Hail to the King

I would, like Grant Morrison in his foreword to Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Vol. 1, be lying if I said I'd always been a Kirby fan.  While I had experienced his work as a child, thanks the cheaply-produced Marvel cartoons like Captain America and The Hulk, I didn't really know him - at least not in the way that I knew Stan Lee - until I watched the Comic Book Confidential.  His appearance on that didn't really show Kirby at his fullest but after watching the show I started delving into his, and some of the other artists' work.  Up until now, I had stuck with Kirby's Marvel work, the work he's most commonly known for, but recent recommendations had me contemplating DC's hardcovers, and I finally caved in.

I went into the book expecting classic Kirby, and I can't say I'm disappointed.  Each page features his tics, the blocky character constructions, the dynamic poses (Kirby could make buttering toast look exciting), and the bold ideas.  It also features quite frankly amazing colouring.  Rather than recolour the book, they've restored the colour.  It's a trick that provides each page with a vibrancy that adds to Kirby's art, and something that many recoloured books miss.  On the point of the colouring, the dust cover (above) for this one makes a very good one.  On it is a Dave Stewart recolouring of a drawing of Orion featured in one of the issues contained within the book.  Does it work?  Frankly, no, it doesn't.  What Dave Stewart does, and does very well with the Guy Davis drawn B.P.R.D. is accentuate the shapes of Kirby's art with shading.  He also recolours Orion's helmet and kit a metallic grey, and adds variance in the red of Orion's suit.  What he appears to forget is that Kirby's style was formed during a time when flat colours were generally used.  Compare that with the 'restored' version:

Where in Dave Stewart's recolouring Orion gets lost inside the busy shading of his helmet, the restoration gives you a metallic strong look but also a unified one.  His recolouring of the suit produces a separation alongisde the shoulders, your eye is drawn to the brighter colour either side, where the flat red pushes Orion's head forward.  Finally, the colours that Dave Stewart has used have brought the palette together, and it's a muddy palette, it's dull, he's even turned the background from a strong yellow to a muted orange.   The restored colours are strong, and bold, especially with the lack of shading.  It's a minor gripe, picking on the cover, but where there could be a strong, glaring Kirby Orion, instead it doesn't feel Kirby.  It honestly feels like someone else has drawn it.  Anyway, on to the book itself...

Death to the Old

The most important part of the book is the inclusion of the New Gods, essentially Kirby's contribution to the DCU, albeit used slightly less than his contribution to the Marvel Universe.  They make the volume seem like it should be called Jack Kirby's Big Book of Ideas.  His creations are off the scale, totally out of character with the DCU, including his ultimate villain Darkseid, a menacing stone-browed villain that schemes consistently through the book.  Kirby's character designs mix and match a little with his Marvel characters, with the addition of extreme Kirbytech in Orion's case.  They're weighty statuesque characters.  The most heroic of heroes, and the most villainous of villains.  They are all characterised by straight talking expositional dialogue, something that is lacking in modern comics now that more emphasis is put on decompressive writing and art.

The Fourth World feels like it's the zenith of Kirby's style.  There's less of the softness that he used during his early Marvel books, with the only character exhibiting obvious signs of this being Superman whose face is rarely, if ever, a Kirby face.  His radical art style was too much for DC to allow him to convert their iconic character.  This also means that Superman stands out, as if he doesn't belong on the pages.  He doesn't, as it happens.  The stories he's involved in happen to Jimmy Olsen, and Superman just interferes.  It feels like Kirby didn't want him, and makes me not want him either.

Krackle & Pop

As an artist, Kirby's layouts have always fascinated me.  His style functions largely on the use of positive and negative space.  To make best use of the negative space, his backgrounds are often sparse, something that suits the low level of detail he uses.  The focus with Kirby is rarely on the background, it's always the foreground.  Even his more complex backgrounds provide ample space for the characters.  It's at odds with other forms of comic art, from bande dessinee to manga, but that's why its focus is on heroes and villains.

The other thing that fascinates me about Kirby's art is his consistency, or lack thereof.  He concentrates on the scene itself, not as much on the characters.  For example, here we see Darkseid tower over Desaad in the first panel, yet by the third Desaad is clearly, by the perspective, taller than Darkseid.  But it doesn't matter, your eye is drawn to Desaad and the top half of Darkseid.  The composition, and the information it gets across, is the most important thing when the panel is drawn.  Perspective is secondary information that is only provided in the form of "Darkseid background, Desaad foreground".  Of course, this could be considered incompetence, or a mistake, on Kirby's part, but as page after page of his work is littered with these idiosyncrasies, tweaking perspective, losing or adding detail, switching positive space for negative space, it seems more they are conscious decisions that exist to make the panel function.

There's also the variable compression of each page.  The initial two panels would be stretched in modern comics, where Kirby switches from compressing those panels to decompressing Darkseid's use of his power.  There is excessively expositional scripting, irellevant to most of Kirby's pages but, unfortunately, the standard scripting technique back in those days.  It often hampers the flow of Kirby's artwork, but does leave you staring at one panel for a length of time, and that's got to be a good thing if you're a Kirby fan!

The Untouchable?

None of this implies that Kirby is infallable.  His lack of consistency can fail, but this is usually in a single panel where cohesive characters are a necessity.  Panels that show the police or army feature a multitude of firearms in their hands, no two the same.  This can be attributed to Kirbytech, a form of technological constructions that are often insane in scale and imagination, and a core part of his stylistic storytelling, however to me it highlight's Kirby's biggest issue: the real world.  In this volume he draws cars, but their size, shape, and proportions all have quirks to them.  They're not in his comfort zone to the degree that they are Ditko or Romita Jr.  They don't fit in his world, much the same as Superman doesn't.  But, of course, what we want to see is Kirby's world, one of the purest form of science-fiction, and that's where he always delivers, and why I like his work so much.