On Kirby & Simon's Captain America, Zombie-Killer

In the first issue of 1941's All Winners Comics, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Captain America and Bucky fought to destroy an army of tramps-turned-zombies who were sabotaging the soon-to-be Allied war effort on the orders of Hitler himself! Something of what made that story so radical and entertaining is the topic of this week's post in The Year In Comic series over at Sequart, which I hope you might choose to visit by clicking here.

What follows below was originally part of that week's essay. Eventually it became obvious that I'd actually written two separate posts, one of which discussed the progressive nature of those early Captain American tales in general and one which briefly discussed Simon and Kirby's storytelling in the context of 1941.  The following is the latter piece, which tries to show just a little of how far ahead of their fellow creators Simon and Kirby were in 1941 when it came to creating utterly unputdownable superhero stories.

I wonder if we can ever imagine quite what a rush it must have been for a kid in the late spring of 1941 to be faced with the Timely Comics' anthology title All Winner Comics #1. The shock of the new, or at least the comparatively new, is always well-nigh impossible to convincingly, let alone accurately, evoke. Yet I do find it impossible not to wonder what was it like to come across one of Simon and Kirby's game-changing Captain America tales in the first issue of All Winners, sandwiched as it was in between far more familiar and less radical fare? For though it's not as if several of the comic's other features weren't compelling in their own right, it is that Simon and Kirby's work was considerably more dynamic and innovative than that of any other super-book creators of the time. For another writer or artist to have their work placed either side of one of those barnstorming early Captain American tales was for them to be faced with the inevitability of playing support act and second-fiddle to Joe and Jack's storytelling. For Simon and Kirby had transformed the form and content of the super-hero sub-genre with the arrival of Captain America Comics in December 1940, and they'd shown no signs of intending to slacken off the ambition and vitality of their work as the following year progressed.
 

A typical page from Carl Burgos' luridly titled Human Torch tale, "Carnival Of Fiends"

      
The opening feature in All Winners Comics #1 was Carnival of Fiends – Carnival Of Fiends! -  a Carl Burgos Human Torch & Toro short featuring several nefarious Japanese super-spies operating under the cover of a community of loyal-to-the-Republic Chinese-Americans. It’s predictably slight but exuberant, and that's in spite of its barely perfunctory art and a plot that’s not even that. The page designs often involve little more than one three-row, nine-panel composition after another, with the occasional merging of frames in order to emphasise the drama of the moment. Sometimes a hand or elbow or foot, flaming or not, will poke tentatively rather than energetically beyond a panel's border, and there'll be an infrequent and arbitrarily circular frame thrown in now and then just for the monotony-relieving hell of it all. Improvisation arrives without too much purpose, simplicity marks the storytelling for want of any other option, and yet it's all crammed with movement and incident and loaded up with cliffhangers. Secret codes! Gas attacks! Firework displays! Television screens! Flaming super-heroes! Fifth columnists! Hidden passages! Fiendishly hypnotised super-androids! Crude it undoubtedly is, but then, that's part of why it's so compelling. It crackles with conviction and commitment, like a two-chord garage band nuking a Sunday morning’s peace with endless run-throughs of the same Nuggets knock-offs.

   

         

The pace then plummets with the arrival of The Order Of The Hood, a tale of the Black Marvel produced by writer Stan Lee and artists Al Avision and Al Gabriele. With his unfortunate habit of packing less incident-crammed panels onto each page of his story than Burgos, Lee allows scenes to sprawl across several sides without anything that’s ingenious, energetic or gruesome enough being injected into the mix to charge up the rubes. Sinfully, more than a page is given over to the action-free, ennui-inspiring sight of the Black Marvel being led without struggling to a "Ray Machine", while the dullest of master-villains rambles on about how he intends to be ever more masterful and villainous in the future. Lee tries to inject wisecracks in place of incident and speechifying in place of spectacle, but that just adds stodge to tedium. Even worse than primitive, the art’s relatively polite. Too vaguely competent and sedate to be adult-baitingly perverse, too lacking in invention to be anything other than a great flat, characterless mish-mash of more of the same, Avision and Gabriele's art compliments Lee's adventure-light plot to create tensionless, interest-free panels.

