In late September 2012, Luca Dolcini sent the Kirby Museum an e-mail query regarding a 25-page Kirby western story he found in an Italian comicbook called “Le Legge Del West.” Luca and his fellows on the Blue-Area of the Moon Marvel Continuity Resource could not find an original American printing. Sending along some snapshots of the pages, “Partitia Finale A Snake River!” looked like Kirby’s work, but the job number O-253 in the first panel, while matching the style of Goodman/Lee/Atlas’ numbering,  was unknown to both Greg Gatlin’s AtlasTales.com and the Grand Comics Database’s Comics.org. GCD lists O-254 on a story with a publication date of August 1958. Luca mentioned that the main character was the “Silver Kid”, but none of the Silver Kid comics on Comics.org provided any obvious linkage to this story. Was it an unused “Black Rider” story?

Snapshots

Responding to my query on the Timely-Atlas discussion group, Michael Vassallo identified George Klein as the inker since the telltale Klein corona is evident in some backgrounds. Michael also pointed out that according to its US publication history, the Goodman/Lee office did not publish any stories 25 pages long until 1961’s Fantastic Four #1 (which some index as two stories of 13 and 12 pages). It’s interesting that Klein is attached to both of these stories.

After a while, Luca found an Australian version of the non-Kirby cover with the title “Showdown At Snake River!” in James Zanotto’s AusReprints.com database. Kevin Patrick of the blog Comics Down Under, responded to a query that, as luck would have it, the Rare  Books Collection at Monash University Library in Melbourne, Australia, where he studies, had a copy of Horwitz Publications’ “Showdown At Snake River!” and sent scans.

The story, a perfectly good one, doesn’t contain any splash pages. The title is only in the top third tier of the first page, and there aren’t any chapters. Could “Showdown…” have been produced for the foreign market? Considering the relatively recent discovery of Kirby’s ghost work on the Davy Crockett, Frontiersman daily strip being printed in comic book form in the UK and France, the story’s lack of splashes and—other than the title tier—all pages having only six panels, could it be a re-worked comic strip? Kirby Collector editor/publisher (and Kirby Museum Trustee) John Morrow pointed out that some of the panel sizes are irregular—which is not something that Kirby would do in that era—so perhaps some cutting and pasting was done.

Australian pages

In his last e-mail, Luca wrote that “La Legge Del West” was published in July 1959. He also found the story printed in strip form, with two panels per page, published in 1962 in Collana della Prateria #6—Pericolo!. There was a second “La Legge Del West” comicbook with the same cover artwork, only this time including the signature of John Severin, published in the early 1970s, but it did not contain “Partita…” If anyone can date the Horwitz “Showdown…”, or find the origin of the Severin cover art, or have any other information to share regarding this fascinating discovery, please post here, or contact me at the Kirby Museum.

“I went to Pratt a week.  I wasn’t the kind of student that Pratt was looking for. They wanted patient people who would work on something forever. I didn’t want to work on any project forever. I intended to get things done. I did the best drawing I could, and it was very adequate — it had viability, it had flexibility. The people in the art class kind of sympathized with me, and yet they couldn’t abandon their own outlook toward art.”—Jack Kirby¹

What Kirby is describing of his early experience here is a clear example of divergent thinking, one of the hallmarks of the creative genius personality (but more on that in a bit). Brent Staples, in an article titled “Jack Kirby, a Comic Book Genius, Is Finally Remembered” published in The New York Times on August 26, 2007 wrote “Mr. Kirby did a lot more than just draw. As the critic Gary Groth so ably put it in The Comics Journal Library, “He barreled like a freight train through the first 50 years of comic books like he owned the place.” He mastered and transformed all the genres, including romance, Westerns, science fiction and supernatural comics, before he landed at Marvel.

He created a new grammar of storytelling and a cinematic style of motion. Once-wooden characters cascaded from one frame to another — or even from page to page — threatening to fall right out of the book into the reader’s lap. The force of punches thrown was visibly and explosively evident. Even at rest, a Kirby character pulsed with tension and energy in a way that makes movie versions of the same characters seem static by comparison.

For the record I believe ‘genius’ is one of the most overused and therefore devalued words in the English language. Just Google “The Genius of…” and add any name that comes to mind and you’ll see what I mean. Kim Kardashian? The Situation? (life & style; and comedy; respectively). Perhaps this has the makings of a new parlor game.

While most agree that Albert Einstein fits the general conception of genius, when it comes to the creative arts there is no clear delineation. In the end it comes down to the definition of the word, which itself isn’t clear. One would think anyone with an IQ of over 160 would qualify for something other than Mensa membership, but that isn’t necessarily so. In fact, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary definition doesn’t even mention a specific IQ score.

