Standby.
Normal transmission will resume tomorrow.
I'd like to make an admission.
(And as I write this, I feel like I've already made this admission before.)
Sometimes, I just don't get the hoopla surrounding Jack Kirby.
I think that we have literally seen developed every idea the man had over the course of his life. Very often they involve cities made out of trees. And underground complexes. In fact, were we to put the vast majority of Kirby's ideas onto the same planet, we would be living on a giant ball of Swiss cheese.
When I feel like this, I have to remind myself of my experience reading Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. As I made my way through that...dense...tome, I kept shaking my head and wondering why this was so important. She would come to a conclusion of some sort, and I'd sort of nod my head and say "Yep, how is this news?" Until I realized that, before her, no one was saying these things. In some ways, Kirby is the same. Before him, there was no Marvel Universe. And, yes, his art is amazing and dynamic and all of the other superlatives one likes to use. But does this mean we need to keep mining little notes and ideas and sketches and attaching his name to them to make more comics?
All this said, I found today's comic to be quite enjoyable. There's an old saw that is often repeated by comics people that Kirby was amazing, yes, but he needed an editor more than most. What we see in today's comic is just that. Roy Thomas, editor (amongst other things) extraordinaire guides the interconnected Secret City Saga, and it reads so much more naturally than, say, Captain Victory. In fact, I'm intrigued enough to see about tracking it down (through dollar bins, of course). A secret civilization, the "Ninth Men, in an age fifteen millennia before our own," whose time is over. A few individuals stash themselves away in life support pods, and hope for the best.
I can only assume a few of them come out in the next issue.
To be continued.
