Adding to the Fantastic Four Mythos?

The core mythos of the Fantastic Four comics, launched in 1961 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, is that a family goes into space, gets turned into monsters by cosmic radiation, and decide to make themselves into a new sort of superheroes. They don’t have secret identities (at first they didn’t even have special costumes, but fans insisted); in fact, they’re celebrities. And they take on the biggest threats to Earth.

Family was key to the mythos: an arrogant scientist, his best friend, his fiancée, and her kid brother. As the crew of a space mission, an extended family made no sense. As a team stuck together and sticking together through one galactic crisis after another, it had deep meaning.

Earlier this year an alleged synopsis of the movie leaked and was then denied:

“The Fantastic Four” will tell the story of two very young friends, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm. After an event transforms the boys, they find themselves empowered with bizarre new abilities. Reed becomes a scientific genius who can stretch, twist and re-shape his body to inhuman proportions. Ben becomes a monstrous, craggy humanoid with orange, rock-like skin and super strength. However, the two end up being owned by the government and used as weapons. But after they mature, two others with powers come into the picture – Sue Storm “The Invisible Girl” and Johnny Storm “The Human Torch.”

In other words, the four principals weren’t a family first and superheroes second. That would be a big change. But instead of talking about that, a significant number of fans got upset only about the concurrent casting news: that the actor expected to play the Human Torch was Michael B. Jordan, a young black man.

That talk continued today as the studio confirmed Jordan’s casting and revealed more information, including Kate Mara as Sue Storm. Jamie Bell, who became a star in Billy Elliot, has been tapped for Ben Grimm, the Thing. I can’t really see that, and it’s impossible to imagine someone better for that role (as Kirby originally designed the Thing) than Michael Chiklis in the last two movies. But Bell can produce Grimm’s working-class, Yancy Street outlook, and we probably won’t see his body anyway—we’ll see a CGI, motion-captured overlay.

But again, a significant slice of people complained about Jordan being black. Some of those folks tried to justify themselves by saying that Johnny and Sue are supposed to be siblings, yet Jordan is black and Mara white. As artist Cameron Stewart responded on Twitter, “Interracial siblings are apparently much much harder to explain and accept than stretchy limbs, invisibility, burning skin and a rock man”. Other complainers simply repeated their gripe that today’s moviemakers were changing a detail of the story they liked when they were twelve simply to be nice to people of color.

I can see one argument that Johnny Storm’s character has to be white as Kirby originally drew him. In the early comics Lee wrote Johnny as a hothead with a big ego and dangerous powers. Only a good-looking blond kid could get away with that behavior in 1961 and become a celebrity. Even now, young black men are subject to dangerous stereotyping. So that argument for casting Johnny as white, male, and handsome rests on a racist society.

But to see Johnny Storm’s character or story requiring him to be black in this age depends on seeing his skin color and ethnic background as inherent to his character—more than being a young and handsome hothead, more than his relations with other team members. Furthermore, most of the criticism has focused on that casting instead of on the much bigger changes to the larger mythos. It’s hard to see it as not just resting on but perpetuating a racist society.

Walter Mosley’s Childhood Favorites

Here’s Walter Mosley answering the New York Times Book Review’s question about his favorite childhood reading:

I know that as a working writer I should answer this question in such a way as to make me seem intelligent; maybe Twain or Dickens, even Hesse or Conrad. . . .

But the truth is that the most beloved and the most formative books of my childhood were comic books, specifically Marvel Comics. “Fantastic Four” and “Spider-Man,” “The Mighty Thor” and “The Invincible Iron Man”; later came “Daredevil” and many others. These combinations of art and writing presented to me the complexities of character and the pure joy of imagining adventure. They taught me about writing dialect and how a monster can also be a hero. They lauded science and fostered the understanding that the world was more complex than any one mind, or indeed the history of all human minds, could comprehend.

In 2005 Mosley got to show his love by spearheading a project to republish Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first Fantastic Four adventure at giant size, one panel per page.

Argo Nots

The movie Argo is a triumph of production design, recreating the look and sound of Teheran, Washington, and Hollywood in 1980. Which is absolutely necessary for the picture to work since the story is so outlandish that without complete realism in everyday details it would seem like Hollywood bullshit.

