Top 50 Greatest Things: #26

My top 50 greatest things.

Number 26: Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby was a comic book creator and still remains the greatest sequential artist of all time. His figures were robust and the action that came from them was so stylized it could trick the eye into believing those images were actually in motion. His designs for machinery and spacecrafts were these massive and surreal depictions that dominated sometimes two pages at a time. My favorite work of his is his New Gods series that obviously involved the elements I mentioned within the context of these "new" Gods battling over good and evil. Another personal favorite is his comic adaption of 2001: A Space Odyssey which has all of that cosmic imagery from the movie being projected through the Kirby lens. More specific single issue recommendations would be Fantastic Four #51 and The Mighty Thor #160. Kirby truly expanded the imagination in relation to what lies out there in the great beyond. He also was disciplined in his storytelling, making sure that the characters and the things they would face, whether big or small, remained the true wonder in his stories.

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