(The readers loved this. Posterity loved this. At the time, I think, the publishers simply pined for their vacuum cleaners.)

Page after page, idea after idea. The most important thing was the work, and the work never stopped.

I loved the Fourth World work, just as I loved what followed it—Jack’s magical horror title, The Demon; his reimagining of Planet of the Apes (a film he hadn’t seen) as Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth; and I even loved, to my surprise (because I didn’t read war comics, but I would follow Jack Kirby anywhere), a World War 2 comic called The Losers. I loved OMAC: One Man Army Corps. I even liked The Sandman—a Joe Simon–written children’s story that Jack drew the first issue of, and which would wind up having a perhaps disproportionate influence on the rest of my life.

Kirby’s imagination was as illimitable as it was inimitable. He drew people and machines and cities and worlds beyond imagining—beyond my imagining anyway. It was grand and huge and magnificent. But what drew me in, in retrospect, was always the storytelling, and, in contrast to the hugeness of the imagery and the impossible worlds, it was the small, human moments that Kirby loved to depict. Moments of tenderness, mostly. Moments of people being good to each other, helping or reaching out to each other. Every Kirby fan, it seems to me, has at least one story of his they remember not because it awed them, but because it touched them.

I did not meet Jack Kirby. Not in the flesh. And I wish I had walked across that room and shaken his hand and, most importantly, said thank you. But Kirby’s influence on me, just like Kirby’s influence on comics, was already set in stone, written across the stars in crackling bolts of black energy dots and raw power, and honestly that’s all that matters.

Neil Gaiman

September 2007, London

P.S.: In a perfect universe you would walk around a huge Kirby museum and stare at Kirby originals and also at the printed and colored versions of Kirby’s art, and Mark Evanier would stroll along beside you, telling you about what you were looking at, what it is, when and how Jack did it and why, because Mark is wise and funny and the best-informed guide you could have. He knows stuff. This is not a perfect world and that museum does not exist, not yet, so you will have to settle for Mark Evanier on the page.

The introduction to Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, 2008.

The Simon and Kirby Superheroes

I’ve written about Jack Kirby in the past, about the power and the energy of his art and his storytelling. He was one of the people who made comics what they are today. He was the most dynamic, most innovative, most creative (if we were only talking quantity, not quality, given the list of important comics characters Jack co-created, he’d still be a giant) artist in twentieth-century comics.