R.I.P. JOHN ROMITA SR.

 I've no special observations on the significance of Romita's contribution to mainstream American comics, and I'm sure countless fans are singing his praises on that score. I will say that DC had his talents at their disposal in the early sixties, but they neglected to keep giving him work and so steered his course toward Marvel. There he became an inestimable asset to the company in his interpretation of Spider-Man. None of the other artists then available to Marvel-- Andru (who seems to have auditioned for the post), Kane, Kirby, Colan, or any of the DC stalwarts-- could  have channeled the sexy soap opera of Spidey in the late Silver Age. 

It wasn't a smooth transition. Lee, possibly anticipating difficulties with Ditko on the Spider-title, had Romita pencil a Spider-Man guest-shot in DAREDEVIL in 1966, apparently a few months before Ditko departed Marvel entirely. But it's a pretty pedestrian outing.

But Romita grew into the job quickly. In SPIDER-MAN #40-- incidentally, the second Spider-comic I ever owned-- Romita served up great action in the then-final Spidey-Goblin climax, but the soap operatics were more intense than they'd been under Ditko.

Romita was never known for huge fight-scenes like Kirby and Kane, but he outdid himself with Spidey's new villain The Rhino.

Not to neglect the girls of gorgeosity at all...

Here's a neglected moment in history: Gwen Stacy getting fed up with Aunt May and her apron strings.

And just to indulge a private theory... Romita has stated that he designed the Kingpin on his own in 1967, with no input from Stan Lee. I don't disbelieve his assertion that Lee gave Romita no description, since Lee wasn't an artist. But I've always thought Romita might have modeled his "my-fat-is-all-muscle" sumo-gang-boss on a slightly earlier character. To be sure, I can't imagine Romita going out of his way to read KID COLT as a regular thing. But he could have just seen the issue in passing on visiting Marvel offices, with the result that one "my-fat-is-all-muscle" tub o'lard begat another. From KID COLT #117 (1964), written by Stan Lee and penciled by Jack Keller:

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #21: "MEN IN BLACK" (MENACE #3, 1953)/"THE HIDDEN FACE" (TOS #25, 1962)

 I found this minor story looking at early works by the newly-deceased John Romita Senior. It's not symbolic enough to stand as a near-myth or a null-myth, but is pretty much a straight "social relevance" story by Stan Lee and Romita. I would guess that the anti-bigotry message is something Stan could have been emulating from EC Comics, though this story predates EC's best known story about the rebounding of vigilante justice, "The Whipping," from a 1954 SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES. Stan's story, interestingly, has the bigot even hating on foreigners of Caucasian ancestry, for when his wife leaves him, he rails against her for being "a Swede."

It's also of minor interest to see the now famous phrase "Men in Black" used with zero E.T. connotations. The reference is to the fact that the main bigot and his buddies don imitation KKK robes, but black instead of white. This leads to a Poe-esque orgy of self-flagellation, as the bigot punishes himself by imagining that he can't take off his black mask.

ADDENDUM: Stan Lee later recycled this story with a new SF-angle in "The Hidden Face," TALES OF SUSPENSE #25 (1962), with art by Steve Ditko.

MYTHCOMICS: 'SPIDEY SAVES THE DAY!" (SPIDER-MAN #40, 1966)

“I had a big argument with Steve Ditko, who was drawing the strip at the time. When we had to reveal the identity of the Green Goblin, I wanted him to turn out to be the father of Harry Osborn, and Steve didn’t like that idea,” Lee explained. “He said, ‘no, I don’t think he should be anybody we’ve seen before.’ I said ‘Why?’ He said ‘Well, in real life, the bad guy doesn’t always turn out to be someone you’ve known.’ And I said, ‘Steve, people have been reading this book for months, for years, waiting to see who the Green Goblin really is. If we make him somebody that they’ve never seen before, I think they’ll be disappointed — but if he turns out to be Harry’s father, I think that’s an unusual dramatic twist that we can play with in future stories.’ And Steve said ‘Yeah, well, that’s not the way it would be in real life.’ And I said ‘In real life, there’s nobody called The Green Goblin.’ And so Steve was never happy about that, but since I was the editor, we did it my way.”