Definition of GENIUS

1. a plural genii : an attendant spirit of a person or place
   b plural usually genii : a person who influences another for good or bad
2. a strong leaning or inclination : penchant
3. a : a peculiar, distinctive, or identifying character or spirit
   b : the associations and traditions of a place
   c : a personification or embodiment especially of a quality or condition
4. plural usually genii : spirit, jinni
5. plural usually geniuses
   a : a single strongly marked capacity or aptitude <had a genius for getting along with   boys — Mary Ross>
   b : extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity
   c : a person endowed with transcendent mental superiority; especially : a person with a very high IQ.

And from the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

“Genius: Person of extraordinary intellectual power. The genius displays originality, creativity, and the ability to think and work in areas not previously explored. Though geniuses have usually left their unique mark in a particular field, studies have shown that the general intelligence of geniuses is also exceptionally high. Genius appears to be a function of both hereditary and environmental factors. See also gifted child.”

Our contemporary concept of genius comes mainly from the writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his The Critique of Judgment (1790) during the Age of Enlightenment. Genius, Kant wrote, is “the exemplary originality of the natural endowments of an individual in the free employment of his cognitive faculties.”²

Still, the problem is, even the definition of “creative” is hard to quantify. It is that very individuality that helps us define genius, for it can thereafter be imitated.

“Before creativity, the psychoanalyst must lay down his arms.”— Sigmund Freud

During the mid- 20th century, psychologists began studying creativity for the first time.³ And not surprisingly, this research yielded little concrete evidence of a strict definition of what it means to be creative or how creative personalities are formed. To be a creative person you had either a strict or liberal upbringing, did well or poorly in school, had lots of friends or none.

However, some major personality traits were established for what defines a creative type.⁴ The key idea in the psychologist’s conception of creativity has been divergent thinking. By standard measures intelligent people are thought of as convergers, people who given a puzzle can figure it out. In contrast, creative people come up with many different associations, some of which are idiosyncratic and possibly unique.⁵

A representative study conducted by the Berkeley Institute of Personality Assessment did yield some conclusions: “Creative architects” as distinguished from their less creative peers, exhibited a greater incidence of such personality traits as independence, self-confidence, unconventionality, alertness, ready access to unconscious processes, ambition, and commitment to work.

This willingness to experiment arises from a temperament that’s seeks arousal, from sheer pleasure in working with the medium, from a confidence in one’s own emerging powers, and from the relationship between the ease in own artistic medium and difficulties with standard scholastic practices. If one cannot succeed where they are supposed to, one may combat personal frustrations by blazing a trail in one’s area of strength.

Another study⁶ has shown that creative solutions to problems occur more often when individuals engage in an activity for its sheer pleasure than when they do so for possible external rewards. Indeed, knowledge that one will be judged on some criterion of “creativity” or “originality” tends to narrow the scope of what one can produce (leading to end products that are conventional). In contrast, the absence of an evaluation seemed to liberate creativity. In other words, you can excel where you have the freedom to.⁷

It has also been suggested that the most highly esteemed creators not only are more productive in general, but that they produce more “bad” works that have been long ignored as well as more “good” works that are esteemed by posterity.⁸

The quality of the early years is crucial. If, in early life, children have the opportunity to discover much about their world and to do so in a comfortable, exploring way, they will accumulate invaluable capital of creativity on which they can draw in later life. If, on the other hand, children are restrained from such discovering activities, pushed in only one direction, or burdened with the view that there is only one direction, or one correct answer or correct answers that must be meted out only by those in authority, then the chances that they will ever become creative adults are significantly reduced.

For every one child who decomposes music there are dozens who simply play as they are taught. Young musical performers, for example, often reveal their gift for composing by a constant effort to “rewrite a piece.” Often this adventurousness is interpreted as insubordination. There are individuals who overcome the intervention of authority to go on to become creative in spite of restrictions.

“Hell, there are no rules here. We’re trying to accomplish something.”
—Thomas Edison

However, if one combines the definition of creative as a “divergent” thinking, someone who comes up with “idiosyncratic” solutions and combine that with the definition of genius, “a single strongly marked capacity or aptitude” and “displays originality, creativity, and the ability to think and work in areas not previously explored” I think one has a conclusion as to what comprises a “creative genius.”

According to The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979):

“Genius: The highest level of manifestation of man’s creative forces. The term “genius” is used both to indicate a man’s creative ability and to evaluate the results of his activities. Assuming an innate capability to productive endeavors in some field, genius, as opposed to talent, not only represents the highest degree of giftedness but also is connected with the creation of qualitatively new works and with the discovery of previously unknown creative methods. The activities of genius are achieved in a definite historical context of life in human society, on which genius draws for its creativity.”

