Jack Kirby (1917-1994)

Jack Kirby would have been 90 years old today.

I know I write too much about Jack but that's because people are always asking me about him. And as more time passes on this planet without him, more people ask. I don't know how many times I've heard fans of his work regret that they didn't get to meet him. His work enriched their lives in some way and they assume, probably correctly, that a personal encounter would have been even more enriching. At the very least, they could have told him what his unbounded creativity meant to them, professionally and/or personally.

It's easy to see the professional influence. A staggering number of people in the arts — and not just in the field of drawing super-hero comic books — learned from him. It might have been how to draw action or how to stage a love scene or even how to invest characters with emotion and excitement. It could even have been his fierce work ethic. That's all well and good.

But I continue to marvel (no pun intended) at the number of people who were inspired by Kirby in non-artistic ways…people who were motivated to make more of their lives or just to be better human beings because of something Jack wrote, something Jack drew, something Jack said. I was always impressed with his outright decency and honesty, and the fact that he treated everyone around him well until they gave him a good reason not to. Sometimes, he continued to treat them well even after he had plenty of good reasons not to.

You'd think it would be hard to miss Jack. We are not all that far from the day when every single important comic book he produced will have been reprinted in a fancy, deluxe edition. I can only think of a few other people in the comic book field of whom that could be said and none of them produced anywhere near as much work as Kirby. But the work is only part of what he meant to so many of us. We still have the work. What we don't have is the man. That's what we miss.