Here's a Jack Kirby drawing of the Fighting American, a character he created after he got screwed out of Captain America and figured if the entire American comics industry was going to build itself up by copying him, he could do worse than ripping himself off.
Here's a detail from the astounding new Yuichi Yokoyama book, Color Engineering (much more on which soon). There's no way this is a coincidence.
I've often wondered about Yokoyama's stylistic similarity to Kirby, usually concluding that it must just be one of those things. I'm not sure how available Kirby's work is in Yokoyama's native Japan, and from what I understand he doesn't hold a particularly high place in the Japanese canon of comics either. But here's Japan's best cartoonist, Yokoyama, doing a straight-up Kirby quote. Now I'm thinking the perceived disconnect between Yokoyama's world and Kirby's is mainly in the way they're marketed: Kirby has the commercial empires of Marvel and DC pushing him, Yokoyama goes through one of the US's artiest publishers to get his work out here in the States. I read Yokoyama's drawing of a Kirby character as the kind of homage to the master that it seems like every American cartoonist performs at least once, as well as a simple, bold reading of Kirby himself. That stuff may be filling the millionaires' pockets today, but it's still as crazy and adventurous as it ever was. After this drawing, the spirit of Kirby hangs over the rest of Color Engineering, adding a welcome varnish of pop-comics sensibility to the stunning new work of one of the form's premier avant-gardists.
4 comments:
Yah, I asked him about Kirby and he shrugged and seemed like he honestly had never heard of him. This was in 2009 tho - so I'm sure he's looked at it now. The thing with Yokoyama-san is that he's always "on" so I can never tell if he's doing a Warhol or something, haha.
That's kind of what I always figured. I guess some of the same stylistic gestures could have come from Tezuka. Or he could have just pulled that picture from "something he saw", not necessarily a specific in-depth reading of "Kirby comics".
There's also the rich tradition of Japanese costume heroes, which is more rooted in live-action TV than comics - Kamen Rider, Ultraman, that kinda thing.
There was even a '70s Super Sentai spin-off that featured a 'Mr America' - that's him on the left, with 'Miss America' second from the right: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lpzNwmTPoMQ/Sq02ucl2lDI/AAAAAAAAACQ/4XpOnmdKOA0/s320/battle_fever_J_blog.jpg.
According to the Wiki the show was a Marvel co-production. It's possible Yokoyama is drawing from these influences rather than straight from the font of Kirby, as it were.
On second glance, the guy on the left looks French. The girl is definitely 'Miss America' though.
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