I think key here is the notion that creative genius us beyond mere talent, or hard work. They go on to say, “Historical concepts of the nature of genius and its evaluation are related to a general understanding of the creative process. The ancients (Plato and, later, Neoplatonists) viewed genius as a type of irrational, “divine inspiration.” With the Renaissance (Leonardo da Vinci, G. Vasari, J. Scaliger) came the cult of genius as creative individuality, which reached its apogee in the romantic period, as exemplified by the preromantic Sturm und Drang in Germany, romanticism, and the theories, evolved from romanticism and characterized by the opposition of genius and the masses, of T. Carlyle and F. Nietzsche. The concept of genius in the contemporary meaning of the word developed in the 18th century. It became a fundamental aesthetic concept in A. Shaftesbury’s system: genius creates in a like manner to the forces of nature; its creations are original, in contrast to imitative artists. I. Kant also emphasized the originality and naturalness of creative genius: genius is the “natural endowment of the soul …. through which nature gives order to art” (Soch., vol. 5, Moscow, 1966, p. 323). F. Schiller described the nature of genius through the concept of naïveté as the instinctive following of artless nature and the ability to grasp the world spontaneously.”

Therefore, if one were to define genius as someone who diverged from a known path and transformed his or her field of expertise in the 20th century, my list would include, in no particular order:

1. Pablo Picasso (art)
2. Martha Graham (dance)
3. Louis Armstrong (jazz)
4. Lucien Bernhard (graphic design)
5. Woody Guthrie (folk music)
6. Orson Welles (film)
7. James Joyce (writing)
8. Bob Dylan (popular song)
9. Albert Einstein (science)
10. Jack Kirby (comics)

If a chart would be created of what came before and after, each would qualify. While we have no way of knowing how Jack Kirby would have scored on an IQ test, it doesn’t really matter. The fact is he transformed his field from the moment he entered it, and unlike many other accepted geniuses, continued to do so for the next 35 years. Consider that Einstein’s breakthroughs occurred when he was still in his 20s.

What I am submitting is that Kirby was a creative genius, one that changed the way comic storytelling was approached going forward.

The closest comparison I can draw is that of Louis Armstrong. While Armstrong did not create jazz, he was there as it emerged. Whilst he recorded in tandem with others throughout his career (King Oliver, Ella Fitzgerald, Jack Teagarden, et al) his singularity always shown, and he managed to influence jazz and popular music for every decade from the ’20s till the ’60s.

Likewise Kirby influenced comics from the moment he hit the ground running and continued to do so for the next four decades. Beginning in early 1941 with Captain America, less than three short years after Superman landed on earth from Krypton, Cap wasn’t the first patriotic costumed hero (that honor belonged to The Shield), nor the first to rely less on superpowers than physical prowess (that would be Batman). Rather it was the dynamism of his advanced storytelling and page design that changed the way comic book stories were told. To continue the Louis Armstrong analogy, Captain America was Kirby’s “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven.”

As Gerard Jones describes in Men of Tomorrow, “What Kirby brought to comics was an opera of line and mass. The stories didn’t matter, so much drama did his anger bring to the figures bursting out of the panels, the bodies hurtling through space as fists and feet drove into them, the faces contort in passion, the camera angles swinging wildly and the panels stretched and bent by the needs of action. His hero’s anatomy made no sense. Kirby had never been able to afford life-drawing lessons; he was making it up.  But Captain America came to such life and moved so forcefully through a time and space that existed only because Kirby said they did that he became more real than the carefully drawn heroes of the art school graduates. Kirby celebrated the body, the male body, male sweat and muscles, not with the fetishism of bodybuilding but with savage joy. And countless boys at the brink of puberty loved him for it. Within two issues Captain America was selling a million copies a month. Suddenly every young artist was drawing action like Jack Kirby.”⁹

However, Kirby’s growing confidence went far beyond his drawing abilities, and in fact the stories did matter. His main interest was in telling stories, and he frequently wrote and plotted the tales he drew.  Ever the divergent thinker, even when given a script, according to former assistant and biographer Mark Evanier, Kirby (and partner Joe Simon) would make paper airplanes out of them. “They tried for a while to control us, but we knew how to do comics. Finally they let us do whatever we wanted,” recalled Kirby.¹⁰

Soon after Kirby and Simon introduced the kid gang to comics, early in 1942, with The Boy Commandos and The Newsboy Legion, brought over from such popular films such as “Dead End” and Kirby’s own rough and tumble experience growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, leading the way for Charles Biro and others to follow. The kid gang would cross genres at Kirby’s hand in the early 50s with the Western Boys’ Ranch. Western comics are a comic category Kirby did not create, along with the Crime comic (that credit goes to Biro), still his influence was felt on such titles as Bulls Eye, Black Rider, Gunsmoke Western, Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid and Justice Traps the Guilty, Headline and Police Trap, respectively. Indeed, Kirby often cited his favorite story as “Mother Delilah,” in issue number 3 of Boys’ Ranch. Remarkably it manages to cross no less than three genres, the Western and kid gang with the raw emotion and pathos of a Romance comic.

According to Simon and Kirby Studio historian Harry Mendryk, Kirby’s greatest output between 1947 and 1959 was in Romance comics, another genre the team created.

