I'm out of my depths in the 'fine Art' world, I quit trying decades ago in a way. The 'you know what moves you when you are in it's presence' thing... or 'I know what is a great _____ (fill in genre label) song when I hear it'. In a way anything in an Art gallery is 'Art', be it a rotting coat of meat, a restroom toilet, dripped paint, a lab specimen with a statuette dropped in it, large vinyl french flies falling out of a giant packet, a Brillo box, a giant comic panel... the frame of being on a wall or on display confers 'Art' status to virtually anything. What Jack Kirby did one can see the skill involved. To me comics are a craft, I can't really think of them as fine anything... not fine literature or for Art, but that doesn't mean i don't respect and like 'em. I like Link Wray's old Rumble song recorded in a former chicken coop through a cheap amp even though it's not an orchestra performing Beethoven. Now, I did see coffee mugs sold which had "Lichtenstein's" fine Art comic panel enlargements. If he got a cut as "his" work that would be immoral to me. The "originals" being sold by him I don't think anyone could do anything about that. At this time there were collages using magazines and even comic books for it's 'raw material' being sold as well, and Warhol screen-printing an Elvis magazine photo with his colors added never gave a cut to Elvis that I'm aware of.
How's the view from there, with your head up your ass? The point I was making is that Lee was also an employee, not the ruling boss who got to call all the shots. Someone who's getting regular pay from the same employer is an employee, freelance or otherwise.
I'd rank Kirby as one of the 250 greatest comic artists, but he doesn't come close to cracking the top 100. Very influential though; without him, truly great artists like Steranko, Smith, Buscema and other Marvel stalwarts might never have achieved the status they did.
Stan was brilliant at following trends; during the 50s Red Scare he was virulently anti-communist, and in the 60s, he became a Shakespearean hippie. The PT Barnum of the medium.
Colan was another unsung Marvel genius; he really came into his own as Kirby was gearing up to leave for DC.
His work on other titles - including the ridiculous Captain Marvel - in 1968 is uniformly impressive, as is Buscema's; the short-lived Silver Surfer title!
Just two of hundreds of gifted artists working in the medium; most others worked for far less, did far more, and are still grossly under-appreciated.
Kirby and Ditko never again came close to achieving what they did with Stan; they were partnership in which the wholes were vastly greater than the parts.
Your point continues to be wrong. Do you have trouble reading? Kirby was not an employee. An employee and a freelancer are not one and the same thing. Your arrogant, rude ignorance shames you if you only had the intelligence to know it.
Interesting point about Warhol. If anything, he should have gave credit/$ to the photographer of that image of Elvis. Probably a discussion for a different thread though. And as crazy as it sounds, I regard certain comics as highly as I do fine/classic literature. I studied classic literature at university (I have a minor in it, for whatever that’s worth!). At the time I was taking those courses I was working in a comic book store and would bring up themes from comics in to some of them classroom discussions. Fond memories.
I would partially agree with that, but pretty much every artist, with rare exceptions such as Miles Davis or Picasso, has a career peak and doesn’t sustain that career peak for decades. Jack Kirby was born in 1917, and, as has been noted above, had already been a major figure in comics in the 1940s and 1950s before his collaborations with Stan Lee in the 1960s. To my mind, Kirby’s absolute peak was Fantastic Four #57 through #60, the story where Dr. Doom steals the Silver Surfer’s powers. The final issues of that story came out in 1967, when Kirby was 50 years old. So, leaving aside the issue of how much Lee brought to the table in the 1960s, to expect Kirby to continue to be at the top of his game in the 1970s, after three decades in the business, when he was in his mid-50s, is asking a lot. Yet in 1970/71, he created the Fourth World for DC, writing and drawing four books a month. For DC, he created Darkseid, who has become one of DC’s most iconic villains, still appearing long after Kirby’s departure from DC in major story arcs for the Legion of Super-Heroes and other titles. The Fourth World still attracts readers today, to the point that DC has recently published a $150 “Absolute Edition” of the first half of Kirby’s Fourth World saga, a volume that at least one reviewer has called “the best DC Absolute Edition ever.” After creating the Fourth World, Kamandi, and Omac for DC in the early to mid-70s, Kirby came back to Marvel and created the Eternals, an idea that has now been turned into a $200 million Marvel movie. What Marvel movies are based on characters or concepts Stan Lee created after 1970? Of course, there are none. It also appears increasingly likely that DC is going to make a New Gods movie as well, by the way: ‘The New Gods’: Everything You Need to Know About Ava DuVernay’s DC Superhero Epic If you look at the arc of Jack Kirby’s life, the 1960s were always going to be Jack Kirby’s peak, regardless of who was filling in the dialog balloons for the stories he created. Expecting him to keep on creating at his superhuman pace into his 50s and 60s is ridiculous, although, again, in his 50s and 60s, he did actually continue to create major characters and concepts who are still exploited by DC and Marvel to this day.
