     
The
King's Jewels Leading comic-book professionals
recall their favorite Jack Kirby work. by Tom Heintjes
One of the keys to the perpetual popularity of Jack Kirby’s
work is its irresistible visual appeal; apart from Kirby’s
understanding of the mechanics of storytelling and his formidable,
innovative use of anatomy, it’s impossible to escape the allure
of his style. It is relentlessly forceful, smooth and strong at
once, and with it Kirby created many images that imprinted themselves
on millions of people over the course of decades. Explaining what
made his work unique is simple: when it came to superheroes and
the development of the primal storytelling vocabulary that accompanied
them, no one did it more innovatively, or for longer.
What’s more difficult, then, is to sift through the tens of
thousands of images he created to arrive at the handful that stuck
most permanently; a personal decision, to be sure, since it concerns
not defining Kirby’s best work, but rather his most memorable.
Like so many other comics fans who began reading in the 1960s, I
cut my comics teeth on Kirby stories, and many of the images he
presented stick with me to this day. Knowing that I’m not alone
in carrying Kirby imagery around, I decided to pay tribute to him
by getting in touch with creators who owe Kirby a creative debt
and asking them to select their most personally memorable Kirby
work.
FRANK
MILLER
 “One
issue of New Gods made a big impression on me,” Miller
said. “It was ‘The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin’
from New Gods #8. It featured a man in normal street clothes
involved in a fantastic situation, absorbing inhuman amounts
of punishment. At the time, it was one of the most dramatic
things I’d ever seen; I felt like an explosion was going
off in my head when I read it.”
Miller added that when he arrived in New York in the 1970s as
a comic-book artist, he was intent on forging a career in crime
comics, a genre that barely, if at all, existed (but one that
he has almost singlehandedly revived). “I had a bunch of
drawings of guys in trenchcoats in dark alleys,” he said.
“I just wanted to draw crime comics. I loved the super-heroes
and I grew up on them, but they weren’t what I, myself,
wanted to do. I actually wondered then if there was a place
for me in comics. But that issue of New Gods made the connection
between superhero dynamics and crime comics, and I knew it could
be done. Of course, it took Jack Kirby to do it.’’ |
NEAL
ADAMS
“In general, when I was very young, I didn’t like
Jack Kirby’s work—I preferred the work of guys like
Dan Barry, who drew attractive faces and had a more illustrative
style,” Adams said. “I thought of Jack’s work
as being . . . well, ugly.” His perception changed when
he saw Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown, a DC-published
SF/superhero comic book inked by Wally Wood, who had a more
lush, illustrative style that appealed to Adams. “Whereas
I’d never followed Jack’s work before, I found myself
following Challengers of the Unknown, in spite of myself. It
really knocked me out.” It was around this time that Adams,
a maturing artist, noticed elements in Kirby’s work that
weren’t immediately apparent. “His stories were very
cleanly told and easy to understand, and as time went by I realized
he was working in a sort of shorthand, focusing on telling a
story, not on rendering,” he said, a concept that was not
lost on Adams.
“At the time Challengers of the Unknown came out, it was
superior to anything DC was doing, in terms of both art and
story,” he said. “The combination of Kirby’s
storytelling and Wally Wood’s inking blew me away. The
combination of their talents was a genuine shock—suddenly,
Kirby’s genius for storytelling was combined with Woody’s
gift for illustration.”
Adams retains special fondness for another Kirby/Wood collaboration:
Sky Masters, a newspaper SF strip that was, like Challengers,
pencilled by Kirby and inked by Wood. “Sky Masters was
a strip about real people traveling into real outer space; it
wasn’t a fanciful space-opera piece,” he said. “I
loved Kirby’s storytelling on it; he had complete mastery
of the story’s construction.”
“Gradually, I became a Jack Kirby fan, because I became
sophisticated enough to look past what I had previously considered
‘ugly’ faces on his characters,” he added.
By the time Kirby began laying the foundation of the Marvel
Universe, Adams said, Kirby was introducing concepts the likes
of which comics had never seen—concepts that Adams found
revolutionary. “The comics had never seen a character like
Kang the Conqueror, who could travel through time and space,”
he said. “The first time I saw Kang, I frankly didn’t
realize how incredible that concept was, which is partly due
to how well Jack integrated the character into the story.
“Then, when the Silver Surfer came to Earth, I began to
appreciate in an adult way what Jack was introducing,”
Adams added. “When other creators saw Jack introduce the
Surfer and this other character who swallowed planets, we thought,
‘Whoa! Can we do that?’ It was unprecedented; it was
a revolutionary way of thinking about the limits of the superhero
genre, and Jack was working past the limits.”
