Whenever somebody tries to sing, say, a Whitney Houston song on American Idol, the judges wag their fingers and gripe. “You’re not Whitney — you shouldn’t try to be.” They’ve got a point. It’s probably always safest for the young artist to avoid direct comparison with an established master stylist: even if you do a passing job, or, for that matter, an outstanding job, nobody’s going to give you any real credit for it, because everybody will be thinking about how much better it was in its original form. In some cases, of course, the original wasn’t all that great, really, but we think we remember it was — and the brilliant version we’ve got stuck in our heads is enough to spoil our enjoyment of any new version.

Jack Kirby, the artist who, among other things, worked with Stan Lee to create many of the popular characters in the so-called “Marvel Universe,” including The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The Incredible Hulk, is widely considered to be the premier visual stylist in the history of the superhero genre. Ask any illustrator working in “mainstream” comics today about his or her influences, and you’re way more likely than not to hear his name. Most of these artists limit their debt to Kirby to his layouts, though, or his action sequences and foreshortened poses, or the way he drew energy crackles, or, most importantly of all, the dynamic way he moved a story along, panel by crazy panel. Very few, if any, imitate the outward characteristics of his style, his uglier mannerisms. Kirby was never a “realistic” artist, not really, but especially toward the end of his career, he moved further and further from any attempts at naturalism, and evolved his own visual language for representing the world — a bizarre, baroque world that didn’t resemble our own very much at all, and which wasn’t especially or particularly pretty. For example: in Kirby’s world, people’s fingers are square, even box-like, broken by hard lines, thick, stiff-looking, flat, as though they’re made of bricks and mortar.

Tom Scioli, the artist of GØDLAND, goes all the way in his imitation of Kirby — down to the kinds of details that might be considered, well, weaknesses in the Kirby style (or, at the very least, personal flourishes that are best left alone by those artists who follow). Like the hands. Scioli isn’t just influenced by Kirby, he is trying to look as much like Kirby as possible. This is the first thing you notice about GØDLAND, and it is the thing that sticks with you and colors your entire reading of the book, no matter how hard you may try to put it out of your head. Here’s a sample page. Note the bizarre, only-believable-in-Kirby-world hands, especially in panel two:

I am not saying that this is a bad thing. It’s actually kind of cool. And very brave. Scioli can’t imagine that his work will avoid comparison with Kirby’s, and he surely can’t imagine that anybody will declare him Kirby’s superior (even if he were superior to Kirby, which he isn’t, the combined forces of Kirby’s historical importance and our own fannish nostalgia would make Scioli’s superiority invisible to us). If we’re tempted to say that his work suffers in comparison to actual, you know, Kirby pages (and we are so tempted), we have to remind ourselves that almost every contemporary comics artist’s work would suffer in comparison to the master of the superhero idiom. We don’t bring up that comparison most of the time, when looking at most artist’s work, because they aren’t quite so brazen in their efforts to mine the style of the master. And that’s what I believe he’s doing: mining. He’s not “ripping off” or “swiping” so much as imitating in order to understand. The art, to this reviewer, anyway, feels too honest to be cynically motivated. Whether or not Scioli’s mining of the Kirby idiom pays off will depend on his progress in the future. It’s not something that can be known now, based solely on the volume currently under review. If he manages to internalize the Kirby style to the point where he actually evolves past it — going through imitation into a unique style of his own, the way that Bill Sienkiewicz famously digested and refined and eventually outdid the Neal Adams style when he was younger — then he may become a master in his own right. For now, he is only an echo, albeit a sincere and interesting echo, of Kirby himself.

