Kirb Your Enthusiasm (2)

By: John Hilgart
February 21, 2011

Second in a series of posts, each one analyzing a single panel from a Jack Kirby-drawn comic book.

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KirbyBlackMagic-550 — Click on image for larger version. Click on that image to zoom in.

Before the advent of Kirby’s cosmic crackle visual effect, there was the Simon & Kirby smolder. The smolder’s approach to detail was somewhere between brushy and calligraphic — imbuing shadows and organic shapes with waves of complex, immanent energy. The crackle radiated outward as particles, while the smolder was the sinister energy within. Though this style was deployed across the Simon & Kirby comics of the Fifties — including the gorgeous romance stories — its signature application was the macabre.

As this panel from the story “Dead Man’s Lode!” in Black Magic #4 (March 1952) demonstrates, what smoldered best was death. Kirby retained this style after parting ways with Simon, using it specifically to represent the evil and unnatural. It appears startlingly in his giant monster and science fiction comics for Marvel (1958-1961), where its unnatural curves and brimstone-y surface contrast with the simpler, draftsman-like perpendiculars of the rest of the art on the page. It’s the perfect visual approach to the stories’ Cold War metaphor: annihilating death erupting into the prosperous and well-ordered society. This Black Magic panel tells the same story more concisely. In Plato’s allegory, we mistake shadows cast within a cave for reality, which is actually outside of the cave altogether, and perfect. In Kirby’s version, the cave is the reality, a panorama of grotesque death, lurking just below the surface of the tidy myths of progress and prosperity that organized life outside the cave in 1952’s America.

As Kirby knew firsthand, the prosperity of post-war America grew out of vast fields of human corpses. In 1944, he went from drawing Captain America comics in New York to the battlefields of France, arriving a couple of months after D-Day. His assignment was apparently quite dangerous, advancing to the front lines to make reconnaissance sketches for the Allies. We can only imagine the scenes of decaying horror that he saw there, and Kirby’s subsequent career seems almost to be organized around finding reasons to depict the mind confronting something it cannot assimilate. The aghast face is everywhere in his work, from the supernatural and science fiction comics to the precise moment a heart breaks in a romance story. After the return to superhero comics, it begins to appear everywhere, this “Oh my fucking god!” face. In 1966, Galactus would arrive, a hungry, amoral, life-erasing personification of an indifferent universe — the existential horror of death in its purest form.

While the smolder effect continued to signify the macabre in Kirby’s later work, it was also applied to a situation that more and more seemed to concern him: human transformation. In the Sixties or Seventies, when he drew someone zapped across the universe or shifted from one state of being to another, we could expect to see their screaming, smoldering face. It’s still a form of death, or near death — the atomization of the corporeal self — but now it is also apotheosis, the self migrating to a higher plane or transforming into something new. This is perhaps Kirby finding his way past death as a horrifying absolute. If Galactus suggested there was no god (or that god was a Watcher, not an actor), Kirby’s later career has nearly everyone turning into gods. Troubled gods to be sure — just like your average teenager — but for the most part safely on the other side of death, imbued with the crackle of cosmic life. This shift reaches its conceptual and visual apotheosis in 2001, in which the black, smoldering blank of the monolith explicitly fronts the crackling beyond, in a series of obsessively repetitive narratives of death as transformation into a cosmic baby.

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ALSO ON HILOBROW: Joe Alterio’s Cablegate Comix | HiLobrow posts about comics and cartoonists | HiLobrow posts about science fiction | The New Gods generation

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What do you think?

Joshua Glenn says:

February 22, 2011 at 9:52 pm

Great insights in this essay! And Hilgart has thoughtfully posted a Kirby monolith from “2001” as part of his “Kirby in the ’70s” series running concurrently with “Kirb Your Enthusiasm”:
http://4cp.posterous.com/monolith-1-2001-4-1977
Jim A says:

February 23, 2011 at 10:37 am

My favorite instance of this may not be “pure” smolder, as it occurs in a panel that also features external emanations (albeit of a dot-less, non-crackling sort): It’s the close-up of Bruce Banner at the instant the gamma bomb goes off in The Incredible Hulk #1. Stan Lee’s caption refers to Banner’s “ear-splitting scream,” but the panel always conveyed to me that Banner’s cry of terror and pain was effectively silenced, drowned out by the blast behind him.

The panel has become so iconic that I’ve seen it used as an accent in magazine articles to represent generalized shock and horror. It works on this level in part because Banner, with his weak chin and professorial eyeglasses, looks like a corporate everyman in the close-up. But the real power of the image lies in its original context. The panel that precedes it is a searing full-body view of Banner absorbing the force of the blast. And the panel that follows is another close-up, nearly identical to the first, but minus the smolder, that shows Banner still wailing hours after the detonation. The cold-war bomb terror has been absorbed and internalized, but its full effects on mind and body are yet to manifest. Great stuff.
Joshua Glenn says:

February 23, 2011 at 3:11 pm

Jim A — you should have written one of the posts in this series! Love your commentary on the Hulk panel.
John Hilgart says:

February 24, 2011 at 12:34 am

Jim, that’s amazing. The look of horror that required two frames to be sufficiently horrified. By the ’70s, Kirby would have just blasted his character’s face into a Rorschach blot. Maybe that’s the divide between the exposure scenario and the transformation scenario. They were separate steps in the early ’60s Marvels, based on the model of radiation exposure and subsequent genetic mutation. The Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spiderman are Cold War heroes by this measure; they were irradiated, and later they changed. Late Sixties and Seventies Kirby seems to be much more on the SHAZAM model. Exposure and transformation are simultaneous.
Jim A says:

February 25, 2011 at 12:33 pm

Joshua – Thanks!

John – That’s a terrific insight about transformation and atomic exposure.

I am enjoying the Kirb Your Enthusiasm posts immensely.
Tom Scioli says:

April 27, 2011 at 2:09 pm

Great panel. It’s amazing how putting a name to something helps you to see it. Kirby’s “smolder” is something I was aware of, but never was able to articulate.
Josh Glenn says:

September 12, 2011 at 10:31 am

Brilliant close read of Kirby Krackle (and Smolder) by Rob Steibel — and thanks for the shoutout, Rob!

http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/dynamics/2011/09/05/kirby-crackle/
Nathanael Piper says:

May 15, 2013 at 11:47 pm

Love this blog so much. FCP is full of pure beauty.

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Kirb Your Enthusiasm (2)

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