Hope you’re enjoying our look at Jack Kirby’s top 20 best character designs! Yesterday we covered 20-16, below are 15-11.

15. Mr. Miracle

AFD: Kirby’s tenure at Marvel during the 60s was obviously his most groundbreaking and successful, but his 70s work at DC, when he was given relatively free reign to build worlds with the New Gods, is arguably just as intriguing…at least in theory. Mr. Miracle’s dry personality could use a dose of Stan Lee, but the character’s look is an absolute triumph of design. Although I honestly have no idea, I would hazard a guess that Kirby put a lot of effort into Mr. Miracle. There’s a striking use of bold color and perfect symmetry at work, which gives the character a sleek, economical, refined look that feels like the result of a long revision process. Mr. Miracle also shows once again Kirby’s genius for memorable visuals: you may not know this character, but once you see him, he’s locked in your brain for eternity.

Steve: Much like the Demon, Kirby’s use of bright yellow and red, along with a liberal use of bright green, should have left eyes nationwide weeping in pain. Again, like the Demon, Kirby not only pulled it off, avoiding any 3-D Man type disasters, but managed to create a singularly unique character in the process. Personally, the thing that always fascinated me the most about Mister Miracle’s look was the way his outfit bonded to his face as though it were a second skin. Rather than simply wearing a mask, it’s as though he’s been shrink wrapped in his costume’s material resulting in a subtle but throughly unique twist on the whole masked hero concept.

14. Magneto

AFD: THE HELMET. Although Kirby might be better known for being outlandishly elaborate and strange, he did know when something perfectly simple worked. Ninety-five percent of Magneto, one of Marvel’s five most popular and infamous villains, is actually pretty dull. He’s got a cape, he’s got a skin-tight suit, he’s got boots and whatever. Everything he’s wearing is a similar shade of purple. Oooh, scary. So why is Magneto imposing and frightening? THE HELMET. Said THE HELMET hides much of the character’s face, but leaves enough room for sneers and psycho bug eyes and open mouths yelling and anything else Kirby has in his Villainous Expression arsenal. And of course there’s that weird transmitter thing on the forehead. THE HELMET.

Steve: Andrew really didn’t leave a whole lot for me to add here - HELMET. When we were developing the list, one of my concerns about including Magneto was the simple fact that, helmet aside, he’s really boring. Then it dawned on me - the simple fact that I was even debating whether or not to ixnay the Master of Magnetism from the list rather than simply doing so was evidence enough that he belonged. As soon as I realized that Magneto’s helmet has become nearly as recognizable a symbol as Spider-Man’s chest emblem or the Punisher’s skull, there was no way I could knock him out of here.

13. Thor

AFD: Some of Kirby’s designs seem obviously timeless from first glance, others, not so much. Thor falls into that second category. How and why has Kirby’s original depiction of the character stubbornly stuck around for so long? How are those silly little wings on his hemet not completely stupid? Hard to say beyond mentioning Kirby’s ability to artfully depict movement, depth, mass, and anatomy. With Thor, Kirby keeps things simple again and, similar to The Demon and just about everything Kirby designed for Marvel’s wonderfully bonkers Thor-niverse, there’s an almost avant-garde pop spin to steretypical fantasy tropes happening. Seriously, check out the circles on Thor’s wife-beater. Who else would’ve included those? Who else would’ve known they’d actually work?

Steve: Even more impressive than a character whose basic look never changes over the course of decades and decades is one that is constantly updated and tweaked by later artists only to see the original creator’s design return time and time again. Everyone thinks they can make Thor look better than the King, but the god of thunder inevitably returns to his blonde, Kirby roots.

12. The Celestials

AFD: I would posit that although the Celestials aren’t Kirby’s best work, they may in fact be the most representative of his style. Kirby taking himself to the far reaches of his own aesthetic, maybe. Ultimate Kirby, perhaps. If you wanted to introduce someone to the power and outlandish imagination of Kirby’s art, it would be nice to have a multimedia presentation on the Celestials handy. The bottom line is these are huge, gigantical dudes without faces in crazy space armor and massive space machinery carrying space weapons with strange and precise designs all over everything and it looks utterly awesome. Nothing else is like the Celestials — they genuinely could be from beyond space and time.

Steve: Even though the Celestials have never headlined a comic on their own and rarely, if ever speak, they’re still one of Kiby’s most awesome creations. Giant space gods that are essentially hunks of Kirby machinery walking around with arms, legs and heads accented by copious amounts of Kirby Krackle? If you can’t see how cool that is, I don’t know what to tell you.

11. M.O.D.O.K.

AFD: Ah, MODOK. A giant squishy head in armor with little arms and legs hovering around in a super chair = sold. It didn’t really occur to me until I got older what a great sense of humor those 60s Marvel and DC guys (well, except for Ditko) had. Self-aware, anything goes silliness is an underrated aspect of Silver Age superhero comics that I think has contributed to the era’s timelessness, and MODOK is a phenomenal — maybe the best — representation of that whole ridiculous-but-wow-amazing style. M.O.D.O.K. 4. E.V.R.

Steve: Quite possibly the most grotesque character to ever be regularly and prominently featured in mainstream comics, Kirby channeled his horror and science fiction ideas together to create MODOK, one of the most memorable characters to ever grace a newsprinted page. The aptly and descriptively named Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing is meant to be the stuff nightmares are made of, and while no artist has ever made the mistake of trying to make him less hideous, nobody will ever match the sheer ugliness and power Kirby endowed this modern day Frankenstein’s monster with. “Ridiculous-but-wow-amazing,” yes, but MODOK’s creepier than hell, to boot.

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