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.

Death and the maiden over

Death, along with Jack Frost and the Moon and other entities of nature, in folktales appears in person - not the divine ruler of the realm of death, as in mythological stories, but the very embodied spirit of mortality. In Norwegian tales it's often a specific death, a given plague that is seen as an old woman going from village to village. Sometimes Death can be tricked - though usually not for long, and at great cost, for if folktales don't ultimately tell the starkest of truths then what are those stories for?

Italo Calvino was partial to Italian folktales, and the last story in his collection Fiabe Italiane is "Jump into my Sack", in which a crippled boy acquires a magic sack in which he briefly traps Death. There's no comeback, and he releases Death almost at once without prompting - just the sort of rough edge you expect in folktales.

Arthur Ransome's story "The Soldier and Death" is structurally much tidier. There the sack belongs to a Russian soldier who uses it to snare Death when she comes for the Tzar:

From that time on there was no dying in the world . There were births every day, and plenty of them, but nobody died. It was a poor time for doctors. And so it was for many years. Death had come to an end, and it was as if all men would live for ever. And all the time the little old woman, Death, tied up in a sack, unable to get about her business, was hanging from the top of a tall poplar tree away in the forest.

In time the soldier realizes the consequences of a world in which no-one dies, so he sets Death free. But she's thoroughly frightened and won't take him now, so he goes on to harrow Hell and finally meet a fate that is affecting, but far too authorial and elegant for me to believe that Ransome has presented this story just as he came across it in some woodland hut beside the samovar.

"The Soldier and Death" was published in 1920. Nineteen years later, the story put on new clothes in the form of On Borrowed Time, a movie with Lionel Barrymore as an old man who traps Death, now male, up an apple tree. He finally relents when his grandson falls trying to climb the tree and is paralyzed but unable to die. This version ends with Gramps and young Pud (sic) following Death up to a shining light in the sky. What can I say? Paul Osborn, the screenwriter, was perhaps not quite the storytelling genius Ransome was.

Early in 1962, in the pages of Amazing (Adult) Fantasy #9, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko revived the story as "The Man Who Captured Death" - a classic Lee/Ditko title, for sure. Death here looks like Bengt Ekerot and is caught in "an electronic ray". Beetles become immune to DDT and eat the crops; rats breed and infest the cities; antibiotics stop working; the incurably ill suffer but cannot die. So the old scientist who designed the ray turns it off: "You were right, grim one! No man may alter the mysterious scheme of things!" To which Death replies, "Thus has it ever been... Thus must it ever be..." Okay, still not on a par with Ransome. But it has Ditko drawing Death, and if anything could equal the dark brilliance of Russian folklore it's that.

Whether Death is stuck in a sack or a beam of light, good stories never die, especially when deadlines loom. And so we have a new spin on the story for television in the form of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I'm doubting that Death will actually be personified in this show, as that kind of concept belongs to fairytales and not to science fiction, but it will be interesting to see how the writers develop it. Because if Death is not a person, or at least a fantastic force of nature, then what process could systematically stop everyone dying throughout the world? In ten weeks we'll know.

In Mirabilis we have our own take on the story, "Death and the Maiden Over", in which Death arrives at Lord’s for the end of the cricket season. In a curious wager, he pads up and faces each of England’s fast bowlers. Until somebody can get him out, no-one in the world is to die. Finally, after a long afternoon that sees hospital wards filling up to capacity, W G Grace is called out of retirement and gets Death leg before wicket from his bath chair. Appropriate for a doctor, I think.

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

The genius of Ditko

There is no greater comic art luminary than Steve Ditko. Leaving aside the brilliance of his draughtsmanship, any page of his work is like a masterclass by the world’s greatest storyteller, director and cinematographer all in one.

Take a look at this excerpt from “The Shrieking Man”, which originally appeared in Eerie #4. The first page introduces us the set-up, hero, villain, dramatizes the whole thing with some vibrant Ditko drawing and atmospheric Dutch tilt, and incidentally slips in quite a bit of vital exposition without us even noticing. (To be fair, writer Archie Goodwin deserves his share of the credit for that.)

Now see what Ditko pulls off on the second page. In three panels he moves us from the set-up scene to a passage-of-time montage by way of a shot explaining the nearby graveyard. Three freakin’ panels, dude! Most modern comic artists wouldn’t be able to pull that off if you gave them three whole pages.

