I’ve been tinkering with animation lately and I’m finding that basically it’s a collage artform. Here’s a collage that spun off from one of my animation projects. The end product is reminiscent of Kirby’s cover to New Gods #1, which was an atypical cover for him. I didn’t intend to homage that cover, but since Kirby is so much a part of my DNA it doesn’t surprise me.
I wasn’t able to attend Comicon this year, but I had a piece of art in the 2010 Comicon Image Yearbook, entitled “The Death of Godland.” With the end of Godland drawing nearer I thought it would be funny to do a take-off on those Starlin cosmic “Death of ___” comics. Bill Crabtree did the coloring.
I donated the original art to the CBLDF auction at this year’s Comicon.
Thanks to my pal Joe Casey for grabbing a couple of these books and sending them to me. There’s a lot of great art in there.
Next up is something I’m really excited about. It’s the print debut of “American Barbarian.” It’s being serialized in France in Organic Comix “Reptile” magazine.
Organic publishes French-language versions of “The Myth of 8-Opus” and “Godland” in Strange Magazine. When I showed Reed Man, the Man behind Organic Comix, “American Barbarian” he jumped at the chance to publish it. They’re pretty huge Kirby fans over at Organic. They publish French translations of actual Kirby stories in addition to my “fake Kirby” comics. I think Reed Man might be an even bigger Kirby fan than I am, if such a thing is possible.
I’ll be drawing another red-white-and-blue-clad swashbuckler, this time for Mighty Marvel.
This is a project I get asked about a lot, strangely enough. Just before Godland, there were a half-dozen different projects I was working on, this being one of them. At that time, I really wanted to be Jack Kirby. Working on one or two different comics wasn’t enough, I wanted to draw a whole line of comics. There’s that lesson of knowing your limits that I hadn’t heard yet.
Zombie Kamikaze was a script that Scott Mills sent me. I loved it, and at the time I was looking to work with other writers, trying to work on material that was outside of my voice. This was a script that appealed to me. It was action-packed. Another thing that appealed to me about it was that I saw it as a way of working on a comic in a genre that Kirby hadn’t tackled, which is a hard thing to find.
Once Godland started taking off, I soon learned that you can’t do everything. I had to drop a couple of the projects I’d been working on. ZK was a tough one to drop, it had so much going for it. What helped is that I’m not really a fan of the Zombie genre, so drawing page after page of it wasn’t fun the way drawing cosmic spacescapes is for me. Another thing, which is funny in retrospect, is at the time I thought “this Zombie comics fad isn’t going to last.” There’ve been several points since then where the zombie genre in comics has gone up and down, but it seems to me it’s definitely here to stay. The other factor for me was that when I started ZK, I hadn’t read “The Walking Dead” before. Once I read TWD, I realized, this is the ultimate zombie comic. It’s so good, how could I ever compete with this? So that’s where ZK stands as of now. I still feel that maybe at some point I’ll come back to it, but there are a lot of other projects that are higher up on my to do list.
Though most people never think about ghis work in this regard, Kirby is the father of the barbarian comic. His Thor laid the groundwork for all that was to come. Kirby’s Thor is really the first fully realized sword and sorcery comic. It started out with the default sci fi ties that go with the superhero genre, but as more and more mythic elements were brought in you ended up with this really neat combination of sci-fi, mytho-fantasy, and superhero. With New Gods Kirby combined these elements in a more purposeful way to achieve the effects he waqnted to get, a reevaluation of the self-image and dreams of 20th century culture, as opposed to the on-the-fly cobbled together sensibility of Thor. New Gods arrived of one piece.
Toxl the World Killer was Kirby’s post-Conan fantasy character. A throwaway character, but hard to forget once you’ve read it. Nothing Kirby did was truly throwaway.
Kirby’s other big outlet for barbarian stories were the early issues of 2001: A Space Oddyssey which would feature some imagined primitive ancestor of ours in some pivotal situation in Kirby’s view of our early development, then flash-forward to their ancestor in futurespace dealing with some related peril, whether it’s thematically or just visually linked.
