sfcityduck

Kirby pencils inked by Wally Wood would definitely have fit in to the SF books as evidenced by the later Sky Masters of the Space Force newspaper strip. But even that collaboration would have been just more of the same at EC, and really would have been a tier below Frazetta & Williamson or Wood on his own when if came to the SF books. EC wasn't interested in doing the kind of books or stories where Kirby really shined, so I doubt there was any mutual attraction at all. Your Kurtzman comparison surprises me. The Dan Barry & Kurtzman Flash Gordon strip had some similarity to Kirby, but Kurtzman at his best with EC on his own in stories like Corpse on the Imjin and Airburst was doing work that was nothing like Kirby.

Considered one of Toth's best art efforts and Stan's writing does not get in the way. Read it here: http://pangolinbasement.blogspot.com/2012/03/toth-western-gunfighters-24-his-back-to.html

This chart works great if you make two changes: (1) start with 1930s and (2) get rid of everything to the right of the decade. I kinda like "Age of Duck" though.

It is worth remembering that Gaines helped form the ACMP in 1947 and its publisher's code in 1948 (the precursor to the CCA). Check out this letter sent by EC at the time: (Note: MC Gaines had died a year earlier, the skinflints were using old letterhead.) So Gaines made his bed at the time. Not sure why Stan Lee is being blamed, when he was actually putting up a fight against the notion comics were bad for kids: Gaines also had EC join the CMAA in 1954 and he voluntarily submitted his books to the CMAA created CCA - again making his bed. Not all publishers did, notably Dell, Western and Classics Illustrated. Gaines in interviews has stated that after changing his titles didn't work, he decided to give up on the comics format as an attempt to circumvent the Code. That worked for Mad, but it did not work for the picto-fiction crime and horror books. The great mystery to me is why didn't Gaines keep publishing science fiction? I guess he didn't think it was adult enough for picto-fiction treatment or was not commercially viable. The latter may be the right answer because Gaines viewed the science fiction books as his personal favorites and the horror books as a way to pay the bills. Worth noting that the conversation you reference concerned "Judgment Day" which appeared in ISF 33. EC refused to make the change Judge Murphy requested. Look at ISF 33: It has the CCA stamp. Judge Murphy backed down on his requested changes. Gaines won the battle with the CCA! But he decided to surrender in the war and voluntarily shifted to the magazine format. ISF 33 was the last comic he published. That was his voluntary choice and I can only wonder how history might have been different if he'd done things a bit differently.

Hulk 180 was not the revival of a prior character (what started the prior Silver Age). But GS X-Men was the revival of a prior superhero group - a starting point that echoes the criteria for the start of the SA (and led to other group revamps like the New Teen Titans, West Coast Avengers, etc. and a general proliferation in group books). Having said that, I agree that's a bad criteria for the start of the Bronze Age. But KirbyJack's point is a good one that if you want to define an age by a superhero event similar to the SA, GSX 1 makes sense. Again, far better just to talk about decades. This "ages" thing doesn't really make much sense for anything but a narrow band of comics (superhero comics) and only for a narrow range of time and publishers.

It's to see the Farrah Fawcett poster ad:

This thread makes no sense to me. Comic "ages" don't pertain to titles. They pertain to the industry as a whole. The "Golden Age" began with Action 1. It didn't begin with a different issue for every title. And the options offered in the poll above (last issue in 198x year) show how arbitrary they are. A valid question is: Why have "Ages" at all? The well-known answer is: (1) Because of a tradition started by the collecting community in the 1960s (although there were collectors and pros discussing the "Golden Age" of comics as early as the late 1940s), (2) Because dealers have found the "Ages" to be a convenient short hand that helps them sell books, and (3) because collectors have developed an "Ages" OCD. So let's just assume "Ages" are worth having. So then the question becomes: When does the Copper Age begin? The answer to that question hinges on what the point of the "Age" in question is. The term "Golden Age" as understood by the members of early fandom who came up with it was to denote the "Golden Age of superhero comics" when the whole superhero concept came into being and took the industry by storm. That started with Action Comics 1. The term "Silver Age" as understood by the members of early fandom who came up with it was to denote the "Silver Age of superhero comics" when Golden Age heroes who had fallen out of print started to be revived by D.C. kicking off a new era of superhero comics. That revival commenced with Showcase 4. Certainly, there were a number of earlier attempts at other superhero revivals in the 1950s (the Atlas revival of Captain America, Human Torch, and Subby maybe being the most notable) and even DC had examples of the creation of new "superheroes" that predated Showcase 4 (Martian Manhunter and Phantom Stranger for example), but the Silver Age focused on revivals of classic DC characters in the minds of the collectors penning that term in the very early 1960s. So Showcase 4 was the book. Then Marvel came along. Some folks talk of the "Marvel Age" which began with FF 1. But that term is really used mostly as hype by Marvel itself, not by comic collectors and scholars. FF 1 is rightly seen as just being another example of post-Showcase 4 revival of superheroes (explicitly reviving GA Human Torch and a few issues later Subby, and implicitly reviving the "plastic" and "invisible" hero archetypes). Which brings us to the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age does not key off of superhero comics at all. There was no industry shaking superhero comic development for which there is a consensus view that it kicked off that "Age." Instead, the Bronze Age is a confused term that is most often tied to industry developments. These included (1) a changing of the guard at the companies with old pros retiring and new younger creators ascending to power and the corresponding change in comic subject matter, (2) changes in distribution that led to a proliferation of new comic titles, (3) the revival of non-superhero genres like horror, monsters, barbarians, etc., (4) title implosions and explosions, and (5) the beginning of the rise of the direct market and comic book stores. The beginning of the Bronze Age is a pastiche of factors and, as a result, collectors tend to look at a number of different comics as symbolizing the "beginning." The reality, however, is that most of us don't really care what the first "Bronze Age" comic was, we just accept it happened sometime around 1970. Because the "Bronze Age" is not defined by any particular development in superhero comics, unlike the GA and SA, there's just no need to have a single book be the symbolic beginning. It's a Zeitgeist, not a comic which started the "Bronze Age." Back in the 80s, the notion of the "Copper Age" started to arise. At the time, we viewed it as having to do with the emerging primacy of independent publishing and the direct market. Since then, folks have tried to tie the Bronze Age to story developments in superhero comics, focusing on Secret Wars and Crisis, etc. As a result, there's a lot of confusion. Me, I come down on the side that the Bronze Age, like the Copper Age, is defined by industry factors, most notably the solidifying of the direct market as the key market for comics and the rise of publishers outside of the big 2. I view Love and Rockets 1 (1981), Dazzler 1 (1981), Comico Primer 1 (1982), Albedo 0 (1983), Ronin 1 (1983), and Teenage Mutant Turtles 1 (1984) as all strong candidates to be "Copper Age" comics. 1985 is just too late in the game, being even past Secret Wars. Whatever date you pick, it is again about the zeitgeist not about some development in a particular issue of a title. My takeaway from all of this is that "ages" is a dumb concept that should be abandoned. Far better to just discuss decades.

Everyone forgets Star Trek: The Motion Picture was the inspiration for new Star Trek comics.

Everett could do action and his covers are unbelievable:

Ignore away. I'd hate for you to get any cognitive dissonance.

Great work on Fox's Fantastic, Science, Blue Beetle, and Wonderworld titles where he was basically ghosting the great Lou Fine, work on Blue Beetle, Amazing Man, Silver Streak and Champion, editing for Timely and Fox, and created multiple features for Timely before Captain America such as the Fiery Mask and Trojak. Simon was an important figure in the early GA before Kirby joined him. That's why Kirby was willing to be the junior partner.

That lasted for what? Four issues of Adventure? Apparently, it did not add to sales so much that DC wanted to keep it going. Bob Kane was the first DC artist to negotiate a royalty contract starting with D27 for Batman. He always received creator credit and income for Batman, even when unknown creators were doing all the work. Kane was the subject of articles for his creation (as were S&S). So the brief credits that S&K got on DC covers aren't that notable. They seem more like a desperate attempt by DC to attempt to capitalize on S&K when they were floundering with what to do with them. S&K at DC didn't create anything great, the best they did was milking the old kid gang concept.

Again, there were lots of "hits" in the GA. Captain Marvel, Donald Duck, and many other books have tenable claims to being the largest selling books. No one is declaring the Fawcett artists who worked on Captain Marvel to be great artists (Kirby copied CC Beck's style when he worked on Capt. Marvel). They were just very popular comics. Good for S&K in being popular at times. At other times they were losing money. That's life. The Romance Comic concept was, in retrospect, an obvious one. There had been romance themes and even single comics before Young Romance. Simon, however, saw the demand based on the numbers for magazines. So he jumped on the train by putting out a "Love" comic. Other publishers followed suit and did it better than S&K. (Remember, EC did horror and SF better, they did not invent that genre - that's a normal thing in the comic business.) So putting out Young Love is, again, just polish, not a case for being in the HOF.

