WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT. 3

 I would say, then, that all mysteries after Poe tend to follow either the rational model of the Dupin stories, where the detective's acumen resolves all the problems, and or the irrational model of "The Oblong Box," where even the solution of a given problem merely generates a sense of greater mystery, often of some mystery that remains insoluble.-- RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL PROBLEMS, 2019.

In Part 2 of this series, I mentioned that Infantino's investment in infusing "Rational DC" with the irrationality of the Gothic was signified by (1) the "spookification" of HOUSE OF MYSTERY and the debut of DEADMAN, both in 1967, and (2) the reinvention of the 1950s character The Phantom Stranger in SHOWCASE #80, in 1969. But in between those two, another DC stalwart showed similar changes in 1968, a little before the Bat-books went full-bore Gothic. I have no direct testimony that Infantino intervened to alter the direction of DC's CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which had dealt with rationalized versions of the metaphenomenal since its genesis under Jack Kirby and Dave Wood.

  

For roughly six years Arnold Drake had been writing the CHALLENGERS title, often with art by Bob Brown, and all of their contributions had fallen into the rational model. By some odd chance, their last two issues on the title effectively launched the irrational, Gothic direction for the remainder of the series' original run. In issue 62 (June-July 1968), Drake introduced a new set of villains for the heroes, The Legion of the Weird, which comprised five villainous wizards from different cultures: the vaguely East European Count Karnak. the Egyptian Kaftu, the possibly American Mistress Wycker, the archaic Brit druid Hordred, and the unspecifically Indian medicine man Madoga. Drake had used this multicultural approach to sorcerous evildoers before in a 1964 Mark Merlin story, which took much the same rational approach as everything else DC published in that year. 

The Legion "weirdies," as one panel calls them, uses various mystic forces against the Challengers, not least with a gigantic mummy named Tukamenon. However, for whatever reason Drake and Brown were unable to finish the Legion's battle with the "Challs."  

Though #63 ended in a cliffhanger, the next two issues of CHALLENGERS were fill-in stories written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Jack Sparling, who would be the closest thing the title had to a regular penciler. Though many of the stories that followed involved mad science as much as mysticism, Sparling, whatever his limitations, was much better than Brown at rendering freaky-deaky visuals, so it's not unlikely he was selected for just that purpose.

  

Issue #66 finishes up the Legion of the Weird story with Sparling and a Mike Friedrich script. The villains are defeated but escape, never (as far as I know) to return. Denny O'Neil then took over the series for the remainder of its original run, and he certainly showed even more penchant for supernatural mystery-stories than anyone previous. O'Neil's stories for the title were as pedestrian as those of Drake and Kanigher. but there are a couple of minor landmarks in his run. In #69 O'Neil finds a reason to get charter Challenger Prof Haley out of the way so that he can bring in the Challengers' first regular female member, Corrinna Stark, to take Prof's place. In the early sixties the Challs had a recurring "irregular female member"    named June Robbins, but Corrinna was the first regular female Challenger. 

O'Neil didn't really think that much about the character, though. She starts out helping the Challs because her mad-scientist father half-killed Prof, but though she offered to take Prof's place, she didn't really have any skill except that of being a hot girl, depending on whether she was drawn by Sparling, Dick Dillin or George Tuska. Three or four issues into O'Neil's run, Corrinna suddenly gets psychic medium-powers for the sake of some more spooky stories, and there's a moderately entertaining story in #74 that guest-stars both Deadman and O'Neil's private dick Jonny Double. Then in #75, Corrinna and the four guys finish the last of the mag's new material with a one-page introduction to a Kirby reprint, and such reprints take up the rest of the issues until cancellation with #80. (Technically the book on its bimonthly schedule ended in #77 and the last three Kirby reprint-issues appeared about two years later, in 1973.) There's a mention of Jack Kirby's new works for DC in the lettercol to issue #76 (1970), and that's probably the only reason the dying book went reprint at all. Someone, maybe Infantino, thought that Kirby fans might desert Marvel to pick up anything the King did at DC, even old work that was largely out of fashion. 

So the CHALLENGERS title spent most of its life as Rational Fantasy, detoured into Irrational Fantasy for its last two years, and then went back to its origins for its unspectacular finish. Infantino's Gothic preoccupations had some great results for the Bat-titles and tapped a market for horror-tales that Marvel never quite accessed. But despite preceding PHANTOM STRANGER into the new Weirdie terrain, "Gothic Challengers" is a mostly forgotten chapter in DC history.

"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.

EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 3

In ENSEMBLES DISASSEMBLED I put forth a tentative analysis of the ensemble of heroes in the Wolfman-Perez CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. In part I argued that just because the creators tried to squeeze in nearly every DC character who ever had a series, that didn’t mean all of the heroes functioned as part of the ensemble. I might still get around to CRISIS’s stature-vectors one of these days. But since I just remarked on the unequal vectors of characters in DC: THE NEW FRONTIER, I may as well apply my theory to that work. In my analysis I said:

Numerous other characters prove central to the action—Superman’s cohorts Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, the Barry Allen Flash, all four of the Challengers of the Unknown (whose presence gives Cooke the chance to homage their creator Jack Kirby), and Rick Flagg and the other three members of his Squad. Numerous other DC figures make what are essentially cameos—the Blackhawks (who don’t get too much air action), Aquaman, Adam Strange, and even the Viking Prince. Even less central are a quintet of DC’s mystic heroes, who only appear to explain to readers their shaky reasons for not participating in the conflict, even though the island’s menace threatens the totality of the world.

Building on this loose assertion, I find that the characters who all share superior stature-vectors in NEW FRONTIER are:

SUPERMAN, BATMAN, WONDER WOMAN, LOIS LANE, JIMMY OLSEN, GREEN LANTERN (Hal Jordan), THE FLASH (Barry Allen), J’ONN J’ONZZ, THE CHALLENGERS (Ace Morgan, Prof Haley, Rocky Davis, Red Ryan), THE LOSERS (Johnny Cloud, Sarge Clay, Gunner Mackey, Captain Storm), RICK FLAGG, KING FARADAY

All of the other characters embody lesser stature-vectors, although some of them have fairly large charisma-vectors, best exemplified by Ted “Wildcat” Grant, who gets a final non-superheroic triumph when he beats Muhammad Ali in the ring. 

