Four Apparently Naive Panels From The Early Golden Age: Why Don't We Do This More Often? No 2

art: Howard Sherman
words: Gardener Fox
from: "The First Meeting Of The Justice Society Of America", All-Star Comics # 3, Winter 1940

I. Today's super-hero artists so often have a fetish for detail. Whether it's the muscles, real and imagined, which knit together bulbously around the super-human skeleton, or the quite-unconvincingly intricate-and-yet standard-issue New York City street-sets against which our mighty protectors act out their fist-first dramas, detail, whether appropriate or not, is seen as being synonymous with realism, and "realism", whatever that may mean, is lusted after as the ideal. Indeed, the superhero universes, with their line-wide crossovers and micro-managed continuities, have long-since started to function as alternative fictional realities in detail as well as in broad sweep. And the appeal, for the ever-dwindling hardcore audience, is that of a universe which can be fully inhabited by the reader, which can be mentally parachuted into at any geographical as well as narrative point, where the same well-policed fictional state can be experienced as self-consistent and familiar wherever the reader has placed themselves.

But that expectation concerning the detail of an immersive fictional reality was, of course, quite absent from the mind-set of the creators who mostly sweat-shopped their talent away on the first Golden-Age glimmers of what has become the Detective Comics Universe and the Marvel Comics Universe too. And in that foreign country of that particular past, they really do do things differently there, and it's easy to spot those possible futures, those evolutionary branches which quickly withered as time past and the more kinetic vision of the super-heroic reality gathered pace and steamed onwards towards today. For example, consider the still and languid beauty of Howard Sherman's panel above. Though Mr Fox's dialogue has Dr Fate declare "I must hurry! Inza is still in danger!", this isn't the manic and macho proclamation we might expect from Siegal and Shuster's Superman, or Simon and Kirby's Captain America. Oh, Dr Fate is determined, but in keeping with his character at the time, it's the kind of determination which marks out the collection of a child from school as important, or the importance of completing a tax return before the appropriate deadline. His body-language alone tells us that he's on a serious mission, but there's no sign of angst or desperation there. For Dr Fate is rarely shaken in his responsibilities beyond the occasional recognition that this leopard-woman or that celestial tyrant will indeed pose a challenge. Dr Fate's buttocks are never clenched in valiant determination, and if his brow is furrowed with the effort of projecting heavenly fire, we never see it. His helmet is as blank and serene as is his personality.

For in truth, nothing is going on in this panel except that Fate is, through some obviously-undemanding mental effort, rising high into the air. There's nothing thrilling here beyond the simple fact of a levitating man in his beautifully ridiculous costume, a scene which in its' ability to capture the boyish heart was probably already redundant by the late months of 1940. The simple act of pulling on colourful jodhpurs and flying through the sky was no longer of and in itself remarkable at all to comic-book readers. Two years and more before, Superman had hauled terrified criminals up the sides of skyscrapers while below the distant highways of traffic were drawn as if they were so frantic that only a mass of speed lines could convey the sheer overwhelming pace of modern life. The superhero has from its very beginnings existed in a bewildering world of frantic speed and mass and grandeur, though, grandeur apart, Dr Fate here seems to come from a slightly different, though no less enjoyable, tradition.

For Mr Sherman's city is a quite different world to all of that. If comic book artists have always tended to want to show us, to a greater or lesser degree, how each city really does contain a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million stories and more, then Mr Sherman seems to realise that a metropolis which has all those possibilities has too many for us to focus upon. His city is so abstract that it can only be one thing, can only tell us one story: this is the city that Dr Fate flew away from. And because we're not distracted by an intricate and overwhelming host of details, Mr Sherman's city is, upon reflection, a remarkable and even terrifying place. Look at how his skyscrapers project solidly up into the clouds, and how at that fearsome altitude the same winds which push the clouds into the buildings fairly buffet Dr Fate's cloak, if not the mighty frame of the mighty Dr Fate himself. This city is a quite fantastic place, and Dr Fate is without a second thought leaving these magical skyscrapers behind to save his friend, as if Arthur would ride out from Camelot without looking behind at the castles' great walls or thinking twice about his knights, and his wife, and his nation. Nothing else matters to Dr Fate but his friend, and so nothing else is allowed to matter in the panel, even as the world he's leaving behind is simultaneously shown to be thoroughly impressive. (There'd be no great value in him leaving anywhere less impresive, after all.)

And so this Dr Fate is a quite different kind of super-hero. Not simply a less-psychologically detailed one, or a more restrained actor in a less specific environment. This Dr Fate exists at times in a dreamworld where the lack of the clutter of the continuity-minded gives the reader in many ways more room to have a say unconsciously in the narrative. For that is a fairy story magician, and that is a fairy-story castle of a city, and yet, despite or rather because of their simplicity, I can feel an almost psychedelic effect when engaged by that single panel. Whether the design is the result of an artist's deliberate choice, or of a speedy mind and hand working to fulfil a deadline, or even of a compromised hodge-podge created through the inability of an artist's technique to fulfil his intentions, that beautifully-balanced panel forces the reader to engage with it, to make sense of it, far more than would be provoked by many a modern and more cluttered design.

Even the fact that the background's so dark raises questions. And the fan-mind immediately wants to know answers. Is it night-time? What's the city? Who lives there? Does anyone live there? Are its' streets like those of cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoons, empty of people and empty of motion? And why wouldn't there be people there, and what would it be like to parachute in to there and search for company, and help.

Thankfully, the panel won't tell us, and the next shot is of Dr Fate closing in on yet another mountain-top art deco home of yet another magical opponent. How long was his journey from city to mountain top? What did he think and feel as he travelled? What was the physical experience of flying that far like for him?

