Sidelining Martin Goodman

Continuing essay to counter the constant erroneous corporate propaganda regarding the early days of Marvel Comics.

Another thing that the Lee droolies like to do is to claim that Stan Lee was a marketing genius guiding the corporate ship known as Marvel Comics. This never happened. Martin Goodman, the publisher and owner, held Lee in such low esteem that his junior cousin-by-marriage had to clear everything through the owner (Goodman) for all but the most minor decisions. Contrary to the lies made popular by later faux-historians, you can see that Martin Goodman was a hands-on publisher who paid very close attention to all of his publishing ventures, especially to Marvel Comics. Once Kirby and Ditko had revitalized the comics publishing portion of his publishing outfit he did not want the Comics Code Authority, or muckraking journalists, to come down on him with complaints against the material he was printing.  He was enjoying his resurgent economic success, while also searching for a buyer to make him a rich man. He didn't need complications and kept a very close eye on Marvel.

I mention all of this because I was recently referred to an article which repeats the fallacy that Lee was some kind of marketing genius, giving him credit where none is due.

Lee never marketed anything. Just as he never created, plotted, or wrote anything.

Lee was a rudderless shill. He depended upon upper management for all direction. All of it. Martin Goodman was the man who built a publishing empire from essentially nothing. Goodman hired the talent, paid them, saw to the day to day running of the show and made sure the bills were paid. And he certainly knew how and where to advertise and to make the decisions concerning customer outreach.

This article claimed that it was Lee who saw a way to expand sales by noticing new customers who hadn't been targeted. However, Lee didn't see any untapped market. He never directed any kind of promotional campaign or fan outreach. Hell, he couldn't buy paperclips for the office without permission so how was he supposed to find and toss advertising money at this great invisible prospective customer base?

Reporters like the fellow who wrote that article make a common error. They had seen that lying blowhard on TV, radio, or in too many print interviews for them to formulate any honest conclusions remotely based on the truth.

Lee was never executive material who could be trusted with a responsibility as important as marketing. If no corporate powerhouse had ever wanted his one dimensional car salesman schtick, his own cousin wasn't going to trust him with something as serious as advertising Marvel Comics. Lee was a subnormal jackass, and he was far too stupid to create any complicated or nuanced business models. He couldn't even plot the comic strips so often credited to him!

However, Lee was a shill who had value to various Marvel owners (and Marvel owners ONLY!) due to his (and the corporations) unfounded claims over the intellectual property stolen from creators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Giving that creep credit for the hard work of Martin Goodman is akin to saying that the actor who portrayed The Marlboro Man was the Chief Financial Officer of a multi-national tobacco corporation. Would you say that some nameless actor was the business mastermind of the vast Marlboro Cigarette Company? Only a snookered moron would make that claim. Like the Marlboro Man, Lee portrayed a garish, posed, false character trotted out to blinker the hoi polloi. They train people to do that. They direct them how to say it, and when to repeat their scripted lines. But the costumed actors don't run the company. Neither did a shill working for Martin Goodman, Cadence Industries, etc.

To paraphrase Steve Ditko: A shill is a shill.

A fiction.

Martin Goodman, the man who actually built and guided a publishing company.

Liar, Liar

 Presented as the alternative to decades of propaganda.

As I predicted long ago, with the death of the corporate shill known as Stan Lee, the truth about his career in comics is coming out at a more rapid pace than when he was still breathing. But while it's easier to get the word out concerning his moral crimes, it's no easier to deal with his fans when one is telling the truth about him.

I can only describe his fan base as religious fanatics. They have been fed a line about his divinity and if you challenge this line you are at risk of the same kind of attack you would expect from a crazed fundamentalist, or from a rabid animal. When you tell what really happened at Marvel after Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko transformed the publisher from a faltering outfit into a tremendous success the Liar's true believers will descend on you with knives out.

