MYTHCOMICS: "DEUS EX MACHINA," ANIMAL MAN #18-26 (1989-90)

 

  

The latter half of Grant Morrison's run on ANIMAL MAN wasn't originally given any particular title. However, by whatever contrivance, when DC issued its first softbound reprints of the title, they distributed the first half over two volumes, probably with supplemental material, while the latter half finished up in Volume 3, given the title of the last Morrison story, "Deus Ex Machina."

The first half of Morrison's ANIMAL MAN is a good basic reboot of the late sixties DC character, who in his original incarnation had never taken off. The first seventeen issues emphasize the attempts of Animal Man, who possesses the power to emulate the abilities of all animals, to fight for justice but also to care for the wife and children he maintains in his "Buddy Baker" identity. Morrison also invests Baker with a passionate protective feeling toward the many lower animals maltreated by uncaring human beings, and the author succeeds in making this moral point without becoming preachy. The early issues include a lot of guest appearances by familiar DC heroes and villains. Moore's SWAMP THING and Gaiman's SANDMAN had pursued a similar course to attract regular DC readers. However, the latter half of MACHINA is devoted to doing a deep dive into the DC cosmos rather than emphasizing the main hero's milieu-- and on top of that, a deep dive into the concept of metafiction.

Issue #18 foregrounds a storyline hinted at in the first half: the nature of Animal Man's powers. He meets academic James Highwater and the two seekers go to the desert and chew peyote to bring about a "vision quest." Highwater relates Animal Man's powers to the "morphogenetic fields" suggested by parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake (whose work, BTW, I also admire). From a vulpine oracle named "Foxy," the seekers also learn of an impending "crisis," which is Morrison's metafictional reference to the 1985 CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. This in itself is a form of metafiction, given that the CRISIS over-wrote established DC continuity so that almost no one remembers the events of that cataclysm. What Morrison plays with is something of an "anti-CRISIS" as he begins bringing back all the untidy fictional creations that the 1985 event sought to banish.

 

However, Buddy Baker's experience goes even farther than CRISIS. Not only does Buddy meet the 1960s incarnation of Animal Man, whose existence was rebooted to make Morrison's version, he also beholds the audience that's reading his comic book. Further, Original Animal Man's rants about how their creators "twist and torture" their fictional creations are borne out when Buddy gets home and finds his family slaughtered by an assassin.

     

For three issues, Buddy puts metaphysics on hold as he seeks out the men responsible for the killings, though later he'll conclude that the real murderer is his writer, Grant Morrison. Issue #23, entitled "Crisis," shows how the Psycho Pirate-- one of the few characters from the 1985 series who remembered how reality had been structured before-- begins summoning all the banished characters from whatever conceptual limbo they occupied. However, he also summons bizarre alternate forms of famous DC characters, all calculated to reflect the "grim and gritty" trend of eighties superhero comics. 

In issue #24-- graced by an evocative cover that celebrates the birth of DC continuity in the Silver Age-- Animal Man defeats the immediate menace of Overman and his purification bomb, satirizing current tastes for "realism." But the hero still wants to know what entity is responsible for the deaths of his family, so he's sent to the limbo of cancelled comics-characters.  

Unsurprisingly, in limbo Animal Man meets a lot of characters who simply ceased to be published, rather than being banished in the 1985 CRISIS, such as The Inferior Five, The Green Team, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and (as seen above) The Gay Ghost. Though Morrison naturally only shows characters from DC or from companies DC acquired, he implies that the same limbo awaits other companies' failed icons, in his amusing line about "the great ruined cities of Atlas and Warren." (Atlas Comics ceased operation in the 1970s while Warren Comics went into bankruptcy in 1983-- though not all of Warren's characters were relegated to limbo.) 

 

As I've already stated, the architect of Animal Man's many torments is his writer on ANIMAL MAN the comic, and he only engineered the hero's sufferings for the sake of "drama." After spending the rest of the last issue outlining for the hero the absurdity of superheroes in the author's "real world," he concludes by expressing dismay at how reality has invaded fantasy. He vanishes and Buddy goes back home, where he's given one last gift by his author: a "reboot" in which Buddy's family never died at all. (I didn't regularly read the comic after Morrison left, but I suspect that this escapist fantasy probably ensured that subsequent authors left the Bakers unmurdered, since such a development would have been seen as thoroughly predictable.) 

And so ended one of the early runs that made Grant Morrison a popular comics-author. I don't agree with his implication that human beings create fictional characters solely to torture them, and I rather doubt Morrison really believes that himself. Indeed, everything that Real Author Morrison tells his readers may have exactly the same status as what Fictional Author Morrison tells his fictional hero-- that it's all done for the sake of a good story.   

GUNN SHOTS

 

"Our plot has nothing to do with All-Star Superman, but some of the aesthetics of what Grant wrote and what Frank drew were incredibly influential," he continues. "They also had that sort of science fiction, and the idea of Lex as a mad science sorcerer, almost. You know, science is his own sort of sorcery. And the giant, you know, the monsters and the threats and all of that the Silver Age look through a green lens. I think a lot of that was taken from All-Star Superman, and that was my biggest one, for sure. Also my favorite."-- Total Film.

