Jack Kirby Collector #22

T

H

$5.95

E

In The US

A 68-P AGE ISSUE ON KIRBY’S VILLAINS!

ISSUE #22, DEC. 1998

C

O

L

L

E

C

T

O

R

AN UNPUBLISHED

Kirby Interview INTERVIEWS WITH

Steve Rude & Mike Mignola COMPARING KIRBY’S MARGIN NO TES TO

Stan Lee’s Words STUNNING UNINKED

Fantastic Four #49 Pencils Darkseid, Red Skull, Doctor Doom, Atlas Monsters, Yellow Claw, & Others THE GENESIS OF

King Kobra Unpublished Art INCLUDING PENCIL PAGES BEFO RE THEY WERE INKED, AND MUCH MO RE!!

NO MINATED FO R TWO 1998 EISNER AWARDS INCLUDING “BEST COMICS-RELATED PUBLICATION”

1998 HARVEY AWARDS NO MINEE “BEST BIOGRAPHICAL, HISTORICAL OR JOURNALISTIC PRESENTATION”

Dr. Doom, Silver Surfer TM Marvel Entertainment, Inc. Artwork © Jack Kirby & Dave Stevens.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

KIRBY

COLLECTOR

BULLETINS

•

KIRBY

COLLECTOR

BULLETINS

•

KIRBY

COLLECTOR

BULLETINS

ERUDITE EXAMPLES OF EXCEPTIONALLY INTERESTING ENDEAVORS! ITEM! To make subscription and back issue orders easier for our readers (especially those overseas), we now accept VISA and MASTERCARD! Phone, fax, mail, or e-mail your order! See the ad on page 67 of this issue for a list of available issues.

ITEM! Our whopping 160-page COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOLUME 2 (our new TRADE PAPERBACK collection reprinting TJKC #10-12 plus over 30 NEW pieces of Jack’s art) is still available! It’s only $14.95 postpaid in the US ($16.95 Canada, $24.95 elsewhere), and features a new guided tour of the Kirby’s home (including photos and art) by a British fan who visited them in the 1980s. If you never got to visit Jack and Roz at home, this is the next best thing!

ITEM! The updated JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST is now shipping! It’s the most thorough listing of Kirby’s work ever published, and is produced with the approval of Ray Wyman (who did the initial version of the list), with proceeds going to the Kirby Estate. This fully-updated, definitive edition took over two years to complete, and lists in exacting detail EVERY PUBLISHED COMIC (we think!) featuring Jack’s work, including story titles, page counts, and inkers. It even cross-references reprints, to help collectors locate less-expensive versions of key Kirby issues, and includes an extensive bibliography listing BOOKS, PERIODICALS, PORTFOLIOS, FANzINES, POSTERS, and other obscure pieces with Kirby’s art, plus a detailed list of Jack’s UNPUBLISHED WORK as well. The updated version is regular comic book size, 100 pages, and costs $5 postpaid ($5.50 Canada, $7.50 outside North America).

It’s a must for the serious collector of Kirby’s work!

ITEM! COMIC BOOK ARTIST #3 is now shipping, and Kirby fans won’t want to miss it!

Stellar STEVE DITKO contributed a piece to the ALTER EGO section detailing his role in the creation of Spider-Man, and his recollections of Kirby’s original rejected Spidey story for AMAzING FANTASY #15 (including a drawing of what Jack’s version looked like)! The issue also spotlights NEAL ADAMS & THE MARVEL AGE, featuring a new wrap-around, full-color Adams cover, a new interview with Neal, unpublished art, incredible thumbnails from many of his Marvel stories, and unused pages from his never-completed X-MEN GRAPHIC NOVEL! CBA #1-3 are still available for $5.95 each, and you can subscribe for four issues for only $20 in the US! If you want to get involved, submit copies of art from your collection and articles about your favorite comics artists to JON B. COOKE, PO Box 204, W. Kingston, RI 02892-0204. (Also, look for CBA #4, spotlighting Warren’s Horror work, in March, and get ready for the solo ALTER EGO SPECIAL in May!) ITEM! Don’t miss LEGENDS OF THE DC UNIVERSE #14 (shipping Jan. 13th) which contains MARK EVANIER and STEVE RUDE’s new JIMMY OLSEN story, based on an unused plot by ol’ KING KIRBY himself (hashed out when Mark was Jack’s assistant back in the early 1970s)! If you loved Jack’s take on Jimmy, Superman, The Guardian, the Evil Factory, Morgan Edge, and of course Darkseid, you won’t want to miss this one. For a preview of Steve’s very Kirbyesque art from the story, check out his interview in this issue!

ITEM! Believe it or not, Rosalind Kirby left us almost a year ago. On November 8, close friends and family members were on-hand in Thousand Oaks, CA for a special ceremony in her honor. Jewish tradition calls for the head-

JOHN’S JUKEBOX Where did Jack come up with all his villains? A big clue can be found in the number of times Adolf Hitler & Co. surface in the articles and interviews this issue. Jack managed to create any number of colorful villains over the years, but Doctor Doom, the Red Skull, and Darkseid really stick out in my mind as his “signature” bad guys. Of the three, only the Skull is a self-proclaimed Nazi, but Victor Von Doom came from a European background (for all we know, Jack envisioned Latveria as part of the Nazi campaign in World War II), and as you’ll see this issue, there were more than a few parallels between Apokolips and the Third Reich. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; nearly anyone who met Jack in person got to hear a war story or two, but I’m not sure many of us really grasp just how much the war affected him. Jack saw firsthand the horrors of war, from men dying on the battlefield to the atrocities of concentration camps. Thankfully, few of us have ever had to take the life of another human being, but don’t forget that Jack undoubtedly killed more than once while defending his country during WWII. You don’t come back from an experience like that without being changed, and you’re likely to view good and evil in very black-&-white terms. I can’t recall many of his comic book villains being sympathetic characters in any way, and I think that’s because they’re all based in some way on the Nazis. Jack’s lack of sympathy for villains began in Europe in the 1940s, and I think those experiences were a constant source of inspiration whenever he needed a new antagonist for his heroes.

It made for some entertaining and memorable battles in comics, but it’s a shame such “good” villains had to come from such real life evil.

Long Live The King!

ITEM! Check out the TJKC Web Site (maintained by RANDY HOPPE) at www.fantasty.com/kirby (NOTE: That’s “fanTASTY” — as in “yum-yum” — not “fanTASY”).

And if you love getting tons of e-mail from fellow Kirby fans, join the KIRBY MAILING LIST by sending an e-mail request to kirby-l@fantasty.com.

ITEM! The O’NEIL OBSERVER is a brand new publication dedicated to the work of Diligent DENNY O’NEIL and the craft of comic book writing! O’NO showcases articles on and interviews with Denny and his collaborators (the first issue features Steve Englehart, Mark Evanier, Elliot S! Maggin, and Steve Skeates), original artwork, and more!

TJKC is participating in a special CROSSOVER INTERVIEW with Denny (running in both TJKC #23 and O’NO #1) about his collaboration with Jack Kirby on JUSTICE INC. and RICHARD DRAGON, KUNG-FU FIGHTER! The examples of the King’s art showcased in O’NO #1 will be different from the ones in TJKC #23, so be sure to check out this great new ’zine from Bodacious BOB BRODSKY, 8455 Fountain Avenue #611, West Hollywood, CA 90069.

We’ll have full ordering info next issue, or send an SASE to Bob to get subscription details. Coming in February!

KIRBY COLLECTOR CHECKLIST For full descriptions of each issue, see page 67 SORRY, TJKC #1-6, 8-12, 14, 15, and our first TRADE PAPERBACK collection ARE SOLD OUT!!

THE COLLECTED TJKC, VOLUME TWO: (NEW!) 160page trade paperback, reprinting TJKC #10-12, plus new Kirby art! $14.95 ($16.95 Canada, $24.95 elsewhere) THE JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST: (NEW!) 100 pages! $5.00 ($5.50 Canada, $7.50 elsewhere) Now shipping!

TJKC #7: We found extras of our 36-page KID GANG theme issue! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada, $7.40 elsewhere) TJKC #13: 52-page SUPERNATURAL theme issue! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada, $7.40 elsewhere)

John Morrow, Editor TwoMorrows 1812 Park Dr. • Raleigh, NC 27605 • (919) 833-8092 FAX (919) 833-8023 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com stone not to be placed until a year after a loved one’s death, and this “unveiling” ceremony was a chance to put grieving aside, and celebrate Roz’s life. Let’s all take a moment today to remember this special lady who meant so much to Jack, her family, and all of us.

ITEM! Because of the success of DC’s NEW GODS and MISTER MIRACLE paperback collections, they’ve scheduled a FOREVER PEOPLE volume for next year (reprinting the full eleven-issue run). Also in discussion is a proposed DEMON collection, reprinting Jack’s eerie stories (including a couple of unused pages from DEMON #1)!

We’ll keep you posted as things get finalized.

ITEM! If you want to find a comics shop in your neck of the woods (or if you’re traveling and want to know where the local shops are), pick up your phone and call up the COMIC SHOP LOCATOR SERVICE toll-free at 888COMIC BOOK (that’s 888-266-4226). This is a totally free service sponsored by DIAMOND COMIC DISTRIBUTORS, in an effort to get more people exposed to the wonderful world of comics!

2

TJKC #16: 52-page TOUGH GUYS theme issue! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada, $7.40 elsewhere) TJKC #17: 68-page DC theme issue! $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere) TJKC #18: 68-page MARVEL theme issue! $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere) TJKC #19: 56-page ART theme issue! $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere) TJKC #20: 68-page WOMEN theme issue! $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere) TJKC #21: 68-page issue on Jack’s WACKIEST WORK! $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere) TJKC POSTER: See pg. 64. $7 ($8 Can., $10 elsewhere) AND DON’T FORGET: COMIC BOOK ARTIST #1: 100-page issue spotlighting DC Comics from 1967-74, with NEAL ADAMS, CARMINE INFANTINO, JACK KIRBY, JOE KUBERT, MIKE SEKOWSKY, NICK CARDY, a new NEAL ADAMS cover, and more! (Plus ROY THOMAS’ new ALTER EGO on the flip side!) $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere) COMIC BOOK ARTIST #2: 100-page issue spotlighting Marvel Comics from 1970-77, with STAN LEE, GIL KANE, STERANKO, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, JIM STARLIN, MIKE PLOOG, a new GIL KANE cover, and more! (Plus more of ROY THOMAS’ new ALTER EGO!) $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere) COMIC BOOK ARTIST #3: 100-page issue spotlighting NEAL ADAMS & THE AGE OF MARVEL, with a new ADAMS INTERVIEW, plus a close-up look at his Marvel Comics work, including thumbnails, unused pages, penciled pages before inking, and more! (Plus another new ALTER EGO section by ROY THOMAS!) $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere)

Issue #22 Contents: Morals and Means..............................4 (the hows and whys of Jack’s villains) Fascism In The Fourth World.............5 (Hitler meets Darkseid) So Glad To Be Sooo Baaadd! ..............9 (the top ten S&K Golden Age villains) At The Mercy Of The Yellow Claw!....14 (the brief but brilliant 1950s series) Jack Kirby Interview .........................17 (a previously unpublished chat) What Truth Lay Beneath The Mask? ..22 (an analysis of Victor Von Doom) Madame Medusa..............................24 (the larcenous lady of the living locks!)

Mike Mignola Interview...................25 (Hellboy’s father speaks) Saguur ..............................................30 (the Kirby villain who wasn’t) Atlas Monster Showcase..............31-32 (a few of our favorite splash pages) Galactus, Pillager of the Planets! ......33 (the big guy checks in) Centerfold: FF #49 Pencils! ..............34 A Failure To Communicate...............36 (Part Two of our series comparing Jack’s margin notes to Stan’s dialogue) A Kirby Riddle..................................44 (the real-life basis of Arnim Zola!)

Steve Rude Interview........................46 (Steve’s keeping the Kirby flame alive) A Really Interesting Change .............53 (there’s no union in the Evil Factory) The Three Faces Of Darkseid............54 (an unholy trinity emerged) Introducing: The Others! .................57 (a sneak preview from the Kirby Estate) The Creation of King Kobra .............58 (Steve Sherman details Kobra’s genesis, including the original unused script!)

Classifieds.........................................64 Collector Comments.........................65

T

H

ISSUE #22, DEC. 1998

THE ONLY ’ ZINE AUTHORIZED BY THE KIRBY ESTATE

E

C

O

L

L

E

C

T

O

R

Front cover inks: Dave Stevens Front cover color: Homer Reyes & Dave Stevens Back cover inks, collage, and color: Jack Kirby Photocopies of Jack’s uninked pencils from published comics are reproduced here courtesy of the Kirby Estate, which has our thanks for their continued support.

COPYRIGHTS: Aquaman, Ben Boxer, Big Barda, Boy Commandos, Brainiac, Crazy Quilt, Darkseid, Deep Six, Demon, Desaad, Dr. Canus, Emissaries, Glorious Godfrey, Granny Goodness, In The Days Of The Mob, Jimmy Olsen, Joker, Kamandi, Kobra, Lex Luthor, Metron, Mokkari, Mr. Bleak, Mr. Miracle, Oberon, Orion, Penguin, Rip Carter, Scott Free, Simyan TM & © DC Comics, Inc. • Arnim Zola, Black Talon, Blue Diamond, Bucky, Captain America, Crystal, Doctor Doom, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Frightful Four, Galactus, Goom, Hulk, Human Torch, Ikaris, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, Jimmy Woo, Liberty Legion, Loki, Magneto, Medusa, Miss America, Mr. Fantastic, Odin, Patriot, Pildorr, Primus, Punisher, Red Raven, Red Skull, Ringmaster, Saguur, Sandman, Sharon Carter, Silver Surfer, Skrull, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, Suwan, Thin Man, Thing, Thor, Toro, Trapster, Vision, Watcher, Wizard, Yellow Claw TM & © Marvel Entertainment, Inc. • Justice Machine © Bill Reinhold • Antimon, Cybele, Dark Domain, Devil’s Advocate, Karion , Sleykaria, The Others, Thunder Hunters, TM & © Jack Kirby • Stuntman TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby • Hellboy TM & © Mike Mignola.

Dave Stevens was only 18 when he inked this commissioned piece for a fan in 1973, and it graces this issue’s cover.

Our back cover this issue is the original Darkseid concept drawing, in ink, watercolor, and collage by Jack himself!

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 5, No. 22, Dec. 1998. Published bi-monthly by & © TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. John Morrow, Editor. Pamela Morrow, Asst. Editor. Jon B. Cooke, Assoc. Editor. Single issues: $5.95 ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere).

Six-issue subscriptions: $24.00 US, $32.00 Canada and Mexico, $44.00 outside North America. First printing. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is © Jack Kirby unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors. PRINTED IN CANADA.

3

These sympathetic villains were so successful that the competition tried to imitate their success. DC re-tooled Lex Luther such that his evil was motivated by an urge to get revenge against a young Superman who accidentally caused his baldness. Not quite as dramatic or heartrending as the scarring of Victor Von Doom’s mug, eh?

These loners, like the sociopaths, also tended to build criminal armies. But there was something a bit pathetic about them as they put together collections of surrogate friends. And when they inevitably blew-away one of their criminal soldiers for failing to rob and maim efficiently, it reeked of neediness, of their repressed need for buddies, surfacing in a violent, cathartic gesture of retribution.

Of course, with the hundreds of villains that Kirby created in his nearly half-century long career in comics, he invented all sorts of wrongdoers that won’t fit into any attempt at analysis, but most can be analyzed in the terms set forth above. For an intriguing example, take a look at Granny Goodness. Where do you think she fits in, hmm?★

Morals and Means

by Link Yaco Kirby had three types of antagonists; each had their own methods of operation for their evil work, but they only had two types of weapons.

Slapfights vs. “Pure Power” enerally speaking, the villains were either athletic types like Batroc the Leaper (my favorite) and the human top-like Whirlwind, or they possessed vague sci-fi weapons that enabled them to fire blasts. Bad guys like the two-bit Unicorn or the big feller himself, Galactus, could zap the protagonists with bolts of “pure power” or “cosmic force.” What this stuff was remains unclear in my mind. It could blow up buildings and worlds, but when it hit humans, it left them “stunned,” sometimes with ripped clothing, but seldom with a bruise or even a scuff mark that lasted more than a few panels.

This “pure power” seemed to be a metaphoric power, not a physical one. It certainly lacked the heat and radiation that we associate with familiar forms of visible or even invisible beams of energy (e.g. electrical, lasers, x-rays, microwaves, ultrasound, particle beams). “Pure power” never set cities afire, although it would reduce them to rubble.

Whatever their powers, Kirby’s colorful villains usually fell into one of the following areas:

G

The Sadistic Sociopath Kirby’s earlier bad guys tended to be more onedimensional. Characters like the Red Skull were evil personified. They seemed to gain an almost sexual satisfaction from murder and torture. Whereas the Skull was anarchic, there were psychotic megalomaniac villains who were capable of being cooly calculating. Magneto was even more frightening than the Skull, for he pretended to be working for an altruistic cause (a Nazi-like brotherhood of superior mutants), but his ultimate goal was domination, and cruelty not only came easily to him, he enjoyed it!

The sociopaths tended to be criminal masterminds with henchmen. They didn’t mind getting their hands dirty, but they liked to maximize their terror-wreaking, which meant recruiting a small army. And the sociopaths were generally more likely to execute their jittery junior mobsters than innocent bystanders.

The Opportunistic Mercenary Kirby grew up in a very rough section of New York in a very rough period of time. He was no stranger to hoodlums and gangs, and the monetarilymotivated soldier-of-fortune was a character type that he knew well. Guns-for-hire toughs like Batroc might be hired by Hydra, but they worked alone. Theirs was a very hands-on approach.

The Alienated Loner Kirby’s most interesting creeps were the tragic isolated types like Dr. Doom and the Mole Man who were pissed-off at society for making them outcasts. Every geeky comics fan, and any halfway literate kid growing up in Hell’s Kitchen (like Kirby) knows what it feels like to retreat from the world to live with the mole men while plotting your revenge.

The good doctor makes a house call, in these pencils from the cover of Spidey Super Stories #19.

4

Fascism In The Fourth World An examination of the Third Reich’s similarities to the conflict of the gods, by Jerry Boyd Darkseid concept drawing for the Super Powers toy line.

S

o much can be read into Jack Kirby’s Fourth World opus that subsequent readings over time only add to the genius of this unfinished, yet endlessly entertaining masterpiece.

The beautifully-orchestrated interplay of technology, intrigue, spirituality, biological engineering, etc. can all be commented on in depth, but one of the most fascinating aspects to me in all of this was Kirby’s take on Nazi history as it was presented in the world of Apokolips.

Kirby had been a soldier in WWII serving in General George Patton’s Third Army which became world-renowned for its crushing breakthroughs on the German defenses after D-Day. Like any other infantryman, he witnessed firsthand the horrors of war, and had seen or learned afterwards the terrors the S.S. had kept hidden: The extermination camps.

The Nazis had threatened a world, and for a time had seemed unbeatable. Their philosophies, use of technology, new approaches to warfare and ethnicity, etc. seduced a significant part of their nation, and sadly, continue to inspire new worshippers to this day. Years after Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” fell in May 1945, comics creators would create fictional would-be world conquerors like the Yellow Claw, Magneto, and Doctor Doom. Older characters like Fu Manchu and Dr. Mabuse would be revamped for a post nuclear-age movie crowd and a cruel, calculating scientist/despot named Dr. No would calmly tell super-spy James Bond how he planned to plunge the world into WWIII in the first of the Ian Fleming-based film adventures. Kirby had spent the better part of the ’50s co-plotting and drawing monsters and madmen who ate, slept, and breathed tyranny; but just as the world couldn’t (and shouldn’t) forget the Big One, neither could he.

Hitler & Darkseid Hitler, the ultimate villain of the 20th century, is mirrored somewhat in Darkseid, the “ultimate” — period. In writings on and recollections of the Fuehrer, his desire for war is apparent. In his book Mein Kampf, the young Hitler expresses his desire for a large Germanic living space — Lebensraum — which would take place not in colonial possessions overseas, but in Europe. What if the Europeans (the present possessors) object? “Then the law of self-preservation goes into effect; and what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take.” He goes on to write: “Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish...”

Darkseid is the archenemy of peace. “Wielder of holocaust! Disciple of power and death!” Orion describes him as he stands before the demon’s statue in New Gods #1. Kirby makes Darkseid’s worldview less complicated (and wisely so) and gives him three main objectives: • The acquisition of power (leadership of Apokolips) — New Gods #7 • War with New Genesis (the entire tetralogy) • The attainment of the Anti-Life Equation (one attempt thwarted in Forever People #8) Like Hitler, Darkseid is cruel, manipulative, charismatic, and aloof. It has been said about Hitler that he had no “real” friends, only cronies, hangers-on, and worshippers who sought to curry his favor for personal reasons. Hitler had a good intuitive sense about his associates, and after releasing the barbaric nature of his followers, sat back in the position of leader/warlord in efforts to twist the world into fitting his monstrous vision. Hitler took the undercurrent of anti-semitism, ethnic prejudices (against Slavs and Gypsies), political mistrusts (against Communists and outsider democracies), and gave those frustrated, impoverished, brutal, and sometimes perverted members of his Nationalist Socialist Party a slow, but steady reign of terror which ended in the Nazification of Germany.

In Kirby’s writing, Darkseid’s agenda needs no great amount of time. The “power beings” of Apokolips are inherently evil, their planet having been “saturated with the cunning and evil which was once a sorceress.”

Evil is manifested in many types: Desaad and Kalibak are tormentors, Kanto’s an assassin, Granny Goodness and Wonderful Willik are lesser tyrants, and even Mantis desires a “share of the booty here (Earth).” Like Hitler, Darkseid gives free rein to the evil in his cohorts in order to facilitate his gaining of “the ability to control all free will!”

While the Fuehrer and the ruler of the shadow planet inspire respect (and terror) from their accomplices, true love eludes them. Hitler’s great love was his niece, Geli Raubal, who committed suicide in 1931, after quarreling with her lover/uncle. To the Nazi princes Adolf confessed forever afterward that she was the only woman he ever loved. The core of Hitler grew ever colder after her death.

Darkseid was denied an early love in his life. Suli died mysteriously as a result of court intrigue.

She is mentioned briefly in New Gods #11, but without affection by her paramour. Her death may have hardened the heart of the ruler of the dark world. Tigra and Darkseid are placed together briefly in 5

New Gods #7, but “irreconcilable differences” are shown between them, and Darkseid has her whisked away in continued exile after announcing his plans for Orion.

Darkseid’s two sons are extensions of his plans: Orion, part of a political pact, and Kalibak as a brutal warrior/enforcer. He is not warm or friendly to either. Hitler was friendly, playful, but not warm toward the children he knew. He saw children as an extension of the “state,” and the state’s future would be manifested in tall, athletic, blond barbarian/soldiers that would dominate the world. The egos of the two leaders would not permit a real heir to the positions of power that they had mapped out for themselves.

Creatures Of Conflict Aside from the Hitler/Darkseid similarities, two other characters stand out in comparison. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, was one of the Fuehrer’s most trusted henchmen and an important personage in the brainwashing of the German and Austrian peoples.

Goebbels staged Nazi Party rallies, art exhibits, oversaw film productions, made speeches, and gen-

Goebbels (top) & Glorious Godfrey (below). erally oversaw the “selling” of National Socialist ideology to the masses. Later, when the war would go badly, the “bloodthirsty noncombatant” would call for German deserters to be shot.

In short, he sold Hitler’s brand of “Anti-Life.” Glorious Godfrey, Darkseid’s pompous preacher, is his counterpart.

Godfrey (Forever People #3) sends out the “Justifiers,” suicidal human bombs who strike out at those resistant to their philosophy. Godfrey whips people into a frenzy with his sweeping oratory (like Goebbels) and then sits back to view the carnage. Kirby even began Forever People #3 with a quote from — Adolf Hitler.

(this page and next) Uninked pencils from the “Young Scott Free” back-up in Mister Miracle #5.

6

In Amazing Heroes #47 (May ’84), Kirby compared Metron, “the academic god,” to Edward Teller, who developed the hydrogen bomb. “He had to create the bomb; that was his capability, and he followed his capability.” Jack’s contention is that a person has to follow his drives, his ambitions and capabilities — and oftentimes, without thinking what it might do to the people or world around him. Metron sets in motion some of the technology used in the war of the gods, but he is emotionally and morally unattached. His own great

powers keep him outside of the intrigue/ turmoil/destruction of the war, and so he simply continues on his quest to gain even more knowledge.

and Germany became Hitler. This bind to the highest legitimate authority in the land took from the man his individuality, personal responsibilities, and for many, decisions made by conscience. After a time, the war effort would dominate all aspects of life within the Reich and millions of Germans would share the final fate of their leader.

Religion The New Gods are mysteriously linked to the prophesying Source (the closest thing to an omnipotent spirit in their system). Even Metron is in awe of its secrets and power. The Source is connected to the Mother Box, an invaluable instrument to the “ultimates,” giving them protection, comfort, travel coordinates, and more. Izaya the Inheritor, at a low point in his life, accepts the Source as an alternative to war and with it, begins a new era of peace and contentment in the world of New Genesis. Though the Supertowners have no great understanding of the magnificent, fiery hand which appears to them at times, they know that the Source is wise, good, and merciful.

Jack’s creation of Metron is brilliant but he may have been hitting into another true-life characterization he was not aware of. Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, was a man with similarities to Metron. Briefly, Speer began as a young architect but received a powerful patron in Hitler (a frustrated architect) and was given free rein to design buildings, stadiums, museums, etc. in glory to the Reich. During the war, he was thrust into war production and became a genius at it, frustrating the allied bombers by continuing to keep up arms production and experimenting with new “wonder weapons.”

Speer was never a “true Nazi,” many claimed, just a deluded man caught up in his job. Jack would rightly say Speer followed his capabilities. Speer would say in his memoirs that he never stopped to ask about the extermination camps or ponder what a Hitlerian world would be like.