Then look at how Ditko kicks the story action into gear. A camera prowls to the window. See those tangled trees, the contrast of light and shade, the angles he picks, the care with which he locates the asylum relative to the graveyard so that we always know where we are. Again, many of today’s artists would miss this. They’d eschew the long shot to avoid having to draw too much detail, and a string of close-ups would leave us disorientated. Ditko never needs to clutter his frame with detail. It’s all there, but he carries it off with deft economy.

Yep, I’m kind of a fan if you couldn’t tell.

Atlas shrugged

Having talked a bit about Steve Ditko last time, I just have to put in a quick plug for Strange and Stranger, Blake Bell’s book on the great man’s life and work.

There’s not much point in me critiquing Ditko’s work here. It’s all been said better already (by Bell, for one) so I’ll just add that when I was voraciously consuming Marvel Comics the way modern kids do Twilight and alcopops, the official line had Jack Kirby as king of the artists - but, for me, Ditko always had the edge.

To this day, no other comic artist is so breathtakingly cinematic in his storytelling, nor as visually inventive and consistently surprising. I loved seeing Thor knock chunks off rock trolls with his uru hammer, but it was Ditko who kept coming up with new ways to amaze. You know in the Spider-man movie, when you first see Spidey swinging from building to building? The way the sheer momentum flings his limbs into extreme poses? That’s pure Ditko.

So, look: the guy was a genius. Blake Bell’s book is a large-format, lavish production on quality paper, so not cheap. But it’s a glimpse at genius. And it’s cheaper than a bottle of flavoured vodka. So go ahead and treat yourself. Me, I’ve already put in my order for the follow-up.

Something fantastig (sic)

My friend Michael Levy was at a cocktail party this weekend. His host: none other than Stan Lee. (There they are below.)

I’ve never been given to hero-worship as such, but Stan Lee was a big figure for me growing up. He’s J K Rowling, Anthony Horowitz and Stephenie Meyer rolled into one. I doubt if any other writer in history has created so many characters who inspire such levels of absolute devotion.

In the rush to make movies based on comic books, many Hollywood execs have missed the point that the really big hits have all come from the mind of Stan Lee. The Spider-man movies, for example; even if we forget the third one (and believe me, I’ve tried) that’s nearly $2 billion in box office takings alone.

Not that the money means a thing, but look at the love. Aunt May, Pepper Potts, Foggy Nelson, Mary Jane Watson - Stan created families of characters we can connect to and care about. Now, tell me: does anybody even remember the name of the lead character in Wanted?

Stan matters to me because his work taught me that stories in print form could be as compelling as movies. And, month on month, he showed me how to do it. The power of suspense to draw you in. The effectiveness of surprises and reversals to keep you guessing. The impact of cliffhangers to bring you back. And, most important of all, the through-line of characters that makes us want to invest in them emotionally.

There’s only one other cocktail party in the world that I’d want to crash as much, and that would be one hosted by Stan Lee’s one-time creative partner, Steve Ditko. (This is completely hypothetical, as I’m pretty sure Ditko isn't the type to throw cocktail parties.) The Spider-man stories were created by them both, following the “Marvel Method” whereby artist and writer would agree on a plot, the artist would go off and pencil the comic, and the writer (almost always Stan in the early days) would only then add the dialogue.
Famously (though not necessarily accurately, as Jonathan Ross has pointed out )the two are said to have fallen out over the identity of the Green Goblin. This had been set up over many issues and had all the readers guessing, including an earnest little wonk in short pants called David Morris. After forty years, I don’t think I’m throwing out a spoiler if I say that the Goblin turned out to be Norman Osborn, father of Peter Parker’s best pal Harry. Ditko had supposedly wanted him to turn out to be someone we had never seen before, on the grounds that was more realistic.

So it was. But stories aren’t realistic, and Stan was right. For whatever reason, Ditko left the comic before the Goblin was unmasked. He was replaced by John Romita (that’s J.R. senior, kiddies) - a towering talent in his own right, so it wasn’t exactly a George Lazenby moment. But I hope that there’s an Amazing Fantasy-style parallel universe out there somewhere in which Lee and Ditko never parted company and went on spinning intricate webs of narrative to ensnare us for decades more. Maybe they’re poolside in LA right now clinking piña coladas. In the hearts of True Believers ‘tis so.