Winding your way down Yancy Street

I’ve never been to New York in the summer. And in particular I’ve never been to the Lower East Side in summer in the early 20th century. Yet I know the place like home. I can smell the fruit and cabbages that have rolled from barrows to get trodden underfoot. The stink of livestock and automobiles. The tobacco and stale sweat on the clothes of passers-by. The cheerfully rude street banter. The delighted shouts of kids running wild. The hissing gush of fire hydrants and the petrichor rising from the heat-stifled dust of the sidewalk.

How did that become a familiar place in my childhood memory? Not from movies like Dead End (1937), much as I love them. They can show you a photographic record, but they can never depict the way it felt. For that you need a guide like Jack Kirby.

A time machine could drop you in Lower Manhattan, but it couldn’t find you Yancy Street, though you’d recognize the hard-as-nails stare of Yancy Streeters in the neighbourhood kids – among them, back then, the young Jacob Kurtzberg. Wikipedia credits the invention of Yancy Street to Jack and Stan Lee, but if any such claim stretched credibility it’s that one. Stan grew up ninety blocks away in the Upper West Side. If he ever saw a street gang it would most likely have been up on the movie screen. He never lived that life and breathed that air as Jack did.

There’s been a lot of water under the Williamsburg Bridge since the Silver Age. Revisionists got their hands on the FF and soft-soaped everything for a more sentimental generation. So Ben Grimm became a former Yancy Streeter, Aunt Petunia a young medic, the gang itself openly reconciled with the hero they loved to hate – or hated to love. I’ll have none of it, and I don’t believe Jack would either. He could be big-hearted without getting schmaltzy. He could depict affection without corniness. He was a no-nonsense, stogie-chomping guy, just like his big orange creation, and his comic book New York was real in a way that nothing in Marvel’s universe feels these days.

And that’s why it matters. Because when we see the Surfer soaring over the skyscrapers of Manhattan, we also know the bustle of the ordinary folk way down there on the street. Jack shows us that so as to make the cosmic adventures real. When Galactus arrives, he doesn’t just come to chow down on concrete and girders. There are living, breathing people at threat, and the genius of Jack Kirby is to make them a richly contrary variety of types – not the nice, carefully set-up-for-sympathy cast of relatable bystanders that a modern comics writer would assemble, but real New Yorkers, warts ‘n all, many of whom might resent the high-handed experts like Reed Richards, the liberated women like Sue Storm, the loudmouth kids like her brother, and even be jealous of a rocky-skinned, two-fisted clobberin’ monster like Ben Grimm.

The people who inhabit Jack Kirby’s New York – a place he evoked more expressively than any other comics artist, even Ditko – reflect the ambiguity the Fantastic Four themselves feel about their role as heroes. His New Yorkers are maddening, loud, ungrateful, fickle, adoring, demanding, vibrant, scrappy and fun. When the FF step forward to protect mankind, they stand as champions of the good, the bad, and the majority who are just in between.

In such a mix, the Yancy Street gang stand out as the most constant of the lot. Whenever the Thing’s self-pity inflates to grandly indulgent proportions, he can count on a snappy put-down from the Yancy Streeters to bring him back to Earth. He might go into space, fight alien empires and demi-gods, and save the whole furshlugginer galaxy, but when he’s back and takes a stroll past Yancy Street, it’s their jeers and catcalls that comprise the most sincere welcome home. It’s fitting that, with Ben Grimm’s self-loathing simmering just under the surface, the nearest he’d have to a fan club would be a bunch of hard-boiled, blue-collar guys who send him exploding cigars and pelt him with rotten tomatoes. And you get the feeling he wouldn’t have it any other way.

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This essay originally appeared in Jack Kirby: Variations On A Theme, edited by Glenn B Fleming, who knew Jack Kirby personally. You need the whole book, true believer.

From Mytek the Mighty to the TARDIS control room

I was delighted and honoured to be invited to appear at CRoM Con Europe, the convention for comics fans and SF/fantasy geeks. Many thanks to Pops Van Sant, our esteemed host, and Glenn B Fleming, UK comics powerhouse, for including me. I got to hold forth about Mirabilis for a bit, describe my visit to the Doctor Who studios back in the Hartnell era, and as an added bonus I got to meet the guys from the Earth Station One podcast. Their back catalogue of episodes will be the soundtrack to my country walks well into the spring.

