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Super Powers by Jack Kirby (Super Powers (1984)) Kindle & comiXology
Together with such creative collaborators as Joey Cavalieri, Adrian Gonzales and Paul Kupperberg, Kirby revisited all of DC’s greatest heroes and villains in the pages of SUPER POWERS, and launched them through time and space into the kind of cosmic adventure that only the King of Comics could deliver!
Jack Kirby reinvented the superhero genre with his sprawling saga of the Fourth World—a bold storytelling vision that was decades ahead of its time. In honor of this extraordinary talent’s centennial, DC Comics is proud to re-present the groundbreaking work of the King of Comics in a brand-new series of trade paperback editions collecting his classic DC titles in all their four-color glory!
Revisit this bygone era—and thrill to the imaginative power of one of the medium’s greatest masters—in SUPER POWERS BY JACK KIRBY, collecting both of the dimension-spanning sagas that capped off the King’s triumphant tenure at DC.
Collects SUPER POWERS #1-6.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDC
- Publication dateJanuary 23, 2018
- File size919137 KB
- Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download
- Read this book on comiXology. Learn more
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Product details
- ASIN : B077YXRW55
- Publisher : DC (January 23, 2018)
- Publication date : January 23, 2018
- Language : English
- File size : 919137 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Not enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Not Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Sticky notes : Not Enabled
- Print length : 268 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #906,059 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #10,636 in Superhero Graphic Novels
- #19,159 in Superhero Comics & Graphic Novels
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Jack Kirby (/ˈkɜːrbi/; August 28, 1917 – February 6, 1994), born Jacob Kurtzberg, was an American comic book artist, writer, and editor widely regarded as one of the medium's major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators.
Kirby grew up poor in New York City, and learned to draw cartoon figures by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons. He entered the nascent comics industry in the 1930s, drawing various comics features under different pen names, including Jack Curtiss, before ultimately settling on Jack Kirby. In 1940, he and writer-editor Joe Simon created the highly successful superhero character Captain America for Timely Comics, predecessor of Marvel Comics. During the 1940s, Kirby, generally teamed with Simon, created numerous characters for that company and for National Comics, later to become DC Comics.
After serving in World War II, Kirby produced work for a number of publishers, including DC, Harvey Comics, Hillman Periodicals. At Crestwood Publications he and Simon created the genre of romance comics and later founded their own short-lived comic company, Mainline Publications. Ultimately, Kirby found himself at Timely's 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics, which in the next decade became Marvel. There, in the 1960s, Kirby and writer-editor Stan Lee co-created many of the company's major characters, including the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and the Hulk. The Lee-Kirby titles garnered high sales and critical acclaim, but in 1970, feeling he had been treated unfairly, Kirby left the company for rival DC.
At DC, Kirby created his Fourth World saga, which spanned several comics titles. While these series proved commercially unsuccessful and were canceled, the Fourth World's New Gods have continued as a significant part of the DC Universe. Kirby returned to Marvel briefly in the mid-to-late 1970s, then ventured into television animation and independent comics. In his later years, Kirby, who has been called "the William Blake of comics", began receiving great recognition in the mainstream press for his career accomplishments, and in 1987 he was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.
Kirby was married to Rosalind "Roz" Goldstein in 1942. They had four children, and remained married until his death from heart failure in 1994, at the age of 76. The Jack Kirby Awards and Jack Kirby Hall of Fame were named in his honor.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Susan Skaar (Kirby Museum website) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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However, it's far from the only reason.
The two episodic mini-series DC Comics collects in this trade paperback feature the Leaguers battling Darkseid, the tyrannical ruler of Apokolips that Kirby featured in his "Fourth World" saga of the early 1970s. In both tales, Darkseid stays removed from physical conflict, instead manipulating events through minions, including not only Fourth World supporting characters like Desaad, Kalibak and Mantis, but also supervillains including Lex Luthor, the Joker and the Penguin-and forcing the Leaguers to peel away his machinations before a final, high-stakes confrontation.
