Rip Kirby Comics Cbr 14
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After serving in the European Theater in World War II, Kirby produced work for DC Comics, Harvey Comics, Hillman Periodicals and other publishers. At Crestwood Publications, he and Simon created the genre of romance comics and later founded their own short-lived comic company, Mainline Publications. Kirby was involved in Timely's 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics, which in the next decade became Marvel. There, in the 1960s, Kirby co-created many of the company's major characters, including the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Ant-Man, Thor, Iron Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Silver Surfer, and the Black Panther, among numerous others. Kirby's titles garnered high sales and critical acclaim, but in 1970, feeling he had been treated unfairly, largely in the realm of authorship credit and creators' rights, Kirby left the company for rival DC.
At DC, Kirby created his Fourth World saga which spanned several comics titles. While these series proved commercially unsuccessful and were canceled, the Fourth World's New Gods have continued as a significant part of the DC Universe. Kirby returned to Marvel briefly in the mid-to-late 1970s, then ventured into television animation and independent comics. In his later years, Kirby, who has been called "the William Blake of comics",[2] began receiving great recognition in the mainstream press for his career accomplishments, and in 1987 he was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame. In 2017, Kirby was posthumously named a Disney Legend for his creations not only in the field of publishing, but also because those creations formed the basis for The Walt Disney Company's financially and critically successful media franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Kirby was married to Rosalind Goldstein in 1942. They had four children and remained married until his death from heart failure in 1994, at the age of 76. The Jack Kirby Awards and Jack Kirby Hall of Fame were named in his honor, and he is known as "The King" among comics fans for his many influential contributions to the medium.
At the urging of a Crestwood salesman, Kirby and Simon launched their own comics company, Mainline Publications,[44][45] securing a distribution deal with Leader News[46] in late 1953 or early 1954, subletting space from their friend Al Harvey's Harvey Publications at 1860 Broadway.[47] Mainline, which existed from 1954 to 1955, published four titles: the Western Bullseye: Western Scout; the war comic Foxhole because EC Comics and Atlas Comics were having success with war comics, but promoting theirs as being written and drawn by actual veterans; In Love because their earlier romance comic Young Love was still being widely imitated; and the crime comic Police Trap, which claimed to be based on genuine accounts by law-enforcement officials.[48] After the duo rearranged and republished artwork from an old Crestwood story in In Love, Crestwood refused to pay the team,[49] who sought an audit of Crestwood's finances. Upon review, the pair's attorneys stated the company owed them $130,000 for work done over the past seven years. Crestwood paid them $10,000 in addition to their recent delayed payments. The partnership between Kirby and Simon had become strained.[50] Simon left the industry for a career in advertising, while Kirby continued to freelance. "He wanted to do other things and I stuck with comics," Kirby recalled in 1971. "It was fine. There was no reason to continue the partnership and we parted friends."[51]
Several months later, after his split with DC, Kirby began freelancing regularly for Atlas despite harboring negative sentiments about Stan Lee (the cousin of Timely publisher Martin Goodman's wife), who Kirby believed had disclosed to Timely back in the 1940s that he and Simon were secretly working on a project for National.[60] Because of the poor page rates, Kirby would spend 12 to 14 hours daily at his drawing table at home, producing four to five pages of artwork a day.[61] His first published work at Atlas was the cover of and the seven-page story "I Discovered the Secret of the Flying Saucers" in Strange Worlds #1 (Dec. 1958). Initially with Christopher Rule as his regular inker, and later Dick Ayers, Kirby drew across all genres, from romance comics to war comics to crime comics to Western comics, but made his mark primarily with a series of supernatural-fantasy and science fiction stories featuring giant, drive-in movie-style monsters with names like Groot, the Thing from Planet X;[62] Grottu, King of the Insects;[63] and Fin Fang Foom for the company's many anthology series, such as Amazing Adventures, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, and World of Fantasy.[14] His bizarre designs of powerful, unearthly creatures proved a hit with readers. Additionally, he freelanced for Archie Comics around this time, reuniting briefly with Joe Simon to help develop the series The Fly[64] and The Double Life of Private Strong.[65] Additionally, Kirby drew some issues of Classics Illustrated.[14]
