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Retro that Failed

Comics frequently borrow from themselves, which provided the original inspiration behind the Recycling Bin columns. Sometimes they borrow in the form of simple rehash of simple concepts that may have enjoyed a moment of greatness but became blurrier and less meaningful with each iteration. Sometimes they borrow for the purpose of parody. Sometimes they borrow for lack of inspiration.

And, of course, sometimes comics borrow for the purpose of providing a tribute to a book, talent, or period of comics that owns some peculiar greatness.

At the end of the last century, a number of pieces appeared to explore the Silver Age, through a lens of preferences shaped by having survived the "new comics" experience of the early 1990s. World's Finest, Brave & the Bold, Superboy, the "Silver Age" event, and a number of Archives volumes approached this angle on DC's side; Marvel kept matters more towards anthologization, such as the Essentials volumes (which collect long runs of Silver Age comics, plus some later material), though experiments like Avengers: Domination Factor and X-Men: The Hidden Years explored certain important moments of the comics of about a generation ago.

We couldn't reasonably expect all these tributes to deliver. The Silver Age books attempted, sometimes in a flawed fashion, to reproduce a period style in a manner unable to contain the intrusion of later elements that superceded important period characteristics. Superman versus the Hulk gave a brilliant visual treatment to a meeting between the Hulk of 1963 and the Superman of 1986. Other works attempted to pass of a clearly revisionist approach as a Silver Age period tribute, to generally limited success.

However, two projects from Marvel Comics promised a great deal. Marvel's Greatest Comics meant to feature Erik Larsen and a hand-picked team of talents capable of reproducing a 12-issue series retaining the feel of Jack Kirby's very last Fantastic Four work. X-Men: The Hidden Years promoted itself as a piece aiming to recapture the visual quality of the Roy Thomas / Neal Adams X-Men in an ongoing series. Both books had benefit of talents who could pull off such an ambitious stunt, and this raised hopes.

We hoped for great things, given the talent invested in these projects and the material they sought to explore. Yet what we got resembled less the living, breathing material that appeared on comics pages at the dawn of the seventies and more a mummification of something we can tell has died. Neither work succeeds to the potentials promised by the talent brought to bear to the task; and, in both cases, the work on paper somewhat puts the retro-craze of the turn of the 21st century into disrepute.

The Specimens

X-Men: The Hidden Years and World's Greatest Comics Magazine both seem bent on a pattern of pointless derivation without the spark that drove the originals that provided the model for these books to follow.

Pre-production hyperbole, once again, set up readers for disappointment. Begin with the releases concerning X-Men: The Hidden Years. John Byrne, we heard, would work with Tom Palmer to recreate thematically, visually, chromatically, and on as many levels as ability allowed to recreate the Thomas / Adams X-Men, anthologized for the contemporary reader in the trade paperback X-Men Visionaries: The Neal Adams Collection. Select samples of art, showing a deep, dense color and some elements of composition that did suggest that Byrne got the concept and could deliver. However, the kind of intensity required for an artist's work at his prime and the kind of effort he can sustain in the long term on a monthly title don't always travel together.

In the case of World's Greatest Comics Magazine, we saw in the design less of a burden on any one particular figure. Led by Erik Larsen, who shows us monthly in the pages of Savage Dragon that he understands certain basic elements of what made a Kirby comic work, a team of fellow fans of the style, such as Bruce Timm, Keith Giffen, and Ron Frenz (and a larger number of peers, both on the penciling and inking side) would attempt to add one year to the remarkable Lee - Kirby run of Fantastic Four. Though Kirby, having left Marvel over a truly obnoxious attempt to cut his pay while demanding the same amount of work, ended the period with his departure to DC during the early 1970s, a short period of the title thereafter suggested that other talents could replicate the momentum of the period; therefore, the task of a gang of similarly-minded artists under the direction of Larsen to insert another year of Fantastic Four between the last Kirby issue and the first post-Kirby issue seemed a manageable task. After all, Kesel and Grummett had managed to appropriate some of the elements and enthusiasm in their second run on Superboy. World's Greatest Comics had a larger talent pool to draw on, with good credentials for the task at hand, and we need not, in such a context, have feared the failure of the project through simple burnout of an overworked artist.

The Orion Phenomenon

For some people, delving into Kirby territory produces material with just the right combination of Bang! and Wow! that inspires others to want to try to do it as well. For instance, Walter Simonson has managed to make his series Orion a roller-coaster ride worthy of the source material, and which definitely compares well with the standard set by works like Fantastic Four.

Simonson seems to know some secrets that others forget. He uses the Kirby concepts, but he does not fear to play with them - hence one sees developments like Orion himself mastering the Anti-Life Equation and using it in a misguided attempt to reform the worlds with which he has a history. Nor does Simonson attempt to replicate with any precision Kirby's visual feel, knowing that he needs to make the action leap from the page much more than he needs to produce pages using a four-panel grid.

