Wired Mesh

Kirby & Kirby

While Pakistani sportswear salesmen were busy on my blog ("We always prefer Customer Satisfaction"), I was cruising the backwoods of Florida with Josiah, catching up with family and friends. In the most interesting development, Bruce Kirby, who runs the Cambridge Study Center and taught me in high school, has asked J. Q. and I to start an online magazine on Christianity and culture. We're envisioning something a little bit like Salon or Slate, only much smaller, with greater openness to faith, and making no money (I guess that last bit's not different from Salon at all). Anyone interested in submitting thoughtful pieces on music, literature or contemporary culture is welcome to drop me a line.

Speaking of Kirbys, Elvis Mitchell has a great article in today's Times, with novelist Michael Chabon talking about Jack Kirby, the King of Comics. Kirby, who invented the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, and the Fantastic Four, would have been 86 tomorrow.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the article is Chabon's contention that while a glut of movies are being based on comic books these days, Jack Kirby's comics actually borrowed constantly from the movies. "But it worked both ways," he says, "because Kirby was a huge movie fan. And his comic books are sometimes subtly, sometimes very blatantly borrowing from the movies that he loved. There was always this very strong element of that Warner Brothers, George Raft, John Garfield, Jimmy Cagney gangster stuff going through all of the books. And there's all the Universal horror movie stuff he kept going back to over and over. You can just tell the influence of movies was very, very heavy on him."

It always fascinates me how different forms of art influence others. Film seems to have a special potential for impacting and being impacted by other types of art, since it is an amaglam of visuals, music and narrative. It borrows constantly from paiting, novels and musical composition, and those art forms in turn borrow from it.

More on this later. I have to go apartment shopping.