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Today marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the pinnacles of weird speculative sci-fi films of the late ‘60s alongside the likes of Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green. The film actually wasn’t a huge success immediately upon release but slowly became a cult classic, allegedly because audiences of stoners would enjoy tripping out to the psychedelic images on display.
The film proved popular enough to warrant getting a comic book adaptation by the king of comics himself: Jack Kirby. Kirby liked doing the comic so much and it did so well for Marvel that this led into a new ongoing comic by Kirby exploring his own interpretation of the Monolith and the attendant 2001: A Space Odyssey mythos, which is what I’ll be looking at today.
The Jack Kirby 2001: A Space Odyssey comic is, today, mostly remembered for being the book that introduced the character of Machine Man, but we’ll get to him in due time. The opening few issues are basically all the same structure as the film but following more fantastical events and with Jack Kirby style splash page artwork. If you’ve never seen 2001 or just don’t remember, the way these stories work is mostly centered around the Monolith, an unknowable entity that’s taken an interest in the development of mankind.
Each issue begins in pre-history with the Monolith appearing to a single representative of ancient man and using its weird psychic powers to inspire them to take the next step in the evolution of human thought like inventing the wheel or bronze. From there we cut to a distant future where we see basically the reincarnation of the stone age character making another great leap forward, usually in space exploration, before again encountering the monolith and passing through a trippy otherworldly dimension then aging into a cosmic fetus of some kind.
Much like the movie version of this story I’m not really sure the “narrative” is what’s going to hold the most interest for folks in this comic series, especially with how repetitive things get around issue 4. The bigger selling point of the comic IS the trippy weirdness of it all and the chance to see Kirby draw dinosaurs and spacemen in the same issue.
This appeal definitely wasn’t lost on producers at the time either as that was a big selling point of Kirby’s entire late career among the big 2. He’d previously had a surprise hit for DC with Kamandi, a book that was literally pitched as a rip-off of Planet of the Apes, and Marvel was keen to mimic its success- first with 2001: A Space Odyssey then later with Devil Dinosaur.
Kirby himself was most drawn to the property because of his growing fascination with what was, at the time, a new and emerging theory- Ancient Astronauts. If you’ve never encountered this idea it’s basically become the bread and butter of sci-fi lately, the concept that ancient humans were guided by or at least interacted with alien astronauts.
Kirby had become fascinated by the idea, like most of nerd America, when it was introduced to the world in the book Chariots of the Gods, to the point that it played a key role in inspiring his New Gods comic. 2001: A Space Odyssey was basically just another chance to explore this concept and was hardly his last- the idea would pepper his work going forward, most notably in his Marvel comic Eternals but it was also there throughout his independent work.
As for the comics themselves, I wouldn’t say they were one of Kirby’s best writing works. By this point, he’d been working in the medium since the ‘40s with Captain America and spent the better part of the ‘60s and ‘70s working on a titanic number of comics at once so taking a lighter approach to the scripting on this book is pretty forgivable. Like I said, it’s most similar to the original Devil Dinosaur comics: a romp through a science fantasy version of the primal age more about showcasing how imaginative and developed the artwork could be.
Speaking of which, Kirby’s art skills really were near their absolute zenith at this time and every issue of 2001: A Space Odyssey involves at least 1 spectacular double-paged spread. A real standout is the story in issues 5-6, imagining a sterile dystopian future where the Earth has become so polluted that all aspects of life are these elaborately packaged artifices and the monolith appears to a superhero-obsessed directionless young guy and inspires him to join the space program where he makes first contact with alien life.
The alien life design is incredibly weird and evocative in that Invasion of the Saucer Men kind of way and the space flight scenes are a thing to behold, especially some of the final scenes where our hero re-encounters the monolith after helping mankind move beyond its plastic prison.
As for Machine Man, whose stories make-up the last 3 issues of the comic and whose solo series followed up this one, it’s kind of another transparent reworking of old Kirby ideas but with a new coat of paint. To be clear, I don’t MIND the new coat of paint, Machine Man has one of the most striking visual designs of all time and it’s not at all surprising he became instantly iconic with comic readers and has endured to this day. However, the story, which only tangentially involves the Monolith as the thing that inspired Machine Man’s creator, feels an awful lot like Kirby’s OMAC comic for DC, which was itself, again, literally pitched by editorial as “Captain America in the future.”
A lot of it is fairly standard “robot on the run” stuff set in Kirby’s vision of a New Age ‘70s sci-fi dystopia, so like imagine Logan’s Run as decorated by Galactus. Probably the most interesting part of the run is in the 10th issue where it’s revealed the Monolith has a kind of archenemy- Satan. Seriously, I’m not even kidding, the issue is titled ‘Hotline to Hades’ and they mean that very literally.
It’s all about some villainous fat cat who has a phone that lets him call Satan and apparently Satan really hates that Machine Man has free will so he puts a hit out on him. It’s really weird and vaguely reminiscent of classic Doctor Who, I honestly wish the concept had come up sometime prior to the last issue if only so we could see more of Satan vs. a big hunk of rock.
You shouldn’t need me to tell you that Jack Kirby’s bizarre reworking of Stanley Kubrick’s bizarre reworking of Arthur C. Clarke’s very bizarre 2001: A Space Odyssey is a niche oddity at best. A lot of your enjoyment of it is going to depend on how much you like Kirby artwork and are willing to forgive anachronistic depictions of the Stone Age involving dinosaurs and such. Personally, it’s the kind of mini-series I’d argue is the pinnacle of the comic genre: not necessarily great but definitely experimental and unique, you really aren’t going to read anything else like it out there.
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