Jack Kirby Collector #57

Atlas TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR FIFTY-SEVEN

In The Days Of the Giants--He Was The Migh tiest!

IN THE US

$1095

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES Each book contains over 30 PIECES OF KIRBY ART NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED!

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 4

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #10-12, and a tour of Jack’s home!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #13-15, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #16-19, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #20-22, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #23-26, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #27-30, plus new art!

(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

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905573 Diamond Order Code: FEB063353

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490038 Diamond Order Code: JUN084280

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490120 Diamond Order Code: DEC084286

NEW!

NEW!

Stan Lee & Jack Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

Celebrate the 50th ANNIVERSARY OF FANTASTIC FOUR #1 with this special squarebound edition (#58) of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, about two pop-culture visionaries who created the Fantastic Four, and a decade in comics that was more tumultuous and awe-inspiring than any before or since. Calling on his years of research, plus new interviews conducted just for this book (with STAN LEE, FLO STEINBERG, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, and others), regular Jack Kirby Collector contributor MARK ALEXANDER traces both Lee and Kirby's history at Marvel Comics, and the remarkable series of events and career choices that led them to converge in 1961 to conceive the Fantastic Four. It also documents the evolution of the FF throughout the 1960s, with previously unknown details about Lee and Kirby's working relationship, and their eventual parting of ways in 1970. With a wealth of historical information and amazing Kirby artwork, STAN LEE & JACK KIRBY: THE WONDER YEARS beautifully examines the first decade of the FF, and the events that put into motion the 1960s era that came to be known as the Marvel Age of Comics!

(128-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 (Subscribers: counts as two issues toward your Jack Kirby Collector subscription) ISBN: 9781605490380

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was too far ahead of its time for Hollywood, so artist JACK KIRBY adapted it as a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, making it his final, great comics series.

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!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

Compiles the “extra” new material from COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES 1-7, in one huge Digital Edition! Includes a fan’s private tour of the Kirbys’ remarkable home, profusely illustrated with photos, and more than 200 pieces of Kirby art not published outside of those volumes. If you already own the individual issues and skipped the collections, or missed them in print form, now you can get caught up!

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905559 Diamond Order Code: JAN063367

SUPERHEROES IN MY PANTS!

MARK EVANIER’S old and new essays on JULIUS SCHWARTZ, bad convention panels, CURT SWAN, cheap comic fans, unfinanced entrepreneurs, stupid mistakes in comics, PAT BOYETTE, and other aspects of the Art Form, profusely illustrated by award-winning MAD cartoonist and GROO collaborator SERGIO ARAGONÉS, including new covers!

(200-page trade paperback) $12.95 ISBN: 9781893905351 Diamond Order Code: FEB088013

(120-page Digital Edition) $4.95

JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST GOLD EDITION

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!

(128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 ISBN: 9781605490052 Diamond Order Code: MAR084008

Also available: WALLACE WOOD CHECKLIST

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

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

(52-page comic book) $5.95 • (Digital Edition) $2.95

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

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!

(60-page tabloid with COLOR) $20 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT043208

TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

Contents

THE NEW

Legendary Kirby!

OPenInG SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 (the legend continues) BankaBle aRT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 (Kirby’s earliest use of legends?)

ISSUE #57, SUMMER 2011

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JaCk F.a.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 (Mark Evanier, 1972) InneRvIew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 (Jack’s first Comic-Con panel, from 1970) GalleRY 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 (Thor & Co. in sketch form) CInemaTIOn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 (a review of the new Thor film) kIRBYTeCH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 (old tech vs. new) mYTHCOnCePTIOnS . . . . . . . . . . .24 (let’s build the hammer of the gods) kIRBY OBSCURa . . . . . . . . . . . . .28 (Barry Forshaw’s conjuring up more Black Magic by Kirby) DevIlISHneSS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30 (a big red dinosaur’s in the Garden of Eden) UneaRTHeD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 ( Satan’s Six layouts, and the scoop on that series by Tony Isabella) kIRBY aS a GenRe . . . . . . . . . . . .34 (Adam McGovern looks at some Kirb-“e”-inspired work) GalleRY 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 (graphic, graphite folklore) CenTeRFOlD: “JeRICHO” . . . . . .40 (a new twist on the Old Testament) J-F-kIRBY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50 (how did the Kennedy assassination affect Jack—and when?)

FOUnDaTIOnS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 (a man and his god dog) InCIDenTal ICOnOGRaPHY . . . . .59 (Prester John both old and new) InFlUenCeeS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 (Jon B. Cooke continues his look at Kirby’s 1970s work, as he interviews Kobra’s Martin Pasko) GODSTOPPeRS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 (answer the Eternal question) mYTHCOnCePTIOnS . . . . . . . . . . .70 (Jerry Boyd on World War god) JaCk kIRBY mUSeUm PaGe . . . .78 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) COlleCTOR COmmenTS . . . . . . .79 PaRTInG SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 (a new legend for Cap) Front cover inks: D. BRUCe BeRRY (unpublished Atlas #1 cover) Back cover painting: GeORGIO COmOlO Front cover colors: TOm ZIUkO The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 18, No. 57, Summer 2011. Published quarterly (made it this time!) by and ©2011 TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Single issues: $14 postpaid ($18 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $50 US, $65 Canada, $72 elsewhere. Editorial package ©2011 TwoMorrows Publishing, a division of TwoMorrows Inc. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is ©2011 Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is ©2011 the respective authors. First printing. PRINTED IN CANADA. ISSN 1932-6912

(above) From the mid-1970s sketchbook Kirby drew for his wife Roz, here’s Atlas, a Kirby concept that never got fully realized beyond his one appearance in First Issue Special #1 (April 1975). Atlas TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

COPYRIGHTS: Aquaman, Atlas, Atom, Batman, Beautiful Dreamer, Big Bear, Bug, Darkseid, Demon, Desaad, Dr. Fate, Fastbak, Flash, Forever People, Green Lantern, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, Kobra, Lightray, Man—Bat, Mark Moonrider, Morgaine LeFey, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, OMAC, Orion, Serifan, Superman, Vykin TM & ©2011 DC Comics • Balder, Captain America, Devil Dinosaur, Don Blake, Dr. Doom, Eternals, Galactus, Human Torch, Ikaris, Karnilla, Loki, Mercury, Mr. Fantastic, Odin, Pluto, Prester John, Red Skull, The Monster, Thing, Thor, Warriors Three, Watcher, Wyatt Wingfoot TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Heimdall (from GODS Portfolio), Jericho, Ramses, Satan’s Six TM & ©2011 Jack Kirby Estate • Black Magic, Fighting American TM & ©2011 Joe Simon and Jack Kirby Estate • Conan TM & ©2011 Robert E. Howard Estate • “Last Days of Pompeii” TM & ©2011 Classics Illustrated • Roxie’s Raiders, Thundarr TM & ©2011 Ruby-Spears Productions.

Opening Shot (bottom right) DC will return OMAC to something more akin to the original Jack Kirby concept in this fall’s OMAC #1, written by co-publisher Dan DiDio and co-written and illustrated by Keith Giffen and Scott Koblish. (right) Captain America: The First Avenger debuts in movie theaters shortly after this issue goes on sale.

Atlas, OMAC TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

Captain America TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc. Film still ©2011 MVLFFLLC.

by John Morrow, editor of TJKC

Legend Continues The

ased on the slate of movies being made from Jack’s source material from nearly 50 years ago, his work is turning out to be as timeless as we Kirby fans always knew it was. And this issue’s theme of “Legendary Kirby” gives me a chance to present examples of how Jack put his own spin on classic folklore, to immortalize it in the comics realm, and nowadays into pop culture as well. His work stands the test of time, and continues to be an inspiration and influence on the great creators of today, both inside and out of comics.

So rather than spending time yakking about what we already know, let’s get right to it, shall we? Here’s some examples of his legendary characters, and how they’ve been reused and reworked. Although Jack’s no longer with us, his work is here to stay. ★

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(below) Steve Leialoha lovingly inked this unused Atlas piece, which we ran in pencil as the cover of TJKC #4, way back in 1995. Was it really an unused cover for Atlas #1 as we always assumed? The image doesn’t really “feel” cover-like, which leads us to ask: since this scene perfectly follows the action in the last panel of First Issue Special #1, could this be the splash, or even cover, for issue #2?

Join the NEW Jack Kirby discussion group, run by the Jack Kirby Museum. Go to: http://groups.google.com/ group/jackkirby New & improved! More closely moderated, and strictly focused on Kirby, kirby, Kirby!

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Bankable Art The Romance of Money was a 1937 giveaway used by banks of the era. The interior was black-&-white, with blue added for the cover only.

Another printing was done with red ink on the cover in 1942. It’s signed “H. T. Elmo”; Horace T. Elmo was the owner of Lincoln News where Kirby drew this 24-page, 5" x 6.5" booklet.

The Kirby of Legend

by Stew Silver and Jerry Boyd sequential art storyteller doesn’t need a number of studio executives, a director, costume or set designers, musicians, or even a cast to present his or her ‘films.’ If the creator has a mind to, recreating ‘legends of the past’ can be as easy as sitting down before brushes, pens, pencils, and art board and letting the imagination and composition mix into words and pictures.

The legendary Jack Kirby drew one of his earliest stories (some will claim that this was his earliest published material— from 1937!) called The Romance of Money. The short effort dealt with legendry, oft-repeated tales (and some not familiar to most, of course) from different lands. Confucius, Croesus, Homer, George Washington, Julius Caesar, Washington Irving and the fictional Rip Van Winkle (who slept for twenty years, decades before Steve Rogers) were mentioned. For a young draftsman (the King would be 20 years old in ’37) who’d one day become a legend himself in his chosen field, this was an auspicious beginning—a moment in history where a legend-to-be began his career on the stuff of legends. ★

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Mark evanier

Jack F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

by Mark Evanier (below) Cover of the 1972 Comic-Con program book, published just as Jack’s new Demon and Kamandi series were debuting.

[Editor’s Note: As I type this, the 2011 Comic-Con International is just five weeks away, and the Dreaded Deadline Doom has descended upon TwoMorrows and Mark Evanier, as we both prepare for our biggest convention of the year, and deal with other deadlines that are looming.

So, instead of a new column this issue, we proudly re-present Mark’s contribution to the 1972 San Diego Comic-Con program book—then, in its third year, still being called “San Diego’s West Coast Comic Convention.” This was written just after Mark had left Kirby’s employ, transitioning from being Jack’s assistant alongside Steve Sherman, to venture out into a writing career that would include numerous hit TV shows, and of course, comics. The Fourth World had just been cancelled, Mister Miracle #10 and Demon #1 were on the stands, and Kamandi #1 was about to debut.] week from next Monday, Jack Kirby will be fifty-five years of age. A week from next Tuesday, the first issue of Kamandi—Last Boy on Earth will be on your newsstands.

A week from next Wednesday, it will probably be virtually impossible to locate a copy of that debut issue, all having been gleefully snatched away by Kirby enthusiasts. You’re probably wondering what connection, if any, these days have with one another. If so, you probably wandered into this comic convention in a misguided search for the La Mesa Tattoo Parlor. It’s three blocks north, past the Chevron station, fella; this is the SAN DIEGO WEST COAST COMIC CONVENTION—in capital letters, no less!

For the rest of you, the connection is obvious. But let’s run over it once, anyway, because—what the hell—this is the convention program book and Mike Towry didn’t have to ask me twice if I’d like to write some nice things about Jack Kirby. These are them…

At age fifty-five, Jack Kirby is younger than ever. At fifty-five, he has been in the comic book industry for well over half his life and longer than virtually any other writer, artist, letterer or editor, still actively producing.

True, there are a few who were in the field before Kirby and who still remain… but, in all that time, none of them have produced as many pages of power-packed filled-tooverflowing-with-action, dynamic illustration. And none have matched him for both quality and quantity of innovation and imagination.

When I first met Jack Kirby, name-dropper though I may be, the main thing that impressed me was that here was a man not content to rest on his laurels; not content to coast on his already-substantial reputation; not content to give his readers less than their forever spiralling money’s worth. Here was a man who was coming up with more new ideas and more new characters than whatever young blood the industry may have come up with, that year.

One day after this fifty-fifth birthday, Kamandi will be further proof of all of the preceding contentions. Admittedly, there are those who will be unwilling to accept it in lieu of Kirby’s exciting New Gods and Forever People series. It is difficult to describe the kind of enthusiasm that those books generated throughout the reading public. About all it can be compared to is the rise of Marvel during the early sixties and the ever-present knowledge that the finest was always still to come; that something exciting was happening here and you, the reader, were in on the ground floor. Jack Kirby is not stale—this, at a time when there are some comic book writers around from whom penicillin may be made. Figure that analogy out!

I could go on and on, writing about Jack Kirby. And I will.

When Jack Kirby came into the comic book field, everything was new. His biography

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(next page, top) Kirby’s table at the 1971 Disneyland convention at the Disneyland hotel. You just know this visit sparked his imagination to create Desaad’s “Happyland” theme park in Forever People!

Standing in the background is a young Mark Evanier, and seated is Steve Sherman. (We’ve forgotten who submitted this years ago; please contact us for your free issue!) (next page, bottom) Unused cover for Kamandi #11 (Nov. 1973). (right) John Pound’s illustration that accompanied this Evanier piece in the 1972 program book.

Kamandi, Demon TM & ©2011 DC Comics. John Pound illustration ©2011 John Pound.

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has been recounted many times and it reads like nothing so much as a list of high-quality comic book features. In no particular order and in no way complete: The Fantastic Four, Bullseye, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man, The Avengers, Sgt. Fury, Boy Commandos, Green Arrow, Young Love and its various successors, Iron Man, Manhunter, Fighting American, The Fly, Rawhide Kid, Newsboy Legion, Boys’ Ranch, Stuntman, Black Magic, X-Men, the Human Torch, Jimmy Olsen, Challengers of the Unknown, Silver Surfer, Thor, Foxhole, Ka-Zar, The Hulk, Sub-Mariner, Agent of SHIELD, Ant-Man and the ever-popular New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle and, now, The Demon.

But if everything was new in comics’ formative days, that creative surge could not hope to last forever. Very quickly, all the blatantly obvious ideas for superheroes were consumed. In the aforementioned itemized Kirby features list, it is interesting to be aware that a hefty percentage were Kirby creations or Kirby co-creations; and that another hefty percentage of those creations debuted in comics’ latter days—at a time when some companies and their creative personnel were using “revival” in lieu of—or as a synonym for—new material.

We have said little about Jack Kirby’s oft-noted drawing ability. Talk about your great oversights of 1972. As a rule, men who have a strong artistic sense do not go into comic books.

However, men who have a strong artistic sense and a strong storytelling motivation do. The difference? Glad you asked…

Over some thirty years, Jack Kirby has honed and refined what has come to be known, logically, as the Kirby style. It is no emulation of reality; no simulation of the Real World as rendered by pencil and pen. To the contrary, it is a powerful and exciting and flexible world unto itself, as conjured by Kirby for the sole purpose of telling engrossing and captivating stories. Though Kirby’s a captivating artist, I’d like to think that that is of secondary importance to his storytelling ability. Individually, his panels are breathtaking, but what they form, collectively, is of a greater importance—the concepts, the action, the plots, the ideas. There are many men in the comic book field who draw pretty pictures. But there are very few whose pretty pictures tell stories, anywhere as dynamically or directly. In recent years, Kirby has applied his ability, almost wholly to superhero fodder. But not long ago, as part of an unrealized project, he had cause to draw several romance stories. And I can attest that his style fit them, perfectly.

Call me a blatant name-dropper if you wish—l’ve been called a lot worse, I assure you—but I’m very proud to count Jack Kirby among my past employers… even if it is frustrating to work for one man who is almost always right. Chalk it up to a helluvalotta experience and an unerring eye for what people are looking for in the way of comic books. It is frustrating to work for a man who really needs no assistants, either, for that matter. I found that being a writer-assistant to Jack Kirby was like being the pinch-hitter for Hank Aaron. Or like being Mister Miracle’s locksmith, if you prefer a more comic-oriented comparison.

But it was a valuable experience if only to have known Kirby for so long.

This is the third San Diego con-clave and Jack Kirby’s been a guest-of-honor at three out of three. The people in San Diego know a good thing when they see it… the Padres, notwithstanding. Kirby at a San Diego convention is as much an integral part as a donation from ITT. I hope that, in the brief moments you attendees have to meet and query him, you will gain something valuable. That certainly happened at this year’s convention in New York, where Kirby was feted as Guest of Honor—somebody stole his wallet. Some folks just have no respect for the man who has been the most important of the comic book field’s creative influences. Oh, well… ★ (Mark Evanier welcomes your questions via his website, www.newsfromme.com. He will again be answering those queries in issue #59 of this magazine, since next issue is a standalone book with no columns.)

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Innerview (below) Jack Kirby penciled this Fighting American illo in 1977, and Joe Sinnott inked it 5 or 6 years ago. (next page, top) Kirby speaking to the crowd at the 1970 Comic-Con panel. (next page, bottom) Kirby’s cover for the 1970 Comic-Con program book.

“It’s Not in the Draft [The following panel was conducted at the first, full San Diego Golden State Comic-Con (which is today’s Comic-Con International: San Diego), held August 1-3, 1970 at the U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego.

Let’s put the following piece in perspective. Five months prior, in March 1970, it was made public that Jack Kirby was leaving Marvel Comics to work for DC Comics—an unprecedented move by the company’s star storyteller. A one-day mini-con was held on March 21 as a warm-up for the big summer event (that show’s program book is shown below), with Mike Royer as the only guest. At the time Jack is speaking here, comics with an October 1970 cover date were about to be released, which would include Kirby’s first issue of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen (#133) for DC, and the very Kirbyesque-looking Conan #1 drawn by Barry Smith for Marvel. John Romita’s first issue of Fantastic Four after Kirby was about to debut, and Neal Adams’ first issue on Thor had just appeared, with Joe Sinnott’s inking. So the comics world hadn’t quite yet gotten to sample Kirby’s Fourth World, Marvel was still reeling from Jack’s departure and trying to make things look as “Kirby” as they could, and fans were wondering where the company would go without him there.

The tapes for this panel were given to Mike Towry by Shel Dorf’s old friend Charlie Roberts, who had in turn received them from Shel’s brother, Michael Dorf. The panel was transcribed

by John Morrow, with the permission of Mike Towry. Mike has posted the link to the audio at http://www.comicconmemories.com/ 2010/01/08/recordings-of-the-1970-san-diego-comic-con-1-listen-tothem-here/ so you can have the chance to actually hear Jack speaking.]

Fighting American TM & ©2011 Joe Simon and Jack Kirby Estate.

Comic-Con program art ©2011 Jack Kirby Estate.

MARK HANERFELD: Right now I’m supposed to introduce Jack Kirby. I have no idea really how to do that, except to say he writes a hell of a story, and draws a hell of a story. You really ought to see the new stuff he’s doing, ’cause it’s terrific. Jack, c’mon up here and tell ’em more about it. [applause] JACK KIRBY: I really appreciate being here. I really deeply feel that it’s an honor being among you. It’s one of the reasons I draw people like I do, because I feel that I want to respond to you in some way, and when I do, I find that it’s a great deal of gratification to me. It’s not a question of telling a good story; well, of course it’s a question of telling a good story. The way I know it’s a good story is when you like it, or you hate it, or when you hate me for writing it or like me for writing it, [laughter] because I get some kind of a reaction, see? When I get a reaction from people, even if it’s bad, I feel that somebody’s out there, and I feel that people are living, and they’re analyzing things, and that their minds are in motion, and that life is going on. It’s the one time that I feel people; I don’t feel cars, see? I don’t feel buildings, I don’t feel tanks, I don’t feel guns, I have no respect for them, see? I have no respect for what they are; they’re just not alive. That’s why I ridicule cars, I ridicule guns. You’ll never see me draw a gun the way you’ll actually see a gun. Or you may not see me draw a car the way you’ll actually see a car. It’s my version of a car. I feel I can do anything I want with it. And I feel that’s what we all should do with it. Just try to see the world our way. Those things are made for us.

Cars are made for us, and all these immaterial non-living things are made for us to do what we want with. That’s what I do; I try to make my version of it. I try to give a

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smanship. It’s in the Man.” larger than life version to a very mundane object. I feel I’ve made life a little richer for myself. And maybe in a way I’ve done it for you. If I get a question from you, or get some response from you, I feel that I’ve established some kind of a link with you, the people that I’m doing my work for. Somehow I’ve done it; somehow I’ve been quicker living than dying, [laughter] and one of these days I’m just not going to change quick enough, and I won’t be quick enough, and somebody will replace me, and maybe keep telling the kinds of stories that get reactions from you. But right now I’m doing it, and I’m enjoying it, and certainly my best moments come when I can really see you in person, and talk to you face to face, and see that I’ve really understood you in some way. That’s why I say it’s a pleasure for me. It’s a real source of gratification.

So if I can do anything better, I’m gonna try it.

And if I can do anything weirder, I’m gonna try it. If I can do anything more startling, I’m gonna try it. Or maybe something very, very outrageous, I don’t know.

You might clobber me for it, and that’ll be great, because it’ll be a new experience for me, and I’ll enjoy every minute of it. I was once going out of a burlesque theater, and I had a heck of a good time being thrown out. [laughter] It was a great experience. I feel that’s what life is; it’s just a matter of reaction.

Reacting to experiences.

Sometimes they’re very bad, sometimes they’re traumatic, and sometimes they have a deep effect on us. But that’s okay; I think we should take it, and weather it, we weather it stoically, and take the best thing out of it, and maybe

become real human beings from it. I think if we’re able to react, we’re alive. If we don’t react to anything, I think we’re in some kind of limbo. Those are just my thoughts on things, and that’s the way I draw.

That’s what goes into my drawing. My God, I’ve analyzed myself for thirty years, [chuckles] and I think that’s what’s come out of it. So, that’s my thing. I’m giving you my version of the world as I see it, whatever random thoughts come into my head. You’re getting what I think about it. I don’t know what you think about it, but that’s what I think about it. I see it my own way. And I feel, in doing that, I become an individual.

If I played piano my own way, I’d be an individual, and I feel that I’d have some enriching quality.

And I like that. I like to have some enriching quality.

It makes me feel good. Some people don’t like to have enriching qualities. And they just go about doing whatever they’re doing, in business or something else, and they do well at it, and they accept it.

But I don’t accept that. In fact, I don’t accept anything. I fight anything that comes along. I like to see it my way, and I like to do it my way. It makes me feel great. Whatever reaction comes my way, I love to handle it. I’ve handled all kinds of reaction, and I’ve had a great time at it, really. There have been times when it just scared the living daylights out of me, but having lived through those times, [chuckles] I can look back at them almost fondly. So you say, “Well, I’ve handled that,” see? I’ve bloodied my axe

in some way, and I’ve handled it. So that’s not so bad. Y’know, I don’t know how it was resolved, but it was resolved in some way. I came away from it, the other guy came away from it in some way, but looking back on it, I had a great time, really. Even getting tossed by that bouncer, it was a great experience, because this guy looked like any character that Warner Brothers would dream up, y’know? The guy next to me was making a lot of noise, and being a loser, I was the one who got thrown out. But that was a great experience, although at the time, I couldn’t understand it in its context, I feel that now I do. I really had a good time.

So, what I do is, take whatever I feel about all these things, and put it in my drawing, and maybe entertain you in some way. You have to tell me; I can’t. I haven’t got that much of an ego. You have to tell me. And of course, in a way, you do, because the books do well enough, [chuckles] and that’s good enough. I get letters. I go along that way; I live that way. That’s my—well, I suppose you call it a lifestyle. And I’ve never gotten out of the groove. So I’m content with it, and it just about sums me up.

If there’s anything you’d like to ask me, possibly about the field itself, about the direction of comics—I can only give you my version of it, and you’re welcome to it. So help yourselves.

AUDIENCE: Why did you quit the Fantastic Four?

KIRBY: Why’d I quit it? I can’t tell you. [laughter]

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AUDIENCE: There was a similar situation about 25 years ago. You quit Marvel, and a good selling magazine called Captain America, and you went over to DC. I liked your stuff better over there, but why’d you quit Marvel?

KIRBY: The situation demanded it. That’s the only thing I can tell you. The details would bore you. But I can tell you that the situation demanded it. I do what I have to do. I can’t vacillate. I’m not an indecisive man. I do what I have to do, and, y’know, I did it at that time.

AUDIENCE: Do you think it works in cycles? Like, you’ll feel freer at one company, and you’ll go over to that one…

KIRBY: No. No, it doesn’t work that way. You’re no more free with one company than you are with another. You just have to do it. Somehow, there’s something happening at the company where you are that makes you feel… that’s all you can do for it.

And that’s not enough, so I go somewhere else.

AUDIENCE: By “freer,” I mean at one company you’re just doing this one magazine, where at DC you’re doing several…

KIRBY: No, no. I had the latitude of doing more than one magazine at Marvel, or at any other place.

I just felt that the situation demanded my leaving, so I left.

SHEL DORF: What would your advice be to a young 8

cartoonist trying to break into the field these days?

KIRBY: Well, comics in particular is a very limited field. I suppose a lot of fields are that way today. But I feel it depends on you yourself. If you’re an aggressive individual, and you want to make this your field—and there is no school. You make your school.

I say that you borrow arms and legs and heads and necks and posteriors from anybody you can. In comics, which is a peculiar field, every man—every artist—is the other artist’s teacher. There’s absolutely no school for it. People can teach you the mechanics of it, which is good. I can see a good reason for that.

But drawing a good figure does not make you a good artist. I can name you ten men, right off the bat, who draw better than I do. But I don’t think their work gets as much response as mine. I can’t think of a better man to draw Dick Tracy than Chester Gould, who’s certainly no match for Leonardo da Vinci. [laughter] But Chester Gould told the story of Dick Tracy, the way it should’ve been told. No other guy could’ve done it. So it’s not in the draftsmanship; it’s in the man. Like I say, a tool is dead. A brush is a dead object. It’s in the man. And if you want to do it, you do it. If you think a man draws the type of hands you want to draw, steal ’em; take those hands! [scattered applause, laughter] The only thing I can say is, Caniff was my teacher, Alex Raymond was my teacher. Every guy who drew comic strips was my teacher. Whatever he had stimulated me in some way. And I think that’s all you need; you need

that stimulation, to make you an individual. And the draftsmanship? Hang it! If you can draw decently, learn to control what you can. Learn to control what you have. Learn to refine what you have.

Damn perfection! You don’t have to be perfect! You’re never going to do a Sistine Chapel, unless somebody ties you to a ceiling. [laughter] So damn perfection! All a man has in this field is pressure, and I think the pressure supplies a stimulation. You have your own stresses; that will supply your own stimulation. If you want to do it, you’ll do it. And you’ll do it any way you can.

I remember I thought I was going to do it the proper way, and go to a big art school, and I went to Pratt Institute, and the next day I was out! My old man lost his job, and I was selling newspapers. [chuckles] You can’t call the shots on these things.

There’s no script in life, you know. Except for today; there are art schools on every corner, and the opportunities have improved greatly on becoming an artist. Any man who wants to become an artist today has the opportunity of finding it almost anywhere, because it’s the age of mass selling. It wasn’t that way when I was younger. It was tougher, and I had to do it on my own. I used the dismemberment method. I took a hand from Caniff, and a head and spine from Raymond, because I liked his flexibilities—he could bend his figures. His figures moved, they had life; that’s what I wanted. So I took from Raymond, unashamedly. I never really kept it, because I took what he had, and I blended it with

what I had. And I had something, just like you have something. I don’t know what it is, but if you can snatch something from the next guy, who’s had the experience, take it! Because that’s all you’re lacking. If you lack the experience, take it from a guy who has it. Because if you can’t go to a place where they teach it to you properly, take it on your own, and help it fortify what you have.

Something’s going to come out of it; something with your imprint, something with your fingerprints. I mean, Gershwin’s songs are fingerprints, Alex Raymond’s drawings were fingerprints. And they’re indelible, and they’re immortal, because they were him. I don’t know what you’ve got, but it’s the same damn thing. It’s an immortal thing. Whatever you put your stamp on is going to be you, for all time. And not only that, people are going to recognize it. They’re gonna say, “You did that.” And if it’s good, they’ll say, “You’re good.” And if it’s bad, they’ll say, “Boy, you need a little more instruction.” [laughter] But it’s gonna be you, and that’s the magic of it. I believe that whatever a man touches, that’s the magic of being a man. If a man touches a gun, or a man touches a pen, he gives magic to that object. That object becomes an extension of himself. That object does something that it can’t do itself. That’s the magic of being a man, and I feel that’s what I’ve done in my own way. And nothing more than that; just a matter of being stimulated, and maybe settling some inner battle that I’ve had inside myself. And I’ve just let it go at that.

KIRBY: Well, technically it doesn’t differ, because I work from my house, I’ve got a studio in the house, and I send the stuff in.

That’s the way it was at Marvel. I would live in some suburb, and maybe once in a while, twice a month, I’d go into the city, see all the people, and get the heck scared out of me, and run home.

Maybe that’s the way it is here. I like it. There’s been so much tumult in my life, that the experience of being isolated is very fresh to me. And I suppose I’ll get bored with it sooner or later, because I’m living on top of the last of the teenage condors, and we’re beginning to bug each other. [chuckles] AUDIENCE: What character’s your favorite, and which one do you identify with?

KIRBY: Well, I identify with the Thing, if you must know. [laughter, sustained applause] Despite his looks, I think he’s a very heartwarming character. And I try to portray him that way.

I don’t identify with characters. I feel that I identify with using the characters. The characters themselves are a challenge. I explained to some people in the back that characters are like the weapons. I mean, they’re useless, unless you use them in a very

(previous page) Kirby’s writeup from the 1970 Comic-Con program book, by the late Shel Dorf. (below) An uninked ballet in pencil, from the splash page of Captain America #104 (Aug. 1968).

