Jack Kirby Collector #30 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Fully Authorized By The Kirby Estate

AN IN-DEPTH LO O K AT KIRBY’S TWILIGHT YEARS Featuring:

$5.95 T

ISSUE #30, NOV. 2000

In The US

An unprecedented examination of

Kirby’s 1980s Career including His work on

Captain Victory Silver Star Hunger Dogs Super Powers Animation and more!

Interview With superstar writer

Alan Moore about His Kirby Influences

Jack’s nephew

Robert Katz talks about his duties as co-trustee of the Kirby estate

Kirby As A Genre Fantastic Four Animated Series Unpublished Art including published pages Befo re They Were Inked, And Much Mo re!!

Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Storyboards from the

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS STORIES BY THE INDUSTRY’S TOP TALENT. TM

SERGIO ARAGONÉS

PAUL CHADWICK

WALTER SIMONSON

RICK VEITCH

ROY THOMAS & JOHN SEVERIN

JACK KIRBY

BRENT ANDERSON

GRAY MORROW

FEATURING JACK KIRBY’S “STREET CODE” (COMPLETELY REMASTERED), & BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH’S FIRST NEW COMICS STORY SINCE 1997! ALSO FEATURES: ART SPIEGELMAN’S ORIGINAL SHORT STORY “MAUS”, & MORE! JOE KUBERT • EVAN DORKIN • BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH

NICK CARDY

160-PAGE TRADE PAPERBACK NOW SHIPPING • PAINTED COVER BY STEVE RUDE FOREWORD BY WILL EISNER • $19.95 ($23 CANADA, $30 ELSEWHERE)

TwoMorrows. Bringing New Life To Comics Fandom. TwoMorrows Publishing • 1812 Park Dr. • Raleigh, NC 27605 USA • 919-833-8092 • FAX: 919-833-8023 • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

Issue #30 Contents Eighties Ups & Downs........................4 (Chris Knowles takes an unprecedented look at Jack’s twilight years) Kirby Animation Portfolio .................8 (some of Kirby’s coolest animation presentation art, still in pencil form) “Get Out Of Comics!”.......................2 8 (Jack’s advice to a fan) Alan Moore Interview ......................3 0 (we watch the fan-favorite writer have his say about the Kirby Influence) CENTERFOLD: Hawkman! ..............3 4 (the winged wonder never looked so good) Kirby As A Genre .............................4 0 (Adam McGovern continues his new regular column about other artists’ comics influenced by the King) Another Marvel Myth ......................4 2 (the story’s sad, but it features lovely FF Animation storyboards!) The Good, Bad, & Unfortunate ........4 4 (a realistic look at Kirby’s later years) Special “Street Code” section............4 8 (two writers examine one of Jack’s last great masterpieces) Still Shining......................................5 0 (Silver Star examined) Amazing Advs. of Michael Chabon..5 2 (the ultra-hot fiction writer talks about things Kirby) Kirby Photo Essay ............................5 4 Robert Katz Interview ......................5 5 (Kirby nephew and co-trustee of the Kirby Estate speaks) “Postcard” ........................................6 3 Special Announcement about TJKC ...6 4 Collector Comments.........................6 5

ISSUE #30, NOV. 2000

THE ONLY ’ ZINE AUTHORIZED BY THE KIRBY ESTATE

Our front cover sports new Paul Smith inks and colors over this 1980s Kirby recreation of the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15, featuring Spidey carrying (we’re told) Steve Ditko (note the pencil)!

Front cover inks & color: Paul Smith Back cover inks: Al Gordon Back cover color: Tom Ziuko 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. Our thanks to both Paul Smith and Al Gordon for their superb work on this issue’s covers! COPYRIGHTS: Animal Hospital, Cary Becomes A Car/ TurboTeen, Harry the Head/Hidden Harry, Heartbreak High, Mighty Misfits, Mr. T, Ookla, Raven, Roxie's Raiders, Skanner, Thundarr, Wonder Boys and all accompanying art is ©RubySpears Productions. • The New Fantastic Four animated series and all accompanying art is ©Depatie-Freleng. • Space Ghost and Super Friends animated series and all accompanying art is ©Hanna-Barbera. • Phantom, Prince Valiant TM & © King Features. • Planet of the Apes TM & ©20th Century Fox. • Captain Victory, Darius Drumm, Insectons, Killer Bee, Lightning Lady, Silver Star, Stereon, Street Code, Valley Girl strip TM & ©the Estate of Jack Kirby. • Destroyer Duck, Medea TM & ©Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby. • Supreme TM & © Awesome Entertainment. • Fighting American, Stuntman TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby. • Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Doom, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Human Torch, Invisible Girl, Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards, Spider-Man, Thing, Thor TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Aquaman, Batman, Darkseid, Demon, First American, Flash, Green Lantern, Guardian, Hawkman, Kalibak, Metron, New Gods, Orion, Robin, Secret Origins, Super Powers, Superman, Uncle Sam, Watchmen, Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 8, No. 30, Nov. 2000. Published bi-monthly by & © TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. John Morrow, Editor. Pamela Morrow, Asst. Editor. Eric Nolen-Weathington, Production Assistant. Single issues: $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 elsewhere). Six-issue subscriptions: $24.00 US, $32.00 Canada and Mexico, $44.00 outside North America. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is © Jack Kirby unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors. First printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Eighties Ups & Downs A look at one of Kirby’s most prolific—and least documented—decades, by Chris Knowles staffers who were handling his work. This was also the dawn of a new regime at Marvel and Jack was facing the prospect of greater editorial interference. The House That Jack Built no longer had a place for him. Evanier had gotten wind that Hanna-Barbera was doing presentation art for NBC for the Fantastic Four proposal and called his friend Iwo Takamato, who was in charge of the project. “I said ‘Why don’t you get Jack Kirby to do the presentation art?’” Evanier recalls, “and Iwo said, ‘Well, doesn’t Jack Kirby live in New York?’ and I said ‘No, he lives in Thousand Oaks. Here’s his number.’ They called him and Jack came down the next day and he ended up doing a bunch of big presentation art for Hanna-Barbera, and they loved him.” There was a snag in the works, however. Marvel had made a deal with H-B competitor DePatieFreling for the rights to the FF, as well as other Marvel properties. Thundarr and crew fight an overgrown At the time, comics artist Doug arachnid in a post-apocalyptic subway in Wildey was working at D-P on a this presentation art from the series. Other proposed Godzilla ’toon. In an artists would take these pencil pieces and arrangement reminiscent of “The add polish with inks and airbrush color. Pact,” DePatie-Freling sent Wildey and Godzilla over to HannaBarbera and got Kirby and his cocreation the Fantastic Four in exchange. Jack worked with Stan Lee developing the FF ’toon for DePatie-Freling, which was later bought out by Marvel. Since Marvel’s relations with D-P were already cozy, Jack was able to have the work he did in animation count towards the terms of his Marvel contract. But all did not go smoothly. “DePatie-Freling used him very foolishly,” Evanier recounts. “They had him as a storyboard artist, which he couldn’t do. He simply didn’t have the background in animation to do that.” The Fantastic Four cartoon itself was similarly ill-starred. Remembered principally for the absence of the Human Torch, and the presence of the absurd Herbie the Robot, the series ran for two seasons and had little impact. Jack left the studio at the end of the show’s production run and did some freelance work for HannaBarbera. At the same time, he worked on an abortive line of comics proposed by an entrepreneur, tentatively called “Kirby Comics.” This is where the genesis for such concepts as Captain Victory, Satan’s Six, and Thunderfoot lies. Soon, however, the world of animation beckoned anew. Fellow comics exile Steve Gerber had created a new science-fiction

Chapter 1: Hooray for Hollywood! ack’s career in animation began in the late 1970s. Saturday morning cartoon powerhouse Hanna-Barbera had decided they wanted to do a new version of the Fantastic Four cartoon, which had a successful run in the mid-’60s. At about the same time, Mark Evanier, Kirby’s friend and confidant, had a somewhat disheartening dinner with the Kirbys. Jack had apparently decided that there wasn’t a place left for him in the increasingly constrictive world of comics, and he had decided that he would not renew his contract with Marvel, which was due to expire in 1978. Jack had found that Marvel was a different world now, and he was having difficulty dealing with the disrespectful young

Thundarr and Ookla fight the Hydra in this Kamandi-esque scene.

cartoon with studio honcho Joe Ruby of the house known as RubySpears Productions. STEVE GERBER: “The first time I met Jack was at Ruby-Spears. We had sold a show called Thundarr the Barbarian and the original character designs were done by Alex Toth. At some point or another Mark Evanier suggested to Joe Ruby that we bring Jack Kirby in to design the settings, the characters, the weapons, all of the villains— all the incidental stuff in that show basically. Everything other than the three main characters. I heard about (Evanier’s proposal) and just thought it was a wonderful idea. Joe asked me what I thought and I said it was an incredible idea and that’s how Jack came aboard.” According to Evanier, Thundarr was created and then pitched to NBC. After some hemming and hawing by the network, Ruby-Spears was asked to do more presentation work. Toth was busy so Jack was called in on Mark Evanier’s recommendation. Jack’s presentation was what helped sell the show. “Every time an episode of Thundarr would be written, Jack would be given a list of all the new characters, props, machinery, and he would go home and do sketches which would be adapted into model sheets. He was basically a concept designer, ” Evanier recounts. Unlike Toth, who usually drew the models that the animators used, Jack’s ideas would be further refined by a team of specialists. Ruby-Spears also initially made the same mistake DePatie-Freling had. Comics genius Jim Woodring was working in the storyboard department for Ruby-Spears at the time. “Jack tried his hand at a couple of storyboards, but he couldn’t really do it. He just didn’t understand

the concept,” Jim recalls. “You have to be familiar with cinematic technique and vocabulary, just to know the way scenes have to work off each other. You have to know cutting rhythms and that sort of stuff.” Thundarr went on to be a cult favorite cartoon, and Jack’s ideas found a much larger audience, and subsequently, a whole new generation of young minds to warp. After Thundarr ended its run, Jack was offered a contract with Ruby-Spears. He was paid a weekly salary and was given a host of duties, most in the design and development arena. “Ruby-Spears was kind of a development-happy studio,” Evanier says. “They would spend an awful lot of time and money designing art and doing scripts for dozens and dozens of shows that never made it.” From his vantage-point in the storyboard department, Woodring seemed to notice this process was somewhat troubling to Jack. “As time went on and none of Jack’s (cartoon property) ideas were actually used, I think he began to feel a little desperate about his situation. I think it bothered him that he was giving them all these ideas and they were just ending up in a closet somewhere.” “It depends on what Jim means by that,” Gerber offers. “Jack would come in occasionally with original ideas for series or he would be given ideas by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears or whoever and take those ideas home and develop visuals for them. But most of the stuff that came out of the studio never sold. That’s the case with any animation studio.” But concept creation for new series was only a part of Jack’s duties for Ruby-Spears. Kirby collaborator and historian Greg Theakston observes that “Kirby was an idea guy. So when he went into the animation 5

(above) I pity the fool who doesn’t get a kick out of this riff lifted from My Bodyguard. (below) Example of the thumbnails Jack would be given to work from at Ruby-Spears.

work, that’s all that it was: Strictly ideas. My favorite example [is] Mr. Crab’s Car. ‘Give us four Crab Cars.’ So for four hours, Kirby would sit there and knock out an incredible variety of four different vehicles that Mr. Crab would be driving in.” Jack worked on development all year ’round but would also work on production for current shows when the studio was busy for production season (usually a period from March to October). “I believe Jack did some presentation art and model sketches on the Mr. T show and God only knows what else,” Gerber recalls. “He worked on a lot of things.” Though Jack had the privilege of doing the majority of his work at home, he also would work on-site during busy times. “Jack would work in the studio occasionally when there was something that had to be done quickly or if changes had to be made,” Jim Woodring remembers. At those times, Woodring would get to watch Jack in action. “I was never a comics fan,” Jim recalls, “ so when Jack came to work there, I knew he was a famous comic book artist—but I wasn’t even that familiar with his work. So I was seeing him without the gloss of his reputation. What I saw was this energetic man in his sixties who seemed to be hermetically sealed in his own imagination—and was like a fountainhead when it came to generating ideas and designs and concepts. It almost seemed that as fast as he could draw, he could think of things to draw. I would occasionally watch him at work and he was like a plotting machine, as they used to call those old computer-drawing devices. He would just start in the upper left hand corner and end up in the lower right hand corner and without any sketching, or laying-out or proportion guidelines or anything, he just knocked out these incredible, complex pictures.”

to Jack. Jack had risen to the pinnacle of success in his field in the previous decade and there was nowhere else to go, especially at that time. Comics had peaked and begun their decline in popularity in the ’70s, and there was no incentive for publishers to treat their talent decently (not yet, at least—Jack would later help break down the walls of the comic book monopoly of the Big Two). MARK EVANIER: “Jack was very happy working in animation. He felt much more welcome at Ruby-Spears then he did when he went to a comic company at that point, because Ruby-Spears—and Hanna-Barbera for that matter—was filled with new young artists who grew up on his work. And he’d walk into the room and they’d start bowing and scraping and saying ‘Here’s the greatest artist who ever lived!’ Jack felt enormously proud and honored to be around that crop of people. “Jack had gone through times in his life when he thought he was a prisoner for DC or Marvel. The idea that he was making a very solid living, providing for his family, getting a health plan and vacation pay— he never had vacation pay in his life—and working in television, he was making a living doing something different and he no longer felt trapped in the [comics] business. “It was very important for Jack on a personal level

The Great Escape Escaping what Jack had called the “Viper’s Nest” of Marvel Comics and being embraced by Hollywood’s open arms was important 6

to say ‘I’m out of Comics.’ He was quite determined to never again have his income dependent on a comic book company. He liked the notion of saying ‘I got out of comics, I’m now a TV producer’. Ruby-Spears gave him the title of Producer after a couple of years, and that meant something to him.” GREG THEAKSTON: “He had a contract. It was something Jack was always concerned with. He was a child of the depression. He had an impoverished, in the classic sense of the word, childhood. His brother and mother and dad and he all lived in one room. He said that ‘My vacations in the Summer were going out on the fire escape!’ So the fact that he was working and always had money coming in... and they respected him, they kissed his feet at these places. Unlike being chewed-out by some two-bit editor, the heads of the company would come to greet him and make sure that he was happy. They went the extra effort at Ruby-Spears or wherever he worked. They acknowledged him as the King and always made him comfortable when he was there. Taking work into Ruby-Spears was always a very happy experience [for Jack]. “There were some real nightmare situations at comics companies—having unnamed editors call up Kirby and telling him how terrible his work was and how dare he turn in such a crummy job. “[At Ruby-Spears] there wasn’t this demand on Jack to produce 22 pages of continuity that locked together like a puzzle. I’m sure it was extremely refreshing to be able to just do wild visual ideas without being locked to a series or a story. Of course, the downside of that was that he had less creative control over what it was that he was doing. On the other hand, I imagine that there was such a variety of material and close enough to his interests that he was more than happy to sit there every day and draw these incredible... I mean, most of that material has never been seen by the public. I was looking at a stack of maybe 100 scene illustrations from the Thundarr series. They’re all just completely finished, beautiful, could-be-a-splash-page or double-page spread—everyone of ’em and no one will get to see them.” Ruby-Spears was later bought by Taft Broadcasting, which also owned Hanna-Barbera, and the two studios became closely aligned. Ruby-Spears moved across the street from Hanna-Barbera and their operations became interlocked. During a slow season, Jack and many other artists were loaned out to Hanna-Barbera and Jack began work on H-B mainstays like the alliterative trio of Super Friends, Scooby-Doo and Space Ghost.

JACK KIRBY: THE UNPUBLISHED ARCHIVES My first contribution to THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR was a lengthy and erudite appreciation of the JACK KIRBY: THE UNPUBLISHED ARCHIVES card set, but my magnum opus was pared down to a single paragraph. Now, at long last, am I vindicated! Suffice it to say that if you don’t yet have that aforementioned card set, drop whatever you are doing and hunt it down. Now. This set is an invaluable, priceless document of an important, and yet under-publicized phase of Jack’s career. Perhaps more than any of Jack’s comics work, this card set gives you a potent dose of “Kirby Unleashed.” Which is exactly what he was. Jack’s bosses (it’s not yet established whether or not they were angels sent by the Almighty to reward Jack for a life of toil) basically told Jack to go to town, to let it all hang out, to “go for it, you mad dog!”...just as long as he did so with a pencil on a large piece of illustration board. Jack would get his list of assignments from the bosses, then would go home and mine his bottomless imagination—bringing up concepts, characters, situations, and machinery for whatever project was at hand. The drawing would be brought in and worked on by a team of talented finishing artists who would prepare the boards for pitch meetings. The card set prints many, though certainly not all, of those efforts. There are legions of bizarre characters, arsenals of wacky weaponry and vehicles, countless contingents of critters and scads of strange situations all handsomely inked and colored. And most of the work is of considerably higher quality that his comics work of the time. This, after all, was Jack’s day job, and he obviously worked very hard to please his paymasters. I really cannot recommend this card set highly enough. Aside from the unbridled creativity the cards show, the images themselves are just plain pleasurable to look at. They are also pretty darn wacky, and the slick finishing only heightens Jack’s inherent surreality. It’s amazing to think, in this day and age, that a senior citizen was producing the volume and quality of work he did at Ruby-Spears, and still managed to produce comics on a more or less monthly basis. In these days, when fan-favorite artists can take up to a year between issues, you wonder—what’s their excuse? - CK

(top) Balder-like character for Super Friends. (left) Sartorially-challenged sorceress character for Space Ghost. Note the scribble to “simplify.”

Raiding the King Features catalog: Prince Valiant and The Phantom get ready for their close-ups in these presentation boards for unrealized animated series.

Beauty & The Beasts: Concepts for unsold Animal Hospital and Wonder Woman cartoons.

Kirby shows his range: Uncharacteristic character art for Heartbreak High and The Mighty Misfits.

Shades of 1972: The Demon and Kamandi? No, it’s The Raven and Planet of the Apes presentation art.

Cary Becomes A Car? (The name was later changed to “Turbo Teen,” but never sold.) (below) Shades of OMAC! Skanner faces what New York commuters deal with daily.

A gallery of wrong-doers from Steve Gerber’s Roxie’s Raiders pitch.

needed talent. They called Jack Kirby and made their pitch. Kirby rifled through his huge pile of concepts and ideas and offered them Captain Victory. Captain Victory’s genesis preceded its print debut by a few years. As discussed earlier, Jack was approached about the time he had left Steve and Bill Schanes started Pacific Comics when they were in Marvel by a would-be comics entrepreneur, who wanted to start a line high school, selling back issues of old comics they had scoured old book called “Kirby Comics.” Jack was asked to do something like Star Wars stores and garage sales for. By the mid-’70s, Pacific Comics had become for a possible graphic novel and the pages produced for that abortive a mail-order giant, and their ads appeared regularly in the increasingly venture comprised the first two issues of Captain Victory and the Galactic hefty advertising sections of Marvel and DC’s color comics. As the Rangers. What is ironic is that Captain Victory bears little resemblance decade progressed, they began a lucrative trade in “artists’ portfolios.” to Star Wars, and a great deal of resemblance to Star Trek. It could be These portfolios were high quality, suitable-for-framing prints of works argued that Captain Victory himself was none other than Captain James created by fan-favorite comics and fantasy artists. As the ’80s began and Tiberius Kirk reincarnated as the Kirbyean Nordic-hero archetype. the comic book direct market began to explode, the Schanes’ figured Jack was also inspired, albeit not in a positive way, by the success of the time was right to take on the four-color monopoly of the New York Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Jack explicitly stated in interviews based companies. They would produce a line of color comics and disthat Captain Victory was a rejoinder to that enormously successful tribute them exclusively in the burgeoning comic store network. They Steven Spielberg film. Kirby was disgusted by the rosy optimism of the film, and by the portrayal of the aliens visiting Earth as harmless and cute little avatars of universal brotherhood. Jack was a student of history and of nature and he reckoned that the only reason an alien race would cross the vast reaches of space to visit us would be to conquer and subjugate the Earth, not take a few of its inhabitants on an interstellar joyride. In fact, at the end of the original 48-page graphic novel, Jack promised a sequel to be entitled “Encounters of a Savage Kind.” Jack worked with the ever-reliable Mike Royer on the graphic novel. Jack and Mike did some of the best work they’ve ever done together, certainly better than the uninspired and dispirited work they produced at the end of their Marvel run. The Schanes Bros. were hooked, but by the time the title had begun, Royer was otherwise committed, having donned his mouse ears for what became a lengthy tenure for Disney Consumer Products. So Jack offered the inking duties to his young friend Mike Thibodeaux, and by the time Captain Victory hit the stands, Jack’s interests had led him elsewhere. In the course of its run, Captain Victory went from being a relatively straight-forward space opera to a full-blown cosmic freakout unlike anything seen in comics before or since. The narrative seemed to follow Jack’s stream of consciousness and the art was a constantly mutating blend of cubism, Kirby psychedelia, and, buried somewhere beneath, something approximating standard-issue action fare. Kirby’s designs were dense, surreal, almost maddening. Cut loose not only from editorial interference but also from the discipline of the newsstand, Jack’s imagination went places few, if any, have been before. Jim Woodring on Captain Victory: “Jack’s art was psychedelic in the way comics from the ’30s and ’40s were psychedelic. I think that was where he came from. There was something really naive about all of his fantasy scenarios. There wasn’t a lot of the kind of phony, portentous, metaphysicalspiritual qualities that have crept into comics. It always reminded me of Coney Island, just naive and whacked without trying to penetrate beneath your epidermis.” It is this writer’s opinion that Captain Victory This is what they mean by “Kirbyesque.” Pencils from Captain Victory #1, page 7. is overdue for reevaluation. Taken as a Marvel14

Chapter 2: Captain Victory (or, “Take That, Mr. Spielberg!”)

exploit. To see this process at its purest, at its most undiluted, look at Captain Victory. Kirby seemed to jettison narrative and coherence and all the other niceties of storytelling in relentless pursuit of his own personal revelation. The void of space became even more Kirbyesque in Victory’s pages. Space pulsed and throbbed. Stars, even galaxies were constantly birthing on the page. In a startling anticipation of one of the most stunning photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, a giant eye opened in the universe on the title’s pages (CV #7). The most fearsome, the most destructive villain the Rangers ever faced hadn’t even been born yet (CV #10). Aliens of every imaginable variety stalked the books panels, including one whose very presence in our space-time continuum altered the fabric of reality itself, and one who was a big as four galaxies. (A personal sidenote: My first Kirby comic was Kamandi #30 (“U.F.O. The Wildest Ride Ever”). I cannot begin to describe the impact this comic had on my imagination. My first impression of Jack was formed by this comic, and that impression was “Kirby = mind-blowing, freaked-out, hyper-imaginative comics.” Bruce Berry’s obtuse inking only served to heighten this effect. I know some TJKC readers don’t care for Kamandi, D.Bruce Berry’s inking, or Captain Victory, for that matter, but this is the reason that Captain Victory dug itself so deeply into my addled cranium.) How many fans were fully appreciating this unprecedented phantasmagoria is hard to say. Apparently, the first couple of issues sold well, but as the artwork and storyline got weirder and weirder, the sales apparently began to drop. “I think it was the wrong book for the time,” Mark Evanier says. “ I don’t think it’s a book that Jack would have chosen to do had he not had that book already on the shelf. It was too much like a traditional super-hero comic to appeal to people who were sick of traditional superhero comics, but it wasn’t enough like traditional super-hero comics to appeal to people who wanted such a thing.” If their interest stopped with the first few issues, casual readers might also have felt that they’d seen Lightning Lady gets ready to kick some Galactic Ranger butt in these pencils from Captain Victory #2, page 25. it all before. The Insectons looked like they styled action comic, it doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Taken as a manic, were ripped out of the New Gods’ pages, CV’s sidekicks Orca and Tarin mind-bending fever dream, it puts any of Grant Morrison’s attempts looked like leftovers from the Inhumans and Kamandi, respectively, and at such to shame. It is my pet thesis that Jack’s relentless strip-mining Captain Victory’s name and appearance seemed like yesterday’s news. of his subconscious creativity caused him somehow to break through To make matters worse, the last two issues of the book were printed to some Jungian layer of our collective mind. The constant hours at on Baxter stock with the hand-painted color that Pacific never seemed the desk, the constant need to hold the attention of the American to get a handle on. Pacific’s switch over to full-color printing on Baxter adolescent, the constant demands by editors to top himself by coming stock (and the concurrent 50-cent price rise) was a disaster and probably up with new ideas caused him to open a door, somewhere deep in his helped bring about the company’s demise. Nowhere was this disaster mind or deep in our mind. This is why a relatively unschooled son of uglier and less appropriate than it was on Jack’s books. The modeled immigrant squalor, an unquestioning foot soldier in history’s greatest (muddled?) coloring didn’t accentuate the art, it simply made it look calamity, a man who seemed untroubled by neurotic self-reflection but cruder. The muddled pinks and ocres that Pacific’s production department was overly concerned with the whims of the marketplace, could give was so fond of destroyed pictorial separation and depth of field. The birth to so many mind-blowing concepts. This is why he could bring into cover to the last issue of Captain Victory is a particularly egregious the world so many ideas that comics and even Hollywood continue to example of this. The coloring reduces the entire image into a brown 15

and indecipherable mess. Captain Victory followed a very strange curve. The ’80s stories started off shakily as Kirby reacquainted himself with the concept and Thibodeaux acquainted himself with Kirby’s pencils. The title then built up steam conceptually, becoming America’s premier Psychedelic/Cubist/ Space-Operatic hallucination, and then waned in the later issues as Kirby began to run out of rabbits to pull out of the book’s hat—but there are at least six issues (CV #7-12) that are, in this writer’s opinion, required reading for “Kozmic” Kirby fans. Finally, it’s possible that one very famous comics fan got at least a passing glimpse of the book. In the first storyline, a race of giant, armored, insect-like aliens invades a planet and creates a massive underground hive, where they store the corpses of human victims. From out of the sky, the Space Rangers come and fight with this alien invasion,

which is led by the insectoid’s queen. This is Captain Victory I’m describing now, not the 1986 Jim Cameron film Aliens. But, come to think of it...!

