"It's All Lies." Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics review

I was fortunate enough to have a very good friend ship me a copy of Tom Scioli's Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics, a comic book biography of the man who was quite possibly the greatest man the comics medium has ever seen.

I've always thought of Tom Scioli as a Kirby-infused artist. Certainly that's what I understood based on his work on Godland and American Barbarian. But in Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics, Scioli doesn't mimic Kirby - only when he's recreating Kirby's own drawings. Instead, the main body of this story is told in a style more reminiscent of a Fantagraphics publication (I should mention this is published by Ten Speed Press, who have been quickly building up an impressive list of graphic novels in the last few years). Kirby is depicted with eyes so enormous, he looks almost like an anime figure! Almost every page is laid out in a six-panel grid.

The book begins before Kirby's birth by relating how his parents met and continues past his death, showing quick glimpses of his legacy and of the many films made about his creations. It's an amazing tome; I learned many things about Kirby I didn't know, such as his intent that the Fantastic Four story about the Enclave would be a commentary on objectivism, but Stan Lee nixed it.

Stan Lee certainly does not come off well in this book; it's hard for him to come off well, as Kirby's story is told primarily through Kirby's perspective, and when you get right down to it, although they collaborated for more than a decade, it was (no matter how Stan tried to frame it) a business association, not a friendship.

There are only two things I want to criticize: first, that the pacing of the book seems lopsided. Scioli goes into great detail about Kirby's work prior to Marvel in the 60s, but once he reaches Kirby's most popular era he speeds up the pace, breezing through much of it. All of Kirby's life and career are represented here, but the Marvel Comics era feels light.

Second, that for all the time Scioli spends on Kirby, I don't feel he gets across what made Kirby a great comic book creator. His focus is almost exclusively on the popular characters Kirby created. Okay, but was he any good as an artist? Heck, in their brief Kirby in Comic Book Comics, Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey put more effort into explaining how Kirby laid out his pages than anything in Scioli's near-200 pages.

But these are very minor quibbles. This is an excellent biography and it will hopefully inform people who are interested in Kirby about his life and work in an easy-to-digest narrative.