Tired & Emotional Team-Up:- The Micronauts & American Flagg Face The End Of The World With Tears In Their Eyes And No Winning Quip Within Ear-Shot

1.

There are times when I can almost indulge myself in the delusion that I've found evidence of a secret textbook, known only to an elect of professional creators, and perhaps a few of their less-talented friends, containing the secrets of how to produce successful comic books. For across the history of comics there are key sequences presented and then re-presented here and there which are almost too similar for coincidence to excuse their existence, despite their appearing in quite different contexts and to quite separate purposes.

It's as if there is an experience-blessed "How-To" manual, laying out precise instructions which a creator might choose to follow when an absolutely specific effect is being sought.

2.

Lost for a way to end a long-running and highly charged epic without (a) wanting to make your protagonist appear vainglorious and invulnerable, and (b) the conflict that's been closed to seem in retrospect to have been something of a triflingly foregone conclusion?

Well, why not turn to page 475 of the How-To-Do-Comics manual and check under the sub-heading "Pathos And The Downbeat Epic Ending", where you'll be shown a three-panel progression which works every time;

1) Portray your victorious protagonist exhausted by the concluded ordeal while at least one loved one races to their assistance.
2) Focus hard-in onto the faces of the protagonist and the loved one, showing (a) the depth of weariness and upset in the protagonist's face, and (b) the loved one placing a comforting hand on the hero's shoulder.
3) Close your tale with a shot of the defeated villain and the lover promising that (a) the fighting is over and (b) the protagonist has achieved their noble ends.

3.

One of these unlikely and yet, given the sheer volume of comic books which have been produced over the decades, inevitable coincidences can seen in the respective conclusions to the opening arcs of Bill Mantlo and Michael Golden's "Micronauts", from November 1979, and Howard Chaykin's "American Flagg", from September 1984, where the relatively rare phenomena of the victorious hero too shocked and weary to grasp the fact and meaning of his victory can be seen working itself out in two remarkably similar 3-panel progressions.

It's not that the stories are in any way reminiscent of each other beyond the trick of their endings, but it is as if they've both been shaped with reference to a hidden and guiding third source, a secret set of recommendations which only the elect have reference to.

4. "The Micronauts: ... There Will Be Peace At Last", writer:- Bill Mantlo, artist:- Michael Golden (vol 1:11)


Panel 1:

In "There Will Be Peace At Last", Commander Rann of the Micronauts finds himself unable to grasp the truth of the fall of the vile Baron Karza. "Is -- is it over?" he asks his compatriots, clearly physically shattered and befuddled by his experiences. Behind him, his robot sidekick Biotron and, most importantly, his deeply-concerned lover Marionette, race to his aid, emphasising to the reader how the great victory has come at a considerable cost.


Panel 2;

Weeping with exhaustion and emotion, Rann is taken into the comforting arms of his lover Marionette.


Panel 3:

We are shown the empty armour of the apparently slain Baron Karza, while Marionette's words of reassurance to Rann are presented as a closing statement ;

"Thanks to you ... there will peace at last." (11:18:3-4)


5.

Mr Mantlo and Mr Golden's ending to that first Micronauts arc was a touchingly atypical conclusion to a superhero story of the time, and it would remain so to a somewhat lesser degree even today in 2010. Freeing themselves from the tradition of presenting their story's victors as fist-waving parade-leaders, theyn succeeded in accentuating Rann's achievement by symbolising the cost of the long struggle against Karza's regime in the Commander's overwhelmed and tearful response. In doing so, Rann's heroism was counter-intuitively made all the more significant by his inability to bear his emotions with the stoicism we still expect of heroic leads. His efforts and his personal losses have been so overwhelming that his very masculinity has been undermined, reducing him to the position usually occupied in more traditional heroic narratives by the weeping if brave heroine, or the aspiring but still callow boy sidekick. This is, as a consequence, a portrait of a man who's given absolutely everything to his cause, whose very reserves of personal restraint have been consumed in sustaining him, and the realisation of that sparks our sympathy just as Karza's spectacular defeat has triggered a state of four-colour catharsis. Pity and relief, schadenfreude and victory; it's a potently moving brew, made all the more powerful in the context of the time and its far less fluid gender roles. The weeping hero, the strong and supportive heroine, the technological shell of the vanguished antagonist, the coming of peace, and all at such a terrible cost; it's a progression of meanings which functions as if part of some wonderfully effective alchemical formulae.

