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I wonder if you wouldn't mind ranting endlessly on Kirby's Fourth World. Having just discovered the majesty of the King (thru Marvel's FF Essentials), I'd like to read more of his work but am put off by the mixed reviews I have heard. What did you think? What worked? What didn't? Is the art purdy?
OK...my take on The New Gods is filtered through everyone else's take on it, since I didn't get my hands on them until the mid-80's. It's pretty clear that Kirby was holding back toward the end of his Marvel run, and was just going through the same characters over and over again, but when he came to DC, his batteries were recharged.
He brought his visual style to DC, which had previously had a very stiff house style, and it was very clear that while they wanted him to work on the Superman line, they didn't like how he DREW Superman, hense they had people redrawing all of his Superman and Jimmy Olsen heads. They also paired him with Vince Colletta, who tends to simplify drawings, remove backgrounds and "flatten" artwork to a bland house style. (and OH how I could piss and moan about Colletta) After Kirby complained about the changes made to his art, DC let him hire his own inkers and present a completed package to them, which they would publish. It's at this point that Kirby's finished artwork style changed, because he hired inkers who didn't change his work AT ALL.
So, you get Kirby's energy, amazing creativity and power, but none of the art corrections that people like Joe Sinnot did when they inked his work at Marvel. Some people like it a lot, some hated it, and me, I appreciate it, but wish it could have been inked by someone with more polish. Still, there is page after page of art that blows me away, and no one does action better than Kirby. So, artwise? It's a step down from his peak Marvel work IMHO, but better than his early Marvel or Golden Age work.
Story-wise...it's pure Kirby, which means that there is amazing creativity and no discipline. Some issues are brilliant ("The Pact" and "The Glory Boat" are two of my favorite comics ever), and some feel like the pages might be out of order, but you can go along for the ride because of the inventiveness and visuals. The scripting is up for a LOT of debate...I have heard some people who knew Kirby say that his characters spoke like that because HE spoke like that, others have called it "word jazz", and some people have said the scripting is painful. I didn't like it when I first read it, but now I sort of "read past it" considered the ideas Kirby wanted to get across, not the actual scripted words.
In the formats it is in (four black and white trades) it's a cheap buy, and well worth the reading, IMHO. You can see things where Kirby was just doing a "data dump" from his brain: Black Racer was his attempt to have a version Silver Surfer that he could control after Stan completely changed the character; The Forever People were what he thought about hippies; The whole "House Roy" thing in Mr. Miracle was the nastiest "fuck you" in entertainment other than John Lennon's "How Do You Sleep" and so on. There is enough stuff there for a entire comic book company to go for years using his ideas (It's my contention that Marvel rode Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko's ideas until the late 90's when they finally had to go and get some talented people to create new stuff rather than hand off each series to be written by a different editor), and if you can let go of the scripting, it's an exercise in PURE joycore.
My opinion (which is not a majority among the hard-core Kirby fans) is that he was at his best on issues 40 - 80 of the Fantastic Four when Stan was helping him restrain his natural ADHD creativity and Sinnott was smoothing out his art. His New Gods was GREAT stuff, as was his war stories in Our Fighting Forces, The Eternals (until the Hulk story) and Kamandi, but when the New Gods was cancelled, a lot of the wind went out of his sails, and he quit putting so much of himself into his work.
And The Hunger Dogs was SUCH a horrible mess that I can't read it again...and it wasn't Jack's fault it was so fucked up. He submitted it, DC said he needed to rework the story so that they could use all of the characters afterwards, his eyesight was failing and he had a unmeetable deadline, so he and his inkers literally cut up the pages, re-arranged panels and re-did the story to meet DC's needs.
How's that for a long rant? |
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