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Editor's Note: Gil Kane passed away at the end of January 2000 from cancer. Kane's passing leaves a huge hole in the medium that no one from the next three generations of cartoonists can fill.

Old Wine: Gil Kane through the Years

One surviving cartoonist (as of 1999) has enjoyed a career that spans all but five years of the cumulative history of superhero comics. Born sixteen years after Will Eisner, nine years after Jack Kirby, and twelve years before the first Superman story saw print, Gil Kane has worked in every significant period of comics history.

In a sense, one traces the history of the comics medium itself in tracing this man's career, although it took some twenty years of working, on and off, in the industry, both for minor and major players, before comics bigwigs and fans alike recognized the specialness of the man and his work.

Born Eli Katz in Latvia in 1926, Gil Kane came to America in 1929, and, like many other boys of his generation, developed a fascination for the newborn superhero comic. Like much of the talent that defined the high points of the Silver Age, Kane would come from the world of readers to become a legendary artist and sometime creator. However, one would have to work to determine at one point Kane crossed the line from struggling beginner to Revered Name. Recognition came to Kane later in life, and perhaps this deferred celebrity helped mold him into a perfectionist who never stopped honing his art and never settled for uninspired mediocrity.

A Complicated Resume

A modern comics resume might include a noted success revitalizing a single superhero title. At one time, the body of comics fans knew Frank Miller as the man who had revitalized Daredevil; at another time, the industry knew John Byrne strictly in reference to his work on The Uncanny X-Men. The celebrity system, once in place, did little for the long-term artist who did not hit it big early in his career; and in Kane's early years, this celebrity system did not yet exist. The life of an unrecognized cartoonist promised, back then, more of the same lack of recognition. Yet Kane's earliest work (meaning his works before Green Lantern and The Atom would bring his name exposure) covered a broader terrain than the formative works of later luminaries.

Kane has, over some fifty-six years, worked on post-production on art (eraser and whiteout chores); on pencilling Scarlet Avenger, Wildcat, and Sandman comics in the Golden Age of comics; on westerns, war comics, "Rex the Wonder Dog," romance comics, science fiction comics during the transitional period of the 1950s; on DC and Marvel's major titles through the sixties, seventies, and eighties; on cartoons for Ruby-Spears Animation during one of his absences from comics.

Kane designed the refurbished Silver Age Atom, in whose pages he would perfect his characteristic style. He created Morbius, the Living Vampire, and Iron Fist, two characters that enjoyed short-lived Marvel titles in the seventies and appeared as supporting characters in a number of intermittent later books. He created and drew the science fiction strip Starhawks for several years.

He has worked for Timely (Marvel), DC, MRJ (Archie), Simon and Kirby's studio, Quality, Image, in a career encompassing all of the periods of superhero comics from a date near their inception (1943) to the present (1999), and may continue with a body of work spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.

Troubled Early Days

Gil Kane describes the first 25 years or so of his career with some degree of self-deprecation, the sort of criticism one might expect from a relentless perfectionist hoping to outrun his shortcomings. His interest in comic art began in his days as a comics reader, unlike many of the earliest talents in the industry, who moved from other types of illustration, including daily comic strips, into the newly-created superhero comic medium.

Gil Kane dropped out of high school and, from there, went directly into various aspects of the production side of the comics business. As late as the 1960s, he might have entertained doubts about the wisdom of this decision, comparing himself unfavorably to models difficult to match. Such models, for Kane, included, over the years, Jack Kirby (of course); Alex Toth; Hal Foster; Roy Crane; Alex Raymond; and Lou Fine. Yet his style, in its maturity, did not seem to reflect derivation from these sources. Kane, for years, confesses that he couldn't "get" how to do the things such craftsmen did, and frustrated both himself and the occasional publisher with his inability to compose and storytell like these expert hands.

Kane entered the industry in his mid-teens, taking a job erasing pencils from inked pages in the Jack Binder shop; he would follow similar work to MLJ, the company that later became Archie Comics.

