Because Stan Lee & Jack Kirby Said So!; Making Sense Of The Mighty Avengers (Part 2) "But What Diabolical Scheme Shall I Employ?"

continued from last Saturday;

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 not that the page we're discussing is absolutely typical of The Avengers in this period. In fact, it's the most narration-heavy example in the first few issues of The Avengers until the sixth page of issue 3. But as extreme examples often do, it allows us to see something of the various typical contributions of Lee and Kirby in a more obvious, exposed form. And here what we can note is how insistent and compelling the different contributions of Mr Kirby and Mr Lee could be, both individually and together.

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.

To be continued;

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!".


.

More about →

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko & The Incredible Hulk That Failed

1.

It's always a relief and an inspiration to realise again that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko didn't invariably know quite what they were doing during that creative high summer of Marvel's in the first half of the 1960s. For there's a terrible danger in looking back on the run of marquee-headlining characters created by those three gentlemen between the summer of '61 and the spring of '64 and assuming that the excellence of their work can be explained with reference to some vaguely-defined form of temporary and collective genius. In retrospect, it can indeed seem that Mr Lee and Mr Kirby and Mr Ditko were together locked so deeply into what sports psychologists call the zone that there's nothing that we relatively unblessed mortals might learn from their achievements beyond perhaps the need to keep praying that the next life brings us such remarkable skills of our own; The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Ant-Man, The Wasp, Dr Strange, Iron Man, The Avengers, The X-Men, Daredevil, and all the host of supporting characters and story-concepts that've helped to float an entire cross-medium industry ever since, all debuting in that period of less than three years. And in the face of that achievement, rather than asking "How did they do it?", we're all too often reduced to asking instead "What did they do to ruin their own good luck?", because it often seems impossible to believe that they didn't have the creative process under their control, and that they therefore must have done something to ruin what otherwise might have continued for years more. Did they, perhaps, disrupt their own fine fortune through poor communication, or power politics, or the mis-distribution of financial spoils, or any number and combination of factors that might be considered in hindsight as relevant to the eventual tailing off of all that incredibly inspiring work?

At what point, in the context of the creation of the modern superhero comic, did Lee and Kirby and Ditko become mortal and fallible, and who's to blame? Where lies the Yoko Ono-factor in this story?


Yet the heartening truth about the work of Marvel's hallowed creative trinity is that for all of their undoubted brilliance, and I don't think "brilliance" is too strong a word, they weren't ever able to simply put finger to typewriter and pencil tip to page and create one market-dominating masterpiece after another. In truth, it doesn't take more than a moment to note that the run of books mentioned above hardly arrived fully-formed and fit-for-purpose, since only Spider-Man and, after their second issue, the Fantastic Four, didn't require some measure of radical conceptual surgery to ensure that the characters prospered. Indeed, to a greater or lesser degree, every single one of the "first-wave" books needed recurrent and often fundamental redesigning to ensure that they competed as best they could on the newsstands and in the comic racks of the Sixties, and of course beyond. And many of those properties which now seem to have arrived as complete-in-themselves and fighting-fit, as Superman and Batman had in their turn appeared to do so in their day, actually struggled simply to tick over as middle-ranking sellers. Of these, of course, none had such an impossibly confused and difficult early life as "The Incredible Hulk", whose own comic lasted but six issues before being cancelled as its final chapter hit the stands in the January of 1963.

For the story of Lee, Kirby and Ditko and the Silver-Age Marvel revolution is, as we all know, one of perseverance as well as inspiration, of flaws as much as of perfection, and of hard and often counter-productive effort as much as the unveiling of one good-for-fifty-years franchise after another, and their mutual achievements are made all the more impressive and inspiring by realising again that they were mortal, that they had games where they left the pitch muttering after scoring a duck, and that sometimes the books that they lavished their attentions upon suffered not in the absence of their best efforts, but in part because of them.

2.