This comment, made by James Gunn to various press-reps while publicizing a SUPERMAN LEGACY trailer, seems to be all that he ever said about the influence of the Morrison-Quitely ALL-STAR SUPERMAN on his film. The opening sentence, where he notes that he's not attempting anything like the ALL-STAR plot, didn't stop a lot of fans from speculating that the Morrison work would be a major thematic influence, rather than just influencing some aesthetic aspects of the movie. (I note that the Total Film essay specifies that some members of the cast took inspiration from the GN as well.)

Now that I've both reviewed the film and re-examined ALL-STAR, I don't even think Gunn took much from Morrison/Quitely in terms of aesthetics. Gunn and M/Q are both making use of the garish, larger-than-life imagery of Silver Age comic books. But Gunn takes those images at face value, while M/Q find ways to illuminate the symbolic potential of such images. For instance, Gunn's Fortress of Solitude carries no sense of wonder: it's just a repository of things Gunn needs to make the story work: a solar-ray healing machine for Superman's wounded body, and robots to attend his recovery. Interestingly, David Corenswet is quoted in this IGN piece as to how affected he was by the M/Q depiction of the Fortress, allowing him as a performer to have insight into the "gentle loneliness" of the Superman psyche. I think Corenswet conveyed in his performance the sense that, even with human friends and a few fellow Kryptonians, Superman is still terribly alone. In my ALL-STAR review I considered the possibility that the M/Q "vision of interconnectedness...makes Superman so devoted to helping others, and it may be the only thing about ALL-STAR to influence James Gunn, even though Gunn chose a totally different direction." But now I don't think Gunn, even though he may have comprehended what M/Q meant re: the connectedness of people, took any influence from ALL-STAR there. 

Gunn does want to convey a sense of Superman as being motivated by a deep and soulful caring for all living beings, even the kaiju-creature Luthor sends to tear up Metropolis. But the closest Gunn comes to articulating that motivation comes in the final scene between Superman and Luthor:

I'm as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human. And that's my greatest strength.

        

Now that's a vision of commonality, but not of interconnectedness. It doesn't really explain the hero's extraordinary reverence for life-- something not shared by his fellow superheroes. Hawkgirl cheerfully executes one of the villains, saying, "I'm not Superman," thus channeling the sentiments of many of the harsher comic-book vigilantes, some of whom Gunn has adapted, such as Peacemaker. This scene suggests that even though Gunn was trying to convince viewers that Superman's great kindness is the new "punk rock," he knew that the audience would want to see at least one villain pay the ultimate penalty, and Luthor was clearly not going to be knocked off. Barring new info from seeing the movie a second time, I think Gunn was just trying to find some way to rationalize Superman's dominant Boy Scout image. He might have built more upon a possible "savior complex" the hero had built up in reaction to his understanding of the "legacy" left him by his Kryptonian parents, but if Gunn meant something along those lines, the concept didn't make it into the finished movie.

More Gunn Shots to come, possibly.

    

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERMAN IN EXCELSIS" (ALL STAR SUPERMAN #1/ 10-12, 2007-08)

 

Even before I saw and reviewed SUPERMAN LEGACY, I'd heard somewhere that James Gunn might have been influenced by Grant Morrison's 2007-08 limited Superman series, ALL-STAR SUPERMAN. I don't intend to research what Gunn might have publicly said about the Morrison work, though I assume he did make some statement or other. My reaction to the assertion was that I thought Gunn might have borrowed this or that storytelling trope, but I highly doubted that he would have any interest in Morrison's predominant themes of archetypal realities and creative evolution. But now that LEGACY is a box-office success, that leads me to examine ALL-STAR through the lens of myth-explication.

Previously I reviewed just one two-part story in ALL-STAR, the Bizarro sequence, without saying anything definitive about all twelve issues. I will now state that even though the ALL-STAR series is almost certainly the best Superman story of the 21st century (and may continue to do so if the comic continues until 2099), its diverse stories don't all sustain my concept of symbolic concrescence. Morrison made a studied effort to bring all his concepts under his chosen theme, the aforementioned ideal of creative evolution, but I don't think he was successful across the board. He formulated a sort of "frame-story" in which the villainous Luthor finally manages to doom Superman, and this frame starts with issue 1, becomes a leitmotif throughout issues 2 through 9, and culminates in issues 10-12. The stories in 2-9 are many times better than what usually passes for a good Superman story in this century, but their purpose is not predominantly to illustrate the main theme. The "in-the-frame" stories are Morrison's attempt to isolate all the quintessential tropes of the Superman series up to that point-- mostly the tropes of the 1955-70 Silver Age-- though he works in references to other eras (Steve Lombard of the 1970s, Doomsday of the 1990s). For me, the frame-story, for which I've used the title Morrison gave to the last installment, is the only segment that thoroughly fulfills the theme of creative evolution.

