Jack Kirby Collector #45 by TwoMorrows Publishing

IN THE US

$995 JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR FORTY-FIVE

De v i l Di n o s a u r T M & ©2006 M ar v e l C h a r a c t er s , I n c . • S u n f i r e T M & ©2006 J o e S i mo n & J a c k K i r b y E s t a t e • T h e A v e n g e r © Co n d é Na s t P u b l i c a t i o n s , I n c .

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. $9 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

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 #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

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

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. $9 US

SUBSCRIBE: 4 tabloid issues: $40 Standard, $56 First Class (Canada: $64, Elsewhere: $68 Surface, $84 Airmail).

VOLUME 1 (240-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #1-9) $29 US

TJKC #26: (72 pgs.) GODS! COLOR NEW GODS concept drawings, KIRBY & WALTER SIMONSON interviews, FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE, BIBLE INFLUENCES, THOR, MR. MIRACLE, more! $9 US

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION (160 pgs.) Kirby’s sixissue “Visual Novel” for Pacific Comics is reproduced from his powerful, uninked pencil art! Includes Kirby’s illustrated movie screenplay, never-seen sketches, pin-ups, and more from his final great comics series! $24 US

TJKC #25: (100 pgs.) SIMON & KIRBY! KIRBY, SIMON, & JOHN SEVERIN interviews, CAPTAIN AMERICA pencils, unused BOY EXPLORERS story, history of MAINLINE COMICS, more! $9 US

KIRBY UNLEASHED: (60 pgs.) New, completely remastered and updated version of the scarce 1971 portfolio/biography, with 8 extra black-and-white and 8 extra color pages, including Jack’s color GODS posters, plus other art not seen in the 1971 version. $24 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! $9 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! $9 US

H! MARC N I S P I SH

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 art. Now in tabloid format, with Kirby’s art at even larger size.

TJKC #44: (84 pgs.) TABLOID MYTHS & LEGENDS issue! MARK EVANIER column, unseen KIRBY interview, ART GALLERY with DEMON, THOR, ATLAS, Kirby cover inked by MATT WAGNER! $13 US

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 #30: (68 pgs.) ‘80s WORK! Interviews with ALAN MOORE & Kirby Estate’s ROBERT KATZ, HUNGER DOGS, SUPER POWERS, SILVER STAR, ANIMATION work, more! $9 US

VOLUME 4 (240-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #16-19) $29 US

VOLUME 2 (160-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #10-12) $22 US

TJKC #45: (84 pgs.) TABLOID TIME MACHINE! EVANIER column, intv. with son NEAL KIRBY, two complete ‘50s stories, PAST and FUTURE art galleries, Tribute Panel, 3-D KIRBY COVER! $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 #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

NEW! VOLUME 5 (224-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #20-22) $29 US

IL! IN APR SHIPS

VOLUME 3 (176-page Trade Paperback, reprinting #13-15) $24 US

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOLS. 1-5

These TRADE PAPERBACKS reprint the first 22 sold-out issues of THE J ACK KIRBY COLLECTOR! Each volume includes OVER 30 EXTRA pieces of unpublished Kirby art!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

WRITE NOW! #12 (APRIL)

(80-page magazine) $9 US

ROUGH STUFF #1 COMIC BOOK NERD (JUNE) #1 (JUNE)

(96-page magazine) $9 US

PAUL LEVITZ on comics writing, KYLE B AKER reveals his working methods, Machine Teen’s MIKE STEVE ENGLEHART’s thoughts on HAWTHORNE on his work, writing for today’s market, survey of TOP COMICS EDITORS on Making Perspective Work For You how to submit work to them, by B LEVINS and MANLEY, Marvel Editor ANDY SCHMIDT on Photoshop techniques with ALB ERTO RUIZ, Adult Swim’s the how to break in, T. CAMPB ELL on VENTURE B ROTHERS, and more! writing for webcomics, plus a new GEORGE PÉREZ cover! Edited by New KYLE B AKER cover! Edited DANNY FINGEROTH. by MIKE MANLEY.

DRAW! #12 (MARCH)

REDESIGNED and EXPANDED version of the groundbreaking WRITE NOW! #8 / DRAW! #9 crossover! DANNY FINGEROTH & MIKE MANLEY show step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and roughs to pencils, inks, colors, lettering—it even guides you through printing and distribution, & the finished 8-page color comic is included, so you can see their end result! PLUS: over 30 pages of ALL-NEW material, including “full” and “Marvelstyle” scripts, a critique of their new character and comic from an editor’s point of view, new tips on coloring, new expanded writing lessons, and more! (108-page trade paperback) $18 US

HOW TO CREATE COMICS, FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT (JUNE)

One of the finest draftsmen in comics, spotlighted with a COMPREHENSIVE CAREERSPANNING INTERVIEW, rare and UNSEEN WORK, and extensive GALLERY OF EYE-POPPING ART! (128-page trade paperback) $19 US

MODERN MASTERS VOL. 7: JOHN BYRNE (APRIL)

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

TwoMorrows. Bringing New Life To Comics Fandom.

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Four issues US: $40 Standard, $56 First Class (Canada: $64, Elsewhere: $68 Surface, $84 Airmail). BACK ISSUE!: Six issues US: $36 Standard, $54 First Class (Canada: $66, Elsewhere: $72 Surface, $96 Airmail). DRAW! or WRITE NOW!: Four issues US: $24 Standard, $36 First Class (Canada: $44, Elsewhere: $48 Surface, $64 Airmail). ALTER EGO: Twelve issues US: $72 Standard, $108 First Class (Canada: $132, Elsewhere: $144 Surface, $192 Airmail). FOR A SIX-ISSUE ALTER EGO SUBSCRIPTION, JUST CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!

SUBSCRIPTIONS:

Compiles material from issues #3 Spotlights UNPUBLISHED penciled PETE VON SHOLLY’s side-splitting pages, preliminary sketches, parody of the fan press, including and #4 of DRAW!, including Collects the first two issues of such publications as WHIZZER, ALTER EGO, plus 30 pages of NEW tutorials by, and interviews with, detailed layouts, and unused inked versions from artists throughout the COMICS URINAL, ULTRA ERIK LARSEN (savage penciling), MATERIAL! New JLA Jam Cover EGO, COMICS B UYER’S GUISE, comics history. #1 features ALAN DICK GIORDANO (inking by KUBERT, PÉREZ, GIORDANO, B AGGED ISSUE!, SCRAWL!, DAVIS, GEORGE PÉREZ, KEVIN techniques), BRET BLEVINS TUSKA, CARDY, FRADON, & COMIC B OOK ARTISTE, and (drawing the figure in action, and NOWLAN, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍAGIELLA, new sections featuring LÓPEZ, ARTHUR ADAMS, JOHN more, as we unabashedly poke figure composition), KEVIN scarce art by GIL KANE, WILL BYRNE, WALTER SIMONSON, fun at ourselves, our competitors, NOWLAN (penciling and inking), EISNER, CARMINE INFANTINO, and BRUCE TIMM! Includes and you, our loyal readers! Go to MIKE MANLEY (how-to demo on MIKE SEKOWSKY, MURPHY www.twomorro ws .com for a commentary on the art, backWeb Comics), DAVE COOPER ANDERSON, DICK DILLIN, & more! ground information, plus before sneak preview in March! (digital coloring tutorial), and (192-page trade paperback) more! Cover by KEVIN NOWLAN. and after comparisons from some (64-page COLOR magazine) $26 US of your favorite series of all time! (156-page trade paperback with $11 US color section) $22 US (100-page magazine) $9 US

BEST OF DRAW, VOL. 2 (JUNE)

GERRY CONWAY & ROY THOMAS on their ’80s “X-Men Movie That Never Was!” with art by ADAMS, COCKRUM, B USCEMA, B YRNE, KANE, KIRB Y, HECK, & LIEB ER, Atlas artist VIC CARRAB OTTA interview, ALLEN B ELLMAN on ’40s Timely, FCA, 1966 panel on EC Comics, & MR. MONSTER! Edited by ROY THOMAS.

“Toy Stories!” Marvel’s G. I. J OE™ and TRANSFORMERS, “Rough Stuff” MIKE ZECK pencil gallery, ARTHUR ADAMS on Gumby, HE-MAN, ROM, MICRONAUTS, SUPER POWERS, SUPER-HERO CARS, art by HAMA, SAL B USCEMA, GUICE, GOLDEN, KIRB Y, TRIMPE, & new ZECK sketch cover! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

ALTER EGO COLLECTION, VOL. 1 (JUNE)

ALTER EGO #58 (MAY)

BACK ISSUE #16 (MAY)

COMING SOON FROM TWOMORROWS!

Contents

THE NEW

Kirby’s Time machine! OP ENI NG SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 UNDER THE COV ER S . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 (adding a new dimension to Kirby art) B EGI NNI NGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 (spend some time on Jack’s block)

ISSUE #45, WINTER 2006

I NNER V I EW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 (Jack’s son Neal Kirby speaks) GA LLE RY 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20 (Kirbyvision: Past) M USEUM PA GE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28 (www.kirbymuseum.org) J A CK F.A .Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 (Mark Evanier reveals some little known Kirby stories; or not...) I NCI DE NTA L I CONOGR A P HY . . . . . .35 (Tyranosaurus Kirby) KI R B Y OB SCUR A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36 (searching for sex in Jack’s work) GA LLE RY 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 (Kirbyvision: Future) DOI NG J USTI C E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 (Denny O’Neil on Kirby’s Avenger) A CC OLA DES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 (Dr. Mark Miller diagnoses why he won a Jack Kirby Award) I N THE ZONE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51 (Ray Zone interviews Kirby in 2-D) FOUNDATI ONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 (two complete 1950s S&K stories, restored by Chris Fama) KI R B Y A S A GENR E . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 (a varied batch from Adam McGovern) TR I B UTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64 (the 2005 Kirby Tribute Panel) B EFOR E & A FT ER . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71 (more classic pencils vs. inks) EX HI B I T I ONI SM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 (the MOCA Kirby exhibit in detail) COLLECT OR COM M ENTS . . . . . . . . .78 PA RTI NG SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 (Confucius say, “Check this out!”) Front cover inks: M I KE R OY ER (Kirby figure) SHA NE FOLEY (background) Front cover color: R A NDY “ SA R GE” SA R GENT Back cover inks: B I LL B LA C K Back cover 3-D conversion: R AY Z ONE COP Y RI GHT S: Boy Commandos, Challengers of the Unknown, Demon, Green Arrow, In The Days Of The Mob, Jimmy Olsen, Klarion, Losers, Manhattan Guardian, Mister Miracle, New Gods, OMAC, Sandman, Space Ranger, Supergirl, Superman TM & ©2006 DC Comics • 3-D Man, Black Panther, Captain America, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Doom, Eternals, Galactus, Hulk, Iron Man, Journey Into Mystery, Machine Man, Moonboy, Odin, Red Skull, Ringmaster, Sgt. Fury, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Strange Tales, Thing, Thor, Warlock, Where Monsters Dwell TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Black Magic, Bullseye, Captain 3D, Fighting American, Police Trap, Strange World Of Your Dreams, "The Thing On Sputnik 4", "This World Is Ours", Young Romance TM & ©2006 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate • Captain Victory, Edna Dingle & Friends, Heck City, Heck Robot, King Masters, Reptar, Silver Star, Sky Masters, Solar Legion, Sunfire, Teenagent, Unfinished Warrior TM & ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate • Incredible Hulk TV images © Universal. • Fantastic 4 DVD © Fox. • Charlie Chan TM & © the respective owner. • The Avenger TM & ©2006 Condé Nast Publications, Inc. • 2001: A Space Odyssey TM & ©2006 Turner Ent. Co. • Animal Hospital TM & ©2006 Ruby-Spears • Battle For A Three Dimensional World ©2006 3D Cosmic Publications.

(right) The Losers are about to live up to their name, in these amazing splash page pencils from Our Fighting Forces #151 (Oct. 1974). Losers TM & ©2006 DC Comics. The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 13, No. 45, Winter 2006. Published quarterly by & ©2006 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 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $40.00 US, $64.00 Canada, $68.00 elsewhere. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is ©2006 the respective authors. First printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

Opening Shot

by John Morrow, editor of TJKC

ouldn’t you know it? No sooner had TJKC #44 hit stores in November, with my announcement that the one-hour documentary Jack Kirby: Storyteller would be on the December DVD release of last summer’s bigbudget Fantastic 4 movie, did I get the news: Fox had decided to pull it, saving it instead for a future “special edition” of the film on DVD in Spring 2006. We got the word out as best we could, online and through our Yahoo mailing list. (If you aren’t on our mailing list, sign up at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/twomorrows/ so you can always be apprised of the latest developments at TwoMorrows—we promise we won’t overwhelm you with spam.) But undoubtedly some of you went to your stores in early December and plunked down $19.95 for the F4 DVD, expecting to learn more about Jack’s life and career. So now, instead of the general public learning about Kirby, it’ll be a more limited release, most likely predominately to the comics shop market (which largely already knows at least a little about Jack’s career). Bummer.

Kirby Is Coming... If you’re curious to see other video appearances by Jack, he appeared on Bob Newhart’s short-lived TV show Bob playing himself in “You Can’t Win”, the 15th episode of the one and only season, which aired January 29, 1993. Jack also played himself in the 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential, and the 1987 direct-to-video documentary Masters of Comic Book Art. Fantastic 4 DVD ©2006 Fox. Hulk TV images ©2006 Universal Pictures. Green Arrow TM & ©2006 DC Comics. Dr. Doom, Silver Surfer TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Silver Star TM & ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate.

We’ve finally been able to track down the episode of The Incredible Hulk TV series where Jack has his uncredited cameo as a police sketch artist. It’s from “No Escape”, the 19th episode of the second season, which originally aired March 30, 1979. But more bad news; this episode isn’t on the recently released The Incredible Hulk—The Television Series Ultimate Collection boxed DVD set, so unless you know someone who taped it, you’ll have to content yourself with the couple of screen captures we’re presenting here, or stay tuned to the Sci-Fi Channel in hopes of catching it in reruns. However, it’s not all bad news on the Kirby front. The “Masters of American Comics” exhibit coorganized by the Hammer Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles included Jack Kirby as one of the 15 influential “Masters” in their show that opened November 20 and runs through March 12. On page 76 of this issue, you can see a write-up of the exhibit, which will travel to The Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin from April 27-August 13, and then to New York for a few months. Also, the United States Postal Service is issuing a set of 20 DC Comics super-hero stamps in late 2006, and included will be a Green Arrow stamp based on the Kirby/Royer drawing from the cover of DC Comics’ 2001 Green Arrow collection. Apparently there will also be a Marvel set in 2007, so hopefully that’ll feature more Kirby images. Even more Kirby is coming from TwoMorrows in 2006. In March, we’re releasing Silver Star: Graphite Edition, a 160-page trade paperback which’ll feature Jack’s entire six-issue Silver Star series from Pacific Comics, only this time reproduced mostly from his original, uninked pencils (taken from photocopies in the Kirby Archives). Also, in April, we’re proud to present the Collected Jack Kirby Collector, Volume Five, the next in our series of trade paperbacks (this one 224 pages), reprinting our now sold-out issues #20-22, plus more than 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published. Both are available for ordering at www.twomorrows.com or at your local comics shop through Diamond Comic Distributors’ Previews catalog. And if that’s not enough, stay tuned for a really special Kirby item we’ll be releasing in July, just in time for this year’s Comicon International: San Diego. I can’t spill the beans just yet, as we’re still finalizing some details, but we’ll have the full story next issue (or keep your eyes peeled to www.twomorrows.com for the earliest official announcement of it). Marvel’s got a second Marvel Visionaries volume on Jack in the works (although the Kirby family won’t see a dime from it), and I’m sure we’ll see more Kirby in DC’s Archives volumes this year. Add to that three more issues of the Kirby Collector, and 2006 is shaping up to be full of square knees, krackle, and the wonderful inyour-face action we’ve all grown to love by the little tough guy from the Lower East Side. Yes, Kirby Is Coming (as the 1970 DC house ads used to say), and here’s hoping he’ll keep on for years to come. ★

Under The Covers

ur front cover this issue is a montage of characters from throughout Kirby’s career, assembled and inked by Shane Foley. Shane put this piece together, unsolicited, and sent it to me when he saw we had a “Time Machine” theme issue coming up, and when I saw it, I knew we had our cover. We asked Mike Royer to ink the central figure of Jack (taken from a self-portrait he did for the Hunger Dogs graphic novel), and he graciously agreed. Then Randy “Sarge” Sargent added the color, to make an effective shot of Jack traveling through Kirby-time. (Test your Kirby I.Q. and see if you can track down the source of each of the images shown!) Our back cover is an actual 3-D rendition of Jack’s cover art for the never-published Captain 3-D #2 (circa 1953). An anonymous contributor sent us a copy of the pencils to this unseen cover (which were retrieved from a garbage dumpster behind Harvey Comics’ offices in the 1980s). Knowing of AC Comics publisher/artist Bill Black’s affinity for the character, I immediately thought of him to ink these pencils. Bill had previously reconstructed this piece—working only from a tiny house ad for the never-published second 3-D issue—and used it on the cover of his own Golden Age Men of Mystery #15 in 1999 (check Bill’s website for other great Golden Age reprints: www.accomics.com). Bill jumped at the chance to do an “authentic” version, actually working from Kirby’s pencils this time (which are shown on page 55 of this issue). We think it really evokes the Simon & Kirby look of the period. But I figured, why go to the trouble of reproducing an unused Kirby 3-D cover, and only show it in 2-D? Enter: Ray Zone, the guru of the third dimension. Ray has made a name for himself as the artisan behind numerous 3-D comics from the 1980s to today (including Battle For A Three Dimensional World, the 1982 Kirby one-shot comic, which was Jack’s final 3-D work—and the glasses from which were the cause of Johnny Carson publicly mocking Jack on The Tonight Show in the 1980s). Ray was thrilled for a chance to work with Kirby again, and did a slam-bang job of 3-D’ing Bill Black’s inks, and our classic TJKC logo as well. As an added bonus, Ray sent us a transcript of his 1984 Cable Access show wherein he interviewed Jack about his career, which we proudly present on included in subscriber copies! page 51 of this issue.

FREE 3-D GLASSES

Or get yours by mail while supplies last!

Unfortunately, TJKC’s budget didn’t allow us to have 3-D glasses manufactured and bound into this issue, so we’re having to rely on the likelihood that longtime Kirby fans have some kind of 3-D comic in their collections, and can dig out the glasses from them to view this unearthed masterpiece. However, subscribers to this issue got another extra. Ray Zone generously donated enough 3-D glasses for us to include with subscription copies, plus some extras. So if you’re not a subscriber, and can’t locate any old 3-D glasses, send us a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE), and we’ll send you a free pair, while supplies last. But we’ve only got about 100 extras, so hurry if you need them, but if you’ve got an old pair somewhere, please dig them out, and save the free ones for those who don’t. It’s what Jack’d want. ★

Childhood Stories Part 1:

Beginnings (below) Here’s an interesting curiosity; young Jackie Kurtzberg’s tattered, typewritten script for Journey’s End, a 1929 play written by R.C. Sheriff. Set in World War I, it revolves around a group of British officers fighting on the front lines in France. Jack’s high school must’ve put on a production of the thenpopular play, and Jack, with aspirations to become an actor, took on the pivotal role of Raleigh, an optimistic new arrival who is soon transformed by the realities of war. This artifact was sent to me by the Kirby family, and we can assume young Jack managed to see the 1930 film version at least once; he couldn’t resist drawing a WWI scene on the front of his script (alas, there aren’t any other illos in it). It’s an eerie precursor to the war horrors Jack himself would experience during WWII. This likely serves as the first time Jack was given a script to act-out, whether live, or with paper and pencil. (next page) A 1931 sample strip by 14-yearold Jack Kirby.

From a collection of essays entitled “Conversations with Jack.” Based upon interviews with Jack Kirby and his family from 1989 to 1992 for the book The Art of Jack Kirby, by Ray Wyman Jr. [Although Jack often publicly claimed that he never wanted to see his old neighborhood again, he spent quite a lot of time ruminating about his life in the Lower East Side. He said some pretty touching things about his father and some surprising things about his “gang.” He remembered certain people and what they did (e.g., Leon Klinghoffer). This text never made it into AOJK for two big reasons—one, Jack and Roz wanted me to focus on the art, not the childhood (they had the impression nobody was interested in this stuff ); and two, I was a lesser writer. Had I done what I am doing now, I’m sure I could have made the case. This essay was compiled from interviews that took place between July 24 and October 10, 1989.] verybody has the ability to transcend themselves. You have this ability, only maybe the right moment for you has not come. It may come and maybe what you will do will astound you. Maybe you will reflect on it for the rest of your life and say, “How could I have done that?” But you did. Given the situation, a person can accomplish anything. I’ve seen it done a hundred times. I’ve done it myself a hundred times. I’ve done things that I shouldn’t have been able to do. I took on six guys in a fight and I won. I survived the deep freezes in Europe with bullets flying over my head. I got my family out of the Lower East Side. See? When you do this and succeed you do it because you love. I used love in everything I did. I would jump into a wrestling ring with a guy twice my size. Now this guy would fight as matter of fact, but I took it as a matter of love. I was going to get this guy because that is what I wanted to do and I got enjoyment out of it. Well, I couldn’t do it today, certainly not at 72, but when I was a younger man I felt that I could tear up the world and get away with it. My father was Benjamin Kurtzberg. He came from a very well-to-do family in Austria. He was a scrappy guy: he would scrap in the factory; he would scrap in the street, he would knock out any guy looking for trouble. But he was also a very gentle man. He never did much talking but I know that he

loved me very much. He carried me around on his shoulders when I was a little boy. Sometimes I would catch him looking out the window and looking at things that I couldn’t see. Being a kid, I could never understand it. Mostly, I was glad to be close to my old man. And I was. He really loved me. I think he thought about the life he left behind in Austria. He came from a very wealthy family. They had titles and they all had an ear for customs that went back as far as anybody could remember. He got into scrapes with the locals. I don’t remember the details, but one particular thing was a bad situation and my grandfather didn’t want him to get killed. People solved their differences with duels. You could use a sword or a pistol, but either way you had to go through with the duel. I think my grandfather had other ideas and he stuffed some money in my father’s pocket and shipped him off to America. Back in those days, a buck was a lot of money. This was around 1903. At that time, everybody was coming to America; immigrants from all over coming in from England, France, Ireland, Germany. Nobody knew what an Oriental was; we knew the Orientals around our own particular way, I could go down to Mott Street and see all the Orientals I wanted, but as many of them assimilated into our culture, they dressed like I did. You could shoot crap with them, play ball and do the rest like you did with the Irish, or anybody else. We were all immigrants. I never saw any Oriental in his homeland, but I never saw an Irishman in his homeland or a German in his homeland. Like all immigrants, he came over to make more money. Nobody wanted to be a peasant. In Europe, you had to struggle to make a dollar. You had to struggle to stay in the fields! My father must have been very surprised to see so many people. And the competition was very intense; you had the peasants from Europe and people from all parts of America. Why did Iowans go to New York? They wanted to become tycoons. Of course, some of them, the best thing they ever get is a store. They become store owners and they become proud of that. To them it is better than some guy that’s going to shuck corn and pull weeds the rest of his life. Eventually, the money ran out and my father had to find work and get married. Immigrants were getting married all over the place. So, it didn’t take him long to find a wife. My mother, her name was Rose, she had been living in America for several years. She was a 5-year-old girl when she and her sisters made it over. They were the ones who came over with the very first wave of immigrants at the turn of the century. So, she had plenty of time to establish herself into the local community of Austrians and it was natural that somebody would arrange for her and my father to meet. That was the way couples met back then. Most immigrants wound up working in the factories. It was the same for my family. My mother and father both worked at a textile mill near the docks on the East Side—probably a sweatshop like the ones depicted in the history books. Just rows and rows of machines for as far as the eye can see. I would have wound up working in a factory—in fact, I did. I worked for Max and Dave Fleischer doing animation and I was, essentially, a factory worker. I would do six pictures of a guy taking one step

and I would pass them down to the next guy and he would draw the guy taking another step, and so on. Max and Dave Fleischer had an animation factory and I got out of there fast. The one thing I didn’t want to do was end up in a factory like my father. I lived down in the Lower East Side of New York, 1361 Suffolk Street between Norfolk Street and Stanton Street. And I remember Allen Street where the elevated trains ran. I would stand someplace where I could get a close look at the passengers passing by; it was a wonderful exhilarating experience. Of course the trains would rattle like crazy; rumble and roar like a jet coming down right on top of you. It was all part of the noise of the environment. You wouldn’t want to live there.

with his heart and it was at the wrong time. Now I suppose he could have been easily saved today. But at that time, there was nothing anybody could do. This was a time when there was no penicillin. There was no medical technology to speak of. Anybody with pneumonia was a done man. Winters got real severe and a lot of people passed away. I remember having a lot of sweaters on me, I can tell you. Our idea of preventing disease was to wear four or five sweaters and everything else you could put on. So what did people depend on? God. People performed exorcisms; it was a very real thing to us all. When I was nine years old I got double pneumonia. I was supposed to die. What was going to save me? My mother could not give me up. She called in the rabbis and they all danced around my bed and chanted, “Demon, come out of this boy. What is your name, demon? Tell us your name. Come out of this boy.” I just happened to pull out of it because... I don’t know the reason. But you had to rely on something, God or at least pure chance.

That’s why I tried to find any escape that I could find—anything that was feasible I would do. I would sit up on the roof of the building and look down at everything; I would camp out on the fire escape and read a book; I always had a book. The Sunday comics pages was where I found one of my distractions. A strip would take up a whole page so you could see the drawing very clearly. You could get lost in it and make it your world. My family couldn’t afford to have a nice place, but my mother kept it very clean. I’m talking tenement, so there were very few conveniences. We had a metal barrel right in the middle of the room that was our stove and that had a chimney pipe that went up into the ceiling. And we had a kneading table right behind the stove and the washtub where we took baths and washed our clothes. There wasn’t a bathroom; we took turns taking baths in the same room where we prepared our food and the toilet was down the hall; the whole floor used the same toilet. We had one little room with a dining room, if you want to call it that, but it was a little room with two windows and all the women would look out those windows and talk to each other across the street or look up and talk to each other from one floor above. But my mother did what she could and kept the place very clean. She kept the place as clean as a whistle. I had a brother and he died many years ago. His name was David. He was five years younger, but he was 6'1". I have always tended to be short; it gave me an inferiority complex. So David would take me into the movies. I used to get in on younger prices, so we would say he was my younger brother and then he got in on the younger prices too. He was a big heavy guy. I don’t know; something went wrong

My mother held much faith in God and on folklore. She was like a lot of women of her time; everybody was superstitious and everybody believed in fables from their homeland. She was also a great storyteller. I got that talent from her and by listening to her every night. There was no television and we had a radio but I enjoyed the stories my mother told me because they were very believable. The radio was theater, people running around making noises and yelling at each other. You couldn’t see the action but it was vivid in your mind. It was very good for its time but my mother’s stories—the characters were alive and they existed right in front of you. Storytelling can be very personal in that way. The best stories are the ones that can touch you; anytime anybody tells you a good story and it is in person they have a smell, a sound, and they breathe. That is the essence of good storytelling, when it can reach out and touch you. My mother learned storytelling from her mother. Like her mother, and her mother’s mother, my mother told me tales about people, God, and the land they lived on. That’s the kind of home I grew up in. And the neighbors were wonderful people, and they were fair people. They were the kind of people who spoke their minds, and despite the fact that they might have an argument with you one day and they would protect you the next. Why? Because you were their neighbor and you lived on that block and you lived in that building and you were part of them. That’s the way it was. We all clung together. I remember when my brother was being born—I was about 5 years old—right there in our apartment! Kids weren’t born in hospitals, so I stayed with my neighbor. This was during Depression time and

The Block

people couldn’t afford doctors. You could hear everything, every foot fall, every moan. It wasn’t easy to deliver a baby. Those kinds of time seem primitive now, but they were the best that you could do then, under the circumstances. I drew a picture of my neighborhood; I call it “The Block.” It is a collage of the images that still fill my head. I am telling you that it is exactly how it was. Wash hanging up on lines that went from one side of the street to another, kids bawling, parents screaming at their kids, women feeling the fruit and vegetables on the cart; any one of them could have been my mother. Boys fighting on the stoop; could be me, could be somebody else. There was the blood drunk, the cop yelling at the woman for throwing garbage out the window, the taxi cabs, kids playing in the street, baseball in all this traffic, and I can tell you, there were horses in the traffic, automobiles, trolley cars, bicycles, dogs, push carts, guys pushing racks of clothes, trash piled up to here—it was a very lively place, but it was a mess. You played handball and by accident somebody would hit the ball and knock a guy’s hat off somewhere and the next thing you know you are running the block while this guy is chasing at you, yelling. It was close quarter recreation! You couldn’t do anything about it. Back then New York still had quite a few cobblestone streets; nothing like the smooth roads we have now. And the sidewalks were rough too. To us now they looked like tombstones. When they were chasing my gang, we would go hopping over these tombstones and into the yards. Sometimes we’d use the clotheslines and, of course, if you swung on the clotheslines all of the women would stick their heads out from their apartment windows and curse you, “You, young so-and-so.” We would call each other worse. We gave each the kind of names, the stereotype names that you would see in pictures. Like “Mick” and “Spick” and “Fathead” and “Big Ass” and things like that. Sometimes we would call the teachers names. Yes, to their face! They would chase us through the halls. Some guys would do worse. I am not talking about gentlemen. These were rough kids. We would fight in the gym, in the classroom, in the hall—anywhere we had room enough to swing our fists. We would be out in the yard and some guy would pick a fight with another guy. The next thing you would know you would have the whole yard fighting. Our teacher was the gym teacher. And he was a pretty smart guy. He would give us an hour of basketball before we went up to class—have us exercise and burn off some of the cockiness that comes with youth. And after you shoot basketball for nine months straight you get to be pretty damn good at it. We used to shoot across the court and get it at the ringers. We really enjoyed ourselves. He was one hell of a nice guy. He knew how to treat a guy. Other teachers had to try to imitate him to win our respect or else we would start picking up the tables and chairs. I would start a fight if I thought there was a problem. I would be scrappy on that account. You wanted to show a guy you are just as big as he is, 5

otherwise they would take you out, and I don’t mean on a date. Guys back in the city would punch your lights out just for kicks. I got to the point where I would have taken on anybody. We lived right near PS 20 which was a kind of a junior high school and elementary school. And the guys would fight there. It was another kind of world back then. But I didn’t like to fight. But I could. I did it very well. In this setting, this is something that is instinctive, really. If you go through an experience that is similar to this you know that you can’t back off. If you tell a guy you are going to do something for or against him, you do it. If you don’t then who is going to believe you the next time? Backing down was like telling a lie. You would never lie. I never lie. I was never devious like that. And, of course, sometimes you pay for that instinct. You pay for that in business, but you are also respected for it because you earn trust. I find that I earn my share of respect because I never lie. Living in this neighborhood you learn to only make promises that you can keep. I got into one gang fight in the street and I was knocked out; flat unconscious. My guys walked me up five flights of wooden steps and left me at the door of our apartment. They made sure that I looked as good as I could, they straightened out and buttoned my shirt and everything; cleaned me off so that, laying there by the door the next morning, the sight wouldn’t shock my mother when she opened the door. All that for my mother. We all respected everybody’s else’s mother. A mother was sacred. It didn’t matter who you were. If you had a mother, then you were okay. Even between gangs and cops; they all knew each other and the bond between them was their mothers. The other thing you wanted was to look good for your mother. I suspect that some of the guys in the crime syndicate were guys who wanted suits so they would look good for their mothers. Some of these guys would go into a clothing store and they would just take a suit. They’d break into the warehouses or the stores after they were closed and steal

whatever they thought made them look sharp. You didn’t want to get in the way of a guy who was desperate to look good for his mother. Then they would stand on the street corner looking sharp as hell picking up all the girls. After that, the object of the whole thing was to get a good overcoat or a nice hat and be a devil with the girls. I was never a member of what you would call a real gang. I wasn’t that sociable. I was the kind of a guy who kept to myself, but I had friends and we ran around the neighborhood causing our own trouble; the kind of trouble that boys often do. I never stood on a street corner looking for trouble, but as far as friends go, we hung together for our own mutual protection. We looked out for each other and made sure that nobody got into trouble. If one of us got into a scrap with some other neighborhood, the rest of us would pile on; we’d have a real dogfight right there in the street, swinging fists, throwing things at each other. What a mess. The other guys knew that they had it coming if they ever messed with us. But between friends, you get these ideas and the ideas are really what can get you into trouble. You start to feel that you are invincible; like you really have power. As far as a kid is concerned, you’re just hanging together, what’s wrong with that? But as a group, you get into the pack mentality and you do things because you think that nobody can stop you. But there are rules. There wasn’t any object to be a gangster without rules. They are just guys like us. The cops were the guys who listened to their mothers. The gangs just didn’t. I mean they respected their mothers, but they couldn’t help themselves. They were weak. They wanted new suits. Sometimes their parents didn’t have the money for them or they couldn’t get a job at the time. They had to go out and get ’em someway. And they would get together in a gang and they would go through a whole store. And then some guy would be the leader of the gang and say, “Well, I thought of this damn thing. That makes me the leader. You guys listen to me. We’ll get more than that. We’ll get overcoats.” And of course, that’s how gangs were formed. I mean they weren’t cast in some movie, but that is where they came from. Later on, they got into the business of colliding with each other, but that’s another story. Some of my friends became gangsters, but a lot of them became cops. Most of them went on to live respectable lives. I remember Seymore Blau, we called him Tootie, Red Schaeffer, Maxy Goldburg, Georgie Comet, Buggy Bergson, Chubby Clee. And Leon Klinghoffer and his brother Albie. My best friend was Morris Cohen. Now Morris Cohen, he loved airplanes. He built the best model airplanes you ever saw. And I can tell you that they were faithful to the real thing. His models were perfect; faithful to the very nail.

