OBSCURA
Barry Forshaw
A regular column focusing on Kirby’s least known work, by Barry Forshaw Barry Forshaw is the author of Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide and American Noir (available from Amazon) and the editor of Crime Time (www.crimetime. co.uk); he lives in London.
there is a story called “The Two-Dimensional Man” in which the hapless protagonist takes a powder that turns him into a comically-drawn “flat man.” The story is full of truly bizarre ideas, and Kirby tackles head-on one quite absurd sequence in which a group of cows about to be transported are turned into flat, two-dimensional creatures and stacked like a pile of newspapers—even though they are still living and breathing. The hero is next up (accidentally) for the treatment, and the reader has time to wonder why if he has ingested the transformational powder via a cup of tea (he has an English butler—it’s the only way Americans drink tea, of course, when given to them by their London-born butler), how it is possible for his clothes to attain the same two-dimensional status as his body. But the story is great fun, and the best thing in an issue which contains an excellent piece by Lou Cameron, who also provides a rare cover. And “The Two-Dimensional Man” is a reminder of how humour was something else that Kirby could do when necessary. The recent death of Mad magazine’s great caricaturist Mort Drucker makes one wonder about the other things that Kirby might have done in this area, given the chance—although he did do humour work for Marvel and Mad imitators.
CONFRONTING THE RIDICULOUS
All readers of this magazine will happily accept praise for the comics medium in general, won’t they? After all, why would anyone be looking at The Jack Kirby Collector if they were not a fan of the medium? But here’s something you may not have heard praised before; the possibility that the medium can (that is, for the duration of a story) make the ridiculous—as opposed to the simply imaginative—surprisingly plausible. In comics, somehow, all things are possible—which they are demonstrably not in other fields. Case in point: Jack Kirby’s work on Fantastic Four—and specifically Mr. Fantastic. The first example of a human being who can stretch and distort his body in astonishing ways was, of course, Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, and Cole was well aware of just how silly (and unscientific) the concept was. Cole played his red-clad hero (and idiotic sidekick Woozy Winks) for laughs—in fact, there are those who would argue that Plastic Man was the greatest humour comic book ever produced. But when Kirby and Stan Lee repurposed the notion with Reed Richards, they largely played it straight, and Kirby enthusiasts were persuaded to willingly accept this most ridiculous of superhero powers. However, there is an earlier example in Kirby’s work of something similar in terms of outrageous notions—but on this earlier occasion, it is perfectly clear that he knew it was impossible to take the concept seriously. In DC’s Tales of the Unexpected #24 (April 1958),
GARGOYLES
Writing a column such as this over a long period— which John Morrow has been kind enough to ask me to do—leads to certain problems. For a start, writers such as myself have to avoid an endless stream of encomiums for the subject of the column (in this case, a certain comics illustrator); that would become a little boring after a while, and—apart from anything else—most readers of The Jack Kirby Collector don’t need to be persuaded of the talents of the man whose name is in the masthead. To that end, over the years, I’ve tried to be frank about what even Kirby’s admirers sometimes admit are the missteps of the Master: such as the fact that his amazingly fertile writing imagination (leaving aside his illustrative skills) was wildly undisciplined—and even in his best work, in need of a stern editorial hand such as that provided by Stan Lee (and which was in less evidence in his last DC period). Having said that, one can instantly start to argue with oneself—despite the purple prose and the occasional incoherent plotting, Kirby’s innovations in those final DCs still produced an amazing bushel of concepts and notions which are still in use today, including one which is central to the current DC universe: the godlike super-villain Darkseid. But back to finding something new to look at in the work of Jack Kirby. Examining a typical issue of Atlas/Marvel’s Strange Tales (#74, from April 1960) will remind the reader of what was becoming a typical package of that era: a lead-off Kirby strip followed by back-ups from the likes of Don Heck and Paul Reinman, topped off with an outing from editor Stan Lee’s other heavy hitter, Steve Ditko. In this issue, the Heck and Reinman tales are unexciting, standard stuff—as they so often are in the books of this period. The Ditko closer, “When the Totem Walks”, is one of his most impressive pieces from this period, with a dynamic splash panel that dispenses with the border and uses the white of the page to great effect. But we’re here to talk about Jack Kirby, and the opening story, “Gorgolla! The Living Gargoyle!!” (overuse of exclamation marks was a Stan Lee 40