Here, then, are the basic truths:

What we know of today as the Marvel Universe was created mainly by Jack Kirby. To a lesser extent it was also given commercial success by Steve Ditko. There were additional contributors such as Bill Everett, Wally Wood, Dick Ayers, Don Heck, and others; but the mass of the modern fables emerged from the minds and talents of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

The big liar we call Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber) was the editor for the comics arm of a publishing company started by Martin Goodman. Lee was cousin-by-marriage to Goodman, so his installation into the company was an act of pure nepotism. No talent was involved, and no meritocracy was at work. A relative was shown the ropes and was provided with a steady paycheck at a very young age. Lee's lack of talent is obvious in that he never left the employ of his relative and stayed there over the years, never venturing forth to find gainful employment elsewhere, and never proving himself as anyone valuable enough for a head hunter to come calling. It's often said that Lee was a good salesman, but I always found him to be on a level with a scamming used car salesman. His personality was odious, at best.

But what service did he provide for Martin Goodman? After Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were allowed to create new titles to cash in on the superhero craze of the early 1960s, Goodman needed a salaried employee whose name could be attached to the intellectual property to cement the company's claim to that property. And, as the only salaried employee at the comics arm of Martin Goodman's corporation, Lee fit the bill.

So: the liar's name went on every book as writer. Later, Lee claimed to have created all of the titles and characters at the early Marvel Comics. He claimed to have created the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, the Uncanny X-Men, Daredevil, the Mighty Thor, Dr. Strange, the Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man, Giant Man, Ant Man, etc. In fact, though, there is zero evidence that Lee invented any of the characters which he claimed to be writing. Also, there are credible claims that he wasn't even writing the parade of successful books appearing from the likes of Kirby, Ditko, Ayers, Wood, Everett, Heck, Romita, and company. Keep in mind that before the explosion of creativity provided from Kirby and Ditko, Goodman's most profitable enterprise was publishing a line of men's adventure fiction magazines. There was a  constant parade of talented writers in and out of the  building who were only too happy to expand dialog already provided  by the artists who were actually not only creating the characters, but plotting and writing them. For a couple of hours work these ghost-writers could earn grocery money. No big deal that another man's name went on. For in those days comic scripting was held in lower esteem than even the pulp fiction they were producing for Martin Goodman. Who cared if a no-talent bum put his signature to it?

Over the following months and years as Marvel's fortunes expanded Goodman sought to sell the company. I can imagine what he was thinking. He'd already seen his comic book business go through a boom and bust cycle from the early 1940s and through the 1950s, and he could have figured he was riding another wave that might soon crest and fall. He wanted to get out while the company was a ripe crop ready to be harvested and sold. Therefore, more than ever he needed a corporate shill that enabled him to claim ownership of the intellectual property that rightly resided with the men who had sweated it out: mainly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. For that purpose alone, Lee's lying presence was invaluable.

Eventually, Goodman did sell Marvel. For enough cash so that he was able to retire to Florida as a wealthy man. What he never considered was that the value of Jack Kirby's creations was far more than he ever could have dreamed. The publisher never figured that his connivance with Liar Lee was a theft that would someday be measured in tens of billions of dollars. I cannot think of another theft of intellectual property that rivals what was stolen from Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. The monetary value of the likes of X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers, Dr. Strange, etc. staggers the imagination. And as that wealth has increased, so did the lies of the man whose professional existence was provided for that sole purpose. And also continued the willingness for the various corporate owners to go along--they still needed that lie to live on.

In fact, though, we all know who created the characters. Kirby, Ditko, Everett, and others did. Who wrote the books? The artists who illustrated it were expected to plot and also write them. The editor placed his name on the credits page as "writer" when there is zero evidence he ever wrote anything other than poorly rendered promotional blurbs and columns, and an occasional butchering of dialog and scripts in some issues. The corporations claimed ownership for everything because of the existence of a sole salaried employee.

Today, as I said, the truth is emerging. We now know who created the characters and wrote and illustrated the stories. It wasn't the lying editor.