And he made them all on his own because there were no kits. Spads, Sopwiths, all sorts of models. He did this with great passion. I didn’t have the patience or the inclination to build model airplanes. But this guy was a master at it. Soon he had a whole collection, in his apartment. He lived on another floor. I forget which one; I think he lived on a lower floor. I would go in, it was a magical experience for me because he built them so well. Later on he began to fly real airplanes. Once he took me up and we flew upside down over New York City! He scared the hell out of me, but that’s how I got the idea of drawing city scenes from a bird’s eye view. After the war, he took up a Marine flyer, and they were just going up at Floyd Bennet Field just to fly around, and they crashed; crashed on take off. Something went wrong; maybe a wheel crumbled or a wing tip may have touched the ground. Tootie became the Assistant Police Commissioner of the New York Police Department; one of the other guys went into show business. He was a comedian. Maxy developed a writing talent. He was very talented in that way, like all the guys he had a great talent for seeing past the event and looking at the people involved. So he got into writing and was an editor in Texas. Leon Klinghoffer was on the Achille Lauro when the terrorists took it over [Editor’s Note: October 7, 1985]. They were probably pushing passengers around. Leon was a guy that couldn’t take that; he wouldn’t stand for it. There are people like that in every war; somebody who will stand out and face the enemy with nothing but his bare hands and his wits. I knew Leon and I knew his brother Albie, and they were that kind of people. They wouldn’t flinch if a gun were held to their head. The Klinghoffer family had a dry goods store. I don’t know if they’ve still got it, but it has been years and years. We used to play in the gutter together, that’s how I knew him. We used to play stick ball and used to play in the street and all the guys on the same block used to play together, then we would go out and fight the guys from the next block. We would chase each other on the roof tops, swing in the clotheslines; we were always making some kind of racket. This was around Suffolk and Norfolk Streets. When we were through playing, Albie and Leon would go to work in the store. We grew older, I guess they took the store over. I didn’t see them or hear about Leon until I heard about this incident. You know, they didn’t kill him at first. They probably beat him up when he raised a fuss. I told Roz that I wasn’t surprised that he got killed. That is how the guys were; we were all from a crazy macho age—it produced many heroes like Leon. I’m sorry that he had to go out like that, but it was probably the way it should be. Leon was a brave man. NEXT: The Brotherhood (above) Leon Klinghoffer with wife Marilynn. (left) 1930s caricatures by Jack—we assume they’re of his tall brother David, father Benjamin, and mother Rose. All art this article ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate.

INNERVIEW

The Son Also Rises Jack’s son Neal Kirby interviewed Conducted and transcribed by John Morrow

(right) Jack mentions, on page 4 of this issue, how his father used to carry him around on his shoulders when he was little. Here, Jack returns the favor to two-year-old Neal in Fall 1950, during a touching moment on Jones Beach. Our thanks to Neal for sharing the photos shown throughout this interview.

(Jack and Roz Kirby welcomed their only son Neal into the world in 1948 in Brooklyn, New York. The family moved to Long Island when Neal was only a year or two old, where he was raised among, eventually, three sisters and a host of relatives from the Lower East Side. He left home to attend college in New York in 1966, and followed the family to California after graduation. Now 57 years old—and father of Jack’s grandchildren Jeremy, Tracy and Jillian—Neal graciously sat down for this telephone interview, which was conducted on August 10, 2005, and was copyedited by Neal.) THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Do you remember your parents telling you what it was like growing up on the Lower East Side of New York? NEAL KIRBY: My mother never talked much about her childhood at all. My father did, and explained a lot about his childhood; it was rough. When you listen to stories about his childhood, it’s like watching the old “Our Gang” comedies; a little bit rougher, of course, but the same kind of thing. TJKC: Once you moved to Long Island when you were around a year old, did your family stay in that same house until they moved to California in the 1960s? NEAL: They lived in one house until I was about three, and then they bought a second house about two blocks away, and that’s the house I was brought up in, in a town called East Williston. They were there from about 1950, ’51 until they moved around the end of 1968, beginning of 1969,

when they moved to California. TJKC: What do you do for a living now? NEAL: I’m a science teacher. I’ll be teaching a little math this year. I teach seventh grade. TJKC: Were you always interested in science? NEAL: Yeah. I tried going that direction when I entered college in 1966; I started out as a zoology major. But a number of things happened in college, and I wound up with a degree in Business from Syracuse University, back in New York. When I came out of college, I moved directly to California; I was married at the time to my first wife. I wound up in banking for twelve years, then financial data processing and marketing for about ten years. I never really liked it; I enjoyed banking somewhat, but I never really enjoyed the corporate life. After my divorce around 1989, ’90, I was living in Central California, and moved back to Southern 7

(above) Jack hard at work in the late 1940s. We adjusted the photo digitally to see what was on his board, but it appears he was just getting started, and the page was blank. (right) Cover art from Charlie Chan #3 (Oct. 1948), which, from the inscription, was either sold or given away in 1968. (next page, top, clockwise) Jack, Susan, and Neal in March 1949 • Jack and Roz take the kids to the playground in Fall 1950 • Summer 1954, with new addition Barbara • Spring 1952, with Neal at four years old. (next page, bottom) Perhaps the strip Neal remembers taking into New York was King Masters, shown in this inked example. Jack had Frank Giacoia ink the samples of this strip about a jazz trumpet player, but he was never able to sell the concept. Charlie Chan TM & ©2006 the respective owner. King Masters TM & ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate.

California. I was pretty much flat broke, and I stayed with my parents for a couple of months, and got myself this little studio apartment next to the runway at LAX. I’d reached the point in my life where I literally hated waking up and going to work in the morning. I hated what I was doing, and I had started dating my current wife Connie. I’d also just gotten custody of my son Jeremy, who was going into sixth grade at the time. So Connie said, “What do you really want to do?” and I said, “I always wanted to be a science teacher.” So she said, “Why don’t you go back to school?” I was in my early forties by this point, but she said she’d watch Jeremy at night. So I went back to school two nights a week; substitute taught during the day and worked a part-time job the other two nights and weekends; and within two years I had two teaching credentials and a Master’s Degree in Education. I could not have done any of this without my wife, Connie. She was my support and inspiration. Now I consider myself so lucky; there’s so few people who really enjoy what they work at, and I just love going to school every morning. Where else can you get a room full of animals, and microscopes, and telescopes, and everything else you always wanted as a kid, and somebody else is paying for it, and letting you do it? It’s incredible.

NEAL: I was always geared more toward the Sciences. My artistic talent stopped at boats and planes; that was about it.

TJKC: As a child, did you inherit any artistic talent? Or were you geared more toward the Sciences and Math?

TJKC: Do you remember seeing him read the newspaper regularly? Did he focus on the headlines, sports, or comics?

TJKC: Did any of your sisters gravitate toward art? NEAL: My sister Barbara did. From a drawing standpoint, she has some nice artistic talent. I can write somewhat; my wife says I’m a good writer anyway, though Connie’s a much better writer than I. Tracy and Jeremy are both very bright and are also very good writers and very talented. My youngest daughter Jillian is in dance, and writes well, and draws well. She does everything; math and science. I think she probably picked up more of my father than anyone else. She’s my daughter from my second marriage; she’s ten years old. TJKC: Your dad read a lot of science-fiction work; was that a common bond, or was that not grounded enough in reality for you? NEAL: It was a common bond. I remember when I was a kid, he belonged to the Science-Fiction Book Club. Once a month, these hardcover books would come in the mail, and he’d read ’em in, like, twenty minutes or something. I’d read a lot of them, with the old authors like Vonnegutt and those guys. My father also loved history, and had a lot of history books around. TJKC: A lot of people have asked over the years, when did your dad have time to read? He was glued to the drawing board 16 hours a day, cranking out page after page. When did he sit down and actually read science-fiction books? NEAL: He did a lot more reading before things got really hot and heavy with Marvel. When that started, even I noticed a lot of his reading tapered off. Starting around 1960, ’61, when the FF hit, they kept piling on more work. He was working 14, 16, 18 hours a day. At that point he had very little reading time, up until around the early 1980s when he started slowing down.

NEAL: I rarely saw him read the newspaper; I guess he was one of the first people that depended on the TV for the news. When he was drawing, he always had the TV going. My parents were like most at the time. When [Walter] Cronkite came on, life stopped. I was the same way after I went off to college. He was always keenly aware of what was going on, but he wasn’t the type to sit there in the morning with his coffee and read the paper. TJKC: Did your dad read you bedtime stories when you were a kid, or did your mom do that kind of stuff? Who tucked you in at night? NEAL: We were all very close as a family as children, but I don’t remember being read to a lot as a young child. They didn’t really do that. They were the kind of parents that were always there for you, but at least in my case—I don’t want to speak for my sisters—I can’t recall them doing a lot of reading to me. A lot of my reading was solely on my own, because I enjoyed it. TJKC: How did you view your mom and dad’s relationship? Was it the typical Ozzie and Harriet kind of marriage? Or was your mom more liberated than a lot of women of the time? NEAL: They were very, very close. My father was also very protective of my mother. But for the times, I would say my mother was definitely more liberated. My father being my father, he was down there working, doing all this creative stuff. He couldn’t run the house; my mother handled a lot of the business transactions and the household finances. My father couldn’t screw in a lightbulb. Literally! [laughter] He’d try screwing it in, and it wouldn’t go, and he’d get frustrated and smash it with his hands. [laughter] So we even had to take that privilege away from him. But my mother was a strong woman; she ran the roost, and pretty much controlled everything that was going on in the house. My father had no mind for that stuff; he wouldn’t have been able to survive without her. TJKC: What’s the birth order of your siblings? NEAL: Oldest is my sister Susan; she was born in 1945. She still lives back in New York. I’m second. Then there’s my sister Barbara, who’s born in 1952. And the youngest is Lisa; she’s 13 years younger than I am. TJKC: What’s the earliest memory you have of being aware of what your dad did for a living? NEAL: It’s funny; him being a comic book artist, to me as a boy, was just what he did for a living. There was absolutely nothing special about it. Every two, three, four weeks, he’d go into New York City to bring his work in. I do have recollections back in the 1950s, about occasionally having to drive into Brooklyn for a strip he was working on; it wasn’t Sky Masters. It wasn’t Wally Wood; someone else was doing some inking, and we’d drive into Brooklyn and bring work there. But it just never seemed different to me. Back then, what people did for a living, their incomes, all that kind of stuff was a very private, family matter. You never asked what somebody’s father did for a living; that was considered incredibly bad

manners back then. I remember once or twice in elementary school I’d mention it, and the teacher would go, “Oh, can your father come in and draw some sketches for the class?” and he’d come to the school and draw some super-heroes up on the blackboard. Also, back then the comic book market was a fairly limited market; it’s not like today where you can mention a super-hero, and everybody knows what you’re talking about. There were no movie or TV shows; the original blackand-white Superman show might’ve been the only one. So even to my friends, the fact that my father was an artist didn’t mean that much. TJKC: Did you grow up reading comics, or were they not of any real interest to you? NEAL: I started reading them at the time when the Monster books started coming out, late 1950s, early ’60s. Then I got into it a little more, and started reading the older ones my father had in his studio: Black Magic, the old western books. I enjoyed the more “sciencey” ones obviously. I always enjoyed reading Thor because of the historical and mythological stories involved. If I wasn’t teaching science, I’d

Simon had a son my age. I didn’t actually get along with him that well; I just kind of hung around, and half the time I just sat in the car. [laughter] TJKC: I’ve never heard much about your dad’s younger brother David. Do you remember your uncle? NEAL: Oh yeah. Uncle Dave was my second father, basically. He lived in Brooklyn. He was a floor waxer. I remember when I was seven or eight, he’d drive out on a Saturday, and I’d jump in his car and go help him wax floors. The floor waxing machines were huge; they’d pretty much pull me around the floor until I got big enough to handle them. Dave was more into things like fishing; he’d take me fishing about once a month. He kind of made up for some of the things my father just didn’t do; I don’t want that to sound like it took away from my father at all, because it didn’t. It was the type of thing where, okay, Dad doesn’t go fishing, big deal; Uncle Dave takes me fishing. TJKC: Were he and your dad very close? He seemed to talk very fondly of his brother in interviews. NEAL: They were. When they were growing up on the Lower East Side, Dave was physically much bigger than my father. My father was maybe 5'7" in shoes. Dave was about 6'2". Even though he was bigger, he was the younger brother, so other kids picked on him. My father would say that just about every fight he got into as a kid was protecting his younger brother. Dave as a kid had long, curly blond hair, so all the other kids would pick on him, and it was pretty much a weekly fight over Dave’s hair. TJKC: Your mom always spoke very fondly of her sister Anita. Were you close to her as well? NEAL: I was as a kid, growing up. They lived in upstate New York in a town called Liberty, in the Catskill Mountains. So that was kind of our Summer Vacation, to go up to their house. TJKC: What about your grandparents? All I’ve heard was that your dad was very close to his mother. Boy M& sT ndo ma Com . ics Com DC 006 ©2

(above) Before Jack left for World War II, he created this model sheet for the artists who took over the Boy Commandos strip. Note that Alfy’s name had been erased and replaced by Tex, so this was still being used in-house at DC in 1947 when the character change was made. (right) Neal jammin’ on the clarinet with the rest of the Kirby clan, November 1958. (next page) If anyone out there has a copy of the 1954 book Confederate Agent by James D. Horan (an account of the life of Civil War spy Thomas H. Hines), let us know what’s on page 214. We’re assuming Jack did these studies in conjunction with his work in Classics Illustrated Special Issue #162A (June 1961). 10

be teaching history, because I love that just as much. I just went yesterday to see the King Tut exhibit in Los Angeles; it was incredible. TJKC: So you didn’t really start reading comics while your dad and Joe Simon were working together? NEAL: No. It wasn’t until he was at Marvel that I started reading them on a regular basis. TJKC: When your dad started working at Marvel, did he routinely get copies of the comics sent to him? And did you trade those with your friends? NEAL: He started getting some of those. Actually, I don’t recall any of my friends being comic book readers. There really weren’t that many kids interested in comics until the start of the FF, and the early 1960s with Marvel. TJKC: Do you have any particular memories of Joe Simon coming to visit? At one point, the two families lived across the street from one another. NEAL: That was when I was really young, like three or four years old. I don’t have any recollection of that. If I remember correctly, the Simons moved further east on Long Island, and I do have some memories of driving out to the Simon’s house on Saturdays or Sundays. I think Dad would bring some work with him, and we’d spend a couple of hours there. If I remember right, Joe

NEAL: They were very close. I never knew his father; he died when I was about a year or two old. His mother Rose, who my daughter’s named after—that’s her middle name—died when I was seven or eight years old. They had her in what’s known today as an assisted living home. I never really got to know her that well. My mother’s mother also died within that same year, around 1955. The only grandparent I got to know well was my mother’s father; I think I was 20 or 21 when he died. TJKC: Your family had this huge close-up drawing of an aged face with a beard, hanging in their living room. [Editor’s Note: See Collected Jack Kirby Collector, Volume Two for a repro of this amazing image.] I’ve heard people say it’s Moses, and it’s your grandfather. Which is it? NEAL: That was strictly his interpretation of Moses. My mother’s father was pretty much bald as a cueball for all the time I knew

him. [laughter] That drawing’s hanging in my living room, and it looks nothing like him.

Now, of course, we’re all very close; I’m probably closer with my sisters now than I’ve ever been.

TJKC: That’s a powerful piece of art; the eyes just follow you around the room.

TJKC: Would you say you and your dad had a lot in common?

NEAL: That’s the first thing people mention. People who aren’t even religious, must less Jewish, go, “That’s gotta be Moses.”

NEAL: We had a lot in common. I got my love of science and history from him. I know I shared a lot of his values, both morally and politically. I’d say we were very close; our big difference was that I can screw in a light bulb, and he couldn’t. [laughter] I was able to build bookcases and do electrical and plumbing things, and he couldn’t. But I think that’s because the creative part of his brain consumed him.

TJKC: Do you recall roughly when your Uncle David passed away? NEAL: Around 1971, ’72. I flew back to New York with my father for the funeral; we were living in California at the time. TJKC: Which of your siblings were you closest to growing up? NEAL: Just age-wise, my oldest sister Susan. It was a very “sitcom” older sister/younger brother relationship. We’d pick on each other, kick at each other. I was the little brother peeking in at her parties. It was very typical, almost like you’d see on Ozzie and Harriet. By the time Barbara got a little bit older, I was already off in college. Just by virtue of not being around that much, we didn’t have that close of a relationship, and Lisa pretty much the same thing.

TJKC: So it wasn’t a case of him not wanting to do that stuff; he literally couldn’t do it? NEAL: No, his brain just didn’t work that way. If you look in terms of geometry, the guy could draw a perfect circle without a compass, and do all these things with perspective and so on, that most people can’t do. But if it came to measuring a wall to put up a bookcase or something, that he wouldn’t be able to do. And it was the type of thing he wasn’t interested in, and didn’t have patience for. I think that kind of goes along with it. TJKC: Do you find yourself becoming more like him

as you get older? NEAL: No, I can still screw in light bulbs pretty well. [laughter] But I do some creative things also. I’m a fairly good writer, though most of my writing talent goes to writing grant requests to get money for my classroom. I guess if I keep getting the grants, I must be a decent writer. TJKC: Did your folks take you to art museums? NEAL: Yeah, they did. Occasionally, we’d go into the Metropolitan Museum in New York. We’d go more toward the older exhibits; the ancient Egypt exhibit, the suits of armor, and all that. TJKC: That’s funny; I’d have thought your dad would be more interested in Pop Art, and the more Modern Art. NEAL: No, I don’t have any recollection of him being interested in Modern Art whatsoever. He never made the suggestion to go to the Guggenheim Museum, or anything like that. TJKC: Were they really strongly stressing to you kids the importance of education, and getting good grades? NEAL: Oh, absolutely. Moreso with me; I think they were more traditional, in that it was the boy who had to go to college, earn a living, that kind of thing. Growing up, there was never any question that I would go to college. College was part of the normal progression; it was never an option. It was expected, and I never had any thoughts of not going to college. TJKC: I assume your parents never went beyond high school, right? NEAL: No. My father never graduated high school; my mother did. My dad got into his senior year, but never finished. TJKC: Did they push you toward any artistic endeavors; piano lessons or that kind of thing? NEAL: No. I took clarinet lessons for a number of years. That was pretty much my choice. The public school I was going to had a big art and music program. Again, learning an instrument was just something you were expected to do where I went to school. Then as a teenager I learned to play the guitar, because in the 1950s and ’60s, every teenage boy was expected to play the guitar. TJKC: That’s how you got girls, right? [laughter] NEAL: Absolutely! It worked in high school; I had my own rock band and all that. TJKC: What about sports? Did your dad think you should try out for the football team? NEAL: No. They never really pushed any particular thing. It was pretty much, whatever I felt interested in, they allowed me the freedom to do it. TJKC: With two parents having grown up during the Depression, how did that affect your childhood? Was it constantly, “Turn off that light switch!”? NEAL: Oh no, they were just the opposite. I had part-time jobs, starting when I was about 15, because I always liked having my own pocket money for dates. I remember leaving for a date, or the beach or something, and pulling out of the driveway, and Dad would come running out of the house, going, “Here, do you have enough money?” [laughter] “Yeah, put your wallet away, Dad.” They saw that the Depression was such a hardship on them, that they wanted to be the opposite for their kids. 11

TJKC: In the mid-1950s, after Dr. Wertham released his book Seduction of the Innocent, and the Senate had their subcommittee meetings on Juvenile Delinquency, your dad and Joe Simon’s company Mainline folded. Were you aware of things being particularly tough then? NEAL: No, just the opposite. Through their whole lives, even as an adult, they would not talk about business, or income, or anything like that. That was just not discussed, not shared with the kids. We wouldn’t have an inkling if things were going good, or things were going bad. TJKC: So you weren’t aware of the whole backlash against comics? NEAL: No, not at all. Most of it I didn’t know about until reading about it in his biography many years later. TJKC: Do you remember your dad being particularly excited when he landed the

Sky Masters strip? Was it always a dream of his to do a syndicated newspaper strip? NEAL: I honestly think he enjoyed that more than comic books. I know he loved doing Sky Masters. That was so far ahead of its time, it’s incredible. If you look at some of the things he designed; I remember one thing where he’s got Sky Masters floating outside the spaceship, he’s holding this wand which would shoot out little jets of air, and that’s how he moved around the spaceship. That’s exactly what the first astronauts used outside the early ships. NASA wasn’t in existence at the time, but there was this center where they were training jet pilots for early space flight. I guess they picked up on the comic strip, and they started sending him all this classified information! [laughter] I remember him getting this lithograph in 1957, and it showed all the rocket boosters built to date, and all the ones planned out into the future, right up through Mercury, Atlas, the Saturn V, which launched the moon ships. There was one planned after the Saturn V called the Nova, which was even bigger, but was eventually scrapped in favor of the Space Shuttle. It was incredible stuff. TJKC: So that explains the authentic look of the strip. NEAL: Absolutely. A lot of it, he did without that material. It took a while for the strip to grab hold, before this little fan club, so to speak, within that early space community started sending him stuff. TJKC: Being a science buff, I take it that strip was particularly interesting to you. NEAL: Yes. Now I run the astronomy program at every school I’ve been in, and I write grants for telescopes, and we do astronomy one or two nights during the Winter. So I’ve always had a love of that also. TJKC: Did your dad take you to movies, or did you watch them together on TV? NEAL: Usually, if we went to the movies, it was a family, Sunday afternoon thing. It was normally things like musicals, like Around The World In 80 Days and things like that. TJKC: So you didn’t go see the 1950s Atomic Monster films? NEAL: No, but we’d watch them on TV. Dad had this little leftover World War II TV set, and that was down in his studio in the basement of the house. They got one of the first color sets; I remember watching one of the first Wonderful World of Disney shows in color when that first came on. Most of the time, I’d go down in his studio to watch TV with him on his 10" black-&-white. TJKC: Did you have a favorite TV show you’d watch together? NEAL: Our thing was Victory At Sea and Groucho Marx. [laughter] Those were the two things we never missed. He loved Groucho Marx. TJKC: Although your dad smoked cigars, occasionally we’d see pictures of him smoking a pipe. Why and when would he choose a pipe over a cigar? NEAL: I always remember him smoking both, but it was just whatever he was in the mood for. If you put a statistic to it, it was probably 4-to-1 cigars. Before he quit, after his heart attack, it was always easy to buy him gifts, because you could buy him a box of fancy cigars, or a new pipe. He didn’t care about clothes or anything. I remember he got into this kick of corncob pipes. [laughter] I’m not sure why; maybe he just liked the taste of the burning corncob.

TJKC: How did your dad’s devotion to his work affect you and your sisters? Before the Marvel stuff hit, and he was burning the midnight oil so much, did you get the sense of, “Well, Dad works all the time...”? NEAL: Oh no. Prior to Marvel, I don’t want to say he worked normal hours; being a typical artist, he liked working at night. But we did typical family things; we went to the beach on Sundays during the Summer. I think he tried to maintain a normal family life, as best he could, given his occupation. I never had a sense of feeling ignored or anything like that. TJKC: What were his typical hours like? NEAL: He would normally start working at 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning, and work through to maybe 10:00 or 11:00 at night. He always had a long day, even prior to Marvel. Once Marvel hit, he’d start working at the same time, but most of the time he’d work till 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. That was in “The Dungeon,” his basement studio; it was the size of somebody’s typical second bedroom. Maybe 12' x 12' or something like that. It was nicely finished in stained tongue-and-groove knotty pine, with built-in bookcases, so it was a nice little room, but it was in the basement, so the room’s one window was up five or six feet, at ground level, and would open to the driveway. TJKC: But you felt like you saw plenty of your dad? NEAL: Oh yes. He was always there. In school when we were involved in a concert or graduation or anything, he was always there for us. They both were. TJKC: What were holidays and vacations like? Did you generally do it with other relatives, or did they just grab the kids and go somewhere, or just hang around town? NEAL: Most of our vacations were during the Summer, and we’d go up to Liberty for a couple of weeks. We had normal Summer vacations. About once a month, especially on Saturdays, there were always relatives coming out to our house on Long Island. They wanted to get out of the city, and here were the Kirbys living out on Long Island, so they’d go there. On weekends, especially Saturdays, there was almost always some cousin or aunt or uncle coming over. TJKC: We’ve all heard stories about what a terrible driver your dad was. Was he always bad, even when you were young, or did he get worse as time went on? NEAL: I remember him starting out terribly. [laughter] When I was maybe ten years old, he had to pick me up from Hebrew school one afternoon; I think my mother was sick. I started Hebrew school fairly young, because the only Temple around us was Orthodox, so I started going twice a week. We weren’t Orthodox, but the only Temple around us was. In the course of going the five miles between the Synagogue and the house, we went up on the sidewalk at least once or twice. [laughter] I remember him going up on the sidewalk, between the telephone pole and a building.

[laughter] I’m not sure what the reason was. Then when we got close to the house, a paper bag blew across the street, and he thought it was a dog, and we went up on the sidewalk again. [laughter] He said one of the reasons he was such a bad driver and afraid of driving was—back in the 1940s before he went into the Army, he was making good money. So he bought this big 12-cylinder Lincoln Zephyr, and he had his mother in the car with him, driving through Central Park, and he hit one of these big granite balls that sits on top of a pedestal. The ball rolled off down the hill, and picnickers went scrambling. [laughter] I guess his mother got hurt a little bit in the accident, and it made him gun-shy of driving. But I think primarily, he was just always thinking; he couldn’t concentrate on driving the way you need to. TJKC: When you started dating, did your dad offer you any advice on girls? And if he did, was any of it good advice? [laughter] NEAL: Actually, I never got “the talk.” Before I went off to college, he made some remark like, “You know how to be careful, right?” [laughter] or something to that effect. But I never got the big family life sex talk. They just didn’t want to bring it up. [laughter] You know, figure it out. TJKC: When your dad started working for Marvel, did he ever take you up to the offices? NEAL: Oh yeah. I went up there quite a few times in the early 1960s. I met Stan Lee, and Flo Steinberg; she was great, always very nice when I went up there. Normally I’d just sit out in the anteroom while Dad went in and met with Stan. She’d say, “Can I get you a soda?” or this and that. To me, it was a chance to play hooky, because we did this about once a month. [laughter] I would take a day off from school and go into the city with him. Going to Marvel was his thing, and from there, we’d go to the Central Park Zoo or one of the museums or something. We just made a day of it. TJKC: Do you have any particular memories of seeing Stan Lee, or your dad’s interactions with him? NEAL: Not particularly. If I was in the Marvel offices, I’d get a “hello” from Stan. I remember once as a teenager, a friend and I were going to the beach, and Dad needed to get some work to Stan Lee, so we took a little detour and dropped some work off at Stan Lee’s house. I don’t remember if he even came to the door. I remember he had a daughter that was a little bit younger than I was; maybe she came to the door. But not a lot of interaction with Stan Lee; I met him a few times. TJKC: Do you remember watching your dad work on the early Marvel books at all? NEAL: Oh yeah. A lot of times, I’d stand over him and say, “Hey, whatcha doing?” and he’d show me what he was drawing. I can remember him drawing the first FF, and Thor, and X-Men and all that. I’d stand and watch him draw quite often.

(previous page, top) Kirby/Wally Wood Sky Masters strip from March 4, 1959.

(previous page, bottom) Late 1960s illo of Bullseye.

(above) Jack hams it up in the backyard pool with Susan and Neal, in the Summer of 1952.

(below) Singing along to a “Best of” album of folk singing quartet The Weavers during Chanukah 1962 (note that two-yearold Lisa has finally made the scene). Other gifts that year are a woodworking skill set (undoubtedly for Neal), and a 33rpm album of The 2000 Year Old Man comedy routines by Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Sky Masters TM & ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate. Bullseye TM & ©2006 Joe Simon and Jack Kirby Estate.

TJKC: Of course, the big controversy all along has been how much your dad created, versus how much Stan created. Do you remember your dad working from scripts or outlines or plots? NEAL: The way I remember it—and I certainly don’t want to be the definitive word on it—is basically he had the 13

(this page, top and middle) While digging through books at an antique shop, Tom Morehouse came across a book of Official U.S. Navy Photographs from WW II, and discovered an image Jack swiped for the splash page to Sgt. Fury #13 (Dec. 1964). Tom also dug up this swipe [below] from a painting that Jack used for the cover of Police Trap #1 (Sept. 1954). Keep those eagle eyes peeled for more, Tom! (below) Neal Kirby in Fall 1965, posing for Jack’s Teenagent concept.

story in his head. Normally he’d start in the middle of a story, and then do the beginning and the end. So he had the story in his head, and most of the time he’d be drawing the story, and writing the storyline into the margins of the page. TJKC: Would this have been on the earliest issues, or later? We know he did that around the time the Silver Surfer and Galactus came along, because you see margin notes all over the pages. But in early 1961, ’62, was he working from any kind of supplied outline? NEAL: I honestly don’t recall. To the best of my knowledge, he met with Stan on a fairly regular basis, so I can only assume they probably worked out the storylines together. But in terms of what came through in the story and the actual development of the characters, whether it was the FF or Thor or whatnot, I honestly think in terms of the character development, he was the driving force there.

