"King" Kirby

Well, we've been mourning his passing for 14 years now, which at least take a little of the edge off.

Hey, remember when Johnny Carson taped a show in the afternoon, where he asked where this Kirby guy gets off calling himself the "King of Comics", when he'd never even heard of a stand-up commedian by that name? Naturally, when the show aired that night, the switchboard suddenly lit up like Las Vegas on New Year's Eve, so he apologized the next day.

But I'm also reminded of the time somebody got on a message board and said he was about to start teaching a college-level course on comic books, so he needs to know -- what's the big deal about Jack Kirby?

I replied with a question -- When somebody has to ask that, where does he get off teaching a college-level course on comic books?

Personally, I'm not such a fan of superheroes that I revere him above all others. But he occupies a high spot in my esteem, just behind Eisner, Kelly and a few other second-echelon cartoonists. (The top echelon, to me, consists of Carl Barks, all by himself.)

Quack, Don

Don;

Personally I won't rank them as one being better than another.

People can say that Alex Toth's drawings were better than Jack Kirby's.
(Toth's were certainly more stylishly realistic, but then who is to say that Jack Kirby-given the same circumstances as Toth couldn't do the same.)

But, and, I think you made this point in your response to my posting, they all were very good in the genre, and, style, they chose to work in,
so why try to rank them. Just enjoy them.

I still think Barks was the greatest cartoonist of the 20th century -- in the English-speaking world, almost certainly, unless there's some real obscuro out there doing great work. In the rest of the world -- it's true, I don't know most of them, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say he was probably the best there, too.

What made him great was not how well he drew, tho he was certainly 'way up there in that area. It was how well he put together stories. I may have been part of the first generation to enjoy his work (at least, the second half of it), but a good story speaks to the ages, and his are enjoyed by a fresh audience every time they're reprinted -- which I expect will be a long, long time.

And it's not his sparkling prose style, either -- tho he certainly had that. I see it echoed in my own work, and not just when I'm consciously letting myself be influenced by him. Several's the time I've caught myself using a clever word construction, wondered where I picked it up, and later found it in Barks.

In 2006, I had the pleasure of attending an international conference for comic book writers, sponsored by Egmont, the European Disney licensee. And practically everybody there, even those who first experienced his work in languages other than the one he'd written his classics in, agreed that Barks was in a class by himself.

Maybe not everybody, even there, took as extreme a point of view as I do. But if you ask me, Carl Barks was the greatest comic book storyteller who ever lived.

The other guys -- okay, maybe they can't be ranked. You can't compare Sheldon Mayer with Walt Kelly, other than to say they're both among the best. But there's absolutely no doubt that Barks is the greatest of them all.

Do I sound really, really opinionated on this subject? If so, I'm not a bit surprised. I started to form this opinion in early childhood, and for the past 50-something years, it's only gotten stronger.

Quack, Don

Hey Don, what's your opinion of Floyd Gottfredson? (Did I spell that right?)

I love Gottfredson's work, but he's not one of my extra-special favorites, like Eisner or (a modern fave, just so nobody'll think I only like dead cartoonists) Scott McCloud. But Gottfredson didn't do the complete work all by himself -- he worked with script writers, such as Ted Osborne, and inkers, such as Ted Thwaites. Still, there's a distinct look to his Mickey Mouse, and he sure did put across those stories.

Thinking about him reminds me of when I started writing a lot of Mickey, in the mid-'90s. Editor Byron Erickson (a huge Mickey fan, by the way) said Gottfredson was the model to base Mickey on, so I spent a couple of hours re-reading his stories, and started pitching new ones carefully crafted after that model.

But they kept being rejected! "Mickey isn't like that." "Mickey doesn't do that." "That's not the way I see Mickey." It was discouraging, until I realized what I was doing wrong.

I made an effort to put aside that interpretation of the character, and spent a couple of hours re-reading Mickey stories Byron had edited. From then on, I had very few problems with him.

Quack, Don

Dead cartoonists: the best kind of cartoonists.

Yeah, you can really count on 'em not to muck things up.

Quack, Don