Will Murray
"COSMIC" KIRBY AND THE GOD CONCEPT
I've been a fan of Jack Kirby for about 45 years, ever since I started
reading comics at the tail end of 1961. My timing was pretty good. I came in just
as the great Kirby Explosion of Cosmic Creativity was about to begin. It was,
let's face it, the Big Bang of Comics for my generation.
While I don't clearly recall my first introduction to Jack Kirby's work other
that it had to have been on one Marvel's many monster titles, I was able to
recreate it from memory and on-sale dates. It was "KRAGOOM! The Creature
Who Caught an Astronaut," in Journey into Mystery #78, March 1962.
It was a creepy crepuscular little 7- pager inked by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee's
favorite Kirby inker, and one of mine. "Kragoom" was one of the last of the "Big
Monster" tales Kirby did. Lee was phasing them out in favor of shorter,
spookier stories.
A second Kirby tale, "The Sorcerer," backed up the first. My other
favorite Kirby inker, Dick Ayers, embellished that one. It was a perfect example
of the type of fantasy tale Kirby had specialized in since the days he produced
Black Magic with Joe Simon.
Soon, I discovered the companion titles--Strange Tales, Tales to
Astonish and Tales of Suspense. Kirby led off every issue with haunting tales
like "The Two-Headed Thing", "The Martian Who Stole a City" and "The
Midnight Monster." New Kirby stories appeared virtually every week. It
was astounding.
Back then, he was simply J. Kirby, for that was all the signature Stan
Lee allowed him. Soon, Kirby had a first name and he started transitioning from
monsters and aliens to superheroes. I brought FF 4, then Incredible Hulk #1.
Soon there was Thor and an emerging legion of others.
I read other publishers of course. DC. Charlton. Radio Comics. But I never
suspected that DC’s Challengers of the Unknown had been created by Kirby,
who had abandoned it to other hands. Nor did I recognize that emblematic image
of the Fly that decorated his cover logo was a Kirby drawing.
Twenty years in the comics business, Jack Kirby had saturated the field.
He was about to reclaim and reenergize it.
The superheroes came tumbling out. Kirby was such a dominant figure
that even though he didn't originate Iron Man, everyone assumed he did. In a
way they were correct. His cover for Daredevil #1 smacked of being a concept
sketch, but how much of the character design was Kirby and how much Bill
Everett will probably never be known.
Even Spider-Man, the most un-Kirby hero in the growing Marvel
firmament, turned out to have Kirby roots in a thing called the Silver Spider.
But the true wonder was not simply the new superheroes. Kirby had
created a young army of them in the two decades before the 1960s--although
hardy any of them possessed true super powers. It was in the expanding
universe which these new Marvel heroes explored. Not just on Earth and near-
space, but in Atlantis and Asgard and across other dimensions. Not content with
fighting crime and supercriminals through his superheroes, Kirby pushed the
frontiers of comic book melodrama out beyond its farthest extensions.
Comic books would never be the same again. They couldn't, any more
than a supernova could return to being just an ordinary sun.
I read it all and loved them all. To this day, I still think the best era to
grow up reading comic books was in the 1960s. Jack Kirby was not the only
genius at work in that incandescent decade, but he was the greatest genius.
To this day, no other comic book talent created or co-created so many enduring
heroes.
Over time, my interest in Kirby the artist shifted to Kirby the man.
His creativity intrigued me. Who was this guy who executed pages and
pages of art at supernormal speeds? What made this creative dynamo tick?
From whence sprang his unique genius?
I don't know if the answer will ever be known. Jack Kirby as a human
volcano of inspiration. A prolific absorber and regurgitator of ideas. Give him a
weak concept--say Ant-Man--and Kirby would make it seem inspired, if not
brilliant.
Although I met him a few times and interviewed him twice, I never got
to know the man. But others who did know him described a fascinating figure.
Artist Chuck Cuidera first encountered him in 1940, when he applied
to Fox Comics for work and met the newly-minted team of Jack Kirby and partner
Joe Simon, who was art-directing at Fox.
"Joe Simon hired me right on the spot and he said, 'You're going to
be my assistant.' The guy that was sitting in back of him was Jack Kirby. He was
doing 'Cosmic Carson.' I still remember that. He used to talk to himself quite a bit.
Nice guy. Real nice guy. Of course, Jack Kirby and Joe were getting ready to do
Captain America."
DC editor Jack Schiff, who worked with the duo in the 40s and 50s, told
me the following:
"I would say that Jack was more creative, but wilder. Joe was the guy
who would pull it together. We once had a sort of race in the front office. We had
a big artist's room. Jack and Mort Meskin were sitting next to each other and
there was some copy we needed pretty quickly from both of them. Each of them
turned out five pages of pencils. Beautifully. It was really something. After a
while, people began to crowd around watching. And they would both go ahead
undisturbed. Meskin was a more careful artist than Kirby, and that's where Joe
Simon came in, in a sense taming or correcting some of Jack's stuff."
Five pages a day was and still is considered the maximum number of
comic book pages a professional artist can turn out without his work suffering.
It's believed to be the maximum limit of sustained human capacity. Few can do it.
Reportedly Kirby did it on a routine basis. For that reason, the five-page limit
is called the Kirby Barrier.
Larry Lieber, who with Stan Lee and Joe Simon racked up the
greatest number of Kirby collaborations during the days when he scripted Jack's
pre-hero Marvel monsters, recalled that Kirby drew so rapidly that Lieber was
always in a rush to produce new scripts to feed the relentless artistic machine
that was Jack Kirby.
Lieber recounted, "When I was starting to draw--this is before the
Rawhide Kid--Stan said, 'Jack, maybe you could help Larry to draw. Show him
something or other.' And he sat down and he took a page that I had drawn, and
he went over it to show me what he would have done it. I said, 'How do you
draw?' And he showed me how to construct in a very simple way. He took a
blank page and he made a sketch. He set the figure and he did this and he did
that. He was doing it for me. I noticed he paid no attention to the anatomy of the
figure at all. I said, 'Jack, what about anatomy?' He said to me, 'Larry, if I had to
worry about anatomy, I couldn't get my pages out." The page that I drew was a
guy in a coat walking someplace. And what he drew for me wasn't anything. It
was just like bending a figure. Like an anatomy lesson, except there was no
anatomy!"
Kirby friend Richard Kyle, who commissioned "Street Code" for
Argosy, told me that many many people described Jack's working method in
the identical way: "Jack would just stare and stare at a blank sheet of paper as if
projecting a mental image onto the paper. And then he would draw what he saw."
Inker Mike Thibbeadoux:
"...the layouts he did were so rough, you could hardly see the figures. And
then he'd start up in the left hand corner. I remember ....it was like the image was
already there and he was tracing it. It's quite amazing."
Stan Lee described it this way: "Most artists would draw a circle for the
head and a circle for the body and then start filling it in. But Jack would just start
with the head and he would draw it and every line was there right from the start.
He didn't make little rough drawings first...it was the most eerie feeling watching
him draw--you felt he was tracing what was already in his head."
Sometimes, Kirby would start in the corner of the page, beginning with a
foot and extrapolate from there, in flagrant violation of all the rules of
composition.
"When Jack had what he wanted in mind, he just drew it," said Mark
Evanier. "It was eerie."
"Mike is wrong," corrected Joe Simon. "The other guys are right. Jack
did not sketch out lines or circles. He just put down the drawings where he
wanted them. I have worked with Jack for over 25 years and never saw him
roughing out a figure before he drew it. I also worked with another genius, my
letterer Howard Ferguson who often did not do penciled lines as guides under his
lettering. That too was weird."
Larry Lieber thinks he understands how Jack Kirby worked.
"First, he did see it in his mind a lot. And the more you see it in your
mind, the easier it is, I think. The style in which he drew, it was easy to do it with
that. There was something very simple about his drawing. It wasn't very
illustrative, like John Buscema. And he didn't vary his emotions that much, for
instance. Or his expressions on the faces. He had been doing it for so many
years, and he just trained himself to do it. And he did it in a simple way.
"I thought he was wonderful as a comic artist," Lieber continues.
"The best. But one of the things I envied was that he had a style that almost no
inker could ruin. It was almost inker-proof. Not quite. Why? Because his work
was so simple, in a way. There was nothing subtle in his drawing for an inker to
go off. It was almost like doing an animated cartoon. Except he put millions of
figures in and he turned and twisted them. But once he put his basic drawing
down, you couldn't ruin it unless you just didn't want to follow the line. Yet the
beauty was in the power of it."
Stan Lee told me much the same thing: "Nobody could hurt Jack's stuff.
The strange thing about it, I cared much more about who inked Kirby than
Kirby did. We used to discuss in the office the fact that Kirby never seemed to
care who inked him. This is a guess on my part because I never asked him, but
I think Kirby felt his style was so strong that it just didn't matter who inked
him, that his own style would come through the way he wanted."
Still the questions linger. How did Kirby do it? At what point did he
shift from being merely a prolific comic book artist to "Cosmic" Kirby, Imagineer
of Universes?
Searching through the many interviews he gave, some clues
can be gleamed.
