Kirb Your Enthusiasm (15)

By: Joe Alterio
March 2, 2011

Fifteenth in a series of posts, each one analyzing a single panel from a Jack Kirby-drawn comic book.

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kirby-panther-smash-550 — Click on image for larger version. Click on that image to zoom in.

Other artists draw lines, Jack Kirby drew shapes. The shapes were born of some odd undersea palace where all metal has striations, and every hand is carved, rough-hewn, from a crumbly yet indestructible rock. There was no better character than Black Panther — a force of shapes — for Kirby to pour his wet concrete id into. A cultural theorist might have plenty to say about a character called Black Panther, who first debuted in 1966, but he’s less interesting as a metaphor than he is as an artist’s model, perfect for trying out new positions without a distracting cape or foolish headband. Kirby made the character an obsidian void of musculature, an empty shell punctuated only by eyes, a dark knight before The Dark Knight. In panels like this one, from Black Panther #1 (January 1977), he’s a crumpled interrobang as he suffers a blow to the solar plexus here, a crescent of masculinity as he dodges a thug’s bullet there, a silent judging phantom — moving, stretching, punching, leaping. Kirby’s creation could be construed as the floating guilt of a nation as a golem with a 42-inch chest, but only because we see what we want in great art. In my case, a vessel for action.

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MORE POSTS by JOE ALTERIO: QUALITY JOE: sketches vs. finished drawings | ROBOTS & MONSTERS series | Q&A with Gary Panter and Charles Burns | CABLEGATE COMIX | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Black Panther | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Kirk vs. Gorn | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Akzidenz-Grotesk | GROK MY ENTHUSIASM: Million Year Picnic | and HILO HERO items on Winsor McCay, Django Reinhardt, Wendy Pini, and many others.

ALSO ON HILOBROW: Joe Alterio’s Cablegate Comix | HiLobrow posts about comics and cartoonists | HiLobrow posts about science fiction | The New Gods generation

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Tags

Black Panther, comics, Jack Kirby, kirb-enthusiasm, sf

What do you think?

I dig your form-over-content take on Black Panther, Joe. He originally did have a cape, I think — but you’re right that he’s much more fluid-protean-emptyvesselish (and less Batman-like) without it.

“Crumpled interrobang” – perfect! You can see the restlessness of Kirby’s creativity when you posit it this way. He turned the limitations of a character who was almost a silhouette into a showcase for his compositional skill.

As I’ve been going through the entries in this series I’ve been thinking, “Where’s the punching?!” But as I looked down the list of contributors I knew in my heart that Joe would pick a shot of dynamic action violence.

Thanks, David and Josh! I fully appreciate Kirby’s functional storytelling skills, but there is something nearly *edible* about the jagged, hashed, swooping line work of Kirby. It’s like his brain itself was holding the pencil.

Brilliant panel choice, Joe! Visceral dynamism, and a shape “for Kirby to pour his wet concrete id into” is genius.

Great description of Kirby’s art, Joe! Black Panther’s costume design was the simplest [kinda like Alex Toth’s The Fox] and, so, Jack hadda bring everything he knew into that form to make it rock. Plus, SHAPES. If I’ve learned anything from Kirby it’s that, when he abandoned accuracy, he made it all work with shapes and brought it to a 4th World level. Just look at that panel. It’s broken but it’s right!

Now I feel really bad that I questioned Joe’s use of “interrobang.” PS: Now that David mentions it, I think this is the only punching panel in the series!

Thanks, Dean. 4th World: engage!

The insight here makes me want to do a bunch of close crop enlargements of Kirby’s Panther on 4CP, like he’s a living Rorschach blot!

I’d go see that shrink, the one who used Kirby rorschach blots to plump my psyche, any time.

This panel also features one of my favorite Kirby-isms. Check out the Panther’s hips and what should be his glutes. That looks an awful lot like a groin, instead. He seems to have done this during fight scenes (early Avengers pages with Cap have this a lot). “That punch was so hard that…”

Yeah, the BP here sorta looks like those Masters of the Universe action figures whose torsos swiveled around completely.

Great choice of panels. Reminds me of Michelangelo’s unfinished captive figure sculptures. That was an uncrumpled Alteriobang!

I don´t know if you´ve invented the word “interrobang” and what it means exactly, but it is my favorite new word. Sounds like the perfect name for site that does exactly what is done in this series – maybe it would be a cool name for another series of his kind. And honestly: why aren´r you people publishing this series as a book with some extra essays and great reproductions of images – by which I mean a pulpy look, of course or maybe even some cheap paper as part of the point – you know: Pulp Scholarship.

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Kirb Your Enthusiasm (15)

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