Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Review: 'Jack Kirby's Dingbat Love'


In the seventies, Jack Kirby developed several titles for DC Comics’ “Speak Out” series, which would skew toward a more adult readership while tackling topics such as divorce, African-American romance, and street crime. DC did not like Kirby’s approach, watering down his comics in most respects and ultimately nipping them all in the bud. Consequently, Kirby’s work on True-Life Divorce, Soul Love, and Dingbats on Danger Street has become some of the rarest artifacts from the “King of Comics”.

That does not mean these titles were all that great. The stories in the anthologies True-Life Divorce and Soul Love were more like sketchy premises than developed tales. Dingbats on Danger Street, a serial about a crime-fighting street gang, was better developed and more in Kirby’s wheelhouse, but it was also kind of rambling. The problems were not necessarily Kirby’s fault. He wanted to draw other writers (his wish list included Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe!) and artists into these projects, particularly True-Life Divorce and Soul Love since he realized that as a non-divorced, non African-American man, he was not the most qualified to write these magazines for a mostly female audience. DC was not having that and insisted he write and draw them all before basically vaporizing the titles.

True-Life Divorce, Soul Love, and Dingbats on Danger Street may not be as timeless as The Fantastic Four or The Incredible Hulk, but the story behind them is interesting, and they are fairly fun as ultra-seventies relics full of charmingly awkward slang and dated décor. So Kirby completists will still want to check out Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love, a funky new hardcover from TwoMorrows Publishing that tells the history of Kirby’s “Speak Out” work through a series of illustrated essays and recreates those lost titles in a variety of ways. Some stories are simply presented as rough pencil art. Some feature period inking and some feature new inking and digital coloring performed with a relatively light-hand to better approximate how these comics would have looked during the seventies. Dingbats on Danger Street may supply the most readable stories, but the most love clearly went into Soul Love, which recreates the whole hypothetical package complete with period-style advertisements and text stories by publisher John Morrow and his daughter Lily. Groovy!

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