Jack Kirby was born on August 28th, 1917. He is one of the greatest visionaries of the last century. His spirit lives on in nearly every panel of the mainstream American comics industry….and beyond. He created or co-created Captain America, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Darkseid and hundreds more characters you know and love to argue about.
Kirby did it all: superheroes, fantasy, SF, war, westerns, romance. He invented romance comics, kid sidekick comics, krackle effects and everything else.
One thing Kirby was known for was monsters. The early Marvel comics line (pre Spider-Man) consisted of lots and lots of monster comics, all with silly sound effect names, and similar shock Twilight Zone storylines, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Kirby, Ditko Dick Ayers and others. A Gutter Review piece by Sergio Lopez offers some of Kirby’s thoughts about them.
Kirby gave a withering assessment of the comics in 1975, saying that “I was given monsters, so I did them. I would much rather have been drawing [Westerns]. But I did the monsters. We had ‘Grottu’ and ‘Kurrgo’ and ‘It.’ It was a challenge to try to do something—anything—with such ridiculous characters.” And he later frankly acknowledged the element of commerce behind chasing fads: “They made sales, and that’s always been my prime object in comics. I had to make sales in order to keep myself working. And so I put all the ingredients in that would pull in sales. It’s always been that way.”
It’s true that the stories were created at a break-neck pace (Lieber recounted that Kirby could draw six pages of the monster comics in a single day, enough for a complete story) and that they operated firmly within genre constraints — yet there was also an intangible element of creative magic in many of them. They proved important for the development of many of the creators involved: the grand scale of the narratives allowed for an elevated, faux-epic narrative style in a way that Westerns and romance comics did not, a tenor which would become Lee’s signature. Editorially, Lee had the opportunity to try out innovations that would become key to building up his own mythology: some of the monster comics included occasional editor’s notes, letter’s pages, and reader’s polls; often creators signed their names to a cover. Sometimes stories — especially Ditko’s — featured meta narratives about Lee and his artists themselves — precursor to the illusory image of the Marvel Bullpen Stan Lee would will into existence. All of these nascent elements, expanded, would come back and help build up Marvel as a brand.
Despite Kirby’s frank admission of the commercial nature of these stories, he still drew them as if his life depended on it. Maybe it did.
This Jack Kirby monster (above) is inked by Steve Ditko.
Each image of a monstrous beast destroying property as little people flee is fresh and new, as if it had just been invented.
Another Ditko ink job.
Even a brief search for Jack Kirby monsters art on the internet reveals another thing much discussed: how much better the original coloring looks compared to newer versions. Take this classic and chilling image.
And a reprint version
And this whatever it is – probably a tribute.
Another example: 
The colors are the same and yet….they don’t look good.
Marvel’s suspect reprint coloring has been the subject of much criticism, but I’ll leave that to another piece.
Kirby could also draw non monsters.
He could draw many things.
Happy birthday, Jack. I wish you’d made it to see the world you created come alive around you.
Jack Kirby was Born August 28th, 1917 not 2017. Please correct this.
Here’s to Jack, who originally wanted to do movies, then did a lot of comics, then said he thought he might have been pretty good at doing movies if he’d had the chance, like Spielberg or sumthin’, and whose creations have now made more movie money than Spielberg.
Great choice of artwork, Heidi. Much as Kirby deplored them, I’m rather nostalgic about those monster comics he worked on. Like everything he did, it was, and is, iconic.