The Superhero Reader

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

  It would seem that, during the production of FF #48, both Kirby and Lee saw something they wanted to use in the Surfer, and so Kirby elaborated. As Lee recounts in Son of Origins: “Later, as I started to write the dialogue for the strip, I realized that The Surfer had the potential to be far more than just a high-flying, colorful supporting character. Studying the illustrations, seeing the way Jack had drawn him, I found a certain nobility in his demeanor, an almost spiritual quality in his aspect and his bearing. […] I was tempted to imbue him with a spirit of almost religious purity” (206). Accordingly, issues 49 and 50, as they emerged from Kirby’s drawing board, pushed the Silver Surfer to the fore. Out of Kirby’s improvisation, then, came a signature character, one in which both Kirby and Lee developed a keen interest. They would return to the character repeatedly, first, in Fantastic Four #55, then in the epic FF #57–61 and subsequent issues, often casting the Surfer as a victim and emphasizing his innocence and suffering, qualities that Lee, finally, underscored in the Silver Surfer series of 1968, with its pathetic, blatantly Christlike hero. By the late sixties Lee had been so charmed by the character that he came to regard it as specially his, and, insisting on an anguished, Romantic, and sacrificial treatment of the character, took it far from what had emerged on Kirby’s drawing board (McLaughlin 97; Raphael and Spurgeon 123). Ironically, Kirby’s impromptu narrative problem-solving resulted in one of Lee’s most self-consciously ambitious literary efforts—a testimony to the odd results often achieved through the Marvel production method.

  The Silver Surfer, then, is Kirby’s fingerprint on the Galactus trilogy. Most relevant to my interest, though, is the way the character’s expanded role affected the shape of the story. The Surfer’s rebellion against Galactus constitutes a key example of Marvel’s signature dualism: master versus herald, with humanity in the middle. The Fantastic Four thus experimented with the same sort of conflict hinted at in the early issues of the X-Men. It opened the door to the grand-scale, cosmic adventures that would appear in Thor. Other ideas introduced in the FF likewise recalled the X-Men’s premise: most notably, that of the Inhumans, a race of beings superhuman by nature yet forced to live in a Hidden Land, shielded from human eyes. In the first Inhumans story, immediately prior to the Galactus trilogy (November 1965–January 1966), Kirby and Lee again discarded the conventions of accidental origins and secret identities in favor of a more mythic approach, creating a pantheon of good and evil characters (the Inhumans’ royal family) with a shared origin and destiny. One senses Kirby—the evidence shows that it was mainly Kirby plotting the series at this point—straining at the limits of formula here, cramming whole series’ worth of concepts into The Fantastic Four. The existence of other worlds or dimensions allowed for similar explorations; new settings, such as the Negative Zone and Wakanda, became breeding grounds for new characters and ideas. In Kirby’s run on The Fantastic Four, then, and especially between late 1965 and late 1967, the Marvel Universe began to sprout.

  This sudden afflatus may in part have been due to Martin Goodman’s plans to expand the Marvel line: biographer Ronin Ro claims that Kirby had been apprised of such plans and even promised a share of the profits from expanded merchandising, and thus was incentivized. By Ro’s account, Kirby, when he realized that Goodman in fact could not expand the line so quickly, ended up grafting his ideas onto The Fantastic Four. In any case, as the Marvel Universe went through this growth spurt it began to diverge drastically from the ordinary life-world of its readers, blooming into a strange world all its own. The month-to-month Fantastic Four serial—the cornerstone of Marvel—gestured toward a saga, a vast, rambling narrative. To the low-fantastic appeal of the costumed urban hero was added an emphasis on invented landscape and infinite powers akin to high fantasy. The frontier ethos of the vigilante hero—and the questions of justice, vengeance, and law that go with it—were sidelined in favor of pure, marvelous invention.

  THE EPIC APPROACH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

  Kirby’s transformation of the superhero dates back to the basic, then-unfulfilled premise of The X-Men. Through the ongoing conflict between good and evil mutants, Kirby felt his way tentatively toward what would become, for him, an irresistible new idea. Instead of defending the status quo, that is, the everyday life-world assumed by their readers, the X-Men redefined the world by their very presence. Instead of defending against random “crime,” the X-Men battled other mutants, for humanity’s sake. Unlike the superhero comics that came before it, then, The X-Men started from a premise that was not conservative but potentially transformative. Harking back to the genre’s science fiction roots (recall Philip Wylie’s Gladiator, for example), it had the potential to make the whole world look different. This possibility would be more fully exploited as Marvel’s continuity developed into an ever-tighter generative (and restrictive) mechanism. X-Men, in short, opened the door to a speculative approach to superheroes, an approach much influenced by Kirby’s reading of SF. Kirby then gladly walked through that door in Fantastic Four and Thor, taking those series to new heights.

