Jack Kirby Collector #49 by TwoMorrows Publishing

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR FORTY-NINE IN THE US

$995

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERVIEWS WITH KIRBY and his contemporaries, FEATURE ARTICLES, RARE AND UNSEEN KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and presentation of KIRBY’S UNINKED PENCILS from the 1960s-80s (from photocopies preserved in the KIRBY ARCHIVES). Now in OVERSIZED TABLOID FORMAT, it showcases Kirby’s amazing art even larger!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #23

Go online for money-saving BUNDLES, including an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with the entire run at HALF-PRICE! “...packed with original pencil sketches, rare pages, and so much more cool stuff that upholds TwoMorrows’ rep as the best comics history torchbearer publishing today.” quickstopentertainment.com on THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR

17" x 23" JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR POSTER Only a few left of our TJKC retailer’s poster! $10 US Not available through Diamond.

Rarely-seen KIRBY INTERVIEW, UNINKED PENCILS from FANTASTIC FOUR #49, comparison of KIRBY’S margin notes to STAN LEE’S words, interview with DENNY O’NEIL, 7th Grade school project by granddaughter TRACY KIRBY (illustrated by her grandpa!), unpublished story from SOUL LOVE, unpublished art, pencil pages before inking, & more! KIRBY/ALEX HORLEY cover!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #36

KIRBY COLLECTOR #37

KIRBY COLLECTOR #38

KIRBY COLLECTOR #39

KIRBY COLLECTOR #40

THOR ISSUE! Never-seen KIRBY interview, JOE SINNOTT and JOHN ROMITA JR. on their Thor work, MARK EVANIER, extensive THOR and TALES OF ASGARD coverage, a look at the “real” Norse gods, 40 pages of KIRBY THOR PENCILS, including a Kirby Art Gallery at TABLOID SIZE, with pin-ups, covers, and more! KIRBY covers inked by MIKE ROYER and TREVOR VON EEDEN!

“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” MIKE ROYER interview on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE GALLERY tracing the evolution of Jack’s style, new column on OBSCURE KIRBY WORK, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s TECHNIQUE AND INFLUENCES, comparing STAN LEE’s writing to JACK’s, and more! Two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

“HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE KIRBY WAY!” PART 2: JOE SINNOTT on how he inks Jack’s work, HUGE PENCIL GALLERY, list of the art in the KIRBY ARCHIVES, MARK EVANIER, special sections on Jack’s technique and influences, SPEND A DAY WITH KIRBY (with JACK DAVIS, GULACY, HERNANDEZ BROS., and RUDE) and more! Two UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS!

FAN FAVORITES! Covering Kirby’s work on HULK, INHUMANS, and SILVER SURFER, TOP PROS pick favorite Kirby covers, Kirby ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT interview, MARK EVANIER, 2002 Kirby Tribute Panel (DICK AYERS, TODD McFARLANE, PAUL LEVITZ, HERB TRIMPE), pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by MIKE ALLRED and P. CRAIG RUSSELL!

WORLD THAT’S COMING! KAMANDI and OMAC spotlight, 2003 Kirby Tribute Panel (WENDY PINI, MICHAEL CHABON, STAN GOLDBERG, SAL BUSCEMA, LARRY LIEBER, and STAN LEE), P. CRAIG RUSSELL interview, MARK EVANIER, NEW COLUMN analyzing Jack’s visual shorthand, pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by ERIK LARSEN and REEDMAN!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #24

KIRBY COLLECTOR #25

KIRBY COLLECTOR #26

KIRBY COLLECTOR #27

KIRBY COLLECTOR #30

KIRBY’S GREATEST BATTLES! Interviews with KIRBY and JIM SHOOTER (on Kirby’s art battle with Marvel), comparison of KIRBY’S margin notes to STAN LEE’S words, page-by-page analysis of NEW GODS #6 (“Glory Boat”, including Jack’s pencils), how Kirby’s WWII experiences shaped his super-hero battles, Sgt. Fury, unpublished art, and more! KIRBY/MIGNOLA cover!

SIMON & KIRBY ISSUE! Feature-length interview with JOE SIMON about the S&K shop, KIRBY talks about his Golden Age work with SIMON, interview with JOHN SEVERIN, unpublished BOY EXPLORERS story, the rise and fall of S&K’s MAINLINE COMICS, unpublished art, pencil pages before inking, and more! KIRBY/ADKINS and KIRBY/SEVERIN covers!

KIRBY’s GODS! Interviews with KIRBY (discussing the true nature of God) & WALTER SIMONSON, 8-page color section with NEW GODS CONCEPT DRAWINGS, how Jack was influenced by JUDAISM AND THE BIBLE, examining Kirby’s take on mythology, plus features and art (including uninked pencils) from THOR, MR. MIRACLE, ETERNALS, FOREVER PEOPLE, and more!

THE KIRBY INFLUENCE! Interviews with KIRBY (on his WWII experiences) and ALEX ROSS, KIRBY FAMILY roundtable discussion, All-Star Tribute Panel (featuring NEIL GAIMAN, DAVE GIBBONS, KURT BUSIEK, JEFF SMITH, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, MARK WAID, and others), color section, features, art (including uninked pencils), and more! KIRBY/BRUCE TIMM cover!

KIRBY’S TWILIGHT YEARS (1978-94)! Interviews with ALAN MOORE and Kirby Estate co-trustee ROBERT KATZ, comparison of KIRBY’S margin notes to STAN LEE’S words, Jack’s 1980s career in-depth, including pencil art from SILVER STAR, CAPTAIN VICTORY, HUNGER DOGS, an animation art portfolio, FF STORYBOARDS, and lots more! KIRBY/PAUL SMITH cover!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #31

KIRBY COLLECTOR #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #33

KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

KIRBY COLLECTOR #35

FIRST TABLOID-SIZE ISSUE! MARK EVANIER’s new column, interviews with KURT BUSIEK and JOSÉ LADRONN, NEAL ADAMS on Kirby, Giant-Man overview, Kirby’s best 2-page spreads, 2000 Kirby Tribute Panel (MARK EVANIER, GENE COLAN, MARIE SEVERIN, ROY THOMAS, and TRACY & JEREMY KIRBY), huge Kirby pencils! Wraparound KIRBY/ADAMS cover!

KIRBY’S LEAST-KNOWN WORK! MARK EVANIER on the Fourth World, unfinished THE HORDE novel, long-lost KIRBY INTERVIEW from France, update to the KIRBY CHECKLIST, pencil gallery of Kirby’s leastknown work (including THE PRISONER, BLACK HOLE, IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB, TRUE DIVORCE CASES), westerns, and more! KIRBY/LADRONN cover!

FANTASTIC FOUR ISSUE! Gallery of FF pencils at tabloid size, MARK EVANIER on the FF Cartoon series, interviews with STAN LEE and ERIK LARSEN, JOE SINNOTT salute, the HUMAN TORCH in STRANGE TALES, origins of Kirby Krackle, interviews with nearly EVERY WRITER AND ARTIST who worked on the FF after Kirby, & more! KIRBY/LARSEN and KIRBY/TIMM covers!

FIGHTING AMERICANS! MARK EVANIER on 1960s Marvel inkers, SHIELD, Losers, and Green Arrow overviews, INFANTINO interview on Simon & Kirby, KIRBY interview, Captain America PENCIL ART GALLERY, PHILIPPE DRUILLET interview, JOE SIMON and ALEX TOTH speak, unseen BIG GAME HUNTER and YOUNG ABE LINCOLN Kirby concepts! KIRBY and KIRBY/TOTH covers!

GREAT ESCAPES! MISTER MIRACLE pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER, MARSHALL ROGERS & MICHAEL CHABON interviews, comparing Kirby and Houdini’s backgrounds, analysis of “Himon”, 2001 Kirby Tribute Panel (WILL EISNER, JOHN BUSCEMA, JOHN ROMITA, MIKE ROYER, and JOHNNY CARSON) & more! KIRBY/MARSHALL ROGERS and KIRBY/STEVE RUDE covers!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #41

KIRBY COLLECTOR #42

KIRBY COLLECTOR #43

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

1970s MARVEL WORK! Coverage of ’70s work from Captain America to Eternals to Machine Man, DICK GIORDANO & MARK SHULTZ interviews, MARK EVANIER, 2004 Kirby Tribute Panel (STEVE RUDE, DAVE GIBBONS, WALTER SIMONSON, and PAUL RYAN), pencil art gallery, unused 1962 HULK #6 KIRBY PENCILS, and more! Kirby covers inked by GIORDANO and SCHULTZ!

1970s DC WORK! Coverage of Jimmy Olsen, FF movie set visit, overview of all Newsboy Legion stories, KEVIN NOWLAN and MURPHY ANDERSON on inking Jack, never-seen interview with Kirby, MARK EVANIER on Kirby’s covers, Bongo Comics’ Kirby ties, complete ’40s gangster story, pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by NOWLAN and ANDERSON!

KIRBY AWARD WINNERS! STEVE SHERMAN and others sharing memories and neverseen art from JACK & ROZ, a never-published 1966 interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER on VINCE COLLETTA, pencils-toSinnott inks comparison of TALES OF SUSPENSE #93, and more! Covers by KIRBY (Jack’s original ’70s SILVER STAR CONCEPT ART) and KIRBY/SINNOTT!

KIRBY’S MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS! Coverage of DEMON, THOR, & GALACTUS, interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER, pencil art galleries of the Demon and other mythological characters, two never-reprinted BLACK MAGIC stories, interview with Kirby Award winner DAVID SCHWARTZ and F4 screenwriter MIKE FRANCE, and more! Kirby cover inked by MATT WAGNER!

Jack’s vision of PAST AND FUTURE, with a never-seen KIRBY interview, a new interview with son NEAL KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’S column, two pencil galleries, two complete ’50s stories, Jack’s first script, Kirby Tribute Panel (with EVANIER, KATZ, SHAW!, and SHERMAN), plus an unpublished CAPTAIN 3-D cover, inked by BILL BLACK and converted into 3-D by RAY ZONE!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST

Focus on NEW GODS, FOREVER PEOPLE, and DARKSEID! Includes a rare interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’s column, FOURTH WORLD pencil art galleries (including Kirby’s redesigns for SUPER POWERS), two 1950s stories, a new Kirby Darkseid front cover inked by MIKE ROYER, a Kirby Forever People back cover inked by JOHN BYRNE, and more!

KIRBY’S SUPER TEAMS, from kid gangs and the Challengers, to Fantastic Four, XMen, and Super Powers, with unseen 1960s Marvel art, a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, author JONATHAN LETHEM on his Kirby influence, interview with JOHN ROMITA, JR. on his Eternals work, and more!

KIRBYTECH ISSUE, spotlighting Jack’s hightech concepts, from Iron Man’s armor and Machine Man, to the Negative Zone and beyond! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, TOM SCIOLI interview, Kirby Tribute Panel (with ADAMS, PÉREZ, and ROMITA), and covers inked by TERRY AUSTIN and TOM SCIOLI!

WARRIORS, spotlighting Thor (with a look at hidden messages in BILL EVERETT’s Thor inks), Sgt. Fury, Challengers of the Unknown, Losers, and others! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, interviews with JERRY ORDWAY and GRANT MORRISON, MARK EVANIER’s column, pencil art gallery, complete 1950s story, wraparound cover inked by JERRY ORDWAY, and more!

The most thorough listing of Kirby’s work ever published! Lists EVERY PUBLISHED COMIC featuring Jack’s work, including story titles, page counts, and inkers, plus an extensive bibliography, listing BOOKS, PERIODICALS, PORTFOLIOS, FANZINES, POSTERS, a detailed list of Jack’s UNPUBLISHED WORK, and more. A must for serious Kirby collectors!

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(84-page tabloid) $13 US Ships July 2007

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TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

Contents

THE NEW

WARRIORS ISSUE! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 (we’re about to hit the Big Five-Oh!) UNDER THE COVERS . . . . . . . . . . . .3 (Jerry Ordway rocks!) JACK F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 (Mark Evanier on how he met Jack)

ISSUE #49, FALL 2007

HANGIN’ TEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 (the rise & fall of the Silver Surfer) INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY . . . . .10 (Big Barda exposed!) INNERVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 (a short but sweet Kirby interview) CREATORIUM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12 (who’s Thor’s daddy?) BEFORE & AFTER . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 (a pencils-to-inks comparison of an unused Thor #167 page) INFLUENCEES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 (it’s Kirby, the ORD-way) THINKIN’ ’BOUT INKIN’ . . . . . . . . .16 (Bill Everett’s hidden Thor messages, and Mike DeCarlo re-inks the cover of Thor #126) NEAR MYTHS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 (why was Thor such a dull guy?) MUSEUM PAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) GALLERY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 (fight! fight!) ALL AROUNDER . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42 (Surrounded...!) FAST & FURY-OUS . . . . . . . . . . . .44 (Sgt. Fury fights prejudice) OUR ARTIST @ WAR . . . . . . . . . . .46 (Jack shares his most intimate war stories with Scott Fresina) FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 (a complete 1954 Foxhole story) WINNERS & LOSERS . . . . . . . . . . .60 (the gritty world of Jack’s Our Fighting Forces) PUFF PIECE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61 (smoke if you got ’em!) KIRBY OBSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 (Barry Forshaw on Yellow Claw and House of Mystery) CLOCKED OUT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64 (time ran out for the Challengers) FINE PRINT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 (writer Grant Morrison talks to Adam McGovern about Kirby) OLD SOLDIERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72 (the private life of Pvt. Strong) BEGINNINGS & NEVER-ENDINGS . . .74 (from Kamandi to Thundaar) COLLECTOR COMMENTS . . . . . . .78 PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 Cover inks: JERRY ORDWAY Cover colors: TOM ZIUKO The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 14, No. 49, Fall 2007. Published quarterly by & ©2007 TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Pamela Morrow, Asst. Editor. Christopher Irving, Production Assistant. Single issues: $13 postpaid ($15 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $44 US, $64 Canada, $76 elsewhere. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is ©2007 Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is ©2007 the respective authors. First printing. PRINTED IN CANADA. ISSN 1932-6912

(above) We’ve previously seen Jack’s cover rough for a proposed Big Barda & Her Female Furies comic. We can think of no other reason for this sketch of Gilotina to exist, other than as a companion piece for that presentation. Man, that would’ve been one interesting comic! Gilotina TM & ©2007 DC Comics. COPYRIGHTS: Atlas, Big Barda, Boy Commandos, Challengers of the Unknown, Darkseid, Demon, Gilotina, Glorious Godfrey, Green Arrow, House of Mystery, In The Days Of The Mob, Jason Blood, Justice League of America, Kalibak, Kamandi, Lightray, Losers, Manhattan Guardian, Metron, Mr. Miracle, New Gods, OMAC, Orion, Spawn of Frankenstein, Shazam, Shilo Norman, Spirit World, Superman TM & ©2007 DC Comics • Avengers, Balder, Black Panther, Captain America, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Hercules, Hulk, Iron Man, Jane Foster, Loki, Odin, Red Skull, Sgt. Fury/Nick Fury, Sif, Silver Surfer, Thor, X-Men, Yellow Claw TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Destroyer Duck TM & ©2007 Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby • Death Fingers TM & ©2007 the Jack Kirby Estate • Johnny Reb TM & ©2007 the respective holder • Bruce Lee TM & ©2007 Bruce Lee Estate • Bullseye, Fighting American, Foxhole, Race For The Moon TM & ©2007 Joe Simon and the Jack Kirby Estate • Private Strong/The Shield TM & ©2007 Archie Publications • 2001: A Space Odyssey TM & ©2007 Turner Entertainment Co. • Thundaar TM & ©2007 Ruby-Spears Productions

Opening Shot

by John Morrow, editor of TJKC

dare say, in all modesty, that I work with Jack Kirby on a daily basis now as much as Stan Lee did back in the 1960s. For the last 13 years (the length of time Stan and Jack worked together at Marvel), I’ve been producing this regular magazine about the man dubbed by Stan as “The King” of comics. Every day, whether I’m physically working on The Jack Kirby Collector or not, Kirby plays a part in nearly every aspect of what I do—from the time I wake up, till the time I konk out and hit the hay (which, when I am working on TJKC, is usually pretty late in the evening). So with my 50th issue approaching, I knew it had to be something really special. When we jumped to tabloid-size with #31, we gave “big” a whole new meaning in the comics-related magazine market. Now, with TJKC #50, we’re taking it one step further. For one “issue” only, we’re doing a tabloid-size, 168-page trade paperback book instead of the usual saddle-stitched 84-pager (think Ray Wyman’s The Art of Jack Kirby book). Since it’s twice the size, it’ll count as two issues toward your subscription if you’re a subscriber. (Of course, it’ll be available separately for those who aren’t, for a cover price of $19.95, or $24 postpaid in the US.) I’m calling it Kirby Five-Oh!, and it spotlights the 50 best of everything from Jack’s 50-year career in comics. Our regular columnists have formed a distinguished panel of experts (gently guided by your’s truly) to choose and examine things like the best Kirby story published each year from 1938-87; the best covers from each decade; Jack’s 50 best unused pieces of art; his 50 best character designs; and profiles of, and commentary by, the 50 people most influenced by Kirby’s work! Plus there’s a 50-page gallery of Kirby’s powerful raw pencil art, and a deluxe color section of photos and

The Big Five-Oh!

(above) Kirby Five-Oh! sports a Superman cover image from Lisa Kirby’s private collection. We figured a character as iconic as Supes was the perfect choice for this book spotlighting an artist as iconic as Jack. Superman TM & ©2007 DC Comics. Nick Fury, Fantastic Four TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

finished art from throughout his entire half-century oeuvre. The book features a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover [left] inked by DC: The New Frontier artist Darwyn Cooke, and an introduction by Mark Evanier. A percentage of profits will be donated to the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center (www.kirbymuseum.org). It’s scheduled to ship in February, and since it’s a book, there technically won’t be an “issue #50” of TJKC; the next magazine edition will be #51, out next summer (giving me a little time to recover from Kirby Five-Oh!). TJKC #51 will be the only other issue I’ll be producing next year, but worry not; 2008 will see TwoMorrows releasing an updated Jack Kirby Checklist in April, a Collected Jack Kirby Collector, Volume 6 (reprinting issues #23-26, plus new material) in June, and the Fourth World Companion book I’m writing with George Khoury for October. Those, along with the about-to-be-released Kirby, King of Comics from Mark Evanier, Marvel’s Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure (shown above, finally presenting FF #102 the way Jack intended it) and the Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Marvel Masterworks volume (left, which I just penned the intro for), plus DC’s next Fourth World Omnibus, should keep all you Kirbyites satisfied throughout the year. Fifty issues is a great point to reflect and re-evaluate; where do you want to see this publication go after #51? Please help me shape the future direction of the mag. If you want to see it continue for fifty more issues, drop me a line at twomorrow@aol.com with your likes and dislikes, and consider contributing to the mag. Certainly, we’re in no danger of running out of Kirby art to show, or of aspects of Jack’s life and career to talk about. What other creator could you say that about, after 50+ issues? ★

Under The Covers

The Golden Realm

by Douglas Toole or this issue’s “Warriors” theme cover, we started with an unpublished penciled piece that Kirby drew in the 1960s for Marvelmania, showing everyone’s favorite Norse thunder god flying around Asgard. We asked the multi-talented Jerry Ordway (the subject of our latest Modern Masters volume, now shipping) to ink the sketch, and our longtime colorist Tom Ziuko to add the colors, and ended up with the terrific finished wraparound product you now see. Ordway, who has provided artwork for previous TwoMorrows magazines, is making his first contribution to the front cover of The Jack Kirby Collector with this issue. “I did a back cover for an issue of TJKC, and I inked an interior Kirby sketch once,” he said. “I have subscribed to TJKC since it was a newsletter. I finally just twisted John Morrow’s arm and said, ‘I want to do a cover!’” This issue’s theme is “Warriors,” and the cover features Thor, Balder the Brave and Heimdall, the guardian of the Rainbow Bridge between Asgard and Earth. While Kirby drew plenty of war comics, and many of his science-fiction characters wore mechanized armor, the images of Thor and his fellow Asgardians are among the most indelible. Ordway said the job allowed him to revisit his professional roots as an inker. “Kirby’s artwork is much more stylized than mine. Mine is rooted more in the Hal Foster/Alex Raymond tradition. My favorite Kirby era, however, is the mid-1960s

through the 1970s, when he branched off from doing more realistic drawings into his own, iconic visual language. So the challenge for me in inking it was to try to keep it true to Kirby while still injecting some of my own style into it. “When I was doing the cover drawing, I blew it on up on my copier so that it was a little bigger than the printed size and then lightboxed it onto a clean sheet of paper. I did that because I wanted the best line-quality I could get on my inking. If I lost any of the ‘Kirby’ in the inking, it was because the original drawing was not as big as it was when I inked it. Sometimes when you do that, you find that a figure that was an inch tall is now two inches tall, and so a dot won’t do for an eye. But I’m crossing my fingers that the printed version looks great, because I went that extra mile for it.” Thanks to both Jerry and Tom for their contributions! ★

Jack F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby by Mark Evanier irst off, I hope that by the time you read this, my book on Jack—Kirby, King of Comics from Harry N. Abrams, Inc.—will be out and resting comfortably on the Amazon Best Seller List. Actually though, I’ll settle for it just resting comfortably on my dining room table. It’s taken a long time to get it off to press, in part because Kirby is not someone you can just slap together a book about. As a topic, he demands great care... and so does all the fine artwork we’ll be reproducing. I figure I needn’t do a selling job on anyone who’d read this magazine. So I’ll just say that I hope you’ll think it does Jack justice, and please, people: Stop calling it a “definitive” work. Jack is too vast a subject for any one book about him to be “definitive” and there will be others, including at least one more from me. I also want to thank all the folks who’ve pitched in to help, mostly in terms of locating artwork and arranging for high-resolution scans. I thank you all in the book... though knowing me as well as I do, I probably left someone’s name out and will be apologizing here next issue.

On to questions. A. T. Campbell, III of Austin, Texas writes to ask: I was curious if you had a favorite run of issues or individual book that you felt represented Jack Kirby’s best artwork. My favorite long runs are probably Fantastic Four when Joe Sinnott was his inker, and New Gods at DC. My favorite individual works are the Silver Surfer graphic novel he did with Stan Lee, and the Treasurysized adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It probably goes without saying—not that I’ll refrain from saying it—that I like almost everything Jack ever did, at least from a visual standpoint. I stuck the “almost” in there because I’m sometimes saddened by the work he did his last few years when a combination of eye and muscular ailments made it painful for him to draw. Even then though, I sometimes look at that work and I so admire the determination and tenacity with which it was done that it doesn’t sadden me. Thinking about Jack always, eventually, brings you to the positive view of any bad situation. And, turning to the positive: I have a particular fondness for the late work out of the Simon-Kirby studio when Joe Simon or Jack was inking Kirby pencils on a strip like Boys’ Ranch or Bullseye. There was something very bold and arresting about that work—pure, unfettered Kirby style and energy—and the more I see of it, the more I love it. I would guess my favorite period for Kirby artwork was at Marvel from around 1965 until late 1967. In ’65, Jack got a very slight increase in his rate. It was but a dollar or two per page but it enabled him to do a little less work per week and still make enough money to feed the Kirby Clan. Moreover, and perhaps more important: He began to make a concerted effort to spend less time going to the Marvel offices. Each trip in and back cost him most of a full working day. (His staggering output in the early Sixties, which we’ve discussed here in the past, is all the more remarkable when you realize the following: That even though he was working a seven-day week, he sometimes only got to spend four or five of those days at the drawing table.) Once he got the teensy 1965 raise, he was able to spend a little more time on each page. It wasn’t a lot more—maybe half an hour, if that much—but it made a difference. So did the fact that the storylines for the most part became even less Earthbound, thereby affording him more interesting things to draw. And of course, ’65 was when Joe Sinnott returned to Marvel and began inking Fantastic Four. That sure made things look a lot better, and not just on the books Joe inked. Suddenly, he was raising the bar for Kirby Inking, showing everyone else how it should be done. I liked that work and I liked everything Jack did that was inked by Frank

Giacoia, especially when it was really by Frank. Mr. Giacoia was a tremendous talent but he often had the inker’s equivalent of Writer’s Block and would call on friends to help him get his work in. Giacoia-inked comics of this period often include the handiwork of Mike Peppe, Mike Roy, Joe Giella and others, including some hands I just plain can’t identify but they aren’t Frank’s. Interestingly, Frank seems to have done less of this “jobbing-out” on his Kirby jobs than he did on some other pencilers’ work but there are a few places in the work he did over Jack that could have benefited from a little more Frank and a little less Someone Else. In late ’67, Marvel and DC both began having their artists draw smaller and I think Jack’s work suffered a bit from it. On the other hand, some of my favorite Kirby art of all time can be found in the issues of Thor that Bill Everett inked beginning a year later... on the smaller page format. And I loved the work of Kirby/Royer over at DC, but you probably guessed that. I have no particular favorite Kirby art after around the mid-Seventies. It’s all good but the special joys for me were in the stories, not the pictures. If I had to pick one fave though, it would probably be that adaptation of 2001. Our next question comes to us from Greg Weiner, who is also from Texas—in this case, San Antonio: At a convention, I once heard you tell the story, the long version of your first meeting with Jack. I believe you were working for or about to work for Marvelmania, the Marvel fan club that replaced the old Merry Marvel Marching Society. Could you please tell that story in your column? Gladly. Marvelmania International was a mail order firm that briefly—for less than three years, I think—had the rights to run a “fan club” for Marvel that was actually a way to sell merchandise. It was ineptly and, I thought, dishonestly run and when the full extent of that became apparent, I quit and so did my friend Steve Sherman, who was also working there. About a year later, Marvel shut them down because too many kids hadn’t received the Hulk posters they’d ordered, and Marvel hadn’t received much in the way of royalties. This is the story of how I met Jack but it’s also the story of how I wound up working for Marvelmania for a while. Advertising for Marvelmania International initially appeared in comics that went on sale on Tuesday, July 8, 1969. On that day, I had arranged with some fellow comic fans to make a field trip. I was going to go meet Jack Kirby. The previous Friday, Jack and Roz had appeared at the Westercon, a gathering of science-fiction buffs held at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. Jack was not a featured guest. He and his wife had just shown up and paid admission. New to Southern California, Kirby was eager to make contact with local comic fans and whatever writers and artists he could locate. The con seemed like a good place to begin looking for it, and word quickly spread that Jack “King” Kirby was on the premises. He was instantly mobbed by admirers, none of whom had ever met a real live comic book artist before. It was then a custom at s-f conventions for attendees to sport personalized name badges; to turn over the pedestrian ones the convention supplied and to have some artist compose something more imaginative on the obverse side. One fan approached Kirby and asked if “The King” would embellish his badge. Jack obliged, sketching out a quick head of Thor. In a scene Roz would allude to for the rest of her life, the kid took the finished drawing from Jack, thanked him and then turned around and yelled to the rest of the room, “Original Jack Kirby art for sale!” On the way home, Jack took a vow—which he occasionally violated—to stop doing sketches for fans. It was a painful decision because he’d always loved the joy he witnessed when he presented

a sketch to an admirer. The problem was that it was becoming yet another situation where his work was making money for someone else and not for the Kirby household. Fortunately, not all of those who surrounded the Kirbys that day were as mercenary as the badge-seller. Several were members of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club, a group of somewhere between 40 and 80 local fans that met weekly at Palms Recreation Center in West L.A. This is the group I wrote about in all those columns that are collected in all those books of mine that TwoMorrows sells. (Look around. There must be an ad for them close by.) A couple of the members there were on the club’s Board of Directors. They told Jack about the organization and asked him to attend a meeting as a guest speaker. Roz, in turn, invited the club’s Board of Directors to the house for a visit. I had not attended the convention. Seventeen years old and fresh out of high school, I was just beginning to sell articles and barely acceptable drawings to magazines, and had skipped the con to work on an assignment. (Before anyone asks: I never

