The
first comic I ever read
"The Fantastic Four”
Written – Stan Lee
Pencilers – Jack Kirby
Inker – George Klein and Christopher Rule
Colorist – Stan Goldberg
Letters – Artie Simek
Editor – Stan Lee
November 1961
Written – Stan Lee
Pencilers – Jack Kirby
Inker – George Klein and Christopher Rule
Colorist – Stan Goldberg
Letters – Artie Simek
Editor – Stan Lee
November 1961
Now
before you begin thinking that the Crapbox contains a copy of the much
sought-after first issue of The Fantastic Four, calm yourselves. It doesn’t.
The printout you see above and the panels that follow are courtesy of Marvel’s
Fantastic Four/Silver Surfer DVD collection that I picked up a few years ago.
However,
I had read and committed to memory this story and the ones that followed it
from reprints in paperback form that Marvel produced in 1977. Dubbed Marvel
Comics Series, these sold for just under two bucks. And although the book bears
the sin of omitting Jack Kirby’s name, his indelible penciling is showcased
through-out its pages.
I
have stated before that I owned a few of these, including Spider-Man and Doctor
Strange. They became lost or thrown out years ago and until finding one at a
comic book convention, I had no remembrances of having owned them. I knew I’d
read the starter stories from somewhere, but for the life of me could not
recall where. Some part of me passed it off as having read them out of the
library, but that chance find at Dallas’s Fan Days jogged those memories right
back.
This was my first comic, and I cannot think of a better place to have started.
Come with me, back to a time before the bickering over who did what, and jump into the head of a ten year old kid who cherished reading more than anything. A strange little boy who you could sit in the corner with a book and he would not move for hours, lost in worlds long ago and far away. A kid with few friends who felt like the people on the pages were real and their struggles were part of his daily existence. A time when things seemed a little more innocent, even if they truly weren’t.
This was my first comic, and I cannot think of a better place to have started.
Come with me, back to a time before the bickering over who did what, and jump into the head of a ten year old kid who cherished reading more than anything. A strange little boy who you could sit in the corner with a book and he would not move for hours, lost in worlds long ago and far away. A kid with few friends who felt like the people on the pages were real and their struggles were part of his daily existence. A time when things seemed a little more innocent, even if they truly weren’t.
A time for heroes.
It's
a mysterious type of beginning, starting with a flare gun creating a cloud
filled with the words “The Fantastic Four” over the city of New York. The
police are baffled and rumors fly even among the boys in blue. A figure covered
in shadow stands by a window. His hand holds the very gun that fired the flare,
its smoke curling from the barrel as evidence of his deed.
And
the world will never be the same again.
Likewise,
the world outside those four-color pages would never be the same again either. The
Fantastic Four kicked off the Marvel Age of comics. And even though Kirby had
worked in the industry for nearly two decades, most of us would label this the
Kirby Age of comics as well.
Image courtesy of mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com
Kirby began his career in comics working for the Lincoln Newspaper
Syndicate in 1936. He was self-taught, having spent his formative years drawing
and tracing images from the newspaper strips and editorial cartoons. He
remained until 1939 and then joined up with Fleischer Studios working on their
Popeye cartoons as an inbetweener (an artist who fills in the action between
major-movement frames) but the repetitive work didn’t suit him. He exited
Fleisher for something more his style.
His
comic book work began with him writing and drawing form Eisner & Iger, a
firm that created comics on demand for publishers. Kirby’s first published
work, according to him, appeared in Wild Boy Magazine. Kirby used pseudonyms
through much of his early career, settling on the name Jack Kirby only because
it reminded him of James Cagney.
From
there, he moved on to the Fox Feature Syndicate and for the first time started
exploring the superhero narrative with The Blue Beetle. During that time he met
Fox editor Joe Simon, and began a collaborative effort as freelancers for Timely
Comics. For the house that would eventually be renamed Marvel two decades
hence, the pair created the successful patriotic superhero Captain America.
Simon became Timely’s editor and Kirby their art director until the war effort
took Kirby into the European theater.
After
a post-war success in creating romance comics allowed Kirby to purchase his
first home and first home studio, Joe and Jack allowed Timely’s (now Atlas
Comics) relaunch of Captain America in 1954 to produce Fighting American. The
venture initially meant to outdo Atlas’s Cap, but soon devolved into satire of
the current anti-communist McCarthyism in Washington.
In
the years that followed, things would become strained between the pair, with
Simon eventually leaving the industry for a career in advertising. Kirby
continued to freelance, which lead him back to Atlas and DC and then finally
back to Atlas again. For a couple of years Kirby contributed across all genres
until November of 1961 served up a chance at the newly minted Marvel imprint in
collaboration with current writer/editor-in-chief Stan Lee.
What
followed was a decade of Kirby defining the Marvel house style and Stan Lee
promoting artists as if they were rock stars, none being awarded higher praise
than Jack “King” Kirby.
image courtesy of www.comicbook.com
So
settle back as we traipse through these digital leaves of the first ever story
of the era of Marvel comics. While it may begin with smoke and mystery, it
continues with a woman who vanishes.
Across
town a woman notices the smoky words hanging above her head and exclaims to her
friend Susan bewilderment at their discovery.
Yet
she turns to encounter more shocking revelations as Susan has disappeared into
thin air. Also Susan never to my knowledge ever called this woman back to
apologize. Rude! But not as rude as knocking over people just because they can’t
see you. Surely she could, you know, find a path that doesn’t involve pushing
every single person out of the way.
And
when knocking over pedestrians ceases to be fun, Susan then decides to give
this cab driver a fright that possibly will lead to lots of psychological counseling.
