1.
There are without doubt a host of reasons why someone might declare a particular version of a serial fiction property to be the definitive one, but, of course, there is no right answer. It's always a matter of opinion, and that's what makes each new re-invention of a comicbook as fascinating as it might be disappointing. We want to know whether a new approach to an old character can get it right, even as we know that there's no exclusively correct version at all. Yet, re-reading the Avengers work of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby has made me wonder whether there are some objective qualities that might be found in their work which make their portrayal of characters and concepts seem definitive. By this I mean that I've recently started to ponder whether the fusion of style and content that a team of creators adopts can carry a greater or lesser sense of authority with its readers. Is it possible that there's a way of presenting the superhero on the page which is more likely to cause the reader to decide that that is the version, that is the take, which should in future be acknowledged, respected and kept to? Because I suspect that some creators present their tales in such a way that causes, regardless of the story they're actually telling, the world they're depicting and the characters they're describing to appear to be more objective, more real, more definitive.
We might love a version of Spider-Man because it was the first comic book we ever read, or a take on Batman because we were exposed to it at a particularly vulnerable moment of early adolescence. We might be drawn to a specific artist's style, or to an emotional moment which touches us. But perhaps, beyond the content of the narrative and the nature of the superheroes involved, there are qualities of storytelling in this sub-genre which demand that we take what we're being shown seriously, that impose upon us the creator's version of events in such a way that leaves our imaginations less able, and less willing, to question the validity of what we're seeing.
2.
I'm not suggesting that the work of Lee and Kirby can be argued to constitute that least convincing of propositions, the utterly closed text, where meaning is completely fixed and narrative exists in a form that can't be quibbled with. (Such a comic book would be a form of Anti-Life Equation, after all, nullifying free will and stultifying the reader's creativity! Mr Kirby would never have approved.) And yet I am starting to believe that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's work during the first two or three years of the Marvel Revolution of the early Sixties worked to often create an intense and supremely effective form of what we might call "Paternalistic" storytelling, in which far more of the authority for dictating what is happening on the printed page is held by the creators than is typically found today. "Paternalistic", of course, is a word which has been long held in disrepute by large swathes of folks who intuitively associate any kind of power with repression and tyranny, but I mean "paternalism" is the best of senses. After all, what could be more admirable than parents who take an appropriate responsibility for those they're looking after? And in the pages of Lee and Kirby's work from 1961 to 1965, roughly speaking, can be found a combination as well as a collision of styles which, in the most kindly and entertaining fashion, demands that the reader accepts the sense and detail of what's on the page regardless of how ridiculous and even nonsensical it is.
Put simply, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's combined efforts work on the reader to guide them through a story in a highly controlled and specific sense. When first reading "The Coming Of The Avengers", for example, there's little space for the reader to generate doubts about whether events actually happened in the way that's shown. There's little need on first reading to start fleshing out Lee and Kirby's version of events with extra material, for most if not all doubts and questions and confusions are either obscured by their craft or made to seem irrelevant when considered in the light of how much sheer fun the reader is having. Lee and Kirby pick the reader up with that first splash page of Loki's splendid and haughty nose and propel their audience through the story at an ever-intensifying and yet deliberate and controlled pace until the final page is reached and roared past and there's finally a moment to blink, take a breath, and wonder what the business about the Hulk pretending to be a green robot was all about.
And that's what I'd like to try to discuss today, although I fear I lack the knowledge and the critical language to in any way fully explain the points I'm going to touch upon. But I'm so in awe, of the work that the two gentlemen produced for "The Avengers" # 1 that I'd like to try to earn myself just the slightest measure of a greater understanding of how they achieved what they did. To read "The Coming Of The Avengers" is to be given a snapshot of one moment in the revolutionary process by which Lee and Kirby took the paternalistic traditions of the American superhero book and, in fusing their craft with a previously unseen degree of vigour and innovation, changed everything.
3.
In praising the paternalistic style of Mr Lee and Mr Kirby as expressed at this particular point in their careers, I should say that I'm not suggesting that such an approach should be, or even could be, used in today's superhero comic books. That there's a huge amount about storytelling that might be learnt from just one page of the first issue of "The Avengers" shouldn't be taken as meaning that I'm asking for a return to the style and content of 1963. And yet it should be noted that a great deal of Alan Moore's very finest work, for example, has been in collaboration with artists who've used variations upon the three-tier, nine panel layout for their artwork so common to the first years of Marvel's rise.