But telling this simple truth can still be a tough row to hoe. One has to deal with the army of zealots who believe the fallacy that a slimy grifter created the characters they love. These fans equate the face of a gleaming, grinning slug with their beloved comics. And there are the professional sellouts working in the comics industry who still feel the urge to kiss corporate ass after the lying bastard they once worked for is dead and rotting. Hopefully, these prostitutes will come to their senses and find enough dignity to stop lying for a dead thief and the corporate master he served. Maybe that will happen. But I doubt it.

ACCORDING TO JACK KIRBY by Michael Hill. Highly recommended.

The Amazing Spider-Man. Created by, plotted by, written by, penciled by, inked by Steve Ditko.

Comic Books are Doomed.

Ever since I was a child comic books have been a part of my life. Even during the periods when I wasn't so much as looking at a comic book they were still with me, the tens of thousands of them that I had read floating around in my mind.

Back in those days there were all kinds of comic books and they were inexpensive and readily available to children and their parents in all manner of places where people could buy them. They were in newsstands, grocery stores, convenience stores, at the druggists, bookshops, and so on. These days, not so much. Sometimes you can find a very limited selection of comic books in chain bookstores, but mainly you have to go into a comic book shop to locate them. Yeah, ever since around the 1980s or so, shops catering specifically to comic book fans have been the go-to spot to buy comic books.

At any rate, I'm not writing this to talk about why the comics industry is dying or how it happened. I'm just here to say that it is doomed and to explain, succinctly, how that's a foregone conclusion.

The two biggest comic book companies are Marvel Comics and DC Comics. Even the most non-nerdy of people generally know this fact. Both companies are owned by media conglomerates who make a huge amount of money producing feature films and TV shows. The reason they wanted to own Marvel and DC is because what they desired about the two publishing concerns was to get their corporate mitts on the intellectual property represented in Marvel and DC.

That is, Warner and Disney don't possess DC and Marvel to see the regular release of four-color periodicals. To the men who run those outfits, what they want are the grist that they use to make movies that produce billions of dollars in profits. In Disney's case they wanted the sweat of Jack Kirby's brow. Again, I'm not here to belabor the obvious fact that a corporate shill (Stan Lee) never created anything but was just the trigger that allowed Marvel to steal Jack Kirby's creations. That's an important part of the process of course, but it's not how the comics industry doomed itself.

The sad fact is that Disney and Warner no longer care one damned bit about comic books. What they want is the intellectual property that fuels the movies and cartoons that they make that, in turn, spawn toy sales and video game sales and infuse their coffers with the rentals of DVDs and streaming video. Fuck actual comic books. These guys don't give shit-one about the comic book and its place as one of the few uniquely American art forms.

Comic book publishing barely makes a profit mark on the logs of Warner and Disney. And that fine line of black on the yearly books keeps getting thinner and thinner. As far back as 1960 that profit margin was so small for a man named Martin Goodman who owned what later became known as Marvel Comics that he was going to abolish the company. Only the arrival of Jack Kirby and his talent put off that decision and created the basis for a billions-of-dollars company. But there aren't any more Jack Kirbys out there; and no champion with a gleaming mind and talent to illustrate is going to put off the demise of comic books.

Some years back I heard that the owners of comic book shops, and their customers, had begun referring to monthly comic books as "floppies". It's not a nice term and shows the contempt for comic books that both the sellers and buyers of them felt for the medium. Even at that point I realized that there was no way the industry could be resurrected. When the very people who sold them, and the "fans" themselves were using an epithet to label the books...well...that's just about the end of the line. To the big guys at Disney and Warner Communications floppies ain't something they want to deal with.

And here, then, is the bottom line:

DC and Marvel really aren't making a profit for Warner and Disney. At first, it was just a bothersome gnat for them. "These ants don't make us any money. But we gotta live with it 'cause we want the characters that we use for the movies and video games. What ya gonna do? Eh."

