Kirby as an artist

The next story ends with this image:

Notice anything? When reading this (January 2018) people were discussing the upcoming publication of Kirby's adaptation of The Prisoner. Here is the splash page. Notice a similarity?.

Yep. the stretched arms and torso. Kirby was famous for adding extreme muscle, bone and sinew to his action shots: distorting the body to reflect the mind. Here he does the same with mental topics. The first prisoner is stretching, tensing against the bars. His arms are drawn longer. The second prisoner is trying to escape yet there are no bars: his prison is psychological, his battle is in the mind. His body is stretching, contorting.

We see the same "bad art" in 2001: the story is about extremes of reality, of stretching contorting ideas, or death and rebirth in infinite forms, and the faces and bodies stretch accordingly. We see the same in New Gods and in Captain Victory: extreme mental states contort the face and body. In fact, we saw this in the previous monster tale: it was the whole point of the Abominable Snowman story.

Kirby does not do this in regular stories: no extreme emotion? No extreme body. So it is no accident.
 

Both Picasso and Kirby have a huge body of early "realistic" work to show they have mastered the language of amateur art. But so-called "realistic" art is not realistic. The real world is not flat or static. What matters in the real world is movement, conflicts, relationships. Picasso, Kirby, and other great artists learn to depict the commonplace with a few strokes (this is a face, this is a body) and instead focus on what matter: expressions, movements, relationships.  The distortion is the story.

This was probably not deliberate of course. Kirby wrote by immersing himself in the story. If he felt stretched or compressed it is only natural that his characters would be the same. This reminds me of Britain's Dennis the Menace. Leo Baxendale, in his autobiography "A Very Funny Business", records how Davy Law (creator of Britain's Dennis) was often under immense pressure. Dennis began as a very short, round characters, but the more pressure Law was under (from deadlines etc.), the skinnier and taller Dennis became. It was unintentional, but Davy was drawing from his gut. What he felt came out in his art. Kirby was the same. All great artists are like that: they put emotion on the page.

Layers

Kirby's art works on multiple layers. On the surface that picture just shows an odd looking man. But the more we dig into the story, the more we can unlock from an image. Kirby has so many layers. For example, beyond the level of The Prisoner itself we have "why did Kirby's choose that?" and "how does this fit into Kirby's other work?" On that topic, Charles Hatfield wrote:

Kirby's version of No. 6 resembles himself, sometimes remarkably so. That Kirby's hero should be square-faced and rugged is hardly surprising, yet the resemblance between the Prisoner and the artist goes beyond this in its specificity. The brooding eyes and taciturn mouth recall McGoohan, of course, but the face and figure also recall Kirby's familiar self-image: broad-nosed, compact, pugnacious. More importantly, the story - about a man resigning his position as "a matter of principle," only to find that he is once again in the grip of an unprincipled power - seems to echo Kirby's departure from Marvel, the frustration of his ambitions at DC, and his return to Marvel under a new set of editorial restraints. 

Kirby's stretched prisoners in turn mirror all people who try to escape from their life but cannot. Layers upon layers upon layers!

This is why people come back to Kirby. There is always more to ponder, more to discover.