![]() ![]() They actually started to feel biblical in scale.”Ĩ. “It was his masterpiece,” writer Grant Morrison told The Guardian, “an epic cosmic war between evil gods and good gods…It was the first time that comics came with a cosmic dimension. Freed from superheroes he created an entire new mythologyĭC let Kirby go wild in the early 70s and the result was a new cosmology full of religious intensity, with a hidden Kabbalist subtext – the New Gods. But the savvy Lee grabbed most of the credit and Kirby, wounded, left Marvel for rivals DC in 1970.ħ. Far more than just an illustrator, Kirby plotted entire stories. ![]() Their revolutionary comic the Fantastic Four began as a family adventure and evolved into a transcendental sci-fi odyssey. Together they created believable, vulnerable three-dimensional characters who stood the test of time and made Marvel billions. The tale of Marvel comics partners “Smilin’” Stan and “Jolly” Jack is a triumph and a tragedy. He and Stan Lee were the Lennon and McCartney of comics “Every panel was a population explosion – casts of thousands, all fighting, leaping, falling, crawling… Speed was the thing: rocking, uproarious speed.” He’s the reason comics look the way they do.Ħ. “Muscles stretched magically, foreshortened shockingly… Legs were never less than four feet apart when a punch was thrown,” writes Jules Feiffer in The Great Comics Heroes. Kirby brought a savage dynamism to comics that blew away the stilted compositions of old. He changed the look and feel of comics forever His wartime experiences fed into comics as offbeat as Boy Commandos, Sgt Fury & His Howling Commandos (Nick Fury’s debut) and later The Losers, where Kirby’s outlandish anatomies and wild battles turned WWII into a bizarre fantasia.ĥ. As an artist he was assigned to forward reconnaissance, drawing towns and targets, and almost lost his legs to frostbite in winter 1944. Kirby was drafted in 1943 and landed on Omaha Beach ten weeks after D-Day. Kirby served in WWII and brought the imagery of battle back to his comics ![]() On the cover of his very first issue, Cap socks Hitler on the jaw, a scene cleverly homaged in the 2011 movie.Ĥ. He’s isolation-era America in one man, the peaceful individual who accepts that sometimes you just have to fight, and a hero for American Jews like Kirby and Simon in particular. With Captain America, he put the USA’s conscience in a superhero suitĬo-created by Kirby and Joe Simon in 1940, Cap isn’t just the superhero archetype – the quiet guy transformed by science into a champion of justice. The Lower East Side would always be with him in the stubbly bums and street melées that populated his stories.ģ. He drew pirates, funnies, mysteries, crime and early superheroes for the sweatshop comics business, using a variety of pseudonyms and settling on Jack Kirby because it sounded like James Cagney. Kirby was a self-taught, blue-collar geniusīorn Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917, this son of two Austrian Jewish immigrants dreamed of drawing his way out of his poor New York neighbourhood. And Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 could only play catch-up to Kirby – see his comics adaptation of the movie for a real mind-blower.Ģ. It’s impossible to imagine the interstellar gigantism of Star Wars without Kirby’s epic visions. Through the 60s Kirby took the Fantastic Four on an unprecedented voyage into pop art psychedelia, turning humble comic books into 10¢ cosmic grimoires much as The Beatles did with pop records. Kirby gave us our modern idea of the cosmicīefore Jack, the unknown meant a 50s vision of clunky spaceships and green Martians. Here’s what you need to know about the four-colour prophet that contemporary star scriptwriter Grant Morrison called “the William Blake of comics”.ġ. This self-taught Lower East Side kid created the look – and much more – of icons like Captain America, the X-Men, Thor, the Fantastic Four and Iron Man.īut shady practices in the business meant that Kirby earned a comparative pittance from his billion-dollar children. The man who shaped huge vistas of the modern imagination died 20 years ago this week.Ĭomics artist, writer and psychedelic visionary Jack Kirby, who passed away on 6 February 1994, laid the foundations of Marvel’s lucrative movie universe. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |