Kirb Your Enthusiasm (4)

By: Dan Nadel
February 22, 2011

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

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kirby-omac-550 — Click on image for larger version. Click on that image to zoom in.

OMAC arrived in 1974, a year after Jack Kirby’s cosmic opera “Fourth World” titles were canceled, leaving him with two years left on his contract with DC Comics and no real direction. Kirby’s career is full of such moments of financial and creative drift: when what must’ve felt like desperation resulted in great work — it forced him into the business in the late 1930s and pushed him to innovate for Marvel in the early 1960s. Of course he did just as much, if not more, good work under better conditions, but it was not always a bad thing when his natural grandiosity was pinched a bit, forcing him to condense rather than sprawl. In those two years of limbo he wrote and drew some of his best comics: The bulk of Kamandi and Demon, Our Fighting Forces and OMAC.

OMAC (One-Man Army Corps) was a working stiff named Buddy Blank who was “changed by remote-controlled hormone surgery … from space!” by Brother Eye, “the most sophisticated machine ever devised.” And he’s a force for peace — “large armies lead to large wars,” so OMAC contains conflict before they grow. Issue 2 (November 1974) finds OMAC on his way to Electric City to see Professor Myron Forest, the scientist behind his transformation. But the city is “closed” because villainous Mr. Big has rented it for the night; in return the citizens of Electric City won’t have to pay taxes for a year. Or, as Kirby presciently wrote: “It’s the era of the super-rich! When money, like technology, reaches complex proportions, complex situations arise.”

After OMAC fights his way into the city (“He’s breaking through!! This dude is a one-man army!”), he’s offered a ride in a convertible by two men — one in a harlequin suit and the other dressed as a skeleton. And here we arrive at our panel. It’s a typically deep space, seemingly stretching through the comic book itself, a technique Kirby probably learned from “Wash Tubbs” cartoonist Ray Crane. And within that space is Kirby’s blend of plausible machinery (really more like abstract patterning) and grounding realism, like a road and a goofy threesome silhouetted in a future car. Kirby is sometimes claustrophobic with detail — he’s controlling everything you look at, so there’s no way into his language. But sometimes, as with this panel, he allows himself transitions and moments of quiet (well, quiet and some exposition). Suddenly, rather than being in the middle of the action you find yourself just observing from afar.

After this panel, the story moves fast: The skeleton and the harlequin turn out to be hit men gunning for OMAC, but instead only succeed in killing Forest. Some pages later Mr. Big is defeated and OMAC is once again ready for assignment. And Kirby has finished a 20-page story about some of his primary themes: money, war and death, cloaked in hyperbole, esoterica and machinery. It all seems so simple, but then, like with this panel, you start to take it apart, look at what he did, and realize just how much this artist was able to pack in. Back against the wall, Kirby always produced.

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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 (4)

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