6."American Flagg: Solidarity For Now, conclusion", writer/artist:- Howard Chaykin (vol 1:12)

Panel 1:

Reuben Flagg finds himself similarly disorientated in the first of the final three panels of "Solidarity For Now". Reflecting the far less Kirby-esque tone of the comic, we see him sitting back and lost to shock rather than wracked by exhaustion and struggling heroically to rise. Yet, just as Rann was unsure of the identity of those around him when the Time Traveller had left his body and his battle ended, so too is Flagg apparently oblivious to either the burning body of his nemesis Scheiskopf above him or, indeed, of the fact of his own shattered leg. Mandy, in her turn, expresses the surprise and pity for his situation that emphasises the depth of his own sacrifice.

Panel 2:

Just as Commander Rann was so utterly exhausted and disorientated by his travails that he could no longer control his emotions, so Flagg is shocked and traumatised to the degree that he retreats back to childhood Jewish myths to explain what's happened to him. Wide-eyed and unable to grasp that he might turn his gaze to Mandy's in order to communicate with her, he tries to explain to the both of them that Scheiskopf is " ... a golem -- ", a monster that can defy death and which can't be stopped. And if the stereotypically masculine Rann's weeping is a quietly shocking and endearing marker of how greatly that character had suffered, then the secular Flagg's uncharacteristic grasping at the myths of his own upbringing is similarly a telling transgression of the natural order of things. This is, as was Rann, a man to both admire and pity, because he's lost the essential components of his own identity is his attempts to do the right thing.

Panel 3:

"Hush, Reuben -- you got him." Mandy promises him as the physically crippled and emotionally devastated Flagg collapses over in her supporting arms, a symbol of the community reunited with the slaying of the monster, who, in the best traditions of Mr Chaykin's work, is shown dead behind them with his arse quite explicitly on fire, while his survivors process the fact that they've actually outlived their very own golem.

7.

I find it fascinating that both Rann and Flagg become more heroic the less they're obviously in control of themselves and their situations. Neither of them achieved their victories with any degree of comfort, control or forethought. There was no glorious master plan that either of them carried to fruition, and no overwhelming show of force by them that super-heroically won the day for either. Rann had been possessed during his final battle by "The Time Traveller" and the killing blow on Baron Karza was landed by an alien ally, the World-Mind. Flagg, as befits a far more prosaic species of hero in a tale conspicuously free of Kirby-esque space opera, was reduced instead at the close of his closing battle to desperately stabbing at Scheiskopf's neck with the glass that was shattered in pieces around them. For both Rann and Flagg, theirs were unlikely victories won at the very last moment through a mixture of chance and desperation, and as a consequence their last-ditch achievements left them shocked, tearful or bemused, necessarily comforted by loyal lovers, and seeming so much more deserving of victory because they came so very close, despite their very best efforts, to not achieving victory at all.

It's a three-panel trick which works so well in such different contexts that it could almost be imagined to have been reproduced from a mythical textbook containing the secrets of how to create excellent comic books, and to order, every single time.


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Four Apparently Naive Panels From The Early Golden Age: Why Don't We Do This More Often? No 2

art: Howard Sherman
words: Gardener Fox
from: "The First Meeting Of The Justice Society Of America", All-Star Comics # 3, Winter 1940

I. Today's super-hero artists so often have a fetish for detail. Whether it's the muscles, real and imagined, which knit together bulbously around the super-human skeleton, or the quite-unconvincingly intricate-and-yet standard-issue New York City street-sets against which our mighty protectors act out their fist-first dramas, detail, whether appropriate or not, is seen as being synonymous with realism, and "realism", whatever that may mean, is lusted after as the ideal. Indeed, the superhero universes, with their line-wide crossovers and micro-managed continuities, have long-since started to function as alternative fictional realities in detail as well as in broad sweep. And the appeal, for the ever-dwindling hardcore audience, is that of a universe which can be fully inhabited by the reader, which can be mentally parachuted into at any geographical as well as narrative point, where the same well-policed fictional state can be experienced as self-consistent and familiar wherever the reader has placed themselves.