According to this essay, Ditko later claimed that the argument about the Goblin happened, but that it merely served as a "straw that broke the camel's back." It appears, then, that when Ditko worked on his next-to-last issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, all of the setup elements in #37-- in which Norman Osborn assaults Spider-Man and seems implicated in the attempted murder of Professor Stromm-- were completed "under protest." Ditko then walked away from Marvel with SPIDER-MAN #38, obliging Lee to coinplete the remainder of the Green Goblin story in #39 and #40 with the artistic aid of John Romita.

It's interesting that in this much later expatiation about the Green Goblin story, Lee emphasizes "an unusual dramatic twist that we can play with in future stories." In 1966, though Lee couldn't have known back then how long the Spider-Man franchise would last, he must have guessed that the concept had more than a few good years in it. However, there's no indication in the previous Lee-Ditko stories that either creator had much of an idea about what I'd call "the myth of the Green Goblin." He was, in all of his appearances, simply a masked mystery villain who haunted the hero's tracks. Lee and Ditko occasionally exploited the mystery of the Goblin's identity very briefly, but there was no real sense as to why he was more of a menace than, say, Mysterio. Even the story in #39-- the punnily-titled "How Green Was My Goblin"-- is little more than set-up.

However, "Spidey" in #40 shows Lee going from zero to sixty. For all the blather from fans who want to believe that Lee's artists created the whole show, it's patently absurd to think that John Romita--who had just assumed the job, and who subsequently claimed that he assumed Ditko would eventually return to the feature-- was the primary creative force here. Lee understood that continuing readers wanted a payoff, and thus he almost certainly reverted back to the much-lauded moment in SPIDER-MAN #10, where Jonah Jameson reveals his jealousy of the featured hero in a self-examining soliloquy.

The bulk of the story falls into two main sections. It begins with an unmasked Spidey chained and captive in the Goblin's lab, and trying to get the villain-- who has just revealed his identity-- to keep talking until Spidey can break free. The Goblin does indeed keep talking, revealing his origin as he does so, and then he sets the hero free for a culminating fight. The hero wins, but with the knowledge that even if the villain goes to jail, he'll reveal Spidey's identity. Fortunately for the hero, Norman loses his memory of ever having been the Goblin. For a time, his threat was ended, though every time the character re-appeared, Lee teased the reader with the possibility that the Goblin might still return, as indeed he did, though not for several years.

It's the origin, though, that gives the story the mythic resonance earlier Goblin stories did not have. In essence, it's a Jekyll and Hyde story, but one in which the villain is changed by accident, a la the Hulk. But unlike the majority of latter-day Jekylls, Norman happens to be a father, whose son Harry is one of Peter Parker's friends.

While Norman tells Peter the story of his origins, he ends up revealing that his idea of being a father is tied up in conspicuous consumption:

Note that in the second panel, Norman considers his excellence as a parent dependent on what other people would think:"I wanted everyone to see what a great father [Harry] had." Lee's main purpose in making Norman a ruthless businessman was to show how he had lost his way: that he'd become obsessed with making money, deluding himself that he was doing it for Harry. Thus he's a Jekyll who's already given in to his dark side before he ever comes across the "Hyde formula"-- which he examines for no reason but to see if it can make him more money. Significantly, the formula was created by Professor Stromm, the man Norman sent to jail, so in a sense Norman's transformation into the Goblin might be seen as Stromm's revenge.

I would imagine that the main reason that Lee has the formula turn green before it explodes in Norman's face was to give a reason as to why he later chose to become a green-hued super-villain.

Still, it's interesting that, though Lee doesn't make the connection, one of the main associations of the color is that of-- money. One thing neither Lee nor his collaborators even comment on, even subconsciously, is the question as to why a tough-minded businessman would chosen a Halloween motif for his super-villain costume. I realize that originally Lee and Ditko merely wanted a mystery villain with no particular motive for riding a mechanical broomstick and tossing explosive pumpkins. Yet, since a goblin is one of many impish creatures who were designed to be caricatures of human beings, Norman's decision to become a murderous man-witch makes a certain amount of sense.

ASSORTED STAN AND JACK STUFF PT. 2

I've been meaning for some time to get back to one particular issue I have with Abraham Riesman's muddled meditations on "Stan Lee's Legacy." particularly with respect to Jack Kirby's famous allegations that he did all the plotting work and that Stan Lee did nothing but write the dialogue afterward.