We did this thing with photographs in the basement of the house. He had this idea for TeenAgent. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time, and he took pictures of me stalking around the basement with this fake pistol, and basically I was supposed to be this teenaged James Bond. It was one of those things that he had an idea to do. He designed the cover, and whether he presented it to anybody, I have no idea. TJKC: As the Sixties were wearing on, we understand now that he was getting more and more disenchanted at Marvel. Did you get a sense of that at home? NEAL: Again, they really kept that stuff to themselves. But I do remember one occasion, this would’ve been maybe around 1963, ’64. I was upstairs in my bedroom doing homework or something, and I could hear my father just screaming uncontrollably downstairs, and my mother trying to calm him down. It was kind of scary, and I didn’t know what was going on. I remember my mother coming upstairs and saying, “Your father’s just upset with a few things going on at work. Don’t worry about it, he’s not mad at you kids or anything like that.” There was a lot of frustration there unquestionably. TJKC: Was he one to lose his temper often? NEAL: He occasionally lost his temper, but it was pretty rare. TJKC: Steve Sherman reminded Lisa about how they bought these paisley flower stickers in the 1960s, and once in a while your dad would get mad and punch a hole in those hollow wood doors, [Neal laughs] and they’d take a sticker and put it over the hole.

TJKC: Sitting around the dinner table, did he ever say, “Neal, I’ve got this great idea for a new Thor story,” or did he leave his work in the Dungeon? (next page) A couple of examples of Jack’s 1930s political cartoons, predating his Captain America work.

(next page, bottom) Neal’s Bar Mitzvah in June 1961.

NEAL: When he walked up the stairs, that was it. Very rarely did he remark about his work around the dinner table, or just sitting around. We called it “coming up for air,” maybe 9:00 or 10:00 at night, and he’d go into the kitchen for coffee and cake. That’s when I’d take my homework break, and join him in the kitchen, and we’d shoot the breeze about anything. Very rarely do I remember actually talking about what he was working on. We’d talk about it when he was downstairs in the Dungeon, but he pretty much left it there. TJKC: Were you the direct inspiration for any of your dad’s characters? Did you ever toss him any ideas that he ended up using? NEAL: One thing. [laughter] When he was doing “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.”, this was right after James Bond hit, with the Aspen Martin and all the fancy cars. He wanted to give Nick Fury a fancy car like James Bond had. Being into cars at the time, like any typical teenage boy, I went through some of my old Road and Track books and said, “Here, use this one.” I remember it was a Porsche 904 racer. I said, “If you look at the design of the car, you can build missiles into the wheel wells” and this and that. That was my one contribution to the comics industry, Nick Fury’s car.

NEAL: The upstairs bathroom door; my older sister will probably kill me for saying this. [laughter] She was very much the atypical rebellious teenager. Dad, of course, was very protective of my mother, and if Susan was to talk back to my mother, Dad would chase her upstairs. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, and he’d put his fist through the bathroom door. [laughter] It never got to her or anything, but he put his fist through the door a few times. [laughter] They were called Hollow Core doors; if he tried it on a solid door, none of us would be enjoying his artistry at this point. [laughter] Before they moved to New York, they took that woodgrained Contact Paper and put it over the doors to cover up all

the holes. [laughter]

with the German prisoners.

TJKC: Despite these instances, it didn’t sound like your dad was a particularly volatile guys. But did he mellow when he got to California?

TJKC: You said your dad loved to regale people with his war stories. Did those stories change over time, or did they stay pretty consistent? Being such a great storyteller, you’d think he might have a tendency to exaggerate things as the years go by.

NEAL: In terms of that type of thing, yeah, he definitely mellowed as he got older, though he very much remained, literally, the little tough guy from New York. Not that I’m big, I’m only 5'9", but my father was still smaller than I was. But I knew better than to pick a fight with him, physically or otherwise. [laughter] Somewhere around the late 1980s, we went out to dinner at some little restaurant in West Lake Village, which is near their home in Thousand Oaks. At one point, he’s repeating his war stories we’ve heard a hundred times, and we all sit there and smile, and we’re all kind of laughing. And I kind of look over my shoulder, and I see these other two older guys, big guys with white hair and their little white-haired wives, and they’re looking over at Dad. And I’m thinking, “Oh, maybe these guys fought in Northern France like Dad did, and they’re listening to his stories.” So we get through, and go up to the cash register to pay the bill, and these two guys come up. One gets on either side, and one of them looks down at Dad and goes, “Ach, so du bist ein Starke?” which means in German, “So you think you’re a superman?”. And I’m going, “Oh my gosh, this guy’s a damn Nazi!” So Dad, who’s 5'7", looks up at this guy who’s about 6'2", and he goes, “Yeah, ich bin ein Starke” which means “Yeah, I’m a strong guy, you wanna do something about it?” And I’m thinking these guys are gonna start fighting the War in the restaurant! [laughter] TJKC: How old was your Dad when this happened? NEAL: He was at least 70 at this point, and ready to take on these two big German guys in this restaurant. Luckily they just kind of turned and walked out. TJKC: Did your dad pick up German during the war, or did his family speak it from the old days? NEAL: His family spoke Yiddish. His family was from a part of Europe called Galicia, which at that point was part of the Austrian-Hungary Empire. So his family spoke Yiddish, though more toward German, since they were actually part of Austria. And my mother’s family all spoke Yiddish, even though her family was from Russia. Yiddish is very close to German; I even studied German in high school so I could understand what all the relatives were saying. When they’d come over on a Saturday afternoon, if they wanted to gossip about somebody, one of the old aunts would say “Nicht vor dem Kinder” which means “Not in front of the children,” and that was a cue for everybody to start speaking Yiddish, so the kids wouldn’t know what they were talking about. [laughter] I thought, “I don’t need this,” so I started studying German in high school. But when he was over in Europe, he could communicate pretty well

NEAL: They were pretty consistent. I think what may have failed him a little as he got older, was more relating facts to timelines. I’ve seen things in print, and go, “Well, that couldn’t have happened.” Some of the more gruesome things, he never talked about. Most guys in combat won’t talk about the more gruesome things, and some of those I learned about from my mother rather than from him. I guess a lot of combat veterans will talk about it more as gallows humor. TJKC: Did those rough experiences affect his views of, for instance, the Vietnam conflict, and you possibly getting drafted? NEAL: Oh, absolutely! I guess today you’d classify him as a liberal Democrat. In Vietnam, he was very much against the whole thing, right from the beginning. TJKC: So he didn’t hesitate to speak out about his feelings on Vietnam? NEAL: Well, he did among the family. It was no big mystery to anyone in the family how he felt about it. In 1968 or ’69, when the first draft lottery was held, I was going into my third year of school. They would choose by birthdays; if your number came up low, you knew you were getting drafted. They would let you finish out your school year, and that was it. This was at the time of the Tet Offensive, so this was not a good time to get drafted. I had some friends over at my apartment, and we were all watching the lottery on TV, and I remember they called that night. He said, “Listen, if you draw a real low number, if you want to finish college in Canada, we’ll support you 100%.” He didn’t want me to go at all.

TJKC: Would you consider him pretty sociallyconscious? NEAL: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. There was one point I remember, I think it was the Summer of 1969. I was still in college, but came out to California for the Summer. It was right when Cesar Chavez was leading the grape boycotts in California. My mother came home from grocery shopping, and she had some grapes in the shopping bag. And he goes, “You can’t have those!” and he picks up the grapes and throws them out the kitchen window. [laughter] He definitely had a social consciousness, and one of the things that sticks in my mind more than anything—and probably goes back to your question about the effects of the Depression—is when I was a teenager, and we went to a cousin’s Bar Mitzvah on my father’s side of the family, so it was on the Lower East Side of New York. His side of the family was maybe middle class, but not well-to-do by any sense of the imagination. It was a very simple affair, and after the ceremony, they had this little meal set up in the lobby of the synagogue; what’s called a Kiddish, a little buffet. I remember looking at the door of the synagogue, and there was an old homeless man standing in the door looking in. My father walked over there, and took the guy by the arm, brought him inside, and sat him down at the table and made him a plate of food. TJKC: Was your mom a good cook? NEAL: Uhhh... no. [laughter] That’s pretty much a given. She could boil chicken, and made Swedish Meatballs, which I used to joke I would load into a musket. [laughter] We survived. Occasionally we’d go out for a meal. TJKC: Did your dad ever cook?

TJKC: Was your dad active in politics? Did you go out and draw art to help campaigns, or make contributions to political candidates? NEAL: No. Of course, before World War II he did some political cartoons, and he did Captain America and the Red Skull and all that. But no, he was never politically active later in life. He never made his feelings a secret by any means, but he didn’t actively go out and take part in demonstrations, or anything like that. 15

(right) An unfinished warrior drawing, circa 1970s.

just kept walking out the door. We thought we had hit a little gold mine there. I remember the little black-and-white things we did, 8 1⁄2" x 11"s which we sold in sets. We did larger black-and-white posters at one point, though I can’t remember what characters they were.

(below) Red Skull convention drawing. (next page, center) Neal’s children Jeremy and Tracy, flanking youngest daughter Jillian, in 1999. (next page, far right) Pencil drawings done for Marvelmania.

TJKC: Steve talks about how, when you guys would get together around the pool, you had a video camera.

were pretty young guys. We just kind of became real good friends; we’re like brothers. TJKC: Did you offer the suggestion to your dad, to hire Steve and Mark when he was doing the DC stuff? NEAL: No, that was totally him. I didn’t have anything to do with that at all. NEAL: No. He would’ve starved to death if it wasn’t for my mother. [laughter] TJKC: Steve Sherman talks about what good friends you guys have been over the years. How did you first meet him? NEAL: Around 1970, I guess, Steve had gotten involved with the Marvelmania thing, and I had just graduated college and moved out to California. I started wanting to get a little bit involved in these extra comic book activities, so that’s how Steve and I first met, when he was at Marvelmania. TJKC: So this was before your dad hired him and Mark Evanier to help out with the DC stuff. NEAL: Right. I was 22, he was probably 21, so we

TJKC: My understanding is that Communicators Unlimited was your idea, your concept to help your dad market himself independent of what he was doing for other companies.

TJKC: Do any of these films still exist anywhere? NEAL: I have no idea. I think that was Steve’s video camera, so if anybody has it, he does. [Editor’s Note: You better believe I e-mailed Steve Sherman to see if any of the old footage exists, but alas, he doesn’t think so.] TJKC: I assume there had to be some good practical jokes played on each other. NEAL: Not so much practical jokes on each other. If we were at a convention or going to a bar or something, we were going to pretty much be as crazy and loud and funny as we possibly could, without getting kicked out. We never did anything obnoxious or anything, but when we were together, we just liked having a good time. TJKC: And your dad was in on this?

NEAL: It wasn’t solely; it was just one of those things where myself, and Steve and Mark got involved to some extent. It was one of those things where we’re sitting around the kitchen table, trying to come up with ways to make extra money. Kirby Unleashed was the first thing we came up with.

TJKC: I take it you were pretty close to your dad.

TJKC: Did you have your Business Degree?

NEAL: Oh yes.

NEAL: Yes, I majored in Marketing and minored in Economics. So I kind of handled the business end, and did a lot of the marketing and selling, and arranged for the distribution, and did the work on getting the copyrights. Steve did all the graphic layout of the book. Our budget was very limited, so we had to do all the color separations by hand; I think we went through three tons of Zip-A-Tone. [laughter] Mark did a lot of the writing, so it was very much a collaborative effort.

TJKC: So you were your dad’s art agent for a while?

TJKC: In reprinting it last year, the sense I got from talking to everyone was that you eventually sold all the copies, but it wasn’t a huge financial success by any means. NEAL: No, the net profit probably came out to maybe $2000, which back then was probably okay, but nothing huge. From there we printed up those posters of the Norse Gods, unrelated to Marvel. We called them art posters; they were printed on very expensive paper, and they were actually very expensive to print up. We probably made a few bucks on those. We took a bunch of stuff back with us to a convention in New York, I think in 1972, ’73. The people at the convention gave us our own little room, and we had a bunch of stuff printed up; black-and-white pictures and so on, and we just couldn’t sell enough of this stuff. It 16

NEAL: [laughter] Yeah, we did some pretty outrageous things. Captain Plunger; we just got this crazy idea. I found some old helmet, and a bathroom plunger, a garbage can lid, and I put a towel around my neck. We put together this little video of Captain Plunger. I did the whole thing in a kind of Billy Crystal Yiddish accent. [laughter]

NEAL: Oh yeah. More the observer at this point. When Steve and I got together, and Steve’s brother Gary as he got older, we were pretty much the performers, and Dad just liked to sit there and laugh at us.

NEAL: For a while. It was nothing formal, just something that we did primarily at the convention in San Diego back in the ’70s. I kind of did it more to just stir up interest, and try to make original comic book art more legitimate as an art form. TJKC: Were you selling his original art, or trying to line up commissions, or find new jobs for him? NEAL: As far as I was concerned, it was either posters that we had, or original artwork. Any original artwork was when my mother would go through what they had, and say, “Okay, you can try to sell these at the convention.” TJKC: If this was the early 1970s, DC and Marvel hadn’t started returning original art, so was this mostly stuff from the 1950s? NEAL: Right. There wasn’t very much. Occasionally he’d do some new pieces on his own, or it was leftover pages. TJKC: Can you describe how you sort of drifted away from what your dad was doing in comics, and went out on your own? Was it mid-1970s? NEAL: Around the late 1970s, early 1980s, I still lived in Thousand Oaks. I spoke to my parents almost daily, and saw them at least once or twice a week. I was working for a company that did data

processing for banks, and got transferred to the Fresno area for five or six years. Just the sheer distance of being away from the family, I kind of got out of it. Then in 1989-90, I was going through my divorce, and life was kind of falling apart at that time. When I moved back to Southern California around 1990, I lived with my folks for a couple of months. I remember going to a San Diego convention at that time with Steve and Gary. It was a difficult time for me, and getting back into the comic book side of things was emotionally on the back burner. I was just trying to get my own life back together. TJKC: Were your folks there for Jeremy and Tracy’s births? NEAL: Yes they were. They were both born in Thousand Oaks; it was very typical back then, the mother would go into the hospital, and they’d take the father and grandfather, and stick you in the lowest, furthest corner of the hospital away from the birthing room, [laughter] and that was where you stayed until the baby was out and cleaned up, and looked like something on TV. [laughter] They were both there for the kids’ births. TJKC: You grew up with a dad who was idolized by a lot of guys of your own generation. Was there any pressure being “Jack Kirby’s son” when he was getting known among your peer group? NEAL: No, I never had any sense of that. I always felt more flattered when I ran into somebody who recognized the characters, and what my father did. I was more than happy to interact and tell them what I knew, but I never felt any pressure. TJKC: The stories are infamous about fans dropping in unannounced to your California home. Did any of that go on in New York? NEAL: Very rarely. I can remember maybe one or two instances of some fans calling ahead, but back in New York it was very rare. That really didn’t start until he moved to California. Whether some of that went on when I was off in college, I suppose that’s possible, but I don’t remember that type of thing until the ’70s. TJKC: Is there anything you think is generally misunderstood about your parents, and your dad in particular? NEAL: If anything, because he kept so much to himself—which is typical of a man of his generation—I think people don’t really have a very good appreciation of the extent of his frustration from the lack of receiving credit for what he did. In terms of remuneration, sure, obviously he wanted to be paid better, just like everybody else. But I think his big frustration is, “Hey, at the very least, I co-created all these characters.” The family joke is, “If they wear spandex, he probably created it.” That was a very big source of his frustration, which I don’t think fans in general have an appreciation of. Because he never expressed it. TJKC: How big of a frustration has it been for you, and your sisters as well? Is it something that really plagues you, or is it just an annoyance? NEAL: It’s been a frustration. I can’t honestly say it’s something you scream and yell about, but obviously within our family, it’s always been there that you knew your father created all these characters, and you go to the movies like the X-Men, Hulk, Fantastic 4... at least on Fantastic 4, he got the screen credit. But for all the other things, not receiving credit for what’s due as a creative force behind it... and that’s obviously been true of most of the other artists of his generation. Yeah, it is a source of frustration. TJKC: Are you in touch with the fan community, and what’s been going on since your dad passed away? Do you at least get a sense that the fan community appreciates him, and gives him credit for what he did? NEAL: Yes I do. The past several years, I’ve been not so much involved with it. After my father passed away, I was a little bit, but during the last year or two of my mother’s life, I was trying to reestablish myself in my career, and remarrying, and my daughter being born at the time. The year before my mother died, by wife Connie developed a chronic illness. It was very difficult for me to be involved in comics and family affairs for quite a while. It’s just been within the past year 17

Hero Biography Jack “King” Kirby, Comic Book Artist By: Jillian Kirby

Captain America throws his muscular body at his arch enemy, the Red Skull! The Fantastic Four seem to jump off the page battling Doctor Doom! Smashing through a brick wall comes the giant green body of the Hulk! These are just a few of the incredible comic book characters created by my grandfather, the late Jack Kirby. Jack was born Jacob Kurtzberg, on August 28th, 1917, on the Lower East Side of New York City. The Lower East Side was one of the poorest and toughest neighborhoods in America. It was a busy place filled with all sorts of sights, smells, sounds and people. As a child, Jack relished going to the movies. Often, his mom dragged him out of a movie after he’d seen a picture two or three times. Furthermore, Jack loved listening to his mother’s wonderful tales, reading books and telling his own stories. Kirby said, “I was raised in an atmosphere of strong storytelling. My parents came from Europe and all the European legends came here with them.” Finally, Jack loved to draw. He drew everywhere he could, even on the walls of his apartment and often studied how to draw books borrowed from the library. Jack attempted three things as a young person that assisted him to decide to become a comic book artist. First of all, at the age of 12, he began to read science fiction books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. He also loved reading science fiction pulps by Hugo Gernsback. Later on, when Jack was 16, he joined the Boy’s Brotherhood Republic (B.B.R.), which was a special club formed on the Lower East Side of New York. This club gave the neighborhood boys an opportunity to learn some skills, discipline and develop self-esteem. The B.B.R. developed a newspaper that Jack created a comic strip for called K’s Konceptions. He also wrote titles, articles and drew caricatures, which are drawings of a person that exaggerates certain features. Last, he obtained a job as a trainee at Max Fleischer’s animation studio. He was soon promoted to an assistant animator, with the job task of an in-betweener for the Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. An in-betweener draws the characters between their key actions. This makes the cartoons flow smoothly. All these events helped Jack eventually become a comic book artist. These are three significant facts about Jack Kirby that I find interesting. First, he created many superheroes such as Captain America, Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and X-men, which became famous in comic books, movies, and cartoons. His character Darkseid served as the model for Darth Vader in Star Wars. Second, Kirby’s style of art became the standard for comic books and has been imitated by many comic book artists. His heroes are very bold and muscular. In the book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, Kirby’s comic book panels were said to be, “A population explosion; casts of thousands, all fighting, leaping, falling and crawling.” Third, Jack served in the army in Europe during World War II and was in combat for many months. This helped strengthen his ideas of patriotism. He believed that a person should stand up for what he thinks is right. I can relate to Jack’s love of art and style of art. I, too, love to draw. When your characters seem to jump off the page at you, I think it is cool, because it seems 3-D and realistic. This style makes the reader like the story told by the artwork so much that it is hard to put the comic book down. Additionally, when Jack was in the army, he drew pictures of everything he saw, for example, portraits of soldiers and battlescenes. Likewise, when I am at an exciting scene, like a birthday party, I want to draw a picture of the party—what I am seeing and what I am doing, much like Jack did when he was in the army. These were three important facts about Jack Kirby and the fact which I relate to the most. In conclusion, Jack created 430 original comic book characters, and 400 comic book covers in the 52 years he worked as a comic book artist. All in all, he illustrated more than 21,000 comic book pages. That is enough to fill 2,600 comic books. Many people think Jack produced more artwork than any other comic book artist. In my opinion, the most important accomplishment of Jack’s was that he created many superheroes. Some of the most well known are: Captain America, X-Men, Fantastic Four, and The Hulk. A considerable number of these characters have been featured in movies, comic books and cartoons. There are many reasons why I think Jack is special but the two main ones are that, first, he had an active imagination. Jack was able to create numerous comic book characters with his famous style of art. He was excellent at telling stories with his art. Second, Jack bravely fought in World War II and barely survived. He was a true patriot who hated the Nazi’s! Jack died on February 7, 1994 in his home in Thousand Oaks, California. He died of a heart attack at 76 years of age. Jack Kirby was my grandfather. He died the year before I was born. I really wish I had the opportunity to meet and share moments of my life with him. However, through studying his artwork I have gotten to know and admire him. Bibliography The Art Of Jack Kirby, By: Ray Wyman, Jr. The Comics Journal Library: Jack Kirby, Edited by: Milo George

or two that I’ve started getting back into it. Moreso as my daughter Jillian got older, since she was born after Dad died. The only way she could learn about her grandfather was literally by researching him. When she was in third grade, they had to do a biographical project on a hero, so she chose her grandfather. She researched and wrote this biography, and it was a great way for her to learn about Dad. It’s funny; the local newspaper just published it. [laughter] It’s not bad, even for a nine-year-old. So it’s really through her that my wife and I started getting back into it. TJKC: Do you think your dad will ever get the credit he deserves? NEAL: I’m hopeful at this point that he’ll at least get the credit. I think having a large screen credit at the end of the Fantastic 4 is a starting point. Hopefully, whoever Marvel does a movie deal with, if it’s one of Dad’s characters, they’ll at least give him a screen credit for it. I would hope at this point, they’re not going to go backwards. Whether there’s ever any kind of remuneration... it’s hard to say. The comic book industry unfortunately is still one of the few industries that deals in creativity, that pretty much still operates like it’s 1938. [laughter] TJKC: Did you see the Fantastic 4 movie? NEAL: Yes. TJKC: What about Hulk, and the X-Men films? NEAL: No, primarily because we thought they were too violent to take Jillian to. The Hulk we didn’t go see because so many of our friends told us it was so unlike what Dad did in the comics. But the Fantastic 4, more because of our daughter getting involved in it, and Dad getting credit on it, this one we said we should go see. We really enjoyed it; we thought it was a lot of fun.

TJKC: Would your dad and mom have liked it? NEAL: I think so. I think they would’ve enjoyed, at the very least, seeing the characters come to life, relatively following the storyline. When you look at some of the movie reviews that panned it, I’m going, “What do these people expect?” If you want high drama, rent To Kill A Mockingbird or something. It was a fun movie, and we enjoyed watching it. In fact, when we were leaving the theater, they had this huge cardboard theater display, 8'x10'. I’m switching schools this year, and I think, “That would look good up on the wall.” So I go up to the theater manager, and I ask him if I can take the thing, and he says, “Sure, go ahead, we just throw them out anyway, or give them to our employees.” So after the movie, Connie and I are spending an hour unbolting the thing, and people are leaving the theater thinking, “What are these people doing?” [laughter] I’ve got it stapled up on a wall in my classroom now. I was interviewed by Jon Mefford for the Special Features part of the DVD, so I’ll get my ten minutes of glory and fame on that. TJKC: In San Diego, he told me about interviewing you; that when you walked up, he thought, “Whoa! That’s Jack Kirby!” [laughter] I’ve seen pictures of you when you were younger, and I didn’t see too much resemblance, but when I saw that photo of you in the Orange County Register, it was kind of eerie how

much you look like your father. NEAL: I know, people say the older I get, the more we look alike, which is good. My hair loss ought to pretty much stop where it is right now. [laughter] TJKC: When your dad was 57—your age now—he was nearing the end of his most prolific period, and back at Marvel for the last time. But then he reinvented himself, going back into animation for a whole new career. I was struck by the parallel that you, after doing what you did for so many years, kind of reinvented yourself going back to what you loved, with teaching and science, much like how your father started out in animation. NEAL: That’s funny, I’ve never looked at it that way. TJKC: By all accounts, he was much happier in animation. NEAL: I think so. He seemed to enjoy it. I know he always liked the people he was working with, Joe Ruby, and Barbera and so on. When my mother would have to drive him into LA for meetings, he always seemed to enjoy their company and doing that work. TJKC: Do you have a favorite story, character, or even individual piece of art your dad produced? NEAL: I do, actually. I’m looking at it right now, because I have it in my little office here. It’s the original cover piece to Kirby Unleashed. When you look at it, especially the one guy’s face who’s staring out at you, there’s just a lot of majesty, power, and honor. You know this is somebody who’s going to fight for the underdog. That’s just the feeling I get from that piece of artwork. Every figure is just a powerful, majestic figure. TJKC: Did he do that piece just for Kirby Unleashed, or had it done it earlier for himself? NEAL: If I remember right—we’re going back about 30 years here—it was just a piece he had done, and we chose to use that for the cover. TJKC: What’s your fondest memory of your mom and dad, either together, or each one separately? NEAL: [pause] In terms of just the most relaxed times, and having fun with your parents, I would say probably some of the times when I was a kid, and we went to Jones Beach. It’s when I remember my parents being the most relaxed, and just having fun. Dad was a pretty good swimmer; he taught me to swim by throwing me in a wave. [laughter] Those summer memories from when I was a kid are the most pleasant. TJKC: Is there one piece of advice from your dad that stands out as the best he ever gave you? NEAL: He wasn’t the type to sit down and give advice. It was more just his values and attitudes. For him, to quote Spike Lee, it was just “do the right thing.” If that’s how you live your life, if you look out for the little guy, and be socially responsible, this was how he lived his life. I think in a lot of his stories, that’s the story he’s telling. ★

(previous page, far left) Jillian Kirby’s third grade “Hero Biography”, which was recently published in the Trabuco Canyon News.

(previous page, center) Roz Kirby at home with Neal’s wife Connie and baby Jillian, in April 1996.

(above) An example of Jack’s animation work from the late 1970s.

(left) Connie, Neal, and daughter Jillian in August 2001.

[Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Mark Staff Brandl for help with the German spellings, and to Jim Amash for suggestions on some key questions for this interview.] 19

Gallery 1

KIRBYVISION : PAST

by Shane Foley

prehistory is on a collision course with the far future. Usually alien. Jack visited these scenarios often, such as here.

(pages 20-21) Dev il Di n os au r #4, p a g e 7 an d #5, p ag e 1 Are these pages from the past or the future? The further back in time one goes the more mysteries there are, so ‘Prehistory’ was a minefield of fun for Jack. (As long as he wasn’t asked to be ‘scientifically accurate’.) And as is the case so often in science-fiction work, that

(pages 22-23) Ou r Fig h t i n g For c es #151, p ag es 6 & 7 The pressure is immediately on for the Losers in these pages from Jack’s first issue. The top panel of page 6 is a masterpiece of design, beautifully composed and with the grouped enemy virtually faceless in their heavy uniforms. The trees and the foreground helmet stop the eye wandering off the right side of the panel, then assist it down to the Losers in the next panel.

ere’s more proof, if any be needed by now, that Jack Kirby was equally at home dramatizing any era of the past or the future. All he needed was a premise with a bit of action or drama and he nailed it every time.

(pages 24-25) J u s t ic e I n c . #4, p ag es 10 & 16 Jack loved drawing the ’40s, so Kenneth Robeson’s Avenger, who enjoyed a surge in the popularity of his paperback books in the ’70s, was a natural for the King to draw. He even makes bi-plane action, as seen here on page 16, seem effortless to depict.

(pages 26-27) I n t h e Day s o f t h e Mo b #2, p ag es 11 & 40 No aliens or such far fetched ideas in this version of the past. It seems Jack wanted in the ’70s to revisit the crime and romance genres of a decade and more earlier, but in an even more adult way. They are hard-hitting in their look at relational violence and sexuality. Page 40 here graphically depicts both. One can only wonder what may have happened if the series had been promoted and sold. 21

www.kirbymuseum.org At the suggestion of member Tom Kraft (have you seen his http://whatifkirby.com website?), the Kirby Museum is starting an Original Art Digital Archive. Tom’s idea is for Kirby Museum volunteers to scan both sides of Kirby original art in color at high-resolution. This archive would not only provide amazing images for the Museum’s Kirby Catalogue Raisonné, but also help scholars and historians in their efforts. Visit the project’s web page at http://kirbymuseum.org/ oaarchive.html for more information.

Newsletter Catalogue Raisonné TJKC Edition Winter 2006 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

Speaking of the online database, PHP/MySQL guru Greg Gatlin is hard at work on the “Admin” section of the program. So, even though there haven’t been any obvious improvements to the way the database works, rest assured, progress is being made!

Membership News The Museum welcomes these new members: Iikka Korhonen, Philip Miller, Dusty Miller, Tom Kraft, Mark Elstob, Melvin Shelton, Bob Heer, Tom Brevoort, Ralph Rivard, Tom Field, Ernest Shiner, Bob Shippee, Peter Houde, Drew Mayer, José Lopez, Greg Rowland, Kam Tang, Harry Mendryk, John Firehammer, Garrie Burr, Gary Picarello, Chris Klamer, David Schwartz, Anthony Foraro, Bruce Haley, Anthony Garcia, Elbert Coalwell, GAGNÉ International Press, Calvin Thacker, Ray Owens, Ray Wyman, Jr.. Questions about membership? New Address? E-mail us at: membership@kirbymuseum.org

Pencil Art Archive The Museum is now in possession of over 3500 scans of Jack’s pencil photocopies (made by the Kirbys before Jack’s pencils were inked), and is in the process of incorporating them into the Museum website. Plans call for rotating galleries from this Pencil Art Archive to be made available to the general public, offering a new, miscellaneous selection of pages every few months. Museum members will have access to the entire collection for viewing, which will number over 5000 pages when scanning is completed by TwoMorrows.

Join us! We accept PayPal! Any organization like ours can’t overemphasize how helpful annual support commitments can be to our efforts. So, in order to help us with the maintenance of annual membership dues, we’ve set up PayPal’s new subscription management service. Additionally, this special service of PayPal gives us a jump start on the management and production of usernames and passwords for the in-development members-only section of the website. However, because we don’t want those of you who opt for the upper-tier posters and/or need international shipping for their posters to pay more than $40 next year, we’ve had to customize PayPal to meet our needs. What we’re doing is charging the non-dues amount as an additional one day trial fee. This was the best solution that PayPal could currently provide for our needs—it works, but it does appear a bit odd if it’s unexpected. So don’t fret, if you’re having your poster shipped outside of the U.S. or want one of the “nicer” posters, that’s what is covered in the Amount Charged Today. Your $40 Annual Membership will be charged separately “tomorrow.” That said, if you’d rather not get involved in an ongoing annual PayPal charge—and we’ll repeat that we can’t overemphasize how helpful that kind of annual support can be to our efforts—you can simply use the Make A Donation button to send us a one-time amount of your choosing. Use the Note to Kirby Museum field that’s provided to let us know what poster you’d like. We’ll be happy to work out any login/password details afterwards. Checks and money orders can still be made out and mailed to Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, Inc.. Please include your e-mail address, phone number and poster choice in your correspondence or on the memo line of your check. Our mailing address is below. We offer an Academic Membership at half-price, too—please contact us if you’re a student, teacher or scholar and would like to take advantage of that discount. http://kirbymuseum.org/membership.jkm

Annual Membership with one of these posters: $40*

Captain America — 23” x 29” 1941 Captain America — 14” x 23”

Strange Tales — 23” x 29” Super Powers — 17” x 22” color

Annual Membership with one of these posters: $50*

Lisa Kirby lkirby@kirbymuseum.org John Morrow twomorrow@aol.com

Art Exhibit The Museum is in the planning stages of assembling a traveling exhibit of Kirby original art. If you have pieces you’d consider loaning for this show, please e-mail Rand Hoppe at rhoppe@kirbymuseum.org. Shipping and insurance will be provided by the Museum.

Marvel — 14” x 23”

Galactic Head — 18” x 20” color

Incan Visitation — 24” x 18” color

*Please add $10 for memberships outside the US, to cover additional postage costs. Posters come “as-is” and may not be in mint condition.

Original Art Archive!

Mark evanier

Jack F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby by Mark Evanier (below) Adam Starr of the 1930s “Solar Legion” strip does bear a slight resemblance to Space Ranger (shown here on the cover of his debut in Showcase #15), but how compelling is the evidence of a Kirby Konnection? Space Ranger TM & ©2006 DC Comics. Solar Legion TM & ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate.

ur first question this issue comes from Patrick Cooper, who seems to have spent much of the last six months typing out Kirby Kwestions to e-mail to me. Not that I’m complaining. Anyway, Patrick asks...