At the opposite end are DC’s mystic heroes, who appear as little more than cameos. 

Other characters of lesser stature include:

SLAM BRADLEY, BLACK CANARY, HOURMAN, GREEN ARROW, THE BLACKHAWKS, THE CATWOMAN, the rest of THE SUICIDE SQUAD (Karin Grace, Jess Bright, Hugh Evans) JUNE ROBBINS, THE VIKING PRINCE, ROBIN, AQUAMAN, ADAM STRANGE, and three characters who will later become involved in superheroic escapades: Ray “THE ATOM” Palmer, Nate “CAPTAIN ATOM” Adam, and Doc Magnus, later creator of THE METAL MEN.

One point I want to drive home here is that just because a character is part of an ensemble in an ongoing feature does not necessarily translate into high stature elsewhere. For instance, in the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN feature, I have no hesitation about including June Robbins to be part of that ensemble, given that she was a reasonably constant presence in the feature for a dozen or so issues. Robbins even has a minor feminist significance, since she participates with the all-male team with more distinction than did, say, Lady Blackhawk with the rather chauvinist Blackhawks. But June Robbins really doesn’t do much of anything in NEW FRONTIER, so she’s not part of the ensemble. Similarly, Rick Flagg plays a vital role in FRONTIER. However, his ensemble-mates from the 1960s SUICIDE SQUAD—whom, as I noted in this review, were really poorly conceived characters—are just hangers-on in NEW FRONTIER. They have more functionality in the narrative than does June Robbins, but as characters they’re of little consequence in terms of their stature.

This ruminations may lead me to some further formulations regarding the nature of centricity, but for now I’ll leave the analysis at this juncture.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3

                             
The last comics-item I rated as an inconsummate null-myth was 1965’s “THE HAUNTED ISLAND” (CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #43). It’s without question a story whose constituent parts don’t cohere into a pleasing whole, but it also illustrates my new distinction regarding concrescence, in that its parts don’t even relate to one another within the narrative.



For purposes of comparison with other narratives, I’ll identify ISLAND’s master thread as being that of “hero must confront evil counterpart.” To be sure, the story probably came about for extrinsic reasons of stoking the feature’s sales, in that editor Murray Boltinoff probably made the decision to give the heroes new uniforms, and assigned Bill Finger to come up with a rationale in story-form. Finger’s oddball solution was to have the “Challs” (as they were informally called) kidnapped by five mutated scientists, all of whom considered that they lived “on borrowed time”as did the quartet of adventurers. I mentioned that the imagery of ISLAND is all over the place, best exemplified by a mutant who looks like the Frankenstein Monster in a Beatle wig (the haircut even gets an explicit comment from one of the heroes). Yet even more damaging to the story as a whole is that the mutants initially want the heroes to subject themselves to mutation willingly—meaning that they’ll no longer be the heroic figures that the mutants found appealing. When the Challs decline, the mutants threaten to put them in suspended animation like the rest of their collection—though both scenarios would seem to render the idea of giving the heroes new costumes nugatory. Thus ISLAND demonstrates both a state of inconsummation and a poor level of mythopoeic concrescence.

To remain focused on the “evil counterpart” thread, a more effective example is 1969’s “AND SO MY WORLD ENDS” (JLA #71). Like the Challengers story, this one focuses upon an ensemble of heroes, though one among them, the Manhunter of Mars, receives “special guest star” billing. J’onn J’onzz convinces the heroes of Earth to follow him to Mars to prevent a Martian threat to Earth, but even the Martian doesn’t know that a civil war between Mars’ two races has decimated both sides, leaving only handsfuls of survivors on both sides. Green Martian J’onn meets his White Martian opposite number in battle, and though J’onn prevails, the victory is pyrrhic, since his civlization is all but perished. This is an entirely consummate story insofar as it gives the reader a feeling of completeness and satisfaction, even if it may incorporate one or two lapses in logic. But the master-thread of “hero’s evil counterpart” is only adequately explored, though a subordinate thread about the futility of war provides ample support, giving WORLD a fair level of mythopoeic concrescence.

   Finally, the 1947 story “THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD” provides an example of both consummate status and a high level of concrescence. In my review I wrote:

Other comics-features had played around with the idea of pitting heroes, whether in solo features or in groups, against teams of villains, so the basic idea of the Injustice Society was nothing new in 1947. What makes this story a "mythcomic," though, is Kanigher's attention to making the villain-group a formidable reflection of the good-guy group.
Much of the time, the JSA heroes won their battles a little too easily, partly because so many of their foes were just ordinary thugs and swindlers. I've argued elsewhere that one has to respect the gumption of commonplace crooks in challenging do-gooders who had godlike powers, but it still didn't usually give rise to many memorable battles.

I won’t repeat the various reasons I stated for validating the mythopoeic discourse of INJUSTICE, though, like the other two stories analyzed here, the tale’s not free of flaws and is not one of the more“sophisticated” even within the superhero genre. But it provides a good example of a story notable for just one strong master-thread, and nearly no subordinate threads in the mythopoeic vein.

NULL-MYTHS: "THE HAUNTED ISLAND" (COTU #43, 1965)

There are a lot of Silver Age DC stories that are wacky in a good way, and there are those that are wacky in a bad, I-can't-believe-it's-so-bad way. But this 1965 CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN story qualifies as a null-myth because it's bad in an inconsummate way.

"Haunted Island" is the second of two stories in issue #43, and it gets the cover feature in large part because this issue marked the heroes' shift away from their dull purple jumpsuits to uniforms in bright primary colors of yellow and red, complete with hourglass-emblems on their chests to remind readers that they were "living on borrowed time." (I think it was around this time that the venerable Blackhawks had to give up their dour blue outfits for garish red and black garments.)

"Island's" writer Bill Finger reportedly only scripted seven stories for this DC series, all under the editorship of Murray Boltinoff as far as I can tell. One presumes that the costume-change signified that CHALLENGERS' sales had dropped somewhat. Like many other DC stories of the time, "Island" doesn't just content itself with having the heroes decide to change their togs one fine day. Instead the change stems from an almost impenetrable whim on the part of the story's villains.

First off, the heroes get involved in protecting a museum-sarcophagus from theft by a weird bird-man.