Captain America TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

AUDIENCE: How does the process work when you’re about to start a new strip with Gardner Fox or Stan Lee or somebody. Do they give you the outline, and tell you how to do that in each panel, or…?

KIRBY: Well, in the case of Marvel, most of the plots, I handle myself. It’s easy enough to do it after 30 years.

I would discuss it with Stan, I would tell him what I was going to put in it, and it was either approved, or I would change it, you know, to maybe further the plot. In my case, it was done that way. I’ve always done my own stories. I’ve never done anything else.

AUDIENCE: How did you and Lee first get together?

KIRBY: I applied for a job. [laughter] AUDIENCE: You’re probably most famous as the best of the action artists. Do you enjoy putting in more frames of action, just for the sake of having a good fight scene, or do you like it only when it’s instrumental in the plot?

KIRBY: I like it when it serves the story. For instance, if it serves the story, I’ll have a sort of choreographed action. I’ll choreograph the thing out like a ballet. In other words, if Captain America hits a man and he falls to the floor, and some guy is coming up behind Cap, he’ll already know what he’s going to do with this guy. It all becomes one big dance; it becomes a ballet, and it’s acted out on the paper. Of course, the limited amount of space is frustrating. It’s not what it could be. I think that’s what comes out of my drawing. It’s just not what it could be. I think comics is a powerful, basic medium, and it hasn’t had its full application yet. Maybe I’ll never give it that application, but I feel frustrated in that respect, that the power of comics actually hasn’t been utilized. And it can be utilized in a very sometimes awesome way.

AUDIENCE: Aside from yourself, who do you think is the greatest living comic artist? [laughter] KIRBY: I’m not gonna answer that. The only thing I’ll say is, find a guy with an ego and he can answer that.

AUDIENCE: How would you say working at DC is different than working at Marvel?

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he’s mean as heck, and on top of that, he’s got an eye that destructs everything in sight. And you can’t be more burdened than that. And of course, there have always been people like that, and I thought that he represents them. So I had to do The Hunchback of Notre Dame all over again, because I felt there was a very dramatic question. “Why did you make me like a gargoyle? Why was I picked out to look like a gargoyle? I think like everybody else. I have the same feelings. But I’m alienated. I’m separated. I look like a gargoyle.” And of course, he underwent the same torment in the story. And I told that story, but in our way, in a way that could maybe get across to people like us. And I say “us” because I’m certainly, in no respect, any different than anybody else.

Y’know, I just like to tell a good story. Kill me. [laughter] And that’s about it.

AUDIENCE: Do you feel that Romita and Neal Adams, who have taken over the mags you left, have handled them in the same tradition?

effective way. That’s what I try to do; I try to tell a good story. Sometimes I feel that the classics are great, and I can’t tell a classic story—like I told somebody before, I can’t say “thee” and “thou” to you. It’d be ridiculous, because I can’t say it in the first place, and I’m not affectatious enough in the second place. So I’ve got to tell this story in my way. For instance, I mentioned the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

We all love that story, but we’ve seen it, over and over and over again, that poor little hunchback jumping from steeple to steeple—everybody kicking him around, until he asks in the end, “Why did you make me like a gargoyle?” And of course there’s no answer.

And so I like that story. There’s tragedy in it, and there’s drama in it. But I can’t tell it that way any more. I try to tell it another way, and see if you react to that. I call the hunchback a “Quasi-Motivational Destruct Organ,” and it’s my way of saying “Quasimodo.” And he isn’t a hunchback anymore; he’s an ugly little computer, and he hasn’t got any legs, and he’s beefing about the whole world. And

AUDIENCE: Did you invent some of the new supervillains and characters for Fantastic Four?

KIRBY: Yes. SHEL DORF: Do you read science-fiction?

KIRBY: All my life. I was 13 years old, and I was going to school, and it was raining, and this thing came floating down the gutter. I can only say that’s how it happened. It was a kind of a Hugo Gernsback quarterly of some kind, it was all wet, and I sat down on the curb to read it. [Kirby laughs] I swear, that’s how it happened. And I just never got over it.

I mean, it was so incredible to me, I just never entertained these kind of concepts. And I got my lumps for it, because they wouldn’t tolerate it around my way. Around my way, the Hunchback of Notre Dame would’ve gotten his lumps too. It was one of those deals.

KIRBY: Well, I think they should. I think they should put everything they have into it. Maybe more; I think they should try to kill me if they can. I feel they should try. I think it’s the professional thing to do. It’s just my philosophy. I don’t know if they’re going to do it or not, but I feel they should try. And I think that’ll make bigger people out of them. It’s the old story of, y’know, eating the other guy.

Cannibalism, I always felt, was the highest form of religion in some way. I think it’s the highest tribute you can pay to a man. So I wanted them to eat me.

AUDIENCE: In the Marvel line in the 1960s, what part exactly did you play in creating the line? Besides art; I mean also plot and characterization of all the magazines you worked on in the early issues when they were just developing. What part did you play besides art?

KIRBY: Quite a substantial part. That’s all I’m gonna say. [laughter] AUDIENCE: What was your inspiration for the Silver Surfer?

KIRBY: Gee, I don’t know. The Silver Surfer came out of a feeling; that’s the only thing I can say. When I drew Galactus, I just don’t know why, but I suddenly figured out that Galactus was God, and I found that I’d made a villain out of God, and I couldn’t make a villain out of him. And I couldn’t treat him as a villain, so I had to back away from him. I backed away from Galactus, and I felt he was so awesome, and in some way he was God, and who would accompany God, but some kind of fallen angel? And that’s who the Silver Surfer was. And at the end of the story, Galactus condemned him to Earth, and he couldn’t go into space anymore. So the Silver Surfer played his role in that manner. And, y’know, I can’t say why; it just happened. And that was the Silver Surfer. I suppose you might call it—I don’t know, some kind of response to an inner feeling.

AUDIENCE: Have you read the Lee introduction to the Steranko History of Comics?

KIRBY: Yes. AUDIENCE: Would you say that Stan Lee added revolutionary ideas to comics?

KIRBY: I’d say that Stan Lee quoted me quite a good

10

deal. [laughter] Are there any other questions?

SHEL DORF: The reason I ask is, there seems to be a kind of division between the real science-fiction fans, and comic fans. And I can see no reason; one influences the other. Don’t you agree?

KIRBY: Yes, I feel that they’re very closely related. I feel that science-fiction has its own thinking level. I feel comics is a more basic response. I feel sciencefiction is a more sophisticated response. Sciencefiction is a sophisticated response to the incredible, or to the projected. You take a situation today and you can project it far into the future, and you can come up with something fantastic. But you’re thinking on a sophisticated level. In comics, you have to think on a more basic level. I have to show you a picture, and you have to know right away what I’m saying in that picture; what that picture is saying, and what it’s doing. And you can’t think about it, because you won’t tolerate it. You won’t tolerate trying to make out what I’m saying. So comics has to be quick, it has to be fun, and it’s got to tell you the story immediately, in that panel; and that’s why you buy comics, and that’s why you understand them.

AUDIENCE: How do you feel about the way Jim Steranko’s working, and has developed [inaudible, but apparently about his work on Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD].

KIRBY: That was Jim’s version of it. I had my version;

it was strictly an action version, and strictly a projection of the times that we live in. I tried to be five years ahead of James Bond, and I set that kind of thing for myself, and I think I was. I really lived it up in 1975.

AUDIENCE: What do you think is the best character you’ve ever created or drawn?

KIRBY: All of them. [laughter, applause] AUDIENCE: You say Steranko projected [inaudible]. Some of the stuff was hard to grasp…

KIRBY: Well, if you think it’s hard to grasp, like I say, you’re your own particular reader. I have my own analyzation of Jim Steranko.

It’s unfair, I think, to ask me anything about Jim Steranko’s merits, or any artist’s merits. The only thing I can say is, they’re all giving you their own version. Sincerely. What these stories are about. If they don’t come over effectively, something is lacking, and I can’t answer for them. I never have. Yes? AUDIENCE: Who do you like to ink your work the best?

AUDIENCE: I think in 1960, 1961, did you do Classics Illustrated, the story of the Civil War? KIRBY: Yes. I think I did Anthony and Cleopatra at the time, with a cast of thousands, [laughter] which nobody accepted.

AUDIENCE: Mr. Kirby, being an amateur artist, the artist himself is about the most active critic of his own work. Are you extremely critical of your own work?

KIRBY: Yes, because if I cheat you, I cheat myself. And I’ve cheated myself pretty often sometimes, and never realized it. So I’ve done pages over, and I’ve done two, three pages over sometimes, and I felt I had to do it, and I did it. I know every trick in the trade. I can tell you that right now. I know more angles about anything than anybody here, because I’ve had the opportunity to think them all out. I can think my way out of a maximum security prison inside of two-and-a-half hours. But I don’t utilize my mind for that. I utilize it to do the best that I can in the work that I do.

If I have to punish myself, I’ll punish myself by doing some very grueling work.

(far left) Kirby hated working for Classics Illustrated, due to constant redraw requests like this example from “The Last Days of Pompeii” in #35 (March 1961). (previous page, bottom) Kirby had just experienced frustration with another hunchback in Chamber of Darkness #4 (April 1970), in the heavily rewritten story “The Monster” (as detailed in TJKC #13). (previous page, center) Early Barry Smith Conan sketch. (below) Kirby’s DC freedom would be limited by the company’s correction of Olsen and Superman heads, as in this Jimmy Olsen #135 example.

All characters TM & ©2011 respective owners.

KIRBY: Anyone that’ll keep faithful to the pencils. I don’t mind a style at all. I’ve had men with the boldness of Dick Ayers, and I’ve had men with the finesse of Joe Sinnott, and I’ve had men with the grace of Wally Wood, and somehow they’ve always kept the kind of impact image of my pencils. And I’ve been very grateful for that, very grateful, because it’s left me free to do my own penciling. I’ve been very grateful for that.

AUDIENCE: Who was the one who put the influence on you artists to put token Blacks into the pictures, and when did this really come about?

KIRBY: Uh, the blacks in my pencils…?

AUDIENCE: No, Negroes, figures, the people walking around in the scenes. Who put pressure on you to do that?

KIRBY: [sounding irritated at the questioner] There was no pressure. I thought it was time to do it. [applause] I found that there was a lack in myself. I found that I, myself, had not been doing it, and I felt it was my responsibility to do it, and I did it, because I’d want it done for me. It was as simple as that. And it’s going to remain that way, as far as I’m concerned.

AUDIENCE: What do you predict for Marvel’s future?

KIRBY: I can’t predict Marvel’s future. I won’t.

AUDIENCE: What do you predict for DC? [laughs] KIRBY: Only what I can predict for myself.

AUDIENCE: [questioner asks about Bullseye and Kirby’s work with Joe Simon at Mainline] KIRBY: About my relationship with Joe, and Bullseye, and…? Well, it was a bad venture, that’s all. It was a poor time to do it, and we did it, and we suffered for it. And they were good books; they were doing as well as any other books. But the other books were doing poorly. [laughter] That’s the only thing I can say. But they were good books.

AUDIENCE: Would you like to do the Conan strip?

KIRBY: No. It’s been done. [By Barry Smith - Editor] 11

an artist like yourself?

KIRBY: Well, my schedule is rough. I’ll turn out anywhere from 3 to 4 a day. Of course, my average is running out fast; I’m getting older. [laughter] AUDIENCE: Did you have anything to do with the recent trend at Marvel, switching from villain as antagonist, to the problems of the real world [as the villain] ?

KIRBY: Yes. We’re running out of villains, and we’re running out of blacks and whites. We’re running so fast now that I think we’re running into ourselves. That’s what I’m working on now.

AUDIENCE: Is that the reason pollution, and…?

KIRBY: Yes, that’s part of it. It’s very easy for an average person today, to become a neo-criminal.

It’s just too simple. We live in a kind of an age where, no matter what we do causes some kind of a ripple that may have mass consequences. It’s as simple as that. There are no more individual villains with individual evils. Even evil has run away. One evil has compounded another in a mass way, just like production of goods.

AUDIENCE: Can you tell how the “King of the Comics” thing got started?

KIRBY: [laughter, Kirby laughs] It started with a publisher; I won’t tell you his name. [laughter] [Editor’s note: It was Victor Fox.] I was very young, and it was a delightful experience, although I didn’t think so at the time. But somehow it made an impression on me and a few other guys. Joe Simon was there, and Al Harvey, and this publisher would walk along while we were working, and he’d puff on his cigar, and go, “I’m the King of the Comics.

I’m the King of the Comics.” And it became a kind of byword. And every time a magazine failed, [laughter] we figured somebody’d say, “I’m the King of the Comics.”

AUDIENCE: Did you create both villains, the Red Skull and Doctor Doom?

KIRBY: No. I had a hand in creating Doctor Doom, and the Red Skull was created by Eddie Heron, who created Captain Marvel. And Eddie Heron was one of the best writers that DC ever had. A fine man; he’s gone now, but he had a very facile, and flexible, and creative mind. I admired him. He was a professional. He created the Red Skull, he created Captain Marvel, and a lot of other characters you’ll see at DC today. A fine man.

AUDIENCE: How do you come up with the ideas for those fantastic computers you draw? (above) Pencil villainy from Captain America #103, page 14 (July 1968). (next page, top) Kirby sketching and signing at Comic-Con 1970, where this panel took place.

Captain America, Red Skull, Dr. Doom, Thing, Mr. Fantastic TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

KIRBY: Well, the machinery is non-functional. [laughter] The machinery is strictly art; it’s a practice in layout. I like to draw a work of art that looks like a machine. And if you accept it as a machine, I’ve done my job. It’s well thought-out; when I draw it like an electronic machine, it looks like an electronic machine. If I draw an electrical machine, it looks like an electrical machine.

The toughest job I had was drawing dimensional machines, and I tried to draw my version of the kind of machine that might take you into another dimension. I feel that, if there is anything like an extra dimension somewhere, I feel there’s a machine that’s about to do the job. And of course, they will. There are roads that we just never travel, and they don’t have to be asphalt roads.

AUDIENCE: What’s the schedule to turn out artwork per day for

12

AUDIENCE: What was your favorite comic to draw at Marvel?

KIRBY: I got a kick out of doing the Thor legend, which I researched. I kind of did my version of it. They thought that Thor should have red hair and a beard, and that’s not my Thor. So I just went my own way.

AUDIENCE: Do you think Doctor Doom’s face is supposed to be as scarred as they say, or is it just a small scratch, and Doom’s such an egomaniac that it affected him, and he said, “No, I can’t face it…”?

KIRBY: Well, Doom is a very tragic figure. Doom has got a lot of class; I like Doom. [laughter] Doom has got a lot of class, he’s got a lot of cool. But Doom has one fallacy; he thinks he’s ugly. He’s afraid to take that mask off. Doom is an extremist; he’s a paranoid.

He thinks in extremes. He can’t think, “Well, I’ve got a scar on me, but that doesn’t make me repellant….” Actually, Doom is a

very handsome guy with a scar on him that he got from acid when he was a child. But Doom is an extremist, he’s a paranoid. To him, he’s extremely ugly. If Doom were to lose one hair, he’d put on a wig. [laughter] And if Doom had an enemy, he’d have to wipe him out. And if Doom thought that anybody was smarter than himself, he’d kill ’em, because Doom would have to be the smartest man in the world. He’s an extremist; but, y’know, he has good manners. [laughter] AUDIENCE: Have you ever shown Doctor Doom without his mask on?

KIRBY: Yes, we did an origin story where we related the episode where he became scarred. Listen, if I’m taking up too much of your time in any way…

AUDIENCE: [murmurs of “no, no”] KIRBY: Just make believe it’s a burlesque. [laughter] AUDIENCE: You speak of Doctor Doom and the Red Skull in such glowing terms, but you seem to think the costumed villains are on the way out, to the more real evils of the world…

KIRBY: No! No! AUDIENCE: Don’t you think their personalities are a lot more fun to fool around with, than a hero who has to be sort of bland.

KIRBY: No, I think that everyone is fun to fool around with. I think we should all put on a costume. I think the clothes we wear today are very drab. I think we should all put on super-hero costumes and have a real fine time. I think we ought to wear reds, and nice blues, and rich colors, and have a great time. Just wear what we want to wear. I don’t see why I have to wear a tie or a formal suit, and a lot of other guys have to look like penguins, [laughter] just because it’s called for. I think we ought to have a good time, you know? Why not?

So the other guy doesn’t have a tie; I’m not going to run to Emily Post and say, “I want to report him.” [laughter] AUDIENCE: What do you think of the underground press?

KIRBY: Sure, it’s extreme. I think there’s a terrific vacuum on today’s newsstands. Somewhere between the Free Press and the Los Angeles Times is a new newspaper. I just don’t know what it is.

I can’t say. I’ve read the Press, and it’s a little extreme for me. I feel that somewhere there’s a compromise, and the compromise just hasn’t come up yet.

Comic Fan’s Mom Bids on Kirby Drawing at 1970 Comic-Con #1 Auction, and Wins!

by Jack Bertram was there at the 1970 Comic-Con. I was 15 and my mother drove me down there from L.A. It was a big thing for me, my first contact with fandom in the flesh. I was so in awe of Kirby, Bradbury and all the other guests—just in awe of the whole situation, that I was at a convention for comic books.

They auctioned off some sketches that Kirby did, right there in person. I remember sitting there as they began to auction off the drawings, thinking that when the bidding went over $10.00, that was too high for me. The bidding went a little higher and suddenly my mother was standing up, calling out $40.00. My head turned—I looked up at my mom in disbelief. To me $40 was a lot of money. Anyway, we won the drawing and I was happy to have it. I still have it today.

Here’s a photo of that sketch that Kirby did at the 1970 Comic-Con. The paper that he sketched it on is 36″ x 42″.

It’s a large sketch that he did on stage. He did other sketches too, that other people purchased. In the book Comic-Con: 40 Years of Artists, Writers, Fans, and Friends, there is a picture of Kirby doing this sketch. I was excited to see that sketch in the book.

The sketch contains the faces of Reed Richards, Doctor Doom, and the Thing. Someone from the Comic-Con staff commented that this could be the last time that Kirby draws these characters. So, this seemed pretty historic at the time.

But I didn’t care about the history of it. It was a Jack Kirby drawing and that’s all I had to know. They took a picture of me with the drawing. I’ve always wondered if that picture was still around somewhere hidden in some archives. ★

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(Comic fan Jack Bertram blogs at http://jackbertram.blogspot.com.)

AUDIENCE: It seems like, in a lot of comics from DC and Marvel, the villains base their reason for aggression on the fact they’re disfigured in some way, like Luthor lost his hair…

KIRBY: Of course. How else would you show mental disfigurement on paper? I mean, if a man is sick, how else can you show that sickness, except by a scar, or an aberration, or a bent hand, or a twisted foot?

AUDIENCE: So the physical disabilities are just symbolic?

KIRBY: Yes, and I feel that’s the way it’s always been. Go back to any criminal’s past, and you’ll find some kind of disfigurement.

AUDIENCE: Did you start Sgt. Fury as a sort of anti-war comic strip, or was it supposed to be [inaudible] ?

KIRBY: I was asked to do Sgt. Fury. [chuckles] I did it from my own experiences.

I had London look like London. I felt that it should be done that way; not glamorized, but real. In other words, I was out to show London during the Blitz, and I showed London during the Blitz. When I showed a German gun, I showed a German gun. I felt that kind of strip should be done real.

AUDIENCE: Did you write it?

KIRBY: Yes, I wrote that.

AUDIENCE: Was that based on anyone you knew, or was it a composite of…?

KIRBY: It was a composite of lots of things, lots of my own experiences, which I’m going to say nothing about. It was terrible. [laughter] SHEL DORF: Could we impose on you to draw a few characters?

KIRBY: Well, if they’d like to see it. [applause] ★ [At that point, Kirby went to a large sketchpad and began drawing for the fans.]

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Gallery 1

Immortal Penciling n the late 1970s, Jack Kirby filled a

I sketchbook with pencil drawings of his

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Thor TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

characters, and gave it to his wife Roz as a Valentine’s Day present. Presented here are some of the “immortal” characters from Thor included in that sketchbook, scanned directly from the original drawings. Enjoy!

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Odin TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Loki TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Balder TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Fandral TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Karnilla TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Volstagg, Hogun TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Cinemation

Thor Movie Review

Lots of lightning, but needs more thunder, by Bruce Younger (this page) Images from the new Thor film, in theaters now. It stars (shown below): Chris Hemsworth (Thor) Natalie Portman (Jane Foster) and (right, top to bottom): Anthony Hopkins (Odin) Tom Hiddleston (Loki) Idris Elba (Heimdall) Images ©2011 Paramount Pictures.

Thor TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ourney into Mystery with the Mighty Thor was the first Kirby comic for which I acquired a complete run. It was 1964 and I was 11 years old. I pored over those early issues, fascinated by the Norse mythology, unfamiliar to me at the time. I drooled over Kirby’s artwork, especially the classy look lent by Dick Ayers’ very capable inking. I even made my own full-size Mjolnir out of wood and leather!

So, to say I was excited about the new Thor movie would be an understatement, but I was concerned that the whole thing could end up being really cheesy. Much of what was charming in the original comic would never be accepted by today’s audiences, especially when merging it to the reality inhabited by other Marvel films.

However, the initial trailer looked promising, and with a cast including Natalie Portman and Anthony Hopkins and Kenneth Branagh directing, I started thinking this movie could really work. And it does.

Sometimes.

Separating the film from the source material is difficult, but I’ve attempted to do so for this review.

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Thor As a Movie Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is shown as a brash, arrogant young god who gets banished to Earth for disobeying Odin (Anthony Hopkins). We’re shown the grandeur of Asgard and the back-story of its war with the Frost Giants. We meet the Warriors Three, Sif (Jaimie Alexander), the manipulative Loki (Tom Hiddelston), Thor’s mother Frigga (Rene Russo), and Heimdall (Idris Elba).

We even get a brief demo on the archaically mechanical yet highly technological Rainbow Bridge… and that’s pretty much all within the first half hour.

We’re also introduced to Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), a scientist researching celestial phenomena. She runs into Thor (literally) as she speeds through the New Mexico desert to find the impact point for what appears to be a large meteor, in reality Thor’s hammer thrown to Earth by Odin. Add an investigation into the hammer/meteor by S.H.I.E.L.D., led by Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg reprising his role from Iron Man II), and you get an overly complicated story bogged down with too many characters.

That’s not to say it’s all bad.

Hemsworth presents a fine Thor, and Hopkins cuts a grand figure as Odin.

The story does a decent job merging the mythological world with the actual world. The set design, costumes and visual effects are stunning, and once you get through the set-up, the story moves along pretty smoothly.

Like some other comic-based films, Thor suffers from a script that tries too hard to introduce a world of fantasy to an unfamiliar audience while trying to please the diehard fans. There are places where the pacing needed to be streamlined, and the story in general should have been simplified.

Some characters could have been eliminated or relegated to the background. As it is, there is virtually no development of Fandral, Hogun or Volstagg and very little of Sif and Heimdall. Portman’s role as Jane Foster could have been filled by any halfway decent actress for the amount of presence

she had. And I’m not convinced that Frigga should have appeared at all.

Additionally, battle sequences appeared muddled, and the final slugfest with the Destroyer sort of fizzled.

Still, this was mostly a fun movie to watch, and though it wasn’t a great film, it did a decent job of aligning the character with Marvel film continuity, and bringing Thor and Asgard to the big screen in a believable and visually exciting way.

Thor the Movie vs. Thor the Comic If you are a purist in how you view comic characters translated to film, Thor may be disappointing. Donald Blake is used in name only as an inside joke; Thor has no alter ego, no walking stick to tap, no transformation; Jane Foster has been upgraded from nurse to scientist; Asgard is described as one of “the nine realms” that exist in different dimensions, Earth being one of them; and the explanation for the power within Asgard is an advanced technology taking the form of what we would call “magic.”

Obviously, to make Kirby’s concept into a movie and tie it into the reality established by Iron Man, some revisions and compromises were necessary. Most of those revisions work, and in some cases strengthen the believability of the story. The explanation for Asgardian power makes a kind of sense, and is more acceptable than the magical basis for the comic. In many ways, it adapts Kirby’s later concepts about the existence of god-like beings from New Gods and the Eternals, and the idea that any sufficiently advanced technology will seem like magic to less sophisticated cultures.

Transforming Jane Foster into a contemporary professional woman was pretty much a no-brainer. It works well, and helps tie together various story threads—the initial encounter with Thor, the discovery of Mjolnir and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s interest, which in turn lays the groundwork for how S.H.I.E.L.D. brings together Iron Man, Thor and Captain America (as well as Black Widow and Hawkeye, played by Jeremy Renner in a cameo) to form the Avengers.

One change I disagree with is the elimination of Don Blake. In my opinion, the film could have started with Hemsworth playing Blake as a colleague of Jane Foster. Blake would be obsessed with celestial phenomena and its affect on weather patterns, only remembering his life as the god of thunder after finding Mjolnir, at which point we would see the flashback to the events that bring us to the present. This scenario would have helped simplify the story, add romantic tension between Blake/Thor and Foster, create a stronger dynamic between a newly awakened Thor and Sif as his abandoned love interest, and give more credence to the idea that he has spent decades, as opposed to days, learning humility and compassion.

Despite its flaws, Thor is a fun ride. The detail in Asgardian regalia and architectural design is a tribute to Jack’s ability to create cohesive worlds for his characters to inhabit. There is also a terrific homage to Kirby in a battle with a creature in the Frost Giants’ realm, obviously inspired by the pre-hero monsters Jack did so well.

All in all, Thor is well done and visually interesting, building on the Marvel film universe and anticipating what looks to be an exciting experience with the coming Captain America film this July, and The Avengers next May. I’m pretty sure Jack would have gotten a big kick out of it all. I know I do. ★ 21

the Onslaught of the New!

Kirbytech From old tech to new; Kirby’s Thor evolved as Jack’s storytelling desires matured. Below are pencils from the “Tales of Asgard” story in Journey Into Mystery #112 (Jan. 1965), and (next page) more pencil art from Thor #166 (July 1969). The later level of technology was nowhere to be found in the character’s earliest adventures, but Journey Into Mystery #120 (Sept. 1965, bottom row) seems to be a starting point for Kirby adding hightech to the strip, with both a collage, and some of his trademark scientific gizmos showing up.

Thor, Loki, Odin TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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by Shane Foley any words have been written comparing Jack Kirby’s Thor to his New Gods series. This short piece seeks to show that Jack’s changing appreciation of the theme of the gods on Earth is apparent in Thor, both in elements of plotting and artwork.

As most ’60s Marvel fans know, the Fantastic Four was the only strip that Jack commenced and remained with. All others he started, he then left in the hands of others so he could move on. When the initial explosion of new features was over, it was Thor that Jack decided to return to for his regular assignment.

In reading these early Thors, it seems fairly obvious that it was his interest in the Norse mythology that drew him to it. He had begun “Tales of Asgard” a few months earlier in Journey Into Mystery #97, which Stan Lee admits was “90% Jack’s plots” [interview with Roy Thomas in Comic Book Artist #2, page 13].

While the lead Thor feature often had him in conflict with more mainstream type Marvel super-villains, the Asgard feature retold Norse parables and stories and was consistently set in the mythological realm of Asgard. Soon, the elements of this back-up feature found their way more and more into the main story,

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where the contrast between the “ancient ways” of Asgard and the elements of the modern world were often in focus.

Then in the mid-’60s, Jack had a renaissance. Both his art and interest in technology exploded in a new direction, and it was here that I believe there was a problem for him with Thor.

What do we see? As Jack changed his style in the mid-’60s, the initial results were tremendous and the work looks like he was thoroughly enjoying himself.

The Fantastic Four evolved easily with Jack’s increasing fascination with technology. It was there that his first “new technological gods”—the Inhumans, Galactus and the Surfer, the Black Panther, and Prester John—appeared.

In Thor, Kirby seemed just as inspired. The storylines involved the Absorbing Man, Hercules, Pluto, and a mystic Demon, while “Tales of Asgard” had the celestial Viking ship sail on its marvelous “Quest”—brilliant stories, beautifully told, with the Asgardian backdrop used loosely and to full advantage.

In these stories, we note how Jack attacked his visual representation of his gods. Never was he interested in looking “authentically ancient.” He wanted the illusion of “ancient Norse,” but this was secondary to a real feeling of power and “otherworldly-ness.”

Asgard never looked just like an old city. It was glorious, strong and alien, yet usually with enough flotsam around (shields, flags, swords and spears, blazing torches, etc.) to give the impression of an ancient, if unworldly city. When Jack drew Olympus with Zeus and his gods, they wore togas and sported leaf-wreaths on their heads and used harps, yet rather than looking like a group of theater actors, they looked every inch to be powerful gods, as befitted the story Jack was telling.

Super technology in the Fantastic Four and on Earth. Otherworldly power in Asgard. Yet even here in these wonderful Thors, we see Jack’s “new” approach—his fascination with superscience and technology—creeping in.

In the earliest “Asgard” features, the myth of mankind’s beginning, as well as elements such as Yggdrasill, the protective tree around the Earth, were recounted. (The first “TOA” in JIM/Thor #97.) But already by Thor #122, Jack ejected any continuity with this and showed during Thor’s time travelling escapade with journalist Hobbs a more “evolutionary” view of the Earth and the universe’s beginnings.

Thor’s hammer was said to have had mystical, Asgardian origins, yet in Thor #120, the power of the fires of the Pittsburgh furnaces were sufficient to heal Thor’s ruined hammer; a strange blending of two worlds indeed.

