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Here's a relatively well-known picture of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby...
The piece of art on the drawing table -- the splash page debuting the Boy Commandos from Detective Comics #64 -- suggests this photo was taken in 1942. Both men went into the service in 1943.

But I bring this photo up today not to try to date it. Check out the back wall, just above Kirby's head. That's clearly a drawing of Superman. Although it's a little too out of focus to really see any details, the basic pose is very reminiscent of how Shuster drew the character posing, and the "S" emblem on his chest is in a simple triangle, not the more familiar shield shape that became close-to-standard about a year before this photo was taken. This image looks like a mirror image of the cover from Superman #6.


So was this a sketch of Superman that Shuster himself did a year or two prior to this photo? Was this done by either Simon or Kirby to see how close they could come to replicating the style of the insanely popular comic? It seems to me, too, that the drawing is done directly on the wall -- I don't see any edges of a piece of paper. Did Shuster visit the Simon & Kirby studio at some point and doodle that on the wall? Or maybe one of the other Superman artists -- Paul Cassidy or Fred Ray perhaps? Although that seems unlikely since they were all-but-ghosting for Shuster at that point -- that doesn't strike me as something they'd "celebrate" by drawing someone else's character in someone else's style on someone else's wall. It was actually Ray who changed the "S" trinagle to a shield shape, and he mostly only did Superman covers anyway. And Cassidy was working remotely out of Milwaukee. But there was still a number of artists who professionally worked on Superman at that point, including several on the newspaper strip alone.

I'd be curious if anyone has done any more investigating about that particular Superman drawing. Was it actually drawn by Shuster? If so, what was he doing in the Simon & Kirby studio? Comic artists were a relatively insular community, but I don't recall ever reading about Shuster actually meeting with any other artists in the 1940s that didn't wind up drawing Superman with/for him. And if it was Simon or Kirby, why draw someone else's character while they were trying to bust their butts to invent new ones? And why put someone else's character on directly on their studio wall? I have lots of questions here that I've looked for answers to off and on for a few years without coming up with anything. Do any of you have any ideas?
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Stamped from the Beginning Review
https://ift.tt/1bE5hVk

Kleefeld on Comics: Giant-Size FF #1 Review
https://ift.tt/qSDUKJf

Kleefeld on Comics: The Flash Gordon Solution?
https://ift.tt/n6PUor4

Kleefeld on Comics: Whither Jungle Action?
https://ift.tt/rdMX3cu


Years ago, I was collecting and collating historical information on the first 100-ish issues of the Fantastic Four. Creator interviews talking about that period, letters pages, scans of original art... whatever I could get my hands on. My idea was to write a book about the FF's creation, using as many as-close-to-first-hand sources as possible. I never got around to writing it -- I had trouble believing there was an audience for it -- but Mark Alexander eventually put together more or less the same thing.

Anyway, I've still got the binder of materials I put together, and it includes some print-outs of a Yahoo Group discussion from 2002 (not surprisingly given its age, now removed) about the Black Panther. One question that piqued my interested was why Don McGregor's Jungle Action got abruptly canceled in late 1976, only to be replaced by Jack Kirby's Black Panther two months later? Jim Kosmicki had a fascinating history/analysis of that period, and I thought I might re-present it here...
70's Marvel appears to have been ripe with inter-personal politics. When Kirby came back, he only wanted to be left alone. He took his characters and pulled them away from the Marvel Universe. He wasn't interested in continuity. Remember that Kirby was the originator of T'Challa (there's evidence of a character named Coal Tiger in his files that shows that he had wanted to do this character for a while before it showed up in FF). When he came back to Marvel after going to DC in the early 70's, he didn't want to work on other people's characters. There was a deliberate attempt to keep these stories separate from what had been done before with the characters -- to go back to the original concepts of the characters as envisioned by Jack. He wanted Captain America back, as his claim to that character dated pre-Marvel, and the only other character he'd co-created who was considered available was the Black Panther.

Now, your question is WHY was Black Panther considered available? Remember that we are remembering Jungle Action from the benefit of hindsight. JA was popular with a certain level of reader, but was never a popular hit. The vast majority of comic buyers at this point in time were still young boys, not older fans of the medium. JA never rose above bi-monthly status, which indicates that its sales were solid enough to avoid cancellation, but not enough to raise it to monthly status. This is true of most of the more "adult" Marvel books of the 70's: Warlock, Captain Marvel, Dr. Strange, Killraven, etc.