The bird-man absconds with his booty, but the Challengers pursue in their plane, while conveniently commenting on other "rare artifact" thefts of recent weeks. They land on a "dead island," and in their explorations they find a private museum that includes a preserved dinosaur and giant scorpion.

They then have a dust-up with a large fellow who, despite his sixties turtleneck, is without doubt mean to evoke Universal's image of the Frankenstein Monster. However, in their pursuit of the giant fellow, the heroes are gassed. They wake up wearing their spiffy new outfits.

Then the Challs meet not one, not two, but five freaky forms, including the giant and the bird-man. The leader, who looks much like one of DC's elfin support-characters, informs the heroes that the five freaks are mutant versions of once-human scientists. Their mutation causes them not to just to choose isolation from the human world, but also to collect "things that should be dead, yet still exist."

The mutants, having established that they consider themselves a cockeyed version of the "borrowed time" crusaders, then establish that they want the Challs to join them on the island as part of the collection. Why the mutants should care what the heroes wore, if they wanted museum exhibits, is pretty much ignored. One of the heroes, Prof, volunteers to let himself be mutated, hoping to be able to turn against the death-collectors.

Prof's stratagem doesn't quite work as planned: he turns into an "evil energy-being" and attempts to kill his friends. Only through lots of luck are his buddies able to reverse Prof's transformation and escape the Haunted Island as it conveniently blows up, dooming the mutants and their collection. The four stalwarts then decide to keep wearing the costumes. The end.

The presence of a mutant who looks like the Frankenstein Monster-- but whose identity has nothing Frankensteinian about it-- shows by itself enough symbolic inepititude to qualify "Island" for null-myth status. The story's more salient concept-- the Challengers are given new costumes by negative versions of themselves-- has a little more promise, but it blows that potential by heaping incident upon incident.

The CHALLENGERS title was never distinguished by very good stories, and only occasionally by good art. But this one may well be the mediocre feature's lowest moment.

THE LINE BETWEEN '"FAIR' AND "GOOD" PART II

In Part 1 I proposed that the narrative element that most made the difference between works of "fair mythicity" and "good mythicity" was that the latter sustained more of a "unity of action," so for Part 2, I decided to provide some examples based largely upon the work of one artist, Jack Kirby, either by himself or in collaborations.

To this date one of my preferred examples for an inconsummate null-myth is the debut tale of the Jack Kirby/Dave Wood collaboration, "The Sorcerer's Box" from 1957's SHOWCASE #6. I won't repeat the arguments presented here as to why the Kirby/Wood story proved inconsummate, but here's the closest I found to a "theme statement" for the story, which in turn would have provided it with any unity of action:

....the "villain" of the story, whose name so obviously references "Merlin," is a rather half-assed version of the Faustian over-reacher.  I noted earlier that the story does touch upon the nature of masculinity, and it does, in the sense of evoking pleasure in the heroic acts of the Challengers.  But the story doesn't work well as far as positing Morelian as the obverse of the heroes, simply because he pays them to do a dangerous job.  Is Morelian in some sense "anti-masculine" for having done so?  This is a possibility, but Kirby's story (and Dave Wood's dialogue) offer little to explain why the heroes suddenly take a dislike to Morelian at the end.  

Boiled down, the potential underthought-- for Kirby and Wood probably would never have become didactic enough to produce a complementary overthought-- might read something like, "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." The story doesn't succeed in evoking even that simple a theme statement, though as I pointed out in the essay, Kirby had probably completed more unitary works prior to his CHALLENGERS outings.

Now, I did not label this THOR story a "near-myth" when I examined it in COMBAT PLAY PT. 2, but it does attain a clearer theme statement than the CHALLENGERS story, even though the Lee/Kirby collaboration is no more truly didactic in its main purpose.

What does keep #152 from being just another big battle-tale, though, is that Thor and Ulik are arranged to represent philosophical postures. Thor, son of Odin and scion of Asgard, is heir to a philosophy of noblesse oblige, while Ulik describes himself as "lowly-born-- with naught to lose-- and a world to gain."

Though the sociological myth here is much clearer and more deeply resonant, though, it's still just what I've called a "myth-kernel" in the midst of a "very rambling arc" that involved, not just Thor and Ulik, but also Balder, the Norn Queen, Loki, and various other Asgardian personnel, all with arcs that don't complement one another. So it's a near-myth possessed of only "fair" mythicity. It's sort of like a disorganized essay with a strong theme statement, while the CHALLENGERS story is disorganized all the way through.

Sociological myth once more takes the fore in another Lee/Kirby collaboration, this one from a few years previous to the Thor tale. The FANTASTIC FOUR tale titled "The Red Ghost" is included as one of my mythcomics,which should suggest to readers that I give it at least some level of good mythicity. My current line of thought about the necessity of a "unity of action" within the story, which in turn supports the creators' symbolic discourse, is borne out by my observations about the balance between what could have been flat elements in a purely didactic argument:

...in contrast to other, less complex allegories-- whether from Marvel Comics or elsewhere-- Lee and Kirby devote an inordinate amount of effort to contrast the exemplary behavior of the four American heroes versus the selfish and controlling behavior of Ivan Kragoff.  This elevates the argument beyond merely "good democracy vs. evil Communism," for it speaks to what is good in humankind generally as well as to what is evil in humankind generally.  I note, just for one possible example, a scene in which Reed announces his plan to fly to the moon alone.  His comrades set him straight with a little horseplay, which nevertheless underscores that though Reed Richards leads the group, he does so with "the consent of the governed."

At the same time, I'm moved to ask whether or not this "unity of action" can also apply to longer works. I find that one of Kirby's solo achievements, the original NEW GODS epic, resonates with Aristotle's pronouncement that Homer had managed to provide unity to THE ILIAD by focusing upon "the anger of Achilles," no matter how many other separate war-related plot-lines might have spun off from that.

Kirby's abbreviated epic, reviewed here, garnered some complaints for having gone in too many directions at once, but despite some admitted flaws, the artist does always keep a unity of action in the NEW GODS comic proper. Whatever particular plot Kirby might have followed in a given issue, the concern of the title was always about the relationship of heroic Orion to his devious father Darkseid-- a relationship that Orion only suspects at the start, and which reaches a thematic culmination in the 1984 graphic novel THE HUNGER DOGS.