  In sum, Marvel under Kirby introduced an epic approach to the superhero genre that was “mythic” both in its scale and in its pantheonic complications. At Marvel, heroes and villains shared common origins and each side was defined by its constant struggle against the other. This idea has had a great impact on the structure and iconography of the genre in the years since. By establishing pantheons of rival superbeings, Kirby infused a once tapped-out genre with the potential for more complex character relationships, sustained and meaningful conflict, and spectacular narrative drawing. Drawing of course was at the heart of it all: Kirby the designer was questing for new things to do. But the narrative consequences were far-reaching. Kirby’s outsized take on the genre at last gave superheroes threats worthy of them, villains and dangers that could fill the historical gap left by the defeat of “the Axis” at the end of WWII, the genre’s first boom period. Thus superhero comics could implicitly rehearse the ideological struggles of the Cold War without sinking to naked jingoism (though early on there was plenty of that too), and could speak to the era’s looming sense of apocalypse. This mythic approach of Kirby’s paved the way for series in which heroes not only saved the world but redefined it. It also gave the contemporary superhero a reason for being. With X-Men and Thor, Kirby began to weave into comics the kind of complex narrative designs found in classical myth or the Old Norse Eddas, while yet upholding a stark, sharply drawn, Comics Code-sanctioned moral dualism, a Manichean tug-of-war between Good and Evil.

  Admittedly, said dualism fails to capture, in fact refuses, the frequent moral ambiguity of so many myths and Eddas, with their capricious, often self-serving, sometimes self-destructive gods and heroes. For the most part, the Marvel Comics of the sixties skirt tragedy and uphold a staunchly prescriptive morality. As Code-approved superhero comics of their era, they remain locked into a pinched, earnestly moralistic idea of children’s fiction; as partial heirs to the bathos of muted, post-Code romance comics, they work on emotional registers that call to mind formula adolescent fiction. These are stories conceived with young readers—or, rather, a frankly conservative, moralizing approach to young readers—in mind. Their explorations are often blunted by that assumption. And yet Marvel’s fallible heroes, the moments of genuine pathos scattered through their stories, and the expanded fictional world in which they adventured, all these took the superhero comic book in vital new directions. Monster-heroes like the Thing and the Hulk, as well as misfits like Spider-Man, sharpened the superhero’s internal agon, his driving self-conflict, resetting the genre’s basic tensions. At the same time, Marvel’s supergroups—its families of heroes and villains—introduced complex interpersonal dynamics, far from either solo hero tales or the blandly collegial, clubhouse-like atmosphere of DC’s then-Justice League (which gave no hint of personality conflicts, nor indeed of distinct personalities, among its members). The ever-expanding storyscape around them, meanwhile, was stuffed with things to
respond to, recurrent menaces to fight, dreamlike locales to visit, and the possibility of relationships to rekindle.

  Marvel thus made formula superhero comics both more welcoming of emotional complexity and much wider in scope. In the latter quality, their epic scope, Kirby’s handprint shows through especially clearly; Marvel’s new sense of scale afforded him a grand canvas. It liberated him. As a result, the Marvel of the sixties boasted some of the most inventive graphic design and cracklingly vital narrative drawing ever seen in comic books. But this accomplishment did not end in the sixties, for Kirby would go on, after his classic period at Marvel, to explore still more shaded and conflicted characters and more expansive worlds.

  If, fortified by Kirby, Marvel rebuilt and revitalized the superhero, then this success prodded Kirby further, stoking his ambition. He began to see that he could treat superheroes as vehicles for personal expression and for the conflict of ideas, at a time when ideas seemed to animate conflict on a global scale. As the rhetoric of the Cold War pitted rival ideologies against each other in a bid for world dominance, so Kirby worked out the conflict of ideas with a rugged graphic immediacy. More and more, he assayed themes that haunted and provoked him. More and more, he made abstract concepts leap off the page, personified. In his hands, some of the genre’s axial conflicts—between justice and authority, for example—became less important, while others—such as the superhero’s status as both insider and outsider—were boldly redefined. A peculiar otherness crept into his superheroes: they became gods, and pulled humans into the orbit of their conflicts. They worked the cosmos, not just the city, but brought the cosmos to the city too, imbuing the city with layers and mysteries. Asgard and New York, Supertown and Metropolis—Kirby made the mundane settings of the earthbound hero and the grand settings of mythology part of one vast narrative design. By this point he was less interested in the kinds of conflictedness that first gave life to the superhero—masculine self-doubt, urban paranoia, the allure and wickedness of crime—but very interested in doing new things with what was there, the established and understood language of the genre. He turned this language toward mythic fantasy. His best work gave ideas an embodied urgency and an archetypal obviousness but at the same time a quirky and surprising visual richness.

