No I don't see it that way at all. His interest in science fiction and myth is evident as far back as the FF and Thor so there is a lot of continuity from his earlier Marvel work to the DC and 70s Marvel stuff. There's no sign of insecurity or wanting to appear highbrow or of reacting to other creators* - far from it! His writing consistently reflected what were obviously life-long interests and concerns, and his handling of the themes was quite subtle - much more so than is the case in the vast majority of superhero comics.

As mrp said, it's the very fact that his stories dealt with ideas far beyond the bounds of superhero comics that fans don't appreciate them. Because modern superhero comics remain mired in adolescent power-fantasies, albeit with a thin coating of soap-opera relationship drama, which is where their supposed sophistication - largely illusory - comes from.

*with one obvious exception, which I'll get into later if the question arises again

I would beg to differ on the point I bolded. For instance, in art spiegleman's Maus, there is really no subtlety in portraying the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, it really is on the nose and an in your face allegorical portrayal, but there is an incredible level of sophistication in spiegleman's storytelling and in the subject matter he is exploring. I think in many ways the same is true of Kirby-he portrays things in an "on the nose" fashion, but the subject matter he is exploring has a certain level of sophistication and the thematic level of the stories underlying the visual portrayal has a lot of depth to it, hence sophistication of storytelling.

I think on some level market forces surrounding working for Marvel or DC limited the approaches creators could take when publishing through them, and audience expectations was one of those market forces. When audience and publishers saw Kirby's name attached to a project, there was a certain expectation as to what the style of comic was going to be, and it mostly centered on super-hero comics like he produced at Marvel in the Silver Age, but when he left Marvel the first time, I think he wanted to move beyond that, to explore other genres and ideas, but the market forces confined him to do that in a way that resembled the super-hero comics that people were expecting from him. Publishers hoped that in appearing like super-hero comics they would sell to people expecting super-hero comics, but I don't think it worked that well because Kirby was really doing something else in the types of content he was exploring, and there was a little bit of a disconnect there. There were probably better ways to go about exploring the genres and themes Kirby was looking to do, but the market and audience expectations had become centered on the super-hero genre and what other genres were successful in that market and to that audience looked and read like super-hero comics in a lot of ways. That was the only way they were going to get shelf space and sales in the market.

Conan was a successful genre book at the time, but between the Roy Thomas's writing and John Buscema's "refined Kirby Marvel house style" of art, it looked and read a lot like a super-hero book. Conan even got his own little union suit where he wore fur shorts all the time (not even the generic loin-cloth skirt he started with) no matter where he went or what he did, it was in effect his super-hero costume. And it played by the rules of super-hero comics in terms of following continuity, how it built and played with a supporting cast, how the A-plot, B-plot C-plot structure (as articulated by Paul Levitz) was used and how those plots were cycled through, etc. Even Marvel's Star Wars comics played by the super-hero rules for the most part when it went beyond the movie adaptation with issue #7, even though it wasn't a super-hero book. It's what was expected of books coming out from Marvel at that point. Super-heroes were the dominant form in the market place and if you were going to be published by Marvel (and to a lesser extent DC though there was more room for diverse content in the war and mystery books at DC, but not so much in the rest of the line), you had to play by the super-hero rules to appeal to the super-hero audience because that was the dominant audience and had pushed aside other types of fans/readers.

As "sophisticated" as McGregor's Black Panther run was in Jungle Action (and I like that run), it still looked like and read like a super-hero comic. When Kirby came on Panther, there was a bit of a cognitive dissonance because it still looked like a super-hero comic, but it didn't read all that much like one. It ignored the rules of super-hero comics (including adhering to past continuity) and explored themes and ideas Kirby was interested in that came from outside comics which was not what the audience or the market was used to or looking for, but it still looked like a super-hero comic because of the confines of those market conditions. I'm not sure Kirby's look would have changed much if it could escape those expectations, but there was no way it was going to escape them, so it becomes a moot point.

Bottom line was Kirby was doing something different and not playing by the established rules of super-hero comics, and that put a lot of people off. The books looked like they should meet expectations, but they didn't because they were playing by a different set of rules and not intended by Kirby to stay int he same sandbox his earlier Marvel work had been in even if he was using some of the old characters/tools for part of what he was doing). The audience that might have appreciated them wasn't there (and I think a lot of Kirby's post 1st stint at Marvel output-i.e. his Fourth world era DC stuff through his second stint at Marvel and into his Pacific days has a lot more appreciation in hindsight than it did at the time, many of the audiences who appreciated it discovered it after the fact not as it was coming out). I don't think the problem was any lack of sophistication in Kirby's art or storytelling, I think the problem lay in the fact he wasn't doing the same old thing again, he wasn't creating stories that read like his Silver Age Marvel stuff did, he wasn't adding new wings to the structure of the Marvel Universe (at least not by intention), he wasn't playing within the sandbox of continuity, he wasn't fitting in with what people thought super-hero comics (particularly Marvel super-hero comics) were supposed to be and nobody (including the editorial staff at Marvel at the time) knew what to do with it or how to take it.

