what is jack kirby's artistic legacy?

Don't get me started on Gødland...

in the late 60s/early 70s marvel actively encouraged their artists to swipe - figures/layouts - from old Kirby comics, so again the Kirby spirit has filterd down through Buscema, Romita, Steranko and so on (v. often Kirby wld provide basic layouts for new marvels to help get them accustomed to the house - ie kirby - style)

giffen of course has been a swiper-thief from day one, w/ yes Kirby as his first victim - see also the work of Rich Buckler, who cld move between Kirby style and Adams style seemingly at will

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I think decompression kind of did for him as an influence, though, for now at least - the whole ethos of slowing it down, letting suspense or tension build, naturalism in dialogue and figure-work, all quite un Kirby-esque. Bendis for instance is the first big Marvel star writer who you really couldn't have imagined working (aesthetically speaking) with Kirby. (Though you could imagine Bendis/Ditko quite easily).

i think tom is right abt decompression being the antithesis of kirby style, and maybe another diff is that bendis and most modern comic bk scripters write full scripts, rather than the old 'marvel style' of plot-outline-fleshed out-by-artist-and-then-dialogued-by-writer, again a method/formula that totally favoured kirby dynamism

I think Kirby might not resonate as much in comics as he does in movies and TV nowadays. Remember when spaceships looked like chubby rockets with fins and a bubble? Then Kirby happened. No Jack Kirby = No C-3P0.

Well, yes, but uh, SILVER SURFER: PARABLE = jean giraud gets to be his hero. You don't even hear the name Moebius until after Kirby began his work on the Fantastic Four - he was still drawing westerns until about 1963.

It'd be curious for someoen to try to develop Kirby's aesthetic outside of superhero comics or at least outside of fight scenes.

Speaking of which, it must be *just me*, but when I saw this thread title I immediately thought of Jaime Hernandez.

Women never looked like that! Have you see the feet Kirby drew on his women? Their hands are twice the size of their feet! (At least.)

I like how even his savage warrior women or female neanderthals (2001 #2, Devil Dinosaur #5-7) still don't neglect their lippy. With the latter, a nice, rigidly-set beehive 'do to boot.

No Jack Kirby = No C-3P0.

Yeah, Kirby has a lot to answer for, man...

They were all Chinese, obviously.

At the very least, there’s a definite primal quality to Miller’s work from Sin City onward that seems to me to be very Kirby-influenced, regardless of whether the results are any good or not…

Most of this in-yer-face dynamic stuff in comics comes from Kirby one way or another. That was definitely amongst his innovations--to capture a whole sequence of movement in a single frame, rather than a single, posed moment of it, heightening the effect with extreme foreshortening, etc. He did it brilliantly, but it's still for me more in his sense of abstract design and stylisation that I find the most interest, though at the same time, I've zero interest in seeing other people trying to copy it (ergo: Godland is a *yawn*)--it's not a formula, it's the pure esoteric quirkiness that can make the best and most interesting art in any form so compelling... not to be copied at any costs!

Kirby's legacy should be about finding your own weirdness and just going along with it. Such wonderful idealism!

Except that Miller’s been pretty crappy for a while now, so eh. Actually, I will admit to liking the first Sin City story, and I actually have a certain fascination with the train wreck that was DKSA. You’re dead on about the mannered minimalism Miller’s been shooting for recently though—is Miller trying to mix Kirby with Kochalka these days?

So… erm… yeah, I’m ready to go with the idea that Kirby’s biggest legacy should be that comic creators follow their own weirdness. That sounds pretty damned good to me!

But in terms of concrete influence, it’s interesting to note the difference between folk like Miller and Morrison, who take definite cues from the man but each have a style that is totally their own*, and someone like that Godland guy whose work is an all-out pastiche. Scioli’s most definitely not following his own weirdness, though I do like some of the mix of out-of-time humour and po-mo silliness that you get in Casey’s Godland scripts.

*Again, all issues of quality aside…

The earlier Sin City stuff was very nice, visually. By the time of Family Values, it's becoming an abortion. He's getting more distorted and more bigfoot, and it doesn't work as well. He's hacking it a bit, too -- the controlled expressionism of earlier stories is dropping to pieces, all kinds of varying effects creeping in to solve problems he's not willing to take time out to solve more elegantly. So he falls back on older answers, often incongruous with the stylisation he'd set up for the SC 'look' and resulting in a horrible mess...

