"WHY DID KIRBY THINK HE COULD WRITE?"

 I saw this question on Classic Horror Film Board, so here's my answer.

__________

That's a complicated question, and a lot of different people will give you different answers. I've done as much research as I can into the subject, but obviously I'm speaking of matters I didn't witness.

From his first independent ventures in comics, like a POPEYE imitation comic strip ("Socko the Sea Dog"), I think Kirby only "wrote" in the sense that he would map out the pencils and then add dialogue later. I'd be surprised if ever in his long career he actually wrote a script for anyone else. He hooked up with fellow artist Joe Simon within a few years of getting into comic  books, at least partly because Simon had a better head for business and for seeking out editorial contacts. When Simon and Kirby hit it big with Captain America (to be sure, an independent creation of Simon's), the two artists became flush enough to open their own studio. I would guess that Simon "wrote" in the same way as Kirby but the studio did accept scripts by other hands; in one interview, Kirby admitted that some other guy originated the Red Skull during that period. The only comment I've seen from Simon was the offhand remark that during their association he "would never let Kirby write," but he didn't elaborate. Most of the dialogue from the Simon-Kirby titles, both at Timely and at DC, is jazzy and efficient, but it's so much unlike the weird dialogue Kirby produced in the seventies that I tend to think the two artists had ghosts come in and smooth things out. 

Kirby and Simon collaborated on the farcical FIGHTING AMERICAN-- whose dialogue, TO ME, sounds a lot like the wacky scripting of the solo Kirby stuff later-- and then the two parted ways in the mid fifties. Then we see a few features written purely by Kirby, not quite as free-wheeling, but still tending to a lot of gosh-wow exclamations. He had a success with CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN in 1957 but he was teamed with writer Dave Wood. Was that at the insistence of his editors at DC, who wanted some quality control? I would think so, even though on the whole the CHALLENGERS stories were driven by Kirby's profligate imagination. I theorize that Wood just kind of went along with whatever wild gimmicks Kirby turned out. This is an important point because in Kirby's mind, he was really "writing" the whole feature and Wood was just adding dialogue that would suit DC'S editors.

Kirby got on the outs with DC's management and Atlas Comics, soon to become Marvel circa 1960, became Kirby's main account. Editor Stan Lee didn't immediately start turning out masterpieces with Kirby, and it seems like to Lee Kirby was just another jobbing artist, even though the two of them had crossed paths at Timely, when Lee was just an office boy. Then DC started its superhero revival, so Lee naturally turned to one of the artists best known for that genre, and thus FANTASTIC FOUR was born. There are a few surviving documents indicating that Lee did not at this time turn over sole creative effort to Kirby, and this would be logical, given that Kirby hadn't exactly had a ton of hits over the past ten years.  Once books like FF and THOR became successful, slowly the working relationship became more fluid, and it appears that Lee let Kirby "have his head" more often. For all that, though, it's obvious to me that Kirby did some things-- such as crossovers-- only because Editor Lee demanded them.

Over time, Kirby came to resent the fact that Lee got the writers' salary, when he Kirby was the one inventing most of the new heroes and villains. Personally I don't think he appreciated Lee's contribution to the dramatic heft of the new wave of superheroes, and I think he came to believe he had done it all and Lee just filled in the dialogue as had Dave Wood. In the eighties COMICS JOURNAL editor Gary Groth certainly encouraged Kirby in this belief, during which time Kirby dismissed the idea that Lee had ever contributed to the stories. He got both a writer's and penciler's salary when he went to DC, and so his later work at Marvel, Pacific and elsewhere was usually though not always on the same terms. 

And that's my view as to why Kirby believed himself both the writer and creator of everything he did after breaking up with Simon, except for a few isolated special projects.

STAN, JACK AND JOE STUFF

In response to this post about Jack Kirby and credit-sharing, I wrote:

Kirby did one long interview with COMICS JOURNAL back in the 80s, which I confess I haven't reread for years. It's my memory, though, that he said something to the effect that, "Back in those days (the Marvel years), nobody ever thought any of this stuff would be worth anything." Now, on one hand, this might be an oversimplification, since Kirby certainly knew that Superman had become a huge franchise. On the other hand, even in the sixties, he might've had had little faith in other franchises to become valuable over time; that maybe Superman was a special case, and therefore anything he co-created with Simon or with Lee was just going to be a passing fad. On the third hand (?), he also probably knew that Martin Goodman would never have made an equitable deal with him no matter what, so taking more than his fair share of credit was the only way he'd feel like he'd gotten back at Marvel's inequities-- even though it meant marginalizing the contributions of Simon and Lee.

All that said, I should add that from everything I've read of Jack Kirby, he tended to re-invent almost every script given him-- and I think that he was aware as to how much new stuff he brought to the table. I don't think that creative process is enough to establish him as "sole creator" of any collaborative enterprise, though. The finished product has to be the basis of any creative judgment, and if Comic A was based on an idea by Stan Lee, then visually elaborated by Jack Kirby, and then subjected to scripting-alterations by Lee again-- then Kirby's not the sole creator.

In the CRIVENS essay Kid brings up Kirby's tendency to omit former business-partner Joe Simon from later discussions. I agree that this does not always reflect well on Jack Kirby-- and yet, I don't think that Kirby work-relationship with Simon was quite the same as the Kirby-Lee relationship.

For one thing, the devoted comics-historian has a pretty good idea as to how Stan Lee wrote stories in the twenty-odd years before his collaboration with Kirby. But Simon teamed up with Kirby so early in their respective careers that Simon's creative personality is harder to pin down.

Here's how I speculate things went down in the Simon-Kirby Shop: Simon may have discussed story ideas with Kirby before either of them put pencil to paper, just as Stan later discussed ideas with Jack. But since Kirby was far more the production powerhouse. I speculate that Kirby probably did the lion's share of the penciling during the partnership, and that he probably never "wrote" a script in that whole time, but simply poured the story as he saw it out onto the drawing-board. I tend to doubt that either Simon or Kirby wrote the dialogue on these collaborations, though, since neither of them showed themselves facile with good dialogue in later days. I suspect they used a host of unidentified scripters, particularly during the Simon-Kirby days at DC, since DC editorial insisted on a more formal approach to scripting than the two artists had known at Timely. The scripters were probably hired by Simon, so in a sense Simon extended his sense of the story through these intermediaries, in contrast to Stan Lee's approach, where he himself usually did the scripting (though on occasion an intermediary would be credited with finishing the script to a Stan-plot.)

In my essay SIMON SESSION I said:

Following the dissolution of Joe Simon’s partnership with Kirby, though, almost nothing Simon authored has accrued a fan-base. I’ve argued that he may have provided “quality control” for Jack Kirby, whose wild creativity sometimes resulted in incoherent narratives. However, very little of the material Simon authored without Kirby shows even modest creativity.

I still believe that Jack Kirby needed "quality control" during most of his career, and during the Kirby-Simon partnership much of the work that they did spans the gamut from "pretty good" to (more rarely) "really good." But it's one thing to get quality control from someone who doesn't have much creativity, and another thing to get it from someone who does possess the creative spark. To repeat myself once more, I don't seek to justify Kirby's omission of Joe Simon's contributions, though I can see why Kirby might've imagined that he was the only one doing any heavy lifting in that relationship.

From my outsider's standpoint, though, the synergy between Kirby and Lee was far different, and I think Kirby got from Lee as good as he gave. But Kirby had spent a long, long time spinning his fantasies on the drawing-board, and he probably wasn't all that sensitive to the ways in which Lee MAY have turned him in new directions. Years later, when Kirby was seeking to reclaim his original art from the recalcitrant Marvel Comics, the artist said many dismissive things about Stan's talents, and some fans have taken those pronouncements as gospel. To me, the obvious fact that Kirby's later solo productions abjured the "soap opera" approach of Marvel proves to me that Kirby did not originate this approach to characterization, despite the fact that together Kirby and Lee could do soap-opera tropes better than anyone else in the business.

Kirby, unlike most professionals in his time, had an incredible capacity to remember and rework dozens of story-tropes from dozens of genres, so that much of his work, alone or in collaboration, seems like raw creativity unleashed. But he didn't always know the best way to channel his own creativity, precisely because he was so many-faceted. In addition, that creativity insured that he could never be entirely comfortable just cranking out stories for a client like DC Comics, and even if he didn't especially want to return to Marvel in the late 1950s, the ways in which his talent responded to Stan Lee's innovations re-defined the superhero genre at a time when the comic-book medium lay on the edge of extinction. Without the intense fandom that arose from Marvel Comics, it's possible that few readers would even care these days about sorting out who did what, and why.

MYTHCOMICS: "GIANT KILLER" (SICK #38, 1965)

After re-evaluating Joe Simon's BROTHER POWER issues here, I occasionally contemplated checking out Simon's 1960s magazine SICK. I never read it in The Day, but its first incarnation enjoyed some duration, presumably providing Simon with his daily bread for the decade. I picked up a back issue at random, and found that the issue was modestly entertaining, evincing a darker sense of humor than the MAD of the 1960s.

Humor magazines didn't get a lot of fan-coverage over the years, and similarly, not many online fans have labored to scan issues of old humor mags, and so this essay will be almost image-free, like my analysis of THE MAIDEN AND THE DRAGON. However, "Giant Killer" is only one page, consisting of five panels, so it's not that hard to describe. SICK didn't provide credits in their contents-page, and the signature on the piece is difficult to make out, so based on other info I'm tentatively crediting the work to SICK contributor Arnoldo Franchione. In the unlikely event that someone corrects me, I'll issue a retraction. (Hah.)

PANEL 1: The "Giant Killer" of the title is the Biblical David, seen at the moment of his first heroic act,  at the moment that he slays the hulking warrior Goliath with a stone from his sling. No one else is seen but the two combatants. Goliath looks to be over ten feet tall and is bearded; David is a beardless youth with something of a Dudley Do-Right profile.

PANEL 2: The colossal feet of dead Goliath are seen at right, and out of nowhere a bunch of identical, black-bearded figures appear to acclaim David. Though the context would suggest that they are Israelites, they look like the stereotype of the Arab, since all of them wear the traditional burnoose and thawb (robe) that mark said stereotype. Here's an approximation of the visual stereotype, taken via Google from a news-story on a controversial high school mascot.

PANEL 3: The burnoosed men, all smiling toothy smiles, take David upon their shoulders. He seems genially pleased with their attention.

PANEL 4: The maybe-Jews start walking, carrying David along, as he raises his arms over his head in a "aren't I great" gesture. He doesn't notice that the group is approaching a palm tree.

PANEL 5: At left David is now dead, hanging by the neck from the palm tree, and the maybe-Jews are walking away in triumph.

Now, the obvious "lateral meaning" here could be boiled to, "One day you're a hero, the next you're a blood sacrifice." And if Franohione had chosen to make his ironic point with, say, a historical figure like Julius Caesar, maybe that would be all there would be to it.

But because Franchoine chose to invoke the myth-story of the Israelite king David, this means that this one-page cartoon reaches into a different set of references. In my essay NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES  I noted how some myth-works may "structure [a] narrative... as a commentary on other narratives"-- the narrative in this case being the grand scheme of patrilineal descent that ties King David to Jesus of Nazareth (however tortuously).

In the Old Testament, of course, David does not get sacrificed. The very popularity he gains from killing Goliath endangers his life, when current monarch Saul tries to eliminate the competition. But David lives to a ripe old age, and his passing has nothing to do with hanging-- though images of hanging play a definite role in the fate of the House of David.

Long after David has become king, one of his sons, Absalom, attempts to stage a coup and become the new ruler. The rebellion fails. Absalom flees, but he's captured and killed after his long hair gets caught in a tree's branches, pulling him from his steed.

Much later, Jesus of Nazareth suffers a death that involves an image of hanging, albeit not by the neck.

Finally, contemporaneous with the death of Jesus, his betrayer Judas-- who is admittedly not tied to the House of David-- chooses to execute himself (at least in one of the Gospels) in the same manner as Franchione's hero.

I don't advance here the view that Franchione was attempting any sort of structured allegory. Nevertheless, I think there is a raw creativity here that goes beyond the simple ironic moral of the one-page narrative. I'm particularly interested in the appearance of David's killers, for they don't share the image of "saintly Israelites" that SICK's readers would have seen in the cinema of the sixties. They look, rather, like "evil Arabs." For the audience of the time, would have been an image that could be seen as guilty of sacrificing a heroic Biblical figure. It would be going too far to implicate Franchione, decades after the fact, for perpetuating a disguised version of the Jewish "blood libel." At the same time, there's something going on in this brief cartoon that goes beyond just a quick ironic joke, in which the triumphant figure of the Biblical David is travestied by subjecting him to an execution not unlike many other sacred sacrificial figures.

MYTHCOMICS: "A THING IS BORN" ( BROTHER POWER #1-2, 1968)

What a difference an issue makes.

Back in February, I devoted two essays-- here and here-- to stories in which DC raconteurs revived Joe Simon's 1968 character "Brother Power the Geek." I preceded these formal analyses with the essay SIMON SESSION, which provided an informal overview of Simon's post-Kirby career. I stated that I'd only read the first of BROTHER POWER's two issues, and that, though I found "a few interesting mythopoeic touches" in the first issue, I didn't think I was missing much in not having read the second one.

However, I recently acquired the second and last issue of BROTHER POWER, and upon giving both issues a more intensive reading, I've decided that, inconclusive though the story is, it sustains enough complication to rank as a mythically satisfying story-arc. In a similar vein, I rated Wally Wood's THE KING OF THE WORLD as a mythcomic, even though the second part of Wood's serial didn't provide the same quality.

Nothing can be said about Simon's "Geek-out" project without stating that it was one of various attempts by DC Comics to court the so-called "youth culture" of the late Silver Age. Earlier I summed up these attempts by saying, 'I did not read BROTHER POWER back in the day, and what little I initially heard about it made it sound like another misguided attempt by way-over-30 comics-makers to appeal to young readers by trying to sound “hip.”'