We can quibble over the look of Kirby's art all day, but if the art looked exactly the same, but Kirby was playing by the rules and producing stuff that fit in better with what he did in the 60s at Marvel and wasn't exploring thematic content that was outside the typical realm of comic book fandom and making books that fandom found more palatable because it met their expectations and played b the rules, his books would have sold better and would have gotten the Marvel Zombie seal of approval despite any perceived artistic shortcomings. But Kirby wasn't doing that and fans weren't having that.

-M

I just don't get this - for example, I read 4th World and all I see is "good space gods" versus "eeeeeevil space gods" - what am I missing?

Let's start with the art: The difference--rather essential--between Spiegleman's work and Kirby's is that Kirby worked in the "realistic" art form associated with action/fantasy, not the stark, early sort of underground-inspired stylings of Speigleman as illustrated in Maus. As a result of Kirby working in the action/fantasy genre, there's an expectation that the comic art is not going to be needlessly outrageous for the sake of it, where anatomy actually resembles something one might describe as the human form.

Moreover, on the subject of his ideas--



Concepts: Regarding Maus, the use of the historically ugly animal/racial analogues was a case of Speigleman being clear about the way in which both were viewed by the other in reality (not to mention wartime propaganda art), and on the global scale; in doing that, no one reading it could forget exactly where each character was emotionally and in their positions in that tale. That's not a lack of subtlety, but dealing with the most offensive cultural judgements (IOW, racism) of a dark period of history. In Kirby's case, his very nature was to go overboard in story, where everything had to be the equivalent of a nuclear missile one second away from hitting the local orphanage, with all young eyes on the agent of their death. In other words, he believed the "greatest" conflict, the "most powerful god" character, the most "jaw-dropping" event, the "biggest cliffhanger" was the way to go as a matter of habit/practice, or a way of being (creatively speaking). The problem was not just centered on delivery, but intent; he continued to repeat certain themes probably based on his own expectation that as the so-called "king" he had to "go big", and I suspect he believed he was staying ahead of the numerous comic talents who had completely changed the industry since the late 60s, in both art & story.


Again, we cannot stereotype the market and/or audiences as being incapable of "understanding" and/or adjusting to anything Kirby was creating. Frankly, it was not so removed from ideas explored by others that its too "highbrow" (yes, some have used that to describe his post-Marvel work) or of an intellectual depth beyond the alleged cape and cowl set's ability to wrap their minds around it. That's the sort of piled-on mythmaking (now thankfully debunked mythmaking) that had Gene Roddenberry and his acolytes spending decades swearing NBC rejected the 1st Star Trek pilot for (among a few reasons) the presence of a strong female character, when NBC actually welcomed it. In other words, many comic fans were not so brainwashed or superhero genre partisans that they would suffer some sort of negative, involuntary reaction to larger, non-superheroic ideas.

As pointed out a few posts ago, I was not the only comic reader from the questioned period who read DC and Marvel, but enjoyed their non-superhero titles, magazines and more importantly, the often challenging work published in Metal Hurlant, several Warren magazines (Comix International at the top of their list, and other publishers' various titles--work as format-breaking and/or innovative as anything Kirby attempted, and arguably without the repetition or bombast of certain Kirby concepts. Contrary to some beliefs about the state of the industry at that time, publishers were already interested in challenging not only the readers, but themselves, with the end result of that interest being fans--including innumerable, hardcore cape & cowl readers--were more than eager to consume.

Kirby's more miss-than-hit 70s output was exemplified in his adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey; for a man allegedly so filled with such Brobdingnagian ideas soaring above the muck of pajamas and fists, not only did he fail to comprehend the clear-as-day meaning of the Kubrick film, but added his completely unnecessary "Kirby-isms" to a plot needing no help, no Marvel-izing (which he helped to develop), or anything else. Somehow, he seemed to think he could inject wild, and in some cases embarrassing elements to the film adaptation and the short-lived spin-off, where Kirby--in repetitious fashion--simply plucked from the film's surface, then quickly moved on to his favorite oversized face villains, ancient barbarians altered by the monolith, revealing an absolute misunderstanding of why Bowman was transformed by the monolith in the first place. Instead, Kirby has it float around, repeatedly turning various characters into new "seeds" as if that was the device's neverending purpose, while the generic protagonists (generic to Kirby's 70s work, that is) jumped from one improbable, open-mouthed action piece to another, filled with characters who would--visually and psychologically--feel at home in any of Kirby's other 1970s comics. Then, there's Machine Man.....