And that three-tier, nine-panel grid is as apposite a marker of the Paternalistic style as any other, just as the innovations within it in the early Avengers are emblematic of the mutiny against the conventional that was the Marvel Comics of the period. By 1963, the nine-panel page was already a decades-long default setting for the organisation of the comic book's pages, and before that, for the comic strip too. But its survival as a staple of storytelling reflected its utility, its fundamental versatility, as much as its historical ubiquity. The nine-panel, three-tier page is perfect for providing a story which is packed with a concentration of incident and excitement while ensuring that the progression from action to action, to scene to scene, is as clear and involving as possible. The audience for comic books in 1963 was made up, after all, with the exception of an exceptional minority of almost exclusively male and young adult readers, of children. They were as likely to be extremely young as they were to be limited in their literacy. Comic book publishers survived by working on the assumption that their readers had never come across a comic book before, and by necessity presumed that their audience needed guiding through the process of consuming a story consisting of words and pictures, frames and gutters.
Indeed, the industry worked upon the assumption that each generation of comic book readers would be entirely replaced within at the most 24 months, and understood how important it was that each new replacement reader should be supported and claimed. The reader wasn't seen then as an active consumer who might want to take the time and energy to learn about the detail of continuity before being able to buy into each month's comics. It was the primary task of the comic book creator to paternally ensure that what was before the reader was not just interesting and exciting, but immediately and consistently comprehensible.
In such a context, the nine-panel page was as vital a method of attracting and holding a reader's attention as might be imagined. It permitted comic book creators to focus not just on the individual events that each story was constructed around, but also on the transitions from event to event. There was space in such a page to show not just, as in the example below, how The Hulk disabled Iron Man, but how that event came to be. The reader's hand was held tightly and, yes, caringly , by such a careful process through each comic book so that at no point did their attention waver because the jump from point "a" to point "b" confused and alienated them.
4.
It's certainly true that to the modern eye, the three-tier, nine-panel grid can look old-fashioned, monotonous and formulaic. Such an impression is in part undoubtedly true, and yet such rigid storytelling traditions permit slight digressions made within the standard formula which evoke considerable effects. As we'll discuss, the simple matter of replacing a three panel tier with a two-panel one emphasises the importance of the events depicted in the unexpectedly and untypically larger panels. And when an extreme digression occurs, such as when the Hulk appears on page 9 of "The Coming Of The Avengers" in a panel which takes up two entire tiers, the reader almost has to take a step backwards to cope with the sudden change of scale and the sheer impact of the scene before them. The principle of significant effect resulting from slight digressions from a norm is one which modern comics has largely lost, and it's a terrible shame. Worse than that, it's a tragedy, because one of the simplest techniques for creating amazement and focusing attention in a reader has been abandoned because the industry has in part forgotten how the nine-panel system actually worked. For the paternal approach wasn't entirely conservative. Within its constraints were pioneered a host of techniques for making what seemed like a deadhanded and static approach exciting and innovative.
We'll discuss some of those innovations in a moment, but before we do, it's important to note that the paternalistic nine panel grid doesn't just ground the reader in the business of reading comic books. It also reminds the creator that they are writing and drawing comic books which need to make transparent sense to their audience. It would take a remarkably willful and ignorant creator to take such a layout and consistently misuse it. Catastrophic failures in storytelling which are often obscured by sequences of story-thin pin-up pages in today's books just can't be masked within such a layout. The three-tier, nine panel page doesn't just make the reader compliant and attentive, it makes the creators into responsible tale-spinners too.
5.
Perhaps the best place to start in attempting to find something of the source of the authority that lies in Lee and Kirby's paternalistic collaborations of this period is to look a little closer at what each party brought to their work in The Avengers. For in "The Coming Of The Avengers", what's remarkable is that there are actually three more or less distinct storytelling voices often operating at the same time. There's the effect that arises from the combination of Mr Lee and Mr Kirby's work, but, almost uniquely, their individual voices don't disappear at all in their collaboration. Just as their work has a identity of its own which neither man's endeavours elsewhere carries, so their early Avengers's pages simultaneously carry their individual signatures too. Put simply, each page in the first issue of the Avengers has three intense and demanding voices all dominating and guiding the reader's attention at the same time; there's Mr Lee's words, there's Mr Kirby's art, and then there's the combined force of the two creating an effect through synergy which must have been utterly confounding and thrilling in its day, just as it remains vibrant and beguiling today.
6.
