Kirby Studies

Rob Steibel, at his Kirby Museum blog, Kirby Dynamics, has posted a very kind entry about my recent interview with Tom Spurgeon, as well as about Hand of Fire itself. Thanks, Rob, for the encouraging words, and for the shout-out!

Rob follows this with a terrific series of posts building on the concept of the technological sublime as discussed in my book, with a focus on Kirby’s original pencils, and then the finished Kirby/Royer artwork, for page 14 of Kirby’s comic book 2001: A Space Odyssey #1 (Dec 1976)—a real beauty. Nice to see!

Benjamin Woo, a super-sharp scholar of comics and culture at Simon Fraser University, has posted a review of Hand of Fire to his site, BenjaminWoo.net. It’s very encouraging. Woo calls the book “smart and sharp and learned, but acces­si­ble to the inter­ested layper­son and shot through with gen­uine love for the material.” Nice to hear!

Also, Gary Picariello’s review for Yahoo! calls Hand of Fire “enjoyable and thoughtful reading” that “makes the reader think.” I particularly appreciate his description of the book as “critical thinking at its best.”

Meanwhile, Rob Steibel, over at his Kirby Dynamics blog, has nicely sounded the trumpets! Thank you, Rob.

Reader response has started to appear on amazon.com, of course, with the usual mixed results (heh). Nothing like contrasting doses of ego-boosting affirmation and skull-rattling provocation all at once!