Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby
By Charles Hatfield
310 pages
6 x 9
30 b/w illos
8 pages in color
University Press of Mississippi
$25 in paperback
$65 in hardcover
Hatfield examines Kirby's artistic legacy, analyzing the development of his technique, the recurring themes in his work, his use of dynamic composition and moral ambiguity in his art and writing, his split from Stan Lee at Marvel, and his later work as a solo artist. Hatfield considers briefly Kirby’s early work in romance, western, horror, and humor comics but concentrates on the artist’s superhero genre, showing what makes Kirby “a singular narrative artist: a cartoonist and writer of ineffable power, endearing eccentricity, and lasting influence.”
Hatfield traces Kirby’s “improbable career,” examines the way the artist’s drawing was a narrative art, discusses the ways Lee and Kirby created Marvel Comics, and shows how Kirby changed the superhero, concluding with an analysis of Kirby’s unprecedented Fourth World creations. Hatfield’s perception is acute and his vocabulary is precise, usually without the sort of verbal pretension that infects academic writing; his style is conversational and friendly, eminently readable.
In one of the earliest chapters in the book, Hatfield undertakes to solve the riddle of which of the seminal Marvel creative team, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, was the formative genius. Hatfield readily admits Kirby’s shortcomings while pinpointing his indispensable contribution. “Although Kirby would not be capable of creating a publishing empire like Marvel on his own, he did serve as the dynamo that powered Marvel and revitalized Lee’s then idling career as a comic book writer. ... Kirby was the artistic dynamo of the Marvel line.”
Hatfield scarcely skimps on Lee’s contribution. Some of his happiest lexicological dance steps are performed in the arch descriptions of what Lee did.
“It would be an exaggeration to credit Kirby with full authorship of his work at Marvel; the sixties, after all, were a pivotal decade for Stan Lee as well. As editor and chief spokesman for marvel, Lee’s presence was sustaining, generative, and overwhelming: his verbal swagger and editorial cunning were definitive to Marvel, and documentary evidence suggests he was, early on, both Kirby’s guide and active collaborator in envisioning such properties as the Fantastic Four. ... Lee’s stew of verbal bounciness, jokey reflexivity, earnest humanism, cheerful cynicism, and grandstanding, Barnumesque hype established the Marvel ethos. ... Kirby produced what many consider his greatest sustained work within this context, in a collaborative process ... that served to harness, discipline and spotlight his strengths. Stan Lee ... helped make all that happen and was, though not sole architect, conservator and chief promoter of the Marvel mythos.”
Still, through it all, “Kirby warrants recognition as Marvell’s signature artist and founding conceptualist ... [standing] as Marvel’s co-founder.”
While Hatfield’s assessment of the Kirby canon is formed largely on the basis of the concepts Kirby convened and fostered—the characters he invented and the stories he told about them—Hatfield also recognizes that Kirby’s metier, the basis of his triumph as a comics artist, lies in his instinctive understanding and demonstrable mastery of pictorial narrative. It was making pictures that fueled Kirby’s creative engine and that dramatized the product.
“Kirby’s graphic ferocity, the sheer, brawling kineticism of the style, calls to mind combat,” Hatfield writes, “—the slugfest, the siege, the riot, in sum the carnal indulgence of raw physicality and untamed rage.” Passages like this are imbued with the essence of Kirby.
And again: “It should be evident by now that Kirby’s style represents an especially tense and fiercely, brilliantly, elaborated version of that struggle. Perhaps this is why Kirby was, for so long, the superhero artist par excellence: his style constitutes an unresolved yet generative compromise between realism and symbol, naturalism and fantasy.”
Sentences like these need not make specific connections to a particular drawing or series of drawings: they are sufficiently persuasive through vaulting verbal dexterity. And Hatfield is better at such pyrotechnics than most academics. He is, therefore, fun as well as informative to read.
