...you know, I'm tempted to say that Kirby didn't shake up the status quo in the 1980's because the status quo they were shaking up was the one he created, but that's not really true.
Kirby DID define the status quo on at least four occasions -- he and Simon co-created the first romance comic, a genre which was huge in its day; they also co-created Captain America, the most obvious icon of the patriotic superheroes of the 1940's; and then of course he's best known for his work at Marvel, which revitalized and redefined superheroes, and his last big contribution was the giant, epic scope of Fourth World.
But while that stuff all laid some foundations for the status quo of the mid-1980's, it had all been pretty well perverted by then -- the angst of the 1960's had been exaggerated into soap operas and frequent character deaths, and the epic scope of Fourth World had given way to crossovers and events.
Watchmen, Maus, et al DID, however, give rise to another of Kirby's visions: comic books being collected in trade paperbacks and sold in bookstores to a mainstream audience. (This, of course, totally blindsided Moore, and is the reason he never got the rights to Watchmen back and hates DC forever.)
(Incidentally, "comic books published in collections and sold in bookstores" is another definition of "graphic novels", and one I don't find particularly offensive, though I generally call them "trades".)