Jack Kirby Collector #44 by TwoMorrows Publishing

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR FORTY-FOUR

IN THE US

$995

COMING SOON FROM TWOMORROWS! Prices Include US Postage. Outside the US, Add $2 Per Item Canada, $3 Per Item Surface, $7 Per Item Airmail

KIRBY UNLEASHED: (60 pgs.) New, completely remastered version of the scarce 1971 portfolio/biography, with 8 extra B&W and 8 extra color pages, including Jack’s color GODS posters. $24 US

TJKC #21: (68 pgs.) KIRBY, GIL KANE, & BRUCE TIMM intvs., FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE (LEE dialogue vs. KIRBY notes), SILVER STAR screenplay, TOPPS COMICS, unpublished art, more! $8 US

TJKC #30: (68 pgs.) ’80s WORK! Interviews with ALAN MOORE & Kirby Estate’s ROBERT KATZ, HUNGER DOGS, SUPER POWERS, SILVER STAR, ANIMATION work, more! $8 US

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOL. ONE: (240 pgs.) Reprints TJKC #1-9, plus over 30 pieces of NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED KIRBY ART! $29 US

TJKC #22: (68 pgs.) VILLAINS! KIRBY, STEVE RUDE, & MIKE MIGNOLA interviews, FF #49 pencils, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, KOBRA, ATLAS MONSTERS! Kirby/Stevens cover. $8 US

TJKC #31: (84 pgs.) TABLOID FORMAT! Wraparound KIRBY/ ADAMS cover, KURT BUSIEK & LADRONN interviews, new MARK EVANIER column, favorite 2-PAGE SPREADS, 2001 Treasury, more! $13 US

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOL. TWO: (160 pgs.) Reprints TJKC #10-12, plus over 30 pieces of NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED KIRBY ART! $22 US

TJKC #23: (68 pgs.) Interviews with KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL & TRACY KIRBY, more FF #49 pencils, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, unused 10-page SOUL LOVE story, more! $8 US

TJKC #32: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! KIRBY interview, new MARK EVANIER column, plus Kirby’s Least Known Work: DAYS OF THE MOB #2, THE HORDE, BLACK HOLE, SOUL LOVE, PRISONER, more! $13 US

The KIRBY COLLECTOR (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life & career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby & his contemporaries, feature articles, & rare & unseen Kirby artwork. Now in tabloid format, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art at even larger size.

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOL. THREE: (176 pgs.) Reprints TJKC #1315, plus over 30 pieces of NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED KIRBY ART! $24 US

TJKC #24: (68 pgs.) BATTLES! KIRBY’S original art fight, JIM SHOOTER interview, NEW GODS #6 (“Glory Boat”) pencils, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, more! Kirby/ Mignola cover. $8 US

TJKC #33: (84 pgs.) TABLOID ALL-FANTASTIC FOUR issue! MARK EVANIER column, miniinterviews with everyone who worked on FF after Kirby, STAN LEE interview, 40 pgs. of FF PENCILS, more! $13 US

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOL. FOUR: (240 pgs.) Reprints TJKC #1619, plus over 30 pieces of NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED KIRBY ART! $29 US

TJKC #25: (100 pgs.) SIMON & KIRBY! KIRBY, SIMON, & JOHN SEVERIN interviews, CAPTAIN AMERICA pencils, unused BOY EXPLORERS story, history of MAINLINE COMICS, more! $8 US

TJKC #34: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! JOE SIMON & CARMINE INFANTINO interviews, MARK EVANIER column, unknown 1950s concepts, CAPTAIN AMERICA pencils, KIRBY/ TOTH cover, more! $13 US

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION (52 pgs.) Kirby’s 1975 Graphic Novel in original pencil form. Unseen art, screenplay, more! Proceeds go to preserving the 5000-page Kirby Archives! $8 US

TJKC #26: (72 pgs.) GODS! COLOR NEW GODS concept drawings, KIRBY & WALTER SIMONSON interviews, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, BIBLE INFLUENCES, THOR, MR. MIRACLE, more! $8 US

TJKC #35: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! GREAT ESCAPES with MISTER MIRACLE, comparing KIRBY & HOUDINI, Kirby Tribute Panel with EVANIER, EISNER, BUSCEMA, ROMITA, ROYER, & JOHNNY CARSON! $13 US

TJKC #20: (68 pgs.) KIRBY’S WOMEN! Interviews with KIRBY, DAVE STEVENS, & LISA KIRBY, unused 10-page story, romance comics, Jack’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY screenplay, more! $8 US

ALTER EGO #56 (FEB.)

BACK ISSUE #14 (JAN.)

DRAW! #12 (NOV.)

WRITE NOW! #11 (NOV.)

NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews with COCKRUM and GRELL go “Pro2Pro” on KYLE BAKER reveals his working methods, Superman creators SIEGEL & SHUSTER, the Legion, pencil art gallery by BUSCEMA, Machine Teen’s MIKE HAWTHORNE on Golden/Silver Age DC production guru BYRNE, MILLER, STARLIN, McFARLANE, his work, Making Perspective Work For JACK ADLER, NEAL ADAMS & TV icono- ROMITA JR., SIENKIEWICZ, looks at Hercules You by BLEVINS and MANLEY, Photoshop clast (& comics fan) HOWARD STERN on Unbound, Hex, Killraven, Kamandi, MARS, techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, Adult Adler, art by CURT SWAN, WAYNE BORING, Planet of the Apes, art & interviews with Swim’s the VENTURE BROTHERS, and AL PLASTINO, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, KIRBY, WILLIAMSON, more! Edited by MIKE MANLEY. & more! Edited by ROY THOMAS. and more! Edited by MICHAEL EURY. (96-page magazine with color) $8 US (100-page magazine) $9 US (100-page magazine) $9 US

BENDIS, WAID, DAVID, DEMATTEIS, DeFALCO, O’NEIL, DIXON, ALONSO and 17 others tell PROFESSIONAL WRITING SECRETS, plus DeFALCO and FRENZ on working together and an all-new SPIDERGIRL cover by FRENZ and SAL BUSCEMA! Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH.

THE JACK KIRBY THE DARK AGE (JAN.) BRAVE & BOLD ART OF COLLECTOR #44 (NOV.) Documents the ’80s and ’90s era of comics, JIM APARO (DEC.)

TITANS COMPANION (NOV.)

from THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and Focuses on KIRBY’S MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS, including THE DEMON, WATCHMEN to the “polybagged premium” craze, the DEATH OF SUPERMAN, renegade THOR, ATLAS, ETERNALS, and others! Plus, a rare interview with KIRBY, MARK superheroes SPAWN, PITT, BLOODSHOT, EVANIER’S regular column, Kirby pencil art CYBERFORCE, & more! Interviews with galleries of THE DEMON and other classic TODD McFARLANE, DAVE GIBBONS, JIM LEE, KEVIN SMITH, ALEX ROSS, MIKE mythological characters, a never-reprinted MIGNOLA, ERIK LARSEN, J. O’BARR, BLACK MAGIC story, an interview with Kirby Award winner & family friend DAVID DAVID LAPHAM, JOE QUESADA, MIKE ALLRED and others, plus a color section! SCHWARTZ, new Kirby Demon cover inked by MATT WAGNER, & more! Edited Written by MARK VOGER, with photos by KATHY VOGELSONG. by JOHN MORROW. (168-page trade paperback) $24 US (84-page Tabloid) $13 US

(224-page trade paperback) $29 US

(80-page magazine) $8 US

TJKC #27: (72 pages) KIRBY INFLUENCE Part One! KIRBY and ALEX ROSS interviews, KIRBY FAMILY Roundtable, all-star lineup of pros discuss Kirby’s influence on them! Kirby / Timm cover. $8 US

TJKC #36: (84 pgs.) TABLOID ALL-THOR issue! MARK EVANIER column, SINNOTT & ROMITA JR. interviews, unseen KIRBY INTV., ART GALLERY, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, more! $13 US

A career-spanning biography of the A comprehensive history of the NEW TEEN definitive Batman artist, from his start at TITANS, with interviews and rare art by CHARLTON COMICS to his heyday at DC MARV WOLFMAN, GEORGE PÉREZ, JOSÉ COMICS and beyond, with rare and LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, LEN WEIN, & others, UNSEEN APARO ART, and written by a Silver Age section with NEAL ADAMS, SCOTT BEATTY (writer of Batman and The NICK CARDY, DICK GIORDANO, & more, DC Comics Encyclopedia) with ERIC plus CHRIS CLAREMONT and WALTER NOLEN-WEATHINGTON (editor/designer SIMONSON on the X-MEN/TEEN TITANS of the Modern Masters book series), and crossover, TOM GRUMMETT, PHIL JIMENEZ an introduction by artist ALAN DAVIS! & TERRY DODSON on their ’90s Titans work, a new cover by JIMENEZ, & intro by (128-page trade paperback) $20 US GEOFF JOHNS! Written by GLEN CADIGAN.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Four tabloid issues in the US: $36 Standard, $52 First Class (Canada: $60, Elsewhere: $64 Surface, $80 Airmail). TJKC #37: (84 pgs.) TABLOID HOW TO DRAW THE KIRBY WAY issue! MARK EVANIER column, MIKE ROYER on inking, KIRBY interview, ART GALLERY, analysis of Kirby’s art techniques, more! $13 US

TJKC #38: (84 pgs.) TABLOID KIRBY: STORYTELLER! MARK EVANIER column, JOE SINNOTT on inking, SWIPES, talks with JACK DAVIS, PAUL GULACY, HERNANDEZ BROS., ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #39: (84 pgs.) TABLOID FAN FAVORITES! EVANIER column, INHUMANS, HULK, SILVER SURFER, tribute panel with ROMITA, AYERS, LEVITZ, McFARLANE, TRIMPE, ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #40: (84 pgs.) TABLOID “WORLD THAT’S COMING!” EVANIER column, KAMANDI, OMAC, tribute panel with CHABON, PINI, GOLDBERG, BUSCEMA, LIEBER, LEE, ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #41: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! 1970s MARVEL, including Jack’s last year on FF, EVANIER column, GIORDANO interview, tribute panel with GIBBONS, RUDE, SIMONSON, RYAN, ART GALLERY, more! $13 US

TJKC #42: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! Spotlights Kirby at ’70s DC Comics, from Jimmy Olsen to Spirit World! Huge Kirby pencil art gallery, covers inked by KEVIN NOWLAN & MURPHY ANDERSON! $13 US

TJKC #43: (84 pgs.) TABLOID! Kirby Award winners STEVE & GARY SHERMAN intv., 1966 KIRBY intv., Kirby pencils vs. Sinnott inks from TALES OF SUSPENSE #93, Kirby cover inked by SINNOTT! $13 US

TJKC SUBSCRIPTIONS! 4 tabloid issues: $36 Standard, $52 First Class (Canada: $60, Elsewhere: $64 Surface, $80 Airmail).

BACK ISSUE!: Six issues in the US: $30 Standard, $48 First Class (Canada: $60, Elsewhere: $66 Surface, $90 Airmail). DRAW! or WRITE NOW!: Four issues in the US: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail). ALTER EGO: Twelve issues in the US: $60 Standard, $96 First Class (Canada: $120, Elsewhere: $132 Surface, $180 Airmail). NOTE: IF YOU PREFER A SIX-ISSUE ALTER EGO SUBSCRIPTION, JUST CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!

TwoMorrows. Bringing New Life To Comics Fandom. TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919/449-0344 • FAX 919/449-0327 • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

Contents

THE NEW

Myths & Legends ISSUE! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 (a Kirby documentary on the Fantastic 4 DVD?!) UNDER THE COVERS . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 (leave, leave, the form of pencil...)

ISSUE #44, FALL 2005

MUSEUM PAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 (news from the Jack Kirby Museum) INNERVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 (Jack’s rarely-seen 1983 interview) JACK F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 (Mark Evanier’s trip to Syd Shores) INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY . . . . . . . .17 (a Norse is a Norse, of course, of course) KIRBY AS A GENRE . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 (Adam McGovern on who made who) ACCOLADES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20 (Kirby Award-winner David Schwartz talks about Jack, Mark, and Mike) SOURCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 (Etrigan’s great grandfather?) RETROSPECTIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 (Jack’s midnight masterpiece, The Demon) GALLERY 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 (some Demonic pencils) OLD FRIENDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 (Barry Alfonso shows us that Witchboy’s all grown up) PUBLIC DOMAIN THEATRE . . . . . . .34 (two complete Black Magic stories) KIRBY OBSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42 (journey into unexpected mystery...) NEAR MYTHS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44 (how faithful was Jack’s to legends) GALLERY 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 (myth-illogical Kirby art, in pencil) RETROSPECTIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54 (Thor the Thunderer revealed) BEFORE & AFTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 (compare classic pencils to published inks, side-by-side) NEAR MYTHS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 (Odin’s not “all that,” and the legend of Galactus’ origin) KIRBYWOOD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70 (F4 screenwriter Mike France speaks) COLLECTOR COMMENTS . . . . . . . . .78 PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 (what would Demon #17 have been?) Front cover inks: MATT WAGNER Front cover colors: DAVE STEWART Back cover painting: GEORGIO COMOLO Photocopies of Jack’s uninked pencils from published comics are reproduced courtesy of the Kirby Estate, which has our thanks for their support. COPYRIGHTS: Black Panther, Captain America, Eternals, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Him, Hulk, Iron Man, Journey Into Mystery, Machine Man/X-51, Nick Fury, Odin, Prester John, Spider-Man, Thor, Watcher TM & ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Atlas, Barri-Boy, Batman, Brainiac, Darkseid, Demon, Desaad, Farley Fairfax, Flash, Forever People, Green Lantern, Guardian, House of Mystery, Jason Blood, Jimmy Olsen, Joker, Kamandi, Lex Luthor, Mark Moonrider, Merlin, Mister Miracle, Morgaine Le Fey, Newsboy Legion, Penguin, Sandman, Sandy, Super Powers, Superman, Vykin, Witchboy, Wonder Woman TM & ©2005 DC Comics. • Thunderfoot, Gladiator & Dracula drawings TM & ©2005 Jack Kirby Estate. • Black Magic TM Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. • 2001: A Space Odyssey © 1968 Turner Entertainment Co.

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 12, No. 44, Fall 2005. Published quarterly by & ©2005 TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor. Pamela Morrow, Asst. Editor. Eric Nolen-Weathington, Production Assistant. Single issues: $13 postpaid ($15 Canada, $16 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $36.00 US, $60.00 Canada, $64.00 elsewhere. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is ©2005 Jack Kirby unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is ©2005 the respective authors. First printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Opening Shot

by John Morrow, editor of TJKC

he critics seemed to be pretty lukewarm toward this summer’s Fantastic 4 movie. Ratings hovered at just a little above average, with most of the initial reviewer headlines proclaiming something along the lines of “Fantastic 4 is hardly fantastic.” So I went in to my local multiplex (something I don’t get to do very often these days, being the father of two small kids), armed with popcorn, a non-comics friend, and low expectations for the film. I came out, however, feeling pretty happy with it, for two reasons. First, I thought is was a good film. Not great, mind you; Dr. Doom needed to be a lot more interesting (despite casting Julian McMahon of TV’s Nip/Tuck, who I thought was visually perfect for the part), and the climax, while packing plenty of action, was over much too quickly (but it did a great job of showing the foursome working together against a common foe). If those two things had been better, I really think it would’ve been one of the top comics-related movies ever made. As it is, I felt they did an outstanding job of presenting the team’s origin (and it didn’t bother me at all that Doom went up into space with them, unlike in the comic book). The special effects were spectacular throughout, and while the acting may not win any Academy Awards, I don’t recall too many given out to other comics moviestars in the past. Chris Evans did a dead-on portrayal of what a hot-headed Johnny Storm would be like in real life. Ioan Gruffud was an appropriately stuffy Reed. Jessica Alba thankfully didn’t spend too much time being invisible (rowr!). Michael Chiklis was convincing and loveable as Ben. And the interplay between the Thing and the Torch was, for me, the highlight of the flick, perfectly capturing their volatile relationship from the Lee/Kirby comics. While the film doesn’t look exactly Kirbyesque, there’s a lot of high-tech gadgetry and sets that were obviously inspired by Jack’s work, even if only Kirby geeks like us will ever know it. And of course, the huge end credit for Jack was the icing on the cake. All in all, it was a fun escapist romp, and I recommend everyone reading this magazine check it out on DVD (and check out screenwriter Mike France’s interview elsewhere in this issue). The other reason I was happy after leaving the theatre was because, three weeks after the film’s release, there was a decent sized crowd. Since most comics fans undoubtedly went to see it the first week it was out, this makes me confident that the film also appealed to the general public, despite lackluster reviews. (Even my non-comics friend who went with me enjoyed it, having no idea who the FF were.) That in turns makes me hopeful that the DVD version of the film will sell a lot of copies. But John, you ask; if the Kirby family isn’t receiving any money from the film (and they’re not), why do you want it to sell well on DVD? The reason is, the Fantastic 4 DVD contains a documentary on Jack Kirby! As I write this, I just finished watching a prerelease copy of it. Titled Jack Kirby: Storyteller, and produced by Jon Mefford (who’s assembled many of the extra features on Marvel’s recent film DVDs), it’s a one-hour look at Jack’s life and career. It features interviews with a who’s who of comics pros, including Stan Lee, Neal Adams, Steve Rude, Alex Ross, Barry Windsor-Smith, Walter Simonson, and more! There’s also commentary by Jack’s kids Lisa and Neal Kirby, Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman, Mike Royer, Mike Thibodeaux, and others involved in furthering the Kirby legacy, including yours truly (hey, somebody had to put the “Who?” in the who’s who). The bio presents plenty of rare family photos and Kirby art provided by TJKC and the Kirby estate, and while the visuals are focused on Jack’s Marvel work (this is, after all, a Marvel DVD), Jack’s entire career is discussed in detail, including the Simon & Kirby years, his DC period, and animation (plus a wonderful section devoted to Roz Kirby). And best of all, they got their facts right! No, the Kirby family still doesn’t stand to gain a penny off the F4 movie or DVD, or the slew of promotional items that are blanketing toy and department stores around the world (have you seen the lifesize Thing Feet at Toys ’R’ Us?); we can only hope that, if the DVD does really well, perhaps 20th Century Fox will do the right thing and pony-up a co-creator payment for the Kirby family, to match even a fraction of what Stan Lee will receive (frankly, I’ve given up hope Marvel will ever do the right thing on its own). But regardless, this documentary stands to present Jack’s name and life to the general public in a way never before possible, and will hopefully generate some understanding of Jack’s role in the creation of Marvel’s characters, even if there’s no financial compensation coming for it. So, what would Jack have thought of the F4 movie? Not really having known him, I can’t say for sure. But I like to think he’d have mostly enjoyed it (perhaps with the exception of Stan’s cameo as postman Willie Lumpkin); and I’m confident, after viewing the documentary, he’d be thrilled with the way his legacy is being preserved. From talking to producer Jon Mefford, I know that was his intention in deciding to make the documentary (an idea which, by the way, was enthusiastically approved of by Marvel Studios exec Avi Arad). That’s also the purpose of the new Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center (launched on August 28 by Rand Hoppe at www.kirbymuseum.org— see the Museum Page elsewhere in this issue for more info). And of course, it’s been the goal of this magazine for eleven years and counting. This is a pivotal time for Jack’s legacy, with a lot of important events all converging. Many people are doing their best to raise Kirby’s public profile, and I hope you’ll all do your part—by buying the F4 DVD, joining the Kirby Museum, and continuing to support this publication. Together, we’ll see that Jack finally gets the credit he’s due, and have a lot of fun in the process. ★

Kirby On Film (above) Michael Chiklis as the Thing. (top right) Jack Kirby with his art display, at a comics convention in the late 1970s. (below) Cover of the Fantastic 4 DVD, which features a documentary on Jack’s life. It’s due to hit stores on December 5. Fantastic 4 DVD ©2005 20th Century Fox. Characters TM & ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Under The Covers

ur front cover this issue is Matt Wagner’s third attempt at inking the below pencils from Jack’s “Black Book” sketchbook (done in the mid-1970s as a gift for his wife Roz). When we asked why he did two earlier versions (shown below), Matt responded, “The first one turned out “too Royer”—as you had distinctly asked for it not to be. Additionally, as had often been the case whenever I’d tried to ink a Kirby piece in the past, I lost all sense of texture—cloth looked the same as skin looked the same as rock looked the same as flame. “On the next one, I decided to roughen things up a bit and used a scrubbly dry-brush effect that gave the piece an almost-indy/alternative comics look. Still wasn’t satisfied with it, though. “In the end, I did a version with ink wash and that one worked out quite well. It really captures not only the textures, but also the spirit of Kirby’s pencils—as well as a hefty dose of my own identity as well. Showed it to Bob Schreck and Diana Schutz last week and they both thought it looked great—“a true collaboration.” At Matt’s request, the piece was then colored by Dave Stewart, who has lots of experience at coloring over ink wash, and we think it ended up pretty spectacular!

Our back cover is a painting of Galactus by Georgio Comolo that’s based on Jack’s beautiful full-pager from Thor #160. Georgio’s done a slew of amazing Kirby-based paintings, including the great Demon #7 two-page spread shown above (you should see it in color!). To view more examples of his work, and for commissions, be sure to visit his official website at <http://comolo.redsectorart.com/> ★

Museum website goes live! On 28th August 2005, Jack’s 88th birthday, the Trustees of the Museum presented the website of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center to the world— and the world visited! We opted to allow the news to spread across the web, rather than contact news agencies as we did with the announcement of the formation of the Museum. Rand simply announced it in the comments of a few blogs who were also celebrating Jack’s birthday and confirmed it on Kirby-L—the Yahoo Groups-based Kirby discussion group—after eagle-eye Kris Brownlow discovered the site before Rand posted his announcement there. Word began spreading, and soon, some major web-culture and comicbook sites were sending people our way—sites like Metafilter, Boing Boing, Newsarama, The Comics Reporter, and The Jack Kirby Comics Weblog. Kirby appreciators in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, The Netherlands, and Brazil acknowledged our debut, as well. Almost 175,000 requests were made to the website in its first week!

Newsletter TJKC Edition Fall 2005 The Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center is organized exclusively for educational purposes; more specifically, to promote and encourage the study, understanding, preservation and appreciation of the work of Jack Kirby by: • illustrating the scope of Kirby's multifaceted career, • communicating the stories, inspirations and influences of Jack Kirby, • celebrating the life of Jack Kirby and his creations, and • building understanding of comicbooks and comicbook creators. To this end, the Museum will sponsor and otherwise support study, teaching, conferences, discussion groups, exhibitions, displays, publications and cinematic, theatrical or multimedia productions.

Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center PO Box 5236 Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA Telephone: (201) 963-4383

Board of Trustees Randolph Hoppe rhoppe@kirbymuseum.org Lisa Kirby lkirby@kirbymuseum.org John Morrow twomorrow@aol.com 4

Catalogue Raisonné Greg Gatlin, the Museum’s MySQL/PHP hero, and Rand have been continuing their work on the development of the database. Soon, we will be adding many of the scans of penciled Kirby artwork that the Kirby Estate has provided, not to mention the significant scanning efforts TwoMorrows has contributed. Need we mention that Museum members will gain access to a larger offering of these scans than the general public?

Kirby Video! In addition to the Glenn Flemming video featured on the website (edited by David Schwartz), John Hitchcock has provided the Museum with a VHS tape of an interview he held with Jack in 1985. We expect to have some of this digitized and available on the website in the coming weeks. This kind of material is crucial to our documentary project. Thanks Glenn, John, & David!

Membership News The Museum welcomes these new members: Tod Seisser, Kris Brownlow, Mitch Jomsky, Steve Meyer, Jim McCaffery, Kenn Thomas, Ronald Chironna, Wade Aucoin, Jimmie Harvey, Scott Rowland, Lee Curiel, Eric Reinders, John Floyd. Questions about membership? New Address? E-mail us at: membership@kirbymuseum.org

Join us! For the Jack Kirby Museum to become the vital institution it can be, it needs the support of an active membership. We are always looking for volunteers and donations. In addition to the costs of developing educational programs and exhibits, the Museum’s bank account needs to cover operating expenses such as professional services, web servers, insurance, shipping and postage, amongst other things. So, like most educational arts institutions, we offer Annual Memberships. Other than knowing the Museum is being helped to pay its bills and develop its educational programs and exhibits, Annual Membership will will provide Members access to a greater library of images in our database, when that functionality is added. We do, however, offer incentives for Membership in the form of posters donated for this purpose by the Kirby Estate. We are still getting our online payment system ready, but checks and money orders can be made out to Jack Kirby Museum and mailed to us. Please include your e-mail address, phone number and poster choice in your correspondence or on the memo line of your check. Students half-price (contact us). The posters are offered “as-is”—please do not expect yours to be in absolutely perfect mint condition.

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INNERVIEW (below and throughout) Unused cover for Thunderfoot, based on the legend of Bigfoot. This concept was created with Satan’s Six and Captain Victory in the mid-1970s for a proposed new line of “Jack Kirby Comics” (note the logo), but was abandoned when the investors’ financing fell through. Thunderfoot TM & ©2005 Jack Kirby Estate.

Idea & Motive In Kirby’s Comics Conducted by Ronald Levitt Lanyi, submitted by Kenneth F. Thomas, and reprinted with permission [Editor’s Note: The following interview, conducted by Ronald Levitt Lanyi, first appeared in the Fall 1983 issue of the Journal of Popular Culture. It’s the official publication of the Popular Culture Association, which is dedicated to breaking down the barriers between so-called “low” and “high” culture and filling in the gaps a neglect of popular culture has left in our understanding of the workings of society. You can find out more by visiting <www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0022-3840>. Our thanks to the PCA for permission to reprint this interview.]

ack Kurtzberg was born on New York’s Lower East Side in 1917. Nineteen years later, his comic strip illustrations were appearing in nearly seven hundred newspapers. A few years after that, as Jack Kirby, he entered the newly-established comic book industry and introduced, among other techniques, both the full-page spread, in which a single panel occupies an entire page, now a standard practice for opening a story, and the double-page spread, a highly spectacular feat which perhaps only Joe Kubert, of all other comic book artists, has yet been able to produce with similar skill. In the early years of U.S. involvement in World War II, Kirby’s illustrations for the first kid-gang comics—The Young Allies, “The Newsboy Legion,” and The Boy Commandos (this last at its peak selling 900,000 copies per monthly issue) provided boys with surrogates through whom they too could help defeat the Axis powers. Then, after returning from combat duty in Germany, Kirby drew My Date, the first of the romance comics, which now account for nearly half of the industry’s sales. In the 1960s, he illustrated the super-heroic exploits of The Fantastic Four, one of the most bizarre and successful comics in the medium’s history. Among his more recent efforts are series with such self-explanatory titles as The New Gods, The Forever People and The Eternals. Although he has been a major force in comic book illustration for over forty years, only within the last thirteen has the widespread recognition and praise which he richly deserves become evident. For instance, in The ComicStripped American, a pioneering study of the cultural values underlying a number of our past and present comics, Arthur Asa Berger notes that Kirby creates “brilliant panoramas... with remarkable flair and a wonderful sense of spatiality.”1 In Maurice Horn’s mammoth World Encyclopedia of Comics, it is asserted that Kirby is “Perhaps the most accomplished of all comic book creators.”2 In his History of Comics, Jim Steranko, himself a very fine comics artist, states that without Kirby “... there may not have been any comics to write a history about.”3 In the first issue of The Harvard Journal of Pictorial Fiction, Kirby’s artistry is likened to that of the great expressionist cinematographer Fritz Lang. In a letter printed in issue #198 of Kirby’s Captain America series, a fan christens him “The Michelangelo of the comic book,” and the editorial reply to that letter includes a reminder that Kirby is, after all, “the one and only ‘king’.” Matching this recognition of his artistry in its recentness is Kirby’s assumption of the additional role of scripter for his comic books. Within a few years, he has established himself as one of the most amusing and interesting writers now active in mass culture. In the conversation which follows, I am primarily, although not exclusively, concerned with getting into the mind of the writer, uncovering the ideas and motives which generate his stories, or, if you will, myths. This conversation was recorded in Kirby’s room at the San Francisco SheratonPalace on September 18, 1976, during Bay Con Two, a convention of “overground” and “underground” comic book writers and artists, fans of all ages and—I hope—levels of intelligence, and dealers of the wide assortment of paraphernalia that fans really don’t mind paying high prices

for. As I was leaving Kirby’s room, I espied myself in a group of small boys in the hallway, attempting to keep concealed yet oh so anxious for a look, a handshake, an autograph from “the one and only ‘King’.” RONALD LEVITT LANYI: I’d like to get your response to a section from psychiatrist Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, in which, to support his contention that comic books maim young sensibilities, he recounts an argument he had presented to a little girl: “If later on you want to read a good novel,” he told her, “it may describe how a young boy and girl sit together and watch the

(above) Concept art for Thunderfoot. (next page, top) Jack’s cast of characters for the strip. (next page, bottom) In this drawing, Thunderfoot looks different than in the above concept drawing, so we’re assuming this is a later revisiting of the concept, perhaps for an animation proposal. But the girl feeding him, and the giant feet, are a dead giveaway that it’s related. Thunderfoot TM & ©2005 Jack Kirby Estate.

rain falling. They talk about themselves and the pages of the book describe what their innermost little thoughts are. This is what is called literature. But you will never be able to appreciate that if in comic-book fashion you expect that at any minute someone will appear and pitch both of them out of the window.”4 Would you comment, please? JACK KIRBY: Yes, I will. There is more likelihood to young persons that someone will come and pitch them out of the window than there is an attraction in watching the raindrops fall. They accept the raindrops as part of the natural environment, and therefore ignore them. They ignore the natural environment because they already psychologically accept it. They accept it for what it is. What more can they do, except do a rain dance, which they’re not going to do. But they will go out and buy a comic magazine because the young people feel that there is more to their environment than rain or clouds, and they want to know what that is. And so they find it in adventure. LANYI: Well, part of the quote from Wertham involves the young couple telling each other “what their innermost little thoughts are.” KIRBY: Well, we never feel that we have little thoughts. Even when we’re little, everything is pressing, everything is urgent. The average human being is insecure from the word “go.” And I imagine if we were to have an accurate or detailed memory of our own birth, we could probably remember ourselves kicking and screaming all the way down to the infants’ ward. And we’re still kicking and screaming. We’re either screaming for something better, we’re screaming for good feelings, we’re screaming for

constant happiness. And, of course, that innate insecurity is still there: We want to be entertained. We want to be scared. We want to be elated. LANYI: You’re saying, then, that—. KIRBY: I’m saying we’re creatures of emotion. LANYI: And that comics not only entertain us better, but more accurately reflect our psychological condition than the kind of “good” literature Wertham was talking about?

KIRBY: I’m saying it fulfills us for a half-hour. After that, I don’t know what you do personally. LANYI: When America was very young, the sensibilities and intellects of our Founding Fathers were nurtured by a shared literary experience which included the Bible, religious tracts, rationalist philosophers, and a smattering of the Greeks and Romans. Two centuries later we find ourselves incredibly divided intellectually, with few literary experiences that most segments of society can be expected to have shared. One of our persistent literary bonds is provided by comic books, which, ironically, often seem to be on the offensive against the intellect. In your own works there is a persistent villain-type who is literally all head and who either lusts to control all life, as did “The Head” in issue #10 of Mister Miracle, or to destroy all life, as did “The Misfit” in issue #9 of Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth. In another recent series, The Sandman, which you drew but did not script, one of the title character’s aides, “Glob,” was a kind of giant brain with little arms and legs; he was kept inside a huge test tube, suggesting both his remoteness from real experience and untrustworthiness. Perhaps your most interesting apparent condemnation of the life of the mind recently occurred in issue three of your new Marvel series, The Eternals. Doctor Damian, an archaeologist and “good” character, comes upon The Tomb of the Space Gods and, in it, writings revealing the secret history of the gods and man. To study these writings, however, Damian must part company with his daughter forever, spending the rest of his life imprisoned in the Tomb. There’s not a moment’s wavering; he doesn’t hug or kiss his daughter goodbye, just calls “Be happy, child” after her as she’s

dragged off screaming. Here, with more bleak irony than ever before, you seem to be saying that not only does a well-developed intellect cut one off from the rest of life but even from one’s own self. Is that correct? KIRBY: That’s correct. And I feel that every human being, having actually found his own niche, will stay in that niche, and to the exclusion of everyone else. In other words, everyone else is expendable to that particular thing which overwhelms him. My belief is that in the last analysis you’re the one that’s most important. You’re the one that’s going to survive. You’re the one that’s going to see the world as it is in your final moments. You’re the one that can only have that particular experience that fulfills you. And, of course, I’m not saying it’s the right thing, or it’s the moral thing. I’m just saying it’s a condition of the human animal. If you find fulfillment, that doesn’t mean your loved ones are going to find fulfillment. You can help them, but you can’t provide it for them. You can’t cut up your own fulfillment and give them the pieces. You can just help them find theirs. But if you find fulfillment, you can’t share that with anybody. LANYI: Well, did “The Head” find fulfillment in lusting to control the planet? KIRBY: Well, in that particular case, yes. That would fulfill “The Head,” to control the planet. He was a megalomaniac. A megalomaniac—that’s his prime purpose, to satisfy that megalomania. If you’re a bland person, well, that megalomania would be watered down to a high degree, and you might just go out and pinch a girl. LANYI: More prevalent in your works than characters whose minds are too developed are the grotesque, often semi-human beasts whose efforts to conquer or destroy the world or just maim and kill at will are always ultimately frustrated. You seem to use them to present a conventional halfway Puritanism. The appearance, actions and fate of your grotesque beasts seem to say that id release is both psychologically necessary and morally reprehensible. Certainly these appear to have been your underlying motives in issue #8 of Mister Miracle, in which the hero is ultimately victorious over the demonic “Lump,” who is specifically identified as an embodiment of the universal id. Does this half-way Puritanism always guide your use of grotesques? KIRBY: Grotesques to me are—well, any grotesquery is the human condition in the extreme. The human condition in the extreme is, of course, distorted, and it doesn’t represent the normal image. The abnormal image will have abnormal goals, and, of course, abnormal goals will have a dire effect on a normal majority. And, therefore, this singular abnormal goal must somehow be modified. And, of course, in comics we can’t do it dimensionally, so we just throw the guy in jail. In other words, we have no time to reorient this fellow. We have to stop his machinations. We have to isolate him and put him where he can do the least harm and get the most rehabilitation.

LANYI: Why is it that he appears in the first place? KIRBY: As a villain? LANYI: Yes, as a grotesque one. KIRBY: Oh, I mean that’s my own representation of anything bad. In other words, to me, something has to be extremely bad to warrant extreme action. My format is extreme action, and I can’t get extreme action out of a guy who cheats at cards. I’d probably punch him in the nose or call a cop, and that’s not going to entertain my readers. I have to have a fellow who’s going to destroy Manhattan, or destroy New York, or sink North America under the ocean. That kind of guy can only be put away by a super-hero. And that’s when I go into action. LANYI: Isn’t it odd that although your grotesques always lose out, the societies they assail often appear mired down in moral confusion, if not downright chaos? For instance, one of your least comic representations of the moral quality of society was presented in your short-lived OMAC, One Man Army Corps series for DC. In it the title character struggles to achieve a heroism which seems to make little if any difference, for, as a character in issue five explains, “It’s a jungle out there! It’s everyone for himself.” OMAC’s is a society of continuous crime in which the preservation of some semblance of good is a thankless task, largely undertaken by an organization of literally faceless beings who, like OMAC, are guided by an impersonal technological deity with the Orwellian name of Brother Eye. This machine was designed by Myron Forest, deceased, whose name sounds like “My run Forest,” which suggests “My run in the Forest,” which in turn suggests that efforts at establishing or maintaining moral goodness in society are as idiosyncratic as they are temporary. In fact, in concluding the series in issue #8, you presented what seemed to be the extermination of both Myron Forest’s god-machine and OMAC. Did that series accurately gauge your faith in the goodness of society? 7

during your last connection with DC was the avoidance of old age and death. Your Demon series opened with Morgaine Le Fey seeking with malicious desperation to regain her very long-lost youth. The story in the fifth issue of OMAC was described on the cover as: “The most evil racket ever created!! New bodies for old!!” In issue #37 of Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth, the last issue you scripted before relinquishing the series prior to returning to Marvel, the teen-aged hero encounters a society of mutant humans whose life expectancy is five years and who attempt to usurp his longevity. I don’t see how this theme could have much of an impact on your readers, the vast majority of whom surely have little if any personal involvement with the anxieties of old age and death. On the other hand, you, who at fifty-nine are far from antiquated, did refer to yourself as “an old fart” a few years ago in a conversation printed in the second issue of Mysticogryfil: The Journal of Cosmic Wonder. I’m wondering, then, if the concerns in those comics weren’t strictly autobiographical, and that what we witnessed was, first of all, a yearning of your present middle-aged self for the youth you once were, and, secondly and more importantly, a condemnation of that yearning in the actions of the hero, which, thirdly, prepared you to accept the old man to be; in effect, a rite of passage which you prepared for yourself. KIRBY: No, I don’t think it was that. The passage I accept as naturally as I accept a haircut at the barber. It’s going to happen. I’m going to have to get old. I’m going to have to get a haircut. I’m going to have to buy shoes. And I’m going to have to get older. No, it wasn’t that. It was my search for the rackets of the future. In other words, what’s going to replace gambling; what’s going to replace the rackets that make money now. I believe that the yearning to stay young is so strong in us that when the time comes when we can plant our brain in a younger and stronger body, I think we’ll pay anything for that. I would love to be a racketeer who can sell that kind of thing and make a million on every operation. I think it’s going to happen. I think that when that kind of thing is done, the Mafia will control it. And you’ll be able to get a young body for a million dollars, of course if you can afford it. I think everybody’s going to try to afford it, but that kind of thing will come, just as we can transplant a kidney, just as we can transplant any other tissue in the human body. As long as any organ in the human body is transplantable, I don’t think that disqualifies the brain.