"I did a strip called 'Hurricane,' which was a forerunner of the Thor
mythology,” Kirby said 1976. “And 'Hurricane' became 'Mercury', and
'Mercury’ became something else. I began to combine mythology with
present-day action. And, bit by bit, the format for a lot of the stuff I do
today was born at that time. And I can tell you I had a healthy interest in
mythology…. A lot of the elements of my work today were present in the
strips then."
"My definition of the word 'cosmic' is 'everywhere,'" Kirby once said.
"Outside of Earth, we have everywhere. They say there's nothing out there. I
say there is everything out there. We haven't got the means or the money
to reach it, but it's out there!"
In his work, Jack Kirby first started searching "out there" after World War
II. The initial vehicle was the horror comic, Black Magic.
“The war was still fresh in my mind,” he told Ray Wyman. ”I couldn’t
draw rotting corpses and limbs like that. I used the stories my mother told me,
the ones her mother passed on to her. They were the same ones that inspired
Frankenstein and Dracula in the movies. They were just old legends and stories
about the supernatural, and they were very effective.”
Soon, the Space Age dawned. Challengers of the Unknown and Sky
Masters were Kirby’s first probes into the new frontiers of the newest comic book
field.
"Challengers of the Unknown came from their own particular
time," Kirby once explained. "They were post-war characters. What the
Challengers of the Unknown were saying is, Where are we going now?
And that is a question I asked in all those stories. In the Challengers, I
put in new gimmicks and the machines that we already had. I took them
two-three stages ahead as to what we might have. I would take them five
years ahead. If we had certain generators, I would make a supergenerator
of some kind, and have my story revolve around that. What would it do
to human beings? Perhaps it would summon aliens from some foreign
planet. It gives us the power to do that."
Eventually, Challengers and Sky Masters gave rise to the Fantastic
Four, out of which the Marvel Universe would evolve.
Elsewhere, Kirby observed, "Challengers was like a movie to
me. The science fiction pictures were beginning to break, and I felt the
Challengers were a part of that genre. I began to think about three words
which have always puzzled me: What's out there? I thought, what's really
out there? Then I began to draw characters from outer space, characters
from beneath the earth, characters from anywhere that we couldn't think
of. The Challengers were us contending with these very strange people.
Yes, they were always precursors to the Fantastic Four--except
the Fantastic Four were mutations."
It's always been clear to me that if Kirby hadn't have left DC,
Challengers of the Unknown would have been the vehicle for his mature
period. Instead, it was Fantastic Four.
Could an answer be found in Kirby's combat experiences in Europe?
Cryptically, Kirby once said that he thought he saw God after he hit Normandy
Beach. What did he mean by that? He didn't say, and the interviewer didn't probe
the subject, alas.
In an obscure interview Jack Kirby gave to Warren Reece for Overstreet
Comic Book Quarterly in 1994, he told the following life-changing tale:
"I had a guy die on me once, during the war, and he looked up at me and
he said, 'What the hell happened? What happened?' And here I was, just a
schmoe from the East Side from New York City, y'know, and what do you answer
the guy? I told him, 'You happened.' See? And that was real.
" It got me to think how valuable human beings are; and at that moment
I discovered my own humanity, In that moment, I discovered everybody else's'.
And when the man was hit and he asked me ,'What happened', I could only
answer him---here was a man who was slipping away--and I said, 'You
happened.' I tried to tell this man what I really felt; and that's what I felt.
"I felt that he had happened, and that was the most important event
in the world; and it set me to thinking. I said, 'What the hell really happened?" I
mean, they feed us a bunch of bull in a lot of various books. What the hell do
these facts mean? See? And I sit down and it's a privilege to have the time
sometime, to sit down and just say, 'What the hell really happened?' Did Joshua
really knock down the damned walls with 60 trumpets? That's bull. Did our
Creator send out angels all over the universe carrying his messages? What were
they? Guys with feathered wings and night gowns? Horsefeathers! What
happened? Of course, my designs probably don't fit the real thing, but they're
a step on my part to find out what the real thing was. To me, story-telling is
very real."
Kirby touched on this search for spiritual truth when he talked about
his painting, "Angel", in Ray Wyman's Art of Jack Kirby.
"I did 'Angel' because I wanted to portray my version of what an angel
might have really looked like. All we have to go by is what somebody painted of
what somebody else thought they saw. To the primitive people who might have
witnessed an angel, the idea of flight without wings--feathered wings--was
incomprehensible. So a Godly creature, even if it did have wings, would be
interpreted very differently."
In the final analysis, the forces that produced the cosmic-powered
Jack Kirby of the 60s was a combination of human and creative experience, a
natural maturation of a man and his chosen field, and finally, the indefinable.
Of them all, it's the indefinable that most intrigues me.
"I don't know what my senses are comprised of," Kirby once
admitted. "I only know that I have senses; I have whatever senses that I have.
