﻿You probably know Jack Kirby as the co-creator of Thor, Captain America,the X-Men, and basically half Marvel Universe.
But today, we’re at an exhibit honoring one of the King’s weirdest works:
his comic-book adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kirby’s over-the-top art was a strange fit for Kubrick’s subtle, reserved film.
Sequences that are sparse and silent on screen are brought to life with dazzling cosmic landscapes, copious Kirby Krackle, and breathless, operatic captions.
There might be more words on one page than there are in the whole film,
and somehow, it still works.
Classic sequences like HAL’s lip-reading,
and the famous million-year match cut play out very differently on the printed page,
but that clash of contrasting geniuses is exactly what makes the book so special.
With '2001,' he tried to tie in as much of the movie as he could while keeping his style,
but since Kubrick had such a tight style,
it's an interesting contrast with Kirby’s more dynamic style that was more bombastic.
I mean the thing about Kubrick is that,
you're sitting in that theater or you're at home watching the movie,
he's got your attention span. You're gonna sit there and you're going to watch.
Kirby can't do that to you in a comic book, so he's going to put panel panel panel panel panel.
He'll give you some great spreads like behind us over here.
There was a lot of great synergy between the kind of mind blowing images that Kirby would put on the page,
and some of the mindblowing experiences people had at the ‘2001’ movie when they were sitting in the theater.
Kirby’s adaptation came out eight years after the film,
just when it was undergoing a resurgence in colleges and cult theaters.
Meanwhile the King had just returned to Marvel from DC,
where he created the far-out Fourth World of the New Gods.
As a pioneer of cosmic comics,
Jolly Jack was a great fit for the trippy ‘2001.’
He's like a zeitgeist for the 20th century.
He saw the birth of all this technology, he saw the space race and all of these things...
I mean he drew worlds and universes from his basement and Long Island and then just expanded all of our consciousness.
Like a lot of movie tie-ins, Kirby’s ‘2001’ has been out of print for years thanks to rights issues.
but the volunteers at the Jack Kirby Museum have preserved the comic in a one-of-a-kind format that’s larger than life.
I didn't find out about it until the 90s because nobody ever talked about it.
And now, coming back to it, I think the things that I'm most drawn to are the two-page spreads and the collages,
and some of the really experimental things that he did with the story visually.
Due to whatever the deal is in lawyer land or corporate land or whatever land, these comics have never been reprinted.
So we figure we could promote them a little, talk about them, maybe we can find somebody who will give us permission to publish them again.
The Treasury Edition was a lot of work because since it hasn't been reprinted, the quality of what's there is from 1976.
And the idea there is, since his art has so much impact and so much beauty,
to take that and blow it up and make it even more visually exciting.
Kirby’s adaptation was just the beginning, continuing on into a monthly series that explored the potential of the monolith in all-new stories.
The series was cancelled after just ten issues, but not before Kirby created yet another Marvel Universe mainstay:
Aaron Stack, Machine Man.
With Machine Man, it seems like he took that interest in technology and kind of infused it with the what he might have wanted to do with the Silver Surfer.
Where the surfer was kind of the fish out of water, discovering what humanity was,
The Surfer was the cosmic fish out of water,
Aaron Stack, X-51, Machine Man is the technological fish out of water.
Kirby’s wild creativity and ingenious art make perfect sense for a museum setting.
His style is truly timeless, and seeing it on display gives you an all-new appreciation for his constantly evolving technique.
He's already kind of mastered this form.
And at that point it is more abstracted but it's more graphic.
He's using heavier linework so it becomes more bold by this point, like he's got a purpose.
It's almost like free form jazz when you can draw this stuff. That's what I love about it.
I love how geometric it is.
I love when two characters are about to come to blows, it seems like each blow is about to be the deciding ones.
There's just an explosive amount of like crazed mania in Kirby art.
Even when it's in outer space, even when it's celestial, there's humanity and there's soul to it.
The '2001' exhibit is curated by The Jack Kirby Museum, a volunteer organization dedicated to preserving the work and memory of the comic book titan,
from creating a digital archive to exhibiting his work around the world.
The mission of the museum is to take this wonderful creator that has influenced everyone and most people don't even know,
so for that reason, our purpose is to promote Jack Kirby in any way we can.
We have these exhibitions, we travel around the world.
That is part of our goal, to really encourage awareness of Jack Kirby, who he is, and his influence on everything.
If you’d like to donate or get involved with the Jack Kirby Museum, you can learn more at KirbyMuseum.org.