King Kirby Day 2011

Today would have been Jack Kirby's ninety-fourth birthday, and I wanted to celebrate the day as I did last year: by swiping one of the panels drawn by Kirby that was burned into my visual memory at an early age and lives there to this day.

I don't have much time to explain why I chose this particular panel—that'll be a post for another day, soon. But if you've seen the Favorites zine, this is a panel from the comic I wrote about.



Other people (and little stuffed bulls) will surely honor Kirby better. But I wanted to make sure I didn't let the anniversary of his birth pass without peering again into the mysterious power his images have over me.

Happy King Kirby Day

Today would have been Jack Kirby's ninety-third birthday.

In the past, I've posted brief essays on Kirby's kinetic page composition, and on his design sense, both for characters and for machines, and I've frequently posted doodles and swipes of Kirby's drawings, from Etrigan to Kro and Ikaris, from Ulysses Klaw to Scott Free.

Today, I thought I'd celebrate the King's visual legacy by "covering" a panel from an issue of Kamandi that got lodged in my imagination (and my memory) when I was something like six or seven years old.



It still gives me the shivers. Morticoccus, the Living Germ, released from his prison of decades by the misbegotten Misfit, ready to destroy every living thing he encounters, until the world itself is dead.

I don't intend this as a memorial to Kirby. Other people (and little stuffed bulls) will do a better job with that. I just wanted to spend a little time this morning reworking an image that I'll never forget. It's personal, I guess. But it was good to get that into my notebook.

King Kirby Day 2012

Today would have been Jack Kirby's ninety-fifth birthday.

As I have for the past couple of years, I spent a little time today copying a panel drawn by Kirby that lodged in my visual imagination when I was a kid and never completely got dislodged.

Don't look at it too closely. My work really suffered from a combination of scale and tool choice: I was drawing this way too small for it to get inked well with my ready-to-hand combo of brush pen and medium-fine Rapidograph. The colors are pretty nice, though.

Why do I do this? The pictures still, after all these years, have an eerie power for me, most of which comes (I think) from the seriousness with which I studied them when I was little.

Suppose you're walking in a ruined theater, where no one has set foot for twenty years. There's a little old upright piano in the dusty backstage wings, and out of curiosity you plink out a chord. The notes are hollow, weak, and a little sour, but you have to be impressed that they still play.

That's the way it is for me with these pictures. I think I would recognize that "organic director" in any context, even though Kirby only drew it once. (Lightray refashions it into something less horrible before we get another clear look at it.)

This year, I invited a few of my friends to join me in my observances.

Scott Koblish drew a panel from Kirby's run on Captain America.

Check out Ben Towle's Lockjaw pinup.

And dig Damien's Mark Moonrider.

I didn't have to invite Bully to commemorate the occasion, of course. He did it all on his own.

Ditto, Adam Koford, natch.

And Evan Dorkin? Nuff said.

Our Contribution to "Covered"

If you're clicking over to our blog from the "Covered" project, I hope you'll stick around to check out our big summer back-issue sale and maybe some of our ridiculous "Doodle Penance" posts.

(And if you haven't heard of "Covered," I highly recommend it as a cool place to see people manipulating and laying claim to the powerful imagery of other people's comics covers.)

You might be curious to know how we chose our contribution, and why our image looks so little like the original Walt Simonson cover for Batman #366. We actually worked up two submissions for "Covered," and the one they ran was our version of the cover of the first comic book Mike ever bought.

The way we did these was typically peculiar and unnecessarily difficult.

The main thing is that each of us was, sort of like Pierre Menard, duplicating an image he had never really seen. First, we both picked covers that the other guy hadn't seen. Mike drew a set of pencils from the original cover of Batman #366...



(All of the images in this post will enlarge if you click on them.)


... and I then inked his pencils without consulting the original image:



... and then, still without consulting the original, I colored my version digitally:



I was trying to stick pretty close to the flat colors of the Superfriends cartoon there. I wanted to stay pretty cartoony in my inks as well, figuring that would be a good way to "own" the image and make it look more like our work than the original.

