Jack Kirby Collector #52

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR FIFTY-TWO IN THE US

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Unseen JIM APARO cover, STEVE SKEATES discusses his early comics work, art & artifacts by ADKINS, APARO, ARAGONÉS, BOYETTE, DITKO, GIORDANO, KANE, KELLER, MORISI, ORLANDO, SEKOWSKY, STONE, THOMAS, WOOD, and the great WARREN SAVIN! Plus writer CHARLES SINCLAIR on his partnership with Batman co-creator BILL FINGER, FCA, and more!

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Interview and cover by comic painter CHRIS MOELLER, features on New Zealand comic artist COLIN WILSON, G.I. Joe artist JEREMY DALE, and fan favorite TERRY DODSON, plus "GOOD GIRL ART" (a new article about everyone's favorite collectible art) by ROBERT PLUNKETT, a "Rough Critique" of an aspiring artist's work, and more!

Go behind the pages of the hit series of graphic novels starring Scott Pilgrim with his creator and artist, BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY, to see how he creates the acclaimed series! Then, learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS works on the series, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

Features event reports from around the world, and the MINDSTORMS 10TH ANNIVERSARY at LEGO HEADQUARTERS! Plus an interview with the head of the LEGO GROUP’S 3D DEPARTMENT, a glimpse at the LEGO Group's past with the DIRECTOR OF LEGO'S IDEA HOUSE, instructions and spotlights on builders, and an idea section for Pirate builders!

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BRICKJOURNAL COMPENDIUM 2

The definitive autobiographical book on ALAN MOORE in a NEW EXPANDED AND UPDATED VERSION! Includes new interviews covering his work since the original 2003 edition of the book. From SWAMP THING, V FOR VENDETTA, WATCHMEN, and LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN and beyond – all are discussed by Alan. Plus, there’s RARE STRIPS, SCRIPTS, ARTWORK, and PHOTOGRAPHS, tribute comic strips by NEIL GAIMAN and other of Moore’s closest collaborators, a COLOR SECTION featuring the RARE MOORE STORY “The Riddle of the Recalcitrant Refuse” (newly remastered, and starring MR. MONSTER), and more! Edited by GEORGE KHOURY, with a cover by DAVE McKEAN!

Explore the Silver and Bronze Ages of Batman comic books in THE BATCAVE COMPANION! Two distinct sections of this book examine the Dark Knight’s progression from his campy “New Look” of the mid-1960s to his “creature of the night” reinvention of the 1970s. Features include issue-by-issue indexes, interviews with CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA, DENNIS O’NEIL, and NEAL ADAMS, and guest essays by MIKE W. BARR and WILL MURRAY. Contributors include SHELDON MOLDOFF, LEN WEIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, and TERRY AUSTIN, with a special tribute to the late MARSHALL ROGERS. With its incisive introduction by DENNIS O’NEIL and its iconic cover painting by NEAL ADAMS, THE BATCAVE COMPANION is a must-have for every comics fan! By MICHAEL EURY and MICHAEL KRONENBERG.

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Original Comic Book Art & The Collectors Examines the hobby of collecting original comic book art, letting you meet collectors from around the globe as they detail collections ranging from a few key pages, to hundreds of pages of original comic art

by JACK KIRBY, JOHN ROMITA SR., and others! Features interviews with industry pros, including writers GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, and ROY THOMAS, and exclusive perspectives from Silver Age artists DICK GIORDANO, BOB McLEOD, ERNIE CHAN, TONY DeZUNIGA, and the unparalleled great, GENE COLAN! Completing the book is a diverse sampling of breathtakingly beautiful original comic art, some lavishly presented in full-page spreads, including pages not seen publicly for decades. Written by STEVEN ALAN PAYNE. (128-page trade paperback) $15.95 US ISBN: 9781605490151 Diamond Order Code: JAN094470 Now shipping!

FULL-COLOR! BRICKJOURNAL, the ultimate magazine for LEGO enthusiasts of all ages, began as an online (PDF) magazine in 2005, and this book compiles the digital-only issues #4-5 (Vol. 1, from 2006) in print for the first time! Features interviews with: MIKE WILDER (about using a Mindstorms robot to film a 3-D documentary) and MARK LARSON (creator of the Fabuland Housewifes online comic strip), ALBAN NANTY on his LEGO-based Star Wars® film, plus features on LEGO character sculptures, tutorials on LCad software for creating projects, an examination of LEGOLand's history, behind the scenes at a LEGO factory, building big with LEGOs (from castles and rollercoasters to ships and skyscrapers), creating custom minifigures, instructions and building techniques, and more!

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For the latest news from TwoMorrows Publishing, log on to www.twomorrows.com/tnt

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

KIRBY OBSCURA! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 (Simon & Kirby are back!)

UNDER THE COVERS . . . . . . . . . . . .3 (are you ready for some football?)

JACK F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 (Mark Evanier examines whether Lennon and McCartney ever worked Marvel Method)

ISSUE #52, SPRING 2009

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GALLERY 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 (unedited last pages from some of the final issues of Jack’s comics) KIRBY OBSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . .16 (Barry Forshaw goes Negative) UNEARTHED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 (we’ve got Fish In A Barrel) INNERVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 (a 1972 interview with Jack) JACK KIRBY MUSEUM PAGE . . . .27 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) ADAM McGOVERN . . . . . . . . . . . .28 (Joe Casey, Glen Brunswick, and others on the Kirby influence) INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY . . . . .31 (ve vant to drink your blood) INFLUENCEES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 (Steve Englehart speaks) GALLERY 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36 (savor these unused Thor pages; you’ll need them in a moment) ORIGINAL ART-IFACTS . . . . . . . . .45 (let’s go find Galactus!)

JOURNEY INTO MYSTERIES . . . . .46 (trying to make sense of THOR #168-170) KIRBYSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 (how Jack casts a shadow) HIYA, HAI-YAH! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 (a hard-hitting look at Kirby’s unused Bruce Lee comic) NUTS & BOLTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58 (a glimpse at Kirby’s work in commercial illustration) UNEARTHED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 (Kirby Masterworks questions) FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 (a Kirby Western Tale) CROSSUNDERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 (Kirby was big in 2008) TORCH BEARERS . . . . . . . . . . . . .68 (DC’s Dan DiDio interviewed) KIRBYIONAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70 (Kirby, the CIA, & the Lord of Light) COLLECTOR COMMENTS . . . . . . .78 PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 Front cover inks: DON HECK Front cover colors: JACK KIRBY Back cover inks/color: JACK KIRBY The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 16, No. 52, Spring 2009. Published quarterly by & ©2009 TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Single issues: $13 postpaid ($15 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $50 US, $60 Canada, $84 elsewhere.

All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is ©2009 Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is ©2009 the respective authors. First printing.

PRINTED IN CANADA. ISSN 1932-6912

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(above) Page 9 of “King” Kobra #1 (Feb. 1976); this issue had wholesale art and text changes, but note how the “obscured” face in panel 3 has been restored to Jack’s original version. Inks by D. Bruce Berry. Kobra TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

COPYRIGHTS: Aquaman, Arna, Batman, Brute, Challengers of the Unknown, Count Dragorin, Darkseid, Death of the New Gods, Demon, Devilance, Dingbats of Danger Street, Dr. Canus, Dr. Fate, Esak, Final Crisis, Firestorm, Flash, Forever People, General Electric, Glob, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Highfather, In The Days Of The Mob, Jed, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, Kobra, Losers, Martian Manhunter, Negative Man, New Gods, Oberon, Red Tornado, Robin, Sandman, Shilo Norman, Super Powers, Superman, Witchboy, Wonder Woman TM & ©2009 DC Comics • Balder, Captain America, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Doom, Eternals, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Hulk, Ikaris, Iron Man, Karnilla, Loki, Machine Man, Magneto, Moonboy, Odin, Secret Invasion, Sgt. Fury, Sif, Silver Surfer, Sub-Mariner, Thermal Man, Thor, Warriors Three, Watcher, Wolverine TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Bruce Lee art, Captain Victory, Cover hero, Football art TM & ©2009 Jack Kirby Estate • Black Magic, Bullseye, Fighting American TM & ©2009 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate • Fish In A Barrel, Western Tales TM & ©2009 Joe Simon • The Avenger/Justice Inc. TM & ©2009 Conde Nast • Blue Bolt TM & ©2009 respective owner

Opening Shot

by John Morrow, editor of TJKC

ou may (or may not) have noticed a slight difference in the size of this issue. No, that page count’s the usual 84, but I’m talking about the physical size of the mag. I trimmed an extra half-inch off the height this time out (and will on all future issues). This small change allows subscription copies of TJKC to fit in some nifty, rigid mailers, which should protect them better in the mail system, and get them in subscribers’ hands in much better shape. Back in May 2007, the US Postal Service passed some new regulations that required all Standard Mail (which is how we usually ship subscriber copies, to save them money) to be flexible, so we had to eliminate the backing boards we’d been sending them with. Now, we’re standardizing on the rigid mailers for TJKC, and using Media Mail instead of Standard Mail. Since it’ll cost us more to mail each copy, we’ve had to slightly increase the US subscription rate. I think readers will agree that it’s worth a small price increase to ensure their subscription copies arrive in good condition.

Since this issue’s theme is “obscure Kirby work”, it’s only fitting that I get to announce the pending release of London-based Titan Publishing’s new tomes featuring a d ate the work of the best-selling team in comics history, Joe -main cre r might-and and by shee infant form e Spirit rted with an Simon & Jack Kirby! While most Kirby fans are intiTh sta of ] r by ato Kir d cre “[Simon an LL EISNER, , art, and genre.” — WI ntor. In script whole new was my me on mately familiar with Jack’s work from Marvel in the Sim Joe tered comics , when I en E “Lucky for me the master!” — STAN LE s were ter rac cha 1960s and later, they’re not nearly as well acquainted was e his editing, he it looked lik wing style; dynamic dra , ing rst bu this with the first 20 years of his comics career, most of “[Kirby] had panels.” r of ned by the inning autho barely contai litzer Prize-w Clay CHABON, Pu & which was spent in partnership with Joe Simon.

L r AE lie CH va el MI Ka — of Chap Adventures that Sistine He painted The Amazing one else— stradamus. colors every No of the Titan’s plans start with a deluxe full-color hardcover te s let wa pa a ers, a brush and e all the oth “Kirby, abov book environment with ch.” mu ny fun too of is g Best of Simon and Kirby book (shown at left), to be praise ceilin emulates. No fiction grand master to this day— ce LISON, scien EL AN RL released in May 2009, and as I write this, I just — HA of comics. He e pioneers ter, he e of the tru “Joe was on could draw, he could let say, returned from the New York Comic-Con, where Joe he ed to could write, edit. Kirby us hest n, he could t was the hig e.” could desig tha d was on hand to sign limited edition lithographs an ,’ leagu comics ‘Joe knows stow on a col Jack could be Kirby: King of Comics of compliment r tho au promoting the new book. Each litho is limited to a , ANIER — MARK EV hundred copies, and are individually hand-numbered—one is of Fighting American, the other is of “The Girl Who Tempted Me!” from Young Romance #17 (Vol. 3, No. 5, January 1950).

The Best of Simon and Kirby book features a healthy sampling of S&K’s most famous characters, including Fighting American, Stuntman, and The Fly, plus other stories from titles like Black Magic, Justice Traps the Guilty, and Young Romance, the first romance comic. And through the cooperation of Marvel Comics and DC Comics, The Best of Simon and Kirby will include stories featuring Captain America, The Vision, Sandman, and The Boy Commandos. The art has been painstakingly restored by Harry Mendryk, and Joe Simon is overseeing the process, and will provide behind-the-scenes commentary on the original stories.

That volume will be followed by The Simon and Kirby Superheroes, which will feature more extensive collections of stories of costumed heroes such as Blue Bolt, Fighting American, Stuntman, and the Fly. Then, Titan will launch The Official Simon and Kirby Library beginning in late 2009. The library will include volumes collecting the greatest horror, detective, and romance stories ever produced by Joe and Jack. Titan plans to release two books a year, and all these books are authorized by both Joe Simon and the Kirby Estate. Finally, Titan will publish a new illustrated autobiography of Joe Simon, tentatively titled Joe Simon, The Man Behind the Comics, in 2010. (above) I saw color proofs of (And one other Simon & Kirby item to note: DC will soon be releasing an Archive edition Titan Publishing’s new Simon & Kirby book at the of Joe and Jack’s Golden Age Sandman stories, which New York Comic-Con, and I’m penning the Introduction for, and Mark Evanier is trust me; you’re going to writing the Afterword.) love this!

Lastly, let me mention a couple of our own Kirby Blue Bolt, Fighting American TM & ©2009 publications I hope you’ll consider. We still have a few Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate. • Captain America TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, copies of the Limited Hardcover Edition of Kirby FiveInc. • Superman TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

Oh!, our huge 50th issue of TJKC, done as a book. It Football images ©Jack Kirby Estate. includes a Kirby pencil plate not in the softcover version, and is limited to 500 numbered copies, so order Limited quickly before they’re gone. And just on sale is Hardcover: $ Collected Jack Kirby Collector Volume 7, which compiles 34 95 the last of our first 30 “regular-size” issues (before we went tabloid-size with #31). It also includes 30 pieces of Kirby art never published before, so if you’ve missed any of our old issues, they’re all finally back in print through those seven books, with some nice extras. Don’t miss ’em! ★

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Under The Covers

by John Morrow his issue’s covers are classic images done by Jack in his prime, rather than newly inked renditions of existing Kirby pencils by a top comics pro of today. But our front cover has special significance to me. Back in the early days of TJKC, I saw some convention photos of Jack, and at his booth in those days he displayed some amazing concept drawings for various New Gods characters, including several that were never used. I’d made it my goal to track them down and finally publish all those pieces for everyone to see and enjoy, and I’d been able to find all but one of them: the one you see on this issue’s front cover. After years of searching (including seeing it briefly in a stack of Kirby art, but then inexplicably not being able to find it again shortly thereafter), this elusive drawing finally surfaced last year, and I’m proud to be able to present it here. It’s one of two Kirby items that I vowed I’d have to track down before I could end this magazine and/or die happy; the other is Jack’s original Spider-Man tryout pages that were rejected by Stan Lee in the early Sixties, making way for Steve Ditko to give the character his well known look of today. I’m still searching, Kirby fans, and I won’t rest until I find them!

The back cover features four never-published interpretations by Jack of American football teams of the future! These wild imaginings were done in conjunction with the work Jack was commissioned circa 1972 to do for PRO! Magazine, the National Football League’s official publication. The October 22, 1973 issue of PRO! featured two pieces (shown below) that we’ve run previously in TJKC, but these four intergalactic concepts have never been published, to my knowledge. Images are courtesy of Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com).

And hey, just for grins, the October 19, 1975 issue of PRO! (right) featured views of Minnesota Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton on and off the field, drawn by our man Kirby, so I figured, why not show them here too? Enjoy, courtesy of the Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org)!

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Mark evanier (below) Though Sgt. Fury #18 (May 1965) credits Dick Ayers as the artist, Kirby drew this splash page, and the final, pivotal page of the issue, demonstrating his input into other artists’ books. (next page) Did Simon & Kirby work “Marvel Method” on books such as Black Magic?

Here’s the cover to the Sept. 1952 (Vol. 2, #10) issue.

Sgt. Fury characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Black Magic Characters TM & ©2009 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate.

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Jack F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

by Mark Evanier reader named George Parker asked me to weigh in on a discussion that seems to pop up every twenty minutes on one message board or other. Someone likens the team of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby to the team of John Lennon & Paul McCartney, and suddenly folks are arguing over whether Stan is John and Jack is Paul or Paul is Jack and John is Stan and does that mean Don Heck is Ringo and Flo Steinberg is the Walrus?

Most analogies only go so far and stop. This one doesn’t make it to the Negative Zone and barely gets halfway across Abbey Road.

The first place it breaks down, of course, is that John and Paul didn’t have a clear division of work. Both wrote lyrics. Both wrote music. There was nothing one did that the other did not, whereas Lee and Kirby had somewhat different job descriptions and skills.

Also, though they might not have felt so at times, both Beatles received sufficient accolades and cash for their work while Lee and Kirby were both grossly underpaid and their fame was confined to a small niche audience. It has only been in the last few years that Stan Lee

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has become the household name that he certainly deserves to be.

But you can draw some comparisons, largely in the way each duo reinvented the area in which it worked, kickstarted an industry and set the model and bar for countless others. And certainly in both alliances, you have some fuzziness over who contributed what. We know that Paul largely did “Yesterday” all by himself and that it was Jack’s idea that Galactus have a silver herald on a gleaming surfboard, but there are many instances where the men involved couldn’t say... or agree.

Of most Beatles songs, you can only declare, “That’s by Lennon and McCartney,” and you can’t go much farther than that.

True, you can say that with “It’s Getting Better” on the Sgt. Pepper album, Paul wrote the lines, “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better / A little better all the time,” and then John interjected the part that goes “It couldn’t get much worse.”

But it’s still by Lennon and McCartney. Even on a song where one guy did 80% of the work and the other did 20%, it’s still a Lennon-McCartney creation. And the only reason we know who did what on that song was because it was one of the instances where recollections and anecdotes agreed, which is not always the case.

The story of John and Paul is one of two guys working increasingly apart. Early on, they wrote in the same room, practically in each other’s faces, about as “together” as two songwriters could be, and the recording sessions went in much the same manner.

Then by ’64 or ’65, they were moving more into individual efforts but contributing snippets and amendments to each other’s drafts as per the above example. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, they went their separate ways.

Which is where I see the strongest Lee-Kirby parallel.

Throughout the sixties, Stan and Jack moved slowly apart. In fact, they split on very close to the same timetable as John and Paul. Kirby told Lee he was leaving Marvel in March of 1970.

McCartney announced the following month that the Beatles would be splitting up.

Leading up to both severances were periods of growing and laboring apart. The early Lee-Kirby collaborations were closer than the later ones. Early on, Jack would come into the office and they’d talk through ideas, sometimes with Jack sitting at a drawing table, batting out sketches. The depiction of Stan and Jack at work in Fantastic Four #10 was pretty much accurate, except for the part about Doctor Doom walking in on them. That almost never happened.

(One other quibble with sequences like that is that they conveyed the erroneous impression that the comics were written and drawn by Lee and Kirby working together in an office each day.

Actually, Jack did his work at home and only came in for a few hours once a week, if that often. Stan did much, often most of his scripting at his home and primarily handled editorial and administrative work at the office, sometimes only coming in two or three days a week.)

Whatever the level of closeness was, it lasted only so long. As Marvel expanded, Stan got busier and Jack cut back on his visits to the office. With so many pages to produce, Kirby could ill afford the time to take the train into Manhattan, nor did it fit with his personal schedule. The busier he got, the more nocturnal he became. His peak creative hours were late at night, after Roz and the kids were asleep and he could forget about family responsibilities and live

wholly in the story of the moment. When you’re getting to bed at 5 or 6 AM, it’s tough to be in New York for a noon story conference... which Stan couldn’t spare much time for, anyway.

When Jack did manage to time his life so he could get into town at a decent hour, it usually meant losing a day. He’d try to get there by 11 AM in the futile hope he could meet with Stan and be off before the office emptied for lunch. But Kirby and trains ran late and most of the time, he’d get there just in time to go eat with whoever was around.

(Stan Goldberg, who colored most of Marvel’s books for a time and drew Millie the Model, likes to tell the story of going to lunch with Kirby. He, Jack and inker Frank Giacoia had to cross a treacherous intersection together and Goldberg told Giacoia, “You walk on one side of him... I’ll walk on the other. If he gets hit by a car, the whole company goes under.”)

Back from eats, Jack would get to visiting with the staff while he waited for Stan... and then he’d find out that Stan was running behind; that Heck or Ayers or Wood or some other artist was waiting for his story conference, which somehow had to go first. Often, Jack would wind up in that other artist’s story conference, tossing out ideas for an issue of Daredevil or The Avengers or some other comic he wouldn’t be drawing. Kirby was glad to be of aid to a fellow artist and found it hard to decline, but he resented when he felt he’d helped write a comic with neither credit nor pay.

So there was another good reason not to go into the office. Eventually, the in-person story conferences became so infrequent that it didn’t make much difference when in 1969, Jack moved himself and his family to California. That was a year before he left Marvel and by then, though he may not have known it, I think it was inevitable that Jack would stop collaborating not just with Stan but with any other writer.

Jack actually never viewed himself as the kind of artist who drew scripts by others. Some of us think of him that way because we first knew of him as the half of the Lee-Kirby team who drew. But before he began working with Stan, the norm for Jack was to either be heavily involved in the writing or to do it alone.

That was how it had worked in the Simon-Kirby shop. When that operation dissolved, Jack had to grab whatever work he could get... and if that meant drawing without writing, fine. Much of the time, it meant contributing to the writing—devising plots and/or rewriting scripts— but for strictly artist pay. At DC on the mystery comics, the Green Arrow feature and Challengers of the Unknown, Jack occasionally wrote, but more often plotted and then rewrote.

When he first told me this in 1970 or thereabouts, I was skeptical. In ’69, I met and talked with Whitney Ellsworth, who’d been DC’s editor-in-chief throughout most of the forties and early fifties. One of the things he’d told me about his company was that writers wrote and artists drew and that they never, ever did that weird thing Marvel did of having the artist participate in the plotting of a comic. He didn’t say Kirby hadn’t done that during his time at DC but it made me wonder if Jack was exaggerating to say he had.

Later though, others who had worked for DC concurrently—including Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky and Arnold Drake—all told me that, yes, Jack had probably done just what he said he’d done, plotting and rewriting stories without pay and occasionally writing one for pay. That never happened with most of the artists who worked for the firm, particularly those who toiled for editor Mort Weisinger.

But Kirby’s editor, Jack Schiff, made an exception for Kirby.

Among those of us who analyze uncredited comics and attempt to determine authorship, there is much debate over certain stories. Did Kirby write them? Or did he rewrite someone else’s scripts so thoroughly that he largely obliterated the other writers’ styles? On some, we’ll probably never know.

When he went to work for Stan Lee, it was a little different. Jack asked about writing scripts but that was Stan’s job... and what Stan couldn’t handle went to his brother, Larry Lieber. Still, Stan was glad to have Jack’s input into the writing... which brings us to the famous “Marvel Method” of creating a comic.

Do I need to summarize that method? Maybe I do. Previously in comics, the norm was for the writer to type out a whole script, telling how many panels would be on a page, what the artist should draw in each and the writer would also write out the words that would go in the caption and word balloons. This was all done before the artist had any involvement. With the “Marvel Method,” a plot would be devised, the artist would break down the story from the plot, drawing it all out in pencil, and then the scripter would devise the copy after the art was penciled.

No one is quite certain how and when this sequencing of tasks was first employed in comics. The writer Robert Kanigher—who, by the way, hated working that way—said that schedule problems occasionally necessitated it back in the forties. Many tales of Steel Sterling and other MLJ strips drawn by Irv Novick were, he said, written via this procedure.

He surely was not the first to do it like that. When comics were produced in “shops”—studio arrangements where many writers and artists worked in the same room—every possible division of labor was employed, including this one.

(I asked Jack once if they’d ever worked that way in the Simon-Kirby studio. He said, approximately, “I can’t recall doing that but we must have at some point.”)

The method came into its own when Stan began using it on almost all his writing work of the sixties. Lee and Kirby seem to have worked plot/art/script on Rawhide Kid stories that predated Fantastic Four #1 by about a year and quite likely before that on short stories for the romance or monster comics. Stan Goldberg has said that he worked art-before-dialogue with Lee on Millie the Model at least a few years prior to the advent of Fantastic Four.

But the way Lee did it, particularly with Kirby or Ditko, was not quite the way that would later be employed by others at Marvel and other companies. Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and others who followed Stan at Marvel were more likely to write out a plot with little or no involvement by the penciler. As Roy noted once on a panel we were on, “There were some artists you could [co-plot] with but most you couldn’t. Not every good artist was Kirby or Ditko.” In fact, some writers would later supply very detailed plots to the artists, even to the point of a suggested panel-by-panel breakdown and some rough drafts of possible dialogue.

That wasn’t how Stan usually did it. He usually plotted comics in tandem with whoever would be penciling or doing layouts. Either that or if he was comfortable with that artist’s sense of story, he’d leave them to do it on their own or after the briefest of conversations. The idea might start with either man and 5

(below) Splash page to Justice Inc. #2 (July 1975). This was one of the few 1970s DC books Kirby drew from someone else’s scripts; in this case, by Denny O’Neil. Notice that Jack still penciled Denny’s dialogue in the balloons. (next page) Kirby’s Magneto sketch, done for his private meeting with Paul McCartney in the early 1970s.

Magneto TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Black Magic Characters TM & ©2009 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate.

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sometimes all that person had was a single sentence or premise.

They’d talk it through. It has been alleged in articles that Stan Lee would sometimes get so carried away in these sessions that he’d leap up on his desk to act out a fight scene or otherwise perform the actions that Thor or Captain America might go through. I’ve asked just about everyone who ever plotted with Stan if they recall him actually getting up onto the desk and the usual response is, “No, but he sometimes got so excited about a story that it wouldn’t have surprised me!” (If we’re talking about the office Stan had when I first visited him in 1970, I can imagine one reason he might have been up on the desk: There was barely room to walk on the floor in that crackerbox.)

After the meeting, Jack would go home and start drawing the story they’d discussed. Or maybe he’d start drawing a different story that he thought was what they’d discussed. Not only did he sometimes deviate wildly from what they’d talked about, the absent-minded Kirby sometimes drew the wrong strip altogether.

According to Sol Brodsky, who was Stan’s Production Manager during much of this period, Stan and Jack would discuss (for example) the Nick Fury story Jack was going to draw and on the way out, Stan would mention something about the next issue of Fantastic Four they’d be tackling. Jack would then go home and

draw that issue of Fantastic Four.

Stan would sometimes type out a plot outline after a meeting and mail it to Jack... but often by the time it arrived, Kirby would be on page 13 and would have taken things in a different direction.

Throughout the sixties, the meetings between Lee and Kirby grew briefer and the plot outlines grew shorter or were omitted entirely. I have about two dozen of them from Jack’s files and some are only a sentence or two long.

However it happened, Kirby would sit at his drawing table for several days and pencil out the story, then it would go to Stan for dialoguing. Early on, he’d go over the story with Stan and explain what he had in mind for each panel but later, as time grew precious and Jack decided to minimize his visits to the office, he’d write out notes in the margins. You’ve all seen them on Kirby original art or in reproductions of it. Stan would then compose the copy, sometimes hewing closely to what Jack intended, sometimes deviating wildly.

The process yielded some great comics but more and more, the method adopted to capitalize on the skills of Jack Kirby stopped working for Jack Kirby. Taking his beefs in no particular order...

He felt it did not work for him creatively. Jack was an opinionated fellow with views on everything, and in everything he worked on, he was making some sort of statement.

Often, it was a very personal and emphatic statement. It pained him at times to see Stan temper, ignore or even invert some theme or concept that he put into a story when he drew it... just as I’m sure it often pained Stan when an artist changed what he thought should wind up on the pages. (There’s probably a parallel in this to Lennon/McCartney. In fact, most creative people want their ideas to reach the audience unaltered and undiluted... and the more skilled they grow at their craft, the more they crave that.)

Jack also felt the process did not work for him as a means of production. Gil Kane once told me he agreed with an observation I’d made that the “Marvel Method” probably worked best with an artist who had a little flair for writing but not a lot. You needed a little flair to figure out what should happen in each panel... to flesh out whatever the writer gave you and to insert additional bits of business. If the plot said, “On page eight, Captain America slips past the Red Skull’s guard and gets inside the laboratory,” you’d have to employ a bit of writerly ingenuity to figure out how to get him in there.

There were artists, including some very good ones, who simply couldn’t work that way.

Give them a full script that told them what to draw in each panel and they could launch right into a masterful job. Leave them to decide what should happen in each panel and they’d stare at the blank drawing paper for hours and then, as some did, return to Stan and say, “I’m sorry... I can’t do this.” Brodsky estimated for me that in the early days of The Marvel Age of Comics, at least half the artists who tried working “Marvel Method” failed. In some cases, they turned back the assignment. In others, they handed in something Stan found it difficult to script.

Carl Burgos and Bob Powell would probably be examples of the latter. Joe Orlando told me that on every job he did for Stan, working “Marvel Method,” Stan would require massive redraws, changing around the story details Orlando had worked out. For Joe, it felt like he had to draw each issue twice—once before and once after the writer figured out how the plot

should go. He finally refused to redraw most of one story without additional pay and that ended Joe Orlando’s career at Marvel.

But to think too much like a writer could present problems. It did for Bill Everett, one of many who tried working “Marvel Method” and found it difficult.