(above) Page 15 pencils from 1976’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Treasury Edition. (below) John Romita’s replacement art (right) for this last panel of Tales of Suspense #92 (Aug. 1967) appears to be inked by Frank Giacoia, although Joe Sinnott inked the story. Captain America TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

seriously entertained the idea of a career as an artist. I always wanted to be a writer. Still, every now and then—but with decreasing frequency as the years go by—I draw things for the fun of doing so. And every now and then, someone hires me to do this or if I’m the editor, I hire myself.) But back to July of ’69. Since I was the president of the club, I was included in the Kirby Expedition—an exciting prospect and one that I did not dream would lead to a long personal and professional association. Having yet to obtain a driver’s license, I took a bus to a favorite newsstand, bought the comics that had come out that day, and paged through them as I walked to where my friends and I planned to meet for the drive to Irvine. None of them had driver’s licenses, either. Our treasurer’s mother would be acting as chauffeur. Spotting that first Marvelmania ad, I was amazed to see a local mailing address. The comic book industry—in which I did not then expect to ever work—was based in New York, and seemed impregnable to out-of-towners. On a whim, I stopped at a pay phone, called Information and got a number for “Marvelmania International.” By an odd coincidence, though the firm’s P.O. Box was several miles away, its office was just a short walk from that phone booth. A man named Don Wallace answered and when I identified myself as the president of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club, he invited me to visit—immediately, if I could. That invite and the one to the Kirby home were the only two perks I ever received from my exalted, elected position. I told Mr. Wallace that I was en route to meet Jack Kirby and he replied, “Give him my best and come by, tomorrow.” Two hours later, my fellow officers—Robert Solomon, Bruce Schweiger, Mike Rotblatt—and I arrived at the Kirby dwelling in Irvine. Mike Rotblatt’s mother dropped us off and went off shopping, planning to come by for us later. It was a modern but sterile townhouse in a newly-built community where every building looked like every other building. It actually took us a few seconds to work up the courage to ring the bell but finally, we did—to no avail. No one was home. We thought we had the wrong house but we could peek in a window and see Marvel Comics on a chair. So we just waited. I think we spent most of the time berating Bruce, who’d arranged the time and date with Mrs. Kirby, telling him 6

he’d probably made a mistake. He hadn’t. The Kirbys had just gone marketing and it took longer than expected. Ten minutes later, a car pulled into the driveway with a woman driving and a short man sitting in the passenger seat, fingering an unlit cigar. Each of us in turn introduced himself. As Rob gave his name and shook Jack’s hand, Kirby said, “It’s all your fault. You hired him.” There was an awkward pause. None of us knew what he was talking about. Mr. Kirby repeated his incomprehensible joke— “You’re the guy who hired him”—and Rob looked around, wondering how to respond. Hired who? Rob was still in high school and had never hired anyone for anything. When he finally asked Mr. Kirby to explain, all Jack would do was chuckle and say, “Don’t try to evade responsibility. You hired him.” I had a sudden thought. Most comics then ran a little business notice once a year called the Statement of Ownership, a post office requirement. Some of the ones in older Marvels, I had once noticed, had listed as the company’s business manager a person named Robert Solomon—no relation to my friend. At one comic club meeting, I had pointed this out and we all joked about it, treating our Robert as if he was that Robert, secretly running Marvel. Standing in front of the Kirby house that afternoon, I guessed out loud: “Robert Solomon hired Stan Lee?” Jack grinned and told us a little about that Robert Solomon. Then he turned to me and said, “Young man, you know your comics.” That was my introduction to the odd, disconnected way Jack Kirby spoke and it was the first time I felt the awesome power of his approval. Over the next 24 years, I would see that man surrounded by an endless stream of fans and admirers, all willing to say or do just about anything to earn a dollop of that esteem. Mike, Rob, Bruce and I carried in groceries and we then spent a delightful afternoon with Jack but also for a time with Roz. The sight of his original, uninked pencil art stunned us, as did the Kirby hospitality. We’d brought along a tape recorder, figuring to record an interview for a fanzine that Rob published but Jack waved it away. “Let’s just talk,” he said. Busy as he obviously was, he was genuinely willing to chat for hours and to answer all the dumb questions posed by four geeky readers. Among the many topics, he volunteered for us his assessment of how much he’d contributed to the creation of the Marvel heroes and the writing of their stories. Almost as if pre-arranged, Stan Lee phoned just as Jack was finishing his discourse on the topic. We got to listen in on Jack’s end of a “plot conference” which lasted only a minute or two—though, after it, he made a point of telling us that, on earlier issues, they’d spent a bit more time talking. He also relayed to us some news Stan had just told him of projects Marvel was planning and he offered the opinion, “Martin is charging off in all directions without a clue where he’s heading.” My friends weren’t certain who Martin was. Since Jack didn’t seem about to volunteer that information, I explained, “Martin Goodman, publisher of Marvel.” “And Stan Lee’s uncle,” Kirby added. Then he turned to me and said again, “Hey, you really do know your comics.” (A quick aside: Though everyone in comics referred to Stan as Goodman’s

nephew, that wasn’t really the precise relationship. In fact, the aforementioned Robert Solomon was the uncle at the company who hired Stan. Solomon later married into the Goodman family so there was that tribal connection.) Jack was completing the art to Fantastic Four #97 that day. Having been told by my friends that I was an artist—which I guess I was by fanzine standards—he startled me by suggesting I finish the penciling on a partially-drawn figure. I insisted my skills were woefully below the benchmark of even the worst professional comic book, let alone one drawn by Jack Kirby. Nevertheless—perhaps because I didn’t have samples with me to prove this—Jack insisted I at least draw a hand on the figure. He sat me down in the old, rigid-backed wooden chair in which he spent so much of his life and thrust a pencil into my paw. It was an odd sensation, and I remember wondering why I, a 17-year-old non-professional, had a much better drawing table and a much more comfortable chair in my bedroom at home. In the years to come, I would marvel—no pun intended—at the hours Kirby worked; how he was willing to sit there for upwards of twelve hours a day, drawing page after page. It was even more remarkable to those of us who ever tried sitting in that rigid, backnumbing chair. I also recall being terrified at the prospect of putting so much as a pencil line on a Jack Kirby page. I mean, it was not like I could have improved the thing. Or done anything but harm it. I imagined readers everywhere shrieking with horror and bombarding the Bullpen Bulletins, vowing to never again purchase another Marvel because of the wretched hand they found in that one panel. But then two quick thoughts calmed me down. One was the knowledge that Joe Sinnott inked Fantastic Four and I thought, “Oh, he’ll fix it.” (As it turned out, Frank Giacoia inked that issue. But he was pretty good, too.) And then right on top of that came another, more intelligent thought: “What am I worried about? Jack Kirby has erasers. The minute I’m outta here, he’ll redo whatever I draw.” So I drew... and I drew very lightly to make it easier for him to erase. My sense, by the way, was not that he was testing me as a potential assistant, at least for that. I think he was just trying to give a kid the thrill of being “part of ” an actual comic book. Jack, as I later learned was like that. He wanted everyone he met, at least in an idol/fan context, to come away from the encounter with a little something... but not an autograph or a sketch. He wanted them to come away with encouragement or confidence or some sort of betterment, however minute. I saw him do this with just about everyone, including many who didn’t appreciate the advice or support and would rather have had a quick drawing of the Hulk. I’d brought some fanzines to which I’d contributed articles and I’d intended to leave them so he could perhaps peruse them at his leisure. Instead, Jack took one, sat down in that chair of his and commenced to read it to himself right then and there as Roz took us on a tour of the house. Later, when we got to talking about Don Wallace, Kirby suggested that I might be valuable to the Marvelmania operation: “That guy really needs someone who knows the comics.” The next day when I visited Wallace’s office, I learned that Kirby had phoned and given me a glowing recommendation. I was soon hired in a part-time capacity to edit a fan magazine for the operation and to act as resident Marvel Expert. Other members of our club were also enlisted to roll posters and stuff envelopes. A few of us would even get paid, though not in full. Jack never got paid by Marvelmania, either. I should tell that story here some time. But that’s the story of how I met the guy. It was a magical day and, as I look back on it, a life-changing day. Mike, Bruce, Rob and I went home in a kind of daze... and we were halfway up the San Diego Freeway when we realized we’d clean forgotten to talk to Jack about coming to speak at our club. ★ Mark Evanier welcomes your questions about Jack Kirby. You can reach him through his two websites, www.POVonline.com and www.newsfromme.com, both of which are packed with stuff to read, much of it about Jack. And this may be you last chance to get the Evanier “POV” Bundle, as we’re almost sold out of Wertham Was Right. Go to www.twomorrows.com to order before they’re gone!

(previous page) 1970s Thor fan sketch, and a photo of a young Mark Evanier hard at work at Marvelmania, courtesy of Steve Sherman. (above) 1978 Fantastic Four commission. (left) As recounted here, Mark Evanier ghosted Johnny Storm’s waving hand in this panel from Fantastic Four #97 (April 1970). All characters TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MARK EVANIER “POV” BUNDLE (BUY 2, GET 1 FREE!)

Hangin’ Ten (right) The Silver Surfer finally hit the big screen in this summer’s F4 sequel, but the 1977 Silver Surfer graphic novel was originally intended as a treatment of sorts for a proposed film that never materialized. The letter from Jack (at bottom) to “Stanley” confirms that Jack was largely setting the direction of the GN (note Jack’s mention of his “occasional typing error”; is it possible this script for the GN’s first two pages is by Jack instead of Stan?). The page 27 sequence Jack refers to is shown on the next page.

The Surfer’s Big Wave

by Robert L. Bryant, Jr. hy can’t the Silver Surfer “hang ten”? Because he’s got no toes, brother. From the beginning, in the 1966 Fantastic Four comics in which the Surfer first appeared, Jack Kirby drew the skyrider without toes on his silver feet, as if he were a not-quite-finished statue, or as if his creator Galactus had simply not bothered to sculpt ten more digits on his herald. Or maybe Kirby just felt that the toes would have been an annoying distraction, a detail too literal for such a symbolic character. For whatever reason, Kirby’s Surfer soared through space without tootsies—and so does the computer-generated Surfer in director Tim Story’s Fantastic 4 sequel, which opened in theaters June 15.

Story’s Surfer looks like a living, 3-D representation of Kirby’s Surfer in his 1966-68 Fantastic Four appearances, lacking only the sleek blacks of Joe Sinnott’s inks and maybe an occasional flare of Kirby Krackle. Story and his special-effects men told reporters they pored over Kirby Surfer illustrations to nail the Surfer’s poses. Visually, this isn’t the Buscema Surfer or the Moebius Surfer—it’s Jack’s original. But there’s also something in there of the sad, wise Stan Lee Surfer persona, the suffering alien who would forever be characterized as “Christlike.” (Do a Google search on the phrases “Silver Surfer” and “Christ,” and try to count the hits.) Stan’s contributions to the Surfer’s character can’t be ignored, says Roy Thomas, former Marvel editor in chief and only the second man (after Stan) to write dialogue for the skyrider. Thomas says: “As one who was in the office the day Kirby’s pencils for the Fantastic Four issue that introduced ‘the Surfer’ [came in]—and that’s what Jack called him, no ‘Silver,’ and of course no actual dialogue—I saw how Stan, as editor and writer-to-be, gushed over Jack’s idea... Stan was in his way as much the [Surfer’s] creator as Jack was—just as, though the Fantastic Four itself was certainly Stan’s idea, Jack had become that concept’s co-creator by drawing Lee’s story and fleshing it out in 1961. [Stan] not only named the character [with the “Silver” modifier], but put virtually every line of dialogue, and thus, to a great extent, characterization, in the Surfer’s mouth from the very start. “...Still... I believe my esteemed mentor Stan Lee made a mistake in 1968 when, as the artist for the Surfer’s solo title, he chose to have John Buscema, not Jack Kirby, draw [and thus co-plot] it. He probably had numerous reasons, including both Kirby’s busy schedule... and a desire to take the Surfer in a slightly different direction—but, in the long run, probably The Silver Surfer would have done better if it, too, had been done by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby—the most important comic book creative team from the 1960s through the present.” His origin aside, how did the Surfer play on the movie screens in Peoria this summer? The nation’s film critics were generally more impressed by the skyrider than by the movie. The Los Angeles Times: “The Surfer has the kind of movie-star presence even movie stars dream about.” The Houston Chronicle: “The Silver Surfer is an important addition, because he is as inherently and mystically cool as the Fantastic Four are inherently and prosaically flaky.” The Fresno Bee: “The Silver Surfer could easily take over the film franchise.” Here are some thoughts on the Surfer and his past, present and prospects for the future, from e-mail interviews conducted shortly before the film opened: LISA KIRBY: Jack’s youngest daughter and a trustee of the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center: “I believe that people will love seeing the Surfer in a big movie... I think the movie will bring the Silver Surfer to a whole new generation of fans. I definitely expect to see Surfer action figures and other marketing merchandise. “I was pretty young in the ’60s, so I wasn’t really aware of what my father did for a living—he was just my dad. It wasn’t till I was a little older that I took more of an interest in his work. I [always] thought the Surfer was pretty cool. It was interesting that a guy who grew up in New York City could come up with a 8

I loved writing the Surfer. Because of his general pacifism, and the fact that Fox wanted to be true to Stan Lee’s dialogue, which meant a lot of long, Hamlet-esque speeches, we developed a whole new way of telling animated stories, cutting from the Surfer to action elsewhere that would eventually threaten him and continuing his voiceover while it went on. This drove oldschool TV animation writers/directors crazy. But Fox loved it that way. What we did was set up the inevitability of a conflict each week... and then move through the chain of events to get to it. “As to whether the Surfer and the general [movie] audience are ready for each other, the way I see it is that we’ve now got a general film audience that grew up on Marvel Comics, which means that the FF, Spidey, the Avengers, and the other big guns of the Marvel line are part of the cultural consciousness. I don’t think the Surfer has the same widespread audience, but I also don’t believe that matters here. The audience for another Fantastic Four film will go see it regardless of who the guest stars or villains are. “...If the film is well written and well produced, and the Surfer is as well presented as the Human Torch was in the first film, then I think he’ll be a big addition in terms of the excitement he can generate as part of the plot. If the Surfer is lame... well, he could cause some unintentional laughs, but I don’t know if that will matter much to the overall box office gross. Like everyone else, I’m eager to see how all this turns out... especially if they keep the suffering, Jesuslike Silver Surfer that I, frankly, love.”

character like this. He told me that he saw guys surfing in Malibu on TV, and thought it was the greatest thing. I guess the idea developed from the image of how he perceived the surf culture. “When the first Fantastic 4 movie came out in 2005, I was real anxious to see it, mainly due to the fact that I was not sure if my father was going to receive proper credit... I was very proud to see his name up there side by side with Stan Lee... Not many people [among the general public] realize that there was another person involved in the creation of these properties. The movie is a way for the mainstream public to learn about Jack Kirby and his contribution to the comic book industry... From what I have seen from the movie trailers, the Silver Surfer looks great!... I had no idea that Laurence Fishburne was doing the voice, but he is great actor and I’m sure he’ll do the Surfer proud.” LARRY BRODY: Writer/producer who wrote or co-wrote every episode of the Fox network’s 1998 Silver Surfer animated series and co-created the series with Stan Lee: “Our intention was to stick as closely to the comics he did with Jack Kirby as possible, and I think we succeeded pretty well. Even the art was Kirbyesque!...

STEVE ENGLEHART: Veteran comics writer who scripted Marvel’s revived Surfer comic in the 1980s: “As a guy who wrote him as a solitary philosopher, I happen to think it’s his look that’s his strongest feature. He is, really, from everyone else’s POV, all exterior. The metallic body puts up a barrier, turns him into something you look at, not into. He has no ‘eyes as windows to the soul’; they’re flat and metallic.Which is why it was brilliant to have Alicia, the blind sculptress, be the one who got to know him (in the 1966 “Galactus Trilogy”).Yes, women are more sensitive than men, yadda yadda, but only that woman, that person, would not be subtly shut out by his impenetrable reflectivity. “...When I did Silver Surfer #1 (the second series), he’d been around for 20 years, he’d been on the famous blacklight poster, he’d been acclaimed a transcendental Marvel hero and Kirby’s greatest creation, he’d had a prestige series by Stan the Man and John Buscema, he’d had a graphic novel by Moebius, a graphic novel by John Byrne... and he’d never sold. He’d never been able to attract a mass audience. I made that happen because I found the right way to play him, but there isn’t a lot of room for error in that. For every fan you pick up shading him one way, you run the risk of losing another. His greatest strength is the way he looks; his greatest weakness is the way he looks. You have to get past his innate inability to relate, and the audience’s innate inability to relate to him as a real being. “...If [the movie is] done just right, he can be the star of the summer. If they don’t, he’s just another comic book second banana in the midst of a stream of comic book films, and how long till Iron Man*?” ★ *Author’s note: About a year.

She Turned

INTO Her!

Incidental Iconography An ongoing analysis of Kirby’s visual shorthand, and how he inadvertently used it to develop his characters, by Sean Kleefeld

t’s fairly common knowledge that Jack Kirby based Big Barda after seeing a picture of Lainie Kazan. But it seemed to me that would only account for the face and hair, but not her costume design. A slightly less well known piece of knowledge is that the photo of Kazan that Jack saw was in Playboy. Since she only appeared in the October 1970 issue, I started there. Imagine my surprise when I found a photo of Kazan in that short four-page piece looking every bit the sexy Amazon and wearing the 1970 pop-culture equivalent of chain mail. Jack got Big Barda not from Lainie Kazan, but from a single, very specific picture of her shot by Lawrence Schiller. The photo is small and was shot with a soft focus; coupled with the slight mis-registration in my copy, it won’t reproduce well here. So to help showcase just how obvious this was, I’ve pulled in the assistance of artist Paul Horn to reproduce the image, merged with Big Barda to show just how seamless the transition is, especially for someone with Jack’s imagination. So, without further ado, Jack Kirby iconographing Big Barda as channeled through Paul Horn... ★

You can see Sean Kleefeld’s website at www.FFPlaza.com. Paul Horn is the creative force behind the Cool Jerk comic strip. You can read it or pick up his first collection at www.CoolJerk.com Big Barda TM & ©2007 DC Comics. Playboy cover/photo ©Playboy Enterprises.

Innerview

(above) Len Wein, age 14, at the time of the interview, and later in the 1970s as a pro. (below) Splash from Bullseye #1. Bullseye TM & ©2007 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate. Art reconstruction by Chris Fama.

(Len Wein was an active contributor and editor in the early days of comics fandom, so we asked for permission to reprint this rare Kirby interview, which he conducted for Masquerader #6, one of the earliest comics fanzines. Len said, “Only if you make it clear that I was maybe 14 years old at the time I wrote it. There is so much grammar I would love to correct now. Just goes to prove one can never escape their past.” While this interview may not reveal any unknown Kirby facts, it’s a fascinating artifact; an interview conducted at Jack’s New York home, shortly after the birth of the Marvel Universe, and undoubtedly one of the earliest published Kirby interviews. Enjoy!) In the seven or eight years I’ve been collecting comics, I always had the

ambition to visit the pros. Though they seemed to be away and afar from me, my dream finally came true when I met with Mike Sekowsky early last year. Later, I visited such pros as Gil Kane, Joe Giella, Joe Kubert, etc., but my dream was just reaching its zenith; I had yet to meet the great Jack Kirby. Through devious means, my interview with the Kirby of Action Shots was accomplished by my stalwart companion, Ron Fradkin and suddenly one Saturday we found our bikes parked in front of a brickfront house in a nice neighborhood, the kind of place where you least expected an artist as Kirby would like. A short ring of the doorbell and we were greeted by a human figure completely surrounded by cigar smoke; this figure, we learned, was Jack Kirby. Once in his office Jack apologized for all the cigar smoke, stating, “Most people think I work for money. I don’t, I really work for cigars!” We all laughed and then followed my interview: LEN: How old are you, Jack? KIRBY: Thirty-nine, although I’d prefer to remain ageless! [Editor’s Note: If this was conducted the same year it was published, Jack would actually have been forty-seven. Either that, or this interview was actually conducted in 1956!] LEN: How long have you been illustrating comics? KIRBY: Thirty-nine years, or at least it feels that long. Really, I’ve been working for over twenty years. LEN: What art school did you go to? KIRBY: I went to Pratt Institute for one day; the next day the Depression struck and I was out on the corner selling newspapers. LEN: What was the first strip you worked on? KIRBY: Believe it or not, the first strips I worked on were Popeye and Betty Boop, and I enjoyed it. (Both Ron and I were startled, not believing that the great Jack Kirby had gotten his start drawing funny animal strips.) LEN: What was your favorite strip of all the ones you worked on? KIRBY: I never worked on a strip I didn’t like, but I guess the strip Joe Simon and myself had the most fun on was the Fighting American and Speedboy. We really had a ball on that strip, spoofing the patriotic hero; but I guess we picked the wrong time to create them. The public wasn’t ready for another patriotic hero. LEN: A great shame! By the way, what caused you to break up with Joe Simon? You were a great team. KIRBY: Why did Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis break up? We both decided it would be better for both of us. But, I’d rather not talk about it. LEN: Who do you feel was the best Simon and Kirby creation? KIRBY: Bullseye, our western hero. Both Joe and I thought he was tops! At this point, the conversation drifted afar... at points too lengthy to mention. All in all, I found Jack Kirby to be everything I thought he’d be and more. And my subsequent visits continue to prove that Jack Kirby is truly an artist with impact. ★

Creatorium

Who’s Your Daddy?

‘d like to offer these excerpts from two books published in [the summer of 2002]. Read them, and ask yourself: How, how, how can two men have such completely different recollections of events they both took part in? First, here’s Stan Lee discussing the creation of Thor in Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee by Lee and George Mair (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 2002). In Chapter 13, Lee writes: “I had already given birth to the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-Man. Next, I wanted to come up with something totally different... It finally came to me—don’t make him human—make him a god. “That notion intrigued me. I certainly had enough gods to choose from. There were Roman gods, Greek gods, and Norse gods, just to name a few. Mulling it over, I decided readers were already pretty familiar with the Greek and Roman gods. It might be more fun to delve into the old Norse legends, and fun was always the name of the game. Besides, I pictured the Norse gods looking like Vikings of old, with the flowing beards, horned helmets and battle clubs. I liked the imagery. “One of our established titles, Journey into Mystery, needed a shot in the arm, so I picked Thor, the Norse god of thunder, to headline the book. After writing an outline depicting the story and the characters I had in mind, I asked my brother, Larry [Lieber], to write the script because I didn’t have time. Always dependable, Larry did a great job on it, and it was only natural for me to assign the penciling to Jack Kirby, who drew it as though he had spent his whole life in Asgard, the home of the gods.” Seems clear enough, right? Now, here’s Jack Kirby discussing the creation of Thor in the series of 1989 interviews he gave The Comics Journal’s Gary Groth, which are reprinted in The Comics Journal Library, Volume 1: Jack Kirby (Fantagraphics Books, 2002). Kirby tells Groth: “I came up with Thor. Whatever it took to sell a book, I came up with. Stan Lee had never been editorial-minded. It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things—or old things, for that matter. “...I came up with Thor because I’ve always been a history buff. I know all about Thor and Balder and Mjolnir

by Robert L. Bryant, Jr.

the hammer. Nobody ever bothered with that stuff except me. I loved it in high school and I loved it in my pre-high-school days... I loved Thor because I loved legends. I’ve always loved legends. Stan Lee was the type of guy who would never know about Balder and who would never know about the rest of the characters. I had to build up that legend of Thor in the comics.” Seems clear enough, right? The more we doth know, the murkier do matters become. I think Odin said that once. If he didn’t, he should have. ★

BEFORE & AFTER

This issue, we’ve got a “Before & After” comparison of an unused Kirby pencil page from Thor #167, and inks by Bruce McCorkindale, inker for Malibu, Marvel, DC and Image Comics, and current artist on Markosia’s Heretic: The Templar Chronicles.

Re-inking Thor Flickr Project Reader Adam Koford requested that we supply a page of Jack Kirby Thor pencils to allow other artists to attempt to ink it, as an online educational and experimental exercise. We couldn’t resist, so go to www.flickr.com/groups/reinkingthor/pool/ to see what nearly 50 contributors have done with the pencils we supplied, from the sublime, to the absurd! 13

Influencees (below) Ordway solos on Thor in this pencil page from Avengers: Dominion Factor. (next page, top) It was Kirby’s suggestion to resurrect Captain Marvel at DC in the early ’70s; here’s Jerry’s take on the character. (next page, bottom) Ordway inks Kirby! Captain Marvel TM & ©2007 DC Comics. Iron Man, Thor TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Jack Kirby, the Ord-Way