Chapter 3: Destroyer Duck (or, “Take That, Mr. Galton!”)

Pacific wasn’t the only California publisher banking on Jack’s prodigious talents to launch a color comics line. Dean Mullaney and Cat Yronwode had had some success with their Eclipse Monthly, a black-&-white “ground-level” magazine printing the work of some established and up-and-coming cartoonists. Steve Gerber shared the same somewhat counter-cultural mindset of the Eclipse crowd, and had published his post-Howard the Duck collaboration with Gene Colan, Stewart the Rat, there. When Steve needed to raise some capital to finance his lawsuit against Marvel for the rights to Howard, he knew exactly where to turn. Steve was instrumental in getting Jack hired on at Ruby-Spears. In addition to Thundarr, Jack and Steve worked closely on another Gerber concept. “Jack and I were both involved in the development of something called Roxie’s Raiders, which never quite got off the ground,” Steve recalls. “ It was a 1930s kind of Indiana Jones crossed with Doc Savage concept.” When Gerber approached Jack to draw a benefit comic for his lawsuit—for free—Jack said, without blinking, “Sure, sounds like fun.” The resulting product of this union, Destroyer Duck, was Steve Gerber’s hilarious screed against the increasing corporatization of Marvel Comics and of Reagan’s America. Gerber enlisted other friends to come on board and help in the fight. Mark Evanier, Sergio Aragonés, Jerry Siegel, and Neal Adams contributed back-up material, and in a moment of inspiration, Gerber tapped Alfredo Alcala to handle the finished art duties. Alcala had been working with Kirby on the Ruby-Spears pitches and, against all odds or expectations, his work meshed quite well with the King’s. Besides being a devilishly entertaining strip on its own merits. Destroyer Duck also addressed two of the long-standing criticisms of Jack’s less rabid fans. Jack had shed much of his Marvel era following when he began dialoguing his own material and began using more faithful (and less ornate) embellishers. The arrangement he had with DC, and later in his Marvel tenure, allowed Jack full control over the work. Full control to Jack meant the dialogue and inking being done the way he, and not some editor 3000 miles away, wanted. Jack wanted the inking to be faithful to the pencils, and became almost fanatical about this after the experience with Vinnie Colletta on the Fourth World books. Mike Royer, a professional’s professional, gave Jack exactly what he wanted and did so under time and financial constraints that few, if any, other artists could have withstood. But many fans, used to Marvel-style polish, found Jack’s ’70s work unappetizing. Here’s a mystery: A random pencil page (labeled “page 16”) from what appears to be an unpublished Alcala brought back a bit of polish to Roxie’s Raiders comic book story. Kirby’s pencils and also helped to smooth 16

Drawing The Line (In The Sand)

over some of the anatomical awkwardness that Jack’s pencils had been exhibiting since the late ’60s. The lettering and sound effects had that Marvel-type feel and Gerber’s endlessly inventive writing made the package complete. When asked if the look was meant to appear Marvel-ish, or at least like some devilish inversion of a Marvel comic, Gerber replied, “It wasn’t so much that it would look Marvel-ish, the idea was that this was Eclipse’s first four-color comic book, and we wanted to make sure that it looked just like a ‘real comic book.’ We wanted to scare the bejeezus out of them—make it absolutely clear that they were not the only ones who could do this!” Kirby seemed to be taken away with the spirit of the enterprise and turned in his most inventive and energetic comic book work of the ’80s. The book went on to be his biggest seller of the decade, with the first issue racking up sales of a now-unimaginable 80,000. STEVE GERBER: “Jack wanted me to be the writer on the book and he wanted to be the artist, and that’s the way he wanted to handle it. He used to pat me on the back all of the time and tell me how wonderful it was working with a ‘real writer’! Jack would certainly add a lot of touches. “It was only the first issue that was done as a benefit issue. The succeeding issues were only done because the retailers insisted on a series. They didn’t think they could sell a one-shot. My own feeling was, although there was some very funny stuff in the later issues too, that the first issue probably should have stood alone as its own little monument to my anger and Kirby’s. “Jack’s stuff could never exactly be described as passive! His work on Destroyer Duck, yeah, 17

There has always been two schools of thought in comic book illustration. I refer to these competing factions as the “Cartoonists’ School” and the “Illustrators’ School.” The former school includes such talents as CC Beck, Jack Cole, Steve Ditko, and Bruce Timm. The latter tradition grew out of the newspaper adventure strip tradition and counts artists like Al Williamson, Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson, and Alex Ross in their ranks. And clearly, with the notable exception of Bruce Timm, modern fanboy allegiance has always been pledged to the illustrators. Muddying the waters are what I call the “Straddlers.” These are artists who employ the energy and vitality of the Cartoonists with the breadth and complexity of the Illustrators. Will Eisner almost singlehandedly invented this approach, followed by folks like Frank Robbins, Alex Toth, Mike Ploog, and of course, Jack Kirby. Jack’s role as a Straddler has always puzzled the fan community, since like other straddlers, his approach is wholly his own. Jack’s “line of action” figure work in the ’40s was clearly influenced by the zany cartoons of the time, possibly a product of Jack’s short-lived tenure in the Fleisher shop. But Jack’s work had always been tempered by the discipline and demands of his editors and his work skewed more heavily towards illustration. By the end of his Marvel run and towards the dawn of the Fourth World, something changed. In addition to being a straddler, Jack was also an Impresso-Expressionist, and his style began to morph to better express the emotions Jack was seeking to convey. Figures got bigger and blockier, anatomy became abstracted, and his layouts became more explosive and energetic. Unfortunately, his lurch towards the Cartoonist approach came at exactly the wrong time. The comics world was entering an awkward and self-conscious period, and “cartoony” was the most withering epithet a fanboy could hurl at an artist. Several great Straddlers like Mike Ploog, Frank Robbins, Joe Staton, and Tom Sutton were either unappreciated or chased out of comics. Jack’s work was scorned by the fanboy crowd, their eyes dazzled by oceans of Wrightsonian crosshatching and Adamsian idealization. A Straddler could be tolerated, even admired, but a Cartoonist....well, suffice it to say that there was no place in comic books for a lowly Cartoonist, mister! But Jack lived in his own world and his flirtation with Cartoonist-ism eventually became a full blown tryst. This union was squirting out litters of pups by the 1980s. The official fanboy line was that Jack couldn’t draw anymore, and if drawing equals being a Neal Adams clone, maybe that was true. A look at the penciled work tells a different story. I believe that the tendency, and the desire, to Cartoon only deepened when Jack was around the talented folks in Animation. If you look at drawing elements often unappreciated by some of the Illustration boosters—like composition, storytelling, design, and quality of stroke—it’s all there in much of Jack’s early ’80s work. I think that Jack may have been having some problems then, but I think the basic fact of the matter is that his interests and his approach were simply going in new directions, directions that the “Relevancy”- obsessed comic book fan wasn’t willing to follow. - CK

(top) Cover pencils from Destroyer Duck #2, as Gerber and Kirby skewer Frank Miller’s Elektra.

there was a certain passion to it towards the beginning that I think probably had something to do with his feelings towards Marvel. “It was one of the best experiences I ever had in comics, working on that book with him. He was one of the funniest and most talented human beings I ever met.” Kirby’s work on Destroyer Duck also seemed to earn him some good will from the community at large, and the book signaled a renewed interest in Jack’s career and his own struggles against his former employers. Jack’s stock in the eyes of the Comic Community at-large had sunk precipitously after the cancellation of the Fourth World books, and the fanboy clique was particularly ungracious. Fanboy opinion is maddeningly fickle, and yesterday’s superstar is usually tomorrow’s whipping

boy. One need look no further than the abuse heaped on ’80s and ’90s golden boys in the fan press and on the Internet today. The established fan press was usually remarkably faithful to Jack, but at street level the fan consensus was at best disdainful and at worst hostile. Kirby’s work was usually ignored or casually dismissed in the lower-brow fanzines. But in the eyes of the faction within the community that was looking towards the future, Jack’s moves in the ’80s were very well-received. Like so many other points in the medium’s history, Jack was there at the line of scrimmage, helping to bring the field forward. Captain Victory and Silver Star helped put Pacific, the first real threat to the old system, on the map. He helped a fan-favorite writer get a new deal on the fanfavorite character he created for the fan-favorite publisher. After a decade of often being seen as has-been and hack, Jack was adopted by many of the most crucial movers and shakers in the business as a father figure and an important symbol of resistance against a corrupt and unfair status quo.

Chapter 4: Silver Star (or, “Take That, Mr. Claremont!)

Destroyer Duck #2, page 19. In the printed version, panel one was expanded into a full-pager for page 18, & replaced here.

MIKE ROYER: “Probably in late ’81, there was a strike of the screen cartoonists. Because all of us cartoonists on-staff at Disney had been hired under the union classification, we were technically on-strike. However, since we did nothing at all in animation, the union allowed us to continue working, but we could not cross the picket lines. So, we would go in once or twice a week and pick up our work from the Jack-in-the-Box [restaurant] across the street from the Disney lot, and go home and work. And that’s why I had the time to work on Silver Star. Jack gave me a call one day and wanted to know if I had the time and I guess I felt I did, and I met Jack and Roz for a long lunch at the Copper Penny Restaurant on Burbank. Over the course of lunch, Jack told me the storyline for Silver Star, and all the time we were eating, I was thinking ‘Good God, how is he going to put all of this material in twenty-some pages?’, not realizing that what Jack was telling was all six or seven issues. It was all done in his head.” Silver Star is an unjustly overlooked part of the Kirby canon. It is unique in that it was designed by Jack to be a mini-series, and remarkably, the basic premise of the series seems to be as much a rejoinder of the success of Marvel’s X-Men as much as Captain Victory had been to the dewey-eyed naivete of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In every aspect, except the main character’s costume, Silver Star is very much the X-Men stripped of the super-hero trappings. The new race of Homo Superior

is scattered, anonymous and apparently unaware of their true nature. Many use their powers for material gain as entertainers. Much of the story concerns Silver Star trying to gather up his genetic kinsmen in an attempt to protect them from Darius Drumm, a villainous mutant who wants to monopolize his status as a post-human. When thwarted by Silver Star, Drumm becomes a literal angel of death who sanitizes the landscape as he flies over in what is undoubtedly one of Kirby’s most horrific tableaus. Drumm is a throwback to the New Gods in many ways. He resembles Darkseid physically and shares the Fourth World villain’s obsession for total destruction. However, Drumm doesn’t rule a planet, but lords over a Fundamentalist Cult he inherited from the father he murdered. In this, Drumm is reminiscent of Glorious Godfrey, Kirby’s vicious caricature of fundamentalist preachers. Both Drumm and Godfrey are Kirby’s visions of the apocalyptic “Fire and Brimstone” preacher, obsessed and driven to annihilate individuality, and ultimately, Life itself. Kirby seemed to be commenting on how the Christian vision of the afterlife had been perverted and transformed by fundamentalism into an obsession with death and worldwide annihilation. Both Drumm

Silver Star’s original costume: Inks by Kirby.

and Godfrey seek to eliminate life, because they see God’s creation as wicked and unclean. Drumm is very much the penultimate Kirby villain, a purified version of Darkseid. Whereas Darkseid searched for an elusive equation to wipe out creation, Drumm uses his formidable mutant powers to become Anti-Life, and is only defeated by Silver Star’s use of hypnotism to trick Drumm into seeing himself consumed in the inferno. Silver Star clearly was not appealing to Drumm’s humanity, but his egocentricity. Art-wise, Silver Star was a mixed bag. The first four issues were inked by Royer, whose bold style complimented Jack’s increasingly cartoony style quite well. Those issues were also printed in standard four-color process, giving Jack’s work the simple and colorful impact it needed. But when the strike at Disney ended, Royer was unable to finish the series, and the last two issues were inked by D. Bruce Berry. Whether because of deadline pressures or because it had been so long since he had worked with Jack, Berry’s work lacked the crisp, other-worldly sheen he had lent to Kamandi— and like Captain Victory, the air seemed to go out of the book’s tires entirely with the introduction of Baxter paper and the full-color process printing.

(top) Primetime pencils from Jack’s original film proposal for Silver Star.

Captain Victory, Silver Star and Destroyer Duck all ended at about the same time. Jack was busy at the time developing other ideas, including a never-published title called the Midnight Men, but the comic racks were Kirby-less once again. Jack probably didn’t mind. He had plenty of work to do for Ruby-Spears and Hanna-Barbera, and his life in general was pretty darn good.

INTERLUDE

most prominent creators. DC was preparing a new JLA cartoon called Super Powers and Kenner seemed quite receptive to redesigns of Fourth World characters. Two Super Powers comic book mini-series were planned to tie in with the ’toon, both making extensive use of Jack’s early ’70s characters. DC offered Jack a generous and lucrative contract, cutting him in on licensing proceeds, even though Jack had signed away his rights long before. The icing on the cake was to be a reprinting the original New Gods series with a concluding story to be written and drawn by Kirby himself. The story of this venture has been covered in depth in these pages, but suffice it to say that this was a problematic concept from the outset. Thirteen years and countless Kirby creations had passed, and it seemed to be a bit dodgy to expect Jack to wrap up a story that he probably didn’t expect to finish in the first place. New Gods followed no set narrative curve and the issues that were published in the early ’70s seemed to merely establish the cast and settings that Jack would work with for as long as he could. In fact, one could make a strong argument that all of the published Fourth World books were merely exposition (with the exception of the second half of Mister Miracle’s run, which this writer sees as extraneous and irrelevant to the Fourth World as a whole). As has been recounted, Jack’s plan for the New Gods was to kill most of them off. DC understandably balked at having characters slated for commercial exploitation done away with by their creator, so the original ending was scrapped and two lengthy stories were eventually published. One, the story published in New Gods Reprint #6 (1984), was hurriedly prepared as a stop-gap while Greg Theakston prepared a fully-painted graphic novel using the rejected Hunger Dogs story along with some new material. “Even Gods Must Die” (New Gods Reprint #6) wasn’t a bad story; in fact it was somewhat clever in its commentary on the ubiquity of automation and technology. In one humorous sequence, Jack had the fearsome Female Furies reduced to desk duty behind massive banks of computers. Jack’s pencils were again somewhat awkward and cartoony, and New Gods Reprint #6, page 37 pencils. (Mercifully, it wasn’t a scratch-&-sniff comic.) again Berry’s inking at times seemed rushed, but Bruce’s light, delicate line was a refreshing change of pace for Jack’s ’80s work. All things considered, this second to last chapter of the New Gods saga was fairly entertaining and a substantial improveKirby’s comic jones was not idle for long. After a commercially and ment over much of Jack’s Pacific work. “It was Jack’s big finish. I artistically disastrous period in the late ’70s, DC Comics was on the would imagine that he put that kind of extra work into his beloved move again. DC was blessed with the visionary editorial triumvirate of story, no matter how much DC had distorted it,” Theakston observes. Jennette Kahn, Paul Levitz, and Dick Giordano, but was also blessed In addition, the juxtaposition between this new story and and the with the competition’s editor-in-chief, who was chasing away seasoned reprint of New Gods #11 showed how much Jack had become interesttalent at a rapid clip. As DC turned its attention to the mushrooming ed in abstract design and unusual page layout. direct market and the lucrative trade in high quality reprints, Jack’s But what it wasn’t was satisfying, nor was the Hunger Dogs graphic New Gods series came back into favor. Levitz had been quite successful novel released the following year. Ending a story that wasn’t originally in using Fourth World characters in the fan-favorite Legion of Supermeant to end seemed awkward and forced. It would have been much Heroes, and Kirby’s riffs were being copped by some of comicdoms 20

Chapter 5: Return To The Gods

’80s Inking Jack’s fans are a passionate lot, and there is perhaps no issue that riles their passions greater than inking. As someone might have once said, if you want to transform a group of otherwise mild-mannered comic art afficionados into a raving, drooling pack of wild beasts, simply say the two magic words: “Vince Colletta.” You will soon bear witness to a spectacle of unbridled savagery unparalleled in human history. As a lifelong Kirby fan, I too have my opinions. But in the final analysis, I am all too aware that these opinions are a question of hair-splitting. Jack’s art was so powerful and confident that it would take a lot, and I mean a lot, of effort and/or incompetence to defile it. Though I must admit a strong dislike for say, Joe Simon’s or Paul Reinman’s crude and heavy-handed work, there are surely a large coterie of Kirby fans who would rise up to smite me in their defense. But I can safely say that most, if not all, of Jack’s finishers from, say, 1955 on, were at least (in the case of George Klein or the dreaded Colletta) adequate and at best (in the case of Wally Wood or Joe Sinnott) stunning. Jack’s ’80s work is of course controversial, and one of the most heated controversies concerned the inking. I remember being told by a comics pro at a convention that the only problem with Jack’s work in the ’80s was his inkers. And surely, there has been no shortage of criticism in that arena. Some have said that Mike Thibodeaux simply lacked the chops to tackle Jack’s stuff. Greg Theakston had to endure the taunts and brickbats of Kirby purists for his alleged desecration of the Hunger Dogs. And to this day, there are old Marvel loyalists who will mutter dark words about Mike Royer while perusing stacks of Jack at original art booths. I am a professional cartoonist. Admittedly, I haven’t done a lot of comic book work and I’m not proud of any of it, but I know a thing or two about how the work is done. So I thought I’d burn up a sidebar, weighing in with my two cents on Jack’s Eighties embellishers.

graphic novel, but I really enjoy his work on Silver Star and what I’ve seen of the Hunger Dogs as well.

MIke Thibodeaux Mike’s background was more in commercial art than in comics. Subsequently, his approach to Jack showed much more of a decorative and poster-like approach than a Royeresque narrative approach. Mike was also pretty young at the time, and was inking the early issues of CV in his spare time, which accounts for some of the rough edges on those jobs. That being said, I can certainly see the appeal that Mike’s inking had for Jack, especially in the ’80s. Jack was clearly becoming much more interested in design—specifically abstract design—work and MIke T. was perfectly suited to help Jack express this part of his creativity. Mike’s approach on Captain Victory was to isolate each line and shape and sharply define each of them as a separate design element. His stress lines were defined with a razor’s edge and some of the energy bursts looked liked they were rendered using a circle template. Mike helped Jack refine the geometric and abstract qualities in Jack’s drawing. On many of the issues of Captain Victory you can see each panel as a separate and distinct work of art suitable for enlargement and framing. However successful this might have been as a exercise, there were two problems with this approach. The first is that this is Comics we’re talking about, not fine art, and isolating the elements therein caused the narrative flow to be disrupted. Secondly, and this is not my personal opinion, but the abstracting and geometric qualities of Mike’s work are exactly what a lot of comics fans didn’t like about Jack’s ’80s work. I’ll never forget a comment made by a friend, one Saturday morning at the legendary comic store, the Million Year Picnic. He was glancing through Captain Victory #8 and then brandished it at me and said “They should call this ‘Square Comics.’ ” He knew what a fan I was of the title and of Jack and wished to upbraid me for like such abstract and angular work.

Mike Royer

Alfredo Alcala

Mike is a phenomenally talented artist. The shame of it is that few people have seen his own work. He is a fantastic penciler as well as an inker. His own style is a lot different from what Kirby fans might expect and his comic work owes more to his early mentor Russ Manning than it does to Kirby. Mike is also a journeyman in the best sense of the word, a craftsman’s craftsman who follows directions, tailors his own inclinations to the job at hand and gets the work done on time. I think that Mike would have inked Kirby a lot differently than he had if Kirby gave him some slack. Mike had the misfortune to come on the scene after Jack was agitated by Colletta’s behavior during the Fourth World days. I also think that Mike’s true calling is that of a humor/bigfoot cartoonist, which is why he was so successful at Disney. So for my money, Mike’s work was best suited to Jack’s ’80s pencils. I believe that Jack’s work had intentionally become broader and more “cartoonish.” I don’t for a second think that his early ’80s work was the result of some degenerative problem with his drawing. There was a bit of shakiness in the line and he was no spring chicken, but I believe Jack was very much influenced by his experience in animation. Mark Evanier said he believed that if Jack had his druthers, he would have done much more work in a humorous vein. My only criticism of Mike would be that he tended to flatten Jack’s ’70s work with an approach that skewed towards cartooniness. Not always, to be sure, but certainly during the Marvel days. But artists are products of their environment and Mike was already doing a lot of humor work in the late ’70s. My all time favorite Royer work is the stuff he did on the original Captain Victory

At first blush, Jack and Alfredo might seem to be wildly incompatible—the master of the broad stroke versus the grand poobah of the fine line—but their work together at Ruby-Spears and on Destroyer Duck was outstanding. In fact, I thought the DD material was highly reminiscent of Jack’s work with Syd Shores in the late 1960s. Both Shores and Alcala were heavily influenced by Alex Raymond’s early Flash Gordon work, and both inkers brought a bit of subtlety to Jack’s bolder than bold pencil work. Alfredo also did a fantastic job on the handcoloring on Destroyer Duck #5. Alfredo’s work surely displeased purists, but he added another dimension to Jack’s work that many appreciated.

D. Bruce Berry I think of all of Jack’s inkers in the ’80s Berry is my least favorite, but there are two mitigating factors that bear mentioning. First, as mentioned in my analysis of Silver Star, Berry had the misfortune of having his work caked in hand-colored crud. Secondly, in the case of Silver Star and I am guess in the case of New Gods #6, Berry was very likely enlisted at the last minute and had to meet tight deadlines. Royer had to bail on SS and the New Gods #6 story was a stop-gap story to bide time until the Hunger Dogs was reworked. These factors spell deadline doom to me. D Bruce hadn’t worked with Jack in almost 9 years when he was enlisted to finish the Silver Star series. The resulting work showed the lag. Bruce’s personal style was also much lighter and more refined that Royer’s. Unlike Royer who worked in brush, D. Bruce worked mostly in pen. Interestingly enough, Berry’s strip “Flynn”

was run as a backup strip in early issues of SS. Though his layouts betrayed a Kirby influence, his linework hearkened back to the Golden Age of Illustration. There was a strong Charles Dana Gibson or James Montgomery Flagg-type feel to his finishes. That being said, I appreciated the contrast of Berry’s more delicate line on the New Gods story. Jack’s drawing was getting a bit cruder at that point in time, and Berry helped to tone down the heavy-handedness a bit. The work was also helped considerably by DC’s topnotch production department and by Anthony Tollin’s tasteful coloring. Though I think Berry’s inking was the least artful of the lot, it worked well on its own terms. And there’ll always be a special place in my heart for Berry’s Kamandi work.

Greg Theakston My first look at Greg’s work with Jack was the last issue of the first Super Powers series. And though I risk being burned in effigy for saying so, I must confess at the time I thought it was the best inking on Kirby I’d seen in a long time. And I still think that Greg did a fantastic job on that issue. In addition, the book also shows how much of a difference a professional and experienced production staff like DC’s can make in the look of a comic book. Greg was unique among Jack’s inkers in that he was not ordered to follow the pencils exactly. His approach to the linework also had more in common with inkers like Joe Sinnott and Frank Giacoia than it did with Mike Royer. Greg was also unique in the challenges and working conditions he faced at the time. All of the work Greg did was done for DC, who had different standards and expectations than did Eclipse or Pacific. Jack’s relationship with DC was not terribly cozy, and Greg acted as an intermediary between the DC offices and the Kirbys. It’s a matter of historical record that DC rejected the Hunger Dogs story, and it’s no stretch of the imagination to think that Jack wasn’t overjoyed by that, especially when you consider Jack’s stormy history with DC. A lot of folks have grumbled about Greg’s inking on the reworked Hunger Dogs. Several points are raised in my mind here. First, there were numerous production problems with adapting standard comics pages to graphic novel size. Greg had discussed the problems with the glaring incompatibility between Berry and Royer’s finishes, a fact that can’t be argued. More controversial is his claim that the stats he received were poor. Some have countered that it was not a big deal for the stats to be reshot. But, if DC was not happy about the project in general, it’s likely that they wouldn’t break their backs having their busy and expensive production department go back and reshoot the work, especially if a local artist, and friend of the Kirbys, volunteered to fix everything for free. Theakston’s work does have its critics. A strong case can be made that Theakston rendering often lacked integrity with Jack’s original intent, and that Royer’s finishing was much more consistent with Jack’s constructions. Admittedly it was often jarring to see a handsome Joe Sinnott-styled face on a figure 5 heads tall. But Jack didn’t complain and continued to work closely with Greg, so it can only be assumed Jack was happy enough with the end result. And again, I must admit that I was, well, relieved is the best way to put it, when the Hunger Dogs came out. I was a kid and wanted a measure of slickness in my comics. Greg worked hard to do Jack’s big finale what he thought was justice, and in his mind that meant fixing some of Jack’s drawing problems and giving the work a more polished look in general. But I am also sympathetic to the “original intent” crowd. Hopefully, the bossman will run the original Royer pages in their entirety in the future so we can compare and enjoy both. As mentioned in the section on the second Super Powers series, I think Greg did the best work possible on those pages, considering the circumstances. - CK

D. Bruce Berry’s original, unaltered inks to the last page of the Hunger Dogs Graphic Novel.

wiser and probably more successful to have Jack reboot the series and pass the book off to other hands, the way he had conceived of in the first place. Jack seemed unsure what he wanted to say about his old creations, other than decrying the onslaught of technology, personified in the reappearance of Metron’s young protege, Esak. Now in the service of Darkseid, Esak was no longer young and cherubic. His obsession with inhumane technology had hideously disfigured him, and the only reward Darkseid offered Esak for his toil was the strength to kill himself. As explored in these pages, Hunger Dogs itself was essentially a salvage job undertaken using old material originally slated for the New Gods reprint series along with a patchwork of new pages. None of it hung together particularly well, visually or thematically. Greg Theakston’s inking and painting was handsome and gave the work some welcome solidity, but some fans decried the change from the familiar look of the past two decades. Some fans have also criticized Theakston for imposing so much of his own personality on the inks. For his part Theakston counters, “I got the original art and I looked at it and I thought ‘What the hell’s going on here? The Berry stuff and the Royer don’t mesh at all.’ And because they have been instructed not to change anything, some of the anatomy’s askew and some of the faces are wrong. It really wasn’t in-line with the rest of [Jack’s] career. So I said [to DC Editor Andy] Helfer, ‘Can I work on this, can I bring this all together?’ And Helfer says, ‘We are so through with this thing that you can do anything you want on it.’ The book was made of a 22page story that was supposed to finalize the series, and DC looked at it and said ‘We don’t like this’ and Jack said ‘What do you mean you don’t like it?’ So there was friction right off. Jack had to come up with

a story that he can wrap around this first book and then do a whole new book that doesn’t repeat what he had just done. They give him a certain leeway, which of course he deserved, and when he turned in something they didn’t like, they made it difficult for him.” In the end, however, the transitions between Greg’s work and earlier pages by Berry and Royer were also somewhat jarring. Where there had been two more or less completely disparate finishing styles, there now were three, and the entire project was marred by production glitches. But none of this would have mattered if the story was there in the first place. Though all involved labored to the best of their abilities, Hunger Dogs did not provide the closure on the New Gods saga that it had originally been meant to provide. Mark Evanier puts it best: “Jack was not good at going backwards. Jack had left that behind and was no longer interested in that particular story or the emotional underpinnings of those characters. There were a lot of problems with the Hunger Dogs, but one of the problems was that Jack was going off in other directions.”

