Thursday, July 7, 2011

All-American Kirby Heroes!


I stumbled across this purported Jack Kirby image. It features his many patriotic heroes. I don't know the source of the image though. It seems far too composed to be a convention offering and frankly it seems too derivative to be by the King himself actually. It feels traced to me, but I could very well be wrong on that score.

Here are the sources I located for three of the figures. The Captain America, Fighting American and Speedboy figures seem somewhat too exact to me. I don't recollect Kirby ever repeating himself quite this way.



The Private Strong image seems a modern update of this pose.


And I've not been able to locate the Bucky template, though the pose is a classic Kirbyesque pose.

Was this produced for the Heroes & Villains portfolio perhaps? I'm sure someone knows.

UPDATE: I found the image here and it credits Mike Royer as the artist. That might explain things.

Here's a link with the details about this bit of artwork.

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4 comments:

  1. I've never seen this before; I'm curious where you came across it. I can confirm it isn't from Heroes and Villains (each of these characters is depicted separately there) and I agree with your assessment in general about the visual clues this wasn't by Kirby. If someone is selling it as Kirby original pencils, that would be fraud.

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  2. I lose track of where I find these things. It can be weeks before I get around to a post. In this instance it was just a few days ago, but I cannot seem to locate it again.

    I'll keep looking.

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  3. I just did another search and found the drawing credited to Mike Royer. I've updated the entry to reflect this. Do folks agree that Royer is the artist?

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  4. Ah, that was the clue I needed to find a description of the origins of this piece here:

    http://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=23643&gsub=1997

    My only concern was that someone might be trying to pass this off as a Kirby page for sale, but clearly that's not the case and this piece is well documented.

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