Profile
Subscribe
The hardcover edition of this fully colored version of the silver star is in the stores finally and it is a nice reminder of a great man.
The problems of the story are still there of course but as this very clear review of the book puts it if you’re a Jack Kirby fan this is a book you should have.
They don’t call him the King for nothing. Jack Kirby was able to put more awe and wonder into a comic panel than anyone else ever to try it, and while Silver Star is far from his grandest work, it’s still an enjoyable ride with the King. Done originally as a movie proposal and turned into basically a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the early eighties, Silver Star is a bit more down-to-earth than most Kirby stuff (but still on a big scale- small for Kirby is still akin to the Grand Canyon). It also differs from most of Kirby’s other stuff in that it’s a self-contained story with a real beginning and end. Most of Kirby’s work was in the Marvel and DC universes, and his characters lived beyond Kirby’s work. He was creating and then leaving it behind for others to continue in an open-ended way (though in a few cases, like New Gods, he did try belatedly to provide an ending of sorts a few different times). But with Silver Star, the story has an ending, and Kirby leaves the characters in a place where there’s closure.
I originally encountered Silver Star not in the comics, but in the “graphite edition” a year or two ago, which reproduced Kirby’s pencils without inks. That presentation was cruder, but it gave the story more gravitas and grounded it in ways that this much more colorful version can’t match, yet this version seems larger in scale somehow. It’s interesting how different presentations of the same thing can produce different experiences.
Anyway, if you’re a Kirby fan, this one probably deserves to be in your collection. It’s one of Kirby’s last original creations late in his career, and probably the last one to capture that trademark Kirby feel of larger-than-life bombast juxtaposed with cosmic themes and philosophical underpinnings.