Philosophy Jack Kirby’s assessment of Nazi Socialist ideology is clearly reflected in the manner of life on Apokolips. Young Scott Free grows up as a cadet on the dark planet and is constantly bombarded with platitudes of “You’re not a beast — if you kill for Darkseid!” and the like (Mister Miracle #6). Indeed, the entire culture of Apokolips is on a war/death fixation and because of this, all citizens are linked to the mindset and ambitions of its ruthless, powermongering leader.

In 1934, Adolf Hitler exacted a sacred oath of allegiance from all officers and men of the armed forces — to himself. In doing this, the Fuehrer became Germany

Metron appears to confirm Scott’s existence; was he Jack’s version of Albert Speer (shown above)?

7

On the shadow world, the Source is rarely acknowledged. In New Gods #6 (1984), a scientist observes, “Were I on New Genesis, sire, I would believe that the original personalities now reside with that mystery, the Source!”

“Careful! You tread on subversive ground,” Darkseid answers. The master of the holocaust will abide no outside power (spirituality) in his realm.

In 1941, Martin Bormann, party secretary to Hitler, said publicly, ‘’National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.” Eight years prior to that statement, the Nazi princes had slowly and deliberately jailed, killed, and persecuted into silence Christian leaders and clergymen in a program to invent a religion of the state — a religion based on culture, race, and blood. The Christian Cross was to be removed in existing churches and superseded by the swastika.

O’ Deadly Darkseid “The face they saw was granite-hard — and the eyes in it were fixed on the limitless! In this face was the challenge to gods and men. He was the ultimate test for anything that lived!”

Mister Miracle #18 The above description of Darkseid says it all! Darkseid is relentless, everpresent evil and his lifestyle reflects the worst qualities in men. Betrayal, spousal abuse, child abandonment, assassination, destructiveness, and more are all displayed with aristocratic elegance by the dread lord of Apokolips.

The Omega Effect, his unstoppable disintegrating eyebeams, are a logical extension to his creed of total power.

Yet, all of this malevolence is tempered masterfully by Jack. The writer/artist keeps the real horrors off-panel, yet all the time he lets you know this evil god and his minions are far worse than Marvel’s Loki, whose only goals are the destruction of Thor and friends and the throne of Asgard.

Darkseid wants it all.

Darkseid is complex and even majestic in his own way. He disdains destroying the Forever People (in #8), explaining to Desaad, “Greatness does not come from killing the young.” Admonishing Desaad again (in New Gods #2), he serves up a moment of grudging admiration for Orion, his sworn enemy.

Even Darkseid needs a companion. In New Gods #6 (1984), he sadly confides, “I could use a friend. Desaad, perhaps.” Other instances like this show the dark lord’s vulnerability or humanity, not the least of which are two sequences in which he is finally shaken by the powers of automation (New Gods #6, 1984) and Micro-Mark (The Hunger Dogs).

The machines have outstripped the makers and Darkseid is dismayed to be in the presence of a power more destructive than himself. He is astute enough to know that he cannot rule the universe if his weapons of war have destroyed it.

But, while Adolf Hitler and Darkseid sound notes of oppression and destruction, Kirby’s happy optimism is met in New Genesis. That planet is the utopian hope of peaceful, happy, brotherly co-existence realized. Just as the allies defeated Nazism, Darkseid too, can be defeated — if one considers his/her own heart. The triumph of Izaya/ Highfather is echoed in his son’s triumph/escape from Apokolips and Orion’s victory over his own natural impulses. Big Barda leaves her home world (hell) for Scott Free, falls in love with him, and with love in her heart, goes with him to New Genesis (paradise).

The Hitlers (and Darkseids) of the world must be faced, but if one overcomes, the promise of heaven and happiness is within each person’s reach, and the totalitarian regimes of the dictator can never be completely realized.★ 8

So Glad To Be Soooo Baaadd!

The Top Ten Simon & Kirby Golden Age Villains, by R.J. Vitone ow do you rate “evil”? How do you choose the ‘best’ of the ‘worst’? What elevates one bad guy over the next? Tough choices, especially when you have a colorful crowd to pick from. Jack and Joe liked their heroes, so they created some great villains to menace them. The team’s early days at Novelty Press produced plenty of menaces, but only one truly memorable foe. At Timely, the advent of WWII and the free-wheeling “anything goes” house style called for darker, more terrifying threats. (So it should come as no surprise that many of the names on this list spring from the pages of Captain America.) Over at DC, the feel of the stories softened; less gore was spilled, more sugar-coating ladled on. The result? Less chances to develop many scenery-chewing bad guys. And after the War, “real life” crime comics and romance titles left traditional super-villains behind. But the early years of the Golden Age and the War leave us plenty to choose from! So here’s my “stab” at it:

H

The Top Ten S&K Golden Age Villains 1) The Red Skull (by S&K: Captain America #1, 3, 7, Young Allies #1 (part); by others: Captain America #16, 37, 61, 74, Young Allies #4, All-Select #2, All-Winners #12) Was there any doubt? Such melodramatic malevolence! Such singleminded hatred! The Red Skull embodies true comic book evil and was created for tyranny’s sake. Compared to him, all the rest of S&K’s Timely gore-corps aren’t half as menacing to the US and Cap! He gave you the feeling that the War was merely a minor excuse for his activities, that he’d be doing even worse deeds without it. An intimate of Hitler,

the Skull had his own agenda (“I’ve got a world to conquer—and no man will stop me!”). A powerful fighter, truly a “hands-on” killer, he seemed just as happy to strangle a single victim to death as he was killing thousands with some engine of mass destruction... and he just wouldn’t die! In his first appearance, he’s poisoned. Then he’s blown up. Then he drowns. In one story, Cap chokes him to death. (Really!) Didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter that he was unmasked in a few stories and looked like an older version of George Maxon from Captain America #1. The Skull’s appeal was the attitude that came with the mask: The sheer joy that he showed while running soldiers over with a tank; the heartfelt glee he exhibits while hanging helpless hostages (“DIE! DIE! HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!); the pride he took in his work (“WAIT ’TIL ADOLPH HEARS OF THIS!”). And don’t forget his mad determination to kill Cap and Bucky. He continued his vile ways after S&K left Timely. Cap #16 and Young Allies #1 and 4 contain epic-length tales of terror. As the War wound down, so did he. By Cap #61, he was robbing banks with a gang of thugs. In the end, inevitably, he went to Hell to fight Cap one last Golden Age time. The trail of corpses he left behind led him right to the top of this list. Congratulations, bonehead!

The Skull’s S&K Cap stories are reprinted in Vol. #1 and 2 of Captain America: The Classic Years. His first story is in the Marvel Milestone edition of Cap #1. His final S&K story is in Fantasy Masterpieces #6. Young Allies #1 was reprinted by Flashbacks in the ’70s.

“Next issue” ad from Captain America #1. Back in 1941, you could see an ad like this in a Timely comic — and then go buy the book for only 10¢! (above) The Skull’s first splash.

9

2) Satan — The Devil — Pluto (various issues) Got ya on this one, huh? Didn’t expect to find the “Prince of Darkness” on the list, did you? Well, that’s part of the charm of Simon & Kirby. These guys drew on every

(below) The original, unpublished version of the cover to Captain America #7 (shown here from a Timely house ad) featured the Red Skull. Why he was replaced before publication is a mystery. (right)Always a funster, “Satan/Pluto” goes to a party in the Hurricane story from C.A. #1.

source possible for new story ideas: Pulps, old movies, heroic myths, current events, even other comics! Is it any wonder that Lucifer showed up — not once, but several times? In Red Raven #1’s “Mercury” strip, he’s the Hitler-esque ruler of a warring nation. In Daring Mystery #6, he menaced the Fiery Mask. In Captain America #1, a “Mercury” story was reworked into a “Hurricane” story, but the Devil looked sharp!

Marvel Mystery #27 contained the final S&K “Vision” strip, and they really went to Hell. It’s always nice to see Satan referred to as “L.S.” by his demonic minions! And what an artistic interpretation of Hades —

it’s shown as a big-time business, complete with Kirby creatures working as typists. (Could this have been Jack & Joe’s vision of the Timely offices, which the team was leaving soon due to financial differences?)

Over at DC, a sweet little Fudd-like Satan met the Boy Commandos in a tussle over a Nazi’s soul — a great blend of action and fantasy, especially the part about the Nazi having a soul. So you see, Satan belongs on this list! The two Mercury/Hurricane stories and the Fiery Mask strip are reprinted in The Complete Jack Kirby volumes. The Vision and Boy Commandos strips have never been reprinted. (Damn!)

Satan has Vision trouble in Marvel Mystery #27 (Jan. 1942). Then just a year later, S&K use him in Boy Commandos #5 (Winter 1943).

10

3) The Green Sorceress (Blue Bolt #1-10) She’s lean, mean, and shiny green. She rules a vast empire and has a major case of the hots for Blue Bolt — but he only wants her to be “good.” Could you expect her to be anything except evil? One of the main characters and driving plot devices in S&K’s Novelty strip, she more than earns her way onto this list.

TJKC’s recent “Kirby’s Women” issue (#20) has an overview of the Green Sorceress, so look it up. (The author is a friend of mine.) Verotik has issued a fullcolor reprint of the Blue Bolt S&K run, and they are also in the Complete Jack Kirby volumes in black-&-white.

4) Kai-Mak, The Shark God (Marvel Mystery #23) Okay; you’re stranded on a desert isle — alone — but one day a seven-foot shark walks Even after S&K left Timely, the Red Skull appeared (wearing the Japanese “Rising Sun” symbol!) in C.A. ashore. Yes, walks. That’s bad enough, but when he asks you Talon leads the pack because he has some extra what you’re doing on his island... well, you get the point! Kai-Mak is style, plus an origin in old movies. An an early example of one of Jack’s favorite creatures: An ordinary fish/ auto accident crushes the right bug/animal possessing extraordinary powers. The shark-god showed hand of artist Pascal Horta. up in the “Vision” story in MM #23, and put up one great fight.

Desperate, he tells a doctor he’s Rather vicious and toothy, he had held sway over the natives until the prepared to die rather than Vision put an end to him — at least in that era. Only one Vision story live without his art. The has ever been reprinted, and I’ll bet you a ‘fin’ that this wasn’t it! (But doctor offers a slim hope check TJKC #13 for a look at Kai-Mak!) — graft the hand of convicted murderer Strangler Burns onto the artist’s wrist. (Hey, it was the only hand on hand, okay?) The operation was a success, but people start to die as the hand resumes its evil ways, dragging poor Pascal along. (In the 1935 film Mad Love, surgeon Peter Lorre grafts The Black Talon from a killer’s hands onto an injured Captain America #9. concert pianist. He can’t play the piano as well as he used to, but can he throw a knife!) The combination of the Talon’s torments and his “artistic” approach to murder makes for an entertaining story. Cap punches him through a window, and he lands in Young Allies #2. Catch his S&K debut in C.A.: The Classic Years Vol. 2.

5) Thor, “The Villain From Valhalla” (Adventure Comics #75) “ROBBING, KILLING, PLUNDERING, HE STALKS INVINCIBLE...

UNTIL...” Sandman and Sandy take over! One of the best stories of the Golden Age produced one of the best villains. What a premise: A super-powerful “god” from the past blasts into a modern city, leading a horde of ancient Viking warriors. After some twists and turns, the forces of good rout the forces of evil. So what if “Thor” turns out to be a heavily-armored modern-day crook named “Fairy-Tales” Fenton? This is pure S&K, right down to a great full-page battle of the ages. Find a copy, rash mortal! The story was reprinted in Adventure Comics Digest #499 and Forever People #6.

Mr. Bleak seemed so nice in Boy Commandos #5. So what’s with that shadow?

6) The Black Talon (Captain America #9) The S&K run on Cap produced some really grotesque villains. Among these was a “black legion”—the Black Toad, the Black Witch, and the Black Talon. (There was one guy called the White Death.) The

7) Crazy Quilt (Boy Commandos #15,18,24,29,33) Born in the post-WWII comics era, Crazy Crazy Quilt appears in Boy Commandos #29 (1948). Quilt is a fine 11

example of criminals with less “edge” on them.

Terror and horror were all but gone, replaced by kinder, gentler means of law-breaking. Jack and Joe gave their new villain a gimmick: A crime mastermind is blinded in a gunfight with a mob rival. A dangerous operation restores only his ability to see bright, solid colors. The shock cracks his sanity, and Crazy Quilt is born. In Jokerstyle fashion, he led Rip and the kids on some merry chases. In his first outing, he almost stole the Mona Lisa. In another, he “paints the sky” to cause panic and loot a city. One of only a few recurring foes in S&K’s career, Crazy Quilt makes the list with flying colors.

(Ouch!) None of the Crazy Quilt stories have been reprinted.

scenes to defeat the Allies and to kill Rip and the boys. He remained in the shadows, and it’s that air of dark mystery that adds to the character’s appeal. “Killed off ” in B.C. #3, a revamped version known as Agent 13 popped up in 1947, again as a mysterious international crime figure.

The two war era stories are reprinted in Mister Miracle #6 and 7.

10) The Ringmaster of Death (Captain America #5) Here’s a guy who’s so mean, he whips the circus midget! “Inspired”

by Hitler, he plots to murder the leaders of America’s defense system.

With them out of the way, he’ll “grip the country in a steel vise of terror!”

He cuts a Kirbyesque figure, sort of a mixture of Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price. His methods of execution are movie-like as well: A tiger rips a General apart, a cobra bites a Defense Commissioner, and (my favorite) elephants try to crush Cap and Bucky. (What? They didn’t smell them coming?) In true villain fashion, when his plans are thwarted, he tries to kill poor Betty Ross. Needless to say, Cap disposes of the Ringmaster in a single panel of campy Batman-like sound effects!

Good stuff. Check the story out in Fantasy Masterpieces #5 or Vol. 1 of C.A.: The Classic Years — and yes, this is basically the same Ringmaster who returned to the Marvel Universe in Hulk #3.

Dishonorable Mention Adolph Hitler (“Der Fuehrer”) Let’s face it; trying to conquer the world is standard comic book fare — even “killing” all who stand in your way is. But here was an actual living person who, to Americans during the late-’30s/early-’40s seemed to be doing just that! Reports of the inhuman deeds he instigated set the Nazi leader up as a popular target for comics. (What a shock it must have been for a kid flipping through the new comics rack in 1941 to spot the cover of Cap #1, showing Hitler getting a royal knock to the jaw, or Daredevil Vs. Hitler #1, with the entire Lev Gleason superhero corps ganging up on the dictator!) S&K used the despot quite a few times, from cameos to being a full-blown guest “star.” He’s featured on the covers of Cap #1 and 2, Young Allies #1 (both versions), and gets a

8) The Fang — Arch Fiend of the Contents page art from Captain America #5!

Orient (Captain America #6) Surprisingly, Jack and Joe did not use many Asian foes in their Cap run. When they did, they went overboard! (The mutated “oriental giants” in Cap #2 are loads of fun!) Fang should warm the hearts of any old-time movie or pulp fan, because he embodies just about every stereotype and cliché you can imagine. He’s the yellow-skinned head of a murderous Tong sect. He drools. He has fangs. He tortures. He hacks heads off. He blusters. He threatens and promises painful death. On the flip side, he’s cuddly and considerate. Instead of sawing Bucky’s head off slowly and painfully, he offers to swiftly chop it off! It’s this rare mix of mercy, mirth, and mayhem that plants the Fang firmly on this list.

This moody epic is reprinted in Vol. 2 of C.A.: The Classic Years, and in Fantasy Masterpieces #6, where the Comics Code eliminated much of Fang’s innate warmth.

9) Agent Axis/Agent 13 (Boy Commandos #1, 3, 23) Slouch-hat and cape enshrouded, Agent Axis is another S&K wartime “symbol.” Described “...as sly and deadly as the foulest of the Nipponese... as treacherous as the Nazi beast!”, he clubfooted through a trio of Boy Commandos stories. Sharply portrayed as a mysterious master of terror, this evil Gestapo agent worked overtime behind the 12

Eisner Award-winning artist Gary Gianni puts a pulp-inspired spin on the Red Skull. A life-long Kirby fan, his moody art appears regularly in Dark Horse Comics’ Hellboy, and his latest project, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, is a limited edition hardcover available now.

They Also Served...

WWII provided a vast canvas for Jack and Joe to draw on. Their major villains needed lots of disposable cannon-fodder as helpers. If you’re any kind of Golden Age fan, you know that the Nazis were usually portrayed as fat, stupid, arrogant, and mindlessly destructive. Many’s the time the Boy Commandos swept right through their ranks. The Japanese got even rougher treatment, speaking through buck-toothed mouths with hissing phrases right out of “Mr. Moto” films. They were shown to be cowardly fighters, always ready to quit. (The cover of Boy Commandos #9 is a vivid Kirby portrait of a “Nip” surrender.) Other S&K war covers worth an extra look are Star-Spangled Comics #28 (the Guardian leads the Newsboy Legion onto a battleship), Adventure Comics #79 (a classic; Manhunter hunts German subs), and Adventure #96 (a “Jap” collapses over US invasion plans as Sandman and Sandy haunt his dreams!).

(below) Cover pencils from Marvel Premiere #40, a Kirby “retro” cover.

Lugs, Mugs, Pugs, and Thugs War or not, the Golden Age needed villains of all sorts, and S&K covered just about every type, living and dead. They used crooks, gangsters, bums, and grafters; counter-fitters, prize-fighters, and ballplayers; bundists, spies, and saboteurs; swamis, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and dinosaurs; living plants (what?), mad scientists, magicians, musicians, and crazed school teachers; and many more, all with wide ranges of evilness. Sometimes they reformed, sometimes they died. It really didn’t matter. The story was the thing!

A Top Ten list with so much to draw from is bound to incite opinions. Let us know your S&K Golden Age villain picks, or if we left out anyone you love to hate!★ classic “bum’s rush” on Boy Commandos #2. He’s the evil, thinly-disguised ‘Hendler’ in Red Raven #1’s “Mercury” strip, and is played for laughs in World’s Finest #15’s Boy Commandos story. In Cap #2, Bucky gets to kick both Hitler and Goering into the trashcan! Were he “just” a comic book villain, he may have made the Top Ten list just because he made so many appearances in comics! As it is, he rates a separate mention.

The Lurch & Crawl Crew Costumed Foes, Creatures, and Miscreants Who Fell Short of the Top Ten (in no particular order): • The Buzzard (Manhunter, Adventure Comics #73) • Gorro, Dr. Grimm’s monster (Cap #4) • The Butterfly & Lenny (Cap #3) • The Nightshade (Sandman, World’s Finest #6) • The Black Toad (Cap #7) • Stretcho, Presto, Samson, & Midge, The Crime Carnival (Sandman, Adventure #84) • The Wax Man (Cap #2) • Ivan the Terrible (Cap #4) • The Black Witch (Cap #8) • Housedate Harry (My Date) 13

At The Mercy Of... The Yellow Claw!

by Pat Hilger he years 1956-57 were a curious time for comics. In the wake of Dr. Wertham, the CCA, and the success of television, comic books were on unsteady ground. Many publishers were abandoning the medium, as were many of its best creators. Among them was Joe Simon who found work in advertising. Jack did not want to give up on the industry he loved, so he sought solo work.

Most of his work came from Harvey and DC, but ’56 and ’57 also found him working for Martin Goodman at Atlas. The acrimony of S&K’s split from Timely in ’42 had apparently dissipated. During this period he worked on a few stories in the fantasy, western, and war genres, but the bulk of his mid-’50s Atlas work appeared in three issues of a book called The Yellow Claw.

The strip was a generic version of Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu. The first issue appeared in October 1956, with script by Stan Lee and art by Joe Maneely. Jack came on board with issue #2.

The strip had several ingredients which would seem to conspire against Jack. He hated working on strips that he did not have a hand in creating. Not only was the Yellow Claw someone else’s

T

Yellow Claw #2 splash page.

A Kirby splash from Yellow Claw #3. Naturally, Jack worked in a Nazi.

14

character, but it was really someone else’s copy of someone else’s character. Lee stressed quantity and each issue featured several short stories of four to five pages, as opposed to two or three longer tales. Finally, each story was locked into a basic formula. FBI agent Jimmy Woo would be dispatched to thwart a nefarious scheme cooked up by the Yellow Claw. Jimmy would succeed, usually with an assist from the Yellow Claw’s niece Suwan. These limitations were somehow able to bring out something special from Kirby.

It was as if he was trying to give the readers something extra to make up for them.

I must admit that I really don’t know who wrote these stories. Stan was the editor of the title and had written the first issue, but I’d be surprised if Jack did not have some say in quite a few of them. Jack was a science-fiction fan and this interest made him privy to some ideas that were not common knowledge to the average comic book reader of the time. The Yellow Claw series used some very atypical concepts in some of its stories. For example, “Concentrate On Chaos” has a group of psychics using ESP to cause hallucinations and distort the reality of American targets. ESP was not a well known topic in 1956 America. “The Yellow Claw Captured!” used the concept of the android at a time when the “nuts & bolts”-style robot was much more familiar. He’d explore this idea further with his Life Model Decoys in the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” series. “The Living Shadows” examined the concept of alternate dimensions.

“The Screemies!” used mutant birds and their origin was explained as their being sea gulls that flew too close to atomic tests. The idea of radiation as a catalyst to transformation would become a staple of the Marvel line, and this was one of Kirby’s first uses of the notion.

One of the series’ most bizarre characters

Kirby does his take on Salvador Dali in this page from Yellow Claw #2.

Page from Yellow Claw #3, showing the evil one in all his malevolence.

was called UFO, the Lightning Man. He was an alien from Alpha Centauri that was similar in appearance to the Watcher. He rode the skies in a small “convertible style” flying saucer and shot lightning from his hands. As fate would have it, the first human he met was the Yellow Claw, who convinced him that Americans were savage enemies of peace. Yellow Claw had UFO destroy guided missiles that the US Army was testing. Jimmy was sent to stop him. As UFO was just about to kill Jimmy, Suwan revealed the truth of her uncle’s deceit to him. Disgusted with the entire species, UFO left Earth, vowing never to return.

Curiously, the title of the story was “Introducing UFO, The Lightning Man,” giving the impression that he might’ve become a continuing character — a funny title considering the story’s ending.

Jack did some interesting things with a number of the layouts. He seemed to give a nod to Will Eisner in “The Microscopic Army” and “The Yellow Claw Captured!” The former incorporated the story titles in the artwork, while the latter was a full-page mock-up of a newspaper. S&K used unusual shaped panels in a lot of their ’40s work, but after the War they used them less and less.

Jack returned to this in YC and used them to great advantage. In other stories he used half-page panels to good effect.

The use of disproportionate size is an artistic device that is very well suited to comic books.

(Quality’s Dollman and DC’s Batman are two strips that come to mind.) Yet it was one that Jack had not yet deeply explored. The Yellow Claw series featured two tales using the drastic variation of size. “The Microscopic Army” had the Yellow Claw attacking the US with a horde of tiny soldiers, while “Temujai... The Golden Goliath!” had Jimmy battling a giant idol. Jack had used giant-sized characters in some earlier titles, but this may be the first published example of his use of Lilliputian elements.

Later on he would use drastic size differentials in his monster books and with the super-hero strip “Ant-Man.” The art on the strip is exceptional, even by Kirby standards.

There is a panel in “Concentrate On Chaos” that looks like it could have been painted by Dali. It contains bending skyscrapers, floating vehicles, a folding sidewalk, and a very confused, winged dog. The expression on the pup’s face is priceless!

The fourth issue of the series features a most bizarre and unlikely art pairing, Kirby and John Severin. Severin is a very powerful inker and was not afraid to incorporate his own unique rendering on top of

Splash page from Yellow Claw #3.

Shades of the Scrapper Troopers!

Jack’s pencils. The result is an odd, but quite interesting blend of the two greats’ styles. [Editor’s Note: We’ll have more about John Severin’s work with Kirby in our upcoming Simon & Kirby theme issue!]

The strip was a barrel of fun and it also represents the first Lee/Kirby collaboration on a continuing character. It must have rung a chord with writer/artist Jim Steranko; when he took over the “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” strip during the late ’60s , he incorporated the characters into the series. That story arc is one of the best remembered of Steranko’s comic book work, and it has its roots with Jack’s Yellow Claw.★ 16

Captain America would fight six guys at a time.

Jack Kirby Interview

GLENN: Y’know, you always had a knack for that misunderstood kind of anti-hero. Not so much Captain America but — well, even Captain America. In the beginning, he was this skinny kid, y’know? And when you re-did the Sub-Mariner, he goes back home and his race was gone after he was a bum in the bowery, or whatever.

Conducted by Glenn Danzig with Mike Thibodeaux in the early 1990s Transcribed by Glen Musial GLENN DANZIG: I’m doing an article on how the prices for your artwork have jumped, especially since I’ve been collecting, and it’s kind of great. Is it gratifying to see people really appreciate your stuff now?

JACK: Every story has to have a little pathos.

GLENN: Something somebody can associate with, who’s feeling maybe not in time with the world.

JACK KIRBY: It would be gratifying to anybody, to know that what you’re doing is not only valuable but worthwhile. It appeals to people.

That’s immensely gratifying. I enjoy that feeling.

JACK: Actually, I was telling myself and the reader that we can do it! If we want to write a good story, then we could write a good story. If we want to run a mile, we can run a mile. If we want to win a hockey

GLENN: Do you think there’ll be another age like [the 1960s] again?

That stuff was just so imaginative.

JACK: Certainly, of course. Because, as time goes on, changes come with new times and those changes have to be interpreted by the people of that particular period.

GLENN: Do you think there’ll be Renaissance guys like you and Joe Simon and Stan Lee, who were under the gun and had to produce ten titles a month? These guys now do one book and they can’t even get out twenty pages in a month.

JACK: At that particular time, the business was young. The routine was certainly not developed as well as it is today. So we did what we instinctively felt had to be done.

MIKE THIBODEAUX: You still had the quality, though; the quality was good.

