Graphic Content: Kirby Grips

Ditko, along with Jack Kirby (and, yes, writer Stan Lee) were the foundation mythmakers of the Marvel universe. Marvel was created in their image - or, rather, by their images - more than 50 years ago now.

But in 1973 and 1974 I was obsessed by Spider-Man, drawn to Ditko's rubbery figures, his use of shadow, the way he'd divide Peter Parker's face in two - half nebbish student, half Spider-mask. That and the soap operatics of Stan Lee's scripts (right from the off I was more interested in Betty Brant and Gwen Stacy than Doctor Octopus and Electro).

I read Thor too and, in time, the Fantastic Four. So I knew about Kirby, but it would be a while before I appreciated him. To start with, I didn't really respond to the blocky solidity of his characters, the thick, even chunky lines he used, the very pugnaciousness of his artistic style.

It didn't help that by the time I was running around every newsagent in town to pick up whatever American imports I could find - we're talking late seventies now - Kirby was back at Marvel after years away and being given free rein to follow his own interests; to wit an expansive cosmic vision that had always been there in the old Fantastic Four and Thor days but was then tempered by Lee's insistence on the human interest angle.

I couldn't get my head around Kirby's late seventies work at all, the carved-from stone-figures, the awkward declamatory, tin-eared violence of the artist's dialogue. The unreality of it all.

The novelist Jonathan Lethem suffered a similar disconnect with Kirby at that time, one he recorded in his essay My Marvel Years. "In his DC work and the return to Marvel, where he unveiled two new venues, The Eternals and 2001," Lethem writes, "Kirby gradually turned into an autistic primitivist genius, disdained as incompetent by much of his audience, but revered by a cult of aficionados in the manner of an 'outsider artist'. As his work spun off into abstraction, his human bodies becoming more and more machine-like, his machines more and more molecular and atomic (when they didn't resemble vast sculptures of mouse-gnawed cheese), Kirby became great/awful, a kind of disastrous genius uncontainable in the form he himself had innovated."

Of course now as an adult - when the superhero soap operatics doesn't mean very much to me any more - it's the "autistic primitivism" of Kirby's art that I respond to most. The unreality is now what appeals; the way he draws his prog rock imagery - all Chariots of the Gods cosmic giantism - with an almost punky cartooniness. And I guess I see him now through a fine art framework. It's even tempting to project him as some kind of ur-Raymond Pettibon.

But of course in doing so I know I'm missing the point. Kirby is a comic artist, not an artist. "Kirby generated stories through drawing," as Charles Hatfield argues in his book Hand of Fire. Kirby was, first and foremost, a storyteller. And a protean one at that. Which (finally) brings us to this new book The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio. It's a book that contains more than 350 pages of original art created by Kirby, his partner Joe Simon (together they created Captain America in the 1940s) and the artists who worked with them in their studio - Mort Meskin, Leonard Starr, Dick Ayers, Doug Wildey, Al Williamson and Bill Draut among others. War stories, superhero stories, love stories, war stories, westerns and space stories - all comic book life is here.

Simon and Kirby were Jewish Americans born in the second decade of the 20th century who became key figures in the birth of the comic book in America. Even before Kirby joined up with Lee to kick-start Marvel Comics at the start of the 1960s, he and Simon had worked for more than 20 years turning out strip after strip in genre after genre. Kirby's art would become more expansive (and, yes, cosmic) as the years went by but from the start his style was instantly recognisable - in the boldness of his line, the power and dynamism of his figure work, his inevitably apple-cheeked facial portraits, and, of course, his willingness to play with layout. As Mark Evanier says in his introduction: "If Kirby could have found a way to draw off the edge of the page, he would have."

It's when you get the chance to read an entire strip that you get to see the full range of Kirby's talents. Best of all, here are the original black and white pages of the 1950s Boy's Ranch comic strips, a labour of love for Simon and Kirby, that read like John Ford westerns - all joshing comedy and clean violence - nailed to the page.

But in a way this book is a sort of art book. It is happy to reproduce individual splash pages and double page spreads divorced from the original story. And when I think of Kirby now it's not the stories that come to mind it's individual images that mostly come from his later days - those staggeringly vivid double page spreads of a post-apocalyptic America from his DC comic Kamandi, the cosmic grandeur of Kirby's Silver Surfer dodging meteors - that spring to mind. A Kirby diorama if you like that's already there in Boy's Ranch and early strips like The Stuntman - reproduced here - too. In short, what we are given in the pages of this book is the sense of an artist taking hold of his imagination and laying it all out for us on the page in all its wildness and energy.

Which begs a question. To appreciate comic strips do we have to take in the whole thing, the story, the dialogue, the art? Or is it acceptable to pick and choose the elements we like?

Answers below the line.

The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio, Mark Evanier, illustrated by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Published by Abrams ComicArts, £40.