February 15, 2006
There, below
In terms of raw percentage, I am not a big comics reader. (We all know what that means.) But I have friends in the industry, follow the blogs, accumulate geek lore on the subject et cetera.
Anyway, recently there has been a perk, an upswing of interest in the great American symbolist cartoonist Jack Kirby, now that he's safely dead. I've been an admirer of his art for a long time, and not simply because I look like one of his characters. But let me give you his potted biography first.
James Anthony Kirby was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1917, the second of seven children; his family had settled in Harlem by 1924. Although Kirby dropped out of high school during the Depression in order to help support his family (his father died when Kirby was 10), he attended the night classes of the Harlem Renaissance artist Charles Alston, who also sidelined as a commercial illustrator for the leading fashion magazines of the day.
Alston quickly recognized Kirby's talent. Through Alston, Kirby was hired as a single-panel cartoonist by the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate at the age of 19. Although the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate soon folded, Kirby picked up work in the new format of comic books, where he began developing his distinctive style. At the same time, he also picked up a new nickname, from the initials with which he signed his work: JAK. It would last him a lifetime.
Now let me show you his work.
Kirby was not afraid to mine the memories of his violent teenage years on the streets of Harlem:
Like other African-American visionaries of his generation, such as John Coltrane, or his almost exact contemporary Sun Ra, Kirby was not afraid to include intimations of the cosmic in his art:
(Yes, he's skiing. He's the personifcation of Death, and Death skis.)
Still, it wasn't until 1961, working at Marvel Comics with his editor and collaborator, the Chinese-American cartoonist Stan Lee, that Kirby really hit his stride. But that's a story for another day.
Posted by coyu at February 15, 2006 06:15 AMA wise guy eh?
Posted by: Martin Wisse at February 15, 2006 03:02 PMYou forgot to mention Stan's sons, Jim and Jae Lee, who became famous in the early nineties as artists and writers.
Posted by: Martin Wisse at February 15, 2006 03:09 PMActually, that's a common misconception.
Posted by: Carlos at February 15, 2006 05:05 PMIncidentally, there's a point I'm trying to make here, about certain US subcultures and race. (Maybe I'm being too subtle? Whoa.)
Also, based on the few pages of the on-going Seven Soldiers / Grant Morrison [1] miniseries that I looked at -- and quickly reshelved; Jesus Christ, boltcutters??? -- I think there's a fifty-fifty chance that its conclusion will re-introduce the Black Racer into the DC Universe. [2] There are thematic similarities in a certain black character's predicament.
[1] Someday, Doug, you have to explain the appeal.
[2] Death as a perky Goth girl is so 1990s. But Death as a black skier is eternal.
Posted by: Carlos at February 15, 2006 08:15 PMHaving been long divorced from the world of comic books (some issues of Scout: War Shaman being my last purchases before real life intruded), I find that you're being way too subtle. Please do fill me in. My daughter just got a copy of "Justice League Unlimited" along with some action figures, and has suddenly become hero-obsessed, so I have some catching up to do.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at February 16, 2006 12:39 AMIt's a complicated one, Bernard. But here's the basic analogy:
subculture exclusivity : normal people ::
subculture industry exclusivity : black people ::
subculture death : subcultural health.
Jack Kirby, who is now viewed as something of a god (a New God, perhaps), was born Jacob Kurtzberg on the Lower East Side of NYC, and was not black. I concocted that biography to show there was no a priori reason why he couldn't have been.
But the comic book industry was and is still incredibly... whiteboy.
Meanwhile, despite the genre's successful resistance to outsiders, the superhero comic book seems to have entered a slow death spiral.
It won't affect your daughter though. Outside of comics, superhero properties are still innovative and vital.
Posted by: Carlos at February 16, 2006 07:34 AMSlow death spiral of the superhero comic book: I agree. Although note slow, superhero, and comic book. Non-comic superhero properties, as you say, are vigorous; on a much smaller scale, so are non-superhero comics.
At the moment, their growth is sharply limited by distribution issues. Most comics are sold in comic book stores, which are economically dependent on superhero comics. If they can ever break out of this, though... that could be interesting.
Note that non-superhero comics are much less prone to the industry's whiteness and boyness; cf. "Love and Rockets", "Strangers in Paradise", et al. And then of course manga; but that really deserves a post of its own.
Grant Morrisson: he's very uneven, and the Seven Soldiers are not shaping up as his best. Go and borrow the Doom Patrol TPB from someone, okay?
Final thought on Kirby: remember that he was a writer as well as an artist. I suspect an African-American Kirby would have been a very different sort of writer; even if he'd kept the same themes -- cosmic clashes of good vs. evil, and such -- there's something very Jewish-American about classic Kirby dialogue.
Hang on [googles]...
Yah. Here's Harvey Jerkwater on Kirby:
"Kingese is overheated prose, every verb in boldface, and every damn sentence ending in an exclamation point. Plus, of course, Kirby's patented bizarro terminology. The Fourth World titles were written in fluent Kingese:
Caption: Trogdor tears down the steel door! Metal shreds beneath his power!
Trogdor: This day must not end with a Fire Penguin crushed by Strongbad!
Sookie: Hurry! The song of battle calls! I need a lozenge!
Caption: The Positron Lozenge cures the evils of hay fever!
"Like beatnik poetry, Kingese has charm, but it reads like the work of a man for whom English was a fifth language, striving for eloquence after drinking two bottles of cough syrup..."
I just think AA Kirby would have a completely different, um, rhythym. With long-term effects on writing across the industry.
Doug M.
Doug, that's precisely why I think Sun Ra is an excellent comparison to Kirby. I mean, Sun Ra and his Arkestra? Pure Fourth World, man.
It's not particularly Jewish-American. But it is Cosmic-American.
Posted by: Carlos at February 17, 2006 02:35 PMOn a perhaps not entirely unrelated note, I'm trying to figure out what the catch is, here:
http://www.thesoulexchange.com/
Apart from the dangers inherent in double-selling title, of course. Though that opens up a market for soul-title searches....