The 1993 Comics Journal interview with comics master and gentleman without equal Jim Woodring is one of my favourites ever. It is now available on their website in MP3, complete with authentic tape hiss interspersed with the occasional “Huh.” and “Riggghtt…” by Gary Groth.
Mr. Woodring discusses his work, his childhood apparitions, and relates some extremely entertaining stories about working on Saturday Morning crap like Rubik the Amazing Cube at Ruby-Spears. As I understand it he inked and coloured some Jack Kirby presentation pieces and as a result is able to pass on a classic Kirby anecdote or three during the course of the conversation.
After lending my New Gods collection to my buddy Dave Howard a couple of weeks ago, he asked to explain why I liked Kirby’s work so much. He found it to be childish, which is a pretty fair assessment, but since I always need to feel that I have at least a semblance of a justification for my childish interests, I wasn’t happy with the muddled answer I gave him. Jim Woodring’s comments about Kirby help somewhat in the defense of my Kirby obsession. Although he wasn’t a fan of Jack’s work, having never really read super-hero books, he was very impressed by his powers of inventiveness. This is really what has always appealed to me most about Kirby; I call it Kirbization. Books, movies, mythology, TV shows, story ideas whipped off during a cab ride, everything and anything gets filtered through Kirby’s sensibility and comes out transformed. Given even the most banal or stupid (or both) set up he will almost always create something original, and distinctly ‘Kirby’. He often had crappy starting points for his stories: Kamandi’s Planet of the Apes rip-off roots, his 2001 adaptation and his short run on Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen(I so much want to do a diss Stan Lee right now), but given a little time he was usually able to take the story off in some weird, unexpected and original route.
In contrast, his work for Rub-Spears was, for the most part, all beginning, with no follow up and therefore no opportunity to make sense of all the craziness he’d created. I’ve read in interviews with Kirby that by this point in his career he felt his was getting more respect (and definitely more money) from the animation business than he had in his long comic career, which doesn’t surprise me. But in this case you can see that inventiveness mutating into something that’s just disturbingly bizarre. As Woodring says(I’m paraphrasing here): "It seemed like work that could’ve been done by a computer. Just random ideas thrown together”. Without the narrative context of a comic story, coupled with fading hope that any of his animation work would actually see the light of day, Kirby’s almost automatic technique of throwing random unrelated concepts and word combinations to together get ideas resulted in abominations like this:
This is from a set of collectible cards that Comic Images released back in 1994 entitled Jack Kirby: The Unpublished Archive. The ‘unpublished’ pieces were a bunch of Kirby’s insane Ruby-Spears idea pieces and my friend Dave Lapp always told me that he found this particular drawing to just too awful to bear looking at. I keep it close my work area, usually on a mantle or shelf nearby; it’s an enigma that seems to hold clues to so many tantalizingly questions: Who is this character? Who does he hide from? Why is hiding in a Hat Box? Is he a bad guy or a good guy or something in between? Why does he have flat feet? The commentary on the back of the card doesn’t help much:
Of this Jack Kirby illustration, Joe Ruby comments: "What can I say?"
Thank you Mr. Ruby. He goes on to explain that these types of humorous, bizarre drawings are what Jack Kirby was famous for. I agree that it’s bizarre, and humorous, but it’s only humorous in a sad, dispirited way; to me this drawing says that Kirby has realized that nobody he’s working for really gives a shit what he does, and as a result je’s stopped giving a shit as well. Dave’s take on the image verged on the horrific; to him the character climbing out of that box represented some ugly part of Jack’s persona. Thinking about it, perhaps it’s the hack that lived inside him? Maybe something worse? I won’t take the psychoanalysis too far, Woodring’s comments make it clear that he thought Kirby was a swell guy, but a couple of the anecdotes touch on the uglier side. I’m thinking story about how Kirby threw a tantrum when someone with the company preferred a Woodring Concept over one of his.