The Anti-Climax Jack’s next and last major project was the second Super Powers mini-series, one of the most controversial episodes in Jack’s career. From the New Gods work to this series, there was an alarming dip in the quality of Jack’s drawing. Theakston labored mightily to polish Jack’s work, but the fundamentals often just weren’t there. As with Hunger Dogs, Theakston says, “I’ve come under a lot of fire for that stuff. I did them on overlays. I would ink something and it didn’t look right, I would buzz it off with an electric eraser. There are spots of those jobs 22

that have been inked three times to get it right.” Like many other fans line itself was also shaky. “He had a tremor, which is why he stopped who have seen Jack’s penciled work on Super Powers, Theakston doing autographs” at conventions, Theakston says. believes that Jack’s hand-eye coordination had begun to deteriorate, a There was rampant speculation at the exact cause of Jack’s condition not at all unusual for a 68-year-old man. Jack was a living decline, which shall be addressed later in this article. However, what legend and a giant among men, but he was, after all, mortal, and not is beyond speculation is that at the time Jack was in the midst of an immune to the ravages of time. incredibly stressful and time-consuming battle with Marvel over the However, there were frequent glimpses of the old magic here and return of his original art, and ultimately over his copyrights to the there, particularly in some of the imaginative design work. “I’m sure characters he co-created. Jack was pushing 70 and was facing a battle the design stuff was what kept him amused; the figure drawing was a man half his age would have found taxing. This couldn’t help but really secondary,” says Theakston. “He was really unique when it affect the quality of his work. In any event, Super Powers was Jack’s last came to his design work. Art history is my thing and there’s nothing major comics work and it was a strange and unfitting end to a storied like him. And that’s the definition of a genius. They’re unique.” and distinguished career. “Jack swore after Super Powers that he would Furthermore, the work done for Super Powers was a startling contrast never do another regular book ever,” Theakston says. “It was such a to the work he had done for animation at roughly the same time. Greg Theakston weighed in on the advantage Jack enjoyed in the animation field: “The difference was [the animation drawing] was all large. He was doing pieces two and three feet wide. It was not so much an issue to him to knuckle down and do little details. The fact that it was so enormous freed him so much that it was really quite the pleasure, and when he had to go back to doing comics after doing years of large animation drawings, he had a hell of a time. It was very difficult for him to draw at 150% [of published size]. The Challengers/ Superman team-up [DC Comics Presents #84, Aug. 1985] was done at that size and you could see it was a struggle for Jack to be drawing that small. “So when Super Powers was coming and it was clear that Jack was going to be drawing the whole series and I was the designated inker, I had a pow-wow with [DC Editor Andy] Helfer and said, ‘Look is there any reason in the world why we can’t do these pages at 200 percent?’ And he said , “No, in fact we’re at the point now where people are turning in artwork in all shapes and sizes, it doesn’t matter one way or the other.” So well, jeez, let’s go for it, let’s have Jack do them larger. We did that to accommodate him.” There was also a wide variation of the quality of the drawing from page to page. “Interestingly on Super Powers,” Theakston says, “I would be receiving them in batches of three pages at a time. He’d do three pages a day [!—C.K.], and the first page would always be pretty good. The second one would be OK, and the third one... by the time you got to the last panel on the third page, he was out of gas.” Greg adds, “Every once in a while [Paul] Kupperberg would write an interesting page that would pique Jack’s interest and Jack would put a little [extra] effort into it.” But the fact remains that the art on Super Powers was perhaps Jack’s weakest ever. Panels were crowded with characters whose anatomy and posing resembled that of thrown rag dolls. Characters seemed to be barely five heads tall at times, in contrast to the standard eight. The actual Jack’s art got more cartoony as the ’80s wore on. From Super Powers #5 (First series), page 8. 23

hardship for him to do that book. He hated the story, he had no interest in the characters, and he was ailing.”

Chapter 6: Moving On, Or Trying To What is interesting about Kirby’s work in the late ’70s and ’80s is that conceptually, his new creations were not really super-heroes. Following the Marvel Age, in which Jack played a crucial part, the entire comics industry, from fans to the executive editorial levels was slowly being dominated by the Super-Hero Cult—and it was a cult that Kirby seemed no longer interested in pandering to. MARK EVANIER: “Jack was very much torn about doing stuff that read like old Kirby comics. He wanted to do stories that interested him—and the stories he did at Marvel, the stories he did for DC, and the ones he did even for Pacific were things that interested him. There’s so much of Jack in those stories, I’m kind of amazed sometimes that people get a lot of what he was talking about. Some of them were personal issues with him— issues in the news, issues in the world, his relationship with various people— that’s what he was writing about. Jack did much more autobiographical comics than a lot of people realize, but he did them in a way that even he didn’t sometimes see the connection.” Captain Victory and Silver Star both wore skin-tight costumes, but that is where their resemblance to your standard Marvel or DC super-hero ended. Captain Victory seemed to care little for the people on Earth, he was simply there to do his job. He was governed by an arcane and inhuman creed: “Victory is Sacrifice, Sacrifice is Continuity, Continuity is Tribulation.” Jack even went to great lengths to imply that Captain Victory was the son of Orion and therefore heir to the throne of Apokolips. Silver Star was on his own personal mission and his struggle was against Darius Drumm alone. One gets the feeling from the story that if he was chasing Drumm and happened to run past a bank robbery or some kind of calamity, he would ignore it and continue pursuing Drumm. In fact, Silver Star seemed to be contemptuous of humanity and its future prospects in general. Witness these words spoken to an elderly man in a restaurant in Silver Star #4: “Whatever you’re thinking about Elmo Frye—Big Masai—and myself is perfectly true! I suppose it just happens, Pops! One man makes a spear—another man counters with a shield—and so on, through the ages... They do it all! Bigger— Scarier!—Never realizing how long they’ve been at it—and that their time has come to clear the stage! No offense, Pops—You’re obsolete.” These are the very same words one could imagine Magneto, a consummate Marvel villain, speaking. And yet they are spoken not

Super Powers (First series) #5, page 23.

only by a Kirby “hero,” but by the titular protagonist of the series! This kind of cold-eyed pessimism is emblematic of Kirby’s solo work, yet unimaginable in a Stan Lee story. One of Kirby’s enduring frustrations surely must’ve been to see his characters, in his stories, mouthing the sort of sunny, “up with people” liberalism that is the hallmark of Stan’s oeuvre. Unlike Stan Lee or Joe Simon, Jack grew up in a ghetto and slogged through the killing grounds of Europe in WWII. He saw Death up close, and saw Humanity at its worst. All of his work in the ’80s was characterized by this rather grim view of the race. And in many ways, Jack was deeply conflicted about his work throughout the second half of his career. Despite his financial indepen24

dence from comics, the scarcity mentality ingrained by the ghetto and the Depression never fully left him. At the height of his career, Jack was the highest paid artist in comics, but this was analogous to being the world’s tallest midget. The overarching imperative for most of Jack’s career was Sales, not Art. Comics was literally a nickel-and-dime business, and there was little science behind what kept a series on the stands. Conflicting with this scarcity mindset was Jack’s desire and ambition to say something about Life. Jack Kirby had done a lot of living and had seen aspects of life that few of us ever glimpse outside of a television screen. Jack wanted to speak his mind, and had always been subject to partners who ultimately called the shots, partners whose life experience was far more limited than his own. Jack was also a voracious reader and his interests went far afield from the heroic fantasies that were the bread-and-butter of comic books. GREG THEAKSTON: “Jack just drew. He just drew and drew and drew. It didn’t matter if it was animation stuff or his own work. You might say that the comic books themselves were simply a platform for Jack to throw out as many ideas as he possibly could. It wasn’t so much

the fact that it was a comic—and he loved drawing comics—he had so many ideas that the comics were the perfect place to express them.” But Jack’s desire to be his own boss often did not serve him well. All of his post-’60s work, especially his ’80s material, tended to be almost too inventive; that is, fantastically creative at the price of coherence. From very early-on a pattern was set. He would start strong, introducing the characters and the basic premise of a series. The first few issues would follow an established storyline, and then a period of apparent second-guessing and self-doubt would set in. Loads of new characters would wander in and out of the storyline, erasing the focus, and then the series would lapse into standard boilerplate action and or sci-fi. MIKE ROYER: “It’s a testament to the genius of Jack Kirby that when he started something, he knew where he was going. Being the creative person that he was, he was at liberty to change direction any time he wanted, but basically when he started he knew what he wanted to do. I think that’s probably the one weakness in the way Jack worked, being his own editor. I became acutely aware of it when I was lettering Silver Star. There were a lot of things that confused me. It was a case of being the editor and having created Signs of a struggle: Jack’s drawing ability was clearly declining in the mid-’80s. Cover pencils the whole thing before he put one stroke on paper— from Secret Origins #19. The Uncle Sam figure is by Murphy Anderson. Jack knew it inside and out—and sometimes in putting it down on paper as the creator, he knew it so well that if someone who knew nothing about it looked at it and was confused, he wouldn’t notice that. When he had total control his one weakness was that he knew so much that sometimes he needed another editor. Not to change it, but to say ‘Jack, I don’t understand this.’”

Chapter 7: The Other Art Controversy From Captain Victory to the New Gods and finally to Super Powers, there was a noticeable and steep decline in the quality of Jack’s drawing.There has been rampant speculation on the cause of this alarming drop-off. Some had said that Jack’s eyesight was failing, some said he was ill, others said he just didn’t care anymore. However, what is often overlooked in commentary on Jack’s work in the ’80s is that he had a fulltime job outside of the comics field. He was also working what amounts to two full-time jobs at an age where most men would have retired. He was increasingly preoccupied with his legal struggles with Marvel, and he often was dealing with collaborators who were either inexperienced and/or busy with projects of their own. Compounding that problem was Jack’s essential disinterest in what happened to his work once it left his table. GREG THEAKSTON: “I always think that the audience was just a bonus, that Jack was really doing what he was doing for Jack. There’s a lot of truth to the idea that he never looked at the books once they were off his board. He’d take a spin through to make sure that all the coloring was good and see what the package looked like, but he always looked ahead at what was coming next.” The first work that fandom saw from Jack in the ’80s was Captain Victory. What one must realize on the early issues of Captain Victory was that Jack was not working with the seasoned veterans and production 25

staff that Marvel or DC would have afforded, or with a polished workhorse like Mike Royer (apart from the first two issues, inked by Mike three years prior to publication). Mike Thibodeaux was basically growing up in public and Captain Victory was his baptism of fire. Mike greatly improved during his run on Captain Victory, and would come to lend Jack’s pencils a sharp and polished sheen, but he was often heavy-handed, wasn’t authorized to correct some of the problems with the drawing, and sometimes didn’t fully grasp the subtleties in Jack’s line. That being said, though his work might not’ve helped Jack win back the Marvel Zombie crowd, Mike’s finishing gave Captain Victory the otherworldly feel it needed to fully insinuate itself to the readers subconscious. In addition, the lettering and coloring at Pacific were also not yet up to the standards of the majors. These factors are often poorly understood and under-appreciated in the context of comic art. Subpar lettering and coloring can kill the most beautifully drawn art, especially when it comes to a holistic pictorial thinker like Jack Kirby. Five decades of toil in comics conditioned Jack to design a page with the end product in mind—that is, not only his work, but the inking, lettering, and coloring were anticipated and factored into Jack’s decision-making process. Neal Adams said that Jack’s work was only properly understood once it was presented in published form. With the early issues of Captain Victory, Jack was not working with experienced vets, but with gifted young greenhorns. A young Steve Oliff colored the first few issues of CV, but his work was often too dark and complex for the title. Janice Cohen then took over on CV and the first four issues of Silver Star and the look of the books greatly improved, using her bright and bold palette. But the art on the last two issues of both titles then took a nosedive with both the introduction of fullprocess color and the uncharacteristically hurried inking. It almost seemed that the writing was on the wall concerning Jack’s future at Pacific and there was an effort to tie up all the loose ends as quickly as possible. The end result is that much of the work for Jack struggles with proportions in this otherwise nicely-designed page from Silver Star #6 (page 20). CV that seemed crude in its final presentation motion. In fact, it seems that even if he had the time, Jack’s temperareally did not differ much from Kirby’s ’70s work when looked at in ment and essentially introverted nature would never allow him to do pencil form. Jack’s drawing had become broader and more expressionthe legwork necessary to put affairs in order. istic, but was essentially on a par with earlier efforts. In addition, Jack was clearly not interested in drawing ’60s-style Bearing this in mind, Pacific was probably not the best place for Marvel comics in the first place. EVANIER: “Jack had gotten bored Kirby’s work. The company got off to a strong start, then spent the with drawing ‘Marvel Comics.’ To draw something that looked like an remainder of its existence in a perpetual state of flux. Titles would old FF was to him kind of defeating, because it meant that he was appear and then vanish. Some books, like Ms. Mystic and the Rocketeer back in 1968.” were prone to maddening delays in their publishing schedules. The But as the decade progressed, nothing could hide the fact that publishers couldn’t seem to decide on a format and would change Jack’s work was clearly starting to suffer. formats midway in the run of a title, as discussed before. Such chaos MIKE ROYER: “I had some meetings with Gil Kane in the early did not serve Jack’s work well, especially when you consider that he ’90s. We had some interesting discussions and, of course, Jack came was working full-time in animation. The increasingly idiosyncratic up, because if he knew me at all it was from bumping into me at occacurve of his penciling required top-notch (read: expensive) talent to sional conventions, or the fact that I was associated with Jack. He said interpret it and Pacific wasn’t able to provide that. And Jack, with his that what was happening to Jack is something that happens to every time and attention elsewhere, was unable to get all the wheels in 26

to fully explore it. It was a time when Jack could simply sit down at a chair and dream on paper. Despite the lingering battles that were left to fight with his former overlords in the decade, and the messy conclusions to those struggles, Jack came out on top. He was recognized by important people as a leader, as someone who did something truly special with his talent. He was profiled on Entertainment Tonight. Johnny Carson spoke at length about his work on the Tonight Show, and this dysfunctional family known as the Comic Book World adopted him as its Highfather. I truly believe that years from now, even if comic books are long forgotten, people will still remember Jack Kirby. I believe his legend will only grow—because what Jack did transcended comics. Jack dreamed amazing dreams, and he dreamed them for us.★

artist at some point in their life, and he called it ‘The Curl.’ No matter what your brain tells you to do, the hand doesn’t do it anymore. “Knowing full well that Jack was an impressionist, I noticed what Jack was doing on these New Gods covers was Jack doing his impression of his own characters. Chest designs, the Moebius Chair—all sorts of things were a little different. I noticed a bit of that ‘Curl’ creeping into Jack’s work in the late-’80s, and I see in some of the late stuff that’s reprinted in The Jack Kirby Collector. I think he was a genius to the end, but I think we all—anybody that draws for a living—at some point human nature, and I think Mother Nature, takes a revenge on your body and there’s just some things you can’t do anymore.” Finally, the seeds to Jack’s decline might have been sown in the approach and method of drawing that was so dazzling to those who watched him work. Jim Woodring had observed that Jack would do these incredible illustrations straight on the paper, without sketching or laying anything out. As Nature took its course on Jack’s physiology and his coordination suffered, this method didn’t serve him well. When Jack was at 100% physically, and the framework was already developed in his head, he didn’t need to work it out on the page. But probably the reason that Jack’s work suffered so badly was that he didn’t work out the problems on paper, the way someone like Gil Kane would. Anyone who spoke to Jack in the ’90s knew he was as intellectually sharp and cogent as ever. The only explanation for Jack’s sharp decline can be that he relied on a method of drawing that required his full range of coordination, a faculty inevitably dulled by Father Time. And whatever technical difficulties he was experiencing, his imagination was, if anything, more fertile and explosive in the ’80s than at any other time in his life.

The Happy Ending This magazine began six years ago to celebrate the life and work of Jack Kirby, and what is worth celebrating about that man was not only his skill and unparalleled imagination, but also the warmth and generosity of his spirit. Kirby’s gifts to his fans did not end with his physical passing. There are still countless works yet to be seen, wonders and visions yet to be experienced. For this writer, the 1980s was, and will turn out to be regarded, as the probably the most productive period of Jack’s limitless imagination. It was a time when Jack was paid handsomely to do what he loved best: Create new ideas. It was a time when Jack had finally found people who recognized his genius and wanted to allow him

(top) Jack’s handwriting (from the back of a pencil xerox) clearly shows signs of a tremor. (above) Jack compensated for his drawing problems by turning up the gas on his page designs. Pencils from Captain Victory #13, page 14.

sure to become the social equivalent to what comic books were in the past. If I was a young man today, I’d probably be involved in the creation of rock videos.” Thus spake Jack Kirby in 1978 A.D., and music videos were in their extreme infancy at that time. MTV didn’t even exist yet! The man was a prophet with an eye on the future. For ages afterward, Kirby’s words “Get out of comics... they’ll rip you off ” (above) The cover of One #1 (1977). ©Steve Garris. echoed in my mind. (below) Dailies from Kirby’s proposed Valley Girl comic I had dreamed of strip, suggested by a 1980s meeting with Frank Zappa. becoming a comic book genius like Jack Kirby, yet I suspected that he had said those things to me because the comic I had shown him was a travesty. Many of my friends were top notch comics and commercial arts professionals, but I was becoming the Ed Wood of comics. I believe that Jack Kirby had diplomatically told me the truth. I took his advice and got out of comics. Three year later my old publisher Pacific Comics released a new series titled Captain Victory by—you guessed it—Jack Kirby! It was 1981 and ironically, that same year, a new television sensation burst upon the world. It was called MTV. Go figure! ★

“Get Out Of Comics!” said Kirby, and my heart nearly stopped, by Steve Garris t’s 1978 at the San Diego Comic Con; my comic book One had been published a year earlier by Pacific Comics and I was excited as I handed a copy to Jack Kirby. Those were the days when you could just walk up to famous artists who were attending the convention and engage in real conversations with them. Jack Kirby was always gracious and friendly and I had spoken with him several times in years past. Now I had finally produced my one comic book and I was eager to bring my product to the attention of the King! He studied my comic book for a minute or two, then said to me, “You’ve done it. Now you’re one of us.” “One of us.” Ahh, yes; here was the King of Comics welcoming me to the enchanted realm. This was the high point of my entire life at the time. I was “in.” Jack Kirby looked into my eyes with a stare that seemed to penetrate my very soul as he continued: “Now I’ve got some advice for you. Get out of comics.” “Get out of comics”?! I was severely shocked. Had my god spoken these words? Did my comic miss the mark and was I to be exiled from the comic book kingdom before I’d even entered that hallowed place? I was probably the picture of insecurity at that moment, as Jack continued, “Get out of comics because they will rip you off.” “Not my publisher!” I defended. “They’re all the same,” Kirby insisted. “How do you think I feel when I see the Hulk on television and I get nothing for it?” I hadn’t realized; my mind was paralyzed with fear and I was unable to respond for a few seconds. I’m sure the King saw my confusion. “You should get out of comics and go into rock ’n’ roll videos,” Kirby explained. “The world has changed since comic books began. We didn’t have television then. These televised rock music videos are

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The Supreme Writer: Alan Moore Interviewed by George Khoury (Interviewer’s note: Lately I’m finding that the more interviews I do, the more difficult it becomes to write these introductions. Maybe it’s because you never want to overlook the accomplishments of the subject, but when the subject is Alan Moore it literally becomes impossible and nerve wrecking. No matter what dictionary you look in, there are no words that can capture either who Alan Moore is or what he means to comics. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to give this the old college try. Alan Moore did something to comic books that was wonderful, magical and beautiful. He brought a renaissance—a revolution to the art form, armed only with his vision and his pen. Moore brought a cerebral edge to comics, the likes of which have never been seen, making innovations and bringing back imagination. He expanded the boundaries and destroyed any limitations with his storytelling. His writing gained the love of the fanboys and the respect of the mainstream because he is a great writer in any medium. The British six-foot-two resident of Northampton has earned a welldeserved place in comics folklore alongside Jack Kirby and Harvey Kurtzman. His work on Swamp Thing, Watchmen, From Hell and other classics will forever stand as a testimony to the kind of greatness comics

can achieve. And every month, a whole new generation of readers continue to get dazzled by his work on America’s Best Comics. Moore like Kirby is a pioneer and a gentleman. And like the King, we are all better for having known him and his work. This interview was conducted in two sessions during a rainy November in 1999.) THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: How powerful an influence was Jack Kirby for you? ALAN MOORE: Well, I’ll have to go all the way back to my very early childhood for that. I first discovered comics when I was about seven; this would have been around 1959 or 1960. When I said “comics” I meant American comics; I had read the homegrown British fare before that, but when I first came across the Superman and Batman comics of the time, the first couple of appearances of the Flash, things like that, these were a revelation. I became completely addicted to American comics, or specifically to the DC Comics that were available at the time. I can remember that I’d seen this peculiar-looking comic that I knew wasn’t DC hanging around on the newsstand and it looked too alien. I didn’t want to risk spending money upon it when it wasn’t stuff that I was already familiar with. And then I can recall on one day, I think I was ill in bed—I’d been seven or eight at the time—and my mother said that’d she get me a comic to cheer me up while I was confined to the bed. I knew that the only comic that I could think of that I hadn’t actually bought was a Blackhawk comic that I’d seen around. So I was trying to convince her to sort of pick up this Blackhawk comic, kind of explaining to her what it was and that it was a bunch of people in blue uniforms. Much to my initial disappointment she brought back Fantastic Four #3, which I read. It did something to me. It was the artwork mainly. It was a kind of texture and style that I’ve just never seen before. The DC artists at the time, I didn’t really know their names, but their style was the one I was accustomed to: Very clean, very wholesome looking, and here was something with craggy shadows with almost a kind of rundown look to a lot of it. It was immediate; literally, from that moment I became a devoted fan of the Fantastic Four and the other Marvel books when they came out—particularly those by Kirby. I mean, it was Kirby’s work that I followed more than anybody else as I was growing up. Just the work in Thor and “Tales of Asgard,” the Fantastic Four during that long classic stretch in the middle, and then when Kirby went over to DC and the Fourth World books. This was around the time that I was approaching my psychedelic teenage years and the subject matter of these books seems to be changing along with me. I absorbed actively every line he drew in those years, or at least the ones that I was able to lay my hands on. There’s something about the dynamism of Kirby’s storytelling. You never even think of it as an influence. It’s something that you grew up with, kind of understanding that this is just the way that comics were done. So I’d say yeah, that I would account for the influence of Jack Kirby upon my own work. It’s almost like a default setting for my own storytelling. It’s sort of like if you can tell a story the way Kirby would have, then at least that’s proper comics; you’re doing your job okay. TJKC: Had you read Challengers of the Unknown prior to Fantastic Four? ALAN: I’d seen the Challengers of the Unknown but I don’t think I’d seen the Kirby issues, I’d only seen a couple of the later ones. If it had been the Kirby issues for some reason they haven’t clicked with me, but I rather think they were some of his lighter stuff. I saw the Kirby Challengers stuff later and loved it, but I think the only Challengers of the Unknown that I had seen at that point was by the later artist that took over after Kirby moved on from the book.

Alan Moore & Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen. This Gibbons image was adapted from DC’s Who’s Who #5 to be used as a t-shirt design.

TJKC: What exactly made those classic Marvel stories so revolutionary? Was it that the storytelling was more mature than DC? ALAN: An extra dimension had been added to both the storytelling and the art. In a sense the DC characters at the time were archetypes to a certain degree. Archetype means they are one-dimensional. Stan Lee and his collaborators in terms of the story overlaid a second dimension of character. He gave them a few human problems. These weren’t three-dimensional characters but they were of a dimension more than what we’d been used to, and something about the art kind of corresponded with that. With Kirby there was a level of attention to detail and texture and intensity about the art that seemed to give another dimension to the super-hero—to the comic book—than what was used at the time. It just seemed to be much more visceral, much more real. The Human Torch finding the SubMariner in a bowery slum; that kind of had a visceral reality to it that was much more engaging.

(above) The first appearance of that spoof of a spoof, First American from Tomorrow Stories #1. Art by Jim Baikie. (below) The spoofee, Simon & Kirby’s Fighting American, showing his stuff.

TJKC: It seems that everyone at the beginning finds Kirby’s artwork a bit awkward. Did it take you a while to get used to it? ALAN: Well for a while, probably seven or eight pages, but yes there was that kind of shock of something unfamiliar. But then again, in my life that’s generally been a sign; something I’m almost repulsed by to start with will be something I’ll be enduringly fascinated by later. Some of the underground artists, the first time I saw their work, genuinely repulsed me, but later I became addicted to them and the same is true to a different degree with Kirby. Yeah, looking at his art for the first time there is that shock of something that is unfamiliar, and at first the shock might feel unpleasant, but pretty soon it’s a strong acquired taste and you have to have more of that.

