Reading Comics #119 "And neither one is Jack Kirby"

In the previous installment of this column, I argued about the sour turn the legacies of Alan Moore and Mark Waid are taking.  Now I'm going to continue by adding a third name to the mix: Jack Kirby.

What does Kirby have to do with Moore and Waid?  Everything.  He's everything that their careers have been missing.

Kirby was a dynamo who co-created a large majority of the comic book characters you know.  That includes basically the whole '60s Marvel landscape.  (Don't tell Stan Lee, though.  He's still convinced he's The Man.  As if that makes a difference to fans who know Kirby as The King.)

Kirby, I'm going to argue, was basically exactly like Moore and Waid.  To a certain extent.  He was a fanboy, too.  The difference is that he was already in the medium when it took off to its greatest heights.  Here I mean the creation of Superman.  As far as I'm concerned, Kirby ended up dedicating his whole career to understanding the Man of Steel.  Hence, Captain America.  What else is Steve Rogers but a regular guy who turned himself into Superman?

Again and again, Kirby would seek to conquer this obsession.  It became most prominent when he finally took control of his own destiny (as much as he could, anyway), working as both artist and writer.  I'm talking about the New Gods, of course.

What else are the New Gods but Kirby's vision of what it would be like to have a whole world of superheroes?  Or the ultimate what if? with Superman, whether in the form of Mister Miracle (the spawn of the good gods) or Orion (the spawn of the evil ones), both of whom still became iconic heroes in their own right?  In their own ways, Superman.  Exactly Superman.  And who is Darkseid but the ultimate villain, who debuted in the pages of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, and has since gone on to become arguably the most iconic and translatable foe in all of comics, going up against Superman himself on countless occasions?

The bulk of Kirby's legacy could very well be viewed in this context.  I've never seen other fans arguing this, but it seems kind of obvious when you think about it.  He really wanted to write Superman.  He basically never really did.  But he still did anyway.  And everything he touched was the better for it.

He got a lot of bad breaks.  Everything that Moore complains about, actually did happen, very blatantly, with no apologies, to Jack Kirby.  Alan Moore is no Jack Kirby.  Yes, there's no great treasure trove of accolades for Jack Kirby stories the way there is for Moore's work, no one stumbling all over themselves to make movies of his comics the way they do over Moore's (who complains bitterly each and every time, just because he can, apparently oblivious to the fact that history always remembers the repeated story best, with rare exceptions; Alan Moore, I'm sad to say, is no William Shakespeare, who incidentally also worked on repeated stories).  But Jack Kirby is still going to leave a far greater legacy than Alan Moore.

Because we're only starting to find it.  Did you notice how Argo, the movie that won the 2013 Best Picture at the Oscars, based some of its material on Kirby's work?  And not even work anyone had particularly even heard of.

That's the goal, if you work in comics.  It's not just to get your name in the credits, have a string of popular and critical successes.  Moore doesn't seem to understand that.  Waid doesn't seem to understand that.  But they long ago stopped considering themselves fans capable of adding to the canon.  They commentate all the time.  So did Kirby.  But he did so in ways Moore only approached in Watchmen, but so timidly he thinks it's a work that needs to be protected.  If Kirby had been so bashful, when he died in 1994 the only thing anyone would have said about him was "Comic Book Creator Who Jealously Guarded the Legacy of New Gods Passes Away."  And that's basically what's going to happen to Moore.  And to Waid.

Take a page from Jack Kirby, is what I'm saying.  Use that experience you had with Miracleman, with The Flash, with some of those other early, truly inspired works, and build on it.

Because years from now, people will still be talking about The King.  And rightly so.  What about you?