Some of that work is out of print or out of favor, but I think a Contract with God, Life on Another Planet (a very good work, by the way), New York: the Big City (an absolutely brillinat tour de force, IMO) and A Life Force (a good, though flawed attempt at a great graphic novel) stand the test of time.

Also, I have some late issues of Will Eisner Quarterly, and there’s some pretty good short stories in there (I haven’t read it in over 20 years, but I’m thinking of the one with the old gentleman under a palm tree looking at a kid building a sand castle).

Why can’t i vote on ben jones today. Thats my mid winter crisis.

Er, sorry, was just struck by that turn of phrase.

I think someone should rewrite and rerecord the song “The Ballad of John Henry” as “The Ballad of Jack Kirby” (my favorite version is either Johnny Cash or the Bruce Springsteen/Pete Seeger). It’s about a man struggling against the machine and in Kirby’s case the Machine could be the corporate editorial dictates of the funnybook industry.

He beat the machine, but his mighty heart burst in the process.

Ok ok, my one actual contribution to this discussion:

One think I notice about Wood, Toth, even Kirby and Eisner to an extent is that they were somewhat shackled by growing up entirely within “genre” storytelling. Like, they couldn’t conceive of doing work that wasn’t fundamentally structured as the cheap sweatshop-produced children’s entertainment that they had been trained in, even when, after their mid-life crisis and at the peak of their careers, they had editorial freedom.

Perhaps putting economics next to the psychological analysis would help:

1) the “market” at the time seemed to only support comics with people hitting each other a lot

2) many of these artists came up at a time when being a comic artists WASN’T perceived as being artistic expression, but a job, like any other, and they took it to feed their families

one of my teachers used to say, “People said Kirby never owned anything [referring to his characters or intellectual property]. That’s not true, Kirby owned a house, and a car and maybe a boat at some point…” part of the point he was making is that by agreeing to work for the big comic publishers, these men all got the chance to lead comfortable middle-class lives of relative affluence in post-war America, be breadwinners for their family.

That’s a choice that relatively few comic book artists now are given the opportunity to make, and I bet a lot of creative indie cartoonists would totally take the boring, less creatively fulfulling “corporate” cartooning job if it offered the steady paycheck it once did.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n08/jonathan-lethem/my-marvel-years

Though I value strangeness, I’d personally stop short at calling Kirby’s dialogue “good.” His carnival-barker-meets-William-Blake constructions are certainly distinctive and entertaining. But there’s little variation across his characters — they’re all talking “Kirby Speak,” and it flattens them out. At least with Lee (who’s far less interesting to me as a creator), Reed Richards and Ben Grimm spoke in different registers, and can be distinguished as personalities by the contents of their word balloons.

Commercial comics strike me as being stranger than commercial film of the era, I assume because the production costs were lower and there were fewer people involved in pumping out the final product. Though today, the ascendency of geek culture might have imported some of that strangeness to the mainstream — for example, looking at how deeply weird and Ed Woodian Lucas’ second star wars trilogy was. I haven’t subjected myself to a full Michael Bay movie since The Rock, but the descriptions of the Transformers movies make them seem like entirely bizarre conglomerations of adolescent anxieties, half-digested minstrelsy, high-tech gloss, and body-function shtick.

When that much money’s in the mix, weirdness tends to lose the charm of the weird. If it’s basically one person inflicting their visions on a piece of bristol board, it looks benign and maybe even bracing — when an entire studio of people is bent to a director’s weirdness, it seems a little totalitarian. Well, “totalitarian” is pushing it, but it’s dispiriting to see so many talented technicians put at the service of such relentless kitsch.

Jeet and Dan’s posts did make me think there might be some illuminating parallels that could be drawn between the film industry and the comics industry in the 60s and 70s. Like the established comics pros seeing the rise of the young turks, and trying to adapt themselves to the new trends and new freedoms (with often mixed results), there were a few filmmakers who worked their way up through the studio system, and tried for a more personal or at least looser approach as the studios lost their hegemony.

I’m sure I’m blanking on a lot of names, but at least off the top of my head, there’s Nicholas Ray attempting an experimental feature at the end of his life, “We Can’t Go Home Again,” Powell’s notoriously career-killing “Peeping Tom,” Preminger’s “Skidoo.” You could also trace some interesting changes in the work of Orson Welles, though he was far enough outside the studio system (even while he was working inside it) that he’s an odd fit all around — which perhaps goes some distance towards explaining his successes in both modes.

And like the interesting link between Wood and Spiegelman, there seemed to be a fair number of intergenerational friendships, from one wave to the next — Ray with Wim Wenders, Powell with Scorcese. In both the comics and the film industries, it raises some interesting questions about personal expression, and how people who have learned to express themselves through commercial or genre infrastructures seem to have a difficulty reinventing their language. Or at least adapting themselves to a fundamental shift in values regarding what constitutes creativity, and the importance of a personal vision to it.

Lastly, though it’s more of a sketch than an actual stab at biography, I think Jonathan Lethem’s essay about Lee and Kirby has some of the gimlet-eyed perceptiveness an ideal biographer might bring to bear on Kirby’s work. Since links aren’t formatted in the comments section on comicscomics, I’ve posted the link below rather than doing it inline:

,a href=”http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n08/jonathan-lethem/my-marvel-years”>http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n08/jonathan-lethem/my-marvel-years