In his Eisner winning 2011 book, Hand of Fire: The Comic Art of Jack Kirby, Charles Hatfield states that Romance comics “…shaped the celebrated superhero narratives that followed, with their emphasis on love, loss and anguish. Kirby never abandoned a genre, but rather reworked earlier genre conventions in new forms, splicing and adapting.”¹¹

This dramatic breakthrough would become an intrinsic ingredient at Marvel in the early ’60s. According to Hatfield,  “It was under Kirby, though, that Marvel decisively latched onto the idea of unresolved, never-ending conflict between superpowered opposites, and revealingly, Kirby’s subsequent work often explores this kind of dualistic premise in distilled or exaggerated form. This sort of mirroring obviously appealed to him, as both a storyteller and a designer of characters.

The X-Men series, launched in 1963, is the keystone example. It introduced the germ of the idea that was to emerge full blown in may of Kirby’s later creations: that of superhuman heroes and villains springing from a common origin, vying with each other like rival gods in some epically dysfunctional family. Humankind, of course, was caught in the middle.”¹² As Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon noted, “I don’t think it’s any accident that… the entire Marvel universe and the entire DC universe are all pinned or rooted on Kirby’s concepts.”

It was not Kirby who introduced mythological or cosmic elements to comics, rather it was the grand scale and sweep of these elements that resonated throughout the industry, beginning at Marvel and exploding the following decade in his Fourth World magnum opus.

Once at DC, on titles such as The New Gods, The Forever People, Mr. Miracle, The Demon, The Losers and others, Kirby brought a synchronicity to the art and storytelling that few in the industry have achieved, while still working in a highly commercial venue. Artist James Romberger observes, “I do tend to value Kirby’s picture-making skills the highest on the genius scale, I guess….that he is able to do those huge spreads with multiple figures in deep space, all with astounding weight and presence and even more, of tremendous impact, of movement within that space. No other cartoonist has this level of skill and vision. Then I rate his writing and art in tandem from the best of his 4th World books at his peak and there simply is no parallel for how deep and humane and resonant these works are…”

One example of divergent thinking is Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth. Reportedly suggested by publisher Carmine Infantino as a Planet of the Apes knockoff, Kirby riffed on the theme in such inventive ways as to render the source immaterial, as far a field as Charlie Parker’s bebop “Ornithology” is from the jazz standard  “How High the Moon,” over which it is written. Kamandi lasted over 40 issues, Kirby’s second longest running title. He returned to Marvel in the mid-seventies and to earlier characters such as Captain America and Black Panther but also explored grander schemes once again in The Eternals and 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on Stanley Kubrick’s seminal film, used as a launching pad for an exploration of the human spirit and follies throughout history and into the future.

In the ‘80s his comic tales took a more personal turn, with Captain Victory and “Street Code”, and while his influence over the comics filed began to wane, Silver Star stands as a coda to an illustrious career, a dark inversion, colored by his World War II experience when compared to that other creative genius’ last hurrah, Satchmo’s “What A Wonderful World.”

Kirby left us in 1994. In the 21st century, with the advent of CGI, his creations have exploded onto the silver screen. Moviegoers who most likely would not recognize his name have spent billions worldwide to watch them in wide screen 3D.

Kirby fits all the definitions of “creative genius:” someone who’s “creations are original,” who had “ability to grasp the world spontaneously,” who “represents the highest degree of giftedness but also is connected with the creation of qualitatively new works and with the discovery of previously unknown creative methods,” someone who’s “originality, creativity, and the ability to think and work in areas not previously explored” and finally as someone who left his unique mark in his particular field, and our culture as well.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”—Albert Einstein

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Special thanks to Norris Burroughs, Randolph Hoppe, and James Romberger for their help and guidance.

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Endnotes:

1. Comics Journal Interview #134, with Gary Groth,  February 1990.
2. The Critique of Judgment by Immanuel Kant, page 181.
3. J. P. Guilford, Study of Human Intelligence, According to Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (SI) theory, an individual’s performance on intelligence tests can be traced back to the underlying mental abilities or factors of intelligence. SI theory comprises up to 150 different intellectual abilities organized along three dimensions—Operations, Content, and Products.
4. Carl Jung, Psychological Types , 1921.
5. Joy Paul Guilford, Study of Human Intelligence.
6. American Psychological Association Monitor on Psychology, Considering Creativity, Dean Keith Simonton, University of California, Davis, Volume 34, No. 10 November 2003.
7. Dr. Teresa Amabile, Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Her 30 year research has studied how the work environment can influence creativity and motivation has yielded a theory of creativity and innovation.
8. Creating Minds: An Anatomy Of Creativity As Seen Through The Lives Of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, And Gandhi by Howard Gardner, Basic Books, 1994.
9. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones,  pages 200-201.
10. Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier, page 60.
11. Hand of Fire by Charles Hatfield, page 22.
12. Hand of Fire, page 130.

