BBC WORLD SERVICE WEEKEND: NEWS, SPORTS, ARTS AND I READ A POEM

Happy New Year! I was a guest on the estimable World Service Weekend programme Sunday (30 December), talking about the usual smorgasbord of news and feature items with the great Julian Worricker as host and the Chinese artist and commentator Aowen Jin. It was a fast-moving and very interesting two hours, as it always seems to be; one of the programmes it is really a pleasure to do.

Being the BBC, the programme is almost impossible to listen to easily on the BBC IPlayer, whose radio section has been re-branded 'BBC Sounds', and programmes broken up into nuggets for the archive. For the moment, you can hear our two hours in three slightly-bigger-than-nuggest slices.

The first may be found here although we guests appear after the 0630 bulletin, 27 minutes into the show. At which point I talk about Steve Ditko, Richard Wilbur, and my trip to the bridge from which John Berryman jumped in St. Paul. We then move on to tariffs, to the age of consent in France, my own choice of story--1968 as a bumper year for 50th anniversaries, and that day's upcoming election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The second is here, and covers the hour between 0700 and 0800. The highlight is probably the story of Syrian refugee Hassan al-Kontar, who lived for months in Kuala Lumpur airport, rather than be deported back to Syria. Strangely enough, it was the feel good story the end of the year show really needed.

I talk a bit about sport at the beginning; Colin Kaepernick and a protest different to 1968's (but I should have mentioned very much in synch with Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Peter Norman in Mexico City in 1968) and much more, including the building of massive cultural centres in Taiwan.

I also get to read my poem 'January Then, February Now', which I discussed in the first segment. I have always enjoyed reading my poems publicly, but I haven't done that very often --the last time was a London Magazine benefit reading ten years ago or so--but this was my first radio broadcast. I've listened back and it sounds good; more importantly, my own evaluation of it makes sense. Many thanks to Julian and to producer Junaid Ahmed for making room for it.

The final half hour, 0800 to 0830, you can link to here.  The major story is the Bangladeshi elections, but sadly no one offered predictions (mine would have been fairly close, both in terms of result and of alleged manipulation of the vote--a topic which would have dragged me back to the American situation, where election fraud is a hugely underreported story, while virtually non-existent voter fraud remains an issue promoted by Republicans and parroted by the major media. I get to switch from sport to a quick analysis of China's growing influence in both 21st and 19th century terms. I was pleased to get that point in.

And finally, there is a piece of humour in church, which allowed me to do my Jesus as standup shtick:
'I'm Jesus, I'm here all the milennium, don't forget to tip your waitress'.

It's a fine show; give it a listen.

STAN LEE: MY OFF THE BALL TRIBUTE

Tuesday morning I appeared on Off The Ball radio in Ireland, where I often discuss NFL and other American sports, but this time it was to talk with hosts Ger Gilroy and Eoin Sheahan. You can listen (and watch) that conversation here. A lot of it touched on things I wrote last month in my article about the artist Steve Ditko,  "The Amazing Spider Man and the Incredible Ayn Rand" which appeared in the Autum 2018 issue of Jewish Quarterly (sadly no link to the complete article).

There's not a lot really to add, without tracing Stan's history within the comics industry, but the key point was the change in comics which the Marvel revolution brought about. Almost immediately, in one sense, as DC were fairly quick to update Batman and go 'relevant', famously, with Green Arrow, behind the scripting of Dennis O'Neil and artwork of Neal Adams. Stan started a move to more mature work which would accelerate -- often in graphic novel format -- at the point where the comics industry became more diffuse, and at least part of it began aiming at an adult market. Some of which were the now adult and prosperous kids who had read Marvels in the Sixties.

The feud between Stan and Ditko was in one sense the feud between the Sixties and the Fifties, between the traditional comics market and a new one, between teenagers and adolescents. Stan won, obviously.
And in the long run we now have major motion pictures whose sensibilities are very much still those of Lee in the late Sixties, very much still emotionally the same Spider Man and X Men or whatever.

Stan wasn't necessarily the best writer of comics--he had a tendency to flowery kind of amateur dramatic dialogue--O'Neil and Roy Thomas were the two most notable of the writers who began as understudies to Stan, O'Neil moving to Charlton and then to DC when editor Dick Giordano moved from Charlton.
But the tenor of their work was formed by the enthusiasm for story-telling and faith in the medium Stan Lee had. Lee was also a remarkable self (and Marvel) promoter, and being a devoted reader of Marvel in the Sixties was very much like being part of a club, an Our Gang mentality that was a link to that adolescent enjoyment. Plus his heart really was in the right place: that photo above comes from Stan's Soapbox, which appeared in the comics: that one was the famous screed against bigotry which has received a lot of attention now he's died.

I really was 15 when I bought my first comic, and I was right, it was Avengers 28. I was a scholarship student at the local prep school, I had read Crime & Punishment, Look Homeward Angel, No Exit and the like in my English classes (and more at home: that was probably the summer I read The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings in one week). I was playing football, and soon would be starting at defensive end (at 6-2 175) on a team with 19 and 20 year old post-grads. And I was pretty much addicted to comic books. For better or worse, it formed my next six years, probably depressed my grades, definitely made my coaches distrust my toughness, and certainly helped me resist full maturiosity. Thanks Stan.

