THE FOUR COLOR GRIMOIRE
MEDITATIONS ON COMIC BOOK DAEMONS
This is part of No Gods But My Own, Volume 2. Read this if you’re just joining in.
KRACKLE KANON, PART 1
THE DISPOSABLE BLAKE
I began to learn about the universe myself and take it seriously. I know the names of the stars. I know how near or far the heavenly bodies are from our own planet. I know our own place in the universe. I can feel the vastness of it inside myself. I began to realize with each passing fact what a wonderful and awesome place the universe is, and that helped me in comics because I was looking for the awesome.
-Jack Kirby
When you think of the confluence of comics and magic there are a few names that come to mind: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, or Rachel Pollack, for example. But there is one man that puts all of them to shame, a man who gave all of the creators that succeeded him permission to summon the verve and bombast needed to portray the legends and myths filling the pages of comic books.
Who was that first true visionary of the comic book medium?
Jack Kirby.
Grant Morrison once compared Jack Kirby to William Blake and I can't disagree. Kirby was in touch with something that others in his field couldn't fathom. His art was kinetic and alive, bursting with energy and potent iconography beyond the pulp sensibilities the medium of comics embraced during his time.
Jack Kirby came up in a time before occulture had fully blossomed but I'm pretty sure he would've found a home among the riff raff haunting occult bookstores and magical forums these days. He was that sort of guy.
An outsider.
An iconoclast.
A conduit of the blazing world of imagination.
Much like Austin Osman Spare or William Blake, those who witnessed Kirby work were awestruck by how he seemed to channel his imagery from elsewhere. There are stories of how Kirby would start a page on the upper left corner and just start drawing, finishing at the lower right corner, and ending up with a fully rendered comic book page that had no planning or forethought at its spine. When it comes to the art of comics, that is a truly amazing feat akin to watching Zappa improvise with his band or seeing Bobby Fischer play a perfect game of chess.
When you factor in his prodigious output it's hard to argue that the man WASN'T a visionary. At times Kirby would be drawing anywhere between five to ten books a month, translating to somewhere around seventy five pages of fully penciled artwork every month.
Kirby did this for DECADES, leaving behind thousands upon thousands of pages of amazing art.
This is where Blake and Kirby truly diverge. Where Blake was able to later draw praise as an artist, a poet, and spiritualist. His work transcended the obscurity it had landed in during his lifetime and his reputation went from being a madman to being a visionary. Kirby, on the other hand, is pretty much a name only known by those familiar with comics and his reputation among them as “The King of Comics” can't pierce the walls of your local comic book store. Beyond those circles Kirby has been relegated to obscurity, popping up whenever one of the characters he left his indelible mark on is turned into a movie. He has always been overshadowed by figures like Stan Lee, his collaborator for most of his career at Marvel comics. There have been movements to shine more of a spotlight on his contributions to the history of comics in recent years but his influence still seems to fall short of a greater popular recognition.
KOUNTER KULTURE KING
Throughout his career, Kirby liked to innovate, not follow. His attitude was best summed up a few years later when he read that some new artist would be taking over on Captain America and hoped “to do it in the Kirby tradition.”
Said Jack, “This kid doesn’t get it. The Kirby tradition is to create a new comic.”
-Mark Evanier
Jack Kirby was a fan of the counterculture and embraced all forms of offbeat individuals. There are plenty of stories of Kirby having meetings with people like that aforementioned Frank Zappa and had a true love for anyone trying to cut their own path through pop culture. At one point he even attempted to adapt a show many would consider peak 60's counterculture: The Prisoner.
One needs only to look at The Forever People to understand how much faith Jack Kirby put into the counterculture and the thread of alternative spirituality that weaved through it. The Forever People was a part of Kirby's FOURTH WORLD and centered around a group of misfits from space who traveled to earth to fight the ultimate evil in the universe. The entire group resembled hippies and rode around on a sentient motorcycle.
The Forever People were all superheroes. Their leader, Mark Moonrider, could cause explosions with his Megaton Touch but had sworn to never take a life. Beautiful Dreamer could cause illusions. Their tank, Big Bear, was a giant with superhuman strength. The most sensitive of the group, Serifan, was psychic and wielded a revolver that shot Cosmic Cartridges, bullets that caused a wide variety of useful effects. Then there was Vykin the Black who had electromagnetic powers and could trace the paths of atoms with his mind.
The big gimmick in The Forever People was that when they came together around their Mother Box, a sentient handheld computer, the entire team would trade places with Infinity-Man, a being of immense power that was inextricably linked to the origin of all power-The Source.
Jack Kirby treated the characters within The Forever People with overwhelming empathy and care during a time when hippies had earned more derision than respect in the mainstream culture of the time. They were teenagers assigned a task that would cause any adult to wither. As far as metaphors go you could do worse when it comes to describing how it's the job of the next generation to protect and create the future and how older generations will push back to preserve the past.
It was one of the strangest contradictions in Jack Kirby’s legend. By all accounts Kirby was a total square, living and dressing quietly and conservatively. He didn’t drink or do drugs. Even his time as hoodlum in New York or a soldier in World War Two had no bearing on the fact that Kirby had nothing but sympathy for those who didn’t fit in.
SPACE GODS, ALL THE WAY DOWN
I feel that life is a series of very interesting questions, and very poor answers. But I myself am willing to settle for the questions. If the questions are interesting, I feel I evoke them in what I do. I feel that should be good enough for everyone else.
