Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby was always a very socially conscious creator, often destroying literary conventions by reversing or subverting the stereotypes of the era. Kirby created some of the earliest black superheroes, invented teams of superhero hippies when mainstream society was shunning them, and even created a few very strong female characters which opposed the typical, frail damsel-in-distress character that tended to dominate comic pages back in 1971, with a few exceptions.

Perhaps his most notable female character is Big Barda – relatively obscure, but a character who plays a significant role in the ‘Fourth World’ tales that underpin the DC Universe. She’s married to the smaller, weaker Mr. Miracle, who himself is a master at escaping any given situation, but does not possess any kind of superhuman strength or endurance. As a fictional pair, it was certainly unusual for the female to play the role of a dominant protector, but her appearance also coincided with the Women’s Liberation Front – a fact that Kirby was almost definitely conscious of.

Beyond all that, I’m a fan of Big Barda because of her costume, which remains relatively unchanged since Kirby’s initial drawings of her in ‘71. It’s just that great. It’s overcomplicated, has giant fins, is almost entirely made of some kind of chainmail, has a giant red cape, and it’s an aesthetic masterpiece – not to mention that Kirby drew her with the proportions of a ‘thicker’ woman, a divergence from the increasingly idealized comic female. I like something to hold onto. I mean, not ‘for dear life’, but some handles are nice.

There have been four incarnations of Barda in action figure form. Back in 2000, DC Direct produced her at 6” scale in a boxed set with Mr. Miracle and little Oberon. This was during an era when DC Direct was still producing things in very small, very expensive quantities and of less-than-amazing quality – so it’s definitely a piece for series Barda fans who need to own every incarnation, but as an action figure, it doesn’t really stand on its own. It’s also still the only way to get Oberon, who Keith Giffen Justice League fans will see as an essential part of the team. The set can be found for around $30 – which cheaper than the original release price. Toy investing is a fickle mistress.

The second Barda action figure was released with the animated style Justice League Unlimited line from Mattel, roughly in 2007. At about 4” tall, she accompanies Deadshot and Martian Manhunter in a 3-pack that was very poorly distributed, was rarely found on shelves, and as a result, can be found for about $100 today. This incarnation is the rarest and most expensive Barda, but her two appearances in the animated series kind of make this an essential piece (which I’m disappointed that I never found) – even if the figure uses a stock female body that’s much smaller than it should be. This is a chick that can take Superman in a fight. Mattel has been making promises to re-release harder to find figures in all of their DC properties, so I hope we get another shot at JLU Barda.

Late last year, DC Direct again revisited Barda with their New Gods line, which is probably my favorite series of action figures in many years. They’re not super-articulated or shoot laser beams, but they very faithfully reproduce the artwork of Jack Kirby – weird squiggly lines carved into the bodies, square-jawed faces and all. Of all of the Bardas, this is the most faithful to her origins, and can still be snagged for under $15. She’s also the largest, appropriately towering over many other figures.

The most recent Barda, released in March of 2009, was another from Mattel, and can be found in the seventh wave of their DC Universe Classics line. She’s about 7” tall, is very articulated, and is a fairly classic mix of different Barda artists. She comes in two variations, which seem to be a 50/50 split – so while the regular variation comes with her usual helmet, and the alternate variation is helmetless, revealing long, black hair. Both of these can also be snagged for around $15.

Barda has also made appearances in DC Direct’s ‘Women of the DC Universe’ bust line, based on the art of Adam Hughes and in attire more similar to some of her oft-neglected first appearances in Mister Miracle – bikini’d and all, for about $30. She’s also appeared as a Heroclix piece or two, and as a very small ‘DC Universe Who’s Who’ gashapon piece, but I believe that’s the full range of her figural appearances, for absolute completists.

Fans of strong, female characters – I have a replacement for your ol’ Wonder Woman.

True to Hollywood marketing form, every superhero-adventure-summer-blockbuster film has been accompanied by a line of collectible action figures. Mattel produced 2 lines of figures and vehicles to coincide with The Dark Knight (which were exceptionally hot due to the untimely death of Heath Ledger), and Hasbro gave us an array of Iron Man and Hulk toys for the selfsame movie.

While Hasbro’s Hulk movie figures were met with derision due to their substandard quality and ad nauseum repetition the Hulk himself (all with different action features), Hasbro also took the opportunity to ride the Hulk hype and produce an entirely different, comic-based line of Hulk figures – which are selling with wild success, even at the unusually high $15 price tag.

