Good point. I wonder what local TV was like in New York in 1960? And what advertising would Stan be doing, other than stuff in Goodman's magazines?

I know he wrote the Willie Lumpkin newspaper strip. But that was for a Publishers Syndicate, "a relatively small outfit" and "1960 was the only year the syndicate advertised it to potential buyers"
[source]. While some newspapers ran it, it seemed to say more about Stan's fear that Timely was going bust than about any demand for Stan's talents.


How likely is it that Stan was, shall we say, putting a positive spin on his past? (Such as when he claimed to have won a Herald Tribune writing competition three times?)

As a non DC reader, seeing the Neal Adams Batman art was the huge change. From a distance there's "before Adams" and "after".

As for super-cool, when DC beat Marvel, from a distance that was 1983 (Swamp Thing) to 1986 (Watchmen, Dark Knight).

Like I said, that's just an ignorant distance view, but that's when DC really hit me.

Glad you enjoyed the first arc.

I think you're right overall: most readers would not enjoy this series. And certainly not as an introduction to Kirby. But I see it as the final chapter to the Kirby opus. When seen in that context I think it is magnificent. We already had decades of conventional fights (Captain America), conventional romance (Kirby and Simon invented the romance genre), and discovery (Challengers/FF) that climaxed in the death of the gods (Thor to New Gods). I see Captain Victory as the appendix: "Where Now?" "Quo Vadis?" And in that contextI think the weaknesses become strengths.


I think the Jesus parallel is perfect. On the surface it looks supernaturally convenient, but I think it rewards a closer look. Theology fascinates me, and I have written at great length about the life of Jesus and how I feel Paul changed the message. I think Jesus' death was just like Captain Victory's: his friends never understood him but he was trapped in his role, and this was the only way out. Later Paul interpreted the death as having great cosmic significance, but I don't see that in my reading of Mark (the original gospel). I see it as like Captain Victory, an ever increasing pace, accelerating to a spectacular suicide and then it just ends. Leaving the reader to ponder alone. This is like in Mark, which ends with Jesus dead: the resurrection story was added later, contradicts the tone of he book until then (in my view) and is not in the earliest manuscripts.


Or one that is the only possible result of what came before: a search for meaning.

Here again I think the Jesus parallel is good. After the dramatic, insane death, what does it mean? The pseudo-apostle Paul gave the story a cosmic meaning, and so does Captain Victory. Indeed, Captain Victory's title can be seen as Pauline:


That quote sums up the whole Captain Victory series I think. 

At the end of arc 1, Captain Victory has got his despair out of his system in a final explosion of nihilism. Arc 2 begins with him more relaxed, philosophical, with a hint of humour as he needles Mr Mind, his only intellectual equal. Arc 1 was about the endless cycle of desperate battles. Arc 2 then shows purpose in this by zooming out to the galactic level. We see that these endless battles do have purpose, they are part of the endless voyage of discovery, and the friends can enjoy the journey. The final arc, the brief Musketeers special, shows them now at peace, enjoying their adventures.


As the current threat, yes. The story then builds on them and must move on: Insectons illustrate the never ending threats that are the topic of arc 2. This is why I love Kirby: he moves forward.


I see it differently. Captain Victory only has one real villain, one serious enemy (the Lightning Lady with her Insectons). It then moves on to villains that represent types of all villainy (the Wonder Warriors): Finarkin is the desire for power, Marien is the love of killing, Ursan is the tiny threats we overlook but that are the most dangerous of all, and Pharanex is unknown future threats. They are dispatched relatively quickly because the point is not the fight, but HOW to fight. And that is the end. That is the victory. Villains of the month would begin with the third arc (the Musketeers special), easily dispatched bad guys who only exist as a backdrop to the heroes' friendship. But there is no need to show more than one such villain, as Kirby has made his point.


It's interesting that you highlight the more visible conflicts. I think you're right to highlight their relative absence. Kirby's earlier work (Captain America etc) was all about obvious conflicts, but I think Captain Victory is more about abstract victory over all such conflict. I think CV is Kirby at the end of his career, asking "what does all this fighting mean? Is this all there is?"

The conflicts in CV are more subtle than the conflicts in, say, Captain America. CV has conflicts with well disciplined friends who love him and respect him and all fight on the same side, but differ in approach. Or he has conflicts with enemies who are so powerful that just running in with blazing guns won't work. I think (as I wrote at the start) that this series really only works as a conclusion to the forty year story. There were plenty of conventional battles in other Kirby comics, and they reached their natural climax in Ragnarok/New Gods. Now we are meta. Now we are at the reflective stage, the final victory.


I think that is the series' great strength. Captain Victory is Everyman.