-Jack Kirby
When Stan Lee pitched the first appearance of Galactus for The Fantastic Four in 1966, he described it to Jack Kirby as a fight against God. It's hard to tell if Kirby knew that creating gods from space would become the signature of his output in the coming years.
It's not entirely surprising, though. Faith and the search for awe had been a large part of Kirby's life and artistic goals. Of the few pieces of his own work that Kirby displayed in his home three of them were of his interpretations of the biblical God. These pieces are as evocative and frenetic as anything else that emerged from Kirby's drawing board.
Creation myths and cosmic mysticism filled much of Kirby's work in the seventies, from his comic adaptation of the Stanley Kubrick film 2001, A Space Odyssey to an Ill fated series at Marvel Comics, to designs for a science fiction theme park based on a novel by Robert Zelazny. Each and every one is an excellent example of just how dynamic faith was for Kirby, why his approach to modern mythology is so vibrant and important, and why all of this should be so much more important to contemporary occultism than being a few throwaway ideas from some books on chaos magic.
In Kirby's version of 2001:A Space Odyssey, released in 1976, the ebony monolith found on Mars becomes just one of many seeds of evolution. Not just physiologically speaking but also spiritual, treating creation and God like a divine panspermic presence spreading across the galaxy like a dandelion puff. The comic has nearly nothing to do with the movie or novel beyond the first couple issues but that's to the title's benefit because it allowed for Kirby to go hog wild with his ideas of humanity’s luminous future.
During the peak of the ancient alien phase of the 70's, inspired by Chariots of the Gods? by Eric von Daniken, Jack Kirby created a series called The Eternals, about a group of immortal heroes fighting against a group of monsters called the Deviants to defend humanity. Their origin begins with the introduction of a race of space gods, known as the Celestials, who created life on earth through their genetic experiments. It is eventually revealed that the earth itself is the seed for a yet to be born Celestial. This idea of humanity either being the result of or the magnet that attracts divine interventions by interstellar gods is something that will be repeated many times in Kirby’s oeuvre.
In 1979 Jack Kirby was approached with a proposal to draw up plans for a science fiction movie and theme park attraction adapting the novel Lord of Light by Roger Zalazny. For those not familiar with the book, Lord of Light explores both Hindu and Buddhist philosophies through the fantastic lense of a far future planet inhabited by gods and immortals in a story spanning thousands of years. Kirby took an approach to the designs that met somewhere between traditional hindu symbolism and psychedelia with a little garnishment of his signature “Kirby Krackle” energy bubbling around the edges.
According to Roz Kirby, Jack’s wife, he was a man of deep faith. I think his work didn’t ask whether or not gods existed but how they existed and what form their influence manifests in our lives and world. If that isn’t the basic foundation of magic I don’t know what is.
AN EPIC FOR OUR TIMES!
All of this is just an introduction to the man that was Jack Kirby and the epic mythology he weaved throughout his decades in the industry of comics. He has created super soldiers, mutant revolutionaries, and entire pantheons of luminous gods at constant war with one another, and he did it all while living in near obscurity. If only he had been able to see what his drawings had wrought in our times and what his many creations meant to people now.
The examples above provide a decent starting point to discussions to be had later. In later installments I'll be covering things like his legendary New Gods series, some of his more interesting Marvel work like The Inhumans or Machine Man, and so many other titles in-between.
Kirby was a true visionary, leaving behind a legacy of fertile and potent ideas that should blow the minds of any magical practitioner brave enough to explore them. To be honest, my only hope is to pay this vast collection the respect it deserves and shine a light on the sheer potential contained within his canon.
Note:
I want to take a second here to address the creative controversy between Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and the creation of many of the superheroes from Marvel Comics’ stable of creations and explain my angle of approach to the subject. During the early days of Marvel Comics history nearly every story by-line featured Stan Lee as the writer and creator with basic credits for the artists. It was like this for Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Spider Man, and The Fantastic Four. Many of the books were drawn by luminaries such as Wally Wood, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby.
The controversy here is that Stan Lee used what was known as the Marvel Method when writing, which meant that he would make one or two page story outlines for the artist to work from. The artist would have to break down all the scenes, panels, pages, and sometimes dialogue suggestions before they would return to Stan Lee for scripting.
The storytelling and design came down to the artist.
The look of all the characters came down to the artist.
In a lot of ways Stan Lee's role in the creation of these books was much more like that of a carnival barker than that of a creative. He wasn't an artist. He was a salesman. It’s because of this that I give credit for the characters in this series to Jack Kirby and no one else.
Suggested Reading
The Forever People, issues 1-11 by Jack Kirby (DC Comics, 1971-72)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Marvel Treasury Special) by Jack Kirby (Marvel Comics, 1976)
Eternals, issues 1-19, Annual 1 by Jack Kirby (Marvel Comics, 1976-78)
Heavy Metal Magazine, issue 276 by various writers and artists (Heavy Metal Magazine, 2015)
Tune in next week for the second part of my deep dive into the inspired creations of one the comic medium’s greatest visionaries in THE KRACKLE KANON: INHUMAN, ALL TOO INHUMAN!
The biggest news from me this week is that I finished off the paperback collection of this very newsletter. There are still six installments left to run but this baby should be ready for order by the time the last one goes out.
Thank you, as always, for reading and subscribing.
Until next time,
EJM