Kirb Your Enthusiasm (14)

By: David Smay
March 1, 2011

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

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KirbyMrMiracle9-550 — Click on image for larger version. Click on that image to zoom in.

I scanned this panel from Mister Miracle #9 (July 1972) out of the very comic I bought off a spinner rack at the corner 7-Eleven that year. It only cost twenty cents for Jack Kirby to blow my eleven year-old mind. Looking at it now I’m distracted by how much pleasure I take in the four-color printing process where the cheap, pulpy paper absorbed the dyes. I’ve seen reproductions on glossy stock and while the composition remains strong, it isn’t as beautiful; I think Kirby designed the drawing to pull down into the page. Glossy reproductions of Kirby’s work are akin to that first generation of CD releases with their too-tinny brightness, lacking warmth and depth.

Let me extend that musical parallel to praise in particular Mike Royer’s inks. Remember when Sonic Youth toured with Neil Young and talked him into releasing an entire CD of nothing but feedback? That’s what Mike Royer does for Kirby, unleashing raw, ink-black power. It’s difficult to reclaim the element of shock that ran through comic fandom at Royer’s inking, clutching at their pearls as their faces flushed — simply because Royer chose to amplify Kirby’s pencils instead of muting them.

The panel itself is just another everyday Kirby master class in composition. You see exactly why everybody stashes Kirby in their swipe files. Note the genius of the aero-discs as a method of flight. Kirby was always mucking about with ways to make flying look more dynamic, whether it was Thor launching his hammer or the Silver Surfer. But I think the aero-discs were his best innovation because it allows him to bring the poses of a skater into the sky — and what better way to unleash speed and power onto a panel than pulling from hockey and roller derby. It’s fast, brutal, strenuous and gliding. In contrast, the Para-Demons come after Scott Free like a sky full of aerial linebackers trying to drag down a speed skater.

This panel comes from the story “Himon,” which concluded a three-issue storyline that returned Scott Free to Apokolips, and explored his original escape. Considering that Darkseid’s primary motive is to acquire the Anti-Life Equation, which extinguishes all free will, the most surprising aspect of Apokolips is that it is an anarchic free-for-all where different branches of Darkseid’s forces routinely bludgeon each other with manic glee. New Genesis looks like a Swiss day spa.

The character of Himon, a benevolent Fagin training his misfits to create their own Mother Boxes and find The Source, reflects back on Kirby himself and his mentorship of young talents. Similarly, Apokolips plays like the rough-scraped Lower East Side that forged Kirby, and it’s not hard to see Scott Free’s desire to be free, to escape, to find The Source as a metaphor for the young Jacob Kurtzberg’s desire to rise above the streets, to realize the visions he could imagine. This story thrilled me as a kid because I saw myself in Scott. But it’s even more affecting to me now when I see it as a dialogue across time from the older Kirby as Himon — masterful, weary with loss, unbowed — reaching back to his younger, yearning self.

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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 (14)

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