You’d think it would be natural for a guy who’d written so many of the comics he’d drawn in the past, and written them so well. As it turned out, that was much of the problem. One reason Everett didn’t pencil more for Marvel was because, he told me, it took as long to pencil a story from a plot as it would for him to write a full script and then pencil it. In fact, that’s what he often had to do. He’d write himself a script, draw the comic, then toss his script away and hand in the art for someone else to dialogue.

Those who were happiest working that way were probably the guys who had a little facility for writing but not so much that they wanted to do it all by themselves. Those guys didn’t sit there as they drew and figure out every single thing the captions and balloons might have contained.

John Buscema—to pick one artist of many who loved “Marvel Method”— didn’t fancy himself a writer. He plotted a few things here and there during his long, glorious career in comics but never really had the interest (or felt he had the skill) to handle that end of the job. He found it liberating to draw from a plot, particularly because it freed him to make the story more visual.

So if the plot said, “The Fantastic Four spend two pages or so discussing how they’re going to defeat Doctor Doom,” he would—first of all—chop that two pages of talk down to less than a page. And then he’d draw the characters standing around, talking and gesturing, with very little regard to what each was saying in each panel. I suppose if you’d asked him, “What’s Ben Grimm saying in that panel?,” he’d have replied, “That’s for Stan to figure out.”

Jack never thought like that. When he penciled out an issue of Fantastic Four, he mentally “wrote” every line of dialogue, maybe not word for word, but he decided that in Panel One, the Thing was saying this and the Torch was saying that. This might not be conveyed to Stan and even if it was, Stan might have other ideas. But Jack more or less approached everything he did in comics not as an artist but as a writer-artist. He just sometimes didn’t get paid for the writer part.

His wife Roz once said, “It takes Jack longer to draw a story that someone else is going to dialogue than it does for him to do it himself.” That was because he went through the thought process that would be necessary if he was composing the words either way, but when someone else was going to do the script, he had to also summarize his ideas into notes for his collaborator.

So the “Marvel Method” didn’t work for Kirby creatively. It meant he was mentally writing stories and then watching as Stan changed them. No one who thinks of themselves as a writer is comfortable with seeing their stories changed.

The process didn’t work for him financially, either. This was especially the case when the plot largely originated with Jack and then Stan didn’t change things around. Jack felt he was doing work for which he was not being paid. No one likes that, either.

It didn’t work for him in terms of credit. There were times when Stan was enormously candid and generous in describing in interviews how much Jack contributed to the plots and storylines of the comics they did together. It didn’t seem to matter. Jack kept encountering people who assumed every idea in those comics, every concept and character, emerged fully formed from the brain of Stan Lee, and then Kirby drew what Stan envisioned. Either that or they’d think of Kirby’s story input as freebee work, undeserving of recognition or pay.

A few weeks after it became known that Jack had left Marvel for DC, Jack received a number of proposals from DC writers who wanted, as at least one put it, “...to be your new Stan Lee.” I know of at least three such approaches and there may have been more.

One in particular really bothered Jack. It came in a letter he showed me. The writer was suggesting that they should collaborate; that Kirby would draw out each issue and send it to this writer “to write.”

The gentleman was not offering to participate in the plotting. Jack wouldn’t have wanted that from this writer but he resented the rhetoric, clearly indicated throughout the letter, that the writing process started after the comic was completely drawn. Needless to say, the person was not offering to share the writing credit or pay. Kirby, he assumed, would figure out who all the characters were, what they did in each panel and roughly what they would say... but that wasn’t part of the writing.

The letter angered Jack... though he was amused by the fact that as a letter, it wasn’t particularly well-written. He even pointed out that its author didn’t seem to know the difference between “their” and “there.”

That offer and others (the others were a bit more reasonable) convinced Jack

that he was right to set a condition on his work for DC. He would not work “Marvel Method.”

He wanted to write what he drew because... well, he thought of himself as a writer-artist.

But to be cooperative, if DC wanted someone else to write, he’d go along with that, providing the writer wrote a complete script. He was pleased when Infantino told him no, they didn’t want that. They wanted Kirby to write what he drew... as he did with occasional rare exceptions.

Every so often, I encounter someone who doesn’t like Jack’s style of dialogue and who wishes someone else had filled in the balloons on New Gods or other DC books. There was an interview once where I even expressed something of the sort but I came to realize I was wrong. If someone else had scripted those comics, they would not have been the same comics but with jazzier or more contemporary dialogue. They would have been completely different comics. Perhaps they would have been better—we’ll never know—but I’m convinced that Jack could not have plotted and crafted “The Pact” or “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin” or “The Glory Boat” or most of those if he hadn’t felt totally in control of the writing end of those comics. Knowing his story was not going to be changed in the dialogue stage (unless, of course, he changed it) and knowing he’d receive proper credit for his story contributions did a lot to unleash his story sense.

I also think he would have had a hard time handing work off to another writer—even someone he respected, which was a short list—because the writing and drawing of a comic were becoming fused in his mind. Somewhere in an earlier column, I think I made this analogy. Irving Berlin, when he created songs, conceived the music and lyrics together as a single unit. They came to him as one creation and he dictated them to his arrangers that way. (Berlin didn’t read or write music.) Some great tunes have been penned by one guy writing one and one writing the other, and early in his career, Berlin sometimes collaborated. But as he got older and his skills matured, he didn’t separate the duties. Neither did Kirby.

And neither, eventually, did Lennon and McCartney. As they progressed, neither one of them did much in the way of collaboration. Paul wrote some songs with Elvis Costello and John worked briefly with David Bowie... but those were the exceptions. Most of the time, there was no room for someone else in the process.

Jack Kirby worked the way Jack Kirby had to work, which by the seventies was largely alone. He disappeared into each story and didn’t fully emerge until it was done. That seems to be the way Lennon and McCartney worked in later years, and it wasn’t even a matter of the work being better or worse because they didn’t create it in some sort of partnership relationship with someone else. It was just the way they had to work. Someone reportedly asked Lennon once if he’d consider going back and writing just one more song with McCartney. He probably didn’t want to but interestingly, that wasn’t the first thing out of his mouth in reply. He said, “I can’t do that anymore.” For good or ill, I think that by the time he hit the age of around 50, Jack Kirby couldn’t, either.

Next question? ★ (Mark Evanier, author of Kirby, King of Comics from Harry N. Abrams (and several books from TwoMorrows) welcomes your questions about you-knowwho. Visit his website, www.newsfromme.com and you’ll find a link via which to send them. You’ll also find plenty of things to read.)

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Gallery 1

Hit the road, Jack

ack Kirby, with his city boy upbringing, was about as far from being a cowboy as possible. But considering his early love of movies, he undoubtedly saw more than his fair share of Western films, where the heroic cowboy always rode off into the sunset at the film’s end. That image must’ve stuck with him, as you’ll see on the pages that follow.

Presented here is the last page of several of Kirby’s final issues of his various runs on comics. While the last panel on his final issues was often edited or redrawn for publication (particularly on books that were being cancelled), we’re showcasing what Kirby originally had as his last shot on some of his many strips. In some cases, there’s a “next issue” blurb for a following issue that was never published (a giveaway that Jack wasn’t aware he was ending the series until after the story was drawn, which gives readers a taste of “what might have been” if he’d stayed on the series). Other times, it’s clear that Jack knew he was calling it quits, and he utilized a parting shot of the story’s leads walking away from the reader.

It’s interesting to note that, on first issues, he tended to make the final panel a straight-on shot of the character looking directly at the reader, to lure you to buy the next issue. But on ones where he decided (or was told) to hit the road, the characters are generally walking away, cueing the reader that the show’s over, and imbuing a sense of melancholy. ★

J

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(this page) Final panels from: (top row) Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #148, Captain America #214, Forever People #11, Silver Surfer Graphic Novel (middle row) Black Panther #12, Machine Man #9, 2001: A Space Odyssey Treasury Edition, Manhunter #1 (bottom row) Demon #16, Dingbats of Danger Street #3, OMAC #8, Atlas #1 TM & ©2009 the respective owners.

by John Morrow

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TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

10

TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

11

TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

12

TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

13

TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

Final pages from final issues: (page 9) Sandman #1 (Winter 1974) As far as Jack knew, this was a one-shot with Joe Simon, but he added a “next issue” blurb to be safe. (page 10) 2001: A Space Odyssey #10 (Sept. 1977) Mr. Machine spins off to his own mag, but Kirby gives him a farewell panel in 2001 anyway. (page 11) Super Powers II #6 (Feb. 1986) The final “final” page of Jack’s career. (page 12) Devil Dinosaur #9 (Dec. 1978) Jack knew he was leaving, but again, he added a “next issue blurb”. (page 13) Eternals #19 (Jan. 1978) The gods walk off into the sunset.

TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

(page 14) First Issue Special #5 (Sept. 1975) Even though Jack drew two more unused Dingbats of Danger Street stories, he ended the only published one like this. (page 15) Kamandi #40 (April 1976) Jack penciled this from Gerry Conway’s script, but still signed off with his signature panel, leaving the “next issue” panel blank.

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Obscura

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

by Barry Forshaw

eople are once supposed to have thought that the streets of London were paved with gold, but as a boy growing up in the North of England in the 1960s, I knew—with absolute conviction—where the streets were paved with something far more interesting: Any street in Anytown, USA. Every burg in America (I knew for sure) boasted streets clogged with drug stores selling a host of US comics books, with their wonderful four-color interiors—surely the most desirable items on Earth, particularly for those of us who consumed such material only via the chunky 68-page black-&-white UK reprints. What’s more, these same American kids (who clearly didn’t know how lucky they were) had endless disposable income; Brit kids had to make a judicious financial decision every week (as half-a-crown pocket money only went so far): The shilling Race for the Moon or Forbidden Worlds? Or the more affordable sixpenny Superman, Batman or Superadventure (as World’s Finest was retitled in the UK)?

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Looking for inexpensive reprints of the stories featured this issue? House of Mystery #84 (March 1959) was reprinted in House of Mystery #194 (Sept. 1971) and Showcase Presents Vol. 1: House of Mystery (2006). All the Challengers stories were recently reprinted in a DC Archive edition, and Bullseye was collected by Marvel in the 1990s.

Challengers, Negative Man TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

Bullseye TM & ©2009 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate.

CRISP BLACK AND WHITE But if the truth be told, I didn’t lament the absence of the original books—they did turn up from time to time (like manna from heaven) and the British shilling reprints were very handsome and desirable items: glossy color covers, good value (at least a quarter of an inch thick)—with spines, yet, like a paperback book!

(Something the US books didn’t have.) So you could look at your set of Blackhawk or The Flash side-on and have an extra aesthetic frisson (not that I would have known what to call such an experience back then). And the contents of those books! Before the UK packager Alan Class took over and began using much cheaper paper, the original reprint books (courtesy of such reprint merchants as L Miller and the various titles published by Thorpe and Porter) used good quality white paper, so the crisp black-&-white artwork positively leaped off the page.

Twelve-year-old aficionados like me quickly recognized that there was an artist whose eye-jolting work seemed to blossom in this setting, with his bold dynamic lines and brilliantly canny use of solid blocks of blacks. But who was he? Those few school friends in the loose freemasonry of 1960s comics fans (before there was any such thing as comics fandom in the UK) would talk about this ‘good’ artist—and what made it an edgy discussion was the fact that he was somewhat controversial; not everyone liked his highly stylised approach—the very thing, in fact (though we didn’t of course know it at the time) that gave his artwork problems at DC when he worked on their mystery and SF books, as it didn’t quite conform to the house style.

ENTER THE NEGATIVE MAN Take for instance, a back-up tale in one of the shilling books called “The Negative Man.” It showed a bizarre human-shaped figure of pure energy, lifting a ship out of a dock with snaking arms of crackling force, while two scientist gape in shock. Who knew, in a time when comics had no credits beyond the name of Bob Kane on Batman, who drew this? (Or, for that matter, who knew then that stories with Bob Kane’s name on them were not drawn by him, but by one of his ‘ghosts’?)

It was years later that I tracked down House of Mystery #84 (DC, March 1959) and saw for the first time where The Negative Man had originated. It was the cover, still striking, but with a cover clearly drawn by another artist—and by now (as an adult) one could track down these anonymous artisans—the cover was, in fact, drawn by Bob Brown, who was subsequently to take over another strip by the artist of the Negative Man, Challengers of the Unknown. But the dynamism of the story, seen for the first time in full color! Every panel bristled with a maximum dramatic impact— such as the shot of a scientist being hit by a devastating blast of radio energy which would, of course, produce the eponymous Negative Man, soon to dispense mayhem on massive scale (starting with melting a torch in his hand and ending with the dockside ship-juggling mentioned earlier).

WHO’S THE MYSTERY ARTIST? In this era, many a journeyman artist would concentrate all the artistic impact they seemed to have under their belts into the splash panel, with everything else in the succeeding pages being somewhat low-voltage. But not this artist! Many panels in the tale could have passed muster as splash panels: Such as the image of The Negative Man using his power to direct a host of bank notes over the heads of a stunned crowd after a robbery, or the strange creature at bay, surrounded by tractors armed with lead shields.

Looked at in the 21st Century, the story is still the best thing in H of M #84. The first tale, by the usually reliable Nick Cardy (“The 100-Century Doom”) looks rushed, and the pieces by George Roussos and Sheldon Moldoff are frankly ordinary. But, boy, that Negative Man—worth the price of admission, whether you encountered him in a ten-cent US book or a shilling UK reprint!

And did you notice that I didn’t once mention the name of the

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artist this column is about in the preceding paragraph? I sort of assumed you’d know who I was talking about…

FOUR CHALLENGERS, FOUR ISSUES There were four issues of Challengers of the Unknown—and four issues only. The first two issues featured covers by Jack Kirby; #1 was “The Sorceress of Forbidden Valley”, #2 was “The Isle of No Return”. The final two issues had Bob Brown covers (“The Plot To Destroy the Earth” in #3, “The Four Faces of Doom” in the fourth and concluding issue). And that was it. Finis. Confused?

Going back to the earlier notion of just how lucky Americans were… If you were a British schoolboy in the sixties, that’s all we saw—just four issues were published in the UK, and the strange, jumbled-up mix of Kirby & Brown eras on Death Cheaters Ace, Prof, Red and Rocky suggested to us both artists were working contemporaneously on the strip. Only when we saw the US originals did we learn of the relatively long, glorious Kirby run on the strip before the efficient (but less inspired) Brown took over. And showcased in glorious black-and-white (these four books were 68-pagers, with some choice Schwartz-era SF as back-up strips, including the first Adam Strange) was an artist whose work was clearly that of the brilliant talent we’d seen in the Mad Ballantine paperbacks and the few EC reprints we’d had in the UK—the astonishing Wally Wood (who knew back then that Wood was inking Kirby’s pencils, so strong was the former’s identity?). This was comic art refined to the nth degree—the best we’d seen outside of EC. And buried some thirty pages into UK issue #3—after the unexceptional Bob Brown art—was the greatest treasure of all: an ingenious, novel-length piece called “The Wizard of Time”, with the Challs chasing a squat, bearded villain called Tiko though time itself, no less. Wonderful though the monochrome art was to these British eyes, tracking down the original book (DC’s Challengers of the Unknown #4, 1958) in a San Francisco store in my twenties was like finding the Holy Grail—I thought then (and still do) that this was the zenith of Kirby art, burnished by those assiduously detailed Wood pencils.

THE FOUR GREATEST SPLASH PANELS IN COMICS HISTORY What makes this book so special? Well, let’s start with the splash panels—the four best ever seen in a comic book. For Chapter 1, the four jump-suited adventurers crouch in a time machine, with an ancient Greek solder in their midst, hurtling back to the latter’s era; Chapter 2 has Ace and Rocky in careening chariot, fighting off violent hordes of ancient Greeks—the teeming background detail Kirby and Wood pour into this panel can’t have been time (and hence, cost) effective— but like Britain’s comics genius Frank Hampson, who similarly overloaded his Dan Dare strip with added value, Jack and Wally gave every job all they had, and more.

Chapter 3—the finest splash of all—has Red and Prof pressganged into helping build the pyramids—again, the intensely detailed canvas is amazing.

The concluding chapter has the definitive futuristic city á la Kirby, with two Challs dwarfed by an eye-opening futuristic cityscape. The tale itself (written

by Kirby—or Dave Wood?) piles on a symphony of incident and busy plotting, and is even ingenious enough to have the wind-up resolved via the deus ex machina of future cops—satisfyingly, it’s not the Challs who bring the villain to justice. (One niggling query: why do all the denizens of the civilizations of the past appear to speak English?) Fortunately, this four-colour masterpiece has been reprinted several times—most sumptuously in the hardback Challengers of the Unknown Archives Vol. 2 (though the bright, poster-paint recoloring is much less subtle than the original book). But it’s a key purchase for any Kirbyite.

HITTING THE BULLSEYE In its short run for Mainline (and, subsequently, Charlton), the Simon & Kirby Western comic Bullseye was, frankly, something of a dog’s dinner: eye-catching Kirby covers & splash panels (the best of which were collected—in black-andwhite—in the recent Bullseye portfolio). But unlike such S&K projects as Race for the Moon, the cowboy book (even its abbreviated run) had time to run out of steam.

The reasons were numerous. The wring and illustrations in the first issue (1954) had a toughness that would not have been acceptable under the Comics Code. In the origin story, the eponymous Bullseye—still a boy—blows up the rifle of a sadistic Indian chief with a trick shot, leaving his face ‘a gory mess’ (rendered by Kirby as sort of Native American Two-Face), and the young hero is subsequently branded on the chest by the vengeful Yellow Snake with the bullseye that is to be his trademark.

But such grisly fare has vanished by the second issue, and the stories are far more anodyne. However, the main reason why the book isn’t in the upper echelons for Kirbyites is the fact that much of the art is hived off to other inkers and pencilers in the Simon & Kirby stable (in fact, pencilers often change mid-story—it’s not just after Kirby splashes, the usual S&K ploy—The King often draws the first three or so pages of a story). Nevertheless, the books are worth tracking down if you can find them economically priced (but I warn you—it’s not easy!); or you could just pick up the Bullseye portfolio…★ Barry Forshaw is the author of The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (available from Amazon.com) and the editor of Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk) 17

Fish In A Barrel

Unearthed

Reviewed by John Morrow

(right) The cover and (middle) first page for Fish In A Barrel, circa 1955. (bottom) A Kirby Bullseye sketch from 1980.

Fish In A Barrel TM & ©2009 Joe Simon. Bullseye TM & ©2009 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate.

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ish In A Barrel is, according to a letter Joe Simon sent me back in 2000, “a dramatic piece by Joe Simon. Jack had a copy since he signed a release.” However, the dual byline on the cover leads me to believe Jack at least had some input into it. Joe further said it was copyrighted in a book titled Characters, so if anyone has further information on that book, please send it in.

The version in Jack’s files is a 60-page, three-act script for either a television/movie screenplay or a stage production, dramatizing the story of how Simon & Kirby had Crestwood’s books audited in the 1950s, and discovered that the publisher was withholding royalties that were rightfully Joe and Jack’s.

The piece was written around 1955, according to Harry Mendryk, who blogged about it at http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonand kirby/archives/category/z-archive/200703.

Interestingly, the version in Joe Simon’s files is 77 pages long, so I assume Joe revised it somewhere along the line. Simon recounted the real-life version of events in a short chapter of his book The Comic Book Makers, and the title refers to the old expression, “It’ll be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.”

For the screenplay, a lot of dramatic license was taken. “Jay Duncan” is the name of the young artist who was taken advantage of by Cooper Publications. Duncan had been fired by his boss Martin Cooper, and gone on to start his own publishing company.

Instead of comic books, the bone of contention is payments for “kiddie books” like the Little Golden Books of old. The particular property at issue is Bullseye the Sharpshooter, whose cover shows “a heroic, colorful marksman aiming a bow and arrow at the reader.” The background of the cover is described as a huge target, and the subtitle reads: “He Never Misses.”

Jay Duncan’s own publishing business has failed, and he’s enlisted accountant Paul Kurtz to help him get his old job back, using unpaid royalties as leverage.

But Duncan doesn’t realize that his accountant has more in

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mind than the job and a few missing payments.

It’s a really compelling read, with palpable tension between the characters, and a satisfying resolution. Although the character of Bullseye is only mentioned briefly, he serves as the catalyst for all the back-and-forth negotiations between the main characters.

There’s a temptation to read between the lines, and try to draw parallels between the characters in the screenplay and real-life people Joe and Jack encountered. In addition to the obvious (Paul Kurtz and Myron Rosenthal are stand-ins for S&K’s own accountant Bernard Gwirtzman and attorney Morris Eisenstein), Martin Cooper could easily be seen as a doppleganger of Martin Goodman, the head of Timely/Marvel Comics, who fired Joe and Jack in real life over a dispute on royalties for Captain America. It’s interesting to note that the name “Kurtz” was chosen, since Jack’s real last name is “Kurtzberg”. More interesting is the interplay between artist Jay Duncan and Shelly Meyers, who is Martin Cooper’s righthand man, but played both sides of the fence by befriending Duncan, and claiming to look out for his interests (something that comes back to haunt him in the end).

Here’s hoping that Joe Simon will allow this to be reproduced in one of the upcoming Simon & Kirby books by Titan Publishing; it’s worth every Kirby fan’s time to read. ★

Innerview

Train of Thought Part 2 Interview from Train Of Thought #6, circa 1972 Submitted by William Cavitt

(below) The original announcement that local San Diego fans would be appearing as characters in Jack’s Jimmy Olsen strip. This appeared in an early 1970s San Diego Con program book. Courtesy of Shel Dorf.

[Editor’s Note: This year, Comic-Con International: San Diego celebrates its 40th anniversary, and the con is inviting back all the founding members who volunteered their time and effort to launch what’s become the country’s biggest comics convention. Shel Dorf was the convention’s founder, and got to know Jack Kirby well after he moved from New York to California. Shel in turn befriended numerous young comics fans in the Southern California area, and took them to meet Jack at home on several occasions. The following interview came out of one of those visits, and the questions here were asked by Shel Dorf and/or several of the various fans who were visiting Jack’s home that day. Lacking proper credits when it was published circa 1972 in Mike Towry’s fanzine Train of Thought #6, we can only thank Shel Dorf and some or all of the guys who would become the San Diego Five-String Mob in Jimmy Olsen: Scott Shaw!,

John Pound, Bill Lund, Roger Freedman, Barry Alfonso, and the aforementioned Mike Towry. Mike, if you’re out there, Comic-Con’s trying to find you to appear this year, so get in touch; we want to feature a Five-String Mob reunion photo here!]

TRAIN OF THOUGHT: Do you like what Peter Max does?

JACK KIRBY: Yes. Oh, I’m crazy about it. I think Peter Max has taken a greater step than Picasso. I think Peter Max has really taken a realistic stance as far as art is concerned. He’s made art less harsh, and art more rich, and given it more form and more grace. I just can’t explain the kind of admiration I have for Peter Max. TOT: Do you think that it’s legitimate, though, that he merchandises his art?

KIRBY: Sure it’s legitimate. That’s where Peter Max lives. That’s where you live. I mean if exploitation is available to you and you don’t want to use it, that’s fine. If exploitation is available to you and you want to use it, why not? If you feel that it’s going to help you in some way, you exploit. If you feel that you’re going to get nothing from it, or if you want something else from it, you just don’t exploit it.

TOT: Would you ever want any of your characters to be exploited?

KIRBY: Yeah, they’ve been using Captain America to promote a chain of pants stores. They’ve been putting him on shirts and such to sell pants.

TOT: Captain America to sell pants? He should sell leotards.

KIRBY: Listen, you can keep talking, but you’ve destroyed my ego. But, of course, I think it’s right. They exploited something that they felt would help their business. They picked him up and used him just like you would a pencil.

TOT: Would you care to expound upon your work at the Fleischer studios?

KIRBY: Yes, Fleischer animation studio, like any animation studio, is a factory. It’s a factory with long rows of tables. It looked just like my father’s place. My father worked in a factory with long rows of tables with sewing machines on them. My father used to sit by them and turn out his quota of merchandise. That’s what I was doing at Fleischer’s. I was sitting at one of these long rows of tables with lights underneath. They’d give me this in-between action. I would finish the action on seven sheets of paper, and I would give them the seven sheets of paper. That was my importance.

TOT: What would have happened if you’d have gotten into the story writing for the animation and the design aspect?

KIRBY: Probably I might’ve done well, but I just couldn’t wait for that. I just didn’t want to be a nothing, like anybody else.

TOT: How did you get the job at Fleischer’s?

KIRBY: I applied for it. I showed them some sample drawings, and they needed an in-betweener. I got the job. It was a good opportunity—I’m not knocking it.

TOT: Did they pay well?

KIRBY: No, at least not according to today’s standards, but whatever you made in those days counted for a lot. I mean I could get into a movie for 50¢. You couldn’t get into the washroom today for that. So whatever I made then counted. I never knocked the money, I just knock the life. I felt that I was well treated at Fleischer’s. It was a good organization, but it was a big organization and I was just a 17-year-old kid. So who the hell was I, and that was the question I always asked myself. I’d say, “Who the hell are you?” and when I didn’t get the right answer I 19

TOT: When you first went into comics, did you look upon it as your chance to finally make an individual effort?

KIRBY: Sure. I like comic books. There were no standards in comic books at the time. I knew I wouldn’t be faced with stuffy people.

In other words, I talk to a syndicate and they greet you with an established manner, an established attitude. You knew what was going to happen to you right away. That you were just a street urchin coming in with samples of drawings, and you had no reputation. And although the people would treat you kindly, you might as well be part of the wallpaper.

TOT: Comics were in their infancy then.

How did it feel to have your name on the title page of a comic?

KIRBY: I was never concerned with that. I never signed my name. Sometimes they make me sign my name.

TOT: I’m talking about, say, when Captain America hit, and you’d go over to somebody and they’d say, “What do you do for a living?” and you’d say, “Well I write a comic book.” How did that strike you then?

Because it seems public attitudes were a lot different then.

KIRBY: For some reason I can’t explain, it was never my idea to be actually somebody of importance. I did the best I could to stay on the same level as anybody I talked to. I was a little guy, to boot. I wasn’t more than maybe 4' 11" to 5' 1", so I was in fights all the time, and I’d get kicked around a lot. It was just a matter of if I could stand still for 5 minutes and hold a conversation with a guy and have him believe me, and have me try to believe him. It wasn’t the fact of seeing my name on a magazine. I like to tell a good story. I like to do that. It’s never been an ego trip with me. I’ve never had any hostility toward anybody.

tried for something else.

TOT: Wasn’t it a kick, though, to go to the movie theater and see the action and know that it’s your work?

KIRBY: I admit that there was some fascination to it, but it wasn’t the uppermost thing in my mind.

What was in my mind was to do what was required better than eight other guys could do it. I had to duplicate what was being done—something that I wasn’t trained for. So I had to figure out how to do it the best way possible so that it would look better than the other guys. I used to define the human figure for myself. When I used to have to draw creases on an arm, I could feel the muscle flex or I could draw out that arm to its extreme. It’s nice to play around with the human figure like that. I did some extreme drawings, and maybe that’s where all the motion format comes from. And I like that sort of 20

thing. I always felt that Captain America was more of a ballet than a fight. I used to choreograph it. I’d have Captain America fighting 25 guys, and while he was hitting one guy, another guy was coming over the library shelf and another guy was coming in through the window. As this guy was falling, Captain America would turn around and get this guy from the shelf. Meanwhile the guy from the window would grab Captain America’s leg. It would be a dance, each man having his own part. It was never a fight. I never liked fighting. I never liked the results of it.

TOT: Did you have a chance to see the first releases of Superman when the kids were taking it around to everybody and they couldn’t sell it?

KIRBY: In that stage? No. I wasn’t there. I don’t recall who was editor at that time. It might have been Whitney Ellsworth.

TOT: How about your motivation for the craft?

KIRBY: My interest in the craft stems strictly from survival. I’ve never had any idea of being a Michelangelo, or a Leonardo Da Vinci, or a Milton Caniff. I never gave two thoughts to Caniff as a human being. I never gave two thoughts to any other cartoonist as a human being.

TOT: I was making a comparison from early films to comic books when they were in their infancy.

KIRBY: Comic books are still in their infancy.

TOT: Right. But when film actors would have assumed names and wouldn’t go out and admit they were film actors—because for a stage actor to be a film actor was demeaning. Was that attitude present in comic books?

KIRBY: It’s not an attitude. It’s a world. My name isn’t Kirby. Nobody ever used their real name.

There was one guy named Ricardo Cortez, and his name was no more Ricardo Cortez than my name is Jack Kirby. That was the kind of world it was. When I tell you my generation lied or died I’m not kidding.

My generation lied to survive. I changed my name

maybe out of the fact that it might change my luck. In other words, if it took luck to survive, I would change my name.