In the same issue, we see Ularic the Warlock’s parlor looking very “technological” in places (see example at left). Still, most of the time, Jack drew the environment around this “technology” to give it the feel of being something ancient. It all looked so right!

It was around this time that, in my opinion, Jack’s interest in the ancient mythology as a basis for his storytelling peaked, but then died, replaced by a desire to tread new ground and leave the old behind.

After Pluto and Hercules (climaxing in Thor #130—concurrent with FF #53), Thor in one sense went back to being the ‘old’ Thor—that is, though he was now depicted in Jack’s new cosmic mode, he was again an ancient hero outside of Asgard thrust into a modern setting. Rigel, the Recorder, and Ego, followed by the High Evolutionary (#131-135) were thoroughly modern Kirby creations, springing not from any roots in ancient myth but from the same creative techno-fountain as Galactus. After these issues, Thor does indeed confront Ulik and Trolls, but of equal importance to the story is the power of a very technological

being—Orikal and the weaponry he provides under duress. Then Thor goes on to fight Kang, a replicating robot, and the Super-Skrull before encountering another Asgardian threat.

Behind these stories with an increasingly technoedge, “Tales of Asgard” also changed. In #136, the first page has an image of Asgard that looks more like a science center than “ancient” Asgard. Odin strides on a typically “otherworldly” walkway but without any of the motifs that tell us this is “ancient” Asgard, rather than somewhere like Attilan. With #137, the new story led the Asgardians into Arabian Nights territory. The scenery was certainly barbaric, but any Asgardian myth was absent and the villain rode a very modern, “techno” flying carpet.

Suddenly, a few months later in Thor #146, at the end of the Arabian Nights story, Stan announces “We’ve run out of Tales of Asgard stories!” What nonsense. What really happened? Did Stan want the change? Or was it something Jack had lobbied for? However it occurred, it seems to me that Jack was clearly happy for that change. As we have seen, he had been moving away from Asgard for some time towards a more techno-friendly place and Attilan, with its Inhumans—his proto-Eternals, we could say—was much more in tune with his new vision. Since these Inhumans were popular and at that time often touted as being on the edge of getting their own strip, that’s what he did.

In 1968, things changed yet more. Somewhere along the way, Jack lost interest at Marvel. What followed was three years of great work, but compared to the earlier, glory years, it was uninspired. The telltale signs, in Thor as well as in the FF, were the protracted storylines, excessively big panels, loss of characterization, and lack of new characters. In Thor, the Inhumans feature quickly died, with Thor now having a full 20 pages, with each 20-page feature telling far less story than any 16-pager from a few years earlier.

In Thor, the call of new technological gods continued to press in on Jack’s imagination.

Certainly the stories were often “Asgardian” in flavor, but some details showed Jack’s heart wasn’t really there. In #155, Jack visualized Odin’s wonderfully ancient looking horse-headed bed, but he also had his Asgardians using an “Odinian Force Arrow,” a super high-tech missile. Two issues later, amidst swords and lances, “Asgard’s mightiest weapon” was used: a Cosmic Bolt Cannon.

After superb handling in #159 of the discrepancies that had developed in Thor’s origin, #160 saw Thor again tangling with Galactus, Ego, and the Rigelians. Suddenly, Odin too was interested, and indeed fearful, of Galactus. No real reason was given why the ‘gods’ should be interested in such as Galactus. In #163 and #165, Odin seeks to track Galactus again using a viewing screen that looks like it came straight out of Reed Richards’ lab.

Sure, “scientific” looking paraphernalia had always been part of Jack’s Asgard, but it seems more and more that he couldn’t be bothered disguising it so it didn’t look out of place.

Then in #166 and 167, we see the crowning assault of Jack’s new techno-gods upon the old. Odin oversees the construction of a spaceship, complete with uniformed scientists and engineers. No more mystic Viking ship to traverse the mythological heavens in search of the foes of legend. Now Thor

had a spacecraft from Asgard to seek an evil creation of super-science.

And so it went for Jack’s last year on Thor; Ancient Asgardian on the one hand (Surtur rises, for instance), but decidedly modern on the other (Odin sleeps in a steel-looking cryogenic capsule in the same story). Thor had always fought earthen and alien adversaries in his adventures, but Odin and the Asgardians fought a different battle in different places, and thus they were at odds with Thor. And this contention was one of the platforms of the early Thor series. But now, Asgard was succumbing to Jack’s “super-science” look, and thus was more New Genesis than Asgard. Odin created spacecraft and sought Galactus, thus was more Highfather or Zuras than Odin. Correspondingly, the stories lost their edge.

Why? Maybe it was because Jack began to view “the gods” more and more as dramatizing mankind’s situation. He has said as much many times. As modern man was becoming increasingly impacted upon by emerging technologies, Jack’s interest in these technologies also grew—in both a philosophical way as well as a basis for his visuals and storytelling. As the old gods dramatized the ancients’ life pressures, new gods were needed for the modern age. We know this is how Jack saw his New Gods series and where he wanted to go with it.

“An Epic for Our Times!” he called it.

And so it was that Thor, the ancient god with his ancient Viking heritage, couldn’t go where Jack wanted to go. So Jack bided his time until he could indeed do his New Gods. But he couldn’t keep them out of Asgard completely. At least, that’s how it looks to me. ★ 23

MythConceptionS

Hammer of the Gods

right) The book of mythology young Adrian Day had on his bookshelf.

The Mythology of the Mighty Thor,

by Adrian Day

(below) Loki schemes in isolation, in pencils from Thor #147 (Dec. 1967).

oseph Campbell was the greatest proponent of mythology in the 20th Century.

He had no religious affiliation but he embraced all religions, often speaking of the common mythic structure that informs them all. Though revered academically and recognized by many as the leading authority on mythology, his views were unavoidably heretical to the devout practitioners of western faith.

(next page, bottom) Adrian’s homemade Mjolnir and Norn Stones.

Loki, Thor TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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For many, “mythology” carries the inference of falsehood, typically associated with pizza and fairy tales. Campbell understood mythology differently. To him, the purpose of any myth was to reveal truths; deep truths—truths than can’t be solved with equations or examined under a microscope. Where most people of faith get in trouble, according to Campbell, is in substituting denotation for connotation. They hold the stories themselves as sacred rather than the truths behind the stories.

Jack Kirby and Joseph Campbell, it would seem, had a great deal in common. In the early 1960s, Jack Kirby was just waking up to the power of storytelling as a way to “connote truth.” Said Jack, “I didn’t want to tell fairy tales. I wanted to tell things as they are. But I wanted to tell them in an entertaining way. And I told it in the Fantastic Four and in Sgt. Fury.

If I wanted to tell the entire truth about the world, I could do it with Robinson Crusoe, and do Robinson Crusoe for the rest of my life.” While Jack certainly did not confine this realization to traditional mythic figures, the odd mixture of his own Judaic and Germanic origins was a large influence in his propensity for patriarchs and gods.

Specifically, Kirby seemed to have a fondness for Norse mythology and Thor in particular. Both had surfaced in his work several times over the course of his career leading up to his association with Stan Lee in the ’60s. While exploring potential characters to expand the Marvel line, he must have dragged them out again.

In 1962, Journey Into Mystery was just a monster/sci-fi title with sagging sales. Stan Lee was looking for ideas to infuse it with the same kind of success he was seeing with his newer titles. Superheroes were experiencing a revival and placing a character like Thor as the lead story in a title that was already going down the tubes seemed like little risk.

Stan and Jack did not consistently appear as the writing team for Thor until J.I.M. #101, though they were clearly shepherding the book even when not directly involved in the finished product.

While Stan has always assumed full credit for the creation of the series, striking similarities between Marvel’s Thor and Jack’s earlier utilization of the character are strong evidence that the character ‘s conception was more Kirby than Lee. At first, as in previous incarnations, the larger aspects of Thor’s Norse heritage were understated. Though Stan and Jack’s own embellishments may have had their roots in the comic book tradition of Captain Marvel, they were equally appropriate within the ethos of its mythic origins. Don Blake 24

fit very well into the framework of what Joseph Campbell calls the “hero’s journey.” Journey Into Mystery #83 sets up the premise of the series. The frail American Dr. Blake is vacationing in Europe where he stumbles upon a potential alien invasion.

His flight from the aliens leads him unwittingly to uncover a walking stick that changes into an enchanted hammer while simultaneously transforming its bearer into the Mighty Thor. This initial tale is a classic example of one scenario for the hero’s journey: the unwilling hero, whose actions unintentionally draw him into a path of adventure that ultimately leaves him transformed, in a higher state or consciousness. It is precisely the motif Campbell describes in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” when he says, “a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder.”

Though several years would pass before the fuller mythological backdrop implied by Thor’s character would be fully exploited, the seeds were being sown very early on with the introduction of two central characters that would ultimately support that mythology. Altered for the sake of continuity with the “Marvel Universe,” they still bore a recognizable resemblance to their classic Norse counterparts. The expansion of these original folk legends would prove critical to the success and appeal of the series.

Loki, the God of Mischief, appeared in Journey Into Mystery #85. The story briefly introduced Asgard, the Rainbow Bridge (Bifrost), Heimdall, and even referenced Odin. With J.I.M. #86, Odin made his first appearance, when Thor called on him for help. The presence of these two supporting characters gradually increased until, along with Thor, they formed a triad of mythological archetypes that in combination provided the impetus and character dynamics for story development on an ongoing basis.

Odin served as a Mentor. In this role, he gave Thor guidance and kept him humble. The whole Don Blake/Thor relationship was Odin’s device to insure Thor’s humility, something necessary for the wielder of Mjolnir. Loki is easily identifiable as a Trickster. He had a hand in most of the calamities that befell the Thunder God, either directly or through his manipulation of others.

Thor, of course, serves as the hero archetype.

Whether or not it was intentional, Stan and Jack’s addition of Don Blake rings true to another standard mythological theme and one that oddly shows ties to the Christian theme: the God who becomes a man and vice versa. Blake’s mild mannered and unassuming nature compared with the rough and readiness of Thor echoed the biblical flipside Lion of Judah/Lamb of God portrayal of the Christ.

Trails of Asgard While the elements of the Mighty Thor that most readers are familiar with were in place nearly from its inception, much of the tone for the series’ first year and a half was governed by plots that were silly and outrageous. Stories featuring adversaries who hurl national monuments at the protagonist may have been common fare for the day, but this writing style, that holds a certain charm when associated with characters like Jimmy Olsen, retrospectively seems ill suited for Thor. Perhaps this is a testament to how Marvel Comics raised the standard of sophistication among its readers.

The beginning of the Mighty Thor that one generally associates with the “Kirby Era,” however, is a trail that leads back to Journey Into Mystery #97. In that issue, only months before the Lee/Kirby team officially assumed the reigns for the series, there appeared a back-up feature called “Tales of Asgard.” It was “Tales of Asgard” that set the tone for the future direction of the book. The first few stories in the “Tales of Asgard” series read almost like a textbook. They covered the “Genesis,” if you will, of Norse Mythology from the beginning of the world to the origin of Odin and the Norse Gods. Ymir, the Frost Giant, and Surtur, the Fire Demon, were also introduced as players who would be there when the world ended.

Much like the beginning of the New Gods, ideas must have been building up inside Jack’s head so that his return to the book was like the opening of the floodgates. “Tales of Asgard” offered an introduction, paving the way and preparing readers for the reshaping of the book as a whole. With J.I.M. #101, Jack and Stan assumed a permanent place as the regular creative team for the book. The stories and approach for the book changed literally overnight. Though they continued to use non-mythological characters established previously such as the Tomorrow Man, the Cobra, and Mr. Hyde, the randomness that the earlier stories had suffered from was replaced by a clear continuity and sense of direction.

If I Had a Hammer In 1965, as a 5 year-old, along with 4 other siblings, I was sequestered in a small village called Mastershausen somewhere in Germany. For 5 children with no television and limited knowledge of the German language, we were fairly

isolated. Our creativity had to be at its peak just to escape boredom. That my father was a military officer was a definite boon since he brought home large stacks of comics from the men in his squadron on a regular basis. None of those comic books captured my imagination more than Journey Into Mystery’s “Mighty Thor.”

My eldest brother read to me regularly from the pages of Journey Into Mystery. My obvious passion for the character led him to supplement the comics with the original Norse Myths he discovered in a volume of collected children’s stories from the family library. All the petty differences that troubled many a Marvelite in the letters pages, “Thor has red hair and a beard, Odin has one eye,” etc., never bothered me. Mythologically Thor, Odin and Loki were essentially the same characters. Even at the age of 5, this was satisfactorily clear to me.

While I can only speculate as to all the reasons these characters affected me so profoundly, I am quite certain of many contributing factors. Living in Germany certainly played a major role. It was, after all, a country whose very origins were tied to Norse Mythology. My village had cobblestone streets, taverns where villagers gathered to socialize and drink ale, a village blacksmith who we visited on occasion, a neighborhood clock and cabinetmaker, and even a castle.

“The castle” was located in a clearing just up the road from my home. As a family we would picnic there from time to time. Only its outer walls were still standing. A set of stairs in a tower leading to a second level had all but deteriorated. As a five year-old in these surroundings, there was a thin line between imagination and reality.

This wonderland environment gave added resonance to these myths. More than anything else, however, it was Jack’s rendering of Thor himself that lay at the core of my attraction. That fantastic helmet, the long flowing red cape, that wonderful costume with those strange blue dots (Kirby’s Rawhide Kid had them too, leading me to believe they had some kinship), and the amazing Mjolnir were all arresting icons. Thor was just so cool with his long flowing hair. At the time, the world was hollering about the Beatles and their shockingly long locks. I didn’t see what all the fuss was about, myself. Next to Thor, their haircuts never gave me pause for thought.

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In our household, the great milestone for Thor was Journey Into Mystery #116. The lead story, “Trial of the Gods,” had Thor and Loki subjected to a physical trial decreed by Odin to determine which of them was telling the truth. It affected me so profoundly that it inspired my brother to make me my very own Mjolnir and a bag of enchanted stones, that were a point of contention between Thor and Loki over the next several issues. He also promised me a helmet but that never materialized. The hammer was constructed, using the broken handle of an old golf club and a mallet head that my brother carved from a block of wood. I still remember standing in the doorway of our village home one gray afternoon with my Mjolnir in hand, my magic stones and my brother’s red raincoat tied around my shoulders like a cape, feeling the wind and first drizzle of an approaching rainstorm.

Journey Into Mystery #116 was such a watershed for me in so many ways. The back-up “Tales of Asgard” feature depicted Thor in garb other than the familiar outfit that Marvelites thought of as his “superhero” costume, something rarely seen. For some unexplained reason that seemed to thrill me to no end. Not until Thor #145, would Thor be seen again out of costume. In both instances, it affected me with a strange fascination. More than anything else, however, the “Trial of the Gods” issue seemed to characterize all the significant elements of the series and crystallized its mythology. In retrospect, it is the point early on in the series where all those elements were completely refined; a process that had accelerated dramatically with Kirby’s permanent reinstatement.

Telling The Truth About The World Since my upbringing was decidedly Christian, it is intriguing, to say the least, that Norse Mythology and the Mighty Thor held such great

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influence over me. It is particularly interesting in light of the very similar motifs that appear in both biblical accounts and the Lee/Kirby mythology.

One of the strongest themes throughout the original run of Journey Into Mystery was the sibling rivalry between Thor and Loki. Loki’s greatest motivation in all the mischievousness and malevolence he sewed was his desire for what Thor had. He wanted his hammer, his stature, and his favor with the almighty Odin. This idea frequently reoccurs in the Judeo/Christian stories of the Old Testament, as well.

The most obvious, of course, is Cain and Abel. It is present, too, in the story of Joseph and his brothers.

The most striking parallel, however, occurs in the tale of Jacob and Esau, for it is there that the image of the trickster is most pronounced. Jacob conspires with his mother to wrestle, from his father, the birthright and blessing that belong to Esau, the firstborn brother. His father is a blind man, recognizing his sons solely by his sense of smell and touch. Esau, the hunter, is a very hairy man who smells of game and the wild.

Jacob contrives to deceive his father by covering his arms with animal skins and the scent of game.

When the time comes to present Esau’s birthright, Jacob arrives first and the father falls for Jacob’s trickery, giving him the irrevocable blessing that is rightfully his brother’s. (Now there’s a Lee/Kirby plot for you!)

What is of special interest here considering Jacob’s ruse, as the trickster, is the fact that the father in the story is blind. In the original Norse accounts, Odin had but one eye. Readers of Thor were frequently critical of Odin’s presumed omnipotence since he was so often and easily deceived by the wiles of Loki.

Metaphorically speaking, however, it makes perfect sense and plays well into the Lee/Kirby version of Thor and Loki as brothers. Where do the wisest fall shortest but in their estimation of their own children? If it came off to readers as a contradiction of Odin’s power, it still rings true in the mythological sense, for it symbolizes that family issue, both

real and imagined, of parental favoritism.

Indeed, Lee and Kirby’s version actually suggests a rather sophisticated dynamic. Thor clearly is the favored son, and yet the father’s expectations bear down hardest on him. Though he knows Loki’s nature and malice, he often turns a blind eye (forgive the pun) to his falsehood. Loki, with his craft and cunning, plays into Odin’s wishes by siding with him on issues where Thor falls short; ie. the love of Jane Foster. In the everyday world of family life, Loki is the “tattletale” which in mythological terms is the trickster role again. Ultimately, the irony here is that Odin is hardest on Thor, his favorite, and far too lenient on Loki, the son in greatest need of harsh discipline. Meanwhile, Loki—who is well aware that Odin favors Thor—is spurred on in his misconduct out of resentment of this fact.

Much of Kirby’s “truth about the world” can be found in all the Marvel books. They all mythologized the “souls high adventure” that we naturally crave. They were all the same in their mythological premise: an average Joe gets caught up in an adventure, sometimes solicited (FF), sometimes not (Sgt. Fury, Thor), and is transformed into a higher state.

The more specific aspects of their mythological context, as should be the case when a myth is functioning effectively, become more personal. From my own experience, Kirby’s Thor resonated with certain truths that I failed to connect with in the Christian theme. In the context of Christianity, God is our father and Jesus is our brother. The Christian doctrine, however, does not easily permit identification with

either the father or the son. Man in the Judeo/Christian doctrine is a sinner and therefore cut off from God. Jesus is perfect and God incarnate. To identify with him within the Christian denotation is blasphemy.

In contrast, Thor allowed me to identify with the myth in a setting with which I was already familiar. As the youngest of 5 children, I knew all about tricksters through constant sibling rivalry. I was well acquainted with that struggle to find favor with my father. My father was not the unapproachable Christian/Judaic image of God, but he was stern and always had the final word, much like Odin. Moreover, like Odin, he sometimes erred in judgment, fell for the tricks of a sibling’s enchantment, and later had to make amends.

The core of its success, however, lies in the fact that it was not a problem to identify with the hero (Thor). In fact, it was both encouraged and further facilitated by the Don Blake persona. In the Marvel setting, a hero might be weak and often a victim of a trickster’s machinations, but was never helpless.

There was always the Uru Hammer from which to draw strength and to combat the opposition. To identify with Thor was to identify with that which was noble in the human spirit.

Everything about Thor’s appearance, as communicated by Jack, shouted nobility. To attach one’s self to the Uru Hammer was to tap into one’s inner strength.

Mjolnir was definitely a symbol of empowerment.

If one accepts the teachings and principles of Joseph Campbell as true, then it can be accepted that though Stan and Jack did not arrive at the design of their own Asgardian Tales with the conscious and deliberate intention of improving on the mythology behind it, neither was it dumb luck that guided them. Campbell believed that myths come from the collective unconscious. This explains why strong similarities exist between myths of different and unrelated cultures, not to mention the mythological elements that can be identified in all forms of storytelling. It also explains why Lee and Kirby, by borrowing elements from Norse legends and merely following principles of good storytelling, could end up with a largely improved myth in 20th Century terms without really trying.

Though Kirby would continue to “tell the truth” with comics throughout his career—utilizing mythological characters, both

embellished and original—he quite possibly never superceded his efforts on Thor. It had a perfect synthesis of the old and the new. Moreover the premise for the book was a sound one.

Despite the fact that many of the central characters had extraordinary capabilities not shared in human experience, their troubles and conflicts were ones familiar to us all. ★

(above) Thor #154 pencils.

The Don Blake persona, missing from the current Thor film, gives the reader a hero to identify with.

All characters TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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

by Barry Forshaw

Black Magic #22 hasn’t been reprinted, but Titan Books will soon be doing a S&K mystery collection, similar to their Simon & Kirby Superheroes volume.

Black Magic, Fighting American ©2011 Joseph H. Simon and the Estate of Jack Kirby.

Captain America TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Obscura

HORROR IN WALES or a boy bought up in the urban streets of the port city of Liverpool, a trip to Wales, with its rolling fields and lush trees, was something exotic in the 1960s. And though I was impressed by the beautiful countryside (a striking contrast to those Liverpool streets, in those days full of crumbling—now restored—Georgian houses), in the North Welsh town of Rhyl, I would slip away from parental influence (always lax in my case) and seek out those magical corner shops selling comics. Best of all were the secondhand places with a stock of second-hand comics—books predating one’s own youth, such as Plastic Man— and it was in Wales, amidst those unfamiliar sing-song accents, that I found a particularly intriguing shop: dingy and dusty, with a wooden display stand in the street which had a mix of magazines and comics. Lacking the nerve to pick up one of the imported American mags such as Rogue and Knave with their alluring displays of female flesh, I picked up a battered, second-hand British reprint of a lurid looking comic called Black Magic. What made it more tempting were the mouth-watering words superimposed (I later learned, by the British distributor and not to be found on the original US issue), ‘adult comic’. What more could I have asked for?

To English admirers of Jack Kirby in the pre-Fantastic Four era, the most dynamic illustrator in the history of comics was the great unknown—though his work was familiar, with a striking character that instantly distinguished it from the more conventional illustrators whose workaday stories bookended his pieces. Before his signature began to appear on the Atlas/Marvel monster books, who could identify the artist with this immensely distinctive style who turned up in such a variety of genres? As I’ve said in these pages before, my response to this highly individual work was decidedly mixed. It was clear when reading a Jack Kirby tale in a book such as DC’s House of Mystery or Harvey’s Race for the Moon that this was an artist absolutely brimming with talent who clearly blew away most of the competition. But as a young boy, becoming familiar via reprints with the best work of American comic book artists, the rough edge that Kirby’s work had was less congenial to me than, say, the beautifully polished inks of Wallace Wood (ironically, it was to be years before I realized that my favorite DC work by the latter, the earliest issues of Challengers of the Unknown, was actually a prime example of Wood inks over Kirby pencils). My ambiguity of response was not to last long, and the scales quickly fell from my eyes regarding Kirby’s supremacy.

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KIRBY’S DARK MAGIC Certainly, there appeared to be one area in which Kirby was supreme: that of the horror comic. And it was possible to see the King’s work in his signature book in this genre, the Prize title that he co-created with Joe Simon, Black Magic; less grisly than EC titles such as Tales from the Crypt, but just as grotesque—at least in the lead Simon & Kirby tales. Unlike much American fare, this material enjoyed a relatively lengthy reprint period in Great Britain, mostly in those aforementioned chunky shilling editions before they were swept away in the English version of the horror comics hysteria that had already decimated the comics industry in the US. American readers of TJKC may not know it, but we had our own equivalent of the Senate hearings into juvenile delinquency, which consisted of questions being asked in the Houses of Parliament and led to the banning of horror comics in the Children and Young Persons Harmful Materials Act. Black Magic was a casualty of this hysteria, but fortunately quite a lot of work had appeared (including a massive, now much-sought-after ‘album’, backed up with diverse Atlas horror reprints) before the title bit the dust. Oh, and a footnote regarding Wales: I’ve always found that while many Americans are aware of the separate identities of Scotland and Ireland (the Brit-loathing Mel Gibson has helped ensure the former, customarily rendering us as Nazi-stormtrooper-like heavies in his movies), Wales somehow gets subsumed as part of England. English people such as me have no feelings about this; the fiercely nationalistic Welsh (who insist on their own language on street signs, despite the fact nobody outside Wales—and relatively few in Wales—speaks it) are hopping mad. Did you think, for instance, that Anthony Hopkins (father of Jack Kirby’s Thor, of course, in the new Kenneth Branagh movie) is an English actor? He’s Welsh, like Richard Burton.

KIRBY GETS BUSY One book that was not reprinted in a British edition was Black Magic #22 from March 1953, which I first saw as an adult in London rather than Wales. The cover, in fact, is not one of Kirby’s best—it’s a massively crowded over-busy effort, with a variety of bright primary colors that confuse the eye. But a little study pays dividends: a shocked diner is on his knees, looking at an overturned table in a restaurant. And a grim image appears to be inscribed on the surface: the distorted figure of a man, screaming, the pupils of his distended eyes blood red. Neither the startled diner nor a shocked waiter nearby seems to realize the obvious: that the unfortunate figure has somehow been supernaturally imprisoned in the table. It’s a striking cover, even if the eye has to struggle to separate out its various elements.

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But no such reservations applies to the highly impressive lead story in the issue, the only one, in fact, by the Simon/Kirby team (the rest of the issue is filled with creditable but relatively unexciting work by other Prize artists such as Bill Draut and the talented Al Eadeh— though the latter is not at his best here). One artist, however, is at his best— and that is (unsurprisingly) Jack Kirby. The lead story “The Monsters on the Lake” has a very striking splash panel which is, in fact, an early example of the King’s predilection for collage: at the center of the illustration is a man looking nervously from behind a rock at a glowing green shape emerging from a night-time lake, but this central image is surrounded by ersatz newspaper headlines and stories about UFOs (“Coast Guard Photographs Saucers”, “Scientists Explain Views on ‘Saucer’ Phenomenon”; etc.).

The tale itself is a taut and effective drama of close encounter of the third kind, but shot through with a truly dyspeptic view of humanity and mob violence; it’s a cousin to the kind of cautionary piece that Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines were to repeatedly turn out in their powerful Shock SuspenStories morality tales, the sort of effort that Feldstein and Gaines described (rather dismissively) as ‘preachies’, in which humanity (usually in a small town) behaves in a venal or stupid way, and innocents are lambs for the slaughter. The eponymous ‘monsters’ in “The Monsters on the Lake” are not, of course, the visiting aliens, but the townspeople. But there is a striking twist in Jack Kirby’s version.

UGLY HUMANS AND GENTLE ALIENS The story is narrated by the man who had the nocturnal alien encounter on the lake, but Kirby keeps his face in shadow on his first appearance—and most readers will have realized that there is a grim reason for doing this (that reason is disclosed in shocking fashion on the final page). In a truly unsettling mix of spidery inking and immensely refined simplicity, Kirby’s piece relates a narrative in which an extraterrestrial ship lands near a small town, and there is a clue to the attitude that we are to take to the townspeople in the way they are rendered by Kirby. These backwoods types are immensely ugly and stupid looking; it will be no surprise to the reader when they begin to behave very badly as they do. In fact, the ugliness Kirby draws here is worthy of the great British satirical artists William Hogarth and James Gillray, who similarly told us what to think of people by the way they rendered their unappealing mugs.

The creature on the receiving end of the violence is a small, serene-looking alien who is first seen standing unmoving behind a brutal gun-toting local, the spaceman’s gentle face covered in bruises. There is a striking shot of the interior of the spaceship, littered with dead, spreadeagled comrades of the surviving alien. The townsfolk are prepared to kill each other in order to exploit the saucer and its newsworthy contents, and the penultimate page shows an explosion (literally) of massive

violence: amid the human malevolence, Kirby shows us the alien performing a devastating action. The final panels of the piece show that the hero, the only person who has behaved in humane fashion, has still paid a very heavy price. He is dying of radiation burns, and his face is now revealed as a mass of red and bloody weals—it is, in fact, the kind of horror comic image that caused such disapproval in the US Senate and the British Parliament. And such ill-considered disapproval was an immense shame, as this is a sophisticated and adult piece of work with a point to make, as in so many of the spellbinding pieces that Simon and Kirby regularly turned out in the pages of Black Magic.

KIRBY IN ASGARD As I write these words, Kenneth Branagh’s big-budget adaptation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Mighty Thor (as mentioned above) is yet to open, and I’m sure that you (like me) have tried to keep an open mind (and lived in hope that some kind of justice will be done to one the duo’s most impressive collaborations). How many of the King’s highly individual designs (costumes, the halls of Asgard) will end up in the finished film? Or at least be nodded to—however cursorily—by the production designer? By the time you read this paragraph, we’ll know the answer...

JOE SIMON REDUX Now: an appetite-whetting taste of something which will be given pride of place in the next column.

To tie in with the movie blockbuster Captain America: The First Avenger, UK publisher Titan Books will celebrate (in characteristically sumptuous fashion) the life of one of the star-spangled superhero’s original creators, Joe Simon, with the release of his fascinating new autobiography. In his own words, this is the life of one of the most important figures in comics history—half of the creative team Simon & Kirby. Alongside Jack Kirby, Simon created Captain America and was responsible for many of the wildest and most popular titles ever produced.

He was the very first editor at Marvel Comics, where he hired Stan Lee for his first job.

Simon began his prolific career in newspapers during the Great Depression, and this book intimately recounts his journey to New York City, his first meeting with Jack Kirby, and the role comics played in wartime America. He remembers the near-death of the medium, his legal battles over the rights to his most famous works, and encounters with such famous persons as writer Damon Runyon, prize-fighter Jack Dempsey, Batman creator Bob Kane, comedian Sid Caesar, and many more. Plus he reveals what it was like to bring comics out of their infancy, as they became a true American art form. I don’t know about you, but there’s a place already cleared on my bedside table. ★ [Barry Forshaw is the author of The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (available from Amazon.com) and the editor of Crime Time. He lives in London.]

