New York Times recognizes Kirby

[trademark-migration]

This is in the Sunday NYT:

August 26, 2007

Editorial Observer

Jack Kirby, a Comic Book Genius, Is Finally Remembered

By BRENT STAPLES

The fear of being forgotten after death is endemic in the creative

arts. In the case of the iconic comic book artist Jack Kirby, it

happened while he was still alive. By the 1960s, Mr. Kirby had

already revolutionized the comic book business more than once.

Working as principal artist and in-house genius for Marvel, he

created a voice and an aesthetic unmatched by any other company.

 

Marvel took his talents for granted and denied him the credit and

compensation he clearly deserved. Worse, he was overshadowed by his

loquacious and photogenic collaborator, Stan Lee, who became the

public face of an enterprise that depended heavily on Mr. Kirby's

skills.

 

Mr. Kirby eventually quit, leaving behind characters like the Hulk,

the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the Silver Surfer, and ending what

was easily the most fruitful collaboration in comic book history. His

long and ugly battle with Marvel over the rights to his original

artwork galvanized the artistic community and raised his public

profile.

 

Still, by the time of his death in 1994, he was clearly worried that

Mr. Lee would eclipse him in public memory and that history would

deny him the recognition he deserved for breathing life into a

collection of universally recognized superheroes who would eventually

become movie stars.

 

History was late to the party, but it finally arrived. Thanks to

renewed interest in Mr. Kirby's work — and shout-outs from novelists

like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem — he is more widely known

today than he was in the 1960s. Back then, those of us who read him

haunted newsstands and drugstores, ripping each new issue right out

of the deliveryman' s hands. Two books, including a long-awaited

biography, are in the works, and the reprint industry is threatening

to resurrect everything Mr. Kirby ever produced.

 

He was introduced to a broader public just last month when the United

States Postal Service issued 20 stamps depicting Marvel characters.

The images seemed deliberately chosen to maximize Marvel's marketing

opportunities. Even so, Mr. Kirby is credited on eight of the stamps

and could have been credited on several more. After all, he did at

least some work on nearly every major character Marvel produced.

 

Mr. Kirby did a lot more than just draw. As the critic Gary Groth so

ably put it in The Comics Journal Library, "He barreled like a

freight train through the first 50 years of comic books like he owned

the place." He mastered and transformed all the genres, including

romance, Westerns, science fiction and supernatural comics, before he

landed at Marvel.

 

He created a new grammar of storytelling and a cinematic style of

motion. Once-wooden characters cascaded from one frame to another —

or even from page to page — threatening to fall right out of the book

into the reader's lap. The force of punches thrown was visibly and

explosively evident. Even at rest, a Kirby character pulsed with

tension and energy in a way that makes movie versions of the same

characters seem static by comparison.

 

The frenetic action and the rooftop fighting so common on the

superhero set did not just materialize out of nowhere. Mr. Kirby

remembered much of it from his Depression-era youth on New York's

Lower East Side, where, he once told an interviewer, the incessant

fights among rival gangs were often staged up and down fire escapes

and during running battles across tenement rooftops.

 

In a recent interview, his friend and biographer Mark Evanier

described Mr. Kirby as a man so obsessed with giving voice to the

characters that he had to give up just about everything else. He put

aside driving, Mr. Evanier said, because he became so distracted that

he would sometimes run off the road. Once he got a book plotted in

his head he'd sit at the drafting table around the clock if

necessary. With a fixation like that, he easily outproduced even his

most prolific contemporaries.

 

With interest in Mr. Kirby growing — and his characters already

marching across the screen — a movie of his life is clearly in order.

Properly handled, the film could give an abused and neglected genius

his full due while offering a fascinating glimpse into one of the

most vibrant and creative eras in pop cultural history.

 

 

 

 

[*paull*]

Get lost, loser.

[clemso]

A film about Jack Kirby's life would be immense, can't imagine who would play him though.

 

Clem...

[trademark-migration]

A film about Jack Kirby's life would be immense, can't imagine who would play him though.

 

Clem...

 

I hope there is a grain of truth to the article and we see something ala 'Painting with Fire' on Kirby. That would be so cool - & a great tribute to 'The King'.

[the blob]

yeah, but kirby is dead. "painting with fire" was interesting because frazetta is still alive and a lot of it was interviews of him and such. OTOH, i suppose there is a decent amount of interview footage of kirby out there, no? Maybe the BBC or canadian public television was bright enough to interview him, lord knows the U.S. media was probably too brain dead. problem is, who would give a voice to it, talk about his creative process? Stan Lee was there for a lot of it, but he sure as heck isn't the right person to do that!

 

 

[the blob]

i guess simon could do some of it. but he's like 206, right?