This line of eight Hulk-related figures has been a holy grail for me since I first saw them back at Toy Fair. While I have a causal collection of Hulk toys (because really, the guy’s gone through about a million changes and ‘costumes’, and he’s iconic), I was more interested in the enormous figure that you can build if you collect all eight – Fin Fang Foom. While the name might be ridiculous, the character is a shining example of the wacky energy that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby pumped into their comics in the 1960s. As a semi-rabid Kirby devotee, this was a thing that I needed to have around. Plus, he’s a giant space dragon – a combination of three of the greatest words in the English language. You know, aside from ‘naked sandwich robot’.

Other great Jack Kirby names : Arnim Zola, Flippa Dippa, Agnar the Fierce, Baron Zemo, Bombu, Devil Dinosaur, Galactus, Annihilus, MODOK, and Giant Man. Interestingly, nearly every ‘build-a-figure’ that’s been made in the Marvel lines is a Jack Kirby / Stan Lee creation, from X-Men’s Sentinels to The Blob, excluding Onslaught, Apocalypse, and The Brood Queen. Kirby’s just that epic. You need to buy eight figures just to build one of his.

Whenever a new line of figures comes out, I hit the message boards and browse for sightings. Toys generally start out in California, and over the next three weeks, slowly make the crawl to New York. The original plan for this Hulk line was to release the first four figures in July, and release the second quartet in August. There would be a two-month long interim in which you’d only have half of a space dragon built. It was a strange plan for Hasbro to make, especially when collectors feel very unsettled about half-completed things, but it was Foom. My love affair with space dragons could endure.

I hit Toys ‘R’ Us one morning and found the first five figures, and immediately loaded them into my arms and ran to the checkout counter. I was so excited (and possibly sweaty) that I didn’t even bother checking deeper into the pegs, since the back of the package now revealed a change in Hasbro’s plans. These first five would ship now, and the remaining three would ship in August. Because these were being touted as ‘limited edition’, reports were also coming in that if your local Toys ‘R’ Us (my only real buying option, due to my remote location) was going to get any at all, they were pretty much limited to one case – and that these were all shipping at once. My Foom was legless, and even after returning to the store about 4 times each week, my search turned up nothing. When the pegs were finally taken down and replaced with Batman stuff, I resorted to eBay. Again, for the unrequited love of a space dragon.

But for a while, I was on the hunt again. The toy collector climate in my area isn’t all that heated, since I’m friends with one other serious collector, and the only other collector that I know of is the ‘greasy hat’ guy that I’ve caustically written of before. I’m not the kind of guy who’ll wait outside of the store, breathing heavily on the windows until I’m let in. My dedication isn’t worth the cost of my soul or dignity, or a healthy breakfast. I’m of the mindset that if I’m meant to find something, it will present itself to me, and that stress-less (and somewhat Zen) attitude towards collecting has served me well enough. But somehow – I was really serious about Foom. I was hunting hard, just short of wearing a snazzy camo getup and carrying a compound bow through the toy aisles. I had something to look for – but it was never about ‘having’. Somehow, it was more about Jack Kirby, and having something of his around to inspire me creatively. When it comes to creativity, I’m relentless, remorseless, and have no budget.

Today, I finished my Fin Fang Foom, legs and all, and he’s a towering monument to the heart of comic culture – and by far the best ‘build-a-figure’ made since Hasbro’s taken over the ‘Marvel’ lines from ToyBiz. Sure, Foom has no formal relation to The Incredible Hulk, as he’s more of an Iron Man villain than anything else, but I’ll take him where I can get him. While the classic Marvel Legends line seems to be either fading out or spinning into less ‘Legendary’ characters since Hasbro rook over, the Hulk line keeps true to both recent and classic comics.

Stay tuned for a detailed review of the eight Hulk figures!

Jack Kirby, as I’ve mentioned before, was a singular fella. Working double duty and both a writer and an illustrator for both Marvel and DC Comics at different times, he had complete control over a whole army of characters that he created, scripted, drew and edited. In most hands, this would be a disaster – but Kirby made it work, because he made it work in a narrative language that he created.

The creative control that he was given over his own later titles was nearly absolute, legend that he was, and he took advantage of every iota of that power. For DC Comics, he created the Fourth World, an entirely diverse and self-contained universe that ended up playing an integral role throughout all of DC continuity. As he moved from publisher to publisher, he trailed memorable stories behind him, and one of the very last stories that he told was that of Devil Dinosaur and Moon-boy, before he left comics (due to lack of benefits) to work in animation until his death – with a few odd comic projects in-between.