But that expectation concerning the detail of an immersive fictional reality was, of course, quite absent from the mind-set of the creators who mostly sweat-shopped their talent away on the first Golden-Age glimmers of what has become the Detective Comics Universe and the Marvel Comics Universe too. And in that foreign country of that particular past, they really do do things differently there, and it's easy to spot those possible futures, those evolutionary branches which quickly withered as time past and the more kinetic vision of the super-heroic reality gathered pace and steamed onwards towards today. For example, consider the still and languid beauty of Howard Sherman's panel above. Though Mr Fox's dialogue has Dr Fate declare "I must hurry! Inza is still in danger!", this isn't the manic and macho proclamation we might expect from Siegal and Shuster's Superman, or Simon and Kirby's Captain America. Oh, Dr Fate is determined, but in keeping with his character at the time, it's the kind of determination which marks out the collection of a child from school as important, or the importance of completing a tax return before the appropriate deadline. His body-language alone tells us that he's on a serious mission, but there's no sign of angst or desperation there. For Dr Fate is rarely shaken in his responsibilities beyond the occasional recognition that this leopard-woman or that celestial tyrant will indeed pose a challenge. Dr Fate's buttocks are never clenched in valiant determination, and if his brow is furrowed with the effort of projecting heavenly fire, we never see it. His helmet is as blank and serene as is his personality.

For in truth, nothing is going on in this panel except that Fate is, through some obviously-undemanding mental effort, rising high into the air. There's nothing thrilling here beyond the simple fact of a levitating man in his beautifully ridiculous costume, a scene which in its' ability to capture the boyish heart was probably already redundant by the late months of 1940. The simple act of pulling on colourful jodhpurs and flying through the sky was no longer of and in itself remarkable at all to comic-book readers. Two years and more before, Superman had hauled terrified criminals up the sides of skyscrapers while below the distant highways of traffic were drawn as if they were so frantic that only a mass of speed lines could convey the sheer overwhelming pace of modern life. The superhero has from its very beginnings existed in a bewildering world of frantic speed and mass and grandeur, though, grandeur apart, Dr Fate here seems to come from a slightly different, though no less enjoyable, tradition.

For Mr Sherman's city is a quite different world to all of that. If comic book artists have always tended to want to show us, to a greater or lesser degree, how each city really does contain a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million stories and more, then Mr Sherman seems to realise that a metropolis which has all those possibilities has too many for us to focus upon. His city is so abstract that it can only be one thing, can only tell us one story: this is the city that Dr Fate flew away from. And because we're not distracted by an intricate and overwhelming host of details, Mr Sherman's city is, upon reflection, a remarkable and even terrifying place. Look at how his skyscrapers project solidly up into the clouds, and how at that fearsome altitude the same winds which push the clouds into the buildings fairly buffet Dr Fate's cloak, if not the mighty frame of the mighty Dr Fate himself. This city is a quite fantastic place, and Dr Fate is without a second thought leaving these magical skyscrapers behind to save his friend, as if Arthur would ride out from Camelot without looking behind at the castles' great walls or thinking twice about his knights, and his wife, and his nation. Nothing else matters to Dr Fate but his friend, and so nothing else is allowed to matter in the panel, even as the world he's leaving behind is simultaneously shown to be thoroughly impressive. (There'd be no great value in him leaving anywhere less impresive, after all.)

And so this Dr Fate is a quite different kind of super-hero. Not simply a less-psychologically detailed one, or a more restrained actor in a less specific environment. This Dr Fate exists at times in a dreamworld where the lack of the clutter of the continuity-minded gives the reader in many ways more room to have a say unconsciously in the narrative. For that is a fairy story magician, and that is a fairy-story castle of a city, and yet, despite or rather because of their simplicity, I can feel an almost psychedelic effect when engaged by that single panel. Whether the design is the result of an artist's deliberate choice, or of a speedy mind and hand working to fulfil a deadline, or even of a compromised hodge-podge created through the inability of an artist's technique to fulfil his intentions, that beautifully-balanced panel forces the reader to engage with it, to make sense of it, far more than would be provoked by many a modern and more cluttered design.