There's no question that Joe Simon was a middle-aged man at the time he created Brother Power, and moreover, since he identified himself as a Republican, it might seem incongruous for him to attempt a heartfelt evocation of the hippie ethos. Indeed, the cover-copy for issue #1 tries to suggest that the story will give the readers a titillating look at the "dangers in hippie-land." This ballyhoo was an outright lie, but it sort of fits the serial's often carnivalesque mood. Though I've never read any of the issues of SICK that Simon edited during the 1960s, I'd hypothesize that by 1968 he'd already touched on counterculture topics in his "magazine of sick humor," and that in BROTHER POWER he was trying to meld his taste for such humor with the requirements of a superhero title.  At the same time, BROTHER POWER labored under a lot of restrictions, for the Comics Code couldn't allow depictions of the sex and drugs associated with the hippie movement. Yet it seems unlikely that Simon would have taken advantage of the freedom of the "underground comics movement" had he been given it. Indeed, whereas most DC raconteurs merely pasted a few "hip" phrases or motifs over completely traditional stories, Simon's GEEK is interesting in that he understood at least a few aspects of the counterculture, but chose, for the most part, to subvert that ethos with his own conservative outlook.

Here's a bullet-point breakdown of events in the two issues, which I've conflated under the first chapter-heading in issue 1, "A Thing is Born:"

(1) In 1968 San Francisco, a small community of "peace and love" hippies find themselves continually bullied by a gang of nasty bikers. (Cops, who probably persecuted hippies far more than bikers, are at most an incidental threat in "Thing.") The battered longhairs retreat to an abandoned tailor shop-- specifically abandoned because of the hippies' "unkempt" presence-- and try to clean their blood-soiled garments. One hippie, Brother Max. has soaked his clothes so much that he's afraid they'll shrink, so he puts them on a life-size tailor's dummy. Then, for the next three seasons, all of the hippies apparently forget about both the clothes and the dummy, which just sits in the tailor shop, soaking up various substances-- blood, dust, rain and machine oil. (This bit of forgetfulness, as well as some of the other things the youths do, might suggest that there was indeed some drug-consumption going on, and that Simon just didn't show it.) Once three seasons have gone by, a providential lightning bolt strikes the dummy, and brings it to life. 

Moments later, the bikers conveniently decide-- a whole nine months later-- to take over the hippies' "pad." Brother Power, converted by the lightning into a super-strong golem (my term), routs the mean motorcyclists. The hippies, who call one another "brother" (no sisters are around at the time), dub the living dummy "Brother Power." One of the less generous youths also calls him a "geek," though this was probably meant to follow from an earlier line in which a biker calls the dummy a "freak." But the connection was lost when editors forbade Simon from using the term "freak" for his protagonist, forcing the less logical substitution of "geek."

(2) Brother Power, initially mute, learns to talk, and though he's not very attractive at the start, the hippies accept him as one of their own. However, the Geek's presence amid the hippies attracts the attention of a group of evil circus-people, who run "the Psychedelic Circus."

The Circus-People kidnap Power so that they can exhibit him in a full-fledged freakshow. The addled hippies want Power back, but somehow get sidetracked when they decide that their enemies, the bikers, must be the real culprits behind the kidnapping. This inspires one of the daffier scenes in the story, in which the hippies dress up in superhero costumes and confront the bikers with a "comic book hero happening." Of course the bikers again beat up the hippies, after which they protest that they're innocent of this particular crime. Only by pure chance do two hippies stumble across the current location of the Psychedelic Circus. Then, by dint of uncharacteristic bravery, they save Brother Power from a freakshow that looks strongly influenced by the artwork of "Big Daddy' Roth.

(3) Cindy, the first hippie-girl with an actual name-- as well as the only female character of consequence--  stitches the somewhat damaged dummy together, and also pretties him up a little. This inspires romantic inclinations in Power. However, instead of trying for some of that "free love," Brother Power seeks to impress his lady-love the old-fashioned way: by Getting Ahead in Life. With some support from his fellow freaks, Power runs for president, on a platform of "love, peace... flower power." Unfortunately, the only thing the campaign accomplishes is that it makes the Circus-People aware of Power's whereabouts. The poor losers trump up charges against Power and set the cops on his tail. The distressed dummy goes on the run, and then does a "King Kong" off the Golden Gate Bridge, disappearing into the bay-- for the time being.

(4) Issue #2 picks up with Power, temporarily "dead" from his immersion, being fished from the bay and set up in what seems a patently Christ-like posture. Power's rescuers are a bunch of "urchins" called "the Clinkers," who look somewhat like a gang from a 1950s "jay-dee" film. The Clinkers, like the hippies before them, are oppressed by another group of goofballs: "the Berlin Airplanes," young guys who dress like World War One fighter-pilots and even pilot their own glider. During an Airplane-attack, Power comes back to life and trounces the intruders with a none-too-peaceful outburst of violence. However, despite being made part of the Clinker community, the dummy doesn't care for their do-nothing ways any more than he did for the hippies' inactivity. Power seeks employment at a grocery store, sounding like a character out of Horatio Alger when he states that he doesn't "mind starting at the bottom." Predictably, he doesn't remain in the position of a simple grocery stock-boy for long. 

(5) Diligence at the grocery-store leads Power to a new job at a plant that makes missiles for space exploration, but, as will later be established, has no connection with munitions. At the same time that the Geek goes to work on the factory's assembly-line, the owners are worried that they may soon go bankrupt if they don't solve their current production problems. They've opted to bring in a supposed mathematical genius, Lord Sliderule, who dresses in Renaissance clothes and is accompanied by tumbling dwarfs (!)  Sliderule only accepts the job so that he can eventually sell the factory's secrets to foreign powers, but before he can even make a phony pronouncement, Brother Power figures out a solution to the problem. Power is promoted to plant foreman but he naively allows the dethroned Sliderule and his flunkies to remain employed on the assembly-line.

(6) Though he's forbidden from using sex or drugs, Simon does manage to work in a hippie-protest. Power's old longhaired chums show up, under the impression that the factory is making missiles for wartime use. (This is as close as the stories dare come to a countercultural take on the conflict in Vietnam.) Power soon sets them straight, and even gets them to give up their lotus-eater lives and become productive citizens.

However, vengeful Sliderule sabotages a test-missile and makes it look like the Geek done it. It comes out that Power is still wanted from last issue, so the Governor of California-- an unnamed but very recognizable Ronald Reagan-- calls for Power's arrest. Again the misunderstood mannequin flees, this time hiding in one of the factory's missiles. Sliderule sets off the missile, and Brother Power is sent into orbit. The villains are arrested, and the story ends as the hippies wonder if they'll ever see their Geek again.

It's probably just as well that Simon never let the completed third issue be seen, for the two-issue arc, though very episodic, probably represents everything Simon had to say about the counterculture. I don't for a moment think that he was as personally fascinated with the subject as he claims in a promotional text-piece. I believe he saw, as much as any artist of the time could, that the counterculture represented a potential shift in values. As a professional creator, he wanted to see if he could make a living from his take on it-- even though, as I said, he frequently undercuts most of the most cherished images of the ethos. His hippies are good-hearted but generally foolish, and even their rejection of what Simon calls the "grey flannel, split-level world" is cast aside when their charismatic leader convinces them of the value of good hard work. Brother Power talks a lot about peace, but both of his stories display roughly the same amount of fighting as a Captain America tale. Only in one area does Simon hold something in common with the hippie ethos. A lot of male hippies were accused of being no less chauvinistic than the majority culture, and in the short-lived world of Brother Power, females exist only as sources of "romantic inspiration"-- making quite a marked contrast to the gynocentric bias of Rachel Pollak's above-mentioned GEEK reboot.