If there ever was a practical textbook for how not to write a superhero tale, then it was those first six attempts in the pages of The Incredible Hulk to turn Lee's idea of a superhero/monster hybrid into a viably reader-friendly shape. Misjudgement after mistake follows on one after another in that initial short run, and every issue is marked by radical changes to the strip's fundamental premises in a futile though instructive attempt to take Mr Lee's confidence about the ill-defined character and indeed power-set of the Hulk and make something substantial and successful of it. Much of these difficulties, of course, were caused by the fact that Mr Lee was in uncharted waters, trying to reinvent the superhero with one eye on sales and another on his own tastes and emotions, and where his inspiration, improvisations and craft had paid dividends with the radically left-of-centre superheroes of "The Fantastic Four" and "Spider-Man", the Hulk posed a quite different challenge.


Quite frankly, Lee and his colleagues never quite established what the Hulk's purpose in the stories which bore his name was. Did he exist as the antagonist of his own comic, to unthinkingly threaten the status quo of early Sixties America, or was he perhaps even a world-threatening super-villain, possessed of both unrivaled strength and super-intelligence.? Or was the Hulk in some way a down-at-heel and cruelly misunderstood superhero, a protagonist who despite being hated and hunted down, faced up to his wider moral responsibilities and saved the Marvel Universe from even-more fearsome foes? For the Hulk was in fact all of those things, and often all at the same time too. In his second appearance, for example, he fought the invading Toad Men, but only to secure his own freedom and to get his great green fingers on their alien super-weaponry. (At 2:10:8 he declares; "With this flying dreadnought under me, I can wipe out all mankind! Now the Hulk can be the hunter instead of the hunted!") And that in itself was an incredible whiplash change of direction from the Hulk's introduction just two months before, when he'd been portrayed as an almost mindless Frankenstein Monster-esque creature, where his one coherent ambition seemed to be best declared in his haltingly expressed desire to " ... get away -- to hide --". (1.6.6.)


The Hulk in his first short-lived and ever-changing incarnation was, therefore, either portrayed as a passive or a quite frankly threatening if not entirely evil character. Neither quality, it might be argued, is a particularly winning characteristic for a book-headlining superhero to bear, and that would be particularly true for the far more conservative tastes of 1962's comic book market. For a Hulk who merely wants to be left alone creates nothing of purpose in his own stories. He has no mission except to find somewhere quiet and secure, and stay there. A successful adventure from the point-of-view of that Hulk would be one which began in silence and darkness, progressed through the same, and ended quite as it had started, meaning that drama had to be continually generated by the accident of people stumbling upon the Hulk or vice-versa, leaving the narrative constantly lacking any purposeful direction. And although later incarnations of the Hulk turned that passivity into a childish and endearing quality, here the monster is a growling and murderous beast, and even now it's hard to feel sympathy for this ugly, selfish and violent take on Bruce Banner's alter-ego, a monster who had no mission to fulfil, and yet no winning personal qualities to inspire sympathy by either. With his thick and broad brow protruding above the tiniest of noses, his eyes buried deep into his skull and sheeted in shadow, this Hulk is Karloff not as alienated child but brooding psychopathic killer, and the reader couldn't help but know it.

Trying to inspire the reader's affection while giving the Hulk some purpose saw the character's intelligence and personality radically alter from issue to issue, as if the Hulk were an engine which just needed to be correctly calibrated before letting it run efficiently on forever. (The fact that there might be a fatal flaw or two in the Hulk's conception was obviously one which the confident tinkerer that was Stan Lee refused to at first accept.) So, the Hulk was transformed into a mean, intelligent and world-threatening super-baddie in issue two, and a mindless golem under the control of Rick Jones in the comic book following that. The first solution solved the problem of the Hulk's passivity, but replaced it with the problem that readers were unlikely to want to buy into the adventures of a creature who wanted to destroy all of mankind, and the second collapsed on the back of the problem that Rick Jones lacked an agenda beyond wanting to keep the Hulk hidden away too.