And I bring them all into play. I don't know what my senses are...I can't define
them. All my senses are hidden from me. But they move me...I know our own
place the universe. I can feel the vastness of it inside myself. I began to realize
with each passing fact what a wonderful and awesome place the universe is,
and that helped me in comics because I was looking for the awesome. I found
it in Thor. I found it in Galactus.... I felt that somewhere around the cosmos
are powerful things that we know nothing about, and from that came
Galactus. He was almost like a god, and that's where I came up with the
god concepts. There might be things out there that are ultimates compared
to us."
Elsewhere, Kirby claimed that Galactus was his take on the Almighty.
"Galactus was God, and I was looking for God," he once admitted.
"When I first came up with Galactus, I was very awed by him. I didn't know what
to do with the character. Everybody talks about God, but what the heck does he
look like? Well, he's supposed to be awesome, and Galactus is awesome to me.
I drew him large and awesome. No one ever knew the extent of his powers or
anything, and I think symbolically that's our relationship [with God]."
This quest inevitably led to Kirby's New Gods, which he considered his
ultimate exploration of what he called the "God Concept."
“And, of course, from characters like Galactus and the Watcher, I evolved
the Fourth World out of it, which was entirely Biblical, with New Genesis and
Apokolips and the gods of New Genesis and Apokolips, the evil gods, the good
gods, and gods that were trapped between good and evil, and. of course.
frustrated…. And now I’m working on The Eternals, which attacks the same
theme from a different direction. The god theme is coming in from another
another direction. This is a takeoff on von Dankien’s theory about space
gods being here in the past, and naturally I’m making a variation of that and
elaborating on it. In other words, the intriguing question is, suppose they come
back? What happens?”
Kirby didn’t literally believe in these theories, any more than he
worshipped Thor. He was a devout Jew, with the traditional beliefs of a
person of that ancient faith. But the God concept was something that fed and
fired his imagination.
“To put it short,” he once observed, “the gods are giant reflections of
ourselves. They are ourselves as we think we should be or we might be. They
are idealistic and dramatic versions. They make a lot more noise than we do and
therefore attract a lot more attention that we do. We feel that we’ve been fulfilled
in some way if our own images act out fantasies that we entertain.”
It all seems to go back to that question posed by that nameless dying
soldier on an unknown European battlefield. True meaning lies in the questions—
because the ultimate answers may be unknowable.
"I didn't mean to lead anybody onto any sort of religious path," Kirby
told FOOM in 1975. "I have no message myself. I feel that life is a series of very
interesting questions, and very poor answers. But I am willing to settle for the
questions. If the questions are interesting. I feel I evoke them in what I do. I feel
that should be good enough for everyone else. I know it sounds pontifical just
saying it, but I usually don't see anything but a really interesting series of good
questions to keep everybody busy for the rest of their lives and then let it go at
that. So I think the God Concept has these types of elements in it. In other
words--what happened; what was happening; what's going to happen. Those are
the essential questions for anybody, and that's why we create gods, create
myths. Because we say 'These people know what's happening.' In other words,
we need to justify ourselves , so we create gods. We say, 'These people are
responsible for what's happening. These people are responsible for what going
to happen.' Of course, when we say things like that, we create a mystic element
in our own thinking. And I think that's what we see in it. We see some sort of
mysticism to explain the reason for our own environment, for our own psyche.
There are reasons for many of the things we fail to understand, but just aren't
qualified to see them. I believe that's why the God Concept is powerful--it
involves us. It involves us inside. It involves us outside. And that's the God
Concept. So everybody thinks in that direction. I think everybody thinks about
destiny. The forces that rule destiny. And, of course. those forces that we call
God. That's a powerful concept that rules us entirely."
In the four-color universe that he created, Jack Kirby was nothing
less than a Creator God.
"In the last analysis you face the universe by yourself," Kirby observed.
"You can't face it for anybody else; you can't face it in anybody else. The final
analysis is what counts. That's you. The 'you' business is involved in the God
Concept, and that's very strong. You'll find out in the end, when everything gets
wiped away and you stand in your underwear, all that's left is you. And you find
in that moment your feelings are very strong. And you're all there is. So when we
yearn for gods, we're merely expressing that kind of feeling..... 'I'm all there
is; you're all there is....I believe Marvel's treatment of Thor is valid because it
projects Thor as we'd like to see him. Thor is us...as a personal superhero. And
I think it's true. I think that all of us see ourselves as superheroes, and we try to
justify it with mysticism. And it's true because it works."
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Some uncredited quotes first appeared COMIC SCENE,
THE COMICS JOURNAL, COMIC BOOK MARKEPLACE and THE JACK KIRBY
COLLECTOR.
