Architecture of Dreams II: Ants

This post is both an act of penance and a product of inspiration. I felt rotten writing a negative review of Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure last week, since Jack Kirby is probably my favorite comics artist, and I'm happy to make amends and post about the reasons to love--rather than criticize--Kirby's art. And I was inspired by Charles' superb "Architecture of Dreams" to take my own look at Kirby's mise-en-scene. I'm a couple of years older than Charles, so my example is from the Fantastic Four rather than Jimmy Olsen and Kamandi.

Let's begin theoretically, by considering the terms foreground and background. Critics sometimes talk about a comics panel having a foreground that captures the reader's awareness, and a background that is somehow less important and demands less concentration from said reader. We assume that the objects and figures in the foreground--drawn larger and "closer" to us--automatically deserve our maximum attention; we also assume that the background (smaller and "further away") is packed with the stuff we can ignore, the chicken fat thrown in to create a sense of pictorial realism or add a few extra jokes to a Mad Magazine strip.

Kirby's art, however, doesn't fit those assumptions. Here's a wild splash from FF #57 (December 1966), page 11 (as reprinted in Essential Fantastic Four Volume 3 -- click the thumbnail for a better view):

Some of our attention is directed towards the small figures of Dr. Doom and the Silver Surfer by the word balloons, which begin at the middle of the page. The balloons are either linked to each other by bridges or they follow the left-to-right reading direction, creating a map that directs us through the Doom-Surfer conversation. In addition to representing speech in a silent medium, word balloons commonly include a tail that resembles--and functions like--an arrow, literally pointing at characters, compelling us to look at them.

And we read the word balloons to find out what's happening in the story. At this point in FF #57, we know that Doom is hatching a nefarious plan. Even first-time comics readers would be put on alert by Doom's unsettling appearance and by a typically bombastic Stan Lee caption on page seven that describes Doom as "the most DEADLY--the most DANGEROUS--the most utterly DEMONIAC VILLAIN on the face of the Earth!" On a basic level, we know that the desires, goals and motivations of characters form the cause-and-effect chain at the heart of all stories: a narrative is about someone (usually though not necessarily humanoid) doing something for a reason. Doom's face dominates FF #57's cover, and Doom and/or the Surfer appear in 16 panels of the story before page 11. This frequency implicitly tells us to consider carefully what these characters do, because the trajectory of the story will emerge, at least in part, from how they interact.

Interestingly, though, Kirby draws Doom and the Surfer as tiny figures, preferring instead to focus on Doom's "greatest scientific projects" with such detail that the machines and odd shapes threaten to steal our attention away from the word balloons and central characters. This splash page, like so many other single- and double-splashes in Kirby's oeuvre, de-emphasizes narrative and favors sheer visual spectacle.

Kirby creates this spectacle, and captures our attention, by using repetition with variation to build up his compositions. The column of futuristic machinery in the upper left looks like a series of stacked symmetrical discs, and each disc has a prong sticking out from its right side and some sort of cylindrical plug on its front. ("Front" is defined here as elements that directly face the reader.) Yet each prong is different, with the most elaborate being the C-clamp formation shared by the two discs at the top of the column. The plugs are different too, with two hooked to cables and one unattached. The column works as a representation of machinery because its shape is modular, but we find it fascinating to look at because of its irregularities, its bizarre mix of variant details.

Kirby also uses curves and zigzags to destabilize static compositions. Note how he connects the column of discs to a tube full of energy that dominates the bottom of the page. If the entire left side of the splash were stacked discs, the composition would be a bit dull and oppressive, but a flowing, organic form like the tube adds dynamism. My eye reads the caption at the top, follows the length of the disc column to read Doom's word balloon, and then gets caught up in the shape of the tube, following its loop to the helmeted technician and his strange Kirbytech welding gun at lower left. The juxtaposition of monumental Kirbytech and curving forms happens elsewhere in Kirby's comics. One example is a splash page from another FF, #77 (August 1968), where a curve in the foreground breaks up our view of Psycho-Man's cityscape. Here's the page from the original, yellowing comic (click!):

Back to FF #57, Kirby (and inker Joe Sinnott) also decorate that splash with zigzags. There are at least two adorning the ominous forge in the upper right of the picture; also, extending from the C-clamp to the prong sticking out from the third disc is a metallic bar spiked with triangles that create a zigzag pattern. In a text page in Phantom Force #2 (April 1994), Larry Marder connects Kirby's zigzags, and other manifestations of his style, to the art of the Hopis, a Native American tribe known for their ornate masks and Kachina dolls, artifacts which celebrate the spirits that govern nature. As Marder writes:

There are hundreds of recorded Kachina spirits. Some of the sacred masks are hundreds of years old but (to me) every single one of 'em looks like it was designed by Jack "King" Kirby in his super-hero prime. The zigzag motifs, odd armbands, peculiar aprons, loincloths, winged, horned and feathered masks shout "Kirby! Kirby! Kirby!"