   

        

But what did the reader think and feel who then turned the side and came page-to-face with The Case Of The Hollow Men? Unlike the opening salvos of the preceding Human Torch and Black Marvel tales, Simon and Kirby took the whole of their first page to trail the pop-pulp horrors that were to come. Even today, it’s a splash that doesn’t so much demand the reader’s attention so much as stab fish-hooks in their eyes in order to tug them too and fro across the artwork. Enter the page at the top left and there’s a fanged, cowled ne’er-do-well with his sinister, leering head tilted to direct the audience's gaze towards the four-storey tall zombie.You might think that we'd need no encouragement to notice that undead behemoth pierced through as he is with two longer-than-a-grown-man swords. But Simon and Kirby weren't taking any chances where a square half-inch or two of dead space at the top of the side was concerned. Then, follow the direction of the zuvembie's lurching progress and there’s the pitiful sight of a cowering Bucky Barnes, made all the more vulnerable by his lack of either a mask or any cover to hide behind. But even that’s not nearly even action and jeopardy! For tearing in from the right-hand edge of the page is the Sentinel Of Liberty himself, as yet unnoticed by his opponent, but caught for us just about a nano-second before he tightens his hands around a dead-skinned, over-sized neck. The design hauls the eye backwards and forwards across the page until the art seems dizzy with movement, and yet that's only the top of the page accounted for.

          
Cap's leap leads us to focus next on the monster's almost-parallel right and then left arms beneath him. It's a process which in its turn directs us downwards past the series of protruding sword points and hilts, beyond the flailing washing line and the undead man's own extended right leg, before finally arriving at a scene in which a spattering of doughty but helpless cops are attempting to shot down the already unliving zombie. Here the dead-bum's body serves as a spine upon which a series of eye-directing horizontal design-elements can be hung, carrying us down from one aspect of the conflict to another. Even then, the reader's not allowed to catch their breath, for before the page can be turned, there's hype to be consumed. First, the sight of the patrolman who's being crushed beneath a giant fence-shattering boot carries us away from the page-leaving edge into the text caption. Then, via the detail of a poor tumbling alley-cat, we're pushed towards the title-line at the page's base. Only when we've doubled back on ourselves and arrived at the final star-spangled "A" of the good Captain's name do Simon and Kirby relent and allow us to move onwards and over the page.

Horror of such an explicit kind has often been associated in the shorthand of comics history with the later years of the 40s and the early 50s. Simon and Kirby were producing gruesomely disturbing imagery in 1941, as the above testifies.

         

And that's just one aspect of how far ahead Simon and Kirby were in the day. Simply through the apparently hectic and yet skillfully organised elements of their page-designs, they created a sense of frantic momentum and densely-packed incident which none of their colleagues and competitors could begin to match. (It might be argued that few today could do so either.) Yes, to step back from this first page of The Case Of The Hollow Men is to notice how technically suspect the composition is when considered as a whole. The figure of Bucky seems to be lifted from another source entirely, for example, and the building he's standing upon is an unconvincing confection of a prop. In fact, the more the reader stares, the more the different elements of the composition seem to come from quite separate sources. Yet Simon and Kirby's skill lay how their work convinced the audience to read and enjoy each parts of the work in sequence. As such, of course, the reader isn't concerned with, for instance, whether the perspective of it all is convincing. Who could possibly care about the degree to which the symbolic and the pseudo-realistic aspects of the page have been convincingly combined, when there's that impossibly massive sword-cushion of a zombie lurching in the direction of Captain America's sidekick, and when that poor cat might be about to be crushed to death?

      
Ensuring that the reader's utterly captured by the events before them while also guaranteeing that they feel irresistibly compelled to read on was all that mattered here. In many ways, it's all that matters now. And regardless of how impossible it might be to re-capture what the audience of children who consumed the likes of All Winners Comics #1 in 1941 actually experienced, it's close to impossible to believe that they didn't practically rip this page from the comic in order to discover what was going to happen next.

"The Year In Comics" features a discussion of other aspects of Simon and Kirby's zombie-fighting Captain America tale here.

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