Director Ben Affleck was nine years old when the Iran hostage crisis began. He was thus recreating the milieu of his childhood, from new Star Wars action figures to grown men in three-piece suits. Early on there’s a scene in which his character watches television, and he made sure to show us the man standing up and clicking the dial from one VHF station to another. Every time the scene shifts to an office, we hear the busy sound of a Selectric typewriter. With no answering machines in sight (though they were on the market), the story’s telephone connections become even more tenuous.

During the closing credits, the filmmakers show off their work, pairing period photographs of the Iranian Revolution or decaying Hollywood with their careful recreations of the same sights.

Those credits also show the fake passports of the real American diplomats at the center of Argo’s story, and their haircuts really did look like that. Again, such details helped immensely to make them seem real since we see little of those characters beyond their plight. Affleck’s own performance as CIA “exfiltration” specialist Tony Mendez consists mainly of looking serious in a beard. The acting energy comes from the pacing and the supporting cast of pros: Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, and Victor Garber.

It’s disappointing, therefore, to learn that the movie’s realism in little things masks big liberties with what actually happened. The movie’s basic concept is true: Mendez and the CIA used the production of a science-fiction epic in turnaround called Argo as cover to fly six American diplomats out of Teheran.

But the exciting scenes—the last-minute interventions, the Republican Guards tumbling to what’s happening, the airport chase—are completely fictional. The Tony Mendez character arc, from separation back into his family’s bosom and from professional exile back to being a CIA hero, also doesn’t seem to reflect reality. Argo is a movie about Hollywood bullshit proving useful in the real world that’s actually built of Hollywood bullshit.

In real life, all of the challenges in the movie’s tense, exciting third act had already been cleared away through the least exciting activity American filmmakers can probably imagine: careful, quiet work by Canadian bureaucrats.

One visual element of the real story that didn’t make it into Argo consists of Jack Kirby’s designs for the planned epic and its related theme park, Science Fiction Land. This PDF from the Kirby Museum uses Kirby’s drawings to illustrate interviews about that grand project. The image above is the original announcement that the movie would start filming soon.

Who Would Win in a Debate—Batman or the Avengers?

The hype for the new Avengers movie (especially in the Boston Globe) has gotten so loud that it’s starting to make me forget the Kree-Skrull War. One item stood out: Alyssa Rosenberg’s brief essay at Think Progress:

I’m excited to see an intellectual debate between [The Dark Knight Rises] and The Avengers. Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies have always had an element of monkish sacrifice to them: to be an impactful superhero, Bruce Wayne’s had to surrender his true public image (in the first film, he acts the playboy to disguise his intentions), the love of his life and of the populace, and now, it’s implied, either his life or his physical health. . . .

The Marvel franchise, and The Avengers in particular (without spoiling anything), take the opposite tack. Its superheroes become better individuals more closely drawn to their communities for their experiences as superheroes. . . .

These two movies are going to make serious bank for their studios. But taken together, they’re also a vigorous argument about superheroism.

And the superhero genre is usually, I’d say, an exploration about what it means to be a hero, writ large and acted out while kicking other largely symbolic characters in the face.

The debate that Rosenberg envisions is, we should note, between Marvel’s mightiest team and Batman, not DC’s hero lineup or outlook. One theme of Kurt Busiek and George Pérez’s two-company crossover of the Justice League and the Avengers back in 2003-04 was the Marvel heroes’ surprise and suspicion that the DC team was so comfortable with popular acclaim. In that case the Avengers stood for “monkish sacrifice,” for doing the right thing without expecting praise or popularity. The Justice League was their world’s mightiest law-enforcement organization.

But Batman changes the equation. Since the 1980s the Dark Knight has stood apart from most of his DC Universe colleagues because of his lack of attention to social niceties and preference to work alone (albeit with a large “family” of supporters and protégés). Nolan’s movies give Bruce Wayne two in-the-know father figures (Alfred and Lucius Fox), but no other surviving confidants.

That Batman would fit with several of Marvel’s heroes as Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and colleagues originally conceived of them: the Hulk is an anti-hero, Spider-Man an outsider, and so on. He wouldn’t get the modern Tony Stark, also a billionaire playboy but one who’s told the world that he’s Iron Man.

