The Weirdest Sci-Fi Comic Ever Made: Understanding Jack Kirby's 2001: A Space Odyssey by Darius Julian

Author:Darius, Julian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sequart Organization
Published: 2013-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Kirby deconstructs the expectations of the super-hero genre with comedic brutality. From 2001, A Space Odyssey #5 (Apr 1977). Art by Jack Kirby and Mike Royer.

Throughout the 1970s, Kirby had launched offbeat title after offbeat title, both for DC and for Marvel, only to see them cancelled – usually with surprising rapidity. Meanwhile, the titles he co-created with Stan Lee in the 1960s kept right on selling. Kirby’s criticism of how fans regard “the slightest deviation” as “an emotional trauma” certainly reads like a complaint about the inflexibility of the American comics reader (which, incidentally, didn’t end in the 1970s). The word “believer” also recalls how Stan Lee, in his letters columns and editorial captions, routinely called Marvel’s readers “true believers.” Kirby’s doing something remarkably transgressive here – in a comic published by Marvel, no less.

Kirby’s career stretched from the 1940s (the so-called Golden Age of comics) into the 1980s. For the first couple decades of his comics work, comics weren’t so dominated by the super-hero genre. Adventure, crime, detective, and romance stories were sometimes as, or more, popular than super-heroes. While we often look at fanzines and comics conventions as positive developments, since they give readers power and even allow them to participate in comics culture (and played a major role in the study and promotion of comics history), Kirby may be connecting these developments with the codification of comics readers and their expectations. Instead of comics readers being decentralized in local pockets, fanzines and comics conventions helped create a common culture. And with this culture, Kirby’s references to fandom suggest, came a kind of petrification of the super-hero genre – so extreme that “the slightest deviation” leads to “emotional trauma.”

It’s notable that what breaks the illusion for White Zero isn’t the villains, or the explosive threat, or the deathtraps – all of which accord with genre expectations. The only thing that’s “wrong” is that the princess doesn’t fit the unrealistic, gorgeous body type expected of a love interest. Compared to the structure of a super-hero story, the love interest’s body type ought to be the most trivial thing. Perhaps that’s Kirby’s point, underlining how narrow the super-hero reader’s allowance for deviation is. But as we’ve noted, Kirby was known for his relative inability to draw attractive women, so perhaps his choice of “slightest deviation” is a more personal gripe against his readers’ expectations. Should we wish, however, we may also see this as a feminist argument, pointing out how staunchly comics readers seem to expect unrealistic female bodies. In recent years, the internet has revealed just how strongly some fans feel about this issue, and few topics seem to provoke reactionary zeal among super-hero fans as complaints about the depictions of women. In this context, White Zero’s reaction to the princess’s body doesn’t seem exaggerated at all. (Neither, some would say, does his name.)

When White Zero exits through the waiting room, he’s chided by the other costumed customers, which he returns in kind, telling them to “grow up!”

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