I concluded Part 1 with this hypothesis:

I may use this line of thought to a lead-in to another question, regarding whether it's most beneficial to have a "unity" of idea between a work's overthought and underthought, or whether the two exist on essentially separate but intersecting mental planes, not unlike the interdependence of harmony and melody in music.

I think at least the two examples of "good" mythicity in this essay demonstrate that the mythopoeic underthought does intersect with the more didactic overthought: that the former supports the latter but that neither is defined by the other.

ASSORTED STAN AND JACK STUFF PT. 2

I've been meaning for some time to get back to one particular issue I have with Abraham Riesman's muddled meditations on "Stan Lee's Legacy." particularly with respect to Jack Kirby's famous allegations that he did all the plotting work and that Stan Lee did nothing but write the dialogue afterward.

[Roy] Thomas had an experience any comics fan or historian would kill for: He walked the offices of Marvel in the mid-’60s, when Lee and Ditko were working together on Spider-Man and Doctor Strange stories and Lee and Kirby were working together on nearly everything else, including The Avengers, The X-Men, and The Fantastic Four. Here’s the problem: It’s extremely unclear what “working together” meant....Kirby, from the time he left Marvel in 1970 until his death in 1994, swore up and down that Lee was a fraud on an even larger scale: Kirby said he himself was the one who had all the ideas for the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and the rest, and that Lee was outright lying about having anything to do with them. What’s more, he said Lee was little more than a copy boy, filling in dialogue bubbles after Kirby had done the lion’s share of the conceptual and writing work for any given issue. “Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything,” Kirby told an interviewer in 1989. “It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things, for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories.”

At no time does Riesman suggest that Kirby might be exaggerating his claim to near-total creative input. Riesman does credit Lee with coming up with inventing Marvel's "shared universe" approach and with changing the game for all mainstream comics in terms of spoken dialogue, but he makes no argument against the verdict asserted by Kirby's longtime friend and confidante Mark Evanier:

“Unfortunately, from day one, Jack was doing part of Stan’s job, and Stan was not doing part of Jack’s job,” says comics historian Mark Evanier, who worked as Kirby’s assistant and has worked on and off with Lee since the 1970s.

So according to Kirby, he got a raw deal because Lee didn't share the writing-paycheck with him. According to an interview with Roy Thomas (to be identified LATER), Kirby invoked this injustice when he came back to Marvel in the 1970s, claiming that the only way he Kirby would collaborate with a writer would be if the writer wrote full-script descriptions of the stories, so that Kirby would only contribute the art. As most fans know, Marvel's editorial department consented to let Kirby write and draw all of his titles during his second contractual stint with Marvel. I suspect that Kirby knew that the Marvel editors valued his ability to draw vividly, without full-script constraints, and that his demand would lead, as it did, to his finally being able to collect both the artist and writer paychecks that he thought to be his due during the first contractual stint.

I don't begrudge Kirby that privilege, and even though I find little of his 1970s work palatable, from a historical perspective his solo work gives modern critics considerable information about the way he formulated stories when not interacting with another creative presence. What I do cavil at, though, is the idea promulgated by Kirby-- and championed by most anti-Lee writers, including Riesman-- that what Lee was doing was unique in the history of comics, or even Jack Kirby comics.

Here's an interesting aside on the way Kirby worked with another writer, taken from Mark Evanier's KIRBY: KING OF COMICS:

Kirby could do CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN without [Joe] Simon, and he did. A writer named Dave Wood provided scripts, which pretty much meant sitting with Kirby, hearing him spin off a plot, and the going home and typing it up. Jack rewrote whatever he was given anyway."-- KIRBY, page 101. 

Evanier does not cite his source for this view of the Kirby-Wood collaboration, but it's likely that his information came from Kirby. This narrative is probably as accurate a description of a 1957-59 working-relationship as anyone's likely to get after sixty years, but what I find most fascinating is that Kirby's creative process on CHALLENGERS, prior to any significant 1950s collaborations with Stan Lee, was essentially "the Marvel Method." This method meant that the writer simply discussed the plot very generally with the artist, after which the artist created his own version of the story, which might or might not owe anything to the writer's intentions-- at which point the only thing left to the official writer would be the dialogue.

So the question occurs to me, "Let's say that Jack Kirby did the lion's share of the work on CHALLENGERS; then where were his complaints about Dave Wood getting a full writer's paycheck?" I strongly doubt that Wood took anything but the full writer's check; no writer back then would have wanted to work with Kirby for less than the going rate, nor would DC Comics, whose relationship with Kirby was less than amenable, have made any special dispensations for Kirby.

And my answer is a cynical one. Kirby may have harbored some resentments back in the 1950s, but they never surface as they did with respect to Stan Lee for one simple reason: the Challengers were a penny-ante project that never showed-- and I suspect, never will show-- the potential to make Big Money in other media. By the time of Kirby's COMICS JOURNAL interview, there could be little doubt that the work he'd created at Marvel had such money-making potential. I surmise that even though Lee had no more rights to these properties than Kirby did, Kirby inflated the false issue of not getting paid for co-plotting, without mentioning that it was clearly the way he preferred to work.
In fact, though Riesman doesn't spot the discrepancy between what Kirby said he wanted and how he actually worked, Riesman sings the praises of the Marvel Method in terms of freeing comic-book artists from the tyranny of full scripts, and he quotes John Romita Sr, expressing sentiments that may well have mirrored those of Jack Kirby, at least back in his salad days:

“I realized that comics from a script was absolutely paralyzing and limiting,” says John Romita Sr., an artist who worked extensively with Lee in the ’60s and has remained a close friend ever since. “When you had the option of deciding how many panels you’d use, where to show everything, how you pace each page out, it's the best thing in the world. Comics becomes a visual medium!”

In the world of abstract moral judgment, maybe it was wrong for Kirby not to get co-plotting money for both his DC and his Marvel work. However, in terms of real-world interaction, I find it unlikely that any writer would have worked with Kirby under that arrangement-- and as I've said before, I don't think Kirby was capable of producing profitable comic books without writer-input, in any decade whatever.

I don't doubt, as I've said many times before, that Stan Lee has also made claims about his contributions that also lack substance. But when I see Kirby protesting his Marvel treatment with no perspective on how greatly the Stan Lee collaboration boosted his reputation in fans' eyes, I think that he, more than Stan Lee, may need to have his legacy more thoroughly interrogated.

SOLO AVENGERS, MIRACLE TEAMS PT. 4

In my examination of Golden Age hero-teams in Part 2, two facts should be evident:

(1) Most of the ongoing superhero teams are dominantly "co-ed." Miss America is an equal member of the All Winners Squad for its two paltry appearances, and Mary Marvel usually appears alongside her male counterparts in all or most MARVEL FAMILY teamups.  The use of Wonder Woman in JUSTICE SOCIETY was somewhat spottier, as she sometimes only appeared in a story to serve as the society's secretary. Some fan-critics have asserted, though, that the legal agreement between William Marson and DC Comics may have affected Wonder Woman's appearances in that august body.  It must be noted that when Black Canary was admitted, she was used without reservation, and to my knowledge never had to bring anyone their coffee. 

(2) In contrast, few other hero-teams-- some of which mixed together the "kid-gang" and "superhero" genres-- included girls in the mix.  Holyoke's "Little Leaders" feature was a necessary exception, in that it re-utilized "Kitten," sidekick to Catman, who was the star of the title in which the "leaders" appeared.  Generally, if female characters appeared at all in such teams, they were more like hangers-on than full-fleged members.  A possible model for this "hanger-on" type would be the character "Pat Savage" from the DOC SAVAGE pulps, who occasionally broke into her male cousin's "boys' club" but was never a regularly featured participant.  In pre-Code comics, one example of this was "Palomino Sue," who showed up in a few stories in the 1950 Simon & Kirby title BOYS' RANCH.

Why would the superhero teams, few as they were, of the 1940s have been dominantly "co-ed" when other types of teams were not?  The most likely reason is that the idea behind all three superhero teams was to form a "more perfect union" of costumed characters who had appeared separately in anthology-comics and occasionally met one another (Human Torch/Sub-Mariner, Captain Marvel/Spy Smasher).  In contrast, each of the non-superheroic teams was its own individual animal, created to play off a particular set of genre-trope, as well as being responsive to the perceived demands of reality.  That is to say: WWII adventurers like the Blackhawks, roughly based on the Foreign Legion, had no girls in their ranks because real-life combat troops were usually all-male.  Fictional kid-gangs occasionally allowed for female members, but they too were in part copied from real-life boys' clubs, whose raison d'etre was almost always "no girls allowed.  Oddly, one of the few teams that recycled a character from an earlier feature-- a practice that would become common following the Silver Age-- was that of the Girl Commandos, wherein a starring character named "War Nurse" decided to ally herself with a distaff band of "lady Blackhawks," and even dropped her superheroic name in order to blend in better.

But I said in the last essay that I would address the first hero-team of the post-Code era of American comics, which also begins the so-called Silver Age.  This was not a superhero team, but a close analogue: Jack Kirby's CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN. (Though Kirby was not the sole creator on this feature, he was the dominant force, so I will speak as if he alone created CHALLENGERS.)

Kirby's CHALLENGERS was in essence an adult version of the kid-gang concept, and probably owes something to an earlier Simon/Kirby work for Harvey Comics, THE BOY EXPLORERS (1946). This short-lived feature concept involved a band of kids, with one adult supervisor, traveling the world in search of bizarre phenomena.  It ptovides an illustration of the rather loosey-goosey way Golden Age comics generally approached their miracles: a heavy emphasis on the visceral elements and not much sustained examination of any fantasy-logic to support said wonders.

Kirby's CHALLENGERS is a different type of science-fiction adventure.  To be sure, just like Golden-Age Kirby, Silver Age Kirby was still oriented on providing a great deal of frenetic action, in contrast to many DC comics of the period.  But for whatever reason the stories also allowed for a small degree of contemplation of a given story's wonders.  In the second CHALLENGERS story, the group encounters a colossal intelligent robot named Ultivac.  Though there's a great deal of action, Kirby devotes more time here than he would have in a BOY EXPLORERS story to delineating the nature of Ultivac's self-generated intelligence and the robot's scornful opinion of humanity.

CHALLENGERS's tryout appearances in DC's SHOWCASE magazine were popular enough to spawn a regular magazine that lasted until 1971, though Kirby's last issue was #8.  Arguably CHALLENGERS also influenced a host of other non-superhero team-books at DC.  It may be noted that Quality's long-running Blackhawks were leased (later sold) to DC Comics in the same period, and that DC's first issue of BLACKHAWK, #108, was published in the same year as the debut of the Kirby work in SHOWCASE #6.  However, while BLACKHAWK soldiered on with an all-male crew until 1959, when the Hawks acquired a female hanger-on in the form of Lady Blackhawk, the Challengers acquired their female almost-member in their second appearance, the Ultivac story in SHOWCASE #7. Though at certain points during the story Kirby places new addition June Robbins into a position not unlike that of Fay Wray in 1933's KING KONG, June seems far more strongly patterned after the image of the female professional scientist familiar with giant-critter flicks like 1955's IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA.

June was made an honorary member in that issue, and was thereafter used with a frequency I term "semi-regular" rather than merely occasional, and though in her earliest version she wasn't a combative type, it was clear that the Challenger guys respected her smarts and daring. 

This was rather a contrast to Lady Blackhawk, whom the Blackhawks couldn't even find time to nominate to the "honorary member" position

Even though the Challengers didn't have a regular gal-member for many issues, it would seem self-evident that their girl-friendly structure influenced DC to launch other adventure-teams in which girls were regular team-members, as with THE SEA DEVILS, the original SUICIDE SQUAD and the crews associated with RIP HUNTER and CAVE CARSON. 

As for how much this pattern in turn influenced the superhero teams-- stay tuned for the final installment of this series.

CONSUMMATELY CHALLENGED

In CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FOURSOMES PART 3 I said:

There is one mythopoeic element that may have some significance in the story as a whole—an element I’ll treat in a separate essay—but within the origin-sequence, it carries no plurisignative value.

The page, from SHOWCASE #6 (1957), shows that element:

 
 
 
 
 
One might be forgiven for thinking that the element I reference is the lead splash-panel, in which the four uniformed heroes are seen against a backdrop of flames and a devilish-looking figure-- who, incidentally, bears no strong resemblance to anyone in the story.
 
But no, the element to which I refer is the puzzling way that collaborators Jack Kirby and Dave Wood chose to characterize the "Heroes" radio program on which the future Challengers plan to guest.  At a time when female adventurers were rare birds in American media, the radio program chooses to focus not on one, but *four* nameless women who, the announcer claims, "have earned the right to the title 'hero!'"  The women are not named and never appear in the Kirby CHALLENGERS again.  So why four women, rather than, say, a big-game hunter along the lines of Clyde Beatty?
 
It's at this point I return to my earlier-expressed notion, in CONSUMMATING PASSIONS, of an "inconsummate symbolic discourse."  This is functionally the same as my notion of "presentational incoherence" as expressed in GESTURE AND GESTALT PART 3, but the former term skirts around the necessity of going into Langer's complex definitions of the "presentational" and the "discursive" to explain the terminology.
 
To this sort of peculiar creative quirk, the default response of the Bloody Comic Book Elitists is usually that if something in the story isn't well done, it can't be important.  Obviously I don't agree, and do agree with Suzanne Langer that such works can possess "diffuse meaning" at the very least.  Four unnamed heroic females are used to introduce four starring heroic males.  If the story as a whole had something to do with the roles of masculinity and femininity, the unnamed females might at least function as a counterpoint to whatever discursive point the author sought to make.
 
But though one could view the book-length story of SHOWCASE #6 as something of a weighing of the nature of masculinity, the only other appearances of femininity are also inconsummate.
 
The story in brief: some time after the Challengers have become established as a four-man team of daredevils, they receive an offer to do a job for one million dollars: "a job for men who fear neither devil nor death."  This is interesting wording given the devilish figure in the splash panel, though it too doesn't lead to any plurisignative pay-off.
 
The Challengers fly to Canada to meet their new employer, a mystic named Morelian.  Morelian wants the four men to be his "guinea pigs" by opening the four chambers of a giant box "constructed in an age long forgotten."  Twice Morelian references the most dominant feminine myth-reference, "Pandora's Box."  Sure enough, each time the heroes open one of the first three chambers of the box, that chamber releases some incredible menace.  Whereas Pandora's Box famously releases various incarnate evils to plague mankind evermore, the sorcerer's box is a grab-bag that releases entities with no obvious connection.  One is a remote-controlled machine.  Another seems to be a living entity, called a "freezing sun." And the last (actually first in presentation) is a big egg which hatches a titanic Greek-looking stone warrior.  This menace, unlike the others, actually gets a second mythological reference, as an inscription on the box calls the egg a "dragon seed," prompting Red Ryan to remember the legend of Cadmus, "the guy who planed a field of seeds and grew a crop of fighting men."  The bulk of the story deals with the heroes finding ways to quell each menace, though the defeat of the giant warrior is the most like a cop-out: after the Challengers see him survive an atomic explosion, they figure out that he's just a mental projection, and they "think" him out of existence.
 
When the three menaces have all been neutralized, the Challengers get back to the box, only to find that Morelian has opened the box's fourth and last chamber.  Morelian wanted the heroes to deal with the creatures so that by process of elimination he would find the treasure in the last chamber: a ring whose inscription seems to promise immortality.  The Challengers, despite having gone into the deal with their eyes open, scorn Morelian's "selfish reason" for exploring the box, but Morelian simply shrugs and leaves in his private plane.  The plane summarily crashes, destroying the box in its fall, and Morelian dies, leading the heroes to deduce that he misread the inscription: that it was the box containing the ring that promised immortality, not the ring itself.  The Challengers then depart with the observation that "we're still living on borrowed time-- which is more than you can say about Morelian!"
 
 

 
 
Many later CHALLENGERS stories, by Kirby and others, follow this basic pattern: the heroes find some strange artifact which unleashes various fantastic menaces that they the heroes must then fight or corral.  But this version of Pandora's Box doesn't attain any great mythicity simply by referring to the Greek myth, or even by invoking a few other images with feminine subtext (both the egg that hatches the giant warrior and the mythic "dragon seeds" to which it's compared).  Therefore, because it seems that Kirby was playing around with mythic elements but not really bringing them into any sort of narrative control, the feminine elements-- the four women, the egg (which also appears on the book's cover) and the two Greek myths-- are of an inconsummate nature.  One can imagine an interesting narrative that used them all with greater intensity, but "Secrets" is not such a story.
 
Similarly, the "villain" of the story, whose name so obviously references "Merlin," is a rather half-assed version of the Faustian over-reacher.  I noted earlier that the story does touch upon the nature of masculinity, and it does, in the sense of evoking pleasure in the heroic acts of the Challengers.  But the story doesn't work well as far as positing Morelian as the obverse of the heroes, simply because he pays them to do a dangerous job.  Is Morelian in some sense "anti-masculine" for having done so?  This is a possibility, but Kirby's story (and Dave Wood's dialogue) offer little to explain why the heroes suddenly take a dislike to Morelian at the end.  An extrinsic reason, not actually alluded to in the text, might be that Morelian's quest to escape death is morally dubious; that opening the box to gain immortality is tantamount to making a deal with the devil.  In Morelian, Kirby presents an inconsummate symbol of Faustian ambition, which is puzzling since it was the sort of story he'd done well in earlier venues, as in his collaborations with Joe Simon for features like SANDMAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA.
 
None of the Kirby CHALLENGERS stories, whatever their behind-the-scenes origins, ever score very high on the mythicity scale.  That's why it's equally puzzling that he should have experienced such a comparative creative ferment for the early Marvel stories.  But that's another essay.
    
 
 

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FOURSOMES PART 3

I’ve stated in Part 1 of this essay-series that I concede the *possibility* that the FANTASTIC FOUR may have come about, as fervent Kirby-supporters claim, as having been mostly conceived by Jack Kirby, aside from perhaps the addition of a new Human Torch to the mix (as Kirby would have been unlikely to have revived that particular character). However, I’ve been comparing the type of narratives found in the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR against the prior Kirby work most often compared with the FF: the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, originated by Kirby and writer Dave Wood. Based on those comparisons, I think it’s more likely that Stan Lee gave Kirby much more substantial storytelling input than had Dave Wood. I don’t credit Lee’s courtroom claim to have originated nearly everything in the Lee-Kirby collaboration. But I also don’t believe a similar claim from Kirby, nor do I favor the opinions of fans who believe Stan’s greatest contribution was stepping back to let Kirby “do his thing.”


