Someone's Asking for a Gil Kane Punch

In addition to moving home offices, I've been doing a lot of Gil-Kane-punching-related research over the past couple of weeks. Much of this research has involved reading through most of Gil Kane's fantastic (though surprisingly punchless) early 80s run on Action Comics with Marv Wolfman.

While researching these comics, I've been struck by the reactions to Kane's Superman art that ran in the Action Comics letter pages. Although there is a lot of praise for Kane from right-thinking readers (including some readers claiming his Superman is the best ever--suck on that, Curt Swan), there was also a strong and vociferous negative reaction that ran in the letter pages for several issues. I want to spend some time here focusing on these many wrongheaded and misguided comments that are clearly on the wrong side of history and deserving to be on the receiving end of their own Gil Kane punches(names and addresses have been removed to protect the idiotic).

First up is this missive, from Action 545 (July 1983), by a Mexican reader who claims that there is no future in Gil Kane:



Clearly, the writer, with his claims of "sacrilege," was a member of the little-known Curt Swan cult that emerged in southern Mexico in the late 70s. However, this cult was quickly wiped out by Zapatistas soon after this letter was published, so he probably never got to see if his precious Curt Swan ever returned to the title.

Others took a safer, though no less wrongheaded, route by claiming that perhaps Kane wasn't suited for Superman, as we see in this letter from Keith Pollard's one fan:


A similar complaint was that Kane's art really required an inker, which is patently ridiculous. Through most of his career, Kane's art was plagued by inkers whose style overwhelmed the pencils. Most of the suggestions on inkers would simply recreate this travesty:

Other writers suggest such inkers as Frank McLaughlin and Dave Hunt, neither of whom were suitable for Kane's pencils.

This debate raged on in the letter pages for many more months, if you can believe it, with the rhetoric becoming increasingly more vitriolic, which may come as a shock to comics fans who are used to the balanced, reasoned discourse that is now commonplace among such fans in these more enlightened times. In fact, these two letters in particular should earn their writers special Gil Kane punches of their own.

This guy is especially douchey, suggesting that one of the greatest artists in comics history--one of the architects of the Silver Age who apprenticed with the likes of Jack Kirby and Bernard Baily--needs "art lessons":

I would remind everyone that the Superman Special to which he refers contains this panel and this one.

However, this following letter makes me want to track down the writer at the address he provided (though it is 26 years old) and re-enact a Gil Kane punch on him, using a plate glass window in lieu of a traditional comic panel:

Really, how far on the wrong side of comics history can you get when you claim that comparing an artist to Kirby, Ditko, and Janson is not a compliment?

The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 9: Stop Hitting Yourself!

Sorry I missed last week, but recovering from HeroesCon and finishing up summer teaching made posting difficult. To make up, here's an extra-special splash page from Action Comics 541:

The Complete Works of Dr. K, Part 3

This one... well, this one is a bit embarrassing.

I'm not embarrassed because I wrote a letter to Vigilante, a pretty bad series that spun out of The New Teen Titans and is only really notable for two issues that Alan Moore wrote and a pretty good costume designed by George Perez.

Instead, I'm embarrassed about the opinions I expressed in this letter--opinions that I can't believe I ever really held. In fact, I try to make myself feel better about this letter by convincing myself that I was taking on a persona here. I may have also just been carried away with the letter, trying to make it more dramatic while not really thinking through the ideas I was expressing. Anyway, I was 16 at the time, and this probably wasn't the most embarrassing thing I did that year.

The letter was written not as a response to anything that happened in the series, but to a recent news story about a "Subway Vigilante" who would later be identified as Bernard Goetz (the Wikipedia entry seems to be pretty extensive on the case). I wrote the letter the day after a Nightline report on the story, and my letter gives the details of that report, including some information that would later turn out to be false, about the four kids (whom I refer to so eloquently as "punks") being armed with sharpened screwdrivers.

(Click to make it even more embarrassing!)

If I ever run for president, this is the kind of thing that would surface in the media, raising questions about my consistency when it comes to issues of gun control and crime. However, on the plus side, I'd probably get the endorsement of the gun lobby.

