The Style of Jack Kirby | Strip Panel Naked

[@flappospammo]

He’s called the king for a reason

[@benperkins6657]

This is exactly what I feel about style. I have been drawing independent comics for almost a couple of decades and my style isn't anything more than shorthands or tricks and illusions meant to convey an object or scene in a conservative amount of time. I, on average, spend about ten to sixteen hours on a page depending on complexity and when you hear stories of Kirby working on four books a month and pumping out something like fifty pages a week and you really understand a couple of things. One, the extreme amount of output Kirby had, and two, he had to come up with the tricks and shortcuts that would inform the visual language of how he approached his storytelling. Excellent video!

[@StripPanelNaked]

You learn what’s important, right? Or at least what you personally think is important, combined with experience and speed and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. We’ve all been in a crunch before and had to make decisions in work, and that’s definitely where we learn what we need to leave in and out!

[@benperkins6657]

@@StripPanelNaked That's definitely the case. And it's all personal or what obviously is dictated within the script, but again, there is room for interpretations and improvisation. The personal priorities are why no two artists have the same style. However being influenced and creating homages is another story. May be a good subject for an interview. Like how some artist use influences from past artist. The example that springs to my mind is the correlation between Kirby's work and Steranko's. Love your channel. Keep it up.

[@drmidnight680-kz2le]

​@@benperkins6657they should ask how do we see the real world as opposed to photos or videos and try using that for their style instead of using Kirby for their art education. I see the world is closer to Picasso or Van Gogh VS photo realism or Neal Adams.

[@adamwee382]

3:25 It's not all about speed, Jack said many times that his biggest inspiration was movies. He was trying to create a "still movie" Though i do think you're right that speed did play a big factor, He was known for churning out as many drawings in a day that other artists did in a week or two. When you're getting paid per drawing without sort of revenue sharing it makes a lot of sense.

[@mikebelbin]

Kirby's characters often look distressed, panicking, angry, fearful. It's not just the limbs. His favourites, like the Thing, or Thor, or even Orion. They're often at the mercy of larger characters (the bullies) but tough too. Like New York street kids in conflict with other gangs or larger buddies. It's not just fighting limbs or dramatic faces, it's little Jack fighting the Giant, the oldest story model in human history, against invaders, against tyrants, against death.

[@JefferySummers-nm7st]

Jack Kirby is my favorite artist ever

[@raygsbrelcik5578]

Honestly, I wish someone could/would draw some comics this way Today!

[@flappospammo]

On twitter they had some of his work where he spent some time on the drawing , they were utterly stunning. Fine art level

[@chrism70kc]

I read somewhere that Kirby created over his lifetime 20,318 pages of art! Kirby was many things, but lazy was not one of them! If he had to fill in a few panels with speed lines and Kirby Krackle™ to get the job done, I certainly don't blame him.

[@StripPanelNaked]

I replied to someone else before about this idea, but I'd love to see the difference between a page and a deadline page, and see what an artist personally deems necessary to make the page work. Like the minimum lines, the minimum drawing, etc. Because that's certainly style. Kirby did so many pages and it forced him to clearly think about what actually was necessary on a comic page. It's super interesting!

[@randalwung8715]

@@TonyTylerDraws Two days, maybe one. It was the fill-in issue during Steranko's 3-issue Cap story, George Tuska inks, and it's GOOD.

[@angelvalle9963]

His art work is the finest in comic history he's truly the king.

[@HelloMisterJAMWAH]

I didn't see the big deal with Kirby until very recently, through my appreciation of Tom Scioli. Now I devour his quirks and try to learn from them. This was a really interesting analysis, boiling down what can be hard to recognise as Kirby's approach to a way to start looking at it more critically.

[@StripPanelNaked]

Thanks! Yeah, I quite like this concept of seeing what people leave in when they are rushed. I can't remember where I saw it now, but there was art exercises where you had one thing to draw, and you did an attempt at in 10 seconds, 30 seconds and 60 seconds (or something like that), and the comparison between the three was great-- in most cases you can read the quick image just as easily, so what becomes important? Speed and deadlines definitely teach us that, for right or wrong! 😬

[@HelloMisterJAMWAH]

@@StripPanelNaked I know James Raiz does that on his channel, I think it's 10 seconds, 1 minute and 10 minutes. Definitely a good exercise. I've been doing 3 minute portraits recently and learned a lot about where to put detail.

[@brucedavis3816]

Kirbys art is distinctive in the face of the caracters. He draws the jaw of just about everyone with a square almost ape like overly big jaw!!! Especially bad guys. Their jaws are over the top square!!!

[@mrpalaces]

Man this channel deserves so many more views

[@StripPanelNaked]

mrpalaces haha thank you :) happy about those check it out!

[@danje748]

Glad to have your videos back, they have been sorely missed during the christmas vacation =)

[@StripPanelNaked]

Haha thanks! If you'll allow me a plug, there's always tonnes to catch up on over at patreon.com/strippanelnaked ! 😅

[@jabezcreed]

Kirby made fast and easy be "dynamic." A lot of 90's artists made fast and easy be big and flashy. Huge figures with bulky costumes, 2 panels on a page, big splash pages, etc. I appreciate that Kirby never gave up on trying to tell a story on the page.