[Roy] Thomas had an experience any comics fan or historian would kill for: He walked the offices of Marvel in the mid-’60s, when Lee and Ditko were working together on Spider-Man and Doctor Strange stories and Lee and Kirby were working together on nearly everything else, including The Avengers, The X-Men, and The Fantastic Four. Here’s the problem: It’s extremely unclear what “working together” meant....Kirby, from the time he left Marvel in 1970 until his death in 1994, swore up and down that Lee was a fraud on an even larger scale: Kirby said he himself was the one who had all the ideas for the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and the rest, and that Lee was outright lying about having anything to do with them. What’s more, he said Lee was little more than a copy boy, filling in dialogue bubbles after Kirby had done the lion’s share of the conceptual and writing work for any given issue. “Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything,” Kirby told an interviewer in 1989. “It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things, for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories.”

At no time does Riesman suggest that Kirby might be exaggerating his claim to near-total creative input. Riesman does credit Lee with coming up with inventing Marvel's "shared universe" approach and with changing the game for all mainstream comics in terms of spoken dialogue, but he makes no argument against the verdict asserted by Kirby's longtime friend and confidante Mark Evanier:

“Unfortunately, from day one, Jack was doing part of Stan’s job, and Stan was not doing part of Jack’s job,” says comics historian Mark Evanier, who worked as Kirby’s assistant and has worked on and off with Lee since the 1970s.

So according to Kirby, he got a raw deal because Lee didn't share the writing-paycheck with him. According to an interview with Roy Thomas (to be identified LATER), Kirby invoked this injustice when he came back to Marvel in the 1970s, claiming that the only way he Kirby would collaborate with a writer would be if the writer wrote full-script descriptions of the stories, so that Kirby would only contribute the art. As most fans know, Marvel's editorial department consented to let Kirby write and draw all of his titles during his second contractual stint with Marvel. I suspect that Kirby knew that the Marvel editors valued his ability to draw vividly, without full-script constraints, and that his demand would lead, as it did, to his finally being able to collect both the artist and writer paychecks that he thought to be his due during the first contractual stint.

I don't begrudge Kirby that privilege, and even though I find little of his 1970s work palatable, from a historical perspective his solo work gives modern critics considerable information about the way he formulated stories when not interacting with another creative presence. What I do cavil at, though, is the idea promulgated by Kirby-- and championed by most anti-Lee writers, including Riesman-- that what Lee was doing was unique in the history of comics, or even Jack Kirby comics.

Here's an interesting aside on the way Kirby worked with another writer, taken from Mark Evanier's KIRBY: KING OF COMICS:

Kirby could do CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN without [Joe] Simon, and he did. A writer named Dave Wood provided scripts, which pretty much meant sitting with Kirby, hearing him spin off a plot, and the going home and typing it up. Jack rewrote whatever he was given anyway."-- KIRBY, page 101. 

Evanier does not cite his source for this view of the Kirby-Wood collaboration, but it's likely that his information came from Kirby. This narrative is probably as accurate a description of a 1957-59 working-relationship as anyone's likely to get after sixty years, but what I find most fascinating is that Kirby's creative process on CHALLENGERS, prior to any significant 1950s collaborations with Stan Lee, was essentially "the Marvel Method." This method meant that the writer simply discussed the plot very generally with the artist, after which the artist created his own version of the story, which might or might not owe anything to the writer's intentions-- at which point the only thing left to the official writer would be the dialogue.

So the question occurs to me, "Let's say that Jack Kirby did the lion's share of the work on CHALLENGERS; then where were his complaints about Dave Wood getting a full writer's paycheck?" I strongly doubt that Wood took anything but the full writer's check; no writer back then would have wanted to work with Kirby for less than the going rate, nor would DC Comics, whose relationship with Kirby was less than amenable, have made any special dispensations for Kirby.

