Jack Kirby the Writer


 


As I said earlier, I read the first issue of Neil Gaiman's and John Romita Jr.'s take on the Eternals. I'm not going to review it, nor creak my rocker and tell you what this geezer her would have done differently. I enjoyed it.
But what it did move me to was contemplating ol' Jack again.

One of my biggest emotional crises, at least insofar as comics were concerned, was when Kirby left Marvel to go over to DC. I had been a happy bigoted Marvelite up until then, al about how awesome Marvel was and how lame big dinosaur DC was. When Marvel lost the principal reason I was an adherent, I had to grow up some. This was good: I was able to appreciate good comics in general, and not look at, say, Joe Kubert's work and have my biggest thought being, "but--why isn't he working for Marvel?"
Nonetheless, when Jack jumped over to DC, there was all sorts of things I wanted not to like about his books. I noted with triumphant bitterness that DC gave him Jimmy Olsen, unarguably one of their bottom of the barrel books. Vinnie Colletta was OK on Jack, but not great.
And the writing....!
At this remove, it's easy enough to make fun of Stan Lee's dialogue, let alone Jack Kirby's. Stan's simple High Style can ring hokey, but considering where it came from--the stuffy late Victorian pomposity and adulterated Tennyson-from-Milton-from-the Bible thumping cadences, it was at least efficient. (Read H. Rider Haggard to see what i mean.) And his humor was funny.
But where Stan was glib, Jack was jagged. Jack knew the value of concision: he certainly didn't want to cover his own artwork with word balloons and captions. But where Stan brought it down to polish (that, to be fair, looked more like varnish at times) Jack scraped down to bedrock. The results, while never muddled, sometimes sounded as if English wasn't Jack's first language.
The problem with this is that it's become easy to take that rawness and extrapolate back until you consider all of Jack's work big and rawboned and crude, with a presophisticated vast magnificence, all supported by visionary artwork.
And that's a mistake.
In the New Gods saga, Kirby changed the DC universe completely by giving DC what it had lacked: a great villain in the form of Darkseid. But this was not just putting Milton's Satan in cyborg armor and push him out on the superhero stage: there was much more to it. What Darkseid was after was the Anti-Life Equation: a cantrip that would shut down all independent will except for the will of the speaker.
That's not ruling the world. That's not sitting on the Throne of God. Darkseid does not want the universe to sing his praises--he wants to shut it down.
Think about that for a moment.
The vision of what he wants is so dark as to be incomprehensible--flattening out the universe into a lifeless colorless machine, shrunk down to the size of your own ego. Supplying nothing, giving you nothing outside of yourself. It's ultimate power--but power without reward.
It's not Jim Starlin's Thanos's love of Death: death is something outside him, and that gets shut down too. It's not even nihilism, but something far worse. It's not the assertion of meaninglessness; it's the active destruction of meaning.
That's not a Bad Guy; that's not even Evil as we commonly know it; that's something worse. The only parallels to the abyss Jack Kirby reveals to us is when, in Charles Williams's All Hallows Eve, the black magician, having learned the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton (which I suspect is the birth-seed of Jack's Anti-Life Equation), he pronounces it backwards, annihilating himself. That, and Goethe's succinct quote in Satan's mouth, "Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.." I am the spirit that always denies.
Jack Kirby is not fumbling around here. Is Darkseid's a comprehensible motivation? But people seem to operate on that principle every day. Is all evil reducible to that madness? But Jack doesn't portray Darkseid as mad. Is he?
And Jack's aware of the pervasiveness too. He has Darkseid's minion, Glorious Godfrey, come to Earth and preach the gospel of Anti-Life. If you join the forces of Anti-Life, you can wear a Justifier Helmet™! And there's the deadly brilliant slogan on a banner in Godfrey's televangelist stage, "Life will make you DOUBT! Anti-Liife will make you RIGHT!"
Get out that old double-bagged copy of Forever People #3, and it'll sound really frighteningly familiar these days.
Later artists would use G. Gordon Godfrey as a demagogue to stir up animosity towards superheroes. But what Jack is showing is something infinitely worse than that. And infinitely more profound. He's selling the Abyss. And people are buying it.
And it leads to the compelling question, Does Darkseid simply want to be Right?

