With a suggestion from Arlen I submit the following: The failures of Jack Kirby. My contribution to the discussion is what I consider to be his biggest embarrassment and also a piece of the puzzle in the ongoing Lee/Kirby debate. Kirbys comic rendition of the movie/book 2001: A Space Odyssey. Heres a link to a web page which examines this giant special issue (a dream project of Jack) and what it tells us about Kirby the story teller, in both written and visual form. A couple of snippets from the webmaster of the website: Before Jack Kirby continued the story of 2001, he adapted the film into a 70-page comic. Although the comic adapts the film — it uses Jupiter, for example, whereas the novel used Saturn — it does incorporate some dialogue from the novel. Strangely, it also incorporates elements from the screenplay, in which the computer HAL spoke more colloquially. Such inconsistencies with the finished film are common in adaptations produced in time for the motion picture release, but they’re rarer in adaptations produced long after the fact, as this one was... Of course, it’s not like Kirby was alone in using captions to “fix” visual problems and narrative ambiguities. Stan Lee did so all the time. Silver Age Marvel comics are filled with this kind of incredibly poor storytelling (such as characters tossing something not previously shown, with only a caption explaining how they got it, or even why they’re doing what they’re doing). In Kirby’s defense, he’s only repeating the bad habits he learned from a long career in corporate comics. So if Lee had let Jack write the dialogue in his comics, would it had been that much better? I remember how excited I was as a teen to buy this, given I loved Jacks work and the movie, 2001. Once I finished reading it, I felt ill. This demonstrated to me that Jack could be every bit as indulgent and egotistically blind as Stan Lee. So is the dividing line between the two men (and their respective egos) really all that wide? sequart.org/magazine/20670/on-jack-kirbys-2001-a-space-odyssey-adaptation/
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 03:52:06 +0000
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