(above) The final, inked cover, with logo lettering by Mike Royer. Mike did logos for Captain Victory, Satan’s Six, and Thunderfoot before “Jack Kirby Comics” was abandoned. While he inked Captain Victory and some of Satan’s Six, the logo is as far as he got on Thunderfoot ; this cover appears to be inked by Jack himself. (next page) Climactic page to Jack’s 1976 2001: A Space Odyssey Treasury Edition. Thunderfoot TM & ©2005 Jack Kirby Estate. 2001 © 2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

KIRBY: I believe that society’s goodness is a fluid thing, and it’s subject to the change in time, subject to the change in temper. It’s subject to a host of things. It’s the kind of thing that created a group criminality in Germany. Whenever there was a parade marching down their streets, there they were, waving their flags. Of course, you can say they were forced to do it. Somehow they did it. I don’t think you can force an entire group to do anything. I think that a group either supports its leaders or it doesn’t. And I felt that particular case, the specific case of the Nazi era, was that kind of thing in which the group turned criminal because its leaders were criminal. If our leaders set a certain pace, we go along with that pace. Maybe it’s part of a herd principle. Maybe it’s the way we are as human beings. I believe we have to go along with something to maintain a structure. I’m not talking about these things in terms of good or bad. As in the case of the Germans, it just turned out to be destructive for them as well as everybody else. So I feel it’s a kind of thing that we can’t regulate. In other words, I can’t say when it will happen here, or when it will happen there. I’m just saying it’s a vagary of a human group. LANYI: One of the recurring themes of your work a few years ago

LANYI: According to Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, after a rite of passage there follows “an interval of more or less extended retirement... so that when, at last, the time has ripened for the return to the normal world, the initiate will be as good as reborn.”5 In your own case, if memory serves, after working on that final Kamandi adventure, in which the hero escapes a society filled with anxieties about death, you stopped producing for DC and then, some time later, resurfaced at Marvel. Your first significant work there this time was a giant-sized adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey in which you state (or mean to, for there’s an unfortunate typo), “Mortality is a condition of man. And he must be taught to surmount it....” A few panels later, you add, “Where is the end? Where is the beginning? Do they really exist?” Since doing that adaptation, you have converted 2001 into a monthly series and, I assume, mean to continue the ideology of the giant-sized issue. In sum, you give the appearance of having ripened into a new state of awareness, I think a deeply religious one, in which you no longer fear aging and death. Is that a fair assessment? KIRBY: That’s true. I, oh I don’t pretend to be, you know, my fears of death. I’m afraid of death. I’m afraid of ending what I’m doing. I’m afraid of not having a hamburger anymore. I’m afraid of not being able to walk out in the sun and sit down on an afternoon

and look out over the hill at my place. I’d hate to see that all end. I’d hate to give up a lot of things. Of course, I know that must come eventually. I don’t exactly fear it; I would just hate to see it end. I believe that early in life our fears extend merely to death itself. We’re afraid of death. We don’t know what death is. It could be something as easy as taking a haircut, which is horrifying because you don’t know what the barber is going to do to you. LANYI: Well, then, what are you saying in the 2001 series? KIRBY: In 2001 I’m saying that we don’t know what death is, where it’s at, what kind of an experience it’s like. We don’t know what it is until we experience it. I have a friend that experienced death. He died in a plane crash. I know that he saw death coming because he went into a stall about three hundred feet off the ground. I know that he saw the earth coming up at

him, and I know that he knew he was going to die. And he must have been horrified at that moment because he was entering the barber shop, about to sit in the chair, about to see what the barber was going to do to him. He was that child again. And, of course, now he knows whether it was just a haircut or something else. But I personally don’t know what it was, and I feel that we don’t. We don’t know where it starts. LANYI: You rarely allow your heroes close familial ties. Speaking of heroes, in the fourth issue of OMAC, you stated that “What they do is the sum total of what they are.” And your description of a group called “The Hairies” in issue #135 of Jimmy Olsen also seems to fit the majority of your heroes: “They are their own experience....” Often what use you do make of family relationships is ironic and bleak. In the first issue of The Demon, Jason Blood says, “That parchment is as fresh and strong as the day it came into my family’s

possession hundreds of years ago.” In fact, Jason Blood has no family and is not the son of anyone’s blood, but is a rootless and ageless self-reliant man. Sometimes your heroes are orphans with unsatisfying relationships with foster parents. For instance, in a series you briefly worked on for Archie some seventeen years ago, Tommy Troy, The Fly, has a life of continual and lonely drudgery forced upon him by the elderly couple with whom he lives. Another example is in the third issue of OMAC, in which the hero rather stiffly meets and greets his foster parents, who have been assigned to him without his asking or knowing and have simply shown up at his residence, prepared to move in. He carries their bags to a room he assigns them, and that’s the last we see of them in that issue, as well as in the series. One father-son relationship you did give some play to was that of the tellinglynamed Darkseid and his heroic son, Orion, in The New Gods. The relationship was summed up in the first issue by Metron, The Master of Theories, who said, “Who is more ready to fight the father—than the son!” Orion’s most comforting relationship seems to be with a machine, the Mother Box, just as OMAC’s seems to be with Brother Eye, and both names are clear travesties of familial roles. I’m curious to know your motive for devising such dim family situations for your heroes and making them appear to have become do-gooders as a compensation for the insubstantiality of their personal lives. Surely it can’t be too personal a motive as, from time to time in your comic books, you, who are yourself a heroic figure to hundreds of thousands of readers, happily mention your wife, Rosalyn, your son and daughters and your grandchild. KIRBY: Well, what I don’t mention is computer dating, which we have today. I believe that computer dating, taken down to its full range, will end the natural family as we know it. In other words, the mother and father will sooner or later become interchangeable for the individual. If a man needs a mother or father, like every human being does, society will supply it for him, just as we get gum from a machine. LANYI: You see that as a real possibility? KIRBY: I think it is a real possibility. I believe that a man is at his best when he feels that he has roots, that he has some kind of heritage, even if it’s supplied for him. Oh, I wouldn’t want to make an analogy of monkey experiments, but I’ve seen monkeys cling to substitutes. I’ve seen monkeys cling to papercloth images. I believe we will do the same. LANYI: Your vision of family life in the future seems to be a depressing one. KIRBY: No, it’s not depressing, not if you’re happy with it. And I believe that a man can be made happy with it. I believe that if a man knows he has a mother and father, that’s enough for him. I think the only conflict would be the natural conflict. What made Orion and Darkseid such deadly enemies was 9

because it was a natural relationship. There were father and son, pitted against each other. One may even love the other. And yet they had to fight because it was a natural relationship, and there was an enmity there which had to be resolved. In other words, the son had to transcend the father. I believe that’s natural. If the son cannot transcend the father, he’ll die in frustration. And, therefore, to survive, he’d have to beat the father. I believe that kind of feeling extended from the caves, and I believe that many a father ended up with a dented skull, which was given to him by members of his own family. LANYI: Another kind of loving relationship your heroes usually lack is with women, especially those who aren’t amazons like Big Barda of the Mister Miracle series. In issue #9 of The New Gods, Orion speaks harshly but representatively when he declares, “As for love. Madam—I find love in battle hotly fought—in vengeance fulfilled!!” Mister Miracle, on the other hand, does fall in love in issue #18 of his series, but you seem to have used that event as an expedient for getting rid of him. He tells Barda, “We’ve wasted precious time,” and she agrees, saying, “We’ve spent our time on all the things that don’t count.” And a few pages later, his heroism and the series come to an end. Flash Gordon had Dale, The Sub-Mariner had Donna, Doctor Strange had Clea, Ant-Man had the Wasp, Hawkman had Hawkgirl. In fact, in the Fantastic Four series which you drew and Stan Lee scripted in the Sixties, Mr. Fantastic had The Invisible Girl. Why, in works which you alone have produced, do you dissociate romantic and/or married love from male heroism? KIRBY: Well, I believe that male heroism is secondary. Male heroism, to my mind, is the prelude to romantic love. In other words, a man has to bring something to his girl. If it can’t be the pelt of a lion, if it can’t be the meat of a crab, it’s got to be something. It’s got to be a raise in pay. It’s got to be a recipe for something they both like. It’s got to be some kind of victory. In other words, a man has to have a victory in order to fulfill either his romance or his marriage or his male status. LANYI: Of all your heroes deprived of a loving relationship with a member of the opposite sex, Kamandi stands out as a special case, for it is not entirely clear what sex is opposite to his. What is clear, I think, is the support he lends to Wilhelm Stekel’s theory, stated in Die Sprache des Traumes, of the bisexual tendency of dreams. For Kamandi may be centrally “man,” the middle syllable of his name, but around the edges he’s a girl whose name is “Kandi.” His face differs only slightly from those of the series’ infrequently-appearing female characters; mainly their lips are darker. His long, gently cascading blond locks conceal a bare amount of his nearly total, smooth-muscled nudity. A being of pure energy attempting to duplicate his face and form comes out female. Hardly a Hemingway Code Hero, bearing up under pressure with stoic grace, Kamandi lets his feelings of powerlessness and frustration get out of control, and often has need of his protector, the mutant he-man, Ben Boxer. With a single touch of his “cyclo-heart,” Ben converts to solid steel, with hard muscles glistening all over-clearly a priapic fantasy. Kamandi’s own masculine side also is centrally, although subliminally, defined in terms of the strong penis. Freud stated in “Three Contributions to a Theory of Sex” and Peter Hays demonstrated in The Limping Hero that in the myths of primitive societies as well as in the literature of the advanced ones, male sexual potency is often symbolized by the foot. Kamandi’s feet are covered by loose but imposingly tall boots which sometimes are shown extending well up his calves and always are the tallest boots of any of the characters in the series. Thus, as a girl, he needs a big strong man. As a boy, he already is a big strong man. Would you comment on this reading of Kamandi’s androgyny? KIRBY: Well, I feel that you’re placing this bisexual connotation on the thing out of your own interpretation. To my mind, Kamandi is the man in puberty; Ben Boxer is Kamandi at the age of twentyseven. The man in puberty has not gone the route that hardens his muscles to hard knots. He hasn’t gone that route yet; he’s softer, he’s smaller, he’s less able to defend himself. Therefore, 10

it’s not the bisexuality that’s in evidence there; it’s the man’s need for a brother, for a protective brother. It’s man’s need to protect a younger child. It’s man’s need to trust an older brother and to run to him for aid. Kamandi does that with Ben Boxer. And Robin did that with Batman. And Bucky does that with Captain America. Bucky can handle himself with one or two fellows, but Captain America will come to his aid when he’s overwhelmed. And that’s my point. My point is little brother, big brother; man in puberty, man at the peak of manhood. LANYI: In Love and Death: A Study in Censorship, author Gershon Legman asserted: “That the publishers, editors, artists, and writers of comic-books are degenerates and belong in jail, goes without saying....”6 Elsewhere in the volume he offered a specific degeneracy, stating that “...comic-book companies [are] staffed entirely by homosexuals.”7 Can I get a rise out of you, so to speak, on that one? KIRBY: Well, I believe that we have our share of a range of people. I can’t specifically name the homosexuals in comics. I believe that if there are dangerous degenerates there, they should be put in jail. If there are dangerous degenerates in any other medium, they should be put in jail. If there are degenerates in high office in our land, they should be put in jail. I believe that we should have the best of our people in any position, in any medium, in any form of endeavor, that we should be represented by the best of what we’ve got. If we aren’t, that’s a human failing. And, actually, we can’t leave anybody out. I mean, if the degenerate is trying to contribute something to society in a degenerate form, I’m not going to fault him for it entirely, see? I’m just going to fault him for messing things up. And that’s my point. ★

Notes 1. Arthur Asa Berger, The Comic-Stripped American (New York: Walker, 1973), p. 204. 2. Maurice Horn, ed., The World Encyclopedia of Comics (New York: Chelsea, 1976), p. 429. 3. Jim Steranko, History of Comics. I (Reading, PA.: Supergraphics, 1970), p. i. 4. Frederic Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954). Quoted in Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (New York: Dial, 1965), p. 42. 5. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Cleveland: Meridian, 1956), p. 10. 6. Gershon Legman, Love and Death: A Study in Censorship (New York: Hacker, 1949), p. 45. 7. Ibid., p. 43.

Mark evanier

Jack F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby by Mark Evanier (below) A pretty punchy example of Syd Shores’ inks over Kirby from Captain America #101 (May 1968). This image was shot from a copy of the original art, showing the detail that Shores put into his inking. Captain America TM and ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

We start this time with the following query from Michael Wohl: I’ve seen you write about which Kirby inkers were your favorites but I’ve never seen you give your opinion of Syd Shores, whose work I loved. I’d also like to hear whatever you know about his return to Marvel after years away and what Jack thought of his inking. was not a big fan of what Shores did to Jack’s pencil art on Captain America. I liked him better embellishing Gene Colan but even there, I thought there were plenty of inkers who were more sensitive to the task. That said, I will add that I liked Kirby/Shores a little better

when I saw some of the original art. Shores was using a lot of fine lines—some, apparently executed with a ball-point pen of some sort—at a time when comic book printing was especially noxious, and a lot of what he put in went muddy. This was also a period when Marvel’s colorists were being influenced by what DC was doing with color in their books—darker colors, less reliance on bright primary tones, less yellow on the page. Kirby once described it as: “Everything being colored like it’s a war comic.” (It is said that a few months later, Stan Lee happened to leaf through a pile of their comics—like Jack, he didn’t look at the printed books all that often—and said something like, “This isn’t how I want our books to look!” And with that, Marvel went back to brighter, lighter colors... and a better approach, I thought, at least for their super-hero titles.) Still, even given those excuses, I thought Shores was miscast... not just as a Kirby inker but as an inker at all. And his stint inking Jack is a good example of, as you occasionally see in comics, an inker not being sure of his goal. Shores’s natural drawing style was quite different from what Jack was then doing... so was the end product supposed to look like Kirby or Shores? There are panels in those issues that skew in both directions and I don’t think either approach is particularly effective. Inking another artist is not something that comes naturally to some folks who know how to draw, and I don’t think Shores was really suited for the chore. Once upon a time, Syd Shores was Marvel’s star adventure artist. He held the post for a period after Kirby and Al Avison but before Bill Everett, Joe Maneely and the return of Kirby. No less than Gene Colan and John Buscema would later cite him as a powerful teacher/influence, and you could see a lot of other guys who drew for Stan Lee back then wishing they were Shores. Shores started at Marvel as an inker, working with Simon and Kirby on their first Captain America books. In an unpublished interview with Shores that recently came my way, he explained: “I had been assisting Mac Raboy and it didn’t pay enough. I’d just gotten married and I was desperate for a real paycheck. So I wrote and drew this strip called “The Terror” and I took it up to Timely Comics, just picking them at random. The whole office consisted of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and we sat around talking for a 11

(these two pages) Another page from Captain America #101, showing the level of detail Kirby was putting into his pencils (above), and likewise the intensity Syd Shores gave to the inking. Maybe it’s not a match made in heaven, but both gents were certainly trying their best! Characters TM and ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

while with Jack chewing on his cigar. I think they were more affected by how much I needed work than with “The Terror.” They offered me a staff job—$30 a week—doing inking and some paste-up. Well, of course, I grabbed it. “My first day there, the first thing they gave me to do was to ink the cover of Captain America #1. I didn’t do a bad job on it, if I do say so, although Joe and Jack took turns going over it with a brush and heavying up my lines. “I can’t tell you how much I learned from Jack in the year or so that I worked under him. He’s the master at establishing a powerful, stand-off look for the chief characters. He doesn’t make his leads that much taller but he gives them a tremendous power, the way they’re built... big chest, big hands and head, legs two or

three times the normal thickness. And it always worked.” Shores was right, of course, in the above quote. But when he tried to draw super-hero comics in the late Sixties, he would be faulted for not having learned that lesson. Or maybe he learned it but was unable to apply it. Back in the Forties, Simon and Kirby left the company after ten issues of Captain America believing that their promised share of profits was not being paid honestly. (Quick aside: The late Richard Morrissey and some of his friends who liked to analyze writers’ styles came to the conclusion that there’s some writing by Kirby and maybe by Simon in Captain America #11. I’ve never read the issue so I have no opinion on the matter, and neither Simon nor Kirby recalled leaving any scripts or materials around when they departed. A subject for further study...) After Joe and Jack hiked off to DC, Shores inked Avison and a few others for a time at Timely, then moved up to penciling, soon becoming one of their most valuable artists. Most of what he drew, before and after he went off to fight in World War II, was embellished by Vince Alascia. In the Fifties, Shores penciled and often inked stories for the war and western titles but work began to get tight. In 1957, he was one of many artists who felt he had to give up comics and look for work in other fields. In his case, it was mostly magazine illustration, though there were periods that found him behind the wheel of a cab. At least once, he picked up a fare and was embarrassed that it was an art director who had previously employed him. What got him back into comics ten years later was an expansion plan at Marvel. Around 1966, with sales soaring higher and higher, publisher Martin Goodman began to hector his distributor about allowing him to publish more comics. Independent News, a division of DC Comics, had once agreed to handle no more than eight Goodman titles a month, and had only been persuaded to increase that number slightly since then. In January of ’66, for instance, Marvel put out 13 comics— Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers, X-Men, Daredevil, Journey Into Mystery, Tales of Suspense, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Sgt. Fury, Kid Colt, Outlaw; Two-Gun Kid and Millie the Model. (Comics were twelve cents then. Hard to believe but you could buy everything Marvel published, including Millie and the westerns, for about half the price of one 2005 issue of Fantastic Four.) Goodman believed there was room on the newsstand for many more Marvel Comics per month. Jack Liebowitz, who ran DC and Independent News, believed there was not. He feared that more comics would only take away from the sales of those that were already there. One might assume he especially feared that new Marvel books would thrive at the expense of existing DC titles. Given what occurred later when Marvel did expand, that would have been a prudent fear. Several times during this period, he thought he was on the verge of convincing Independent so he’d put Stan Lee on alert: Get set to add more books. One such notice came when Goodman

heard that Joe Simon was contracting with Harvey Comics to launch a super-hero line. Here’s what Jack recalled... “Goodman was afraid of Joe. A lot of people were afraid of Joe because they knew that Joe Simon was good at putting books together. If I were Martin and I’d heard that Joe Simon was going to put together a line of super-hero books to compete with mine, I’d be worried. “I came in one day and Stan said, ‘Martin says we have to add more books.’ They were afraid Al Harvey, who had pretty good distribution, was going to crowd them off the stands.” The rumor was that the Harvey line would start with a half-dozen new titles and quickly double or triple in size. Plans were hurriedly drawn up at Marvel to add new books. Several new characters would be introduced into existing comics and then spun off into their own. The first two would be The

Inhumans and an Afro-American hero who would later be dubbed The Black Panther. At least, that was the plan for about a week or so. The folks at Independent News said no to Goodman’s demands to add more titles. As it turned out, Marvel had nothing to worry about. Simon’s new heroes—Jigsaw, Piranha, Bee-Man, Spyman, Magicman, et al.—only lasted a few issues apiece, suggesting that maybe Jack Liebowitz was right. Maybe the newsstands then were carrying as many super-hero titles as the market could bear. Goodman didn’t see it that way. He continued to draw up various expansion plans, only to have them shot down by Independent. Liebowitz would only permit an occasional new title and only if it was either in the less-commercial 25-cent format or was not a super-hero title. When he allowed Goodman a new western book and a new humor book, Martin

had Stan Lee skew them as much as possible towards the purchasers of the super-hero line. That’s how we got Ghost Rider and Not Brand Echh. What Goodman really wanted to put out then was more books of the super-guys and there were some obvious expansion options. The Hulk and the Sub-Mariner were splitting Tales to Astonish. Dr. Strange and Nick Fury were co-habitating in Strange Tales. Captain America and Iron Man resided at opposite ends of Tales of Suspense. To Goodman, those were three comics that could have been six comics. There were also other potential strips and books to be built from some supporting players: The Silver Surfer, The Watcher, Ka-Zar, The Inhumans, etc. In late ’66 and throughout ’67, Goodman looked for a way to expand his line, either by changing distributors or by pressuring Independent to take on more books. The latter was preferable since his contract with Independent ran through late 1969 and might prove to be unbreakable. At the time, he was also angling to sell his entire operation to some conglomerate. Many smallto-medium-sized companies were doing that then—DC was sold at about that time—and increased grosses, even of the short term variety, could lead to an increased sales price. Late in 1966, he gave the order to swap around the strips in the anthology books. Tales to Astonish would feature Hulk in the front and Dr. Strange in the back. Tales of Suspense would have Captain America as the lead and Nick Fury bringing up the rear. Strange Tales would be Iron Man up front, Sub-Mariner in the back-up position. The idea here was to redeploy the strongest strips as leads. The three back-up features would eventually be dropped out to become separate comics. Strange Tales, for example, would turn into an Iron Man comic and a separate new numbering would begin for Sub-Mariner. Again, the plan lasted about a week. Independent said no and the order came down from Goodman’s office: Put everything back the way it was. Shortly after, Goodman decided to launch a new Hulk comic—this would have been a year or two before he finally did—and assign the Hulk’s space in Tales to Astonish to tales of the Silver Surfer. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Stan and Jack prepared the first Surfer story to run in Tales to Astonish and then, when the redeployment was called off, that story was used in the 1967 Fantastic Four Annual. During this time, Stan knew he would soon have a need for more writers and artists, especially artists. His modus operandi with some new pencilers had been to break them in by working over Kirby layouts but around this time, Jack began refusing to do that kind of work any longer. He felt that the fractional page rate he received was simply insufficient for the effort and contribution involved. Instead, Stan would have new artists learn a strip—and the “Marvel method” of storytelling—by inking the feature, then moving up to penciling it. Johnny Craig would ink Gene Colan for a time on “Iron Man,” then take over penciling the strip. Herb Trimpe would ink Marie Severin on the “Hulk,” then become the “Hulk” penciler. As we shall see, Syd Shores would wind up inking Kirby on 13

looked with Kane handling the art. Bringing in Joe Sinnott to ink only helped a little. The bigger problem was that Kane failed to click with Stan on a personal level. The list of pencilers with whom Stan felt a strong rapport and who could break down a plot the way he liked it was a very small list, and Gil somehow never made it. Later, when Kane did a stint penciling Amazing Spider-Man and Stan was writing it, Gil worked primarily with John Romita, and Romita worked with Stan. So Gil went back to DC and Kirby went back on “Captain America.” Which brings us back to Syd Shores. For several years, Shores had been in occasional touch with Stan about maybe coming back to comics. Stan apparently called him once about taking over Daredevil after Wally Wood left and before John Romita walked in the door seeking work. At that moment, Shores had steady work drawing for a men’s adventure magazine and had to decline. Later, when work there wasn’t so steady, Shores called Stan who had to tell him, “I don’t have anything for you just now.” Finally in 1967, Independent finally agreed to allow Goodman to add more super-hero titles and he gave the order to split the three double-feature books into six. A year or two later, they revived the anthology format with Astonishing Tales (features of Ka-Zar and Doctor Doom) and Amazing Adventures (The Inhumans and The Black Widow). Now, Stan really needed more artists and when Shores found himself without work and called again, he was welcomed back to the fold. At first, Stan was excited. Shores had once been a terrific penciler for Captain America. If he could pick up on the modern approach, he’d fit right in... and free up Kirby for other projects. This, alas, did not happen. Shores did up a few samples and they weren’t quite there, though Stan didn’t hold that against him. After all, even Johnny Romita and John Buscema had bombed in their first attempts to pencil Marvel super-heroes. They’d learned by working with Kirby... and Shores could, as well. Shores inked Jack on Captain America for a little less than a year. It was apparently a frustrating time for him, as he never quite “got” whatever Stan was hoping he’d pick up—or, at least, Stan never felt he did. Once, Syd was given a plot and told it was time to solo. Time to go off and pencil on his own, he was told. When he brought in the first few pages, Stan looked them over... and faster than you could say “Irving Forbush,” the pages were discarded, Kirby was reinstated as penciler and Shores was back to inking him. The work was probably very competent by most standards but Stan was looking for a certain “something”

“Captain America” as a planned prelude to assuming the penciling chore. One concern in any expansion plan was how to deploy Kirby. Under consideration were new strips or books of several characters for which Jack was the logical artist. There was also talk of trying to create some new features. Any of these options would mean freeing up some time on Kirby’s schedule. In June of ’66, to pick a date from this period at random, Jack was penciling Fantastic Four, Thor and the “Captain America” strip in Tales of Suspense. He was also laying out the “Hulk” strip in Tales to Astonish and sometimes penciling, sometimes laying out the “Nick Fury” strip in Strange Tales, plus he was doing around six covers a month, and there were annuals that year—containing new stories—of Fantastic Four and Thor. That constituted more than a full workload and even after he stopped doing layouts, Jack really didn’t have time to take on a full new book. Something had to go, especially if Captain America was soon to be moved into a solo book . Stan decided that of the strips Jack was then doing, “Cap” was the one that needed him the least. At first, the answer seemed to be Gil Kane. Kane was obviously an accomplished penciler who could draw a dynamic super-hero: No need to have him “break in” working with someone else. (Kane’s first, earlier “Marvel Age” job—a pseudonymous effort over Kirby layouts in Tales to Astonish #76— was not because Gil needed to learn anything. It was because that was the only assignment open when he went up to Marvel one day looking for work.) Kane began drawing the “Captain America” strip in Tales of Suspense. He also took over the “Hulk” feature in Tales to Astonish, which Jack no longer wished to lay out. The hope was that Kane would continue with one of those features—most likely, the former— when it came time to move them into full books. That would free Kirby to do something new. Didn’t work that way. Though Gil was a fine artist and though some of us loved the work he did then, Stan didn’t like the way “Captain America”

in a super-hero penciler— especially one who’d be drawing a book he was scripting. It was probably not just a matter of not being able to draw dynamic figures with exciting staging. The main thing Stan was seeking in artists back then was the ability to take a brief plot and break it down into a story that would work for his purposes. Shores, he felt, could not do this. Stan also complained that, at times, Shores would lose the Kirby style in the art he was inking. There are several panels in those issues that were retouched by John Romita, largely to get back a little more of the Kirby approach, and others where staff artists were told to “white out” some of the extra shading that Shores was applying. This puzzled Shores because he’d been laboring under the impression that the idea was to phase him in as the strip’s artist. So what was the big deal if the art started to look more like him and less like Jack? To further confuse the guy, when he went to Kirby for advice—as he did more than once—Jack told him, approximately: “Be yourself! You’re a great artist. Do what your instincts tell you.” (During one of those visits, the two men got to talking about their World War II experiences and were amazed to discover they’d been in the same regiment at the same time. They had somehow never crossed paths.) In the interview I mentioned a few dozen paragraphs ago, Shores said, “I never could do a Captain America that satisfied Stan. I was never even sure if I was supposed to do Kirby’s Captain America or develop my own.” Ultimately and sadly, Syd Shores joined a notunimpressive list of artists who were unable to give Stan Lee what he wanted for super-hero comics in The Marvel Age. Shores remained primarily an inker until his death in 1973, although the company did give him some penciling work on mystery titles, one issue of Daredevil, and a short-lived book that he reportedly helped create called Red Wolf. On the latter, they assigned Wally Wood to ink, presumably in the hopes that Wood, who had a tendency to submerge pencilers’ styles, would compensate for Syd’s shortcomings. Kirby, when he heard about this—from Shores himself, I believe—did not agree that his friend was deficient as an artist. Syd was another guy Jack called “a first-rater,” the term he used for most of his peers when he felt they did quality work.

As for what Jack thought of his inking, it was the same thing he said about Wally Wood or Bill Everett or many others who inked Kirby pencils for a while. Said Jack, “What’s he doing working on my work? He’s a great artist. He should be doing his own work.” I only have a little more room, so let’s run a few short queries. Chris Murrin writes: Did Kirby use Kevin McCarthy’s visage for Morgan Edge because he remembered him from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or was it because McCarthy played General “Happy” Jack Kirby in A Gathering of Eagles? If it’s the former, or some other reason altogether, then that’s a doozy of a coincidence. As far as I know, that’s a coincidence and you’re right... it’s a doozy. Jack did see Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In fact, he saw a lot of science-fiction movies in the Fifties and early Sixties... less so, after that when there were fewer such films being released and the ones that did come out became more violent. These movies constitute an area of “Influences on Kirby” that has not been given much study. There are scenes in the Marvel monster comics of the period, and then in the early super-hero comics, that are right out of Jack’s moviegoing. Try watching The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and reading the first Hulk story. You’ll see what I mean.

went back and added text, correct? Any estimate, or anecdote? I’m curious about stuff like this—did it take him an hour, two, etc.? Jack drew the whole story out, then went back in and wrote in the text as pretty much the last step. Later might come a little tweaking of the art here and there, and in the dialoguing process, he might get some idea of how to improve a panel by redrawing. But putting in balloons and captions was pretty much the last thing he did. How long did it take him? Not all that much time, because he had most of it in his head by then. I’d say writing in the dialogue took him half of a work day... maybe six hours, maybe less. I don’t mean he wrote all the copy in six hours. He composed it in rough form as he was drawing and then it took him about six

(previous page, bottom) Jack was a member of the Los Angeles-based C.A.P.S. (Comic Arts Professional Society) with other artists he respected. This etching was published in a C.A.P.S. how-to-draw book in 1982. Art ©2005 Jack Kirby Estate.

I believe Kevin McCarthy stuck in his brain after the movie you mention but who knows? Jack’s mind always made odd connections, often without him being aware of them. Several folks have written me over the years with this one: How is “Darkseid” pronounced? As if spelled “dark side,” as in “the dark side of man’s nature.” At least, that’s how Kirby always pronounced it around me. But at least once, when some fan who pronounced it “dark seed” was excitedly telling Jack his theories about the character, Jack went along with it, rather than correct the kid. And the kid went around telling everyone who’d previously told him he had the name wrong, “No, I was right. That’s how Jack Kirby pronounced it.” Jack occasionally did that with people. He hated to dampen enthusiasm and passion, and so would often “go with” what others felt or believed. So his attitude was kind of like, “If you want to pronounce it your way, go right on ahead.” Robert Steibel sent in this question... I was wondering how long it took Jack to dialogue/caption a book during his stint at DC during the ’70s. He illustrated the story first and then 15

hours to finalize and write it down on the page. He did not come to the task of dialogue writing like an outside writer starting from scratch with an already-penciled story. That was kind of how Jack drew. He got it all in his head and then when he drew, it looked like he was tracing an image that was already there. He committed the text to paper roughly the same way he laid down the images he’d already conceived. Then, unless it had to be shipped off immediately, he’d let it sit for a few hours and give it another read-through and change a few things... maybe have Roz read it. If she was confused by something or felt a scene was too heavy in violence or too suggestive, he would always adjust the material. And if Steve Sherman and I were around that day, he might have us go through it... or not. At some point, though— always too abruptly to suit him—Jack would have to turn loose of the story and ship it off. At that point, the story was done. He’d forget all about it and move on to the next project. Lastly, Darrin O’Connell sent me this question... Thank you, Mr. Evanier, for your ongoing articles and championing the cause of Kirby. I have to ask if you ever get tired of writing about Jack. I pray that you don’t but I’m curious if you ever do. I think it’s about as easy to get tired of writing about Jack as it is of reading his work. Which is a glib way of saying that ain’t gonna happen. And isn’t it interesting that Jack’s work is, in some ways, more popular than ever? Marvel recently began reprinting stories he wrote and drew in the Seventies, back when some were saying he was washed up. A lot of books that were then suggested as better have not withstood the

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test of time—at least, not yet—and Jack’s are still being reissued and discovered by new readers. There’s something so rich about even Kirby’s lesser works and that same richness makes him fascinating to talk about, to think about, to write about. I sure haven’t gotten bored with the topic yet and I doubt I ever will. Next question? ★ Mark Evanier welcomes questions and also visits to his websites. There’s his daily weblog, located at www.newsfromme.com, and his not-daily site, www.POVonline.com. Both have plenty of content about Mr. Kirby and both have a link where you can e-mail your Kirby Kwestions. And if you still haven’t tried TwoMorrows’ collections of Mark’s acclaimed POV columns (shown at left), for a limited time, when you purchase two for the regular price of $34 US Postpaid, you get the third one FREE! Check the TwoMorrows house ad to order by mail, or go to www.twomorrows.com

(above) An example from Jimmy Olsen #145 (Jan. 1972) showing that, at least in this instance, Jack wrote the “next issue” dialogue first (probably while fresh in his mind) before going back to dialogue this final page of the issue. Characters TM and ©2005 DC Comics.

From THIS:

He Got THIS?

Incidental Iconography An ongoing analysis of Kirby’s visual shorthand, and how he inadvertently used it to develop his characters, by Sean Kleefeld uch has been written about Jack be the source of Jack’s 1957 version Kirby’s work on Thor—from the of Thor, with the fur cape, horned helmet, debate over who controlled the character’s bare arms and a tunic with circular plates destiny (Stan or Jack) to how the Thor that showed up in embedded in it. Would that Rackham’s Siegfried Journey Into Mystery was not Jack’s first attempt at the character. carried a hammer, he could easily be mistaken for This article, as the rest of those in this column, will focus on the the son of Odin. visual evolution of the character. We cut to a few years later, as Jack was Jack’s first professional attempt at the character showed up in working on Marvel’s new Fantastic Four comic Adventure Comics #75 in 1942. The character design was fairly book. Stan Lee had recently gotten sales numbers evidently based on the typical depictions of Norse legends, sporting an back on their first issues and was beginning to unkempt beard, a winged Viking helmet, loin cloth, arm bands, and strapped boots. This Thor wields a utilitarian hammer and has a sheathed sword about his belt. Kirby’s design here must largely have come from older depictions of the character, although the over-abundance of muscles seems to have been Jack’s own addition. It should be pointed out, though, that real Vikings never wore helmets with wings or horns—more on this in a bit. A Jack Kirby Thor next appears in Tales of the Unexpected #16. This is a most 5 Adventure Comics #7 significant pre-Marvel attempt at the character, in large part see that Martin Goodman was because of his chronal proximity, having right, and that they should been created in 1957. This version of Thor return to publishing super-heroes. The first tentative response was The Incredible bears visual hallmarks of the previous Hulk, and before the first issue’s sales numbers came in, he had Jack Kirby working on their next they-could-still-argue-he’s-not-quite-an-outright-super-hero-ifest dots! two: the scruffy beard, fur-like loin cloth, cted #16—ch pe ex Un e th and sheathed sword from the earlier appearNational-began-asking-questions super-hero: Thor, the god of thunder. Indeed the job Tales of ance; and the horned helmet, tunic and uniform boots from the latter. numbers indicate Journey Into Mystery #83 was wedged comfortably between Hulk There are two new additions to the design, though, #2 and Amazing Fantasy #15. that are clearly noteworthy. First is the addition of a Whether it was Stan or Jack who suggested Thor is beyond the cape. This cape appears to be simply a fur clasped scope of this column (and has been around Thor’s neck and one could easily see a Viking addressed elsewhere repeatedly) but it using it to ward off the cold, winter winds of Norway. clearly fell to Jack to develop the characThe second, more curious, addition is that of circular ter’s visual design. Whether by intention designs added to the chest area of his tunic. Looking or serendipity, Jack effectively lifted his carefully at the art, one can see that this isn’t the character design from his Unexpected simple circular designs that appear in later Marvel story. The few differences are: this new comics, but appear to be more numerous, and Thor is clean-shaven, does not carry a focused exclusively on the upper body. The suggessword, and sports a trimmed and hemmed tion seems to be that of a form of armor; small cape instead of a fur one as well as winged plates sewn onto a leather tunic to deflect blows helmet instead of a horned one. The changes away from vital areas of the chest. Like the to his facial hair and cape were almost horned helmet, this also has little relation back to certainly done for editorial reasons, to place historical Vikings. Both have their roots in fiction. Thor more squarely in the super-hero genre; The “classical” image of a Viking is wellthe cape having been long established as a known in large part due to opera. Richard super-hero emblem and the bare chin also Wagner’s series of four operas collectively called having been long established as heroic visual, Rackham’s “Wotan Rev The Ring of the Nibelung is perhaps one of the much like the white cowboy hat. And if there eals His Ang uish to Brün most widely known works of fiction about Vikings. (The powerful and was any question with regard to Stan’s intention hilde” enduring “Ride of the Valkyries” is from the second of these operas.) While the original of selling Thor to his readers as a super-hero, costumes begin to play with the visual notions of horned helmets and metallic his editorial note in the last panel of Thor’s first breastplates, it was seemingly cost-prohibitive at the time to become too elaborate. It story verifies those intentions by calling the new protagonist, “Thor the Mighty, the thus fell to turn-of-the-century illustrator Arthur Rackham to provide lush interpretations greatest super hero of all time…” (While beyond Jack’s direct control, it might be and stunning visuals to accompany Wagner’s story. And, indeed, we find what must (continued on page 19)

Adam M c Govern Know of some Kirby-inspired work that should be covered here? Send to:

As A Genre

Adam McGovern PO Box 257 Mt. Tabor, NJ 07878

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

WHO MADE WHO Men of Tomorrow his being the first “Kirby as a Genre” column written after the Fantastic 4 film, it may be inevitable that our thoughts turn to the men behind the mega-franchises making other people rich, so there could perhaps be no better timing for the latest entry from one of those countries where our own pop prophets are more honored than here: the British saga of Stan & Jack. Written and drawn by Pete Dorée (so no chance of credit disputes), the book follows the intrepid dimension-crossings of a very familiar scripter and artist in adventures stranger than their famous fictions. Picture the old What If? issue where the classic Marvel Bullpen become the Fantastic Four, take out the Fantastic Four part, and you’ve got the general idea; then prepare to laugh yourself into another plane of reality as you recognize the various creators coming out from behind their drawing boards and typewriters to take center-stage in an odyssey through the studio backlot of the pulp imagination (from magic forests to distant galaxies and whatever they think of next). Not just Stan and Jack but Gil Kane, Wally Wood and an elusive, trenchcoated Steve Ditko appear, each separately shrouded in their signature artistic style and each pitch-perfectly speaking in the patterns of their well-known public personas. Though an agile and inspired gag cartoonist, Dorée isn’t completely up to the visual task of capturing every artist’s look (a fact he deftly works into the self-deprecating narrative), but in fairness there are a lot of inimitable talents to evoke here, and Dorée’s ear for their one-of-a-kind personalities is flawless, along with his comic timing and his sense of both the bombastically clichéd and the quietly absurd. Evoking the improvised, irreverent feel of early Marvel while perhaps structuring his story and distinguishing his characters better than the real thing often did, Dorée has great fun with the flourishes and foibles of these historic figures, and though the results may be a bit Stan-bashing for some—Lee’s credit-hogging reputation is made much sport of (in a way that Kirby himself didn’t touch in that long-ago What If? )—that’s really just one part of a portrait in which each man’s legend (freakishly productive Kirby; dandyish, otherworldly Kane; paranoid, oracular Ditko; etc.) is affectionately cranked to a Marx Brothers-ish 11. A transoceanic uprooting to attend the renowned Kubert School has put Dorée’s publishing empire on hold, but as a special offer to TJKC readers he will fashion an otherwise free copy of Stan & Jack’s first issue for the postage-and-handling sum of $6/£3 by international money order, sent to Pete Dorée, 12 Green Park, Cambridge CB4 1SX, England; he’ll be there until fall of ’06 and welcomes any questions at Petedoree@aol.com. Dorée is a vital wit and an astute historian in deceptively cartoony camouflage; drop him a line and Stan & Jack will make, er, a true believer out of you.