Both the choice of villain and the length of each series (the first ran five issues; the second, six) give "Super Powers" an epic scale that stories in the regular "Justice League of America" title lacked. Indeed, like the Fourth World stories, "Super Powers" crackles with the power of Kirby's boundless imagination.
"Super Powers" also has the advantage of existing outside DC Comics continuity of the mid-1980s, when these stories were published originally. At the time, the official League was a motley crew of second-string heroes, and the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" maxi-series was redefining the entire DC Universe. Since "Super Powers" was based on a toy line, Kirby and his collaborators use their artistic freedom to go for broke and throw at the reader everything but the kitchen sink, without regard to either chronology or realism. In the process, they propel Justice League storytelling to wild, over-the-top heights the ongoing title couldn't hope to match. And, since the toys dictated the League roster, the reader gets to see DC's big guns-including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Aquaman-together again, confronting their ultimate foe.
Kirby plots the first series, leaving the scripting to Joey Cavalieri and the art chores to Adrian Gonzales, who provides an adequate enough riff on Kirby's distinctive style. The King himself steps in to both write and draw its finale.
The second series, though, is where "Super Powers" really takes off. As writing wasn't Kirby's strongest suit, Paul Kupperberg provides the script-which involves Darkseid trying to turn Earth into a noxious, Apokolips-like wasteland and enslave humanity. Thus, Kirby was free to concentrate on his art...and he delivers layouts that merge both page design and panel shapes with his action-packed pencils to become a unified, eye-popping whole in a way he rarely did when he functioned as DC's one-man band, writing and editing books in addition to penciling them. And Greg Theakston does superb work inking Kirby's pencils.
(As an aside, we finally see what a Kirby Superman looks like, as both Al Plastino and Murphy Anderson redrew Superman figures in Kirby's "Jimmy Olsen" comics of the early 1970s because DC thought they deviated too far from the approved company model.)
"Super Powers by Jack Kirby" transcends its humble origins to give readers DC's greatest heroes battling arguably its greatest villain, in epic, bombastic stories illustrated by a comics master who packs his pages with both manic action and crazy visuals. It will please any fan of either Jack Kirby or the Justice League.
In the first series, Darkseid has a competition on Apokolips to find four champions. He imbues them with a fraction of his own power in order for them to pass on this power to four Earth villains. They choose Lex Luthor, Brainiac, The Joker and The Penguin. Seriously? The Penguin. The four villains spend much of the series using their new powers to battle members of the Justice League. It’s really not that good until the fifth issue. What happens in the fifth issue? Jack Kirby takes over as artist and writer. It’s interesting that Kirby supposedly did the plotting for the first four issues because the fifth is a radical departure and features an excellent ending.
The second series is essentially a continuation of Jack Kirby’s Hunger Dogs, which was published in 1985. The tone is completely different from the first series and starts off with Darkseid escaping an angry mob, which is how Hunger Dogs ended. Darkseid is cornered by a pair of Hunger Dogs, intent on killing him, but effortlessly immolates them with his Omega Beam. This is far more hard core than anything in the first Super Powers mini-series. All the penciling in the second series is done by Jack Kirby but this is far from his best work. If you’re old enough to have watched the Super Powers television shows they were aimed squarely at children but the plot here is more mature. Having been exiled from Apokolips, Darkseid is seeking to take Earth as his own using his Seeds of Doom. Not the greatest story ever written but like the previous mini-series it has a very good ending. I’d actually be curious as to whether there is a follow up because Darkseid is left in a somewhat ambiguous state.
There are two reason I don’t regret buying this book. First, I originally read these stories when I was a teenager so they bring back a nostalgia that younger readers wouldn’t feel. Second, one could argue that it is the true continuation of the Fourth World storyline following Hunger Dogs. As far as I know this is the only continuation with Jack Kirby’s seal of approval. If I hadn’t read these books when they were originally published in the mid 80’s I don’t think I’d put them in very high regard but they are decently entertaining and have a beautiful 80’s vibe. As for extras there really aren’t any. Paperback is probably what this collection merits but I wouldn’t have minded a few pages of additional background material.