But it's only a small step from there to realizing that you can just as easily hire some hack writers to sit at a desk in an office somewhere and come up with more stupid superhero characters. You don't have to tend to a failing company like DC and Marvel rupturing cash and causing you momentary angst. Just close them down and have those low-paid hacks create for you and fuck the goddamned comic books.

It's coming. Hell...Warner came to the same conclusion long ago concerning real books when they shut down Warner Books and sold it off to a French corporation. If they can do it to a company that was making hardbacks and paperback books then they can (and will) certainly do the same with Marvel. These suits at the top of the heap will roll Marvel and DC up into the bigger corporation and shut down that annoying office full of incompetent editors and mouthpieces in New York. They can (and will) pay some clueless schmucks in Hollywood to make up silly superheroes for them without all of the cost and hassle of running offices on the other side of the continent.

Comic books are doomed. Soon, the only place you'll be able to find your "floppies" will be at the fan gatherings where nerds go to dress up as superheroes and fairies. For a while there will be some guys there selling moldy bits of limp pulp paper called "comic books". There will be some aging rubes there buying them for a decade or so, and then those rubes will die with their collections of acid-infused pulp decaying into flaking dust. There's a term for that kind of thing: Dead People's Toys.

And that will be the end of comic books.

"Gimme $100,000! Such a deal!"

A Vanishing American Art Form

This week I read articles about plummeting sales at Marvel Comics Group (part of Disney). Some people (including some Marvel editors) were blaming the recent attempt to "diversify" the characters by reinterpreting old standbys and new creations as racially, ethnically, gender, and sexually inclusive. Apparently this editorial move coincided with vanishing sales.

But the editors and comic reporters got it wrong. They are right in that the comic book--one of the true American art forms--is dying out. But they missed the reason for it. Comics are dying out because the industry abandoned the kind of diversity that matters--comics that cater to all kinds of tastes.

The HUGE problem with "mainstream" comics is that they aren't mainstream. They are dominated by silly superhero comics. Now, don't get me wrong. To paraphrase Paul McCartney, I love silly superhero comics. I love them so much that I even wrote a superhero novel. I would like to write more of them. Superhero comics have their place. They should probably be a part of the comics publishing business. But they shouldn't be 99% of it! Imagine, for instance, you went into a library or bookstore and 99 out of 100 of the books in it were about superheroes. 

Comics by their nature tend to tilt toward genre fiction, but there was a time when there was every kind of comic book you could imagine selling in huge numbers. Comic books about policemen, criminals, sports figures, animals, history, military, funny animals, humor, teenagers, romance, horror, science-fiction, fantasy, classic fiction, westerns, movie adaptation, trains, cars, etc. etc. etc.

Superheroes came along and began to overwhelm the industry when first DC, and then Jack Kirby (at Marvel, the company that Kirby built) brought them back. They kicked Donald Duck and Richie Rich and Classics Illustrated and everything else to the gutter and have run roughshod over the comic book publishing business ever since.

Enough.

Either the industry finds a way to start selling all kinds of comics to the public, or they fade away and go extinct. A variety of types of comics that appeals to a huge and varied audience is what will save the industry. Not some whining liberal's version of "diversity".

Jack Kirby, the man who created Marvel Comics (and who could create and write and illustrate any kind of comic) was ironically responsible principally for the dominance of the superhero genre that has overwhelmed comic book publishing since 1961.

 And here is but a taste of the kinds of comic books that the superhero genre has overwhelmed and crushed. Gone, now, from the newsstands. Absent from the book shops. Vanished even from the comic book specialty stores. Unless the industry can somehow bring back this kind of variety, the business and art form will soon become extinct. (Scroll down.)

These barely scratch the surface of variety that people used to see when approaching a newsstand where comics were on display. No wonder the market is vanishing.

Loving the Fascist Loon

All comic fans know that the Silver Age of comics began when DC made a concerted effort to revive the superhero genre by redesigning The Flash in Showcase Comics. It was a success, soon spinning off into a renewed title. They then followed suit by reviving a newly realized Green Lantern which was equally successful. Then followed things like the Justice League, etc.