Unchanged throughout his entire career was the bombastic, dramatic voice that narrated all of his stories, and a dramatic, action-filled scenario for every single panel. While this method of storytelling went over amazingly in his early career, it stopped resonating with a changing audience as the 1970s passed. Kirby was clearly a man in love with the art, and he continued with this flair until the end. It makes for some campy, but ultimately entertaining, reading.

The 9-issue series of Devil Dinosaur was originally published in 1978 by Marvel, and lasted for only nine issues before it was canceled. It follows the adventures of a monkey-like human, who is verbal, and who befriends a powerful and violent (but ultimately faithful) nonverbal dinosaur, named Devil for the red skin that he acquires as he’s cast into a volcanic eruption and survives! The 173-page collection retains the original letters pages and Kirby’s reflections upon his stories that finished out every issue (plus, ads for old comics!) – which are details that many collections omit as extraneous, but I always find that they contextualize the story more faithfully. Kirby’s ruminations reveal what a unique thinker he was, closing out at least three issues with the idea that ‘no one can ever really know what happened – maybe this is a true story!’ He states this convincingly enough that it remains ambiguous whether or not HE really believes it to be true, or he’s just attempting to engulf the reader in this mythology. He’s a man that’s clearly up on his science, but also prescribing to the idea that he knows just how much we DON’T know about the dinosaurs. This idea remains relevant even today, when dinosaurs are being completely rethought with each paleontological find. (Thanks to Dinocollector for pointing out the difference between this and ‘archaeology’ down below!)
As if having a cherry-red dinosaur rampaging through a humanoid-populated vista weren’t enough, Kirby makes almost all of the humanoids talk with Shakespearean grace and import – even ending the 9-issue series with a singular panel in biblical script, spelling out ‘…and thus endeth the Chronicle…’ We can assume that these florid speech bubbles are a rough translation from caveman-to-Kirby and that Jack never REALLY thought that Moon-boy wrote The Tempest, but it adds a great flair to the tales as they progress.

At this point in Kirby’s artistic career, his illustrations became more impressionistic and broad than ever before. Things seem to change proportions between panels often, but always to the benefit of the action involved. None of it was done out of laziness or a lack of attention to detail – it’s all done to affect ACTION. With multiple exclamation points. Cavemen with decidedly 1970s haircuts notwithstanding.

Devil Dinosaur and Moon-boy fight dinosaurs, giant bugs, giant humans, and crazy space-machines before the series ends and they make other appearances throughout the Marvel Universe, unfortunately not written by Kirby. This means that, in some stories, Devil turns into a terrorist who can now talk, and has eaten Moon-Boy, or that they die together on the moon, or are briefly brought into present day as criminals. While Jack Kirby envisioned that the duo existed within the main Marvel Universe, later writers who were more concerned with the continuity of acceptable science and history, moved Devil and Moon-boy into other parallel universes. It’s not certain which universe the duo exist in today, but they have appeared in comics as recently as 2007 – not bad for a team that lasted only 9 issues.

Devil Dinosaur is an essential part of any Jack Kirby library – and if you don’t have one at least started, you can’t consider yourself a serious comic reader – and that’s probably a good thing, given the attendance I’ve seen at the conventions. I loves me some Jack Kirby, though, and $20 – $30 bucks for a beautifully restored hardcover collection is a great deal.

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There’s pretty much no denying that Jack Kirby is ‘The King’ of all comic writers and artists. His wild and innovative ideas, his unrelenting work ethic, and his ability to pack more action into a single panel than most comics pack into an entire book, all add up to Kirby being one of the most influential forces in making comics what they are today.

Recently, DC Comics published the first volume of the Fourth World Omnibus, a collection of four different comic series beginning in 1971 that Kirby wrote, drew and edited ALL BY HIMSELF, all at once, and all of which interwove to tell a greater tale about the world of Apokolips trying to take over our Earth. In ‘Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen’, ‘New Gods’, ‘Mister Miracle’, and ‘The Forever People’, Kirby introduced a collection of characters so diverse that they were always a pleasure to experience, and many of whom still are important elements in the DC Universe today. Creating and controlling four books is no small task, but even during his mid-50s, Jack Kirby was going strong.

Of course, he was going weird a lot of the time too – but that’s part of the Silver Age (and early Bronze Age) charm. Here are ten panels from the Fourth World Omnibus that, all for different reasons, have made me love Jack Kirby.