I read on the Internet a theory that Jack Kirby created the DC character Space Ranger and that when he had his fight with editor Jack Schiff, Schiff threw away the work Jack had done on the comic but not the idea. What can you tell me about this theory? Do you think there’s anything to it? Well, I’ll tell you what I know and you can decide whatever you want to decide. Not that you wouldn’t anyway. Let’s start by underscoring that I never heard Jack make any such claim, and that I know of no physical evidence or eyewitness testimony that he ever wrote or drew anything for the strip. I never even heard Jack say the words “Space Ranger” and wouldn’t assume he knew such a feature was ever published. The “case” for his possible involvement, such as it is, is wholly circumstantial and requires a few Hulk-sized leaps of deduction. As we all know, DC launched its Showcase comic in 1956 as a venue to test out new features that might graduate to ongoing books. “Challengers of the Unknown” appeared in issues #6, 7, 11 and 12 before it got its own title. The job of filling Showcase rotated between the various DC editors. About the time Challengers was spinning off, someone—apparently, editorial director Irwin Donenfeld— suggested they try some space heroes not unlike the popular newspaper strips Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. A decision was made that editor Julius Schwartz would develop a strip set in the present-day while his fellow editor Jack Schiff had his freelancers whip up one set in the future. As a result, “Space Ranger” appeared in Showcase #15 and 16 and “Adam Strange” ran in #17-19. The latter was edited by Schwartz, written by Gardner Fox and drawn initially by Mike Sekowsky with covers by Gil Kane. “Space Ranger”, meanwhile, was under the editorial supervision of Schiff. The art was done by Bob Brown and the scripts for

the Showcase issues were reportedly by Edmond Hamilton. Some reports say that Gardner Fox was involved in developing the idea and plotting the first stories, and that Murphy Anderson had a hand in designing Space Ranger’s costume. Murphy says he had nothing to do with it, and I’m not sure whether to believe the part about Fox. So how does Kirby’s name even come up in any of this? Here’s how: Space Ranger was a man named Rick Starr, who worked for an interplanetary agency battling space villains. Mr. Starr was aided by an alien sidekick named Cryll. In his earliest days in comics, Kirby wrote and drew a science-

fiction strip called “Solar Legion.” It featured a man named Adam Starr, who worked for an interplanetary agency battling space villains. Mr. Starr was aided by an alien sidekick named Dalek. There were a few plot similarities in the first stories of the two strips, and some people see similarities in some of the designs, particularly the two characters’ helmets. But that’s pretty much the argument right there. Was it a coincidence or was there some connection? Those who think it couldn’t be mere happenstance point to the fact that Kirby was working for Jack Schiff at the time Space Ranger was born. Our Jack even drew a non-series story that appeared in the back of Showcase #15, right after the first “Space Ranger” tale. (I wouldn’t take that as proof, by the way, that Kirby was aware of the character. He rarely looked at printed comics unless there was some specific reason, like he was being asked to critique the material or do the following issue. Sometimes, if he took over a book from someone else, he did so without even reading the issue before.) Advocates of the “Kirby created Space Ranger” conjecture even have an explanation as to why Adam Starr changed his first name: Because down the hall, Julie Schwartz was already working on Adam Strange, and you wouldn’t want both your new space heroes to be named Adam now, would you? One theorist who wrote me speculated, “As we all know, Kirby had a falling-out with Schiff over their deal on the Sky Masters newspaper strip and was barred from working for DC. It would make sense that because of that, Schiff threw out whatever Kirby had done on ‘Space Ranger’ and reassigned the project.” Yes, that might make sense... but only if the time frame was different. At the moment the first “Space Ranger” stories made print, Kirby was still on good terms with Schiff. 29

(above) Pencils from Jack’s last stab at both Superman and the Challengers, from DC Comics Presents #84 (August 1985). (next page, top) Sky Masters 6/14/59 Sunday strip. (next page, bottom) Two covers for issues that Kirby may—or may not—have contributed ideas to. Superman, Challengers, Supergirl, Jimmy Olsen TM and ©2006 DC Comics. Sky Masters TM & ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate.

(What happened with Sky Masters is not relevant here so I won’t go too far into it except to say that it was a very complicated matter—more complicated, I believe, than it seems in some accounts that have been published. Kirby, who was not great at managing contracts on his own, got sandbagged into a very bad deal. The way he handled the problem made it worse and angered Schiff... and when all was said and done, J.K. was told his services were no longer welcome at DC Comics. But like I said, that’s not relevant here. If Kirby did anything on “Space Ranger”, he did it some time before his ouster.) During this period when Jack was working for DC, he was drawing Challengers of the Unknown and the “Green Arrow” strip. He was also drawing and occasionally writing short mystery stories for books like House of Secrets and My Greatest Adventure. This was nowhere near enough work to keep him busy or to keep the Kirby household in groceries. In the (approximately) 30 months

he toiled for the company, he did slightly over 600 pages for them—or an average of 20 per month. That was not a lot for the prolific Jack Kirby, who could and did draw twenty in a week when he had the work. He drew for other companies but at the time, every one but DC was either paying rockbottom rates or teetering on the cusp of insolvency. Needing more to do and more security, he was constantly pitching concepts for new comics to whichever editors at DC would hear him out. If Schiff had said to Kirby, “We’re looking for an outer space hero set in the future,” it’s probable that Kirby would have suggested one. Or two or three or nineteen. The Jack Kirby I knew years later overflowed with ideas and was always tossing them off, often without being asked. Tell Jack that you needed a proposal for a comic book about a Portuguese figure skating judge and by God, he’d have one. Or if he didn’t, he’d come up with one in about three minutes. So it’s certainly possible he suggested a spaceman strip and that it was a reconfiguration of the old “Solar Legion” premise. But there’s zero proof that actually happened. Moreover, I’m not sure why if it did happen and Schiff liked the notion well enough to go forward with it, he wouldn’t have had Kirby draw the comic. Though he later cooled to the idea of working with the man because of a business dispute, the editor liked Kirby artwork tremendously. (In Schiff ’s version of the Sky Masters dispute, he said—under oath, no less—that he selected Kirby for the project because of the artist’s expertise in drawing sciencefiction material.) Kirby certainly had time to draw another book or two a month. Yes, it’s possible Kirby tossed out the idea and someone else grabbed it and ran with it. That did happen with him many times and at many companies. Jack provided at least the germ cell for a lot of scripts that were written by others, even for books with no visible Kirby connection. But in this case, the similarities between “Space Ranger” and “Solar Legion” are rather generic, plus there is that fact that the first two issues of “Space Ranger” were apparently written by Edmond Hamilton. In 1940, the same year Kirby was introducing “Solar Legion” in Crash Comics, Hamilton was launching a pulp hero named Captain Future, who was a lot like Space Ranger, too—and there were even alien sidekicks around. One was a shape-changing creature named Otho. (Years later when he was writing the Legion of Super-Heroes for DC Comics, Hamilton introduced the shapechanging creature, Proty. Same idea, different protoplasm.) There’s nothing in “Space Ranger” that Edmond Hamilton couldn’t have recycled out of his earlier work, let alone created anew. Though I’m a big promoter of the idea that Kirby has not been properly credited for all he invented, my inclination is to be real skeptical about this one. I’m not saying it absolutely didn’t happen. I’m just saying I don’t see any reason to believe that it did. After I drafted the above reply, I e-mailed it to Patrick Cooper and he wrote back with a follow-up question...

You said Jack often tossed off story ideas that others grabbed. We all know he threw out ideas for Marvel books when he was there, including creating villains for comics he didn’t draw. Did he do that while he was at DC doing Challengers of the Unknown? On stories he drew, almost certainly. Throughout Jack’s career, there were relatively few instances where he illustrated a script that he had not at least coplotted. During the years of the Simon-Kirby studio, it was Standard Operational Procedure for Joe and Jack to either write the scripts themselves or when employing outside writers, to practically dictate the plots. And later, when he worked with Stan Lee at Marvel? Well, if you read this magazine, you know how that worked. I tend to believe Kirby’s accounts of working for DC in the mid-Fifties; of coming up with the plots for the Challengers stories he drew, as well as most of the mystery stories he produced and most of the Green Arrow adventures, even those scripted by others. Admittedly, this is more of a feeling based on my knowledge of Jack than anything based on tangible evidence. But several others who were then working for DC, including Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky and Bob Brown, believed it, as well. Kane further confirmed for me Jack’s claim that he also rewrote scripts by others when he drew them, and that it became a point of friction with some of the other editors there and a reason why they didn’t want Kirby on their books. He didn’t do what they felt an artist should do: Just draw what he was given. Schiff took some heat from others in the office for allowing Kirby to do this. It was one of the reasons Kirby couldn’t get work from the other editors. (There were at least two others: Some of the editors and some of those in the DC Production Company felt that the Kirby art style was just not the DC art style. Also, a couple of DC editors at the time were known to demand kickbacks from their freelancers. If you wanted work from them, you had to slip them a few bucks under the table in some form. When Kirby solicited work in one office, the editor told him how it worked... and Jack told the editor he was a crooked bastard. Or words to that effect.) Two DC writers in particular seem to have profited from Jack’s generosity with storylines and springboards. One was his collaborator on Sky Masters and Challengers, Dave Wood. According to Kirby, he’d get together with Wood, give him ideas for both strips... and then find out they’d turned up in other, non-Kirby comics. Kirby also related some intriguing accounts of coming to the rescue,

plot-wise, of a writer named Robert Bernstein, who wrote for most of the major comic book companies in the late Fifties and into the Sixties. The way Jack told it—and Gil Kane, among others, told me he absolutely believed this—Bernstein knew Kirby primarily because they lived near each other and often took the same train into Manhattan. Bernstein was, I am told, a nervous kind of guy who worried incessantly about how editors would receive his work. You may have seen a comic that EC published in 1955 called Psychoanalysis, in which various characters visited a shrink and discussed their anxieties and nightmares. One such character was a neurotic, overweight Jewish writer named Mark Stone. Bernstein not only wrote most of the comic but based that character on himself and his own experiences on the couch. Anyway, as the story was related to me by Kirby, Bernstein would be nervous about not having a socko plot idea to pitch to his editor... especially when that editor was Mort Weisinger, who was notoriously rough on his freelance writers. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Bob Haney, who was one of those freelancers. My own research suggests that Haney was exaggerating a bit as to how often the following happened, but it definitely did happen... “Weisinger lived to say to writers, ‘Your idea stinks. I have a better one.’ The thing was, he didn’t. Half the time, the way it worked was that I’d go in and pitch him an idea about, say, Lois Lane marrying a Martian. Weisinger would say, ‘That’s crap. Here’s an idea I thought up on the toilet that’s better than that.’ And he’d send me off to write ‘his’ idea about Jimmy Olsen turning into a giant frog or something... “The next day, Bill Finger would come in with an idea and Weisinger would say, ‘That’s crap’ and he’d give him the idea about Lois Lane marrying the Martian. Of course, Finger was the one who a week earlier had pitched the idea about Jimmy Olsen turning into the giant frog. But this way, Weisinger kept his writers on the defensive and he promoted the idea that he was the story genius behind all his comics. You had to walk in with something really special before he’d let you write your own idea.” According to Kirby, Bernstein developed stomach pains at the prospect of pitching plot ideas in the Superman office. When he got desperate, he’d walk down to the train station and wait around, letting train after train into New York go by until he spotted Kirby boarding one. Then he’d hurry onto the same car as Jack, squeeze into the seat next to him and mention he was in need of a story. After that, it was just a matter of jotting down the plot ideas that poured out of Jack. That’s about all I know about this odd relationship. I don’t know of any specific

when Jack suggested plot ideas for comics he didn’t draw. Don Heck, Wally Wood and Bill Everett were among those with first-hand accounts of such participation. Frankly, I’ve learned to never be surprised at where Jack Kirby ideas turn up. There were so many of them that they couldn’t all fit in just the comics Jack drew. Our next question is from Jeff Beachamp, who writes... I was interested in your comments on Syd Shores in the most recent issue. Could you go into more detail about how you felt about different artists inking Jack Kirby’s work? And how would it have worked if Jack had inked his own penciling? Would it have looked like what Mike Royer did? I keep hearing how faithful he was to Jack’s pencils. What should the goal of a Kirby inker have been, in your opinion?

stories that were based on free ideas from Kirby except, if we believe Jack, the tale that introduced the villain Metallo in Action Comics #252. It’s even possible that ideas that originated with Kirby were pitched to Weisinger by Bernstein, rejected by the editor and then, as per the above, assigned to some other writer like Bob Haney or Bill Finger. The late Richard Morrissey—a fan and comic scholar who liked to analyze writers’ work in Sixties comics—identified several other Bernstein scripts for Weisinger that involved elements one might associate with Kirby. One example: In Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #55, Jimmy went back in time, became pals with Thor and battled the evil Loki. Did this idea come from Jack Kirby? We don’t know. We’ll probably never know. Bernstein also wrote most issues of The Fly for the Archie Comics people after Joe Simon had departed as its editor. Did Kirby contribute any ideas that Bernstein used in it? Your guess is as good as mine. 32

I might as well tell a bit more of the story of Robert Bernstein. Actually, I only know a bit more of it. Around late 1961 or early 1962, Bernstein had a knock-down, drag-out fight with Weisinger. The topic is unknown but it ended his long association with DC Comics. He went to work for Marvel where, under the name “R. Berns,” he wrote about a dozen of the early stories of Iron Man, Thor and The Human Torch, many of them drawn by Kirby. Stan Lee was apparently not overwhelmed with the writer’s work but it is not known if he resigned or was fired. About the same time, Bernstein’s stopped writing super-hero comics for the Archie folks and seems to have gotten out of comics altogether. He passed away in 1983. If anyone knows any more about his life and times, please drop me a line. Getting back to Mr. Kirby: In addition to plots he gave to writers like Wood and Bernstein, there are also the known instances at Marvel in the Sixties

Jack didn’t want to ink his own penciling. Most artists do—or if they don’t, it’s because they figure they can make more money doing only one end of the job. Artists are all different and some are just faster or more facile doing one thing than another. Some are also more valuable to the company doing one particular job so the company steers them into that position. John Buscema, for one, was never all that comfortable having his work inked by someone else but Marvel wanted as many pages out of him as possible. And that’s what they got for years—by refusing, except in isolated instances, to let him ink his work and by giving him financial encouragements to only pencil. To Kirby, inking was a particular bore. The part of the job that interested Jack was telling a story... and once he’d penciled a story, he was done telling it and eager to begin telling another. To then spend several days going over that same story again and adding to drawings that were finished in his mind was drudge work. I suspect there have been very few artists in comics who viewed the process quite this way. As I’ve noted here, Jack didn’t care a lot who inked him. He rarely expressed a negative view of another professional but I suspect if we’d laced one of his cigars with Sodium Pentathol and he’d smoked himself into a truth-telling stupor, he’d have said he preferred the inkers who inked in bold, powerful strokes and who imposed little of their own styles. I would say that keeping the energy and emotion on the page was the main thing Jack expected of an inker. Mike Royer did that. Frank Giacoia did that. Joe Sinnott certainly did that, especially in the later issues of Fantastic Four that he inked of Jack’s. I liked all three of those gents, as well as Bill Everett, Chic Stone, Don Heck, Dick Ayers and a couple of others. I have the feeling I mentioned this in another column but Stan Lee once told me that his favorite inker for Kirby’s pencils was Steve Ditko. He said it was a shame that Ditko was so valuable drawing his own stories that he couldn’t be assigned more often to ink Jack. I agree with Stan that Kirby and Ditko went well together. Here’s kind of an interesting way to look at this: I’ve interviewed an awful lot of comic artists and if they’re the kind whose work gets inked by others, the conversation invariably gravitates to which inkers did they like and which ones did they not like. This is, of course, after we get past the point where almost all of them say how they prefer to ink their own work. In the cases where they say they liked what a

certain inker did with their pencil art, they usually have one of two markedly-different viewpoints. One is: “Boy, that inker did a great job. He inked it just the way I would have.” And the other is: “Boy, that inker did a great job. He did all sorts of things I never would have thought of to do.” John Buscema and Gil Kane, who liked very few of their inkers, were in the former category. Ross Andru was in the latter. (Ross was also one of the few guys who, like Kirby, didn’t enjoy inking his own work.) In Kirby’s case, neither mindset really applied because he didn’t want to ink his own pencils so he never really thought how he’d treat them. Back in ’69, I began corresponding with Joe Sinnott, who had been inking Jack’s work for several years but had never met him. Joe was curious about something. There was a certain thing Jack did often in his penciling, filling in a large black area but leaving flecks of white in it. Joe used his own judgment as to how to treat such areas but he wanted to know what Kirby had in mind: Did Jack intend for them to be filled in with solid black or did he see them as textured with the little white highlights? Joe sent me a little sketch to demonstrate the kind of thing he was talking about. I took it out to Jack and asked him how he’d expect an inker to treat something like that. Jack gave him me an odd look, like it was a matter that had never occurred to him. Then he said, “You ink that as texture... leave the little highlights.” “Okay,” I said. “I’ll write to Joe and tell him.” Two seconds later, Jack changed his mind. “Or you can ink it as solid black. Whatever works best.” In other words, Jack had no idea how it should be inked. He’d never thought about it, never imagined what the finished art would look like. It was a decision to be made by the inker when he was sitting there with a brush in his hand. He didn’t even know how he would ink those areas. My guess, based on seeing him ink a few things here and there when I worked with him, is that Jack inked by Jack would not have looked much like what Royer did. For one thing, Jack didn’t have Mike’s slick control of a brush. For another, Jack wouldn’t have followed his own pencils as closely as Royer or any of the guys I named a few paragraphs back did. Jack could have done bolder lines with a brush than he was ever able to achieve with a pencil, so he would have done bolder lines. He probably also would have added all sorts of little feathering and modeling details. The end product, I’m guessing, would have looked like a cross between Giacoia and the better inking that George Roussos did on Jack’s Sgt. Fury, only a bit crisper. I think we’d have liked it very much but maybe not enough to make up for the fact that there would have been half as many Jack Kirby comics on the stands to buy. In Jack’s case, I think appreciation of an inker would have been along the lines of: “Boy, that inker did a great job. I hardly noticed him.” Which is not to say Jack didn’t appreciate his best inkers. He very much respected the skill necessary to understand what he meant and keep his intent and style when working in the different

medium of India Ink. I know he was very impressed that some— especially Royer and Sinnott—could take the machinery and buildings he drew freehand, without using a ruler, and straighten up everything so it seemed functional and properly constructed. Often, these men had to “true up” Jack’s perspective a bit, moving things around a fraction of an inch. The problem I tried to point out in the piece on Syd Shores is a question that some inkers face, which is to what extent they’re supposed to just make the penciler’s work reproducible— and to what extent they’re to create a new work of art that represents the fusion of their style with that of the penciler. Mike Royer consciously approached Kirby work with the first goal. Others, if they thought about it at all, were less concerned about remaining anonymous. The frustration for Shores seems to have been that when he inked Kirby, neither approach was acceptable. At a convention in 1970, I spent some time with Wally Wood who, no matter what I wanted to discuss, kept talking about his association with Kirby. He really admired Jack, both personally and as an artist. Wood inked a lot of other illustrators over the years and I suspect his collaborations with Kirby on Sky Masters and Challengers of the Unknown were among the few times he felt he was inking someone who drew better than he did. He may even have said so to me in pretty much those words. Nevertheless, those stories would certainly fall into the category of an inker who imposed his own style on Jack’s penciling, even to the extent of, at times, obliterating too much of the Kirby.

(previous page) 1984 commissioned drawing of Sgt. Fury. Note the detail in his pencils, even at this late stage of his career.

(below) A mid-1970s drawing of the Demon, inked by Jack in marker. This is far from the best example of Jack inking his own work, but it gives us a sense of how he didn’t labor over inking. It’s a safe bet this piece in pencil would’ve been a lot more powerful and interesting to look at. Sgt. Fury TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Demon TM & ©2006 DC Comics.

When we spoke at the con, Wood made the comment that he wanted to ink Jack’s pencils again... but not the way he did on those earlier comics. He said that looking back, he felt that work was too cluttered with unnecessary detail and that he’d lost a lot of the things Jack did so well. He said—this is an approximate quote— “Someone showed me what Joe Sinnott was doing and I realized that’s it. That’s how Kirby should be inked. It was so much better than what I’d done.” (Joe was at that convention. I went up to him later and said, “Congratulations. Earlier today, you received the biggest compliment a guy in your line of work can receive.”) Unfortunately, Wood only got to ink one more Jack Kirby story after that—an issue of Sandman for DC. Wally was ill at the time and relying heavily on assistants... and since Jack hated drawing that comic, his pencils were probably not his best work. Still, you can sorta/kinda see Wood trying to do it Sinnott’s way, trying to enhance Kirby instead of overpowering him. I’m not suggesting there’s a right and wrong here. Certainly on some strips, with some penciler/ inker match-ups, it’s altogether appropriate for the inker to impose his style and to submerge the penciler’s—when Wood was inking various other artists on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, for example. They were his characters and his creation, and he was the ongoing creative spirit of those books, at least on

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the early issues. But I think on most Kirby strips, the “right” way was to make it look as much like Kirby as possible. And I think we should all be grateful to Joe, Mike and the others who managed to do that so well. Next question? ★ Mark Evanier often writes of Kirby over at his daily weblog, www.newsfromme.com and his not-daily weblog, www.POVonline.com. He welcomes your Kirby Queries at either address. And if you can’t get enough of Mark’s work (and who can?), be sure to pick up TwoMorrows’ three collections of his 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 this issue to order by mail, or go to www.twomorrows.com

(above) Wood’s final inking on Kirby was for Sandman #6 (Dec. 1975). Jack’s heart may not have been in this series, but he turned in a pretty professional job, as evidenced by these pencils from page 12. Characters TM & ©2006 DC Comics.

He built THIS:

Out Of THIS?

Incidental Iconography An ongoing analysis of Kirby’s visual shorthand, and how he inadvertently used it to develop his characters, by Sean Kleefeld Century removed from the issues. King e’re going to take a somewhat different approach to this issue’s Kong, The Lost Island, When Dinosaurs Incidental Iconography. We’re going to examine Ruled the Earth, The Valley of Gwangi, The Last a small portion of paleontological history in relation to Dinosaur, One Million Years B.C., My Science Project, Carnosaur... indeed, it’s quite easy to find a great many instances of Tyrannosaurus Rexes showing up in popular culture. Through that, we will be able to see how Jack Kirby came to American pop culture as that same, cold-blooded, lumbering, erect predator with design one of his more unusual creations: Devil Dinosaur. vestigial forearms; despite the modern understanding of the T-Rex as a fasterWhile the recovery and examination of bones and fossils is almost certainly as moving, warm-blooded creature that held its body considerably more horizontally old as those bones and fossils themselves, it really wasn’t until the late 1800s that and likely did use its forearms to help in scavenging. paleontology became a science unto itself and began to capture the imagination of Some may argue that our current interpretation of the Tyrannosaurus stems the public at large. Real dinosaur hunters like Edward Cope and Charles Marsh from recent revelations and discoveries. While there are elements that have been were perhaps as well known in their day as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional George definitively proven here in the 21st Century, many of the ideas were postulated as Challenger from The Lost World, written towards the tail end of paleontology’s socalled “Gilded Age.” (I might take a moment here to recommend Jim Ottaviani’s early as 1917. At that point, however, the Tyrannosaurus had been actively (and graphic novel Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards as an excellent inaccurately) set in the public consciousness for well over a decade and public overview of some of what was going on in paleontology at the time.) displays of erect T-Rex skeletons would remain in museums throughout much of the Not surprisingly, the Tyrannosaurus Rex was an incredible discovery in the rest of the century. (The notable Carnegie Museum’s exhibit remained incorrect until early 1900s, compared to the partial vertebra attributed to Manospondylus Gigas 2003.) The end result is that the general public knowledge of the Tyrannosaurus Rex found a decade earlier. A 1902 skeleton was found by Olof Peterson digging in was decidedly in contrast with contemporary Wyoming for the Carnegie Museum; however, it took several years to get it back to scientific thinking, and remained relatively the Museum and have it properly examined. This gave unchanged until the Jurassic Park movies. Henry Osborne’s crew, working for Steven Spielberg, however, cannot the American Museum of Natural receive all the credit for this. Paleontologist History, time to recover another John Ostrom had actually discovered the skeleton, while he hastily published first “raptor” in 1964, studied it for a few a paper on carnivorous dinosaurs in years, and finally published his findings 1905. It was this publication where in 1969. That began a renewed interest Osborne was able to name the in dinosaurs that Scientific American dubbed a “dinosaur renaissance” in Tyrannosaurus Rex, while his skeleton 1975. It was this renewed interest in was still being excavated. The first drawing of a dinosaurs during the 1970s that gave Tyrannosaurus Rex was by William D. us Sid and Marty Kroft’s Land of the Matthew especially for Osborn’s Lost, Dino DeLaurentiis’ version of paper. It was based on the multiple King Kong and, of course, Jack Kirby’s partial skeletons that had been found Devil Dinosaur. However, the public by that point and Osborn made sure to perception of dinosaurs had been in note in the picture’s caption that the the public consciousness long “association of the small forearm is enough that it would take another probably incorrect” as it was quite out two decades to begin to change of proportion compared to all of the popular opinion. other dinosaur skeletons found previously. Devil Dinosaur is clearly based The forearms were in fact correct, but a on the Tyrannosaurus Rex; there’s lack of understanding of the T-Rex’s not much that’s incidental about that. Jack Kirby was seeing this dinosaur musculature led to it being drawn as an renaissance, and it impacted him erect beast with a tail dragging along enough to use it as a springboard behind it. This error was compounded in for his new comic. What is striking, 1915 when the American Museum of though, is that Devil Dinosaur is Natural History revealed the first public apparently modeled after what display of a Tyrannosaurus skeleton; the we now believe about the T-Rex, dinosaur was not only shown to a much and not what was commonly wider audience but it was mounted in an Inc. accepted in the 1970s. Devil is even more erect stance. Charles Knight— rs, cte ara Ch Marvel r TM & ©2006 Devil Dinosau ! ht shown using his hands and arms upon whose work, many subsequent rig ts got the an t—Jack even ar r on multiple occasions, he moves quickly, his tail is rarely dinosaur illustrators took their cues— ve co #5 r Devil Dinosau shown dragging on the ground. Even Jack’s explanation for his red coloring—third inadvertently kept the fallacy alive by repeating degree burns over his entire body—suggests that Devil is warm-blooded. Although what would later be known as errors for the issue of sustenance is rarely brought up, we also see that Devil is not portrayed many years. as a predator, but that of a scavenger or forager. This is certainly a far cry from The Tyrannosaurus Rex has been a matter of several scientific controversies how Jack’s contemporary storytellers were depicting the Tyrannosaurus. over the years. One of the earliest was whether they were warm- or cold-blooded, In fact, the only things Jack seemed to have actually gotten “wrong” are his and much more recently the movie Jurassic Park fanned the flames in the debate depiction of Devil’s razor-like teeth and the basic notion that humans and dinosaurs over how fast they could actually run. Most of the discussion, however, remained largely in the scientific community and popular culture spent most of the 20th (continued on page 37)

Obscura

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

ex. That’s the one thing that’s missing from the very strange Simon & Kirby Prize comic, Strange World of Your Dreams. Of course, despite drawing some of the most eyeopening, stunningly upholstered females in comics (Big Barda, anyone?), Jack Kirby was not as sensuous an artist as, say, Virgil Finlay or Wally Wood. But then it hardly mattered, with either his pre- or post-code work, where the erotic was not center stage. But the absence of sex from SWOYD was as ludicrous as it was from the pages of EC’s Psychoanalysis. One doesn’t have to be either a Freudian or a Jungian (and certainly not a member of the Moral Majority) to acknowledge how crucial sexuality is to our emotional equilibrium—but the comics medium could hardly deal with it frankly in a book such as S&K’s surreal examination of the world of dreams, that ultimate repository of all our deepest sexual feelings (and EC, a company that had hardly fought shy of sexual elements in its glory days was running scared by the time of the ‘New Trend’, censorship-conscious Psychoanalysis). Actually, there’s one story in the brief, bizarre, six-issue run of Strange World of Your Dreams (in issue #1, actually) that shrieks out for an erotic element in its po-faced dream analysis strip, “Send Us Your Dreams”—but fudges the issue completely. Dr. Richard Temple, a Mort Meskin-drawn character sitting behind a globe of the world (essential for all dream analysts, of course), introduces the curious case of Julie Pendleton. Kirby now takes over to give us Julie’s tale in the first person. She’s dreaming that she’s riding a bike in an evening gown (!) before performing acrobatic stunts on the machine, to the bemusement of guffawing crowds (the crowds are drawn in a caricatured style that suggests Kirby might have been the heir apparent of the great English illustrator, William Hogarth). But then things turn even odder—and in a page reproduced here, Kirby, (in his most grotesque manner) has Julie suddenly dressed in an ill-fitting old-fashioned bathing suit, then pushed by a friend into a mud puddle. Then (if all of this weren’t enough) she becomes obese, and finally ends up running down a rubbery street, being pelted by stones. What’s up? Dr. Temple points out that her problem is not (as one might have supposed) sexual anxiety (being laughed at by crowds in your bathing suit, indeed!)—but something more

None of the stories discussed have been reprinted; of course, Black Magic #9 is a reprint book, and readily available. Black Magic, Strange World Of Your Dreams TM & ©2006 Simon & Kirby. Journey into Mystery TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

innocent: the worries over her appearance are down to injured vanity, no less; over a comforting pipe in the last column (another essential prop for dream analysts), Temple assures us that a little humility would do us all no harm. Actually, the ludicrousness of all this doesn’t matter a damn: we can enjoy Kirby giving full rein to that brilliant surrealist streak of his, in an all-too-brief experiment that went out of business as quickly as EC’s Psychoanalysis. Ironically, the New Puritans are arguing that a liberal attitude to

sex is now a Bad Thing—perhaps Simon & Kirby, chafing at the bit of censorship in their dream book, drew the comic that encapsulates this new orthodoxy. However alarmingly it may be reported in America, you mustn’t think that London has, in recent months, been a place of fear. Certainly, for a while, we were all a touch apprehensive when using public transport for fear of backpack bombs that had our number, but the Blitz spirit quickly kicked in, and we carry on as normal. With the word ‘terror’ on the news day in and day out, this TJKC London Correspondent has been thinking how that very word once held a delicious tingle of anticipation—when it appeared on the front cover of comic books, in a now-distant era. These days, the horror comics could barely compete with the real-life fears of the 21st Century world we all tread warily in, but to open those pages again is a nostalgic reminder of a simpler world. Which brings us to Jack Kirby’s generally restrained (but suitably grotesque) forays into the horror comic—particularly as our publisher is making available some vintage Kirby horror material in these very pages. Black Magic is, of course, the Simon/Kirby horror title from their Prize days—and those who have put together a full set of those books will tell you what an uphill struggle it is. Many of these comics are very elusive (as indeed are the very collectable British shilling runs of the title at 68 pages, including a rare, chunky, cardboard cover annual that also ran some of Stan Lee’s