Simonson fears neither to warp characters to the needs of the story nor to undermine established details of the inherited canon of the Fourth World material, through its various incarnations. A writer who knows the core of a concept - what makes it work and what it has to retain to continue to work - can deal with inherited material as a living and resilient thing, rather than as a calcified, crumbling, brittle structure like dead bones that will come apart if anyone exerts too much effort in trying to bend them.

Compare this to the approach given to X-Men: THY and World's Greatest Comics Magazine. In each case, these books attempt to continue a run aborted by an untimely end; in one case, by the cancellation of the series, in the other by the departure of Kirby from Marvel Comics. We can look at both ends of this story in back issues, with the bookend tales defining a universe that had not changed a great deal between the early and late ends. We can, therefore, deduce that not much of importance could have happened in the interim. And we can therefore interpret the ongoing events accordingly: Despite all the sound and fury, it signifies nothing.

The Kirby Fallacy

One might gauge the success of a concept or series of concepts in that it seems to approximate properties of a perpetual motion machine. In terms of comics, this means that a truly excellent idea contains enough hooks and driving elements that it seems capable almost of generating stories by itself, without a lot of work from talent using the material.

A great period of art can create derivative works by a kind of aesthetic resonance, but this doesn't occur in a vacuum. If it did, one would not see events where a Kirby-related franchise seemed to go terribly astray, as some observers claim Fantastic Four did during DeFalco's tenure as writer, not long before the "Heroes Reborn" experiment tried, and failed, to reinvent Marvel Comics as Image Comics. The Avengers franchise, for that matter, would not have taken a series of peculiar turns by the 1990s that involved it in themes and storylines many fans would prefer to forget.

As with Kirby, so with other revered teams and themes on titles. While we can give due consideration to Neal Adams' argument that a corrupt returns system helped lower reported circulation figures in such a way that X-Men just barely failed to make the cut during his watch - and thus became a reprint magazine for a short period prior to its cancellation - we can note that Marvel did cancel the title.

Kirby, Thomas, and Adams would go on to greater things later on before a later generation would take the spotlight. However, their later achievements would take on different material, different themes, different tones, different ideas. The ultimate exhaustion of what they built, in spite of what they gave to comics, would find itself evidenced in the fact that something like thirty years would pass before superhero comics became bankrupt enough to consider that its go-faster stripes, tick lines, deep color, and gold-plated formats hadn't quite made for a better comics; as the various edifices of flashy but insubstantial material crumbled, it would require some time for the smoke to clear and allow creators to look back and see the mountains on the horizon.

Things Talent Can Borrow

Concepts, settings, and styles can flow from creator to creator without necessarily losing in the translation (though this depends a great deal on the talent involved).

The imperfection of memory can often contribute to the failure of a tribute piece, in that creators begin to forget that more appeared on the page than the idiosyncrasies they choose to exaggerate. For instance, although the Beast, early in his career, did begin to dabble in polysyllables, he seldom or never suffered from the kind of pretentious logorrhea that Byrne has perpetually erupting from his word balloons. Nor does Byrne's beast let up, even in thoughts to himself. A "Hmm....interesting." balloon would suffice for Sherlock Holmes in cartoon form, but, since Byrne remembers the Beast's vocabulary, at every moment we must endure a bombastic outpouring that suggests some weapon that crosses a machine gun with a thesaurus.

You can bring in a dark Tom Palmer line to a work with the right resources. Given your connections and your financial assets, you might bring the talented Mister Palmer himself into a project, much to its benefit. You might solicit coloring like the end of the first X-Men series; perhaps you could even drum up the funds to get Neal Adams himself to attack the task of the neo-EC type coloring he used during that run and portions of the Avengers run described as "The Kree-Skrull War."

This won't make the magic happen without all the pieces there. You could pile matches 300 feet high and still not produce a fire in the absence of oxygen; translated to artistic notions, the inspiration has to appear to give a work the necessary life. And for X-Men: The Hidden Years and World's Greatest Comics Magazine, it simply hasn't shown up, regardless of the talent thrown at the problem. Larsen writes better, more fun material - and material truer to a Kirby inspiration - in Savage Dragon, just as Byrne more truly takes off when presented with projects like World's Finest: Generations.

Things Talent Can't Borrow

We might well inform ourselves by considering Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In this work, a pretentious scientist sought to create a man from spare parts dredged up from the graveyard, and ultimately made something monstrous that, in a type of poetic justice rather rare in the real world, destroyed him. However, for the rest of us, the danger does not exist: Should we rob cemeteries in order to create a kind of biological Erector set, we would possess a foul-smelling pile of worm-riddled parts stinking up the laboratory. No amount of electricity, whether drawn from the lightning or from the wall socket, could make that stinky mess live again.

We have the material of life - at least, some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, potassium, iodine, nitrogen, sulfur, sodium, and iron that had once lived - but we can't make it live, at least not yet, not with current methods. However, in some particulars, the truly talented can come very close; they can approach agonizingly so, just as a prospective Prometheus might make something resembling a human body, convincing in the texture of simulated tissues and underlaying (pseudo-) skeletal and (simulated) muscular components, but ultimately unable to get up off the table and play tennis.

