Happy 92nd Birthday, Jack Kirby!

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ThatNickGuy

If Jack Kirby had lived to be around today (well, technically, yesterday, the 28th), he would have turned 92.

I never really had a love for Kirby's work until I started watching Superman: The Animated Series, which highlighted a LOT of great Kirby characters, including my all time favourite villain, Darkseid. Now, I own a lot of his works, including all of DC's Kirby Omnibus' so far (aside from the recently released Sandman Omnibus), a giant first volume of his work with Stan Lee on Fantastic Four and even the Devil Dinosaur omnibus.

He's one of the greats and it's really, truly sad that he isn't a household name like Stan Lee.

One website did a 24 Hour Kirby Celebration that I'm starting to looking through:
http://bullyscomics.blogspot.com/search/label/24 Hours with Jack Kirby

We'll miss ya, Jack.
 
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Also, if you liked a comic book written in the last 25 years, you liked Kirby by proxy. He and Ditko more or less invented the whole variable line width/block shading shading thing. I'm a big fan.
 
ZenMonkey

ZenMonkey

Love those KirbyFacts! He is far more deserving of that list than the other guy who is usually found in such lists (the homophobic, creationist "action star").

I totally agree Kirby should be up there with Lee. On second thought, Lee's popularity these days stems mostly from his attention whoring, so maybe I take that back.
 
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ThatNickGuy

I'm sorry, AE, but Jack had a bigger hand in those ideas than anyone ever gives him credit for. Look at any issues that he did at DC and the sheer number of characters that came out ever not just every couple of issues, but EVERY issue.

After Jack left Marvel, the number of great characters dwindled and Fantastic Four sure as heck wasn't the same book after he and Stan stopped working on it.

I'm not saying that Lee doesn't deserve credit, but Kirby deserves a lot more than he ever got. The way to write a Marvel story back then would be having a conversation with Stan Lee, bouncing ideas around, then the artist would go and draw the whole comic (sometimes without Lee's say at all), then Lee would write in the dialogue, captions, etc. Sometimes, Kirby would make suggestions for dialogue.

Why do you think Steve Ditko, who CO-CREATED Spider-Man and that entire mythos, never wants anything to do with the business anymore? He, along with Kirby, basically helped create the Marvel universe and Stan Lee took all the credit. Technically, he was the PR guy for Marvel, because he did all the interviews whereas Ditko and Kirby were very reserved people. So, the newspapers and such started treated it as Lee being the idea guy and gave the ideas to the artists. And he rarely, if ever corrected them.

Kirby and Ditko got SCREWED. Lee made craploads of money on merchandise sales that neither of those guys, or other artists, saw a dime of. There's a story in Kirby's biography where he went into a toy store and was fuming, seeing all the toys of characters that he co-created and DESIGNED, and wasn't seeing a red cent for them.
 
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It's true, but I think Lee has unfairly gotten a lot of backlash hate lately, too. Kirby and Ditko breathed life into the creations, but Lee did have a lot of the skeleton ideas. Like persecution of mutants, and a hero who struggled to get by financially day to day, or a family of heros who hated each other sometimes. Lee may personally be an asshole, but those are some of the core things that make Marvel Marvel.
 
@Li3n

@Li3n

Lee's gotten backlash coz he blows his own horn too much... but let's not take this thread there...
 
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ThatNickGuy

Covar said:
Kirby is an idea man, but was certainly no writer. FF is 50/50 Lee and Kirby.
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It was definiately Lee/Kirby that did FF, I'm not arguing there. But Kirby had more than his share of work involved in that comic.

Also, if he's no writer, then how do you explain his Fourth World books, Kamandi, Devil Dinosaur, The Demon, The Losers, The Eternals and OMAC? I've read them all and, while they're certainly not Shakespeare, they're damn well-written.
 
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