Favorite Comic Book Pages: Fantastic Four #51, Page 1

Do you know how hard it is to agree on just one Jack Kirby page?

This wouldn’t be a problem for me when I was young. As a kid, I didn’t like Kirby’s work at all. I prefered the art of people like John Buscema, John Romita Sr., Frank Miller, John Byrne, Al Milgrom and Mike Mignola (thanks to Rocket Raccoon!). I just didn’t understand Kirby, and I was frustrated because everyone kept telling me how I was supposed to. He was “the King” afterall.

Luckily, I came around when I was older.

So now I can appreciate pages like this:

Outside of Kirby’s art, this page has all the things I loved about Marvel. Stan Lee’s hyperbolic credits, the larger than life title, and the gravity that I couldn’t find in the DC comics coming out in the same time. As for the art, this is the Thing that I love, at once horrifying and pitiful. The facial expression Kirby gives him is perfect, and though the rain is a lazy and overused visual shorthand to express sadness and disappointment, the heaviness of it and the thickness in Kirby’s lines make it work.

What my young brain couldn’t reconcile was how Kirby’s work appeared to go against what I trained to expect from comic books. I understand now that Kirby wasn’t repeating the language of comic books, but instead he was reinventing it, exploring it further, and then reinventing it again. I think a lot of comic book artists see the empty page and think of only the story that needs to be told, but Kirby looked at the page and saw an entire universe waiting to be discovered.