And as each issue tries to recombine the strips various components in an attempt to make them gel and function effectively, the whole business starts to become rather desperately amusing. This is the single example of a Lee/Kirby/Ditko superhero strip from this period which starts off badly, if intriguingly, and then tapers off quickly into confusion and abject commercial failure. (Even the adventures of Hank Pym survived longer in the marketplace than this, albeit with the sales support of two of the Fantastic Four, and then of course the Hulk himself, as co-features.) And the attempts in the second half of this first run to recast the Hulk as a superhero, while retaining something of his distinctive fierceness, gutted the comic of much of its remaining power, and lead to the most cringe-worthy moment of all in these six comics, where we're shown the Hulk stroking the hair of some teenage radio hams who've helped him to defeat the Metal Master while declaring "I guess you kids deserve most of the credit! If you hadn't rounded up all the junk I needed to make that gun, it woulda been too late." (6.21.8) It's a compassionate volte-face that doesn't just fail to make sense in terms of the character's previous behaviour, but also in terms of hpw the creature behaves and what he says just two panels before, where he's aggressively declaring that " ... most of you dumb humans always lose your heads when somthin' happens!" (6.21.6) Stumped to discover how to make the Hulk both Frankenstein and Superman, Lee is here reduced to having him be both in different and quite contradictory panels, and in just six issues, the Hulk had been transformed from a super-powered horror to a gruff Ben Grimm-like superhero with an embarrassing gang of teenage sidekicks demanding gruffly-delivered cuddles from him.

3.

We know that this period saw Stan Lee becoming more and more certain that one of the key components of the new Marvel superhero was the presence of a tragic alter ego, the human Achilles Heel which inspired pity as much as the super-powers inspired awe, and Banner is certainly such a piteous figure. The "milksop" scientist held in contempt by General Thunderbolt Ross who suddenly and terrifyingly finds himself hyper-powerful, but unable to reveal himself to the world, would seem to fit Lee's schema very well, except that of course Banner carries all the weight of the disadvantages of being the Hulk without experiencing any of the benefits for himself. In fact, Banner doesn't ever become a super-powered character at all, because his mind as well as his body mutates as the Hulk takes control. He's all pity and no glory, a perpetual victim despite his early successes in saving Rick Jones' life, transforming the Gargoyle back to normal and repelling the invasion of the unfearsome Toad Men, for he's doomed to wait helplessly for the sunset before surrendering his own mind as well as his body to the Hulk. This is a character who cannot win, and the reader knows that, for if Banner cures himself of the Hulk, the comic book itself ceases to exist. This simple fact robs the narrative of anything other than a weary knowledge that while punch-ups will be won, the satisfaction of seeing the curse of The Hulk lifted will never arrive.


Indeed, it's terribly hard to see how Lee and Kirby imagined that Bruce Banner might serve in any fashion as a heroic lead in The Hulk at all. For, even beyond the problems outlined above, Banner's situation is so terrible that none of the enjoyment-through-association that younger readers in particular gain from comic books was possible. Banner doesn't ever become a super-powered character because his mind as well as his body mutates as the Hulk takes control. The Hulk is, by any rational calculation, therefore a mental disorder as much as a physical mutation, and Banner himself is utterly diminished by both processes. There's little more disturbing in all of Marvel's history, for example, than the scene at 1:14: 6-8, where Banner sits impassively before a window as night falls and waits to be obliterated by his alter ego's arrival. As the shadows across his face deepen, his eyes widen and his teeth clench with horror, and finally his features are entirely obscured by darkness. It's the comic book equivalent of a man awakening briefly from Alzheimer's only to realise that he'll inevitably be reclaimed, and it's a thoroughly unsettling scene.