TJKC: You used to draw more often when you were younger? ALAN: Yeah, I used to sort of draw. I did my share of Kirby swipes and sort of old exercise books and that sort of stuff. Yeah, I had delusions of adequacy as an artist right until the start of my comic book career. It was only then I realized that I could never draw quickly enough or well enough to actually make a living on that so I switched over to being a writer. TJKC: Do you think your style of comics writing is a natural progression to what Lee and Kirby did in the Sixties? ALAN: I guess it must be to a degree. That’s some of the early stuff that I saw, so like I said, that’s almost a kind of default setting. TJKC: But namely with your super-hero work.... ALAN: Yeah, but there again that was the only kind of comic I’d seen at the time: Super-hero comics, really. Even war and western comics were super-hero comics in drag, so basically that is almost a default storytelling style. Lee and Kirby: It’s just basic. It’s something that’s omnipresent—you don’t even think about it. You don’t even notice it. It’s there like air is there. TJKC: Have you ever tried writing in the Marvel style? Scripting to already plotted and illustrated artwork? ALAN: The nearest I ever got to that is when we were doing 1963; partly that was a matter of expediency. We needed to be able to do these things quite fast, without a huge amount of extra typing work for me. Also, it was appropriate that we did them in a Marvel style. I’d layout a page with, say, six panels in it. I did two or three pages like that. I phoned them through to Rick Veitch or Steve Bissette. So what we did was I’d read them the panel descriptions over the phone like there’s somebody in the left foreground, or there’s somebody in the right background. We’re in this kind of setting. These are who the characters are. This is kind of roughly what they’re saying to each other. One of them looks angry. The other one looks impassive. Then I go through that bit and they send the artwork. Probably before I’d even seen the artwork, I’d touch up the dialogue and send that over to them. So I’d get the dialogue done and they’d have to work from that 31

because I’d already know what was going to be in the panel because I’d described each panel rather than just give a plot breakdown to the page. So it was a bit more of a shorthand version than the way I usually write. It wasn’t quite Marvel method.

want to. It’s sort of just there if they could use it. So yeah, they are very lengthy scripts. TJKC: How would you say that you broke into the industry? ALAN: I started doing a strip for a music paper. I was writing and drawing a weekly strip for a music paper, Sounds, over here. Then I started doing a weekly strip for a local paper in Northampton. It just gave me enough to support myself and my wife and my baby. I could just about support myself. I started to do script work for the British Marvel Comics on Doctor Who and for 2000 A.D. doing short stories for them, and slowly started to move more over to script work. Did the stuff on Warrior and then got snapped up by America. From then on it was Swamp Thing and all the rest of it.

TJKC: I remember hearing that one of your instructions when they were drawing the 1963 book was that you wanted a rushed look to the art to get that Sixties feel. ALAN: To a degree, I was kind of writing it faster as well. That was to try and get that thrill, that rush of creativity that I’m sure must have been a part of working on those early Marvel comics back then. TJKC: Do you know normally work in full script? ALAN: I always work in full script—and not only full script, fuller than normal scripts. My scripts are gigantic. They are huge amounts of detail and description that the artist is quite free to ignore if they

TJKC: You knew early-on that this was what you wanted to do? ALAN: I think I always knew that I wanted to be involved in comics in some way. I think at first I thought I might end up drawing them; when I realized that wasn’t to be, I switched over full tilt to writing them. TJKC: How far ahead do you usually work? ALAN: It depends. At the moment with the ABC books, doing five of them, I’m not really getting a chance to work very far ahead with any of them. I’m just a little bit ahead of the artist. If time allows, I like to be as far ahead as possible. TJKC: What did you think of Kirby’s written work? Does it have certain uniqueness to it? ALAN: Yeah! There’s a primitive power to it. The dialogue, the punctuation; these things are sometimes a bit strange, but that doesn’t take away from just the raw feeling and energy in those works and storylines. He was somebody that always shot from the heart. I thought that was a quality that came over in his writing. TJKC: Did you feel any excitement when his Fourth World would come out? ALAN: Oh yeah! I remember that we were all really thrilled by them. I remember at the comic convention where I actually saw some early copies of Jimmy Olsen work, just how excited everybody was just to see them coming out— whenever it was that Kirby’s Fourth World stuff came out. Yeah, I can remember everybody being very thrilled; we were all absolutely devastated when the books seemed to finish without a proper ending. TJKC: What was the oddest Kirby book that you ever read? ALAN: I don’t know. Devil Dinosaur, maybe; that was pretty weird. I don’t know, there’s a certain oddness to all of Jack’s stuff, it was all pretty wild. Probably Devil Dinosaur if you have to pin me down to one. TJKC: Did you follow his return back to Marvel in the mid-Seventies? ALAN: I must admit I didn’t like it as much as his early Marvel work or his DC work. It’s Jack Kirby so it’s all got its own charm, but compared to the early work; no, I wasn’t so thrilled about it. Although I know of some people who think of that as his best work. I guess it’s a matter of personal taste.

The final product was a bit odd, but Kirby’s original proposal for Devil Dinosaur showed no signs of Moonboy.

TJKC: From the work that Kirby did on the Fourth World, were you able to distinguish what

done is terrific. I really want to thank you.” It was almost embarrassing to have Jack Kirby thanking me. I just assured him that it was me who should be thanking him, sort of because he had done so much to contribute to my career. He had a glow around him, Jack Kirby. He was somebody very, very special. TJKC: Do you have any favorite Jack Kirby comics or images that stand out in your head? ALAN: I really liked some of that Three Rocketeers stuff that he did, where he was using all those weird collage effects ahead of his Fantastic Four work. Some of the Galactus stuff in terms of impact, yeah, that was stunning. Ego, the Living Planet: The page at the end of that issue of Thor where you suddenly get that full-page picture of Ego, the Living Planet with the little tiny spaceship of Thor or The Recorder or whoever it was in the foreground; that is probably the single page that stands out in my mind. TJKC: You’ve mentioned often that you’ve had some regrets of how Watchmen influenced other comics; is that why you went retro with 1963? ALAN: I’d been working outside super-heroes for a long time. When I returned to them I felt that I’d probably prefer that super-heroes have all of the energy that I remember from the comics of my youth; sort of less of that misery that Watchmen, in part, had brought to them. So yeah, that was probably part of the decision to have some fun with an older style of comics in 1963. TJKC: One of the many things you wanted to show with 1963 was the difference between the heroes of yesterday with the heroes of today. Do you feel you were able to do that? ALAN: No, we never got to finish that series for various reasons, which was a shame, and also because events kind of superceded it, but I think pretty much that would have been the conclusion: To put the two super-heroes in contrast together. But I guess just the fact that 1963 was appearing on the stands at the same time as did those heroes kind of made the contrast implicitly anyway. So yeah, I guess in a way we did, but not as thoroughly as we originally intended. TJKC: What are some of the differences between the 1963 and 1993 comics? ALAN: Back in ’63, there was a kind of boundless optimism; no matter how many anxieties or fears there might be hanging over the work, that venues into this incredible optimism—that everything was possible. That was true of the artists who were working with the form. They were experimenting. They were trying things. They were caught up in the energy and experimentation of the times. I think that perhaps in ’93, there were some very good artists but it seemed like there was a kind of lack of energy. A lack of fierceness to the work, a lack of desire to push boundaries or to experiment which was there in the Sixties.

A Kirby pencil sketch of the FF done for a fan.

Lee and Kirby each contributed to the Sixties Marvel books they did? ALAN: My position on that without knowing is that I’m sure that Stan Lee did a lot of contributing to it, but I always got the impression that probably the bulk of the work was Kirby. That might be being unfair to Stan Lee, I just don’t know; but I get the impression that the bulk of the storytelling and everything was done by Kirby—and even a lot of the suggestive dialogue, so I really don’t know. You can see a certain polish missing from the dialogue in the Fourth World books, but there was certainly still all of those powerful ideas there. I suppose you can draw your own conclusions from that.

TJKC: How would you describe Kirby’s use of mythology and other genres in his work? ALAN: It was great. He obviously got a real feel for these archetype figures. I remember “Tales of Asgard” being some of his best work, and the way he blended together myth and science-fiction in Thor was terrific. I thought he got exactly the right degree of relevance for the original material and exactly the right degree of irrelevance, where he was prepared to sort of change it and do new things with it; that kind of made the myths live in a sense.

TJKC: Probably one of the more positive things that happened to you when you came to the States was that you were able to meet Jack Kirby in person. What type of an impression did you get? What did he say to you? ALAN: It was very brief. It was a bit of a tense time because it was during that panel where we were talking about getting Kirby’s artwork back from Marvel. So I met Jack very briefly before or after that panel, but all I remember was that aura he had around him. This sort of walnut colored little guy with a shackle of white hair and these craggy Kirby drawn features. This sort of stockiness. I just remember him chatting with me and Frank Miller and he was saying in this kind of raspy voice, “You kids, I think you’re great. You kids, what you’ve

TJKC: One of the most amazing things about Kirby is the more you see his work, you start to notice the great versatility he had jumping from genre to genre. ALAN: Sure, it’s stunning. You look at his westerns, Boys’ Ranch, the romance stuff; that’s the sort of thing which I’ve always tried to emu33

A stunning piece of presentation art for a never-realized Hawkman animated series. Most of these presentation boards measured an enormous 40" x 30", roughly twice the size shown here.

late. I’ve always liked to think that I could have as much breadth and versatility in my work as Kirby did—obviously in a different way because I’m a writer and he was an artist/writer. Yeah, I’ve always admired that in him. I think more people should. If you’re going to take something from Kirby, don’t take just his style; take his sense of adventure, take his willingness to explore other forms and take a few chances.

(below) The cover of Demon #16. Can you take it? Pencils by Kirby. (bottom left) The Rhyming-One as he appeared under Moore’s guidance. Art by Steve Bissette and John Totleben, from Swamp Thing #26.

TJKC: Society in general still tends to trivialize comics, yet embraces its concepts in other mediums. Do you think this will ever change? ALAN: It’s already changed to a certain degree. It’s changing by degrees. I don’t think it’s going to be the overnight change that we once imaged it might be, but I think we’ve gained a small foothold, or I at least think some work has. It can only help to sort of hope that comics will eventually creep into some social acceptance, although what comics need social acceptance for, I’m not entirely sure. TJKC: How did the Demon’s appearance on Swamp Thing come about? ALAN: It was Steve Bissette wanting to use the character because he was a big Kirby fan; he and John Totleben liked the Kirby run on the character. I’d seen some of the Demon stuff and so we decided to work from there. I took from what was the current state of the Demon at that time and tried to suit it up to serve my own design. Yeah, we got a very good three-part story out of it. TJKC: I read that for you to write the character you had to get into character. ALAN: Oh yeah, but that’s the same with most characters. With the Demon with those particular rhyming bits of dialogue, that was a little bit more difficult. I’ve got a method actor approach to most characterizations, but with the Demon I was trying to imagine how he might move, he might think and talk. TJKC: I tried to interview Garth Ennis about how Kirby influenced his Demon run, and he said that your Demon was his influence. ALAN: Well, that’s nice. Garth’s a great writer. I’ll always

have a soft spot for Garth and his writing. TJKC: But this is a bit strange, don’t you think? ALAN: I guess so, but then again there are people who love the Fantastic Four and never saw it while Kirby was doing it. It’s a bit strange, but there are people who like my run of Swamp Thing who didn’t know that Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson created him. It’s just how comics is, I guess. Characters pass from one creator to another and it just depends which phase of the character you happen to be familiar with. TJKC: One of my favorite things about Kirby is his use of allegory in stories. Is this something that stands out for you? ALAN: Yes, to a degree; in the Fourth World stuff it started to become more noticeable. It’s there, obviously. It was something that he had a love for. I mean, he liked to philosophize with his work; that is something that set him apart from a lot of his contemporaries. This was something that came over when I met him. This was somebody who was a fighter. His work was part of a struggle to get his ideas across. There was the same sort of spirit in his artwork as I’m sure he must have had in the streets of wherever it was he grew up. 36

They were very broad allegories. They were very grand, magnificent things, which was appropriate to the stature of Kirby’s artwork. I enjoyed his allegories but I’d have to say that I enjoyed his elemental fantasies every bit as much. Kirby’s allegories were great, but it was mainly just his storytelling, his artwork, and his vision—the kind of moral that might be drawn from Kirby’s work when you’re talking about good and evil, those sort of generational problems. These are big things that have been explored by lots of different artists and writers in lots of different mediums, whereas the thing that I responded to most in Kirby’s work was the bit that was individual and uniquely him in whatever way that was presented. Whether it was in elemental fantasy like the Fantastic Four or the more allegorical stuff in the Fourth World saga or even the pretty crazy stuff in Devil Dinosaur. So the thing that probably drew me to Kirby’s artwork was more not the

ideological depth, but just the pure energy of being Jack Kirby. TJKC: Could you tell me a little about the “New Jack City” story in Supreme? ALAN: The basic story was that some sort of mysterious citadel seems to have appeared overnight somewhere in some high, inaccessible Tibetan mountain valley or whatever. So Supreme goes to investigate and what he finds is this bewildering landscape which is in fact a great number of different landscapes sort of fused together. There’s bits of it that look like a 1930s Depression era bowery slum, where he meets a kid gang and a costumed hero that the kid gang are obviously accomplices of. They have some battle with a suitably super-villain type. I believe we have a huge Atlas monster rising from the depths. Supreme wanders down a tunnel to find himself coming out into a trench of a battlefield where there are lots of grizzled multi-ethnic soldiers: An obvious Irish one, an obvious Jewish one, an obvious Black guy, all very much like the Sgt. Fury line-up and a whole slew of patriotic heroes. This carries on until Supreme actually meets the supreme creator of this world, who kind of turns out to be Jack Kirby. This is very difficult to explain because it took a whole story to tell the story, but it’s basically that this gigantic floating head changes from this kind of Kirby photo montage—the head is changing, it always looks like Jack Kirby drawn or both. This gigantic entity explains to him that he used to be a flesh and blood artist but now he is entirely in the realm of ideas, which is much better because flesh and blood has its limitations because he can only do four or five pages a day tops, where now he exists purely in the world of ideas. The ideas can just flow out uninterrupted. He talks about the very concept of a space where ideas are real, which is the kind of place to some degree all comic creators work in all their lives, but Jack Kirby maybe more than most. So it’s kind of an idea that being free of a physical body, this artist is then able to explore endless worlds of imagination and ideas. TJKC: What is the significance of the Kirbyesque drawings on the ceiling of the precinct in Top Ten? ALAN: It’s just something Gene (Ha) and Zander (Cannon) decided upon because they thought there should be a mural in the police station. They thought, “What would be a good mural style and something that doesn’t look like Gene or Zander’s style?” And it just seemed that a Kirby style would be perfectly suited for murals in the city. So that was Gene and Zander’s idea, but I gather that it was for the reasons I described. They needed something that looked like a convincing mural style to go with the metropolis as we presented it in Top Ten that contrasted with their own story, and Kirby was the perfect choice.

Rick Veitch art (with unfinished Supreme figures) from the “New Jack City” story in Supreme.

TJKC: Was there ever a Kirby character that you might have wanted to tell a story for? ALAN: That’s difficult really because I enjoyed doing the Demon in Swamp Thing back then. I guess that if things had worked out differently and I had gone to Marvel rather then to DC during that period in the ’80s—if I hadn’t had such an early falling out with Marvel—then I guess any of them might have been fun. Fantastic Four, obviously. Thor was terrific. I managed to get a lot of that out of my system during the 1963 stuff. All of Jack

Rick Veitch pencils and inks from the two-page spread of Alan Moore’s Kirby-inspired story “New Jack City.”

Kirby’s characters were great. I’d prefer to work with my own characters now anyway but back when I was working with other people’s characters, it’s difficult to think of a character Jack Kirby created that wouldn’t have been interesting to write.

everybody else who cares about any particular artist’s work—to make sure his or her work is still being discussed in 100 years time, by you or descendants. TJKC: It’s funny; lately I’ve been thinking that what Kirby did in comics can be compared to what Beethoven and Mozart mean to music. ALAN: Right, you can say for certain that there will still be music in 100 years in some form or another, but we hope that there will be comic books in 100 years’ time.

TJKC: In a hundred years time, say, how do you think Kirby’s role in comics will be defined? ALAN: That very much depends not so much on Kirby’s undoubted talent and genius, but upon the taste of the audience in 100 years. There’s a way things should be and the way things might be. In an ideal world, Kirby should be realized as someone who did incredibly dynamic poignant work in the comics medium, but during its very early stages. Work that had an enduring impact and influence upon everybody that comes after him; that should be how he is remembered. But of course, there are an awful lot of wonderful comic book artists, for example, I’ve never heard of and I don’t really care about seeking out, because they are fixated largely upon an art style or a group of artists who became popular in the ’80s and ’90s or whatever, and they don’t have very much regard for history. This is not a sweeping condemnation of comics fans, but just culturally in general. There are an awful lot of people who do not deserve to be forgotten who are forgotten because culture is often such a fickle and shallow thing. I guess that while there are people with the enthusiasm for Kirby... which is obviously shown in the Kirby Collector. It’s your job—and

TJKC: You’ve said yourself that one of the reasons that you got into comics was for the aesthetics, the art form. Is there still room for more innovations? ALAN: Of course there is. There’s always room for innovations. It just depends whether there are that many people who care to make them. People like Jack Kirby are remarkable because they don’t come along very often. There were more people like Jack Kirby in the early days of comics. Individual creators like a Will Eisner and a Harvey Kurtzman who could have an incredible impact on the way comics were put together and conceived of. These were sort of giants. There have been some other people who have made bold experimental moves. I don’t see a lot of that around any more. I see a lot of people going through the motions; there are people making an effort certainly. It’s been a long time since there was any one individual creator who sort of really tried to push the boundaries of the medium or to impose a unique 38

individual style upon things in the way that Kirby did. Yes, the possibilities for comics are endless but it depends upon coming up with men and women who are just capable of realizing those possibilities, which is something that is totally unpredictable. TJKC: I hear all the time from people who say that all the super-hero stories have been told, that they’re done; that these stories and ideas can only be fresh once. ALAN: Yeah, so then you have to go to the trouble of actually going and making something else fresh. It is a bit of work and I can understand how a lot of creators these days don’t really seem to be prepared to do it. They’d rather wait for somebody else to do the innova-

the highway, but trying to reach it. Creativity or the advance of any medium is like one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons, where you’ll have a railroad train running across the desert with Daffy Duck having to chop up the railroad train itself in order to lay tracks in front of the train. I don’t know if you are familiar with the particular cartoon image I’ve got in m’head: Sort of laying tracks in front of you where there are no tracks, which is a giant leap of faith. You have to first believe that there is something in front of you, then you have to do your best to actually reach that point rather than say, “We’ve reached the very edge of creativity because I can’t think of anything to do. Therefore, I will decide that the entire humanity has reached the edge of creativity just because I’ve given up,” which is a very cowardly and defeatist attitude. If only more artists could grab the medium by the horns in the way that Jack Kirby did and sort of decide that they are going to make up their minds whether we’ve reached the end of ideas and whether there might be a few more in there. My basic position is that ideas are infinite, limitless, but it just depends whether we’re prepared to do the work to actually bring them in. Whenever you get creators talking about some inherit fall or failure in the medium or in any particular genre, they are mainly talking about their own flaws and failings in their own creativity. You can’t blame the medium: “I guess there weren’t that many super-hero ideas. I guess that we’ve used them all up.” It reminds me of the ancient Greeks when they were coming up with all these myths in the first place. The world of ideas is inexhaustible and infinite. You just have to find them, which an awful lot of people are not prepared to do. They’d rather let

tion and then jump aboard because that is much easier. It’s much safer in terms of your career. If you wait for somebody else to prove that it works and then jump aboard, you’ll probably get more out of it in terms of profits—and so will your characters—than the actual person that did the innovation ever did. You could carry on doing stories about super-heroes forever. There’s still new cowboy stories to be written. If anybody disbelieves it, they should pick up the works of Cormac McCarthy and try picking up Blood Meridian and see if that’s not a new way to tell a cowboy story. I do get a little tired of hearing people saying that everything is done that can be done. “All the great innovations were in the past.” What kind of culture would we have if everyone always thought like that? Certainly people have been thinking like Moore and Kirby meet at a 1980s San Diego Comicon. Photos by and courtesy of Jackie Estrada. that for a long time. I’m sure that ever since any form of art or music began there’s always been a someone like Jack Kirby do all the hard work and mining and the huge crowd of people thinking, “Well, that’s it, really,” thinking, back-breaking; mining an industry for thirty or forty years and then “How could we ever top this?” And then somebody comes along who the nuggets that he happens to throw to the surface always find them doesn’t believe that and doesn’t buy into that—doing something and they put a new spin on them. They don’t want to do the hard which is completely revolutionary and changes everything around, work themselves. This is not a blanket condemnation of the whole and then everyone is euphoric for however long it takes for the buzz industry. I think it’s fair to say there are a number of people in the to wear off, and then they say, “Well, now all the great ideas have been industry who are much happier sort of working with stuff that’s had. There’s no possibility of anything in the future”; which I think is already been placed, rather than to try and build up their creative a weak and defeatist attitude. I think that any creator worth their muscles and do some of that work themselves. But that’s just my own thoughts should not be believing that there is a point further down particular feeling I’m sure.★ 39

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As A Genre

John Paul Leon’s art from the Alex Ross-guided Earth X series. © Marvel Characters, Inc. José Ladronn’s Kirbyinspired art from Legends of the DC Universe #22, featuring Superman’s return to a storyline set-up by Kirby during his Jimmy Olsen run. © DC Comics. A page from Jean-Marie Arnon’s funky French Kirby riff, sort of like Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur with a little sex thrown in. © Jean-Marie Arnon. Full-page splash from Mike Allred’s ultra-hip The Atomics, bringing back the fun of Jack’s early X-Men and FF, but updated for today. © Mike Allred.

A regular feature examining Kirby-inspired work, by Adam McGovern

Monster Hits? elcome to another installment in our excavation of Jack Kirby’s lingering imprint on pop culture. This is the column where we survey the current state of stylistic homage, character continuation, and conferrings of credit where “the King” is concerned—though this issue’s references have a disturbing tendency toward really big reptiles and insects.

Earthly Delights In our previous column’s Vault of Euphemisms, it was waggishly noted that, in lieu of a formal credit agreement between Marvel and the Kirby estate, Earth X Issue Zero was “Dedicated to the works of” Kirby and several others. In more seriousness, that recently concluded novel-forcomics is very dedicated to Kirby and kindred creators, weaving one of the most imaginative worlds since da king himself and accomplishing probably the most philosophical treatment of super-heroes since Watchmen. An end-times anti-adventure that offers an elegiac alternative to standard-issue dystopianism, Earth X— conceived, as was its DC counterpart Kingdom Come, by Alex Ross—subtly sends up the Byzantine continuity of late-’90s comics

in much the way that Kingdom Come’s overkill-sized cast of characters sent up the mid-’90s comics industry’s boom and doom. Establishing an intricate but followable unified-field theory of the Marvel Universe, the series goes above and beyond the call of duty in its reverence for Kirby, making many of his most unsung characters central to the narrative. Not only are the Celestials from the underrated Eternals series integrated into everything that’s ever happened in a Marvel book (in a way too intriguing for me to give away if you haven’t already heard it), but Earth X’s point-of-view character is X-51, a radical reconstruction of the once silly and derivative Mr. Machine / Machine Man. Texas Jack Muldoon arises from the murk of Kirby’s much-debated final run on Captain America as an important if briefly-viewed character, and even those wacky mid-century monsters of Kirby’s Marvel/Atlas years are given a reason for being. I know what you’re saying: “What, no Devil Dinosaur?” Well, there's always hope in the promising sequel series Universe X, in its early stages as you read this.

Vive la Ressemblance However, if you can’t wait for your Devil Dinosaur, there’s always French creator Jean-Marie Arnon’s import graphic album La Caverne des Coeurs Brisés (which would roughly translate as “Heartbreak Cave”), a kind of prehistoric Elvis movie resembling a somewhat less politically correct version of Kirby’s maligned

opus, in which the grim struggle for daily survival seems heavily linked with the inability to keep one’s bearskin on for any length of time. Visually, the Kirby influence is impressively recreated without being dismissably derivative; narratively, I admit you’ll have to have retained more of your high-school French than I did to comprehend much beyond the softcore shenanigans, though the pictorial storytelling is concise and spectacular at well-paced intervals, with characters whose expressive range exceeds that of Kirby himself in his DD period. The book represents a notable embracing of the pulpy Kirby aesthetic in the sophisticated realm of French comics, even as the best of French style sparks a leap in the talents of a certain American-based Kirby admirer. Namely, José Ladronn’s celebrated Kirby homages in books like Marvel’s Cable had been faithful but a bit mechanical for my tastes, but have now taken on much more depth and grandeur—and, however paradoxically, more distinctiveness— through an unlikely merging of the Kirby look with that of France’s Moebius. The new hybrid was first on view in a backup story for the otherwise lackluster 2000 Thor Annual, and can now be seen in the latest Inhumans limited series, probably still very much on the racks as we hit them ourselves. [Editor’s Note: Look for upcoming interviews with both Arnon and Ladronn in TJKC!]

Bounty of the Mutants The tastiest influence-stew of all flows forth each month in Madman creator Mike Allred’s mutant-slacker saga The Atomics, a pop-art archetype-fest in which bits of the original Fantastic Four,

X-Men, Avengers, and Doom Patrol—for starters—mix ‘n’ match in Allred’s trademark dream-like overlap. The early Lee & Kirby affection is clear on every page, but it’s actually earlier than you think— Allred has cited as his major influence (yep, we’ve officially got a pattern here) those pre-super-hero giantmonster shorts Stan & Jack turned out in Godzillian proportions before the 1960s, and though only Atomics’ giant insect-man Shrek has directly nodded to these classics thus far, fans of Tim-Boo-Bah and Fin Fang Foom may yet have their day!