Marder's piece ends as he asks Kirby directly about Native American art, and discovers that "the hard truth was Jack wasn't really aware of the Hopis at all [...] The Hopis were not a direct influence on his DC or any other creations."

Despite Jack's demurral, there's more to say about Kirby and Native American visuals. First, there's evidence in his comics--the mosaic on the splash page of Bullseye #5 (April 1955), the design of Tomazooma in FF #80 (November 1968), the Incan costumes of Ajax and his freeze-dried band of air traffic controllers in Eternals #2 (August 1976)--that Kirby knew enough to at least fake convincing versions of Native American designs. But perhaps the combination of irregular shapes (zigzags, curves) with Kirbytech is an example of Kirby's broader tendency to mix the organic and inorganic in his stories and art. Doctor Doom, MODOK, the New Genesis Mother Boxes, Machine Man, the Celestials--all these characters are cyborgs, uneasy combinations of man and machine, while the Thing (man + rock) and the Silver Surfer (man + cosmic matter that looks a lot like chrome) extend Kirby's interest in hybridity beyond a mere human/machine synthesis.

This penchant for hybridity has, I think, a long-term effect on Kirby's drawing style. The signature Kirby squiggle, which begins to appear in his art in the 1960s (and is all over the machinery in the FF #57 splash), was originally used to denote metallic sheen. By the mid-'70s, however, the squiggle is everywhere, turning clothes, musculature and even hair into surfaces that look hard and unyielding than soft and fleshy. I date Kirby's decline as an artist to the moment where the squiggle became either an unconscious tic or a Wolfli-like compulsion, a symptom of his move away from the outside (the expectations of his readers, and the forms of nature and the human body) and towards a solipsistic interiority, a Kirby-world too far away from the world that we all share.

In his excellent essay "The Monument Carver's Stone," in The Comics Journal Library: Jack Kirby book, Christopher Brayshaw argues that it's a false dichotomy to pit Kirby the storyteller and Kirby the designer at odds. Brayshaw writes the following about Kirby's rendition of the human figure:

Whereas Kirby's depictions of inanimate objects--buildings, starships, or the tombstones in the monument carver's yard [in Kirby's autobiographical tale "Street Code"]--possess an almost sculptural solidity, his figures often seem more fragmentary, flayed by flat, slashing ink lines that scar their features like razors. Thematically, Kirby's mature, post-1960 work represents life as an endless battle for survival, and his characters' ragged appearances help underscore their all-too-brief departures from the primal matrix from which all living things rise and eventually return.

Brayshaw's point, in other words, is that Kirby's figures and backgrounds work together to express the message that the human species is helpless and insignificant. In Kirbyville, humans are always in danger of being supplanted by homo superior, Johnny Storm flies through the universe to fetch the Ultimate Nullifier and concludes that humans are "like ants," Kamandi watches his fellow humans reduced to animals as other species take over, and the monolith in 2001 represents (as it does in Kubrick's pessimistic movie) a deus ex machina solution to the human race's inability to improve itself. In the terrific interview with Chris Knowles in The Jack Kirby Collector #47, Jonathan Lethem argues that the core of Kirby's art is a brutally frank acknowledgment of the unimportance of human affairs. From the interview:

Knowles: Captain Victory, [Kirby] said, was his rebuke to Stephen Spielberg thinking that aliens would come and be our friends, and Silver Star was his rebuke to Marvel's vision of The X-Men. He has Silver Star say to this old Black guy in this corner store, "Listen, we're going to wipe you off the face of the Earth. You're done."

Lethem: Yes, I think that's absolutely right.

Knowles: Where do you think that came from? Do you think that was intrinsic to his upbringing?