JACK: I’ve always had the quality because it was the kind of quality I wanted. I felt that each man that does any kind of a task believes that he can do it. I mean, when you consider the kind of environment I came from, you say, “A fella that came from the Lower East Side — where did he get the idea that he could draw, and do art, and develop his art to a high degree?” Well, I did.

GLENN: Y’know, there are a lot of artists now who can draw technically good drawings, but there isn’t the heart behind it; there isn’t that excitement. When you see a Kirby drawing, it jumps off the page! Now you look and say, “Okay, it’s balanced, but...?”

JACK: My stories were true. They involved living people, and they involved myself. They involved whatever I knew. I never lied to my readers.

GLENN: It came out in your artwork. Whatever was going on inside you and where you came from, it came right out in your artwork — what happened in your life. That’s what I’m saying: Maybe some of these artists, because of the way the world is now — I don’t know if it’s coming out in their art. Maybe they haven’t lived the stuff that you lived.

JACK: I must admit that at the time I started, it was certainly a period of turbulence and doubt and fear, and everything was happening to give people cause to think. Not only that, it gave people cause to fight, and so I found myself in the midst of that kind of a period. And what came out of me, you’ll find in Captain America.

Cover pencils from Captain America #210.

17

would always see them fighting with themselves; they actually had their own personality. They weren’t just evil guys and that’s why you’d love ’em. They actually had personality, too. You could identify with them.

JACK: I saw my villains not as villains. I knew villains had to come from somewhere and they came from people. My villains were people that developed problems. What was wrong with Dr. Doom? He was a very highly-regarded scientist and what happened was that there was an explosion in his laboratory and it ruined his face. It scarred his face for life and, being the perfectionist that he was, he had to hide that face. And how did he hide that face? In a mask of iron and steel.

Doctor Doom became a man with a deep, deep problem, and a man with a deep problem is going to give all the people trouble. (laughter) These are the roots from which villains spring if you dig deep beneath the stereotypes, and I did, y’know?

There were people on my block who became gangsters; there were people on my block who became cops. My best friend said, “I’ll become an artist like you. I’ll take you to my mother and you can tell her that you’re making money at drawing,” and of course he told his mother. He said, “Jackie is an artist and they’re paying him for his drawings, and if I do the same, they’ll pay me, too.” And his mother says, “No, no!” I remember that. People really believed in stereotypes and she says, “I know all about artists and I want you to be someone—something different.”

She says, “I want you to go out and get a decent job.” (laughter) When I came back from Basic Training, my friend was a New York policeman and he retired as a police inspector. Can you find a job more decent than that? Mothers being the sacred objects that they were, a man would obey his mother.

GLENN: Back then also, if your dad was a cop, they wanted you to be a cop. And if your dad was a plumber, they wanted you to be a plumber.

JACK: Of course; that kind of thing was prevalent.

GLENN: Was there any pressure on you to not be an artist?

Kirby pencils, Sinnott inks from Fantastic Four #102. game, we can win a hockey game. And I did; I played hockey in the gutter in New York. I played with wooden sticks, with people who wanted to win, too. And it’s human to want to win; to beat the other guy and say, “I won this game and I feel great about it.” Why? Because I know I would. And that’s the way I felt. Now, when I began to draw, certainly I wasn’t Rembrandt. I drew on the tenement floor and I remember the janitor coming up and bawling me out, and he’d erase my drawing on the tenement floor. And I would draw another one, y’know? (laughter) And, of course, I found out that I liked it and I pursued it.

JACK: No, no. My dad was a factory worker, and my dad loved me and my mother loved me. They always supported me and whatever I wanted to do, they knew that I would do the decent thing.

GLENN: Even in the lean times, did they say, “Go do your art”?

JACK: Yes, yes. They had a deep faith in me. I loved them for it. I made up my mind to make my parents proud of me and I tried my best. Of course, I’d have tried my best in other fields; it could have been in any field. My object was to make my parents proud, and I loved them deeply.

[At this point, there is a break in the recording, and it resumes with a discussion of the Achille Lauro incident. In October 1985, members of the Palestine Liberation Front, a member-organization of the PLO, hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro while it was at anchor in Port Said, Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea, and held its passengers hostage. Many American tourists were on-board, including elderly, wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, who was a boyhood friend of Kirby’s. The terrorists shot Klinghoffer in cold blood and threw his body overboard. To rub further salt into the wound,

GLENN: A lot of people don’t know that you actually scripted a lot of these stories — most of them. Even the Marvel stuff.

JACK: I did.

GLENN: You always gave the villains — Dr. Doom, or Magneto, or Sub-Mariner, or whoever — they were the ultimate villains and they were evil, but they had their other side; the internal turmoil. You 18

PLO officials repeatedly mocked the victims, declaring at the United Nations that Mrs. Klinghoffer had probably murdered her husband “for the insurance money.” Abu Abbas, head of the PLF and mastermind of the hijacking, when asked about the killing of Klinghoffer, replied, “Maybe he was trying to swim for it.”]

could tell us legends that would enchant us.” And they’ll take out tape recordings and say, “Listen.”

GLENN: Imagine little kids doing book reports on Captain America (laughter): “For my book report, I did Captain America by Jack Kirby.

Captain America was a man...”; it would be great.

GLENN: The guy who jumped on the terrorists was in a wheelchair?

JACK: They become classics in their own right.

JACK: He was in a wheelchair, yeah. When I knew him, his folks owned the mini-store on my block. He was the only one that went after the terrorists.

GLENN: They’re definitely part of the American culture.

JACK: They’ve become universal. The comic book was born in America, but now I get calls from Iceland; I get calls from New Delhi, and around the world. That’s why comics are important, because they’re legitimate storytelling. It’s model storytelling because our technology accommodates that kind of thing.

ROZ KIRBY: He went after them verbally. He talked back to them.

MIKE: They shot him in the head.

JACK: Nobody said a word to the terrorists; they did as they willed.

Klinghoffer was the only one who talked back to them. He died. They threw him overboard and he died. A guy from my block would do it.

He wouldn’t stand for it because there were women on board and he felt that...

GLENN: You know what’s great about all this — you haven’t been doing comics for a while now that you’ve retired, but everybody wants to know about Jack Kirby.

GLENN: Where was that? In Brooklyn? Bronx?

JACK: No, Lower East Side. And that’s why I say they turned on him. [People on my block] were people that were just becoming Americans.

I felt I was an American because I was born here. All the guys felt that. And, of course, Captain America came out of that kind of a feeling.

GLENN: Did you think Captain America would last this long?

Bruce’s inks of a Kirby pencil drawing.

JACK: Yes. I think anything good will last.

GLENN: But still remain that popular?

JACK: That’s like asking, “Do you think Robin Hood will last?” Yeah. Robin Hood will last for 500 years.

GLENN: This brings up another point; you created legends. They’re actually American myths. It’s like when you read about Hercules or Robin Hood or King Arthur. Kids also read about Captain America and the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. It’s the same thing; it’s like a mythology, and people actually study the history of these heroes, like what happened in issue #4 when it’s already 300 issues out, and things like this. They want to know the whole history.

JACK: Of course, the way I interpret it, our work will last — maybe not forever, but it will last a long, long time. Remember, Robin Hood was created in medieval times. King Richard was still king, right?

GLENN: That’s going to be wild. A hundred years from now when someone picks up something and says, “What’s this?” and it’s a Captain America comic book by Jack Kirby, it’ll be like they’re reading Robin Hood from ages ago. Do you think these old comic books will be like first editions or something?

JACK: Yes, they’ll be looked upon as medieval texts, and your children will talk about me.

They’ll say, “My great grandfather was impressive in my times. My great grandfather The original splash to Captain America #103; the Red Skull underwent major changes before publication.

19

JACK: Once in a while.

GLENN: Are the fans generally nice and pleasant?

JACK: Oh, they certainly are. I haven’t met any that weren’t. They’ve always treated me well, y’know. I’ve always loved the fans. I think there’s something about comics and good storytelling that’s a marriage, and they realize that. That’s the wonderful thing about comics: It puts the idea of published storytelling in the hands of the ordinary guy. That’s American.

Villain conceptualized by Jack for the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel.

GLENN: Didn’t you and Joe Simon start Mainline in the ’50s? That was a pretty much an independent. You went against the big boys. Were you guys the first to do that or were there other companies?

JACK: Oh, yes, we were pretty much the first, and we put some good stuff out. We did the first satires, and I had a lot of fun with those. We began to find different avenues for comics to experiment with. They did well. Everybody that read them, liked them.

GLENN: Didn’t Marvel just reprint the Fighting American stories?

JACK: Yes, the Fighting American stories are very good.

GLENN: Are they going to do the Bullseye ones?

JACK: They probably will.

ROZ: We don’t know yet. They’re first coming out with Boys’ Ranch. That’s coming out January 18th.

GLENN: Obviously, there’s got to be interest in it if they’re doing it. Marvel doesn’t do stuff unless it’s...

JACK: I can tell you, Boys’ Ranch will sell well because it’s a good book. It’s about real boys; different types in the Old West. To me, the people are real. I love people in general and I think it’s reflective of me. That’s what people see. And I’d like to see ’em do more books but they’re off to a good start.

GLENN: Did you create Sgt. Fury?

JACK: Yes. He was my idea of a soldier. Having been a soldier myself — just a PFC, really — the experiences were very, very real, and whatever was real to me was so reflected in Sgt. Fury. That’s the way things were in the War. It’s that kind of a thing that galvanized me because — well, it happened, and I was right in the middle of it.

JACK: If I told you all of it, you’d never believe it. (laughter) You’d never believe it.

GLENN: What about Sharon Carter from Captain America — that was a great love story; all these ups and downs, just like a real relationship.

MIKE: I’d believe it. (laughter) But I’ve heard your stories.

GLENN: How do you feel about this renewed interest in Jack Kirby?

They’ve revised New Gods and put it out again and given you credit.

JACK: Y’know, for comics to be effective they have to mirror life in some way. You’ve got to make them high drama. You gotta make them — not fictional, but you’ve got to dramatize, like what you see in Captain America.

JACK: Well, I get the comics and I can see it. I can see people... I see a preponderance of stories. I feel that everybody in sight wants to tell a story and, of course, comics are the best kind of a conduit. Some of the fellas will write for the publishers or draw for the publishers. There’s a flood of independents. And where did the Ninja Turtles come from?

From independents. Can you tell me anything more successful than the Ninja Turtles?

GLENN: What’s really great about Captain America is that the career always got in the way, and the girl would always say, “Choose between me and your career,” and he’d go, “My country comes first.”

JACK: Yes, because Captain America was always sort of a symbol. He was united to a principle which he couldn’t forgo. He couldn’t deviate from that principle, and that’s very human. Now we can change our manners and we can grow in all kinds of different ways, but underneath it we’re always going to be us; and no matter what we learn, it’s going to be interpreted by us — and not only that, but the effects of our own values. You may become an immensely successful man, a great business man, but basically you’re going to be the kid who grew up on a certain block and had done all that, and used all that in the way this kid would use it. You would treat people as that kid would treat them; you’d either like them or dislike them as this kid inside you would sense it, and he would interpret it — this kid would always interpret it in you.

GLENN: Right now? No. They’ve gone, literally, from their basement or garage to an American success story.

JACK: It could only happen in America because it’s a democracy. Now maybe it can happen in Russia. (laughter) Who knows what’s going to happen?

GLENN: It must gratify you that all these little kids are seeing this Marvel and DC stuff, and it’s like, “Wow! This is incredible stuff!”

JACK: Y’know, I get feedback and it’s gratifying, really.

GLENN: Do you like doing public appearances, and meeting your fans?

20

GLENN: How did you get the ideas for some of these women? I noticed that a lot of them looked like Roz. JACK: I can tell you that the minute I saw Roz, I was... [pause] GLENN: Captivated?

JACK: I was. And I make no bones about it.

GLENN: And you came out with all these new women characters that look like Roz, except for the women with the black hair — (pointing at book) who was that character?

Was that anyone specific?

JACK: No, not really; not anyone. I respect women in general. I would never do anything to offend them. I feel it’s the prerogative of every American to protect them.

GLENN: You always had strong women in your books. Sue Storm was always strong.

She resolved a lot of the FF’s conflicts. Big Barda was a muscle woman; way before women got involved in body building, you had Big Barda.

JACK: Oh yes. I thought women should have their independence, which they could utilize.

GLENN: That was way before its time. You said this girl is a warrior woman; she should have muscles and she should be a fighter. Obviously, anyone with common sense would realize that.

JACK: And warrior women are not new.

Throughout history we’ve read about them.

GLENN: Again, you were the first to do it.

JACK: Well, it was because I had the opportunity. I respect women very, very highly.

GLENN: Was it great going from Marvel to DC and getting that much freedom?

JACK: I didn’t get it; I took it.

GLENN: Was it great having that freedom?

JACK: Yes. I’ve always been that kind of person. I’ve always done what I felt had to be done. And the reason they took it was the fact that the magazines sold. At that time, even for 10 cents I usually got several hundred thousand book sales. And take Joe Simon — we came from totally different backgrounds, yet together we made an A Skrull captures the Thing, in these pencils from Fantastic Four #91. excellent team. I admired Joe, and he liked that type of person. But I know that I did, Joe knew that we did, and the kind of stuff I did. Together we created stuff that sold magazines. we took that prerogative.

GLENN: Do you have a favorite? Did you like working by yourself as a GLENN: Definitely, when people see a Kirby book, they know it’s by writer and artist or did you like working with Stan or Joe? Kirby, and that may be why the artwork has appreciated so much now.

JACK: I just get back to circumstance. You’ll never find two more diverse guys than Joe and myself, except in temperament, except in JACK: Yes. There are problems in [the stories], and there are people who ambition, and except in trying to achieve excellence in whatever we are true to their own environment — and they’re all real, but very, very do. I constantly admired Joe for that. interesting. If you analyze them, you’ll find that I’m not really fictionalizing. There’s a realistic ending, there are realistic circumstances, GLENN: Did Stan give you pretty much a free reign, though? there are realistic beginnings and consequences — consequences for the heroes. Heroes make mistakes. Super-heroes can iron them out.★ JACK: Everybody did. If I hadn’t sold magazines, I wouldn’t have been 21

What Truth Lay Beneath The Mask?

An analysis of Doctor Doom, by John A. Modica he Fantastic Four were entering into their first year as a team.

When Doom returns in Fantastic Four #10 (which also heralds the Riding the wave of new popularity for super-hero comics, Kirby and first appearance of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the Marvel Universe), Lee were just beginning to change the history of comics. more is revealed about Doom’s growing powers. Doom appears at the Enter Doctor Doom!

1962 headquarters of Marvel Comics on Madison Avenue, where he Victor Von Doom, a.k.a. Doctor Doom, first appeared in takes off his metallic mask for the first time. Both Stan and Jack are Fantastic Four #5, but there was a noticeable difference between the shocked when they see his face. (The reader never saw his face — in a quartet and the Doctor: The FF wore no masks, while Doctor Doom’s dramatic touch, Kirby only shows us an over-the-shoulder view.) face lay under a mysterious shroud, with his face hidden behind a steel Ironically, in Doom’s early appearances, it is the female characters mask. All that was known about Doctor Doom was that he was evil.

(Alicia Masters and Sue Storm) who prove to be the thorn in his side Readers, like the FF, wondered: What lay hidden under that mask? when he almost defeats the Fantastic Four. It could be concluded that Kirby had always had a great influence in comic books, and his Doom does not have mastery over women. In his 12-page origin in FF influence is greatly felt here. Jack was a voracious reader when he was Annual #2, we find his mother was a gypsy sorceress. Could this have a child, and many of his heroes and villains were deeply influenced by been the reason for Doom’s lack of power against women? Perhaps her his love of mythology and literature. It’s no small coincidence that Kirby strong influence — both maternally and supernaturally — influenced read Alexandre Dumas’ classic The Man In the Iron Mask. Like Dumas, him when it came to women, giving him deep respect for them. Also, Kirby may have designed Doctor Doom to be the intellectual twin of it’s never explained how Doom’s mother died. (Could she have entered Fantastic Four leader Reed Richards. (He even became Richards evil into the Netherworld? That would further explain Doom’s interest in twin in issue #10.) the supernatural.)

On the other hand, Stan Lee feels Doctor Doom was created by Nothing exemplified Kirby’s genius more both he and Jack Kirby. In Bring On the Bad Guys, Lee stated that both than the Fantastic Four in 1966, as “the he and Kirby hashed out several ideas for the fifth issue of Fantastic times were a-changing.” In one Four. They both wanted a villain that could prove to be an equal chalyear, the Inhumans, Galactus, lenge to the newly-created team. Lee went on to cite that it was he who felt the last name “Doom” was key and it was Lee who later attached the word “Doctor.”

Regardless of what happened next, Doom proved to be an immensely popular rogue.

Beginning with page one of FF #5, Kirby illustrates to all that Doom is a manipulator. His hands hold doll-like replicas of Mr. Fantastic and the Thing. Two other dolls, the Invisible Girl and the Human Torch, stand on what appears to be a chess board.

He muses that he is the only one who could defeat the new team of heroes, for they are in his way in a quest Jack’s cover pencils from Marvel Treasury Edition #11. for power.

22

T

Silver Surfer, Black Panther, and Prester John were introduced into the Marvel Universe; other villains were created; the original Human Torch returned in FF Annual #4; and the single standalone classic of Fantastic Four #51 (“This Man, This Monster”) was produced. It was a banner year for Marvel’s flagship title, but the most interesting development (or non-development) found in 1966 was that Doctor Doom did not appear until the final panels of issue #56.

By #57, Doom’s thirst for power had multiplied. He would now drain it from any cosmic figure in the known Marvel Universe.

Issues #57-60 are a four-part discourse on Doom’s hunger for power, and both Kirby and Lee demonstrate that the “perils of power” have a price. It would be another year and one Annual before Doom would appear again. Like the other year hiatus, Kirby created more universes and sub-universes for Marvel, and when Doom awkwardly appears again in issue #73, his mind is in the body of Daredevil. It appears that from this point on, both Lee and Kirby had come to an impasse, for neither could agree on which direction to take the ultimate villain.

It was around this time Kirby started losing his interest with Marvel Comics, even as Lee was becoming the publiclyrecognized spokesman for Marvel. Kirby left New York for California to look for new fertile ground, and wanted to be recognized for his contributions to Marvel Comics.

There is no better symbolism of Kirby’s plight at Marvel than that found in his final Dr. Doom episode in FF #84-87.

Instead of envisioning Stan Lee to be Reed Richards (as later depicted in What If? #10), imagine Jack Kirby to be Mr. Fantastic.

Then take it a step further, imagining Stan Lee to be representative of Doctor Doom.

In #84, the FF investigate the small village kingdom that Doom rules. Everyone appears to be happy (this is the image Marvel conveyed to its readers—that it was one big happy place to be). At the end of the issue, Richards tries to escape the village, and is cut down a few yards short of freedom.

Doom replies that Richards, like the other inhabitants of his kingdom, will be “eterA classic Kirby/Sinnott cover, from Fantastic Four #86. nally happy” there. By #85, it is clear that Richards has been a victim of mind control, appearing in nineteen issues and two Annuals by Kirby, what lay behind and at the close of this issue, Doom’s robot army is about to attack.

Doom’s mask would and still is a mystery to all comic book fans.

(Was Kirby waxing symbolically that all who worked at Marvel were Stan Lee offered the most credible piece of evidence that the face mindless robots?) We get another scene of Doom unmasked, again behind the mask of Doctor Doom was not disfigured — at least in from an angle the reader can’t see. (John Parrett’s letter in TJKC #16 Kirby’s eyes. In Bring On the Bad Guys he concludes his chapter on leads one to believe that Jack originally planned to show readers what Doctor Doom with a memory of Jack Kirby. Here he states Kirby once lay beneath Doom’s mask, but was perhaps overruled by Lee.) drew Doom without his famous steel mask, “..and guess whose face Finally in #87, Doom captures Sue Storm and Crystal. Once again was smilin’ out at you beneath the dark green hood!” a woman saves the day as Sue Storm uses irony to show Doom the But it was Kirby who would get the last word on what lay beneath hypocrisy of his nature. He releases the team and allows them safe the metallic mask. In Jack Kirby’s Heroes and Villains, Kirby stated “...he’s passage. It could be concluded here that Kirby made the decision to a good-looking guy, and he only has a tiny scar on his cheek, but because leave Marvel at the close of this issue. Jack would finish illustrating he’s such a perfectionist, he can’t bear to see that imperfection. He one more year of the Fantastic Four, but never in his remaining issues isn’t hiding his face from the public, he’s hiding it from himself.’’★ would we get a glimpse of Doctor Doom, masked or not. After 23

Madame Medusa The Larcenous Lady of the Living Locks, by Mark Alexander

ern regions of Attilan, because they were cousins as well as lovers, which put an unusual spin on their relationship. In any event, the minute Medusa became someone’s love-interest, she became about as interesting as the Wasp.

Granted, she still whipped men around with her scarlet tresses, but not with the same relish, the same evil enthusiasm that she once had.

After becoming a heroine, she was awarded her own one-shot comic book (Marvel Super-Heroes #15) and she was the first female in the Marvel Universe to achieve this, but her potential for true greatness was lost forever.

It’s sad, really. As a villainess she could have been a real contender, a female Dr. Doom, no less. As a heroine she was good (very, very good), but when she was bad, she was better.★

or my money, the most potent femme fatale that the team of Kirby/Lee ever created was Madame Medusa of the living hair.

She was, in a word, magnificent.

Our first glimpse of her was on page 5 of FF #36 where she explodes onto the scene like a titian-haired tigress whipping three policemen around (with her hair, mind you) like so many rag dolls.

Very dramatic, indeed.

Kirby’s boundless imagination kept inventing ever more ingenious uses for her prehensile tresses. At her whim, her hair became an extra set of arms, a lockpick, a lariat, or a means by which to propel her through the air itself.

As Sue Storm’s evil counterpart in the nefarious Frightful Four, she was the perfect villainess. She was cold, contemptuous, arrogant, and aware of her superiority to the men who surrounded her. While Sue Storm, the Wasp, and Marvel Girl were the weakest members of their respective teams, Little Red Riding Head (as the Torch called her) always seemed one step away from wresting the Frightful Four’s leadership from the Wizard. Among Marvel’s female protagonists, Medusa was without peer.

It’s too bad Stan and Jack hardly ever let Sue engage in violent physical combat. In FF #36, after the I-Girl neutralized Medusa’s hair with paste, they should have had a knockdown, drag-out cat fight (preferably in a mud puddle!).

As it turned out, Medusa was only allowed to retain her bad-girl status for five issues; after that, everything changed.

Gorgon brought the reluctant Madame back to her people and bits of her mysterious past began to unravel.

She was, it seems, part of a super-powered genetically engineered royal family who were living in self-imposed exile from the rest of mankind. Furthermore, she was deeply in love with (and totally devoted to) Black Bolt, the King of the Inhumans.

(Why, then, did Gorgon have to drag her back against her will?)

I assume Black Bolt and Back cover pencils to Marvel Treasury Edition #11, featuring Medusa and friends.

Medusa were from the south24

F

occurred to me to pick it up because it was a DC comic. I was already so entrenched in Marvel comics, I couldn’t be swayed over.

Later, with the exception of Frazetta, Bernie took the biggest chunk of my time devoted to studying just one artist, and that probably went on for a solid two years.

Mike Mignola Interview Interviewed by Jon B. Cooke (Mike Mignola grew up in Oakland, CA. Heavily influenced by such diverse artists as Vaughn Bode and Bernie Wrightson, Mike did early work on the Hulk at Marvel, and continued with other super-heroes until he found his niche with gothic subject matter, including a movie adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. His work on DC’s Cosmic Odyssey exposed him to Kirby’s Fourth World characters, and led to a heavy Kirby influence in his art — an influence that can be found in his current work on the critically-acclaimed Hellboy at Dark Horse. This interview was conducted by phone on November 8, 1998.)

TJKC: Did you have an interest in the macabre when you were young?

MIKE: I remember in sixth grade reading Dracula. I think some kind of light bulb went off in my head, and I said, “That’s it. I just want to be interested in monsters.” Somehow that didn’t translate into comics at the same time. My favorite comics were Fantastic Four and Thor. Even when Marvel started doing monster comics, I was into the super-hero stuff.

By the end of high school, I had pretty much lost interest. I was collecting, but I’d stopped reading the stuff. It just didn’t hold my interest. At the same time, I was really getting into fantasy stories; I discovered Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, and I was much more interested in that kind of stuff. I was just the quiet guy who sat in the corner and did nothing but read.

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Were you interested in comic books as a young child?

MIKE MIGNOLA: I’d seen them, and my cousin had them when I was growing up. He was buying things like the Fantastic Four and Sgt. Fury, but it was many years later — the late-1970s — I started collecting.

TJKC: Did you recognize Kirby’s work when you were young?

MIKE: It stood out. I distinctly remember a couple of Fantastic Fours my cousin had, and they did stand out glaringly from the other stuff. There was the issue with “Him” and the wonderful white cocoon cover [FF #66], and many issues later there’s one with green tentacles grabbing out at the FF [FF #88]. Those covers made such a huge impression. As a kid, the power that was in those images left a mark on my brain. Years later when I did start buying comics, one of the first things that got me started collecting were those Marvel’s Greatest Comics, with the Fantastic Four reprints.

TJKC: It’s interesting that the two covers you mentioned from Fantastic Four both have sort of gothic imagery; they’re atypical Kirby, in the sense that you had the cocoon, and the house with the tentacles.

There’s a very strong influence in your work that seems to be Kirby.

MIKE: As a kid, I never sat down and said, “I want to be Jack Kirby.”

When I was reading comics, Jack must’ve been off at DC, because all I was seeing was the Marvel reprint stuff. When he came back to Marvel to do Captain America, I was already getting into guys like Wrightson, so those books were so wacky, it just lost me entirely! (laughter) I appreciated Kirby; especially the old stuff — which I loved on a gut level — but I wanted to be a “pretty picture” guy like Wrightson and Kaluta and all those guys. Around the time I started doing comics, I realized I was never going to draw as well as a guy like Steve Rude or Jerry Ordway; my work is kind of clumsy and awkward.