Have a look at the original, by comparison:



Simonson's image has a little more kinetic energy in it—a subtle change in the position of Batman's right leg makes a lot of difference in the balance of his figure, I think—and my Joker is a little bit chunky. And of course I didn't quite figure out the light and shadow on that weird building. But I think our version gains in legibility what it loses in energy.

(Mike would like me to point out, here, that the cover of Batman #366 is unique in the many-decades-long run of Batman in having a never-repeated logo for the book's title, integrated into the drawing almost in the manner of one of Will Eisner's Spirit titles. Mike has also heard that this cover existed before the story it illustrates—that the drawing by Walt Simonson was so cool that the editor ordered a story created to back it up.)

Our other cover-of-a-cover, which you'll see only here on the blog, started with drawings of Jack Kirby's Forever People #6. That's not the first comic I ever owned—my childhood copy was part of a big pile of Fourth-World comics given to me by one of my dad's friends when I was about six years old. But out of that Kirby-at-DC stash that had such a powerful effect on me as a kid, I thought this one had one of the coolest covers.

I started with a quick thumbnail, to see whether the image would work in my simplified style:



Then I did a set of pencils in my notebook and sent them over to Mike, who had never seen the original image:



(Already I am losing some of the energy and drama in the thumbnail.)

Then Mike did an admirable job inking my simple scribbles:



... and then he put some colors on them:



What's strange—and I still can't really believe we can say this—is that the original Jack Kirby cover of Forever People #6 seems more subdued.



I'm not sure how successful either of these "covers" is—I mean, I don't think either of us should consider quitting his day job in an effort to unseat James Jean or whoever—but I have to say it was a ton of fun to put some time and effort into aping Simonson and Kirby. I won't say it has been a long time since I last copied drawings by Kirby, but this is probably the most careful I've been about it, and as an exercise I certainly recommend it.

Where Kirby meets Woodring...

We're still in sort of a holding pattern while we wait for our last five constraints, but here's a quick note:

I recently bought the Marvel Devil DinosaurOmnibus, which collects a strange, abortive mid-1970s Jack Kirby series that seems to be born from some of the same impulses that created Kamandi and Kirby's 2001. It's kind of completely crazy.


What's that, Moon Boy? You sure do look alarmed! And those colors in the sky sure are bright!

What are you looking at, little simian pal?





Now that is a splash page. You can click to see it biggerly.

Mike and I saw this image in black and white at the Masters of American Comics show in New York, and it impressed me then; in color it's even more ... what's the word? Dynamic? Astounding? Insane?

That gigantic cosmic dinosaur-beast spirit thing (and the orange-yellow wheel of eyes below it) remind me, more than anything, of some of Jim Woodring's fancies and phantasmagoria. In particular, I'm put in mind of the "Crazy Newts" toys. I have a couple of those that hang around on my desk:



Sometimes it's a crazy, bright-colored, square-headed, super-mutated cosmic lizard that gets you through the day.

Alphabeasts: F is for Four-Dimensional Space Whale

The winner of last week's poll was "Moby-Dick analogue," so this week's entry for Alphabeasts is "F is for Four-Dimensional Space Whale."



These aren't the only space whales out there, of course. Like, remember, O Nerd-as-a-Kid, those ones who healed Storm when she had a Brood larva in her? Too late to draw them for this alphabet. Then there's the critter that nursed itself on the engines of the Enterprise-D after Captain Picard killed its mom. And it's been ages since I read this other book, and maybe those whales were off in the distant future, not in space, but they do start with W if you want them.

Anyway, to get my faux-Kirby space whale up against my faux-Kirby background, I had to put a lot of my linework right against flat black; if you want to see the drawing itself, it's here:



I actually hadn't yet seen the Futurama episode ("Möbius Dick") that features this creature until this weekend. And I'm not sure how I feel about these latter seasons of Futurama, to tell you the truth, though it's nice to see the characters (and the cast) back in action. We don't learn a whole lot about the four-dimensional space whale in that episode, anyway, except that it feeds on obsession (not the fragrance) and only "breaches" into three-dimensional space to fill its lungs with vacuum.

