The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s annual Art Festival is primarily dominated by the latest in alternative and small press comics. But many of the panels at the event (held June 6-7 in New York), programmed by scholar Kent Worcester, dealt with classic works and creators from comic books’ long and rich history.
Dr. Charles Hatfield of California State University in Northridge, California, presented an abridged version of a chapter from his forthcoming book The Burning Hand: The Apocalyptic Vision of Jack Kirby. The hand in the title is a reference to the hand of the Source, the representation of God in Kirby’s 1970s Fourth World comics including The New Gods. Hatfield linked Kirby’s classic work of the 1960s and 1970s to the late 18th and early 19th century Romantic movement’s concept of the Sublime, particularly as it was defined by the statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797).
Hatfield stated that, according to Burke, the Sublime combined both “ecstasy and terror,” evoking an “irresistible power” that was “both great and terrible.” Burke also believed that human reason could never quite recover from contemplating the force of the Sublime. The Romantics found the Sublime in the power of nature, but, Hatfield said, Kirby dealt in what author Leo Marx termed “the technological sublime” as visualized in science fiction. However, Hatfield explained, Kirby was not really interested in hard science fiction, but rather in the “spiritual” question of how the human mind copes with the technological Sublime.
As an example, Hatfield pointed to the sequence in the Galactus trilogy in Fantastic Four #48-50 in which the Watcher dispatches Johnny Storm on a quest into outer space to Galactus’s immense “world-ship.” On his return, Johnny seems overwhelmed by his experience, claiming that people are merely “ants” in comparison to what he has just seen. (This raises the perennial question of the degree to which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby collaborated on the stories they did, since it was ultimately Lee’s decision to use the “ants” simile in the dialogue.
In the story “Norton of New York” in Kirby’s lesser known 2001: A Space Odyssey series for Marvel in the 1970s, Hatfield pointed out how Norton was “nearly unhinged” by undergoing the change that transforms him into a Starchild, which Kirby described as “a means of admission to a new universe.”
Dr. Hatfield spoke of how the Celestials in Kirby’s Eternals were “the inscrutable zenith of Kirby’s obsession with godlike figures,” lacking the face that makes Galactus still anthropomorphic. Hatfield also talked about Kirby’s ambiguous attitudes towards the quest for knowledge, ranging from the heroic Mister Fantastic to the amoral Metron to New Gods’ immobile Promethean Giants, punished for attempting to solve the mystery of the Source. Hatfield even dealt with Kirby’s experimental photocollages, saying they were attempts to visualize aspects of the technological Sublime that Kirby apparently thought lay beyond his ability to draw.
Next, one of comics’ living legends, Jerry Robinson, received the Lawrence Klein Award, named after MoCCA’s founder. In making the presentation comics writer/editor/historian Danny Fingeroth described the amazing scope of Robinson’s long career: from assisting Bob Kane on the early Batman and creating the Joker, to his own successful newspaper comic strips and theatrical caricatures, to his books and exhibits on comics history, to his role in freeing imprisoned cartoonists in Uruguay and the Soviet Union. A slide presentation of examples of Robinson’s work followed, with Robinson regaling the audience with anecdotes about each one.
Later in the afternoon writer Paul Karasik moderated a panel about Harvey Kurtzman’s short-lived humor magazine Humbug, which Fantagraphics Books has just republished in a two-volume boxed set. Appearing with Kurasik were two of Humbug’s cartoonists and co-owners, Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth, two of the sharpest, wittiest panelists ever to be found at a comics convention.
After Kurtzman left MAD, which he had created, he started a new humor magazine, Trump, for Hugh Hefner. “Trump went out of business before it hit the stands,” Roth told the audience. “It couldn’t wait.” Kurtzman and his artists then put their own money into starting Humbug. But though Kurtzman had “great ideas,” Roth said, “they were not practical.” Jaffee explained that “Unfortunately, in striving to be original, it created more problems than it solved.” For example, Jaffee continued, Kurtzman decided to make Humbug a different size than standard comics. But instead of making it bigger, he made it smaller, so customers couldn’t see it behind the other comics! Jaffee also noted that Humbug’s distributors were not trustworthy. In the end, Humbug lasted only eleven issues.
As for the cartoonists, “We were having children because we were young fellas and sex maniacs,” Roth merrily explained., He also observed that “In those days Jews didn’t drink except me and Al. Harvey Kurtzman, if he smelled a cork, would get drunk.”
One of Roth’s stories best sums up Humbug. Kurtzman wanted to do a parody of The New Yorker, so he told the cartoonists, “I want you to bring in unfunny cartoons.” But at the next planning meeting, “everyone said they couldn’t come up with any that weren’t funny.”
Karasik returned for Saturday’s final panel, “The Twisted Genius of Fletcher Hanks.” From 1939 to 1941, right after the debut of Superman, Hanks wrote and drew 51 comics stories featuring characters like Stardust and Fantomah, before vanishing from comics. Fantagraphics premiered You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation!, edited by Karasik, at MoCCA; together with Karasik's previous Hanks collection I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! , all of Hanks’ known comics work is now in print.
“What makes these stories strange is everything about them,” said Karasik. Weirdly over the top, and badly drawn in various ways, Hanks’ comics nonetheless have genuine power in their dreamlike imagery and visual storytelling craft. Karasik told the audience how he had located Hanks’ elderly son, Fletcher Jr., who had been unaware of his father’s comic book career. Then Karasik showed examples of the elder Hanks’ work while a recording of an interview with Fletcher Jr. played. Fletcher Sr. was an abusive fatter and an alcoholic, yet, Karasik pointed out, he drew on his personal brutality in his stories to become a true comics auteur.
