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Actually all the Kirby Fourth World series are top and wonderful... and each offer a different angle on the same themes and in many cases, events. 'Mister Miracle' is my favorite out of those, but 'The New Legends of Angry Thor and His Pal, Lightbulb Jesus and Their Mob' AKA 'New Gods' and the cosmic hippies of 'The Forever People' are also pretty excellent.
From the Marvel era his FF is just spectacular, though there's a lull in the second big B&W trade, with the third being all over ace, from the Inhumans to Galactus, Black Panther kicking the shit out of the FF and being beat by a powerless and perpetually sleepy Indian, and everybody boiled down to these indelibly sexy and elemental portrayals.
I like the conceptual side of Jack Kirby's 'Captain America' where he applied this mentality of: look at random group on the street and think *If I were Cap, how would I beat them all up, efficiently and as fast as possible?* The execution... I'm just not much for Cappy Americana.
'Kamandi' and 'The Demon' and that era have their fans, but he seems, by that time, to have given up on the more serious or useful underpinnings that 'New Gods' or even 'Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen' had. There's a back-up piece in 'Jimmy...' about the government-regulating clone culture of The Hairies, where he talks about not fighting anything, but letting the other side fight and establish their boundaries and you (as metaphored by The Hairies) just doing your own thing, being peaceful and doing what's going to benefit everyone the most and get things moving... essentially, he's laying out the core ideologies of 'The Invisibles' for eight year olds. Which is utterly lovely.
If you don't like Kirby's 'word jazz' stylings of dialogue, pick up something he did with someone else, but personally, I find when it was almost entirely the Jack Kirby show... that's where the gold became uber-gold, rhinegold or whatever.
The thing to bear in mind is that (a) the material is almost always written for fairly young children, and so everything is interpretted through that particular lens of focus and attention, and (b) there's still something of that young child in all of us and it's probably tapping something mythic in that sense. Very primal, iconic - and those are terms that get tossed around so much in comics and mean nothing usually, but with Kirby... He's doing ideas with legs and faces, more often than *people* with legs and faces. Some of us think we're all doing 'ideas with legs' though. |
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