Bibliography

Alter Ego, Roy Thomas, editor, Bill Shelly and Jim Amash, co-editors, et al, TwoMorrows, Raleigh, NC.

American Psychological Association Monitor on Psychology, Considering Creativity, Volume 34, No. 10 November 2003.

Berkeley Institute of Personality Assessment, http://ipsr.berkeley.edu/about.html

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, http://www.britannica.com

Evanier, Mark, Kirby: King of Comics, Abrams, New York, NY, 2008.

Gagne, Michel, Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby’s Romance Comics, Fantagraphics,  Seattle, WA, 2012.

Gardner, Howard, Creating Minds: An Anatomy Of Creativity As Seen Through The Lives Of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, And Gandhi; Basic Books, New York, 1994.

Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Macmillan, Inc., New York, NY, 1979.

Hatfield, Charles, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, University Press of Mississippi, 2011.

Jack Kirby Quarterly, Chrissie Harper, editor, Quality Communications, London, UK.

Jones, Gerard, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, Basic Books, New York, 2004.

Jung, Carl, Psychological Types, Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.6, Princeton University Press; Princeton, NJ, 1976

Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgment, Germany, 1790

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus, http://www.merriam-webster.com.

Mendryk, Harry, Simon and Kirby (blog), http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby

Theakston Greg, Comic Strip Kirby; The Complete Jack Kirby, volume 1–5; Jack Kirby Reader, volume 1–2, Pure Imagination, New York.

The Comics Journal, Gary Groth, editor, Kim Thompson, Eric Reynolds, co-editors, et al, Seattle, WA.

The Jack Kirby Collector, John Morrow, editor, TwoMorrows, Raleigh, NC.

Thorpe, Scott, How to Think Like Einstein: Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius; Sourcebooks, Inc, Naperville, IL, 2000.

Wyman, Ray, The Art of Jack Kirby, The Blue Rose Press, Orange, CA 1994.

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Steven Brower is an award-winning former Creative Director for Print, a former art director at The New York Times and The Nation, co-author and designer of Woody Guthrie Artworks (Rizzoli, 2005), author of Satchmo: The Wonderful Art and World of Louis Armstrong (Abrams, 2009), and author of two books on Kirby associate Mort Meskin for Fantagraphics. He is on the faculty of Marywood University in Scranton, PA, and The School of Visual Arts in New York City. What an appropriate entry on what would have been Kirby’s 95th birthday! Thanks, Steven. — Rand.

A two week run on the “Davy Crockett, Frontiersman” daily strip was recently discovered in a French digest.

by Jean Depelley, with Bernard Joubert

As strange as it seems, our discovery was not made in the USA, but in France! And the info arose from two Kirby-related investigations.

First, Strange comic magazine, which I hope readers are familiar with as Strange has published many Kirby-related subjects and rarities, was gathering a French Kirby checklist. This checklist isn’t as huge as the American one, but it is quite big nonetheless! So, with publisher Reed Man and a couple of contributors (including Jean-Michel Ferragatti, François Soulodre and Dominik Vallet), we had been searching for Kirby art in the enormous number of comic magazines that had come out in France since the end of World War Two. Quite a task! But we expected that even if we made interesting finds, none would surprise the American Kirby followers.

The second event leading to the discovery was the release of the documentary film, “Marvel 14: Superheroes Vs. Censorship”, which Philippe Roure and I directed, explaining why Marvel comics were banned by Communists and Catholics in France in the early 1970s.The film features Kirby by analysing Marvel’s successful style. Philippe and I were attending L’Etrange Festival, a famous movie festival where the film had been scheduled to be screened. The producers of the festival also invited the people interviewed for the documentary, so our friend Bernard Joubert, a noted comics historian and editor, was present at the show.

After the screening (which went over well with the audience, thanks!), Bernard, Reed and I had a moment to chat, and, naturally, we discussed Kirby and the checklist. Bernard told us he remembered an obscure Kirby Western that came out in the late 1960s. As we weren’t familiar with it, two days later Bernard sent me the exact references of the French digest “Zoom” #15 (October 1968, published by Jeunesse et Vacances), and its content. The Kirby piece in it was a Davy Crockett story. Naturally, I associated it with the comic book series published in Harvey’s Western Tales #31 and #32 (October 1955 and March 1956). But Joubert was not convinced: “No, I really think it was a daily strip. It reads like one… Kirby just took over someone else’s strip for a while… There is a copyright to a syndicate and some dated credit boxes.”

Next Bernard emailed me some scans of the aforementioned story and wrote: “Here are the 14 pages of Kirby art as well as pages before and after Jack’s run. They are all copyright Columbia Features Inc. You’ll notice the change of artists in the middle of the story and the dated credit boxes which clearly identify it as a daily strip. It seems unlikely the French publisher put a comic book story right in the middle of a continuing strip. This is certainly the US “Davy Crockett, Frontiersman” daily strip by McArdle.”

