Hold on, is that a face?
As a child I thought there was no question. There was a face on the planet Mars, probably left behind by some ancient Martian civilization. I heard all of the expert speculation in an episode of Sightings and I was reminded of it's existence every time the Time-Life: Mysteries of the Unknown commercial aired. They played that ad over and over.
In 1958, Harvey Comics published a science fiction comic put together by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby called Race for the Moon. It contained a five page story titled The Face on Mars.
The first time I read this story was on some now defunct UFO website, accompanied by the kind of vaguely paranoid and poorly researched information I'd come to expect. The poster implied they were introducing information about a real extraterrestrial civilization through fiction. That was as funny to me as Jim Keith implying the increasing level of sex and violence in 90s Batman comics were part of a government mind control experiment in Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness. The intelligence community has messed around with plenty of niche groups over the years but I feel like I'd have heard some rumors from inside comics if we'd been infiltrated.
The Face on Mars was a good comic even if it's not amazing. The story of astronauts discovering the ruins of an ancient alien civilization has been told many times but this one is pleasingly executed. Kirby's designs are attractive and his art is enhanced by Al Williamson's beautiful inks. Those aspects are nice but it's the appearance of the infamous face that makes this comic memorable.
I wasn't a child when I read The Face on Mars. I had already learned about pareidolia. Mars Global Surveyor had already taken pictures of the face under a less friendly light. I was pretty sure what we'd obsessed over was an optical illusion. In spite of it's implausibility, knowing that Jack Kirby told a story about the face two decades before it entered the public imagination made it seem important again.
I would continue to find examples of Kirby's prescience. Kirby deployed Captain America in Europe fighting Nazis before the US officially entered World War II. He depicted the Easter Island heads having bodies buried underground before archaeologists dug them up and found out that they really did have bodies. There are drone weapons and smart bombs in The Hunger Dogs, OMAC, and even in a 1954 issue of The Fighting American.
Then there were the vaguely new age trappings of his most epic works. His characters regularly interacted with gods, if they weren't gods themselves. They attained higher states of consciousness or perceived unseen levels of reality.
Jack Kirby was a prophet. He was also regular guy with a great talent and an impressive drive to make new things. He was tapped into something intangible and it poured out of every one of his comics. Was it imagination or was it arcane knowledge? I don't think it really makes a difference. There's a voice in my head, and it may just be my sentimental side, but that voice tells me that Jack Kirby's 100th birthday is a significant event. Let's celebrate.
For a closer look at the original art for The Face on Mars check out this post from the Kirby Museum.
For some writing about Kirby that touches on his more occult qualities, check out this article and some of the other articles it links to.
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