Revisiting the ‘Violent Ballets’ of Jack Kirby

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/books/review/tom-scioli-jack-kirby-atlas-at-war.html

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The Pittsburgh-based cartoonist Tom Scioli’s science fiction and superhero stories have lately come to resemble distorted memories that have taken solid form. His subtle inks preserve the softness of the drawing underneath, and the paper is scumbled as though forgotten for decades in a basement. This thumbworn aesthetic shrouds and amplifies a ferocious, often goofy imagination. With the most poetically evocative style in the superhero genre today, Scioli is a perverse auteur: Handling all aspects of the art and writing, he breathes strange life into licensed properties.

For instance, every page of this year’s staggering FANTASTIC FOUR: GRAND DESIGN (Marvel, 120 pp., $29.99) collapses about a year’s worth of Marvel Universe high jinks into a 25-panel-per-page fever dream, jammed with bonkers plot twists (“We returned empty-handed only to face the most powerful man on earth, a man who could control molecules”) and frenetic, lovingly drawn miniatures. So much is at stake that after a few pages, nothing is. What’s left is pure eyeball bliss.

In 2019’s GO-BOTS (IDW, 128 pp., $17.99), Scioli turns his essentially subliterate subjects (a line of Transformer-like toys) into players in a psychedelic apocalypse, full of mind-blowing reveals and impish wit, as when a professor explains that the mutable machines “started out as a parking solution. … You get to your destination and the car walks along with you.” (A Go-Bot dutifully demonstrates.)

Executed with the same soft colors and tawny pages, Scioli’s latest graphic offering, JACK KIRBY: THE EPIC LIFE OF THE KING OF COMICS (Ten Speed Press, 201 pp., $28.99), is a biography of his comics idol. Kirby (1917-94) co-created much of the Marvel pantheon, visualizing with palpable force such figures as Spider Man, Thor, Black Panther and the X-Men. He was born Jacob Kurtzberg on the Lower East Side, to Jewish immigrants from Galicia, a region soon to be “engulfed in the First World War … and washed away for all time by the Holocaust.” Short and pugnacious, he belongs to the Suffolk Street Gang, perpetually locked in battle with the neighboring Norfolk Street Gang. (“I drew what I knew,” he says. “I composed violent ballets.”)

Though Scioli tells the story in Kirby’s voice, he sticks to the historical record, locating resonances big and small. As a kid, Kirby is informed by both the violence all around him and his mother’s Old World “vunder-meyses,” which find their futuristic translation in Hugo Gernsback’s science-fiction magazine Wonder Stories. His first comics appear in the amateur newspaper of a youth club called the Boys Brotherhood Republic, where he befriends the founder Leon Klinghoffer — yes, that Leon Klinghoffer. (Noting how his wheelchaired pal put up a fight with P.L.O. hijackers decades later, Kirby says proudly: “A guy from my block would do that.”)

After stints helping the animator Max Fleischer and the cartoonist Will Eisner, Kirby teams up with the editor Joe Simon. The two launch assorted characters into the void (e.g., Red Raven, combining “elements of Batman and Superman”) before hitting on Captain America for Timely Comics, the precursor to Marvel. The debut cover (March 1941) shows Cap decking Hitler, an instant sensation that also drew ire from the German American Bund. At Timely, he meets an irritating office boy, Stan Lieber, who prances around the office playing a flute — and who will become his chief collaborator and lifelong nemesis, under the alias Stan Lee.

What seems like a sober, respectful biography turns out to be something more thrilling. Scioli makes the bravura decision to tell Kirby’s story in one go, sans chapter breaks; with few exceptions, each page is stolidly structured around six uniformly sized panels. It’s the comics equivalent of a Thomas Bernhard novel, giving Kirby’s life the form of an incantation or rant: the way he’s constantly generating wild new scenarios and characters (the unloved Super Sherlock, the hardy Iron Man), how his old grudges with Stan Lee and the industry in general are never far from his mind. Watch as he chews out the inker Mike Royer for turning one of his heroines into a Cher look-alike, then X-actos out the offending visage and replaces it with a photocopy of the original penciled version.

He ages so gradually that the reader might not register how gray his hair has become until the last page. Kirby fans will know, say, the date when he briefly moved to the rival publisher DC, but actual years seldom appear in “Jack Kirby.” This timelessness is an apt tribute to an artist who died over 25 years ago, yet whose midcentury dreams prove more popular than ever.

A standout sequence relates Kirby’s time in the Army: Arriving in France shortly after D-Day, he is plunged into a universe of lethal violence. (When his superiors realize he’s the artist who drew Captain America, they send him ahead as a scout to make maps.) Kirby channeled some of his firsthand experience into fictional war stories, three of which appear in the rich if confusingly titled ATLAS AT WAR! (Dead Reckoning/Marvel, 258 pp., $65), a selection of comics from the end of 1951 to June 1960. Atlas was the pupal name used by Timely before it became the Marvel we know today. It published over 500 war comic books, under roughly a dozen titles (“Battlefield,” “Battle Action,” et al.), for approximately 2,700 stories across the decade. The 50 grim, bullet-ridden tales in this collection demonstrate how cartoonists like Kirby, two of his best-known inkers (Joe Sinnott and Steve Ditko), the future Mad magazine caricaturist Mort Drucker and other familiar names adapted to the market.

Most titles have exclamation points (“Bazooka Battle!” “Rookie!”), a trend reaching its inane peak with “The Man With the Beard!,” a simpatico 1959 take on Fidel Castro’s rise to power. World War II is well represented, and even the Civil War makes an appearance (“Gettysburg!”), but over half the pieces unfold during the Korean War (a conflict technically still active today).

The book provides a newsstand-level glimpse into how that “forgotten” war was perceived and publicized at home: distant, draining, but still ennobling. Unlike Harvey Kurtzman’s comics (collected in “Corpse on the Imjin!”), though, these make little attempt to get inside the head of a Korean. (Hank Chapman’s strident “Atrocity Story” at least notes civilian slaughter at the hands of the Communists.) Ironically, the most satisfying story in the book isn’t one by Kirby, but rather a fleet three-pager about the futility of war — written by none other than Stan Lee.