Finding a copy of  Zoom #15 was no easy task. However, after reading it and comparing it with the Harvey Western Tales stories, I had to admit Bernard was right, of course. After a new search, here are the conclusions on this new entry to be added to the American checklist:

“Davy Crockett, Frontiersman” by Jim McArdle was syndicated by Columbia Features Inc., with writing by France “Ed” Herron. “Davy Crockett, Frontiersman” started as a daily strip in early 1955, right in the middle of the Davy Crockett craze. In fact, it premiered the same time as Harvey’s Western Tales. Presumably it was cancelled in 1959, even though it is said to have been available from Columbia up to 1972.

Ed Herron and Kirby were friends since their 1939 tenure at Fox. Herron, who Kirby credited as a co-creator of the Red Skull, was writing for National (DC) as well as the “Crockett” strip in 1957. Kirby started working at National again right after the 1957 Atlas Implosion. Perhaps Herron and Kirby reacquainted themselves at National around then, which fostered Kirby getting the “Davy Crockett” strip assignment.

Kirby was a trained artist in the genre, having already produced several westerns (“Wilton of the West”, “Lone Rider”, “Western Love”, “Boys’ Ranch”, “Bullseye”), not to mention his recent work on “Davy Crockett” in Harvey’s Western Tales comic book. Jack had also already worked for syndicates (Lincoln, Associated Features Syndicate, Fox) and knew how to handle daily strips.

To sum up, starting in January 1957, Jack Kirby “ghosted” the “Davy Crockett, Frontiersman” daily strip for less than three weeks. He started on a single strip on Thursday, 10 January—probably as a try-out—and went back to it for a 18 day tenure, from Monday, 14 January up to Saturday, 2 February. No evidence points to Kirby working on the larger Sunday strips. He inked the whole run, except the last three strips, which seem to be delineated by Roz. The strips Kirby worked on were not signed by Kirby, nor Herron, nor McArdle.

When Jack left the assignment early February, the art was taken over by Jim Christiansen on the Monday, 4 February strip, who eventually signed it with Herron. A few months later, Herron and Christiansen dropped the Davy Crockett strip for another Columbia Features Inc. property: the detective Nero Wolfe, whose daily strips and Sunday pages they produced between fall 1957 – early 1958. Kirby and Herron would later work together on The Challengers Of the Unknown for National.

So here are some previously unknown Kirby pieces from the late Fifties. Even though it has been terribly mistreated by touch ups for the French magazine, it is still pure Kirby, inked by himself. Now it is up to American collectors to track down unaltered strips, so that we can rediscover them in all their glory!

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Editor’s note: The above is a re-worked translation of the article Jean posted on bdzoom.com this past March. I first became aware of this Kirby Davy Crockett work through collector and scholar Tom Morehouse almost a year ago (August 2011), when I scanned the Crockett pages and the cover of Tom’s copy of Marvelman 230 (L Miller, 1958) for future reference. Tom and I thought, as Jean originally did, that it was unpublished work for Harvey’s Western Tales.

In July, there was  further discussion of this work by a number of people on Comics.org’s GCD-Chat discussion group, where it was pointed out that in 2002 Matthew Gore discovered and posted Kirby Davy Crockett work from Marvelman 231. Rodrigo Baeza posted about it on his blog in July.

Jean and Bernard really cracked the case by sourcing it back to the daily “Davy Crockett, Frontiersman” strip syndicated by Columbia Features. As Jean ends his article above, let’s hope that unaltered US strips can be found.

- Rand

Thanks to ICS’ Peter Coogan, Craig Fischer sat on The Auteur Theory of Comics panel in San Diego last month. Craig is an Associate Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, USA. – Rand Hoppe

I’m late to appreciate Kamandi. In the 1970s, when I was a kid buying comics on spinner racks in drug stores and supermarkets, I sampled a couple of issues and wasn’t impressed. I was a Planet of the Apes fan, and I felt (not without reason) that Kamandi ripped off Apes’ premise; also, the issues I read, inked by D. Bruce Berry, looked less electric and kinetic than the Kirby art in Marvel’s Greatest Comics. So I let Kamandi drift onto my list of unread funnybooks.

This summer, however, at Heroes Con in Charlotte, I bought a bargain-basement copy of the first volume of DC’s Kamandi Archives, which reprints the first ten issues. This time, I like Kamandi much better, particularly “Flower!”, originally presented in Kamandi 6 (June 1973), a story which strikes me as both touching and innovative. To explain why “Flower!” is so exceptional, I need to define a concept from literary and film studies–focalization–and apply the concept to Kirby’s narrative techniques in “Flower!”