Estranged from his editor at DC, Jack Kirby had retreated to working at Martin Goodman's outfit (which was not then called "Marvel"). He had been trying to talk his editor is allowing him to create superheroes at the nascent Marvel the way they had done it at DC (including Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown). Finally, with Goodman threatening to shut down the comics arm of his publishing business, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were given the task of creating, writing, and illustrating a raft of new superhero characters.

Kirby, of course, created most of what we would later call the Marvel Universe; and Steve Ditko also made tremendous contributions.

But Spider-Man and Dr. Strange were not the first superheroes that Steve Ditko created for a publisher. A full year before Kirby changed everything with his Fantastic Four, his co-worker had already had a hand in creating a new superhero for Charlton Comics:

Captain Atom.

Captain Atom was a classic superhero transformed by radiation into something more than human. In his case, he was Allen Adam, a technician who, accidentally launched into orbit in an experiment craft, has his body destroyed, but whose existence is altered by radiation so that he is able to reform his atoms and consciousness. His powers were explained as being of nuclear energy origins and he quickly becomes a super-powered agent for the US government. (If this sounds familiar, Alan Moore slightly altered the story for his own version of Captain Atom as Doctor Manhattan in the comic book THE WATCHMEN.)

The creation is officially shared between writer Joe Gill and Steve Ditko. But I have always wondered about the details and know nothing of them. I can only surmise from the collaborations between the two how much credit should be attributed between them. Sometimes it is obvious in Ditko stories that are credited to Gill that he, in creating the dialog, had almost no idea what Ditko had written--for the dialog sometimes bears no relation to the illustrated story! This is not the case with the Captain Atom tales, with the dialog generally being logical to the sequential storytelling, if somewhat campy and sophomoric.

But one thing that does stand out in these stories is the right wing politics and subtle philosophy that comes through. This aspect of the comics makes them classic neo-Fascist Ditko polemics. Yes, most politics in late 50s and early 60s comic books was right wing, but Ditko's take on politics is almost unique in the industry. That wacky sense of the sociopath as hero does glimmer between the cracks. And so I am left wondering if the writing was actually all Ditko, with only the dialog being from Joe Gill.

It would, of course, be a familiar story for Ditko and Kirby very soon after.

My personal copies of Space Adventures starring Ditko's Captain Atom.

 

 

 

STRANGE TALES #103

My latest pick up for my comic collection. This one's great for several reasons. It fills a gap in my run of Strange Tales, it's a Jack Kirby book, and it also has a Steve Ditko story! So I'll go through this one and pretend I'm an eight-year-old kid again, discovering the world of comics created by Kirby and Ditko! This copy is nice. It has some classic 'Marvel chipping', but is otherwise in decent shape. Marvel books during this period were notorious for having low-quality cover stock that is susceptible to chipping along the leading edges. I can live with it.

My copy of STRANGE TALES #103.

SPEEDBALL 6-10.

There is a kind of charm to the SPEEDBALL series. Ditko crammed quite a lot of story into what was then a small publishing package. The size of your average monthly comic book at that time was reduced quite a lot from Ditko's days in the Golden Age and Silver Age. He figured a way around this by packing a lot of panels to the page--sometimes ten or twelve panels. Gone were his grand splash pages of the early days, reserving those for the opening shots of each issue.

Another thing he did that was old-school was that he sometimes had two separate stories in each issue. This also harkened back to the very early days of the resurgent superhero comics of the Silver Age. There is also the possibility that Ditko knew that the modern fan base might not go for his new series and he wanted to establish Speedball as a character and set up a history and a mythos as quickly as possible within the run of the book while he had the chance.

If that last possibility was correct, then it was the right thing to do. Because SPEEDBALL was canceled after only ten issues. The new crop of kids and subnormal adults in those days acting as Marvel's fan-base just weren't impressed with the old master's title. And so Ditko went back to doing his own thing on his own time and Marvel got yet another creation which they could turn into cash at some future date.