Perhaps the best way for me to try to illustrate this point is to start by looking at what each creator brought to a specific page. I thought it only fair not to load my argument before I'd made it, so I picked one of the less dramatic pages from the first issue of The Avengers, page 14. (See scan directly above.) And the foundation of this page and its effect is obviously the peerlessly clear and yet quite thrilling storytelling of Jack Kirby. We'll look at the fine detail of how each tier in this page "works" in a moment, but just to make a point, I'd like to present the page with Mr Lee's words removed from it;
Without Lee's words, the clarity and power of Jack Kirby's art becomes all the more impressive. Even though the above scan of the art can hardly carry the force of the original, having empty captions and balloons obscuring large areas of the original art, the absence of text still emphasises what a beautifully precise and supportive sense of storytelling Mr Kirby had. Not only does panel 1 flow into panel 2 and so on, but it does so in a way that's intriguing even if it's not appropriate for the scene to be exciting. Again, we'll talk about the details in a moment, and so I won't preempt myself for fear you'll think I've not noticed this or that point. But the key issue here is how Mr Kirby's page fulfils the three key criteria of paternalistic storytelling. It's clear in each panel, the transition between panels is similarly transparent, and even in its quieter moments, it's intriguing and involving.
It's fascinating, or at least I'm going to argue it is, to then study this same illuminating page with Mr Kirby's art removed and Mr Lee's words restored;
What's immediately noticeable is how Mr Lee approaches the matter of storytelling in a fashion that's remarkably rare today. For Mr Lee isn't just complimenting Mr Kirby's work, he's also in some senses competing with it too. Note how the placement of the captions and balloons is designed to carry the eye with some considerable momentum from the beginning to the end of the page regardless of whatever art is on display. It's a process that's been enabled by the professionalism of Mr Kirby, who had left the top third, and in particular the top-right third, of his panels free of major incident to allow the text to be added there. Lee's placement of narration, thoughts and speech regardless of its content into that space, is exemplary, and it's something which just doesn't get wide enough credit these days. Through his skill, the eye is drawn swiftly to the end of each tier, and then pulled downwards for the process to repeat itself. It's quite possible for the reader to experience a great deal of the sense of the page without doing anything more than glancing at the artwork, and yet, of course, Mr Kirby's work has its own narrative momentum and force working both with and parallel to Mr Lee's words. The text and its placement therefore acts as more than an extra level of information supplementing the art. It's a vital part of the construction of the page's visual meaning for the reader, and the source of a parallel, powerful and yet often redundant narrative running alongside Mr Kirby's storytelling.
Combined with this is the fact that Mr Lee's words themselves tell pretty much the same story as Mr Kirby's art does. It's an old tradition of both comic-strip and comic-book, of course, and it's a process rightly often lambasted for its redundancy. Yet, and here's another mark of Mr Lee's excess of competence, his text, though neither as competent or as daring as Mr Kirby's art , is vigorous and compelling. In this pinnacle of Lee and Kirby's use of the paternalistic style, both text and art power the reader across a page crammed full of movement and power, detail and excitement. To the raw, threatening and even now still-disturbing shots of Mr Kirby's Hulk is added the strange mix of immediacy and hyperbole that marks Mr Lee's words. Of course, Lee's words are ultimately somewhat purple and often quite unnecessary, whereas Mr Kirby's art stands in its own right as unambiguously excellent. But we're discussing the distinctly forceful brand of paternalistic storytelling these two gentlemen produced here, in this comic at this moment in time. My point is not to suggest that anything here is the highest form of comic book storytelling, though I suspect that much of it is relevant to such a concept, but to rather try to scratch away at why it was, and remains, a so very powerful and attention-fixing form of storytelling. The question is not "Would we do that today?", but "Look at how that effect was created then, and how might it be still be applied today!".
We can perhaps show how Mr Lee's text in part overcomes its own redundancy by showing how, in combination with the fact of its placement, it intensifies rather than merely describes the events in Mr Kirby's art. Below is a scan of the text from the first tier of this page with the captions placed in sequence, and it can be seen that not only is the story being told in Lee's words just as Kirby's art describes, but that Lee's style is as broad and forceful, if less subtle and effective, as Mr Kirby's panels are;
Of course, the words are often nonsensical. It's not the point of the paternalistic style to make sense! Rather, it's the point of the paternalistic style to be thrilling and clear in the terms of the story at hand while spiriting the reader past any looming uncertainties and sillinesses. "The Avengers"# 1 is full of scenes which make no sense at all, and of sentences which collapse at even a partial glance. But effect is all here, and the effect is invigorating and distracting, as thrilling as the first three chords of a garage band's first single. It doesn't matter that the phrase "the speed of a charging dreadnought", for example, makes even less sense than Mr Kirby's anatomy often did. Both that marvellous abstraction of the human and superhuman form by Mr Kirby and that broad and engaging silliness of Mr Lee performs the same function. It explains, excites, and then pushes, encourages and hauls, the reader onwards.
7.