         

 

"Excelsis" begins with daredevil billionaire Leo Quintero (note the possibly coincidental resemblance of the name to "quintessential"). He and a crew of androids fly a spacecraft to the periphery of the sun, ostensibly to map the solar body, though there's also a reference to taking fire from the sun in some Promethean endeavor, in line with a couple of references to the Ray Bradbury short story "The Golden Apples of the Sun." However, Lex Luthor, who's apparently aware that Superman is watching over this scientific project, smuggles on board an android timed to blow up the ship. Superman bursts in and expels the android, but in so doing, he like Icarus (not a Morrison reference) flies close to the sun. Even though the sun is the source of most or all of Superman's fantastic powers, the hero's not able to simply barrel his way his way through the solar mass here, as he did in so many other comics-tales. The Kryptonian's system is poisoned by too much solar "information," and Quintero informs Superman that he's likely to die soon. As something of a measured boon, Quintero also states that if he can't save Superman with his science, he'll try to create "replacement supermen."

While anticipating his death, Superman seeks to arrange his affairs for that contingency, though he still has to deal with continuous menaces to Metropolis. One of his most vital decisions is to reveal to Lois Lane the truth of his double identity, as well as giving her a guided tour of his Fortress of Solitude. Among the many wonders he shows off is a "baby Sun-Eater," which is Morrison's only reference to the history of Superboy's involvement with the Silver Age Legion of Super-Heroes-- though the creature pops up later in a more essential role. Lois doesn't entirely believe the hero, and he isn't truthful about everything. Superman informs Lois that his recent visit to the sun "tripled my curiosity, my imagination, my creativity"-- which seems to be true in a general sense-- but the hero doesn't tell the girl reporter that too much sun has also killed him. (I wonder if there's a parallel to the psychotropic drugs that appear in many Morrison stories, though I don't know how often such substances result in death in his stories.)

   

Superman keeps busy despite the sword hanging over his head. As Clark Kent he interviews Luthor, who's been sentenced to execution, and the hero isn't entirely able to conceal his revulsion at the mad scientist's waste of his talents. He finds a new world for the Kandorians to inhabit. He visits the Kent farm, recollecting the circumstances of Pa Kent's passing, which in Morrison's world involves a meeting with "Supermen of the Future." And, to experiment with seeing how Earth would get along without him, he creates his own pocket-planet, "Earth-Q," which is essentially our own world (complete with an artist, implicitly Joe Shuster, creating the fictional Superman). Morrison presents this Superman as a modest god who constantly seeks the best for mortals, albeit a god with human limitations.   

   

Morrison's intra-frame stories are loosely united by a "twelve tasks of the hero" motif, but the final and most important feat is that Superman, unlike Captain Ahab, succeeds in "striking the sun itself." But this isn't the non-sentient solar orb that accidentally poisoned the hero. Rather, this surrogate sun is Solaris, a solar computer from the future, an entity who wants to usurp the position of the regular sun and become the object of Earth's veneration. Luthor's responsible for Solaris' presence as well, apparently because the villain didn't want Superman to go off and die in private. Instead, Solaris bombards Earth with red sun radiation, so that Luthor will be able to personally torment and execute a powerless Superman.      

However, in a moment of irony, Superman outthinks his enemy-- using "brain over brawn," a line which James Gunn more or less recycled for LEGACY. The hero uses a gravity gun that accelerates Luthor's metabolism, to burn out the super-powers the villain gave himself. And on top of that, Luthor is forced to see the universe through Superman's eyes: "this is how he sees all the time, every day. Like, it's all just us, in here, together. And we're all we've got." This is implicitly the vision of interconnectedness that makes Superman so devoted to helping others, and it may be the only thing about ALL-STAR to influence James Gunn, even though Gunn chose a totally different direction.      

So both Luthor and Solaris are defeated. But because Solaris poisoned the sun, Superman doesn't expire on mundane Earth, but ascends to the Heavens, becoming joined with the body that has slain him. Back on Earth Lois keeps the faith, telling Jimmy that the hero hasn't died, but is only seeking to heal the sun with a new "heart." Morrison suggests but does not affirm that this may be true, but clearly, in this sequence, the writer is using the trope of the hero's death to sum up, not simply his accomplishments, but all the creativity that gave him the status of a modern myth.    

Finally, the Latin phrase "in excelsis" translates to "in the highest," and appeared in a Christian hymn within the phrase "Glory to God in the highest." But within the context of the ALL-STAR stories, "in excelsis" connotes humanity's need to emulate its highest creative potential. This is underscored in issue 10, where Morrison and Quitely give the reader a glance at Earth-Q, where its version of the 15th-century philosopher Pico del Mirandola states the following.

“Let us not yield sovereignty even to them, the highest of the angelic hierarchies! Become instead like them in all their glory and dignity. Imitation is man’s nature, and if he but wills it, so shall he surpass even imagination’s greatest paragons.”

Morrison seems to be alone in drawing a connection between empathy for all beings and "imagination's greatest paragons," and that may be the thing that keeps ALL-STAR on a "higher plane" that most of what passes for "Superman mythology" in this era.       

    

MYTHCOMICS: "THE CURSE OF THE SUPERBOY MUMMY" (SUPERBOY #123, 1965)

By 1965, many of the Mort Weisinger-edited comics of the SUPERMAN line had gone beyond the fustiness of their Golden Age precursors. If one goes beyond my specific connotations of "mythicity," and speaks only of how each of the titles nurtured its own mythology, then both of the SUPERMAN books, the SUPERGIRL backup, LOIS LANE and JIMMY OLSEN all showed unprecedented inventiveness in creating new characters and concepts, or in causing old ones to interact. (I'm leaving the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES feature outside these considerations because it sported a very different conceptual format.) But of the features set in the 20th century, SUPERBOY was the least distinguished in sheer creativity. 

