This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Evan Narcisse, Douglas Wolk and Graeme McMillan talk about the Strange Adventures one-shot and Kirby Genesis #0.
EVAN: They should have never put a Paul Pope cover on Strange Adventures #1. Not because it creates expectations that his work would be in these pages, but because Pope’s turned out some of the best sequential art sci-fi in the last ten years. Nothing in this book comes close to the level of Pope masterpieces like THB or 100%. The stories collected here feel like inventory work in search of connective tissue. It’s not that they need to be narratively aligned, either; they all just feel random and half-baked.
I got suckered by the first page of the first story. I’m a big Denys Cowan fan from his work on The Question with Denny O’Neil and his Milestone stuff, and I know Selwyn Hinds as a former editor-in-chief of hip-hop magazine The Source. There’s also the fact that anytime more than one black person works on a comics story I get all swoony. The pairing made me expect a socially conscious, urban-inflected cyberpunk story, and while we get that here, it’s really only the skeleton of one. The in medias res structure doesn’t help things, and this story, like almost all of the ones in Strange Adventures #1, succumbs to the dangerous impulse to jargonize everything in the new reality. You spend so much time trying to decode the language that the other elements of the plot can fail to move you. In the case of “Case 21,” the plot pings on similar beats–personal worth as personal destiny–as Gary Shytengart’s Super Sad Love Story, but without the slapsticky humor that lubricates everything in that novel.
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GRAEME: Oh God, yes – The jargon is horrible, and the worst of all is definitely the much-hyped new series from Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, “Spaceman.” While all of the stories in this oneshot suffer from some variation on “trying too hard” – a shame, given the pedigree of those involved – “Spaceman” is especially guilty of substituting an attempt at style over anything resembling substance. The language is awkward and the only thing even vaguely disguising the fact that there is not one interesting thing about the story.
EVAN: The best of the other stories in here have at least germs of good ideas, mostly. I actually really liked “Partners” for the central idea and “Postmodern Prometheus” for the execution, but something nagged at me even with those efforts. Reading Strange Adventures #1 reminded me of the big science-fiction and horror anthologies I’d pick up from the library as a kid, where every story held the promise of a fevered imagining. In the best cases, the work here feels like it needs room to grow, as if they were pitches for larger projects. In the worst cases, they feel tossed off, like “Refuse” (pun not intended) or–despite Juan Bobillo’s beautiful painted artwork–”The White Room.”
Going back to Pope, his sci-fi work isn’t bolt-from-the-blue stuff, in that it shows its influences readily. But, it visually stretches out in such a way that pulls you in. Nothing here does that for me. In fact, it highlights a sad fact, which is that DC’s biggest problem right now is their inability to develop and retain talent. Books like this–an anthology where new approaches and experimentalism can be given free reign–are exactly where it should be happening. So, when they sputter, the logic supporting the same old conservatism can continue unchecked.
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DOUGLAS: I was looking forward to Strange Adventures: hey, a new one-off anthology of short science fiction comics! I remember those! I used to really like Time Warp and Mystery in Space! And there are some good writers and artists involved with this one! And so on.
Long story short: this thing is an embarrassment. Has everyone forgotten how to put together a short story? I don’t know what went wrong with these stories, but they’re borderline unreadable. There are multiple Matrix knock-offs; there are a couple of “oh no! it’s virtual reality!” stories; there’s a story by Jeff Lemire that’s essentially the first 15 minutes of Moon with Ultra the Multi-Alien plugged into it for no reason that makes sense. Peter Milligan’s story is the old “is the imaginary friend REAL? is the person with the imaginary friend NOT REAL?!?!” saw, and nothing else. The preview of “Spaceman” makes me completely uninterested in seeing it.
