ABOVE: With great power comes great imbecility
Because he is somewhat articulate and gives the appearance of thinking before he speaks, it is easy to believe that Mark “The Human” Steyn is only stupid about politics. But, in fact, as with his as-portrayed-by-Arnold-Stang American counterpart James Lileks, the musical theater enthusiast is capable of being stupid about any subject to which he puts his pen, as we see in a recent article he wrote for Macleans (“the National Review of the Frozen North”).
The article concerns legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby, and since politics and superheroes are two of my nerdiest obsessions, naturally I was thrilled when I heard that one of the dumbest political pundits in North America had turned his attention to one of the greatest superhero artists in history. How long would it take for Mark to make a total jackass of himself? One paragraph? Two? As it turns out, he didn’t get any farther than the title:
WHAM! Spider-Man, the Hulk . . .
Astute readers, of course, will be aware that Jack Kirby had nothing to do with Spider-Man. But hey, as I am all too aware, magazine writers do not often have the privilege of writing their own titles and/or headlines. Perhaps this was just an innocent goof on the part of some Maclean’s intern; let’s give Mark the benefit of the doubt and see what he’s got to say.
Let’s go back to the sidewalk, and ask pedestrians if they know Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men…If they’re pretty much anyone under, say, 55 to 60, they’ll say sure. If they’re under 75, maybe the Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer don’t ring any bells, but they’ll have heard of Captain America.
Hmm. I’m not sure what he’s trying to establish here. That people over 60 won’t have heard of Spider-Man? That seems kind of odd, given that people born before 1948 would have been adolescents (in other words, comics’ target demographic at the time) when the character debuted to great popularity. He then seems to claim that only people over 75 will have heard of the Fantastic Four or the Silver Surfer, which seems even odder, because if you were born in 1933 or before, you probably didn’t pay much attention to comics in the mid-’60s. But hey, this is arts criticism, not math! Let’s leave the poor guy alone and let him talk.
Who created — or co-created — all of the above? A fellow by the name of Jack Kirby.
Oh, dear. This is a bit harder to work around. Jack Kirby didn’t create or co-create Spider-Man. That task fell to reclusive genius/right-wing Objectivist crank Steve Ditko. Beyond drawing the cover of his first appearance, Kirby never had anything to do with Spidey, and was never even a regular artist on any of his regular titles. Okay, so, Mark has made a pretty egregious factual error about a subject at the very start of a two-page article about that subject in a national magazine. But surely he won’t make it any worse by yammering on about politics, right? Right!
Stan [Lee] was Marvel’s head writer and presiding genius and, to a couple of generations of readers, Mister Comics. (I met him briefly at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in 2000: yes, he’s a Democrat — why do you think comic-book heroes gave up truth, justice and the American way to sit around on rooftops like Spidey riddled with self-doubt about whether their awesome powers are a blessing or a curse?)
Of course! Stan didn’t make his characters psychologically deep and riddled with anxiety in an attempt to bring more adult, sophisticated writing to a medium that had previously been aimed at children. He didn’t do it because he wanted to make them easier to relate to, more human and resonant. He did it because he’s a dirty filthy stinking liberal! Curiously, no one seems to have tipped Mark that Jack Kirby was also a lifelong Democrat, and much more of a liberal than Stan: Kirby supported unions, was an early champion of civil rights, and was doing a comic that satirized McCarthyism at a time when Marvel was still cranking out tons of books with sinister Commie villains.
Mark goes on to lament how much more money Stan Lee made than Jack Kirby, which has to be the only time in his career he’s stood up for an employee against management. (He also makes it out that Stan is committing some sort of crime by continuing to rake in the bucks — “Jack wasn’t that jolly by the late sixties, and Stan’s still smilin’, still pulling down gazillion-dollar-a-year retainers for ‘consulting’ on this or that” — which is not only suspiciously anti-capitalistic for a movement conservative like Steyn, but also ignores the fact that Stan has the advantage of still being alive. Kirby died 14 years ago, but had he lived, he might just have recouped a lot of the money he felt that Marvel owed him thanks to the groundbreaking efforts of dirty filthy liberal Democrat trial lawyers like Marc Toberoff.) Someone get this guy a copy of Mr. A, quick!