Kirby was pure action and perfect for that target audience. There should be circulation figures in issues of JA and BP that would allow one to compare the relative popularity of the two runs. I would guess that the Kirby version probably sold a little better, but to an entirely different audience than JA. (unfortunately neither audience was big enough -- maybe if they could have been combined somehow).

As I recall, and I'm sure people on this list, including Don, can attest, Don's books, even though most were bimonthly, were often late on deadlines. Marvel was very sensitive about this issue, to the point that when Jim Shooter took over, he instituted several policies guaranteeing "fill-in" issues be ready at a moment's notice. If JA was one of those chronically late books, taking it away and giving it to Jack, who never missed a deadline, could be seen as a good business decision. Not an artistic decision, but a business decision.

In addition, comic distributors were always very cautious about offending people in the rural midwest and South. There are anecdotes galore about how publishers wouldn't even allow black characters or heroes because it would offend major distributors. In a newstand distribution model, if you don't get distributed, you don't even have a chance to sell your product. The story against the Klan could very well have been creating some of these negative reactions. Newstand distributors in the 70's were an odd bunch. Again, there are many different stories, but if they decided to kill a book, they could. They could simply refuse to put the book out, and automatically claim a return against the "unsold" copies. There's some strong anecdotal evidence that many "hot" books of the 70's like Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Kirby's Fourth World books were being sold in case lots out the back door and then those copies claimed as unsold because they were never counted as having been distributed through "normal" channels. The Klan story could very well have given these distributors a reason to stop pushing a marginal title, whether there was any actual public outcry or not.

And that is important, I think. JA was a marginal book. It's artistic impact may have been strong, and as you indicate in your email it's impact in the black community was disproportionate, but overall, the Panther was not a mainline character. He was published to a small but loyal audience. The publisher made a business decision to try a new approach to try to reach a larger, more profitable audience. I don't think that there was any conspiracy or even any racial overtones to the decision.

After all, Marvel has consistently tried to revive the Panther, so there's clearly some appeal to the character in the editorial offices. They finally concluded the Klan storyline in Marvel Premiere late in the 70's, the Panther was a long-running part of their bi-weekly Marvel Comics Presents title, there was the 4 part bookshelf series, and the revived series written by Christopher Priest.

There probably was a personality conflict that caused JA to be cancelled and given to Kirby, but it was also justifiable as a business decision. Ironically, Kirby's treatment in his second tenure at Marvel was a horror show, partially because people resented books like JA being cancelled and the Panther given to him.
Dan Schkade debuted as the new writer/artist for King Features' Flash Gordon comic strip back in October. Before that, the strip had been in reruns since 2003. Like many adventure strips, it had been suffering from a seemingly perpetual dwindling readership for decades, in large part because of the newspapers' decisions to shrink their comics sections. When Alex Raymond created the strip in 1934, newspapers afforded comics a sizeable chunk of of their space to comics. Adventure strips like Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant would get an entire half page or more; this allowed artists to do wonderfully detailed drawings and spend a great deal of time advancing the story. However after seeing successes like Peanuts and Beetle Bailey which used exceptionally simplified drawings (i.e. cartoons), newspaper editors realized they could shrink them down significantly while they still remained legible, meaning they could put more on a page. They increasingly demanded all strips be shrunk down, to the point where jokes about each panel being no larger than a postage stamp date back to the mid-1990s. With such a tiny physical space, artists could not include many details and adventure strips with their ongoing storylines in particular suffered pretty heavily.

Part of the problem with adventure strips being forced into that format isn't so much that the art itself had to suffer. You could, after all, draw an ongoing adventure story with no more detail than Charles Schulz put into any given Snoopy drawing. The more significant issue is that a creator effectively now has only three -- maybe four -- panels to recap yesterday's strip as well as advance the new one. That's challenging for even the most talented creators out there, and the only one I've seen really do it successfully on a consistent basis was Jack Kirby in his short-lived Sky Masters strip. His primry technique was to have at the start of each new strip a character respond to the previous day's installment. Despite Kirby having a reputation for having a tin ear when it comes to dialogue, it usually flowed very smoothly and sounded incredibly natural. (Probably in no small part to co-creator Dave Wood.)

Schkade has taken a different approach, and one that's probably the second-most effective one I've seen after Kirby. What Schkade does is that he switches the story perspective frequently. By changing the storytelling point of view from Flash to Dale to Aura to Barin to... he can present some of the same story information he's already shown but without the story feeling repetitive because it's also relaying the feelings and impressions of that new/different character. Is Flash escaping a relief (to Dale) or an opportunity (to Hans) or a threat (to Ming)?