####
"COSMIC" KIRBY AND THE GOD CONCEPT
I've been a fan of Jack Kirby for about 45 years, ever since I started
reading comics at the tail end of 1961. My timing was pretty good. I came in just
as the great Kirby Explosion of Cosmic Creativity was about to begin. It was,
let's face it, the Big Bang of Comics for my generation.
While I don't clearly recall my first introduction to Jack Kirby's work other
that it had to have been on one Marvel's many monster titles, I was able to
recreate it from memory and on-sale dates. It was "KRAGOOM! The Creature
Who Caught an Astronaut," in Journey into Mystery #78, March 1962.
It was a creepy crepuscular little 7- pager inked by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee's
favorite Kirby inker, and one of mine. "Kragoom" was one of the last of the "Big
Monster" tales Kirby did. Lee was phasing them out in favor of shorter,
spookier stories.
A second Kirby tale, "The Sorcerer," backed up the first. My other
favorite Kirby inker, Dick Ayers, embellished that one. It was a perfect example
of the type of fantasy tale Kirby had specialized in since the days he produced
Black Magic with Joe Simon.
Soon, I discovered the companion titles--Strange Tales, Tales to
Astonish and Tales of Suspense. Kirby led off every issue with haunting tales
like "The Two-Headed Thing", "The Martian Who Stole a City" and "The
Midnight Monster." New Kirby stories appeared virtually every week. It
was astounding.
Back then, he was simply J. Kirby, for that was all the signature Stan
Lee allowed him. Soon, Kirby had a first name and he started transitioning from
monsters and aliens to superheroes. I brought FF 4, then Incredible Hulk #1.
Soon there was Thor and an emerging legion of others.
I read other publishers of course. DC. Charlton. Radio Comics. But I never
suspected that DC’s Challengers of the Unknown had been created by Kirby,
who had abandoned it to other hands. Nor did I recognize that emblematic image
of the Fly that decorated his cover logo was a Kirby drawing.
Twenty years in the comics business, Jack Kirby had saturated the field.
He was about to reclaim and reenergize it.
The superheroes came tumbling out. Kirby was such a dominant figure
that even though he didn't originate Iron Man, everyone assumed he did. In a
way they were correct. His cover for Daredevil #1 smacked of being a concept
sketch, but how much of the character design was Kirby and how much Bill
Everett will probably never be known.
Even Spider-Man, the most un-Kirby hero in the growing Marvel
firmament, turned out to have Kirby roots in a thing called the Silver Spider.
But the true wonder was not simply the new superheroes. Kirby had
created a young army of them in the two decades before the 1960s--although
hardy any of them possessed true super powers. It was in the expanding
universe which these new Marvel heroes explored. Not just on Earth and near-
space, but in Atlantis and Asgard and across other dimensions. Not content with
fighting crime and supercriminals through his superheroes, Kirby pushed the
frontiers of comic book melodrama out beyond its farthest extensions.
Comic books would never be the same again. They couldn't, any more
than a supernova could return to being just an ordinary sun.
I read it all and loved them all. To this day, I still think the best era to
grow up reading comic books was in the 1960s. Jack Kirby was not the only
genius at work in that incandescent decade, but he was the greatest genius.
To this day, no other comic book talent created or co-created so many enduring
heroes.
Over time, my interest in Kirby the artist shifted to Kirby the man.
His creativity intrigued me. Who was this guy who executed pages and
pages of art at supernormal speeds? What made this creative dynamo tick?
From whence sprang his unique genius?
I don't know if the answer will ever be known. Jack Kirby as a human
volcano of inspiration. A prolific absorber and regurgitator of ideas. Give him a
weak concept--say Ant-Man--and Kirby would make it seem inspired, if not
brilliant.
Although I met him a few times and interviewed him twice, I never got
to know the man. But others who did know him described a fascinating figure.
Artist Chuck Cuidera first encountered him in 1940, when he applied
to Fox Comics for work and met the newly-minted team of Jack Kirby and partner
Joe Simon, who was art-directing at Fox.
"Joe Simon hired me right on the spot and he said, 'You're going to
be my assistant.' The guy that was sitting in back of him was Jack Kirby. He was
doing 'Cosmic Carson.' I still remember that. He used to talk to himself quite a bit.
Nice guy. Real nice guy. Of course, Jack Kirby and Joe were getting ready to do
Captain America."
DC editor Jack Schiff, who worked with the duo in the 40s and 50s, told
me the following:
"I would say that Jack was more creative, but wilder. Joe was the guy
who would pull it together. We once had a sort of race in the front office. We had
a big artist's room. Jack and Mort Meskin were sitting next to each other and
there was some copy we needed pretty quickly from both of them. Each of them
turned out five pages of pencils. Beautifully. It was really something. After a
while, people began to crowd around watching. And they would both go ahead
undisturbed. Meskin was a more careful artist than Kirby, and that's where Joe
Simon came in, in a sense taming or correcting some of Jack's stuff."