And so it goes.

SPEEDBALL #6.

SPEEDBALL #7. Ditko delivers one of his typical villains, a masked gunman.

SPEEDBALL #8. This is probably my favorite cover of the bunch. Featuring one of the simplest bad guys I've ever seen Ditko produce. And all the more appealing for that simplicity. Read it if you can find it.

SPEEDBALL #9...continuing the adventures of a teenaged superhero who still lives at home with his parents.

The last issue. Twisted science and criminal mayhem! What did Ditko suspect about Monsanto?! The finale of the series in which one of the bad guys is croaked in typical Ditko fashion.

SPEEDBALL!

Most of my collection of Steve Ditko comics are from 1968 and before. For a long time I didn't consider much of his later work for my collection for many reasons. I was mainly collecting his comics material because of feelings of nostalgia. So, even though Ditko was far more productive after 1968 than he was before that, I wasn't seriously looking upon that material as collectible.

But then I happened to buy a huge stack of Ditko's Charlton ghost stories mainly from the 1970s and early 80s. This was, I discovered, nice work. Especially the covers. And, of course, I decided to give such work consideration and began to collect it.

One title of which I was aware was SPEEDBALL. This is one he created upon his belated return to working at Marvel Comics. It's a hard one to pin down, and not among my favorite works by Mr. Ditko. He created, plotted, and penciled all of the ten issues he produced before it was canceled. But it's not the kind of thing that was foremost in my mind to add to the boxes of my Ditko books.

Finally, though, I located an entire set in nearly new condition at a silly-low price and took them home. The covers are pretty good for this period for Ditko, but the interiors just don't do it for me. There's not a lot of inventive use of layouts there, and none of the inkers seem to have appreciated delineating his pencils. I do understand that Ditko was all about laying down the line in quick order as he went into his later years--giving what he felt was a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. Perhaps that's why there's almost no magic to this series.

When I compare it to something like STATIC, which he did not too many years before SPEEDBALL, there is an enormous difference in quality. Maybe he just wasn't going to bust a gut for Marvel. It's hard to say.

The dialog is by Roger Stern, and I see little of Ditko's political and philosophical dogma running through the stories, but that stuff is there if you pay attention. In addition, there seems to be a struggle afoot between the creator and the publisher:

SPEEDBALL was marketed (it seems to me) as a book for younger readers. There is a grade-school feel to the logic and storytelling there. But it also has a hard edge to it in some of the adventures--and knowing Ditko's black/white good/evil way of seeing the world, I wonder if the series was indeed intended by him to be aimed at younger readers, or if the book was blind-sided by the publisher and its editors.

Who knows?

At any rate, I added them to my collection. It ain't THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, and it's not STATIC, and it's not even THE CREEPER or THE BLUE BEETLE. But it's still Ditko.

SPEEDBALL #1. Ditko starts off the series with a butt shot of the new hero. From everything I've read, his old professional nemesis Stan Lee HATED such covers. Seems fitting Ditko would deliver exactly thus since Liar Lee wasn't in the position to nix the cover at this point.

Issue #2. One of the weirder villains.

#3. Ditko seemed to enjoy creating superheroes who are not supremely powerful. Speedball is just such a creation. Unique, but not god-like. And so the villains he faced were similar in stature.

SPEEDBALL #4.

SPEEDBALL #5. I didn't particularly care for the inking done on any of the ten issues. It's all just uninspired. Decent, but there's no magic or care in it. I suspect Ditko must have been delivering the least amount of detail in his pencils and layouts.

Another Kirby in the Wall

I bought a copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #18 for my collection. The list is getting narrower. I'm about to get into mega-expensive territory (unless I can land some bargains).