(There's a pretty cool sequence starting about 11:55 into the episode where the Planet Express ship gets dragged into the fourth dimension on a "sleigh ride" behind the harpooned whale. It reminded me of an interesting old post I wrote about violations of the two-dimensional page by three-dimensional creatures.)

(Also, at 10:30 into the episode, the space whale blows out a breath in the form of a fractal, which is a nice math joke I guess.)

Anyway, all this talk about "four-dimensional this" and "three-dimensional that" made me want to work up a 3-D version of my 4-D Space Whale, so I tinkered with the method I'd used on Ben Towle's Kirby ukulele way back in the day. If you can do the "magic eye" method, you should be able to relax your eyes and see a 3-D space whale between these two images.



Or, if that method never works for you, you can whip out some 3-D glasses and try to see it here. I had trouble with the hues, though, so there's some "ghosting." Maybe that's just the four-dimensionality coming through.



UPDATE: better 3-D versions are in my next post.

Next week, I have a couple of different ideas for creatures to draw. What would you like to see me do?



You have until Friday evening to tell me.

Old Kirby-Character Doodles

I pulled out an old notebook (from 2004) the other day, so I could hunt up some details about the apartment I used to keep on Long Island. As I was flipping through the notebook, whom did I see but my old favorite superhero from childhood, Scott Free?


There he is, among notes for a verse essay on escapism. (I've written the poem, but haven't found a place to publish it yet. I keep sending it out.)

I wasn't sure whether I was remembering this right, but I dug out a notebook from the spring of 1995 (the first year I was in New Haven, while I was still taking courses in graduate school), and sure enough, there's Scott Free in pencil, on his aero-discs, sailing among doodles drawn from a discussion of The Tempest. I think the bug-eyed guy on the left is one version of Caliban.



You see, when I was just five or six years old (if I remember right), a friend of my father gave me a big collection of Kirby's work at DC: almost every issue of Forever People and Mister Miracle; lots of New Gods and Kamandi and Jimmy Olsen and The Demon. It was a huge influence on my young mind, I think. Kirby's design sense permeated my childhood head, and his characters seemed to me more "real" than Marvel's characters, in the way that Hercules and Odysseus are more real than characters in a novel or on TV.

A few pages earlier in the 2004 notebook, just goofing around on a page with a to-do list, here's Etrigan:

Yarva Demonicus Etrigan, people!

Something about this doodle got me thinking: where have I seen something like that recently? A Kirbyesque physique, in celebratory contortions? Swagger and strut with blocky fingertips?

A-ha, I realized: Casey and Scioli's Godland! Friedrich Nickelhead, dancing in celebration, taunting Basil Cronos!

Yep, that's Dylan he's listening to. It's a trippy, trippy book.

Elm City Jams #3 (May 2005)

In the third issue of Elm City Jams, apparently just to make things more difficult for ourselves, we added a new complication to each of our one-page jam strips: every page would begin with a title drawn at random, as before, and a formal constraint drawn at random from a different deck.

Some of these constraints were straightforward (if vexing), like a requirement that every panel run the full height of the page, or a requirement that the panels be shaped like something important in the panel. Some of the other constraints were more baroque, like the one we used in "Draculina vs. Wolf Lady," where each caption was written and obscured before the accompanying panel was drawn (without knowing what that panel said).

In "Kirby Speaks Through Ouija," the constraint was that we had to make use of Matt Madden's Exercises in Style, so the strip swipes each of his panels, though in the opposite order. Here's the middle tier:


Probably my favorite strip in this book is "Because of This, I Cannot Love," a sort of tribute to Lewis Trondheim's Mr. O. You'll certainly need to click on this in order to read it -- the panels are tiny -- but please come back when you're done.

