About Kirby’s artwork

Here's about Kirby's artwork

Some time around 1954, work in the field of Comic books began to grow scarce, even for the formerly lucrative team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. When Simon became an editor for Harvey publications, the dynamic duo went their separate ways. Kirby struggled to find work, approaching the newspaper syndicates with proposals for strips. In 1956, he returned to work for National Periodicals, developing such ideas as Green Arrow and Challengers of the Unknown.

At some point following the breakup of the team, Jack Kirby’s style began to undergo a series of gradual changes that would alter the look of his figures and the design of his pages. Kirby’s heroes had always possessed a lithe sinewy and somewhat elongated musculature. Beginning somewhere in the mid to late fifties, Kirby’s artwork began to bulk up and to take on a more architecturally geometric quality. Coincidentally around this time, Kirby’s pencils were coupled with the embellishment of an inker of extraordinary skill who was a legendary draftsman in his own right.This was the remarkable Wallace Wood, who had honed his skills with EC Comic’s groundbreaking storytelling.

The unique partnership debuted on the aforementioned series Challengers of the Unknown, a series often considered a forerunner of Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four. Kirby soon realized his dream to pen a newspaper strip, one Sky Masters, which was also inked by Wood. Wally Wood is usually described as an intense workaholic who labored obsessively over his pages. In an article in The Comics Journal #197, author Bill Mason says this of Wood’s development as an artist.

“The young Wood taught himself how to draw in a dashing, boldly exaggerated style which he gradually refined by adjusting the spatial relationships in his drawing, through an extremely laborious process of point to point navigation from one solid object to another.”

1-1812

You can see in the intricacy of this panel just what Mason is talking about. There is literally no space in this composition that is not being used to maximum advantage. From the pine trees in the background to the gnarled branches and stumps to the scattered figures of the dead with their artfully arranged limbs and the shadows they cast, all the panel shapes are precisely arranged with dark and light almost perfectly balanced.

The ability to do this sort of spatial structuring is something that Wood had in common with Jack Kirby, who is generally regarded as someone who drew seemingly with no effort or preparation. This may be the case for the latter portion of his career, when he had more or less mastered his craft, but having seen some examples from his early swipe file, I believe that Kirby worked extensively on his depiction of reality. One notable example is Robert Riggs illustration that Kirby used for a cover for Police Trap #2. The figures that Kirby more or less copied, who are standing in a station house show a serious concern with the understanding of the arrangement of deep space.

I believe that Kirby’s artistic collaboration with Wallace Wood on Challengers and Sky Masters had a profound effect on Kirby’s approach to his work. Wood’s obsession with the meticulous arrangement of spatial relationships reinforced a similar tendency in Kirby, who became for the next ten years increasingly more proficient at utilizing every object placed on his page to maximum compositional advantage.

I also believe that Wood’s mastery of black spotting affected Kirby’s perception of and use of dark and light in his pencils.

Kirby first worked with Wood on issue #4 of Challengers of the Unknown. The previous issue is inked by Marvin Stein, and while there are backgrounds, they are a bit uninspired by Kirby standards. Wood’s inking of the following issue shows us that we are in for something completely different. In this splash panel, there is an almost geometric arrangement of the figures emerging from the background.

2-COTA splash

In the Stein inked pages, the machinery that Kirby draws function as a device to establish setting and has only a secondary design purpose. Wood’s inspired rendering seems to usher in the first era of techno-Kirby, where nearly all surfaces of all objects and in particular machinery, are covered with detail that serve primarily a design function.