Might of a Thousand

In 1993, Topps Comics relaunched Jack Kirby's Silver Star as a miniseries under the auspices of writer Kurt Busiek and artist James W. Fry. Though the series was canned after only one issue, Busiek has revealed that he planned to pit the hero against an army of 1,000 supervillains - many of whom he and Fry managed to conceive, reportedly reaching somewhere in the upper 800s before the ax fell. Here is a two-page spread from that first issue, showcasing just a few members (relatively speaking) of that planned awesome army of evil.

While I'm amused by the flying catwoman - who I'm pretty sure Busiek has said is actually named Kittyhawk - take a closer look at the pink blob to the left of the Lightning Lady. Yes, Silver Star just barely avoided the terrible might of a Barney the Dinosaur/Godzilla crossbreed! Oh, the horrors...

Don't fret too much over Busiek and Fry's seemingly wasted efforts, though; apparently a number of their unused ideas ended up in Astro City. Whether any of the characters here are immediate predecessors to Astro City villains, though, I couldn't say.

TAARUU!

This is my absolute favorite page from Jack Kirby's run on Forever People. It is, in fact, probably one of my favorite single comic pages of all time; seriously, I want that second panel on a shirt.

Scan from an early 2000s-era trade paperback of Forever People, originally published in Forever People #2.

Advertainment: Big Jim's P.A.C.K.

Look out, G.I. Joe! Mattel's BIG JIM is here with his Political Action Committee to legislate you into oblivion!

Big Jim is an incredible killjoy.

Oh. That's P.A.C.K., not P.A.C. Well, shoot, there go our riveting tales of campaign finance reform. I'm sure Dr. Steel would have raised some compelling points. (On the other hand... man, that is totally Jack Kirby artwork, isn't it?)

I have no idea what I scanned this out of anymore, unfortunately. I guess I should have kept better track of that, but I only own so many vintage 1975 comics...

How Not to Revamp a Villain: The Puppet Master.

So the Puppet Master is one of those villains. Y'know the kind, the one trick pony. Who only has one trick. When a character in the Fantastic Four suddenly starts acting out of character you can pretty much put money on the fact that it'll be the Puppet Master's doing. The only wrinkle that makes him interesting is that he's directly related to Benn Grimm's girlfriend Alicia Masters.

(Well not DIRECTLY related, since he's her step-father. But you get the point.)

So when you have a villain like this (for example The Mad Thinker, or Arcade) what do you do with them? You can only use them so many times because they get repetitive. The answer is simple -- you take the core of the character, and then you revamp it! So that's what they (that is Stan Lee and artist Bob Powell) did with the Pupper Master in Strange Tales #133.

What? WHAT THE FUCK

How to Read: Jack Kirby.

All the images used for this page are from
Captain Victory #1 or Silver Star #1, both
from Kirby's time with Pacific Comics.

 So lately I've been chatting with my friends about Jack Kirby comics and I thought I'd write you up a five step guide to getting started reading Jack Kirby comics.

Kirby is one of the greatest artists ever to pick up a pencil. I don't just mean in comics, I mean ever. The guy was so creative it seemed to be bursting from his every pore. It's hard to think of another single creator who did more for American comics than Jack Kirby did. Everything he ever did was influential, or at least really powerful.

But some modern readers find his work hard to get into.

I can understand it. Kirby's work, while wide-ranging is also very much of a style. If you don't get into Jack's art style, it can be hard to get into reading his works. Which is really unfortunate because you're missing out on so much. So the goal of this guide is to give you the tools to be able to immerse yourself in Kirby's world. To just let yourself go.

He's Magically Vicious

Despite the Kirby-centric paragraph to the left,
the art here is credited to Dick Ayers. Just FYI.

So it's fair to say that I'm a fan of Jack Kirby. However, I don't think I've read as much of his material as I would like - in terms of collections, I believe I only have The Forever People of his Fourth World books, and a couple trade paperbacks of his '70s Captain America and the Falcon run. So when I saw a reprint of the Joe Simon/Jack Kirby run of The Fly for cheap at a local comic show, I made sure to snatch it up.

The Fly is one of the Archie Adventure Series heroes, published by, yes, Archie Comics. The company actually started out publishing superheroes (under the name MLJ Magazines), but America's Favorite Teenager soon eclipsed his super-brethren in popularity and became the publisher's flagship character.

Where does The Fly figure into this? He's not one of the "Golden Age" heroes of MLJ, for one, having been created by Simon and Kirby in the early 1950s. He became part of their core stable in years to come, though - whenever there was an Archie superhero revival, you'd be sure to see him alongside The Shield and the Black Hood (who did start out in the '40s), even if he was sometimes called Fly-Man.