Like the artwork, the story is also an import directly from Kirby world. This turns out to be less problematic. For one thing, Kirby just wasn’t as good a writer as he was an artist, so it’s much easier for a writer to come along, take the best of what Kirby had, and yet still be better. Everybody knows that Kirby was great on the big concepts — creating a fantastical world and populating it with fantastical superheroes — but he fell down on the final, finishing stages: his dialogue was almost always hokey and wooden; his narrative captions were melodramatic; his characters, too often, two-dimensional (in the non-visual sense, that is). It’s no coincidence that the most famous Kirby creations were the products of collaboration with a slicker, less revolutionary soul (even before he met Stan Lee, Joe Simon filled the role of finisher/polisher/packager for Kirby’s concepts, like The Newsboy Legion and Captain America). Joe Casey, the writer of GØDLAND, demonstrates strength after strength specifically where Kirby showed weakness as a writer. Many of the most memorable parts of this book are made memorable by snappy dialogue, for example. That’s not something anybody would ever say about a Kirby solo effort. At the same time, Casey manages to reproduce the psychedelic, world-building glee that marks Kirby’s brand of action-adventure. Casey is further along in his career than his artist, Tom Scioli — he’s already had the TCJ interview treatment, for example, which is a rarity for a “mainstream” comics creator these days, especially one who isn’t a bona-fide writer/artist — and he’s easily a much better writer than Kirby even on Kirby’s best day and Casey’s worst. There’s no question that, by revisiting Kirby tropes, he is improving upon them (which is what I expect and hope that Scioli will do someday, visually).
That’s not to say that the story doesn’t have its problems.

Here’s the thing: if the intent was to produce a fun throwback to Kirby’s late career — the New Gods/Kamandi/Eternals/Detroyer Duck era — while putting a little bit of a contemporary spin on the “Kirby genre,” then the book is an unqualified success, in large part because of Casey’s cleverness as a writer and Scioli’s sincerity as an imitator/reinventor of the Kirby style. It is for this reason that I plan to read all the GØDLAND trades as they come out, personally. But I’m certain that that is not the intent — that Casey and Scioli mean to do more. Here’s a podcast interview from Wordballoon.com, where Casey mentions that GØDLAND is supposed to be more than a nostalgia kick, specifically pointing to the relationships between the protagonist, Adam Archer, and his sisters, as an example of the complexity and contemporary nature of the work. Yeeks. If anything, the relationships between Adam and his sisters remind me of the weak, childish characterizations you might see in any typical Silver Age comic book — there’s one sequence, between Adam and his sister Neela, for example, that reminds me of the poorly-done “feminist” version of Lois Lane from the late 1960’s/early 1970’s (if you’re not familiar with those books: the only difference between the feminist Lois and the pre-feminist Lois was that pre-feminist Lois was always grateful when Superman rescued her; feminist Lois was always pissed off by the rescue; neither of them, though, was able to survive on her own, without rescue of some sort or another). When I was reading it, I thought: “Fun! He’s playing with that old campy helpless-but-bitchy pseudo-feminist stuff.” But, well, in light of his statements about the book, and about his goals — it seems that, maybe, um, he wasn’t. If the real intent is to step beyond pastiche into something that stands on its own, outside of its references to old comics (Kirby or otherwise), and can be taken seriously as a character study, or even as a meaningful action-adventure, then Casey and Scioli have a long way to go.

They have plenty of time to get there. That’s the good news — sort of. Like the first volume of Grant Morrison & co.’s Seven Soldiers of Victory, which I reviewed a while back, this book doesn’t contain an entire story. Unlike Seven Soldiers, GØDLAND doesn’t even pretend to want to have an ending. This isn’t a “graphic novel” in any real sense of the term: it’s just a collection of comic book issues. If you’re signing on to GØDLAND as a reader, you’re committing yourself to a never-ending, cliffhanger-driven serial, even if you only read the thing in trade paperback form, as I plan to. The only difference between reading the monthly comic books and the trade collections is that the trades have bigger chunks of story — but they’re no more complete than any individual issue. I’m personally signing on: it’s a lot of fun; I have a great deal of appreciation for the Kirby comics that serve as the primary influences on this work; and I have a sneaking suspicion (or maybe just a “sneaking hope”) that Casey and Scioli have got what it takes to actually surpass the source material and provide us with something the likes of which we’ve never seen before. But I imagine that this might take years, maybe even a decade or two — if the series manages to last that long. Are you up for such a long payoff? If you, like me, have a high tolerance for comic book nostalgia, and a particular fondness for late-era Jack Kirby, you’ve got to get in on GØDLAND. But, honestly, I’m not sure if I could recommend this book (which, ultimately, means recommending the series, because it doesn’t make sense in any context other than the never-ending serial which it serves to kickstart) to the casual reader. I dunno. Maybe.

Title: GØDLAND Volume One: “Hello Cosmic!”
Creators: Joe Casey and Tom Scioli
Publisher: Image Comics
Cover Price: $14.99

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