Jack Kirby Reader

    (Pure Imagination, 2004)
™ and © Pure Imagination

There’s plenty to relish in this second volume of The Jack Kirby Reader which collects still more of his work from the late 1940s. There’s plenty of his hard-edged crime stories and stark love stories, plus another “Flying Fool” strip seemingly inspired by the then-current movie A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

But the real run comes from the kitschier ones like supposedly true, but brutal “The Mad White God of Palm Island” or “My Problem Date,” a teen romance with such hardcore Kirby concepts as futuristic vehicles and a street gang.

By far the strangest and the best are Kirby’s oddball attempts at doing funny animal stories which ignore the traditional formula and instead give us a single anthropomorphized creature living in a world of humans (an inverted Kamandi?) Like Earl the Rich Rabbit, a talking millionaire bunny with a different house for each day of the weak or Lockjaw (that name sounds familiar) the Alligator, a tough-talking, derby-wearing, butt-kicking gator who goes to college.

— S.A. Bennett
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