Joe Sinnott fortuitously began inking Kirby on The Fantastic Four in late 1965, right when the King embarked on what is arguably the greatest phase of his long career, the full flowering of his creative dynamism exploding the Marvel Universe. Coincidentally during this fertile period, Kirby also developed the many artistic tropes and stylized delineations of speed, power, and energy (“Kirby Krackle”) that have since become graphic standards for generations of comic artists.

Sinnott was there to ink and codify it all, giving Kirby’s complex and sprawling pencils a sensitive, flexible contour and attention to detail that his FF predecessors, Dick Ayers, Chic Stone and Vince Coletta could never have. They were all too one-dimensional: Ayers too heavyhanded with his brush, Stone too cartoony with his uniformly thick outlines, and Coletta too finelined with his scratchy pen (better suited to Kirby’s Thor work) to give Kirby’s new, multi-dimensional pencils the discriminatingly detailed and time-consuming inking they deserved.

Sinnott had in his inking arsenal what those others didn’t: both a bold brushline that was able to give Kirby’s supersized figures the heft and weight they commanded, as well as a fine penline that seemingly never missed the tiniest of dots in Kirby’s Krackle or a single rivet in the King’s outrageous, outsized technology. Sinnott’s brushline also had a natural thick-thin range to properly finesse Kirby’s true graphic signature, the omnipresent squiggle, found on everything from musculature to machinery, as no other inker had before or since.

Of course, aficionados of Mike Royer’s inking of Kirby at DC Comics in the 1970s might disagree. They claim Royer’s inks were the truest to Kirby’s pencils, and have cited Kirby’s own endorsement of Royer’s work as such. While it is true that Sinnott would often “fix” details of Kirby’s work that Kirby would either overlook or pencil sloppily—like crooked eyeballs or costume details—Royer’s more so-called “faithful” inking indirectly exposed a harsher aspect of Kirby’s pencils, a rough-hewn quality that, in its uniformity of rendering by Royer, lacked depth from foreground to background. Nevertheless, Royer has his adherents, and, while such a subjective argument can never be settled, I maintain Sinnott to be Kirby’s greatest inker.

And if Kirby is indeed the greatest penciller in comic book history, and his FF work his greatest single body of work, then Joe Sinnott can justifiably stake a claim as the greatest inker in the history of the medium.

The comic cover art for this post was created by the unsung yet top Batman/Superman cover artist of DC for over 10 years, largely the entire ’50s, Win Mortimer!

My eulogy for Mortimer, delivered at his funeral on (or about) January 10, 1998; he was 78 years old.

I worked with Win at Neal Adams’ Continuity Associates from 1983-85, penciling storyboards and comp art (that Neal would ink and then have colored) for advertising agencies. Win worked in a room with fellow DC Comics old-timer Jack Sparling. Sparling’s work was still fresh in my mind then, because I was a big fan of his 1968 series Secret Six, “Johnny Double” in Showcase, and a couple of post-Adams Spectre stories.

But Mortimer’s background was more of a mystery to me; I couldn’t recall anything he had particularly done, though I somehow knew he was an old-time DC artist, as if his name had seeped into the part of my brain that stores comic book history. But the more I saw of his penciling, I realized he had drawn one of my favorite comics from my childhood, a pre-TV show Batman Brave & Bold, the team-up with Eclipso, issue #64, March ‘66 (with a great cover by Gil Kane!).

From that moment on, I felt a kinship with Win, an eccentric little man with a big heart and great sense of humor—and took more interest in his artwork. I noticed that, although his present drawing style seemed a little quaint and wispy for Adams’ inking needs (then again, everyone’s penciling seemed quaint and wispy compared to Adams’!), Neal always gave Win the most complicated storyboards to draw, the comps with the most people in them, the crowd scenes, difficult backgrounds requiring strong perspective. And Win always came through—and on time!

I left Continuity in ‘86, but at least once or twice a year I’d stop up at the offices on West 45th Street in Manhattan to say hello. Invariably the cast of younger artists would be different, but Win was the constant, drawing away at his board that he kept propped up more like a painting easel, using pencils that he hand-sharpened on a graphite stone. He never wanted to retire, and Neal never stopped giving him the tough drawing assignments.

I always wondered: why Win? Why, when Adams could have had any hotshot young artist drawing for him, considering the wealth of talent that had passed through Continuity’s doors over the years, did he keep this man commuting every day from Carmel in upstate New York?

A few years ago, I finally found out why. Around 1993, Abbeville Press published those miniature (4-inch square) books, Superman in Action Comics and Batman in Detective Comics, both featuring, in chronological order, the covers of the first 25 years. Inside was the work of all the well-known artists associated with those titles: Shuster, Boring, Plastino and Swan in the Superman book, Kane, Robinson, Sprang and Moldoff in Batman.

But the revelation in those books was the incredible covers by Win Mortimer. While most of the artists of that era favored a bold, pin-up approach that focussed on the foreground figures, Mortimer’s covers were all beautifully-detailed gems, complete scenes with full backgrounds and dynamic perspectives.

Mortimer was an avid collector of antique guns and cars—he had a working Model-T Ford—so all the covers that featured period props like stagecoaches and classical foreign cityscapes were invariably done by him.

