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.
Rip Off
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteI'll keep looking.
Rip Off
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?
ReplyDeleteRip Off
Ah, that was the clue I needed to find a description of the origins of this piece here:
ReplyDeletehttp://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.