Adams also enjoyed much of Kirby’s Fourth World material,
and feels it was underappreciated then and remains so today.
“They didn’t realize that Jack was giving them a new
universe to explore,” he said. “There was so much
unrealized potential there that DC is still trying to figure
it out and understand it.” |
STEVE
GERBER Capturing the quirky or human moments is perhaps
an aspect of Kirby’s work that is too often overlooked.
I mentioned to Gerber that I believe Kirby excelled just as
well at drawing a man hailing a cab or drinking a cup of coffee
as he did at portraying the Negative Zone. Gerber heartily agreed,
and one of his favorite Kirby sequences is the flophouse scene
from Fantastic Four #4, where Johnny Storm stumbles upon the
amnesiac Sub-Mariner. “It was a quintessentially Kirby
scene of quirky characters interacting,” he said. “When
Johnny lights up his finger and shaves the Sub-Mariner, it’s
an incredible piece. I can’t look at it without marveling.
“For all his incredible ability at presenting gods, living
planets and larger-than-life, slam-bang action, Jack also excelled
at portraying the eccentric, more human moments, and that was
one of the elements in his work that endeared him to his readers,
I think.”
Another one of Gerber’s personal favorites is from Fantastic
Four #7, ‘Kurrgo, Master of Planet X.’ “It was
largely a completely forgettable story, except for this one
sequence were the FF have been transported to another planet,
and there are robots floating down,” he said. “It’s
done from the most incredible, unbelievable perspective I’ve
ever seen, and it works—he made it work! I still just stare
at it and I’m agog at how he made it work.”
Gerber also cited the second panel on page 17 of Fantastic Four
#5, where The Thing dons the garb—complete with beard—of
Blackbeard the pirate. “The Thing is the largest character
in the panel, and it’s an extremely dramatic shot,”
he said. “Again, it’s Kirby showing his absolute mastery
of the quirky moment and the quirky character. It’s a case
of the subject matter, the startling composition and the imagery
all coming together in such a unique way.”
Next, Gerber cited an example of some favorite Kirby work that
carries with it a more personal aspect. In 1982, Gerber was
trying to raise funds with which he could continue to pursue
his legal efforts to win some ownership rights to Howard the
Duck, a character he created under a work-for-hire situation
for Marvel. His biggest gambit was to write a benefit comic
book, Destroyer Duck, that he hoped to persuade Kirby to illustrate,
since Kirby had had his own unpleasant legal wranglings with
Marvel. “When I decided to do Destroyer Duck, I took Mark
Evanier to Jack’s house with me for moral support. I didn’t
know how to approach the King of the Comics to draw a comic
book for free for me,” he said. “I explained how it
was going to prevent me from going to a debtor’s prison,
and Mark explained about the lawsuit, and then we got to the
Big Question: Would you draw it . . . for free? And I have to
tell you that my voice went up about three octaves with the
words ‘for free.’ Without skipping a beat, he said,
‘Sure—sounds like fun.’ He wasn’t even fazed
by it.”
During this time, Gerber was working in the animation studios
of Ruby-Spears, and Kirby came by one day to drop off the penciled
pages. “He handed me the pages and walked out. A few minutes
later he came back in, and he found me on the floor laughing,
with tears in my eyes.” Gerber had just read the panel
that ranks among his personal favorites: panel 2, page 11, where
the plaque behind Ned Packer read, “Grab it all, own it
all, drain it all.” “I looked up at him, and he smiled
down at me and said, ‘So, you like it?’ ”
Gerber noted an interesting quirk in Kirby’s work on Destroyer
Duck: “Here was a guy who not only could draw anything
in the universe, he could draw whole universes! But for some
reason, he could never get Destroyer Duck’s beak right,”
he said, chuckling. “Alfredo Alcala kept having to redraw
it when he inked. I always thought that was kind of funny.”
Finally, since no one mentioned one of my own personal favorites,
I’ll go ahead and slip it in here. It’s from Fantastic
Four #55, an early appearance of the Silver Surfer. The scenes
portraying The Thing’s ruthless, relentless pursuit of
the Surfer was intoxicating to me as a child. The scene where
The Thing tears apart a building (one of those wonderful, old-New-York
buildings Jack so fondly rendered so many times) to bury the
Surfer even today resonates for me—partly with nostalgia,
to be sure, but partly with the recognition of Jack Kirby’s
absolute mastery of his chosen medium. The King is gone, and
no one can succeed him, but his legacy lives on. Perhaps Steve
Gerber put it best: “For one of the few geniuses I’ve
met, it’s impossible to talk about what a genius he was
without lapsing into all the cliches. But they’re all true.