And the sheer, staggering amount of covers Mortimer drew! More than Boring and Sprang! So many of the covers I had seen as a child reproduced on the covers of the Superman and Batman 80-page Giants and Annuals were by Mortimer!

As I flipped page after page of those minibooks (and then their larger, hardcover editions published subsequently), it dawned on me that Winslow J. Mortimer was the de facto cover artist for DC Comics’ two flagship characters for almost ten years straddling the 1940’s and 50’s!

And that was the era that a young Neal Adams grew up in, reading DC Comics. Adams must have been influenced by those great Mortimer covers, and that is why, I suppose, he had a deep respect for Win’s work; Adams never forgot that Win could compose a great drawing on paper, featuring people, places and things expertly drawn.

Thanks to those books, I believe Win achieved a kind of revisionist respect for his work in the comic book field. He was to be a guest of honor at last year’s San Diego ComiCon, but could not attend due to his failing health (my one true regret now is that his story, in his words, was not properly documented, so yet another great chapter of comic book art history dies along with him). But at least he lived long enough to know that he was esteemed by the industry he had toiled in for so long.

And that we, the collectors and lovers of the great medium of comic book art will always have the beautiful work of Win Mortimer to study and enjoy forever.

4CP: Four Color Press features an article by John Hilgar titled “In Defense of Dots: The lost art of comic books.” This article is BRILLIANT!!!! As the author/designer of the coffeetable comic book history book The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, I’m all about those dots vs. current printing modes; here’s what I wrote in my preface:

…artists whom I think rank among the greatest American artists of the 20th (and 21st) Century. Artists for whom there has never been a coffeetable book celebrating their work, the actual printed comic book art as it was transmitted and perceived by the readership, printed with ben-day dots on cheap newsprint—not the black and white original art, as beautiful as it is; that’s production art, as far as I’m concerned. And certainly not the recent spate of reprints, which, though they serve a noble purpose, remove the original coloring and replace it with garish colors on harsh white paper. I wanted to create the first true art book about the art of the comic book artists of the Silver Age of comics. Now it is true, that most of the comics in those days were poorly printed, with mis-registrations rampant; yet there is also something beautiful about them, too, and in trying to capture the integrity of the original printed art while also “cleaning” it up, I assumed the more accurate role of art restorator: not recoloring, but retouching…

Jeffrey Kripal has returned to discuss his latest book addressing the esoteric and the paranormal in popular culture. In this case his new book is Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (University of Chicago Press, 2011). From the book’s description:

In many ways, twentieth-century America was the land of superheroes and science fiction. From Superman and Batman to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, these pop-culture juggernauts, with their “powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men,” thrilled readers and audiences—and simultaneously embodied a host of our dreams and fears about modern life and the onrushing future.

But that’s just scratching the surface, says Jeffrey Kripal. In Mutants and Mystics, Kripal offers a brilliantly insightful account of how comic book heroes have helped their creators and fans alike explore and express a wealth of paranormal experiences ignored by mainstream science. Delving deeply into the work of major figures in the field—from Jack Kirby’s cosmic superhero sagas and Philip K. Dick’s futuristic head-trips to Alan Moore’s sex magic and Whitley Strieber’s communion with visitors—Kripal shows how creators turned to science fiction to convey the reality of the inexplicable and the paranormal they experienced in their lives. Expanded consciousness found its language in the metaphors of sci-fi—incredible powers, unprecedented mutations, time-loops and vast intergalactic intelligences—and the deeper influences of mythology and religion that these in turn drew from; the wildly creative work that followed caught the imaginations of millions. Moving deftly from Cold War science and Fredric Wertham’s anticomics crusade to gnostic revelation and alien abduction, Kripal spins out a hidden history of American culture, rich with mythical themes and shot through with an awareness that there are other realities far beyond our everyday understanding.

TheoFantastique: Jeff, thanks for coming back a second time to discuss your research and writing on the paranormal and popular culture. What kind of reception has Mutants & Mystics gotten from reviewers, and particularly among those working in religious and cultural studies?

Jeffrey Kripal: It’s hard to say, as it just came out, but there was a fairly substantial Roundtable Discussion of it on Patheos, which included, of course, a response from you. The respondents were generally enthusiastic, though some expressed reservations about some of my claims and readings. I think what they really meant is that I take the paranormal too seriously. But they were all kind, professional, and humane. And, besides, I appreciate their reservations.  Heck, I don’t even believe myself sometimes.

TheoFantastique: I was struck early on in your book where you encourage the “deep reader of science fiction and superhero comics” to consider the influence of gnostic and esoteric literature. Yet curiously, we often hear the argument made that science fiction is incompatible with religion and spirituality. Given what you’ve argued in your book, what do you think about the influence of religion in general in science fiction and comics, and why do you think the gnostic and esoteric has been overlooked in particular?

Jeffrey Kripal: I think the influence of Gnostic and esoteric ideas on science fiction is patently obvious, and that this is only resisted by readers who are invested in some sort of materialist or scientistic worldview. “Science” is really a kind of code for the “supernatural” in much of this literature. Certainly not all of it. Sci-fi culture, like any culture, is radically plural.

TheoFantastique: I think many are used to thinking of science fiction as having more secular origins, and yet you speak of the role of certain schools of thought in “the occult origins and historical developments of fantasy literature and science fiction.” Are we talking about divergent streams of development, and how have Rosicrucianism and Theosophy played a part in the occult aspects of this?

