Zombie Kamikaze

This is a project I get asked about a lot, strangely enough. Just before Godland, there were a half-dozen different projects I was working on, this being one of them. At that time, I really wanted to be Jack Kirby. Working on one or two different comics wasn't enough, I wanted to draw a whole line of comics. There's that lesson of knowing your limits that I hadn't heard yet.

Zombie Kamikaze was a script that Scott Mills sent me. I loved it, and at the time I was looking to work with other writers, trying to work on material that was outside of my voice. This was a script that appealed to me. It was action-packed. Another thing that appealed to me about it was that I saw it as a way of working on a comic in a genre that Kirby hadn't tackled, which is a hard thing to find.

Once Godland started taking off, I soon learned that you can't do everything. I had to drop a couple of the projects I'd been working on. ZK was a tough one to drop, it had so much going for it. What helped is that I'm not really a fan of the Zombie genre, so drawing page after page of it wasn't fun the way drawing cosmic spacescapes is for me. Another thing, which is funny in retrospect, is at the time I thought "this Zombie comics fad isn't going to last." There've been several points since then where the zombie genre in comics has gone up and down, but it seems to me it's definitely here to stay. The other factor for me was that when I started ZK, I hadn't read "The Walking Dead" before. Once I read TWD, I realized, this is the ultimate zombie comic. It's so good, how could I ever compete with this? So that's where ZK stands as of now. I still feel that maybe at some point I'll come back to it, but there are a lot of other projects that are higher up on my to do list.

Odin

Okay, so the photo of Anthony Hopkins as Odin is making the rounds. I do see some Kirby in that costume. The costume it's closest to, though, is the armor Odin wore when he fought Surtur in the Walt Simonson run. I'm assuming they'll use that run more as the template than the Kirby run. I hope they don't. They seemed to do that in the Hulk vs. Thor cartoon. I'm a big fan of Simonson's Thor run, it's second after Kirby's for me, but I'm not a fan of his design of Asgard. It looked like an authentic viking settlement, not the home of other-dimensional Kirbygods.

I feel like this is one movie where you can go full opera, so why not? Why doesn't Odin have an impossibly large and intricate helmet? You could really pull it off with CGI, so the actor will have no trouble moving his head (see Natalie Portman in Star Wars episode 1 for how not to do a Kirby-esque helmet).

Of course, early production stills of actors in costume is a lousy barometer to use to judge whether a movie will be good or not. I thought the Spiderman costume looked bad in early stills, but the movie ended up being awesome (IMHO). The early shots of the Hulk looked like an inflatable pool toy, but I thought the film was phenomenal. Brandon Routh as Superman looked absurd in the stills, but the movie ended up being great. So maybe Thor will end up being my favorite movie of all time? Of all the Superhero movies thus far, this is the one where the source material is dearest to me. Those Kirby Thor comics are some of my favorites. They're my favorite of his sixties work for sure.

The only superhero movie I can remember where I really though the costume stills looked good was the Tim Burton Batman. I could not wait for that movie. The silhouette was just like the then-current Jim Aparo Batman. As we all know the movie ended up being just okay. So here's hoping in the case of Thor, bad costume stills equals great movie.

Kirby's Barbarians (Part One)

Though most people never think about ghis work in this regard, Kirby is the father of the barbarian comic. His Thor laid the groundwork for all that was to come. Kirby's Thor is really the first fully realized sword and sorcery comic. It started out with the default sci fi ties that go with the superhero genre, but as more and more mythic elements were brought in you ended up with this really neat combination of sci-fi, mytho-fantasy, and superhero. With New Gods Kirby combined these elements in a more purposeful way to achieve the effects he waqnted to get, a reevaluation of the self-image and dreams of 20th century culture, as opposed to the on-the-fly cobbled together sensibility of Thor. New Gods arrived of one piece.

Toxl the World Killer was Kirby's post-Conan fantasy character. A throwaway character, but hard to forget once you've read it. Nothing Kirby did was truly throwaway.

Kirby's other big outlet for barbarian stories were the early issues of 2001: A Space Oddyssey which would feature some imagined primitive ancestor of ours in some pivotal situation in Kirby's view of our early development, then flash-forward to their ancestor in futurespace dealing with some related peril, whether it's thematically or just visually linked.