There's no wish-fulfillment to be had here, although there is a fascinatingly powerful metaphor of how indeterminate our personalities are when we're possessed by extreme emotions, and it was quite literally too dark a place for a superhero book to occupy so unflinchingly in the Marvel Comics universe of 1962. I'd imagine that many readers took one look at the panels (1:4:6/7) where Banner's irradiation by the Gamma Bomb is expressed by his endless screaming and decided, consciously or not, that this wasn't very much fun at all. After all, to the fact of Banner being a victim of extreme and uncontrollable mental illness had been added every trauma and neurosis of the atomic age, an era in which American school-children practised hiding beneath their desks in order to prepare for when the bomb dropped. This, the comic was telling its readers, is what happens when the bomb drops, and radioactivity here went beyond a plot convenience that might give you spider-powers to a deathly force that would ruin your body and your mind before setting out to wipe out everyone around you too. The Hulk was therefore an ill-considered metaphor for just about every substantial public fear of the period; the disruptive and violent outsider, the mentally disordered, the physically diseased, and the horrible awareness that the atom-bombers were always airborne and ready to destroy the world with the press of a red button or two.

Taking all that and mixing it in a commercially successful manner with a superhero tale was always going to beyond Mr Lee and Mr Kirby's abilities, because it would've been beyond anybodys in the context of that time and that market. The Hulk in his original form was everything that's most fearful about the early Sixties to the white majority of America beyond the unthinkable taint of Communism. And any effort to make him heroic and compensate for those would only diminish the horror, causing the character's uniqueness to dissipate, as indeed soon happened in issues 5 and 6. But attempting to retain that menace would only produce a brew far too bleak and unappealing even for the new audience that bought into the travails of Peter Parker and The Thing.

4.

There are moments when it seems clear that Banner and not the Hulk has been given the job of playing the tale's protagonist, such as when he does free the Gargoyle or when he pops up at sunrise to destroy the Toad Men's fleet. Yet, in the very next issue after that, Banner is entirely absent from the story, and then his situation shifts again as he gains the power to maintain a greater measure of his intelligence when the Hulk emerges each night at dusk. Time after time, the story becomes something utterly different to what it was before, and though surely the sales figures couldn't have been returned in accurate detail in time to influence the next comic book off the rank, something was making Lee corkscrew around with the narrative's set-up. By issue 5, the Hulk is back as a quite separate personality from Banner's and acting, as we've said, as something of a superhero in taking on the "brutal hordes of General Fang", (5.15.6) while by the final book of the run, the relationship between the two characters is even more protean and even more uncertain. Banner is now at times retaining some of the Hulk's muscles and strength after transforming back, while the Hulk is forced to wear a Hulk mask to hide the fact that Banner's white face, and presumably his short-sightedness too, hasn't changed while the rest of him has. (Having the Hulk appear wearing a mask of his own features surely takes the award for the daftest example of jeopardy in any Marvel Comic from the period, though I fully accept there'll be considerable competition for that.)

In all of these situations, Banner, whether the hero of the tale or its victim, is portrayed as the character in the text most worthy of our sympathy. "How much longer can I endure this?", he asks himself at 6:4:2, and it's something which the readers must have been asking themselves too. Because at the core of Banner's character lurks a moral cowardice which is shared by no other Marvel superheroes alter-ego, and although I wasn't conscious of this as a boy, I'm now sure that I was aware on some level that Bruce Banner's behavior was never a simple and goodly counter-weight to the Hulk's at all. For there was always something about Banner which made General Ross's crass and bigoted insults seem almost appropriate, some wretched quality of his which they seemed to illuminate even as the text tried its best to cover the truth of the matter up. And that truth is that General Ross was right, for Banner as a character was fatally flawed when it came to occupying a heroic space in the text. He's an appallingly selfish and anti-heroic man. His first response upon awakening as himself after the Hulk has violently kidnapped Betty Ross is to express gratitude that she's remained unconscious throughout the whole affair; "Perhaps it's better this way." he says, "She cannot know my terrible secret." (2.22.9) Now, you and I might think that everybody should know Banner's secret. The Hulk is the most dangerous of monsters and even by the character's second issue, it's obvious that he can't be controlled. He's even menacing Banner's so-called true love in a thoroughly aggressive and disturbing way. Yet Banner arrives at the belief that secrecy is the best option without any reflection on his own responsibilities at all! Imagine the lives that might have been saved, the existences unshattered, if Banner had been a decent man who put the community's needs before his own. He's the equivalent of any patient zero, of any Typhoid Mary, who continues to wander through the world despite knowing of their own contagious sickness because they don't want their freedom curtailed.