Jeffrey Kripal: If you look at the reverence and wonder with which science is imbued, say, in early pulp fiction, you cannot help but see a certain religiosity at work here. You also see, by the way, a whole bunch of Rosicrucian ads advertising booklets on how to develop one’s own superpowers. This is not speculation on my part. Geez, just open almost any volume of AMAZING STORIES, and there are the Rosicrucians.

The manifest means of human or cosmic transformation in sci-fi, of course, are framed as scientific, but these means and methods are often indistinguishable from magic. That is their latent meaning. Arthur C. Clarke’s famous line about how any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic was more insightful than probably even he recognized.

I also think something else is at work here.  What cutting edge science does so well is show how “the impossible is real,” that is, it demonstrates that the universe is far, far weirder than we thought, and that this weirdness is not simply a function of our imaginations. It is the real. That’s so mind-blowing.

TheoFantastique: How significant have Stan Lee and Jack Kirby been to the development and exploration of esoteric mythemes in comics, and now by extension, in cinematic treatments of these comics?

Jeffrey Kripal: It was this team that created so many of the standard Marvel superheroes we see today on the silver screen. I remember Lee well as a kid. His chatty, friendly, playful way of interacting with his readers was just wonderful. We all felt like he was talking to us. That’s because he was. But it was Kirby who probably brought the real Gnostic and mystical sensibilities to these characters, mostly, I suspect, because he himself was so invested in these ideas and possibilities. He was fascinated by the ancient alien hypothesis, as well as by parapsychology, Kabbalah, psychical phenomena, and so on. Not that Lee has not also shown interest in such things from time to time. He sent a brief but lovely response to me years ago when I wrote him about my project. And his recent television series on “real superpowers” is a good example of his openness to this kind of approach. Thank you, Stan.

TheoFantastique: I was surprised to see you refer to Gene Roddenberry’s interest in psi phenomena and altered states of consciousness. It is well known that he was a secular humanist, and this comes through in the original Star Trek series. And yet as I consider your reference to his paranormal interests I recall many episodes where the paranormal surfaces, as in the second pilot episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” It features two crew members who encounter a phenomenon in space that gives them paranormal, almost godlike powers. Might this be an example of the “baptism” of the paranormal and esoteric in scientific guise so as to be more palatable to Roddenberry and other materialist-oriented science fiction fans?

Jeffrey Kripal: Exactly. I am not sure there is any real contradiction here. One has to keep in mind that the whole language of “the psychical” and “the paranormal” was developed by intellectuals and humanist scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as ways of talking about these things that was not “supernatural.” I mean, the paranormal is precisely that—“normal,” and yet something beyond or “para” what we consider at the moment to be normal.  Most of these intellectuals believed that the supernatural was simply the natural that we did not yet understand. These terms, of course, have been re-deployed by our present media in highly undisciplined, and often frankly silly, ways, but their origins were quite serious and quite precise.

TheoFantastique: In your conclusion you refer to “our present mirrored cultures of religious fundamentalism and scientific materialism, which appear oddly united in their ferocious ‘damning’ of the paranormal.” What would you like to see by way of developments that might move us beyond this impasse? Including the paranormal on the research agendas of religious studies and cultural studies? Dialogue between the esoteric, religious and scientific communities? Other suggestions?

Jeffrey Kripal: We simply need to stop shaming, humiliating, demonizing, and dismissing individuals who come forward with heart-felt descriptions of their own encounters with the impossible. We also need to integrate these narratives and experiences into our models of the world, be these advanced in the humanities or the sciences. I am completely convinced that the cultural taboos around these things are really quite weak and basically insecure.  They are basically bluffs.  Or they are barks, not bites. If enough people stood up and just said, “Stop it,” it would, more or less, stop. The truth is that the vast majority of thinking individuals are utterly, and rightly, fascinated by these extraordinary events. Why do we have to be so damned boring?  Why should we stay in our boxes?

TheoFantastique: Jeff, thank you again for the book, the interview, and the opportunity to be part of the discussion concerning it.

Jeffrey Kripal: Thank you, John. I always enjoy what you have to say. I think you are part of what makes our culture so interesting and so healthy. Thank you for saying “Stop” in your own way.

Related posts:

“Jeffrey Kripal – Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred”

“Christopher Knowleds: Gods, Esotericism, and Comics”

TheoFantastique is pleased to announce a new contributor, and feature. Comic artist and historian Arlen Schumer, who has contributed here previously on The Twilight Zone, will be contributing essays known as the ComiColumn. Arlen’s website provides some background on his work and talents:

Arlen Schumer is an award-winning comic book-style illustrator for the advertising and editorial markets; an author/designer of coffeetable art books, including The Silver Age of Comic Book Art (Collectors Press), which won the Independent Book Publishers Award for Best Popular Culture Book of 2003; and a recognized expert on American popular culture—especially the legendary television series The Twilight Zone and the music of Bruce Springsteen—presenting his VisuaLectures on these and other subjects at universities and cultural institutions across the country since 1988.

Arlen’s ComiColumn’s will be posted on the main page of TheoFantastique, and will also be part of a new ComiColumn page all their own, thus giving this blog an additional dimension that explores comics as important cultural pieces of the fantastic from the unique perspective of Arlen Schumer. Below we are pleased to present the first ComiColumn essay.

“The Auteur Theory of Comics”

Text adapted from the visual presentation made by Arlen Schumer at the New York Comic Con panel, Saturday, October 15^th, 2011.

The recent court loss for the Jack Kirby estate in its battle with Disney, Marvel’s corporate owner, over copyright/ownership of the Marvel characters, revealed Stan Lee’s testimony as being the usual lynchpin in deciding the case in his, and Marvel’s, favor, that testimony essentially promulgating the same misconception that he, not Kirby, was the true author of the Marvel Universe by dint of his salaried role as editor and writer, and Kirby’s professional status as a work-for-hire employee. This misconception ignores the actual role Kirby played in the actual creation of those seminal comic books, as the auteur—author in French—of their stories. “Auteur” in the way Franco-cinemaphiles in the 1950s—first Francois Truffaut in the journal Cahiers du Cinema, and then American counterparts like The Village Voice’s film critic Andrew Harris—postulated their Auteur Theory of Film, that a film’s director, and not the screenwriter, as was previously thought, was a film’s true author.

So too can the Auteur Theory of Film be accurately applied to the “Marvel Method” of comic book authorship, innovated by Lee, who gave his artists (originally and primarily Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) anything from a typed synopsis of a story to a verbal springboard of an idea—the equivalent of the screenplay in film—and the artists drew out/plotted/staged/paced the story visually to fill the page count given, using two-dimensional versions of the same tools and devices a movie director uses to craft a film: casting, editing, lighting, sound, choreography—after which Lee would add the dialogue and captions to the artists’ work.

Stan’s interviews from the ‘60s, which stand in contrast, and somewhat of a contradiction, to his testimony in this case, were submitted in documents—eventually thrown out by the judge—during the testimony of Kirby experts John Morrow (publisher of The Jack Kirby Collector) and Mark Evanier (Kirby’s biographer); here’s an example:

“I would tell Jack the main idea that I wanted, and then we would talk about it, and we’d come up with something. I would give him the outline for the story. As we went on, and we had been working together for years, the outlines I gave him were skimpier and skimpier. I might say something like: ‘In this story let’s have Dr. Doom kidnap Sue Storm, and the Fantastic Four has to go out and rescue them. And in the end, Dr. Doom does this and that.’ And that might have been all I would tell him for a 20-page story. If the book was 20 pages long, I’d receive back 20 beautifully drawn pages in pencil which told a story. Jack would just put in all the details and everything. And then it was—I enjoyed that. It was like doing a crossword puzzle. I get the panels back, and I have to put in the dialogue and make it all tie together. So we worked well together that way for years.”

Ergo it was the artists who were the actual storytellers, not “just” the artists, with Lee, of Marvel Comics, like the directors of films have been considered the true authors of their films for over 50 years now, entitled to the benefits of credit and copyright protection of their films.

At the same time, this is not to deny Lee’s co-authorship and creatorship of Marvel Comics—he deserves exactly 50% of the credit, for his absolutely crucial contributions as editor/writer/art director/salesman and spokesman—but not a percent more or percent less. The sad fact of the matter is that Lee has successfully campaigned throughout his post-working relationships with Kirby and Ditko to create the perception—and therefore the “reality”—that he was the 100%, primary, sole creator of the Marvel Universe, relegating Kirby, specifically, to the historically demeaning role of the artist as merely a “pair of hands,” a “wrist” who robotically drew up Lee’s scripts, the only “theory”/process of comic book creation the judge was presented with.

(Comic creators like Will Eisner and Jm Steranko, who both write and draw their own work, are not germane to this discussion; they’re already 100% creators of their works. The Auteur Theory in both film and comics, as I’m applying it, pertains to those directors and comic artists who did/do not write their movies or comics, but collaborate with screenplay writers or comic writers; by dint of the act of directing a film, and drawing a comic book story, the director and the artist are the true authors/auteurs of their respective final product. The comic book works of writers like Alan Moore and Harvey Kurtzman are trickier to evaluate; for who is the auteur of Moore and artist Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen? Who is the auteur of Two Fisted Tales/Frontline/Mad? Because both Moore and Kurtzman functioned as much as art directors as writers—Moore verbally with his notorious panel descriptions and Kurtzman visually with his layouts—they’re legitimate exceptions. The overarching concept of the Auteur Theory of Comics is that it applies to any artist who does the visualizing of a comic book story, because the act of illustrating a comic book script—whether old-school full-script “DC style,” “Marvel style,” or whatever style—makes that artist a de facto auteur of the final “product” and therefore a de facto 50/50 co-creator of the work.)

The Marvel Method comic-creation working relationship of Lee & Kirby operated, in actuality, more like the Beatles’ Lennon & McCartney songwriting team; just as the early Lee/Kirby Fantastic Fours were closer to true 50/50 collaborations (see Lee’s 1960’s interview recollections and typed script/synopsis for FF #1), so too were Lennon/McCartney’s initial songs together. But as the years went on, Beatles songs became more often de facto solo projects, like McCartney’s “Yesterday,” or his “Hey Jude,” in which Lennon’s lyric, “The movement you need is on your shoulder,” is his sole contribution—essentially no different than Lee suggesting to Kirby in ’65 to have the FF fight a really big villain, and Kirby coming up with the entire Galactus/Silver Surfer trilogy (as in penciling the entire story out, and writing dialogue bits and notes in the margins). Since every Beatle song could never be perfectly quantified as to who did what, John and Paul decided early on to credit their Beatles songs to an across-the-board 50/50 split, “Lennon & McCartney,” making it easier to share in the real world of publishing credit and royalties. That’s how Lee should’ve worked with Kirby, who did the heavy lifting of actually “telling” the stories so that Lee could “write” multiple comics—the practical, economic imperative behind perhaps the greatest storytelling breakthrough in comic book history.

