the great one is coming

Today would have been Jack “The King” Kirby’s 90th birthday. For an eloquent tribute to the man and his prodigious legacy as a comics creator one couldn’t do better than checking out Kevin Church’s essay on the subject. This being Armagideon Time, I’m just going to indulge in some autobiographical meanderings accompanied by half-formed thoughts and some music.

My first comics purchased as an active consumer (rather than handed down by adults) came from a stall at a flea market in Reading that my parents attended one Sunday each month. The dealer kept a small collection of high-value books under a glass case, but his bread and butter were a dozen long boxes of unsorted, unbagged comics sold for thirty-five cents a pop, or three for a buck. It was a veritable cornucopia of comics of all genres and stripes from the early to late 1970’s, with the occasional beat up Silver Age title or more recent (as in 1980-1982 “recent”) castoff thrown into the mix.

I was more concerned with characters and “cool-looking” covers than with the works of certain creators, though the range of the material meant that Jack Kirby’s stuff was pretty well represented. New Gods (and other “Fourth World” titles), The Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, his bicentennial era run on Captain America were are present in abundance, and being a typical eight year old kid, I avoided them like the plague.

What can I say? It was a time when the detailed styles of John Byrne and George Perez were in ascendance, and charms of Kirby’s unique vision were lost on a child who hadn’t outgrown the notion that Wolverine was the coolest character ever. I was also fairly ignorant of comics history at the time, as well, and my first inklings of The King’s singular importance to Comics as We Know Them wouldn’t come until I picked up a cheap paperback reprint of the early Captain America stories which originally ran in Tales of Suspense during the 60’s. To young Andrew, Kirby’s stuff just seemed off-puttingly weird -- weird art, weird characters, and weird concepts that I was unable to appreciate in light of the then-contemporary standards of cool.

I didn’t stay young and stupid forever, however. The scales did eventually fall from my eyes, though the process took the better part of a decade. I grew to understand the pivotal role Kirby played in the history of the comics medium, even if I still puzzled over the Kirby-illustrated entries for his various DC creations in the original Who’s Who in the DC Universe directory. They seemed as if they belong to a world unto themselves, which in hindsight, they pretty much did. (With the exception of Kirby’s Fourth World mythos’ incorporation into the Legion of Super-Heroes’ “Great Darkness Saga” arc, his DC creations were never done justice by other creators, especially ones who claimed a special insight into his original vision.)

In the end, it was the camp factor that sealed the deal. The sheer oddness of Kirby’s dialogue (staccato beat poems of ellipses, dashes, and exclamation marks) and more bizarre concepts were repeatedly singled out for good-natured razzing in Kitchen Sink’s World’s Worst Comics Awards miniseries in the early 1990’s, and the WTF factor was too great to ignore. It was a time when my interest in comics was at its lowest ebb, but I was able to convince my more enthusiastic brother as my proxy. Something happened, though. We came for some cheap laughs, but instead went away with a deep sense of respect for the man’s work, but not necessarily for the reasons one might expect.

Now that the pendulum has swung completely the other way, and Jack Kirby has become a highly revered figure in comics enthusiast circles, I find myself wondering if idolatry has trumped nuanced appreciation. Kirby is most often cited as an “ideas man,” someone who was able to make manifest more high concepts in 22 pages than most creators do in an entire career, but I think to just point to Devil Dinosaur or Granny Goodness and say “Wow, that shit is insane! Woo!” is incredibly reductive. It’s true that Kirby had an unparalleled flair for ideas, but that alone isn’t what makes him important.

(That’s not discounting his contribution his artistic impact, which was immense. His innovations in layouts and composition were as radical and dynamic a quantum leap in the comics medium as the use of multiple camera angles and setups were to film, but that’s pretty much established knowledge at this point.)

The current of the zeitgeist runs pretty close to the surface for many of Kirby’s ideas, and it’s pretty easy to figure out the inspirational material for much of them. Future Shock begets OMAC and “The World That’s Coming.” Planet of the Apes begets Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. Popular science articles on genetics beget Cadmus and the DNAliens. Chariots of the Gods? leads to The Eternals. One of the later issues of his Fantastic Four run included a thinly veiled homage to The Prisoner. Of course, it’s not the inspiration but what one does with it, and Kirby had a knack for reimagination beyond recognition that eluded his peers and would be imitators, but the real thing that set him apart was his underlying idealism and faith that good will triumph.

For me, it’s best embodied by one of the core elements of Kirby’s Fourth World mythos. To seal a truce, the leaders of two factions of warring gods, one good and evil, agree to an exchange of sons. The child of the good leader, Scott Free (aka Mister Miracle), rises above the crushing despair of the hellworld orphanage to which he is sent off to, and manages to retain his fundamental sense of decency. The child of the evil leader, Orion, grows to embrace -- however tenuously -- the righteousness of those who have raised him. It’s the old nature versus nurture argument, but where all paths lead to redemption.

Sure, summarized in this manner it may sound a bit corny and overly simplistic, but in light of how goodness is currently presented in the superhero genre as an extended holding action against overwhelming evil, it’s both refreshing and uplifting to witness in action. In Kirby’s world, evil by its very nature is inevitably doomed to failure. All of Darkseid’s (the leader of the evil gods) plans are destined to come to naught because he cannot grasp the virtues of friendship, compassion, and noble sacrifice…

…and that’s worth a zillion Devil Dinosaurs or Paranex the Fighting Fetuses in my book. (Though I really, really do love Paranex the Fighting Fetus. Seriously, if I ever get a tattoo, it’s going to be of the little guy.)

The Thompson Twins - King for a Day (from Here's to Future Days, 1985) - THEY ARE NOT TWINS!!! -- YET THEY COME -- COME FROM AN ISLAND ACROSS THE SEA -- TO DELIVER "POP MUSIC" FOR THE PURPOSE OF --- ENTERTAINMENT!!!!!


Another reason Jack Kirby will always be tops in my book is that he created the Forever People, a Fourth World title about a group of cosmic hippies. Even if he kind of flubbed the execution, the fact that a man of my grandparents’ generation was willing to present the youth counterculture in a sympathetic, non-caricatured manner not too long after the 1968 Democratic Convention and the Kent State shootings counts as nothing short of revolutionary.

Shamen - Phorever People (from Boss Drum, 1992) - I always imagined them as being more into aggressively mellow singer-songwriter stuff myself... (Actually, whenever I read the Forever People, the "Yay, Eden!" song from the space hippie episode of Star Trek loops in my head.)