You’ve gotta hand it to Jack Kirby — if you or I had been toiling away in the comic-book industry for approximately four decades, only to have our major life’s work strangled in the proverbial crib, we would probably give up on the whole notion of the “sprawling cosmic epic” altogether and just stick with simple stand-alone stories, punctuated by the occasional two-or-three-parter, until it came time to hang up our pencils and call it a career. Who needs the disappointment of early cancellation all over again?

And yet, after the editorially-mandated quick demise of his Fourth World opus, The King’s non-stop imagination kept chugging away at the only speed it knew how to operate : full throttle. And while he kept creating new and innovative concepts and characters during the remainder of his tenure at DC (Kamandi, The Demon, OMAC), these were all essentially self-contained…

One could argue that I should have started this “Kirby Week” theme I’ve got going with with this, as it marks the beginning of what many of The King’s fans consider to be the best and most important phase of his career, but in truth the October, 1970 cover-dated Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #133 is such a flat-out transformational comic (not just for the series itself, but for the medium in a more general sense) that even on an umpteenth read-through, it offers a hell of a lot to unpack and analyze.

Oh, sure, there are more important entries in The King’s lengthy C.V. than this one, but I think a person would be hard-pressed to find a single issue that attempts to do more than this story does — after all, this was the very first comic that Kirby produced under his then-new contract with DC, and given…

Among the ranks of Jack Kirby devotees and casual fans alike, you likely won’t be able to find many willing to make the claim thatSuper Powers#5 (cover-dated November, 1984 and featuring the story title “Spaceship Earth! We’re All On It!”) ranks among The King’s greatest works — and I’m not here to make that case, either. What Iamhere to do is to advance a (hopefully) convincing argument that this is still a terrific comic well worthy of critical re-appraisal, and that the flaws itdoeshave aren’t Jack’s fault. In fact, he tried his best to save this mess of a series and pretty much pulled it off.

Some quick background info is probably in order at this point :Super Powerswas a mini-series launched by DC to capitalize on a then-popular line of toy “action figures” bearing the same name, which featured all of…

Let’s keep rolling and look at another of my absolute, all-time favorite stories The King ever did. This time up : the two-part saga of “Panama Fattie” from Our Fighting Forces numbers 157 and 158, cover-dated July and August, 1975 respectively.

As our story begins, some shady shit involving hijacked equipment and supplies has necessitated The Losers’ presence in the Panama Canal zone, but that doesn’t mean ultimate hard-luck heroes Captain Storm, Johnny Cloud, Gunner and Sarge don’t have time for a drink, and the bar favored by servicemen in the area is owned by a fellow American — specifically, a larger-than-life (in every respect) gal whose real name is Lil, but who everyone refers to as — well, you can probably already guess. Lil’s a fun-loving lady with a heart of gold (or so it would seem) and an eye for men in uniform, and she takes a special…

If someone put a gun to my head and forced me to name my all-time favorite Jack Kirby story, on most days I think I’d have to go with the two-parter from issues five and six of 2001 : A Space Odyssey known in fan circles by its short-hand title, “Norton Of New York.” This pair of comics has anything and everything you could ask for — high drama, deep philosophical questions (specifically in relation to the subjects of individuality, the heroic ideal, the ever-fragile male ego, and the ever-deepening flight of huge segments of the populace into realms of pure fantasy), superb cosmic artwork, dystopian existentialism, even something of an unrequited love story. We’ll get to all of that (and more, I promise) in due course, but first a little bit of backstory for those not steeped in comic book history —

With the near-unprecedented success of Marvel’s Star…

Our ostensible “stars” here are two apparently-popular WWE personalities named Sheamus (a.k.a. “The Celtic Warrior”) and Drew McIntyre (a.k.a. “The Scottish Psychopath”), which bodes well for the notion that wrestling has moved on from racist caricatures of Middle Eastern and Asian people, I suppose, but beyond that the context of this particular…

A dying cell phone leads to panic leads to attempted abduction leads to…

Any way you slice it, Philadelphia cartoonist Nate Garcia’s Alanzo Sneak is an impressive package — richly drawn, published in an oversized magazine format by your friends and mine at Strangers fanzine (who, it has to be said, are absolutely killing it since venturing into the world of comics publishing), and thoroughly conceptualized, this is a comic that fires on all cylinders and bears all the hallmarks of autuer work, with production values to match the quality of its visual storytelling. From the minute you see those “Ben Day Dot”-style cover colors accentuating the absolutely wild sense of proportion Garcia brings to his titular protagonist, you know you’re in for a wild ride that engages both eyes and mind. I honestly have to ask myself : how can this guy only be nineteen years old?

Maybe he’s just a quick study, or maybe he’s some kind of prodigy, but whatever…

There’s a school of thought which posits that we really dodged a bullet with the last election : yeah, Trump is still out there making noise, but he left office whether he wanted to or not, and now we can go about the business of steering this flagging ship we call America back toward a course of normalcy. Never mind the fact that “normalcy” isn’t a great state of affairs for many people, and their utter contempt for the political establishment was one of the biggest factors in President Goldenshower’s rise to power, this view is entirely too optimistic even leaving aside Biden’s own pro-corporate, militaristic leanings — the threat, you see, isn’t over, largely because it didn’t start with Trump and it never really went away.

I should be clear that by “the threat,” I refer to the potential for the US to descend into an overtly fascist, authoritarian…