Peeking in on Kirby and Lee

HiLoBrow just published Rob Steibel’s analysis of an original page from Fantastic Four, #63, that preserves handwritten notes and revisions by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.

I was especially interested by Steibel’s comments on changes made after Kirby had drawn the page, Lee had scripted the dialogue, Sam Rosen had lettered the balloons and captions, and Joe Sinnott had inked the art. The page came back to Lee as editor-in-chief, and he ordered further changes in house.

About one panel Steibel writes:

look closely at the word balloon in the top left corner — you can see all the dialogue has been covered in white-out, and replaced with the text written in the small circle right above the change. Those notes are in Stan Lee’s handwriting. This is obviously a change made at the very end of the process.

Lee must have rethought that bit of dialogue, though it’s not clear why.

There’s a more subtle change in another panel: Lee asked for more space between two word balloons coming from the same character. As Steibel suggests, “Lee may have felt there was too much blank space above the character Blastaar, and this revision made the image more balanced.” I think Lee also wanted more space to symbolize a gap in time between the speeches in the two balloons; that gap offers Blastaar the opening to do his blasting.

Lee also had an in-house artist fix how Blastaar shot explosions from his fingertips. Steibel notes:

Lee writes in the margins in the second circle, “More speed lines,” which you can clearly see were added to the image because they are fairly shaky, once again, much different than Sinnott’s impeccable line-work.

This documentary record bears out Lee’s recent testimony about how he worked with Kirby, which in turn is consistent with his past statements. He cultivated the image of a blowhard, but he was an honest blowhard.

Stan Lee’s Dialogues

Bleeding Cool just published a long transcript of Stan Lee’s deposition about the emergence of the Marvel superhero universe back in the early 1960s, as part of a lawsuit between Jack Kirby’s heirs and Disney/Marvel.

Most of Lee’s deposition consists of stories he’s told before, in much the same fashion. I saw no surprises about the “Marvel method” of comics storytelling, the creation of specific heroes, or Lee’s long personal respect for Kirby as an artist. That doesn’t change how in the 1960s comic-book creators all signed work-for-hire deals.

One of the issues in the lawsuit appears to be how much dialogue Kirby might have composed in the margins of his artwork. Here’s a pertinent exchange from Lee’s deposition about the notes on one surviving page of original art:

STAN LEE: Well, that’s Jack’s handwriting. That’s the way he wrote them. Yes.

Q. And could you tell us, for example, in this instance I see that there’s a dialogue that’s actually in the different blocks. Tell us who did that dialogue. How was the process done?

STAN LEE: Well, I wrote the dialogue and the captions, but Jack would give me notes. For example, in panel 4 of that page, the next to the last panel –

Q. Right.

STAN LEE: — Jack wrote what he suggested the dialogue might be. “I will rule. My years underground will end.” That was to let me know what he felt the fellow should be doing or saying.

So I wrote, “My conquest will be complete. I, the Mole Man, banished from my fellow men half a lifetime ago, will return at last as Master of the Earth.”

Yeah, that’s the way Stan wrote them. And I suspect the published version had more exclamation points.

A similar deposition with artist John Romita, Sr., addresses the same question. Romita would pencil possible Spider-Man dialogue for Lee, with the result:

He invariably would not use them, and I asked him once “why wouldn’t you use — why wouldn’t you let him” — he said something similar. He said, “because I can’t speak in somebody else’s vernacular.” He says, “when I am writing my characters, I am writing in Peter Parker’s personality and Aunt May’s personality and I write the captions in my personality. If I start putting your personality in there, I am going to confuse the reader.” So he used to — he told me — he invariably did not use anything that was in the margins that was cleverly suggested by the artists, because he said he did not want to stray from his normal approach.

He had a dialogue going with the reader. Saying “dear reader, this is your editor speaking right now.” He used to do that. It used to drive me crazy. I used to tell him “you are puncturing the illusion.” It’s like opening a door in the theater and letting the sunlight in and everybody realizes they are watching a movie now. I said “you are ruining” — he said, “it doesn’t matter. I am talking to my readers.”

I think Stan Lee took the idea of a snarky conversation between the comic company’s “bullpen” and its loyal readers from similar messages in the EC comics of the early 1950s. It was certainly a hallmark of the Marvel superheroes comics he co-created in the 1960s. And that dialogue never punctured the illusion. Rather, it drew readers into a fun-filled conspiracy to suspend disbelief.

