It’s official. There will be a New Gods movie. It will be a big budget Warner Brothers film, becoming part of the DC Universe, and it will be directed by Ann DuVernay. The implications, for anyone who chooses to ponder this are quite mind boggling. What immediately comes to mind for me is  that this will focus worldwide media attention on Jack Kirby as a writer/creator and not merely as as Stan Lee’s trusty go-to Marvel artist. Then too, what will the reaction be at the Lucasfilm division of Disney. Will many more people take notice of the obvious similarities that the Star War Universe has in common with a comic book that preceded the it by several years.

Jack Kirby will now leave his large imprint on two rival cinematic spheres of influence. The film that resonated best for me in the Marvel Universe was “Captain America, The First Avenger”, but that was because it was set in the time of the world that had the greatest significance to Kirby, the period of WWII. The conflict was against fascism, and Kirby had been in that fight. Fascism was ultimate “anti-life”. World War II was essential to the development of Jack Kirby’s ontology, his philosophy of the nature of existence. As a man fighting Nazism, for him it was the essential battle of good vs. evil.

The second major part of Kirby’s ontology was mythology, anything from Greece, Norway, various pagan religions and most important Judaism. You can see it in the New Gods. Apokolips vs, New Genesis. It is again the Manichean struggle of light against dark, good against evil.

So far, in  the Marvel movies, much of this seems to be turned into a romp for the sake of more and more action. There are so many characters vying for attention that it’s difficult to focus on  the nature of the conflict. In “Thor Ragnarok,” a film that was visually  very much Kirby influenced, it was difficult to understand what anyone stood for. Even Asgard, Thor’s home seemed to lack any coherence as a place from which gods and a mythology came.

The New Gods will be the first total Kirby-verse, the opportunity to build a Kirby Ontology and incorporate it into the DC Universe. Hopefully, the hot new Hollywood director will approach the task with respect.

Let us hope for the best. This will be a big step. It will also be a test. Is it better to trivialize something for the sake of entertainment and profit, or to take it seriously and try to interpret it as best you can? Sometimes, someone’s grand vision of someone else’s vision can lead to something incoherent, or neither here nor there? After all, this is pop culture, Comic books. Does it really matter?

For those who revere Kirby, it certainly matters. Nearly every panel he conceives, such as the two featured here, gives any half-wit an almost complete set of directions on how to interpret it. New Genesis, shown above, is a total environment, richly textured and peopled by consistent characters and worldviews. Darkseid and Apokolips  shown below, gives us the figure and realm of a being whose very nature is the antithesis of the freedom of independent thought. So we should hope for someone who can take that vision and give back something that is respectful of the greatest creative mind in the history of comics.

Whatever happens, let’s at least be glad the King’s legacy and family are getting a shot in the arm.

August 28^th 2017 will be Jack Kirby’s 100^th birthday. Clearly, a good deal will be written about this occasion. I’d like to say something about what this event means to me, having grown up in a time period that had one foot in the old-world ways and one in the new. I was born in 1952, just seven years after the end of the great war, and that conflict’s mythology loomed large in my life. I lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Abe Zimmerman, the Candy Store proprietor had Dachau numbers tattooed on his forearm. Needless to say, it would be a tough sell for someone to try to convince me that the Holocaust never happened.

To us neighborhood kids, the war represented good’s conquest over ultimate evil, and Jack Kirby’s characters embodied that epic. It felt like Jack Kirby was an American in the old-school sense. Few comic book creator’s heroes felt quite so righteous and principled. The United States is a nation whose credo  was written on a plaque in 1903, inside the Statue of Liberty, which stands in New York harbor.  “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” is part of the text on the statue’s plaque.  Kirby’s parents were just such “wretched refuse” as the poem was referring to.  They were Austrian Jewish immigrants. and Kirby was raised on Essex Street in the bustling Lower East Side of Manhattan.

When the call came in the 1940’s for America to fight the fascism fomented by a former Austrian Corporal turned dictator, Kirby went to France under the command of General George S. Patton. Kirby came to Paris as a liberator. The page from Young Romance #10 above tells the story of a soldier that could easily have been semi-autobiographical. Kirby knew well those hedge rows, ruined towns and blood-drenched fields he wrote of.

When he returned to New York, he was a vastly different man, one who had seen the face of death countless times. He was no dull-witted killer who could shrug off such experiences. Every impression burned itself on his raw artistic sensibilities. His only defense against carnage was to transform it into art.

