Halloween: Day 12

Separated at Birth?

Interesting that in the absence of the classic Fourth World characters to yet be fully realized in the NewDCU that Professor Insidd, the sadistic Yellow Lantern has a look similar to the Jack Kirby design of Desaad. While the Prof and the Apokolptian interrogator have the same sadistic predilections and toothy grin it is Desaad's hair and the skull designs on Insidd that are creepily similar.

A repost, but hey, it's Halloween and Jack Kirby

iKirby

My birthday is this week and in celebration my lovely wife purchased for me an iPad. I'm not crazy about (a) the price and (b) the DRM but she received a substantial employee discount from her work that brought the tablet down to a reasonable price. I have to admit the tablet is a lot of fun. I don't have the kind of job where I will use it for work so it will primarily be a source for entertainment though it does have some useful tools available. The tablet is easier to carry around than a laptop and larger than a phone so it is in my "Goldilocks Zone" for personal devices. That is, it is just right.

The moment I opened the box I was determined to personalize my iPad before I looked for nifty applications and games. Being a comic book aficionado there is little better a source to declare your comic book geek cred than by displaying art created Jack "King" Kirby. The late artist and conceptualizer Jack Kirby is famous his work on Captain America, the ground-breaking run on Fantastic Four with Marvel Comics and his Fourth World space opera saga for DC Comics. Jack Kirby routinely drew over-the-top, rule-smashing spectacle that sometimes was not appreciated in his day. But even during those periods when some companies and readers didn't always support Jack Kirby's output he always had fans who never let him or his employers forget just how much they appreciated him.

There are few creators in the comic book field past and present that could get away with the artistic stunts Jack Kirby routinely excelled at. Those that try and succeed usually emulate Kirby's unique line style or layouts. Other than unique characters and landscapes Kirby also drew fantastic, impossible and arcane machines that in one story operate by magic and others via super-science, though Kirby often made no distinction between the two, particularly when it came to his depictions of the Asgardian gods in Marvel's Thor series.

Jack Kirby drew for the floppy. In his day the trade paperback consisting of many collected stories was rare and as a concept was underutilized. Kirby didn't generally create art that would serve a purpose much beyond that month's entertainment in what was then considered a disposable format, the comic book. Much of today's comic book art is created with multiple forms of formats in mind for immediate use specifically designed to fully exploit other forms of media. As a marketing tool, an entire industry exists just to supply fans with the extra art and prose outside of the regular periodicals to fulfill their needs. One of the most popular and easiest image types to be found are those created as background pictures for phones and computer monitors, commonly known as "wallpaper". There exists plenty of comic book covers and pages created by Kirby that would serve as a good background image to express my appreciation of the King but a die hard fan such as myself wants something unique.

I had something definite in mind for iPad wallpaper but I couldn't find anything suitable outside scans of Kirby panels. The closest I came to what I wanted was some fan art in the Kirby style. Cool images to be sure but not precisely what I was looking for. What I really wanted for my iPad wallpaper was the ultimate Kirby gadget: The Control Box, the emotion-controlling weapon wielded by the 1960s Fantastic Four villain the Psycho-Man. In the Marvel comic books the Psycho-Man is a despot from another universe who uses the emotions of fear, doubt and hate as weapons to terrify and manipulate human beings, torturing them until they become subjugated to his will. The Psycho-Man has been an semi-recurring character in various Marvel series since 1967.

Looking around the web I found only a few fan-made Kirby-inspired images of the "Mother Box" device designed for the cellphone. The Mother Box is a sentient and benevolent computerized nanny that guides and assists both the good and evil New Gods of Jack Kirby's Fourth World series. Examples of the Mother Box for the phone can be found here and here and here.

My searches for a suitable image of the Psycho-Man's Control Box met with negative results so I decided to create one of my own. My photoshop skills are nearly non-existent but I thought I'd try to create my own Control Box anyway. Initially, I tried to emulate a comic book style of the Control Box but quickly discarded that in favor of a more realistic depiction.