I've only read bits and pieces of the late forties/early fifties SUPERBOY, I've found them extremely jejune compared to the SUPERMAN scripts of the same period, even allowing for SUPERBOY's simpler, kid-focused plots. Only one event in the feature's late Golden Age era is still remembered by fans today, the creation of Lana Lang, which as I argued here began as a recapitulation of Lois Lane's character. Then two more "myth-events" followed in the first five years of the Silver Age. First came the introduction of Krypto in 1955. Then in 1960 came one of the feature's few mythic stories, "How Luthor Met Superboy," which debuted the appealing idea that Luthor and Superboy grew up together in Smallville long before they became implacable foes in adulthood. The "retcon" of Luthor was followed other tales which borrowed from the SUPERMAN comic books (or, in one case, from the SUPERMAN comic strip), so that the Boy of Steel began meeting Phantom Zone villains and the like. But even by 1965, his writers showed little sign of evolving any new myth-material original to Superboy's universe-- again, not counting the Legion.

I suspect that the premise of "The Curse of the Superboy Mummy" might have begun from an idea for an arresting cover image-- Lana Lang and Superboy finding archaic doppelgangers of themselves in an Egyptian tomb. Given that idea, writer Leo Dorfman and artist Curt Swan then probably had to "work backward" to find some way to justify the image. But this time Dorfman rooted his makework story in one of the key myths of the Superman cosmos-- the War Between Men and Women.

The three-way relationship of heroic Superboy, admiring Lana Lang, and apparently-timid Clark Kent had of course been borrowed from the SUPERMAN comics, but a few interesting divergences arose. For one thing, Lana became at some point the daughter of an esteemed archaeologist, so she could sometimes be tied to arcane or unusual discoveries. 

Now, the cover does not specify the nature of the "curse," but the opening caption does, implying that somehow Lana's presence is going to bring doom to the hero-- even though she doesn't show any of her more annoying traits here or in the issue's other two stories. Nevertheless, when Dorfman takes us back to 3,000 B.C. in Egypt, the writer changes the Smallville setup-- "young girl only thinks the guy she knows is weak"-- to a literal reality. Seth, weakling son of royal magician Ahton, is humiliated when the taunting Neferti demonstrates that even she's stronger than he is. Doting father that Ahton is, he goes for the quick fix, asking Isis for help.

Isis shows Ahton the futuristic feats of Superboy-- proving that even archaic gods are big fans of the Kryptonian franchise-- and Ahton learns how to duplicate Superboy's powers with a magic potion. There is of course no internal reason for Ahton or Seth to duplicate the Superboy costume too, except to make the cover-image work out. But I give Dorfman extra points for coming up with a rationale for the insignia, since the Egyptians didn't have the European letter "S."

During Seth's short super-career, his major accomplishment is really to blow off Neferti when she tries womanly wiles to attract his attention. But Neferti shares the snoopiness of her later doppelganger, so she not only learns Seth's true identity, she even sees images of Superboy and Lana in Ahton's magic oracle-shield.

Then, just as the nosiness of Lois and Lana sometimes put their romantic idol in one kind of peril or another, Neferti has a "Deianeira moment," where she trusts in an unscrupulous adviser to give her a love-charm. The jade scarab she wears to attract Seth kills him, and her as well, when she tries to rescue him from the sea. (The story has an unusual amount of death for a mid-sixties SUPERBOY tale.) 

This half of the story is the most resonant for its use of a trope one might call, "Hero Killed by Woman's Egotism." Astute readers are expected to notice that Lana appropriates the very jade scarab that killed Seth, and so there's no great mystery to those readers when modern-day Superboy begins experiencing non-romantic heartaches when he gets near Lana. The Big Reveal of the next three pages is pretty routine and not worth recapitulating here; those interested in the denouement may read it here. The only mythic element of the modern-day section of the narrative is that, even though Lana isn't intentionally endangering Superboy, the hero's dimestore self-analysis is never actually invalidated. According to the way Lana normatively functions in the SUPERBOY canon, she does at least endanger the hero's peace of mind with her frequent identity-hunting. And if one chooses to amplify the potential feelings of these purely fictional characters, Lana also could incur a lot of resentment by her frequent complaints about Clark Kent's meekness-- though to my knowledge she never went so far as to embarrass Clark in a contest of strength/skill. So if Superboy does harbor secret resentments of his potential girlfriend, it's not because he's swayed by any ancient superstition. He just resents nosy, nagging women.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE CREEPING CREATURES OF STEEL" (HOUSE OF SECRETS #23, 1959)

What's great about myth-hunting is that how even the lesser near-myths show up in the most unexpected places. 

Though a lot of Silver Age DC serial characters have earned a measure of popularity-- sometimes more than they enjoyed in their original eras-- DC's anthology-stories usually don't generate even nostalgic memories. And for the most part, these one-shot tales don't deserve much respect. Marvel fans still celebrate many of the one-off stories from that company's Silver Age, if only because of stellar art-talents like Kirby and Ditko, But who in the ranks of DC fans care much about the output of the DC anthologies of the late fifties and early sixties? They're usually tepid gimmick-dominated narratives, crafted by a company that valued conformity to a subdued art-style (allegedly that of comic strip artist Dan Barry)-- a company that believed that its dominion of the market was etched in stone-- or steel.