Even the fact that the background's so dark raises questions. And the fan-mind immediately wants to know answers. Is it night-time? What's the city? Who lives there? Does anyone live there? Are its' streets like those of cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoons, empty of people and empty of motion? And why wouldn't there be people there, and what would it be like to parachute in to there and search for company, and help.

Thankfully, the panel won't tell us, and the next shot is of Dr Fate closing in on yet another mountain-top art deco home of yet another magical opponent. How long was his journey from city to mountain top? What did he think and feel as he travelled? What was the physical experience of flying that far like for him?

Well, don't ask me. The questions above are mine, but so is my disinterest in answering them. Answers are nearly always less affecting than questions, after all, though you'd never know it from our beloved comic books, where there's not the slightest inconsistency that hasn't sparked a effort to reconcile it far out of proportion to the original sin. I find the dream-logic of the silent night city facing down the clouds and standing till against the winds far more affecting at this moment than I do the enigmas of continuity.


II. But just one year later, in All-Star Comics # 7, artist Stan Aschmeier (see above) produced a suspiciously, shall we say, familiar portrayal of our mighty Dr Fate, but now we have the city behind him laid out in some greater detail. And that detail grabs at the reader's attention and demands that the good Dr himself recedes in our scrutiny. That mass of dark vertical lines plunging down the panel quite breaks up the balance of Dr Fate's composition, and seems to pin him in a frozen moment rather than allow him to fly out of the panel's right-edge. And this despite a caption printed just before this panel intoning how "Through the sky leaps Dr Fate with the rapidity of the very wind." As far as I can see, there's not much leaping going on there-in, and there's not much rapid-wind speed being generated either. But I can see those four cars so strangely bunched together to the bottom-left, and the two crowded sections of sidewalk which stand in puzzling contrast to the long empty stretch of pavement to the panel's left. And I shouldn't have those components to even notice, because noticing them destroys the magic with questions. This city isn't a city, it's a collection of items great and small associated with a city, just as children's Christmas toys used to often contain a collection of cardboard press-out buildings and people which were supposed to stand for somewhere more exciting than wherever the child happened to be. And poor Dr Fate is obviously trapped in this panel forever, pinned by those lines, diminished by that detail, not so much leaping into space as held there in time forever.

art: C. C. Beck
words: Bill Parker
from: "Whiz Comics Proudly Presents ..... Captain Marvel", Whiz Comics # 2, Winter 1940

I. And above, in this panel from the very first appearance of Captain Marvel, we find the same stillness and the same informing apparent naivety. Because this too is a city of form and not detail, of silhouettes and simple structure, and as a consequence we're again freed from seeing the clutter of a city, and instead we see the city as it is to young Billy Batson, who in his colour is obviously our point-of-view character. Though there is detail, and important detail, in the panel, it's carefully placed so it informs rather than distracts., and so the meaning of the art is always straight-forward: this is a young boy compelled by poverty to work far far into the night in appalling weather. How do we know it's late at night? Well, there's the clock-face declaring it's almost midnight, of course. How do we have our sense that Billy is poor reinforced without our having to think? Well, of course, he's coat-less while the passers-by are wreathed in their overcoats and protected by hats and umbrellas. And how do we know that Billy is cold, and perhaps frightened too? Well, obviously again, because he's standing next to the only source of light and heat, the entrance to the subway, which of course we want to explore, because of its' colour, and because it's hidden, which is such a clever device, given that's where the story will take us. In too many modern stories, the detail is so rich that the reader can't recognise where they need to pay attention to, and so the pleasure of, for example, finding out that they will be going down into that subway is today undercut by the fact that there would metaphorically be a million subways, and a million more alternative destinations.

II. And so, what at first appeared to be as static and unsuper-hero-like a panel as possible, one even in some ways less remarkable in its force than the Dr Fate panel by Mr Sherman above, reveals itself to be a mass of information, to be so cleverly constructed that it quite frankly shames the overwhelming majority of modern work. This is a piece which works because of it's simplicity, the care of it's construction, and because the infinite choices pestering the artist have been ruthlessly pared down to what tells the story and absolutely nothing else.

It's worth considering what this panel would look like today. How many drawings would be needed to convey this information, how much detail would be invested in establishing these points? And how much do many of today's creators think about what they're doing so as to identify the absolute minimum necessary to fulfil the requirements of the story?

art: Bernard Bailey
words: Jerry Seigel
story: "The Spectre: The Incredible Robberies" from "More Fun Comics" # 67

And if simplicity of design and execution is the point, regardless of whether the effect was achieved through design or accident, through skill or incompetence, I leave you, dear reader, with the above panel from a single 10 page Spectre story from 1941. Now, anybody can remove a single panel from a Golden Age story and claim that it represents some lost element of craft. It's an easy and dishonest trick to play. And so, with my hands held high in recognition of playing an easy and dishonest trick, I wonder how the above scene would be played out today? For this single panel of the Spectre's farewell to spirits who've been put to ill-use by the villainous Kathoon would surely be presented as a far more complex and complicated affair today. After all, there's so much opportunity which has gone unmined in ths original scene. ("Perhaps the Spectre might envy his fellow ghosts as they return to the other side of the grave?" is the first question that came to this reader's mind. I wonder how many others there might be before the well runs dry.) There's not even been an explanation in the narrative for why all the dead folks wear Spectre-like green cloaks and cowls, though only the Spectre's dead body is exposed for all the world to see. Everyone else is as covered-over as a monk.

But just as there's much to be said to be said for an artist ruthlessly slashing away at their possible choices until only the elegantly functional ones remain, so too perhaps modern day writers might on occasion say less. Sometimes the questions that are unanswered are far more interesting than the answers themselves, and on occasion a writer might set out to leave a touch more unexplained in their work, even at the risk that a hard-core collector parachuting into that particular corner of that particular superhero universe might have to ask themselves a few more questions before knowing where they are. Because, to take this one example, I know I want to know who the spirits were, and what they thought and felt, and how their enslavement has been to them. I'd love to know what their after-world is like, and what the Spectre thinks about it.

But really, I'm think that I'm glad that I don't know. And perhaps, in this age of "deconstructed" story-telling, where writers are often both less-traditionally precise in their explanations and yet far more wordy in how they have their characters express themselves, we might see a few more panels where the expressible isn't expressed. And where the mystery remains.

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The Jack Kirby Closing Triptych In "The Fantastic Four": Why Don't We Do That So Much Anymore No. 1

1. Why Don't We Do That So Much Anymore?

There's a blog to be written about why certain comic book narrative conventions have fallen out of fashion, but this isn't that blog. This blog is a celebration of a comic book convention that's fallen somewhat out of fashion, and which ought not to have, namely "The Kirby Closing Triptych", an example of which you can see below;

This example comes from the first Fantastic Four annual, and although the panels are too untypically overcrowded by Stan Lee's dialogue to qualify as one of my favourite such sequences, it's certainly both paradigmatic and touching. It's typical, in that it shows the reader what has happened after the main action of the story has closed. (In this case, the Atlantean's invasion of New York has been defeated and Namor has abandoned his forces to seek medical assistance for Sue Storm.) And with the main conflict over, the triptych can focus on the emotional force of the discovery by the Sub-Mariner that his people have abandoned Atlantis just as he'd abandoned them. (You'll note how Namor's isolation and loneliness is cleverly accentuated by Kirby in each panel by having, firstly, the Sub-Mariner's craft dwarfed by the sky, and then the sea, and then finally by having the tiny figure of Namor hemmed in by the great empty buildings of his evacuated capital.) It's one of the clever and effective ways that Lee and Kirby often used to leave their readers feeling that there was an emotional core to the super-powered punch-a-thons which constituted much of each issues' content; they ended on a subdued and yet involving panel progression.

2.

"The Kirby Closing Triptych" is obviously just the term my mind threw up to describe the three panel sequences with which Kirby would close many of his Fantastic Four stories. But don't get me wrong, I know that many artists have used this story-telling trope. It's just that it was Kirby's use of the closing triptych which attracted my attention to the technique. And, of course, I'm not claiming that Kirby invented the three-panel closer. I'm know, for example, it was a common trope in many of the EC tales from the early Fifties, and that Steve Ditko amongst many other artists used it brilliantly. (Indeed, the earliest Kirby example of it I can find is in the June/July Doubleheader lead in the second issue of 1954's "Fighting American", which means that it had been a common device in comics for at least years prior to that issue.)

