Criticism is one of the things I think I can do, and do fairly well. And by far the best criticism I ever wrote in my life was a series of articles about Jack Kirby, "the king of comics".
It was a matter of the subject matter raising the critic's game. The better the work, in my view (are you listening, Kenna Hijja?), the better the criticism: the more there is to seize and understand, to elaborate and connect, to explain, even to oppose. Kirby was unique: a wholly self-built genius, who had constructed, out of the most miserable cheap odds and ends of American popular culture - fifties monster movies, Houdini escapology, poster artwork, costume films about Romans and Vikings, pulp fiction, sci-fi mags of the pre-ARGOSY age - one of the most overwhelming artistic achievements, I would say THE most overwhelming, of the whole twentieth century. Visually, he was stunning. His paintings and collages, though few as compared to the immense body of his pencil comics art, are enough to stock a museum, and breathtaking; as for his comics, my calculation is that there are upwards of FORTY THOUSAND pencilled pages by him, at least half of which are visual masterpieces. And then there is the small matter of his writing...
I will not start another series of articles about him in this LJ, and I am not going to reprint my older series, because they would not work without illustrations. I do, however, enclose one of his obituaries, written one year after his death by a writer, Mark Evanier, who had known him well. It has comparatively little to say about his genius, but much - though not enough - about the human qualities that fed that genius.
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