I seriously doubt Marvel slammed its editorial fist on the table, demanding that direction in a spin-off from...2001 (of all properties), particularly when the publisher's other post-movie adaptations (before and after 2001) generally retained the essence of what made the source successful / interesting as in their Star Wars, and Planet of the Apescomics. Some creators--particularly when praised too much for their own good--adopt a kind of "I can do whatever I want" / "I AM great!" mentality with no ability to step outside of self to see excess or shortcomings. As an example, in the film world, James Cameron & Irwin Allen shared that personality type, in that their every success only encouraged them to repeat tired ideas, always quick to "go big" (as if that meant better) with content that clearly yelled out its "importance" rather than actually being important.

At the end of it all, if most of Kirby's 1970s output failed--meaning readers did not embrace it, that is more of a comment on the quality of the material than any suggested conditioning of readers.

Well, I put down my thoughts in my 4th World thread; but, here are a few key points.  The father-son dynamic of orion and Darkseid.  It's allusion through much of the series, then open knowledge towards the end.  Orion has been shielded from this knowledge, as Highfather sought to tame his rage and wild nature through the teaching of New Genesis.  Love vs hate.

There is the nature of freedom, explored throughout Mister Miracle.  Scott's struggles to escape the deathtraps are metaphors for free will.  Scott ends up inspiring Barda to leave Darkseid's service, for love, then help her free the others in the Female Furies.  In that series, we also encounter Orion's mother, Tigra, who had her child stolen from her, by Darkseid, as part of The Pact.  She is kept a prisoner, denied identity and status, and ends up joining in with Scott and Barda's rebellion (though Kirby hit the reset on that with the Hunger Dogs and the Armagetto story that preceded it). 

Forever People, which was the weakest, explores the nature of free will through anti-life, especially in the sequences involving Glorious Godfrey.  This was a metaphor for evangelists, like Billy Graham (the model for Godfrey) and the hatred that seems to accompany many, as well as the self-serving building of power and wealth, at the expense of followers, looking for direction.  It also looks at the optimism of youth and the power of it, in the face of the horrors of the world.

The Jimmy Olsen stories are as much about science getting ahead of itself, via the DNA project, and the search for community, in the case of Superman, when he encounters the New Gods.  The latter part kind of got shuffled aside for much of the series.

New Gods is many metaphors, not just good vs evil.  There is the aforementioned love vs hate, the son replacing the father, art and poetry vs machinery and industry, destruction of the environment through mass industry (especially that devoted to conquest and destruction), nature vs nurture (Orion's heritage as Darkseid's son vs his growth on New Genesis), court intrigues, metaphors of Nazi experiments and the Holocaust, wisdom vs knowledge, the search for parental approval by abused children (Kalibak, especially).  I could probably find more if I read through individual issues again.

Any comic reading is going to be subjective, as with any art form.  Some people see things that others don't.  That's the nature of and the beauty of art.  The experience is unique to the individual..


As to other things, without Kirby, there is no Metal Hurlant.  So many of the founders were inspired by and pure fans of Kirby.  You can see it in their work, especially Druillet.  They have been very vocal about their love of Kirby.  Meanwhile,, I love Heavy Metal (when it is good); but, so many stories trade in higher levels of sex and violence as being mature, vs having a complex story to tell, with more mature personalities and motivations.  Many, such as Bilal's solo work, trade much on the lush art, while the story is confusing, at best, and incomprehensible, at worst.  I'd stack up the 4th World and the Eternals against anything in that magazine, over the years.  Kirby had misses; but not those books.  Even the misses, though, quite often had better storytelling mechanics than some of the "sophisticated" comics. 

Alright, the move is finished (apart from some unpacking and organizing new rooms); so, let's get back to celebrating Kirby and his space gods.

Eternals #17



Predating George RR Martin by about two decades, Kirby gives us "Sersi the Terrible." Get your goblet of wine, light some wildfire, and settle down into your favorite iron chair (mind the sword edges).

When last we left the gang, Zuras had saved Ikaris' bacon by dispatching a Hulk robot, Makarri had run into something or someone and was mind-controlled into attacking Ikaris, and Zuras went to investigate and found that the man in the iron mask was loose, a man called the Dromedan.



Zuras' distraction frees Makarri, but everyone is pretty tired and the Dromedan is getting the better of them. We learn he was created by the Deviants as a weapon to use against the Eternals; but, he turned on his creators. Ikaris tries to attack; but, the Dromedan tells him to go pound sand (well, stone...); so, he does. Literally. Zuras attacks again and melts the ground beneath the Dromedan, trapping him, while he tries to put the containment helmet on him again. The Dromedan fights back...



Makarri tries again, but the Dromedan controls him and forces him to use his powers to free him from the molten rock. It looks like everyone is about to get the keisters kicked, when our favorite party gal arrives...