Return to the Vault of Euphemisms And while we’re on the subject of mutated youth, the X-Men movie—or, by the time you get this issue, perhaps the X-Men home video—is not only, as those of you who weathered the snobbishly lukewarm reviews and made it to the multiplex know, the height of the super-hero-film art to date (with nuanced performances, dignified gender dynamics, dazzling but ungratuitous pyrotechnics, and unforced social allegories); as a bonus, if you wait out the end-credits long enough, you’ll get to see “Special Thanks” given to both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Not the heady “Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby” credit of the Silver Surfer cartoon series, but in the perennially improved-upon X-Men concept’s special case of other handlers— Thomas & Adams, Wein & Cockrum, Claremont & Byrne—who are still more conspicuous by their absence even from the “thanks,” we should be, er, thankful. And while we’re on the subject of movies, credit, and Devil Dinosaur, ya think any Disney dollars have found their way to the Kirby heirs for Dinosaur’s anachronistic lemur ‘n’ saurian combo, outer-space menaces, and epic quest? If you answered correctly and need something to stop your fuming over the fact that even Jack’s loopiest concept is mined to make someone else’s dinosaur-sized bank, consider this item from our equal-time files: Marvel’s limited series The Sentry (about midway through its run as you read this) is not only a captivating Alan Moore-esque odyssey through popculture history, it’s also based on an abandoned character developed by Stan Lee and Artie Rosen to be Marvel’s flagship super-hero before the Fantastic Four—so, while it remains true that Jack Kirby’s collaboration is

indispensable to Marvel as we know it, recollections of his flying in the window with the fully-formed Marvel Universe in his hand as the furniture flew out the door in the hands of repo men seem to have been a bit exaggerated. Okay, that’s about as much equal time as I can take for one month!★

Kirby Koincidences Kirk Groeneveld writes: “One weekend, my daughter asked for us to set up our long water slide plastic tarp on our hillside and put the sprinkler at the head of the slide to water it. As the sprinkler bubbled a little short geyser of water, my daughter excitedly called out, “Look, Daddy... black dots!” Puzzled, I walked over. There, clearly imaged against the bright yellow plastic sheet was the shadow of the small drops of water... the bright sun overhead was casting their shadow onto the yellow sheet.... I recognized the image for what it was immediately... then did a double take.... Kirby Krackle and Kirby Dots.... vintage special effects right out of FF #58, drawn by Jack Kirby and inked by Joe Sinnott. “I wish I had the presence of mind to snap a picture of the small special effect for you, but I’m not sure a still shot would have conveyed the image the moving shadows made.” Got a weird coincidence involving Kirby? Send it in!

by Jon B. Cooke 981 was a tough time to be a Kirby fan, with Jack’s work to be found only every so often on the comics racks. So naturally it was a delight to read the cover of the 20th anniversary issue of Fantastic Four (#236, November 1981). Not only was it a “Special Triple-Sized Issue” of Kirby swipes by one of his better substitutes, John Byrne, but another blurb on the bottom announced, “Plus: An all-new F.F. Blockbuster by Stan (The Man) Lee and Jack (King) Kirby!” This was a treat even at the then-pricey cost of $1. (Imagine! 64 color pages for a dollar!) Most had to have been disappointed when they opened the back pages to find the story “The Challenge of Dr. Doom,” a 14-page glorified storyboard of Kirby “breakdowns” of a DePatie-Freleng Fantastic Four cartoon, uninspiringly inked by a crew that includes some of Jack’s least embellishers: Stone, Ayers, Milgrom, Sinnott, Roussos, Brodsky, Colletta, Giacoia, Marcos, and Byrne. It was a second-rate adaptation of the Fantastic Four’s first encounter with Dr. Doom from FF #5 written by Smilin’ Stan, and featuring the insipid addition of Herbie the Robot, the Human Torch’s replacement. This was hardly “all-new,” certainly not a “blockbuster,” and not even the true FF! The blurb was (surprise!) typical Marvel hyperbole. Still, it was unseen Kirby art, and this reader took it to heart when he read the unsigned “A Note on Our Special Feature”:

modify Jack’s storyboard into a comics format, and voila! (A tip of the hat and many thanks to David DePatie and Jack Kirby for their consent and cooperation in this somewhat unusual undertaking.)”

There was a certain gratification in believing that while Jack slaved away in Hollywood, he still thought well enough of his old pals at Marvel to grant his “consent and cooperation” to help celebrate the coming of the third decade of the Marvel Age of Comics. While hundreds of thousands of readers ate up this Bullpen Bull, a later interview with Kirby (published for a much smaller audience) proved it to be just that: Bull. In the Spring of 1982, Fantaco Enterprises published The Fantastic Four Chronicles, their own loving 20th anniversary tribute to Reed Richards & Company. Featured is a two-page article by Roger Green, “Questions and Answers With Jack Kirby, Version Two,” (a title which got this Kirby Kompletist almost scrambling for the imaginary first part), which showed an artist very reluctant to talk about some old work. In his introduction, Green wrote: “I asked him about (FF #236)... (and) Jack said, ‘I had nothing to do with it. Some friend of John Byrne’s called and asked if I would do something for the 20th anniversary issue. I said no. So they [Marvel] took the roughs I did for DePatie and put six [actually ten] inkers on it. I didn’t know anything about it until the goddamn thing was published.’ He received a copy from a friend who thought he had worked on it. Jack received no additional renumeration for the reuse of the storyboards, either from Marvel or DePatie-Freleng, he said.” “Consent and cooperation,” indeed.★

“This issue’s anniversary story by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby represents the first collaboration by that titanically talented duo since King Kirby left Marvel some years ago for the wooly wilds of animation studios... When DePatie-Freleng started their Saturday morning cartoon show version of the FF, that story was among the first adapted... with storyboards by Jack, no less. When we were looking for a special feature, someone suggested we

(above) Some of Jack’s FF animated series storyboards that were inked by various artists, and reworked into a story for FF #236 without Jack’s consent.

Note the blank spot next to Stan Lee where Jack was originally drawn by John Byrne, then removed by Marvel.

Another Marvel Myth

(A sincere tip of the hat to the staff at Fantaco Enterprises who contributed a copy of their ’zine for this article, after the author’s copy was devoured by a household of three boys. Last time we checked, copies were still available at a measly $1.50 (plus—yikes!—$5 shipping) from Fantaco, 21 Central Ave., Albany, NY 12210. The interview primarily includes discussion of Captain Victory, Destroyer Duck, animation, inkers, and his philosophy of creativity.) 43

The Good, The Bad, & The Unfortunate My View of Kirby After ’78, by Shane Foley very few were actually picked up and produced—and Jack knew it.2 Then came Pacific Comics. Captain Victory evidently began strongly, but folded due to lack of sales.3 In 1984, DC agreed to let Jack finish his New Gods storyline, which Jack said he was very happy about,4 but the limitations, editorial demands and final product were not what either party had expected or really wanted.5 Evidently, Jack had long wanted to act in a more advisory/creative-only capacity for other writers and artists. It seems he enjoyed his input into Mike Thibodeaux’s Phantom Force concepts6 and at least his career ended on a relatively high note, for at the time of his passing, his creations for Topps (his old Secret City Saga ideas) were reportedly selling well.7 But how great it would have been if more of his creativity had been able to be harnessed and marketed as he had wished.

es, “The Good, the Bad and the Unfortunate” is an extremely weak title, but Jack liked using movie titles—even those that were overused to death like this one—and he used a similar version of this one himself (next issue blurb in Silver Star #4). Because it sums up the three very different points that come to my mind about this period of Jack Kirby’s career, I thought I’d use it. I hate to end negatively, so let’s turn the order around a bit:

The Bad Whereas Jack had difficulty having commercially successful work after leaving Marvel in 1970, it seemed things got even worse after he left them for the second time in ’78. Initially, there evidently was talk of a “Kirby Comics” line. Jack proposed Captain Victory, Thunderfoot, and Satan’s Six, but the money was never forthcoming and the comics never happened.1 Then Jack’s career as a conceptualizer for an animation company began well, with him happily producing drawings and ideas with an imaginative flair that was usually missing from his last DC and Marvel work. (Just look at the difference between his vehicles in OMAC and Captain America and those seen in TJKC #21.) But as time went on,

The Unfortunate

I know others I’ve spoken to don’t quite see things my way here—and all this has no bearing on the quality of Jack’s comics or animation work—but for years I have felt uncomfortable with two characteristics that permeated his interviews in his later years. To me it seems that, from the ’80s onwards, Jack allowed some of the injustices and disappointments that had happened to him to color what he thought and said (and I’m in no way trying to minimize or trivialize those injustices). I find it terribly frustrating when reading in many of those interviews that the great man was incapable of admitting, or at least extremely reluctant to admit, that this work may not always be the fan-favorites that he would like them to be. Jack has always maintained (and rightly so) that he did much more writing at Marvel (in particular) than was usually admitted. As he says, of course ‘plotting’ is ‘writing’, and plotting involves, at the very least, a suggested script; but as the years went by, it seems to me, Jack lost perspective. In 1970, he talked in one interview about his huge creative role at Marvel, but added, “I’m not saying Stan had nothing to do with it. Of course he did. We talked things out.” 8 In later interviews—mostly after the legal hassles with Marvel were in full swing—he seems less and less willing to give Stan any credit. “I was penciler and a storyteller and I insisted on doing my own writing. I always wrote my own story, no matter what it was. Nobody ever wrote a story for me.”9 In the same piece there were lines like “Nobody’s ever seen Stan Lee write a story” which he goes on to qualify a little, but the intention is clear. Even Joe Simon, for whom Jack always seemed to have the highest regard, felt that some of Jack’s comments in reference to his co-writers was “a little crazy”.10 He seemed to talk like he was the editor making the decisions Amazing Heroes #47 cover. That stick of dynamite confused many a reader when it was colored pink at publication. (“I came in with presentations. I’m not 44

gonna wait around for conferences. I said ‘This is what you have to do.’);9 certainly largely true, but equally certainly, a one-sided, not altogether fair account of what really happened. Again and again we read Jack talking of history as he probably wished it were. (Gil Kane gave a great comment on the way Jack really talked with Stan in Comic Book Artist.)11 The hurt from Marvel ran really deep, we know that; but how I wish he’d been able to prevent that coloring of so many things he said. The second area I don’t like hearing from Jack in his later years was his inability or unwillingness to accept that his later work was not as universally popular as earlier in his career. Yet time and again in interviews, he justifies his work by saying, “It sold very well.” In the ’50s and ’60s, that is true. But his ’70s work simply did not catch on as well. Why couldn’t he admit it? Even if his Fourth World sales were far better than DC thought and it shouldn’t have been cancelled, there’s no way he could have known that. Why did he say (for instance) in one interview, “I assure you it (New Gods) was in DC’s top 10”?12 He wanted it to be. He desperately wished it were, and maybe in reality, it nearly was, or would soon have gotten there; but from his vantage point, he could not have known it. I wonder why he felt compelled to say such a thing—and apart from Kamandi, it seems all his other ’70s work was the same. Why couldn’t he admit sales were lower than he’d hoped? Insecurity? Was it because as yet, there was no flood of acknowledgement that he was a far bigger factor in Marvel’s triumph and continued success than was generally stated? (I remember someone—Mark Evanier maybe—saying that at one point, Jack was afraid of being forgotten, since his name wasn’t attached to his major Marvel creations.) Whatever his reasons, I long to read an interview with Jack where he could be really honest and admit that, love it as he might, his later work was (or certainly appeared to be) accepted and loved by a smaller section of the general readership. Other artists—actors, singers, cartoonists—have a major success or two in their careers, then go on to be able to do the things they enjoy more, but can quite easily admit that what they do now is not as universally popular, even though in their minds, it is actually better—but it seems Jack couldn’t. Why did he feel that, even in his fifties, he had to be on the cutting edge of what readers wanted? I guess Jack really hated the fact that his most successful work sales-wise was with Joe Simon and, more to the point, Stan Lee—not his solo work—especially since he felt the Marvel corporate line was that Stan was the Father/creator at Marvel. Finally, when Jack got free of being in a partnership, his work, sales-wise, seemed to falter. Maybe, to him, he was afraid that lack of high sales on his solo work seemed to cry out to the comics world: “See! You do need Stan!” How I wish he’d been able to graciously accept that, apparently, his solo work appealed to a smaller readership base. This is what I find ‘unfortunate’. Why? Because it reveals to me a man who ought to be content after such a magnificent career, yet was unable to be so. In no way am I trying to say Jack deliberately didn’t tell the truth. We know that truth and fairness were of paramount importance to him, and I mean no disrespect or malignment to the Master; just the desire that the fact he’d given so much to so many and that he’d “done it all and done it fairly” (to paraphrase him) was enough, and that he felt at peace with God and himself as a result—but the hurt and disappointment often got on top of him. At least that’s how it seems to me; but then there’s the ‘good’— and there’s lots of it:

The Good Good—because much of the output I’ve seen by Jack in this period was as magnificent and inspiring as ever. His ability to maintain his drawing quality for a 20-page feature had severely diminished by the early ’80s, but to a huge degree, the vision, imagination and inspiring thought were all still there. The creativity in some of his animation pieces is just amazing. In his vehicle and weaponry designs shown in the Jack Kirby: The Unpublished Archives card series and TJKC is an outlandish imagination which seems to take the simplest idea and make it work. Not since the Fourth World was Jack putting so much into his mechanical representations. His characters were just as good. I can easily imagine “Power Planet” as a fully-developed and much-loved series of Jack’s, had it been produced under different circumstances. Along similar lines, the strength of Jack’s imagination and drawing ability was proven again when he was asked by DC to produce new or updated New Gods character sketches and designs. Part of the deal with DC, around the time Hunger Dogs was produced, was to get Jack to do these so that he could share in the profits when some of the New Gods characters were marketed as toy figures. Most importantly, this was an excellent gesture on DC’s part, and in-keeping with the growing attitude amongst fans and pros regarding Jack’s contribution towards the entire comics industry. But it also gave Jack the opportunity to produce some tremendous new New Gods art pieces. As far as his comic work goes, to me, Captain Victory had all the promise of a classic series. It was an open ended series—a ‘super Star Trek’ if you like—unlike New Gods or Eternals or Silver Star which had a particular theme; but this sort of thing is exactly what Jack was great at. What were the Fantastic Four, or the Challengers or Kamandi but openended vehicles for Jack to go places? Some complained that Captain Victory was just Jack rehashing old themes, but even if it was, so what? So was the FF when it comes down to it—a combination of Challengers, Sky Masters and Monster stories with plots developed from earlier Lee and/or Kirby stories. It felt new though. Nearly all of Jack’s stories or concepts had forerunners, often in his own work (I remember a letter in FF #55, which said Galactus was a “run-of-the-mill space villain”). Part of Jack’s genius was in looking original, even when he wasn’t. Who was the High Evolutionary but Frankenstein in space-age dress? It was what he actually did with the concept that was always important. (Besides if Kirby wanted to revisit his own themes that he no longer owned, who could deny him? I’d rather see Kirby do his own sub-version of his own creation any day than see someone else muddle around with the ‘real thing’.) Captain Victory, to my mind, had potential oozing out of every pore. What was going on with Major Klavus? Who was Paranex? I asked in the last TJKC “where had all the villains gone”, referring to a part of Jack’s ’70s work. The answer could be “they went into the ’80s”, because Jack’s ability to create them was well and truly intact when we look at the Wonder Warriors, as well as Thunder Hunter, Marauder, and others

Which “Harry” came first? Either way, this has to be one of Jack’s strangest animation concepts ever.

we’ve been privileged to see in concept form. And who on Earth was Captain Flane?—a bizarre, mystery character in the mold of Himon— who has unexplained meaning, yet fills the story with the feeling there is something meaningful going on. (Maybe I’m thick and it is really obvious who Flane represents, but I don’t need that knowledge to appreciate him.) Where had the Dreadnought Tiger been before? What stories had the Asterider been involved in? What made Victory the man he was? And most of all, what ideas for them did Jack have that never got to the drawing board? Along the way, in the issues that we got, there was a lot of Jack’s typical ideological discussion, which made for more thought than in a dozen other comics. All the weaknesses in Jack editing his own material and in his failing art quality couldn’t hide the magic that was there. It’s a pity it had to end after only fourteen issues. Silver Star was a very different type of strip. The first issue was as good as any Kirby had done, with lots of mystery, intriguing scenes with the unnamed Darius Drumm, and superb art. In typical Kirby fashion, the dialogue/monologue scripted for Drumm was excellent, whereas much of the talk between the more ordinary cast (Custer and Hammer) had an unnatural and sometimes forced quality; and Mike Royer evidently changed some of the script for Silver Star #1 because he felt Jack had overlooked a point or two. (Wherever this was, according to Royer, Jack did not appreciate it.) 13 As the story progressed, the motivations and character of Darius Drumm were brilliantly written with often profound and disturbing insight. Not since “Himon” did Kirby present such harshness and cruelty as the motivation for a character—and in his typical way, it was handled subtly, yet without diluting its force. That the whole origin of Drumm was preceded by a scene of Drumm with an ice cream I find very creative and clever. I love Kirby’s poetical, philosophical scripting, such as the exchange between Silver Star and Drumm in Silver Star #5, page 12, where they debate the place of pain in life. (Then this is quickly followed two pages later by “Do you still want to stick around and dance with these flakes?” “Roll, baby, roll!” Uugh!!) Little lines here and there like #6, page 4 (“Your evils strain at the leash!”) reflect a Biblical-style understanding of human nature that I rarely find in many other writers. (Dare I say it? This type of poetical line, pregnant with meaning and a wonderful grasp of the human condition brings Shakespeare to mind; but of course, Shakespeare would never write “Roll, baby, roll!” would he?) Towards the climax, the art again began to falter but the plotting remained focussed, and apart from those places in the script that begged for polishing, I find the series a satisfying and well-crafted whole—one of the few that Jack actually got to finish. Soon, Kirby’s philosophical scripting was again in overdrive for “On the Road to Armagetto”. Whatever behind-the-scenes interference was going on with Hunger Dogs (or did Jack—as he used to with Stan Lee—just not listen to what DC said they wanted?) and however disappointing or anticlimactic the final product was, “Road” by itself is a great single chapter; so much so that I think if it had appeared as part of a series, without the “this-is-the-long-awaited-ending!!!” hype, it could easily have been regarded as a classic. The debate between Darkseid and his hidden, New Age ally, against the backdrop of the approaching destructive onslaught of Orion, was great. Then to have Esak’s identity and tragic life revealed and to have Orion, of all people, comforting him and praying over him (and getting an answer!!) was powerful and sensitive—not the climax the powers-that-

be wanted, but a wonderfully written chapter, with far too many expectations on it. I even love Jack’s cover to Super Powers #1: Characters unfamiliar to Kirby, but a trademark symbolic fist of iron in the middle. What a delight to see, after all those years, a Kirby cover at the newsstand. I find Jack a wellspring of inspiration, even in his later, often unpublished work. How I wish there could have been more tangible success for him in those last years, and I’m glad that when Jack passed away, Secret City Saga was selling well and that he felt some of the recognition due to him was forthcoming. I hope that now, in Heaven, he has some inkling of the sheer enormity of his influence over so many people, and that they know that he truly was the Master. ★ 1 Mike Royer interview—Jack Kirby

Quarterly #8, pg. 9

7 The Jack Kirby Collector #21, pg. 63 8 The Jack Kirby Collector #18, pg. 60

2 The Jack Kirby Collector #11, pg. 35

9 Comics Feature, May 1986, pg. 46

3 Comics Feature #34, 1985, pg. 47

10 The Jack Kirby Collector #25, pg. 41

4 ibid

11 Comic Book Artist #2, pg. 41

5 see The Jack Kirby Collector #6 & Jack

12 Comics Scene #2, 1982, pg. 30

Kirby Quarterly #9 6 see letters pg. in Phantom Force #0

13 Mike Royer interview—Jack Kirby

Quarterly #9, pg. 10

Silver Star #2 cover pencils.

#11

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with a minimum of atmospheric niceties. Kirby’s ear for dialect and speech-pattern is keen, and his insights into the simmering hostilities and tenuous tendernesses of his childhood environment are poignant. For the most part, page composition is imaginative and pacing is cinematically effective. Kirby’s portrayal of the breakdown of sexual community is especially vivid: The story essentially depicts no female child or responsible adult male; the world of “Street Code” is one entirely populated by feral boys and the overworked, unfulfilled women they sentimentalize. These mother figures’ younger counterparts are present only by reference, when two neighborhood toughs announce their plans to “feel up goils”—a statement which, in light of the recent mass sexual assaults in New York’s Central Park, provides a chilling perspective on what changes and what stays the same. Matching the impact of this simple but incisive fragment of dialogue is a major wordless image: The two-page spread in which a boys’ fistfight spills from a ground-floor apartment into a wide-angle view of a lower-class 1920s street scene. In one of Kirby’s most spectacular single

Beyond The Dead End Deciphering the Significance of “Street Code”, by Adam McGovern n the early 1980s, Jack Kirby’s reminiscences about his upbringing in the ethnically tense tenements of early 20th century Manhattan inspired publisher Richard Kyle (a frequent contributor to this magazine) to solicit from Kirby a short graphic story on the theme for Kyle’s fledgling fiction quarterly Argosy. The piece was not fated to see print until 1990 (in a rare run now redressed by its inclusion in TwoMorrows’ new graphic anthology Streetwise), but there was an aptness to the timing—three years before Kirby’s death—in that, in some significant ways, the story was the summation of the artist’s life’s work. Kyle was right in sensing that this was the story Kirby had been waiting all his career to tell, though it wasn’t a simple matter of autobiographical expression smothered under a lifetime of action-adventure obligations. Kirby’s childhood memories had played out periodically through his career, in the “kid gang” genre he and Joe Simon brought to comics, from the Dead End Kids-inspired “Newsboy Legion” and war-effort Boy Commandos in the early 1940s; to the western and world travelthemed Boys’ Ranch and Boy Explorers in the late ’40s and early ’50s; to Kirby’s solo series The Dingbats of Danger Street, an updated Dead End Kids for the ’70s. Tellingly, while Kirby left behind no extra issues of the abruptly cancelled Fourth World books which are considered his magnum opus, several unpublished issues of both Boy Explorers and Dingbats have surfaced. The unprecedented opportunity that “Street Code” offered the artist was to tell his story of mob mentality and Darwinian strife with none of the mediating filmnoir aesthetics or romanticized heroics he thought the market expected of him. This rescue of Kirby’s personal testament for the historical record came almost too late. There is in “Street Code” a clear competition between the vitality of Kirby’s recollection and the decline of his formal abilities. Anatomy is weak in some passages; storytelling grows lax and confusing at the point of the young protagonist’s philosophical crisis; description of the ghetto inhabitants’ cultural animosities tends toward the hyperbolic; and Kirby’s notorious abuse of quotation marks is in an advanced state. But there is much success to go with the qualifications. The setting is evocatively recreated

illustrations, we also see a kind of culminating, ironic take on the epic scope of the “doublepage splash” he pioneered: In this panorama the action opens up into an outside world that’s just as physically constricting and emotionally choked as the interior spaces, effecting a damning and clear-eyed characterization of the time of life Kirby is looking back on. But to look without rose-colored glasses is not to look back in anger, and in Kirby’s unfearing confrontation of the world he himself indeed transcended, there is an essential optimism. The deprivations of the artist’s upbringing seem to have instilled in him an equal and opposite generosity toward the next generations (including an explicit and uncommon sympathy for the counterculture in his ’60s and ’70s work). Though flawed, “Street Code” was a fitting valediction from an artist who never let the bad breaks of his own life prevent his good wishes for others.★ (left and above) Scenes from Kirby’s 10-page story “Street Code”, reprinted in TwoMorrows’ new anthology Streetwise, featuring autobiographical stories by top comics pros.

