Webcomic Weekly: Paul Pope’s Reinterpretation Of Jack Kirby’s OMAC…

Webcomic Weekly, taking a look at online comics (my definition of webcomics is as broad as I want it to be) from all over. Today, a little Jack Kirby reimagined by Paul Pope…

In 2005, DC Comics published Solo #3, featuring the works of Paul Pope. And part of that was an experiment to reinterpret Jack Kirby’s magnificently over-the-top first issue of OMAC as, as Pope puts it, “a reduced fever dream.”

Pope, if you don’t already know, is just a sublime comics maker, hugely talented, something of an auteur, very much a rock and roll kind of artist. After bursting into comics in the early ’90s with his self-published material, including THB, which I absolutely adored as a 20-something, he’s worked with DC, Dark Horse, produced the Manga Supertrouble for Kodansha, and generally fills his pages with energy, appropriating ideas and styles from Europe, Manga, and traditional US superhero comics.

His work includes THB, The Ballad Of Doctor Richardson, Escapo, Buzz Buzz, Supertrouble, One-Trick Rip-Off, Batman: Year 100, Heavy Liquid, 100%, Wednesday Comics: Adam Strange, Pulphope: The Art of Paul Pope, and the Battling Boy graphic novel series.

But let’s talk OMAC.

Created by Kirby in 1974, towards the end of his time at DC, where he’d introduced his Fourth Worlds comics and characters, OMAC was sort of a Captain America in the future, a corporate nobody in a dystopian society transformed by the Brother Eye satellite and put to work for the Global Peace Agency. It was, frankly, weird. But it was wonderful Kirby sort of weird.

So what sort of artist would even consider reinterpreting something like this?

Yep, Paul Pope.

There’s the opening page of both Kirby’s original (on the left, although I really shouldn’t have to tell you that) and Pope’s reinterpretation on the right.

You can read the whole thing here at his website. Obviously, it’s rather a bold move. In Britain, we’d describe it as ballsy, in the USA you might hear it described as chutzpah. Doing a sort-of panel-by-panel recreation of a Kirby comic but then having the audacity to alter it, reorder the storytelling, and adapt it to your own style… oh yes, that takes the sort of self-confidence that Pope’s exhibited throughout his career.

Here’s a little more comparison… Jack’s double page spread 2-3, page 4, page 5…

And how Pope reinterprets it… his page 2… but then he shifts the rest to the climactic end of his OMAC, the end of his page 13, and pages 14 and 15…

Yep, now that really is self-confidence personified… take a Kirby story and make it your own.

But frankly, that’s Paul Pope all over. It’s why some don’t like him all that much. But me, well I’ve always loved what he does.

Go take a look at his OMAC strip and while you’re there at Pope’s site, do go and look at the rest of his work. If you’re anything like me, you’re going to absolutely love it – if you don’t already that is.