Galaxy Green Created by Jack Kirby

 

art by Howard Simpson

Kirby only did two pages of Galaxy Green. That may not sound like much, but with Kirby, two pages can contain enough ideas to keep other creators busy for decades.

In 2007 and 2008, French writer Jean Depelley and artist Reed Man brought Galaxy Green back in the revived French comics magazine Strange. Reed Man colored Kirby’s original pages, then he and Depelley continued the story, turning Kirby’s abandoned cosmic tease into something closer to a full-fledged series.

The women later returned in Kirby: Genesis, the Dynamite Entertainment series Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross developed from Kirby’s unpublished characters and concepts. There, Galaxy Green crossed paths with creations such as Captain Victory, Silver Star and the Glory Knights, finally joining the larger Kirby universe they had been orbiting for years.

Galaxy Green may be a footnote in Kirby’s career, but it is a very Kirby footnote. Beneath the jokes, beauty-pageant poses and interplanetary matchmaking sits a surprisingly modern bundle of anxieties about gender, reproduction, extinction and who gets to decide the future of a species.

It also reminds us that Kirby rarely threw away an idea. Even his unfinished experiments seem to keep moving, waiting for another artist, another generation or another galaxy to pick up the signal.