I'm heading to San Diego today, with the Kirby Museum setting up with scanner, Mother Box, stickers, postcards and friendly conversation at TwoMorrows' Booth #1301.

Looking forward to seeing everyone; bring your original Kirby art to be scanned and included in the Original Art Digital Archive.

The Kirby Tribute panel is at 10am on Sunday.

Announcements, pictures, videos, tweets, who knows else, to come!

Kirby has said on several occasions that he identifies with the Thing, the grumpy orange skinned monster he co-created with Stan Lee in the first issue of the Fantastic Four. The son of Austrian Jewish immigrants, Kirby grew up on the mean streets of New York’s lower east side. The area was teeming with rival street gangs, and as the artist details in his Street Code comic, he fought nearly every day to survive. Just how much anger Kirby carried inside him is difficult to tell, but he certainly channeled it into his vital and energetic artwork.

In 1933, a film appeared that must have exploded like a rush of primordial energy in the impressionable brain of the then sixteen old Kirby. The impact of King Kong is difficult to appreciate today, but suffice it to say that nothing like it had ever been seen before. The cutting edge technology of stop motion animation allowed the filmmakers to create the illusion of a gargantuan creature in a primeval lost world and then see him transported to 20th century New York City.

King Kong has been analyzed extensively, yielding interpretations running the gamut from a metaphor for the subjugation of man’s primitive instincts to that of the enslavement of African Americans. What is certain is that Kong’s treatment at the hands of a callous humanity makes him an extremely sympathetic and tragic figure and it is easy to identify with his plight.

Essential listening for those of you interested in understanding the legal context of the copyright termination letters that the Kirby heirs delivered in September 2009.

Host Doug Lichtman (Professor, UCLA School of Law) and guests Peter Menell (Professor of Law, UC Berkeley) and David Nimmer (Author, "Nimmer on Copyright") informally discuss termination rights as part of Intellectual Property Colloqium.

Click on over to the Copyright Termination page to listen.

A few treats to celebrate Independence Day here in the US:

Scans of photocopies of Kirby pencils art from Captain America's Bicentennial battles! (With a focus on splashes and spreads)

One often encounters the notion that an exceptional artist is touched by genius. People of a different metaphysical perspective might even suggest that such an artist is divinely inspired. Looking at the work of Jack Kirby, I am inclined to agree with both positions. Kirby’s work possesses an energy that is so prodigious that it suggests forces beyond ordinary human comprehension. Kirby seems to be directly accessing what he might refer to as “The Source.”

To describe what I’m getting at, it is helpful to speak of an outdated 19th century philosophy known as Vitalism, which in Webster’s dictionary is defined as “a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions.” The term Vitalism was introduced to me by Kirby lister, Peter Sattler, during a debate on the nature of Kirby's great talent. 19th century chemist and philosopher, Carl Reichenbach later developed the theory of the Odic force, which could be described as a field of living electro-magnetic energy that permeates all things. Kirby, a chronicler of Thor’s Norse mythology and no stranger to all things Odic, appears to have a direct conduit to such an energy source, which is apparent in the extraordinary vitality of his artwork.

It is easy to dismiss a quaint concept such as Vitalism, particularly if one has a scientific reductionist perspective. However, Ernst Mayr, one of the 20th century’s leading evolutionary biologists stated, “It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading Vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Decartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine.”