One of the guys I really gravitated to in those days was Frank Miller, and his drawing came second to the way he was telling the story. That really clicked. Suddenly I was seeing comics as more than just pretty pictures. Frank’s drawing was very simplistic even then on Daredevil, and I got into drawing figures for power, not for accuracy. Walt Simonson was another real direct descendant of Kirby’s; his work was so powerful. When he started doing Thor, it had become almost Kirby. I knew Kirby was behind all this, but I wasn’t sitting down looking at Jack’s books until I did Cosmic Odyssey for DC. I was using Kirby for reference, and it was like a light bulb going off! I’m not happy with my work on Cosmic Odyssey — I got super-heroes out of my system, which I guess is a good thing — but the best thing that came out of that period is I had Kirby on the drawing table so much of the time. I’d seen the New Gods, but never read it; I really didn’t care that much about it, but to work off of that, and learn — “Wow, that figure doesn’t make any sense, but boy does that thing move! There’s power there!”— I started realizing all the guys

TJKC: Were you attracted to Kirby’s work more than the better renderers, like say, Bernie Wrightson?

MIKE: I was a Marvel brat. I remember going to the newsstand and seeing Swamp Thing there, but it never

Mignola cover from a Hellboy mini-series.

25

out drawing super-hero comics were looking at this stuff! Everybody should, because comics are so boring compared to this! There’s different kinds of people doing different kinds of comics, but if you’re doing super-hero comics, you should really be looking at Kirby’s work.

TJKC: Did you have any exposure to his early 1960s monster work?

MIKE: I had seen a lot of that when I was young, and I always loved that. If it came out of Marvel — and they had reprints of that stuff — I generally saw it.

TJKC: Did you always have aspirations to be in comics, or did you want to be an illustrator?

MIKE: I was pretty unrealistic. I got to the point where I wanted to draw nothing but monsters. Around the end of high school I started realizing this might be a problem, (laughter) so I started looking at comics. I knew I couldn’t draw well enough to do comics, so by the time I got out of art school, I’d set my sights on being an inker. I’d pretty much copied that whole A Look Back book of Wrightson’s; I’d worked out a brush technique, and I was just

horrible at it. So I became a penciler because I was such a horrible inker, and I couldn’t do anything else. (laughter) TJKC: As you developed, you seemed to become fearless in your use of blacks.

MIKE: I’ll fess up in print; it began as my way of covering the things I didn’t know how to draw. It wasn’t me being really into Alex Toth.

TJKC: But you started to understand light and shadow.

MIKE: Yeah. Early on, that was mostly coming from Frazetta. Though Wrightson uses a lot of black, his drawing was a lot fussier and a lot prettier. For awhile that was really appealing to me, and then I got sucked away from Wrightson toward these big, powerful shapes. I lost interest in the fussy brush rendering, and went back for the more primitive, heavy-handed kind of stuff, which led really nicely into Kirby. Jack, on a much more abstract level, was doing the same kind of stuff. It wasn’t this pretty, fussy drawing; it was these big, strong blacks. Jack isn’t generally a guy you think of for spotting blacks, but he was putting enough highlight on certain things so you had a big, black, powerful drawing. That’s when I started realizing that the less you draw, in a lot of ways, is really more important. What became most important was editing your drawing — like, if it’s a silhouette, but we see the star on the guy’s chest, we know it’s Captain America.

TJKC: You had a lot of strong covers coming out in the 1980s. Did you want to be a cover artist for a period of time?

MIKE: When I first started as an inker, the goals I set for myself were: I’d be an inker so I can be in this business, and someday before I die I’d like to do maybe a ten-page story. It won’t have women or horses in it, because I can’t draw them. (laughter) I can draw some kind of story of Conan fighting a monster for ten pages, then I can die saying, “I drew a comic.” (laughter) But I also thought I’d like to do some covers.

I saw Terry Austin doing some covers — here’s a guy who’s an inker and also doing covers. It didn’t seem like a realistic thing, but it happened pretty fast. My first year of being penciler, I did a whole year’s worth of Hulk covers. I liked that; I had a certain take on doing single illustrations.

One year I did almost nothing but covers, and at that point I’d started liking doing comics, and covers were getting in the way.

I got to a point where I felt like everything in mainstream comics I wanted to draw, I’d drawn, except for a Kirby monster. (laughter) I remember someone calling me from DC asking me to do an Aquaman cover. I’d never cared about Aquaman to begin with, but they said, “It’s got the Deep Six.” (laughter) I’d never read the New Gods, so I said, “What’s that?” They faxed them to me, and I said, “I’m on board!”

If you look at that cover, Aquaman is about the size of your thumb, (laughter) and he’s mostly in silhouette. But boy, did I lovingly draw the Deep Six! (laughter)

Mike’s Aquaman cover, featuring the Deep Six. 26

TJKC: Your Kirby influence really shows on Cosmic Odyssey.

MIKE: Some of the stuff on Cosmic Odyssey, when I brought it in, the editors said, “That looks pretty weird.” But I’m sitting here looking at the New Gods all day long; it doesn’t look too weird compared to that stuff! (laughter) I was on-fire looking

A Royer-inked two-page spread from the still unpublished In The Days Of The Mob #2. Note the Hitler reference in the text. at that Kirby stuff; it’s so wild, and it makes better comics. So I had that in mind.

I remember doing a Superman book shortly after that, and there’s a big barbarian kind of guy in it. I thought, “Why not make him three times bigger?” There was a drawing of this guy carrying somebody under his arm, and this guy was huge! I remember bringing it in to the office, and the editor saying, “Whoa!” He didn’t make me redraw it, but he said something to the effect of, “This stuff ’s getting kinda funky looking!” (laughter)

and pile it together to make a comic, we’d have a lot better comics. I think 90% of the people drawing comics couldn’t care less about what they’re doing. I’m very fortunate.

TJKC: How much of a consideration is the audience when doing your work?

MIKE: I have no idea what my audience likes and doesn’t like, so I’m not able to say, “My audience wants this kind of story.” I’m not secondguessing myself in that respect. Whatever I’ve done, I’m always afraid this is the one the audience isn’t going to like; but all I can do is do the stories I’m thinking about, and put them out there, and hope for the best.

Nothing can compete with what I’m doing now; I get to do pretty much whatever I want, and it tough to come up with something better than that.

TJKC: You seemed to avoid super-heroes after Cosmic Odyssey.

MIKE: A scary thing happened after I did Cosmic Odyssey. I’d said yes to a back-up feature in Swamp Thing, and I remember talking about it to one of the editors up there. He said, “That surprises me, because you’re such a good super-hero artist.” A light went off: “You weren’t careful, and you became a super-hero artist!” (laughter) Of course, I’d done Cosmic Odyssey, and every super-hero in the DC Universe was in it. That’s when I realized I’ve got to decide what I want to be.

Anything with super-heroes I’d already done, so now, I’ve gotta go do something else.

TJKC: What’s the genesis of Hellboy? When did that start to gel in your mind?

MIKE: I did a one-shot Batman story in Legends of the Dark Knight that was kind of a supernatural thing. I plotted it, and when that was done, I remember thinking, “That was a lot of fun. It would be fun to do other stuff like that.” When I started thinking of my own stuff, I thought I could do more stories like that, but create a character to specifically put into stories like that. The thinking was, do I draw just a guy? If I make it a monster, even if he’s doing his grocery shopping, I’m always drawing a monster! (laughter) The bottom line was I just wanted to draw monsters. Hellboy, which I think is a very Kirbyinspired visual, is the kind of character I was drawing at conventions for fun. I would make up this guy with these knobs on his head which

TJKC: Are you doing what you want to be doing now? How would you describe it?

MIKE: I’m the luckiest man in comics. I get to draw big monsters banging into each other, and I get to do all the folklore and all the weird supernatural kind of stuff; all the things I’ve read for years, I’m now able to do. All the images rattling around in the back of my head for years now have a place to go, which I think is what makes the best comics. Ideally, if people could take all the things they’re interested in 27

are taken from some Kirby trolls in Thor. The hand is very much a Kirby machine, with those flat Kirby Thing fingers. I couldn’t imagine a character who’d be more fun to draw all the time than him.

talking about doing Hellboy. Frank Miller was doing Sin City. All these people started talking, and we all got together. We had this meeting, and most of us wanted to go with Dark Horse. I think we kind of liked the idea of a group identity. It was great for me, because I wasn’t a big name. I’d had a couple of books that did okay, but I had no track record. Legend shone the spotlight on me, and everyone noticed Hellboy because of that. If it wasn’t for Legend, Dark Horse might’ve published Hellboy, but it would’ve been just another comic out there.

TJKC: So Kirby was there even at the inception of Hellboy?

MIKE: Yeah; maybe not consciously, but he was right back there. If anybody’d said, “What kind of thing do you want to do?” I’d probably have said I wanted to do a big, ballsy thing like Kirby’s Thor — something like that, with lots of mythology.

TJKC: Does Legend still exist today?

MIKE: It doesn’t really. It never officially disbanded, but it was never officially there. I think if somebody wanted to put that symbol on their book they probably still could, but it doesn’t exist anymore to me. It was a great place to be at the time; it did wonders for Hellboy, but it doesn’t really need that group umbrella anymore.

TJKC: Are those knobs on Hellboy’s head sawed-off horns?

MIKE: Yeah. So many people thought they were goggles. Give me some credit! If they were goggles, I’d have drawn straps or something! (laughter) I specifically did a scene where his horns grow out, and he snaps them off; but people didn’t notice that, so I’m doing it again. (laughter) If I do it every couple of years, they’ll notice.

There’s certain things about him that are based on my dad. My dad was a cabinet maker, and he was always coming home all scuffed up; his hands were these big, callused monstrosities. It’s kind of fun to beat up on Hellboy because I know he can take it, because he’s my dad. My dad could stick his hand into the planer, and get his knuckles chopped off, (laughter) and he’d come home with dried blood caked all over him. “Ah, yeah, I got my hand stuck in the planer today.” (laughter) There’d be dried blood drizzling down the side of his head: “Ah, I don’t know, some nail shot out of a nail gun. I’ve got to pull this thing out of my skull later.” (laughter)

TJKC: Do you feel the audience you’re developing is for you or for Hellboy?

MIKE: So far it’s for me doing Hellboy. How much of that audience would follow me to something else, I don’t know. I’m nervous about finding out, but if I come up with the right handle on the right project, I’ll do it.

TJKC: When you think of Kirby, what villains come to mind? How do you view his take on villainy?

MIKE: The bad ones were the worst, and the good guys were the best.

He was a real “good vs. evil” guy. The Red Skull, Baron Zemo; you just can’t go far wrong with Nazis. The Red Skull’s not only a Nazi, he’s got a red skull mask — just the greatest.

TJKC: How did you get involved in Legend? You weren’t that big of a name at the time.

MIKE: I really lucked out with Legend. Legend did more for me than probably anybody else in that group. John Byrne and I were already

TJKC: Do you have a special affinity for a particular Kirby work?

MIKE: There’s one issue of Fantastic Four. It has a lot to do with when Dark Domain, an unrealized Kirby concept.

28

I think Jack also didn’t overthink stuff.

There’s such a gut-level approach to the work.

It’s great, it’s big, it’s giant, and he got it on paper so fast he didn’t have time to think it was silly, or whatever. He just threw that job over his shoulder and careened on to the next one. Hopefully my art is evolving for the same reason: I’ve got so many stories I want to tell, and I’m not as concerned about getting that thumb looking perfect. The lesson Jack Kirby teaches is: At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what that thumb looks like, as long as your heart’s in the right place when you’re telling that story.★

Unfinished Kirby sketch.

I first discovered it. It’s issue #62; it works on so many levels. It’s sad, it’s emotional, it’s traumatic, it’s amazing. Sue Richards has a heartbroken look on her face because Reed Richards is hanging on a rock, lost out in the Negative Zone. The Thing rips this giant monitor out of the wall because he can’t stand looking at this guy, and they can’t help him. It’s just so huge, and it’s graceful; that’s something people don’t generally mention about Jack’s stuff. He gave a beauty and a grace to things, plus the giant power. The guy was amazing. He could do anything and everything, and he did it all in the same comic all the time, three or four times a month.

TJKC: Did you ever meet Kirby?

MIKE: I met Jack a few times, just to say, “Hi, I’m a big fan.” I don’t know if he ever saw anything of mine. I was on a panel with him once or twice. It’s one of those things where I never really got a chance to talk to the guy, but I don’t know what I would’ve said. There really aren’t words. I was looking at Kirby’s stuff today, thinking about this interview, and I said to my wife, “I don’t really know what to say about Jack Kirby.” I’m unable to intellectualize my feelings about that stuff; it’s just so damn good. Of all the people who’ve done comics, there’s probably nobody else I can get that carried away with, just looking at his stuff. It’s just so powerful and so amazing, and so beautiful on so many different levels. It just works like crazy.

I have no idea if Kirby ever looked at N.C. Wyeth; he could’ve, the stuff was around. These are guys who knew what the hell they were doing; guys who sacrificed pretty pictures and elaborate detail for power. Wyeth and Kirby had a lot of the same internal thought processes, as far as these big, powerful things. If it’s going to be sensitive, it’s really sensitive. If it’s going to be powerful, you go that whole extra mile to make it really powerful. If that means a leg is three times bigger than it should be, and a hand is twice as big as it should be, and a head is two times smaller than it should be to get that power, that’s what you do. The important thing is getting that story across, not making sure the guy’s got the right number of hairs on his forearm.

TJKC: Do you think Jack was a genius?

MIKE: If there’s a genius in comics, it was him. To my mind, he’s done it better than anybody else. In so many different ways, he did so much.

He carried so much of the weight, and he created so much of what we still have. How many drawing tricks are so common in comics, and the guys doing them don’t even know where they came from? So much of it came from Jack, not even taking into account how many characters he created. You have to have drawn this stuff for a few years to realize how impossible it is to have done what he did.

Darkseid & Co. by Mignola.

29

Sagurr

by Ted Krasniewski

Sagurr to the storyline? I’d bet he didn’t, but it’s an interesting notion to entertain, because it would make Sagurr a Kirby creation after all — one uncommonly lacking, in its delivered form, any sort of visual definition or dimension!

It’s marvelous to consider the ways in which an idea receives or is denied life, and how a concept may be enriched or impoverished by a shifting host of conditioning factors. Under different circumstances — a later decade perhaps — Jack might have made of Sagurr a fully-fleshed entity, one that might have gone on, as have so many others, to some measure of fame. As things stand, Sagurr’s name serves as little more than an intriguing placeholder for a character who never arrives, a villain who was never there. No wonder he’s hard to remember!★

ho remembers Sagurr? There isn’t much to recall, I’ll admit; only the slightest of evidence shows that he was there at all, and his association with Kirby, by any strict definition, is tenuous at best. If you care to check, you’ll find him — sort of — in a seven-page fantasy that Jack drew entitled “I Dream of Doom,” way back in Strange Tales #96 (May 1962). It went like this: Every night the same terrifying monster appears in Frank Atwell’s dreams, reaching out to take him in its grasp. Overwhelmed with fear, (As an aside, Ted notes all those “double Rs” in those stories — he awakens to lie in dread over the possibility that the next nightmare Torr, Lo-Karr, Orrgo, Krogarr — and wonders if it could have been will be one he, somehow, can’t awaken from. Fearing for his sanity and Stan Lee’s unconscious reply to DC’s “double L” gimmick.) seeking help, Frank visits a doctor, and under the calming influence of an administered sedative falls asleep, to be confronted by the monster once again. This time, however, he doesn’t escape its clutches; and neither can he escape the story’s inevitable twist-ending, as the creature carries him off and deposits him, safe and sound, in another dimension — his own true home, as it turns out, and the place where Frank reigns over a devoted populace as their beloved king.

(He’d been bewitched, you see; cast into a dream-world — one synonymous with our own reality — to live there as an ordinary man, oblivious to all he’d previously known. His loyal ministers back home mounted their own counter-spell to the one afflicting him, launching a rescue mission to snatch him back, and it was their persistent efforts to find and free him that Frank, in his amnesiac state, perceived as the monster that haunted his dreams.)

When the other-dimensional royal court gathers joyously ’round their bewildered ruler to explain how he could ever have become so incredibly lost, we hear for the first — and only — time of an evil magician who was banished from the land for his crimes, and of his vengeful parting spell that hurled the good king into the nightmare world (ours) that would have swallowed him up forever, were it not for the wholehearted labors of his people to undo Sagurr’s wicked magic.

But, remarkably, all reference to this exiled sorcerer is contained in a single word-balloon on the story’s next-to-last page! He remains completely offstage throughout the tale; not one panel yields the least trace of him! A Kirbydrawn story in which the villain remains invisible?

How many of those are out there? It’s surprisingly uncharacteristic of the creator who brought us decades of powerfully defined, larger-than-life protagonists. The Red Skull! Dr. Doom!

Galactus! Darkseid! Any that Kirby didn’t create outright he made his own by virtue of the vivid life he infused into his depiction of them. The missing Sagurr, however, exists as a mere plotcomponent — the nail upon which another character’s second life is hung.

Jack isn’t credited with any of the writing here, but what if he actually played some part in plotting the action, and was in fact responsible Jack’s splash from Strange Tales #96. What follows are few of our favorite Kirby monster splashes. for finally adding the agency, even the name, of 30

W

31 Strange Tales #98 (July 1962), with Paul Reinman inks.

Strange Tales #94 (March 1962), with early Joe Sinnott inks on Kirby.

32 Journey Into Mystery #62 (November 1960), by Kirby/Ayers.

Tales of Suspense #15 (March 1961), featuring that lovable scamp Goom. Inks by Ayers.

all down to that helmet; it was simultaneously a crown, a metallic mask, and (undoubtedly) an instrument of advanced cosmic technology with a function that was inexplicably never revealed.

That helmet, mind you, was so impossibly cool it made you forget the flaws in the rest of the costume; the bare legs (which would be colored over in subsequent reprints) and the “G” insignia on the chest-plate. (Did Stan and Jack assume the English alphabet was utiKirby’s first demi-god, by Mark Alexander lized throughout the universe?)

Cut to page 2 of FF #49. This full-page drawing is quite possibly ook into the eyes of the Watcher on the cover of FF #48. What the greatest page Kirby ever did for Marvel Comics; as an exhausted could possibly cause this omnipotent and omniscient super-being and helpless FF look on, Galactus and the Watcher argue over the fate to look so fearful, so foreboding? Even before you read page one of the Earth. If one wanted to determine the exact point where Marvel of “The Coming Of Galactus,” it’s obvious you’re being built up for Comics peaked, this was probably it. It was here that most people something monumental. realized Kirby and Lee had taken their medium further than anyone Has any character in comics history ever had such a mind-dazzling thought it could ever go. Just as the Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper, they introduction? And when Galactus (what a name!) finally strides forward upped the ante and set a new standard for all who would follow. in the last panel, no one was disappointed. He was simply the most Back to Galactus, we notice that like Thor, he has a quasi-Biblical/ imposing figure comics had ever seen.

Shakespearean manner of speech. Furthermore, he is uninterested in First, he was gargantuan; he stood a head taller than the Watcher (and totally indifferent to) the turmoil he is causing the inhabitants of and he was fitted with the most amazing headgear imaginable. It was Earth as he prepares to devour their planet!

That’s right folks, this is the key to Galactus; he’s not evil, he’s just hungry, and he satiates his hunger by spanning the cosmos like an intergalactic vampire consuming entire worlds, leaving them barren and devoid of life. How does he do this? Through the use of Kirby’s most awe-inspiring technological marvel — the Elemental Converter! It floats down from “G’s” spacecraft, practically assembles itself, then proceeds to envelop a planet with catalytic force. Then, through a feedback effect, it converts nearly everything into pure energy on which Galactus feeds.

This conversion of matter to energy/ energy to matter, according to Einsteinean physics, may be the key to the universe itself.

Did Kirby know this, or was this a cosmic coincidence? In any event, Galactus was no more a villain than any other carnivore; the Watcher himself said Galactus was “above good or evil,” but try telling that to those he consumed! Ben Grimm was right; he made Doc Doom look like a piker.

Everyone reading this magazine is undoubtedly familiar with the storyline of the trilogy; the Torch retrieves the Ultimate Nullifier and Mr. Fantastic bluffs Galactus into forsaking his mission. Finis.

Now, mind you, in a perfect world Galactus would have kept his vow never to return to Earth, and would have never been seen again. Unfortunately, a planet-devouring demi-god is a hard act to follow. Any Earthbound villain bent on (yawn) world domination would simply pall beside the great Galactus, so it was inevitable he would return and every time he did, he became less awesome, less God-like than his original incarnation. In 1966, however, his grandeur was unequaled.

Kirby would go on to create other Godlike beings who spanned the spaceways, but repetition tends to trivialize great ideas. The “Galactus Trilogy” was Marvel’s finest hour because Galactus was Kirby’s ultimate villain.★ Marty Lasick inked this piece at the request of Roz Kirby. Nice work, Marty!

Galactus, Pillager Of The Planets!

L

33

Page 2 pencils from Fantastic Four #49, possibly Stan and Jack’s finest hour. Do comics get any more awesome than this?

A Failure TO Communicate: Part Two

by Mike Gartland (featuring Jack’s uninked pencils from Fantastic Four #49) hat can be written about Galactus that hasn’t been expressed already by historians far more informed and eloquent than I? But let’s start off within the context of this issue’s theme: Is he a villain? By textbook definition he is not; he’s more of an adversary or antagonist, and given the previous opponents superheroes had faced up to his appearance, he represents either the ultimate adversary or antagonistic overkill — take your pick!

Galactus is a prime example of the thinking man’s opponent; i.e. an adversary that is so powerful it quickly becomes apparent that physical opposition will do no good in subduing him. A plan has to be devised or a way found to defeat him. In earlier stories for Marvel, Jack played with the notion of an alien visitor of enormous power, but they were more or less misguided (Impossible Man or Infant Terrible), or they posed no threat to mankind (the Stranger).

Galactus, on the other hand, is not misguided — quite the contrary; because of his very reason for being, he poses the ultimate threat to mankind.

In interviews, Jack would say that “Galactus was God”; I always wondered if Jack really meant God. Granted, Galactus was definitely a “god” but surely not The God. To speculate, perhaps Jack was saying that if super-heroes were ever to face God, Galactus would be about as great an adversary as they could encounter. Superheroes have faced aliens before, and powerful ones too; but it was the 36

W

37

If you compare these pencils to the published stories, you’ll see how inker Joe Sinnott — as he mentioned way back in TJKC #9 — took a few liberties in his inking, including altering Reed’s, Sue’s, & Johnny’s faces during this early FF period.

38

way Jack interpreted Galactus to the reader that made him the first space god. How he was introduced made all the difference to the history of comics. His coming is heralded by not one, but two powerful aliens before he even arrives, telling the reader in essence that this was not your typical visiting alien menace; this is the menace; this is IT! Jack introduced Galactus in FF #48; the second half of the book is utilized to prepare readers for his arrival, which culminates with the last page. This gives you an idea of what Jack was thinking about; devoting half an issue just to prepare the reader was saying something about this character.

Things really get moving with #49 and we are very fortunate to have these uninked pencils from that historic story.

As opposed to my article last issue, there is no failure to communicate between Kirby and Lee on this storyline. Stan followed Jack’s direction without making major changes, and the story flows beautifully because Lee stuck to Kirby’s plotting — and let there be no mistake about who plotted and paced this story. Despite whatever input Stan might or might not’ve had at the conceptual phase, these margin notes show the action and dramatic impact of this pivotal episode in Marvel’s history begin with Kirby.

But while Jack was the “father” of Galactus, we shall see — to his credit — Lee may have been his savior.

As far as Silver Age Marvel history is con-

39

cerned, there is the period before Galactus, and the period after.

With the introduction of this character, Jack entered into a period of cosmic creativity; granted he was always creating technological wonderment, but now he was incorporating the Universe in many of his ideas. After Galactus came SubSpace, the Kree, the Colonizers, Ego the Living Planet; even the Trolls in Thor had Orikal — a powerful alien — in their company. It was space-age mythology fathered by Kirby, and Kirby’s new “Zeus” was Galactus.

Jack has said that after creating Galactus he had to “step back from him.”

According to historian Mark Evanier, Kirby never meant for Galactus to be a recurring menace à la Dr. Doom. He might use him again, but only sparingly, so as to maintain the awesome nature of the character. Needless to say, Galactus became an immediate hit with the readers of the time. Ever in touch with the fan base, Lee undoubtedly heard their pleas for his return. According to Evanier, after prompting from Stan, Jack brought Galactus back in not only Fantastic Four, but Thor as well.

So thanks to Lee (and the fans), we have more great Kirby Galactus stories and art than probably would have existed otherwise.

Before returning Galactus to the FF, Jack added a small cameo to his Thor/ 40

41

42

Jack definitely wanted to pen the origin of this character. But there was, by this time, a failure to communicate with Lee, who may have had his own ideas of the character’s beginnings. As seen in TJKC #14, when the Galactus sequence was completed, there were many unused pages left over, but none of them pertained to the origin part of the storyline itself; so Jack was at least able to put an origin in before “losing” the character to someone else — or leaving Marvel, which he did less than a year later. (It’s still unclear how much of the published origin was Jack’s idea, and how much was Stan’s.)

At the end of the unpublished pages from the origin sequence, Kirby was going to have Galactus battle alongside Thor; perhaps Jack scrapped the idea, or Stan (wisely) rejected it, thinking that it would lead to the character’s denigration (which, as we have seen from subsequent stories after Jack left — and overuse of the character — it probably would have). In my opinion, to this day no one has yet been able to capture the awesome nature of Galactus as well as his creator, Jack Kirby.

What made Galactus so riveting a character? From the outset, everyone who knows of him before he appears is rendered in characterizations of fear, dread, and awe: The Skrulls, the Watcher (whom we already knew to be an extremely powerful character), and even after Galactus appears, the Surfer as well. In the uninked splash to FF #49 we see how awestruck the FF are — much moreso than in the inked version. Most telling was the reaction of the everyday people scattered throughout the storyline. This was indeed the coming of a god — Kirby’s god — and it terrified plenty.