Banner's intention to maintain his everyday existence while attempting to lock his alter ego away every night is more than a reprehensible attempt to hide the reality of his situation away in the name of his own privacy. It's also the act of a profoundly selfish scientist as well as a utterly self-obsessed man. Because if Banner's Gamma Bomb creates such monsters, then Banner is the best means by which science can study, and perhaps learn to deal with, the situation. (There's no indication that this Marvel Universe is one where governments would sanction Banner's medicalised torture, and such state corruption won't appear in the MU for years and years, and so the good doctor isn't hiding the truth in order to avoid losing anything but his own liberty.) Yet he doesn't even inform Ross, or indeed anyone else, that the Gamma Bomb can cause such mutations, let alone that it's already done so and that everyone, both near and far, is now in appalling danger.

But Banner wants to be normal, and Banner wants to be with Betty, and so Banner doesn't end up sounding like a very different character to the various selfish Hulks at all. If Banner didn't see how immoral his decision to hide the truth of his situation was in the wake of the horror of his first few mutations, he really ought to have done so after a few dozen of Hulk-caused disasters. And so it's not Ross that demeans Banner in the reader's eyes, but rather Banner who does it to himself. If he had any of what General Ross would surely refer to as "moral backbone", he'd have given himself up. Yet he constantly puts others at risk in his own interest. It's actually unforgivable, and whether its present in the text or the sub-text of the story, it leaves us with a character who can only run and hide while only very rarely inspiring admiration or sympathy.

5.

With the ever-changing status quo of "The Hulk" in this brief period, where the heroic and villainous roles in the stories are constantly being filled in confusingly different ways and to different degrees by Banner and the various Hulks, it's no surprise to note that the super-villains present in the text appear both redundant and irrelevant. Redundant, in that "The Incredible Hulk" already has an antagonist present in the great green shape of the title character, and irrelevant because each of the villains on show in the first six books tell us little about the Hulk at all. In fact, they're a selection of generic baddies and run-of-the-mill communists which could, and regularly were, dropped into the pages of most every Marvel book except for Dr Strange. It's certainly no surprise that the only one of them has been regularly used in the Marvel Universe in the years since and that's the openly-derided Ringmaster, the truly unimpressive possessor of a big top and big hypnotic hat. Quite what a carnival huckster can tell the reader of the Hulk through comparison with and conflict against Banner's alter ego escapes me, just as I'm baffled about what Tyrannus, the cad from far under the ground, means in the context of the Hulk's tales. These super-villains stumble into the Hulk's orbit, get bashed around rather considerably and then limp off without anyone being changed, anything being altered, and nothing being learned beyond the fact that Hulk is, yes, stronger than anyone.

But there were two antagonists who offered a great deal more than a standar-issue evilness to the Hulk's nascent mythology, and these were the Gargoyle and, less significantly, the Metal Master. Both possessed mental abilities which could be played up in comparison to the Hulk's raw and excessive power and brutish thinking, but, regretably, the Gargoyle barely meets the Hulk and the Metal Master is faced by a Hulk with much of Banner's scientific knowledge. More confusingly yet, the Gargoyle is cured of his own deformities by Banner, and, bereft of his mutant intelligence, turns against his Communist masters in an act of nuclear self-immolation. What can this possibly be telling us? That any advantage caused by mutation is a difference ill-earned which should be eradicated whenever possible? That those who've been mutated should allow themselves to die in recompense for their sins? That nothing is so precious as being "normal"? That Banner's mission is to assist others who've suffered as he has to die?


The list of possible and confusing readings stretches on for far longer than just those three suggestions, but I hope the point is made. This is a book whose creators simply didn't know what they're were doing, and bereft of the kind of luck combined with inspiration and hard work that grounded Spider-Man immediately as a metaphor for adolescence, and which then lent any of his opponents the metaphorical threat posed by the adult world to the youthful Peter Parker, the Hulk stumbled along from crisis to crisis without generating a single convincing antagonist at all. And even as the Hulk might at any moment morph from hero to villain and back again without any good reason for doing so at all, so too can the meaning of his adventures turn on a sixpence and race in the opposite direction to whatever had been cannon two months before.

6.

General Thaddeus E. "Thunderbolt" Ross is the vilest of characters, a blustering old toothless Patton screaming at Banner before a full control room of scientists and technicians that the inventor of the Gamma Bomb is " ... a milk-sop! You've got no guts!" (1:2:6). But he's also the single most convincing and semi-admirable protagonist in all of these six issues, a fact which again speaks of how confused the whole construction of "The Incredible Hulk" is. Ross is J. Jonah Jameson writ unpleasantly large, a stereotype of a stereotype, and given that I loathed the character as I did no other in comic books as a boy, and given that it's still hard for me to read his bellyaching and bullying without wanting to see him thrown out of the army, and indeed off of the planet, for cruelty as well as braying arrogance, that's saying something. And yet, despite the lack of respect that he and his opinions are shown in Mr Lee's text here, General Ross always occupies a position of moral correctness that exists quite independently of his unpleasant personality. He's a public servant dedicated to preserving the social status quo against the violations of The Hulk, and regardless of how we might hate him for insulting dear saintly Dr Banner, he's absolutely right to do so. The Hulk is a menace, Banner is a coward, and the actions of the two are a terrible threat to the United States, if not the world. And when Ross listens to his trembling daughter express her fears that " ... The Hulk! He came from the darkness! He -- he was terrifying!"(1:21:5), and swears that "I'll find him and destroy him!" (1:21:6), he's stepping into the role of the traditional monster-slayer, and monster the Hulk surely is. Ross is doing no more than defending his daughter as well as the rest of us, and his judgement of the Hulk was correct, for this Hulk wasn't the misunderstood child of the later decades in any way at all.


In fact, General Ross is one of the few characters in The Hulk who displays some genuine competency on any consistent basis. He leads the Earth's resistance to the Toad Men and brings down one of their orbiting space-ships, although how he fills the post of managing the Gamma Ray programme and running Earth's missile defence shield is a touch puzzling. He's as brave as we might expect a career military man to be, having presumably begun his career in World War One, refusing later to bow to the Toad Men's fleet with a sub-Churchillian "We'll never surrender! We'll fight 'em! We'll beat 'em! Somehow, someway, we'll save Earth for mankind!" (2:16:6), and he nearly manages that where the Hulk is concerned by later trapping him in a rocket and blasting him away from the Earth more than forty years before the Illuminati thought to do so.


Smug, self-obsessed, nasty and the bearer of an authoritarian personality he might be, but General Ross is the closest to a hero that the pages of "The Incredible Hulk" got to, which must in itself rather insistently point to some pretty serious flaws in the structure of the book itself.

7.

But any book which starred such a genuinely unpleasant man as Ross as its supposed protagonist was never going to survive in that marketplace, not even back when the political youthquake of the counter-culture was yet to shudder its way up to the attention of the American mainstream. Sadly, neither was the token teenager of these stories, Rick Jones, one of the least invigorating serial superhero-sidekicks in the history of American comics, ever going to win a substantial book-selling readership either. For regardless of how Marvel Comics have constantly underplayed his sole culpability for the ruination of Bruce Banner's life and the creation of the Hulk, Jones is one of the least sympathetic and most catastrophically ignorant supporting characters of all time. As such, he occupies a singularly odd place in the narrative as a whole. On first appearance, there's a suspicion of James Dean if not Marlon Brando, a counter-cultural rebel. "Cool it, man! The kids bet I wouldn't have nerve enough to sneak past the guards ... " (1:4:1), he says, while


posing with a harmonica just a few feet away from ground zero. Yet any hope that Jones might bring with him a set of values which would set him radically apart from the military status quo of the book's cast swiftly collapses, because Jones isn't a rebel so much as an idiot without a cause. He's a nice boy, an under-achiever with a sweet nature, and very little is made of the fact that he unleashed the Hulk upon Marvel Earth, because how could a sweet kid be such an irresponsible and culpable idiot? It's as if any teenager might by chance and irresponsibility cause such a beast to be created, as regrettable as crashing dad's convertible on a country lane or burning down the tree house after falling asleep while surreptitiously smoking there. How those "kids" who wagered with him to drive into a bomb testing sight must have wanted rid of him, and how much better it would've been for everyone else on Marvel-Earth if it had been Jones that'd had been "... bathed in the full force of the mysterious gamma rays". (1:4:5)

