If you're a regular reader of mine, you know I'm a sucker for anything related to Jack Kirby. So when I saw the solicitation for Mike Hoffman's Secrets of Jack Kirby: Methods and Techniques, it was a no-brainer to put my order in.

Now, let's get a couple things straight right up front. I've been reading Jack's work since I became interested in comics as a kid. And I've been professionally studying his art in particular for over twenty years. The odds of a 72-page book talking about Jack's art telling me something I didn't already know are about nil. That's not why I got this. Jack's body of work has been studied more than virtually any other comics creator ever; everyone who's ever worked on it or with Jack has been interviewed repeeatedly. There are no "secrets" in what Jack did; he used regular ol' comics storytelling ideas, but he just implemented them very, very well. My interest here is in seeing how someone else looks at Jack's art and how they might use/interpret what he's doing differently. Where they feel more emphasis should be in studying his work.

Second, the solicitation copy for the book reads, "A fascinating and insightful examination of the actual working methods of Jack Kirby's famed comics work, profusely illustrated." So this not a how-to-draw-like-Jack instruction book. And again, at 72 pages, there's only going to be so much of Jack's decades of comics work it will be able to cover.

So what does this look like in practice? What Hoffman does is take pages of Jack's art -- mostly interior comics pages, mostly just the black and white line art -- and explain one artistic technique that is used on each page. For example, there's one page discussing "circular composition" and it showcases a page of Jack's art that utilizes a circular composition. There's another page discussing "left/right balance" and it showcases a page of Jack's that utilizes a strong left/right balance. The book goes through about 40 different artistic ideas this way, mostly devoting one page for each topic; although a few get multiple pages. Then there's a three-page comic sequence by Hoffman in which he conspicuously uses many of those techniques, followed by a few Kirby-related text pieces he'd originally done for other outlets.

The good thing about using Jack's work to showcase examples of different artistic ideas is that he produced a LOT of work over his career, so it's not hard to find excellent examples. This is especially beneficial in Hoffman's book because his explanations/decriptions are generally limited to only two or three sentences. For example, the description accompanying "functional flatness" reads in its entirety: "The large figure in panel 3 is mainly shown 'flat on' to the viewer -- though the arms are folded back -- this is a [sic] intentional contrast against a highly dimensional background using radical perspective." If "functional flatness" were a phrase in comics, that might be sufficient but it's not a phrase I've heard before. And just to make sure I'm not just letting whatever personal limitations in my education get in the way, a Google search on "functional flatness" turns up mostly a lot of engineering related results and even by adding "comics" to my search query, most of the results are discussing the physical flatness of comics and how to get rid of spine roll. If Hoffman wants to push the idea of "functional flatness" in comics art as a thing, that's fine of course, but his descriptor here is a bit lacking for what's effectively a new term.

The book has a fair amount of that. There's not a page on "foreshortening" but there are ones for "balanced exaggeration" and "perspective manipulation," and another on "no foreshortening." So it's a little challenging if you want to look for a specific technique Jack used -- you have to know what Hoffman decided to call it, which may or may not be related to whatever terms you learned in any art classes. Further, the book doesn't have any of the concepts organized by any artistic principle (like everything related to layout together or everything related to linework together) but it's just all alphabetical based on whatever terms Hoffman is using. That page on "no foreshortening" is listed under "N" for example.

The additional text pieces are fine for what they are, but they do strike me as basically filler. Half of them don't really speak to Jack's art in any way, and the other half are more on his overall approach to comics broadly, not anything relating to the techniques showcased in the book.

I find myself struggling to think of an audience this book would be good for. The core (I think) idea of explaining artistic concepts through Kirby examples would be useful to younger/less experienced artists is solid enough and the Kirby examples are great, but the explanations/descriptions are not descriptive enough for that audience. And for people who are familiar enough with the concepts that they don't need longer explanations, there aren't enough examples that they wouldn't be able to find just thumbing through their own collections. This book seems to be a middle-ground that wouldn't serve either potential audience very well. But with a retail price of only $14.95 US for the paperback version, I can't complain too much about getting to look at Jack Kirby artwork. (A hardcover version is also available for $24.95 US.)

Usually when I'm talking about Winsor McCay, I'm talking about one of his brilliant comics. Probably Little Nemo in Slumberland. But he was a beast of an artist and cranked out tons and tons of work, including several experimental animated films, which he drew (and sometimes colored!) by hand. He even took Gertie the Dinosaur on tour and presented it as part of a Vaudeville-style act, with McCay himself seemingly interacting with the animated Gertie.