Focalization is the term used by narratologists—those scholars who study how stories work—to identify how stories are often filtered through a character who chooses what facts and details to emphasize and omit. As Manfred Jahn defines the term:

Focalization is the submission of (potentially limitless) narrative information to a perspectival filter. Contrary to the standard courtroom injunction to tell “the whole truth,” no-one can in fact tell all. Practical reasons require speakers and writers to restrict information to the “right amount”—not too little, not too much, and if possible only what’s relevant. (The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, 94)

Of course, “relevant” is an ambiguous term here. Relevant narrative information can refer to scenes that advance a character towards a goal, or to details that enrich a feeling that an author wants to convey to his/her audience. Focalization reminds us that storytelling is by definition incomplete, slanted, subjective: the Beowulf poet sings the praises of the Grendel-killer, but when John Gardner focalizes the same story through Grendel’s own perspective, the changes are profound.

When discussing visual media like comics and film, we should not equate focalization with the first-person point of view, with actual vision through a character’s eyes. In the film The Son (Le fils, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2003), our anchor of focalization is Olivier (Olivier Gourmet), a carpentry teacher at a reform school who mentors Francis (Morgan Marinne), a delinquent who (it is gradually revealed) murdered Olivier’s infant son. The Dardennes avoid Olivier’s literal point-of-view, opting instead for a prowling hand-held camera that struggles to keep up with Olivier as he instructs his students and watches Francis carefully, uncertain if he should take revenge. Here’s a shot from The Son:

This shot is a third-person portrait of Olivier as he stares at Francis, but we still feel Olivier’s anger and confusion. On a basic level, Olivier is in virtually every shot of The Son, a continual presence that elicits our attention. Narratively, Olivier is the agent through which we gradually figure out the story; we find out about the dead child through Olivier’s actions and conversations. Focalization is about the flow of story information through the perceptions of a particular character, but that doesn’t mean that readers and spectators have to be imbedded in that character’s literal vision.

What surprises me about focalization is how easily and quickly our interest can slide from one character to another. Another example from the movies: the shower scene and its aftermath in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). During Mother Bates’ attack, we feel the terror of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), but after Marion’s death, our focus switches to Norman (Anthony Perkins), the milquetoast charged with cleaning up his mama’s mess. We watch as Norman slowly and carefully mops the floor, wraps Marion’s body in the shower curtain, and deposits the bundle in the trunk of Marion’s car. He then drives the car into a nearby swamp, and when the car briefly refuses to sink, I (and other spectators) have a strange reaction: I feel for Norman, I worry that he won’t be able to hide the murder evidence. Hitchcock successfully swings Psycho’s focalization from Marion to Norman, prompting our sympathy for (spoiler alert, 50 years after the fact!) a homicidal psychopath.

How does focalization work in comics—and, more specifically, in Kirby’s comics? How does Kirby use character presence and action to establish focalization, and does he shift among characters like Hitchcock does? In order to answer these questions, however tentatively, I’ll now look closely at “Flower!” If you have a copy of that story, get it and read along with me.

“Flower!” begins with a six-page “Chapter One.” The story opens with Kamandi and Flower driving a “dune-wagon” across a desert landscape, until (in a typically kinetic Kirby splash on pages two and three) a squad of masked figures on motorcycles erupts in their path. The ensuing collision and confusion of vehicles prompts Kamandi to fire a rifle and shoot out one of the cyclists’ tires, after which another of the masked riders throws a “toss-truncheon” at Kamandi, knocking him unconscious. The final page of Chapter One reveals that the motorcyclists are tigers, zookeepers charged with protecting animals from poachers while guarding a wildlife sanctuary.

In this first chapter, Kirby shows an effortless ability to shift our focus away from one group of characters to another. On the first page, Kamandi and Flower are clearly center stage, presented as they are in tableau-style medium close-up, and the tiger-cyclists have yet to appear in-panel (though both Kamandi and Flower hear the roar of their motors). On the next page, however, the riders suddenly explode into our attention. Kirby draws them bounding through the air, one rider in a particularly extreme close-up at the bottom of page three. In this composition, Kamandi and Flower are presented as more distant figures—we now see them from above, and we’re further away from them—as they swerve their vehicle to avoid hitting the cyclists.

Throughout the rest of Chapter One, Kirby continues this process, minimizing his focalization on Kamandi and Flower while maximizing his (and our) attention on the cycle-tigers. Kirby does this partially through word balloons. As readers, we naturally gravitate to word balloons, and the tails of the balloons literally point us to the figures “speaking” in a specific panel. On page four of “Flower!”, there is a panel that returns us to a close-up on Kamandi and Flower, and Kamandi yells while firing his gun:

This is the last time Kamandi speaks in Chapter One. The last three pages of the chapter are a tiger gab-fest, with the zookeepers talking about Kamandi’s cleverness as an “animal” and their plans to take Kamandi and Flower to the wildlife preserve. All these word balloons are arrows pointing us to the tigers both as characters and as visual presences on the page. By the end of page five, we’ve shifted our interest to the tigers so decisively that we’ve almost forgotten about Kamandi, even when his dune-wagon crashes into rocks.

