Marvel Comics Artist's and Artisan Editions

Before the colorists have their ways with comic book pages, line artists conceive and perfect the contours of the superheroes who swing across skylines on their webs or smash through brick walls. For some aficionados, pre-colored pages are the purest products of the central artist's vision, hence the existence of "Artisan" and "Artist's" editions of iconic comics. 

IDW's latest additions to its "Artisan" and "Artist's" library showcase Jack Kirby's unpretentious illustrations for Fantastic Four issues #71, #82-84, and Annual #6 (in which the Invisible Girl brings down an android and the FF put Maximus's hypno-gun out of commission), John Romita's similarly bold and basic work for Spiderman #67-69, #71, #75, and #84 (in which Spidey finds himself shrunk down to 6 inches and grapples with the Kingpin), and a random assortment of pages depicting Jim Lee's comparatively complex work on X-Men. 

Unlike the "Artisan" homages to Kirby and Romita, Lee's Artist's Edition makes no attempt to spin stories. It's all about the art, which appears on astoundingly huge 12" x 17 1/2" pages in a hardcover package with giant centerfold. When the illustrations are blown up to such proportions and drained of color, the eye is drawn to unexpected spots on the page. The central images that register with perfect punch on standard-sized pages step aside to allow the small details to swoop out: the tirelessly applied hatching, the wrinkles of a furrowed brow (there are a lot of those), the stubble on a square jaw (lots of those too). 

The pages of Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four: Artisan Edition, John Romita's The Amazing Spider Man: Artisan Edition, and Jim Lee's X-Men: Artist's Edition are also uncommonly tactile despite the absence of consciously applied color. Taped-on typed page numbers, globs of white paint, penned notes in margins, and even dirty fingerprints humanize comics that always seemed a bit like they slipped in from some more perfect dimension.

Review: 'The World of Twomorrows: Celebrating 25 Years of the Future of Fandom'

In his introduction to The World of Twomorrows: Celebrating 25 Years of the Future of Fandom, Mark Evanier rewrites a quote from playwright George S. Kaufman to declare, “If you want to get revenge on a publisher, convince them there’s an audience out there for books and magazines about comic book history.”

Review: 'Jack Kirby's Dingbat Love'

In the seventies, Jack Kirby developed several titles for DC Comics’ “Speak Out” series, which would skew toward a more adult readership while tackling topics such as divorce, African-American romance, and street crime. DC did not like Kirby’s approach, watering down his comics in most respects and ultimately nipping them all in the bud. Consequently, Kirby’s work on True-Life Divorce, Soul Love, and Dingbats on Danger Street has become some of the rarest artifacts from the “King of Comics”.

Review: 'Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said!'

In 2014, the Jack Kirby estate reached a settlement with Marvel that saw the late comics artist/writer finally receive credit for his multitudinous contributions to co-creating the Marvel Universe with Stan Lee. Comics historian John Morrow was an expert witness for the Kirby family in the case. Five years later, Morrow has published his own investigation into the matter of whether Kirby or Lee can be called the true father of Marvel in the form of an oral history called Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said!

The book is a chronological he said/he said narrative that essentially picks up steam in the early sixties and continues through the settlement. Oral histories tend to be unreliable, and Stuf’ Said! certainly comes with its own baggage. Stan Lee was a shamelessly self-aggrandizing self-promoter who believed that writers are the true creators. Jack Kirby was bitter and sometimes lashed out in both interviews and satirical comics that depicted Lee as a talent leech. Despite input from many of the people closest to these two men, a definitive answer to Morrow’s central question remains elusive.

However, examining that question—which should really only be of concern to the Kirby and Lee estates despite some fans treating it like some sort of pro-wrestling rivalry— isn’t really the main draw of Stuf’ Said! The book is much more interesting as a close examination of the ups and downs of a working relationship between two very influential creative people with their own personal foibles told largely in their own words without too much editorializing by the author. Although Morrow’s role in the settlement may raise eyebrows, he does an admirable job of remaining neutral throughout the book, occasionally making an attempt to interpret the intent behind a statement while framing that interpretation as something that needs to be taken with a grain of salt (which he conveniently and cleverly signals with a little graphic of a salt shaker).

Morrow’s efforts to cover the men’s public opinions of each other is certainly thorough, though there is the unavoidable issue of imbalance since Lee was so addicted to performing interviews and writing editorials and Kirby was not. There is also a lot of repetition to wade through as the men tended to say the same things in a lot of these interviews: Lee incessantly explains how it was his idea to create superheroes with foibles, Kirby regularly insists he was behind the X-Men and the Fantastic Four because he was concerned about radiation, Lee loves to say that Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde inspired him to create the Hulk, and so on. Occasionally there are minor variations in these statements that Morrow seizes on to point out an inconsistency in the speaker’s memories, but all that repetition doesn’t always make for the most compelling reading.