I found a modest exception to this rule while glancing through HOUSE OF SECRETS #23, which was the first appearance of the serial character Mark Merlin. Merlin's debut was underwhelming to say the least. However, this issue also contained "The Creeping Creatures of Steel," penciled by George Roussos. Naturally no writer is credited, but since Jack Miller is credited with the "Merlin" tale, I'll call "Creeping's" author "Maybe-Miller."

"Creeping" opens with one of the many unlikely attractions that appeared in Silver Age DC comics: an amusement park called "Legend Land," wherein the three dominant rides are modeled after Greek mythological monsters: the three-headed dog Cerberus, the winged Harpy, and the hybrid monster Chimera. But suddenly the three monstrous structures come alive and start galumping around.

The park-owner calls in Larkin, the engineer who created the constructs, but he knows nothing about their curious capacity for perambulation. He suggests using magnets to restrain the monsters, and since there happens to be a magnet factory nearby, the humans try to restrain the Cerberus with a big one. Despite what the dialogue says ("Nothing can stop this thing"), the magnet apparently slows Cerberus down enough that an "acetylene torch crew" is able to dismantle the three-headed dog-scraper in jig time, despite the fact that the other two monsters are getting closer. But then the two creeping creatures and the disassembled beams go flying through the air.

The last two pages wrap things up in tidy fashion. The befuddled humans observe that the three "creatures" are homing in on the Ajax Iron Mine from which their raw materials were taken. All the humans can do is watch as the creatures, as well as a truck full of iron ore, return to the mine. They also provide a sci-fi rationale, since Larkin just happens to remember that a meteor struck the mine long ago, turning the metal there into "cosmic iron" that possesses the attribute of "self-magnetism."

On the face of things, "Creeping" is just another gimmick-tale with thoroughly dull talking-head characters. But of the many myth-figures from which Maybe-Miller could have chosen, he happened to pick monsters who all have ties to the Greek underworld. Two of the three were birthed by the serpentine deities Typhon and Echidna, while a third, the Harpy, was linked in some stories to Typhon and a different mother. However dimly, these constructs, made in the image of creatures aligned to death and darkness, defy the will of mortals by returning to the underworld that spawned them.

Of course there are no "self-magnetic" minerals; the only entities with "homing instincts" are animals. Of the animals referenced in the myth-creatures-- dog (Cerberus), goat, lion and serpent (Chimera), and bird (Harpy)-- only birds have a strong repute for said instincts. I don't claim that Maybe-Miller had any conscious intent beyond turning out another gimmick-tale. But there's more myth-potential here than in a couple hundred similar stories from Silver Age DC.

THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION

For once, I got permission from a forum-poster, one DoctorHermes428, to reprint here a post from CHFB that sparked my current essay. The conversation involved in part talking about the reasons why in the late 1960s Jack Kirby declined to accept any offer Stan Lee may have made re: taking over Lee's de facto Art Director duties for Marvel Comics, and why he Kirby decided instead to sever relations with Marvel in 1969 and go to work for DC Comics under head editor Carmine Infantino.

____________

I don't see how Jack Kirby would have enjoyed being Art Director, no matter if it paid better. He loved working on his own, sitting up all night over the drawing board. Being in an office with people coming in and out all day, the phone ringing, arguments over a cover layout... all this would have annoyed him beyond bearing (as I see it).
What happened at DC really broke Jack Kirby's heart. His grand plans for the Fourth World books where he had some of his favorite creators working for him, as well as his ideas for a line of black and white magazines, weren't supported by DC (mostly Carmine Infantino). 

I don't think Kirby was ever the same after this. He still turned out some fine comics but increasingly he was jus going through the motions. The spark had been damped. He wasn't out to change the world or create his life's work, he just settled down to make a living. I know most people will say, "It's just comic books, what's the big deal?" but to me it's one of the biggest missed opportunities in pop culture ever. -- DoctorHermes428.

Now in my essay STAN, JACK, AND JOE STUFF I mentioned in a general sense the way the Marvel Universe had in essence undermined Kirby's independent way of doing comics, though I didn't address any long-term creative consequences. I wrote:

From my outsider's standpoint, though, the synergy between Kirby and Lee was far different [from the Simon-Kirby collaboration], 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.

 First, I should enlarge on what I said about "new directions." 

I've the impression that both Lee and Kirby read widely in many pulp genres as young men, and that, unlike many of their contemporaries, they were able, whether with one another or with other collaborators, to convey that enthusiasm to their young reading-audience. And of all the genres they both absorbed, the most important one to their 1960s collaborations was the genre of science fiction.

Now, the prose pulps of the 1940s would have offered a rather schizophrenic view of the genre, for one could encounter on the stands both pure "gosh-wow" space operas like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Captain Future alongside and deeper, more thoughtful philosophical meditations by authors like Asimov and Heinlein. So far as I can tell, though, almost no comics raconteurs of the 1940s tapped into the philosophical side of SF. All, including Lee and Kirby, were totally invested in "gosh-wow." And I will extend that argument (for reasons that will soon become clear) to the employment of SF in American cinema. In the decade of the 1940s, nearly no "philosophy-SF" was attempted, and the few attempts hardly came close to touching the hem of Fritz Lang's trouser-leg.