“That whole thing that he and Jack started was strictly for expediency because he didn’t have the scripts ready. That’s the reason. It was not done out of any stroke of genius, it was done out of expedience. Jack would call up and say, ‘Stan, I didn’t get the story yet, or the script” and Stan would say, “Ok, what I’m going to do is describe the first five or six pages in action for you, do them without words and when you send them in I’ll put the words in.’ That’s how it grew into the Marvel method of art first and script second. It was like sunlight had come into the room because this was a visual medium that had become a verbal medium for fifty ears, and suddenly it was the visual medium that it had intended to be in the first place. I think that the biggest thing Stan and Jack contributed to the industry was that. Visual first was a huge step forward; it was like a quantum leap.”
—John Romita

Yet despite this grand recollection, Stan always took full writer’s pay, while artists like Romita were never remunerated for their co-plotting and de facto writing. The most egregious example of this practice taken to an absurd degree is the famous Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #1 (June ’68) opening sequence written and illustrated by Jim Steranko, whom Stan didn’t want to pay as a writer because, according to Steranko, “…there were no words on the pages”! This myopia of Lee speaks not only to the primacy of word over image in both the lay public’s and the average comic reader’s—and creator’s—minds, but to the misunderstanding of the entire process of visual storytelling in comics, where the artist has control over sound as well as lighting and staging of a writer’s words; If he feels a sequence in the story can best be told silently, as in film or television, he has that paint in his palette. Theoretically, if Stan himself had written that SHIELD story—even traditionally, in full-script, with the dialogue he would’ve preferred—the auteurship of that sequence would still be Steranko’s!

Because the artist in comics has always been the auteur of the comic book reading experience, due primarily to the primacy of the visuals themselves; or, as artist Gil Kane put it once: “The only thing that makes comics worth reading is the art.” And Gene Colan said: “Every story I ever drew was like being the director of a film.” These simple statements are part and parcel of the Auteur Theory of Comics, the elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge: that in the verbal/visual medium known as comic books, the visual creation of a story is a de facto act of co-creation (and therefore morally and ethically entitled to all the legal benefits of co-creatorship).

Take the origin story, probably the most important component establishing the legal provenance of a comic character. Lee has always maintained, in court and out, that he created the character concepts first, and thus “created” them fully. But there was a little-known “character concept” bandied about for 15 years, called “Spiderman,” that didn’t become a copyrightable/trademarkable/successful character until artist Steve Ditko put pencil to paper and created the “Spider-Man” we know of, of stage, screen, comics, merchandise and de facto logo of Marvel, as the mouse ears are to Disney. As Ditko’s iconic Spider-Man “self-portrait” implies, a comic book “creation” isn’t fully “created” until an artist visualizes his own or a writer’s idea/synopsis/script. Which begs the question: was Stan Lee’s verbal origin story of Spider-Man more “important” in the overall/eventual success of the character than the greatest costume design in the history of comic book superheroes by Steve Ditko?

Are Gaines’ and Feldstein’s overwritten captions and word balloons to those classic EC Comics more “important” to their renown than the golden-age-of-illustration artwork that conformed to their prepared panels?

Are Bob Haney’s great 1968-69 Brave & Bold stories more “important” than the auteurism of Neal Adams’ artwork/storytelling, in which he changed all of Haney’s daytime scenes to night, just as a director of a film might alter the screenplay to more effectively work on the screen, not the printed page as the screenwriter wrote it?

Are Marv Wolman’s Tomb of Dracula concepts/writing/dialoguing more “important” to that ‘70s success story than the auteurist, atmospheric artwork/storytelling of Colan/Palmer?

When I was reading those Batman reprints from the ‘50s in those eighty-page annuals during the ‘60s, I was entertained by a raft of reprints, all uncredited, as was the DC policy then. So why did the stories illustrated by (we later found out) the great Dick Sprang stand out from the surrounding hackwork of Bob Kane ghosts? Because, despite working from complete scripts and tight editorial control (just like that of the Hollywood movie studios) Sprang’s confident, direct, exaggerated qualities that we came to love about Sprang made every story he illustrated a “Dick Sprang story,” no matter whether Edmond Hamilton or Bill Finger or whomever wrote them, because Sprang was the auteur of those Batman stories—just as the great film directors Hitchcock, Hawks and Ford, who worked from others’ screenplays within an extremely collaborative/edited/oft-censored medium, with producer control no better or worse than comic book artists had to deal with (and are still dealing with), were later declared auteurs of their films by the French film theorists.

Like film, comics are a synchronistic collaboration of words and pictures, ergo any form of a verbal script is only half of the art form known as the “comic book”—whether it’s as brief as Lee’s capsule directives to Kirby, or as extensively detailed as Alan Moore’s panel exegeses for Gibbons to follow in Watchmen.

