Jack "King" Kirby
Creator of the Challengers of the Unknown
1917 - 1994

Volumes have been written about Jack Kirby.  A genius at innovation, he helped jumpstart the Silver Age superhero revival. Here we'll concentrate on Jack's Challenger efforts.

People have always loved explorers, from Marco Polo to Neil Armstrong.  So says Paul Kupperberg in the Foreword to COTU Archives Volume 1.  Jack Kirby was among their admirers, yet by the mid-1950s, the world had been mapped - or so people thought.  When the Russians launched Sputnik, the Space Age was born.  And Jack Kirby saw its potential. Kupperberg notes, "Jack seemed to understand that a new age of exploration was coming, that comics were poised for a renaissance."  New frontiers meant new wild stories, but "the very best creators made fantastic scenarios plausible."

Jack had created many properties over years.  Some fizzled, some stayed.  At least one proved a time bomb. With Wally Wood, Jack launched his own space shot, "Sky Masters and the Space Force", a newspaper strip.  It was a success, and let Jack propose new projects to publishers.

At DC, editors were trying something new with SHOWCASE.  The first issues were about non-super heroes: Fireman Farrell, Kings of the Wild, Frogmen.  Then Julius Schwartz and Carmine Infantino revived The Flash, who would prove a hit.

Still, DC took "baby steps" with new ideas.  And Jack Kirby walked in the door with a proposal, so the story goes.  He had already drawn the earliest Challenger adventures.  The concept was right.  Kupperberg notes the Challengers "fell somewhere in between super-heroes and straight adventure.  The protagonists possessed no powers beyond their own natural-born brains and/or brawn, yet they wore costumes and were outfitted with enough gadgets and gewgaws to do Batman proud." The DC Encyclopedia entry notes the Challengers bridged the gap between the 1940s "mystery men" and the 1960s supermen.

Jack once explained, "The Challengers are a suicide squad.  They are the men who take the risks.  These are the kind of guys who travel through time as casually as you or I go to the corner store.  I wouldn't want to travel through time like those guys.  I'd be scared out of my underwear." (Quoted by Paul Kupperberg in the Foreword to COTU Archives Volume 1.)

Jack knew how to mix personality types for dynamic interaction.  "It's like any group of friends. One is like this, another is like that, and they complement each other. Groups have no need for duplicates, and God forbid if you had two hotheads - you'd never survive." (Kupperberg Foreword.)

Jack helped write and drew four issues of Challengers for SHOWCASE, then drew the first 8 issues of their own title.  And the time bomb went off.  "Sky Masters" had become such a success he and Jack Schiff argued about profits - and Schiff was also Jack's editor at DC.  Jack admits, "I'd get into fights with editors and I'd get into arguments with publishers."  Jack walked.

To Marvel, where Stan Lee had been told to clone JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA.  He and Jack assembled the FANTASTIC FOUR, but Jack based it on an earlier story.  As John Morrow notes in the Foreword to COTU Archives Volume 2, Jack's story "The Menace of the Invincible Challenger" had appeared three years earlier with almost the same characters. A scientific genius, a hotshot pilot, a hothead, and a "rocky" strongman.

Jack spent years at Marvel, then fell out with Stan Lee, and walked again.

Back to DC, where he worked up The Fourth World concept of THE NEW GODS, MISTER MIRACLE, and others. Here's a self-portrait he drew in FOREVER PEOPLE 4.

Paul Kupperberg adds that in 1985, he got to work with Jack on the SUPER-POWERS miniseries, a fan-boy's dream.

One of Jack's last works was a 1985 Challengers team-up with Superman in DC COMICS PRESENTS 84.  John Morrow concludes, "It's nice to know that Jack got one last shot at challenging the unknown before his own time ran out in 1994."


Erik Larsen, creator of Savage Dragon and other works, is a huge Kirby fan.  He made some astute observations on his blog, "One Fan's Opinion", at Comic Book Resources.  Erik kindly gave permission to quote him here.

"Prepare yourself for yet another Kirby rant.