Jerry Ordway interviewed by Douglas Toole (Jerry Ordway has worked for comic books for more than 25 years as a writer, penciler and inker. While he is probably best-known for his work on DC Comics’ All-Star Squadron, Infinity, Inc., Adventures of Superman and The Power of Shazam!, he has also produced work for Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, First Publishing and others, including WildStorm’s recent Red Menace mini-series. Mr. Ordway was interviewed by telephone on November 30, 2006, and reviewed and copy-edited the article.) THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: What was some of your earliest exposure to Kirby’s art? JERRY ORDWAY: The first stuff of his that I saw would have to be Thor. My first exposure to Marvel Comics was a matter of happen-

stance. I did not have a newsstand near where I lived. My family was taking a train trip, and at a train station in Milwaukee, my mother gave my brother and me a dollar to buy comics. We went to the magazine section and said, “Holy cow! There’s comics of that TV show we like to watch!” We used to watch The Marvel Super-Heroes show, and had no idea there were Marvel comics! We were a ready-made audience for the comics once we saw they were available. Thor was an immediate hit with me, and with my older brother, Joel, who was not really into comics. I got into the Fantastic Four about a year later, but my first Marvel Comics were Thor, Spider-Man, The Avengers, Daredevil and Tales of Suspense (with Captain America and Iron Man.) Years later, I realized that I had seen a Captain 3-D comic—long before that train ride—in a box of my oldest brother Mike’s comics that were in the basement. I couldn’t find 3-D glasses, so I was a little perplexed, trying to read it, but I do remember thinking that Captain 3-D had a really cool costume. Even now, I think it’s pretty wild—a classic Kirby design. TJKC: You mentioned that you liked Kirby’s 1960s and 1970s work. Did you follow him to DC in the early 1970s? ORDWAY: I really didn’t collect DC comics before Kirby went there. I did get a few DC comics here and there, but not as a rule. For instance, I bought DC’s Captain Action comics, which were based on a toy that I just loved. I was an 11-year-old “Marvelmaniac” who thought that Marvel was new and hip and DC was stodgy. But when Kirby went there, it made me look at DC as a cooler place. I am a huge fan of the Fourth World stuff, especially [Superman’s Pal] Jimmy Olsen. I really liked the DNAliens and the weird stories with cloning and all that. As a kid at the time, the book seemed really cutting-edge to me. Kirby often put Jimmy Olsen at odds with Superman in the stories, which also played to my age group, I guess. That era’s Superman was clearly a father-figure, and Kirby played with that to great effect. TJKC: You and Kirby seem to have two very different art styles. ORDWAY: I have a harder time breaking the rules. Some artists who are really good at dynamics and drawing something really powerful can say, “Okay, I know an arm doesn’t bend this way and a tendon doesn’t work this way, but this image looks best.” Whenever I look at something like that, part of me wants to correct it. (laughs) But you can’t do that with Kirby’s pencils. When you start correcting things, you lose what Kirby put there. I always thought Joe Sinnott had a terrific way of grounding Kirby’s pencils, even on pages where the anatomy of the characters were a secondary consideration for Kirby. Frank Giacoia did the same thing, giving Kirby’s pencils a nice line weight so that they had more realism without compromising the style. I always wondered why Sinnott wasn’t the regular inker on the Thor book until after Kirby left and John Buscema took over. I would have loved to see a Kirby-Sinnott version of Asgard. Or a Wally Wood-inked issue of Thor, for that matter. TJKC: How is it to ink Kirby’s pencils? ORDWAY: I’ve inked Kirby’s pencils a couple of times outside of TwoMorrows projects. I was part of the Image Comics group that did Phantom Force

in the mid1990s. I inked four or five pages in each of the first two issues. In that first one, I vividly remember that two of the pages were actual Kirby pages, while the others had been reconstructed (using a lightbox and returning the inked pages to a penciled state) by Keith Giffen. Anyhow, as a professional with years of experience, I felt very intimidated when I looked at the actual Kirby-penciled pages. I thought, “I’m going to ink this. Holy cow!” It was terrific. When you look at a Kirby page, your eye might be drawn to all the overexaggerated elements—like a hand pointing nearly out of the page or something—but the page would always have such power and great storytelling. Even in the quiet moments of the stories, Kirby could take a very wordy talkative sequence and make it seem interesting without resorting to gimmicks. I have always regretted that he did not live to see the book published. The Phantom Force book missed its intended ship date by about eight months. We had all worked for free, donating our efforts on the book, and some of the contributors took a long time to submit their pages. Over the course of that delay, the “boom” market went “bust,” and the initial orders for the book dropped from about a million copies—a pretty phenomenal level—to about 300,000 copies. That initial order would have generated a very healthy paycheck for the Kirbys. I always felt badly about that, but few of us knew he was in bad health. TJKC: Did you enjoy working at Marvel? ORDWAY: I loved it immensely, but was frustrated that I could not seem to get a regular assignment. I grew up reading Marvel Comics in the 1960s and 1970s, and was heavily influenced by the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby style of making comics. Other artists, such as John Romita, Gene Colan, Don Heck, and the Buscema brothers also helped make those characters important to me. It was just by a quirk, really, that I wound up getting work from DC first, and I felt loyal to the company for that. I really enjoy working with the people at DC. I did some fill-in issues here and there at Marvel for a couple of years starting in the late 1990s. I wrote and drew a couple of issues of The Avengers. I penciled and inked the 2000 Thor Annual. I inked an issue of Thor over John Buscema’s pencils [Thor #9, 1999]. That was a real thrill, as he was one of my big artistic-heroes. The Marvel stuff was a lot of fun, and maybe some day I’ll go back there and get to draw a Spider-Man comic. Maybe if I hang in there and keep working hard... (laughs)

four pages a day! Pretty awesome. TJKC: Did you ever meet Kirby? ORDWAY: I met him a couple of times at comic conventions. I was at a big DC dinner in Chicago around the time that Kirby was doing Super Powers and Hunger Dogs. There were maybe 15 or 20 people seated at this big round table, and there he was, exactly as you would expect him to be—a terrific guy, telling war stories. Roz kept rolling her eyes, saying, “They don’t want to hear that.” And we were saying, “Yes, we do! Tell us more!” (laughs) I also saw him at a surprise anniversary party that was thrown for Roz and him in San Diego not long before he passed away. I only had occasion to say hi to him and Roz, unlike the various folks who stopped in at their home. I was too intimidated to pursue anything else. I remember Mark Evanier saying, “Just call him and talk to him,” and I’d say, “I can’t. I’m scared.” (laughs) I’m sure he would have been fine with it, because so many people would just call him, and Kirby always seemed to take it in stride. He gave of his time to just about anybody who asked for his opinion. Over the course of my career I’ve been blessed to meet a lot of the people who were very influential to comics in general and to me, as well. I’ve spent time with Jerry Siegel and his wife, Joanne, Jerry Robinson, Julie Schwartz, and others like them. I’ve been able to ink the pencils of some of the best in the business, too, like Wayne Boring, Gil Kane, Jack Kirby, Jim Mooney, John Buscema—it’s been pretty amazing. TJKC: Any final comments? ORDWAY: I have one little anecdote: When I was I kid, growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the local UHF Channel 18 would run The Marvel Super-Heroes show. For a while, the station held an art contest with three categories for three different age groups—real little kids, older kids and teenagers. At the beginning of each show, some station employee would be standing in a hallway with the drawings posted behind him and announce the day’s winners in each category. The three daily winners would each receive a $1 bill, and were put into a drawing to win the grand prize: a Schwinn bicycle. My brother and I would sit there every day when we got home from school, and make fun of the posted drawings. But one day, a drawing of Thor I had submitted was chosen and my name was read! All those days we ridiculed those drawings, and one of them was mine! Before they announced my name, we really tore into the drawing, because I had forgotten to draw Thor’s cape, and forgotten to put the wings on his helmet. Pretty sad, but I still won that day. No record of the drawing exists, as the station did not return it to me, but I still remember the crisp, clean dollar bill I got in the mail—my first paying comic job. ★

TJKC: What do you think about Kirby’s armor? ORDWAY: It’s impressive that he was able to costume all those characters in the first place! The early issues of Journey Into Mystery with Thor really stand out in my mind. It seemed like each issue, Odin would have some new, complicated and original outfit. The “Tales of Asgard” back-up stories were the same. Kirby was so clever—those things are not as easy to draw as you might think. It’s very difficult to draw a lot of people in armor and have them stand out and be distinct. I don’t know where he got the design ideas for his armor, but he was clearly influenced by something at some point in his life that just got ingrained in his mind. His Fourth World books had really interesting designs for the para-demons and Kalibak and all those characters that didn’t really step on the toes of his Thor designs. During the time I was working on the Superman books, I drew appearances by the New Gods and a few trips to Apokolips. I have to admit it was tough. (laughs) It’s hard to make that stuff look as good as he was able to. The designs are especially impressive when you realize the pace that he was working at in the 1960s and early 1970s—drawing three or 15

Thinkin’ ’bout Inkin’

The Everett Code!

by Angel Gabriele ike countless masses of comic readers, I have been and always will be a fan of the graphic talents of comics king Jack Kirby, studying it passionately over the years—so much so that even my pal Denys Cowan would tease me with, “Looking at those same comics again? Y’ been reading the same books over and over for 20 years! Stop It! Look at some new comics!” He was right! I had been reading the same books for more than 20 years—most all illustrated by King Kirby. Jack’s work mesmerized me like none before or since. And although I could appreciate the talent of others, I had a small handful of favorites. Jack was at the top o’ the list followed by another old school legend, Bill Everett, creator of Namor, the SubMariner. So in 1969, when toward the end of Kirby’s run on Thor, God of Thunder, “Wild” Bill Everett took over inking with issue #170 (actually inking several pages in #169 no doubt due to the passing of another fine craftsman George Klein, who in turn had replaced Vince Colletta starting with issue #168), I was thrilled. Everett’s distinctive style had graced the King’s pencils on several “monster” stories in the pre-hero era. He also had stepped in to finish Thor #143, years earlier, receiving full credit, even though Colletta’s linework can be seen on the first few pages. Still, starting with #170 and for the next six issues, Bill was inker for Thor. Man, did I love the stuff! Though not exactly faithful to the King’s pencils, the collaboration was still a visual feast for my hungry eyes, so much so that during the 1971 Metro Con in Washington, D.C., I bought three pages from issue #170 (pages 1, 14 and 15) from a New York art dealer in attendance. It was then I realized the printed book did not do Bill’s brushwork justice, as anyone lucky enough to own any originals from these six issues well knows! About a year or so later, as finances dictated, I sold the pages to dealers, and always regretted doing so—never thought to xerox them back then, but I still had the comics, and I would continue to study them over and over for years to come. Cut to 1989: I’ve gone to the Mid-Ohio Con to pick up my friend Denys, where he had spent the weekend as a guest. In the dealer’s room, I met an art dealer who had ten or twelve pages from various Thors inked by Colletta and Everett! Oh, did I want them, but couldn’t afford ’em. I did manage to talk the dealer into trading several pages for some Cowan and other art (cool!) and he would xerox some others for me, as I would do for him, with other art I had. I’ve never run across him again, but then I rarely go to conventions. As far as the art goes, oh boy! Christmas, my birthday and other great days all in one! After a drive of several hours, we arrived at my studio in

(above) Examples of the Everett Code abound in issues he inked, especially Thor #175 (April 1970). (inset) You have to flip it upside-down to see it, but it clearly says “Judy Ann” in Everett’s inked squiggle. (below) Bill Everett in the 1960s. Thor TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

the quiet hamlet of North Manchester, Indiana, where I was working with Denys on his assignments for Marvel and DC. After settling in, I again began to study xeroxes of Bill’s incredible, detailed brushwork. Suddenly, while looking at page nine of issue #175, I saw it! Why hadn’t I seen it before? Carefully hidden on an enormous Kirby weapon was a squiggle that spelled “Judy Ann.” In the same panel on a warrior’s shield that resembled a telephone dial was “Judy.” Wow! Bill had hidden a name in his inks. Then, on page 10, in the Asgardian tower dead center on the page were the letters “Judy!” Was there more? Since my originals and xeroxes were few, I snatched my wellread copies, and continued my search. There on page 11, panel three, alongside the Storm Giant’s ax blade I could see an upsidedown “J-A-T.” “Hey! That’s not Judy Ann. What’s going on?” I thought. The middle panel on page 12 held the answer: “Princess Judy Ann Taylor” and “Roman” graced the wall between two black areas. And, by Loki’s horns the words “Judy Ann” and again “J-A-T” were evident. There in the next panel were again the letters “J-A-T” in the wall behind Loki! Then on page 13, decorating the headboard of

Odin’s bed, in the last panel “Judy Ann.” On the floor of page 14’s first panel—”J-A-T!” “Pretty neat,” I thought. In page 15’s last panel, under Hogun’s mace, and again on both sides of the first panel of page 16 hidden in the blue walls was the name “Judy.” On page 17, however, the initials were undetectable. Maybe Bill had grown tired. But alas, not so, for on page 18, on Loki’s wrist, “J-A-T” was formed in the wrinkles of his glove and in the helmet on the warrior to his side was what looked to be another clever “J-A-T!” On page 19 “J-A-” graced the magenta chest armor of a warrior in panel three, and finally the final panel of page 20 hid another “Judy” by the base of the torch. I pondered how long the enigmatic Judy Ann Taylor had been with us. Although long thought as mere background details, the “Taylor,” “Princess Ann” and “Judith” on pages seven and eight now meant something! Even the faint “JAT” on the truck gracing the splash page now had purpose, as I suspect did the numbers “10-01-20,” found on panel one, page two. Mayhap it was Everett’s birth date, but this is total speculation! I couldn’t resist going back to Thor #170 and seeing what else there was to “discover.” And true to form, the talented Mr. E. started his game (as best as I could find) on page two with “J-A-R,” again on page five with “J-A-T” and “J-U-D” on page nine. There are others in ish #170, but if I gave them all, then you’d miss out on the fun of finding them yourself. So, when you next look at these issues, see how many you can find. Remember, “Wild” Bill had hidden variations in every issue in his run, with #175 hosting the most. In issue #174, on page five, the date 10-01-20 again appears as does the date 5-28-38 (could this one be Namor’s birth date? Or maybe the birth date of the enigmatic Judy Ann?), and again 5-28-38 in the third panel on page six, along with another “JAR” and “NS” or “HS” and others. As I stated earlier, I’ll leave some for those interested sleuths among you readers to discover for yourselves.

For more than a decade, I’ve pondered the reason behind Bill Everett’s careful placement of names, letters and dates, and why he choose these particular symbols to be immortalized for all of time. Although I have no definitive answers, I know that Mr. Everett was not the first, or the last, to use his talents to incorporate hidden names in his work. Years earlier, long before I discovered the Everett Code, I had found initials and names among the Aztec symbols master craftsman Murphy Anderson had drawn in an early issue of Hawkman, and there are no

doubt others. But none of these others were secretly encoded into the work of Jack Kirby. I’ve read (in a slick li’l pub called The Jack Kirby Collector) how Jack had one time questioned that a craftsman of Everett’s stature had ever spent a stint as regular inker of his work. After all, Bill Everett was the creator of Sub-Mariner, and as I understand it, Kirby rarely bothered with the printed comic, so most likely had NEVER seen the names and symbols that graced his powerful artwork. These issues inspired me to follow in the footsteps of Bill Everett, as from 1989 on, I’ve hidden “Gabe” and other notes such as “PDG” or “Angel” into uncredited work I’ve done with Denys and others. A few examples (if anyone out there is interested in looking) include Question Quarterly #1, the cover to Green Arrow #41 and Batman: The Ultimate Evil, among others. I even incorporated a few friends names in our last collaboration, Hardware #36, for DC’s Milestone line. So, in closing, although discovering the hidden code, hitherto unknown to most fans of both Jack “King” Kirby and “Wild” Bill Everett, I’ve opened a Pandora’s box of new questions for the faithful legions to speculate and debate. It’s possible the answers are out there, but where? Who out there holds the key to decipher… …The Everett Code?! ★ [Editor’s Note: Angel Gabriele also submitted the Red Skull illo that ran in #48, which we mistakenly forgot to credit him for.]

More ’bout Inkin’ (right) Unused pencils from Journey Into Mystery #109 (Oct. 1964), which would’ve been inked by Chic Stone, a favorite inker of this mag’s editor, if not many others. They’re presented here to give a bit of an idea of the level of Jack’s penciling in roughly the same era as Thor #126 (March 1966), the cover of which Mike re-inked below. Thor, Hercules TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

What Might Have Been

Thor #126 cover re-inks and comments by Mike DeCarlo n the 1960s, inkers were not held fast to faithfully tracing off on a penciled page. Often, as long as you met deadlines, no one looked too closely at the interpretations of the inker. However, I feel poor Jack had his share of inkers who perhaps not merely rushed towards a deadline, but had no clue as to how to approach Kirby’s pencils.

Colletta was perhaps the worst, and this “calamity” was accentuated because it coincided with Jack’s most wondrously creative and artistic period (1965-1970). I have studied Kirby’s art since 1963, when I first began reading and buying Marvel Comics. His strengths were many: Structurally sound (excellent geometric construction), graphically strong with awareness of design and value composition (though maybe not in Toth’s class) and wonderful use of descriptive line and style. Nothing was put on the page that did not have meaning to it. Colletta ignored or compromised all of these strengths with his sloppy, time-saving strokes, often converting important detail to silhouettes or deleting them entirely. He also softened Kirby’s dynamic angularism and inserted his own weak interpretations of muscle, texture and (worst of all) facial expressions. I have attempted in this recreation to somewhat offer a “what-might-have-been” and hope I was able to do it in a pleasing manner. I purposely chose a croquill style of fine-arts inks because I know that is what Stan Lee was looking for at the time, and why he ultimately chose to stay with Vince for so long. ★

Near myths

A Vain, Humorless Dullard Why was Kirby’s Thor such a gloomy Gus? by Robert L. Bryant Jr.

ercules, you have to admit, probably wouldn’t use a straw. But when Thor comes upon the Prince of Power and Jane Foster getting all cozy in a New York soda parlor in Thor #125, there he is, daintily sipping his Coke or Pepsi or Mountain Dew through a straw rather than guzzling it down in a single lusty swallow. He’s probably trying to impress Jane. Or maybe he fears the deadly Olympian Belch that can follow 12 ounces of carbonated Earthly beverage. Anyway, two’s company, three’s a triangle, and ere long, Thor and Herc are wrecking the soda fountains. “I do not seek to harm you!” Thor cries as the battle begins in #126. “Merely to show you that power misused is power abused!” Hercules: “What manner of warrior are you? Your lips spout fables, whilst your sinews are the equal of Hercules!... The mortal female for whose favor we battle deserves better than such a vain, humorless dullard as thee!” Thor: “Dim-witted clod! If I be humorless, it is not without good reason!” Then he serves Herc some knuckle sandwiches to go with his Coca-Cola. Besides the bombastic Jack Kirby pencils, one reason the 1966 Thor/Hercules sequence is so well remembered is because of their vivid contrast of personalities—a contrast emphasized by some choice Stan Lee dialogue. Thor, the grim-faced champion of justice, vs. Hercules, the smiling hedonist who lives for wine, women, song and picking up other gods’ girls in soda parlors. “He is as Thor had been, in the halcyon days of yore!” the thunder god thinks. So why was Kirby’s Thor such a gloomy Gus? “It is not without good reason!” the thunder god had said. Let’s examine some of them: 1. A DIVIDED PERSONALITY. In Thor’s origin story, the lame physician Don Blake appears to “channel” Thor’s consciousness and powers. As time went on, we saw less and less of the doc, and he was essentially forgotten unless he was needed for a story point. By the time Kirby left the book in 1970, Blake was little more than a mortal costume that Thor wore on occasion. Was Blake Thor? Was Thor Blake? Which was the original personality? Was Thor Blake’s dream of being a god? Or was Blake Thor’s dream of being a mortal? Did the “Blake” part of Thor tug at his subconscious, whispering, “Let me out of here,” while Thor was off adventuring? (Like Roy Thomas’ conception of Rick Jones and Mar-Vell.) Did the two personalities rub each other raw like sandpaper? “If I am truly Thor—then who is the real Donald Blake?” Blake/Thor wonders in Thor #158 (1968). “And if I am Don

For a god who proclaimed his undying love for human Jane Foster over and over (and even agreed to relinquish his deityhood over her), he sure got over her quickly after one glance at the stunning Sif in Thor #136 (right). And they say women are fickle! Thor, Hercules, Sif, Jane Foster TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Blake—where was Thor before I took his identity?” Or... what if Blake never existed? What if Odin, in a fit of pique over some real or imagined transgression, had transformed Thor into “Blake,” blanking his mind and forcing him to live a lifetime as a mortal until he’d learned his lesson? And what if Thor’s mighty hammer, like Tolkien’s One Ring, brought itself to Earth, blindly searching for its master, because it wanted to be found? And then, when “Blake” stumbled onto Thor’s hammer in the cavern, the Odinspell was partially reversed, and “Blake’s” influence gradually faded away.... (Was this “The Answer” that Stan Lee promised in 1968? Base perfidy hath caused that issue to vanish from my collection.) In any case, a psychologist would have lots to discuss with Thor, or Blake, or both at the same time. Wham! He’s Thor. Wham! He’s Blake. It’s still easier than Clark Kent’s phone booth. 2. WOMAN TROUBLE. Don Blake loved Jane Foster. Thor loved Jane Foster. But Thor loved Sif, too. Did Blake love Sif? Did Sif love Blake? Which woman did Thor really want? Was it unseemly for a god to be messing with a mortal? Sif could certainly kick Jane Foster’s all-too-human posterior... and then Don Blake could tenderly apply some Band-Aids. 3. FATHER ISSUES. At an absolute minimum, it would be heavy, heavy baggage to have Odin, Lord of Asgard, the All-Seeing, the AllKnowing, the Ham that Am, for a father. Odin was always watching, always interfering, always taking away Thor’s powers, making him go here, go there, do this, do that. (Imagine this for a young-Thor “Tales of Asgard”: “Thor, thou hast failed to sweep the fallen leaves from the Rainbow Bridge as I did tell thee! As penance, thine allowance shall be cut yet again, and in the Corner of Concentration shalt thou stand until I shall tell thee otherwise! I have spoken!”) A cosmic disciplinarian, Odin would be a massively difficult father image to live up to. Add to that an absent mother. (No mother... and an omnipotent father. Good thing Dr. Wertham had gone back to sleep during the 1960s.) Was Thor competing with Odin? Hoping to become just like him? (Unlike Loki, who rebelled from the very beginning.) All those times when Odin acted from afar to punish Thor for some failing, was he really interested in cosmic fairness or somesuch, or was he just trying to psychologically rein in a son who could one day threaten, or inherit, his power? (Like Jock Ewing used to do to J.R. on Dallas.) 4. SQUARE PEGS, ROUND HOLES. Bradford Wright, in Comic Book Nation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), a scholarly study of comics’ impact on youth culture, puts Thor’s essential problem like this: “An outsider in his own right, Thor is never completely at home with his fellow Norse gods of Asgard or with the mortals of his adopted world.” Could it be that simple? Wright also finds it significant that Thor never kept his 1965 promise to take down the Vietcong. 5. HAST THOU A TYLENOL, MORTAL? And, of course, the most simple explanation of all: That huge, iron helmet, with its soaring metal wings, probably really hurt Thor’s head and made him cranky. Conan the Barbarian had the same problem. It’s why he drank so much. ★ 21

www.kirbymuseum.org Be a Kirby Warrior! Join the Kirby Museum!

Newsletter TJKC Edition Fall 2007 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 comic books and comic book creators. To this end, the Museum will sponsor and otherwise support study, teaching, conferences, discussion groups, exhibitions, displays, publications and cinematic, theatrical or multimedia productions.

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

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

(previous page and above) Before debuting them at Marvel in the ’60s, Jack used an early version of Thor and Loki in DC’s Tales of the Unexpected #16 (Aug. 1957). Thor and Loki shown at left and above are ©2007 DC Comics. Thanks to Chris Fama for the art restoration!

Sunday New York Times “Editorial Observer” acknowledges Kirby as “Comic Book Genius” A wonderful way to start the week of Jack Kirby’s 90th birthday was the publication of Brent Staples’ “Jack Kirby, a Comic Book Genius, Is Finally Remembered” in the Op-Ed section on 26 August. Although the piece was spurred by the appearance of Kirby art on eight of the twenty Marvel Super-Heroes stamps issued by the United States Postal Service, Mr. Staples noted the growing interest in Mr. Kirby. neighborhood has changed a lot since then, but in some ways it’s the same. TwoMorrows sent California some Kirby books for fund-raising purposes. We had samples of our membership gift posters for Rand and scanner were set up ogling and enticement—as well as a large print of the spread from Kirby’s autobiographical at the TwoMorrows booth at the “Street Code”. Special thanks to festival organizers James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook huge San Diego convention again for their help. this year. He was pleased to talk with Kirby fans like David Schwartz, Glen Membership News—thanks for your support! Gold, Kasra Ghanbari, Tom Scioli, and We welcome these new members: David Hanson, Michael Hill, Luke Kennedy, Francesco Andrew Cooke, to only mention a Spreafico, Matt Webb, Jay Goitia, Mark Miller, David Jeffery, Bruce Zick, Guy Gilchrist. These are few. Once again, Mike Thibodeaux, our recent renewed memberships: Richard Lemon, Allan Harvey, Jeffery Wilkie, John Coyne, Ger Mike Burkey, Anthony Snyder and Apeldoorn, Lyle Tucker, Thessalonikianastasios Lazaridis, Olivier Foltzer, John Floyd. more allowed us to scan Kirby pages for our archive. Online Resources After the convention, Lisa Kirby Kirby-L Discussion Group: http://kirbymuseum.org/groups.jkm also invited Rand and his wife Lisa to Bob Heer’s Jack Kirby Comics Weblog: http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/kirby/ stop by her house north of Los Bob’s New Kirby Announcement page: http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/kirby/new-kirbyAngeles for a visit. A lovely time was announcement-page/ had by all, with Rand scanning many Bob’s Kirby In Print Guide: http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/kirby/kirby-in-print-guide/ pieces from Lisa’s personal collection. Harry Mendryk’s Simon & Kirby blog: http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby/ Tom Morehouse starts off “Kirby’s Real Folks” exhibit Tom Morehouse, who curated our “Kirby’s Civil War” exhibit, sparks another show titled “Kirby’s Real Folks”. Says Tom, “whether it was a world leader or just some kids he met at a convention; Jack’s universe was peopled with real folks.” While Tom has gathered examples from some of the more obscure and rare items in his “kirbykrypt” collection, we hope that everyone will contribute. See the exhibit page for more info: http://kirbymuseum.org/gallery/v/Rea l+Folks/ Kirby Museum at Lower East Side Art Festival On 8-9 September, Rand and Lisa Hoppe, with special guest Richard Bensam, manned a table spreading the Kirby word in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan Island’s East Village/Lower East Side. Jack Kirby spent his early life a few blocks away. He fought in the ghetto’s streets, then worked hard and moved out, never wanting to return. The *Please add $10 for memberships outside the US, to cover additional postage costs. Posters come “as-is” and may not be in mint condition.

Kirby Pencil Art Archives See numerous examples of Kirby pencil page photocopies (like the ones presented in this magazine) at http://kirbymuseum.org/gallery/v/Pencil+Photocopies/ and be sure to join the Museum to get access to even more exclusive, members-only art! Special Thanks to Andy Brown and the folks at Conundrum Press for their donation related to Andy’s Captain Victory essay in the book “Monster Island Three”, and Gary Carlson and Joe Zierman at Big Bang Comics for the promotional page in “Teen Rex - Last of the Dino-Men”.

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*

Marvel—14” x 23”

Galactic Head—18” x 20” color

Incan Visitation—24” x 18” color 23

Fight Club

Gallery

by Shane Foley

ack was a guy from the mean 1930s streets of New York’s Lower East Side, so it’s no surprise he could draw his characters dishing it out as well as taking it:

(page 24) Bruce Lee character sketches (mid-1970s) A real life warrior getting the Kirby treatment. For some reason, I’ve always been surprised by Kirby’s ability to capture likenesses—like he did, for instance, in The Prisoner—and with Henry Kissinger—and here, with Bruce Lee! This was apparently done in conjunction with Jack’s unused Bruce Lee sample pages (see below) that later saw print as part of Phantom Force, with Bruce turned into the character Gin Seng.

tighter than ever. Five great warriors from Jack’s hectic days in the early ’60s! (page 31) Thor/Loki commission drawing (1984) More warriors from his past. Note how Jack was so good at placing his characters in evocative environments—even when he’s drawn that place a thousand times before! (page 32) Atlas #1, page 7 (April 1975) [sigh] If only Jack had produced more episodes of this wonderful warrior! A perfect example page of how to manipulate the reader’s eye from panel subject to panel subject!

(page 25) OMAC #7, page 5 (Sept. 1975) OMAC’s antagonist is a small box! Yet even in a scenario like that, Kirby is able to make the struggle really dynamic. ‘Power’ is one of the buzzwords used to describe Kirby’s wonderment—and this page proves the point!

(page 33) In The Days of the Mob #2, page 21 (unpublished) (1971) A particularly grisly episode comes to a flamboyant end, as a mobster who was caught with his hand in the proverbial “cookie jar” gets his comeuppance. What a waste of a pinball machine...

(page 26) Johnny Reb Sunday strip (December 8, 1957) A ’50s page with warriors of a totally different and more realistic kind. Not a single ‘action’ panel, yet the page is alive with character and group dynamics and the promise of excitement! What amazing art came from Jack during this time—and so much of it was rarely seen!

(page 34) In The Days of the Mob #1, 2-page spread (Fall 1971) The warrior involved here was Jack himself!! What detail! Precious few shortcuts were taken here—an inspired work, inked by Vince Colletta!

(page 27) Black Panther #10, page 2 (July 1978) More warriors in choreographed violence! Compare the published page to these pencils and see how Jack added some background elements to make a clearly readable page even better!

(page 35) In The Days Of The Mob #1 cover rough (Fall 1971) People who saw Jack draw said it looked like he was reproducing a drawing he could see in his head! Maybe he

did that with this cover too—’cause this is very close to how the published cover looked! (page 36) Demon #1, page 10 (Aug. 1972) With pages like these, it’s no wonder many feel that it’s the early ’70s where Kirby was at his best! Isn’t the mass and power of the upper left warrior a work of sheer brilliance? (page 37) New Gods #8, page 18 (April 1972) Another early ’70s page! Kirby liked to use the word ‘Ultimate’! Pages like this show that it was Kirby himself who was the ‘Ultimate’! What more can be said? (page 38) Our Fighting Forces #151, page 8 (Oct. 1974) Look at the decoration hinted at on the back wall. Kirby drew at 100 miles an hour, yet always managed details like this. A quiet, yet immensely powerful page... (page 39) Our Fighting Forces #152, page 9 (Dec. 1974) …followed by an all-out action page. Explosions, debris, rubble, action—and warriors of one kind or another everywhere! Kirby loved ’em all! (page 40-41) Thor in Asgard pencils (pencil version of our wraparound cover) (circa 1969) Partially unfinished Marvelmania piece—who knows why? Jack must have enjoyed the effects his Krackle made— why else would he finish those before finishing the rest? ★

(page 28) Destroyer Duck #5 cover (Dec. 1983) Battered—rough as guts! Jack could even make a duck into a warrior! Fabulous trademark Kirby explosion!!

(page 30) Avengers commission drawing (1983) Hard to believe the artist here is the same as that who did the Johnny Reb page. Yet for all the grace that was now missing, Jack’s pencil work got 24

(page 29) “Death Fingers” concept drawing (precursor to Dingbats of Danger Street ) (circa 1975) Great layout! With minimal detail and his amazingly creative use of shadow, Jack shows his new character’s environs and dangers. Love the clothes on the line behind!