In closing I should address Simon's claim to sole authorship. He receives sole credit on the title-pages of both issues, but it was eventually revealed that the pencils were actually provided by Al Bare, a Golden Age comics-artist who had worked with Simon at SICK MAGAZINE. However, since Simon made assorted claims about having stage-managed many of the artists with whom he worked-- including Jack Kirby-- it doesn't seem unlikely that Bare may have worked from breakdowns or even just thumbnails provided by Simon, so that in essence Bare may have been drawing things exactly as Simon wanted them, even right down to the "Big Daddy" Roth visual quote. Originally I didn't care for Bare's mix of frivolity and sombre freakishness. However, now I find that at times the art communicates a lyrical charm, one not entirely at odds with the counterculture's emphasis on visual intensity. 

NULL-MYTHS: JACK QUICK FROST (1966-67)

In essays like this one, I've argued that during the fifteen-year partnership of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Simon may have functioned as a "quality control" for Kirby's sometimes undisciplined creativity. If so, then Sinon's business relationship with Kirby may have operated much in the same way as Stan Lee's editorial authority over Kirby during the latter's first Marvel tenure. This hypothesis provides at least a tenable explanation as to certain changes in the quality of Kirby's work once he did all the writing and editing of his features in the 1970s and (mostly) from then on.

I've quoted Simon as stating that he usually assumed writing duties during his collaborations with Kirby; that he often wrote out scripts or, being an artist himself, provided Kirby or other artists under his aegis with roughs or thumbnails. This arrangement wouldn't keep Kirby from making verbal suggestions about stories, just as he did with Lee. Some of Kirby's claims to have "done it all" elicited many fans-- and even professionals like Alan Moore-- to credit Kirby's claims by asking how much work of consequence Lee produced without his two most creative collaborators, Kirby and Steve Ditko.

I've already given my answer to that question elsewhere, but it seems fair to ask the same question about Joe Simon's creativity apart from Kirby. However, he linked up with Kirby so early in his career that Simon doesn't have a lot of non-Kirby work on his resume. Like Lee, his professional career in mainstream comics came to an end by the early 1970s, and the most notable items on that resume are a few short-lived features for DC Comics, the editorship of SICK MAGAZINE from 1960 to 1968, and a much briefer editorial post for Harvey Comics' "Harvey Thriller" line from 1965 to 1967.

Technically, the first titles from the "Thriller" line were largely reprints of older material, and even when the line began issuing assorted superheroes in late 1966, editor Simon included large quantities of anthology-style stories as backups to the super-doers. Simon had worked on many superheroes during the Golden Age, not least his co-creation Captain America, and had worked with Kirby on sporadic genre-revivals in the 1950s, such as FIGHTING AMERICAN and Archie's FLY and SHIELD properties. Given that the genre enjoyed an upsurge in the early 1960s, one might have thought that if Simon cared much for the genre apart from channeling Kirby's greater enthusiasm for it, then that creative interest would have showed up in the Harvey Thriller line. Indeed, some fans have speculated that the only reason Harvey Comics started the "Thriller" line was to be in a position to take advantage if the BATMAN teleseries became popular when it debuted in early 1966.

If this was Harvey's game-plan, they took their sweet time about reacting to the show's immediate success, since the "Harvey Heroes" didn't start appearing until late 1966-- and when they did, costumed cut-ups like Jigsaw, Pirana, Spyman and the Bee shared a lot of space in their titles with assorted works that looked like whatever old pros like Wally Wood and Al Williamson happened to have stuck in their rejection drawers. Worse, what makes the Harvey Heroes "null-myths" was that though Simon aped Stan Lee's "heroes with problems" schtick at times, it seemed clear that Simon couldn't invest enough conviction in the costumed characters to make them attractive to the juvenile readers of the era.

One immediate indicator of Simon's disaffection was that most of his "Harvey Heroes" couldn't even come up with decent names. Spyman and Pirana (apparently that was how Simon thought it should be spelled) were just passable, but it's hard to imagine a kid fantasizing about sporting a name like JIgsaw or the Glowing Gladiator. The Bee was particularly schizophrenic name-wise. In his two stories, he was called "the Bee." But on both of the exterior covers, he was called "Bee-Man"-- a transparent ploy to have a logo resembling that of a certain chiropteran hero. And then there's-- "Jack Quick Frost."

At least, that's what he's called most of the time, without much explanation-- except that a few times someone uses the name "Jack Be Quick Frost," which must be one of the most cumbersome puns of all time. Frost starts out as government agent James Flynn, who gets flash-frozen into an iceberg-- a swipe from what Marvel had done with the reborn Captain America?-- and so gains super-freezing powers. A stronger influence on the hero is probably the "Mister Freeze" character from the BATMAN teleseries. The TV character, derived from a one-shot villain from the Batman comics, had debuted in Batman's first half-season, and Jack Quick Frost swipes Mister Freeze's vulnerability-gimmick: that of being in danger if he doesn't have access to deep-freeze temperatures.

Technically Simon may not have drawn or written any of these features. Still, I tend to think he would have followed the same habits he'd built up: sketching out what he wanted for raconteurs like Otto Binder and Jack Sparling (credited on GCD for the first of Jack's two adventures). Binder had written dozens of comics stories by the time of the "Thriller" line, and I think it's unlikely that he would have floated cutesy name-puns like "Jack Be Quick Frost," which sound like something Simon might've cobbled together for FIGHTING AMERICAN or SICK. Yet, as the above section shows, though Simon probably tried to work in BATMAN-references, the writer has clearly been told to emulate Stan Lee's style. "Biting icicles," indeed.

There are other bits of carelessness even in just two issues: the character is seen using a freeze-gun on the cover of his first appearance (again, like Mister Freeze), even though in the stories proper he always projects cold-rays from his fingers. But the thing that makes me choose Jack Quick Frost as a "null-myth" is the fact that Simon couldn't even keep his own psuedoscience straight. In his last appearance, fighting his sole enemy "Lord Lazee," Frost is exposed to dry ice.

But the whole point of dry ice is that it has a refrigerating effect on whatever it touches. It may feel like it burns when touching a normal person's flesh, but it shouldn't have any deleterious effect on a superhero who likes things cold.

And with this ignominious comedown, "the coolest hero in comics"  came to a much deserved end. Apparently Simon kept the rights to a lot of these characters, but there's no indication that he owned this one-- whose real name probably ought to have been "Jack Quick Buck."

MYTHCOMICS: "CITY OF GHOULS" (FIGHTING AMERICAN #2, 1954)

Only one FIGHTING AMERICAN story in the Simon and Kirby corpus presents the Communist menace as an apocalyptic menace rather than as a bunch of sad-sack subversives. The story "City of Ghouls" is featured on the cover of issue #2, though it diverges from the story inside. It's true that in the narrative, the main hero and his kid sidekick Speedboy are threatened by being hurled into a "sky well." However, the hurlers in the story are just an ugly gang of humans, whereas the cover depicts them as inhuman creatures. Though the Judeo-Christian idea of hell is not directly referenced on the cover, the fact that the bad guys in the story are devil-worshipers gives Fighting American's peril the resonance of a man being hurled into a lower circle of hell by demons.

The story begins with the news that the Communists' "general staff in America" has mysteriously gone off the surveillance grid. Simon and Kirby, in one of their last "serious" treatments of the Communist menace, were reaching into their Axis bag-of-tricks, for in the early 1950s there was nothing comparable to a "general staff" for American-based Communists. Since by page three Johnny Flagg mentions the so-called "Bavarian Redoubt" of Hitler, it's obvious that the artists were trying to give the Commies some of the heft of Nazi villainy. Fighting American and Speedboy don their ordinary attire to investigate the rumors that the missing Commies may be hanging around Mount Shasta in California. As happens only in comics, the investigators find their quarry first time out, and the two heroes are captured by a city of Communists, who are planning a massive assault from within America's borders.

Had the heroes merely destroyed a Communist base of operations, "Ghouls" would be no more memorable than dozens of other base-destroying missions. But by page five, it's become clear that the Commies didn't build the city on Mount Shasta. Johnny and his partner are captured by the original inhabitants of the city. Their spokesman claims that they are all "devil worshipers" who have secretly lived on the mountain for two hundred years, and they're happy that the Commies have shown up, since it means that they have new victims to sacrifice to their "dark master." (There's even an aside about how the cultists have been sacrificing their own members when they couldn't get outsiders, which makes one wonder how they've kept up their numbers for two hundred years-- especially since there's no evidence of any women in their group.)

The devil-worshipers typically sacrifice victims by dropping them out of a hole in the mountain, so that they will "fall into the sky." Why they don't simply strike the side of the mountain is not explained, but the good guys change into their hero-costumes and start kicking ass. Then the Communist forces get into the act, and a caption reads, "It's now devil against devil, evil against evil, with Fighting American and Speedboy doing battle with both." The heroes manage to escape the mountain, along with the cultists' hostage, Johnny's almost-girlfriend Mary (whose role in the story is a subplot that never quite comes together). Then Johnny phones the FBI and essentially tells them to "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out," by launching an aerial attack on Mount Shasta,. The story ends with the sight of flames "sweeping clean the last signs of invasion from our soil."

Critics who like to see superheroes as fascist would surely eat this story up, since both the devilish and the godless are wiped out like an infestation. In fact, Johnny even uses metaphors that compare the two groups of villains to "insects," while the planes dropping the bombs are compared to crop-dusters. Yet "City of Ghouls," for all of its obvious inconsistencies, is a fascinating look at the lengths two comics-creators went to, to try to make Commies into villains worthy of the name.

ASSORTED NEAR MYTHS AND ONE NULL MYTH: FIGHTING AMERICAN (1954-55)

In the short run of Simon and Kirby's FIGHTING AMERICAN-- seven issues, published from 1954-55-- one can find a rich harvest of near myths. Only one story in this corpus-- to which I'll devote a separate essay-- brought together its mythic elements with sufficient density to create a mythcomic.

In interviews given long after this run, Joe Simon talked as if the feature came about when he and Kirby sought to show comics-makers of the period how to do an action-packed superhero comic in the tradition of their Captain America, the classic WWII champion whose rights were owned outright by Timely Comics. However, it may have been more of a desperation ploy on their parts, of trying to find something, anything, that would catch on with audiences of the period. The superhero genre had declined in popularity since the post-war years, and not until 1958-- when DC Comics began emphasizing the genre in their line-- did the genre catch fire again.

In addition, Simon and Kirby sought to apply all the rock-em, sock-em storytelling strategies they'd used in the 1940s. But Captain America and other Simon/Kirby productions benefited from existing in an apocalyptic world, where it seemed like the battle between good and evil was taking place as a part of everyday life. The real-life Axis powers provided an enemy of unbridled aggression, and any fictional characters modeled on them could be just as pulpishly violent. And even when Captain America chose to fight other forms of evil, such as vampires and mad scientists, these too could take on the stature of larger-than-life villainy.

Fighting American was positioned to be a Commie-smasher in the same way Captain America was a Nazi-smasher-- but even I suspect that even had the feature premiered at a boom time for superheroes, it simply didn't work to substitute Commies for Nazis. Even allowing for the fact that Simon and Kirby were drawing on superficial images of real Communists for their stories, the years of the Cold War didn't present Russian Communists as great symbols of aggression. (Chinese Communists are not very important in the FIGHTING AMERICAN stories.) Rather, the average American knew Communists primarily as spies and subversives, and so that was how Simon and Kirby treated them. But because of this, Fighting American's villains lacked the formidable qualities of even the lesser villains of Captain America. As if the artists were dimly aware of the problem of making Commies into great villains, by the third issue of the comic, Simon and Kirby began portraying the Commies as goofy ne'er-do-wells, with names like Poison Ivan and Hotsky Trotsky.

Additionally, Simon and Kirby were probably somewhat influenced by the example of Harvey Kurtzman's MAD, one of the few indubitable sales-successes of the early 1950s. The influence isn't so much in content-- Kurtzman was a master satirist, while Simon and Kirby depended more on goony comedy-- as in style. American comics were often produced by Jewish-Americans, including these three artists. But while a few American comics-characters might have oddball accents, like those of Brooklyn or the Wild West, a reader almost never encountered a character who sounded like a New York City Jew. Kurtzman changed that, slipping in yiddische words like "goniff" and "meshugenah" for MAD's largely goyim audience, and occasionally having characters speak in the elliptical fashion favored by many New York Jews of the time. Rarely if ever had Simon and Kirby reproduced the Jewish cadence of speech, but it came to the fore in remarks like this one:

'Get this guy! A real "eager beaver!" If I suddenly yelled "Fighting American," he'd hide under a bed!'-- FIGHTING AMERICAN #7.

To my ears, at least, this is the same mode of speech Jack Kirby used in his problematic scripting for his 1970s work, which gives FIGHTING AMERICAN a certain cachet in terms of Kirby-history.

Yet despite his wearing a gaudy,, star-spangled costume, Fighting American was a very colorless character, and so was his kid-partner, who had so little background that he didn't even possess any other name than "Speedboy." In the 1940s both Captain America and Bucky were at best two-dimensional characters. Yet their creators infused both of them with a passionate hatred toward evil, whether it took the form of a Nazi Bund or a guy dressed in a buttefly-costume. Fighting American and Speedboy were just bland, though the former boasts an origin that had great psychological potential-- only to drop the ball on developing it, so that it became no more than a null-myth.

Captain America was a weakling whom the U.S. government transformed into a muscular superman with a special serum. Simon and Kirby kept the basic idea of the government creating a superman, but threw in a strange, barely acknowledged sibling complex.

