Excelsior, True Believers

Jonathan Lethem tells the London Review of Books about Marvel comics, focusing on his memories of Jack Kirby's return to the Bullpen in 1976, when the lengednary co-creator of most of Marvel's greatest heroes became "a kind of disastrous genius uncontainable in the form he himself had innovated." To put it another way:

Karl immediately took up a view, one I've now learned was typical of a young 1970s Marvel fan: he said Kirby sucked because he didn't draw the human body right. Karl was embarrassed by the clunkiness, the raw and ragged dynamism, the lack of fingernails or other fine detail. Artists since Kirby had set new standards for anatomical and proportional 'realism': superhero comics weren't supposed to look cartoonish anymore. I, schooled both in the love my father, an expressionist painter, had of exaggeration and fantasy, and in Luke's scholarly and tendentious devotion to his older brother's comics, decided I saw what Karl couldn't.

You be the judge.

Lethem's written about the bond he and Karl shared over comics before, in this 2002 LRB essay coincident with the release of Spider-Man.