At one point we got to talking about Wrath of the Gods, a fabulously scary '60s comic strip set in the mythic age of Greece. It was illustrated by the (also mythic) Ron Embleton, of course, not "Ron Pemberton" as I burbled during the podcast. (I'd been chatting about Inside Number 9 recently; that's the only excuse I've got.)

If you want to skip, I come in after about three and half hours, but listen to the whole thing (there's a part two as well) because there are so many fascinating people with stories to tell and wisdom to impart. Talking of which, here's the time Glenn met Jack "King" Kirby:

And if you've just joined us:

Farewell to Genial Gene

The first new comic I bought had a classic Gene Colan cover: a dramatic up angle with just enough architectural detail to establish a sense of place but all the emphasis on the characters in muscular action pose.

I don’t know why I picked Daredevil. I’d been following Marvel characters in tattered old anthology books from the secondhand store across the road from the newsagent, all the stories out of order, covers scuffed white, and I already knew I liked Iron Man and Spider-Man best. But Daredevil had Colan’s art, and that was a revelation to me.

Ninepence on the counter and now I was a true collector. And immediately Gene Colan was the artist for me. I liked the openness of John Romita’s work, the gut-busting cartoony energy of Kirby, the clean precision of Don Heck, but Colan’s stuff was rawer and it was real. He could skimp on background detail, favoring tight shots that let him focus on the characters. But after all, the characters’ feelings and actions are what matter in a story. Lavishly depicted scenery in a comic book is like descriptive prose in a novel – you want just enough. And Colan knew exactly how much that was.

Take a guy hailing a cab in the rain. Kirby would give you a beautifully formalized fire hydrant and newspapers billowing soggily in the gutter. Ditko might give you a shot down on the whole street, with rain sluicing off gargoyles and the character dwarfed by the elements. Colan, though – he’d just show part of a building, the curb and the fuzzy headlights of the cab, all as sketchily under-detailed as possible, leaving the emphasis on the man raising his arm. And that line of action would be perfect – not the “model posed in the act” that most comics artists would give you, but a panel like a paparazzi shot catching a moment of action in a continuous movement.

That’s what Gene Colan had that other comics artists lacked. They’d dress a scene wonderfully, like a movie set, but Colan clothed it in reality. If he drew characters in a gym, you could smell the stale sweat. His New York sweltered in the summer and in the winter you could feel the bone-scooping cold. If he drew a ceiling collapsing, you felt the weight of the rubble. And most of all there was the constant sense of movement. His cars and trains sped by; his characters lunged and spun; emotions seemed as real as if the characters were in the room with you; a kick from Daredevil looked like it’d knock your teeth out.

Gene Colan died this week and the Silver Age of individual, idiosyncratic artistic talent like his slipped further away from us. But it gives us an excuse to briefly push aside the veil and bask in a ray of sunlight from those halcyon days. Thanks to digital comics, a lot of those great works are available again, and I advise anyone with a dream of working in comics to take an afternoon or two and really look at Gene Colan’s work from the late sixties through to the mid-seventies. We lived in the presence of genius then and we could buy it for ninepence a month. That’s something worth celebrating.

Also, imagine my delight, having read Daredevil #24 and gone back for more, when I discovered he was also drawing Iron Man!

Gene Colan September 1, 1926 to June 23, 2011

King's heirs sue to get the crown back

Passing a newsagent's window this week, my eye caught a display for Ben 10 bubble gum or ice cream or something. A couple of steps later, I backtracked for another look, because (by gum) there were the distinctive "black dots" which, for my generation, evoked the coruscating, pulse-pounding force of cosmic energy as depicted by the one, the only, Jack "King" Kirby.

I love the idea of modern artists using the King's visual signifiers in corporately created stuff that's designed to sell toys to kids. It seems like a blow for freedom, as though they're smuggling something sacred under the very noses of the marketing wonks who are jabbering about whether little Ben needs to be fifteen percent more relatable or whatever.

Even better news this week is that Kirby's heirs are making some headway in their attempts to recover rights in the characters and stories he created. It's ridiculous that they should have to go to the lengths of shelling out money to lawyers in order to get their demands even acknowledged, but that's the world we live in. I've been on that ferry ride myself, and after you pay the lawyers to unleash shock and awe, the corporation turns round and says well goodness, you didn't need to do that, golly we always meant for you to have a share in those rights all along, you never needed to get legal folks involved, blah blah. To which I can only add that the Kirby family have all my best wishes and I hope they do get control of those rights, for the simple reason that (I assume) their interest is personal as well as financial, and creative works are valueless if they're taken away from the people who have genuine passion for them.