’ re ou e y th e re , su p of ou’r , ay to Y ca Ok the ain. meri dle at d c h A h a n , l in foo apta can Wel . u C yo ing you d g h an nyt , can bein y a ap le b C nd ded ? ha roun iles x r su the E

O be ooh! An surr You o d c an even unde an esc d th ap if yo !!! esc ere’s e art u’re ter ape still ist, SU ror o from no RR f b OU ein the ND g... ED . !!!

When You’re A Jack Kirby Hero, You’d Better Get Used To Being... Okay, scared, aren’t you? Perhaps you want to bring your friends. Surely if there were a bunch of Avengers around you, you couldn’t be... SURROUNDED!!!

All Arounder by Glen Gold

irby ay, K an out w y An ally r s r re tion neve ermuta ing of p rround . of su heroes s i d h goo Can ever guys und o surr ad a b s! Ye guy?

Surrounded!

(And by the way—those Exiles were pretty third rate, and the villains on the Avengers cover weren’t much better, but Mister Miracle surrounded by guys in jumpsuits? “First we will tie you up then we will check your tire pressure and see if the U-joints are properly lubed. Bwahh-hah-hah.”)

Howe ve it doe r, sn’t usuall yg too w o ell. e lut so g ab tin he et as tt fg dw . Bu ing o nde Fury K rou ick as k w r su or N , he bac ed s. po st Fir und 1940 rro e su in th

Sure that cover looks be like it might actually y. John Severin, not Kirb e, Doesn’t matter! Becaus only five issues later, Kirby once and for all put his stamp on making sure he was surrounded again.

An d ye the Du ars la n, tw m en te h Du r, w ty i ma s sid m sti ith e su nag , Fu ll at AG rrou ed to ry AIN nde ge t by , th d ye ska guy is tim t te s o e b o ard n s!

u’re at yo w wh an you I kno ?C ded king thin surroun e be ar still here t n when you tha ? m e of mor re of the ea ther Yes!

But this is Nick Fury, and I figure after a couple of decades of this, he has post-traumatic stress disorder and even when he’s going out to get the newspaper, he still has to deal with the terrible threat...of being...

Fast & Fury-Ous

More Than Just Action

Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos #6 examined, by David Schwartz ole models. We all need them, and those of us who were lucky enough to have good ones, have immeasurably better values because of it. Nowadays it seems that role models that kids can count on are few and far between. After all, outside of a child’s parents, who does he or she turn to for role models? Is it the rapper who advocates violence? Is it the politician who lies to further his own position? Is it the over-worked and underpaid teacher who just wants to get through the day and go home? These days, who can kids turn to for advice and a sense of understanding of our culture? You got me. With all the craziness in the world today I don’t know how a 10- or 12year-old child could look to outside sources for advice on how to become a well-rounded individual. Hopefully kids today have grounded, well-rooted parents, or many of them are going to be caught adrift without the moral compass to understand right from wrong. Thankfully, much of my role modeling came in the way of Marvel comics during the 1960s, and most notably Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (with a little help from Steve Ditko). For example: The Rawhide Kid taught me that it’s important to do what you know to be “the right thing” even when everyone around you misunderstands your actions. Ben Grimm (the Thing) taught me that no matter how rough the world has been on you, you still deserve to be loved, and can still be a part of a family. The Human Torch taught me (and Spider-Man as well) that there’s no shame in losing a battle, as long as you give it your all and face your challenges instead of running away from them. Thor taught me the importance of respecting your parents, even when they are wrong-headed and you can’t always follow their dictates. For all of Thor’s disobeying of Odin over his love for Jane Foster, he maintained respect for his father. But one of the most important lessons learned was in Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos #6. This comic came out in 1964, at the height of the Civil Rights movement. This was one year after Martin Luther King, Jr. led his march on Washington. And this was the year Stan Lee and Jack Kirby let all comics readers know where they stood on prejudice and bigotry. Looking at the cover of Sgt. Fury #6, you’d never know it was going to be a story about morality. You’d never know that it was going to teach every young reader in no uncertain terms that prejudice was unacceptable in our society—that bigotry of any kind was something to be scorned and ashamed of. Nope, the cover looks like any other issue of Sgt. Fury. It was a story about a Nazi leader (Field Marshall Erwin Rommel) who was known as the Desert Fox. It was a story that promised to be full of action and suspense. In fact, the first few pages of the story sparkle with Kirby’s dramatic power. The splash page sets up the villain, with the floating heads of the Howlers fore-shadowing their involvement in trying to stop this Nazi menace.

(this spread) This story was pretty hard-hitting for its time, and really pretty daring during the Civil Rights Era in which it was published. (next page, top right) A 1980s fan commission of Nick Fury. Characters TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

For those unfamiliar with Sgt. Fury, the Howling Commandos were an integrated army unit. They were multi-cultural, and even had a black member in their group, Gabriel Jones. Since the real army was segregated until 1948 and World War II ended in 1945, Lee and Kirby took creative license with the inclusion of Gabriel Jones—they were clearly trying to make the Howlers a melting pot of nationalities and cultures. Rebel Ralston was a southerner from Kentucky. Dum-Dum Dugan appears to be Irish. Dino Manelli is Italian and Izzy Cohen is Jewish. Junior Juniper (who loses his life in battle) is an “ivy-leaguer.” All of these disparate commandos come together to fight like a welloiled machine without any tension regarding differences in their religious or cultural backgrounds. This changes in issue #6. Early in the story while the Howlers are training to take on Field Marshall Rommel, Dino Manelli is hurt while leaping from a plane when his parachute fails to open. Sgt. Fury hurtles after him and saves his life by untangling his chute in mid-air as they fall! Leave it to Kirby to make everything he touched bigger than life and virtually bursting off the page! Kirby almost makes you feel what it’s like to be in the air without a chute, as we watch Fury risk his own life, without hesitation, to save Dino. While Dino’s life is saved, he suffers a broken leg, which causes Fury to have to get a temporary Howler to replace Dino on the mission. Here’s where the life lessons start to be introduced. The replacement, George Stonewell, is introduced to Dino in the hospital, but refuses to shake his hand. When introduced, he mutters only, “Manelli, eh? An Italian I see…” Immediately, we see that this new replacement has a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Fury notices it, too, but gives Stonewell the benefit of the doubt. Next, Fury introduces Stonewell to the Howler’s Izzy Cohen, a Jew. Again, Stonewell is standoffish and dismissive. Again, Fury is concerned, but believes Stonewell is just trying to impress Fury

by showing him how tough he is. Next, Fury introduces the new guy to Reb Ralston. Since Stonewell perceives Reb to be “one of my kind,” he’s happy to meet him. Reb doesn’t understand what the new Howler is intimating and is clearly oblivious to the racial prejudices that are being exhibited. In the next panel, Stonewell meets Dum-Dum Dugan, and is starting to feel more comfortable as he perceives both Dum-Dum and Reb as being more his “kind” of people. The piece-de-resistance of prejudice occurs when Stonewell meets Gabe Jones. At first he is excited because he perceives the name “Jones” to be a “real American name,” but then is shocked when he realizes Gabe Jones is a black man. Stonewell even remarks that he’s not sleeping in the same barracks with him. At this point, after seeing the blatant prejudice,

Sgt. Fury has had enough! He confronts Stonewell and calls him in no uncertain terms a bigot. He remarks that, “We’re stuck with ya because we move out by dawn—and there’s no time to trade ya in for a real human being!” Fury then warns Stonewell that he’d better keep his racist tendencies to himself or he’ll make him wish he was never born. Now, back in 1964 these were the politically correct sentiments of the day, but a substantial part of the population felt exactly like Stonewell. There were areas in the Deep South and other places around the country where a lot of the people were prejudiced, were bigoted, and didn’t shy away from expressing it. Here’s where the role model question comes in. What Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did in these pages was to make it almost impossible for the young comics reader to feel justified in being prejudiced. Nowhere in the story was there any sentiment that Stonewell had a right to his racist views. Nowhere in the story was there any question that Stonewell was wrong. Dead wrong! No gray, no ifs, no buts, but completely wrong about his bigotry. In my opinion, this was a brave thing to do. Comics were sold throughout the country, and Stan

Lee wanted those sales. He didn’t want to have his comics a point of controversy, and I’m sure Martin Goodman (the publisher) was not too crazy about controversy that might affect sales either. Yet, both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby clearly felt that this was an important issue—so important that they were willing to make a stand and say, “This is not okay,” and punctuate it for every comics fan who picked up this issue of Sgt. Fury. And what makes this all so very effective, is that this is not an adult preaching to children about the evils of racial prejudice—this is a hero, letting the reader know that bigoted people are “rats,” and that “they just crawl out of the mud long enough to poison whatever they touch.” How could a child reading this retain any racial prejudice if he admired Sgt. Fury and what he stood for? Throughout the rest of the story, we see that Stonewell is a brave soldier and an able commando. However, it is his unwillingness to be a team player with Izzy and Gabe that has him continually jeopardizing the mission. We are shown that while the Howlers work as a well-oiled machine, when someone’s personal prejudices get in the mix, their efficiency breaks down. Ultimately, Stonewell is injured in battle (because he disregards Fury’s orders and wants the credit for himself instead of having to share it with the Jewish Izzy) and the capper to the entire story is that to save his life, Stonewell must receive a blood transfusion from Gabe, who shares his rare blood type. Imagine all of the bigoted people in the early 1960s who picked up this comic and watched a white man receiving a blood transfusion from a black man. And the thing that makes this so clearly a “role model” moment is that there is no controversy within the participants of the comic. While Stonewell is shocked that he received blood from Gabe, everyone else treats it as a completely normal occurrence. As a result, a young reader is left with the idea that integration, with all races and cultures able to live together is the norm, and that anyone who is bigoted and trying to stop this from happening is wrong.

It was this type of role-modeling that was sprinkled throughout Marvel Comics in the 1960s. Stan Lee (and I’m sure Jack as well) made it quite clear that an individual’s actions mattered, and made a difference. They believed that a kind, benevolent society should be the norm—a society where differences are accepted and embraced, and that no one should be discriminated against because of their race or culture. I personally grew up reading and internalizing these beliefs. And I find that many of the ideals voiced within these comics still ring true to me, even some 40 years later. In that way, Lee and Kirby (and Ditko as well) helped to shape the beliefs of my youth and helped to provide me with a moral compass that has served me well over the years. And since I clearly wasn’t alone in reading their work, I’m sure there are many others like me, who to one degree or another, had their sense of morality shaped by these comics. ★

Our Artist @ War

(right) This excellent detail from the cover of Foxhole #5 (July 1955) shows the King could capture intense combat scenarios with the best of them. (next page, top) Here’s a marker drawing of the greatest shield-slinger of them all. (below) Jack and Scott Fresina pose behind a special cake to commemorate DC’s 50th anniversary, at the Golden Apple Comics store in 1986. Foxhole TM & ©2007 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate. Captain America, Bucky TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

(right) Cap and Bucky radiated confidence to an uneasy nation in the detail from the first page of Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941). (next page, bottom) “Home Alive in ’45!” was a popular saying among Patton’s soldiers as the Allies sensed the collapse of Fascism in Europe. Jack and Roz happily posed for this picture upon Jack’s release from duty. 46

The Kirby Battlefields

War stories and their combatants as told to and interpreted by Scott Fresina, with historical notations and additional writings by Jerry Boyd f you sit down long enough to hear from various veterans about their war experiences, you’ll find they usually come in two types. There’s the combat vet who keeps the horrors he’s seen deep inside and wants to share little or none of it with others, and the other type who’s made some peace with his former situation and who’s willing to pass on the information as a testament of his own worth as a soldier, or an exorcising of past demons, or a warning... of possible perils for the future. Former P.F.C. Jack Kirby was the latter. In interviews, travels to comic conventions, and as the subject of books and magazines, the King’s reminisces of the killing grounds of Western Europe in ’44 were sprinkled throughout his postwar conversations. I first met Kirby in the early ’80s as was recounted in TJKC #43. Being a lifelong fan of the fantastic in pop culture (particularly television, comics, and sci-fi and horror films), it was a joy to meet Jack and his family through Mike Thibodeaux. As a former New Yorker and having some talent as an artist, the Kirbys and I hit it off and a long friendship followed that ended somewhat with Roz’s death but lives on (happily) through get-togethers with Lisa Kirby, Mike T., and other members of the extended Kirby “familia universalis”. (That’s Italian for... awww, figger it out!) It was my honor to introduce and say a few words at the 2004 Jack Kirby Awards in San Diego, and of course a greater honor just to have known and to have had many pleasant afternoons with the Kirbys. In the soldier’s scenarios Jack would recall for general public consumption (such as the ones printed in this ‘zine and elsewhere), I noticed there’d be war tales he trotted out for some... and other darker, bloodier ones he’d held back—just for his intimates, or perhaps, people he’d felt would understand. What follows are some stories of his I remember almost word for word, and since I treasured those special talks as they were happening, I’m happy to pass on the memories of an old soldier (who’ll never fade away) down to his many fans.

The Red Sheet Occasionally, Jack and I’d go to the backyard where they had a pool to sit and talk—always a great place to relax. Mostly, we sat in Jack’s studio, which I believe was originally a den. We had a lot of fun talking about all sorts of things but things got a little more sober when he shared his war stories.

It really wasn’t a happy time when he got drafted—and I think he was already married to Roz. She made it a point to write something to him every day. She wanted to write something nice to him on a regular basis because she felt he was out there struggling, suffering—he’s out there in the war every day so she felt he needed to hear something nice and positive from home. He told me, “One day, we had a particularly ugly day. One day something... so ugly... happened to me that I didn’t want to talk about it later. When I came back to the barracks and there was mail for me, I read a poem and I read it out loud—something Roz had written for me.” He couldn’t remember the poem or exactly what it was about, but he said it was a Reader’s Digest kind of “fluff stuff ” and when the barracks guys heard it they were just howling with laughter and falling over. At first he didn’t want to tell what that horrible event was... and those of us that heard that part of the story assumed the laughter spilled out because you had these battle-hardened dogfaces listening to this easygoing, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm kind of poem and the audience has been out catching hell! Over the years the story would actually come out in bits and pieces.

I never pressed it. But sometimes I’d ask, “Isn’t it funny, Jack—that you ended up in the infantry and you’re an artist. How come they didn’t put you in an artistic function?” “Well listen, it was World War II and they needed every able-bodied guy. Not that I didn’t try to get out of combat. I thought I’d get work like Willy Mauldin or work with Stars and Stripes or something.” At one point he told me he approached his C.O. (Commanding Officer) and said, “Look, I know my name tag says Kurtzberg but my professional name was Jack Kirby.” He says the C.O. was unimpressed so he went on, “I drew Captain America for the comics! So, maybe you can get me some work, y’know... doing work like that.” “So the guy says, ‘Oh, you’re an artist! I didn’t know we had an artist in this platoon here. Let me look into this…’” And Jack could go on sometimes and just ramble. I didn’t know where he was going with this or what revelation he was going to blindside me with, but he recalled that the officer later called on him to do a job. Kirby was told, “I need an artist on this. It’s good you’re an artist.” He held up this map for Jack to look over for a reconnaissance mission—a dangerous outing, y’know. “Go across this river here,” the C.O. explained. “We think it’s not occupied but we gotta know. If you spot any kraut machine guns or if you see any occupied areas in this village here, I need you to put some x’s where they show up. This is what I need an artist for.” Jack and I laughed and I asked, “So this is the favor he’s giving you?!” “Yeah well, I opened my big mouth so I got in even hotter water! So now I’m doing something really dangerous!” We continued to laugh about that but as the story went on it was no laughing matter. This was the story he didn’t want to reveal earlier. He apparently had big problems with the freezing cold as winter went on. It was bitter, bitter cold. He spoke of a buddy who saved his toes because he found some cognac in an abandoned house and he shared it with Jack. It kept their circulation going. Another friend of Jack’s lost three toes. Jack, following orders now, went to investigate (with some other soldiers) this empty inn. It was big, gorgeous. They went in there and it seemed to be abandoned. Concerned about his feet, Jack said to himself, “I’m gonna find some booze... because it’s freezing cold.” He locates the bar but he turns to find three Germans have got the drop on him. And he’s thinking, “This is it.” So, they order him to sit down but they don’t know he can speak German and he understands their conversation. His grandmother told him stories in German when he was small. The Nazis notice the name Kurtzberg and recognize it as a Jewish name. They start saying “Juden” (Jew)! They call him a Jew and all this stuff. Again, I didn’t know where Jack was going with this but it was fascinating because they had held him at gunpoint. Anyway, they decide they’re going to do the drinking and they sit down on some easy chairs and they make Kirby sit down on the floor in front of them. They’ve got guns trained on him and one has a pistol… the three of them have him covered. Then Jack veered off in his narrative to me. “The Germans were pretty boys, you know what I mean?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Well, they really liked to look good… in their uniforms. And their uniforms were very beautiful. If you look at the way they’re tailored—there’s much more thought that went into the (aesthetic) design that the average dogface American in their fatigues.” Now I’m really lost. Kirby continued, “They have these great, beautiful riding boots that go up to here (he made a sweeping gesture to his kneecap). Not only that, but the riding boots have a sheath for a dagger that fits perfectly in there.” Now I realize where he’s headed. As the German soldiers are drinking, they’re getting pretty drunk and they start to pass around the whiskey or whatever they’re drinking. As Jack put it, “They’re speaking German but I understand them perfectly. They start saying things about my mother.” And Jack says, “And a few times in my life this has happened to me—a ‘red sheet’ comes down before my eyes... and then I don’t know what happens.” Then he got quiet. I’m all into it and I shout, “Well—what happened?! I gotta know—!” Kirby says, “All I can tell you is... I started shouting stuff in German back at them... and when I was done, they were all on top of me... but they were all dead.” I sat there dumbstruck and I finally whispered, “Oh, my God… I’ll bet that’s something you’ll never forget.” “I can still hear their screams.” Roz elaborated. “He keeps reliving it in his dreams. Whenever I hear he’s talking German in his sleep, I wake him up because I know he’s... reliving that situation. I say, ‘Jack honey, wake up!’” Apparently, Kirby had pulled the knife from one guy’s boot (that was extended toward him) and was incensed enough—old style “East Side rumble”—and three guys dead, y’know. He finished it all with a smile.

“By the time I make it back to the barracks, I read this ‘sing-songy’ poem about how beautiful life is... from Roz…” And we all started laughing so hard we were near tears. We were about to lose it—Roz, too. It was a very grim thing though, and I said to him, “Boy, what horrors you guys went through... to keep this country free.” Philosophically, Jack asserted, “Yeah, war’s a terrible thing. But when I see you kids and how you turned out, I would do it again.” (One of the nicest things I remember him saying.) A final addendum to the “red sheet” thing: He told me a few times he’d lost it before like that; street fights, that kind of thing. I said, “Like the Hulk, huh?” He’d answer in all seriousness, “Really that’s the Hulk.”

Frozen Feet (In the record cold along the Western Front in late 1944, GI’s with “frozen feet” or “trenchfoot” was one of the biggest problems for soldiers from England, Canada, America, Australia, France, and elsewhere. Many of the Allied commanders expected the war to end before Christmas, and unfortunately thousands of their men didn’t have proper winter combat gear. Consequently, many soldiers (like Pvt. Kurtzberg) were sent home because they were unable to continue fighting. Some lost their toes or had to have their feet or legs amputated due to loss of blood circulation in the trenches.) Jack was aware of the problem of frozen feet but couldn’t account for why he didn’t lose any of his toes or worse. He shared a foxhole with three guys. One guy kept an eye out for cognac or any type of alcohol that aided the circulation. The other guy kept his feet together because he stole extra pairs of socks. So I asked him, “So, Jack—you didn’t keep a bottle around and you didn’t steal socks. So how did you keep from losing your digits?” He said, “Oh, I don’t know!” 47

Street Fighting

(above) Jack in 1945 in Brighton Beach, NY. (top right) PFC Jack Kurtzburg, recuperating in an Army hospital, sent this illo of his frozen feet condition home to Roz. (right) The Foxhole #1 (Oct. 1954) cover sums up how some soldiers reassured their families back home. (top right) A rare Kirby art lesson depicting a soldier struck down in action.

Another time we got together, Jack told me about the experiences he and his friends had in taking towns from the enemy. “War is never like it is on television or the movies,” he began. “One minute you’re receiving orders from a guy and the next minute the building you’re in is caving in from artillery fire! If you’re in a certain part of the building you can jump out of the window and you might be safe for a while longer. If not... you’re killed. “I remember talking to this lieutenant and in the next few seconds, I’m knocked all the way into this factory and he’s a big red smear on the wall. To this day I’m not sure what exactly happened. We thought we were in a secure area, y’know, but it turns out three tanks with infantry had come up the streets around us. We were surrounded and didn’t know it! Tank fire, I guess... killed our lieutenant. This lieutenant was from Brooklyn like me, and we had that in common… but he must have taken a direct hit and I’m thrown on another floor in another building! “We all did what we had to do. The Germans are charging the factories and we’re firing on them from the windows. A German charges me but a G.I. from the second floor hits him with a bullet and the guy must have been knocked back through three rooms. “You get... combat experience fast in those situations.” I asked him what he was most concerned with when his life depended on his every little move. “You soak up everything that goes on... quickly,” he said without a pause to reflect. “You’re conditioned to do that. Sometimes combat is like a comedy. Guys are running and shooting in all directions. But you’re still in the most serious… the deadliest of realities. You gotta kill the enemy! So you pay attention… and soak in everything that’s going on around you. You have to do that! It may mean the difference (between life and death)...”.

Carnage Jack explained, “We had to cross the Moselle River (in France). It was an important area that was contested by us and the Germans. “So, we sit next to this big ravine that goes along France for miles. It’s hundreds of feet down from our former positions and we gather there with replacements. The wind is blowing so hard we can barely hear our colonel’s orders.” (It was always interesting to me when I heard Jack’s war stories that he usually placed himself in the scenarios all over again, speaking in the present tense as if he was actually reliving those days, and writing it down as it happens. I’d heard these last two a few times, so I remember them well.) Kirby went on, “It’s the middle of winter and the cold is our enemy, also. Sounds just disappear in the wind, but we figure out what he wants us to do and it’s confirmed when we get up, move out, and go down this cliff to join this tank battle. “The sounds of the tank battle couldn’t be lost in the wind! We heard it all… and saw incredible things! The fighting is crazy! Guys are running naked back and forth across the Moselle River. A German tries to surrender to me and I yell to him that I don’t have the time to take prisoners and that we’re trying to march someplace. “We’re still in line, following our lieutenant, and moving toward this massacre. We went over (the river) in long flat boats, assault boats, y’know. “The Germans know they have to turn us back, this river is vital to them. It (the battle) went back and forth. They chase some of us back to our boats after guys reached the other side. They were firing directly into our foxholes where our guys were sleeping! “I was one of the last guys to cross, and I hung onto… one of the boats. The smoke of the battle shielded me and I barely made it across. The Germans didn’t waste their ammunition firing into the smoke. They fired at guys they could see. “I guess we had enough guys to take that side of the river. The Germans ended up retreating. Later, the engineers came down and put the bridges down. The next wave of guys had an easier time crossing than we did. 48

Skull—Duggery (Nazi ne’er-do-wells examined by Jerry Boyd) The greatest of Simon and Kirby’s early villains was undeniably Hitler’s ace saboteur, assassin, and one-man wrecking crew, the Red Skull. Like the Joker over at National, he survived a number of seeming deaths to recover, frustrate, and thwart the Young Allies, Captain America, and Bucky time after time, just as his real-life counterparts did to the Allies. Evading the American authorities with seeming ease, the Skull put hideous ends to U.S. generals and anti-fascist civilian leaders while still finding time to destroy munitions and military stations. Sometimes he announced his deadly presence to his enemies with a small... red skull. Political cartoonists have used skull images for decades to denote war’s destructive nature, so this Cap fan always took it for granted that the Red Skull was a natural extension of those illustrated editorials and war posters. But to be certain, I decided to contact the legendary Joe Simon and get his comments and Mr. Simon said, “I don’t mean to rain on this parade, but the Red Skull was not derived from any of those skull posters. It was simply a good and colorful image that was ‘invented’ to provide shock art. We did a lot of that in those days. “What I’m trying to say is—we hoped to deliver a Phantom of the Opera moment when the viewer is first confronted by the horror close-up. We had no idea that the character would be remembered for such a long time.” So, the true origin of the Red Skull hearkens back to Lon Chaney, Sr.’s 1925 horror classic, The Phantom of the Opera (shown above). However, the image of war’s skull-faced countenance is still present in Jack and Joe’s great malefactor because Chaney’s makeup for the mad Erik was reportedly based on the horribly disfigured veterans of World War I!

The Real Red Skull? If the Fuhrer had had anything close to his fictional four-colored henchman, the spotlight would’ve fallen on special commando operations and S.S. officer Otto Skorzeny (shown below with Adolf Hitler). Skorzeny was a fanatical Nazi who gained his leader’s unfailing confidence by successfully executing a number of daring and dangerous missions throughout the war. The high point of his résumé was his incredible rescue of deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in which he and a select group of operatives (on gliders!) invaded an Italian partisan mountain stronghold where the Duce was held prisoner in ’43. They got him back to Germany without losing a man or firing a shot. Later, Skorzeny was personally given another special command by Hitler and ordered to sow confusion among the Americans before the Battle of the Bulge began. Otto and his men did their jobs well, moving and removing road signs, infiltrating enemy lines to disrupt communications, seize badly-needed supplies, etc. The U.S. armies in the area were so caught off guard that Hitler’s huge gamble there paid big dividends initially. A rumor even circulated that an assassination attempt on General Eisenhower’s life was underway and that and the surprise German offensive was enough to keep Ike sequestered at his command post for a number of days, reducing his effectiveness. According to Time/Life’s The Battle of the Bulge, a German commando team, captured by G.I.s near Liege, told their captors that Skorzeny and a special commando team were going to penetrate all the way to Paris; they would rendezvous at the famous Café de la Paix, head for Supreme Allied Headquarters at Versailles and assassinate Eisenhower. Ike became a virtual prisoner in his Versailles headquarters, surrounded by triple guards, machine guns, and barbed wire. The Supreme Allied Commander suffered through a few days of this captivity; then he stormed out of his office and announced angrily, “Hell’s fire, I’m going out for a walk! If anyone wants to shoot me, he can go right ahead. I’ve got to get out.” Jack Kirby was a

(top) Cap was temporarily under “new management” when he got his assignment from the Red Skull in Tales of Suspense #67 (July 1965). (above) Generals Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton (who commanded the 3rd Army that Kirby was in), Omar Bradley, and Courtney Hodges were understandably jubilant as the US made ready for their last assault on Germany in March 1945. (left) Joe Simon, another “super soldier,” smiles for this photo at war’s end. (below) The Red Skull at his nefarious best, in this blown-up detail from an unused cover for Captain America Comics #7.

(above) If you say you’ve never seen this Boy Commandos issue, you’re probably right! This was the rare ashcan edition DC put out to secure copyright for Simon & Kirby’s new title in ’42. (right) Simon & Kirby’s Agent Axis was a beautiful, cold-blooded killer and saboteur. Her chief nemeses were the Boy Commandos. Here’s one of her appearances from Detective Comics #85 (March 1944). (below) Shades of convoluted continuity! Agent Axis reappears in Tales of Suspense #82 (October 1966). Not only was the villain in the wrong era, he was fighting the wrong hero (Captain America instead of the Boy Commandos), and at the wrong company (Marvel instead of DC)! Captain America, Red Skull TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Boy Commandos TM & ©2007 DC Comics. Agent Axis TM & ©2007 both companies, we guess.

private in General George S. Patton’s 3rd Army (which showed extraordinary heroism and tenacity during the Bulge fighting along with General Courtney Hodges’ 1st Army) and he may have remembered the famous rumor that so concerned the Allies then some twenty-plus years later when he and Stan were doing wartime stories for Cap and Bucky. In Tales of Suspense #66-68, Captain America, hypnotized by a lackey of the Red Skull, gets involved in a mission to kill the Supreme Commander of the Western Allied Command! (Ike isn’t mentioned by name, but you get the idea. The former general and president was still living at the time.) The assassination plot rumor, perhaps began by Skorzeny in ’44, was possibly resurrected by the King in ’65, and transformed into one of Cap and Bucky’s most engaging multi-parters. (In the comics, The Supreme Commander was based in London.) And Skorzeny? Like the Red Skull, he escaped Allied justice and reportedly made it to South America where he lived out the rest of his years, at times hobnobbing with other former upper echelon Nazis in hiding.

