One must appreciate his sense of self-worth.
“Hmmm, what does he love? Fishing? Scrapbooking? Who can say?”
Anyway, that’s how you introduce a character. Well played, Jack Kirby or whoever it was that blurbed this on the cover of Forever People #4 (1971).
Content may be a little short on this site over the next week or two, but I’ll check in when I can. Thanks for reading, pals, and we’ll be back to normal service soon.
The Forever People is underrated. I think it’s one of Jack Kirby’s best 1970s comics at DC. The whole naive Flower Children Young Gods angle is refreshing. Issue four also has a biting satire of Richard Nixon in that one of the animatronic clowns at the “Happyland” amusement park resembles him. Imagine all of the satirical mileage Jack Kirby would have gotten out of Trump if Kirby were still with us. Then again, Glorious Godfrey is basically Trump before Trump. And Desaad is the spitting image of Rudy Giuliani…
“And Desaad is the spitting image of Rudy Giuliani”
Similar, but Rudy looks more like Nosferatu!
Kirby loved a subtle name didn’t he?
I don’t think there was anything subtle about Jack Kirby’s storytelling. I once got a headache from reading an issue of New Gods because of all! the! exclamation points! I literally have to turn down the volume in my head when I read anything written by him.
While we’re at, Granny Goodness does bear a passing resemblance to Barbara Bush…
@Pedro de Pacas…I was thinking that as well!
@Thom H.
What do you mean?!? Kirby’s bombastic writing style is part of his over the top charm!!! That, and his oddball characters like the Gobblegoozer from Captain Victory!!!
Without Kirby and Ditko Stan Lee w
Chopped off sentence fragment, I see …
I meant to write that without Kirby and Steve Ditko’s awesome imaginations Stan Lee would not have been able to turn Atlas’ monster of the week comics into the Marvel Universe…they did all the heavy lifting…
@Sean: I’m not disputing Kirby’s influence on the medium. I’m just saying that maybe he could have used a period every once in a while.
But thinking about this makes me appreciate Tom King’s script for Danger Street even more. The punctuation-style curse words annoyingly chopped up a lot of the dialogue. But maybe that was an homage to Kirby’s exclamation point usage.
Stan Lee only used exclamation marks for all his Silver Age comics also. I used to think it was to show his comics were so bombastic, but I later learned it was because periods were hard to see on the printing used for Marvel comics in the 1960s, so he chose to end sentences solely in exclamation marks. Of course, that doesn’t explain Kirby’s usage of multiple exclamation marks, but to be fair, Led has been known to use multiple exclamation marks in the early days also. He wanted the kids to really know when one sentence was ending, I guess.
Apparently, Lee tried to ban the use of exclamation marks in the early-1970s, but most of the writers ignored the edict. Hey, they wanted to be like Lee and Kirby, so they weren’t going to listen to something that “The Man” wouldn’t do.
@Thom H.
I was somewhat joking…but on a more serious note, I would guess that Kirby grew up on the classic newspaper comic strips from the 1930s…Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant, Captain Easy, and so on…and that probably influenced his snappy patter and excessive exclamation points. That and Warner Bros. Gangster films…since Kirby wanted to be a film actor when he was young…a la James Cagney.
What you mentioned about Tom King sounds likely, although I’m not a fan of TK’s deconstructionist/PTSD-infused comics, so
I stopped reading his output some years ago.
But I will say this, there is a pure energy and vitality to Kirby’s ’70s output at DC that I find engaging and fun…even if there are plot holes, unresolved storylines, and other things going on. I also feel that Kirby was soaking up the counterculture ideas of the time…I mean, The Female Furies could almost be like something out of Spain Rodriguez’s stories in Zap Comix.
@Chris V: Thanks for the reminder. I totally forgot about that reason for the exclamation points.
And I have to “turn down the volume” with Silver Age Marvels, too. They’re all so loud.