I think that if I had stuck to the facts of the case, as they were known at the time I wrote the letter, I probably would have been okay, but it is in that second paragraph that my opinions and language get a little overzealous, and that's the part that makes me cringe. (It should be known, however, that "Reasonable Force Is a Joke" is actually the title of a rare Public Enemy b-side.) Associate Editor Barbara Randall, who began handling the letter page for this comic on this issue, claims that "the mail has brought its share of comments on the case," so I should feel proud that my letter got picked as the representative example.

I should also feel proud to share the page with the fantastic, prolific letterhack, "T. M. Maple." How great was T. M. Maple? Well, he does have his own Wikipedia page, where it states that he had more than 3,000 letters published in his 17-year letterhacking career. That beats the crap out of my measly half-dozen or so. There used to be at least two websites devoted to T. M. Maple, but both seem to have disappeared from the net.

Despite the fact that I once again included my home address with the letter, I didn't get a lot of mail from this--mainly catalogs and the like. That's probably for the best, and it may attest to the fact that not many people were reading Vigilante to begin with. (This particular issue does contain some awesome art by Denys Cowan, who is one of the great fight artists in comics.)

This wasn't, by the way, the SCIENCE!-related letter that I promised last time. I realized I was doing these out of sequence, and that one should come next.

The Complete Works of Dr. K, Part 2

A couple of years after writing the letter to JLA, I was inspired to write a letter again, this time to Tales of the Teen Titans, the series that had previously been known as The New Teen Titans before DC launched a new series with that title for the burgeoning direct market. That change had caused me some consternation as a comic reader and a fan of the Titans because, living on a farm in North Dakota, I was a long drive from a comic shop where I could pick up the new Titans series, and I wasn't likely to get to one on a monthly basis. However, in 1985, I had just earned my driver's license (on the second try), so driving 30 miles to Fargo was within the realm of possibilities.

My complaint about the shift in comic sales from newstands to the direct market was not the inspiration for my letter, however. I was instead responding to a two-part story that ran in issues 51 and 52, focusing on the character Jericho and introducing his mother's detective agency, Searchers, Inc.


(Note that I got smart here and withheld my address to avoid the prison correspondence solicitations that the previous letter drew.)

The introduction of Searchers, Inc. had the feeling of a "backdoor pilot," to use the television term that makes me giggle--that is, we were being introduced to a group of characters only to have them spin off into their own series, the way Mork and Mindy spun out of Happy Days. However, Searchers, Inc. never did get their own series, and I don't even recall if the concept returned even in the Titans books. One of the Searchers operatives, Amber, seems little more than a Misty Knight knock-off:


Overall, this is really a nondescript letter where I'm, once again, trying to capture the typical voice of the comics letter page. At the end of the letter, though, I compare the story to a Robert Ludlum novel. At the time, I was voraciously reading Ludlum's spy thrillers, and I may have had a specific novel in mind when I was making this comparison, but I can't remember which, as most of them seem to run together in my memory nowadays (except for the Jason Bourne novels and The Holcroft Covenant, which remain my favorites). I do remember getting the sense, though, in this and other espionage-tinged stories that Marv Wolfman wrote, that they bore a striking resemblance to Ludlum's work, and I may have been implying a deeper connection in this comparison. Even the title of this story, "The Jericho Imbroglio," sounds like a bad Ludlum rip-off.

I also comment on the hints dropped that one of the Titans is Cheshire's baby daddy. In typical Marv Wolfman fashion, where subplots could be drawn out for years like a soap opera, the identity of the baby daddy wouldn't be revealed for a while, but we all know now that it's Speedy.

These issues also reveal how STAR Labs scientists uncovered a winged alien named Azrael under the Alaskan ice. Azrael had already debuted in the baxter Titans book, which was supposed to take place one year after the newsstand series:

(Cover image from The Grand Comics Database.)
My complaints about Azrael in my letter turned out to be completely justified. Azrael was a whiney emo alien, and his story simply petered out in the run-up to Crisis on Infinite Earths. This character was, for me at least, the point at which the series jumped the shark, and I soon quit buying what had once been my favorite series.

The revelation of Azrael, however, did provide this panel, which features a line that I try to work in to my daily conversation:


"I'll stake my doctorate on these tacos being delicious!"
or
"I'll stake my doctorate on the latest Bring It On movie being cheertastic!"

Up next: Dr. K uses SCIENCE!