Kirby’s Captain America was the embodiment of his creator’s righteous rage at the forces of naked savagery that the artist had endured. Here on this page from Tales of Suspense #67, we see Cap, under the insidious spell of the Red Skull in the company of a squadron of Nazis. This panel has long been one of my favorite examples of compositional Kinetic energy. Every shape making up the structure of the surrounding Nazis is designed to give Captain America forward propulsion.

In panel two, Bucky explodes from a Nazi’s grip, while dodging a burst of machine gun fire. His rage is palpable as he snatches up a weapon and returns fire. There is no clever caption that suggests his bullets are less than lethal. There would be no point in trying to tone down the savagery of Kirby’s rage, channeled through Bucky. Next, he cleverly uses a grenade to outfox another Nazi and then subdue him in hand to hand combat.

There is something primal about the pages of this series from the mid-sixties, focusing on Captain America’s wartime adventures. Seldom again would Kirby return Cap to this period. Here, by bringing his golden age hero back to the time of his inception, Kirby appears to be exorcising some of his demons. The specter of Hitler’s Nazism was the very antithesis of the 20^th century American dream. Teutonic racial supremacy vs. cultural inclusion and assimilation. Never mind that Steve Rogers was the spitting image of blonde, blue eyed Aryan godhood. He’d been born stunted and frail, but the spirit of American progressiveness had made him whole and infused with indomitable power over evil. This was the symbolic America of my youth. Without generosity of spirit and the dream of justice and equality, there could be no strength to overcome adversity.

Woe to any force that would falsely usurp that cloak of righteousness to mask their true intent. The anti-life equation was always lurking in the shadows. Kirby quickly saw through the travesty that was Vietnam. He had little patience for those that betrayed the ideal. In his Kamandi series, Kirby skewered Nixon’s flawed presidency in a hilarious satire of the Watergate scandal. His most powerful works, like the Fourth World series pitted the light of compassion and reason against the will to dominate and subjugate. This was the majesty of Kirby. His spirit was one that would enliven and justify the name that would be given to those he served with, “The Greatest Generation.”

In comics, Jack Kirby is usually thought of primarily as an artist. This is mostly because of the work that did in the 60’s with Stan Lee and Marvel. Lee’s genius was for promotion, and while he helped put Marvel on the map and displayed his, Kirby’s and others names prominently on the work, he also assured that posterity would see him as primary writer and architect of the Marvel Universe and see Kirby merely as someone who interpreted Lee’s writing and ideas. Based on seeing Kirby’s margin notes on his original art, we now know that this was not the case. In fact, the opposite was true. Lee was the interpreter, putting his words in Kirby character’s mouths. Not only did Kirby usually plot the books as he drew them, he also gave verbal guidelines as to the character’s intent as well as dialog suggestions to the scripter. Lee’s scripts were often clever, with a bow to the hip and the modern, and readers responded well, feeling part of the club of true believers.

Still, for me, the most important factor of storytelling is characterization. Kirby’s characters are always complete, essentially and physically. In other words, Kirby understood fundamentally what defines an individual, and he used that package of personality to express an aspect of human nature in the service of telling a story. For instance, in Kamandi, Kirby takes full advantage of the specific animal nature of his animal characters. They become archetypes of people who embody those characteristics.

This Page from Kamandi #2 above has always been one of my favorite Kirby spreads because it’s a real New York image, showing the Rats finally taking over the town.

Throughout the series, Kirby hits the nail on the head with the anthropomorphic characteristics of his animals. They all basically behave like humans, but they also possess qualities of their specific animal natures. For instance, rats are vermin, scavengers, sly and shifty.  In Kamandi’s world, the rats are hijackers, stealing the spoils of others work.

Tigers, like the charismatic Caesar and his son Prince Tuftan shown on this page from Kamandi #1 below are the well-conditioned and highly trained Roman hordes. Gorillas are crude and bombastic and they live in what once was Las Vegas.

This is merely an extreme example of what Kirby has done consistently as a storyteller during his entire career. Kirby’s characters are always sharply delineated and have powerful personas and clear intention in service of the story and its message. Kirby was a keen observer of human nature. Living in the bustle of Essex Street, he was acclimated to the chemistry of masses of people. He became adept at breaking down human nature to its essences. Some of his best work was with teams and gangs, often of children like the ones that he ran with through the streets of lower Manhattan. With his focus on group interaction, relationship was always primary.

