Jack Kirby Art and Morphological Resonance

Strange things happen sometimes and you find yourself at the nexus of them. Case in point: Jack Kirby artwork.

When we ran a massive Kirby retrospective last summer, we just thought it would be fun. (It was!) Along the way, we connected with Science and Religion and corresponded with its author Iain about our mutual Kirby appreciation. Iain paints, and we like to paint sometimes (when we’re not working on our next guitar masterpiece or creative writing or blogging our butt off…)

Somewhere in that correspondence, one of us suggested the idea of creating paintings inspired by Kirby’s more cosmic works. Because if you look at Captain Victory, there’s a lot more going on artistically than just another space opera comic book. Kirby’s splash panels open up a really unique art style that doesn’t really fit in with any established school. The King took a cosmic vibe he’d been developing for years and just ran it over the top.

So we painted a few things, and Iain was painting, too. We ran the final version of his Silver Surfer painting in our 2011 review of Mars. Then it got weird. Just a few days later, Scott Edelman posted on Reddit about artist Sharon Moody. We read the column and dug a little deeper. We looked at the art gallery that represents her work and also her own web site to get a better understanding of where she’s coming from. That’s when we discovered Sharon had created a photo-realistic depiction of the same Jack Kirby Fantastic Four comic book from which Iain took his inspiration!

Of course, we wrote Iain about it, and he sent us his thoughts on morphological resonance: “When we make advances, people pick up on it in many ways psychically, of course to a faint degree – the internet, being a reflection of advancing towards an already existing universal concept, performs the same function. Nevertheless, even without direct communication, people pick up ideas from the movement of consciousness, reflecting it in their own way.”

Now, you may groove on that like we do, or you may dismiss it as unscientific. One thing we know for sure: things often happen in ways we can’t fully explain, and things seem connected in a deeper way than our conscious intellects can fully grasp. Carl Jung had a theory of synchronicity that closely relates, especially as far as our intuitive faculty goes, and Lao Tsu may have pointed to the mysteriously interconnected workings of the Tao. But this much is true: it gets weirder.

Not five minutes went by after reading Iain’s morphic message when we got a pingback from an artist’s site. Nik Harron – who we admittedly never heard of before – posted a painting of Galactus and linked back to our post on Jim Lee’s version of this character first brought to life by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. What the…?! Were we not just discussing this idea of proliferating Kirby paintings?

How many Jack Kirby-inspired paintings are out there? We don’t know! But it’s one thing to talk about coincidence, and it’s another thing entirely to experience so many ‘coincidences’ coinciding in such a short period of time. Perhaps Mars lies near the nexus of a Jack Kirby morphogenetic field. If so, nothing would make us happier!

Now, get out there and create your own Kirby-inspired works. We’d love to hear about them!

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