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Devilishness (below) Jack’s penchant for creating powerful female characters was in full force with Eev from Devil Dinosaur #6 (Sept. 1978).

Though this series is not that highly regarded among Kirby fans, perhaps another look is in order?

All characters TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Serpent In The Garden

Devil Dinosaur and the Satanic Imagination of Jack Kirby, by Jarret Keene any of Jack Kirby’s best concepts are inversions of legends, myths, folktales, and, in particular, stories from the Bible. His most obvious and resonant biblical turnaround is the conflict between the Silver Surfer and Galactus. (Surfer is the fallen angel who, rather than lead humans into temptation, protects them from Galactus, who is God, albeit a World-Eater instead of the Creator.) Late in his career, Kirby continued to tinker with ideas from the Old Testament, especially those in the book of Genesis. His most successful effort includes Devil Dinosaur #6 and #7, a two-part story that recasts Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise as a harrowing escape from a homicidal, computerized, alien intelligence.

I’m going to elaborate on this in three ways. First, I’m going to show that, through the character of Eev, Kirby recasts the biblical Eve as the less-passive, more Kirby-esque, tough woman Lilith. Second, I’ll show that Kirby twists the Fall from a story of Adam and Eve’s weakness into Adam and Eve’s freedom from a vicious, technological god. Finally, I’ll explore Kirby’s relationship to technology as developed in this two-part Adam-and-Eve story in Devil Dinosaur.

Set in the Valley of Flame circa the Mesozoic Era, Devil Dinosaur is Kirby’s stab at prehistoric fiction, a sub-genre of sci-fi. Like Kamandi’s Earth A.D., the Valley of Flame is a vast, imaginative playground, minus the mutations. Instead, the terrain is overrun with terrible lizards (Thunder Horn, Iguanodon, Bone-Back) and brimming with various tribes of dawn-men (small-folk, hill-folk, killer-folk). No one enlivens genres like Kirby, and the Valley, though it’s no Asgard, hosts a spectacular rogues gallery: Long-Legs (giant spider), the Swarmers (giant ants), “sky demons” (alien invaders), the Hag of the Pits, and the dino-riders.

The title’s extraordinary cast is matched by the ambitious underpinnings of Kirby’s stories. For instance, issue #3 (“Giant”) challenges the tabooentrenched notion of childhood innocence.

Indeed, Kirby’s juvenile literature is never completely juvenile, and “Eev” (issue #6) and “DemonTree” (#7) confirm the King’s position as a dramatic and thought-provoking comic-book auteur.

“Eev” begins with a quirky potentiality: “The greatest story ever told could have begun with dinosaurs, demons, and giant ants. Of course, there had to be a man... and a woman called Eev!” Having just sent the sky-demons packing, StoneHand (the “Adam” character), White-Hair (an elder dawn-man), and Devil encounter the eponymous character, a prehistoric pretty who is intent on bashing the Swarmers with a rock and piercing their skulls with a sharp instrument. She is not the passive “Eve” of the Bible. Eev is assertive, outspoken, an individual (“Stand clear! I don’t fear these Swarmers!”).

Stone-Hand, the story’s Adam, calls her “arrogant” and “loud.” As such, Eev resembles the Jewish archetype of Lilith, which requires elaboration.

The story of Lilith in Jewish folklore grew out of a single contradictory passage in the Old Testament: “Male and Female He created them” (Gen. 1:27).

Since God’s creation of Adam and Eve are sequential and distinct, rabbis—working under the assumption that every word in the Bible is true—resolved the contradiction. The rabbis interpreted the first passage as referring to the creation of Adam’s first wife, whom they named Lilith. (Thus, many “literalists” consider Eve to be Adam’s second wife.)

This interpretation led to the development of the legend of Lilith, whose name appears in the Bible only once: “Yea, Lilith shall repose there” (Isa. 34:14). In the Talmud, a post-biblical text, and in the apocryphal Testament of Solomon, Lilith is

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described as a demoness with long black hair. But it’s The Alphabet of Ben Sira, written sometime during the 11th Century, that provides the first account of Lilith’s legend: Adam and his first companion did not get along, because Lilith would not let Adam dominate her and demanded equality. Eventually, she left the Garden of Eden and settled in a cave near the Red Sea, where she fornicated with and gave birth to demons. Since her flight from Paradise, she has preyed upon sleeping infants and seduced lonely men out of revenge.

Kirby’s Eev possesses the same forceful and confident nature, the same seductive and destructive bent, as Lilith. When Stone-Hand insists that Eev submit to him, she warns: “You’ll find me more dangerous than the Swarmers!” When Stone-Hand lays his hands on Eev, she clobbers him. He invokes the authority of “the spirits” who have brought them together and sanctioned his dominion over her. “The spirits have spoken to you—not to me!” she responds. “Set me free!”

And still she does not acquiesce. Unconsciously, then, Kirby models his character after a Jewish legend. Or else he merely intends to give a good-natured tweak to a creation story that has long been used to argue for the inherent superiority of the male gender. The latter impulse is more likely, since Kirby excels at depicting powerful women characters in many of his narratives, characters like the Fourth World’s Big Barda.

The twists and turns don’t end there, for “Eev” and “Demon-Tree” echo and distort the Edenic myth in startling ways, giving a fresh, subversive charge to the story of Adam, Eve, Satan and the Fall.

The beginning of issue #6 wraps up the storyline from the previous issue. Space aliens have invaded the Valley of Fire and threaten to extinguish it. Devil Dinosaur craftily incites the Swarmers to overrun the alien spaceship, jamming its mechanisms and causing it and its nefarious passengers to explode. (Interesting, isn’t it, that a plague of insects rescues the Valley of Fire from certain holocaust? Remember that Joel 1:120 details the plague of locusts that devastates Israel.)

But a remnant of the invasion survives: an independently thinking computer, what Moon-Boy calls a “demon tree.” A technological marvel, it lures Eev, Stone-Hand, and White-Hair into its virtual paradise.

Unlike the biblical Tree of Knowledge that imparts the distinction between good and evil, the Demon Tree seeks to keep its company blissfully ignorant of life outside the transparent force-field surrounding its miniature Eden. The tree announces: “You have no need to face any further danger! I shall serve your every need!” Thus, in Kirby’s inverted Genesis, the deprivation of knowledge becomes an evil gesture, and the strangulation of man’s autonomy is something only a homicidal cyber-god is capable of. Furthermore, despite being from the heavens, the god that creates Eden is a secret assassin, feigning the role of protector and harboring murderous plans.

Eev and White-Hair quickly adapt to the Demon Tree’s shelter, which symbolizes the biblical Garden of Eden. “That thing has made this a place of wonders!” says White-Hair, referring to the tropical paradise that has been prepared for them. “Don’t be too grateful,” replies Stone-Hand. “We’re still its captives!” Like her biblical namesake, Eev offers her Adam fruit from the Tree. “Here, take this fruit, Stone-Hand. It will help keep you content.” Stone-Hand refuses, instead calling upon the concept of free will—and the will to hunt, to fight, to lead. He challenges the Demon Tree: “Do your worst, foul spirit! When I find your weak spot, I shall destroy you!” For this, the Tree tranquilizes him. In essence, Kirby reverses Adam and Eve’s attitudes in his retelling of the Fall. In Kirby’s reversal, Stone-Hand (Adam) is the one who disobeys God, while Eev adopts the more passive stance of the biblical Adam. Thus, Eev is no longer blamed for drawing God’s wrath. Instead, Adam shoulders that burden. But rather than banish them, the Demon Tree tightens the noose.

When Stone-Hand recovers, he and Eev find White-Hair dead. “There is no safety in this place!” says Stone-Hand. He picks up his club, but the Demon Tree incinerates it with fire. “Your companion’s death was unavoidable!” the Tree says, attempting to soothe its captives. “It was due to a radiation leak, which I promptly corrected.” But these words only heighten Stone-Hand’s desperation. He strikes the Tree again, this time with his fists, and does serious damage. The Tree initiates a “survival repair procedure,” while Stone-Hand and Eev race to the edge of the transparent wall, where they find Devil Dinosaur and Moon-Boy. They urge the red T-Rex to break the wall, which he does. The Demon Tree’s power source reaches its limits, and the tree explodes.

Let me put what Kirby does here in the starkest possible terms: In Kirby’s retelling of the Fall, the serpent (Devil Dinosaur) destroys the unjust techno-god, obliterates the Garden and becomes Adam and Eve’s savior. When was the last time you read something this (continued on page 33)

(above) A blatant twist on the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, shown here in pencil form from Devil Dinosaur #7 (Oct. 1978). Although nearing the end of his 1970s Marvel stay, Kirby was managing to block out much of the criticisms from within Marvel and fandom, and go his own way with stories that today stand up better than much of the company’s 1970s output.

All characters TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Unearthed

(next page) Tom Kraft of the WhatIfKirby.com website (check it out!) tracked down these early layouts Kirby did for his never completed Satan’s Six comic. Apparently drawn in the late 1970s, he utilized Brian Bluedragon, one of King Arthur’s knights, as a lead character. Shown on this page is the art that evolved from those layouts, into the eight finished pages that were eventually incorporated by Tony Isabella into Topps Comics’ 1990s Satan’s Six series. Unfortunately, it was hampered by artwork that didn’t mesh well with Kirby’s pages in that first issue.

All characters TM & ©2011 Jack Kirby Estate.

(reprinted with permission from Tony Isabella’s Online Tips, Nov. 7, 1999) t one point in the 1990s, there was talk of optioning Kirby’s Satan’s Six concept for a big budget film. In response to whether he’d be getting a credit line on any movie deal involving Satan’s Six, Tony Isabella—scripter on the Topps Comics series—relayed the following in his online column.

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“Jack Kirby created Satan’s Six. He wrote and penciled eight pages of a never-completed story and also did two model sheets of the characters.

When Topps editor Jim Salicrup asked me to develop and write the Satan’s Six series, those ten pages were my Bible. Although I would have been entitled to include “developed by” in my credit line, as did other creators who worked on the “Kirbyverse” titles, I chose not to.

Chalk it up to my enduring, profound love and respect for Jack and Roz Kirby.

“It was my decision to include those eight pages of Kirby story and art—rewritten ever so slightly—in the first issue of Satan’s Six. Anything that wasn’t in those eight pages or the two pages of model sheets was my creation or interpretation.

Everything I added to the concept, everything I wrote for the series, was all approved by Jack. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only “Kirbyverse” creator who sent Jack and Roz everything I did on the book. It wasn’t something I had to do; it was something I felt I should do. And besides, it gave me the opportunity to talk to Jack and Roz a couple times a month.

The

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Devil’s Due

Jack and Roz only asked for two changes in the four-and-a-half issues of Satan’s Six I wrote.

(The “half ” comes from an 8-pager I wrote for the Secret City Saga #0 giveaway.) I had a character called “Bjorn Again” in one story and Jack felt that might be offensive to some readers; he suggested “Bjorn Happy” and I made the change.

Roz asked that the artwork be brought more in line with the model sheets; that, unfortunately, was not something over which I had any control.

“All along, Jack told me that I should make the book my own. I think I did that, but I also think I remained faithful to Jack’s core concepts. Satan’s Six remains one of the best experiences of my comics career and some of my favorite work.

“Did I retain any rights to my Satan’s Six work? No, I didn’t. It was work-for-hire. As far as I’m concerned, Jack Kirby and his heirs own every word I wrote for the series.

“Would I like to be acknowledged for my contribution to Satan’s Six? Of course I would. I’m very proud of the work I did on that series. But whether or not I receive such credit is completely up to the Kirby family. Jack rarely got his rightful share of credit during his amazingly productive career. If he gets a little more than his rightful share on this one, even at my expense, it’s the least I and every other writer or artist who ever worked on a Kirby creation owes the man.

“Would I like to write more Satan’s Six stories? You can bet the farm on that one. I loved working with those “loveable losers” and would love the chance to work with them again. However, none of my phone calls to Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson have been returned. Sigh.”★

(“Serpent In The Garden” continued from page 31) ambitious in a comic book targeted at kids?

Now even Eev recognizes that Devil Dinosaur has rid the valley of evil. “He has freed us to live the way we were meant to live! By our own wills and ways!”

Stone-Hand adds, “Eev and I shall remember what happened here and tell the tale to all we meet!” The “narrator” enhances the deconstructive power of the story by stating: “The tale of the Demon Tree will be told, of course, many times in many ages, and each time it is told, there will be slight differences and changes, so that the original version will be lost and remain true only to those who took part in it.” So the computer-powered, radiation-leaking, alien intelligence that Devil Dinosaur bests will later be explained as a conflict between early Man and a merciless, yet ultimately benevolent, deity. How ironic.

What’s also fascinating is how Kirby’s story undercuts the magico-religious metaphors that have swirled around computers since their invention. After all, in a world increasingly dependent on digital technologies, the esoteric knowledge and arcane terminology associated with science confers on it an almost religious status. To many, the death of God and the rise of science have made way for a theology of technology. Firmly fixed in the mass imagination through any number of sci-fi films and Star Trek episodes, the archetype of a cyber-god is perhaps most memorably—and humorously recounted—by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who upon purchasing a desktop computer noted that as “an authority

on gods” he was inclined to identify the machine as “an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.”

This is how Kirby equates divine authority with blind allegiance to the Machine, which is why he fuses them together in the Devil Dinosaur storyline.

Kirby’s is not an ambivalent view of God and technology. Rather, he consistently depicts these concepts as fundamentally harmful to the democratic spirit and free will inherent in man. Inversely, Devil Dinosaur and Moon-Boy are romantic symbols of man’s brain and brawn, respectively. For Kirby, they represent a balance rather than a fusion of two extremes. (Of course, Devil is plenty cunning, but Moon-Boy often articulates for the reader the deeper motivations governing his dinosaur companion’s actions.) Together they inhabit the true Paradise, a place free from the manipulation of God and Machine: the Valley of Flame, where Nature can be cruel, but rarely psychopathic. This is why Kirby, in his juvenile literature of Devil Dinosaur, has his characters symbolically trash the TechnoGod’s garden and banish Him in favor of nature and freedom.

Satanic or merely sacrilegious? While it would be difficult to prove that Kirby’s interest in the occult was enough to classify him a hardcore devil-worshipper, there’s enough evidence in Devil Dinosaur to suggest that Kirby’s grievances against God extend beyond routine blasphemy. As a result, I’m comfortable appending the term “Satanic” to Kirby’s powerful, limitless imagination. Or maybe the Devil made him do it! ★ 33

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

As A Genre

adam mcGovern PO Box 257 mt. Tabor, nJ 07878

a regular feature examining kirby-inspired work, by adam mcGovern

JaCkeD In Being an internet-attention-span-length supplement to recent surveys of all things Kirb-“e”

Reboot of the King he broadband Source was perhaps never more supercharged than when the respected HiLoBrow blog (at which, full-disclaimer, I’m a contributor) held an online Kirby Konference with 25 thinkers and artists called “Kirb Your Enthusiasm” (http://hilobrow.com/tag/kirb-enthusiasm/ ). Each essay zoomed in on a single Kirby panel like artifacts of an astro-archaeologist’s collection, to expand exponentially on the concentrated abundance of Kirby’s themes. All panels could be physically enlarged and explored like a microverse, in image as in text examining both the King’s basic circuitry and grand design.

It’s been a golden age for Kirby scholarship, with essays like Ken Parille’s brilliant “Bedlam and Baby” at The Comics Journal site (http://www.tcj.com/ bedlam-and-baby-parables-of-creation-in-jackkirby-and-chris-ware/#comment-4605 ) spanning comics-history spacetime to compare mainstream master Kirby and indie icon Chris Ware and show that the art/pulp atoms can be combusted fruitfully and the worlds of spinnerrack legacy and graphic-lit future can collide without a scratch. (TCJ has also been raising the shipwrecked star-saucers of many an engrossing Kirby interview and account of his long legal dispute with Marvel in the Journal’s online archives, with great fanfare and apt timing during a summer’s worth of Kirby concepts filling much bigger screens, and more widely than even the most-faithful might expect—I’m still curious how the Thor-movie Asgardians seem to have bought themselves a Boom Tube :-) ).

Matching the careful scrutiny of Kirby’s canon in words, 4CP (Four Color Process)’s series “Cosmic Debris: Kirby in the ’70s” mounts a gallery of Kirby’s basic unit of creativity, exalting the ben-day dot to a place alongside the abstract-expressionist drip in the midcentury mass-art pantheon and allowing admiration at the molecular level of the mystic mechanical imprint that all Kirby’s lo-tech panoramas took into account. (http://4cp.posterous.com/tag/ cosmicdebriskirbyinthe70s ) Pulling pack on the viewscreen just a bit from Kirby’s raw materials to his unprocessed originals, What if Kirby (WiK) at http://www.whatifkirby.com/ remains a definitive trove of uncut Kirby graphite and unfinished or unused Kirby concept art, affiliated with invaluable TJKC ally the Jack Kirby Museum, who no doubt have a page in this issue and can otherwise be found at http://www.kirbymuseum.org/.

Of course the web wouldn’t be the web without its inherent remix capabilities and the unbounded capacity to wonder about Kirby what-if’s in each superfan’s imagination and personal imagefile; one portfolio that’s been floating in cyberspace and gathering

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Ward Sutton does every comic that was ever worth reading (top left); Josh Siegel invokes the definition of light and dark in his Surfer & Galactus portrait (lower left) and the mod Mondrian panel-grid for FF (center); Kirby teleports to Stefano Pavan’s drawing board (bottom right).

All images copyright their respective creators.

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legend so long it seems like two world wars ago is the set of fauxKirby covers for fictional Inglourious Basterds tie-in comics you can find here (http://www.chud.com/21569/jack-kirbys-inglouriousbasterds-comic-book-adaptation/ ) and elsewhere; another is the strange parallel-universe pull-list of reinterpreted real-life Kirby covers, in styles from post-it scribble to construction-paper-collage stained glass, at the Covered blog here: http://coveredblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Jack%20Kirby.

This year’s NYC-based alternative comics expo MoCCA Fest was covered in Kirby, as Metropolis’ paper of ephemeral record The Village Voice reflected the fest from every newsstand with cover cartoonist Ward Sutton’s comic-archive mashups including an orange-brick SpongeBen and a Charlie Brown foreshortened into an angular, shiny-skinned Watcher in a perceptive re-sorting of both respected newspaper pop’s and rejected four-color prophecy’s reigning eternal onlookers. (You can still steal it for yourself on The Beat at http://www.comicsbeat.com/2011/ 04/06/ward-sutton-covers-the-village-voice/ ) It was also at MoCCA Fest that artist Josh Siegel (modHero) caught my eye, leading me to a tumblr. account (http://modhero.tumblr.com/ ) full of the most stylish and thoughtful distillations of superheroic spectacle into crisp, minimal essence. The historical sequel to comics’ classic shorthand starts here! For the most tothe-point text counterpart, click to the letters page that talks back at iFanboy’s “Ask…The Demon Etrigan” (http://www.ifanboy.com/ content/articles/ASK_THE_DEMON_ETRIGAN __04_18_2011 ), in which Kirby’s maddest rhymer delivers not the answers you were seeking but the answers you deserve, in the best sessions of Life Imitating Kirby since the Twitter heyday of Hobo Darkseid.

Kirby Goes Broadway (Almost) There’s something to be said for human contact and the physical world if you don’t make a habit of it, so I owe it to myself, literally, to note the staging this past June 4-19 of my live theater production “Funnybook/Tragicbook” at the Comic Book Theater Festival held in Brooklyn’s secret hideout of adventurous performance, The Brick; I owe it to all Kirby fans to leak one representative image (below) from the not-anything-like-Thor half of our presentation, engraved by TJKC BFF Stefano Pavan and colored (for those of you reading this in our, ahem, digital edition) by Mirko Benotto. And with that we’re timed out, true believer—face front and press save! ★

Gallery 2

Graphic Folklore

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hen it comes to taking a concept and turning it on its head, nobody can touch Jack Kirby. Whether it’s a fable, legend, biblical character, or a “new” god of some sort, he spun the kind of folklore that his readers will be passing on for generations. To wit:

(this page) Pencils from Eternals #2 (originally titled Return of the Gods), detailing an entire heretofore unknown race that once ruled Earth. (pages 36-37) Two-page spread from Eternals #3.

The Space Gods have returned, and you better hope they’re happy! (page 38) Jimmy Olsen #143 brought back the iconic Frankenstein and Dracula characters, Kirby style... (page 39) ...while Olsen #144 dredged up the Loch Ness Monster. (pages 40-41) Kirby’s “Jericho” drawing adds a new spin on the Old Testament story of Joshua, who brought the legendary city’s walls tumbling down with sound waves. (pages 42-43) Two pencil pages for Atlas #1, which eventually appeared in DC’s First Issue Special #1. (pages 44-45) The “Young Gods of Supertown” was a quick filler used when DC expanded New Gods to a lengthier format. Had the comic continued under Kirby, we’d likely have seen Fastbak in more than his two appearances. (pages 46-47) New Gods #9 pages, as Lightray shines, and Orion unleashes his fury. (pages 48-49) Merlin, King Arthur, and Morgaine LeFey served as the backdrop for these pages from Demon #1.

Eternals TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc. Jericho TM & ©2011 Jack Kirby Estate.

Demon, Jimmy Olsen, Superman, Fastbak, New Gods, Atlas TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

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We All Live In Happyland

J-F-Kirby In Kirby’s original splash for New Gods #1 (Feb. 1971, below), why didn’t he leave room for the issue’s indicia?

On the opposite page, you can see the published version where the sword behind the goblin’s head doesn’t line up.

Otherwise, it was a pretty clever patch-job by DC’s production department.

New Gods TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

Jack Kirby and the JFK Assassination, by Robert Guffey

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n the Summer 2006 issue of The Jack Kirby Collector, Jack Kirby biographer Mark Evanier reports an intriguing comment once made by Kirby that has far-reaching implications in regards to reassessing the real world influences Kirby brought to bear on his most challenging works of the 1970s.

Let’s begin by quoting Evanier’s reportage in full:

One time, we got to talking about the assassination of President Kennedy. That event had an impact on everyone who was around at the time, at least on their personal life, so I was not surprised to hear Jack say that it had a profound effect on him. My little eyebrows shot up, however, when he said that it had a major impact on his work.

That, I had never sensed… and I still am not sure what he meant by that. He was unable to cite an example. He was definitely not referring to the one short story he did for Esquire years later chronicling the events in the life of Jack Ruby after Kennedy was shot.

With that in mind, I went back one time and reread everything Kirby had done around the time of the Kennedy assassination. The work that would have been on his drawing table around or after 11/22/63 included the Thing-Hulk battle in Fantastic Four #25-26 and the issues soon after, the coming of The Cobra and Mr. Hyde to the Thor strip, X-Men #5 or 6 and The Avengers #5 or 6.

Can you see anything in those stories to suggest one of the creators was deeply moved by the murder of John F. Kennedy? I can’t. Even reading forward a year or two, I don’t get a sense of the turmoil it brought to this nation.

There are no storylines dwelling on [that] kind of upheaval.

In Fantastic Four, Stan and Jack did a tale called “Death of a Hero” in which the father of Sue Storm was killed. It was a moving story but you’d have to stretch farther than Mr. Fantastic Four to connect it to the death of J.F.K. in any way.

And yet, Kirby said what he said and his grief at the death of our 35th president is undeniable. I’m sure he must have put it somewhere into his work. I just can’t figure out where. If I ever do, that may turn out to be my favorite Jack Kirby work.

I understand why Evanier’s “little eyebrows” shot up upon hearing this comment. To get to the bottom of this mysterious statement, my initial instinct probably would have been to do what Evanier did: re-read the stories Kirby was working on at the time of the assassination. The fallacy in this approach, however, is to assume that an event as tragic as the assassination of John F. Kennedy would immediately manifest itself in someone’s work. Artists are like anyone else. Sometimes it can take years to even acknowledge that a tragedy has occurred, much less express one’s grief in a meaningful way.

Two examples, both referring specifically to the JFK assassination: Richard Matheson, author of the classic novels I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, and What Dreams May Come, among numerous others, once gave an interview in which he discussed the genesis of his classic short story “Duel.” This suspense story, published in the April 1971 issue of Playboy, was subsequently adapted by Matheson into a screenplay that became Steven Spielberg’s first film (and, some contend, one of his best). The film, like the story, is entitled Duel, features Dennis Weaver in his most challenging role, and premiered on ABC television in 1971 to great critical acclaim. Many critics contend it’s one of the finest films ever made for television.

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Though the story was not actually written until 1970, Matheson came up with the idea on November 22, 1963. If not for Matheson revealing this in the interview, one would never imagine that the subtext of this relentless thriller involved the JFK assassination. Matheson said that he and a friend were at a golf course in Simi Valley, CA when they heard about the President’s assassination. They abandoned the game immediately and drove home in a deep depression. On the way back home, for no apparent reason, a truck began terrorizing them on the freeway. For awhile it seemed as if the driver wasn’t going to let up, then pulled away and vanished as fast as he’d appeared. This disturbing incident, along with the tragic news about the President, combined to create an overall sense of unease in Matheson. Matheson said he grabbed an envelope and on the back of it jotted down an idea about a

man stalked relentlessly by a semi during a road trip, then forgot about it. Only years later did he stumble across the scrap of paper, remember the momentous events surrounding that day, and begin writing the story. The ubiquitous paranoia that pervades both the story and the film, the sudden sense of one’s tidy universe having been turned upside down, stems from the emotions Matheson and the entire world experienced on 11/22/63. But the important point is that it took Matheson seven years to write the story (McBride 199-200).

Example the second: Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans when Kennedy was assassinated, brought in David Ferrie—a private investigator believed by Garrison to have been involved in the assassination—for questioning on the very day of the murder. Even though there were numerous reasons to follow through on the

investigation of Ferrie, Garrison stood down when the FBI announced publicly that Ferrie was not considered to be a viable suspect (Garrison 10). As dramatized in Oliver Stone’s film JFK, Garrison promptly forgot about the assassination and went about his life as did almost everyone else in America. Not until encouraged by a private conversation with Senator Russell Long, a conversation in which Long expressed great mistrust in the findings of the Warren Commission, did he resume his investigation of Ferrie and his cohorts (Garrison 13-14). The essential point is that even Garrison, a man directly involved in investigating the assassination from the very first day, experienced an emotional delayed reaction that prevented him from seeing the facts of the case until three years after it had occurred.

Therefore, it’s logical to suggest that Kirby might not have been emotionally ready to deal with the true implication of the assassination until many years later. The place to look for Kirby’s reaction to the JFK assassination lay not in his Marvel work of the 1960s, but in his most important work for DC Comics in the early 1970s, one year after Garrison’s highly publicized trial of Clay Shaw, the only man ever brought to trial for the assassination of JFK. It’s likely that Kirby was paying attention to Garrison’s much-publicized trial, just as many Americans were at that time.

The reason that Kirby was “unable to cite an example” to Evanier is probably because no one specific example existed. Kirby was no doubt referring to an overall tonal change in his work, a veritable paradigm shift that must have been as tumultuous to Kirby’s world as Kennedy’s assassination was to the country. Let’s return to Mark Evanier’s words for a moment: “I don’t get a sense [from his early Marvel work] of the turmoil [the JFK assassination] brought to this nation. There are no storylines dwelling on [that] kind of upheaval.”

Turmoil. Upheaval. What Kirby books contain more turmoil and upheaval than his Fourth World stories? The Fourth World is a complex quartet composed of four separate books, The Forever People, The New Gods, Mister Miracle and Jimmy Olsen. The cornerstone book is The New Gods, the first issue of which begins with the apocalyptic sentence, “There came a time when the old gods died!” Just as the subtext of the Matheson story involved our struggle to survive in a world where our sense of order has been tipped over onto its side, the recurrent theme throughout Kirby’s Fourth World stories—a theme not repeated in many other Kirby works—is that of the shallow facade of everyday life being ripped aside to reveal something far darker underneath. Not only does Kirby depict puny human beings trying to maintain their sanity in the face of such sudden life-altering events, but demonstrates that even gods have a hard time adjusting to new realties.

David Lynch, another groundbreaking artist fascinated with the JFK assassination (in fact, he once wrote an unproduced screenplay about JFK’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe based on Anthony Summers’s book Goddess), begins his 1986 noir masterpiece Blue Velvet with a defining scene about post-assassination America: We begin with the establishing shot of a picture-perfect front lawn outside a suburban household surrounded by a white picket fence somewhere in the American South, then track downwards through the black soil 51

and the emerald green grass to reveal an extreme close-up of insects crawling over each other inches beneath the earth. The message of this image is simple and powerful. Lynch has made a career of exploring this basic dichotomy in project after project; he has always been drawn to the darkness lurking just beneath the placid surface of America life.

In his Fourth World stories, Kirby explored the same theme with equal muscularity and sheer audacity many years before Lynch had even begun work on his debut film, the nightmarish Eraserhead, yet another story about what happens when one’s everyday reality does not accrue with the worlds

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inside one’s head.

Compare the aforementioned shot from Blue Velvet with this scene from Forever People #4 (September 1971). The first caption reads: “The Kingdom of the Damned is not a hidden place! It’s in full view of us all! But, it has been rigged by a malignant force so that its tormented inmates are seen and heard—and ignored!!” Juxtaposed with this caption is a full-page illustration, colored in dark shades of blue, of a horde of people screaming in terror while beating on what looks like an impenetrable plexi-glass wall. Considering that the man who drew this scene was a Jew who fought under General Patton during World War II, it’s hardly inappropriate to superimpose images of Dachau and Auschwitz over this scene. When we turn the page we are confronted with a brightly-colored doublepage spread depicting what appears to be a massive amusement park along the lines of Disneyland. The people we saw screaming in the previous scene are trapped behind a window embedded in the mouth of a giant clownish figure while unsuspecting (uncaring?) pedestrians stroll by on their way to another thrill ride. Above the entrance to the park is a single word colored blood-red: “HAPPYLAND.”

