Jack Kirby's 90th birthday honored in the NYT

Posted by Cory Doctorow, August 28, 2007 5:02 PM | permalink

In honor of comic legend Jack Kirby's 90th birthday, the NY Times has a great little feature on him.

Mr. Kirby did a lot more than just draw. As the critic Gary Groth so ably put it in The Comics Journal Library, "He barreled like a freight train through the first 50 years of comic books like he owned the place." He mastered and transformed all the genres, including romance, Westerns, science fiction and supernatural comics, before he landed at Marvel.
He created a new grammar of storytelling and a cinematic style of motion. Once-wooden characters cascaded from one frame to another -- or even from page to page -- threatening to fall right out of the book into the reader's lap. The force of punches thrown was visibly and explosively evident. Even at rest, a Kirby character pulsed with tension and energy in a way that makes movie versions of the same characters seem static by comparison.

Link (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

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Discussion

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#1 posted by OM

, August 29, 2007 8:09 AM

...And what does DC Comics do to honor The King's memory? Rather than using Jack's greatest creations, the New Gods, they're publishing an 8-issue miniseries killing off *all* of them.

...Why? Because DC's EIC, Dan Didio, admittedly loves to kill off "old characters" and replace them with "newer, fresher ones". Ones that don't sell, as their recent Firestorm and Flash revamp failures have proved. This sort of recycling isn't what the fans want, not that Didio cares one iota, apparently. And now he's got the "Fourth World" that Kirby created in his sights.

Jack Kirby deserves more respect than that. This is essentially pissing on his grave.

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#2 posted by Anonymous , August 29, 2007 8:14 AM

...how 'bout that other 'Jack Kirby' who invented the integrated-circuit in the 1960's ?

Who had a bigger direct impact on your life ?

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#3 posted by Listener #109577 , August 29, 2007 12:31 PM

@ #2 anonymous:

What about him? Is it his 90th birthday?

Care for an apple or an orange?

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#4 posted by 流水线

, August 30, 2007 1:05 AM

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