To those who still damn Gibbons with faint praise for Watchmen’s success because, to one online poster, “a raccoon could have drawn that story and it would have been awesome,” Watchmen is, indeed, a 50/50 collaboration no matter how you parse Moore’s and Gibbons’ individual contributions, and good luck to you if you’re going to try—it’ll always be purely subjective. Moore’s Watchmen script is only worth what someone’s willing to pay to read it in its original form, just like screenplays to films are available to those who want to read them—but neither are complete artistic entities on their own. Moore himself would be the first one to admit that all of his comic book collaborations, with a who’s who of artistic greats like Eddie Campbell, Brian Bolland and Bill Sienkiewicz are equivalent in their contributions of words and pictures (hence Moore’s equitable sharing of both the legal and financials of each property). And to further diminish the line of “reasoning” that Gibbons’ “contribution” to Watchmen was somehow minimized by Moore’s gargantuan talent, imagine what a less-cerebral 2000 AD artist than Gibbons would’ve done with Moore’s Watchmen scripts—or what an average Marvel artist like Don Heck would have done with Lee’s “Have the FF fight a really big villain” idea, or what kind of costume artist Larry Lieber would’ve designed for Spider-Man!

There is a reason that Alan Moore gets more credit from the general public for Watchmen than Gibbons does; it’s why Stan also gets more credit than Jack. Literary criticism far outweighs visual/art criticism in terms of both column inches and overall impact and ubiquity, with far more literature courses taught in universities than art history. And because the graphic novel and serious criticism of comics as a visual/literary hybrid are still relatively recent—and even then, because most comics fans are not visually literate enough to actually discuss the artistic merits (and faults) of comic book art to the same degree that they discuss story/character, comics criticism pretty much follows the standard story/characters discussion, with a backhanded compliment of the “art chores” usually falling to the penultimate paragraph of most comics reviews. Combined with the fact that both the lay and comic audiences know far more about traditional “art”—painting and sculpture, and now computer graphics—than they know about how comic book art is actually produced, and you have the current situation, in which Stan Lee is thought of as both the writer/creator and the artist of Marvel Comics! Want proof? From a recent issue of Comic Shop News (#1259), by Cliff Biggers & Ward Batty in cooperation with newsarama.com:

“Comics icon Stan Lee, creator of the Mighty Marvel Universe and characters such as Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, X-Men, and Iron Man…”

Think of this Auteur Theory of Comics being the testimony in defense of Kirby that could have/should have followed Lee’s entirely self-serving testimony, enlightening the court, the media covering the trial, comic book readers and the general public to truly understand, maybe for the first time, the role of the artist in the de facto co-creation of a comic book work, and to the truth of the Marvel Method in actual practice, asserting an artist of the magnitude of Jack “King” Kirby his morally and ethically rightful place as the auteur of the Marvel Comics Universe.

Call for Papers: Graphic Novels, Comics and Popular Culture-SWTXPCA 2012

Please make plans to attend our 33rd Annual Conference
February 8-11, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center in

Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras NW,
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA 87102
Tel: +1 505 842 1234 or 888-421-1442

http://www.swtxpca.org

Proposal submission deadline: December 1st 2011

The SW/TX PCA/ACA area chair invites papers on Comics, Graphic Novels and Popular Culture.

Any Aspect of Comics and Graphic Novels in Popular Culture will be considered.

Possible panel/discussion topics

With the recent rise in the Superhero movies, a discussion of 2011’s summer of the superhero or superflop would be welcome eg., Captain America, Green Lantern, Thor, X-Men First Class. What is the future of the superhero based movie?

Pedagogical approaches to teaching graphic novel content. This has become an increasingly important part of comic studies and the area chair seeks those scholars who would like to present on this topic.

Zombies and Vampires in comics continue to rise in popularity. Why are these monsters ideally suited for four colored pages?

Other topics:

Sequential Art and Storytelling

Manga, Anime and the Movies

Comic-Conventions-Fan Culture

Particular Artists or writers (Bendis, Steranko, Kirby, Everett, Niles, etc)

The Rise of the Graphic Novel

What is a Graphic Novel?

History of Newspaper Comics!

Gay Characters in comics

Film, Television, Animation and Superheroes!

Adapting Graphic Novels for the Screen

Racism and the X-Men

Spiderman as the Everyman

Cartoon Network: Good or Bad for Comics

Comics and Philosophy

Graphic Novels as outlets for social justice (i.e., World War III )

Comics as political satire (e.g., Tom Tomorrow, Addicted To War )

Horror Comics

The Resurrection of Captain America-Why NO comic character ever stays dead?

DC, Marvel, and Comic corporations

Comics Studies and Film Studies: How do the two intersect?

The Definition of the Superhero

Indies and their role

Comics and Graphic Novels around the world (e.g., Tintin, Asterix).