DKSA (I prefer Out!) is kinda fascinating. I mean, the style's all over the place. He ends up with this Twisted Evil Warner Bros thing, yet the first issue starts out almost in the same style as 300 and we see him FUMBLING, publicly, for an approach. By the end of #1, it's already morphed drastically. It continues over #2. It's only in the last issue that there's anything vaguely resembling a cohesive approach. After a fashion. Honestly, if he was an unknown and trying to submit this stuff to publishers, he wouldn't have a chance in hell. Being a successful Big Name = a license to be a fucking amateur, apparently. :-/

At least when Kirby turned out utter tripe (i.e. Super Powers), he had the excuse of being an old man with shaky hands.

BTW, I must admit I didn't read the Godland stuff! I looked at the online previews ages ago. The art put me off. The interviews with Scioli, too, where he says stuff like, 'The only way to do comics is Kirby.' Such a BONEHEAD! How can someone SO miss the point of creative expression? And the bigger question is, why do 'professional' publishers waste good money on such things?! *sigh*

Also, is it so shocking that an artist that emulates Kirby to such a (respectful? sycophantic?) degree actually sez, 'The only way to do comics is Kirby?' Also also, I wd think that the point of creative expression is to, um, express yrself creatively as you see fit?

And as to Frank "BIGFOOT" Miller, yeah, it's the whole "what the hell is he doing?" factor that gives DKSA its strange gravity, and I'm definitely up for hearing more about why slocki likes that book (at the risk of turning this into a thread about Frank Miller when it's supposed to be about Kirby).

I def. agree wrt Casey's scripts, but I think that Scioli playing it straight (if you can actually play it straight while drawing dwarf-sized mouse people) actually accentuates the line that Casey's straddling so well. Which is seemingly the same line that a slew of pop crits straddle when praising Kirby to the (post-modern?) BIFF BANG POW crowd.

Sorry, am otherwise occupied and my typing's gone haywire. :-/

I also thought the colouring was really bad at times. Varley is great, but it looks like she was practically learning Photoshop on the job doing this book.

I don't want anyone to think I'm totally down on Miller, either, because I like a lot of his work. Even when he makes a mess, it's an interesting mess. Did anyone see that little strip he did in Autobiographix? That was... interesting! Everyone paled next to Eisner's effortless little vignette, though...

Except DKSA wasn't funny.

That description makes me sound like I don't like it, which isn't true--it's just an odd, odd piece of work, is all. My favourite piece of work from that collection was the Eddie Campbell strip though. Since Campbell's pretty much my favourite cartoonist that's no surprise.

But... erm... yeah... Kirby...

Uhm, Eddie Campbell's Bacchus riffs on various olde-style Marvel comics, including Kirby's, so there's another concrete influence. In terms of artists following their own muse rather than just aping Kirby, Campbell’s work is a pretty good example, despite the connection I just made. There’s some good stuff in After the Snooter about the intoxicating affect those early Marvel books had on Campbell, and yet look at that story. With it’s absurd/lyrical slice-of-life style, it couldn’t be further from the mode we associate with Kirby if it tried.

(As yet another random aside, I love the fact that Campbell references the Silver Surfer/Galactus relationship when he talks about Dave Sim being the herald for the big self-publishing push that Campbell got caught up in.It’s so goofy, but yet so utterly natural!)

Or at least that's the general idea. Campbell does it much less dramatically, of course...

Yeah, Campbell's great. And it's not like riffing Kirby is a bad thing for a particular effect. It's when someone makes a career out of it that... maybe the best way of putting it is, it makes me kinda sad. Especially if there seems to be genuine ability underneath.

I speak as someone who has done Kirby riffs too! This is my faux Black Panther #13 cover, f'rinstance. How do I feel about that? It was FUN to do. But artistically it's nonsense, an attempt at straight imitation. I didn't take it seriously at all.

I mean, in terms of learning to draw, Kirby's the worst artist in the world to copy. He distilled everything into such a totally esoteric form that there's nothing academic you can literally absorb from it. Watered-down versions of distortions that you could only totally understand if you were inside Kirby's head has to be a bad idea -- an inhibiting influence, really.

Am I...?