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Jack
Kirby's legacy 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
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."
COMMENTARY FEATURES INTERVIEWS SKETCHBOOKS CLASSICS LINKS Copyright@1997-99
Hogan's Alley Magazine. All rights reserved. |
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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. 
"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."