And my answer is a cynical one. Kirby may have harbored some resentments back in the 1950s, but they never surface as they did with respect to Stan Lee for one simple reason: the Challengers were a penny-ante project that never showed-- and I suspect, never will show-- the potential to make Big Money in other media. By the time of Kirby's COMICS JOURNAL interview, there could be little doubt that the work he'd created at Marvel had such money-making potential. I surmise that even though Lee had no more rights to these properties than Kirby did, Kirby inflated the false issue of not getting paid for co-plotting, without mentioning that it was clearly the way he preferred to work.
In fact, though Riesman doesn't spot the discrepancy between what Kirby said he wanted and how he actually worked, Riesman sings the praises of the Marvel Method in terms of freeing comic-book artists from the tyranny of full scripts, and he quotes John Romita Sr, expressing sentiments that may well have mirrored those of Jack Kirby, at least back in his salad days:

“I realized that comics from a script was absolutely paralyzing and limiting,” says John Romita Sr., an artist who worked extensively with Lee in the ’60s and has remained a close friend ever since. “When you had the option of deciding how many panels you’d use, where to show everything, how you pace each page out, it's the best thing in the world. Comics becomes a visual medium!”

In the world of abstract moral judgment, maybe it was wrong for Kirby not to get co-plotting money for both his DC and his Marvel work. However, in terms of real-world interaction, I find it unlikely that any writer would have worked with Kirby under that arrangement-- and as I've said before, I don't think Kirby was capable of producing profitable comic books without writer-input, in any decade whatever.

I don't doubt, as I've said many times before, that Stan Lee has also made claims about his contributions that also lack substance. But when I see Kirby protesting his Marvel treatment with no perspective on how greatly the Stan Lee collaboration boosted his reputation in fans' eyes, I think that he, more than Stan Lee, may need to have his legacy more thoroughly interrogated.

HIDE AND BUSIEK

Yes, I think the pun still works even if you pronounce the name "Byoo-sik." So there.

Before getting into Kurt Busiek's response to my comments on this now closed BEAT thread, I'll make a general statement: I don't think that any of the complaints from McDonald or anyone else have ever been concerned with the most basic level of "sexualization," which in this essay I termed "glamor." I think the fuss is now, and has always been, about the two more extreme forms of sexualization: "titillation" and "pornification."  The NSFW photos McDonald prints on the BEAT thread fall into the third category. It's debatable as to whether the "boob windows, brokeback [position]s, boob socks and more" fall into the secondary or tertiary category.

My post is directed at McDonald's complaint of a lack of equity in terms of sexualization of males and females. I wondered how one might be accomplish the hypothetical state of total equity, since equity is what most of these critics claim that they want. I wrote:

For sake of argument, let’s say a comics company wanted to have an absolutely level playing-field, but still wanted to be able to depict its characters in a sexual manner. What would be the solution? I for one think it would be both immoral and futile to ask straight cartoonists to attempt to sexualize male characters. With rare exceptions, they simply wouldn’t have the mindset.
Could the company create a level field simply by employing 50% straight artists and 50% gay artists? But then, the gay artists chosen would have to be something along the line of P. Craig Russell, who can draw women competently but IMO generally doesn’t sexualize them as he does his male characters.

Kurt Busiek replied:

>> I for one think it would be both immoral and futile to ask straight cartoonists to attempt to sexualize male characters.>>
Straight cartoonists are all male, after all.
And it’s immoral and futile to ask Olivier Coipel to draw sexy men, but moral and effective to ask Amanda Conner to draw sexy women.
I think, perhaps, that cartoonists, both male and female, straight and gay, should be able to draw what the story needs. If the story needs a sexy guy, it shouldn’t be immoral (immoral?!) to ask for that to be drawn in a story. A sexy woman, same deal. But the idea that straight men simply can’t draw sexy men, and that it’s actually _immoral_ to ask them to do so, is a pretty weird concept.
But then, perhaps to some eyes, sexy women are just and normal and the default setting, while sexy men are weird and unpleasant and squicky. To the point that morality demands that men not have to draw such things.
This is called gender bias, though, and it’s not really a compelling argument.
kdb

First, I'll address Busiek's only valid point. A touch, a touch, I do confess it, but yes, not all "straight cartoonists" are male.  However, if one is dealing with straight female cartoonists, then there would be no issue of compulsion with respect to those hetero female cartoonists.  It would be entirely natural for them to sexualize males, even as it would be entirely natural for a gay male artist-- as per my example of P. Craig Russell-- to sexualize males.

