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T H E D A I L Y H A M M E R
February 13, 2007
Unspeakable shit "Who can tell what's going to rile you up," said a friend recently, and it's true that in the midst of Darfur, peak oil, and ... MORE

Fabulous book cover of the month

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Stan Lee, Stan Lee, Stan Lee. All you ever hear about is freakin' Stan Lee and how he "revolutionized" comics. I'm sick of it. Especially since it was Stan Lee who helped Marvel Comics screw his old pal, the genius Jack Kirby, out of ownership of his own original artwork.

What Stan Lee did was introduce angst and self-doubt into the personality of the costumed superhero. This was an original idea for its time. It worked pretty well for Spider-Man, the first character of this type. After Spider-Man came many more characters who were all brooders: the Thing, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, the Sub-Mariner. They're all practically the same guy, guys who worry and fret as much as they beat people up.

The Silver Surfer was the most tedious superhero of them all. All the Silver Surfer would ever do was fly around cursing mankind for its shortsightedness and violence. BO-ring! (Even Jack Kirby's awesome spacescapes couldn't save this turkey.) The Silver Surfer was followed by the dysfunctional Avengers, and the biggest angst-filled bores of all, the X-Men (not the original X-Men, whom Jack Kirby actually invented himself, but the later X-Men).

There I said it. The X-Men. Boring. Overrated. Buncha wanky whiners. You got a problem with that? Bring it on, motherfucker! And while we're on the subject, you know who else is an overrated bore? Frank Miller's goddamn "Dark Knight." You take a perfectly fine D.C. superhero and apply the Marvel formulaic angst and brooding, add some warmed-over third-rate noir, and you get the colossal bore that is Frank Miller's Batman.

"The Dark Knight." Jesus, that is so gay. Give me a fucking break.

But what I want to talk about is not Stan Lee and all the overwrought, overrated, pretentious bullshit he spawned, but rather the overlooked genius Jack Kirby. Jack Kirby may not have invented the Space Opera--that, I believe, would be Isaac Asimov--but he brought an unprecedented scope and quality of imagination to space-based comics. His outer space scenes boiled and bubbled with textures and patterns. He filled his panels with rows of weirdly organic-looking machinery stretching to infinity, pentagon-headed armies of androids, and humongous cityscapes reaching toward extraterrestrial skies with threateningly asymmetrical shapes. Jack Kirby's worlds were heavy and ill. There was always the sense that things were not okay, that the heavily inked atmospheres that hung over everything would in the end crush any temporary victory won by the good guys. His angst was not obvious and scripted, but rather expressed itself in the feverish imagination of his drawings that always outweighed the happy endings.

So where are the Jack Kirby compilations and reissues? Nowhere, because guess who is in charge of the official history of superhero comics? Stan Lee. And according to Stan Lee, Stan Lee is is the only guy who mattered in the Marvel revolution. So if you see him at another one of those occasions when he's taking credit for everything good and true, go up to him and say two words: "Jack Kirby." He will not be able to look you in the eye.