(throughout this article) Examples of the oft-hilarious adventures of Stan & Jack, a favorite of this magazine’s editor. Check it out! (next page, bottom) Michael Chiklis as the Thing, in a poster for the F4 film. Stan & Jack TM and © 2005 Pete Dorée Fantastic 4 Poster ©2005 20th Century Fox. Thing TM & ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Family Redefined The Fantastic Four is so specially associated with Kirby that its long-awaited film version is of particular interest to the King’s subjects, and worthy of some delving even if it’s holding up the discount-DVD shelves alongside its infamous bootleg predecessor by the time you read this. Though it’s the least lofty of any super-hero movie so far (no oedipal tragedies, no fretting about the justice/vengeance boundary-line), this frees it from any pretensions to fall short of, and it’s a lot funner than I expected given how far from its model’s flavor and content it turned out to be. Gone are the cold-war subtext and intimate pathos, and Dr. Doom is a weak link indeed (or rivet, as the case may be)—the 18

comics’ grand, tragic figure is given a quite cardboard and motivationless makeover (though I neither fault the filmmakers this failure nor envy them their task, the character having already been done to perfection when he was called “Darth Vader”). What remains intact is the dysfunctional-family dynamic between the four heroes, which adapts hilariously and refreshingly to the screen in an ensemble performance with few flaws. The idea of cranky heroes with public identities is still new to the comic-movie, and feels as innovative now as it did to the first FF fans in ’61. But you want to know about the Kirby content. Some art-deco office-tower in Vancouver is modified at the top with one of those great transistorized-lego 13-sided Kirby hyper-rhomboids to make a Baxter Building, and though it bears no resemblance to the comic’s version it well evokes Kirby’s sleek erector-set cityscapes in general, and proves that an entire skyline of ’em could be brought to the screen; if you’re gonna shoot in Canada and call it New York, CGI an elevated train through the middle of a made-up Manhattan (as in Spider-Man 2 ), etc., you might as well generate an

entire urban environment from Kirby’s high-tech playgrounds for FF2. Another nod seems to be given to Kirby’s concept of Doom as an obsessive perfectionist who wore the mask because he’s got one scar on his precious face; the movie’s Doom comes by his deformity slowly and spends most of the film fretting over little more than a nick. I’d swear that Michael Chiklis not only read every Lee/Kirby issue he could find but interviewed every Kirby acquaintance who was left in fashioning his definitive Ben Grimm portrayal. And though Ben is not seen in yarmulke and prayer-shawl as per a favorite Kirby sketch that has run in this magazine, the Jewish star worn by Sue in the final scene seems some kind of tribute to comics’ patriarchs in general and its King in particular. Which brings us to the issue of all due respect: The week Spider-Man 1 came out, the character’s flagship comic bore an honest-to-gosh “Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko” line, presumably since J. Michael Straczynski comes from an industry where creators get credit and has enough clout to make some demands; no such luck with even Straczynski’s FF title when this movie came out. It’s a slippery issue; the strange fact of franchised properties is that, over the course of their evolution by successive hired hands, there are not only characters to consider, but charactersas-we-know-them—Daredevil, for instance, was undeniably created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett, but Daredevil-as-we-know-him (and as we saw him in his movie, which credited no one) is arguably a creation of Lee, Everett, Wally Wood, Gene Colan, Frank Miller, Kevin Smith, Joe Quesada, and Brian Michael Bendis. There’s a little of this syndrome in the FF movie; the team’s origin (and Doom’s powers) derive as much from Ultimate as from plain-old FF, and insofar as the film has a plot, it owes more than a little to Grant Morrison’s recent 1234 miniseries. But the FF sprang into being remarkably complete; Frank Miller did “his” Daredevil, but just about everyone does Lee & Kirby’s FF (and the handful of creators who brilliantly blaze new trails, like Morrison & Jae Lee in 1234 and James Sturm & Guy Davis in Unstable Molecules, are reacting to Lee & Kirby’s indelible template). Thus it is that we come to the closing credits of Fantastic-Four-theMovie, which, in the indisputable, indefinable and unactionable style of the Spider-flicks, is “Based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” Two issues ago this magazine led a campaign for Kirby to get due credit on the then-unreleased film. So, um, let me know… did we win? ★

(Adam McGovern lives in Mt. Tabor, NJ, and is glad that he gets credit for this column at the end. Isn’t that the least any publisher should do?)

(“Incidental Iconography,” continued from page 17) noted here that Thor’s new color palette is brighter and more in line with a super-hero here than in previous versions of the character.) Why the sword was dropped remains unclear, but the change to a winged helmet does make sense visually. Jack had, in previous iterations of the character, used both the winged and horned designs, suggested from Rackham’s various illustrations. (The character Wotan is shown in Rackham’s illustrations sporting a helmet with wings.) Choosing wings in this particular instance of Thor makes sense thematically, as one of his powers established during the origin is flight. This is reinforced in Thor’s belt buckle design. Jack spent many years thereafter working on Thor stories. Whether it was the repetition or simply Jack’s affinity for the Norse legends, Jack kept the character design amazingly consistent. Nearly all of the changes that were implemented under Jack’s hand were slight variations in stylization. It will only take a casual browsing of this issue to see Jack’s versions of Thor over the years and, after 1962, the biggest differences seem to come from differences in inkers. (For example, the tiger stripe effect on Thor’s boots is largely from Vince Colletta; Jack’s pencils show he was still drawing them as leggings.)

o or we kn —the Th 3 8 # ry te Into Mys Journey

A minor exception is Thor’s helmet spike. While Thor’s helmet is very indicative of the character and has become an icon in its own right, Jack did make one slight design change early on. Look closely at the first five pages of Thor’s origin story. It’s most noticeable on the opening splash, but also visible in the third and sixth panels of page five: Thor’s helmet sports a front-to-back flange instead of a spike. This is modified on page six to the more familiar spike and remains intact after that. It would seem that Jack’s glancing back to the way he drew the flange on the previous page gave way to a slight misinterpretation that stuck. Much like the Silver Surfer and Galactus, noted in a previous “Incidental Iconography,” Thor’s costume has largely remained unscathed over the past several decades. Unlike those two, however, it has changed on occasion— only to revert back to the classical (and incidental) iconic Kirby design. ★ (See Sean’s website at www.FFPlaza.com) 19

Accolades (below) An example of the kind of help David gives to this publication: He discovered this obscure 1980s Kirby piece (inked by Mike Thibodeaux) and immediately sent us a copy. Whatta guy! ©2005 Jack Kirby Estate

David Meets Goliath David Schwartz Interview Interviewed and transcribed by John Morrow (Editor’s Note: In case you’re not familiar with the name David Schwartz, let me say he’s a great friend of the Kirby family, and of yours truly as well. While he’s never been in the public Kirby spotlight, he’s helped out innumerable times on this magazine, supplying just the right piece of art when a need arises, and acting as a liaison between us and an often overworked Mike Thibodeaux in getting us materials for the mag. As you read this interview—which was conducted September 19, 2005 by phone, and was copyedited by David—I think you’ll understand why David was chosen to receive a Jack Kirby Award at last year’s Comic-Con International: San Diego.) THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: David, can you give us some brief biographical information on yourself? DAVID SCHWARTZ: I’m 47; I was born in 1958. I grew up in New York City, in Greenwich Village in the 1960s and I went to my first convention in 1971, which was Phil Seuling’s con; I was 13. TJKC: Was Kirby there?

DAVID: Jack was there in 1972, I believe. I got a copy of Demon #1 signed. It was July of 1972, and I’ve still got that signature. Demon #1 would’ve been out some time in May. That was the first time I met Jack. Neal [Kirby] was there selling Jack’s comics and art. The thing I remember most is waiting in line with everybody. There was a guy in front of me with Captain America #1, which was a big deal even at that time, and he had Jack sign it. And there was another guy who had Spider-Man #42, and Jack looked at it and said, “I didn’t work on this,” and the kid said, “That’s okay, could you sign it anyway?”” (laughter) So Jack signed Spider-Man #42. If the fan was happy, Jack was happy. TJKC: So you were steeped in the whole ’60s-era Marvel period? DAVID: Yeah, the Marvel stuff ’s what grabbed me. I’d read the Archie and Harvey stuff when I was younger, but my first “real” comics were Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. The first things I bought off the stands were Spider-Man #44 and Fantastic Four #58 or #59. Then I started buying Marvel Tales and Marvel Collector’s Item Classics, and discovered Ditko’s Spider-Man and the real early issues of Fantastic Four in those reprints. But I was completely unaware Jack had been at DC prior to that, and didn’t know much about his comics in the 1940s. TJKC: Was there anything really eventful about that first meeting? DAVID: No, it was pretty much, “Here, will you sign my book?” There was a line of people, and I said “hello” and shook his hand. I was very shy, and went away; a quick meeting where I recognized who I was in the presence of, and there was a long line and I didn’t want to overstay. TJKC: After that Demon #1 signing, when were your next encounters with Jack? DAVID: The first was at a convention in the late 1970s. It was either at a Baycon in San Francisco or a San Diego convention. I had an opportunity, for whatever reason, to be talking to Jack, and I went to lunch with him and Roz. I wasn’t the only one; there were four or five fans, and I seem to remember just being in a position where they said, “We’re going to get something to eat; would you guys like to come?” And we went. That was the first time I actually got to sit down and meet them, and really know Jack on any level. I just remember being kind of in awe of being at a table with Jack Kirby, and speaking with him throughout the lunch. It was just a great thrill. In 1980, I’d graduated from San Francisco State University, and moved down to Los Angeles to work in the television industry. I met Mike Thibodeaux at a convention, and we got to know each other and became friends. He had just started inking Captain Victory, around 1981. He was so excited, and so secretive, because it hadn’t come out yet, and he didn’t want to say anything until it came out—partially because he couldn’t believe he was doing it. (laughter) He didn’t want to jinx it. Mike invited me up to the Kirbys’. It was pretty amazing; their walls were adorned with all this bursting creativity of Jack’s, whether it was things he’d just done for the house, or his collages. You were in this amazing, powerful space of Jack Kirby’s energy, and that was pretty phenomenal. Jack would go with you around the home, and give you a little story about each piece of artwork; a little guided tour around his home. Over the years, he did it so many times, that by the time Jack passed away, when fans would come up there with me or Mike, I was able to give that tour to some extent. (laughter) And because Mike and I were friends, I was invited up many more times during the years. The next time I ran into Jack was at Ruby-Spears, when he was doing animation things. I started writing animated cartoons in 1982 for Hanna-Barbera, Ruby-Spears, Filmation, and Disney. Over the years, I wrote 75-80 different episodes of cartoon shows as a freelance writer; things like Alvin and the Chipmunks, Jonny

been a lot harder for me to get my foot in the door.

Quest, the Addams Family, and many others. The day I ran into Roz and Jack they were dropping off artwork, and because I had visited them in their home, they remembered me, so we said “Hi” as a passing thing. I remember it because it was always a big thrill whenever I got to see Jack. TJKC: How’d you get started in animation? DAVID: Mark [Evanier] got me started. Someone had given me his number, saying he was a comic book person who also worked in television. I was in college, and I’d written some speculative sitcom scripts, so I called him. Mark was willing to read them and give me advice. TJKC: At the time, did you realize this was Jack Kirby’s former assistant? DAVID: No, I didn’t have a clue! (laughter) I didn’t associate the name at the time. I probably knew he’d worked with Jack in one portion of my brain, but it didn’t connect right away. Here was a guy who worked in television who could possibly give me some advice on my scripts. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to work in television, I didn’t know anybody except Mark, so I said, “I’m new in town, let’s have lunch.” So Mark and I established a friendship. He knew I was trying to write sitcoms, and I was working on different TV shows as an assistant, but wasn’t able to break in. Mark was a story editor at Hanna-Barbera, and gave me the opportunity to write a Richie Rich cartoon in 1982; he bought it, liked it, and it actually aired. And I thought, “I’m in! Mark’s the story editor, and I’m gonna be able to do more scripts, and everything’s great,” and Mark said to me, “Now I’ve gotten your foot in the door. You need to go out and get work from other people, so it doesn’t look like you’re only being hired because we know each other.” It’s the best thing he could’ve done. He gave me an aired sample that I could bring to others, and say, “This was bought by Hanna-Barbera, and now I want to do one for you.” So I went out and worked for twelve years doing animated cartoons. Mark gave me what he called a TenMinute Lesson On How To Write Animated Cartoons. For the next ten years, to anyone I met who wanted to get into writing cartoons, I considered it my duty to go to lunch with them, to be willing to read what they wrote, and to give them that Ten-Minute Lesson. It’s not ten minutes on how to be a writer; it’s ten minutes on how to write for this specific format. I really felt an obligation to help anyone who wanted to get into the industry, based on the kindness and helpfulness Mark had shown to me. Without Mark, it would’ve

TJKC: Were your other encounters with Jack visits with Mike Thibodeaux up to the Kirby house? DAVID: Yes. Mike became kind of the unofficial greeter up there. If people wanted to go up there and meet Jack and Roz, Mike was the person Jack and Roz would refer them to. Mike was kind of the ambassador of bringing people up there. (laughter) I think there was also an added comfortability for Jack and Roz when Mike was there. Mike also knew the values of the original artwork really well, so he could help with that if people wanted to buy art. Over the years, he became kind of an adopted son to them.

DAVID: All modesty aside, I was basically someone who backed Mike up. Mike would go up there, and he’d be with people he didn’t know; different collectors, or huge fans who’d be so thrilled to meet Jack. Mike didn’t know a lot of these people, and wasn’t all that comfortable going up alone with these people he didn’t know, so he would invite me to come along, because he knew me, and we had a certain camaraderie, and an ability to be comfortable and include the new people in that comfort zone. Mike would call me and say, “Somebody wants to meet the Kirbys,” and I’d meet him over at his house, and we went up there. That was kind of the pattern.

TJKC: Being an art collector, were you helpful to Mike in suggesting whether he should negotiate up or down when he was pricing original artwork to sell to collectors? DAVID: Oh yeah, I became very good at doing that. TJKC: Mike became the de facto art DAVID SCHWARTZ He was really the liaison agent at some point. It just sort of to Roz, but when you’re evolved that way through this process? dealing with something as DAVID: Yeah. Since Roz wasn’t an fluid as art collecting, art collector, it was very hard for her sometimes things go up in value, or get more or less to be up on all the pricing. Plus, how do you negotiate popular; Mike and I having the ability to soundboard with Roz Kirby? You just want to say, “Here’s all my each other made a big difference, so we at least felt money, Roz, give me whatever you think it’s worth.” Jack and Roz were getting a fair price. A lot of our (laughter) Mike could be that person, so you wouldn’t goal was to make sure we were able to satisfy both have to say, “Gee, Roz, can I have it for ten dollars the collector who didn’t want to feel they were overcheaper?” He became really invaluable to them, and paying, while at the same time wanting to make sure he did it all out of his love for them, for years and Roz and Jack got a very fair price for their artwork. years. TJKC: Why do you think you received a Jack Kirby TJKC: How often did you see Jack after the RubyAward? Spears meeting? DAVID: After Jack passed away, Mike and I really DAVID: Mike and I went up there once or twice a became very instrumental in making sure Roz was month, for at least a couple of years in the mid-1980s. okay, and taking care of Roz. Mike, certainly much TJKC: So you got to be a regular fixture around the more than I was, made sure she was okay healthhouse? wise, or was able to get what she needed. We used DAVID: Yeah, but nowhere near what Mike was. It to take Roz to dinner a lot, and spend a lot of time got to the point where they were very familiar with with her, because she was a real joy to spend time me when I came up, and I was very friendly with them. with. But I want to emphasize that, while I was there and was always trying to do what I could, Mike did TJKC: All modesty aside, what was your involvement so much more, and put in so much more time. with Jack and Roz and the family? That’s not to minimize what I did, but I don’t want it to look like I was up there with Mike every time, and I was as helpful as he was. Because truthfully, he was family with them, and I was basically his friend who was lucky enough, and in the right place at the right time, to be able to be supportive of him, and have all the wonderfulness of being part of that family. At some point, somebody needs to write something on how instrumental Mike was in the well-being of the Kirby family, especially after Jack passed away. If Roz needed groceries, if she needed to be driven somewhere, if she needed to go to the doctor, he was right there every time. Mike was probably at first so in awe of meeting them in the 1970s, but his love for who they were as people quickly transcended his love for who Jack was as an icon. TJKC: My sense is that you helped Mike a lot. DAVID: I’m very organized, and have a lot of clarity and a good memory about things. I remember if a piece of artwork was sold or not, or if it had some kind of defect that Mike might not remember. I would also remember what previous things sold for, and because 21

of that, I was able to be a good anchor for Mike. He easily knows as much as I do about any of this, but sometimes the specifics of a transaction might elude him, or he might forget if something had been sold six months ago. That was something I was able to help with, since I have a very good memory about those kinds of things. TJKC: So if Mike was their art agent, is it fair to describe you as assistant art agent? (laughter) DAVID: Sure. I was the guy who sometimes took the heat when a collector wanted something at a price that was too low, and Mike would come to me. I’d say, “Mike, that’s really not fair. This piece is worth considerably more than what this person’s offering.” So there were times when collectors were not all that thrilled with me. (laughter) I could be the bad cop, because I could remember what things sold for, and had a really good perspective on the value of the artwork. TJKC: Mike’s such a good-natured guy, and I always wondered how someone that nice could haggle over art deals. DAVID: It’s a double-edged sword. Mike wanted Roz to get the most she possibly could, but on the other hand, he wanted Roz to get the money; if you make something too high, it doesn’t sell. So it was really a balancing act that was being done all the time. To Mike’s credit, I think everyone who was there always went away feeling taken care of, and treated well and fairly. TJKC: Are you still helping Mike with that today? DAVID: To some extent. I don’t do that much with him anymore, except to

soundboard with him on pricing. When he prices things to sell for the Kirby family at the San Diego convention, he and I usually discuss what the pricing should be, so it’s not done in a vacuum. It always helps if you have someone you can bounce questions or pricing off of. But as far as actually selling the material, Mike’s in charge of that. TJKC: What’s the first piece of Kirby artwork you remember buying? DAVID: It was FF #81, page 10, a four-panel page. I bought it for $10 in the mid-1970s. TJKC: Do you have a favorite Kirby comic or story? DAVID: Oh, man, that’s like asking, “What’s your favorite Beatles song?” (laughter) TJKC: Okay, what springs into your head as the most memorable? DAVID: They’ve gotta be Fantastic Four issues. #48-50, #55 with the Surfer and the Thing fighting, it’s just great, great stuff. #51 was just an extraordinary issue. #57-60, those first issues I read, were just mind-boggling. I like the Rawhide Kid. Jack’s stories were just phenomenal! The whole idea of the little guy who stands up against all odds, and everybody hates his guts, but he’s still a decent, ethical person who’s always trying to do the right thing, even when everybody around him is out to kill him or arrest him. He maintains that ethical integrity. I just love the Rawhide Kid. I finally collected all the issues, and had them made into a hardbound volume. TJKC: What are you doing today? DAVID: I keep my hand in animation a little bit; the last thing I worked on was the Addams Family cartoon for Hanna-Barbera; I wrote about a third of the series. Since 1990, I’ve been producing direct response television commercials. I have a company called Infomercial Solutions, which produces commercials and infomercials. I did the Razor Scooter commercial for Sharper Image, worked with Cathy Lee Crosby on a skin care infomercial, and have been involved with over a hundred direct response commercials and infomercials during the past 15 years. It’s enabled me to support a family, raise kids and of course, buy Kirby art. (laughter) TJKC: What was the most remarkable thing about Jack and Roz? DAVID: What I find most amazing about the type of people they were, is that at a time in the 1960s or early 1970s, when there was absolutely no financial benefit for them on any level to bring people into their home, they invited these comic fans into their home, and fed them, and spent time with them. People would just show up, and descend on their home, and this couple was trying to make a living; Jack had work to do, and was paid by the page, so it probably cost them income for that day. And they would basically drop everything and spend the time visiting and making sure these fans were taken care of. Jack and Roz were just good, decent, caring people. In a world where people are always looking out for themselves, they treated everybody who cared about Jack’s work like family. That’s who they were. Jack and Roz as people were at least as extraordinary as Jack’s artwork and creative ideas. ★ (above) David and Lisa Kirby at the 2005 San Diego Con. (left) FF #81, page 10 (Dec. 1968); the best $10 David ever spent! Fantastic Four TM & ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Etrigan’s Great Grandfather?

Sources

by Brian Eads was combing the Classics aisle of a local video store recently, looking for any interesting DVDs, when I stopped in my tracks. There on the rack, staring out at me amongst films from Hollywood’s by-gone era was... Etrigan? What in the world was this? Consumed with curiosity, I bought the DVD and headed home to see for myself. It was Häxan (The Witch), a silent film by Swedish director Benjamin Christensen. The film is quite an oddity; it starts with a historical overview, presented in a documentary style, describing ancient views of both the physical and supernatural worlds, and the evolution of the belief in a personification of evil that eventually became the Medieval Devil. From this, it goes on to illustrate in re-enactments how the fear of the Devil and the resulting hysteria led to the persecution and executions of those believed to be witches in league with Satan. Christensen’s view is informed by modern (circa 1920) psychiatric theories of hysteria, both individual and collective. After the introduction, the story is told in a series of vignettes; some are literal depictions of the horrifying methods of torture used by the Inquisition to extract confessions from accused witches; some depict rather harmless forms of witchcraft, such as fortune-tellers or purveyors of love potions; but by far the most shocking are the wild, phantasmagoric scenes depicting the beliefs regarding witches and the Devil held by peasants and the Church in the Middle Ages. These vignettes are full of powerful and disturbing imagery. Christensen himself plays the Devil, seen throughout the film luring women with evil temptations and presiding over his followers. The depictions of a Black Sabbath, witches flying through the night to the Devil’s orgy, and making potions from the blood of unchristened babies are just some of the shocking scenes. Christensen used these not to titillate, but rather to illustrate how rampant fear led people to unchecked flights of terrifying imaginings. But, as horrific as these are, the film is also leavened with humor, such as a procession of witches lined up to kiss the bent-over Devil’s buttocks or the shots, interspersed in an orgy scene, of demons frantically churning butter. Christensen used what for the time were cutting-edge techniques like multiple exposures, claymation, running film in reverse, and stunning makeup to achieve effects that I found impressive even today. Now we all know that Jack “borrowed” the Demon from Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. But I think it’s quite likely that Hal Foster saw Häxan and drew upon it when he created his “demon.” Of course, the evidence is only circumstantial, but I think it is fairly plausible. Foster’s demon was created in 1937; Häxan premiered in 1922, plenty of time for Foster to have seen it. Hal Foster traveled extensively throughout Europe, which would have presumably increased the likelihood of his encountering this film. And Foster obviously had a keen interest in Medieval Europe, the primary setting of Häxan, which would have made this film of particular interest to him. There is a striking similarity between Häxan’s unnamed demon and the mask Foster devised for Val. Foster’s mask is

I (below) The cover art for the DVD of Häxan. (bottom) Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant dons a goose-flesh mask, to become at least one of Jack’s inspirations for the Demon.

more “realistic” than the face depicted in Häxan, but then Val is only wearing a mask, while the character in the film is actually supposed to be a fiend from the pit. Plus, Foster had to devise something that looked like it could be fashioned from a goose— an absolutely ingenious ploy—and he did. However, he may have based his design on publicity stills from the film because the demon mask he created resembles the cover image more than how this demon appears in the film itself. (Yes, I realize Hal Foster couldn’t possibly have seen this DVD cover. In the course of researching this, I found several images from Häxan that appear repeatedly, and this demon is one of them; this leads me to believe that these photos were originally publicity stills, or perhaps even lobby posters, from the film’s release. If so, then it’s entirely possible Foster could have seen a very similar, if not the exact, image.) This demon—all of the various demons in Häxan are individuals with unique makeup— appears on film only briefly during the orgy scene; he’s shown stirring some infernal brew, then offering it to a naked witch before an altar and, finally, debauching a witch during the orgy. In the film, the demon has very long, serrated ears and prominent horns. In this photo, however, the angle he’s shown foreshortens the horns and ears considerably; the ears were also cropped to show just his face. This picture looks very much like the goose-mask fashioned by Val. Also, one of the more technically outstanding sequences from Häxan is Christensen’s depiction of witches flying through the night sky on broomsticks. In Prince Valiant, Foster has the demon-masked Val spook some castle raiders by “flying” through a window on a broomstick. While on the face of it this may not seem very telling, I have never heard any folk tale of demons using broomsticks—only witches. Maybe, if Foster did see Häxan, this imagery was compelling enough for him use it for his demon. We know Jack in the late ’30s/early ’40s lifted several other images from this Prince Valiant sequence, such as the cover to Red Raven Comics #1. But it seems odd that, in 1972, Jack would, out of the blue, design a leading character based on an image from thirty-five years previous. By then, he was a steamroller of creativity; I can’t imagine him bothering to slow down enough to reference another artist’s work, even one as revered as Foster. (I’m not aware of any other notable Kirby swipe from the dawn of the Silver Age-on.) Though this sequence in Prince Valiant obviously made a strong impression on him at the time, it’s hard to believe Jack would suddenly decide to lift that image all these years later. But what if something jogged his memory and reminded him of this favorite sequence from his youth? Again, all I can offer is circumstantial evidence, but I think it’s possible Jack saw, or was at least aware of, the film Häxan. Subtitled “Witchcraft Through the Ages,” it was re-released several times over the years, once in 1941 and again in 1968 (with narration by William S. Burroughs!). The 1968 re-release would have been only a few years before Jack created the Demon. Maybe he saw it—or at least publicity photos for it— and recalled Foster’s demon and the fantastic sequence from Prince Valiant. In fact, Jack’s Demon in some ways resembles Christensen’s more so than it does Foster’s: Häxan’s demon has what appears to be fur around his eyes, which radiates outward jaggedly; Kirby’s Demon has this same look, but the eyes of Foster’s mask are simply dark recesses under Val’s brow. I believe it is possible that not only was Foster’s demon inspired by Häxan, but Kirby’s Demon may have been a synthesis of both Foster’s and Christensen’s visions. Jack’s fertile imagination fathered the Demon, and there’s no doubt that Hal Foster can be regarded as the Demon’s Grandfather. And, now, I think it’s time to recognize the man who may well have been the Demon’s Great Grandfather, Benjamin Christensen. ★ 23

Retrospective

Jack Kirby’s Midnight Ma

An uncanny look at a demon named Etrigan, by Brian Cremins

“There’s still a black, shivery outside, you know––a weird realm from which men shrink in terror. Science hasn’t done away with it. Nothing will ever do away with it.” ––Fritz Leiber, from Weird Tales, Sept. 1946 “As a needed change of pace in Kirby’s experimentation, the occult character emerges as an identifiable individual who lives on the premise that the strange world of black magic and potent spells is real and horribly alive with potential dangers for us normals.” ––Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman, “Demonology as Heroics,” The Demon #2 (Oct. 1972) “AAAARRR!” ––Etrigan the Demon, from “My Tomb in Castle Branek!,” The Demon #2 (Oct. 1972)

or most comic book fans, the word “uncanny” evokes images of teenage mutants wearing skin-tight costumes and doing battle against a white-haired, middle-aged man with a redand-purple tin can on his head. Many of us, in fact, gained an extra point or two after stumbling across this word on the SATs (raise your hands if you know what I’m talking about, class!). While I could spend this entire essay talking about Jack Kirby’s invaluable contributions to the mythology of the X-Men, truth be told, they didn’t have that glorious adjective added to their name until issue #114 in 1978 and they weren’t officially The Uncanny X-Men until issue #142 in February, 1982, at which point Jack was busy at Pacific Comics writing and drawing Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers. So this essay isn’t about Jack and the X-Men, but it is about Jack and the Uncanny, specifically all of the strange characters and worlds Jack created for us during his sixteen-issue run of The Demon in the early 1970s. If you like your weird tales mixed with humor and just a hint of the absurd, you owe it to yourself to read “The Reincarnators” from The Demon #3 (Nov. 1972) or, better yet, the stories featuring Klarion the Witchboy and his evil cat Teekl (issues #7, 14, and 15). Just be sure not to read these stories too late at night, or you may find yourself murmuring, “Gone! Gone!––The form of man––! Rise, the Demon Etrigan!!” and suddenly be transformed into a stunted creature with webbed ears, pale yellow skin, and fiery red eyes. This sounds like a classic case of split-identity. Calling Dr. Freud, please! Dr. Freud?! In 1919, Sigmund Freud published a paper in the journal Imago entitled “The ‘Uncanny,’” one of the many short essays in which Freud writes more about literature than he does about his patients. He admits as much in the first paragraph of the essay, saying, “It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of feeling,” (Freud 368). As the essay progresses, it becomes clear that Dr. Freud loved a good horror story just like everyone else and was especially frightened by E.T.A. Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” (first published in 1816-1817 and translated into English as “The SandMan”), the chilling tale of an obsessive young man slowly destroyed by the memory of a traumatic event from his childhood. I won’t tell you whether or not the young man is destroyed by the villain of the story, the shadowy Coppelius––you’ll just have to find out for yourself. However, I can tell you about Freud’s reaction to the story, which inspired him to invent a definition of “the uncanny” which will help explain why Jack’s Demon stories, for example, are so ghoulishly entertaining. The good Dr. Freud informs us that the uncanny “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible––to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in the clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread” (Freud 368). “Creeping horror,” “dread”––has this sentence been translated from the German by H.P. Lovecraft or Fritz Leiber? Perhaps my American Heritage Dictionary will help to clear things up a little. “Exciting wonder and fear; inexplicable; strange: an uncanny laugh.” My faithful red dictionary also informs me that, in case I want to do some exploring, I should “see synonyms at weird.” So we’re right back where we started: the kind of feeling you get from reading the weird tales and experiencing the creeping horror of a pulp magazine of the 1930s. Not so fast! Dr. Freud isn’t quite finished with us just yet.

sterpiece “[T]he ‘uncanny,’” Freud writes, “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud 369-370). Later in the essay Freud refers to another great German thinker and philosopher, Friedrich Schelling, and elaborates on this earlier definition: “According to [Schelling] everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, yet comes to light,” (Freud 375-376). This is the part of Freud’s essay which is so intriguing, especially when applied to Jason Blood and his link to Merlin’s Demon, Etrigan. Jason’s great curse, explored not only by Kirby but also by Matt Wagner in his underrated 1987 Demon mini-series, is his sense of alienation from his own body. After he discovers his violent, vengeful other half, Jason Blood no longer feels at home in his own skin. You can’t blame Jason from feeling estranged from himself; after all, how would you feel if at any moment a simple rhyming couplet could turn you into a creature from the deepest pits of Dante’s––and Jack’s––fiery imagination? The first issue of The Demon, “Unleash the One Who Waits” (Aug.-Sept. 1972), is filled with several uncanny moments in which Jason, a demonologist by trade, slowly uncovers his true identity as the human vessel for Etrigan. As Blood tells Mr. Warly in the opening scenes of issue #1, “A demon haunts my dreams! A demon haunts my life!” Jason’s mysterious past is slowly coming to light, and he’s beginning to feel a little crowded by that other creature who shares his skin. By the way, I neglected to mention another interesting bit of linguistic trivia, courtesy once again of Dr. Freud, who informs us, “In Arabic and Hebrew ‘uncanny’ means the same as ‘daemonic,’ ‘gruesome,’” (Freud 371). No wonder we’re told in the credits of The Demon #1 that we’re about to read “A MIDNIGHT CLASSIC by JACK KIRBY with inks of darkness by MIKE ROYER”! Jack’s Demon first arrives on earth at a time when, as we learn in “Unleash the One Who Waits,” “men still [live] in the shadow of the old gods!––and [fear] them!” As the walls of Camelot fall before Morgaine Le Fey’s ruthless, bloodthirsty hordes, Merlin formulates a plan to defend himself and his “Eternity Book.” What better way to fight evil than by summoning a creature from the depths of Hell itself? “I will soon vanish with Camelot, faithful guardian,” Merlin tells Etrigan as the battle for Camelot subsides. “I’ve given you a torn part of this fabled book! It is to be your destiny––on earth!!” But why cast a fierce Demon as a hero? Can he be trusted? Merlin then reveals that Etrigan will again be summoned to defend humanity from Morgaine Le Fey’s evil plans. “That may be many centuries hence––after time has done its work on Morgaine Le Fey,” Merlin reveals. “Her evil beauty shall fade and die, as Camelot does this night––never to be renewed!––unless she finds me––and this ancient book!” And, sure enough, in the early 1970s a rapidly-decaying Morgaine Le Fey

returns to claim the Eternity Book but soon faces Jason Blood, who appears to have forgotten all about his powerful alter-ego... except for those curious dreams, of course. The often tense relationship which exists between Jason Blood and Etrigan throughout the original series––on the cover of issue #3, for example, they are shown chained together and trying with all their might to pull away from each other––calls to mind other uncanny relationships in the realm of imaginative fiction. Dr. Jekyll, Bruce Banner, and Bruce Wayne are all respected men of the world who constantly struggle with inner demons who threaten to overwhelm them. Walter Gibson’s The Shadow, another creature of the night, is often more terrifying than the criminals he claims as his victims, but he spends most of his time as playboy Lamont

Cranston waltzing arm-in-arm with Margot Lane at the Cobalt Club (I don’t have the room here to explore The Shadow’s other secret identity, Kent Allard!). What they all share in common is a dual, conflicted identity, a life spent sharing their space in the universe with another being more strange and powerful than one man can ever be. As Etrigan tells Jason in the dream sequence which opens The Demon #3 (Nov. 1972), “HA HA HAH!! We’re linked together, you and I! Bound as brothers, Jason Blood!” To underscore the tense relationship between these two brothers, Jack and Mike Royer produced some of the most grotesque creatures and dreamscapes ever seen in American comic books. The word “uncanny” applies not only to Jason Blood’s relationship with Etrigan, but also to Kirby’s explosive, often expressionistic drawing style. 25

