1. This is a good tweet in a good thread & I want to expand on this point. Kirby & Kirby both had styles that were curiously at odds with their politics.https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1015417564158050305 …
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4. Kirby the social democrat drew large, muscular world conquering heroes & heroines:pic.twitter.com/iYT6DA6x3B
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5. Ditko the Randian individualist drew characters who were scrawny, wirey, grotesque, over-powered by the world, mystical (Dr. Strange) and animalistic (Spider-Man & his foes)pic.twitter.com/jWxJU7GrDL
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6. As befits his politics, Kirby did create characters who were born in poverty (as he himself was) but they were always robustly healthy proletarians, in the mold socialist realism. Think of Big Barda, who grew up in the ghettos of Apokalypsepic.twitter.com/TFI2KCrq1l
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7. As a Randian, Ditko believed that good people were rational, world-conquerers. Yet his imagination swerved in a different direction, against idealization towards surrealism (Dr. Strange's nightmare world) & frailty/vulnerability (Spider-Man).
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8. I think the disjunction between style & politics in Kirby & Ditko shows that good artists can never be reduced to their programmatic beliefs, that their aesthetic impulses often take them in directions beyond conscious intent.
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9. Of course Jack Kirby's social democracy comes through not so much in his style as in his thematic concern with groups. Kirby, rare among American artists, had little use for individualism. His characters were always defined by group identity.
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10. Kirby grew up in a world of groups: gangs, The Boy's Republic, the army, the team of Simon & Kirby (and its bullpen), his family. Ditko, by contrast, was one of nature's isolates.
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11. Kirby's stories always came back to groups: Captain America was an army man, the Boy Commandos, Challengers of the Unknown, Sky Masters, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Inhumans, New Gods. Often these were stand-ins for ethnicities or classes
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12. Ditko's characters, by contrast, were loners, misfits, oddballs & radically unclubbable: Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, Mr. A, the Creeper, etc Often their masks covered their entire face, a mark of their social isolation.
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13. In 1965, Ditko quit Marvel & wrote a letter to Kirby saying (in effect) "Marvel & Lee are screwing us, you should quit too." Ditko as a bachelor could quit, but Kirby was married with four kids.He couldn't. At least not right away.
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14. In the early 1970s, Kirby did a gentle spoof of Ditko in an allegorical story about an Ayn Rand inspired eccentric who builds his own rocket to the moon, ahead of NASA. http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/effect/2011/11/02/2011someday/ …
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15. As an arch-individualist, Ditko died as he lived, alone. When the police discovered his body earlier this month in his apartment, he had been dead for two days.
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End of conversation
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