Jack Kirby Collector #11

Fully Authorized

By The Kirby Estate

$4.95 In The US

CELEBRATING THE LIFE & CAREER OF THE KING!

44-p age ISSUE Spo tlighting Kirby In Ho llywo o d!

Issue #11, July 1996

Simon & Kirby’s Hollywood Hero

Stuntman How Deep Is it?

The Black Hole WHy the

Lord Of Light Never Saw The Light Of Day unlocking Jack’s Adaptation of

The Prisoner From Thundarr to Sco oby-Do o : Jack’s career in

Animation Unfilmed Ideas Will Jack’s Movie Ideas ever get made?

May the So urce Be With You:

New Gods vs.

Star Wars including Jack’s Pencils Befo re They Were Inked, And Much Mo re!!

1996 Eisner Awards Nominee For Best Comics-Related Publication

Stuntman © Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

Unpublished Art

KIRBY

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KIRBY

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KIRBY

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A JUMBLE OF JUBILANT JARGON JUXTAPOSED AROUND JACK! ITEM! There’s nothing new to report on the tribute book that Mighty MARK EVANIER and Fearless FRANK MILLER are co-producing, or on the one being done by Manic MIKE THIBODEAUX and Jaunty JIM STERANKO. We hope to get more details on them at this year’s SAN DIEGO COMIC CON, so stay tuned!

ITEM! Speaking of comic conventions, if you missed the Ramapo Comic Con in Spring Valley, NY (May 18), you missed a wonderful one-day con featuring guests like DICK AYERS (who’s wowing comics fans with his new work on Old Town Publishing’s DR. WONDER), MARIE SEVERIN, HERB TRIMPE, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, MURPHY ANDERSON, WALT SIMONSON, AL WILLIAMSON, and many others. The TJKC table was strategically placed next to JOE SINNOTT’s, so we got to chat with JOE and his lovely wife BETTY, and watch him draw sketches for fans. All in all, it was a great day, made even better by getting to meet so many Kirby fans from the New York area. Special thanks to RANDY HOPPE for picking us up at the airport, to JON B. COOKE for setting up our table, and to Jon’s brother ANDY COOKE for letting us crash at his place that night. Next up: HEROES CON in Charlotte, NC (June 14-16), the CHICAGO CON (June 2123), and the SAN DIEGO COMIC CON (July 4-7). Be sure to stop by and say hello! (Sorry, Southwest fans, we won’t be able to attend the DALLAS FANTASY FAIR this year.)

Pure Imagination’s The Complete Kirby Vol. 1 (a series reprinting all of Jack’s work from the beginning of his career) is ready to go to press, but 400 people must commit to buying a copy before it can be published. Volume 1 includes Jack’s early work from Blue Bolt, Red Raven, Crash Comics, Jumbo Comics, plus other early comic book and comic strip work (some never published in the US), and a text feature to put it all in perspective. Vol. 1 will be a 164-page softcover in black-&-white with color cover, and would sell for $25. If you are willing to commit to purchasing a copy when it’s published, write to Greg Theakston, 1707 East Lake Dr., Marietta, GA 30062 or e-mail him at: 75451.3472@compuserve.com and let him know. DO NOT SEND ANY MONEY NOW! You’ll be notified by mail when it’s published.

ITEM! Gregarious GREG THEAKSTON reports that for Vol. 2 of his COMPLETE KIRBY reprint series, he still needs Famous Funnies #75 & #80. If you know where he can get these in any condition, call him at (770) 424-5151.

ITEM! Once production on this issue of TJKC wraps up, we’ll be getting together with RICHARD KOLKMAN to get started on the updated Kirby Checklist, which’ll include everything Jack ever had published (including reprints and interviews). We’ll be modifying the existing one from Blue Rose Press’ THE ART OF JACK KIRBY, in cooperation with AOJK author RAY WYMAN. We hope to have the first draft ready for proofing by interested volunteers this Fall, but you can still contribute now. Keep sending lists of errors and omissions from the AOJK checklist, or if you’ve got an accurate list of your own to contribute, write us!

ITEM! The Feb. 20, 1996 edition of DAILY VARIETY carried a story about the acquisition by Fox Family Films of rights to produce a live-action SILVER SURFER movie.

We’ll keep you posted as details develop.

JOHN’S JUKEBOX It’s no secret that Jack always wanted to direct a movie.

As a young boy, he thrilled to the adventures of screen stars like James Cagney, and wanted to be an actor.

Luckily for us, his mother wouldn’t let him go to Hollywood, so he channeled his energies toward creating stories on paper instead of celluloid. But inevitably, he ended up working on numerous film-related projects and animation in Hollywood after moving near Tinseltown later in his career. So we thought we’d use this issue to cover some of Jack’s well-known and notso-well-known Hollywood connections. I hope you give this issue “two thumbs up!” Now, in case you missed the blurb on this issue’s cover, here’s the big news this month: TJKC has been nominated for an EISNER AWARD for Best Comics-Related Publication (Periodical)! The Eisners are given out every year at the San Diego Comic Con, and they’re like the “Oscars” of the comics industry, voted on by over 5000 professionals. Let me publically thank everyone who’s contributed art and articles; your efforts are the reason for this honor. Pat yourself on the back, folks! And to those of you who’ve subscribed or picked up TJKC at your local comics shop, thanks for helping spread the word about our ongoing tribute to Jack. With your continued support, we’ll be able to keep going until we run out of Kirby stuff to write about (and considering Jack’s prolific career, that could be awhile).

Long Live The King!

John Morrow, Editor • 502 Saint Mary’s St. • Raleigh, NC 27605 • (919) 833-8092 • FAX (919) 833-8023 e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com ITEM! This fall a new Superman animated series will debut. Fans of Jack’s FOURTH WORLD series may notice some familiar faces in the series, and MARK EVANIER will be involved in the writing. There’ll be other surprises for Kirby fans, so be sure to tune in!

ITEM! Pull out any Marvel comic from October 1975, and read Smilin’ STAN LEE’s Soapbox. In it, he states that Jack is “the co-creator of most of Marvel’s greatest strips!” Since Stan thinks Jack deserves co-credit, shouldn’t you let Marvel Comics know you think so too?

Write to: Mr. Terry Stewart, Marvel Comics, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016 and ask that they put “Created by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby” on books they co-created. (We’re doing this in conjunction with Dr. Mark Miller’s ongoing letter-writing campaign to get Jack a credit line.)

ITEM! Check out the KIRBY COLLECTOR HOME PAGE on the World Wide Web, put together by RANDY HOPPE. The URL is: http://www.mordor.com/thehop/kirby It’s got biographical information on Jack, and a synopsis of each issue of TJKC published to date, with samples of Kirby art and articles from each issue. And we’ll be putting the updated Kirby Checklist online for free downloading once it’s completed, so everyone can have access to it.

ITEM! If you’re on the Internet and enjoy interesting discussions of all things Kirby, join the JACK KIRBY MAILING LIST. Send an e-mail message to CHRIS HARPER at ampcon@dircon.co.uk and ask him to put you on this FREE mailing list. Then prepare yourself for a deluge of e-mail; Jack is a pretty hot topic of discussion on the ’Net! ITEM! Don’t forget, you can still make donations to the educational fund that was set up in Jack’s name shortly after his death. Send donations to: The Jack Kirby Educational Fund, Temple Etz Chaim, 1080 Janss Rd., Thousand Oaks, CA 91360.

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KIRBY COLLECTOR CHECKLIST These Issues Of TJKC Are Available – See Page 43 TJKC #1: This 16-page INTRODUCTORY ISSUE features rare Kirby posters, articles on a 1978 Kirby traveling display and the MARVELMANIA PORTFOLIO, Jack’s original OMAC concept sketch, an unused THOR page, and more! $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #2: A 16-page GENERAL INTEREST issue with rare 1970s SANDMAN pages, a fan’s phone conversations with Jack, MARVELMANIA PORTFOLIO plates, unpublished FANTASTIC FOUR panels, a page of the Jack Ruby ESQUIRE story, other rare art, and more! $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #3: A 16-page CAPTAIN AMERICA theme issue with a JOE SIMON interview, more MARVELMANIA plates, convention sketches, 1960s & 70s CAPTAIN AMERICA pages before they were inked, and more! $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #4: A 16-page GENERAL INTEREST issue, with a MIKE ROYER interview, more MARVELMANIA plates, THOR pencil pages before being inked, unused ATLAS #1 cover pencils, Euro-Kirby fandom, and more! $2.50 U.S. $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #5: A 16-page GENERAL INTEREST issue featuring transcripts of Jack’s 1972 speech at VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, unpublished FANTASTIC FOUR pencils, how Kirby used real people in his comics, essential Kirby collectibles, unpublished KOBRA pencils, and more! $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #6: A 36-page FOURTH WORLD theme issue featuring interviews with MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN, more of our MIKE ROYER interview, the NEW GODS portfolio, the story behind HUNGER DOGS and Jack’s original ending to NEW GODS, and unpublished art, plus FOURTH WORLD pencils before being inked! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America) TJKC #7: A 36-page KID GANG theme issue with an unpublished 1987 interview with Kirby, overview of the S&K KID GANGS, plenty of unpublished art from BOYS’ RANCH, BOY EXPLORERS, JIMMY OLSEN, DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET, X-MEN, and more! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America) TJKC #8: (Our first full-color cover!) A 36-page all-star CONVENTION theme issue with transcripts from the KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL at the ’95 SDCC (with JOE SINNOTT, MIKE ROYER, MARK EVANIER, and TONY ISABELLA), convention memories, essay by JIM STERANKO, CAPTAIN AMERICA pages before they were inked, convention sketches, and more! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America) TJKC #9: A 44-page FANTASTIC FOUR theme issue with everything you wanted to know about the FF! JOE SINNOTT interview, FF pencil pages before inking, the original version of FF #108, unpublished art, and more! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America) TJKC #10: A 44-page HUMOR theme issue! ROZ KIRBY interview, STEVE GERBER on DESTROYER DUCK, GOODY RICKELS, FIGHTING AMERICAN, plus JIMMY OLSEN and THOR pencil pages before inking, other unpublished art, and more! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America) AND ON SALE RIGHT NOW: TJKC #11: If you’re reading this, you already know what’s in this 44-page HOLLYWOOD Theme Issue! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America) THE JACK KIRBY PORTFOLIO (from Dark Horse Comics): Available thru comics shops, and limited to 500 copies, signed by Roz Kirby. Includes 5 plates of Jack’s Biblical imagery, plus pencil sketches. Price: $175.

TJKC POSTER: Full-color, 17” x 23”, shipped in a mailing tube. See page 43 of this issue to order. $7 US.

Lights! Camera! Punch’em!

The Silver Screen Saga of Stuntman, by R.J. Vitone tuntman, “The New Champ of Split-Second Action,” occupies a S&K took the movie motif to heart. The plot is classic “whounique but very obscure corner in the Kirby closet. Hitting the dunit,” with plenty of humor, romance, and menace thrown in. Jack stands during a post-WW II comics glut, the title scarcely had used the circus as a visually colorful background for the events of the time to find an audience before it was cancelled. And since its publisher story, and the manic motion fills in the rest. only sporadically re-entered the super-hero market, the strip last saw Kirby’s art for the series is inspired. This was one of his “transiprint in mainstream comics in 1955, long before most collectors tional” periods, and his figure work reached new heights of stretched would have noticed it. looseness. Stuntman’s elongated figure is a far cry from the earlier That’s a shame, because Stuntman is a terrific Simon & Kirby package, and an important one as well. Even though the team was widely regarded as tops in the field, Stuntman stands as the only “traditional” superhero created by them since The Guardian (in ’42), and would be the last until Captain 3-D (in ’53) and Fighting American (in ’54)! When you think of how identifiable Kirby is with the genre, it’s amazing to find that long of a stretch away from it.

Stuntman Comics #1 hit the newsstands early in 1946. Produced by Harvey Publications (with whom both Jack and Joe seemed to enjoy a decent working relationship over the years), the book must have held bright promise for S&K. They were back from the war, anxious to tackle new projects.

Stuntman led the way at Harvey, to be followed a month later by Boy Explorers. It was time for a fresh start.

And what a start! The first story plays like a Cecil B. DeMille epic. Amid the pageantry of a traveling circus, calculated evil claims the lives of two of the “Flying Apollos.” The surviving member, Fred Drake, dons a stylized version of his acrobat costume, determined to claim justice. Along the way, he meets foppish movie star Don Daring, who spends his idle time as an amateur detective. As (comic-book) fate would have it, the two bear an amazing resemblance to each other.

Don hires Fred to act as his “stand-in” and perform physically demanding movie scenes for him, as well as to free up his time to pursue his sleuthing hobby. Beautiful actress Sandra Sylvan turns up in time to provide love interest and be menaced by the killer. Stuntman swings into action, saving the day by acting as a lion tamer. Newspaper headlines crown the new “Nemesis of Crime,” and a legend is born!

This unused splash page from Stuntman #1 was penciled on thick illustration board, rather than thin bristol.

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The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 3, No. 11, July 1996. Published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows Advertising, 502 Saint Mary’s St., Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092.

John Morrow, Editor. Pamela Morrow, Assistant Editor. Single issues: $4.95 each U.S., $5.40 Canada, $7.40 outside North America. Six-issue subscriptions: $24.00 US, $32.00 Canada and Mexico, and $44.00 outside North America. First printing. The initial printing of this issue was mailed the week of April 15, 1996.

All characters are © their respective companies. All artwork is © Jack Kirby unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors.

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(above) Pivotal panels from the Stuntman story in Green Hornet #39. (left and right) Photos of Jack taken at an early 1970s Disneyland comic convention, around the time that he did the Stuntman pencil drawing on page 78.

Photography by Sam Maronie.

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muscle-bound Captain America. Although it looks different, there’s an appealing flow to the work. Other familiar touches are on hand. Don Daring, handsome but ineffectual, is a typical S&K foil, and Sandra is a Wasp-ish blonde in the Sharon Carter/Sue Storm style. All the other Kirby trademarks are there—fluid storytelling, forced perspective, and hyperactive action.

If you follow the basic idea of “show-biz” elements, then the rest of issue #1 rounds out the series’ “pilot.” “The Crimes on Cauliflower Row” showcases Don Daring as he sets off on a new detective case. Meanwhile, Fred Drake “fills in” for the star in a slam-bang movie scene, while Sandra finds that her jewels are missing! Needless to say, all three are soon hot on the trail of the suspects. Stuntman has to tie up the case by beating up a gang of hulking boxers. It ends with a S&K twist, as Sandra remembers that she sent her jewels out to be cleaned!

“The House Of Madness” opens with a slick two-page splash that mixes the grim image of a madhouse with twisted elements of a fairy tale.

Sandra gets trapped in the sanitarium with a bevy of strange characters, and in short order Don Daring blunders in.

Stuntman arrives in his new sedan and a couple of pages of fights end the tale.

If the stories sound simple, don’t be fooled.

The art and plots for the entire Stuntman run appear unrushed and tightly considered.

Jack and Joe were at a new start of their career as a team, and at this point there were not a lot of demands for their time. This was also before they would assemble a large “bullpen” of artists to aid in production, so most of Stuntman is “pure” Simon & Kirby. Joe would ink many of the strip’s pages, as well as share in plotting and scripting duties. His work adds depth to the stories. Round panels, extra (above) humor, dramatic inking, and A Kirby Stuntman explosive action highlight sketch from 1977. the entire run. There’s also more dialogue to (right) When plots collide! read than in most Golden Age Fred meets Don Daring, and books, adding even more depth to Stuntman is born, in Stuntman #1. the work. (Dialogue would grow in importance in S&K comics, reaching dizzier heights in the soon-to-develop romance titles.)

The stories in Stuntman #2 show no decline in quality. “The Backstage Killer” continues the “whodunit” formula, right down to another last-second twist ending. But “The Rescue of Robin Hood” is even better. Opening with a great heraldic double-page spread, the tale promises the excitement of story-book thrills combined with Hollywood makebelieve. Every page delivers, as the movie studio films scene after scene of the familiar Robin Hood legend, using ineffectual Don 5

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Page 8 from Stuntman #2.

(above) 2-page spread from Stuntman #2. Errol Flynn and Kevin Costner had nothing on Simon & Kirby! • (below) Old-time serial action from All-New #13. research for a western role, stumbles into a “ghost town” full of vacationing crooks. Of course, Fred and Sandra are along for the ride.

After attempting to scare off the gullible movie stars, the thugs opt to use them for target practice! Stuntman leaps into action. In one of the most sustained battle sequences in S&K history, Stuntman cleans up (and demolishes) the town. It’s a masterpiece of frenzied abandon— flying fists, smashed doors and walls and machine guns all come into play. By the end of the story, the ghost town is just rubble!

“The Diamond’s Curse” found its way to Harvey’s All-New Comics #13. Light on action but long on plot and character, the story follows Daring’s search for a missing “cursed” diamond. Greedy crooks want the priceless gem, so Stuntman has to step in once again. Nicely paced, “The Diamond’s Curse” wraps up the S&K Stuntman run on a high note. By the end of 1946, the team had moved on. Stuntman was

Daring as the star. Fred Drake is helpless to aid him, because the director has made the inspired choice of actually hiring the super-hero as an extra. The results are funny, as poor Daring slips and slides through a few pages of slapstick. But just like in the movies, some “bad guys” show up, and Stuntman crashes the set to save the day!

Those first two issues of Stuntman stand as excellent examples of Golden Age Simon & Kirby efforts. In most eras, the title may have been able to continue, but Harvey Publications was in a state of flux, and newsstands were jammed with too many new books to allow much room for patient growth. So Stuntman Comics died, and the leftover finished material was used mainly as filler in other Harvey books.

“Rest Camp For Criminals” was released in a 51⁄2" x 81⁄2" black and white special and sent directly to mail subscribers. All the already established themes run through it. Don Daring, eager to soak up

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left behind, never to star in new epics produced by them again. Harvey reprinted some of the strips in 1948, then put the cast in mothballs until 1955, when four of the stories were repackaged, re-edited, and represented in Thrills Of Tomorrow #19 and 20.

“The Champ of Split-Second Action” seemed lost amid Harvey house ads for Casper, Sad Sack, and Baby Huey, and quietly faded away into permanent retirement.

Perhaps it’s for the best. By 1955, Kirby’s style had evolved even further. The slick excitement of Fighting American made Stuntman look stately and stiff. It wasn’t.

Stuntman stands as a well-plotted, wellwritten and well-drawn strip, still worthy of note and very, very collectible.

Now if only someone would buy the movie rights! ✩ (Editor’s Note: At least three unpublished S&K Stuntman stories exist, and at least one of them is unfinished. Joe Simon’s book The Comic Book Makers features unpublished art from “Terror Island,” (featuring a villain called The Panda), “The Evil Sons of M. LeBlanc,” and “Jungle Lord.” Presented here is a previously unseen, partially inked page from “Jungle Lord.” In addition, a house ad in Stuntman #2 proclaimed the upcoming appearances of Stuntboy and Stuntgirl. They may have been scheduled for another unpublished story, appeared in one of the ones mentioned above, or just never made it into print.

If you’d like to sample Stuntman without buying the originals, track down a copy of Simon & Kirby Classics #1, a 1987 one-shot from Pure Imagination that reprinted several stories.

Finally, here is the planned cover for the unpublished Thrills Of Tomorrow #22, which would have featured more Stuntman reprints.

The art isn’t by Simon & Kirby, but we thought you’d like to see this rare piece of art. Thrills Of Tomorrow was canceled at #20, but presumably #21 would’ve had some variation of the unpublished S&K Stuntman #3 cover.)

Stuntman Checklist Stuntman #1 (April/May 1946) “Killer In The Big Top” (Origin story, 13 pages) “The Crimes on Cauliflower Row” (10 pages) “The House of Madness” (12 pages) Stuntman #2 (June/July 1946) “The Backstage Killer” (12 pages) “The Rescue of Robin Hood” (11 pages) Stuntman #3 (Oct./Nov. 1946)* “Rest Camp For Criminals” (12 pages) *#3 was a half-size black-&-white issue sent only to mail subscribers.

All-New Comics #13 (July/Aug. 1946) “The Diamond’s Curse” (14 pages, including a full-page ad for Stuntman #3)

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Black Cat Comics #9 (Jan. 1948) Reprints “Killer In The Big Top” Green Hornet #39 (May 1948) Reprints “Rest Camp For Criminals” Thrills Of Tomorrow #19 (Feb. 1955) Reprints the first and third stories from Stuntman #1.

Thrills Of Tomorrow #20 (April 1955) Reprints both stories from Stuntman #2.

When older stories were repackaged in Thrills Of Tomorrow, art and text were altered to comply with the new, powerful Comics Code. Some of the changes are odd, others are just downright silly.

Even with the changes, these titles offer collectors a chance to obtain lower-priced versions of a true Kirby classic!

The Unfilmed Ideas Of Jack Kirby

by Steve Sherman ’m writing this while sitting in a basement underneath Stage 15 at Sony Pictures Studios (formerly MGM) puppeteering the controls of an alien creature. Above me is a giant set of the interior headquarters of MIB (which stands for Men in Black). Based on the comic book, Men in Black is a science fiction picture produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. It’s a story about aliens and cataclysmic galactic wars. Somehow it seems appropriate considering this article is about Jack Kirby and Hollywood.

One of Jack’s not-so-secret wishes was to direct a movie. To Jack, his comic book works were basically blueprints for movies. While many of Jack’s characters have been translated into animation, Jack specifically wrote three concepts which he hoped would be produced as live-action pictures.

The first of these was a show entitled Tiger 21 and was developed in the early 1950s. It was a re-working of an idea Jack had in the late ’40s for a comic strip called Starman Zero. Jack had been approached by an agent who had a deal with NBC. In the ’50s, before the advent of video-

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tape, much of the live programming on television was produced in New York. The show was a half-hour science fiction program about a young hero who drove a vehicle dubbed Tiger 21. The location was a secret base on the moon called Command D. Each week the hero would be involved in adventures involving aliens and (this being the ’50s) Soviet spies. Also vying for a spot on the network was another program entitled Man In Space which starred William Lundigan, and was more or less a realistic show about astronauts on the moon. NBC decided to go with Man In Space as the producer of that show was, according to Jack, the brother-in-law of someone at NBC. Not one to let things go to waste, Jack was later to use elements of Tiger 21 in what eventually became Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth.

In the early 1970s Jack again turned his attention to films. The first of two projects was entitled The Lightning Lady. This was a sciencefiction picture about a small town that is invaded by a colony of aliens led by the Lightning Lady, a queen bee alien. Jack later turned this into the comic book Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers, adding the Captain Victory characters to the plot.

One of the most enjoyable things about working with Jack was the opportunity to be able to just sit and listen to him spin tales or reflect on “what if ” situations. One evening, we were discussing the concept of miniaturized worlds—something along the lines of what later would be termed nanotechnology. It was from this premise that we began discussing what would become the basis for Silver Star— Superhero. Jack thought that it would make an exciting picture and we began working on it. On weekends we would discuss the plot and characters and then during the week I would write it up. Eventually

(top) Unused, unfinished cover for Silver Star #4, featuring what looks to be an early version of the character Big Masai. (bottom) We’re unsure if this 1980s drawing of Tiger 21 is what Jack had in mind for his 1950s show, but we thought you’d like to see it anyway. He must have felt strongly about the character if he was still thinking of him 30 years later.

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we had a 40-page outline of the story. Later Jack used this plotline for the Silver Star comic book.

Jack never threw anything away, and ideas and plots that couldn’t be used immediately were saved and used later; not that they were written down in notebooks. Jack somehow managed to keep it organized in his head. One idea was a 13-episode series that involved UFOs. I had just finished reading the novel Rendezvous with Rama and was talking it over with Jack. The more we discussed it, an idea took shape about what would happen to ordinary people who became involved with UFOs. Within an hour, Jack had come up with an anthology show about UFOs. It was very dramatic in tone with comedic elements; very Twilight Zone-ish. Jack had 13 plot synopses in no time. Just to

hear Jack describe the show, I was sold.

Jack held the premise that not all aliens would be friendly. Each person who came in contact with them would come away with something different, and not all of it good. The show had a lot of great story elements, especially since it would have a different guest star each week meeting these great Kirby aliens.

Jack never got around to using it, but it was amazing to me how these ideas would just flow through him. Even without the drawings, Jack could be a spellbinding storyteller.

With the advancements being made in computer-generated graphics and digital technology, hopefully we will someday see Jack’s vision translated into reality. ✩

A Nice Surprise

by Tom Morehouse y wife and I had rented a cabin in the Pocono Mountains for the 1996 New Year’s weekend. On January 1st, we came across an ephemera dealer named Mr. 3L’s whose warehouse has to be seen to be believed! When we walked in, that delicious aroma of old paper hit my nose and (to paraphrase Herman’s Hermits) somethin’ told me I was in for somethin’ good!

I, of course, made a beeline for the comics, but found none of the elusive “Love” books I needed.

Moving around I saw examples of Americana wherever I looked: recruiting, movie and other posters from as far back as the turn of the century; songsheets, calendars, handfans, newspapers and magazines of every nature piled on the floor and on shelves in every square inch of the place! Now I really got excited because I’ve been searching for the September 1966 issue of Esquire for years, and here were three long shelves and several piles of said magazine in front of me!

I stooped down to the first pile and there, on top, was a nice condition copy of Esquire 9/66! My hands were shakin’ and my knees were weak (sorry Elvis!) as I picked it up and commenced to thumb through, looking for the article on Marvel Comics illustrated by Kirby and Marie Severin. As I got to the page before the article, a small (61⁄2" x 31⁄2") piece of paper with obituary notices on it fell out and drifted towards the floor. As it flipped over, I realized that on the other side of the obits was a TV ad for Captain Nice, a 1967 NBC-TV show starring William Daniels as a bumbling (but nice) superhero.

The art in the ad, as in the opening credits of the show, was by Kirby! I’d seen a really poor quality dub of the promo trailer for the show before, but never any flat art.

There it was staring up at me from the top of my shoe.

And here it is for us all to enjoy—Captain Nice by Jack Kirby. ✩

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rooftops. The full art was shown on TV commercials, zooming in to show specific details and out again to display the entire piece.

The original art was inked by Chic Stone. Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to track down a copy of the complete art, although the original is owned by a collector in England. Does anyone out there have any idea where we can find a repro of it? Write and let us know!)

(Tom’s art is from an ad that appeared January 16, 1967—the night Captain Nice premiered—in the TV listings of newspapers across the US. Captain Nice is described in the ad as “a super-nemesis of crime... who’s such a nice guy that he feels sorry for the villains he brings to justice...” The Kirby figure is cut from a larger scene that included a birds-eye view of a cityscape, crammed full of assorted villains and weapons on various 10

May The Source Be With You Comparing New Gods and Star Wars

by Fievel Elliott

does not mark the moment that Lucas stepped into the cinema scene either, which in reality occurred around 1965 after meeting cinematographer Haskell Wexler. Already Lucas would have lived out what audiences would view in 1973 as American Graffiti. His first full length film THX 1138 (1970) was a science fiction saga which already hinted toward the later mannerisms of Star Wars. From this point forward the inspiration of Flash Gordon would eventually flesh out into the movie all of us know today. But, forward in time serves no meaning at the present. With both New Gods and Star Wars, the audience must start out in the middle of the epic. The past retains a titanic proportion of the ideas and myth that distinctly led Kirby and Lucas down two distinctly different paths of thought, which in time found them bumping into each other.

here exists a belief among many Kirby fans that George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy may have been inspired by Jack Kirby’s Fourth World series, or expressly New Gods. Emotionally and socially, Star Wars and New Gods may appear to dramatically delve into near bliss. More than a few professionals seem to agree. In the first issue of DC’s 1984 New Gods reprint series, Mark Evanier wrote briefly about New Gods resembling a science-fiction trilogy in a text piece. “See, there’s been this series of science-fiction movies, three in all the last few years...”

Evanier said. “I’ve only seen one of them myself, and it seemed altogether Kirbyesque to me. More than a few folks who’ve seen all three have told me that it’s The New Gods; that is, certain of the characters and certain of the villains seem to parallel a lot of what Mr. Kirby had going in the series... only, of course, he did it first.”

Comic book artist and writer Frank Miller attends that Lucas likely did derive some ideas out of New Gods “...much [of] the genre of space opera, in story and visual design, came from Kirby. Ignore Lucas’ smokescreen on naming films by Akira Kurosawa as his inspiration in creating Star Wars. Read The New Gods.” (“God Save the King,” The Comics Journal #105, Feb. 1986) But to accept that may mean denouncing a plethora of inconsistencies at the matrix of both creations. Star Wars does resemble New Gods on an emotional and social level, but to make comparisons on a grandiose scale can open room for doubt. To eliminate this doubt one needs to first and foremost know the facts.

By 1970 Lucas had already envisioned the idea of composing a heroic space fantasy in the form of Flash Gordon, and probably would have, until he found he couldn’t afford the rights. Now, this is the point for some Kirby fans to contort, “Hey! That’s the same year Kirby started his Fourth World stuff!” This is true; although, this does not christen the theory that Lucas peered into a copy of New Gods one afternoon and then suddenly—BOOM—we have Star Wars. This also

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Inspirations Lucas arrived at organizing reference for Star Wars by traipsing back through his predecessors, from Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and John Carter of Mars (obviously Lucas cherished the comic strip over the comic book). Other renowned authors of our past, without which Star Wars would not feasibly exist, include Cyrano de Bergerac, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Hugo Gernsback, H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and numerous others. Film-wise Star Wars combines elements of a plethora of past movies, including Stagecoach, Capt. Blood, The Wizard of Oz, The Sands of Iwo Jima, Tod Browning’s Freaks, The Searchers (Lucas derived quite an amount from this movie, including the ideas for Mos Eisley Cantina and Luke returning home to find his aunt and uncle dead.

Siskel and Ebert attest that Star Wars stands as one of the best westerns ever made), B’wana Devil, The Crimson Pirate, Mark Of Zorro, Scaramouche, Knights of the Round Table, The Shadow, 2001, Soylent Green, and Planet of the Apes.

In May 1973 Lucas completed the first draft of Star Wars. In this

An enraged Orion bares little resemblance to Luke Skywalker. Here Orion battles Kalibak, in uninked pencils from New Gods #8.

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early treatment the concepts of the Force and the teacher/student relationship appear absent, although Skywalker’s character resembles one sleek and knowledged, which probably derived from Lucas’s favoring the samurai film of the Japanese, including Akira Kurosawa.

For example, Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (1958) relates an adventure story strongly paralleling the exploits of Luke rescuing Princess Leia from an evil pursuing dark lord by escaping over to the side of the Republic. Even Lucas contested the character of R2D2 and C3PO arrived from the two bumbling misfits in Hidden Fortress.

upon Luke (Lightray or Orion), and brother Deak (Orion) Starkiller fulfilling the prosperous goals as sons of the Starkiller (Himon = Yoda and/or Ben Kenobi = Metron) by helping him against Darth Vader’s (Darkseid’s) crusade against the Jedi, including the aid of the Forcecontrolled Kyber Crystal (Mother Box = Lightsaber). Evidently, although debatable, no characters in New Gods compare to Han, Leia, Chewbacca, Biggs, Wedge, Jabba the Hutt, Mon Mothma, Imperial Governor Tarkin, R2D2, C3PO, and, even later in the continuity, Lando Calrissian, and Boba Fett. Not even until Lucas’ fourth draft in late ’75 did these characters fully develop in film form, but then again, even the earlier idea of the Cloud City of Alderaan (New Genesis) will prevail all the way up until The Empire Strikes Back’s Cloud City of Bespin.

What of comparing the main villains of each story? Vader’s appearance doesn’t resemble Darkseid’s (although a number of us could undoubtedly accept James Earl Jones as the voice of Darkseid).

On the other hand, Vader would pass for Doctor Doom’s third cousin any old day. Before doing research for this article, I would continually proceed to make the same objection, but the facts of Vader’s origins do not find Lucas with a copy of Fantastic Four Annual #2 wedged into his back pocket during preproduction. From the start Lucas required Vader to resemble a Bedouin wearing a silk robe, black silk face covering, and a large style Japanese Warrior’s Helmet (à la Kurosawa).

Ralph McQuarrie, production illustrator, and, Joe Johnston, effects designer, took these ideas and added to them. McQuarrie suggested a breathing mask (he thought Vader would need one during the boarding of a ship), curved snout and goggles for desert protection.

Afterwards John Barry, production designer, and his designers took these ideas and formed them into the present day Darth Vader.

To understand better, one needs to discard all trivial connections. Part of this problem could play out in the fact that, in fantasy, Luke, Leia, and Han serve as an anchor (into reality) in relation to all of the contrasting extremes in Star Wars. In the New Gods, Claudia Shane, Harvey Lockman, Dave Lincoln, and Victor Lanza, all of whom Orion rescued from Darkseid’s mind-probing equipment in New Gods #1, serve as an anchor between gods and mortal man. But, separate Orion from the regular uncredulity and the ties really start to fall away. Orion does wield the Astro-Force, but do not confuse this as a channeling of the Force associated in Star Wars. Besides, Kirby never did elaborate on the specifics of this Astro-Force. Neither should one envision Orion and Darkseid as simply synonymous to Vader and Luke. Visualize Orion not as Luke, but a younger Vader (Anakin Skywalker) on the dawn of succumbing to the dark side. Like Vader, Orion masks his true face by wearing a symbolic mask.

In the opposite sense, both Star Wars and New Gods relate a story about ourselves and the world around us. Highfather’s paramount purpose cannot find rebuttal from a new hope in Star Wars because both represent the hope of an everlasting remnant towards humankind.

The fragility of the latter statement shows through from the pasts of both Highfather and Ben Kenobi. Highfather traded in his zest for battle in place of peace. In The Empire Strikes Back, Kenobi even reminds Yoda about recklessness on behalf of Luke. “So was I [reckless] if you remember!” Orion also escaped a rigorous life on Apokolips in lieu of a pact between Highfather and Darkseid. The pact reflects the similar situation of the stashing away of Luke and Leia, as infants in Star Wars, to keep the threat of an heir to Vader suppressed. Here also lies the similar mysteries about Orion’s and Luke’s & Leia’s mother. If Leia & Luke end up serving a slightly reversed roll of Scott Free (Mr. Miracle), although possible, this plausibility starts to peter out except that in a sense, Leia did feel restricted on Alderaan, and Luke on Tatooine, as Scott did on Apokolips. As the Kenobiesque and Yodaesqe figures of Metron and Himon arrived as Scott’s choice of escape, so stands the same for Leia’s & Luke’s choice of rescue from Obi-Wan Kenobi and crew. Lightray, not Orion, represents Luke, but represents him as the innocent, virtuous, and adventurous Luke at the genesis of Star Wars.

Lightray’s and Orion’s relationship can also resemble the relationship between younger versions of Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Similarities And Differences By the time of Star Wars’ second draft on January 28, 1975 Lucas’ story starts to deal heavily along the lines of New Gods. The development on how the Republic Galactica (New Genesis) formed by a holy man named Skywalker (Izaya The Inheritor who transitions to Highfather) who discovered “The Force of Others,” (The Source) described as “an energy field influencing the destiny of all living creatures.” This force was composed of two alternates: the good (New Genesis), which related insight and powers to Skywalker (Highfather), and the bad (Darkseid = Dark Side), which could serve the same purpose to those seduced by darkness. During the old times both powers ruled separately until the Senate (Apokolips) fell under the control of darkness and turned into the Empire. The Jedi Knights (Old Gods) of protection all but vanished until the time of a new hope (New Gods). This new hope rests

The last commissioned piece of work Kirby did was for Topps’ Star Wars Galaxy: New Visions 2 Card Set. Kirby’s comments on his vision of Star Wars read, “I’ve always written stories about father and son relationships, and thought that having Luke Skywalker in a scene with Darth Vader would be very moving and appropriate.” Appropriate because of his work on New Gods? It’s a shame that Kirby never found involvement on Marvel’s Star Wars comic during the 1970s. The Topps card stands as the only known work of Kirby involving Star Wars characters.

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By keeping on this train of thought one can also now start to develop different kinds of perspective on the characters of Himon and Metron. Himon and Metron compare and contrast as Star Wars characters quite frequently throughout the tapestry of New Gods. Himon at first glance can relate to Kenobi, but overall relates to the overbearing humoresque and sometime demeaning figure of Yoda.

Metron can resemble Kenobi in the way he toyingly swayed Luke into a cause for the Force in the same way Darkseid conningly swayed Metron into serving his needs. In Star Wars and New Gods both Metron and Kenobi show up at one point or the other to save or influence a particular situation. Metron acts towards a relentless plight of knowledge. Himon acts as a survivor in an unforgiving world, but one that also enjoys beauty. A combination of both Metron and Himon could relate to Han because he also goes about his own way as a survivor, but personally he retains a soft spot. The notion of the Boom Tube and the Mother Box adheres to Himon in the same way Hyper-Space and the Millenium Falcon relates to Han. In The Hunger Dogs (released in 1985 after all three Star Wars films), Kirby’s representation on the New Gods appears to shift. No longer do the meanings of the gods thinly clarify a veiled rapport between the realisms and fictions which thus form humanity’s never-ending heroes. Now the gods seem to portray the unseen forces of the world that pull all the strings. Hunger Dogs dramatizes the transition of a corrupt world into an even larger system of political corruptness through automation and pushbutton philosophies. During this time even Kirby revealed some insight into Star Wars’ similarity to New Gods in an Jack hints at his feelings about Star Wars in these pencils (with unused dialogue) from New Gods reprint #6. article by Peter Dodds, Jr. Kirby observes Star Wars surmounts to the gist of all past and present cinema in the that the conflict between Darkseid and Orion is “very, very heavy same way Citizen Kane surmounts to the gist of all past and present territory, the territory they had in the Star Wars movies between film-making. Kirby’s legacy simply surmounts to the gist of all past Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.” With regard to the relationship and present novels (which Kirby called his stories). Lucas and Kirby between Vader and Skywalker, Kirby remarks, “I think they got themboth related stories and events based upon real people and seasoned selves into trouble on that one because it takes a lot of maturity, really, these stories in the same way as the authors of the past (from whom to define that kind of relationship. What father would want to kill his they both admit to taking) so that they could inspire the youth of own son? And what son would want to kill his father? And yet it’s today to act in the needs of tomorrow. The best case scenario for happened, son against father, hating each other for reasons that are those who need a springboard for extra consistencies between Star their own. Darkseid and Orion find themselves pitted against each Wars and New Gods can be found right here. If anybody lifted from other, but each has qualms about killing the other.” (“The Gods Kirby’s Fourth World, the network of Star Wars assistant designers Themselves,” Amazing Heroes #47, May 15, 1984) (who probably idolized Kirby for inspiring his or her career) stand true as the likely candidates. In relating the attempts of someone lifting mannerisms from another, Kirby once said, “In the last analysis, you can’t do someone else’s work. You haven’t got someone else’s outMythology, as in the annals of history, reigns supreme throughlook. You can only figure out things for yourself.” (Amazing Heroes #47) out every generation. The legends and heroes of today represent a Let us not read into the scheme of things because that can make simple transition from all the legends and heroes of yesterday. “There a mountain out of a mole hill. Take a cue from Lucas himself. “People is nothing new under the sun,” said King Solomon. Hard as that parahave perceived Star Wars differently from the way it really is.” (Starlog dox may seem, all creators draw forth from the same pot as the others. #120, page 49.) In retrospect the similarities of Star Wars and New Don’t be surprised if it all comes out in the wash!

Gods even amaze me, but they do not surprise me because they Both Star Wars and New Gods combine elements of fantasy, resolve at just that. Similarities. ✩ robots, gangsters, monsters, comedy, chivalry, westerns, and mystery.

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Conclusions

Kubrick à la Kirby

by Jon B. Cooke t takes a Kirby-size stretch of the imagination to call Jack a great non-Kirby characters were never treated with much enthusiasm, and he dialogue writer. Malevolent rantings and hyperbolic oaths belted seemed resistant to ever “get it right,” whether it was the “S” emblem or out staccato style were more his line. Jack was more apt to verbalize Spidey symbol. A sense of the dreaded editorial hand (almost always a rage and fury than to creating realistic, delicate chit-chat. Let’s face it, bane to Kirby’s work) pervades over parts of this oversize edition, with a Jack’s storytelling abilities improved with age, but in writing converfeeling that the artist was anxious to get to the good stuff. And with his sations his talents were sometimes wanting. vistas of space, spreads of the Monolith, and splashes of the Moon’s And that’s the crux of the problem when faced with his adaptaterrain and the Dawn of Man, he gives it to us. He gets it right, and contion for the Marvel Treasury Special of Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A tinued to for some spectacular issues of the subsequent comic series.

Space Odyssey. The script, the book, and the movie all retain nuance Don’t expect to find answers to Kubrick’s enigmatic film in Jack’s and subtleties that are missing from the otherwise stunning 72 pages version. Overall, while you may find the adaptation itself the least of of Kirby art. The wonderfully mundane dialogue found in Arthur C. all the versions of 2001, you will find Jack Kirby exploring the infinite Clarke’s script and novel is reduced to declarative, good-natured banand beyond, and that is an awesome sight (and currently one hell of a tering in the comic. Hal, oddly the most interesting — and human — bargain!). ✩ character in all the forms of 2001, is changed from a guilt-ridden sentient machine, submitting to murder to hide the shame of lying, to becoming a maniacal, raving villain, hellbent on getting the crew out of the way in the Kirby version.

There’s an important distinction to be made in this, one that reveals Jack’s moral views of right and wrong and his hopes for mankind. As endeared as he was to super-science, Jack cared more for the righteousness of man’s aspirations and less the promise of technology.

No machine could ever replace the indomitable human spirit, so the appliances become the bad guys in 2001. While Clarke used irony and banality of his human characters to underscore the profoundness of our first contact with Other Life Forms, Kirby brings forth the black and white conflict of good and evil in his version, of man versus machine, which may just miss the point of Hal’s presence in the story.

But then, Jack was rarely known for his subtlety and nuance, and his art, making up for any overly-enthusiastic wordage, is sock-o.

(Much of the captions are lifted verbatim from Clarke’s novelization.)

The 10" x 131⁄2" format showcases some astonishing Kirby spreads, especially his all-tooshort version of the Stargate “light show” — five straight splash pages of awesome power and tumult. Frank Giacoia’s ink’s are as faithful and striking as ever seen on Kirby’s work, and Adkins’ cover inks are especially loyal to the pencils (surprising for such a stylized embellisher) and testament to the creator’s talent. Of note is some exceptional coloring by Marie Severin and Kirby, the King doing a rare turn with the four color palette. Especially nice is the muted grey and yellow tones of the closing hotel room sequence. Four full pages of photo collages (using mostly production shots from the film) pale against the peak skill of his cartooning, and suffer from the perennial problem with Jack’s collages: bad reproduction.

Jack Kirby rarely adapted other creators’ works, and usually his reluctance comes through.

Whether Deadman, Superman or Spider-Man, Splash page pencils to Jack’s 2001: A Space Odyssey adaptation.

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Once Upon A Time: Kirby’s Prisoner

by Charles Hatfield What happens when your favorite cartoonist gets his hands on your favorite television show?

will and individual identity in the face of near-overwhelming odds; week after week, he succeeds in foiling all attempts to make him talk, yet fails to escape the Village. Ironically, he is never named, despite his repeated cry, “I am not a number! I am a free man!”

Though Number Six matches wits with a series of figurehead leaders, all known by the title “Number Two,” the ultimate power behind the Village (Number One, presumably) remains unknown.

Throughout the series, the stalemate between Village and Prisoner is challenged but never broken—that is, until the last two episodes of the series, an infamous two-part story in which No. 6 defeats his captors, encounters No. 1, and “escapes,” only to begin the same cycle all over again!

Under McGoohan’s direction, the series departed radically from its literal premise, so much in fact that writer/script editor Markstein eventually bailed out of the project. By then the show had become a truly strange blend of spy heroics, Orwellian SF, absurdist humor, and philosophical allegory. After more than a year of production, ITC pulled the plug on The Prisoner—which was, after all, costly, behind schedule, and (by TV standards) obscure. Broadcast in the UK in 1967-68, and in the US in the summer of ’68, The Prisoner caused brief ripples of enthusiasm, puzzlement, and outrage; in fact, British reaction to the last episode was so hot that McGoohan went abroad to escape notice.

Yet, once shown, The Prisoner faded into obscurity—only to be recovered by a growing fan following in the 1970s, and rerun in the States

The Prisoner!

British response to the 1960s’ Bond-inspired fad for spy thrillers, The Prisoner was conceived in 1966 by writer (and former secret service agent) George Markstein, and brought to life by actor/ producer Patrick McGoohan, co-producer David Tomblin, and crew (under McGoohan’s banner, Everyman Films Ltd, but financed by the company ITC). A conceptual follow-up, if not a direct sequel, to McGoohan’s popular series Danger Man (US title: Secret Agent), Markstein’s Prisoner concerned a former espionage agent imprisoned in a retirement community for spies. As finally produced, the series elaborated on Markstein’s premise by treating it symbolically: the spy thriller became an allegory of the tension between individual self and institutional authority—in McGoohan’s words, an “allegorical conundrum” open to myriad interpretations.

The allegory rests on a plot elegant in its simplicity: a secret agent resigns his position, only to find himself a prisoner in the Village, a superficially quaint yet rather sinister locale. Unnamed powers want to know why he resigned, and try to force his secrets from him, but he refuses to say anything, and dedicates himself to escaping. Week after week, the Prisoner, dubbed “Number Six,” fights to preserve his free

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Kirby’s 2-page spread from pages 2-3 of his Prisoner adaptation. Inks by Mike Royer.

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by PBS in 1977 (my first exposure to it). The show’s memory lives on in numerous books, record albums, videotapes, and other merchandising, thanks in part to the efforts of Six of One, an authorized, international fan club. (Reportedly, McGoohan has recently signed with Polygram to write and produce a Prisoner feature film.)

References to The Prisoner in comics are many, but to my knowledge only two licensed Prisoner comics have been attempted: one, a four-part sequel by Dean Motter and Mark Askwith, published by DC in 1988-89; the other, an unpublished adaptation from Marvel Comics, written and drawn by none other than Jack Kirby! This unfinished, seventeen-page story, what was to have been the first in a series, was created by Kirby and partially inked and lettered by Mike Royer in the Summer of 1976 (to be published in Nov. ’76, with a Feb. ’77 cover date). Since Marvel scrapped the project, this single episode is all that remains of Kirby’s plans for the series.

control (see TJKC #6).

Kirby’s fascination with The Prisoner in fact dates back at least as far as Fantastic Four #84-87, which would have been produced in 1968, the very year The Prisoner was first broadcast in the US. That story focuses on a Latverian village constructed by Dr. Doom to entrap the FF, a village in which the falsely-smiling peasants seem just as cowed and evasive as the inhabitants of McGoohan’s village. Stan Lee later (October ’69) acknowledged this story as an homage to/parody of The Prisoner—clearly, the concept lodged itself in Kirby’s brain soon after, or even during, the TV show’s original run.

The Prisoner must have appealed to Kirby the storyteller on a gut level, as it raised philosophical questions in a disarmingly accessible form. McGoohan and Co. used the then-popular spy genre for all it was worth—despite its intellectual ambitions, and portentous tone,

Why Kirby?

According to Steranko’s Mediascene (Nov.-Dec. 1977), Marvel’s Prisoner began as a proposal by editor Marv Wolfman, which led to an effort by Steve Englehart and Gil Kane—an effort nipped in the bud

by Stan Lee, who gave the project to Kirby.

Lee later scuttled the series altogether.

Given its history, one might expect Kirby’s adaptation to be lukewarm, a matter of assignment rather than passion—but no, his Prisoner is an intense, ambitious comic, oddly in tune with his other 1970s projects.

It’s not hard to see why The Prisoner appealed to Kirby. Indeed, the series’ concept, which Kirby glossed as “an individual’s stubborn attempts to wrest freedom from subtle but oppressive power” makes perfect sense within Kirby’s oeuvre. Its paranoiac, Orwellian premise dovetails with the dystopian future of Kirby’s OMAC (197475), as well as the Orwell riffs in Kirby’s “Madbomb” saga in Captain America #193200 (1975-76). Likewise, echoes can be found in the later “Mr. Machine” story in Kirby’s 2001 #8-10 (1977), with its theme of free will vs. mind control.

Going back farther, we find the theme of freedom vs. control tackled most directly in Kirby’s Fourth World saga (1970-74). The Forever People, in the “Glorious Godfrey” story arc (#3-6), confront brainwashing on a grand scale, in the form of Godfrey’s evangelical crusade, then are imprisoned within Happyland, an amusement park which serves as a kitschy facade for Desaad’s experiments in manipulation; later, in “The Power” (#8) they face a megalomaniac whose will-power can turn others into puppets. Over in Mister Miracle, the very idea of a “super escape artist” invites comparison to The Prisoner, with its stress on entrapment and escape; indeed, there are echoes of The Prisoner’s nameless Village in Granny Goodness’ horrifying “Orphanage” on Apokolips. On a larger scale, throughout the Fourth World, Darkseid’s ongoing quest for Anti-Life dramatizes the struggle between individual freedom and totalitarian

Page 4 of Jack’s Prisoner adaptation, fully inked and lettered by Royer.

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The Prisoner was filled with chases, fisticuffs, and intrigue; its thematic conceits were grounded in a credible, almost palpable world. In short, the series used a familiar genre, and a hard-hitting style, to allegorize weighty issues. Sound familiar? This might be a capsule description of Kirby’s Fourth World. Just as The Prisoner had treated the spy genre as an intellectual vehicle, Kirby had tried to make the superhero comic a platform for ideas. Kirby’s Prisoner, in the wake of the Fourth World, represents another attempt to wring significance and depth out of his style—a style forged in juvenile adventure comics yet responsive to Kirby’s own preoccupations and concerns.

The Comic Book Unlike most of Kirby’s comics from the mid-’70s, The Prisoner is not broken down into brief chapters, so the story’s rhythm seems less dynamic, more deliberately measured, than was his wont. Yet the pages feature standard Kirby layouts: usually four, five, or six panels per page, plus two full-page splashes and a double-page spread (pp. 2-3, of course). In keeping with Kirby’s mature preference for regular layouts, the page designs are steady and gridlike. Royer, impeccable as ever, inked the first five pages and one panel on the sixth, and lettered all of the captions and most of the dialogue; thus The Prisoner provides an instructive glimpse into Royer’s working process as well as Kirby’s. Throughout, Royer’s fidelity to Kirby’s pencils is evident, as is his practice of skipping around in a story rather than finishing each page one at a time.

Plot-wise, Kirby’s story recaps the first half of “Arrival,” the first episode of the TV series: The Prisoner finds himself in the Village.

Seeing a waitress at an outdoor cafe, he plies her with questions (closely paraphrased from the original), but learns nothing. A flashback reveals how the Prisoner got here (Kirby’s version of the series’ main title sequence, cleverly interpolated). He leaves the cafe and takes a taxi ride, which, again, reveals almost nothing. Back in his appointed cottage, he answers a telephoned invitation from Number Two to meet him at “the Georgian House” (“the Green Dome” in the original). No. 2 and No. 6 meet, and the interview between them establishes the series’ basic conflict (again, with dialogue lifted almost verbatim from the show). Finally, the Prisoner (now called No. 6) takes a helicopter ride with No. 2, and thus learns that the Village is in an isolated setting, cut off from the rest of the world.

Like Kirby’s tabloid-sized 2001: A Space Odyssey, his Prisoner is a close, painstaking adaptation, faithful to the original not only in concept but also in many of its details. Yet unlike 2001, The Prisoner offers few opportunities for Kirby’s panoramic style, and these seventeen pages, since they cover only the first half of the series’ pilot, lack even the brisk, physical action which was Kirby’s stock-in-trade. “Arrival” in fact contains much that Kirby didn’t get to, including the introduction of “Rover” (the enigmatic watchdog of the Village), a plot involv-

The Prisoner resigns! Page 5 of the adaptation. ing the apparent suicide of “Cobb” (a former associate of the Prisoner), and a couple of failed escape attempts. Kirby’s story includes none of these violent shocks—no fights, no tricks, no unexpected reversals— but instead simply introduces the series’ premise. In a longer form, Kirby’s adaptation might have achieved the varied rhythms and roughand-tumble action of the original, but in the seventeen-page comicbook format, we are left with a story which promises much, yet lacks the expected Kirby fireworks.

Indeed, The Prisoner is a remarkably restrained effort for Kirby, in contrast to his other mid-’70s work. Here Kirby’s energy is pent-up, his trademark freneticism banked and contained. In fact, physical action reaches its highest pitch in the two-page flashback which replays the main title sequence from the original series: the hero hurls his letter of resignation onto his superior’s desk and storms from the office; later, in his apartment, he is gassed, and carried away—that’s all.

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Yet, despite its seemingly unkirby-like restraint, the story simmers subtle, The Prisoner himself must be subtle in his efforts to escape; with intensity. From the outset Kirby’s powerful storytelling devices are thus Kirby’s too-brief episode ends in mid-air, the tension not at all disevident, though turned to unusual purposes. For example, the two-page sipated, the intensity not at all dispersed by violence. spread which establishes the Village locale, though devoid of the teemIn an impressive close-up in the final panel, the Prisoner seems ing life typical of Kirby’s spreads, capitalizes on Kirby’s monumental like a caged tiger, anxious to escape—and you can sense this in Kirby sense of scale: we see the Prisoner wandering the deserted Village streets as well. The “next issue” blurb, overeager to please, promises a story in the early morning, walking stiffly, dwarfed by the architectural setwith the blood-pumping title “Kill Me If You Can!” replete with “new ting of the Village square. The sheer scope of the drawing underscores revelations... and new gimmicks!” The incongruity of this blurb, after the Prisoner’s aloneness, and the apparent lifelessness of the Village, a story as measured, as controlled, as the one we’ve just read, suggests while Kirby’s rendering summons a dark, threatening atmosphere. that Kirby wanted to balance philosophical depth with hard-hitting Clotted shadows, thick crosshatching, and distinctive details (e.g.,cobbleaction, much like the original series— who knows where he would have stones, shingles) give the Village a rough, weather-beaten look, somegone with it from here, or how wild the ride would have been? In any how more akin to the Eastern European settings of The Demon or FF event, The Prisoner pushes Kirby’s action-adventure formula to its limit, #84-87 than to the quaint holiday resort (Portmeirion, North Wales) daring to depart from convention with a long, slow build-up. The series’ used in the TV series. Though premise demands such delibKirby’s Village square is moderate treatment, yet one can eled on the original (indeed, sense Kirby’s impatience to the fountain and columns are take the material and run exact copies), it seems more with it. dense, more claustrophobic, Design-wise, The Prisoner and less cheery. Here the sininvokes the original series ister aspects of Village life are yet remains very much a all too apparent at first glance, Kirby comic. The landscape, while the absurd aspects, gadgets, and characters, underscored in the TV series though patterned after the by the colorful location, banal original, are rendered with music, and other comic details Kirby’s usual energy and (e.g., the marching band, the freedom. Only the likeness of striped awnings), are less proNo. 6 himself (i.e., the face of nounced. Kirby’s Village is Patrick McGoohan) gives nightmarish, but lacking in Kirby problems, as indeed irony. one might expect, given Besides the opening Kirby’s well-known impaspread, other stock Kirby tience with reference photodevices also contribute to the graphs. The opening splash, story’s intensity. For instance, in particular, does not sugan extreme close-up of the gest McGoohan at all: the Prisoner’s face, one eye glaring Prisoner is too gaunt, his from the shadows, signals the nose not round enough, his beginning of the crucial flashexpression too old and careback sequence; the staring worn. Yet by page 4 a stable eye and the densely shadowed likeness emerges, one which face are pure Kirby. The scene remains fairly distinct Panels from page 6 of the adaptation, partially inked by Royer. of the resignation itself, on the throughout the tale—the following page, takes its cue from the thunderclaps heard in the TV face is not precisely McGoohan’s, but close enough for recognition. I’m show’s main title, but gives the device a Kirbyesque twist: the scene is tempted to attribute the improved likeness to the good offices of Royer lit by flashes of lightning, signified by a storm of crackling Kirby dots! (who, for example, later “fixed” the details in Kirby’s strip adaptation Kirby in fact takes every opportunity to increase the visual drama of The Black Hole), but, no, the face remains consistent, and indeed of the piece without inserting gratuitous action. When the Prisoner is becomes even more McGoohan-like, in the later pages, uninked by gassed, we see the shadow of his crumpling figure, hand clutching his Royer. During No. 6’s interview with No. 2, Kirby produces a number throat, obviously struggling to stay conscious . When, later in the story, of drawings which are startlingly close to the original. the Prisoner hears the phone ring inside his appointed house, his stance This interview scene, pages 10-15, is the story’s most obviously is pure Kirby: legs spread, knees bent almost to a crouch, body tense with “Kirbyesque” sequence. Departing from the original series somewhat, alarm. The next panel shows him bolting toward the door to answer the Kirby allows his Prisoner to see the high-tech gadgetry which his sophone, his figure a study in torsion and momentum. All the mannercalled “keepers” use to monitor the Village; indeed, he transforms the isms of Kirby in action are here, even when the story’s action is subtle. interior of No. 2’s headquarters, “the Georgian house,” into “a maze Throughout, one senses that Kirby’s ferocious energy has been of technical wonders.” Whereas the cameras and other devices used in turned inward, resulting in a quiet yet restive piece of work which the series were hidden from No. 6, behind a quaint household facade, reflects the Prisoner’s own plight. Repeatedly we are reminded of the Kirby turns the entire setting into a futuristic playscape, rife with Prisoner’s powerlessness, as if Kirby felt the need to justify the character’s high-tech detail. apparent passivity. “There’s no way out,” the Prisoner realizes as No. 2 Thankfully, he preserves many essential design elements from the demonstrates the power of his unseen masters; moments later, his anger TV series: No. 2’s large, bubble-like chair; the enormous seesaw-like gives way to resignation, as he ruefully admits, “I could be considered monitoring device in the control room; the streamlined telephones, a captive audience!!” Urged to join No. 2 on a helicopter survey of the now dated but then futuristic; the badges bearing the penny farthing Village, No. 6 responds blandly, “Since I must accompany you, there is symbol; the homey little details such as teacups and dishes; and even little reason to refuse.” Because the power which oppresses him is the pint-sized butler (a nice likeness of actor Angelo Muscat on the 18

bottom of page 12). Yet in Kirby’s hands No. 2’s office goes from a huge, austere circular room (the design of the original) to a complex, architecturally-cramped setting filled with Kirby’s distinctive abstractions.