Atlas horror tales). Not so, however, a welcome run of reprints put out by DC in the ’70s, when Kirby was back in the DC stable. Although only a snapshot of the King’s BM work, they’re still an affordable way of picking up some cherishable Kirby material. Take, for instance, issue #9 of the reprint book (from May ’73). Actually, this is really a way of going back to the discussion of The Strange World of Your Dreams, as to be perfectly frank (and this column always tries to be frank!), the only worthwhile story in this issue is the last, brief Simon & Kirby piece, “The Woman in the Tower”, reprinted from the pages of SWOYD #3 (Nov. ’52). A striking Jerry Grandenetti cover of a man being strangled by his own ghost is far more dramatic than anything in the workaday Mort Meskin tale “Who Walks In My Dream?” that it illustrates. Similarly unexciting is the first piece, “Yesterday You Died!”, which only has one justification for reading: to see how a great deal of the subsidiary material in Black Magic barely aspired to the quality of the stories put out by the book’s head honchos, Mssrs. S&K. And going back to “The Woman in the Tower”, it’s a perfect demonstration of how the duo were able to transform a totally unexciting story (suffering, as with other S&K tales discussed in this column) from an inability to take on board sexual themes. The splash panel shows an oddly angled stone tower, at the foot of which two figures extend their arms to a female figure in a cell higher atop the structure. The heroine relates (to the fictitious Dr. Richard Temple) how she finds herself imprisoned in this monstrous tower, which is drawn with all the gothic splendor that Kirby can call upon when required. The shot of wailing faces (the woman’s fellow prisoners) and a sinister robed figure that prowls the corridors with a torch held aloft is classic Kirby, as is the page showing the monstrous face of the jail keeper as it makes its way into the cell of the terrified woman. The windup explanation to this story is a particularly feeble one (something about seeing the departed signifying a release from trouble), but Kirby fans might find it worth shelling out the not-too exorbitant figures this book commands, even if only for three pages. You know about Marvel’s glorious super-hero period, when the more staid DC Comics was thoroughly trounced by its upstart rival. And you know about Marvel’s horror period, when (under the Atlas logo) Stan Lee gave EC Comics a run for their money with the aid of such talents as Joe Maneely (though not, regrettably, Jack Kirby). And you know about Marvel’s giant monster period, the immediate predecessor to the super-hero era. But do you know about that brief, rather splendid period just before Kirby’s Fin Fang Foom and Co. went on their citydestroying rampages? Such books as the highly collectable Journey into Mystery #54 in 1959 encapsulate this era perfectly, straddling the innocuous postcode fantasy books and preceding the appearance of the Fantastic Four and their like. The cover of JIM #54, a lively Kirby effort, suggests that the monster period is already here, as a giant, grey apelike creature smashes its restraints á lá King Kong and menaces a theatre audience, but this isn’t quite the case. The nicely drawn Steve Ditko story that the cover illustrates (“I Unleashed Monstro on the World!”) may be a Kong rip-

off, but isn’t as formulaic as such tales would become in the later issues of the book. This is followed up by an unexceptional Joe Sinnott piece in which a nasty wrongdoer experiences poetic justice (a favorite cliché of both Stan Lee and his EC inspirations), while the third story is a nicely drawn Al Williamson SF outing, “My Other Face”, in which Williamson’s art is finessed (as so often) with some elegant Krenkelstyle futuristic cities. A dull, predictable John Severin piece follows, and then we come to Jack Kirby’s splendid wind-up tale, “I Am The Menace From The Purple Planet.” It’s not a monster piece, and it’s all the better for that, allowing The King to come up with some dazzling spaceship interiors and colorful aliens. In fact, it’s essentially another rip-off. While the Ditko piece stripmined King Kong for its inspiration, the Kirby tale is a riff on the then-recent Robert Wise movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, with an alien and his robotic companion delivering dire warnings to an intimidated Earth. But if anyone is upset by comics magazines that rip off other genres, they should really find themselves another form of entertainment. After all, some of the very best examples of the form—notably the entire EC line and the aforementioned Marvel superhero explosion—were both simple reworkings of successful formulas created by others. And part of the enjoyment of the Jack Kirby piece is not just the customary accomplished art, but seeing how Kirby and Stan Lee could ring some entertaining changes on the work of others. Having said that, there are better books from this brief and entertaining fragment of Marvel history than Journey Into Mystery #54. But with a Kirby cover and wind-up story, why should any reader of this magazine resist? ★

(“Incidental Iconography,” continued from page 35) shared the planet at the same time. Jack acknowledged the latter point in the letters page of #1 and, over the course of subsequent issues, noted that part of his overall point in Devil Dinosaur was to challenge humanity’s need to fear and distrust the unknown through that unnatural juxtaposition of man and beast. As to the former point, I have to believe that this was a conscious stylistic decision, as even a cursory examination of any T-Rex skull will show that their teeth were more conical in form. This notion of consciously applying an artistic style is reinforced in the depictions of other dinosaurs—all of which share the same razor-like teeth, including the herbivores. So the question that remains is: how much of Devil Dinosaur was based on Jack’s reading of actual scientific literature and how much did he just get lucky with? I would suggest that the use of Devil’s tail, his posture, and his relative quickness were based at least on some external readings. If nothing else, this was indirectly noted in Disney’s Fantasia which Jack had no doubt seen and at least subconsciously picked up on. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn, though, that Jack had done some reading on the subject as well. Although I have no evidence on the remaining points, I

— Dinosaurspt. e ing of the Reptar, K usly unseen conc. Estate a previo ck Kirby

(Barry Forshaw is editor of Crime Time magazine and lives in London.)

06 Ja TM & ©20

would suggest that Jack was merely telling a good story and used his innate sense of storytelling to extrapolate how a Tyrannosaurus might move and act. Why would he have arms and never use them? If his skin was singed, why wouldn’t it be affected the same way a human’s would? If given food freely, why would he bother acting as a predator? I would suggest that Jack approached these questions somewhat simplistically and applied a common sense logic to them that would surely be considered absurd under scientific scrutiny, but he still got the basics right. There is still considerable debate going on in the scientific community about the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and much of what we now believe is still under discussion. Paleontologists, after all, are extrapolating whole epochs by looking only at the partial shadows of a small number of its inhabitants. Direct analysis cannot be conducted because, quite simply, there aren’t any dinosaurs left alive to analyze. Additionally, scientists are people, too, and are prone to maintaining the status quo as much as anybody else. But the prevailing wisdom in scientific circles today suggests that a storyteller without much scientific background seemed to have gotten it right nearly three decades before they did, proving once again Albert Einstein’s belief that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” ★ (Visit Sean’s website at www.FFPlaza.com) Devil Dinosaur TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Reptar TM & ©2006 Jack Kirby Estate.

Gallery 2

KIRBYVISION : FUTURE by Shane Foley don’t even know if I like it!! The first page of issue #3 is different. I’m convinced that right up through the ’70s Jack was avidly reading about the possibilities that technology would open up to humankind. The final product may eventually look different but, as here at the start of #3, many of his predicted ideas are not far from the mark at all.

(pages 38-39) OM A C #1, p a g e 1 an d #3, p ag e 1 What can you say about a page like the first one of OMAC #1? I’m surprised DC’s editorial supervisors didn’t ask Jack for a slightly different take on it. But then the image appeared on the cover too, so they obviously thought it was fine. Me? I still can’t think of anything to say. I

(pages 40-41) E ter n al s #10, p ag es 2 & 3 No one could draw smashed metal, heavy equipment wielded by heavily armored warriors, or the hammering impact of futuristic cannons like Kirby. No one could illustrate the otherworldliness of alien markings or the enigmatic movements of a space giant like Kirby. Only Kirby could draw a scene like this! (It looks futuristic but it’s actually in ‘the present!’) 39

(pages 42-43) 2001: A Sp a ce Od y s s ey #1, co v er & p ag e 14 When I discovered Kirby’s 2001 in 1977 (I believe #2 was my first) I was stunned to see him depict the Monolith as he did. Where was the smooth, ebon form shown in the movie? However, Jack knew that what worked on screen may look lifeless and uninteresting on the static page of a comic. So to get life and energy into that unmoving rectangular shape meant tackling it differently than a movie director might. And of course he was right. 2001 was a strange series in many ways that had us all wondering where it could possibly go. Along the way we were treated to many pages like the first issue’s 14th page, where Jack showcased his unique ability to give stunning life and movement in weird and stellar settings. Wow!

(pages 44-45) Don Heck p os t er s What superb detail is in these two futuristic drawings that Jack drew for Don Heck in 1966. Evidently, they were a ‘thank you’ to him for his ink-work on his Gods posters. (Read Don’s comments in TJKC #43.) What strikes me about them is how in the ’60s when these were done, Jack always seemed to draw a new design. To be sure his shadowing, silhouetting, highlighting, and krackle techniques are always the same, but the designs are individual. Unique. How did he do it? (Note the never-completed inset figure, which was on the back of the robot drawing.)

Doing Justice (below) Splash page pencils from Justice Inc. #3 (Sept. 1975). Although Denny O’Neil wrote the script for Jack, Kirby hand-lettered the captions and balloons on his art for #2 and #3, but not on #4 (see #4 pencils in our Gallery this issue). (next page) Page 11 pencils from Justice Inc. #2 (July 1975). Jack was great at evoking the 1930s period of the strip. The Avenger TM & ©2006 Condé Nast Publications, Inc.

Dennis O’Neil Interview

Interviewed by Douglas Toole (Plenty of comics have been set during the past, but DC seemed to have a serious interest in it in the mid-1970s. In the spring of 1975 alone, DC launched two series set during prehistoric times (Tor and Kong the Untamed), three set during medieval times (Beowulf, Claw the Unconquered, and Stalker), and one set during the 1930s. Justice, Inc. was based on a series of pulp magazines published between 1939 and 1942. In the pulps, explorer and adventurer Richard Benson was so traumatized by the murder of his wife and daughter that his hair and skin turned ghostly pale and his facial muscles were paralyzed. While hunting their killers, he learned that his facial features could be molded like clay. By using makeup, wigs and contact lenses, he became a master of disguise. Armed with his four-shot, .22-caliber pistol “Mike” and his throwing knife “Ike,” Benson renamed himself “The Avenger” and began a war against crime. Several of the pulp stories were reprinted in paperback form in the 1970s, and DC published a bi-monthly comic version of Justice, Inc. starting in May of 1975. Dennis O’Neil wrote and edited the comic version. The first issue featured art from Al McWilliams, but

the other three issues published by DC were drawn by Jack Kirby. Dennis O’Neil is a longtime writer and editor of comics, as well as being a novelist and an occasional writing instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Two of his most recent works are the novelization of the Batman Begins movie, and Hero’s Quest, a novel featuring Green Lantern. This interview was conducted by telephone on March 20, 2005, and was copy-edited by Mr. O’Neil.) THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: You were the writer and editor of The Shadow and Justice Inc. What was your interest in pulp novels back in 1975 and bringing them to comic book form? DENNIS O’NEIL: Comics are the direct descendants of the pulps. It was just taking the form back to an earlier incarnation. And both The Shadow and Justice Inc. [The Avenger] were very visual concepts. I thought they would adapt themselves well. So we did The Shadow partially because he was a character that I thought still had some cache, although I don’t know if that would still be true now. But the old pulp magazine stories had been reprinted in different formats. And my first exposure to the character was from the old radio show, which starred Orson Wells and other people later. And that was still fairly fresh in people’s memory. So he seemed like a natural one to revive, and I think the perception was that it was going to be a big success. So it was natural to see what else was there that was similar that we might be able to adapt. TJKC: Was it difficult getting the rights to those characters? O’NEIL: I don’t recall. I would suspect not. Editing was a very compartmentalized discipline back then. I mean, I didn’t see sales figures. I had virtually no interaction with the business side at all. So I never knew. I would say that I wanted to do something and I was told I could or could not do it after some time had passed. What the intermediate steps were, I had no idea. TJKC: But you were sure you wanted to write both The Shadow and Justice Inc.? O’NEIL: Back then, DC was experimenting with the writer/editor position. I don’t think it ever really works very well, but I was a reasonably good candidate for that, having had some editorial experience and—at that point—a pretty decent resume as a writer. So again, I don’t know how much discussion there was about it. I said I wanted to do it, and it was probably assumed I would do both things. I have a lot of regrets about that, because I think I really slighted the editor end of it. That’s the danger. It’s very useful to have another pair of eyes. I prefer to have an editor, unless it’s a bad editor, in which case I’d rather do it myself. TJKC: As the editor of Justice, Inc., how did you end up with Al McWilliams on the first issue? O’NEIL: I have no idea. Probably maybe Carmine Infantino put out the word that we needed an artist, and I guess Al was available. TJKC: Do you remember why you switched artists and went to Jack Kirby after the first issue? O’NEIL: I don’t remember. I would suspect it was because Al was no longer available and Jack was always prolific. I was extraordinarily lucky to have an opportunity to work with him, albeit a very short opportunity. I would love to say that I planned and schemed and managed to get him,

but I think it was the luck of the draw. TJKC: Was this your first collaboration with Kirby? O’NEIL: I think so. I knew him, but I can’t recall ever working with him. TJKC: It seemed like the comics were adapted from some of the original stories. Were you working fullscript or Marvel-style with Kirby? O’NEIL: I always worked full-script whenever possible. There are actually probably ten or so artists who I would have preferred to work Marvel-style with— and Jack would certainly have led the list—but it just so happened that we didn’t do it that way.

TJKC: It was a bi-coastal working relationship, right? O’NEIL: Right. I don’t remember ever actually sitting down and talking with Jack about the book as I had and have with other artists. I sent him a script, and a few weeks later I received a full art job. TJKC: In your scripts, did you call for specific types of cars, guns and fashions, or did you just assume you would get backgrounds appropriate to the 1930s? O’NEIL: I trusted Jack. I don’t think I asked for a Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun or anything like that. He could be trusted to understand the requirements of the script and to provide what was appropriate.

TJKC: It seemed like you were one of the few writers during that period to work as a scripter with Kirby. How was he to work with? O’NEIL: He was always a complete professional. I never detected a temperament when I worked with him, or when I watched him working at Marvel earlier. It was always a joy. From an editor’s standpoint, you knew he was going to deliver, you knew he was going to deliver on time, you knew it was going to be good. TJKC: Overall, were you pretty happy with the series? O’NEIL: I don’t remember being unhappy with it. I wished it had lasted longer, but I think I had a sense pretty early on that it was not going to be the big hit of my career. [laughs] We were doing things month-to-month back then. You couldn’t ever be sure if and when something was going to be cancelled. And if it was going to be cancelled, you didn’t always know why. TJKC: I noticed that in the fourth issue—what was to be the final issue —the little box on the last page that would normally have said when the next issue would be on sale was left blank. Do you know why the book was cancelled so abruptly? O’NEIL: I have absolutely no idea—maybe sales, maybe something else. Back then, you really didn’t have reliable circulation figures for maybe six months. Maybe the preliminary first-issue figures were low, and the company decided to cut its losses, especially because it was costing them something for the license. But I’m just guessing. In those days, I would go into the office and I would be told something was cancelled. I would suspect that the blank space you’re talking about had been whited-out by the production department. It was a way-different business back then. Much more cut-and-dried. Much more mechanical. Comics were not respected as an art-form yet. They are now, I sometimes think almost to their detriment. People get almost a little too reverent about the stuff. But back then, sure, some of us knew it was an art-form, but I don’t think that was the general belief. TJKC: Any closing thoughts? O’NEIL: It was a fairly minor chapter in both my life and Jack’s. No regrets about it. One of these days I will probably find my copies of the issues that I have in storage and have them bound. And I’ll be happy to have it. I’ll put it on the shelf next to The Shadow. ★

Accolades (below) Mark’s first page of Kirby original art, from Jimmy Olsen #135 (Jan. 1971). (next page, center) Mark’s original Merry Marvel Marching Society membership card. (next page, bottom) On his first visit, Mark rummages through the piles of art Jack finally got back from Marvel Comics.

(above) Mark once asked Jack if the “Martin Bursten” credited story in Timely’s Red Raven #1 was in fact a tongue-incheek pseudonym used by Jack. He said, “Yes, it was” and smiled when Mark asked him for the autograph you see here.

The Doctor Is Into Kirby Kirby Award winner Dr. Mark Miller interviewed by John Morrow [Editor’s Note: Dr. Mark Miller, M.D., is a longtime friend of the Kirby family, and of this magazine’s editor. Born in 1954, he grew up in Texas, but moved to Portland, Oregon after medical school, where after years in private practice, he now spends a good deal of his time teaching medicine. Early-on, just after TJKC was launched, I received my first correspondence from Mark, who had organized a letter-writing campaign to persuade Marvel Comics to give Jack Kirby a co-creator credit on comics featuring his characters. When you read this interview—conducted on February 3, 2006— you’ll learn a few other reasons why Mark received a Jack Kirby Award at the 2004 ComicCon International: San Diego.] THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Did you grow up reading Kirby’s comics? MARK MILLER: Yes, I quite literally grew up with Jack’s stories and art. I can honestly say that reading those comics while I was in elementary school helped to fuel my passion for science, literature and art. I still have most of the comics that I read as a child, from my very first purchases—Fantastic Four #5 and the Incredible Hulk #2—right up to end of Jack’s run at DC and his last Marvel books. I’d buy all of the Marvels that I could find first and then pick out the other comics with the most interesting covers from DC and the smaller publishers. It was obvious to me then that the Marvel titles were much more interesting then the competition. And it was also obvious that Jack’s storytelling style, his unique take on anatomy and movement and his amazing perspectives made for the best stories of all. Of course I can’t say that I ever analyzed any of that back then. The comics with Jack’s work in them were just the most fun! My brother Keith, who is three years younger then I, quite literally learned to read with those early comic books. TJKC: Did you have any fellow comic collecting friends back then? MARK: I think that I knew two other comic book fans before 1966, when I attended the initial meeting of the Houston Comic Collectors Association and I discovered local fandom for the first time. Here were 20 or so collectors, some of whom were my parent’s age. And everyone there knew about Jack Kirby! TJKC: What do you recall about comic collecting back then? MARK: Well, back in 1966 my father had given me the Jules Feiffer book on comic book superheroes which was my first glimpse of a Captain America and a Human Torch and a SubMariner that existed before the ones that I was familiar with. At

these monthly meetings of the HCCA there might be examples of early Timely and DC comics as well as Marvel comics that I wanted in order to fill the gaps in my collection. All of the books that I would like to have owned exceeded my allowance by a great deal. Things haven’t changed that much since then. In 1967, the club put on the first HoustonCon and I believe that it was one of the very first comic conventions ever held. My brother and I got there when the doors opened and stayed until they swept us out. Until I left for college, I attended most of the conventions that were held each year in Houston and Dallas and Oklahoma City. It was a bit of a circuit and it was a lot of fun to go to those conventions and see so many familiar faces. That was well before the first Overstreet Price Guide came out and collecting had a great deal of innocence about it. I still have the first Overstreet Guide that I bought from Bob when he was selling them out of a cardboard box. Everything really changed on the heels of that guide. TJKC: Did you ever see Jack at any of these conventions? MARK: No, it was often rumored that the “King” was going to be the surprise guest but that never happened. TJKC: Was there much original comic art at those early cons? MARK: I don’t recall that being a big item until the very late ’80s or early ’90s. Of course there were pages of original art both from comics and comic strips at the earlier conventions but the appreciation of comic book art was nothing like it is today. I saw my first piece of original art done by Jack at a convention in 1972 and I swiftly traded for it. I still have that page up on the wall; a photo-montage page from Jimmy Olsen that has Superman explaining the importance of the Project unlocking the secrets of DNA. I have a room in which Jack’s artwork lines the walls and I keep some of my other collectibles. TJKC: What’s your favorite piece of artwork in your collection? MARK: Well, I’d have to say that it may be Jack’s personal collection of Captain America #1-10 that is in a bound volume in which Jack drew 4 pieces of art on the two frontis pages and two end pages. TJKC: Did you purchase that volume directly from Jack and Roz? MARK: No, I saw this book at either my first or second visit to the house, and at first I felt that it might sound unkind of me to even ask if it was for sale. I believe that Mike Thibodeaux let me know that it would be all right to bring up the subject. As it turned out they were flattered that I would ask, but said that they would prefer to keep it. Roz did say that she would call me if they were ever going to sell any of the bound volumes that they had in their bookcase. Some years later, perhaps a year or two after Jack passed away, I received a catalogue for a Sotheby’s Comic Book and Comic Art Auction and there was the book. Shortly thereafter, Roz called me because she had recalled our earlier conversation.

TJKC: Did you buy many pages from Jack and Roz? MARK: No, most of the art that I own was purchased or traded for at conventions or purchased at auction. For all of the times that I visited Jack and Roz, I believe that I bought only two pages from them at home. TJKC: Tell me about your first visit to the Kirby home, and how it came about. MARK: It was 1986 and I had not been active in comic fandom since about the time that I finished college some 10 years earlier. I had stored away all of my comics and fanzines in 2 or 3 old footlockers for safe-keeping and carted them with me whenever I moved. After all that time, I opened up one of my footlockers and there were the last comics that I had purchased back in college. As I went deeper into the stacks, the comics got older and older until I was back to my very first comic books. I can clearly remember the joy of rediscovering those old comics. I also clearly recall thinking that I have to find Jack Kirby and meet him in order to tell him how important he was to me. So, that evening I called a friend of a friend, Bruce Zick. Bruce and I have since become good friends and I know that he has contributed some of Jack’s work to the Kirby Collector. Bruce and I had heard of one another for years because our mutual friend kept telling us, “You guys’ve gotta meet—you’re two comic book nerds,” and I think that we had only met once before I made that phone call to him. At the time that I called, Bruce was living in California and busy doing animation work for Disney. I had heard that he once worked at Ruby-Spears so I immediately asked him if he knew how I could meet Jack. Bruce said that he didn’t have any direct connection to Jack but that he would make a few calls. I don’t know the details, but somehow Bruce got ahold of Mike Thibodeaux’s number and Mike arranged for a meeting with Jack. TJKC: So you didn’t know Mike before then? MARK: No, the first time we met was at his apartment before we all drove to Thousand Oaks. Now, totally unbeknownst to Bruce or me, Jack had just recently settled with Marvel for the return of his artwork. As word got out, collectors and more than a few dealers wanted to descend on Jack and Roz in order to purchase art. Mike was acting as a buffer for them and he assumed that Bruce and I were two other folks looking to buy some artwork. I’d say that we were about halfway to Thousand Oaks, talking comic books all the way, discussing favorite plot lines and favorite comic panels, when Mike said something like, “You guys really love this stuff like I do.” We couldn’t agree more and when Mike asked what sort of artwork we were looking to buy, Bruce and I just said, “What artwork?” I think it’s fair to

say that Mike was overjoyed when he realized that three hours like that when Roz came in and we were two fans who just wanted to meet Jack with announced that we had to come back to the kitchen. absolutely no other agenda. That drive was a great way It was all far more then I could ever have asked for. to start my friendship with both Mike and Bruce. I was fortunate enough to come back to Sapra Driving into Thousand Oaks and going up Sapra Street several more times after that and every time Street, I kept rehearsing what I might say when I was special, but that first time was pure magic. knocked on Jack’s door. Any lines that I might have TJKC: Did you get to know any of the other family planned were lost when we pulled into the driveway. members? Instead of waiting for us to come to the door, out MARK: Yes, I’ve met all of the kids and the grandkids marched Jack and he came right up, and several of Lisa’s cousins. I shook my hand, and thanked me can’t recall the first time that I for coming to see him. I have no met Lisa but I think the world clue what I said in return. Mike of her. We see one another far let Jack know that we had come less frequently then I’d like up for the sole purpose of meetbut every now and then, one ing and thanking him and once of us will call the other in MARK MILLER again Jack said something like, order to get caught up. When “No, I want to thank you.” Finally, I hear her voice I’m reminded Roz stuck her head out of the of all the good times that I door and said, “Kirby, let them had with her mom and dad. come into the house!” Roz ushered us in and asked Aunt Anita is Rosalind’s sister and I mean it when I us if we were hungry and what we wanted to drink. say that I love her. She is so funny and quick and I just wanted to keep shaking Jack’s hand and give she represents a link to a past that is beyond value. him a hug and there we were at the refrigerator with Roz calling out some sandwich choices! I was feeling TJKC: You were at Jack and Roz’s 50th wedding pretty dazed by the sincere hospitality and kindness anniversary as well? that never changed in all of my subsequent visits. MARK: You bet. It was really a treat to get to meet Jack gave us a tour of the house, and wall after many of the family members and friends. I listened wall was covered with these to many stories about “Uncle Jack.” It was obvious beautiful pages of his artwork. that everyone there really loved Jack and Roz. It was We ended up in Jack’s studio something that you could feel in the room. The way area where Jack kept his drawthat Jack and Roz treated fans and friends, I’d think ing table. About two-thirds of that it’s fair to say that they had quite a few non-kin the floor was covered with family members there. literally thousands of pages TJKC: As an M.D., were you of some help to Jack of original art. We had to and Roz with their own medical conditions? Did take off our shoes because they come to you for medical advice? from one wall to another MARK: Both Jack and Rosalind seemed to go out of there were pages of original art spilling out from their way not to call me about their health issues oversized envelopes. To say that it was overwhelming even when I asked them to. They consistently said would be an understatement. that they did not want to take advantage of me. I Jack and Roz let us wander around for a while still made a point of asking about their health every and then we all seemed to come together and Roz time we spoke and I think that my biggest role was said something like, “Watch out for Kirby and those stories of his.” As Jack sat down, I was as spellbound as a kid with his first comic books. Jack answered some questions that I had and then he proceeded to tell us stories. Roz came in and out of the room with snacks, asking us if we wanted Jack to stop. That was the last thing that I wanted. He talked about his boyhood days and the streets of New York, about his Grandmother’s storytelling abilities and his time in the Second World War. He talked about different characters in myths that he loved and about how comic books could tell great mythic stories in a way that was relevant for kids and adults in today’s world. He talked about how “bad guys” could be created by small acts that had happened to them and how “heroes” had frailties and weaknesses that they may try to ignore at their own peril. I should mention that he kept stopping to ask about us and our lives and I kept trying to get him back on track about telling us more of his stories. I think that we must have spent more than 49

She felt badly and I told her there was no way that I could have asked her to keep that book for me. As it turned out, I was the only one who bid on the book, or perhaps there was one other bidder. Mike Thibodeaux called me soon after the auction because Roz wanted to see if I had gotten the book after all. That’s another example of how amazing Roz was. As it turned out, I paid less at auction then I had planned to offer Roz and I told her that I would be happy to pay her the difference. She refused to accept a check, so I asked her if she would split the difference, and she made it clear that the subject was closed.

in “translating” what their doctors may have told them into everyday English. I also spoke to Roz a good deal when Jack was undergoing treatment for cancer. Jack survived what I know to be a very difficult and painful regimen and I never once heard a complaint from him. I still remember how hoarse he sounded when he persisted in asking me how I was doing! When you look at pictures of the 50th wedding anniversary, you can see how thin Jack looked as he had just finished the most difficult part of his treatment. He really was perhaps the strongest gentleman that I’ve ever known. TJKC: I know that you were close to Roz as well. MARK: Definitely. In fact it was usually necessary for me to find out how Jack was doing by talking to Roz! After Jack passed away, Roz and I spoke on an even more frequent basis. I still came down to visit and Roz and I would go out to eat or go shopping together. Like Jack, she was one of one, and the fact that she and Jack were able to have all of those years together is what I like to think about when my thoughts drift into how Jack was so ill-served by the industry that he helped to create. TJKC: In TJKC #3, we ran a full-page petition you’d organized to convince Marvel Comics to give Jack a co-creator credit. How’d that come about, and how far did the effort reach? What kind of effect do you think it had? MARK: Well, it was as obvious to me as it is to other fans of Jack’s work at Marvel that he has long deserved a byline for the many comic characters that he created in the 1960s and ’70s. One day I wrote a letter to Marvel saying, “Come on already and give Jack and Stan a byline on the characters that they co-created.” I never got a response so I decided to type up another letter and xerox a few dozen copies and I left them at a couple of comic stores in town. I also sent some to friends and asked them to consider copying them and sending them on in a type of chain letter. This was long before I became computer literate so everything was done by mail. I then paid for a nicer version of the letter to be typeset over the self-portrait of Jack at his drawing table surrounded by his characters. I wanted to distribute them at the next San Diego Con and luckily I first took a copy to Jack and Roz in order to get their permission. Jack immediately noticed that I had listed Captain America on the letter and said, “No, that’s not fair to Joe. You’ll need to take Captain America off this list.” Of course, it was obvious that Captain America was a Simon & Kirby creation so I had that changed before the convention. At the convention I placed stacks of these form letters in various places. I also left petitions to be signed at a few of the tables. Mike Thibodeaux and Rick French collected several hundred signatures, as did Hans Kosenkranius. I think that I had around 700 petition signatures and signed letters by the end of the con. That same year, I took out an advertisement in the Overstreet Price Guide that reproduced the letter asking for a byline. As it turned out, quite a few people sent their letters to me and I got to forward them to Marvel in big stuffed envelopes. Then of course, you graciously agreed to enclose the form letters in each copy of the Kirby Collector. When all was said and done, several thousand names were sent in. Every state was represented along with around a dozen or more other countries. Of course, the byline that Jack deserves hasn’t appeared yet, but perhaps that small but important gesture will be something that Marvel will see fit to do one day in the near future. TJKC: All modesty aside, why do you think you received a Jack Kirby Award? MARK: I imagine that it was because of my role in helping Roz receive a pension from Marvel Comics. I’m only comfortable mentioning this because Lisa has given me permission to do so. Sometime after Jack passed away, I received a call from Lisa letting me know that her mom had been admitted to the hospital with a heart problem. Rosalind had passed out at home and an ambulance had been called because she was so weak. As it turned out, Rosalind needed a pacemaker placed in order to keep her heart rate regular. I spoke to Roz that evening and she sounded well but I hung up the phone feeling fairly upset. In essence, I was angry about the ways that I felt Jack had been treated poorly by Marvel and the way that 50

Roz had to endure these injustices along with Jack. The next day I wrote a letter to the president of Marvel Comics. I expressed my concern about Rosalind’s recent health problems and stated that if Jack hadn’t lived to see a better treatment by Marvel Comics, at least Marvel could step up and do the right thing for Rosalind. I honestly expected that very little if anything would come of my letter and that I just needed to put my sense of frustration into writing. A short time later, a nurse at my clinic told me that a Mr. Terry Stewart was on the line. I asked the nurse to grab his chart and then I would speak to him. Of course, there was no chart for Terry and when I asked the nurse to ask him who he was, she answered, “He says he’s the president of Marvel Comics.” I immediately thought it was a good friend of mine pulling my leg, so I answered the phone fully expecting my friend’s voice. Instead there was Terry, introducing himself to me and asking about Rosalind. It took me a moment to compose myself and then I filled him in on how Roz was doing. He asked what I thought he should do and if I thought sending flowers would be appropriate. I said that would be appropriate, but in addition to flowers that he should consider sending her a pension check. Keep in mind, that at this stage of the conversation we were not on a first name basis, and Terry responded in surprise at my suggestion of something like a pension. He was very pleasant as he stated that no widow of an artist, writer or editor at Marvel had ever received a pension. I then calmly told him that this wasn’t just any writer, artist or editor; that this was Jack Kirby’s widow and that “Marvel was the house that Jack built.” Terry said that even if he wanted to, the lawyers at Marvel would never let something like that happen because it would open a Pandora’s box for future claims of property ownership of comic characters and any items that might feature these characters. He expressed additional legal concerns while I listened to him outline exactly why it was unlikely that something like a pension could be considered. I let Terry know that all of that made sense to me and that I wasn’t a lawyer. I then asked why Marvel’s lawyers couldn’t draw up an agreement that clearly protected them in any of these areas and then send a monthly pension check to Roz. I think that Terry may have laughed in a friendly way at my simple question. He said that he would get a memo out to the legal department and that he would then call me back. Not yet knowing Terry, I thought that would be the last conversation he and I might ever have. As it turned out he called me about a week later, asking how Roz was doing and said that he had not forgotten our conversation regarding a pension. He let me know that he had heard nothing further from his lawyers at that time but that he would keep me posted. I believe that we spoke two or three times over the next 3 months and then he surprised me with a call at home. He informed me that a pension plan had indeed been approved and then he asked if I would like to have the honor of telling Roz myself. I’m not sure if I’ve ever made a phone call in which I was happier than that call to Rosalind. I won’t mention the amount of the pension check but I will say that Roz received a monthly check from that month until she passed away some three years and two months later. Was the check an adequate compensation for Jack’s legacy? No, it was not. But the amount was far more generous than any figure that I could have imagined and I can only say that Terry Stewart took the reins and did something that no one at Marvel had the courage to do before or since. TJKC: Did you ever have the chance to speak with Terry Stewart again? MARK: I’ve only spoken with Terry on a couple of occasions since then. After Roz passed away, I called Terry and thanked him again for making that pension a reality. He was as gracious in accepting my thanks as he had been in every conversation that we ever had. TJKC: Lastly, do you have a favorite Kirby story or character? MARK: I have said this before; for all of the hundreds of super-heroes created by Jack Kirby, the one hero that I loved the most was Jack himself. ★ (above) In honor of Dr. Miller, here’s 1980s animation art for an Animal Hospital concept! (below) Mark’s first visit to Sapra Street. Is he a happy guy, or what?! Animal Hospital TM & ©2006 Ruby-Spears.