There are some beautiful-looking pieces here, not least the Paul Pope cover (to that list of recent notable SF comics, I’d add his Adam Strange serial from Wednesday Comics). But good science-fiction comics short stories have to do their worldbuilding work incredibly quickly–make a few quick strokes, and get on with the business of building a plot that arcs and crests and resolves. Back in the ’80s, when 2000 A.D. was running one-off five- or six-page SF stories (“Future Shocks”! “Time Twisters”!) almost every week, they were where new writers had to prove themselves–to demonstrate they could come up with a killer story, soup to nuts, in 30 panels or so. The ones who could do it well are the ones you’ve heard of. (Alan Moore was the king of the “Future Shock” for a year or two at the start of his career.)
What’s particularly weird is that Strange Adventures, in its first incarnation in the ’50s and ’60s, had what seems like a perfectly workable template for updating: start with some sort of inexplicable thing, don’t bother trying to explain it, and then just run with what happens after that. But as you note, Evan, most of these stories spend their entire length patiently trying to explain their premise.
GRAEME: I just found this issue very empty. Nothing felt complete, or approaching original, which… is a problem for science fiction, you know? I felt like I’d read everything before, and that familiarity made each of these adventures far less Strange than they were supposed to be. I agree that books like this should be where creators experiment and new creators come up, but this really felt like same-old, same-old to me. Even the Paul Pope cover seemed very familiar, and considering how much I love Pope, that should be a sign of how disappointing this whole thing felt to me.
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EVAN: I’m going to leave it to the true comics scholars in our midst to explain the ins and outs as needed, but I know enough to say that Kirby Genesis #0 isn’t the first time that these Jack Kirby characters have been trotted out for reboots. It’s a tricky thing to say, but these latter-day creations aren’t Kirby’s most inspired work. Oh, the existential themes that crop up throughout his career were there, as was the genius-level speed, composition and design that made him a legend. But when I read the Pacific Comics run of Captain Victory way back when something seemed to be missing. Some spark, some snap wasn’t there. Jack Kirby stands as comics’ ultimate work-for-hire martyr, but the latter-day stuff always seemed evidence to me that he might actually have needed collaborators like Stan Lee. Either that, or the righteous anger that had justifiably been boiling up in him as his creations became culturally adored moneymakers–with Jack himself unable to reap benefits–affected his creativity in a meaningful way. Even, if you love Kirby as the King of Comics, parts of that infamous and recently reprinted interview with Gary Groth from The Comics Journal are hard to read. You wonder if the joy of his old work diminished in his new work.
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That interview led me to wonder if Genesis just might be the fundamentally right approach for these characters. Take away the cruel twists of fate Kirby’d been dealt, keep the visual energy and cosmic ambitions for characters like Silver Star and Captain Victory and put them in the hands of talent who won’t ape Jack’s work but gently try to re-frame it. Not a bad springboard, I think.
But the key thing you need to accept if you’re going to get any enjoyment out of this book is that Kirbywork (TM) is pretty much a genre unto itself, and has been for decades. There are whole schools of artists who are happy to try and capture the King’s quirks into a formalist style. There’s Ladronn–even though the Euro graphic album approach is thick in his art DNA, too. There’s Tom Scioli, who, in both his collaboration with Joe Casey on Godland and his own solo work like American Barbarian, uses Kirby’s style as a point of departure. I’m glad Kirby Genesis doesn’t do that, though. Recontextualization, not slavish devotion, is key here. Even though his sounds like he could’ve worked for Martin Goodman, Jackson Herbert has a sleek, modern style more in line with Brent Anderson than classic Kirby. For Jack’s designs to still look good, wild and crazy under someone else’s pencil underscores the power of his work.
I liked this book more than I was expecting and, really, I was intrigued by the first page. It blurred the line between reality and fiction and teased me with a bit of history I didn’t know. From there, Genesis incorporates the themes of Kirby’s work–the wonderment at and questioning of the human condition against a backdrop of unknowable cosmic forces–into the universe and the voices of its everyday characters. I mean, it’s funny yet effective that all that portentious space talk was coming from a teenager’s mouth. That kind of trick is what makes Kurt Busiek such a great (if deeply underappreciated) writer. He always manages to find some vein of relatable naturalism in his work: photographer Phil Sheldon’s confusion at the dawn of the Golden Age in Marvels or the Clark Kent teased with Superman jokes only to find he does have Kal-El’s powers in Superman: Secret Identity. Yet it doesn’t feel like a template in his hands; it just feels like good storytelling.