The only other full-page panel in the tale (aside from the opening splash) comes when No. 6 encounters No. 2, and it surrounds the latter with a riot of detail. Screens, buttons, and glyphs are everywhere; geometric forms, shadows, and metallic highlights transform the backgrounds, in panel after panel, into a claustrophobic Kirby wonderland, reinforcing the text’s initial description: “It is as if the present has been gulped down into the dark maw of a threatening future.” (page 11) In contrast to the openness and weathered look of the first few pages, the sequence inside the Georgian House is a clutter of beautiful shapes.

Yet this clutter is dramatically effective, reinforcing rather than distracting from the narrative, because Kirby uses his abstract forms to guide the eye. For example, a panel on page 13 shows a head shot of No. 2, against a swirling, circular pattern of techno-stuff, as, in the extreme foreground, the Prisoner’s accusing finger points directly at him. Thus the composition focuses everything on No. 2, reinforcing his words, “Haven’t you realized there is no way out?”

Similarly, on page 15, dark, circular patterns of machinery surround and contain the small figures of No. 2 and No. 6, as the latter declares, “You won’t hold me!!” Altogether, pages 10 through 15 demonstrate Kirby’s extraordinary ability to organize gobs of visual detail into dramatic compositions.

Fallout?

Yet there is more than visual craft at work in The Prisoner. These seventeen pages have a peculiar resonance—indeed, it’s tempting to read them as an allegory of Kirby’s own professional situation in the mid-’70s. As Chris Harper has observed, Kirby’s version of No. 6 resembles himself, sometimes remarkably so. That Kirby’s hero should be square-faced and rugged is hardly surprising, yet the resemblance between the Page 15 of the adaptation, still in pencil. Royer hadn’t finished inking the book when it was shelved.

Prisoner and the artist goes beyond this in new limits. Though the adaptation can’t be called a complete success— its specificity. The brooding eyes and taciturn mouth recall the scripting is inconsistent, sometimes labored, and, again, the premise McGoohan, of course, but the face and figure also recall Kirby’s famildemands more than seventeen pages can give—Kirby’s Prisoner offers iar self-image: broad-nosed, compact, pugnacious. More importantly, much: ingenious breakdowns, startling compositions, and a subtle, the story—about a man resigning his position as “a matter of princicarefully sustained mood. Hopefully, the entire story will one day be ple,” only to find that he is once again in the grip of an unprincipled printed in complete, authorized, and legible form—and recognized as power—seems to echo Kirby’s departure from Marvel, the frustration an extraordinary response to an extraordinary series. ✩ of his ambitions at DC, and his return to Marvel under a new set of editorial restraints. Such conjectures, of course, fascinate us precisely Thanks to Chris Harper, Mark Nevins, and especially John Morrow because they cannot be confirmed or unconfirmed, only pondered. for research help. Published sources include Alain Carrazé and Hélène On the face of it, it makes no sense to read so much into what is, Oswald’s The Prisoner: A Televisionary Masterpiece (Barnes & Noble, after all, only a licensed TV adaptation. Yet The Prisoner, finally, 1995) and Roger Langley’s The Making of The Prisoner (Six of One, remains a remarkable Kirby artifact—both because its theme and tone 1985, enclosed in the BAM-Caruso LP, Prisoner Themes, 1986). are distinctly personal, and because its quiet tension pushes Kirby to 19

The Black Hole: How Deep Is It?

by David E. Jefferson n 1979, Walt Disney Productions released a big-budget science fiction film entitled The Black Hole. It’s about the crew of the spaceship U.S.S. Palomino, on a mission to find signs of life in the last uncharted area of the galaxy. As their unsuccessful mission is drawing to a close, they encounter a “Black Hole,” a deep gap in the fabric of time and space which alters the natural laws of physics and reality as we understand them. To complicate matters, the crew, headed by Captain Dan Holland, also discovers the U.S.S. Cygnus, a long-lost space probe whose lone remaining passenger is Dr. Hans Reinhardt. It’s later revealed that Reinhardt has turned his former crew into subservient humanoids, capable only of obeying his will. Reinhardt’s goal

is to enter the Black Hole (for reasons that are never totally made clear), but he’s eventually undone by his own evil plans. The crew of the Palomino attempts to escape back to Earth, but they inadvertently get drawn into the Black Hole in the movie’s climax.

At the time, Disney used their Treasury Of Classics Sunday comic strip as a vehicle to promote new films they were releasing, and needed someone to adapt the film into comic strip form. Mike Royer worked for Disney during the making of The Black Hole movie, and suggested Kirby for the job. Jack accepted the assignment, the only film adaptation he’d undertaken since doing 2001: A Space Odyssey, but this time the scripting would be handled by Disney’s Carl Fallberg, with inks by Royer.

The 26-week adaptation ran in Sunday newspapers from Sept. 2, 1979 through Feb. 24, 1980, and it certainly achieved the desired result; it successfully transferred the movie’s characters and plot into the medium of comic strips.

Overall, the adaptation is fine and true to the film, and the art is unmistakably Kirby and dynamic. Royer’s work on it is also excellent.

But how deep is it?

By “deep,” I’m referring to the high standard and quality of comics that Kirby defined, redefined and exceeded throughout his career, and it’s by comparison that we see this adaptation is ultimately unsatisfying. The story breaks little new ground, and similarities to earlier Kirby work echo throughout the adaptation.

Like Darkseid, Reinhardt appears to have achieved something akin to the Anti-Life Equation by converting his crew into mindless slaves. Similar to Metron and Darkseid’s attempts to explore The Source (and even Reed Richards examination of the Negative Zone), Reinhardt could be seen as seeking to conquer the mysteries of life by entering the Black Hole. Even the robot V.I.N.C.E.N.T. is reminiscent of Herbie the Robot from the FF Animated Series.

Black Holes were not new to Kirby.

He had Thor encounter a Black Galaxy where the laws were different. The Negative Zone that Kirby’s Fantastic Four explored contains a Black Hole called the Anti-Matter Area, where space is transformed into anti-matter in the form of violent explosions. In 2001, a Black Hole is represented by the presence of the Monolith (which literally means the single stone). In the final analysis, the “Black Hole” is a new label applied to an old concept, or to use the Thing’s colloquialism and malapropism from FF #68 (Nov. 1967), “...like Willy Shakespeare said, The October 14, 1979 Black Hole strip. (Each newspaper reconfigured the panels to fit their own page layouts.) ‘What’s in a moniker?--A rose by any

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other name’ll still give ya hay fever!’”

Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey adaptation establishes a baseline from which we can do a comparative analysis; the difference being that Kirby wrote the 2001 adaptation and could use his full creative abilities and scripting ironies. Unfortunately, this is lost in The Black Hole strip. A prime example is Palomino crewman Harry Booth. In the film he urges Capt. Holland to seize control of the Cygnus from Dr. Reinhardt.

However, when the time comes to act, he deserts his fellow crew members and launches the Palomino in a futile escape attempt. Kirby probably would have expounded upon Booth’s characterization had he written the script. He might even have constructed a parallel between the traitorous Harry Booth and Presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth (possibly making Harry a descendent of John Wilkes Booth). In scripter Fallberg’s defense, this was not articulated in the film either, but this is the missing level of “depth” that is common to Kirby’s work.

We must also recognize the fact that the medium of a weekly comic strip differs drastically from that of a comic book or Treasury Edition, in that only one page appears each week. This limitation alone prevented Kirby from doing his famous fullpage spreads. By giving Jack a script and photos from the film, Disney’s focus was more on the characters and backgrounds matching that of the film than on the adaptation having “depth.”

Obviously, if a film is not “deep,” it’s unlikely its comic strip adaptation will be. How does The Black Hole fail to achieve depth? The concept of the Black Hole simply is not defined enough. In Fantastic Four, Kirby made The final installment of The Black Hole, from February 24, 1980—not exactly an awe-inspiring conclusion! it clear how the Anti-Matter Area of the Negative Zone operated. Even in cases where the Black Hole was an unknown (ie. the Source and the Monolith), Jack still articulated what it could do; the Source produced the burning hand that provided words of wisdom and powered the myriad Mother Boxes, while the Monolith served as a catalyst, speeding up the evolutionary process from ape to man and from man to Star ell us what your favorite Kirby story of all time is (any story Jack Child. These vital explanations are left out of The Black Hole, despite worked on qualifies, whether as artist or writer, but please list only the fact that in the climax, the crew of the Palomino journeys right one single story/issue). So far, only a few entrants have chosen the through the center of it. As Mike Royer said in his interview in TJKC same story, so don’t be afraid to be original! We’ll print the results in #6, “The last Sunday page... has a big splash panel of the cast looking TJKC #13, and randomly draw voter’s names and award the following: out a window at whatever the hell’s on the other side of the Black GODS Portfolio, 21st Century Archives Kirby Card Hole... none of us knew.”

Set, Italian magazines reprinting the Silver Surfer In the end, the crew survives and comes out safe. The big question Graphic Novel, New Gods #1, and Argosy Magazine with “Street Code” story. is “How?” Unlike 2001, we were deprived of the wondrous visuals of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place winners will be randomly awarded Card the journey (a Kirby trademark). By the Kirby standard, it misses the Sets, Italian Magazines, and miscellaneous Kirby comics. So vote already! mark in this area, and thus can’t be considered “deep.” ✩

Enter The Big Kirby Contest!

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Grand Prize

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Seeking The Lord Of Light Producer Barry Ira Geller interviewed by John Morrow (In November 1979, the movie industry was abuzz over the announcement of a planned $50 million science fiction movie based on Roger Zelazny’s Hugo award-winning novel Lord of Light. It was scheduled to begin filming in July 1980 on 1,000 acres of land near Denver, Colorado. The plan was that, instead of removing the sets after filming, they’d be incorporated into a new theme park called Science Fiction Land, which would’ve been three times the size of Disneyland, and would open in 1984. The entire project was the brainchild of screenwriter Barry Ira Geller, who commissioned Jack Kirby to provide a series of drawings for the theme park and movie sets, and incorporated them into a promotional package to help secure funding for the project. Legal problems eventually arose for which members of the local city council and Geller’s second-in-command were convicted; and although Geller was cleared of any wrongdoing, neither the movie or theme park were ever completed. We asked Barry Ira Geller to elaborate on his experiences with Jack and the Lord of Light, and he generously allowed us this interview, conducted on January 18, 1996.)

TJKC: Did Star Wars’ success give you greater incentive to proceed?

BARRY: I guess you could say that. I was really pushing science fiction for several years as a screenwriter. I got turned down all over the place. (laughter) In 1975, I was living on options, and I did have a small film produced, but no one would listen to me. I talked to a lot of producers.

I was promoting science fiction stories left and right, but no one would listen to me. It wasn’t until after Star Wars that people started listening to me.

TJKC: Did you know Jack before you got him involved on the project?

BARRY: No, I didn’t. I took over and bought the first option in late 1977 or early 1978. For those who don’t know, an option is when you purchase the rights to make a movie for a limited period of time, to see what you can do with it. Then if you want to, you can purchase the full rights. Initially, I spoke to a couple of artists, and I’d say, “Can you do this like Jack Kirby does it?”

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Could you give us a brief synopsis of the plot of Zelazny’s novel?

BARRY IRA GELLER: Basically, it’s about a band of survivors fleeing the destruction of their planet which was called Urth. They were selected for their different psychic abilities or expanded-consciousness abilities. They later become the crew of a spaceship that lands on a planet they call Earth, as in our Earth, and turn themselves into the gods of the Hindu pantheon. In the course of a thousand years, they take over the creatures of the planet and build their own cities in a remake of Earth’s ancient India.

The story is really one of those love/hate triangles between three very powerful people, which ultimately ends in one of them fighting all his colleagues for the freedom of the planet, and the freeing of technology for mankind. His name is Sam, short for Mahasamatman, or the Lord of Light. His ex-lover was also the most powerful female goddess, and it’s quite intriguing. Imagine having the most passionate, explosive relationship you can dream of... and having it continue for 800 years! The book was originally published in 1967, the same year it won the Hugo award.

TJKC: So you were familiar with Jack’s work?

BARRY: I read Fantastic Four #1 off the newsstand! (laughter) When I was a teenager, FF, Iron Man, X-Men, and Thor shaped my whole consciousness of super-heroes. I was very much into his knock-’em-dead artistic style. I went through two artists and wasn’t happy with their work, and the obvious dawned on me. Why not just call up Jack Kirby? (laughter) So I did in 1978, and I found out he was living here in California. I was totally away from comics for years, so it was just my memories I was going on.

TJKC: At that point, had Jack ever read the novel?

BARRY: I don’t think so. Jack really wasn’t so much of a reader as a storyteller, so I put together an adaptation that I think he glanced through. But generally it was our conversations that gave him the greater idea. He was a concept man.

TJKC: When you first approached him, was he immediately enthusiastic about the project?

BARRY: Actually, he was. There was an interview our Public Relations person “The Lord of Light” featuring the character Sam. did with him, and he was quite excited by it. He saw the characters as larger-than-life.

TJKC: How did you get involved in making a movie out of the novel?

(Editor’s Note: The interview Barry mentions accompanies this one.)

BARRY: In the early 1970s, I was looking for a property like Lord of Light, because I felt there was a great message and a spiritual awareness TJKC: What criteria did you give Jack to work from? Did you tell him of the rest of the universe, very much like Lucas did with Star Wars. I how many drawings you needed, and of what? was working with a director who had initially optioned it. I was a screenBARRY: We were doing two things at once. I was involved in building writer, and I dropped another job to take up the screenwriting on that a theme park at the time. In fact, it was the theme park that was going one, and ultimately he left the project and I just bought it. This is in to be financing the film. Jack had the extraordinary feat of doing the mid-1970s. Star Wars had just come out. I was actually working designs that would also be theme park structures. The drawings he did on the first adaptation of Lord of Light before Star Wars came out.

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are for the theme park, but they’re also for the Lord of Light movie.

Jack was probably the most incredible artist that I’ve ever worked with. I was working with top people in their fields; several Oscar winners, and the number one architect in the world at that time. And Jack was the most amazing one of all. It was kind of magical. I would basically sit down with Jack for a few hours, and we’d discuss concepts. For example, on The Northeast Corner Of Heaven, I came to Jack and said, “My feeling is, these guys are bringing their technology to this planet, and everyone copies them.” We talked about the Hindu religion and mythology, and the Tibetan Mandala design of temples; it’s a sort of traveling up through consciousness as you get to the top, and we sort of said, “This is a good place for the spaceship to be.” And we just threw ideas back and forth.

It was the strangest thing. How do you know when someone got what you said? And the funny thing was that I’d see a certain kind of shine in his eyes, a certain glow. And I went, “Hmm, I know he’s got it.” (laughter) Normally if you give someone instructions, you don’t know if they got it until they hand you some(above) “The Northeast Corner Of Heaven” • (below) “Terminal Of The Gods” thing back, and you help them a little bit more.

I really am a believer in allowing a person to create. I think that was TJKC: Were you planning to use the movie sets for the theme park one of the most important aspects of our relationship. And I’d get a before Jack ever got involved? call two or three days later, and I’d come back to his studio, always BARRY: Correct. bearing a box of Dunhill cigars. (laughter) And there it would be. He hit every one of those drawings first time out of the gate. It was amazing.

TJKC: There’s one here that looks like it was watercolored.

I was awed. Then we’d get to work on the next one.

BARRY: That’s the only one that wasn’t what I was originally thinking The first drawing was called Terminal Of The Gods. You’ll notice it of, and I gave it to him as a present. For that one, I asked for an idea has a more Mayan feel. That was done just as he was finishing Eternals. of what the streets of Heaven looked like. That’s all I said to him. He At the end, you’ll see he got much more Hinduistic and Eastern, based colored it in later and called it The Angel. It’s called Streets Of Heaven. on our discussions and a giant picture book on India that I gave him, (A color reproduction of this piece can be found in The Art Of Jack Kirby.) which helped us communicate. That book is still there on his bookshelf.

TJKC: How many drawings were there in all?

BARRY: Thirteen. One is a double-spread.

TJKC: Did you have black-and-white line art in mind from the beginning? And who picked Mike Royer as inker?

BARRY: Both were Jack’s choice, and I agreed.

The two pieces entitled The Royal Chambers Of Brahma are good examples of how I said, “Jack, I want to have something with 100-200 feet of revolving virtual image holograms of all the different people on the planet, and states of consciousness, and energies and emotions.” Then I said, “Let’s try it with just the revolving gardens,” which is more like the novel. The novel doesn’t really say where anything is, so I took artistic license with it.

TJKC: But in terms of who decided which scenes to depict, that was your decision?

BARRY: Oh yes. I had very distinct ideas of different ones I wanted.

TJKC: Have they all been published anywhere?

BARRY: There was a Media Kit, but they weren’t published, per se. Roz and I have plates of everything, and at some point we may 23

“Planetary Control Room” is a two-page spread.