The central villain of the Fourth World series, Darkseid, and some of the Fourth World concepts, appeared in Jimmy Olsen before the launch of the other Fourth World books, giving the new titles greater exposure to potential buyers. The Superman figures and Jimmy Olsen faces drawn by Kirby were redrawn by Al Plastino, and later by Murphy Anderson.[104][105] Les Daniels observed in 1995 that "Kirby's mix of slang and myth, science fiction and the Bible, made for a heady brew, but the scope of his vision has endured."[106] In 2007, comics writer Grant Morrison commented that "Kirby's dramas were staged across Jungian vistas of raw symbol and storm ... The Fourth World saga crackles with the voltage of Jack Kirby's boundless imagination let loose onto paper."[107]
In addition to his artistic efforts, Kirby proposed a variety of new formats for comics such as planning to collect his published Fourth World stories into square-bound books, a format that would later be called the trade paperback, which would eventually become standard practice in the industry. However, Infantino and company were not receptive and Kirby's proposals only went as far as producing the one-shot black-and-white magazines Spirit World and In the Days of the Mob in 1971.[108]
Kirby's other Marvel creations in this period include Machine Man[125] and Devil Dinosaur.[126] Kirby's final comics collaboration with Stan Lee, The Silver Surfer: The Ultimate Cosmic Experience, was published in 1978 as part of the Marvel Fireside Books series and is considered Marvel's first graphic novel.[127]
In the early 1980s, Kirby and Pacific Comics, a new, non-newsstand comic-book publisher, made one of the industry's earliest deals for creator-owned series, resulting in Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers,[134][135] and the six-issue miniseries Silver Star (later collected in hardcover format in 2007).[136][137][138] This, together with similar actions by other independent comics publishers as Eclipse Comics (where Kirby co-created the character Destroyer Duck in a benefit comic-book series published to help Steve Gerber fight a legal case against Marvel),[139] helped establish a precedent to end the monopoly of the work-for-hire system, wherein comics creators, even freelancers, had owned no rights to characters they created.[140]
In the twilight of his life, Kirby spent a great deal of time sparring with Marvel executives over the ownership rights of his original page boards. At Marvel, many of these pages owned by the company (due to outdated and legally dubious copyright claims) were given away as promotional gifts to Marvel clients or simply stolen from company warehouses.[145] After the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976, which greatly expanded artist copyright capabilities, comics publishers began to return original art to creators, but in Marvel's case only if they signed a release reaffirming Marvel's ownership of the copyright. In 1985, Marvel issued a release that demanded Kirby affirm that his art was created for hire, allowing Marvel to retain copyright in perpetuity, in addition to demanding that Kirby forego all future royalties. Marvel offered him 88 pages of his art (less than 1% of his total output) if he signed the agreement, but reserved the right to reclaim the art if Kirby violated the deal.[146] After Kirby publicly slammed Marvel, calling the company thugs and claiming they were arbitrarily holding his creations, Marvel finally returned (after two years of deliberations) approximately 1,900[147] or 2,100 pages of the estimated 10,000 to 13,000 Kirby drew for the company.[148][149]
Jack Kirby has been referred to as the "superhero of style", his artwork described by John Carlin in Masters of American Comics as "deliberately primitive and bombastic",[174] and elsewhere has been compared to Cubist,[175] Futurist, Primitivist and outsider art.[176] His contributions to the comic book form, including the many characters he created or co-created and the many genres he worked on have led to him being referred to as the definitive comic book artist.[177] Given the number of places Kirby's artwork can now be found, the toys based on his designs, and the success of the movies based upon his work, Charles Hatfield and Ben Saunders declare him "one of the chief architects of the American imagination."[178] He was regarded as a hard working artist, and it has been calculated that he drew at least 20,318 pages of published art and a further 1,385 covers in his career. He published 1,158 pages in 1962 alone.[179] Kirby defined comics in two periods. His work in the early 1940s with Joe Simon on the Captain America strip, and then his superhero comics of the 1960s with Stan Lee at Marvel Comics and on his own at DC Comics.[180] Kirby also created stories in almost every genre of comics, from the autobiographical Street Code to the apocalyptic science fiction fantasy of Kamandi.[181]
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