1) Now, Jimmy Olsen went through more than his fair share of crap, but that kind of thing just happens when you hang out with superheroes. He’s been turned into a giant turtle, a gorilla, a Viking, grown a beard (under circumstances which are far more sinister that they might seem), found himself with six arms, married to a gorilla, and even became a dirty hippie. In the above panel, Jimmy finds himself in the underground labs of Project Cadmus, which has been growing strange duplicates of Superman, Jimmy, and the whole Newsboy Legion. I mean, if I were going to grow a duplicate of someone, I’d sure pick a newsboy who perpetually dressed in a SCUBA suit and called himself ‘Flippa Dippa’, wouldn’t you? I’d also make some of them 7 inches tall, just for the hell of it.

Superman knew about this stuff all along, but decided to omit these little details in his conversations with Jimmy. Not so much as a “Oh, by the way, there’s an army of mutant YOUs underground somewhere, but it shouldn’t be a problem unless the giant green one somehow breaks out in comic-book fashion, so, like… don’t freak out,” from the Man of Steel.

Jimmy meets his enormous, verdant doppelganger. And this is why I love Jack Kirby.

2) Of course, the Giant Green Jimmy broke free from his holding area because of the machinations of evil operatives from Apokolips, of where there were many, many factions infiltrating Earth. And of course, each faction needed a leader, and none was more terrifying than Granny Goodness.

Kirby created any number of truly eclectic characters in the Fourth World, including the dwarf Oberon, the death-like Black Racer, and Anti-Life cult leader Glorious Godfrey, but Granny was a stroke of genius. Talking of herself in the third person and mercilessly beating her bumbling minions, Granny’s primary job was, get this, the head of an orphanage. Genocidal evil was just a hobby. Misbehaving children-slash-soldiers would be sent to the X-Pit, one aspect of which was a large, clear box with buttons that allowed you to choose how to be tortured, from fire and ice, to poison and drowning in mud.

Just look at that transformation between the two panels above! None but Kirby could deliver such a purely psychopathic enragement as convincingly. I suggest Bea Arthur or Ed Asner (who voiced her in the JLU cartoon) for the casting call.

3) Speaking of ‘goodness’, issue 139 of Jimmy Olsen fell victim to one of the odd celebrity appearances that peppered and plagued comics of the era. Why would Don Rickles appear in a DC comic book? The reasons are lost to time, and mild embarrassment, but it still remains rich in campy kinda-awesomeness.

But wait – this isn’t Don Rickles after all! It’s ‘Goody’ Rickles, who’s… some kind of non-evil Rickles twin who happens to work in the R&D department of a newspaper. Now, why there’s a creepy clone of Don Rickles working at a newspaper is never explained, but let’s just assume that it’s yet another poor cloning choice that the 1970s seemed to make so often. Mr. Edge seems just as surprised as we are when ‘Goody’ barrels his way into his offices, and it’s an unusual comedy of errors from there on in, until finally, Goody is stuffed full of explosives (along with Jimmy Olsen and The Guardian) by a gangster and thrown from a truck. Which is pretty much what you feel like doing to anything in your immediate vicinity by the time the comic is done.

What will become of Goody Rickles? Will this ever make sense? We’ll find out in the next volume of the Fourth World Omnibus.

4) With a title like ‘The Forever People (of Super Town)’, you know that you’re in for some out-there sci-fi brain-punching. The Forever People were a brand of hippies that made their way into Kirby’s Fourth World stories (in addition to Jimmy Olsen’s ‘The Hairies‘), spouting things about ‘unity’ and ‘harmony’. It was surely unusual for a 50-year old man to be portraying the ‘hippie’ demographic in a positive, productive light, but the Forever People could ‘join hands’ around the ‘Mother Box’, chant a magic word and become / summon The Infinity Man, who had seemingly limitless powers.

Maybe the Forever People weren’t ready to come back to our time, though. When you meet a small, crippled boy, the first thing you do should NOT be to ‘hand him a cosmic cartridge that makes his brain explode into awareness of the entire universe’, and then tell him to shut up while you run away to fight The Mantis. Something about that chain of events doesn’t sit right. I usually save rocking someone else’s perceptions of the universe for at LEAST the second date.

5) Jack Kirby was also known for mixing collage-like elements into his comic pages, and here’s but one example of that. Along the Zoomway, the mysterious bridge that links the Wild Zone to the Mountain of Judgment, things get… wacky. Kirby seems to do this in moments where consciousness is being altered, or things are shifting from one reality to another – in very start contrast to his bold, animated linework. Artists from Bill Sienkiewicz to Sam Kieth would later employ college elements into their comic pages, but Kirby was the originator.

