This short piece ran as a sidebar to the Daily Telegraph’s 1994 obituary of Jack (King) Kirby as a personal view of exactly why he was considered such a titanic figure.
Kirby’s virtuosity lay in his seemingly effortless command of every aspect of the comic-book artists’s craft. His fertile imagination enabled him to create and design memorable characters virtually overnight, but he was also a born story-teller whose surgingly confident pacing never slackened a tale’s hold on the reader, and a master of characterisation who could render a street-corner conversation as gripping and suspenseful as the decisive battle in a galactic war. Kirby’s art had unequalled solidity, energy, velocity and wit: no situation was too implausible for his deceptively rough-hewn draughtsmanship to induce instant suspension of the reader’s disbelief. His images seemed simultaneously as fluid as mercury and as solidly tactile as granite; and he was as comfortable with a World War II adventure or a horror tale as with the science-fiction or superhero sagas upon which Marvel’s ’60s triumph was based. He worked at a phenomenal pace, often pencilling three to five pages a day where lesser artists could only manage one or two, and his unmistakable approach became an entire graphic idiom in its own right: the Marvel house style was essentially his, and he became the primary model for successive generations of comic-book tyros. The proof of his pre-eminence was this: whenever Kirby quit a feature to be replaced by another artist, the life went out of the strip and the characters never seemed quite ‘right’ thereafter. The Kirby version of any title was always definitive: any character he drew was his forever. In a world of corporately-owned characters where artists and writers are generally considered interchangeable, this was a unique achievement.
Daily Telegraph, 1994