Firstly, I chose a minimalist metallic wallpaper for the background. That gave the surface of the Control Box a texture that made it seem more real, as if it was cut and shaped out of some alien sheet metal in a hidden lab by some insane, cursing alien who muttered to himself, swearing dire retribution on all those who wronged him. Because you just know the young BEM who grew up to become the Psycho-Man got beat up everyday for his lunch credits at Microverse Junior High. After that I created the FEAR, DOUBT and HATE status screens, throwing in some drop shadows to make them appear 3-D. For the control switches I used a standard power button image. I chose a green light for the button because there was enough red adjacent to it.

I then embossed a couple of over-lapping trapezoid shapes on the left side, cut out some sections and added some more generic control buttons. I created a couple of textured surfaces for the right and left sides to add depth. Of course the Control Box would not have that special Kirby touch without some gratuitous zig-zag lines running across the surface. This was for me the most difficult part of creating the Control Box. Initially, I intended to make some curvy lines but the simplistic line art distracted from the other more photo-realistic parts of the Control Box. I considered a more 3-D effect by inserting a wave-style bike rack into the image but again, I didn't like how it fit into the overall style.

Then I considered using standard circuit boards. Reversing the image of a circuit board would make any text on the surfaces appear sufficiently alien so the English words and numbers wouldn't be too distracting. I kind of liked the idea of Psycho-Man building a prototype Control Box showing exposed circuitry. But none of the ones I found online or had in the garage I scanned worked for me. I wasn't enthused about making a jagged or wavy circuit board myself as my PS skills would have made it obvious I shaped the image by deleting sections defined with a polygonal lasso tool.

I was kind of stuck with what to do to finish off the Control Box. It just would not do not to include the ultimate in stylized Kirbyism. Then I had the idea of using an image of a flexible printed circuit. Cutting and pasting the image of a length of FCB across the surface of the Control Box gave me that special Kirbyesque zig-zag of actual circuitry and I really liked the end result. So I loaded the Control Box image into my iPad and I couldn't be more pleased with how it looks. I've decided to share it with any other fans to put onto their phones or tablets if they want. So take a gander. Here is my re-imagining of the Psycho-Man's Control Box, created by Sleestak after Jack Kirby. Hope you dig it.

Click picture for all sizes including Hi-Res, suitable for framing

Happy Birthday, Jack Kirby!

Here's some cake!
Thanks for all the sweet Kirby Krackle!


Why is Kirby the King? Check out the Mid-Ohio-Con Moc-Blog.

Futura and the Top-Heavy Star Fems

Godland wasn't the first comic book series to be published as an homage to Jack Kirby. Back in 2002 the company AC Comics put out, among a few other titles, a book titled Fighting Yank using several Golden Age public domain characters. Decidedly for an older audience, Fighting Yank ran for five issues and featured the title character, Miss Masque, Pyroman, Rulah and others. Several of the characters are currently enjoying a revival in the Alex Ross-helmed Project Superpowers series.

Fighting Yank #3 (2002) published a "Palpitatin' Pin-Up" accomplished in a Jack Kirby and 60s Marvel house style by artist Eric Coile. Like most of the AC Comics product their line skewed to the horny fanboy market and this page featuring the "Top-Heavy Star Fems" of Planet Comics was no exception. While the characters were always traditionally drawn as beautiful women with a high skin to fabric ratio, Coile knew his audience and took pains to render the Golden Age stars of several Planet Comics serials with endowments far in excess of how they were drawn in the original books.

From Left to Right: Warner Bros. Martian, Futura, Mysta of the Moon, Gale Allen.

What If...Steve Ditko never went into a career in comic books?

We'd have had to rely on another creator for weird inter-dimensional landscapes.

Jack Kirby's "Dark Dimension" from Blue Bolt #5 (October 1940).