STEVE DITKO: MY BBC LAST WORD ESSAY

I've done an essay on Steve Ditko, creator of Spider Man, Dr Strange, The Question, and Mr A, for BBC Radio 4's Last Word. You can listen to it here; the introduction comes just before the 17 minute mark. But as is so often the case with Last Word, the programme itself is worth the listen, especially the lead item on Oliver Knussen, about whom I wrote right here last week. I knew of Sam Chisholm from my days working at Sky, and then there are two fascinating obits for people I didn't know, Barbara Harrell-Bond and Anna Sandor de Kenos. It's this mix that helps explain why I love being part of the show. Thanks to producer Neil George.

Ditko called out for more length. Some of what was cut out of my script as recorded was in my Guardian obit of Ditko, which like the Knussen you will find just before this post. I probably should have spent a little more time on his weirdest super-hero, The Creeper. But look at that (very early) Mr A panel, and think that decades later, Ditko was writing far more argument into far more static panels. It was outsider art indeed. And I am writing a deeper dive into Ditko and Ayn Rand, which I will let you know about....

STEVE DITKO: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

I've had the sad pleasure of writing Steve Ditko's obituary for the Guardian; it's online now here and should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, but there is so much else to say about Ditko that I could not get into the word limit, and that would probably be considered too esoteric for the Guardian readership.

Ditko's work in those 50s Atlas/Marvel comics and elsewhere was a great honing ground for his later super-hero work.  See the illustration left; he would have made a fine illustrator for Edgar Allen Poe or HP Lovecraft. The expressiveness of his faces, no matter how stylised, was the key to his success with the early Spider Man, as I wrote, but it was not just Peter Parker's hesitant teen--it was Aunt May's worry and Jonah Jameson's bullying bluster. His villains registered enjoyment of their evil--it's how one as absurd as the Green Goblin could work (see also The Creeper).

Ditko also drew other Marvel heroes: his Bruce Banner emphasizes the Peter Parkerish nature of his wimp personality--this was not Superman combing back his spit curl and putting on a pair of smart-guy glasses. I would have liked to discuss the difference in Spider Man after Ditko left and John Romita took over: Romita's faces are more perfect; his women actually beautiful. His Peter Parker was more of a heroic figure before he becomes Spider Man. Romita, who came to Spidey from Daredevil, was adept enough with action, but something more primal was lost. Of course the books immediately increased in popularity. It reminded me of when the underrated Don Heck took over from Jack Kirby on The Avengers; Heck's work reminded me of John Prentice on Rip Kirby, in the Alex Raymond school: his faces were cleaner, and his action more subdued.

And of course there was nothing like Dr Strange, which quickly became my favourite Marvel. I made the point that youngsters thought Ditko must be tripping when he drew the comic, and nothing was further from the truth. By the way, the Guardian using 'hippy' for 'hippie' is one of their bizarre 'style guide' decisions: the guide appears to have been written by someone who spent the Sixtys (sic) locked in a teletype room trying desperately to save received English from American encroachments. Correcting a neologism? What next, yuppy as the singular of yuppies? 

Charlton Comics ran out of Derby, Connecticut, not far from where I grew up. They were one of the town's big industries in the dying Housatonic Valley (Wham-O, makers of Frisbees and Whiffle Balls, were another, in Shelton) and they were in the comics business mostly to keep their printing presses busy. But they were a great proving ground for talent--the story is that Ditko introduced Dick Giordano to DC, where he eventually became the editor. Some was local talent, like the great Batman artist Jim Aparo, who came from nearby Hartford, and the amazing Joe Gill, who wrote twice as much as Stan lee twice as fast. Charlton was also the place where my college buddy Wayne Howard, who had been an assistant to Wally Wood, worked and became the first artist to get a name credit in the title.

The Question remains one of my favourite comics characters, especially before he went over the top: he predated the Pauline Kael/Dirty Harry 'fascist' controversy. I remember Mr. A from Wood's Witzend, to which I subscribed, and I found it funny in a strange way--thinking perhaps Ditko had gone off the rails. This was before I realised there were actually people who took Ayn Rand seriously, which was just before those people starting trying to control the world.  The Question has appeared in DC's animated Justice League TV series; a movie is frequently rumoured. Dennis O'Neil did a nice job with an update of Ditko's series; I think it's time I wrote a Question novel.

The Jonathan Ross BBC4 documentary is a good one, even if Ross' smugness at not revealing anything Ditko said to him irritated me at the time and still does. You can find it on You Tube here. Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's contributions make it work, but there's also nice stuff from Jerry Robinson and Stan Lee, as well as a couple of later Marvel staffers.

Trying to divide the kudos for Marvel's success is pointless, though we might have wished the financial rewards to fall to Kirby and Ditko as they deserved. John Romita, in the Ross doc, makes the point that Ditko wasn't really interested in money; like a ranch hand he wanted an honest day's pay for his work.