[@StripPanelNaked]

jabezcreed those 90s artists ended up being a kind of breath of fresh air at the time- which is why they sold tonnes and tonnes of comics. But you’re right, we often looked at those works now as something of its time, where a lot of Kirby remains timeless.

[@lpsalsaman]

Awesome vid! Kirby style change due to necessity, since artists pay back then depended on how many pages they could complete. Plus once he went back to Marvel comics in 58, he was their workhorse in a lot of titles. His panels reflected a lot of "camera shots" or angles, which he learned by working with Max Fleischer Studios early on in his career. So he applied it to his panels, which gave him a whole different dimension instead of the more static or flat comic strip look. Anyway, keep up the great work!

[@StripPanelNaked]

Yup! In that speed we certainly can see what Kirby considered important.

[@CarinaUrbani]

I had a question for you, How do you think Kirby's style influenced the earlier TMNT comics? Thanks!

[@emerpus01]

It’s all over eastman and lairds style but the series get more Kirby when they go to space around issue 5 & 6. And not too long after was the explicit Kirby tribute in the Don one shot.

[@Bloodriversnake]

Style is the recognisable result created by the more or less conscious implementation of similar solutions to a frequent set of problems. (Or something like that)

[@StripPanelNaked]

Alexander Lidström I think there’s a bit more leeway to the more or less conscious, but otherwise yeah a pretty good summation haha!

[@Bloodriversnake]

@@StripPanelNaked "More or less unconscious implementation" then? I know at some point I had a definition I was happy with but that was years ago in my tender youth!

[@StripPanelNaked]

Alexander Lidström I think probably conscious or unconscious! In some of the episodes I did a while back with Dec Shalvey we talked about this, and he said initially he’d never realised he created a diagonal line across his horizontally stacked pages until he started preparing a class. So there’s some conscious style in there in terms of the panel stacks, and some unconscious application of “that looks good” that seemed to exist!

[@scottlemien5964]

Wow. So many bad comics analysis videos and this one hits it outta the park. Awesome!

[@rodneymarsden3003]

Early Jack Kirby working for Timely I believe he was working with other artists doing background work for him and Joe Simon. The idea was to get the work out as soon as possible. When he later worked for Marvel there was just him, the inker and the colourist.

[@MrPpppp55555]

Great video ! It is fascinating how the many of the arguments here hold for the manga industry as well. A lot of manga are usually produced on a weekly basis (and for years at a stretch) and it affects the style of the manga in profound ways. All the way from, deliberately messy (but quick) art styles as caricatures for certain emotions. Very strong usage of textures instead of colours since they probably don't have the time to colour their pages, and even the panelling and the amount of story progression in each chapter. Over the years this had led the manga industry to develop a unique style which is a lot more caricatured than the American comic book industry, but imo a lot more unique character design process. To the point that these days, the designs are so unique that it is possible to differentiate almost all major characters with their silhouettes . It is always fascinating to see how the restrictions on a medium or person dictate their style all the way from your webtoon video to this. Thanks a lot !

[@lookylookhere71]

He also makes the characters different sizes in each panel, so it looks more interesting.

[@JakeTvisterOfficial]

Thanks, Has! Will you do a follow up related to this on art parenting, where you use Kirby as a case example that influenced later artists (Hellboym Head Lopper, Black Hammer etc.)?

[@StripPanelNaked]

I'm not sure that I'd do a direct comparison, just purely because my interests are more in how the things have worked, but where there's a comparison to draw I'll certainly do so! The fundamentals of this you could basically apply to everyone-- what do artists leave in and what do they leave out? It's especially easy for someone like Kirby because they produced worked over literal decades, where some artists have only been working one, but I might revisit this idea with artists like Mignola or Miller in future episodes...!

[@jimle1370]

This is such a good analysis video

[@StripPanelNaked]

Jim Le thank you!

[@MrLCGO]

Jack would usually draw four comic issues at least per month. So yeah, no wonder his style was developed for speed and dynamism.

[@MalamoDiamanto]

Jack Kirby is God. That's his style.

[@kevincruz7958]

A style was always, in my view, what the artist loved to draw and what he could draw quickly. There are exceptions where one is above the other. I can see the situation where an artist loves something but he can only do it by taking his time, or something that is quick and he's good at it, but doesn't necessarily like it. Some artist like to take more shortcuts than others and, after that, it's up to the reader to decide if they like it or not, so the artist must be damn sure that what he's doing, whether he likes it or he's good at it, in order to have his content consumed. That could also happen with a writer.

[@ANovellover]

Yes,, you are right

[@awsomerobyn2603]

Thank you so much. I needed this for my artists research part of my igcse project for the year. You really helped a lot 😊😄

[@sleepyreader666]

I have tried to mimic specific Kirby panels and they take a long time to draw...there's tons of details in every figure...just very stylized details...having tried it out on the paper I can't see how he did it so fast...