At the bottom of the page armored soldiers are observing this scene through a view screen while talking among themselves: “The master ‘scrambler’ is working smoothly! The fools trapped in that image little realize that we are distorting their cries into laughter!”

Consider the obvious parallels: the dark reality underneath juxtaposed with the artificial facade above. Both scenes encapsulate Lynch and Kirby at their best. Both make a conscious decision to interweave humor and horror in a single moment for the purpose of creating a biting commentary on the shallowness of modern society, commentary that is more social realism than either fantasy or satire.

As the story, entitled appropriately “The Kingdom of the Damned,”

continues, we realize that our titular heroes, The Forever People (four demi-gods from another planet who have arrived on Earth to help humanity from behind the scenes), have been kidnapped by the forces of Darkseid, the despotic ruler of a planet called Apokolips and the arch-villain of the Fourth World stories. All five of them—Mark Moonrider, Beautiful Dreamer, Big Bear, Serifan and Vykin the Black—are being tortured in a subterranean dungeon beneath Happyland.

At one point in the book Darkseid is seen strolling through Happyland among the teeming masses. Anywhere else on Earth Darkseid’s ominous visage would instill only fear in people. Here in Happyland everyone ignores him, thinking him to be part of the attraction—everyone, that is, except for one small girl who clutches onto her grandfather’s coat and says, “Grandpa!

That man is scary! Make him go away!”

GRANDPA: “Hush, child! It’s not polite to embarrass strangers!”

GIRL: “I’m afraid, Grandpa!”

GRANDPA: “Why this gentleman is probably in the cast of some show, here!

Aren’t you, sir?”

DARKSEID: “No, Grandpa! I’m the real thing!”

GRANDPA: “This is no time for jokes, friend!

Can’t you see this child is frightened?”

DARKSEID: “Of course, friend!

All young humans recognize the real thing when they see it!”

Grandpa and child scamper away in confusion and fear (respectively) as Darkseid continues to taunt them: “Young humans see me—even in ‘Happyland!’ But you elders hide me with ‘cock and bull’ stories to keep the premises smelling sweet!”

GRANDPA (as he’s running away): “Fool!”

DARKSEID (as the “camera” pulls in for an extreme close-up of Darkseid’s cackling face): “And still, the cosmic joke escapes him! For how can he cope with me—by shunning me—his other face.”

Juxtaposed with this image is a caption that reads: “Darkseid’s massive features crack wide with the laughter of Apokolips! But the sound of it is drowned by the melodious music of ‘Happyland!’” (Kirby, Fourth World Omnibus Volume Two, 25-26) We then cut to a scene where Mark Moonrider is being tortured inside “an unbreakable, transparent cage” while six people (one of them clearly a Navy man on leave) stare on in amusement. From their perspective, Moonrider looks like nothing more than a howling skeleton in a house of horrors.

In the next scene Big Bear is being shot at with real artillery by people who think they’re firing blanks at a robot bear.

In the third torture sequence, the pattern is reversed. The master inquisitor of Happyland, a man named DeSaad, puts Beautiful Dreamer on display in a glass cage.

From her perspective she’s being attacked by hideous monsters when in fact these strange beasts are nothing more than onlookers who think they’re watching a Sleeping Beauty display.

The fourth and final torture sequence involves Serifan being forced to continually push a button with his foot in order to prevent Vykin the Black from having his head torn off by oncoming rollercoaster cars. As Desaad says, “Just don’t get tired! It could be fatal to your friend!”

(Kirby, Fourth World Omnibus Volume Two 26-33).

More than any single issue of the Fourth World series, “The Kingdom of the Damned” encapsulates Kirby’s overarching viewpoint, one that had altered drastically from that which we saw in his equally entertaining—though far less complex—runs on The Mighty Thor and The Fantastic Four at Marvel. In one twenty-two page story, we are introduced to the essential themes: reality is not what it appears to be on the surface, modern day America chooses to blind itself to the darkness lurking beneath an artificial facade that is made bearable only by cheap and distracting amusements

devoid of any meaning, and that when the human race is fortunate enough to be graced with the presence of benevolent gods, they react by torturing them for their own idle pleasures. They’ll even stand in line and pay for the privilege.

Some might suggest that this dark scenario could be interpreted as a parable about the past and not the 1970s present in which Kirby lived. Given Kirby’s direct involvement with World War II, one might assume that Happyland is a stand-in for the concentration camps of Germany and Darkseid an exaggerated

(previous page) Kirby takes a jaded view of what happens behind the facade of Disneyl...

I mean, Happyland, in Forever People #4 (Aug. 1971). (above) The destruction of Happyland, from Forever People #6 (Dec. 1971).

All characters TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

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caricature of Adolf Hitler and other violent dictators that Kirby grew up despising. Though these levels are no doubt present in the text as well, it would be a mistake to simply stop there and analyze no further. There are indicators that point toward a far more relevant interpretation.

Consider Happyland itself. In the early ’70s Kirby had relocated to California after an entire life spent toiling away in the urban jungles of New York.

He had removed himself from his natural environment—an environment he used to great advantage in all of his Marvel stories of the 1960s, recreating the familiar metropolis into a strange environment as mythological as Middle Earth or Oz, a twisted Wonderland where almost anything was possible, anchoring his fantastic leaps of the imagination in the grittiness of streets we could all recognize. To uproot himself and move to the suburbs of Southern California must have been quite a shock.

It’s easy to imagine a displaced Kirby taking the family to Disneyland soon after their arrival and being disturbed by the gaudy horror of it all.

Whereas most people would simply see all the smiling faces, Kirby chose to see the people screaming just below the surface. This must have been a defining moment for a man who had spent the past decade growing increasingly more uncomfortable with his role as a virtual slave to a corporate entity that was bleeding all of the best ideas out of his head with no real recompense. Imagine living through the trenches of Europe fighting for freedom and democracy only to discover that what you thought was freedom was just an illusion. At the end of the day the dictators were still in charge, except they didn’t advertise themselves quite so obviously as they had in Europe

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in the 1930s and ’40s. In America, post-WWII, the new breed of dictators smiled and shook your hand and pretended to be on your side while picking your pockets clean with the other hand. And if you complained you were accused of being as disloyal as a Communist wishing to defect to the Land of the Free. The horrors of the Fourth World were those aspects of modern day America that repulsed Kirby, the reality that lurked beneath the lies his generation had been fed for decades.

With The Forever People, Kirby created a group of young people— Beautiful Dreamer, in particular— who have the ability to see through illusions and use them to their own advantage. The fact that they are intended to be a hyper-real representation of the peace movement of the late ’60s and ’70s is a testament to the mind expansion Kirby must have been undergoing all throughout the previous decade. Some of the characters Kirby helped bring to life, such as The Hulk and Spider-Man, were being hailed by the college crowd as counter-cultural figures even in the early ’60s when they first appeared.

Whereas these figures embodied the ideals of the ’60s more by happy accident than strategic design, with the Fourth World series Kirby clearly decided to reflect his own world in a more direct way. He

aligns himself with the new generation, telling stories that question the need for war while also glorifying those who must fight it when the enemy leaves no other choice.

In The Forever People and the other Fourth World books Kirby is documenting the paradigm shift not only in himself but his entire generation as well, everyone who lived through the horrors of World War II fighting for democracy only to see their own children drafted into a war revealed to be more and more absurd and meaningless as the years wore on and the lies grew thinner and thinner—just as thin as the lies Kirby was being fed at Marvel at the same exact time in regards to empty promises (most notably of profit sharing and royalties) from those who signed his measly paycheck every week while growing rich off Kirby’s creations.

In November of 1963, just as the Marvel Universe was getting off the ground thanks primarily to the innovations of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, the youngest President of the United States was shot dead in the streets. Having grown up in the violent, mob-ridden streets of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1930s, it would be difficult to imagine that Kirby wouldn’t recognize all the earmarks of a gangland hit when he saw it and understand—at least on a subconscious level—what really happened in America that day. But if he wasn’t able to put the pieces of the puzzle together immediately, surely those pieces would have risen to the surface and coalesced into something terrible and new the second he freed himself from the yoke of the Marvel offices, a corporate environment that must have felt as repressive as the gestalt of Nixon’s America. (This is not an unfair deduction, considering the fact that Kirby moved all the way to the West Coast to escape Marvel’s influence, among other reasons.)

In his sunny new environment Kirby set to work sorting through the debris of the 1960s, of his

entire generation, and recombining the shattered remnants into a whole new world that exposed the old lies, the old gods, for exactly what they were: false idols. Thus, organized religion is revealed to be nothing more than another form of mind control in The Forever People #3 in which we’re introduced to the smoothtalking manipulations of a revivalist-style evangelist named Glorious Godfrey. In Mister Miracle #3 a pharmaceutical drug transforms an entire building filled with a group of average Americans—who are described as being “ordinarily a conventional, self-disciplined lot”—into a pack of homicidal maniacs (Kirby, Fourth World Omnibus Volume Three 375). In The New Gods #3 a man who appears to be nothing more than a paralyzed Vietnam vet, an innocent victim of a war gone wrong, turns out to be the living manifestation of Death itself, perhaps implying that no man who fights an unjust war can be considered entirely innocent. In New Gods #11, in what is one of the great plot twists of American comic books (good enough to be appropriated by George Lucas for his Star Wars films five years later), the main hero of the Fourth World books, Orion of New Genesis, is revealed to be the son of the villain, Darkseid. Orion’s struggle throughout the books is not to reconcile these two halves of his personality, but merely to acknowledge that he has a dark side in the first place.

Orion’s self-discovery mirrors the journey that America itself was taking at that time as it slowly came face to face with its own shattered self-image in the wake of every disastrous foreign policy decision made after Kennedy’s premature death.

By the early ’70s Kirby had awakened to the dark reality that many other Americans of his generation were gradually waking up to, thanks to the tireless efforts of a worldwide peace movement: that America could no longer be seen as a benevolent big brother righting the wrongs of the world, that the seemingly endless bloodbath in Vietnam didn’t represent a battle for democracy but was instead little more than an excuse to make a small elite wealthy off a very profitable war, that the President’s repeated promises to end America’s involvement in Southeast Asia were as empty as the dead glare in Richard Nixon’s deeply set, beady eyes.

That Darkseid’s clever, strategic manipulations are far closer to Nixon’s covertly authoritarian regime than the overt boot-inyour-face of an Adolf Hitler from thirty years before is made explicit by this comment from Mark Evanier in his afterword to the fourth volume of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus. Here Evanier comments on Kirby’s difficulties in returning to the Fourth World epic while working on its concluding chapter, The Hunger Dogs, in 1985: He had trouble getting back into his story. Time had passed, the world had changed, Jack had changed. Issues that had mattered to him in 1971 were no longer front and center, clear and present.

The forward-thinking Kirby, the man who lived in the Now and Beyond, had trouble looking backwards and reconnecting with his characters. They might not have changed, but the personal references on which he’d based them—the people, the issues—had changed. In ’71, Jack had invested his vast distaste for Richard Nixon when he wrote dialogue for Darkseid. Now, Nixon was a distant memory, Jack’s anger towards him had abated, and it was tough to rekindle or rethink the passions. (376-78) In the early ’70s Kirby’s sympathies were with The Forever People, but he’s too much of a realist to think that Beautiful Dreamer’s power to conjure illusions would be enough—by itself—to stop an enemy as intractable as Darkseid. In the last issue of The Forever People (#11) Kirby mercifully removes them from the main battle and allows them a respite in a solitary paradise where, we assume, they remained till the end of their lives. Just as young people all over the country were “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out” in the immortal words of Timothy Leary, The Forever People pull the ultimate “drop-out” move and retire to a kind of cosmic commune in an alternate dimension cut off from the strife that is the rest of the universe. Meanwhile, Kirby’s savage warrior, Orion, is left to perform the dirty deed of removing Darkseid from power.

Ironically, by the time we reach the conclusion of the tale in The Hunger Dogs, Darkseid has become an insignificant shadow of his former terror-inducing glory, made irrelevant by a mechanized dystopia he himself put into place. Most of the power seems to be in the hands of a deformed child thoroughly conversant with the computers necessary to run Darkseid’s empire, a child Darkseid seems to fear. Despite Evanier’s comments about the difficulty Kirby had giving the Fourth World a proper ending, The Hunger Dogs must be considered a clever and darkly humorous commentary on the ultimate effects of fascism on the dictators themselves. Kirby’s Fourth World is a complex epic that evolved to match the changes not only in its creator but also in the world that surrounded him, the world from which these ostensibly fanciful creations emerged.

In the final analysis, The Fourth World could be said to be about a nation coming to grips with its own Jungian shadow, a shadow that first reared its insubstantial visage for many Americans the day the old gods died on November 22, 1963. ★ WORKS CITED Evanier, Mark. “Afterword.” Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus Volume Two. New York: DC Comics, 2007.

Evanier, Mark. “Jack F.A.Q.s.” The Jack Kirby Collector #46 (Summer 2006): 22.

Garrison, Jim. On the Trail of the Assassins. New York: Warner, 1991.

Kirby, Jack. “The Kingdom of the Damned!” Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus Volume Two. New York: DC Comics, 2007.

12-35.

Kirby, Jack. “The Paranoid Pill!” Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus Volume One. New York: DC Comics, 2007. 363-85.

McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. Cambridge: De Capo Press, 1999.

(previous page) In many ways, Forever People had a much darker tone than the other Fourth World books, and features some of Darkseid’s most menacing moments; ironic since the lead characters were so positive and idealistic. It’s perhaps the perfect statement about our country’s loss of innocence following the death of JFK and the tumult of the 1960s. (below) An unused cover for the 1984 New Gods reprint series. Compare Darkseid here to the previous page; it’d been over a decade since Kirby last used him at DC. His features had noticeably softened and smoothed over that time, and one could argue that Kirby’s attitudes and motivations had as well, leading to a Hunger Dogs conclusion that accurately represented Jack’s sensibilities as well as his earlier Fourth World work had during its era.

All characters TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

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Foundations

A Man & His Dog

Commentary, art reconstruction, and color by Chris Fama

have to confess to not knowing much about this story from Picture News #1 (Jan. 1946). John Morrow asked me to restore it for this issue, and that was the first time I ever saw it.

When I was looking at it, I guessed it was from the Blue Bolt period of Simon and Kirby’s catalog—something from the early ’40s; the line work was really loose, the layouts hadn’t solidified… it wasn’t even clear to me which of the two drew it. It was only when I sat down to write this introduction that I discovered it was post WWII work!

Not too sure how S&K picked up this fourpager in their schedule, but to me it seems clear they were trying for a more illustrative style, perhaps by request. ★

I

(All you digital subscribers might find it a bit odd that the colorist decided a collie should be pink, but we kept it faithful here to the original. Who knows?

Maybe this was a prototype for Devil Dinosaur.)

TM & ©2011 the respective owner.

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TM & ©2011 the respective owner.

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58

IF YOU LOVE CLASSIC S&K, DON’T MISS THE

SIMON AAND ND KKIRBY: IR RBY BY: SUPERHERO SUPERHEROES OES • Thrill to Stuntman, Fighting American, The Black Owl, Captain 3-D, The Fly, Private Strong and many more!

• Including never-before seen stories and brilliantly restored masterpieces.

• Featuring a brand-new introduction

by Neil Gaiman!

THE BEST BEST OF SIMON AAND ND KIRBY KIRBY BY • Spans the entire two-decade partnership of The Dream Team.

• Covers every genre from Superheroes to Wartime to Horror to Romance.

• 240 brilliantly restored full-color pages and deluxe large format.

TM & ©2011 the respective owner.

SIGNED AND AN ND NUMBERED SIMON AND D KIRBY KIRBY

BY PRINTS Titan Books presents exclusive, high-quality limited edition numbered prints signed by Joe Simon, available at www.titanbooks.com © 2010 Joseph H. Simon and the Estate of Jack Kirby

What’s Old

Is New Again!

Incidental Iconography J

All characters TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc..

ack Kirby pulled from any number of sources for inspiration, and the myths and legends of old were not to be looked over. You may have seen something about his take on Thor lately in a theater. One of his lesser known updates to an old legend is that of Prester John, who he’d written in to Fantastic Four #54.

The original Prester John legends started becoming popular in the 12th century, but had probably been circulating for generations prior. There are many conflicting stories about the character, but he’s generally depicted as a just and honorable king that ruled a small Christian empire amid the Muslims of Eastern or Central Asia. Because he ruled in such a “strange” and “exotic” land by European standards, he was frequently also given many magical treasures, everything from a mirror that was able to see anywhere, to the Fountain of Youth.

Prester John’s appearance in the Fantastic Four stems from the Human Torch’s quest to release his girlfriend Crystal and the Inhumans, who were trapped behind a Negative Barrier. The Torch stumbled onto an ancient crypt quite by accident and discovered the sleeping Prester John in the tattered remains of his armor.

The bulk of his armor is drawn as chain mail. Though first invented around 400 B.C., it remained in use for centuries. Certainly by the 12th century it was not uncommon for protection—it is repeatedly shown in the Bayeux Tapestry from around that time—though people began favoring plate armor in the 1200s.

Interestingly, though, Prester John is presented much more serenely in other, older depictions, often in kingly robes and cloaks.

Jack’s interpretation of Prester John, at first blush, seems unique from any other illustrations of him. Outside comics, he’s almost always shown with a long beard and a stately crown. One 13th century depiction, The Battle of Gengis Khan and Prester John, does feature John in chain mail with a red tunic over it, but the helmet and crown are wildly different than what Jack drew. In fact, the helmet Jack designed does not seem to have a direct counterpart in medieval history. It does bear some similarity to a spangenhelm design, some of which sport eye protection, but they also tend to use chain mail to protect the neck and not the solid plating Jack drew.

There were two Anglo-Saxon cemeteries dating to the 6th or 7th century excavated in Sutton Hoo, near Suffolk, England in 1939. There were a great many artifacts uncovered there and it was a significant find that helped fill in some gaps of history from around a period previously clouded by legends. One of the objects found was an elaborate ceremonial helmet (above left). It featured a fairly solid construction around the entire head not unlike the one Jack’s Prester John wears, though it also covers the mouth area as well.

The mask, I think, bears mentioning here because part of the ornamentation includes a bushy mustache—much like Jack’s Prester John. It’s impossible to say for sure that Jack drew inspiration from this mask but, for a little context, excavation on the Sutton Hoo site was re-opened in 1965, not long before Fantastic Four #54 would have been started. General interest in the excavation would have been piqued again, and news stories most certainly would have passed by Jack’s eyes.

The accompanying photo of the helmet ran as a full page in Life magazine.

Prester John’s appearance in FF #54 is abrupt both in his introduction and his departure. He pops on to the scene with little fanfare on page 11 and, though he remains a significant presence throughout the remainder of the issue (his torn garments miraculously repairing themselves by page 12) he is absent and unmentioned in #55. In fact, he remains absent from comics entirely for nearly a decade until his Evil Eye is used as the main plot point for Steve Englehart’s Avengers/Defenders War in 1973.

[Editor’s Note: Interestingly, the Evil Eye is similar in design to the wand Kirby included in his 1966 “Ramses/Black Sphinx” concept drawing, shown here.

FF #54 shipped in 1966, so we’re not sure which came first.]

As shown in the Kirby Museum Newsletter last issue, another piece entitled “The Golden Age of Prester John” was found stapled to a pitch entitled Three Presentations. It also included two story premise sketches showing John investigating a UFO base and encountering Count Dracula. The character design is very similar to his Marvel version, though Jack’s removed the fur-lined sleeves and trimmed down the helmet a bit. Jack’s also given him a “demon horse” and some sort of feathered, saw-toothed lizard/bird. Though these pieces are undated, his accompanying Raam piece (seen last issue) is marked 1972. These concepts don’t seem to have gone anywhere—if they were done for DC, where Jack was doing the bulk of his work at that time, it’s possible that “The Golden Age of Prester John” was rejected for the similarity to the Marvel character.

Jack returned to Prester John one final time in 1975, after he returned to Marvel, by drawing the cover to Marvel Two-In-One #12. John appears much as he did in Fantastic Four #54, so it seems likely Jack was given some reference material.

Though inker Frank Giacoia did make a few alterations from Jack’s pencils (seen in TJKC #44, and a detail atop this page), he left Prester John’s design intact.

Though Jack spent little time working on the character, and he was neglected for many years, Prester John found some notoriety as he became a regular character in Cable & Deadpool back in 2005, sporting much the same iconography Jack gave him decades earlier. ★ Sean blogs at http://kleefeldoncomics.blogspot.com, and is the author of Comic Book Fanthropology available from www.comicbookfanthropology.com.

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Ramses TM & ©2011 Jack Kirby Estate.

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

by Sean Kleefeld

Influencees (right) A recent portrait of Pasko by Kobra collaborator Michael Netzer (then “Nasser”). (below) Original art from Kobra #1 showing D. Bruce Berry’s lettering of Kirby’s original, unused dialogue, which got covered by pasted-up balloons (see next page). Note the redrawn face (by Pablo Marcos) and the unretouched Kirby face in the last panel. (next page, bottom) Cover to Kobra #2.

Marty Pasko Interview

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke [Martin Pasko was nicknamed “Pesky Pasko” by legendary DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, for whom he wrote for many years. He is a veteran writer and/or story-editor in a diverse array of media, including nonfiction and television, working on such shows as Roseanne and cult favorites Twilight Zone and Max Headroom. He helped translate many comics to TV animation, including The Tick, Cadillacs & Dinosaurs,”and Batman: The Animated Series, for which he won a 1993 Daytime Emmy® Award. He is also a co-writer of the animated feature Batman: Mask of The Phantasm. Pasko has worked for many comics publishers as well, writing “Superman” in several media, including TV animation, newspaper syndication, and webisodes as well as comics, and co-created the revamp of “Dr. Fate” (shown on next page, from First Issue Special #9) that is the basis of the character’s current, long-lived incarnation. He also got the thankless task of taking over Kirby’s Kobra comic after Kirby left DC, which is the main subject of this interview, which was conducted in May 2011. It was copyedited by Martin, who currently blogs about comics and the entertainment industry at http://martinpasko.blogspot.com/]

Kobra, Dr. Fate TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: When did you first encounter Kirby’s work?

MARTY PASKO: I first read The Fantastic Four when I was really, really small, and, perhaps because my own family was a bit dysfunctional, the book really turned me off (all that bickering). I was used to the DC approach, which was all very benign, with friends who didn’t argue with each other much. It was unrealistic, but benign. And seeing the Fantastic Four—this was in the first ten issues or so—at that young age… I reacted badly to it. I didn’t like it at all. I really wasn’t that aware of the art. At that age, it was always more a matter of the story to me. I think that’s always been a bias of mine, being a writer. To some extent my attitude has always been ‘a good story can always survive bad art’ but it doesn’t work the other way around. Until I was much older, I wasn’t art literate enough to appreciate Jack’s work—the dynamism and the ways in which he would take liberties with conventional anatomy but make it work.

It was also seeing his work in the period in which he was inked by Joe Sinnott that changed my mind. I really got hooked by the imagination at work in that stuff.

That’s when I reassessed Fantastic Four, in 1968, when Jack was doing most of the plotting, so it really was his fertile imagination at work that hooked me. A few years later, when he took over Jimmy Olsen, that’s where my real exposure to Kirby as a comics reader (as opposed to writer) happened, because I was primarily a DC reader rather than a Marvel one.

TJKC: What was DC like in the mid-’70s?

MARTY: I worked primarily for editor Julie Schwartz but I also wrote for Murray Boltinoff, Joe Orlando, and Gerry Conway. I loved working with Gerry, especially on the First Issue Special revamp of Dr. Fate with Walt Simonson.

Gerry had a deal that assumed he would write all the titles he edited, but he soon realized he had bitten off a little more than he could chew, I think. And he admitted as much. So that’s why his office became a really great place for younger, less experienced writers to go looking for work: Gerry quickly evolved a system whereby he would do the first issue of something as a writer and then another writer would pick it up. His first issue would function like a “pilot” script. He did that with Man-Bat— he did the first issue with Steve Ditko and then handed it off to me with the second issue, with art by Pablo Marcos. He did that with Freedom Fighters and Metal Men, too. Except for Metal Men, where Walt Simonson stuck around for a few months, those second issues usually didn’t have the same quality of art as they had in the first. Then60

Publisher Carmine Infantino cancelled the Man-Bat title after the second issue, and after that it stated getting harder and harder for Gerry to hang onto artists. They didn’t want to turn down other work and make a commitment to DC because they felt that cancellation was imminent at any moment, often capriciously and without reference to sales figures.

By the time Gerry had to do Kobra, Jack had already left the company. It had been planned as a

one-shot for First Issue Special before Carmine cancelled that title, and the 17 pages or so were left over in inventory.

Carmine basically threw this thing, originally called King Kobra, at Gerry and said, “Here, do something with this.” Then Carmine scheduled it as a monthly ongoing.

Gerry had the feeling that, because it was a Kirby title, it wasn’t going to be long for this world, so he didn’t even bother doing the reworking of the first issue himself. He just handed it off to me and that was as close as I got to working with Jack in comics. It was a collaboration after the fact.

Gerry had decided the Corsican Brothers take-off was the only thing that he really wanted to preserve from Jack’s King Kobra. The twin brothers were 65 in the original version and Gerry thought the built-in logical flaw there was that if they had a psychic link like the original Corsican Brothers—one is hurt and the other feels the pain— how has the Scotland Yard detective, who became the Jason Burr character, been unable to locate Kobra all these years? The set-up in the original book was that he had been searching for his twin brother for six decades because he knew his twin brother was evil. We had to contrive a way for that psychic link to have been there for a shorter amount of time, to rationalize the premise that, at the point of attack in that first issue, Jason was learning about Kobra’s existence for the first time, as opposed to having known about it and been trying to find Kobra. I think Jack, in his original concept, modeled Jason Burr (that’s what we called him; he was called something else in the original) on Nayland Smith and was thinking of Kobra as a kind of East Indian version of Fu Manchu.

To answer your question about what it was like working at DC, it was very chaotic in those days.

This was right after the formation of Warner Communications and right after DC had moved into 75 Rockefeller Plaza, and just about a year or two before Carmine got fired. Kobra was one of the last things done on Carmine’s watch.

TJKC: Did you welcome the assignment? And were you given carte blanche to do what you wanted? You obviously had the art…

MARTY: Yes, and Gerry ordered some changes to the art, too, but it didn’t match the Kirby art terribly well. Did I relish the assignment? To be honest, at

that point, I was happy to be working on it because Julie couldn’t keep me busy enough, so anytime Gerry threw something my way I was happy to do it. Quite frankly, the alternative was to write another horror mystery anthology script for either Joe Orlando or Murray Boltinoff, whom I didn’t find it particularly easy to work with. And those kinds of jobs were always more labor intensive because, for some reason, those editors required a pitch in the form of a written plot synopsis before committing to the assignment. Whereas, with Julie and Gerry, you could just go in and spitball the story, and after a half-hour you had it, you took your notes home and wrote the script, which was much easier.

What Gerry did was hand me Jack’s original art and say, “What can you do with this?” I told him I didn’t think the story made a lot of sense. It was a toss-off. Years later, Jack admitted as much to me.

“Oh, that,” he said. “King Kobra. Yeah, I had to fulfill my contract.” He said, “I think I penciled it in two days.” Seventeen or 18 pages in two days—that just astonished me. Anyway, all we did, basically, was have stats made from the foreign edition, because they had already shot the negatives for it, and what they did with the foreign editions would be to opaque out—they don’t do it anymore, as comics haven’t used negatives like that in 20 or 30 years—but at that time, they would opaque out all the lettering for the foreign publishers, and these overseas subcontractors would substitute lettering in the respective foreign languages. So I had stats of those made up, so I wouldn’t be influenced by the script, and I just created a whole new story, retrofitting it to the existing art. We even moved some panels around.

The only people hearing this story who have been dismayed by it have been hardcore fans of Jack Kirby’s work, and over the years they’ve said, “You’ve mutilated Kirby’s vision!”

And so on and so forth. So I was very, very happy to have caught up with Jack at Ruby-Spears and found out it was okay with him.

TJKC: You made an effort not to look at the original dialogue in the story as submitted by Jack?

MARTY: Exactly.

TJKC: Did you do much shuffling with the story?

MARTY: There was stuff that came in from left field in the original story. There was an alien spacecraft.

Jack obviously had something in mind to pay off later on in the run, but since there was only the one issue, since Carmine had cut him off after the one issue, we had no idea where it was intended to go, so we devised an entirely new rationale for what it was and why it was there.

I don’t think that Gerry believed we would do more than two or three issues. And, in point of fact, Carmine did cancel it after the fourth issue, but then Jenette Kahn came in and the first thing she did was revive it and it was given to Paul Levitz to edit. A lot of the inventory jobs in the mystery titles were done that way. What an inventory job was, was, if a story didn’t work out for some reason, Joe Orlando would shelve it. Once a year, the accountants would come in and have to document the intended write-offs, and Joe and Murray Boltinoff would be under pressure to rework and publish as much of that stuff as possible. So they would often have their assistants write new dialogue to existing 61

art. What I often did, because I started at DC in ’73 in the Junior Bullpen program, was to write new dialogue for finished art, where Joe thought the story or the dialogue wasn’t any good but the art was too good to waste (I redialogued early jobs by Howard Chaykin and Jeff Jones that way; the art was great but the scripts, by Bob Kanigher, were incomprehensible). Often I’d use the technique of throwing away the script or whiting out the lettering and build a totally new story off what the art “suggested.” So I’d had some experience with that technique and used it with Kobra.