  Kirby’s work, in short, pursued the possibility of superheroics as allegory, a possibility he broached at Marvel, then went on to plumb in his visionary and bizarrely eccentric Fourth World for DC. Through the Fourth World he introduced multiple innovations that have influenced superhero comics ever since. One such innovation, the idea of simultaneously launching several new series within a single larger storyline, has since become common industry practice. Other innovative features of the Fourth World were its deliberate symbolic parallelism; its ideological subtext, if indeed we may call it subtext (it’s pretty obvious); and the way it used an overarching conflict and shared cast to revive and exploit various subgenres. Like The X-Men—and indeed it underscores in hindsight Kirby’s distinct contribution to The X-Men—the Fourth World establishes a conflict among demigods, of which humans become the focal point and deciding the fate of humanity the main objective. The saga’s titanic villain, Darkseid, attacks Earth in hopes of plucking a fateful secret from human minds, while Darkseid’s opposites, the gods and heroes of “New Genesis,” spring to humanity’s defense. This is where The Fourth World begins: with human life, ever the disputed stake in Kirby’s epics. Here Kirby’s mythic approach to the genre emerges in its pure form; here archetypal figures are locked in world-defining struggle. Having established this struggle, Kirby developed symbolically fraught characters and cast them in variations of traditional comics genres.

  It may be that, in 1971, all this was too much for the comic book’s tottering newsstand market to handle. After all, the original incarnation of the Fourth World proved short-lived. However, the concept has been revived repeatedly, insistently, over the decades since, usually in diminished or more readily containable form. Even though the series posed trouble for the putative continuity of the DC Universe, subsequent writers have found its concepts irresistible and sought to reintroduce them, or versions of them, into the company’s expansive menu of characters. In fact Kirby’s pantheonic treatment of superheroes, of which the Fourth World is the very distillation, has since transformed the narrative strategies of the whole superhero genre. Four decades after the Fourth World began, creators intuitively recognize that superheroes demand not only worthy antagonists but also coherent worlds and shared origins. So this is how Kirby reshaped the superhero genre: the notion of “continuity” prevalent in superhero comics today rests not only on the phenomenal success of the Marvel Universe that Kirby did so much to create, but specifically on the mythic approach to the genre that emerged, tentatively, in The X-Men and then blossomed into the Fourth World. More than any other creator, Kirby opened up this rich and habitable space.

  I make this claim not to exult in an easy triumph, nor to make the case for Kirby as the only important contributor to Marvel. We know that Kirby was not the sole architect of Marvel; the company’s achievement was collective and contingent on a set of circumstances impossible to be repeated, including the facts of Kirby’s availability and financial desperation. Moreover, despite his contributions to the Marvel aesthetic, thus to superhero comics in general, Kirby did not vault directly from Marvel to due recognition, compensation, or a general sense of ownership—editorial, financial, or professional—over his own work. Though gush about Kirby as “King” was common enough, his co-authorship of Marvel remained veiled behind company rhetoric. He had to wait until retirement for a measure of vindication, critical reappraisal, and partisan fan support. Finally, Kirby was not interested in the workmanlike upkeep of continuity, nor did he have much of a share, in later years, in the Marvel continuity he helped to create. Rather, he was interested in high concepts and the overflowing of ideas, designs, and visions. By the mid-seventies, continuity was his nemesis. He professed disinterest in subsequent revisions of his characters by other creators, did not return to old series with the intention of recreating the terms of their earlier success, and was sometimes held to task for either wrenching old properties in new directions or failing to notice that new directions had already come. That Marvel continuity post-1970 fostered a sense of comparative realism only proved to be a thorn in Kirby’s side, and, in later years, the freewheeling, childlike qualities of many of his comics frankly alienated many of the fans that had lapped up his work (under Lee’s imprimatur) back in the sixties. The Marvel Universe, more generally the settled and hyper-rationalized version of the Marvel aesthetic that overtook the comic book field, turned out to be inhospitable to Kirby’s talents.

  Kirby’s position vis-à-vis the superhero genre is therefore a curious one. At Marvel he co-created a vast narrative that, on the one hand, fired his ambitions and pushed him further along artistically, and yet, on the other, bred a fan culture whose expectations for consistency and systemization would only have straightjacketed him, had he been able to meet them at all. If it is possible for one person to be both a father figure and an outcast, Kirby has been both of those. While the repertory of contemporary superhero comics, specifically the vast narratives of Marvel and DC, is based largely on his work, today’s comics are so thoroughly enmeshed in the custodial upkeep of continuity that the actual history and rude specificity of Kirby have been effaced, and the daffier, more outré elements of his comics have been kept at arm’s length. Perhaps this is why writer Chris Roberson has referred to the late Mark Gruenwald (1953–1996), onetime Marvel editor and continuity expert, as the real “father of modern superhero comics”: “The current state of superhero comics, with its obsessive attention to continuity and rationalization, line-wide crossovers, multiple realities, and increasing divergence from the real world, resembles nothing so much as a Mark Gruenwald comic writ large” (“Mark Gruenwald” no page).

  This “current state” is as much the achievement of fandom as of p
ublishers. It is designed for sharing. We know, after all, that genres are not simply formulas or lists of conventions or clichés, but social compacts, ways of acting and relating in the world. We know that the superhero genre isn’t simply a textual but also a social network, that knowledge of continuity grants cultural capital within said network, that continuity generates both fan fiction and professional comics, and that by now the difference between the two is practically no difference at all. The superhero genre and its collective, its fandom, are now online, “cross-platform,” and invested in the shared universe model; the genre has become a big playground. Why not?