The Female Red Skull? Among many of Hitler’s prejudices was his chauvinistic attitude toward women. In his National Socialist rhetoric, German women were to be caretakers of the home, supporters of their men, and bearers of healthy Aryan children. That was basically it. Few women impressed the Fuhrer on a professional basis, so it’s highly unlikely he’d have entrusted his top espionage assignments to a member of the gentler sex. But in the pages of Detective Comics and the Boy Commandos, Agent Axis, a S&K femme fatale, put her own unique stamp on fifth columnist machinations. Like the Skull, she put an end to U.S. generals and decimated Allied strongholds with a network of fascist helpers. Inevitably, Captain Rip Carter and his plucky band of war-hardened youngsters crossed paths with the mysterious Agent Axis, whom everyone assumed was a man! Revealed as a woman (but no lady!) at the end of their first struggle (see Mister Miracle #7 for the reprinted tale), the murderess chose to leap to her death rather than be captured. Naturally, she survived to threaten the war effort of her antagonists later. She was never the über-menace Timely’s Red Skull was, but she was a memorable villain in her own right, and also notable as the first DC baddie to cross over into the Marvel Age! In Tales of Suspense #82, a hypnotized Cap (what, again?!) secretly controlled by the Adaptoid, fought (in his mind, at least) against his old foe (!), Agent Axis! King Kirby may have forgotten by ’66 that he’d cocreated A.A. for DC, but the brief encounter was nevertheless… another Kirby first! ★ 50

“The enemy picked their positions well when they really wanted to hurt us. At Moselle, they attacked small units, small forces... y’know, groups of guys they thought they could handle. When too many guys (Americans) came along across that river, they made a strategic withdrawal. That was probably… a smart move. “Later on, we were stuck in a spot where they were just plastering us. They hit us with heavy machine gun fire and .88 guns. They tore up the ground around us. It felt like the world was ending... with this offensive of theirs! The whole shoreline was being ripped to shreds and there were guys being cut in two and flying through the air! You just have to get as low as possible… and stay there! I’m scared to death! In minutes the shoreline looks nothing like it did twenty minutes before the shelling.” This seemed to me like another ‘how’s-Kirby-gonna-get-outtathis-moment?’ so I interrupted him to ask, “Wow, Jack—so from your description of this battle, the Nazis have really zeroed in on your company! How’d you survive?” Jack smiled, shook his head, and said, “A guy orders me to take five men… and go see Marlene Dietrich! Can you believe it? We fall back and get on a truck that takes us to an old church. The church had been ruined by the fighting. Marlene gets out of another truck that pulls up about the same time as ours. Some officers get out of the same truck. Marlene goes in and gets up on a stage and entertains a number of soldiers! There were some Germans in the crowd, also!” He laughed, and then continued. “Sometimes fighting… combat, can be a hodgepodge of events and then you get other crazy things like that. Marlene Dietrich… at the front! “One scene… I’ll never forget. I saw these dead German soldiers laying… in a perfect circle almost… but the bottom parts of their bodies were missing. Cut in half, all of them. A shell must have exploded right in the middle of this group.” We both shook our heads, picturing this image of carnage.

No Tough Guys I told Jack that one of the Kirby comics that affected me the most when I was small was Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos #18. I didn’t find out until later, when I rediscovered the book, that Jack only drew the splash page and the last page of the book! It’s the one where Nick Fury has decided to propose to Pam Hawley and they’re on the splash together (see TJKC #24) in the midst of a Luftwaffe raid on London. So she runs off to the hospital to care for the wounded and he returns to his unit. He’s bought a ring and he’s ready to give it to her. The interior was done by Dick Ayers and throughout the book, Fury comes close... in the action sequences to losing that precious ring. Fury shows up at the Hawley home at the story’s end and there’s a nine-panel sequence, I believe, penciled by Kirby. Fury’s so excited about proposing to his love that he doesn’t take in how distraught her father is. Her father says, “Nicholas, I can’t bear to tell you this. There was... a raid... on the hospital where... Pamela was…” There were, like, three panels of shock with the Sarge putting that big Kirby fist in his face... and he removes it—and he’s stunned. The ring drops from his hand and he walks away into the night. That was one of the most powerful segments I’d ever seen and I told Jack that it caused tears to roll down my face when I was a kid because here was this very tough guy and… Jack cut me off and said, “There are no tough guys.” And I think he knew what he was talking about.

Hitler, Patton, & Darkseid Jack had a great understanding of his characters, particularly his villains and despots and what motivated them. He said, “The bad guys don’t know they’re bad. They’re just self-interested.” Jack could get going talking about politics and history. He’d enjoy those types of conversations. He’d say, “Look, there’s not much difference between Darkseid and Patton.” And I’d cut in, “I thought you were gonna say, ‘Like

Hitler.’” Kirby would go on. “Patton would sleep on the field with his troops. He’d do that because he believed it’d be good for the mission and it’d be good for everybody. He believes what he’s doing is right. He’s self-interested about doing that and the objectives of his army. They don’t think they’re evil! They think we (people who object to them or their ways) are evil. “Darkseid thinks he’s got the right idea!” So I’d challenge that. “So, Hitler’s like Darkseid... but Hitler’s like Patton?!” (I had to question part of that rationale—I could see Hitler and Darkseid partying together, but...) “I don’t know if Hitler’s like Patton!” he answered, maybe backing off a bit. But then he said something I’ll never forget. “We’re gonna have another Hitler. Mark my words.” I laughed and said, “You’re kidding! We can’t have another Hitler! C’mon. There’s all this education about this nut...” Jack said, “No, no, no. Trust me. It won’t be obvious like that. He’ll come wrapped in the American flag!” I’ll never forget that. That was deep. I said, “No Jack… people won’t —”. He said, “Trust me. I’m working on a novel that this may come out in.” “Is it a graphic novel?” I asked. Jack said, “No, I’m just writing it. I’m not drawing it. And some of that will be in it.” [Editor’s Note: Jack’s referring to The Horde, his unfinished fiction novel.]

(above) Throughout his career, Kirby had opportunities to include the unforgettable despotism of the Nazi warlord in his stories, like this instance from Spirit World #1 (1971). (right) Although their main adversaries were Communists, Fighting American and Speedboy battled other perceived menaces to society as well. From Fighting American #1 (April 1954). (below) Compare the original art for S&K’s cover for Race For The Moon #1 (March 1958) to the published version. Fighting American, Race For The Moon TM & ©2007 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate. Spirit World TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

Gangsters & Nazis Kirby, like Churchill and Stalin, compared Hitler and his National Socialist cronies to big city gangsters. And the young Jacob Kurtzberg encountered more than his share of gangsters in his early years on New York City’s Lower East Side. The young 20th Century saw the rise of N.Y. mobsters Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Dutch Schultz, Meyer Lansky, and an ambitious enforcer named Al Capone (before he relocated to Chicago). Our future King could relax and enjoy the romanticized versions of underworld toughs in darkened movie houses where Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, George Raft, and Humphrey Bogart held court, but he knew mobsters for what they really were. Gangland criminals were vicious, greedy people who fought tooth and nail for control of territories and the Nazis’ “land grab” in Europe (Jack would tell co-workers in the late ’30s/’40s) was not much different. Before he did his part in combating fascism, Jack had to survive his “first battlefield”—the mean streets of the Brooklyn slums, and he told this harrowing account of a gangster’s attack to Scott in the late ’80s. He had sold newspapers for a little while when he was a kid. (He came off like Scrapper of the Newsboy Legion to me when I heard this one.) I don’t know if he had a regular paper route or if

he just did a friend’s route for a little extra money. In any case, Jack explained, “I knew the mob guys for what they were... and I knew the Nazis for what they were. “You see all the guys (gangsters) all the time. If they were in a very good mood, they’d tip you real good. Or they’d even buy all the papers off you and tell you to go see a movie. Sometimes they wanted to show off to the guys and girls they were with.” Kirby paused for a moment and a frown appeared. Then he went on. “Now, if you caught them on the wrong day...” It seems Jack had apparently ticked off one of these criminal types some kind of way. The guy chased him down a street and Jack tried to escape by hiding in a phone booth. He put his feet up against the door (to keep the guy out). “The guy just kicked out all of the glass (in the booth) so he could kick at me! Imagine a guy chasing a little kid like me... and kicking all the glass away so…” I asked Kirby if he got beaten up by this ‘person’ (I’m using the term loosely, of course) and he said no. While the man was in a frenzy, stomping in the glass sections, Jack wisely shielded his eyes and darted out of the side of the booth (which was partially cleared from being a glass barrier) when he sensed the time was right. Being small, fast, and certainly terrified, he made it safely home. Jack finished this story with, “These guys had some crazy tempers. Those were the streets and the times I grew up in.”

Cold War Tensions In the brilliant television mini-series Cold War, it was stressed many times that America and Russia’s longest military struggles were their forty-plus year battles between the values of democracy and the ideology of Communism. Jack and Joe, of course, contributed to their nation’s way of thinking in the pages of Fighting American. In retrospect, their sometimes lighthearted take on East vs. West could’ve been interpreted as subversive. In the ’50s, just a mention that an individual was “soft on Communism”, “a red dupe”, or “a pinko” derailed marriages, reputations, and careers in the U.S. While Dr. Wertham and others set their sights on crime and horror comics, most war super-heroes-battling-Communism comics slid beneath the watchdogs’ radars and F.A. and Speedboy came across as good, two-fisted, All-American Commie smashers, and indeed they were. Johnny Flagg was Steve Rogers for a new era. And though the Marxist-Communist villains the pair encountered (like Poison Ivan, Hotsy Trotsky, Rhode Island Red, and others) were sometimes whimsical in their execution, the entire product never undermined the seriousness of the threat from the Iron Curtain. Moreover, Simon and Kirby were never seen as undermining the West’s fight against Bolshevism. Jack, Joe, and later Stan Lee (who’d co-create a small division of Soviet baddies to take on his “marvels”) had to live with the possibility of nuclear war and the global political landscape was

something no comic creators could ignore. Stan, usually light-hearted in his dealings with fans, was dead serious when he responded to readers (in the letters columns) who asked him to “ease up on creating” so many Communist villains. Lee responded that he’d stop when the Reds did and he followed up The Red Ghost, Comrade X, The Gargoyle, etc. with The Black Widow, The Crimson Dynamo, The Titanium Man, and the Cuban-dispatched Crusher (and this last bunch was all for Iron Man!). Before the Marvel Age, however, the “Space Race” was in full gear following the success of Russia’s Sputnik in ’57 and Kirby and Simon responded to America’s interest in space with a comic called Race For the Moon (in ’58). In his time at Atlas, he did new WWII stories amid tales of the Korean Conflict. The race to land men safely on the moon and return them, new battlefields in Asia, Cuba, South America, the Middle East, and Africa gave creators new arenas for their super-heroes to duel their foes. The super powers fought by proxy for the most part, utilizing espionage to its best capabilities, cajoling nations, intimidating friends and enemies, but both were humiliated (before it was all over and the West won) and beaten by North Vietnam and Afghanistan. One Cold War incident that Jack commented on from the ’80s, is recalled by Scott. The only thing I remember about Jack relating to the current events of the time— remember, it’s really funny… because talking about politics, you could tell Jack could really have a fiery temper. He could get incensed. But 99 percent of the time I saw him, he had it… his temper, under control. Around the time during Reagan’s tenure… there was a Korean jetliner shot down by the Russians. And Roz was in her usual place sitting on the couch and Jack was standing around his drafting table and he got a little incensed talking about the incident. “Look, they shot down this Korean jetliner… and they had some American civilians on it!” Kirby went on and with his temper flaring, he was saying that Reagan blew it! Jack said, “What they shoulda done—they shot down one of ours, we should shoot down one of theirs!” And Roz says right then, “Oh, c’mon! Nobody wants war!”

“Naww, I’m just saying—but now they know he’s (referring to President Reagan) yella!” And I looked at him and said, “We should just shoot down one of them, Jack? We should be as bad as them?” “Naw, not as bad as them,” he continued. “They shot down a civilian jetliner. We shoot down a military one. Because… listen, when a soldier signs on, he knows he can get killed at any time. Everybody knows that. That’s what you’re signing on for. So we shoot down a military one. We still wouldn’t be as bad as them.” (To put Kirby’s comments in another perspective, there were

to know! (New Gods #1) article, commenting jokingly on it as I did so. With Metron is responsible for the Matter Threshold considerable fuss Hitler put on his glasses and used by Apokolips to visit quick, punishing attacks began to read: upon the warriors of New Genesis. Technological Speer is, in a sense, more important for Germany breakthroughs on the worlds of the gods present today than Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, or the themselves in the forms of bacteriological monsters, generals. They all have, in a way, become the mere “an impacter the size of a planet”, and other auxiliaries of the man who actually directs the giant innovations Jack grandiloquently called, “technopower machine—charged with drawing from it the cosmic war!” maximum effort under maximum strain... in him is The young Jack Kirby lived through an intense era the very epitome of the “managerial revolution.” in which successful army and naval invasions meant Speer is not one of the flamboyant and picturesque all the difference in the world to a new time when Nazis. Whether he has any other than conventional bombs and missiles of all types could bring a political opinions at all is unknown. He might have terrifying end to entire nations in a matter of minjoined any other political party which gave him a job utes. In “The Pact!” (New Gods #7) he shows how and a career. He is very much the successful even celestial “ultimates” must find the wisdom to average man, well dressed, civil, non-corrupt, very march away from greater conflicts (with their mighty middle-class in his style of life, with a wife and six weapons in tow), and march toward a conciliatory children. Much less than any of the other German peace. (Even Darkseid had to go along with that for a leaders does he stand for anything particularly while at least.) German or particularly Nazi. He rather symbolizes a One of Darkseid’s human models, Adolf Hitler, type which is becoming increasingly important in all could not envision (luckily) the technological possibelligerent countries: the pure technician, the bilities that Speer and others entreated him to fund classless bright young man without background, and support. Speer wrote later in his remarkable with no original aim than to make his way in the memoir Inside the Third Reich: “Hitler was plainly world and no other means than his technical and not delighted with the possibility that the earth under managerial ability. his rule might be transformed into a glowing star. Occasionally, however, he The men who make the machines of battle, joked that the scientists in their otherby Jerry Boyd worldly urge to lay bare all the secrets under heaven might some day set the Nazi Germany stood at the forefront of nuclear globe on fire. But undoubtedly a good research in the early ’40s, but Hitler’s lack of deal of time would pass before that concern for ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (there’s came about, Hitler said; he would certhat phrase again!) in this area and many others tainly not live to see it.” that Nazi developers had in abundance eventually True. The Nazi warlord would commit compromised his war machine with enormous suicide before the first atomic bomb consequences. was dropped on Hiroshima in Imperial Albert Speer, the Fuhrer's level-headed Minister of Japan. However, before that, German Armaments and his personal architect, was the highgeniuses like Wernher Von Braun were est ranking Nazi to see the revolutionary spirited east and west by the concepts present in weapons innovations. Americans, Brits, and Russians to Recognizing that the unequal struggle on land, prepare for the next war. (Already, the sea, and air favored the Allies from late ’42 on, creators of the a-bomb were becoming Speer worked with technicians that pioneered the household names—Albert Einstein, ME-262, the first fighter plane to use jet engines. Teller, and Oppenheimer, among The Germans also possessed a remote-controlled others.) flying bomb, a rocket missile that could home in Hitler and Speer look over some of the latter’s architectural plans in 1934 Technicians had in the course of on an enemy plane (and was even faster than the at the Fuhrer's home on the Obersalzburg. WWII become ME-262!), and a groundmore important to-air missile was in than columns of soldiers, It is the lack of psychological and spiritual ballast, development. and in their own way, more and the ease with which he handles the terrifying Speer was a young powerful. technical and organizational machinery of our age, man ablaze with ideas, (Esak outdid Metron with which makes this slight type go extremely far but in his zeal to perform Micro-Mark in the Hunger nowadays… This is their age; the Hitlers and his ministerial duties to Dogs. This invention forced Himmlers we may get rid of, but the Speers, whatevhis fatherland, he closed the outmoded Female Furies er happens to this particular special man, will off his thoughts in other into becoming button-pushers. long be with us. areas. He never asked Micro-Mark was an innova“Hitler read the long commentary straight through, questions when hushed tion of greater destructive folded the sheet, and handed it back to me without a rumors of war atrocities potential than the Matter word but with great respect.” reached his ears and Threshold. Kirby was comAt the Nuremburg War Crimes trials, Speer never queried menting on the times.) In life impressed the international tribunal with his frankReichsfuehrer Himmler as in art, the ultimate chalness. He was spared the death penalty and served about the fate of the lenge for nations seeking to twenty years at Spandau Prison in Germany for “resettled Jews.” co-exist (or to wage war) was using slave labor to perpetuate and prolong the Nazi To Kirby he was a reining in the unbridled scienwar effort. “heartless technician” tific advances for destruction. Speer warned the world from his trial about the (see Jack Kirby Collector The British Observer (of lessons he’d sadly learned and the dangers of tech#38) and a basis for the April 9, 1944) recognized nology given free rein under a totalitarian regime. King’s “academic god” these changes in an article Metron also seemed to learn from his mistakes Metron. In answer to Speer presented to Hitler at after being manipulated by the dark side (I had to Orion’s angry denunciathat time. put that in) in New Gods #7. His more fan-friendly tions of his character, the Speer wrote, “In order to efforts include his helping Orion against Kalibak in master of the Mobius This close-up of Albert Speer was probably taken in anticipate [Nazi Party Sec.] New Gods #1, his attention and aid to the young Chair coolly replies that 1944. The Reich’s crumbling fortunes showed on his Martin Bormann [whom Speer Scott Free, his collaborations with Himon, and his who runs the universe face in this gloomy portrait. despised], I myself handed discovery of a brand new world for the matters not to him. How it Hitler the translation of this Supertowners to dwell on in The Hunger Dogs. ★ is run is what he wishes

Architects of War

millions of Americans who were angered by that ‘accident’ and many who felt the same way Jack did.) Anyway, that was his take on that. Some of Kirby’s feelings here may make some of you feel that he was an “all-smiles” guy on the outside, but filled with “attitude” on the inside—and a negative attitude at that. That’s far from the truth. The King’s “attitude”, if he had one at all, was overwhelmingly positive. He believed in the inherent goodness of all people. He believed that if he treated a person with dignity and fairness in his heart, it’d be noticed, appreciated, and reciprocated in turn when it was the other individual’s turn. Often, his tactics worked. Mark Evanier, Mike Thibodeaux, the Sherman brothers, and others who knew him longer and better than me can attest to this. It was only when Jack’s “fairness doctrine” failed, and/or the bullies, liars, and cheats of the world took advantage of the good folk of the world (like Hitler and Mussolini’s betrayal of the agreements made with Chamberlain at Munich in ’38) that he got angry at times. He certainly had a right to those feelings. Jack grew up a poor kid on the tough slums of the inner city, a young man trying to eke out a living during the Depression, and a soldier on the Western Front during the Big One. Remarkably, Kirby survived all of that with his sensitive, caring nature intact! He triumphed over the Hitlers, Red Skulls, and Darkseids of his time just as his comic heroes did. He shared his immense talents with a grateful, adoring audience for decades and left a legacy filled with more plateaus than most artists (in comics and other mediums!) could hope to attain. Kirby took a measure of pride of being a good man… and a good American citizen. He often stated that he was proud of being an American. He was aware that had he grown up somewhere else where there was no great outlet for storyteller/artists like him, his life would’ve been very different. Jack knew he could’ve perished in the war (or lost his feet) and never boasted that he knew he’d make it or that there was no bullet made in Germany that had his name on it. As a “regular guy” (as he sometimes called himself ), his other large contribution to the society and land he loved and supported (even though he was no fan of Presidents Nixon and Reagan, just to name two) was Captain America. He loved all of his characters for different reasons, but Cap was something special. He told me, “He was an expression of patriotism. It was a patriotic time (the war years) and Captain America expressed what a lot of people were feeling. It wasn’t about getting into the war, but doing what was right and what was needed. And Hitler, the whole Axis thing needed… to be beaten.”

So, the “Kirby battlefields” stack up as a score of victories for the little guy who stood up, fought the good fights, survived, and continued to spread his notion of fair play and right through his deeds and work. Not bad, Jack… not bad at all. ★ Scott and Jerry extend special thanks to Joe Simon, Aaron Sultan, and Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., for their time and contributions in the completion of this piece. Excerpts from Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer are copyrighted by the Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1970. Mr. Miracle, Metron TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

Metron reveals himself to Cadet Scott Free in Mister Miracle #6 (Jan. 1972). Cleverly, Kirby used Granny Goodness’ orphanage as a play on the Hitler Youth groups that spread across Germany and Austria in the 1930s and ’40s. Those groups became the Nazi dictator’s training grounds for fledgling soldiers, just as Darkseid’s orphanage system was in the comics. Characters TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

Foundations

Life In The Foxhole

he Comics Code Authority would have had a field day with the title of this story! You’ll understand in a few brief pages. Foxhole was part of a “new group of comics designed for readers who are tired of the same old stuff,” or at least that’s how the ad ran. In fact, most of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s creator-owned line bore a striking resemblance to the team’s earlier successes with Prize Publications. The idea behind the line was very similar to an idea Jack would pitch to DC Comics some years later. Joe and Jack would develop concepts for titles, then staff out the actual stories to a bullpen of artists, with the two men serving largely in an editorial “big-picture” capacity. Later at DC, Jack launched most of his titles himself. But at Mainline, other artists handled the bulk of the interior work immediately, often with a Kirby cover to entice readers. The Mainline bullpen was pretty much the same guys who freelanced for S&K at Prize—artists usually relegated to back-up features behind a Simon & Kirby main feature. The comic racks where jammed with titles at this time, and it didn’t take long before the team’s dream of starting their own imprint was in jeopardy… In this story from Foxhole #2, Jack tells a tale very similar to “Slaughter House” originally published in the July 1954 issue of Black Magic (reprinted in the Jack Kirby Collector #44). Foxhole #2 was cover dated December 1954. While restoring this art, I was struck by the odd title

Art restoration and text by Christopher Fama

lettering. Readers of this magazine know Jack often penciled the title of his own stories in large regular handwriting at the top of the page. I wonder if that wasn’t the case here; but the inker was in such a hurry, he inked Jack’s chicken scrawl and no one caught it. And now, strap yourself in and enjoy “Booby Trap!” ★

Mainline house ads, promoting Foxhole, among other new titles.

Winners & Losers Jack’s most personal war stories appeared during his obscure run on “The Losers” in Our Fighting Forces #151-162 from 197475. The run began and ended with Joe Kubert covers, but the middle issues had striking Kirby covers like this one from #155. Characters TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

Phantoms In The Mist

by Shane Foley Partisans: Officially the “Peoples’ Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia”, the Partisans were the major resistance movement engaged in fighting the Axis powers in the Balkans in World War II. The occupying Nazi forces were so brutal on the local populace that this group’s guerrilla activities enjoyed wide support from the suffering population. In 1943, they received official recognition from the Allies as the legitimate national liberation force of the country. Source: Wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisans_(Yugoslavia)

y far my favorite issue of the “Losers” that Jack Kirby produced is “The Partisans” (Our Fighting Forces #155, May 1975). Kirby always told a good solid story but every so often one seemed to sit up and take me by surprise. This was one of those stories. I love it when a writer gives away the secret or a major element of a story right up front and in the reader’s face—yet the reader can’t see it. Herge’s TinTin adventure, “The Castafiore Emerald,” is one of those stories, where the villain of the story is boldly depicted in the first panel, yet the reader would never know. Jack did that in this issue. [SPOILER WARNING!] In the first panel, the Partisans appear “like Phantoms in the Mist.” Way to go, Jack! This is a ghost story and you’ve said as much on page 1, panel 1. But of course, the way you did it, you knew we’d never pick it, didn’t you? And you were right! After a drop gone wrong, Sarge and a wounded Gunner are lost in the Yugoslavian forest. Then this group of Partisans appears before them. Sarge is happy to have made what he believes to be their contact. But the newcomers don’t speak. They watch silently and gesture. It is all very strange. But this is a war-torn country and there is a language barrier. More

strangers appear (as if from nowhere—ha!) but they are no more outgoing. The apparent cultural divide continues as they make no effort to help Sarge with Gunner. It annoys him—but what to do? He goes with them. By the time Sarge realizes this is not the contact group he was to meet up with, it is too late. Gunner and he haven’t the energy or means to move on, so he decides he has little choice but to help this group (“the bunch of crumbs!”) complete their task—blowing up a significant bridge. Our heroes are definitely not in control here, and Jack wrote it so well. Sarge, leaving Gunner to rest, has another very strange, silent communication with the Partisan leader in the fur hat. Then he suddenly finds himself alone. “Hey! Where’d everybody go?” More strangeness. Before he can think on it further, he sees that the Partisan group are in the midst of the Nazi encampment drawing their attention. It seems that they want Sarge to do the job of blowing the bridge. And they are willing to put their lives on the line to give him the means to do it. So he goes for it. But they hadn’t drawn quite all the fire. A tank has Sarge in its sights. I am amazed at how well Kirby can draw such a massive larger-than-life figure as Sarge, yet still manage to present him as vulnerable and human. Sarge is no super-hero here and to face this oncoming metal monster he must gamble with his life! It pays off. He is seemingly able to cripple the tank. But he is gravely wounded. And worse! It is not dead! The gun turret moves and he is helpless before it as it seems to find him. But again the self-sacrificing, strangely silent Partisans take an unexpected role. Standing in a group on the hillside they distract the tank and it directs its fire at them. But it has been deceived. Some previously planted explosives in the hills detonate under the tank’s fire and the hill explodes, taking the target bridge with it. Sarge is the only one left. The following scenes of Sarge are sheer Kirby brilliance. On page 14, Sarge is totally bewildered, “a life clothed in shock!” He doesn’t comprehend at all what has happened, wandering around the scene in a daze. The Allies arrive and there is more gunfire and explosions around him. Then on page 16, panel 1, Kirby presents a fabulous visual of Sarge sitting shell-shocked and punch-drunk amidst the carnage. So Gunner and Sarge, blabbering about “Partisans and a fur-hatted leader,” finally get the help they need. The denouement is that there were no Partisans left in this part of Yugoslavia. The last group had been wiped out about a year ago after planting explosives in the hills that they never got to use. And yes, they were led by a man in a big fur hat. What a corker of a story! So complete in itself! So well constructed! So well scripted! So well visualized! How do I finish this? I know—I think I’ll read it again! There aren’t many stories I can read over and over and over again. But this one I can! ★

Puff Piece

Smoking Kirby Cigars An evening with three French cigarillos, by Jean Depelley, with the help of Franck Bouysse and Phil Jecker

hen imagining Jack Kirby (for those unfortunates like me who didn’t have the chance to meet the man), the picture that generally comes to one’s mind is that of the artist hard-working at his drawing table, with his characters bursting out of the page. He somehow was responsible to our collective subconscious for that representation, as he produced at least two vivid self-portraits of that sort (one with his Marvel characters and the other featuring the Fourth World’s). Looking at these pieces of art, one thing had puzzled me for years until now: Jack drew himself smoking cigars. At first glance, one can understand—at least sociologically— Jack’s fascination for big cigars. Not to mention the (politically-incorrect) pleasure he had from smoking, he was himself a small man from the New York Lower East Side slum, he worked at one point in his career with the tall and self-confident Joe Simon and, especially, he constantly had to deal with editors thereafter… quite a handful of good reasons if there were any! But the fact that triggered something in my mind was when I read—thanks to Ronin Ro’s Tales To Astonish book (Bloomsbury, 2004)—that Jack smoked Roi-Tan Falcon cigars—another King’s preferred brand, the one and only Elvis Presley! Then, how could smoking these cigars not be an intense experience—like sharing these two geniuses’ perceptions, going back to the very roots of their own popular media? Thanks to olfactory empathy, I had to conduct this Shamanic experiment myself… and, with the help of two friends, Franck and Phil, we started the search for Roi-Tan cigars! The quest was long and difficult. Suffice it to say that these cigars are not available in France. We had to track them down on the Internet. No luck, there was no export to Europe. It seemed hopeless, until Phil remembered his friend Maria (bless

(above) As Jack pores over proofs for new issues of S&K’s romance comics in this 1949 photo, it’s clear he didn’t know that the Surgeon General would one day require all cigars to carry a warning that: • Cigar Smoking Can Cause Cancers of the Mouth and Throat, Even if You Do Not Inhale. • Cigar Smoking Can Cause Lung Cancer and Heart Disease. • Tobacco Use Increases the Risk of Infertility, Stillbirth and Low Birth Weight. • Cigars are Not a Safe Alternative to Cigarettes, and • Tobacco Smoke Increases the Risk of Lung Cancer and Heart Disease, Even in Nonsmokers.