(bottom) Back in 1978, inker Gary Martin and his brother Kris loved reading Kirby comics and drawing exaggerated action poses they called “The Kirby Leap.” For his brother’s birthday, Gary got Jack Kirby’s phone number by calling Information, and asked him to draw Kris’ portrait for a birthday present. After explaining to Jack how they attempted various Kirby Leaps when playing Frisbee, Gary rushed a photo of Kris (and $35) to the King, and promptly received this pencil sketch of Kris executing a perfect Kirby Leap. Gary practiced inking on it countless times over the years, and now uses it as a warm up when inking Moth pages by Steve Rude. ©2005 Jack Kirby Estate

If you would like an illustration of that haunted feeling which accompanies the return of what Freud called “something long known to us, once very familiar,” look no further than The Demon #14 (Nov. 1973), which features Klarion the Witchboy and his magical cat Teekl. The story opens with Etrigan being menaced by a herd of armor-plated, four-legged beasts swimming in a sea of fire. The narrator tells us, “There are places where even the fiercest of occult creatures tread with caution––great caverns glisten fiery red and the very air boils with heat and echoes with the roars of monsters––more than the mortal body is in danger in this world full of terror––the soul is at stake here––even the soul that lives in Etrigan, the Demon!” The terror is only beginning, for, on the very next page, we find ourselves immersed in one of Jack’s patented double splash pages. Other demons, far less human than our friend Etrigan, burst off the page while our eyes are drawn to the ghastly image of Gargora, a modern-day version of the dreaded Medusa from Greek mythology, a creature whose hair consist of thousands of serpentine tentacles, each one crowned by a nightmarish face. “Nothing is safe in the kingdom of Satan!” the narrator tells us. “Every footpath crumbles––or leads to some greater terror––.” On page three, Etrigan is about to be saved by a small green creature who resembles Glob from the Kirby and Simon Sandman reunion (published in the winter of 1973-1974). But Etrigan soon learns that even he is not safe from this Shambler, whose “jaws are ready!––Eager!” to devour him. Jason Blood wakes from his dream just as the Shambler prepares to take a bite out of Etrigan. We readers pause and breathe a sigh of relief––for a moment, anyway, until Klarion and Teekl arrive to cast spells and to cause general mayhem. The opening sequence of The Demon #14 is terrifying to us precisely because it is so familiar. Like Merlin himself, Jack conjures up common, everyday images and then distorts them: a mountain range covered in flames and Kirby Krackle, faces lacking eyes and distinct features, lions with tongues like serpents and bats with bodies like men. Despite the surreal power and narrative drive on display in this opening sequence and in countless other Kirby stories from this period, Jack’s late-period drawing style still has its detractors. In their book, The Comic Book Heroes from the Silver Age to the Present, Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones praise The Demon as “a rare and potent blend of horror and heroics,” but they also suggest that Kirby’s art took a slow and steady turn for the worse during the same period [of the early 1970s following the demise of the Fourth World titles]. “The large pencils that had once been so effective now became too big, and the details

sketchy, with the results that his compositions became disjointed and unclear, while his stories began to speed by too quickly to be satisfying. He was also not much helped by the rather rough inking of Mike Royer, who replaced Vince Colletta early in Kirby’s stay at DC.” (Jacobs and Jones 183) Those “large pencils” and “disjointed” compositions, however, contribute to The Demon’s gothic, often unnerving atmosphere. Mike Royer’s heavy, robust inking style adds a dark, brooding quality to the bizarre characters and dynamic layouts. Vince Colletta’s more intricate line work, so effective in a book like The New Gods, would not have been as satisfying in the Jason Blood’s gloomy, darkly comic world, which is filled with what Serbian cartoonist Aleksandar Zograf would call “hipnagogic visions.” Zograf, the pen name of Sasa Rakezic, explains that these visions, “appear while I’m entering a hipnagogic state (the state between being awake and being asleep). These strange half-dream images have brought me closer to some enigmatic world within, and made me realize that there is a great and not yet explored source of creative sensations within our inner reality.” Many of the dream images Zograf has recorded in his comic Psychonaut would be right at home next to the Shamblers and Gargoras featured in The Demon, which remains one of the King’s most entertaining and thought-provoking series even thirty years after it first hit the newsstands. The stories remain chilling because, like the uncanny dream sequence of The Demon #14, they are so familiar to us. Though most of us have never been transformed into a yellow, reptilian Demon dressed in a Medieval cape and tunic, we’ve all lost our temper, all felt alone and strange in our skins. Jack’s true genius was in telling stories of ordinary people trapped in extraordinary situations and trying their best to find a way out. As Jack himself wrote in “A Time to Build,” the essay which concludes the first issue of The Demon, “Like his brother, the superhero, [The Demon] breaks the mold of Mr. Average and obtains his powers from a world outside the one we know.” The world Jack Kirby explores in The Demon is one of strange creatures who were already ancient when the world was first born. This is the world of primal dreams and nightmares which, according to Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman in The Demon #2 (Oct. 1972), is similar to the one found in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and the films of Stanley Kubrick. To this list I would add such American mythmakers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Shirley Jackson, and Flannery O’Connor. Like Jack Kirby himself, each of these writers has added a dark new chapter to our book of collective dreams and nightmares. Although he is best known for creating larger-than-life heroes and villains locked in cosmic struggles of good-versus-evil, Jack’s horror stories are not to be ignored. Don’t be alarmed if while reading The Demon late at night the shadows on the wall begin to look all too inhuman and familiar––it’s only Jack weaving another of his powerful spells! ★

Works Cited and Further Weird Reading! Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Collected Papers, Vol. IV. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1925. 368-407. Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Ed. E.F. Bleiler. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1967. Kirby, Jack (w, p), Mike Royer (i, l). The Demon (#1 Aug.-Sept. 1972––#16, Jan. 1974), DC Comics. Jacobs, Will and Gerard Jones. The Comic Book Heroes from the Silver Age to the Present. New York: Crown Publishers, 1985. Leiber, Fritz. Night Monsters. New York: Ace Books, 1969. Overstreet, Bob. The Official Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide No. 32. New York: The Crown Publishing Group, 2002. Wagner, Matt. The Demon (#1 Nov. 1986––#4 Feb. 1987), DC Comics. Zograf, Aleksandar. “Aleksandar Zograf ’s Hipnagogic Visions.” Psychonaut #1 (March 1996), Fantagraphics Books. 26

Gallery 1

ExorcisE the Demon! A look at Kirby’s pencils from his 16-issue run on DC’s The Demon (1972-74). (page 28) Simply one of the coolest (and creepiest) images Kirby created for his Demon series. (page 29) While others have always drawn werewolves as sleek, sinewy creatures, leave it to Jack to envision one as a hairy, hulking behemoth. Demon #6, page 19 pencils. All characters TM & ©2005 DC Comics

(this page) Demon #2 cover pencils. We originally tried to get Bernie Wrightson to ink this piece for this issue’s cover, thinking it was tailor-made for him, but were unable to work it out. But just imagine...

(page 30) Jack had a few Monster Movie protagonists in his Demon run (Werewolf, Frankenstein, and one other that you’ll learn about for the first time on the last page of this issue!), and as you can see from these pencils from issue #9, he even evoked Lon Chaney’s classic portrayal from the 1925 Phantom of the Opera silent film. Compare Chaney (left) to Kirby’s Farley Fairfax, and you’ll see what we mean. (below) Jack’s splash to Demon #15 featured Klarion the Witchboy, the only other returning villain in the series other than Morgaine Le Fey. For the low-down on Klarion’s real-life inspiration, just turn the page! ★

Old Friends

Witchboy, All Grown Up

An interview with Barry Alfonso, by John Morrow (below) Shel Dorf, Barry Alfonso, and Jack Kirby, circa 1971, and Barri-Boy makes the scene in this pencil panel from Jimmy Olsen #144 (Dec. 1971). (next page, top) Witchboy, based on Barry’s visage, debuts in this pencil page from Demon #7 (March 1973). The photo at the bottom is of Barry in 1973 with Carmine Infantino and Kirby. Both photos courtesy of Shel Dorf.

[Editor’s Note: A lot of Kirby fans are likely familiar with Barry Alfonso without even knowing it. Born September 6, 1957 in Springfield, MA, he moved to San Diego, CA in 1965, where he got involved in the local comics fan community, leading to a visit with Shel Dorf and other fans to the Kirby house in 1969. That group of fans wound up being immortalized as the San Diego Five-String Mob in Jimmy Olsen, with young Barry serving as the visual inspiration for Barri-Boy, the group’s “sixth string.” Jack later based the look of Witchboy from The Demon on Barry as well. Currently living in Pittsburgh, Barry was nominated for a Grammy Award for his liner notes to a Peter, Paul and Mary collection, and also co-wrote a Number One country song with Craig Bickhardt called “In Between Dances” (performed by Pam Tillis in 1995). Barry graciously agreed to this e-mail interview, which was conducted in September 2005.]

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: How’d you first meet Jack Kirby? BARRY ALFONSO: It happened more of less this way: in the late summer or early fall of 1969, I’d looked up a local comic book dealer named Richard Alf. Around that time, I’d also been in contact with Shel Dorf, who (I think) was trying to sell some comics through an ad in the local paper. I recall putting Richard and Shel in contact with one another, and that led to the first meeting of what became the founding group of the San Diego Comic-Con. (Others attending were, I believe, Bob Sourk, Dan Stewart, and Mike Towry). Shel knew Jack Kirby and proposed that we take a trip up to his townhouse in Irvine, CA (where he was living before he moved to Thousand Oaks). Being a 12-year-old Jack Kirby fanatic, I was thrilled, of course. 32

TJKC: Are there any specific memories of that first meeting? Did you see Jack drawing? BARRY: Jack and his wife Roz were extremely welcoming and gracious to all of us. Roz made us hamburgers and Jack took us around his house. I remember being amazed to see an original Jack Kirby collage, as well as large prototype illustrations (colored) of new or redesigned characters, including a more elaborately-costumed Balder and a hero/villain named the Black Sphinx. Jack also showed us samples of a project he hoped to undertake: a comic book retelling of the Napoleonic Wars. He was willing to answer any and all questions, and even cheerfully accepted my comment that I didn’t like his version of Iron Man so well because he let Tony Stark’s eyes show through the helmet. (The impertinence!) This first get-together (in Fall 1969) must’ve taken place right around the time Jack left Marvel for DC. I recall asking him about the “Inhumans” and “Ka-Zar” series he had been working on. He said he had left them without any further ideas about where they might’ve gone. TJKC: How’d it feel when you saw you got a “solo” as Barri-Boy in Jimmy Olsen? Did you know what to expect from that issue (having seen the art pre-publication), or was it a total surprise? What led Jack to single you out of the Five String Mob, and make you the “sixth string”? BARRY: I’m not sure exactly how I felt about it. Thrilled and honored, obviously. But it also seemed to grow out of this relationship all of us had forged with Jack—he really seemed to have taken a shine to us. I don’t believe any of us saw the artwork from that Jimmy Olsen issue before it appeared, but we did know about it. Why did Jack single me out? Maybe because I was the youngest of the group and the most starry-eyed in my fanhood, or something. TJKC: Did you have any subsequent meetings with Jack, and if so, how often? BARRY: The gang from the San Diego Comic-Con—in various combinations, with new people among us—must’ve visited Jack at least five times total between 1969 and 1974. One of these visits was arranged by me (through Shel?) so I could interview him for my ’zine, Mysticogryfil. Jack was always happy to see us and the get-togethers were very jolly and inspiring. (I recall one time that he mentioned a desire to use Ramon De La Flores as a pen name—has that appeared anywhere before?) TJKC: How did your Witchboy appearance in The Demon come about? Did you know about Witchboy being based on you, before the comic was released? BARRY: Again, I’m not sure how it came about. I will say this—in those days, when I was 13 or 14, my hair was growing longer and I didn’t wash it as often as I might have. Consequently, it curled into little horns around my ears. I think that—along with my skinny appearance—inspired Jack to create this little witchboy character with the horns at his temples. I guess I knew Witchboy was going to appear in the Demon, but I don’t think I saw him until the issue came out. I identified with Witchboy much more than with Barri-Boy; there did seem to be some of me in there. TJKC: Witchboy appeared twice; did you know he would be returning, and did you ever discuss with Jack why he brought him back? BARRY: I wasn’t kept apprised of Witchboy’s whereabouts—Jack probably felt it was best to let me know where he was when the rest of the world did. I think Jack found Witchboy to be a likeably wicked foil for the Demon, as well as a way of keeping an injoke alive among his Comic-Con acolytes.

TJKC: Did you stay in touch with the Kirbys after Jack ended his run at DC in the 1970s? BARRY: No, I didn’t, I’m sorry to say. In 1976, I went off to college and left the comics world behind. TJKC: What was your opinion, then and now, of Jack’s 1970s work, particularly the Fourth World and the Demon? BARRY: I was a complete and total Marvel Comics fan during my pre-teen days and especially loved anything Jack drew. In comparison, his DC work seemed weirder, more personal. It seemed both a harkening back to his youth (the use of kid gangs like the Newsboy Legion was right out of the ’30s) and very modern in its satiric, often tongue-in-cheek style and use of hippie-like characters (especially the Forever People). Jack was given license to do anything he wanted to, and there was no predicting what direction his plotlines would take. He was launching heroes like rockets—remember OMAC and Kamandi and the Sandman? Some fizzled, some popped very nicely. I remember liking his sense of political satire (Glorious Godfrey and his AntiLife Equations seems very relevant to today) and being a little baffled by the goofier moments (the tribute to Don Rickles in Jimmy Olsen, for instance). The Demon strikes me as a kind of 1940s pre-Comics Code Gothic excursion for Jack, a slightly funny Universal horror movie spin-off. TJKC: What are you doing now? Are you still into comics? BARRY: No comic involvements. I’ve been a professional writer for the past 25 or so years, written hit country songs, published a book on Christian music, received a Grammy nomination for my liner notes. I’ve also performed on stage as a poet named Lou Minatti (the closest I’ve come to actually being a Witchboy in the flesh). All in all, I’ve had very checkered but interesting (to me) career. TJKC: Are you aware there’s a Witchboy mini-series coming out now, and what do you think of it? BARRY: Yes, I did know about the mini-series. I had thought Witchboy was just a forgotten footnote in comics history until a friend of mine told me about his appearances on a Batman animated TV series in the ’90s. What a revelation! TJKC: Anything else you’d care to add? BARRY: Jack Kirby was a wonderful man, not just a wonderful artist. I’m sure many, many people have told you this. He was so generous with his time and appreciative of his fans. Among other things, he personally gave me the sense that my creative heroes were accessible and willing to share their secrets with me. This encouraged me to pursue creative work myself as I grew older and seek out people in the arts as mentors and interview subjects as a journalist. And, of course, he transmogrified me into a supervillain, an honor one can never hope to deserve! ★ 33

Public Domain Theatre

Black Magicians

or this October issue, we’ve opted to present not one, but two creepy tales by Simon & Kirby, both from Black Magic. The first is “Slaughter-House” from issue #31 (also known as Vol. 5, #1, from July 1954). The second is “Voodoo on Tenth Avenue” from #4 (April

1951). If the climax of “Voodoo” seems vaguely familiar, check out Fantastic Four #8 (Nov. 1962) for a similar ending, as the foursome battles the Puppet Master—evidence that Jack was having input into FF plots early-on. ★

Obscura

Barry Forshaw A regular column focusing on Kirby’s least known work, by Barry Forshaw

K, you’ve read all the hardback Marvel Masterworks editions of Jack Kirby’s work with Stan Lee, and you’ve consumed the two volumes of his Challengers of the Unknown in the DC Archives series (and if not, why the hell not?!?). And you’ve read all the vintage Kirby Marvel material in the original comics you could afford to buy. What next? Now’s the time to show that you’re a real Kirby enthusiast, not just some Sunday-driver, dilettante Kirby piker. Start seeking out The King’s intermittent appearances in DC comics of the ’50s and ’60s. And now’s the time, before the prices reach the stratosphere! For those prepared to seek out DC’s interesting (if neglected) Kirby material from the ’50s and ’60s, a certain patience is needed, particularly when one encounters a book like House of Mystery #70 (edited by Jack Schiff) from January 1958. The cover, for a start, is not particularly impressive, even though the usually reliable Ruben Moreira was capable of impressive work. But not this time. This one shows a man and woman shrinking from a trio of grotesque looking creatures that stalk a city street. In fact, this scene is the splash panel from the Kirby tale in the issue, “The Creatures from Nowhere.” And turning to this tale, the final one of the issue, makes one wonder which came first: Kirby’s splash panel, or the cover itself. It was most likely the cover that first encapsulated the idea, as this was DC’s modus operandi of the day: create a reader-enticing cover at first, and then build the story around that. However, Kirby’s splash panel demonstrates how much more interesting an illustrator the King was than Moreira; the same three monsters are presented by Kirby, but joined by a phalanx of other outlandish creatures, this time with a tank drawing a bead on them. We instantly see Kirby’s facility for creating grotesque creatures with the extra horrors visible in the panel. As other grotesque monstrosities turn up inexplicably around the city of the tale, any

The stories from House of Mystery #70 and #72 were reprinted in DC Special #11 (March 1971) and Unexpected #162 (July 1974). Journey into Mystery #51’s story was reprinted, with altered dialogue to make it a parody, in Crazy #66 (Aug. 1980).

one of these (such as the eyeless, armor-plated creature with a gaping gopher-like mouth in panel one of page two, or the lynx-like thing with an elongated neck and bird’s body in the succeeding panel) would have done service for an entire story in one of the Lee/Kirby pre-super-hero monster books for Marvel. The script for the tale itself is nothing to write home about, being another version of the “interplanetary zoo that crashes on Earth” concept (an idea that Kirby himself made much better use of in a Challengers of the Unknown tale—and have you bought those DC Archives editions yet? Three minutes have passed since that first paragraph!), but The King used visual imagination in conveying these surrealistic grotesqueries is more than worth the reader’s shekels. I mentioned earlier that a certain patience is required investigating these Kirby tales of this period, and here is the reason: the three stories that precede this windup piece (drawn, respectively by Jim Mooney, Mort Meskin, and George Papp) are very ordinary, workaday efforts, although the Meskin piece deserves some attention as quite the most loosely drawn piece he ever drew for DC, with lines drawn for background detail cutting right through character’s arms and legs. What’s your budget for buying comics? Or, more to the point, how deep are your pockets? If you’re a Kirby fan, and you want one of the key Silver Age books, you’ll find that Journey into Mystery #51 (published by Atlas in 1959) will set you back a few shekels. But it’s worth it! And not just for the Kirby connection: no other post-horror, pre-super-hero Silver Age book from the company has such a stellar collection of talent—although (if the truth be told) there is one dud in the book, proof that Stan Lee, when writing on autopilot, could deliver really lackluster work. The cover, however, is a good indication of the splendors to be found inside. Featuring a tale called “Robot on the Rampage,” it features a massive humanoid computer looming over two frightened human beings being ushered into its presence by sleek robots that move on a single wheel. All of this is illustrated in dramatic style by the great Russ Heath, although his work is not to be found in the issue itself. In fact, the cover story is illustrated by none other than Steve Ditko, and it’s fascinating to compare his story of robots enslaving mankind with Russ Heath’s vision. Ditko, always a master of the grotesque, comes up with even more outlandish robots than Heath, although created to a similar design (one imagines that, as with the covers designed by Julius Schwartz’s stable of artists, the cover came first); Ditko’s robots are a more abstract concept of the machine than Heath’s more earthbound idea. This last tale may be cut from a familiar cloth, and the twist ending is Stan Lee on low wattage: the malevolent computer is disabled simply by an accidentally pulled plug (yes it’s that old chestnut again). But this seems positively inspired compared to the ludicrous twist ending of the first story, Joe Sinnott’s “The Ghost Ship of Space,” which although illustrated in the artist’s typically slick and glossy style, is sunk by the poor scripting. Why then, I hear you ask, is this a key Silver Age book? For all the faults, these are still collectible elements in an intriguing package, but it’s the two (that’s right, two) Jack Kirby tales in the issue that make this wine of a rare vintage—particularly when one of the tales, “The Creatures in the Volcano,” is inked by the artist who made Kirby’s work look better than anyone else’s: the great Wally Wood. “The Creatures in the Volcano” is the star tale of the issue, even though Ditko’s “Robot on the Rampage” is cover featured. Unusually, the piece features a non-American hero, and the strapping South Sea Islander, wrapped in a sarong throughout, is not even the narrator: the piece is told by an (unseen) grandson who relates the narrative many years later. The tale is a fairly simple one: the hero discovers that a volcano threatening his island is not a natural eruption, but the product of experiments by grotesque aliens who have landed within the volcano—and the hero takes steps to destroy the menace which make him very unpopular with his fellow natives. What makes the tale so memorable is, of course, the unbeatable team of Jack Kirby and Wally Wood. The duo’s work on Challengers of the Unknown represented the apogee of both men’s work, and no other inker (not even the celebrated Chris Rule, whose work is to be found elsewhere in this issue) was able to so perfectly mesh his style with that of the King. The best pages here are the third and fourth of the tale, in which the hero encounters the bizarre out-world menaces,

dwarfish creatures dressed in striking green armor. Unlike later inkers (such as Vince Colletta who overwhelmed the Kirby’s pencils), Wood is the perfect delineator, adding only as much as is necessary, and burnishing Kirby’s pencils to a gleaming perfection. It’s Chris Rule who inks Kirby’s second contribution to Journey into Mystery #51, “Alien on Earth,” an otherwise unremarkable Stan Lee piece in which a seemingly threatening alien is driven away, only to reveal in the final panel (to the readers, but not to the inhabitants of Earth) that the outcome of his mission could have been very different. This is probably Stan Lee’s most often recycled plot, but who cares, when the art is an impressive as it is chez Kirby and Rule? The splash panel features one of Kirby’s most grotesque and imaginative aliens, proving yet again how effortlessly he could turn out an army of utterly unlike non-human creations (even such splendid illustrators as Gil Kane relied on a familiar armory of alien designs—Kane used again and again an avian-style beak for his outer space visitors). This tale has been reprinted, but it’s worth tracking down the issue itself, if you can afford to pay for it. Ironically, British readers have had more than one chance to a acquaint themselves with the contents of this issue, as it was reprinted several times (in various forms) in the 68page black-and-white, one-shilling books reprinting DC material. Those same monochrome reprints of classy American material acquainted many a grateful Brit comics fans (such as this writer) with the contents of another issue of House of Mystery, just two down the line from one discussed at the start of this column. Issue #72 appeared in March 1958, and this is a gem. Apart from Mr. K, we have (at their very best) no less than vintage Nick Cardy and Joe Maneely, with an unexciting George Roussos piece the only entry keeping the book from being firmly in the upper echelons. As so often, when covers and splash panels are drawn by different artists, it’s easy to spot who the more talented is. As here: Ruben Moreira’s cover illo for “The Girl in the Glass Sphere” is efficient enough (surprised diners wonder at a tuxedoed young man, toasting his dinner companion, a beautiful girl in evening dress,

while the latter is enclosed in a large glass container); but a similar scene in Joe Maneely’s story is far more dynamically illustrated, reminding one yet again what a loss to comics Maneely’s too-early death was (Stan Lee has often said Maneelly would have been as crucial an element in the Marvel Age of Comics as Kirby and Ditko, had he not died in an accident).

But that’s the windup tale in the issue. Let’s look first at the contributions of Cardy and Roussos. Oh, yes—and Jack Kirby, too—after all, this magazine is dedicated to a certain diminutive cigarchomping megatalent. The Cardy tale, “Dark Journey,” is standard post-code “just desserts” stuff: supernatural justice catches up with malefactor (in EC, said villain would be dismembered by a rotting corpse; here, a swindler is persecuted by a medicine man over stolen money, but has a change of heart rather than meeting a bloody end). But, oh, that Cardy art! The purity and dynamism of the line drawing! The imagination of the panel design! The rendering! Even if Kirby were not coming up two tales hence, readers in 1958 would have felt they were getting their money’s worth (or readers in 1962, if you were British—that was when the 68-page bumper reprints of Blackhawk, etc., turned up in the UK from UK reprint specialists Thorpe and

Porter, using such pieces as fill-ups). Let’s not waste time on the unexceptional George Roussos tale (as with his EC work, and his entries for Simon & Kirby’s Black Magic, Roussos was an efficient but never inspired illustrator with a clunky, flatfooted style). The third tale in the issue is another entry by The King (still on Editor Jack Schiff’s Christmas card list before the Sky Masters debacle soured their relationship). On a totally trivial note, British readers who (like me) first encountered Jack Kirby’s “The Man Who Betrayed Earth” in a black-and-white Brit reprint (by that I mean readers old enough to remember when the Beatles were in the charts) would have been struck by the odd, button-shaped nose of the ray gun-wielding alien in the splash panel. In fact, the alien has no nose as at all: American readers will have had JK’s illustration clarified for them by the colorist: the nose is actually the heel of a TV engineer, standing with his hands held above his head. Trivialities aside, this is vintage JK ’50s material, with ideas flung out like there’s no tomorrow (although, in fact, this is the distinguishing characteristic of the King’s work throughout his career—he was always hyperprodigal with his concepts). The tale itself is slight enough: an Orson Welles-like film producer (JK renders him corpulent in the Welles fashion) transfixes TV audiences with his highly realistic SF shows (shades, of course, of Welles’s real-life broadcast of his near namesake’s War of the Worlds that panicked America), until he finds himself mixed up in a real-life alien invasion. What counts here, of course, is Kirby’s art: in panel two of the first page (reproduced here, but too small for you to see the detail), a giant robot levels a town, while in panel three a massive top creates a tidal wave. Such SF details are studded throughout the tale: a beautifully designed alien spacecraft, and a species of those diminutive aliens that The King was so good at raise the story to levels of genuine pulp poetry (there are wonderful panels in which the producer protagonist, in order to seduce him into betraying the Earth, is shown the futuristic alien society he will be taken to, with towering buildings and towering robots performing a multitude of tasks). The sheer dynamism of the art is par for the course for Mr. K. (as it was also for the exemplary Joe Maneely, who handles the title tale, “The Girl in the Glass Sphere,” with just as much panache as Kirby displayed in the penultimate piece. House of Mystery #72 may have minimal characterization and at least one dud tale, but for those able to appreciate these brief but beautifully judged gems from the mid’50smid-’60s era, there is considerably more nourishment here than in most of the airbrushed wonders that adorn the glossy pages of today’s comics. ★ (Barry Forshaw is editor of Crime Time magazine and lives in London.) 43

Near myths

In Name InInName Only InName InName Name Only Only Only Only

A look at Kirby’s use of legend and myth, by Shane Foley

(below) Kirby took a second shot at Prester John for Marvel Two-In-One #12 (Nov. 1975), if only on the cover. (next page) Merlin debuts on the first page of Demon #1 (Aug. 1972), shown here in pencil. Demon ©2005 DC Comics. Iron Man, Thing ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

“If there’s been one theme running through the comics career of Jack Kirby, it has been legend.” (First Issue Special #1, text page) et how well did Jack know and use the great themes of legend? On the one hand, readers of Thor know well that he had good knowledge of the Norse myths, using what he wanted and ignoring what he didn’t. On the other, readers of Black Panther #1 smiled at Jack’s reference to the story of “Ali Baba and the Genie.” Like most, my knowledge of actual legends is slim. I know a few names and a few generally accepted, but often wrong, ideas of some of the stories. So searching for some background on the legends used in a few favorite Kirby stories would not only enlighten me but reveal a bit about Kirby’s usage of them as well.

Pandora’s Box

(House of Mystery #61, 1957) Kirby’s story involves a strange “talking” chest being dumped at sea, then the attempt of a witness on the ship to uncover the mystery of the box. He is stopped just in time before he unleashes the horrors of the chest, revealed to be “Pandora’s Box.” Pandora was, in classical myth, the Greek equivalent of Eve and was the bringer of sorrows to mankind. When she went to live amongst men, she was given a gift from the gods—a sealed jar with all the misfortunes of existence inside. But her great curiosity got the better of her caution and she broke the seal, releasing sorrow, disease and conflict into the world. Thus, according to the legend, there is now no mystical box or any other container to be found as in Kirby’s story.

Prester John (Fantastic Four #54, 1966) In this story, Johnny Storm and Wyatt Wingfoot meet a character called Prester John. He is dressed in “Medieval garb” and is in suspended animation, courtesy of the “Chair of Survival.” When he wakes, he states he has been there for 700 years. He had been in the service of good King Richard and then travelled the world as the Wanderer, ending up on the fabled Isle of Avalon. So who was “Prester John”? In Medieval times there existed a legend of a great King and Priest of God living in “the Far East, beyond Persia and Armenia” known by the simple and humble title of Presbyter or Prester John. (“Presbyter” means “Elder” in Greek). In the 12th Century, letters supposedly by him circulated in Europe, wherein he writes that his land which included “the Three Indies” boasted rich natural resources, was “streaming with honey, and overflowing with milk,” and was a place of peace and justice. One traveller wrote, “In one region grows no poisonous herb, nor does the querulous frog ever quack in it, no scorpion exist, nor does the serpent glide amongst the grass.” Some records speak of the fountain of youth freely available to all and of John himself being 562 years old. He was said to be the guardian of the shrine of St. Thomas, the apostle to India, at Mylapore. Some sources said his worldly possessions included the Holy Grail, inherited from his Uncle, the Round-Table Knight Sir Percival. Mostly he was popularized as a hoped-for ally against the Muslims. He was believed to be a Nestorian—a member of the independent Eastern Christian Church, who did not accept the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople (the equivalent of the Catholic Church’s Pope). He was usually seen as a Christian priest-king, but Prester John also appears in Medieval Jewish legend. One Jewish traveller in the East between 1159 and 1173 wrote that Prester John was a Jewish King who ruled with great splendor over a Jewish realm. A later account recorded John as being a lineal descendant of Ogier the Dane, who reached the north of India with 15 of his barons. Marco Polo was one of many other Middle Age travellers who claimed John ruled a vast Central Asian Kingdom. In his Travels, Marco Polo says Genghis Khan “fought against Prester John and after a desperate fight, overcame and slew him.” Pope Alexander III sent a messenger to him in 1177 but the messenger never returned. Later 14th Century reports from Portuguese explorers began to place John’s kingdom in Ethiopia. His legend continued, and a 15th Century woodcut depicts him as ruling in both India and Ethiopia. No source that I looked up referred to Prester John as one who had been in the service of King Richard, as stated in FF #54. (These references could only refer to the later Prester John legends as King Richard—of Robin Hood fame—lived in the late 14th/early 15th Centuries.) Nor did they mention he had been known as a “Wanderer,” although for him to have set up a Kingdom in the East, it would have been required at one point. Jack’s Prester John has very little in common with the man of legend. Instead, though he is from ancient times, he is a cosmic-minded traveller who is at home with futuristic technology

due to his experiences. His Kirbyesque travels seem to take him from Baghdad with its evocative flying carpets (page 13, panel 1), east to the Himalayas (panel 2), further east to China (Cathay, panel 3) then “across the angry sea” to what looks like a Pacific Island or South American people, then onto the “fabled isle of Avalon.” The only connection of Prester John with Avalon that I could find was that John perhaps held the Holy Grail. The Grail and Avalon were both of course, elements of Arthurian legend.

Avalon

(Fantastic Four #54, 1966) In Jack’s Avalon, “wizards created mighty machines which harnessed the natural forces of the universe,” which unfortunately destroyed them. All that remain are the chair and the weapon dubbed the “Evil Eye.” What was Avalon? In legend, Avalon, evidently meaning “Island of Apples,” was also called Annwn, the Welsh underworld. It was an island to where, after his last battle with Mordred, the grievously wounded King Arthur was taken for healing by three women in a boat. In some legends, the sword Excalibur was forged there. The first real mention of Avalon was in 1135 when Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welsh or Breton monk, published his Historia Regum Brittanniae (i.e., History of the Kings of Britain). His work, believed to be a collection of already existing legends, covered over 90 Kings of Britain, with a fifth of the work focusing on tales of King Arthur. He wrote of Avalon as King Arthur’s final destination and supposed it to be a paradise, surrounded by water. In “The Life of Merlin,” he records a passage attributed to the Welsh bard Taliesin wherein Arthur is being taken to Avalon. The island is now described as a fairy island, inhabited by the mystic number nine ladies, one of whom was Morgan le Fay. Other legends arose of a prophecy that Arthur would one day return from Avalon to once again rule in Britain. All subsequent works regarding Arthur seem to use Geoffrey’s work as a basis. So from a mystic island of healing and (possibly) resurrection in legend, to Attilan-like crucible of scientific wonders out of its time in Kirby thought, there is no connection except the name and ability to generate a feeling of mystery and awe.

Orion (New Gods #1, 1971) Jack’s greatest character (a bit of personal opinion there) with a powerful name from legend. But what is there beyond the name? According to classical mythology, Orion was one of Poseidon’s unruly sons. He was a giant and a handsome hunter who could walk through he oceans. Once he was blinded in a battle but he regained his sight by the radiance of the sun god Helios. Eos, the goddess of the Dawn, loved him to such a degree that other gods became jealous, so for the sake of all the gods Artemis killed him. He was then raised to the stars as a constellation. Like Kirby’s character? Not at all.

Arthurian Legends (Demon #1, 1972) 1) Merlin With no mention of Arthur, Merlin is seen at the

destruction of Camelot in Demon #1, accepting that he shall pass with it, but unlike it, he shall return. Who was Merlin? Merlin appears to be the creation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in his 12th Century History of the Kings of Britain combines traditions about a bard and prophet named Myrddin with a 9th Century story of Ambrosius. In the latter, the Britons found a girl who was pregnant by demonic forces. They kept her secure and when her child was born, he was immediately baptized as a Christian. Thus the child worked for good rather than evil, yet was still possessed of the fabulous powers of his demonic father. Some legends speak of him learning his craft from a Master named Bleise. In Geoffreys’ work, Merlin is responsible for moving the monoliths of Stonehenge from Ireland and assists Uther Pendragon but is not associated with Arthur himself. Later, Merlin was credited with helping Uther conceive Arthur by disguising Uther as the husband of a beautiful woman named Igraine. As with many Celtic gods and goddesses, Merlin was seen having a deep affinity with nature and could assume any shape he wished. It was in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur that Merlin is viewed as Arthur’s faithful advisor, prophet, and Magician.

Later stories have him as the architect of Camelot. There are various accounts of his death. One has him swallowed by the earth while another blames his death on his passion for women. One (either Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, or Nimue, a siren’s daughter) imprisoned him in an enchanted wood after he had explained the secrets of his magic. In another, Nimue imprisoned him under a large rock and bound him there in a deep sleep by his own spells. A letter writer from Demon #7 posed the question of how Jack’s Merlin could have a demon as a force for good, opposing Morgan. However, whether Jack knew this or not, perhaps it does fit in quite well with the above-mentioned idea that Merlin’s power was demonic in origin. That power was able to be harnessed for good in the legends and perhaps Etrigan could be viewed as a comicbook extension of that power. (This aberration in Merlin’s past is the reason that both good and evil parties are eager to engage the resurrected Merlin in C.S. Lewis’ sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength. With parentage like that, why wouldn’t the bad guys feel he could be converted over to their way of thinking? (continued on next page) 45

down) with Arthur himself unwittingly being Mordred’s father. In another, she stole the sword Excalibur and gave it to her lover Sir Accolon of Gaul with which to slay Arthur. Upon this plot’s failure, she steals the scabbard of Excalibur and throws it into a lake. It was Morgan who enchanted Arthur’s friend, Sir Bertilak, to become the Green Knight, with the purpose of creating as much mischief in Arthur’s court as possible. Evidently, Morgan’s hatred of Guinevere for interfering in a love affair was at the root of this plot. A more modern version of the story combines both approaches, with Morgan as Arthur’s enemy for most of her life, then with her repentance in her later years.

