A lot of it’s the hats and the costumes. It’s not just Galactus that got a Cosmic Beanie: Kirby could casually crank out a panel showing a row of henchmen each of whom were wearing something on their heads never before conceived by the mind of man. You’d never see these guys again but next issue there’d be two or more such panels with entirely different sets of headgear.
And look at those costumes! Today everybody takes the easy way out and just pencils everyone nude and then inks them in with their characteristic colour and icon. Looking at Kirby’s stuff you’re convinced that you’re looking at a clothing catalogue from some foreign country which you’ve never heard of.
But what was really inimitable was the kinetic nature of the art: there’s so much forceful action going on that it seems inevitable that it’s going to spill off the page and whack you on the nose. Kirby was called “an athlete of the easel” because of the way he drew. Most of the time he was waving his arms and implements around so much that your life was in danger if you got too close while he was working. When Captain America is bashing someone with his shield on the page Kirby is above that page bashing it with a pencil in the same manner. This would seem to indicate that he was using the extra-pyramidal ganglia (the portion of the brain co-ordinating large muscle arrangement with emotional and intellectual states) to draw. Which, of course, no one can do… no one Human that is!