“Street Code” & The American Inner City by John Misselhorn recently purchased issue #2 of Argosy magazine, containing Jack Kirby’s “Street Code.” The original idea of Richard Kyle, publisher of Argosy, was that the story be published in muted colors, and Jack Kirby requested that it be done in dismal tones to reflect the life and atmosphere of the New York City of Kirby’s youth (see TJKC #7, “How ‘Street Code’ Came To Be” by Richard Kyle). Although this would have produced a brilliant artistic masterpiece, the final published story is one of the finest pieces of work in Jack Kirby’s career. I’m glad that Mr. Kyle decided to publish this touching, tragic, revealing, and prophetic tale as-is, without color or inks, just the pure Kirby pencils. The final sentence of the story: “But, I was hurting—hurting for Georgie and me—and the lousy things we had to do for the Street Code” rings hauntingly in our ears, communicates the grim theme of this story, and reminds us about how little we have progressed socially. My wife and I met while we were living and working in Japan. Upon returning to America we were shocked and disgusted by the condition of American cities: Dirty, decaying, violent areas. My wife then got a teaching position in the inner city and we often discussed her experiences. While reading Kirby’s “Street Code,” I was compelled to write about how succinct and relevant his portrayal of American inner city life still is today. When my wife taught elementary school in several of America’s inner cities, she endeavored to inspire the children’s creativity, encouraged them to think independently, to treat other human beings with respect, and most importantly to overcome their dismal world and their dreary existence. She often talked about how the lives of the residents of the inner city were controlled and destroyed by this “street code” and the often barbaric, savage, and violent environment that spawned it. She observed how their attitudes became twisted just trying to survive, how their sense of hope and belief in themselves and their future was broken, how their humanity was lost. Kirby communicated the tragedy of the struggle to survive in the inner city slums, how it contributed to their physical deterioration, how it broke their spirits, and the sense of the waste of human lives and potential: “My mother was a handsome woman. But ‘hard times’ were beginning to exact a hard price” and “Although they fought to ‘stay alive’ with their psyches, the slum dwellers crumbled physically— transformed by tenements, hall toilets, and the high esteem of low

salaries.” Kirby was able to overcome this crushing environment, to think creatively and to dream with his spirit. Most of his life he communicated with the grand dreams of what we could become if we overcome the narrow, restrictive everyday brutality of our “street code”—of our environment. His message is more relevant today than ever. Kirby has always spoken out for the “little guy,” the powerless, the oppressed, and taught us what we can become if we dream. Kirby has given us a vivid commentary about the American inner city urban life of his youth, written late in his career, that is still tragically significant today. He always remembered his youth. Perhaps this is why he always championed the “little guy,” struggling against seemingly insurmountable forces which try to control us and keep us down. Kirby triumphed and inspires us all to change. My wife told me constantly what inner city children had to do for their “street code”: Meet violence with violence; avoid letting others know that you enjoy learning or being creative because you believe you have nothing and will be nothing in life; destroy everything around yourself because you feel you are the bottom of society and because of your growing and suppressed rage at a world that has forgotten you, wasted you, and treats you as if you were valueless; use violence to gain the respect that you feel you will never be given any other way or have the opportunity to earn. It’s the law of the jungle: Devour or be devoured; destroy or be destroyed. As a teacher my wife observes every day how important it is for a child to live in a loving home. Indeed Kirby beautifully portrays through his words and pictures a mother’s love and concern for her son as he hurried outside into a harsh world. In the story as the young Kirby was leaving, Kirby narrates about his mother: “She was really a ‘softie’ and turned to spare me the embarrassment of her odd lingering glance. I could feel it inevitably return and warm my back when I left the apartment.” Perhaps the success of Kirby’s career is also a testimony to the power of a mother’s love. Jack Kirby’s “Street Code” is indeed a most powerful story. It is a message to those who must endure the everyday horror of our inner cities that they can also triumph. It is also an implicit condemnation of a system—and those that create it and rule it—that allows this kind of environment to exist.★

last pieces of life’s work is always instructive, the artist’s faults and eccentricities are often more pronounced, his stylistic methods ever stranger. A creative master’s last works are often overly mannered, claustrophobic, and inordinately inward-looking. (Consider the last works of Rembrandt, Kubrick, Goya, Dickens, Henry James, and John An Appraisal of Jack Kirby’s Silver Star, by Michael Neno Coltrane, to name but a few.) Somber of tone, and grappling with ideas both fantastic and serious, s a youngster growing up in the slums of Manhattan in the ’20s, Silver Star was first conceived in the mid-’70s as a film screenplay written one of Jack Kirby’s first dreams was to work in films as a director by Kirby and assistant Steve Sherman (a first draft treatment was in or actor. That the dream was unfulfilled is Hollywood’s loss, but TJKC #21). It’s just as well, based on the evidence, that the film treatment the comic book industry’s gain. In Kirby’s work one can see (perhaps was not pursued further, for it accentuates that peculiar side of Kirby’s unconsciously applied) the affects and influences of Hitchcock, creativity that is dry, humorless and colorless: More concerned with Kubrick, Lang, and other innovative film directors, but irrepressibly ideas and situations than with emotions and motivations. One can bent to the service of Kirby’s own concerns and preoccupations. His remember similarly-minded late-’60s and early-’70s films (John Sturges’ early ’80s series Silver Star is a prime example. Ice Station Zebra, Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain, and Franklin Along with Hunger Dogs and Captain Victory, Silver Star is one of Schaffner’s Patton and Papillon), and visualize how a filmed Silver Star Kirby’s last sustained efforts, a late burst of creative energy. It has to be might have looked—and be content it didn’t happen. noted that Silver Star is an odd, flawed work. A look at any great master’s In the six issues of Silver Star published by Pacific Comics in 1983 and ’84, however, the material is redeemed and made endlessly fascinating by Kirby’s strengths: Consummately original artwork resplendent with controlled, restrained passion, and situations and characters which prod inconclusively but queryingly at the heart of human nature. Kirby’s themes—the will to power and the freedom of autonomous thought, the timeless nature of man’s heroically flawed war against himself and others, his godlike nobility, and his capacity to strive for more civility, coupled with his inherent capacity for ever greater evil—are as old as Homer, and as relevant. Silver Star tells the story of scientist Bradford Miller who, in an effort to create a “Next Breed” of man capable of surviving a nuclear war, performs a series of prenatal implants on a number of pregnant women. The experiment works all too well. The creatures his work has spawned are nearly ageless, unbound by space, and can rearrange at will the molecular structure of matter. Most of the Next Breed have managed to integrate themselves into society by choosing occupations which exploit their abilities (which they don’t fully comprehend). Two, however, have larger roles to play: Darius Drumm, an overgrown infant obsessed with power under the guise of religiosity, and Morgan Miller, Bradford’s son and a medal-winning Vietnam War hero (thus the name Silver Star), who is forced to try and stop Drumm. This is, in a sense, a reworking of the X-Men concept developed by Stan Lee and Kirby at Marvel in the early-’60s, the basic difference being that, unlike Marvel’s mutants, the Next Breed was wilfully created by a man who had, perhaps, not examined the ramifications of his actions beforehand. When confronted with the threat of Darius Drumm, Dr. Miller wallows in self pity for having created him. His colleague Walter, however, counters, “You created—Bradford Miller created? You can change man’s abilities with your radical practices! But—you cannot change man! You’ve created nothing! A man by any other name is no different than his sweet old self!” Kirby, of course, sees man’s capacity for moral virtue as a universal truth, and the choosing of the good as a sign of maturity and wisdom. In contrast, after murdering one of Silver Star’s best friends, Drumm is showed mulling over a malt shake and eating a fudgesicle. The most immoral character in Silver Star is a bratty child. Silver Star also recalls another series Kirby Page 8 pencils from Silver Star #2, showing the silent death of Floyd Custer. 50

Still Shining

worked on six years earlier: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both deal with the species of mankind “stepping up” to a higher level, and both series express the theme in a grand apocalyptic manner. Silver Star’s thematic connection with 2001 is alluded to in a quick, symbolic scene: In issue #1, a government intelligence man looks at x-ray negatives of Silver Star. “Stars—it’s like looking at stars!” he says, repeating, nearly verbatim, the last words Dave Bowman sent back to Earth before traveling through the Star Gate in Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of 2001 (written concurrently with the production of the film). It’s also worth noting that the intelligence man’s name is Floyd Custer, recalling, perhaps, Kubrick’s Heywood Floyd from 2001; another VIP in possession of controversial top secret government information. The bulk of the Silver Star series centers on Drumm’s attempt to wipe out all the “others,” as he calls them, before singlehandedly ruling all of mankind. The others are as varied as their locales: A movie stuntwoman, a baseball player, a ghetto child, a circus geek. Each confrontation is a showcase for Kirby’s timing, design, and extraordinary talent for brilliant spectacles. The circus scene is an example of pure, raw suspense: The geek, as part of the act, has a carousel set by crane onto his chest. Things go awry when Drumm, a member of the audience, causes the carousel to spin ever faster until, in a visually impressive nod to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, the ride explodes, plastic horses and debris flying everywhere. Another scene, in issue #2, ranks with the most effective scenes in Kirby’s oeuvre: Driving across the lonely Montana countryside at dusk, Floyd Custer is attacked by gargoylelike demons which climb over and into his car. In two panels of complete silence he is killed (no screaming, no roars from the creatures). Then Kirby’s “camera” pulls slowly back to reveal a lone figure who has been watching the car (and subsequent crash and explosion) from a great distance. It is Drumm. As if sensing the reader’s presence, he turns and speaks to the viewer. “Oh... been watching me, have you?” As he talks, he thrusts his palms at the viewer, distorting his hands into monstrous faces which finish his sentences as Darius smiles madly at the viewer. This is powerful, hallucinative, disturbing material, decidedly Felliniesque in its daring and cleverness. (It might be worth noting, for the Kirby fanatic, the amazing similarity between the car attack scene and a scene from the 1972 made-for-tv film Gargoyles, televised a couple times in the A disturbing image of Darius Drumm as the Angel of Death from Silver Star #6, page 14. years before the Silver Star screenplay was written. The city shown far off in the distance. It’s an image that rivals anything from scene also perhaps reveals the origin of Floyd Custer’s surname, as 2001, The Eternals, or Machine Man for sheer awesomeness. he’s surrounded and killed outdoors, far from civilization.) The series’ flaws, as mentioned, are numerous: The dialogue is Born evil, physically deformed, and with extraordinary abilities and eccentric and vigorously personal, though also pregnant with implicaintelligence, Drumm taunts and mocks his father minutes after having tion; a plot involving the ghetto child is pursued, but then suddenly been born: “Ha-Ha-Ha! Progress...? Change...?—Or perhaps, the ‘Ides dropped; the ending is contrived and anticlimactic; and Kirby’s artwork of March’, O Caesar...” He kills that father, the prosperous-living leader is, due to his age and failing eyesight, sometimes awkward. Four of the of a religious cult, The Foundation for Self-Denial, by turning the brainsix issues are, fortunately, inked by Mike Royer, the collaborator who washed members of the group against him. Drumm fondly remembers interpreted and understood Kirby’s pencils more greatly than any how he “...created torches and passed them to these crazies, who accepted other. The last two issues are inked by D. Bruce Berry, whose more thin, them like candy!” as they rip the institution and his father to shreds. scratchy inklines were adequate in the mid-’70s. By the early-’80s, Drumm deems himself above all aesthetic and moral concerns: “I however, Berry’s style didn’t quite mesh with Kirby’s thick, black, decided all that was ugly and beautiful—right and wrong!” In his frenzy dynamic pencil strokes. to master and destroy, he forgoes his plans to rule over mankind and Having said the above is like complaining that a James Fenimore decides to obliterate him outright. Calling himself the Angel of Death, Cooper novel is wordy and melodramatic; true but, considering the Drumm transforms himself into a hideous, winged, horned creature the talents of the creator, somehow forgivable. Fifteen years after its publisize of an office tower; it spews fire and disintegrates anything within cation, Silver Star stands out favorably as inventive and exciting work.★ miles of its path. One of the most disturbing, beautiful images Kirby ever drew is in issue #6: The angel, wings flapping, flies inches above an (This article first appeared, in a shorter version, in the Vol. 1, #2, 1987 enormous flat desert plain (which moments before had been lush countryissue of Fantasy Frontiers.) side or a neighborhood), rushing swiftly towards a large metropolitan 51

A curious coincidence between Kirby and writer Michael Chabon: The use of the name “Wonder Boys” (shown here in Kirby’s unsold animation concept for a new Kid Gang).

The Amazing Adventures of Michael Chabon An acclaimed novelist (and big Kirby fan) writes an epic of comics’ Golden Age, by Robert L. Bryant Jr. t’s the last sentence on the last page of Michael Chabon’s new novel: “Finally,” writes Chabon, who’s been called “the hottest fiction writer on both coasts,” “I want to acknowledge the deep debt I owe in this and everything else I’ve ever written to the work of the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics.” So ends, after 639 pages, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Random House, $27, published September 2000), Chabon’s epic story of the Golden Age of comics and of two cousins who create a super-popular super-hero; but it’s just the beginning of the link between the novelist and Kirby. “Neither of my characters is based on Jack,” Chabon told TJKC in an E-mail interview, “but he was definitely a life-inspiration to me.... I did a lot of research on many of the great creators of the Golden Age, Jack included.... I think the most direct Kirby connection to my book is that the major character my two guys invent is a super-escape artist, like Mister Miracle. “I was influenced by reading of how JK based Mister Miracle in part on Jim Steranko. The idea of a comics artist as escape artist just hooked right up in my imagination to the other things I was planning to write about—escapism, a flight from Nazi occupation, the liberating power of imagination. There are some sort of gross biographical

similarities between JK and my Sam Clay—New Yorkers, Jewish, selfeducated, the name change, the move to Long Island—but that’s because there are gross similarities among the lives of a lot of the Golden Age creators.” Chabon’s novel begins in 1939, as teenage Josef “Joe” Kavalier slips out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, on his way to New York to live with the family of his teenage cousin, Samuel Klayman (a.k.a. Sam Clay because “It sounds more professional”). Joe is a budding escape artist and art student with the effortless talent of a Jack Kirby; Sam is a would-be writer and artist with the motor-mouth confidence of a Stan Lee. They have big dreams. They need money. They team up to create a hero called the Escapist. Sam explains the concept, a sort of cross between Harry Houdini, Doc Savage and Scott Free: “Armed with superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains!... He doesn’t just fight (crime). He frees the world of it. He frees people, see?” And they’re off and running through a tangled career in comics, told with a kind of gritty lyricism that would be right at home in any of Kirby’s 1940s work. Chabon, 36, is a Columbia, MD native who grew up in Pittsburgh

and now lives in Berkeley, CA with his wife and two children. He’s a critics’ favorite on the strength of a few novels (one of which, Wonder Boys, was made into a film with Michael Douglas). The San Francisco Examiner called Chabon “the hottest fiction writer on both coasts”; The New Yorker named him one of its 20 best American writers under 40. And for Chabon, Kirby has always been a wellspring of inspiration. “I’m a regular reader of TJKC!” Chabon said via e-mail. “I have the first issue somewhere.... I first became aware of Kirby as Kirby in the pages of Mister Miracle #8—I must have been 8 or 9. Before this, I had taken some note of his work, I think, but it was that book—that incredible double splash of the Female Furies—that just blew the top of my head off. “It was just panel after panel of endlessly ramifying and flowering stuff. Reading his work was like putting on some kind of mystic spectacles. It was like that famous medieval woodcut of the monk sticking his head through the sky into the gears and celestial machinery beyond. I was devoted to the guy after that, but though I was very impressed by the Fourth World books, I think my favorite of all his work was probably Kamandi, though I was also fond of The Demon and later The Eternals. “I think the thing about Kirby that I most admired, and continue to admire—and the thing about him that continues to influence me and my approach to my own work—was and is the sheer untrammeled force of his imagination. Every little idea, whether narrative or visual, seems to throw off a dozen more ideas, shedding them like sparks. He was a world-creating machine, like that thing in the Star Trek movie that can make dead worlds bloom.” [The Genesis Device in 1982’s Star

™

Trek II—RLB] Chabon was one of the writers who took a shot at 20th Century Fox’s X-Men film at various stages of the movie’s tortured development. On his Web site, Chabon posts his (rejected) 1996 X-Men story proposal and explains why you didn’t see his name on the credits when Bryan Singer’s mutant manifesto opened in July. Chabon’s story involves Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Beast, Iceman, Storm, Wolverine, and Jubilee vs. the death squads of an anti-mutant League of Gentlemen. As in the final film, Congress is considering a bill to register mutants, and we “discover” the X-Men through Wolverine’s eyes, but there are no super-villains in Chabon’s proposal. (“I am a little weary of megalomaniacs bent on world domination,” Chabon told 20th Century Fox. Clearly, Fox was not weary at all: The studio hung the final film on Magneto & Co.) “I put way too much thought, time, and energy into this [proposal], all for free,” Chabon writes on his Web site. “The proposal was politely discussed, then just as politely rejected.... I was surprisingly relieved to have failed. I discovered that I had a lot of other great projects at hand, some of them with a shot at actually being works of art. I would not, as it turned out, have wanted to write the X-Men movie, at all.” Chabon’s final thoughts on the X-Men film: “I saw the movie,” he writes on the Web site. “I liked it pretty well. It managed, I thought, to capture some of the loony angst and absurd grandeur of the comics that inspired it. I tip my hat to Mssrs. Singer, et al. Too bad about Storm, though.”★

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Meet Jack Kirby A photo-essay by Cindy Bruns n Jack’s later years, he made numerous appearances at comics shops in the Los Angeles area as well as conventions. On Saturday November 7th, 1992, he made a visit to 20th Century Comics in order to meet some of his fans and promote his then-new book, The Art of Jack Kirby. As part of the day’s events, Jack and store owner Barry Short raffled off a few comics and a pencil drawing of Captain America. These photos were taken that day and used for a photography class project by Cindy Bruns, and we’ve excerpted a few here. Our thanks to Cindy and her husband, Scott, for this submission.

(above) Roz and Jack enjoying a break. (top right) Jack mugs for the camera. (middle right) Jack mingles with the fans, including store owner Barry Short (far right) (bottom left) And the winner is... (bottom right) ...Scott Bruns, displaying his prize alongside Jack and Barry Short.

Robert Katz Interview Conducted by John Morrow, transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington (Jack and Roz Kirby’s nephew, Robert Katz, was born December 10, 1953 in the small town of Liberty, NY, about 100 miles from New York City. Soon to be 47 years old, Robert has been the Kirby Estate’s co-trustee—along with Kirby daughter Lisa—since Roz’s death in 1997. Our thanks go out to Robert for all his help with this magazine, and for taking time out for this interview, which was conducted by telephone on September 7, 2000, and was copyedited by him.)

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: So in terms of the Kirby family tree, you mom was Roz’s sister, Anita Katz? ROBERT KATZ: Right. Anita Katz, who’s maiden name was Anita Goldstein; of course, Aunt Rosalind was also a Goldstein. TJKC: You grew up in New York. Were you near the Kirbys? ROBERT: It was a long drive back then, before the Interstate system. It was a good half day to drive to the Kirbys, who were living on Long Island when I was a kid. They lived in a town called East Williston, and we would drive there a few times a year, and they would drive up to visit us a few times a year. So we did see each other semi-often. TJKC: As a child, did you read comics at all? Were you aware of what your uncle did? ROBERT: Yeah. I was very lucky as a kid, ’cause I was just at the right age, and Uncle Jack put me on the Marvel mailing list. So I got every title from Avengers to X-Men. I got ’em all. TJKC: Wow! From the very early issues, then? ROBERT: From the very early issues—and I not only got Uncle Jack’s comics; I got Spider-Man, I got all the cowboy stuff. If Marvel put it out, I got it. TJKC: Did you keep them, by any chance? Do you still have some of the original ones? ROBERT: Some. Yeah, certainly. Absolutely. TJKC: So you read pretty avidly? ROBERT: Yes, I read everything. There wasn’t a comic that came through the door that I didn’t read. So I was quite the big man on the block, and that’s where a lot of them went. I was very free about giving them away when I was real young. It was only later that I started hanging on to them, and when I got to college, even then I continued to—at that point I wasn’t on the DC mailing list, but I was buying his DC stuff, so I still read Kamandi, Demon, and his Fourth World stuff. TJKC: So obviously you were very aware of his career and into what he was doing. ROBERT: Very much so. I was definitely. I’m sure, as far as the family goes, I’m the only one in the family who can truly say that I was a fan. I would read everything, even the Jimmy Olsens. I didn’t read the later stuff. I never read Captain Victory, Silver Star, the Topps stuff; that’s stuff that I did not read. After his DC career, I pretty much stopped reading comics. TJKC: So you’re not an avid comic book afficionado today? ROBERT: No, I don’t read any today at all. What I read today is—I still subscribe to comics for my son, who’s nine years old, just so he can stay involved in that; and I do have a lot of the Marvel Masterworks. I’ll pull those out and we’ll read those together, which is fun for me to go back and reread the old comics and read them with him, and explain to him a lot of the stuff that went on then.

A 1983 Hulk drawn done as a fan commission.

TJKC: I guess that would spark some interesting memories. ROBERT: Yeah, very much so; especially things like The Hulk.

swimming, but I would still be in that den. I don’t recall if that was his studio or some sort of den.

TJKC: So back in the ’60s—when you were getting all these comics and reading them—when you’d have family get-togethers, did you talk with your uncle about how they were made and what his involvement was? ROBERT: I never really made the connection until later in life that they were the same person. It was his job. It’s just what he did. Just like other dads have jobs, this was Uncle Jack’s job; and it was a cool job, but it was pretty much that. I wasn’t in awe of him at that point in time, because I didn’t realize that other people weren’t doing the same thing. I Our back cover is inked by Al knew there were people who were Gordon, from this 1980s Kirby drawing Superman and Batman, fan commission drawing. The inks are for sale at Al’s booth which I never read—I never read at <www.comicon.com> the DC stuff, ’cause I didn’t have to. I had too much other stuff going on; but I knew those other things existed, so I knew there were other people out there doing comics and it never dawned on me that he was so unique and so much more prolific and better than anyone else out there. That didn’t dawn on me until I got to college and beyond.

TJKC: Was it down in a basement? ROBERT: It wasn’t the basement. They had a basement, also. This was two steps down out of the living room. It was a—what would you call it? TJKC: A sunken living room? ROBERT: It was just two steps down and it might have been an addition or something. It might have even been Neal’s bedroom, for all I know.

TJKC: But you were aware that he was the one drawing those books. ROBERT: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, you go to his house and he was always drawing, and he was always drawing caricatures, and it was his life. TJKC: So it was just “Oh, ho hum, here’s another neat comic book that Uncle Jack drew”? ROBERT: Absolutely. When I would go to his house in Long Island—I still remember the layout of the house and that there was a sunken room off the living room that had all of these World War II model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, and there were posters everywhere; and there were stacks and stacks of comic books. I now realize those were the older comics: Things like the Yellow Claws and the Bullseyes. I didn’t realize at the time I was already reading the even older comics from the ’40s and ’50s— the Boys’ Ranchs and things of that nature—because they were always there in the house. Most of my vacations down there were pretty much spent reading comic books, because my cousins were girls and they didn’t interest me that much. [John laughs] He did have a swimming pool out back; I do remember that. He always had a swimming pool. TJKC: This is in New York? ROBERT: This is in New York. I still remember a lot of times everybody would be out at the pool 56

I don’t think it was, but it might have been his studio. I think his studio was in the basement, so I’m a little confused on those issues.

ROBERT: It was in your last issue. Well, that’s how Uncle Jack met my dad, and my dad just always thought he was a character—which, of course, he was—and that was always my father’s opinion of Uncle Jack. They got along. They’d tell war stories and things of that nature; but, no, Dad never saw him as a giant of the 20th century as far as mass media and culture goes. That only came much later when the Hulk and the X-Men and those things became what they became.

TJKC: I remember Roz talking about the dungeon, the basement studio. ROBERT: Yeah. That’s what I kind of remember. He had a big fish tank down there, which was pretty cool. TJKC: You mentioned your cousins were there. Were you close to Neal [Jack’s son] at all? Were you close in age? ROBERT: Neal is probably five years older than me. We were far enough away in age where he hung out more with my two older brothers. He was always a nice guy; we always got along, but I was too young for him. He was a cool guy.

TJKC: I can see how some would say “That’s our crazy brother-in-law/ crazy uncle. He draws comic books.” Especially in the ’50s and ’60s, one might think, “What a thing to do. You should be out doing solid blue-collar work, not sitting around drawing pictures all day.” ROBERT: No. My dad was an insurance salesman. He didn’t really work with his hands, either, so he wasn’t blue-collar. That was never an issue. Uncle Jack made a good living as an artist and everybody was just accepting of that. This was just a job that he did and there’s a lot of different ways to make an income.

TJKC: What about your other cousins. I take it they were a bit younger than you? ROBERT: Susan was the oldest. She went off to be a rock musician and she left the house early. She was pretty much gone; I didn’t have much to do with Susan. I probably had the most interaction with Barbara because we were a similar age, but Barbara was always very quiet and didn’t really pal around or do that much. She was always a very quiet, very private person. Lisa came along much later. Lisa’s quite a bit younger than me, and while I’m very close to Lisa now, growing up she wasn’t even born yet. She came along much later.

TJKC: So they respected it like it was any other job? ROBERT: Oh yeah, absolutely. They just always looked at Uncle Jack as a character. My dad always used to love to pull this trick on him. My father was quite the gardener, because we lived out in the country. Especially after my dad retired, he would always have a huge garden in the Summertime. He was very good at it. So when Uncle Jack would come up to visit, Dad would always say, “Let’s go out to the garden and pick a salad”; but what my dad would do is, whatever he didn’t grow, he would go to the grocery and buy, and he’d put it out in the garden. [laughter] Then he’d say, “Let’s go pick a honeydew or a cantaloupe,” and there would be only one perfect cantaloupe or watermelon or whatever. Uncle Jack was always so impressed with my father’s gardening skills.

TJKC: In terms of the family perceptions, did your family perceive Jack as someone who “made it”—as someone big and famous—a big-shot, or just one of the guys? ROBERT: At the time, my folks didn’t really have a concept of comic art. At that point in time, the Hulk had not become the icon that he is, and all those [Marvel] characters weren’t icons. My mom always knew Uncle Jack, because he had known Aunt Roz from way back when. So my mom had known him since she was a teenager. To my mom, it was just Jack— and my dad met him in the Army. In fact, my dad was a Sergeant in a platoon that he was in, training down in, I guess, Georgia....

TJKC: [laughs] Well, being a city boy, he didn’t know anything about farming. ROBERT: Never had a clue. [laughter] My dad would have such a good laugh at Uncle Jack’s expense, because he never caught on. That was a good joke. Of course, Uncle Jack always had a great sense of humor and he was always fun to be around. He’d tell a lot of war stories, which always drove my mom and the other adults crazy; but for a kid, to hear the war stories was always exciting. “Tell us more! Tell us more!”

TJKC: We just ran that story...!

TJKC: What were your hobbies growing up? ROBERT: Probably the biggest one was reading. I did read a lot. That was it. As far as other things go, just being a normal kid; just playing around the neighborhood and having your friends.

TJKC: A person once contacted me— either a relative or a close friend of the

family—and said that Jack used to draw all these get-well cards and birthday cards and send them to him. He may have been a doctor. Does that ring any bells? ROBERT: No, but Uncle Jack always did that. He was always drawing. What offbeat things I have—sketches that he did of me when I was 7 and 8. These characters that he drew for me on my birthday, and this one caricature of my dad that’s really very... my dad bought a motor scooter when he retired, and he did a caricature of my dad on the motor scooter, which is a very cherished thing to have. A little thing that he whipped off. It was Uncle Jack.

