So I’ve been studying Jack Kirby lately, because I really like some things about him. Not a lot of things, definitely not all of them, but some of them. I had a comic that I was working on for the Next Issue of Rocksalt that needed a giant knock’emout punch for the antipunchline (that’ll make sense when you see it, the comic is sort of based around the idea of reading it out of order so that the first thing you read gradually becomes something different as you get around to reading the rest of it, sort of playing upon the expectation that a comic should be read from left to right versus the reality that comics are read from the most eye-catching panel to the next, occasionally modified by that aforementioned expectation, so if you make a central enough image you can sort of make people read it over and over again while they read the rest of the panels in a sort of jagged order), and I needed the most rockin’est punch that could exist, which is of course Kirby…
…I’m just breaking up the paragraph here for readability, I’m still on the same subject…
….so I became interested in that most central and pressing question of our time, is Kirby’s anatomy realistic? In the process of making this drawing, I actually took a million reference photos, photoshopped them together, and drew over actual human anatomy in fragments to get this result, and then I had to go back even farther into cartooning (and away from the model) to make it work, so no. Kirby does not depict realistic anatomy. He depicts plausible anatomy, which is better.
