![]() Beginning with Kirby’s hardscrabble upbringing in Manhattan’s Lower East Side (remarkably similar to the back history he later gave the Thing, one of his most endearing creations), Scioli extensively documents the artist’s career and personal life through a chummy and casual first-person narrative. Told from the point of view of Kirby (1917–1994), the biography also acts as a history of the comics industry, from early strips to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The fact that Marvel didn’t see it that way was a large part of why he ended up leaving, going on to build the Fourth World at DC and work on the cartoons that became a gateway for the young Scioli.Scioli (the Gødland series) injects oomph into the already-energetic life story of the “King of Comics” through sweeping narrative and Scioli’s trademark detailed page layouts. If that latter process sounds like one where at least part of the writing credit should go to Kirby – well, the man himself would probably agree with you. “In some cases, Stan and Jack didn’t have chance to have that initial conversation and Jack would just create a complete story, bring it in to Stan and explain to him what’s going on.” Especially when the exact process could change from issue to issue. This became known as the ‘Marvel method’ – a looser, more collaborative way of creating comics that can also blur the lines of who created what. Jack goes home and draws a complete story with dialogue suggestions, and then Stan takes that and adds in his own verbiage,” Scioli explains. “In a lot of cases, the comics began as Stan and Jack getting together and just talking out some stuff, each of them contributing ideas. note: You might not recognize the clean shaven man beside Jack in the panels below, but that’s actually what Stan Lee looked like at the time. The book also traces Kirby’s own influences and fascinations, like Norse mythology – Marvel’s version of Thor was far from the first time he’d told stories with the thunder god – and how he’d come back to ideas from unused pitches or stories that hadn’t fully tapped their potential – the Fantastic Four, for example, is in part a revival of the Challengers of the Unknown series Kirby wrote and drew at DC in the ‘50s.Įd. And his wartime experiences are reflected in the stories he later told with Nick Fury and Captain America. Those boyhood years also fed into the creation of kid gangs like DC’s Newsboy Legion and Boy Commandos. It’s hard to miss the connections between Kirby’s origin story and that of the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm, aka the Thing: both Jewish kids with a penchant for scrapping who grew up on the Lower East Side. It’s a compelling life story, regardless of his impact on comics – but doubly so because you can trace the earliest origins of ideas that would outlive the man himself. The Epic Life of the King of Comics follows Kirby from his childhood as part of an Austrian-Jewish migrant family in pre-war Manhattan, through his time fighting in World War II, to his eventual death in 1994. “This is the guy who created pretty much anything I ever thought was cool.” Connecting the universe From Marvel to DC, comics to animation, and influences that reach far beyond his own work (the visual similarities between Darth Vader and Dr Doom, and how the father-son relationship with Luke echoes New Gods’ Darkseid and Orion, have often been noted). ![]() Once he did, though, it felt like discovering “the centre of my universe”. It really wasn’t until high school that I heard the name Jack Kirby.” It was like, ‘these are great comics because they’re from the great Stan Lee’. “ Thundarr the Barbarian was my favorite cartoon when I was little, he did the design work for that and some of the visual storytelling, then as I got older, I read Thor and Captain America comics – but even though the comics said Jack Kirby in the credits box, I still didn’t make the connection. “When I first encountered Kirby’s work, I wasn’t aware of who he was,” he says. And even as a lifelong Kirby fan, it started the same way for Scioli himself. ![]() “I think that’s most people’s starting point: okay, Stan Lee is this comic book genius, he created all the Marvel stuff,” Scioli, told Polygon. ![]()
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