Sersi saves the day and gets some male chauvinist nonsense from Ikaris; but, she has the only plan of attack. She launches the assault on the Dromedan, then he is hit by multiple Ikarises (Ikari?), duplicates she has created via her molecular manipulations. dromedan destroys them one by one; but, is weakened. He thinks he is down to the real one and destroys it; but, the real ikaris was hiding and hits him with energy beams that are more powerful than anything he has shown before. He appears to die in fire, as the Eternals get to safety. They praise Ikaris and speak of his clan, the Polar Eternals. We switch to see his step brother, Druig, who demonstrates that some Polar Eternals really are bonkers, as he seeks a weapon to use to gain power for himself.

Really nice return to form, after the Hulk robot sidetrack. To me, this proves Kirby should have been left alone to pursue his epic and that it was better to keep it out of the Marvel Universe. The fight has a nice ebb and flow, as the Dromedan seems invincible, but we soon see chinks in his armor. Strategy is then employed to defeat him. Sersi again proves that the most interesting characters were the women and the misfits (Reject, Karkas and Kro). Looks like a family squabble is about to get in the way with facing the Celestials.

Eternals #19



Druig is about to depart; but, wants to gloat...



He heads off to the Pyramid of Winds and makes like Indiana Jones to get past the traps to keep people out. He gets past them and arrives at the pyramid.



He still has to figure out which door to open. meanwhile, Ikaris is regaining strength and burns his way through the metal prison door, then gets a handhold and rips it open. Sigmar is now crying like Prince Joffrey after being slapped by Tyrion. Ikaris forces him to help him get pastthe pyramid defenses. Druig figures out the right door, when he sees Iakris' symbol on it. Ikaris arrives in time and tries to stop him from activating the weapon...



They engage in an old-fashioned Pier 6 brawl (copyright Gordon Solie) and Ikaris is kickin' hinder and taking names; but, Druig gives as good as he gets. he'd fight a buzzsaw and give it the first two rounds (Solie, again). Sigmar tells Ikaris that he has to stop trying to defeat Druig and just plain kill him and Ikaris realizes he is right and unleashes his full force. Druig tries to use the weapon and it's overload time...



Ikaris and Sigmar beat feet; but, the energy is growing and threatening to destroy all. When it looks like the end is near, the Celestial comes upon the scene and fires a bolt of energy, which puts out the cosmic fire, like Smokey the Bear in an armored space suit. The irony of the story is that the target of the weapon saves the day and proves to be impervious to it.



We are left to ponder the future, as this was the end of the series. As was his want, Kirby moved on to other things. He wouldn't venture back to this realm until he launched Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers, in 1981. It wasn't exactly a sequel; but, it tread the same territory and finished the unofficial cosmic link between Thor, the 4th World, the Eternals, and the world of Captain Victory and Silver Star. These later books never quite rose to the same level, as Kirby's work was suffering, due to health issues and age and too long of a gap in time. Marvel let things lie for a bit, until Roy Thomas jumped on the bandwagon, bringing back the Eternals in Thor. That storyline raged across Thor 283-300, with a prologue in Thor Annual #7. It wasn't a bad take and he made good use of Karkas and Reject and brought back The Forgotten One. However, the Eternals were soon pushed aside in favor if Thor's buddies and various other pantheons, as they team up to stop the Celestials.



The story starts well; but, it kind of falls apart, for me, once Roy moves away from the Eternals and focuses more on Odin and the other pantheons. I know, it's Thor's book; but, the Eternals make for a nice change of pace, then Roy kind of goes nuts with his Bulfinch.

The Eternals would languish again, for a few years, before a miniseries, in 1985, from Peter Gillis and Sal Buscema.



That brought things even more into the Marvel U and Jim Shooter replaced Gillis with Walt Simonson, on the last 4 issues, due to script problems. That was followed by a one-shot...



... from 1991, which wasn't anything much to write home about. Sersi and the Forgotten One (under the name Gilgamesh, which was one of the identities that Kirby gave him) ended up in the Avengers, at one point. We later got the Neil Gaiman mini, which, quite frankly, missed the point of the series.

For my money, the Eternals worked best when Kirby was left alone to craft his saga, completely independent of the Marvel Universe. Some things should just stand on their own and Eternals was one of those. Later writers used the Eternals and deviants to retcon all kinds of stuff at Marvel, like making the Uranians (from Marvel Boy) and Titans (from Starlin's cosmic stories) into Eternal off-shoots and making the old Atlas Kirby monsters into Deviant mutates. I'm not a fan of tying everything in the universe together. This tendency has gotten so ridiculous that every character is inter-raleted to every other. The Ultimate Universe went overboard with this, with everything tied to Wolverine and Captain America, from which the movie and tv folks have taken way too many cues, if you ask me. Your mileage may vary.

So, this was the end of Kirby's most interesting project from his return. Next, we will look at one of the weirder ones: The Black Panther.