Kirby's adaptation and continuation of 2001: A Space Odyssey is quite a significant piece of work, and also one of the strangest sci-fi franchise comics ever published.

The adaptation Treasury came out in 1976, eight years after the film debuted. Think about this for a second. That was a very strange time to release an adaptation for a movie, especially when it wasn't playing in theaters and the sequel was still six years away. This was also before the movie gained the critical acclaim that it has today. This was a movie that took a good while for people to get, and suffered from negative press and mixed reviews due to it's slow pace.

But Kirby got it. This was one of his favorite movies, which is interesting because Stanley Kubrick and Jack Kirby could not be any more different artistically. Where Kirby's visual style is wild, explosive and in your face, Kubrick's style is minimal, ambient and subtle. So it was unusual to see Kirby's adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey because, on one hand, a movie like that is hard to adapt, but also because his visual style is so different.

And here's where the greatness of Kirby comes into play. The film inspired him so much so that he was able to get Marvel to back a new 2001 comic series going beyond the movie. No small order. Now I'm not sure how much material Jack used from Arthur C. Clarke's novels because I haven't read them, but from reading the series I'm guessing many of the concepts came from Jack himself. I mean, who else could think up a monstrosity such as Vira the She-Demon? 

The subsequent 2001: A Space Odyssey comic series took the film's ideas to a whole new level. While each comic at first presented the same premise of both prehistoric and futuristic descendants discovering the Monolith, the stories were tailored to fit Kirby's exuberant flair for fantastic and imaginative science fiction set pieces.

And then there's Issue #7. A brilliant take on the whole concept, period. If you have not read this comic yet, you must. In reading this issue, I saw Kirby questioning life, death, humanity and the universe. It's really quite something to behold.

"The end of love is the end of all things. For this world, the drama is almost over..." - Jack Kirby, A Space Odyssey #7 (1977)

In the end, all we have is a machine. Machine Man, that is. The last three issues focused on X-51, an advanced robot that has achieved sentience and must be destroyed. His creator Dr. Abel Stack helps him escape and then endures a metamorphosis of sorts through the Monolith. As X-51 attempts to blend in with humanity, his creator dies, and the military is on his tail.

These last few issues may have been standard Kirby fare, but the way he entwined the whole series together was something special. I've not see many artists, let alone writers, take a concept from a movie and turn it into a whole new entity all together. This is going well beyond just art. Kirby was a mastermind, and we all got to swim in his wild imagination for a bit.