You Don’t Know Jack:
New Comics Journal book on Kirby looks pretty, misses the point
Comic artist Jack Kirby, creator of Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and many many other modern-day myths over his 50+ year career, symbolized everything that was good and bad about the comic book artform and business from the 1930s to the 1980s. Ambitious, tireless, self-made and brimming with prodigious talent, Kirby cut a wide swath through American culture with his larger-than-life characters and in-your-face style. A big thinker and restless innovator, he not only drew some of the best superheroes of the 1940s and 1960s, but also pioneered several adult-oriented comics genres including romance and crime comics, and brought perhaps the most radical science fiction concepts to the four-color page during his stint at DC during the early 1970s. But like many artists, Jack lacked a head for business. He made a decent living for his family, but because of the chicanery inherent in the comic book publishing business, he never received the rewards and credit due his enormous contribution. When he died in 1994, he had been fighting for over 10 years to regain control of his original artwork, obtain creative credit for the properties he produced for Marvel Comics in the 1960s, and restore his reputation among fans who had come to view his classic style and pulp-inspired concepts as corny and old-fashioned.
Into this welter of controversy and complexity wades The Comics Journal Library: Jack Kirby, a deluxe coffee-table edition from Fantagraphics Books and the editorial staff of the Comics Journal. It's a beautifully-produced book and a real bargain at $18.95. For the cost of a typical trade paperback, you get 125 pages of heavy coated stock between nicely-designed covers, bursting with huge black and white and color reproductions of amazing Kirby art, both familiar and rare. There are a bunch of wartime sketches, oversized blow-ups of panels and splash pages, pencils and finished art. There's nothing in here that's unfamiliar to die-hard Kirby fans, readers of The Kirby Collector or previous collections of Kirby’s work, but it's a very mainstream-friendly presentation on a much larger and more accessible scale than, say, art spiegelman's recent Jack Cole book.
It's tempting to hope that a volume that does full justice to the bigness of Kirby's art would be large enough to also contain the legendary ego of CJ editor Gary Groth. Alas, no such luck. Groth lays down the gauntlet in his Introduction, proclaiming himself a shameless Kirby admirer out of one side of his mouth, while insisting that he and his minions have a monopoly on the "appropriate" critical perspective on Kirby's work. There are the inevitable catty (though indirect and anonymous) swipes at former Kirby assistant and family advocate Mark Evanier (one of "a circle of friends, business associates and hangers-on who have since come to form a protective circle around Kirby's work and reputation"), fanzine publisher John Morrow (purveyor of "effusive, semi-literate gushing from a generation of fans who read and loved Kirby as youngsters but haven't progressed beyond childhood fantasies") and comic fans who lack Groth’s pointy-headed scholasticism ("an uncritical cult of well-intentioned fans whose enthusiasm has done more harm than good to Kirby's reputation since his death"). Thanks Gary, we love you too.
The written content of the book is maddeningly inconsistent. There are some terrific, though repetitive, interviews with Kirby at various points in his career (1969, 1971, and Groth's notorious 1989 conversation with a declining and embittered King and Roz). As always with CJ interviews, they could have used editing insofar as they spend a lot of time covering the same uncontroversial ground (40s, 50s, crime and romance comics, Simon and Kirby, etc.). Once is enough if the facts aren't in question. The Groth interview, like the bitter interview Kirby gave to fellow comic legend Will Eisner in 1984 (reprinted in Eisner’s Shop Talk collection), is morbidly fascinating and, it must be said, much more convincing in the reading than in the later characterization of what Kirby said by analysts and historians.
There's a fine essay by R.C. Harvey, who's always worth reading. Then there's a babbling, pretentious and insight-free analysis of the formal aesthetics of Kirby's work by Christopher
Brayshaw. TCJ seems to have a blind spot about the size of Jupiter for this kind of garbage, and Groth just can't help cluttering up his coffee-table masterpiece with a few pages of it here.
The third part of the book highlights Kirby's struggle to secure return of his original artwork from Marvel in the 1980s. This was a shameful incident, a permanent scar on Marvel and the po-faced company men who did their dirty work, and a real opportunity for the comics community to show which side they were on, and the Comics Journal was at the center of it, leading the charge of the forces of good. It’s an important tale to retell, but one gets the impression that the purpose here is at least as much to remind everyone how righteous TCJ had been and recapture the glow of bygone battles as to provide an objective historical account.
Finally, Earl Wells whacks the hornet's nest of whether Lee or Kirby deserves more credit for the creation of the Marvel universe, a topic that has been covered with much more depth, insight and passion elsewhere in the comics community. It's an interesting read, for one more person's opinion on a real Rorschach test question.
In the end, the heavy-handed didacticism of Groth's approach and the book's compulsive desire to ingratiate itself with the "serious" cultural critical establishment causes the book to miss the essence of Kirby's appeal in a welter of historical, political and aesthetic detail. In a nutshell, Groth seems afraid to admit that Kirby's art is fun. It's big, loud, wonderful, charming and visceral in ways that defy stuffy scholarship. Fortunately, Jack's work is present in spectacular abundance to make its own case, apart from the context.
9:01:34 AM 
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