LA's Skirball Center exhibition explores how comics shaped America

The Los Angeles Daily News wrote about the Skirball Center's current exhibition on comicdom's history as part of the USA as a whole:

A year ago, the Skirball debuted its first comic-themed exhibition in years, “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity,” a celebration of the life and work of Kirby, who helped create such comic book icons, such as Captain America, the X-Men, Black Panther and the Avengers.

Now, with “Inventing America,” the center has widened its gaze to include the story of comic books from the early decades of the 20th century to the present, examining creators such as Kirby, yes, but linking the art and adventures to the story of the United States over the past century.

“We greenlit both of them at the same time, knowing they would build on each other,” says Michele Urton, the Skirball’s museum deputy director and co-curator of “Inventing America” with comics expert Patrick A. Reed.

“The overview, because it’s an American history exhibition, we really wanted to time that to America 250,” she continues. “And for practical reasons, we needed a bit more time to do a larger survey.”

I do wonder if it'll cover stuff leading up to say, 2020, by which time quality long plummeted, and if they'll take an objective look at history? Sad logic suggests they won't.

In many ways, “Inventing America,” which runs through February 2027, tells a parallel story of the rise of youth culture in America.

“Comic books were really that first flowering of youth culture,” Reed says. “The first time that there was an entertainment form targeting kids, not only as the audience but as the direct consumer. Publishers recognized that all of a sudden, they can be selling things for nickels and dimes and targeting the kids directly.

“That’s sort of Ground Zero for everything that follows,” he says. “Today in America, youth culture is the driving force of pop culture. That all emerged following the comic book, the 45 RPM record and Saturday morning cartoons.

On this, one can only wonder if youth culture still holds the same influence it once did, seeing how in the past decade, there was less of it in films and TV. And based on how younger generations have been indoctrinated in schools to be uncreative and unproductive, can anyone be surprised if that's another reason why comics have fared no better than other entertainment forms in providing youth culture with what to enjoy when they're uninterested? If sales today are poor, that tells something, and prices long went up far beyond nickels and dimes.

Many of the early comic book creators we still remember today – Superman’s Joe Shuster and Jerry Seigel, Batman’s Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Captain America’s Jack Kirby and Joe Simon – were the children of European Jews who immigrated to the United States.

“A lot of that’s because the industry was founded in New York City, which was a major center of immigration,” Reed says. “The comics companies that were sort of low-end publishing coming out of pulp and broadsheets were an industry founded largely by immigrants, by Jewish Americans.

“And if you were a young Jewish American in New York City, and you had artistic aspirations as Jack Kirby did, if you wanted to work in the arts, the comic book was there.

“The kids in the Lower East Side [where Kirby was born] weren’t necessarily attending fine art programs or going to art schools,” Reed says. “They weren’t necessarily able to jump straight to commercial illustration. So to work in comic books was a way to express your creativity and also provide for your family.”

And the comic book industry has remained, to varying degrees, a world of art and storytelling with its doors open wide.

“As comic books move from the Marvel-DC model and expand in the 1960s, you get the whole underground movement,” Urton says. “People began self-publishing. They’re coming at it from a different angle.

“I think that because the comic book is a format that continues to change and evolve, and that can be created really inexpensively and self-produced, you continue to see entry into this field for a wider and wider range of folks,” she says. “As Patrick likes to say, anyone with a pencil and a piece of paper can become a comic book artist.”

To Reed, that openness creates an energy and vibrancy in comics that’s not always present in the mainstream creative arts.

That can certainly be what it's like today, when the mainstream have long been taken over by conglomerates who disrespect everything the original comics were built on, and practically threw out anybody who didn't adhere to their PC mindsets, including, but not limited to, conservatives, recalling even a liberal like Larry Hama was blacklisted, and that still seems to be in effect. Even Jews aren't respected, and all they're doing is making clear how ungrateful they are to the very community that worked so hard to develop those comics in the first place. In that context, it's not a place where doors are open wide, and we must consider some of the embarrassments that occurred in the past decade and even more recently. So I wish they wouldn't sugarcoat the present, because that's what they're doing.

I'm sure an exhibit like this has its values, but all this failure to examine everything more objectively is harming the industry in the long run, and it doesn't bode well for creativity or even productivity. And whatever one thinks of independent creations, Marvel/DC cannot continue to remain in the hands of conglomerates who don't respect the creators and their creations.