The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem Page A

breathe of it to another boy, let alone be initiated by one more knowing.
We
and
you
don’t know a thing about what
I
felt back then, any more than
I
know a thing about what
you
felt.
    Specifically, nobody much cherishes the comics of Kirby’s “return to Marvel” period—
2001
,
The Eternals
,
Mister Machine
. Even for souls who take these things all too seriously, those comics have a minor place in the history, defining only an awkward misstep in a dull era at Marvel, before the brief popular renaissance signaled by the ascent of the Chris Claremont
X-Men
. Here, joining the chorus of the indifferent, is Kirby himself, from an interview with Gary Groth of
Comics Journal
, one which ranged over his whole glorious career:
    Interviewer: “It always seemed like your last stint at Marvel was a little halfhearted.”
    Kirby: “Yeah.”
    Anyway I want to withdraw the Lennon-McCartney comparison, because there’s something else I’ve sensed about the Kirby-Lee partnership: it seems to me that Kirby must have been a kind of ambivalent father figure to Lee. Kirby was only five years older, but they were crucial years— crucial in defining two different types of American manhood. Kirby came of age in the thirties, was toughened by his Depression boyhood and perhaps privately, stoically scarred by his frontline experiences in World War II. Lee seems more like the subsequent kind of American male, the coddled fifties striver who lived in the world his parents had fought for and earned. Lee was more a wannabe beatnik—Maynard G. Krebs, let’s say. This difference perhaps underlies the extremes of their contribution to the Fantastic Four: Kirby concerned himself with a clash of dark and light powers, and passionately identified with alien warrior-freaks who, like John Wayne in
The Searchers
, were sworn to protect the vulnerable civilian (or human) societies they were forever incapable of living among. His vision was darkly paternal. Lee was the voice of the teenage nonconformist, looking for kicks in a boring suburb, diffident about the familial structures by which he was nevertheless completely defined.
    John Wayne in
The Searchers
is, crucially, a Civil War veteran, made strong and ruined by what he’d glimpsed on the battlefield. Similarly, the first thing to know, and the easiest thing to overlook, about the iconic hard-boiled detective of the Raymond Chandler–Dashiell Hammett–Humphrey Bogart type is that he wears a
trench
coat—that is, he’s a veteran of the First World War. I was once told by a biographer who’d researched Jimmy Stewart’s years as an air commander in World War II that the crucial material in Stewart’s war record was sealed. (Stewart, unlike others who served less vitally but wore their experiences on their sleeves, tended not to talk about the war.) The biographer wondered if Stewart might actually have led a portion of the raid on Dresden, and been protected from infamy by his government. The biographer also wondered if whatever was sealed inside that war record had fueled the deepening and darkening of Stewart’s postwar work—the alienation and morbidity and even cynicism that the great and formerly gentle leading man displayed in films like
Vertigo
,
The Naked Spur
, and
Anatomy of a Murder
. Now, when I consider the steady alienation from humankind of Kirby’s bands of outsiders—from the Fantastic Four to the Inhumans to the New Gods to the Eternals—I wonder if he might be one of those who could never completely come home again.
    But he did try to come home in 1976, to Marvel. And Karl and I bought the hype, and bought the comics. And Karl didn’t like them, and I did. Or, anyway, I defended them. I pretended to like them. Karl immediately took up a view, one I’ve now learned, in my research, was typical of a young seventies Marvel fan: he said Kirby sucked because he didn’t draw the human body right. Karl was embarrassed by the clunkiness, the raw and ragged dynamism, the