In The Zone

A Battle With The Camera

The Jack Kirby Interview, by Ray Zone (Editor’s Note: From 1982 to 1987 Ray Zone produced 30 half-hour episodes of a public access television program called The Zone Show. This program was a talk show for artists that dealt with popular culture and the fine arts. Some of the comic book personalities who appeared on The Zone Show included Robert Williams, Valentino, Deni Loubert, Big Daddy Roth and Jack Kirby. The programs were taped in Santa Monica, California inside a tiny TV studio at the Group W Cable network. On October 10, 1984, Zone interviewed Jack Kirby at the Group W studio using a blue screen background to chroma-key in comic book covers behind Jack as the interview progressed. The entire program ran twenty-eight minutes and fifty seconds and was aired November 21, 1984 on the Group W public access cable channel that spanned the entire Los Angeles area from the San Fernando Valley to San Pedro. This was the only cablecast of the program that was made. The following is a transcription of the Jack Kirby interview, formatted in Q&A style, from The Zone Show.) RAY ZONE: Comic books are one of the truly unique American art forms like rock ’n’ roll and the automobile. They are a very challenging art form and they embody the mythology of the present day. My special guest is Jack Kirby, who has created more comic book characters and innovations in the medium than any other artist/writer. His creations include the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Fantastic Four, the New Gods, the Forever People and countless others. Welcome to the show, Jack. JACK KIRBY: It’s my pleasure to be here. ZONE: What inspired you as a kid, as a child, to first become an artist? KIRBY: My mother. ZONE: How was that? (above) Poster art for Battle For A 3-D World. (right) Ray Zone introduces Jack on The Zone Show, surrounded by screen shots from the broadcast. ©2006 Ray Zone. 51

KIRBY: Well, evidently I probably share your own father’s experience. It used to be traditional for your mother to roll you out of bed and say, “Go get a job.” And I did that. ZONE: That was it? KIRBY: That was it. I got a job at the Fleischer studios as an “in-betweener” on Popeye. I began to animate Popeye. I was one among many people who were doing it and rather a youngster at the time.

(next page, top) Sample panels from Battle For A Three Dimensional World (1982, cover shown above), which teamed Jack with Ray Zone. (next page, bottom) Unused art from Battle For A Three Dimensional World. 3D Man TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Battle For A Three Dimensional World and all related art ©2006 3D Cosmic Publications.

ZONE: Were pulp magazines and writers like H.G. Wells an influence on your imagination? KIRBY: Yes, they were. I became an avid reader. Initially, I was born in a very limited area and I think that generates a kind of a curiosity on your part to look for the things that are outside your own atmosphere. That’s what I did. I began to look for all the things that I didn’t know about. I think that was also generated by my mother. I was an avid moviegoer. I knew that the pictures had to come from somewhere, had to be made somewhere. I didn’t know how the pictures were done and of course that aroused my curiosity. I began to love movies as avidly as any movie fan would. Of course, perhaps, that generated my decision to basically tell a story just like the movies did, like the pulp magazines did, like the basic novel does. Except in my case it ended up by my telling visual stories. ZONE: As a creator of comic books, you have a lot more control over the medium than, say, with a movie. KIRBY: I had complete control. I asked for it. I got it. And I deliberately took it because I felt it was my responsibility. My job was to sell a magazine. And I did that job, initially, as an individualist. Because that’s what I am, I felt the responsibility should be all mine. I took that responsibility and I still do.

(above) Jack drew another 3-D character (which only saw print in 2-D) for the cover of Marvel Premiere #35 (April 1977). Inks by John Verpoorten. Jack would draw the character once more for the cover of What If? #9 (June 1978).

ZONE: What was your first work in the comic book field? KIRBY: My first work in the field was with Bert Whitman. Comics in the beginning were rather chaotic. Small companies were springing up everywhere and the fellows who worked for them would go from one company to another, I remember that. And that’s how we all got to know each other. I met people and it became a wonderful experience. I was a poor boy and I began to meet people who were in the middle class. I met my partner that way. And I found out that there were people living in upstate New York, in Syracuse, in Binghamton, and in Troy and Ithaca and places like that. Of course, it was galvanizing to me. I just followed it like somebody in a trance. ZONE: Tell me how you got started with Joe Simon, your partner for so many years. KIRBY: It was the fact that he came from such a very different area. He was bigger than me. He dressed differently than me. In fact I would go home to my folks and say, “Well, you ought to see his father’s suit. See? And it’s my bet that his father was a politician.” And of course he wasn’t. Only the politicians around my way dressed like that. Joe Simon himself is six-foot-three and a very prolific guy. He graduated from Syracuse College. He had been a sports writer. And he had met all the boxers that I loved so I had an affinity toward Joe. We shared a lot of common interests. ZONE: You guys worked together on the creation of Captain America. KIRBY: Yes, we did and we created a lot of firsts. We worked as partners for about twenty years. ZONE: How did your partnership work? I know you primarily did penciling of comics at this time but you wrote them and inked them as well. KIRBY: I wrote them. I inked them. Joe was more or less the business part of the association. The publishers would respect him. Joe is a big guy. They wouldn’t look at me. That was fine with me

thing around us in our own individual way. If you’re an interesting storyteller, that sort of thing comes through in the story. And the readers could relate to the stories. Joe and I were peopleoriented and that reflected in our stories. People related to that. ZONE: You guys started your own publishing company called Mainline Comics about 1954. KIRBY: Yes we did.

because I didn’t know how to talk to a publisher. I knew nothing about the business side of comics and Joe had a little experience in business and became the business half of our association. ZONE: It was in the early 1940s that you created your innovations with full-page splash panels and double-page spreads. Where did the inspiration for that come from? KIRBY: I call it a John Henry inspiration. I had a battle with the camera. I couldn’t beat that camera and I wanted to beat that camera. So, one page wasn’t good enough, I had to dramatize it into two. If they had a magazine that folded out into ten pages, you would have seen a ten-page spread. And, of course, like John Henry, I couldn’t compete with the railroad. But I did my best. And I still do it to this day. I do my best to be as good and as interesting as the film, and to be as good and as interesting as a very valid novel. I’m competing with the other media, initially. That’s my job. ZONE: You also evolved the kid gang genre of comics with titles like Boy Commandos and “Newsboy Legion.” Where did those come from? KIRBY: It was a natural thing to do because my life was lived that way where I came from. It wasn’t gangs in the sense that it’s portrayed in the movies. It was a togetherness that we shared. We found out who was playing baseball, who was playing handball or basketball. We went looking for each other. In that way we found our own recreation. And I can tell you that we were a pretty wholesome lot.

ZONE: Was that an attempt to have more creative control over your product? KIRBY: That was an attempt to publish. We did very well at it. We did as well as any of the other magazines. But we did it during a period in which comics had gone through a bad cycle. It was poorly timed and we suffered as the other publishers but, being so well instructed in our craft, we didn’t lose any money. We broke even. And we had that satisfaction. ZONE: At about the same time, the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham wrote Seduction of the Innocent, a book that charged comic books with creating juvenile delinquency and inspiring fascist fantasies in kids with super-heroes. What is your viewpoint on his charges? KIRBY: I’m not going to dwell on what his motives were, whether they were exploitative or whether they were genuine. That was his interpretation of comics and, of course, living in a democracy he certainly got his views in front of the public. It became quite an issue at the time and comics suffered. We didn’t have a Code like the movies did. And that was our weak point. That was the point that Wertham struck at hardest. And he was a

ZONE: The 1940s are now known as the “Golden Age of Comics.” Why was there such a tremendous fascination and appeal with comics for the youth of the time? KIRBY: Comics were a new medium at that time. It had never been tried before. It’s strictly an American medium. And they were made in an American manner. If you go to Europe today, you’ll find that the Europeans admire the American comic artist and they too see it as an American medium. Somehow, the American has a character of his own which he transmits to his work. You can see it in our films. You can see it in our novels. There’s no reason why you can’t see it in our comic magazines. That kind of thing is reflected. An American is forthright. He comes to the point. He makes no bones about anything. That’s our national character. I believe that’s the way we are. ZONE: Comic books also celebrate individualism. KIRBY: I believe so. I don’t believe that we’re subtle people. I believe that subtlety is not part of our national character. And so my comics are slam-bang productions. ZONE: You also evolved, with Joe Simon, the romance genre of comic books with a title called My Date. I believe that was the first title. KIRBY: Yes. My Date was an approach to romance. But we didn’t see that at first. We were working for MacFadden Publications. We were working on the Archietype romance and, of course, it was teenage romance. It suddenly occurred to me that MacFadden, who was putting out romance magazines, was doing very well with them. Here we were sitting on top of this goldmine and doing nothing about it. I said, “Let’s do the real thing. We’re sitting on top of romance. We can do romance as well as they can! And not only that, we’ve got the advantage of drawing it, doing it visually.” And so we did it. The first issue of Young Romance sold ninety-two percent which in comics is a sell-out. It means the rest of the magazines are going to be kept in the warehouse. ZONE: Did you find the romance genre somewhat restricting, compared to your former work? KIRBY: No, I didn’t. I did romance my way. And when Joe wrote a story, he wrote it his way. Of course, I think that’s wonderful because we all see every53

great boxer. As an amateur boxer I can say that Wertham did a pretty good job on us. Possibly in a left-handed way, with a left jab, he gave us the Comics Code, which came into existence and made us all legitimate. ZONE: Don’t you think that stories of super-heroes and figures larger than life are a healthy thing for the growing imagination? KIRBY: They always were. I believe that what we’re doing is an updated Hercules, an updated Thor, an updated Tarzan. Superman, to my mind, was an updated Tarzan. I went beyond Superman. I came out with Captain America. All my characters are our own updated versions of the powerful themes that came before us. We all sit on top of very powerful trains of thought that we still haven’t utilized. I think that generations to come will pick up those powerful thoughts and utilize them in their own way. What their product will be, I just can’t say. ZONE: Let’s move up to some of your more current work, particularly the New Gods, and its relation to your universe known generically as the Fourth World. KIRBY: The Fourth World for me is the world of ideas, a very creative world. The New Gods, of course, are a parable of our own times. What do our own times symbolize to us? And, of course, I have a version of what our own times are. What I’ve done is to make a mythology of our own times and attempt to use it in an entertaining manner. It generates interest and I sell my magazine, which is initially my job. That’s what it’s always been. I’m not pretentious about it. I’m not out to be a Picasso, or a Leonardo daVinci. I’m not out to be a Victor Hugo. I’m out to be a Jack Kirby who sells comic magazines. ZONE: In doing that you’ve created your own visual philosophy, you might say, with titles like the Eternals and the Forever People. KIRBY: Well, let’s say I’ve grown. I’ve matured. And as I’ve grown, it’s been a privilege for me just to sit alone and think about subjects that have always been around me. What do I sincerely think about them? I believe I’ve come up with what I think are sincere answers. In doing that, I become myself. I become a person. In doing so, I become something more than trivialized. And I’m proud of doing that. I become Jack Kirby, the way I am. ZONE: I know that, in becoming Jack Kirby, you have influenced countless adults and children alike with this philosophy. KIRBY: If I have, it’s been gratifying to me. I have received letters from a wide range of readers, readers in many diverse professions. It’s not only gratifying but it’s been a pleasure to analyze the range of people who communicate with me. It’s a pleasure knowing that I can communicate with such a diverse audience. So, I’m proud of my profession. I’m proud of myself. And I’m proud of the fact that I have a good knowledge of my own craft. And on top of all I’m proud of being an American because that, initially, sparks everything. ZONE: Why do you think villains, like your character Darkseid, Doctor Doom and others, are so appealing? Why are they so popular? KIRBY: Because they’re part of us. The hero and villain are inseparable. There is something inside of us that continually clashes. There is something inside us that we restrict. There is something inside us that we love to pour forth. I think it’s strictly emotion, of course. And we’re born with that kind of thing. So we portray them as villain or hero. We have to give them a name. We have to give these emotions a name. And so we say “good” and “evil,” “hero” and “villain,” and we say “powerful” and “the powerless.” There are all these extremes. I believe all these extremes are inside us. That’s how the Hulk was born. The Incredible Hulk, to my mind, was Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, a powerful source for that kind of thing. I’ve seen ordinary people do extraordinary things. I can tell you that I’ve done them myself. I can tell you that it’s innate in yourself to bend steel if you really want to, just like the Hulk does. Somehow, inside us, there’s a sort of electric machine that leaps to life. In moments when we least expect them, we do extraordinary things. Out of that, and out of the same line of thought, Stevenson came up with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. ZONE: You’ve said before that classic art by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo is actually comics. How is that? KIRBY: I think they are comics. I don’t mean comics in a funny sense. I mean a sense of visual expression. They didn’t need dialogue. Perhaps all they needed was beauty. They achieved that beauty and where they did that, the dialogue to them was meaningless. That’s what they wanted to accomplish. When we draw, we want to speak. We not only want to visualize what we do, we want to portray our own actions in sound as well as in motion. And so we draw cartoons. We put in dialogue balloons. We put in sound effects, like film. We put in special effects, like in the film, to make them more powerful, 54

to give vent to the kind of feelings that we have. We use special effects that transmit what we feel to the audience. ZONE: These techniques you’re speaking of seem to be what makes comic books a special art form. KIRBY: I believe they are a special art form. They’re a bridge between film and the novel. Comic books are visual novels. Their flaw is the fact that we don’t get two hours to view them. We don’t get five hundred pages in which to write them. I have to give you a compact novel in fifty-two pages and that’s tough to do. It’s tough to do because I can’t give you the rounded picture that I would love to. So I do it swiftly. I do it powerfully. I do it dramatically. And I do the best I can with the kind of medium I’ve got. ZONE: What advice would you give to aspiring artists, or comic artists, as to how they could best perfect their craft? KIRBY: The practical thing to do is to take basic anatomy. All the channels are open for any young person to get acquainted with basic anatomy. Most of us are moviegoers and everybody has already seen stories told on the screen. And they’ve already had stories told to them in school. And they’ve already experienced their own stories and had their own feelings about what goes on around them. Therefore, they’re already equipped to tell stories. I think all they need is the willingness to become an artist. If you have the willingness to do so, you just go out and do it. That’s what I did. I merely did it. They asked me to do it. I found out the best way to do a comic story. I took the full responsibility for it. I told the best story I could. I can tell you that my magazines sold very well. The first Captain America and the succeeding issues sold in the vicinity of eight to nine hundred thousand a month. My New Gods are selling wonderfully. I work with the people at DC. That’s the Superman outfit. We cooperate fully and produce a fine magazine.

(previous page, top) Mort Meskin pencils from the never-published Captain 3-D #2, circa 1953. (previous page, bottom) Jack’s dramatic work for Captain 3-D #1 was tailormade for the process. (this page) The unused 1953 pencils for the cover of Captain 3-D #2. On the reverse side of the heavy illustration board this was drawn on, there’s a very rough thumbnail layout for the cover of Play Ball, a proposed new Harvey baseball comic dubbed “The Season’s Biggest Hit!” on the layout. We’re unsure if such a title ever made it into print; if anyone knows of a copy, please write us! Captain 3-D ©2006 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate.

ZONE: Thanks so much for being on the show. You’ve been a great inspiration to me and I know you’re going to continue to produce a lot of fine work. KIRBY: I thank you for that. You’ve been a wonderful host for allowing me to have my say. I’m grateful for that. At any time if you want to continue our conversation, I would certainly be agreeable. The people here have been very cooperative and I thank them too. ★

Foundations

Shooting Stars

ince we’re time-traveling this issue, we thought these two stories would be appropriate to present: “This World Is Ours” from Alarming Tales #3 (Jan. 1958), and “The Thing On Sputnik 4” from Race For The Moon #2 (Sept. 1958, inked by Al Williamson). Both were

Art restoration by Christopher Fama

done at the beginning of the US/Russia Space Race, and concurrent with Jack starting his Sky Masters newspaper strip, which was fertile ground for him to use his sci-fi background to introduce space travel concepts that would eventually be adopted by the US Space Program.

Adam M c Govern Know of some Kirby-inspired work that should be covered here? Send to: A d a m M c Go v e r n P O B o x 257 Mt . Ta b or, NJ 07878

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

THE KIRBY VARIATIONS

eing a diverse programme of offerings in counterpoint to the master’s perennially rich prototype……

Have It Their Way Kirby characters are still so central to the super-hero industry, and his vocabulary still so intrinsic to the medium, that we could crowd out each issue of TJKC if this column didn’t stick to specific homages to the Kirby style. Every once in a while, though, we have to bend the rules to consider particularly skilled but utterly un-Kirbyish treatments of what he created, in observance of his influence and in the spirit of his own originality. • The four-issue Warlock reinvention from Marvel (November 2004February 2005) had to raise a smile on any Kirby stickler’s lips even as it would please any connoisseur of comics-as-lit: readers of this magazine will be well familiar with the “failure to communicate” between Lee and Kirby on the origin of the character formerly known as “Him,” in which Lee made the scientists creating this synthetic messiah power-mad villains while Kirby considered them wellmeaning despots drunk on good intentions. The latter concept was central to the new book, which expertly wove almost every other strand of the character’s mythos into a fresh interpretation all its own. Written by Greg Pak, author/director of the hit indie cult film Robot Stories, this is simply one of the finest comics of the last 25 years; a gem of sharp, unsentimental drama, brisk, economical action and eloquent, unfussy philosophy. • Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers line—like Kirby’s Fourth World, a hyper-series of (in this case) seven four-issue titles with two framing stories on either end of their collective yearlong run—is a still a classic in the making as you read this. The cycle not only reworks some of the more obscure denizens of the DC Universe while re-conceiving adventure comics themselves; it also pays particular attention to unsung heroes of the Kirby canon. Only Morrison would have the clout and craziness to get away with scoring solo series for Kirby umpteenthstringers like Klarion the Witch-Boy, but to any true Kirby fan, misfits as we were though mainstream we now may be, there’s a special place in the heart for the minor-leaguers—a starring book for Shilo Norman is decades overdue, and the Guardian resonates anew in this latest reinvention. No one is making straight-faced superheroes matter for a new millennium more than Morrison.

(this page, top) Covers of recent comics that owe more than a tip of the hat to Kirby. (right) An example of a Tigerman from the postcataclysmic society of Rocketo. (next page, top to bottom) Sergeantstein; Tom Scioli's Eternals; Chip Danger; Guilty; and Action Philosophers. All characters TM & ©2006 their respective owners.

• For over four decades, out beyond the rim of fandom’s how-does-he-do-it awe over Kirby’s FF or New Gods, lies the what-was-he-thinking shock of his ’50s/’60s giant-monster books. They’re an unsolvable mystery to which many generations of Marvel creators have returned, most recently and perhaps most richly (or at least neck-and-neck with the visionary cheese of Tony Isabella and Dick Ayers’ unsung IT! series in the mid-’70s) by last October’s four-week Marvel Monsters Group mini, spearheaded by gifted Goon creator Eric Powell’s inimitable Will Eisner-meetsNot Brand Echh style. A ghost of Halloween past as you read this, but well worth unearthing by back-issue search, chance nuclear blast or ill-advised excavation.

All Great, No Disaster In the latest installment of my continuing quest to shoehorn contemporary comics of a sometimes minimal Kirby Quotient into our nostalgic field of study, I can’t resist noting the nodding Kamandi similarities in Francisco Espinoza’s brilliant Rocketo (originally from Speakeasy Comics and, this April, Image). In addition to being one of the most imaginative and charming comics I’ve ever read, by an important creator whose style supercollides Darwyn Cooke and Scott Morse to come up with a Tin-Tin for the 21st century and could single-handedly reclaim comics’ underage audience (or double-handedly, with gifted co-scripter Marie Taylor), the book’s future myth of a post-cataclysm society (reshaped continents, anthropomorphic menageries, etc.) inevitably echoes Kirby’s sci-fi fable of the Last Boy on Earth. This visionary saga of the Next Man on Earth is not to be missed by kids of any vintage.

Creating a Monster Secret Kirby roots are unearthed in the art of Pete Von Sholly. TwoMorrows readers will be familiar with Von Sholly’s hazardously funny work on the faux ’60s horror-movie mag Crazy Hip Groovy Go-Go Way Out Monsters for this very imprint, and will want to be aware of his two collections for Dark Horse, Morbid and Morbid 2. If you can imagine a parallel history of comics where the Marvel and DC brass fired all the pencilers and

replaced them with the people making those photo-and-word-balloon “I’m a millionaire thanks to the taxidermist’s correspondence college” ads, mixed with an alternate past where Kirby took up his hallucinatory photo-collages full-time, you can begin to imagine the genre-unto-itself that Von Sholly plies in these two books of brilliantly sarcastic B-movies on paper. The Kirby connection approaches critical mass with a group of hypnotic prints inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath, in which the artist’s equally adept painting style suggests the Brothers Hildebrandt’s evil triplet, with craggy WhereMonsters-Dwell giants aplenty as well. Repeated as farce, Von Sholly’s selfpublished Seargeantstein and His Maraudin’ Monsters (a kind of unintended advance satire of Marvel’s creature-centric

stopped at Bill Burg’s booth by the Archie-esque pinup of Big Barda bopping to a mother box-powered iPod, what stayed with me was his surprisingly moving serious-animal saga Chip Danger: Daredevil Squirrel. If you’re unnourished by the stock sentiment and easy epiphanies of much self-help pop, this unpretentious parable of growth and perseverance may seem like one of the five comics you’ll read in heaven. (www.peteburg. com/bill) Kirby coinvented romance comics, which makes him a proud forefather of the otherwise utterly unrelated Guilty, Karl Stevens’ beautifully drawn, eloquently observed vignette of post-college emotional underachievers. (www.indyworld.com/ stevens) In the merrily copyright-trampling Marvel Gang-Bang (so named because it’s, er, inspired by Marvel, and, um, there’s a whole lot of contributors; what else?), there’s an Eternals story that shows star Kirby emulator Tom Scioli moving into unexpectedly subtle and tender territory. If there’s ever an Eternals collection, Marvel’s lawyers should let this be its bonus track. (www.lunch breakcomics.com)

Saint Augustine’s Fourth World

Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos book) follows the misadventures of several secret weapons who only die with their boots on for starters. The book’s seven-inone-blow choreography and adrenalized absurdity owe much to the reluctant former infantryman who gathers us here each issue, but Von Sholly’s whimsy and dynamism place him in a lineage of pulp revelation on which he and the King stand out with similar distinction— so it’s more like Kirby as a Gene! (www.vonshollywood.com)

Smaller and Better Even in the midst of indie conclaves like the annual Small Press Expo (www.spxpo.com), I see Kirby people. Though I was originally

This issue’s column is veering so far from our typical topic of Kirby-style pastiches that entering the realm of philosophy and comparative religion actually pulls us closer back to business-as-usual. From Fred Van Lente, one of the freshest and most energetic emerging talents in comics writing (catch the

collections of his must-read super-Sopranos series The Silencers and his sleeper-hit spy saga The Scorpion, as well as his oddball opii in the upcoming Super-Villain Team-Up and Marvel Western Three-in-One ), comes the incomparable indie Action Philosophers. In this twisted Classics Illustrated you’ll make more sense of the truly cosmic ideas of great thinkers than you ever did while sneaking

a comic inside your textbook, with hilarious Schoolhouse Rockstyle spins on the famous philosophers’ backgrounds (Plato as real-life ex-wrestler, Nietzsche as supermanin-his-own-mind, etc.), all to the suitably smartass storybook accompaniment of quick-witted cartoonist Ryan Dunlavey. In issue #2 you even get an extra insight into the superlative virtues, absolute evils and uneasy gray areas between in Kirby’s Fourth World scenario—which, in a segment of the Saint Augustine episode cataloguing the competing theologies of that icon’s day, is revealed to be very close to the cosmic conflicts of Zoroastrianism (notwithstanding my serial pronouncements on the New Gods’ roots in the King’s and my shared Jewishness— whaddya want, he didn’t look Zoroastrian). Visit Dunlavey online at www.eviltwincomics.com, and give it up for Lente at www.fredvan lente.com. Tell ’em McGovern sent ya, or that you’re on a mission from God. ★ (Adam McGovern lives in Mt. Tabor, NJ, and while he doesn’t look a thing like Jack Kirby, his knees are rather square and blocky.) 63

Tribute

2005 Kirby Tribute Panel Held July 19, 2005 at Comicon International: San Diego, featuring (shown below, left to right) Steve Sherman, Robert Katz, Scott Shaw!, and Mark Evanier (moderator) Transcribed by Steven Tice Photos by Chris Ng

MARK EVANIER: I’m Mark Evanier. I’m moderating the Jack Kirby tribute panel. What are the odds? [laughter] In the last few years, this panel has generally taken on the shape of bringing up artists and writers over the years who were influenced by Jack to discuss the influence Jack had on their careers, both directly, in terms of giving advice and counseling and mentoring, or indirectly, because of the ways his work inspired them. This is a very important aspect of Jack Kirby, and one which you should not forget. It dawned on me that maybe this year we could talk a little more about Jack the person, directly. So we’ve assembled a panel here of people who knew Jack and worked with him more closely and had a closer personal relationship with him. And I want to talk about a couple of aspects of Kirby and what’s going on in the world of Kirby today, also. Let me introduce the people here now. Paul Levine said he was going to get here a little late and that he was having trouble finding a parking space, so he’s probably downstairs suing someone. [laughter] But Paul’s an attorney who represented Jack, and a little later we’re going to tell, again—some of you have seen it, some of you haven’t—the story of Jack’s encounter with Johnny Carson, and I’ll show you the video of that again. Paul represented Jack during the only lawsuit, as far as I know, Jack ever filed in his life. And now that Johnny Carson’s gone, Paul can talk more freely about the incident, so we’ll probably close with that. On my left is a gentleman who I’ve known since 1967 or ’68. He was a member of our old comic book club, as you’ve probably heard ad nauseum about, many times, and later we worked for a company called Marvelmania, which he briefly alludes to in the new Jack Kirby Collector, and doesn’t even begin to tell you the sleaziness and outrageous, shallow ripoffs and machinations of one of the great fraudulent mail-order firms of this world. And he worked with Jack for a number of years, and has been a close friend of the Kirby family all that time. This is Mr. Steve Sherman, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] Steve is now a puppeteer and puppet maker; I think he probably learned something around the comic book business that led to that conclusion. [laughter] Sitting next to Steve is a gentleman I’ve known for almost as long. I actually met him at Jack’s house—was it 1970, Scott? SCOTT SHAW!: 1969. EVANIER: ’69 or ’70. At that time he was a beginning cartoonist, showing Jack stuff he’d done for his college newspaper and some underground comics. He’s since turned into one of the top animation artists and illustrators and producers of our business. Mr. Scott Shaw!, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] There are those of us who felt real close to Jack, and sometimes referred to him as “Uncle Jack”; let’s hear from a man who had the right to actually call him Uncle Jack. This is Jack’s nephew, Mr. Robert Katz, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] And a man who incidentally did extraordinary things watching out for the Kirbys’ affairs in their later years, after Jack and after Roz passed away, and keeping track of a very volatile, perhaps, is the right word— we’ll talk a little bit more about the legal problems that have plagued those of us who love Kirby over the years. And then I’d like to introduce a few people in the audience. I believe Lisa Kirby was here a minute ago. There’s Lisa Kirby. [applause] And I believe sitting next to Lisa is Tracy Kirby. [applause] Let me introduce you to the editor of the Jack Kirby Collector, Mr. John Morrow. [applause] Let’s briefly run down some of the pending Kirby-related projects that are coming up in the world. As you may know, DC is going to announce the Kamandi Archives, coming out shortly. I will not be writing the foreword to any more of the Archives at DC due to a dispute I had with them over the Challengers Archives, but I’m sure they’ll put together a very fine job on this. I suspect that they are just itching to do just about everything Jack did for DC. Marvel is coming out with a deluxe, huge, overpriced, reproduction of Fantastic Four #1, for which I wrote a commentary; I wouldn’t spend the money for it based on that if I were you. And I don’t know much more about it than that. The Fantastic 4 movie will be coming out on DVD very shortly, and some of us were interviewed for it. I was. Anybody else? Steve was interviewed. There’s a documentary about Jack that’s supposed to be—based on the number of people they talked with, it should be interesting. Neal was interviewed for it? Neal’s supposed to be here. What else is coming out of Jack’s? Anybody else know anything else?

STEVE SHERMAN: Bedsheets. EVANIER: Bedsheets? Yeah, Kirby bedsheets. [general chuckling] I have just about, I think, finished what I consider the first draft of the Kirby biography I’m working on. It is so long that, when you see it you’ll understand. I’m going to open up a beta test conference on the Internet in about a month or two where I’m going to ask for volunteers to read chapters of it and comment on it, but particularly to help me with some of the final bits of research. I had to track down some obscure little things, quotes and—I’ve got a place where there are certain panels I’ve got to find and I can’t find them, so I’m going to ask other people to search the Web for them. Soon I’ll be asking for volunteers to help me with the final bits of research, and I’m hoping to announce a publication date by this panel next year. It’s very long, and I may have to publish it in two editions: the edition that normal people will read, and an edition that people like us will want to read [some chuckling], where it spends twenty pages explaining a certain layout on one page of one issue of Tales to Astonish. Why don’t we talk about Jack a little bit. I met Jack on the 17th of July, 1969, and I loved the guy. I loved Jack before I met him, through the comics. I loved the Jack I met, because he was just so giving and so loving. Every year I feel like on these panels, fewer and fewer people here had the chance to meet Jack in person. I don’t know how many people here had the opportunity, but if you didn’t have the opportunity to meet Jack, one of the things you should know about him is that when he met someone, he always tried to give them something. I don’t mean a sketch. Sometimes he would try to force old copies of Playboy on us. [some laughter] But he used to meet people and think to himself, “What can I give to this person that is inspirational?” or, “What can I give this person so they’ll go away enthused to do better work, or excited?”. Usually it was a philosophical concept, and the people who came just hoping to get a sketch of the Thing were very disappointed, they didn’t understand that that’s not what Jack really had to offer that was wonderful. I got a lot of inspiration from Jack, I got a lot of joy and wisdom, and I’m still trying to parse and apply some of it in a useful manner in my life. And I’ve

(previous page, top) Jack and Roz at home in November 1989.