Even though the caption describes the accident as “violent,” Kirby’s drawing treats it as an unimportant event—so unimportant that it is mostly obscured by the body of one of the cyclists, who is now in the literal and figurative center of our attention. Our interest on the tigers solidifies on the final page of the chapter, where the action slows down and the riders’ dialogue defines them as likeable and sympathetic. In the space of six pages, Kirby shifts his focalization from Kamandi—the protagonist we should be focusing on, after all, since it’s his comic book—to anonymous cyclists who blossom as characters when their true occupations and natures are revealed.

During the next fourteen pages, the focalization decisively returns to Kamandi and Flower. The tigers deposit Kamandi and Flower in the wildlife preserve and vanish. Kirby’s story alternates between scenes of relative peace (Kamandi and Flower gently wake up in their vehicle, and later inhabit a comfortable house) and eruptive violence, as when Kamandi fights to establish himself as the leader of the “animal” herd, and protects himself and Flower from the pumas’ initial kidnapping (or “poaching”) attempt. Kamandi’s mood in this middle section of the story is cautious optimism. Though he knows that he’s been deposited in a zoo, he also realizes that the zoo provides him with the most security he’s had since he hid in his grandfather’s bunker.

He’s begun to make plans for the future too. He’s thinking about staying in the house “indefinitely,” and earlier he seizes on Flower’s suggestion that he should teach the herd to speak and behave like human beings. (Kamandi’s dialogue on page 14, panel 2: “Man’s road back has to start somewhere! Why not here? I—I’ll give the teaching ‘thing’ a whirl!”) Kamandi is also overjoyed to have Flower in his life. When he meets her in the previous story, “The One-Armed Bandit!” (Kamandi 5, May 1973), Kamandi is astonished that she can talk, and their brief relationship is one full of affection and protection; note the encouraging way Flower strokes Kamandi’s forearm when he’s assuming the leadership of the herd (and mulling over the teaching idea) in the first panel on page 14 of “Flower!”. Before tragedy strikes, Kamandi has a home, a purpose, and potentially a mate.

At the end of “Flower!”, the pumas attack again, and Flower is killed before the tiger-rangers can arrive to arrest the poachers. As the tigers pour into Kamandi’s house, they also pour into the story’s panels, vying for our attention. Meanwhile, Kamandi says nothing as he carries Flower’s body over to the same sofa where, a few minutes before, Flower covered herself with a blanket and whispered “Flower feel warm and safe. Kamandi near—Kamandi brave.” We do, however, see Kamandi in close-up, wordlessly weeping over Flower’s dead body. During the last two pages, Kirby returns somewhat to the storytelling approach of Chapter One, as he chooses to again displace Kamandi as our central focus in favor of the tigers, a choice that gives “Flower!” elegant narrative bookends.

The effect of this second shift in focalization, however, is very different from the first. In Chapter One, we connect with the tigers when we realize that they intend to act kindly towards Kamandi and Flower. The end of “Flower!”, however, exposes a callous speciesism among the tigers, and creates an ironic contrast between Kamandi’s sorrow and the condescending tiger comments that end the story.

This conclusion is devastating. All the optimism of Kamandi’s stay at the zoo drains away. By now, I’ve read virtually all of Kirby’s Kamandis, and the conclusion of “Flower!” most forcefully conveys to me Kamandi’s plight as a disposable animal in the post-Great Disaster world. It’s Kirby’s ability to reintroduce a technique from earlier in the story (the focalization shift) and use it to reveal a new perspective on the characters and events (the tigers’ discrimination) that makes this moment so powerful.

I realize that my argument here is incomplete and a little slippery; for instance, I should’ve defined the difference between focalization and “identification,” and talked about why I mistrust the latter term. (In my home discipline of film studies, identification is freighted with other schools of thought—particularly psychoanalysis—that I consider seriously flawed.) I haven’t discussed the moments in the center section of “Flower!” where the reader is privy to information that Kamandi and Flower don’t know, such as the fact that they’re being secretly watched by both the pumas and tigers. And I should’ve examined more Kamandis to see if ironic focalization shifts as in “Flower!” are common in Kirby’s work. Still, writing this post has led me to value Kamandi more than ever.

I’m inaugurating The Kirby Effect because the Kirby Museum needs a place where Kirby interviews, articles, essays can be placed that don’t necessarily belong on our other venues. For example, I’d posted an article by Alex Jay about Simon & Kirby letterer Howard Ferguson as part of my efforts on the Museum’s Home page blog, and think it would be better either for me to post it here, or, if he were willing, to set Alex up with a writer account here. (No pressure, Alex, just using you as an example!)

I hope that some of you will be interested in participating here, whether through comments, or by answering a call for articles. Yes, if you have a paper, article or media presentation in mind, please contact me at rhoppe@kirbymuseum.org.

Thanks.