Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  A 2014 photo of the remains of Alamut Castle in the Alborz (Elburz) Mountains, northern Iran. Photo credit: iStockphoto/ivanadb.

  The ruins of Alamut Castle. Photo credit: iStockphoto/uskarp.

  The novel is a fictional retelling of the founding of an Islamic order of assassins; it’s also a commentary on fascism and totalitarianism, and the techniques that demagogues use to control their followers and manipulate the public. At the time of its writing in the 1930s, Europe was on the verge of crisis. Croatian and Bulgarian nationalists had just assassinated Yugoslavia’s King Alexander I—perhaps at the behest of the fascist government in Italy. The ugly fervor of nationalism was taking hold across the continent. World War II was just a few years away.

  Much like the magical realist authors of Central and South America, Bartol evaded censorship by cloaking his criticism in a fantastical tale, creating a world that on the surface might have seemed much different from his own, but when you read between the lines, there were plenty of similarities. Bartol even dedicated the novel to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, a delicious bit of irony and politely cast shade.

  Bartol did his research. In fact, he spent a decade learning about the history underpinning the legends of the assassins, and studying the religious and cultural context.

  At the center of Alamut is real-life Ismaili leader Hassan ibn Sabbah, who built a hilltop fortress called Alamut and created an elite squad of suicide attackers called the Assassins. Sabbah convinced his young warriors that paradise awaited them if they sacrificed themselves. He called his fighters “his living daggers.” He rewarded them with drugs, booze, and beautiful women.

  This historical reality was embellished generously by the Italian explorer Marco Polo, who reported the sect’s existence to his fans back home. He may have exaggerated the full extent of the debauchery—there is some scholarly debate about whether his reports of drug use were totally accurate—but the sect’s existence is confirmed, as well as their strategic political and religious assassinations. The ruins of their castle fortress, perched atop a massive mountain of rock, can still be seen today.

  Bartol’s Alamut is mostly told from the perspective of a young warrior named Ibn Tahir and a slave girl named Halima. Tahir assassinates a handful of Sabbah’s rivals, leaders of competing sects. But he begins to turn against Alamut. Eventually he confronts Sabbah, who invokes the creed, “Nothing is an absolute reality, all is permitted.”

  In Assassin’s Creed, those lines become “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” a manifesto that links the game’s many iterations and installments. (William S. Burroughs also appreciated the line, which he used in Naked Lunch.) And the storyline of the first Assassin’s Creed game also contains some parallels with Bartol’s novel and the historic assassins, adding a dose of alien technology and other weirdness.

  The novel found its fans here and there throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the war-torn Balkans of the nineties, where its themes of totalitarianism and zealotry struck home. Still, it was mostly forgotten until 2001, when Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 terror attacks sparked the American public’s interest in the motives of violent extremists. The real-life story of Alamut and the hashshashin (or assassins) seemed as if it might be relevant. Perhaps this 1938 novel that fictionalized eleventh-century Persia as a commentary on fascist Europe could offer some insight into the minds of twenty-first-century terrorists from Saudi Arabia?

  Alamut enjoyed a brief renaissance and was translated into many more languages, and was published for the first time in English in 2004. A few years later, the first Assassin’s Creed (2007) would be released to wide acclaim.

  Judging from geopolitics, Alamut’s insights could neither solve the problem of terrorism, nor prevent the rise of fascist ideologues of any stripe. But its rich setting and compelling story may have helped to inspire a game with a powerful central narrative that continues to fuel a massive and successful franchise.

  Jack Kirby, the King of Comics

  Just about every pop culture fan is familiar with Stan Lee (1922–2018), whose name is practically synonymous with Marvel Studios and the midcentury’s comic book revolution. And while Stan Lee—who famously admitted he’d “take any credit that wasn’t nailed down”—undoubtedly made enormous contributions to the genre, they were equally rivaled by those of his less-famous co-creator, Jack Kirby (1917–1994). As dedicated comic fans pay tribute to Kirby’s contributions, he’s never quite become a household name. The characters he invented are another story. As journalist and comics critic Jeet Heer writes in The New Republic, “If you walk down any city street, it’s hard to get more than fifty feet without coming across images that were created by Kirby or inflected by his work. Yet if you were to ask anyone in that same stretch if they had ever heard of Kirby, they’d probably say ‘Who?’”

