Kirb Your Enthusiasm (3)

By: Gary Panter
February 22, 2011

Third in a series of posts, each one analyzing a single panel from a Jack Kirby-drawn comic book.

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kirby_demon-full-550 — Click on image for larger version. Click on that image to zoom in.

By sixth grade I was into comics — Turok and Tarzan and Superboy and Bugs Bunny — but not Kirby, whose work looked blobby like candlewax. Then one night I stayed over my friend David’s house and he converted me. As we ate baloney sandwiches and drank Pepsi after midnight, David rabidly pored over stacks of Marvel comics until he’d forced me to appreciate Kirby’s power and inventiveness. Kirby’s drawings for Thor and Fantastic Four were bombastic and majestic; his sci-fi machinery and character invention were amazing; Kirby was indeed king. I found his imagination and energy frightening (I later found out about Kirby’s violent New York childhood and WWII combat duty), but I started reading more Marvel comics and even joined Marvel’s FOOM fanclub. By the time I got out of art school in the ’70s, Kirby was making crazy comics for DC that were like a beefed-up abstraction of his work at Marvel. I was a budding cartoonist, and I bought every DC title that Kirby did as often as possible; I spent a lot of time looking at the particulars.

This Kirby panel from Demon (July 1973) is an ode to the horrific moment of the unmasking of the Phantom in Lon Chaney’s version of Phantom of the Opera. In Kirby’s hands, the power and psychic dread of the film has been transmuted into drawn form and the impact extended into psychosis. This is a really powerful scary graphic, and its effectiveness may be judged by the fact that every constituent mark and passage is so bold it may be easily read from across the room.

Kirby here uses the compositional strategy, often found in pop art and of super-realist painting, of centrality and frontality — that is, putting an object right in front of your face. This panel is not strictly a straight-on view, as we seem to be standing shoulder to shoulder with a monster who has, for the first time, viewed its molten countenance in a mirror and directs his emotional pitch too near to us. He is in our space, and Kirby puts us so close to the monster’s point of view that we may put ourselves in his place. The face is constructed of a tangle of highly orchestrated thick and thin calligraphic brush marks. As one often sees in the work of Kirby’s early career, the substance described seems to have the character of molten wax, whether it is used describe rock, flesh, leather or fireballs. This panel was drawn late in Kirby’s career and the waxy stuff has begun to flake and splinter like irradiated granite or lava drying, a material appropriate to describing the psychic event of a monstrously destroyed ego.

The lighting in Kirby’s panels is almost always dramatic and emphasized, as in German expressionist film and film noir by multiple sources of light, often two wide and low — sources that put the center of the face in shadow. (This is not an extreme version of that effect.) Kirby also does an interesting thing with his thick and thin outlining. Usually the thinnest point of a thick-and-thin brush-outline appears at the top of the circuit as if light was chasing the shadow off the top of the form. But Kirby very often has the thickest point of the line be on top of the form, reversing the typical usage — and indicating that the light is beaming from below. The flashlight under the chin effect emphasizes the strangeness of the situation; others have used it, too, but never so strikingly as when Kirby springs it upon a turned page.

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ALSO ON HILOBROW: Joe Alterio’s Cablegate Comix | HiLobrow posts about comics and cartoonists | HiLobrow posts about science fiction | The New Gods generation

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Kirb Your Enthusiasm (3)

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