Rolling Comic Books 2020 Visions

Yeah, I picked up the Free Comic Book Day preview, which takes us up to the creation of Captain America and the first encounter with Stan Lee. Thought the use of first person narration was a bit of a risky move that mostly paid off, although if anything it made Kirby sound more... linear... than he tended to be in interviews - does the full graphic novel list sources? I'm hoping that this will at least nudge Evanier a bit into completing his Kirby biography.

I know I am wrong, but I have never been especially moved by Kirby's work. Handing in my ILC badge.

I mean, it's hell of al lot of work, in different styles and genres over 40 years, not to be moved by. Once Kirby hit his mature style in the 1950s almost everything he drew was pretty magnificent, and some of it could be surprisingly elegant. Even when his drawing chops declined in the late 70s, you'd still get glorious psychedelic pages that are genuinely visionary and have worn far better than some of the more 'relevant' superhero stuff, imho.

I think he's best when his dialogue and his art are working together towards a heightened affect - everything is urgent, everything is alarming, if people are sitting around at a picnic then you can only assume that their mental machinations are drowning out the shuddering squeals of monstrous machinery happening just out of the panel. (okay, the terrible alliteration was more a Stan Lee thing)

But both threads are definitely an acquired taste!

I think it's also easy enough to just not be able to get with non-modern superhero comics, or indeed superhero comics at all.

I'm sure it's a lack in me, definitely.

Again, there's lots of Kirby stuff that's in other genres apart from superheroes (although yes, the 60s Marvel era is what he's best-remembered for now).

I'd recommend his Fourth World stuff and his 2001 adaptation to those who aren't otherwise onboard. The closer you can get to unadulterated Kirby, the better.

Now I'm one of those 'wrong' Kirby fans who doesn't particularly like the Fourth World stuff, or at least doesn't hold it in such high regard as many (I prefer pretty much all of the other early 70s DC stuff - Kamandi, the Demon (Kirby's most underrated series imho), even The Losers. ) The early 4th World comics are marred by some especially poor Vince Colletta inking (talk about adulterated JK!) and the whole thing would have benefitted from stricter editorial control/advice, although not necessarily from Stan Lee-dialogue/captions. Kirby was so stuffed with new ideas he sometimes lacked the discipline and focus to stick with a consistent storyline - and sometimes he simply lost interest (I think the original plan with the New Gods was to hand over the three linked titles to other creators, something that DC were never go to play along with, having 'captured' their rivals' key artist).

Once Mike Royer came aboard as Kirby's main inker at DC, things obviously markedly improved visually and yes, it's a much 'purer' version of the Kirby aesthetic - although it seems clear that the general readership preferred Kirby inked by someone like Joe Sinnott, who smoothed out some of the rough edges in Kirby's pencilling. The 2001 Treasury edition was inked by Frank Giacoia, an excellent veteran inker who really preserved the power in Kirby's work while at the same time giving everything a nice crisp line finish.

Also, the pasted on Superman heads in Kirby's Jimmy Olsen books are so jarring and inappropriate that I find it hard to look at those issues.

FYI, the Scioli bio touches on many of the points in your post. I don't know exactly how fact-based it is (although, to answer your question upthread, there are a number of sources cited), but it gets pretty deep into the weeds.

I'll give Scioli's Kirby book a shot sometime; I was reading the early bits on Instagram last year and it was intriguing. It'll probably hit the local library system sooner or later.

I really, really like the unhindered, unedited quality of the Fourth World material. Kirby was such a fount of pure creative energy, at times it's like staring directly into the Source Wall. Overwhelming, bewildering, thrilling.

70s Kirby is my favorite Kirby, honestly

late 60's thor is prob mine

though new gods is hard to argue with

Apart from a couple years of FF and Thor I find him unreadable, but genuinely love him in separate panels

brings up the question of "readability" as it involves images. His stabs at copy, assisted or otherwise, tend to be unreadable but the images (and sound fx) alone tell more of the story than many superhero genre writers can.