Five pages a day was and still is considered the maximum number of
comic book pages a professional artist can turn out without his work suffering.
It's believed to be the maximum limit of sustained human capacity. Few can do it.
Reportedly Kirby did it on a routine basis. For that reason, the five-page limit
is called the Kirby Barrier.
Larry Lieber, who with Stan Lee and Joe Simon racked up the
greatest number of Kirby collaborations during the days when he scripted Jack's
pre-hero Marvel monsters, recalled that Kirby drew so rapidly that Lieber was
always in a rush to produce new scripts to feed the relentless artistic machine
that was Jack Kirby.
Lieber recounted, "When I was starting to draw--this is before the
Rawhide Kid--Stan said, 'Jack, maybe you could help Larry to draw. Show him
something or other.' And he sat down and he took a page that I had drawn, and
he went over it to show me what he would have done it. I said, 'How do you
draw?' And he showed me how to construct in a very simple way. He took a
blank page and he made a sketch. He set the figure and he did this and he did
that. He was doing it for me. I noticed he paid no attention to the anatomy of the
figure at all. I said, 'Jack, what about anatomy?' He said to me, 'Larry, if I had to
worry about anatomy, I couldn't get my pages out." The page that I drew was a
guy in a coat walking someplace. And what he drew for me wasn't anything. It
was just like bending a figure. Like an anatomy lesson, except there was no
anatomy!"
Kirby friend Richard Kyle, who commissioned "Street Code" for
Argosy, told me that many many people described Jack's working method in
the identical way: "Jack would just stare and stare at a blank sheet of paper as if
projecting a mental image onto the paper. And then he would draw what he saw."
Inker Mike Thibbeadoux:
"...the layouts he did were so rough, you could hardly see the figures. And
then he'd start up in the left hand corner. I remember ....it was like the image was
already there and he was tracing it. It's quite amazing."
Stan Lee described it this way: "Most artists would draw a circle for the
head and a circle for the body and then start filling it in. But Jack would just start
with the head and he would draw it and every line was there right from the start.
He didn't make little rough drawings first...it was the most eerie feeling watching
him draw--you felt he was tracing what was already in his head."
Sometimes, Kirby would start in the corner of the page, beginning with a
foot and extrapolate from there, in flagrant violation of all the rules of
composition.
"When Jack had what he wanted in mind, he just drew it," said Mark
Evanier. "It was eerie."
"Mike is wrong," corrected Joe Simon. "The other guys are right. Jack
did not sketch out lines or circles. He just put down the drawings where he
wanted them. I have worked with Jack for over 25 years and never saw him
roughing out a figure before he drew it. I also worked with another genius, my
letterer Howard Ferguson who often did not do penciled lines as guides under his
lettering. That too was weird."
Larry Lieber thinks he understands how Jack Kirby worked.
"First, he did see it in his mind a lot. And the more you see it in your
mind, the easier it is, I think. The style in which he drew, it was easy to do it with
that. There was something very simple about his drawing. It wasn't very
illustrative, like John Buscema. And he didn't vary his emotions that much, for
instance. Or his expressions on the faces. He had been doing it for so many
years, and he just trained himself to do it. And he did it in a simple way.
"I thought he was wonderful as a comic artist," Lieber continues.
"The best. But one of the things I envied was that he had a style that almost no
inker could ruin. It was almost inker-proof. Not quite. Why? Because his work
was so simple, in a way. There was nothing subtle in his drawing for an inker to
go off. It was almost like doing an animated cartoon. Except he put millions of
figures in and he turned and twisted them. But once he put his basic drawing
down, you couldn't ruin it unless you just didn't want to follow the line. Yet the
beauty was in the power of it."
Stan Lee told me much the same thing: "Nobody could hurt Jack's stuff.
The strange thing about it, I cared much more about who inked Kirby than
Kirby did. We used to discuss in the office the fact that Kirby never seemed to
care who inked him. This is a guess on my part because I never asked him, but
I think Kirby felt his style was so strong that it just didn't matter who inked
him, that his own style would come through the way he wanted."
Still the questions linger. How did Kirby do it? At what point did he
shift from being merely a prolific comic book artist to "Cosmic" Kirby, Imagineer
of Universes?
Searching through the many interviews he gave, some clues
can be gleamed.