We could disregard Jack’s dialogue because—and I hate to say this because it’s all so negative, but we’re talking about stuff that literally didn’t make much sense—in Kobra, the reason the pages didn’t make any sense was not so much flaws in the story itself, as Jack had things in mind that he was probably setting up, that were going to pay off later, but which he never got a chance to explore. So we didn’t know where he was going. We had a mandate to take control. Jack wasn’t coming back, so we decided, for example, that the alien spacecraft would actually be Kobra’s ship, which we had redrawn to include the cobra head motif. And then, to make the ending work, I had to work backward to create set-ups, to establish certain elements earlier in the story. That required deletion of some panels and art extension to cover the deleted real estate, and so on and so forth.

Of course, we felt we needed to make the two main characters younger, because the core audience wouldn’t care about protagonists their grandfathers’ age. All the heads were redrawn, so the finished Kobra #1 is very clunky looking.

TJKC: Was Pablo Marcos in the area to come into the office to make art changes?

MARTY: These were in the days before DC developed its Editorial Co-ordinator system. Talent was still being turned into a wishbone by competing editors. For example, I often got caught in little battles between Murray Boltinoff and Julie Schwartz. Each of them wanted a piece of me. Of course, in a situation like that, you’re very grateful to be in demand, but when you get two deadlines at the same time, you don’t know what to do. So that’s why they built that whole Editorial Co-ordinator system.

But before they did that, every editor functioned kind of like a fiefdom and would have his own talent. Like, in Julie’s books, you always saw the same writers and artists because he would keep them busy so nobody else would get them.

Well, Gerry was sort of forced into a defensive crouch and had to do the same thing. That’s how Pablo Marcos got involved. Pablo was one of Gerry’s go-to guys, the way Curt Swan, as the Superman artist, or Irv Novick, who’d done Batman for so long, were for Julie. As I said, Pablo did the second issue of Man-Bat (shown below), and he did the first two or three issues of Freedom Fighters. In almost all of Gerry’s titles from this period, you’ll see Pablo, because he was there. At that time, before there was FedEx or any of the technology for transmission of scripts or artwork that you have today, you had to be in New York to work in the business in the first place.

And the people who got the most work were the ones who were always coming up to the office, making their presence known, by personally picking up and delivering work instead of sending messengers.

At 75 Rock, they had a bullpen where you could actually use company typewriters if you needed to. Cary Bates came in every single day, only with his own portable typewriter, to work in the office. That’s how he would get the work.

A writer would fall behind, there’s a hole in the schedule, something would come up…

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For many, many years, even the Editorial Co-ordinating system worked that way.

You could walk into the office of Pat Bastienne, who was Dick Giordano’s assistant, and say, “Is there something you need?” She would go down the list and see what was behind schedule, where someone was getting in trouble. The whole business was so completely different than the way it operates now, kids working right now can’t imagine. Anyway, the point is, Pablo didn’t redraw Jack’s stuff because he could draw in a style that looked anything like Jack’s. Pablo got the job because he was the first warm body Gerry tripped over. The mismatch, and the ugliness of the resulting art, was horrendous.

TJKC: So you sat down with Jack’s original story. Did you think, “Yeah, there’s stuff I can work with here”? Did you cotton particularly to the Corsican Brothers idea? Did you see it in a positive light?

MARTY: The Kobra cult was a very interesting concept. I saw a lot of potential in it, but basically Gerry and I decided to do something very, very different from what Jack had. I had this sense that this was not something that would ever—you have to understand: this is how it came to me. Somebody looks at me and says, “This is not a guy on his best day. We need to publish this nevertheless. Try to save it.” It’s kinda hard to see such a thing in a positive light, as you put it, when it’s already been handed to you as if it were a turkey, something that comes to you as a fait accompli that way. If I’d felt more positive about it, I wouldn’t have been doing my job, which was to try to fix a train wreck. The editor and the publisher (in absentia) had said, essentially, “This is not publishable in its present form. But we need to publish it nevertheless. We need to amortize the expense of this book.”Also, Gerry was under pressure to come up with a whole bunch of new titles to add to the schedule. Kobra #1 was one job that helped address that mandate.

Another notoriously awful lox that did so was an inane thing called Secret Society of Super Villains.

TJKC: Was there ever a thought not to ignore Jack’s cues for upcoming stories, but expand on them?

MARTY: The simplest way to put it is: Carmine didn’t like it and he couldn’t absorb the overhead that went into it in First Issue Special because FIS had already been cancelled. It had been sitting around for most of a year, gathering dust, and now Gerry, also to fulfill the terms of his deal, had to edit a certain number of titles a month to justify the amount of money he was being paid. It was an odd freelance editing arrangement. Carmine made lots of those kinds of deals in that day, with guys like Joe Kubert and Joe Simon and Bob Kanigher and so on, and it was one of the things the new incoming management team in 1975 (Kahn, Orlando and Levitz) did away with. These freelance editors had essentially been packaging their books, and Gerry had a similar deal. He was under pressure to produce new product; Carmine didn’t like Kobra in its original form and he threw it at Gerry basically and said, “You want a new title? Make it this! But fix it.”And Gerry would sit there, going, “What do you mean, ‘fix it’?”

Whether Gerry had to pitch his take on Kobra to Carmine for Carmine’s sign-off,

I don’t know. I wasn’t privy to that; I was just a freelancer. What I don’t clearly remember, but what I am pretty sure was the case, was that Gerry gave me a list of bullet points of things that didn’t work about King Kobra in his opinion—or in Carmine’s opinion; I don’t know where the notes came from. What I do remember is that I instinctually agreed with everything on that list. It might have been verbal. I don’t remember. I don’t have those notes. I do remember a moment in Gerry’s office where he and I were kind of finishing each other’s sentences in dissecting what didn’t work about it. I think with the possible exception of the failure to make much of an effort to match Jack’s art—which was kind of strange because the second issue of Kobra was penciled by Chic Stone and he could have mimicked Jack (as indeed he did in the very early days of Marvel, also when he had been one of Jack’s inkers).

Had they brought Chic in one issue earlier, that book would not have looked as bad as it did. But for some reason that didn’t occur to them at the time.

TJKC: Were you a part of the selection of subsequent artists?

MARTY: No. TJKC: Was Gerry looking for Kirbyesque artists? Subsequent pencilers included Keith Giffen, Pat Gabrielle, Rich Buckler…

MARTY: Gerry would react very strongly when things wouldn’t work out. He would blame himself. He was very conscientious that way. And he would say, “I won’t let this happen again.” Sometimes that would be turned into an overreaction. Y’see, I wasn’t in the room, but when Gerry handed the art boards to Pablo to lightbox and create the patches for the art on the first issue, my guess is that Gerry told Pablo to make it look like Kirby. And Pablo did but Gerry’s mistake was to let Pablo ink the patches himself with all kinds of feathering, all kinds of very detailed rendering that went into the job and was wildly at odds with Kirby as inked by D. Bruce Berry, who wasn’t one of Jack’s best inkers.

Jack was always funny about inkers, too. I think he recognized that Joe Sinnott made a tremendous contribution. But I never got the feeling that Jack had a lot of respect for inkers, that he really didn’t think that they mattered. A lot of people thought that Roz, who inked a lot of his stuff at various times over the years, was not terribly proficient, and there would be editors asking Jack not to let Roz near the pages. Let me put it this way: I don’t think that Jack was fussy about his inkers the way some pencilers are. As you probably know, Frank Miller went through a very, very, very long period where no one was allowed to ink his work except Dick Giordano or Klaus Janson. That’s the opposite end of the spectrum. I don’t think Jack ever really cared. Consequently, D. Bruce Berry may not have been, let us say, capable of capturing all the subtleties and nuances.

TJKC: That’s one way to put it, Marty. [chuckles] I wonder if Jack didn’t like the distraction of the inking being called to his attention.

It seemed as if he didn’t look at the published books very much.

Whatever job was on his drawing table was the one he was most concerned with. Did you actually get criticism from people about your work on Kobra?

MARTY: Over the years, I have been asked from time to time, “Kobra: What’s up with that?” I was like, “Excuse me?”

“Specifically, that first issue. Why was the art all pasted up?” So I have to go through the explanation I’ve just given you. Recently there was a Kobra trade paperback because there had been some editorial initiative to revitalize the character, who was always intended to be DC’s answer to Doctor Doom. That was what Gerry saw the character of Kobra being and that was what Paul Levitz and Jenette Kahn were very supportive of. That was what they thought the line needed. Paul even talked Jenette into “uncancelling” it (which is why, I think, there was a gap of a couple of months between the fourth issue, which was the last issue with the old logo, and the subsequent one. One of the things they did when Paul took it over was to put a new logo on it).

I’ve had to tell this story even to DC because there was some internal dispute about who created the character. They ultimately

put out a trade paperback collecting the original run and I have been acknowledged as the co-creator of the character as opposed to just Kirby.

TJKC: Steve Sherman, Jack’s assistant at the time, conceived the original story.

MARTY: We felt obliged to keep all of the credits of the personnel who were involved with the book originally. So, Pablo, with the redrawing of the heads, my scripting, and Gerry’s editing were the only new things in the mix. I can tell you I can’t recall who scripted the thing originally… I guess that was Steve Sherman?

TJKC: Steve Sherman and Jack Kirby together.

MARTY: Steve trying to fix Jack’s dialogue, okay. But there isn’t a single word from that original job left in Kobra #1 at all. That I know. It was all… as I said: I waited a couple of days to forget what I had read, so I wasn’t influenced by it at all, and I came back to the pages cold. Gerry and I worked out a backstory. I pitched different concepts to him, but I’m pretty sure the Corsican Brothers connection was in the original story because there are pages we didn’t touch that have the Nayland Smith-type character juxtaposed with Kobra, where he learns the secret when Kobra places a hand over a flame. That was in the original.

So that made me believe… even if Gerry wanted to get rid of that, it would have been very, very difficult to do so because there was only so much time we had to redo the art.

TJKC: The Corsican Brothers angle was important to the storyline, correct?

MARTY: Oh, very much so. We tried not to repeat the same beats as we went forward, but, yeah, I mean, we kept going back to the idea that any injury sustained in any kind of action by Kobra would be felt by Jason Burr. It was something that ran through all of the seven issues and what was going to be #8, which we ran in Five-Star Super-Hero Spectacular, the last pre-Crisis Kobra story. At that point we knew it was being cancelled for good, so—going back to your thing about the Corsican Brothers—the springboard for that story was Jason Burr decides to make the ultimate sacrifice and kill himself in the hope that that will kill Kobra also.

As I recall, it was one of those endings where, y’know, the shadow of Kobra falls upon the grotto into which Burr has fallen.

It’s clear that it didn’t work. That’s what I remember. Whether that’s actually how the story ended as it appeared, I can’t remember. I’m afraid I haven’t had a chance to actually look at this stuff again before speaking to you. My memory is kind of vague. Though I don’t know if looking at the stuff would necessarily jog the memory much. We were working at a very, very fast pace on all of that stuff.

(previous page) Detail of Kirby’s art (and Pasko’s revised dialogue) from Kobra #1 (Feb. 1976). As a kid, this mag’s editor really dug the series, even after Kirby left (and especially after Nasser took over art chores).

In an era of many forgettable 1970s DC comics, those Kobra issues still stand out as pretty compelling. Especially memorable was the final Kobra/Batman story (planned for the never-published Kobra #8) that appeared in FiveStar Super-Hero Spectacular #1 (1977, cover shown below). Even for an almost throwaway one-shot, Kirby managed to come up with a fantastic villain, and the changes by Pasko and company made him even better.

Kobra, Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Atom, Aquaman, Man-Bat TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

TJKC: Was it a pleasure to work with Jack Kirby when you were both in animation?

MARTY: He was hysterically funny. He had known Steve Gerber since Gerber had been in New York.

Gerber was instrumental in bringing him to Ruby63

Spears as a model designer for Thundarr the Barbarian.

Prior to that, Joe Ruby was a big comic book fan and was totally knocked out by the idea that Steve and Mark Evanier could broker a deal to have Jack as an artist at the company. And the respect everybody had for Jack at Ruby-Spears was so profound that he was retained as a model designer, even

64

though his drawings weren’t really animatable in their original form.

The biggest problem with Jack Kirby’s designs in animation—and I’m going to say this as someone who also worked for Marvel Animation—is the pencil mileage in animating those very ornate character designs (we used to call it pencil mileage; it’s all done digitally now, so the term doesn’t really apply). Back in that day, Jack’s designs needed to be “cleaned-up,” which is the animation term for simplifying them, eliminating them of extraneous detail, superfluous detail, such as lot of feathering or shading, or ornate filigree in the costume details, so they could be quickly drawn in the many cels necessary to create movement.

By contrast, the comparatively minimalistic approach of Batman: The Animated Series is the work of a really experienced model designer. Bruce Timm is a genius at knowing what

can and can’t be animated well, and creating shapes to capitalize on that. Alex Toth was an über-genius, and guys like Bruce and Darwyn Cooke and the others worshiped him. On the other hand, Jack didn’t think in those terms, but he came up with great figures. What was so great was everybody’s respect for his imagination, so he had an unprecedented arrangement. Ric Gonzales, the head of the R-S model department, knew that he would have to clean up anything that Jack turned in, but they were willing to do it because the imagination was so powerful. In Thundarr, the main models were designed by Toth, who is Godhead to animation illustrators, because Toth—and to a lesser extent, Doug Wildey, who designed Jonny Quest—wrote the book on designing cartoons in the mid-’60s, with such exciting shows as Space Ghost and Birdman. Toth was the master of minimalism that was animatable yet realistic. Until the somewhat more heavily-rendered Will Meugniot style, which is what characterized G.I. Joe, came into vogue in the ’80s, the Alex Toth approach to model design for action/adventure cartoons was the gold standard. Jack—and later Gil Kane, who worked on the Superman show for the same studio, RubySpears, in the mid-’80s—had the kind of deals they did because Joe Ruby was such a fan of comics art.

So Jack and Gil would do the models but the stuff would be heavily cleaned up by others, since, like

Jack’s, Gil’s stuff was also overrendered by animation standards. Working that way was a lot more expensive than, say, doing what they did at H-B and start with Iwo Takamoto’s “animatable” designs. But the fact is that people still remember Thundarr fondly at Warner Brothers, who are still exploiting that property, just now out on DVD. If that’s not timelessness, I don’t know what is. We’re talking close to 30 years ago now since it was done.

At R-S we also developed a show called Roxie’s Raiders, which was literally created from Jack’s sketchbook. Images would pop into his head that would have no context or backstory, just random character ideas, and he’d sketch them whenever they popped into his head. I remember a very toad-like little person in a tuxedo atop a strange unicycle which had a sort-of platform at the top of it, a kind of combination wheelchair and unicycle, where the wheel was at the end of this long rod. We looked at this in his sketchbook and asked, “What is this?” He said, “I don’t know. That’s ‘The Toad.’” We said, “Okay, fine, ‘The Toad.’”

So all the characters in Roxie’s Raiders were made up from these very strange ideas Jack had in his sketchbook. I think a lot of the shows they did at Ruby-Spears, the ones I wasn’t involved in, were developed in a very similar way. Jack would come in with a sketchbook, and the writer and Joe would page through it and say, “Oh, I’ll take that! I’ll take this!” You felt like a Magpie swooping down and picking out the shiny things. But that’s a bad analogy because the shiny thing is supposedly gold among the dross, or so it goes; but that’s not what this was. All the stuff was gold. What was cherry-picked was what you needed right away. And the next time, someone else would probably find uses for all the other things that Jack had come up with that hadn’t been plucked from the sketchbook on the previous go-round.

We used to joke that Jack should have gone into the pitch meetings at the beginning of every development season and just sit there and wing it. I’m getting into a real digression here, but there’s a story in animation about how Joe Barbera got so good at anticipating the network’s objections that he could counter all of them in the course of selling a show. There’s a story about when Joe went in to sell Scooby-Doo to the ABC children’s executive, Squire Rushnell or Peter Roth—one of those guys. The studios did what were called set-ups, these drawings on big boards, showing the characters in poses and settings that encapsulated what the show would be, and they set them up on easels in the executive’s office. (This art, by the way, usually became the basis of the main title cards on the show, later on.) As part of the series pitch process, Barbera would have a whole bunch of set-up boards created before he would go to New York.

On this particular occasion, the first board on the easel showed two kids on the back of a dinosaur—for a period of time at HannaBarbera, every show was about two kids and a fill-in-the-blank solving mysteries. Barbera makes the presentation of the two kids and a dinosaur, and the executive interrupts and says, “That’s nice, but I’d like it better if they were on the back of a giant dog.”

With that, Joe pulls the first card on the easel aside and lo and behold, the next one is of two kids on the back of a German shepherd. And the executive goes, “Okay, I like that, but instead of a German shepherd, how about a Great Dane?” Joe puts the board aside and pulls out another board from the back of the stack, and there’s the same drawing, except the breed of dog has changed to a Great Dane!

They finally decided that tiny kids riding on the back of a giant dog was too weird, and the concept essentially became four teenagers and a Great Dane. Whether that story is true or whether that’s apocryphal is not really the point; the point is that Jack

Kirby’s imagination was so fertile, the joke used to be: Instead of going to New York with a whole bunch of set-up boards, Joe Ruby (one of the creators of Scooby-Doo and from whom we heard all of these stories—Joe Ruby was always in awe of how Joe Barbera could sell shows, so he always told these stories) was encouraged to just take Jack to New York with him and when the executive proposed a variation, have Jack sketch it on the spot. At one point, it almost seemed as if Ruby was considering it.

TJKC: What is your assessment of Kobra? As an assignment? In your career?

MARTY: I loved it. It was the closest I had gotten, up until that point, to writing something that I had created. I discovered that it is much, much easier to plot something when you’re not writing somebody else’s vision. The business was very, very different in those days. The idea of going off and being left alone—do whatever you want—and the editor takes the script and says, “Thank you very much,” didn’t happen in those days. You were always rewriting, always accommodating a client, and consequently your stuff really wasn’t your own. That was as close as I got to it to that point. But the basic design of the character was Jack’s and that we didn’t tinker with at all. Well, maybe just a little. I think Gerry asked for the cobra head design, the emblem, to be drawn (and I don’t know who it was; it might have been Pablo). That was added to the costume later, I think. But the idea of a villain coming out of a snake-worshipping cult was Jack’s. I did some research on real snake-worshipping cults and their terminology in the Hindi language—for example, Naja-Naja, meaning lord and master, I believe. I tried to give it a veneer of authenticity.

I really did enjoy writing that book. I was not crazy about the fact that the artists changed every single issue for the first four, though. And, to this day, I don’t know why that was. Pat Gabrielle didn’t really do anything else in comics. That fourth issue was a real problem. I’m always reluctant to say anything negative about someone who is still alive and can sue, but it was very early in Pat’s career (if he even went on to have a career in comics) and the pencils I had to dialogue from were almost stick figures. I literally could not tell what was going on in my own story! Pat took a lot of liberties with the plot synopsis in his job and that did not thrill Gerry. As I say, that kind of stuff wasn’t usually done in those days, and that was the point where Gerry was ready to throw in the towel. For all I know, he could have asked Carmine to cancel it. ★

(previous page) Thundarr storyboard and concept art

by Kirby. Even with these secondary characters (bottom), Jack couldn’t help adding costume details that, while worthwhile graphically, would make animating them difficult and costly. (above) A random clown concept that got incorporated into the Roxie’s Raiders animation pitch. (below) You can see the Kobra #1 story reprinted in DC’s Kobra: Resurrection trade paperback, available now.

Thundarr, Roxie’s Raiders TM & ©2011 Ruby-Spears. Kobra TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

[Jon Cooke’s look at Kirby’s 1970s DC work continues in TJKC #59] 65

Godstoppers

The Eternal Question

by Craig McNamara In the hands of a lesser artist, an actionless debate over the worth of mankind would result in a pretty flat comics reading experience.

Kirby, however, imbued such scenes (as in Fantastic Four #49, April 1966, below, or Eternals #6, Dec. 1976, next page) with a sense of spectacle and pageantry that kept readers riveted and engaged in the discussion.

All characters TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

rom the beginning, Jack Kirby’s The Eternals series (1976) was seen by comic fans and professionals alike as a kind of extension of his uncompleted Fourth World saga.

It was a new series, for a different company, and featured allnew characters, but by its very subject matter—gods walking among men—the comparisons were inevitable. That the series putative star, Ikaris, seemed to be an avatar of Orion only strengthened the feeling that this was indeed The New Gods revisited, copyrights be damned.1 Despite the cancellation of the Fourth World titles at DC, Marvel probably felt the concept was a better fit in their comic line, which already boasted a thunder god and a planet-devouring demi-god, among a host of other mythical and cosmic beings.

What Jack delivered, though, was as similar to The New Gods as the Hulk is to Superman. The New Gods told of the war between New Genesis and Apokolips, a near-biblical battle between good and evil. The Eternals also had their own diametrically opposed adversaries, the mutated Deviants, but after the first story arc,

F

they became a much more passive force in the series. With one exception in the later issues, they all but vanished as antagonists.

Instead, Jack used The Eternals to explore the foundations of mythology and legend in the world’s cultures. Using the visitation of strange beings from space as a catalyst, Jack delved into Incan legends, Greek and Roman gods and even biblical history, linking them together with surprising ease.

A recurring theme in both series was the human race’s struggle with the idea of otherworldly races and the expanded view of the universe it engendered. But whereas most humans seen in the New Gods seemed more in awe than threatened by this realization, the humans of The Eternals reacted with the kind of fear, suspicion and apprehension that people in the real world would exhibit if suddenly faced with beings of such unimaginable power.

In fact, upon closer examination, The Eternals is less a New Gods or even a Thor/Asgard redux than a further exploration of themes first posited in Kirby and Stan Lee’s Galactus stories, particularly in Fantastic Four #48-50 (1966).2 Instead of a mere two- or three-episode arc to work with, here Kirby had an openended series which allowed him to delve more deeply into the responses of humanity prompted by an alien visitation.

Similarities occur strongest in three main areas: the premise of each story, the Celestials/Galactus connection, and the human reactions that the events provoked.

I. “My journey is ended! This planet shall sustain me until it has been drained of all elemental life!”

Galactus, Fantastic Four #48 “The mission of the gods is now clear. This is the hour of Earth’s trial!”

Ajak, The Eternals #3 Consider the cataclysmic event that sets each story line in motion: A monolithic figure from space arrives to pass judgement on Earth, with extinction for the human race in the balance. In The Eternals, that presence was Arishem of the Celestials, extraterrestrial beings who (in Kirby’s backstory) long-ago experimented on apes to create the human race (along with the god-like Eternals and the demonic Deviants).3 Standing motionless upon twin pylons in the Andes Mountains, Arishem was to monitor the planet for fifty years before making his decision on the fate of our race.

The alien Galactus, in Fantastic Four #48-504 may seem like less of a judge than an indiscriminate hand of destruction. True, his initial pronouncement left no doubt of both his intentions and his utter disregard of Earth: “This planet shall sustain me until it has been drained of all elemental life.” And over the next two issues, Galactus showed no interest in debating the worthiness of the race his actions would incidentally exterminate. But this arrival of an near-omnipotent figure from above coupled with Kirby’s images of worldwide destruction gave the story biblical overtones, calling to mind nothing less than Judgement Day itself. The link becomes even more explicit when Galactus’ actions are finally checked by the Fantastic Four, who force him to acknowledge humanity’s claim to life. Consider how Galactus’ final words were both a judgement and a caution: “At last I perceive the glint of glory within the race of man! Be ever worthy of glory, humans… be ever mindful of your promise of greatness… for it shall one day lift you beyond the stars… or bury you within the ruins of war!!

The choice is yours!!”

The similarities continue. As the Silver Surfer played the role of Galactus’s herald, so did Ikaris (and occasionally, other 66

Eternals) presage the Celestials. Though the Silver Surfer would eventually become an ardent advocate of the human race, he began in this story as a cold, dispassionate harbinger. In much the same way, Ikaris and the other Eternals displayed a respectful attitude toward the Celestials, neither cheering or condemning them, but always deferring to their superiority and never questioning their right to stand in judgment of our planet.

II. “He is what he wishes to be. He is Galactus!”

The Watcher, Fantastic Four #48 “There’s no way to question the Celestials.

What they decide to do… they will do.”

Dr. Damian, The Eternals #3 The Celestials’ power was reminiscent of Galactus’ as well, in its virtually unlimited and undefined scope. But in the decade between Fantastic Four #48 and The Eternals #1, Kirby had developed greater ambition and sophistication in his work, his characterizations becoming both subtler and bolder, his art more graphically stylized in the process. These combination of these changes gave rise to a conception of alien beings that was truly one of the high points of Jack’s long and innovative career.

Throughout the history of comics, representation of alien races have been almost exclusively based on the human form, though often with the addition of pointed ears, scales or fur, bizarre skin coloring or oversized craniums for an exotic appearance. This was done perhaps less due to a lack of imagination on the part of writers and artists than the desire for antagonists whom the reader could easily grasp (the same reason 99.9% of the extraterrestrial beings encountered in comics are surprisingly fluent in English). Kirby’s ’60s tenure at Marvel is rife with such alien beings— Skrulls, Ovoids, Kurrgo of Planet X, Annihilus, Blastaar, et al.5 With the Celestials, however, Kirby found a way to more truly depict an alien race that was beyond our understanding, while still conforming to some basic visual conventions. Whereas Galactus was clearly humanoid in appearance6 (though gigantic and attired in a masked costume that would look right at home in Kirby’s Asgard), the Celestials were humanoid in shape only. That most fundamental element of human expression—the face—was denied to us.7 The armored shell which encased each of the Celestials was marked by Jack’s familiar graphic symbols for technology and circuits, but even when its arrangement on the head seemed to approximate a face, the expression it suggested was often an aggressive smile or an anguished grimace. Were we truly created in our maker’s image? There is no way to be sure.

Coupled with this was Jack’s deliberate decision to allow the Celestials no voice and no thoughts, defining them and their motives only through their

actions and interpretations provided by Ikaris and other Eternals.8 Galactus often spoke of humanity as being no more than ants to him, but his frequent interactions with our race belied that proposition; however, there were no such interaction between human and Celestial. Most of the time, the Celestials went about their business seemingly oblivious to the reactions of the humans around them. In the few instances where a Celestial did involve themselves directly with modern man—The Eternals #7 for one—it was with the clinical detachment of a scientist regarding a petri dish. More than ants, but less than equals, the human race was just one more in a long line of experiments

conducted by the Celestials, and thus deserving of no pronouncements, no apologies and no explanations.

While Galactus behaved more like an Old Testament god, with great displays of anger, compassion and ennui, the Celestials remained impassive and introverted, roused to action only to check our occasional acts of aggression against them.

Despite the physical presence of Galactus, his narrative power was diminished by every rationalization he made, every mood he indulged and every attack he initiated. But in the creation of the Celestials, Jack stripped away the overheated theatrics of Galactus, leaving beings who were truly unfathomable.

That impenetrable air of mystery gave the Celestials 67

a threatening, awesome and truly alien presence that was light years ahead of what Galactus himself could inspire.

Because the Celestials were not just destroyers (as was Galactus) but creators—our creators—as well, there was an inescapable subtext to the conflict that went beyond the immediate fight for our civilization’s survival. These were our fathers returning to take stock of us, their offspring. Would we live up to their hopes and intentions? And should we fail in their eyes, at what point do our lives become their own, freed of the burden of our parents expectations? The parallels to Judgement Day have always been obvious, but also underlying The Eternals is a generation gap not unlike that which society experienced from the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s—but, as Jack was wont to do, magnified to a cosmic scale.

III. “Try to fathom the cataclysmic forces which have been unleashed. For you shall never see their like again.”

The Watcher, Fantastic Four #50 “We shall see them now. And in doing so, learn more about ourselves than we have ever known.”

Ikaris, The Eternals #1 Whenever Marvel is hailed for its revolutionary approach in the 1960s of setting its stories in the “real world,” that usually refers to the way its heroes were, despite their powers, plagued by the same problems as the common man. But just as significant, Marvel’s effort at placing their heroes within a more “realistic” setting also meant putting their heroes in more interactions with the ordinary people.

Marvel’s New York was populated by both jaded and over-enthusiastic citizens who could frequently be found gathered in crowds around the city’s resident super-heroes, or gazing skyward at them in wonder or fear.

Scenes like this were a Marvel hallmark—Jack drew his share of these many times over his years at Marvel— but rarely did they ever serve as anything other than dramatic filler or simple comic relief. Fantastic Four #48-50 is really one of the few instances where the population’s reactions contributed significantly to the story’s arc.

Following a few scenes cleaning up business from the previous issue, the Galactus saga begins with the Fantastic Four’s return to a New York in panic at the sight of a sky that’s become a blazing inferno. Unaware that the flames are merely an illusion created by The Watcher in an attempt to hide the planet from Galactus, the populace takes to the streets in panic, 68

bewilderment and fear. When the Human Torch streaks over the city to investigate the situation, he’s downed and attacked by a vengeful mob who blames him for setting the sky afire. As with the Fantastic Four, the man-in-the-street’s confusion eventually gives way to a chilling realization of impending doom. As eyes and cameras observe Galactus’s preparations, one cameraman sums up the mood, remarking that this might be not just the biggest story of the century, but the final one as well.

And though it is the actions of the Fantastic Four that ultimately give Galactus pause, it is the

pleas to the Silver Surfer by the Thing’s girlfriend, Alicia, that passionately make the case for humanity: “We all matter! Every living being... every bird and beast... This is our world! Ours! Perhaps we are not as powerful as your Galactus... but we have hearts... we have souls... we live... breathe... feel!” Finally, in the wake of Galactus’ departure, people react in skepticism as well as relief, perhaps suggesting a reason the event will have no lasting impact on Marvel’s world.9 Compare this to the Deviant’s attack on humanity in The Eternals #4-6. Once again, we see

panic in the streets of New York. Once again, we see apocalyptic images that threaten to engulf the world, this time spurred on by Warlord Kro’s reshaping of his form to suggest The Devil incarnate.