  In fact, Kirby was instrumental in developing the pantheon of superheroes currently filling theaters for summer blockbusters and fueling new forms of extended storytelling via Netflix’s shows in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His characters include Captain America, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the Silver Surfer. He was both a storyteller and an artist, creating memorable storylines at the same time as he developed a unique and highly recognizable visual vernacular for superhero comics, bringing an energy and dynamism to the art that was previously lacking. He was massively prolific, creating an estimated 20,000+ pages of published art and 1,385 covers throughout his career.

  Born to immigrant parents, Kirby grew up in a working class Jewish neighborhood in New York’s Lower East Side. (His birth name was Jacob Kurtzberg; he began signing his comics Jack Kirby and later changed his name legally.) Both his Jewish heritage and his impoverished upbringing were essential aspects of his identity. As a child, he often participated in one of the neighborhood kids’ favorite form of recreation: fighting. According to Rand Hoppe, curator of the biggest collection of Kirby images online, “Jack loved fighting so much that he once took a long subway trip to the Bronx to see if they fought any differently there.” His first-person experience of hand-to-hand combat later proved immensely valuable as he choreographed and illustrated superheroes fighting for justice in the mean streets of New York.

  Kirby enrolled at Pratt Institute to study art, but only lasted a week—they weren’t interested in his artistic style and he couldn’t afford the tuition anyway. Instead, he found work at an animation studio, honing his skills as a draftsman doing gruntwork on cartoons like Popeye and Betty Boop. He moved into comics and worked on newspaper strips. It was then he began signing his name as Kirby.

  New Gods #1 © DC Comics. The opening volume of Kirby’s Fourth World series was published in 1971 and introduces characters Highfather, Lightray, Metron, and Orion. Image courtesy of DC Comics.

  Soon, Kirby went into business with Joe Simon, who he’d met in the comics business. The two of them formed their own studio and began developing multipage comics. One of the earliest of these was Captain America. This patriotic, flag-flaunting hero made his arrival in 1940, a year before America entered World War II. The cover of the first issue depicted Captain America punching Adolf Hitler in the face.

  It’s important to understand the cultural context here. While the United States’ selfhagiography of its actions in World War II portrays a nation united against the Nazis, the reality was quite different. Then, as now, the United States was home to an appallingly large contingent of fascist and Nazi sympathizers. For their bold repudiation of Nazism, Simon and Kirby received enough death threats from fellow Americans that the police had to intervene. In his biography of Kirby, Mark Evanier describes one notable occasion: “Jack took a call. A voice on the other end said, ‘There are three of us down here in the lobby. We want to see the guy who does this disgusting comic book and show him what real Nazis would do to his Captain America.’ To the horror of others in the office, Kirby rolled up his sleeves and headed downstairs. The callers, however, were gone by the time he arrive
d.” It’s safe to assume that Kirby would certainly have punched those Nazis himself, if he got a chance.

  In 1943, Kirby was drafted to fight in World War II. During the war, his commanders utilized his drawing skills (as well as his ability to speak Yiddish) and sent him into enemy territory to scout and draw maps. He remained traumatized for life by the horrors he observed during this time, and that brutality—as well as an all-stakes fight between good and evil—undoubtedly influenced the stories he told in the years to come.

  Kirby’s most prolific years came in the 1960s, during his collaboration with Stan Lee. The two worked ferociously to put Marvel Studios on the map, beginning with the Fantastic Four, which was a smashing success. The “Marvel Method” emerged, a stark contrast to how comics were typically created. Stan Lee, as the only writer on the team, would offer a very generalized outline, developed through a freewheeling discussion with Kirby, who threw out plenty of plot ideas. The artists would get to work, creating the panels. (Along with Kirby, Steve Ditko was one of these artists, and he also made really significant contributions.) This approach offered artists a lot of control over how the story was told—they made critical decisions on pacing and plotting. Then Lee would fill in the dialogue. Other studios had writers creating a complete script before handing it off to the artists.

