Sunday 23 June 2024

Kirby dots and Kirby crackle

 
Jack Kirby

In my last post on invisible rays I mentioned the fact that Jack Kirby had devoted much of his career to the depiction of both physical and psychic energies. I have also decided to devote a full post to this issue because a blog on drawing at some point has to acknowledge the influence of Jack Kirby on any artist who read American superhero comic books when growing up in the 1960s. I have in the past referred to Steve Ditko's surreal visionary landscapes, that made up the backgrounds of Doctor Strange comics, but it was Jack Kirby that developed visual languages that gave me an insight into the possibilities of depicting invisible energies.  

An explosion of Kirby Krackle

Jack Kirby in cosmic visualisation mode

I'm not alone in recognising Kirby's importance when it comes to visualising cosmic energies, Jeffery Kripal has stated;

 'For Kirby, the human body is a manifestation or crystallization of finally inexplicable energies... What Mesmer called animal magnetism, Reichenbach knew as the blue od and Reich saw as a radiating blue cosmic orgone becomes in Jack Kirby a trademark energetics signaled by "burst lines" and a unique energy field of black, blobby dots that has come to be affectionately known as the "Kirby Krackle" ... The final result was a vision of the human being as a body of frozen energy that, like an atomic bomb, could be released with stunning effects, for good or for evil. These metaphysical energies, I want to suggest, constitute the secret source of Kirby's art'. (Kripal, 2011, p. 286 ) 

Kirby Krackle is also known in the comic book trade as Kirby Dots, when depicting a directional energy ray rather than an energy field. These overlapping dots are a way of visualising a crackle of energy such as a lightning bolt or what has been called in comic book jargon, 'a battle aura', This is a visual sign that lets the comic book reader know that the hero or villain is psyching themselves up for battle. They are drawn as emitting a coruscating, Kirlian-like glow around their bodies as a sign of great inner power. 

The technique consists of drawing a series of overlapping spots or dots along the edge of the energy effect being created, and as you do so you create a white negative space that begins to optically oscillate. 

Bridget Riley

The Op artist Bridget Riley was using a similar effect at the same time, but Kirby was more organic in his approach, which allowed him to be more suggestive in his metaphoric impact. When I was teaching, an interesting visual exercise for Foundation students, was to take a regular grid and begin to set out dots within it. Then to distort the grid and to make the dots follow the distortion. You can do this within a grid made by using curved perspectives if you want to be spatially playful.


Once you have begun to achieve something like the forms directly above, you can start to copy elements and overlap or push some of the dots together.

There now exists a CGI tool for automatically creating Kirby Dots, and an analogous technique called 'particle emission' is used in video game graphics for rendering particle emissions and energy fields. 

Screenshot from a 'particle emission' CGI showcase



Kirby Crackle

The illustration above was adopted from an online Kirby dot tutorial. The negative space around the dots is vital and you can see how they can either represent moving, directional energy or the porous edge of an energy field.

By combining the dots with lines, especially if the lines were in a deep perspective, Kirby (and other artists working with him) was able to give an idea of a sudden blast of energy, as in an explosion. 


Kirby and Sinnott: Captain America

I was first introduced to this idea of spots as a visual language by my school art teacher, Paul Rudall and I reflected upon it in a previous post on Dots and spots. Both of these approaches to using spots or dots as visualisations of energy, came into my life during the mid 1960s and they have stayed with me, becoming more personally meaningful as I get older. 

Live objects breathing and embedded within an energy flow

References

Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2011). Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 286–287

Foley, Shane (November 2001). "Kracklin' Kirby: Tracing the advent of Kirby Krackle"Jack Kirby Collector. No. 33.

Pencil Jack online tutorial for Kirby Krackle

See also:

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Dots and spots

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

Visualising energy flow

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

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