Created Captain America. It was a hit from day one. Why? The beginning of WWII, which was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but the fight against Germany which was playing out in the Atlantic before war was declared, and a surge in patriotism as FDR ramped up the country to enter the war. CA 1 was hyped by Timely from day 1, with the Sentinels of Liberty concept playing a big part. It was the right book at the right time. But back then, "hits" were much more prevalent because comics were new, had little competition (no tv, few similar movies, and radio was limited), and cheap. It was, however, a concept that was derivative - just another patriotic superhero which had an early plagiarism problem - not something to hang your reputation on when put in perspective. The art on CA 1-10 was not the best art seen in that comic.

No. Simon was the predominant partner on a 60/40 split. He was already an art director when Kirby was a stringer.

Maybe he makes the HoF because lots of guys make the HoF, but he's not even close to Mount Rushmore based on his GA. Before Kirby became Joe Simon's junior partner he did nothing notable in the GA. Afterwards, he had a good run on 10 issues of Captain America - a character designed and envisioned by Joe Simon, but which was a blatant Shield rip-off. Bucky was Timely's second blatant Robin (or was it of Shield's kid partner, I forget) rip-off at Timely, after Toro. Joe liked Kirby's art and his work rate, which was prodigious on CA. Personally, I prefer Schomburg's CA covers to Kirby's, but that's a matter of taste. It was a good 10 issue run. Other than that, what did Kirby do for Timely? The forgettable Red Raven and Vision? The Young Allies was probably the most next notable, S&K's first "kid gang" that unfortunately included the racist portrayal of the watermelon loving Whitewash Jones. Ironically, the idea of CA having a kid gang of helper's originated in a (non-racist) text story written by Stan Lee for CA 4 - the kid gang was called the Sentinels of Liberty and tied into the club used for promoting CA Comics. S&K would milk the kid gang concept at D.C. for the Boy Commandos and Newsboy Legion after their Timely tenure ended with CA 10. Over at DC, other than the kid gang retreads, S&K didn't do anything of lasting impact. A redesign of Sandman and Manhunter. Kirby got drafted and they didn't do much until 1946 when they shifted to Harvey and created the forgettable Stuntman and, you guessed it, another kid gang comic Boy's Ranch. They knew how to milk a theme. S&K did some romance (not the first time it was in comics, but they did create the first on-going romance title to capitalize on a trend Simon saw in magazines and pulps and felt was a big commercial opportunity - he was right, but Kirby was not Matt Baker), crime and other genre work. But I can't think of anything they did that really stands out as seminal. Fighting American was a confused creation that started our serious and became a parody, apparently inspired because Atlas was doing CA (and other Timely heroes) without them. Without Simon, my favorite Kirby of the 50s was Sky Masters but that had the benefit of Wally Wood's involvement. It was a powerful art combination and the scripting by and Dave Wood was also top-notch (they did Challengers with Kirby at DC). After that, Kirby worked on Atlas monster books, which I agree are generally pretty boring (unlike the earlier pre-Kirby and Ditko Atlas books). Kirby's best days were clearly ahead of him starting with 1961. Do you really disagree and think his GA and 50s works puts him head and shoulders above others? I don't. I think Kirby's 1930s-1950s works adds a polish to the reputation he rightly earned working at Marvel in the 60s, but it is a pale shadow of his 1960s work. Kirby is part of a pack in the GA and 50s. In the early to mid-60s, he's the top of the heap. It's easy to look too fondly at his GA work if you are smitten with his 60s work, but that doesn't help your case. I can think of many creators I'd rate above Kirby in the GA (not Stan Lee). For example, to pick a strong parallel, I'd put Bill Everett above Kirby in the GA for his work and creations at Centaur, Timely, Atlas and other publishers and consistently high quality work on genre comics in the 50s. His art style was always appealing, but got better and better as his career progressed, as Kirby's did, but unlike Kirby, Everett peaked in the 50s reaching heights that few artists achieved. Kirby's art from that time period is a rung or two below Everett in my eyes, especially covers.

He could have changed the titles. Horror titles did continue under the CCA. He effectively did when he created Impact and Incredible Science Fiction. Gaines has been quoted as saying that it was his choice to escape the format and go into magazines. He blames other unnamed publishers for his low magainze sales by claiming they told distributors not to market the books. Apparently, that did not include Mad. When Creepy, Eerie, etc. revived the EC model in magazine format, they sold and Gaines elected not to revive EC. His choice. He had given up. I don't blame him as he was making a lot off of Mad then. But I don't think there is any support for Gaines' conspiracy theory other than his unevidenced assertions about the distributors. Shadroch makes a good point on that. I get that you want to blame the demise of EC on Stan Lee also, but that is many bridges too far.

Your point being? As I admitted above, Feldstein wrote some great stories. But he choked the artists. Krigsten found a way to avoid being strangled.