Comic books lie to their audiences, as all fictions do. Lee and Kirby's "Hulk" almost convinces us that Jones is a dynamic presence, a true friend and something of a hero in himself, just as it twists our perspective until General Ross becomes the butt if not entirely the villain of the piece. And, yes, Jones does nurse and support Banner, even somehow learning to operate a "complex ray-machine" (5:1) and how to replace a "shattered steel rambo" weighing several tons (4:11:6), two achievements which are as mysteriously achieved as any the Hulk might pull off in an alien dimension. (Where the requisite strength and knowledge came from is something the text avoids dwelling on.) But Jones is the villain of the piece in so many ways, and not simply in that he caused the Hulk to be created. He's also party to all of Banner's deceptions, and every single disaster that the Hulk causes is aided and abetted by him. If the text didn't constantly portray him unconvincingly as a heroic figure, he might have made the most fascinating study in self-deception, a well-meaning but immature and guilt-stricken lad who started off by ruining the world and then made it worse.


However, by the time Jones has decided to not only continue to help keep the Hulk at large but to assist the green-skinned beast by organising the Teen Brigade, "typical American teen-agers" (6:15:4) who serve as an information-providing radio network for the Hulk in his struggles with the alien Metal Master, the narrative has tumbled over from playful comic-book exaggeration into idiocy. The super-Frankenstein Monster is now the leader of a children's after-school activity club, and whatever potential the terrifying first appearance of the Hulk had possessed has now been twisted and twisted again into a strip which has no idea at all of what it's trying to achieve beyond being popular.


And in the end, I'm shocked to find that General Ross's opinion of Jones is the most sensible one in the book. For where Banner is of course creepily fond of the boy who is collaborating with him to keep him out of the hands of the authorities, Ross is able to take a step back and think of Jones's best interests rather than his own. For we might suppose that General Thunderbolt Ross would be so flattered by Jones asking how he might get to sign up that he'd march the boy right down to the recruiting office then and there without caring about anything except his own five-star ego. But instead Ross pushes aside the chance to at least get Rick Jones to commit to a future in the army at some more appropriate coming date and instead compassionately explains, at 6:12:5/6, that;

"You're only sixteen, you're too young. But if you really want to serve your country...the best thing to do is (to) stay in school! America needs trained men, in every field -- even in the army. And then, when you're old enough ... "

I never thought I'd say it, but General Ross was right. Rick Jones needed to be back in school rather than playing at being a monster's keeper.

8.

If it was impossible over the first year or so of "The Incredible Hulk" to clearly and consistently identify who the good guys and bad guys were, or whether when identified they were worth the paying of any measure of attention to, it was always obvious who the chief romantic interest and hostage-in-peril was, namely Betty Ross, the General's daughter and the only woman to have a speaking line, beyond a single girlish bystander proclaiming the Toad Men's defeat at 2:24:4, in the whole 150 and so odd pages. (Women only rarely appear even as sketchy half-figures in crowd scenes in the Hulk, with the exception of a rather jewellery-obsessed fat lady who gets a whole panel to herself in the Ringmaster tale at 3:18:3) And Betty Ross is the only regularly-appearing representative of a saner, non-militarised world in the whole strip, but she's hardly a figure to inspire anything other than a mild fondness and a slither of pity for. For unlike the other female romantic leads of those first three years of Stan Lee superhero strips, Betty has no life of her own at all beyond trailing around behind her father. She's not a secretary like Karen Page or Betty Brant or Pepper Potts, or a nurse like Jane Foster, let alone a genuine superhero and hostage-in-waiting such as the Wasp or the Invisible Girl or the Scarlet Witch. Betty sniffs and mopes around modestly behind her father, longs implausibly for things to be "... as simple as in (Thunderbolt's) day. When a cavalry charge or a squad of infantryman could solve anything." (1:19:2), and faints whenever danger is close. There's not an atom of independence to her beyond wanting to step out with that nice Mr Banner, who must be at least a decade older than her teenage self and therefore, shall we say, a dubious self-nominated candidate for her hand, as well as other things. (Ross was right about that too.)

