Silver Star cover with my caption

It seems that Dynamite Entertainment comic book publisher Nick Barrucci is wasting his money. He recently tried to get the rights to publish Fighting American comic books.

Fighting American Controversy

You can read the article above. It seems he never had the rights from Joe Simon to publish any Fighting American material.

I wonder why he even bothered to try and get Fighting American? That character is a boring ripoff of Captain American. The costume is terrible and the name is not even good.

Besides he already has a dozen patriot themed characters free to use in the public domain. Why does he need another patriot character?

Besides the public domain characters are at the very least, as good as Fighting American, and most of them are better.

Just a waste of money going after that property.

Dynamite Kirby news article

Now Dynamite has the rights to produce Kirby books, from the characters he did not produce for the big two companies.

This is Kirby strip-mining to the core.

It’s both a mix of feeling good / and feeling bad about a situation like this for me.

It’s good that these new Kirby books might gain new readers who will eventually lookup the original Kirby issues and the other characters he made.

It’s bad because it feels like their exploiting his work yet again to turn a quick buck.

Also it’s bad form in that instead of making new characters and ideas, they keep recycling the same old ideas over and over again ad nauseum.

Sadly for Kirby the only characters he held the ownership rights to were characters he made way past his prime, and in my view, lacking the truly successful qualities of his earlier works like Fantastic Four, X-men or even Fourth World.

Guys like Captain Victory and Silver Star look poor in substance if you were to compare it.

Plus their is also a bias in judging a work because it’s Kirby therefore you favor it more then if it was not his work. I think we all have bias for those creators we like. It’s only natural in comics, or in any field.

Yet to truly judge a work you have to step outside your bias and judge the work on it’s own merits.

I think if works like Captain Victory and Silver Star are judged on their own merits, they don’t hold up well. Their just typical comic book creations, nothing truly outstanding there.

I’d like to clarify the issue and hope it does not sound mean, even if it might sound that way. Kirby actually is in my top five for favorite comic artists. And in my top ten for favorite comic creators.

I just decided to look at this issue from a non biased viewpoint and judge the characters and books on their own merits.

As I said above, when he made these books he was past his prime creative years. And while these later works are okay. I would hardly compare them to the outstanding work he did earlier in his career. Unfortunately the characters and stories he made in his earlier works he never got to own. He got a percentage at least of his Fourth World DC books. But he never got any ownership of his Marvel books, who were the ones that made the most impact in the industry.