Mascot Beyond Rescue

The number of novels inspired by the death of the second Jason Todd (the Robin of the late 1980s) is very small. Peter David’s Mascot to the Rescue! is almost certainly the best of the batch. Which is not to say it’s a good novel, or even a good “chapter book” for young readers.

The premise of Mascot to the Rescue! is that a boy named Josh Miller has become convinced that his life parallels that of Mascot, the kid sidekick in his favorite comic book. When that magazine’s publisher announces that it will kill off Mascot because fans have voted against his old-fashioned chirpiness, Josh and his new friend Kelsey set out to convince the publisher or auteur to keep him alive.

Josh periodically goes into a mental zone where he pretends to be Mascot, which comes in handy when he must fight off paint-ballers, rabid dogs, and other obstacles that pop up to provide an action sequence. The book has occasional line drawings of these scenes from Colleen Doran, who’s drawn for Teen Titans, among others.

David is a fine comic-book writer, with particular experience writing Jason Todd’s successor as Robin in the Young Justice series. But many storytelling techniques that work on the comics page don’t work so well in a prose novel.

Mascot to the Rescue!‘s narrative point of view jumps around, particularly from Josh to Kelsey and back, often within scenes. The narration frequently tells us what different characters are thinking. That approach is out of favor with most modern prose novelists, and even by the standards of other times the result seems clunky. In a comic or movie script, it’s often useful for writers to spell out what characters are thinking, but in prose subtlety works better.

David’s plot relies heavily on coincidences. For example, there’s a holy fool in the form of a mentally disabled man who works for the comic-book publisher; he appears at just the right moment to take Josh and Kelsey to visit Stan Kirby, the creator of Mascot.

But many of the plot’s coincidences just don’t add up. Josh’s mother keeps him from spending any time on the internet, yet she maintains a daily blog about being a single mother. Stan Kirby refuses to send his work electronically and doesn’t event check his email, but he turns out to read Ms. Miller’s blog regularly.

Josh’s elementary-school principal and a social worker from child protection services are the book’s two cardboard baddies. As I’ve written before, it makes no sense for authors to create child-hating villains from people who’ve gone into professions where they have to work with children.

We know from nearly the start that Josh’s mom and Kelsey’s dad are supposed to get together. Their pairing is apparently so imperative that David gives the two characters few scenes together, so we never see the attraction. Similarly, Josh and Kelsey are paired off, each of the good guys gets his heroic moment, and modern comic-book publishing is saved.

But the biggest problem at the start of the book is that Josh really does seem troubled and delusional. His character is probably the novel’s biggest weakness. While many young superhero fans might be attracted to the idea of a real-life adventure that crosses into comic-book publishing, Josh’s character may be too close to what they don’t want to be like. He’s more pathetic than sympathetic.

Through the character of Stan Kirby, an acknowledged homage to his predecessors, David gets to voice some of comics creators’ big recent complaints about the business:

• “Fan” sites on the internet are relentlessly negative.
• Sales reward gore over heroism.
• There are no comics appropriate for kids.

Ironically, it was Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s creation of the Fantastic Four that introduced antiheroes into superhero comics and started the genre toward more complex, mature, and eventually dark storytelling.

That portrayal of comics fandom, however, doesn’t accurately reflect the history of the Jason Todd vote. There have been fans who dislike the cheerful young mascot type, going all the way back to the 1940s. (See Feiffer, Jules.) But the second Jason became unpopular because he didn’t fit that mold. Readers might be discomfited by Josh Miller, but a lot more of them would like to be Mascot.

Supervillains Who Aren’t Really That Scary, #1

After World War 2, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, creators of Captain America, tried to get back into the superhero comics business with their own magazine, Stuntman Comics. (Discussion of what Stuntman owed to Robin the Boy Wonder here.)

That comic book lasted only a couple of issues before succumbing to market realities. Some of the material the team had prepared went back into Simon’s files, not to be published until last year’s Simon & Kirby Superheroes collection.

Among the unpublished material was a double-page spread that promised “the most insidious, cold-blooded character yet seen in comics pages!!!”

That was…The Panda!

Wielding the superpowers of…eating bamboo and not mating easily!

