The Disappointment Artist

by Jonathan Lethem

  Whoever deserves the lion’s share of credit for “inventing” (that is, designing outfits and powers, creating the origin myths and distinctive personae) of the Marvel Silver Age characters, it is unmistakable that in Marvel’s greatest comics—I mean, in the Fantastic Four issues which were reprinted in Marvel’s Greatest Comics, the originals of which Luke’s brother had assembled—Kirby and Lee were full collaborators who, like Lennon and McCartney, really were more than the sum of their parts, and who derived their greatness from the push and pull of incompatible visions. Kirby always wanted to drag the Four into the Negative Zone— deeper into psychedelic science fiction and existential alienation—while Lee, in his scripting, resolutely pulled them back into the morass of human lives, hormonal alienation, teenage dating problems and pregnancy and unfulfilled longings to be human and normal and loved and not to have the Baxter Building repossessed by the city of New York. Kirby threw at the Four an endless series of ponderous fallen gods, or whole tribes of alienated antiheroes with problems no mortal could credibly contemplate: Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, Doctor Doom, etc. Lee made certain the Four were always answerable to the female priorities of Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, Reed Richards’s wife and famously “the weakest member of the Fantastic Four.” She wanted a home for their boy, Franklin; she wanted Reed to stay out of the Negative Zone; and she was willing to quit the Four and quit the marriage to stand up for what she believed.

  I seriously doubt whether any seventies Marvel-loving boy ever spared a dram of sexual fantasizing on Sue Storm. We had Valkyrie, Red Sonja, the Cat, Ms. Marvel, Jean Grey, Mantis, and innumerable others available for that. We (I mean, I) especially liked the Cat. Sue Storm was, to our conscious minds, truly invisible. She was a parent, a mom calling you home from where you played in the street, telling you it was time to brush your teeth. Not that she wasn’t a hottie, but Kirby exalted her beauty in family-album style portraits, showing her nobly pregnant, in a housedress that covered her clavicle. The writers and artists who took over the Fantastic Four after Kirby and, later, Lee departed the series, seemed impatient with the squareness of Sue and Reed’s domestic situations. Surely these weren’t the hippest of the Kirby-Lee creations. Nevertheless, if you (I mean, I) accept my (own) premise (and why shouldn’t I?) that the mid- to late-sixties Fantastic Four were the exemplary specimens, the veritable Rubber Soul and Revolver and White Album of comics, and if you further grant that pulling against the tide of all of Kirby’s Inhuman Galactacism, that whole army of aliens and gods, was one single character, our squeaky little Sue, then I wonder: Was the Invisible Girl the most important superhero of the Silver Age of Comics?

  I’m breaking down here. The royal we and the presumptive you aren’t going to cut it. This is a closed circuit, me and the comics which I read and which read me, and the reading of which by one another, me and the comics, I am now attempting to read, or reread. The fact is I’m dealing with a realm of masturbation, of personal arcana. Stan Lee’s rhetoric of community was a weird vibrant lie: every single true believer , every single member of the Make Mine Marvel society or whatever the fuck we were meant to be called, received the comics as a private communion with our own obscure and shameful yearnings, and it was miraculous and pornographic to so much as breathe of it to another boy, let alone be initiated by one more knowing. We and you don’t know a thing about what I felt back then, any more than I know a thing about what you felt.

  Specifically, nobody much cherishes the comics of Kirby’s “return to Marvel” period—2001, The Eternals, Mister Machine. Even for souls who take these things all too seriously, those comics have a minor place in the history, defining only an awkward misstep in a dull era at Marvel, before the brief popular renaissance signaled by the ascent of the Chris Claremont X-Men. Here, joining the chorus of the indifferent, is Kirby himself, from an interview with Gary Groth of Comics Journal, one which ranged over his whole glorious career:

  Interviewer: “It always seemed like your last stint at Marvel was a little halfhearted.”

  Kirby: “Yeah.”

