A lesson from my forbearers in pulp and printers ink
Late night at the desk, trying to conceive of an illustration, bit stuck on the POV & geometry of the moment [at what point in the narrative in my head do I want to freeze it? Before, while, or after?] hmmm…
scribble scribble schiibblles
Nope, not working.
Well at least I got a lot done on the book today, so I don’t feel like it was a waste.
Today was the first, oddly hot day of the year. Wonderful but also sad. I went for a quick walk to run and errand and was choked off the main road by exhaust fumes and dust. Wish I lived somewhere warm and clean all year, instead of the cesspool of pollution and wildly swinging whether that is Montreal these days. A.J and I keep joking about moving to Australia, but it’s less of a joke than a hart felt desire to escape.
Read an interesting story about fellow 70’s kid Jonathan Lethem’s relationship to the Marvel universe, Kirby’s work in particular. It’s amazing how much we project onto our childhood reading material.
Some stuff can support it - the mining of metaphorical minutia - but really those old Marvel books, much of the DC ones too from the day – I find that they can only by virtue of being so very empty, superficial containers, described with such broad archtypical strokes that yes, you can infer quite a lot….but if you scratch you find often that what you are seeing is more reflection that subtext. Makes them ironically the perfect fodder for nostalgia launch pads.
In the reflections of those old comics I’ve certainly found a looking glass that has taught me a lot about my own efforts. Quite a lot of that golden age work, in Ditko & Kirby’s art in particular, always made me sad. It was all so playful, free in form. But underserved by the scripts.
With Kirby especially, it felt detached from the content. The images and ideas were fantastic, but the execution so pedestrian. Something about it struck me, even back in the late 70’s, as done to please the draftsman in the moment and meet the deadline. It seldom seemed to mesh with the story for me. Eye candy for the escapist.
It seemed to me that in working in the mines to earn his rep working and buffing up other peoples ideas, he tragically never found the room to properly explore at depth a personal aspect, to tell his own stories until he was so stereotyped by the publishers & readers, and in the end limited by his own apparently rather stringent ideas about what could be done and how. He was the classic good hack, proud of his craftsmanship to the detriment of his craft. And like many who embrace the tradesman’s philosophy with the dedication of a monk, he let that be his boundary.
In this story it’s concluded that he never was a good writer, but really we don’t know if he could have ever been a good writer, the opportunity for him to have any kind of healthy and untainted exploration of that possibility was eliminated right from that start, when he decided to become a comic book artist as a capitol J job and accepted the roll as a member of an assembly line.
By the time that his first, understandably amateurish personal story came along [I dare you to find someone who’s first real writing efforts are all that deep, slick or impressive] he was so strictly defined as a creator by everyone, including himself, that no one, accepted it, including most importantly Kirby.
He never seemed to give himself the chance to learn in the end. The readers certainly didn’t. But of course, it’s not like he was some kid just starting out, he was a pro, right? In truth creatively he had more in common at that moment in time with a fan today writing their first hand full of fanfic tales than any seasoned pro, experienced at carrying a book on their own. It was clearly evident in his art that his imagination was fantastic, more than up to the job. But at best as a writer he timidly followed the formulas he’d been indoctrinated into for so long, and never gave himself the room to learn how to do what he was trying to do with any depth, with a personal voice, or any true confidence. Whatever stories he may have had in him seemed so overwhelmed by systematic genre driven ideas and expectations drummed in to him over the years that they never got a chance to evolve or develop into something.
His limited attempts and decision to walk away from that in the end belays a childish expectation that the work perform without the learning curve that all but the most gifted must endure. The appearances of years of experience seemed to become a prison, blinders. Having drawn and co-written for so long he thought, expected, that he new how to do it. And was, it seems, disheartened when it became apparent he wasn’t there yet. Like most he was probably at a loss to understand what was wrong or how to do it any other way. I’m by no means certain but I’ve often thought, that in the interviews I’ve read and heard with him, that a self-recriminating note can be heard in his opinions of his later efforts. Something Jonathan highlights in his article with this old TCJ quote from Kirby
Interviewer: 'It always seemed like your last stint at Marvel was a little half-hearted.'
Kirby: 'Yeah.'
That’s the way I think of it anyway. I think that in truth it wasn’t halfhearted so much as lost in a writer’s wilderness, the dark wood of truly grand, but hopelessly vague ideas with little or no depth behind them.
When I was starting to think seriously about the realities of a career in the comics biz again a few years back - having been shocked out of my own childish misconceptions of what that meant by my first handful of professional jobs - His and his pears life stories largely defined for me a path to be avoided. I had to confront my own hubris and ego, and remind myself that while I’ve drawn comics for over 10 years now, and know how do that, the visual side of story telling, with some degree of competence – I’ve only been trying to write my own stories for 5 years in earnest, I’m still a babe in the woods in that. There were a few notable efforts back before I began my pro career but they were so uninformed and underdeveloped, I look at them now as only potential raw material to plunder. I didn’t get the chance to learn much back then from the efforts, though I’ve learned a lot in hindsight contemplating were and how they each went awry.
With this perspective in mind, frustration with my own limitations has to be put aside in favour of a focused effort to learn this new aspect of story telling I thought at one point I understood. I’ve learned than I have a lot to learn, and always will. That there is no point at which you achieve competence, a point of view propagated a lot in the 80’s to the young wanabe cartoonist. It’s a long journey that only ends with the eventual death of the creator. If you learn a valuable thing or two the lesson in the form of example and wisdom passed on can help nudge the next generation of creators along a bit farther. But none will ever reach some mythical endpoint of final knowledge. The goal for me is not to become but to be.