All of which begs the question: Why not wait until she was at her destination
to turn invisible?
Feeling
that a formula for introducing characters is at play here, we turn to Ben Grimm
shopping for clothes. When tossing off his “this crap would not really conceal
what I look like” trench coat to expose his Thing-ness, the clerk faints dead
away. So far, the Fantastic Four are two for two at scaring the bejeezus out of
people who don’t deserve it.
Grimm
feels that Susan out did him however, so he destroys the storefront, rips up a
manhole and thoroughly demolishes some poor motorist’s car. Remember when I said
the FF was Marvel’s first family of dickmoves? Well, here you go.
It
is plenty exciting, though.
Exciting
to a pair of teenagers working in a garage on a vintage car, even!
Especially
when the smoke words do things that are physically impossible, like form a
number “4” in the sky before they dissipate. It excites one of the lads so much
that his burgeoning hormones cause him to burst into flames. We lose more nice
teenagers that way.
Not
to mention classic cars! Again, the FF are dicks since it would have been just
as easy to step out of the car before melting it to slag.
Just
to be sure we are ramping up the assholery here, our human matchstick melts a
few jet planes because they “get too close to him”.
The
military decides to shoot him out of the sky…
…but
at the last second, he’s rescued by the one person who DIDN’T destroy any part
of the city or mess with anyone’s head.
Who
are these fantastical folk? What are they doing here? What does a twelve year
old think of their destruction of property and infliction of mental anguish?
I
can answer all of these. For that last one, that kid…he thought they were
amazingly cool! I can recall the wonder and affection I had for Lee and Kirby’s
tales right from the very start. It was the very start of that love affair with
Marvel that last throughout my school years and beyond.
What
follows is the pure 60’s Sci-fi version of a family trying to beat the Commies
into space, daring even their own lives to make that jump. In five astounding
pages, Jack and Stan created a legend that isn’t diminished to this very day.
(Even if the assholes at Marvel don’t want to properly package and sell that
legend anymore.)
The
look of fear on these faces, the pelting with cosmic radiation, and the
transformation sequences are rightly copied by others retelling this origin but never improved upon. Kirby
kicked off the mythos of this quartet of adventurers with exactly the right
amount of danger, thrills, and heart. That moment of hesitation before Ben
throws in shows so much. We have Reed as the brains, Sue as the maternal
instinct, Johnny as playful childish exuberance and Ben as the true heart. Their
powers match their nature.
And
if the reader thought that was all he was getting for his two nickels, he was
happily mistaken. Jack and Stan weren’t done with us just yet. Now we enter the
adventure proper, with Jack’s dramatic creatures and posing.
It
is interesting to note a couple of things: First, no uniforms on our cast. The
FF wouldn’t start wearing costumes until the mid-point of issue three. The idea
was to make them more like people with powers rather than the underwear and
capes set. It set the title apart in a very subtle but distinct way.
Secondly,
much of what is depicted are things that Jack was already a master at drawing.
Science fiction and monster stories were both genres that Kirby had been
cutting his teeth on for decades.
The
action sequences were what really grabbed us, however. Like this bit with Reed
and Johnny.
Not
to mention that Jack and Stan were at the pinnacle of their imaginative phase.
As I’ve said before, I know there is a controversy over who authored much of
these tales, the answer to which is only known between the two of them. And
while Stan may have given very short descriptions of story directions and
sketchy plotting, as Kirby has stated, there are still things that we can
easily ascribe to Lee.
For
one, he created a studio that put out a massive amount of characters in a very
short time span that were bona fide winners. Whether he wrote every story
himself or whether his “Marvel method” of giving the artist two sentences of
story plot and letting them run with it, you should credit Lee with not hampering
the creative flow of his staff.
Also
Lee made the artists and writers household names. He was a promoter extraordinaire
and from the lines of Bullpen Bulletins and Stan’s Soapbox, we loyal Marvel
Zombies felt like we knew these people. He made them into kin or folk heroes or
rock stars, imbuing each with an honorary title.
And
in Kirby he found a fount overflowing with amazing visuals, astonishing plots
and great characters. Like our Moleman here, whose origin Kirby spins out in
our final chapter.
Then
Kirby pulls out all the stops with a rock’em-sock’em finale that quite
literally brings the house down.
And
although the first of the FF’s adventures had concluded, they flew off into the
sunrise of a new era in comics. An era that would be filled with more great
characters and terrific action. An era that would cement Kirby’s genius as the
model for over a decade as the official template for doing a Marvel comic the
right way.
I’m
going to shamelessly steal a quote from wiki attributed to Gil Kane from Dallas
Fantasy Fair, July 6, 1985.
“Jack was the single most influential figure
in the turnaround in Marvel's fortunes from the time he rejoined the company
... It wasn't merely that Jack conceived most of the characters that are being
done, but ... Jack's point of view and philosophy of drawing became the
governing philosophy of the entire publishing company and, beyond the
publishing company, of the entire field ... [Marvel took] Jack and use[d] him
as a primer. They would get artists ... and they taught them the ABCs, which
amounted to learning Jack Kirby. ... Jack was like the Holy Scripture and they
simply had to follow him without deviation. That's what was told to me ... It
was how they taught everyone to reconcile all those opposing attitudes to one
single master point of view.”
I
owe my love of comics in large part to Kirby and his influence throughout the
comics industry. My first books were Marvel and the first artists I followed
were Kirby and those who adopted his style.
Today
would have been Jack Kirby’s 100th birthday.
Many of my friends who blog are doing similar Kirby-themed articles today to honor his contribution. Feel free to check them out at the links below.
