This new hardcover from DC Comics features Green Arrow on the cover, but that hero's adventures take up only a small fraction of the book, which is an odds end collection of Kirby's 1950s work for the publisher.
In essence, it's everything Kirby did for DC in the 1950s apart from Challengers of the Unknown. His work on that adventure title, which in many ways was a practice run for the early Fantastic Four comics Kirby would create with Stan Lee a few years later, is collected in two of DC's Archives books.
Apart from 10 six-page Green Arrow tales, the book features mainly suspense and sci-fi tales done for anthology titles such as House of Secrets, House of Mystery, Tales of the Unexpected and My Greatest Adventure. There are a lot of those O. Henry-ish, "ironic ending" stories that were popular in this period, some great-looking Kirby aliens and monsters that set the tone for the work he's soon be doing for Marvel, and some creative concepts and plotting.
We know that, at Marvel, Kirby played a major role plotting out and drawing stories that were later dialogued by Stan Lee. There are no writing credits on most of the stories in this DC collection, although Kirby associate Mark Evanier suggests in the introduction that many likely were plotted by Kirby and written/dialogued by writers such as France Herron, Bill Finger, Robert Bernstein and Dave Wood. The book credits Herron and Wood for writing most of the Green Arrow stories.
Credit-wise, the other notable thing about this era's work is the inking, most of which was done by Kirby himself. Early in his career, collaborator Joe Simon did a lot of this part of the work. At Marvel, Kirby was inked, for better or worse, by a number of other artists. His full art work on these stories is great -- finely detailed and more fluid than the "chunkier" Kirby work familiar from his work of the mid 1960s onward. Evanier mentions that Kirby's wife, Roz, may've helped with some of this inking work, but it's mostly just Jack, and it's beautiful work indeed.
Many of the stories display Kirby's fascination with mythology. There are references to Pandora's box, the Sphinx, the all-seeing eye and Aladdin's lamp. We also see a version of Thor that, design-wise has similarities to the Marvel Comics version Kirby would create with Lee. This thunder god's hammer is identical to the Marvel hero's and he has similar "disks" on his tunic. We also get to see a variety of space aliens, a man turned paper thin and Easter Island-style statues that come to life and crawl out of sand that's buried them for centuries up to their necks.
The Green Arrow stories are serviceable enough -- typical superhero stories of the day when a problem is presented and solved via the hero's smart instincts rather than brawn. According to Evanier, Kirby wasn't given much leeway to insert his own ideas into these stories -- featuring characters that were essentially bow-toting versions of Batman and Robin. But he tried.
It's an interesting period in Kirby's history, featuring much enjoyable work. We see an emerging style and conceptual creativity that would fully take flight at Marvel where Kirby was given much more freedom to experiment and assert his full brilliance.
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