In the same sense, talent can reproduce Kirby covers as tributes all they want; they can appropriate his peculiar feel for anatomy; they can reproduce the squiggly lines; they can replicate the page layouts; they can imitate the explosions; but none of this means they can give the matter life. And, should they fail, they have the carrion sculpture on the laboratory table rather than a viable comics organism.

At some point, someone should tell the zombie-maker to stop wasting his time in his foredoomed attempt to create life. The more talent and resources he has to invest in the hopeless project, the greater the consequence of allowing him to continue in his folly; in this, we can appreciate the tragic side of the near-misses Larsen and Byrne had here, for fans generally assumed if anyone could do what these men presumed to, they could.

In Vivo versus In Vitro

These pieces represent a kind of test-tube version of a comic - an in vitro interpretation that might contain some kind of solution of recognized components of the original piece, but doesn't necessarily quicken or kindle. An undereducated scientist who attempted to grow an embryo to term in a petrie dish might believe that he had included everything necessary to move from fertilized egg to complete animal, but the product itself would betray the absence of key elements necessary for life, particularly the umbilical connection to the living host that provides blood and nutrients.

A retro-themed work that attempts to insert stories between existing bookend tales without actually drawing in new, live material foredooms itself to a kind of lifelessness, a fact which Byrne, in his piece, has recognized (through numerous deviations from the source material) but has failed to overcome. Larsen, for his part, entertains even more severe constraints based on available pieces from other Marvel concepts circa 1970. He can insert cameos of X-Men, Avengers, or the Hulk from the dawn of the seventies; but evidently he dare not introduce grand and sweeping new components, knowing that these, having never appeared in the 30 subsequent years recorded by established continuity, must wither on the vine.

But if you constrain a story to contain only elements that have appeared before somewhere within the history of the book or within the closely-related pieces (for instance, within Silver Age Marvel books), you more or less foreclose the surprising. You walk the same territory again. You move characters like puppets, but the reader can tell that nothing particularly compels him to read the piece, since everything has to go back to the point at which the inserted sequence ends; for instance, readers understand that World's Greatest Comics will not contain plot developments that derail any comics from the point at which post-Kirby Fantastic Four began.

Therefore, what finds its way to the page has a great deal in common with fan fiction, works which allow the writers to use someone else's creations that interest him rather than forcing him to invent components of his own. Perhaps John Byrne or Erik Larsen can do fan fiction better than the amateur or the untrained enthusiast; but the term fits. These books, in the absence of the possibility of anything new or significant happening, simply offer a venue for comics professionals to pursue fan fiction.

Fan Fiction by Professionals

Here, I think, we find precisely what makes these works fail - the same constraints that work against fan fiction, beyond the sometimes-limited resources of talent and inspiration affecting that hobbyists' genre. Fan fiction aims to reproduce or prolong rather than inspire the imagination with new, novel, sweeping concepts. A professional might have a better chance at success within such a creative straightjacket, but he probably will not approach the original, which suffered no such limitations at all.

Where professionals tread on a revered comics territory, they can aim for the style of something - duplicating the technical attributes of some style of comics almost unto the ability to pass the derived material as a counterfeit.

But the attempt to remain true to the source material, in some ways, stifles the processes which make it live. This need to remain within stylistic and conceptual frontier lines means talent must create in a way in which the original figures did not; whereas in Kirby's day on Fantastic Four, one might expect, at any moment, some oddly-dressed and fin-headed goober from the great beyond to burst through the wall, inspiring some adventure that could take any one or combination of the heroes almost anywhere, in World's Greatest Comics Magazine, we know that nothing that happens will interfere with the coming events of trans-100 Fantastic Four comics.

Byrne operated under no such constraints when he contributed his own remarkable run to the Fantastic Four canon, and that material therefore remains vital and readable. But they form the core of the X-Men: The Hidden Years concept, and, though Byrne shows the sense to take occasional artistic liberties with the material (inserting Star Wars and rollerblading gags in a book purportedly set in a period around 1970), nothing here suggests stories of grand scope. Instead, we have what tales we could wedge between the end of the Roy Thomas / Neal Adams X-Men and the beginning of the Claremont / Cockrum X-Men five years later.

With the success of pieces like Avengers 1.5 (and, to a lesser degree, X-Men: Children of the Atom and Superman versus Hulk), we can note that dedicated and inspired talent can capture a moment of the inspiration of a comics franchise in its prime or one of its plateaus. However, economics recognizes something called the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns, which states that one should cease to invest another dollar in an enterprise at the point at which it begins to return less than a dollar for each new dollar invested. This kind of tribute may suffer from a kind of artistic equivalent of this principle: When, despite the enthusiasm invested by talent in a tribute production, the results fail to inspire the reader, one can suspect the piece has passed into diminishing marginal returns. At such a point, investors turn to other things to do with their money; perhaps talent, too, should move on to projects that will return product which better reflects and returns a creator's investment.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 259. Completed 03-JUN-2001.