The constraint, here, was that the comic had to be a thinly veiled advertisement for Doritos.

We seem, in this issue, to have added a liberal dose of blasphemy to our regular mix of profanity and scatology, so if you're offended by that sort of thing, you might want to steer clear of Elm City Jams #3. On the other hand, if you have room in your heart for jokes about crucifixion, click on this image to enlarge it. It's one of our best shuffleupagus pages, featuring a little fish-boy designed by Jon Lewis.


The whole book is full of our typical weirdness -- the sense of humor one reader has called "random and stupid" -- and in ECJ #3 you can find Egyptians fighting Hapsburgs, Death Metalca and the Apocalypse Peavey, a knight with a monkey on his arm, a monologue by Shakespeare's Iago, a nonchalant indy ninja turtle, Ape-Day, a strip about our ECJ hazing rituals, and the Venerable Bede in underoos (hello, search engines!).



The inside back cover offers a mock tutorial on building this sort of craziness, which resulted in three characters we love dearly but have yet to use in an actual comic:


Contributors to this issue inclue Tom O'Donnell, Jeff Seymour, Shana Mlawski, Harry Dozier, and Mike and myself. As usual, it's a 20-page, hand-stapled, digest-sized minicomic, and you can have it for $1.75 if you use Paypal, $1.50 if you use a check, and $1.00 if you get it from me in person. Here's that fancy Paypal button you've been waiting for:

Doodle Penance: "десять докторов"

Google is everywhere, which means that even an ordinary website like ours gets the occasional hit from a far-flung place like Oxford or Rennes, or Israel or Hungary. And this week, we apparently received a very brief visit from a Russian-speaking inquirer, looking for десять докторов. That's "ten doctors," if you can't read Russian.

It's possible that some Muscovite has ten ailments, like Writer's Cramp and Butterflies in the Stomach. Or perhaps some right-wing American kook is trying to make a very subtle and misguided point about socializing health care.

But my theory—indubitably the most plausible interpretation of the search term—is that there's some student out there hoping to do some quick Russian-language drills by making flash cards out of the names of comics characters. In a "Twelve Days of Christmas" sort of build-up, he or she has already printed cards for nine versions of Superman, eight super-gorillas, seven Starmen, six trick archers, five folks with wings, et cetera, and is up to Doctors. (Eleven and twelve are Lanterns and Captains, clearly.)

(Click the pic, please, to enlarge and perhaps admire.)



Actually, there could be more in this set. I've thought of another six or seven already, and there are probably more. Somewhere in comics-land there must be a university that gives a lot of honorary degrees.

Anyway, since our Googler wasn't just looking for "ten doctors" but "десять докторов," let me supply the other side of the flash cards, too.



(Russian translations by my friend Zina Deretsky. Thanks!)

Recognize them all? If the dude with the wild eyebrows and the Kirby krackle isn't familiar, you might need to book a trip to the Fourth World.

If you don't recognize that bald little gremlin in the ninth square, you haven't been reading our archives.

And if you don't know the skeptic in the final panel, you'd better prenez garde aux architectes.

And if you think my original color version doesn't look Russian enough, here's a version in sable and gules.



Mike? What have you got this week?

—Man, why should I even bother? But since I must...

Since Russian doesn't use the definite article, I assumed that our Google searcher was interested not just in "ten doctors" but in "THE ten doctors," better, "The Ten Doctors," as in the Rich Morris fan-fic graphic novel I posted about here or just as in a celebration of the ten incarnations of the Doctor (aka Doctor Who), the tenth of whom just finished his tenure on New Year's Day. So I drew quick caricature-portraits of the ten Doctors whose adventures we have seen thus far:

The less comment on this, the better. But if anyone is still interested in a foreign-language variant on Doctor Who, you could do worse than to seek out the vastly superior rendition of the famous theme-tune as if it were Belgian jazz, complete with French spoken lyrics, by the great musician-comedian Bill Bailey.