Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus

Kirby's actual drawing style, though, blunted his composition's putative power, at least in my youthful experience. Among my dad's stacks of old comics from the 1960s and '70s, I much preferred the cinematic experiments of Steranko and John Buscema's magazine-ad elegance, Neal Adams's attempts at trompe l'oeil and the cross-hatched grotesqueries of Bernie Wrightson, not to mention Heavy Metal, with Moebius's grainy Euro-delirium and Richard Corben's

Kirby's actual drawing style, though, blunted his composition's putative power, at least in my youthful experience. Among my dad's stacks of old comics from the 1960s and '70s, I much preferred the cinematic experiments of Steranko and John Buscema's magazine-ad elegance, Neal Adams's attempts at trompe l'oeil and the cross-hatched grotesqueries of Bernie Wrightson, not to mention Heavy Metal, with Moebius's grainy Euro-delirium and Richard Corben's high-porn magic airbrush. Naively seeking the mimetic in visual art, I found Kirby's supposedly vigorous compositions to be immobilized by the near-abstraction of his rendering. He built his heroes' and villains' colliding bodies from slabs of thickly-outlined shape, decorated but not textured by what in other artists would have been modeling lines but in Kirby granted adornment without the illusion of depth. I felt like I was reading stories about plastic rocks in combat. Kirby's work was notionally three-dimensional, but without a hint of sensuality; an anticipation of CGI, his was not a world I could inhabit.