(Previous page, bottom) A 1960s illo of Fighting American.

also got a problem, which is that, about an hour into meeting Jack, I have been distressed and concerned and worried about this man’s recognition and compensation. The first day I met Jack, we started talking, in very polite, non-hysterical terms, about how he was not being treated very well by Marvel. And by independently checking into it, I found it to be quite true, and how he was not getting the recognition he deserved. But to this day, I still flinch and wince and get a little sick feeling in my stomach when I hear people refer to Stan Lee as the creator of the Fantastic Four. [some applause] And it bothers me, the smattering of applause for that. [louder applause] To those of us who are interested in Jack, I think that’s been a shared suffering. I think a lot of us wince about that. Now that Jack’s gone, it seems even more important that the last thing left is that the name recognition not be ignored. And I’m going to talk a little bit about that today. But I’d like to go down the panel and just ask each person a little bit about what Jack gave them. We’ll talk more about the lack of credit and such later. Steve, we went down to see Jack, if I’m not mistaken, about September of 1969 when I went down for my second visit there, your first. SHERMAN: Yes. EVANIER: What are your personal recollections of what knowing Jack Kirby meant to you. SHERMAN: Well, of course, just like most people here, I was a real fan of all the Marvel work. And, to me, I bought the whole thing: “Smilin’ Stan Lee and Jolly Jack Kirby,” because I was like, “Yeah, right!” And so, when I met Jack, and listened to him and got to speak to him, it was just kind of like, “Ohhh,” [laughs] finding out behind the scenes that he wasn’t really that jolly about all of it. [laughter] But under66

standably, as an artist, you could see where his frustrations came from. This last year, my wife and I went to New York and took the tenement tour, and it just really gave me an idea of where Jack came from, because he used to tell these stories of living in the tenements. And you go into those things and it’s just awful, oppressive. And there’s a story Jack used to tell, when he was eight years old, I believe. He got ahold of some chalk, and just did this drawing on the inside hallway, just covered the whole thing. And the hallway looked exactly like the way he described it, just this black tar paper, one light bulb hanging, and I guess the landlord of the tenement came up to Jack’s mother and said, “Mrs. Kurtzberg, look what your son did. You’re going to have to pay for this.” And she was kind of upset about it, but at the same time she was kind of like, “Oh, what Jacob did is pretty good.” But when you see the kind of life Jack had as a young child, it’s no wonder he had this strong drive to get out of there. And it’s so funny, because here he is in Manhattan, New York City, this large city, and you would think, wow, it was wide open. And yet, he was just confined in a small area of the Lower East Side. I think it was 1933 when the city of New York finally closed down the tenements because they didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. They did have indoor plumbing; there was a toilet in the hallway, which was just shocking to see. It reminded me of the Old West, it just looked like an Old West building. And I think it was ’33 that his family moved out to Brooklyn. But I just got a sense of Jack, from going there, just from all the stories he used to tell us about his childhood, and then seeing exactly these tiny rooms and these tiny buildings. I’d rather sleep in my car, I think. [laughter] It was just amazing. EVANIER: What do you think you took away from Jack in terms of personal inspiration? SHERMAN: I think a work ethic. I mean, I think we realize that Jack really had a strong work ethic in terms of being professional, which is what he always talked about. No matter what the job was, you had to be professional, you had to do the work. And no matter what it was, don’t cut any corners, don’t pull any tricks, because he knew all the tricks. He would tell us, “You want to do a story? Here’s what you do. An eyeball closeup. Do a finger. You’ll get through three pages in half an hour with that.” But he wouldn’t do that. No matter what it was, when you’re telling a story and illustrating it, you do the best job you can. And I think that’s one of the main things I got from him, just doing the best job you can, no matter what. EVANIER: I should have mentioned, by the way, and I apologize, but when Steve and I were working with Jack, we had a third partner in a lot of the things we were doing. This is Gary Sherman out there, Steve’s

brother. [applause] Scott, remember the first time you met Jack? What did you come away with, outside of the silverware? [scattered laughter] SHAW!: Well, I was part of the early fandom here in San Diego, and Jack had moved out to Irvine. I didn’t come up with that group. I think Shel Dorf called him up. I don’t remember who Shel got his number from. But he came up with a small group of fans, and then later, when they moved to Thousand Oaks, we invaded the Kirby home. I mean, we really took it over. I think we showed up with about twenty people that first time. I remember, I think Shel must have just said, “Could we drop by and see you?” And of course the Kirbys were incredibly gracious with their time. “Sure, drop on by.” And it wound up being this all-day affair. Roz had to go out to McDonald’s and get cheeseburgers for all of us. I can see Lisa nodding her head. One kid [Barry Alfonso] was real young, the kid that wound up being Barri-Boy and Klarion the Witch Boy. He was this kind of sickly guy who now writes award-winning liner notes for record albums and stuff. But his mother came with him, and Roz went back and found his mother going through the cabinets in the back of the house. [laughter] And, I mean, it was one of these things where we all felt like we were walking around in Valhalla, but the Kirbys had to get stuff done, and Jack had to do art. And I think it was on a weekend, and the kids were going back and forth. I was a teenage lout, I was a long-haired goofball, but even I kind of started to get a sense of, “Gee, we’re really kind of intruding on these people, and they’re really too nice.” And I think what impressed me was that Jack and Roz both really put up with our crap. I mean, we were incredibly rude without meaning to be. And not only that, they actually liked us. [some laughs] And they had us back. I was doing underground comics at the time, and for those of you here that are young, I apologize, but I worshiped Jack. I thought of him as the best cartoonist, ever. I never thought of his stuff as being realistic. I thought of him the way most people think of Charles Schulz or Al Capp or those kind of guys. Whatever Jack did was from the unique Kirby point of view, and was exaggerated and it was funny and it was dramatic, it was all the things that I wanted to see. And I think, in a strange way, we’ve kind of connected on that level, because I kept wanting to talk to him about cartoonists, rather than say, “You’re, like, the Van Gogh of comics,” or whatever Stan would say on the letters page that month. And he really, I think, kind of reacted to the fact that I was doing my own thing, I was doing underground comics. And I wasn’t, like, R. Crumb, I was just starting out. But I remember doing this poster, and it was a cover take-off on a comic, an issue of Strange Tales, with this giant monster, and he’s saying, “No human can beat me!” standing there with his chest and his body thrown out. And I did a very explicit drawing of this character with a giant male organ saying, “No human can beat me off!” [scattered laughter] I mean, I was about as juvenile as you could humanly be. And I came and I tried to give it to Jack. [much laughter] I go, “This is for you!” [laughter] And he kind of looked at me, and he looked at the thing, and he looked back at me [laughter], and talk about the Thing, this is the Thing! [laughter] And it was so funny, because I look back now, and if I was an adult and some kid brought me—. Any of you have a cat? And the cat that loves you, one morning you’ll wake up and he’ll have a dead bird, and he’ll drop it on your chest [laughter], and think this is his gift to you, and you’re like, “Get

this thing off of me!” [laughter] Here I am giving Jack this completely revolting image, and I’m asking him if he’ll put it up in his house. [much laughter] He said, “I’ve got a family, you know.” I said, “Well, couldn’t you put it up, like, on the inside of a closet?” [laughter] And I think that was a long way of saying that Jack was absolutely accepting. He didn’t take me as a nut. He realized that I wasn’t trying to stalk him and his family, that he didn’t have to get a court order to keep me away from the house, and he really mentored me. I mean, it wasn’t like I hung out at the Kirbys’ house. Some people think it was like the Ozzie and Harriet show and I was Wally, coming by to hang out for a week or something. [laughter] I really tried not—I didn’t want to waste a lot of Jack’s time. For a guy that’s so mouthy, when I’d be around Jack, I’d really kind of be intimidated, because I just wanted to soak it in, I didn’t want to waste his time. But he was so open, and he was so interested in all this stuff, and he really liked the idea of underground comics. And it blew my mind that he was more interested in us, or at least as much interested in us, as we were in him. And I also liked the fact that—my dad was a Pearl Harbor survivor, and my dad saw an awful lot of horrible stuff that he never really wanted to tell me about during the war. And Jack saw some amazing things, and he liked talking about his war experiences, but it wasn’t in some sort of macho way. I think it was just kind of like, can you believe this stuff happened, and he was there? And I think that Jack was at least working out that outrage and that anger at some of the awful stuff that he saw, and yet he was a gentle guy, and he was this little guy. But he was kind of a tough guy, and he’d tell you exactly what he thought of you, and kind of cock an eyebrow. He was giving you exactly what he thought. And it’s funny, because what Mark said about Jack trying to give something away, I always got the feeling that in interviews, and in those early New Gods books, with those essays before they started printing letters—and this fits in exactly with what Mark said, that Jack had this kind of need to say something of worth. And often Jack did, but a lot of times Jack was just kind of a meatand-potatoes guy, and it was a strange disconnect. I remember at times thinking I must be really stupid, because I’m not understanding what Jack is telling me here, or I’d read one of these essays, and I’d go, “I’ve gotta go lay down. [laughter] I’m not quite sure that I’ve grokked what he’s getting at, here.” But I did get that he wanted to help us out. And not that I’m some big humanitarian, but I’ve always tried to meet with kids and have kids over to our house. We actually had a couple of kids we met at a convention live with us for awhile, and they’re now professional cartoonists. But I think it really sunk in that, if you can help other people do something as insane as being a cartoonist, you should. It’s like that “pay it forward” thing, and Jack was doing it with everybody that I knew. He treated everybody with respect and interest and, in my case, I repaid him in a very outrageous way, and he still put up with me and liked me, and he and Roz were always very kind to me and my family. So that’s the longwinded answer. EVANIER: That’s very good. [applause] Robert, at what age did you figure out what your family member did for a living? ROBERT KATZ: Probably not until college. But what I was going to do is just tell a couple of stories about when I was a really little kid, and what kind of an uncle he was. Before I do that, I do want to thank the fans who’ve really kept Jack’s name alive. I think a lot of people here know that somebody else has really taken the lion’s share of the credit for what he has done, and it’s people like you, it’s people who buy the Kirby Collector, and John Morrow, and Mark Evanier, the guys that do these panels every single year.

It’s people like that that have kept his name out there, and have been fighting to give him the credit that he deserves. Of all the things that hurt him in his life, it was the fact that he felt that his credit was stolen from him. Because he was so generous. He always made sure that he gave credit to everybody. He never stole from anyone. And the thing that was most insulting to him is that he felt his characters were stolen from him and he wasn’t given the credit. And the people who show up here, and buy the Kirby Collector, remember this: it’s why he’s finally starting to get recognition, why his name is on the F4 movie finally. I don’t know who’s responsible for that, but he’s finally starting to be given credit, so thank you, everybody. [much applause] I just want to tell a couple of stories of when I was really little. I’m the youngest in my family. There’s four Kirby children; Lisa’s the only one who’s younger than me, so this is actually a story that—I think Lisa was a baby at the time. We were visiting the Kirbys when they still lived out on Long Island, and Jack just decided we were all going to go for ice cream. It was six kids piled

(previous page) An illo for the 1981 San Diego Comicon program book.

in the back of the car to go for ice cream, and this was before seat belts. The kids were all in the back, we’re having a good time, we’re pushing and shoving. Jack was trying to drive, and Jack was not a very good driver. Roz is in the passenger’s seat, and she’s screaming, and she’s going, “Look out, there’s a stop sign coming!” and we’re in the back giggling. And she’s going, “Look out, there’s someone on the right!” and we’re in the back seat giggling. And then he finally hits the curb, the kids are bouncing off each other, bumping heads, falling out of doors. Roz goes, “That’s it! I’m driving! You can buy the ice cream!” [chuckling] That was really the last time that I think Jack ever drove. That’s the last time we rode with him. [laughter] And another story that I want to talk about; this is actually a trick that Roz always played on Jack to entertain the kids. Jack would be working, drawing in his studio, and we’d all be in the kitchen at the kitchen table, and Roz would say, “Watch this.” And she goes, “Jaacck?” And whenever Roz called Jack, he was right there. He just loved Roz. He was so happy to interrupt whatever he was doing to come and do whatever Roz asked, no matter how minute or annoying this request might seem to most people who were working. Jack never acted that way. Roz called, he was there. And Roz would say, “Jack, I think I’d like an orange.” And Jack would go to the refrigerator, he’d open the door. Now, most people probably keep the oranges on the bottom shelf with the vegetables. Jack would start at the top shelf and look for the oranges. He’d move the milk, 68

he’d move the orange juice, it’s not on the top shelf. He’d go to the second shelf, he’d move the cheese and move this and that. No oranges. Finally, in ten minutes, he’d find the orange, he’d bring it to Roz, Roz would say thank you, and he’d go back to his drawing board, go back to work. And we were a bunch of little kids, probably less than ten, and we’d be snickering, “He can’t find the oranges.” And ten minutes later, Roz would go, “Watch this. Jack! I’d really like an orange.” Jack was so focused on what he was doing in his drawing that he didn’t even know that ten minutes ago he came out and found Roz an orange. So what does he do? He open the refrigerator, and starts at the top [chuckling], move the milk, move the orange juice, go down to the second shelf. Finally he would get the orange, he’d bring it over. And we’re rolling on the floor. And he goes— his big line was always, “What are you, a bunch of wise guys?” [laughter] So then he’d go back to work. He was so good-tempered, and it’s like he didn’t even realize what he was doing, he just was happy to take care of Roz, take care of his family, and come out and let us giggle at the guy who was so absentminded that he couldn’t remember where the oranges were. He was just a great guy. When he moved out to California, and I would visit, I would sleep on the couch, and he always did his drawing at night. And it was really hard to sleep in his house; I always had these incredibly vivid dreams, and they would wake me up. So I’d walk in and sit in the studio with him, and sometimes we’d

talk, sometimes I’d just watch TV, whatever. But what I did come to appreciate was how he drew— that he could be there kibitzing with me or just telling his stories, and how the images would just appear on the page. It was not even like he was concentrating on what he was doing, but he had to work fast to get everything out, and the images would just appear on the page. He would just start on one section of the page and do that image, but then he would move over here and he would start working on the fourth panel. And just sitting there and watching him, and being distracted by the TV and coming back, and the page just filled up with these images. To answer your question, that’s when I realized what it is he did and how he worked. It was just amazing how he got those images out. The last thing I was going to say was the last time I saw him, which was about ten years ago. My son’s now fourteen, but at the time he was just a little baby, two or three. And we were out at his house, and he was very sick with cancer then, he was very frail, very sick. [long pause, choking up] But he was playing with my son; in fact it was Tracy’s Star Wars figurines. Tracy had all the Star Wars characters, and he had liberated them and this Darth Vader mask. And Jack was out on the floor playing with my son, and of course my son had to be the big guy, he was Han and Chewie, and Uncle Jack was being Darth Vader. And they were down there playing Star Wars, and I just remember Jack saying, “What are you? Some kind of wise guy?” [laughter] And it

just brought it all home. And even at that point in time, he just— [pause] he was just a great guy. [applause] EVANIER: I’d like to talk a little bit about credit. Now, “credit” has two meanings in the world of a creative person. One of them is the pride of craft. You do the work, you expect people to give you the recognition for it, you sign your name, you expect it to be recognized as yours, and Jack was very proud of what he did. He had pride even in the work that was inked by Vince Colletta, even in the work where somebody redrew his heads; whatever it was, he was very proud that he could start at the beginning of the morning. Jack used to start about 11:00 AM or noon, and he would start with blank paper and pencils, essentially nothing, on this ratty drawing table, this cruddy art taboret. I remember being conscious that I had a better drawing table than Jack Kirby, and I was amazed at this. SHERMAN: He didn’t want one. EVANIER: No, he didn’t want a better drawing table. The little taboret next to the drawing board had all these little burn marks from cigars. There were places where Jack would put down a cigar on the taboret for a bit, and it was still burning. And he’d forget it was there and he’d light another one, and he’d look down, and there was a small fire starting on his taboret. [laughs] “Ahh, that’s just a Thor page or something.” [general laughter] But if you’re doing something that you’re proud of—and Jack was proud of creating something out of nothing with a paper or pencil—you want the credit for it. You also want credit because there was money linked to credit. There’s rewards linked to credit. There’s people downstairs in this convention center who are selling books and art prints or originals, because we know who they are, we’re fans, and we know their names, and it has a great value. Stan Lee, if he were here, would tell you that he was making a lot more money these days because he is “Stan Lee.” People come to him because they want to make deals for his next project, or his next movie deal, because he’s Stan Lee, and that name has that value. Robert, it always struck me that it was very important for Jack to make a living for his family. He took that very seriously. Everybody wants to obviously make a living, but to come out of the Depression the way he did, and to come out of that tenement that Steve described, and having, at a very early age, been the breadwinner for his family—he set out to sell newspapers when he was, what, eleven, I think. It always struck me that he almost lived for that recognition that he was providing for his family, and he took the denial of credit that he had occasionally on both levels. It offended him because he didn’t like seeing somebody else’s name signed to his work. It also offended him because he also felt it was robbing Lisa of her dental plan, or robbing Barbara of her fall outfit or whatever it was. And I’m not sure if I’ve got a question here; I’d like you to speak to this point, how important it was for Jack to have his name on things, how he took—. I run into people at times who somehow think it is ignoble for an artist to expect money. When people were urging Jack to fight to get his original art back, there were people who somehow had a knee-jerk need to identify with the company, who look at a David and Goliath battle and want to see Goliath win. They said, “Oh, Kirby just wants his artwork so he can sell it.” And, well, okay, even if he does, so what? It’s his work. He’s entitled to the revenue for the work. He’s entitled to reap the benefit of it. He

can sell it, he can wear it, he can put it up on the wall. It’s his work. He’s got a right to do whatever he wants to it. And it’s not ignominious for an artist to expect to make some money off his work. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Jack’s need to provide for his family, the same way he wanted to get Roz an orange, he wanted to get Roz a great coat and a great car and a great house and things like that. What did you see of that in Jack? KATZ: Well… today it’s natural that an artist gets paid for his work and an artist owns his artwork. Everybody in this room accepts that. Everyone at this convention accepts that. The artist creates something, the artist owns the work, and the artist can sell it and do whatever he wants with it. That wasn’t the case for Jack Kirby. The case for Jack Kirby was that he got a paycheck for drawing a page of art, and the reason he was so prolific—well, there were two reasons. One part of it is the ideas just came out of his head, so he had to do it. That’s why the Hulk and the Thing were the two characters he

loved the most, because if you can relate to that kind of rage, that kind of power inside of you, and how do you get it out, that’s how Uncle Jack seemed in his artwork. His talent was so great and his imagination was so prolific that he had to get this art out. The other side of that is that he wanted to do it because he got paid by the page, and yes, he wanted to buy his family all the good things that the American Dream could give you. And that was the second reason, because he did want to take care of his family to the best ability he could. I wasn’t going to bring this up, but Uncle Jack never got a pension, he never got anything from Marvel. He got a paycheck. If he didn’t draw, he didn’t get paid, and it was that simple. And you know what? Back then, you think an artist would never give up his artwork? Jack gave up his artwork. Jack gave the artwork to Marvel, and it disappeared. That’s another story that I won’t get into right now, but the Comics Journal has all kinds of information. John Morrow’s book has information about how Jack never got his artwork back. A lot of Jack’s artwork that you see on

(previous page) An unused splash page from Jack’s 1970s Black Panther series. (above) This discarded Black Panther page gives us an insight into how Jack drew. He started at the top left, completed the first panel, then began work on the second. He only made a couple of stray marks in the third panel before deciding, for whatever reason, to abandon this page. Black Panther TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

SHERMAN: I’ll just jump in here. When Marvel first sent Jack the papers they wanted him to sign, when they wanted to send the artwork back, I was there about two or three days after he got the paper, and he showed it to me. He said, “Read this. Look what they’ve sent me.” And I started to read it, and it made my blood boil, because basically what they said is, “You can never say you drew this stuff, you can never say you created this stuff, you can’t say you worked for Marvel unless we give you permission. You can’t say anything. And we own it. And we’ll give you your artwork back, sign this.” And Jack was more like, “Why did they do this to me? I’ve never done anything to them. Why’d they send me this? And why am I the only one singled out to sign this?” And he was more hurt and puzzled by that than he was angry. It was later that he started to get angry about it, but at first he was just more, “Look at all I’ve done for them, all I’ve created, and all I want is my art back, like anyone else. Why would they have me sign something that says I don’t exist?” That really hurt him. He was bothered by that. EVANIER: Yeah, that was one of the things that drove Jack away from Marvel in 1969, or it was actually early 1970. He received a contract in the end of January 1970, that was his first contract with Marvel since they had been acquired by Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation. His previous contracts had all been with Martin Goodman who owned Marvel; Martin had sold Marvel for what now seems like chump change, it was seven million dollars, something like that. Which is probably what it would cost you today to buy Ant-Man. [laughter] And when he got his contract, among other things, there was a very insulting—it was a contract he could not sign. We all have certain points that are sore spots to us. This failed with Jack’s sore point, and one of the clauses of the contract said that he could never claim credit for anything he had done without their permission, and that they could assign credit or not as they chose. They could say that Stan Lee wrote and drew the comics all by himself. Now, that sounds far-fetched, but at that point they were reprinting the early Captain America stories in Fantasy Masterpieces, and Joe Simon’s name was not on them. Joe Simon had ceased to exist because he’d taken a little legal action against the company. 70

At the same time, over at DC, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster did not exist. DC in 1970 actually published a book, a history of DC, of Superman, and didn’t mention Siegel and Shuster. There were other people who had ceased to exist in comics. That was a very big thing for Jack. When people ask me, “Why did he leave Marvel in 1970?”, there were about 25 reasons, but that was a very big one right there. He was not prepared to sign a piece of paper that said you could do whatever you want as far as my credit and I will never contest it, and that was the sign-or-die clause. In other words, you either sign that or you don’t work for us as of tomorrow. And he took what was his only option, which was to leave. After the artwork dispute, I think Jack eased up to a certain extent on worrying about his credit, because he saw so many people rally around him, and he became so much a god at this convention. I remember at the award ceremonies, Jack would get the only standing ovation of the evening, the whole industry would stand up and applaud him, and Jack realized that a certain amount of his legacy was that we, his fans, were going to keep his name alive. He never quite turned loose of the fact that he did not receive his proper recognition, nor should he even have been expected to, but I think he got less worried about it the last few years, because he knew that, as has happened, when they say, “Stan Lee created the Fantastic Four,” a lot of us write in letters and call and stamp our feet and make a fuss about that. But I’ve got to tell you honestly that it still bothers me. I still have moments where I just read something and my stomach turns into a knot. And I went to Stan one time and had a long discussion with him, and he said, “Oh, it’s not my fault,” and, “I didn’t do it.” And at times he’s right, there’s times he didn’t do it, but there’s times when I wish that he was a little more forthcoming, to say, “Oh, by the way, there’s this other guy.” Paul Levine is not going to be here yet to get into our final chapter of this, but does any of the audience want to ask any questions about what we’ve discussed so far, or make some comments? Tracy? TRACY KIRBY: I just want to make a quick comment. In case any of you see him or see his name, one of the guys who was really involved in actually pushing the producers to give credit on Fantastic 4 was one of the screenwriters, Michael France, and he’s been in contact with me. He’s a really nice guy. He really tried pushing it on the Incredible Hulk, too. EVANIER: Dave? DAVID SCHWARTZ: Yeah, hi Mark. One thing I wanted to say is that it’s just so easy for everybody in this group who ever sees Stan Lee’s name or anybody’s name associated with a project where Jack worked on it as well and not giving Jack credit, to just drop a letter. Especially with e-mail, now. Like, Newsweek did it with the Fantastic 4 movie, and it took me five minutes to write a note. And if enough people write a note, they may print one. And this is something everybody can do. EVANIER: The Kirby Truth Squad on the job. [laughter and applause] JOHN MORROW: Robert, can you just elaborate for people about whether or not Marvel is paying any kind of compensation for the Kirbys. KATZ: No. MORROW: Now, be clear, because, absolute zero? KATZ: Zero. Nothing. Marvel has never paid Jack Kirby for any reprints that are… absolutely nothing. They paid him for the pages that he drew, and that was it. Now, the last few years of Roz’s life—I’m forgetting who it was. EVANIER: Well, a bunch of us all started yelling at Marvel, and Dr. Mark Miller is one of those people. It’s very funny, when Dr. Miller called Roz to tell her she was getting a pension, I was on the other line telling her she was getting a pension. She got a small pension.

Chris Fama is back with another “Before & After” comparison, this time comparing Kirby’s “punchy” pencils from page 19 of Captain America #103 (July 1968), to the reconstructed inks by Syd Shores. Flip and compare!

BEFORE & AFTER

the convention floor, that people are selling, that artwork was never sold by the Kirbys. How did it disappear from the Marvel archives? We don’t know. It wasn’t sold by Jack Kirby. It was sold by other people who somehow got their hands on the artwork. As Steve talked so well about, Jack and Roz both welcomed everyone into their house. Everybody. He never had a bad word to say about anything or anyone. Jack hardly even said bad things about Stan. He just didn’t have it in him to be a mean person. He really did believe in giving. He was a great, great giver, and he was a wonderful person. That is the thing that aided him, and it was the hardest thing for a man who had a lot of rage in him, growing up in the tenements. Not a lot of people know about his war stories, but he was—his family was “Kurtzberg,” they were Austrian, they spoke German. So Jack in World War II, he landed a few days after D-Day, so he did all of that hardcore fighting through France and the Battle of the Bulge. He was in the heart of all that hardcore fighting. And he spoke German, and he knew how to draw. Jack tells stories about, “Kirby, take that little baby raft and row across the river, find German tanks, draw a map for us, see if you can hear anything, and come on back.” Well, that’s what he was thrown into. And he was there at the liberation of the concentration camps. He knew great evil; I think Dachau, I’m not sure which one, but he liberated one of the concentration camps. He saw this unbelievable evil. And he did see the world as good and bad, right and wrong, and he knew that not getting credit for his creations was wrong. As we all do, we all know that not getting—well, compensation, too, but for him it was more the credit, because he made a good living, he was a well-paid artist, but nothing compared to what people make today. People that do his reprints make more money than he made. But that’s what he saw as black-and-white, good/bad, right/wrong. And what they did to him was wrong, and he knew it, and it hurt him.

(above) Thing convention sketch from the 1970s.

KATZ: Less than two years, then she passed away. Then that pension ended, so she got it the last couple years of her life. But when Jack was alive, nothing. And those were years when, Jack was not healthy in his final years, so that’s why he kept working and kept working, because he needed to. He needed to provide for his family, and that’s why he kept going long after he should have been retired and a very, very wealthy man. So no, Marvel has never given any royalties or any compensation at all from any of the movies, nothing. Merchandising, none of that stuff. That’s what Steve was talking about, the contract to get his artwork back, that he had to sign something that’s equivalent to the Russians rewriting the history books. And the amazing thing about it was, when they were doing that contract, Jack had done thousands of pages for Marvel. And so at least if he had gotten thousands of pages back, you know what the pages are going for, and he could have had a good living on those thousands of pages. But then Marvel wouldn’t even commit to how many pages they would find and how many pages they would return, because at one time the pages disappeared. They walked out of the warehouse, they would give them to inkers and pencilers and whoever happened to stop by. I don’t know where they went. But thousands and thousands of pages disappeared. You see them at conventions all the time. We don’t know how people got them. We’re not accusing anybody of anything. We just know that they didn’t come from Uncle Jack, and they weren’t sold by him. So what he finally got back from Marvel was just a few hundred pages. EVANIER: I think it was 2100 pages, which still represents—Mike and I unwrapped the packages when they came back, but it was still less than twenty percent of what he should have gotten. He actually got back more than he expected, but what Robert was alluding to is that Marvel wanted Jack to sign this document, and they said to him in essence, “Sign this and then we’ll see how many pages we’ve got to give you.” Now, initially if they had said to Jack, “We’ve got ten thousand of your pages,” that document might have been a little more palatable, or he might have been able to more easily negotiate something that he could sign. But at that point I think they were saying that, “We’ll send you at least eighty pages,” which could have been eighty romance pages inked by Vince Colletta for all we knew. And this was part of the stonewalling. That entire dispute was, Marvel wanted Jack to sign this document, and then they’d work out what he was going to get for it. And he couldn’t take that gamble. I believe the reason Jack got that document that you were talking about was because Marvel’s lawyers woke up one morning and realized how little Jack had signed. In 1968, when Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation acquired Marvel Comics from Martin Goodman, the main thing they were buying was the copyrights. I mean, yeah, they were buying the publishing business, but they were also buying Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, with an eye towards how lucrative a

character like that could be, as witnessed by the then-current Batman TV show. Jack had thought they would come to him and make a settlement with him of some sort, because he had not signed, to his knowledge, any real binding release that he was giving up any rights to those characters. At DC, a somewhat comparable situation was present when Kinney National Services purchased DC Comics, which later turned into Warner Brothers and Time/Warner. But at that time Kinney was buying this company called National Periodical Publications, and they were buying Superman, Batman, and such. Marvel took the position that Stan Lee had signed adequate paperwork over the years as a full-time employee of the company, and Stan Lee, after all, was the sole creator. They didn’t need to have the artist, because the artist hadn’t created it. And that was one of the moments when Jack discovered that not being credited as the co-creator of these characters was extremely damaging to him, and that lawyer for Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation said, “Excuse me, we just bought this company, and there’s this creator here that created all these characters, and you guys haven’t settled with him, you haven’t gotten a release from him.” And they said at that time, “We don’t need a release. We never heard of this man. Stan Lee created it.” And that problem underscored the issue; Marvel then sent Jack a document saying, “We want the right to not credit you.” Years later, as Marvel went through various owners and various corporate takeovers, they became very worried because they didn’t have proper legal signatures from Jack Kirby. One of the things that happens in any corporation, and I was hoping Paul Levine could be here to talk on some of this, but one thing that happens is, the lawyers always come in and tell you that the guys before you screwed it up. And they always want to say, “Oh, we’re very vulnerable because the people who you had before me didn’t do this right, so if we get sued, it’s their fault, and you’d better pay me a lot of money because I’m cleaning some of this up.” The documents that they asked Jack to sign were the current regime’s attempts to clean up the mess of the previous regimes, and Jack was not going to make it easy for them and just politely sign whatever they wanted him to, and that’s why we had that ugly mess that we all saw. SHAW!: I want to point out something, too, because being the only “draw-er” up here, is that you mentioned how Jack felt that it was really important not to take shortcuts, and to give your best work. And as Jack bounced back and forth from Marvel to DC to back to Marvel, each time it was for less of a deal. Each time it was kind of like, “Kirby’s Back,” but he was never treated as well. And at a certain point, people at the companies were openly mocking his stuff when it would come in. And he had to have known about this, and I’ve gotta tell you, if you’re sitting there trying to do a good job, it’s a hard enough job. If you’re sitting there to turn out the kind of work Jack did eight to ten hours a day, sometimes, most of the time on the weekends, too, you’re not with your family. Your family goes to parties and stuff for birthdays, you have to miss it, or you have to make it up by staying up all night or whatever. By that time Jack was an older guy. I remember when I first met Jack, he was younger than I am now, and I’m exhausted if I have to do that sort of thing. But to, on top of that, get the feeling that you’re being screwed while you’re doing it, and not wanting to compromise, and not wanting to be a hack—and it’s a very solitary thing. So I’m sure he had that playing in his head while he was doing it. “Am I a sucker? No. Am I a hack? No. I have to do good work.” But at the same time… I imagine he was just pulled apart while he was doing his work, trying to do good work. You’re committed to that, but you’re also committed to your family, and when you treat people well, you expect to be treated decently in return, and he wasn’t. It must have been a very emotionally tough time. And of course, as his health got worse and worse, that was another thing. He really should have been able to enjoy those years instead of being screwed. EVANIER: I had not intended this panel to be as dark as it has gotten here. [laughter] I was hoping that if Paul got here, which I’m sure is a function of the parking situation outside, he could’ve added a very funny, upbeat story and such, so I apologize. Let’s

say, “I hate those rats at Marvel! They’re no good!” I mean, you really had to drag that out of him. SHAW!: Jack was one of the first cartoonists to really support this convention and would attend every one. I think he missed it once in the early days. But it was really funny, because I realized that I was kind of one of the group of the fans that worked for the big convention that would—I was always a troublemaker, we were always playing pranks and doing weird things at the El Cortez hotel. And I remember the year we put shark repellent in the swimming pool. That same night we had a bunch of fireworks, and Jack was out walking around, and we had a roman candle. And we said, “Jack! You should light this thing!” And somebody said, “Yeah, Jack! It’s the Boom Tube!” [laughter] And I could just see the wheels turning in Jack’s head, looking back and thinking—he was probably 52, 53 at the time, and I was thinking, even now, there’s not much difference between that kid that was running on the rooftops and the fights back and forth between the gangs of kids, because you could tell he really wanted to, but he thought, [Kirby voice] “Nah, I’d better not. Have a good time, boys.” [laughter] EVANIER: Jack got an enormous amount of joy from his fans. Remember Maxine and Alice? SHERMAN: Oh, yes. [laughs] (above) 1976 Captain America commission, which was sold at Baycon that year. (next page) An unused page from 2001: A Space Odyssey #8, the first appearance of Machine Man (then called Mr. Machine). Characters TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

see if we can remember some of the happier moments. SHERMAN: Let me just say that, for all of that, Jack was a happy guy. I mean, 99% of the time he didn’t let that bother him. I read a lot of stuff online where people write and said, “Gee, he was a bitter guy, he was upset.” That’s not true at all. It was only much, much later, when he wasn’t feeling well, that it would get to him. But up until then, for the most part, if you were talking to Jack, he would never mention it. He would always be upbeat, he would always be happy, and all the times that we had with both him and Roz were always fun times, so don’t think for a minute that Jack sat there and stewed 24 hours a day, because he didn’t. He had a lot of other things that he talked about, and a lot of other things he did get to do, so he really didn’t dwell on it that much. Maybe when he was by himself he would think about it, but to everyone else, and if you went up to him personally, he wouldn’t

EVANIER: Back when the first New Gods and Mister Miracle came out, Jack got a photo in the mail from two young ladies who signed themselves “Maxine and Alice,” and they were reading comic books and not wearing any clothes. [laughter] Reading New Gods and Forever People, in poses that would make Larry Flynt blush. [laughter] Jack waited until Roz had gone shopping, and he pulled this photo out and said, “Now, these are fans!” [laughter and applause] SHERMAN: Speaking of that, there was also the night, there was a company in Los Angeles that did a lot of theme park designs, and they were riding very high, and both of the owners of this company were huge fans of Jack. Mark was there that night, I don’t know if you were, but they got a little private room in a nice restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, and they had Jack and Roz there, and I think it was for Jack’s birthday, and they had giant

blow-ups of his covers. Neal Adams was there, and Bill Stout was there, and Sergio was there, and it was like, packed. Everybody except me that was there was a significant cartoonist, and these guys had gone out and hired a stripper. None of us really knew that much about it, we were kind of looking at each other going, “This is really not appropriate.” And this girl comes in in a Wonder Woman costume, and Jack’s there. And you had to have known Jack, but when he was in public, it was almost like, no matter how embarrassing it was, he would act like he was being filmed on Entertainment Tonight or something. And she got her top off, and she’s swinging her breasts around in front of Jack, and stopped. And he’s like, “Well, you’re a very lovely girl.” [laughter] “I appreciate you very much.” The standard, “All the men do good work.” [laughter] And we’re kind of looking at Roz, and we’re thinking Mount Vesuvius is about to erupt, and she was very cool. And they finally got this girl out of the room, and I mean, nothing weird went on other than her taking her top off, but we’re all kind of like, geez, we’re supposed to be wishing Jack good wishes, and it’s this horrible moment. And he just laughed, and Roz got up. People took photos, and Roz goes, “I’ll take those photos. I’ll just cut out a photo of my face and glue it on to her head. [laughter] And it’ll be just great.” And they just rolled with it. It was an unbelievable moment.