"I did a strip called 'Hurricane,' which was a forerunner of the Thor
mythology,” Kirby said 1976. “And 'Hurricane' became 'Mercury', and
'Mercury’ became something else. I began to combine mythology with
present-day action. And, bit by bit, the format for a lot of the stuff I do
today was born at that time. And I can tell you I had a healthy interest in
mythology…. A lot of the elements of my work today were present in the
strips then."
"My definition of the word 'cosmic' is 'everywhere,'" Kirby once said.
"Outside of Earth, we have everywhere. They say there's nothing out there. I
say there is everything out there. We haven't got the means or the money
to reach it, but it's out there!"
In his work, Jack Kirby first started searching "out there" after World War
II. The initial vehicle was the horror comic, Black Magic.
“The war was still fresh in my mind,” he told Ray Wyman. ”I couldn’t
draw rotting corpses and limbs like that. I used the stories my mother told me,
the ones her mother passed on to her. They were the same ones that inspired
Frankenstein and Dracula in the movies. They were just old legends and stories
about the supernatural, and they were very effective.”
Soon, the Space Age dawned. Challengers of the Unknown and Sky
Masters were Kirby’s first probes into the new frontiers of the newest comic book
field.
"Challengers of the Unknown came from their own particular
time," Kirby once explained. "They were post-war characters. What the
Challengers of the Unknown were saying is, Where are we going now?
And that is a question I asked in all those stories. In the Challengers, I
put in new gimmicks and the machines that we already had. I took them
two-three stages ahead as to what we might have. I would take them five
years ahead. If we had certain generators, I would make a supergenerator
of some kind, and have my story revolve around that. What would it do
to human beings? Perhaps it would summon aliens from some foreign
planet. It gives us the power to do that."
Eventually, Challengers and Sky Masters gave rise to the Fantastic
Four, out of which the Marvel Universe would evolve.
Elsewhere, Kirby observed, "Challengers was like a movie to
me. The science fiction pictures were beginning to break, and I felt the
Challengers were a part of that genre. I began to think about three words
which have always puzzled me: What's out there? I thought, what's really
out there? Then I began to draw characters from outer space, characters
from beneath the earth, characters from anywhere that we couldn't think
of. The Challengers were us contending with these very strange people.
Yes, they were always precursors to the Fantastic Four--except
the Fantastic Four were mutations."
It's always been clear to me that if Kirby hadn't have left DC,
Challengers of the Unknown would have been the vehicle for his mature
period. Instead, it was Fantastic Four.
Could an answer be found in Kirby's combat experiences in Europe?
Cryptically, Kirby once said that he thought he saw God after he hit Normandy
Beach. What did he mean by that? He didn't say, and the interviewer didn't probe
the subject, alas.
In an obscure interview Jack Kirby gave to Warren Reece for Overstreet
Comic Book Quarterly in 1994, he told the following life-changing tale:
"I had a guy die on me once, during the war, and he looked up at me and
he said, 'What the hell happened? What happened?' And here I was, just a
schmoe from the East Side from New York City, y'know, and what do you answer
the guy? I told him, 'You happened.' See? And that was real.
" It got me to think how valuable human beings are; and at that moment
I discovered my own humanity, In that moment, I discovered everybody else's'.
And when the man was hit and he asked me ,'What happened', I could only
answer him---here was a man who was slipping away--and I said, 'You
happened.' I tried to tell this man what I really felt; and that's what I felt.
"I felt that he had happened, and that was the most important event
in the world; and it set me to thinking. I said, 'What the hell really happened?" I
mean, they feed us a bunch of bull in a lot of various books. What the hell do
these facts mean? See? And I sit down and it's a privilege to have the time
sometime, to sit down and just say, 'What the hell really happened?' Did Joshua
really knock down the damned walls with 60 trumpets? That's bull. Did our
Creator send out angels all over the universe carrying his messages? What were
they? Guys with feathered wings and night gowns? Horsefeathers! What
happened? Of course, my designs probably don't fit the real thing, but they're
a step on my part to find out what the real thing was. To me, story-telling is
very real."
Kirby touched on this search for spiritual truth when he talked about
his painting, "Angel", in Ray Wyman's Art of Jack Kirby.
"I did 'Angel' because I wanted to portray my version of what an angel
might have really looked like. All we have to go by is what somebody painted of
what somebody else thought they saw. To the primitive people who might have
witnessed an angel, the idea of flight without wings--feathered wings--was
incomprehensible. So a Godly creature, even if it did have wings, would be
interpreted very differently."
In the final analysis, the forces that produced the cosmic-powered
Jack Kirby of the 60s was a combination of human and creative experience, a
natural maturation of a man and his chosen field, and finally, the indefinable.
Of them all, it's the indefinable that most intrigues me.
"I don't know what my senses are comprised of," Kirby once
admitted. "I only know that I have senses; I have whatever senses that I have.
