Kirb Your Enthusiasm (11)

By: Joshua Glenn
February 28, 2011

Eleventh in a series of posts, each one analyzing a single panel from a Jack Kirby-drawn comic book.

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kirby-astonish-550 — Click on image for larger version. Click on that image to zoom in.

From his first work in the ’30s through the early ’60s, Jack Kirby and his collaborators gave us sf comics that mirrored what was going on in literary science fiction during those same years. Like the sf that John W. Campbell began running in Astounding Science Fiction from late ’37 on, the sf comics that Kirby drew were as fantastical as Flash Gordon-esque schlock, yet intelligent and socially conscious. Even when his collaborators wrote schlock, Kirby’s gnostic style mutated their stories into… something else.

In this panel from Tales to Astonish #31 (May 1962), we find a prototypical Kirby protagonist — a square-jawed suburbanite in a short-brimmed fedora — confronted with the out-of-this-world. The story, “It Fell from a Flying Saucer,” concerns an artist who finds an alien artifact, technology so advanced that “we on Earth would say it has magic powers.” (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” as Arthur C. Clarke put it in ’62.) Whatever the man draws with the pencil gets actualized; alas, instead of drawing a planet without war or poverty, he draws himself as king of the world. Outraged that his flunkies don’t believe his story about the flying saucer from which his pencil dropped, he draws it for them… at which point [SPOILER] the UFO materializes, an alien tentacle snatches the pencil, and everything returns to normal.

Or does it? Kirby makes the normal look fraught, suspect. The uncredited author of “It Fell from a Flying Saucer” penned a middlebrow Cold War sf parable about the danger of getting what you wished for (read: utopianism). But as drawn by Kirby, its theme is the uncanny Platonic notion of an empirical world that is not as truly real as the archetypal realm. Kirby was no naive utopian, but he did believe that another world is possible. Long before his post-’63 new-wave visual experimentation (I’m thinking of the photomontages, in particular) and writing (“And that is the insidious charm of ‘Happyland’! For Moonrider, it’s now an unbreakable, transparent cage!”), Kirby’s artwork suggested the gnostic’s intuition that all might change, change utterly. Why, the very flesh of the man pictured here ripples with barely contained potential: he might be Steve Rogers, half-evolved into a super-soldier — or Ben Grimm, Bruce Banner, Buddy Blank!

No matter what other comic-book scholars tell you, the so-called Golden Age of comics lasted from their first appearance in 1934 until Kirby went New Wave after ’63. During that era, Kirby-drawn sf comics — e.g., in the ’30s, “The Diary of Dr. Hayward”; in the ’40s, The Solar Legion, Captain America, “Thought-World Monsters”; in the ’50s, Challengers of the Unknown, Green Arrow, “Saucer Men”; in the early ’60s, stories in Strange Worlds, et al., plus The Fantastic Four, Iron Man, The X-Men — were the uncanniest. It’s as though they fell from a flying saucer.

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ALSO ON HILOBROW: Joe Alterio’s Cablegate Comix | HiLobrow posts about comics and cartoonists | HiLobrow posts about science fiction | The New Gods generation

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Kirb Your Enthusiasm (11)

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