|
|
 |
 |
|
Monday, August 29, 2005
A post for Jack
Better blogs than this one have probably already informed you that yesterday was the 88th anniversary of Jack Kirby’s birth. That’s a day that means a lot to me and millions of others who have been affected by the man’s work.
For me Kirby remains an eternal inspiration. I discovered all of his work through reprints and back issues published before I was born and yet his stuff speaks to me more than most of the creators working when I was just discovering comics as a boy. It’s because Kirby’s working is the finest meeting between imagination and skill ever done in comics.
To see someone make a living out of creating such fantasy and garnering so much due praise because of it is something I really think is special. I fear that if one Jacob Kutzberg was born a few years earlier or a few later more pragmatic forces in life would have him put away his ideas and he’d end up working endlessly in some office some where. Instead Kirby fought up from the streets and through the disrespectful business dealings companies like DC and especially Marvel gave him and kept producing these wonderful creations that could only come out of this brilliant mind. Opening a Jack Kirby comic and seeing a god-like creature that eats planets, a planet that is alive itself, one of the most blissfully twisted visions of the future, the most incredible dystopia committed to the comics page and so many more particles of wonder instills such a fun energy into so many readers because Kirby instilled all those comics themselves with that irresistible energy of invention and storytelling.
Kirby delivered it all with such confidence and bluster it always seems to work. I remember hearing some of those who inked Kirby that all of his pencils were so confidentially and perfectly structured that it was a joy to embellish his work. Every single line was right where it needed to be and all the power of his characters’ actions and emotions were right up front (to see this for yourself heck out the penciled pages in the back of the Marvel Visionaries: Jack Kirby book where you can see pages from the Fantastic Four issues that introduced Galactus. Those issues, by the way, are the greatest superhero comic books ever made).
Whether working with a writer like Stan Lee or Joe Simon or writing for himself, Kirby’s work had this bluster to it that spares the reader no time to catch his or her breath in introducing all this weird stuff. When I first starting reading Kirby’s working through the Essential Fantastic Four series I would often stop at around eight pages into the comic, count how much story has gone by in such small space and just be taken aback at how much entertainment and creativity there was in just the beginning of some of these books. Before then I never knew you could get away with presenting a comic like that. I’m sure Kirby and Lee thought it was no big deal, just the way things should be.
When Kirby wrote his own stories there was this real sincerity to everything so that it can bring the audience in to enjoy the work. Lee provided some necessary ironic detachment to the Marvel work the two were doing but Kirby’s writing was devoid of that. He never took it so seriously that it became grim and impenetrable but there is that feeling that he was really into concepts like Devil Dinosaur or the Anti-Life Equation. It is fun to read those books with some knowing raillery (I often do, especially when confronted with this cover I have to have a bit of a laugh) and Kirby did intend all these books to be fun and jovial, so I don’t feel like I’m taking the piss out of anyone. At the same time I’m more than a little impressed and yet again inspired by how someone can come up with all these big ideas and deliver it with such pure optimism installed in them, all without having any of his comic book writing descend into naïveté. There was something sweet about that.
As long as I can read I will read Jack Kirby’s work. I couldn’t live without it. To see such power in the human imagination is one of those things that make life worth living and makes me want to continue on as a creative person. That’s why Kirby and his work is an inspiration to me and why I’m glad his work is accessible and hopefully will continue to be accessible through reprints for a long time to come.
Check out the Jack Kirby Museum.
Permanent Link: 10:52 AM |
0 comments
Comments:
-- Home
|
|