The scholarly study of Graphic Novels/comics in the academy

Libraries and Graphic Novels

Proposal submission deadline: December 1st 2011

Please submit your title, and 100-250 word abstract through our website database which can be accessed at http://conference2012.swtxpca.org

33rd Annual Conference Southwest/Texas Popular/American Culture Association

February 8-11, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center in
Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
Submission Deadline: 12/1/11
Priority Registration Deadline 12/31/11
Conference Hotel:
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras NW,
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA 87102
Tel: +1 505 842 1234 or 888-421-1442

http://www.swtxpca.org

Rob Weiner
Area Chair: Graphic Novels, Comics, and Popular Culture
Humanities Librarian Texas Tech University
Rweiner5@sbcglobal.net

Although they were once considered a medium suitable only for children’s literature, comic books have increasingly become a vehicle for serious social commentary and, specifically, for innovative religious thought. Practitioners of both traditional religions and new religious movements have begun to employ comics as a missionary tool, while humanists and religious progressives use comics’ unique fusion of text and increasing fervor with which the public has come to view comics as an art form and Americans’ fraught but passionate relationship with religion. Graven Images provides an opportunity for discussion of cutting-edge artistic and social issues by exploring the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels.

In essays by scholars and comics creators, Graven Images observes the frequency with which religious material — in devout, educational, satirical, or critical contexts — occurs in both independent and mainstream comics. Contributors identify the unique advantages of the comics medium for religious messages; analyze how comics communicate such messages; place the religious messages contained in comic books in appropriate cultural, social, and historical frameworks; and articulate the significance of the innovative theologies being developed in comics.

TheoFantastique Podcast 2.4 features an interview with A. David Lewis, a national lecturer in comics studies, an award-winning graphic novelist, and a PhD candidate in Religion and Literature at Boston University. In this interview we discuss comics and the academy, and specifics related to Graven Images, including Superman and Christ-figures, evangelicalism and the comic medium, and Western esotericism in comics and popular culture. TheoFantastique Podcast 2.4 can be listened to here, and at iTunes. Graven Images can be ordered through the TheoFantastique Store.

’68 Exclusive Preview

TheoFantastique: Jeff, thanks for your willingness to discuss your book and its subject matter here. To begin, the paranormal is not recognized as a legitimate subject matter in the academy, including your discipline in religious studies. In fact, many times scholars shy away from expressing an interest in, let alone exploring the paranormal. What is your personal interest in this, and why do you find this a a legitimate topic for religion scholars?

Jeffrey Kripal: Long story.  But I’ll try to keep it short.  I came to the subject very late, that is, within the last few years.  I was trained as a historian of religions, with a special focus on mystical literature in both India and the West.  My fourth book, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2007), was on the human potential movement of California.  This project put me in direct contact with many modern-day mystics and some fascinating scientists, philosophers, and historians who were writing about topics that I had never considered: psychical research and UFOs, for example.  I realized two things fairly quickly: (1) such phenomena are real in the simple sense that they happen and cannot be explained away in every instance as fraudulent, misperception, etc.; and (2) that I had no real way of thinking about these things, and this despite the fact that both are loaded with religious implications (particularly around the nature of mind, consciousness, or what was traditionally called the “soul”).  So I set out to try to trace the histories of “the psychical” and “the paranormal” and see where I might locate myself and my field in these histories.  It turns out that the terms originated in elite academic contexts (Cambridge, Harvard, and Duke, mostly), but that they were later disciplined and repressed for a variety of (mostly bad) reasons.  It must also be said that I underwent a spontaneous mind-blowing paranormal experience in Calcutta in 1989, and that was always in the back of my mind (or in the front of it) too.  I wrote about this experience in my second book (Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom [University of Chicago Press, 2001]) and begin with it again in my next book (Mutants and Mystics [University of Chicago Press, forthcoming]).

TheoFantastique: In your book you refer to the “esoteric currents of American popular culture”. Can you share some examples of this for those to whom such currents might not be readily visible?

Jeffrey Kripal: By this phrase, I mean to point to such things as the way, say, metaphysical energies (or “radiation”) function in the creation of superheroes (think Spider-Man or the Incredible Hulk); or the way, say, the alien functions as a quasi-religious or transcendent figure in the Superman mythos (Superman is basically a crashed alien) or in the classic alien abduction experience; or the way, say, the motif of “mutation” or spiritual evolution enters a mythology like the X-Men or, for that matter again, Superman, that “Man of Tomorrow.”  These are scientific-sounding motifs that are in actual fact deeply indebted to earlier esoteric and mystical notions of metamorphosis, magical powers, spiritual flight, transcendence, and so on.

TheoFantastique: How do you define the paranormal in your book, and how do you see this related to the concept of the sacred as Rudolf Otto referred to it?

Jeffrey Kripal: I define the paranormal as an event or experience in which the assumed division between the subjective or mental and objective or material dimensions of reality breaks down; or, a little differently, when reality begins to behave not in a causal, but in a meaningful or metaphorical way—as if one were caught in a story or movie.  Put differently again, I mean an experience in which consciousness appears to manifest itself in the physical world.  Think mind-over-matter.  I also employ the category of the sacred, which does not mean “the good,” but the sacred as an awesome power encountered in the world that is at once terrifying and beautiful, alluring and dangerous.  Hence the paranormal can appear in both positive or negative forms and elicit either fascination or fear, holiness or horror.  Or, more likely, both.

TheoFantastique: I’ve seen some discussion in print and on the Internet trying to define science fiction in differentiation from fantasy. The logic seems to go that sci-fi tries to paint scientific worlds of possibility. But it’s interesting to me that many times sci-fi includes elements that appear scientific, such as matter teleportation for example, which is portrayed scientically, but which really appears to be magical or esoteric. Is science fiction at times used to portray the esoteric in ways that makes Western rationalists feel better about esoteric or magical experiences?

