided much of the rest of the text. All of these elements are still under copyright, and will continue to be so for several years. (In fact, copyright in the theater is more restrictive than in almost any other field. You can, after all, read a book or listen to an album any way that you wish once you’ve purchased a copy–but to publicly perform a play one must conform to a dizzying array of limitations set out by the author or the author’s agents–usually, that every word of the play will be performed, i.e. no cuts or insertions without permission, and that the appearance, gender and even staging etc will honor the stated intentions of the author regarding the script and contract.)

Sean’s prescription — with which I agree, is that we need to rethink our insanely restrictive copyright laws in order to make it possible for people to reimagine older works, and create new ones, without having their asses sued off.

This does bring up a rather uncomfortable issue for me, though. Mainly…if I think that art is built out of other art, and that the copyright laws should reflect that, then what exactly is the deal with my recent article on Slate, where I discuss my deep disgust with DC’s Before Watchmen? After all, as Jones pointed out with his usual logician’s obsessiveness, Alan Moore has ripped off everybody from C.C. Beck to H.G. Wells, and probably other people whose names begin with A, X, Y, and Z as well. If I think high school kids should be able to mash up Anne Frank and the Carpenters, and I think that Alan Moore should be able to mash up Dorothy and Wendy and Alice (which is probably not the best word choice there, but onward), then what exactly is the problem with having DC put out a new! Watchmen! prequel! — or for that matter, a Watchmen toaster? Isn’t there some moral inconsistency here?

Possibly. But let me try to think through the differences.

— First, it’s useful to remember the purpose of copyright. According to our Constitution, the purpose is not to protect creators. The purpose is to encourage art. Copyright is supposed to give creators a monopoly on their own works so that they will have a financial incentive to create those works in the first place. If as soon as you write something, everybody else can publish it under their name, then you’re going to limit the people who will write to hobbyists who don’t need the money. (Not that there’s anything wrong with hobbyists, he says as he writes for free on his blog. The point is just that ideally you want to encourage other kinds of writing as well.)

However. Giving someone an infinite monopoly on their work also limits creation. It makes it hard to comment on older works, or to remix them, or to use them as inspiration for newer works. That’s why copyright is limited; so that works will eventually enter the public domain where they can be used by other artists with no strings attached to make things like League of Extraordinary Gentleman…or what have you.

The point is that there’s no particular contradiction between arguing that, on the one hand, Alan Moore is being screwed, or that, on the other hand, basing a work on Bram Stoker — or even on C.C. Beck — is okay. I’m personally in favor of a copyright of about 50 years from date of publication — which would mean Watchmen would still be under copyright, but that a lot of works Moore has lifted from would not be. A fifty year copyright would also put Anne Frank out of copyright…though not the Carpenters.

— Second, even when works are under copyright, I think there needs to be a vigorous fair use provision. Such provisions can include, for example, flat fees for using music (like the Carpenters) without giving the creator veto power over how or where that music is used (which, yes, would mean that idiotic republican presidential candidates could use Bruce Springsteen’s songs if they wanted even if the Boss objected. I think that’s a reasonable price to pay for a vigorous public domain, personally.) I also think that in situations where there is no profit, as in Harry Potter fan fiction, for example, most bets should be off.

Soooo…again, how is all of this different than DC publishing Before Watchmen…or than Marvel using Jack Kirby’s characters (which are certainly on the verge of my 50 year timetable) without paying him?

Which brings us to my last point.

—The issue with DC and Marvel is not that they are creating new work using somebody else’s characters. As I’ve suggested, artists do such things all the time; it’s a big part of how art is made. Without it, we wouldn’t have Shakespeare, much less Alan Moore.

So the issue with DC and Marvel isn’t use of the characters. The issue is, specifically, lousy business practices. Moore and Kirby never got to exploit the copyright for the characters they created; instead, Marvel and DC used crappy contacts, evil industry practices, and disproportions of power to gain the benefits of the law for themselves. So it’s not that Marvel and DC shouldn’t use those characters. It’s that they shouldn’t be able to reap a monopoly windfall for using those characters based on dubious business practices.

