Star Wars Wars (King Kirby 079)

Jack Kirby's profound influence on modern pop culture is inarguable. That said - it's started an awful lot of arguments. The biggest being - "Just how much was George Lucas influenced by Jack Kirby in creating Star Wars?"
There are Kirby fans who will swear that Lucas read Kirby's Fourth World books, a light illuminated over his head, and he wrote the script for Star Wars.
There are Lucas fans who say that George never heard of Jack Kirby.
As is generally the case, the truth likely lies between the two.

George Lucas maintains that Star Wars was influenced by Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and the old Flash Gordon serials. Happily, we live in the internet age - scripts are available at various stages of development. If you look at the first scripts, Lucas's claimed influences are quite obvious and appear to be absolutely true. All the basic elements in the first draft can be traced back to those two primary influences.

Jump ahead a couple years to the next version, and suddenly we have a lot of new elements and changes to old parts. As the original trilogy unfolds, the parallels become striking.
Kirby's New Gods were connected to a 'mystic life force that surrounds all living things' called The Source. The primary Big Bad was named Darkseid. (That's pronounced "Dark Side", not "Dark Seed" as some Lucas fans argue. For easy reference, whenever you encounter Germanic names with the ei or ie combination, you pronounced the second letter.) The primary hero, Orion, was unknowingly the son of the Big Bad.

In Star Wars, Darth Vader morphed into a cross between Darkseid and classic Kirby villain, Doctor Doom, and is master of the 'Dark Side'. A 'mystic life force surrounding all living things' called The Force was added, as well as the 'holy warriors' who tapped into it as the New Gods do. It took a little longer for Lucas to adopt the Father/Son element of the clash. The role filled by High Father of the New Gods wound up as the wise elder Jedi, Obi Wan Kenobi, and both facilitated the 'baby swap' circumstances of our heroes' childhoods. There are a lot of other little things that are used to reinforce the notion of Kirby influence in Star Wars, from paralleling the Death Star with Apokolips to lining up various characters. But those are the really obvious seeming elements.

For me, it seems obvious that Jack Kirby did indeed influence Star Wars, but it should be remembered that Star Wars was basically nothing but bringing new life to a mix of influences. I see nothing wrong with adding more flavor to the stew. The only wrong is in trying to hide the influence. Unfortunately, it seems typical for the man in the spotlight to try to keep the spotlight on himself. That happened far too often to Jack over the years.
For Kirby, the concern was more one of being able to reliably keep his family comfortably secure. He never seemed as bothered by the lack of attention and respect as those around him. He was always willing to step up and fight for others, to protect those he cared about, but his ego wasn't something i can ever remember seeing him fight for. He knew who he was. He was too busy doing to waste his time trying to make sure everyone else knew.
Privately, he did get upset at times. Ahmet Zappa recalls one of the times when Jack Kirby was dining with Frank Zappa & family*-
“He told my dad stuff like, ‘Darth Vader was Doctor Doom and the Force is the Source’ and that George Lucas ripped him off. Now this you may not know, and I was only a kid, but I remember learning at the dinner table that my dad was asked to write the music for Star Wars; he turned it down, he said he wasn’t interested. That would’ve been really strange, the lives of us Star Wars fans woulda taken a different turn and that whole score woulda sounded like Tatooine Cantina music.”

Every now and then, though, Jack would express himself through his drawings...

Oh, crap. I just realized - We've not been showing proper respect for Star Wars, and now it's owned by...

Eep!
Gotta go

all art by Jack Kirby, some with a bit of embellishment

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*(Yeah, Kirby & Zappa - we'll get to it)

Jack & Blue

We interrupt the King Kirby 100 for the return of

We're keeping with our Jack Kirby theme this month, but the KK100 tries to be Safe For Work, but not all of The King's fans have the same intent. Nor does this blog, for that matter - but you clicked on the Adult Warning, so you already know that.

So today, let's look at a few of Jack's characters as drawn by other artists, like Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Joe Rubenstein, Adam Hughes, Frank Cho, and Bruce Timm.
One of the most popular Kirby characters for nude/erotic sketches is the Scarlet Witch. One can only imagine that popularity will increase with the current Avengers movies.

NOTE: The images from this post contain nudity, and thus have been moved to our back room for adult content. The text remains that you may make a fair guess as to whether or not you wish to look at the pics.
Please follow this link to The Other Voice Of ODD! archive of the original post to view the artwork.