The twelve Kirby issues of COTU are perhaps close to equaling the first 12 issues of FANTASTIC FOUR in respect to the kinetic qualities of both: both are high-energy juvenile adventures with a lot of sensational action. Yet in my Jungian-influenced literary system I recognize three other aspects of literature beyond the kinetic: the thematic (dealing with discursive concepts), the dramatic (dealing with character interactions), and the mythopoeic (dealing with symbolic complexity). And in all of these, COTU is as night to the FF’s bright sunshiny day.

It is, again, possible that *if* Jack Kirby solely originated FANTASTIC FOUR in 1961, he simply experienced a quantum leap in creativity as he went from COTU and SKY MASTERS to FANTASTIC FOUR, INCREDIBLE HULK, et al. After all, many authors vacillate, for any number of reasons, in terms of their quality over the course of years. However, during the years between 1957 and 1961, during which Jack Kirby began getting most of his work from Stan Lee’s company, he collaborated most often with Lee, either directly or with the additional collaboration of Larry Lieber as dialogue-writer to the Lee-Kirby plots. I think it’s likely that as the two collaborators learned one another’s skills, they played off one another in creative ways that were not possible with earlier collaborators like Dave Wood, leading to a gestalt of complementary creativity.

We have few relics of the Lee-Kirby collaborative process, and fans tend to interpret what we have according to their respective prejudices. Therefore, critics can only compare the narrative themselves. And since FANTASTIC FOUR is most often compared to the CHALLENGERS because the two features have roughly similar origins, a comparison of those origin-sequences is necessary.

The COTU origin is two-and-a-half pages, not counting an unrelated first-page splash-panel. It begins as an announcer for a radio program called “Heroes” tells his listeners that next week the program will feature four men “famous in their own fields.” These four all have their own adventurous specialties: Ace Morgan is a pilot, Prof Haley a diver, Red Ryan a mountain-climber, and Rocky Davis a wrestler. At the same time the announcer is speaking, Ace Morgan is flying the other three to wherever the radio program is scheduled for broadcast (even though it’s not to take place until “next week.”) A storm hits the plane, and when Ace tries to steer the plane out of the storm, the plane’s controls jam. The plane crashes but all four men survive, though it seems like a miracle to them given the plane’s devastation. They decide that they are now living on “borrowed time” and that their destiny is to form a team of daredevils willing to “challenge the unknown.”

The FF origin is five pages, beginning as scientist Reed Richards, his fiancée Sue and her brother Johnny seek to persuade Ben Grimm to pilot a ship, constructed by Reed, into outer space. Ben objects that the cosmic rays surrounding Earth “might kill us all out in space.” Sue accuses Ben of cowardice, and he angrily takes her implicit dare. Later the foursome (none of whom seem to need astronaut training) blast off in Reed’s ship. Just as Ben predicts, cosmic rays strike the ship, affecting all those aboard and causing the ship to crash. The four would-be astronauts survive, but Ben becomes irate with Reed once they see that Sue has gained the power of invisibility. As Ben tries to attack Reed (his words suggesting a hidden desire for Reed’s girlfriend), both exhibit super-powers as they fight, as does Johnny. Reed persuades his companions to use their powers for the good of humanity as the Fantastic Four.

Since the purpose of both stories is to assemble a heroic team, neither can be judged on pure verisimilitude, on whether the characters are likely to become altruistic teams in response to their traumas. But in the case of COTU, everything in the brief origin is purely functional. The motive for bringing the heroes together is a mundane radio program, and there are no significant aspects to the plane the heroes fly in or the storm that causes them to crash. Even the metaphor of “borrowed time” isn’t particularly compelling. There are no discursive elements introduced, and the characters are too similar to generate any interpersonal drama. There is one mythopoeic element that may have some significance in the story as a whole—an element I’ll treat in a separate essay—but within the origin-sequence, it carries no plurisignative value.

In the FF origin-sequence, however, Lee and Kirby provide what I’ve called a “super-functional” narrative. Through the central character of Reed Richards, the creators channel the early sixties’ fascination with the wonder of space-flight in all its thematic, dramatic, and mythopoeic aspects. Richards is given just one dominant character-aspect—a devotion to exploring the frontier of space that borders on the fanatical (“We had to be first!” he cries as the ship leaves Earth). In most SF-movies of the time this would make Reed the over-reacher doomed to suffer the consequences of risk-taking. Here, Ben Grimm, who in an archaic Greek drama would be the warning-voice of the chorus, is the one to suffer the doom of the over-reacher, becoming a monster outside humanity. The bare suggestion of his concealed feelings for Sue would have rich implications for later stories, especially once the team developed into more of a quarreling family than a businesslike team. The seeds of all the thematic, dramatic and mythopoeic elements of the ensuing series are found in this five-page sequence, and even though Lee and Kirby often rewrote specifics of the origin, the FF origin-sequence established a super-functional mythos for the feature’s characters, whereas the origin of the Challengers is merely a set-up that has little if any future impact on stories.

There is no knowing which if any specific ideas Stan Lee contributed to the collaboration. But at the very least I think that Lee did more than simply “let Kirby loose.” I believe that on some level Lee “challenged the unknown” limits of what comic-book superheroes could do, and by example encouraged Kirby to do the same. And therefore, no matter how much work Stan Lee did in the collaboration, the work they produced was more than Jack Kirby ever could have done, unaided.











I

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FOURSOMES PT. 2

In PART 1 of CHALLENGE I said:

The Kirby COTU stories-- some or all of which may've started from full scripts by other writers, though Mark Evanier asserts that Kirby usually rewrote any scripts he was given-- resemble the kind of stuff Kirby did in his mid-to-late 1970s Marvel works. The narratives usually begin with the Challengers being summoned to investigate or eludicate some mystery, usually one with strong SF-aspects, and thereafter the heroes fights aliens or robots or whatever in fast-action stories with no great emotional resonance.

Expanding on this somewhat:

Starting in 1957, Jack Kirby worked on the feature CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN over the course of four appearances in SHOWCASE (issues #6, 7, 11, and 12) and eight issues of the heroes' own feature.  In all of these issues the Challengers shared no space with any co-features, though on occasion a given issue might have two short COTU stories rather than a full-length tale.  In the recent b&w reprint of the early issues credit for writing issues is given either to Dave Wood or to Kirby himself, though there's no preface to explain by what process DC Comics allocated these credits.

