Sunday, December 09, 2012

A Cracklin' Time

Sunday Meskin Measures.

Jack Kirby's The Negative Man for House of Mystery #84 is interesting to Kirby fans, because it features one of the earliest appearances of his trick of using black splotches to indicate light or fire against a black background. Later on, when he saw how Joe Sinnott inked them, the evolved into his famous 'Kirby Krackle', getting a life of their own as some sort of cosmic energy. In The Negative man, Kirby uses this effect to deleniate the outline of the crackling energy of an atomic man.

In the next Mark Merlin story shows a different approach to the same effect on a burning monster. This story is from december 1959 and although Meskin had experimented with the effects of negative space, none of this is used here. Compared with Kirby's effect, this is sort of disappointed. In this (very well drawn) story, it's the stone monster at the end that impresses me the most.


















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