Kirby’s art suggests that the Panda commanded giant insects. Maybe giant insect robots. The way pandas do.

All considered, it was probably okay for this story never to have been completed and published.

Boy Commandos and a Killer in the Big Top

This cover to Detective Comics, #65, shows Batman and Robin welcoming a new team to the magazine: the Boy Commandos, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Judging by art styles, it looks like Jerry Robinson drew the Dynamic Duo, and Simon and Kirby drew the commandos.

The Boy Commandos were a logical outgrowth of a trend that started in early 1940, apparently following market research that said many readers of superhero magazines were boys. Suddenly publishers introduced Captain Marvel, Robin, and a host of other wonder boys and kid sidekicks. Simon and Kirby joined that parade, creating Marvel Boy for Daring Mystery, #6 (Sept 1940), and Bucky as a sidekick for Captain America (March 1941).

What might be even more marketable than one boy? A whole gang of boys! Gangs of kids had roared through comics since the days of Hogan’s Alley, but Simon and Kirby used them for adventures rather than humor. First came the Sentinels of Liberty/Young Allies, featuring Bucky, Toro, and a set of stereotypes. Then the Newsboy Legion, featuring a set of stereotypes. And in 1942, with World War 2 raging, the Boy Commandos—international stereotypes on a mission!

Soon that team was popular enough to join Batman and Robin in Detective Comics—they actually arrived in issue #64, possibly a last-minute addition since the cover didn’t even feature a small picture of them, just a banner. The Boy Commandos remained in the magazine past the end of the war to 1949, but they never knocked the Dynamic Duo off the cover.

That wasn’t Simon and Kirby’s only brush with Robin the Boy Wonder, however. After the war they contracted with Harvey Comics for a new superhero comic called Stuntman, with the first issue dated April 1946.That hero’s origin story starts with a crook trying to shake down a traveling circus. The circus manager refuses the crook’s demands, and the star aerialists, the Flying Apollos, shrug off the threat. But at that evening’s performance, the Apollos’ trapeze breaks. The newest member of the trio, Fred Drake, sees the other two performers fall to their deaths.

Later that night, Fred stumbles across evidence that the trapeze didn’t break by accident. He narrowly escapes being killed for what he knows, then bumps into a rich, handsome man who leads a secret life investigating crime. That man makes Fred his partner, encouraging him to fight crime while wearing a mask, cape, and brightly colored costume.

Sounds rather familiar, no? There are significant differences:

• Fred Drake is a young man, not a boy, and not related to the other members of the Flying Apollos.
• The rich man is movie star Don Daring, who dabbles in detective work as a hobby. He has no secret identity, nor much detective skill; he becomes the stories’ comic relief.
• Daring hires Fred as his stunt double at the studio—thus creating Stuntman!

Despite those differences, it’s clear that Simon and Kirby were recycling Bill Finger’s origin story for Robin from six years before.

The Stuntman comic entered a market glutted with other magazines after the end of wartime paper rationing. It lasted only two issues, so we never saw the promised arrival of Stuntboy.

Stuntman’s origin story and dozens of other comics in many genres have been restored and reprinted in the oversized anthology The Best of Simon and Kirby.

What Happened to Jack Kirby’s Panels?

Today is the anniversary of the birth of comics artist Jack Kirby. [Strictly speaking, as I type that was yesterday, but a deadline meant I didn’t get around to this post then. Rest assured, every other blog that even mentions superhero comics commemorated Kirby’s birthday on 28 August.]

I take the occasion to ask a question that often occurs to me when I look at the artist’s earliest and later work:

What happened to Kirby’s panels?

In Kirby’s early superhero comics work with Joe Simon, most famously in Captain America, the panels danced and twisted with the action. Here’s a page from Marvel Mystery, #25, featuring a hero named the Vision. The panels basically follow a 2x4 grid, but their interior borders curve and shimmy, and the fighting figures burst out of the panels in every interior direction.
By the late 1940s, however, Simon and Kirby’s layout style had grown more sedate. The Kirby Museum notes this in an entry on the team's pioneering romance comics:

by the time Simon and Kirby began working on romances they had already abandoned devices they had previously used to make their pages more exciting. Largely gone were the variously shaped panels and in their place would be a pretty standard comic grid. Also the extension of figures outside of a panel into other panels was no longer done.

