CBR: When Words Collide - Apr 12, 2010

[CBR News]

This week, Tim looks at a tale of two titanic talents, as a post-Sin City Frank Miller once took on the New Gods' origin story of Orion, Darkseid's son, giving the world his version of Jack Kirby.


Full article here.

[Ziza9]

I picked up Tales of the New Gods trade before Final Crisis started and I have to say that this was one of my favorite stories from the trade.

[berk]

Pretty nice article, except when it mentions Kirby's original series. I think that you have to look at Kirby's, um, enthusiastic use of exclamation marks as one of the many personal quirks of his style and that taking multiple exclamation points as evidence of "hysterics" on the part of the character and/or the writer is a serious mis-reading of the text.

Just as an experiment, try reading those sentences as the forceful declarations of larger than life characters, like the powerful speech of an Old Testament prophet or whatever image works for you. As Simonson put it, as a roar, not an hysterical cry.

Everything abut the New Gods is more than human, scaled up, dialed to 11, etc, etc. Kirby's Tigra wasn't any more hysterical than Simonson's, but to see that you're going to have to work a lot harder at reading Kirby's story in its own terms rather than imposing more conventional standards over it and then misjudging it by those rules.

[TimothyCallahan]

Kirby's Tigra wasn't more hysterical than Simonson's?

Since all we have to go on are the words in the balloons and her body language on the page, then, well, she surely was!!

[berk]

And yet I look at those same pictures and read those same words and apparently am being told a completely different story. I see anger, I see ferocity, but nothing I'd understand as hysteria - maybe I'm misunderstanding your use of the word here?