Let’s talk about thriller comics.
Thriller comics tend to run counter to juvenile vibe of superhero comics, since the thriller genre tends to carry a more, I don’t know, “respectable” or “adult” vibe compared to stories …

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“Heroes” is playing through my desktop speakers. And stops. Moves on to “Clay Bodies” by Zola Jesus. The robot head of Jack Kirby, set next to the speakers on my desk, has …

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Engineer Tony Visconti has set up three microphones in front of David Bowie, with volume-triggered gates on them. It was a huge room in Berlin, previously used to record symphonies during World War 2.
(Private …

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Down into the streets, the creases of Jack “King” Kirby’s face, trapped by what could easily be the canyons of New York city avenues, the grey confines of the Depression streets that Jack Kirby ran …

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Deceleration, as the canyons become skyscraper-walled New York streets. We pass the office window that Alex Toth, who never drew a story worthy of his talent and today is known only to specialists in …

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From up here, maybe we can see what we’ve been talking about this whole time.  A world that, from up here, looks like Jack Kirby’s Ego The Living Planet, but instead of its face being …

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Do you know where you are?
I have this vague recollection of someone asking the writer Spider Robinson where his ideas come from, and his answer having to do with hacking your way through a jungle …

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Bugger the robot head that steals my cigars.  I love these Gil Kane BLACKMARK pages.  It’s pretty genetic post-apoc barbarian fantasy.  Archie Goodwin, once again writing for Kane, does his best, but he had to …

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MEANWHILE, IN THE FEVERPITCH WANKPIT OF PHILIP K DICK’S ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS NESTED INSIDE THE ROBOT HEAD OF JACK KIRBY: someone in America is creating graphic novels for the newsstand and the bookstore.  They weren’t called …

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Story-strips.  It made more sense to me than a lot of other replacement terms for comics.  It reminded me of the early childhood where the British comics I got were called “adventure strips,” or “picture …

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It’s right there on the cover of Jack Kirby’s 1980s miniseries SILVER STAR, a comics version of a screenplay he wrote and never sold in the 1970s: “A Visual Novel.”
I guess Jack didn’t fancy using …

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Superman’s head by John Lennon: the wit of his line isn’t unlike Flenniken’s, but it’s less trained, a little more hunting after the idea of the shape than the shape itself.  This year he’s …

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The artificial muscles in the severed robot head of Jack Kirby start shifting around.  For a moment there, he looks like the piercing-eyed Superman of his original JIMMY OLSEN pencils.  Hair starts sprouting, bushy and …

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Jack Kirby had been told, you see, that DC wanted him to reinvigorate their line, and to point the publisher towards the future.  They began by giving him the extant series SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN: …

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Jack Kirby’s move to DC, negotiated over a couple of years, was notable for several reasons.  With few exceptions, people just didn’t cross town like that.  DC and Marvel, still very much the only games …

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The story’s well known, now.  Disenchanted with Marvel — with the constraints on his creativity, with not getting his original art back, with Stan bloody Lee and his bloody ocarina (and, perhaps, with Stan Lee …

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No disrespect should be inferred, in the previous section, to Mr Loeb, currently in (I think) the third blush of an incredibly successful career in commercial comics.  As well as being the man who gave …

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Comics creators who are also performers:
• Afua Richardson, singer
• Paul Pope, DJ
• Alan Moore, vocalist
• Robert Crumb, guitarist
• Antony Johnston, musician
• Kieron Gillen, “Bez”
Styles are tricky things to nail down in comics.  In music, they’re …

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Atom Style was named after the fact.  It is perceived to have emerged in the 1950s, and can broadly be defined as a post-War style.  It’s a modernist style, which is to very broadly say …

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A section from a list of things that happened to comics on a Phildickian alternate world in 2009:
• David Gibbons knighted for services to architecture.  “I was fucking robbed,” says Peter Cook, architect and co-founder …

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A section from a list of comics creators’ three favourite records, because we don’t know what Philippe Druillet’s favourite records are:
“Thriller” – Michael Jackson
“Bitches Brew” – Miles Davis
“Mishima” soundtrack – Philip Glass
–Dash Shaw (BodyWorld, The …

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Stan Lee started out writing full scripts.  He was writing full scripts at the commencement of Marvel Comics.  He discovered that, such was the imaginative power of his collaborators, he could get a comic much …

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This is a section about things people have said.
There’s a quote I like from the Japanese film director Takashi Miike, and it goes like this:
“We have to change the negative things into positive. In today’s …

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Jack Kirby didn’t get to be an intellectual. That’s a label others stick on you. When Jack told Will Eisner, as recorded in Eisner’s book SHOP TALK, of the time in his career …

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So perhaps I encode Philippe Druillet into the robotic head of Jack Kirby that sits on my desk and gobs bits of tobacco leaf at me, too, because Druillet is Jack Kirby from the future. …

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I’d have liked to see someone put the work of French writer/artist Philippe Druillet in front of Jack Kirby. I try to do it now, holding the pages in front of the robotic head …

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I have the head of Jack Kirby in my office.
I built it myself.  Which means, this being the late-postmodern 21st Century, I stole it from someone else and then tinkered with it until it became …