Daily Archives: 14 March 2007

The long completed, but never released, documentary Jack Kirby: Storyteller is finally coming to DVD on June 5th! This hour-long look at the life and career of the King was hailed with cheers when we screened a short excerpt of it at the Kirby Tribute Panel at last year’s Comicon International: San Diego, and features a who’s who of top comics pros telling the world why Kirby matters (plus a few seconds of me putting my foot in my mouth, unless it ended up on the cutting room floor). The documentary is part of the Fantastic Four: Extended Edition DVD from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (a 2-disc set that contains the 106-minute theatrical version of the film as well as a 111-minute extended cut), which is being released just two weeks prior to the big-screen debut of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer on June 15th.

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I’m slowly slogging through production on the new issue of the Jack Kirby Collector (#48, out at the end of April), and am currently working on a great article by Robert L. Bryant, Jr. on the Making of Kirby’s Collages. Anyone who read Kirby’s 1965-72 work at DC and Marvel probably remembers these mind-blowing spectacles. No one in comics then (or since) attempted adding collage—an accepted fine art technique—to comics. Jack had a large collection of magazines like National Geographic and Life, and in his spare time (you know, those milliseconds left over between eating, sleeping, and drawing 5 pages a day), he would sit down, clip interesting photo images from different sources, and combine them together to create some really awesome pieces of art.

The one above was used in his one-shot (actually two-shot, but the second issue wasn’t published) Spirit World magazine. Profoundly influenced by his WWII Army experiences, Nazis and Hitler often made their way into work, as shown here. Unfortunately, printing techonology of the time made it difficult to reproduce these collages in color, so they always ran in black-&-white, usually with some comic figures cut out and overlaying them. (In Spirit World, they ran in BLUE-&-white, because somebody up at DC thought blue ink would be more effective than black for a supernatural magazine…)

Alas, in the Jack Kirby Collector, we’re forced to run them in B&W also, but at least I can give you a color preview of this one here. Enjoy!

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