Anybody else want to say anything else? DAVID SCHWARTZ: One thing we forget is that nowadays, these artists have wares to sell, and people are really nice to fans a lot of times for reasons other than just that’s who they are. When Jack would do this, I mean, there was nothing for him to gain other than that connectedness with people he met. EVANIER: Yeah, there was one time that somebody came to Jack at a convention and said, “We’re having a convention in, like, Fresno next August. Would you come?” And Jack said, “Sure.” And the next week they had advertised it. They hadn’t even actually given him the date, they just put out a flyer, an ad. They didn’t even have the courtesy to call him and say, “Oh, by the way, it’s this date. Can you come up?” and make arrangements. They went ahead and advertised it. And Roz was not happy

with this. They had canceled some plans that weekend to go to Fresno or wherever it was. And I said to Jack, “You don’t have to go to this convention. It’s some little dinky one-day convention in the back of a church somewhere. You don’t have to do that.” He said, “Yes, there are people who are going to drive there to see me. I don’t want to disappoint them.” And he was not going because of money, he was not going because of ego. He was going because he genuinely didn’t want to disappoint anyone who loves his work. And I thought that was a very telling incident about the man. I am sorry we didn’t get to the last part of our agenda here, but next year at this, I’ll get Paul Levine here and we’ll do the Johnny Carson material. [thanks to the panelists, to much applause] ★

EVANIER: And Jack kept saying “I thank you” over and over again, hoping she would get the hint that the show was over, but she was going to do the whole show, whether we liked it or not. Afterward, I went out and I came back in, and I turned to Neal Adams and said, “Neal, there’s a woman in a Deadman suit outside. Prepare yourself.” [laughter] Yeah, he was very polite, and he gave Scott an awful lot of encouragement. I hope Scott will understand when I say this; he would’ve if Scott had been a lousy artist, also. If Scott had drawn much, much more amateurish work, he would have given him encouragement also. I don’t think I ever saw Jack discourage anyone, no matter what. I mean, he was, I thought sometimes polite to people who were quite unworthy of it. But no, no, you were family. But I mean, there were fans that came out and just took advantage of him, and some entrepreneur people who said to Jack, “Oh, just do a few little drawings and I’ll sell this huge movie,” or this huge Disneyland-sized park or something like that, and I thought Jack was exploited a number of times because he was very trusting of people, and very positive to people. But he really appreciated his fans, and he really appreciated people who liked his work. And people would be joking and calling him “the King.” He never acted like the King. He acted like one of us. And one of the things I miss most about him is, when he was at conventions, he would always stand to talk to you. He didn’t want to sit there and have you inconvenienced, he wanted to meet you as an equal. And he would stand down in the convention room and talk forever to people, and to talk about anything they wanted to talk about. And there was no ceremony with him, no caste system around this man, he just genuinely liked the people he met. 75

Exhibitionism (right) Cover of the MOCA program book. (below) The main exterior entrance features a colossal blow-up of Jack’s original art to the cover of Captain America #109 (Jan. 1969). Inset, you can see the interior gallery of the Kirby room. (far right and next page) Three of the pieces in the exhibit: Silver Surfer #18, page 20 • Devil Dinosaur #4 doublepage spread • Thor #146 cover. Captain America, Thor, Devil Dinosaur, Silver Surfer TM & ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Pop Art Productions Kirby at MOCA, by Gene Fama

always thought Jack Kirby art should hang in museums. The only problem is that when the art world acknowledges comics it spends too much time explaining why they deserve our attention. The same article comes out every few years in the local culture page declaring that comics have finally arrived and citing Maus and other so-called “graphic novels” as evidence. Museum exhibits position comics as if their best role is to influence higher art, like panel-swipes by Roy Lichtenstein or captioned frames by Raymond Pettibone. Kirby should hang in museums on the strength of his personal art, not to make the case for funnybooks-as-culture. The curators of Masters of American Comic Art, showing in Los Angeles through March 12, take the right approach. The show takes for granted that comics are a legit medium and never makes a point out of it. Two of the city’s top museums are filled with scores of original pages. The Hammer Museum has newspaper artists predating the comic-book era; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is showing comic-book artists. The focus is on the artists rather than the medium, and not just the usual alternative “comix” darlings; refreshingly, the emphasis here is on classic artists. Fifteen cartoonists are covered in depth: The Hammer Museum is showing Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, E.C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milt Caniff, and Charles Schulz. MOCA’s list is Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. The fact that Kirby is included is not only appropriate but gives us a new context for Jack’s art. Kirby is the only super-hero artist in an exhibit about a medium dominated by super-heroes, yet his work fits in perfectly with the rest of the show and is every bit as independent and personal. It’s easy to see from his seamless integration that Kirby has more in common with auteur-style cartoonists like Kurtzman or Crumb than with super-hero artists like John Buscema or Herb Trimpe. His influence on the other artists in the show, particularly Gary Panter, emphasizes the effect. In fact, Kirby is really the most museum-ready artist in the show, which is probably why his art is featured on the banners, programs, and publicity materials. Driving to MOCA I worried that a gallery designed to show huge abstract paintings and modern art installations would suck the life out of a ten-by-fifteen inch comic page. But Jack’s work is so dynamic and primal that it accomplishes similar energy

What You’ll See: Here’s what’s in the Kirby room of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit:

and impact to enormous abstract pieces on a much smaller canvas. A Kirbyphile picked the material. The pieces show insight into little-known highlights of Jack’s catalogue. With the exception of humor, all his idioms are represented. There was maybe a bit too much of the Silver Surfer 1978 graphic novel, and the art world always seems to have a special affinity for this character, but Kirby’s pages had a hemmed-in quality when he worked with writers in the Seventies and in my view this isn’t prime stuff. No problem: virtually every other piece is eye-popping. The exhibit is thoughtfully laid out. When you walk through Will Eisner’s section into Kirby’s, the fluid quality of the Spirit pages blends into the first of Jack’s pieces, “The Fourth Dimension Is A Many-Splattered Thing.” Kirby’s gallery ends with a Howling Commandos splash that leads perfectly to entry point of Harvey Kurtzman’s gallery, the war story “Corpse On the Imjin.” Each cartoonist receives indepth treatment, giving the sense that each had a specialist choose his pieces. The scope is overwhelming. The show should be seen in more than one visit because the entries are not only numerous but strong pretty much across the board. If there’s any gripe it’s that few rough or unpublished pieces are included except in Chris Ware’s section, which has some surprisingly loose and lovely watercolor sketches. Also, no credit is given to inkers or writers, though hardcore Kirby fans know these details and will find it refreshing that the focus is on Jack instead of his collaborators. The show moves on to the Milwaukee Art Museum from April 27 to August 13, then on to another dual-gallery setup at New York’s Jewish Museum and the Newark Museum in Jersey from September 15 to January 28, 2007. If you want to better understand Jack Kirby, not just as the King of Comics but as a visionary modern artist in a varied and accomplished medium, be sure to check it out. ★

• “The Fourth Dimension Is A ManySplattered Thing” entire story from Alarming Tales #1 (1957). • Avengers #3, pg. 3. • Black Cat #7 “Vagabond Prince” splash (1947). • Black Magic #3 “A Silver Bullet for your Heart” splash (1957). • Black Panther #8 double-page spread. • Boy Commandos #24 cover (1947). • Boy Commandos p. 41 (issue number unknown) (1943). • Captain America #104 cover (1968). • Captain America #108 splash. • Captain America #109 cover. • Captain America Annual #4 cover. • Captain America convention drawing inked by Sinnott. • Captain America Marvelmania Icon. • Captain Victory #6 cover. • Devil Dinosaur #4 double-page spread. • Disassembled and displayed in case: Marvel Treasury #2 “Coming of Galactus.” • Eternals #2 double-page spread. • Fantastic Four #102, pg. 9. • Fantastic Four #15, pg. 3. • Fantastic Four #89, pg. 16 interior splash. • Fantastic Four #93 cover. • Fantastic Four #96 cover. • Fantastic Four Annual #2 splash. • Fantastic Four Annual #6, pg. 43 interior splash. • Journey into Mystery #107 splash. • Kamandi #1 cover. • Kamandi #1 double-page spread. • New Gods #7 double-page spread. • New Gods #7 splash. • Rawhide Kid #18 splash (1960). • Sgt. Fury #3 splash (1963). • Silver Surfer #18, pg. 20. • Silver Surfer graphic novel 1978 pages 4, 23, and one other. • Sky Masters 9/11/58. • Stuntman #2 splash (1946). • Tales of Suspense #43, pg. 3. • Tales of Suspense #84 splash. • Thor #137 cover. • Thor #146 cover. • Thor #175 splash. • X-Men #16 splash. • X-Men #2 splash. • Young Romance #20 “Hands off Lucy” splash (1950). NATI ONA L EX HI B I T I ON TOU R Los Angeles: November 20, 2005March 12, 2006 Hammer Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Milwaukee: April 27-August 13, 2006 Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee New York/New Jersey: September 15, 2006-January 28, 2007 The Jewish Museum, New York, and the Newark Museum, New Jersey 77

Collector

Comments

Send letters to: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR c/o TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 E-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com • See back issue excerpts at: www.twomorrows.com Time is slipping away, and so are some of the words in your letters to TJKC, as we do reserve the right to edit them.

I just received issue #44 in the mail, and discovered your new feature “Before and After.” Fantastic! Heaven! Look at that figure Vinnie erased! etc. Please do as much of this as you can. Being able to flip the full-size art and compare pencils and inks, is a superb way to use the magazine. I was doing this anyway (ie. comparing) when you ran pencils and inks, but being able to actually flip them makes all the difference! Pau l R i v oc h e, CA NA DA In #44, you’re correct that Kirby’s illustration on page 10 was used in Topps’ 1993 DRACULA card set, as a nine-piece puzzle included in their VLAD THE IMPALER comics. But note that the Egghead character at the margins of the drawing was removed when it was inked by Mike Mignola [right]. Seeing this made me realize that, although the picture was supposedly Kirby’s interpretation of Dracula, it was actually Jack’s presentation art for a new character, Dr. Mortalis, which was to be the basis of a proposed film back in 1986. (See TJKC #11 for more info.) As seen in the announcement ad that appeared in Hollywood trade magazines at the time, Dr. Mortalis was accompanied by the Egghead character (whose inclusion here apparently predated his appearances in Jack’s CAPTAIN VICTORY series). Switching to the subject of possible Kirby influences (or coincidences), take a look at this screen capture [below] of the establishing shot of New York’s Lower East Side from the 1938 film ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES. Doesn’t it look surprisingly like the opening spread in Jack’s “Street Code” story? C r a ig M cN a m a r a , S h o r e v ie w, MN

I have purchased TJKC on and off for many years. As a lover of Jack’s art since the late ’60s, I always enjoy revisiting the comic book art I loved, as well as seeing material that is new to me. Unfortunately, I do not subscribe, nor buy as many issues as I could, because of what seems to be two editorial policies that permeate almost every issue. The first is the almost constant effort by

your interviewers and article writers to diminish the contributions of Stan Lee. To those of us who loved Kirby’s contributions to Marvel, we loved the team of Kirby and Lee. We didn’t care who plotted the stories. We enjoyed the final result, which were Lee’s words and Kirby’s pictures. Kirby’s claims that Stan didn’t do anything are obviously ludicrous. Lee’s writing style is lightyears different from Kirby’s, and was a major reason these comics were successful. If the team of Kirby and Lee were celebrated, your publication would be both more professional, and more enjoyable. Your second policy that I find distasteful (and inaccurate) is the constant trashing of Vince Colletta. Pencilers may have despised him because he often took out some of the pencils, but the reader of the comic didn’t know and didn’t care. What the reader did know about the THOR of the 1960s, was that they were looking at something special. Regardless of whatever sub-par work

work, as evidenced by the countless instances of him erasing Jack’s pencils in an effort to cut corners. He was robbing the reader of some of the storytelling that Jack put into his pages, and compromising work that Kirby put his heart and soul into. I felt Mark Evanier’s column on Colletta in issue #43 gave Vince a really fair shake, in explaining some of the logical reasons for his shortcuts. But the sheer volume of instances of it (which is one of the things we try to document, so fans will understand it’s not just a few isolated incidents) tells me that the inker on those stories wasn’t as dedicated as some of his peers, regardless of how much any of us enjoyed the finished product. And I feel that’s worth documenting for the historical record. There’s a reason the guy had such a notorious reputation, and we’re showing why. Also, while Jack was wrong to claim Stan didn’t do anything, it’s equally wrong for Stan to claim all the credit for creating the Marvel Universe when there’s evidence to

(Well, maybe it’s not that surprising, since Jack lived that life firsthand. I think it’s more a case of the filmmakers getting their research right, rather than Jack taking anything from that film.) I just want to congratulate you for running Kirby comic book stories in their entirety these last few issues of TJKC. It adds the missing dimension to the experience of TJKC! Both picks for this issue were superb stories. The “Slaughterhouse” story in particular, coming less than 10 years after the Holocaust, was especially chilling reading. There were some Jews in those concentration camps who decided to aid the Nazis instead of perishing themselves, and I wonder whether this story’s writer had this in mind while penning this story. For that matter, I’d love to know who wrote these stories. Was it Jack himself? J eff Gel b , Sh er ma n Oa k s, CA

the contrary. As little as Jack is mentioned, you rarely hear Steve Ditko’s name at all. Jack made his claim only after years of Stan hogging the spotlight, and in the midst of his heated battle with Marvel over ownership of art that was legally his. If you’ll read the many interviews with Jack we’ve run from before 1980, you’ll find several instances of Jack giving credit to Stan. The team of Kirby and Lee is constantly celebrated in TJKC’s pages, but we try to keep it as realistic, and grounded in facts, as possible when it comes to credits. In any case, I really appreciate you taking time to write, and to support the magazine, even if it’s only occasionally. I would encourage you to submit a piece for TJKC presenting your views; I know it would be well received, as your views are shared by other readers. I’d give it the same consideration for possible publication as any submission. Believe it or not, I randomly selected the following letter after yours, from the folder where I store TJKC letters for publication. What’s said is so ironic—and coincidental— I’ve decided to go ahead and leave it here:)

(We mistakenly included the BLACK MAGIC stories in TJKC #44 under the heading of “Public Domain Theatre.” In actuality, the copyright on these stories is still valid, held initially by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, and later renewed by Joe Simon. The copyright notice should have stated “Copyright Joe Simon & Jack Kirby.” To avoid potential problems like this in the future, we’ve changed the name of our feature to “Foundations”; thanks to Joe Simon and the Kirbys for their understanding about the misimpression that was conveyed! Now on to the lettercol on #44; it’s a lively one:)

Colletta may have done in his career, the team of Kirby and Colletta produced what might be the finest artwork to appear in comic book history. Obviously some readers did not like Colletta’s style of using fine, scratchy lines, but it is exactly this style that makes THOR closer to fine art than any other comic of the time. Colletta was also a master at inking beautiful and handsome faces— one of the most important aspects of inking. Both he and Joe Sinnott routinely improved on Kirby’s penciled faces, which were often hastily drawn. Listen, everyone knows that Kirby was king. He did more than any other single individual when it comes to comic books. One need not diminish the abilities of his collaborators in order to make his contributions seem larger. Do n Ket ch ek (Sorry you’re not happy with what you perceive as an anti-Stan Lee and anti-Vince Colletta bias. I don’t go out of my way to skew the mag for or against either guy, as we’ve run a number of articles favorable to both in past issues (and perhaps you’ve missed those since you’ve not been getting it regularly). But I will say that the mag is governed by the material that’s submitted by fans. There are a large number of fans who have legitimate beefs with both gentlemen, and they deserve equal time to air their views. I don’t think it’s biased to point out the factual shortcomings of Lee or Colletta in regards to their work with Kirby, as long as we’re not just taking cheap shots. We also regularly point out Kirby’s own shortcomings in the mag (particularly in his dialogue). But let’s face it; Colletta did do a lot of hack

#44 contained an answer to a question that I’d been wondering about for years—namely, what was it Witchboy was SUPPOSED to have said on the cover of DEMON #15? (As you well know, a good half of the balloon was BLANK on the printed comic—a color hold that was dropped out, it seems!) There it is on page 24—“Kill him! Kill the Demon and you will exist in his place!” Ah—sweet closure. And since I was provided with an answer, it’s only fair that I return the favor! To answer Bruce Younger’s query: the mystery inker that inked a portion of pages in THOR #179 was jumbo John Verpoorten! And how many readers caught that Vinnie Colletta inked much of the first two pages of THOR #143—an issue credited to boisterous Bill Everett? Keep those THOR pages coming! I love comparing the finished pages with Jack’s pencils—especially the Colletta-inked stuff. It’s amazing what he got away with—I have a page from THOR #125 where Vinnie whited-out an entire TRAIN (page 5, panel 1). It was a treat to see what was under Syd Shores’—uh—embellishing as well. Amazing stuff! And speaking of inking—has anybody considered Bill Everett as the possible inker of FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and 2? Reed’s face especially gives mean Everett vibe and some of the textures remind me of his work as well. It’s a pretty restrained effort on his part if it is, but I just thought I’d throw another name onto the heap. Er i k L a r s e n , I m a g e Co m i c s (See, here’s a respected pro giving his notso-favorable two cents’ worth about not only Colletta, but Syd Shores as well. Should I have omitted his letter to keep from stacking the deck against Colletta? And as for the mystery inker of FF #1 and #2, Mark Evanier tells me he’s got a column coming up that’ll address that issue in detail. Stay tuned!) First of all, let me start by gushing about that flabbergasting Galactus painting on the back cover. In my opinion, that’s the best piece ever to grace the cover of TJKC, hands down. I just can’t begin to tell you how stunned I am every time I look at it. Why wasn’t it the cover? What’s the deal with the JUNGLE ACTION logo on that PANTHER cover? Have you reprinted other PANTHER covers, and I just missed that? I’m guessing you will get a lot

of questions about that. I think Chic Stone inked those THOR pages Bruce Younger inquired about in the letters page. It’s either Stone or Herb Trimpe. I checked your KIRBY CHECKLIST, and THOR #179 was published along with AMAZING ADVENTURES #1 which was inked by Stone. Perhaps Marvel threw those THOR pages into his packet to help with the job. C h r i s Fa m a , C h i c a g o , I L The “Slaughterhouse” story you ran in the last TJKC starts with a scene which seems to have been lifted by the makers of the recent Tom Cruise film, WAR OF THE WORLDS! In a ruined building, the hero struggles with a chubby, grizzled survivor who has flipped out and decides he can oppose the invaders single-handedly with his rifle. Interesting, maybe a coincidence. But the scenes are remarkably similar! I a i n C a r s t a i r s, U K (Sorry, ever since Tom flipped out on Oprah’s couch, I’ve had a hard time watching him on the big screen. Maybe he’s just too glib...) I’m a long-time reader, first-time writer, and all that. I’ve been enjoying TJKC ever since you went tabloid and I’ve finally gotten around to writing to say how much I’m enjoying it. I think going tabloid size was a brilliant idea—I can’t imagine anyone else in comics whose work better suits the scope and size of the format. I think if I had one way to improve TJKC, it would be the return of the kind of column Glen Gold wrote in TJKC #33, where he breaks down the story to an issue of FF and (gently) has fun with it. Even though he’s goofing on the very work this magazine glorifies, Gold’s affection for the material is evident and I had hoped it would be a regular feature. And even though the tone of any issue of TJKC is generally light and fun (you can’t run a whole interview with the reallife inspiration for Klarion the Witchboy and have it be deadly serious), I think an article with the same approach as Gold’s would make for a nice contrast with some of the other more scholarly pieces. In Chris Knowles’ interesting interview with Mike France, he seems to make the assumption that the fanboys who didn’t like the F4 film did so because it took so many liberties with the source material (although this could simply be MY assumption). Well, speaking for this fanboy, the source-material changes made in the FF movie didn’t bother me in the least, but I still thought it was a lousy movie. R o b K e ll y The article “Thor the Thunderer” by Will Murray in TJKC #44 was fantastic. It was a fascinating insight and I loved reading about the different views by Lee and Kirby on the characters in THOR and how they evolved in their formative years. The two commission drawings of THOR in the article are simply stunning and deserve a full-page spread in the future. I hope you continue to explore Kirby’s work on THOR in TJKC as I can’t get enough of it! It’s by far the best reading I have over here in the desert!! C li v e Hi t ch c oc k , Cr i ck et Op er at io n s M an ag er D u b a i , Un i t e d A r a b Em i r a t e s The Internet turns up some weird stuff when you’re looking for something else. I was trying to track down a copy of Kirby’s HEROES & VILLAINS. Believing the two editions had been known as the ‘black’ and ‘white’ books, I typed ‘Jack Kirby white book’ into my search engine. It came up with a chat room hosted by what appears to be an American neo-Nazi group called Storm Front. And there was a whole page discussing Kirby and his work. Bizarre? Certainly. The first writer, a John Robinson, suggests that his fellow neoNazis check out Kirby’s THOR and ETERNALS because, quote: “Kirby brought the all White Norse Gods down into our world, into New York City—and Kirby kept New York City virtually all White through the

early 1970s. That’s something to make one believe in White Gods!” Wow. A racist with a sense of humor. Sort of. This is followed up by an anonymous posting pointing out that Kirby and Joe Simon were Jews. Shock, horror! Anon continues: “I’m guessing, Kirby like other comic book writers, portrayed whites with racial pride as evil or racist. While non-whites victims.” John Robinson replies that he thought Kirby was only 50 percent Jewish, that he was really an Aryan patriot, but that he was exploited by “the very Jewish Stan Lee, who tried to steal credit for the artistic creations of Kirby.” So that explains the whole Kirby v. Marvel creator-credit thing. It was all a fiendish Jewish conspiracy to do Aryan patriot Kirby out of his rights. Of course. Simple. So simple it crosses over into total idiocy. Finally, someone called Harry joins the debate with this pithy contribution: “Yes, it really is unfortunate [sic, or should that be sick?] that most of the early comic writers were Jewish, as they really did create some excellent stories. I was not really a fan of Jack Kirby’s later work however, as he seemed to just craft together odd sci-fi plots, that made little sense. This includes the ETERNALS, who were quite boring IMO. As for Captain America being patriotic, when he was revived in the ’80s he pretty much became a liberal, still fighting against Nazis and racism, never against communist’s [sic] or other scum.” Yes, Harry, such a shame that Jews can be so darned talented, isn’t it? The world would be so much simpler if they just all went around with horns poking out of their heads, cackling maniacally and eating babies like they’re supposed to. Like it’s really annoying that blacks can sing and have a natural sense of rhythm. Why can’t they just stick to picking cotton? And that naughty Captain America, picking on all you loveable Nazi racists, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Unless of course it was black, or Jewish, or gay, or liberal, etc... Well, shame on him. All this nonsense, and doubtless a whole lot more, can be found at: www.storm front.org/forum/showthread.php?t=142964 It comes as no surprise that neo-Nazis are illinformed, nor that they are capable of twisting anything to fit their own warped view of the world, but it strikes me as an insult to the King’s memory that they should even think about enlisting him, of all people, to their nasty little cause. While I never had the pleasure of meeting Kirby, I have learned enough to know that he was proud of his Jewish heritage, and that opposition to fascism and racism were at least as deeply ingrained in his nature as was his Jewishness. Captain America did, after all, join WWII before the American nation. And Kirby created Marvel’s first black superhero in the Black Panther. Still, perhaps the fact that neoNazis are reading Kirby is to be applauded. Maybe some of the King’s intelligent good nature, good humor, tolerance and love of life will rub off on them. One can only hope. By the way, my father was a Communist, and his mother was Jewish. Guess that makes me the Thing to Storm Front’s Yancy Streeters. Well, what can you do? As Bashful Benjamin himself put it [FF #29, pg. 3]: “If only they were nice, ordinary, everyday super-villains we could use all our power and clobber ‘em! But ya can’t tear a neighborhood apart just to find some nut who tosses a mud pie at ya!” Especially not if, like me, you’re a lifelong pacifist. Apologies for that, but I had to write to someone, and I figured you’d be about as sympathetic a reader as I could hope for. Ph i li p Sh a ll c r as s , Wi lt s h i r e, ENGLA ND (I debated whether to run the web address Philip included in his letter, not wanting to give free publicity to a hate group. But after thinking about it, if anyone sees that address here and wants to join in, they really shouldn’t be reading this

magazine anyway—y’know, unless they join in to try and educate the morons that are already posting there. Sheesh.)

In TJKC #44, on page 75 you ask about where Reed and Sue’s ‘Lover’s spat’ may have occurred. Well, since this note of Jack’s was written on FF #46 art, the nearest ‘spat’ I can think of is that little hissy-fit of Sue’s in FF #48 pages 14 and 15, where Reed is locked away with the Watcher. Sh an e Fo ley, A USTR A LI A I was recently looking at an “alternate” cover for KAMANDI #1—essentially the same as the published cover except that Kamandi and his raft were smaller (more distant)—I’m sure you’ve printed it sometime. Anyway, at the MOCA art show, they had the original KAMANDI #1 cover on display and the larger figure of Kamandi in his raft is clearly a paste-up with the surrounding water retouched so the new image matches the background. Hence my guess would be that Jack drew the cover, submitted it after Royer inked it, and was told by somebody (Infantino?) that Kamandi should be bigger, so the new image was drawn, inked and pasted up and then blended to become the cover we know. The point? Simply that the pencil cover presented as an alternate cover is simply the first version of the revised cover. Pet e V on Sh o ll y, Su n lan d , CA (Pete’s hard at work on COMIC BOOK NERD, our spoof of the comics fan press, including our own mags. Wait’ll you see his take on TJKC!)

#45 Credits: J oh n Mo rr ow , Editor/Designer Pamel a Mo rr o w, Asst. Editor Er i c No l e n - W e a t h i n g t o n , Production Assistant Proofreader Design/Layout assist R an d Ho p p e, Webmaster Tom Zi u k o, Colorist Ch r i s Fa ma, Art Restoration S P E C I A L TH A NK S TO A LL OUR CONT R I B UTOR S: Bill Black Jerry Boyd Mark Evanier Chris Fama Gene Fama Shane Foley Barry Forshaw Mike Gartland David Hamilton Rand Hoppe Robert Katz Neal Kirby Jillian Kirby Sean Kleefeld Peter Koch Gary Land Adam McGovern Mark Miller Tom Morehouse Chris Ng Dennis O'Neil Steve Robertson Mike Royer Randy Sargent Scott Shaw! Steve Sherman Mike Thibodeaux Douglas Toole Britt Wisenbaker Ray Wyman Ray Zone and of course The Kirby Estate If we’ve forgotten anyone, please let us know!

Contribute & Get Free Issues! 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 THEM E I D EA ? P LE A SE WR I T E US! S UPE R T EA MS ! ( #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! K I R B Y TEC H! ( #48) Jack’s the father of invention, so we’ll dissect his knack for creating high-tech gizmos and gadgets, from Iron Man’s armor to Machine Man and beyond!

NEX T I SSU E: He’s got the whole Fourth World in his hands in JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #46, as we focus on Kirby’s FOREVER PEOPLE, NEW GODS, and perhaps Jack’s greatest villain, Darkseid! Also included is a rare interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’s regular column, two FOURTH WORLD pencil art galleries (including Kirby’s redesigns for SUPER POWERS), a never-reprinted 1950s story, an interview with Kirby Award winner and family friend MARTY LASICK, a new Kirby Darkseid front cover inked by MIKE ROYER, a Kirby Forever People back cover inked by JOHN BYRNE, and more! It ships in May, and the submission deadline is 3/15/06.

WA RR I OR S ! ( #49) Get fightin’ mad as we examine the numerous knights the King sent out to do battle throughout history. Plus: what Jack really went through on the battlefields of WWII, in his own words. ?? ? ( #50) S END US GU ES SE S! S UB MI SS I ON GU I DE LI NES : 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.

This unfinished, unpublished cover, presumably meant for Charlie Chan #7 (circa 1955), was the last in a string of covers Jack did for the book before its cancellation by Crestwood. Jack wrote the dialogue for the characters here, which was gingerly edited by Joe Simon (as evidenced by the different handwriting in parts of Chan’s and Birmingham’s balloons).

Parting Shot

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JUSTICE LEAGUE COMPANION VOL. 1

COMICS ABOVE GROUND

SEE HOW YOUR FAVORITE ARTISTS MAKE A LIVING OUTSIDE COMICS

BONUS 3-D GLASSES

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