What If...Jack Kirby never went into a career in comic books?

The King wasn't the only creator capable of the high concept character.

Joe Kubert's "Black Racer" from Eerie #9 (October-November 1952).

Why I'm not upset about Big Barda dying

I am not as annoyed as some comic book fans of the off-panel death of Big Barda in her kitchen. At least for this post I won't be addressing the typical contempt that publishers seem to hold for a good portion of their customer base. WFA has many links to the pulling of this month's tiger's tail perpetrated by DC, so check them out.

Instead, I'll go over what I think is happening with the New Gods over all.

Only those not familiar with comic books will believe for a second that Steve Rogers will not return as Captain America, Superboy won't be back in some form and that the New Gods will be dead forever.

I have no doubt that DC is merely rebooting the sometimes campy, though brilliant, characters that Jack Kirby created. I may be wrong, but I am expecting that the New Gods pantheon will be re-imagined somewhat like the finale to DC's Lords of the Ultra-Realm in order to breathe a new life into the concept and extend their marketability. It is possible that DC is re-creating them in order to diminish the hold Kirby or his estate may have on the concept, be it legally or in the minds of die hard fans.

Would I like Barda and pals to remain static and never change? Sure I would. I love them as they are. But even in the current creative climate of fast and loose continuity all characters must evolve or at least have the illusion of growth. There are some amazingly bad and goofy concepts in there and many characters, like Desaad, are criminally misused and weakly portrayed at best. A re-imagining is probably the best way to go about making the Fourth World characters a bit more interesting and contemporary.

So I figure that what is being torn out of the New Gods isn't so much as their hearts, but the "God Essence" that makes them what they are. The body is merely a shell that is unimportant and can be left behind. Of course, knowing Starlin, the divine spark that is being forcibly recalled from the gods is probably being used as fuel for some ultimate weapon of destruction by a villain or anti-hero. In the end I suspect that all the captured souls will be reformed into an all new pantheon of Gods for DC to play with.

The Mighty One, Jack Kirby

It's Jack Kirby's 89th birthday and in recognition of that I present The Tablet of Revelation from Kamandi #29 (May 1975).

All of us fans build our own comic continuity in our heads, keeping bits of lore we like or think should be included and discarding those we feel do not do justice to the characters and their history. Kamandi #29 by Jack Kirby is one of those episodes of lore I keep as a character's true story.

As far as I was concerned Jack Kirby tells the legend of the true Death of Superman in Kamandi #29. In the story it is revealed that The Man of Steel did not die in a fight scene against a creature that should have been a Highfather clone sent by Darkseid (but wasn't). Kirby had Superman die as a real hero, preventing the planet Earth from destroying itself and being destroyed in a series of cataclysmic events that included World War 3 called by survivors as "The Great Disaster". Though the Earth was saved the task proved too much for Superman and he later died. Years passed and all that remained of Superman and an Age of Heroes was his indestructible costume that a cargo-cult of semi-intelligent gorillas worship as a religious talisman. Kamandi, The Last Fanboy On Earth, has his own ideas for the use of the super-suit. He is desperate for a symbol for the beings of his world to rally around and rise above post-apocalyptic barbarism.

Kamandi was convinced that one day Superman would return to fix things and killed a gorilla who desired to misappropriate the costume for his own selfish ends by dumping him into lava. Interestingly, Kamandi was correct that one day Superman would return, however briefly. In a nice hat-tip to Jack Kirby, Jeph Loeb had an alternate time line Superman appear in Kamandi's earth in Superman/Batman #16 (Feb 2005) and reference the story.

Crisis on Infinite Earths pretty much erased the fate of Superman that Kirby penned but the recent Infinite Crisis brought the possibility roaring back. In an industry where creative teams sniped at each other and rendered invalid another's work with regularity no one refuted Kirby's account of the death of DC's cornerstone character.

That says a lot about the respect Jack earned.

Don't forget to visit the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center online!