What made Galactus so terrifying?

Was it his power? The fact that he could destroy the entire planet? Probably in part — but what made him terrifying to me was more psychological: The fact that Galactus did not even recognize that man existed, or cared if he existed, or needed to exist; the fact that Galactus made man look at himself and say “I kill what I need (or want) to survive; not bothering to rationalize if what I kill has a right to live.”

Heck, we don’t worry about a carrot’s Thor #160 page (with outstanding inks by Colletta); again, Stan closely follows Jack’s lead when dialoguing. right to life, so when we realize that we are as little to Galactus as a carrot is to us, Ego story in Thor #134; just as Thor leaves the Black Galaxy (where it’s enough to scare the hell out of you — not so much when you read Ego dwells) we see the great Galactus appear. He is scanning the Black it as a kid, ironically. Only as “rational” adults do we realize how scary Galaxy, whetting our appetite for a Galactus/Ego confrontation. Jack this concept is. And the topper is you can’t condemn him without then “steps back” from Galactus, not using him again until Lee requests condemning yourself. So in the end we see man as an extension of a Galactus story in FF. Jack eventually returns to the Galactus/Ego God; but in the long run Galactus — God — is an extension of man. “seed” he planted in Thor #160, more than two years later, finally Galactus is man, pushed to the ultimate degree; a terrifying concept bringing his classic mythological figures and space god together for indeed!★ several stories. The Ego story leads to an “Origin of Galactus” plotline (Next issue: Part Three of “A Failure to Communicate” with that eventually culminates in Thor #169. the Silver Surfer caught between Kirby & Lee, and more great Jack touches on the origin story in Thor #162 but then leaves it, not uninked pencils from FF #49!) returning to it until #168. It is unclear why this is so; Evanier feels that 43

a reformer and a Socialist, and as was shown by the Dreyfus affair, a man of uncommon courage. In short, he seemed to gather together the two most typical, yet contradictory features of the doctrinaire leftwinger: Avowed immoralistic and deterministic views, and obstinate, often heroic self-righteousness.

These two people, both major artists, represent two different kinds of rebellion against reason: Arnim in the name of instinct, racial identity, and a kind of irreligious mysticism; Zola in the name of a pseudoscientific determinism and a determined revolt against any notion of binding morality. Arnim was a Nationalist, Zola a Socialist. There is even a direct connection between Zola and the beginnings of Nazism through the Swedish playwright Strindberg, who was a passionate, indeed neurotic believer in Zola’s creed of Naturalism, and was for a while a supporter of the Viennese racist and anti-semite Lanz von Leibenfals, whose extremist group was fashionable in Vienna and indubitably influenced the young Hitler.

Now is it a coincidence that Kirby’s villain, the force and power in the hands of the devil (or Red Skull, as his friends call him), is called by

A Kirby Riddle The real-life basis of Arnim Zola, by Fabio Barbieri hough a great genius, though the nicest person you could possibly hope to meet, and though a thoughtful man and a natural intellectual, Jack Kirby leaves everywhere the impression of being uneducated.

He grew up in the armpit of New York City, and his work came from an exercise in natural philosophy virtually unassisted by background; his education was on a par with a manual laborer’s. We do ourselves and him no favors if we refuse to accept incontrovertible matter of fact, and it makes the understanding of his work — with its enormous peculiarities, enormous flaws, and yet more enormous merits — far harder than it need be. But there is one single question that has puzzled me for years and that might well point to completely unexpected depths.

I wonder whether anyone has ever wondered about the curious name of the Red Skull’s ally Arnim Zola? I know that, when I first met him, the name seemed to have an odd inevitability about it, as though I had heard it before. Now, I do not like claims for riddles, codes, and Baconian enigmas, but I think I may have found one. The monster’s two names are famous ones, familiar to any student of European literature, and significant in interesting ways.

The von Arnim family is a distinguished aristocratic Prussian clan that made equally large contributions to intellectual, political and military life; they are prominent in Germany to this day, and its best known members were Bettina Brentano (a well-known diarist and friend of Beethoven, Goethe and everyone who was anyone in Germany) and her husband Ludwig Achim von Arnim, a celebrated nationalistic romantic poet. I think it is of the latter that we ought to be speaking here.

I am not familiar with Achim von Arnim’s poetry; it seems never to have been translated into English, and what I know of his life makes him rather a likable, enthusiastic gentleman patriot with an interest in his country’s folklore. But Arnim’s personality and work are not so important here as the fact that, if I am right, the reason he was picked is his name — beginning with “A.” (In fact, there was a better candidate in the same letter, the notorious raving nationalist writer Arndt. But then Arndt Zola does not quite have the same ring to it.) And it is important to recognize that, whatever he did, he was part of a mystical German nationalism that had as its common heritage a denial of any notion of equality between members of different nations. Along with this went the worship of natural forces and instincts, taken in a direction towards a mystical immoralism and anti-rationalism. If the code I see in Kirby’s Arnim Zola actually exists, then Arnim is there as a representative of Nationalism rather than as himself.

Emile Zola, who straddles the end of the nineteenth century as Achim von Arnim straddled its beginning, is best known for his famous defense of the unjustly accused Captain Dreyfus, J’Accuse...!; an exemplary act of civic and political courage whose echoes ring down the history of our century. But in Zola’s career, the Dreyfus affair was something of a late interlude. Zola was the greatest, if the nastiest, of the Naturalists, who believed that all human behavior could be explained by an analysis of race (that is, birth and genetic inheritance), environment, and situation, and that virtue and vice were mere by-products of these things. His subjects are universally described as sordid. He was also, however,

T

(these pages) Pencils from Captain America #210.

44

and transforming their flesh into the component parts of the castle. Arnim Zola, not unlike Black Panther’s Kiber, is a scientific cannibal.

The connection of all this with the views of either Arnim or Zola is obscure, yet it is not nonexistent. The element of withdrawal from mankind, of rejection of all common standards, of division of mankind between those in possession of cosmic forces (Germans) and the unenlightened rest, is there; and if it is presented in a remarkably hostile manner, we must remember that Kirby, along with a few million other Americans of his generation, had some personal experience with German arrogance and superiority complex. (The arrogance of captured German soldiers made a great impression on him.) There is also something of the terrible German fascination with obscure mystical nature forces, in the fantastic, expressionistic design of the castle, with its primitive masks on the walls, and its dreamlike mazes of corridors.

When Arnim Zola has reorganized life to his specification, the result is not a sterile realm of rationalism, but a romantic nightmare — a German writer’s wild combination of words.

Emile Zola’s belief in material circumstance and genetic inheritance as the ground of all human and social life, with no place for morals as a primary factor, is easily seen to be echoed in Arnim Zola’s awful control over his environment; and his materialism and immoralism are even more present. If this picture sounds unfair to both writers — if it seems to pick up only on the worst aspects of their ideologies, and to deliver a monstrous caricature of both — I think that is part of what we have here. As the word-game on their initials shows, they are used only as representatives of their respective categories — extreme nationalism and materialistic socialism — and any two other writers might have been used in their place. They seem to have been picked only because the name of one began in “A” and the other in “Z.” It is not the men but the categories, or rather the category, that is under attack. By reducing human life to mere material, by breaking down the natural solidarity between human beings, and at the same time by surrendering to inhuman passions and dreams, these tendencies have given Nazism (the Red Skull) its power; even where they themselves are not Nazi, their end result inevitably is. And in Kirby’s Captain America, the Red Skull is directly and declaredly the Devil, the principle itself of evil.

And it is here that I am stuck. The cultural depths, the multiple references, the extraordinary pertinency of the allegory I seem to have found in Arnim Zola, seems to me quite out of the range of Kirby, genius though he was; for it involves not only the potency of imagination and depth of intellect he indubitably had, but also a capacity for cultural analysis that seems completely beyond his reach. I cannot think of a single other work of his that even suggests such an awareness of the meaning of cross-cultural trends in the previous century, or of their relationship with political events. Yet it is surely impossible that such a name as Arnim Zola, with all that it seems to imply, should have been thought of by chance! I really don’t want to encourage this sort of speculation — it is the way to have cranky notions of all sorts about figures in the carpet and hidden messages — but I don’t think I can dodge this problem either.

Was Kirby considerably better read than any of us realizes; and if so, why does he only show it here and nowhere else?★

their two names; that their two names begin in “A” and “Z,” the first and last letter of the alphabet; that one was a Nationalist, the other a Socialist (National-Socialist, geddit?); and that both their schools may be said to be radically in rebellion against common human standards and morality?

Arnim Zola is not a Nazi in any visible sense. He is rather a being who has withdrawn from mankind, to whom mankind is mere biological matter to be molded in the course of his experiments (and, as the Red Skull says, life is manipulated to serve the mighty). He lives in the distant and beautiful Alps (the Red Skull mentions their beauty to Sharon Carter), home of German romantic fantasies in a castle, for all the world like a German prince of the nineteenth century. But he is not human; he has killed himself as a human being in the course of a monstrous surgical operation and has even signified his withdrawal from humanity by taking a deliberately inhuman form. And there is something more: He has not only seized control of the matter of life, he has even made use of it to rule his entire environment. His whole castle is made of living matter, and he can take control of it like a sorcerer. There are a few sinister hints that this has been achieved by kidnapping human beings 45

when I was doing Nexus in 1980, I still didn’t know who Alex Toth was. I was confusing him with Alex Niño for a while! (laughter) Another weird thing about me; when I was reading Kirby’s books in high school, I never knew what an inker was. It never occurred to me it was a guy who went over the penciler’s artwork. I thought it was the guy who colored the book with colored inks or something.

Steve Rude Interview Interviewed by John Morrow (Steve Rude was born on New Year’s Eve, 1956, in Madison, Wisconsin.

After a childhood of influences from Kirby comics to the Space Ghost cartoon series, Steve made a name for himself with his remarkable work on the independent comic Nexus with writer Mike Baron. Steve later made the move to mainstream comics, doing breakthrough work on various series at DC, including the fondly-remembered tribute to Kirby in the one-shot Mister Miracle Special. His latest project is a Jimmy Olsen one-shot in LEGENDS OF THE DC UNIVERSE #14 — out in January — featuring much of the original Kirby cast in another homage to the King. This interview was conducted by phone on November 6, 1998.)

TJKC: How’d you get started in comics? Was Nexus your first pro work?

STEVE: It’s the first work that ever got published. Nexus got published finally in 1981; I seem to remember me and [Mike] Baron thinking up the idea in 1980, but it didn’t see print until a year later.

TJKC: So you guys were friends for a while before working on Nexus?

STEVE: Yeah. Baron and I had tried for two years; we’d done various stories together, one of which was published in some Pacific book

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Did you grow up reading Kirby’s work?

STEVE RUDE: Growing up, there was a guy named Bob Bestoer; I called him “Hun” because I made a nickname for everyone that I grew up with. This guy was an only child, and he had everything a kid could ever want.

So if I wanted to read the latest comic book, I’d go over to Hun’s house. (laughter) Of course, he had a bunch of Kirby comics. I never really bought them on my own; I went over and read Hun’s. Comic books for me were a process of self-discovery later on, when I moved from Madison and made new friends. I wanted to read comic books again, and I obviously couldn’t go over to Hun’s house anymore.

TJKC: What was the first Kirby work you remember seeing?

STEVE: At the local Stop-N-Go around 1966, I remember seeing this Tales of Suspense cover of Captain America falling from the sky, with these two hoods with guns on the rooftops. It may not have been my first exposure to Kirby’s work, but I remember thinking, “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” (laughter) Kirby made everything so exciting; obviously when you’re a kid, you’re always looking for something to be excited by. It was perfect match: A kid and a Jack Kirby comic book.

TJKC: Who were your other influences?

STEVE: I remember 1966 as the year everything kind of happened media-wise for me.

That’s the year Space Ghost came on, the year Star Trek premiered. My other specific influence was going into the library around sixth grade or so and stumbling upon a book called Drawing Heads And Hands by Andrew Loomis. I remember opening up the book and seeing these utterly handsome men and beautiful women; I just completely gravitated towards that. I thought, “Who wouldn’t want to draw like this?” It was just one of those things I was kind of meant to do, I think.

TJKC: I’ve always seen a bit of Alex Toth in your work. Was he a big influence?

STEVE: Alex was an influence by accident. I had no idea who was the designer behind Space Ghost when I was ten years old. Even

Steve Rude’s pencils from the upcoming Jimmy Olsen story in Legends of the DC Universe #14.

46

enough. I wanted to be good enough to somehow get in there. I was hoping they’d offer me work, but in retrospect, it’s better they didn’t. I wasn’t good enough at that time to be doing comics.

TJKC: Did the success of Nexus have a lot to do with you finally getting work from them?

STEVE: Yeah, but I was 24 at the time I did Nexus. There are guys who are in and out of the business by the time they’re 24. I was a late bloomer, but eventually I got better. Issue after issue I’d make some leaps. I tried to learn how to use photographic reference to make my work look real.

TJKC: Did Nexus have any overt Kirby influences or tributes? I remember one scene with a Jack lookalike.

STEVE: Yeah, that was within the last couple of years. Kirby was in there because Baron called the character a Brooklyn street-fighter kind of guy, so I drew Jack Kirby. That’s why he showed up there. The influence was always there; I knew the only way you could ever make any kind of impact on someone reading a comic book was to do exciting, dynamic work, no matter what you drew like. Who could you ever want to look at besides Kirby for that kind of emotional punch?

TJKC: How did the Mister Miracle Special come about?

STEVE: I think I was taking a hiatus off Nexus, and I offered myself to the major companies. I got snatched up by DC to do something with Marv Wolfman on Teen Titans, and Marv and Mark Evanier were good friends, and they somehow got the idea that when one was done using me on their book, I’d hop over to the other one. (laughter) TJKC: Did you know Mark at that point?

STEVE: I did know Mark. I used to come out and stay with him when I would visit L.A., and Mark was always very generous and kind. He put me up at his place, and we talked about Kirby all the time. We went up to see Doug Wildey and Kirby a couple of times. He was my liaison to the world of Hollywood that I knew so little about.

Y’know, we’d all seen the Kirby characters done at that point by different artists, and they were all less than satisfying. (laughter) You can’t do Kirby characters without entering into the visual world of him. When this whole New Gods thing [the proposed series that Evanier and Rude were to do] was coming about, some people up at DC really got ticked off at me for trying to emulate Kirby’s style. To me, there’s no other way but to do it like that. I grew up in high school training to draw like Jack Kirby. That’s what I wanted to do. Eventually other influences come into your life and you become your own man, but that influence was so strong.

When you draw his characters, you want to make it seem as if you’re reading a Kirby comic book. To get that feel, you’ve got to draw like him. So that was my big impetus and goal, and reason for doing it; to make it look like, “Hey, there’s another Kirby comic that I missed somehow.”

Cover pencils from Super Powers, the 1980s series that let Jack draw nearly every major DC villain. later on. It was twenty-four pages, which took me forever to do. It was a great time to be going after something in life; it was an exciting time. I was 21 or something, and we were ready to grab the world by the scruff of the neck and see what we could do with it.

It was such a funny time, and an innocent time; the idea of getting money — like, really good money — for what you’ve done was almost unimaginable. You just want to draw, and that attitude hasn’t changed a whole lot over the years. I’m still kind of like that. I’m driven to do it, regardless of what kind of fan attention I’ll get, or what kind of money’s involved. I almost concluded one time that I wasn’t meant to make money, (laughter) because everything I was doing was always critically applauded, but... (laughter).

TJKC: Early on, I wondered why an artist with your talent would stay with the independents; was it a conscious decision on your part to keep away from Marvel and DC? Was it tough breaking into the mainstream?

STEVE: Before I got success with Nexus, I was rejected by Marvel and DC time after time. Before Nexus came around, I was going up there; I spent every penny I had to fly to New York. I wanted to get opinions, and help on what I needed to get better at. I never liked being not good 47

TJKC: That’s what strikes me most about your work; you get Kirby.

You capture the feel without swiping, but it’s still your work. Is that from those years of studying Jack’s work?

STEVE: Yeah. In high school, every day I was drawing from Kirby’s comics. I remember when I got the Kirby Unleashed portfolio for Christmas one year. My mom played a cruel trick on me. I said, “Is it here?! Is it here?!” She wasn’t going to give it to me until Christmas, and it was actually there, but she said, “No!” and she hid it from me. (laughter) I thought it wasn’t going to show up in time.

Everything the guy did, I just devoured. I just drew, drew, drew from Jack Kirby.

book out, and just draw six or seven pages, getting the feel down, and his gestures down. I immerse myself in the graphic world of Jack Kirby; that’s the artistic challenge for me, and it’s a lot of fun.

TJKC: Do you use Jack’s books for reference while you work?

STEVE: Mostly it’s just practicing, but there’s always a book handy, so I can open it up, and soak my mind with this graphic influence of Kirby, and just start drawing. You kind of want to mind-meld with the material, so to speak.

TJKC: How’d you convince Mike Royer to ink the Special? He was out of the business at that point, doing better-paying stuff for Disney.

STEVE: I think we shamed him into doing it. (laughter) We kind of begged him. I know he was making a lot more money at Disney, but I think he did it as a favor to Mark Evanier and me. It was just before he completely bowed out of doing stuff like this; I know I talked to him about the New Gods stuff before it got aborted, and I just couldn’t get him to do it — and I realized I shouldn’t be hounding this guy to do this. I would love to get him, and yet I so respect what he’s doing; he’s into this new thing, and he’s excited about it, so just leave him be.

He’s one of the few inkers I can name who gave me a perfect inking job. Normally I do touch-ups on the vast amount of inkers I work with; almost always on faces and hands. But Mike Royer? Not a thing.

There was nothing to change; he got it exactly right — a total pro.

TJKC: But when other people do Kirby, they do the Kirby “squiggles” and everything, but they’re too forced.

STEVE: Absolutely. What everyone says to me — and it’s almost like they’ve gotten together and had a private conversation before they talk to me, because they always say the same thing — is, “You captured Kirby so well, but you didn’t steal from him.” I hear that all the time; it’s as if they’re going to insult me if they think I’ve actually copied him in some way. To me, I try to push it as far as I can. I’m not submerging myself; this is all-natural. It’s the flip side of my vast amount of training, and the 21 sketch books I’ve done. I just knew I wanted to be better than everyone else who’d ever said they were influenced by him, or the people who’ve outright copied him.

TJKC: Did you grow up reading the Fourth World stuff?

STEVE: Would you believe I didn’t? I remember seeing an article in the New York Times, saying Kirby was defecting over to DC. That was the only clue I ever had that he was doing that. There was no fan press back then. During my comics rediscovery period, the first comic book I saw was the Demon, so the Fourth World stuff was already over. I got the old issues from the Buyer’s Guide For Comic Fandom. I just remember the thrill of coming back from the mailbox, and seeing those packages stuffed in there. It’s kind of like when I get the Kirby Collector in the mail. (laughter) It was just this unbelievably joyous feeling: Another Kirby comic!

That’s the essence of collecting comics. You get this joy out of life that sometimes life won’t give you. Comic books can do that for somebody. They’re just the most joyous way to stimulate someone’s imagination that’s ever been created, if you ask me. We grew up in a time when Kirby was producing three books a month, and it gave us this sense where you couldn’t wait to get the next thing by this guy. We could just take a trip into this guy’s imagination.

TJKC: Is it difficult to get yourself into a Kirby mindset?

STEVE: It’s not hard, because I grew up with the guy, like millions of other kids. But it’s a lot of hard work; any book I do that’s Kirby-related, or Marvel licensing work that bears a resemblance to Kirby, I get my sketch-

TJKC: You did a nice take on Darkseid in the Special. What is it about Darkseid that makes him such a great villain?

STEVE: He’s an archetype. Evanier’s described him as being everyone who’s ever been mean to Jack Kirby. Anyone who has a life philosophy can clearly see that, for whatever reason, this planet is populated by very, very good people and incredibly evil human beings.

Kirby was no stranger to being acquainted with the bad side of life — the “dark side.” (laughter) That was his philosophical way of putting those qualities in a particular being.

I’m sure other people have picked up on this, but the way his name is spelled — S-E-I-D — is the German spelling. It’s a safe bet that Kirby had some World War II thinking in the back of his mind when he created that name. When I was at Kirby’s house one time, I asked Roz the most obvious question in the world about Kirby: What does he dream about? Does he have dreams? Roz said, “He dreams about World War II all the time.” I heard that, and it

Unknown Mister Miracle drawing, featuring Nazis!

48

Some of Steve’s amazing licensing art for Marvel Comics.

kind of blew my mind. Having never fought a war, it was inconceivable to me that a guy could be so under the influence of an event that took place forty years ago, when he was a young man. It hit me then what kind of impact the war had on him.

today wouldn’t go back and read those old Marvel comics. I believe those stories are as powerful reading — with the philosophy and the archetypal character descriptions behind them — as anything ever done in mankind’s history. Just the pure stuff that’s there; just as Shakespeare wrote about the human heart and the human condition, that’s what all those comic books back then were to me. The example I cite above all else — and this is just one of hundreds of stories Stan and Jack turned out — was the Thor versus Hercules story (Thor #124-130). I cite this as an example of the most searing human drama I’ve ever read in my life; a drama that works on so many levels — as each passing decade comes about, you see the layers of sophistication behind the story. It’s like The Wizard Of Oz; they call it a kid’s movie, but it’s way more than that. All the underlying philosophy of a human life — of our path from a young kid to middle-aged, to an old man, to ultimately dying — you can find in the layers of that movie, or the layers of that comic book I cited.

Think about it: Two guys are fighting, Thor and Hercules, over a girl. With them being from different stations in life — one from Asgard, one from Olympus — they’re obviously made to be competitors from the get-go. This girl is the catalyst for their brawl, and this braggart Hercules beats Thor because dumbass Odin has taken away his powers! (laughter) Thor’s the only decent son he’s got, and he’s taken away his powers, just when he needs them the most. If you take that little snippet right there, you can see an entire philosophy of life, but it goes on to a hundred different levels of story complexity from there.

Thor’s beaten, but he tries as hard as he possibly can — in spite of his stripped power — to beat Hercules, because that’s the kind of thing he’s made of. Hercules is bragging that he’s stronger than Thor, and Thor goes, “Strength alone is a hollow virtue, son of Zeus.” That’s the kind of thing I would think about later on in life; strength is nothing without certain other things to go along with it. We find out later on how important that line is.

So Thor gets beaten. He’s humiliated, and he goes up to Asgard to talk to his old man, and he gets sent to limbo. Meanwhile, all the

TJKC: Did you see Saving Private Ryan? That first twenty-five minutes gave me new respect for Kirby’s war stories. I figured he was exaggerating when he told them, but after seeing that — I can imagine how that kind of experience would stick with you for life.

STEVE: Yeah. I heard an occasional story about Jack’s time there, but it never impacted me like it could’ve. It was just some piece of history we all knew about. Literally fighting for your life and lifestyle is beyond the conception of most people out there. But if we would’ve been Jack’s age and gotten drafted...!

Think of the kind of person he was. People don’t talk about how sensitive Jack was, but he had to have been. You can’t create those kind of mind-blasting images, and know the human spirit so well, and draw work like he did for five decades — it’s got to be a very deep, internal thing. Take a person like that, and send him off to war to do his patriotic duty, and he’s going to come back with things indelibly marked in his mind. That war dogged him his whole life. So if you want to go back to Darkseid, it just seems incredible that it wouldn’t be there, with Darkseid and in reference to the war. And also, Darkseid’s got a helmet that’s not unlike a German helmet.

TJKC: Who’s your favorite Kirby villain?

STEVE: (pause) I don’t know if I could give you a straight answer on that. The Red Skull was always a favorite, because he was Captain America’s complete opposite. It has a lot to do with how the fight scenes were constructed. Those things have great emotional impact on how much drama you can squeeze out of a story. Cap and the Skull were two complete opposite forces, fighting with the power of their own philosophies to beat the other.

This is a good time to talk about something the business is in dire need of addressing. I can’t believe anyone working in comics 49

ment of the rest of his life is at stake, so he goes fleeing up to Mount Olympus, and he meets all these obstacles on the way.

When he finally gets to the very top, his old man condemns him for being stupid for signing that deal.

The old man knows he was tricked by Pluto to sign that deal, but because of his own blind ego, he got suckered in, and it’s his own damn fault. Then he finds out the only way he’s going to have a life from now on is for someone to fight on his behalf. Now we find out that, because he’s never cultivated friendships in life, nobody is willing to stand up on his behalf.

Just imagine the impact of that kind of storyline on someone who’d lived enough to know it’s totally true: You can’t make it alone in this world, without your friends. Anyone who’s had that realization knows how strong that is; there are times when you simply can not do it on your own.

While Thor’s in limbo, he realizes there’s a destiny he has to perform.

He doesn’t know what it is, but because he’s a true and valiant character inside, he has to do what’s right, regardless of what it is. So there’s all this virtuous teaching going on at the same time. When he finds out he has to fight for the guy who beat the crap out of him earlier, and humiliated him in front of his girlfriend, he does it anyway, because he’s that kind of a person. He knows it’s right, and he has to do it, no matter what the odds.

Hercules knows his life is over; he should’ve been there for people, being kind and trying to have a life other than his self-made ego. But he’s never done this, and he’s paying the price for it. When Thor shows up, he just freaks out; he can’t believe the only guy who would be there to save him is the guy he just beat up.

