The Strange Awkward Silences Of John Forte's Legion Of Superheroes: Part 1

1. "Who Has A More Unique Power?" / "I have!"

Though respected voices such as that of Mark Waid speak exceptionally well of the art he produced for 1961's "Tales Of The Bizarro World" strip, John Forte's subsequent work on the "Legion of Superheroes" is never referred to with anything close to unqualified praise. Even Paul Levitz, writing at his most diplomatic in the introduction to the Legion Of Super-Heroes Archives volume 2, will only go as far as mentioning how Forte's " ... curious frozen style found its fame here.", a description remarkable for how it appears to speak well of Mr Forte's work without saying a single good thing about it. And while most every other artist working on the Superman titles in the early-to-mid 1960s is remembered with at the very least considerable fondness, Mr Forte remains a critical anomaly. Many of the stories he illustrated are regarded as classics, or at least vital components of Legion lore, but he's rarely spoken of as anything other than an impediment to reader's enjoyment of the book, then as well as now. George Perez, for example, has said that " ... while I loved the book, there was something about John Forte's art that didn't seem quite right ... although I loved the John Forte stuff because I loved the Legion ... ". And longstanding Legion fan Harry Broertjes concurs, writing that "As a boy reading these stories, I knew in the back of my mind that there was something peculiar about his work -- a curious stiffness in the poses and faces of his characters, the oddball perspective he brought to his distance shots, the strange sense of scale which permeated his work ... Forte's clunk metal robots and mechanical computers, his improbable spaceships and his apparent fondness for 20th century wooden furniture ..."


In the light of such a critical consensus, it seems somewhat amazing that Mr Forte ever managed to hold down his job while, obviously by the good luck of chance and factors beyond his design, the LSH under his care became something of a considerable newsstand success. It's as if the Legion of Super-Heroes became commercially viable despite the artist who guided their development through the first few years of their existence rather than because of his efforts. Ex-DC writer Cary Burkett would seem to support such a contention when he describes how, during his comic-book reading youth, " ... John Forte was drawing the Legion of Super-Heroes ... not a period of stellar art for them either.", and the artist Kevin Nowlan has argued that Mr Forte's work belonged to a typically dull period of comic book journeyman art characterised by "No exaggeration. The action ... very restrained." Indeed, the devastating judgement of John Forte's work on the Legion by Will Jacobs and Gerald Jones in their laudable history "The Comic Book Heroes" can be securely presented as an unguarded, but probably generally-held description, of how his work has been regarded for many, many years. After describing how engaging and imaginative the scripts of then-Legion writer Edmund Hamilton were, Jacobs and Jones write that;

"The man who had to draw such things, and consistently failed to make them impressive, was John Forte, a stiff penciller with a flat style that made everything smaller than life."

2. "I Vote We Battle Them To A Showdown"

There's absolutely no doubt that John Forte's work is odd. There's a few lines spoken by the character Noonan in Joe Hill's short story "Best New Horror", which I was unwisely reading last night just before bed, that seemed to me to best sum up the effect of Mr Forte's work;

"You know how when you're running a fever, you'll look at something totally normal - like the lamp on your desk - and it'll seem somehow unnatural?"

And that's what John Forte's art describes, I believe, a world which at first glance looks "totally normal", at least in superhero comic-book terms, and yet is simultaneously "somehow unnatural". It's a strangely unsettling quality, one of tedium and wonder, banality and beauty, and it seems to say at times that perhaps Mr Forte didn't quite understand what it was he was doing, as if he was ignorant and unconcerned of the long tradition of how superheroes should be depicted, and of how the worlds that the superhero moves through have been shown. In retrospect, it might be expected that this unnerving, untypical quality would mark Mr Forte's art as something quietly remarkable, as a breath of variety in a marketplace marked even then by a homogeneity of style. But that's rarely been the case, and John Forte's work has only on occasion been seen kindly as the work of an inspired maverick. Instead, he's always been a man out of time, then as now, lost to the apparent great leap forward that was the new age of Sixties' super-heroes, neither Swan nor Kirby, Infantino nor Ditko, his art dead on the page with too many unintegrated idiosyncrasies and too little dynamism.

Or so it has seemed ever since the emergence of the fan-boy in the early 1960s. John Forte's LSH art has always stood outside of the circle of critical favour. But, as Glenn Cadigan writes in "The Legion Companion", John Forte was in his day regarded by his editors as a versatile artist who was " ... known to be a good worker who consistently made his deadlines, and he developed a quick, efficient style which was well suited to the young audience for whom his work was intended." Yet, for all of those positive qualities in John Forte's work where his editors were concerned, he's never been able to compete with the affection felt by readers for the work of the Swans and Plastinos, the Mooneys and the Schaffenbergers, who were also producing work to order for such a youthful market.

The photograph of John Forte above is a scan taken from "The Legion Of Super-Heroes Companion" by Twomorrows publishing.

3. "In Disgrace, For Your Black Deeds"

But even some of John Forte's fiercest critics will also admit that his work contained qualities worthy of note, if not actually unrestrained praise. Jacobs and Jones followed up their disdainful judgement of the artists' achievement with the concession that " .. he had a weird, archaic imagination for costumes and paraphernalia - like the clubhouse that looked like a Buck Rogers rocket jammed upside down in the ground - and the frozen caricature of his faces left no doubt of his characters' passions." All of which sounds as if Mr Forte's work contained at the very least elements of lasting utility if not beauty. And Harry Broertjes writes at some length, in his introduction to the Legion of Super-Heroes Archives volume 3, that " .. no-one in comics has ever drawn a bigger menagerie of truly weird and imaginative alien monsters -- or, for that matter, a wider array of distinctly humanoid alien sentients."

Now, I'll take issue with Jacobs and Jones belief that the faces of Mr Forte's characters indicated anything regularly except the blank stares of bored but obedient children waiting for their photographs to be taken and hoping they don't blink at the wrong time, but beyond that, these positive qualities seem quite substantial, especially where a superhero/science-fiction property such as the Legion Of Super-Heroes is concerned. Splendid costumes? Distinct bases, fantastic and memorable aliens? It could be argued that these were exactly the tropes of the superhero book regularly missing from the work of the far-more-highly regarded Mr Swan and Mr Moody, for example.

And yet, the popular prejudice concerning John Forte's work is largely mine too. I felt alienated by his work when I was young, felt betrayed when yet another beautifully rendered Curt Swan cover of "Adventure Comics" issue was turned to reveal another frozen, distorted, unsatisfying Forte-ian job. But I offer up my reservations and prejudices with a single caveat, for Mr Forte's work is still studded with remarkable horizontal panels which offer pleasures quite different to any offered by the other superhero artist of his era, and indeed of all those since. And it's to those horizontal panels that I'd like to dwell upon for a few entries on TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics. For I truly do believe that there are examples of Mr Forte's work which achieve a succesful and controlled strangeness which far more acclaimed artists never thought to aspire to, just as there are significant swathes of his stories which could in their dullness, to paraphrase the despicable Ciano, kill a bull if a bull could read. And the strangest thing is that the very qualities which cause his work to be entrancing are those which also cause his art at other moments to be quite stupefying.

I've placed a few scans of Mr Forte's "horizontal" panels above. I'll explain what I mean, beyond the yawningly obvious, by that phrase in the next entry on this blog, which I do hope you'll join me for, but until then, perhaps you'll accept my invitation to consider the panels above and judge for yourself what virtues they may, or may not, possess. Yes, I've placed some work there that I think is quite awful, but there's also some work, I believe, of a greater virtue too.

To be continued.