13 DAYS OF KIRBY 100: The artist journeys into mystery …
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Welcome to 13 DAYS OF KIRBY 100, our celebration of Jack Kirby’s centennial, produced in conjunction with TwoMorrows Publishing. Over 13 days, we’re serializing the publisher’s forthcoming book KIRBY 100, edited by Jon B. Cooke and featuring essays and artistic contributions by 100 of the biggest names in comics, such as Alex Ross, Mike Allred, Craig Yoe, Dave Gibbons and many, many others.
For the complete 13 DAYS OF KIRBY 100 Index of stories and features, click here.
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Kelley Jones is one of comics’ preeminent artists of the last 30 years or so, with a style among the most distinct in the medium. He also loves to talk comics — he’s contributed to 13th Dimension on occasion — and here he tells a warm story of how he discovered Jack Kirby.
Oddly, it wasn’t through comics …
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NEXT: Jerry Ordway on the ‘Miracle’ of Kirby’s Virtuosity. Click here.
KIRBY 100 is due to be released 8/28, the King’s 100th anniversary. It will be available in stores, online and directly through TwoMorrows (click here to order).
For the complete 13 DAYS OF KIRBY 100 Index of stories and features, click here.
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August 26, 2017
That’s a great story and one I can relate to.
My story for what it’s worth:
I knew Kirby’s work. Marvel (Stan Lee) brilliantly did a good job of educating us (remediation, we call it in the school teaching biz, and Marvel was one of the best teachers I had) because they were reprinting older issues that most of us were too young to have read first time around. I got a whole backlog of Fantastic Four history lessons by reading Marvel’s Greatest Comics. I felt lucky to be able to read them and ached a bit that I wasn’t part of that generation who first read them. Jack’s rendering of Thor, Spider-Man, Daredevil and the FF fighting atop the Baxter building mesmerized me, knocked me out.
Watching Captain America fight Red Skull while he’s tied up (Which I believe the book is featuring) also knocked me out. The rules of movement and physicality that Jack had seemed to be so real, yet incredible – impossible, yet doable. If you just believed and had the right frame of mind.
But the book that cemented it for me was FF 51, “This Man, This Monster” which I read in a reprint featured in a giant Treasury Size edition. We kids were sequestered and relegated to the back room on a cold night as the adults had a party in the front of the house. My 6th grade brain got totally lost in the Stan’s writing and Jack’s art,…. and I realized the greatness of the man and his place in the comic world and the world of Marvel.
Jack was the man!