Reflections of a stormy petrel

Kirby's art took one Hell of a hit, from which he never fully recovered, when Marvel opted for the catchpenny solution to cut drawing paper sizes in 1968. Kirby's hand needs a lot of space to move, and from then on his layouts never quite recovered. One does not notice so much during Fourth World, because of the intensity of inspiration that blazes through the pages, but even then one has to notice things like the increase in not wholly necessary full-page and double-page spreads. After the dreadful experience of the collapse of the Fourth World line, of course, the sense of constriction caught up with him. In my view, the artistic peak of Kirby is from about 1966 to about 1968, and especially in the rare and breathtaking Thor issues in which he was paired with the great Bill Everett.