Trivia / Jack Kirby

• Attention Deficit Creator Disorder: Just imagine Kirby at his height drawing and partly plotting out comics with his detailed panels and pushing them out weekly during the golden age of the Marvel comics. That's a rate of productivity and creativity that is still the stuff of legends. Remember that it takes far more time to draw and lay out comics than it is to write them and as per the Marvel Method, Kirby more or less came up with part of the plots, character designs and action entirely on his own. This goes back to his earlier career. When he was about to sign up for the US Army, Kirby drew up a year's worth of comics as a backlog for his publishers so that he could still pump up material while on tour of duty.
• Creator Backlash: He regretted how harsh his usage of Funky Flashman to vent his frustrations with Stan Lee turned out. Kirby still had resentment towards Lee regardless, he just regretted how far he took it with Funky.
• Creator's Pest: He didn't care for Etrigan The Demon, who he was forced to create, write and draw after DC cancelled his New Gods books.
• Executive Meddling: When he created the Mighty Thor, he planned to have the hero's story eventually end with Ragnarok, like in the original myths. When the Powers that Be vetoed this final end, he went on to create the New Gods, whose story he intended to end with a final battle between Orion and his father, Darkseid. When the Powers that Be vetoed this final end, he went on to create the Eternals, which he intended to end with the ultimate confrontation with the Celestials. When the Powers that Be... and so on.
• Follow the Leader: Kirby is considered one of the most influential artists and writers in comics. He more or less created modern superhero action spectacles, science-fictions and various Cosmic Entity that have gone into Pop-Cultural Osmosis. Kirby's design aesthetic, the Kirby Dots, the particular science-fiction sphere-tron lines he put on his costumes and devices have entered into other mediums (for instance Brainiac's unique Three-Sphere Logo in the DC Animated Universe which Bruce Timm admitted was a homage).
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Being a pioneer of the Marvel Method, Kirby was legendary for his ability to crank out plots and artwork based on short descriptions of a premise. One infamous example of this was the Galactus Trilogy, which originated from Stan Lee simply telling Kirby to draw a comic where the Fantastic Four met God^note The accuracy of this story has been debated in recent years, as research into how the two wrote stories together makes it highly unlikely that Stan would've just written even a one page summary that could be summed up as "The Fantastic Four Fight God" and been okay with Kirby turning it into a three issue epic without his permission. . Len Wein and Marv Wolfman also recounted a time when they visited Kirby and witnessed the man draw an entire two page spread without any layouts or detailed descriptions of the scene.
  Linkara: By this point, Jack Kirby was essentially a robot with a keyboard in the back of his head that you punch superhero concepts into and he'd have a finished comic for you in a week.
• He Also Did: Kirby became an animator for Fleischer Studios in the late 1930s, but felt it was like working in a factory, especially when he had to be an inbetweener ^note The animators who have to do the animation between major positions of animated objects and characters, generally considered a very low-prestige part of the process so his tenure there was brief. In the early 1980s, Kirby returned to animation as a production designer and found it a whole different experience with the younger staff who did the grunt work themselves and treated him with awe.
• Milestone Celebration: 2017 is the hundred year anniversary of Jack Kirby and his creations and famous characters appeared in five out of six major superhero films of that year: Professor X in Logan, Ego the Living Planet and Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Iron Man in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor, Loki, Hela and the Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok and in Justice League (2017), Steppenwolf and other New Gods. In the same year, he became a Disney legend, alongside Stan Lee.
• Money, Dear Boy: While a lot of his work was done with genuine passion and dedication, Kirby's primary motivation when illustrating comics was to provide for his family and ensure their financial security.
• Referenced by...:
  • One issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage) has Donatello meet Kirby, who can make things come alive with a magic crystal tied to his pen. This issue was later adapted into an episode of the 2003 series.
  • In the movie Crimson Tide, Submarine Executive Officer Hunter points out to a crew member on the boat that "anyone who reads comic books knows that the Kirby Silver Surfer is the only true Silver Surfer."
  • Minoriteam would always have an end credit giving special thanks to "King" Kirby.
  • He briefly appears in Argo, played by Michael Parks, in his historical role of drawing the storyboards for the fake movie. Though he's not actually named in the film and you have to do some research to find out it's supposed to be him.
  • In what would turn out to be the last published issue of Alan Moore's Supreme, published shortly after Kirby's real-world death, Supreme discovers a Lost World in the Himalayas, which is populated by a whole load of Captains Ersatz of Kirby creations and ruled by a "Creator" who looks exactly like Kirby and is strongly implied to be Kirby somehow reborn as a god-like entity in the Awesome Universe. His appearance as a giant floating head looking down on the puny figures is a Shout-Out to the splash-panel of Ego the Living Planet in Thor #132.
  • The climax of volume one of Heroes takes place at Kirby Plaza.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Kirby started designing the New Gods in the late '60s at Marvel, where they would have been a post-Ragnarok continuation of Thor. What's less well-known is that OMAC started life as a Captain-America-in-the-future pitch.
  • During The '70s, Kirby was the conceptual art designer for an aborted attempt to produce a film based on Roger Zelazny's 1967 novel Lord of Light. His art was later re-used for the CIA's fake movie "Argo". He even gets a split-second cameo in the film! (The art actually seen in the film, however, isn't his, or even much like it.)
  • Kirby produced the first 17 pages of an adaptation of one of his favourite series, Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner (1967). The series never materialised, but the art he created for it would later be published in 2018.
  • He tried to adapt Frank Zappa's song "Valley Girl" into a comic strip. He only did one strip, which can be seen here.
  • Kirby attempted to pitch a revival of Captain Marvel with the primary goal of giving co-creator C.C. Beck work. While plans fell through due to legal reasons, Kirby's pitch is credited as the inspiration for DC Comics to officially fold Captain Marvel into the DC Universe.

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