Monster of the Day #1561

At this exact moment, I’d say running away would be a good option.

It’s not a popular opinion, but I think that Jack Kirby was a pretty decent artist.

I really miss the color palette from those days, especially the super-vivid browns and oranges. The Thing really looked fabulous on the FF covers back then.

  • Acethepug

    Not a popular opinion? Maybe among the Image-raised mindset, but Kirby KNEW HOW TO DRAW.

    Was his art highly stylized? Absolutely, but he knew the rules of anatomy (unlike, say, a Rob Liefeld).

    Kirby was one of the greats, that won’t ever change. Give me some Kirby crackle any day :)

    And I am LOVING these covers, thanks!

  • Marsden

    Kirby was great! I love his work. He co created my favorite comic book character and a lot of others.

  • Gamera977

    Lol, I was thinking ‘run like hell’ too….

    On the ‘Expedition Unknown’ show host Josh Gates claimed that the Sherpa had always maintained the Yeti was a reddish-brown and it was movies that later portrayed it as white.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    I’m thinking Ken’s Kirby opinion was meant ironically. For me, Jack Kirby is (points at ceiling) right up there as the best comic book artist of all time. Everyone else (points about four feet lower) starts here, with your Neil Adams and your Gene Colans and so forth.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    As for this cover…doesn’t the Yeti’s head look kind of weird? Like something cut out of another drawing and pasted on top of this one.

  • Atlas Kirby was adequate. Early Marvel Kirby was excellent. DC Kirby and later Marvel Kirby wasn’t that great. Hurts my eyes just to look at it.

    Gimme Sal Buscema over Kirby any day. Buscema was great. Though all his characters tended to look ticked off…

    (I also sort of lean Ditko and Romita Sr. over Kirby, too. But that’s the Spider-man fan boy in me.)

  • craigzimmerman12

    I miss the old comic books in which the creators did not feel like they had to lecture readers on the latest social issues.

  • bgbear_rnh

    Since the yeti folk tale was really probably about bears it makes sense they were brown. I think most of the big foot type stories are really about bears. When the folks tried to explain this horrible creature to the Westerners, the westerners assumed they were talking about some new creature, not something they were familiar with.

    I also believe that all “wee folk” type legends were about monkeys. As people moved away from places that had monkeys the stories stayed, but over time no one knew what creature they were talking about.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I was going to say, I thought Kirby was all but worshiped in comics fandom.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I have some old issues where they ranted about such things, so it’s not like it was unknown back then, Though it seems to me that they were able to make them a lot shorter and remembered that their first job as to entertain.

  • bgbear_rnh

    Ken is not exactly sarcasm free guys ;-)

  • Acethepug

    They sold a lot better then, too. Sure, part of it is more competition for an entertainment dollar, but alienating a potential 50% of your audience for virtue-signalling can’t be helping, either.

  • Acethepug

    Nah, run up and give him a friendly hug — what could POSSIBLY go wrong :)

  • bgbear_rnh

    Probably more balanced in their lecturing in the old days.

  • Gamera977

    Wait, you’re telling me the sightings are of a real animal known to science instead of a totally unknown creature people have been seeing for over a hundred years yet we have only the most scanty evidence for? Next are you going to tell me the Easter Bunny isn’t real either? ;)

  • sandra

    i wonder if anyone will ever find that movie camera ?

  • bgbear_rnh

    and God didn’t make little green apple and it don’t rain Indianapolis in the Summer time

  • You… you say that like the Easter Bunny isn’t real. (8^0

    (If I might break character a second, God i love Emoji.)

  • Flangepart

    In a pile of Abominable poop?

  • Rodford Smith

    There are many stories of “wild men” in the US from the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. Most likely about escaped chimpanzees and such. They were generally described as being manlike, but small, hairy and smelly.

  • Rodford Smith

    DC Kirby includes Big Barda.

  • I know. I like both her and her husband as written characters. I’m just not crazy about how Kirby drew them, or his later Marvel Captain America. Something about his lines seem too heavy handed, especially when compared to his Fantastic Four stuff.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Okay, but for all I knew someone had lately rallied the Perpetually Outraged Hordes against Jack’s memory for whatever manufactured reason.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Probably they would say that their lesser amounts of money is made in a more ideologically purified fashion today.

  • Acethepug

    Their audience is becoming more “selective,” heh.

  • Ken_Begg

    OK, Kirby was clearly, at or near his peak, the greatest or certainly most iconic artist in comic book history. That said, the people who feel like Stan Lee tried to hog all the credit from Kirby (and others), and who have responded by trying instead to give Kirby ALL of the credit and Lee none of it, are equally misguided. Kirby’s later solo work has its fans, but for most of it, it ain’t nearly as good. Some of it, in fact, is quite bad. (There are exceptions, admittedly.)

    Lee and Kirby (and Ditko) had a Lennon/McCartney or Brooks/Wilder thing going, where none of the solo work reached the heights of the collaborations. That’s my two cents, anyway.

  • Ken_Begg

    See Night of the Demon for answers.

  • Ken_Begg

    Yes, unconstrained Super Crazy Kirby was nowhere near his best.

  • Acethepug

    Hahaha! Thanks for the smile on that :)

  • Sort of wonder what changed his style. Was it that he started inking his own stuff, too? Whatever the case, he seemed to have lost that certain something he had had at Marvel. Nowhere near a bad artists, especially compared some of the “pros” today.