This was one of my favorite early issues when I was a kid. The introduction of the Super Skrull. As all Fantastic Four fans know, the Skrulls were an alien race who first appeared in the second issue of Fantastic Four and would reappear now and again. This time, though, they brought along their big bruddah, the Super Skrull. Not only could he shape-shift (as all Skrulls can), but he had been given the powers of all of the Fantastic Four, but in spades. He was stronger than Ben Grimm (by several factors), could stretch farther than Mr. Fantastic, could burn hotter than the Human Torch, and could become invisible like Susan Storm.

How can they possibly defeat him?!! You'll have to read this issue to find out! But get your own. This copy is mine, and I ain't sharin'!

My copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #18.

Rough Job

As it says in the author description, I'm a laborer. Specifically, I deliver mail for the United States Postal Service. It's a tough job. Toughest I've ever had. But I'm reminded of a Marty Feldman quote whenever I think it can't get any worse.

Yeah, there aren't too many things more miserable than working in the cold rain. It sucks. It sucks chimp ass.

However, I arrived home to find that I'd filled in another bit in my Jack Kirby collection. My copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #19 arrived. And actually in a little nicer shape than the seller had indicated. I'm quite happy with it, and relieved to be home and out of the freaking rain.

My copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #19, written and illustrated by Jack Kirby.

FF 17

I just got this beauty in the mail. Gosh, I sure do like Ebay.

I have not read this comic since I was about nine or ten years old. It has been that long. Yes, I've had many copies over the years, but it was when I was a collectibles dealer and I didn't have time to read them. Back then, old comics were just a commodity to me. Yes, I liked them and felt affection for the old books, but all I was concerned with was selling them as fast as I could at a profit to enable me to buy the next collection coming down the line.

Nowadays, all I do is collect. I'm not in it to sell them. I buy them because I love the old comics and because of the nostalgia element.

Kirby realized what a cool character he'd created in Doctor Doom. I'm not sure if the fans in the early 60s were clamoring for more of his appearances, or if Kirby just wanted to write more stories with him. But by the time Fantastic Four #17 rolled 'round, this was Doom's fifth appearance! He was already on his way to becoming the Fantastic Four's arch-nemesis.

My Two Favorite Comic Stories

As a kid, I loved superhero comics. As an adult...not so much. Except, of course, in the realm of nostalgia. I still adore those comic stories that inspired and fascinated me as a kid and enjoy looking at them through the lens of decades of history.

My two favorite superhero comic book yarns were written and illustrated by (of course) my two favorite creators of that period of my life: Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. I won't get too much into the history of the pair of stories that so influenced me, except to reiterate that Steve Ditko created, wrote, and illustrated The Amazing Spider-Man; and Jack Kirby created, wrote, and illustrated the Fantastic Four. Neither man had a "co-creator"--just an editor.

I've also covered both of these stories in past essays here in my blog. So I'll just list the stories and the issues in which they appeared and leave my earlier words to stand; and perhaps add some depth to those essays on another day.

The first of these great stories was the Master Planner story arc that ran for several issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the finest super-hero story ever done. Ditko outdid not only himself with this adventure, but all other super-hero comic creators before or since. A few have come close to capturing the depth and breadth of what he was achieving, but no one has surpassed the sheer power of this tale.

When he was allowed, Ditko could create some of the finest covers being done in comics.

Yeah, the fans had never seen Spider-Man done like this.

Despair was never portrayed quite like this. Someday I need to do a study of the way Ditko utilized the imagery of water in his comics.

Years later, after Ditko had left his employment at Marvel Comics and abandoned his amazing creations there, his former colleague was winding down his own tenure at that company. Jack Kirby pretty much created not only most of the characters at Marvel, but the company itself. No one else was as important to that company as Jack Kirby. I have studied his run on his most popular title there, FANTASTIC FOUR, and always noticed that he seemed to let up on the gas after the "Him" storyline in issues 66 & 67. Further research led me to the conclusion that his editor there had wrecked his story, almost completely nullifying its effectiveness and mucking up the dialog pretty much beyond belief. Thereafter, the explosion of creativity that Kirby had lavished on the book to that point ceased. The stories were still excellent and the art was still the most dynamic around, but there were almost no new characters coming out of the book. Kirby was, I am convinced, fed up with seeing the sweat of his brow being capitalized by his employers with nothing for him beyond his page rate. Further, not only was his intellectual property being robbed from him, his stories were often being mangled by the ego-mad idiot editor under whom he worked. Thus, the flow of new properties to his bosses slowed to a trickle.