Like I said, it’s pretty amazing, the things we can superimpose on an old comic book form the 10-cent bin.
scribble scribble schiibblles
Nope, not working.
Well at least I got a lot done on the book today, so I don’t feel like it was a waste.
Today was the first, oddly hot day of the year. Wonderful but also sad. I went for a quick walk to run and errand and was choked off the main road by exhaust fumes and dust. Wish I lived somewhere warm and clean all year, instead of the cesspool of pollution and wildly swinging whether that is Montreal these days. A.J and I keep joking about moving to Australia, but it’s less of a joke than a hart felt desire to escape.
Read an interesting story about fellow 70’s kid Jonathan Lethem’s relationship to the Marvel universe, Kirby’s work in particular. It’s amazing how much we project onto our childhood reading material.
Some stuff can support it - the mining of metaphorical minutia - but really those old Marvel books, much of the DC ones too from the day – I find that they can only by virtue of being so very empty, superficial containers, described with such broad archtypical strokes that yes, you can infer quite a lot….but if you scratch you find often that what you are seeing is more reflection that subtext. Makes them ironically the perfect fodder for nostalgia launch pads.
In the reflections of those old comics I’ve certainly found a looking glass that has taught me a lot about my own efforts. Quite a lot of that golden age work, in Ditko & Kirby’s art in particular, always made me sad. It was all so playful, free in form. But underserved by the scripts.
With Kirby especially, it felt detached from the content. The images and ideas were fantastic, but the execution so pedestrian. Something about it struck me, even back in the late 70’s, as done to please the draftsman in the moment and meet the deadline. It seldom seemed to mesh with the story for me. Eye candy for the escapist.
It seemed to me that in working in the mines to earn his rep working and buffing up other peoples ideas, he tragically never found the room to properly explore at depth a personal aspect, to tell his own stories until he was so stereotyped by the publishers & readers, and in the end limited by his own apparently rather stringent ideas about what could be done and how. He was the classic good hack, proud of his craftsmanship to the detriment of his craft. And like many who embrace the tradesman’s philosophy with the dedication of a monk, he let that be his boundary.
In this story it’s concluded that he never was a good writer, but really we don’t know if he could have ever been a good writer, the opportunity for him to have any kind of healthy and untainted exploration of that possibility was eliminated right from that start, when he decided to become a comic book artist as a capitol J job and accepted the roll as a member of an assembly line.
By the time that his first, understandably amateurish personal story came along [I dare you to find someone who’s first real writing efforts are all that deep, slick or impressive] he was so strictly defined as a creator by everyone, including himself, that no one, accepted it, including most importantly Kirby.
He never seemed to give himself the chance to learn in the end. The readers certainly didn’t. But of course, it’s not like he was some kid just starting out, he was a pro, right? In truth creatively he had more in common at that moment in time with a fan today writing their first hand full of fanfic tales than any seasoned pro, experienced at carrying a book on their own. It was clearly evident in his art that his imagination was fantastic, more than up to the job. But at best as a writer he timidly followed the formulas he’d been indoctrinated into for so long, and never gave himself the room to learn how to do what he was trying to do with any depth, with a personal voice, or any true confidence. Whatever stories he may have had in him seemed so overwhelmed by systematic genre driven ideas and expectations drummed in to him over the years that they never got a chance to evolve or develop into something.
His limited attempts and decision to walk away from that in the end belays a childish expectation that the work perform without the learning curve that all but the most gifted must endure. The appearances of years of experience seemed to become a prison, blinders. Having drawn and co-written for so long he thought, expected, that he new how to do it. And was, it seems, disheartened when it became apparent he wasn’t there yet. Like most he was probably at a loss to understand what was wrong or how to do it any other way. I’m by no means certain but I’ve often thought, that in the interviews I’ve read and heard with him, that a self-recriminating note can be heard in his opinions of his later efforts. Something Jonathan highlights in his article with this old TCJ quote from Kirby
Interviewer: 'It always seemed like your last stint at Marvel was a little half-hearted.'
Kirby: 'Yeah.'
That’s the way I think of it anyway. I think that in truth it wasn’t halfhearted so much as lost in a writer’s wilderness, the dark wood of truly grand, but hopelessly vague ideas with little or no depth behind them.
When I was starting to think seriously about the realities of a career in the comics biz again a few years back - having been shocked out of my own childish misconceptions of what that meant by my first handful of professional jobs - His and his pears life stories largely defined for me a path to be avoided. I had to confront my own hubris and ego, and remind myself that while I’ve drawn comics for over 10 years now, and know how do that, the visual side of story telling, with some degree of competence – I’ve only been trying to write my own stories for 5 years in earnest, I’m still a babe in the woods in that. There were a few notable efforts back before I began my pro career but they were so uninformed and underdeveloped, I look at them now as only potential raw material to plunder. I didn’t get the chance to learn much back then from the efforts, though I’ve learned a lot in hindsight contemplating were and how they each went awry.
With this perspective in mind, frustration with my own limitations has to be put aside in favour of a focused effort to learn this new aspect of story telling I thought at one point I understood. I’ve learned than I have a lot to learn, and always will. That there is no point at which you achieve competence, a point of view propagated a lot in the 80’s to the young wanabe cartoonist. It’s a long journey that only ends with the eventual death of the creator. If you learn a valuable thing or two the lesson in the form of example and wisdom passed on can help nudge the next generation of creators along a bit farther. But none will ever reach some mythical endpoint of final knowledge. The goal for me is not to become but to be.
Like I said, it’s pretty amazing, the things we can superimpose on an old comic book form the 10-cent bin.
posted by max at Saturday, May 01, 2004
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