“The Seven Faces of the Gods”

“Royal Chambers Of Brahma (Interior)” 24

publish it. And some of them were printed in Mediascene back in 1979.

TJKC: From a collector’s standpoint, how many of the Media Kits are out there?

BARRY: There were some special Jack Kirby Media Kits that contained only his drawings, which we called a Coloring Book. It included all the drawings, spiral bound. We were having a coloring contest as a promotion when we first started breaking ground on the theme park in Colorado. There were probably 30 or 40 of those. Then there were these big hardcover ones out there, maybe 20 or 30. That’s what I used for raising money; they had all the drawings and everything. I have no idea their value, but they’re certainly collectible. When the Theme Park project was halted, about 50 of these books vanished. I only have one, myself.

TJKC: Weren’t a lot of the originals auctioned off at Sotheby’s in 1992?

BARRY: Correct. Jack got a few of the originals, and the rest were auctioned off.

TJKC: Did you have plans for Jack to be (above) “Royal Chambers Of Brahma (Exterior) • (below) “Pavilions Of Joy” involved beyond the initial drawings? was before the computer revolution, and before the Internet. (laughter) BARRY: Our deal was that I wanted him to be totally in charge of art It was that kind of force. Jack felt that it was his crowning achievement; direction for the film. He was to have had a percentage of the profits it was no small concept to him. We were playing for keeps. We were real. as well. I mean, once Kirby was involved, who else is there? The agreeIt’s everything Ray Bradbury was trying to do all his life. That’s why I ment was that he was to be a participant in the production. contacted Ray Bradbury about being one of the directors of it, with Jack.

TJKC: Give us an idea what the theme park would’ve been like.

TJKC: Would Jack have been involved in fleshing-out the theme park?

BARRY: The property would’ve been based on Jack’s drawings, and BARRY: Absolutely, at least as far as the Lord of Light sets were involved. dedicated directly to his style. We had raised commitments for about In the drawing called Science Fiction Land, you’ll see how it’s all laid a quarter of a billion dollars from a Canadian entity, and $20 million out. I handed him a layout of where everything went. He visualized it, hard cash from an American entity. I was working with some of the with the mountains behind, and the idea of the hotels. He just visualized best scientists in the world to create stuff that would be used on an everything that we were talking about. entertainment basis. The idea of Science Fiction Land was to force the future into the present, but one which the people owned, which imagTJKC: Why didn’t the movie and the park ever get completed? ination owned, not ruled by other interests. You’ve got to realize this BARRY: (pause) Probably the one word that will say it all is ‘Greed.’ I basically had assigned too much responsibility to certain people who did things, and I didn’t see it. We had some people who forged my name, forged my signature, and were bilking other people out of money, and I didn’t know about it.

They were looking at doing all these land deals around the land that I had optioned, and it came out. It took me about a year or so to straighten it all out afterwards. And I decided to just put it on a shelf at that point.

TJKC: How far did things actually progress on the movie and the park? Was a director ever chosen?

BARRY: No. We got to the point where someone put down the first $10 million, which was in the bank, and I’d optioned 1,000 acres of land in Colorado for the park. That’s when the government stopped everything. I was in the process of talking to directors and scientists, and the money was there. It was something that... it had the attention of many, many people, and it was just unfortunate.

TJKC: Do you still have the option on the book? Are there plans to do anything with the Lord of Light?

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BARRY: In the past couple of months, I’ve made some inroads at a couple of electronic game companies, and I have even gone to contract stages but it’s not done yet. Image Comics was strong about doing something for quite some time. But I’m sure you’re well aware of the turmoil the comics industry is in. So starting up new comics is risky. But it’s something I’d still like to see. I believe the right company will come and take Jack’s mantle on and do it right!

TJKC: Would Jack’s designs be the starting point for any future Lord of Light projects?

BARRY: Well, the rights that I own are to the actual novel. My agreement hasn’t changed with Roz, in that the drawings are a basis for promotion of the rights to the novel, Lord of Light. So the answer is yes, as it is totally inconceivable to me to promote the project in any form without Jack’s designs. However, any further work that would be done would be an entirely different arrangement between me and the Kirby estate.

It’s certainly there as it was originally intended to be, as a promotion of the rights of the novel, Lord of Light. That is, after all, how it all began.✩ (above) “Science Fiction Land” • (below) “Brahma’s Supremacy” (The following interview/biography appeared in being in charge of Exterior Design for the film itself. His work is worldthe promotional materials Barry prepared to secure funding for the Lord of renowned, world-appreciated and world-acclaimed.

Light project, and was written by Barry’s Public Relations representative.)

Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Kirby maintains that at first he wanted to be an actor, as so many Hollywood people came from here is a most impressive book out now entitled History of Comics. his area. His interest in movies started at a very early age and he says, The first two of the projected six volumes are already collector’s “I think my entire generation was brought up by Warner Brothers!” items. The book covers the entire spectrum of its subject from the But Kirby’s talent for both writing and drawing, which he started at inception of comics to the present day. Its very first page reads: age eleven, combined with his intense interest in show business made Dedicated to Jack Kirby him gravitate towards comics... which he describes as “frozen movies.”

Without whom there may not have been any comics to write a history about.

“You can’t draw comics without directing and acting. My value to comics was that I could create atmosphere, a cinematic style of drawing.

This phenomenally-talented artist/writer/editor is in charge of “My figures are alive; they had to be because being self-taught is Special Design Concepts for the whole Lord of Light project alongside of an agonizing process. I didn’t know the fundamentals of anatomy. I had to grasp it myself...

I used to get very frustrated. Then I would watch the movies, learn from the flexibility of real people and eventually I learned how to create my three-dimensional characters.”

Although Kirby wanted to attend Pratt Art School, because of financial pressures he was there only for one day. Eventually he had to opt for an industrial school, so that he could be an auto mechanic in the mornings.

He decided he wanted to try his hand at being a syndicated cartoonist, but first was able to get a job at the Max Fleischer Animation Studios where he produced material for cartoons like Popeye, but when the studio moved to Florida, his family ties kept him in New York.

His ability finally led him to the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate in 1936 where he produced a horde of strips including Black Buccaneer, Socko the Sea Dog and Abdul Jones. By 1939 he produced work for Novelty’s Blue Bolt and Fox’s Blue Beetle. Then in 1941 he drew the first issue of Captain Marvel Adventures.

Kirby then began his famed partnership with Joe Simon and created Captain America, who instantly became an American idol and

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Among his most successful creations are The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and the original design for Spider-Man. Three of the above have already become television series and specials in the United States.

The awards Kirby has line a whole room at his hillside home in California; there are Shazam awards, there are Academy of Comic Art awards, there are Hall Of Fame awards, and many, many more.

Though Kirby has never been involved in a movie before, it is because he never found one that he thought to be worthy of his time before. But he has always believed that his work is directly oriented toward film and says that is because: “I feel that visual writing, which is after all what comics are all about, is in reality, film.

Film tells a complete story that you can look at in such a way that an ordinary novelist cannot (above) “Jet Tube Transporter” • (below) “Hostel Of Hawkana” convey.” whose popularity spawned the beginning of a national comic book Why then did Kirby decide to do this film? industry. The Captain remains Kirby’s most brilliant character, draw“Firstly, had I not been invited to be involved with Lord of Light, I ing him like a super-human complete with a fluid and exaggerated would have gone out of my way to make sure that I could be. anatomy. The Captain soon became the country’s morale-boosting “I wanted to get involved because I am a concept man. I can get anti-Nazi. to the nut of a story. My way of looking at things and the way that I “He was a product of the times,” says Kirby. “Hitler had already develop is exactly what this film needs. That’s my background. This is invaded Poland and that became a pervading situation. Hitler was a a very special project. It’s very challenging... it’s also very powerful.” pervasion of the times. And then there was science fiction... that fit in Kirby maintains that as the story was so unique, the approach perfectly for my creation as it provided the rockets and bombs that has to be also. It has to have a new way of looking at the subject... “It is were used in the stories.” also going to be very valuable to humanity.

Kirby has had a love affair with science fiction since as a small “This film is going to have a tremendous impact in the world, it child he rescued a Hugo Gernsback book floating down the gutter on will show enormous strength. It will allow the Eastern Man and the its way to a sewer. It had a huge rocket on its cover... he’d never seen Western Man to relate to each other. And once mankind relates, they anything like it and consequently read that one and more like it whenwill never again have to fight. They will understand each other’s ever he could. needs and idiosyncrasies.

“At the time, reading sci-fi made you look like the village idiot,” “I believe that this film and the way we are conceiving it could says Kirby, “but I couldn’t give it up so I’d steal upstairs to my room to contribute to saving the world. read until my mother found out and made me read downstairs again.”

“I had to be involved... and I most definitely am.” ✩ Kirby’s mother didn’t mind. In fact, she encouraged him to do anything he wanted as a creator. He also says that she was an immense influence on him.

Being from an eastern European country, she was deeply superstitious, and her impressions were to live with him forever.

“She was full of legends, she used to write herself, she used to dramatize everything, she had a wonderful imagination and we talked and talked and she made up stories for me. I think my style in comics directly related from her form of delivery.”

Following Captain America, Kirby went on to National where he created Boy Commandos and Newsboy Legion, which were to become the prototypes for the “kid” comic books to follow. Then came a stint in the Army. He went to France and ended up in the hospital with frostbite and finally returned to comic strips in 1945 where he started another aspect of the business; that of romance comics.

In his forty-year career, Jack Kirby has produced every conceivable type of comic book work. Many of the field’s most successful concepts are his creations and he has been responsible for more comic book sales in the world than any other writer, editor or artist.

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© DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, Inc. Doctor doom is in sanctum-laboratory (small figures on table and model of baxter building)

Toys with chess-type figures

The Animated Life Of Jack Kirby

by Jon B. Cooke H-B hired Jack to do presentation boards—large renderings of concepts, characters and storyboards outlining typical episodes to pitch show ideas—and on the strength of those NBC bought The New Fantastic Four for the 1978-79 season. “At that point Marvel decided they wanted to do the show at DePatie-Freleng instead,” Evanier said.

Ultimately a deal was reached, where D-F traded off their Godzilla show (with comic great Doug Wildey, to boot!) and got Reed Richards & Co. in return. And they got Jack writing and drawing storyboards.

(For their second cartoon outing, Kirby’s super-hero team was a little different. “At the time, the Human Torch had been optioned to Universal for a TV movie,” Evanier said.

“Everyone thinks that Torch was left out because they didn’t want a character on fire, but actually it was a legal problem.” So in place of Johnny Storm, kids got the next best thing (?): wise-cracking H.E.R.B. — Humanoid Electronic Robot “B” model, or Herbie for short.)

One would imagine that Jack’s mastery of sequential art would make him ideal to panel out cartoon adventures. But storyboarding limited, low budget animation was a different and difficult task. “If you could do one show in five or six weeks, you’re really fast,” said John Dorman, who started at D-P and went on to become Jack’s art director at Ruby-Spears. “My first encounter with Jack was when he would turn in a finished half-hour storyboard every week that he wrote while he was drawing it. It was alarming!”

What D-P tried with Jack was an experiment to introduce the Lee & Kirby style of comics production to cartoons. “Usually in animation, you write a script and a storyboard artist turns it into a series of panels,” Evanier explains. “What they tried with Jack was having him storyboard first and then dialogue, imitating the Marvel method of doing a comic book. It didn’t really work.” Evanier cited two reasons: Jack’s lack of experience in storyboarding and the necessity of sparse action and frequent dialogue in limited animation. “You have to cut off a lot of times during the speech to make up for the fact that the characters aren’t moving very much. You can’t really storyboard and figure out later how much dialogue there’s going to be. It has to be the other way

hen his comic book output declined to a handful of issues in the ’80s, many Jack Kirby fans assumed the artist was taking a well-deserved retirement. But if you turned on Saturday morning TV during those years, you’d have seen the Kirby magic all over the airwaves, often in some pretty weird shows. In a few his influence is obvious, especially The New Fantastic Four and Thundarr the Barbarian. But in a number of unkirby-like vehicles like Mr. T, Rambo, and Turbo Teen, his contributions were also significant. In some shows, including Super Friends, Sectaurs, and Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, he designed vehicle, villain, or maybe background details to certain episodes.

Instead of enjoying a respite after an incredible career in comics, Jack was creating a huge body of work in an entirely new medium, his imagination still blazing to express new ideas. He became a master of presentation art, inventing unusual, innovative concepts and characters which became, as in his previous job, his forte. Jack’s precise contributions to the ’toon biz are still mostly uncharted and the facts are confined to aging files in studio storage rooms, but his influence to those he worked with is still vibrant in their memories and it is a story well worth telling.

W

The New Fantastic Four By 1978 the future must have looked anxious for Jack. He was on a leave of absence from his latest employer, Marvel Comics (where he was suffering increasing and arbitrary staff interference), when Jack confided over dinner to one-time assistant and longtime friend, Mark Evanier. He admitted that he didn’t have the stomach to return to the field he helped mature into an art form, and said he was leaving Marvel—and comics—possibly for good. “He didn’t feel that he had much of a future in comics,” Evanier said, “and felt that he had gone backwards in his career.” After forty years, 21,000 pages of art, and the creation of innumerable concepts and characters that enrich the copyright owners to this day, Jack needed to try something new.

Evanier was at Hanna-Barbera Studios as staff writer for their comics line when he heard a rumor. The art department was trying to imitate Kirby in preparation for a Fantastic Four cartoon series. The writer went to Iwao Takamoto, the studio art director, and asked, “Why not get the real thing?” The creator of the very concept might be available. A phone call and car ride with Roz later, Jack had found that something new: a career as designer for the animation studios of Hollywood, U.S.A.

(center) Jack’s original design for Herbie The Robot. (above and right) A beautiful storyboard sequence from “The F.F. Meet Doctor Doom” episode of The New Fantastic Four. The storyboards for the entire episode consist of 126 of these 3-panel drawings. The lettering under each panel is what Jack wrote to describe the action in each scene.

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Figures are F.F.

Doom is cooking up some kind of plot

Doom is through with game

He raises arm

Knocks down figurines

Presses button

His intentions are ominous...

door slides open

takes off in private jet for new york

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doom walks down ramp to hangar

fallen figures still lie on castle floor...

around,” said the cartoon show veteran.

Jim Woodring, the accomplished cartoonist of Jim and Frank, remembers similar problems with Jack’s storyboards later on, when Woodring was inking most of Jack’s work. Ruby-Spears gave Jack “a stab at [it] without telling him how to really do it. He did some really innovative things like a close-up of somebody’s face to the extent that all you could see was the eyes, and the shot called for panning from the left eye to the right while two minutes of dialogue were spoken.

He made up his own rules. He looked at some other boards and from his own take on how they were done he started doing his. But it was completely unusable.”

The experiment failed. The New FF was not picked up for a second season after a 12 episode run. Plots were retreads of the early Kirby comics, and most were dialogued by Stan Lee (with Roy Thomas contributing a few). But the industry took notice of Jack’s work and more creative opportunities arose, including some freelance work for H-B doing designs for other shows, including the “Space Ghost” episodes of Space Stars. Jack was finally a rising star in Hollywood.

Thundarr The Barbarian

© Hanna-Barbera

© Ruby-Spears Productions, Inc.

Jack’s biggest contribution to television animation came with a six-year stay as salaried designer at Ruby-Spears Productions. R-S was a new cartoon studio that would by the mid-eighties become the fastest growing company in the industry, with dozens of produced shows and specials. It was a short — compared to four decades in comics — but very productive time for Jack as he drew a mountain of concepts whose audience was usually confined to some network executives and the lucky souls at R-S. Under partners Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, who got their start as a writing team at H-B, the studio had a reputation as a good paying shop that produced sometimes pedestrian, sometimes wild cartoons.

Regardless of the finished output, R-S had a knack of recruiting some of the most talented artists in the business, including Alex Toth, Gil Kane, Wildey, Woodring, Robert Klein, and many others who would go on to achieve top fame in other fields. And Dorman pointed out that it was “a lucky collision” of the innovative talents of three men that led to a golden age for the studio: Jack Kirby, Steve Gerber, and Joe Ruby first teamed-up to produce one of the most fondly remem-

bered action/adventure cartoons, Thundarr the Barbarian.

The adventure series was the first idea former Marvel scribe Gerber presented when he arrived at R-S, and it was a novel (for TV) concept: a savage hero in a post-apocalyptic world, battling the forces of evil with his companions, sardonic Princess Ariel, and that bewildered behemoth, Ookla the Mok (whose name, Gerber revealed, was conceived with another comic expatriate, Marty Pasko, at a Hollywood diner by reading “UCLA” as a word). While one can see a derivative mix of Planet of the Apes, Conan, and Star Wars, the show was unique with its emphasis on all-out action, lack of kid sidekicks or comedy relief, and the near absence of that bane of Saturday morning cartoons: repeated use of stock footage (the same “Up, up, and away,” again and again). It was allout action/adventure played straight and it spoke directly to kids. “Thundarr was a big chance for the network to take, because it wasn’t a knock-off or a ‘me-too’ show,” Dorman said. “This was new.”

“ABC was on the fence about buying the show,” Evanier explained. “Joe Ruby said we had to get more artwork done and Toth [who designed the main characters] was not available. I recall saying, ‘Let’s get Jack Kirby.’ So he did a bunch of big pieces of artwork, most of which were inked by Alfredo Alcala (though Roz inked one or two) and that closed the sale with ABC.” Fresh from that victory, Jack went on to do secondary character designs — the villains, supporting roles, props and incidentals for individual episodes — A Kirby character design for Space Stars. • (top) Thundarr poster, inked by Alfredo Alcala. in the absence of the departed Toth. “I was floored 30

© Ruby-Spears Productions, Inc.

when Jack came to work on the show,” Gerber said. Jack remained to do some memorable work such as the two-faced bad guy, Gemini, and many astute viewers recognized the King’s touch in a number of episodes.

Thundarr was popular enough to be renewed for a half-season — a success in the constantly changing industry — and the episodes are well-regarded as genuine, exciting adventure, and probably the only cartoon worth watching at the time. But regardless of the numerous character developments he had in store, Gerber saw the end coming fast. “The network moved Thundarr around a lot, and it fell victim to the fall sports schedule. It was spring before the kids had a chance to really discover it.” By then it was too late and after 21 episodes, the show was cancelled. “It was one of the best things we’ve done,” Ruby said.

While not a big hit, the innovative show energized the studio to create more original concepts, and it was noted by the industry. R-S began growing in a big and profitable way.

Raising The Standard While several worthy ideas came close to

© Ruby-Spears Productions, Inc.

A Kirby-designed scene showing the Devil Masks of the wizard Gemini. selling, neither Kirby or Gerber would find figure per week for drawing,” Evanier said. And when things were slow, similar notable success in their prolific careers at R-S. But they both “he was then loaned out to H-B, and he did a lot of character designs raised a new standard of quality in the work. “Steve brought in writers for Super Friends, and for a few weeks drawing some very weird stuff that wouldn’t sit still for writers who were smug, arrogant and inferior,” for Scooby-Doo. On Super Friends, oddly enough, I don’t think he Dorman said. And Kirby brought prestige to the young studio, serving worked on any episodes that featured Darkseid and Desaad.” But as a spearhead and inspiration to push the envelope for more outmostly Jack worked for R-S. “We liked Jack’s work so much, we put landish ideas. him on staff for six years,” Ruby said. “He was great.”

