LINE KING

Jack Kirby Heroes Thrive in Comic Books and Film (ELVIS MITCHELL, 8/27/03, NY Times)

The characters that spilled out of Kirby's pen are not confined to the DC books or to the astonishing run that Marvel Comics had in the 1960's. In some cases Kirby pasted his characters over photo collages, furthering the Pop Art homage paid to him by Roy Lichtenstein. He also made a template in the 1940's by creating Captain America with Joe Simon.

In "The Great Comic Book Heroes," Jules Feiffer summarized the appeal of Kirby's 1940 comic books, a style that took on a smooth and magnetic elan: "Muscles stretched magically, foreshortened shockingly. Legs were never less than four feet apart when a punch was thrown. Every panel was a population explosion--casts of thousands: all fighting, leaping, falling, crawling."

Mr. Chabon agreed with Mr. Feiffer's assessment. "He could make the comics panel seem too small to contain the stories he was telling," he said. "What I loved about him then, and continue to admire about him now, was that sense of the inexhaustibility of his imagination in every issue of whatever comic he happened to be working on. He worked all over the place his entire career and would just fill each one with 15 great ideas for a story and just push them all into the same book together. And then the next issue would come out, and he'd have 15 more."

What's most interesting is to contrast his work to that of Steve Ditko. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 27, 2003 12:37 PM