However, I recently came across one of the films he was working on in 1921 that was -- as far as anyone can tell -- was never completed and/or presented publicly: The Centaurs. It was produced by Rialto Productions -- basically McCay's own production house. There was about three minutes' worth of animation completed, but because it had been stored poorly, about half of it didn't survive when it was discovered to be in the possession of long-time McCay associated Irving Mendelsohn in 1947. (My understanding is that the actual film strip itself was literally crumbling to dust.) What we have left is then radically incomplete, offering little in the way of actual story. What we do have suggests something of a love story -- with a male and female centaur expressly affection for one another and meeting with (presumably) his parents before a child centaur is introduced. There's also a seemingly unconnected scene where the male centaur throws a rock at a passing bird for no apparent reason.

Because McCay had been passed away for over a decade before any of the footage surfaced, it's unclear why he seemed to have left it abandoned. I've seen speculation that the partial nudity proved too risque for the times, that McCay ran out of funding, and that he was simply getting too old/infirm to continue work on it. Given the other circumstances of his life at that time, I'm disinclined to believe all of those ideas, but I am at a loss to offer any other reasonable explanations.

In any event, as I only recently discovered this footage myself, I thought I might offer it up here as something of a tangental interest to those who might only know McCay from his comic strip work...

Mark D. White's latest book at the intersection of comic books and philosophy is Ethics of the Fantastic Four. In it, he discusses... well, the ethics of the Fantastic Four. He's not looking at individual decisions, but at the cumulative overall approach each character takes that helps to define who they are. He devotes an entire chapter to each of the four primary members, as well as one for Dr. Doom and another for Galactus and the Silver Surfer. He of course offers an introduction to some broad ethical frameworks to work from, and he does have a sort of case study by way of Marvel's Civil War event.

The challenge with this type of overview of fictional characters with decades of continuity is that every character has been worked on by hundreds of creators, even if you limit yourself to a single outlet. White entirely avoids extra complications by strictly focusing on the primary comics continuity, and skipping other media as well as alternate reality versions. But even so, we're still talking about hundreds of creators across thousands of comics.

That's what wound up impressing me most about the book overall. White really did an impressive amount of research, pulling out references to what I would consider obscure stories and incidents to both serve as strong examples or emphasize points he's already made. He very much could've written much the same book with half of the references but by calling out odd, one-off stories on a regular/consistent basis, he really emphasizes that he's not cherry picking examples to prove a point but letting the collective body of all the comics to drive his thesis.

The chapter that perhaps raised my eyebrow the most of was the case study on Civil War, mainly because I felt Reed Richards was written wildly out of chatacter for that story and used more as a plot contrivance than letting the chatacter direct his story. White does spend time prefacing the analysis by looking at an earlier story in which Reed comes to the exact same problem from the polar opposite (and more character driven) position, but he doesn't try to reconcile the two viewpoints or offer how one might change positions so radically. I don't know that one necessarily can rationalize that (I know I've never been able to) but he does at least point out the discrepancy. I don't know if he chose that as his case study in order that he might try to sort it out, or if he just wanted to highlight the most significant disconnect, of if he just wanted to play on the timing of it being the twentieth anniversary of that storyline.

My background with the Fantastic Four is much stronger than my background in philosophy, but White does an excellent job of making both topics extremely accessible. He cites plenty of sources if he mentions an incident or story that you might want to follow up on, and I found his end notes to be as enlightening as the main text.

Ethics of the Fantastic Four came out last year from Ockham Publishing and should be available through your favorite book shop. it retails for $12.99 US.

When I was just getting into comic books in the early 1980s, my options for "research" were pretty limited. There were no comic shops nearby to pick up back issues, conventions for few and far between, the internet didn't yet exist, and my income as a 12-year-old was limited to pocket change I earned caddying at a local golf course. (Which, by the way, was nowhere NEAR as neat a job as Caddyshack led me to believe!) The reprint policies we see today were FAR from the norm, which meant that even finding reprints of old comics was difficult!

But for some reason, in 1981, Ideals produced a series of four trade paperbacks featuring a short collection of stories reprinting tales of Spider-Man, Captain America, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four housed under a "Secret Story of..." umbrella. They had original painted covers (I believe all by Bob Larkin) and all featured the same back illustration and cross-promotion (seen below at right). Each book contained an origin (though not necessarily the original telling), one stand-alone story from around 1970, and a then-recent-ish stand-alone story. I presume the intent was to show how the characters have progressed over the course of two decades. David Anthony Kraft provided introductions for each story, short character biographies, and some general background information.

And, for whatever reason, our local library had a set of these.

It was a small library; the town only had a population of about 7,000. They had a few floppies that periodically came (I only recall The Avengers but I'm sure there were a few other titles) but these Ideals books were just about the full extent of their graphic novels section. As I recall, they were shelved between the Garfield and Peanuts collections, and the how-to-draw books, mostly ones by Lee Ames. I checked these out fairly regularly, particularly the Fantastic Four volume, and until I got my hands on a set of the Marvel Handbooks around 1988/89, these were pretty much the extent of what I was able to learn about the history of the Marvel Universe.