But hey, the guy was too busy thinking of the effects of comics on the future, so we’ll let him slide.

her!), working for NATO and stationed in Europe, who happened to have a daughter living in NYC… get it? Anyway, the first cigar box was lost during the US presidential elections’ security measures toward postage. A second box was eventually received via Kosovo and a third intermediary (hope you still follow me)... And, at long last, January the 13th, 2005, was the evening we decided to try our Kirby invocation! The following is an edited transcript as faithfully recorded by my dictaphone. 9:35 p.m.: Phil, Franck and I are relaxed in my library room. I have previously taken out Jack’s portfolios, comics and posters from my collection to set the proper mood. The tape recorder is working. After a “not so short” class on the King’s career by yours truly (my friends being more European bande dessinée fans), we strike a match and, like primitive people did, search the smoke for inspiration. 10:00 p.m.: First impressions. These are machine cigars (we purists usually smoke crammed hand-made cigars) and the light smoke quickly goes up, clearing rapidly around us. We are surprised as we expected thicker, peaty fragrances. Following the fumes with our eyes, we realize Kirby’s imagination was unbound, even sometimes directionless (at least to his editors). In Jack’s art studio, his great heroes may have ridden such smoke curls, along their intricate adventurous ways… Phil draws our attention to the vanilla flavor. This childish taste, a little heady and unusual to us, reminds us of the cheap medium Jack made his career in and of his colorful pages of printed art. The cigars are pencil-sized (actually, Panatela-sized). We discuss the artist’s gesture, alternating pencil with cigar in a wide movement, giving time to his imagination to brew, in the magical crucible of his ashtray. We can see Kirby’s hand—large, with cubic fingers—perfectly fitting the cigar, creating his godlike characters. 10:25 p.m.: The evening goes on and we light a second cigar. The smoke has invaded the room, modifying our perceptions… Kirby worked at night, a TV set on to keep him company… we experience a blending of textures and sensations. Is that how a teapot or a hair-drier eventually became wonderful spacecrafts on his pages? 10:40 p.m.: The ideas carry on, when my wife Noelle comes home. The stale atmosphere overwhelms her. Fuming (if I may say so!), she opens the windows for fresh air before storming out. Needless to say I feel rather awkward before my friends! She suddenly comes back with a cake she secretly prepared for the evening… I can’t help but think Roz wouldn’t have done otherwise. The rest of the evening is the usual reunion of friends, the four of us having fun and enjoying a delicious dessert. 11:00 p.m.: The evening is coming to an end. I look at the butts in the ashtray and, suddenly, a photograph comes back to me, a pic taken by Marie Severin: a cigar butt, pinned on the Marvel offices’ walls in the ’70s, with an inscription she wrote below: “Kirby was here…”. No doubt Jack was with us—somehow—during that wonderful evening. ★ Many thanks to Maria for her essential role in obtaining the cigars. This article is not to be considered as an advertisement for a brand of cigars or to promote a dangerous smoking addiction. Kirby quit smoking in 1980 after he contracted throat cancer. 61

Obscura

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

ere’s something new for this column: why don’t we take a glance at a double-header of covers Jack Kirby did for DC comics in the late ’50s? But here’s the kicker: while many a Kirby fan over the years must have grabbed two issues of House of Mystery (#78 and #79) at comic marts, salivating at the thought of Kirby goodies inside (the cover stories, at least), The King’s involvement with these issues extends to the eye-catching covers, no more. His clash with DC editor Jack Schiff over the Sky Masters newspaper strip was just around the corner, and his involvement with the home of Superman and Batman was about to undergo a lengthy hiatus (before Carmine Infantino invited him back to create his Fourth World books), and it’s a particular shame that his body of work for the company during this period is relatively slender—particularly as Kirby had refined his style to a level of concision that had become a master class in design—and, what’s more, it was a style he was to modify even further on his move to Marvel. Once again (as so often in the pages of TJKC), we have to talk about conflicts of personalities bringing wonderful work to an abrupt end. Having said that, both the comics under the spotlight here have work by massively talented contemporaries of Kirby’s, and are well worth picking up—not just for the covers. Take House of Mystery #78 (September 1958): the cover features a blue-clad woman in picture hat, veil and cape, rushing away from a building collapsing because of an earth tremor, while a bystander shouts that “The Lady in Black” always appears whenever disaster strikes. Kirby seems to have inked this cover himself (any dissenting voices out there?), and it has the clean stylization that is the hallmark of his work during this period. Interestingly, the crumbling building is drawn in Kirby’s best futuristic style (though the story is set in the present), and it’s fascinating to compare the cover with Nick Cardy’s illustration of the tale itself, the wind-up in this issue. Cardy was also doing some of his very finest work at this period for DC—more detailed and inspired than his later, more celebrated work on superhero fare such as Aquaman, and his rendering of The Lady in Black is exquisite (the eponymous siren is more naturalistically rendered in the tale than the figure in Kirby’s cover drawing). The rest of this

Looking for inexpensive reprints of the stories featured this issue? House of Mystery #78 and #79 (Sept. and Oct. 1958) and Yellow Claw #4 (April 1957) haven’t been reprinted. But Challengers of the Unknown #1 (April 1958) is reprinted in DC’s recent Challengers Archives.

issue, with workaday pieces by Mort Meskin and Howard Purcell (efficient but uninspired as ever) won’t set your pulse racing, but cover and title story are worth anyone’s shekels. And with the very next issue of House of Mystery, #79 (October 1958), we have an even more striking Kirby cover, with an early prototype of the destructive monster he would soon be turning out by the yard with Stan Lee for Marvel. Kirby’s cover shows “The Creature from Inner Space”, a crystalline monstrosity walking across a steaming lake while a frantic hero tries to steer his boat out of its way.

Comparing the creature with Ruben Moreira’s interior rendering of the tale is instructive, and a reminder of the gulf between Kirby and even his most talented contemporaries. Jack Kirby drew the creature once only—on the cover (no doubt created before the story was drawn)—and it’s that stiff-armed pose of the thing that Moreira reproduces again and again in the story as the undersea behemoth lays waste to all around it.

Capable though Moreira’s work is, one can but speculate on how Kirby would have handled the tale. For a start, the creature would have been seen from strikingly different dramatic angles in every panel—so profligate was his imagination, that he would have staged the action with much more verve. But Moreira’s piece is fun—and the first story in the issue, another Nick Cardy gem, is much more that that. British readers first encountered these tales as back-up strips in the 68-page black-and-white anthologies published by UK packagers Thorpe and Porter in the late ’50s/early ’60s (though never as House of Mystery—these would have been filler strips to titles that reprinted such DC fare as Blackhawk and Mystery in Space). And in black-and-white, the clean, beautifully rendered work of Cardy in “The Fantastic Sky Puzzle” leaps off the page with the energy of Kirby’s contemporary fare. More ordinary pieces by Bill Ely and the underrated Lou Cameron fill out the issue, but both H of M #78 and #79 are well worth Kirbyites seeking out. Within a few years, Kirby was over at Marvel, forging a series of world-destroying behemoths with Stan Lee, and while the results are decidedly mixed from a writing point of view (Stan Lee has often said that he took far more interest in the quirky, nonmonster back-up tales he created with Steve Ditko than the repetitive creature bashes), the Kirby artwork is as dynamic as ever. We’ve touched before in this column on the brief but delirious run that Kirby had on Stan Lee’s Atlas knockoff of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, Yellow Claw. If you’re an adherent of political correctness, stop reading now: the four issues of this book trade in the worst kind of racial stereotypes, quite as hilariously dated as Sax Rohmer’s original Oriental mastermind (but with the added virtue that Kirby could realize visually the evil slanted eyes, the yellow pallor—which went with name, of course— and the long talons). Kirby and Lee incorporated a good-looking, square-jawed Chinese-American hero as a counterweight, Jimmy Woo—but who remembers him? Issue #4 (1957) is highly interesting, but as a demonstration of something odd concerning the artwork: very strong inking that almost overwhelms the original pencils. Here, it’s the sturdy John Severin doing the honors for Kirby, and it has to be said that, for the most part, it might be easy (at a casual glance) to think of the whole thing as the EC stalwart Severin’s own work. But wait!

Look at the splash panels! If you call yourself a Kirbyite, and can’t recognize his impeccable touch here, you should turn in your MMMS card. Look at the first splash, “The Living Shadow”, with its elongated shadow monsters—highly reminiscent, of course, of Kirby’s marvellous SF tale for Harvey, “My Shadow Brother.” Or the splash for the second story, “The Screemies”: The giant scarecrow (with a parody of the Yellow Claw’s face) could be one of the world-menacing monsters Lee and Kirby would soon be trading in exclusively (except that the humanoid white-skinned bird-like creatures fluttering round the scarecrow give the art a surrealistic touch rarely to be found in the later monster days). And then there’s the splash for the last piece, “The Thought Master”, in which an odd seated figure radiates a series of reproductions of the face of the Claw from his head like two elongated horns—highly surrealistic once again. This book, being so outrageously non-PC, is unlikely to be reprinted, and copies are expensive—so make the most of the reproductions here. Have you ever thought to yourself (regarding a much-desired comic), “Boy, I want that book! But it’s too damned expensive!” In the past, I’ve had to wrestle with my conscience (and my under-siege bank balance) over two books—the first issue of Mystery in Space... and the cherishable first issue of Challengers of the Unknown (April/May, 1958, after the try-outs for Kirby’s jumpsuited adventurers in Showcase). In both cases, I persuaded myself it was worth shelling out the necessary big bucks even if I had to live on bread and water for quite some time after. But it was worth it! Look at the cover of Challs #1: two marvellous alien creatures (drawn as so often with Kirby, with wonderful economy—look how few lines are used to create the alien child’s face!), dynamic figure drawing (the under-threat Challs in the glass cage), and a situation that makes you absolutely desperate to find out what was going on! The Marvin Stein inks (correction, anyone?) are serviceable, but the merest of curtain-raisers for the unmatchable Wally Wood renderings a few issues down the line. But the first story, “The Man Who Tampered with Infinity”, has all the energy of late-’50s Kirby, as does the title story, “The Human Pets”—a brilliantly concise SF piece (admittedly a house plot for many a super-hero book—alien children treat humans as pets). Best of all, though, you don’t have to shell out the budget-busting amounts I did—you can buy the first issue of Challengers of the Unknown much more reasonably in the invaluable DC Challs archives (even if the colours are a touch garish on this glossy paper). Ah, what a glorious age of quality reprints we live in! ★ (Barry Forshaw is the author of The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (Penguin) and edits Crime Time; he lives in London.)

The Mystery of Kirby’s Inkers The expert eye of Steve Whitaker on some points raised in Barry’s piece... don’t think Kirby inked either of these House of Mystery covers. #78 might be George Klein but for the single thin keylines around the figures. The touch of cross-hatching in the bottom right makes me think Klein. Funny to see Kirby doing the cover for a Cardy story— two Eisner/Iger shop guys cross paths unexpectedly. Greg Theakston has said that Stein denies inking those Challs stories—but it’s nobody else as far as I can see! We have a problem in identifying the inkers on these early Challs stories—there appear to be no records of who did the work. Presumably Kirby sub-contracted the work, receiving the pay from National himself. Where someone as distinctive as Bruno Premiani is doing the work in 1957 it is easier to say “not Stein” with confidence. Similarly the hands that inked the first Challs for Showcase #6 in 1956 remain a mystery—there may be some actual Kirby inks in there, there may be an unexpected inker from Jack Schiff’s regulars... George Papp, perhaps? Stein and Kirby seem to have parted ways during the early work on what was to become Sky Masters. It would be easy to believe that Marvin Stein denied ever inking Sky Masters as there was no name assigned to the project when he inked that well known sample page of outer space drama. It would be harder to say that Challs was unnamed when those first three issues were in production in early 1958. That may not be the case with the Ultivac story for Showcase #7. My feeling is that Schiff’s need for a bigger slice of the pie meant Kirby could pass less on to the prospective inker and the letterer. This was the reason given by Kirby for not parting with a larger percentage of the royalties from Sky Masters—he had lettering and inking overheads to meet. We never see Stein finishing for Kirby after Challs #1-3. By the Spring of 1958 Kirby had hired Wally Wood for the syndicated strip. Wood could letter and ink—and he designed the Sky Masters logo. This was when the character finally gained a name and the syndicate could begin promoting the feature for its launch in September ’58. I wonder who took over the lettering when Wood left in ’59? I doubt that Ayers lettered his tiers—maybe he got Ernie Bache to do that for him. ★

Clocked Out

(above) Jack’s Challs drawing from his 1970s Black Book sketchbook, done as a gift for wife Roz. (below) Although none of the Challengers reprint issues featured a new cover by Kirby, Super DC Giant #S-25 (July 1971, shown on next page) did, inked by Vince Colletta. But the earliest reprints, #64 and #65, were done in 1968, while Jack was still at Marvel Comics. Characters TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

Borrowed Time Runs Out

Kirby’s Challengers reprints examined by Douglas Toole (Thanks to Neal Adams, Carmine Infantino, Dennis O’Neil and Joe Simon, who were interviewed by telephone in early 2006, and provided invaluable insight into this subject. Thanks also to Mike Gartland, who passed questions on to George Tuska, who replied that he did not remember the assignment well enough to comment on it.) ce Morgan, Prof. Haley, Red Ryan and Rocky Davis were many things over the course of their first 13 years as the Challengers of the Unknown—adventurers, explorers, crime-fighters—but did they end their run as marketing tools? The Challengers of the Unknown was one of the first things that Jack Kirby produced for DC Comics during his brief stay with the company in the late 1950s. The concept for the series was simple but open-ended: Four extraordinary men—jet pilot Ace Morgan, skindiver and inventor Prof Haley, circus daredevil

Red Ryan, and wrestling champion Rocky Davis—cheat death during a plane crash and devote the remainder of their borrowed time to seek out risks and challenge the unknown. Their adventures spanned science-fiction, the occult, the fantastic, and super-heroics. Kirby created the series with former writing and business partner Joe Simon, and worked on the Challengers’ first dozen appearances— four issues of Showcase and eight issues of their own title. Then Kirby and DC parted ways, and the Challengers title continued without him. While the Challengers never had their own TV show or appeared on lunchboxes, the book did attract some talented creators—most notably Bob Brown, who drew the book for most of the 1960s—and did maintain steady publication. In the late 1960s, as the Challengers were crawling away from stories that had them facing a series of weird super-villains (the sinister Sponge-Man! Mr. Tic-Tac-Toe!), the title went through a revolving-door of writers and artists under the editorship of the late Murray Boltinoff. The series stabilized, and appeared it would develop some consistency with Dennis O’Neil as the writer, George Tuska as the interior artist, and Neal Adams as the semiregular cover artist. But as Kirby was preparing to leave Marvel Comics and return to DC, the Challengers of the Unknown book suddenly changed from having new material to reprinting Kirby stories from the 1950s, often with Kirby covers. Was it a coincidence? O’Neil came to the book with issue #68. He said he was given the assignment by Boltinoff, read the previous year’s issues, and then sat down to write. One of his first major contributions was the introduction of Corinna Stark to the cast, in issue #69. “Corinna was my idea,” O’Neil said. “I thought the team needed a woman, and—given the supernatural tenor of the book at that time—I thought that a woman with extra-sensory perception would fit in well. Adding Corinna to the mix helped make the book somewhat my own.” Tuska first provided the art to issue #73 (April-May 1970). In the letters page of that issue, an extended editor’s note section said, “Ever since Bob Brown’s assignment was switched to Superboy and Detective, we’ve been fishing around for a suitable replacement... At long last, we think we’ve located our man in George Tuska. Tuska’s been around for some time ... he earned the right to his own mag, and here he is.” He provided the interior art for issue #73, half the interior art for issue #74, and a onepage introduction sequence for a reprinted story in issue #75. Adams drew the covers for issues #67, 68, 70, 72 and 74, and some of the interior art for issue #74, which featured Deadman.

Adams said Boltinoff approached him to draw the covers. “I had worked for him on The Brave and The Bold, and it was a very happy relationship,” Adams said. “We had always gotten along very well, and it was no surprise that Murray would come to me to provide some Challengers covers because the book had been bouncing from creator to creator around that time.” But something significant was happening at DC in early 1970. Kirby had met with Carmine Infantino— a longtime friend and DC’s then-editorial director— and negotiated an agreement to come and work for DC again. “I was in California, and we met for lunch. After lunch, he showed me three covers— Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle. I said, ‘Jack, they look great. When are you going to do them?’ He said, ‘They’re mine. I’m not going to do them for Marvel. I’d like to do them with you.’ We sat down, he gave me his terms, we worked out a contract and I hired him on the spot,” Infantino said. While Kirby expressed an interest in taking over the entire Superman line of titles—a request Infantino said he could not grant—he did not mention working on the Challengers of the Unknown book again. On a side note, Infantino said that Simon also expressed no interest in working on the Challengers book when he came to DC in the mid-1970s. “When I was working for DC, they were looking for new stuff from me, new ideas like The Green Team and Prez,” Simon said. “Simon and Kirby created the Challengers of the Unknown, but by 1973, 20 years had passed. Why would I be interested in going back to the book?” The hiring of Kirby left Infantino with big news and few ways to distribute it. “Kirby Is Coming!” blurbs began to appear in DC comics. The ‘Direct Currents’ promotional page that ran in the Dec.Jan., 1970-71 comics mentioned Kirby three separate times. Infantino said he was aware of some fanzines at that time, but felt that they had such a small audience that it just made more sense to promote the news in the comic books. “There were hardly even comic conventions back then—they were just beginning. There was no easy way to communicate with the audience,” said Adams. “Public relations for comics books? Back then? That actually sounds funny.” Which brings us back to the Challengers book. Challengers of the Unknown #75 (Sept.-Oct. 1970) featured a one-page sequence in which the group gathered around a fireplace and decided to tell Corinna about the time they faced Ultivac. A reprint of “Ultivac Is Loose” from Showcase #7 (March-April 1957) with art by Kirby followed. That one-page sequence would be the last new Challengers material for six years. Challengers #76 (Nov.-Dec. 1970) reprinted “The Traitorous Challenger” from Challengers #2 (June-July1958) and “The Secret of the Sorcerer’s Mirror” from Challengers #3 (Aug.Sept. 1958). Challengers #77 (Dec.-Jan. 1970-71) reprinted “Menace of the Ancient Vials” from Showcase #12 (Jan.-Feb. 1958). Super DC Giant #S-25 (July-Aug. 1971) reprinted “The Man Who Stole the Future” from Challengers #8 (June-July1959), “Captives of the Space Circus” from Challengers #6 (Feb.-Mar. 1959), and “The Wizard of Time” from Challengers #4 (Oct.-Nov. 1958). The Challengers returned in February 1973 with #78, which reprinted “The Isle of No Return” from Challengers #7 (April-May 1959) and “The Sorceress of Forbidden Valley” from Challengers #6 (Feb.-Mar. 1959). Challengers #79 (Mar.-Apr. 1973)

reprinted “The Monster Maker” from Challengers #2 (June-July 1958) and “The Human Pets” from Challengers #1 (Apr.-May 1958). Challengers #80 (June-July 1973) reprinted “The Day the Earth Blew Up” from Showcase #11 (Nov.-Dec. 1957). Why all the Kirby reprints? Murray Boltinoff, who knew the answers for certain, has passed away, but other information remains. Sales for the Challengers book were down. The 1968 Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation that ran in Challengers #67 said the company printed about 317,000 copies of each issue that year but sold only about 166,000 copies. The 1969 statement that ran in Challengers #73 shows the company printed about 290,000 copies of each issue that year and sold only about 140,000 copies. By contrast, according to the statement in Superman #225, the company printed about 959,000 copies of each issue of Superman in 1969 and sold about 511,000 copies of each issue. The editor’s note in the letters page of Challengers #75 mentions that readers had made “a constant clamor to reprint the early adventures of the Challengers.” The Challengers’ debut from Showcase #6 (dated Jan.Feb. 1957) was reprinted in two segments in Challengers #64 and 65. The editor’s note goes on to say that, “For despite a renewed campaign on the part of the fans to re-publish some of their early epicmaking exploits, we resisted those appeals in favor of offering stories that chronicled their latest adventures.” The editor said he concluded that “If readers approved a reprint in two parts, they would acclaim an established classic in a single issue!” After Challengers #75, each reprinted story carried a “By Jack Kirby” or “By Jack Kirby and Wally Wood” blurb. Challengers #75, 77 and 78 used modified Kirby covers. Super DC Giant S-25 sported a new Kirby cover. The letters pages in the books frequently mentioned Kirby and his work on other DC titles. Super DC Giant S-25 also included an essay from Kirby about his background, previous work for DC and plans for the future. Infantino said he did not recall the specifics, but does believe the Challengers book was converted to reprint material to put another DC Kirby book on the stands. “As far as I remember, that was part of the promotion. We reprinted those, and then included the part about Jack coming back. It makes sense,” Infantino said. “We wanted to promote it very heavily.” DC had an extraordinary library of black-and-white stats of all but the earliest material published by the company, Infantino recalled. The production department could have old material brought up, re-colored and ready for press in one week. “There may have been other reasons for the Challengers book to switch to reprints,” Infantino said. “If we did it to promote Jack’s return, it didn’t hurt. I’d love to take credit for that idea, but I don’t think it was mine.” O’Neil said he thought it was

probably not a coincidence that the Challengers title started reprinting Kirby material about the time Kirby was returning to DC. “I remember that it was very unusual for any creator to get the star treatment back then, but DC did give it to Jack,” O’Neil said. “Later on, Jack had problems with the company. Freelancers will always have problems with their publishers—it’s a cosmic law. But it would make sense for the company to use the reprints as a way to expose readers to Kirby’s work at almost no cost—I don’t think anyone was getting any reprint or royalty money back then.” Infantino said DC did not start paying creators money for reprints until 1974, when he was publisher. Adams said Boltinoff did not discuss the reprint format with him, but that he believed the decision was made from higher-up in the company. “They probably did not talk with Murray much about it, besides telling him, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ This was the sort of big decision that would have been made by Carmine and the editorial staff in general. They brought Jack over, and one of the ways to suck up to Jack a little bit would be to reprint some of his work. It would also alert the fans that DC was the new home of Jack Kirby.” Ultimately, the series was canceled after three issues of Kirby reprints, with the one Giant issue in 1971 and a three-issue reprint tryout in 1973. The series revived briefly in 1977, and has returned in some mini-series and regular series since then, but none rivaled the initial decade-long run. “The Challengers book was probably cancelled because it didn’t sell. That’s the only reason we cancelled anything,” Infantino said. “Everything in the business is by the numbers. There’s no emotion involved, unfortunately.” O’Neil said he had moved on to other assignments during the reprint phase, and did not expect to return to the book. “I remember having fun with the book,” he said. “I don’t think I quit the assignment so much as the assignment quit me. It was pretty unorganized back then. You didn’t really know why a book ended, exactly. My guess is that the sales were bad or someone thought the sales were bad or thought the sales were going to be bad. It was obviously cheaper to do reprints than to commission new material.” Adams said he moved on from the assignment quickly, as well. “If I didn’t do a Challengers of the Unknown cover, that just meant more time for me to get my other pages out. In fact, the Challengers covers are not really a high point among the covers I did—they were a mish-mash of stuff.” Whether the reprint decision was his or not, Boltinoff could have shed much light on the subject, possibly definitively. Without him, questions remain unanswered. But wouldn’t it be ironic if the Challengers of the Unknown, who lived on borrowed time, saw the cancellation of their sales-challenged book delayed by a few months in order to promote Kirby’s return to DC? ★ 65

Fine Print (above) Scott Free evokes New Gods #1 and goes back even further in JLA: World War III (art by Howard Porter). (right) Creep-tacular Doug Mahnke monstrousness from Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein #4—not a Kirby character of course but, Grant told us, the Soldier he rotated in when DC turned down his proposal to include Kirby’s Demon! (In this case, the creative team more than made up for what might have been.) (next page, top) The dialogue ain’t naturalistic, but it sure fits the tone of this gripping scene where a human encounters the true face of “God” (Orion) from New Gods #9 (June 1972). (next page, bottom) The splash page of Grant’s dreams, from Forever People #3 (June 1971). (below) After Kirby himself, no one writes a scarier Darkseid than Morrison—cover to the JLA: Rock of Ages collection (art by Howard Porter). Characters TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

Granted An Audience An interview with Grant Morrison, conducted and transcribed by Adam McGovern on January 24, 2007, and reviewed by Grant. Many thanks to Dom, Fred and Ryan. (The fans of Grant Morrison are legion, yet he counts himself in the front rank of Kirby’s own. The connection between comics’ most established icon and this most modern of mavericks is no mystery. Much the same as his thoroughly professional and restlessly pioneering predecessor, Morrison is the go-to sage both for offbeat original concepts like Seaguy and We3, and definitive takes on established properties like JLA and X-Men that carry them forward while preserving their classic flavor. Most recently he’s been refreshing the mythos of comics’ signature creation in All-Star Superman, and mining the wonders and eccentricities of some of the medium’s most notorious cult characters in his Seven Soldiers cycle, a groundbreaking set of subtly interrelated series with visionary collaborators like J.H. Williams III and Ryan Sook that did much to expand the creative possibilities and elevate the folkloric value of the comics artform. Along the way, Morrison has borne the banner of comics’ King, not just with some of the most affectionate and inventive revisitations of Kirby characters but with cosmic storylines which, like Kirby’s own, are among the genre’s few offerings with ideas as big as their spectacle. His late-’90s JLA arc “World War III” concerned a primal psychic weapon of fury and despair from the New Gods’ prehistory, and captured the Fourth World’s flavor of an unusually intimate and emotional epic. As part of Seven Soldiers, he tapped into Kirby’s themes of trauma and transcendence from the original Mister Miracle, remaking it as an odyssey of personal release for Scott Free’s former protégé Shilo Norman. That series put the hero through a dazzlingly disorienting narrative of illusions and revelations, putting Morrison himself in the forefront of creators using the complexities of indie-comics storytelling to transform super-hero fare. In advance of appearing in this magazine which focuses on Kirby’s ideas and images, Morrison cracked the lid on a fascinating Pandora’s Box of fan debate with his very first message to me, setting surprisingly high stakes for an appreciation of Kirby’s language: “I feel it’s about time a writer talked in depth and with some enthusiasm about the unsurpassed comic book poetry of Kirby’s often-overlooked or derided writing,” he effused in an e-mail. “I consider Kirby’s unique nonnaturalistic dialogue one of the highest expressive developments of the comic book writing style. It reads to me like Mickey Spillane teaming up with Allen Ginsberg to write the Bible for moderns and deserves much more attention and respect than it gets.” As someone on the outer frontier of divining sublime meanings from pulp materials, Morrison ought to know, and we sat down to find out much more.) THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: There’s no more intriguing place to start than with your defense of Kirby the writer. Your comments really struck a chord because I always thought there was, strangely enough, a realism to the way he gave baroque speech to fantastic characters. It seemed like a much more considered stylization

than a lot of the dated hipsterisms in other comics of the time. GRANT MORRISON: I think Kirby was a lot more like theater writing; in theater writing you’re able to be a little more literary, because in a lot of cases you tend to be describing things that the audience doesn’t see, or you’re trying to evoke a certain atmosphere. And that’s what impressed me; it makes me think most of that type of writing, and of poetry—it’s that attempt to use comic language and compress it down into very powerful, almost slogans. It has been decried in the past for not being naturalistic, but y’know, Stan Lee wasn’t naturalistic either, he was just a little more naturalistic [than the norm]; Kirby was much more poetic and compressed, and I think that’s why people may find it a little strange. TJKC: I remember an early review of New Gods #1, referring to the “comic-opera dialogue.” MORRISON: Well sure, but then again, Carl Jung in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections talked about when he encountered the archetypes, when he was forming his theory of the archetypes and had these personal revelations and experiences of them, and said that, “the archetypes talk in the language of bombast.” [laughter] That’s what they do! It’s kind of embarrassing, but that’s the way they talk because they’re kind of primal qualities, and Kirby just understood that. TJKC: Speaking of archetypes, I think Kirby was rare as a comic writer in being able to conceive of these beings who we’re seeing on two planes at once; they’re both characters and ideas, persons and personifications. When it comes to gods, most people just do a super-hero in a period costume. You’re certainly someone who grasps this too. What do you feel is the key to doing it? MORRISON: To me, when Kirby’s been done in the past that’s been the mistake of many writers, to just turn the New Gods into super-heroes. There’s been so much of that, they’ve been devalued, and I think there’s a concerted effort on now to put them back in a position of grandeur. They’ve been played as super-heroes but