TJKC: In many of the interviews Jack gave, he was doing a lot of offthe-cuff philosophizing. A lot of people have commented that—and I think Mark Evanier first said this—“Jack said something to me at a convention in ’75, and it wasn’t until 10 years later that suddenly I realized what he was talking about, and it made perfect sense.” Is that a fair assessment of what conversations with Jack were like at times? ROBERT: Yeah. There were a lot of times I would sit there and listen to him and not really know where he was going. A lot of times it almost seemed like stream of consciousness; but he retained everything. I mean, when you look at his “Tales of Asgard” and things of that nature— whatever he read, he absorbed. His mind was just fantastic, how he always seemed to remember everything that he read. That was one of the funny things about him. If he read it, he would absorb it—but if it was a day-to day thing, like remembering where this or that was, that didn’t register with him.

TJKC: In comics, Jack’s known for kind of the odd sense of humor he had. I’m just curious—you said he had a great sense of humor, but did he ever do anything that left you scratching your head? Any strange stories? Roz has told about how he ran into the back of a police car one time. ROBERT: He was totally absent-minded. In a lot of the day-to-day things, if he didn’t have Aunt Roz to look out for him and take care of him, he would not have a good grasp of them. That’s because his mind was always on another world. I truly believe that he lived in his Fourth World. His mind was always thinking; it was always there, and so to bring him back to reality would throw him a curve. He would wash a dish for 20 minutes and then put it in the dishwasher. [laughter] Things of that nature. Aunt Roz would ask him to get something from the refrigerator and he would never find things. He didn’t know where anything was. He was just that kind of guy. He was just always thinking. He spent all of his time creating. His mind was always working on stories. Most of his conversations were all parables and stories, and either stories of the past or stories of the future. That’s just who he was.

TJKC: His brain was so full of all the fun stuff, I guess to our benefit. He did so much great work that he might not have done otherwise if he was worried about changing light bulbs and finding stuff in the refrigerator. ROBERT: Exactly. Again, that’s why he was so prolific. He was so unbelievably fast when he drew. He had so much that he had to get out. That was just his way of trying to control that energy. He just had so much energy. The way to channel it was to pick up a pencil, and that’s what he did. TJKC: Let’s talk about your career background. What do you do for a living now? ROBERT: I’m a financial planner. I started out working for an insurance company. Over the course of time, the direction that I carved out for

myself and liked the most was managing money, and helping people build wealth through management of money, and protecting assets, and things of that nature. It’s just been something I’ve been working towards for about 15 years. Now I’m working for a small company— just me and a couple of other guys—and we’re independent planners. We have a nice little boutique and it’s something I really enjoy doing. It’s very nice working with people and really helping them see that there is light at the end of the tunnel. TJKC: Were you able to advise Jack and Roz on their finances at all? ROBERT: I wish I did, but no. The problem was that by the time I became qualified to do what I do, most of the water had been over the dam for the Kirbys. I was able to be very helpful to Aunt Roz at the end of her life. For the last several years after Uncle Jack died, I was able to help her, which is why Lisa and I became the trustees of the Estate. At that point in time I was pretty much handling that part of her life for her. TJKC: Is your official title “co-trustee” of Jack and Roz’s estate, or is it “co-executor”? ROBERT: It’s the same thing. If there’s not a trust—if it’s a will—it’s an “executor.” If there’s a trust, it’s a “trustee.” It’s synonymous, but [in this case] it’s “trustee.” TJKC: When people hear the word “estate,” it conjures up this image of a cold, impersonal type of corporate entity of some kind. Can you explain for our readers what the Kirby Estate is? What does it consist of? ROBERT: It was pretty much personal artwork and other assets that were left behind. Basically, Lisa and I, our job is to manage those assets for the benefit of the beneficiaries. TJKC: Which is basically the family. ROBERT: Right. TJKC: So if someone wants to license a Kirby property for some project, they should contact you or Lisa? ROBERT: Right. They can e-mail me at rkatz@ecentral.com TJKC: In terms of your handling of the Estate, obviously you’re geared toward the business of financial planning. Would you say you treat it more as a business than Jack or Roz did when they were handling it themselves? ROBERT: Well, the problem is they did not handle it as a business. They were totally and completely taken advantage of by just about everyone they ever did business with, because of how honest and trustworthy they were. They were so guileless they didn’t realize that most of the people out there in the industry were—the Yiddish word is “ganef.” They were just basically thieves. They completely and totally took advantage of Uncle Jack and Aunt Roz from the get-go. Pretty much everybody did. There’s only a few people that really treated them the way they deserved to be treated, and that was really towards the end, where some of the fans became successful, and they realized how they were just completely robbed of everything he created. That was really the sad thing—I wish I was smarter, younger,

Another 1980s drawing (we’re not sure what it was for).

and sooner, so that I could have protected them. They really didn’t have anyone to protect them and they needed protecting businesswise—because of how honest they were, they assumed everybody else was honest. They just never figured out that the people who saw the value of Uncle Jack’s creations were not honest people. They were not honest people at all. TJKC: How do you handle it when a fan approaches you saying, “I’ve got this great idea for a Kirby project,” and it’s really non-commercial? As a one-time comics fan, I imagine you can kind of sympathize with them and see why they’d want to do it. Is it tough to balance the business aspects, and turn people down if that’s what’s best for the Estate? 59

More 1980s work, probably done as a fan commission.

(next page) An entrepreneur hired Jack to do his rendition of a Killer Bee for a t-shirt to be sold when the pests threatened to invade California in the 1980s. At least two other “Killer Bee” drawings exist.

interest in protecting them at all—and that’s the sad thing about their lives. TJKC: How often do you get contacted from people wanting to license a Kirby property, or with some great idea of how they can turn something like Silver Star into the next big motion picture? ROBERT: Not very often. In fact, what I’m trying to do is find some sort of management company to help me do that, because I’m not out there actively marketing. I’ve got my own family and my own business, so that’s something that I’m not doing, and you do need professional representation to do that. I’m talking to people about that, but I haven’t come to any agreements or deals at this point in time. I’m always having discussions to try to find somebody that would be the right fit; that would do justice to the Kirby properties that the Trust owns. Of course, the Trust doesn’t own any of the Marvel characters, or the DC characters. Especially with the Marvel stuff, I’m very blunt in saying that those were stolen from Uncle Jack years and years ago. So the Trust doesn’t have any control or say in what happens there. Like even the X-Men: The fact that they won’t even give him a credit in the movie— they were just bastards. Uncle Jack and Aunt Roz would have been so happy just to have been given credit. Even if they didn’t receive any money, which they never did, but to at least have been given some credit—and the bastards won’t even do that. TJKC: So the Kirby Trust didn’t get cent one from the X-Men movie. ROBERT: Not a penny. They didn’t even give us a movie pass. They won’t say that he had anything to do with it. TJKC: Tracy had mentioned the Endeavor Agency in her interview [see TJKC #28]. Are you still pursuing having them represent the Estate? Anything new to report? ROBERT: Nothing new to report. There’ve been talks and discussions but there’s been nothing concrete.

TJKC: Do you personally feel Jack’s work is still viable in today’s entertainment industry? ROBERT: Oh, absolutely. There’s still nobody who had the ability to flesh out characters and concepts like Uncle Jack. The stuff out there today, most of it is garbage. There’s only so many good ideas in the world and he came up with more than his share. Most people are lucky if they can come up with one idea in a lifetime—and then you have these geniuses like Jack Kirby, that it seems like, “Where does it come from?” It’s just so amazing. I can’t think of anybody who has come up with as many ideas as Jack Kirby. Give people like Bob Kane their due for coming up with great characters and great concepts, but they’re known for their one idea—and look at Uncle Jack. He never, ever stopped. He couldn’t turn it off. It was who he was.

ROBERT: Yeah. At this point I’ve been around, especially the last years of Uncle Jack and Aunt Roz’s lives. I was out to California quite a bit and got to meet a lot of the people that either were, or wanted to be, associated with them. It’s pretty easy to tell which ones are the flaky hangers-on, and which ones really do have some savvy to them. You just have to make those judgments where, again, Uncle Jack and Aunt Roz didn’t make those judgements. They just assumed that everybody was equal. That was the wonderful thing about them: Everybody was equal and everybody was given the same opportunity to be part of what they were doing. I have to be a lot different about that. Again, the one thing I would like to have been able to do differently would be to have protected them from the people that were obviously trying to just make something on Uncle Jack’s name, and really didn’t have any

TJKC: How do you view Jack’s treatment in the comics industry since 60

his death? Just in terms of your interaction with people through what you do with the Estate, do you get a sense of respect from people? ROBERT: It depends on the people. Again, I limit the people. I tend to talk to the people I know truly love him and I tend not to deal with the sycophants and the people who robbed from him. It’s pretty cut and dry. Most of the comics industry did nothing but steal from him. Every now and then I’ll get a call from Marvel, and I make it very clear to Marvel that there’ll be no discussions with me until they give him... I don’t ask for money. I just say, “Will you give Jack at least ‘cocreator’?” I know that Stan Lee is Stan Lee, but I make it very clear that until they give Jack Kirby co-creator credit for the things that he’s done... I’m not asking for any money, I just want to see his name up there, and once you do that we can talk and we can do business and we can go from there; but until you do that, don’t even waste my time—and I never hear back from them. They’ll come up with an idea and I make that one demand and I never hear back from them, and I sure don’t follow up with them.

edited or altered in some way by some outside person. Are there any plans for that novel to be published in whatever form it exists in? ROBERT: It would be nice, but again no one’s offering and no one’s marketing it. There was talk for a while when Aunt Roz was still alive about trying to do it as a limited edition comic/graphic novel like Hunger Dogs, or something of that nature, but for whatever reason it never came to life. That would be great if that ever did happen, but at this point it’s just another one of those projects that’s on the shelf. TJKC: Was the novel actually completed or is it in some semi-finished stage? ROBERT: It’s in a manuscript form. It has a beginning, middle, and almost the end. He was actually not... Aunt Roz told me that Uncle Jack was, in some ways, actually afraid to finish it, because he was afraid that by finishing it, it would be a prophesy that would come true. The way the story was going, the ending was not going to be a— it was going to be more of an Armageddon ending, and he was afraid that if he wrote it, it would be so.

TJKC: Let’s talk for a moment about Mike Thibodeaux. How would you assess his importance to the Estate? ROBERT: Well, Mike is just a great guy. Mike was always there for Aunt Roz and Uncle Jack. He was truly a good son. He treated them like parents and they treated him like a son. It was good, especially in the latter years, that Mike was there for them, just as a human being; and as far as knowing the [original] art [market], and that Aunt Roz made him the authorized seller of the personal artwork—he knows that stuff, he knows the buyers. He knows the value and he’s honest. He does a real good job in that capacity.

TJKC: As a fan, I would love to see it in whatever form it’s in, and read it and evaluate it for myself. Even if it’s unfinished, I would like to get a little background on it and read it straight through—and if it doesn’t quite end, I’ll draw my own conclusions based on the other things Kirby did throughout his career. I’d be curious to know just the length of it, in pages if nothing else. Was this a pretty long novel? ROBERT: It was a few hundred pages. Some of the stuff is still in storage, but I know the manuscript does exist.

TJKC: How directly involved has Mark Evanier been? ROBERT: I talk to Mark periodically. Mark is just a font of information and knowledge. He’s a great person to go to for information. I know that he is one person who does understand what it is that Jack Kirby did. Mark’s been inside the comic industry for all of his life and I do believe that he truly knows that it was Jack Kirby that basically did it all and helped create jobs for lots of people. If it wasn’t for him, would all these people have made the livings that they’ve made in this industry? Maybe yes, maybe no. But a lot of these people know, and I think Mark is one of the people that recognizes how instrumental Uncle Jack was in creating the industry and creating comfortable lives for a lot of people. I do feel comfortable calling Mark when I need information. Mark is definitely a very good source to go to. TJKC: We did an issue that spotlighted what Mike Thibodeaux and Genesis West have been doing [TJKC #27], and a few fans objected to how they’re combining different things together into new animation proposals. Also, Jeremy’s recent Captain Victory book got some negative reviews. In terms of the use of Jack’s ideas since his death, what would you say to fans that think you’re somehow lessening the intrinsic value of Jack’s ideas by not treating them the “right way,” whatever that is? ROBERT: All I can do is what I know Uncle Jack and Aunt Roz would’ve done; and I know they would have encouraged Jeremy and Mike. They always did encourage Jeremy and Mike and everybody else. They encouraged everybody. Unlike a lot of people who are jealous of what they have and always afraid of the new talent coming around the corner, Uncle Jack never felt that way. He always went out of his way to encourage and help new talent, and he would always give things away, because that was his personality and that’s who he was. I know that about both of them. So for me to not respect that and admire that and encourage that would not be true to who they were. So I encourage Jeremy; I encourage Mike; and I wish them nothing but success with whatever they do. If they can build and take what Uncle Jack helped them with and turn it into something, great, I’m all in favor of that. TJKC: There was one project that never really saw completion: Jack’s novel The Horde. It’s an interesting curiosity for fans in that the occasional chapter has been published here or there, but always heavily 61

TJKC: Did you, throughout the years, go to conventions with Jack at all—or did you get involved in terms of his career later on after Jack had passed on? ROBERT: It was pretty much towards the end. I went to a lot of the conventions in the late-’80s and early-’90s. I was going because they were older at that time, so I saw my role in a lot of ways as a chaperone for them— being a gofer for Aunt Roz and Uncle Jack, because at that point they were not that mobile. It was just really nice to be around the King and the Queen—just being around them and being able to share in the adulation and everything that they were given at that point in time. It was also fun, because a lot of times I would bring my son with me, and it was really fun to be able to do it and to enjoy it through his eyes. Just the goofy stuff of going up and having him meet the “real FF” and the “real X-Men” and Batman and all the costumed people that were around, and how much enjoyment he got out of those things: The costume shows and all of the hoopla that was around there, which really is for the kids. Being able to go there with my son really added an additional element for me. We had a lot of fun at the conventions. TJKC: In terms of future Kirby-related projects, is there anything in the works at this point that you want to talk about? ROBERT: No. Again, just that I know Mike Richardson still has the rights to Satan’s Six and I really like the things he’s done. Of course, The Mask was fantastic, and I think he did a great job with Mystery Men and I think he could really do justice to Satan’s Six. Mike was always very, very... I don’t know him personally—I only met him once—but I know from what Aunt Roz told me he was very kind to the Kirbys, especially in their latter years. I really hope it works out for both of us.

A nicely-rendered Reed Richards fan commission from 1983.

TJKC: What would you say would be the highs and lows of being co-trustee of the Kirby Estate? ROBERT: Well, the ongoing low is the continuous insult of the Marvel Universe. I mean, how they can continue...? It doesn’t matter now because they’re dead, but who are these people who are so heartless— who’ve made so many millions of dollars—who are so enriched by a man who did not have a mean, dishonest bone in his body—that they cannot even just give him credit where credit is due? They just can’t even say that, yes, Jack Kirby created these characters. Who would that hurt? That’s the ongoing frustration. All they have to do is give him credit, and we don’t ask for money, but they can’t even do that. They cannot even say, “Thank you, Jack. Thank you for making us millions and millions of dollars. Thank you, Jack.” They can’t even do that.

TJKC: Last question: What would you say is the most obvious way that your aunt and uncle have influenced you? ROBERT: That’s a good question. I guess it’s just the lessons that you take away from a family. What does family teach you? They teach you good lessons and bad lessons, and you try and learn from the bad things and then embrace the good things. The good thing about Uncle Jack and Aunt Roz is that they truly did like everybody. They embraced everybody. They treated everybody so well, so lovingly. They were just the nicest people, and you just hope that is part of your genetics—that it’s something that’s part of your family lesson and family connection there. The best vacations—which I really miss—were always just going up to California and hanging out at the Thousand Oaks home; especially when my son was born, just to go out there and be with them and be surrounded by their love and their graciousness and their generosity—just being in that house which was filled with such wonderful energy. The walls vibrated with comic energy. Around every corner and on every wall there was something marvelous and wonderful. It was good to recapture that again through the eyes of my own son when he went out there. It was a museum that was a home. It wasn’t a museum that you couldn’t touch. It was a real interactive place to be and it was just great to be there; and I miss that a lot.★

TJKC: What are the highs? ROBERT: The highs are just that I am fortunate that—even the conversation we’re having right now, I’m down in my office and my office is just wall-to-wall Kirby artwork. I just have a very nice, eclectic collection of his work. It’s just great to be surrounded by that on a dayto-day basis. That I do have something of his that— again, Aunt Roz and Uncle Jack were very generous about giving away artwork and they were very generous with me. Just having that stuff around me is very comforting. It’s nice to have that. 62

steel, faces too chiseled, torsos too muscled, no pimples or pot bellies, dialogue too stilted, sound effects too loud, too many TZOMs and FZOWs and SSHHREEEEs, too many sinuous alien machines. Nothing sits still; everything is zooming and fighting and exploding in four-color pockets of repeating time. His universes tire Kirby sometimes, they really do. So many moving parts. So much to remember. Almost 50 years’ worth. Sometimes he strolls through the older ones just because they are older and simpler and more innocent, romance and war and scaly monsters bestriding the world, but he usually is pulled back to the ’60s and ’70s, pulled back by the double-page splashes and the vistas of the neon galaxies he created with pencil and paper. The interstellar gulfs hold a special appeal for him. The very big... or the very small. A man could lose himself in there... forever. Kirby chuckles and fires up a new cigar. He knows where he’s going now. He hops off the taxi, says goodbye to his panicky New Yorkers and tumbles to the bottom of the page. Blasting off from a bright yellow CONTINUED bar, Kirby rockets soundlessly into the distant horizons of a new title, finds the panels he wants, blurred now, smaller and smaller, faster and faster, gone in an eyeblink. Next stop: The DNA molecule. Barring a wrong turn, Kirby will be camping out on the introns this Summer.

Postcard by Robert L. Bryant, Jr. ix thousand light years west of Andromeda, Jack Kirby’s Tiparillo dies. He pauses in his flight and relights the cigar, takes a deep pull. It fights the cold. Despite his baggy sweater and corduroys, it gets chilly in space. Kirby has been here since October in a lazy, drifting tour of the burning constellations and he’s not even halfway through to the other side. This is a big, wandering galaxy—as big as they get. It’s a double-page splash. He slipped into these panels through an upper-left-corner caption, looming in this scale as large as a jagged storm front, threaded the allcaps lettering in a tight orbit, building momentum with each pass, then tapped the tight-bundled energy of a triple exclamation mark to kick himself off into a distant nebula, fiery and beckoning in primarycolor green and red. It’s been a rough trip. He drew these panels in 1971 and has forgotten much. Twice, Kirby had nearly slipped into singularities that lurked behind electric, planet-sized gas clouds; once, he almost was fried by a voracious radiation field that glowed a soothing baby blue. A mutant star-thing wearing a mountain range on its rocky back had tried to suck Kirby into a mouth lined with nuclear fire, but it was too slow and too big. Kirby had dodged nimbly and flashed away as the mutant spat a frustrated flood of word balloons: “AAAHHHHH! Come back, HUMAN! Your DEATH will be QUICK, I vow!!” Kirby had paused long enough to launch a reply: “HAHHAHAHAH! FOOLISH creature of the stars!! PICK on prey your OWN size!!!” Then he leaped aboard a meteor and surfed it all the way to Antares. A long trip, this one. Now Kirby is like a swimmer out of sight of land, still strong, but beginning to tire and feeling the undercurrent’s touch. He starts looking for an exit—and he finds it. Where the first splash page flows into the second, there is a gap. He always hated the gaps, but now he can use this one. Kirby exhales a fog of cigar smoke, curls his body like a diver and tumbles into the gravity well of a word balloon drifting nearby. He greedily yanks stored energy from the boldface type, orbits the tight letters at a ferocious velocity, and slingshots off another triple exclamation mark, right through the gap between the pages and out into an ocean of cool clean white space. Kirby sighs in relief. Free of the microscopic forced perspectives of the splash panel, he gratefully skims the calm white borders of the comic book he drew decades ago. The paper universes he created were too complex, too vast; he longs now for the simple sight of his human characters. Rounding a page in one smooth motion, he finds some. Kirby slides into a wide-angled New York City street scene, the change in perspective popping him into 1/48 TH scale. Overcoated men and high-heeled women are spilling out of blocky gray buildings onto the remarkably clean sidewalks, pushing and shoving and pointing in terror at the darkening electric sky. Their rectangular mouths flash a dentist’s dream of solid white teeth as they loose a volley of word balloons: “I’ve NEVER seen anything LIKE it!!” “My GOD! What IS it!!!” “It’s—the END of the WORLD!!!” Kirby sits contentedly on a stalled taxicab and watches liquid alien shadows flow over Times Square. Ah, the critics were right; they were usually right. Most of his characters were cut from the same too-perfect mold, bodies like hand-tooled plastic dipped in stainless

FOR JACK KIRBY (1917-1994)

Pencil art from Kirby’s Battle For A 3-D World.

THE BIG ONE IS COMING IN JANUARY!

#31

NEW GIANT TABLOID FORMAT! 80 “KING”-SIZED PAGES, $9.95!

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• Colossal KIRBY INTERVIEW, plus interviews with KURT BUSIEK & JOSÉ LADRONN, & extra UNPUBLISHED KIRBY ART, shown at GIANT-SIZE! (SUBSCRIBERS: #31 counts as TWO issues toward your subscription • Mailed in a protective envelope with backing board)

AND SEND US KIRBY CHECKLIST CORRECTIONS FOR #32! In addition to coverage of some of KIRBY’S LEAST-KNOWN WORK, TJKC #32 will include a MAJOR UPDATE to the KIRBY CHECKLIST! Send any last-minute corrections ASAP to our Checklist compiler:

#32

RICHARD KOLKMAN • P.O. BOX 50053 • INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46250 • E-MAIL: BigFlatCit@aol.com

DEADLINE FOR CHECKLIST CORRECTIONS: JAN. 31, 2001 JOHN’S JUKEBOX As I write this, my wife Pam and I have just completed an across-the-state of North Carolina bicycle tour; 500 miles in seven days! For you avid bikers out there, this may not sound all that impressive, but considering I’ve spent the last several years sitting in front of a computer all day (especially so since starting this magazine), I look at it as a pretty remarkable personal achievement. After years without a regular exercise regimen, I was able to get into shape in only four weeks, going from nearly collapsing after my first 4-mile trek, to 70+ miles a day. What does this have to do with things Kirby, you ask? Frankly, I’m trying to make more room in my schedule for things like this outside of our advertising work and comics magazines. But I don’t want to let down you loyal readers who are constantly asking for more TJKC (and specifically for us to run the Kirby pencil art BIGGER!). So I’m trying an experiment: For the next two issues, TJKC will be quarterly, to hopefully allow me a little more free time. To offset the slower frequency of issues, each one will be 80-pages, and printed in an almost DOUBLE-SIZE tabloid format (bigger than the old Marvel Treasury Editions!), allowing us to print Jack’s pencils at near-actual size (something you’ve been begging for since TJKC #1)! Each BIG issue will count as two issues toward your subscriptions (so if you’ve only got one issue left, be sure to send a additional $4 to get #31), and will have a $9.95 cover price. The new format will give you more of what you want (KIRBY!), while the time efficiencies of putting out fewer issues per year will hopefully allow me to keep a little more time for myself. Let me know what you think of the new format; if it’s a hit, we’ll keep it permanently. And be sure to send your Kirby Checklist corrections to Richard Kolkman ASAP, as we’ll be featuring a major update in TJKC #32. Long Live The King!

John Morrow, Editor

IN MEMORIUM (JANUARY 4, 1923–JULY 28, 2000)

CHIC STONE Just after last issue went to press, we learned of the passing of comics great and Kirby-inker extraordinaire CHIC STONE. Longtime Kirby fans knew Chic for his inks over Kirby’s pencils on early issues of the 1960s Marvel comics, but Chic also had an outstanding career with other comics publishers as a penciler/inker, as well as in advertising illustration. I had the honor of sharing some good times with Chic several years in a row at the Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC in the 1990s, where he repeatedly told me how gratified he was to meet so many fans who remembered him and his work. He graciously agreed to ink the Thor cover to TJKC #14, not letting on until much later how difficult it was for him. Chic suffered from an eye disease called Macular Degeneration, which made it difficult to work more than an hour or two a day at the drawing board. Still, he managed to get the job done on-time, with spectacular results, as he did with the many fan commissioned drawings he drew in his final years. Our condolences go out to his family, friends, and the many fans who had the privilege of meeting this delightful, incredibly talented man. - John Morrow

Classifieds (10¢ per word, $1 minimum) __________________________________________ WANTED: Low-grade reading copies or color/black-&white xeroxes of NEWSBOY LEGION covers/ stories from STAR SPANGLED COMICS #17, 19, 23, 24, 28, 30, 33, 36-40, 42-52, 59, 61, 62 for article for KIRBY COLLECTOR. Will pay cash or trade TJKC subs. TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Dr., Raleigh, NC 27605. 919-833-8092.

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AMAZING SPIDER-MAN Original Art Wanted! Any page, any issue! Romita, Ross Andru, Frenz, Ditko, Mooney, etc. Contact: Aaron Sultan, 919-954-7111.

