The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem Page B

lack of fingernails or other fine detail. Artists like Neal Adams and Gil Kane had, since Kirby, set new standards for anatomical and proportional “realism,” and those standards had soon been made peculiarly normative by (to me, much less interesting) artists like John Byrne and George Perez: superhero comics weren’t supposed to look “cartoonish” anymore. Karl had no tolerance. I, schooled both in my father’s expressionist-painter’s love of exaggeration and fantasy, and in Luke’s scholarly and tendentious devotion to his older brother’s comics, decided I saw what Karl couldn’t.
    Of course, in my defense of Kirby I was conflating comic art and comic writing. I need to quit conflating them here. That is to say, it’s possible to debate the moment in the seventies when Kirby’s penciling began to go south. He was good; he got worse. What’s undebatable is the execrable, insufferable pomposities of Kirby’s dialogue writing in the Marvel work without Lee. Or the deprivations involved in trying to love his galactically distant and rather depressed story lines. As a scripter, as opposed to “idea man,” he stunk.
    I did try to love the story lines. It mattered to me. With Luke’s help I’d understood that Kirby represented our parents’ values, the Chuck Berry values. In Kirby resided the higher morality of the Original Creator. That which I’d sworn to uphold, against the shallow killing-the-father imperatives of youth.
    Luke, it should be said, never cared about Kirby’s return. Luke was a classicist, and didn’t buy new comics. I was on my own, hung out to dry by
The Eternals
.
    Karl and I were also drawing comics in those days. Well not really comics—we were drawing superheroes: on single pages we’d design a character, detail his costume and powers and affect, then speculate on his adventures. I was profligate in this art, quickly generating a large stack of characters, whose names, apart from “Poison Ivy” and “The Hurler,” I can no longer retrieve from the memory hole. Karl drew fewer characters, more carefully, and imparted to them more substantial personalities and histories. One day in Karl’s room he and I were arguing about Kirby (we really did this: argue about Kirby) and I formulated a rhetorical question, meant to shock Karl into recognition of Kirby’s awesome gifts: Who, I asked Karl, besides Kirby, had ever shown the ability to generate so many characters, so many distinctive costumes, so many different archetypal personas? In reply, Karl turned the tables on me, with a weird trick of undercutting flattery. He said,
You
.
    At the time my ego chose to be buoyed by Karl’s remark. But really he’d keyed on an increasing childishness in Kirby. None of Kirby’s army of new characters at Marvel were ever going to be real, were ever going to mean much to anyone. They weren’t fated to live in meaningful stories. They were only empty costumes, like my own drawings. There was something regressive about Kirby now—he’d become self-affirming, the outsider artist decorating the walls of private rooms.
    The comics Karl and I actually relished in 1976 and 1977, if we were honest (and Karl was more honest than me), were
The Defenders
,
Omega the Unknown
, and
Howard the Duck
, all written by a mad genius named Steve Gerber, and
Captain Marvel
and
Warlock
, both written and drawn by another auteur briefly in fashion, named Jim Starlin. As far as the art went, Gerber liked to collaborate with plodding but inoffensive pencilers like Jim Mooney and Sal (“The Lesser”) Buscema. Those guys moved the story along well enough. Starlin’s were drawn in a slickly hip and mildly psychedelic style exaggerated in the direction of adult comix like
Heavy Metal
, but with the “realistic” musculature that the moment (and Karl) demanded, rather than the Franz Kline kneecaps and biceps of Jack Kirby. Gerber’s tales were wordy, satirical and self-questioning, and stuffed full of homely