Betty Ross is, it must be be said, well worth coming to the aid of, because she's a harmless young woman who deserves nothing less, but there's little to inspire the audience to care for her. She's obviously there to be in jeopardy, because she's a young woman, and she'll obviously always survive, because she's a young woman, and, ho-hum, if she's not being captured by the Hulk, then the Hulk's rescuing her from Tyrannus. It's a game of musical chairs, where the purpose of the game is to kidnap Betty Ross before anybody else can, and the whole situation once again emphasises how slack and counter-productive the drama of these books is.

9.

If only Rick Jones were a representative of a genuinely anti-establishment youth culture. If only Betty was a secret peace campaigner, or even a quietly-radical socialist longing for a summer serving tables in Bleeker Street's folk clubs. If only Ross had been moved to the centre of the narrative and been allowed to be an old knight in the last years of his service hunting down the monstrous beast that is The Hulk.

If only Banner had been played as that which he was, a thoroughly irresponsible and manipulative figure, hiding from responsibility and manipulating young boys to serve his interests rather than that of the wider world.


If only the Hulk had been either a fully-fledged super-villain and Banner both his alter-ego and his main opponent, or a monster embodying all the fear of the "other" that had so characterised American society in the decade and a half prior to 1962, or some terrifying fusion of the two.

For the story and art of "The Incredible Hulk" is so strangely constructed, and so constantly reworked, that all the later reader can do is follow in Mr Lee's footsteps, noting potential, sniffing out new twists, rebalancing the various elements, and flailing around for inspiration, because there's obviously so much untapped potential in this "The Incredible Hulk", and yet the very act of changing one element changes much of everything else, until all that's left is a great soggy mess of Teen Brigades and Bruce'n'Betty holding hands under what had once been a baleful moon.


And yet hindsight doesn't bring any obvious solutions either where these 150 pages or so are concerned. There probably isn't any solution as such anyway. This material is incredibly promising, but it wouldn't be enough to simply shuffle this pack; a new Hulk would need to be introduced, a childish and sympathetic one, in order for the comic to find a workable equilibrium, and eventually, an almost-completely original take based on Banner's D.I.D. under Peter David would ground the comic in a way that'd never been achieved before. And yet, like Kirby, Lee and Ditko themselves, that first take on "The Incredible Hulk" is an ideas machine. Even broken and unsuccessful, it sits there full of promising concepts and interesting mistakes and challenges the reader, just as it challenged Mr Lee and Mr Kirby and Mr Ditko, to make sense of it, to be inspired by it, to make it work.

John Byrne was quite wrong to once suggest that he was returning the Hulk to the character's original roots. There never was anything so set and functional as that. But there were all those wonderful unsolved questions and inspiring quandaries ....


Coming soon, in addition to more on the JMS Thor and the return later this week of "I Know Nothing", reviews of this week's new releases; the top dozen moments of these first 6 Hulk issues. I fear the above sounds a touch superior and snotty, but the point is that even compromised Lee, Kirby and Ditko is far more inspiring than the pinnacle of most people's careers. And Hulk # 1 is one of the most brilliant Marvel Comics of all time, or at least it is until the Commies get in on the act, and there's a great deal to celebrate in 2-6 too. The scene of the Hulk hammering away at a concrete wall while Jones waits fearfully on its other side that closes issue 2 is quite haunting, for example, as Mike Loughlin pointed out in a comment way back in April of this year.



.

More about →