You know the rest of the story; Thor takes on everything on behalf of this moron Hercules, and the story ends with those two walking off as friends. I think it’s just the greatest Loki’s “first” appearance from the Tales of Asgard back-up in Journey Into Mystery #112. story you could ever tell about the commercial, material things in life are about to happen to Hercules. human condition, and it’s in a comic book! It’s all about friendship, He gets all the trappings of modern civilization thrown at his feet: and struggle, and ego, and the consequences of having one, and The women, the movie contract, the media notoriety, and he’s loving there’s no reason why it can’t be in a lowly, simple comic book. My it, until the tide turns. He realizes these people who were supposedly whole life is devoted to making sure that it can be done like that in his friends are anything but his friends. He gets suckered into signing a comic books. deal — and you can see the parallels to real life in this — by unscrupulous TJKC: Speaking of lowly, simple comic books, (laughter) tell me about the bastards that want to control his life for their own means; and he gets Jimmy Olsen story you’ve got coming out in January. Are you inking it? suckered in because of his own ego. He does it to himself. He finds STEVE: No, I think my inking days are over. The last time I inked a out everything he had a couple of weeks ago has been turned on him; whole book, my hand cramped up after page eight. Bill Reinhold is now instead of enjoying the trappings of his current superficial pleasures inking the Jimmy Olsen book, and he did an unbelievably good job. It in life, he’s got to fight for his life. He suddenly realizes that the enjoy50

is superb; it’s like a cross between Colletta’s roughness and Royer’s slick touch.

mildest of ways, which he did when he inked Kirby generally. It was one of the poorest editorial decisions I’d ever seen; it really messed up the art to have two artists’ styles that were as opposed to each other as anyone could’ve imagined. But it’s the way people thought back then; there was no comic book fandom to raise cain over it.

The worst thing of all was when Forever People #1 came out, and those early Jimmy Olsens, where Al Plastino went over Kirby’s figures, and not just the heads. I will never forgive them for doing that! They insulted the fans, which is something you should never do. The fan is the reason you’re doing all this stuff. It was done thoughtlessly, without thinking of why we bought the book in the first place, which is to see Jack Kirby’s mind blow our minds. You weren’t going to do it with an Al Plastino figure.

TJKC: Mark Evanier said it’s based on an unused plot he found in his old notes from a plotting session he had with Jack during the original Jimmy Olsen run. How did you get involved on it?

STEVE: Mark dug it up at some point, and he got ahold of me. We had a meeting with Paul Levitz at San Diego in 1997, and it’s taken all this time to get it together. It reads just like a Jack Kirby comic; I’ve had so many more years to draw and absorb from Kirby since the MM book in ’87, through diligent observation and practice. It’s just a cool graphic exercise to try to capture the spirit of the guy who was most influential in my entire career.

TJKC: You mentioned to me that you were experimenting, trying to capture Jack’s coloring style on the cover.

STEVE: Jack’s got that completely non-academic style of approaching anything in art; he’s just of a mind that’s so far beyond the normal way of thinking.

I almost think if you went to the core of Kirby’s brain, there’d be some special glowing area that was totally tapped into the essence of how far a human’s imagination can go, just using his own mind power. It came from an area that wasn’t based on academia at all; it was something as deeply inside a person as you can get. He just simply summoned it from the well and applied what he felt and knew, based on who he was inside. It’s completely foreign to the way you would learn color, but that’s what a genius is: A guy that can go beyond what is conventional and systematic.

TJKC: What happened to the rumored Jimmy Olsen reprint book, where you’d restore the Olsen and Superman heads that DC had redrawn?

STEVE: Nothing ever happened with it. It’s one of those things Mark Evanier was hot on doing, and I think he had some discussions with DC about it. I think we all felt the same way about those heads being pasted on. It really irked me. I saw the pencils from a lot of those early issues, and there was nothing wrong with those heads. Colletta himself should’ve been the guy to go in on those early ones and just alter them in the

Speaking of Bill Reinhold, he inked these Kirby pencils for a Justice Machine sourcebook. Look, more Nazis!

51

TJKC: When you do Marvel licensing art, do they specifically ask you to imitate Kirby’s style?

STEVE: They know if they need an artist to capture that old style, they should call on me. They never say, “Do Jack Kirby’s style.” They just say, “We want the old Hulk, the old Captain America,” or whatever. I take it whenever I can get it; it pays very well compared to my normal work, and I always look at it as furthering the word of Jack Kirby. In some ways, I feel like I have a responsibility — like all guys who grew up on Jack’s work — to be a keeper of the flame for our beloved memories of when we thought comic books were much better than they are now.

Kirby must be kept alive. You’ve devoted many years of your life to seeing that happen, and I’m doing it in my own way, and others are doing it in their own way. This man gave, gave, gave to everyone; he’s like Thor I spoke of in that story I mentioned. He was a noble, decent human being who fought for the good things in life, and wanted to make sure others had those things too. That’s the greatest thing you could ever aspire to in life. That’s why you want to pass it on to the people who’ll be here when you’re gone. That’s a really big deal to me.

TJKC: What’s the most important thing you learned from Kirby?

STEVE: I can tell you that the process is ever evolving, and ever building on itself. Jack Kirby is a role model for my life. One of the saddest facts of contemporary life is that I can’t seem to find role models anymore. I’ve always grown up with role models. As a kid, Bruce Lee was a hero to me; he was this guy who could beat up all the bad guys in the world, and do it with class. Kirby was a guy that taught me a moral ethic in life, which I think is so important for people to have.

It’s hard to find people that are genuinely good inside their hearts. I guess I’m too damn idealistic to want anything less than that.★

TJKC: Do you have any stories of meeting Jack and Roz? STEVE: I was in such awe at the reality of meeting him, that part of my mind was just turned off. It was an emotional overload for me in some ways.

I remember I was over at the Kirbys’ house one time, and on the wall was this story he’d done on his own. There was this guy wandering around a ship, and all of a sudden there was this black panther walking around. It stuck its head through one of the portholes, and the guy looked up and thought it was a mounted head of an animal. I looked at that and started to laugh hysterically! (laughter) Kirby looked at me like I was nuts, but it appealed to my bizarre sense of humor.

It was kind of a non-sequitur ending that made me erupt with hysterics. It never got published; he’d colored it too. It was something he’d done in the mid-to-late-’70s.

My only great regret in life is having never seen Jack Kirby touch pencil to paper. I drool over stories, especially in the 1960s, where they saw him do that. If ever there’s a testament to this guy’s genius, it’s in the way he worked. The fact that nobody did a documentary on Jack Kirby in the 1960s, when comic books were exploding on campus, is just a pathetic oversight. It’s lost forever. We never saw the guy drawing. You should put out a plea; does anybody have a recording of him drawing something?

TJKC: If you and Mark Evanier had gotten to do your version of New Gods, would it have been a continuing series, or a finite thing?

STEVE: It would’ve been a finite thing.

The story was going to be our dream ending to the New Gods, where Orion actually fights Darkseid. I don’t know if the script would’ve been able to come close to what we all expected and hoped for at the end if Jack had been allowed to do it, but that’s what I was trying for. I would just present it as a humble offering to say, “This is what we’d have liked to have seen.” Nothing more than that. People could’ve taken it as seriously as they wanted to.

Steve redrew this Orion drawing — originally published way back in TJKC #6 — because he felt that his Orion proportions didn’t match Kirby’s.

52

“A Really Interesting Change!”

by Robert L. Bryant Jr. imian and Mockery.

That would be the English translation of the names of Kirby’s Apokolips experimenters introduced in Jimmy Olsen #135 (1971). When we first see them, sifting handfuls of Jimmy, Superman and Newsboy Legion micro-clones (check out those cloned glasses on Big Words), they’re both wearing technohelmets that completely hide their faces.

A few pages later — pages that you spend wondering what in the hell these guys look like and concluding that it can’t be pretty — they unmask. Here’s Simyan, a squat and bearded Neanderthal, his nose as wide as a brick. And here’s Mokkari, looking like the bastard son of the Creeper — hairless yellow skin with great black markings, like tattoos, around dead, all-white eyes. A simian and a mockery (but of what?).

S

(this page) Jimmy Olsen #146 pencils.

These two dogs of Darkseid run the Evil Factory, which seeks to clone its way to victory over the American DNA Project. They’re not the most memorable baddies Kirby ever conceived, nor the nastiest, nor the deadliest. They don’t threaten the galaxy; they are totally lacking in special powers — but they might be Kirby’s clearest vision of stolid, quiet, bad-to-the-bone evil.

Simyan and Mokkari prowl the Evil Factory, taking notes and spouting Nazi-style banalities (“We must be ever precise with our responsibilities”), oblivious to the mutants and clones drifting through huge glass pipes — beings created, not born, for use as “beasts of burden” and biological weapons. When the experimenters capture Jimmy in JO #145 (1972), Superman’s pal lies in terror as they calmly discuss the finer points of “regressing” humans to prehistoric states: “Olsen should undergo a really interesting change! Switch on!” Notes Mokkari: “Regressive genes have proved a delight, haven’t they, Simyan!”

Enter “Homo-Disastrous” Jimmy, whose “resemblance” to Simyan is duly noted by Mokkari. The Jimmy-beast breaks loose and starts mauling Mokkari; his co-worker slowly... aims... and... fires... a Kirby tranquilizer pistol, and Olsen is out. “Strange — that your trigger finger was so cautious — in my defense!” Mokkari spits. Simyan’s reply is a classic Kirby line: “Experimenters take risks — even with humor, Mokkari!”

The exchange ends there, but not the chilly horror of these two; because I don’t think Simyan was miffed at Mokkari’s insult. Not at all. That would be too human a reaction, too human a motivation. No, Simyan simply wanted to see what the enraged Olsen beast could do to his Apokolips colleague — who, after all, is just another test subject in the soulless world of Darkseid.★

53

The Unholy Trinity Though one of Kirby’s most distinctive characters, Darkseid’s personality takes largely separate forms between the three major Fourth World books, in a way not unreminiscent of the diverse and at times ostensibly contradictory characterizations of Jesus in the four accepted Gospels. These differing treatments can be seen to break along the lines of varying conceptions of fatherhood: In New Gods, Darkseid is the Oedipal rival; in Mister Miracle, the absentee dad; in Forever People, the generational adversary.

Given Darkseid’s prominence in Kirby’s oeuvre, fans’ imagination, and DC’s ongoing marketing, it’s interesting to note how seldom he physically appears in the cycle’s principal trilogy. We encounter Darkseid in but three pages of Mister Miracle’s 18 issues; we meet him but four times in all of New Gods’ original run (two are brief walk-ons). The same pattern — though not this article’s thematic focus — pertains to the contractually-obligated (if wildly imaginative) Jimmy Olsen series, in which Kirby had other fish to fry (like envisioning the era of gene-splicing) and in which Darkseid is seen in more conventional criminal-mastermind cameos.

However, the saga’s unifying and most widely known figure appears prominently in nearly every issue of The Forever People — that same saga’s least-remembered (and arguably leastregarded) title. This series, significantly the first Kirby completed an issue of upon returning to DC (see “Jack Kirby’s X-Files,” TJKC #17) and the first of the trilogy proper to see print, is therefore ripe for reassessment as being central to the cycle as a whole. The reason why is best reached through drawing a prior contrast with that cycle’s other two components.

Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? At the heart of the Fourth World saga is a superlative act of negligent fatherhood: New Genesis’ and Apokolips’ rulers, Highfather and Darkseid, exchange sons to barter a truce in their cataclysmic war. This pact defines the difference between the Darkseid we see in New Gods and that we see in Mister Miracle (the two books focused respectively on the traded sons, Orion and “Scott Free”). While portrayed as a distant, personified phobia in each book (“When you cry out in your dreams — it is Darkseid that you see!”), his remoteness is anything but disengaged in the former: Orion is prophesied to return and battle him to the death. And in this book, between exercises of his omnipotence, we see Darkseid brooding morosely on his own matricidal past (the means by which he came to rule Apokolips) and his son’s patricidal destiny. In a telling episode from the series’ final issue, Darkseid eliminates his henchman Desaad for effecting an unfair advantage for his other, Apokolips-bred son Kalibak in a battle with Orion — thus risking the prevention of the foretold Oedipal conflict.

A telling episode, but what does it tell? Certainly it shows us the enigmatic ambiguity of this uncommonly realistic villain: Are we seeing a secret sentimentality for his own flesh and blood? An unacknowledged feeling of guilt and welcoming of retribution for his own, earlier parenticide? Perhaps. But one thing we’re surely seeing is Darkseid’s acculturation to the idea of parenticide as the natural mechanism of generational passage. He adheres unshakably to the unpeaceful transfer of power, while by the same token ensuring the perpetuation of a certain model of power. In this branch of the Fourth World story, in which Darkseid’s father-figure role is literal, his violent opponent Orion identifies with him, embraces his tactics and, arguably, ultimately affirms his values.

Unpublished early 1970s Darkseid drawing.

Satan, the Father: Three Faces of Darkseid

by Adam McGovern nvolved in the creation of an uncommon quantity of indelible characters, Jack Kirby was always a master of pop folklore — stories and personae exceptionally in tune with their times. For his artistic maturity, Kirby set out to graduate from folklore to myth — tales and figures which resonate with the human condition in any time. He knew that he lived in an age and a society in which not only such heroic scale, but such human depth, was hard to come by. But his rare instinct for what chords to strike amidst the cacophony of superficial modern living led him to his goal.

One significant way in which Kirby understood the modern-day construction of myth was in his knitting together of apparent inconsistencies so the reader understands things on a multi-perspectival, “hyper-logical” level. For taking this three-dimensional approach, there could be no better challenge than that most one-dimensional of literary figures: the villain. And villains don’t come any more monumental than Darkseid, the towering antagonist of Kirby’s signature Fourth World opus.

I

54

Therefore, Darkseid doesn’t need to be seen too often in the series’ run; instead, he is everywhere felt.

The Mister Miracle arm of the trilogy is of course one in which Darkseid as a character has even less personal investment. Immediately abandoning Highfather’s son to a boot camp orphanage in the manner of the ultimate absentee dad, Darkseid is more scarce here than anywhere else in the trilogy, only briefly appearing at unexpected and inopportune intervals to obstruct his surrogate son’s individuality and independence. In issue #9 he shows up to take credit for and pride in the persistence that leads Scott to renounce his indoctrinated stormtrooper creed and finally escape Apokolips, vowing not to stop him but imploring him to stay and “Let me complete the destruction of Scott Free” and the submergence of his identity in “the majesty that is the power of Darkseid!”

Then, at the series’ conclusion in #18, his approach, signified by a portentous whirlwind, casts a pall over Scott and ally/escapee Barda’s wedding, which he acknowledges he can’t stop but is happy to have robbed of joy.

In the rest of the series Darkseid, like many abusive fathers, is physically unseen but looms as an antagonistic influence on Scott’s life, manifested in the wayward ward’s lingering post-traumatic anxieties (“There’s a haunting look of fear in your eyes — and pain,” remarks his associate Oberon in #2), and his ongoing stand-in sibling rivalry with still-loyal orphanage graduates who attempt to forcibly return him to the fold.

has to be done!” he bellows after criticism from Desaad at his oversight of one member in an apparent slaughter of the Forever People, #6); a perversely honorable killer admiring of foes’ advantages (“The pups have... put me on the defensive — a great feat!” — issue #6) and indulgent of their limitations (“Greatness does not come from killing the young! I’m willing to wait until they grow!” — issue #8).

This is a Darkseid capable of great humility before fate (“Don’t fret, Desaad! We’ll attain our goals without complete victories — or defeats!!”

— #6), and even great whimsicality, as in the mock “troop inspection” (doubling as a diversion while he secures an escape) in which he indulgently instructs the Forever People on the fine points of their own insurgency (#8). In both issues, he hurls the “pups” across space and time rather than destroy them (for he hasn’t really cracked their mystery!),

The Thousand-Light-Year Generation Gap So, in New Gods Darkseid is present mostly by proxy (not only through his henchmen but also through “our heroes”), and in Mister Miracle he is present more through his consequences on other’s lives.

By contrast, in Forever People he is virtually a co-star. This is not so surprising: Mister Miracle opts out of conflict in a way Darkseid can’t comprehend and doesn’t bother to deal with; Orion engages in conflict in a way which implicitly endorses the status quo and thus scarcely requires Darkseid’s notice. But the Forever People, a hippielike collective of divine troublemakers, engage in opposition of an entirely different and, to Darkseid, unfathomable yet fascinating sort. Whereas Orion embraces “Apokoliptic” violence, the Forever People converse largely in motivational affirmations and (in #11) collectively fret over how to subdue an adversary without violating their principles against killing. In this outlook it is they who are thinking most independently of Darkseid, and thus in need of his fullest attention. And it is here that we see the most of him — and the most nuanced and eccentric characterization of him.

In nine of Forever People’s eleven issues, we meet a Darkseid ruthless in combat but sanguine in defeat (“See what a fine spectacle misfortune provides for us!” he exclaims to Desaad as their diabolical concentration camp/amusement park burns in #6); ungreedily predatory (“I do no more than

(this and next page) Uninked pencils from Forever People #6.

55

the premises smelling sweet!” He has noted the insight of the young and the rationalizations of the older, and is keen to observe this and make calibrations in his own seniority (the patience and humor described above) — but he makes these modifications in the interests of powerconsolidation, not understanding.

Kirby’s Two Dads In this way, he draws a defining, dividing line between Kirby’s ideas of fit and unfit fatherhood. The former is represented by the Darkseid counterpart who has actually taken “father” as part of his name. Highfather is the just and legitimate patriarch (“the true servant of those he leads” — New Gods #7), who must defer to the petition of a youth council on New Genesis (where a Forever People #7 caption intones, “the young have a voice!”) in dealing with the disobediently adventurous Forever People. Highfather wishes to shelter the young, and in thought and action is acutely conscious of the necessary transfer of his authority to them (“First we bow to the young — they are the carriers of life!”

— New Gods #1). In contrast, Darkseid’s quest for the draining of all free will can, on one level, be seen as a withholding of power and agency from the generations which follow him.

It’s a pattern Kirby’s vision of youthculture seeks to break, and this idea carried over to the Hunger Dogs graphic novel, a canon-worthy if over-compressed finale to the cycle. By the time of its publication over a decade after the original trilogy’s suspension, Kirby’s allegorical focus had shifted from the Nixon era’s domestic generational strife to the Reagan era’s global nuclear brinkmanship. Hunger Dogs presented a Darkseid now conscious of his own obsolescence, who, in an era of automated and depersonalized warfare, recurrently notes the passing of his own supremacy and semi-honorable codes of combat. This realization numbs rather than mellows him, as he acquiesces in the genocidal elimination of New Genesis by his thoroughly mechanized, bureaucratized under-regime. On the other hand, with the years Orion has acquired an outlook similar to that of the Forever People (who, like all the Mister Miracle cast, do not appear here) — he returns to Apokolips not to commit patricide, but to rescue his imprisoned mother and leave his homeworld to its self-consuming hostilities. He has finally graduated from the Father’s shadow through self-definition rather than conflict, achieving the happy resolution of his struggle — through the essential abandonment of it — and the optimistic closure of the saga.

It’s a conclusion no one would’ve predicted. Like the people we actually know, Kirby’s characters react in unexpected ways. If Kirby understood how to construct myth in a way that transcended the comic medium’s usual ambitions, he also knew how to evoke the real in a way which exceeded the action genre’s typical abilities — using its most cardboard role, the villain. In Darkseid’s three faces we see that rarest of qualities for the pop culture he inhabits: Three dimensions.★

and when they disappear (apparently irretrievably) to another dimension after a disaster not totally of his own making in the final issue, he seems fatalistically, even wistfully, regretful.

At the core of this embodiment of “Anti-Life” there is a puzzling, ambivalent tenderness. In a sequence from #4 in which Kirby—ever the imaginative one in ways both spectacular and subtle—shocks with the commonplace, Darkseid strides among the patrons of his devilish dual-use theme park, with great significance for the series’ generational subtext. A little girl cries out at the sight of him and is comforted by her grandfather, who exhorts Darkseid to explain that he’s “in the cast of some show here.” “No, Grandpa,” Darkseid replies, “I’m the real thing!”

“Can’t you see this child is frightened?” the man retorts. “Of course,” Darkseid soliloquizes as they stalk away, “...all young humans recognize the real thing when they see it! Young humans see me — even in ‘Happyland!’ But you elders hide me with ‘cock and bull’ stories to keep 56

Introducing: The Others!

A Sneak Preview from the Kirby Estate hough Jack’s no longer with us, his drive and vision have left behind a number of concepts, characters and stories that have yet to be made public. Several of these are being developed for production by the Genesis West publishing team (Mike Thibodeaux, Richard French, and Steve Robertson) and the youngest Kirby daughter, Lisa. The Kirby knack for storytelling is certainly one of Lisa’s qualities, and she’s done an admirable job of bringing some diverse story elements together in these projects.

Two of the projects ready for production are THUNDER HUNTERS and THE OTHERS. In an upcoming issue of The Jack Kirby Collector, these heroes and their stories will be dealt with in some depth.

In the meantime, where there’s heroes, villains are sure to be found as well! Since this is the Villains issue, we thought you’d enjoy a look at some new Kirby villains as a sneak preview of things to come. We’ll keep you posted as work progresses on these series!★

T

Cybele She is a young clone, developed in Karion’s lab. She possesses extraordinary acrobatic skills, making her the “master of motion” in the army of Antimon.

Antimon Antimon leads a newly risen continent of Atlantis in a quest for world domination. He is merciless and without conscience, and only THE OTHERS have the might to stop him!

Sleykaria The THUNDER HUNTERS face a deadly adversary in this evil sorcerer. He must destroy the young heroes to realize his goals of wealth and power over others. His strength is augmented by the mystic Midgard Serpent Staff.

57

Karion He is the TechLord of Atlantis, supreme in all technological matters.

The Creation of King Kobra

by Steve Sherman riting King Kobra was not only one of the best experiences of my life, it was also one of the worst. It marked the end of my “comic book” association with Jack Kirby; but it was interesting, because it did give me an insight into how masterful Jack could be in creating characters, and it taught me a few lessons that to this day come in handy when putting together ideas for presentation.

The genesis for King Kobra came about when publisher Carmine

W

Jack’s original splash page to King Kobra #1.

58

Infantino came to the conclusion first issues of comics sold really well, while the second and third issues tended to drop off, so he came up with the concept of First Issue Specials. These were one-shot titles, designed to grab readers (and collectors) since they were all #1s. Jack was not particularly happy about this — not that he found it difficult to come up with characters, but, by this point he still wanted to do a novel in comic book format. To just crank out books with different characters wasn’t part of Jack’s agenda.

It was at this point that I approached him about coming up with a book. Prior to this, Jack’s agreement with DC stated that all material had to be written and drawn by Jack Kirby, but by now, Jack felt that it would be acceptable. Plus, as I recall, he was now doing work for other editors.

An idea had been going through my head. I was fascinated at the time by the Dr. Phibes movies starring Vincent Price. For some reason, I really thought that the idea of a villain who used different means of killing his opponents was really cool. Of course, this type of adventure goes back to the serials — but comics and serials do have that similar concept of recurring characters in outrageous situations.

When Mark Evanier and I were researching material for In The Days of the Mob, I had come across a book that had described the thugees of India. It is where we get the word “thugs.”

I also was following one of Jack’s story precepts that, in order to have a strong hero, you need a really strong villain. I didn’t want to do a long underwear hero, mainly because there was no way I could come up with anything nearly as well as Jack.

Instead I focused on a villain, figuring also that there were few comics that starred the bad guy. I needed to come up with a bad guy worth starring in his own book.

I should also mention that at the time, I had no idea there had been a movie entitled Curse of the Cobra Woman. Had I been aware of it, I probably would have borrowed some things from it. Anyway, combining the thugs with Dr. Phibes, I came up with the image of a cobra. Since it was to be a Jack Kirby comic, I changed the “c” to a “k.” Obviously, what goes with “Kobra”? Well, if he wants to rule the word, “King.”

I then needed a hero, of course, to battle the King. Who better than a Los Angeles police detective?!

Somehow, I wanted to pit an ordinary lawman against this ultra science-fiction villain. I suppose I was being too “cinema” and not “comic booky” enough. At any rate, I typed the whole mess up, beginning with a splash page of a giant robot smashing through a window of a crowded restaurant. Jack of course was busy turning out the one-shot specials (I think “Atlas”) and was leaving it to

me to work the book out so that hopefully all he had to do was pencil it.

Upon taking it over to Jack, he read it, looked at me, and said, “Boy, does this stink.” Actually he liked the title and the character of King Kobra. What he didn’t see was the hook that would tie the whole thing together. I don’t think he appreciated the humorous touches I had put in either.

I was somehow trying to go for a cross between a Marvel comic and The Spirit.

Sitting at Jack’s kitchen table, his initial thought was to cut each of us a piece of chocolate cake—something he was still allowed to eat back then. As we talked, Jack lit up a cigar—another thing he was still allowed to have. Finally, after a few minutes Jack looked at me and said, “The Corsican Brothers.” “What?” said I. “The Corsican Brothers by Dumas.

Identical twins, one good, one bad,” said Jack. And with that he had not only tied the whole series together but had given the characters a sense of depth that I had missed — and it worked. Now we had a story that really had punch to it.

The more we discussed it, the better it became. By the time I left that evening we had plotted out not only the first book, but another as well, completely forgetting that this was a one-shot book.

By the time I returned the following week with new written pages, Jack had already begun penciling the book. It was really exciting to see the whole thing suddenly come to life on the penciled pages.

Jack had already broken the story down into panels.

It seemed as if maybe we were finally on the road to what Jack had originally envisioned when he moved to California — starting a series of books that he didn’t have to write, and perhaps in the future, not draw.

About six weeks later I was out to Jack’s house to pick up the letters for the Kamandi book. I’d like to say that I noticed there was something odd about Jack and Roz’s demeanor, but I didn’t.

Jack told me that he had received the King Kobra book. I was excited to see it and as soon as I opened it my heart sank.

