leading from
 |
| Scene from The Celestials #7 |
a) Did Jack Kirby reference HR Giger
A question about whether Jack Kirby took HR Giger's Landscape XXIX featuring babies on wheelchairs, and reinterpreted it to make the faces in to the heads of the Celestial giants from #7 of The Eternals.
It seems to be a suggestion that Kirby found out about Giger's art, he himself was interested in art and surrealism, and Giger had already been referencing his art back in paintings such as The Spell II, III & IV.
Again there isn't much to go by but some of the details vaguely or abstractly conform to one another and it's all up in the air.
 |
| baby in wheelchair and Gammenon the Gatherer |
b) Baby in wheelchair and Gammenon the Gatherer
The baby's open mouth becomes the grill over the forehead. The braces becomes the framework beneath the Celestial, Gammenon the Gatherer's visor.
The oxygen tank with pipe fed into the back of the head becomes a side appendage with a device like a small grip
 |
| baby with missing part in the arm in wheelchair and Jemiah The Analyzer, |
c) Baby in wheelchair and Jemiah The Analyzer,
The arm of the baby has lost flesh on the upper arm and ribbed metal is seen beneath.
The arm of the baby has lost flesh on the upper arm and ribbed metal is seen beneath.
It becomes transformed into the head set and mouth of the Celestial giant named Jemiah The Analyzer, and where there is a gap in the flesh, there is a gap between the head set and the mouth.
 |
| baby in wheelchair and Hagen The Analyzer, |
d) Baby in wheelchair and Hargen The Measurer
Here the blobs over the baby's left eye seem to resemble the flower bud shaped blobs on the left side of the face of this celestial.
 |
| baby in wheelchair and unnamed Celestial |
e) Baby in wheelchair and unnamed Celestial
This baby appears to have diagonal impressions around the brow and Kirby has created diagonal patterns for the unnamed Celestial.
 |
| Giger's Landscape XXIX |
Saturday 2nd July 2016
ReplyDeleteAdded Jack Kirby references Giger's Landscape XXIX (1974) (work 249) in The Eternals #7, January 1977 ? So it might well be that Jack Kirby was somehow aware of Giger's work, not really sure how. In issue 7 of the Eternals, there's a panel showing the rows of Celestials, and it looks to me as if he had take Giger's landscape showing the babies in wheelchairs and abstractly used them as reference for the faces of some of his Eternals. So certain faces correspond to the babies in their positions in the images. So perhaps they had friends in the artworld, although Jack Kirby was known for drawing precognitive comic book stories, and then it seems to be just me making the association in my usual way. I'll try not to wear myself out any more thinking about it.