The earliest print technology of the comic book industry only allowed low- quality reproduction, and that necessitated the same broad lines and basic colors used at the turn of the century for poster art. Higher resolution print transfer was already possible when the first issue of Superman hit the newsstands, but publishers sought to balance the cost of pro-duction with what consumers were willing to pay. Low- quality printing in line with news-papers that featured comic strips ensured that publishers would continue to reach the widest audience possible, at what the audience considered to be a minor cost.26In addition, super-hero comic book publishers were always producing the next installment in a favorite char-acter’s story for a hungry consumer, and, therefore, these installments were produced quickly.
This necessitated the cooperative group of artists who worked on Superman in the style of Joe Shuster and the farming of work out to various independent creators expected to work within the confines of a very limited number of house styles. Despite the criticisms of the
early superhero comic books publishers as purveyors of crude art produced by incompetent artists, the fact is that these artists worked within the style of the strips that was conditioned by the necessity of speed. But to say that illustrators were conditioned to produce material quickly is not the same as saying that their work lacked a distinctive style. Even though the talent of the artists would of course vary, many artists understood the tenets of realism but worked within the style established within the field.27Their iconographic style was not the opposite of realism but their style included things characteristic of comic strips such as car-icature, exaggeration for impact, motion- related transitional effects, the regular use of visual clichés, and the absence of background detail.
Examining the early artwork produced by Joe Shuster in the first stories of Superman, the iconographic image that McCloud describes can easily be seen. With five to seven simple lines creating Superman’s facial features, minimal detail to the background, and primary colors representing all characters, a sense of generality allows the reader to easily identify with the character with whom the reader spends the most time: Clark Kent and Superman.
Although intended to take place in the real world, background details remain undrawn unless they are specifically required by the story itself; there is a flatness and general lack of attention paid to techniques that might create depth. While grounded in a specific time, the art itself seems to work in contrast with this aspect of setting, with generalized characters types and nondescript fashions repeated throughout the first decade of Superman comic books. In Action Comics #4, “Superman Versus Luthor” provides clear depiction of these features in panels 61 through 68 (as Superman answers Luthor’s challenge of his superpow-ers). Before Luthor later became the evil genius Lex Luthor, he had hair, and, therefore, without the benefit of color and Superman’s costume, the two figures would be practically indistinguishable (simply rendered in illustrations that approximate the same midrange spectator distance). However, as rendered with starkly different colors, they are strikingly separated from one another as the antagonist threatens Superman with one danger after another (a grenade, a mortar, and poison gas). The only significant details outside the char-acters themselves that are drawn are those dangers just mentioned and related to the challenge (and Luthor’s plane, against which the triumphant Superman threatens to throw him). A horizon line is provided in only two of the eight panels, and background detail establishing relative size (a tree alongside Luthor’s plane) is only provided in one. Instead, there are more lines devoted to the stylized convention of depicting movement within a static scene: the motion lines of (1) a thrown grenade, (2) an explosion, (3) a fired mortar, (4) dispersing gas, and (5) a flying plane. Although somewhat more oriented to realism than Egyptian painting (which mixes two- dimensional and three- dimensional representations by contorting human figures in impossible ways to reveal all fingers, etc.), this same Superman story uses a tech-nique that is similar in effect. Both Gombrich and McLuhan have indicated that traditional cultures react with great anxiety to not being able to see a part of a figure that, in a realistic depiction, is blocked from view by another part of that same figure. Although slightly mod-ified as sequentially arranged panels in time, “Superman Versus Luthor” provides the means to see Superman from every angle in short order; the five panels ranging from 80 through 84 provide five different perspectives of Superman in quick succession.28When encountered in film, the experience of seeing something from all perspectives is often identified as the experience of hyper- reality, something that seems more real than the experience of the real world. However, this could also be understood as a common phenomenon of traditional culture in which the audience is in the midst of the artistic event, feeling connected rather than separated (as they would if limited by the singular perspective of realism).