It's weird but on a drawing level I prefer his work in the 40s and 50s but on a design (costumes, settings) and composition level I think he peaked in the 70s.

Yeah I like him an imagemaker first and foremost, so fwiw I don’t think his work would’ve been better (perhaps the opposite!) if he’d only been paired with a good writer

the less "other writer" there is, the more readable Kirby is. Simon & Kirby collaborating as a team: clear and coherent. Gerber writing something pitched exactly at Kirby's 1980s level of wackiness and rage at injustice: good stuff. Mark Evanier doing the odd tidy-up or copy-edit on Kirby's syntax: the balloons have the same spirit as the individual drawings and storytelling, just a great charge of the author's strengths. Stan trying to fill half the panel with entirely redundant enuniciations, or outright contradictions, of the action being powerfully depicted: gtfoh you jealous sad-sack.

Yes, I think this thing of Kirby as imagemaker is all well and good and true to some extent, but ignores his own commitment to narrative storytelling throughout his career. Again, according to Evanier, Kirby was surprisingly indifferent about inkers, because he felt it was almost impossible for any kind of professional to fuck up the panel-to-panel continuity - the story - established by his very complete pencils. Kirby only swapped Mike Royer for Vince Colletta as the Fourth World inker when he found out Colletta was showing the pages to people in the Marvel offices prior to printing - and Colletta was known for erasing backgrounds and other details in Kirby's Thor pages when it was too time-consuming to ink them. And when Stan Lee and John Romita and Roy Thomas and others instructed artists to 'follow' (ie copy) Kirby's work at Marvel, it was his especially dynamic way of telling a story that they wanted someone like John Buscema to imitate (it seems clear that Stan in particular favoured the more elegant, illustrative style of a Romita or Buscema while, ruefully or otherwise, knowing full well that no other Marvel artist could match either Kirby's inventiveness AND his ability to engage the reader and stir their emotions.)

Ward, the fact that you keep dropping knowledge that I only just learned from Scioli would seem to suggest that his book is fairly accurate + granular.

xxp good summary, sic

Didn't know this was coming out
https://www.blackgate.com/2020/09/17/fantasia-2020-part-xvii-feels-good-man/

I think it's already rentable VOD

Yep, just finished its digital "run" via one of the shuttered arthouses here.

Furie and the director were on Marc Maron's WTF a few weeks ago, and Furie kept referring to the original Boys Club issues as "zines," RIP Alvin

i saw it; it was okay? not deeply revealing and sorta necessarily overstructured to force a redemptive arc on it. Furie seems like a tremendously sweet guy.

Passmore is great
https://hyperallergic.com/586973/sports-is-hell-ben-passmore-koyama

one helluva title page

and Colletta was known for erasing backgrounds and other details in Kirby's Thor pages when it was too time-consuming to ink them

I saw a blog with a bunch of these compared to Kirby's pencils and the final product and it's shocking how much he just decided to not do

I'm curious about that notorious Colletta defender who was around several years ago. I often suspected he was a relation of Vince but I don't know if anything was found out.

I think Eddie Campbell and Walt Simonson have both defended Colletta's work on Thor - I think their main argument is that Colletta gave Thor a distinct feel that distinguished it from Fantastic Four, X-Men, Avengers, Sgt Fury etc. My counter-argument is that while that's sort of true about the earliest issues of Thor that Colletta inked (he's quite good on things like fur textures), the quality soon dropped off and by the end of the run the finished results are just ugly and slapdash, a travesty, even putting aside the business of erasing pencils. When Bill Everett (beautifully) inks the last few issues of Thor drawn by Kirby, the difference is obvious, throwing into stark relief the inelegant heaviness of Colletta's brushwork and cross-hatching.

Colletta's 1950s work, mainly on romance comics, isn't too bad at all, and he was a surprisingly effective inker on Alex Toth on occasion. But I've just been reading an Essentials volume some of the 1970s Englehart-written Avengers, pencilled by George Tuska or George Pere and, inked by Colletta and they're REALLY painful to look at in black and white, without colour filling in some of the absence of detail. Really wretched stuff.