Jeffrey Kripal: Great question!  This is basically my answer in Mutants and Mystics, where I show how modern science is taken up as a mystical code and used toward paranormal ends within popular culture.  So cosmology feeds into the alien and the UFO, physics feeds into the whole language of “radiation” (itself deeply indebted to earlier movements like Mesmerism and Reich’s orgone), and evolutionary biology feeds into the meta-motif of mutation.  The stories may look scientific, but they are not, not at least in any orthodox sense.  What is really going on here, in my opinion, is the creation of a new mystical code, a mysticism of science, as it were.  The situation is really complicated, though, since, if you look close enough, what you also find are scientists speculating along these very lines.  So Carl Sagan seriously suggested a kind of ancient astronaut thesis.  Francis Crick experimented with panspsermia.  And Alan Rusell Wallace (the co-creator of evolutionary theory) was a committed Spiritualist and was convinced that there is a separate spiritual or moral line of evolution.  And so on.

TheoFantastique: It has occurred to me recently that an interesting thing takes place in terms of paranormal experiences in contrast with what would seem to be similar types of experiences in more “mainstream” or traditional religions in the West. The former are considered fringe, whereas the latter has some credibility, at least among religious believers who frown on the former. Is this a case of privileging one type of religious experience due to its social location in culture?

Jeffrey Kripal: Yep.  Hence the piece the New York Times did on my work last fall.  “The Burning Bush They Will Buy, but not ESP or Alien Abductions.” This is my point.  These paranormal events are often religious experiences, even if we do not recognize them as such.  Why do we feel comfortable with weird stuff that allegedly happened a long, long time ago, but not the weird stuff that is happening, right now, in our backyards and, more likely, in our beds?

TheoFantastique: What do you mean in the title of your book in referencing certain individuals, specifically Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Bertrand Méheust, as “authors of the impossible”?

Jeffrey Kripal: I mean to suggest that we, as social groups and cultures mostly, are authoring the feel and shape of reality; that the real behaves differently in different cultural frames; and that what we consider “impossible” at this particular point of space and time may not be impossible in another.  I do not mean to suggest that anything goes, that we as individuals are omnipotent.  Not at all.  But I do mean to point to the incredible force and power of language, ideas, and culture, and the ways these actualize (or repress) basic human potentials.

TheoFantastique: Why did you select the individuals that you focused on in your book? What was it about their approach or subject matter that made them stand out for you?

Jeffrey Kripal: I chose these four authors of the impossible because I consider their books and thought especially sophisticated and nuanced.  Most simply, they do not fall into the usual traps of either-or, but rather think along the lines of paradox and the both-and.  This is my basic sense of the paranormal.  It is a dead-end to approach it as either literally true or completely false.  This is why fantasy and the paranormal are so close.  The truth needs the trick to appear at all.  The fact needs the fantasy.

TheoFantastique: With more scholars involved in the study of Western esotericism, as well as the fantastic in popular culture, do you see the possibility for the paranormal receiving greater positive academic treatment?

Jeffrey Kripal: Maybe.  Not quite yet, though.  I am not particularly optimistic here in the short run, but I am in the long run.  That is why I write anyway.  For the future.

TheoFantastique: I am interested in the idea of tech-gnosis, and science fiction as sacred text. Can you share a little about your next book in process that looks at the paranormal in popular culture through things like science fiction and comic books?

Jeffrey Kripal: My next book, Mutants and Mystics, looks very closely at a set of gifted pulp fiction, science fiction, superhero, and fantasy authors and artists and examines how their works were partly inspired by their own paranormal experiences.  I look at authors and artists like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Ray Palmer, Jack Kirby, Otto Binder, Alvin Schwartz, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Philip K. Dick.  I also examine the roles played here by mystical movements like Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, psychical research, and Charles Fort.  I also examine what I call the mythology of science and its impact on all of these genres, particularly around the discoveries of cosmology, atomic energy, and evolutionary biology.  Hence the alien and the motifs of radiation and mutation.  The book attempts to pull all of this together into what I call the Super-Story, a grand set of “mythemes” that, or so I suggest, is taking shape right in front of our eyes, right now.

TheoFantastique: Jeff, thank you again for your time, and your book. I look forward to the next one on the paranormal and popular culture.

Jeffrey Kripal: John, thanks for having me.  I’m a fan of what you are doing here.  It’s a great site.

Related posts:

“Christopher Knowles: Gods, Esotericism, and Comics”

“Bader, Mencken, and Baker: Paranormal America”

Earn academic credit while studying the dynamics of marketing and fan culture at the largest comic arts event on the continent, July 20-24, 2011.

Over 125,000 attendees and hundreds of vendors, celebrities, and professionals descend on San Diego each summer to participate in the five-day Comic-Con. In addition to a 525,000 square foot exhibit hall filled with the wares of producers, the Con features continuous programming showcasing experts in the following industries and many more:

Plan to join us this summer to experience Con firsthand!

Please contact the program director, Dr. Matthew J. Smith, with your inquiries or to request an application. You can e-mail him at: msmith@wittenberg.edu. Deadline for application is March 1, 2011. An application can be downloaded at the PowerofComics.com website.