Words vs. Pictures
It is fitting that Bob Reynolds becomes the Sentry by stealing a secret formula that complicates his relation to reality, since The Sentry comics themselves are a deliberate adulteration of the superhero formula that made Marvel comics a success. But who developed the formula in the first place?
The history of North American comics can be seen as a struggle for primacy between writers and artists, with the writer/artist as the conscientious objector who wins by default. What I have in mind is not the relationships between individual writers and artists (though they certainly play a role). Rather, at issue is the extent to which it is the writer or the artist who drives public conversation about comics (not to mentions sales). In the Nineties, when a speculator’s market coincided with the rise of the artists who would go on to form Image Comics, it was the artist who dominated (look no further than this new company’s name). In the next decade, writers became the hit ticket (although there is a very strong argument to be made for the unfortunate primacy of editors at the Big Two companies, setting their line’s direction with or without writers’ consultation).
I have already begun making my case for the importance of Seventies writers in the introduction, and I will continue that argument in the next chapter. But it is in the 1960s that the writer/artist dynamic is particularly complex, wrapped up as it is in a basic question of authorship. Who really was the prime mover at Marvel, Stan Lee or Jack Kirby? This is a question with legal, financial and moral ramifications. Stan Lee was undoubtedly the impresario, both as Editor-in-Chief and writer of record for nearly all of Marvel’s output before Roy Thomas’ arrival in 1965, by which point the majority of Marvel’s most iconic characters had debuted. Whether or not one accepts the maxim that history is written by the victors, Marvel’s history was initially written by its editor; while Lee heaped praise on “Jolly Jack” Kirby and “Sturdy Steve” Ditko, two of his main collaborators, he never let readers doubt his own role as Marvel’s creative genius.
DEFINITELY NOT AN EPIC RAP BATTLE
Though Lee would cease his regular scripting duties in the early 1970s, his name figured prominently on every Marvel publication. By contrast, Ditko left Marvel in 1966, while Kirby stayed on until 1970 (with a brief return from 1975-1980). Kirby’s contribution to Marvel’s creation was consistently downplayed, and his fight to have his original art return to him led to the receipt of only 88 out of 8,000 pages in 1984 (Howe). In later interviews, Kirby would claim that he was the primary creator of virtually all the characters he worked on, and that most of the plotting was done by him.
This is not the place to relitigate the Lee/Kirby conflict; it has been explored thoroughly and effectively in Charles Hatfield’s Hand of Fire, Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, and Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, to name just three prominent examples. However, because of the emphasis this chapter places Lee, I feel obligated to state my own views on the matter: given all the evidence, Kirby’s case is much more compelling than Lee’s. Forced to choose between the two, I would have no trouble naming Kirby as the genius behind Marvel.
Nonetheless, Kirby was not the sole author. Even when the plots came from Kirby or Ditko, the words were Lee's. And, while their style may seem clumsy or overblown to later readers’ tastes, they were an essential part of the comics success. All in all, Marvel’s 1960s and 1970s output appears excessively wordy in comparison to current trends, but the evolution of comics writing is not merely a matter of taste. At least part of it can be traced to changes in the visual layout of the comics page, and the relative importance of words for following the action from one panel to the next.
In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud identifies six types of panel-to-panel transitions:
Moment-to-moment: that is, panels that show different stages of an action in progress
Action-to-action: following a specific subject movie through a sequence of actions
Subject-to-subject: the panels describe the same scene, but showing different elements or using different perspectives
Scene-to-scene: the panels move between different scenes in time or space (such as in a flashback)
Aspect-to-aspect: the panels show different aspects of a single event occurring simultaneously
Non-sequitur: no logical connection between the panels can be inferred
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, even the most mainstream comics were moving away from caption-heavy pages and extensive word balloons (with X-Men scribe Chris Claremont always a notable holdout). Both captions and thought balloons have fallen out of favor, reducing nearly all language on the page to spoken dialogue in word balloons Three possible reasons suggest themselves: first, the rise of the writer/artist (such as Frank Miller); second, the successful writing careers of writers who started out as writer/artists (Brian Bendis, Ed Brubaker); and third, the decline in the “Marvel Method” of comics creation in favor of full scripts that are completed before the artist ever puts pencil to paper.