Someone else had been given credit for writing it and the panels had been Unused Kobra pencil page; we’re unsure if this was part of Jack’s original story. re-pasted in a different order. “What hapthis way, what kind of treatment could I expect? Over the years King pened”? I asked Jack. Apparently DC needed to make some changes Kobra has surfaced in various DC titles which is kind of gratifying to and they decided to make them in New York. Jack didn’t seem too see. Looking back there are some things I would do differently with happy about the whole thing. Then he dropped the bombshell: “I’m the characters, but in general, I’d say that it was a pretty good shot. It leaving DC and going back to Marvel,” he said. I was more than a litwould have been fun continuing creating characters with Jack. It was tle stunned. “I don’t think that there is much more that I can do at always amazing to toss him a “what if ” question and hear him come DC,” he said. It was understandable. up with the most spectacular ideas and stories.★ Jack had hoped to try to push the envelope at DC, and in some ways he had, but it seemed inevitable that if he continued there he (Presented on the next pages are Steve Sherman’s original outline for King would soon find himself in the same position he had been in when he Kobra #1—showing his first crack at the story—and the script that had left Marvel a few years before. evolved after discussions with Jack. Our thanks to Steve for sharing these!)

For me it was a sobering experience. If they could treat Jack Kirby 59

King Kobra Outline

King Kobra Script

© Steve Sherman

© Steve Sherman

DOMINGUEZ: Logan! See the guy leaving? The one with the dog? Yeah! Follow ’im. But don’t crowd him.

PAGE 5 CHAPTER 1 — THE HOUSE OF THE KOBRA Our first chapter is an introductory one, which gives us some idea as to what type of character King Kobra is. He lives in a fantastic mansion, which is a cross between Dracula’s castle and the Haunted Mansion. It is situated in an area known as Ocean Park, a once thriving amusement pier, which has long since been deserted. King Kobra owns all of the property, which is surrounded by a huge iron gate. Many of the rides and attractions still exist on the grounds, but they all have been changed to meet Kobra’s needs. The house is set at the end of the pier overlooking the entire area.

When we first meet King Kobra he is showing a man by the name of Portman around his house. Portman is a dumpy, fat man who is obviously a criminal type. Kobra is taking him through the mansion and is showing him all of the various strange and unique artifacts that he has amassed over the decades. It is at this time that we also meet King Kobra’s beautiful assistant, Marianna. We reveal a little bit of Kobra’s character during his exchange with Portman, from whom Kobra wants to know what has happened to the Blue Egg of the Andes. The Egg was found preserved in an ice block in the Andes Mountains. It was brought to the US in its frozen state to a research institute. It was stolen from there

by Portman who also killed a guard to get it. Kobra reveals all this to Portman, who agrees to tell Kobra where it is for a price. The final panel shows Kobra saying to Marianna to “honor their commitment to Mr. Portman.”

CHAPTER 2 — TO CATCH A KOBRA! The splash page opens with a full shot of a section of San Pedro Harbor. The place is crawling with police cars.

There is a huge crane lifting something out of the water. It’s a transparent acrylic egg, and encased inside, like a “fly in amber” is our old pal Portman. It is here that Dr. Philip Snow enters the story. He is accompanied by his dog, Hannibal, a St. Bernard. Snow is talking to Det. Lt. Martin Dominguez of the LAPD. Dominguez is a tough talking, no nonsense type who reminds us of Anthony Quinn. Dominguez reveals that he has called Snow onto the case because Snow was involved in the expedition which found the egg, and the police have had Portman under investigation, although they never had any proof. Dominguez and Snow return to the police station.

CHAPTER 3 Meanwhile, King Kobra and Marianna have left for a small town on the outskirts of Louisiana. From Portman, they’ve learned that the egg is in the possession of a wealthy gambler known as “Odds” Bodkin. Bodkin lives in a typical Southern colonial mansion located near a bog. Kobra is in disguise. Bodkin refuses to give up the egg and as Kobra prepares to leave, we hear a strange cry coming from the bog.

PAGE 1 1. Scene: We open up on a waist-high shot of Police Lt. Martin Dominguez. He bears a striking resemblance to Anthony Quinn. He is talking on the phone.

DOMINGUEZ: Yes sir! I’ll take care of it. Of course!

2. Scene: Dominguez slams down the phone — hard!

CAPTION: In an out of the way place, in a remote section of the city, King Kobra waits. He waits for the moment when he will strike again. A time when he will emerge from THE SNAKE PIT!

DOMINGUEZ: DAMN!

KOBRA: Fantastic! Fantastic! Look how the images come to life!

3. Scene: A 3/4 panel. Dominguez is leaning on a windowsill. Outside we can see the skyline of downtown LA.

PAGE 6

DOMINGUEZ: It seems I have no choice in the matter, Snow. The chief says this one’s your baby now!

1. Scene: We see that Kobra has been fooling around with some sort of holographic device. By attaching electrodes to his head, he can conjure up 3-D images. He is talking to a fat, crummy-looking character, know as Portman.

PAGES 2 & 3 1. Scene: Full-page splash. A 3-shot which includes Dominguez and the party he’s been speaking to — Dr. Philip Snow.

There’s a likeness between Christopher Lee and Snow. Lying on the floor next to him is his almost constant companion, a large, lugubrious looking St. Bernard named Hannibal.

CAPTION: In a city the size of Los Angeles, a Lieutenant on the force learns that he can always expect the unexpected.

In the case of Lt. Martin Dominguez of the LAPD, he has suddenly found himself in the midst of the most unusual case in his career. His assignment: To find and capture the most bizarre criminal of the decade. To put an end to THE DEADLY MENACE OF KING KOBRA! SNOW: I realize it’s unusual to have an outsider in on these things, Lieutenant, but I’ve been after the Kobra for some time. I know I can help.

DOMINGUEZ: Well, apparently the Chief thinks so, too! You can pick up your ID. card and badge downstairs.

KOBRA: As you can see, my dear friend, there are infinite possibilities to be conjured with! This machine will afford me many hours of pleasure! You have done your job well, my dear Mr. Portman!

2. Scene: Close-shot of Portman.

PORTMAN: Thanks, Kobra. But it sure seems we went through a lot of trouble just to rip-off a fancy TV set.

3. Scene: Kobra, impatient with Portman’s stupidity.

KOBRA: Ah, my slow-witted friend. Don’t you see? It is only a matter of time until I can give substance to these images.

Just think, an army of drones, created by my mind!

4. Scene: Kobra leads Portman out of the room.

KOBRA: But that is for later. We have something more pressing to attend to.

5. Scene: Kobra and Portman are walking through a warehouse There are boxes and crates full of paintings, books, and strange looking machines.

PAGE 4 1. Scene: Close shot of Dominguez.

DOMINGUEZ: I don’t want any grandstand plays! If you find him, get in touch with me. I don’t want your dead carcass on my conscience!

2. Scene: Two-shot of Snow and Hannibal. In contrast to Dominguez’ excitability, he is exceedingly calm.

SNOW: I’ve tangled with Kobra before, Lt. Dominguez. I know you think that this is strictly a police matter, but King Kobra’s methods don’t recognize any boundaries.

KOBRA: Look at it, Portman! These past few weeks have been extremely profitable. These objects will be welcome additions to my collection.

PORTMAN: (Not impressed) If you say so.

PAGE 7 1.Scene: They enter another room.

KOBRA: Unfortunately, Portman, this will be our last foray in this part of the country. The local police are becoming quite irritated with my unorthodox approach to acquiring things.

3. Scene. Snow checks his watch.

SNOW: Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get over to the university campus. I’ll keep in touch.

4. Scene: Dominguez, Snow and Hannibal at door. They are leaving.

DOMINGUEZ: See that you do!

CHAPTER 4 We now switch to Snow and Dominguez who are in a car headed for Bodkins’ house. They are discussing the fact that their investigation into the death of Portman has led them to Louisiana because of numerous checks made out to Portman from Bodkin.

Cut back to a full-page spread of Kobra, Marianna, and Bodkin at the edge of a moss-encrusted bog. Rising out of the swamp is a dinosaur which is modeled after the creature in “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.” Bodkin tells how the creature hatched from the egg due to the warm climate in which it was kept. Kobra insists that he must have it at any cost. Just then, Dominguez and Snow arrive.

1. Scene. Full-page splash. King Kobra is attached to a crazy-looking machine.

PORTMAN: I’ll say. I’ve heard that they’ve called in a specialist. Some dude named Dr. Philip Snow.

2. Scene: At this, Kobra stops dead in his tracks. A bitter smile crosses his face.

KOBRA: So, it’s Snow, is it? All the better, my friend. All the better.

SNOW: (To Hannibal) Come on, boy.

3. Scene: Kobra and Portman.

5. Scene: Dominguez returns to his desk. He picks up phone.

CHAPTER 5 Snow and Dominguez are attracted by a scuffle. They get there just as Bodkin backs in too close to the bog. The monster grabs him. Dominguez runs back to the car for a shotgun. He blasts the monster, killing it as it sinks to the bottom of the swamp.

Kobra is mad that they’ve killed the beast. Bodkins’ death was an accident (or so it seems) so they can’t hold Kobra. He vows vengeance on them both.★

60

KOBRA: We’ve crossed swords many times, Philip and I. As

far back as I can remember we have been at odds. It seems as if fate has decreed it so.

PAGE 8 1. Scene: Inset of Kobra’s face. He is recalling his past. We have an overview of an African village. It is in a remote section, no civilization for miles around.

CAPTION: Kobra’s mind flashes back to a time and a place that he has recalled often.

KOBRA: The story is almost legend. Nothing much out of the ordinary ever happened in those remote villages, so when something unusual took place, it became a matter of great interest.

2. Scene: On a mountainside. A native is running towards a man dressed in a safari outfit. The man looks like an older version of Philip Snow.

CAPTION: “My father was an anthropologist working in the remotest part of Africa. He had brought his wife to this forgotten outpost almost 4O years ago.”

NATIVE: Bwana Snow! Bwana Snow! Come quickly!

Memsab Snow have baby now!

3. Scene: Snow enters tent.

SNOW: Veronica! Are you all right?

PAGE 9 1. Scene: Close-up of Veronica Snow. A pretty, young girl.

VERONICA: Yes, Robert. Everything’s fine. Shamba’s here to help me.

2. Scene: Two-shot of Shamba, the old Black mid-wife and Robert.

SNOW: I’m sorry we aren’t back in the States. You should be in a clean hospital — SHAMBA: Bwana Snow. Wait outside. Time now.

3. Scene: Snow and the native are waiting outside the tent.

NATIVE: Do not worry, Bwana. Shamba, she good. She deliver me!

SNOW: Yes, yes N’gura. I suppose you’re right.

4. Scene: There is a scream from the tent as Snow rushes in.

CAPTION: “My father had expected to hear the first cries of a newborn baby. Instead, he received the mournful cry of the mid-wife.”

SNOW: Veronica!

5. Scene: Veronica is dead. The mid-wife is ashen.

SNOW: No! Oh my God, no! The baby! What about the baby?

6. Scene: Shamba pulls back a blanket to reveal Siamese twins, alive and kicking. Quite gruesome, to say the least!

PAGE 10 1. Scene: A grave in the village.

CAPTION: “They buried my, or should I say our, mother on the mountainside. We were taken under the wing of Shamba.”

2. Scene: Robert Snow looking really terrible.

CAPTION: “Our father did not think it so fortunate that we had survived. He slowly destroyed himself, day by day.”

Kobra #1, page 8. Note the redrawn faces and dialogue changes when published (as shown at left). care of us. Someday, we may be able to repay them.

PAGE 11

4. Scene: We are back to the present. Kobra has finished his story. As I would like to see it — I doubt if you’ll agree, Jack — Portman is almost asleep in a chair.

3. Scene: The twins are now about 7 years old. The Kobra half is staring out of a window. Philip is reading a book.

1. Scene: A hospital operating room in a large city in the US. Inset head of King Kobra.

KOBRA: But that was long ago. Much has happened since that time...

CAPTION: “As far as the natives were concerned, we were something akin to gods. We were revered and honored. To them we were something special.”

KOBRA: When we were 12 years old, the missionaries sent us to the US. They had the skill to perform the operation that would separate us.

KOBRA: Portman! We’ve an appointment to keep. Let’s go!

KOBRA: Will you hurry up and finish! I don’t want to spend the whole day indoors.

DOCTOR: Scalpel! Get that suction ready!

PHILIP: It wouldn’t hurt you to open a book, you know.

2. Scene: Kobra and Philip are in separate beds. Angle favoring Kobra.

4. Scene: Close-up of Kobra. He is angry.

KOBRA. Finally I’m free of you! No longer will I have to put up with your insufferable whining!

KOBRA: Bah! You and your studies! We don’t need that. We could control these fools. We are unique! They can work for us.

5. Scene: Close-up of Philip.

PHILIP: You seem to forget that these people have taken

3. Scene: Angle on Philip.

PHILIP: We will never be free of each other, brother. We are bound together for the rest of our lives!

61

5. Scene: Portman snaps to attention.

PAGE 12 1. Scene: Full-page splash. An auditorium on a university campus. On stage is a fantastic-looking robot. On the staff is Professor Sheridan, who uncovered the robot, Snow and Hannibal.

CAPTION: Meanwhile, on the campus of the local university, Dr. Philip Snow is playing a hunch. Discovered in an undersea cave, a mysterious creature dubbed “The Space Sentinel” has been brought to the school for study. A turn of events that will surely lead to DESTRUCTION!

SHERIDAN: So you see, Dr. Snow, we really aren’t quite sure what purpose this being served. Or even if it’s of Earthly origins!

SNOW: I see, Professor. It is fantastic alright. I only wish the security measures around here were a little better.

PAGE 13 1. Scene: Close-up of Hannibal.

HANNIBAL: GROOWLLL! 2. Scene: Snow reacts.

SNOW: What is it, fella? What’s wrong?

3. Scene: Suddenly the body of Police Sgt. Logan comes tumbling over the side of the upper balcony.

LOGAN: Yarrgh!

4. Scene: Snow is leaning over the body.

(above) More face changes. (below) Note the D. Bruce Berry lettering of Jack’s original dialogue.

SHERIDAN: Who is it, Doctor?

SNOW: It says here — Sgt. Logan, LAPD. What was he doing up there?

5. Scene: Close-up of Sheridan.

SHERIDAN: Snow! Look!

rifle.

KOBRA: Ha-ha-ha-ha! I’ve got it, now!

KOBRA: Quite a rare treasure, wouldn’t you say? Naturally, I’ve modified it for my own purposes!

6. Scene: Kobra fires the gun at a wall. It shoots a laser beam.

EFFECT: Kzzapp!

5. Scene: Robot smashes a police car.

PAGE 14 Scene: Moving across the floor are a pair of large drone snakes. Instead of eyes, they have two glowing heat-sensing devices.

CAPTION: From the other side of the room — 2. Scene: The Snake attacks Snow.

KOBRA: Yes, that’s it! Everyone run! You’re no match for me now!

PAGE 16 1. Scene: Kobra points the gun at Snow.

KOBRA: Perhaps you would like to take a closer look?

4. Scene: Hannibal jumps one of them.

5. Scene: Both men are wrapped tightly.

SNOW: It’s no use, Professor! We’re caught!

6. Scene: Police fire at the robot.

EFFECTS: (Gunshots)

2. Scene: Hannibal leaps for Kobra’s arm. Gun goes off.

HANNIBAL: Roowrrr!

3. Scene: They wrestle around.

4. Scene: A police car pulls up. Out steps Lt. Dominguez.

DOMINGUEZ: Head for cover! Get some men to the other side! Move it!

PAGE 18

KOBRA: Arrrgh! You stupid — !

3. Scene: The beam has hit the robot causing it to come to life.

1. Scene: Close-up of Kobra.

KOBRA: (Thought balloon) Things seem to be too close.

Time for an honorable retreat!

4. Scene: All are now staring transfixed at the robot.

KOBRA: Amazing! Quite remarkable, really!

SNOW: QUICK! We’ve got to stop it!

2. Scene: Kobra and the robot blast off into the sky.

KOBRA: Good-bye gentleman! I have what I came for!

5. Scene: The robot starts towards them.

3. Scene: Dominguez is puzzled. In the background we see Portman in custody.

6. Scene: Kobra fires another shot. It doesn’t faze the creature.

DOMINGUEZ: I’ll be —

KOBRA: Oh my!

4. Scene: Snow has gotten out of his bonds. He is next to Dominguez.

SNOW: It looks as if Kobra got away with it again, Lt. DOMINGUEZ: Yeah, sure — Say, are you alright?

5. Scene: Snow.

SNOW: Yes. Wish I could say the same for your Sgt. Logan, though.

6. Scene: Dominguez and Snow.

DOMINGUEZ: If it takes every man there is, I’ll get King Kobra. You can count on that, Snow.

Da End★

PAGE 15 1. Scene: Kobra enters scene.

KOBRA: Well, well! I trust that you are both comfortable!

My, but this is a surprise, isn’t it, Dr. Snow?

2. Scene: Snow is angry.

SNOW: I had a feeling that you wouldn’t be able to stay away.

PAGE 17

3. Scene: Kobra turns towards robot in background.

SNOW: Kobra! Get these animated ropes off of us! We’ve got to stop that thing!

KOBRA: Oh, but of course. The robot. Something as unusual as that is a must for a man of my tastes!

4. Scene: Kobra becomes bitter.

KOBRA: Something you have not always agreed with, eh?

Now that we have finally caught up with each other, I have something to show you. Portman!

5. Scene: Portman enters. He is carrying an ancient-looking

1. Scene: Snow hollers at Kobra.

KOBRA: I’ve a better idea, brother!

2. Scene: Kobra leaps onto a platform that is mounted on the robot’s head.

KOBRA: These controls shouldn’t be too hard to figure out!

3. Scene: Kobra, now guiding the robot, crashes through a wall.

62

Jack with Steve Sherman, circa 1975.

Kamandi #1 Original Art For Sale Complete 22-page book, plus cover (incl. 2-page spread).

From the collection of the Kirby Estate. Accepting offers until JANUARY 31, 1999. Call Mike Thibodeaux at

(818)708-2345

Classifieds (10¢ per word, $1 minimum) ______________________________ HOGAN’S ALLEY has something for every fan of comic strips, comic books, animation, & more! Each 100+ page issue has features, interviews, reprints, appreciation and analysis of the entire medium! Four issue subscriptions are $18.95 ($27.95 overseas) from: Hogan’s Alley, PO Box 47684, Atlanta, GA 30362 or sample them online at www.cagle.com/hogan ______________________________ LIMITED EDITION PRINTS FOR SALE. Jack Kirby–A Premier Presentation from the Ruby-Spears Productions Animation Collection—can be seen on the Web at: www.madmorgan.com or by contacting Jeff Cooke at Mad Morgan Enterprises, PO Box 6698, Burbank, CA 91510, (818)848-1445, FAX (818)840-1252, e-mail: morgancooke@earthlink.net (catalogs available). ______________________________ 1960s MARVEL memorabilia wanted!

Buttons; fan club kits; toys; send-away T-shirts; Captain Action; Bullpen autographs. Contact: Aaron Sultan, 3201 Arrowwood Dr., Raleigh, NC 27604. 919-954-7111. e-mail: spiderboop@aol.com ______________________________ MIGNOLA Hellboy art wanted, also Alex Toth DC work, Vampirella Special Hardcover, “Ark” #33 (Toth Interview).

Brian Postman, 238 East 24th Street, #2A, New York, NY 10010. ______________________________ WANTED: 1965 to 69 Kirby pages.

Also Colan Submariner, DD and 1969 Barry Smith. Duncan Youngerman, FAX: 335-46-02-59-60 (France). ______________________________ WANTED: J.I.M./Thor #110-179 for reading. Low grades / prices, please.

Trade available: Kamandi #6-13 VF. K. Groeneveld, 177 N. Congress, Athens, OH 45701. ______________________________

PENCILERS & Inkers wanted for a Kirbyesque comic. Call Juan Gonzalez at (707) 578-0785 or write to: 225 Carrillo St. #2, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. ______________________________

If you’re viewing a digital version of this publication, PLEASE read this plea from the publisher!

JACK KIRBY Comics/Cards.

Stomberg, 303 S. 5th St., Oregon, IL 61061. ______________________________ KIRBY COMICS for sale. Private collector selling extra copies from ’60s and early ’70s—early Marvel Superheroes and some DC—various grades.

Call or write for list: Clifton F. Marley, P.O. Box 757, Robbins, NC 27325, (910)948-3993. ______________________________

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:

ROMITA SPIDER-MAN original art wanted. Any page, any issue. Also wanted: Kane, Ditko, Andru. Top dollar paid. Finder’s fees paid. Contact: Aaron Sultan, 3201 Arrowwood Dr., Raleigh, NC 27604. 919-954-7111. email: spiderboop@aol.com ______________________________

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.

HEY KIRBY FANS! A number of collectors have contacted TJKC about finding copies of Kirby’s GODS Portfolio, Kirby Unleashed, Jack Kirby Masterworks, the New Gods portfolio, the Dark Horse Kirby portfolio, Marvelmania Portfolio, and other hard-to-find Kirby collectibles. If you have any of the above available for sale or trade, please contact TJKC, and we’ll try to get sellers and buyers in touch with one another. ______________________________

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.

THE BYRNE VICTIMS UNITE QUARTERLY wants you! Featuring over 20 years and 12,000 pages of published work From "Wheelie And The Chopper Bunch" to "The X-Men: Hidden Years" don’t miss a single issue of the only fanzine of fan favorite artist and writer JOHN BYRNE. For more info visit: http://www.acc.umu.se/~alpha/byrne/ Single issues: $2.95. Subscriptions: $14.25 a year for 6 issues from: The Byrne Victims Unite Quarterly, 372 Pierson St. Apt. D, Crystal Lake, IL 60014, Attention: SUBSCRIPTIONS or email: Lifedth@chicagonet.net ______________________________

TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

www.twomorrows.com

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #22 A TWOMORROWS

PUBLISHING

EDITOR: JOHN MORROW

DESIGN & LAYOUT: TWOMORROWS

We have extra copies of the FULL-COLOR 17" x 23" promotional poster we give to comics shops that carry TJKC. Help us pay for our press run, and get a beautiful Kirby collectible in the process!

Price includes shipping in a sturdy mailing tube. ($7 US, $8 Canada, $10 outside N. America.)

ASSOCIATE EDITOR: JON B. COOKE

PROOFREADING: TWOMORROWS REGULAR COLORIST: TOM ZIUKO MARK ALEXANDER NICK ALEXANDER FABIO BARBIERI JERRY BOYD DAVID BREWIS ROBERT L. BRYANT JR. JON B. COOKE GLENN DANZIG MARK EVANIER RICHARD FRENCH MIKE GARTLAND RUSS GARWOOD GARY GIANNI DAVID HAMILTON ANDY HELFER PAT HILGER FRANK JOHNSON LISA KIRBY PETE KOCH TED KRASNIEWSKI MARTY LASICK BRUCE LOWRY ADAM MCGOVERN MIKE MIGNOLA JOHN MODICA AARON MORRIS MARK PACELLA BRIAN PEARCE MIKE PRICE BILL REINHOLD HOMER REYES STEVE ROBERTSON STEVE RUDE DAVID SCHWARTZ STEVE SHERMAN DAVE STEVENS MIKE THIBODEAUX R.J. VITONE LINK YACO TOM ZIUKO SPECIAL THANKS TO: JON B. COOKE GLENN DANZIG MARK EVANIER MIKE GARTLAND D. HAMBONE RANDY HOPPE RICHARD HOWELL ROBERT KATZ PETE KOCH MARTY LASICK MIKE MIGNOLA MARK PACELLA BRIAN PEARCE MIKE PRICE HOMER REYES STEVE ROBERTSON STEVE RUDE DAVID SCHWARTZ STEVE SHERMAN DAVE STEVENS MIKE THIBODEAUX ROY THOMAS R.J. VITONE TOM ZIUKO AND OF COURSE THE KIRBY ESTATE MAILING CREW: RUSS GARWOOD D. HAMBONE GLEN MUSIAL ED STELLI PATRICK VARKER CONTRIBUTORS:

Posters For Sale!

PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE KIRBY ESTATE

ASSISTANT EDITOR: PAMELA MORROW

CELEBRATING THE LIFE AND CAREER OF THE KING!

BIMO NTHLY!

O N SALE HERE!

FULLY AUTHORIZED BY THE KIRBY ESTATE

64

Collector Comments Send letters to: The Jack Kirby Collector c/o TwoMorrows • 1812 Park Drive Raleigh, NC 27605 or E-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com _____________________________________________ (Here are a few words from a recurring letter writer:) _____________________________________________ Dear Mr. Morrow: Thanks for printing my article on Hidden Harry. You will be glad to know I am working on article another called “DEVIL D I N O S A U R ROCKS, BARNEY SUCKS!” Watch for it.

Nick Alexander (now age 12) (We’re ready when you are, Nick! And now a word from Nick’s proud papa:) _____________________________________________ I was delighted to see the uninked page from FF ANNUAL #5 that you ran in TJKC #21. However, I noticed that Crystal appears in three panels from which she is absent in the published version. I’ve always wondered why Crystal appeared on the cover when she wasn’t part of the aggregation that battled Psycho-Man, and now I know. Originally, she WAS. Crystal’s erasure totally disrupts the compositional balance of panel five, and an unnecessary caption arrow was added to fill the void created by her absence. The Torch was redrawn in this panel (by Jack?) and it’s obvious (now) that she was also erased from the fifth panel of the last page. But why? Upon re-reading the story I noticed that the Panther’s battle with “Cat-Beast” is interrupted by a segue to Gorgon’s entrance; the next time we see the Panther, his opponent is gone, and Lee’s caption claims that Cat-Beast simply “vanished.” This doesn’t seem kosher. Was there a cut here?

Please clear up this matter by running more uninked pages from this classic 1967 Annual!

Mark Alexander, Decatur, IL (Sorry Mark, but we only had access to this single copy of Jack’s pencils from FF ANNuAl #5, and it appears to be an anomaly. The “original” copy we worked from was done full-size on a piece of tracing paper, which is now yellowed and brittle — and the corner was missing, as you can see in our repro of it. All the early-to-mid 1960s copies of Jack’s Marvel pencils I’ve seen are “digestsized” photostats, and full-size “thermal-fax” style copies exist for later ’60s work. If any more copies from that issue turn up, we’ll be sure to run them. Hopefully this issue’s FF #49 pencils will tide you over until then!) _____________________________________________ I thought of a few ideas about celebrating the coming of the new millennium with a Kirby project. Lots of these ideas are, to say the least, not very realistic (too complicated, too expensive) but it’s fun to dream!