  Concept art for a film based on Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, designed by Jack Kirby and screen-writer Barry Ira Geller, and drawn by Kirby, with color later added by Heavy Metal Media, LLC. While the film was never made, the CIA used the concept art—and the movie-shooting—as a cover story to rescue six U.S. diplomats in Iran in 1979. The story is dramatized in the film Argo.

  The Marvel Method led to innovative and dynamic work, encouraging the story to evolve organically and letting artists participate more fully in the storytelling; it was an ideal format for Kirby, both an avid storyteller and an inventive artist, to grow and thrive. The method also created a number of problems, because it was not totally clear who contributed what to the end product. Conflicts over authorship eventually soured the partnership between Kirby and Lee; a sad turn of events, because each of them did their best work while under the other’s influence. As novelist Jonathan Lethem writes, “Lee and Kirby were a kind of Lennon-McCartney partnership, in several senses: Kirby, like Lennon, the raw visionary, with Lee, like McCartney, providing sweetness and polish, as well as a sense that the audience’s hunger for ‘hooks’—in the form of soap-operatic situations involving romance and family drama, young human characters with ungodlike flaws, gently humorous asides, etc.—shouldn’t be undernourished.”

  The work that emerged from Kirby and Lee’s collaboration remains the foundation for much of what Marvel is still producing today. “The great Kirby and Lee comics of the 1960s were pivotal in remaking superhero comics into something more than children’s fables, and one fundamental addition was the concept of a super-hero team,” writes Heer. Under their influence, comics became more than action; they became vehicles for a powerful mythology. “Operatic, sprawling, and mythopoetic, the stories Kirby and Lee worked on remade superhero comics into a form of space opera, taking place in a teeming, lively, and imaginatively exciting universe.”

  Nevertheless, Lee and Kirby’s irrevocable split over authorship and royalties was made more acrimonious by what Kirby saw as Lee’s grandstanding. (A 1965 newspaper profile of the two that characterized Lee as “ultra-Madison Avenue” and Kirby as “the assistant foreman of a girdle factory” certainly didn’t help.)

  In 1970, in the aftermath of this breakup, Kirby shocked the entire comics world by making a switch to Marvel’s number one rival: DC. This move was motivated in part by DC promising Kirby full creative control over his own stories. There he embarked on his most ambitious work yet. This series of titles, called The Fourth World comics, included Mister Miracle, The New Gods, and The Forever People. It was a complex and sprawling epic, overflowing with interwoven threads and dancing across genres—the innovative work of an auteur given free rein to explore his most genuine artistic impulses. Lethem describes it as “massively ambitious, and massively arcane.” To DC’s disappointment, it was not a commercial success.

  “At DC, Kirby seemed to have flown off into his own cosmic realms of superheroes and supervillains without any important human counterparts or identities,” Lethem says. “The feet of his work never touched the ground. The results were impressive, and quite boring.”

  Storytelling aside, it’s not just his prolific creation of characters that earned Kirby the title the “King of Comics.” His vibrant, boisterous, highly stylized illustrations influenced a generation of comic book artists. He pioneered foreshortening techniques, a part of the scene thrusting into the immediate foreground, bringing more depth to previously flat images. “There was something special about any story with Kirby art,” writes biographer Mark Evanier in his Afterword to Kirby: King of Comics. “His work fairly crackled with life-affirming energy. Even with the bad printing and the sometimes-bad inking, it commanded your attention and your involvement.”

  Likewise, Kirby’s intricate depictions of machines and technology—such as his rendering of Black Panther’s futuristic techno-utopia of Wakanda—inspired creators like James Cameron, who called Kirby “a visionary.” Cameron said of his own work on Aliens: “Kirby’s work was definitely in my subconscious programming. . . . He could draw machines like nobody’s business. He was sort of like A. E. van Vogt and some of these other science-fiction writers who are able to create worlds that—even though we live in a science-fictionary world today—are still so far beyond what we’re experiencing.”