"Y'see, I love Jack Kirby! I love his boundless imagination, the many worlds that he populated, his powerful storytelling, his sometimes stinted, sometimes bizarre, sometimes poignant scripting and his amorphous anatomy and backgrounds.

"Jack pushed things farther than any creator in comics that I know of. In his later years, Jack's art became almost cubist. Jack's grasp of anatomy was pretty decent in his younger years but as time passed, Jack increasingly let things slide. He started using jags and slashes to represent cuts where one muscle met another and these tended to shift and slide in directions that often bared only the slightest resemblance to those on an actual human being. He wouldn't solve the same problem twice. The anatomy of one arm or one shoulder or one back could be wildly different from those on another figure. Jack's concern seemed to be on motion and power and storytelling. It wasn't important to have an arm drawn with authentic detail - what was important was that you could tell that it was an arm and that it served its function in telling the tale at hand.

"Jack got credit for drawing great machines and they were marvelous to behold. His fans will go on about the thought and care that went into them and how they seemed to be able to really work, but that's not really the case. As anybody who's tried making a 3-D model of one of his machines can tell you, they really didn't work in three dimensions. Is it any wonder that most artists, faced with the challenge of having to draw one of Kirby's exquisite machines opted to simply slavishly copy them line for line as Jack drew them rather than try to figure out how to turn these contraptions? They're almost Escher-like in the way they bend reality.

"Jack tended to eyeball perspective and he seldom touched a ruler, which left his inkers the often-awesome challenge of making sense of it all. Jack made it work. It looked great, but on further examination you'd notice buildings with multiple sized windows and randomly placed awnings with nonsensical outcroppings thrown together at juxtaposing angles with similarly bizarrely constructed dwellings. Jack's unstructured structures made for a lively landscape that bulged and bended and practically breathed with life. Often Jack placed shadows more to balance a page than to indicate a working light source. Snakelike shadows crept and crawled up buildings and over faces creating fascinating nonsensical patterns along whatever surface they wandered.

"A big part of what made (and makes) Jack's work so compelling is the haphazard quality of it all. Here was a guy creating thousands of pages at a breakneck speed. His art veered wildly and his shortcuts were amazing. Rather than try and draw a horde of gods or insects matching outfits, Jack would give each of them their own imaginative look that would appear once and than be forgotten as characters were mowed down with wanton abandon. Why bother looking up a character's previous appearance when it's easier to make up a new character or redesign the old one? Stories started at one place and lead to another without any rhyme or reason. Jack would get distracted or confused or simply had an idea that overwhelmed the one before and he was off and running in a bold new direction.

"Take the Inhumans, for example. Medusa was introduced fairly early on in the pages of the Fantastic Four as a deadly femme fatale who joined forces with the Sandman, Wizard and Trapster to form the villainous Frightful Four - later on it was revealed that she was part of the Inhumans, but taken altogether her actions made no sense. She had no real motivation for hanging out with a bunch of bad guys and once she was reunited with Black Bolt and company, she no longer gave them the time of day. In the one story where she was thrown back together with the others, Medusa betrayed her former teammates but she really had no sound reason to join their ranks in the first place under the circumstances. It was simply the case (as I see it) of one idea trumping the previous one. Ditto with Thor's extended quest in "Tales of Asgard." It started somewhere and seemed to have a direction but over time it wandered off in another direction and its original purpose was never satisfactorily addressed. (And sure, Stan Lee was involved here, but it's well known that Kirby did much of the plotting and his later work on New Gods and the rest follow similar paths, veering madly from one direction to the next).

"I don't view these as bad things necessarily. Too many stories in comics suffer from too much thought being put into them - characters do what they do in a perfunctory manner to get readers to that big payoff and it often reads as though characters are simply going through the motions. Jack Kirby's comics were organic. They grew and unfolded as they went along in wild and unpredictable directions and therein was found the fun."



Learn more about the King's life and work at Bud Plant's Jack Kirby Biography page.

And, just opened, visit the Jack Kirby Museum online!