026
“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 …

025
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 …

024
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 …

023
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 …

022
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 …

021
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 …

020
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 …

019
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 …

018
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 …

017
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 …

016
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 …

015
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 …

014
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: …

013
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 …

012
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 …