1. The complete Jack Kirby on CD-ROMs. Yes, that would be great! All Jack’s comics together using a 21st century technology. It looks incredible but a similar project was realized with Eisner’s THE SPIRIT and a complete Schulz ‘s PEANUTS is on the way.

2. The Kirby checklist on CD-ROMs. That is a more realistic project: The research is already done (your checklist is perfect) but the CD-Rom would allow you to illustrate in color all the covers and all other subjects at a very low cost (a scanner, time, no costly paper). And with hypertext, cross reference would be easy. What a way to begin year 2000!

3. The Jack Kirby Statue. Artist Randy Bowen has been doing super-hero statues based on Kirby’s designs (see issues of PREVIEWS from the last couple of months) for a while now. How about having him (or another artist) do a sculpture of Jack Kirby based on one of his

self-portraits, the most famous being the one you used for your first issue and on the cover of your first trade paperback.It would be great to have a 6” to 10” statue of the King at his drawing table (and you can have a small replica of the drawing on the tiny drawing table!). I think every Kirby fan would be very happy to put it next to their MARVEL MASTERWORKS! A Thor statue was advertised at $50.00, so it’s a project that can work.

4. The Kirby Black Book (HEROES & VILLAINS) Trading Cards Set. This book (the pencils) has been outof-print for a while and never was very affordable to the average fan. So why don’t you publish them as a card set—it would be black-&-white, you can print on both sides of the card (or you can use the back to print the inked version of the same drawing) and you can add a few more pencil drawings of a few heroes Kirby forgot when he did his book for Roz. All in all, it would be a very interesting project and very affordable.

5. A TJKC Special issue: The Unpublished Kirby. This idea is to put in print before the century is over all his work that hasn’t seen print yet: DINGBATS, IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB, SOUL LOVE, BOY EXPLORERS. I know you would need the DC’s okay but you still have time to do it.

6. A JK Trade Paperback: The best stories in pencils!

You could publish a book of complete stories before they were inked. It would be great to have them complete instead of on a one by one ratio as you usually publish them. And it would be fun to compare a full story in pencils vs. inks.

7.The definitive JK Portfolio, reprinting all the material that was published in portfolios and is now out-of-print: MASTERWORKS, KIRBY UNLEASHED, GODS, NEW GODS. All in one place and maybe not as a portfolio but as a TJKC Special issue.

Jean-Francois McDuff, FRANCE (You’ve got some great ideas, some of which we’ve already considered. let’s take them in order: 1. Man, are you thinking big!!! It’s a great idea, but I don’t have the 50,000,000 hours it’d take to scan it all!

Plus, getting permission from copyright holders would be a nightmare.

2. Ray Wyman has mentioned something like this, with hyperlinks, etc. Again, it’s not something we have the time to do, but Ray may give it a shot at some point.

3. I’m not sure what the market would be for this; Kirby fans tend to want stuff actually done by KIRBY (a previous statue based on a Kirby drawing did poorly). But I’m intrigued about what that Kirby self-portrait would look like in 3-D; I’d probably buy one.

4. Personally, I hate card sets; the images are too small to be satisfying to me. I’d rather see a cheaper, fullsize version of the sketchbook made available again.

5. You’ll never know how hard I’ve been trying to get this done. We’ve tracked down the originals or good stats to virtually all of this stuff, but DC has turned down our requests for permission on their copyrighted material; but we’re still working on them!

6. Again, the copyrights are the problem. That’s why we print stuff piecemeal; it avoids the hassles, even if we can’t print the whole stories.

7. Again, if copyrights could be worked out, this is possible. But for it to look its best, you’d need access to the original art, and most of it’s been sold over the years.

Thanks for letting us know what you’d like to see. I hope I don’t sound like a naysayer; it’s just that people have tried before (me included) to get some of this kind of stuff done, and copyrights are usually the thing that keeps them from happening. I think the unpublished stuff has the most commercial potential; the problem is there are really only a few thousand people at most who’ll buy this, and that makes full-color cost-prohibitive on most of them. And most companies won’t consider letting you use their characters without a huge licensing fee—if at all— and that makes some of these projects unprofitable as well. I’ve tried to convince DC that THEY should print the unpublished Kirby stories, but they say they’d have to sell at least 8000 copies of a paperback book to make it worthwhile, and I’m not sure that’s possible, unless it’s high profile stuff like the recent NEW GODS collection.) _____________________________________________

65

Re: The Gil Kane interview. Kane says the SHADOW radio show started with Orson Welles in 1932. Actually, the Shadow began as a narrator (not a star) in the radio series DETECTIVE STORY HOUR in 1930. The first voice of the Shadow (there were several over the years) was James LaCurto. The Shadow didn’t actually become the star of his own radio show until 1937 and it was then that Welles did the role.

The artist who painted that wonderful Superman painting Gil speaks of was Hugh J. Ward. Supposedly (this is rumor, not fact) Sol Harrison was given the painting upon his retirement.

Arthur Petty? Are you sure Kane didn’t say Arthur Preddy, long-time DC artist and friend of Bernie Sachs?

Jon Cooke asks about Kirby’s appreciation for Lou Fine. Jack told me he admired Fine greatly and learned a lot about figure drawing from him. They spent a fair amount of time talking drawing together, particularly about figure drawing. Alex Kotsky, a close friend and coworker of Lou Fine, said that “Fine had a great appreciation for Jack Kirby’s work.”

Jim Amash, Greensboro, NC _____________________________________________ I don’t read comics nowadays; I’ve grown tired/bored of the super-hero format. Nevertheless, I ventured into a comics specialty store recently, more out of curiosity than anything else, and accidentally came across TJKC #20.

I’ve been a fan of Jack Kirby for many years, and naturally had to find out more about the guy whose drawing has so much power and energy. I found the short strip, “The Other Woman,” the best feature of #20. It confirms my suspicions that Jack Kirby’s talents should not have been heavily spent (and perhaps wasted) on the superhero genre. I personally would have loved to see Jack produce a graphic novel adaptation of Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE. That most certainly would have been the comic book event of the century. (The closest Jack has done to something truly epic is the Treasury Edition to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.) I was fascinated with the number of hairdos Jack has given Sue Storm. I was never conscious of the variety when reading the Fantastic Four in my younger years.

Jack had a way with villains. There was no question his bad guys were reeking with evil. His best examples were Victor Von Doom and the Red Skull. Jack’s bad guys did talk, but on a lot of occasions I did not think it was necessary — their sinister action was more than adequate in the panel, and dialogue was to me so much unnecessary clutter.

All in all, TJKC #20 was worth the buy. I trust you will continue to feature unpublished art and stories in future editions of TJKC. Whatever you do, don’t drop the interviews; they are a big plus to the magazine. It would be great if you could have color inside the magazine without a significant increase in price. May TJKC have a long and distinguished run — well beyond #100.

Kon Calembakis, Australia (Thanks for the vote of support, Kon. It’s a constant struggle to get uS comics shops to stock extra copies of TJKC, so new readers can discover it. I’m glad shops in Australia do! As for unpublished stories, look for one from SOul lOVE next issue!

Incidentally, no one ever responded to our “Sue’s ’Do’s” contest from TJKC #20, and a free issue of TJKC is waiting for the first respondent who correctly identifies which issues of FF all those hairstyles came from! Here’s a hint; we listed them in consecutive order!) _____________________________________________ THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR is truly a ray of sunlight in these dark times. You’re certainly continuing Jack’s legacy of positive, hard-working “Can-Do-ism,” which was even more admirable in the face of the injustices he continually suffered at the hands of the very people who’ve gone on to destroy a valuable and prosperous industry.

Okay, in some cases the villains are the SUCCESSORS of those Jack faced, but they’re all the same, and if Darkseid had met them, it would’ve been curtains for the human race.

Robert Loren Fleming _____________________________________________

In issue #21, the “Twilight at Topps” article features a drawing of Jack’s on the last page. The caption says that the characters featured are “A group of SECRET CITY villains.” But these characters are the mysterious “benefactors” of Earth’s super-villains in the first SUPER POWERS mini-series Jack worked on for DC in 1984. Is this a mistake on your part, or was Jack reusing these characters for his SECRET CITY project?

Adam Castro, Cross Lanes, WV (Shortly after going to press on #21, we came across a copy of the original drawing with Jack’s notes to the editor of SuPER POWERS on it, as shown here. I suspect

that, since Jack didn’t draw most of the first SuPER POWERS series, he probably forgot these guys had already been used, and ten years later when digging out his unused ideas to flesh out the Topps series, they got reused unintentionally.) _____________________________________________ I have a couple of questions and comments from a generally wonderful issue. (I hope you don’t get tired of hearing the praise—but the two books you publish really are about the only comic-related delight many of us have left and you are doing a beautiful job—even living up to your own hype. Thanks.)

First, I think Pam’s “stinky little books” line from THE COLLECTED TJKC Vol. 2 will assure her a place in literature. Ed Hatton’s family in Ireland loved it. (Thanks for printing his letter.) My wife nodded knowingly and laughed out loud when I read it to her. Even at the Ozcon in Sydney this year, Pam’s honest little line came up in conversation amid smiles of understanding (as always, with a non-comic-oriented wife lovingly acknowledging her husband’s strange hobby). Pam, how does world wide immortality (notoriety?) feel?

Thanks so much for the TOPPS article. We finally find out who THE MIDNIGHT MEN were (fantastic!) and I finally find out why I’ve been unable to get a hold of VICTORY #2-5. How about for an upcoming issue you get Kurt Busiek to summarize his plot for the unpublished VICTORY issues and his understanding of the characters—especially ones like Tiger 21 who was to appear in #3? Perhaps Keith Giffen too, since he began as a ’70s Kirby clone and seemed to be really creative with the Kirbyverse characters. (I find Giffen to be one of the few writer/artists around who is often creative in a (vaguely) Kirby way—particularly on his LEGION OF SUPERHEROES—5 YEARS LATER books and VICTORY #1.)

Mike Gartland’s “A Failure to Communicate” was intriguing. I think it actually shows how clever Stan was as wordsmith—something Barry Windsor-Smith admitted in COMIC BOOK ARTIST #2. I’m convinced this ‘failure to communicate’ is exactly why ‘Sub-space’ became the ‘Negative zone’ in the early FFs—with Stan trying to find powerful words to explain a difficult concept and superimposing them over the drawn sequence. After all, it’s much easier to explain that ‘Positive matter meeting Negative matter’ equals ‘danger, suspense and boom!’ than to explain a dimension of ‘inferior-frequency’ space and matter, where that matter is less ‘real’ and a huge distance in ‘real’ space becomes much less, and is therefore the means of achieving greater than light-speed jumps through the universe, but which is also adversely affected by a ‘real/superior-frequency’ world’s gravity (make sense?). I’m convinced the latter is something along the lines that Kirby was originally getting at in FF #51 & 56 even though I’m sure he wouldn’t have understood it any better than I can explain it here. The letters page of FF

#89 sees Stan admitting that it was originally Jack’s idea, even though, by then, Jack himself had adopted the positive/negative explanation. Of course, it would be too much to hope that pages from FF #51 exist with Jack’s margin notes, wouldn’t it?

I notice on the FF ANNUAL page that Psycho-Man was originally ‘Psychon’. I wonder if Jack approved of Stan changing it or whether this was just another little annoyance that contributed to Jack’s displeasure.

A question: What is the evidence of an aborted INHUMANS comic? The 5-page origin sequences look pretty self-contained to me.

Another question: You say that the ’60s photocopies come from Marvel to help Jack with continuity. If this is the case, why does a copy of parts of FF ANNUAL #5 exist?

It was a self-contained story. Even more so, where did the copy of the pencils for the Crystal pinup last issue come from? And the Inhumans origin was jumping from prehistory to present time after the 5 pages this issue. Why copy them for continuity? Same for CAP #104 for that matter. Any comments?

OMAC: Was the concept sheet you show here connected with the one you showed in TJKC #1, or is it part of a later presentation? I remember noticing that first one had no mention of ‘The World That’s Coming’ and wondered if Jack originally designed OMAC as a current day super-hero.

KAMANDI: Way back in TJKC #7, you stated in the letters page that there seemed a big interest in Kamandi and that you had quite a store of Kamandi material. Well?

We’ve had one cover and 2 articles (in #17) but not much else. How about it? I’d love to see more pencils and background from this GREAT book.

Thanks again. Hope it keeps being as much fun for you as for us.

Shane Foley, Australia (Don’t worry, Shane; we lOVE the praise! Pam was awfully flattered by the comments she’s gotten on her intro. She hates being the center of attention, but it’s fun for me to see her getting noticed so much.

I definitely want to get Giffen on record for our upcoming issue on “THE KIRBY INFluENCE,” and I’ll try to get Kurt involved too (but he’s recovering from a new baby and lots of deadlines right now!).

We’ll be delving into some other VERY interesting comparisons of Jack’s notes vs. Stan’s dialogue in the next couple of issues. But y’know, Jack was dealing with sub-space and dimensional jumps in detail (as well as TIGER 21) in the STARMAN ZERO strip in the 1950s— and probably before—as shown in TJKC #15.

Regarding Psycho-Man’s name, I’ll just bet Stan thought it was a more commercial choice, playing off Hitchcock’s hit film PSYCHO. I personally prefer Psychon.

As for the evidence of an aborted Inhumans comic, there’s what looks like an erased indicia blank on the splash page of one of the back ups, which was covered up with credits and filler art. If it was planned as a backup, why would there be an indicia? And why would Stan have chosen to run an Inhumans back-up in THOR of all places?

About Jack getting continuity copies of books that weren’t continued, it’s just my guess, but I’ll bet Marvel had a standard policy to copy everything and send it to Jack. They probably didn’t have time to sort through and say, “This he’ll need for continuity, this he won’t.” That would require someone with knowledge of each storyline to make a decision, and Stan was probably the only one who could—and he was busy doing other stuff.

I’m pretty sure the two OMAC concept sheets are connected, but don’t have specific proof. However, I doubt Jack planned Brother Eye to be part of a current-day strip.

I hope to do an all-Kamandi issue at some point, but most of the copies of pencils I’ve got are pretty faded out, and I don’t think readers would be too pleased with the quality. As soon as I feel I have enough quality art and articles—and believe me, having enough articles on Kamandi is NOT a problem—you’ll see the issue.) _____________________________________________

66

KIRBY COLLECTOR #21 was kinda light on the historical side of Kirby (which is my favorite) but made up for it with lots of small Kirby trivia. The article on Jack meeting Frank zappa was first rate, and the item on Jack’s appearance in MILLIE THE MODEL was hysterical.

The interview of Jack was a beaut!! Focusing on his views on technology, it avoided all the historical reruns that accompany most of Jack’s interviews. Interesting that a man whose whole life involved the intermingling of future technology, and ancient mythology, actually appears to have been most leery of the future, and firmly rooted in his Biblical heritage. Jack’s belief in the Biblical idea of the creation seems antithecal of all his many forays into cosmic storytelling of creation and evolutionary mutations. A most interesting man!!

Mike Gartland”s analysis of the Kirby/ Lee writing schism, as seen through the comparison of Jack’s liner notes to Stan’s dialog was interesting. The only way to get a better idea of Jack’s thought process would be if there was an example of Jack providing liner notes, and then providing his own dialog on the same story.

Finally, a big thank you to whoever provided the fullpage art to the CAPTAIN NICE advertisement. Putting this on the back, in full color (as done by Mr. Kirby himself) with no text or ad copy is a thing of beauty.

The article that I think is the most ripe for discussion comes from Adam McGovern: “Kirby Fans’ Wackiest Causes.” With a sixty-year history of creating comic book fantasies, obviously there were some truly horrible ideas that should have been aborted. As his example Adam uses the PRISONER adaptation that Jack attempted, and was gratefully stopped by Stan Lee before seeing print.

While I agree with Mr. McGovern that the artwork looked flat and uninspiring, I think that this is a poor example because this was not a Kirby creation. I think the project that we should really be glad never saw fruition was the SOUL LOVE magazine that Jack pitched to DC in the early ‘70s. From what little we have heard and seen of this idea, it sounds like a bad idea, badly conceptualized, and poorly realized.

The second example that Adam gave was a concept that Kirby created, but he felt it was handled better by another writer: The Silver Surfer. While I disagree with his premise, we of course will never know where Kirby would have taken the Surfer. I trust Jack’s instincts, and the small solo story in FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5 is enough to tell me that Jack had a firm grasp on this character. But the question still remains: What Kirby concepts or characters were done better by others? I can’t think of too many, perhaps the Black Panther, Ant-Man (maybe), possibly the Hulk. A case could be made for Spider-Man, since the first visual concept was Kirby’s. I am interested in other opinions though.

Stan Taylor, Eustis, FL (As for others’ takes on Kirby’s characters, we’ll delve into it in our upcoming KIRBY INFluENCE issue. And everyone will get their chance to judge SOul lOVE next issue, as we present an unpublished story from it! Stay tuned.)

NEXT ISSUE: Expect the unexpected as ANYTHING GOES in #23! It ships in February with a painted DEMON cover by ALEX HORLEY (based on a Kirby pencil drawing), and Jack’s 1960s METRON concept drawing (in ink, watercolor, and collage by KIRBY himself)! Inside you’ll find SURPRISE INTERVIEWS (including a RARE KIRBY INTERVIEW), plus an UNPUBLISHED STORY from Kirby’s 1970s SOUL LOVE comic! Then we present Part 3 of our comparison of Kirby’s margin notes to STAN LEE’s DIALOGUE, a school project by then 10-year old TRACY KIRBY (illustrated by her GRANDPA JACK!), a look inside THE BLACK HOLE, Kung-Fu, fan art, and other goodies to keep you guessing! Plus there’s incredible rare and unpublished Kirby art, uninked pencil pages from THE DEMON, SANDMAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, JIMMY OLSEN, DESTROYER DUCK, and more! The deadline for submissions: 1/5/99. Until then, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Artwork ©1998 Bernie Wrightson.

COMING IN MARCH:

#4

COMIC BOOK ARTIST (100-pages, $5.95 cover) features great comic book artists, writers, editors, and the books they made great! Our fourth issue proudly presents EMPIRE OF HORROR: THE WARREN PUBLISHING STORY, featuring a FULL-COLOR BERNIE WRIGHTSON COVER, plus: • The definitive JIM WARREN interview (with behind-the-scenes details of his years publishing VAMPIRELLA, CREEPY, EERIE, BLAZING COMBAT, HELP! and other fan favorites)!

• An in-depth interview with BERNIE WRIGHTSON, including plenty of RARE and UNPUBLISHED art!

• Rare and unpublished art, interviews, and features with FRANK FRAZETTA, RICHARD CORBEN, JACK DAVIS, AL WILLIAMSON, ARCHIE GOODWIN, HARVEY KURTZMAN, ALEX NINO, and other Warren alumni!

On the flip side, comics legend ROY THOMAS provides another new edition of ALTER EGO, focusing on his work on THE AVENGERS and X-MEN, plus rare and unpublished art by STEVE DITKO, JOE KUBERT, & others!

BACK IN PRINT!

VOLUME ONE

Characters © Marvel Entertainment, Inc.

COLLECTED KIRBY COLLECTOR, Vol. One: 240-page trade paperback reprinting TJKC #1-9, including the FOURTH WORLD and FANTASTIC FOUR issues, plus a NEW section with over 30 pieces of art never before published in TJKC, including pencils from THOR, NEW GODS, THE PRISONER, FANTASTIC FOUR, CAPT. AMERICA, HUNGER DOGS, JIMMY OLSEN, and more! Interviews with KIRBY, JOE SIMON, MIKE ROYER, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, essay by STERANKO, new introduction by EVANIER, and page after page of RARE KIRBY ART! (SHIPS IN APRIL • ORDER NOW!)

SUBSCRIBE TO: WE NOW COMIC BOOK ARTIST ACCEPT (Start my sub with issue ❏ #3 ❏ #4) CREDIT ❏ $20 for 4-issues in the US CARDS! ❏ $27 for 4-issues in Canada/Mexico ❏ $37 for 4-issues elsewhere (Airmail)

Fax, call, THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR or e-mail (Start my sub with issue ❏ #23 ❏ #24) ❏ $24 for 6-issues in the US your order! ❏ $32 for 6-issues in Canada/Mexico ❏ $44 for 6-issues elsewhere (Airmail) Name

JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST, 1998 EDITION: The most thorough listing of Kirby’s work ever done! Fully updated, listing every published comic with Jack’s work, including story titles, page counts, and inkers.

It even cross-references reprints! There’s also a bibliography, listing books, periodicals, portfolios, fanzines, posters, unpublished work, and more! 100 pages— proceeds go to the Kirby Estate!

COLLECTED KIRBY COLLECTOR, Vol. Two: 160-page trade paperback reprinting TJKC #10-12, plus a new guided tour of the Kirby home, complete with photos and over 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published in TJKC! Interviews with JACK & ROZ KIRBY, GERBER, BYRNE, EVANIER, STERN, WOLFMAN, and more! Color Kirby/Steranko cover.

BACK ISSUES: (SORRY, TJKC #1-6, 8-12, 14 & 15 are SOLD OUT!) • ALL PRICES INCLUDE SHIPPING! ❏ COLLECTED TJKC Vol. 1: (240-page TRADE PAPERBACK reprinting #1-9) $21.95 postpaid ($24.95 Canada, $34.95 elsewhere) ❏ COLLECTED TJKC Vol. 2: (160-page TRADE PAPERBACK reprinting #10-12) $14.95 postpaid ($16.95 Canada, $24.95 elsewhere) ❏ JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST (100-pages, listing every published Kirby comic!) $5.00 postpaid ($5.50 Canada, $7.50 elsewhere) ❏ TJKC #7: (36-pages) KID GANG issue! Unpublished KIRBY interview, unpublished art from BOYS’ RANCH, BOY EXPLORERS, JIMMY OLSEN, DINGBATS, X-MEN, and more! Kirby/Stevens cover. $4.95 postpaid ($5.40 Canada, $7.40 elsewhere) ❏ TJKC #13: (52-pages) SUPERNATURAL issue! Kirby interview, unpublished 7-page story, DICK AYERS interview, DEMON, BLACK MAGIC, ATLAS MONSTERS, & more! Color Kirby/Ayers & Kirby/Bissette covers. $4.95 postpaid ($5.40 Canada, $7.40 elsewhere) ❏ TJKC #16: (52-pages) TOUGH GUYS Issue! FRANK MILLER and WILL EISNER interviews! Kirby’s cowboys, gangsters, kid gangs, spies, soldiers, & more! Color Kirby/Miller & Kirby/Kesel covers. $4.95 postpaid ($5.40 Canada, $7.40 elsewhere) ❏ TJKC #17: (68-pages) DC issue! Interviews with KIRBY, NEAL ADAMS, and D. BRUCE BERRY! Plus OMAC, KAMANDI, CHALLENGERS, SANDMAN, & more! Color Kirby/Royer and Kirby/Rude covers. $5.95 postpaid ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere)

Address

❏ TJKC #18: (68-pages) MARVEL issue! Interviews with KIRBY, STAN LEE, THOMAS, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, SEVERIN, TRIMPE, ROUSSOS; ANT-MAN, ETERNALS, & more! Color Kirby & Kirby/Sinnott covers. $5.95 postpaid ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere)

City

❏ TJKC #19: (56-pages) ART issue! KUBERT, EASTMAN, MILLER, EVANIER, GERBER, GROTH, & KIRBY interviews, thesis by GIL KANE, COLOR SECTION (with Jack’s paintings)! Color Kirby/Alex Ross cover. $5.95 postpaid ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere)

State

Zip

Country

Phone ENCLOSED IS: ❏ Check or Money Order for US $ CHARGE MY: ❏ VISA ❏ MasterCard Exp. Date: Cardholder’s Name:

❏ TJKC #20: (68-pages) JACK’S WOMEN! Interviews with KIRBY, DAVE STEVENS & Jack’s daughter LISA; unused 10-page story, CAPT. VICTORY screenplay, GALAXY GREEN, & more! Color Kirby/Steacy cover. $5.95 postpaid ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere) ❏ TJKC #21: (68-pages) JACK’S WACKIEST WORK! Interviews with KIRBY, GIL KANE, & BRUCE TIMM; SILVER STAR screenplay, TOPPS COMICS work, & more! Color Kirby/Wiacek & Kirby/Stone covers. $5.95 postpaid ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere) ❏ TJKC #22: (68-pages) VILLAINS issue! KIRBY, STEVE RUDE, and MIKE MIGNOLA interviews; genesis of KOBRA, FANTASTIC FOUR #49 pencils, Darkseid, Galactus, & more! Color Kirby/Stevens & Kirby covers. $5.95 postpaid ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere)

Card #

❏ COMIC BOOK ARTIST #1: (100-pages) Spotlighting DC COMICS: 1967-74, with a new NEAL ADAMS Batman cover, interviews and features on ADAMS, KIRBY, INFANTINO, CARDY, KUBERT, GIORDANO, & more! $5.95 postpaid ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere)

Signature:

❏ CBA #2: (100-pages) Spotlighting MARVEL’S SECOND WAVE: 1970-77, with a new GIL KANE cover, interviews and features on STAN LEE, KANE, WINDSOR-SMITH, STARLIN, STERANKO, PLOOG, & more! $5.95 postpaid ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere)

Send to: TwoMorrows 1812 Park Drive • Raleigh, NC 27605 Phone: 919-833-8092 • FAX: 919-833-8023 e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com

❏ CBA #3: (100-pages) Spotlighting NEAL ADAMS: THE MARVEL YEARS, with a new ADAMS cover and interview, TOM PALMER interview, rare Adams art, unpublished Adams X-MEN GRAPHIC NOVEL art! $5.95 postpaid ($6.40 Canada, $8.40 elsewhere)

TwoMorrows. Bringing New Life To Comics Fandom.

™

Darkseid TM DC Comics Inc. Artwork © Jack Kirby.