What I find "immoral and futile," since Busiek patently misses the point, is this implied element of compulsion for the sake of equity.  Heidi McDonald may or may not really want to see more depictions of male sexual abjection; her actual sentiments are of secondary importance here. But the phrasing of her rhetorical point implies that if you have pornifed female characters in comic books, you ought to have pornified male characters-- and not just, as she says, men "with a good physique in a dynamic pose."

Now, in my scenario of a 50-50 split, I made allowance for 'rare exceptions" to the tendency wherein hetero males are generally stronger at depicting sexy women, while homosexual males would be generally stronger at depicting sexy men. (A similar distribution would of course pertain for female artists as well.) Busiek, puffed up by his desire to score a point rooted in facile sarcasm, names off Olivier Coipel and Amanda Connor as types who do not fit my schema-- happily ignoring that I have already allowed for exceptions to the rule.  He says:

I think, perhaps, that cartoonists, both male and female, straight and gay, should be able to draw what the story needs.

This is also facile thinking because the entire point of extreme forms of sexualization is that they are not "needed" in an absolute sense, unless one is producing literal pornography. With the advent of the Comics Code, comics-publishers often reprinted pre-Code works with substantial redrawing, to avoid being accused of pandering to the youth of America.  In some cases, even artists who controlled their own works sometimes ameliorated the sexier aspects. In one JOURNAL interview, underground artist Jack Jackson stated that in some editions of WHITE COMANCHE he covered up some female breasts because he wanted the story to be more available to younger readers.

Busiek propounds a bland code of the professional artist, who can supposedly draw sexy men and sexy women with equal facility. There are artists like that, as I have admitted. There are also artists like P. Craig Russell, who is not overly strong with female sexuality, and artists like John Romita Sr, who's not overly strong with male sexuality.

I for one want to see artists do what they're good at, not what someone claims that they must do to satisfy a politically correct agenda.

Busiek's final point about "gender bias" is of course predicated on a straw man that is duly torched by my advocacy of gay artists to draw whatever they want to draw.


BTW, since Heidi makes mention of J. Scott Campbell's possible limitations in the arena of sexualizing males with respect to a particular Spider-Man cover, I thought I might as well print this except from a Campbell fan-page to illustrate that maybe with Spider-Man, he wasn't really giving it his best shot.

MANARA-RAMA

I am impressed-- but hardly surprised-- at the incredible superficiality of the objections recently raised by Milo Manara's "variant cover" to SPIDER-WOMAN #1. Here's the much critiqued cover:

This BEAT post happily reprints a translation of Manara's response.  Since I've been recently expounding on theories regarding the evolution of female homo sapiens, particularly in this essay, readers of this blog may anticipate that these Manara comments would get my equivalent of a "high-five:"

it’s not my fault if women are like that. I’m only drawing them. It’s not me who made women that way: is an author much more “important”, for those who believe … For evolutionists, including me, on the other hand, women’s bodies have taken this form over the millennia in order to avoid the ‘extinction of the species, in fact. If women were made exactly as men, with the same shape, I think we would have already been extinct for a long time.

Most ultra-feminist posters will not deal with weighty questions of the extent to which "biology is destiny."  For most of them, the matter is purely one of marketing to a male demographic, and so offends against the injunction: Thou Shalt Bow Down Before the Buying-Power of the Female Fan. THE MARY SUE comments:

The series is being written by Dennis Hopeless with art by Greg Land, and although it appears Marvel is attempting to draw in women with a slew of new female-led titles, this does not instill confidence. Nor does it tell women this is a comic they should consider spending money on. In fact, what the variant cover actually says is “Run away. Run far, far away and don’t ever come back.”

Manara-- who claims that his regular work doesn't seem to make his clique of female fans run away-- goes on to situate the question as one that cannot be reduced to simple ideology, by virtue of his observation that women's bodies evolved to exhibit sexual attractiveness.

I don’t know if this character will also become a movie, but it does, I think they would have their sweet problems to make her do what Spider-Man does (frame her in the same vicissitudes and athletic performance and so on) without her becoming seductive. If she’s played by an actress endowed with an ass, it is clear that her ass will be seen. I0m reminded that her tights are “painted on” … I also noticed that some website says that more than a suit, what you see in my drawing, it’s body painting. It’s true. Sure it is. But because it is so in all the superhero comics: These tights are painted on them. You don’t see a crease, a wrinkle. You read the muscles perfectly.