The trend has been towards greater cooperation between the writer and artist from the very beginning and a better understanding of page layout on the part of the writer. The comics pages tended to slow down their depiction of action, with a greater emphasis on aspect-to-aspect, subject-to-subject, and movement-to-movement transitions. When the resulting “decompressed storytelling” is seen as a flaw, the writer is usually blamed, but the writer is letting the artist slow down and use the visuals as the primary means by which the reader gets necessary information.
With the noteworthy exceptions of comics narrated by one of the characters (one of the few instances in which captions have not fallen out of favor), the written word in mainstream comics has shed most of its responsibility for helping the reader move from panel to panel. [1] But getting to this point has been a long journey. If we look at a middle-of-the road Golden Age comic published by National (the precursor to DC), we find pages that veer closer to the model of the illustrated story. Picking up any Justice Society of America story from the 1940s, we see very abrupt transitions from panel to panel, with the captions and the explanation heavy-dialogue doing most of the heavy lifting. Later, Jack Kirby would be credited with making superhero comics feel kinetic rather than static; while this is primarily a function of his movement of bodies through the space of the panel, it is greatly assisted by panel layouts that flow far more smoothly than those of most of his predecessors. [2]
At the height of his work on Fantastic Four and Thor (the mid-1960s), Kirby produced dynamic comics that were a model of clarity: virtually any one of his pages could be understood without any words at all. His skill as a visual storyteller made all the action crystal clear. Lee’s tendency to underline some of the action by having his character describe it aloud was most likely predicated on a lack of trust in his readers, rather than in Kirby or the other pencilers with whom he worked. It would take decades, along with a recognition that the comics readership was skewing more and more adult, for superhero comics to let go of the habit of overexplanation.
Even if we acknowledge the superfluous description that mars his writing, Lee’s scripts brought something to the page that his artistic collaborators could not: a focus on character (as Lee would put it) or selfhood (as I would). Through dialogue and captions, Lee developed his heroes’ inner lives while Kirby and Ditko so dynamically represented their outward actions and conflict. The point is not that comics artists cannot represent inner states visually; some of the best pencillers of the past four decades are past masters at combining facial expressions, body language, and pacing to give the reader a highly developed sense of mood and emotion. But that is not what Kirby did; his range of facial expressions was narrow, his emphasis was on motion and dynamism, and his confidence that their inkers would preserve nuance in the finished art was justifiably low.[3]
Lee’s 1960s scripts tended to fulfill four primary functions:
Addressing the reader in second-person captions, as part of Lee’s skaz-based efforts at fostering a sense of community between creators and readers;
Enhancing or reinforcing the panel-to-panel flow with dialogue and captions that moved the reader along the page;
Explaining what is happening on the pages (whether it needed explanation or not);
Documenting and interrogating characters’ motivations, states of mind, and inner turmoil.
Given the looseness of the Marvel Method, we might even consider Lee’s words to be interpretive or exegetical, the verbal annotations of Kirby’s and Ditko’s visual art. Lee told his readers both how the characters felt, and how they should feel about what the characters did and felt. He was simulating the consciousness of his heroes while stimulating the consciousness of his readers.
But what, in this case, does consciousness mean? Later writers and artists, who had the tools and the leeway to produce consciousness effects that were more subtle and evocative, gave their readers a sense of an inner world more consistent with the theory of consciousness as an emergent property: inner states are inferred or presented through actions, fragmentary utterances, and facial expressions. For Lee, the only way to demonstrate an inner state was to move it into the outer world. Consciousness had to be narrated, with interiority expressed primarily through spoken and unspoken monologue.
Notes
[1] This is not necessarily the case in “art” comics or “indy” comics, particularly those that have come in for high praise outside the comics world. Both Lynda Barry (One! Hundred! Demons!) and Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) produce work that often reads as a hybrid of comics and illustrated stories; the narrative through line is carried by the words more than by the transition from panel to panel.
[2] The obvious exception here is Will Eisner, whose weekly comic, The Spirit, was a masterpiece of layout that emphasized movement-to-movement, aspect-to-aspect, and action-to-action transitions. It would take decades for Eisner’s influence to be truly assimilated by subsequent superhero artists, most notably Frank Miller.
[3] It should also be noted that the printing processes, color palette, and paper stock for comics in the 1960s and 1970s were of a much lower quality than the standards that obtain today.