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I’d thought enough time had passed that I could forgive Jack Kirby. But I just learned I was wrong.
I was on staff at Marvel Comics in the mid-’70s when the King returned and tried to pick up where he’d left off. At the time, as I sat there in the Bullpen with my blue pencil and proofread the original art for some of his initial issues of titles such as Captain America, which he not only drew, but wrote and edited, I was horrified. The art could still be the stuff of dreams at times, but the words that came out of his characters’ mouths seemed more like a nightmare.
The buzz from us kids in the office wasn’t kind. I’ll admit it. Kirby was a god to us for what he did during the ’60s, but what he was doing at Marvel in the ’70s made us wince, and we didn’t have the tact or maturity to say it appropriately. So we acted like ungrateful punks. But now that the years have passed, as I read some of those issues of Captain America over again, I’m wincing still.
The reason I’m subjecting myself to them once more is because two of the backup stories I wrote at the time have been reprinted in The Essential Captain America Vol. 6, and after first rereading my own work (of course!), I decided to give Kirby’s another shot.
The powerful artwork still made me smile, and the frenetic pacing caused my childhood to rush back again, but as for the words on the page—Ouch!
Not only do none of the characters talk the way people actually talk—or even the hyperbolic, melodramatic way superheroes talk—but they are barely coherent. And what’s worse, in Captain America #207, old winghead, after discovering that a tyrannical dictator in a banana republic was torturing his people, decided to do NOTHING, basically declaring it none of his business!
Here’s that disturbing panel.
Until this rereading began, I was only offended by the crudeness and incomprehensibility of Kirby’s dialogue, but now, decades later, I’m also repulsed by Cap’s decision, no matter how well or poorly it was phrased.
Shame on you, Captain America!
If I ever needed a reminder of how much Stan Lee and Jack Kirby needed each other, neither ever creating separately at anywhere near the level they did when together, man oh man, this was certainly it.
I agree that the issue of U.S. involvement in foreign affairs is a nuanced one, but sadly, Kirby just didn’t have the writing skills to convey it as nuanced. As presented in that issue of Captain America, the matter has no gray to it, and is clearly offered up as black and white.
Cap is aware of atrocities and turns the other way. That’s not what heroes DO. In the two preceding panels, we see him thinking, “Whoever runs that banana jail seems to get his kicks out of kicking the inmates! The man they call ‘The Swine’ must be typical of the kind of bully that flourishes in these two-bit dictatorships.” And rather than do anything about it, he just goes on his way. Perhaps Jack meant to convey Vietnam parallels, but it’s more a Darfur situation, in which people stood by and did nothing.
If Kirby really wanted to present a morally ambiguous issue, we’d have seen Cap choosing one side over the other, only to then see that both sides are in the wrong. Compare this sequence to the famous scene in Green Lantern #76 in which GL intercedes on the wrong side, only to be educated by Green Arrow. That issue may read a bit obvious now, but it’s far more nuanced in its moral that you’d better think twice before choosing sides.
Kirby bristled with energy and imagination in his comics of the ’70s, that’s undeniable, but man do I wish he was allied with a scripter who could have made him shine!
I’ve overlooked a lot of nauseating politics in comics (mostly from the Left), so I can;t get too worked up any more about them. But the sheer incoherence of Kirby’s ddialogue and captions have driven me nuts since the 1970’s.
I was a DC kid, but distinctly remember reading and liking some Marvel’s Greatest Comics with Kirby FF and Thor (around ’70-’71), and loving the story and art, So I was very interested in what he’d do at DC. I didn’t know Stan Lee or anything about Marvel at the time, so there was no nostalgia or company loyalty involved. But the DC stuff was incomprehensible. I simply could not make sense of what anyone was saying or doing. The inking was OK but uneven. Later when Royer came in, it got worse as the art itself now turned harsh and agressively ugly.
That’s when I simply gave up on buying anything new by Kirby. Which takes nothing away from what he did in the past.
