One Hundred Years of Jack Kirby!!
I painted this a couple of years ago on Jack Kirby’s birthday. I was online, looking at comics imagery, and I found it was Jack Kirby’s birthday that day. He would have been 96 or 97. I was planning to paint that day, but now I wanted to make something significant to Jack Kirby. So, I came up with this, something that occurred to me when I going over the reasons that made Kirby so damn great. I thought of my old room, where I started collecting comics. That’s supposed to be my brother off to the side, playing or doing something by the chest of drawers, and those are my comics on the bed.
That room was the place where I first heard of Jack Kirby, where I first read back issues of the Eternals, Machine Man, and Devil Dinosaur. I also had a couple of rare issues of early Fantastic Four and one of Thor; those three issues from before my birth spelled out a mystical time for me. My brother had some Kirby Captain America comics from the Marvel return of the 1970s, and there was more. When I reach back far enough into my memory of Jack Kirby, I go back to this room.
Jack Kirby was there at the dawn of the comic books, and he came to influence that industry in so many ways. In the realm of American superhero comics, there has been no one more influential or beloved. Today marks what would have been his hundredth birthday, and so let us devote a moment of reflection to the King of Comics.