This next Kirby image demonstrates more than any, I think, that Kirby was just throwin’ anything and everything out there:
“He is able to spy in places to high for ordinary people”. The Giraffe is nothing more than a perverted Mr. Fantastic. A true hero for the 21st century! The Giraffe uses his voyeuristic tendencies in the service of humanity! is the tag line I see.
But I can’t help but love the cards- to be honest, what I’m really in love with is not even the images, but the pure, yet to-be-solidified Kirby ideas. The names. They’re evocative as hell. If I were a musician I would make an album with a song based on every name. I was first exposed to the bizarre alliterative word combinations by an index cardf for the 'Unpublished Archives' that was sent to me by a friend that listed the names of the images.
Listen to them. Speak them aloud to the air like the sublime riddles they are:
The Everything. Breakout Struts. Battle Whale. Manfitting Boat. Techno-Claw. Hammered. Breakthrough. Unlikely Heros. The Clutching. A Perfect Evil…
See how they float in the air in front of you, like incorporeal spirits waiting to be born into physical form? I thought a lot about what these words could possibly mean before I picked up the full set or cards:
Controlling Evil. Not destroying evil, mind you, not even preventing it, but controlling it. What? Are you idealistic enough to expect we’re going to be able to get rid of evil all together? No, the best we can hope for is to control it. I pictured Hitler on a leash.
747 Submarines These are truly massive submarines. And they fly as well. That’s pretty much what Kirby drew.
Shark Jet I’ve never seen this image, but I assume that like 747 Submarines, this one can be taken pretty literally. It’s a shark that can fly like a jet, or a jet that bites like a shark. He used mutant flying sharks in an issue of Kamandi. They were in backyard pool, of course, where flying sharks usually make their homes.
Madcap Medical…It has alliteration and a story set up all in one title. I’m assuming it was part of the zany soap-opera/comedy set in a hospital that he was working on. Oh yeah, all the doctors in this late night ‘adult’ cartoon were animals.
Train-Tank Like the 747 Submarines and Shark Jets, this is a train that has turret and a big gun like a tank. It crosses the country by rail, shooting at whatever targets it can from the tracks. If you are smart enough you just stay away from the train tracks and you don’t have anything to worry about. See, this is one of many reasons I could never be a comic artist on the scale of Jack. One little problem with a story concept and I’d be: “This is just stupid, what possible benefit would having guns attached to a train offer?” But Jack would just keep going with it. Maybe this fantastic vehicle existed back when trains were a more popular means of transportation, like back just after the turn of the century? They use lots of trains in Europe; maybe the story takes place in Europe? That’s it! It’s a high speed Train-Tank used by terrorists! Or the story takes place in an alternative reality where cars were never invented but trains were? You know what, lets combine all those ideas! Now you’re thinking like Kirby!
Barbabic Bobsled I never knew that Goths and Huns actually invented the Olympic Bobsled competition, did you? I pity the man or woman that crosses their path on the toboggan hill.
The Amazoids Here he’s doing the old ‘add oid to the end of any word to make it sound cool’ trick. Remember what they decided to call the worms in Tremors? Snakoids. It was a joke.
Four-Arms This is a stock monster Kirby used over and over again in his comics. “I can’t think of any monsters to have Jimmy Olsen fight today, but this issue is due in a week. Ahh… I’ll just use Four-Arms again.”
Quaint But Deadly As hard as I try I could not reconcile these two adjectives in my mind, so I figured Kirby must be on to something really amazing here. How can anything that is quaint also be deadly? Or more to the point, why would something quaint be deadly? “My! That house is very quaint…” “Yes, but be careful, it is also very deadly…” As it turns out, that’s pretty much what Kirby had in mind; it’s a house that transforms into a military helicopter. I think that he may have been taking a little too much from the Transformer craze that must have just been reaching North America around this time.
posted by Alan
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6:30 PM
Monday, January 05, 2004