I wish Kirby hadn’t fallen in with fan sycophants (looking at you Evanier) who pumped him full of bullshit and bile. I wish someone from movies had gotten hold of him to explain that “Story by” and “Screenplay by” are two legimate credits, and while he was a genius at Story he was shit at screenplay. Instead he was convinced that the only way to get the credit he deserved was to do EVERYTHING, whether he was good at it or not. Choosing his own inker (friend of his sycophants) was the same kind of bad decision. Had Kirby stayed with a commercially appealling inker, allowed a helping hand to write the actual words for him, and occassionally by edited out of dumb decisions like Goody Rickels and Black Racer, his reputation would have NEVER hit the skids in that unfortunate period of the 70’s and 80’s.
I could almost swear I just heard you say Mike Royer was a bad choice to ink Kirby.
I don’t know how to say it more plainly. Mike Royer was a bad choice to ink Kirby.
I hear nothing but good things personally about Royer. I think he is a fine artist, whether drawing Winnie the Pooh, or Alex Raymond tributes. I wish he had been allowed to ink others, like maybe Curt Swan. But he made bad choices when inking Kirby, probably egged on by Kirby hangers-on who thought any form of fixing or diluting Kirby was ruining it. He removed every ounce of subtlety and nuance from Kirby’s pencils. He took every quirk, construction line, and misaligned eye and AMPLIFIED them rather than POLISH them.
Even SInnott freely admits that he, with encouragement from Stan, used to FIX Kirby’s off-putting quirks. That’s what made the artwork classic. It was the best of primal Kirby and classy SInnott. The same with the words. Lee was like the “inker” of Kirby’s writing – he added fixes and polishes to make it PERFECT. And commercial, to boot.
Royer didn’t “fix”.Kirby’s flaws. Royer EXPOSED Kirby’s flaws, to the detriment of his reputation and commercial appeal. Which I call a mistake.
Hi Scott,
A reader forwarded this posting to me last year and it was in my file of things I never had a chance to reply to. I posted some comments today on the post here:
http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/dynamics/
I have a few more comments tomorrow.
This seems like it could be a fruitful dialogue so I hope you and maybe some of your other readers will add comments here or email me any comments at:
I will run them at Kirby Dynamics. FYI: I have the comments option off on that site because I don’t want to have to censor profanity.I figure people can comment in forums like this and i can post a link.
I’d love it if you could give us more first person details based on your observations of how Jack was treated by Marvel employees in the 1970s, I’ve heard a lot of rumors, I’ve read off-the-record accounts, and I’ve read hearsay that the individuals that you called the “ungrateful punks” were pretty disrespectful towards Jack, and I’d also like to read more about what specifically it is that comics fans like you and maybe some of your readers find “repulsive” about Jack’s text in his 70s books.
Thanks,
R-
I love Kirby like religion…but its pretty clear that writing was not his strong suit!
Still the best comic artist ever though.
River –
See, those semantics are the problem. You CAN’T just call him an artist!. He was an artist, creator and storyteller. All of those things he did INCREDIBLY well. But the thing that hangs people up is the distiction between “creator”, “storyteller”, “writer” and “wordsmith”. He could Create whole worlds, myths and mythologies. He could craft crlassic plots and stories. He was a TERRIBLE wordsmith. He was a TERRIBLE editor – every genius has bad ideas once in a while, and he simply ran with them anyway. Because inking, coloring and lettering didn’t matter to him, he took other peoples’ terrible advice about it. The lettering and inking got turned up to “Kirby +11”, making it inaccessible commercially.
In addition to creating, plotting, storytelling, and drawing, I thought his collage art was excellent, his OWN rare inking was good, and I really LOVE anything he colored himself. But he wasn’t imperfect. Even the most diehard Kirby fan like the Kirby Dynamics guy HAs to be realistic about Kirby’s wordsmithing, his editing and one last thing he was bad it – his business sense. He got screwed and dissed over and over and over and he NEVER made the right move to get the things he could have. I think he really abhorred the “bully” mentality, and just never wanted to press his advantages when he could.
I know the Kirby Dynamics guy will call me a Kirby basher, but if you read this with a clear head you’ll reallize that it’s 95% praise and 5% reasonable and realistic criticism.
Scott-
As for other examples of bad bullpen behavior, what is the “Jack the Hack” story?
Odkin – I wouldn’t call that Kirby bashing at all BTW…its funny, but I never noticed your point about the inkers and letterers, but now that I think of it, right around the time of the “Fourth World” the inks sort of became almost too strong…but most of that stuff is awesome anyway! Sinnott was the best of course…I bought a Sinnott original pencil sketch recently just because I loved his inks on Kirby’s stuff. ( Turns out he’s a pretty good penciler too! ) : )
i’d love to read some quotes from the time this happened at marvel
i’ve long heard kirby called “jack the hack” and would love to know who said that about jack
thx
Rob seems to conflate respect to Kirby as a writer with respect for his prose. Writing isn’t just dialoguing or scripting.
No, but it’s a huge part of the job in comics and the most visible part of the writing process so if it’s done poorly, it shows. Kirby’s not-so-good writing always shows.
hi aaron,
i just don’t agree that kirby’s writing was “not-so-good” at all
for me the pinnacle of a long career is the 4th world and that is kirby alone
it is a masterpiece of words and pictures
what a man
long live the king
Really? Never read an early issue of iron man by Stan Lee?? Sounds like the Fox news bits that ended on the cutting room floor.
Stan Lee is much more on the nose. Read his iron man stuff, euch. Besides Lee couldn’t hold a candle to Kirby’s sense of conflict and character. Even without Lee, and sometimes more, Kirby had a stellar output. Everything had a fresh spin. Even the eternals which should have been New God’s 2, had fresh character developments. All I see when looking at Kirbys body of work is a man learning as he goes, the craft of writing and perfecting it. He gave it the atmosphere he wanted. Look at his character designs, they weren’t realistic or useful. Even everyday objects like buildings, a vcr or phone didn’t look like an ordinary building, phone or vcr, but they fit and seem normal in a Kirby composition. Stan Lee reiterated everything that was having in his dialogue balloons. Kirby used the balloons to explore character.
For comparison look at Stan Lee’s output since he hasn’t been riding the backs of great creators with his “plot” scripts. The condor? It’s all hack stuff. Kirby s silver star? A trove of ideas. This is a guy who taught himself. There was no time to practice, or college writing courses. His page output was how many a day? Put it in perspective. Also I’d like to see that cap panel in context.
Barry Pearl
Dear Scott:
I read your thoughtful blog on Kirby and Captain America and, if you don’t mind me adding something, I like to point out a few things.
First, I agree that Kirby’s writing technique was not compelling, nor was it very good. He did work better with a collaborator be it Lee or Simon.
But I am giving him a pass over the comment that you object so strongly about, in issue #207 for a number of reasons:
First, I was around then too, and this was the era of the Viet Nam war and we had grown tired of America being the policeman of the world. When he says, “This is not my country and not my place to fight for causes I know nothing about” he was expressing what many people were feeling at the time, perhaps even what he, himself was thinking, that things can be bad in other countries but we cannot, or should not interfere everywhere even when we saw horrible things.
But it is his bad dialoguing that gets in the way of his actual plotting. Perhaps he could have cleared it up by continuing saying something like, “unless I have a good reason.” Soon, when given that good reason, Cap goes into action and fights the bad guys. This was common in storytelling especially in comics. That is, give a reason why you don’t get involved and then the writer finds a reason why you should. Did we ever really think he won’t get involved?
I think Kirby was trying to show the moral conflict we were all facing at the time. Now, when I read it out of context it has a different meaning. But during the latter part of the Viet Nam conflict we were battling ourselves and each other over these issues.
Funny, with Iraqi we faced some of the same issues. I guess we will never resolve this conflict.