The Superhero Reader

by Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet

  By contrast, Marvel in the sixties not only let the villains get away but also made the unresolved threats they posed a continual and defining aspect of the heroes’ world. By the mid-sixties Marvel had developed powerful pairings of hero and villain whose continual conflicts could sustain stories indefinitely: the Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom, Thor and Loki, Spider-Man and Dr. Octopus, Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, the X-Men and Magneto. What’s more, Marvel’s villains were often tied to the heroes by shared origins—connected symbiotically, almost like family. There were few precedents for this in earlier superhero comics. One example could be Black Adam, a villain introduced in Fawcett’s Marvel Family series in 1945 who shared the same magic origins and basic costume design as the heroes (again, this Marvel Family was unrelated to Marvel Comics). Black Adam, however, was originally a one-shot character, and would not be reused for some thirty-two years. Marvel took this idea of the villain as hero’s counterpart and, over the years, ran with it: for example, the Fantastic Four’s resident scientist, Mr. Fantastic, nearly met his match in Dr. Doom, a mad genius whom he had met and tried to befriend years before when both were in college. Doom often seemed to be motivated as much by fraternal rivalry with Mr. Fantastic as by innate evil: a popular villain, he became a near-constant presence in the lives of the Fantastic Four and a pillar of the Marvel Universe (he has starred in several series of his own). In the X-Men series, the hate-filled Magneto fulfilled a similar but even more central role, growing in stature so much that, long after Kirby’s tenure, the character would hover uncertainly between villain and misguided antihero.

  Nemeses were everything. Numerous Marvel comics in Kirby’s wake pursued the idea of the villain as inverted hero, as rival and opposite. The Hulk clashed with other radiation-induced monstrosities, the Abomination and the Leader; Iron Man battled a rival armored character, the Titanium Man; and Dr. Strange faced off against rival sorcerer Baron Mordo, who shared his origins. Meanwhile, Ditko’s Spider-Man faced foes such as Dr. Octopus and the Sandman, who, like Spider-Man, gained their powers through nuclear accidents and who, equally like Spider-Man, were freakish in power and appearance (indulging Ditko’s penchant for elastic, ever-morphing body types and curving, serpentine shapes). Much, much later, well past Ditko, Spider-Man would face evil doppelgangers whose looks were closely patterned after his own costume (Venom, Carnage). The villains often seemed to be distorted shadows of the heroes.

  Surely Kirby cannot be credited or blamed for most of this? Of course not. These trends did not pop out suddenly in 1961–62, but over time as the Marvel Universe grew, fitfully, erratically, at first more the result of cross-promotional improvising than some considered, long-range plan. Many creators beyond Kirby and Lee were involved in its growth. It was under Kirby, though, that Marvel decisively latched onto the idea of unresolved, never-ending conflict between superpowered opposites, and, revealingly, Kirby’s subsequent work often explores this kind of dualistic premise in distilled or exaggerated form. This sort of mirroring obviously appealed to him, as both a storyteller and a designer of characters.

  The X-Men series, launched in 1963, is the keystone example. It introduced the germ of an idea that was to emerge full-blown in many of Kirby’s later creations: that of superhuman heroes and villains springing from a common origin, vying with each other like rival gods in some epically dysfunctional family. Humankind, of course, was caught in the middle. X-Men approached this concept through the then-novel idea of mutants, that is, superbeings who were simply born that way. X-Men #1 (September 1963) establishes the blueprint straight off: a perpetual conflict between “evil” mutants, represented by Magneto, and “good” (that is, pro-human) mutants, represented by Professor Charles Xavier and his young students, the titular X-Men. Linked by a common name and nature (mutant), yet starkly divided by philosophies and means, Xavier and Magneto define opposite poles in a struggle that was to become a foundational element in the Marvel Universe: Magneto seeks to rule over humankind as “homo superior,” while Professor X seeks peaceful coexistence with humans and strives to defend the world from Magneto’s ambitions. This fundamental conflict is at work even in the first story.

  Originally, neither Magneto’s specific origin nor Xavier’s was important. Their common mutanthood was a given. What mattered was the struggle between X-Men and evil mutants to define the relationship between mutantkind and humankind. In this struggle, humanity became the fulcrum and victim, just as, so often in ancient mythology and epic, humans are proxies in or victims of conflicts among gods and goddesses. In the X-Men’s premise, then, there was a promise, a seed, of mythological scope. There had never quite been anything like this in comic books before: never had super-villains played such a fundamental role in a series, and never had comic books focused on a “race” of superbeings simply born with their unique powers. The X-Men needed no magic words, no mystic thunderbolts, no cosmic rays or attacks by radioactive bugs to explain their abilities. Neither did their most potent and enduring antagonist, Magneto. From this simple idea came, gradually and without fanfare, a new approach to the superhero.

  Granted, Kirby and Lee did not fully exploit this potential in the early X-Men. The Lee and Kirby X-Men of 1963–66 was an underachieving series that, after a promising launch, came to seem cramped and uninventive alongside Kirby’s best work. Kirby departed the series on the cusp of 1966 to focus on other work; by then he had fully penciled X-Men issues I-II and provided layouts for other artists, mainly Werner Roth, in issues 12–17 (dated July 1965 to February 1966). He would provide covers or cover layouts for most issues through late 1966. But this was not his sharpest work; frankly, X-Men was a second-stringer. Lee handed over the scripting to protégé Roy Thomas as of #20, and what followed was largely undistinguished until the arrival of artist Neal Adams in 1969. Shortly after the fondly remembered Adams/Thomas run, the series died, only to be revived as a reprint book, in which status it continued quietly for almost five years before its widely touted revival in 1975, years after Lee and Kirby. Even the earliest issues of X-Men, those penciled fully by Kirby, had been comparatively weak: the only essential villains introduced in the early run were Magneto and the robotic Sentinels, and, as had The Fantastic Four before it, the series cast about uncertainly for subplots, hooks, and distinctive characterizations. Kirby and Lee returned to Magneto monotonously throughout their two-plus years on the title, without deepening the conflict among mutants or expanding the scope of the action in such a way as to capitalize on the series’ premise. Though said premise held extraordinary promise, when handled in an ordinary way it confined and hobbled the series, making it dully repetitive. Truthfully, the X-Men languished in the shadow of the Fantastic Four; the series demanded a bigger treatment than it got. The early issues remained trapped in month-to-month superheroics, often against colorless villains, the only novelty coming from Professor X as teacher and the hovering presence of Magneto as antagonist. Years would go by before other creators (Chris Claremont et al.) would begin to extrapolate from the original and exploit the series’ potential.

  Though X-Men had the glimmer of an idea, it was Kirby’s peak period on Marvel’s Thor that most successfully explored a pantheonic approach to superheroes. The mythological Thor had held a special fascination for Kirby for decades: witness “Villain from Valhalla,” a 1942 Sandman story by Kirby and Joe Simon, or “The Magic Hammer,” another Thor-related story for DC’s Tales of the Unexpected in 1957. However, the early Thor stories in Marvel’s Journey into Mystery failed to capitalize on the character’s mythic origins. Like many of the early-sixties Marvel series, Thor began with one foot in the Kirby/Lee monster comics; then, after Kirby’s brief initial run, it had little offer besides standard crime-fighting stories in mythological drag. However, once Kirby returned to the series and hit his stride—especially in 1966 and after—his Thor became a launch pad for epics of unprecedented scope and mythic resonance. Building on, though also offhandedly distorting, the patterns laid out in Nors
e myth, Kirby and Lee made Thor’s unpredictable half-brother Loki into a pure villain and central figure, while also spotlighting other mythic characters, both heroic (e.g., Sif, Balder, Heimdall) and villainous (e.g., Hela, goddess of death; various giants and trolls). Thor’s pitiable human alter-ego, the lame but well-intentioned doctor Don Blake—in superhero parlance, his civilian identity—disappeared for issues at a time, as Kirby’s interest in conventional superheroics waned and he instead explored the possibilities of a godly pantheon.

  Prior to this, Thor had been dominated by romance-styled plotting about Thor/Don Blake’s stymied relationship with love interest Jane Foster, his nurse. This was Superman with a vengeance: Blake, kindly, lame, and a bit dull if not outright “mild-mannered,” desired Jane, but his true self, Thor, could not cleave to her because his godly father, Odin, forbade him to love a “mortal.” Jane was often in need of being rescued; Thor/Blake was torn by his divided nature. In essence, Don Blake was a mashup of Clark Kent and the then-popular Dr. Kildare. In the Thor of the mid-to-late sixties, though, things were cosmic: often, nothing less than the end of everything was at stake. Jane Foster was eventually shunted to the side and the series went Blake-less for long periods. Plots occasionally wobbled back to earthbound crime-fighting and soap opera, but most often slipped the traces, giving free rein to Kirby’s off-the-cuff mythopoeic barnstorming. Kirby’s design and drawing went wild, the elastic plots giving affordance to spectacular graphic invention.