Ultimately, you just have to say, ‘Read his work.’
’’ |
CHRIS
CLAREMONT  Even
for a teenager who had given up reading comic books, the splash
page to Fantastic Four #49 was irresistible. “I was walking
home from high school one day, and I saw FF #49 on the spinner
rack, and I was intrigued enough to pick it up,” he said. “I
flipped it open and said, ‘Gee, here’s a hero who has a growth
of beard! What’s this?’ Later in the story, Reed’s having a
shower and a shave, just like a real person would, even though
there’s this fantastic cosmic menace outside, and I’m thinking,
‘This is absolutely incredible stuff!’ Page after page after
page, my mind was boggled.” Fantastic Four #50 was no less stunning
to Claremont. “When Johnny gets the Ultimate Nullifier, then
later wonders how he can manage to do something so mundane as
to sit in school after having seen the other side of the universe—there
was nothing else like it,” he said. “It was a synthesis of artistic
and literal vision, like nothing I had seen in comics before.”
One month later came the classic “This Man, This Monster” in
FF #51. “I couldn’t believe what these guys were producing!”
he said. “It was exciting, visceral. It was as if Jack was saying,
‘OK, I’ve got a roller-coaster in my pencil—let’s go!’ ” Claremont
purchased those issues of The Fantastic Four, as well as many
to come. “There was no way then to get back issues, but I started
looking to see what else Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were producing.
In a very real way, those issues brought me back into comics.”
Claremont recalls the feeling of excitement he had when he saw
Kirby’s panoramic portrayals of Asgard in Journey Into Mystery
and, later, Thor. “When Jack rendered Asgard, you could believe
it was home to the gods,” he said. “When he drew Odin, you could
believe he was the All-Father. He filled the space. That’s why
his Thor worked in a way that Wonder Woman—another mythological
character—didn’t; no one managed to capture the sweep and majesty
the way Jack did.” |
NEIL
GAIMAN  For
a Marvel reader (or a fan of American comics in general) in
Britain in the 1960s, life was full of challenges. Neil Gaiman
said American comics came to the United Kingdom as ballast in
boats, and were anywhere from three to six months old when they
arrived—usually heavily damaged by water or rough handling.
For this reason, Gaiman grew up preferring DC books to Marvels.
“DC comics featured self-contained stories, whereas Marvels
tended to run over two or more issues,” he said. “So, if you
got your hands on issue #10 of a given Marvel book, there was
no guarantee you’d ever get #11, and you’d never know how the
story ended. That wasn’t a problem with DC books.” Gradually,
British publishers began reprinting some American comics fare.
“Odhams Press had a stable of comics from around 196768; the
titles were Wham, Smash, Pow, Terrific, and Fantastic, and the
earliest X-Men stories were reprinted in Fantastic; that was
wonderful. Then, in 1968 I was given a box of American comics,
both Marvel and DC. The Fantastic Four issue featuring The Inhumans
really opened my eyes up.” Eventually, Britain developed a rudimentary
comic-shop system, usually housed in basements of run-down buildings
in the bad part of town, where some American material was available.
“You’d go to a part of London you’d never been to, knock on
the door and they’d let you in to buy your comics. Many of the
comics were marked ‘ND,’ which meant ‘not distributed;’ those
books had never been officially distributed in England at all.”
It was through shops like that that Gaiman became acquainted
with Kirby’s work. One of Gaiman’s favorites is
Kamandi #29, the Kamandi-Superman story. “It’s an interesting
premise, because it’s a world in which you’re never sure Superman
existed,” he said. He also mentioned the Captain America story
from 1976’s Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, in which
Kirby’s pencils were inked by another Englishman, Barry Windsor-Smith.
“Kirby’s work always possessed everything except beauty; his
work had grandeur, majesty, power—everything except beauty.
Barry Windsor-Smith’s inking brought beauty to his work, and
then it had everything.” Gaiman mentioned a ‘Big Max vs. Devastator,’
a Losers story from Our Fighting Forces #153 that featured a
young SF fan who is the butt of the other children’s pranks.
“It’s got an odd sort of heart, and I’d love to know how much
of Kirby himself was in that little science-fiction fan.” As
Gerber did, Gaiman praised Kirby’s ability to convey the more
mundane, everyday moment for which he is seldom mentioned. “One
of his pages I love most is one of his most atypical,” he said.