TOT: Did you have a Jewish sounding name? Was that it?

KIRBY: I had a Jewish-German sounding name. Which I am.

TOT: Then there was automatic prejudice; when people heard the name they would hire someone else.

KIRBY: Well, yes there was but I never ran into it. I changed my name not because of that. I only ran into it when I came face to face with people who I was almost alien to. For instance, a guy from the streets of New York is an alien to a Texan from the Panhandle. A guy from the Texas Panhandle is a complete alien to a guy from the New York City ghetto. I would be a total alien to a farmer from the midwest. He would be brought up in a sealed environment just like mine. My environment was sealed.

It was hermetically sealed. I was in a mold. He was in his mold.

And another guy was in his mold. I bunked with a guy who came from a population of 150, in a town I never heard of, in a place I still don’t know where it’s at. The only Jew that he’d ever seen was a statue of Moses that Michelangelo did.

He said, “Well, Jews had to have horns.” And I said, “Why?” He says, “Well, look at that statue of Moses. He was a Jew and look at the horns he’s got.” And, of course the effect of the curls on Moses’s head looked like horns.

To him Jews were devils. When he saw me he couldn’t believe I was a Jew. And he never did. And if I told him 150 times, 190 times he’d of never believed it.

have robbed a bank but he’s wearing a $300 suit and says, “Well, I don’t see you wearing a $300 suit.” The fact that he robbed a bank to do it wasn’t the thing. The thing was that he was wearing a $300 suit and you’re not. He’d say, “Well, how much did your suit cost, pal?” And you’d say, “Well, 25 bucks.” He says, ”Well, you’re a nothing.” He says, “Who the hell are you? Just a guy who wears 25 dollar suits.”

TOT: Did you ever read The Amboy Dukes?

KIRBY: I think the Amboy Dukes had something different going for them.

TOT: I read it a couple days ago, and the whole gang was wearing zoot suits and they were really expensive. They had to dress flashy and the whole thing.

KIRBY: My friends did, although for some damn reason I didn’t like overcoats. And the big thing was an overcoat; an overcoat with a big velvet collar. You had to have a velvet collar. The girls would just drop at your feet if they saw you had a velvet collar on.

Who the hell were you if you were wearing a turtleneck sweater?

(this spread) Two pencil pages from the Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles Treasury Edition, from 1976. On the previous page, you can see Jack drawing himself as a young newsboy on the streets of New York. The below page reflects his early love (and apparently, almost career choice) of acting.

Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

TOT: Is your name legally changed now?

KIRBY: Yes. It was changed 30 years ago. I don’t think that kind of thing means much.

TOT: It’s more of anglicizing the names than anything else. Jack Benny was originally Benny Kubelsky, and...

KIRBY: I don’t think it’s anglicizing the name. I think it’s making the name exotic.

For instance, I think if I named myself Ramon De La Flores, see what I mean? Like what if I took a shine to a Latin name; I didn’t like my real name of Jack Kurtzburg? Now I might say to myself, “Jack Kurtzburg, who’s going to believe that kind of a name?”

TOT: Harvey Kurtzman would.

KIRBY: So I said, “Jack Kirby sounds great.’’

It just sounded great to me. I said, “That’s what I’d like to be called, Jack Kirby.” Now if I’d say, “Gee that Ramon De La Flores, boy, now there’s a name for me!” now I would sign my name today “Ramon De La Flores.”

If I had liked that kind of a name. I see nothing wrong with that. I don’t think I’ve done anything illegitimate.

TOT: Last time Rich Rubenfeld and I talked to you, you mentioned trying out for a role that John Garfield got.

KIRBY: Oh yeah, that was a movie syndrome.

Everybody had it. Like I say, everybody was raised by Warner Brothers.

TOT: You got pretty close to it though.

KIRBY: Yeah, I got pretty close to it because I was driven that much by wanting to do anything to become a person. I never considered myself a person. You couldn’t where I was.

You weren’t a person unless you did something. A gangster could walk in and come in with a $300 suit. He did something. He may 21

(below) A brutal look at what fighting the Nazis was really like, from Our Fighting Forces #152 (Dec 1974). DC’s just released a hardcover collection of Kirby’s great 12-issue run from that series. (next page) Unpublished page from Dingbats of Danger Street #2 (circa 1975), featuring one of Jack’s final kid gangs.

Characters TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

But if you were wearing a snazzy coat with a velvet collar and a wide-brimmed hat, who could top you? You were something.

Somebody on the street would stop and talk to you and you know, “Look at that guy! I wonder what he does.” You’d be able to talk to anybody.

TOT: It’s kind of the opposite these days. You look at somebody and you say, “That guy looks real.” He is wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt. While if you see someone in expensive clothes you say, “Wow, what’s with him?”

KIRBY: Well, that’s what I like about it because that kind of thinking is a challenge to the other kind. I think it’s just as valid. And I think it’s better. The previous type of thinking led everybody to look alike. They’re just a bunch of guys walking around with velvet collars and wide-brim hats. And they were the same guys. They were all the same guys. They talked the same, they looked the

same. One might’ve had a pencil mustache but they were the same guys. Whereas today I see people. I may be isolated at times but when I do meet people I get the feeling that I’m actually talking to human beings. It’s a great experience for me. I’m just speaking for myself. And if you guys thought the same as people did where I come from, we wouldn’t even be talking, because I would know every word that you were going to say and I’d just walk away from you. That’s all, unless I wanted to deal with you in some way. I’d know you. You’d be me.

TOT: When they came up with the Young Allies and they used Bucky in there, did they just follow the motif you’d set down? Did you have a hand in that or not?

KIRBY: We were experimenting with anything. There were no standards. There were no kid teams. So I did a kid team. If there are no standards you fish around to try and see where you should go. Now like these New Gods and Forever People, the challenge in that is to make maybe ordinary guys, the next guy to know what I’m talking about, because I’m maybe saying something very heavy. There might be nobody to tell me whether I’m wrong. I feel that I’m trying to define something. It would crush me if it had no validity. The challenge is to see if there’s anybody who can define it in his way and tell me what I’m saying.

TOT: When you did a script you were definitely going into the feelings of the time.

What I had in mind was a Young Allies cover. When you look at it now it’s almost frightening, the caricatures of, say, the Japanese, and things like that. That was just established practice?

KIRBY: Sure. Everything we saw, or talked, or dealt in was exaggeration. It was movies.

Everything that we did or thought was a movie plot. A Jap was a movie villain. If he was a villain, you killed him. Maybe that’s why we won the war. I’ll tell you frankly, the Germans couldn’t even define us. The Germans couldn’t even understand us. They had no respect for us as soldiers, really, but then we began to do things that they thought were absolutely crazy. They just couldn’t understand it, but we did them.

We did things that they didn’t even expect and they got killed for it. These poor guys didn’t even know what the hell was happening to them when they died. We were acting out a lifestyle that they didn’t even have. Ours was just tougher than theirs.

TOT: It’s intriguing when people talk about the German regime and how they indoctrinated the children with the youth bunds and everything, and I look over the comics of the ’40s with things like “Smash the Axis” and “Let’s Kill These Nazi Rats.” American children were just as indoctrinated.

KIRBY: Well look, if you’re going to fight, if you’re actually going to fight, and you know you’re going to die, you’re going to be psyched-up for living or you’re going to die. Frankly I was so... well, I, I can’t describe how I felt. It was like a guy in shock. You get to the point where you just don’t care. That may be the right attitude. I don’t know. Nobody cared. There was one night the Texans just got up—a bunch of

22

Texans just got up, took the machine guns. And the Germans had the other side of the town which was bisected by a wall. They just got up, took the machine guns, went over the wall, and the next thing you know there’s a great big racket, everything’s going on, and then they come back. They just sit down and that was it. It wasn’t the kind of thing you play on a chessboard.

There were just human beings involved, people. There was no front line. I mean you just sit there. A German comes and taps you on the back and asks you for a cigarette. You just never knew what they were going to do.

TOT: How much of an influence do you think comic books are on youngsters?

KIRBY: Not much more than any of the other media is. It’s there. Movies are there. TV is there. Comics are there.

You can get an amateur who will use comics in poor taste. You can get a first rate professional to use comics, which hasn’t really been done yet. But I’m trying to see that it’s done. I feel I’m going to strike out in that direction. There are things that I want to do that I can’t tell you about. That I’m going to do. I think comics, like any other medium, can transcend itself. It’s not an illegitimate medium. It’s a very powerful, first rate medium. But nobody has gotten it into his head to use it first rate. Comics is a language. I can talk to you in comics. I can talk to anybody in comics and they’ll understand me. I don’t have to know your language. I think the written word is going out. I think people want to see and touch. I think comics is the simplest way of doing it. You can have any crude style you want in comics, but if you want to say something... I mean, Chester Gould would do a better job of telling me about Dick Tracy than Alex Raymond would, because Chester Gould knows Dick Tracy and it doesn’t matter how he draws. He’s going to tell me a better story about Dick Tracy if I’m interested in Dick Tracy and want to know more about him. I’d rather get it from Chester Gould than from Leonardo Da Vinci.

TOT: Did you personally come under any fire during the Wertham deal and the Comics Code?

KIRBY: Sure, everybody did. I thought it was kind of stupid but there was nothing I could do about it. I was in a poor position to do anything about it. I was doing well enough but sometimes the times themselves—they’ll run away and you become part of whatever’s happening. It just carries you along. It’s like a flood, you just try to hold your head above the water. Gradually it subsides in some manner. You start to function again. The ’50s, I think, themselves were an ugly, ugly period. People dressed ugly. They looked ugly. Fashions were ugly. I think it was something that people felt about themselves. They had

the sack dresses, and all sorts of weird get-ups, and short hair. People looked like hard plucked chickens.

They’d been bred for a Mexican fighting cockarina.

That’s an ugly image.

TOT: Why did Wertham do that, in your opinion?

KIRBY: Wertham? He made a living out of being anti-comics. He’s still around. He wrote books. He has a point in what he says. Sure, keep violence out of comics. Don’t cross the line. Every censor says that. Keep your standards up. What are your standards? Where is the line?

TOT: Do you think comics created any kind of juvenile delinquency like some of these people during the ’50s said in different magazines?

KIRBY: I think the world creates juvenile delinquency.

Juvenile delinquency is a state of mind. If you are a very frustrated individual, if the world frustrates you, you’ll do things to get rid of it. It’s no one thing. It’s the world. It’s what makes up the world.

It’s movies and people and... right now I have an attitude about the world that you might say is very heavy. It’s the world that makes me feel like that.

Maybe tomorrow that kind of thing will pass and 23

I’ll feel great. Everything will look great. And sometimes to people who are going to become juvenile delinquents there’s nothing. Suddenly the lid is on and they’re left in the dark somewhere. And they’re scared, and they’re frustrated, and whatever they look for they haven’t got, so they strike out in some way. Human beings do that.

TOT: Ray Bradbury said that all this violence and stuff is a kind of catharsis. He says that basically we’re all animals with the instincts to kill. He says that by killing off people in his own stories that he’s exorcised this savagery that is in us all, and for the people who read this stuff, it is also a way of getting it out of their systems.

KIRBY: I believe that. I’ll go along with Ray Bradbury on that. I know I have a lot of hostility in me somewhere, for some reason. Somewhere in my world it was instilled in me and I’ve got it. And I feel, being the kind of man that I am, I might do a lot of paranoid things. I wouldn’t want to be in a position of leadership, or I wouldn’t want to be in a position where I could hurt people, or I wouldn’t want to be in a position where I could do some kind of cruelty because I feel that I’m capable of it. Just like a lot of people in my generation are capable of it. It’s done every day in business—one man kills another regardless of the consequences. One man will kill another and cut off his salary or eliminate his job. And the fact that that guy’s job is eliminated means that that guy’s kids won’t eat. That guy’s income is stopped.

That guy’s wife must retrench. Life must become harder. The guy that cuts off his job never thinks about that. Things are going to get better for his family. His kids are going to get more advantages. That’s what competition means: One man symbolically killing another.

TOT: Do you feel that you’re still competing with a lot of other comic artists, or are you now more competing with yourself?

KIRBY: I feel that I’m more or less playing Ping-Pong. Not to denigrate any of the other artists but I feel that I’m playing Ping-Pong with my own kind of thinking. I’m playing Ping-Pong with myself. I’m taking a chance on my own thinking. And if it’s valid, I’m going to win the game. If it’s not valid, I’m going to lose the game. Whether John Buscema or Neal Adams or anybody else can draw as well as I, or better than I, doesn’t count as far as I’m concerned. What I succeed or fail at is going to count. And if I fall, I won’t give a damn what I think about anybody else.

I’m going to feel pretty bad about myself.

TOT: You know what you were rappin’ about when you said it was the world that did that whole thing? I met a couple of chicks a couple months ago and they were from a thing in San Francisco called The Holy Order of Man. And I said, “What’s causing everybody to be like in this cosmic thing, like the Forever People thing? Why is everybody doing this all of a sudden?” And they said, “2000 years ago the world was at its densest point and since then it’s been moving out of that. It’s been continually moving out of that. At the 24

Renaissance it really started to move out and now, like in the last couple of generations we’ve seen it move from an extremely dense point to a less and less dense point. And as a result everybody’s thought and everything is flowing more freely.” It blows my mind.

KIRBY: I think that maybe if there is a thing like that, it’s wonderful. That’s the kind of world I would like to live in. Now I’m never going to live in that kind of a world. I’m never going to see it. But I know it’s going to exist if it can exist. I think if I see the dawn of the thing it may be good enough for me. I mean, why the hell should I see the whole thing? It doesn’t matter. If I see, say, a Wright brothers airplane I know a B-52 can be built. So what the hell if I never see a B-52?

TOT: That’s what gets me about this thing. You’ve got this New Genesis and that would fit. It goes like a figure eight. Starts off at Genesis and ends up with Genesis.

KIRBY: Yes. And I feel that New Genesis is no more an idealistic place than it is a place where a guy can say, “Well, I think I’ll grow a mustache” or “I think I’ll wear yellow pants today” or “Gee, I’m going to put on a cowboy hat. How about that?” And everybody’ll say, “Well, okay.” That’s all. And you should have the opportunity to say, “You know what I think I’m doing? I going to take 8 months off to write a play.” You should be able to do that. That’s New Genesis to me. And you could be an executive making $50,000 a year and you could say, “You know what I’m going to do? I’ve been sitting behind the desk

getting flabby. I’m going to go out and get a job as a ditch digger. I’d like to do that for about six months just to harden up. Maybe get down there and begin using the muscles. I’ll rotate with a guy.” You find a ditch digger who’s just about had it. Some intelligent guy, and maybe he can handle your job. And you say, “How about trading, just for awhile?” You never know what the hell strikes you.

You never know what you might like to do.

TOT: Now that your environment has changed and you’re here sort of isolated in the mountains, do you think you’re going to lose touch with what’s going on in the cities?

KIRBY: Maybe.

TOT: If you bring your characters into the city, what are you going to do?

KIRBY: I’ll just remember the city I know. You never get that out of you. Everything I’ll probably see till the day I die will be New York. Not because I particularly like New York. It’s what I know. But I love California. I’m glad I got off my backside because New York is all vertical. And I’ve never—except for that one experience in France where I saw the Moseau Valley, and, of course, that was France.

That wasn’t America, and France is something different— but over here I’ve never seen anything with the expansion of California, and I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I saw it. I just love it here. I love it here.

TOT: Well, there’s a new look to the cities. I was in Detroit on business about two weeks ago. Actually it wasn’t business. I had to testify in court. My brother was hit by a car, a hit-and-run driver, five years ago and the case just came up. I got the license and identified the guy. But just being in Detroit for the 20 days that it took, the brutality of the city came across stronger than ever after having lived in California for a year. I noticed a brand new architecture springing up. The store fronts are all bricked up except for one strip of glass across the top to let a little light through.

They’ve got mesh across the glass and now they’re trying to put design into the mesh to make it attractive. The cities are like fortresses now.

KIRBY: You have a condition in the cities that I never had.

I know that. There’s a heckuva lot of people. A heckuva lot of them. In my day there weren’t that many people.

Maybe there’s a denseness accumulating there too. You’re going to warrant a little more protection. If there’s any sort of menace building up there it’s because of the population build-up. In my day there was plenty of room for everybody. The room wasn’t much to look at, but everybody had plenty of it. The ghetto was the only place that was really overcrowded. You could walk the streets and you wouldn’t feel the crowds as much as you do now. When I lived in Long Island I’d come in maybe twice a week to the city, and there would be something about the crowd that would scare me. I’d just be right back to the suburbs. And I felt a hell of a lot better.

TOT: The city does have an effect on people in so many ways. You smile at somebody here in California and they return your smile.

Smile at people in Detroit and they look at you and say, “What is he smiling about? What does he mean by that?”

KIRBY: I don’t think that means anything.

TOT: And the colors. They all wear dark colors. Black overcoats are in now. Black rain coats. They look like pallbearers.

KIRBY: The climate’s different. You’re walking around in a gray climate—you wear a gray suit. The guy with the smile hasn’t got anything more to give you than the guy with the frown. In fact I would take my chances on the guy with the frown. A lot of images that I had, even about movie stars, boiled down to a big nothing. That movie culture that I was brought up on was a big nothing. Of course it was a fantasy, and the stars were just a lot of second rate people built up by press agents. It could’ve been done

to me when I was a second rate person. So the smile, and whatever is handed to you is just face value.

TOT: But there’s the other side of the coin. You wouldn’t want them to be so completely realistic.

KIRBY: I have no choice on what they are.

TOT: I mean movies and entertainment, comic books—it’s all escapism. You wouldn’t want them to...

KIRBY: I’m sorry. Yes I would. Yes I would. I would’ve been damn glad to know what they were like as people. I would’ve been damn glad to know. I don’t see why they were afraid to face me as they were. I mean, if they were farm guys, I don’t see why they were afraid to face me as farm guys. Where do they come across as Indian scouts, or where do they come across as bedroom cowboys, or super-sophisticated people when they’re not? When they had the same background as I had. Once in awhile they could break down and face me as they are. I would’ve faced them as I am. I think maybe the world shouldn’t have facades. Maybe pomp and circumstance adds a lot of color. What else? I mean, why can’t we just face ourselves? I see nothing wrong in that.

(previous page) Pencils from Forever People #7 (Feb. 1972); too bad Jack never showed us what the ditch diggers on New Genesis were like... (above) Jack’s memory of life in New York City hadn’t dimmed, as evidenced by this 1971 unused page meant for In The Days Of The Mob #2. (Don’tcha just love that creepy final panel?) Inks by Mike Royer.

Characters TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

TOT: Do you like them putting word balloons on your covers? Do you think it spoils anything?

KIRBY: Only if they put them in the wrong places. You could make a bad layout.

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TOT: Some of your Marvel covers were just covered with word balloons all out of place.

KIRBY: Well, that’s true. Some of them were, some of them weren’t. I don’t think they really spoiled much of the drawings. Balloons are a part of comics. If you’re doing a comic you’ve got to have a balloon somewhere.

TOT: Do you think the cover primarily sells the comic?

KIRBY: I think it primarily attracts sales like a movie marquis, or a coming attractions in a theater, or a commercial. No matter what gimmick you use you’ve got to get someone to look at the merchandise. It’s an old sales adage.

TOT: There’s something that we’ve got to ask you. Maybe we have dirty minds but the Mother Box means one thing to us and we just wondered if you had that in mind.

KIRBY: I know it, I know it. I was just wondering whatever happened to your reaction. It’s only when I created the damn thing and really began to think about the label I put on it and I began to think what’s going to happen in Watts when they see this Mother Box bit. That Mother Box, you know. I’m leaving it that way.

That’s what I feel it is.

TOT: It is the Mother Box? KIRBY: Yes. TOT: The Mother Vagina. This is what you had in mind then.

KIRBY: No. I didn’t have the Mother Vagina in mind.

TOT: These four guys touch the box, right?

KIRBY: Right.

TOT: And out of it comes life of the Infinity Man, and out of the vagina comes life. That’s where life comes from.

KIRBY: Well, the basic...

TOT: But why not?

KIRBY: Well, sure. Why not? I’m not going to argue with it. It could be analyzed that way.

Except that I just didn’t see it that way. I saw it as gaining simple strength from the mystic. I feel that man has the capacity to gain strength from the mystic, something outside himself, something beyond his body. I feel that if man can generate fear, if he can generate cruelty, he can generate who knows what. I think that if I wanted to, I could tear this table in half, if I psyched myself up to do it. I’ve done it. I once took a baby carriage—fortunately my kid wasn’t in it—and I took this thing out of shape. It looked like it just couldn’t be done, but it was just done, out of pure anger.

TOT: Do you think the Comics Code is becoming more lenient?

KIRBY: I think that comics has been sorely put upon.

Comics, like movies, have their own specialized audiences. I’m not talking about Mickey Mouse, or Super Duck, or Atomic Mouse. I’m talking about people your age and people my age who read comics. I think that sex can be treated with good taste and respect as well as any other subject. I feel that sex is life. I feel that there is nothing wrong with life. I feel that the human form is beautiful.

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Not beautiful as much as meaningful.

TOT: One question then. Why is it I feel they’re emasculated? Why don’t the super-heroes have balls?

KIRBY: Why don’t the super-heroes have...

TOT: You draw the crotch flat, right? You flatten it out.

KIRBY: Well I’m not conditioned, let me say this, I’ll speak in those terms, I’m not conditioned to draw balls. In other words, if I drew balls I would feel as if I’d done something I shouldn’t ordinarily do.

balls. Now, I would draw phallic symbols. I would draw baseball bats. I might draw people moving in exotic postures or directions, but I will not show pubic hairs. I will not show balls. I will not show the penis or the vagina. Why? I don’t know why.

I’m just not conditioned to do it since childhood.

TOT: It’s a hang-up, isn’t it?

KIRBY: Of course it’s a hang-up.

TOT: Do you like underground comics? Do you think it’s a good new direction for them to take?

KIRBY: I think it’s a new direction. I don’t know whether it’s good or not. I think it’s not professional.

I think it’s not done professionally. I think it’s a good try. ★

TOT: What’s the difference between balls and a hand or an elbow?

KIRBY: I’m personally not conditioned to draw

(above) Viewing the Mother Box as a Mother Vagina adds a whole new dimension to this page from Forever People #11 (Oct. 1972). Characters TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

www.kirbymuseum.org The art collection keeps growing at the Kirby Museum!

New York Comic-Con Rand Hoppe and his scanner were set up again at John Morrow’s TwoMorrows booth at New York City’s Javits Center for the New York Comic-Con this past February. While there weren’t any new TwoMorrows Kirby goodies premiering, like the Deities Portfolio had last year, a grand time was had. Thanks to Kirby art collectors and dealers like Tom Kraft, Richard Howell, Alex Jay, Anthony Snyder, Bechara Maalouf and Albert Moy, we added quite a number of scans to the Original Art Digital Archive. Also, Kirby scholars, other than some of the aforementioned, like Mike Gartland, Richard Bensam, Jon B. Cooke, James Romberger, Michael Vassallo, Steven Brower and Greg Theakston stopped by for a visit; some for extended discussions, some for a quick hello.

Newsletter TJKC Edition Spring 2009 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 multi-faceted 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

Web Site The museum’s new web site is still under construction as of this writing. We’ll probably damn the torpedoes and allow for a limited roll-out of new features, like ever-patient Norris Burroughs’ “Kirby Kinetics” blog, very soon. Stay tuned.

New Members Mark Barsotti, Richard Pineros, Ron Lopes, Stan Taylor, Steven Brower, Kevin Walters, Thomas Mott, Michael Casto, Jeremy Radisich, Alternate Worlds, Inc., Christine Harper, Antonio Salvador, Mark Buckingham, Michael Cecchini, Richard Pontius, Leemar Boykins, Roy Dean, Steve Tenerelli, Tamas Jakab, Casey Bruce, Trevor Craft, Mike Figueroa, Andrew McAdams, Bill Kruse, Don Rhoden, Will Welz, Carlos Barajas, Wendell Brown III. Renewals!

Peter Sullivan, Robert Shippee, Robert Steibel, Daniel Tesmoingt, Gary Picariello, Philip Miller, Jeff Hollick, Mark Elstob, Tom Brevoort, Melvin Shelton, David Frankel, Peter Cluck, Ralph Rivard, Ernest Kwiat, Ferran Delgado, Tom Field, Kam Tang, Garrie Burr, Elbert Coalwell, GAGNÉ International Press, David Schwartz, Ray Owens, Jonathan Ross, Kasra $ Ghanbari, Shane Foley, Russell Payne, Antonio Iriarte, Jean Depelley, REEDMan, Bob Heer, Tim Perkins, Jim McPherson, Jeff Wilkie, Allen Harvey, Michael Niederhausen, Ger Apeldoorn, Michael Hill, John Coyne, Lyle Tucker, Thessalonikianastasios Lazaridis, Mark Miller, David Jeffery, Tom Kraft, Scott Rowland, Richard Pineros, Ron Lopes, Jeff Hollick, Chris Captain America—23” x 29” Strange Tales—23” x 29” Harder, Jose Lopz, Peter Houde, 1941 Captain America—14” x 23” Super Powers—17” x 22” color Thomas Mott.

Annual Membership with one of these posters: 40*

Kirby Pencil Art Archives Log on to see numerous examples of Kirby pencil pages and be sure to join the Museum to get access to even more exclusive, members-only art!

Annual Membership with one of these posters: $50*

Randolph Hoppe rhoppe@kirbymuseum.org Lisa Kirby lkirby@kirbymuseum.org John Morrow twomorrow@aol.com Fantastic Four TM ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

*Please add $10 for memberships outside the US, to cover additional postage costs.

Posters come “as-is” and may not be in mint condition.

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Marvel—14” x 23”

Galactic Head—18” x 20” color

Incan Visitation—24” x 18” color 27

Adam M cGovern Know of some Kirby-inspired work that should be covered here? Send to: Adam McGovern PO Box 257 Mt. Tabor, NJ 07878

These interviews were conducted by e-mail on 11/11/08-11/12/08 with Joe Casey; 11/13/08 with Andy Suriano; 11/11/08 with Glen Brunswick; and 11/11/08 with Dan McDaid (all vowels translated from the British).

(right) We don’t have to beat you over the head with the Kalibak references—but where’s the fun in not?

Chuck Amok (corner) meets his match, from Charlatan Ball #1.

TM and ©2009 Joe Casey and Andy Suriano

(below) Un-“Pact”: A group of Fourth Host impersonators mix their Kirby metaphors, from Charlatan Ball #4.

TM and ©2009 Joe Casey and Andy Suriano

(next page, bottom) Tough crowd: Magician Chuck Amok prepares to disappear.

TM and ©2009 Joe Casey and Andy Suriano

(next page, top) Star-crossing lovers Barock and Zoe ride the, um, silver diving-board?

TM and ©2009 Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid

(following page, top) Another powerful pinup of the bruiser with the Kenyan-sounding name, Barock!

TM and ©2009 Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid

(following page, bottom) Deities in drag: The Jersey Gods do their part to cure our oil addiction in this Michael Allred alternate cover.

Jersey Gods TM and ©2009 Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid

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

KIRBY INCOGNITA ack Kirby was known for taking his readers and his artform to unprecedented heights, sailing the currents of cosmic spectacle and piercing the horizon of near-divine insights.

As befits the fearless explorer, he also crashed the spaceship and detoured into some logical black holes from time to time (did somebody say Fighting Fetus and Goozlebobber?)—but as anyone who’s ever opened the wrong Egyptian tomb or picked a bad necronomicon to recite will tell you, these are worthy adventures too.

At least they are to two intrepid creative teams turning some of Kirby’s wackier traditions into whole new genres and essential reading at Image Comics—Joe Casey (yes, Gødland’s Joe Casey) and Andy Suriano on the ongoing Charlatan Ball, and Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid on the juststarting Jersey Gods.

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That Rabbit’s Dynamite Tom Scioli, Casey’s collaborator on the over-the-top-and-throughthe-ceiling cosmic odyssey Gødland, once told me he felt they were holding back. On Charlatan Ball (a surrealist farce signaled by even a title that looks like a typo), Casey, at least, is holding back not so much. It’s the story of, well, that’s a good question, but there’s this D-list strip-club stage magician who gets yanked out of our reality as a pawn in the quantum chessgame between a bunch of actuallymagic space warlords, in a nightmare dimension-shuffle of worlds where anything can happen, including the infatuation of a 50-foottall warrior goddess and the mutation of the fake magician’s hatrabbit into a murderous man-bunny (a kind of Red Queen and March Hare as if Martin Goodman had told Kirby to jazz up Lewis Carroll and paid him in dope). Casey’s free-associative narration, Suriano’s Wagnerian hotrod art, and Marc Letzmann’s hallucination colorpalette make it unlike anything in comics. TJKC asked Casey and Suriano what the hell is going on…

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Gødland expands on the Kirby contributions that are most fondly remembered and widely emulated—the idealized heroics and inspiring cosmic spectacle. Charlatan Ball seems like an attempt to squeeze value from the Kirby that no one’s

in a hurry to claim—the grotesque techno-ogres from Atlas Monsters to MODOK; the speaking-intongues story structure or writing style of a Sandman or Devil Dinosaur. These may access some primal fairytale narrative juice and unlock some visionary ways of thinking… or not, though it seems to be working that way in Charlatan Ball. Is there no road into Kirby that doesn’t lead to genius, and are some routes more bumpy than others?