Like jazz and baseball, superhero comics are a uniquely American art form, whether culture snobs admit it or not.
I like them a lot and don't care what a proper cultural anthropologist or whatever thinks. It's the chasing after that sort of literature or fine Art 'respectability' itself I find out of place, but that's just an opinion. I have found some of the various stabs to be good or interesting comics, things Barry Smith has done, or say that Will Eisner Hamlet's soliloquy from a tenement rooftop. Of all the comic books and strips the ones I can see most likely to pass through the ages as capital A Art would be Krazy Kat by George Herriman or Little Nemo by Windsor McCay. People with super powers, costumes, and codenames... I can't seem to reconcile that with standing alongside something like Crime & Punishment, Return Of The Native, Moby Dick or even Wuthering Heights. Talking animals and Princesses in a dream though... well sure, Aesop and Shakespeare had those both covered! Cavaet: I've only been able to read single issues here and there of Kirby's New Gods and Eternals so far. Perhaps someday my library... don't think I can afford them all otherwise.
That the 4th World stuff has been - and continues to be - exploited, now cinematically, doesn't signal greatness to me. Those books were narrative bombs from the get, with only Kamandi (sometimes) making sense. Lovely to look at, but that's about it. Without Stan (and sometimes with him!), Kirby was an artist lost in a maze of his own far-flung imagination. While I wish he'd been inked that well at Marvel (George Bell???), Kirby went into full decline after breaking up with Stan, and Steve... ...nuff said.
The greatest achievements in comic books and comic strips generally occurred pretty far away from Kirby & the world of super heroes, though that Galactus Trilogy!
You can argue about whether or not the Fourth World books are as great as the Fantastic Four and Thor, and I share your belief that Kirby sometimes got lost in the maze of his own imagination, but the fact remains that other DC creators have continued to use the Fourth World characters long after Kirby left DC, that, fifty years after it was created, Kirby’s Fourth World work is still in print in expensive hardback editions, and that, fifty years after it was created, Kirby’s Fourth World work is being turned into a major movie. Whether or not you or I think the Fourth World is Kirby’s best work, the work endures and is not forgotten. And, once again, the decline, if any, between Kirby’s 60s work for Marvel and his early 70s work for DC can be traced to more than just simply his divorce from Stan Lee. After thirty years as a creator, is it realistic to expect Kirby, or any creator, for that matter, to remain at the absolute top of his game as he enters the fourth decade of their artistic career? Was he supposed to maintain forever the standard he set from roughly Fantastic Four #45 through #67, decade after decade after decade? Not many creators in any field manage to do that.
I think he had a great imagination and interesting ideas from start on into late in life (although I wasn't reading comics when he did stuff for Topps (I think it was tapps). I mostly would've just liked a writer-editor assistant for him to improve on the dialogue. I wasn't crazy about Royer on him all the time (though he was great inking early Keith Giffen when Giffen was influenced by Kirby), Thibodeaux was my preference if he wasn't being too heavy which I think sometimes he was trying to make Kirby into Hal Foster or something. Here's one I really like though, because it's Kirby doing Star Wars!