“In Demon #6, the Howler and the Demon are on a plane having
a conversation, and there’s nothing else going on,” he said.
“Usually, when Jack Kirby characters are having a conversation,
there’s something going on, even if the characters are merely
walking from room to room. You never see characters just sitting
around talking. It was quiet moments like that made the other
stuff work. When there’s nothing but action and you never get
close to the characters, there’s nothing to make you stop and
care.” Similar to that scene is another of Gaiman’s favorites:
a scene from Demon #15 wherein Glenda is walking around in Jason’s
darkened apartment, futilely looking for him. “It’s beautiful,
strange, and creepy,” he said. |
TODD
McFARLANE A relative latecomer to the joys of Kirby, McFarlane
didn’t discover his passion for comic books until he was
in his late teens, by which time Kirby had returned to Marvel
after several years’ stay at DC. “I was really taken
with his high-energy approach to his work, and that’s what
I’ve tried to pull out of his work for my own work,”
he said, recalling Black Panther #1, a story that featured a
typically manic Kirby chase and a bejeweled frog. “It was
a crazy, intoxicating kind of story, and I really got wrapped
up in it,” McFarlane said. “Since I got into Kirby’s
work kind of late, I don’t have the very early impressions
of him that other people do. But I do remember thinking that
this kind of comics really worked, and this was the kind of
work I wanted to do.
“Jack never lost sight of the fact that he was drawing
fantasy,” McFarlane added. “Stan always talked about
the realism of Marvel comics, but that same material would not
have worked the way it did if it had been drawn realistically.
Now, I like Neal Adams’s work, but I don’t think Neal’s
approach would have worked on the Fantastic Four—it needs
a more outrageous style, like Jack’s. It always amazes
me when people criticize Jack’s work as being ‘too
cartoony,’ without realizing that it needed to be drawn
in his outrageous, larger-than-life style. Jack broke it down
to its simplest form, and that was its strength.” |
BARRY
WINDSOR-SMITH "Defining my opinion of the most
important material Kirby created is to stare into a cosmic
kaleidoscope and, without reservation, choose the finest
of color patterns and the most exciting of starbursts,”
Barry Windsor-Smith said, singling out Kirby’s mid-to-late-’60s
work on Fantastic Four work as some of his most memorable
and outstanding work. “Each panel and page was so
filled with energy and wonder that, as with the Beatles’
work of the same time, I knew I was honored to be alive
and aware at these epochs of such undeniable genius.”
Looking back on Kirby’s body of work, he says Kirby’s
‘Galactus Trilogy’ is probably his ultimate
work, but hastened to add that in saying that “I
offer small shrift to the other wonders the titanic mind
of Jack Kirby was creating during the same period. In
short ... I cannot decide upon the greatest of Kirby’s
greatness.”
Before 1966’s Galactus Trilogy, Windsor-Smith was
a DC Comics fan. “When I was reading DC Comics’
Green Lantern and Flash in the early ’60s, my only
knowledge of Jack Kirby was the monster books he was producing
for Marvel—you know, ‘Splurg from the Planet
Hurl’ and such like,” he said. “I was attracted
to the monster books only because of Kirby’s drawing
ability, but I knew nothing of his superhero work of previous
times.” But while scouring the racks one day, Windsor-Smith
happened upon the only two issues ever published of Archie
Comics’s The Double Life of Private Strong (which
Windsor-Smith has always fondly recalled as The Private
Life of Double-Strong), first published in 1959. “Although
the main figure on one of the covers was clearly not by
Kirby, it was the filmstrip representation around the
top and right sides of the cover that absolutely thrilled
me—then and now, even though I no longer have those
books.” he said. “In what could be considered
an utterly throw-away fashion, Kirby had drawn about twelve
frames (emulating a film reel sequence) of the hero falling
in controlled dives and springing up to belt a couple
of baddies, then rolling along and switching to his alter-ego
gear.
“The extraordinary fluency of the figure drawings
took my breath away; I’d never seen anything like
it, ever,” he said. “Limited of funds in those
long-ago days of youth, I chose to forgo my Flash and
Green Lantern fix to buy both the Kirby books. I studied
them for hours that became years and because of those
two flimsy, poorly printed bits of juvenalia that I picked
up for sixpence each in a sweet-shop that no longer exists
in a neighborhood that self-destructed two decades ago,
I have always had a bright star by which to navigate my
dream of trying to be one one-hundredth of the galaxy
that was Jack Kirby.” |
|