Kirby never did that. He had that extra dimension, and the extra dimension was, I think, to do with the language. ’Cause you look at something like “The Glory Boat” [New Gods #6]; I remember reading “The Glory Boat” as a kid and it just seemed like a chapter of the Bible. [laughs] It was so intense and operating on such a high level of symbolism, but it was very emotive, so all the feelings were coming through; it didn’t have to be naturalistic. If you read the Bible, it’s not naturalistic [to our speech] anymore, but it still has a power in its evocation and it’s still emotional and it can still move people. And I think Kirby was tapped right into that type of language that goes straight into the unconscious mind and stirs emotions. To me, it’s why his work as a writer is a lot more artistic than people may think of it as—it’s more like music than writing. TJKC: Another part of that archetypal orientation is this prismatic characterization, where Darkseid seems like three different characters among the main Fourth World books, from the Forever People’s impish foil to Mister Miracle’s absentee abusive dad. I saw that at work in Seven Soldiers, for instance the way that Nebuloh is a fearsome huntsman in one of the books and is pining about the princess in another. Do you perceive any influence there? MORRISON: It wasn’t conscious but definitely that’s what you want from a character; that’s why Darkseid is so popular still. Because as you say, he is very different in each of the books. I remember when I was doing Justice League [Rock of Ages] I picked up on the bully Darkseid, who appears in Super Powers, and he just keeps punchin’ guys in the head [laughter]—but the Darkseid that remains in my head is that amazing splash when he says, “I am the tiger-force at the core of all things!”— y’know it’s just terrifying, that monstrous, elemental presence. And those two are very, very different, but the fact that he contains both of those is kind of… when I did him in Justice League I think I was trying to combine those two, the bully who just punches his para-demons and throws them off parapets but at the same time this elemental quality. I

think the Force of Evil should be able to be evil on all scales, even the most petty. I used to think Darkseid’s the sort of guy who would go in and change all the records in the record sleeves. [laughter] TJKC: That would especially trouble the Forever People—“Maan, I’m too stoned to know if I left the Grateful Dead in the Paul McCartney sleeve…” MORRISON: “I thought I was puttin’ on a happy record but it’s a creepy one.” TJKC: Exactly; completely change the direction of their trip. MORRISON: The Darkseid who just crushes biscuits in their packets and then leaves. [laughter] I played him a little like that at the end of Mister Miracle #3 where you see him moving the diapers from one shelf to a higher shelf, the most petty—but I wanted Darkseid to be evil on all scales so he’s evil on the towering, cosmic scale but he’s also evil in that he’d just f*ck up an innocent person’s life for the hell of it. TJKC: Still, another aspect of Darkseid that I think you got better than anyone (though Walt Simonson tapped into it too in Orion) is that in Mister Miracle you did an eerie job of portraying Darkseid the way he sees himself—all the greatest villains of both history and fiction see themselves as heroes. MORRISON: It has to be that way, or else they don’t have any real drive. No one sets out to be hated by everyone. Most people believe that what they’re doing is the right thing. 67

guy 40,000 years ago paints his hand on the wall, then every generation would go in and renew that. But by renewing it they always slightly change it. So you ended up with the entire history of the tribe in some way on the walls. And it seems to me that’s a lot of what we’re doing with super-hero comics. ’Cause the characters don’t really grow old, they have to be available to each new generation, and the thing to do is to refresh them. But the only way to refresh them is to know what the original creators meant. A lot of people who’ve done Kirby just didn’t have Kirby’s reading list, [laughs] they didn’t understand the stuff about Kabbalah or the Jewish stuff that Kirby was bringing to it, or just the basic classical mythology that Kirby was bringing to it. And if you don’t know that Metron is basically the same principle as Mercury or Hermes or Thoth, then you’re lost; it’s hard to approach the New Gods without knowing all that stuff, and without knowing exactly which, y’know, Voudou god corresponds to which New God. Because they all do fit; Kirby created a perfect pantheon, which actually fits into the traditional seven gods that every single culture has. To be unaware of that is to miss the point. So really, Kirby has to be understood, and a very few people doing comics have the kind of erudition that he had. TJKC: It’s interesting, ’cause it was very instinctual, and people tend to not characterize him as an “intellectual,” but it seems to me that he was able to weave together so many influences… MORRISON: People don’t characterize him as an intellectual because he was a working-class kid from the Lower East Side who went to war. But he was a reader, and readers are intellectuals. That’s another thing I emphasize often, because I came from a poor background— probably not as bad as Kirby’s [laughs] but it was pretty rough—but my parents were into books, and into politics, so they brought me up as a reader, and I think Kirby was the same. So even though people think of him as “not intellectual” because he has a very physical dimension to his life, the guy was into stuff, and he read a lot, and it comes out in his work. Maybe he wasn’t educated, but he was clearly an intellectual.

TJKC: How hard was it getting into his head—or is the point that somewhere, he’s in all of ours? MORRISON: Well he is; Darkseid is the dark side, Kirby couldn’t have been more straightforward. All you really have to do is think of the worst elements of yourself, on every possible scale. We all have people who bother us and make you think you could do it better—if you could just control that person and make them stop that one bloody thing they keep doing; and that becomes Darkseid, you know, the idea that you could be able to control everyone with an equation. Thinking that you’re smart enough and you’re clever enough to be the one who’s able to control everyone and make it work. [laughs] TJKC: Just the magnification of our wish to order life. Another thing you once mentioned to me was your “efforts to keep Kirby’s concepts alive and growing rather than preserved under glass.” That’s an interesting paradox, because while you’re interested in keeping them going forward, you also talk about going back to their “first principles,” which I guess is another way of saying you tap into the sources rather than just building on top of other people’s results. To you, what is it that makes his concepts both classic and renewable? MORRISON: Simply because they are so mythic and so archetypal. I made an allusion when I was doing the panel at San Diego last year with Deepak Chopra and we were talking about comics as a kind of spiritual vehicle; one of the things I said was that in aboriginal cultures, particularly in Australia, it’s common for people to carry on the tradition by basically painting on the cave; so, say some 68

TJKC: Absolutely; even in the most throwaway sequences he’d use devices from theoretical physics that are common knowledge now but which most of us had no idea of at the time. MORRISON: Exactly, I mean you read OMAC now and it’s startling, because it’s about the world we live in today. I came to OMAC only a few years ago and just thought it was one of the greatest things I’d ever read. So ahead of its time, so prescient. TJKC: Even spookily in some cases; when they captured Noriega in the late ’80s and printed that mugshot, the first thing I thought of was the similar scene in “The Busting of a Conqueror” in OMAC #4 [March 1975; pencils shown above]; Kirby tapped into all these weird revenge fantasies that became realities. MORRISON: All that stuff, and the idea that gangsters would run entire towns, [laughs] and Brother Eye, which is basically making the “big brother” concept benign, which is what’s happened in the world today with surveillance culture; it’s all about making the watching eye [seem] benign rather than scary. Like Big Brother, the biggest show in Britain. [laughs] He was kind of aware that it wasn’t gonna go the way Orwell thought. And the idea of those faceless policemen… I think that book was brilliant. Kirby was just well aware of what was happening; he was reading a lot, and he was projecting those currents into the future—like the best of Warren Ellis or Alan Moore, or any of those people who also read a lot. TJKC: In terms of a more immediate intersection of comics and reality, it’s interesting that, around the same time, you portrayed the New Gods and Neil Gaiman revived the Eternals as fallen idols wandering the earth in the guise of street people. A lot of Americans can relate to this feeling that we woke up one day and the bad guys had won, and I bet a lot of our friends can too. Were you sensing any of that at the time? MORRISON: I’m a firm believer that historical currents kind of guide where events

was twisted. The days when I used to be able to travel around the world effortlessly… suddenly the world seems scarier. To have that as the metaphor in the comic—“Okay, the bad guys won, now how do we fight back, how do we get the better of them?”— that makes the struggle in the comic so much more profound. TJKC: Both profound and intimate, which is something I find uncommonly refreshing about when you “do cosmic”—it’s really about the impact of world-shattering events on individuals. MORRISON: That’s how we tend to experience it, so it’s important to have that element. The stuff I loved in The New Gods in particular was all those scenes with Orion in a business suit pretending to be “O’Ryan”—the idea that gods are walking among us pretending to be human. If it had been purely a cosmic story it just wouldn’t have that connection. You really need that connection; Kirby was great at it because he could evoke the cosmic in a way that hardly anyone else in comic books had ever done, and at the same time he could really ground it on the streets of the Lower East Side.

are going; the smarter writers read the newspapers and keep an eye on things so you tend to see a lot of similar currents start to flow. But with that one, my basic idea came from starting to try to reimagine the New Gods, and give ’em a bit of power again. And the notion was just based on the Voudou gods who are powerful principles. I’m sure you know I’m into magic, and so I’ve kind of dealt with these ideas; the notion of a god is, quite simply, if you want to invoke a god what you do is concentrate on one quality above all others. So if you want to invoke the god of war you surround yourself with martial images, you play “Mars” from The Planets Suite, [laughs] you work yourself into a real anger and you go out and pointedly destroy whatever you want to destroy; that is you possessed by a god. It’s quite as simple as that. But obviously the gods were given personifications because nobody’s ever that angry for their entire life. [laughter] So you become possessed. When you’re absolutely desperately in love you’re possessed by Aphrodite; when your communication skills are great and you get on really well with people you’re possessed by Hermes or Mercury or Thoth, or Legba in the Voudou tradition. And all these are the singular qualities reduced to the point where you have nothing else; there’s only love in there, there’s no hate— that doesn’t happen to people a lot, which is why we get the idea of gods. So I wanted to go to that, and say that the New Gods are actually principles, that can’t be created or destroyed. They will manifest themselves. And obviously the idea in the DC continuity is that the New Gods have a particular interest in the planet Earth, because as I suggested in Justice League, it’s the “first world,” and it’s gonna be the next cradle of the gods, so it’s important for them to either succeed or fail here. That was the basis of that, and [in Mister Miracle] the idea was that Darkseid had won, because I thought we needed to move it beyond, y’know, just waiting for the Ragnarok again, and have an actual situation where, okay, evil has won—that’s a really great struggle to have, when evil’s actually won the day.

TJKC: Which I thought you skillfully updated by having such a hip-hop-influenced theme for the current Mister Miracle. MORRISON: Yeah, I guess; I just thought it was a Kirby-type thing, and I’d been listening to a lot of hip-hop, and [thought] Kirby would have loved that stuff, it’s his kind of poetry and his kind of thinking. TJKC: The closest you came to pure Kirby was that bizarre buzzword poetry in the second issue of Mister Miracle: “Death is the drive-by that never ends. The long, black sedan, the sound of the bone beatbox.” [laughter] MORRISON: It’s great stuff to write, when you get into the groove of that—I would write all my comics like that but no one would have it. [laughter] Like in Justice League when you have those moments where Orion just shouts, “The blood-red game of gods has

(left) Metron’s prophecy, from JLA: World War III (art by Howard Porter). (above) Morrison’s supercop conception of the new “Manhattan Guardian” (with first-issue cover image by Cameron Stewart). Morrison ret-conned a “Newsboy Army” to share his stories. (below) Aurakles, mad champion of the old New Gods, from Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle #4 (art by Freddie E. Williams II). Characters TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

TJKC: The churn of history is like that; the negative can be ascendant, and comics are kind of lacking in that part of the cycle—for obvious reasons. MORRISON: And as you say, it really ties into the way a lot of us have felt since 9/11, when everything changed, everybody’s head 69

shows. So someone like Shilo is about that. It’s the new-model human, y’know, homo famous. [laughter] I tried to deal with that, and he can be a really interesting character because he’s part of that world. TJKC: Which is why I was sorry to see him die—is that him coming back out of the grave in the finale, or just the essence of “Mister Miracle”? MORRISON: Oh no, that’s him, he’s back; you can’t kill Shilo Norman. [laughter] And I do have plans for some of that stuff; for some of the New Gods stuff I’m working up some ideas that we hope to do shortly—it’s not over. TJKC: Will it be stand-alone, or incorporated in a broader narrative like Shilo was in Seven Soldiers? MORRISON: It’ll be more focused, I’d imagine, on the New Gods, but spiraling out into the wider DC Universe. It’s a case of re-placing them, so they regain grandeur again, and mythical power, and stop being just boring super-heroes from the edge of the universe.

begun!” [laughter]—only in Kirby guise can you get away with it. TJKC: That book was certainly a case of what you were saying about the gods being principles that are eternal and can appear in different manifestations in different eras, with this new kind of gangsta resurrection of them. Scott Free himself was conspicuous by his absence from the series, and I almost got the sense that Shilo and he were being posited as two in the succession of a single archetype, almost as if he was a manifestation of Scott, or maybe vice versa. MORRISON: That’s how I felt about it. A lot of people still love Scott Free and want to see him back, but I like the idea that it’s passed on. And I think he would have liked it to be Shilo. There’s something about Shilo Norman which is quite contemporary and interesting. To me he’s the one who should be Mister Miracle. “Mister Miracle” began with Thaddeus Brown handing over the mantle, and I see that Mister Miracle’s about the succession. Kirby set up Shilo to be that; there’s no other reason for him to be in the story.

TJKC: I think you’re well poised to do that, because one thing that struck me in Seven Soldiers was that you’re one of the few people who’s been able to come up with convincing and consistent new-New Gods characters, specifically Aurakles. MORRISON: I think if the New Gods appear on your planet it has to be biblical— they should never just come to fight a bad guy. The minute one of them appears on the planet, that’s that, the sun goes out. [laughter] It has to be so important, and everything has to go into the archetypes; that’s how it’s never been done and that’s how I’d like to do it. TJKC: It brings me back to these great scenes in Kirby’s original where, like, every time Orion throws a tantrum suddenly a storm starts. [laughs] MORRISON: It has to be elemental; batten down the hatches, the apocalypse is coming. TJKC: You rightfully keep coming back to the word “biblical,” and there’s certainly

TJKC: That’s very interesting; it kind of re-centers the narrative—it’s not necessarily about escape but about generational passage. Which I guess is a kind of escape; certainly Thaddeus Brown made the ultimate escape! MORRISON: It makes it become about a principle again, the principle that Thaddeus Brown stood for. He gave an image to the principle of escape, which is the Mister Miracle costume. And then it tied into Scott Free’s life on Apokolips, and that costume came to represent escape for him. So I think the costume’s the really important thing in all of that, because it’s the symbol of the escape. And, as a writer, there’s something more interesting about someone like Shilo Norman, and where he might stand in the world, and the fact that we know it’s a young black guy under the hood, but he’s the messiah. TJKC: I always saw Scott as a messiah or Prometheus figure, since he’s the one of all the New Gods who had the most direct interest in humans, who seemed to relate on an equal level to them, so the fact that he would pass his identity along fits in very nicely with that. MORRISON: Also, everyone in the Western world wants to be famous; every kid now is a star in the making, thanks to American Idol and Big Brother and all those

(above) An elemental Orion image by Howard Porter from JLA: World War III. 70

a direct line between the Hebrew Bible and The New Gods in terms of this kind of aloof, austere way that Orion deals with humans, and I see this line continuing even in the spectral coat, like Joseph’s, that the updated DNA Project leader wears in your AllStar Superman... MORRISON: I grew up with the Bible and Shakespeare, and even though I didn’t like these things when I was young, I read them, so a lot of the language is influenced by that, and again, it can be quite grandiose and pompous, but with these characters it really fits. And as you say, with Superman there’s all kinds of biblical references, and not because I’m Christian, but because I read that stuff when I was young I had it all hammered into my head as language, and it is beautiful, rhythmic language. But definitely, with Kirby I think there’s a lot of Kabbalah in there that no one has ever really dug out, which surprises me; someone should be studying The New Gods in terms of Kabbalah because it’s quite incredible.

TJKC: Well, Blake was a writer/artist too—a comic artist in some ways. MORRISON: And Blake also had these mythical, godlike beings who exemplify human emotions or human struggles. And he had them playing out the myths against the backdrop of the London of his day. And the language was this powerful, rolling kind of language describing huge cosmic events and vistas; he’s very, very similar. When the idea of fashion is gone in 500 years’ time and they look at Kirby and his artwork, it will seem the way William Blake reads to us. When it stops being a “style” that people progress beyond, and just becomes Kirby’s own personal expression, then people will see it properly. ★ [Look for Grant’s essay in the volume introducing DC’s lavish new Fourth World Omnibus series. Adam’s regular “Kirby as a Genre” column is on hiatus this issue, but what a hiatus.]

(previous page, top) It makes sense—but still comes as a surprise—that one of comics’ most visionary scripters is a great designer too; here’s Grant’s blueprint for the sleek 21st century makeover of Shilo Norman, Mister Miracle (with Pascal Ferry’s first cover image). (below) Kirby has Shilo Norman in the frying pan in these pencils from Mister Miracle #17 (Dec. 1973). Characters TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

TJKC: And the concept of this world split into light and dark is right out of Zoroastrianism too... MORRISON: Oh yeah, the whole Manichaean kind of thing and the divide. But the idea of the Source, which I find fascinating—and no one really goes near it ’cause no one gets it—but the Source is the highest [plane], the Ain Soph Aur, the “white room” of Kabbalism, and all the characters fit into classic Kabbalistic sefirot [aspects of God]; like, Orion would be Gevurah and Metron would be Hod; a lot of them do fit in, and I think Kirby was involved in a lot of that stuff as well. TJKC: It could be; now that I think of it, even a lot of his design could almost be a Kabbalistic or for that matter a Tantric diagram; y’know, like Ikaris’ costume, all these weird geometric forms with connecting grids. MORRISON: Yeah, that tree-of-life, zigzag thing that he does. TJKC: I always thought of it as a very distant influence of the Art Deco buildings he would have seen as a kid, but I guess it goes back even farther! MORRISON: Artists tend to create huge complexes of influence; as you say, the top of the Chrysler Building could merge with a Mayan temple, could merge with the diagram of the tree of life to make a costume design. TJKC: Are there any Kirby characters you’d stay away from, or are they all archetypally rich enough to have possibilities? MORRISON: All of ’em. Forever People a little less, because it would all be about Hippies; if we make it about Goth, and make it a little darker and ultraviolent, then the Forever People would work again, but Forever People always has to be about whatever the teenage current is at the time. TJKC: Well, thanks for all your time and insights. MORRISON: It’s great to get a chance to talk Kirby. I think he’s a really good writer, and he should be placed in the tradition of Blake, and the Beat poets. 71

Old Soldiers

The

Pvt. Life of Pvt. Strong ust what did Pvt. Strong do when he wasn’t pulling full-time duty in his short-lived comic book run? Why, he was working overtime in the “film strip” images on the covers! Jeff Gelb, a lifelong fan of Double Life of Private Strong #1 and #2 (June-Aug. 1959), decided to take the little iconic film frames that ran on the covers, blow them up, and assemble them in order to make this “new” comic strip featuring Archie’s Shield. There’s a few frames here that don’t look to be Kirby’s work, and the inker’s identity is anyone’s guess (though we’d bet it was either Simon or Kirby). But despite the fact that these images would reproduce so small, it’s amazing the amount of detail (and trademark Kirby action) Jack was able to cram into such a small space. Enjoy! ★

Archie Publications, Inc.

Beginnings... (top) Jack drew this sketch on the front of a envelope sent to a fan in 1975. (below) Jack takes a jab at Hitler in this page of pencils from Kamandi #12 (Dec. 1973). Characters TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

Born In The Bowery by Robert L. Bryant Jr.

n the first issue of Jack Kirby’s Kamandi series for DC, the “last boy on Earth” kills two looters, copes with his grandfather’s death, gets imprisoned, and almost lights off a nuclear warhead. Tough kid. But then again, he was born in the Bowery. New York’s Lower East Side, where Kirby grew up, was a rough-and tumble place “with all sorts of sights, people, sounds and smells,” Kirby once recalled. Look at the images in his autobiographical story “Street Code” published in Streetwise. Random violence, turf wars, gangs, slums, lawlessness, makeshift weapons,

no justice except that imposed by fate or luck. Kirby left the Bowery, but it never left him; it would be reborn again and again in his work—as Suicide Slum in the ’40s Newsboy Legion stories, as Danger Street in the aborted ’70s Dingbats series... and even as the entire planet in 1972’s Kamandi. After a “natural disaster linked with radiation” mutated, intelligent animal species rule the world, and humans are little more than dumb animals (à lá Planet of the Apes). Kamandi, whose ancestors escaped the apocalypse in underground bunkers, is orphaned and set loose into this brave new world; the series is about Kamandi’s search for his tribe, if there is one left. That’s the science-fiction setup. The emotional setup is straight Kirby autobiography. All of Earth is Suicide Slum in Kamandi—jury-rigged, crumbling, dangerous, lonely, hostile to outsiders. Pistolpacking lions, tigers and bears battle each other with the same fervor that the Irish fought the Italians in Kirby’s Bowery youth; strangers are suspect, and only within a tribe is there anything like peace. (In Kamandi, the cats and dogs may speak English and drive trucks, but they still fight like... cats and dogs. They can’t help it.) Kirby’s life and views influence the series in smaller ways as well: The New York City that Kirby saw as infested with greedy corporate types has, in Kamandi, been taken over by intelligent, giant rats (what else?). Apes run what’s left of Washington, but we never find out whether the end of the world took place on the Republicans’ or Democrats’ watch. In another issue, a photo of Hitler—whom Kirby fought to stop in World War II—is sold under the banner of “Funny Animal Pictures.” (Take that, Adolf.) And the series is filled with jabs at 20th-century consumer culture and American arrogance. (A lion-man tells Kamandi, “Your species was once highly valued!”) As a kid, I remember being disappointed that Kamandi had no special powers, no special abilities—hell, not even much character, compared to, say, the New Gods or Fantastic Four. Just a shaggyhaired teenager, looking like a pubescent Ka-Zar. But he wasn’t supposed to be a super-being. He was Kirby’s surrogate, getting beaten up by gangs, escaping by the skin of his teeth, hanging on until things got better, and feeling like “the last boy on Earth”—much as Kirby must have felt as a kid who loved (of all things) books in the tough turf of the Bowery. ★

...& Never-Endings

Thundarr Rumblings by John Morrow he Ruby-Spears animated series Thundarr The Barbarian was as close to “Earth A.D. (After Disaster)” as Kirby would ever again come following his departure from Kamandi at the end of 1975. But while it’s widely know that he contributed a lot of storyboards, ideas, and character drawings to the show, fewer people realize he actually got the opportunity to embark on some panel-to-panel continuity, in the form of a little known, failed attempt at a Thundarr newspaper strip. Jack drew two weeks of dailies and two Sunday strips before the idea was shelved. When we asked writer Steve Gerber for his recollections of the project, he couldn’t offer much. “At some point, the studio lost interest in the project. That’s really all I remember about why it fizzled.” As you’ll see from the Sunday strip below, Jack was working from a full script from Gerber, as well as a panel layout breakdown. For an artist who’d been almost exclusively writing his own stories for over a decade, Jack did a wonderfully faithful interpretation of Gerber’s script. Thundarr’s setting of a future Earth, following a nuclear accident, was just a stone’s throw from his earlier Kamandi setting. And once again, the lead character had those long, blond locks that exemplified characters like Thor, Captain Victory, and of course, Kamandi.

Based on the sample above, it’s a shame the strip never took off. It would have been nice to see a regular dose of Kirby art in local newspapers in the early 1980s, particularly involving a strip about a genre Kirby knew so well. ★ (Thanks to Steve Gerber for permission to print his script.) Characters TM & ©2007 Ruby-Spears Productions.

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KIRBY FIVE-OH! (JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50) ALTER EGO: THE BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE

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Picks up where Volume 1 left off, covering the return of the Teen Titans to the top of the sales charts! Featuring interviews with GEOFF JOHNS, MIKE MCKONE, PETER DAVID, PHIL JIMENEZ, and others, plus an in-depth section on the top-rated Cartoon Network series! Also CHUCK DIXON, MARK WAID, KARL KESEL, and JOHN BYRNE on writing the current generation of Titans! More with MARV WOLFMAN and GEORGE PÉREZ! NEAL ADAMS on redesigning Robin! Artwork by ADAMS, BYRNE, JIMENEZ, MCKONE, PÉREZ and more, with an all-new cover by MIKE MCKONE! Written by GLEN CADIGAN.

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ALTER EGO #72

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ALTER EGO #76

SCOTT SHAW! and ROY THOMAS on the creation of Captain Carrot, art & artifacts by RICK HOBERG, STAN GOLDBERG, MIKE SEKOWSKY, JOHN COSTANZA, E. NELSON BRIDWELL, CAROL LAY, and others, interview with DICK ROCKWELL, Golden Age artist and 36-year ghost artist on MILTON CANIFF’s Steve Canyon! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

FRANK BRUNNER on drawing Dr. Strange, interviews with CHARLES BIRO and his daughters, ROY THOMAS’ 1971 synopsis for the origin of Man-Thing, interview with publisher ROBERT GERSON about his 1970s horror comic Reality, art by BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, JEFF JONES, and others FCA, MR. MONSTER, a FREE DRAW! #15! PREVIEW, and more!

STAN LEE SPECIAL in honor of his 85th birthday, with a cover by JACK KIRBY, classic (and virtually unseen) interviews with Stan, tributes, and tons of rare and unseen art by KIRBY, ROMITA, the brothers BUSCEMA, DITKO, COLAN, HECK, AYERS, MANEELY, SHORES, EVERETT, BURGOS, KANE, the SEVERIN siblings—plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

FAWCETT FESTIVAL—with an ALEX ROSS cover! Double-size FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) with WALT GROGAN and P.C. HAMERLINCK on the many “Captains Marvel” over the years, unseen Shazam! proposal by ALEX ROSS, C.C. BECK on “The Death of a Legend!”, MARC SWAYZE, interview with Golden Age artist MARV LEVY, MR. MONSTER, and more!

JOE SIMON SPECIAL! In-depth SIMON interview by JIM AMASH, with neverbefore-revealed secrets behind the creation of Captain America, Fighting American, Stuntman, Adventures of The Fly, Sick magazine and more, art by JACK KIRBY, BOB POWELL, AL WILLIAMSON, JERRY GRANDENETTI, GEORGE TUSKA, and others, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

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BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE, covering major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, featuring faculty, student, and graduate interviews in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with B.P.R.D.’S GUY DAVIS, MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, a FREE WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW, and more!

HEROES ISSUE featuring series creator/ writer TIM KRING, writer JEPH LOEB, and others, interviews with DC Comics’ DAN DiDIO and Marvel’s DAN BUCKLEY, PETER DAVID on writing STEPHEN KING’S DARK TOWER COMIC, MICHAEL TEITELBAUM, C.B. CEBULSKI, DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, Nuts & Bolts script and art examples, a FREE BACK ISSUE #24 PREVIEW, and more!

