Bill Courtney

Some Samples of Jack "The King" Kirby's Work

Saturday, 3. March 2007, 17:04:11

I came into comics about the time Neal Adams was the big influence on style and this hot young new talent’s skill at realistic rendering weighed heavily over the titans of the past, including the king of the titans Jack Kirby. In fact as a kid I was so infatuated with Neal Adam’s approach I actually looked down on Kirby and his school of devotees which was just about everyone prior to Adams. As time has gone by I appreciate not only Kirby’s skill and talent as an illustrator but his sheer intensity in terms of production and creativity. He was a prodigious creator of characters as well as pages and covers and despite the claims made by Stan Lee it was Kirby who invented and developed Marvel’s greatest characters, including Spiderman and the Fantastic Four (while Lee no doubt had a hand in turning Kirby's "Silver Spider" concept into a workable Marvel superhero and the very low key Steve Dikto developed the charcter visually into the Spidey we know and love, the fruit of it all was Jack's Silver Spider or Spiderman idea he had toyed with for a few years). His career was long and I remember when he left Marvel after having enough of Stan Lee’s infamous ego and went to DC that I was blown away by the new work he did with The New Gods and Miracle Man and other titles which he also wrote.

I have long felt his work with Marvel was downplayed by Lee and in an interview I once read Lee goes so far as to say that he (Lee) has always considered Dikto to be the co-creator of Spiderman (Lee being the other co-creator of course), once again depriving Kirby of some of his due respect. Kirby was a little bitter as well towards Lee in interviews calling him nothing but a "personality". Well it is all the stuff legends are made of and Kirby's move to DC while shocking at the time proved to be an auspicious move that produced, in his later life, some of his best graphic work ever.
I really appreciate and admire this style now as well as the entire "pre-Adams" school and can see what it is all about finally in my twilight years. He was a comic great and considered by some (and now myself as well) to be the single greatest creative figure in comic book history. Neal Adams would eventually vanish into lame advertising art hardly ever to draw comics again though his ephemeral career is still influential to this day, but Jack Kirby was passionate about comic books to his core and driven to create only them to the end. Consistently productive and of single focus. Truly a titan.