Of course, romance comics were a different genre from superhero fight scenes. So here’s an example of the latter from Simon and Kirby’s Fighting American in 1953. The panel borders are straight and stuck to a regular 3x3 grid. Though the flailing figures still break through those borders, they didn’t intrude on neighboring panel space nearly as much.
Finally, here’s a page by Kirby alone from 1967, showing Captain America in battle with Batroc. Stan Lee wisely chose not to add any witty banter during these fisticuffs. In this 3x3 grid, the action is wholly contained within the panels, with the possible exception of a slice of the villain’s fist in panel 1. We see the same wide swings and punches as in the Fighting American’s fight, but they’re all cut off at the panel borders.
Perhaps Kirby liked working on regular grids all along, and Simon argued for breaking that frame. In an article on Simon’s early solo work in Silver Streak Comics, January 1940, the Kirby Museum says:

Simon does not seem to be satisfied with a standard panel grid and uses variously sized panels instead. Unfortunately it becomes a bit confusing and Joe sometimes had to add arrows to indicate the proper reading sequence.

Of course, every artist was learning the form back then, so this might not reflect Simon’s long-time preference.

Another possibility is that Kirby’s lean 1950s made him eager to be as productive as possible, and sticking to a grid saved him time in laying out pages. Perhaps different publishers preferred different styles. And finally, there’s the possibility that Kirby just came to like working within his panels instead of smashing them open. As Bully noted yesterday, Kirby knew very well how to break from his usual 2x3 grids for dramatic effect.

The Other Boy Wonders of 1940

As I described yesterday, in late 1939 American comic-book publishers apparently realized that preteen boys were their biggest audience, and scrambled for ways to appeal to those readers even more. Captain Marvel--a kid who turned into a super-powered adult--was one response. Robin--a kid who fought criminals in costume without any fantastic powers--was another.

Then in issue #41 of Detective Comics (cover date July 1940), the last panel of the Batman stories started describing Robin as "the ORIGINAL Boy Wonder." Which made me wonder: What other kid heroes was the magazine trying to dismiss as wonders-come-lately?

I turned to Don Markstein's Toonopedia. It doesn't offer a one-stop answer to the question of "Who was the second boy wonder in superhero comics?", but it is indeed a "Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge" (and some historical poppycock).

The first issue of Blue Bolt, dated June 1940, featured the adventures of Dick Cole, the Wonder Boy. Like Dick Grayson, he had no special powers but excellent conditioning. This Dick didn't boast the costume and secret identity of a superhero, however; he was more a descendant of dime-novel heroes like Frank Merriwell. The publisher also didn't feature him so prominently; Dick Cole didn't appear on the magazine cover until issue #10 (shown at top).

The next month, Quality's National Comics offered a six-page back-up story of Wonder Boy, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal teenagers. Wonder Boy wasn't featured on a comic-book cover at all until 1944, when another company reprinted his stories in Bomber Comics.

Top-Notch Comics, #8, dated September 1940, offered "The Marvel of 1940--Roy...the Super-Boy!" He was a new sidekick for the Wizard, and like Robin wore a tiny cape and shorts.

[ADDENDA: I missed Marvel Boy! Of course, he appeared only in the September 1940 issue of Daring Mystery Comics, and in a second story published in 1943. But he was a creation of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. And he was yet another teenager gaining superpowers in that watershed year.

And yet another September arrival: “The Amazing Boy Richy the Rang-a-Tang Kid! Brand New!!” in Blue Ribbon Comics, #6. The cover shows Richy helping “Rang-a-Tang the Wonder Dog” to rescue Charlie Chaplin. In this case, the boy sidekick actually replaced the star canine’s adult sidekick.]

[FURTHER ADDENDA: Weird Comics, #3, with a cover date of August 1940, gave us the Dart and his teen sidekick Ace Barlow. Young Ace was called “the Amazing Boy,” but as he threw himself into fights (usually throwing himself head-first into a crook’s abdomen) he tended to announce himself as “Ace Barlow.” Nevertheless, the identity of the Dart and his amazing pal was still a mysterious secret.]

In fall 1940 the Marvel company launched The Human Torch magazine with issue #2 [don't ask], giving one of its top heroes a title of his own. And a sidekick as well--that magazine's first story was "Introducing Toro, the Flaming Torch Kid."

