I sometimes think that the exaggerated esteem afforded Jack Kirby’s body of work ultimately does him no favors. Kirby, of course, was a gaddam genius — creating (or co-creating, depending on how much credence you feel like granting Stan Lee on any given day) most of Marvel Comics’ most iconic characters, defining the visual vocabulary of graphic storytelling, and mastering just about every conceivable genre within comics, including a few that he invented himself. But there’s a tendency among Kirby fans to treat every dot, every scribble, as a legacy for the ages.
This view of Kirby, as the lone Promethean wizard creating worlds from whole cloth, began even in his lifetime — encouraged, no doubt, by the man’s unprecedented creative control over his latter-day projects. Rather than the assembly-line system of most comics, where the different jobs of putting a book together were coordinated from the central location of the publisher, Jack Kirby’s 1970s Marvel work found Kirby himself wearing all the hats. He was both writer and penciller; inks and lettering were both done by assistants (usually Mike Royer), in Kirby’s own studio and under his supervision — making him his own editor, in title and in practice. In the letter-to-the-editor pages reproduced in the Devil Dinosaur Omnibus — the first reprinting of the comic’s original 9-issue run from 1978 — the address given for correspondence is a PO box in Kirby’s California hometown, rather than, as in Marvel’s other books, the publisher’s New York City offices. Think about that: Kirby didn’t even trust Marvel to forward his mail. That’s the level of sovereignty that he, alone of all comics creators, was afforded. No wonder they called him “The King.” (more…)
The cover has Sentinels on it. The opening credits have Sentinels in them. The back cover seems to promise this will be a really cool, animated adaptation of the classic X-Men comic-book two-parter “Days of Future Past.” So where in the flying hell are the Sentinels and a war-ravaged future in the freakin’ movie?
Although a major player in Norse mythology, the character of Thor is known primarily to comics fans, and only recently to the general public, due to the news that famed director Kenneth Branagh (Peter’s Friends, Dead Again) will be helming a movie for Marvel Studios based on the character’s heroic exploits, due out in 2011.
In the past month I’ve been rooting through the boxes in my attic, looking at the stuff I’ve squirreled away up there over the years. I came upon a small cache of drawings, paintings, and such, gave them a once-over, and decided maybe it was a good idea to bring them downstairs and get some quality scans together, just to have a decent record of their existence. I doodle from time to time, but my dreams of being in the business of comics are long gone. This is partly due to the quality of what’s out there, specifically the writing. In the past two decades Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller have made that once unimaginable leap from the “funny books” to honest-to-God literature, and they didn’t even have to change their addresses. With the often funny but deeply felt 
. Each example not only deserves space on the snootiest of bookshelves, but some deserve to kick a few warhorses off those shelves just for breathing room.