comic | episodes & e-books | store | about
< previous post | next post > | all news from Jul. 2010 News archive | News search | RSS
 
  Not so Kirby KrackleJul 13, 2010 7:18 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:An interesting coincidence as I ate my omelet this morning led me to an important comic history discovery!
 
So last night, in a sort of tired excited state, not knowing what to do with myself, I was clicking "Random article" on Wikipedia, and, as is probably inevitable, I ended up on Jack Kirby, whose 12-13 penciled pages per day max output made me feel very unproductive. Anyway, I noticed a mention of something called Kirby Krackle, and went to see what it was. Basically it's the black balls he'd throw around to make things like energy or space or whatnot, like so
 
Image
 
And Wikipedia linked to this big article with this comic pundit guy talking about how Kirby invented the "krackle" dots and all that, tracing it back through all his comics to establish that he first used it without doubt in 1966, and maybe he got it from the first astronomical picture of a quasar (which is, by the way, the energy given off by a feeding supermassive black hole, although they didn't know that at the time) in 1963.
 
Well, that's an interesting theory and all, and could be right, who knows, but the article's concluding quote is not right:
 
"People who have never heard of Jack Kirby use a form of Kirby Krackle. But until 1966, there was no such thing. And it was Kirby who found it."
 
How do I know this is incorrect? Because over breakfast today I was reading my Sydney Jordan's Jeff Hawke collection that just arrived, and, in the story "Overlord," printed in 1960, I noticed
 
Image
 
And it continued, all over that page.
 
Now, I don't know if Jordan was the first to use this graphic technique--odds are he wasn't--but obviously it was used to render exciting space scenes at least six years before Kirby started in with it.
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
 
< previous post | next post > | all news from Jul. 2010 News archive | News search | RSS
 
© Copyright 2024 Ben Chamberlain. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy