Jack Kirby,
born Jacob
Kurtzberg in 1917,
picked up the nickname King when he was young. That is not the only reason Mark Evanier
applies the title to him in Kirby: King
of Comics. Kirby was one of the most influential creators in comics
over the course of his long career, beginning in 1938 at the Eisner-Iger shop,
which began in the early days of the medium.
Kirby is a coffee table book, full of images
from Kirby’s work. Though Evanier’s biography
of Kirby is interesting, I suspect these images, some of them large, full-page
reproduction were always conceived as a major selling point of the book. Kirby
was a professional artist, mostly in comics, his entire career, which was long,
so it only makes sense that you need to see a selection of his drawings to
understand why he had such an impact on comics.
You can see
Kirby’s influence everywhere in comics, especially superhero
comics. He worked for both Marvel and
DC at
different times, and had a hand in creating or co-creating many popular characters and
settings.
More than
that, he had an influence on the style and visual language of comics that
writers and artist still used today. He was one of the first comic book artists
to break away from strip layouts (carried over from newspaper
comics) to designing for a full page. His characters busted through the panels.
His drawings were dynamic and suggested powerful motion; this is a striking
characteristic of his work that is discussed by nearly everyone who writes
about Kirby. I find his drawings can seem strangely flattened out and dimensional
at the same time.
Because
Kirby worked for so long, on so many comics, for so many publishers, and had
such an influence on the artists who grew up reading his work, you’ll still see
many Kirby touches in current comics. I see them in the depiction of technology,
the design of characters and costumes, the
framing of action
scenes, and even the continued use of Kirby dots (especially at
DC, no doubt because they just look so cool).
He was an
innovator who introduced new types of images into comics, such as collage, and new
genres, such as romance. He
even foresaw the future of the comic books, pushing his publishers for better
quality material and printing, new formats, longer stories, and new ways to
market and sell comics. Publishers balked at the cost of such innovations at
the time, but many of the changes Kirby predicted and sought for the industry
eventually came to pass.
Kirby is
known mainly as an artist, but he was also a writer. It may be fair to say that
Kirby couldn’t leave a script alone and regularly modified scripts he was
adapting to drawings. His solo writing was packed with big ideas and wild
concepts and sometimes had trouble finding large audience in his day, though
these comics have often done well when collected and reprinted. I do not think
it unfair to say that some of his best work was collaborations with other
writers. For much of the first half of his career, he partnered with writer Joe Simon,
with whom he created Captain
America and romance comics. In the 1960s, he
collaborated with Stan
Lee at to co-create much of what is now the Marvel Universe.
If you’re
interested in this book, you may also be interested in
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