JACK KIRBY MIGHTY THOR ARTIST EDITION HC Hardcover – January 1, 2016

Wow! Great stuff! King sized edition showcasing great King Kirby artwork on Thor. I could spend hours looking at this book! So interesting to compare the different inkers and the different looks they bring to the artwork. Its all subjective opinion as to which look you prefer. As for me, I pick Chic Stone! Great book again from IDW, I have not been disappointed yet! ☺

Whenever a serious discussion of comics art and/or history is being held the King,Jack Kirby cannot be ignored. A hero of mine and a great artist whose im pact will never fade.

IDW Publishing have hit on a winning format here, given the extremely high price of original classic comic art pages. These mammoth books consist of extremely high quality reprints, scanned directly from those hard to find and impossible to afford pages, in this case, a whole 160 of them. This is the first IDW Artist's Edition to feature Jack Kirby's work from Marvel Comics, the company he was working for when Stan Lee dubbed him 'the King.' The soubriquet stuck because Kirby is, quite simply, one of the greatest, and most influential, stylists ever to wield a pencil in the under-appreciated medium of comics.It's hard for me to find fault with this book, having spent years looking for even a single page I could afford from Kirby's epic run on 'The Mighty Thor' (1962-1970) and with absolutely no luck. Within the protecting box and huge hard covers of this book, we have not just odd pages of this wonderful art, but entire stories from Journey Into Mystery (#111, #117, #118), Thor (#134 and #135), and Thor Annual (#2). Extras include a gallery section of 10 Kirby Thor covers. Most of the inking over Kirby's pencils is by the unjustly criticised Vince Colletta, whose style perfectly suits these stories of a Norse god let loose in 1960s New York and in Asgard and other realms pierced by Yggdrasil, the World Tree. I loved these stories as a kid and seeing them now, as it were, on the wide screen in HD, is just an unbelievable treat.My one criticism is the same as it has been for previous Kirby Artist's Editions, which is that if you're going to go to all the trouble of producing these pages at the same size as the original pages (the book measures a whopping 22" x 15"), then why is it necessary to cut off or through the margins of the artwork? In the case of Kirby's 60s Marvel work, this is doubly important, because the presence of Kirby's marginal notes is essential to understanding what the artist's original intentions were before Stan Lee got hold of them and wrote the scripts, often changing character motivations or whole storylines. If IDW could correct this glaring oversight in future editions, they'd have a perfect product instead of just a damn good one.As it is, I'm delighted to have access to this art so well reproduced, even to the extent of printing it on something very like the Bristol Board on which is was originally drawn. The reproduction is so good that you can see every mark Kirby and Colletta left on those pages half a century ago, each little twitch and flick of Colletta's pen or brush, glimpses of Kirby's not-quite-erased pencilling, occasional blobs of white-out or blue pencil from the art department and at least some of those all-important marginal notes, mostly from Kirby, occasionally from Lee requesting changes.Incidentally, there are only a few panels where Colletta has erased portions of Kirby's drawing instead of inking it complete. There are, however, numerous instances of him doing what every other Kirby inker did in the 50s and 60s, i.e. tidying up, adjusting poses or facial features slightly to improve balance, and doing his best to ensure that the finished pages looked as good as possible, given the time constraints and Marvel's lousy pay rates. The end result speaks for itself in these pages. Kirby and Colletta on Thor remain one of the greatest art teams in comics.As an added bonus, Journey Into Mystery #111 is inked by another favourite Kirby inker, the great and underrated Chic Stone. Stone's fluid brushwork was, perhaps more than any other, responsible for Marvel Comics deserving the 'Pop Art' tag they put on their covers for a while in the 60s. His inking over Kirby's pencils is just awesome. Wow!I loved a lot of Marvel comics in the 1960s, including, of course, Kirby's Fantastic Four and Ditko's Spider-Man, but there is something about the combination of Kirby's peerless pencils and Colletta's sensitive inking on Thor that I still find magical to this day. Hence not docking a star for the cropped margins - but seriously, come on IDW, you can do it!