He also worked on an enormous amount of cartoons, a few out“Jack was enormously happy with his experience at R-S.” Evanier side of the studio. “Jack was on this contract to receive a certain dollar said. “He told me they gave him the title of producer at some point, he was working with Hollywood people, and he was out of that environment of the closed shops of DC or Marvel. Television, at least, had a little more dignity to it. He got paid very well, and got a health plan which became very handy for the family.”

As in his comic book career, Jack didn’t stop to work on one concept at a time. Woodring’s first exposure to Kirby’s art came when he began at R-S during Thundarr.

“It was [Jack’s] job to come up with ideas that might be turned into TV shows,” Woodring said. “So he would come in every Monday morning, with a big thick stack of 20" x 30" inch Crescent board under his arm, on which he had drawn characters, settings, and show ideas. He had given names to all the shows, all the characters and vehicles, which were all really, really imaginative.”

The next concept that sold was Goldie Gold and Action Jack, about Jack’s initial drawings (like this one showing how Thundarr’s Sunsword works) helped Ruby-Spears sell the show. a beautiful, teenage newspaper 31

© Hanna-Barbera

all over the picture and later on he found out that that wasn’t mud; somebody’s head got blown off and splashed in his notebook. He said, ‘Some guys would have kept that just out of morbid curiosity.

Now, I’ve never had any doubts about my feelings on that subject, and I just tore off that page and never thought about it again.’”

Besides the oral historian, there was Jack Kirby the musician.

“We had a skiffle band,” Woodring recalled. “We got these instruments at a pawn shop, and we’d play sort of improvised rock and roll at the job.” Woodring still has proof that the King jammed with the L.A. Bastards, as they called themselves. “I have Jack performing on a Fender Stratocaster on a couple of these tapes — he had no idea how to play it, he was just hitting it. We also have him playing the trumpet (he said he played trumpet in the Boy Scouts) and he played some free form jazz… He’d just walk in while we were playing, and we’d go, ‘Hey, Jack, play this!’ and give him a guitar or trumpet. We would just keep playing and he would do the solo.”

Kirby also got along well with the boss. “Jack liked Joe tremendously and vice versa,” Evanier said. “They had a lot of things in common. They were both big cigar smokers. Joe was a big fan of Kirby.”

Ruby agrees. “We did work very closely. And we spoke the same language. It was very easy with Jack; I’d say something and he knew exactly what I wanted, and he delivered it.” At R-S, Jack “was treated different than I’ve seen any artist ever treated,” said Dorman. “He basically got to come in and do anything he wanted at all times. And he was loved for it.”

“Whenever he’d leave the building,” Woodring said, “we’d all go, God, can you believe we’re working in a place where this little, vibrating, fireball of a man comes walking in and just knocks out these fantastic drawings, and on top of it, he’s a celebrity. I mean, what a weird job! It was great!”

R-S was that rarest of companies in its appreciation of artistic talent, and Dorman’s department had unheard of creative freedom and was paid very well. “Even when a minor success would happen, Joe and Ken gave the maximum recognition to us… anything we wanted, we got,” Dorman said. “We just stole the best artists out of all the other companies. They just wanted to work with us because we paid them more, they got more liberties, they were respected, they were around people who truly loved what they did. They came in with

An example of some of the “very weird stuff” Jack did for Scooby-Doo. publisher (with “limitless wealth”) who, with her bodyguard/ photographer friend sought adventure and intrigue. Conceived by Gerber, the series’ design had a distinct Kirby influence.

While producing an ever-increasing supply of episode designs, the studio was still devoting enormous energy to finding that goldmine of a sellable original idea. “The animation industry was seasonal; they would work during production time and not work during pitch time.”

Woodring said. “Because R-S was a small company, we all worked year-round. When we were through with production, we’d work on pitches.” Pitches were very important, and no one could make better presentations than R-S, who brought out their heaviest hitter.

“Jack would bring in all this different kind of artwork and [the production artists] would make it into something coherent for presentation,” Evanier said. “There was a great synthesis there where Jack would bring in this great stuff and the writers would write to it. I’m actually surprised that more of that stuff didn’t turn into shows, because there were some very good ideas there.”

© Ruby-Spears Productions, Inc.

Inside Ruby-Spears At R-S the King was appreciated. He was making exceptional money with a lighter work schedule (and could draw larger as his eyesight continued to weaken).

“Jack turned out an immense volume of work,” fellow R-S layout artist Rick Hoberg said. “It was just amazing how much this guy had coming out of him. I heard from Roz later that he only worked a couple hours one day a week to get all this stuff out!”

Jack was also having fun. When he arrived in the art department with his week’s work, it was an event for the staff artists. “We’d all come in and look at them, stand around and laugh, point at the various things, and try to make him stay, talk and tell us stories,” Woodring said. “He’d sit around and shoot the breeze. He told us war stories, told us of growing up tough in Brooklyn — walking across boards atop one tenement to another to escape beatings.”

“He talked about being an infantryman,” Woodring continued. “And he’d say ‘Boy, when you’re standing there, and you got your gun and the fixed bayonet, and you see them coming at you, and you think, boy, I hope the strategy they taught us is correct, coz the next thing you know, it’s happening, the nightmare is happening!’”

“He said he was drawing a picture and a bomb came in,” Woodring remembered. “Mud got splattered

Jack drew this (very Kamandi-like) scene for the “Brotherhood Of Night” episode of Thundarr.

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© Ruby-Spears Productions, Inc.

A sample daily from the proposed Animal Hospital newspaper strip. Jack did a few sample strips before the idea was shelved. work that was truly special, and they knew they were doing something that the other artists would sincerely appreciate.”

“It was an insular company,” Woodring said. “When the rest of the industry went on strike, we didn’t because we weren’t a union signatory, we all made well above union scale. It was really good socially; I got to work with the most talented cartoonists I ever met, who’ve all gone on to such stellar heights.”

Dorman maintained a rebellious, clubhouse atmosphere at the art department, which they called Bastard Central, and which was housed in Cheech & Chong’s old place. The art director fostered a competitive spirit that promoted artistic excellence in the fiercely loyal

Thundarr Ratings Checklist

by Terence Sanford ✩✩✩✩✩ Must See ✩✩✩✩ Excellent ✩✩✩ Good ✩✩ Fair ✩ Bad FALL 1980 Secret of the Black Pearl ✩✩✩✩ The wizard Gemini brings the Statue of Liberty to life and she rains destruction on a human settlement until Thundarr gives up the black pearl he possesses. An excellent first episode, particularly because of Kirby’s medieval look for the characters and settings.

Harvest of Doom ✩✩✩ The lizard-like Carocs are transporting deathflowers (which destroy a person’s will) to a wizard to use in his war against a group of humans.

Raiders of the Abyss ✩✩✩ A mysterious group is kidnapping humans so they can drain their strength and remain young and strong.

staff. He reviled petty executives with personal agendas, invigorated the artists, and could make something out of the most puerile material.

“We had a band, we had pie fights with real pies, we went bowling, had long lunches, made up T-shirts, and antagonized other people in the building,” Woodring said. The L.A. Bastards endlessly pulled pranks on writers, executives, vendors, and even the Hungarian restaurant next door (which involved gunplay — just ask!). The stories are, alas, too numerous to recount here but be assured, they are precious tales of a golden era.

And the department also worked. Days, nights, weekends on the endless presentations and pitches, most that never made it out of the ing humans for food to take back home. The alien ship is pure Kirby.

stronghold in search of treasure, but it turns out to be empty. The Mound on which the stronghold rests is made of gold and the pirates are prisoners inside of it.

Battle of the Barbarians ✩✩✩ The wizard Kubli seeks the scepter of the Yang-xi, which can take away his powers. When Thundarr intervenes, the wizard hires Zogar the Barbarian to deal with him.

Brotherhood of Night ✩✩✩ Seevon, leader of the wolf clan called the Pack, wants to turn the wizard Infernus into a wolf and make the Pack invincible. Network censors would not allow the werewolves to bite anyone, so people were turned into werewolves by having a glowing paw pointed at the victims.

Portal Into Time ✩✩ Predictable time travel story, worth watching to see more of Kirby’s great creations: a laser-mounted halftrack and a defensive weapon called The Guardian.

Attack of the Amazon Women (No stars) Avoid this episode at all costs!

Den of the Sleeping Demon ✩✩✩ An escaped slave named Judag believes in a legend that says whoever wakes a sleeping demon will be given the powers of a wizard.

Challenge of the Wizards ✩✩✩ Four wizards compete for the Helmet of Power, and the wizard Shollo demands Thundarr represent him in the contest or he will kill human prisoners. Kirby creations abound in this episode, including a scorpion vehicle, a giant wheel with spikes, and a flying manta craft.

Mindok the Mind Menace ✩✩✩✩✩ Best episode of the series! The wizard Mindok seeks a new body; he only has his brain left after an accident 2000 years ago. Kirby designs characters and war machines right out of the Fourth World.

Valley of the Man-Apes ✩✩✩ The man-apes are putting the giant robot King Kong back together to conquer a settlement of dwarves and rule the valley. A fun episode to watch, as Thundarr’s sunsword slices through Kong, causing the giant robot to smoke and fall apart.

Treasure of the Moks ✩✩✩✩ River pirates enter the Moks’

Stalker From the Stars ✩✩✩ An alien has come to Earth seek-

FALL 1981 (2ND SEASON) Wizard Wars ✩✩✩✩ The trio is caught in a war between the wizards Skullos and Octagon.

City of Evil ✩✩✩ The swamp wizard Saraut uses the Gauntlet of Power to restore a miniature city to normal and use its technology to conquer the world.

Fortress of Fear ✩✩✩ Argoth, the wizard with 1000 eyes, captures the trio and plans to marry Ariel. Thundarr and Ookla lead a slave revolt and free the prisoners.

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Last Train to Doomsday ✩✩ Gemini returns to seek revenge against Thundarr. (Gemini appears to have lost weight due to some poor animation).

Prophecy of Peril ✩✩ The wizard Vashstar does everything possible to bring about his own downfall in this predictable prophecy tale.

Master of the Stolen Sunsword ✩✩ A phony wizard using magic tricks steals Thundarr’s sunsword and recharges it in the Pool of Power located under the remains of Griffith Observatory.

Trial By Terror ✩ Thundarr’s friend Thorac has been accused of stealing some fuel. It turns out the sheriff is the real thief and is in league with the wizard Artemus.

Island of the Body Snatchers ✩ The witch Circe needs the body of another sorceress to leave her island. Guess who the lucky lady is? In the end, Ariel gets her beautiful body back, Circe turns to stone, and the series comes to an end.

When the Cartoon Network began a few years ago, they ran Thundarr. Unfortunately, they move the show around to different time slots. Check your television listings; you’ll be glad you saw this show. ✩

© Ruby-Spears Productions, Inc.

A Thundarr newspaper strip was also proposed, and Jack did two weeks worth of samples as well. Shown here is the second Sunday page. meetings of unimaginative network execs and skeptical advertisers.

Whether bought or not, some ideas had real promise, and some were just plain bizarre.

“The shows were all derivative,” Woodring explains. “There was a show called Turbo Teen about a kid who turned into a muscle car when he got hot, kind of based on Knight Rider. Remember the Rubik’s Cube? Years after that fad was dead, they decided to bring up Rubik, the Amazing Cube. Then the Mr. T show — he and a team of youthful gymnasts would drive around and solve mysteries. There was a group called the Centurions, which was guys in action suits fighting. And Jack worked on a show called Sectaurs, sort of like centaurs, but instead of half-man, half-horse, they were half-horse, half-insect.” And those were the ones that made it on the air.

The King also contributed to a number of near misses. The idea behind the almost-bought Roxie’s Raiders was “to do an updated cliffhanger movie serial,” Evanier explained. Developed by Gerber and Pasko, Roxie was “a female Doc Savage with a squadron of guys who were all specialists in their fields… Jack did quite a bit of artwork for that.” And there was Future Force, which Hoberg said, “was a take-off of (the comic) Captain Victory.”

“There was another ill-fated project the studio was working on called Animal Hospital,” Woodring recalls. The show was touted as a risque, late-night adult cartoon, full of ribald humor and even a little T&A. “I don’t know if he was asked to do it, but Jack suddenly started coming in with daily newspaper strips — penciled but not inked, that he had written and someone else had lettered, and it featured all the characters he had invented for Animal Hospital. It was five or six days worth. Somehow I ended up with one of these strips, and it’s got this very weird, stilted humor. He was kind of frozen in time in some ways,

so when he would draw a policeman it would look like a beat cop from 1934 in a modern setting — a hat with these exaggerated peaks, swinging a nightstick. He’d draw sedans that were ’48 Pontiacs. His Animal Hospital would be anachronistic in the same way. You could tell it was written by an older guy whose sensibilities were not rooted in the modern world.”

What R-S excelled at were presentations. The combination of boss Ruby’s masterful pitchmanship, art director Dorman’s zealotry to become the presentation company (packaging shows to be sold in their entirety to the networks), and the exceptional talents of an extraordinary art staff headed by the great Jack Kirby gave the studio a different emphasis than their competitors. With the networks now buying shows to own, and ever-increasing competition from new or revived studios, R-S sought a niche as “a service that makes presentations because then we still had a chance where our foot was in the door,” Dorman said.

But sometimes the company’s goals were a mystery to even those who worked there. “None of us could figure out why they were paying copious amounts of money for unproduced stuff that they had no intention whatsoever to present or pitch to anybody,” Dorman said.

“Joe was a humane guy. Although it seemed to creative people that he would lean towards things they wouldn’t all the time, and purposely excluded good ideas. But at least he paid for them to be developed so that those people could be kept alive and housed. Joe tried his hardest.”

As evidenced by the striking and welcome—if error-filled—Jack Kirby: The Unpublished Archives trading card set published by Comic Images, Jack’s ideas were often drawn by other artists. “Jack would design concepts,” Hoberg said. “Sometimes they’d get painted up, sometimes we would just ink them, but in the end quite often they used Gil Kane to do a real nice comp, and it would get painted from that.”

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A universal goal of every studio was to create and sell an original property — a new Bugs Bunny — that would make them rich and end the exhaustive, costly scramble for licensing deals. Thundarr was evidence that R-S could create moderately successful originals, but new concepts (as opposed to those based on pre-sold ideas, personalities or characters) began to be a tough pitch for even a master salesman like Joe Ruby. “The name product took over and action/adventure was very difficult to sell in those days. I always wanted to do a pure Jack Kirby show but we never were able to.”

Woodring sensed a frustration in Jack as time passed and virtually none of his concepts were being produced. “He was doing all this work, coming up with all these really good ideas, and none of them ever went anywhere. I guess he had entered into it, thinking he was going to create a TV show, and when it looked that that wasn’t going to actually happen, then I think he got irked, and he reacted to Hollywood in that case just by a slow burn, and being angry, and kind of letting you know he was angry, and talking frankly about it if you asked him. I had nothing to tell him so I never asked.”

Woodring also saw an anger in Jack’s work. “Especially towards the end of his tenure there,” Woodring said, “when he began to get disgruntled, his work got sort of recklessly crazy. He did a drawing of a character named Heidi Hogan, which was a bearded lumberjack in a pinafore dress jumping off a cliff with a propeller beanie. Doing the work he must have been on pure automatic pilot, he must have been thinking about something else entirely, and he automatically drew this nonchalantly insane picture.”

Jack Kirby’s Produced Animation Work (1978-1987)

End Of An Era During Jack’s time in the field, the industry changed drastically.

“R-S went from being a very big company to a very small company,” Evanier said. “They just sold less and less, became smaller and smaller.

The animation business in ’77 or ’78 was controlled by four studios that did all television animation. Today, it’s about thirty. R-S went from having a third of the business to almost nothing.”

“We were at Filmways a few years, then we were sold to Taft Broadcasting,” Ruby explained. “We were there for a total of ten years.

When Turner bought them, they just kept Hanna-Barbera, and dissolved the rest, us included.” In the down-sizing, Kirby left the studio on good terms.

“There were a number of years that Jack felt enormously confined by comics,” Evanier said. “And so doing the stuff for Ruby-Spears was almost liberating in that he wasn’t always trying to please the same little marketplace, wasn’t working with the same restrictions of the page.

He was also doing a wider variety of material — humor stuff, designing funny animals, and he could go up to Joe Ruby and say, ‘I’ve got a whole new concept,’ and Joe would say fine, go off and spend the next two weeks drawing up the stuff… Jack liked nothing better than to sit there drawing up ideas. He was treated very nicely by the staff and in the company of some new, young artists. And at his age he was happy to be in a new area.”

Jack’s departure signaled the end of a special era at R-S, and besides occasional freelance animation work (contributing to Hawkman and Wonder Woman show development, the almost-sold Princess of Power, and in the notable cartoon mini-series, Dark Water), the King had finished a second career, leaving behind an awesome amount of imaginative work, and went on to meet a different challenge: resolving the fight to get his original art back from Marvel.

A detailed history of Jack’s cartoon show career is still to be written, but the memory of the man and his inspiration to the industry is kept alive by the many artists and writers who still feel the privilege of having worked with him. For them, Kirby lives — in their memories, in their work, and in their hearts. However small the audience of his presentation work, and regardless of the trite content of many of the produced shows he designed, the man and his art inspired some exceptional talents to use the Kirby Method: be limitless in scope and boundless in imagination. It was a lesson well learned and well taught. ✩

The New Fantastic Four D-F NBC

9/78 - 9/79

12 episodes

Thundarr the Barbarian R-S ABC

10/80 - 9/82

21 episodes

Goldie Gold and Action Jack R-S ABC

9/81 - 9/82

13 episodes

Space Stars H-B NBC 9/81 - 9/82 Astro & the Space Mutts Herculoids Space Ghost Space Stars Finale Teen Force

11 episodes 11 episodes 22 episodes 11 episodes 11 episodes

The All-New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show H-B ABC 9/83-9/84

26 episodes

Mr. T R-S

9/83 - 9/86

30 episodes

Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show H-B ABC 9/84 - 8/85

16 episodes

Turbo Teen R-S ABC

9/84 - 8/85

13 episodes

Centurions R-S Syndicated

1985

64 episodes

Rambo R-S

Syndicated

1986

65 episodes

Sectaurs R-S

Syndicated

1985

5 episodes

Chuck Norris’ Karate Kommandos R-S Syndicated

1986

5 episodes

Lazer Tag Academy R-S NBC

9/86 - 8/87

14 episodes

NBC

© Ruby-Spears Productions, Inc.

Note: Episode numbers pertain to show’s entire run, not what Jack worked on. Special thanks to all who were interviewed for this article, and especially Mark Evanier for his continuous help. — JBC.

