|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
||||
|
Jack
Kirby's legacy - continued 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 clichés. But they're all true. Ultimately, you just have to say, 'Read his work.' "
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."
COMMENTARY FEATURES INTERVIEWS SKETCHBOOKS CLASSICS LINKS Copyright@1997-99
Hogan's Alley Magazine. All rights reserved. |
||||
CHRIS
CLAREMONT