And I bring them all into play. I don't know what my senses are...I can't define
them. All my senses are hidden from me. But they move me...I know our own
place the universe. I can feel the vastness of it inside myself. I began to realize
with each passing fact what a wonderful and awesome place the universe is,
and that helped me in comics because I was looking for the awesome. I found
it in Thor. I found it in Galactus.... I felt that somewhere around the cosmos
are powerful things that we know nothing about, and from that came
Galactus. He was almost like a god, and that's where I came up with the
god concepts. There might be things out there that are ultimates compared
to us."
Elsewhere, Kirby claimed that Galactus was his take on the Almighty.
"Galactus was God, and I was looking for God," he once admitted.
"When I first came up with Galactus, I was very awed by him. I didn't know what
to do with the character. Everybody talks about God, but what the heck does he
look like? Well, he's supposed to be awesome, and Galactus is awesome to me.
I drew him large and awesome. No one ever knew the extent of his powers or
anything, and I think symbolically that's our relationship [with God]."
This quest inevitably led to Kirby's New Gods, which he considered his
ultimate exploration of what he called the "God Concept."
“And, of course, from characters like Galactus and the Watcher, I evolved
the Fourth World out of it, which was entirely Biblical, with New Genesis and
Apokolips and the gods of New Genesis and Apokolips, the evil gods, the good
gods, and gods that were trapped between good and evil, and. of course.
frustrated…. And now I’m working on The Eternals, which attacks the same
theme from a different direction. The god theme is coming in from another
another direction. This is a takeoff on von Dankien’s theory about space
gods being here in the past, and naturally I’m making a variation of that and
elaborating on it. In other words, the intriguing question is, suppose they come
back? What happens?”
Kirby didn’t literally believe in these theories, any more than he
worshipped Thor. He was a devout Jew, with the traditional beliefs of a
person of that ancient faith. But the God concept was something that fed and
fired his imagination.
“To put it short,” he once observed, “the gods are giant reflections of
ourselves. They are ourselves as we think we should be or we might be. They
are idealistic and dramatic versions. They make a lot more noise than we do and
therefore attract a lot more attention that we do. We feel that we’ve been fulfilled
in some way if our own images act out fantasies that we entertain.”
It all seems to go back to that question posed by that nameless dying
soldier on an unknown European battlefield. True meaning lies in the questions—
because the ultimate answers may be unknowable.
"I didn't mean to lead anybody onto any sort of religious path," Kirby
told FOOM in 1975. "I have no message myself. I feel that life is a series of very
interesting questions, and very poor answers. But I am willing to settle for the
questions. If the questions are interesting. I feel I evoke them in what I do. I feel
that should be good enough for everyone else. I know it sounds pontifical just
saying it, but I usually don't see anything but a really interesting series of good
questions to keep everybody busy for the rest of their lives and then let it go at
that. So I think the God Concept has these types of elements in it. In other
words--what happened; what was happening; what's going to happen. Those are
the essential questions for anybody, and that's why we create gods, create
myths. Because we say 'These people know what's happening.' In other words,
we need to justify ourselves , so we create gods. We say, 'These people are
responsible for what's happening. These people are responsible for what going
to happen.' Of course, when we say things like that, we create a mystic element
in our own thinking. And I think that's what we see in it. We see some sort of
mysticism to explain the reason for our own environment, for our own psyche.
There are reasons for many of the things we fail to understand, but just aren't
qualified to see them. I believe that's why the God Concept is powerful--it
involves us. It involves us inside. It involves us outside. And that's the God
Concept. So everybody thinks in that direction. I think everybody thinks about
destiny. The forces that rule destiny. And, of course. those forces that we call
God. That's a powerful concept that rules us entirely."
In the four-color universe that he created, Jack Kirby was nothing
less than a Creator God.
"In the last analysis you face the universe by yourself," Kirby observed.
"You can't face it for anybody else; you can't face it in anybody else. The final
analysis is what counts. That's you. The 'you' business is involved in the God
Concept, and that's very strong. You'll find out in the end, when everything gets
wiped away and you stand in your underwear, all that's left is you. And you find
in that moment your feelings are very strong. And you're all there is. So when we
yearn for gods, we're merely expressing that kind of feeling..... 'I'm all there
is; you're all there is....I believe Marvel's treatment of Thor is valid because it
projects Thor as we'd like to see him. Thor is us...as a personal superhero. And
I think it's true. I think that all of us see ourselves as superheroes, and we try to
justify it with mysticism. And it's true because it works."
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Some uncredited quotes first appeared COMIC SCENE,
THE COMICS JOURNAL, COMIC BOOK MARKEPLACE and THE JACK KIRBY
COLLECTOR.
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