3.


Here's another use of the Kirby Triptych, this time from 1966's "The Fantastic Four Annual" No. 4. Again, the main action of the story has closed by this point. The original Human Torch is dead, the Fantastic Four are safe, and the villainous Quasimodo has been rendered helpless. But the story is made more memorable by slowing the pace of the reader's eye across the last page and having Quasimodo deliver a pitiful, dying soliloquy.

4.

The three-panel closer was most effectively used when dealing with relatively quiet and emotional moments. (The engagement between Reed and Sue comes to mind as another example of this.) But it was less effective when it was applied to conveying a sense of danger and threat, such as in the sequence below from Fantastic Four # 41;

It's hard to imagine that Kirby couldn't have delivered a far more imposing and fearsome effect if he'd chosen - or been free to chose - considerably larger panels, or even a full page spread, for this malicious declaration. Surely that would have been more effective than ending on the final panel's close-up on Ben Grimm's eyes, which aren't so different from how they were usually depicted. The closing triptych was excellent for small, intimate moments, but, given that the panels typically occupied less than a third of the pages' height, physical action could often end up constrained and its' emotional effects diminished.

5.

The first appearance of the Kirby triptych in "The Fantastic Four" was in its' third issue, and even now that's one of my favourite closing sequences of all. Once again, the main conflict of the issue has already been resolved, with the defeat of the Miracle Man, and a cliffhanger concerning the Human Torch walking out of the Fantastic Four has been established. That all having already been achieved, the triptych effectively raises the intensity of the sense of dread which the dissolution of the Fantastic Four is intended to inspire, again accentuating the emotional punch of the story.

And if the triptych didn't usually deal effectively with extremes of physical action or violent emotion, it was brilliantly effective in evoking a sense of impending doom, of dread. Dread, after all, is associated with the slowing down of the progression of time, with one awful moment being compounded by another, and another and another, and here the clever and partial freezing of the movement of Reed and Sue in the panel's forefront while the Torch disappears out of view, only to leave a flame-trail in the last panel's upper right corner, creates that dreadful sense of disaster and helplessness and foreboding.

6.

We see something of that same sense of dread mixed with more hopeful emotions evoked in the panels above from Fantastic Four # 91, the bulk of whose story has previously concentrated on the kidnap and enslavement off-planet of The Thing by Skrulls. The main cliffhanger for the next issue has already appeared on the previous page to the one this triptych appears on, where a fearsome robot informs Ben Grimm that " ... only your DEATH will justify my life." But here the reader is given some hope that help will be on its way, though you'll note there's no loosening of the tension in the scene by any suggestion that would make rescue appear inevitable. Reed and Johnny are still in their civvies, showing they're far away from the conflict and its' resolution, and it's Reed's brainpower that's coming into play, letting the viewer know that the actual fighting is still ahead. (Brain-power alone rarely if ever closes a superhero story without fists being thrown beforehand, after all.) I particularly admire how Kirby pulls his "camera" away from Johnny and Reed as each panel succeeds the one before, leaving us with the final shot of our heroes constrained by the framework of the Baxter Building. (If the shot had pulled out to show the Baxter Building, with clear sky behind and above it, there would have been the danger of making the endeavour ahead to free Ben feel a touch too easier than a sense of partial dread requires. Blue and open skies, of course, tend to make us feel more hopeful than a couple of men staring out of a concrete-framed window.)

6.