COTU can be fairly regarded as Kirby's first solid-selling series following the end of his business partnership with Joe Simon in 1955.  But as I noted above, most of the COTU stories are pretty formulaic despite the Kirby touch.  In the shorter stories, Kirby's works seems constrained by what may have been attempts to fit a conservative DC "house style" (which Gil Kane asserted to be most influenced by the example of comic-strip artist Dan Barry).  The full-length stories-- in particular a wild time-travel story in COTU #4-- often show Kirby returning to a style of "epic" storytelling that recalls his most successful Golden Age work.  However, the plotting of these stories lacks the relatively-strong characterization seen in the Golden Age work Kirby produced in partnership with Simon.  The four heroes-- Ace, Prof, Rocky, and Red-- are largely interchangeable aside from their particular talents (diving, piloting, etc.)  Often the plots, while reasonably efficient for this type of helter-skelter adventure, have a "fly-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants" quality; one that reminds me of the pace Kirby employed on most if not all of his solo works of the 1970s and thereafter.  The dialogue is never as eccentric as one finds in the 1970s solo works, but one presumes that credited co-writers like Wood were responsible in some instances, while in others Kirby himself kept to the then-current writing-standards of his employers.

To be sure, about a year after the debut of COTU Kirby collaborated with both Dave Wood and his brother Dick on the comic strip SKY MASTERS, which prefigures a return to more nuanced characterizations than one sees in COTU; again, more in tune with the Simon/Kirby level of storytelling.  The SKY MASTERS strips I've seen have a rather Caniff-like quality in respect to characterization; nevertheless, the short-lived strip (58-61) is at best an interesting experiment.

One of the oddest aspects of the COTU is that while Kirby was working on the title, the characterization of the main heroes had none of the individual development of even some of the one-shot characters Kirby portrayed in his anthology monster-stories in the adjoining years, for such "Marvel" magazines as TALES OF SUSPENSE and TALES TO ASTONISH.  However, almost immediately after Kirby left COTU, two stories by one DC writer, France Herron, suddenly played around with the notion that two of the Challengers, Rocky and Red, quarreled a lot.  The two stories-- "The Cave-Man Beast" and "Creatures of the Forbidden World"-- aren't especially well characterized beyond this schtick, probably borrowed from a similar one in the DOC SAVAGE pulps.    But it's interesting that as soon as Kirby left the title, someone started a "meme" which Kirby and Lee would realize more fully in FANTASTIC FOUR's constant quarrels between the Torch and the Thing.

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FOURSOMES

Recently I had the chance to read DC's SHOWCASE reprints of the earliest issues of CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which includes all of the issues on which Jack Kirby worked.  COTU, as the heroic team's name is often abbreviated, is often considered by many Kirby fans to be evidence that Jack Kirby probably brought some work very like the Challengers to Marvel in the early 60s, and that this was eventually altered to become the company's flagship superhero title, 1961's THE FANTASTIC FOUR.

The proposition  is certainly a fair one.  All artists tend to recycle work that either interests them or their audience (in terms of selling well), so it's logical to assume that one heroic team might beget another.
In addition, for many fans the most salient similarity between the two hero-teams is that they bond after a crash landing.  In the origin of the Challengers from 1957's SHOWCASE #6, the four heroes are unrelated adventure-seekers who happen to share a plane on the way to a mutual rendezvous.  When all four men survive their plane's crash, they decide that they now live on "borrowed time" and to band together in order to perform feats of derring-do.

As most fans know, this has some resemblance to the origin of the Fantastic Four as told in the premiere issue of their magazine (though details were often changed in later retellings).  The most salient difference is that all four of the heroes in FF #1 know one another quite well when they agree to Reed Richards' idea that they should steal the rocket he worked on from the government and use it to fly to the moon.  In addition, whereas the crash in SHOWCASE #6 happens by sheer chance, the cause of the FF's rocket-crash stems from a peril that Reed and his allies foresee: a barrier of cosmic radiation on the outskirts of Earth's atmosphere.  All four would-be astronauts find themselves transformed into cosmically-powered beings, with the result that, even though one of them has become a rock-skinned monster as a result, all four agree to start using their powers to defend the world from evil.

I can well believe that Jack Kirby might have used COTU as a base idea from which to propose some concept that became the Fantastic Four.  Perhaps he did this on his own, perhaps it came together in response to the now-legendary order from Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, in which he allegedly commanded Stan Lee to come up with a book like DC's JUSTICE LEAGUE.  Other fans have noted the fact that Marvel had no individual superhero features in 1961, so that at that time a duplication of DC's JUSTICE LEAGUE scheme could not have worked.  Logically, an original hero-team along the lines of COTU-- and its two or three DC-imitators, like SEA DEVILS and CAVE CARSON-- probably seemed the ideal solution to the problem.

However, there's one big problem with seeing the FANTASTIC FOUR as entirely the spawn of Kirby's CHALLENGERS work: in terms of mythicity, of symbolic resonance, COTU is like an artist's sketch of a fully formed idea, while even in the early, somewhat crude FANTASTIC FOUR stories, the idea has been developed.

The Kirby COTU stories-- some or all of which may've started from full scripts by other writers, though Mark Evanier asserts that Kirby usually rewrote any scripts he was given-- resemble the kind of stuff Kirby did in his mid-to-late 1970s Marvel works.  The narratives usually begin with the Challengers being summoned to investigate or eludicate some mystery, usually one with strong SF-aspects, and thereafter the heroes fights aliens or robots or whatever in fast-action stories with no great emotional resonance.

In contrast, even the weakest of the early FANTASTIC FOUR stories show a concern for dramatic storytelling, in which the individual characters have distinct personalities and relationships with one another.  Because of such distinctions, the first ten FF stories sustain a mythology of characters, each with his or her archetypal nature: even a pallid villain like the Miracle Man from FF #3 carries some of the resonance of the Faustian deceiver.  In contrast, one Kirby robot or alien is pretty much like every other Kirby robot or alien in COTU.

I can't say with certainty that Stan Lee made all the difference.  It's certainly possible that Kirby simply had a creative breakthrough with FANTASTIC FOUR like nothing since his 1940s work, and that Stan simply abetted that breakthrough.

But something about that partnership changed the stakes for comic books from then on.  I hope in future essays to say something more about it.