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