Jack “The King" Kirby was such a factory of ideas... Hollywood’s actually developing a whole host of his unfinished concepts nearly two decades after the man’s death. Seriously, not just one idea... a HOST. According to the New York Times, there are around 600 unused artboards from his days at the Ruby Spears cartoon company that are currently causing a stir as being potential new media properties. The proposed shows have names like the Gargoids, the Bad Guys, Roxie’s Raiders and Golden Shield, and if you look at the pictures below, you’ll know that they’re all in the King’s signature style.
Kirby’s always something of an enigma, in my eyes - - a man whose life was almost as unbelievable as his creations. Now, he didn’t moonlight as an escape artist, like Jim Steranko did, but he did have a nigh-superhuman workflow and an expansive imagination that seemed to almost run totally counter to his upbringing. In the regard to the former, the man cranked out something four or five pages a day, which is an almost-inconceivable rate for artists, today. In regard to the latter, his work ethic was very much in character for a “working stiff” who'd grown up in the rough patches of the Bronx; though that background, in turn, was almost totally out of character for a man who created such far-out and bizarre cosmologies! Seriously, I’ve seen interviews with Kirby and he sounds like a gruff old man you’d see in your grandpa’s barbershop, not the guy who came up with KAMANDI, THE LAST BOY ON EARTH. It seemed to me like he was the corporeal conduit for some extradimensional entity.
The guy just dropped amazing ideas, left and right. I’ll never get over the fact that NEW GODS and the whole FOURTH WORLD line from the 70s was considered a failure at the time. It was actually canceled. And now, not only have Darkseid, New Genesis, the Mother Boxes, Mr. Miracle, the Boom Tubes, et al, endured… they’re significant pillars of the DCU’s entire cosmology. Like I said, the guy’s imagination was unbelievable.
== TEASER ==
-- Tom Pinchuk is the writer of UNIMAGINABLE for Arcana Comics and HYBRID BASTARDS! for Archaia. Pre-order the HYBRID BASTARDS! hardcover now on Amazon.com.
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