So how far was kirbys influence and what exactly fucked him over? Everytime i see this image i die a little inside

So how far was kirbys influence and what exactly fucked him over? Everytime i see this image i die a little inside.

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Marvel/DC stole his drawing's
I'm pretty sure a lot of his work was work for hire so he didn't get to control own or make money from his art
So he only made money when he made art and I'm guessing he didn't have a great retirement package as a freelance artist and old people don't do things fast

>what exactly fucked him over
The publisher at Marvel, Martin Goodman. And in general the business people treating the creators as replaceable, which you couldn't get away as easily with in an era with interior credits like you could in the Golden Age.

People love to say it was all Stan, but Stan's only guilty of having credit thrown at him not so much in stealing it. He wasn't the one writing up the contracts and firing Kirby for refusing to relinquish any claim of ownership in characters he created/co-created.

>stole his drawing
That too. Companies used to not give original art back to artists for no reason other than to keep it. Sometimes they would just throw it away. Over at 2000AD you have stories about the early days where original art was used as anything from doormats to soaking up leaks.

>So how far was kirbys influence
he's the king, and we are his subjects
there's nary a capeshit artist in this day who would not cite him as an inspiration
he was unparalleled in his sense of outlandish futuristic designs, and he was a seasoned master of motion, kinetics and page layout
I can spend excessive time just gazing at his pages, then realize 'oh yeah, I gotta read words, too'

When a comic pro creates a new character, or any other such merchandisable commodity, it belongs wholly and solely to the company. This is true of every extant character from Superman on down

Probably the most influential comic book artist of the 20th century.

He didn't read the fine print. and he didn't help Joe Simon when he tried to get royalties for Cap.

What works of kirby should i read first?

Except that isn't true of Superman, they pay out the nose to the Shuster Family and they have to put in every comic "Superman made possible by a special arrangement with the Shuster Family". There's also cases like Tommy Monaghan and the Hitman characters who are somehow owned by Ennis, because 90s DC was weird. (I am also fairly sure Jack Knight is owned by Robinson but this I cannot confirm).
This isn't even touching the giant realm of creator owned shit out there. GOAT related.

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Sure, but the issue was in regards to shit like royalties, and more on Marvel's end than anything else. Today, if you work at DC Comics and you create a character who is, say, popular enough to appear in one of the movies or TV shows, you're at least entitled to some royalties from it (it's why Len Wein got paid more for Lucius Fox appearing in The Dark Knight trilogy than he did for all of Wolverine's appearances throughout all the X-Men movies). Comics in the 60s up to the late 70s is a horrorshow of creators making groundbreaking characters, stories, and so on, and receiving absolutely nothing for it because the Editors considered them wholly replaceable.

>(I am also fairly sure Jack Knight is owned by Robinson but this I cannot confirm).
Nah, there are just a few characters that are associated with certain creators that DC just won't use out to maintain good relations with the creator in question. They have a similar setup with Gaiman and Sandman and Milligan and Rac Shade.

Moore they just don't give a shit about, because they burned all conceivable bridges with him years ago.

Golden Age Captain America
Fantastic Four
Avengers
Unncany X-men
Fourth World stuff at DC

>Probably the most influential comic book artist of the 20th century
I feel like strictly in cape comic terms, there's not really a "maybe" in there. If you expand it to all sequential art, yeah, there's a valid bit of debate, especially in regards to how styles formed internationally. Herge, Tezuka, etc. But with capes, I'm gonna say nah, nobody comes close to the level of influence.

its just 100 years a big chunk of time

and Eisner existed too

I'd also like to add that he was a fantastic writer. He was an avid reader, had a library of books at home, and was well-versed in writing war, romance and tragedy comics.

The only reason he's not remembered as a good writer is because Stan Lee insisted on writing dialogue bubbles. Even when he didn't know what the story was.
In Superman (animated series) when Darkseid says, "I am many things, Ka-El; but here, I am god." That's a lot like what Kirby would write for the character.

Paul Levitz actually did. When he was running the show Watchmen and ABC were off limits because he wanted to keep that bridge from getting completely destroyed because of WB.

Now that they know he'll never come back they don't make the effort, even for the artists that worked with him.

working my way through his new gods stuff right now and ngl sometimes it comes off like a 5 year old on a sugar rush is writing it.

So does your post, "ngl".

Eternals
His 2001 adaptation too

But really, Eternals.

I still like it. Are you mad?

>Milligan and Rac Shade
Nobody tell him!

Christians and Jews can't into mythology. They cannot ever get rid of their Judo Abrahamic bias.
I expected something like Illiad, but it ended up as another capeshit book.

he's friends with Castallucci and gave full approval

>Everytime i see this image i die a little inside.

Mark Evanier, who knew Kirby well, had this to say:

>I heard him say it, though not directly to me. When I met Jack, I had no expectation of working in comics or working in comics as much as I eventually did. What he said to me was more in the nature of encouragement to keep thinking of comics as something to do for a while before moving on to other things. But I heard him say the line or variations of it to others — mostly kids who approached him at San Diego Cons. I can't give you any of their names because I think they all took his advice.

>Well, some of them did. Around 1971, a young artist named Wendy Fletcher visited him and showed him her drawings. I don't think he said the "break your heart" line to her but he told her not to get into comics, urged her to pursue other illustration work and gallery showings (as he did to Romberger) and told her, "If I catch you working in comics, I'll spank you."

>Wendy did later work in comics. After she married Richard Pini and became Wendy Pini, they created and she drew Elfquest and other wonderful things. Jack did not spank her. I think he may have congratulated her for doing such fine work and retaining ownership of it. There were many variations of his advice. He especially urged folks he thought were talented to not see drawing someone else's creations for DC or Marvel as a real career.

>I should also point out that Jack's advice fluctuated. There were times he was happier in the field than he was at other times. When he did say things like that it came from a frustration not with the form of comics, which he loved, but with the working conditions, bad compensation and loss of control of one's work he encountered. He probably said it much less (if at all) in the last years of his life when he could see creators sometimes holding onto copyrights and making real good money in comics.

>And I doubt he was ever as dour as the above drawing (by New Zealand cartoonist Dylan Horrocks) made him out to be. He usually said such things with a feisty, defiant manner. Jack was a pretty feisty, defiant guy.

Moebius

Meh. He should've signed a better contract then.

That would be Tezuka.

Oh, that's really nice

That would be the "etc" I mentioned when opening up the debate to ALL forms of sequential art. But Eisner would never be considered a god of the cape genre and considered a rival of Kirby in that sense, that wasn't his thing. Eisner would be running against the likes of Toth, or Manning, and would be well above them in many ways.

If you're looking for the person in the cape genre that redefined panels and layout as a means of telling a story within a story, that would be Steranko.

Stan's a sleeze, but he's not the root of the problem.

Nobody tell this retard that he's retarded, that agreement doesn't mean "only Milligan uses the character" it means DC talks to Milligan about it first out of courtesy.

Yeah, from everything I've ever read on him, he may have been beaten down by the suits, but he was never broken, he never stopped loving it.

FF

(you)

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This.
Stan's not without his faults but he gets too much hate. He wasn't Bob Kane

and there you are again, lol.