Though the story initially focuses on Johnny Flagg, a radio celebrity renowned for attacking American Communists, the real star is Johnny's brother Nelson. Johnny is the typical Simon-Kirby he-man: square-jawed and broad-shouldered, though he was injured during his stint in the armed services, so that he has to walk on crutches. Johnny's radio-colleague Mary, your basic "Lois Lane" figure, openly admires Johnny, and so does his less impressive brother Nelson, though what Nelson doesn't say about his brother is as important as what he does say:

"Johnny was always the pride of the family-- a brilliant student, a prize athlete, and a war hero."


Nelson doesn't say what it means to him to dwell in the shadow of his brother, but he does touch on the irony that his crippled sibling can no longer be a man of action, "depending on his weak little brother to do his leg work." Later Nelson tries to stand up to a bad guy and gets beat down, living the reality of Clark Kent-- until evil Communists kill Johnny, making it possible for Nelson to banish his sibling envy in a macabre manner.

After Johnny is killed, the government, without so much as a by-your-leave, takes possession of his body, and somehow rebuilds the corpse to be "the agent of the future." But they can only bring this super-agent to life by transferring Nelson's mentality into the body of his late brother-- and Nelson, grieving for the brother he loved (even with resentment), quickly agrees.

Thus the weak body of Nelson dies, erased as the weak Steve Rogers was erased-- and yet Nelson lives on, to enjoy the skills and muscular powers of his brother's body. (Mary doesn't stick around much longer, but from then on, she seems to dote less on her co-worker than on his superheroic alter ego) For the remainder of the hero's short career, there's no further acknowledgement that the person everyone sees is not Johnny, but Nelson. As far as Simon and Kirby were concerned, Nelson existed only to bring about a magic-like transformation of weakness into strength. Still, this strategy didn't do a lot for making Fighting American work, even as a two-dimensional character.

However, though in FIGHTING AMERICAN Simon and Kirby never got any further than opening a door leading to dark psychological corridors, later Kirby, in partnership with Lee, would return to the theme with better results. Another weakling-- Bruce Banner, whom Nelson slightly resembles-- would not need to get his power from an envied sibling, but from his own "id," the wellspring of his desire for power and violence. True, early issues of THE INCREDIBLE HULK are all-over-the-place, in which the hero-monster varies between being a brutish villain to a muscular "genie" manipulated by his youthful buddy. But even so, Kirby seems to have grasped, in partnership with Lee, that Bruce Banner's problem had to be front-and-center this time. instead of being swept under the proverbial rug.

JUST ANOTHER TOSS-OFF KIRBY KOMMENT

Fourth World is a good, if regrettably cut-off-too-soon,, body of work, but I don’t think of it as being “similar.” to the Marvel works. I think FW shows Kirby returning to the tropes he preferred in both his pre-Marvel and post-Marvel work: mostly balls-out pulp-action with occasional sentimental moments– nothing quite like the “epic soap opera” he worked on when collaborating with Stan Lee.

Yes, yes, Stan was no great shakes before JK and SD– although I don’t think anyone’s really fully evaluated all of his 50s work with Joe Maneely– but he was an editor first and a writer second, and Kirby’s talents were such that he needed some reining-in. I think the S&K studio provided some reins in the more realistic work– particularly the S&K romance stories, which might be the closest to Lee-Kirby Marvel in structure– but I’m just not seeing that JK could do it all alone, genius though he was.

SIMON SESSION

     

As I’m going to be devoting some essays to a Joe Simon creation—though not in a review per se—I decided to devote some space to Simon's career.

In this essay I argued that it’s hard to assess the authorship of anything Jack Kirby “wrote” in his two long-term collaborations with, respectively, Joe Simon and Stan Lee. But at least with Kirby, he was solely responsible for both art and script on a assortment of later works, and a critic can examine said works to garner some idea of Kirby’s creative tendencies. And though Lee never drew any of his comics-work, one can also gain some idea of his creative propensities from those works in which the artists largely followed his scripts without much personal input.

Following the dissolution of Joe Simon’s partnership with Kirby, though, almost nothing Simon authored has accrued a fan-base. I’ve argued that he may have provided “quality control” for Jack Kirby, whose wild creativity sometimes resulted in incoherent narratives. However, very little of the material Simon authored without Kirby shows even modest creativity.

I confess that I’ve no personal acquaintance with Simon’s work on SICK MAGAZINE in the 1960s—and I’ve the impression that few fans from the period paid close attention to what seemed like just another MAD imitator. The most one can say is that it must have had something going for it to have lasted as long as it did.

Considerably less successful was the superhero line Simon engineered for Harvey Comics in the mid-1960s. Most if not all of the features edited, and sometimes written, by Simon have a tedious, gimmicky quality to them. Some fans have speculated that the line only came out because someone at Harvey knew about ABC-TV’s impending adaptation of the Batman franchise. Most of the Harvey superheroes have a constipated 1950s look to them, and even the most formulaic of Jack Kirby’s DC work, during the actual 1950s, looks good by comparison.

Discounting the last collaboration of Simon and Kirby on DC’s 1970s SANDMAN title—which indirectly gave birth to the franchise associated with Neil Gaiman—only the two-issue wonder BROTHER POWER—THE GEEK seems to have earned a modest following in fandom.

I did not read BROTHER POWER back in the day, and what little I initially heard about it made it sound like another misguided attempt by way-over-30 comics-makers to appeal to young readers by trying to sound “hip.” Moreover, the covers of the two issues were both unusually dark and suggestive of horrific interiors. In actuality, the interior art, drawn by Simon’s SICK collaborator Al Bare, reflected more in the way of antic humor than of ghastly grue.

To this date, I have not read the second BROTHER POWER issue, and don’t have the first one close to hand. I recall a few interesting mythopoeic touches in the first issue, though. One is the protagonist’s origin. He—or rather, it-- starts out as a tailor’s dummy. A bolt of lightning brings the dummy to life in the tradition of the cinematic creation of the Frankenstein Monster, and upon gaining sentience the dummy acts much like the movie-monster: perpetually baffled by the customs and contrivances of humankind. The now-living dummy is adopted by a handful of lovably goofy hippies, who give him clothes and face-painting to make him one of them.

They also give him a name with a certain mythic resonance: Brother Power. Simon was certainly exposed to the catchphrase most often associated with hippie culture: that of “flower power.” The idea was slightly oxymoronic in that the hippies knew that flowers had no power as such: that they could only seduce people away from the paths of militancy and violence by inculcating a love of beauty and fellowship. Simon may have concocted the name “Brother Power” out of a partial understanding of this ideal, for the hippie-hero—never a superhero in the accepted sense of the word—tended to use his ill-defined powers mostly in a defensive manner.

Finally, in his initial outing Brother Power is called a “geek” by someone or other; hence the additional name in the comic book’s title. Originally Simon had wanted the character to be addressed as a “freak,” because he apparently realized that this was an early instance of insult-reclamation. Squares called hippies “freaks,” and the hippies reclaimed the epithet to connote their ingroup’s specialness, as seen in Gilbert Shelton’s FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS. The story goes that DC was afraid that the word “freak” would suggest the drug-culture to readers, even though drugs are not even referenced in the initial issue. Thus Simon was obliged to substitute the sound-alike “geek,” simply because it too could be used as a term of opprobrium. 