JOE CASEY: There can definitely be bumps in the road, at least in this case. Certainly Charlatan Ball has been a bit more of a headscratcher for a lot of readers, even those who embrace Gødland fairly unconditionally. Let me put it this way... if Gødland is my New Gods, then Charlatan Ball is definitely my Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers. I love both of those Kirby books, so obviously these things are all subjective. But in all honestly, on a purely conceptual level, the Kirby aspects of the series come mainly from my collaborator/co-creator, Andy Suriano. I just come up with wacky concepts like the Gang of Four Gods and Donnarama and Andy goes to town on the designs. And he’s definitely got a Kirby thing to his art. For me, I was trying to bring a bit of my Peter Milligan/Brendan McCarthy influence. Freakwave, Rogan Gosh, Mirkin the Mystic... all great, underrated classics of the medium that really affected me as a reader. But then again, I think McCarthy has more than a bit of Kirby in him, too... so it’s all part of the Great Chain.

TJKC: Books like Gødland and Charlatan Ball deal with the most exaggerated characters possible, from the lowliest loser like Chuck Amok in Charlatan Ball, to the loftiest icon like Iboga in Gødland— and yet they seem more true-to-life than many comics with much grittier and everyday settings. What’s to be learned by both reader and creator from these extreme types of characters and worlds?

CASEY: Characters have to be relatable to the reader, no matter how big or small they’re meant to be within the reality you’re creating.

Yeah, they may be extremely exaggerated, but in Charlatan Ball especially, I don’t have any real inclination to write them as unknowable. That’s part of the fun of it. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to

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realize more and more that, while the world is certainly complex, it’s not quite as complex as I imagined it would be when I was a kid. Most things can still be broken down into components of basic humanity. So that point of view definitely bleeds into how I write these characters I’ve co-created.

TJKC: With any fully-rounded writer there’s bound to be some overlap, but is it safe to say that what Gødland is to the FF and quantum science Charlatan Ball is to, like, The Demon and metaphysics?

CASEY: I would refer back to my New Gods/Captain Victory analogy. But to be completely serious, the overlap [with Kirby] is my own imagination and how far I can stretch it. I’ve said it many times before, but that’s the real lesson, the real inspiration I take from Kirby and his body of work. I really think that’s the lesson he wanted other creators to take from him... for all of us to do our own thing. Art styles aside, it’s about digging deep within yourself to try and bring out something that’s unique to you. Certainly your influences will inform those things, but I don’t think anyone but Scioli and I could’ve come up with Gødland; likewise for Suriano and me with Charlatan Ball.

TJKC: How much is Charlatan Ball created with the coloring in mind, and how much of a role do you or Andy take in overseeing it? Certainly Gødland is one of the books most talked about for its color even though it’s got a cult-star penciler, and Tom Scioli has told me how he started to evolve his art with that color in mind over time. The colorist on CB almost feels like a third storyteller in ways that aren’t all that common in comics today (much less in Kirby’s lifetime), so how does it figure into your own brainstorming of the book?

CASEY: The coloring is hugely important, and it’s something that Andy and I are pretty intimately involved with. On Charlatan Ball we’ve got a great colorist in Marc Letzmann. He’s extremely collaborative. There have been times, especially early on, where Andy did pretty detailed color guides to establish the look and the tone (and how certain characters are meant to be colored). For my part, I’m usually in there pushing for more Photoshop-y effects to help enhance the storytelling—for a book that deals with magic, it’s only natural to use all those technological tricks to sell the different spells and demonstrations of powers.

But this is the thing about creator-owned comics... at least my creator-owned comics. I like to work with a close-knit team whenever possible, for everyone to feel like they’re somewhat invested in the book. For Marc, this is his first big gig as a solo colorist, so it’s a chance for him to really show off and I want him to have that freedom. Even the letterer, Rus Wooton, is a close collaborator with the different balloon styles and various fonts I ask for. So we’re all creating this comicbook together. It’s one of the rewards of this medium, that collaborative spirit.

escape and not a reminder of how much the world blows. This one, anyway—Chuck Amok goes to some pretty far-out places, hahaha…

TJKC: Andy, what do you get to do, or learn about comic storytelling or universe-building, from cutting loose in this Kirbyish style that you might not get to by following from another model?

ANDY SURIANO: To me, the Kirby Universe is limitless.

It ranges from a nightmarish American history (I’ll never forget Captain America’s “Bicentennial Battles”), to the rough streets of Dingbats (of Danger Street), to the post-apocalyptic vision of Kamandi. Kirby’s [oeuvre] was like a virtual encyclopedia of the past, present and future. But moreover, [regardless of] the era, each panel was dynamic. Where is that these days?!

That sort of storytelling is now endangered by photo reference and this new ideal to strive for realism.

Besides, you want monsters or mutants? Nobody drew them better than Jack. Nobody.

TJKC: Charlatan Ball seems to bring back as much of the anarchy and caricature of early MAD as it does anything from the superhero sample-book—is there not enough humor and too much perfection in many comics at the moment?

SURIANO: To me, Charlatan Ball is two parts Kirby, two parts Jack Davis, a dash of Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, some of my own aspiration to be Eisner…and a whole lot of crazy! Hahaha! As for contemporaries, yeah, I feel like a charlatan myself for saying it because I read some of these books—but if I really wanted courtroom dramas, I’d watch primetime television. The Iraq War? I got the news. Where is the escapism?? A realistic take on superheroes seems like an oxymoron to me. Where’s the fun?? I like my spandex. I guess that’s what I’m trying to do in Charlatan Ball, insert a little bit of energy, give the reader fun stuff to look at. Make each book an experience or

Last Exit to Asgard Cosmic action and modern sex comedy collide like unmatched relatives in Jersey Gods, the epic of budding romance between a suburban yuppie mallrat and an ultraviolent space deity by writer Glen Brunswick, artist Dan McDaid and a cosmic armada of prestige guest-creators (including star backup-story writer Mark Waid with rising indie sensation Joe Infurnari on visuals). The movie-serial mythology and page-ripping galactic force of Kirby are on full display with an affection equal to the manic humor. TJKC talked to Brunswick and McDaid to find out what it all means to them…

TJKC: People sometimes wonder how son-of-immigrants Jack Kirby came up with so many Nordic supergods like Thor. But actually, the Asgardians and New Gods are a bunch of immigrants too, fitting in uneasily on Earth. New Jersey’s a big immigrant state, from both within and outside the US (400,000 newbies move here a year, and 400,000 of their predecessors run screaming, true story). Do you agree that those Kirbystyle paragons are really the biggest misfits of all, and was Jersey a particularly good boiling pot to play out their story in?

GLEN BRUNSWICK: I don’t know that I’d call them misfits. In many ways, Kirby’s gods are like all immigrants when they come to America. They want a better life, a place to grow, a sense of identity and to be loved. Thor has this massive ego when he comes to Earth, but what is it that makes him whole? It’s when he discovers that Jane Foster loves him. Orion is searching for his identity—his place in the world. He constantly wonders why he is different from the people of New Genesis. Kirby infuses his characters with these very human attributes. In a sense it’s what makes these unfamiliar larger-than-life characters relatable. This is the Kirby legacy that Dan and I are striving for in Jersey Gods. [Series star] Barock doesn’t even realize that he is searching for love when he gets involved in a life-and-death struggle at the Cherry Hill mall. But love is what he finds here and it’s enough to keep him around to pursue the American Dream. And what he finds is that inside he’s not so different from any of us.

TJKC: Superhero comics tend to take place in one big New York, regardless of whether they actually call it 29

“New York” or “Metropolis” or “Central City,” and everyone thinks the real-life Jersey is just one big suburb of NYC—either way, in the cookie-cutter comic world, New Jersey might as well be New Genesis. So far the homelands of the Jersey Gods are shown very vividly, and this may be the first time I’ve seen a superhero fight at the mall instead of in Times Square—is a sense of place important to your work?

BRUNSWICK: Place is very important. In order to suspend your disbelief and take the journey with our characters you need to feel as if you can step into the panels and walk around in a real place. I can’t take credit for this. Dan is a genius when it comes to doing that thing that Kirby could do, which is create these far-out looking shapes and places and make you feel as if they can function either as real lodgings or working technology. New Jersey, on the other hand, seemed like a fun place to set the story for a number of reasons: Jersey always gets this unfair rap of being the armpit of the universe. There’s even this song that goes, “I’m from New Jersey. I don’t expect much. If the world ended, I would adjust.” I felt that it would be wonderful in terms of drama and comedy to juxtapose this magnificent godlike being with the stink of living down New Jersey’s soiled reputation.

TJKC: Kirby was great at building whole worlds that he might end up using only a corner of—but it never seemed like he was simply whipping up some madscientist machinery and putting a chemical name together with a Roman suffix or somethin’ and thinking that was all ya need to show an alien and their culture. Your book has that same logic and imagination—did you do a lot of society-inventing and character-development before you even started writing the story, or did the events and the world around them both start filling in as you went along?

BRUNSWICK: Dan and I did a lot of thinking about the god planet Neboron, where our heroes are from. We created a history of a 10,000-year-old civil war that nearly destroyed them. And out of this war came their godlike powers as a way of survival. And everything they do relates back to this war that changed them so. The deeds they did still affect them today and guide whether or not they strive for acts of heroism or revenge. Dan created the magnificent look of their planet and the wonderfully

strange wildlife that exists in the aftermath of a nearArmageddon. And I think he also infuses this sense of hope that a magical place has risen from the ashes.

TJKC: Dan, what do you get to do, or learn about comic storytelling or universe-building, from cutting loose in this Kirbyish style that you might not get to by following from another model?

DAN McDAID: Kirby as a genre is large enough, wide enough, that you can work in his milieu and still create something which is personal.

Although everything he did was fuelled by his unique worldview, there’s no one typical Kirby story. He did small slice-of-life stuff, and grand cosmic opera, and bureaucrats and businessmen and bullsh*tters and... you name it. So what he did for us, was to effectively create a toolkit for expressing these characters. You’re not going to get this kind of range, this diversity of story from many other cartoonists. So in a way, he’s a medium in his own right, and it’s an incredibly flexible medium that can be tooled towards making small stories, cosmic Shakespeare, and pretty much anything.

TJKC: The character design is very astute—lotta familiar accessories from the Kirby wardrobe, but whole new inventions based on his higher principle of alien family crests and interstellar work-clothes rather than just the typical circus strongman stage-costume.

This ends up looking much cooler than the standard cape/briefs/leggings/insignia template, but few artists come up with it. Instinct or intention, in the case of Jersey Gods?

McDAID: Instinct, through absorption. I’ve spent a lifetime subconsciously absorbing comics in general and superhero comics in particular—which of course means I’ve been absorbing Kirby, usually without realizing it. So when it came to designing a Kirbyish world, I already knew a lot of what that would entail. I don’t even look to his work to help me solve a problem—it’s all a part of my DNA now. So with that safely back there, I can bring my own voice—not to mention other influences—into the mix. I think you particularly see that with the human character Zoe and her interaction with our hero, Barock.

The thing we’re striving for here is to create something iconic. So the designs—at least for the lead characters—should be strong and simple and convey a lot of their story before the characters even open their mouths. Between us, Glen and I have cooked up a bit of a backstory for all of these characters: that Sirius is a transformed human from the Dogon tribe, that Helius is his hedonistic, easy-going son, that Barock is from a fiercer, more Nordic tradition and so on. Once you’ve got this kind of backstory in place, it’s easier to extrapolate what people from this kind of back-

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ground would look like—that Sirius would wear robes and sandals, that Helius (being the “sun”) would have a sun on his chest, that Barock would wear a darker, more martial uniform, etc. It hangs together pretty well, and hopefully the reader will subconsciously start putting the pieces of this world together. Then, when we dip into this world’s history, it’ll all make a kind of sense.

TJKC: Many modern comic artists are good at drawing heroes who are big and imposing in themselves, but not at giving any feeling of the impact these characters have on anything around them—I guess that may go with being better at single pinup images than storytelling, because in a common Kirby fight-scene or your work I can feel the freakin’ panels shake with these thudding bodies. Is the story the first priority, and what’s the best way to balance it with design?

McDAID: The story is the only priority. In a way, Glen has created the perfect playground for me here—a place where the mundane and the uncanny meet. I’ve been a lifelong fan of Doctor Who for this very reason: when the real world and the world of story clash, you get something really exciting. With Who, you’ve got invasions of Earth, and ordinary streets being destroyed with laser fire, and the world—our world— shakes. That’s the effect I’m after here. The design is always working to enhance the otherworldly, the extreme, the larger-than-life. Or to enhance the tension between those elements and the smaller, quieter stuff. We want the characters—all of the characters, in their way—to be charismatic. That’s what Kirby’s work had: charisma. If we can harness just a small amount of that, we’ll have made something special. ★ (Jersey Gods starts in February. The first Charlatan Ball collected edition appears in May. Adam McGovern should have been sold by last December.)

He Awoke

As him?!

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

by Sean Kleefeld

n 2007, Jack would have turned 90 years old. I happened to note at the time that Jack’s birthday that year saw witness to a full moon, and it occurred to me that I’d never seen a Jack Kirby werewolf. And, as I sat and reflected on that a while longer, I had difficulty recalling Jack’s interpretations of any of the classic horror monsters. To some degree it makes sense, in that the Comics Code explicitly precluded the depiction of werewolves, the walking dead, ghouls, and vampires from 1954 until 1971, the time during which Jack was drawing most of his monster stories. But Jack’s comic career started well before 1954 and lasted well past 1971, so where were those monsters?

It was not long afterwards that I was given the three issues of Topps’ Dracula: Vlad the Impaler comic which included a set of trading cards that, when combined together, formed what appeared to be a Kirby version of Dracula! A little more research showed this was actually a character Jack designed that went by the name Dr. Mortalis, but by the time I learned that, I was already hunting for Kirby vampires!

tic comics, hardly a fitting venue for vampires. (At least, it wasn’t a fitting venue for them back then!) The Comics Code followed soon after that, and vampires were out until 1971, a full thirty years after his last vampire story.

Eventually, Jack had an idea for a new Dracula series. It was to be something of an anthology format, telling tales of the vampire from different time periods. He wasn’t working on it too extensively because the 1954 Code was still in place but, once the code was changed, he found himself in something of a race with Marvel to get vampire comics back on the market. As a whole new series would take time to develop, both Jack and Marvel opted to get vampires into existing comics. Jack created “The Man From Transilvane” for Jimmy Olsen, and Roy Thomas and Gil Kane created “A Monster Called... Morbius!” for Spider-Man. Count Dragorin debuted in Jimmy Olsen #142. He follows most of the standard vampire conventions established by the Universal and Hammer films. As the premise of Transilvane was that its inhabitants patterned themselves from horror movies, it should come as little surprise that Dragorin—in what we see of him— bears some visual similarities to Hammer Films’ Dracula starring Christopher Lee in the titular role. What’s most curious about Dragorin’s design is that there’s little there in the first place. Most of the drawings of him feature simply an amorphous cape below a relatively non-descript face, though a few images suggest a pleated shirt underneath. But in all cases, his outfit is quite dark with its cape and cuffs being the most memorable/notable. It’s hardly surprising the J.O. Ladronn took to wholly redesigning the character for Legends of the DC Universe; Jack had really left nothing to work with.

Marvel ended up beating Jack to the punch a second time by getting Tomb of Dracula into production before Jack himself could get much work done on his own Dracula proposal. It must have been something of a shock to Jack and his associates at the time, as he was never known for being slow or behind-the-curve.

We wind up missing yet another possibility for Jack’s take on vampires over in The Demon. The original pencils for his last panel of the series (seen on page 8 in this (above) Classic monsters in a pencil detail from Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #143 (Nov. 1971). Characters TM & ©2009 DC Comics. issue) show that, had the book continued, his next story The earliest attempt at a vampire story by Jack dates back to Captain Marvel would have pit Jason Blood against “The Vampire!” Unfortunately, the book was Adventures #1 circa 1941. The villain, Bram Thirla (shown atop this page), is a canceled before Jack even began work on that story. vampire in the classic Slavic manner, and he bears more than a passing similarity So what we end up with are basically two Kirby vampires over his entire to Count Orlock from 1922’s Nosferatu. Both Orlock and Thirla are tall and gaunt, career, and both of which borrowed heavily from movies for their visuals. Was the and showcase exceedingly long fingernails and very angular features. Indeed, even concept not original enough for Jack to justify putting his energy towards more Thirla’s clothing seems to be patterned of Orlock’s with his long and plain coat. The distinctive character designs? Was it a way to honor some films he really enjoyed? most notable differences on Thirla seem to be the addition of large, bat-like wings Did he not even realize where he was pulling his ideas from? Of course, we can’t and wisps of hair and a goatee. ask Jack now and I doubt he would remember, even if we could. But I do find it While not entirely original on Jack’s part, it would have stood out at the time interesting to note that he took radically different approaches to essentially the against Universal Pictures’ then-prevailing interpretation, which cast Bela Lugosi as same character when he had three decades to play with the ideas in his head. the debonair vampire king. (The Lon Chaney, Jr. and John Carradine versions came Mark Evanier notes in his introduction to Jimmy Olsen: afterwards in 1943 and ’44-’45 respectively.) Whether or not Jack deliberately borAdventures by Jack Kirby Volume 2 that Jack once said, rowed from the 1922 movie is speculative at best, but I’m sure he was deliberately “I don’t want to repeat myself when I do Dracula.” Whether attempting to avoid drawing anything that resembled Lugosi. Indeed, he took that it was because of the passage of time or simply the fact to an extreme a few months later with a blood-draining, anthropomorphic rutabaga that he only tried twice, Jack can at least say he didn’t in Marvel Mystery Comics #20, but I’m trying to stick with something at least repeat himself when he tackled the vampire mythos. ★ vaguely in the realm of classical vampires here.

Of course, not long after his first vampire story, Kirby was off in the army. And, Check out Sean's blog at once he returned, he developed Young Romance and got the ball rolling for romanhttp://kleefeldoncomics.blogspot.com.

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Influencees

Steve Englehart Speaks could do many things but he couldn’t write, and Stan could do many things but he couldn’t draw. It certainly wasn’t true that Stan just dialogued Kirby’s stories—first, because it wasn’t, and second, because “just dialogue” would not have made us care so much about the characters and their personal situations. On the other hand, we know it wasn’t true that Jack just drew Stan’s stories—first, because it wasn’t, and second, because “just drew” would not have made the characters so heroic and dynamic. But to say either Stan or Jack was secondary is, I think, faith-based rather than reality-based. FF #48-50 would not have been the classic it is without both of them.

Interviewed by Shane Foley

(above) Blurb from the box at the top of Steve Englehart’s Captain Victory #1 script, page 1, and (next page) Paul Gulacy’s cover for that never-published first Topps issue. (below) Kirby Marvelmania button art, circa 1969.

Captain Victory TM & ©2009 Jack Kirby Estate. Silver Surfer TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

(So read the opening page of Steve Englehart’s script (above) for his unpublished Captain Victory series. Here obviously is a writer who has great respect for King Kirby.

Steve Englehart is well respected for his work as a writer in comic books since the early ’70s. Previous TwoMorrows’ interviews can be found in Comic Book Artist #2, 7, 18 and Back Issue! #8 (mainly regarding his ’70s Marvel work), Comic Book Artist Collection, Volume 2 and Back Issue! #3 and 10 (regarding his Batman work), TJKC #33 and Back Issue! #11 (comments on the Fantastic Four).

And he keeps turning up in other Back Issue! editions as books he was involved in keep being covered. Together with great info on his writing methods, the most recent career-spanning interview is on show in Write Now! #12. And no doubt there are a few more I’ve overlooked.

This interview came about after I was looking over Steve’s website, found at www.steveenglehart.com (where else?). There is lots of background info there on all his series and it is highly recommended.

What really grabbed my eye, and became the springboard for this article, was when I saw that Steve had his unpublished Topps’ Captain Victory scripts for sale. Now these I just had to see. Together with his aborted West Coast Avengers plots, I bought #1. So often, I’ve found that writers don’t seem to ‘get’ Kirby characters in a way that I find satisfying, so I was hedging my bets when I only bought the first script. But to my immense pleasure, I thought his take on CV felt pitch perfect! So in short order, I also bought scripts 2 and 3. Now I want 4, 5 and 6. Pity they don’t exist. This exchange was conducted by e-mails beginning early 2007.)

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: You’ve stated a number of times that your first exposure to Kirby was the Galactus trilogy from Fantastic Four #48-50. Do you think, “This is a Kirby story, dialogued by Stan Lee” or do you think the Lee/Kirby productions are not that easily divisible?

STEVE ENGLEHART: I think it’s Lee/Kirby, and the reason is, comics are a hybrid medium. That same art with a different writer would have been a different experience, and vice versa. But Lee and Kirby fed off each other at that time. Jack

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TJKC: A hot topic amongst Kirby fans is the debate about his scripting ability. Some love it. Others hate it. And there are those, like me, caught in the middle. Your letter published in Comic Book Artist #7 mentioned Kirby’s “tin ear”, showing where you stand. Any comments on that?

STEVE: I’ve never liked Jack’s scripting. It does not sound like human speech, and IT puts the emPHAsis in the WRONG places.

When I was asked to do Captain Victory, I had to go back and plow through all the books, and I discovered that there was a lot of Kirby magic in them, but it was hard to make out behind that tin wall. At one point, I suggested to Topps regarding Captain Victory—and later to DC regarding the Fourth World—that they republish Kirby in English. Meaning, hire a real writer (i.e., me, since it was my idea) to redo the dialogue so as to make clear what Kirby was intending to say, and add personality as Stan used to do. I think particularly with the Fourth World, everyone says “Oh, great classic series,” but very few people actually want to read it. But if you were to do the “remastered” version, of that or Captain Victory or any of his other self-scripted stuff—staying absolutely true to what he was trying to say, but making the words flow like the art—they could all be reborn.

Having now pissed off all of Jack’s true believers, I’d go back to your kind introduction where you vouch for the fact that I wrote a Captain Victory you found satisfying. I revere Jack for everything but the scripting, and I’d love to bring his self-written stuff to its full potential, to make those later series as “satisfying” as the FF or Thor.

TJKC: We know opinion is divided about Kirby’s scripting. On the other hand, no one can argue that he didn’t have great conceptual ideas. But what about his actual plotting? What do you think of his actual method of story construction?

STEVE: His plotting was great. Everything was great except human speech.

TJKC: Do you think there are many elements of your approach to writing that are heavily influenced by Kirby’s approach?

STEVE: I’m sure there are, but at this point it’s hard to say.

Which means, when I was learning my craft, I was influenced by all the great stuff around me, and Kirby was a major figure in that realm—but it’s all evolved into my own style now so I can’t pick out anything unique to Jack, or anyone else. Maybe others can see things I can’t.

TJKC: What are your thoughts on Kirby’s Fourth World? Do you think it was a case of “too much, too quick”? Do you think the scripting, more than the torrent of ideas, was a problem?

STEVE: Yes, the scripting was a problem; that will always be true for me. But beyond that, imagine a universe where the FF, Thor, and, oh, Spider-Man and Ant-Man had to function as a separate, four-headed entity. You immediately run into problems with one head demanding more attention than another, some series speeding up and others slowing down so they stay in sync—

problems where the structure gets in the way of the story. In fact, those four books I just mentioned did the occasional crossover but they were much more loosely linked than the Fourth World, and even an accomplished scripter would have had to bring all his craft to the table to keep them from bogging down. Secondly, Jack did delight in throwing out high concepts, but (scripting again) he wasn’t so good at maintaining those concepts. Characters came and went with no rhyme or reason, without having accomplished a whole lot—very much with the idea that “Hey, they’re all part of a vast universe,” as opposed to “Hey, they’re interesting individuals in a vast universe.” People were concepts, not people.

Now, that’s fixable, and it’s a shame that, in my opinion, finances and ego led Jack to dispense with a professional writer. I don’t want to belabor this, but a pro writer could take the story and art that’s there, add personalities, cross-references, foreshadowing, and make those stories loom a whole lot larger, on the scale of an FF #48-50.

TJKC: What was your approach to Mister Miracle when you and Marshall Rogers picked up after Kirby had left? Did you feel honorbound to make it as “Kirby” as you could? Or did you take the view that the editors hired Englehart, therefore it’s an Englehart approach they want?

STEVE: Part of being “Englehart” is being true to the guys who came before me. I’m gonna write the best Mister Miracle I can, but it’s going to segue seamlessly from what I’m picking up from. If I want to go someplace else with the character, I’ll start where he is and move him where I want him, and that journey is part of his story and his character arc. So the “Englehart” approach to Kirby—in Mister Miracle, in Captain America, in the Silver Surfer, in the FF—is to figure out what Kirby had in mind and honor that, while I take it new places. I’m not into replicating.

TJKC: Any thoughts on Kamandi, OMAC, and the “Losers”? Do aborted projects like “Atlas” inspire ideas that you wish you could develop?

STEVE: Kamandi was fun; I did a fill-in issue with Dick Ayers and enjoyed that. OMAC didn’t develop far enough to get a good handle on; people who developed it afterward developed it. And the “Losers” was fun but didn’t really fit against the darker Kanigher/Kubert standard for DC war books.

TJKC: Kirby returned to Marvel in ’76 just as you were winding up your first stint there. Did you have any contact with him then? What did you think of his Eternals series?

STEVE: I didn’t have any contact with him then. But one of my great fanboy memories is, I happened to be hanging around DC one afternoon in 1970, when Jack was just setting up shop there, between Marvel and the Fourth World, and he invited a bunch of us to go have dinner with him. So there I was, not even in comics yet, having dinner with the King at what seemed his highest point ever. This is old stuff for Mark Evanier, but pretty special for me.

Several years later, when I was doing Captain America, Jack and Steranko and I shared a stage at Comic-Con. But those may be the only two times I hung out with him.

As for the Eternals—much more successful

than the Fourth World, in part because it was just the one series and so free to go its own way, in part because it was only barely connected to the Marvel Universe and so free to go its own way, and in part because Jack created a solid cast and mythos from concepts he obviously was deeply involved with, personally. But it still suffered from the “Hey, we’re a bunch o’ concepts” approach, as opposed to the “Hey, we’re half a dozen actual people.”

TJKC: There were only six issues between the end of your Cap run and Kirby’s return. What did you think of his approach?

STEVE: I didn’t like it. It was Jack, doing his creation, so what could you say, but it lost all the characterization that Sal Buscema, Frank Robbins, and I had made the norm over the previous four years. That’d be true no matter who the previous people were.

TJKC: What about other projects of his, like Machine Man, 2001, Devil Dinosaur, and Black Panther ?

STEVE: 2001 was another thing he was obviously very interested in; gods and mythology was clearly his passion in those years. Black Panther was kind of like Cap—him doing his creation, very different from the previous version—but it was also like Eternals, in that the Panther’s world didn’t intersect much with the Marvel Universe. Cap was in the center of the MU and stood out because of it; Panther was on the edges. So Panther worked in a lot of ways, because it could. Devil Dinosaur was bad Kamandi. Machine Man was pretty good.

TJKC: It seems to me that from 1970 on, Jack didn’t want to listen to any editorial advice. On the one hand, given his age and previous success in the industry, one can understand why. On the other, 33

this factor seems to have been a major cause of his lack of success (ie. sales) from then on. What comments do you have on that, and also, knowing how the industry works, how hard that would have made it for both him and his employers?

Reading stories of Jack’s arrangement with DC to wind up the New Gods, then seeing how his “Road to Armagetto” (great little episode though it is) was not what they wanted, I can’t help but see massive frustration for all parties. And surely a big part of that is simply that he wouldn’t listen, going off in his own direction, then getting annoyed when his work is rejected! I feel his “robot Hulk vs. Ikaris” was another example of totally missing the point of what Marvel asked for.

