The King

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It’s the 28th Day of our month-long online Jack Kir­by Trib­ute, suggested/sponsored by Howard Simp­son. You can find the work on your favorite social media plat­forms by the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Trib­ut­es.

Today’s prompt is sup­posed to be Jack­’s Sil­ver Star char­ac­ter, but I’m tak­ing the lib­er­ty of shift­ing things around a lit­tle bit. Instead, I’m doing tomor­row’s prompt: “Jack Kir­by por­trait— Draw a por­trait of Jack Kir­by him­self.” My rea­son­ing is because today is actu­al­ly Jack Kir­by’s birth­day! Born in 1917, this would be his 106th birth­day today (if my math is right). So I feel like post­ing the por­trait today is appro­pri­ate. A con­fes­sion: I’m not real­ly a por­trait kind of artist. It took some work to get this to where I felt com­fort­able with it, but I did get there.

The King’s lega­cy lives on in all the great work he left us, and all the cre­ative inspi­ra­tion he’s pro­vid­ed. There are some artists who make you feel like giv­ing up, break­ing your pen­cils and walk­ing away, because you’ll nev­er be as good as they are. But then there are artists like Kir­by who, although you know you can’t do what he did, there’s some­thing in the work that fires you up and inspires you to go and create!

I hope you like my attempt at por­trai­ture here, and tune in again tomor­row to see my shot at Sil­ver Star.

2 thoughts on “The King”

  1. joe musich

    Excel­lent reorder­ing of “orders.” Great Jack. Sent it off to Evanier. Any read­ing I have done about Jack would imply he was an encour­ag­ing indi­vid­ual and not at all uncom­fort­able which some are today at being a “role mod­el.” For­tu­nate­ly for a lot of ‘toon­ists like your­self, and even more for those of us who just stand look­ing in awe, he was a man of char­ac­ter. And nev­er a BSer. The Mark Lewis smile on Jack is per­fect. Framed by the shades Kir­by Crack­le in the back­ground is won­der­ful. Thank you.

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    1. Mark Post author

      Glad you like this.
      What you’re say­ing squares with every­thing I’ve ever heard about Jack. Mod­ern artists would ben­e­fit to learn from his behav­ior in how he con­duct­ed him­self with fans. He was jus­ti­fi­ably proud of doing good work, but seemed to view him­self as a work­ing man, not a rock­star who was above talk­ing with people.
      I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet Jack once or twice at Com­ic Con, but could nev­er quite work up the nerve. What was I going to say that he had­n’t already heard a mil­lion times? But in ret­ro­spect, know­ing what I know now, I think he gen­uine­ly appre­ci­at­ed it each and every time some­one told him how much his work meant to them. I now regret not talk­ing to him.
      I real­ized as time passed that work­ing in comics, guys like Jack spent a lot of time toil­ing away on their own, in their stu­dio, not real­ly know­ing beyond a cer­tain point how much their work was con­nect­ing with the read­ers. It’s not com­plete­ly dis­sim­i­lar to work­ing in TV ani­ma­tion (which I’ve done the past 30 years), so I have a ref­er­ence point. When some­one tells you that some­thing you worked on years ago to sup­port your­self and/or your fam­i­ly real­ly mat­tered to them and had an impact, you can’t not appre­ci­ate hear­ing that.

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