Now, I've stated that I don't think any human being is defined entirely by biology. But suppose we begin with the postulate-- as I believe even Kelly Thompson has admitted-- that most audiences prefer to read about good-looking heroes.  If one also grants the previous postulate that women's bodies evolved to spotlight their sexual nature, then it would seem all but inevitable that women's bodies, in the midst of the frenetic activity characteristic of the superhero genre, will display feminine sexual features with greater emphasis-- unless, of course, you could convince producers to cloak all the female characters in burkas.

A few years ago, illustrator Kevin Bolk produced this spoof of superhero art, in which the male heroes show off their butts the way their female kindred do:

What no one (to my knowledge) noticed was that the spoof is funny not purely because the butt-spotlighting practices of the comics industry are grievously inequitable, but also because male heroes look stupid showing off their butts.  This isn't to say that hetero females don't like to see real shapely male butts. But tt's very unlikely that comics-producers can expect to sell a lot of funny-books appealing to the demographic that will buy CAPTAIN AMERICA for butt-shots.  It should come as news to no one that hetero males will buy sexy photos or drawings of sexy women in far greater quantity than hetero women will buy pictures of sexy males.  If there is any ideological truth to the many ultra-feminist rants about "objectification," it's a truth that is entirely secondary to the differing ways in which each gender displays sexuality.

A less insightful set of Tumblr "faux covers" were reproduced on this BEAT post. In response I wrote:

I can think of a number of commercial “non-erotica” comics that treat ripped male heroes rather neutrally– which is what people are thinking of, and incorrectly labeling as, “idealization.” But I can also think of a number of comics in the same category that show off ripped guys as being attractive to women within the diegesis, which in my book is still “sexualization,” even if it’s not as blatant as it is with women. (Okay, no Morbius butt-shots, but it used to be very popular with Nightwing–)

But supposing feminists who advocate “absolute equality” got what they wanted. What then? A ceaseless quest to monitor the balance at all times, to make sure no one steps over the sacred line?

Good luck with that.

For example, here's the Tumblr version of "sexy Sub-Mariner."

Now, to follow up on my remarks above, here's an equally "full-frontal" John Buscema rendering of the character from the cover of 1968's SUB-MARINER #1:

Is one drawing inherently "sexier" than the other? Of course not. All one can say is that the Tumblr cover makes greater use of visual tropes that suggest male sexuality. That does not mean, however, that the Buscema cover is devoid of sexual representation.  The hero is not merely "idealized," as Kelly Thompson and others have claimed. He's drawn bodybuilder-style in part to suggest immense strength-- a factor that speaks to the combative mode of the series-- but he's also ripped to represent a level of male sexuality that is at least *believed* to be intrinsically appealing to the female of the species.

At the same time, it should be expected that whenever one has male characters drawn by hetero male artists, one should also expect to see some of the "neutrality" I mentioned above.  Just as Manara says in his response, he draws sexy women because that's how he sees women. Putting aside the old "everyone's-subconciously-homosexual" canard for now, it's also logical that some full-frontal depictions of a given hero will be somewhat neutral to the question of attractiveness.  Here's another "full-frontal" pose of Prince Namor, in which male sexuality has, for whatever reason, been played down. The effect of this John Romita Sr. cover is not unlike some of Kelly Thompson's "cover-up" tactics for feminine superheroes.

And then there's Jae Lee's version of Namor, from SUB-MARINER #26 (1992). I for one hardly see much difference between this savage sea-man and the one from Tumblr:

To follow up my point about idealization in more detail, I find it presumptuous that certain feminists should expect that artists should draw males and females with equal sexuality, or lack of same.  John Romita Sr's work showed an unquestionable talent for drawing glamorous women, while his male characters tended to be more "neutral."  Would modern feminists be satisfied if all hetero male artists drew both sexes with equal neutrality (or "idealization," as Thompson calls it)? I assume that is the goal, since I don't see any feminists demanding an equal level of over-the-top sexuality, except in a satirical context. While I can't agree with Milo Manara that these American cultural developments have anything to do with the influence of Islam, the "equity proposition" is devoted to an ideal of sameness that I deem deadly to any form of creativity, and is therefore not that far in basic sympathies from any ideology of conservative religiosity.

