Thursday, August 28, 2003

Chase

I should mention that a past August 28 was also the birthdate of my other mentor in the comic book field, a lovely man named Chase Craig. Chase was the editor-in-chief for Western Publishing's Los Angeles office and as such was responsible for countless Dell and Gold Key Comics, including the Disney and Warner Brothers titles. If you enjoyed the work of Carl Barks or Russ Manning or Harvey Eisenberg or any of the folks who wrote and drew those comics, you were enjoying a comic book edited by Chase Craig. He set and maintained a very high standard, lowering it only to allow me to work for him for a few years there.

As I look over my dubious knowledge of how to write comics, I have to admit that I learned as much from Chase as from Jack.

Chase was born August 28, 1910 and passed away in December of 2001. Western's books rarely carried credits, and I'm not sure Chase's name ever appeared in any of the thousands of fine comics he supervised. But leaving aside his momentary lapse of hiring me, he deserves to be hailed as a very important person in the history of the medium. Elsewhere here, I have just reposted this column which I wrote at the time of Chase's passing. If you're interested in comics and unfamiliar with the name of Chase Craig, I hope you'll give it a read.

• Posted at 8:21 PM · LINK

Jack

Had we not lost him nine and a half years ago, today would have been the 86th birthday of Jack Kirby. Part of me finds this hard to believe because I still find myself talking about Jack, writing about Jack, thinking about Jack. He remains as powerful an influence on many of us as he did when he was alive and we could go out to his house and talk to him, see him at conventions and so on. Part of this is due to the timeless quality not only of his work but of his wisdom. The former is easier to discuss. Jack's comic book work glowed with a certain kind of organic energy and even when the storyline involved other dimensions or Norse Gods, the emotions displayed had more to do with us as human beings than a lot of so-called "realistic" or "relevant" comics.

In 1975 when Jack returned unhappily to Marvel as writer-artist of a small group of books, his work was generally derided. Some Marvel staffers, in terms they now regret or deny, denounced his work as the ravings of a washed-up, senile old man. Many readers spoke ill of it, and though I loved Jack dearly, I didn't even like it that much and (cringe) said so in print. History is proving us at least partially narrow-minded, as that work is rediscovered, reappraised and even respected more than a lot of material we then thought superior. If Jack were the kind of person to laugh at others' comeuppance, he would have the last chuckle at that.

But I find myself increasingly thinking of Kirby the Man, as opposed to Kirby the Comic Book Creator. Jack's quirky, disconnected way of speaking often made him hard to follow, and therefore made it hard to realize that he was a brilliant man and a much deeper thinker than you had to be to draw super-heroes and super-villains punching each other across the page. I am not knocking those who just drew such scenes without a lot of philosophy and gut behind it; even at that, they were giving their employers a lot more than their employers ever gave them. But Kirby Art came wrapped in a worldview and a sense of humanity, and I increasingly find myself wishing Jack had been granted a venue where he could have done more than Marvel Comics, regardless of what company published him.

I wish someone had gone to Jack and offered him a gig like what Sam Glanzman had in back-up features in the DC war books. Glanzman wrote and drew a series called "The U.S.S. Stevens," which were simple autobiographical tales from his days in World War II. Kirby had wonderful stories of his own wartime experiences. Some were certainly true, some were embellished but all were amazing, and the only times Jack really had the opportunity to commit them to paper, he had to freely adapt them as episodes of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos or The Losers. Even configured for those purposes, they were compelling but I wish they could have starred P.F.C. Jack Kirby instead of those gimmicky, less-real characters.

And I wish someone had commissioned him to do the kind of graphic novels in which his friend (and one-time employer) Will Eisner has excelled. Eisner is still kicking the heinies of much younger men with visual recollections of his childhood and maturation. Kirby did one effort in this vein, a tale called "Street Code" that left his close friends eager for more. But it was only the one story, it was only a few pages, and it was done at a time when his eyesight and drawing hand were impeding his creative output. Too little, too late.

And I wish some publisher had just said to Kirby, "Forget about what the marketplace currently thinks is commercial. Forget about what everyone is expecting when they pick up a Jack Kirby comic. Here's a nice salary. Do the book that takes comics where you see them going in ten or twenty years." That may sound risky but I think it would have been like if you were asked to spend two bucks on a lottery ticket where the odds were only 10-to-1 against winning a million bucks. I wasn't even a publisher then and I still regret that I never put up my own money to try and make that happen.

Most of all, I wish I'd just listened more to what he told me. I remember a lot of it, often verbatim, and I taped or took good notes on a lot of it. But I regret every syllable that is gone forever.

Jack: I don't know if they have a good Internet connection where you are. (It took Marv Wolfman until last week to get high-speed out in Woodland Hills.) But if you're reading this: We miss you. You have no idea how much we miss you. And I think at times, even we don't have any idea how much we miss you.

• Posted at 2:43 PM · LINK

Recall Stuff

The L.A. Times and CNN are talking about holding a California gubernatorial debate on September 30. The idea is that they would invite any candidate who was at 10% in either the L.A. Times poll or the Field poll, plus Gray Davis. Those two polls are running far enough apart that it's likely Tom McClintock would qualify by at least one. That would probably mean the debate would be Davis, Bustamante, Schwarzenegger and McClintock. So you'd have...

• Two Democrats who seem to detest one another
• Two Republicans with wildly-different viewpoints
• Two guys who want the recall, one who doesn't and one who says he doesn't
• Three pro-choicers
• One guy who admits to having used marijuana and hashish, and to participating in public group sex...but is not Larry Flynt
• Three people with experience in government
• ...and four completely different views of how much fiscal difficulty California is in.

That should be interesting. But what do you want to bet some enterprising station puts together an alternative debate with Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt, Gallagher, that porn actress and a few others? And that Arianna Huffington, Peter Ueberroth and Peter Camejo get shut out of both?

• Posted at 1:24 PM · LINK