But comic book SF took on its own schizophrenic division in the very early 1950s. Going by my partial reading of the early issues of DC's flagship  SF-anthology comic, STRANGE ADVENTURES (1950), I would say that DC remained steadfastly committed to the "gosh-wow" method. In the same year that ADVENTURES debuted, William Gaines' EC Comics published its two SF-titles, WEIRD FANTASY and WEIRD SCIENCE. EC experts would know more than I of Gaines' reading-proclivities. But for whatever reasons-- which probably include the proclivities of contributors like Wally Wood-- EC's two magazines proved to be more in the spirit of "philosophy-SF" that had been best propagated in the forties by ASTOUNDING MAGAZINE and in the fifties by THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (said magazine having begun in 1949). To further support the sense of a changing ethos, American cinema suddenly began investing heavily in "thinking-man's SF," with DESTINATION MOON in 1950 and both THE THING and THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL in 1951. 

I can't say at present how much the changes to comics-SF and movie-SF affected either Lee or Kirby in the first half of the fifties. I don't think by that time either man was likely to be reading pulp magazines any more, whether the magazines were simple or sophisticated. But I have the distinct impression that both of them kept a weather-eye on the new breed of SF-movies, and that both men began emulating cinema's version of "philosophical SF" in their comic books, and MAYBE imitating EC's efforts in that department too. How much these emulations affected their work in the early 1950s is not important to my thesis. But it seems without question that when they started collaborating on SF-work in the late 1950s-- even on the works where Stan's brother Larry Leiber provided the dialogue-- they began giving the characters in their short-term anthology-tales more characterization than anything one could see in DC's gosh-wow stories of the decade.

The DC gosh-wow dynamic also informed the company's SF-heavy superheroes of the late fifties and early sixties: FLASH, GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE. But when Lee enlisted Kirby to collaborate on their flagship superhero title in 1961, the first thing they did was to work in one of the tragic monsters they'd been using in their SF-anthology tales, but as an ongoing hero. 

Though Lee and Kirby were very different individuals and had very different attitudes toward their creative endeavors, I think the synergy between them came from a common understanding that you could tell far more engaging comics-stories if the characters were at least on the same level of a movie like 1953's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. From the years 1961-1964, that's as far as their aspirations went.

Then, during the years 1965 through 1967, Kirby goes through a period of incredible dynamism in terms of designing new characters. In FANTASTIC FOUR alone, he visualized the Inhumans, Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the Kree, and the Black Panther in that short period. It's possible, as Kirby apologists believe, that Lee simply let Kirby create everything during that period and just filled in the dialogue. But there's no literal proof that Kirby never picked up any ideas from his editor and collaborator. One can only say that Lee probably could not have designed a character to save his life. That said, before Kirby wasted time coming up with a design for comics' first Black superhero, I think it's axiomatic that Lee would have signed off on spotlighting such a character. Indulging some of Kirby's wilder flights of fancy didn't mean letting the artist do whatever he pleased. Lee was the editor, the guy who made decisions about what did or didn't benefit the image of the company he was building into a small empire. So if Lee had wanted to turn King T'Challa into just another White jungle-hero, that's what Kirby would have been obliged to draw.

As DoctorHermes says, in the late sixties Kirby saw that for the first time his works were getting a little serious attention from the non-comics world. He didn't think, probably correctly, that he was getting due credit for his contributions-- though to be fair, outsiders would not have cared about the specifics of who created what. As I said in my earlier essay, only hardcore fans kept track of such minutiae. For the last two years of his second Marvel tenure, Kirby reined in his creative impulses, probably to keep from giving away any more profitable ideas to the company. One anecdote suggests that Kirby might have shown Stan Lee a few rough ideas he'd later take to DC Comics. When some interviewer related this anecdote to Stan Lee, the Marvel editor typically said that he didn't remember one way or the other.

Ironically, one of the models for Kirby's "Fourth World" was not a major SF-author, but the foremost fantasy-author of the sixties decade, J.R.R. Tolkien. To be sure, the only thing Kirby really took from Tolkien was a general metaphysical attitude toward the struggle between the Good of New Genesis and the Evil of Apokolips, a theme not present in most SF prose works. But almost all of the imagery of the Fourth World stemmed from science fiction, not fantasy. 

What Kirby presented in the Fourth World was usually "gosh-wow" SF garnished with occasional philosophical content. Nevertheless, the scripts he wrote were fully as ambitious as those he co-created with Lee. I think it's likely that, aside from just wanting to be independent of his collaboration with Lee, Kirby hoped to establish his Fourth World as an artistic rival to the Marvel Universe he'd helped build.

I like many fans wish that Carmine Infantino had allowed the Fourth World story to come to a decent conclusion. But even given such circumstances, I don't think Kirby-at-DC had a chance in hell of challenging the popularity of Marvel. I hypothesize that in the early years, both Lee and Kirby probably enjoyed, as much as any professional adults could, the fannish pleasure of having two heroes from different features clash. At least I can't look at the 1964 "The Hulk vs the Thing" and see anything but two creators having fun, rather than just hacking out a job for pay. But when Kirby went to DC, the only way he could prosper at that company-- where various characters were parceled out into separate feifdoms-- was to keep his creations isolated from everything in mainstream DC, apart from some minor usages of Superman, Jimmy Olsen, and new incarnations of the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion. 