EXEMPLARY STAN, EXCEPTIONAL JACK 'N' STEVE PART II

To recap: fannish opinion usually considers that famed editor/writer Stan Lee didn't do anything of worth prior to Silver Age Marvel Comics; that he must have been coasting on the talents of his artists-- largely Kirby and Ditko, though sometimes the argument is extended to all the Marvel artists as a whole.

I for one find this argument may be a bit too pat.  Whether one agrees with it or not, though, depends on whether one believes that the work Kirby and Ditko did prior to their collaborations with Lee was substantially like the work they did slightly later with Stan Lee.  Many fans have seen no essential differences between the Kirby of CHALLENGES OF THE UNKNOWN and the Kirby of FANTASTIC FOUR.  I take the position that there are considerable differences between these two phases of commerical creativity.

However, "Defending Stan Lee" in terms of his pre-Marvel creativity presents two large problems.

The first is that in many of his public statements following the success of the Marvel line, Stan himself dismissed his Golden Age work in the comic book medium.  Of course, in so doing Lee was patently attempting to design a story of heroic proportions: in which his Marvel Comics work alone shone above the dreck he'd been creating for the previous twenty years.  While it's quite likely that Lee had no deep and abiding regard for the work he'd done prior to Marvel, his judgment of it isn't centered in any critical process as such.  One suspects that if an early comics-character like Lee's "Jack Frost" had become as extraordinarily popular as the Human Torch was in that era, and continued to be revived to good effect, Lee would probably not have minded linking his name to that chilly concept.

The second problem, though, is that unless one goes out and buys tons of hard-to-find Lee Timely-Atlas comics, there's no way to assess the quality of Lee's "dreck."  Recent years have seen a greater turnout of reprints of the Timely-Atlas line, but I suspect that we're not going to see omnibus editions devoted to goofy teen-comics like MARGIE, WILLIE and NELLIE THE NURSE-- even though it's arguable that it was in stories like these that Lee honed the brand of "insult humor" he used so well in his Silver Age superhero comics.

The expected riposte from Lee-loathers would probably be, "So what?"  While Steve Ditko didn't enter the comics field until 1953 and didn't work for Timely/Atlas until 1955, Jack Kirby had been working in comics only a little longer than Stan Lee had.  In contrast to Lee's middling record, Kirby, albeit in concert with Joe Simon, had turned out a plethora of conceptions.  Not all of them were successful, but even co-creating only Captain America and the Boy Commandos would put him (in many fans' estimation) far ahead of Lee's co-creation of such minor figures as the Destroyer and Headline Harris.

For many fans, this ends the discussion.  Early Kirby created more famous characters than early Lee did, so Kirby alone was the creative one, period.

However, that's not a viable measure of creativity as such.

Were Lee's Golden Age stories dreck?  I've read only a smattering of his works, though it's not always easy to tell what Lee did or did not write, as demonstrated here by blogger Nick Caputo.  Some have been bad, and some have been good-- but only in a special way: the way I would term "exemplary," but never "exceptional."

I said in EXEMPLARY AND EXCEPTIONAL 2 that I felt a story could be very ordinary in some respects yet exemplary in just one, as was the first Batman story.  The same is generally true of early Lee work like his war-comics, humor comics, and superhero comics.  A collaboration between Stan Lee and Dan deCarlo (Stan 'n' Dan, as they were then billed) might be, in terms of plot, a fairly ordinary cute-girl comic like MILLIE THE MODEL, but it would in my view be exemplary if it possessed some quality above the ordinary.  I did perceive a sprightliness, an effervescence, in Lee's early humor work that I don't see in a lot of the humor comics of the period, which I do dismiss as entirely ordinary.

Kirby's work, however, also has its moments of badness and goodness, but when it was good, it was good in the "exceptional" sense, or, to gloss John Romita's remarks, once again, in its sense of "completeness."  Even enjoyable Kirby works might present a number of narrative problems, as I argued in my analysis of the first CHALLENGERS story.    But Kirby's narrative lapses never diminish that sense of artistic integrity.