Close behind, perhaps not surprisingly given the amount of cheesecake inherent in her comic book role as Mister Miracle's stage assistant, is Big Barda. Her warrior side has inspired entire 'muscle porn' fan groups. Those two contrasts offer an intriguing combination to many artists and fans...


The Wasp, of course, has lot of fans and can inspire a fair bit of fetish oriented artwork. Her appearance in the recent Avengers cartoon series open another fan base and style of artwork. We'll see more of her next week, but here's a nice study of her for now...


Kirby's biggest stars are often more popular in cartoons:


To wrap things up for this batch, here's one of my favorite cartoons of the type:

46 Hours And 36 Minutes (King Kirby 078)

We saw previously some art Jack Kirby did for Esquire magazine's 1966 article about Comics On Campus. We didn't talk about how Kirby got screwed on that deal. Esquire acquired Jack's services through Marvel comics, who attracted Kirby's interest by offering magazine rates for the artwork, considerably higher than the rate paid for comic book work, making the deal very enticing. After the work was done, including an unpublished cover - the original art for which was lost - Jack learned that Marvel, not Esquire, was paying for the job, and they were only giving him comic book rates for it.
The contact at Esquire apologized for the whole mess upon learning the details, and promised Kirby more work to help make up for it. So it was that a few months later, Jack was contracted to illlustrate this short piece on the the last 46 Hours And 36 Minutes In The Life Of Jack Ruby appeared in that May's Esquire magazine. The original pages had documentary references to the Warren Commission Report and other sources at the bottom, dozens in total, showing the depth of research for the script:

46 Hours And 35 Minutes In The Life Of Jack Ruby by Jack Kirby with Chic Stone for Esquire #402 (1967)

The King And More (King Kirby 077)

I promised more of our Kirby In Comics feature today, and we've got some good ones to fill that promise.
Going back to late 1968 and early '69 in Not Brand Echh #s 11, 12, & 13, let's start with a trinity of parodies of The King -

Of course, there was that time Alan Moore had Supreme meet Jack Kirby...

Just gotta love that tribute to one of Jack Kirby's greatest covers:

 Of course, how does Moore treat The King inside? Let's look and see...

Whole Lotta Love there. Almost called Jack Kirby God or something.
Of course, there's that time the Fantastic Four actually met God...

...and from a meta standpoint, it's an inarguable truth.

Jack Kirby stars in Not Brand Echh #s 11, 12, & 13 (1968-9), Supreme: The Return #6 (2000), and Fantastic Four #511 (2004)

Launching the X-51 (King Kirby 076)

One of Jack Kirby's Odder creations (which is saying something given some of the competition) is X-51 aka Aaron Stack aka Mister Machine aka Machine Man.

Over the years since The King unleashed our living robot hero, he's been all over the Marvel universe, even became a Watcher at one point. I suppose that's almost appropriate given X-51's origins...

Jack only did nine issues of Machine Man...

...but in that short time he was both creating wildly and asking questions, exploring potential issues. Not just within the stories, but in the letters-free letters column, as well. A decade before Star Trek: The Next Generation was lauded for exploring potential social ramifications for self-aware machine intelligence, Kirby was already asking questions. For example, here's his essay from the first issue:

Here's the introductions to the next few essays:

This one seems particularly relevant as we advance machine systems capable of dealing death & destruction autonomously. Heck, we even have robotic suicide bombers now!

But we still haven't gotten to the odd bits. The parts they can't talk about when they retell Machine Man's origins. The true why of the blurb

X-51, you see, evolved beyond his mere machine nature. He did so back before Machine Man #1, in the same manner our species was induced to evolve.
Trapped, bound, facing dismantlement... it happened...

...he encountered The Monolith!

Next issue, after pulling a Nick Cage...

...he makes his escape, and while hunted has a second encounter with The Monolith:

Beyond his evolutionary advancements, this encounter with the boy leads him to thinking more like a 'superhero' and he soon changes his alias from Mr. Machine to Machine Man. (This might also have been to avoid licensing issues with MGM & Kubrick)
So, they can't usually mention any of that stuff, since the first three issues of "Machine Man" were actually the last three issues of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Jack turned a basically impossible assignment - adapt 2001: A Space Odyssey into an ongoing series - into both a wild, semi-psychedelic, evolutionary ride and a fairly serious probe at issues of the coming 30 years. (The King always liked to think 3 decades into the future) And he created another enduring Superhero in the process.

King Kirby - Always Amazing.

X-51 covers & panels by Jack Kirby & Mike Royer for 2001: A Space Odyssey #s 8-10 (1977) and Machine Man #s 1-9 (1978)