And once again, this apocalyptic event culminates in the human race’s awareness of a powerful alien visitor among them. But though the battle itself would abruptly end, there were no easy resolutions to be found, and no spirited defense of our planet.

Unlike the Galactus story, this was just the beginning of the interaction of the “space gods” (as Jack termed them) with humanity.

Though The Eternals’ primary human focus was on Dr. Damian, his daughter, Margo, and university professor Samuel Holden, there were scenes scattered throughout the series of humanity coming to grips with the reality of an alien occupation of their planet. There were a few inevitable armed responses by Americans and Russians, to be sure, but the pyrotechnics were relatively minor. Mostly, we saw people struggling to reconcile the issues posed by the discovery of Celestials, Eternals and Deviants, and pondering the implications for their future, best typified by issue #6’s debate on a university campus.

In Jack’s oeuvre, humans were often found grappling, both physically and philosophically, with god-like beings whose very existence threatened the order of their world. As befits a man who fought in a war that threatened to consume the entire world, Jack’s human characters were far from being mere bystanders, but instead sought to control, to mediate or at the least, understand the epic conflicts in their midst.10 Had Jack ever been afforded the opportunity to bring The Eternals to some kind of conclusion, one can imagine that humans themselves would have

Footnotes 1 It would be another decade before Jack showed how he could circumvent legal issues to write an ending to his New Genesis saga, substituting Blackmass and the world of Hellicost for Darkseid and Apokolips in his Captain Victory (1981) series.

2 Interestingly, certain plot elements would also echo those in Fantastic Four #64 and 65, such as the discovery of an ancient spaceport by explorers, one of whom closely resembles The Eternals’ Dr. Damian; the awakening of long-dormant sentries; and the subsequent arrival of a member of the alien race, The Kree, to judge (and punish) our heroes for their actions. But these are superficial similarities in a plot that was concerned mainly with providing new adversaries for Reed Richards and company. Indeed, Dr. Damien’s grizzled, bearded face was Kirby’s iconic representation of an elder professor; given Kirby’s well-known short memory for past character details, it’s unlikely he ever intended to revive a throwaway character from a story nearly a decade ago, despite attempts by later writers to insist it was the same character.

3 Yet another parallel can be found in Lee and Kirby’s “Origins of the Inhumans” back-up feature in Thor (1967), in which the Inhumans are revealed as the product of ancient genetic tinkering by the alien Kree race.

4 To a lesser extent, Lee and Kirby’s Silver Surfer graphic novel

played a decisive role in convincing the Celestials of their worthiness. Knowing Jack’s enduring faith in humanity, there could be no other outcome.

The idea of “gods among us” was just one of the many themes Jack revisited throughout his career.11 But however familiar the theme, Jack was never content to simply imitate past works. He always found a fresh angle to reinvigorate a concept. Though The Eternals is admittedly often flawed in execution (issues #14-18 in particular lose sight of the premise almost entirely) and never came close to approaching the significance of “The Galactus Saga” in Marvel’s (and Jack’s own) history, its portrayal of an alien visitation was as much a departure from previous stories as Galactus was a decade earlier.

It’s unfortunate that the very expansiveness of an ongoing series, while allowing Jack to indulge his imagination to its fullest, also had the effect of diffusing the intensity of the premise. It is a significant omission that in no issue of The Eternals did even one human question the right of the Celestials to judge and possibly exterminate the human race.

Perhaps the very notion of a fifty-year judgement removed any sense of urgency, for the characters as well as the readers.

Even today, 35 years after the first issue hit the stands, we’re still only a little more than halfway through Arishem’s judgment period.

In his final years in comics, Jack would revisit the idea of an alien occupation one more time, in the first six issues of Captain Victory (1981). Here, the invader was no single god-like being, but a horde of near-mindless “Insectons” swarming over the planet. But in the climax of the story, Captain Victory climbs inside a monstrous humanoid machine called a “Drainer” and proceeds to suck the lifeforces out of the Insectons in a scene of cataclysmic fury—an interesting reversal of both his Galactus and Celestial stories.

At last, the supremely destructive powers of an alien being are harnessed for our benefit. ★

(1978) retold the story, eliminating the Fantastic Four and expanding on the efforts of Galactus to coerce the Surfer back into service.

However, without a dominant human element, Galactus’ threat seems vague and less threatening; worse, the Silver Surfer’s conversion happens so quickly and with such little soul-searching that any reader would wonder how he could have previously sacrificed any world for Galactus’ appetite.

5 During the same period he was breaking new ground in The Eternals, Kirby also introduced a few new alien races in the more traditional vein in Captain America Annual #4 (1977) and Devil Dinosaur #4-6 (1978).

6 Apart from his towering size, Galactus’ one feature that marked him as alien were the square pupils in his eyes; even these, however, were replaced by normal, round pupils by the end of the story arc.

7 Kirby had experimented with depicting alien beings as bodiless spheres of glowing energy, in both Kamandi #31-34 (1975) and Captain America #204-205 (1976), but in both cases, the energyballs were ultimately dispensed with in favor of a familiar human form.

8 For another example of how an inscrutable alien presence can dominate a series, see Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey series (1976). However, with the Monolith being little more than a black rectangle, and limited to only a passive influence on events, there was not enough drama and intrigue to sustain an ongoing series.

9 It is hard to imagine that conclusive proof of alien worlds (not

(previous page) The faceless, voiceless Celestials from Eternals #7 (Jan. 1977) are unlike any other character in comics, before or since. If Jack saw God when he created Galactus, here Jack seems to be creating beings a step above God. (left) Jack was intent on keeping The Eternals out of Marvel continuity, but while he somewhat bowed to fan and office pressure to do so, it was with teases like this Thing cameo in #6, which dodged the issue of whether the character was really in the Eternals’ world, or just a comic book character there. (above) With or without horns, the “ugly” character is still viewed as the devil, while the handsome one evokes angelic connotations; a reaction Kirby flipped upside-down with Karkus and the Reject in Eternals.

All characters TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

to mention the existence of mystical forces and mythical deities) wouldn’t radically alter society almost overnight, but even on Marvel’s Earth, these questions were quickly swept under the rug at an adventure’s conclusion, in order to preserve the resemblance to the reader’s world.

10 Kirby’s New Gods #11 included an exchange that neatly sums up the difficulty of human dealings with god-like beings. A police commissioner informs the captured Kalibak that both of the warring factions of gods are welcome to use his office for a summit.

The bestial Kalibak responds by effortlessly bursting his shackles, promising to deliver the message. “Kalibak is not without a sense of humor!” he laughs.

11 Other recurring themes included secret races within society (The X-Men, the Inhumans, Silver Star); normal men gifted with supernormal powers (Captain America, Fighting American, Private Strong, the Fantastic Four, Silver Star again); adventurers in barbaric past or future worlds (Tuk the Caveboy, Kamandi, Atlas, Devil Dinosaur); kid gangs (Boy Commandos, Newsboy Legion, Boys’ Ranch, The Dingbats) and men battling their own savage nature (Orion of the New Gods, The Hulk, The Demon). Even Kirby’s Machine Man shared similarities with his Mister Miracle, beginning with a protagonist who constantly got out of tight scrapes using a limitless supply of on-hand technology; more significantly, though, both series concerned attempts by a professed individual to exercise free will and escape a military machine.

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Mythconceptions

Godhood’s End (-ings)

Ragnarok, ‘Last Battle’, the Big One, and smaller wars analyzed in Kirby-esque context, by Jerry Boyd (below) Pluto unleashes his madness in this page from the “Mercury” story in Red Raven Comics #1 (Aug. 1940), Kirby’s first work for Timely/Marvel. (next page) A squad of good old American troops tackle Pluto’s Mutates from the future, in these pencils from Thor #164 (May 1969). Go get ’em, fellas!

All characters TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

or decades, we had “gods” in the field of sequential artwork.

Like movie moguls or “film gods/goddesses” in old Hollywood, titans of incredible talent peopled the comic packaging companies of New York City.

Graham Ingels, Bernie Wrightson, Gray Morrow, and Tom Sutton (among others) were masters of gothic horror. John Severin, Russ Heath, and Joe Kubert did war stories better than most. Dan DeCarlo, Harry Lucey, Samm Schwartz, Stan Goldberg, and Henry Scarpelli held court when it came to teen humor. Al Williamson, Wally Wood, and Al Feldstein beckoned us to the stars like no three others. But when it came to the gods, there’s only one name—and that’s Jack Kirby.

Many times the King professed to a lifelong interest in

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mythology. He told an interviewer for Comics Scene Spectacular (#2, 1992), “Thor is an ancient myth—what I did was to make him saleable once again.”

Scott Fresina, one of Jack’s many friends, recalled that, “Kirby certainly read and studied the Germanic and Norse gods as he got along in years, but he told me that he first heard the myths from his Austrian-born grandmother when he was very young. He fell in love with these stories and some of them stayed with him forever.”

In sundry myths, there were gods and goddesses of beauty, harvesting, and representatives of the oceans, sun, moon, and stars but (like a typical little boy) Jack was particularly fascinated by the power, grandeur, and supernatural weapons and abilities of the warrior gods. Their lives and triumphs, defeats, and ends would wind their way into his retooled but immensely entertaining modern mythologies.

Mercury... Fights For Earth!

Continuity wasn’t a big deal in the Golden Age of Comics, but some Timely creators gave it a real shot. Bill Everett’s early Sub-Mariner adventures were continuing cliffhangers akin to Flash Gordon serials, and Timely writers sometimes explained how the Red Skull and the Black Talon cheated death or escaped when they next resurfaced.

The ultimate real-life villain and comics villain at the time was a former Austrian corporal and frustrated artist named Adolf Hitler. Captain America and Bucky fought him under that name, but Mercury, son of Jupiter, knew the dictator as Rudolf Hendler— actually the evil god Pluto in human guise! Hendler was a S&K thing only—elsewhere in Timely Comics, Hitler was Hitler!

Mercury is given the task of upsetting Pluto’s plans, and his fleet feet speed him across time and space to our besieged planet, where men and their great war machines collide in wide swaths of destruction. Pluto explains to his cousin Mercury (whose godly gaze easily penetrates his disguise) that he’s “never had so much fun!”

An enraged Mercury strangles Hendler but the dictator’s guards intervene. Their earthly weapons have no effect on the handsome young god, and he takes it upon himself to show the leaders and people of the warring nations the paths to peace, much to Pluto’s consternation! (Mercury could’ve been a latter-day Supertowner with an inventive name change—Fastbak, maybe?—and a nifty new costume.)

Jack was never like his later commanding officer, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. who thrived on combat and loved war.

Though he’d never return to Mercury (later renamed Hurricane by other Timely stalwarts), Kirby and Simon’s decision to make their fast-moving protagonist fight just as hard to secure a lasting peace as when he’d trade punches, reflects Jack’s affectation for the reluctant but capable warrior, ready to extend the “olive branch of peace” but standing prepared to physically defend the rights and lives of others.

Moreover, Jack and Joe couldn’t have allowed Mercury to destroy Pluto then and there. This villain’s evil was eternal and World War II, in which S&K would soon participate as soldiers across France, Belgium, and Asia, had yet to engulf the majority of Americans. The end of the war could not be 70

foretold when Mercury took leave of Hendler/Pluto and the young god wouldn’t be there at its end.

At the war’s end, Joe and Jack’s warriors (whether celestial or mortal in nature) could only stand in as idealized embodiments of the millions of Allied servicemen and women (almost 20 million in the States alone!) who’d eventually help break the backs of the Axis coalition.

The Power of the Aesir Jack, aided by Joe Simon and with others, would return to mythological warrior gods off and on throughout the ’40s and ’50s. However, it was the introduction of the Mighty Thor in 1962 and that strip’s ongoing success that cemented Jack’s reputation as the comic gods’ ‘godfather.’ Lordly Odin’s tribesmen, the Aesir, were drawn in spectacular fashion by the King to a grateful comicdom who’d also spent a godly... er, goodly amount of time in theaters with mouths agape at the exploits of Hercules, Maciste, Samson, the Sons of Samson (!), Atlas, and the beloved Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

(I saw the latter feature then with older cousins and their friends and we spent a happy afternoon afterward battling in teams as “warriors and skeletons.” But the niceties of having a Journey Into Mystery comic mag was that it could be taken home with you and cherished again and again at your convenience.)

Jack and Stan rapidly expanded their JIM cast of characters: Odin, Loki, Heimdall, Surtur, Ymir, Hela, Sif, Mirmir, Geirroddur, Sigurd, and Balder.

Lee’s dialogue for the lords of Asgard reflected his love for Shakespeare. He told an interviewer for Comics Scene Spectacular #2 (1992), “If I think about it, I was crazy about Thor. I loved the corny way he would talk. I loved having his father say, ‘So be it!’ and all of those expressions.”

The Asgardians and the various rock trolls, flying trolls, storm giants, etc., were wonderfully attired, radiating power. And since none of them owed their unique abilities to radioactivity or advanced scientific breakthroughs, it had to be a little easier for Lee and Kirby to eschew plausibility based on atomic age experimentations and just rush them into battle!

But who would the Aesir battle... and why?

To their mortal worshipers, the immortals were Vikings writ-large. They invaded enemy strongholds (like the Vikings did), drinking heartily along the way and laughing in combat. They reveled in their powers, taking on their sworn enemies— the dwarves, monsters, and giants who were jealous of the proud Aesir.

Thor (Thunor to the ancient Germanic tribes) sometimes depended on help from Loki (they’d been buddy-buddy for centuries before Loki’s imprisonment by the gods), Tyr (the Norse god of war), and the wise Thjalfi.

(Thor’s need for allies in his struggles may have accounted for the creative inclusion of Hogun, Fandral, and Volstagg.)

The Thunderer was not sadly resigned to his fate—indeed, he relished his missions. He was immensely strong (as he was in the comics), full of enormous vitality and power, and the sole possessor of Mjollnir (the Scandinavian spelling is used here), the single most powerful weapon of his tribe. He

slew the Asgardians’ enemies with thunder and lightning. In some legends, Odin was his father. If he wasn’t, Odin was still regarded as the All-Father, ruler of gods and men, and chief of the sky gods (and the brooding clouds above them were where the Vikings pointed to as they celebrated their gods’ stories). Odin’s vast powers created the solar system as men knew it then, and he spent much of his time choosing earthly champions from among the dead to rally about him to stave off Ragnarok.

Heimdall is pretty much the same as he appeared at Marvel. Ever vigilant and courageous, he sits beside the Rainbow Bridge to guard the entrance to the fortress of the gods from the giants and monsters.

He rarely needed sleep and had hearing so keen he could detect the growing of grass on our planet.

Stan’s interpretation of Loki was that he was “an evil god,” Kirby saw him as “a tortured person” and both were right! In myth, this adopted son of a giant was both a help and a hindrance to his fellow gods (sometimes in the same story!) and a tortured prisoner of his own evil, eventually shackled to three large flat stones for his treachery against Balder. To some ancient believers, he was the Norse equivalent of the Devil, whose monstrous offspring would one day bring about Ragnarok.

Other gods weren’t used much (drat the luck!) by Kirby and Lee. (One can’t blame them, they were kinda busy with Midgard-based heroes at the time, also.)

Tyr, the war god, appeared briefly as “the master archer” of Asgard in the story where Odin bestows Balder with the enchantment of invulnerability for 71

If This Be Ragnarok!

(above) Thor the Mighty thunders his was across this 1970s commission illo.

Balder, Loki, Thor TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

(above) Balder (Balduur?) the brave may have been a direct ancestor of Lightray in Kirby’s mind, if you examine the ancient myths. (right) Heimdall gets a makeover from his Marvel Thor days, in Kirby’s 1970s GODS Portfolio. (next page, top) For the 1984 New Gods reprint series, here’s Mike Royer’s lettering and logo for the fourth issue. Kirby was obviously aware of how “The Pact” was held in high regard.

Lightray, The Pact TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

This Heimdall TM & ©2011 Jack Kirby Estate.

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his bravery, gentleness, and beloved status amongst the gods (see Tales of Asgard Special #1, 1968). To some students of myth, Balder had to be a sky god, like his father Odin. When Balder is killed by the urgings of the hate-filled Loki, the great tethered wolf Fenrir (renamed Fenris by Lee) devours the sun, literally and symbolically killing the light of the world. Balder was linked to the sun and its brightness—a ‘god of light’, to many.

The Balder of the Marvel Age had no special powers or weapons like Odin, Heimdall, Loki, and Thor—but the powers of light manifested themselves in Jack’s later creation, Lightray, who in that analysis might just share a special kinship with the brave Balder.

Going back to the myths yet again, there was once a Viking warrior named Sigmund the Volsung. He pleased Odin with his battle prowess and the god king gave him a splendid sword in his natural lifetime. When Sigmund died (in battle, naturally), Odin appeared on the earthly battlefield and shattered the blade with his great spear. The broken sword pieces were re-forged for Sigmund’s son, Sigurd, who’d also found favor with Odin. Sigurd’s name was used for the villainous ‘earth sprite’ in JIM #111. Kirby again used him as a heroic type for one of his incredible plates in the Gods Portfolio in the early ’70s. Sigurd is shown brandishing a gleaming spear that looks suspiciously like re-forged shards of glass….

The unsheathing of the Odinsword, courtesy of Stan, Jack, and Vince Colletta (and some fine lettering by ‘Artful’ Artie Simek helped to make those pages sing, also!) was much more entertaining and certainly less depressing than the Ragnarok of antiquity.

The Marvel-ous talents just mentioned laid down their final battle of the Aesir and the evil ones in Thor #127-128, but Stan returned to expand the finale with Gerry Conway and impressive artwork by John Buscema and inker John Verpoorten in Thor #200 (1972, shown at right).

In this worthy retelling of the deadly prophesy and final fates awaiting our heroes, evil Loki is shocked to learn that only “those deemed... worthy... would rise again.”

Over at DC, the King had already raised hell (cleverly called Apokolips) for his readers as well as Heaven (New Genesis). He took Balder’s atoms (“Balduur” in New Gods #7—the King used a spelling variation) with him and Karnilla’s, also. (The sorceress’ identity is implicitly stated.)

The fall of Asgard hinted strongly at rebirth, a popular theme in many religions and mythologies. Balder’s spirit and the gods’ sons (who miraculously survive Ragnarok!) were sheltered in the World Tree (Yggdrassil), some historians note, to join a Balder returned from the dead. This final magick of Odin’s (and his two brothers’) is the saving grace of a new world, complete with a new and more radiant sun, rising from the floodtides that engulfed her (due to the Midgard Serpent’s ascension from the oceans). This new earth would be free from all its terror and destruction, green and fair as she was in the beginning.

Kirby simplified the influence of Brave Balder for his epilogue/ prologue for renewed godly hostilities in New Gods #1, but since he loved the old myths, it’s probable that Balder (Balduur) was a template for Lightray and the gentle gods of the paradise called New Genesis.

The Uneasy Peace Before WWII there was WWI. Before New Gods #1 and the battle for the Anti-Life Equation (or the “final, terrible war of the New Gods,” as Jack called it), there was “The Great Clash.”

If you liken the endings of The Great Clash to WWI (called “The Great War” during its time and afterward), you can see the uneasy peace pervading the mighty European Powers (and America) and the King’s sister planets.

The Treaty of Versailles (set down in France) stripped belligerent Germany of some of her land holdings. There were war reparations to be paid out as well and those terms stunned the proud Germans. Resentment and violent hatred for the victors smoldered in the German consciousness… particularly in the minds and hearts of her embittered ex-soldiers— including Adolf Hitler.

In Bavaria in 1923, he gave a speech to a rapt throng: “I want now to fulfill the vow which I made to myself five years ago when I was a blind cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals (Germans who’d ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ and manipulated its defeat) had been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched

Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.”

“Izaya wants peace. I want—time! Time to make this bombed-out waste a meaningful pursuit!” (Darkseid surveyed a crater near his palace when he made this revelation in “The Pact!”)

To Izaya’s credit in this story, he gave as good as he got. Despite losing his wife, his generalship keeps his world on par with Apokolips, and he even exacts revenge on Steppenwolf.

Still, the cosmic struggle results in a stalemate… and an uneasy peace.

In TJKC #26, Jack explained to Ray Wyman, Jr. his basis for the pact (treaty) that ended the first godwar. “There was a custom among the European kings to trade babies... and then they couldn’t go to war with each other in battle because they might kill their own sons.” Later in the same chat, Kirby added “The Pact” was “based on the fact that good and evil men can make a pact; in fact mortal enemies can make pacts—like the English and French did. Of course it never really worked, but they tried.”

The pact Darkseid agreed to would see a convenient end for him when Scott Free would escape from Apokolips. And by that time the dread lord of the evil gods would not only have an excuse to wage war on New Genesis anew, but also to obtain a secret equation found only on Earth.

Hitler’s pre-war treaties existed only for the Nazis, Mussolini, and Tojo to isolate their prospective enemies from becoming possible allies, and then to conquer and carve up the world.

Other contributors to this magazine have pointed out that Kirby based many (if not all) of his characters on real people. Since many of his mighty celestials in effect represent a one-man army, it’s Orion (to me) that comes off as the entire Soviet Army!

On The Road To Armaghetto...

Orion was betrayed by his father (at the end of New Gods #7 and even before that!) just as the Reds were betrayed by the Nazis in June of 1941. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was established by the two dictatorships through their foreign ministers to grab large parts of Poland (a nation-state they both despised) should Nazi Germany subdue her. Stalin was surprised and unsettled, however, by the quick victory of the Wehrmacht. He attempted to shore up his defenses, hoping against hope the Fuehrer would not turn his greedy attentions on his vast nation.

After the Battle of Britain, the Germans tore up this treaty with the Soviets.

The Red Army learned the meaning of blitzkrieg as they were hurled back to within 40 miles of Moscow at one point! They weathered the storm, battling with fanaticism, just as Orion surmounted the obstacles of Brola, the Deep Six, Kalibak, Mantis, and Kalibak again!

Finally in 1943, the Bolsheviks took the offensive and never let go. They modified their tactics and pounded the Nazis’ eastern forces relentlessly. Then, they stormed the capital of Berlin itself, forcing Hitler, his mistress, and many of his still-loyal followers to commit suicide or surrender.

After finishing his half-brother, the ultimate warrior-god Orion smashes into the fortresses of his native world [New Gods reprint #6, 1984). Unfortunately, Kirby had a limited amount of pages to ‘end’ the war and though he announced in Amazing Heroes #47 (May 1984) he’d bring back Mister Miracle, Big Barda, “and most of the rest of the major members of the ‘Fourth World’ cast,” those appearances didn’t materialize at all. Cheeez, even the Black Racer didn’t check in to swoop over all the carnage!

Still, Orion was totally on the offensive now. His attacks had breached the best defenses Apokolips could muster and he pulverized men and machines in his quest to destroy his father and end the war. Orion’s successes even rallied the lowlies of Armaghetto and kept the master of the holocaust moving from underground shelter… to other underground shelters. (Hitler moved into the Fuehrerbunker at war’s end.)

Darkseid’s betrayal of his son adds to Orion’s rage, and don’t think his dad didn’t know it! In The Hunger Dogs, the big ‘D’ says of Micro-Mark’s growing presence on New Genesis, “The risk is in the corrupting of the virtuous—because virtue has a bad habit of coming back!”

He was thinking that Highfather might retaliate in kind, but his observation might’ve easily applied to his banished son—who revives from his wounds on the very next page.

(Orion was no ‘angel’ before the war— and neither was Stalin (!)—but revenge for betrayal can be a great motivator.) The eastern war was marked by a particular savagery and the Russian ferocity on the battlefield was fueled by the uncountable number of atrocities committed by Hitler’s S.S. In a “war of annihilation” as Himmler called it in ’41, the Soviets were determined to

Even in jest, Darkseid poses a menace! A 1985 Kirby sketch.

Darkseid TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

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The Eternal Warrior

s we’ve all learned by now, “King” Kirby based a Agroups, number of his characters on real people, etc. Himon was named and drawn after Jack’s father-in-law, Mister Miracle had a touch of Christ in him, Funky Flashman was partial to Stan Lee, and so on.

But what of Orion? The “eternal warrior,” as Lightray referred to him in New Gods #9, was the embodiment of the Red Army rampage that helped to crush the Hitlerites, but the probable single person inspiration for him is Gen. George Patton, Jr. The commander may have liked the notion of him being an “eternal warrior.” He was a career soldier (who dreamed of distinguishing himself in war since boyhood), and a voracious reader of military histories.

Of Patton, his biographer Alan Axelrod wrote, “Beginning in childhood, the past, in the form of vivid ghosts of heroism and ageless models of command, was always present for Patton. The historical figures of whom he read were superimposed upon his experience. Lifelong, he devoured libraries of history, especially the history of ancient conquest, general military history, and the memoirs of celebrated generals.”

Patton attempted to incorporate the best of past commanders into his planning strategies, but aside from his readings was his fervent belief in his having led past lives. Axelrod later noted, “He was never embarrassed to confess his belief in reincarnation, his conviction that he had marched with Napoleon or with Bohemia’s John the Blind against the Turks in the 14th century, or even that, as a Roman legionnaire, ‘Perhaps I stabbed our Savior in His sacred helpless side.’”

The young “Georgie” (as some called him as a lad) was driven. He learned to ride horses early, was energetic, and possessed of an endless craving for exercise and competitive activities.

In time, he’d practice putting on his ‘war face’ (an intimidating scowl for friends, enemies, and soldiers under his command). In New Gods #9, Orion’s ‘war face’ is revealed in the light of day, the light of truth, and to the god of light. Probably unknown to Jack at the time he did this comic was the fact that Patton used his war face to mask his many insecurities, as did Jack’s war god. The commander could be a tyrant (some of his soldiers discussed him in disparaging tones following 74

his untimely death), but he could also be very emotional, generous, and even tender when his rough demeanor cracked. An example? Not added in the excellent movie done on him was his openly weeping for slapping an enlisted man and facing disgrace for it (actually, he slapped two men on separate occasions).

Patton could smile, laugh, and even joke in combat. So could Orion. In New Gods #5, the fierce one destroys a monstrous mutated clam that holds him fast (even though he’d already freed himself from its clutches), then wipes out Slig’s bodyguards, after that Slig’s Mother Box, and finally Slig himself, and all the while... he’s enjoying himself!

Orion’s altered face masks his insecurities.

He’s troubled by the dual nature genetics and circumstances have mapped out for him. Still, the core of him (in New Gods #9) nevertheless finds love, as he puts it “in battle hotly fought!—In vengeance fulfilled!!”

Patton would’ve agreed. He often strode near the frontlines of a battle zone, offering himself as a target, shouting commands, cursing the Italian and German enemy, and electrifying his men with his personal presence and desire for conquest.

Kirby wasn’t a worshiper of Patton, however. He told a fanzine interviewer (see the Jack Kirby Quarterly #12), “He’s (Patton) standing in the rain and his uniform is a mess. The truth is lousy. You know, George C. Scott—we would have gone to hell with him. Here’s this jerk Patton standing there yelling at us.” Jack conceded though, that the general was a terrific officer in terms of pushing an advance quickly and keeping the opposition on the retreat.

Jack didn’t care for Patton, but others who fought under him were completely captivated.

Once, the commander addressed his men with, “I can assure you… that the Third U.S. Army will be the greatest army in American history…. We are going to kill German bastards—I would prefer to skin them alive— but gentlemen, I fear some of our people at home would accuse me of being too rough.”

A young recruit noted that following this statement, the general “slyly smiled.” The men were impressed. The recruit wrote of Patton, “Here was the man for whom you would go to hell and back.” ★

exact harsh reprisals on their enemies for the nearly 20 million of their kinsmen who had fallen. Orion and Darkseid are masters of annihilation. Like Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, they were locked onto a course bent on the other’s total destruction.

Let’s add Kalibak to the mix. Though Orion’s similarities to Tigra are reasons enough for his father to disown him, Kalibak’s boyhood was never brought up

by Kirby. Given time, the King may have done another tapestry issue (New Gods #12—“Darkseid and Sons, Part 2,” perhaps?) detailing the early years of the boys with special emphasis on Darkseid’s relationship with Kalibak. (We know from New Gods #11 that the cruel torturer was unaware that he was Darkseid’s son.)

But the quest for final destruction is wrapped up in Orion and his father, two men very much alike in some ways. Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the same coin to many, including Winston Churchill. Both were raging, nihilistic dictators whose creed of world conquest through ideological and military control destined them to meet in battle.

Stalin’s armies, like Orion, eventually proved to be the stronger.

In The Final Analysis...

In my humble opinion, and after years of doing my inadequate damnedest to ‘channel’ Kirby’s thinking for his originally-intended “Last Battle,” I believe that there was no chance of Darkseid surviving the outcome.

Why? Darkseid would’ve surely perished because Mussolini, Hitler, Yamamoto (the planner of the Pearl Harbor attack), and Tojo all died due to the eventual Allied victory. Jack knew his war and over time had studied and learned the lessons of history. He put them into the godwar from The Great Clash to The Hunger Dogs. He’d teach those lessons to his readers.

Adding his own viewpoint about historical warriors and their conflicts, Jack despised military aggressors.

How do we know this? A very telling caption was provided for the Roman exodus from Brittany in Forever People #7. Big Bear is positioned off-panel and his pointof-view shot of the powerful splash comes under the caption that reveals the young god’s thoughts, “It’s Darkseid who should be seeing this! After all, these are his children!”

Kirby adds (about the Romans and others to follow), “Ever evolving from man’s weakness for dominion—his fear of others—his worship of strength!!!”

