Recognizing Jack Kirby ...

The new York Times (free registration required) has a short article on comic book legend Jack Kirby (his 90th B-day would have been yesterday).

The guy is amazing, and I'm grateful for his influence on comics. I've actually been re-reading a lot of his original stuff lately, so this tribute to a hugely influencing creative comes at a good time for me.

Don't know who Jack Kirby is? First, shame on you. Second, here are a couple of snippets from the NY Times article for context:

"Mr. Kirby did a lot more than just draw. As the critic Gary Groth so ably put it in The Comics Journal Library, “He barreled like a freight train through the first 50 years of comic books like he owned the place.” He mastered and transformed all the genres, including romance, Westerns, science fiction and supernatural comics, before he landed at Marvel.

"He created a new grammar of storytelling and a cinematic style of motion. Once-wooden characters cascaded from one frame to another — or even from page to page — threatening to fall right out of the book into the reader’s lap. The force of punches thrown was visibly and explosively evident. Even at rest, a Kirby character pulsed with tension and energy in a way that makes movie versions of the same characters
seem static by comparison."

(Via Boing Boing.)