Yeah I cannot get on board with any sort of vinnie colletta rehabilitation. A vandal.

I liked what he did until I found out what he didn't do.

there’s a lot of emphasis on getting product out the door and I got the impression Colletta was fast

the bosses like that, and artists handing in stuff late tend to forgive some lapses in inking/coloring, from what I’ve heard

the bosses like that

allegedly C0l3tt4 got lots of his work despite the quality of the output because he was allegedly connected to various low-grade mob guys and would allegedly supply call-girls to alleged editors

that might not hurt your career, either!

post Yeah, Colletta was definitely one of those go-to guys when a penciller was horribly late on a book. But again, when you compare his stuff to other last-minute deadline savers like Mike Esposito or Frank Giacoia, it's still just as ugly as fuck. Colletta was also apparently pretty canny when it came to playing office politics and the like, perhaps partly because he 'saved the day' so often for grateful editors - he was even DC's art director at one point in the 1970s (the late comics writer Martin Pasko once joked in an interview, "I was up at the DC offices, petting Vinnie Colletta's guide dog...")

And according to Roy Thomas, Colletta was popular with the readers; the issues of The Invaders that he inked over Frank Robbins' pencils sold better than those inked by the far superior Frank Springer - perhaps because he 'dulled down' the wonderful manic contortions of pure, unadulterated Robbins.(Roy is also the source of the call-girls story, iirc - he said that Colletta once tried to get him to appear in 'compromising' photos with some 'models' that Colletta had escorted up to the Marvel offices.)

It's hard to know if the mob rumours are just Italian stereotyping or basically true - the definitive history of comics and organised crime still needs to be written. It is a fact that Charlton Comics had mob connections (and Colletta got a lot of work out of Charlton in the 1950s) - and the mafia certainly had an interest in magazine distribution.

the issues of The Invaders that he inked over Frank Robbins' pencils sold better than those inked by the far superior Frank Springer

dunno what this is but I'm now imagining crime comics with car chases in, drawn by Robbins & Springer, and they look great

The Invaders was Roy's first extended foray into retro-necro continuity - it was set during WW2 and featured the original Captain America, Sub-Mariner, Human Torch etc.

https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/07eee32bc373a77c2e360818760b8ec0.jpg

retro-necro continuity

lol

(the late comics writer Martin Pasko once joked in an interview, "I was up at the DC offices, petting Vinnie Colletta's guide dog...")

this is a fucking quality burn btw

It's hard to know if the mob rumours are just Italian stereotyping or basically true - the definitive history of comics and organised crime still needs to be written. It is a fact that Charlton Comics had mob connections (and Colletta got a lot of work out of Charlton in the 1950s) - and the mafia certainly had an interest in magazine distribution.

― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, September 22, 2020 12:47 AM

I vaguely remember there being a book about this, or maybe it was just part of the book?

I can't confirm it but there was a story claiming that the first Batman + Superman teamup was done for the mafia.

explains a lot

Glad to find out that Neal Adams's expanding Earth/Philadelphia Experiment conspiracy theorist side hasn't made him a Q/COVID/MAGA psycho. (I would still give most of the money I have to not have to spend a day driving him around again.)

Lol. I can only imagine how crazy he is from his recent Batman work. A likeable sort of crazy, though.

Ann Friedman, Ira Glass, & Tim Heidecker are each hosting an Online Screening + Live Stream Q&A of the 2020 Sundance-Award winning doc Feels Good Man this weekend Sept 25-27th! Only 250 tickets available per showtime at https://t.co/JPwTdcqnUx pic.twitter.com/1F8YGdku9v

— Floating World Comics (@floating_world) September 23, 2020

"For the love of Asgard, keep your Oversword sheathed!"

Every so often Stan puts down a line that gives me a chuckle.