Well, don't ask me. The questions above are mine, but so is my disinterest in answering them. Answers are nearly always less affecting than questions, after all, though you'd never know it from our beloved comic books, where there's not the slightest inconsistency that hasn't sparked a effort to reconcile it far out of proportion to the original sin. I find the dream-logic of the silent night city facing down the clouds and standing till against the winds far more affecting at this moment than I do the enigmas of continuity.


II. But just one year later, in All-Star Comics # 7, artist Stan Aschmeier (see above) produced a suspiciously, shall we say, familiar portrayal of our mighty Dr Fate, but now we have the city behind him laid out in some greater detail. And that detail grabs at the reader's attention and demands that the good Dr himself recedes in our scrutiny. That mass of dark vertical lines plunging down the panel quite breaks up the balance of Dr Fate's composition, and seems to pin him in a frozen moment rather than allow him to fly out of the panel's right-edge. And this despite a caption printed just before this panel intoning how "Through the sky leaps Dr Fate with the rapidity of the very wind." As far as I can see, there's not much leaping going on there-in, and there's not much rapid-wind speed being generated either. But I can see those four cars so strangely bunched together to the bottom-left, and the two crowded sections of sidewalk which stand in puzzling contrast to the long empty stretch of pavement to the panel's left. And I shouldn't have those components to even notice, because noticing them destroys the magic with questions. This city isn't a city, it's a collection of items great and small associated with a city, just as children's Christmas toys used to often contain a collection of cardboard press-out buildings and people which were supposed to stand for somewhere more exciting than wherever the child happened to be. And poor Dr Fate is obviously trapped in this panel forever, pinned by those lines, diminished by that detail, not so much leaping into space as held there in time forever.

art: C. C. Beck
words: Bill Parker
from: "Whiz Comics Proudly Presents ..... Captain Marvel", Whiz Comics # 2, Winter 1940

I. And above, in this panel from the very first appearance of Captain Marvel, we find the same stillness and the same informing apparent naivety. Because this too is a city of form and not detail, of silhouettes and simple structure, and as a consequence we're again freed from seeing the clutter of a city, and instead we see the city as it is to young Billy Batson, who in his colour is obviously our point-of-view character. Though there is detail, and important detail, in the panel, it's carefully placed so it informs rather than distracts., and so the meaning of the art is always straight-forward: this is a young boy compelled by poverty to work far far into the night in appalling weather. How do we know it's late at night? Well, there's the clock-face declaring it's almost midnight, of course. How do we have our sense that Billy is poor reinforced without our having to think? Well, of course, he's coat-less while the passers-by are wreathed in their overcoats and protected by hats and umbrellas. And how do we know that Billy is cold, and perhaps frightened too? Well, obviously again, because he's standing next to the only source of light and heat, the entrance to the subway, which of course we want to explore, because of its' colour, and because it's hidden, which is such a clever device, given that's where the story will take us. In too many modern stories, the detail is so rich that the reader can't recognise where they need to pay attention to, and so the pleasure of, for example, finding out that they will be going down into that subway is today undercut by the fact that there would metaphorically be a million subways, and a million more alternative destinations.

II. And so, what at first appeared to be as static and unsuper-hero-like a panel as possible, one even in some ways less remarkable in its force than the Dr Fate panel by Mr Sherman above, reveals itself to be a mass of information, to be so cleverly constructed that it quite frankly shames the overwhelming majority of modern work. This is a piece which works because of it's simplicity, the care of it's construction, and because the infinite choices pestering the artist have been ruthlessly pared down to what tells the story and absolutely nothing else.

It's worth considering what this panel would look like today. How many drawings would be needed to convey this information, how much detail would be invested in establishing these points? And how much do many of today's creators think about what they're doing so as to identify the absolute minimum necessary to fulfil the requirements of the story?

art: Bernard Bailey
words: Jerry Seigel
story: "The Spectre: The Incredible Robberies" from "More Fun Comics" # 67

And if simplicity of design and execution is the point, regardless of whether the effect was achieved through design or accident, through skill or incompetence, I leave you, dear reader, with the above panel from a single 10 page Spectre story from 1941. Now, anybody can remove a single panel from a Golden Age story and claim that it represents some lost element of craft. It's an easy and dishonest trick to play. And so, with my hands held high in recognition of playing an easy and dishonest trick, I wonder how the above scene would be played out today? For this single panel of the Spectre's farewell to spirits who've been put to ill-use by the villainous Kathoon would surely be presented as a far more complex and complicated affair today. After all, there's so much opportunity which has gone unmined in ths original scene. ("Perhaps the Spectre might envy his fellow ghosts as they return to the other side of the grave?" is the first question that came to this reader's mind. I wonder how many others there might be before the well runs dry.) There's not even been an explanation in the narrative for why all the dead folks wear Spectre-like green cloaks and cowls, though only the Spectre's dead body is exposed for all the world to see. Everyone else is as covered-over as a monk.

But just as there's much to be said to be said for an artist ruthlessly slashing away at their possible choices until only the elegantly functional ones remain, so too perhaps modern day writers might on occasion say less. Sometimes the questions that are unanswered are far more interesting than the answers themselves, and on occasion a writer might set out to leave a touch more unexplained in their work, even at the risk that a hard-core collector parachuting into that particular corner of that particular superhero universe might have to ask themselves a few more questions before knowing where they are. Because, to take this one example, I know I want to know who the spirits were, and what they thought and felt, and how their enslavement has been to them. I'd love to know what their after-world is like, and what the Spectre thinks about it.

But really, I'm think that I'm glad that I don't know. And perhaps, in this age of "deconstructed" story-telling, where writers are often both less-traditionally precise in their explanations and yet far more wordy in how they have their characters express themselves, we might see a few more panels where the expressible isn't expressed. And where the mystery remains.

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