In May 2013, Sequart began its second themed week with Sci-Fi Week. For it, Sequart’s founder, Julian Darius, planned something fairly ambitious: a 12,000-word analysis of Jack Kirby’s wonderfully bizarre adaptation and continuation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Yes, continuation. It’s just one of those things that has to be seen to be believed.) Broken down into six parts, Julian’s analysis included an introduction, a discussion of Jack Kirby’s adaptation of the movie, a discussion of the first four (of ten) issues of his comic-book continuation, and an essay on how Kirby’s work differs from 2001 co-creator Arthur C. Clarke’s own continuation.
After Julian finished posting it online, he became even more ambitious and decided that, with a bit of work, these pieces could be added to and turned into a short book. In order to do this, first he went back and expanded and polished the existing articles. Then he wrote about 12,000 more words, analyzing the remaining six issues he didn’t cover online. In all, the 90-page finished product, The Weirdest Sci-Fi Comic Ever Made: Understanding Jack Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is twice as long as Julian’s original online series of articles.
So if you’re a fan of Jack Kirby, wacky sci-fi comics, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or (better yet) all of the above, you will really enjoy this book (and it most likely will make you want to search out the truly baffling comics themselves). The book is available from Amazon in both a print version ($7.99) and for the Kindle ($3.99).
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