The Book I Read: The Weirdest Sci-Fi Comic Ever Made: Understanding Jack Kirby's 2001: A Space Odyssey by Julian Darius

Speaking of The Weirdest Sci-Fi Comic Ever Made: Understanding Jack Kirby's 2001: A Space Odyssey by Julian Darius....

I was just a few pages into this book before I started Jones-ing BAD to read the comic book series. That's the danger of reading intelligent commentary on comic books--at least for me. So I poked around on eBay for awhile...long enough to see that the Marvel Treasury Edition (actually it was a Marvel Treasury Special) was selling for a pretty hefty price...$50 to $175...when it hit me...I think I HAVE a copy of this book somewhere. Where would it be, though? I tried to think like a Brother K, and...¡listo! within minutes I had it in my hot little hands.

That was a nice surprise. Odd how I have a memory that can forget that I have something, then realize that I might have it and know exactly where it is...even though I didn't know where it was. Ahem. I feel like I just saved $100, though. (Averaging it all out.) Not that I'd have paid $100 for it, but I would have wanted to. Just sayin', sir.

I knew I had some of the ten regular issues that Marvel published following up on this Treasury Special, but I was pretty sure that I was missing a few. I checked my trusty inventory list and yes, looked like I was short issues 1 and 10. Those were bad issues to be missing, too, I suspected: #1 for obvious reasons, and #10 because it was one of the earliest appearances of Machine Man (then known as Mr. Machine). I looked around on ebay and found a copy that was reasonably priced, almost ordered it, then had a thought: I have two inventory lists of my comics, because I just did an update on the "new" books, but haven't yet put them in with the old ones. I checked that second list, and...guess what?

So it looks like I will be getting on to this as soon as I finish Dr. Darius's book, won't I? 

Now if only I could find those Keith Giffen Legion of Super-Heroes (volume 4) issues....

Dr. Darius has an interesting attitude towards Jack Kirby and his work. On the one hand, he clearly regards Kirby as a great genius and one of the giants in comic book art...possibly even in Art itself. He seems anxious to point out some of the things which Kirby does in the 2001 series which he regards as brilliant, and he does this a number of times. On the other hand, he does not hesitate to point out spots where Kirby is sloppy or even inept, and he does this with a nice sense of humor at times, such as here, when he is talking about the pattern Kirby establishes in the first four issues of 2001:

"This is the formula he took from 2001: prehistoric adventure, future adventure, then turn into a space baby."

Even after reading this sentence a number of times, it still makes me smile.

Other times he just drops the mic: 

"It’s disgraceful in its storytelling incompetence."

But you know...it seems to me that this is very much a Call 'Em Like I See 'Em, not the sour envy grapes of, say, Richard Lupoff writing about Edgar Rice Burroughs. 

ANYway....

Another plus on this book--which was absent from the otherwise excellent Sequart book on The Legion of Super-Heroes, Teenagers From the Future: the illustrations inserted into the text actually correspond to the points being made about the comic book. Unfortunately they're small and low resolution, and though you can expand them on the Kindle, the art and text become blurry--readable, but necessitating a squint at the least.

I must say that Dr. D's commentary is the best comic book analysis I've seen with only one exception: an article about an issue of The Losers which (I think) appeared in The Jack Kirby Collector: "A People Thing: An Examination Of Jack Kirby's "The Losers" Story In Our Fighting Forces #152" by & © 1998 Mike Kidson, which is available HERE. Talk about drilling down, man. Kidson goes into so much specific detail that I thought about using this article as a model of how to take literature apart in my AP English classes...and was only deterred by the massive amount of copyright infringement that would've been involved. 

ANYway...Darius doesn't get down to as much detailed analysis as Kidson did, but he is examining a larger body of work--about 250 pages of story, as opposed to the 18 page story Kidson examines. I wouldn't have minded if Darius had gone this route, but that probably would have ended up being a very hefty book...and would probably have taken years to write.

Just one more thing...I think I'm going to have to rewatch 2001: A Space Odyssey, too. Damn, this Darius guy is good.

Also going to have a look at some other Sequart books. (You can check out their book list HERE.) I might need to read that one on Hellblazer. And Watchmen. And....