Adam McGovern Know of some Kirby-inspired work that should be covered here? Send to: Adam McGovern PO Box 257 Mt. Tabor, NJ 07878
As A Genre A regular feature examining Kirby-inspired work, by Adam McGovern
Victory Orbit (right) Benjamin Marra’s monumental offering to the New Gods in this theoretical cover image. (below) Fiffe’s design is killing it in this MODOK sketch. (next page, top) A bit of Jack’s own 1980s Captain Victory magic. (next page, bottom) Second-generation Kirbytech and female fury from Fiffe’s self-published phenomenon Copra.
Jack Kirby may have been the most conceptual of comic artists—his system of squiggling, krackling texture and tangles of monolithic tech being a kind of hieroglyphic of the epic struggle to exist, no matter what surface or character they took shape as. And Joe Casey may be comics’ most visual writer—his radical rephrasings and visionary ideas being like the coordinates of worlds that spring full-blown into your imagination like gods being summoned or Matrixes falling away. It’s a fine event horizon to meet at, and Kirby and Casey have come close many times, most famously in the cosmic gospel of Gødland, the co-creation of Casey and artist Tom Scioli, in which both Kirby’s dynamic way of seeing and his monumental method of looking at the world (and what’s beyond it) were taken forward by two creators continuing the transcendent journey Kirby projected himself on. More recently Casey has been rewriting the fundamental formula and revisiting the genetic code of several of the storytelling forms most basic to modern comics—from the macrocosm of The Bounce’s multiple realities to the vividly felt close focus of SEX’s dystopian soap-opera of fallen former superheroes (each book a fitting successor to the way Watchmen messed with the conventions of the form while finding new stories to tell), and the visceral, mythic parables of power, citizenship and our place in the world (and, again, beyond it) in the trilogy of series that make up Catalyst Comix. Casey’s firstever direct collision with a Kirby creation is happening this year, as the hyperimaginative Captain Victory falls into his hands. Part of the Kirbyverse properties currently docked at Dynamite Entertainment, this adventure of a galactic police force will enlist an honor role of some of comics’ most individualistic voices to tell it—including the endlessly versatile pop-history style-channeler Jim Rugg, neounderground martial-art maestro Ulises
Farinas, auteur scribble-saboteur Connor Willumsen, fantasy-vérité genius Farel Dalrymple, sketchand-burn visionary Jim Mahfood, and art-grindhouse sensation Nathan Fox, as well as the surreal prophet Michel Fiffe (whose biologic tech does for the organic what Kirby did for the hard-edged), and the pulp superstar of indie sci-fi and action, Benjamin Marra. The series should hit around the time you’re reading this (July 2014), and while the new book’s universe was still being built at the time we went to press, even with no art yet materialized we thought Casey, Marra and Fiffe could paint a mental picture that will have you warp-driving to the comic shop. THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR spoke with them by e-mail from March 11-13, 2014. THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: It may be easier to be “Kirbyesque” when you’re working on series Kirby himself didn’t do—a book like Gødland extends him whereas picking up where he left off on one of his own books could repeat him. Is it a matter of instead tapping the same things he was (certain speculative physics and primal sagas) and carrying those forward in different directions? 86