By 1970, though, the DC approach of keeping their features largely isolated from one another was beginning to lose favor with the hardcore fan audience. Those fans were a minor subgroup of the general audience, of course. But the casual comics-readers weren't ready to commit to Kirby's big project. Could the hardcore fans have made the Fourth World profitable enough to keep it going a little longer? No one can possibly know. All we know is that comics fandom of the early 1970s was divided on the merits of the New Kirby Universe. I've seen a fair number of fans reminisce that they just couldn't get into Kirby's rather eccentric scripts, and that may be because they'd become accustomed to the greater quality control seen at Marvel under Lee's editorship. I'm fairly sure that Don Thompson expressed contempt for the Kirbyverse in his fanzine NEWFANGLES, just a year or two before he and wife Maggie began writing for the tradezine THE BUYER'S GUIDE.

I concur that after the premature cancellation of the Fourth World books, Kirby never again sought to equal the incredible creativity of either that creative era or of the 1965-67 period. Some particular ideas are very good; some are pretty bad. As for mainstream comics after Marvel's classic period, I don't see a lot of writers and artists seeking inspiration from either prose or cinematic SF with the intensity that I discern in the works of Lee and Kirby. More often, I saw the tendency to rework tropes from the Lee-Kirby days, or from standout SF-comics of the sixties, like the Fox-Infantino ADAM STRANGE. (Chris Claremont riffing on the ALIEN movies is not my idea of a meaningful SF-influence.) Kirby's creative decline mirrored the demise of both gosh-wow SF and philosophical-SF in the comics medium so far as I can see, as Lee's linking of superheroes and soap-opera melodrama (which merits separate discussion) took precedence. 

And that's as good a place as any to end these somewhat doleful meditations.

PARADIGM SCHIFF

 

On occasion I’ve found fault with the kind of criticism that concentrates only on the “firsts” or the “big events” in comic book history (or in any arena of fiction, genre or otherwise). While no one can read everything— sometimes, not even all the stories centered around an evergreen serial character like Batman—it should be kept in mind, as I mentioned here, that the first Joker story is not necessarily the best Joker story.

When I picked up a cheap copy of 2018’s DC COMICS SUPER HEROINES: 100 GREATEST MOMENTS, I knew that “firsts” and “big events” would be the main concern of the book’s author, Robert Greenberger. All of the “100 Greatest Moments” tomes are big, heavily illustrated coffee-table books, spotlighting various aspects of DC comics history. Usually the book touch only adequately upon the history of the company’s first forty years while giving heavier coverage to the developments of the last four decades. I don’t especially begrudge this editorial decision. Every generation has its own preferences in popular culture, and if you’re selling a coffee table book to readers in the 2010s, it probably ought to concentrate on subject matter of interest to readers in the 2010s.

For that reason, I won’t cavil at the choices made by Greenberger and/or his editors. I could complain, say, that a major Silver Age heroine like Elasti-Girl gets only two pages, and that she’s only given a couple of panels fighting (or just starting to fight) a giant robot. But I can appreciate that the comics-reading paradigm has shifted: that, from the eighties onward, super heroines became a lot more important to hardcore comics-fans than they ever were to the more casual readers who used to pick up funnybooks at the corner store. So it’s all but inevitable that Harley Quinn gets a lot more coverage than Elasti-Girl, and I don’t take issue with Greenberger’s choices in any serious way.

What does give me pause, though, is a passage in which he puts forth an inaccurate paradigm with respect to the history of DC’s treatment of its super villains. I think it’s more a mistake than anything, based on inaccurate recollections. Still, the way in which DC changed its practice of using bizarre villains in the Silver Age made a difference to the way they told superhero stories for all future decades. Today, almost every superhero published by every publisher has a “rogue’s gallery.” It’s hard to remember that even a hero like Batman, renowned for a memorable cast of villains since the 1940s, spent his first fifteen years fighting ordinary crooks rather than super-criminals. A shift in this paradigm did occur after the establishment of the Comics Code in 1954, but it’s not quite the same as what Greenberger reports on page 156, where he’s trying to sum up the involved history of how Catwoman, absent from DC titles for twelve years, was returned to “active service” in a 1966 issue of LOIS LANE. Greenberger writes:

In the 1950s, DC Comics decided to retire its costumed criminals in reaction to congressional scrutiny of the comic book field. That all changed in the 1960s as the New Look Batman titles began to reintroduce the villains, fueled by the January 1966 debut of the ABC BATMAN series.

The short version of my disagreement with Greenberger is this: if anything, it was the non-costumed criminals who started appearing less, while in the post-1954 BATMAN comics, long-time editor Jack Schiff continued to add to the rogues in the gallery of the Caped Crusader.

