Life & Mortality Quote by Jack Kirby

Kirby’s line lands like a beer-soaked toast, but it’s also a working-class metaphysics: no heaven, no sequel, no prestige afterlife. For a cartoonist who helped invent modern myth, the bluntness is the point. Kirby spent decades drawing gods, cosmic tribunals, and endless resurrections, yet here he strips the universe down to one panel: you get one run, then the ink dries. That tension is the subtext. The man who made immortality look routine is telling you not to outsource meaning to eternity.

The phrasing is deliberately unpoetic, almost defiantly unliterary: “but once,” “you’re done.” It has the cadence of a street corner truth, not a philosopher’s maxim, which fits Kirby’s biography. He was a Depression-era kid from the Lower East Side, a World War II veteran, and a relentless producer in an industry that treated artists as replaceable parts. In that context, “let the good times roll” isn’t hedonism; it’s a refusal to be sentimental about suffering or to romanticize sacrifice as its own reward.

Culturally, it reads like an antidote to the moralizing that often shadows superhero narratives: be good, be pure, be worthy. Kirby’s counter-lesson is almost punk in its clarity. Enjoyment becomes an ethic, a small act of sovereignty against bosses, deadlines, and the cosmic machinery he spent his career drawing. The irony is that his art achieved the kind of permanence he denies; the advice still feels urgent precisely because he knew how quickly creators get erased.