2) Morgan Le Fay As portrayed in Kirby’s Demon, Morgan le Fay (or Morgaine le Fay as Jack preferred to spell it) was the sorceress who used her powerful spells against Camelot and brought it to its destruction. Hints are given by Kirby that not all the power was supernatural magic (page 6 panel 1: “Again and again the forces in play generated, charged and struck at the once impregnable Camelot! The new names for them were not yet born—and men still called them magic!”), yet beyond rare phrases such as this the power presented was indeed magic and sorcery, with the greatest being Merlin’s prized Eternity Book. So who was Morgan le Fay? Morgan appears in various writings with the duel 46

role of both healer and dark magician; as one plotting against Arthur, yet also being his guardian in death. She first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work Life of Merlin, wherein she is the first of nine sisters who rule the Fortunate Isle, and who claimed she could heal Arthur if he stayed there. Here she is a healer as well as a shape-changer. Later versions present her as one of the three women in a barge who escort wounded Arthur to Avalon to tend his wounds. In Breton villages, water fairies are known as morgans, which may explain her name and the root of some legends which have her living in a lake. In different writings from later times she becomes an enemy of Arthur. One strand of writing seems to fuse her character with that of a woman named Morgause and made her to be the mother of Mordred (who eventually struck Arthur

3) Camelot Demon #1, page 1, opens with the Camelot’s fall as “...One fiery night, it met its end! Great Merlin was the last to meet the overwhelming hordes of the enchantress Morgaine le Fay!” What of the real Camelot? Despite Camelot’s close association with the Arthurian legends, its name is a later addition, not appearing until the 12th Century poem by a French romancer, Chretien de Troyes, after Arthur begins appearing as a king, rather than the general of an army that it appears he really was. Other centers, such as Carleon, have equal prominence as his headquarters in other writings. The name “Camelot” is thought by some to be the Frenchman’s corruption of Camalodunum, the Roman name for Colchester. Some archaeologists and historians believe that a site called Cadbury Hill—with 1200 yards of perimeter surrounding an 18-acre enclosure and rising about 250 feet above the surrounding countryside— may well have been the real site of Arthur’s meeting place, with its fortifications from the Arthurian era. But most understandings of Camelot seem to coincide with the description from Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallott” and “Idylls of the King” where it is seen as “many-towered,” a city built to music. It came to represent high morality and an ideal place. After the defeat of Arthur at the hands of Mordred, there appears no record of what happened to Camelot. Rather than die in flame, it appears to have passed quietly away, as though with the decline of the glory of the Round Table. Although one reader who had a letter published in Demon #9 stated, “According to legend, Merlin was not around at the fall of Camelot, which took place in a completely different way than in Demon #1.” (This writer obviously was better informed than I am.) 4) Etrigan From the days of Camelot, through various parts of history and to the present day, Kirby presents Etrigan as the demon who assists Merlin whenever

he is called. When not in service, he resides in the form of Jason Blood. So who is Etrigan? A search of the Internet revealed no “Etrigan” mentions apart from those referring back to the comic. (And one strange one that always referred to Afghan hounds, but I couldn’t follow that up). One site on demonology listed over two dozen names of demons, yet with no Etrigan. A letter in Demon #7 reads: “I am writing because of an interest in your factual representation of the Demon, Etrigan, but I find no mention of him in the Gaetia, the Lesser Key of Solomon. The closest name of a demon is Eligos... where (did) you gather the information on this demonic figure?” The answer was “...sorry to say, Jack’s primary research for this book has been about 40 years of old monster movies.” So despite the Demon seeming to be factual to that particular reader, it seems Etrigan is a pure Kirby-ism without a base in legend. Unless someone else knows more?

Atlas

(First Issue Special #1, 1975) This only Kirby drawn issue of “Atlas” has this to say in the text page: “Legend has it that Atlas was the first king of Atlantis and the leader of the Titans that Zeus overthrew. For his role in championing the Titan cause, he was condemned to carry the heavens on his shoulders.” And what of Kirby’s Atlas? Kirby’s Atlas lives in “a time when man was rising out of barbarism. There were cities of great wealth and power…” (Atlas, page 2). “…It was a time when men’s eyes beheld wondrous sights!! When tongues spoke of mighty deeds… and mortals became undying myths… for they lived with strange mysteries and came to grips with the mammoth terrors that survived the bygone eras… but before this legend, there was Atlas the Untamed!” (page 5). An ancient, exotic world, but nothing like the world of Zeus and the Titans. The text page continues: “Yet what is legend? The dictionary defines legend as ‘a story coming down from the past; especially one popularly accepted as historical though not verifiable.’ But modern interpretation has given the word legend the quality of something larger than life… more dramatic, more powerful, more unique. “And that’s appropriate for our new version of Atlas…. “Atlas is but the latest in a long series of visions of the past/present/future/unknown. It… draws upon the concept of legend again. But more importantly, it is an entirely new speculation—a new addition to the Kirby mythos.” So Atlas is another Kirby hero who has nothing more to do with the character from legend than sharing a name.

Conclusion Jack Kirby wrote in The Demon #1, page 1: “It is said that there was a time on earth when strange creatures roamed all lands!! And that these beings became the core of myths and legends surrounding the fabled powers of bygone eras.” In other words, he says the legends he is playing with here are being treated very loosely and as a springboard for wherever his imagination takes him. So here, as it seems in most cases, they are their namesakes in little more than name only. But if these examples are typical of Jack’s approach to the characters of legend that he uses, then I find an intriguing conclusion—one already known but reinforced by this brief study. Any Kirby reader knows that often his characters and stories appear to have a meaning and depth beyond the obvious comic-hero clash. That quality then cannot be attributed to his reworking a great theme inherent in a particular legend,

because he simply doesn’t use the legends’ themes. It is a testament more to his own skill as a conceiver of stories, of the motivations of his characters and as a dramatizer of real life issues. Though his story elements are usually of gigantic proportion, they have a grounding that is rarely seen in comics. So maybe it is appropriate to say again as has been many times before, that the real “legend” in all this is the master storyteller himself, Jack Kirby!

Works Cited New Encyclopedia Brittanica, Vol. 9, 1994; Facts on File Encyclopedia—World Mythology and Legend 1988; Time Life—Mystic Quests, World Book 2002, Vol 15; Strange Stories/Amazing Facts, Readers Digest 1975; www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot—the web site of The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester; and The Mystery of King Arthur, E. Jenkins, Jarrod and Sons, England, 1975. More on Prester John as well as portions of his supposed letter can be read in the editorial in Roy Thomas’ marvellous Arak, Son of Thunder #24 (DC Comics, August 1983), wherein Roy gives some background on John, whom he’d put to quite different use than Jack Kirby did.

(above) Was Atlas a heroic name from the legends of the past? Yes. Did Kirby’s Atlas have anything in common with that legend? Nope. Here’s a terrific page from First Issue Special #1 (Apr. 1975), originally drawn to be page 19, yet dropped presumably to bring the page count to its required length. Pity—it’s a nice page that helped flesh out the characters. And what potential this series had beyond its single issue! (previous page) Morgaine Le Fey from Demon #2 (Oct. 1972). Atlas, Demon ©2005 DC Comics

Gallery 2

Myth-IllogicAl ARt

ack Kirby used established myths and legends as the basis for much of the work he did in comics, but he rarely was faithful in his adaptations. From those big circles on Thor’s chest, to his imagery of the Grim Reaper riding on a pair of airborne skis, nothing was terribly sacred in his interpretations of characters who, throughout time, have held a certain almost religious

by Shane Foley

significance to society. Take the following pieces for example; while you’ll get a hint of the source material they’re inspired by, chances are no one before (or after) Kirby ever envisioned these characters quite the same—or as dramatically. ★

(this page) Jimmy Olsen #144, page 20 (Dec. 1971) Kirby’s great wrap-up to the Evil Factory storyline included his Fourth World explanation for the Loch Ness beastie of legend. What a beautifully designed Nessie he did too! (page 49) Forever People #9, page 21 (June 1972) A séance, a liberal dose of New Genesis technology, and a controversial handling of Deadman combined with a powerfully updated version on the Frankenstein monster to give the young gods of Supertown an explosive Kirby struggle. If Kirby had any inkling that his beloved Fourth World series was fast coming to an end, one wouldn’t know it from the power in his penciling. Jack would also use Frankenstein-like characters at DC in The Demon #11-13 and Jimmy Olsen #142-143. (page 50) Kamandi #7, page 19 (July 1973) As a change of pace after the death of Flower in #6, Jack drew a parody of King Kong for a fun-filled following issue. (This was Steve Sherman’s explanation from the letter’s page in #12 anyway.) The last line in the comic is great Kirby tongue-in-cheek humor. (Look it up—it’s magic!) This shows how close in some ways (but not in others) Jack was to the movie! (page 51) Sandman #7, page 12 (1975) Even everyone’s favorite myth Santa Claus got his turn under Kirby, albeit in one of the handful of ’70s stories he didn’t plot. Kirby’s usual dynamism is often present, though by Kirby standards ol’ Santa is conservatively drawn. But isn’t the pencil work nice!

(page 53) Eternals #5, page 11 (Nov. 1976) Did Jack introduce this version of the Greco-Roman gods to replace those he’d introduced a decade earlier in Thor? Or did he just like ’em and in typical Kirby fashion, ignored the past so he could have fun with an alternative version? Either way, Olympus, Zeus, Athena and Mercury were great springboards for Kirby’s imagination! 48

(page 52) Black Panther #6, cover (Nov. 1977) The Panther book was action from beginning to end. And again, he was in the thick of it from page 1 of his sixth issue. Involved in a plot to find the legendary Cup of Youth, you can bet what the Panther found was uniquely Kirby and had little to do with any ‘real’ myth.

Retrospective

Thor The Thunderer either Stan Lee nor Jack Kirby really created the Mighty Thor. They simply borrowed him from mythology.

N 54

by Will Murray

“One of our established titles, Journey into Mystery, needed a shot in the arm,” Lee once wrote, “so I picked Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, to headline the book. After writing an outline depicting the story and the characters I had in mind, I asked my brother, Larry, to write the script because I didn’t have time. Always dependable, Larry did a great job on it and it was only natural for me to assign

the penciling to Jack Kirby, who drew it as though he had spent his whole life in Asgard, the home of the gods.” “Well, I knew the Thor legends very well,” Kirby allowed, “but I wanted to modernize them. I felt that might be a new thing for comics, talking the old legends and modernizing them. I believe I accomplished that. Thor is an ancient myth—what I did was make him salable once again.” The year was 1962. Lee and Kirby were busily converting fantasy anthology comic books like Strange Tales and Journey into Mystery into super-hero showcases to build a new line following the surprise success of their Fantastic Four. Lee had been Marvel’s editor since 1941, while Kirby had recently returned after long estrangement from the comics house for which he had co-created Captain America two decades before. “I knew that they were lacking super-heroes,” Kirby recalled. “Nobody had really done many in many a year. After the war the super-heroes kind of faded, but of course after a certain amount of time it was time to bring them back. So I brought back the super-heroes. And that’s where all your Fantastic Fours come from. That’s where Thor comes from. I took anything powerful that could sell a magazine—and I did.” Which of the two men first had the inspiration that a Norse legend could be adapted to comic books is unknown. The popularity of Steve Reeves’ Hercules movies may have given either one the idea. Comments both Lee and Kirby later made seem to suggest that their thinking began with Hercules. Yet both Lee and Kirby claimed to have been struck by inspirational Nordic lightning first. “Thor I got from the Germanic legends, the Norwegian myths,” claimed Kirby. “I would take a lot of the stories from the legends. So instead of doing Hercules I would use Thor because nobody used the Norwegian legends.” “Nobody had ever done anything with the Norse legends,” Lee asserted. “We had the Hulk who was the strongest living human on Earth, and then we even had the Thing who was almost as strong. I wanted to do a new book and I said to Jack, ‘Who can we get that’s even more impressive? ...After a while it occurred to me that the only way to make something bigger and stronger than the strongest creature on Earth was to create someone who is outside of our little ol’ home planet.”

Kirby had a track record. The Nordic thunderer had been popping up in his stories since the 1940s, most often as a villain. His earliest mythological creation, Mercury, was renamed “Hurricane, Son of Thor” when the character switched from Red Raven Comics to Captain America in 1941. A year later, Simon and Kirby’s Sandman battled a wild-bearded foe calling himself Thor in “The Villain from Valhalla.” And there were others. “I did a version of Thor for DC in the ’50s before I did him for Marvel,” Kirby pointed out. “He had a red beard but he was a legendary figure, which I liked. I liked the figure of Thor at DC and I created Thor at Marvel because I was forever enamored of legends. I knew all about these legends which is why I knew about Balder, Heimdall, and Odin. I tried to update Thor and put him in a super-hero costume. He looked great in it and everybody loved him, but he was still Thor.” That story, “The Magic Hammer,” appeared in Tales of the Unexpected #16, dated August, 1957—exactly five years before the Marvelized Thor debuted in Journey into Mystery #83, August 1962. The 1957 Thor was clad in the traditional bearskins and horned helmet. Otherwise the only similarity lay in the hammer—Kirby carried the design over unchanged.

The way Lee told it, reviving Thor was a creative struggle in which Jack Kirby was uncharacteristically bereft of ideas. “I figured the only thing to do is get a god,” Lee continued. “There’s nothing more impressive than a god. So Jack said, ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’ So I started to think—the Roman gods, the Greek gods, a lot had been done with them... we’d all seen Hercules and the others, but people don’t know much about the Norse gods... including me. So I started looking them up and when I got to Thor I just thought, gee, a guy who is the god of thunder and lightning—that’s impressive.... So, when I re-read the saga of Thor, God of Thunder, and his mighty hammer, I knew I had found our next super-hero! “I told Jack about it and when I saw the way he drew Thor it was just wonderful... the outfit he gave him... the hammer. I wanted him to have that hammer, and I came up with a plot so he could.” Jack Kirby recalled it quite differently. “I came up with Thor,” he said flatly. “I knew the Thor legends very well.... I came up with Thor because I’ve always been a history buff. I know all about Thor and Balder and Mjolnir, the hammer. Nobody ever bothered with that stuff except me. I loved it in high school and I loved it in my pre-high school days... that’s what kept me in school—it wasn’t the mathematics and it wasn’t the geography; it was history.” “As far as I can remember,” insisted Lee on another occasion, “Norse mythology always turned me on. There was something about those mighty, horn-helmeted Vikings and their tales of Asgard, of Ragnarok, of the Aesir, the Fire Demons, and immortal, eternal Asgard, home of the gods. If ever there was a rich lode of material into which Marvel might dip, it was there— and we would mine it.” Perhaps the absolute truth lay in the middle. After all, Thor had been around for centuries. But where Thor was concerned,

Yet Lee was no stranger to the swashbuckler either. His favorite actor, Errol Flynn, was renowned for his costume epics. A decade before Lee had scripted an Arthurian comic called The Black Knight, which he considered the high point of his pre-Marvel Age work. “When I was a kid,” he pointed out, “I fantasized about Robin Hood, King Arthur, King Richard—even Charles Lindbergh. You imagine you’re going to do great things. I saw Errol Flynn movies and I wanted to be Errol Flynn. Every time I left the theater, I had a crooked little smile on my face and I swashbuckled down the street. Until I was ten years old, I wished that I had a sword by my side.” Either way, neither man was about to do a direct adaptation of the Norse thunderer. “Before staring the series,” Lee told one reader, “we stuffed ourselves to the gills with Norse mythology, as well as almost every

(above) Charlton’s Out of This World #11 (Feb. 1959) contained a Steve Ditko story featuring a young Viking named Thor who discovers a magic hammer in a cave—more than three years before Marvel’s Thor debut! (previous page) A simply spectacular Thor commission from 1975. Thor TM & ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. Out of This World © Charlton Comics.

other type of mythology—we love it all! But, you’ve got to remember that these are legendary tales— myths—and no two versions are ever exactly the same. We changed a lot of things—for example, in most of the myths Thor has red hair, Odin has one eye, etc. But, we preferred doing our own version.” The Lee-Kirby version would be clean-shaven, and possess long blond hair. “I don’t feel he ought to have a red beard,” Kirby said of the Marvel Thor. “I like to do my own version of Thor.... The Norse legends are free domain. A traditionalist will leave them as they are. As a creative person I must treat them in the context of ‘now’. Today, blondes have more fun.” Other modifications were necessary. “Then there was the problem of empathy,” Lee imparted. “I realized that it wouldn’t be the easiest job in the world to make a reader in Hoboken develop an affinity for some long-haired nut in blue tights and helmet wings who also happens to be a Norse Thunder God. Still, one formula that’s always worked in comics is the gimmick of the secret-identity hero. Also, thought I, this particular strip will be offbeat enough to allow me to employ one of the oldest cliches in the book: frail and feeble Dr. Donald Blake is in reality the most invincible immortal of them all—the mighty Thor.” “I believe the secret identity is an acceptable comic format,” Kirby once said of the Thunder God’s dual nature. “I feel that his secret identity is his link with us. If he didn’t have a secret identity, Thor would just be a god, someone we can’t touch. Someone we can think about, but someone we can’t be. We can be Thor if we have that secret identity.” This was the era of Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey on TV. Doctors were popular romantic figures. It seemed natural to go in that direction. “I wanted Blake to be a surgeon because of the dramatic possibilities it would later present,” Lee added. “I could envision themes where Thor is needed in Asgard bur Dr. Blake is needed on Earth to perform a critical operation (which none but he can perform, natch). Oh, the suspense, the tension, the choice that must be made. Besides, he could spend his spare time romping about with some ravishing registered nurse when the occasion demanded, or even when it didn’t. Yep, I was convinced. Donald Blake would be a doctor, thin, lame, defenseless—the exact antithesis of his awesome Asgardian alter ego.” The origin story was simple, but a departure from the scientifically-inspired super-heroes he and Kirby and been creating. “Almost all our heroes had gotten their superpowers from some outside source,” Lee reflected. “Spider-Man had been bitten by a radioactive spider; the Hulk had been the victim of a gamma-ray explosion; with the Fantastic Four it was sudden prolonged dose of cosmic rays and, just to show we weren’t getting into a rut, Thor had gained his godlike powers by picking up a rough wooden cane inside a mysterious cave.” While Vacationing in Norway, Dr. Blake discovers the gnarled walking stick. Accidentally striking it, he is transformed in a lightning-punctuated thunderclap into the Thunder God, while the stick becomes his mighty Uru hammer. On it is inscribed the legend: “WHOSOEVER HOLDS THIS HAMMER, IF HE BE WORTHY, SHALL POSSESS THE POWER OF...THOR.” Facing with an invasion by the Stone Men from Saturn, Thor whirls into action. Literally. 56

“And then,” Lee joked, “the dopiest idea I ever had was, “How can I get him to travel? Superman flies, the Hulk jumps, Spider-Man web-swings—and it occurred to me, ‘There’s a thong on the hammer. If he swings the hammer, and lets it go and holds onto the thong, the hammer will take him with it.’” Lee’s description of the thonged hammer confirms that a Kirby character design predated his script. “When he wanted to fly,” Lee elaborated, “he’d whirl the hammer over his head faster than a propeller and then, when he released his grip on it, it would go flying off into the heavens—and, since his wrist was attached by the thong, the hammer would carry our hero off with it.” By whatever methods the talented team devised Thor, they were not alone in bringing him to life. A third collaborator played an important part. “One thing I’ve never fully understood about Thor is his name,” Lee has confessed. “Oh, I don’t mean the name Thor—I’m referring to Don Blake. Having always had a terrible memory, I made life easier for myself by giving most of my characters alliterative names, i.e., Bruce Banner (the Hulk), Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic)... etc. If I could remember either the first or the second name then I had clue to the other name which began with the same letter! So I’ll never know why I didn’t call him Don Dickens or Bill Blake! It’ll just have to take its place among life’s many unsolved mysteries!” The reason was simple. Lee didn’t invent that name. His brother Larry did. “I had written some of the first stories for Thor, all from Stan’s plots.” Larry Lieber revealed. “I came up with Don Blake. I made up Uru hammer. I remember calling it that. I wanted something short so it would be easy to letter. It was off-beat and sounded like a foreign language.” Lieber saw it as simply a new writing assignment, like “Ant Man” and “The Human Torch,” which he also helped launch that year. “‘Thor’ was just another story,” he notes. “I didn’t think about it at all. Stan said, ‘I’m trying to make up a character,’ and he gave me the plot, and he said, ‘Why don’t you write the story?’” “Even though I wouldn’t be writing the script,” Lee recalled, “I always tried to ensure that the basic concepts would be mine. Of course Larry put in a lot of his own distinctive touches. One that I’ll never forget was his saying that Thor had an Uru hammer. When I read that, I figured the kid had done a lot of research and unearthed the name of some ancient metal. I was proud of him.” “Evidently the word ‘uru’ means power or something,” Lieber later discovered. “In my blundering I stumbled on a real word. What do I know? I barely speak English. I don’t speak Norse.” Colorist Stan Goldberg first applied superheroic hues and the trademark golden-blond look to Kirby’s striking design. “There really was no heavy thinking about the color I used for the super-heroes,” he noted. “Stan Lee left it up to me as to the colors of the superheroes and the villains. As you can see, the early heroes were colored in the basic colors of red, yellow, and blue. The reason for this is that these colors reproduced correctly 90% of the time. The villains were colored with greys, greens, magenta, and other non-primary colors. Thor was a super-hero and, of course, all super-heroes were blond or dark haired (no redheads). I’m sure if I did make him a redhead, Stan would have made me change it.”

Kirby’s elaborate costume inspired one of Goldberg’s most striking coloring approaches. Somehow, Goldberg made Thor’s leather and metal pseudo-Viking ensemble work in the modern world. “Jack had such a great facility with just a few lines to capture the absolute essence of what a character was supposed to be,” praised Lee. “He made the Thunder God look just like a God of Thunder should. It took a lot of courage, too. You’ve got to remember that Thor had long blond hair before it became fashionable among us mere mortals—before the Beatles made the scene. Had anyone but Jack Kirby been the artist, it’s barely possible that the ol’ hammer thrower’s masculinity might have been in question.” The man chosen to ink the seminal story was Joe Sinnott, later to become one of Kirby’s most celebrated inkers. “I probably remember that more than anything I ever worked on,” Sinnott said. When I got it, I said, ‘Gee, what a great character.’ Especially Dr. Blake slamming that hammer on the ground. I thought that was a great idea, like Captain Marvel saying, ‘SHAZAM!’ I thought that was a novel way for the incapacitated doctor to turn into this Viking god. Stan and Jack did a tremendous job on it.” In many ways, Marvel’s Thor can be seen as a variation on Fawcett’s old mythologically-inspired super-hero, Captain Marvel. The magical metamorphosis of Don Blake to the godlike warrior in superhero colors amid a burst of thunder and lightning paralleled young Billy Batson’s classic thunderbolt transformation into the World’s Mightiest Mortal. One obscure inspiration might have been the Silver Spider, which Lee and Kirby tried to turn into Spider-Man until Lee realized that the what Kirby gave him was too close to Archie comics’ Fly. Like the Fly, the Silver Spider was a boy who rubbed a magic ring and was transformed into an adult super-hero with mystical powers. Although Kirby inherited the discarded concept from the old Simon and Kirby studio, Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. Beck actually originated the Silver Spider, borrowing heavily from Captain Marvel. Kirby started work on the first “Thor” story just after Lee took Spider-Man away from him and gave it to Steve Ditko, and some of the discarded concepts might have been carried over. But there was no doubt that Kirby was the one who reinterpreted Thor as a modern day super-hero. “We all have a kind of feeling that I think we’ve had for thousands of years,” he acknowledged, “that there are higher beings somewhere. I think all our spiritual feelings stem from that. The truth is that the Greeks had Hercules, even as the Norsemen had Thor, and through the ages we’ve had heroes similar to them. In ages past, we had Samson, who’s no more than a super-hero. And today we have our super-heroes. We believe in them because we believe in ourselves.” At the same time, Kirby seemed sensitive to the notion that this wasn’t the most respectful thing to do to a legend. “Thor was very real to the guy in the Middle Ages,” Kirby once said, “and not only that if you think about it; Thor was a religion as well. Thor is not a comic book story—Norse mythology was a religion, just as Greek mythology was. I was being superficial when I did Thor and if I showed it to a guy who was really involved in it he would tell me it wasn’t good enough.”

At first, Thor was a simple superhero strip. He battled everything from cliched Communist dictators to supervillains like the Tomorrow Man. But his most frequent opponent was torn from the same mythology as the Thunder God himself. “In the vast panoply of legendary menaces,” Lee asserted, “surely none has ever been as totally devious and diabolical as that very same Loki, Thor’s half-brother. According to the great Norse myths that have lived through the ages, Loki has primarily been known as the God of Mischief. But we at Marvel took the liberty of altering that myth a little. To us, Loki is, was and always will be the supreme embodiment of all that is despicable and deadly in man or godling. To us, he’ll always be the God of Evil! And to me personally, he’ll always be one of my favorite villains.” Extremely versatile, Loki sometimes confronted Thor directly, and on other occasions through magical surrogates like Sandu and Merlin. Invariably, he was defeated and found out by Thor’s father, Odin, who like Loki and Heimdall, was introduced in the third story, although Thor doesn’t begin to directly commune with his father until the following issue. “I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Odin,” said Lee. “I’ve always admired Odin’s dignity, his unflappability, his stern but honorable sense of justice. And the thing that makes him extra appealing to me is the fact that he has two sons, both of whom he loves, even though one is virtuous and the other an unmitigated villain. In writing his dialogue. I’d often try to imagine

the sorrow and heartbreak of a father who must have known in his heart of hearts that one son was a sinister betrayer, and yet, he was still Odin’s son, still flesh of Odin’s flesh, which was why the heavyhearted, silently grieving All-Father could never completely disavow the evil Loki.”

“Who was Odin but a father figure?” Kirby observed. “Show me any legendary story that doesn’t have a father figure. Hercules had to bow to down to Zeus, or at least talk politely to him. Zeus ran the whole universe. The Germans had Wotan; he ran the universe. The Norsemen had Odin run the universe. Then there were other sons and daughters of gods.” Kirby soon stepped away from “Thor,” as did Larry Lieber. Inker Joe Sinnott briefly drew the strip. “I did a few ‘Thor’ stories in Journey into Mystery,” Sinnott recalled. “At the time, the rates at Marvel were terrible, and I was really rushing my work. Looking back, I wish I’d done better work on ‘Thor,’ but at the time it was just another job, and I certainly didn’t think the character was going anyplace.” “Then,” continued Lee, “some stories were later scripted by Robert Bernstein, another Marvel mainstay who signed his work R. Berns. But I was so envious of these guys for writing one of my favorite characters, that I took over the scripting chores myself starting with Thor’s fifteenth story.” In Journey into Mystery #97 Lee and Kirby reteamed for that story, pitting Thor against the Lava Man. At the same time, they inaugurated an important backup feature, “Tales of Asgard.” At

first these were just retellings of Norse myth, and tales of Thor when he was a boy. Soon, however, they would drive the future direction of the series. While Don Heck drew the next few Thor adventures, Kirby contented himself with “Tales of Asgard.” “I loved Thor because I loved legends,” Kirby revealed. “I’ve always loved legends.... I think it must have been some Norseman with a rusty helmet and a muddy beard sitting on the bank of a river scratching himself... he looked like nothing, you know, and he knew it, but somehow he wanted to have a better image of himself, and he concocted Odin and Thor and Hercules and Samson and a lot of other figures that stood sky high. And in that reflection he saw himself, and by worshipping that reflection he himself became bigger, and his helmet became shinier and his beard became silkier, and he was able to throw around that thunder and lightning.” Kirby seems to have embraced Thor as if he had Scandinavian blood in him. “I feel that legends were born from the urge to soften someone’s suffering,” he suggested. “If you were a Viking, and you just got back from a raid, looking like hell, covered with blood... and you looked down at yourself and felt miserable... there was always Thor hammering away heroically at the top of the mountain. The lightning would flash and great Odin was there smiling at ya.” Under Lee and Don Heck, Thor began drifting into mediocrity, fighting super-villains like the Cobra and Mr. Hyde. “As to the stories themselves,” Lee wrote in the first Marvel Masterworks edition of “Thor,” “You’ll notice that Thor’s speech had not yet become as stylized, archaic or godlike as it later grew to be. One of the main reasons is the fact that most of the stories took place here on Earth rather than high in the gleaming grandeur of Asgard. In fact, in those first tales, we did little more than hint about the fabled realm and the awesome assortment of gods and goddesses that dwelled therein. Most of our concentration was upon the evil Loki and, since I’m basically a romantic at heart, the dramatic relationship between poor Don Blake who couldn’t reveal his awesome secret to the girl he loved, and Nurse Foster who was essentially torn between her feelings for the dedicated surgeon and the heroic thunder god who could never be hers!” But the strict super-hero approach wasn’t taking the feature anywhere. Lee was forced to reenlist Kirby to get “Thor” back on track. Almost immediately, the strip began focusing on Asgard and new Asgardian foes like Loki’s surrogates the Enchantress and the Executioner in issue #102. Surtur and a Storm Giant from “Tales of Asgard” dropped in on Earth in the next issue and from that point on, Thor operated in two overlapping worlds, Midgard and Asgard. Often, he was teamed up with Balder the Brave, first introduced in #108 after an earlier cameo, but developed in “Tales of Asgard.”

As Kirby’s Asgard evolved, it became a fantasy that mixed Viking accouterments with quasi-mystical technology. Is Odin a spiritual super-being—or actually a futuristic technocrat in high-tech retroViking armor? Was Loki an alchemist? Or master of a dark but unknown science? Was Thor’s hammer a product of magic, or super-science? Kirby seemed to be saying both. “My gods are like that,” Kirby explained. “They try to survive in awesome situations. They’re awesome people.... They live in galaxies far, far away, and maybe they feel that they’re ultimates in their own way, but they’re not. Like anybody in an average situation, I don’t know if there’s an ultimate, or where the ultimate lies. I feel that possibly I’m not equipped to ever answer that question. But the question intrigues me. I feel that it intrigues everybody. Like with everybody, it’s a question of faith. So, with me it’s a question of storytelling and faith. That whatever the ultimate is, I have to have faith that it exists. And, of course, the hero does too; otherwise he would never lay his life on the line.” Lee seemed to take it all less seriously. He made jokes about the toll booth on the Rainbow Bridge leading to Kirby’s Asgard, which he quipped reminded him of the Coney Island amusement park, and gave the Thunder God nicknames like “Goldilocks.” Keeping the core mythology straight was not a high priority. Kirby introduced Odin’s wife via a flashback in Journey into Mystery #111. But when Lee sat down to script it, he changed Thor’s mother into a vague romantic interest from Odin’s past. She was never depicted under Lee and Kirby. Lee explained, “I think most of the legends are very vague about Odin’s wife or wives; the few that I read always mentioned different women, and I could never pin it down. So I thought of him as a widower.” According to myth, Thor was the son of Odin and Jord, while Balder was the offspring of Odin and Freya, sometimes called Frickka. Loki was the adopted son of a Storm Giant, but after establishing that fact in “Tales of Asgard,” Lee seemed to have forgotten all about it, calling him Thor’s half-brother or step-brother, and emphasizing Loki’s blood relationship with Odin. Lee and Kirby demoted Balder from brother to best friend. “Certainly 90% of the ‘Tales of Asgard’ stories were Jack’s plot,” admitted Lee, “and they were great! He knew more about Norse mythology than I ever did (or at least he enjoyed making it up!). I was busy enough just putting in the copy after he drew it.” “Stan Lee was the type of guy who would never know about Balder and who would never know about the rest of the characters,” proclaimed Kirby. “I had to build up that legend of Thor in the comics. The whole Asgardian company, see? I built up Loki. I simply read Loki was the classic villain and, of course, all the rest of them. I even threw in the Three Musketeers. I drew them from Shakespearean figures. I combined Shakespearean figures with the Three Musketeers and came up with these three friends who supplemented Thor and his company, and this is the way I kept these strips going—by creative little steps like that.” Fandral the Dashing, Hogun the Grim, and Volstagg the Enormous—better known as the Warriors Three—were also first introduced in “Tales of Asgard” and soon gravitated into the main feature. “I made those up,” countered Lee. “I specifically remember that I did them because I wanted a Falstaff-type guy, a guy like Errol Flynn, and then I

wanted a guy like Charles Bronson who was dire and gloomy, riddled with angst. Those three were mine.” But Kirby remained firm: “I felt that Thor needed friends, so I went to the Four Musketeers, and that was the basis.” As for Thor himself, though he displayed dominion over the elements, calling down thunder and lightning and rainstorms at will, his Uru mallet also possessed the properties of conjuring up ionic and magnetic forces, even time travel. Was he an ancient Norse immortal, or something more superscientific, even transcendent? “I don’t know what spiritual beliefs are comprised of,” Kirby once mused. “I only know that I have senses; I have whatever senses that I have. And I bring them all into play. I don’t know what these senses are... I can’t define them. All my senses are hidden from me. But they move me.... I know our own place in the universe. I can feel the vastness of it inside myself. I began to realize with each passing fact what a wonderful and awesome place the universe is, and that helped me in comics because I was looking for the awesome. I found it in Thor. I found it in Galactus.” Kirby seemed to be saying that in spite of the Thunder God’s mythological roots, his Thor was the Thor of the 20th Century. In that context, his role was that of super-hero. There was no other identity that made sense in the Judeo-Christian world that had replaced the old myth-based Scandinavian civilizations. By 1963-64, Thor was appearing in two parallel strips and was a member of a new Marvel superhero team called the Avengers. Publisher Martin Goodman wanted to follow up the Fantastic Four with another super-hero group in emulation of DC Comics’ Justice League of America. Since the fledgling Marvel line consisted of only a handful of heroes, it was either use them all, or reach back into the Golden Age for characters not seen in two decades. “Jack was the perfect choice for a team-type book, since he had drawn virtually all the characters I’d be wanting to use,” Lee reminisced. “After kicking it around for a while, we came up with what seemed like a perfect combo. We’d start with the Hulk, just to make it difficult. Then, we’d include Thor, ’cause there’s always room for a God of Thunder. Iron Man would be able to supply them all with weapons and bread whenever they needed it, and we’d toss in AntMan and the Wasp just for the sheer lunacy of it.” “Here were several personalities that were designed to be solo heroes,” added Kirby, “and we had to produce an effective portrayal of them working together—closely. Of course, they’d argue. They might even come close to killing each other, but the idea worked and we managed to make a convincing story out of a very improbable situation.” “However,” Lee added, “although it’s easy enough to decide who the team should consist of, the tough part is figuring out how to get them all together. As you can imagine, it wouldn’t make a terribly interesting story merely to have someone send the others a note inviting them to join a group of super-heroes. We had to find a unique and exciting way of bringing this ill-assorted group together, and that meant introducing a villain who could be the catalyst. But what villain would be dangerous enough, powerful enough to have any effect on four of the most famous super-heroes in the Marvel Galaxy? That answer came to us in a blinding flash—Loki, God of Evil!”

Once again, Loki worked through a surrogate, engineering a situation where Earth’s mightiest heroes band together to stop a rampaging Hulk. And once more, his scheme backfires, leading to the creation of the Avengers—with the Incredible Hulk as a charter member. Thor rarely battled foes who were his equal. Now he was teamed up with the other strongest man in the Marvel Universe. It was an uneasy alliance, with the Hulk departing after three issues. A brief battle between the Thunder God and the Hulk in Avengers #3 was expanded into a more dramatic slugfest for Journey into Mystery #112 destined to answer the question, who was stronger? “I would have to guess that Thor is stronger, only because he is a god and probably can’t be killed,” Lee later speculated. “I don’t know how the guys have been writing him lately, but I thought of him as invulnerable. I would think that with his hammer and everything, he’d probably beat the Hulk. But what’s interesting with the Hulk is the more he fights and the more he’s beaten, the stronger he gets, so maybe it would be a draw.” Although Thor might seem a natural group leader, that role fell to Captain America when he was revived in issue #4. The Avengers was the strangest super-hero band ever conceived. But it couldn’t last. For one thing, Thor’s own adventures were taking on the quality of an epic of interlocking continued plotlines, leading one reader to joke that Lee should retitle the magazine Journey into Confusion. With the sixteenth issue, Thor and most of the original Avengers were abruptly written out of the series. “I was finding it too difficult to seem to be realistic,” confessed Lee. “For example, in his own book, Thor might have been trapped in Asgard somewhere, and yet in The Avengers book, he’s here attending a meeting. I seem to remember, I did get mail from a lot of readers about that point, and I felt, ‘Maybe it’s destroying the pseudo-realism of the stories, where a character is dying in one story and in the other story he’s the chairman of the Avengers meeting.’ I think that had a lot to do with it....” The post-Avengers switch occurred during a significant shift in “Thor,” when the God of Thunder with his counterpart Loki, faced the Trial of the Gods. Simultaneously, Kirby abandoned Loki’s huge-horned costume, giving him a new “dark prince” look that better went with the God of Evil’s emerging role as pretender to the throne of Asgard, and the strip’s increasing emphasis on palace politics and sibling struggles. The transformation was so sudden that in one issue, the old Loki was currying favor with Odin, and the next, the new Loki was creating a powerful new foe in the Absorbing Man. This change was never explained. The inspiration for the new design may have come from the concurrent “Tales of Asgard” stories featuring a younger Loki wearing military armor similar to the new design. Clearly, Loki’s role was shifting from chief antagonist to arch-rival. Given the speed at which Kirby generated pages, it’s possible he simply lost track of the two Lokis. The new Loki was more handsome than the old, and Kirby retooled him over several issues before arriving at a definitive new look in issue #116. “Characters like Thor would cause Jack trouble,” art director John Romita recalled. “All the fans knew that Thor had six buttons on the front of his uniform. Well, sometimes Jack would draw four, then six, then four again—all in the same story. We 59

about Thor. I loved the corny way he would talk. I loved having his father say ‘So be it!’ and all of those expressions.... Everybody told me I was crazy. They told me that no little kid is going to read stories whose characters say things like ‘Get thee hence, varlet!’ And I said, ‘The hell they won’t.’ Well, Thor became one of our most popular characters, and I used to get letters from college kids who’d say ‘I’ve been reading Thor and I’ve just noticed that you’re actually writing in blank verse. The meter is perfect. It scans.’ And they started discussing it in class and so forth.... Being an old cornball from ’way back, I really enjoy writing dialogue that sounds different from everyday lingo. In the case of Thor, our hammer-wielding Asgardian just wouldn’t sound right if he talked like a New York taxi driver or a down-home farm boy. Uh uh! Everybody’s favorite Goldilocks is the one and only God of Thunder, a legendary Immortal, and he’d better sound like one if we intended to keep you with us.” Much of the drama centered on the three-way conflict between Odin and his two strong-willed sons. Family strife drove many storylines, and Thor got into trouble with his father fully as often as Loki did. “And it was fun writing for gods and goddesses, for Loki the evil god,” Lee admitted. “I enjoyed writing the irony into the stories... for example even though Loki was a villain, he was Odin’s son... and Odin loved him... and Thor didn’t want to break Odin’s heart by letting Odin know how evil Loki really was.” Soon, Thor was having adventures in outer space too. “There was a time when I had to do a story about a living planet,” Kirby recounted. “A planet that was alive and a planet that was intelligent. That was nothing either because there had been other stories on live planets, but that’s not acceptable. Oh, I could tell you that there was a living planet somewhere and you would say, ‘Yeah, that’s wild. But how do you relate to it? Why is it alive?’ So I felt somewhere out in the universe the universe turns liquid, becomes denser and turns liquid and that in this liquid there was a giant multiple virus and if this multiple virus remained isolated for millions and millions of years it would begin to think. It would begin to evolve by itself and it would begin to think, by the time we reached it it might be quite superior to us, and was Ego.” Whether operating on Earth or in Asgard, in outer space or battling the Tomorrow Man in the far future, Thor somehow fit every mileau into which Lee and Kirby flung him. “Thor I gave a futuristic costume,” explained Kirby. “He hasn’t got a Norseman’s costume—it’s reminiscent of a Norseman’s costume, but he can wear that costume in 2085 if he wants to and get away with it.” When asked who guided Thor’s destiny in those days, Kirby was diplomatic. “Both of us, in a way. I researched it and gave my version of it. Stan humanized it in a way where, for instance, I might be concerned about Thor’s relation to the other gods. I might bring up a Ulik or I might bring up something out of the wild blue yonder, like the Orikal—that great big thing which nobody knew anything about. I tried to fathom it myself. And Stan would come down to earth and find Thor’s relationship with Earth people. In other words, we go up and down the spectrum always trying to find something new in it....” While Kirby continually pushed Thor into ever more cosmic vistas, Lee preferred to keep the Thunder God down to earth. “There was also a Thor story that I always remembered,” said Lee. “Again it was at a time when being a hippie was such a popular thing and all the kids were following Hunter Thompson and Jack Kerouac and people like that... and many of them were saying we’re going to drop out and to Hell with everything. I had Thor meet a bunch of kids somewhere and he starts lecturing them, except I tried not to do it in a true lecturing way, Thor says to them there’s nothing wrong with criticizing the way things are or wanting to change them or make them better, but you can’t do it by dropping out. If you want to make any meaningful change you’ve got to plunge in and you’ve got to do things. Of course I worded it better in the book than I’m saying now. And I kind of liked that and I got a lot of mail about that.”