Lethem: It's a paranoid view of consciousness, and the human consciousness, that is obsessed with the idea that nobody understands that death is everywhere. But in strict scientific terms, it's deeply accurate. [Laughs.] The problem is that all storytelling has to begin from a point of view where human affairs, however inconsequential, do matter to the people involved in them. And it's as though Kirby was grumpily losing his patience for that pretense.

So what is the Kirby landscape? Is it architecture that in its epic scale reduces human inhabitants to inconsequential ants? Is it an arena where tropes of representation--particularly the Kirby squiggle--flatten out the differences between humans and machines, between living beings and inanimate objects? I don't know, though I'm finding it hard to reconcile the pessimism of these interpretations with the sheer joy I (and Charles, and thousands of other readers) feel when looking at Kirbytech or a Kirby splash page. Maybe the Fantastic Four is my favorite Kirby series because the inherent pessimism of his pictures is mitigated by Stan Lee's traditional (and often corny) humanism. Or maybe Kirby's plots really are an uneasy (but dramatic) combination of characters we can identify with and an existential sense of "man is a nothing too"--but that the true reality is that death is everywhere and one gesture from Galactus or a Celestial would prove it.

Do mixed messages and contradictions like these make Kirby's art richer?

Comments

[Johnny Bacardi]

...Kirby's figures and backgrounds work together to express the message that the human species is helpless and insignificant.

I think this is true up to a point, however, I think he would often set up his plots this way only to emphasize the scale of the menaces his protagonists were facing, and make the eventual triumph that much more meaningful. Remember, the FF took down Galactus because of Johnny's trip to get the Ultimate Nullifier, but his self-doubting inner monologue (which Stan wrote) helped raise the stakes in the reader's mind. I'm also reminded of "The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin" in New Gods #8, in which ordinary mortal policeman Turpin held his own in battle with Kalibak of Apocalypse.

If anything, I believe Kirby was all about the triumph of the common man in the face of enormous odds, which reflected his childhood growing up in the poorer parts of NYC.

[Charles]

Johnny, thanks for the thoughtful comment. I've be re-reading "Turpin" myself lately, and trying to figure out what to make of the story's ambiguities. Oddly, the title character really doesn't get very much time on-panel, but, OTOH, he IS the title character, so I can't help but think that Kirby's opening narration, which says the Orion and Lightray are really the stars (because, after all, they are gods, and Turpin but a man) is meant to be taken as ironic.

It's clear that Kirby was preoccupied with the question of humankind's (in)significance in the cosmic scheme of things. That issue of 2001 (#6) where Norton of New York becomes a true hero seems to me to be a summation of this tension: Norton is heroic, yes, if perhaps deluded (he's a comic book enthusiast and hero-worshipper, really the very type of the dedicated superhero fan) and his fate is ultimately dependent on the inscrutable monolith (a deus ex machina, as Craig points out). And yet, his heroic actions seem to matter in the story; he has weight and presence as a character, more so, I'd say, than the human cipher's in Kubrick's 2001.

What is Norton's weird trip in 2001 #6, if not a riff on the same theme of human (in)significance that comes up in when Johnny makes his cosmic journey in FF?

Here's a link to the GCD data for that issue of 2001:

http://www.comics.org/details.lasso?id=31027

[Craig Fischer]

Hi, Johnny, and thanks for your comment. In my post, I was afraid of overstating Kirby’s pessimism, which is why I mentioned Lee’s humanism and "characters we can identify with" in my last paragraph. (I should’ve made my point clearer, though.) I agree with much of what you said, particularly your point about how Kirby creates suspense by pitting heroes against seemingly undefeatable foes, but I do have a couple of comments:

1.) NEW GODS #8 is very ambiguous on the issue of the "common man." Turpin does "hold his own" against Kalibak, but look at that title: Kirby also defines his struggle as a "Death Wish," as a suicidal pathology. Maybe the problem is that Turpin battles Kalibak with brute force, and in several NEW GODS stories (especially "The Glory Boat") physical conflict is shown to be less effective than intellectual solutions to the challenges that Darkseid and his minions pose.

2.) I’d agree with what you said about Kirby’s "common man" theme as an outgrowth of his NYC tenement upbringing, and I wonder: was that where Jack got his sense of scale too? Imagine being a little child, looking up and seeing buildings stuffed with thousands of people jutting into the sky...

[Johnny Bacardi]

I meant to get back to this yesterday, but you know about the road that's paved with good intentions!