Though the cover showed Toro alongside his mentor, there was no blurb to identify him as a teenager, and it's really hard to tell one person engulfed in flames from another. Nonetheless, of all these young characters, Toro has had the longest career in comics; he even shows up in this summer's Young Allies special.

Finally, Pep, #11, dated January 1941 but on newsstands before the end of the previous year, brought on Dusty the Boy Detective as a sidekick for the Shield. Months later, Dusty even started teaming up with Roy the Super-Boy.

By 1941, boy sidekicks were no longer a novelty. Indeed, they were almost required. Captain America charged onto the scene with Bucky at his side in his very first issue. To do something new, writers had to upend that relationship, as Jerry Siegel did with the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy--kid hero, adult sidekick.

Cover images from the Grand Comics Database.

Robin Goes Up Against Crazy Quilt One More Time

The Cartoon Network's Batman: The Brave and the Bold takes its subtitle and theme from the comic book that each month for much of its run teamed Batman up with a different DC hero. In the episode to air at the end of this week, the cartoon's Batman works with a very special guest star: Robin!

Why is Robin a guest rather than Batman's regular partner? This cartoon takes place after Dick Grayson has grown up. But he hasn't taken on the role of Nightwing, as in the regular comics (and other recent Batman TV shows).

Rather, the Dick Grayson who returns in Batman: The Brave and the Bold wears one variant of the costume of the grown-up Robin on Earth-2. (However, in a bit of cross-pollination, he appears to work in Blüdhaven, the crime-riddled city near Gotham that Chuck Dixon invented for the Nightwing magazine in 1996.)

Batman: The Brave and the Bold promises a more cheery milieu than the current Batman comics, supposedly suitable for kids. We'll see whether that light-heartedness extends to how this grown-up Dick Grayson feels about working with Bruce Wayne again.

ComicVine hosts no-dialogue previews of three action scenes:

• young Robin defeating the villain Crazy Quilt.
• grown-up Robin defeating the villain Solomon Grundy.
• grown-up Robin defeating Crazy Quilt again.

I like the fact that Dick's acrobatics look superior to Bruce's; despite the story's Golden Age roots and tone, we see no falling down at inconvenient times.

And as for Crazy Quilt, Jack Kirby created this villain for Boy Commandos in 1946. He was an artist who had damaged his vision during a crime and could see only bright colors. Crazy Quilt goes up against Robin in Star-Spangled Comics, #123, in 1951, which seems like a natural antagonism: Crazy Quilt with his limited vision against the DC hero who dresses like a stoplight.

But the character had a long lay-off until the Oct 1979 issue of Batman. That story added a personal resentment to the saga of Crazy Quilt v. Robin: the Boy Wonder has accidentally destroyed the rest of the artist's vision. So now Crazy Quilt is obsessed with getting revenge. Alone among Batman's villains, he hates Robin more than the Caped Crusader.

That set the stage for Crazy Quilt's reappearance during the first Jason Todd's first outing as Robin in 1984. Oh, the irony!--the villain stalks Jason for what Dick had done. Apparently Crazy Quilt's vision problems mean that he can't tell that Robin is suddenly a foot shorter than when they last met.

Most recently, we get a glimpse of Crazy Quilt in Nightwing Annual, #2, as Dick and Barbara Gordon (formerly Batgirl) reminisce about their first date. Somehow Crazy Quilt locked them in a safe. We never see how, and I suspect writer Marc Andreyko realized that it would have been hard to convince readers that the man could actually do that.

After all, being obsessed with Robin is kind of pathetic for a supervillain. (Present company excluded.) As is being a blind painter, or trying to look threatening while dressed in rainbow colors. Despite his half-century of villainy, despite his accumulation of a laser-beam "color helmet" and then hypnotic powers, the character of Crazy Quilt never seems dangerous. He belongs in a cheery cartoon.

It looks like the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode will follow the same general arc as Crazy Quilt's comics career: young Robin bests and inadvertently blinds the criminal artist, so he returns years later with a Robin obsession. How obsessed? Here's another preview image from Warner Bros. Animation.
Airings in the US on the Cartoon Network:

• Friday, 22 May, at 8:30 PM
• Saturday, 23 May, at 10:30 AM
• Wednesday, 27 May, at 7:00 PM

“Spend a Week at the ’39 World’s Fair”

I've been writing about how the British comic-book creators that DC hired to reinvigorate its line in the 1980s, such as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and yesterday Dave Gibbons, found inspiration in the American comics of the 1960s that they had grown up reading.

