Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby, founding artist of the Marvel Universe, creator of the Fourth World for DC, and war hero, was born 100 years ago today.

His influence on comics and popular culture is hard to overstate, from creating and designing characters currently dominating cinemas to inspiring generations of artists. There’s a lot of Kirby in the animated Superman (not least a character he created designed to resemble the man himself) and as much in Mike Mignola’s worlds. I had no idea until recently how much Masters Of The Universe owes to the Fourth World, too.

The Fourth World also includes one of my favourite notions - the arch-villain’s lieutenants competing for his favour goes all the way to them raising their own armies.

I first came across his work in black-and-white reprints in Marvel UK’s SF weeklies, usually standalone shorts with cool monster designs. At some point they started a run of Devil Dinosaur, which was pretty much exactly my interests at that age, so I had a soft spot for his work from early on.

And there’s still stuff that he never used, like Roxie’s Raiders, a 1930s spy team masquerading as a travelling circus. I want to run that Adventure! game right now.

Kirby’s own life could provide some adventure ideas as well. A street fighter, an animator in his teens, who received threats from American fascists and responded by scaring them off, a war hero, the designer of the unmade Roger Zelazny adaptation Lord Of Light and its double duty as a theme park proposal which was the basis for the CIA mission to rescue Iranian embassy staff by posing as location scouts filmed as Argo...