Anyway, I don't mean to sound like I'm disputing your ideas, but I think I see certain things differently in places.

I think a lot of what Kirby was about, as well, was a reflection of his formative years -- he grew up when the American public still looked up to and wanted larger-than-life "heroes". Partly because the media wasn't as pervasive as it is now in all walks of life, it was possible for, say, a Babe Ruth to be a heroic figure, especially to little kids, while indulging himself in various hedonistic pursuits that would have him drawn and quartered in today's ESPN-infested climate. As someone who was raised to believe in the heroic nature of sports stars like Ruth, film stars like Errol Flynn and Clark Gable, and presidents like FDR, as were many people, celebrities (it was assumed) were normal folks and worked their way to fame and fortune and notoriety. I think there was a lot of that in the concepts and stories he came up with. He was always coming up with larger than life, omnipotent menaces and then giving us more down-to-earth heroes who, against all odds, succeeded in winning the day, or at least wrestling it to a standstill. When Kirby titles the Turpin story as the "Death Wish" of Terrible Turpin, I believe that was intended in an ironic fashion, to mimic those who doubted that an ordinary human (albeit one with the constitution of an ox) could go toe-to-toe with a New God -- even one who was clearly a second-rater.

I can't really comment on his 2001 stories; while I saw them on many a spinner rack as a teen, I never picked them up. Even back then, I never really liked film adaptations (which I thought it was), even though I know by now that he went WAY off that course eventually.

Charles, I do love that last line of your last reply, about Kirby as a child. Boy, that would be a nice illustration if someone could do it justice...!

[Isaac Cates]

Just a note to say, Craig, that I'm really glad you called up that Larry Marder piece about the similarity between Kirby's costume designs and Hopi kachinas. I spent some time in the Southwest a couple of summers ago, and caught myself doodling a bunch of kachinas in my notebook, most of which were more Kirby than Hopi, I think -- but the design sensibilities really are alarmingly similar. (Big Bear and Mark Moonrider really have some of that Southwest look, for example.)

It's frustrating to find out that it's just a coincidence, though I suppose it was too unlikely a connection to be true.

[CharlesWHatfield]

I seem to recall having a letter printed in one of those early Beanworlds, comparing Marder's world-building to Kirby's! I remember Marder's story about the Hopi (non?)connection vividly.

(I'll have to look for that letter. Or is it just my imagination, running away with me? I'm sure that the Marder/Kirby comparison was in my head way back then...)

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

I think you nailed it with the rhetorical question in the last sentence--humanism and nihilism fight it out in Kirby, and the failure to resolve that fight enriches Kirby's later work.

That said, there is a strong case to be made that the human spirit and optimism get the upper hand, thanks to Kirby's work on Mister Miracle. Even Darkseid couldn't keep that suckah down.

(BTW, I really liked your observation on the growing dominance of the Kirby squiggle. Contrariwise, that's why I sort of prefer Kirby's increasingly abstract work in the 1970s. The whole world becomes a battleground, with the very surfaces of things--hair, clothing, furniture--ready to explode into combat at any moment)

[Craig Fischer]

Wow, am I behind on responding to all the great comments to my post. I blame my children, my job, and my fundamentally lazy nature. Here's a few quick comments, though…

JOHNNY: Hey, that line about Kirby and scale was mine, not Charles'! And as for artists who might do it justice, how about Phillipe Druillet? :)

ISAAC: I've never been to the Southwest--as a fan of both Herriman and John Ford, I have to visit Coconino County before I die--but I can certainly see design similarities between Kirby's costumes and the pictures of Kachinas that I've seen. The first place I saw Marder advance his Kirby-Kachina theory was in AMAZING HEROES #100, a special tribute issue to Jack. I remember a little one-panel BEANWORLD cartoon in there where Marder wrote something like "When I think of Kirby, I think of Hopi Kachina dolls and surrealism." I lost that issue of AM over the years, or I'd post a scan of the panel.

JONES: All that stuff about Kirby’s pessimism comes from writers and thinkers better than I. In particular, that interview with Jonathan Lethem in TJKC #47 is indispensible. I like your theory that the squiggle is Jack’s visual representation of dormant but kinetic energy ("ready to explode into combat at any moment"), although from a design standpoint it still bothers me. It's too ubiquitous, too distracting; it renders everything too much the same. Maybe the problem is that I don’t agree with Jack that the world is a battleground..?