Tuesday, August 26, 2008

JACK KIRBY: THE MOTHER OF ALL INVENTIONS

ITEM! One of the toughest things about working with Jack "King" Kirby was just trying to keep up with and sort through all of his idiosyncratic ideas. Jack was the kind of creator who threw away more ideas before breakfast than most of us had all year. And I’ll be the first to admit that when parsing through the 10 gazillion ideas he’d pack into those pencilled pages’ margin notes, a few times I went. “well, gee, that’s great... but it’s just too crazy. THAT’S never gonna happen.”

But I’ve noticed that the present has a habit of catching up to Jack’s future-perfect ideas. To wit, Apple’s ubiquitous iPhone. Just recently, at least two comapnies have announced or deployed comic book reading applications for Steve’ Job’s wunderdevice. A company named Clickwheel developed something called the Clickwheel Comic Reader that lets you read specially-formatted comics right on your iPhone. For example, you can subscribe to Great Britain’s titanic 2000 A.D. and Judge Dredd for a nominal fee, or catch tons of other comic creations for absolutely free!

Then there’s iVerse’s recently announced iVerse Media Player, which will do basically the same thing when released. And iVerse is actively seeking content partners even as we blog. What a great way for independent comic book creators to distribute their wares, as well as the big boys. I can tell you that your Uncle Stanley will be right on top of this with my own daringly Disney digital comic series, Time Jumper! As the late-great Walt Kelly said, “We have met the future, and it is us.” And as always, Jolly Jack was waiting for us there all along. While your iPhone can’t yet summon a Boom Tube up for yah (Hear that, Jobs? Get to work!), but you can read comics on it for Odin’s sake! How cool is that? To keep up on the latest and greatest comic reading applications for your iPhone or iPod Touch, go to the iPhone Comic Book website. Tell ‘em Stan the Man sent yah!

Excelsior!
Smiley

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This comparison has already been made several times by other writers.