Kirby at 100 - News From ME

Kirby at 100 - News From ME
He was amazing. "If he were still with us, Jack Kirby would have been one hundred years old today…but of course, an awful lot of Jack is still with us. Hundreds of characters he created or co-created are still appearing, many of them in hit movies that have made them more famous than ever. Back in the sixties, Jack predicted that there would someday be highly-successful, big budget motion pictures of Thor, Captain America, et al. He told me that when I first met him in 1969. One of the reasons he never got his financial due out of Marvel was that the folks who ran Marvel back then never believed that. They had a limited idea of how much anything in Marvel Comics could ever be worth and didn't want to share those meager amounts with anyone. It was pretty simple math: The less they paid Jack and all the other folks who created their comics, the more they got to keep for themselves. When he told them what he saw as the potential value of the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the rest, they nodded politely, refused him five-dollar raises and joked behind his back that he was out of his friggin' mind. And later, they sold the company for beads 'n' trinkets because they lacked the one thing Jack had by the tonweight: Imagination. Jack's spirit and influence are also evident in 2017 in projects featuring characters and properties he never touched directly — and not just comic books. I see Kirby in movies and TV shows and advertising and videogames and animations and toy design and even in fine art. Anywhere someone makes a visual statement, you're likely to find at least some talent influenced — directly or indirectly — by Jack Kirby."