Many other examples could be drawn from the first decade of superhero comic books and lead to similar conclusions, whether those examples came from Bob Kane’s Batman, C.C. Beck’s Captain Marvel, or Harry Peter’s Wonder Woman. Out of the three prominent superhero artists just mentioned, Peter might be the most interesting as an artist who had worked for about thirty years, illustrating periodicals with different standards for their images. Despite much work in his past that required three- dimensional perspective and intricate line work, Peter readily adapted to the culture of the superhero comic book industry and produced renderings much more in line with other superhero comic books. Maintaining my focus on Superman, it could be argued that a course could be charted from Joe Shuster (1930s and 1940s) to Wayne Boring (1950s) to Curt Swan (1960s and 1970s) that demon-strates a march toward realism and naturalism in superhero comic books. Each artist is incrementally more detailed in their representations of characters and backgrounds, and more complex colors are used to compliment their work. I would concede this argument to a certain extent, as Boring uses more definitive hatching to indicate the presence of light and dark, and Swan more regularly depicts Superman relative to other elements in a scene.
Nevertheless, the change from Shuster isn’t dramatic, and both artists retain relatively simple drawings of facial features and general outlines of human and architectural forms that are reinforced by a simplistic color palate. What should have been much more significant than this apparent incremental move away from traditionalism would be the introduction of Marvel superheroes in the Silver Age intended to rival well- established superheroes within the DC universe, such as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. When Stan Lee received his first superhero assignment from Martin Goodman, he decided to experiment with the formula that required all superheroes to be ideologically perfect. Many critics involved with superhero scholarship see the Marvel universe created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Jack Kirby to be the end of the heavy and generally flat heroes of the Golden Age. As I will note in chapter 5, this perspective tends to be influenced by the desire of critics to find definitive historical turning points, but I will offer here what I consider to be some of the clearest support for the faulty basis of such historical revisionism; the illustration provided for Lee’s stories by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko continued to work in iconographic terms and avoid strict realism and naturalism.29
Although both Kirby and Ditko would work for years in the comic book industry, before the creation of Marvel superheroes, both would be best remembered for their con-tributions to that superhero universe.30And while Ditko spent his time working within other genres before the 1960s Marvel comics “revolution,” Kirby would have a much more extensive background with superhero comics after working with the Fox Syndicate on various superhero titles. His most famous collaboration during that time would be with Joe Simon, resulting in the 1941 creation of Captain America (a character that captivated most superhero readers during the war years). With the exception of the famous cover of issue #1 (featuring Captain America punching Hitler) with its fairly detailed backgrounds, the interior art of Captain America worked in ways very similar to Joe Shuster’s Superman. However, there are a few things worth mentioning that expand the traditionalism of Kirby’s early work, such as the first page of issue #1, which presents Captain America fully costumed and dis-connected from the story (in a way similar to the formal presentation of royal figures or heroes in a triptych). In addition, Kirby seems to indulge in the use of caricature and stereo-typed images more freely than Shuster to represent villains (who are regularly ugly, disfigured, and primitive).31Beyond the tenets of traditionalism already mentioned in conjunction with ancient art, Kirby also works with the synergy McCloud establishes between word and
image. In the concluding pages of the story, Kirby combines two elements related by virtue of story but not realistic space or proportion, by placing a running Captain America in front of enlarged representations of newspapers sporting headlines about him: another collage- type arrangement. Throughout the story, Kirby uses the direction of movement within a single frame to carry the reader to the next frame and to involve the reader within the action itself (as Captain America steps out of the panel frame); while this technique accentuates the dimensionality to some extent, its overwhelming effect is to involve the reader as a subject connected to the story.
As the Silver Age superheroes of DC comics again became popular, Atlas (later renamed Marvel) joined the fray with the previously mentioned assignment to Lee to create their own version of DC’s Justice League of America. Working with Kirby, Lee developed a super-hero team influenced by other genres in which he had worked such as science fiction and romance. However, being a team that lacked the unity seen with the superheroes of the JLA, the team members still represented types and their famous bickering didn’t depart from precedent set in oral epics like Homer’s Iliad or in comic books like The All Winners Squad.32Likewise, Kirby didn’t change his iconographic style to fit something more in line with literate culture (which Lee’s writing was not) so much as to refine his iconographic style. As Kirby’s characters became more block- like in their facial features, they became harder to distinguish from one another, excepting that they usually possessed wildly different and symbolic accessories (like the weapons of epic characters): the Mole Man’s goggles, the Sub- Mariner’s ears, or Medusa’s hair. To further elaborate on the growing iconographic depiction of characters, two of Kirby’s most famously designed creations appear in Fantastic Four #48, “The Coming of Galactus,” and represent his overall aesthetic approach: the Silver Surfer and Galactus. While the hero, the Silver Surfer, is a sleek silver figure who is devoid of all distinctive characteristics (with no hair, clothes, or weapons excepting his surf-board), the indifferent god and villain, Galactus, is suited in garish and highly detailed armor that hides all potentially distinctive human features. (Speculation could be made on Although he experiments with several different approaches, Jack Kirby’s style becomes increas-ingly simple and iconographic (from Fantastic Four #37, p. 11).
