By: Jack Kirby Publisher: DC Comics Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: DC Comics Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 304 Publication Date: December 01, 1997 Release Date: December 01, 1997
Don't listen to the haters... Regardless of the art direction decision to include new greys in the artwork, Kirby's brutal genius with a pencil shows through loud and clear.
Who cares about the paper, ink and binding! I'm just happy that I can pay such a small sum and have all this art in such a small space on my shelf!
It's KIRBY, for god's sake! The New Gods. The Fourth World. Whatever you call it, it's Jack Frickin' Kirby. You have to suffer through the "soft" Vince Colletta inks until you get to the Mike Royer "hard edged" inking, but it's worth it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get the Kirby "faux-1970s Hippy" stuff, but this is the beginning of the "Darkseid" saga that epitomizes him as the quentisential DC Villain (sp?). Sorry, no speelcheck on Amazon. Forget the wanky dialogue and just concentrate on the images, and you'll find this the finest of King Kirby's efforts at DC. My personal fave was "Mister Miracle," but this runs a close second. Orion -- son of Darkseid -- fighting a never-ending battle against his father's hordes of Para-Demons and Hunger Dogs. What's not to love? My fave in "New Gods" is "The Pact", that reveals the true identities of Orion and Scott Free (like we didn't guess before). Too bad DC didn't have the foresight to see this saga to the end. (I know, "Hunger Dogs" et al, but I consider that an "alternate dimension"). Darkseid has become an icon of DC villains, but has frequently become a shadow of his former self. This is where it all began. Check it out.
Re-Color it or Don't -- the Greyscale Stuff is Awful I found the shading they used to approximate the colors incredibly distracting. It muddied the art to the point where it seriously impaired my ability to track what was going on with the story. It may sound like a quibble, and you may be able to get past it, but I sure as heck couldn't.
Granted, it may have been the work itself. Hey, I know Kirby is God (see Waid, Mark). I know Kirby revolutionized the form. I know it is sacrilidge to badmouth Kirby. I know all of this, but my God, he was a terrible writer. He's the George Lucas of comic books -- a visual genius with a tin ear for dialogue and a slavish devotion to convoluted (and usually unrevealed) backstories. Couple that with the half-tone printing I mentioned before, and you've got a collection only a die-hard Kirby fan could love.
Okay, "The Pact" is pretty great. I'll give you that. If they ever come out with either a re-colored or BW line art version, I'll give it another shot.
Take That Ted Turner! In what was surely a misguided attempt to mock their boss's penchant for colorizing classic movies, the gentle subversives at DC comics did the reverse with Jack Kirby's classic 4th World books. Politically it was a bold statement, but it doesn't serve Kirby's work well. I respect 'em for taking such a bold stance and whatnot. I just wish they had done it to Englehart's run on Batman or something boring like that.
Good Comic, Bad Printing I wrote previously (down below somewhere) that this book was reproduced in black & white because of the limitations of reprinting color comics, and I still believe that's true. However, I wrote what I did before I bought the actual book. Now that I have one in hand, I can see that not only did DC print this in black & white (which would be fine), they printed it on poor, old-fashioned comic book, newsprint-style paper. And they added monochrome benday-dot washes to approximate the original colors. And it looks pretty lousy.
The poor paper is bad enough. By the time this was printed in 1998 we as a species knew enough to treat comics with some measure of respect. I've got a first edition trade paperback of Frank Miller's "Ronin" on beautiful bright white paper printed in 1987, over ten years earlier. Once again, the industry is giving Jack Kirby short shrift.
The coloring job is pretty poor, too. If only this had been reprinted in line art from the original inks, on real paper, it would have been really great. As it is, only the art and story -- all Kirby, flaws and brilliance intact -- make this a worthwhile buy.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