Then, in issue #90 of the title, a new story arc appeared. The Skrull/Slave arc. It could be argued that the plot was partially based on the germ of an idea from the TV series Star Trek. But beyond that it was all classic Kirby. Kirby had always been fascinated by mob characters and science fiction. And so he plunged his comic book alter-ego, Ben Grimm, into a long story steeped in mob culture and a pure science-fiction, planet-spanning adventure. It was, I now know, Kirby's fond farewell to his character of Ben Grimm as he planned his move away from Marvel and to fields greener for his creative energies.

Symbolism. One of Kirby's earliest creations for Marvel was the alien race, the Skrulls, who were shape-shifters. Here, he is tricked and kidnapped by a Skrull posing as his friend, Reed Richards. Fooled again, sucker!

Ben Grimm, in chains!

One of the most effective and dramatic covers I've seen in superhero comics.

The finale. Torgo was the major character (I can't say "villain" because he truly was not such) that Kirby created for this story arc. However, for all the emotional power of Torgo, Kirby chose to give him a kind of generic android appearance similar to the kind of thing he'd been handing off to his employers since issue #68 of the title. Let them create their OWN unique images to exploit!

Comic Collection Additions.

I haven't had much time to devote to my comic collecting hobby lately. In fact, I've had quite a dry period for that because of my workload. I've been way too busy to work on the collection very much.

But I have picked up a couple of comics recently.

Adding to my early Marvel collection I grabbed a copy of STRANGE TALES #112. Jack Kirby cover. One of my pals has made the pitch that if the cover for these early superhero stories was by Kirby, then he likely did the plot also. He'd hand in the art for the cover along with the plot. Of course the plot would later be credited to a certain asshole editor who wrote nothing and created nothing and who slapped his name on everything to pad his paycheck and to ensure that the company retained copyright.

This issue has a story illustrated by Dick Ayers. When I was a kid I never liked any of the Human Torch stories that Ayers illustrated. There was something in those days that I found crude about his art style and I always found it an effort to read any story that he illustrated. Of course now I have a greater appreciation for him, but there's always that nagging memory of my childhood feelings coloring my opinion of his work.

The story dialog is credited to someone named "Joe Carter". I didn't know who this was, so I asked around on the Internet about him, and was informed that Mr. Carter was, in fact, Jerry Siegel, one half of the creative team who gave us Superman. In the early 60s he was still writing for the industry and he did the dialog on a number of these Human Torch yarns.

There's also a good Steve Ditko science-fiction story in the mix. All through the first few years of the superhero renaissance at Marvel there was a backlog of science-fiction and monster stories written and illustrated by the likes of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Paul Reinman, and the rest of the Marvel bullpen in those days. So Marvel would pad the issues out with these unpublished stories that had already been commissioned and paid for. It's actually for these monster stories mainly by Kirby and Ditko that I started collecting comics again.

STRANGE TALES #112.

Another book that I picked up was an EC. I don't focus on collecting Golden Age comics, but I do enjoy buying EC books now and again. I've bought a number of them this year, and this one was a real find. It's in decent shape and is currently the oldest EC comic that I own, published in 1950. It's #16, but is in reality #2 of the title. It used the numbering from a previous title and after #17 the numbering started with #4. So there are actually two "#15 through #17", which can be confusing.

Owning this book, I'm reminded why EC is considered as having the highest quality stories and artwork of any mainstream comic book publisher in the history of the format. I hope to keep buying ECs over the next few years.

HAUNT OF FEAR #16 (actually #2) with a great Johnny Craig cover.