On this we agree: Atlas did have an assembly line mentality. Pretty much all publishers did - S&K definitely included. That' was the whole point of a shop. What varied was the quality of the assembly line. And Atlas certainly had its highpoints. Read the Archives yourself and you'll find them. Stan Lee was, by his own admission, burned out on comics in the 1950s. No one has ever argued that Stan's 50s output is his creative peak (nor do I think anyone's ever argued that for Kirby or Ditko). Stan felt reinvigorated as a result of the Marvel shift into superheroes. I don't doubt that the new subject matter and the success was a big part of that as was his collaborators. Certainly the Marvel work early to mid-60s work product by Lee, Kirby and Ditko was the peak of their career. Kirby's art in the early 60s is entirely different than the rushed "rubber band" style he used in the GA back when his main selling point was volume. Ditko's Spiderman work puts his prior and later work to shame. What you fail to see is that in an creative endeavor, all of the parts have to work together to achieve greatness. It's the mix that matters. And the early to mid-60s Marvel mix did just that. Your attempt to ascribe that success to just Kirby or just Ditko ignores that just Kirby or just Ditko never achieved those heights alone, certainly not on Challengers or Yellow Claw. There's a reason for that. Ponder it.

The fact the Courts had to strike down censorship laws establishes the legislature, counties and city governments were passing censorship laws. The threats chilled publishers into forming the CCA. Gaines was all over the map on why EC got out of comics. Personally I think he just lost the will to fight so he tried to escape the format which didn’t work.

But what made that story great was Krigstein’s rebellion against the Feldstein style. That story has been cited by many as the greatest ever drawn, including Pulitzer winner Art Spiegelman who wrote his dissertation on it. Miller owes his career to that story as do other artists from the 60s on.

Anyone who has read the Atlas archives can attest that there a lot of great stories in the pre-Kirby and Ditko monster era by great artists like Everett, Krigstein, etc. The blanket write-off of all things not Kirby is, again, the kind of tribalism we see in sports and politics but which has no place in serious comic history.

Yellow Claw and Challengers were not superhero books. Flash was a revival and updating of GA hero. So was FF, both explicitly (Human Torch and shortly Subby - two of the big 3) and derivatively (Mr, Fantastic, Invisible Girl). As I said above, superheros were always part of the 50s mix with strong titles continuing throughout the 50s like Superman (Fawcett was sued out of business it did not fail at superhero’s), with new heroes being tried out and revived, including at Marvel WITHOUT KIRBY for several years. What changed by 1961 was DC and other publishers had reached the point where superhero revivals were an indisputably successful trend. That is what got trend follower Goodman’s attention. Kirby did not have the juice in 1961 to get a new superhero title at Marvel greenlit. Goodman only made safe moves based on trend following. Challengers was not part of the superhero trend. It was more an adventure/sf/monster book. Did ideas from Challengers make their way into FF? Yes. But not the important ones which made Marvels 60s efforts succeed.

First, the most famous EC story, the most influential on artists, the one that is museum worthy is “Master Race” thanks solely to Krigstein. I would rate several Kurtzman stories higher on the scale than “Judgment Day” also. Second, your summation of the history of comic censorship and self- censorship is distorted. The forces of censorship started swirling around comics no later than 1947, BEFORE Entrrtaining Comics as we view it was even up and running, The first publisher self censorship group, the precursor to the CCA, was formed in 1947 by a group that included Gaines and Dell (which pulled out rather than agree to self-censorship in 1948) and others, but not Goodman or DC or MLJ. ACMP stamp on EC upper right corner: it was formed in response to both private activism against comics (articles etc) AND GOVERNMENT ACTION ON THE CITY AND COUNTY LEVEL to ban comics. Later on, after SOTI was published in 1954 and Gaines fell on his face in the US Senate hearings multiple states had censorship laws on the road to adoption. The CCA was then a last ditch effort to stave off govt. censorship. You have the basic facts wrong: you talk like a tribal sports fan arguing a refs call more concerned with your team’s success than the truth. All these people are dead. There are no teams here. We should aim for the truth.

Are you seriously equating Yellow Claw to Showase 4? Unbelievable. Yellow Claw kickstarted nothing relating to superhero’s. Atlas you will recall had already failed at a mid-50s superhero revival, and so had S&K. Contrary to what many think, superhero’s were a constant presence throughout the 50s and new ones were introduced throughout. The import of Showcase 4 is it set in motion a DC revival of mostly old characters (Martian Manhunter was new) which led to the JLA - which prompted Goodman to direct Stan to jump on the trend -which he did with FF. Marvel was late to the revivals but the formula they came up with won the day ultimately. Yellow Claw presaged nothing that went into that formula. Yellow Claw was just a retread of a non-superhero concept that first entered comics in the 1930s.