[@StripPanelNaked]

sleepyreader666 he’d been honing that style for decades and decades, at there’s instances of repeated figures and actions and similar poses, so he may have had a lot of this down to a sort of brain equivalent of muscle memory. And it’s always tougher to mimic a style that someone else finds very natural! He just had a lot of experience, I guess.

[@davidmoses6434]

KILLER episode, Hass! Love it!

[@iOnRX9]

Kirby was doing 80 pages a month

[@moiqbal5667]

as Tom King sums up Kirby's work and style: "It screams of Myth! "

[@StripPanelNaked]

Mo Iqbal I think so much of that was the drama. I feel like Kirbys later work really was all theatre (which comics absolutely can be).

[@hobbsmakescomics]

That was great. I love the conclusion, you came to. I think its worth noting (and if you mentioned it and I missed then sorry). But Kirby didn't ink his own work 99 percent of the time- he was almost always a penciler (though he was actually a very good inker), and not to take anything from him at all, but honestly a lot of what we think of as Kirby is an inker's interpretation of his shorthand.

[@LanceAnderson77]

Jack’s pencils were anything but “shorthand.” 🙄 Look at the pencil xeroxes for the Galactus trilogy.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Actually, Kirby's penciled artwork was very tight. Almost as if he was trying to ink those pages using the pen. It is not hard to find examples of his penciled pages online. If some pages did look rough it was because Vince Coletta, long time inker for Kirby in Marvel, actually _erased_ part of the artwork in order to speed up his own part of the job so that he could get more pages done in a shorter timeframe (and get a bigger paycheck, of course).

[@daveylevsonart]

Super informative thank you!!

[@mesolithicman164]

Very interesting. I always think Kirby is defined by one word, energy. Everything he draws seems to radiate energy, and this energy powers his storylines.

[@johnaquino7619]

Would that power be . . . "Energy-X" ? :-) ( just a modest Freedom Force reference )

[@mesolithicman164]

John Aquino Could be. I've never read that, do you recommend it?

[@johnaquino7619]

​@@mesolithicman164 Freedom Force is an older game for desktop computers which was an homage to the comic books in the era of Jack Kirby. They emulated his art style quite a bit. It's a fun game. :-)

[@mesolithicman164]

John Aquino Sounds interesting, I'll look into that, big Kirby fan. Thanks for the heads up. 👍

[@mesolithicman164]

John Aquino Just had a look. I really like the character designs, they're a bit bonkers but in a really good way. Was there anything else like this, worth checking out? I've never been a computer game player hence my ignorance.

[@TheGoblinoid]

God I love this channel

[@Martin_TheCollector]

Wonderful!!

[@StripPanelNaked]

Martin The Collector thanks!

[@omegacyclone1989]

Big fan of jack Kirby!

[@darthknight1]

Except a lot of this analysis is looking at Kirby art that was inked by Vince Colletta who avoided inking much of the background and midground elements Kirby would include in his pencils, completely erasing them come the final version. :-( Great video though. I just wish more of Kirby's art had survived through to the finished product.

[@StripPanelNaked]

I think, having seen pencils and finished inks before this, the point still stands, though. You had Colletta merge a bunch of Kirby's backgrounds with the crackle/dots, but what Kirby was doing is still very evident on the panels and page. In some cases it was arguably destructive, but I wouldn't consider it beyond any extreme examples to be destructive enough to change the nature of Kirby's approach in terms of style and composition.

[@bunnyw3712]

will you do an episode on Shintaro Kago's "Abstraction"? it's the most creative manga i've ever seen, even tho it's a little gross

[@StripPanelNaked]

I haven't read it! But adding it to my reading list :)

[@bserum]

Some of those backgrounds disappeared as a result of Vince Coletta inking his work.

[@StripPanelNaked]

B. Serum potentially- I think it’s far too clear a style choice to put it to Coletta occasionally dropping some lines though! It speaks to the use of speed lines and crackle/dots that same approach.

[@PassiveNights]

Comic Tropes just did a video on it

[@siverickson7961]

Shout out to Rob Liefeld kek

[@michaelrapson]

Respectfully, I think you're analysing the wrong era. Kirby's art peaked in 1967 or early 1968 at Marvel. By the Eternals he was in a decline. To each his own I suppose, but if you look at the Marvel era from 1966 to 1968 all the best of Kirby in his pomp was there.

[@StripPanelNaked]

Michael Rapson Ah I ADORE The Eternals. For me it’s peak Kirby, honestly. But that’ll come down to taste. I just think that’s him firing on all cylinders artistically.

[@raphaelcurley]

Kirby Krackle > Kirby sp(d)ots

[@FirstnameLastname-kn5sw]

Ping! PING! *PING!*

[@mrzack888]

Japan Manga copied Kirby's BG style. They stole IP. Need to pay royalties to the Kirby family.

[@hahahahaha288]

How?

[@sleepyreader666]

W