Crazy Chris Fama isn’t content with just bleaching out Kirby stories for us to run in our “Public Domain Theater” section. Now he wants to do one special “Before & After” comparison per issue, showing a prime page of Kirby pencils, juxtaposed with his own bleached, reconstructed page of the published inks.

BEFORE

got used to looking out for things like that. But, the time we used up for making corrections was more than made up for by his overall productivity. I don’t think anybody ever complained.” After the Trial of the Gods was over, the Thunder God paid a visit to Avengers headquarters, and finding a bunch of upstart heroes, stalked out, never to return to the team while Lee and Kirby were in charge of his adventures. For the next few months, every foe Thor faced was either created or guided by his half brother. Loki was becoming a convenient crutch. “One reason I chose Loki to be the Thunder God’s main antagonist is because it was possible to give him so compelling a motive for hating Thor and for continually plotting his brother’s downfall,” revealed Lee. “The jealousy of one prince for another! Sibling rivalry between two gods! Those are motives that anyone can accept and understand.... As a matter of fact, I’ve always sort of thought of Thor and Loki as resembling, in a distant way, the biblical Cain and Abel, except that Thor so far has managed to survive Loki’s lethal little attacks.” Where the Fantastic Four focused on a close-knit family of super-heroes, “Thor” dwelled on a dysfunctional family of demigods. It was a darker view, one realized by the grim and gritty inking of Vince Colletta, whose work Kirby privately felt was illsuited to his pencils. “In the old gods,” Kirby pointed out, “Loki was an evil god. Thor was a good god, a god of virtues. But not only as an allegory. I had Thor as a human being, examining himself saying: ‘Here I am. I’m supposed to be a great guy, right? Why do I kill people?’ And that’s his problem. Loki finds no problem with that, see? In other words, he’s an arrogant type, see? He says, ‘As long as I’ve got this power and I’m born with it, what am I supposed to do—waste it?’” Where Lee saw Loki as merely evil, Kirby perceived subtler shades. His Loki was a godling tormented by unmet ambition. “I have as much compassion for my villains as I do for my heroes,” he explained. “And I feel that my villains are really tortured people, just as my heroes may be tortured people in a way.... My villains are not specifically downright evil; I feel that they’re people with problems who inflict those problems on others. And of course, if you do that, you come into contention with these others; and so you’ve got a story. Sometimes there are no villains at all.” “Another fact that seemed to make Loki the perfect archenemy for Goldilocks is the fact that both have godly powers,” Lee noted. “And, though Thor possesses greater physical strength than the God of Evil, Loki more than compensates by his mastery of deadly spells and savage sorcery. Storybook battles are always far more interesting and far more effective when the opponents seem to be evenly matched—or when the villain appears to be stronger. And, since Loki is ever the schemer, ever the plotter, ever the precipitator of each fateful encounter, he usually enters the fray with the scales of battle tipped precariously in his favor.” During this period, Kirby began driving the plots more, creating new villains and supporting characters. He introduced Hercules and the other Olympic gods in the 1965 Journey into Mystery Annual, then brought them back for an epic seven-part extravaganza later that year. Kirby seemed to have become fascinated by the gods of mythology, and Thor was the natural place to explore them. “I brought mythology into modern times,” Kirby stated. “I brought in Hercules. I brought in Samson.... They’ve done that throughout the ages. Zeus became Jupiter, who became Odin. I guess Odin became Wotan. Because these tribesmen (savages) had to have that kind of figure to glamorize their own existence, to entertain their own souls. They had to tell themselves that whatever they did was in super-human terms, or they couldn’t survive.” Stan Lee seemed to rise to the occasion, his scripting growing more grandiose and portentous by the issue. “We later took Thor out of Journey into Mystery and gave him his own book, and that was when I started having him speak in a pseudo-biblical/Shakespearian manner,” Lee stated. “I was crazy

It’s not only functional—it’s symbolic of what he is; he comes into a whole new world and he feels pretty good about it.” Loki himself was missing for two years during this phase. Odin had exiled the God of Evil and the Absorbing Man after a failed takeover of Asgard so naked that the All-Father could no longer ascribe Loki’s motives to mere sibling rivalry. Frozen and helpless in space, the God of Evil twice attempted to influence foes like the Destroyer and the Super-Skrull by mental means. Perhaps Lee and Kirby and the readers had grown tired of his wily tricks. Or perhaps it was that, unlike Dr. Doom and some of the more multi-dimensional Marvel villains, the one-note Loki wasn’t an intrinsically interesting personality. “Since Mephisto was supposed to represent Satan, I would have to say that he was the most evil villain I ever created,” Lee allowed. “Loki comes in a close second, though. He has very few redeeming virtues. He’s definitely not a likeable lad.” When Loki physically returned in 1967, he was inexplicably back in his original outlandish outfit, egging on new foes for Thor to contend with, like the Wrecker and the Norn Queen, Karnilla. Loki quickly reverted to his original role as chief antagonist, somehow metamorphosing into an ugly, physically-powerful antagonist who could now stand up to the Thunder God in mortal combat. Odin’s frequent bursts of temper, resulting in the halving of Thor’s godlike powers, certainly equalized those bare-knuckled contests. In this case, Thor had been completely stripped of his powers, including the ability to revert to Don Blake, and banished to Earth by his father. For nearly a year, the God of Evil drove the plots. And for a change, his malicious plans were going somewhere. Kirby always saw his storylines as having arcs and directions, and he was growing bored with Thor, and a never-ending cycles of similar conflicts, both martial and familial. He decided that since the Norse myths prophesied the coming of Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, this would be the ultimate challenge for the Thunder God. Especially as it was supposed to mark the final battle between Thor and Loki. Kirby had already foreshadowed this dire event in “Tales of Asgard” two years previous. As he had done so many times before, Kirby decided to move a concept to the main feature. In a four-part 1968 epic, Odin, Thor and their valiant company face a rebellious Loki and the awakened mighty Mangog, and attempt to forestall Ragnarok. Thor #167, whose cover depicted the Thunder God helpless and defeated in the clutches of Mangog, might have marked a fitting climax to the series. Months before Kirby had dropped the “Tales of Asgard” feature. He was ready to move on from Thor. But first the series was going to go out in cataclysmic style. According to Norse mythology, Ragnarok was inevitable. It was the duty of the gods of Asgard to keep it from happening as long as they could. A combat veteran, Kirby came to see Thor as an expression of his war-hardened generation. To him, he had already lived through his own personal Ragnarok. It was called World War II. “It was a brutal generation, but it had no traumas, see?” he explained. “Now, I was in World War II. I never got a trauma, see? I just did my job. In other words, it was a Do-Your-Job generation.... In the Vietnam thing, it was different. I often tell my wife how hard I sweated it out for my son so he wouldn’t go to Vietnam. I didn’t like that war. I thought it was crazy. And of course, that had an affect on a generation of young people that just couldn’t understand it. They couldn’t handle it; and they still have trouble today. They couldn’t do a Thor, see? And they wouldn’t want to. They would lay off it, see? They might do a well, some kind of moralistic play, but they would never do a war story. My generation, all they knew was war.” Apparently, Lee balked at Kirby’s planned denouement, and wisely so. Thor still had many good years of life left in him. The Ragnarok storyline was resolved in a hasty but triumphant manner with Odin handily defeating Mangog. Kirby paused for one issue while Thor’s origin was reprinted. This was followed by a sequel telling the tale of how the headstrong Thor was expelled to Earth as the mortal Don Blake until he learned

So this issue, we present a recently discovered (and wrinkled) stat of the page 2 pencils of the “Tales of Asgard” story from Journey Into Mystery #121 (Oct. 1965), showing Jack at his penciling prime, and the resulting inks by Vince Colletta here. Flip and compare!

& AFTER

A close examination of that sequence from Thor #154 shows that another artist drew the hippies into Jack’s panels. It was not the first time Lee had imposed his personal vision over the artist’s original intent. Gradually, despite Lee’s preferences and occasional asides about Thor being on an “Asgardian kick” in the letter columns, the strip moved further and further away from Midgard and the limited practice of Dr. Blake. Changes had to be made. “When we first started the ‘Thor’ strip, in the early ’60s,” Lee explained, “I’m forced to admit that we used the usual formula in regard to females. Thor had a girlfriend, a nurse named Jane Foster, who never (with one brief exception that we won’t waste time with now) suspected that the lame Dr. Don Blake was really the mighty God of Thunder. Poor Jane Foster was required to do little more than scream fitfully, faint suddenly, and flee fearfully when the occasion demanded. As for Thor, he seemed to spend half his time worrying about her, explaining his absences to her, and rescuing her from whichever villain he was involved with at the time. But then—we saw the light!” After years of Thor and Odin arguing about the unworthiness of the God of Thunder desiring to take a mere mortal for a bride, Odin granted Jane Foster immortality in 1967. But she recoiled from the unearthly challenges of Asgardian life, and was returned to Earth, her memory erased—out of the strip and Thor’s life forever. This marked another important turning point, and the final shucking off of most of the strip’s super-hero conventions. But before the issue was over, Thor had his eye on a new paramour. “Even before Women’s Lib became a household expression,” Lee revealed, “I began to tire of the way some of our female characters were being depicted. Thus, a decision was made to alter some of our male/female relationships, and to replace a few of the more passive female characters with new, more forceful ones. In the case of the super-cliched Jane Foster, I gradually began to ease her out of the series while introducing a new romantic interest for Odin’s long-haired offspring in the person of the stunning Sif. Sif was really something else! She was a goddess true. Clad in the usual form-fitting Asgardian armor, she would oftimes fight side-by-side with Thor and his immortal buddies, swinging sword, mace, or battleaxe like a warrior born, which indeed she was. The minute Sif enters the scene, the feature took on a whole new fascination for me.” Kirby seemed to agree. “I thought women should have their independence, which they could utilize,” he has said. “And warrior women are not new. Throughout history we’ve read about them.” More and more, Thor operated on Earth and in Asgard accompanied by Balder the Brave and the sword-wielding Sif. Less and less, he was a lone figure talking to himself in elevated language. Increasingly, Thor became the epic saga of a warrior and his comrades-in-arms as they battled military threats like the legions of the Norse Trolls and the Greek Pluto to the two worlds they protected. Lee and Kirby depicted it as a war strip, which Kirby saw as its true roots. “There are people to this day who are trying to survive previous wars,” Kirby explained. “It’s hard. And that’s why they have to become legendary.... All history is like that. People creating myths to survive. Just as they want to survive battle, they have to survive their entire life experience. I don’t know how long that was for the early people, but it must have been very extreme and very hard to survive, and I believe that’s why we have these dramatic myths.... They are just representations of ourselves. At that time, you take a crummy Viking, remove the glamour, and what the heck was he? Some poor guy in bear skins who never took a bath. He had a beard with lice in it and he says, ‘Look at me, I’m really a cruddy object’—and I felt the same way. The GI’s feel the same way sometimes when they’re sitting in some hole but suddenly he says: ‘What the heck am I doing? What am I a symbol of?’ And then he begins to idealize the version of all the bravery that goes into the fight. Maybe he begins to see himself as Thor and his captain as Odin. Then he sees what he’s fighting for. He sees why he’s in that hole, why he’s in the dirt, why he’s dressed in that stupid uniform.

humility and rediscovered his Uru hammer, which was now being called by its true mythological name. Larry Lieber recalled, “One day Roy Thomas was going through Bullfinch’s Mythology, and he came in and said, ‘Larry, where did you find this Uru hammer?’ I said, ‘It’s not in any book. I made it up.’ So he looked at me with this sort of shock or disbelief. He found, of course, the real name was Mjolnir, and so he used that. From then on it was Mjolnir—never mind this Uru hammer.”

For months, Kirby was growing dissatisfied with Stan Lee and Marvel Comics, as a direct result of creative decisions made without him. When The Silver Surfer was given his own title, leaving Kirby out, Kirby was hurt. He had specific plans for that character. Kirby also faced the problem of where do you take Thor after his brush with Ragnarok? His immediate solution was to enmesh the Thunder God in a universe-shaking conflict between Ego the Living Planet and Galactus, the enigmatic planet-eating cosmic being from The Fantastic Four. To the consternation of readers, in some inexplicable way. Thor channeled his elemental powers through his magic mallet to “smite” and drive off Galactus, thereby saving Ego. Did this mean that the Norse Thunder God was more powerful than galaxydevouring Galactus? Lee and Kirby never satisfactorily explained it. After that, Kirby inserted an origin of Galactus story originally intended for The Fantastic Four into Thor to make sure that his vision, and no one else’s, saw print. Another FF character he felt slipping away from him was dubbed “Cocoon-Man” by Kirby and renamed “Him” by Lee—later known as Adam Warlock—also popped up in Thor where Kirby could use him his way. Galactus soon returned, and as originally drawn by Kirby, the two were to have joined forces to fight an earthbound menace called the Thermal Man. But Lee overruled that idea, and forced Kirby to redraw the ending so that the two went their separate ways. Another Loki subplot was also discarded, resulting in the replacement of almost half of the issue’s original pages. Galactus might seem an odd character to team up with Thor, but Kirby didn’t see it that way. “Galactus in actuality is a sort of god,” Kirby observed. “He is beyond reproach, beyond anyone’s opinion. In a way he is kind of a Zeus, who fathered Hercules. He is his own legend, and of course, he and the Silver Surfer are sort of modern legends, and they are designed that way.” But Kirby’s definition of a “god” had evolved. “Galactus is a true god—a god in the meaning of modern technology,” he

explained. “Not a god in a spiritual sense, but a god in a mythology that’s very modern in context. It’s a modern mythology. In other words, what I’m taking is the old religions and transforming them into our contemporary lives so we an accept them. Galactus, of course, is the ultimate figure and still he has a human problem, too!” As had happened in the Fantastic Four, the introduction of Galactus into the strip set the stage for Kirby’s dissatisfaction and eventual abandonment of Thor. His thoughts had been going in the direction of launching a new “gods” series at Marvel, to supplant Thor. That had been the artist’s original post-Ragnarok plan. “I feel that there was an actual replacement of the ‘old’ gods by new ones which are relevant to what we see and hear,” Kirby philosophized. “In other words, Thor may have been great in Medieval times, but I feel somehow, that we have transcended. Once it had a certain glamour, but now we need a new kind of glamour. Not that it isn’t fantastic, but we don’t see it in the same lights anymore. I think we see things differently, the same things with an altered interpretation. You know what Thor looked like, what Mercury looked like, what Zeus looked like, and all the rest of them. It’s like everything that’s done and seen. What I’m trying to do is show the things that haven’t been done or seen. We have our ‘new’ god today—technology. A new way at looking at things that I have got to represent.... “So in order to express that value, we make ‘new’ gods. We can’t be Thor. We can’t be Odin, anymore. We’re not a bunch of guys running around in bear skins; we’re guys that wear spacesuits and surgeons masks.” The artist who had updated Thor for the 20th Century ultimately came to realize that the Thunder God was no longer relevant in the Space Age. A publisher’s edict to cut back in the continued stories contributed to a sharp diminishment in the hero’s epic adventures after the aborted GalactusThor alliance. To add insult to injury, Kirby’s covers were often rejected and redrawn by others. He also fretted under the hasty inking of Vince Colletta. “Colletta was a good professional inker,” Kirby allowed, “but I didn’t care so much for his particular style.” Finally, he was forced to skip an issue in the middle of the “Fall of Asgard” storyline in an effort to save the failing Silver Surfer book. He couldn’t. Kirby’s heart was no longer with his Marvel heroes. After turning in a further installment of the multi-part saga wherein a once-more revamped Loki overthrows Asgard and tricks Thor into exchanging bodies, Kirby resigned, leaving Lee to finish out the cliched storyline with artist Neal Adams. The resemblance to the Ragnarok storyline, with the Fire Demon Surtur standing in for Mangog was probably not coincidental. Lee and Kirby had fallen into a pattern of recycling old successful plots. Kirby was determined to strike out in new directions. Yet he remained haunted by the god concept. For a time, he considered doing a revamped version of Norse mythology, since Marvel did not own the legends, only Lee and Kirby’s interpretation of them. He designed alternate versions of Balder and Heimdall and others so obscure they never showed their faces in “Tales of Asgard.” But not Thor. Beyond offering the designs in an art portfolio called Gods, Kirby did nothing with them. “I must have a hangup of some kind,” Kirby once said of his predeliction toward heroic gods.

“I’m prone to my own environment and express it in terms of gods. Maybe I was oriented to some sort of mythology. I speak in terms of mythology. Another man will speak in terms of straight adventure, or in terms of romance. I’m communicating in my own way. And I try to make variations of it from time to time in order to be commercial.” The concept that really captivated him was to create a new mythology built around this new notion of technological gods. He envisioned an opening splash depicting a Ragnarok-like scene in which the old gods of legend lay shattered and defeated. And in their aftermath arose a reenergized pantheon of New Gods. Its roots stemmed from Kirby’s creative evolution at Marvel. “My inspirations were the fact that I had to make sales and come up with characters that were no longer stereotypes. In other words, I couldn’t depend on gangsters, I had to get something new. For some reason I went to the Bible, and I came up with Galactus. And there I was in front of this tremendous figure, who I knew very well because I’ve always felt him. I certainly couldn’t treat him in the same way I could any ordinary mortal. And I remember in my first story, I had to back away from him to resolve that story. The Silver Surfer is, of course, the fallen angel. When Galactus relegated him to Earth, he stayed on Earth, and that was the beginning of his adventures. They were figures that had never been used before in comics. They were above mythic figures. And of course they were the first gods. I began thinking along those lines, and The New Gods evolved. I began to ask myself, Everybody else had their gods. What are ours? What is the shape of our society in the form of myths and legends? Who are our gods? Who are our evil ones, and our good ones?” When the first Kirby titles began appearing from DC Comics in 1971, they consisted of a quartet of interlocking books under the umbrella title of the Fourth World. His chief protagonist was a war dog of futuristic technology named after an old myth, Orion the Hunter. “The Fourth World, to me, was modern legendry,” Kirby said, “I had to create a modern legend of our own, and I did this with The New Gods. It was a Father-Son affair, just like all our previous legends. There was Thor and Odin, there was Hercules and Zeus, and I felt that in our age, it would be Darkseid and Orion. That was my concept... I felt I would define our own society. The Greeks defined it with their own gods, the Norsemen defined it with theirs.... Orion and the New Gods is an allegory, really. And the New Gods are just a continuation of the old gods.” Numerous readers thought they recognized in the splash page that opened the first issue of The New Gods, the broken bodies of Thor, Balder, Heimdall, and the proud warrior company of Asgard. Others noticed the striking similarities between these pages and similar panels Kirby had drawn for the “Tales of Asgard” Ragnarok sequence, especially one image showing the home of the old gods being rent asunder. It looked exactly like Kirby’s Asgard, which he depicted as a floating island in space. This was Kirby’s way of signaling his fans that for him, the Marvel Thor was dead and buried. Kirby never considered offering the burgeoning idea to Marvel. “It’s not that I was cramped,” he explained, “but there were limitations which stopped me from going on. I was involved in what I was doing there and I feel that this would never have fit into what

they were doing. This is a whole new interpretation and it cannot be told with shields and swords; it must be done with what we know and deal with what we worry about.” Stan Lee kept Thor going with artist Neal Adams and John Buscema. Eventually Roy Thomas took over scripting the God of Thunder, and other creative teams followed in the decades that followed, some memorable, but most mediocre. But Marvel’s Thor never again soared to the heights achieved when Lee and Kirby were his master. From a topseller rivaling The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man, the once-mighty Thor had fallen to the level of a second- or third-tier title. And while the character has persevered for over four decades, Thor rarely rose above mediocrity after Lee and Kirby. In later years, evidently reconsidering, Jack Kirby looked back on his version of Thor as fundamentally honest. “I believe Marvel’s treatment of Thor is valid because it projects Thor as we’d like to see him. Thor is us... as a personal super-hero. And I think it’s true. I think that all of us see ourselves as superheroes, and we try to justify it with mysticism. And it’s true because it works.” “I felt that ‘Thor’ was more than just a trivial strip,” concurred Lee. “There was a lot of depth there. Also it was easy to be imaginative when you’re talking about great concepts like Asgard and the Rainbow Bridge linking Asgard to Earth.... I think over the years the writers now have lost most of these elements for some reason and I think they’ve sort of forgotten about Don Blake and Thor. I’m a little surprised at that. If I were doing it now, I think I would do a Thor book perhaps a little bit differently.” Perhaps that was the biggest irony associated with the Lee-Kirby Thor: if they had to do it over again, both men would have opted for a different approach. Yet together they melded Norse mythology and modern melodrama into a far-flung form of fantasy that broke new ground and forty years later still stands the test of time. “I think that the man who is to make the next mythology will be drawing from the comics,” predicted Kirby. “That is the origin of all our characters. Tarzan is a mythological character, like Samson or Thor or Hercules; they are all ‘super-heroes.’ ...Superman is an update on Tarzan, just as Tarzan is an update on Samson, and just as Samson was a companion to Thor. People had their fantasies at that time, just as we have them now. Of course, we have them in our own recognizable image.” ★ (Grateful acknowledgement is made to previous interviewers and their sources used to compile this oral history. In addition to original interviews conducted by the author, the following books and publications were referenced during the writing of this article: The Jack Kirby Collector Alter Ego Comic Book Artist Comic Book Marketplace Comics Scene Starlog FOOM Comics Feature The Comics Journal Origins of Marvel Comics Son of Origins of Marvel Comics The Superhero Women Bring on the Bad Guys! Excelsior! (The Amazing Life of Stan Lee.) 65

Near myths (below) The ultra-rare 1970 Marvelmania Thor button by Jack. (next page) Page 3 pencils from Thor #166 (July 1969). Thor is overcome by “Warrior Madness,” and Odin has to smack him down for it. Thor, Odin TM & ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc.

(bottom) In a moment of imperial rage from Thor #145 (Oct. 1967), Odin pointedly reminds his warriors who their daddy is.

The All-Powerful Was Nev

by Jerry Boyd din’s tirade after winning a fateful battle against Forsung, the mightiest of the Enchanters (in Thor #145), was entirely in keeping with his character. After all, Odin is the king of the Norse Gods. He is responsible for his brethren’s immortality and his powers alone are great enough to halt the mightiest threats to Asgard—including Surtur, Mangog, Ymir, and a kingdom of vicious trolls. Odin’s powers (though never truly outlined by Kirby and Lee) encompass an entire universe (presumably, ours) and all life forms upon them, giving him dominion over life and death and powers beyond the human imagination. He can bend time and space easily to his will, instill great amounts of his power in objects (the Odin-Ring, his scepter, the Destroyer, for examples), and even draw the strengths and abilities of the lesser gods of the Aesir if need be. Odin is wise and all-seeing/knowing. Eschewing the dark, knowledge-gathering ravens of Norse folklore, Kirby (wisely) installs various visual objects in the palace royal where the Asgardian lord can witness events on Midgard and throughout the many worlds in his keep. Odin is all-wise. Odin is mighty and all-powerful. Odin is majestic and worthy of respect. Odin is merciful but vengeful. These are things we’ve read over and over again in the pages of Thor. So why does the lordly Odin, easily the most awesome supporting character in Marveldom, suffer as a character in his own right? Because, despite the bellicose rantings of the greatest of the Viking gods, he falls apart under scrutiny, contradicting his words with his actions, and often becomes little more than a pain in the neck for his more even-tempered and likable offspring, Thor. If Odin is all-wise/seeing, why does he need visual devices at all to monitor happenings on Earth or anywhere else?! Loki steals one of these objects (in Thor #148) so that the “all-seeing” won’t be able to witness

his half-brother being demolished by the Norn-powered Wrecker. Thanks to Odin’s handling of the situation, Thor’s spirit is brought before Hela (#150) to be spirited off to Valhalla! And, to save you all from digging up your back issues, Thor’s powers were taken away by Odin for the sin (?) of wanting to stay on Earth following Odin’s aforementioned defeat of Forsung. Say what?! Or in Asgardian—verily, this doth standeth against all reason! If you want more evidence, Odin strips Thor (again!) of his greater godly powers in Thor #126 during his battle with Hercules for the sin (?) of continuing his courtship with and revealing his identity to Jane Foster. You’d like to think a god is above ethnic prejudices, but in this case Odin was responsible for the creation and nurturing of Earth and mankind (see Tales of Asgard #1)! This makes the All-Father prejudiced against a frail mortal woman he indirectly “fathered”! I’ll go easy here. Lee and Kirby leaned on the Samson and Delilah passage from the Holy Bible’s “Book of Judges” for this one and it did make for an engrossing storyline. The Thunderer reveals his alter ego to the woman he loves. A furious Odin strips him (through Seidring the Merciless) of half his strength setting up his loss to and humiliation by Hercules, the Lion of Olympus. In the Old Testament, the angels of the Lord told Samson’s parents to never take a razor to their son’s head. Samson reveals his secret to Delilah, who betrays him with the most famous haircut of all time. This sets up his loss to and humiliation by the Philistines. However, Odin, by giving his power to Seidring, sets up a bigger problem for all Asgard because evil Seidring takes over (Thor #127)! Couldn’t the All-Wise see this coming?! Despite everything, the son of Odin returns to his homeland, gets clobbered by the full brunt of the Odin Power from the merciless one and miraculously saves the gods of Asgard. Odin is restored and learns something of a lesson as he carries the battered, unconscious body of his barely breathing son away. In Thor #128, Odin laments of his punishing of the Thunder God but—do the math!—it’s only a couple of years (Midgard time) before the prince of Vikings is stripped of his supernatural abilities again!! Odin’s mercy?! You can have it. I see more vengeance (and petty revenge, at that) than anything else. (Well, at least it was nice to see Seidring hand lordly Odin a few well-deserved lumps back in #127.) As far as the All-father’s claim to being “all-powerful,” forget it. Orikal (Thor #138-139) is an outsider to the Odinian realm and his powers rival his. You can make good cases for Eternity, the Watcher, Zeus, and a certain devourer of planets, also. In addition, why does an all-powerful deity have to sleep at all? The OdinSleep, Odin’s once-a-year ritual, always spells trouble for his less powerful tribal members. In JIM #118-119, the Destroyer gets loose. In Thor #155-157, the Mangog tears through the Eternal Realm and in #175-177, Loki successfully steals the Odin-Ring and inadvertently frees Surtur and then there’s Hell up in Harlem... er, Asgard. Couldn’t Odin see these catastrophes in the making?! In ancient mythology, Odin fares a little better. Respected as the wisest and the proper king of the Aesir, he nonetheless depends on his war god, Tyr, and the strongest single weapon against the evil ones—Thor’s enchanted hammer. The mythological Odin does not see to it that evil Asgardians such as the Executioner and the Enchantress create additional problems for Earth’s residents and their Norse protectors. All of the mythological Asgardians are on the same page (except Loki, of course)—they battle the evil ones and draw worthy Vikings’ souls into the court of Valhalla to stave off defeat at Ragnarok. I’ll give the comic book Odin credit for being majestic and worthy of respect. (No one ever outfitted a character better than Jack Kirby and no character ever received a better wardrobe from a creator than Odin.) In the final analysis, Odin must be less of what he claims to be for others to rise to the occasion. If there is no Odin-Sleep, we

ver All That wouldn’t have some of the incredible story arcs Stan and Jack gave us. If there’s no romance with Jane Foster (and Odin’s mishandling or non-handling of the situation), then Loki’s placing her in peril creates

a lot of empty pages in Journey into Mystery. There would be a lot less heard from the likes of Mr. Hyde, the Executioner, the Cobra, the Grey Gargoyle, the Enchantress, etc. Furthermore, if Odin thwarts every insidious plot of Loki’s at the outset, there’s less need for the sacrificial heroics of Balder, the Warriors Three, Sif, Heimdall, and the others. Like his mythological counterpart, Odin reigns over a multitude of immortals and some are warrior

gods with incredible abilities. They must be kept busy with conflicts or battles, unlike the more hedonistic “ultimates” over on Mount Olympus. The venerated Zeus and his fellows (Thor #129) seem more at home in their sun-drenched kingdom pursuing raucous revelries than the grim, icy mountain-inhabited Viking gods a universe apart. In keeping with Norse legends, the Odinian legions share borders with ice giants, storm giants, trolls, and other shadowshrouded lands of menace. What do you do with an immortal band of warrior gods who are by nature in search of adventure and conquest? Give them work. The clanging of sword upon shield, and battle hotly contested must be the norm. By being not quite what he claims to be, Odin provides it all. Still, the omnipotent one’s big failing mark is Loki. In the legends, Loki (sometimes called the Fire God!) is diminutive in his natural state (he can change his shape and appearance) and is carried about by the much larger Thor. In these legends, the pair were great friends and a very successful team before the terrible time of Ragnarok! Loki’s cunning and quick mind were fabulous assets to the Aesir and kept the evil giants they faced unbalanced. Loki’s later punishment for a crime against the gods greatly embittered him and the growing of his monstrous offspring spells doom for the Norse Gods. It’s an interesting historical note that Odin, with all his braggadocio and “wisdom,” was eventually supplanted by Thor as the Vikings and their descendants saw more true heroism in the Thunderer (who doesn’t make such costly mistakes as the inclusion of Loki in Valhalla’s court). I enjoyed the Kirby-Lee depictions of the Aesir overall, but the adoption of the child that would one day be the God of Mischief and Evil is irksome. Legendary god or comic magazine character, couldn’t Odin see it coming?! But then, all things have to end. Odin can’t set up battles for the gods forever or foul up (if you will) enough to create conflicts for them. (After the Lee and Kirby issues, Gerry Conway would have the God of Thunder ask some tough questions of his father— YAAAY!!—about his handling of events following a battle with EgoPrime; see Thor #202.) Odin does triumph finally—by endorsing a Ragnarok that allows for a race of “new gods” to rise from the noble, righteous, and worthy spirits of those who have fallen. So there’s an end to Loki. And on that optimistic note, I’ll end here before I pull out some comic book expletives because I’m still ticked off that Odin let Thor get beaten by that overbearing Hercules back in the day.... ★

Near myths

The Legend of the Origin of

alactus G by Sean Kleefeld

f there ever was a Jack Kirby creation worthy of the title god, it is Galactus. The legend of how Stan Lee instructed Jack to “Have the FF fight God” is one of the classic origin stories of comicdom. But is Galactus’s debut Jack’s original design for the character? Ironically, the origin of that story lies within the pages of what was Galactus’s own origin book: Thor #169. Jack, in his later years, described how he would occasionally draw stories for books, then later remove them in favor of another direction. Not one to waste any ideas, though, he would save the pages, sometimes using them as a sort of idea-file, or outright using the pages en totem for other books. In one instance, he claims to have used an extended Watcher sequence intended for the Fantastic Four in the pages of Thor. In actuality, this narrows down the possibilities considerably, as Uatu only appeared in three issues of Jack’s Thor: #165, 168, and 169. And #169 is the only one with an actual Watcher sequence longer than one page. Interestingly those last two issues cover the origin of Galactus. And where might Jack have first had the idea for Galactus’s origin than the character’s debut in the Galactus Trilogy? Let’s take a look at some of the facts. We know that #169 was substantially overhauled from the story Jack initially planned. TJKC #14 graciously presented us with eight pages of artwork drawn for that issue. Also, in reviewing #169, we find a number of sequences are rather disparate, giving us a somewhat disjointed story. Then we can look at some inconsistencies in the printed artwork itself. While, admittedly, Jack isn’t known for his consistency of details, there are some portions that defy even Jack’s most basic design premises of characters. Look closely at page 14 (below), showing Thor and Galactus walking across the horizon and tell me when did Jack ever draw Galactus with a draping swathe of cloth? Or in the earlier Watcher sequence, where Uatu is depicted clearly without said cloth? I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe this is a good place to look for Jack’s missing FF pages. The artwork from what was supposed to be Thor #169 clearly shows an emphasis on the Warriors Three and their battle with the Thermal Man. Jack’s design for the thrust of the story was not the origin of Galactus. The margin notes show Galactus and Thor’s discussion focusing on what’s currently happening on Earth and Asgard, nothing to do with the past, much less Galactus’s origin. Could Jack have squeezed the previously promised origin of Galactus in the first dozen pages? Well, certainly. But would that have been the focus of the issue? Looking at the now-mythic origin itself, we can break it down into three distinct parts: a Watcher finding a ravaged ship, a pre-godlike (and decidedly human-looking) Galactus on Taa, and Uatu conducting some sort of experiments of an entity. Note my terminology. There’s very little in the art of these sequences that actually suggest that they were created for the same story, much less a Galactus one. What discrepancies can be found? First,

note that space suits in all three flashback segments bear little resemblance to each other, aside from color. The ship design, while consistent in the second and third portions, is unique for its first appearance on page two. And the man who would later become the world-eater is depicted differently in each flashback as well. I think there’s little doubt that #169 was a hatchet job, likely done to meet a deadline. But that doesn’t adequately explain why Jack changed things from his original Thermal Man story. A look in the previous issues helps explain this, though. Jack started officially telling the origin of Galactus in Thor #162. But the man was a consummate storyteller, and probably planned to play out the plot for some time. Witness that he waited another six issues to return to the mythic origin. But notice, too, “Stan’s Soapbox” in Thor #168: “Starting as soon as possible, we’re abandoning our policy of continued stories! Yep, that means we’ll try to make every Marvel masterwork complete in each issue... we’ll have to shorten our plots—perhaps tone down on our sub-plots, and tighten our pacing.” Jack was clearly told to wrap things up in a hurry, while he already had several stories brewing. It seems to me that Jack learned of Stan’s new directive, and quickly (and possibly angrily) put together the ending of the mighty Galactus’s origin. We are left only with possibly trying to identify where Jack pulled his art from, and what it may have been intended for. As stated earlier, Jack claimed to have used an extended Watcher sequence from the Fantastic Four in Thor. The third flashback seems to fit this bill. While it does seem like it ought to be part of Galactus’ origin, Galactus is not actually drawn, explaining Jack’s memory of it as a Watcher sequence. And the only place this might seem to have come from would be Fantastic Four #49, possibly being the original reason why Uatu halted the FF’s attack on Galactus on page 8 (shown below in pencil). If Jack had first drawn an origin (or a partial one), he may have, upon reflection, decided it didn’t really give the FF reason to pause. Wouldn’t an explanation of Galactus’s power have been more meaningful? It may have fit better with Jack’s original thoughts about Uatu and Galactus, though. His original ending of Thor #169 has Galactus offering to help the thunder god, claiming saving worlds would be a nice change from destroying them. And, if the Watcher was supposedly an omnipotent benign figure, wouldn’t it have been perfectly ironic for them to have switched roles? Uatu as the ultimate bringer of destruction by creating Galactus, and Galactus later renouncing that role. We also have an eight-page flashback sequence on Taa, Galactus’ homeworld. What immediately jumps to my attention is that Jack’s rejected pages start on page ten. Dropping the first (and unnecessary) page from the flashback, we could easily create an entire, coherent issue, using the published page one, the slightly

truncated flashback, a one-page transition, and the remaining unpublished Thermal Man story. While I might dismiss the flashback as another story Jack grabbed at the last minute, the 3⁄4 splash of that giant statue on page seven (shown here) looks too Galactus-ish to be coincidence. And, while it doesn’t recount a complete origin by itself, notice the teaser copy from #168 only promises “The WHY of Galactus.” The published page 19 seems to fit very well in-between the unused art for what should have been pages 14 and 16. And the first three panels of the published page 20 fit well shortly after the unpublished page 17. The final three panels of #169 are new, given the change in direction Jack had to take. The transition pages between the flashbacks are clearly new. Looking at some of the original art for these pages, one can note a distinct lack of gutter notes, suggesting that Jack completed them quickly and didn’t care to help Stan connect the sequences with dialogue suggestions. What remains unaccounted for is the first Watcher flashback on pages two and three. The heavy-handed balloon effect on the border suggests this, too, was artwork forced into a story it wasn’t intended for. This is further reinforced by a change in the story. In Thor #168, Uatu discovers the ship initially empty, only finding one crewman nearly dead. But in #169, the ship is strewn with bodies in every panel. Where this portion of the story came from is unclear. It may have been part of the same Watcher sequence Jack pulled from the Galactus Trilogy, although the unusual appearance of Uatu’s garments suggests to me that this was an entirely different story that was retro-fit with heavy character shadows and Watcher robes. Finally, there is some debate about the cover of the issue itself (shown on the previous page). The central Thor figure appears to be by John Romita. But, surely, John wouldn’t have created the entire cover. To wait until Jack sent in the re-created artwork, and then build a collage out of art for a book that almost assuredly was behind

schedule at this point? Wouldn’t it have been easier and faster if John simply drew something original? Plus, Jack was the one with a penchant for collage, not John. Could it be that Jack created the collage cover with a negative image of Galactus as a subtle play on where his Galactus went to? That John’s Thor was a later addition at Stan’s request? This is, of course, the stuff of which legends are made. Readers are surely painfully aware of both Stan and Jack’s faulty memories, so we are left with speculation and the generation of new myths about Jack and Stan’s then-deteriorating relationship. Will we ever uncover the nuggets of truth that are the basis of any legend? I would suppose not, based on our understanding of other myths. But we can, like scientists studying Stonehenge, make some educated guesses about how a monumental body of work was constructed. ★

(next page, bottom) On the back of a stat of his art sent by the Marvel offices in the 1960s, are these handscrawled directions by Jack, for an apparent meeting with Stan Lee at the Seawane Country Club in Long Island, NY. (We don’t think Jack ever took up golf!)