STEVE: The thing was, he was Kirby. No one in comics had ever or has ever been as big as he was. John Buscema, for example, very ably replaced him as “Marvel’s top artist,” but Buscema was never The King. And Kirby the King had a very good argument that he hadn’t gotten all the respect he’d deserved. So I think a lot of where he was at in 1970 was getting the respect he knew he should have—and the first crack out of the box, DC is having his Superman faces redrawn. Then, when the Fourth World began to tank because of Jack’s refusal to have a writer (his last writer had been his editor, of course), Jack was in no mood to listen to editorial, and editorial had to step gingerly around the King, and he ended up inside his own walled-off castle. Part of it is completely understandable, and part of it is ego and finances—in my opinion. So by the time he goes back to Marvel, he won’t

rejoin the Marvel U, he does his own thing on his own, he does his own Cap, his own Panther, and if Marvel asks for the Hulk, he does his own Hulk, not theirs.

TJKC: When Kirby began Captain Victory at Pacific in 1981, he was hoping that the independent publishers would change comics for creators like him. You were involved at that time as well with Coyote, Scorpio Rose, etc. How do you look back at those times now—and what effects of it do you see in the industry today?

STEVE: Those companies had a great effect because they opened doors where there hadn’t been any doors before—creatively, financially, every way. In the long run, they couldn’t compete against the bigger companies, but without those companies developing better deals for the creative talent, those deals would never have been available at the Big Two. TJKC: When you had your chance to do the FF in 1987, Kirby had not been actively involved there for over 15 years. Did it feel like you were doing a Kirby book and look to get his feel there or had it been diluted/redirected so much that this wasn’t an issue?

STEVE: When I did the FF, I felt that the original spirit of the book—four normal human friends trying to figure out how to cope with their strange powers—was diluted to the point of invisibility. The four most saintly icons on the planet held little interest for me. So I shook things up pretty good to get back to that spirit, and that was pure Stan and Jack.

TJKC: Similar question for the Silver Surfer. This was never a Kirby book, but how much of Kirby’s Surfer, as opposed to the Lee/Buscema character, did you look for when formulating your version?

STEVE: It’s an interesting question. Again in this case, I was sick of the endless replications of the later version—“I suffer as I fly... alone!” And the fans were sick of it as well, since it had never sold with that formulation. So I wanted to get him back in space, and stop his incessant suffering, and that takes us back to the Kirby version. But on the other hand, the Buscema version was the one everybody knew after twenty years. So, in line with my concept of picking up from wherever the character is when I get him, I moved the Buscema version toward the Kirby version and created the Englehart version.

TJKC: You say you like Captain Victory. Did you feel that way before you got to plot your stories, or was that an opinion you gained after you tackled it?

STEVE: Afterward. I did not like him when I first read him because I couldn’t get past the tin wall. That was my big personal revelation, when I saw there was something worthwhile inside that wall.

TJKC: Captain Victory was different from the FF and the Surfer in that your stories, together with the Busiek/Giffen Victory mini-series, would have been the first non-Kirby written stories. Tell us your thoughts in approaching this.

STEVE: It’s really the same no matter who I take over from or when I take over. I want to honor what’s there and move it forward. If I were awed by whom I was replacing, I wouldn’t be able to do my job.

TJKC: We know that Captain Victory #1 and 2 were completed by Jack around 1975. The rest of the series was done in the early ’80s. As it progressed, he showed that Captain Victory was a direct descendant of the Fourth World, with Captain Victory being Orion’s son, Voice/Blackmass being the disembodied Darkseid, Hellikost being Apokolips, etc.

In your story, you postulate that Argus Flane was originally Orion. Are you sure Jack meant this or is it just a wild, logical guess?

STEVE: I think at this point, Jack had several complete mythological structures which he couldn’t use because they belonged to DC or Marvel, so he was taking the parts he liked and using them as above. In other words, Flane could not have been Orion straight up, but he probably was Orion in Jack’s mind. The problem that I have found in my own writing is, when you say “I’m gonna do a character just like

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the Batman except with one change,” pretty soon it’s not the Batman at all. So Flane could start out being Jack’s secret Orion, but once Flane got going in the different universe, he would become Flane. And I might add that, if at that point you start trying to shoehorn him into Orion, making him do what Orion would have done, it starts to undermine Flane as a character because he’s acting out of character.

TJKC: When telling Captain Victory’s origin tale, Jack drew Captain Victory’s face changing and getting more and more evil and wild looking, echoing a feature of Orion. In your story, you run with that, giving Captain Victory a real ominous quality.

While plotting this, were you conscious of the Fourth World connection, exploring that, or were you running with what you saw as potential in this aspect of the Captain Victory strip, regardless of any Orion-implication Jack may have put there?

STEVE: Both. I was doing Captain Victory but I knew where that came from and tried to, uh, honor it.

TJKC: Jack’s scripting became more and more obscure in the origin episodes, so a lot of explanatory stuff was forgotten altogether, like explaining who Paranex the Fighting Fetus was. Any comments?

STEVE: I assume the Fetus had something to do with the 2001 space child, as Jack continued to connect concepts he liked.

TJKC: Did you create the two new female crew members Salimba and Zirizi, then see where the story went? Or did you have an idea that needed the women, so put them in?

STEVE: Yes. :-) I had to flesh out the crew, it made sense on all levels to throw in some women, and then, as is generally the case, I let them shape their own stories.

TJKC: Some see Jack having a Captain (Victory) as superior to a Major (Klavus) as a problem. I don’t know anything about the chain of command in the armed forces, but how do you see this?

STEVE: In the (American, at least) Navy, Captain is a very high rank. Above him are admirals, but below him are Commanders[!], and there are no majors. I just followed Jack, who, I assume, came up with the name “Captain Victory” the same way he came up with “Captain America,” then started pulling ranks from his army experience, where there are majors.

TJKC: A comment that only those who’ve read your scripts would know: In it, you gave Captain Victory a name, Jak. Nice. And his immediate superior is Admiral ‘Rozz’. I can’t decide whether you’re being respectful or cheeky.

STEVE: Actually, just respectful.

TJKC: In the Collected Jack Kirby Collector, Volume 5, David Hamilton has this story: He said he asked at a Con why Jack really left Marvel. He writes, “Jack looked at me straight in the eyes, with a ‘how dare you’ look on his face, and he went on to tell me and all around whatever I’d heard was untrue! ‘But,’ I said, ‘Steve Englehart said…’ “Steve doesn’t speak for me!” Jack said. ‘Well that didn’t go too well.’”

He then went on to record how years later Jack admitted that he thought they were robbers at Marvel, citing the case of Captain Marvel being one of his ideas.

STEVE: That one beats me. I wasn’t at Marvel, or even in comics, when Jack left, so all I know about it is what we’ve all heard as hearsay. I don’t see how I could have said anything for David to

quote. But I can see why Jack would react that way, and I don’t, and never did, speak for him.

TJKC: You said at the end of your 1984 interview in Comics Interview #14 that “I have a horror of wandering around comics conventions twenty years from now, saying, ‘I used to write the Avengers. I was famous once.’” Those twenty years have passed— how do you see things now?

STEVE: The same. I don’t go to cons unless I’ve got something new out. I’m perfectly happy to talk about the Avengers or Captain Victory—maybe even more so about Captain Victory because so few people have seen it—but I’d rather talk about what I’m doing now. Of course, what I’m doing now is a novel, which confuses the issue... :-)

(previous page) Gulacy’s cover for the planned second Topps issue of Captain Victory. (above) Kirby pencils from Captain Victory #11 (Jun 1983), as the hidden lineage of his grandfather Darksei... I mean, Blackmass, comes to the fore.

Captain Victory TM & ©2009 Jack Kirby Estate.

For all those who like Captain Victory, go to www.steveenglehart.com and buy the scripts off Steve—they’re worth it! ★

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Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Gallery

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Thor Unused

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Original Art-ifacts

Original art to Thor #167 (August 1969), courtesy of Heritage Auctions. Inks by Vince Colletta. Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Journey Into Mysteries

I Can you help us track down any unused pages from this Thor sequence, or published pages with margin notes? If so, get in touch, so we can conclusively solve this mystery!

Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Avenger R

t wasn’t all that unusual for Jack Kirby to occasionally end up with some unused pencil pages from his stories. He worked very instinctively, not sitting down to write out a plan of attack for the art in a new issue. He generally worked it all out very roughly in his head, then went full speed ahead drawing pages, sometimes in story “blocks” that he’d combine later. So once in a while, he’d end up with an extra page that needed to be cut, and he’d set it aside, with the thought that he might one day be able to reuse it in another story (something that rarely ever happened, since he’d constantly be off to new ideas).

What was unusual was for Jack to end up with the better part of a full issue of unused pages, as with Thor #169 (October 1969).

Let’s recap: Thor began a quest to seek out the origin of Galactus back in Thor #160 (January 1969), launching Jack’s final multiissue Thor epic, with Ego, the Recorder, the Wanderers, the Watcher, and Galactus all woven together into what began as a pretty amazing tale. We got a brief look at Galactus’ origin in #162, then took a two-issue detour in #163-164. “Him” returned in #165-166, in a story full of sub-plots about Loki, Karnilla, Balder, and the Watcher, with Odin still searching for Galactus. As Thor battled “Him”, he succumbed to the dreaded “Warrior Madness”, and at the end of #166, Odin punished Thor by sending him on a mission to find Galactus. Thor finally found Galactus in #168, and...

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they sat around talking to each other. And from then on, Jack’s Marvel output was downright mundane. What happened?

I touched on this back in TJKC #14, as I’d tracked down a handful of unused pencil pages that seem to have been intended for #169. Since then, this mystery has plagued me, and I’ve been trying to make sense of why there were so many leftover pages, and why the published versions of issues #168-170 were such a convoluted mess. I’ve been struggling to put together some conclusive evidence to support my hunches about it, and the deeper I’ve gotten into it, the more questions have been raised.

I’ve finally reached the point where I’m ready to air my theories, and throw this open to our readers, in hopes they can shed further light on the mystery. But to get to this point, I enlisted the help of Shane Foley and Sean Kleefeld to give me their opinions, and their input was invaluable to this article.

Putting #168’s Pieces Together The first step is to try to rearrange Thor #168 into Jack’s original order, so that the unused page 15 (with Balder, Karnilla, and Haag) from the Marvelmania Portfolio falls in the right place, and here’s our best shot at making it fit:

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Re-Assembled

The mystery surrounding Thor #168-170 , examined by John Morrow, with help from Shane Foley and Sean Kleefeld

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doesn’t end with anything about “dead people,” but published page 16 does. So we think it’s pretty conclusive that the Karnilla/ Loki Marvelmania page was intended for #168, page 15.

This required deleting a couple of very superfluous Galactus pages (shown at left), which didn’t really add anything to the narrative. However, if you look at the story the way we think Jack originally presented it, Galactus only appears in 4 panels (one of which only showed his feet!). For a yarn titled “Galactus Found!”, it’s a safe bet Stan would’ve felt the Big G should be a bit more prominent than that, so we’re assuming that’s one reason why the Loki sub-plot pages were scrapped in favor of two new ones which feature Galactus. (There’s another we’ll discuss shortly.)

There are some subtle word changes made just before publication in #168. On page 2, Odin originally states that Galactus’ power “doth RIVAL mine own!”, but RIVAL was changed to CHALLENGE. On published page 17 (shown at left), Galactus initially said he’s seeking Thor’s AID, but it was later changed to UNDERSTANDING. And at the end of #168, the “next issue” blurb originally said #169 would feature “The Secret Of Galactus!”. It was changed to “The Why Of Galactus!” at the last minute—a change with major ramifications, as you’ll see. (above) According to our reconstruction, these two Thor #168 pages weren’t originally part of the issue.

Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Our reasoning for this is based largely on telltale clues in Jack’s margin notes for the unused Karnilla/Balder page 15. The note at top says Karnilla is angry that Loki nearly killed Balder (which happened in #167). Haag’s voodoo doll is clearly the one Loki used in #167. Jack’s note at the bottom says “Odin’s interference ruined everything!” which it did in #167. And a big clue to what came right before this page originally is in the top notation: “But now to LIVE, angry people….” This assumes that page 14 before it was about DEAD people. The published #168, page 14

Thor #169: The Awesome Question?!

For an issue with the title “The Awesome Answer!”, #169 sure raises a lot of questions! I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to state that there are some awkward story transitions taking place in Thor #169—Jack could tell a story much better than this.

In all honesty, it has some of the worst storytelling I’ve ever seen in a Kirby comic, and those unpublished pages, while short of earth-shattering, are certainly solid storytelling. A lot of the

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published inking looks particularly wobbly, with numerous faces obscured by heavy black shading, and many pages having—to me anyway—the feel you get when an inker uses a lightbox (tracing on a separate piece of art board), rather than inking directly over the pencils. (Compare the inking on the splash page of #169 to the rest of the issue—there’s little detail, and the soft quality looks like a third generation photocopy.) There are several pages of Thor and Galactus talking that again seem superfluous, as if they were added after the fact. So just what went on with this story? Obvious signs of alterations would be changes in lettering and page number styles, as well as sudden shifts between inkers, and I’m still trying to make sense of it all.

A new piece of the puzzle recently surfaced (in very low-resolution form, unfortunately)—another unused Thor #169 page. There’s an inscription on it that

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reads: “To Shel - Jack Kirby ‘69”, then “And back to Jack, with affection for all you’ve [done for me] - Shel Dorf” (Based on the fuzzy notes, Jack gave the pencil page to Shel Dorf as a gift. If I’m reading the notes clearly, sometime after, Rich Buckler inked the page, and then Shel gave it back to Jack, so these aren’t Everett’s or Klein’s inks; the page was rejected while in pencil form.) Because the image is so blurry, we can’t make out much of the specifics or margin notes, but there appears to be part of an “8”, and it works nicely as page 18 of the original story.

Armed with that new page, the next step in solving this mystery is to try to reassemble Thor #169 back into some semblance of the order Jack originally drew it in. After much back and forth e-mail discussion between Sean Kleefeld, Shane Foley, and me, what’s shown here is our best guess at the most logical form Thor #169 took when Jack drew it:

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Unknown missing sub-plot page, likely featuring Warriors 3 or Loki/Karnilla 9

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Redrawn Thor/Galactus panels

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This leaves 9 1⁄3 pages that went unused, replaced by an 8-page Galactus extended origin sequence (below), plus 1 1⁄3 pages (shown at left) to change the ending of #169. The obvious reason for the changed ending is Galactus’ decision on the final page, to join Thor in battling the Thermal Man, as “a chance to save instead of destroy.” Granted, it appears that Galactus was acting out of character throughout the published version, and it was stretching things a bit to turn him into a hero (although I guess if anyone could’ve made it work, Kirby could).

Also, the “next issue” blurb, just before publication, originally said the title would be “Thunder Over The Orient”, but was changed to “Thunder Over New York”. Were Thor and the Big G going to exact revenge on the Asian inventors of Thermal Man? In Jack’s original version of this story, Thor and Galactus never came to blows. In fact, in the margin notes at the bottom of published page 17, Kirby has Thor saying “I pity you, Galactus”, which is what sets him off in a rage, from which he quickly calms down. But in the published page 18 (left), which was inked by Bill Everett (and was undoubtedly drawn later), Jack’s margin notes reflect the revised ending of the story, as Galactus says “Too bad -- you are brave” and Thor states “Then to battle. The power of my hammer -- against yours”, just as Odin interrupts and sends Thor back to Earth.

Extenuating Circumstances To fully understand why so many #169 pages got dropped, and how they originally fit into Jack’s story, we’ve got to weigh several considerations.

First, in issue #168, the “Stan’s Soapbox” editorial states that Marvel, effective “as soon as possible,” was doing away with continued stories and sub-plots. Undoubtedly, that factored into the decision to get rid of the large section of Warriors Three pages in #169 and the Loki pages in #168, as Stan was looking to bring this epic to a halt as quickly as he could. And since editorial pages were done just before going to press, this edict could’ve come down after Jack had drawn #168-169, and probably while he was working on #170.

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Secondly, we know Kirby was moving at that time, and #168-169 could’ve been turned in together, just before Jack’s move from New York to California in early 1969 (which could help explain how they were reworked in-house at Marvel). Supposedly the last thing loaded on the moving truck in New York was Jack’s drawing table (he was allegedly finishing a Thor page!) and it was the first thing off in California. Mark Evanier’s pretty sure Jack moved in March 1969, which (using the 6-month-prior-topublication rule that seems to be standard back then) means he’d be drawing the issues with cover dates of roughly Sept. 1969 when he moved (ie. #168-169). I get a sense that both issues might’ve been in-house at the same time and monkeyed with together, so maybe Jack got an issue ahead before his move in ’69. Then, when changes needed to be made, Jack was in transit to California (or already 3000 miles away), so Marvel altered them in the Bullpen. Jack’s move also explains why we got a couple of Romita covers in a row. Kirby did a powerful cover for #168, but then we get the pieced-together #169 cover by Romita and the Bullpen with background clips from the issue, and #170’s by Romita after Jack’s too-cluttered cover was rejected. #169’s the only issue where no unpublished version has turned up, making me believe Jack never drew one, due to his moving schedule.

(I spoke to John Romita to see if he recalled anything about this story, or his replacement covers for Thor from that time, but he didn’t remember any specifics; just that Stan would regularly drop things on his desk to correct or redraw, often with last-minute deadlines, and he’d crank them out. Especially on covers, the more time he had on a deadline, the more changes Stan would have made. Romita had his head buried at his drawing table all the time, so the Thor #169 cover was just another assignment Stan dropped on him like the others, and he didn’t recall any office politics about it. Likewise, Roy Thomas doesn’t recall any specifics about the issues in question.)

Lastly, we’ve got to consider the inkers. George Klein inked most of Thor #168 and #169, and was credited as inker on both, but he died in 1969, either while, or just after, working on this Thor arc. The conventional wisdom is that Bill Everett was called in to ink the rest of the storyline when Klein died, but the Everett (and possibly other unidentified) inks are interspersed within both issues, rather than appearing sequentially. Unless Klein inked random pages of two issues at the same time, anything Everett inked was added later, and not part of the original story.

I’ve got the ink stats Marvel sent Jack for #168170, and usually I can scan these, really darken them up, and make out some of the margin notes.

Alas, all the George Klein-inked pages are pristine clean (my examination of some originals shows faint traces of Jack’s notes, but they’re erased beyond legibility), so I only was able to get a few notes from the Everett-inked pages. There are a few lettering changes that were made just prior to publication, but nothing that gives any real clues.

The Nirak Origin Sequence Now that we’ve reassembled #169 in its native form, and established that Everett-inked pages likely came later, we’ve got to make sense of the 8-page Galactus origin sequence the ended up on pages 613 of #169 (shown on opposite page). Shane Foley thinks this was Stan’s after-the-fact input, since it reads like a typical Lee heroic tragedy. But is it possible that this sequence is actually left over from an issue of Fantastic Four, and Jack tossed it into the mix when his other pages were omitted, and he was about to miss a deadline in the middle of his move to California?

In his “Jack FAQs” column in TJKC #36, Mark Evanier states, “Jack once told me that he’d deleted a long sequence with The Watcher from an issue of Fantastic Four and later used it in Thor.” Sean Kleefeld thinks pages #15-17 (give or take a panel) from Thor #169 were the ones Jack was referencing in Mark’s quote, since #169 is the only issue Jack did

(above) George Klein-inked Thor #169 pages are clean as a whistle—no margin notes. But there is a scribbled note from Stan Lee on this one that, if we can decipher it, may give us some answers. (left) Kirby gave the main protagonist of this Galactus origin sequence—the guy who became Galactus—a name: Nirak. There is mention of a “plague” in Kirby’s partially cropped margin notes at the bottom of this page. (previous page, top right) A newly discovered unused page for Thor #169, albeit in blurry form. If you own this page, please send us a scan or copy!

Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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with a Watcher sequence longer than one page (the #168 Watcher pages could’ve been part of it). But since that segment’s not really very long (and I think it plays a more vital role in this mystery, as you’ll see shortly), it seems more likely to me that pages 6-13 are the leftover Fantastic Four pages Jack was referring to.

I know what you’re thinking: “How can that be a reused Watcher sequence, when it features the guy who ended up becoming Galactus?” Maybe that big Galactus head on page 6 was originally a big Watcher head, narrating the story.

And have you ever noticed how all of Taa’s inhabitants are wearing very Watcherlike togas? It’s certainly something to consider, whether these were old pages or new ones.

Bill Everett inked the first five pages, but then it switches to George Klein inks, so perhaps Klein was working on this sequence when he died. There are ample Kirby margin notes on those Everett-inked Galactus origin pages, and I’m working on getting clear copies from a few collectors. The couple I’ve found show that the bald guy who ended up being Galactus actually had a name—Nirak—and he was investigating a disturbance in the structure of the planet’s sun. (He’d just gotten back from the sun when he takes his spacesuit off on page 8.) So there was a whole lot more plot there than ended up in the dialogue. It may’ve still revolved around a Creeping Plague—I’ve got to find more notes to be conclusive, and hopefully we’ll have some by next issue—but Stan has a note to remove the people’s smiles when Nirak tells them there’s a disturbance in the sun, almost as if Jack was redoing Jor-El telling the Kryptonians doomsday was coming, and they were scoffing at him. (If that’s what Jack plotted, I bet Stan went nuts when he saw Jack doing a take-off of Superman’s origin!)

I’ll need clearer notes on the rest of it to make any definite conclusions. Curiously, Everett inked black hair on Nirak on page 8, panel 3, but it was corrected to make him bald for publication.

As for what issue of FF might’ve originally housed an extended Watcher sequence, Marvel’s Tom Brevoort reminded me that there was a one-page Watcher interlude in FF #60, but it was never followed up on. So I’d suspect it was for a later issue (maybe the “Surfer in Sub Atomica”

(above) These two Don Blake pages from Thor #170 did no more than expand the page count, and likely replaced the Loki sub-plot pages.

Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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sequence), and Jack was planning this stuff to coincide with his Silver Surfer origin (which he supposedly planned for FF around that time, but had to nix when he found out about Stan doing one in the solo Surfer book with John Buscema).

Thor #170: That’s A Wrap At the end of #169, the epic search for Galactus is curtailed with a hasty wrap-up page, and it’s time to tie off the remaining loose ends in #170: namely, Thermal Man, Loki and Karnilla, and the Warriors Three.

There’s a clear difference in the look and feel between #169 and #170, and it’s not just by the addition of Bill Everett as the new inker. The art looks a lot looser, the pacing’s frenetic, and Jack’s Thermal Man now matches #169’s. It’s basically

one long fight scene, with little thought given to continuity or characterization.

The elimination of continued stories meant Jack had to get “done in one,” and the ending is anti-climatic, to say the least. We do get a short sub-plot interlude, as Karnilla conveniently snatches the Warriors Three from danger (thereby wrapping up another dangling plot thread), leaving Thor to take care of Thermal Man awfully easily by himself.

At this point, Jack had already eliminated the sub-plot of Loki trying to turn Asgard against Odin (begun on the unpublished page 14 of #169), but there are two pages from the Marvelmania Portfolio that carry this theme through.

Assuming they were meant for #170, we’ve got to find two disposeable published pages, and the two (12 and 16) where Thor changes to Don Blake and back again fit the bill. So here’s our stab at how Jack would’ve handed in #170 originally:

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This pagination is by no means conclusive, although those Don Blake pages seem very much an afterthought. However, Shane Foley thinks those Loki pages from the Marvelmania Portfolio could have been drawn by Kirby before he knew exactly which issue they’d be in. Mark Evanier has spoken before of Kirby penciling story “blocks,” then inserting them where they fit best. Jack used a setting similar to this in #175, where Loki was again inciting rebellion, so Shane thinks those two pages never got to a stage of being put in any issue by Jack.

The Real Secret Of Galactus?

Okay, we’ve more or less determined what pages went where, and have a rough idea why the changes were made. But we still haven’t figured out the more important question: Why did Jack lose interest immediately following Thor #169?

He was a professional, and had gone through story alterations before. So why would this have been different? To hopefully come to a conclusion, let’s first get into what we know, or can generally accept, about where Jack was personally and professionally at the time he was drawing Thor #169.

From past articles in this magazine and elsewhere, we know that Kirby got ticked off when Stan Lee changed Jack’s directions and motivations on characters he was personally invested in: First on the Silver Surfer, then on “Him.” This promising 10-issue Thor arc ended with a whimper in #170, the Nov. 1969 issue, and his last great FF epic (the Thing/Skrulls/Torgo arc) ended with the Dec. 1969 issue. We also know every story he did after that was relatively weak, showing very little effort from Jack to do anything groundbreaking. So it’s pretty clear that one of those two storylines must’ve finally knocked the wind out of Jack’s sails, and it makes the most sense to be the heavily altered one from Thor.

In this final continued epic, Kirby seemed to be leading up to something big, giving one last shot to get some creative satisfaction at Marvel.

And what other “big concept” character did Jack feel a personal attachment to? Galactus—something must’ve happened with Galactus’ origin that left Jack dejected. But Jack had already done a basic version of Galactus’ origin a few issues earlier (in #162), so why address it again? That earlier version didn’t seem to cause any decline in his interest level at Marvel. However, that first origin was left intentionally vague and open-ended, so it could lead to some bigger revelation—and I don’t think it was just the “creeping plague.”

I think the Thor #169 story was the last straw for Jack—because Stan altered Galactus’ origin, by changing Jack’s motivation behind one last character he was attached to: The Watcher.

My theory (which builds on Sean Kleefeld’s from TJKC #44) is this: I think the big payoff of Thor #168-169 was supposed to be the origin of the Watcher, as well as Galactus. A simple dialogue change in one panel (#169, page 14, panel 5, above) could’ve been the culprit. Does that panel show the Watcher simply observing as it states—or is that gizmo of his what actually spawned Galactus? (That strangely stuck-on Galactus head, and the illegible note from Stan, lead me to believe something’s not right here.)

The more I think about this, the more I’m convinced that Jack, probably as far back as Fantastic Four #48, originally conceived of the Watcher as the one who spawned Galactus, and after seeing the terrible entity he created, took his vow never to interfere again, and to only “watch”—then broke it to make amends for his mistake. I think it makes great sense plot-wise to let the Watcher be the catalyst for Galactus, and would achieve several things: • Explain why the Watcher was in this Thor story • Provide motivation for why the Watcher got involved to save Earth in Fantastic Four #48 • Give a reason why we got a second origin for Galactus, just a few issues after the first one (for the Watcher payoff ), and 54

• Make one kickin’ climax to this issues-long epic!

Think back to the original “next issue” blurb at the end of issue #168: “The SECRET Of Galactus!” Not the “Why” of Galactus, but the “Secret.” There was some intentional reason for this change.

Now, look back over Jack’s original version of #169 (the one without the 8page Galactus origin sequence). There’s nothing in there about Galactus’ origin we didn’t already learn in #168 or #162; no “secret”, no “awesome answer” as the splash page states (and look at the goofy title lettering on the splash page of #169; Artie Simek was way better than that, and it looks like someone much less skilled relettered the title of that issue). All we get is the Watcher, standing around observing Galactus evolving, and letting him escape.

But if, on the other hand, Jack set it up with the Watcher’s tampering causing Galactus’ evolution, then you’d have a secret worth revealing at the end of a nearly year-long epic. Think back to FF #48-50; there are definite indications throughout that Galactus and the Watcher knew each other well, and there’s a backstory we aren’t privy to.

(They’re even the same extra-large size!) I’m convinced this is what Jack had in mind all along, and was finally leading up to it in this last long Thor epic.

That revelation would also give us a reason to have sympathy for Galactus, so maybe, just maybe, we could buy into Jack’s notion of him trying to redeem himself by teaming up with Thor to stop Thermal Man. Stan’s changing that revelation, added to Jack’s past disappointments, could’ve crushed his spirit enough to keep him from ever getting personally involved in his Marvel work again.

Shane Foley agrees that this makes sense. “It sounds like Jack’s wonderful logic. And it really reminds me of the changes made to that second Inhumans origin, where Stan took the tragedy out of it as well, effectively gutting the heart of it. It also really gave the Watcher a better reason to be there, and gives the

story a power the published version doesn’t even approach. It seems just right that he would have a story where it’s the ultimate good guy, the Watcher, who made this massive bungle eons ago—then to have Galactus, the result of that bungle, make a decision that would effectively redeem himself.”

That Galactus is wearing a Watcher-style toga robe in #169, page 14, panel 4 (left), initially had me thinking Jack had Thor sitting and talking with the Watcher instead of Galactus in #169, and the Bullpen missed that small correction. Instead, perhaps it was just a simple costume error; since the next panel would feature the big Watcher payoff, Jack was just getting ahead of himself.

If we’re right about this, it brings up one small problem with Jack’s approach—Stan and Larry Lieber had already done a Watcher origin back in Tales of Suspense #53 (May 1964), amended more recently in Watcher backups in the Silver Surfer comic (which I’m sure Jack wouldn’t have read, due to Stan’s choosing John Buscema to draw it instead of him). It was stated as far back as FF #13 that there was a whole race of Watchers, all of whom never got “involved,” but only watched—Jack probably didn’t recall this, so his new origin wouldn’t jive with existing Marvel continuity. While it could’ve been reconciled, this also could’ve been Stan’s rationale for changing the Watcher’s motivation in the story.