And, in a bitter but by no means isolated irony, the excessively insane draconian provisions of our copyright law mean that the creators are actually much more extensively screwed than they would be if copyright were reasonable. If copyright were only 50 years, Marvel would be in the process of losing its rights to its properties one by one — which would mean that anybody could make a Spider-Man movie or an Iron Man movie, which would make Marvel essentially worthless, which would mean it would go out of business — which wouldn’t benefit the Kirby family financially, of course. Still, you’d think his ghost would at least get a kick out of it.

In any case, the point is: the creators working on Before Watchmen are not despicable because they are using someone else’s art to make art, because that’s what all artists do. They’re despicable because they are knowingly helping DC exploit a monopoly that was obtained by fucking over the people who created it — and because one of those fucked over creators has verbally erected the equivalent of a picket line. Hughes, Straczynski, Cooke, et. al. are not thieves. They’re scabs. I hope that’s a comfort to them.
 

I For One Welcome Our New Superhero Overlords

Posted on by

 
Okay, I’ve just seen The Avengers, Marvel’s and Disney’ latest blockbuster superhero movie, and first I want to state: yes, Jack Kirby does get his name in the credits.

In a half-assed way.

The credit line states: “Based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.”
True enough, as far as it goes. A more honest credit would have read: “The Hulk, S.H.I.E.L.D., The Avengers and Nick Fury created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; Thor and Loki created by Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby; Black Widow created by Stan Lee, Don Rico, and Don Heck; Captain America created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.”

(And justice would further be served by the additional line: “Iron Man created by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby and Don Heck; Hawkeye and the Black Widow created by Stan Lee and Don Heck.” Don Heck was never a fan-favorite, and has been dead for some years; there’s no constituency for his memory; but his contribution should not be slighted.)

The problem is, as the dominant paradigm now has it, individuals don’t create; only corporations create. And Marvel/Disney would rather slit their entire management’s throats than acknowledge that this fiction, the source of their billions, is based on a lie.

Well, I shan’t continue in my grumpiness — after all, I was hypocrite enough to ignore the boycott of the film initiated by Kirby family supporters such as Steve Bissette.

So how was the movie?

Alan Moore, when asked his opinion of the first Image superhero comics, made an interesting analogy.

He said an old-style superhero comic (say, a Dick Sprang ’50s Batman) could be compared to coca leaf: a mild stimulant. The powerful superhero comics of the seventies, like those drawn by Neal Adams, would be the equivalent of refined cocaine. And the Image comics were the equivalent of crack.

To steal his simile: The Avengers is the crack cocaine of superhero movies. It will stimulate the comics fan into a near-fatal geekasm.

That’s not a criticism, actually; this flick’s an exceptionally well-made distillation of its genre. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like, to quote Abraham Lincoln. It hits all the right notes. Superheroes beating the shit out of each other? Check. Cool, sexy super spy? Check. Neat-oh futuristic equipment and weaponry? Check (The rise of the Shield helicarrier from the ocean to the skies invokes genuine awe.) Nasty-ass aliens, supercilious super villain, awesome costumes (Loki finally gets to see action in his bitchin’ horned helmet), tons of death and destruction, and Cap instructing old Greenskin: “Hulk, smash!”? Check, check, check, check and check!

The film isn’t lacking in non-infantile pleasures, either. The dialogue is crisp and witty — although poor Thor and Captain America are handicapped by having to wax solemn or anguished while the rest of the cast are given all the zingers. The best lines go to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark (Robert Downey Jr); one scene between the two makes one think more of Noel Coward than of Stan Lee.

(There are plenty of physical laughs, too, mostly coming from the Hulk. After an incredibly snotty divine put-down by Loki, Greenskin educates him with a beat-down that looks like a violent gag from a classic Popeye cartoon.)

Ah, Loki. An adventure tale is only as good as its villain. The classically-trained British Hiddleston plays the part with such relish that one only sees in hindsight the nuances he brings to the character: there is an under-layer of pain and anguish to his posturing. And, true to both the comics Loki and that of Norse mythology, he relies as much on cunning and the psychological manipulation of his foes as upon brute force.

(I won’t tell why, but the funniest line in the film is Loki’s “I’m listening.”)

Downey somewhat unbalances the flick: as some wags put it, a better title would have been ‘Iron Man III, co-starring the Avengers’. Not that I’m complaining — it’s always a delight when he takes the screen, especially when out of armor.