  Valérian, the Popular French Comic Series That Inspired a Generation

  The Fifth Element (1997) is one of those delightfully polarizing movies that people seem to either love or hate; it’s a weird spectacle, a baroque fever dream, both surreal and unforgettable. The narrative centers on an ancient alien evil that threatens to destroy a twenty-third century Planet Earth. The only weapon that can defeat it is comprised of four stones (expressing the classic elements, earth, water, air and fire) . . . plus Milla Jovovich. This narrative is often baffling and occasionally incoherent, but is carried by the charismatic performances of Gary Oldman, Chris Tucker, and a ruggedly handsome and wisecracking Bruce Willis, playing that guy he always plays—you know the one. A red-headed, waiflike Milla Jovovich is breathtakingly beautiful, making her status as the most supreme being on the planet a little easier to accept.

  Valerian: The Complete Collection Volume I, which contains The City of Shifting Waters and The Empire of a Thousand Planets. Published by Cinebook in 2017.

  The film’s greatest appeal is in its sheer spectacle. It’s bizarre, exuberant, occasionally grotesque, a boisterous pastiche. As pop culture critic Emily Asher-Perrin wrote in a review for Tor.com, “It is loud and dark, funny and frightening, heavy-handed but full of mesmerizing and carefully rendered detail. It is the cinematic equivalent of Rococo artwork, of New Year’s Eve fireworks, of a gorgeous rainbow cocktail that gives you the worst hangover of your life.” Back in 2000, film critic Adam Smith wrote for Empire, “This is a film that looks unlike any you’ve seen before. Ever.” Arguably, the descriptions still stands.

  The film’s director, Luc Besson, hired fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier to create the over-the-top costumes. He also called on several immensely talented consultants to aid in the design of the film. One was Jean Giraud, the famous French concept artist and illustrator who also went by Moebius (see this page). The other was Jean-Claude Mézières, co-creator of the long-running smash-hit graphic novel, Valérian et Laureline, which chronicles the adventures of two time-traveling government agents. Valérian, the time-traveling space agent, meets and is saved by a peasant girl in eleventh-century France, who then joins him on his journey, traveling to the twenty-eighth century to become his partner.

  Mézières’s presence on the film was no coincidence. Besson had long dreamed of making these beloved French co
mics into a movie. In fact, he’d been a fan as a child, as the series first began in 1967. In 2016, he told an audience at San Diego Comic-Con that he began reading the comics when he was ten. “I wanted to be Valérian,” he said, “but I fell in love with Laureline.” Despite being a lifelong fan, Besson couldn’t see a plausible way to make the movie. Valérian, a grand intergalactic space opera about time-traveling space agents, was not the kind of story one could easily film. Until, of course, CGI changed the game.

  Besson credits James Cameron’s Avatar with giving him the courage to finally tackle this project, his lifelong dream. “I thought to myself that the technology to make it was perhaps finally there. I’d already written several drafts of an adaptation a few years before then, but it was Avatar that made things possible.”

  Without any major studio backing, Besson assembled the funding himself, coming up with around $200 million to finally bring Valérian to the big screen—the most expensive non–U.S. studio movie ever made. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets hit theaters in summer of 2017. Fans of The Fifth Element were elated, ready to once again enjoy a space opera extravaganza brought to them by the brilliant imagination of Luc Besson.

  The Avatar influence is obvious from the first moments of the film, which depict the idyllic island paradise of the alien Pearls, who are bald, slender, graceful, and almost translucently pale (and slightly blue-tinged, though maybe that’s just the reflection of the sky and sea). Like The Fifth Element, the film is a massive visual spectacle, vibrant and frenetic, a million colors at once. Almost all of it is CGI. One of the earliest examples is a scene set in absolutely massive inter-dimensional market, an entire world somehow folded inside the atoms of ours. Writing for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson calls the scene “an absolute marvel, clever and kitschy and suspenseful.”