There's a new movie out adapting The Eternals, a comic Jack Kirby created, wrote and drew back in the seventies. Response to it seems to be wildly mixed if you read reviewers and online comments. It's mixed in my e-mailbox where I have several messages from folks who want me to say it's a masterpiece and Jack would have loved it, and I also have messages — at the moment, the exact same number — asking me to say it's awful and he would have hated it.
I will not do either of these things. I can't say it's good or bad because I haven't seen it…and I can't say what Jack would have thought of it because, first of all, he hasn't seen it either. He passed away in 1994 and I'm not all that skilled at posthumous mind readings. Secondly, I'm not Jack Kirby. Sadly, no one is this these days.
Once in a while, I feel confident to say how I think Jack would have felt about someone because I recall him saying I hope no one ever does so-and-so to my work and then I see someone doing so-and-so to his work. But I never heard him talk about the possibility of an Eternals movie.
I can say that he had very little problem with others building on what he'd done, especially if he was receiving proper credit for what he'd done and decent compensation for its ongoing value. He loved it when characters he created for the Fourth World series turned up on TV cartoons and he received checks…checks he knew would continue for his family after he passed. But he was not at all like Bob Kane, who wouldn't have cared if someone turned Batman into a Nazi mongoose as long as the name of Bob Kane was displayed on the screen and also on a large check. Jack certainly cared about content…passionately.
If you forced me to take a guess at how Jack would have felt, I'd guess he'd be pleased that someone felt that his comic series would have made a great movie and had backed that feeling with however many skillions of dollars it took to make the movie. Whether he would feel a great movie had resulted, I have no idea. Like almost every other author who ever had his or her work adapted to another medium, he would not have expected the end product to be exactly what he had in mind but he would not want to see something that in no way resembled what he'd done passed off as what he'd done.
And if you've seen the film, you can take it from there. But if you hated it, don't make the mistake of assuming Jack would have hated it…or if you loved it, that that means he would have loved it. Because not only am I not Jack Kirby, I'm reasonably sure you aren't, either.