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I haven’t talked about Alex Ross much, even though he’s one of Genesis’ chief architects. That’s because his contributions kind of hover in the background. His brand of eyes-with-crow’s-feet realism informs Herbert’s style, and he’s got pages in the book, too, but it’s not his show. It’s Kirby’s show. I don’t know if this is the book you give to a reader who doesn’t get Kirby, but I am interested to see if some of his lesser creations can find new life in the hands of others.
DOUGLAS: Brent Anderson is a good point of comparison–the brief (twelve-page) preview here actually read a lot like Busiek and Anderson’s Astro City project. (Also, the cover design of Kirby Genesis looks a whole lot like the cover design of Busiek and Ross’s previous collaboration, Marvels!)
I sometimes like to imagine that “Jack Kirby” is not a particular creator but an actual genre of comics, with its own evolving traditions and tropes. Think of it that way, and this is the equivalent of an old-fashioned whodunnit or showdown-at-the-OK-Corral story, with Kirby Krackle in the place of a sinister butler or clinking spurs. Everyone involved is clearly having a really good time playing with some of the finest toys in the toybox, which makes it a pleasure to read. That said, I would be very happy to never see Alex Rossified versions of Captain Victory or Silver Star or, I don’t know, Destroyer Duck; visible crow’s feet don’t make a character more meaningful. Obviously, Kirby not getting a cut of his creations and co-creations’ eventual profits is one of the great embarrassments of the American comics business. But I also don’t think it’s unfair to say that, especially during and after the Kamandi/OMAC era, he really did need collaborators on the writing side–people who could channel his crackling power into something more directed and focused.
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Busiek actually wrote one (published) issue apiece of Victory and Silver Star comics back in 1993, when Topps Comics published a short-lived “Kirbyverse” line of more not-particularly-realized ideas from the Kirby notebooks. As we’ve also seen in Astro City, Busiek’s got a real fondness for Kirby’s cosmic madness, but he comes at it from a completely different angle: he pulls back from it to give a sense of its reverberations, rather than smashing directly into the heart of the thing itself. I enjoyed it a lot–and maybe my favorite bit of writing in the issue is the dead-on Kirbyism of the next-issue box: “We sent an invitation! But who’ll come a-knocking? The trader–or the tiger?” Which turns out, on the next page, to be partly an actual Kirbyism.
GRAEME: I’m on the record as being firmly on board for this series. I really enjoyed this preview, but what really sold me was the sneak I had at the next issue, which firmly sets out the tone of the series, and it’s that tone – and really, the UNKirbyishness of it, the deliberate evocation of a real world that Kirby could never quite surrender himself to, before it gets invaded by Kirby’s creativity – that won me over almost effortlessly. There’s something about what’s done here that feels respectful of Kirby’s legacy in ways that I wouldn’t even have considered: The recontextualization of his optimism about humanity (in terms of both Kirby as a character, and the, I guess, “cosmicness” of the opening of the story, the idea that the universe gets inspired by the creativeness of a human), for example, seems to understand Kirby and speak to his appeal without devolving into parody or just copying what was already there.
There’s such affection for what makes Kirby’s stuff great, here. Not just in the art (although Alex Ross and Jack Herbert both bring work that fits in with Kirby’s aesthetic without sacrificing their own take), but in the language, too. The next issue caption here is perfect, you know? As much as I wanted to love this book when it was announced – I adore Busiek’s work, especially Astro City, and am a complete Kirby nut – I had managed to convince myself this would, somehow, be a letdown. But it really wasn’t. I am an unabashed fan.