Look, this is why I, a University of Chicago graduate (twice), steeped Henry James and Roland Barthes, still cleave to comic books. It's a bright, engaging, delightful medium where you can nonetheless embody all sorts of complex crap. Being non-real-time, you can structure things that allow the reader to pause and consider, and so the enigmas can be absorbed. And Jack's solo work is a perfect example of that.

Similarly, the Eternals, Jack's triumphant return to Marvel. Hollywood expectations would lead one to think Jack, after being frustrated in his Fourth World plans, would go on in the same vein now that he's Back With Us. But the Eternals is brilliant example of how to play off people's expectations and time and again subvert them, giving them something better in the process.
Just to start with, let's take Ikaris. ("Ike Harris".) When you first meet him, he seems to me the tried-and-true big slab-faved Kirby superhero, just like Thor or Captain America. Powerful, earnest, humorless. Oh, you say. Then, as you get further on in the series, you meet his fellow Eternals, all of whom say "Oh, Ikaris? Hood guy, but boring, earnest, and no sense of humor." Far from being the Standard Hero, you learn he's not the sharpest card in the Eternal deck. And then, a bit further on, you learn that our all-American blond guy is, in fact--a Russian. (A Polar Eternal, all of whom are currently playing out their roles in the Soviet hierarchy.)
And the world Jack's created? We've got Immortal, indestructible Eternals--icky, monstrous Deviants--and us. And all this set up by the truly startling, monumental Celestials. (They're Jack's best artistic conception: anthropomorphic, truly colossal, and all with different elaborate structures instead of faces.)
But the Deviants, though twisted, ugly and malicious, aren't devils who hate us: no, they don't think much of us, or about us, in general. It's the Celestials, the Space Gods, they hate. Likewise, the Eternals are not gods to us: while they live among us, they're more interested in having a good time than guiding our civilization and saving cats out of trees. All in all, their indestructability tends to make them a bit more frivolous and detached than gods or heroes should be.
And, seeing as how the Celestials have come to judge the planet's worthiness, it's a question implicit in all of this: should we be cheering on the Eternals or the Deviants in this? For all the Eternals' cool costumes and powers and handsomeness, might not the response of the Deviants to the Gods be the correct one?
And behind it all there's a structure to all this that, once again, shows more thought to Jack's work than is immediately apparent. If Earth is a big evolutionary test environment, then the Celestial's program seems eminently sensible. You have a large target population as your substrate. You have a separate source of various mutations that can be tested out in the main population--and them you have a control group as a benchmark. And that, not Gods or Devils, might be what the Deviants and Eternals really are.
It's a much more complicated structure in talking about the Fate of Man than you might expect from funny books--and at the same time reads like a good ol' thrill-a-minute superhero comic, which Jack exhaled with every breath. I was a working pro already when The Eternals came out, but I was as rapt as any fanboy when those issues came out.

And although the lack of polish persisted in Kirby's dialog, still things shown through. A phrase out of Eternals #1--"Behold the Universe! The vast Home of the Gods!"--was so dead solid perfect that I used it as the first line in my Eternals series. To these beings, the immensity of the universe was nothing more than their hearthstone and their resting place, was both wonderful and perfectly summed up in that phrase.

All of Jack's stuff was not imbued with challenging ideas: When the comics industry smacked him down, it was easy for him to go into the 'just a working stiff' mode. Trying to paint him as an uncompromising Fine Artist won't work. But that doesn't mean that he thought any less seriously or deeply than others in that FA world. And Jack at his best smashed open an awful lot of doors in terms of to what you could handle in a funny book.

In the words of Lord Buckley, he stomped on the terra.

Posted: Tuesday - January 16, 2007 at 03:14 PM        

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