More celebration of STAN LEE’s 85th birthday, including rare examples of comics, TV, and movie scripts from the Stan Lee Archives, tributes by JOHN ROMITA, SR., JOE QUESADA, ROY THOMAS, DENNIS O’NEIL, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, JIM SALICRUP, TODD McFARLANE, LOUISE SIMONSON, MARK EVANIER, and others, plus art by KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, and more!

Features a new interview and cover by BRIAN STELFREEZE, interview with BUTCH GUICE, extensive art galleries/commentary by IAN CHURCHILL, DAVE COCKRUM, and COLLEEN DORAN, MIKE GAGNON looks at independent comics, with art and comments by ANDREW BARR, BRANDON GRAHAM, and ASAF HANUKA! Includes a FREE ALTER EGO #73 PREVIEW!

Features an in-depth interview and cover by TIM TOWNSEND, CRAIG HAMILTON, DAN JURGENS, and HOWARD PORTER offer preliminary art and commentaries, MARIE SEVERIN career retrospective, graphic novels feature with art and comments by DAWN BROWN, TOMER HANUKA, BEN TEMPLESMITH, and LANCE TOOKS, and more!

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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 If you don’t write, you’re itchin’ for a fight, so send your letters and e-mails to TJKC, where we will cruely edit them for length and content!

If you don’t mind I’d like to clarify a point regarding the “Kirby’s rendition of Green Arrow” stamp art. I’ve attached two scans of said drawing. I don’t know why this bugs me so much but it does. I don’t mind that to a large segment of comicdom, if they know me at all, it’s just as Jack Kirby’s “inker.” However, I would like at least one or two people to know what I did on the reprint cover art that became a United States postage stamp. The scans are a “before” and “after” if you prefer. I just want people to know that it’s Mike Royer’s rendition of Green Arrow in the style of Kirby/ Royer of the 1970s, which was the nature of the assignment from DC back in 2001, or whenever it was. I was supplied with the Bullseye piece and retooled it to Green Arrow as instructed. If people believe it is Jack Kirby’s pencils with my inks, it proves I was successful in my task. Why I give a damn at this point in my life is a mystery to me, but sometimes it just rankles me when I see that all the time this piece is referred to as (just) Jack’s. Oh well, they love me at our main Post Office here in Medford.

Another little note about your Adam McGovern “Kirby As A Genre” column... not important, but in light of the obvious Kirby influences on TEEN REX, you might find it amusing that the cover was inked by yours truly. Mike Royer I am about to commit a major MEA CULPA in front of “Kirbydom Assembled.” Uh, I think we should give Vinnie Colletta a break. Now, don’t misinterpret my statement. With the FOURTH WORLD project, Jack made the correct decision in replacing Colletta as inker. Instead of asking Jack, Vince used his own judgment in omitting certain drawing details (a whole train? GOOD LORD *Choke*!). But with the FOURTH WORLD, what may have seemed like something minor to Colletta, may have been an important storytelling item to Jack. A project of that scale didn’t need anyone going their own way. On the other hand, from the examples I’ve seen in TJKC, I don’t see where anything major was eliminated from THOR. In exchange, we got Vinnie’s luscious cross-hatching, which gave the comic a look that evoked thoughts of Hal Foster’s PRINCE VALIANT or even early renaissance icons. While I am not the first to make that observation, I will say this: When I look at the complexity of something like page 4 in THOR #128, and then look at the delicate modeling throughout the rest of the same issue; in a book that was SELDOM late... all I can say is that if I had been there, and if Mr. Colletta needed to eliminate something minor in order to maintain the same high level of quality—I would have been the first one to hand him the Wite-Out! Yea, verily! Rex Ferrell I wanted to thank you for your ongoing efforts with TJKC. I read something out of my collection of TJKC everyday, and the articles about Jack’s life never fail to inspire me. When I became very ill, my comic books and TJKC’s were the only things I had any interest in. Jack’s life, inspired me to live. Jack struggled in life. He had to work hard. He was an amazing talent with no marketing ideas of his own. He’s like a musician that gets used by the record company because all he can do is sing and write hit songs. And that is all he can do. Not everyone is born to run a business. Jack had no ambition to rule the world. Too bad he never met up with the right “business” partner that would have protected him and created a busi-

ness around Jack’s talent. Roz was his life partner. He needed someone that had the business side of things handled and would look out for Jack. If he had that, we might have had an entirely different body of work from Jack. I think there is a certain “Lennon and McCartney” factor with Stan Lee and Jack. Together, as a creative team, they equaled up to more than they did when apart. Stan smoothed Jack’s work out, especially the dialogue issue. It’s interesting that neither of them felt they really needed each other. Certainly Jack didn’t feel he needed Stan once he came into his own. He wanted to write, and create without other people in the way or taking the credit for his ideas. If the FOURTH WORLD had gone off at Marvel, if Marvel had protected Kirby and not jerked him around, they would have opened the ’70s with another Silver Age of comics. Sales would most likely still have dipped, as the boomers went to work and stopped buying comics, and the economy changed, but it would have been so cool to see Jack doing Orion and Mister Miracle at Marvel. Those characters in the Marvel Universe would have rocked. What cool crossovers. DC was just too backward to get anything. The weird thing is... if the FOURTH WORLD was never cancelled, if Marvel wasn’t short minded, there would have been no DEMON, my favorite Kirby book. So the fates move in mysterious ways. DEMON #7 is my all-time favorite Kirby book. The dialogue is smooth, great new characters, killer action, the story is one issue long and awesome, and it all ties up in the last three panels smoothly. Kirby effortlessly telling fantastic stories. I could have read this book for years. And the jackasses at DC cancel it! What idiots! The DEMON and KAMANDI were the last things Jack did before his peak drawing style and interest in working so hard for no reward, began to wain. He left DC with millions in revenues on characters he created. They will be making money off Jack Kirby’s work and ideas, like Marvel, for years and years to come. RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER. I wonder how much they will make on THAT one? ’Nuff said. Daniel Burke (I’d argue that Joe Simon did indeed look out for Jack’s business interests, as well as his own, up until they split up after the demise of the Mainline company. But once they went their own ways...) I ordered a TJKC set (#31-34) Thursday (the 5th) and, as I live in England, was astonished to receive this today (the 11th). You must have your own transatlantic airline! It’s (years!) old news now I know, but the tabloid format is, well, astounding—

I didn’t quite expect this sort of high quality, some of the pencil repros are so good—it’s like the real artwork sitting in front of you! David Driver #48 arrived Down Under yesterday. I’m amazed at how you manage each and every issue to present at least one totally unexpected delight! This time, there was more than one. And as usual, I’m writing before I’ve read even half of the articles. First: The layout page for TALES OF SUSPENSE #70! Magnificent!!! To my knowledge, this is the first layout page of Kirby’s that we have where we can see what the penciler did with it. Here, we see that George Tuska deviated markedly from Jack’s extremely rough figure work, particularly in panels 1 and even more so in 6. A wonderful find! (And this in the same month that Roy Thomas finally unearths an example of Ditko’s plot notes for Stan in ALTER EGO #68!) The FF #75 page: Another page that has turned up since the list was published in #38! And what solid and beautiful pencils they are too. I always felt that it was during this period (beginning with #73) that Jack’s dissatisfaction at Marvel began to show. Not in the finished quality of his pencils (as this page clearly shows) but in the lack of polish in some of the figurework. He seemed content with figures and faces that were not nearly as polished as they were just a few months before. And the stories here and in THOR became drawn out and far thinner in plot. I’ve often wondered why on Earth Jack drew the sub-atomic world just like a model—with the connecting rods. Was it to convey clearly to the reader this was not outer space? Or was it because he looked at such models and simply loved the look and design of them? He certainly did no such thing when Sub-Atomica first appeared in FF ANNUAL #5. As usual, Sinnott’s inks were perfect. But the pencils are even better!!! The commissions and sketches: You must have stumbled on a cache of new material this time ‘round! I love the brilliant sketches on pages 4 and 5. Seeing Kirby doodles is rare indeed and it’s wonderful to be able to compare how different Kirby’s are to those by such greats as John Buscema. Even these doodles basically have a clear line approach, rather than the scribbly building up of a form. Even without the date with the signature, the Cap drawing on page 17 is obviously pre-’70s. Jack lost that grace and suppleness in most of his work after about ’68 (when the FF #75 page was done). It’s an unusually elongated figure for Kirby—a real treat to see. I love the Thing pin-up on page 58.

It’s better than many Jack did. And with those exact flying boots from the pin-up in FF ANNUAL #5. (For years, back in the late ’60s/early ’70s I had that FF pin-up on my wall, taken from a British magazine that had it nicely printed as a centerfold that could be removed. Somehow, the way it was printed made Sue the prettiest she ever was, even more than in the ‘real’ ANNUAL or any reprint I’ve seen since.) Then there is ‘Adam and Eve’—with their fur coverings BEFORE they’ve eaten the fruit? (Or is Eve offering it for the second time around?) These and the others were all most unexpected, a real treat. (Did you pick up the blooper I made with my comments about the BLACK PANTHER page? No? Good. I won’t mention it then. :-) Ummm—did you know that this time you presented two pages that have been in the galleries before? (Page 18 was in #34 and page 43—yeah, a page which I commented on—was in #40). Those Indexes needing updating? So you published my comments about my dislike of Tom’s colors for the cover. Hmm—do I thank you or not? :-) Well, now that Tom knows and I probably can’t get any more in his bad graces, I will go further: The front cover was made to almost look pretty good compared to the EVEN WORSE back cover!!! What on Earth?! He looks like a candy bar wrapper—or a lollipop—or a Christmas Tree—or something. (Since misunderstandings easily happen in e-mails, I’ll add that I’m writing all this with a disbelieving smile. I find the coloring funny on the one hand and horrible on the other, thinking that Tom was just having a ball. I feel like shaking my head in disbelief!! Tom is SO good—how can he do this?) Shane Foley, AUSTRALIA (I still like Tom’s coloring; that robot’s NOT on Earth! So nyahhh! But yeah, I really need to update my index of art we’ve run; hopefully I didn’t repeat anything this issue...) You published an interview with Kirby in TJKC #48, in the midst of which (pg. 28) you posed an editorial question to the readers about Jack’s reference to doing packaging for Mattel. I think he was very likely referring to the BIG JIM P.A.C.K. action figures, which Mattel put out in the mid-’70s. I remember seeing them back then. I was just a little too old to buy them, but the box art caught my eye, and I immediately recognized Jack’s work. I can also help to identify the source of a couple of the Bernard Pras pieces which accompanied the “Internationalities” interview. The two pieces listed as “variations on a female theme” on page 67 clearly are based on Darwyn Cooke’s cover art for CATWOMAN #1. Mark Lewis I’ve been intrigued by the 1966 robot drawing Jack did for Don Heck since you printed the pencil version in issue #45. Although clearly in Jack’s developing style, some elements about it—the ball-bearing feet and the detail on the right-hand pincers—still seem a bit unusual in his work. When I saw the inked version on the back of the latest issue, I realized why it looked so familiar. It looks like Jack’s version

tions to get this second disc about Jack, I’ll even go see it. Heck, the thing came with a free movie ticket!!! What’s not to love? I could use a nap this weekend. You are vindicated, young John. I am your servant, forever. Long Live The Kirby Kommandos!!!!! Now, get back to work. All this praise must’ve increased your hat size. Claude Parish (Again my apologies to people who bought the first F4 DVD based on my recommendation; I found out too late they’d decided to save the Kirby documentary till the RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER movie was out. But it was worth the wait!)

of Steve Ditko’s robot, “The Living Brain,” back in SPIDER-MAN #8 (which coincidentally also featured Kirby’s “Spider-Man versus the Human Torch” story). It might seem odd that Jack would be ruminating on an obscure Spider-Man villain from two years previous—except that the issue had been reprinted in 1966’s MARVEL TALES #5. If he had received a copy due to his own stories that were reprinted in that issue, one can imagine him looking at Ditko’s robot and thinking, “That’s not a deadly robot. Here’s what it ought to look like!” Craig McNamara, Shoreview, MN Dear John (Baby, you’re the greatest!) Morrow, There is no way you remember me. I used to call you and bug you a few times a decade ago and most recently chided you for making me buy a copy of that cinematic toxic waste dump calling itself FANTASTIC 4. You said that there was a documentary about Jack Kirby on the disc. There wasn’t. I condemned you to a hell reserved only for readers of the HEROES REBORN storylines thinking them to be new and original stories torn from the minds of funnybook originals. I now write to beg your forgiveness... Hell, your FOURgiveness! Not wanting more than a jug of orange juice and a few razors (for shaving—don’t worry, not suicidal!), I ambled into one of the 75 local Wal-Marts in the Baton Rouge area to find, unheralded (ironic, I know) a special edition two-disc DVD of the aforementioned cinematic oily discharge daring to call itself FANTASTIC 4. “Two discs,” thought my thinking thing inside my head. “What could they be trying to sell the unsuspecting public this time?” A tiny piece of brain came to life and turned the package over to look at its backside (no butt jokes, please) and there it was! OH-MY-GOD! (Oh my New Gods, even.) “JACK KIRBY, STORYTELLER.” John Morrow, ruler of all things Kirby Kool, command me and I will do your bidding. I’m sorry I ever doubted that, one day, the true story of Jack Kirby’s Marvelous career would come to light. John Morrow, publisher of the world’s greatest magazine now in existence, you are worthy! Sorry I ever doubted you. But 20 bucks was 20 bucks. I’ve watched it three times now. I could cry. Did, the first time. If it takes another turd of epic dispropor-

Just looking at the reprint of FOREVER PEOPLE #2 in the FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS and noticed something (again) that always seemed a little weird. In the last panel of the last page of the story (page 22 I think) Darkseid is talking about finding the human with the secret he’s after—and ends his speech with the phrase “And if you would wrest the secret from him, give him to me!” It seems to me that last phrase should be Desaad talking. He’s in the panel and he’s the one who enjoyed “wresting” things from people... I think the balloon is drawn wrong giving the impression Darkseid is saying that. You think? Pete Von Sholly (I think! Therefore I end this lettercol.)

#49 Credits: John Morrow, Editor/Designer Pamela Morrow, Asst. Editor Eric Nolen-Weathington, Proofreader Rand Hoppe, Webmaster Tom Ziuko, Colorist Chris Fama, Art Restoration Bob Brodsky, Circulation Director, Cookiesoup Periodical Distribution, LLC SPECIAL THANKS TO ALL OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Neal Adams • Jerry Boyd Larry Brody Robert L. Bryant, Jr. Mike DeCarlo • Jean Depelley Scott Dunbier Steve Englehart Mark Evanier • Chris Fama Shane Foley • Dan Forman Barry Forshaw Scott Fresina Angel Gabriele • Jeff Gelb Steve Gerber Glen Gold • Paul Horn Carmine Infantino Lisa Kirby • Sean Kleefeld Adam Koford Bruce McCorkindale Adam McGovern Jeff McLaughlin Tom Morehouse Grant Morrison Eric Nolen-Weathington Dennis O'Neil • Jerry Ordway James Romberger David Schwartz • Tod Seisser Joe Simon • Douglas Toole Len Wein • Steve Whitaker Tom Ziuko • 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 THEME IDEA? PLEASE WRITE US!

NEXT ISSUE: Instead of a normal issue, KIRBY FIVE-OH! is a special look at the best of everything from Jack Kirby’s 50year career in comics! Our regular columnists form a distinguished panel of experts to choose and examine: The best Kirby story published each year from 1938-1987! The best covers from each decade! Jack’s 50 best unused pieces of art! His 50 best character designs! And profiles of, and commentary by, the 50 people most influenced by Kirby’s work! Plus there’s a 50-page gallery of Kirby’s powerful raw pencil art, and a deluxe color section of photos and finished art from throughout his entire half-century oeuvre. This 168-page tabloid-sized trade paperback features a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover inked by “DC: The New Frontier” artist DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, helping make this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! (A percentage of profits will be donated to the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center.) We’re not soliciting contributions, but send us material for future issues, and look for KIRBY FIVEOH! in February 2008!

KIRBY FIVE-OH! (taking the place of #50) See the box at left! #51: EVERYTHING GOES! After over a decade of “theme” issues, we amassed a wealth of great submissions that can’t be pigeonholed into one topic, so we’re putting the best of the best in a miscellaneous issue sure to please nearly everyone! #52: YOU TELL US! Although #52’s over a year away, don’t waste any time! If you want to see this magazine continue, let us know what we’ve neglected to cover in the past, and send us ideas for new things you’d like to see in TJKC! We need your art and articles, so we can shape future issues, so send ’em now! SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Submit artwork as: 1) Color or B&W photocopies. 2) 300ppi TIFF or JPEG scans 3) Originals (insured). Submit articles as: 1) E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com 2) ASCII or RTF text files. 3) Typed or laser printed pages. We’ll pay return postage and insurance for originals—please write or call first. Please include background information whenever possible.

Parting Shot

This absolutely stunning 1978 fan commission drawing is indicative of many Jack did around then; juxtaposing one of his most popular characters in a generic scene with some kind of large monster, and unnamed antagonists lurking in the background. It may not look like Asgard, but we’d bet the purchaser wasn’t disappointed with the end product. Thor TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JACK KIRBY BOOKS

JACK KIRBY (1917-1994) stands as comics’ most prolific talent, with a 50-year career wherein he created or co-created such iconic characters as THE FANTASTIC FOUR, SILVER SURFER, THE HULK, X-MEN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THE NEW GODS, and a legion of others. These books pay tribute to him and his creations.

NOW SHIPPING FROM TWOMORROWS!

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOLUMES 1-5, EDITED BY JOHN MORROW

VOLUME 1

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 4

VOLUME 5

This colossal trade paperback reprints issues #1-9 of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, the highly-acclaimed magazine about comics’ most prodigious imagination: JACK KIRBY! Included are the low-distribution early issues, the Fourth World theme issue, and the Fantastic Four theme issue! Also includes over 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, including uninked pencils from THE PRISONER, NEW GODS, FANTASTIC FOUR, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THOR, HUNGER DOGS, JIMMY OLSEN, SHIELD, and more! Features interviews with KIRBY, JOE SIMON, MIKE ROYER, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, STEVE SHERMAN, and other Kirby collaborators, plus an introduction by MARK EVANIER.

Reprints issues #10-12 of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR —the Humor, Hollywood, and International theme issues! Also included is a new special section detailing a fan’s private tour of the Kirbys’ remarkable home, profusely illustrated with photos, and more than 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, including Jack’s uninked pencil art from THE PRISONER, NEW GODS, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THOR, HUNGER DOGS, JIMMY OLSEN, SHIELD, MACHINE MAN, THE ETERNALS, and more! Learn more about the King’s career through interviews with JACK AND ROZ KIRBY, JOHN BYRNE, STEVE GERBER, MARK EVANIER, ROGER STERN, MARV WOLFMAN, and others!

Reprints issues #13-15 of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR—the Horror, Thor, and Science-Fiction theme issues! There’s also a NEW special section with 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, including uninked pencils from CAPTAIN AMERICA, THOR, JIMMY OLSEN, THE DEMON, NEW GODS, THE PRISONER, and more! Go behind-the-scenes of Jack’s career through interviews with KIRBY and his collaborators and admirers like DICK AYERS, CHIC STONE, WALTER SIMONSON, AL WILLIAMSON, and MIKE THIBODEAUX, and see page-after-page of rare and unpublished Kirby art! Features a 1960s Kirby cover, and an introduction by STEVE BISSETTE.

Reprints issues #16-19 of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, including the Tough Guys, DC, and Marvel theme issues, and a special issue detailing the intricacies of Jack’s art! Also included is a new special section with over 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, featuring Jack’s uninked pencils from NEW GODS, MISTER MIRACLE, FOREVER PEOPLE, JIMMY OLSEN, KAMANDI, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THE SILVER SURFER, OMAC, and more! It features interviews with KIRBY, STAN LEE, FRANK MILLER, WILL EISNER, NEAL ADAMS, nearly the whole MARVEL BULLPEN (including JOHN BUSCEMA and JOHN ROMITA), and others, plus a KIRBY/STEVE RUDE cover!

Reprints issues #20-22 of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, including the Kirby’s Women, Wackiest Work, and Villains issues, featuring interviews with JACK KIRBY and daughter LISA KIRBY, plus DAVE STEVENS, GIL KANE, BRUCE TIMM, STEVE RUDE, and MIKE “HELLBOY” MIGNOLA! Also features an unpublished Kirby story still in pencil, Jack’s original pencils to FANTASTIC FOUR #49 (from the fabled Galactus trilogy), and over 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, including Jack’s uninked pencils from THE DEMON, FOREVER PEOPLE, JIMMY OLSEN, KAMANDI, ETERNALS, CAPTAIN AMERICA, BLACK PANTHER, and more, plus a KIRBY/DAVE STEVENS cover!

(240-page trade paperback) $29 US ISBN: 9781893905009 Diamond Order Code: DEC032834

(160-page trade paperback) $22 US ISBN: 9781893905016 Diamond Order Code: MAR042974

(176-page trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905023 Diamond Order Code: APR043058

(240-page trade paperback) $29 US ISBN: 9781893905320 Diamond Order Code: MAY043052

(224-page trade paperback) $29 US ISBN: 9781893905573 Diamond Order Code: FEB063353

BACK ISSUE #24

DRAW! #15

WRITE NOW! #17

ROUGH STUFF #6

ALTER EGO #73

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ALL- STAR COMPANION V. 3

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME 13: JERRY ORDWAY

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ORDER ONLINE: www.twomorrows.com JOHN ROMITA... & ALL THAT JAZZ! The artist who made AMAZING SPIDERMAN Marvel’s #1-selling comic book in the 1960s talks about his life, his art, and his contemporaries! Authored by former Marvel Comics editor in chief and top writer ROY THOMAS, and noted historian JIM AMASH, it features the most definitive interview Romita’s ever given, about working with STAN LEE and JACK KIRBY, following Spider-Man co-creator STEVE DITKO as artist on the strip, and more! Lavishly illustrated with Romita art, it’s a career overview of a comics master, and a firsthand history of the industry by one of its leading artists! Available in Softcover and Hardcover (with 16 extra color pages, dust jacket, and custom endleaves). (192-page softcover) $29 US ISBN: 9781893905757 Diamond Order Code: APR074018

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was too far ahead of its time for Hollywood, so artist JACK KIRBY adapted it as a six-issue mini-series in the 1980s, making it his final, great series. Now, the entire run is collected, this time reproduced from his powerful, uninked pencil art! Also included is Kirby’s ILLUSTRATED SILVER STAR MOVIE SCREENPLAY, never-seen SKETCHES, PIN-UPS, and an historical overview to put it all in perspective!

For the first time, JACK KIRBY’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY GRAPHIC NOVEL is presented as it was created in 1975 (before being broken up and modified for the 1980s Pacific Comics series), reproduced from copies of Kirby’s uninked pencil art! This first “new” Kirby comic in years features page after page of prime pencils, and includes Jack’s unused CAPTAIN VICTORY SCREENPLAY, unseen art, an historical overview to put it in perspective, and more!

Reprinting the fabled 1971 KIRBY UNLEASHED PORTFOLIO, completely remastered! Spotlights some of KIRBY’s finest art from all eras of his career, including 1930s pencil work, unused strips, illustrated World War II letters, 1950s pages, unpublished 1960s Marvel pencil pages and sketches, and Fourth World pencil art (done expressly for this portfolio in 1970)! We’ve gone back to the original art to ensure the best reproduction possible, and MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN have updated the Kirby biography from the original printing, and added a new Foreword explaining how this portfolio came to be! PLUS: We’ve recolored the original color plates, and added EIGHT NEW BLACK-&-WHITE PAGES, plus EIGHT NEW COLOR PAGES, including Jack’s four GODS posters (released separately in 1972), and four extra Kirby color pieces, all at tabloid size!

(52-page comic book) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JAN042759

(60-page tabloid with COLOR) $24 US Diamond Order Code: OCT043208

(160-page trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905559 Diamond Order Code: JAN063367

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

SUPPORT THE KIRBY MUSEUM: www.kirbymuseum.org

(208-page hardcover w/ COLOR) $49 US ISBN: 9781893905764 Diamond Order Code: APR074019

SILVER AGE MEGO 8" SUPERSCI-FI COMPANION HEROES: WORLD’S In the Silver Age of Comics, space was GREATEST TOYS!TM

the place, and this book summarizes, critiques and lovingly recalls the classic science-fiction series edited by JULIUS SCHWARTZ and written by GARDNER FOX and JOHN BROOME! The pages of DC’s science-fiction magazines of the 1960s, STRANGE ADVENTURES and MYSTERY IN SPACE, are opened for you, including story-by-story reviews of complete series such as ADAM STRANGE, ATOMIC KNIGHTS, SPACE MUSEUM, STAR ROVERS, STAR HAWKINS and others! Writer/editor MIKE W. BARR tells you which series crossed over with each other, behind-the-scenes secrets, and more, including writer and artist credits for every story! Features rare art by CARMINE INFANTINO, MURPHY ANDERSON, GIL KANE, SID GREENE, MIKE SEKOWSKY, and many others, plus a glorious new cover by ALAN DAVIS and PAUL NEARY! (160-page trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905818 Diamond Order Code: JUL073885

Go to www.twomorrows.com for FULL-COLOR downloadable PDF versions of our magazines for only $2.95! Subscribers to the print edition get the digital edition FREE, weeks before it hits stores!

Lavishly illustrated with thousands of CHARTS, CHECKLISTS and COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS, it’s an obsessive examination of legendary toy company MEGO (pronounced “ME-go”), and the extraordinary line of super-hero action figures that dominated the toy industry throughout the 1970s. Featuring a chronological history of Mego, interviews with former employees and Mego vendors, fascinating discoveries never revealed elsewhere, and thorough coverage of each figure and packaging variant, this FULL-COLOR hardcover is the definitive guide to Mego. BRAD MELTZER raves, “I’ve waited thirty years for this magical, beautiful book.” And CHIP KIDD, internationally-recognized graphic designer and author of BATMAN COLLECTED, deemed it “a stunning visual experience.” Written by BENJAMIN HOLCOMB. (256-page COLOR hardcover) $54 US ISBN: 9781893905825 Diamond Order Code: JUL073884

More amazing secrets behind the 194051 ALL-STAR COMICS and the 1941-44 SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY—and illustrated speculation about how other Golden Age super-teams might have been assembled! Also, an issue-by-issue survey of the JLA-JSA TEAM-UPS of 1963-85, the 1970s JSA REVIVAL, and the 1980s series THE YOUNG ALL-STARS and SECRET ORIGINS, with commentary by the artists and writers! Plus rare, often unseen art by KUBERT, INFANTINO, ADAMS, ORDWAY, ANDERSON, TOTH, CARDY, GIL KANE, COLAN, SEKOWSKY, DILLIN, STATON, REINMAN, McLEOD, GRINDBERG, PAUL SMITH, RON HARRIS, MARSHALL ROGERS, WAYNE BORING, GEORGE FREEMAN, DON HECK, GEORGE TUSKA, TONY DeZUNIGA, H.G. PETER, DON SIMPSON, and many others! Compiled and edited by ROY THOMAS, with a new cover by GEORGE PÉREZ! (224-page trade paperback) $31 US ISBN: 9781893905801 Diamond Order Code: MAY078045 Surface

Airmail

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$44

$56

$64

$76

$120

BACK ISSUE! (6 issues)

$40

$54

$66

$90

$108

DRAW!, WRITE NOW!, ROUGH STUFF (4 issues)

$26

$36

$44

$60

$72

ALTER EGO (12 issues) Six-issue subs are half-price!

$78

$108

$132

$180

$216

SUBSCRIPTIONS:

1st Class Canada

Features an extensive, career-spanning interview lavishly illustrated with rare art from Jerry’s files, plus huge sketchbook section, including unseen and unused art! By ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905795 Diamond Order Code: NOV068372

MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD Shows the artist at work, discussing his art and career! (120-minute Std. Format DVD) $35 US ISBN: 9781893905771 Diamond Order Code: MAY073780

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