Jack Kirby

No artist shaped the super-hero comic more than Jack Kirby. His pages hit like nothing else on the shelf: colossal figures, crackling cosmic energy (the famous "Kirby Krackle"), impossible machines and a sense of scale that makes gods truly divine. The large omnibus format is the only one that does his art justice.

His 1970s Marvel work — especially the Eternals, which he wrote and drew — is late-career Kirby at the height of his freedom, inventing an entire cosmic mythology right on the page. The Celestials, the Deviants, the sheer scale of it all: it's pure imagination, and the source code for decades of cosmic Marvel art.