Check out Part Two for another five panels of Kirby greatness from The Fourth World Omnibus! If this doesn’t make you love comics, I’ll personally come over and give you the lobotomy that you so sorely need.

Let me just come out and admit that I’m an enormous hypocrite. Sure, I might go on and on about how awesome something is, and how superior it is over another option, but if there’s one thing I’m pretty easily swayed by, it’s the presence of Awesome. Should anything suddenly present its Awesomeness unto me, oh man, will I be over there in a second. I am an Awesome addict, and given the vast, vast array of addictive substances that our modern world presents us with, I think I’ve made the healthy choice. Awesome, and beef tatake, which is basically Awesome in meat form.

My hypocrisy in point : the great ‘graphic novel vs. the comic book‘ exploration, way back in September. Who remembers September anyhow? That was like, three years ago. I advocated the simplicity and compactness of the graphic novel over the traditional comic book, but it became recently clear to me that I’d neglected some very important aspects of The Mighty Comic Book in my quest to save space and money.

See, I’ve become enamored with The Inhumans, a genetically altered superhuman team of outcasts from Marvel Comics, who either live in the Himalayas or the Moon, depending on when you’re reading. In searching for their original 12-issue Inhumans miniseries, it dawned on me that the series was not yet collected into a trade paperback format, and I’d have to hunt down the original single issues if I wanted to read about their classic 1975 exploits. While Marvel and DC are both actively collecting their older comics into Archive Editions and Masterworks collections, many miniseries are still unreprinted. So, after a search, I found myself with a complete run of The Inhumans and Machine Man, drawn by such amazing legends as George Perez, Gil Kane and Jack Kirby.

The comics are yellowed, the staples are loose and they’ve clearly been read a few times before. This is a death sentence for anyone with pure collecting on the brain, but those folks can buy officially graded comics if it’s monetary value and preservation that you’re after. There’s a whole creepy conglomerate of giga-nerds who take care of this sort of grading and artificially inflate the values of things. Me, I wanted to lay in bed, sick with the flu, and drift off into the adventures of The Inhumans as they first appeared. And drink cocoa and have a pretty girl bring me soup. And maybe a unicorn. After I started flipping through the first few issues, I noticed the one hugely important thing that trade paperbacks are missing, besides the romance of delicately turning a brittle page and smelling the pulp – the advertisements.

Now, comic book advertisements from 1975 are a whole other breed of advertising, very specifically targeted to the comic-reading audience of young males, and so beautifully, heartbreakingly surreal. It’s fairly apparent that they’re not bothering to conform to any standards of honesty or realism. Often, the comic will break for two pages at a time to make way for black and white ad space. In this way, the original panel flow between paired pages isn’t interrupted, and the ad sections can be easily skipped by the reader. The bottom of the comic page preceding an advertisement even warns the reader that the next couple of pages will be full of advertising, so as not to break the pace of the story too severely. In my own enlightened era, I’ve found that these wide-open spreads of empty promises and quixotic notions to be just as entertaining and emotionally charged as the comic itself. They’re very amusing when you’re not the beleaguered kid stuffing two dollars into an envelope with the promise of learning Instant Kung Fu in 6-to-8 weeks in a desperate attempt at preserving one’s own ass on the way home from school.

If you’re unfamiliar with this brand of advertising, take a look at this gem from the Masculiner Company. Nestled in the warm bosom of the fantasy universe of The Inhumans, those attractive women and outcast muscular men of great ability, the reader is presented with an exciting prospect of his own. The implication that slapping some gluey tufts of hair on your face will make a romantic lothario out of you seems all-too-possible in such a fantastic context. If Black Bolt can level cities with a mere utterance of sound, who’s to say that your new, convincing (and spontaneously appearing) sideburns won’t finally net you that cheerleader who doesn’t know you exist? Couple that with ads that sell you secrets about how to grow 6 inches taller in a week and how to gain 25 pounds of muscle by tomorrow, and you have one violently unrealistic portrayal of the human body and, well, life itself, and it’s all spelled out without any implication that ‘results may vary’ or ‘hammerfist kung-fu technique cannot be learned overnight’ or ‘hell, we’re totally screwing with you here’. Anyone who thinks that only the body images of girls are preyed upon in the media clearly has never read a 1970s-era comic book.

This kind of advertisement featured five distinct categories : body improvement, wacky products, money making schemes, Hostess fruit pies, and individuals selling other comics (often interspersed with the comic publishers selling their own branded accessories). As the decade came to a close, ad space was taken over by full-color ads for video games, candy and Saturday morning cartoons, but a page or two of black-and-white untruths lingered on. Stay tuned.