Poor Mojo's Newswire

Jack Kirby didn’t get to be an intellectual. That’s a label others stick on you. When Jack told Will Eisner, as recorded in Eisner’s book SHOP TALK, of the time in his career when he “began to intellectualise,” you can almost literally hear Eisner’s condescension come off the page. Art Spiegelman, struggling to say anything of import about Kirby in a conversation with Gary Groth, calls his work “dimwitted.” ... Somewhere in the back of Jack Kirby’s severed robotic head, the old Philip K Dick subroutines assert themselves for a moment, and the thing’s misty eyes project a Phildickian alternate world where Jack Kirby became the progenitor of a two-fisted Jewish intellectual line. This altered timewave surfs me to late 2008, where Douglas Rushkoff, having now taken boxing lessons and been blooded in streetfights, beats the shit out of two muggers on a Brooklyn street corner and writes about the experience in his next book LIFE INC., a long and involved consideration of the social contract and the pleasing efficacy of stamping on someone’s balls. On his wall is a picture of Jack Kirby in a fine suit with an expensive and most importantly elegant cigar in his hand, a cigar like a Fifties rocketship.... Can you imagine a Jack Kirby-designed Skylab? Even a Jack Kirby-designed car? Would he see that stories can be told through the design of things? That there is fiction in architecture, and narrative in design? Mark Evanier, assistant, longtime friend and biographer to Jack Kirby: “…(it was) hard to realize that he was a brilliant man and a much deeper thinker than you had to be to draw super-heroes and super-villains punching each other across the page… I increasingly find myself wishing Jack had been granted a venue where he could have done more than Marvel Comics, regardless of what company published him.”

Today the Comicon boards, again like the American West, have been reduced to tumbleweeds and bunker-dwelling psychopaths. Many nerd historians believe the death warrant was signed in 2000 when Marvel.com shut down its terrible forums, releasing upon the Internet uncounted hordes of socially retarded people with pent-up rage and no jobs or friends to interfere with their posting time. Many of them found their way to Comicon, where they began a dedicated campaign to drive away the board's resident comic-book creators. Threads that used to consist of several industry pros casually shooting the breeze with fans turned into fuck you judd your pissing in the eyesokets of Hal Jordan teh one true GL!!! Which is arguably true, but not the stuff of lively debate. Even without the Marvel exodus, however, the Comicon boards would've fallen in the end, because they were a favorite hangout for comic-book creators, and if there's one thing comic-book fans hate, it's comic-book creators. Superhero fans, especially, see their favorite characters as independent entities who exist apart from human interference; the artists and writers are just jerks who try to get between Spider-Man and his fans and mess stuff up. Nowadays, Comicon retains only a small, tenaciously Erik Larsenious population. It's a fave hangout of old-school trolls and embittered refugees from the John Byrne forum. Most of the other regulars are the kind of fans who not only download all their comics off BitTorrent, but will tell the creator and then get enraged when he asks them not to. Don't you know what a favor they're doing for you by ripping off your self-published comic, Erik Larsen? Why aren't you grateful for having fans? Huh? Huh? Asshole.