The idea of switching a story's focus from character to character is hardly new, of course, but I believe this is the first time I've seen it expressly used to overcome the limitation inherent in the excessively short installments. Coupled with Schkade's generally simplisitic style of illustration, I think he's turned out to be about the best choice King could've made when it comes to re-starting Flash Gordon. But is it sufficient enough to win over new readers and give Flash Gordon a boost? I don't know. I do think he's doing a bang-up job, all things considered, but I also don't think it's his best work because of those same considerations. I think the phsyical format newspapers have forced strips into has made the adventure strip largely untenable for most audiences. Schkade's doing some creative work within those limitations, but I think that's almost more of an academic consideration than a practical one.

I think comics syndicates have been indeed slooooooooowly testing out some approaches to their older, legacy comics that are smart. Allowing strips like Nancy and Popeye and Flash Goron to do/be something very different than they've been historically is, I think, 100% necessary to even consider their longevity. Whether or not any one of these attempts is successful is a matter of debate, but trying to run those legacy strips the way they were run a century ago has been proven not to work, so good on them for not trying to continue fighting that losing battle. I think they're moving way too slowly to be effective with it all in the long run, but they're at least moving.
Let me start this review by prefacing things with slight disclaimer: I am several months behind in my reading of the regular Fantastic Four title. I've still been getting it regularly, but the last issue I read was #11 which came out six months ago. Everything that's come out since then has basically just been getting stacked in a "to read" pile. See, despite being a huge fan of the characters, I've found Ryan North's work on the book extremely underwhelming. Not actually bad per se, but not very good either. I don't find myself particularly eager to dive into those books; literally every issue of the new series that I've read has felt like a fill-in issue. Maybe that's changed in the past few months, but from the couple issues I quickly skimmed through, I don't think so. So with that said...

Giant-Size Fantastic Four #1 is the best new FF story I've read since maybe the 60th anniversary issue back in 2021. I'll admit that seeing Stingray on page 1 was initially a bit concerning (he's a decent enough character, but he's basically only brought in when you've got an ocean story and Namor is unavailable for some reason, so he always has this also-ran feel about him) but the main story gets going quickly, so he doesn't become distractingly out of place or anything. And the story is interesting in that it basically just gives an origina for Namor's catchphrase, "Imperious Rex!" Which doesn't sound like much of a story, but there's definitely a lot more there than you might first suspect and with some interesting turns that you probably won't see coming even after you start getting the gist of where things are headed. There is some action in the story, but not any unnecessarily long fight scenes or anything. It's a staunch reminder that the Fantastic Four are NOT superheroes, but super-powered explorers. Their stories should not focusing on giant battles and winning through strength and raw power. Mr. Fantastic indeed solves the conflict verbally and the antagonist, too, doesn't just fight the team because that's what 'villains' do. The story ends not exactly amicably but peaceably enough, and it makes for some interesting potential character coflicts to come. Whether Marvel acts on or realizes them well is another matter, of course, but it's an excellent setup.

The story was written by Fabian Nicieza. I've liked his work since at least the late 1990s. He's an excellent storyteller to begin with, and has a good understanding and appreciation of continuity when he's working on Marvel properties. He has similar storytelling sensibilities as Kurt Busiek, Mark Waid, and Dan Slott, and I can't say I've ever come across a Nicieza-written story that wasn't at least good if not great. He's quite quite the body of work and Giant-Size Fantastic Four #1 falls well in line with his ouvre.

I was not previously familiar with artist Creees Lee but he turns in some solid work here as well. Pretty smooth storytelling throughout and nice linework. I definitely wouldn't mind seeing more of his work. Although I'm not a fan of the Human Torch's handlebar mustache (which is not Lee's design) I did think he did a good job rendering the character in his various half-aflame states.

The issue also reprints the Jack Kirby/Stan Lee story from Fantastic Four #33. Thematically, I know why they chose that one but it's not a particular favorite of mine from that era. Honestly, mostly because I don't care for Chic Stone's inking of Kirby. But it is a story that doesn't get reprinted often, I don't think, so it is cool that it's offered here to add some historical context.

Like I said, Giant-Size Fantastic Four #1 is the best new FF story I've read in a few years, and I'd love to see Nicieza and Crees continue to do more FF stories. I'm sure the current creative team on the main book have plenty of their own fans, but I found this to be a far superior story just from a technical standpoint and is much more in line with the characters I've known as the Fantastic Four.
There is a subset of Americans who think racism was solved in America when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. That seems kind of absurd on the face of it, but not nearly as absurd as that subset of people who think racism was solved in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln signed the the Emancipation Proclamation. Or as absurd as the people who think slavery was a good thing actually. I would like to think all of those people are in a minority, and that most people do indeed recognize that racism is still around. I think a lot of people don't know how to recognize it if it's not presented as a hood-wearing Klansman, but they at least know it's not something that got solved with a couple of laws.

What I think a huge number of people don't realize, though, is just how baked in to the very foundation of the United States racism really is. Beyond just that slavery was a thing and George Washington himself kept over one hundred enslaved people at his Mount Vernon home. Yes, the land had plenty of natural resources that early settlers were able to exploit and help to kickstart the US as a rich nation, but that opportunity was magnified a hundred-fold because of the labor of those who were enslaved. Could the country have done as well as it had -- could it have harvested enough raw materials to sell huge volumes to other countries -- if slavery were not a thing? Could the railroads have been built fast enough to allow for pretty rapid urban expansion across the entire continent if not for slavery? Could the cities and industrial centers even been built without getting enslaved people to do much of the work? Absolutely not.

The thing is, though, they don't teach that in social studies. Like, at all. Discussion of slavery pretty much starts and stops with people picking cotton. There's more talk about Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin than all the people who fed all the cotton gins across the entire country. According to social studies textbooks, at worst, slavery was a weird blip in history and racism isn't even mentioned as being absolutely central to the idea. And, if you got a 'standard' public education like I did, you heard something vague about Jim Crow laws -- which were never explained well; I was an "A" student and I didn't understand them at all until well after college -- and then all of sudden, racism seems to be a big thing when Rosa Parks was apparently too old and tired to get up from her seat on the bus. (I was gobsmacked when I learned, literally decades later, that she was only 42 at the time and had been a civil rights activist for over a decade by then. The way it had always been told to me, she was in her 70s and could barely stand on the best of days, and kept her seat more out of exhaustion than anything else.) I learned more and better, though, because I kept reading and kept trying to find out more about everything; but my understanding is that is fairly uncommon. Most people get their degree and are done trying to learn. They spent so long being brow-beaten with the idea that learning equals rote memorization that they actively dislike the very idea of learning and spend much of the rest of their life avoiding it. So they don't adopt a model like me, where I've actively spent the past 25-30 years trying to unlearn all the gross mischaracterizations and outright lies I was taught growing up.

All of which brings me to last year's Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America by Joel Christian Gill, adapted from the 2016 book by Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. I have to admit that I have not read Kendi's original to make direct comparisons, but this certainly falls well within Gill's known ouvre. Many of his works that I've read were biographies of Black men and women from US history, and while not strictly just a biography per se, this has many biographical elements to it, focusing on five individuals whose influence on the country was not only great, but helped define how the country deals with race and racism. While you may be familiar with some of the names in the book, you're most likely not familiar with their ideas on race, except perhaps the most superficial notions of good or bad. I've persoanally learned quite a bit from the book, and the level of detail and nuance that's gone into is insightful to say the least.

I'll add, too, that Gill's skill as a storyteller is excellent. I've pointed this out before in some of my reviews of his previous work, but he continues to improve and utilizes here some fascinating techniques that I haven't seen used precisely in this way before, particularly when it comes to the lettering. I also detected a subtle change in his illustration style as well; his figures are more distinct and stand out from one another much more than I'd seen in his earlier works. Which is particularly interesting because the structure of the book is such that he could probably get away with even less distinction if he wanted to without appreciably impacting the narrative. I do enjoy seeing creators improve their craft over time!

As I said, I haven't read Kendi's original, so I can't make direct comparisons. I don't know what Gill may have left out or added in, and I don't know if this graphic version is necessarily an easier or harder read that the prose version. But I can say that Gill's adaptation reads very smoothly and very well and, while the subject matter prevented it from being a light read, it wasn't nearly as weighted down or dreary as the title might suggest. (Probably also helped by Gill's cartoony illustration style.) I highly recommend everyone checking this out; there are very people who I think wouldn't benefit from reading it. I can virtually guarantee you will learn some things out of it and, depending on your childhood, perhaps even enough to get you pissed at every one of your social studies teachers from back in the day. Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America was published by Ten Speed Graphic last year and should be available through any retail bookstore. The paperback sells for $24.99 US and the hardcover for $29.99 US.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: King's New Strategy - Quick and Cheap
https://ift.tt/I0bRirU

Kleefeld on Comics: From Trees to Tribunes
https://ift.tt/4lSvMB5

Kleefeld on Comics: Li'l Abner, The TV Show
https://ift.tt/Mq8AyRI

Kleefeld on Comics: Krazy Kat Rag
https://ift.tt/vO0gir7