  Anyway I want to withdraw the Lennon-McCartney comparison, because there’s something else I’ve sensed about the Kirby-Lee partnership: it seems to me that Kirby must have been a kind of ambivalent father figure to Lee. Kirby was only five years older, but they were crucial years— crucial in defining two different types of American manhood. Kirby came of age in the thirties, was toughened by his Depression boyhood and perhaps privately, stoically scarred by his frontline experiences in World War II. Lee seems more like the subsequent kind of American male, the coddled fifties striver who lived in the world his parents had fought for and earned. Lee was more a wannabe beatnik—Maynard G. Krebs, let’s say. This difference perhaps underlies the extremes of their contribution to the Fantastic Four: Kirby concerned himself with a clash of dark and light powers, and passionately identified with alien warrior-freaks who, like John Wayne in The Searchers, were sworn to protect the vulnerable civilian (or human) societies they were forever incapable of living among. His vision was darkly paternal. Lee was the voice of the teenage nonconformist, looking for kicks in a boring suburb, diffident about the familial structures by which he was nevertheless completely defined.

  John Wayne in The Searchers is, crucially, a Civil War veteran, made strong and ruined by what he’d glimpsed on the battlefield. Similarly, the first thing to know, and the easiest thing to overlook, about the iconic hard-boiled detective of the Raymond Chandler–Dashiell Hammett–Humphrey Bogart type is that he wears a trench coat—that is, he’s a veteran of the First World War. I was once told by a biographer who’d researched Jimmy Stewart’s years as an air commander in World War II that the crucial material in Stewart’s war record was sealed. (Stewart, unlike others who served less vitally but wore their experiences on their sleeves, tended not to talk about the war.) The biographer wondered if Stewart might actually have led a portion of the raid on Dresden, and been protected from infamy by his government. The biographer also wondered if whatever was sealed inside that war record had fueled the deepening and darkening of Stewart’s postwar work—the alienation and morbidity and even cynicism that the great and formerly gentle leading man displayed in films like Vertigo, The Naked Spur, and Anatomy of a Murder. Now, when I consider the steady alienation from humankind of Kirby’s bands of outsiders—from the Fantastic Four to the Inhumans to the New Gods to the Eternals—I wonder if he might be one of those who could never completely come home again.

  But he did try to come home in 1976, to Marvel. And Karl and I bought the hype, and bought the comics. And Karl didn’t like them, and I did. Or, anyway, I defended them. I pretended to like them. Karl immediately took up a view, one I’ve now learned, in my research, was typical of a young seventies Marvel fan: he said Kirby sucked because he didn’t draw the human body right. Karl was embarrassed by the clunkiness, the raw and ragged dynamism, the lack of fingernails or other fine detail. Artists like Neal Adams and Gil Kane had, since Kirby, set new standards for anatomical and proportional “realism,” and those standards had soon been made peculiarly normative by (to me, much less interesting) artists like John Byrne and George Perez: superhero comics weren’t supposed to look “cartoonish” anymore. Karl had no tolerance. I, schooled both in my father’s expressionist-painter’s love of exaggeration and fantasy, and in Luke’s scholarly and tendentious devotion to his older brother’s comics, decided I saw what Karl couldn’t.

  Of course, in my defense of Kirby I was conflating comic art and comic writing. I need to quit conflating them here. That is to say, it’s possible to debate the moment in the seventies when Kirby’s penciling began to go south. He was good; he got worse. What’s undebatable is the execrable, insufferable pomposities of Kirby’s dialogue writing in the Marvel work without Lee. Or the deprivations involved in trying to love his galactically distant and rather depressed story lines. As a scripter, as opposed to “idea man,” he stunk.

  I did try to love the
story lines. It mattered to me. With Luke’s help I’d understood that Kirby represented our parents’ values, the Chuck Berry values. In Kirby resided the higher morality of the Original Creator. That which I’d sworn to uphold, against the shallow killing-the-father imperatives of youth.

  Luke, it should be said, never cared about Kirby’s return. Luke was a classicist, and didn’t buy new comics. I was on my own, hung out to dry by The Eternals.

