Giants

By Regie Rigby

Sir Isaac Newton was not, by all accounts, a particularly modest man. To be fair, when you are the finest mind of your generation, and you have completely revolutionised physics, you don’t have to be. But he did leave the world one rather modest quote. When, in his later years somebody praised him for his great academic achievements he said “I may have seen further than everyone else, but only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.”

We all do that. Today's comics creators do not produce their art in a vacuum. They are standing on the shoulders of the giants of the golden age who came before them. Indeed, as a medium comics has had perhaps more than it’s fair share of giants.

The trouble is, we’re running out.

Last week I wrote an obituary for Carl Barks. The man who created Uncle Scrooge McDuck - the man who created Duckburg. The man who made Donald Duck himself the water fowl he is today. Not so very long ago Charles Schulz left us. Not long before that we lost Bob Kane, Siegel and Schuster, Jack “King” Kirby. All gone to the great artists studio in the sky.

They’re in good company of course. The writers and artists of the golden age were themselves standing on the shoulders of some pretty impressive giants - creators whose names are today largely unknown outside the world of comics, and not all that well remembered amongst comics fandom either.

Creators like Winsor McCay, who in 1914 all but invented film animation with a vaudeville show in which he directed a cartoon dinosaur. McCay had been working in comics for some time by that point, produced the comic strip Tales of The Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle for the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune before 1900. In 1905 he began Little Nemo in Slumberland a strip which was a sensation in it’s day, and whose influence can be seen in comics even now - almost a centaury later.

Then there’s George Herriman, creator amongst other things of Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat first appeared in 1910 and is the story of the cats unrequited love for Ignatz the mouse - who liked nothing better than to smash Krazy in the face with a brick. Actually there’s rather more to it that that, but Jerry the mouse, who arrived on the scene much later could have learned a thing or two from Ignatz, let me tell you!

Both of these creators left the party before the Golden Age got going. McCay died of a stroke in 1934, Herriman finally succumbing to a long illness in 1944. Neither had produced strips that were typical of their time, and indeed neither had been particularly popular in their day. (Krazy Kat in particular probably wouldn’t have lasted for thirty four years had William Randolph Hearst, who owned the papers who published it, not been a fan). But that’s not the point. Popularity (or lack of it) alone does not make you a giant. After all, everyone today thinks of Van Gough as a great artist - nobody gave his work a second glance when he was alive.

No, McCay and Herriman are giants not because they were popular in their day, but because they were influential. They were the creators that the giants of the Gold and Silver Ages - as well as the creators of today grew up reading. But perhaps the influence of artists like McCay and Herriman, in terms of the non professional comics community, was less than the giants of the golden age that followed.

Siegel and Schuster created the template for the Superhero we are all so familiar with today. The Superman we all know and love (well, OK. I don’t love him, but everyone else seems to...) was launched on an unsuspecting world in Action Comics issue #1 in 1939, and changed the face of the mainstream comics industry forever.

It is not exactly true to say that Supes was the first superhero. Siegel and Schuster didn’t create the character in a vacuum, and their influences ranged from Hercules (of Roman mythology, not obviously the “Legendary Journeys” nonsense currently on TV) to Sampson (of Delilah fame) to Philip Wylie's novel "Gladiator" (which I‘d love to read, but have never been able to track down). Quite apart from all that, the character was originally conceived as a villain. Not something that DC highlight much (although they used a variation on the title for a major Supes crossover in the nineties), but Reign of the Superman was published in the early thirties in a science fiction fanzine.

Their work impacted almost immediately on the work of a certain Robert Kane, who up until that point had been drawing “funny animal” stories. He came up with the original concept for Batman, always a darker vision than that of his blue and red clad predecessor. But Batman (who again was not created in isolation, and allegations of plagiarism have been levelled at Kane in the past) set the mould that Superman had created, and the rest is very much history.

This revolution of the thirties set the pace for much of the next thirty years. There were great creators in that time of course, but few who can be said to have made such an impact on the medium. The next giants made their splash in the sixties. Jack “King” Kirby didn’t start his career at Marvel in the sixties, far from it. His work in comics started as early as 1935. Kirby and long time collaborator Joe Simon created the pre war (from an American perspective) super patriot Captain America not for Marvel, but for Timely Comics in 1941. Kirby also did a large amount of work for DC comics in the forties and fifties.

But is was undoubtedly the move to Marvel and collaboration with one Stan Lee that cemented his status as an American Icon and true comics giant. He was involved in the creation of almost all of the early Marvel characters and was in large part responsible for the rejuvenation of the company in 1961. To this day, the Marvel “house style” is basically a refined version of Kirby, and as such Kirby can be seen reflected in the work of many of today’s “big name” artists.

After the sixties ended though, the world began to change. Comics began to fall from favour, and arguably the medium started to become too small for true giants to emerge. What giants do we have now? Bryan Talbot perhaps is worth of the label. Perhaps Alan Moore. But few others. Oh, there are fan favourites of course. I can hear people muttering about Neil Gaiman for instance. But much as a love his work (and I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Sandman as I believe I’ve mentioned in previous columns) Gaiman doesn’t cut it as a giant. The “big name” artists such as Rob Liefield and Alex Ross don’t cut it either.

Liefield has been resting on his laurels for far too long, Ross is a good still life artist and his stuff looks fantastic, but at the end of the day looks like what it is - well rendered life portraits of body builders. To be a great comics artist you need more than technical skill, and Ross doesn’t have what it takes.

Still, there is one giant in the industry today that I have overlooked. A giant who is connected with the giants of the gold and silver ages not because he was influenced by them, but because he used to employ them.

Both Bob Kane and Jack Kirby worked for the Eisner-Iger studio in the thirties. The Eisner of Eisner-Iger was a certain Will Eisner - a man universally acknowledged as the great master of the art of comics. His first major success, The Spirit, a masked detective who was almost a superhero ran until 1952, although he kept turning up in reprint for right up to the nineties, when he got his own series again with all sorts of big name creators queuing up to work on him. Looking at Eisner’s Spirit strips from the forties is a humbling experience. Even now, more than half a centaury after they were first produced they look innovative. Frankly Eisner’s work - particularly his art - from fifty years ago looks newer and fresher than much of the stuff on offer today.

Once his work on The Spirit was done, Eisner got on with taking comics and shaking them around a bit. In the fifties, he created educational comics - including a technical manual for the US Army! In the seventies he returned to fiction comics, producing A Contract with God and inventing the graphic novel (so far as I know he coined the term) in the process.

Eisner was one of the first to take comics seriously as an art form. His book about comics, Comics and Sequential Art (another term coined by Eisner)was built from the popular course he has taught for several years at New York's School of Visual Art. It remains one of the standard texts for serious students of comics.

Eisner’s work is still very much with us. Quite apart from the reflections of it which can be seen in the work of modern creators, his work was published until the late nineties by Kitchen Sink Press, and since the demise of that company the Eisner Library has been taken on by DC. But Eisner himself isn’t done yet. His most recent book, Last Day in Vietnam was published by Dark Horse only a couple of months ago.

Eisner is to the creators of today as the Titans were to the Gods of Olympus. He was here before any of them, in one way or another they all learned from him, and yet, unlike the Titans of mythology, he endures.

He may be the last giant we ever see.