However, Marvel showed great judgment when they chose Joss Whedon to direct. Whedon has extensive experience in comics and feature films, but I’d wager that he was chosen especially for his experience in television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where he proved his ability to handle large ensemble casts in fantastic milieus. The script perfectly characterizes every role, far better and more subtly than the comics ever did. It’s a masterpiece of psychological clockwork.

Two of the minor heroes particularly stand out: Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). There are hints of dark, complex, anguished pasts for both of them. I get the feeling Whedon would have been more than happy to have centered the film on these two.

One surprise, on the other hand, is how overshadowed Thor (Chris Hemsworth) emerges. Frankly, he cuts a poor figure compared to the dashing Stark, the brutish Hulk, the glittering Loki. In Thor, he towered; here, his cape looks tatty, and his previous vikingly cool beard makes you think now that he was too rushed to shave that morning.

The fights, the Hulk-smashing, the repartee are all top-notch. In sum, if you want a summer blockbuster where “you can check your brains in at the door”, this is for you.

But we never can do that, can we?

Art by Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia

The Avengers has special place in my nostalgic pantheon: issue 5 was the very first Marvel comic I’d ever purchased, back in spring 1964, when I was 9 years old. Sure, I was aware of the marketing hook behind it — “Your favorite heroes TOGETHER!”– and didn’t care a whit. Yeah, I’d already seen it with Justice League of America from DC. Loved it there, too.

Looking back, there were troubling aspects to this comic. The Avengers were the élite, and pretty much also the tools of the élite. They were bankrolled by Tony Stark, comics’ epitome of the military-industrial complex; they lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York — the swankiest address in the world. ( Of the great mansions built there by the “robber baron” capitalists of the 19th century, only the one housing the Frick Collection remains.) They fought commies and aliens and worked with the government. And they were self-selected: the aristocrats of the superhero world.

They resembled nothing so much as an elite private club, like the Yale or Century clubs, floating high above hoi polloi.

The film carries this conceit to the next step, arguably an even more sinister one.

The last half-hour of the movie shows a gigantic battle between the Avengers and an army of extraterrestrial invaders in the streets of Manhattan. And my childish, fannish joy in these shenanigans was overlaid by a feeling of dread — of appallment.

I realized why halfway through: it was the location of this mass destruction that roiled me. A ten-year-old taboo had been shattered, one dating to 9/11. It’s now acceptable once more to depict buildings in New York, and the people inside them, being destroyed.

And this is where my unease was compounded. This iteration of the Avengers wasn’t the old “gentlemen’s club,” obnoxious though that be.

This one was conceived from the start as the auxiliary of a tremendously powerful secret American government defense agency. This élite cadre of superhumans, following the orders of a wise leader, Nick Fury, was there to protect us from unreasoning, fanatic aliens bent on flying into our greatest city and toppling its skyscrapers.

From Space Al-Quaeda.

So that’s my reading of The Avengers. Its subtext, hardly subtly advanced, is the glorification of Homeland Security and of the current security state. Why, even the Hulk, that powerful adolescent fantasy of revolt against authority, meekly goes along with the program. Who are we to gainsay him?

Hmm… maybe I really should’ve checked my brain in at the door. Then again, maybe I did, and just forgot to check it back out…

P.S. I saw this film in Paris, where it was released on April 25; it won’t be in general release in the States until May 5. Such divergences between international release dates are less common than they once were, for two reasons: a) the studios want to discourage piracy, and b) cultural globalisation. It’s only in the past twenty years that France adopted summer as a movie blockbuster season, as it has always been in America: before, summer was given over to b-films and re-releases. (Hey, if you were spending the summer in France, would you want to waste it in a movie theatre watching Hollywood fare?) And gone are the days as recent as 1989, when Warner Brothers had to launch a whole campaign in advance of the Tim Burton movie explaining who Batman was to the French. The crowd I saw Avengers with was wholly familiar with the characters. La coca-colonization culturelle n’est pas morte, helas!
 
 

Spoiler alert:
 
 
The usual post-credits closer reveals who Loki’s mysterious alien ally is. Yep, it’s Thanos.