Kirb Your Enthusiasm (7)

By: Jason Grote
February 24, 2011

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

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

As a kid, I found Kirby’s ’70s comics garish, frightening, overindulgent — belonging more to forbidden “adult” comics like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers or The Savage Sword of Conan than to the familiar worlds of DC and Marvel. That all changed when, as a pre-teen, I found entire runs of Kamandi and Machine Man to be had for a few dollars at the flea markets and used bookstores of suburban New Jersey. (As an aside: in one issue of Kamandi the titular hero does battle in a post-apocalyptic department store that is identical in every way to the Englishtown Flea Market). Collectors had snapped up Kirby’s more valuable Fourth World, and Golden and Silver Age Marvel creations, but although I’d once dismissed ’70s Kirby as something akin to primitivism (because my eye had been trained by the Marvel house style and/or by cartoon-ier DC artists like Curt Swan or Ramona Fradon), I now found myself entranced.

Machine Man has a strange pedigree — although the character has been showcased in some truly brilliant sf comics, he’s a fairly boilerplate character (the self-aware, emotional robot) who spun out of Kirby’s adaptation of Kubrick’s/Clarke’s 2001, one of the weirder licensed comics ever to have existed. Unlike, say, the extended Star Wars universe, 2001 didn’t leave much room for spinoffs, so Marvel gave us the further adventures of that trippy superevolved space baby and those Australopithecines who were visited by the monolith, until finally we arrived seven issues later at a superhero who was a little bit like HAL 9000. The above panel, from the second page of Machine Man #1 (April 1978), shows a fairly typical superhero rescue… but the plot details aren’t important.

Kirby here shows himself to be a subtler and more confident artist than even the most skilled of his peers, who presented iconic superheroes flexing in battle-ready poses on page after page; instead, he represents his (brand new!) hero via a single body part, an extendable arm that turns into a ladder. (This brainstorm would be aped, years later, by the creators of the animated children’s cartoon Inspector Gadget). With the picture’s unusual vertical length and dizzying perspective, Kirby puts himself in conversation with great artists and engineers: like Filippo Brunelleschi, who invented forced perspective in1425; or the Austrian Joseph Puchberger, who invented the first panoramic camera in 1843, cranking Daguerreotype plates 19 to 24 inches long. Finally, the panel also evokes mid-period Hitchcock films like Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), giving the reader the sickening sense of falling from a great height. Even in this supposedly lesser work, Kirby is a supreme storyteller, a master of composition, and a sui generis genius of the dynamics of cartooning.

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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 (7)

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