Arguably his most celebrated, influential and iconic team is The Fantastic Four. It is often noted that the Individual characteristics of that group are Elementals, whose nature and specific powers are based on Earth, Air, Water and Fire. The dynamic clash and synthesis of their disparate personalities gave the stories depth and dimension. Beginning with the fourth issue and the reintroduction of the Submariner, The Fantastic Four became a showcase for the introduction of scores of characters that would interact with our heroes and then often spin off into their own series. Dealing with relationships was what Kirby did best, and this can be seen in nearly everything Kirby worked on, from The Fantastic Four to Kamandi.

It’s interesting to study the period when Kirby and Lee had just started reintroducing superheroes into the lineup of what was to be published for the fledgling Marvel line. At that point, Kirby was still crafting the lead story in a series of monster comics. Such an example in the April 1962 issue of Journey Into Mystery #79 was entitled The Midnight Monster.

The main character in this story bears more than a passing resemblance to The Incredible Hulk, whose first issue appeared a few scant months later. Note in particular the similarity in the transformation scenes of the two comics, appearing on page five of the Hulk and page three of “The Midnight Monster”, wherein we see a scientist morphing into a strange and frightening creature. Notice also also that in the very beginning of the series, Bruce Banner turned into The Hulk when the sun went down, a sort of Midnight Monster himself.

 Many people see this Midnight Monster story as a Hulk prototype, and also see it as strong evidence that Kirby’s eclectic creativity was the primary force behind the profusion of characters that flowed from Marvel in a matter of months in the early 1960’s. Kirby is such a powerful visceral and visual storyteller, that his spirit infuses the narrative with his essence. In most cases, it is not the concept that is important, it is the style and vitality of the creator that makes the character come alive for the reader.

We also have compelling evidence of Kirby’s initiating the creative process nearly this early in the torn pages of a  Hulk story, possibly intended for Issues three or four, in a period where the Hulk still has some sort of psychic connection to Rick Jones. The pages in question, such as the pencilled one below were brought by Kirby to Lee’s office for approval, and have Lee’s notes written on them as though the two were discussing the dialoging before the communication broke down. It was reported that Kirby tore the pages in half and threw them in the trash in anger after Lee rejected them.

In a note written by Kirby that was used as evidence in the recent (and resolved) legal action between Disney/Marvel and the Kirby heirs, the King stated that  he had created the Hulk which was a spin- off of a single story that he did for Marvel. This story, “the Midnight Monster” may very well be the story he refers to. The characters in both tales are infused with a similar menace and with an old-world gothic aura that is so much a part of Kirby as to be an indelible signature.

Let us focus on Kamandi, the longest running series that Kirby produced for DC Comics in the 1970’s. Kamandi was a very entertaining and imaginative run of comics and somewhat Swiftian in its use of satire. This combination of fun and intelligence was the reason that it lasted as long as it did.

As most people know, this concept was Kirby’s riff on Planet of the Apes, and the cover above with its half-sunken Statue of Liberty certainly conjures that film. This is a powerful image, with the Empire State Building as the point from where the figure of Kamandi emerges, and Lady Liberty’s tilted stance gives that figure diagonal and forward trajectory as he resolutely paddles his raft in our direction.

Kirby is still at the height of his powers as he gives us this gem of a composition above, on panel 5 of page 12 of the first issue, as Kamandi is carried along by a tiger on horseback. The strategic placement of riders gives maximum momentum to the lead horse carrying Kamandi. The amazing this is that despite the fact that the eye is moved from left to right to emphasize the direction of the action, there is still a circular sweep that brings the eye back around. This way you first see the tiger known as Caesar’s exhortation to charge and then the other riders yell of victory.

On the following page above, we see the leopards fleeing towards us as Caesar charges forward. The challenge here is for Kirby to create his usual forced perspective magic. He succeeds by using the slight diagonal of the horse’s position reinforced by the gun-weilding leopards angle, the fallen leopard’s raised arm, the leg in the lower right quadrant and the explosion at upper right that throws force lines rightward and upward. Even the blades of grass at the bottom of the panel serve the same purpose, to move the rider out of the panel and in your face.

Kirby delighted in running these creatures through their paces and as a result, Kamandi was one the most playful and animated series that he produced.