Mark Evanier shares the cover to his upcoming book, Kirby: King of Comics:
Kirby: King of Comics is 224 pages in a 9″ by 12″ hardcover format, published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. which is arguably the leading publisher of art-type books in the United States and maybe anywhere. The book is filled with illustrations from Jack’s life, ranging from things he did as a kid (signed with his real name, Kurtzberg) to work as an adult. Many of the items have been seen before, though never with this quality of printing. Many have never been published. I have, for instance, a couple of unused Marvel covers from the sixties, one still in pencil, and a number of pencil commissions he did for people late in life. We’re printing Jack’s autobiographical story, “Street Code,” right off the original negatives. We’re printing a Fighting American story right off the original art. We have some of Jack’s famous collages and a couple of pages where he took the art to some comic he’d done and hand-colored the original art. There are some amazing pieces.
It can also be pre-ordered at Amazon.com.
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:11 am
The book might be great, but I think the cover is horrible. Especially the way the title is written.
July 2nd, 2007 at 10:28 am
I’m there.
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:23 am
I’ll definitely be picking up the book, but I agree, that’s a pretty disappointing cover. I understand what the designer might have been going for (the “wide-screen spectacle” of Kirby’s work), but the execution of it isn’t working. Not every retail or online display of the book will show the front and back cover, making it an incoherent mess to anyone who might see only one cover or the other (suicide in retail). I also think the typography looks incredibly amateurish and poorly thought through, as if it were simply plopped on there in a basic graphics program. Very unimpressive.
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:32 pm
A cover that poorly designed in no way pays tribute to The King. Does the title really need to appear 3 times?? I can only hope that the interior is more carefully conceived.
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:16 pm
I think it’s a great cover because it is so chaotic, and not designed in a way that makes it look like a book published in 2007 and “tastefully” designed by someone using Photoshop and using a font they just saw on a Web site or clothing label. I think also that anyone in the potential audience for this book would pick up a book with a giant gray forearm smashing toward them, to figure out what in the world it was.
Do you folks who dislike this like Chip Kidd’s work on the All-Star Batman and Robin and All-Star Superman books? I think they are horrible… despite my tremendous admiration for just about all the rest of his work. These titles are heavily designed, but it seems so arbitrary. I’d rather see a blunt design that doesn’t look like someone made 50 different comps and then went over it 50 times than a blunt design that looks so heavily belabored.
February 24th, 2008 at 8:10 am
The cover just does not show the masterful work of the man. It is a hodge-podge and a mess, playing up the POW and BAM riff that other media use when focusing on comics. For a book and man of this stature, certainly Marvel and DC would’ve allowed their Kirby art to be used on the cover.