Still, fans who feel they have a pony in this race will find Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! fascinating, and like all books by Morrow’s TwoMorrow’s Publishing, it is great to look at with oodles of color and B&W artwork and a witty format.

Review: 'Behaving Madly: Zany, Loco, Cockeyed, Rip-Off, Satire Magazines'

When Bill Gaines and his line of delightful horror comics came under fire from the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency (yecch!), his cohort Harvey Kurtzman schemed to pull one of their non-horror titles away from the Comic Code’s wagging finger by changing the format of the satirical MAD from a comic book to a proper magazine. The move was cagey. It was also a mad commercial and cultural success, and you know what happens when something’s successful. Suddenly MAD was sharing rack space with Zany!, Frantic!, Crazy, Man, Crazy, From Here to Insanity, Loco, This Magazine Is Crazy, and plenty of other would-be MADs. Like the comics that attempted to recreate the macabre magic of Gaines’s horror titles, the MAD knock offs rarely lived up to the mag they aspired to be. That doesn’t mean that they never delivered funny material or top-notch art. In fact, many MAD-men such as Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Angelo Torres, Basil Wolverton, and Will Elder also worked for the other guys. So did such comics luminaries as Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, and John Severin of the most enduring MAD knock off, Cracked.

IDW’s new collection Behaving Madly curates articles from the best of the knock offs, many of which feature these big name artists. Not everything in the collection can go toe-to-toe with the Usual Gang of Idiots. Certain pieces seem to end before reaching a punch line or opt for a sort of head-scratching absurdity. Some are too text heavy, such as Ric Estrada’s limp spoofs of Hemingway and Spillane from Frantic! The bits that strive most to follow the MAD format are usually the most successful, such as Art Gates’s hilariously violent Blackboard Jungle spoof from From Here to Insanity and Wolverton’s magnificently grotesque “Fashions for the Miserable Motorist” from Crazy, Man, Crazy.

Whether or not the comedy hits the bull’s eye, the artwork is almost uniformly boss and the ultra-fifties themes hit the nostalgic sweet spot. Behaving Madly is a trip through a malt shop populated by Elvis, Marilyn, Monsters (there’s an entire section devoted to Drac, Frankie, and their cronies), Archie (in a Zany! parody that’s nearly identical to one that appeared four years earlier in MAD), Ernie Kovacs lookalikes, and Maiden Form bra models. This also means that the spoofs sometimes play up such outdated and highly regrettable sources of “humor” as racial stereotypes and beating up women (blecch!). However, most of the pieces in Behaving Madly are an uncomplicated kick, and the near 50-page introduction is a swell history of these second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth-rate magazines.

Review: 'The Simon & Kirby Library: Horror!'

As if we needed any more proof of the insanity of the anti-comics Senatorial hearings of the 1950s, one of the comics called into question was Black Magic. E.C.’s horror comics were the most visible victims of the senate’s witch-hunt, both because William Gaines courageously/foolhardily challenged the subcommittee directly and because his comics were really, really gruesome. In comparison, Black Magic was a paragon of restraint. Most of the tales Joe Simon and Jack Kirby whipped up for the comic were tastefully illustrated, usually lacking in violence or even the explicitly supernatural. To put it in TV terms, if Tales from the Crypt was Boris Karloff’s Thriller, then Black Magic was One Step Beyond. 

A lot of the stories compiled into The Simon & Kirby Library: Horror!— part of a series compiling the guys’ work by genre— barely qualifies as horror. Pieces such as “The Girl Who Walked on Water” and “A Giant Walks the Earth” are squarely in the uncanny or fantasy drawers. “The Scorn of the Faceless People” is presented as a psychological study by a couple of cartoon shrinks. There’s also a short piece on Nostradamus’s vague predictions. Quite unlike Crypt’s menagerie of zombie and vampire tales, many of Simon & Kirby’s stories could have really happened. Even a tale about a mysterious werewolf lady is plausible. Although a few stories close in on the graphic muck the more committed horror comics deliver (“Freak”, “Nasty Little Man”, and the genuinely horrifying “Hungry as a Wolf”, for example), readers who really want to swim in that stuff might be a bit disappointed by the maturity of Simon & Kirby’s dalliances with the genre. The duo’s artwork is more in line with the gooey romance comics they pioneered than goopy horror.

Those who already count themselves among the artists’ fans will be most impressed with The Simon & Kirby Library: Horror! This is a great looking volume with restored artwork that doesn’t look absurdly digitized, as the recent volumes of Dark Horse’s The E.C. Archives do. You also get more thrills for your buck. There are over fifty stories collected here; everything Simon & Kirby contributed to Black Magic and the weirder (and wonderfully titled) The Strange World of Your Dreams, which featured illustrated dramatizations of the actual dreams of that comic’s founder, Mort Meskin!