Boys’ Ranch are markedly different from the somewhat one-dimensional patriotic epics of World War II.

            But then, none of us were as simple-minded about our country or about Good and Evil in the 1950s as we’d been in the 1940s.  Working with his long-time partner Joe Simon, Kirby nonetheless tried to revive the clarity of war-time patriotism with another super-powered patriot, Fighting American, in 1954.  An unabashed attempt to cash in (this time) on a patriotic creation like Captain America, Fighting American was a crusader against Communism, which, in the McCarthy atmosphere of that time, was a noble thing to be.  Unhappily (as I point out in The Art of the Comic Book), the timing was wrong:  McCarthy and his minions were discredited just about the time Fighting American hit the stands.  Simon and Kirby quickly revamped their concept and attempted to produce a satirical book.  Alas, neither of them was much good at satire.

            But perhaps in the foundering satire of Fighting American we have the seeds of the self-mockery that distinguishes the early Marvel creations.  Couldn’t Kirby have brought that notion with him to Marvel?  Suggested it to Stan Lee as a novel approach to heroism?  And couldn’t Lee, the man who scripted My Friend Irma and other similarly juvenile humor titles, have seen in the concept a place where his penchant for humor could be exercised and immediately pounced upon it.  Why not?

            It’s pretty clear from the testimony quoted in Wells’ article and in other places in the same issue of the Journal that Lee ginned up plot ideas and that Kirby accepted some of them and rejected others as he fleshed out the ideas that Lee rained down upon his head.  Overhearing a story-development session from the back seat of a car, John Romita reports:  “Stan would plot the Fantastic Four with Jack, and they would both come in with their ideas, and they would both ignore each other.  Each one would have their own ideas, and I could see that the other guy was countering with another idea. . . .  So when Jack got the story in, sometimes Stan would say, Gee, Jack forgot what we talked about.  And I’m sure Jack thought the same thing, that Stan forgot what they talked about.”

            The pages of art that Kirby turned in transformed Lee’s story ideas into dramatic action.  And Lee embellished the action with his verbiage, writing captions and speech balloons that gave the stories a self-deprecating patina.  Kirby could not have injected any such mocking tone into the tales; but Lee’s contribution was as lyricist, refining the creative output of his collaborator.  This is no small achievement.  But the creative workhorse here was, in my view, Kirby, not Lee.

            Despite the mockery, the stories were still celebrations of the heroic, as Wells maintains.  So how did Kirby get from the Marvel ambiance to the New Gods ambiance?  The latter shows that Kirby, once a believer in the redemptive and triumphant power of heroism, had lost his faith—or, rather, had tempered it with an almost cynical realism.  He did what all of us did as we progressed from World War II through the Korean War to Vietnam.

            Kirby was as fond of his audience as he was of drawing and storytelling.  Any comic book reader who spent any time with him can testify to that.  And Marvel’s success with the college crowd (slightly older readers than he’d been working for prior to that time) doubtless made Kirby more aware of the blighting impact of Vietnam on American youth than he had been before during either of the other conflicts he’d witnessed.  His readers were being marched off to a war they despised for reasons that seemed wholly irrelevant.  Kirby could scarcely have ignored what was going on around him—and around his readers.

            This was another war.  But by now, we had all learned something about how war works in a purely political context, a war fought not to win but to make a political statement.  An endless war.  But this time—in sharp contrast to the wartime 1940s —many Americans viewed war as futile and, ultimately, meaningless.  Kirby, I believe, came to share that view, and he incorporated his attitude into the New Gods books.  And heroism in that context was certainly less heroic.

            That’s the route I think Kirby’s thinking took.  And that’s why the New Gods books, although produced by the same creative personality as the Marvel Universe, seem so anti-thetical.  The New Gods books represent just another step in the philosophical and psychological evolution of Kirby’s thinking about life and heroism.  The New Gods, as Wells says, were not 1960s Marvel heroes.  They were, rather, 1970s Kirby heroes.

            That Kirby attempted such a mature and nuanced treatment of heroism was due, probably, to his realization that comic books could be made for older, more mature, readers than before.  His experience with the Marvel books had shown him that.  With the New Gods books, then, he simply took the next step.  Kirby’s entire career can be seen as a progression.  I’ve indicated some of that progression here; in my book, I indicate other aspects of it.  For now, however, it is perhaps enough to say that if we view the creative artist as a growing, developing consciousness, we can easily explain what Wells finds so inexplicable, the conflicting views of heroism and human nature found in the Marvel Universe and in the New Gods universe.

            As for why Kirby never spoke or wrote much (if anything) about this change in his attitude about heroism, that is scarcely strange. From World War II to Vietnam, Kirby experienced what I may call the Great Disillusionment. To a man for whom patriotism and doing good were once important values, the deterioration of traditional patriotism during the anti-war protests of the late 1960s and the accompanying doubt about the morality of the war (its goodness in the sense that America always wages war on the side of the angels) must have been deeply disillusioning. But would a man of Kirby’s patriotic cast of mind then speak of such things? I think not. I think instead of talking about it, he wrote stories about his disillusionment—the New Gods stories. But by the time he wrote those, he was a different man than the man who wrote the Marvel superhero comic books, and that’s why I think he wrote both of them.

            While we’re on the subject of the early Marvel Universe, let me offer another notion about it—namely, that the much remarked upon issue-to-issue continuity that pretty early began to distinguish Marvel books was not the result of a conscious marketing or artistic decision but the accidental consequence of the need to produce more and more books in less and less time. 

            The earliest books offered self-contained stories.  But as the line became successful, the impulse was to capitalize upon that success by producing more and more books.  It is more difficult to invent stories that have endings than it is to crank out storylines that simply go off in one direction or another—without, at the moment of conception, having any particular conclusion in mind.  And since the imperative was to manufacture Product, story endings were superfluous.  Story directions— something moving in one direction of another, any direction—were all that were needed to fill the pages of Product; with the direction of a storyline in mind, an artist like Kirby or Steve Ditko could plunge ahead, penciling pages and illustrating incident after incident, without a thought for the future beyond the issue on the drawingboard.  In lieu of an ending, there was simply a caption, announcing, “Continued in the next issue” (or words to that effect).

            As work progressed along the direction of a given storyline, ideas were generated—new incidents were tacked on to the initial conception of the storyline, nuances of character development were introduced, and, at various but unpredictable points, “endings” were reached.  My guess is that most of these so-called endings were chanced upon as the storyline unfolded rather than envisioned at the launch of the storyline.

            The books were undeniably exciting.  They also stimulated sales of successive issues.  All of this was “success.”  No question. 

            But the storytelling practices thus initiated were degenerative:  they led to more of the same haphazard plotting of stories with direction but without conclusions.  And the result is that we had great bodies of would-be “literature” that is meaningless because the stories lack the endings that would give significance (and, hence, meaning) to the incidents they embody.

            And to some extent, we still suffer from the triumph of this practice.  We can still find books that have no stories with endings being produced, willy nilly, by “writers” who think stringing incidents together, one after another, is “storytelling.”  These writers, it seems to me, don’t understand what a story is.  And nothing in the industry’s most resounding success story—the Marvel story—could persuade them of the necessity for acquiring the self-discipline essential to good storytelling, the discipline that imposes an ending (and therefore a meaning) upon the direction of a narrative.

            Too bad.

            For insight into the contents of The Art of the Comic Book, click here.