Kirby doth live!

Rating: 10/10 (6 May 2011)

At long last, the cosmic concepts that Jack Kirby wrought with imagination and artistry have been rewrought for the big screen with the flamboyant filmmaking (and cgi) of Kenneth Branagh. As per Kirby's dictum that "comics shouldn't REFLECT reality, they should TRANSCEND it," THOR the motion picture TRANSCENDS. (Not in a WATCHMEN kind of way, but Transcendent, nonetheless.) JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #83 was a dramatic departure from the standard 1950s Atomic Age movie-inspired origins of most of the Marvel super heroes. (Kirby had been using Thor in comics prior to that- his hammer even turned up in a western, at one point-, but, this time around, he zeroed in on the gallant God of Thunder and his homeworld of Asgard.) The result was a comic book that I personally felt outstripped everything that had come before it. (See my comments regarding Kirby's death in a newspaper article that appeared shortly thereafter at capefearcomics.webs or on our facebook site.) Kirby was an artist whose cosmic sensibilities were never really tempered by his blue collar work ethic: he was a visionary in the field, and a quick perusal of any one of the four black and white reprint volumes of the THOR saga (inked by MY all-time favorite Kirby inker, Vince Colletta) clearly shows WHY. Like Bruce Lee, Jack Kirby was an inspiration to those of us who were paying attention- and, like Bruce Lee, Kirby represented the promise of Unlimited Potential. Gods knows this movie doesn't QUITE live up to its promise, but it's close enough for now. I'll leave you now with a few words from Mark Evanier's beautiful Afterword to KIRBY: KING OF COMICS: "Heroism was much more heroic, villainy was all the more villainous, and love was just plain lovelier." Not a bad epitaph.