  Karl and I were also drawing comics in those days. Well not really comics—we were drawing superheroes: on single pages we’d design a character, detail his costume and powers and affect, then speculate on his adventures. I was profligate in this art, quickly generating a large stack of characters, whose names, apart from “Poison Ivy” and “The Hurler,” I can no longer retrieve from the memory hole. Karl drew fewer characters, more carefully, and imparted to them more substantial personalities and histories. One day in Karl’s room he and I were arguing about Kirby (we really did this: argue about Kirby) and I formulated a rhetorical question, meant to shock Karl into recognition of Kirby’s awesome gifts: Who, I asked Karl, besides Kirby, had ever shown the ability to generate so many characters, so many distinctive costumes, so many different archetypal personas? In reply, Karl turned the tables on me, with a weird trick of undercutting flattery. He said, You.

  At the time my ego chose to be buoyed by Karl’s remark. But really he’d keyed on an increasing childishness in Kirby. None of Kirby’s army of new characters at Marvel were ever going to be real, were ever going to mean much to anyone. They weren’t fated to live in meaningful stories. They were only empty costumes, like my own drawings. There was something regressive about Kirby now—he’d become self-affirming, the outsider artist decorating the walls of private rooms.

  The comics Karl and I actually relished in 1976 and 1977, if we were honest (and Karl was more honest than me), were The Defenders, Omega the Unknown, and Howard the Duck, all written by a mad genius named Steve Gerber, and Captain Marvel and Warlock, both written and drawn by another auteur briefly in fashion, named Jim Starlin. As far as the art went, Gerber liked to collaborate with plodding but inoffensive pencilers like Jim Mooney and Sal (“The Lesser”) Buscema. Those guys moved the story along well enough. Starlin’s were drawn in a slickly hip and mildly psychedelic style exaggerated in the direction of adult comix like Heavy Metal, but with the “realistic” musculature that the moment (and Karl) demanded, rather than the Franz Kline kneecaps and biceps of Jack Kirby. Gerber’s tales were wordy, satirical and self-questioning, and stuffed full of homely human characters dealing with day-to-day situations: bag ladies, disc jockies, superheroines’ jealous husbands, kids who faced bullying at their local public schools. His approach to the superhero mythos was explicitly deflationary. Starlin was more into wish-fulfillment fantasies of cosmic power, but he was droll and readable, and the scrupulous way he drew his psychedelia was actually indebted (I see now, paging through the stuff) to Steve Ditko’s early version of Doctor Strange. Enough: I fear I’m losing you. The point is, Gerber and Starlin were the two creators whose work was pitted in the day-to-day contest against “The Return of the King,” and they were winning, hands down, even in my muddled and ideological heart.

  Local ironies: the alienated, noble, loner type that Karl responded to most of all—embodied for him in Warlock and the Vision, Karl’s absolute favorites—was plainly a distillation of pure Kirby characters like the Silver Surfer and Black Bolt. But I couldn’t lead Karl to appreciate— why should he have?—Kirby’s authorship.

  And: Steve Gerber, who in his postmodernish anti-sagas seemed to us utterly our “contemporary” (I have to put that in quotes so that you don’t think we literally believed Steve Gerber was fourteen years old), was engaged in a killing-the-father imperative of his own, one that leapfrogged over the Silver Age, and also right over my and Karl’s heads at the time. That’s to say, reading Gerber now, I see that three of his best characters were sly parodies of mid-century comics which Gerber must have grown up reading. Omega the Unknown, a handsome blue-costumed and -haired humanoid from a destroyed planet, and with a kinship with a human boy, was Gerber’s undermining of both Superman and the original Captain Marvel (known to us only as the pathetic replicant Shazam). The Defenders’ Nighthawk, a powerless millionaire with a utility belt and a flying cape, was basically a Batman parody. And Howard was a corrupted Disney duck.

  The moment I’m describing would come to a precipitous end. Karl and I were in intermediate school in Brooklyn together until the summer of 1977. Though our friendship was strained toward the end of that time, both by Karl’s physical maturation and by the increasing distance between his rebellious nonconformity with the adult world and my parent-identifying nonconformity with the teenage world, we certainly continued to sporadically buy and evaluate Marvel comics together until the end of eighth grade.

  It was high school which severed our connection, for what would become years. I went off to Music and Art, in Manhattan, a place much populated by dreamy nerds like myself, and perfectly formulated to indulge my yearning to skip past teenagerhood straight to an adult life: many of my best friends in high school were my teachers. Karl was destined for Stuyvesant High, where he drifted into truancy. Then he’d land at one of our local public high schools, John Jay, where he’d be forced to continue battling a world of bullying I’d left behind.

  Luke, meanwhile, was still safe in the preserve of private school, where his negotiation with the call of teenagerhood, and beyond, might be subject to the push and pull of peer pressure, but better isolated from the starkness of the bankrupt city around us. Our friendship, mine and Luke’s, was restored somewhat during those high-school years, though I suspect I sometimes eluded him. My public-school experiences had made me worldly in ways that Luke’s stubborn cognition, and the advantage of his older brother’s influence, couldn’t quite match. As for physical maturation, I now shot ahead, to catch up with Karl (though he wasn’t around for me to make the comparison), while Luke still lagged slightly. Now, I think, I was to Luke as Karl had been to me; I was his Karl. No rebel, I had nonetheless begun to smoke pot, which Luke still distrusted. No whiz with girls, I was at least comfortable with my puppyish interest, while Luke remained, for the time being, gnarled up regarding that subject.

  Between me and Luke, Jack Kirby was still a tacit God, but only on the strength of his canonical sixties work. Luke and I, righteous in our reverence for origins, didn’t between us acknowledge Kirby’s continued existence. It would have been unseemly, like dwelling on the fact that Chuck Berry, rock ’n’ roll’s progenitor, had had a seventies novelty hit called “My Ding-a-Ling.”

  Whether Karl continued to buy comics I couldn’t know. And what of the place where our argument about Kirby had been left, in the end? That was lost, along with much else, in the denial surrounding the state of our friendship, which had attenuated to an occasional “hello” on the streets of the neighborhood.

  And there it would spiral forever, oblivious to contempt:

  The last year of high school, before college changed everything, Luke and I still drifted together occasionally. Now it was he and I who drew comics—not innocently wishful superheroes, but what we imagined were stark satires, modeled on the work of R. Crumb and other heroes of the “underground.” Luke had by then begun dating girls too, and one of our last collaborative productions was a Kirby parody called “Girlfriends from the Earth’s Core.” A two-page strip, it reworked the material of a failed double date of a month before, when Luke and I had taken two girls, soon to be our first bitter exes, to a fleabag movie theater at the Fulton Mall. Luke “penciled” the pages, and I was the “inker”—I specialized in Kirbyesque polka dots of energy, which we showed rising from the volcanic bodies of the two primordial girlfriends.

  I know them both, Luke and Karl. Luke and his wife live in a New England town. The oldest of their children is named Harpo, which strikes me now as more of the reverence for our parents’ culture
that always drew us together. Luke works making animated films (as Kirby once attempted to, when his comics career was demoralized by the failed return to Marvel). His conversation still features Fantastic Four–derived phrases like “Aunt Petunia” and “It’s Clobberin’ Time.” Kirby is in Luke’s DNA; I see it flashing in his eyes. I know for him it is more real than it ever was for me, as real as an older brother who’d slipped out of the house and left Kirby as his placeholder.

  Me, I’m a fake, my Kirby-love cobbled from Luke’s certainty, Karl’s resistance, and Stan Lee’s cheerleading. My version of an older brother was Karl, and Karl wasn’t reverent about Kirby. Karl was only curious— Kirby was merely on the menu of the possible, alongside Starlin and Gerber, alongside Ghost Rider and Warlock, alongside forgetting about comics and getting into girls or music or drugs instead. Karl never had that kind of crush on his own or other kids’ parents—a crush on the books on their shelves, on the records in their collections.

  Karl, though, still lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood to which I’ve returned, and which he never left. He lives down the street, and we’re both only a few blocks from the once-treacherous precinct of our shared school. Last week I had him over, and we dug out a box of Marvel comic books. These were the same copies we’d cherished together in 1976 and 1977—for, in an act surely loaded with unexamined rage, I’d purchased Karl’s comic collection from him late in our high-school years, when his interest drifted, when our friendship was at its lowest ebb.