Happy Jack Kirby Day!

Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Marvel Universe, would've been 98 today.

Here's a relatively random, but still awesome, selection of his work through the years.



























Jack and his wife Roz
 

New Music Friday: Jimi Hendrix; Van Morrison; Yo La Tengo; The Faces; Disney Legacy soundtracks, more

Click the links to order discounted CDs, vinyl and downloads from Amazon.







Pop Culture Roundup: Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Alex Shomburg, Ray Bradbury; Jose Garcia-Lopez

Comic Book Resources shares images of some of the Jack Kirby artwork being featured in a new exhibit at California State University Northridge.




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Slay, Monstrobot spotlights Steve Ditko's work on early issues of Marvel's Incredible Hulk.


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The Golden Age highlights the paperback cover art of Alex Shomburg.


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Check out Ray Bradbury's FBI file.


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Back in the early 1980s, comics artist extraordinaire Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez was assigned to create a style guide for DC Comics that essentially showed other artists how to draw the various characters, the colors of their costumes, etc.

Now you can see the whole thing via a Garcia-Lopez fan page on Facebook.


Hey! We're on Facebook now!

If you're into that sort of thing.

Pop Culture Safari on Facebook.

Twitter, too.

Coming soon: Peppy And Virginny In Lapinoland by Hergé

Out Nov. 18 from Fantagraphics.

Hergé’s proto-Tintin comics, which feature funny-animal haberdashers
in the Wild West. Hergé is known worldwide for his plucky, globetrotting, strikingly quiffed hero Tintin. But before the runaway success of this character, the struggling Belgian cartoonist created a number of shorter-lived and less well-known series and characters. 
By far the loopiest were 1934’s Peppy and Virginny (“Popol” and “Virginie” in the original), a couple of haberdashers who journeyed to the Wild West in search of new clientele, accompanied by their trusty horse Bluebell— where they ran into savage Indian tribes, evil bandits, and much more. They experienced only one adventure, but it was a doozy!

The crisp, “clear line” drawing style of the earliest vintage Tintin albums combines with a freewheeling, farcical storyline and engaging funny-animal characters (the leads are bears, the Indians are rabbits with ears for feathers, and the main villain is a bulldog) and gorgeous Euro-album coloring to make this a genuine oddball classic of Franco-Belgian comics, and Fantagraphics is proud to present its first American release (and its first English-language release in two decades).

With the Spielberg/Jackson Tintin adaptations and a steady flow of new books about Tintin and his creator (such as last year’s Adventures of Hergé graphic-novel biography), work by Hergé remains in high demand and this book shows a fascinatingly idiosyncratic facet of his career. And it’s a rollicking, hilarious, kid-friendly (if you can give the non-PC 1930s “Injuns” a pass) read to boot. Full-color illustrations throughout.

More DC Comics 100-pagers

Continuing our series of galleries spotlighting DC Comics 100-page comics.