The France Connection F4 screenwriter Mike France interviewed by Chris Knowles [Editor’s Note: Thanks to Lisa Kirby, I got to briefly meet screenwriter Mike France at last year’s Comic-Con International: San Diego. Lisa told me that Mike was involved in helping get Jack a credit on the Fantastic 4 film, so it was a given we’d have to have a chat about his involvement. What follows is a fascinating glimpse into the ins and outs of super-hero films in Hollywood, conducted by Chris Knowles in September 2005, and copyedited by Mike France.] THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: You co-wrote the screenplays for the Hulk and Fantastic Four film adaptations, and there was a lot of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby influence in those films. In particularly the F4, I think you guys really captured the spirit of the early FFs. MIKE FRANCE: Thanks! Yeah. TJKC: The earliest comics were just a lot of fun. MIKE: That was the key word that we wanted to get across. TJKC: There was an element of media savvy in F4 that reminded me a lot of a lot of the early Lee/Kirby stories. MIKE: That was a key part of the early stories—

it’s turned into a standard thing to do for super-heroes, but that whole idea of having them not have secret identities and to become, essentially, reality TV stars was a real cutting edge idea for Stan and Jack back in the early Sixties. TJKC: With the Fantastic 4 script, did you basically go through a bunch of early FFs and cherry-pick ideas, or was it more something that you had read, it was part of you, it was in your blood, and you didn’t really need to research. MIKE: Well, I definitely loved it. When I heard that F4 was becoming open as an assignment, I just told my agent, “I’ve gotta do this,” and stormed the offices of 1492, Chris Columbus’s company, which was developing it at Fox, and finally convinced them to let me do it. Once I got the job, I had the most fun prep time I ever had on a script just pulling out first—I read as many Fantastic Four comics as I could get my hands on, but the ones that I really pored over again and again were the first hundred or so issues, the Stan and Jack issues. TJKC: Are you going to be working on the sequel? MIKE: Beats me. Any chance to revisit these characters would be welcome. TJKC: A pretty good chance of it with the receipts on the picture. MIKE: There’s going to be a sequel, that’s for sure. They haven’t officially announced it, but my understanding is that everybody at Fox is very happy with it. TJKC: I really feel that you kept the spirit of the early books. I mean, you updated it for the modern times. Let’s not forget that that comic came out 44 years ago. MIKE: That was what I wanted to do in writing the script. Obviously, because it was 1961, there were story points and technical things that just wouldn’t work anymore. Initially they’re taking a stolen rocket up to beat the Reds into space. Unless you’re doing a period piece, things like that you have to change. And I changed some other details, like the fact that—y’know, Johnny and Sue really didn’t have a reason to go on the space trip in the original comic. Sue was going up because she’s dating Reed, and Johnny’s going up because he wants to look after his sister, and unless you were doing it as a flat-out comedy, you just could not do that in a movie, so I had to come up with reasons for them to go; to make Sue a scientist. And I thought it would be fun, too, to make Johnny a pilot in his own right, and to give him a kind of a love/hate backstory relationship with Ben. TJKC: That was also in the original comics, too, the needling— MIKE: This is what I’m talking about in terms of making changes but still trying to keep the spirit alive. Oh, yeah, the pranks between Johnny and Ben were a huge part of the comics, and that’s one of the things that everybody loves—the comic was hilarious when that happened. The change I made to Johnny was just to try to define that relationship a little more. TJKC: You made Johnny a bit older. MIKE: Yeah, to show that there’s that relationship going back a few years, at least, that these guys have been getting under each other’s skin even before this accident happened. TJKC: The cockiness of Johnny is something that became much more earnest as Kirby became more involved in the writing of the stories. But with Johnny, something that I think got lost in his character in a lot of subsequent interpretations was how cocky and bratty he was. And I thought that that was really preserved.

MIKE: I felt he was one of the most fun characters in the comic, and he’s one of the most fun characters to write. The whole thing about him in the early comic is, here you’ve got a teenage kid who has suddenly had all this thrust on him to become a super-hero, so he acts like a kid when he’s presented with this responsibility. And I just wanted to turn that around a little bit by making him a bit older, but still just as arrogant, and still just as immature. In the comics you had a teenager who was sort of pressured to act like an adult, and he just acts like a brat all the time. What I wanted to have was more of a guy who physically was an adult, but acts like a kid all the time, to the point that you just want to smack him. And I thought that would be a good thing to play off of, Ben being so gruff, and Reed being so serious. TJKC: How old did you see the characters as being in the movie? MIKE: I saw them as being, like, Johnny in his twenties, and Reed and Ben being in their thirties, maybe forty, tops, and Sue being in her twenties, as well. I think that would—I mean, it’s not that far off from where we are in the movie, because I think Michael Chiklis is in his early forties, and I guess he’s probably playing late thirties or something. He might have been a little young, but, y’know, that’s okay. Everyone will be happy about this when it takes, another six or seven years to get the next two movies out, so... [laughter] I think that’ll work out all right. TJKC: Let me ask you about the way the film handled the backstory between Reed and Doom, which I thought worked out really well, but some of the fanboys were critical of it. MIKE: The only part of it that I did was just the notion that the origins would be tied together, of Doom and the rest of the Fantastic Four. In my script, I had Doom as a Russian scientist who was essentially controlling access to the international space station, or Russian space station. And Reed needed to get up there to perform an experiment, so he controlled to the space station that way, all hell breaks loose, and they all get their powers. Doom gets mutated, too, as a result, getting this metallic skin. The difference between my draft and what followed—what was created by other writers, what made it to the screen there—is, when I did mine, Doom pretty much was separate from the others. He crashed into Latveria and instantly really became classic Doom, the Doom of, say, FF #50s through #80s. He’s got all the crazy machines, he’s running Latveria with an iron fist, even though he’s convinced that he’s doing it for all the right reasons, and everybody should be grateful to him. What happened later is, Mark Frost changed it so that Doom would be an industrialist

and have access to the space station. And because we’re talking about a long development period of almost ten years, there were a number of different executives who had to deal with this movie at Fox. Y’know, people come and people go. But everybody was always a little skittish about, “How are we going to handle Doom? How are we going to handle how he’s a lot like Darth Vader?” And everybody always was trying to figure out how to tiptoe around that, and with the changing him into an industrialist, that did tiptoe around it a little bit. He’s not really classic Doom until the end. TJKC: There’s such an irony there in that Darth Vader is just basically— MIKE: Doom. I know, I know. But because Darth Vader came first in the movies, and because Darth Vader has really stamped himself into—I mean, I remember seeing Star Wars as a kid, and it was so obvious that it was a Doom copy, because the FF was so stamped into the consciousness of fifteen-yearold kids who were going to see the movie. But now, these people don’t read comic books anymore, and a lot of people maybe don’t know who Dr. Doom is. So one of the problems to deal with is, how do you separate him from Darth Vader? Although, in the end, he wound up being classic Doom, if only for the last ten, fifteen minutes or so. He really looked like Darth when he was picking up Sue and throwing her around in the office. TJKC: Let me ask you a more general question about adapting Kirby and Kirby’s ideas. With CGI being so prevalent nowadays, it seems that you can—it’s more possible to sort of encapsulate the phantasmagoria of Kirby’s vision. MIKE: Absolutely. TJKC: But do you feel that’s something that producers and executives would want to shy away from, or do you feel that Hollywood is ready for the Kirby machinery and the cosmic angle? Do you think that that’s going to just go over most viewers’ heads? Is that something that you would ever consider when working on a script? MIKE: Oh, no. I tried to evoke Kirby stuff as much as possible. I think on the first page of my F4 script, I described the Kirby machinery in there. I really wanted that to be the set design, that you would see all those huge, crazy machines. And the same thing applies to my Hulk script, because I used the Leader in there, and it didn’t make it into the movie. I was hoping also to see all those big, crazy machines in the Leader’s lair. I think that seeing Kirby images up on screen, up on Kirby’s scale, is something that the audiences are ready for, and they’re starving for. One of the bigger moments that I wrote for the Hulk movie was the battle in the desert, where he’s throwing the tanks around. But that is so clearly a Jack Kirby moment. It was one of the things that I think got the most positive reaction from the movie, when you finally get to see the Hulk unleash, going against the military. When I was a

kid reading the Hulk comics, that was what I wanted to see on screen. TJKC: “Hulk smash.” MIKE: Yeah! The problem is, it’s one thing—when Jack Kirby was drawing it, it’s paper and ink and his incredible imagination. When you’re turning it into a movie, it’s tens of millions of dollars for just one of those sequences. So, yeah, I thought as CGI was coming up that it would become that simple, that it would almost be less expensive to do things that big. But it hasn’t worked out that way. It’s really, really expensive to do CGI and have it look good. TJKC: And that’s just because of the time constraints. You have to pay the artists to create all those effects. MIKE: Well, it’s hard to do. If you look at the Hulk movie, where the Hulk is a CGI character entirely, some of the shots look amazing, some of the shots look terrific. And some of the shots do not look amazing. It’s just very, very hard to make it come across. TJKC: You said that the story that made it onto the screen was a lot different than your script. You had a director who had never directed a film like that before. There was a lot of darkness and somberness in that film. MIKE: Yeah. Well... in the script development, I was preceded on that movie by John Turman. He wrote the first drafts, like, in 1994, ’95, I think. I never saw any of his material when I wrote mine in ’98, but I think that the producers were probably coaching me a little bit with some of his material, so there were a few things that he did that I did, as well. But we both had one thing in common. We both, I think almost unique to the zillion other writers who worked on it, wanted to bring in the character angle for Hulk, that Bruce Banner had a very rough childhood, and it had caused psychological turbulence for him. TJKC: Was that something you got from the comics? MIKE: That was something we got from the comics. My understanding of the history of this in the comics, is that Bill Mantlo created the angle that Banner had an abusive father, and that Peter David took it to many other levels, with Banner and the Hulk going into therapy and the various things that he did with that. But the thing that John and I both tried to do with our drafts was to use that backstory to create a psychological context for Banner’s problems with anger. When James Schamus took over on the script, he brought the father into the foreground by making him a character in the present, and I think that sort of knocked the movie out of whack a little bit. It made the movie almost as much about the father, David Banner, as it was about Bruce Banner, and I think that was a mistake. In terms of the darkness that you’re talking about, I think it was a huge mistake

because my seven-year-old son is really into it. I was hoping to see the giant Kirby machines in Reed’s lab.

to make a Hulk movie that little kids could not, and should not, go see. I mean, just from the opening credits, where you’ve got vivisection happening under the titles, you had kids shrieking from the theater just based on that. But when you get into the rest of it, with the depiction of the father killing the mother with a butcher knife, it was a very hard thing for families to take, especially when the movie was marketed towards kids all year long. That Hulk Hands aisle was set up in Toys ’R’ Us around here four or five months before the movie came out. TJKC: Let’s talk a bit about your basic philosophy in adapting comics to screen. This summer Fantastic 4, which you worked on, and Batman Begins are two of the biggest movies, and the biggest movie is War of the Worlds, which you could certainly argue has a lot of comic book elements in it, and just genre, a lot of influences. Before F4 came out, you had The Incredibles. I was wondering what you felt when you saw it. MIKE: Well, I’d been out to the F4 set in Vancouver just to visit. I wasn’t working, but I took my family out to visit about two weeks before The Incredibles came out. I took my son to see the movie, and on one level, I really enjoyed it. On another level, I was looking at it, just pulling apart all the influences of this thing, going, “Oh, I see Jonny Quest there, and James Bond there, and the Silver Age Flash, and all kinds of stuff.” But, yeah, I kept going, “Wow! Look at all the Fantastic Four angles that are in here. What awful timing.” It just cast a giant shadow on all the media coverage of the movie; any reporter who was looking for a way to slam the movie had it, y’know, to say, “Oh, haven’t we seen this movie?” and the like. So that was frustrating, to see a lot of good FF gags be used in that movie. For instance, one of the big moments in one of my F4 scripts was a classic thing that you saw in the Fantastic Four comics all the time, that I always wanted to see on screen: Mr. Fantastic turning himself into a parachute to save somebody else. And, y’know, bang, there it was in 72

The Incredibles. Well, this is fun and everything, but I would have preferred to see it in the Fantastic 4 movie. [laughter] I wish that the timing had been a little different on that movie. In one way, I wish the movie had come out earlier, because The Incredibles was such a huge hit, and it felt like a Silver Age movie. There was a lot of Silver Age Marvel, a lot of Silver Age DC in it. If that movie had come out and been that kind of hit two years earlier, I think with F4 we would have gotten even more of a Silver Age feel. I think they would have felt like it was not only possible, but required for them to do that. It should have come out earlier, or later. If it came out later, then we wouldn’t be listening to this, “Man, isn’t that a ripoff of The Incredibles?”. TJKC: But I think, in the end result, there was a lot of fear that the public would reject the F4 movie because of The Incredibles, and since a lot of people aren’t familiar with the source material, they’d think F4 was a ripoff instead of vice versa. MIKE: Exactly. Right. That’s something that I know Fox publicity was just trying to fight against ever since The Incredibles opened, because when it opened, that was pretty much when they were ramping up the publicity, with on-set interviews and the buildup to the summer. TJKC: Let’s talk about, as a writer, what your involvement in the actual production of the film is. There’s a preconception among people who don’t really understand how films are made that the writer’s part of the production team. You work on films where you write a script that ends up being very different than the script that is filmed. When you do a piece like the Hulk or F4, what is your involvement once the script is written? MIKE: There’s not much. After I’ve done my job, there’s not that much for me to do. I did go to visit the F4 set in Vancouver because I’ve got good relations with the guys at Marvel, but I wasn’t there working. I was strictly there as a tourist. I went with my son and my wife, just

TJKC: Maybe they didn’t have the budget for that. [laughs] MIKE: Oh, they didn’t quite get there. But the way the movie is structured, there’s sort of a promise that more is coming, so I would hope and expect to see a lot more of that in the future. But once you’ve turned in your script, as far as being on the set, it’s kind of like being a ghost in a haunted house. Y’know, you can kind of flutter around and say, “Wait a minute, I liked this house better when the couch was closer to the window,” but nobody’s going to listen to you. And that’s probably as it should be. You’re just getting in the way if you’re doing things like that. Once they’re on the set and they’re shooting, they’re very busy and they’re trying to get it out, and the die is cast. So there’s really nothing for me to do except go have a good time and horse around with Michael Chiklis. TJKC: How do you feel as a writer when it is taken out of your hands, and you’re no longer in control of where it goes? And then there might be writers who come along and rewrite your work. MIKE: Well, I try to be as objective as possible when I look at other people working on the same project that I’m on. For instance, the way John Turman and I met was we were arbitrating to figure out who was going to get credit on the Hulk movie, and when you do that, you get the big pile of all the scripts that have been developed. I read John’s script and said, “Wow! This guy’s version is great!” And he really liked mine, as well, so a mutual friend hooked us up. I try to be as objective and see that somebody else might be doing something better than I am. There are aspects of John’s script that I like better, much better, than mine. But, on the other hand, it is very frustrating when you look at things that happen later that do make it to the screen that are not nearly as good. I understand when changes are made sometimes to accommodate the budget. There’s a physical reality, for instance, to deal with, gigantic action set pieces. If you can only afford three gigantic action set pieces, and there’s six in the script, then the real world is the real world, something’s got to go. But it does get frustrating when there are a lot of character things that are dropped into a script that are not an improvement. That is the most frustrating thing for me, when it’s something that is just—it’s

free, the character stuff is free. And when that gets screwed up, I get angry. TJKC: Let me talk about your life as a screenwriter. I have a gist of an understanding about how things work, but say you wanted to adapt Machine Man as a film. Would that be something that you would write on your own and approach them, or do you wait for an assignment to come to you? You’d mentioned before that the assignments were being handed out for these films. MIKE: It depends. Sometimes you get a phone call. Fantastic 4, I chased. On the Hulk, I got called twice—well, actually, at least twice—to do that, because that’s just been in development for something like ten years before the movie came out. Now, in the case of doing something obscure like Machine Man, that would be something where you would go, “Wow, what a great idea. Let’s find who’s got the rights.” In the case of DC, you pretty much know it’s Warners and New Line, and you’ve got to go through them first. Marvel, they could be anywhere. It would not surprise me to learn that Machine Man was in development, because he’s got just about everything going someplace. But it’s funny you should mention that, because John Turman and I just loved Kirby’s stuff, and have been trying to figure out if there’s a way to get Challengers of the Unknown going as a movie. And that’s the case of something where outside of the comic world nobody knows what it is. There are no producers calling us, saying, “We think the public is ready for Challengers of the Unknown.” This is me and John just working various angles to see if there’s a way to get it done. Actually, we’re just starting to do that again. We couldn’t get it going last year, but we’re going to try again this year, I think.

TJKC: So you almost started at the end, because you did your penultimate Kirby movie. Where do you go from there? MIKE: It may not be. Like I said, maybe there’s a chance that I’ll wind up doing another F4 movie. I would certainly love that opportunity. And if that doesn’t happen, then maybe John and I will get a shot at doing something that could be even bigger, if we get to do Challengers. No, I think there’s room for a lot more. There were peeks of Kirby in both the Hulk movie and the Fantastic 4 movie, but I think it’s certainly possible to top those. TJKC: Were you a fan of the Seventies material at all—the DC New Gods/Fourth World material? MIKE: I didn’t enjoy it that much when I was a kid, because I was a kid when that stuff came out. When Kirby moved over to DC, I was one of those kids who felt like it was as if the Beatles are breaking up. When he had moved to DC, it was great work, but I was not, as an eleven-year-old kid, ready for what the Jimmy Olsen comics became. They were really mind-blowing. I’ve gone back to them since and said, “Wow, this is really, really incredible stuff,” but I just wasn’t ready for it at the time. TJKC: Do you think that any of that stuff would ever work on screen, or is it just too esoteric? MIKE: It’s funny, a couple of years ago I was actually talking to Warners about doing Mister Miracle. They wanted to do Mister

(previous page, top) You can see the Kirby influence on the Hulk film by comparing this old house ad by Jack for Greenskin’s series in Tales To Astonish. (previous page, bottom) The Incredibles managed to steal a lot of F4’s thunder, reportedly causing rewrites and even reshoots of a few scenes. (below) A Machine Man film? If producers went back to the original source material from the character’s debut in 2001: A Space Odyssey #8 (July 1977), it might have a shot! Here’s his debut splash page pencils. Hulk film ©2005 Universal Pictures, Inc. Hulk, Machine Man TM & ©2005 Marvel Characters, Inc. Incredibles ©2005 Disney Enterprises, Inc./Pixar Animation Studios.

TJKC: It’s interesting because Challengers was kind of Kirby’s precursor to FF in a lot of ways. MIKE: And you know what? That would be an argument that I would make this year that I didn’t bother making the last time around, but now that F4 has come out and done so well, I would remind them of that. TJKC: When you were a kid and reading comics, what were your favorite Kirby books? MIKE: Oh, boy. The Fantastic Four ones. My favorites of all time are the middle run, from about the Forties through the Eighties. TJKC: Well, that’s certainly the peak, that’s Kirby’s peak as an artist. MIKE: I just love those books. And, like I said, it was a big delight to take them out while I was working on Fantastic 4, and it’s been a delight also to just take them out and read them to my son. He’d rather sit down with me and read some of those things than watch cartoons and play video games. TJKC: That’s a lot of reading. I’ve noticed the things are very densely dialogued. MIKE: I noticed that, too, because I’ve read all kinds of different things to my son, like picture books or contemporary comic books or things like that, and those things fly by pretty quick. But if you sit down and try to read him an issue of Fantastic Four, not only does it take a long time, but I’d forgotten how good the vocabulary is in these comics. And I was thinking, “Wow, people always thought these were for morons or something,” but you’d have to run to the dictionary even for some of the things Ben Grimm says, leaving aside the big, expository speeches from Reed Richards or Doom. So, yeah, there’s no question that that run of FF is my favorite Kirby material of all time. 73

(below) Mister Miracle #10, page 5 (Sept. 1972). At this point, Jack had abandoned the strip’s Fourth World ties, leaving a series that might actually make a good TV show. (next page, top) Mike hit it big in 1993 as screenwriter on Cliffhanger, starring Sylvester Stallone. Mr. Miracle TM & ©2005 DC Comics. Cliffhanger ©TriStar Pictures.

Miracle as a TV show. And I looked at it, and I said—I mean, I love it, and I actually think that would make a good movie, but I said I don’t know how it’d work for TV, because you can’t do the literal version, or even a toned-down version of the comic with TV budgets. Even if you threw out all the science-fiction angles— and I think there was some talk of just making him into an escape artist, period—then you’ve got a guy doing MacGyver-type set pieces, only bigger, every single week. And I said I don’t know if you can do that on a TV budget. So it kind of fell apart. But I think Mister Miracle is one that certainly could work as a feature. New Gods is really interesting, too. I’ve heard rumors over the years—nothing official, just stuff I picked up on the Internet—

but I read somewhere that somebody at Warners was thinking about New Gods as an animated feature. TJKC: Actually, they’ve used a lot of those New Gods characters in the cartoons, especially the Superman cartoons, and the Justice League as well, so maybe that’s the best place for that kind of work. MIKE: It’s big. When you actually say “the gods” in any context, it’s hard to keep it real. I wrote a script about the Greek gods, and it’s very, very hard. I think this is one of the reasons that Thor is one of the major Marvel characters that they haven’t been able to get off the dime on because it’s so big. I think that’s another reason Silver Surfer is taking so long to get going. TJKC: Well, ironically, they did a treatment of Thor in a Hulk TV movie. MIKE: Oh, yeah, I remember that. That was awful. I hated all the pilot stuff that they were doing with those later Hulk movies. I really enjoyed the early Hulk shows, especially the pilot for the Hulk series, but by the time they got around to the fake Daredevil thing and the Thor thing— I’ve got that one on laser disc. When I bought it, I thought it was actually the second TV movie. The original show started with a couple of TV movies and then it became a weekly, and it was called The Return of the Incredible Hulk, and so I thought it was the second original TV movie. TJKC: You made your name with two pretty big projects, Cliffhanger and GoldenEye. How did that come about? I mean, you just seemed to fall out of the sky and land two big budget films. MIKE: Yeah, it was the overnight success story, only it took me years and years and years. I moved to LA in about ’85, ’86, and I was working as a script reader for a long time, trying to get some spec stuff going. I just took a year of my life, pushed everything to the side, to write Cliffhanger on spec. When I put it out, I said, “Okay, this thing is way, way, way too expensive for anybody to make. Maybe it’ll just be a good sample for me to get writing assignments for action movies.” But Carolco Pictures bought it and put it into production right away, so there’s no question that I was lucky that they were ready to go on it almost the second they had it in their hands. TJKC: It’s a pretty heartbreaking life trying to get started in Hollywood as a writer. MIKE: It’s really hard. It took me a long time, because the

job I took as a script reader, you’re sitting around all day reading other people’s scripts, doing notes on them. TJKC: It gets kind of numbing after a while, I’d think. MIKE: Well, yeah. You do that for five or six hours, and then you go home, and you don’t really feel like sitting down with your own script after doing that. So what I wound up having to do just to break out of the cycle was, I was able to arrange my schedule so that I could do it part-time, where I would just do the script reading about three days a week. Then I just said, “I’m not going to do anything the rest of this year, I’m just going to take the other four days of each week and write.” It was exhausting, but I got it all done. TJKC: The critics went way over the top in criticizing the F4 movie, and I thought it was really interesting that they were so roundly rebuffed by the public. MIKE: Well, y’know, it’s interesting. With the reviews of F4 and Hulk, the very first wave of both was positive. The very first prerelease stuff was positive on that, but then once those guys got a whiff— they do tend to travel in packs, a lot of them. Once it became the cool thing to knock either movie, that just knocked the dominos over for all of them to trash the movie. TJKC: It almost seems like it worked in the film’s favor, though, because people would go to see it and go, “Oh, this is a good movie. What are they talking about?” And then they’ll tell everybody, “You know that movie that the critics trashed? It’s really good!” MIKE: I thought they were really good. When I tell you the early ones went well, I was at the press screening where I live in St. Petersburg, and I did a press screening with the guys who wrote for four different local media. I mean, major papers, not just the guy doing the weekly shopper or something, and they all gave it great reviews. I was kind of shocked to see the way some of the reviews came out, but I was pleased that people came out for the movie in spite of that. Everybody enjoyed it. I’ve noticed this summer that, more than any other movie I can remember having done, people are really seeking me out, going, “Wow, that movie was great, I took my kid twice.” TJKC: You might have also benefited that Batman Begins was so dark. MIKE: That was something that, believe me, we were all kind of looking at and banking on a little bit, because we knew that Batman Begins was, in a way, going to have the same problem that the Hulk ultimately did, which is that you really can’t take kids to it. I think some people took kids to Batman Begins, anyway. TJKC: You know, people brought their kids when I saw it. I wanted to slap them in the head. I’m, like, “Get these kids out of here!”

MIKE: Well, y’know, it’s hard for people to know, because the movie is marketed all year round. For months and months leading to the release, it’s all over the cartoon networks, and so the kids are seeing it, saying, “Let’s go see Batman.” It’s very strange. It was really weird for me to be going to a Batman movie and to not bring my son. On the one hand, as an adult, I was very happy to see this dark, serious, gritty version of it. On the other hand, I’m going, “I can’t bring my seven-year-old son to a Batman movie? That seems kind of weird.” But, yeah, I figured this summer that the Batman movie would be very good and would have legs. Even though it didn’t have the opening that Warners hoped it would have, I figured it would have legs with adults, that adults would come out of that movie going, “Wow, I never thought I would enjoy a comic book movie that much.” And that’s pretty much how it turned out. I figured, before the fact, that it would be sort of the same way with Fantastic 4, only with kids, that there would be a lot of repeat business from families and kids going again to matinees and things like that. It has had a pretty steady performance, even to this day. TJKC: Well, the movie’s made almost three hundred million dollars worldwide. That’s a hit by any standard. MIKE: Yeah, I know. We still haven’t opened in Italy, Japan, and a few other places. So it’s going to top three hundred. TJKC: What do you feel about the future of comic books and movies? Do you feel like it’s something that’s going to continue? There was a period when the first Batman movie hit, then you had a whole slew of really bad comic book movies like Dick Tracy and Judge Dredd and Tank Girl, and everybody thought— MIKE: Steel. TJKC: And Steel. [laughs] Everybody thought, “Okay, well, that’s the end of that.” Now that Marvel is much more involved in the production, and DC has always been—Steel and Joel Schumacher notwithstanding—very involved in the making of the films, do you feel that because you’re seeing successes like the Fantastic 4, and Batman Begins, this is something that is going to continue, or do you feel like that this is just another trend? MIKE: Well, it’s impossible to say, because to say comic books as source material is a trend, I think that will just go on forever. Batman in particular has shown the total range there is to an interpretation of a hero. Now you have pretty much every conceivable interpretation of Batman. They’ve done the very silly TV show, which was also a very silly movie. You had the Batman movies of the ’90s, which kind of veered between serious and silly, and the cartoon shows which have veered between the silly ones of the ’60s and ’70s to the serious-but-stillfun ones of the past few years, and now Batman Begins. And that’s all from one character. I think that the only threat there would be to comic book movies as a trend burning out is if there’s a sameness to the storytelling. There’s definitely a trap you can fall into, for instance, when you do an introductory movie, because, when you come right down to it, a lot of comic book origins are very, very similar. The real acid test for movies, for comic book movies and super-hero movies, is once you’ve done that origin

story, what do you do next, and how do you keep the interest going? On F4, I think it’s pretty clear that what they need to do is keep the family dynamic intact from the comics, but try to top what was done in the first one in terms of spectacle and adventure. And I think that’s certainly possible. With something like that Hulk, because the movie was a little bit schizophrenic, you run into a fork in the road for the sequel. What do you do; get more introspective about Banner’s character, or do you try to make it more about “Hulk smash”? TJKC: It seems that Spider-Man 2 and X-Men 2 were almost better received than the first movies. Are the sequels liberating when you’re dealing with a comic book movie? You don’t have that burden of establishing the origin? MIKE: In one respect, yes, because when you’re doing a set-up movie, there’s all kinds of material that you have to deal with whether you want to deal with it or not, just in terms of explaining how everything’s set-up. Once the bulk of that set-up is done for the heroes—explaining how they got the powers or why they’re putting on a suit or whatever—once you’ve got that out of the way, then, yeah, you are able to have some more fun with it. I think SpiderMan 2 and X-Men 2 benefited from that dynamic, and they also were well-received because they still explored the character stuff. With Spider-Man 2, it explored Peter Parker’s continuing problems. Basically, he was having a little super-hero fatigue and he was getting tired of it. And X-Men 2 really upped the ante in showing how the X-Men were really at war with the US government, and not a war of their choosing. So, yeah, with the second movie, you have a platform to sort of cultivate the seeds that are planted in the first. TJKC: Do you have any plans to work on any sequels, or is it not up to you? MIKE: Oh, it ain’t up to me. [laughter] I would love to do a Hulk sequel, and an F4 sequel, I would love that. But that’s up to Mr. Arad, and he’ll call me or he won’t call me on them, but I would certainly love to do either of those. TJKC: Well, now the big question. We have a lot of screenwriters working in comics. Is that in the cards for you at all, or do you prefer to stay away from that? MIKE: No, I’d love to. I was at San Diego Con this year, walking around meeting different guys in independent comics. That’s definitely something that I would be interested in doing, because a lot of the things that I write, or that I’ve written and attempted to pitch somewhere, are too expensive to film. But they wouldn’t be too expensive to draw, so yeah, that’s something that I would like to do. It requires a little more thought, I guess, on my part, because I haven’t worked in the comics field before, and it’s kind of baffling to me, because I don’t know what the market is, or who’s reading comics anymore. ’Cause, y’know, where I live, we don’t have a comics shop, it seems like there’s huge distribution problems; these are all things that I have to try to figure out before putting a toe in that world. ★ (above) A handwritten note Kirby jotted down on the back of a stat of FF #46, page 2, sent by Marvel to help him maintain continuity from issue to issue. We’re unsure whether it was an idea Jack had, or one Stan Lee might’ve given to him in a phone conversation. Does anyone have an idea what issue this sub-plot might’ve ended up in? 75

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Edited by ROY THOMAS The greatest ’zine of the ’60s is back, all-new, and focused on Golden & Silver Age comics and creators with articles, interviews, unseen art, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

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ROY THOMAS covers his 40-YEAR career in comics, with ADAMS, BUSCEMA, COLAN, DITKO, GIL KANE, KIRBY, STAN LEE, ORDWAY, PÉREZ, ROMITA, and many others! Also, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER and more!

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ALTER EGO #51

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Golden Age Batman artist/Bob Kane ghost LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ interviewed, the Golden & Silver Ages of AUSTRALIAN SUPER-HEROES, Mad artist DAVE BERG interviewed, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT on WILL EISNER, ALEX TOTH and more!

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DIAMOND’S “2004 BEST PUBLICATION ABOUT COMICS!”

#1: PÉREZ, KIRBY, BUSCEMA, KUBERT!

#2: HUGHES, RUDE, WAGNER, STEVENS!

#3: EVANIER, GIFFEN, MAGUIRE, BOLLAND!

“PRO2PRO” interview between GEORGE PÉREZ and MARV WOLFMAN (with UNSEEN PÉREZ ART), “ROUGH STUFF” featuring JACK KIRBY’s PENCIL ART, “GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD” on the first JLA/AVENGERS, “BEYOND CAPES” on DC and Marvel’s TARZAN (with KUBERT & BUSCEMA ART), “OFF MY CHEST” editorial by INFANTINO, & more!

“PRO2PRO” between ADAM HUGHES & MIKE W. BARR (with UNSEEN HUGHES ART) and MATT WAGNER and DIANA SCHUTZ, “ROUGH STUFF” HUGHES PENCIL ART, STEVE RUDE’s unseen SPACE GHOST/ HERCULOIDS team-up, Bruce Jones’ ALIEN WORLDS & TWISTED TALES, an “OFF MY CHEST” editorial by MIKE W. BARR on the DC IMPLOSION, & more!

“PRO2PRO” between KEITH GIFFEN, J.M. DeMATTEIS and KEVIN MAGUIRE on their JLA WORK, “ROUGH STUFF” PENCIL ART by ARAGONÉS, HERNANDEZ BROS., MIGNOLA, BYRNE, KIRBY, HUGHES, two unknown PLASTIC MAN movies, a look at the Joker’s history with O’NEIL, ADAMS, ENGLEHART, ROGERS & BOLLAND, an editorial by MARK EVANIER, & more!

#8: ADAMS, VON EEDEN, #4: BYRNE, CLAREMONT, #5: ROSS, HUGHES, LYNDA #6: WRIGHTSON, COLAN, #7: APARO, BYRNE, CARTER, LOU FERRIGNO! THOMAS, GODZILLA! LEE, EVANIER, & MORE! & ’70s BLACK HEROES! CASEY, SIMONSON! “PRO2PRO” between JOHN BYRNE and CHRIS CLAREMONT on their X-MEN WORK and WALT SIMONSON and JOE CASEY on Walter’s THOR WORK, WOLVERINE PENCIL ART by BUSCEMA, LEE, COCKRUM, BYRNE, & GIL KANE, LEN WEIN’S TEEN WOLVERINE, PUNISHER’S 30TH & SECRET WARS’ 20TH ANNIVERSARIES (with UNSEEN ZECK ART), & more!

Covers by ALEX ROSS & ADAM HUGHES, Wonder Woman TV series in-depth, LYNDA CARTER INTERVIEW, WONDER WOMAN TV ART GALLERY, Marvel’s TV Hulk, SpiderMan, Captain America, & Dr. Strange, LOU FERRIGNO INTERVIEW, super-hero cartoons you didn’t see, pencil gallery by JERRY ORDWAY, STAR TREK in comics, & JOHN ROMITA SR. editorial on Marvel’s movies!

TOMB OF DRACULA revealed with GENE COLAN and MARV WOLFMAN, LEN WEIN & BERNIE WRIGHTSON on Swamp Thing’s roots, STEVE BISSETTE and RICK VEITCH on their Swamp work, pencil art by SMITH, BRUNNER, PLOOG, BISSETTE, COLAN, & WRIGHTSON, editorial by ROY THOMAS, GODZILLA comics (with TRIMPE art), CHARLTON horror, PREZ, and more!

