SOME KIRBY KOMMENTS ON KWEERITUDE

In this post and in its comment-section I made reference to the fact that when artists reference an idea like "the evolution of sexual roles," they may not be simply churning out rote ideas but are using said ideas in league with their own observations. I referenced Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster as examples of such artists, though I must admit that the annals of comics-fandom probably don't provide any explicit commentary from them on such subjects.

However, one of those annals, THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, does provide such commentary from another artist of that same generation, the redoubtable Jack "King" Kirby. TJKC was good enough to reprint in their Feb 2005 issue (#44) a long interview Kirby had with Ronald Levitt Lanyi, an academic who also interviewed luminaries like Steve Englehart and Don Rico for academic journals. In keeping with fair-use laws I will only be excerpting two sections of the interview here for purposes of illustrating how an artist of that generation did in fact respond to intimations of "queeritude" in his work.

As one last preface I will say that Lanyi's questions tend to lead his interviewee into deep psychological waters, which may not be a good approach for a well-rounded interview but which did produce some interesting responses.

In the FIRST SECTION, Lanyi asks Kirby "why, in works which you alone have produced, do you diassociate romantic and/or married love from male heroism?"

KIRBY: "...Male heroism, to my mind, is the prelude to romantic love. In other words, a man has to bring something to his girl. If it can't be the pelt of a lion... it's got to be a raise in pay... It's got to be some kind of victory. In other words, a man has to have a victory in order to fulfill either his romance or his marriage or his male status."

In the SECOND section, Lanyi puts forth a rather complicated argument about whether or not Kamandi has bisexual aspects (Lanyi references both Freud and Wilhelm Stekel) because of his resemblance to the female characters and because "Kamandi lets his feelings of powerlessness and frustration get out of control, and often has need of his protector, the mutant he-man, Ben Boxer... Thus, as a girl, he needs a big strong man."

KIRBY: "Well, I feel that you're placing this bisexual connotation on the thing out of your own interpretation. To my mind, Kamandi is the man in puberty; Ben Boxer is Kamandi at the age of twenty-seven. The man in puberty has not gone the route that hardens his muscles to hard knots. He hasn't gone that route yet; he's softer, he's smaller, he's less able to defend himself. Therefore, it's not the bisexuality that's in evidence there; it's the man's need for a brother, for a protective brother... Kamandi does that with Ben Boxer. Robin did that with Batman. And Bucky did that with Captain America. Bucky can handle himself with one or two fellows, but Captain America will come to his aid when he's overwhelmed. And that's my point. My point is little brother, big brother: man in puberty, man at the peak of manhood."

Now, having printed these responses, I hasten to say that these interpretations of Kirby's work are not the only ones possible simply because they came from the artist himself. Polysemic readings are always possible, though they must be grounded in hard data relating to the structure of the narrative. Lanyi doesn't quite accomplish this , though he does make one or two good points that I may cover elsewhere.

I print the first excerpt to illustrate what I pointed out in THYMOS PART 2: that the idea of a fictional character dedicating his victories to an admiring female (but presumably not getting it on with her right off) is not necessarily some sort of elaborate displacement cover for queeritude. Queeritude may come into the equation of this or that artist who uses the concept, but the concept by itself clearly has meaning for Jack Kirby. It follows that it may have a similar appeal for other artists and for their readers, which Jules Feiffer semi-jokingly references when he notes that girl characters were meant to be saved by the hero, who would then dash away. But why bother to save girls if your "real" interest is guys? Plainly the girl-saving ritual is one appropriate to the latency stage of what were originally children-readers: one is ready to prove oneself to girls but not quite ready to have sex with them.

I print the second excerpt to illustrate that Kirby's concern when talking of the adult male/young male team-- as with Captain America and Bucky, whom I profiled (not very seriously) as a "sacrificial lamb" here--is not with sex, but with the threat of violence. This is an aspect which Freudians and their fellow-travelers like to dismiss as being a pure displacement for the matter of sexual release. But though the violence in adventure-fiction is so ritualized that it becomes, from a naturalistic angle, "unreal," that does not mean that "violence" is nothing but "sex misspelled." I should be dealing more with the likenesses and differences of sex and violence in THYMOS PART 3, and may even find room to Friedrich Nietzsche as well this time.