Kane took a position with DC comics shortly before his eighteenth birthday came and he entered the army in 1944.

While armchair comics historians like to classify the medium into definable periods with names like "the Silver Age" and "the Golden Age" and even "the Bronze Age," implying that the comics within a period demonstrate a remarkable unity, such labels tend to ignore the real changes occurring within specific periods.

For example, when Kane returned to DC from the army, comics had begun to change; a slow decline in interest in superhero titles preceded the anti-smut campaigns of the likes of Dr. W. Wertham, whose Seduction of the Innocents attributed juvenile delinquency to the four-color contents of lurid comic magazines. By 1952, Mad comics could note, introducing a parody of Plastic Man, that the costumed freaks of yesteryear seemed to disappear, becoming rarer and rarer with the demise of each title. Poor sales would kill some superhero titles as readers aged and put comics behind them; other titles would die because of lawsuits, such as the case that destroyed Fawcett Comics and delivered their entire stable of Superheroes into DC's hands, where these characters would not see print again for twenty years; other titles went under in the comics-boycotts that affected most severely the horror and true crime comics.

Kane, however, kept working throughout, since comics itself did not ail so badly as specific flavors thereof. The romance comic had come into its own during the postwar period; the true crime comic survived; funny animal comics enjoyed an explosion aided by the sideways translation of talent from animation studios to comic book publishers; and, though not much inclined to work in any of those forms, Kane recognized a taste for work in the western comic. Surviving superhero comics, science fiction comics, and war comics would provide him some work during the lean years between the end of World War II and the beginnings of the Silver Age. Nor did Kane refuse odd projects, such as the "Rex the Wonder Dog" title he drew until its cancellation.

Late Bloomer

Kane's comics career took him through so many varieties of comics that he acquired a feel for those universal elements of strong storytelling. The diversity of his assignments during his struggling years gave him a broader view of the medium, whether he cares to acknowledge any such vision. His career offers some insight onto the failings of modern comics, with their gimmickry and hyperspecialization. Kane did not cut his eyeteeth under the Silver Age celebrity system and the more lurid cult of "comics creator" nonsense that would corrupt the medium by the 1980s. Unlike the one trick ponies that come quickly, then peak and crash, Kane has worked in too many styles to find himself trapped in the cul-de-sac of overspecialization now afflicting the abandoned heroes of the "new comics."

Some observers credit Kane's run on The Atom with endowing his style with those features that would typify the artistic plateau he reached and from whence his reputation derives. Others believe Kane's work for Marvel in the 1970s brought him the recognition that had taken since the 1940s to achieve. The work itself might have to testify precisely when Kane left the ranks of "good" artists and stumbled into the terrain of the "truly great." However, whenever such fame came, it built on the effort he put into self-improvement in the 1960s. Kane describes his early career as insignificant, and gives himself little credit prior to the days in the 1960s when he resolved to better himself, practicing technique every day, gaining an understanding of composition couched in arcane terminology like "deep space," "deep seeing," "white space," and "negative space." Somewhere in this process he learned how to bring a third dimension out of a two-dimensional panel, learning something about both perspective and anatomy that would define his subsequent style and lead him to become an object of emulation by a younger generation of talent.

Oddly, just as Kane seemed to hit his stride with the mature style that evolved during his days doing The Atom, he became dissatisfied. Perhaps, once having recognized the new plateau his work had reached, he felt likely to coast, and sought other things; for whatever reason, Kane soon ceased work on DC's titles and took assignments doing work for Marvel, such as his classic work on The Incredible Hulk.

Yesterday's Cub, Today's Lion

In the seventies, Kane again found himself doing more than the superhero comic. Though the record bears witness to his excellent work on The Amazing Spider-Man, Son of Satan, What If?, and a number of short-term or fill-in assignments on the diverse catalog of Marvel superhero titles, Kane penciled the sword-and-sorcery characters Conan and John Carter of Mars (the latter, according to Kane, involved a near-burial of his work under the dominating inks of Rudy Nebres, who had a rare ability to completely drown the work of pencilers).

