Graphic Story Part 2

Started raining, as promised, very early this morning and well into the afternoon. Stopped in time for the voter turnout to surge. Naturally, I was caught in it.
One of the things that stands out in my memory was the strange way Jack Kirby drew hands in his comics for action scenes. An outstretched hand was forever jumping off the page toward the reader, with the palm down and the fingers all fanned out, but with the wrist bent outward a little. Didn't matter if it was Mister Fantastic, The Thing, the Human Torch, Captain America, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer (what a comics character!), the Black Panther, one of the Inhumans, or even Galactus pronouncing destruction, or Doctor Doom pronouncing ... well, doom. They all hand this outstretched arm with very carefully fanned out fingers and the wrist bent outward a little. It was Kirby's signature. If you saw that hand sticking out of the cover (in effect), you knew Kirby drew the comic, and it was going to be fun to look at.
Kirby knew what to exaggerate to bring a kid into the action on the page. Shoulders always big, legs really muscular, waists tight. Eyebrows were always thick and drawn together in concentration. And all the hair stayed in place, unless maybe somebody got clobbered hard, and a lock would fly out. (Speaking of clobbering, of course the Thing's hair stayed on tight under all those orange scales!) But that wasn't all. Kirby would sequence a fight scene across an entire page, with Cap or somebody jumping over the evildoer and flipping end over end, and then kicking the guy in the head, with style, to boot! (No pun intended, but I'll take it.)
As I said in yesterday's post, these things stick in a kid's head. I later found out more about Jack "King" Kirby shortly before he died back in the mid-80s. Kirby lived in New York, grew up tough, and yearned to be in the circus. It was a means of escape for him, to fantasize being a trapeze artist, flying high above the crowd. But for some reason, he never pursued it. Then, I was watching something on TV ("Circus of the Stars") and a trapeze artist was trying to show some TV actor how to swing on a trapeze. He said you didn't want to grab the bar overhand if you were going to do some kind of flip. You had to fan out your fingers, aim your thumbs at the bar, grab it underhand as it swung toward you and lock your grip with your thumbs coming over the top. Like the "Kirby hand." So, Jack maybe did learn something about trapeze flying, after all!
But if so, why did he quit? One of my Marvel faves was Daredevil -- the Man without Fear. (This was years and years before Frank Miller made Daredevil into, well, a devil.) Kirby drew the first Daredevil cover, and probably designed Daredevil's first uniform -- a bright yellow with a black singlet and a cowl with devil's horns. I'd read years and years later that Kirby had intended it to look like a trapeze artist's costume. Why would Daredevil be The Man without Fear? He can't see converging lines -- so he can't get vertigo. Vertigo is an optical illusion that many trapeze artists fear, because it can come on you suddenly, and for no apparent reason. Daredevil's hypersonic hearing made him completely immune to vertigo -- hence, no fear. Maybe Jack had a problem with getting vertigo, and couldn't do the high wire. I guess we'll never know. (Kirby could draw as a kid, and maybe used that skill to get himself a cartoonist's job in the Army so he could get off the World War Two battlefield's front lines.* 
Look at the Fantastic Four -- they're all in trapeze costumes. One of the acts in a circus was a man who shot himself out of a cannon while holding flames or being "on fire" as an extra stunt. He was called The Human Torch. On the circus midway were people who could do contortionist tricks -- Mister Fantastic. There was always a brutish strongman doing seemingly impossible feats of strength -- The Thing. And the Invisible Girl? Making a woman disappear was a standard magic act on the circus midway. I think that's what lay behind The Fantastic Four's popularity -- the unconscious connection with many a little boy's dream -- to run away and join the circus, just like the king of comic artists wanted to do.
Kirby had a lot of younger imitators who adored his work. I mentioned Barry Windsor-Smith yesterday. He was one. Another was responsible for my quiet revenge on the cool guys who bought the FF and Spider-Man comics before I could get to the store. His name was Jim Steranko. Part Oriental*, Steranko was into martial arts -- judo, I think. And Steranko loved movies. He took over drawing a failing comic from Kirby -- Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. It shared a comic with Doctor Strange. (By the way, the only woman who drew a Marvel comic in those days was Marie Severin. She temporarily took over the title when Steve Ditko quit Marvel. If you can get back issues that old, you may agree that she did a better job than Ditko -- better by far, in my opinion.)
Steranko got a few issues under his wing, and all the cool guys bought the comic before me, again. They laughed at me as I begged to borrow them when the teacher wasn't looking! Steranko drew huge futuristic guns and outlandish vehicles, as well as really sexy female counterparts to Nick Fury -- who wore an eyepatch. And Steranko was so good at storytelling that Stan Lee just let him take over, and then gave Nick Fury his own comic. That's when Steranko went wild -- OpArt effects, wild panel layouts, or maybe no layouts at all, detail unheard of in comics art before that, and imaginative spy stories, blended with eerie science fiction twists. It left the cool guys behind. They didn't like it, because they didn't understand it. I had Nick Fury comics all to myself. They stuck in my head, as I saw nearly twenty years later. Steranko's work was that far ahead of its time. What happened twenty years later? Next time -- along with the reason behind another of my faves.

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*I later learned that Kirby was a soldier in WWII, and he experienced combat first hand. Steranko is Croatian. 'Hand' instead of 'had' is left as I originally typed it in 2006.



LJ orig.: 11/07/06