the attempt to create reader identification with certain figures in Lee and Kirby’s tendency to put no masks (or readily removable masks) on the heroes and permanent masks on vil-lains.) While backgrounds do become slightly more elaborate in Kirby’s Marvel comics, there is no subsequent creation of realistic depth; instead, the backgrounds are more deco-rative and strangely abstract, suggesting elaborate pipework or circuitry that does not exist in the “real” world.33Even when Kirby utilized photomontage, as in issue #48, he did so to represent the strange and barely recognizable “testing machines” of the otherworldly Galactus, much more stylized than realistic. However, the dynamism of Kirby’s artwork directs movement of the eye and becomes even more noticeable as an indicator of movement (such as with the opening sequence of issue #48, featuring the Inhumans). On page 2, the first panel reveals the Fantastic Four to be thrown across the room; the second panel focuses on the faces of Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl; and the third panel moves outside to depict the shaking of the Inhumans’ complex. Unlike the movement within the mentioned Superman story, the changes made from panel to panel involve not only changes in perspective on the same subject but also distance from that subject and other subjects as well. This sort of “cinematic” movement develops a sense of this story within an imagined world and involves the reader even more within the expanding scope of the story (as with an oral epic that regularly forsakes a singular perspective to include all relevant details).
In addition to the Fantastic Four, Kirby would co- create other superhero staples of the Marvel universe such as the X- Men, the Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor.34The other artist who provided the foundational ideas for the Marvel universe would be Steve Ditko in his work on Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Ditko drew characters simply, reserved most of his detail work for elements such as the webbing on Spider-Man’s costume, and allowed his elongated style to be more important than the idea that these characters existed in a real world. With an approach similar to Kirby’s, Ditko would nevertheless often provide more detailed and realistic backgrounds, like the mechanical lab equipment seen on pages 15 and 16 of Spi-der-Man #3, but would balance this out with practically blank backgrounds on pages 18 and 19; again, details in the background are motivated by story emphases. In addition to Ditko’s standard artistic elements, he would be noted for introducing abstract characters in Dr. Strange, such as Eternity (a personification of the universe), represented as the outlined figure of a human, filled with an image of outer space (stars, planets, etc.).35On one hand, such an illustration could be understood in modernist terms as surreal or on the other hand, in iconographic terms, as the negative space that either enables or resists identification.
While I do not want to enter this debate at any length, I do bring this up to highlight the fact that identifying art as traditional is not an attempt to oversimplify the work of these artists. While that may be the impression made by a reference to traditional art, that impres-sion is likely the result of a literate culture’s sense that nontraditional art is necessarily more complex and simply better. As in the study of orality and literacy, the study of traditional and nontraditional art should lead to the conclusion that neither is better but that the two are fundamentally different. If anything, I hope that describing superhero comic book art enlarges a discussion about it (with thoughts of how Kirby’s photomontage or Ditko’s so-called “surrealism” might be the result of traditional impulses as much as nontraditional impulses or how other “innovations,” like Jim Steranko’s use of Pop Art and Op Art, might be something other than a step forward). While some may be inclined to ascribe this icono-graphic approach to individual style, I would argue that the use of this iconoicono-graphic style is too uniform in both the Golden and Silver Ages of superhero comic books to suggest that this style is not a community formation. In addition, the idea that people were copying
the style of Shuster and Beck or Kirby and Ditko because it was popular is ultimately irrel-evant, because that style was popular in superhero comic books for a reason. The fact that Kirby and Ditko were recognized as significant artists is not necessarily out of keeping with what would be the social dynamics of an oral culture. While the conventional story may have had a life long before the singer, there would undoubtedly have been favorite singers able to sing stories in ways within tradition and most preferred by the culture.36