  Equally grand in scope from the mid-sixties onward was Kirby’s Fantastic Four, which used the team’s science-fiction roots to explore a range of hidden worlds, alternate realities, inhuman species, and space-spanning superbeings. In fact it was the FF that first and most clearly heralded Kirby’s new outsized approach to the superhero genre. The much-praised “Galactus trilogy” in FF #48–50 (March–May 1966), which first introduced the seminal characters Galactus and the Silver Surfer, is similar in outline to many of the conflicts acted out in the peak-period Thor: the Godlike Galactus, not so much a villain as an amoral, impersonal force, struggles with his once-servant, the Silver Surfer, to decide the fate of the world. Again, humanity is the fulcrum: the Silver Surfer’s sympathetic regard for humans resembles Thor’s own, and, eventually, the Surfer would be cast as an almost Christlike sufferer for humanity’s sins (a symbolic burden most weightily depicted in the Stan Lee-scripted, post-Kirby Silver Surfer series of 1968–1970). In the Galactus trilogy, even the most powerful of humans, the Fantastic Four, are forced into the role of bystanders—until the intervention of another Godlike extraterrestrial, the Watcher, helps humanity save itself. Humankind thus tips the scales, though in an almost childlike, unknowing way, in a mythic struggle to decide its own destiny.

  The “Galactus trilogy,” a prime example of Kirby’s technological sublime, was to prove supremely influential, indeed epochal, for Marvel and its fans. Tellingly, it isn’t so much a cohesive trilogy as three months’ worth of issues placed within a larger continuity. Fantastic Four #48 actually begins with the resolution of the Inhumans storyline launched several issues earlier, while #50, though titled “The Startling Saga of the Silver Surfer,” resolves the threat of Galactus halfway through, quickly ushers off the Surfer, and then concentrates on domestic happenings in the lives of the FF: tension between newlyweds Reed and Sue, the tortured wanderings of Ben, who is convinced that his girlfriend Alicia has rejected him for the Surfer, and—this was evidently a selling point—Johnny’s first day at “Metro College,” where he meets new supporting character Wyatt Wingfoot. The “trilogy,” then, has none of the formal separateness or claims to historic importance that we might expect in the marketing of “event” series in today’s comic books. Rather, the operative mode is that of a soap opera. Yet what these three issues are remembered for is their unprecedented scale: Galactus intends to devour the earth’s energy not because he is malicious or evil (the usual super-villain stuff) but because he is a force “above good and evil,” to whom the Earth’s inhabitants are simply beneath notice. The story’s resolution hinges on forcing Galactus, through the Silver Surfer, to take notice. The central character, it turns out, is the one who mediates between the human and the godlike, the Surfer, who unpredictably blossoms from a mere functionary of the plot—a cold, unemotional harbinger of doom—into an articulate and tormented hero.

  Much of the story’s drama stems from the Surfer, as he transitions from plot device (his arrival heralds the coming of Galactus) to character. Introducing the Surfer, as eccentric a gimmick as any Kirby had come up with, was an ingenious narrative stroke, brought to the boards by Kirby without Lee’s input in order to foreshadow the threat of Galactus on a more human scale. The device of the Surfer allows us to approach Galactus obliquely, to imagine what kind of being would need a “herald” this imposing to prepare the way for his arrival. The first chapter’s climactic splash, a full-page panel dominated by the big “reveal” of Galactus, derives its power from the way it fulfills the suspense generated by the dozen or so pages preceding it. The chapter’s title, “The Coming of Galactus,” anticipates its end, for which we are prepared in two ways: first, by seeing the Surfer’s progress through space, toward Earth; second, through apocalyptic signs—a sky filled with flames, then with floating rocks or “debris”—that strike terror into the people of New York City. These unexplained phenomena inspire panic in the streets, provoking confrontations between Johnny and Ben and a fearful crowd. (Ben knocks out one man with a tap of his finger, a bit of comic drollery that offsets the story’s lowering sense of threat.) Afterwards, the omniscient Watcher, a frequent supporting character in Fantastic Four, appears at the group’s headquarters and reveals that the “fire-shield” and orbiting debris were his own unsuccessful attempts to hide the Earth from the Surfer, Galactus’s “advance scout” (oddly enough, the orbiting debris does nothing to dim the light of the sun!). Even as the Watcher speaks, the Surfer slips through the barrier of debris and lands—as luck or narrative economy would have it—right on the roof of the FF’s headquarters. Ben dispatches the Surfer with one punch, but to no avail: the signal having been given, Galactus arrives suddenly, announced by a full-page photomontage splash that shows the opening of his spherical starship. Galactus disembarks, in a costume of baroque complexity festooned, funnily enough, with a “G” on the chest (like Superman’s “S” chevron or the FF’s own “4” logo). Arm outstretched, dwarfing even the giant Watcher, Galactus makes a singular impression: “My journey is ended! This planet shall sustain me until it has been drained of all elemental life! So speaks Galactus!” (20). Part of what makes this work so well, in spite of its unselfconscious absurdity, is the cumulative effect of the narrative teasing that leads up to this moment. This cliffhanger must have been quite a stunner to Marvel readers in 1966.