I mentioned in Part 1 that one of my forum-foes dismissed not only Lee, but pretty much every comics-writer in the Silver Age.  It seems puzzling to me that this opponent could see special qualities in everything Kirby did, and nothing in the work of his contemporaries, even though most if not all of them were engaged in addressing the same pre-teen audience, and were usually employing most of the same story-motifs.

I suggest, in my intersubjective way, that what this individual took for absolute quality was just one type of creative quality: the quality of the artist who brings "integrity" and "completeness" to his narrative world because almost everything in it constitutes something of significance to the artist.  This is the world of the exceptional.

However, the world of the exemplary does not cease to exist in comparison to the exceptional, even though many fans have expressed such opinions.  Stan Lee probably was never a visionary creator as Kirby was.  He probably wasn't even as productive of new concepts as another non-artist writer like Gardner Fox was.  But I find it amazing that many fans can view creativity in terms of absolutely nothing else than "new concepts"-- particularly since even "new concepts" are always derived in part from previous ones.

Lee's type of "exemplary" creativity was certainly not focused on blazing new trails, in contrast to the highly personal approaches of Kirby and Ditko.  But fans who can dismiss twenty years of work as being uniformly bad just because earlier generations of fans never said much good about the work recalls the parable about how medieval doctors refused to investigate the nature of any disease not covered by the works of Galen.

In other words, the fannish narrative of Lee as dreck-producing drone-- even when it's been put forth by Lee himself!-- is just another example of "received wisdom."

Which, as we all should know--

Is no sort of wisdom whatsoever.

EXEMPLARY STAN, EXCEPTIONAL JACK 'N' STEVE

"...there were a few guys who did what I would call a complete world on paper.  If you looked at one panel of Jack Kirby, you knew where you were.  You were in Jack Kirbyland.  And when you were in Ditkoland, you knew where you were.  The reason I called myself a generic illustrator [is] because my stuff, I could make you believe you were in anybody's land... whatever those guys do has an integrity, a completeness about it; they created an entire world." -- John Romita, Interview in COMICS JOURNAL #252, 2003.

As the essay's title should suggest, I'm referring back to the entwined critical concepts I introduced back in this 2010 essay.

My initial definition was as follows:

for me "exemplary" means principally "that which is a good example of something," while "exceptional" means "that which goes beyond what is expected."

A rough parallel can be made between my categories and the dichotomy suggested by Romita above, with "generic illustration" standing in for "that which serves as a good example," while his idea of a "complete world" parallels "that which goes beyond the expected."

In part two of that brief essay-series, I compared the first Batman story, which was exemplary purely in terms of its accomplishment of introducing the hero, and the Englehart-Rogers stint in DETECTIVE COMICS, in which the creators attempted to boil down the appeal of the Batman mythos into six exceptional issues.

But as the title also suggests, I think I've come up with a better example of the dichotomy: the Great Myth of Marvel Comics.  American comics fandom knows no more vital myth: in the beginning there was chaos, until the Three Gods of Comics sorted Kosmos out of chaos, and trailblazed the way to the promised land of Adult Fandom.

But with the orderliness of Kosmos, each god had to be assigned his divine domain.  To the God KIRBY, fandom assigned the heights of heaven, wherefrom he rules forever. To the God DITKO, fandom assigned the great seas of churning anxiety, where he too rules in great dignity.  And finally, to the God LEE, fandom cast him into the Land of the Dead, because as we all know he never "created" anything and couldn't have done squat if it wasn't for Kirby and Ditko.

I would hope readers might detect a note of sarcasm in the last sentence.  No, *I* don't believe the beloved fannish fiction that Stan Lee was nothing without the stellar presences of Ditko and Kirby, but if I had a quarter (inflation you know) for every time I've heard some fan make that statement, I'd probably be rich enough to publish my own line of comics (and not even miss the dough when the line went belly-up).

As I mentioned here, I'd recently been embroiled in yet another Lee-Kirby-Ditko argument in which not a few of my opponents argued in such terms.  In fact, one participant not only dismissed everything Stan Lee had ever done, but also every other Silver Age comics writer: Broome, Fox, Binder, Kanigher.  There was no attempt to offer any argument as to why they were bad, of course, or why Kirby and Ditko shone so brightly above the muck and mire.

In Part 2 I'll suggest some arguments as to why this perception came about, and why (keeping in line with my project of intersubjectivity) it's both right in some ways, and wrong in others.