Perhaps if Marvel had managed to pin this exceptional man down to a long-term job on one of its major titles, comics history might not record the doldrums that followed the purges and exoduses of the calamitous early seventies. With Marvel's loss of Kirby, the resulting shift of duties that helped to overload and burn out established talents like John Buscema might not have happened.

Yet after the sixties the name Gil Kane never seemed to attach to a single title as it had with the "Gil Kane Atom" or "Gil Kane Green Lantern." With whatever regret a reader might face such inconstant attachment to titles, it nonetheless promises the dedicated collector of Gil Kane material with a truly diverse catalog that renders absurd any claims of Kane representing a one-trick performer.

Voice of a Lost Art?

One theory Kane has mentioned in an interview proposes that, in the blurring of media that technology allows, comics may represent an anachronistic format for stories relatable through other visual media, such as the movies.

One must muster considerable optimism or resort to denial to see otherwise; for, although superhero works can bring in money in various media, including movies, television, cartoons, and toys, the original comics medium itself seems doomed to a withering death of dwindling sales and razor-thin profit margins. While public tastes change, the industry consensus has changed more; the printing technology allows works that routinely demand more of pencilers, inkers, and colorists in a market that does not pay more adjusted dollars for high-detail work than it paid twenty years previously for less precise pages.

Can we so clearly write off comics as anachronistic, though? Granted, the improved printing allowed by technology and demanded by markets could make the shortcomings of mediocre talent become obvious. This, however, does not argue for the need to move on from comics. It may simply imply a future with no room for mediocre tenured talent. If so, this would still except Kane, who has defied tenure and transcended the self-presumed mediocrity of his early career.

Changes in the market may soon permanently retire the conventional monthly comic book. This need not kill the genre entire, however. Channels such as trade paperbacks and the Internet offer (admittedly narrow) opportunities to expose comics material. Some talent has migrated to web-based distribution augmented by conventional media (for instance, Don Simpson now moves his work partially by means of his commercial web site Fiasco Comics.

Also, the medium comics (as opposed to the sub-specialty of "superhero comics") enjoys more success in Europe in some ways than America, as testified to by the expatriation of such domestic talent as Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb, who now form part of a growing community of artists who live and work in France.

Fantasy and Fisticuffs

Perhaps, in the end, we should leave Kane's work to speak for itself. This specimen depicts some incident in an early Green Lantern story where the Silver Age's Green Lantern, for whatever reason, decided to forego the giant hands and mallets and other cartoonish constructs made available by his power ring. This sample provides a rare moment of basic low-technology going to town on some generic comics hoodlum of the sixties.

If, in those days, Marvel had cornered the market on vibrancy of action, the occasional independent producer still understood enough about the art to offer an alternative to such a monopoly. Kane's work here demonstrates an energy lacking from his peers in other titles; Murphy Anderson, Curt Swan, Carmine Infantino, Ross Andru, and lesser names doing DC art all, between them, failed to match this grade of four-color mayhem, regardless of their recognizeable ability as artists and newsprint cinematographers.

For Marvel, Kirby and his proteges could, following a formula, impose life upon a prolongued series of fist fights interspersed with the occasional piece of dialog. However, Kane had ceased using Kirby as a model back in the days men like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini seemed ready to rule the world. Kane's dynamism does not owe, in a recognizeable form, to the sixties Kirby style; Gil Kane invented his own means of making action jump from panel to panel and from the page well into the faces of his readers. If we raise a judgmental eyebrow at the cheerful sadism inherent in a sequence where Green Lantern congratulates himself on his ability to beat the phlegm out of some gun-toting thug, we must recall that these days represented the high point of good faith in the man of action: the superhero of this period could smile and wisecrack while breaking ribs and teeth precisely because he had faith in his ability to improve the world through such efforts.