  The Silver Surfer, a clear example of the kind of improvisation that characterizes mid-sixties Marvel, is the device that makes this first chapter tick. He is introduced as a cosmic traveler “zooming along the starways like a living comet—with the freedom and wild abandon of the wind itself,” but also as an object of terror for the villainous Skrulls “of the Andromeda Galaxy,” past enemies of the Fantastic Four, whose fearful determination to hide their entire social system already tells us about the scope of the threat the Surfer represents (7–8). The Surfer is later shown surfing the cosmic explosion of a “supernova” and then detecting our own solar system, all the while shooting through Kirby’s overstuffed, decorative idea of outer space, which is alive with closely packed stars, planets, and fizzing energy (apparently it didn’t occur to Kirby that space is mostly emptiness, or dark matter). When the Surfer arrives, he is a portent, a promise, of impending apocalypse. What’s interesting about the construction of this drawn-out narrative tease is that it apparently came from Kirby alone.

  Stan Lee, in his book Son of Origins of Marvel Comics (1975), credits Kirby with creating the Surfer. According to Lee, Kirby penciled the first chapter of the story a
fter an informal conference with Lee, in which the two agreed on the broad concept of a huge, godlike being “who could destroy entire planets at will” (205)—a pretty generic idea, it must be admitted, and of course Lee’s account is so short on specifics as to be unconfirmable. What is most specific about Lee’s account is that, when Kirby eventually delivered the pages for the trilogy’s first installment, Lee was, he said, startled to see an unfamiliar figure on a flying surfboard, upon which Kirby explained that a being as powerful as Galactus ought to have a herald, “an advance guard” to come before him and pave the way—a good call, but, one is tempted to say, a storyteller’s call, not one justified by any logic other than that of the narrative. Lee recalls being intrigued by, even “wild” about, the Surfer, whom Kirby had created on his own, out of whole cloth (206). What this tells us is not only that Lee did not have a hand in the initial design of the character, but also that he was not in control of the pacing of the narrative, since the Surfer is critical to the dramatic structure of the story’s first chapter. He is the story’s pacemaker. Lee’s account thus inadvertently reveals much about the nature of the Kirby/Lee collaboration at this stage and about the central role Kirby played as a conceptualist and storyteller. By inventing/inserting the Surfer, Kirby in effect plotted the story. He paced the telling. He even provided the character that, in the end, would steal the show, in “The Startling Saga of the Silver Surfer.”

  In other words, the Silver Surfer is a character that grew out of Kirby’s process of narrative drawing rather than a prior intention or any literary considerations. The bulk of the “writing” (in the sense of story-plotting and storytelling) was in the art. Character design and movement, facial expressions, the compositions of panels, the leap from panel to panel, the gridding of the page: all of these crucial cartooning/storytelling elements were the province of Kirby, the artist. Regarding this particular story, Mike Gartland unpacks the process of its creation in The Jack Kirby Collector issues 22 and 23, which provide facsimiles of penciled pages from Fantastic Four #49 that include Kirby’s original plot notes. Gartland concludes: “Despite whatever input Stan might or might not’ve had at the conceptual phase, these margin notes show the action and dramatic impact of this pivotal episode … begin with Kirby” (“Failure,” Part Two 38). In his role as dialoguer, Lee responded to what Kirby gave, at times seriously, at times playfully, always adding a new layer to the total work. In the case of the Surfer, a character for whom Lee has great affection and over whom he reportedly tried to exert a proprietary claim for a while (McLaughlin 98), the meeting between Kirby’s pencils and Lee’s scripts resulted in a new layer of characterization. As the story builds (#49–50), the treatment of the Surfer deepens, infusing Kirby’s initially cold, enigmatic conception—a being of energy, wholly alien and unfeeling—with a “nobility” and an awaking “conscience” that will shape the story’s outcome and in fact provide the crucial stalling action: the Surfer will turn on his master, Galactus, and battle him, buying time for Johnny Storm to fetch the cosmic super-weapon with which Galactus can be overcome. In short, the Surfer, at first improvised by Kirby simply for the sake of storytelling, ended up becoming the story’s thematic linchpin and thereby a major Marvel character.