SWAN/ANDERSON cover, history of BRAVE AND THE BOLD, JIM APARO interview, tribute to BOB HANEY, FANTASTIC FOUR ROUNDTABLE with STAN LEE, MARK WAID, and others, EVANIER & MEUGNIOT on DNAgents, pencil art by ROSS, TOTH, COCKRUM, HECK, ROBBINS, NEWTON, and BYRNE, DENNY O’NEIL editorial, a tour of METROPOLIS, IL, & more!

DENNY O’NEIL & Justice League Unlimited voice actor PHIL LaMARR discuss GL JOHN STEWART, NEW X-MEN pencil art by NEAL ADAMS, ARTHUR ADAMS, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, ALAN DAVIS, JIM LEE, ADAM HUGHES, STORM’s 30-year history, animated TV’s black heroes (with TOTH art), TONY ISABELLA and TREVOR VON EEDEN on BLACK LIGHTNING, & more!

#9: RUDE, TRUMAN, KANE & COSMIC HEROES!

#10: ADAMS, GRELL, KALUTA, CHAYKIN!

#11: BUSCEMA, JUSKO, BOLLAND, ARAGONÉS!

#12: GIBBONS, BYRNE, MILLER, FRENZ!

#13 (NOV.): STATON, CARDY, EISNER, ROMITA!

MIKE BARON and STEVE RUDE on NEXUS past and present, a colossal GIL KANE pencil art gallery, a look at Marvel’s STAR WARS comics, secrets of DC’s unseen CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS SEQUEL, TIM TRUMAN on his GRIMJACK SERIES, MIKE GOLD editorial, THANOS history, TIME WARP revisited, an all-new STEVE RUDE COVER, & more!

NEAL ADAMS and DENNY O’NEIL on RA’S AL GHUL’s history (with Adams art), O’Neil and MICHAEL KALUTA on THE SHADOW, MIKE GRELL on JON SABLE FREELANCE, HOWIE CHAYKIN interview, DOC SAVAGE in comics, BATMAN ART GALLERY by SIENKIEWICZ, SIMONSON, PAUL SMITH, BOLLAND, HANNIGAN, MAZZUCCHELLI, and others, and a new cover by ADAMS!

ROY THOMAS, KURT BUSIEK, and JOE JUSKO on CONAN (with art by JOHN BUSCEMA, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, NEAL ADAMS, JUSKO, & others), SERGIO ARAGONÉS & MARK EVANIER on GROO, DC’s never-published KING ARTHUR, pencil art gallery by KIRBY, PÉREZ, MOEBIUS, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, BOLLAND, & others, and a new BUSCEMA/JUSKO Conan cover!

’70s and ’80s character revamps with DAVE GIBBONS, ROY THOMAS & KURT BUSIEK, TOM DeFALCO & RON FRENZ on SpiderMan’s 1980s “black” costume change, DENNY O’NEIL on Superman’s 1970 revamp, JOHN BYRNE’s aborted SHAZAM! series detailed, pencil art gallery with FRANK MILLER, LEE WEEKS, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, CHARLES VESS, and more!

CARDY interview, ENGLEHART and MOENCH on kung-fu comics, “Pro2Pro” with STATON and CUTI on Charlton’s EMan, pencil art gallery featuring MILLER, KUBERT, GIORDANO, SWAN, GIL KANE, COLAN, COCKRUM, and others, EISNER’s A Contract with God; “The Death of Romance (Comics)” (with art by ROMITA, SR. and TOTH), & more!

WN #1: (88 pgs.) MARK WN #2: (96 pgs.) ERIK WN #3: (80 pgs.) DEODATO BAGLEY cover & interview, LARSEN cover & interview, JR. Hulk cover, intvs. & articles BRIAN BENDIS & STAN LEE STAN BERKOWITZ on the by BRUCE JONES, AXEL interviews, JOE QUESADA on Justice League cartoon, TODD ALONSO, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, what editors really want, TOM ALCOTT on Samurai Jack, LEE KURT BUSIEK, FABIAN DeFALCO, J.M. DeMATTEIS, NORDLING, ANNE D. BERN- NICIEZA, STEVEN GRANT, more! $8 US DENNY O’NEIL, more! $8 US STEIN, & more! $8 US

WN #4: (80 pgs.) Interviews WN #5: (80 pgs.) Interviews WN #6: (80 pgs.) Interviews WN #7: (80 pgs.) Interviews WN #8: (80 pgs.) Pt. 1 of WN #9: (80 pgs.) NEAL WN #10: (80 pgs.) Interviews and lessons with WARREN and lessons by WILL EISNER, and lessons with BENDIS and and lessons by JEPH LOEB & crossover with DRAW!, show- ADAMS on his writing (with and lessons by Justice League ELLIS, HOWARD CHAYKIN, J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI, OEMING on POWERS, MARK TIM SALE, JIM LEE, CHUCK ing a comic created from lots of Adams art), plus inter- Unlimited’s DWAYNE McDUFFIE, PAUL DINI, FABIAN NICIEZA, BOB SCHRECK, FABIAN WAID on FANTASTIC FOUR, DIXON, JOHN JACKSON script to print, plus interviews views and lessons by GEOFF “Hate’s” PETER BAGGE, comics KURT BUSIEK, TOM DeFALCO, NICIEZA, PAUL DINI, JOEY BOB SCHRECK continues, MILLER, MARK WHEATLEY, and lessons by STUART JOHNS, MICHAEL OEMING, scripter/editor GERRY CONWAY, STEVEN GRANT, DENNY CAVALIERI, DIANA SCHUTZ, DIANA SCHUTZ, SCOTT M. DENNY O’NEIL, YVETTE MOORE, DON McGREGOR, & BATTON LASH, secrets of writer/editor PAUL BENJAMIN, KAPLAN, more! $8 US O’NEIL, more! $8 US DENNY O’NEIL, more! $8 US ROSENBERG, more! $8 US Indy creator secrets! $8 US pitching ideas, & more! $8 US & more! $8 US

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Comments

Send letters to: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR c/o TwoMorrows • NEW ADDRESS! 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 E-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com • See back issue excerpts at: www.twomorrows.com The legends are true: all letters sent to TJKC will be considered for publication, but are likely to be edited!

(Looks like we just missed our planned Halloween release for this issue, but I hope everyone’ll still enjoy the spooky coverage of THE DEMON and the BLACK MAGIC tales herein. Now, on to letters on #42 and #43:) I lived a few miles from Mike Royer while he was inking Jack, and I’d visit his studio from time to time. On one visit (someone was with me, though I can’t recall who), I spied several pages featuring a new character who turned out to be Captain Victory. I asked about them. It was an awkward moment. Finally, Mike said he was working on a top-secret project. He said Jack had backing for a new line of comics, Kirby Comics, and quoted him as saying, “Stan will sh*t when he finds out.” Paying for silence, I suspect, Mike gave us a quick glimpse of three or four splash pages for companion strips, and then put all the art away and we talked about other things. A couple of months later I asked Mike about Kirby Comics and he said the financing had fallen through. Richard Kyle (I contacted Mike Royer, who confirmed that, indeed, Richard’s recollections are accurate, and there was definitely a proposed new line of comics called Jack Kirby Comics, featuring CAPTAIN VICTORY, SATAN’S SIX, and THUNDERFOOT. This was around the time Jack was at Marvel in the 1970s, and no one can remember who the entrepreneurs were who convinced Jack to draw complete stories “on spec,” but Mike at least was paid for his work. Jack was eventually able to sell CAPTAIN VICTORY (with additional pages added) as a Pacific Comics series in 1981. SATAN’S SIX went to Topps Comics in 1993 in conjunction with the Secret City Saga, just before Jack’s passing. See page 5 of this issue for a closer look at THUNDERFOOT.)

by a mystery inker. I know who the mystery inker was and I even know why the Superman “S” was left uninked. One day, having nothing better to do, Roz decided to ink a page of Jack’s work she found lying around. It was kind of an experiment to see if she could ink well enough to do some of the work and bring more money into the house. Knowing that Jack drew a lousy Superman emblem, she left that and the plan was for me to put it in. I never got around to it and I think, when I politely told Jack the inking wasn’t great, he abandoned the idea of Roz inking any of his professional work. (She did ink a few things he did for Ruby-Spears, later on.) Mark Evanier I THOUGHT that the babe on the prototype cover of STARBABY [TJKC #43] looked familiar. A search thru my “swipe files” was rewarded with paydirt: the March 1972 PLAYBOY, which featured playmate of the month Ellen Michaels... the photo in question appeared in the spread that accompanied the centerfold. I bought a box of ratty old PLAYBOYs at a comic con years ago, and tore out all the poses for my reference files (yeah, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!). Since Steve Sherman says that HE did the mock up, I suppose the copy of PLAYBOY came out from under HIS mattress, but it is interesting to be able to track down one of the references that went into a stillborn project associated with Kirby. The “public domain” reprints are great, as is the continued investigation into inkers... keep it coming. Jerry McClanahan

Just got the new JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR and it’s, as always, wonderful. You printed an unused page of JIMMY OLSEN (below) inked

Regarding the controversy that has sprung up over the appearance early this year of the “original” Jack Kirby cover art for CAPTAIN AMERICA #200 (above): I am that “current owner (who) is a highly respected member of the comics community...” (And thanks to 78

whoever wrote that; I do try to keep things clean in both life and work!) Now that this year’s San Diego Comic-Con is over, and I’ve had a chance to show the actual piece to several very knowledgeable Kirby scholars, here’s the story as completely as I am able to put it together. Keep in mind that all of this happened nearly 30 years ago. I purchased this art at the 1976 Phil Seuling July 4th comics convention in New York City. I wish I could remember who I bought it from, but memory no longer serves; all I recall is that it was a dealer in the exhibit hall. Memory suggests I may have paid $50 for it at the time. The dealer told me that the artwork had been inked (probably by Frank Giacoia) on an overlay, which is why the pencil art was available. Once I’d bought the page, I took it over to where Jack was sitting and asked him to sign it. Without hesitation, he put pen to paper and did so; he was very busy at that moment so I thanked him and left. When I got home from the convention, I noticed that the pencil art was pretty well uniformly toned a light gray. I figured, having seen the same thing happen to Wendy’s pencil artwork, this was from the page’s being in a flat drawer with many other pages of pencil art, all of them shifting about, the soft pencil becoming smudged. Being the callow twenty-something comic book geek that I was, I thought that the piece would look much better if I did a little judicious “cleaning up.” I took an art eraser and, as carefully as I could, removed the smudge/tone from various places on the cover—some of the background, Cap’s “A” and chest star, the shield—to give it what I thought was a bit of dimensionality. Mea culpa... but it explains the comments about the shading. Cut forward nearly 30 years, to Wendy and me considering consigning a portion of our art collection to Heritage Galleries for auction. Since we also own a number of other Kirby pieces of art, more personal to us, we felt all right letting the CAP #200 cover go. No one was more surprised than I was when the controversy sprung up—especially at the tone of some of the correspondence which seemed to suggest that the only motive “the current owner” could have would be to put one over on some unlucky buyer! I figured that this year’s San Diego expo would represent my best chance to talk to as many experts on Kirby artwork as possible, so I brought along the cover (which had, by mutual agreement, been withdrawn from the auction). I had the chance to speak to Mark Evanier, John Morrow, Mike Royer, Glen Gold, and a couple more folks whose names escape me just now. First let me say that, while for almost three decades I have believed that I owned a genuine piece of Jack Kirby artwork in this cover, and have been happy believing so, I have no interest whatever in trying to maintain that belief in the face of evidence to the contrary, or to argue with people whose knowledge of such things is much greater than mine. I’m quite content to have the mystery resolved, at least to the extent it can be. Of the people I showed the piece to and talked with, every one was of the opin-

ion that the art was a tracing, very likely from the original pencil art or from a photocopy of the original. That part was easily established; what proved more slippery was the “why” of it. I expressed amazement that anyone would go to such trouble to fake a piece of art that, at the time, would not have brought the high prices that Kirby art commands today. Several folks thought that perhaps it might have been copied from the photocopy in order to give the inker a “real” pencil page to ink on overlay; Mike Royer pointed out how that technique was used when creating approved reproductions of Kirby art. Mark Evanier, on the other hand, pointed out that there are people in the world who, for whatever reasons, feel that if they can “swipe” an artist’s work to make it look just like the real thing, then they are in their own mind as good as the original artist. Mark also pointed out that, to someone proficient enough, such a fakery would not take much time at all. The bottom line, then, as far as I can tell is that what I have here is a tracing, with a genuine Jack Kirby signature. We’ll probably never know the “why” or the “who”—but that’s all right. Wendy and I have many wonderful memories of Jack and Roz, as well as some undeniably genuine bits of the King’s artwork. This cover now becomes an interesting bit of Kirby curiosa in its own right. Richard Pini

I just noticed a figure that Vinnie Colletta whited out on a page in the current Heritage Auction. It’s page 11 of THOR #134 in panel 5 (above). You can see the head whited out and the legs but the penciled shoulders are still there! Bruce Hannum (Vinnie only used white-out in spots he couldn’t erase clearly, but we were able to darken the erased areas, so readers could better see the whole figure in the background.) I’ve heard the declaration before about how Colletta’s presence on the issues of Marvel’s THE INVADERS that he inked over Frank Robbins resulted in better sales than when the (arguably better suited for Robbins’ pencil work) Frank Springer took over—but one salient factor keeps getting overlooked: The month at which the inker switch occurred was also the same month that THE INVADERS went monthly, doubling the num-

ber of issues per year required for the reader to keep up with the storylines. Increases in frequency are common times to reassess how much loyalty one has to any existing series— and whether there’s enough funding in the budget to cover the additional expense. For me, acquiring Springer was an impetus towards buying every one of the new, monthly issues, but it’s possible that for some section of the readership, they would have dropped the book whether or not Colletta had been retained as inker.

Also, that TALES TO ASTONISH #64 cover (above) cited as a “particularly striking” example of Colletta’s inks over Kirby—? I always thought that cover was inked by Dick Ayers (and I still do). I e-mailed Ayers about the cover, then sent him a photocopy and he asserted that it wasn’t his inks (first time for everything, I guess). He wrote something about how he always tried to emulate the shine that Wood put on figures, á lá SKY MASTERS (which is news to me). Anyway, he claims it’s not his work. Richard Howell Okay, I’m gonna say it: I like Vince Colletta’s work. Thus, I enjoyed Mark Evanier’s defense (well, it was sort of a defense, I think) of Colletta in TJKC #43. I learned a lot about one of the more controversial figures in comics; a detailed biography of Colletta would certainly get a lot of attention. Why do some people like Colletta’s inking and some don’t? I think it boils down to whether one prefers realistic or symbolic art. One thing Colletta did on Kirby’s pencils was to smooth out the squiggles. For those of us who don’t much care for such squiggles, this is an improvement. I think Kirby’s later work shows the drawbacks of too much of a good thing. On aliens and “gods,” the squiggles were fine. but on characters who were supposed to represent realistic human beings, the squiggles distract from the human qualities that are so important in making fictional characters credible. Colletta isn’t the only one to reduce the squiggle effect. Barry Windsor-Smith, Sid Shores, Wally Wood and, to some extent, Joe Sinnott as well all smoothed out the squiggles (and other extraneous lines), thus making the art more realistic and thus more enjoyable for those of us who like realistic art. For me, the best Kirby art is the first twelve or thirteen pages of CAPTAIN AMERICA’S BICENTENNIAL BATTLES as inked by Windsor-Smith. And Wood’s inks over Kirby’s pencils on the SKY MASTERS newspaper strip are simply fabulous. I prefer photo-realistic art in comics. Not every inker is suited to every penciler, but on Kirby, Colletta was good. Certainly Colletta

took shortcuts, and made changes to some of the pencil art he inked. Occasionally, though, these changes helped. In published examples that I’ve seen, there are a few instances where the removal of extraneous figures or the clarifying of backgrounds helped the storytelling. Will Jarvis, Van Nuys, CA

level and effective accuracy with which Joe managed to “flesh out” Jack’s sketch into impressively realized finished form. The way Joe has joined the right thigh to the hip and torso is truly superb. Spectacular piece! Keep up the good work! Trevor Von Eeden

Mark Evanier makes it clear why, under different circumstances, Vince Colletta would be admired for maximizing his income, and I can tell you it is possible to revile the work without disrespecting the man. The fact remains that, with the exception of the tiny fraction that is in the process of being preserved for posterity in the pencil collection, a staggering proportion of Kirby’s best work has been permanently diminished. The highlight of #43 for me is Gallery 1, featuring the inked and uninked versions of the TALES OF SUSPENSE #93 pages. The Sinnottinked Cap stories are among my favorites... it’s great to see the margin notes and again, the only way these could be better would be the ability to see them before the lettering. Even though Joe is my second-favorite inker, in my opinion he couldn’t improve on Jack’s pencils here; this is particularly evident with the faces of Agent Thirteen. Mike Hill, GREAT BRITAIN

I thought TJKC #43 was one of the most insightful issues in a long time. I was particularly touched by the interview with the Sherman Brothers and how they described Mr. Kirby’s work and thought process. Their lighter, more humorous insights on how Kirby created the stories he did, on how he created work he wanted to see, helped to explain the character of his work. The other time I felt you really struck gold was when someone (I forget who—was it Steve Rude?) asked what Jack dreamt about and Roz said he dreamt about the war, and suddenly a tremendous amount of his work suddenly made more sense. Suddenly I understood his New Gods work a lot more than I had before. That sort of insight where something just clicks and makes sense is one reason why I enjoy your magazine so much. It’s like getting a glimpse into one man’s creative process. Thank you so much. Abel Padilla

The shot of Jack and Spider-Man, a Polaroid taken by me in the late ’80s at a San Diego convention, was simply a photo opportunity and nothing more. Roz, at the time, asked for a copy, which I provided. Imagine my surprise—and chagrin—to see it used now with the caption, “Father and son?” I’d have thought, fifteen years after Steve Ditko’s essay, the matter of SpiderMan’s actual creation would have long been settled. While Jack, Joe Simon and others may’ve had an unpublished character with that name, it’s hardly the same as the highly regarded, well known version. That’s a co-creation between Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Jack’s rendition, with mad scientists and magic rings, remains unused. I don’t like when Jack—or anyone— has their substantial contributions to Marvel downplayed or ignored. Seeing only one individual in a creative partnership singled out for recognition is wrong. But it’s no better, in the case of Spider-Man, when it’s Jack making the unsubstantiated assertions. He had hundreds of characters where he could legitimately claim significant or major input in their creation. Spider-Man, in my view, isn’t one of them. I didn’t want the shot misinterpreted for something it was never meant to represent. Joe Frank Here’s a little question for the Kirby experts out there. I was thumbing through some of the later Kirby issues of THOR, and in #179, his last issue, it credits Colletta as inker, but pages 6, 14, 18 & 20 are obviously inked by someone else. It looks like Mike Royer’s work, but I can’t be certain. I never noticed it before, but I haven’t really looked at the issue in a long time. Hope someone can put my mind at rest! Bruce Younger, Rochester, NY

44 Credits:

John Morrow, Editor Pamela Morrow, Asst. Editor Eric Nolen-Weathington, Production Assistant and Proofreader TwoMorrows & Eric Nolen-Weathington Design/Layout Rand Hoppe, Webmaster Tom Ziuko, Colorist SPECIAL THANKS TO ALL OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Barry Alfonso Jim Amash Jerry Boyd Georgio Comolo Brian Cremins Shel Dorf Brian Eads Mark Evanier Chris Fama Guy Farley Shane Foley Barry Forshaw Mike France Glen Gold Rand Hoppe Neal Kirby Lisa Kirby Sean Kleefeld Chris Knowles Gary Martin Adam McGovern Will Murray Eric Nolen-Weathington David Schwartz Dave Stewart Mike Thibodeaux Kenneth F. Thomas Matt Wagner Tom Ziuko and of course The Kirby Estate If we’ve forgotten anyone, please let us know!

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NEXT ISSUE: There’s no time like the present as we take a trip in the KIRBY TIME MACHINE for Jack’s views of the past and future! There’s a never-published interview with KING KIRBY! A heartfelt new interview with Jack’s son NEAL KIRBY! MARK EVANIER’s regular column, plus our other regular columnists! Two Kirby pencil art galleries—THE PAST and THE FUTURE (both at whopping TABLOID SIZE)! Two rare, complete 1950s Kirby stories! An interview with Kirby Award-winner and family friend MARK MILLER! Kirby’s first script, from the 1930s! Looks at Jack’s 3-D work, the ETERNALS, DEVIL DINOSAUR, JUSTICE INC., war and gangster stories, and the 2005 KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL (with EVANIER, nephew ROBERT KATZ, SCOTT SHAW!, and STEVE SHERMAN)! All behind a new KIRBY/ROYER montage cover, plus the unpublished Kirby cover to CAPTAIN 3-D #2, inked by BILL BLACK and converted into actual 3-D by RAY ZONE! It ships in February, and the submission deadline is 12/1/05.

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I’ve actually never written a letter to a magazine before as a fan, but I’ve got to tell you how blown away I was by the Sinnott/Kirby (yes, in that order for a rare change) cover to issue #43. At first I thought that it was a somehow slightly unusual, yet nonetheless brilliant never-beforeseen Kirby masterpiece! Then I saw the original pencil sketch and was literally staggered by the

WANTED: These magazines: F.X.R.H. #1 and #3; Cinemagic #28, 29, and 30; Wonder #5; SFX #6; Colossa #2; Dark Terrors #8; Prehistoric Times #18; Xenorama #4; Fantascene volume 1, #2; Retrovision #3; Sinbad and the Eye of the Terror Movie Magazine; Just Imagine #2; Spectre #18; Image #1. Write to: M. Lee, 7356 W. Beverly Blvd. #2, Los Angeles, CA 90036

The Jack Kirby Collector is a notfor-profit publication, put together with submissions from Jack’s fans around the world. We don’t pay for submissions, but if we print art or articles you submit, we’ll send you a free copy of the issue it appears in. Here’s a tentative list of upcoming themes, but we treat these themes very loosely, so anything you write may fit somewhere. So get writing, and send us copies of your Kirby art! GOT A THEME IDEA? PLEASE WRITE US! KIRBY TIME MACHINE! (#45) Justice Inc., WWII, Losers, In The Days of the Mob, Simon & Kirby, and some prehistoric strips! FOURTH WORLD ISSUE! (#46) A split look at New Gods and Forever People in-depth! KIRBY’S SUPER TEAMS! (#47) We’ll explore Jack’s group mentality, from kid gangs and the Challengers to the big guns like the FF, X-Men, Avengers, Inhumans, even Super Powers! ALL LEADING UP TO OUR SURPRISE 50TH ISSUE!! WHAT’S IT ABOUT? SEND US YOUR GUESSES! SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Submit artwork as: 1) Color or B&W photocopies. 2) 300ppi TIFF or JPEG scans 3) Originals (insured). Submit articles as: 1) E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com 2) ASCII or RTF text files. 3) Typed or laser printed pages. We’ll pay return postage and insurance for originals—please write or call first. Please include background information whenever possible.

Parting Shot

Demon #16 (Jan. 1974) wasn’t supposed to be the last issue, at least as far as Jack knew when he drew these pencils for its final page. Kirby clearly had in mind a theme for the next issue, as evidenced by the final panel. We can only wonder what new spin the Vampire myth would have received in that story from the delightfully unpredictable Kirby imagination.

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THE TWOMORROWS LIBRARY

NER! D WIN R A W A EISNER

COMICS ABOVE GROUND

SEE HOW YOUR FAVORITE ARTISTS MAKE A LIVING OUTSIDE COMICS

G! HIPPIN NOW S PANEL DISCUSSIONS

TOP ARTISTS DISCUSS THE DESIGN OF COMICS Top creators discuss all aspects of the DESIGN OF COMICS:

DICK GIORDANO

CHANGING COMICS, ONE DAY AT A TIME MICHAEL EURY’s biography of comics’ most prominent and affable personality!

• Covers his career as illustrator, inker, and • WILL EISNER • SCOTT HAMPTON editor, peppered with DICK’S PERSONAL • MIKE WIERINGO • WALTER SIMONSON REFLECTIONS on his career milestones! • MIKE MIGNOLA • MARK SCHULTZ • Lavishly illustrated with RARE AND • DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI • MIKE CARLIN NEVER SEEN comics, merchandising, and • DICK GIORDANO • BRIAN STELFREEZE advertising art (includes a color section)! • CHRIS MOELLER • MARK CHIARELLO • Extensive index of his published work! If you’re serious about creating effective, • Comments & tributes by NEAL ADAMS, innovative comics, or just enjoying them DENNIS O’NEIL, TERRY AUSTIN, PAUL from the creator’s perspective, this guide is LEVITZ, MARV WOLFMAN, JULIUS must-reading! SCHWARTZ, JIM APARO & others! (208-Page Trade Paperback) $26 US • With a Foreword by NEAL ADAMS and Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ!

STREETWISE

TOP ARTISTS DRAWING STORIES OF THEIR LIVES An unprecedented assembly of talent drawing NEW autobiographical stories: • Barry WINDSOR-SMITH • C.C. BECK • Sergio ARAGONÉS • Walter SIMONSON • Brent ANDERSON • Nick CARDY • Roy THOMAS & John SEVERIN • Paul CHADWICK • Rick VEITCH • Murphy ANDERSON • Joe KUBERT • Evan DORKIN • Sam GLANZMAN • Plus Art SPIEGELMAN, Jack KIRBY, more! Cover by RUDE • Foreword by EISNER (160-Page Trade Paperback) $24 US

HEROES & VILLAINS

THE WM. MESSNER-LOEBS TRIBUTE SKETCHBOOK Proceeds from this all-star sketchbook benefit award-winning artist/writer WM. MESSNER-LOEBS (JOURNEY, THE FLASH, WONDER WOMAN) who has fallen into financial ruin. Edited by CLIFFORD METH, with art by ALLRED, ANDERSON, BACHALO, BAGLEY, CASSADAY, CHAREST, COCKRUM, COLAN, DAVIS, DEODATO, HAMNER, HASPIEL, HORN, KAYANAN, KUBERT, LIEBER, MCNIVEN, PALMER, QUESADA, ROBERTSON, SIMONSON, TRIMPE, TUCCI, VELLUTO and other top pros, plus written contributions from NEIL GAIMAN, PETER DAVID, and BEAU SMITH, and a new cover by NEAL ADAMS!

COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOL. 3 Reprinting the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #7 and #8 (’70s Marvel and ’80s independents), featuring a new MICHAEL T. GILBERT cover, plus interviews with GILBERT, RUDE, GULACY, GERBER, DON SIMPSON, CHAYKIN, SCOTT McCLOUD, BUCKLER, BYRNE, DENIS KITCHEN, plus a NEW SECTION featuring over 30 pages of previouslyunseen stuff! Edited by JON B. COOKE. (224-page trade paperback) $29 US

JUSTICE LEAGUE COMPANION VOL. 1

SECRETS IN THE SHADOWS: GENE COLAN

A comprehensive examination of the Silver Age JLA written by MICHAEL EURY (author of the critically acclaimed CAPTAIN ACTION and co-author of THE SUPERHERO BOOK). It traces the JLA's development, history, imitators, and early fandom through vintage and all-new interviews with the series' creators, an issue-byissue index of the JLA's 1960-1972 adventures, classic and never-before-published artwork, and other fun and fascinating features. Contributors include DENNY O'NEIL, MURPHY ANDERSON, JOE GIELLA, MIKE FRIEDRICH, NEAL ADAMS, ALEX ROSS, CARMINE INFANTINO, NICK CARDY, and many, many others. Plus: An exclusive interview with STAN LEE, who answers the question, “Did the JLA really inspire the creation of Marvel's Fantastic Four?” With an all-new cover by BRUCE TIMM (TV's Justice League Unlimited)!

The ultimate retrospective on COLAN, with rare drawings, photos, and art from his nearly 60-year career, plus a comprehensive overview of Gene’s glory days at Marvel Comics! MARV WOLFMAN, DON MCGREGOR and other writers share script samples and anecdotes of their Colan collaborations, while TOM PALMER, STEVE LEIALOHA and others show how they approached the daunting task of inking Colan’s famously nuanced penciled pages! Plus there’s a NEW PORTFOLIO of neverbefore-seen collaborations between Gene and such masters as JOHN BYRNE, MICHAEL KALUTA and GEORGE PÉREZ, and all-new artwork created specifically for this book by Gene! Available in Softcover and Deluxe Hardcover (limited to 1000 copies, with 16 extra black-and-white pages and 8 extra color pages)!

(224-page trade paperback) $29 US

(168-page softcover) $26 US (192-page trade hardcover) $49 US

COMICS ABOVE GROUND features top comics pros discussing their inspirations and training, and how they apply it in “Mainstream Media,” including Conceptual Illustration, Video Game Development, Children’s Books, Novels, Design, Illustration, Fine Art, Storyboards, Animation, Movies & more! Written by DURWIN TALON (author of the top-selling PANEL DISCUSSIONS), this book features creators sharing their perspectives and their work in comics and their “other professions,” with career overviews, neverbefore-seen art, and interviews! Featuring: • BRUCE TIMM • BERNIE WRIGHTSON • ADAM HUGHES

• LOUISE SIMONSON • DAVE DORMAN • GREG RUCKA & MORE!

(168-page Trade Paperback) $24 US

G-FORCE: ANIMATED The official compendium to BATTLE OF THE PLANETS, with unseen artwork and designs from the wondrous world of G-FORCE (a.k.a. Science Ninja Team Gatchaman), interviews, and behind-the-scenes stories of the pop culture phenomenon! Co-written by JASON HOFIUS and GEORGE KHOURY, this FULL-COLOR account is highlighted by a NEW COVER by ALEX ROSS! (96-Page Trade Paperback) $20 US

WARREN COMPANION The ultimate guide to Warren Publishing, the publisher of such mags as CREEPY, EERIE, VAMPIRELLA, BLAZING COMBAT, and others. Reprints COMIC BOOK ARTIST #4 (completely reformatted), plus nearly 200 new pages:

• A definitive WARREN CHECKLIST! • Dozens of NEW FEATURES on CORBEN, FRAZETTA, DITKO and others, and interviews with WRIGHTSON, WARREN, EISNER, ADAMS, COLAN & many more! (288-page unsigned Hardcover) $44 US

MR. MONSTER, VOL. 0

CALL OR WRITE FOR OUR NEW CATALOG, OR DOWNLOAD IT NOW AT www.twomorrows.com

12 Tales of Mr. Monster, with 30 ALL-NEW pages by MICHAEL T. GILBERT, including a new 8-page FULL-COLOR STORY by KEITH GIFFEN & MICHAEL T. GILBERT! (136-pg. Paperback) $14 US

MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON

(80 pages) $29 US THE

(176-pg. Paperback) $24 US

ART OF GEORGE TUSKA

THE LEGION COMPANION • A history of the Legion of Super-Heroes, with DAVE COCKRUM, MIKE GRELL, JIM STARLIN, JAMES SHERMAN, PAUL LEVITZ, KEITH GIFFEN, STEVE LIGHTLE, MARK WAID, JIM SHOOTER, JIM MOONEY, AL PLASTINO, and more! • Rare and never-seen Legion art by the above, plus GEORGE PÉREZ, NEAL ADAMS, CURT SWAN, and others! • Unused Cockrum character designs and pages from an UNUSED STORY! • New cover by DAVE COCKRUM and JOE RUBINSTEIN, introduction by JIM SHOOTER, and more! (224-page Trade Paperback) $29 US

COMIC BOOKS & OTHER NECESSITIES OF LIFE WERTHAM WAS RIGHT! SUPERHEROES IN MY PANTS! Each collects MARK EVANIER’S best essays and commentaries, plus new essays and illustrations by Mark’s GROO collaborator and MAD artist SERGIO ARAGONÉS! 200-page Trade Paperbacks • $17 US EACH ALL THREE BOOKS: $34 US POSTPAID

BEST OF THE LEGION OUTPOST Collects the best material from the hardto-find LEGION OUTPOST fanzine, including rare interviews and articles from creators such as DAVE COCKRUM, CARY BATES, and JIM SHOOTER, plus neverbefore-seen artwork by COCKRUM, MIKE GRELL, JIMMY JANES and others! It also features a previously unpublished interview with KEITH GIFFEN originally intended for the never-published LEGION OUTPOST #11, plus other new material! And it sports a rarely-seen classic 1970s cover by Legion fan favorite artist DAVE COCKRUM!

ALL-STAR COMPANION VOL. 1

HERO GETS GIRL!

ROY THOMAS has assembled the most thorough look ever taken at All-Star Comics:

THE LIFE & ART OF KURT SCHAFFENBERGER

• Covers by MURPHY ANDERSON! • Issue-by-issue coverage of ALL–STAR COMICS #1–57, the original JLA–JSA teamups, & the ’70s ALL–STAR REVIVAL! • Art from an unpublished 1945 JSA story! • Looks at FOUR “LOST” ALL–STAR issues! • Rare art by BURNLEY, DILLIN, KIRBY, INFANTINO, KANE, KUBERT, ORDWAY, ROSS, WOOD and more!!

MARK VOGER’s biography of the artist of LOIS LANE & CAPTAIN MARVEL!

(208-page Trade Paperback) $26 US

• Covers KURT’S LIFE AND CAREER from the 1940s to his passing in 2002! • Features NEVER-SEEN PHOTOS & ILLUSTRATIONS from his files! • Includes recollections by ANDERSON, EISNER, INFANTINO, KUBERT, ALEX ROSS, MORT WALKER and others!

A comprehensive look at Tuska’s personal and professional life, including early work with Eisner-Iger, crime comics of the 1950s, and his tenure with Marvel and DC Comics, as well as independent publishers. The book includes extensive coverage of his work on IRON MAN, X-MEN, HULK, JUSTICE LEAGUE, TEEN TITANS, BATMAN, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, and many more! A gallery of commission artwork and a thorough index of his work are included, plus original artwork, photos, sketches, previously unpublished art, interviews and anecdotes from his peers and fans, plus George’s own words! (128-page trade paperback) $19 US

(128-page Trade Paperback) $19 US

REVISED EDITION!

AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST

WALLACE WOOD

The definitive biographical memoir on one of comics' finest artists, 20 years in the making! Former associate BHOB STEWART traces Wood's life and career, with contributions from many artists and writers who knew Wood personally, making this a remarkable compendium of art, insights and critical commentary! From childhood drawings & early samples to nearly endless comics pages (many unpublished), this is the most stunning display of Wood art ever assembled! BILL PEARSON, executor of the Wood Estate, contributed rare drawings from Wood's own files, while art collector ROGER HILL provides a wealth of obscure, previously unpublished Wood drawings and paintings. (336-Page Trade Paperback) $44 US

(160-page trade paperback) $22 US

WALLACE WOOD CHECKLIST

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS COMPANION The definitive book on WALLACE WOOD’s super-team of the 1960s, featuring interviews with Woody and other creators involved in the T-Agents over the years, plus rare and unseen art, including a rare 28-page story drawn by PAUL GULACY, UNPUBLISHED STORIES by GULACY, PARIS CULLINS, and others, and a JERRY ORDWAY cover. Edited by CBA’s JON B. COOKE. (192-page trade paperback) $29 US

(68 Pages) $7 US

JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST (68 Pages) $7 US

G! HIPPIN S W O N

Lists each artists’ PUBLISHED COMICS WORK, FANZINE ART, ILLUSTRATIONS, UNPUBLISHED WORK, and more. Illustrated with rare and unseen artwork!

TRUE BRIT

CELEBRATING GREAT COMIC BOOK ARTISTS OF ENGLAND A celebration of the rich history of British Comics Artists and their influence on the US with in-depth interviews and art by: • BRIAN BOLLAND • ALAN DAVIS • DAVE GIBBONS • BRYAN HITCH • DAVID LLOYD

• DAVE MCKEAN • KEVIN O’NEILL • BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH and other gents!

(204-page Trade Paperback with COLOR SECTION) $26 US

MODERN MASTERS VOL. 5: GARCÍA-LÓPEZ Latest in our series of trade paperbacks devoted to the BEST OF TODAY'S COMICS ARTISTS, this time spotlighting arguably the best draftsman in comics, JOSÉ LUÍS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ! Features RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, spotlighting his immense talent! Features a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW, never-seen DC promotional and merchandising art, DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTION including color plates, and more! (120-Page TPB with COLOR) $19 US

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO W/ GEORGE PÉREZ DVD This DVD companion to the Modern Masters book series gives you a personal tour of George Pérez’s studio, and lets you watch step-by-step as the fanfavorite artist illustrates a special issue of Top Cow’s Witchblade! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues— including Marv Wolfman and Ron Marz—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way!

A new series of trade paperbacks devoted to the BEST OF TODAY'S COMICS ARTISTS! Each volume contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

VOL. 1: ALAN DAVIS

VOL. 3: BRUCE TIMM

(128-Page Trade Paperback) $17 US

(120-Page TPB with COLOR) $19 US

VOL. 2: GEORGE PÉREZ

VOL. 4: KEVIN NOWLAN

(128-Page Trade Paperback) $17 US

(120-Page TPB with COLOR) $19 US

(120-minute DVD) $34 US