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The Case for Jack Kirby

Some comics readers instantly "get" whether or not to like an artist with a single viewing. However, as obvious a taste might seem, not everyone does or can recognize the achievements of even the talents most esteemed in the medium. Take, for instance, Jack Kirby, who, since his death, has become something of a Patron Saint of the Comics Medium (a role he nearly achieved during his lifetime).

Not everyone gets Kirby the first time around. Differences in personal aesthetic sensibilities lock some out of this appreciation; resentment at the reverence some fans hold for the man and his work incline others to dislike his work on principles unrelated to aesthetics.

For myself, it took until two years after Kirby's death for the appeal to sink in. Why, though, you might ask, would anyone dislike Kirby?

The Case Against Kirby

Kirby's work did not immediately endear itself to me back in the first days of my exposure to comics. The changes he engineered to his style in the sixties, in the creation of an idiom that made comics visually louder than those of decades previous, sometimes also made the human form in his hands seem bizarre and ugly. For a reader who cut his eyeteeth on Neal Adams pieces between 1967 and 1972, the leap to Kirby represented too much aesthetic distance.

For instance, I remember forming a consensus with my brother about Big Barda in the first few issues of Mister Miracle. She seemed grotesque, unfeminine, and, as mentioned before, ugly. He showed me what he meant by ugly, and it sank in. I wouldn't begin to question this appraisal for over twenty years.

Furthermore, Kirby had, during his sixty-year career, moments that did not shine as brightly as his best work. Collectors pointed out to me their disappointment with Kirby's work in the 1976 Captain America run. Consider, for instance, dialogue like this:

RED SKULL: My next shot will hit you in the right arm, fool!

So, through my early comics reading/collecting days (roughly, 1970-1982), I cruelly declared that Jack Kirby was some overrated has-been whose reputation was a product of the nostalgia of some demented individuals daydreaming about "the good old days" of comic books.

In spite of these self-congratulatory barbs and my own imaginary higher sensibilities - sensibilities which never considered talents like dynamism and storytelling - I would become a convert. A number of points, listed below, reshaped my thinking.

Point One: Kirby Creations Can be hard to get rid of as herpes.

Jack Kirby (with Joe Simon, a frequent co-conspirator) created Captain America almost sixty years ago. After the first run of not much over 12 years, the character was resurrected about 1964, and has continued without interruption in the three-and-a-half subsequent decades.

Someone whose work is disposable and uninteresting may occasionally get lucky? True enough. But what about the Fantastic Four (almost forty years of uninterrupted production), the Silver Surfer (intermittent bursts but definite fan appeal), the Challengers of the Unknown, the Inhumans, the New Gods/Fourth World, too many stray heroes to count, and too many stray villains to count?

There's no way to dismiss him as a one-hit wonder. Two many titles still portray characters he created. And, even though name recognition can draw readers to something out of curiosity and loyalty, it's not enough to keep them going (the ups and downs of Image comics demonstrates this axiom). To sell as many books as bear Kirby creations implies something more is happening.

Point Two: Kirby produced more work than an army of lesser talents.

One estimate I've read places Kirby's lifetime output (from, say, 1934 to 1994) at 24,000 pages. This number is difficult to grasp.

Consider that a modern comic book may have about 20 pages of story. That's 1200 comic books. That's enough to print a monthly magazine for 100 years.

Divided across six decades, that's forty modern sized comic books a year (or, roughly, three complete 12-issue series)for sixty years.

Point Three: Kirby May Have Saved the Medium.

When Kirby returned to Marvel around 1960, he found a failing company about to go under. With his contributions (and creations spun off from his efforts or inspired by his stylistic innovations), Marvel not only came back from the edge of the grave, but roared to the top of popularity.

The only big gun in superhero comics during this amazing renewal was DC, whose output, albeit inoffensive, was repetitive, uninspired, and locked into a 1950s rut. The characters did not develop. The new characters of the DC universe were rehashed versions of Golden Age characters (the Flash, the Green Lantern, the Atom) in less-interesting versions.

Now, if we subtract Kirby from the early-sixties equation, what kind of scenario remains?

Marvel in the sixties (in an annoyingly self-congratulatory way) babbled on and on about the "Marvel Style," and as their sales began to overshadow that of the Old Lion, DC Comics, the elder company became concerned, and increasingly attempted to duplicate style and tempt talent from Marvel Comics. Market forces pushed DC to experiment with formulas that were producing diminishing returns, and slow reform did come to DC (although the real DC improvement came with the defection of considerable Marvel talent to DC in the early 1980s).

But without Kirby saving Marvel, the landslide of improvements and updating the medium might not have begun in time to save comics from the economic downturns and stagnation that, even with him, threatened them (and occasionally appear on the horizon as threats today).

Point Four: When You Let Him Be, Kirby Was Cool.

I began this monograph with a few of the points one could argue against Kirby. I drew the wrong point about him from these failings, though; my lack of an overview of the history of the medium led me to condemn his work from anecdotal evidence, and I had the occasional, inevitable dog with Kirby's name attached to it to provide glaring examples of his failings.

All right, the Captain America example above was taken out of context (since I was neither a Captain America fan nor a Jack Kirby apologist back then). But compare his work with a free reign to the stuff that someone else had their filthy claws in.

When Kirby created a property, it tended to have a strong initial run (regardless of sales). But 1976 Captain America was not a ground-up creation; it was a run where Kirby was expected somehow to recover the fine points of the returned Captain America of the early sixties without doing anything controversial or with long-term continuity consequences. So we get "My next shot will hit you in the right arm, fool!"

Those were the terms which drove Kirby away from Marvel about 1970 and drove him away from DC about 1975; in the Fantastic Four, he had a hoary property, rather than a fresh new place to create characters. He was maintaining rather than creating. And, again, with the Superman universe (which connected to his Fourth World through the link of Jimmy Olson comics), Kirby was expected to maintain rather than create. But, after all, Superman didn't get revised until 1986 (and again in 1997, the latter change being the most drastic).

To fairly appraise what Kirby could do while the inspiration remained with him, however, you have to look at the youth of his creations. Look at his DC work in the seventies; look at early issues of OMAC or Kamandi or The New Gods (or his work in Fantastic Four and other Marvel superhero titles of the same period). Don't look at the stuff he did after eight years of working on one title, and don't look at short-term gigs he did on books he didn't control to appraise him as a creator.

His strong point, after all, was in launching new concepts into the superhero universe, not in the 300th reappearance of some tired and disposable villain.