Only time, and more margin notes, will tell if we’re right.

(previous page, bottom, and left) As far back as these Fantastic Four #49 panels, it was obvious the Watcher and Galactus had a history together. Did Jack conceive of the Watcher as the catalyst who created Galactus? That’s our theory, and we’re sticking with it!

Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

The Remaining Pages This article has been a long and winding road for me, full of what ended up being wild goose chases, looking for clues where there were none to be found. Thankfully I had a lot of help from Shane Foley and Sean Kleefeld to keep me focused. But while we’ve found a home for most of the unused Thor pages, there’s a few still floating around. After Jack had some difficulties dealing with Marvel in the later 1960s, Roz Kirby was known to have seen some of the full-pagers he was handing in, and saying, “Those are too good for them,” so Jack would set them aside and draw another image (sometimes just as good as the first). I’m convinced Jack didn’t draw any new pencil pinups for Kirby Unleased or the Marvelmania Portfolio, so all those pencil pages must’ve been meant for some story originally. We’ve accounted for most of them; let’s try to give the others a home too.

I think I finally figured out what that weird drawing of a “ship” is (above right). Shane Foley feels like it probably had something to do with Galactus at one point, and if so, my best guess is it’s from FF #48, page 19 (and was replaced by Jack with a collage instead).

Try it with the Watcher’s word balloon from the collage page in the published version: “See! The great sphere is opening! His devices are sampling Earth’s elemental composition! He has found what he seeks!

The planet is doomed!” The penciling is certainly tight enough to fit that time period.

If the 8-page Galactus origin sequence from Thor #169 really was an unused Watcher sequence from FF, that big Watcher pin-up (right) could have been from it. Shane Foley thinks it fits well into Thor #165, page 11. Mike Gartland suggests that Watcher pin-up could have been meant for the “Him” story in Thor #165, as the Watcher appears there as well.

The one of Galactus popping out of his incubator (lower right) was meant for Thor #162, between pages 16 and 17, or else it was meant to follow panel 3 of Thor #169, page 17 (which could’ve been part of the unused FF Watcher sequence; the penciling’s awfully tight on this one too, making me think it’s from earlier than 1969).

Shane Foley think the Galactus page reworked for the cover of the GODS portfolio (below) was for Thor #161, page 12.

“Look at it: Thor gasps at the end of page 11 and we turn to see—a full page of Thor. Then we see a great half-pager of Galactus bombarding Ego with planetoids. Don’t you think a full pager of the big ‘G’ was more likely? And isn’t that exactly what the deleted full page shot shows—Galactus ripping these planetoids from some nearby star, ready to hurl at Ego?” (One last thing about that Galactus full-pager: Tom Scioli pointed out to me that on the far left side of the picture, you can see Thor’s faded shape behind Galactus. I must say, I never spotted this, probably due to the poor reproduction quality of the pencils. But it fits with Shane’s theory.)

So where does that leave us—will we ever get this Avenger Reassembled? As Sif said in Thor #167, “It could take an eternity.” Unfortunately, we haven’t conclusively answered all the questions, but a few things are beginning to unfold, and hopefully with others’ input, we’ll solve this. I don’t have all the answers, and I think it’s better to present everybody’s theories, and let readers decide which seems most plausible. Next issue is devoted to the work of Stan and Jack, so hopefully someone reading this will provide more clues. Stay tuned, True Believers! ★ (Thanks to Mike Gartland, Tom Brevoort and Tom Scioli for their input.)

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Casting A Shadow

Kirbyscura

irby was an original. Kirby was also a borrower. They seem like contradictory terms but, in fact, they’re not. The same could be said about the Beatles when they devoured early American rock and roll records and attempted to regurgitate them. Only, a funny thing happened. It came out as something new. They had galvanized it and made it their own. This is what happens when great talents seek to imitate what they love. They cannot help but leave their own mark on it in the process.

Jack Kirby was no different, and his influences and borrowings were many. Quite a few of them have been spotlighted here, be it story inspiration, or artistic flourishes like the Kirby dot or his squiggles. No one, to my mind, though, has ever identified the source of Kirby’s shadows.

You know the effect I’m talking about, those odd shadow patterns on floors and walls that come from no reasonable source of light. Their very appearance screams “Kirby!”, so much so that when Bruce Timm and his production team at Warner Brothers decided to incorporate the Demon into their animated version of the Batman mythos, they not only tried to remain as true as possible to Jack’s characters, Jason Blood, the Demon, Klarion, etcetera; they extended their detail-oriented efforts to those bizarre unexplainable nonrepresentational shadows.

But where did they come from? Perhaps, they had no forerunner. Perhaps, they were just one of those little Kirbisms that Jack happened upon in his development that had no literal source of inspiration. It was not unthinkable, and I, for my part, was quite prepared to believe so, until one evening recently when I decided it was time to start watching The Outer Limits again, a whim that our modern world and the miracle of the DVD have made a question of personal convenience. I was watching an episode called “The Sixth Finger”, and I nearly jumped out of my seat when they cut to a shot of a long hallway and I noticed odd unexplainable shadows in the background that could have been penciled in by Kirby himself. I could have, and would have, dismissed it as a fluke had it not continued, unabated, not only in that one episode, but in subsequent episodes as well.

The Outer Limits was the brainchild of Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano—a sciencefiction anthology program, ahead of its time.

Many familiar names associated with the series went on to bigger things. Among them, and critical to look of the show, was Conrad Hall, the Director of Photography. He came to the series with a background in commercials and industrial films, though his first job as D.P. was on Stony Burke, another Leslie Steven’s production prior to The Outer Limits.

Like many series of the day shot on film stock, it enjoyed high production values that are still impressive over forty years later.

Typically, shows from this period relied heavily on the three-point lighting system developed in the motion picture industry, employing a “key light” as the principle light shining directly on the subject, a “fill light” off to one side softening unwanted shadows, and a “back light” that placed a rim outline around the subject, helping to define them. They are fairly easy to pick out, particularly in dramatic series where lighting was crucial in setting the emotional tone of the program.

For Conrad Hall, and any other D.P. working in television

The secret influence in Kirby’s lighting,

by Adrian Day

K (below) A scene from “The Demon Within” episode of Batman: The Animated Series, and a Kirby panel from Demon #14 (below). Compare the lighting in both to this scene from the Outer Limits episode “The Sixth Finger” (top right).

Characters TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

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at the time, the three-point lighting system was the rudimentary vocabulary for everything they did. Hall’s lighting of actors, though leaning heavily to the film noir side, stayed realistic, or as realistic as three-point lighting ever gets. Meanwhile, his background lighting—moody, heavily textured and otherworldly—was like nothing ever seen before in television. With the support of Stefano and Stevens and against the advisement of more experienced television technicians, Hall persisted in his vision, and because of this The Outer Limits stands, visually, heads above even the best programs of the ’60s.

In John P. Alexander’s article, “The Kirby Version” from TJKC #28, covering the myriad of influences informing the subject matter of many of Kirby’s stories, he postulates that Kirby was a fan of The Outer Limits based on ideas he believes were coopted by Kirby in the pages of Fantastic Four. Given the long hours that Jack spent parked behind his drawing board, he most likely caught the show even as he penciled his latest assignment.

In its time, it was recognized by many as the premiere science fiction series, so it’s no surprise that Jack followed it.

In the case of Alexander’s examples, a span of several years exists, in most cases between the cited inspiration and their appearance in a Kirby book. This is no less true with his shadow technique. It only begins to appear in his latter days at Marvel, finally reaching maturity during his Fourth World series at DC. This lag time could be viewed as evidence that the similarities were mere coincidence, though more likely it is simply that: lag time. Jack’s prolificacy as a writer and artist was possible because he absorbed so many influences. Though he was known to have a poor memory in matters that, to him, were of little consequence, great influences in art and literature appeared to be catalogued in some corner of his brain whenever he needed them, even if he had possibly forgotten their original source.

It is this writer’s contention that the point of departure for every creative mind is always one of other influences. To that end, I have to take exception to John P. Alexander’s contention that a thin line exists between homage and plagiarism.

Believing that led to his conclusion that Kirby and Roger Corman fall into the same category, that category being exploitation.

Exploitation is the realm of small minds looking to catch a free ride on the latest trend, like a man looking for a hot tip on some stock in order to expand his limited resources. That would be the antithesis of Jack Kirby.

The discovery of Kirby’s influences in no way subtracts from either his greatness or his originality. There is no doubt in my mind that Conrad Hall’s experimentation with lighting spilled over into the pages of Jack’s books, yet it took many years, and repeated viewings of a favorite series to even recognize it. This is because influences on great talent never quite come out looking like they did when they went in. Their discovery merely enhances the mystery of the process. ★

Hiya, Hai-Yah!

The Other Lee, and Kirby Jack’s unused Bruce Lee comic, exhumed by John Morrow (right) Note the character’s name has been erased and changed to “Gin Sing” in panel 2, but it remains “Bruce Lee” in panel 4.

Characters TM & ©2009 Jack Kirby Estate.

fair amount of mystery surrounds the never-realized Kirby Comics line that was proposed for the mid-to-late 1970s. An unidentified financial backer came to Jack with the goal of producing a new line of comics conceived of and spearheaded by Jack, but financing fell through after Kirby had begun work on the initial concepts. Supposedly planned were comics featuring Thunderfoot, Satan’s Six, Captain Victory, Silver Star, Raam the Man Mountain, and another series that would’ve united Jack with a guy named “Lee”—

A

Bruce Lee, that is!

Shown here are some of the pencil pages for what would’ve been the first Bruce Lee issue. As on Satan’s Six, Jack drew roughly ten pages to set the tone of the strip—some with dialogue, some without. But work ended after that, and these stories languished in Kirby’s files for over a decade.

Soon after, Pacific Comics approached Jack to create a new comic for the fledgling Direct Market of comic book shops springing up across the country, and he dusted off Captain Victory and later Silver Star. To this day, Raam and Thunderfoot haven’t proceeded past the concept stage. But the early 1990s saw a resurgence in interest in Kirby’s work, and Satan’s Six was picked up by Topps Comics as part of their Kirbyverse line, incorporating the original 1970s Kirby art into the first issue.

Similarly, Jack’s unused Bruce Lee pages were folded into Genesis West’s Phantom Force series, with the first two issues published by Image Comics. The Image founders, being big fans of Jack, ended up inking the Bruce Lee pages, with the character’s name being changed from Bruce Lee to Gin Seng.

The art is very reminiscent of Jack’s earlier work on Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter for DC Comics, and stands as yet another example that Kirby could do excellent work in any genre. ★ 57

Nuts & Bolts

Jack Kirby: Illustrator

by Steven Brower

(this spread) Kirby illos from The World Around Us #30 (Feb. 1961), published by Gilberton World-Wide. ©2009 Gilberton World-Wide.

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equential art is its own entity, distinctly different from other forms of the visual arts. It is arguable the most difficult of all.

Rather than a single creator, often it requires the talents of many: writer, penciler, inker, colorist, and letterer working in consort towards a common end. The fact that it ever succeeds on any level, let alone so many, is nothing short of astounding.

Illustration, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.

As an art director for over twenty years I have commissioned hundreds of illustrations from myriad illustrators. The difference between illustrators and comic book artists is profound. While the repartee between illustrator and art director is collaborative—

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a give and take between editorial needs and selfexpression— ultimately it is the work of a single artist creating a single panel, akin to a fine art painting.

In addition the mission of an illustrator is very different from that of the sequential artist. It is their directive to convey a message allegorically or metaphorically. The essence of the article or book has to be boiled down to magazine spreads or a book jacket to grab the reader’s attention and encourage their entering or purchasing the written work. In various ways this is a more difficult task than that posed for the sequential artist, for it requires the ability to convey a message in single frames, whereas the comic artist has several panels and pages to tell his or her story. It is the role of the illustrator to intrigue, to titillate, to create curiosity that gets the reader involved. Unlike a comic book artist, the illustrator should never tell the complete story. There is no resolution needed; rather inference is what is required, to draw the reader in. It is the text of the story or book that tells the entire tale; it is the illustrator that entices the reader to get involved.

Still it pales in many ways in the face of sequential art, which encompasses art, storytelling, pacing, design, point of view and cinematic sequencing. Imagine my surprise to discover Jack Kirby, in my opinion the greatest comic book artist of them all, pulling duty not as a sequential artist, but rather as an illustrator. I was aware that he had done so in conjunction with Joe Simon in pulps in the early 1940s, but here he was twenty odd years later, applying his talents to a very different discipline, albeit within the comic book environ. Kirby’s skills in storytelling are beyond reproach. As one of the seminal founding fathers he established early on the art of storytelling through the use of action, emotion and dynamism, influencing generations to come. Indeed he set the standard for decades, a benchmark for others the follow.

Unlike others in his field, when things got tough following the crackdown on comics championed

by Dr. Fredric Wertham and congress in the early ’50s, Kirby did not change careers and enter into the advertising

world (such as his partner Simon did), or illustration (as did Captain America alumni Syd Shores), nor single panel gag art (such as Jack Cole of Plastic Man fame). Kirby remained a sequential artist throughout, whether in comic books or comic strips, right up until his employment in the animation industry.

So the question before me: how would he have fared as an illustrator? In the series The World Around Us, in the issue Undersea Adventures, published by Gilberton World-Wide publications, I had my chance to find out. Published in 1961, the same year as Fantastic Four #1, the success of the Marvel Universe still lay ahead, and Kirby was still a free agent. Indeed, within the same time period he had

worked on several of the other The World Around Us series, mostly single page and short sequential features, as well as their Classics Illustrated series.

Of course one could consider his hundreds of comic book covers over the decades as the work of an illustrator, especially in the cases where he was not the artist of note on the pages within. The purpose of this art, akin to a book or magazine cover, is to get a potential reader to purchase the book.

However, comic book covers rarely stray too far from their source material and are aided by selling copy to bring the reader in.

This example is very different, however. Oddly, having absolutely nothing to do with undersea adventures, within these pages there is a five-page text adaptation of a short story by Guy de Maupassant, The Duel. Set in the 19th century (the writer’s time period) it is a rather downbeat story of a chance meeting between a Viscount out with some friends, and a complete stranger. As the group stops off for some “ice(s)” before heading to the theatre, they are confronted by a man who stares lewdly at the two women in the party.

When the Viscount confronts the stranger, words are exchanged and so are cards. A duel is set for the following morning. The remainder of the story is largely the interior dialogue of the Viscount as his fear increases over the course of the evening. He settles on pistols, even though be might better survive a sword fight, because with a pistol there is “a chance of the opponent withdrawing.” Given the greater risk involved he faces his own mortality, begins drinking and descends into utter despair. Examining the pistol,

he decides on a more conclusive option.

Kirby illustrates this rather stark story in a likewise manner.

Using a bold illustration style, his art is inked in heavy blacks, similar to high contrast photography that was in vogue at the time, so that only the darkest areas appear. The black and white art is framed in rectangles of flat colors, cyan, magenta, orange and brown, which further evoke the no-nonsense, dark mood of the story.

For the most part Kirby’s storytelling here is pretty straightforward rather than metaphorical. We have portraits of the theatergoers during the confrontation, a close-up of the cards being exchanged, the Viscount writing out his Last Will and Testament. Still, others among the seven illustrations are less specific and more symbolic.

There is the Viscount viewed from the back wandering the city, looking weary and lost; the cinematic illustration of the Viscount dwarfed by the hand and cane of the Colonel entering the room; the distraught Viscount with the clock behind him with his time running out; and finally the Viscount contemplating his fate. This splash page is significant, for with very few details Kirby sums up the end of the story without giving it away: the pistol obscures the Viscount’s face; more importantly there is a gate on the window shown, connoting no escape, an invention that is wholly Kirby’s. It is in this art that we see a glimmer of what might had been, had Jack Kirby decided to enter the field of illustration, rather then the one he so doggedly stayed within. There is little doubt he would have succeeded had he chosen to do so, although I suspect he might have found the medium too static for his unbridled creativity. Why would he choose to illustrate the words of others when he had so many stories to tell? Still, it is interesting to ponder what might have been had he chosen this path instead. ★

Steven Brower is the former creative director for PRINT magazine and has been an art director for The New York Times and The Nation magazine. His award winning book, Woody Guthrie Artworks, was published by Rizzoli in 2005.

Satchmo: The Wonderful Life and Art of Louis Armstrong, which he wrote and designed, is due in March, 2009. His latest project is a book on the life and art of comic book artist Mort Meskin, due out from Fantagraphics.

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A Masterworks Mystery

Unearthed

by Wade AuCoin I need your help solving a mystery. On December 14, 2007, I bought a very special copy of Jack Kirby Masterworks. This copy has hand-written notes in red pen sprinkled throughout the book with very revealing information about Jack Kirby. But for the life of me, I cannot identify the writer of the notes. But I’m pretty sure that someone out there among the readers of the Jack Kirby Collector will be able to. I’ve reprinted a few of the most relevant pages to help you along.

I found the copy of the book in a great little comic shop in Montreal, Canada owned by Marc Parenteau. I was there with my comic-book collecting buddy, Ron Koomas. Both of us live in different parts of Canada, but we were

S Are there clues about Jack’s career here, or just some fan with bad handwriting? Let us know!

Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

in Montreal to celebrate an important chapter in Ron’s life, and what better way for us to celebrate than to seek out new comics stores! Marc specializes in comic-book oddities, and has many.

Sifting through his over-sized treasury books on the bottom shelf of one of his cases, I noticed something different, something that looked hidden and had not been seen in a number of years.

When I showed it to Marc, he looked puzzled, as if he had forgotten he even had it. I popped it open and discovered a treasure. I had never seen or heard of the Jack Kirby Masterworks, but immediately fell in love with. It looks almost like a regular issue of the current Jack Kirby Collector looks now, but I discovered that it was published in 1979 by Privateer Press.

My eyes were immediately drawn to the notes, but they were very hard to make out. As I thumbed through the pages, I fell upon majestic pencil-sketched pages of the Silver Surfer that I had never seen before. This was pretty exciting for me because I am a life-long fan of the Surfer and have tried to get every single appearance of the character that I can get my hands on.

The book was worn and not in the best of shape. As much as I wanted it, I wasn’t sure if I could justify the $20 price tag on it with everything else I was getting that day (you know how it is).

But I thought it would be fun to try to decipher the notes and discover who the mystery writer is. And it would be a nice addition to my Silver Surfer collection to boot! Besides, Marc told me that if I didn’t buy it, he would simply put it on eBay, which was a prospect that I did not relish. I plunk down my last few remaining dollars and plead with Ron to pay for my supper. I was pretty hungry since we had skipped lunch. Time flies when you’re going through comic boxes.

When I got home the next day, I started examining the notes in more detail, but I soon realized that I would need more help.

As much as I have grown to love Kirby’s artwork, I am by no means a Kirby expert. A couple of days later, I sent an e-mail to John Morrow, ye old editor of this very magazine, and he agreed to help me out. I sent him paper copies of the book, and a few days later he e-mailed me the following message: “Fascinating! There’s a mystery here, which I hope we can eventually solve. Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together: The writer: • Likely knew Roz Kirby • Likely knew (and maybe worked with/inked) Steranko • Probably inked Kirby’s pencils • Was alive after 1979, when the Portfolio was published • Probably worked at Marvel in the 1960s • Is likely fairly old, based on the scratchy handwriting

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copy of the Ultimate Silver Surfer novel.

In closing, I’d like to thank John Morrow for allowing me to publish this article and for letting me indulge in a bit of pure comic book joy.

I look forward to hearing from you. ★ Wade AuCoin lives in Moncton, New Brunswick and buys his comics at the Comic Hunter, another very cool comic store in Eastern Canada.

However, that could be any number of people, since some of these qualifications aren’t definite. I was able to rule out several people, since I’m familiar enough with their handwriting to know it’s not theirs. Here’s my short list of possibilities: • Larry Lieber • Dan Adkins • John Verpoorten (have to check to see what year he died) • Sol Brodsky (ditto) • Frank Giacoia (ditto) • Richard Kyle • Ron Goulart (is that a signature on page 2? Looks like it might be “Ron”...)

• D. Bruce Berry However, since some of my qualifications are just assumptions (and not definite), I could be off base. And it’s always possible it’s the writing of someone I’ve never even heard of, since I don’t know everyone that Roz knew. And it could just be an average Kirby fan, writing notes based on things he/she had heard from others, or read in my magazine or elsewhere.”

So is it someone with first-hand information who knew and worked with Kirby, or just someone adding information obtained from second-hand sources? The answer to this question would help in determining the accuracy and importance of the notes.

Just to add another twist to the mystery, on at least one page, there are two different types of red ink, meaning that there could have been two different note writers. Also, on two of the pages, there is the following abbreviation: AA. In my mind, the two most important quotes are that Jack had a significant hand in creating Spider-Man, and that he was responsible for 99% of the plots of most of the work that he did.

If it’s any help, Marc tells me that he doesn’t recall much about how he got the book, but that he thinks he purchased it at a New York comic convention about four years ago.

I’ve given you as many clues as I can about the identity of the mystery writer. I now leave it up to you to help me discover who it is. The easiest way for you to reach me is by e-mail at the following address: carwade@nb.sympatico.ca.

As a prize for the person who successfully identifies the mystery writer, I will provide a 61

Foundations

A Western Tale Art reconstruction and commentary by Chris Fama

956 was a lean year for the King. Jack’s output was extremely low, having returned to Prize and the once lucrative romance genre for the bulk of his work. Jack also found some work at Harvey with longtime collaborator Joe Simon.

This story from Western Tales #33 (July 1956) enjoys what appears to be Joe Simon’s talented hand at the inks.

As an aside, issue #33 is one of the hardest Kirby books to find.

Earlier issues featuring Boys’ Ranch reprints and “Davy Crockett” stories are relatively abundant and affordable. But for some reason unknown to me, this issue is downright scarce. A few years back, I stumbled onto a coverless copy, Simonized for this issue’s Foundations installment. It would be another two years before I found one with a cover.

Since then not a single copy has appeared on eBay, so enjoy this truly scarce material. ★

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Western Tales ©2009 Joe Simon.

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Crossunders

Kirby’s Invasion Into 2008’s Crises

by Jonathan Rikard Brown

f imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Jack Kirby received a plethora of compliments in 2008. While imitators of Kirby are nothing new, 2008 did hold some surprises and new twists on paying homage to the legend. It is impossible to deny the long lasting impact of Jack Kirby’s work on sequential art storytelling. It is also easy to see that Kirby’s contributions to the art form will be present for years, decades, if not for centuries to come. Last year, however, was something special. As we moved into summer, we saw that the two titans of the comic book industry, DC and Marvel, were rolling out their blockbuster mini-series events.

Both companies were drawing from their Kirby created work to shape the coming status quo for their lines’ continuity. We also saw attitudes shaped by this master pushing creators to new peaks. As local comic book connoisseurs debated the merits of DC’s Final Crisis versus Marvel’s Secret Invasion, it was easy to see the true winners were the fans of Jack Kirby’s great work.

Brian Michael Bendis had been gearing the Avengers line towards Secret Invasion for over three years, and all his work had brought focus back to villains created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

The Skrulls were back, and they were going to change everything at Marvel, again. The Skrulls first appeared in Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four #2. While they have popped up several times over the years, 2008 was Marvel’s Year of the Skrull. While the Secret Invasion eight issue mini-series was less of a tribute than other events that year, it drew more heavily from Kirby’s source material than any other Marvel event in recent history. The recent promotional comic entitled Secret Invasion Saga supports the point. This free item presented a short history of the Skrull characters to get newer readers up to date as they moved into the actual event.

The book not only recapped stories Kirby had a hand in, but was done in art style that is reminiscent of Kirby’s legendary pencil.

Secret Invasion and the Skrulls are the central focus of Marvel these days, but there are other great stories and events drawing inspiration from the wonderful imagination of Jack Kirby. Mark Millar, renowned comic book creator who authored Civil War and wrote the initial run of Ultimate X-Men, is working on what he calls The One Man Event. This title refers to the interconnected works that Millar is currently writing for Marvel Comics. One of those works is continuing the adventures of the Fantastic Four in the comic series created

by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The series has now passed its 550th issue, and as Mark Millar works on his run on the title, he expresses a desire to bring excitement back to the title in a way that is reminiscent of Kirby’s work.

When presented a question about his upcoming story and character development in the Fantastic Four, Millar responded by expressing a desire to return the male lead character, Reed Richards, back to the place Jack Kirby had him. Mark Millar stated, in an interview for Newsarama.com conducted by Matt Brady, “Reed is the rock of the first arc and I really wanted to use this story to establish just how cool he is. He’s called Mister Fantastic, for God’s sake, but can often be written off very wrongly as a nerd or a drip. Of course, he has nerd tendencies, but look at the Kirby and Buscema era in particular and the guy is a good looking action hero who faces off against Sub-Mariner, Galactus and anyone

I (this page) DC’s Final Crisis and Marvel’s Secret Invasion both play off major Kirby concepts. (next page) Jack was playing for keeps in his own epic “The Pact” from New Gods #7 (Feb. 1972).

Secret Invasion characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Final Crisis and New Gods characters TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

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else who pisses him off.” It is in these words that we see what made the Summer of 2008 so different from the others.

Last summer we were not being treated to a collection of creators trying to be Jack Kirby, like we have seen so many times in past failures. Now we were seeing creators, both writers and artists, trying to pick up the banner that Kirby held and move forward with his concepts. We saw Skrulls given new life and taken in a direction that is not necessarily Kirbyian, but reflects the courage and strength that Jack’s original pieces had. We saw the end of mishandled Fourth World characters and concepts.

This gave way to the new Fifth World where Kirby’s work would be honored, not watered down by failed attempts to capture what he once did. Even in the Fantastic Four we saw a bold new direction that kept Kirby’s masterpiece close to heart. In an interview for Newsarama.com, at Wizard World Chicago 2007, Mark Millar spoke about his and artist Bryan Hitch’s run on the Fantastic Four. Millar speaking about Lee and Kirby’s epic 100-plus issue, stated, “So our plan is to honor those 100 issues not by imitating the ‘Kirby dots’ or the drawing style or recycling characters we’ve seen brought back again and again. We’re going to honor them by doing what Stan and Jack did and that’s being as new and creative as possible.

Naturally, we’re going to see familiar touchstones of the FF universe, but we’re only doing it when we have something new to say about them. A brand new way of doing them.” This blockbuster season was not about imitation and walking the ground Jack Kirby already covered. Last summer was a revival of Kirbyian passion and creativity.

What made this truly remarkable was that this Kirby revival was not just limited to one titan of comic book publishing. DC Comics was also looking to explore its own Kirby characters in a more creative light. For the past year DC had been working on a weekly series of epic proportions, entitled Countdown to Final Crisis. A major focus of that piece had been characters and concepts that Jack Kirby introduced in his space opera, The Fourth World. In this series we saw Jimmy Olsen palling around with The New Gods as they faced oblivion, as they both moved in bold new directions. An eight-issue mini-series entitled The Death of the New Gods, written by Jim Starlin, had also been introduced to flesh out the peril in which Kirby’s characters are entangled. In an interview conducted by Newsarama.com’s Steve Eckstrom, Starlin touched on the need to move away from Kirby imitation into the

realm of Kirby innovation. He said, “Since Kirby’s initial run on the characters, others have presented them with mixed results. Looking back I’d say at least half of the past New Gods series have done more harm than good. So for me, Death of the New Gods is half honoring Jack Kirby, half mercy killing.” With Jim Starlin pulling the trigger on Jack Kirby’s The Fourth World, the question became, “Where will Kirby’s influence shine through?”

In recent in-house advertisements for DC’s publishing of the Jack Kirby’s The Fourth World Omnibuses, Grant Morrison declared his love of Kirby’s work. As Grant’s next big project approached, one could already tell Kirby’s work and innovation would play a vital role. The seven-issue event entitled Final Crisis is the culmination of Morrison’s work over the past few years. At the end of this event things were severely changed and the status quo of the DC Universe was something new and profoundly different. One of the biggest changes in Final Crisis was the advent of a concept known as “the Fifth World.” DC Comics Editor-inChief Dan Didio recently reflected on Kirby’s characters and the changes coming to DC. In an interview with Newsarama.com’s Matt Brady, Didio said this: “It’s funny for us—I think we’ve telegraphed so much that the New Gods are coming upon a rebirth, and the story that we’re telling with them now is a continuation of the story that was established when Kirby first conceived the concept. Talk about death— Kirby blew up worlds at the start of the series. The story started with “The Old Gods Died!” which made room for the New Gods—we’re picking up that thread and launching the DCU into the future.” Here we saw that while Kirby’s influence affected the bold reach for new creative heights, one also saw that the goal to imitate Kirby’s brilliance was fading from the major comic book publishers as well.

Old favorites getting new twists and brilliant revelations awaited comic book readers at their local shops last summer. Kirby fans saw some of their favorite characters forever changed by the crises. Was this a good thing? Only time will answer that question, but there is a ray of hope. In the summer of 2008 we did not see writers and artists fail at recapturing the exact excellence Kirby’s worked possessed. What we saw was something bright and new. We saw creators blaze trails in the way Kirby once did, with bold steps and inventive concepts that challenged conventional thinking in the comic book medium.

This year nothing will be same, and for Kirby fans, that change looks exciting. ★

Bibliography Brady, Matt. “Grant Morrison on Final Crisis.” Newsarama. 14 Feb. 2008. 28 Mar. 2008 <http://forum.newsarama.com/printthread.php/t=146753>.

Brady, Matt. “Jim Starlin: Ferryman of the New Gods.” Newsarama. 11 July 2007. 1 Apr. 2008 <http://forum.newsarama.com/printthread.php?t=120379>.

Brady, Matt. “Mark Millar: One Man Event, I.” Newsarama. 27 Mar. 2008. 28 Mar. 2008 <http://forum.newsarama.com/printthread.php/t=151599>.

Eger, Justin, and Brian K. Eason. “CBR News: T-Minus: “Countdown to Final Crisis” #12.” Comic Book Resources. 11 Feb. 2008. 28 Mar. 2008 <http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12940>.

Janson, Tim. “Secret Invasion Saga #1.” Mania. 6 Mar. 2008. 1 Apr. 2008 <http://www.mania.com/secret-invasion-saga-1_article_57633.html>.

Phillips, Dan. “Grant Morrison on DC’s Final Crisis.” IGN. 10 Mar. 2008. 28 Mar. 2008 <http://comics.ign.com/articles/858/8528221p3.html>.

“Skrull- Marvel Universe: the Definitive Online Source for Marvel Super Hero Bios.” Marvel. 28 Mar. 2008 <http://marvel.com/universe/Skrulls>.

“WW: Chicago- Millar & Hitch Talk Fantastic Four.” Newsarama. 28 Mar. 2008 <http://www.newsarama.com/Chicago_07/Marvel/Millar_Hitch.html>.

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Torch Bearers (next page) DC’s Death of the New Gods cover art by Jim Starlin. (below) Final page from Mister Miracle #18 (Feb. 1974), showing yet another final panel of characters walking (or in this case, running) off into the sunset.

Characters TM & ©2009 DC Comics.

Dan DiDio Interview

Interviewed by Douglas Toole an DiDio is a prominent figure in today’s comic-book business.

After working for years as a scriptwriter, story editor and vicepresident with the computer animation company Mainframe Entertainment and as a public relations manager and an executive director with Capital Cities/ABC, he joined DC Comics in January 2002 as Vice President–Editorial. Last year, he was promoted to the position of Vice-President–Executive Editor of the DC Universe imprint. In that position, he helps to develop new titles and to chart

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the future of DC’s heroes and villains—including some of Jack Kirby’s best-remembered creations. Mr. DiDio was interviewed by telephone on February 29, 2007, and copy-edited this transcription.

TJKC: Thanks for making time for this interview.

DiDIO: This is actually a fun one for me, because so much of what we have been working on has been building off of the material Jack Kirby did in his time with DC. And so many people have gotten excited by the fact that we have been reintroducing it and bringing it back and playing with it in this fashion.

TJKC: I’ve read that you have been a fan of comics for more than 30 years. What were some of the early comics that stood out for you?

DiDIO: In my early days of collecting, I was a big fan of the monster comics from both Marvel and DC. I remember reading everything from Where Monsters Dwell and Where Creatures Roam to House of Mystery and House of Secrets. I was also a big SpiderMan fan.

TJKC: What were some of the early Kirby books you remember reading?

DiDIO: The Kirby books are easy ones to remember, because when I was growing up, they looked so much bolder than the other books on the stands. I pretty much collected everything Kirby did for DC in the 1970s, although I started a little later than others did. The first one I remember picking up was an issue of Mister Miracle with Shilo Norman on the cover. It was probably issue #15, or around that time.

By that point, New Gods and Forever People had already ended. I was just getting a taste of the Fourth World from what was happening in Mister Miracle, but I enjoyed that issue so much that I started to look for the back issues of Mister Miracle, New Gods, Forever People and even Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. I also picked up Kamandi, The Demon and—a personal favorite of mine—the three issues of Weird Mystery Tales with Kirby stories in them. Those in particular were a lot of fun for me to read because it combined his storytelling style with the anthology format that I enjoyed in comics.

TJKC: Going from Mister Miracle #15 or 16 to the rest of the Fourth World books must have been an adjustment for you. By that point in the Mister Miracle series, most of the issues had stand-alone stories, and the earlier Fourth World books were much more interconnected.

DiDIO: They were more stand-alone. But you have to remember that in Mister Miracle #18—the final issue of the series, when Scott married Barda—Darkseid appears, a reference is made to the Pact [between Apokolips and New Genesis]

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and you found out there was a lot of history behind what was happening in that story. It made you want to read more. I sought out those back issues, but they were tough for me to find—perhaps because they were so special. On the other side of the coin—the Marvel side—I was picking up some of the reprint books, like Marvel’s Greatest Comics [which reprinted early Fantastic Four stories], which were reprinting some of the best Stan Lee/Jack Kirby stories. So I’m reading Mister Miracle at the same time that I’m picking up books showing Doctor Doom stealing the Silver Surfer’s cosmic powers. It was the best of both worlds at that moment for me.

TJKC: What was your impression of the Fourth World books? They weren’t like the other comics DC was publishing at that time.

DiDIO: That didn’t bother me at all, because I was just getting into the DC Universe. I was reading for the sake of reading, and I enjoyed the stories that were coming out then.

TJKC: Did you follow any of the Fourth World characters when other creators used them?

DiDIO: Absolutely! I picked up the Mister Miracle issues that Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers worked on, and stayed with the series when Steve Gerber and Michael Golden came on board. Those issues really stuck out, in my mind. I really enjoyed them. I also remember picking up some of the Return of the New Gods issues that Gerry Conway wrote. I enjoyed them, but the core material—the original series—always excited me the most.

Although I will say that I liked Gerber’s take on Mister Miracle a great deal.

TJKC: You are able to look at comics both as a fan, and as the executive editor of DC Comics. Do you believe the Fourth World works better as a standalone concept, or incorporated in the DC Universe?

DiDIO: As a fan, I think it works better as a standalone concept. As an executive with DC Comics, I have to believe it works better with everything else.

The Fourth World has such a rich history, and there is so much story going on, and there are so many untapped story directions and character interactions. I would be negligent in my job if I didn’t try to find a way to make Kirby’s creations work with the rest of the DC Universe. They add so much to it.

TJKC: In the last two years, readers have seen a lot of the Kirby characters appearing not just as shortterm guest stars, but as parts of major sub-plots or as leading characters. OMAC headlined one of the lead-in miniseries for Infinite Crisis. The Great Disaster was a big part of Countdown. Some Kamandi stories were reprinted in a Countdown Special. The New Gods appeared prominently in Countdown and in the Death of the New Gods miniseries. Was that an editorial decision, where creators were asked to use more Kirby characters, or have creators lately been pitching those ideas to the editors?

DiDIO: It has been a little bit of both. It’s interesting to me that a lot of the creators working in the business right now grew up on that material, and they naturally gravitate towards it. When I worked in animation, I couldn’t tell you how many times we spoke about books like Kamandi, because so

many of us enjoyed that stuff. There was a simplicity to the concept, but a richness to the story that made you want to come back for more and more. Putting on my executive editor hat for a moment, though, it is very hard to execute those sorts of stories in the same style, voice and fashion that Kirby did when he first did them. Most people get the sensibilities, but are unable to fully capture his style and tone. I think that is a shame, but it doesn’t prevent us from trying to continue those stories.

TJKC: You seem to attract a lot of really good creators to those stories.

More often than not lately, the Kirby-related books feature established creators with solid track records, not newer writers and artists.

DiDIO: That has been going on at DC since before my arrival. Mark Evanier and Paris Cullins did a New Gods book in the late 1980s. John Byrne and Walter Simonson stepped onto Fourth World books in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

So many talented people worked on those books over the years. You could tell that those books were not just the only job available for a writer or artist—people were seeking them out.

TJKC: There are a couple of current series that feature the New Gods—Death of the New Gods and Final Crisis. With those books specifically, did writers Jim Starlin and Grant Morrison come to you and say they wanted to use those characters, or were the books editorially driven?

DiDIO: Morrison came to us and wanted to use the New Gods. He probably has the most affinity of anyone for using the Kirby material. He is always talking about new and interesting ways to incorporate the New Gods into the DC mythology. In pitching Final Crisis, Morrison explained the story of the New Gods and what he wanted to do there.

Basically, he wanted to stay true to the characters’ concepts but to launch them in new and exciting directions. Because of that, we wanted to bring a close to the Kirby story in a way we felt was befitting to those characters. We approached Starlin to do Death of the New Gods because he does so well at telling stories of the size and scope that are reflective of the original Kirby material. It’s strange, but Starlin had never drawn the Kirby material to that extent before—with the exception of some great OMAC back-up stories in Warlord. We were really happy to have him come on board and tell the story he told on Death of the New Gods. I think he did a great job on the book.

TJKC: Do Kirby’s creations have a real future with DC? DiDIO: Absolutely. You can’t have stories and characters that rich, and then not use them. It’s just a matter of introducing them in ways that are a little more in-tune and reflective of the current DC Universe and then letting them grow naturally into

it. We are trying to make the DC Universe feel like it is all coming from the same place. That way, in a series like Final Crisis, you can have all the characters dealing with the same situation and the same turmoil. But in this case, the Kirby characters are at the forefront in leading the charge of the heroes and in creating the turmoil. Hopefully, you will come out of this feeling the Kirby characters are much more closely tied to the DC Universe.

TJKC: DC recently reprinted all of Kirby’s Fourth World material in hardbound Omnibus books.

Early Kamandi stories have been reprinted in hardback Archive editions and Kirby’s OMAC stories are being collected, as well. Does the company plan to reprint any other Kirby material?

DiDIO: It is being discussed. Personally, I would... prefer to see the Kamandi stories collected in Omnibuses instead of Archive editions. Kamandi was one of his stronger continuing stories. What else do we have? Sandman? His contributions to First Issue Special, like Atlas? Strangely enough, we will be bringing back Atlas. [laughs] James Robinson couldn’t wait to use him as a major foil for Superman in his upcoming run on the Superman book. The only thing missing is the Dingbats of Danger Street, but knowing Morrison, they may appear at some point in Final Crisis. [laughs] TJKC: Any final thoughts?

DiDIO: My hope is that we do justice to the Kirby properties. I want us to continue to expand upon the ideas he created, and to keep them available and fresh so that new readers can enjoy them as much as we did. ★

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Kirby, The CIA and the

Kirbionage

Reprinted from Comic Art Forum #2, 2002 Submitted by James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook

(throughout this article) Some of Kirby’s concept art for the Lord of Light film and theme park. Inks by Mike Royer.

All art ©2009 Barry Geller.

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n 1978, Jack Kirby realized that he was not going to be able to follow his dreams any further working for the two major comics companies and began to consider other uses for his talents. He made an arrangement to fulfill the remainder of his Marvel contract by doing storyboards and production drawings for the Fantastic Four cartoon produced by Saturday morning cartoon moguls Hanna-Barbera. This gave him inroads into the animation industry, where he would find employment for the next decade. Kirby had moved to California with the hope of expanding his horizons into film and as his comics career dissolved, he almost immediately got involved in a particularly ambitious movie project. In 1978 writer/producer Barry Ira Geller contacted Jack to collaborate on a film adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s Hugo Award-winning novel Lord of Light. The thirteen extraordinary drawings Jack completed were then inked by Mike Royer and made into a limited number of “Media Kits” by Geller for promotional purposes. The complex structures Jack designed were to have been realized as film sets and eventually function permanently as a theme park, but unfortunately after an initial burst of publicity, the project fell into a legal morass.

I

In 1979 during the Iranian hostage crisis, six American diplomats were successfully smuggled out of Tehran. At that time much of the credit went to the Canadian Government for their role in the mission to save the lives of the six Americans, who had survived by hiding in the Canadian Embassy. But 20 years later in an unusual event honoring their fiftieth anniversary, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to honor some of its unsung heroes and revealed that the escape had been part of a covert action executed by their operatives. As the startling details of this story emerged, it turned out that the whole plot hung on Jack’s artwork. The following is an interview with Barry Ira Geller, the man responsible for putting Jack’s work into the hands of CIA spies in this strange saga of real life intrigue, glamour, adventure and Hollywood mayhem.

Interview with Barry Ira Geller

by James Romberger JAMES ROMBERGER: The Lord of Light drawings were a great use of Jack’s talents; it’s a shame the project wasn’t consummated. I have to admit being intrigued by a letter in the Kirby Collector about a Bravo show that referred to your project in a strange

Lord of Light context, that of a front for an anti-terrorist task force bent on freeing hostages in a foreign land. The conspiratorial scenarios multiply as one freely conjectures, not the least concept that the CIA are Kirby fans.

BARRY IRA GELLER: I agree with your perception regarding the different kind of work I employed Jack for—it was the perfect evolution of his total mastery.

Buildings were going to be based upon them—that would have put the Earth on its ears had we been able to do it. Actually, the half hour program was made by WGBH Boston where the CIA’s master spy admitted publicly to ripping off the Lord of Light script and Jack’s drawings to set up a phony production company front in Iran to (successfully) get out six almost-prisoners. This was kept secret all these years. I have the video and will be editing it, and will put it up on my site. It is quite astounding. It turns out my makeup man, John Chambers (Oscar winner for Planet of the Apes) was also the CIA’s chief makeup consultant and gave the script to the spy for whom he worked, Mendez, who was the real Mission: Impossible dude... hahahaha. I was terrified when first seeing the show, but then found “enlightenment”—as I began to acknowledge the wonders of a million coincidences to bring everything up to that point, from me conceiving the project and then getting Jack to do the work, getting Chambers involved, etc... that’s six people alive instead of maybe dead. I am certain Jack would have loved the “Touch of God” relationships here. I miss him terribly to not be able to share the joke.

JAMES: Jack never knew of the CIA plan?

BARRY: No, Jack never knew since the situation was only “declassified” (crime admitted to) this past year. Had Jack still smoked cigars, we would have shared some big expensive sticks on the humor of it all either way.

JAMES: On History Channel last night they had another show about the CIA operative Mendez, on This Week in History. They didn’t show Jack’s drawings but it was obvious they were referring to that same operation to free people holed up in an embassy. They said the film was to be called Argo and that in 1980 they had taken the ads out in Hollywood trade papers about the movie, causing Hollywood to go all abuzz.

BARRY: Fascinating. I remember reading about the Argo project. The reason they didn’t show Jack’s drawings (most likely) was that they didn’t want to pay me any release money, or give credit to Jack or myself.

JAMES: How did you end up hearing about the CIA plot?

BARRY: The Associate Producer of the Bravo show contacted me and I heard about the show afterwards. Like I said, John Chambers had told me he’d done “some” work for the CIA in 1979 in a discussion we had about making Marlon Brando look 20 years younger using some special makeup he’d invented, which he said was used by the CIA. Hadn’t a clue (or anyone else) that his work was so prominently placed. [laughter] The important thing to know about John’s work was that it wasn’t simply makeup; like Bill Tuttles’s work for the Wizard of Oz, it was makeup which became part of the living identity of the character. This is what won him the Oscar, both for Hollywood and, apparently, the government. There are things in the works to find out more about the CIA thing. You will hear about it soon.

JAMES: Could you elaborate for me what Jack meant when he said, “I think this film and the way we are conceiving it could contribute to saving the world”?

BARRY: The concept of the god’s “psychic abilities” which were turned into, over 1000 years, full blown aspects and attributes, were of awesome nature and I think what Jack appreciated most aside from the obviousness of these being characters perfect for him to develop, was the fact that they were still “real people” (i.e. same kind of emotional problems, etc.). The “save the world” thing I believe was attributed to showing the world that we all have the same psychic capabilities—and through the toy line I was developing (with magnetic levitation) and the buildings of Science Fiction Land, the purpose was to showcase the future in a whole new way— by employing many scientists to develop new technologies in various areas, then showcasing the results. Same thing which got Ray Bradbury and Paolo Soleri working with me, too.

JAMES: The prints resemble architectural drawings; were they meant to be literally and faithfully translated into reality?

BARRY: Absolutely. You can’t imagine the heart attacks I was giving to a few

engineers. Actually, I knew there would be “real life” engineering problems, but it was my inner joke to always watch their horror and with Jack I always told him to “make it like he would imagine it and not worry about engineering.” He appreciated this. So Jack and I had a ball thrashing out themes. As he knew, I wanted a “Master” design to then give to all others to do their thing with. We laughed a lot when our architectural consultant screamed holy hell about how impossible it was to make the cantilevered floating gardens of “The Chambers of Brahma, Exterior.”

JAMES: If the backing had all gone through, what aspects of the realization would Jack have been involved in? In terms of a film, would he have been creating additional production design and/or continuity?

BARRY: My offer/deal with Jack was he was “Design General.” Also gave him points in the Gross Profits. This means everyone worked under him. All Science Fiction Land. All film. We designed each drawing to be used both as a set description and theme park description. As I said previously, I was always amazed how he managed to capture the correct POV each time—well, all except one, which I gave him back and it is in The Art of Jack Kirby [by Ray Wyman Jr. and Catherine Hohlfield, 1992, Blue Rose Press–Ed.] as the Angel.

JAMES: Do the scale of the little people in the drawings accurately reflect the intended scale? It would’ve been like seeing Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, for real, amped to the Nth degree!

BARRY: As far as I can determine, absolutely correct. The scale was close to how I envisioned it on most drawings and talked with architects about. The best example of scale was “The Chambers of Brahma Exterior.” Wow! Yes. I have to admit walking around the city and imagining the giant buildings right there. And there was more: I had gotten Buckminster Fuller along for the ride, and 3M interested in funding a floating dome over the whole thing. 1/2 mile high and 3/4 mile long.

Bucky had tried to convince NYC in 1964 [site of the World’s Fair that year- Ed.] that it would float, being warmer inside than out. I believed him.

JAMES: I seem to recall reference somewhere to color versions of the drawings; is this how the Media Kit was presented, as color prints? At any rate those are highly coveted items, I’m sure.

BARRY: Yes, there was a media “kit” which consisted of colored versions of different rides, the full schemata of the Park and film, geological and an Environmental Impact report which I wrote. The color versions of Jack’s drawings came from a “coloring contest” my production company gave. I still have one. Mendez flashes another (where did he get that? hmmmm) on the WGBH movie.

JAMES: I can understand how seeing your ideas used in such a way by the CIA could be frightening, especially given recent events, and perhaps consider yourself a potential target for retaliation by extremists.

BARRY: Frightening, yes but I wouldn’t go that far to say terrorists are after me. [laughter] At least I don’t think any may be, anymore than they would be after Mendez.

JAMES: It does sound like something Jack might’ve approved. I recall reading his comments about his friend Leon Klinghoffer who was murdered by terrorists during the famous Achille Lauro incident.

BARRY: Jack would have loved the whole thing, for sure. Our relationship continued for 17 years or so, and I was always at family gatherings, sedars, etc., and at both funerals. He’d adopted me as a son and writing this wells me up as I miss him quite dearly.

JAMES: I’m very interested in what the greats Bradbury, Fuller, and Soleri thought of Jack’s work for you—any comments you can recall?

BARRY: Ray Bradbury of course was a big fan, as was Jack of him. Ray’s role was that of consultant to different types of theme rides I’d planned. Bucky Fuller didn’t meet us as yet, only expressed his interest on consulting to 3M in building the dome. Science Fiction Land stopped too suddenly, just as work was in progress to get discussions underway. Soleri was the god of architecture at the time, the true visionary. He saw himself as one, too. He, too, was on board to design different theme rides and I wanted to build an arcology with his help. Visiting him, though, I remember feeling the tragic air as he was aware he was living a dream which wouldn’t occur in his lifetime, which I guess afforded him a degree of arrogance. I did succeed in gaining his trust of my project, although I knew it meant ultimately imparting to him he was one chief in a group of chiefs. But he was a driven man with great vision. Hundreds of student architects from around the world would come to work with him.

JAMES: Who else were you tapping for this project?

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BARRY: A number of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, including the inventors of holography, who’d left MIT and now had their own research company. (next page) The CIA’s ad for the fake “Argo” project, which ran in Variety, the Hollywood trade magazine. ©2009 respective owner.

JAMES: In “Science Fiction Land” the perspective is just amazing; all the elements are drawn with incredible precision curving back into the landscape... what are the flaming tubes to the lower right?

BARRY: These tubes housed the underground Excursion of the Planets, my version of Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean.” The artwork and descriptions only exist in the original Promo Kit/Investment Pack.

JAMES: The “Planetary Control Room” seems to anticipate virtual body-machine links, where the grandiose movements of the operators (on flying platforms) of the Raga Wheel are their means of working it, or serving it. There seems to be a supervisor off to the right, in a slightly bigger platform. The planet is “cubed”, but then Jack often drew these monolithic shapes. Was this to be a giant room you would walk into and interact with these machines, or witness laser shows or pyrotechnics?

BARRY: Absolutely. In fact, the majority of this awesome piece was based upon my screenplay depiction. The idea of the Hand holding the world was mine and Jack’s; the Raga Wheel was much smaller in the script, but specially created for the Park for people to actually go on. Keep in mind, this was 1978. But I envisioned the walls made up of virtual image holograms, and people would be able to see all parts of our planet Earth (satellite transmission) and there would be all these cyborgs zipping around communicating to people. Football stadium sized is how Jack and I envisioned it.

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JAMES: Re: “Brahma’s Supremacy”: this drawing reminds me a bit of Jack’s view of Earth from his Bible drawings; it’s basically the same structure as the “Chambers of Brahma” but the lotus in the center of the garden seems to have sprouted a hologram which roils with phantasmagorical shapes... I have worked with lenticular 3-D animation but am unsure of the state of hologram technology, then or now. In a film this could be realized with the CGI available now; what was your intent at the time?

BARRY: First of all, I already had a good background in the physics of phase-reconstruction holography (coherent/incoherent bipolar optics) as well as lenticular lens arrays for 3D as used in parallax panorama-grams (“winkies” as in 3D postcards, Rolling Stones albums, etc). Much of the park was designed to take advantage of the holographic technology which I was aware of that had not been picked up by the bigger companies since its “discovery” in 1963 by Upatnicks and Leiks with their laser version of x-ray graphics, based upon Gabor’s theories of 1947. So I was involved with some of the leading holographers of the time, Cross, and a few others, to work with me on the project. The park was going to have extensive holography, virtual as well as real image. I also had a leading American physicist/engineer who already designed a holographic camera and screen for certain SPFX of the film, which was going to have a virtual image come across the heads of the audience. A special theatre was being designed for our demo. The Russians had done a lot more than the Americans but I was going to outdo them, too. Didn’t know this, I bet. [laughter] I still have the plans (I had as much fun working with scientists as I did with Jack). But to finalize your question, the interior and exterior’s pix were broadstroked

concepts by myself, based upon Zelazny’s general descriptions and my further development. I’d shown the script’s sections to Jack; basically I wanted all the gods to elevator up to the top of the Temple, get in seats which telescoped out to the center (like spokes) where all sat in front of Brahma, who revolved. It got worse if Brahma was pissed off at something, then he had ten heads sprout (as per ancient mythology) and this was quite intimidating. However, the roils and shapes—all these details, they are all JK. All the drawings are from my concepts and requests from Jack and discussions with him afterwards. The one called “Brahma’s Supremacy” was Jack’s first attempt at the “Chambers of Brahma, Exterior.” I went back to him and got him to be more specific with the cantilevered gardens, etc., so that people could recognize aspects of the film and book as well. Hey, I never told Jack to “put a window here, a door there.” That would be like telling a General how to give commands to his troops. I would say and discuss what I wanted to communicate, what I wanted to see and feel and explore visually, as a viewer myself. We would tell stories to each other. I always left the meeting when I just “knew” Jack had it. Hard to explain, but there was a lot of telepathy going on. “Brahma’s Supremacy” (which I renamed) I consider to be Jack taking off with concepts of what Brahma, as the High God, was mentally and spiritually projecting into the world. I loved it. It sold for twice as much as any of the other original art [the drawings were eventually sold through Sotheby’s—Ed].

JAMES: The 3-D pieces I worked on were Parallax Parallelograms. By the way, have you heard of Phillip DeMontibello? Now deceased, but he was my friend’s mentor, and invented a fantastic “fly’s-eye” 3-D effect.

BARRY: No, but I remember seeing or reading something about it. Holography is really a wave-front reconstruction of a recording of the interference between an “in-phase” (coherent) light source and an out-of-phase (incoherent) light source, usually reflecting off the subject. It records all the space in the area and can be adjusted to “project” a hologram, and originally called “real image,” if I remember correctly, by Gabor. With laser projection, holograms took on the name of Virtual Image holograms. The building of “Brahma’s Supremacy” was one of my two favorite ideas, with 100 ft. virtual image projections planned. What can I say? I wanted to dazzle the world. Kinda like that effect in Back to the Future Part 2, with Jaws 2,654 coming out to bite the kid. This is what Jack originally thought I wanted in the first version of the drawing. Seeing the awesomeness of it from his vision, I knew we needed a more “nuts and bolts” recognizable building. So came the second version.

JAMES: You said you brought Gary Gygax over to meet with Jack and discuss potential relationships?

BARRY: Gary Gygax was the literal Father of interactive fantasy gaming, no matter what Steve Jackson says. With the invention of Dungeons and Dragons it started the whole genre. Gary was a fan of Jack’s, of course, so I had the historic idea of bringing the two together (in 1983) to see what would happen. My 12-year-old son, who later became a D&D game-master, stole the show by holding up the meeting by getting Jack to sign all his Eternals (which I still have). We spent the afternoon discussing different stories, interests, ideas, getting-to-know-you stuff.

The men liked each other; unfortunately, nothing professional came of it.

JAMES: Do you see the property still being developed for film (many of the concepts more easily done with technology available now than in 1980)?

BARRY: Yes. After six months of negotiations, Lord of Light came in 2nd place for the Sci-Fi Channel’s next “Dune” project last January (Zelazny’s “Amber” series won. An accountant’s decision, I regret to say).

JAMES: I read of Image’s past interest; what part would Jack’s work have played?

BARRY: On Jim Lee’s office walls is the original two-panel artwork for “Planetary Control Room”—I am sure had they not been going through watching their bottom line fall apart, Jack’s style would have been kept, at least in part.

JAMES: What books did you give Jack for reference?

BARRY: The Art of India by Silvaramamurti (Abrams), The Art of Indian Asia by Zimmer. The first was the major one we used. I gifted Jack and John Chambers with copies which cost $100 at the time. I shudder to remember I got them from the same book-store which was selling Golden Age Captain Americas for $100 but I didn’t buy them. I later came across one of those books in 1994 for $4000... and I am sure it is double that now. Oh well.

JAMES: You said Jack told you why he completely believed the Eternals was a true story...

BARRY: He was enthralled about the Peruvian plains which we had several discussions about being a landing field—it was this perception which he had

dramatized in the Eternals. You will notice the Mayan influence of the first two drawings he did for me, still fresh from finishing the Eternals work (“Terminal of the Gods” was the first drawing). The idea of the returning Gods was consistent with his beliefs of a well populated universe of advanced alien civilizations. It is possible he’d read or heard about Zachariah Sitchin, who’d just started publishing, but I do not know. More like the Von Däniken stories. Kirby Anecdote on UFOs: We had a discussion once about the space probe which sent out a time-capsule... I believe this was in 1978-79. Jack wasn’t very happy about the whole deal, not at all. Why specifically, I asked? He said, “Because it gives away our location. Now they know where we are.”

Eyewash: About Argo

By James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook As engaging and helpful as Barry Geller was, after doing the interview with him there still seemed to be a lot of unanswered questions and discrepancies, so we decided to investigate the chain of events around the CIA plan involving Kirby’s art.

The tangled web of intrigue surrounding The Lord of Light project made it difficult to get an accurate timeline of the events as they happened, since some of the events were deliberately obscured as they were happening. It is sometimes unclear how much information was known to how many people.

What is known is that Barry Ira Geller acquired the rights to Roger Zelazny’s Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel Lord of Light in 1977-78. Geller wrote a treatment and contacted Jack Kirby in 1978 to do the drawings for the movie sets.

The drawings Kirby did mix Hindu and Aztec motifs with the artist’s trademark techno-cosmic machines and energy pyrotechnics in complex architectural renderings. After gestating for approximately a year, the project was finally publicized in November of 1979 when Variety and the Hollywood Reporter printed articles about the project. It was reported that entities in Las Vegas and banks in Canada and New York were involved in raising what seems to range anywhere (depending on the source) from $50-450 million for the movie and for getting between 4001,000 acres of land in Colorado for the movie sets, which would be permanent and function as a theme park, “Science Fiction Land.” In 1980 Prevue reported that a scandal about the real estate deal involving the Denver, Colorado Planning Commission and questions about Jerry Schafer, a Lord of Light co-producer and director of the cult movies Fists of Steel and Like it Is, were being resolved, and that the project was ongoing. Barry Geller was cleared of any charges and in an interview at the time seems still optimistic if not a little wary about the project. Then, nothing more was said about it for 16 years until the Jack Kirby Collector interviewed Barry in 1996. The intro says that members of the Commission and Schafer were convicted, and Barry states, “I... had assigned responsibility to certain people... who forged my signature, and were bilking other people out of money, and I didn’t know about it. They were looking at doing all of these land deals around the land that I had optioned... it took about a year to straighten it out afterwards... the government stopped everything... it had the attention of many, many people, and it was just unfortunate.”

On November 4, 1979, 52 Americans were taken hostage at the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran, by Islamic fundamentalists. President Jimmy Carter froze $12 billion of Iranian assets in US banks, and started diplomatic negotiations for the hostages’ release. Other Americans were trapped behind lines, some in the Canadian Embassy. Trying to resolve the situation and preserve the lives of the hostages, Carter initiated many covert operations to get remaining American citizens, members of our press and other agents out of Iran. One of these scenarios came to light when in 1997, as part of the CIA’s 50th anniversary, they held a ceremony to honor secret agent and “artist/validator” Antonio Mendez (in his own words “someone who could make a radio out of a clamshell”), and revealed one of the successful missions in which he had participated: during the Iran crisis in 1979, six American diplomats had escaped to the Canadian embassy in Tehran.

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“Those from the consulate had escaped out the back door to the street when the militants had been breaking down the front door,” Mendez says. In order to “exfiltrate” them out of Iran, an elaborate plot was hatched by CIA master actor and document forger Mendez involving fake passports, hi-tech makeup, and a film production crew scouting for locations.

In December 1979 Mendez gathered his team and started “Studio Six Productions.” The plan was to disguise “the six” as Hollywood types and whisk them out of the country. Mendez’s crew included “Jerome Calloway” aka John Chambers, Oscar winning makeup artist for Planet of the Apes, husband/ wife team Andrea and Bob Sidell, known for The Osterman Weekend and ET, and Tom Burman, later known for the makeup in Cat People, Howard the Duck, and The X-Files (note: Burman has stated that Chambers created the Bigfoot suit from the famous Patterson film). According to Mendez, they had decided the plot of the imaginary film had to be extremely exotic, eastern-flavored sci-fi, “with something about the glory of Islam.” Ads were placed in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety for the production, to be called Argo. The title was derived from “a profane ‘knock-knock’ joke” told by Chambers.

Mendez says, “Jerome and his associates were masters at working the Hollywood system. They had begun applying ‘grease’ and calling in favors even

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before I arrived.”

In the ensuing media flurry they “let it be known that we had Canadian scouts in Tehran checking out film locations.” The “Studio Six” office was “swamped” by script submissions, including Barry’s proposal and one from Steven Spielberg. On the WGBH video Mendez states, “We stole the script from the Lord of Light, which was a defunct production.” About Barry’s script, Mendez commented to A.P., “If anyone sat down to read this, they’d have to believe that if we were crazy enough to write this script, we’d be crazy enough to be looking for locations in a place like Iran.”

On the CIA website Mendez wrote, “This script fit our purposes beautifully... the producers had also envisioned building a huge set that would later become a major theme park. They had hired a famous comic-strip artist to prepare concepts for the sets. This gave us some good “eyewash” to add to a production portfolio.” The script was credited to “Theresa Harris,” the name one of the diplomats was to have. In the following weeks, the team worked furiously on the disguises and documents; Chambers had advised Mendez that an advance party for a film production would comprise eight people. So on January 25th, 1980, Tony Mendez, in the identity of an Irish producer, and another agent arrived in Iran. The Canadian embassy staff was ready for action, including the Kirbyesque “Sledge,”

a “burly French-Canadian who earned the nickname during those final days because he was destroying classified communications equipment with a 12pound sledgehammer.” Then they met “the six” who were the head of the American embassy’s Consular section, along with two young couples who worked for him, and the agricultural attaché.

Mendez recounts, “I explained what had to be accomplished in the next two days. I instructed the six to go into the dining room to discuss among themselves whether they wanted to go to the airport in a group or as individuals. I waited about 15 minutes and then walked in. They were debating the questions and I distracted them by doing a bit of sleight-of-hand with two sugar cubes to illustrate how to set up a deception operation.” The six decided to go as a group, using the Studio Six cover. For two days the diplomats worked on their new identities, then Mendez received the word from Washington that all systems were go, “See you later, exfiltrator.”

The final night the six served a “sumptuous sevencourse dinner with fine wine, coffee and liqueurs. I told them about Jerome and the Argo knock-knock joke. Everyone took up the Argo cry.”

On January 27, in an anticlimactic finale, Mendez walked the diplomats through the airport.

“I was armed with the Argo portfolio and would overwhelm anyone standing in the way with Hollywood talk. The Iranian official at the check-

point could not have cared less.” The Canadian government received all the credit for the escape. Later, Mendez met with Carter and “showed the President some of the cover materials used in the operation and told him of the Argo/Argau story,” but because of indecision regarding the still- undercover agent being photographed with the President, the meeting was cut short.

Mendez received a promotion and the CIA’s Intelligence Star award, and John Chambers was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit. Chambers died in 2001.

For Mendez & Co., the art of Jack Kirby and Mike Royer greatly added to the credibility of their cover story, and their confidence in pulling it off, irregardless of whether the Iranians ever saw the drawings. Some questions remain, however. For instance, Barry’s project was announced in November 1979 and “Studio Six” began their use of Barry’s material in December 1979. Is it plausible that one month would have been enough time for the entire production to be considered a discarded, failed effort? In fact, both uses of the material were nearly concurrent. It is certain that Barry’s script and Jack’s drawings perfectly suited Mendez’s purposes. Was the ambitious Lord of Light project intentionally derailed by the CIA’s operation, or did Mendez simply take advantage of Barry’s misfortune?

Barry didn’t seem to know any more and Mendez didn’t reply to our inquiries. We were able to speak to outstanding Kirby inker and Disney artist Mike Royer, who had inked Kirby’s Lord of Light drawings. Royer said he had done the inking work at Jack’s request, and had not received a “Media Kit” or copies of the drawings. When told about the Argo scenario, Mike expressed disbelief in no uncertain terms. He told us he was a fan of The XFiles, so we mentioned that Tom Burman did the makeup for that show, and asked if he knew of him or his associates though Disney, but Mike said he hadn’t started there until 1981. After we sent him links to the CIA site, Mike wrote us, “I found the CIA article interesting. Might make a cool TV movie, but of course they’ll have to fill it with shootouts and bombs going off and two or three half-naked babes to make it appeal to US TV executives.”

Jack Kirby died in 1994, and his wife Roz passed on in 1998,

so we contacted Kirby biographer Ray Wyman Jr., who confirmed that Barry was a close Kirby family friend, and had the copyright to the Lord of Light drawings. In reference to the CIA plot, he said, “Actually, I recall that story. After Barry told it to Roz, she went to me and others for our opinions. I recall John Chambers’ name being bandied about—perhaps in association with this CIA fable. What bunk.” After he read the article on the CIA site he wrote again: “That’s how Roz recounted Barry’s version of the story... how would Barry have known that the CIA was involved since the thing wasn’t revealed until 1997? By the way, I recall seeing that Argo poster—probably at the Kirby home in one of the closets.” After seeing the WGBH video of Mendez with the color Kirby/Royer art, Ray wrote: “Love (Mendez’s) last line— ’What happens at the end of Lord of Light ? I don’t know, I didn’t have time to read it’— egad, I hope nobody does that to one of my scripts. Creepy, but really something else.”

Ray added, “Another colorful character that circulated around the Kirby household claimed that the CIA was inspired by one of Jack’s drawings, “Jacob and the Angel”. He said the CIA had built a prototype flying pack based upon Jack’s design. The problem was that only close friends and visitors ever saw the drawing. He also said the CIA had built a robot that could tell friend from foe just by looking at you. Jack thought it was a great story idea—even made up a name for it: “The EYE of the C-EYE-A.” Yup... I hear the howling all the way over here. Roz and Jack heard a bunch of them. They were always personable, generous and gracious—no matter how nutty a story you weaved.” ★

(below) Cover to the rare “Media Kit” for Barry’s Lord of Light project.

To find out more about the current status of Barry Geller’s Lord of Light project, log on to: www.lordoflight.com

Sources Associated Press. 1980 “Iran Rescue Details Revealed.” March 2, 1998.

Lawrence, Robert P. “Real CIA-Hollywood Connection: Too Wacky for Movie.”

Union-Tribune, December 4, 2001.

Mendez, Antonio J. “CIA Goes Hollywood: A Classic Case of Deception.”

On the CIA’s website: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v43i3a01p.htm Morrow, John. “Seeking the Lord of Light.” The Jack Kirby Collector #11, July 1996.

Steranko, Jim. “The Lord of Light.” Prevue/Mediascene #41, July-August, 1980.

Ruane, Michael E. “Seeing is Deceiving.” Washington Post, February 15, 2000.

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C o l l e c t o r

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!

Go online for an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE! 4-ISSUE SUBS: $50 US Postpaid by Media Mail ($60 First Class, $60 Canada, $84 Surface, $136 Airmail).

KIRBY COLLECTOR #23

KIRBY COLLECTOR #24

KIRBY COLLECTOR #25

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’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 superhero 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!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #26

KIRBY COLLECTOR #27

KIRBY COLLECTOR #28

KIRBY COLLECTOR #28

KIRBY COLLECTOR #30

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!

THE KIRBY INFLUENCE, PART TWO! Interviews with more pros influenced by Kirby, including Star Wars’ MARK HAMILL, JOHN KRICFALUSI, MOEBIUS, GARY GIANNI, GEOF DARROW, KARL KESEL, and MIKE ALLRED, interviews with Jack’s grandkids, a look at the career of inker VINCE COLLETTA, and more! KIRBY/MIKE ALLRED wraparound cover!

1970s MARVEL COMICS! Interviews with JACK and ROZ KIRBY, KEITH GIFFEN, and RICH BUCKLER, ‘70s MARVEL COVER GALLERY in pencil, a look inside the 1970s MARVEL BULLPEN, Mike Gartland’s A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE on Jack’s layout work, new KIRBY AS A GENRE column, tips for frugal Kirby Collectors, and more! KIRBY/KLAUS JANSON 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, & JOHNNY CARSON) & more! KIRBY/MARSHALL ROGERS and KIRBY/STEVE RUDE covers!

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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 #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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

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, X-Men, 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, a complete 1950s story, wraparound Thor cover inked by JERRY ORDWAY, and more!

Bombastic EVERYTHING GOES issue, with a wealth of great submissions that couldn’t be pigeonholed into a “theme” issue!

Includes a rare KIRBY interview, new interviews with JIM LEE and ADAM HUGHES, MARK EVANIER’s column, huge pencil art galleries, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS, and more!

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Collector

Comments

Send letters to: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR c/o TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 E-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com • See back issue excerpts at: www.twomorrows.com Frankly, I couldn’t come up with any really obscure references for this spot, so basically, just read the letters and enjoy!

(First, the best fan letter ever, from the one and only Stan Goldberg:

Second, the Kirby’s old home in California went up for sale a few months ago, but with the depressed real estate market in CA these days, it’s apparently been taken off the market, because the current owner can’t recoup the $1,200,000 they paid for it when they bought it a couple of years ago—it’d long since been out of the family’s hands when it sold for that princely sum. But if you’re curious or need a new place to live, log on to: http://www.trulia.com/property/139191752590-Sapra-St-Thousand-Oaks-CA-91362.

Now, on to letters:)

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Just a few bits about #51.

Page 1: I wonder why jack drew so many Cap sketches? There must be hundreds of them. Was it because he loved the character so much? (Though judging by the stories he produced with him, he loved other strips much more. FF, THOR, NEW GODS, KAMANDI—all were usually much more inspired!)

Was it because CA was his first major hit, therefore so dear to his heart?

Was it because he felt he was the most well known character he did without a co-creation credit to Stan?

Personally, I wish there were a ton more FF pics.

Particularly the Torch, which he hardly ever drew. He even left him out of the Black Book sketchbook!

Page 9: Thank you so much for printing all these!

Can’t get enough of these ’50s samples. Interesting how the ‘clean’ look that DC wanted permeated through all these strips.

Page 17: Trivia—the Thing pose is from FF #48, page 17, just before the Thing whumps the Silver Surfer for the first time ever.

Classic!

Shane Foley, AUSTRALIA Back in October of 1977, I contacted Roz Kirby to inquire about purchasing some original art. Being in college, my resources were limited, but I managed to scrape together fifty bucks and bought a CAPTAIN AMERICA

page. (A few years ago I sold it on eBay for $1200.) Yesterday I was digging through some old files and found the original art list Roz sent me in ’77 (below). Notice the prices (especially the covers) on page 3. The Kirby’s were practically giving the pages away!

Kudos to Jack for keeping his art prices low enough for even a broke college kid!

Gary Martin, Beaverton, OR I had mixed feelings about seeing my Kirby copyright piece in TJKC #51. I’m always happy to be a contributor to your fine publication. However, like Mark Evanier muses in his column from the self-same issue, I’m always aware of how a piece could have been improved. In fact I had started a revision some months ago, that unfortunately fell by the wayside as other front burner projects bulldozed their way through.

My biggest qualm with the article was the failure on my part to follow through on illuminating Jack’s claim that Spiderman was his creation. On the face of it, as I stated it in the article, it does seem incredulous and “asinine” outside of the context that surely motivated it. Jack was forever giving away ideas; such were the riches of his creative genius that he had more ideas than he did the time to develop them. Sometimes he generously offered them, as others have chronicled, to a writer here or there who needed a helping hand. Sometimes, as was the case with Captain Mar-Vell, they were pirated by those who were privy to his outloud musings while at Marvel offices. Then there were all those issues of CAPTAIN AMERICA, NICK FURY, and so on that Jack did layouts for. I have always suspected they were as much about getting Jack’s story ideas as they were giving new artists a guide on how to draw dynamic comics the Marvel way.

Of course, as the article points out, ideas alone do not set a precedent for ownership, although Jack’s case may well have been an exception. I say this, not philosophically, but based on a particular court case involving movie producer Julian Blaustein, who your readers might remember from his association with the sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth

Stood Still”. Blaustein had proposed a very specific film adaptation of “The Taming of the Shrew” with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Studio folks thought it was a great idea. The problem was, they did it without Blaustein. The courts determined in that case, that Blaustein’s experience and bonafides in the film industry demonstrated he did indeed have the acumen to follow through from his idea to a tangible copyrightable entity. They sided in his favor.

So though Jack’s statement about Spiderman, when isolated, seemed absurd, it was perfectly understandable in the context of his historical predicament of having others plunder and profit from his own prolific genius. No, the Amazing Spider-Man was not Jack’s Spiderman, but given his track record, is there any reason to doubt Jack was capable of producing one that was equally successful?

Adrian Day, Nashville, TN I’d like to make two corrections regarding Adrian Day’s article about Kirby and copyrights. Day is wrong when he states that C.C. Beck was among those who “insisted at one time or another that Spidey was their child.” I knew C.C. Beck. He never made that claim to me, and I’ve never seen him make that claim in print. In 1988 (possibly 1989), when we discussed the Silver Spider story he drew from Jack Oleck’s script, Beck denied even doing it. I told him that Greg Theakston had copies of the work, and I described the story that was done for Simon and Kirby. Beck told me that he didn’t remember doing this story or ever working on anything for Simon and Kirby (saying “I’ve never heard of the Silver Spider’). Of course, we know that he did draw that one story, but it had fallen completely out of Mr. Beck’s memory bank by the time I talked to him about it.

Day also said that Beck submitted the Silver Spider proposal to Harvey. This is incorrect. The story was commissioned by Simon and Kirby, and it was Joe Simon who submitted the proposal to Harvey, not Beck.

Otherwise, I enjoyed the JKC, as always.

Jim Amash, Greensboro, NC

A few days ago, a Spiderman drawing supposedly by Simon & Kirby was printed in a French comic-related magazine.

Do you know where this one comes from? It is credited "Copyright Joe Simon & Jack Kirby" in the magazine.

I wonder, because before Kirby's version of the character for Stan Lee in 1962, of which pages are still lost from what I know (and which wouldn't be credited to Simon anyway), Jack had no part in its creation in the fifties (as it was

by Simon and Jack Oleck).

The only thing for certain here is that the logo (by Simon) was pasted on this drawing (its story is covered in Joe Simon’s biography).

Jean Depelley, FRANCE It’s been a great year for Kirby publications in general and for your magazine particularly. With the DC reprints, however, I have been disappointed in one regard—they left out Jack’s text pieces that were published in the first issues of NEW GODS, FOREVER PEOPLE, and others.

I loved those pieces! When I was a boy, and reading them for the first time, I thought they offered a welcome change from Stan Lee’s slickness... it seemed like Jack was treating me with respect, with maturity. Now, I think they present Jack’s personality and views in a powerful way that complements his artwork and published comics. The written texts, to us fans, are surely just as compelling as Jack’s artwork.

Perhaps DC didn’t include the text pieces in these latest reprints because of that old (and false) charge—that Jack was a great artist, but not much of a writer.

In thinking about my fondness for those text pieces, I began to wonder if you could put together an issue of the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR highlighting his published writing. I know in the past you have done this to a degree, as when you published the Kirby-Sherman SILVER STAR text. I would love to see all his letter-page essays for DC and Pacific Comics collected into one volume (or one of your magazine issues). I’m not sure if DC would allow you to reprint them in their entirety... but it would be worth finding out.

I would also be interested to find out whether or not those pieces were written solely by Jack himself (as it seems) or with the minor assistance of Mark Evanier or Steve Sherman.

Along similar lines, I wonder if some of his personal letters would be of general interest? I thought his WWII letter to Roz, reprinted in facsimile on page 68 of Evanier’s KIRBY: KING OF COMICS, was fascinating—and also quite well-written, by the way! I think “Jack Kirby’s War Letters” would be of great interest to your readership.

Steve Replogle (Consider it done: #56 is “Jack Kirby: Writer!”)

I found the article “Just An Old Pencil?” in TJKC #51 a fairly interesting read. Do people collect pencils, I wondered. I have hundreds here.

Various lengths, numerous pencil leads, even colors, but they’re all mine for use in my own work. I do have one pencil here that belongs to someone else. Or at least, it used to. I’m just holding it for a friend.

Sadly, the wonderfully talented and immensely ambitious writer, penciller, inker and painter Gene Day left us more than 25 years now. He and I were pals and would talk on the phone, and visit, and on occasion I’d help him with deadlines. I’m glad that I had the foresight to request one of

Gene’s pencils and a brush from his family at the time of his passing. Just a stubby yellow-barreled pencil with all the writing worn off except for the number “1386”, and a common #2 series 197 Winsor Newton brush. Fairly ordinary tools, but Gene could make them sing.

They’ve been framed ever since, flanking a MASTER OF KUNG FU page Gene had given me.

They’ve hung on the wall of every studio I’ve occupied since 1982, serving as a constant source of inspiration when the going gets tough. And a reminder to do your best, even when things are going swimmingly.

Just an old pencil. And brush.

Ronn Sutton, Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA

black-and-white reprints, SMASH had HULK (first Kirby I remember was the Hulk pounding on that subterranean wall with Rick Jones sitting on guard outside, what was that, HULK #3?), and POW had SPIDER-MAN and SHIELD (alternating every 12 weeks with NICK FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS).

FANTASTIC had THOR, IRON MAN and X-MEN (this is the title Neil recalls) and TERRIFIC had “Sub-Mariner,” AVENGERS and “Dr Strange.”

The 5 titles only co-existed between Feb. 1966 and Sept. 1968 (SMASH went on till April 1969 with FANTASTIC FOUR and THOR reprints) but what a sweet era it was!

You’ve printed erroneous details about these publications before, so I hope you don’t mind me detailing these comics.

Now in the scheme of things it’s not very important, I agree, but here in the UK, these titles introduced a generation to Kirby, Lee and Ditko, and that IS important! Right?!

By the way, Neil misremembers the “one extraneous color” added, but none of the Power Comics used ANY added color! Neil is probably thinking of the British Marvel comics that started soon after, in October 1972 (Hey, Stan Lee did the voice-over for the TV commercial that launched them!) which did add one color— GREEN! Great for Hulk, but Spidey? FF? Yeuchh!!

Anyway, I’m only nitpicking cause I love what you do, Roy’s ALTER EGO included.

I’m a comic book pro here in England (Liverpool, in fact. Oh sure, you’ve heard of it!) drawing, inking and coloring 15 pages, 7 days a week, and I can’t tell you how much joy your publications bring me! Carry on!

Nigel Parkinson, UNITED KINGDOM

#52 Credits:

(And for those who remember our overview in TJKC #49 of Bill Everett’s hidden messages in his inks, we’ve got this little tidbit, sent along with art from THOR #175:)

If we’ve forgotten anyone, please let us know!

Look on the truck, between the Thug's thumb and forefinger. Oh, it's JAT. Glen Gold, San Francisco, CA I have been referred to you by Lew Stinger who informs me that you are interested in all things Jack Kirby. Lew and I post at a The Prisoner fan site where I had posted on the Kirby material relating to that TV series starring Patrick McGoohan.

Jack Kirby consulted on books for Enchante Publishing. The character that Jack helped develop was called Mrs. Murgatroyd, a magical character who helped children in difficult moments with the use of natural emotional magic or emotional intelligence. Jack was given consulting credit in the books.

The character of Mrs. Murgatroyd would have been comparable to a very benign version of Jack’s famous Agatha Harkness. Agatha was a protector of the child of Fantastic Four couple Reed and Sue Richards.

I hope that this is of interest and is useful.

John Ryerson First, well, what a great magazine, I don’t know how you produce such an engrossing magazine several times a year, but please don’t stop doing it!

BUT: Neil Gaiman’s comments were misheard by your transcriber. The Odhams Press (only one “d”) published 5 weekly “Power Comics”: WHAM, SMASH, POW, (not Power), FANTASTIC and TERRIFIC. The latter two were 90 percent Kirby/Lee but the other three were pretty much basic British humor anthologies with added adventure strips. WHAM had FANTASTIC FOUR

John Morrow, Editor/Designer Eric Nolen-Weathington, Proofreader Rand Hoppe, Webmaster Tom Ziuko, Colorist Chris Fama, Art Restoration SPECIAL THANKS TO ALL OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Jim Amash Wade AuCoin Francesco Bazzana Tom Brevoort Steven Brower Jonathan Rikard Brown Glen Brunswick Joe Casey William Cavitt Patrick Cummins Adrian Day Dan DiDio Shel Dorf Mark Evanier Chris Fama Shane Foley David Folkman Barry Forshaw Mike Gartland Barry Geller Paul Gulacy Heritage Auctions Rand Hoppe Sean Kleefeld Réchad Lahmar Marty Lasick Dan McDaid Adam McGovern Harry Mendryk James Romberger David Schwartz Tom Scioli Joe Simon Andy Suriano Mike Thibodeaux Douglas Toole Marguerite Van Cook and of course The Kirby Estate

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 art!

GOT A THEME IDEA? PLEASE WRITE US! #53: STAN & JACK! We celebrate the greatest team in the history of comics! #54: KIRBY GOES TO HOLLYWOOD! An issue all about Jack’s career in animation and film!

NEXT ISSUE: #53 spotlights THE MAGIC OF STAN & JACK! There’s a new interview with STAN LEE, a walking tour of New York showing where Lee & Kirby lived and worked, a re-evaluation of the “Lost” FF #108 story (including a missing page that just surfaced), “What If Jack Hadn’t Left Marvel In 1970?”, plus Mark Evanier’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, behind a color Kirby cover inked by GEORGE PÉREZ! The deadline for contributions is April 30, and look for issue #53 in July!

#55: ROUGH STUFF! Inspired by the TwoMorrows mag of the same name, we’ll focus on never-before-published pencil pages, sketches, layouts, roughs, and unused inked pages from throughout Jack’s career! #56: JACK KIRBY: WRITER! A look at the good, bad, and ugly of the oft-maligned writing skills of the King. Here’s your chance to weigh in!

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Submit artwork as: 1) Color or B&W photocopies.

2) 300ppi TIFF or JPEG scans Submit articles as: 1) E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com 2) ASCII or RTF text files.

3) Typed or laser printed pages.

Please include background information whenever possible.

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Parting Shot

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The Jim Bowie introduction page for Western Tales #33 (July 1956). Kirby work doesn’t get much more obscure than this!

TM & ©2009 Harvey Publications. Art restoration by Chris Fama.

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.

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, VOLUMES 1-7, EDITED BY JOHN MORROW REPRINTING THE FIRST 30 ISSUES OF THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, PLUS NEW MATERIAL

JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST: GOLD EDITION VOLUME 1

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 4

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 JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #10-12—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 JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #13-15—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 JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #16-19—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, a Foreword by colorist TOM ZIUKO, and a KIRBY/STEVE RUDE cover!

(240-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905009 Diamond Order Code: DEC032834

(160-page trade paperback) $17.95 ISBN: 9781893905016 Diamond Order Code: MAR042974

(176-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905023 Diamond Order Code: APR043058

(240-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905320 Diamond Order Code: MAY043052

(128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490052 Now Shipping!

NEW FOR 2009

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #20-22—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, a Foreword by DAVID HAMILTON, plus a KIRBY/DAVE STEVENS cover!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #23-26—Jack’s “Greatest Battles,” “Gods,” and his Golden Age work with JOE SIMON! Features rare interviews with Kirby himself, plus new ones with comics pros DENNY O’NEIL, JIM SHOOTER, JOHN SEVERIN, and WALTER SIMONSON! PLUS: see a complete ten-page UNPUBLISHED KIRBY STORY! Jack’s ORIGINAL PENCILS to FANTASTIC FOUR #49 (the first appearance of the Silver Surfer)! Kirby’s original concept art for the Fourth World characters! An analysis comparing Kirby’s margin notes to Stan Lee’s dialogue! Plus a NEW special section with over 30 pieces of Kirby art never before published, and a Foreword by MIKE GARTLAND!

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905573 Diamond Order Code: FEB063353

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490038 Now Shipping!

VOLUME 7 (NEW FOR 2009!)

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #27-30, with looks at Jack’s 1970s and ‘80s work, plus a two-part focus on how widespread Kirby’s influence is! Features rare interviews with KIRBY himself, plus Watchmen’s ALAN MOORE and DAVE GIBBONS, NEIL GAIMAN, Bone’s JEFF SMITH, MARK HAMILL, and others! See page after page of rare Kirby art, including a NEW SPECIAL SECTION with over 30 PIECES OF KIRBY ART NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED, and more!

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 for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, making it his final, great comics series. Image Comics recently collected the printed comics as a full-color hardcover, but now the entire six-issue run is collected here, reproduced from his powerful, uninked PENCIL ART, showing Kirby’s work in its undiluted, raw form!

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!

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 US ISBN: 9781605490120 Now Shipping!

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905559 Diamond Order Code: JAN063367

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

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! 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!

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) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN042759

The most thorough listing of JACK “KING” KIRBY’s work ever published! Building on the 1998 “Silver Edition”, this NEWLY UPDATED GOLD EDITION compiles an additional decade’s worth of corrections and additions by top historians, in a new Trade Paperback format with premium paper for archival durability. It lists in exacting detail EVERY PUBLISHED COMIC featuring Kirby’s work, including dates, story titles, page counts, and inkers. It even CROSS-REFERENCES REPRINTS, and includes an extensive bibliography listing BOOKS, PERIODICALS, PORTFOLIOS, FANZINES, POSTERS, and other obscure pieces with Kirby's art, plus a detailed list of Jack's UNPUBLISHED WORK as well. BONUS: Now includes a complete listing of the over 5000-page archive of Kirby’s personal pencil art photocopies, plus dozens of examples of rare and unseen Kirby art!

17" x 23" JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR POSTER Only a few left of our TJKC retailer’s poster! $10 US

(60-page tabloid with COLOR) $20 Diamond Order Code: OCT043208

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

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