I've thought a lot about this lately. Why didn't Kirby create "friends"? Characters we feel comfortable with? Serial fantasy relies on these friends. People will buy issue after issue just to have a character. Business is built on that. But Kirby does not do friends, Kirby does stories, with a beginning, middle and end. Even his apparently open ended stories (like the Fantastic Four) have a beginning, middle and end under Kirby's run. Other writers are of course free to repeat his themes forever, but that's not what Kirby does. The only time I know of when Kirby he did a never ending story was Captain America: but he is an icon, not a friend. Nobody read Captain America for the personal relationships.

Kirby was perfectly able to write relationships. He and Simon invented the romance genre! But even there we have a story with a beginning, middle and end. Kirby does not do stories where we grow close to the character, and I think that's deliberate. Kirby does not create imaginary friends. Kirby's friends are real people: I think his stories are about you and me. Kirby cared passionately about ordinary people. His did not care about fictional people. His fiction is just a mirror to the real world: Captain Victory has a name, it is your name or my name: he is us. Kirby does not do escapism, he does reality. In his own words:


I think Kirby is like Shakespeare. Hamlet and Othello and Juliet are not other people we can know as friends. They are mirrors to ourselves, to different aspects of our own lives. Just as Captain America is about heroism, and "Young Romance" was about young romance, and "Justice Traps the Guilty" is about justice. And Captain Victory is about final victory over all that troubles us. In my view.

If Stan Lee wrote Shakespeare we would have Juliet worried about acne, and after a hundred and fifty issues (and numerous apparent deaths) she would still be rescued by the male hero. The supervillain would be Tybalt, with his deadlier rapier and ready wit (and Romeo would match his fast talking: the Montague with the Mouth). That is what we want from serial fiction. But that is not what Shakespeare or Kirby are about.

I think Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were doing completely opposite things, and mixing them is what made them so dynamic. Stan Lee was a businessman: he wanted stories that pull people in, His stories were accessible, simple, safe, familiar, friendly. Stan wanted to sell these stories forever, so nothing challenges us, and nothing ends. He succeeded spectacularly well.

But Jack wanted the opposite: he was a storyteller, He told morality tales, he explored hard topics, he produced icons, symbols, representatives of aspects of ourselves. He had something to say, which is why his characters last. He also succeeded spectacularly well. Marvel comics is built on Stan Lee's commercialism and Jack Kirby's literary genius. But Kirby had no interest in milking his characters: he said what he wanted, and moved onto something new. (The exception being Captain America, the series about endless battles).


I agree that Kirby had themes that he developed forever: e.g. we can trace the evolution of godhood from his earliest stories of prehistoric boy Tuk seeking out the ancient island of the gods, to Captain Victory with its vision of an ever expanding universe. But each time he added new ideas that pushed the envelope further. For example, Pharanex and Ursan are new, and the Insectons develop old themes to their logical conclusion (we can see the earliest hints of Insectons in the Fantastic Four, and they are developed further in New Gods).

Finally, I agree that Kirby was writing what he felt like. I don't think he had a conscious plan. But he was so interested in ideas that he could not bare to stand still. He had to always move forwards. That is what gives us such wild ideas as the Goozelbobber and the Fighting Fetus. But I think we can look closer, and ask why Kirby would want to take such risks, instead of sticking to what was safe and worked before. Then I think we seethe unconscious story: his drive to always move forward even if nobody could follow. That is what makes his work so rich and priceless, in my view.


tl;dr I think Captain Victory is a mirror to us. The series is the climax to Kirby's continuous forty year story and only makes sense in that context.

I read the comics first (in Mighty World of Marvel) and always liked the gentle Hulk who just wanted peace, and could never find a friend. This is one of the first Hulk stories I read and this page moved me.


Around that time there was a scene where the Hulk cradles a deer (I think), and this was when he loved Jarella and lost her. That to me was/is the definitive Hulk. I think the TV series captured it perfectly. For me it's the best adaptation of a Marvel comic ever. I wish they had a hundred times bigger budget for special effects, but I can live without that: that's what the comics are for. For me the 1970s Hulk is better than anything in the MCU because it's so believable (though the First captain America movie comes close). These were people you could care about. The first MCU Hulk movies failed I think because the CGI Hulk was not believable at all. The Hulk in the first Avengers movie finally had a personality, but nothing beats the Bixby/Ferigno combo for me.

Does anybody praise Claremont's later work? Everyone says Claremont declined. Is there any chance at all that he is just experimenting? That he is actually more advanced, but most of us prefer his commercial stuff?

Dennis the Menace. The British one. He was an icon, the symbol of all that was wonderful about British comics. But now I just see him as Dennis the Bully. A thoroughly unpleasant character. Maybe he was innocent in those early stories by Davy Law, but now I even wonder about that.