Inspiration not just in the superheroics, but in what seemed mundane to the New Yorkers who had created those comics, such as pizzerias and apartment-house water tanks. Those details represented a different, more exciting way of life.

Where did the American comic-book artists who inspired those creators find similar inspiration in their youth? One major source comes up in Jon B. Cooke's interview with comics creator John Byrne, conducted for a volume in TwoMorrows Publishing's Modern Masters series:

Byrne: If they ever come up with commercial time travel,...I want to go and spend a week at the ’39 World's Fair. Because that was such an influence on comic book artists of that period.

Cooke: You're right! That whole Dick Sprang thing.

Byrne: Jack Kirby was drawing the ’39 World's Fair until the day he died.

Above is a magazine that DC Comics issued for the fair in 1940, showcasing the company's most popular characters. With the second issue, that magazine became World's Finest, and was published continuously until 1986. (In 1990 Dave Gibbons collaborated on a brief miniseries reviving the World's Finest name, bringing everything around again in one continuous loop of nostalgia for the future.)

Graphic Epics Reviewed

Today I'll link to John Hodgman's long review in yesterday's New York Times Book Review of three notable epics in comics form:

• Jack Kirby's Fourth World.
• Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze (though I’m being perverse and showing the collection of Eric’s other major sustained body of comics work, Adventures in Oz from IDW).
• Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man.

I’ll add a confession that goes against the grain of most comics criticism: I never much liked Jack Kirby’s art.

I can see how Kirby’s early work on Captain America with Joe Simon reinvigorated the action-comics form. I admire the length and breadth of his career. I marvel at his vast capacity for work. I appreciate how much Kirby did to invent the “Marvel universe” with Stan Lee in the 1960s. But when I read his 1960s superhero comics as a teenager, most of the faces looked the same, the lines seemed thick and bombastic, and I preferred other artists’ books. (I've come to like Kirby's earlier work more.)

And honestly--naming a character “Scott Free”?

It's like Hemingway, I guess. The man is obviously the most influential American novelist of his generation, greatly changing the style of popular prose (for the better, mostly). That doesn't mean I have to enjoy his novels.

A Swipe at The New Yorker

Bookshelves of Doom pointed me to an item in the New York Post proposing, in its tabloidy way, that New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss had plagiarized an image for the magazine's Cartoon Caption Contest from the comic book great Jack Kirby.

The cartoon in question is for contest #145 on the magazine's webpage above. Kirby's cover for Tales to Astonish, #34, appears here, courtesy of the Grand Comics Database. Monster Blog offers a summary of the story, additional images, and readers' memories.

Bliss apparently felt that everyone would recognize the source of his picture, just as people would recognize Gilbert Stuart's George Washington or figures from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling if they showed up in a New Yorker cartoon. He probably overestimated non-cartoonists' knowledge of this aspect of popular culture; some readers (and perhaps magazine editors) didn't recognize the image while others recognized it but felt the original was obscure enough to make this plagiarism rather than homage.

Part of the problem might be that a magazine cartoon and a comic-book cover are too close. Alluding visually to the Mona Lisa in a cartoon is a more obvious homage because that cartoon is not otherwise much like the Mona Lisa. But two magazine drawings?

Furthermore, Bliss's version isn't much different from Kirby's. He clearly observed the Tales to Astonish cover and thought, "Wouldn't it be funnier if the man in the apartment wasn't reacting to the MONSTER AT HIS WINDOW?" One can get halfway from the cover to the cartoon by simply emptying the man's word balloon. The rest of the way is just showing him speaking calmly on his telephone.

All that said, no other New Yorker caption contest in weeks produced an entry which made me laugh out loud. That caption:

"Okay, I'm at the window. To the right? My right or your right?"

Inspired by Julie at Children's Illustration, another possibility is:

"Yes, this is Harry. I should expect a representative from the Kirby estate to drop by?"

Over at Gawker, one commenter suggested:

"Oh, wait, my mistake--it's just an homage to a monster."