At his blog yesterday, Mark Evanier announced the publisher and release date for his long awaited biography of Jack Kirby…which will now be in two parts:
The first will be a very nicely printed art book with a simpler but quite complete version of the Kirby biography. The volume will also be loaded with rare Kirby art, all of it in reproduced in full color, much of it shot from the original artwork. That needs a bit of explanation. Many of the pieces will consist of black-and-white artwork in pencil or ink but we’ll be printing them in color so that you can see all the pencil marks, corrections, smudges and in some cases, notes in the margins. There will also be plenty of pages that print Jack’s art in pencil form and, of course, color pieces and some things you’ve seen before but not in the way we’re going to present them.
This book will be called Kirby: King of Comics and it will be released in October of this year by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., which is one of the world’s most prestigious publishers of high quality art and illustrated books. It’ll be a hardcover volume, 9″ by 12-1/2″, all in color and with a gatefold and all sorts of nifty features that we hope will make it worthy of its subject.
Later on — and don’t ask me when but it’ll be another year or two at least — I’ll publish the gargantuan, Galactus-sized bio for the hardcore Kirby fan…the kind of person who wants to read every little detail of the man’s extraordinary life. As soon as fresh data stops coming my way, I’ll wrap that one up but in the meantime, you’ll have the first book before this Christmas. I’ll tell you more about it over the next few weeks.
If this isn’t exciting news, we don’t know what is.
Wasn’t he also organizing an art tribute book? I remember shortly after Kirby’s death, there was a long line of Big Name artists who had pledged to each draw a Kirby character for an art book. Whatever happened to that?
This belongs on my bookshelf!
Wish Steve Ditko & Wally Wood would get the same treatment.
Especially Wally Wood. He was the better artist.
I’ll quibble whether he was “better,” any day, but even if he was–Kirby defined the form.
I love the idea that the pencil work will be in color. I’ve only got one pice of original Kirby art–a page of a random Machine Man issue–and it’s wonderful to see those little bits and pieces.
Is there any word on cost? I am worried it will be prohibitive.