Yet it's Mr Kirby's art which tends to provide the subtly of effect which is achieved in such scenes. It's not a rule which can be applied to all circumstances in The Avengers # 1, but it tends to be the best first analytical port of call. In order to try to show something of the little I can gleam of the matter, perhaps we start by looking at that first tier again;
The paternalistic approach needs to ensure that the reader is absolutely clear where incident and the progression between incidents is concerned, and, as we've said, the nine-panel, three-tier layout is undoubtedly a helpful if somewhat rigid method for achieving this. Yet the subtly of Mr Kirby's work, and the incredible depth of skill that he so modestly and effectively puts to use here, still staggers me. In those clever and slight digressions from the most obvious storytelling choices within a metronomic form lies a measure of Jack Kirby's genius. Perhaps I might be able to show this by presenting you with the scan of a photocopy I took of the above, from which I've removed the guttering between each of those first three panels;
Now, perhaps you were always aware of the things I'm about to say, but I wasn't, and I must have read the first issue of The Avengers in one form or another fifty or so times since the 1970s. And yet I never noticed that each of these panels, which appear fairly distinct in the printed layout, is far more closely linked to its fellows than first appears. The line of the ground remains constant from panel to panel, for example, creating the sense that the reader is almost watching key frames from a flicker-film book. The guttering on the page, as we can counter-intuitively see from its absence here, permits Mr Kirby to stage the Hulk's out-smarting of the Hulk with remarkable skill and to some considerable effect. Look, for example, at how the lines that indicate the Hulk's descent in the first panel continue into the second, creating a sense of momentum while allowing the presence of the gutter to indicate that a small amount of time has passed between the Hulk falling and rising again. And while the first two panels are close in composition, in order to show the relation of Bruce to Tony clearly, and to explain what's happening, the third panel is quite different. The Hulk and Iron Man are suddenly thrown together and drawn as larger figures, which accentuates the force of the Hulk's blows, and the sense of power and of the world turned upside down is doubled by the fact that the previously level ground now falls away to the bottom right-hand side of the last panel of this tier. (The landscape is suddenly dotted with sharp peaks too, increasing the sense of jeopardy.) In the previous two panels of the sequence, the issue was the way in which in the two super-people travelled above the ground and related to each other. In the third, part of the focus of the art is to show that Stark is going to crash to the ground, which tumbles away after the eye had registered Iron Man taking a pummelling from The Hulk.
Those three panels are so skillfully and effectively designed that it's hard to comprehend how much skill and knowledge is reflected in their composition. Without fracturing the three panel layout of that first tier, time is manipulated, anticipation and mystery created, and then the explosive and destructive effect of the final confrontation established. Most of all, the second panel is perhaps the most important. How audacious is it that only Iron Man's boots are being shown, for example, a matter which few if any modern-day artists would consider showing. (It seems such a silly thing to place at the extreme right-hand side of a panel!) And yet that frame not only continues the sequence established in the first, but it creates a pause in the action which forces the reader to calculate what will happen next. And that anticipation is actually heightened by Stan Lee's declaration in the narrative box above that the Iron Man who we can see little of is "startled" by the Hulk's strategy, meaning that we can see the action through Stark's perceptions too as well as through Mr Kirby's staging. This is not going to end happily for Tony, we realise, because the force of his forward momentum is going to be added to the downward force of the Hulk's fist.. And that's exactly what happens.
Perhaps I might be forgiven saying the point again. The modern-day artists has a vast arsenal of techniques to manipulate time and anticipation in their command, and many of them use those skills fantastically well. Yet Kirby is achieving remarkable effects within a quite static panel layout, and he's doing so within what would today be considered as tiny little panels. And Lee is increasing the speed at which this scene is perceived and the intensity by which it is understood by the placement of his text and through words he uses to describe events.
Creators are often are their most interesting when they're discovering how to thoroughly shake up expressive forms which are well-established and somewhat limiting. The cleverness and capability which marks Mr Kirby and Mr Lee's work here is remarkable in many ways, and not least because we can see them continuing to stretch how the old Paternalistic forms were usually put to use. Kirby in particular had long been doing so, and soon the whole paternalistic approach would start to collapse, to be ultimately replaced, as we'll discuss later this week, in a more post-modern form which characterises much of The Avengers work of Brian Michael Bendis.
My sincere thanks for the Splendid Wife and her skilled and steady hands for removing text and art from photo-copies of the page we discussed above. That Silversmithing degree and the many and varied skills it involved sure does come in handy!
Next time; we'll take a look at the mid-tier, last panel scene changer, the masking of nonsensical aspects of superhero tales, the irrelevancy of closure and the informing presence of continuity even at the dawn of the Marvel Era. We'll also start to compare it with what we might call the post-modern style of the BMB era of The Avengers, and I come not to bury either the old or the new Caesars, I assure you! I hope you might consider popping in as I try to express something of the peculiar force of Lee and Kirby's adaption of the paternalistic style, which I clearly grasp little of! A splendid day is wished to all and sundry, and do "Stick Together!".
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