DC Announces Jack Kirby 100th Birthday One-Shots

This August, DC will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Jack Kirby's birth with a half-dozen one shots featuring some of his best-known characters.

Bruce Timm, Bill Sienkiewicz, Chris Burnham, Howard Chaykin and Shane Davis provided preview art for a number of one-shots featuring characters like Darkseid, Orion, OMAC, the Newsboy Legion, Mister Miracle, and more. You can see the images in the attached image gallery, via Newsarama.

The projects were announced, with no writers or interior artists attached as of yet, on DC All Access.

The publisher is currently celebrating Jack Kirby's hundredth birthday, which will be on August 28, 2017, with a year-long limited series titled The Kamandi Challenge, wherein various creative teams take over one of Kirby's most beloved characters for an issue at a time.

Kirby himself only lived to be 76, but because of his importance to the comics community, his family's continued involvement in the industry, and the esteem in which he was (and his work remains) held by creators and publishing professionals alike, numerous people and organizations typically put on events to celebrate "The King."

The Kamandi Challenge covers feature trade dress that puts Kirby's face, complete with his trademark cigar, on the cover, surrounded by Kirby Krackle, the word "King" and the number 100. Kirby himself made a cameo appearance in the first issue. At the time, they had characterized the book as the first in a series of publications celebrating Kirby's life and legacy. Other Kirby-themed DC releases this year include Bug!: The Adventures of Forager by the Allred Family and the forthcoming Mister Miracle series from Sheriff of Babylon's Tom King and Mitch Gerads.

"Through the power of his imagination and seemingly endless energy and creativity, Jack Kirby made not just an indelible Kirby-Crackled mark on the world of comic books, but he ended up shaping the entirety of pop culture as it exists today," said DC Publisher Jim Lee. "The vastness of Jack's imagination and his powers as an artist and storyteller remain unmatched to this day. I sincerely doubt we will ever see the likes of Jack 'the King' Kirby ever again."

The issues will reportedly ship at least one every week in August.