It seems customary to note the 100th post in a new blog, but here we are two thirds through the King Kirby 100. Confusion aside, how to mark the occasion while keeping the focus on Jack Kirby?
Y'know... The King had a few 100s of his own, his first way back in 1945:
Of course, it was monster covers in the 50s...
...even on the cowboy books:
But Jack also hit a #100 cover for the genre he and Joe Simon invented:
As you'd expect, superheroes returned in the 60s...
This is surely the #100 that thrilled me the most when it hit the stands. We were all waiting for the 100th issue of Fantastic Four, and man did that cover deliver the goods-
Oddly enough, his Captain America #100 was actually the first issue of Cap's solo title, picking up the numbering from Tales Of Suspense where he'd been sharing the book..
Don't say that doesn't count - Jack was there 100 issues later for #200's cover, too:
A feat he managed to duplicate with the Fantastic Four:
There's a frustrating number of times when Kirby stopped drawing covers during the 90s, then returned just after #100. This list would have doubled in size were it not so. Scanning through his output to find these leaves me even more amazed at the sheer volume of work he produced. Consider that at his output rate, for 40 years he would have reached his 100th page about every 36 days. It seems like half the artists working these days can't turn out 100 pages a year. Jack Kirby was turning out 1000 pages a year for four straight decades.
And he ruled through Quality, not quantity.