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THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #30 A TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE KIRBY ESTATE EDITOR: JOHN MORROW ASSISTANT EDITOR: PAMELA MORROW PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON DESIGN & LAYOUT: TWOMORROWS PROOFREADING: JOHN & ERIC COLORIST: TOM ZIUKO CONTRIBUTORS: D. BRUCE BERRY JERRY BOYD CINDY & SCOTT BRUNS

R.L. BRYANT, JR. MICHAEL CHABON JON B. COOKE JEAN DEPELLEY RICH DONNELLY JACKIE ESTRADA SHANE FOLEY STEVE GARRIS MIKE GARTLAND AL GORDON KIRK GROENEVELD LARRY HOUSTON ROBERT KATZ GEORGE KHOURY CHRIS KNOWLES ROB LIEFELD ADAM McGOVERN MARK MILLER JOHN MISSELHORN ALAN MOORE MICHAEL NENO ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON STEVE ROBERTSON PAUL SMITH MIKE THIBODEAUX RICK VEITCH TOM ZIUKO SPECIAL THANKS TO: MICHAEL CHABON JEAN DEPELLEY JACKIE ESTRADA AL GORDON RANDY HOPPE ROBERT KATZ GEORGE KHOURY CHRIS KNOWLES ROB LIEFELD ADAM MCGOVERN ALAN MOORE ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON RUBY-SPEARS PRODUCTIONS PAUL SMITH MIKE THIBODEAUX TOM ZIUKO AND OF COURSE THE KIRBY ESTATE MAILING CREW: RUSS GARWOOD D. HAMBONE GLEN MUSIAL ED STELLI ROBERT THOMASON PATRICK VARKER 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 _____________________________________________ (A quick clarification to Mike Gartland’s “Failure To Communicate” article in TJKC #29—on page 59, my caption under the Dick Ayers page made it sound like Ayers worked over Kirby layouts on DArEDEVIL. He didn’t (I meant to get across that romita did), but I can see how my wording might’ve been confusing. Now before we get to your letters on #29, here’s a brief missive on another Kirby-related book of ours called STrEETWISE:) _____________________________________________ I devoured STREETWISE, and it’s well worth the time and money. A lot of comics publications these days have superb graphics, but lackluster stories. A common complaint I hear while browsing the comic shops in NYC is “Sure, it LOOKS great, but I’m looking for something to READ this weekend!” It’s a fact that while the ART of comics has matured into an exciting and worthwhile endeavor, the LITERATURE of comics is all-too-often banal, insubstantial, or pretentious, and there are a lot of cliche rehashings of thirty-year-old super-hero plots being published these days (I won’t mention any names). STREETWISE, though, is one of the outstanding collections of genuinely entertaining, enjoyable, adult-level stories published in comics this year. (Adrian Tomine’s OPTIC NERVE anthology, called 32 STORIES, also comes to mind.) Barry Smith, for instance, gave us a tale totally unlike any of his STORYTELLER or Marvel work, a nice “stretch.” Anything Sergio does is charming and delightful. And the production values and graphics are beautiful. But, inevitably, no matter how wonderful and diverse the stories were—and some of these authors really outdid themselves—Jack Kirby’s “Street Code” stole the show. I mean, here’s a whole trade paperback full of the greatest of the great—accomplished masters—and those ten pages blow everybody out of the water! Effortless to read. Perfectly paced. Pow. Touching. Fun. Honest. Here we are in the year 2000, six years after the man’s death, and our most accomplished illustrators and writers are blown off the field by these Jack Kirby pencil pages. I’ve passed the book around to friends of mine who aren’t into comics—intelligent people whom I’ve told about graphic novels and the recent accomplishments in the medium—and they say the same thing. There’s no denying it. The man was THE MASTER. Thanks for giving us more great stuff to read. In particular, thanks for keeping Jack Kirby in publication. Mark Lerer, Forest Hills, NY (I’m glad you enjoyed STrEETWISE so much! We were trying to bring out something a little different for the current market, and I think we succeeded. But the fact remains the book never would’ve happened without the Kirby story being available to us to get the ball rolling. I agree; it’s a pretty amazing piece of work, and I’m thrilled to be able to present it to a new audience.) As for TJKC # 29—Kirby’s second stay at Marvel—it must have been a difficult issue to produce. You explained that ex- and current Marvel staffers were reluctant to discuss Marvel’s attitude toward Kirby and their desire to remain anonymous. It seems logical that you had problems getting interviews and only had the option to synthesize the facts as the “You Can’t Go Home Again” introduction. The problem is that everything is clearly explained in your first article. The difficult task was certainly to fill the 60+ pages left! Nevertheless, you succeeded pretty well! The interview with Jack and Roz was really moving and it was nice to have a look at the wedding photograph. I’m eagerly awaiting the next part of the series. The new installment in the “Failure to Communicate” series was really interesting. Explanation on the entire Kirby layout area was long overdue as this proves to be a major time in Kirby’s desilusion at Marvel, with tremen-

dous amounts of work and no recognition as a scripter. The new “Kirby as a Genre” column is promising. A huge number of artists on both sides of the Atlantic seem to recognize Jack as their king. I wish the series a long run. It was a good idea as well to interview the Kirby influenced Marvel staffers—Giffen and Buckler—who tried their best to capture the Kirby flavor after the King’s departure. I really appreciated the cover gallery, which was a good opportunity—comparing the pencils and final covers—to judge the editing politic at Marvel. Jean Depelley, France With each issue of TJKC I read I feel more and more like a stalker. I know all about Jack’s childhood, his work habits, how he met Roz. Now bits of their sex life. It’s spooky! I half expect any day now to get served with a court order by the Kirby family to cease and desist. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed the 1970s Marvel issue... but I have to wonder if I was reading the same Marvel books as the writers in this issue. I’m as big a Kirby fan as anyone, but man, those Return of Kirby titles just weren’t very good. DEVIL DINOSAUR has to be the worst book Kirby produced up to that point. So what if it has a cult following? So does Ed Wood and GILLIGAN’S ISLAND. Cult status is often pinned on schlock. It’s hardly an indicator of a misunderstood gem. The explanation that DINOSAUR was created as a kiddie series makes sense but it was still an embarrassment. I bought everything Kirby did, but I couldn’t stomach that title. 2001 wasn’t much better. It was boring. MACHINE MAN, BLACK PANTHER and THE ETERNALS were okay, certainly superior to typical Marvel dreck of the time like MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE or NOVA or SPIDERWOMAN, but overall I thought them a pretty weak effort on the part of the King and a comedown from not only the FOURTH WORLD, but his later work at DC like KAMANDI and THE LOSERS. CAPTAIN AMERICA was the best of the bunch, but I remember how disappointed I was with each passing issue. Jack just seemed to be losing his drawing hand. The great Kirby expressionism has devolved into something cartoonish and even downright goofy. The stories were too simple, the characters were wooden and the dialogue: Ugh. Kirby’s wacky scripting never bothered me in his FOURTH WORLD books, but in these Marvel titles it’s painful. I’m sorry, but for Rex Ferrell to state that this CAP run was superior to those incredible Kirby issues in TALES OF SUSPENSE and the first year of the solo title, ones that introduced the Super-Adaptoid, the Exiles, Modok, AIM and the Cosmic Cube, is simply ludicrous! That was Kirby at his peak! Set an copy of TALES OF SUSPENSE #84 (wonderfully inked by Frank Giacoia, a seldom-mentioned excellent Kirby inker) side-by-side with CAP #193 and you’ll see the slide in Kirby’s execution in only 9 years. I’m surprised you left out the 1978 SILVER SURFER GRAPHIC NOVEL, easily the most ambitious story Kirby produced during this period and remarkable for being the great re-team-up (is that a word?) of Lee, Kirby and Sinnott. It’s a remarkable piece in many ways. First, it shows how a top-flight inker could tighten Kirby’s pencils and eliminate the sloppiness I referred to earlier, without compromising that trademark dynamicism. If there was any doubt that Sinnott was THE Kirby inker, a quick look

at this book should end that debate. Secondly it demonstrates both Stan Lee’s strengths AND weaknesses as a scripter: His tendency to mistake weepy melodrama with depth, particularly when it came to the Surfer, and his habit of endlessly repeating a good idea, in this case needlessly regurgitating FANTASTIC FOUR #48-50. On the other hand, his ear for dialogue—Kirby’s great weakness—is amply demonstrated here. It’s a smooth read... just not a very interesting one. My reaction after reading yet another story of the Surfer bawling about his troubles was that someone should give this silver sissy a slap. By the way I’m glad you included a gallery of Kirby’s covers from this period. Those covers were great... far better than the crap within most of those books! I bought a lot of those issues just for the Kirby covers, in particular the INVADERS. I find that ironic... since during his first tenure at Marvel, he was criticized for lackluster covers. John Backderf, Cleveland Heights, OH TJKC #29 is another great issue. I wanted to remark on “You Can’t Go Home Again” because nothing in Jack’s career is more disturbing and inexplicable to me than the way he was treated on his return to Marvel. I well understand the need to not “name names,” yet I burn with curiosity, not for any desire for reprisal (a 25 years too late boycott or some other nonsense) but just to aid me in understanding the psychology of it all. I’m sure it all somehow comes out of a combination of jealousy, perceived threats to job ascendancy, and blind ambition, but, still... to send hate mail to Jack on office stationary, to make phone calls, to invent negative letters for the letter pages(!)... it is all so creepy and unnerving. It seems to me that, even without mentioning names, there is a bigger story here, that it is important for details to come to light (at the very least, it would be interesting to know which letters are real and which the inventions), not to punish, but to illuminate. And maybe aid in the prevention of such treatment happening to someone else. Al Sjoerdsma, Ann Arbor, MI My feelings on Jack’s return to Marvel have always been split. I found I loved his new, original series— THE ETERNALS, MACHINE MAN—but when he took over from what other writers had developed, it felt “wrong.” I actually raved about his first five issues of CAPTAIN AMERICA. Let’s face it, after Steve Englehart jumped ship (the reasons for which I only recently found out, thanks to COMIC BOOK ARTIST) the book was a mess, and Frank Robbins should NEVER have been penciling it in the first place. At first, Jack seemed like a HUGE improvement. But his stuff got so wild and bizarre, and the inks he was getting at times made it worse. If only Frank Giacoia had stuck around!! The real irony is that, only three years ago, I picked up every issue I’d missed back then (I’d stopped buying after #200) and enjoyed them MORE now than when I’d read my best friend’s copies back then. Perhaps my tastes have changed, or maybe my appreciation for Jack has increased that much. The situation with BLACK PANTHER was different, however. Don McGregor had the series YANKED away from him in the MIDDLE of a story so Jack could take over. That left a SERIOUS bad taste in my mouth, as Don had become (and still is) one of my favorite writers because of that series. These days it’s common for two different writers to have stories published side-by-side that show different periods of a character’s life; but we all

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know that was NOT the case here. Someone once suggested Jack’s run would have made better sense as a “flashback” to a point before McGregor’s run; I had to agree. Of course, Kirby wound up leaving in the middle of one his own stories, and his successors wound up finishing not only his story, but eventually, Don’s as well— in a completely convoluted sort of way. It was never satisfying. MACHINE MAN did remind me of the early HULK run. The difference is, the plot MOVED ALONG! MM and his army nemesis were coming to terms with each other, and slowly you could see him moving into the realm of an established “hero.” Whereas THE HULK had stagnated for 20 YEARS after Jack left the series. What Alan Kupperberg revealed regarding Wally Wood was HORRIBLE. More than once I’ve sat around fantasizing about the “dream team” of inkers Kirby should have had on his Fourth World books, and it always comes up the same names: Sinnott, Wood, Stone & Ayers. To learn that Wally had actually PLEADED for the chance and been turned down just got me ANGRY as hell. The article about Jack doing layouts blew my mind! I was aware of it, but I’d never put it together in my head HOW MANY books per month he was doing at the same time! Nobody these days could ever keep so many interrelated plot-threads going so consistently or so well. No wonder Jack was angry about not getting writer credits. Henry R. Kujawa, Camden, NJ Just wanted to drop you a line about a few things I noticed in the KIRBY COLLECTOR: in the latest issue, in the Keith Giffen interview he makes reference to a “Gary Pinter.” I’m sure he means Gary Panter, the designer of “PeeWee’s Playhouse” and innovative RAW artist; creator of “Jimbo”, published by Matt Groening’s Bongo imprint. The times I’ve met Gary we discussed the Kirby influence on his work. Panter is great, and I’m sure he’d love to contribute something to your mag if you asked him. James Romberger, New York, NY Around 1983 sometime after I started working for Marvel, for whatever reason the man who was in charge of Marvel’s warehouse took me under his wing. He was a nice guy, we got along very well. At the time the warehouse was located in Long Island City right over the 59th Street Bridge. Most of the time I would assist—let’s call him “Sid”—in pulling materials that people requested from the warehouse: paperwork from long dormant files, proofs, films and actual copies of the comics themselves. Of course being a lifelong fan of comics and Marvel in particular, I was more than glad to help and be there. I remember when I first started going to the warehouse with Sid that there was a break- in and the place was a bit of a mess. Books scattered on the floor and boxes opened and knocked over etc. At the time there were dozens of moving boxes filled with original artwork, what I would estimate as hundreds maybe a few thousand pages of artwork. Some of these were open and littered the floor too. Later on in the later part of the decade after I helped relocate he warehouse to Brooklyn an inventory was finally taken of all those pages but I’m getting ahead of myself. At one point I remember Sid brought a Vice President with us to the warehouse. The reason being he wanted to get the okay to dump some of the transfiles that had been there for years (and in some instances decades) and make room for some of the new ones soon to arrive. After checking what could go in the trash, this VP started looking around at the rest of the warehouse. This VP started opening a couple of the boxes of original artwork. In an effort to make more room for the incoming transfiles he told us to get “rid of some of these boxes.” To my dismay we did. I do know for a fact that one of the boxes destroyed contained at least one of the full stories of the Galactus Trilogy. I’m not happy about this, I’m not proud of it, but you have to remember that I was only with Marvel a few months at this time and was fearful not to obey orders. There you have it. Now that I write this I feel like one of the Nazi’s at the concentration camps saying, “I was just

following orders.” Like I mentioned earlier came the end of the ’80s the powers-that-be wanted a complete list of what artwork was at the warehouse. An inventory was taken. How it was distributed I don’t know because I had no dealings with the inventory or any of the artwork after it was sent back to the offices on Park Avenue South. I realize this is some heavy duty news. Think how I felt and still do about this situation. Almost 20 years has gone by since this has happened and none of us responsible for this tragedy is any longer working at Marvel. If you do decide to print this I would greatly appreciate it if my name was not attached to the article. I assure you it is all true. Name Withheld at Writer’s Request I’ve long enjoyed [Kirby’s] stint on CAPTAIN AMERICA, and I’ve always loved the concepts and early execution of both THE ETERNALS and 2001. Had Jack been left to pursue these three projects on his own, I think his return to Marvel would be considered, then as now, a total triumph. But throwing his rather lackluster efforts with BLACK PANTHER, DEVIL DINOSAUR, and the SILVER SURFER Graphic Novel into the mix only provides grist for the anti-Kirby mill. Most disappointing to me, more often than not, were his covers. With rare exceptions, these were examples of Jack running on auto pilot, with little flair or imagination. Comparing the rough layouts provided by Alan Kupperberg and Marie Severin, I actually found myself preferring their versions to Jack’s! Considering that Jack Kirby was one of the very finest comic book cover designers from the ’40s right through his DC period in the ’70s, one wonders just how tedious he must have come to consider this (well-paying) task by the time he landed back at Marvel. Then again, it’s always fun to try to spot which little details Jack has forgotten! I can forgive him for not knowing every detail of the Vision, a character he had virtually no contact with, but how the heck could he forget the wings on Thor’s helmet?!? And, as seen on your cover, he apparently did not know that Hank Pym was both Giant Man and Yellowjacket. And on the cover of AVENGERS #153, I’m inclined to say that’s a Marie Severin-drawn Wasp added to the mix after the fact. In some ways, I’m sorry that Jack ever returned to Marvel, because it had to be a crushing disappointment to him over time. It’s a shame that Atlas Comics wasn’t able to hang in there; if Jack had joined up with Martin Goodman, I’d like to think he would have had a more fruitful and creative tenure there than he had back at the “House of Ideas.” Gene Popa, Hammond, IN A couple of thoughts on the “You Can’t Go Home Again” article in TJKC #9: (1) I’m not sure fans should be faulted for “panning” Devil Dinosaur as “beneath Jack and them” if neither Marvel nor Jack Kirby released information specifically denoting that the series was “developed with children in mind.” Given that I’m not sure the creative sources (writer/artist and publisher) disseminated this info, it seems a bit harsh to take these “critical” fans to task for their particular assessments. (2) While I also would have enjoyed seeing more of Jack Kirby’s work, including his output in the 1970s, I think you go a bit far by stating that this latter-day work was an example of Jack “still in his penciling prime.” True, Jack’s (1970s and later) art is by no means garbage and is, by a huge percentage, superior to the majority of the other penciling work then being produced. But, I’m sure the majority of Kirby fans do agree that Jack reached his zenith in the mid 1960s and was, technically, past his “prime” even before his initial departure from Marvel. Despite the accolades Jack has received for his DC “Fourth World” work, there are just as many if not more fans (myself included, alas) who were disappointed at both the art and story of the DC material, including his penciling immediately before and after this period. Unfortunately, when one’s had basically a god-like career of consecutive masterpieces, any noticeable decline from

such lofty quality levels results in fan disappointment and inevitable criticism. Reed Crandall’s latter-day work is also similarly impaired because of the noticeable drop in quality (due to his physical problems). Whether Kirby’s decline was due to the smaller drawing paper size, burnout/disinterest, vision/physical problems, or other/combined multiple causes, I don’t feel we missed Kirby’s “prime penciling” when he left for other endeavors. However, you’re correct in that it would have been great to experience more of Jack’s creative efforts during this period! Joseph F. Lenius, Mount Prospect, IL After reading “You Can’t Go Home Again”, (which was a fine article, but I wish it had been longer), I was appalled to learn that Jack actually received hate mail, etc., from some Marvel staffers. No wonder Jack left comics all together for a time. Having said that, I have to say that Jack’s work on his own, save the Fourth World material, does not hold up as well when compared to the Lee/Kirby material, at least in terms of script. Jack’s writing style was oftentimes odd and did not always have the ring of “real” dialogue. Marvel had always been about fostering a sense of believability in its characters, and that was primarily through characterization and dialogue. The debate still rages (and will always rage) over who actually “wrote” the Lee/Kirby stories, but if by “wrote” we mean “script”, my vote goes to Stan Lee. It’s obvious Jack created the characters and plotted the books, even giving Stan actual dialogue at times, and he was definitely the infusing creative spirit of the books. But it is doubtful he scripted the books when one looks at his work in the ’70s and ’80s. If he did in fact script the ‘60s stories, then his style of writing, like his artwork I might add, had undergone a dramatic shift by the ’70s and ’80s. But even if some of the Marvel staffers had greatly disliked Jack’s work upon his return to the House of Ideas in the ’70s, the childish and frankly “geeky” behavior of hate mail and posting Jack’s work with slurs was totally uncalled for. I can understand their frustration that possibly they wanted to work with Jack and even improve his scripts and he was adverse to the idea of collaboration, but they should have realized that Jack’s past negative experience with Marvel led to his “no collaboration” mindset. Maybe they didn’t know the full story, but it does not excuse that kind of moronic behavior. Oh well, “the past is prologue”. Hopefully, if older creators like Carmine Infantino or Alex Toth were to return to Marvel or DC in a creative capacity they would receive more respect than our man Jack did. Any and all artistic fields must respect their forebearers and seek to build on the foundation that they created, and realize that a destruction or tearing down through slurs of that foundation is not necessary to create their own visions and stories. Adam Casto, Cross Lanes, WV NEXT ISSUE: You asked for it; you get it! MORE PAGES! LARGER FORMAT! GIGANTIC ART! #31 is THE BIG ONE, sporting a new “King”-size format! It starts with a never-published wraparound Kirby cover featuring Superman, inked by the incomparable NEAL ADAMS! Inside, we examine Kirby’s BIGGEST WORK, from his longest stories and most mind-blowing concepts to his wildest two-page spreads! There’s a colossal KIRBY INTERVIEW, plus new interviews with KURT BUSIEK about his work on Jack’s SECRET CITY characters, and an artist who’s made a big impression on Kirby fans, JOSÉ LADRONN! To start the year off right, we’ll explore Kirby’s monolithic work on the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and BICENTENNIAL BATTLES Treasury Editions! Plus Mike Gartland takes a look at Kirby’s work on GIANT-MAN, and our new GIANT-SIZE PAGES allow us to show even more unpublished Kirby pencil art--at nearly actual size! We think you’ll find it’s well worth the new $9.95 cover price! Submission deadline: 12/10/00.

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ALTER EGO #6: (100 pages) GENE COLAN intv., how-to books by STAN LEE and KANIGHER, ALLSTAR SQUADRON, MAC RABOY section, FCA with BECK & SWAYZE, COLAN and RABOY covers, & more! $5.95

COLLECTED KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOL. ONE: 240-page trade paperback reprints KIRBY COLLECTOR #1-9, plus a new section with over 30 pieces of unpublished Kirby art, never before shown in TJKC! $21.95 VOL. TWO: 160-page trade paperback reprints TJKC #10-12 plus 30 new pieces of unpublished Kirby art! $14.95 VOL. THREE: 176-page trade paperback reprints TJKC #13-15 plus 30 new pieces of unpublished Kirby art! $16.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #22: VILLAINS! KIRBY, RUDE, MIGNOLA intvs., FF #49 pencils, KOBRA, more! 68 pages, Kirby/Stevens cover. $5.95 #23: Intvs. with KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL, TRACY KIRBY, uninked FF #49 pencils, unused SOUL LOVE story, more! 68 pages. $5.95 #24: BATTLES! KIRBY’S original art fight, JIM SHOOTER, SGT. FURY, GLORY BOAT pencils, more! 68 pages, Kirby/Mignola cover. $5.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #25: S&K! KIRBY, SIMON, SEVERIN intvs., unused BOY EXPLORERS story, MAINLINE COMICS, more! 100 pages. $5.95 #26: GODS! COLOR NEW GODS plates, KIRBY & SIMONSON intvs., BIBLICAL INFLUENCES, THOR, MR. MIRACLE, more! 72 pages. $5.95 #27: KIRBY INFLUENCE! ALEX ROSS intv., KIRBY FAMILY Roundtable, top pros discuss Kirby’s influence! 72 pages, Kirby/ Timm cover. $5.95

KIRBY CHECKLIST: Lists every Kirby comic, plus books, portfolios, unpublished work, cross-references reprints, & more! ! A must for EbayTM shoppers! 100 pgs! $5

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #18: MARVEL issue! Intvs. w/ KIRBY, LEE, THOMAS, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, more! 68 pgs, Kirby/Sinnott cvr. $5.95 #20: WOMEN! KIRBY, DAVE STEVENS Intvs., LISA KIRBY, unused 10page story, CAPT. VICTORY screenplay, more! 68 pages. $5.95 #21: KIRBY, GIL KANE, BRUCE TIMM intvs., LEE vs. KIRBY, SILVER STAR screenplay, unpubl. art, more! 68 pages. $5.95

ALTER EGO #1: (84 pages) ROY THOMAS’ fanzine is back, all-new! STAN LEE, SCHWARTZ, ORDWAY, HASEN, H.G. PETER, FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA, MR. MONSTER, color ORDWAY cover & more! $5.95

FAX, PHONE, MAIL, OR E-MAIL YOUR ORDER!

COMIC BOOK ARTIST (All subscriptions start with current issue) ❏ $30 for 6 issues ($42 Canada, $54 other Airmail) + FREE CBA SPECIAL

BACK ISSUE POSTAGE: ADD $2 to all orders under $10, $3 to orders from $10-30, and $4 to orders over $30

❏ CBA COLLECTION VOL. ONE • $21.95 ($25 Canada, $35 other) ❏ CBA #7 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ CBA #9 • $6.95 ($8 Canada, $10 other) ❏ CBA #10 • $6.95 ($8 Canada, $10 other)

Name

COMICOLOGY Street

KIRBY COLLECTOR #28: KIRBY INFLUENCE Two! MARK HAMILL, KRICFALUSI, RUDE, COLLETTA, more! Kirby/Allred cover. $5.95 #29: ’70s MARVEL WORK! Intvs. with KIRBY, GIFFEN, BUCKLER, ’70s COVER GALLERY, more! Kirby/Janson cover. $5.95 #30: ’80s WORK! ALAN MOORE intv., in-depth look at HUNGER DOGS, SUPER POWERS, SILVER STAR, ANIMATION, more! 68 pages. $5.95

❏ $20 for 4 issues ($27 Canada, $37 other Airmail) ❏ CC #1 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ CC #2 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other)

City

ALTER EGO

State

Zip

Country (if outside the US) ENCLOSED IS: ❏ Check or Money Order for US $ CHARGE MY: ❏ VISA ❏ MasterCard Cardholder’s Name:

❏ $24 for 6 issues ($32 Canada, $44 other Airmail)

Expiration Date: Telephone:

STREETWISE: 160-page trade paperback with autobiographical comics stories by CARDY, CHADWICK, DORKIN, KIRBY, KUBERT, SIMONSON, VEITCH, WINDSORSMITH, RUDE cover, more! $19.95

ALL-STAR COMPANION: 192page trade paperback by ROY THOMAS, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the JSA! Unused pages, lost stories, new Murphy Anderson cover, & more! $19.95

❏ $20 for 4 issues ($27 Canada, $37 other Airmail) ❏ A/E #1 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ A/E #2 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ A/E #3 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ A/E #4 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ A/E #5 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ A/E #6 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other)

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR

Card #

Send US funds, drawn on a US bank, payable to: TwoMorrows • 1812 Park Drive • Raleigh, NC 27605 PHONE: 919-833-8092 • FAX: 919-833-8023 E-MAIL: twomorrow@aol.com

VISIT OUR WEB SITE: www.twomorrows.com

❏ COLLECTED KIRBY COLLECTOR Vol. 1 • $21.95 ($25 Canada, $35 other)

❏ TJKC #18 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #20 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #21 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #22 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #23 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #24 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #25 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #26 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #27 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #28 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #29 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other) ❏ TJKC #30 • $5.95 ($7 Canada, $9 other)

❏ COLLECTED KIRBY COLLECTOR Vol. 2 • $14.95 ($17 Canada, $25 other) ❏ COLLECTED KIRBY COLLECTOR Vol. 3 • $16.95 ($20 Canada, $27 other) ❏ KIRBY CHECKLIST $5 ($6 Canada, $8 other) ❏ STREETWISE • $19.95 ($23 Canada, $30 other) ❏ ALL-STAR COMPANION • $19.95 ($23 Canada, $30 other)

See Page 64 For A Big Announcement About The NEW Kirby Collector!!