My favourite example of the Kirby Triptych, if you'll pardon my indulgence, comes from the conclusion of "The Fantastic Four" No. 87, and it's ironic that the sequence owes its' power to the skills of Mr Lee far more than Mr Kirby. As you can see, it's a somewhat untypical sequence for a closing triptych, in that the second panel is a close-up on Doom after he appears in the first panel's background, which means that we might imagine from experience of these three-panel closers that the last shot would bring an extreme close-up, perhaps of Doom's eyes with the edge's of his helmet eye-pieces around them. But instead Kirby pulls back to show us Doom from the middle distance, and has us faced with his back too. It's the least artistically engaging and elegant design of the examples here, bar the Quasimodo sequence, with the eye being encouraged to focus in and out of the action, but it's still a perfectly competent and effective piece. In truth, however, it's Stan Lee's dialogue which makes these particular panels so affecting, and I wanted to show how brilliantly Lee could write rather than solely focus on Kirby's undoubted skills. To my mind, this quiet coda, presented once again after the comic's conflict has been almost completely settled, is the finest evocation of Doom's character in almost 50 years of comic books. That's a pretty far-fetched statement where just three panels are concerned, I know, but the Doom here is a fearsome creature made all the more terrifying by his particular sense of honour, his patience, and his rather melancholic sense that victories are often won in the long term rather than the short. This is a far more interesting, and intimidating, Doom than the one who rages against fate, breast-beats his armour and shouts very loudly about conquering this universe and the one next to it too.

I'm sure you've also noticed how elegantly the speech balloons have been placed by Mr Lee in these panels. It's something of a lost art, the careful application of speech balloons so that the effect of the art is diminished as little as possible while the story reads as effectively as it can. There's a lingering suspicion that Mr Lee must have worked out exactly where the balloons would most effectively go before writing the dialogue itself, somewhat as a musician might wait until a tune is perfectly constructed before attempting to write and fit lyrics to it.

It's an untypical end to a superhero punch-up, even for today, in that it's so quiet, and that it carries no hint of a specific conflict to come. There's no hook for the next issue here, unless it's the sense that a creative team that can produce fascinating little story-telling progressions like this demand our presence next time around.

7.

Our last example here isn't by Mr Kirby and Mr Lee at all, but by Roy Thomas and John Buscema, though Joe Sinnott, Kirby's long-standing FF inker, is still on hand to maintain some continuity between the golden age of the Fantastic Four and a somewhat more tarnished era. The above triptych is from Fantastic Four No. 128, the closing issue of the first FF story written by Lee's successor Roy Thomas. The three-panel closer had disappeared from the Fantastic Four with Kirby's departure after issue 102, only to reappear two years later in 1974 with Thomas's first script. Given that writer's keen and detailed sense of comic book tradition, it's hard to suppress the sense that he asked for the triptych to return. (And with his soon leaving the book, the triptych largely disappeared as a regular feature in the FF for at least the many years I stayed with the book.)

But all the great strengths of the triptych can be seen here, given that the main conflicts in the story have, as usual, been settled. Here in this coda we again have the focus on emotion, and in this case the focus is on the awful loneliness of the Mole Man. The design by Mr Buscema is exquisite in its simplicity and precision. The panels are still, with only the choice of closer and closer shots giving the panel sequence a sense of progression. And from the first panel, where we can see the Mole Man in his apparent regal pomp surrounded by his subjects, which is surely a difficult design to pull off in an uncluttered fashion in such a small panel, to the last, where our sympathy is inevitably engaged by the silly lovelorn man, it's perfect. (The fact that Mr Thomas restrains his usual loquaciousness greatly assists the touching affect too.)

And perhaps this example shows that the Kirby Closing Triptych might be a narrative convention which other artists and writers might put to good use more often in the present day too.

8.

The Kirby Closing Triptych is of course a relatively minor artistic resource. And it's understandable that it might not be the common closing trick which it once was. But it remains a brilliant way to create an emotional response at the end of a superhero punch-up, and it's also an effective way to help create anticipation and even dread where the prospect of the next episode of a comic book is concerned. Perhaps the fact that it's less useful in conveying "big" moments, teeth grinding hyperbole and muscle-tensing face-offs, has meant that it's not so fashionable a tool anymore. But I would conceed that the matter of why the closing triptych is less popular an option today is worth saving for another blog entry, and another time.


I'm sure that I've missed many examples of the triptych being used in recent years. But I guess I can only write about my experience, and there's alot of comics out there! And of course, I'm not arguing for a return to the days of 1961 and 1962, when pretty much every Marvel Comic, including the romance titles, seemed to use the three-panel closer more often than not. Have you spotted the technique in use recently? Do you think it has a place in the modern-day artist's armoury? Next time I write such an entry, I'll be focusing on a contemporary artist, just to show that I'm as big a fan of today as yesterday. As always, do feel free to let me know, and thank you for reading! Have a good day.


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