The death of King

Jack Kirby (1917-94) created or co-created much of the superhero pantheon: Captain America, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Silver Surfer and dozens of others. More importantly, he invented the visual language of the comic book. Before him, "comics" were strips syndicated in newspapers, while the first magazine-sized efforts merely replicated the strips' stacked-pallet structure and cramped pacing. Although pre-Kirby inventions such as Batman and Superman have undoubted historic importance, their stiff, often inept artwork and infantile ethos have aged badly. Kirby's supernatural dynamism (every object charged with life force, every creature in restless movement) and his increasingly lysergic imagination (fuelled by nothing stronger than cigars) spawned a universe as distinctive as Bosch's or Goya's. Along with Walt Disney, he was arguably the most influential popular figurative artist of the 20th century, except that Disney couldn't draw very well, delegating the execution to an army of employees, while Kirby was a one-man factory, pencilling an estimated 25,000 pages during his career. In collaboration with scriptwriter Stan Lee, he transformed Marvel Comics from a bankrupt pipsqueak to a world-conquering giant.

brano tratto da "The marvel of comics" del The Guardian

Le versioni a colori dei disegni che ho realizzato per ricordare la scomparsa di Jack Kirby le trovate qui.