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Kirby: King of Comics Posted 25 Mar 2008 Writer: Mark Evanier (book); Neil Gaiman (introduction) Artist: Jack Kirby (all illustrations); Mark LaRiviere and E.Y. Lee (book design); Paul Sahre and E.Y. Lee (jacket design); Alex Ross (gatefold) Publisher: Abrams  4.50 out of 5 Stars Reviewed by Adam McGovern

You’d expect Mark Evanier’s long-awaited and lifetime-researched biography of Kirby to be packed with information and insight — so much so that you might briefly forget, as Evanier doesn’t, that Kirby was about indelible imagery. Kirby: King of Comics is the definitive bound museum of the artist’s work to date, covering more of his career (and shedding more light on its sometimes surprising corners) than any one work ever has.

“Evanier’s account reads like daily journalism, an impressive feat for events that happened most of a century ago.”

This ends up serving the narrative as well: Evanier is an accomplished screenwriter, and the interplay of text and image feels like an epic backstage musical of comics’ first 50 years. For it isn’t just art but narrative itself which is often found between Evanier’s chronicles and commentaries. Other books have paused for sections’ worth of whole comics stories (Feiffer’s Great Comic Book Heroes), presented single pages without their text (Steranko’s History of Comics), or run the author’s copy within the old captions and balloons (Arlen Schumer’s The Silver Age of Comic Book Art); Evanier’s book interleaves fragmentary but well-chosen chunks of published comics as both adornment and example. You get a real feeling of going back and forth from the drawing board to the roar of the crowd, as well as for what was making them roar. The real-time hypertext effect is sophisticated; a digressive but accumulative postmodern parallel narrative that makes this, at least in one way, the Moby-Dick of coffeetable comic-art books.

King of Comics is the latest in a line of neo-pop treatments of Kirby’s work — The Comics Journal Library’s Kirby volume, Schumer’s Silver Age, and DC’s Fourth World Omnibus editions — which blow up the artist’s images with their ben-day DNA at seemingly monumental scale, the essence of their immediate, eternal emotion both molecular and macrocosmic, befitting Kirby’s grand designs in a lowly medium. Here, in addition to many coherent yet staggering images at the size Kirby created them, there are whole front and end papers of just the giant color-separation grain, and a dust jacket ingeniously cobbled from many of Kirby’s leaping figures and exploding forces into one almost abstract-expressionist conflagration; an inspired summation of his defining qualities, all in crisp line and four-color, which alludes wittily to the hallucinogenic photo collages with which Kirby himself expanded the medium’s formal vocabulary.

“Kirby’s life and career are assessed with clarity and fairness and Evanier’s portrait of the King is reassuringly free of bitterness or regrets.”

Evanier doesn’t take the poetic leaps of a Gerard Jones (or jump to his conclusions); instead his account reads like daily journalism, an impressive enough feat for events that happened most of a century ago and much of which the author didn’t experience firsthand, and one which lets the unmediated flavor of each time period — and Kirby’s feelings about it — come through with surprising force. Given Kirby’s unmatched scope and central influence, the resulting story feels like a history of all modern American comics and pop culture with a single, improbable point-of-view character, but the improbable was Kirby’s business. In that and other ways, Kirby’s story is America’s, starting with the boundless opportunity and bottomless need reflected in his rise from tenement-dweller to founding talent of a wide-open new artform. Evanier takes this story forward through the glorious, perilous 1940s (Kirby on top of his industry and on the front lines in Europe); the chilly, retrenching ’50s (Kirby with his creativity curtailed as a censorship-shy industry contracted); the dizzying, contentious ’60s (Kirby solidifying his mature innovations with Stan Lee while staying far from a worker’s victory over the excesses of, er, The Man); the deceptively calm ’70s (Kirby’s career settling out as his work reflects an inner turbulence and many ideas that will much later be seen as groundbreaking); and the universally iffy ’80s (Kirby’s personal culture-wars with Marvel and a few valedictory triumphs in comics and cartoons).

Through the magic of unenhanced production processes, we get to see it all the way it was seen at the time, as if the medium of memory itself is being applied right to the page. The book has its moments of flat phrasing and arid shoptalk; at times Evanier’s scruples as a journalist overtake his instincts as a gifted wit and oral historian. But those who get the work done in entertainment industries stand or fall on the heroic proportion of moves they make right, and Evanier has followed in his old friend and mentor’s footsteps in that regard. Kirby’s life and career are assessed with clarity and fairness to both his disciples and dissenters, and Evanier ends on a portrait of the battle-scarred but contented King that is reassuringly free of bitterness or regrets. A Jack Kirby who couldn’t have poured his creativity into our comparably colorless world, no matter what the reception or reward, would have been the biggest tragedy for both him and us. Kirby often didn’t have status, and hardly ever had power, but what he always had — and what leaps from Evanier’s pages like the classic Kirby hero — was love.

 

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