A flying dragon from the “Battle of the Barbarians” episode of Thundarr.

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Kirby & The Sailorman Cinekirbyesque I I

by Pat Hilger

Examining Jack’s Deal With Empire Pictures, by John Morrow

t’s well-known that Jack worked for the Fleischer cartoon studios during the mid-1930s. But what cartoons did he do? Various sources have given his starting date as late Summer of 1935. I have heard conflicting dates of when he left, some stating as late as May of 1937.

However, in the interview from Volume One of The Jack Kirby Treasury, Jack states that he left “a few months” before the 1937 strike.

The strike began on May 8, 1937, so conservatively we could date his employment from September 1935 to February 1937.

Another controversy surrounds what characters he did and did not do. Many books and articles state that he worked on some Betty Boop cartoons. In the aforementioned interview, Jack was asked if he worked on Betty. His reply was “No, I was strictly a Popeye artist, though I may have worked on their Color Classics series.”

One other problem I’ve encountered is figuring out the production time necessary to complete a cartoon. 14 Popeye cartoons were released in 1936, so I’m estimating 3-4 weeks. Because of this, titles that begin and end my list (and all the Color Classics) are suspect.

Popeye Cartoons

Release Date

King of the Marti Gras Adventures of Popeye The Spinach Overture Vim Vigor And Vitaliky A Clean Shaven Man Brotherly Love I-Ski Love-Ski You-Ski Bridge Ahoy What, No Spinach?

I Wanna Be A Lifeguard Let’s Get Movin’ Never Kick A Woman Little Swee’ Pea Hold The Wire The Spinach Roadster Popeye The Sailor Meets Sindbad The Sailor I’m In The Army Now The Paneless Window Washer Organ Grinder’s Swing My Artistical Temperature

9/27/35 10/25/35 12/7/35 1/3/36 2/7/36 3/6/36 4/3/36 5/1/36 5/7/36 6/26/36 7/24/36 8/28/36 9/25/36 10/23/36 11/26/36 11/27/36 12/25/36 1/22/37 2/19/37 3/19/37

Color Classic Cartoons

Release Date

Musical Memories Somewhere In Dreamland The Little Stranger The Cobweb Hotel Greedy Humpty Dumpty Hawaiian Birds Play Safe Christmas Comes But Once A Year Bunny Mooning

11/8/35 1/17/36 3/13/36 5/15/36 7/10/36 8/28/36 10/16/36 12/4/36 3/27/37

n 1986, Jack Kirby was retired from comics. Except for occasional covers or spot illustrations, no new Kirby work was being seen.

But late that year, Hollywood trade magazines like The Hollywood Reporter and Variety featured full-color ads showcasing Kirby drawings for two upcoming feature films from Empire Entertainment. The films were called Doctor Mortalis and Mindmaster, and were touted as being “Based on characters created by Jack Kirby.”

It looked as if Jack’s dream of making a movie was finally coming to fruition. So why can’t you find these films in video stores today?

(above) Jack’s original drawing for Mindmaster. (next page) The art that ran in Hollywood trade magazines.

The Rise & Fall Of Empire The movie magazine Cinefantastique (Volume 26, No. 4, June 1995) contains a clue about the background of these films. It featured an article on Charles Band, who founded Empire Entertainment in the early 1980s, producing low-budget genre films that enjoyed limited theatrical success, but performed well as video rentals. Empire was adept at producing knock-offs of whatever was popular in theaters at the time (such as the 1984 film Ghoulies, which was inspired by the highly successful film Gremlins from that same year). Band said he was a fan of Marvel Comics, so that may be why he got Jack involved.

Since Empire didn’t produce animated features, it’s logical to assume both films were planned for live-action (despite a cryptic blurb in Comics Feature #53, March 1987, which alluded that they would be animated features, without giving any details). But both films have ties to comic books. Jack had a file of characters that he never fully developed—as they came to him, he’d sketch them and file them for later use. In 1992, Topps Comics made a deal with Jack to create a line of comics using these leftover ideas. In fact, issue #3 of Topps’ Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga (July 1993) features a character identical to the

Jack was an in-betweener. Key animators would draw characters in a series of poses and it was the in-betweener’s job to draw intermediate poses and create smooth and continuous motion. In-betweening was a tedious and boring job. Jack specialized in figures, so his drawing was limited to drawing the same figure hundreds of times and in a style that had to match the key animator’s. For someone with Jack’s talent and imagination, this must have been a living hell.

Many of us can recall the first time we saw an image produced

by Jack Kirby. But if you, like me, grew up watching Popeye cartoons, it may have been much earlier. ✩ 36

bandaged man from the Mindmaster art.

So it’s reasonable to assume these movies came from Jack’s file of leftovers. (The use of the Egghead character from Captain Victory in the Doctor Mortalis art gives further credibility to the idea that these movies were based on old ideas.)

Empire regularly announced many more films than it planned to make, in order to test the saleability of its concepts.

As Band stated in Cinefantastique, “If everybody gyrated towards three of the ten projects announced, those got made and the other ones for some reason didn’t.

It was like a test.” Since no director or stars were announced in the Variety ads, it appears Empire was running them as a way to test reaction to Jack’s concepts before fully committing to the films. It’s uncertain if Jack’s ideas passed this test, as financial problems caused Band to sell Empire in 1988, leaving Jack’s films unmade. But the story doesn’t end there.

PROJECTIONS OF THINGS TO COME

MINDMASTER EMPIRE PICTURES Presents “MINDMASTER” Based on Characters Created by JACK KIRBY Executive Producer CHARLES BAND Produced by JACK KIRBY and MICHAEL ZUCCARO AN EMPIRE PICTURES RELEASE ©1986 EMPIRE ENTERTAINMENT

The Plot Thickens In 1989, Charles Band founded a new company called Full Moon Entertainment, this time foregoing theatrical releases to concentrate on the direct-to-video market through a distribution deal with Paramount. The Cinefantastique article states that he had retained the rights to some unmade Empire projects, and listed mini-reviews of all their releases. Were Jack’s concepts among them?

In the review of their 1992 film Doctor Mordrid, it states that Band “hatched this Dr. Strange clone idea, in conjunction with legendary Marvel Comics writer Jack Kirby, back in his Empire days.” Bingo!

Considering the similarity in name and concept to Jack’s Doctor Mortalis, I scoured the reviews looking for a film that sounded similar to Jack’s Mindmaster, and found a 1993 release called Mandroid. So I rented them both to see how similar they were.

A TJKC subscriber in Europe sent us copies of Jack’s art that

included a plot synopsis of the original films, which gave a basis for comparing the storylines of Jack’s Doctor Mortalis to Full Moon’s Doctor Mordrid, and Jack’s Mindmaster to Full Moon’s Mandroid. Both films were pretty awful (Cinefantastique gave Mandroid their lowest rating), but I saw some striking similarities to Jack’s ideas. The basic plot for Jack’s Doctor Mortalis states that he’s an all-powerful wizard who engages in a multidimensional battle with an evil sorcerer, with mortals caught in the middle. Despite different names (and no Egghead character), Doctor Mordrid adheres to this basic premise.

Even the video’s packaging resembles Jack’s art.

Jack’s original treatment for Mindmaster involves a scientist who is caught in an accident which leaves him debilitated, and must use a thought-controlled robot he invented to stop a crazed fellow scientist.

In the film Mandroid, a paraplegic scientist uses a virtual-reality headset to control a powerful robot he invented, utilizDIMENSIONS TO CONQUER ing him to stop the evil plans of a mad CREATIONS TO CONJURE scientist. Despite these similarities, the AND ADVENTURES TO packaging of both videos states they are TAKE HIM “Based on an original idea by Charles BEYOND THE BEYOND. Band.” Jack isn’t mentioned anywhere.

There are enough similarities to make me think the two Full Moon films were based on Jack’s ideas. But if so, why were the titles changed, and why wasn’t Jack given credit? Fearing that—by renting these films—I was supporting a company that denied Jack credit for his creations, I sent a letter to Charles Band, asking for background on them. In response, he DOCTOR MORTALIS stopped by our booth at the 1995 San EMPIRE PICTURES Presents “DR. MORTALIS” Diego Comic Con and only said in passing, Based on Characters Created by JACK KIRBY Produced by JACK KIRBY and MICHAEL ZUCCARO “Sometime I need to tell you what AN EMPIRE PICTURES RELEASE ©1986 EMPIRE ENTERTAINMENT happened with those.” Despite repeated attempts to interview him since then, he hasn’t returned our phone calls (although his secretary said he would try to see us at this year’s SDCC). We’ll keep you updated as we find out more about these films. ✩ 37

“Heeeeeeere’s Kirby!”

by John Morrow, with thanks to David Penalosa and Greg Theakston

W

ith a career as prolific as Jack’s, it’s only natural that he would eventually turn up on television and film. Here’s a brief summary of some of Jack’s cameo appearances on the big and little screen:

In the February 25, 1996 episode of ABC-TV’s Lois And Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman (watch for a rerun this Summer), the writers slipped in an homage to Jack (and Jim Steranko) when Lex Luthor tells Superman to meet him at “the corner of Kirby and Steranko.”

Jack appeared for a few seconds in an episode of TV’s The Incredible Hulk, as a police sketch artist. We’ll have the full story of how this came about in a future issue.

The film Crimson Tide contains a reference to Jack. The scene involved Denzel Washington’s character breaking up a fight between two sailors, and went like this: WASHINGTON: “Why were you two fighting?”

SAILOR: “Well, I said that the Kirby Silver Surfer was the only real Silver Surfer, and the Moebius Silver Surfer was sh*t!”

WASHINGTON: “You have to set an example, even in the face of stupidity. Now everyone who reads comic books knows that Kirby’s Silver Surfer is the only true Silver Surfer! Now am I right or wrong?”

To show there were no hard feelings over The Tonight Show incident, Jack drew and inked this series of wacky drawings for Carson, portraying him and Ed McMahon as funny bad-guys.

We’re not sure exactly who Virginia is (possibly Ed’s wife?), but she doesn’t look like your typical Kirby female, so we’re assuming she’s based on a real person. If you have any idea who she is, write and let us know!

This interchange was scripted by Oscarwinning director Quentin Tarantino.

Considering Moebius only drew the Silver Surfer once, why didn’t he choose to compare Jack’s Surfer to John Buscema’s. Other subtle Kirby-related bits were included in Tarantino’s earlier film Reservoir Dogs, and we’re trying to contact him about doing an interview for a future issue (he’s currently somewhere writing in seclusion). So stay tuned!

One Friday evening in the mid-1980s, Johnny Carson appeared on The Tonight Show wearing a pair of 3-D glasses. He’d been making jokes all week about how local entrepreneurs were making huge profits by charging kids $1 apiece for the special glasses needed to view a 3-D film being aired by a local Los Angeles television station.

Needing a pair of 3-D glasses for him to wear, Carson’s prop department dug up a pair from Jack’s 1982 comic Battle For A Three-Dimensional World. The side of the glasses read “Jack Kirby, King of the Comics.” Carson, thinking the word ‘Comics’ referred to comedians, said (on the air), “I never heard of any Jack Kirby. This guy isn’t King of the Comics. He must be King of the Conmen.”

According to Mark Evanier, Jack saw the show and was devastated. Mark contacted Carson’s executive producer Fred DeCordova and explained the mistake. DeCordova explained it to Carson, who in turn devoted an entire segment of his next show to apologizing to Jack, and informing his viewers about Jack’s many achievements in comics. ✩ 38

invited me to join them and I did. (They were lunching with Neal Adams and his family, which was an unexpected bonus.) Anyway, I had the seed of an idea from my college days (circa ’72). I originally conceived a character called Noctvrnvs™, a TV monster movie host along the lines of Elvira. (Actually, Noc was inspired by a Syracuse, The “King” and a Crazy Italian’s Epic Love Story!

NY TV station monster movie host who was known as Baron Damon.

by Michael James Zuccaro As a kid, I used to stay up Saturday nights to watch him, and I was one of his “bloody buddies” fan club members.) hen I was asked to write an article about my screenplay collaboI had written a letter to Jack about this idea, and as he did to ration with Jack, the biggest obstacle to overcome was to relate every aspiring artist, he encouraged me to pursue my dream. I realhow Forever Amoré™ came into being without giving away the ized that if this was to occur, I had to pack up and, as Horace Greely plot to the film (since it hasn’t been sold yet). So I decided the best so aptly put it, “Go west!” to Los Angeles. way was to tell the story behind the story.

On my first visit to the Kirby home, I noticed that on the dining Like all readers of The Jack Kirby Collector, I’m a big fan of Jack’s room wall hung a collage of Ancient Roman images (columns, statues, work. Growing up in Upstate New York’s Mohawk Valley during the etc.) that Jack had done. When I inquired about it, he confided that sixties, my earliest recollection of his work was the Fantastic Four. he always wanted to do a Roman character (The Inhumans’ Maximus Jack’s work was the greatest influence on my own creativity. Along The Mad, notwithstanding). with dashes of Frank Zappa, MAD magazine, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Well, because of my years of Latin in high school, I too had an monster movies, and early television shows added into the mix, my interest in things Roman. (I’m sure half of my heritage being Italian mind was overflowing with a hybrid of pop culture influences. This had something to do with it.) My best grades in high school were in hybrid was what eventually became the screenLatin class (with a tip of the hat to my teacher, Peter B. Daymont!), play for Forever Amoré™. and my mom used to kid me that maybe I was a reincarnated Roman.

I first met the Kirbys at the Miami-Con in And so, I wrote a very crude first draft, originally titled Satvrday 1978. I happened to approach them as they Nightmare™ and started to peddle my papers around Tinsel Town. A were breaking for lunch, producer at Paramount, whose father founded one of the Big Three and in their networks, suggested I develop my idea as a screenplay. Since I had always amitaken only one screenwriting course in college, my work was cut out able way, for me. I showed it to Jack and with his Midas touch, he added some they characters and suggested the climax. But the real carrot before this horse was the art that’s shown on the next page!

I remember being in Jack’s home studio just after he finished the pencil sketch and I said, “Jack, you made his horns too big.” (Jack did everything in epic proportions!) He erased and shortened them to the nub-like bumps I requested. Then reality hit me: Wow! The King was taking direction from me! Just another example of why Jack was the King; he was so confident in his talents that he wasn’t threatened by suggestions. Needless to say, I struck a 50/50 deal with Jack and realized that I was the third person that Jack put his name next to after Joe Simon and Stan Lee. Distinguished company indeed!

Even though I hammered out the screenplay and the seed was my idea, this is truly a Kirby creation in every sense of the term: a mythic character out of his time falls in love with a mortal (as in Thor); the supporting cast consists of supernatural characters (à la The Demon); a mortal man becomes a super-hero (as in Captain America and OMAC). The screenplay has all those elements and then some!

As did Jack (and most writers for that matter), I based my characters on persons I have actually known. It would mean little now, without the reader knowing the plot, to reveal just who’s who, but after the film is made I promise ‘it can be told,’ and I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

So all that remains is to finally get this movie into production. Once I determine what studio is most interested in Forever Amoré ™, I will muster the King’s Legions to aid Noctvrnvs™ and your’s truly in bombarding that studio with letters, inspiring the execs to bring Jack’s dream—to do a film with his name above the title—to fruition! So stay tuned - the best is yet Jack did this pencil drawing of Forever Amoré TM supporting characters, as well as the one of to come! ✩ Noctvrnvs™ on the next page (which Jerry Ordway spectacularly inked for our back cover).

Forever Amoré

TM

W

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THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #11 A TWOMORROWS ADVERTISING PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE KIRBY ESTATE EDITED BY JOHN MORROW DESIGN & LAYOUT BY JOHN & PAMELA MORROW PROOFREADING BY RICHARD HOWELL COVER COLOR BY TOM ZIUKO CONTRIBUTORS: TERRY AUSTIN JEFF CLEM TOM COOK JON B. COOKE PETER DEBRUYN PAUL DOOLITTLE FIEVEL ELLIOT BARRY IRA GELLER DAVID HAMILTON CHRIS HARPER CHARLES HATFIELD PAT HILGER LARRY HOUSTON RICHARD HOWELL DAVID E. JEFFERSON PETER KOCH TRISTAN LAPOUSSIERE ANDY MACKLER SCOTTY MOORE TOM MOREHOUSE SHELDON OPPENBERG JERRY ORDWAY DAVID PENALOSA STEVE ROBERTSON TERENCE SANFORD STEVE SHERMAN JIM STERANKO GREG THEAKSTON MIKE VALERIO R.J. VITONE BRUCE ZICK TOM ZIUKO AND MICHAEL ZUCCARO SPECIAL THANKS TO TERRY AUSTIN JON B. COOKE MARK EVANIER BARRY IRA GELLER STEVE GERBER D. HAMBONE CHRIS HARPER JERRY ORDWAY MARK PACELLA STEVE ROBERTSON JOE RUBY STEVE SHERMAN JIM STERANKO GREG THEAKSTON JIM WOODRING & OF COURSE ROZ KIRBY MAILING CREW GLEN MUSIAL ED STELLI PATRICK VARKER BOB PERMER AND THE OTHER KIRBY FANS IN RALEIGH, NC

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them if they had any Kirby art, they would reach down and pull some out from underneath the table and put it back out of sight again after you were done looking and buying. This happened regularly.

Was it just my imagination or does this somehow tie into the reported/ purported disappearance of many pages of Jack’s work (and others’) from Marvel storage during the ’60s and ’70s? I know the art wasn’t kept out of sight because of its price (under $75/page) and I’m also aware that inkers got back a portion of the work which could have found its way onto the market.

Any insight on this would be helpful, as I’d hate to have been a party to receiving stolen property.

Todd B. Spidle, Lancaster, PA

Kirby Collector Comments Send your letters to: The Jack Kirby Collector c/o TwoMorrows • 502 Saint Mary’s St • Raleigh, NC 27605 or e-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com Let me take a moment to say how much we love getting all the letters and submissions you folks send us. Unfortunately, the reality of our Ad Agency workload, mixed with the rigors of getting TJKC out on-schedule every two months, doesn’t leave us much time to answer mail. Your best bet at a reply is by sending us e-mail, but please don’t be upset if you don’t always hear back from us. Rest assured that we read every letter that comes in, and carefully consider all submissions for publication. So keep those letters coming; believe me, there are times when your words of encouragement are the only thing that gives us the energy to finish each new issue!

Since there wasn’t room for letters last issue, let’s start with comments on #9:

(This is a really serious subject, and we’re planning to do an article on it—and on spotting forged Kirby art—in an upcoming issue. Sad to say, it’s likely that any 1960s Marvel art you purchased before Jack settled his dispute with Marvel in the mid-1980s didn’t originate with Jack. Little was publicized about it before the 1980s, so although it was technically stolen, he understood that the fans weren’t knowingly buying stolen property. But that’s why, at conventions throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Jack routinely refused to autograph those pages when asked.

He did get back at least a portion of his 1970s art, from both DC and Marvel, and he would sign those pages.)

Hi! Just received the FF issue. My brief comments: I loved all the art (especially the centerspread) and the Sinnott interview.