Strange to think now of the limitations fans faced even as recently as the 1980s with regards to older stories. We knew they were out there; the current issue number indicated that there were several hundred issues that came before. If you could get to a comic shop, you could rummage through the back issue bins, but even if they did have every issue (which they never even came close to!) you couldn't afford them all. You could find the origin stories in a few places, but if you wanted to see what happened in #5, or #12, or whatever, you were largely out of luck until you could find an original copy and afford to purchase it. So in that sense, the "secret story of" wording was pretty accurate; the stories were pretty secret by virtue of their scarcity.

But even back in the day, I recognized that those Ideals books did not live up to the publisher's name. The spot illustrations used throughout the books were very badly cropped and placed. I didn't think the story selections were all that good (greatful as I was to have them available). Kraft's interstitial prose struck me as both sophomoric and condescending. But they did help to connect me with comics that were published before I was born, and provided a window to a larger tapestry of stories. And for that, I'll have to thank them.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Steve Englehart on the FF
https://ift.tt/QxDhE47

Kleefeld on Comics: From Ghost Rider to Buzz O'Keefe
https://ift.tt/GHoikum

Kleefeld on Comics: Bill Gaines circa 1991
https://ift.tt/QBh1tmf

Kleefeld on Comics: Defacing Old Comic Strip Art
https://ift.tt/bGjqeNp

Kleefeld on Comics: Alley Awards
https://ift.tt/NAUMSow

The original idea for a comic award came from writer/editor/historian Roy Thomas. (Although he had held none of those titles before that point.) Thomas has suggested the idea in a 1961 letter to Jerry Bails as a kind of feature for their then-only-months-old fanzine Alter-Ego. They were originally going to be called the "Alter-Ego Award" but, realizing that no comics award had ever been done before, they decided on the "Alley Award" after the character Alley Oop. Thomas' rationale was that "surely a caveman had to be the earliest superhero chronologically."

Voting was solicited through Alter-Ego and sent directly to Bails who counted the ballots himself initially. By the third year, however, he was receiving so many ballots that he invited several other fans to his house to help. The so-called "Alley Tally" wound up being the first recorded gathering of fans (including Ronn Foss, Don Glut, Don and Maggie Thompson, Mike Vosburg, and Grass Green) and is generally considered a precursor to the first comic book convention.

The first Alley Awards were announced in Alter-Ego #4 and the cover featured a drawing by Foss of the statuette he created. He'd originally carved the sculpture out of wood, made a cast of that, and then produced a series of the finals out of plaster, which he then painted gold or silver.

Beginning in 1965, an actual awards ceremony was held at Academy Con, switching to Phil Seuling's Comic Art Convention when that began in 1968. As both shows were based out of New York City, a number of comic book professionals were able to attend over the years, including Stan Lee, Burne Hogarth, Otto Binder, Hal Foster, Bill Finger, Gardner Fox, Mort Weisinger, James Warren, Roy Thomas (by then having moved to New York and becoming a professional), Gil Kane, Bill Everett, Carmine Infantino, and Julius Schwartz.

By this point, an interconnected comics fandom had become relatively well-established, and Bails' original intentions of getting everything rolling had been very successful. There were several venues open to comic fans, and interest in Alter-Ego and the Alleys dwindled as fans sought other, more narrowly focused options. Both the magazine and awards ended in 1969, with a final awards ceremony for the '69 Alleys conducted the following year.

Here's the original art for the March 11, 1936 installment of Gasoline Alley...

You might notice a black line running through the whole strip about 3/4 of the way down. That's actually not uncommon to find syndicated comic strip art from that era defaced in such a way. Why? Well, here's what the ebay seller who I originally saw selling this years ago said to explain it...

The black line through the lower section of the art is typical for daily comic strips from the 1930s-1940s. During this period, strips were run in two different sizes (full and reduced). The full size strip was originally shot with the bottom copyright notice and made available to newspapers which ran the strip full size. The line was then drawn across the lower section of the strip (effectively creating a new bottom to the panels; with some strips, a blank piece of paper was glued across the bottom) and a second copyright notice applied for papers running a reduced size strip. This is why nothing much happened in the bottom of many 1930s-40s daily strips and why the artists made sure to sign above where the reduced size line would be inserted.

No bothering with marking up the copy because once the original was shot for use in synidcation, it had no further use as far as anyone was concerned.

It's not quite as blasphemous as using the acetate animation cels for Snow White to go "sledding" across the slick hallway floor, but it's still hard to believe shortcuts like that were taken.