Last month, Heavy Metal magazine announced it would be bringing color versions of Jack Kirby’s iconic Lord of Light (and later Operation Argo) art to print the very first time. Before that happens though, io9 is proud to reveal some of the images — as well as how you can get your hands on prints of it at SDCC this year.
Kirby’s art isn’t just fantastically weird and grand — it has an important place in history as part of the 1979 Operation Argo (which you might be familiar with from the recent Oscar-winning movie). Originally drawn as work for Barry Ira Geller’s planned film (and theme park) adaptation of the Roger Zelazny novel Lord of Light, the art was ultimately used as part of a CIA mission to extract hostages from the American embassy in Iran as concept art for a fake movie, Argo. The fake production was used to allow CIA agents to infiltrate the country undetected.
Although we’ve seen much of Kirby’s concept work before, this is the first time ever that it’s been colored — and colorist Mark Englert has doone a pretty fantastic job of emphasising the weirdness of Kirby’s art with a brilliantly psychedelic color palette.
Link: Behold The Psychedelic Glory Of Jack Kirby’s Argo Art, In Color At Last
