The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem

of endurance and shame together, a Kabuki of cringing postures in response to a world of systematic bullying. That was a situation I could no more have explained to Luke than to my parents. Karl and I never discussed it either, but we knew it was shared.
    In 1976 Marvel announced, with what seemed to Karl and me great fanfare, the return of Jack Kirby, the “King” of Comics, as an artist-writer—a full “auteur”—on a series of Marvel titles. The announcement wasn’t a question of press conferences, mind you, or advertisements in other media, only sensational reports on the Bullpen Bulletins pages of Marvel Comics themselves, the CNN of our little befogged minds at the time. Kirby was the famed creator or co-creator of a vast collection of classic Marvel characters: the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom, the Inhumans. In a shadowy earlier career (as captives within the Marvel hype machine, Karl and I had bought into a view that nothing really existed before 1962) Kirby was also the creator of Captain America—his career reached into what was for us the prehistory of comics. The notion that he was about to reclaim his territory was rich and disturbing. In fact, what he would turn out to bring to Marvel was a paradoxical combination: clunkily old-fashioned virtues that had been outmoded, if not surpassed, by subsequent Marvel artists, together with a baroque and nearly opaque futuristic sensibility that would leave most readers chilled, largely alienated from what he was trying to do. Later I’d learn that Kirby’s return created rifts in the ranks of the younger Marvel writers and artists, who resented the creative autonomy he’d been granted and found the results laughable. At the time all I knew was that Kirby’s return created a rift between myself and Karl.
    Kirby hadn’t been inactive in the interlude between his classic sixties work for Marvel and his mid-seventies return. He’d been in exile at DC, Marvel’s older, more august and square rival. In the sixties, DC, despite its stewardship of Batman and Superman, had lost much ground to Marvel—due to Kirby and Lee’s great creations, of course. Then, after Kirby’s relationship with Stan Lee had become aggrieved, DC plucked him away, and handed him, for a while, full creative control of an epic series of Kirby-created titles called
The New Gods
. In doing so, they’d gotten more, and other, than they’d bargained for—
The New Gods
comics were massively ambitious, and massively arcane. Though acclaimed by some as masterworks, they never found much traction with the readership. The reason for their commercial failure is pretty specific. The comics were hard to relate to. While Kirby’s most “cosmic” creations at Marvel— Galactus, the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, etc.—were always bound to human-scale stories by their relationships to prosaic earthly characters— that is, for the most part, the homely and squabbling Fantastic Four themselves—at DC he created a pantheon of gods but didn’t bother with the humans. Similarly, at Marvel his all-powerful monster-strongman types—Hulk, Thing, and, in another sense, Thor—all had fragile human identities to protect or mourn. At DC, Kirby seemed to have flown off into his own cosmic realms of superheroes and supervillains without any important human counterparts or identities. The feet of his work never touched the ground. The results were impressive, and quite boring.
    What he unveiled on his return to Marvel was more of the very same, in two new venues:
The Eternals
, which introduced another dualistic pantheon of battling gods, and
2001
, ostensibly based on Kubrick’s film. Each of these series indulged Kirby’s most abstracted work in his most high-flown cosmic register. Each introduced dozens of colorful but remote characters, and each abandoned or distended traditional story-telling to such a degree that the audience—I mean me and Karl—was mostly