Simon completed a third issue of the comic book before the DC hierarchy shut the magazine down, but that issue remains inaccessible to most fans. The second issue ended with Brother Power being trapped inside a space-rocket and launched away from Earth by Ronald Reagan himself, who at the time had become a conservative icon during his stint as the governor of California.  

 And that is the point from which Neil Gaiman started, when he briefly brought the Geek back into the hallowed halls of DC.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE CASE OF THE BLACK TALON" (CAPT. AMERICA #9, 1941)

Though the Golden Age Captain America was conceived as a protest against the advance of the Axis Powers, creators Simon and Kirby never confined the hero's adventures to wartime struggles. In part they might have been reluctant to deal with the war in more than vague generalities, given that real-life events might outstrip any imaginary exploits. Yet the same rules applied to most superheroes of the period, and many of the other masked adventurers contented themselves with simply fighting mundane crooks and Fifth Columnists.

The Golden Age CAPTAIN AMERICA, though, was full of a love of the grotesque, pitting the Captain and his young partner Bucky against mummies, vampires, artificial monsters, and almost every other horrific figure who'd ever been the subject of an American fright-flick. Most of these encounters with weirdness were thoroughly derivative, though still enjoyable on those terms. But one of the few that actually shows a touch of original thought-- written by Otto Binder and drawn by the Captain's co-creator Kirby-- is also strongly implicated in the racial myths of the time.

The adventure begins with an artistic foreshadowing of the thrills to come. The heroes, in their military attire as Private Steve Rogers and camp mascot Bucky Barnes, attend an art gallery and see a portrait of a "black hand," and Bucky observes that "it's a weird subject, but fine artwork." One panel later, as the two return to their barracks, Steve apparently help repeating the same opposition of "goodness" and "weirdness," with the statement, "A black hand! What a subject for a good painter!"

The two then hear a real murder being committed, so they change into their crimefighting outfits and ascend to an apartment. They find a strangled artist, and while they search the area, Bucky is attacked and almost strangled by an extraordinarily strong black hand. When the Captain rushes to his partner's aid, the strangler flees and escapes. The heroes then realize that the murdered man is an artist of some fame, and that the killer also slashed the artist's paintings as well as killing the man.

After a bit of comic byplay, the reader is introduced to a mad-looking Caucsian painter with one black hand and one white hand, who is now painting the agonies of his victim. With the help of two hired thugs, the unnamed villain ambushes yet another artist in his gallery and takes sadistic pleasure in personally knifing the man to death.

Captain America and Bucky once more manage to show up, but though they defeat the thugs, both heroes are defeated when the man uses his black hand to strangle them into unconsciousness. Only the arrival of the police keeps the two crusaders from being killed. The heroes then resign themselves to tedious "detective work," and it leads them to the studio of an artist named Pascal Horta-- whom the reader knows to be the murderous painter. Again the so-called "Black Talon" manages to knock out the crusaders, and while preparing to kill them he reveals how he came to possess one black hand and why he's been killing other artists and painting their agonies.

However, in the tradition of heroes over the ages, Captain America manages to free himself while the evildoer runs his mouth. Again hero and villain clash, and this time the Talon is hurled from a high window. However, the story ends atypically by showing that the Talon has not only survived, he begins making plans for his next vengeful plot-- which, as the final panel helpfully tells us, will appear in an upcoming issue of the YOUNG ALLIES comic book.

I return now to my distinction of "racial" and "racist" myths. Within my critical system, not every negative portrait of a member of a particular race is automatically racist. If there is some tenable logic in attributing negative elements to a character, then this is no more racist than attributing positive elements to another character of the same race.

Now, in the case of the donor of Horta's super-powerful hand, the reader sees little that would render "Strangler Burns" as even a two-dimensional character. One caption that calls him an "African," but if he is such then he's apparently taken an English-language name. He never speaks and the reader doesn't know why he committed whatever murders he committed. The doctor who proposes the operation claims that Burns volunteered the use of his hand claims that he's done so "as a final decent gesture," but this probably isn't anything more than a nod to American jurisprudence, whose legalities would make such consent necessary.

Now, let us consider Horta (whose surname bears an interesting relationship to the titular monster of Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Horla," also a story about an insidious influence possessing a formerly sane man). Horta is, to say the least, rather intense about his desire to paint no matter what, and though he's initially horrified at the thought of sporting a black man's hand, his passion to paint overcomes all resistance. "Black hand-- white hand-- what does it matter? I can paint again!" However, as soon as Horta tries to use his transplant-hand for painting, he finds himself rendering only portraits of horror. Further, he's inspired to become a strangler himself by killing off his rivals in the art-world, the better to render their deaths in oils.

Is there a possibility that Horta is merely imagining that the hand is forcing him to paint horror? The original 1920 novel about a deadly transplant-hand, Renard's LES MAINS D'ORLAC, was ambiguous as to whether any spirit-possession took place, as was the earlier De Maupassant story. The same was the case with the 1924 Austrian adaptation and 1935's MAD LOVE, the last being the most likely influence on collaborators Otto Binder and Jack Kirby. In contrast, "Black Talon" doesn't spend any time weighing the psychological considerations of Horta's plight.

Given that only Horta's artistic intensity might seem in any way unbalanced, it seems likely that Binder and Kirby meant the reader to accept the pseudo-science explanation for the hand's effects. One might question Horta's scientific acumen when he claims that "the corpuscles from the dead killer's hand invaded my bloodstream," but even the surgeon who performs the transplant tells Horta that "there is wild, new blood coursing through your veins." The doctor doesn't make a strict equivalence between this "wild blood" and Strangler's race, but it's likely that most readers of the period would have made that mental leap.

At the same time, toward the story's end Horta boasts to the heroes that "my black, taloned hand will have made me the world's greatest living artist," implicitly because all of his rivals will be dead. So though the murderer's corpuscles are pushing Horta to madness, the specific method of his madness has to do with becoming a great artist-- something one imagines that the Strangler cared nothing about. And the way that he accomplishes this mad aim is by becoming a hybrid between a white man, with his supposed propensity for "fine art," and a black man, whose brutish influence drives Horta to create horror instead of beauty-- though some of the sadism may be Horta's own. It's amusing to imagine that Kirby, a civilized commercial artist who apparently enjoyed drawing grotesquerie to some extent, may have taken some pleasure in humiliating a "fine artist" by subjecting him to sadism and madness.

So is "Black Talon" a racial or racist myth? I find that it recapitulates elements from both "benign chauvinism" and "malign chauvinism," much as I found when considering the Spirit's character Ebony, who was "racist" in his physical appearance but merely "racial" in other elements, such as his distinctive patois. The idea of a Negro having "wild blood" because he's a savage at heart qualifies as a "racist myth." However, there's a compensatory, merely racial fantasy in which a white artist attains superior strength by obtaining the the hand of a Hulking Black Guy. While early comics most often depicted black men as minstrel-show goofballs, one also comes across depictions of black men as hulking muscle-men. I deem such depictions to be racial myths because they are rooted in the observation of certain real racial body-types, as opposed to made-up caricatures like bulging eyes and liver-lips. Not that Strangler Burns is on the same level of formidability as MANDRAKE's Lothar-- but I'd speculate that the former is drawn from the same archetypal well as the latter.