To begin the long version, though, Greenberger’s sweeping statement, applied not just to Batman but to the whole DC line of the 1950s (by which I think the writer really means 1954-1959), makes no sense. Throughout the decade the company published the Superman and Wonder Woman features, and though neither feature boasted a huge rogues’ gallery in the fifties, I see no evidence of a moratorium in those stories, given that Brainiac appeared in 1958 and Angle Man in 1954. Further, in the late 1950s, some time after the institution of the Comics Code, the company launched titles for three key superhero titles: the Flash, Green Lantern, and the Justice League. True, not until the 1960s proper did these three features soon generating large quantities of rogues. But when these respective features got going, those heroes’ opponents were usually either alien menaces or costumed crooks, with a steadily diminishing presence of non-costumed lawbreakers.

I should mention that before the publication of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern and Justice League features, and before the Barry Allen Flash’s official series began—all in 1959-- editor Jack Schiff was also giving Batman a combination of both costumed crooks and alien menaces. It’s for the “aliens in BATMAN” that Schiff became reviled by early fans, partly because most of the stories were pretty bad. Editors Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz—the one known respectively for most of the Superman features, while the other was renowned for those three fledgling series of the late fifties (among others)—had been SF-fans in youth, and so they understood how to use SF-tropes in kids’ comics books. Jack Schiff was not a SF-fan, and so he accepted a lot of bad space-opera stories that clashed with the basic concept of the Caped Crusader.

But Batman’s ET-encounters didn’t crowd out the super-villain tales, though they might have helped edge out the mundane crime stories. (It’s worth remembering that when Frederic Wertham launched the public jeremiad that led to the Comics Code’s formation, the psychiatrist ranted far more against crime comics than those featuring long-underwear heroes.) Between 1954 and 1959 the Joker appeared four times, and that’s without counting an appearance in the Superman-Batman feature in WORLD’S FINEST. The Penguin may have had a mild moratorium on his adventures, since he only appeared once in 1956 and didn’t show his beak again until 1963, though that second appearance is still way in advance of the 1966 TV show. Two-Face was revived in 1954 and never appeared for the rest of the decade, but he hadn’t been used that often even in the Golden Age.

Of the classic Golden Age villains still extant, only Catwoman—who had appeared in three 1954 stories—seemed to get completely mothballed for the next twelve years, until, as Greenberger notes, she re-appears in LOIS LANE (as does the Penguin, for his second Silver Age appearance). No one has ever proved that DC had an anti-Catwoman policy, though it may be significant that the Princess of Plunder is the only costumed villain specifically mentioned in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, where Doctor Wertham complains about the nasty influence of her whip on young minds.

But Schiff, as stated, continued to build up the Bat-gallery, even if none of these super-crooks were quite on the level with the best Golden Age malefactors.

The Mirror-Man appears right in the cutoff year, 1954, though he doesn’t show up again until 1963.

The Mad Hatter, who borrows the name of a 1948 villain but who is essentially a new character, appears first in 1956 and then again in 1964.

The Signalman appears both in 1957 and 1959 before making one more appearance in 1961 as “the Blue Bowman.”

The Terrible Trio, aka the Fox, the Shark, and the Vulture, make a 1958 debut and then pop up once more in 1963.

And two one-shot villains, False Face and Mister Zero (later Mister Freeze), made their respective debuts in 1958 and 1959, after which both were adapted to the 1966 show, even though only Freeze became ensconced as a Bat-rogue from then on.

And of course, for the remainder of Schiff’s four-year custodianship in the sixties, he also introduced such familiar characters as a new Clayface and the Cat-Man, explicitly introduced to compensate for the lack of a cat-crime crook. Schiff also introduced a lot of lesser foes—Mister Polka Dot, anyone? —but even those examples prove that he bought a lot of stories with fancy-dressed felons.

So the paradigm is this: Schiff, far from cutting down on costumed antagonists, started beefing up Batman’s rogues’ gallery long before the revised versions of Flash and Green Lantern even had regular foes. I’m not surprised that this minor aspect of comic-book history got lost in the shuffle, though I am a little surprised that Greenberger, born in 1958 and thus a guy raised in the Silver Age, allowed himself to make such an erroneous statement. I can only assume it was done in haste, trying to simplify an involved subject for modern comics-fans, who have no particular reason to care about the policies of DC Comics in the 1950s, much less the accomplishments, good and bad, of comics-editor Jack Schiff.

ADDENDUM: Just after completing this essay, I read ALTER EGO #26 (2003) for the first time, and I came across a snippet in which Julie Schwartz sort-of promoted one aspect of the Schiff falsehood. Schwartz says, "fortunately, the one thing I did was to bring back the villains that Jack Schiff had neglected."

That's not quite the same as the assertion that Schiff didn't use villains at all. But Schiff did revive two Golden Age villains, essentially remaking them into new characters (Mad Hatter and Clayface). How many old villains did Schwartz revive? I only remember three during the sixties-- the period when Schwartz was editing the Bat-books to his preferences-- namely Riddler, Scarecrow and Killer Moth. And not that many new Schwartz villains of the sixties grabbed the fans. Blockbuster maybe-- but Eraser? Cluemaster? Spellbinder? His editorship in the seventies seems more like him kicking back and letting the writers do what they wanted, We did get the revivals of Deadshot and Hugo Strange then, but I don't know how much to credit Schwartz with those. I guess Schwartz made more use of Joker, Penguin and Catwoman, but some of that was due to the TV show.

I welcome other fans' input, since I'm not sure if I'm forgetting some important Bat-foes.