However, with his last two New Gods wrap-ups in the ’80s, the King faced a royal dilemma. He had to remove Darkseid from power and leave him still standing! How could even a genius like Jack Kirby conclude his epic with the principal protagonists living at its end?

Darkseid’s technocrats (and Toys ’R’ Us) ‘resurrected’ Kalibak, Desaad, and even Mantis (who wasn’t even killed at the end of New Gods #10!). Jack turned the final story over to the people.

For Amazing Heroes #47 (1984) Jack explained, “In the end the Hunger Dogs are the ones who change things. It’s always ended the same way. The Hunger Dogs defeated Napoleon. The Hunger Dogs defeated King Louis of France in the French Revolution.”

These were still concessions that Jack hadn’t intended originally. The ‘toy soldiers’ meant that the ‘comic soldiers’ had to hang around. Would Orion have lived? The Hunter wasn’t Patton—he was Jack’s creation.

He may have survived the last battle, signifying that despite an unhappy upbringing (on Apokolips) and a somewhat tortured existence, a man can make himself a

hero and a catalyst for great change if he nurtures the goodness in his soul. (Kirby rewarded Orion with Bekka’s love and Tigra’s rescue in the graphic novel.) On the other hand, Orion may have stood in triumph over his dead father just long enough to witness a new leadership inaugurated on Apokolips (Scott Free, maybe?).

Then he’d have stumbled off to die as a new, free society begins in the ruins of Armaghetto (as the Berlin Wall and Communism fell and Eastern Europe lived again).

To the King’s thinking, maybe both father and son had to die like ferocious, predatory dinosaurs at the end of their age in time. A new era of peaceful celestials (the meek shall inherit the Earth?) would usher in a shining new age... hmmm... not unlike, coincidentally, Balder and the sons of the Norse gods.

Even The Gods Can Die...

The issue persists. Neither Orion nor Darkseid got killed.

Himon did. Esak was slain. (Even Kalibak’s clone is out there somewhere!)

Wars never produce complete victories. Kirby knew that.

Following V-E Day, death and destruction continued in the Pacific theater of war and the soldiers there (Joe Simon included) fought on. Millions of the dead were stretched in grim repose across North Africa, Europe, Hawaii, other Pacific islands, and Asia. The good fell with the bad—innocence wiped out with evil.

Soldiers fight, kill, and die in warfare... and they don’t get up to fight again in a later, thrill-packed issue. Jack’s characters were killed in his comic magazine war.

Izaya kills Steppenwolf.

Himon kills Wonderful Willik (whatta great name!).

Slig kills Seagrin. Orion kills Slig and Kalibak. Devilance and the Infinity Man kill (?) each other. Darkseid kills Desaad. Orion kills Esak. Darkseid kills Himon. (And The Godfather killed the competition at the movie box offices—but, I digress.)

Kirby understood that to some extent the dictators and their followers were successful. He has Darkseid ‘remove’ the Forever People (forever?) from the battlefield, keeping them from thwarting his future plans. Later, he destroys the home world of the Supertowners. Darkseid is the King’s ultimate villain. Befitting his status, he succeeds in his war on different levels.

Different religions and mythologies prophesize the end times of man on Earth and/or his gods. However, Ragnarok (as Mighty Marvel sees it) will always be hindered ’cause Thor, Odin, and their brethren can actually outwit, outfight, and possibly defeat the evil ones (and mainly because Thor still sells comics!).

And “Last Battle” has been postponed indefinitely.

In examining the Viking Age deities, author H.R. Ellis Davidson concluded: The gods are heroic figures, men writ large, who led dangerous, individualistic lives, yet at the same time were part of a closely-knit small group, with a firm sense of values and certain intense loyalties.

They would give up their lives rather than surrender these values, but they would fight on as long as they could, since life was well worthwhile. Men knew that the gods whom they served could not give them freedom from danger and calamity, and they did not demand that they should. We find in the myths no sense of bitterness at the harshness and unfairness of life, but rather a spirit of heroic resignation: humanity is born to trouble, but courage, adventure, and the wonders of life are matters of thankfulness, to be enjoyed while life is still granted

to us. The great gifts of the gods were readiness to face the world as it was, the luck that sustains men in tight places, and the opportunity to win that glory which alone can outlive death.

Jack Kirby would doubtlessly have agreed. In the final analysis, Jack, the ‘comics creator god’, who fashioned the four-colored immortals, gave us warriors from beyond the cosmos who fight for their beliefs and our world. Over the centuries, warriors and soldiers have looked to the heavens above for favor in conflict, and the King gave us mighty battlers who launched themselves earthward on our behalf. Just as Kirby never shrank from the challenges of his day, neither did his ‘eternals.’

As Thor was about to depart New York for Asgard on the eve of his greatest challenge (Thor #154—and the Mangog!), Stan and Jack’s scenario and Stan’s wonderful pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue through Thor to a few non-committal drop-outs was inspiring. He whirled his mighty hammer and the Thunderer launched himself homeward. Then, standing upon shimmering Bifrost, he proudly reflected, “The ostrich hides—the jackal flees—but man—and god—do persevere!!” ★ To and from these Sources: Special thanks to Scott Fresina for his recollections and help Patton by Alan Axelrod—Copyright Alan Axelrod and Palgrave Macmillen, 2006 Gods and Myths of the Viking Age by H.R. Ellis Davidson— Copyright H.R. Ellis Davidson and the Bell Publishing Co., 1964 and 1981

(above) Kirby comments on military dynasties of the past and present in this stunning splash from Forever People #7 (Feb. 1972). (left) Relentless—Orion plows through the feeble forces protecting Esak in The Hunger Dogs (1985). (previous page, sidebar) Orion fixes his face before fixing Slig’s hash (for good!) in these pencils from New Gods #5 (Oct. 1971). Jack drew General Patton—a face he knew well—into a cameo in Our Fighting Forces #152 (Dec. 1974). Compare it to the 1945 photo of the General shown here.

All characters TM & ©2011 DC Comics.

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #17

KIRBY COLLECTOR #18

Thor issue! Unpublished Kirby interview, interview with CHIC STONE, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #101 PENCILS before inking, cataloging Jack’s original artwork for the Thor Journey Into Mystery issues, evolution of Thor and the Stone Men, WALTER SIMONSON on Manhunter, Thor & Kirby, examining the real Norse gods, pros and cons of VINCE COLLETTA, linking Thor to the New Gods, KIRBY/STONE cover!

Sci-fi issue! Rare interview with Jack by SHEL DORF, EC Comics legend AL WILLIAMSON interviewed, the story behind Sky Masters, why the Eternals didn’t last, MIKE THIBODEAUX interviewed, features on Machine Man, Captain Victory, 2001, Starman Zero, Silver Surfer Graphic Novel, and others, Jack’s pencils before they were inked, and much more! Cover by KIRBY & TERRY AUSTIN!

Tough Guys issue! Rare Kirby interview, interview with Sin City’s FRANK MILLER, WILL EISNER discusses Kirby, an examination of In The Days Of The Mob, a look at Jack’s tough childhood, features on Bullseye, Link Thorne - Flying Fool, War and Western Comics, 1950s comic strip ideas and others, unpublished art (including Jack’s pencils before they were inked), and more! KIRBY/MILLER cover!

DC issue! Rare 1971 Kirby interview, interviews with NEAL ADAMS, GREG THEAKSTON, and D. BRUCE BERRY, 1997 Kirby Tribute Panel featuring MARK EVANIER, STEVE SHERMAN, MIKE ROYER, MARIE SEVERIN, and AL WILLIAMSON, special features on the Fourth World, Kamandi, Manhunter, Challengers, Green Arrow, Sandman, unpublished art, and more! KIRBY/ROYER cover!

Marvel issue! Rare 1970 Kirby interview, 1975 interview with STAN LEE, interviews with every Bullpenner we could find, including: ROY THOMAS, JOHN ROMITA, JOHN BUSCEMA, MARIE SEVERIN, HERB TRIMPE, FLO STEINBERG, & GEORGE ROUSSOS, special features on Ant-Man, The Eternals, Black Panther, and more!

Kirby cover featuring Jack’s unused SPIDER-MAN MARVELMANIA poster art!

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(52-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $1.95

(68-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

(68-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #19

KIRBY COLLECTOR #20

KIRBY COLLECTOR #21

KIRBY COLLECTOR #22

KIRBY COLLECTOR #23

Special FOURTH WORLD theme issue featuring interviews with MARK EVANIER, STEVE SHERMAN and MIKE ROYER, Jack’s ORIGINAL ENDING FOR NEW GODS, Mister Miracle’s Female Furies, 1971 New Gods portfolio, the HUNGER DOGS you never saw, plus rare and unpublished art from the series, including Jack’s pencils before they were inked, and much more!

KIRBY/SINNOTT cover!

Celebrating Jack’s Kid Gangs! UNSEEN 1987 INTERVIEW with Jack, overview of Simon & Kirby’s Kid Gangs, unpublished Boy Explorers, Dingbats of Danger Street; unsung kid gang the Boy Heroes, Boys’ Ranch unused pencils, Newsboy Legion old and new, unpublished art from X-Men, Jimmy Olsen and others, including Jack’s pencils before they were inked, and much more! KIRBY/STEVENS cover!

Transcripts from the 1995 Kirby Tribute Panel at Comic-Con with SINNOTT, ROYER, EVANIER and ISABELLA, our traveling Kirby Art Show, rare 1975 Kirby interview, a look at Jack’s convention art, 1972 convention panel with KIRBY & TOTH, how Jack met PAUL McCARTNEY, unpublished art including pencils from Captain America and S.H.I.E.L.D. before they were inked, and much more! KIRBY/RUDE cover!

“Art” issue! JOE KUBERT on Kirby & the Kubert School, an analysis of Jack’s dialogue, a Kirby thesis by GIL KANE, KEVIN EASTMAN discusses Kirby, Jack’s battle with Marvel Comics discussed by KIRBY, FRANK MILLER, MARK EVANIER, STEVE GERBER, and GARY GROTH, collecting Kirby originals, Jack’s stolen art, tribute to Roz Kirby, inker spotlight, “Squiggles” and more! KIRBY/ALEX ROSS cover!

Focus on Kirby’s women! Rare 1975 Kirby interview, interviews with DAVE STEVENS and LISA KIRBY, unpublished ten-page story from TRUE LIFE DIVORCE, a close look at Romance Comics, Jack’s original screenplay for CAPTAIN VICTORY, doublecenterfold of GALAXY GREEN, spotlight on Jack’s Women from the ’40s to the ’80s, Kirby pencils before they were inked, and more! KIRBY/KEN STEACY cover!

Kirby’s wackiest work! Unpublished Kirby interview, interviews with GIL KANE and BRUCE TIMM, comparing Kirby’s margin notes to STAN LEE’s words, Kirby’s work at Topps Comics, EDDIE CAMPBELL on Kirby, Jack’s wackiest dialogue and bloopers, special features on Silver Surfer, Black Racer, OMAC, & Goody Rickels, Kirby’s unseen screenplay for Silver Star, unpublished art, and more! KIRBY/WIACEK cover!

Villains issue! Unpublished Kirby interview, interviews with STEVE RUDE and MIKE MIGNOLA, Part Two of our series comparing Kirby’s margin notes to STAN LEE’s words, stunning UNINKED FANTASTIC FOUR #49 PENCILS, special features on Darkseid, Red Skull, Doctor Doom, Atlas Monsters, and Yellow Claw, the genesis of King Kobra, unpublished art, and much more! KIRBY/DAVE STEVENS cover!

Rarely-seen KIRBY INTERVIEW, more 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!), complete unpublished story from SOUL LOVE, unpublished art, pencil pages before inking, and more!

KIRBY/ALEX HORLEY cover!

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(68-pg. magazine w/COLOR) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #9

KIRBY COLLECTOR #10

KIRBY COLLECTOR #11

KIRBY COLLECTOR #12

KIRBY COLLECTOR #13

Fantastic Four theme issue! Interview with veteran Marvel artist and Kirby inker JOE SINNOTT, Black Panther–Role Model for a Generation, The Inhumans–Jack’s Enigmatic Super Group, entirely inconsequential FF Trivia, UNUSED FANTASTIC FOUR #20 COVER, unpublished art including Jack’s FANTASTIC FOUR PENCILS BEFORE THEY WERE INKED, and much more! KIRBY/ SINNOTT cover!

Humor theme issue, exploring the lighter side of Jack! A funny and touching interview with Jack’s wife ROSALIND KIRBY, Fighting American, Goody Rickels, interview with Destroyer Duck creator STEVE GERBER, fans and pros tell Favorite Stories About Jack, unpublished art including Jack’s pencils from JIMMY OLSEN, DESTROYER DUCK and THOR before they were inked, and much more!

Hollywood issue! Stuntman, the Black Hole, Jack and JOHNNY CARSON, why the LORD OF LIGHT never saw the light of day, unfilmed movie ideas, Jack’s adaptation of “The Prisoner,” from Thundarr to Scooby-Doo: Jack’s career in animation, the “King” and a crazy Italian’s epic love story, NEW GODS vs. STAR WARS, unpublished art including Jack’s pencils before they were inked, and much more!

International issue! Two rare 1970s Kirby interviews (one in English for the first time), JOHN BYRNE interview, 1996 Kirby Tribute Panel at Comic-Con featuring MARK EVANIER, ROGER STERN and MARV WOLFMAN, Around The World With Kirby, uninked pencils from Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles and Captain America #101, Jack’s personal sketches, KIRBY/ WINDSOR-SMITH cover!

Supernatural issue! Interview with Jack and Shadow creator WALTER GIBSON, unpublished seven-page mystery story, interview with Kirby inker DICK AYERS, the rhyme and reason behind The Demon, Black Magic, The Vision, Spirit World, 1960s monsters, Kirby costumes, overview of Jack’s Occult and Supernatural themes, Kirby pencils before they were inked, and much more! KIRBY/AYERS cover!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #24

KIRBY COLLECTOR #25

KIRBY COLLECTOR #26

KIRBY COLLECTOR #27

KIRBY COLLECTOR #28

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

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

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

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

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!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #29

KIRBY COLLECTOR #30

KIRBY COLLECTOR #31

KIRBY COLLECTOR #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #33

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

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!

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!

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!

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!

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KIRBY FIVE-OH! CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE “KING” OF COMICS

KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

KIRBY COLLECTOR #35

KIRBY COLLECTOR #36

KIRBY COLLECTOR #37

KIRBY COLLECTOR #38

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

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!

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!

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!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #39

KIRBY COLLECTOR #40

KIRBY COLLECTOR #41

KIRBY COLLECTOR #42

KIRBY COLLECTOR #43

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!

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!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

For its 50th issue, the publication that started TwoMorrows presents KIRBY FIVE-OH!, a BOOK covering the best of everything from Kirby’s 50-year career in comics! The regular KIRBY COLLECTOR columnists have formed a distinguished panel of experts to choose and examine: The BEST KIRBY STORY published each year from 1938-1987! The BEST COVERS from each decade!

Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! And profiles of, and commentary by, the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! Plus there’s a 50-PAGE GALLERY of Kirby’s powerful RAW PENCIL ART, and a DELUXE COLOR SECTION of photos and finished art from throughout his entire half-century oeuvre. This TABLOIDSIZED TRADE PAPERBACK features a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover inked by “DC: The New Frontier” artist DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, helping make this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! Takes the place of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50.

(168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

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!

Spotlights Kirby’s most obscure work: an UNUSED THOR STORY, BRUCE LEE comic, animation work, stage play, unaltered pages from KAMANDI, DEMON, DESTROYER DUCK, and more, including a feature examining the last page of his final issue of various series BEFORE EDITORIAL TAMPERING (with lots of surprises)! Color Kirby cover inked by DON HECK!

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(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

THE MAGIC OF STAN & JACK! New interview with STAN LEE, walking tour of New York where Lee & Kirby lived and worked, re-evaluation of the “Lost” FF #108 story (including a new 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!

STAN & JACK PART TWO! More on the co-creators of the Marvel Universe, final interview (and cover inks) by GEORGE TUSKA, differences between KIRBY and DITKO’S approaches, WILL MURRAY on the origin of the FF, the mystery of Marvel cover dates, MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, plus Kirby back cover inked by JOE SINNOTT!

“Kirby Goes To Hollywood!” SERGIO ARAGONÉS and MELL LAZARUS recall Kirby’s BOB NEWHART TV show cameo, comparing the recent STAR WARS films to New Gods, RUBY & SPEARS interviewed, Jack’s encounters with FRANK ZAPPA, PAUL McCARTNEY, and JOHN LENNON, MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a Golden Age Kirby story, and more! Kirby cover inked by PAUL SMITH!

“Unfinished Sagas”—series, stories, and arcs Kirby never finished. TRUE DIVORCE CASES, RAAM THE MAN MOUNTAIN, KOBRA, DINGBATS, a complete story from SOUL LOVE, complete Boy Explorers story, two Kirby Tribute Panels, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, pencil art galleries, and more, with Kirby’s “Galaxy Green” cover inked by ROYER, and the unseen cover for SOUL LOVE #1!

“The Kirby Vault”—rarities by the “King”!

Personal correspondence from Jack, private photos, collage gallery, rare Marvelmania art, bootleg album covers, sketches, transcript of a 1969 VISIT TO THE KIRBY HOME (where Jack answers questions you would ask in ’69), MARK EVANIER, pencil art from the FOURTH WORLD, CAPTAIN AMERICA, MACHINE MAN, SILVER SURFER Graphic Novel, and more!

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www.kirbymuseum.org

Newsletter TJKC Edition Summer 2011 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 Randolph Hoppe rhoppe@kirbymuseum.org David Schwartz Tom Kraft John Morrow twomorrow@aol.com All characters TM ©2011 respective owners.

Hail To The King - London!

Artist Jason Atomic, a museum member, was one of the organizers of a Kirby-inspired art exhibit (much like a physical version of Jason Garrattley’s Kirby-Vison on kirbymuseum.org) at the Resistance Gallery in April. An auction generously raised some funds for the Kirby Museum, too. Just recently, on June 7, Hail To The King was re-mounted at Orbital Comics, with new pieces, prints and t-shirts.

Original Art Digital Archive Museum Trustee and whatifkirby.com’s Tom Kraft and Rand Hoppe attended Comic Art Con in Secaucus, New Jersey in March with scanner, thanks to the support of Nostalgic Collectables’ Bechara Maalouf. Tom also scanned at the Boston Comic-Con and San Francisco’s Wondercon in April. Whew! Scans of close to 500 new pieces of Kirby original art were added to the archive so far in 2011, and it’s only June! Enthusiastic praise to comic book creator Erik Larsen (Savage Dragon), who graciously allowed more than 250 pages to be scanned.

Membership News The Kirby Museum welcomes its new members and thanks renewing members for their continued support: Ralph Rivard, Steve Tenerelli, Pete Von Sholly Steve Robertson, Jason Atomic, David Marshall, Sean Kleefeld, Allan Harvey, Jeffrey Wilkie, Ken Wong, Carlos Carle, Brandon Gregorius, Charles Soule, Arlen Schumer, Doug Mullins, Jack Perlowitz, Matthew Vanderlee, Jim McPherson, Harry Mendryk.

Questions about membership? New e-mail address? E-mail membership@kirbymuseum.org The Kirby Museum would also like to thank these people for their generosity: Mike Thibodeaux, Erik Larsen, our Trustees (David Schwartz, John Morrow, Tom Kraft and Rand Hoppe) and the Kirby Family, of course!

Envelopes Museum member Steve Robertson recently sent along some packages to the Museum, through the generosity of Mike Thibodeaux. In the packages? The manila envelopes used to send Kirby’s original art back by both Marvel Comics and DC Comics. They haven’t been inventoried yet, but soon. Thanks, guys!

The Kirby Legacy Rand offered the first run of his presentation “The Kirby Legacy” at Alan Rosenberg’s Hawthorne High School comic-con in May. He hopes to be offering it at the Florida Supercon, as well.

Intern!

The Museum would like to welcome a new intern, Michael Cecchini. A Museum member for years, Mike is a Hoboken, NJ resident who is studying Literature at NYU. Mike will be helping with projects covering all aspects of the Museum’s functions, including publishing, member outreach, fund raising, marketing, educational programs, and more, for credit towards his degree.

Plans The Museum currently plans to have a booth at Florida Supercon, Comic-Con International: San Diego, and the New York Comic-Con. Stay tuned to our web site, Twitter feeds, discussion group, or Facebook pages for details as they emerge!

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

Annual Membership with one of these posters: $40*

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

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

Annual Membership with one of these posters: $50*

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

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

Marvel—14” x 23”

Galactic Head— 18” x 20” color

Incan Visitation—24” x 18” color

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 These letter writers are the stuff of legend; you should be one too!

[Another short lettercol this time, but let’s start with news of a new book by a fave TJKC alum:] With apologies for the personal horn-tooting, the Kirby book I’ve been waiting all my life to write is just about to be published.

HAND OF FIRE: THE COMICS ART OF JACK KIRBY, due from the University Press of Mississippi in January 2012, will be the first academic book in English about Kirby. It will be part of Mississippi’s “Great Comics Artists” series (which already includes books on Barks, Tezuka, Ware, Alan Moore, and others). I hope it’s going to make a difference; I’m sure it’s going to say things about Kirby, comic books, and cartooning that haven’t been said before.

In a nutshell, the book is my effort to pull together and focus nearly a lifetime’s worth of thinking about Kirby, and so it includes some thoughts and passages originally published in TJKC, but in an expanded and very different form. I analyze Kirby’s style and the development of his technique, the tensions enacted by the very way he drew, the recurring ambiguities and challenges in his work, his relationship with and eventual split from Stan Lee, and his 1970s work as a solo act. Against the backdrop of Kirby’s earlier work, including of course his work with Joe Simon, the book examines what I consider the peak of his career, the sixties and seventies, when he introduced a new sense of scope and sublimity to comic books.

As it says on the book’s website (http://handoffire.wordpress.com), HAND OF FIRE is “about what Kirby did and why it matters.” More particularly, it’s a critical study of “cartooning as narrative drawing, of superheroes, and of science fiction and the technological sublime.” Really, it’s a book about why Kirby blew the top of my head off when I was a kid, and why he still does.

Charles Hatfield, Northridge, CA Very nice to see ShieldMaster in #56, though humbling in the shadows of comics by Jack and other comic book greats!

I am writing to mention that your editors got the ShieldMaster copyright wrong—they have Joe’s name on it when in fact it is actually “ShieldMaster TM & ©Jim Simon. All Rights Reserved.” Just a note for the future if the SM ever comes up again in your publications.

The team at Organic Comix are terrific.

Perhaps an interview with Reed Man—the artist, colorist, and publisher, and a great Kirby fan—would be something for your magazine.

Jim Simon, Flushing, NY Was reading TJKC #55 the other day and of course enjoyed nearly everything including Jerry Boyd’s rundown of Kirby adaptations to film and screen. I have to take exception to Jerry’s own entry for the Nick Fury telefilm starring David Hasselhoff! Far from being a “barely satisfying though mostly forgettable” film, I’ve found this entry to be the closest adaptation of a Marvel property yet produced. It absolutely captured the spirit of Silver Age Marvel in that while telling a serious story, it yet retained an undertone of self-consciousness that sort of winks at the

audience/readers implying, “Yeah, we know this is absurd, but it’s a great story though!”

Hasselhoff looked and acted absolutely the part of Nick Fury (if only he could have been cast as Fury in the new movies!) and the story itself included the helicarrier (in a fun design reminiscent of a flying aircraft carrier), LMDs, the ESP Division, Hydra, etc. And I loved the early use of CGI for television. Of course there were deviations from the comics mythology but overall they were minor and certainly far less egregious than most other Marvel adaptations have been. I would not say this film had no “vision” as Jerry says the BATMAN TV show had; it did, sort of a combination Kirby/Steranko feel.

I for one am disappointed it was never picked up as a series; it would’ve been great!

Pierre Comtois, Lowell, MA The “unidentified friend” in the photo of Jack Kirby with Bill Mumy is none other than actor Miguel Ferrer (from ROBOCOP).

Bret Mixon, Los Angeles, CA Another excellent issue (#56)! I was especially interested in this one, since Kirby’s unfinished projects have been one of my personal quests over the years, and there were plenty of pages of DC’s unpublished books (DINGBATS, TRUE DIVORCE…) to enjoy! Please continue with them. Thanks also for the BOY EXPLORERS story. These S&Ks are gems!

It seems that there is plenty of Kirby news to come, apart from the series from Dynamite. In the 2010 San Diego Kirby Panel, Paul Levine’s announcement to have a REAL book on Jack’s tenure at Ruby-Spears was quite good news!

Please tell us more about it, when you’ll be at liberty to.

Mark Evanier’s column was even more fascinating than usual, with its coverage of Kirby’s involvement at ESQUIRE. I didn’t know about it at all! I also hadn’t realized DINGBATS’ Non-Fat was no longer black in the single published issue, so congratulations to Sean Kleefeld’s “Incidental Iconography.”

THE HORDE’s new version left me a bit skeptical, wondering if it was the same thing I read a decade ago in the David Copperfield anthology book. The impending menace from the barbarian tribes was missing, and the whole project seems to be a bit unclear. Is it to mix comic pages and text? Who’s going to draw it?

Someone like Tom Scioli would do well. Please let us know more about this project too.

And to finish, I wanted to announce that I am starting a column on French website BDZoom (http://www.bdzoom.com/spip.php?article5013), that will be dedicated to the King.

Jean Depelley, FRANCE I think the self-portrait (in #55) of Jack where the cigar and pencil switch places wasn’t a mistake or even a comment on mistakes. It was just a little whimsey.

If I may make another addition to the “Casting Call” feature: If there was ever a time an actor reminded me of a Kirby creation, it’s

Neville Brand at the end of STALAG 17. You hear that voice, you look at his mug... and he is Sgt. Fury!

And it’s the Kirby version— not Dick Ayers! Check it out.

Also, in the 1964 Viking film THE LONG SHIPS starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier, Poitier vividly played a Moor Prince whose imperial bearing might have been an inspiration for T’Challa. (I’m thinking especially of a panel in TALES OF SUSPENSE #97 where he, the monarch, sits back as his subjects surround him.)

Mark Evanier writes of the influences of the FANTASTIC FOUR logo. The letters of the original logo were slightly altered and made thicker in 1969, beginning with issue #95. I’ve always wondered if a similar change in the NEWSWEEK logo made earlier that year (where it too was bulked up a little) might have planted the seed for the idea of changing it. Whereas the NEWSWEEK modification worked very well and wasn’t changed again until just recently, the revised FF logo looked... bloated. Right from the start it seemed a little sluggish, just like the magazine itself had slowed down and was carrying some middle-aged weight. The original might have had that early ’60s TWILIGHT ZONE thing that perhaps in ’69 was starting to appear a little “cartoony” but compared to all the different versions they have used since it has never been bettered.

I recall reading an article in your onetime competitor, the JACK KIRBY QUARTERLY, in which the writer broke down, panel by panel, a page or pages of a Kirby story (I think it was from THE LOSERS). I’d like to see some articles like that, the kind which break down his storytelling techniques.

Fred Janssen, Long Beach, CA

#57 Credits: John morrow, Editor/Designer lily morrow, Scanning John morrow, Proofreader Rand Hoppe, Webmaster Tom Ziuko, Colorist Chris Fama, Art Restoration SPeCIal THankS TO all OUR COnTRIBUTORS: Jack Bertram • Jerry Boyd Shaun Clancy • Georgio Comolo Jon B. Cooke • Adrian Day Shel Dorf • Mark Evanier Chris Fama • Shane Foley Barry Forshaw • Robert Guffey David Hamilton Heritage Auctions Rand Hoppe • Tony Isabella Jack Kirby Museum Fred Janssen • Jarret Keene Sean Kleefeld • Tom Kraft Steve Leialoha Adam McGovern Craig McNamara Michael Netzer • Martin Pasko Stew Silver • Bruce Timm Mike Towry • WhatifKirby.com Bruce Younger • Tom Ziuko and of course The Kirby Estate If we’ve forgotten anyone, please let us know!

Contribute & Get Free Issues!

The Jack Kirby Collector is a notfor-profit publication, put together with submissions from Jack’s fans around the world. We don’t pay for submissions, but if we print art or articles you submit, we’ll send you a free copy of the issue it appears in. Here’s a tentative list of upcoming themes, but we treat these themes very loosely, so anything you write may fit somewhere. Now get writing, and send us copies of your art!

GOT a THeme IDea? PleaSe wRITe US! TJkC #59: “THe kIRBY vaUlT” Compiles a treasure trove of rarities by and from the King of Comics. Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2011. Ships March 2012. #60: “FF FOllOw-UP ISSUe” Since issue #58’s “The Wonder Years” was the work of one contributor, we’re opening up a separate FF-themed issue for all our other contributors! Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2012.

Ships July 2012.

neXT ISSUe: #58’s a double-size BOOK by longtime TJKC contributor MARK ALEXANDER, titled “Stan Lee & Jack Kirby: The Wonder Years.” It traces the duo’s history at Marvel Comics, and the remarkable series of events and career choices that led them to converge in 1961 to conceive the Fantastic Four. It also documents the evolution of the FF throughout the 1960s, with plenty of Kirby art, plus previously unknown details about Lee and Kirby’s working relationship, and their eventual parting of ways in 1970. Ships in November 2011 to celebrate the FFs 50th Anniversary! (Counts as two issues toward your subscription.)

#61: “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! Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2012. Ships November 2012.

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

With the big-budget Captain America: The First Avenger film set to debut, we thought it was perfect to show this alternate take on the character by his co-creator. Done as a pin-up page in the Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles Treasury Edition in 1976, it’s sort of a new take on the “superhero western” motif that Jack pioneered with Bullseye, making this fabled hero even more “legendary.”

Captain America TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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