The design theme on page 3 made me laugh.

I didn’t like [most of] the articles. I’ve never understood people going on and on about things we all know. It’s boring, uninformative (to me) and a colossal waste of space. I like interviews and articles that teach me things I don’t know. Personal anecdotes are fine, too.

That’s all for now. I look forward to future issues, and especially the Roz interview! Take care!

Steve Rude

Let me take a few minutes of my free time and tell you precisely why the FF ish epitomizes excellence in magazine publishing. A great mag is like an old, welcome friend—someone you share your life with for a short time every once in awhile. A friend who provokes your intellect with thoughtful insight, shares a laugh and maybe a poignant moment. Leaves you fulfilled with good conversation. And one, above all, who shares in your sense of wonder. I don’t know if it’s by design or by the seat of your pants (though I suspect it’s the former), but in a few short issues you have made a magazine that has the same enthusiasm, the same quest for excellence, the same joy for life and discovery, as the subject it studies. In my long experience with the small press, your’s is the Kirby of the ’zines; vibrant, alive, and inspired.

Jon B. Cooke, Providence, RI

(When I first got this letter from Steve, I was a little surprised. After all, I wouldn’t have selected the articles that ran in #9 if I hadn’t found some new and noteworthy (to me, anyway) insights in them. But although the mail on #9 was overwhelmingly positive, we did receive a few other letters that share Steve’s opinion. So what’ll it be, folks? Do you enjoy the retrospective articles we run, or do you only want to read the behind-the-scenes features and interviews? Should we assume all our readers are seasoned Kirby fans, or continue to approach subjects in a manner that newer fans can appreciate as well? Or do you like the current mixture of both? Let us know!)

(Your letter really hit the spot, Jon. Keep those great articles coming!)

Thank you for the latest JK Collector—excellent stuff, which made me go back to read my FF collection again. The Richard Kyle reprint was especially resonant—I’ve always felt that Kirby’s cosmic period, which gave us his best work over a period of 6-7 years, began with FF #44.

Geraint Davies, Swansea, UNITED KINGDOM

A quick observation on your Fantastic Four issue. My only quibble was with a statement made in the otherwise-excellent Black Panther article. Far from “unanimously” agreeing that Noah’s son Ham was black, most Biblical scholars in my experience have concluded that he was the ancestor of the Canaanites, another Middle Eastern tribe that often warred with the Jews (who considered themselves descendants of Ham’s elder brother Shem). This is indicated by the fact that Canaan was the name of Ham’s son (the Bible’s characters’ names often reflected those of tribes said to be descended from them, as in the case of Joseph and his brothers). The events of Genesis 9:2027, in which Ham made the social gaffe of wandering in on his father when he was drunk and naked and was roundly cursed for it, were possibly read by the Israelites as justification for their wars with the Canaanites. But millennia later racist Southern clergymen came up with the notion that Ham and Canaan had been black, largely so they could use this passage to justify black slavery (and, after the Civil War, their “Jim Crow” laws); a self-serving interpretation long since rejected by most reputable scholars.

Rich Morrissey, Framingham, MA

(This letter from an overseas subscriber reminds me how great our International Theme Issue is shaping up! It’s next issue, and I guarantee you’ll be amazed at what our non-American readers came up with.)

Congratulations on what I believe is your best ever issue of TJKC (of course I may be a bit prejudiced, being that the FF has always been one of my favorite series). The articles were all interesting and touched on different areas of the strip, but Darcy Sullivan’s article connected with me as the finest assessment of Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four and their relationship to the 1960s I have read. I believe the key word is exploration. Unlike much of the mindlessness that passes for super-hero adventures today, the FF at its best always had that sense of wonder that made it stand alone, an individual title that spoke much for Jack Kirby’s vision and imagination. While Lee definitely added dimension to the characters with dialogue, nowhere else did he bring forth either characters or concepts that paralleled their collaborative work on the Fantastic Four. This says, in my opinion, that they complemented each other to a degree that was never accomplished when they were on their own.

The topper for me was the pencils for FF #108 and the unpublished cover to FF #20. It was a shame that one of Kirby’s final jobs was torn apart that way, and while it was not the greatest of stories, it was at least as good as (if not better than) some of his final issues.

Nicholas Caputo, Glendale, NY

The Jack Kirby Collector #9 was outstanding—and not because of my small contributions. Please tell Tom Ziuko that he did an outstanding coloring job on the cover.

Continue to be amazed about the unpublished Kirby that you keep coming up with. Loved the Thing on page 2—must do an ink of it someday.

Joe Sinnott (Tom was mighty pleased to hear you liked his coloring, Joe. And I hope if you ever get around to inking that Thing piece, you’ll consider letting us print it!)

Something I’d like more information on is the “Black Market” for Jack’s Marvel work that seemed to exist back in the 1970s. I remember at the New York shows I used to attend, Jack’s work would not be displayed on top of dealers’ tables along with other Marvel and DC artists’ work. But if you asked

(We got more ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ from the unpublished FF #20 cover and #108 pencils than any other art we’ve run so far. We’re constantly searching for more rare pieces like these, but they’re really difficult to find, so if you know of anyone with unpublished Kirby art, please convince them to send us a photocopy of it.)

Stuntman, Fred Drake, Sandra Sylvan, and Don Daring are © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby • Forever Amore, Nocturnus, and all associated characters are © Jack Kirby and Michael Zuccaro • Tiger 21, Big Masai and Silver Star are © Jack Kirby • The Black Hole and all associated characters are © Walt Disney Productions • Captain Nice is © NBC-TV • Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Star Wars are © Lucasfilm Ltd. • The Prisoner is © ITC • Orion, Kalibak, New Gods, Boy Commandos, Darkseid, Superman, Batman, Mr. Miracle, and Demon are © DC Comics, Inc. • 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom, Thing, Invisible Girl, Mr. Fantastic, Silver Surfer, Ikaris, and Captain America are © Marvel Entertainment • Herbie The Robot and The New Fantastic Four are © DePatie-Freleng • Thundarr, Ariel, Ookla, and Animal Hospital are © Ruby-Spears Productions • Space Stars, Scooby-Doo, Scrappy-Doo, and Shaggy are © Hanna-Barbera • Lord of Light and all associated characters are © Barry Ira Geller Productions • Dr. Mortalis and Mindmaster are © Empire Entertainment.

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One brief anecdote: Once when I phoned Jack, I could hear his TV in the background. I asked what he was watching, and he told me it was Jimmy Swaggart. That really blew me away! I asked him why he was watching such a guy. His answer was that he wanted to see if he could understand why Swaggart was so controversial. That experience told me volumes about the character and spirit of Jack Kirby.

Harry Miller, Bowling Green, KY

Submit Something-Get Free Issues! ere’s a tentative list of upcoming issues, and some ideas you could write about. But don’t limit yourself to these ideas—we may run a miscellaneous issue here or there, so anything you write may be published. And as always, send us copies of your Kirby art! Don’t forget: If we publish something you send, you’ll earn a free issue!

H

When DC got the rights to do Tarzan, John Carter, etc. in the ’70s, they had just about everybody in the art stable submit art for a tryout. Kirby did a Tarzan which later saw print in ERBdom.

Ken Webber, Littleton, CO

#12 (O ct. 1996): INTERNATIO NAL Issue

We need submissions from readers currently and formerly outside the U.S, about anything Kirby! Particularly about discovering Jack’s work overseas and the availability of it there. Featuring Barry Windsor-Smith inks on the cover, and foreign Kirby interviews translated into English for the first time! Deadline: 7/15/96.

(This piece also saw print in the 1970s Jack Kirby Masterworks portfolio.)

Now, some comments on TJKC #10:

#13 (Dec. 1996): Monsters & Magic Issue

The interview with Mrs. Kirby was open, warm, and very often outright funny. Her memories of Jack clearly establish him as somewhat of a klutz in certain situations (for example, driving), but that is almost universally the case with a certified genius.

The highlight of the issue for me was the penciled Fighting American piece on the inside front cover. I hope this won’t be the extent of which we hear of this character. Maybe someday it could be explained how so much of the original art survived. Did Jack have immediate access to these originals after production of the comic?

By the way, is it only us old farts who are admiring Kirby’s artistic talent, or do you have a sense that younger readers are being exposed to his work?

Bruce Lowry, Van Nuys, CA

The Demon, Black Magic, Strange World Of Your Dreams, Atlas Monsters, Chamber of Darkness, Kirby costumes, the Golden Age Vision, and other spooky subjects. Featuring an interview with Dick Ayers! Deadline: 9/1/96. #14 (Feb. 1997): THO R Issue

Let’s hear from you, Asgard fans! Featuring an interview with Chic Stone! Deadline: 11/1/96. #15 (Apr. 1997): SCI-FI Issue

Solar Legion, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Machine Man, Sky Masters, Race For The Moon, Starman Zero, Eternals, Jack’s work for pulps, & more.

Deadline: 1/1/97.

(After WWII, Jack and Joe negotiated more favorable deals—and published their own books through Crestwood—so it stands to reason they could get their originals back more easily. As for younger readers picking up TJKC, it’s slowly starting to happen, based on conversations I’ve had at conventions and letters I’ve received.

That’s a big part of what TJKC is about; ensuring future generations remember Jack.)

#16 (July 1997): To ugh Gu ys Issue

From Foxhole, Our Fighting Forces and Bullseye to Boys’ Ranch, Kid Colt and In The Days Of The Mob, the testosterone will fly as we cover cowboys, gangsters and soldiers in one issue. Deadline: 4/1/97. #17 (O ct. 1997): Misc. DC Issue

To answer a couple of questions raised in the issue: On page 33, the Young Romance cover used by Richard Hamilton in his collage is #26 from October 1950. Harold May wanted to know about the Kirby/Wood story “The Creatures in the Volcano.” It first saw print in Journey Into Mystery #51, March 1959 (done near the end of the team’s run on Skymasters of the Space Force).

Tom Morehouse, Garfield, NJ

Kamandi, Atlas, Kung-Fu Fighter, OMAC, Kobra; we’ll cover Jack’s 1970s DC books (plus more on the Fourth World), and go back further into the Golden & Silver Age to cover Challengers Of The Unknown, Green Arrow, Manhunter, and more. Deadline: 7/1/97. #18 (Dec. 1997): 1970s Marvel Issue

Jack’s return to Marvel in the 1970s gets its due, as we spotlight 2001, Captain America, Black Panther, Machine Man, Devil Dinosaur, The Silver Surfer Graphic Novel, and more. Deadline: 9/1/97.

(Thanks for the answers, Tom. Since I recently learned you and your wife are doglovers, I couldn’t resist running this next letter after your’s.)

We’ve got a stellar lineup of comics professionals who’ve agreed to ink old Kirby pencils for our covers, including Steve Rude, Chic Stone, Terry Austin, and more to come!

Of all the great pictures you have presented of Jack, the one on page 8 of #10 brought several tears to my usually jaundiced eyes. I had, in 1983, the great pleasure of visiting Jack and Roz. Though Jack pretended that he had no use whatsoever for this old lazy dog, it was quite apparent that the dog knew what we all know; that it had the great pleasure to be in the keep of one of the nicest, most decent human beings to ever populate this Earth. That dog followed Jack everywhere, and stopped when Jack stopped, and sat when Jack sat down. That dog was never more than a few feet away. I made sure when I took a picture that the dog was included.

Stan Taylor, Eustis, FL

Submission Guidelines: When we print something you submit, we’ll send you a FREE copy of that issue or extend your subscription by one issue. We’re looking for: • Rare and unpublished Kirby art • Original articles and essays on Jack’s life and career • Kirby interviews and correspondence • Kirby convention and fanzine art and articles • Photos and personal recollections of Jack • Published and unpublished reviews of Jack’s work, etc.

NEXT ISH: We’re taking a couple of months off to attend comic cons and enjoy a little vacation time, but we’ll be back in October with our International Theme Issue! The front cover features new inks by Barry Windsor-Smith, as we learn about Jack’s influence around the world through special sections on countries like France, England, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Singapore, Brazil, Australia, and many more. The entire issue is filled with submissions from Kirby fans outside the US, and we’ll feature interviews with Jack (including an Italian one, transcribed into English for the first time). Plus we’ll have the usual amazing assortment of unpublished Kirby art (including some stunning Captain America work). And while you’re waiting for TJKC #12, check out our special offer on the British ’zine Jack Kirby Quarterly—see the ad on our inside back cover for this one-time-only offer. And see us back here in October!

Artwork should be submitted in one of the following forms: 1) Good quality photocopies (color or black-&-white).

2) Scanned images - 300ppi TIFF, JPEG, or GIF file for IBM or Mac. 3) Original materials (carefully packed and insured).

Text should be sent in one of the following forms: 1) Typed or laser printed pages with no “fancy” fonts.

2) E-mail via the Internet to: twomorrow@aol.com 3) An ASCII computer file, IBM or Mac format.

4) For previously printed articles, photocopies are OK. We’ll pay return postage and insurance for originals - please write or call first. Please include background info whenever possible.

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Classifieds COMIC TEST COVERS: Mr. Miracle, Kamandi, others. Limited DC cover approvals $10-$25 each. Ray Spivey, PO Box 27274, Austin, TX 78755, (512)338-4971 CST evenings. ______________________________ WANTED: The Marvelmania Portfolio. I am willing to pay the highest prices possible. Contact - Brian Postman, #2A, 238 East 24th Street, New York, NY 10010 or call: (212)213-6242. ______________________________ WANTED: Sgt. Fury #1 & 2 (or Special Marvel Edition reprints) and Our Fighting Forces #158 needed for article for TJKC Tough Guys issue. Also want Kirby issues of Battle and Foxhole. Also 1970’s Black Magic #69; Challengers of the Unknown #64, 65, 75, 77; Justice Inc. #2; Detective #440, 442; Adventure Comics Digests with S&K Sandman reprints; Where Creatures Roam; Where Monsters Dwell. Also FF #25, 26; Tales of Suspense #59, 65, 66. Have coverless copies of Adventure #77 and Detective #64, 73 for sale or trade. These comics are from the Hawkeye Collection as mentioned in Comic Book Marketplace. Interior pages are complete, off-white to light tan, very supple and tight. My want list above is just a partial listing of Jack Kirby comics I’d like to trade for these Golden Age gems. Patrick Price, 2614 Lyon Street, Des Moines, IA 50317.

(515)264-0617. ______________________________ WANTED: Cover poster of Capt.

America #1, originally sold through TBG @ $1.50. Please write to: Tim Lynch, 181-1/2 1st Ave. #2, Manasquan, NJ 08736-3353. ______________________________ WANTED: Kirby art, portfolios and comics from dealers or collectors in the Southern Ontario (Canada) area. 1905-549-7964. • A special thanks to John Morrow and Ande Parks (the

Q uarterly

inker on “The Ray”) for comeradery above and beyond the call of duty for that New Gods #6; you do Jack’s memory proud. Thanks! ______________________________ DR. WONDER by Dick Ayers, Irwin Hasen, Tony Isabella, and David Allikas brings ’60s style superhero action roaring back! Ask your retailer, or order by mail. Single issues $2.95 each ($3.50 Canada/foreign); #1 and #2 now available, #3 in July, #4 in August. Or send $24.00 ($28.00 Canada/foreign) for a 12-issue subscription. For more information call 516-327-0577 or e-mail oldtownpub@aol.com. Old Town Publishing, POB 447G, Franklin Square, NY 11010. ______________________________

If you’re viewing a digital version of this publication, PLEASE read this plea from the publisher! his is COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, which is NOT INTENDED FOR FREE T DOWNLOADING ANYWHERE. If you’re a print subscriber, or you paid the modest fee we charge to download it at our website, you have our sincere thanks—your support allows us to keep producing publications like this one.

If instead you downloaded it for free from some other website or torrent, please know that it was absolutely 100% DONE WITHOUT OUR CONSENT, and it was an ILLEGAL POSTING OF OUR COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. If that’s the case, here’s what you should do: 1) Go ahead and READ THIS DIGITAL ISSUE, and see what you think.

2) If you enjoy it enough to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and purchase a legal download of it from our website, or purchase the print edition at our website (which entitles you to the Digital Edition for free) or at your local comic book shop. We’d love to have you as a regular paid reader.

3) Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR COMPUTER and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. 4) Finally, DON’T KEEP DOWNLOADING OUR MATERIAL ILLEGALLY, for free. We offer one complete issue of all our magazines for free downloading at our website, which should be sufficient for you to decide if you want to purchase others. If you enjoy our publications enough to keep downloading them, support our company by paying for the material we produce.

WANTED: Kirby reprints for READING: Challengers #76, 80 (will trade #72, 77), Super DC Giant #S-25 (Challengers). K. Groeneveld, 177 N. Congress, Athens, OH 45701. ______________________________ CORBEN original art wanted, especially Warren pages. 908-946-0851 (jfkelly@monmouth.com). ______________________________

We’re not some giant corporation with deep pockets, and can absorb these losses. We’re a small company—literally a “mom and pop” shop—with dozens of hard-working freelance creators, slaving away day and night and on weekends, to make a pretty minimal amount of income for all this work. We love what we do, but our editors, authors, and your local comic shop owner, rely on income from this publication to stay in business. Please don’t rob us of the small amount of compensation we receive. Doing so will ensure there won’t be any future products like this to download.

Celebrating the life and career of the King!

BIMO NTHLY!

O N SALE HERE!

TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

www.twomorrows.com

Fully Authorized by the Kirby Estate

Posters For Sale!

FULL-COLOR 17" x 23" TJKC posters for sale. Price includes shipping in mailing tube. ($7 US, $8 Canada, $10 outside N. America.)

SPECIAL LIMITED-TIME O FFER for Kirby Fans in the USA! Get a sample copy of The Jack Kirby Q uarterly (the british counterpart to TJKC) for only $4.00 US (postpaid). O ffer Ends July 31.

“Your first book has been very gratifying and very pleasing. So, I can tell you that I enjoyed it!”

— JACK KIRBY That’s what Jack said about the first issue of Chris Harper’s ’zine Jack Kirby Quarterly, released back in September 1993. If you’re a US Kirby fan and you haven’t checked out JKQ, you owe it to yourself to take advantage of this special, limited-time offer. From now until July 31, 1996, you can order a sample copy of JKQ for only $4.00 (or a 4-issue subscription for

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$16.00), postpaid. Since you’re ordering through TJKC, it saves you the trouble and expense of converting US dollars to British pounds. There are only three requirements for this offer: • This ONE-TIME OFFER is ONLY for fans in the US. • You MUST use the order form above (photocopies OK).

• Orders MUST be received by July 31, 1996.

We’ll total all the orders on July 31 and send Chris one check (saving all those conversion charges), and he’ll ship your issue from England in August. But don’t delay!

Make check or money order payable to TWOMORROWS and send to: 502 Saint Mary’s St., Raleigh, NC 27605.

Here are Jerry Ordway’s inks over Jack’s pencils for the screenplay of the Kirby-inspired film Forever Amoré TM . Details are in this issue.