SON OF THE LEE-KIRBY DEBATE PT. 2

Another rejoinder from the listserve mentioned in Part 1
 _______________________________________________

I'll amend my earlier statement to say that though there might be some unaltered Kirby scripts that saw print during the Golden Age, I can't agree that the majority of Kirby works didn't get some refinement from other hands.  The DC works particularly seem to have had a lot of the rough edges from the Timely days smoothed out. 

I believe Jack Kirby was an extremely intelligent man whose means of expression was influenced by the down-to-earth rhythms of the Lower East Side and the pulp magazines he loved growing up.  In Evanier's KIRBY-- and I admit I'm quoting from memory, though I can find the quote if necessary-- Evanier remarked that fans were sometimes taken aback not just by Kirby's Brooklyn-esque accent (I know that I was when I first heard him in public) but also by the way he expressed himself, in which his ideas fairly tumbled over one another in his rush to get them out.  I won't say that Kirby *always* scripted comic books that way; he was capable of attempting more formal, restrained dialogue, particularly in SKY MASTERS, which was his shot at the Big Time in those days.  But I don't think that mode of speech and dialogue ever came natural to him.  In contrast, you and others might consider Stan Lee to be "glib" (and I would agree in some specific instances, though not as a rule), but once he honed his style, it remained constant.  He could be snappy, as in his comedy titles like NELLIE THE NURSE and MY FRIEND IRMA, or he could be grim, as in his 1950s monster stories and westerns like BLACK RIDER.  But Stan was like a lot of the better Golden Age writers; once he formulated his  basic style, he kept it.  There was no backsliding into weird grammar-choices, not for him, or for Bill Finger, William Woolfolk, etc.  Stan was an editor first and a writer second, but as he was not an artist writing was one of the main ways Stan made his bread.  That wasn't the case with Kirby, who was always selling his art first.

I don't invalidate your POV, that you say that you see "word choices" and other narrative tics that have stayed constant in Kirby's work.  If my supposition is correct-- that Kirby almost always wrote his dialogue directly on the artboards, rather than writing a separate script first-- then any "fixup" writer who came later would be working from Kirby's original dialogue.  I fully admit that no one like Joe Simon has ever said outright that he had Kirby's dialogue corrected, though Simon did utter a slightly snarky pronouncement to the effect that "we'd never let Kirby write."  Again, it's just my supposition that he may've been thinking not about plotting, but about the headaches of smoothing out some of Kirby's helter-skelter dialoguing.  But it's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

I agree that Kirby was an "original voice," but his mode of expression varied between many truly powerful moments and a goodly number of wonky, awkward malapropisms.  You and others have mentioned that my opinion alone doesn't define the matter, and you're right.  But an awful lot of comics fans have had problems with Kirby's scripting, even when they may love the narrative power of even his most offbeat concepts, like DEVIL DINOSAUR.  That social verdict isn't something that can be blissfully disregarded.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to an online source, here's what Simon said about Kirby's writing in a COMIC BOOK MARKETPLACE interview:

"The standard way that Simon & Kirby worked was that I would write the
story out on the page in longhand. Make little sketches and roughs. And
Jack would take over. Finish the penciling. Then, if we had time, I would
ink….I wouldn't let Kirby write anything. His work was very fragmentary."

SON OF THE LEE-KIRBY DEBATE

I've already held forth here on my reservations regarding the idea of Jack Kirby playing a "lone hand" during his long and estimable career. Still, I threw myself into the debate once more on a listserve, starting with an observation that even if Stan Lee had given Kirby and Steve Ditko every credit that modern fans think that they merited, this credit would never have been noticed by the average person outside comics-fandom. Such outsiders would have continued to believe Stan Lee created everything because he was the most visible figure, just as filmgoers think of Alfred Hitchcock as the sole author of his films, even though he never wrote any of them.

_________________________


My point is that the general public doesn't remember all the collaborators for popular works; average audiences are doing good if they can remember one major player attached to a given work. I'm not necessarily making a one-on-one comparison between Lee and Hitchcock, though I think Lee did marshal talent in a manner comparable to the way Hitchcock did-- an important factor in such collaborative endeavors.

Maybe this comparison will sit better with you: Lee and Frank Capra. To underscore the comparison, Capra wrote a very self-serving autobio in which he basically claimed that he, the director, did it all. Later a critic-- Joseph McBride?-- wrote a well-research refutation of Capra's "I did it all" assertion. McBride demonstrated that all of Capra's financial or critical successes stemmed from his collaborations with two key writers-- two writers whom the general public will never know. Sound familiar?

And yet, saying that Capra and Lee didn't do it all isn't the same as saying that they did nothing.

On Kirby and writing: well, they are documented artist-writers, like Jack Cole, who did for comic books what Foster and Caniff did for comic strips. (Raymond started out collaborating with a writer for some years though; don't know how many.) But the problem with Kirby is that his Golden Age work is so tied to the S&K partnership. I have no problem with believing that Kirby plotted his stories, probably with little or no advance notes before he started drawing. But-- DID HE DIALOGUE THEM? Apparently neither he nor Simon kept records; we don't even know if Kirby got a separate writer-payment in those days, the very thing which became the bone of contention in the Marvel years. (Maybe if one of us was an IRS agent, we could check Kirby's 1940s filings!) The Golden Age works, from SANDMAN to BOYS RANCH, are all basically well written pulp entertainment, efficient but not stylistically outstanding.


Then there's a fifteen-year period in which exigencies forced Kirby to collaborate outside the S&K shop, where so many hands contributed. Kirby works with Dave Wood, Stan Lee, and Larry Leiber, possibly rewriting a lot of what he's given, and only rarely does he have a dialogue-credit, as in that one issue of Nick Fury.

Then, toward the end of his first Marvel tenure, he gets sole credit on a couple of features: one of which is passable (Ka-Zar), one of which is ghastly (Inhumans). He goes to DC, and though some of his dialogue-writing experiments with Shakespearean rythyms, a lot of his dialogue is, in a word, goofy.

So again I ask the question--

If Kirby was writing such competent dialogue back in the 1940s-- when he himself was in his late twenties and early thirties-- HOW DID HE LOSE THAT ABILITY?

That one factor makes me doubt that Jack Kirby ever wrote a line of dialogue in the 1940s and 1950s.

I'm not saying that I believe it impossible; that Kirby was once capable of very efficient pulp dialogue, and then just lost the knack.

But an alternate theory would be that Kirby might have had a lot of help over rough spots in his shop days, so that he wasn't fully prepared to write dialogue as a solo talent in the 1970s.

FOOTNOTE: Another member of the listserve provided specifics on Alex Raymond's writer-collaborators--

"Alex Raymond had Don Moore as his writer for most of FLASH GORDON and JUNGLE JIM. Dashiell Hammett, Don Moore and Leslie Charteris were his writers for SECRET AGENT X-9. Ward Green and Fred Dickinson were his writers for RIP KIRBY."