FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I'm a big fan of one of Leslie Fiedler's quotes from his 1982 book WHAT WAS LITERATURE?: "Mythopoeic excellence is independent of formal excellence." I've never invoked the quote in any of my various analyses of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, either singly or in collaboration. Yet the quote came to mind while I was mulling over some recent friendly arguments between fellow comics-bloggers Kid of CRIVENS and Rip Jagger of RIP JAGGER'S DOJO, if only because both of them made some allusions to "myth."

Now the thing called "myth" is a many-splintered thing, and no one entirely agrees on how to define it. My overall concept of myth is probably not the same as that of Kid, Rip, or Leslie Fiedler. However, one possible common element may be the idea that mythic elements in fiction are those we commonly call "larger than life," and possibly all of us would agree that these two titans of comic-book storytelling predominantly told stories that were "larger than life." (I include Fiedler because he did make a couple of positive remarks on the Fourth World, though I believe he credited the opus to Stan Lee.)

I'll get to quotes by Kid and Rip soon, but first I want to clarify that I'm not entirely sure what specific targets Fiedler was reacting against when he coined his quote. In the book he generalizes a lot about the literary elitism of his time, without naming specific opponents. The way his quote is worded, one assumes that there were critics who believed that "formal excellence" in literary works was everything. If a writer like Virginia Woolf (my example, not Fiedler's) could turn out highly finessed prose that one could admire for its own sake, it would seem that Woolf's lack of any "larger than life" story did not matter to such critics. Fiedler represented himself as someone who could appreciate what he called "myth" in popular as well as elite culture; could appreciate a bestseller-type like Margaret Mitchell as much as he appreciated a literary light like William Faulkner, if not in the exact same way.

OK, so here are the relevant quotes from Kid and Rip from this comments-section of this Dojo post. First Rip mentions two of the more "mythic tales" of Jack Kirby's Fourth World  cosmology, and Kid responds:

I think it likely that many of the themes that people saw in Kirby's work, weren't actually there (or were exaggerated) and had probably never even occurred to him. The Fourth World is laid against a superficial backdrop of 'myth', purely for the purpose of telling stories about good guys versus bad guys.

And Rip responds:

I disagree with you adamantly that Kirby's tapping of mythic themes was by chance. He was intentionally evoking those themes. The "Anti-Life Equation" is a core idea that permeates the stories and is all about the individual freedoms we aspire to.

Now at this point one may be thinking, "okay, all three quoted persons said something about myth, but where does all the fuss about 'formal excellence' come in? Neither Jack Kirby nor Stan Lee was any sort of 'literary light' with a reputation for fine wordsmithing." Quite true. But Kid makes clear that he didn't find Jack Kirby's solo works, Fourth World and otherwise, to be as "readable" as the collaborative works between Kirby and Stan Lee, and this has been a frequent complaint from many other fans over the years in assessing the virtues of the Lee-Kirby collaborations as against the "Solo Kirby" stories, including but not limited to the Fourth World.

It's true that the sort of critics Fiedler was responding to would have deemed both comics-makers to be melodramatic trash. However, I believe that Fiedler was arguing that certain authors did tap into a special type of creativity, one that didn't require a well-turned literary phrase at all. But "readability" was another aspect of story-crafting, and it's as good a word as any for what fans liked in the Lee-Kirby collaborations that they didn't find in the Solo Kirby stories.

Since I'm not trying to make any new enemies, the only reason I quote Kid and Rip is to ground my own responses to their estimations, not to attribute to either blogger something he did not say. And my response is as follows. I agree with Rip that there's a lot of intentional myth-making in the Fourth World, though not so much in the rest of Kirby's solo oeuvre. But I also think Kid is correct that many contemporary comics-readers found the Fourth World hard to follow, and I believe that the hardcore comics-fans didn't invest themselves in Kirby's myths because by 1970 many of them had come to expect a certain level of "formal excellence" even in funnybooks. 

What does "formal excllence" look like on the low level of comic-book melodrama? I see one crucial element that Lee brought to the collaborations that Kirby was not able to master despite his best efforts-- and I'm going to capitalize this element to indicate its importance--

THE APPEARANCE OF CONSISTENT TWO-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS (defined as characters who seem to have two or more dominant characteristics that give the impression of consistency)

Now, I say "appearance" because of course there were dozens of Marvel characters, either by Stan and Jack or by other creators entirely, who were only one-dimensional (defined by just one trait) or no-dimensional (defined by the function the character performs in the story). Both Lee and Kirby grew up with comics in which one-dimensional and no-dimensional characters practically defined the medium, and the main exceptions were in the works of particular raconteurs like Will Eisner and Carl Barks. Lee and Kirby separately experimented a little bit with two-dimensional characters, mostly in one-shot anthology stories, where they didn't have to worry about a serial status quo. 

I might argue that both authors had made minor inroads toward two-dimensional characterizations, Kirby in the comic strip SKY MASTERS, and Lee in his collaboration with Joe Maneely on the five issues of THE BLACK KNIGHT. But they weren't moved by any lofty literary aims in either case. By the late 1950s the comics-business was in chaos, and no one was sure what would sell. DC, long the home to the reigning super-dude, had started pushing superheroes in the last years of the decade. But even these were at best one-dimensional. Barry Allen was a dogged police scientist, Hal Jordan was a slightly more venturesome test pilot. 

Then Lee and Kirby, who had both been doing a lot of stand-alone SF/horror stories for the Company That Would Be Marvel, came together for FANTASTIC FOUR. In those anthology stories both men had sometimes emulated the two-dimensional characters in 1950s SF-films, and they brought a similar dynamic to this new group of superheroes. The feature's success was a blend of Kirby's great talent for character design and Lee's sensitivity to the different "voices" each character might possess. I would never credit all the "myth-elements" to Kirby alone, or all the "characterization-elements" to Lee alone. But each of them had their primary strengths, and together they were able to present a variety of larger-than-life fantasy-situations that seemed more "relatable" because the characters had an apparent consistency of voice and attitude.

I may build on some of these considerations elsewhere, since Fiedler's use of the word "formal" reminds me of my distinction here between "formal and informal postulates." But none of those hypothetical essays are likely to involve the eternal "Stan and Jack" question.

QUICK ADDENDUM: Here's an example of what I would deem a two-dimensional character by Stan Lee, which story he completed with John Romita long before Kirby returned to Martin Goodman's company.