For all that Kirby and Ditko and others may have shouldered the lion's share of the creative burden at Marvel, it was Lee's ability to sense out the market that drove the company forward, that attracted and kept casual fans as well as those entranced by the remarkable work of great artists. Ditko in many ways is the greatest of them, certainly the most mysterious, and most enigmatic. RIP

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE: THE STATE OF THE OSCARS

Avengers Assemble was nominated for only one Oscar, for its visual effects, which would not be unjust for it to win, though frankly most of CGI stuff isn't particularly new or exciting. But if you're a comics fan, you'll recognise something of the detailed drawings Jim Steranko did for the Nick Fury, Agent of Shield comic way back when, full of geometric detail and improbable scale. And, after you think about it, you may realise that although this is by no means a 'great' movie, it is a pretty good bit of writing and directing, and that the so-called adult audience's tastes for what is superior work in films is informed pretty much by the same aesthetic impulse that turns the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby-Steve Ditko world of our Sixties adolescence into mainstream adult entertainment, which then turns middlebrow worthy drama, middle of the road grand scale musicals, or tales of offbeat people having troubled paths to boy gets girl into Oscar contenders. Which is pretty much the same situation as films were in when Marvel became popular in the first place! 

What proves this point, and what is amazing, is exactly how closely the filmmakers have stayed to the original 60s comics characters and storylines. In Avengers Joss Wheddon, of course, was the director and screenwriter (the story credit shared with Zak Penn), and the way he's managed to bring a galactic war involving Norse gods down to a human level is impressive, but it's much the same way Lee and Kirby did nearly 50 years ago. It's something he's meshed with his direction—the screenplay's arc is the moving of the individuals into a group, and the direction basically teases this idea throughout. Wheddon uses his actors well: at one end Mark Ruffalo (worthy of a supporting actor nomination as Bruce Banner/Hulk) dark and depressive and at the other Robert Downey, playing flippant as he seems to do effortlessly well. In between them are the beef- and cheesecake, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth and Scarlet Johannson, the most interesting of the lot, who's given the chance to deepen her character alongside Jeremy Renner. Renner's Hawkeye is potentially the most interesting of the lot, not really in the beefcake bunch, but he never says or denotes enough to turn himself into something more interesting. Perhaps he needed the Hawkeye headgear after all.

The set-up of this movie, which was begun in the individual characters' films the stars made, was presumably something that Penn brought to the table, and you have to admire the marketing nous of Marvel to have conceived of tying those films together in the first place. Samuel Jackson's Nick Fury is the linchpin of all that. Jackson gets a good part, though the fascinating and epically named Colby Smulders, who does smulder away as she says things like 'Yes, sir', works hard to upstage him. The show is nearly stolen completely by Clark Gregg, as Agent Coulston (why do I keep thinking of Charles Colson?), who's playing his usual kind of role but gets it invested with a certain amount of dignity because Wheddon realises he is the stand-in for the audience of geeky kids of all ages.

Tim Hiddleston's Loki is what we expect British actors to bring to villainy in big budget action flicks, while Gwyneth Paltrow appears to be finding her level in Hollywood, here, as Pepper Potts, in a brief role as arm candy to Downey. But the audience, as more or less adult as it must be, doesn't care about any of that. They're waiting for the moment when Capt America tells Bruce Banner, just turned into the Hulk, 'Hulk, smash', and the Big Green Machine smiles. Gamma radiation has never promised so much. The aesthetes out there will scoff, but Avengers Assemble offers more coherence, slightly more depth of relationships, and more humour than most of the Oscar nominees out there. Plus the near destruction of earth. But that says more about them, and Oscar's tastes, and the state of moviemaking today, than it does about what is basically an enjoyable $200 million comic book, the kind I used to pay 12 cents for, feeling then they were worth every penny.

JERRY ROBINSON: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of the comic-book artist Jerry Robinson, who created The Joker, Robin, Two-Face, and Alfred the Butler for Bob Kane's Batman, is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. The paper has a wonderful layout of Robinson and his Batman art. And I ought to point out my own mistake, as the first Superman movie appeared in 1978, not 1975.

I was fascinated to learn that Robinson had taught Steve Ditko, because you really can see the link between their thick, expressionistic inking, and the way they exaggerate to create realistic characters out of somewhat unrealistic drawings. And also because their political world-views couldn't be more diametrically opposed!

It's also rare to write an obit of someone so universally admired. He helped artists in myriad ways, guys like Siegel and Shuster in particular, in the fight for the rights to Superman, but many others in general, by helping them win the fight to retain copyright to their work (and here Neal Adams stands as the other beacon), syndicate their material, and fight for the human rights of political cartoonists. He also deserves for credit for his early history of comic art, one of the first books to take it seriously and do it well.

I wanted to include this quote from Stan Lee, for whom he worked at Atlas in the 1950s, but cut it for space. In retrospect, I wish I had. 'Jerry Robinson was not only one of the finest artists ever to illustrate comic books, but he was also the head of an editorial syndicate which made cartoons available worldwide, as well as being an inspiration to young artists whom he always found time to help and advise. A genuine talent and a genuine gentleman, he was truly a credit to the arts.'