Jack Kirby Collector #59 by TwoMorrows Publishing

...THE

A TREASURE TROVE OF RARITIES BY THE “KING” OF COMICS!

$1095

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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR FIFTY-NINE

IT CAN’T BE! BUT IT IS ! I’VE DISCOVERED...

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SUMMER 2012

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BACK ISSUE #57

BACK ISSUE #58

LEE & KIRBY: THE WONDER YEARS (KIRBY COLLECTOR #58)

Special double-size book examines the first decade of the FANTASTIC FOUR, and the events that put into motion the Marvel Age of Comics! New interviews with STAN LEE, FLO STEINBERG, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, and others, with a wealth of historical information and Kirby artwork! (160-page trade paperback) $19.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Now shipping!

BACK ISSUE #59

DRAW! #23

BRICKJOURNAL #20

PATRICK OLIFFE interview and demo, career of AL WILLIAMSON examined by ANGELO TORRES, BRET BLEVINS, MARK SCHULTZ, TOM YEATES, ALEX ROSS, RICK VEITCH, and others, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

LEGO SUPERHEROES! Behind-the-scenes of the DC and Marvel Comics sets, plus a feature on GREG HYLAND, the artist of the superhero comic books in each box! Also, other superhero work by ALEX SCHRANZ and our cover artist OLIVIER CURTO. Plus, JARED K. BURKS’ regular column on minifigure customization, building tips, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions, and more!

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BACK ISSUE #60

BACK ISSUE #61

JENETTE KAHN interviewed by ROBERT GREENBERGER, DC’s Dollar Comics and unrealized kids’ line (featuring an aborted Sugar and Spike revival), the Wonder Woman Foundation, and the early days of the Vertigo imprint. Exploring the talents of ROSS ANDRU, KAREN BERGER, STEVE BISSETTE, JIM ENGEL, GARTH ENNIS, NEIL GAIMAN, SHELLY MAYER, ALAN MOORE, GRANT MORRISON, and more!

“JLA in the Bronze Age”! The “Satellite Years” of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, with BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, PÉREZ, and WEIN, salute to DICK DILLIN, the Justice League “Detroit” team, with CONWAY, PATTON, McDONNELL, plus CONWAY and GEOFF JOHNS go “Pro2Pro” on writing the JLA, unofficial JLA/Avengers crossovers, and Marvel’s JLA, the Squadron Supreme. Cover by McDONNELL and BILL WRAY!

“Toon Comics!” History of Space Ghost in comics, Comico’s Jonny Quest and Star Blazers, Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera line and Dennis the Menace, behind the scenes at Marvel Productions, Ltd., and a look at the unpublished Plastic Man comic strip. Art/comments by EVANIER, FOGLIO, HEMPEL and WHEATLEY, MARRS, RUDE, TOTH, WILDEY, and more. All-new painted Space Ghost cover by STEVE RUDE!

“Halloween Heroes and Villains”! JEPH LOEB and TIM SALE’s chiller Batman: The Long Halloween, the Scarecrow (both the DC and Marvel versions), Solomon Grundy, Man-Wolf, Lord Pumpkin, Rutland, Vermont’s Halloween parades, and… the Korvac Saga’s Dead Avengers! With commentary from and/or art by CONWAY, GIL KANE, LOPRESTI, MOENCH, PÉREZ, DAVE WENZEL, and more. Cover by TIM SALE!

“Tabloids and Treasuries,” spotlighting every all-new tabloid from the 1970s. Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, The Bible, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, The Wizard of Oz, even the PAUL DINI/ALEX ROSS World’s Greatest Super-Heroes editions! Commentary and art by ADAMS, GARCIALOPEZ, GRELL, KIRBY, KUBERT, MAYER, ROMITA SR., TOTH, and more. Wraparound cover by ALEX ROSS!

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ALTER EGO #111

ALTER EGO #112

ALTER EGO #113

ALTER EGO #114

ALTER EGO #115

GOLDEN AGE NEDOR super-heroes are spotlighted, with MIKE NOLAN’s Nedor Index, and art by MORT MESKIN, JERRY ROBINSON, GEORGE TUSKA, RUBEN MOIRERA, ALEX SHOMBURG, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and part II of JIM AMASH’s interview with Golden Age artist LEONARD STARR! Cover by SHANE FOLEY!

SUPERMAN issue! PAUL CASSIDY (early Superman artist), Italian Nembo Kid, and ARLEN SCHUMER’s look at the MORT WEISINGER era, plus an interview with son HANK WEISINGER! Art by SHUSTER, BORING, ANDERSON, PLASTINO, and others! LEONARD STARR interview Part III—FCA—Mr. Monster—more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and a MURPHY ANDERSON/ARLEN SCHUMER cover!

MARV WOLFMAN talks to RICHARD ARNDT about his first decade in comics on Tomb of Dracula, Teen Titans, Captain Marvel, John Carter, Daredevil, Nova, Batman, etc., behind a GENE COLAN cover! Art by COLAN, ANDERSON, CARDY, BORING, MOONEY, and more! Plus: the conclusion of our LEONARD STARR interview by JIM AMASH, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARVEL ISSUE on Captain America and Fantastic Four! MARTIN GOODMAN’s Broadway debut, speculations about FF #1, history of the MMMS, interview with Golden Age writer/artist DON RICO, art by KIRBY, AVISON, SHORES, ROMITA, SEVERIN, TUSKA, ALLEN BELLMAN, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by BELLMAN and MITCH BREITWEISER!

3-D COMICS OF THE 1950S! In-depth feature by RAY (3-D) ZONE, actual red and green 1950s 3-D art (get out those glasses!) by SIMON & KIRBY, KUBERT, MESKIN, POWELL, MAURER, NOSTRAND, SWAN, BORING, SCHWARTZ, MOONEY, SHORES, TUSKA and many others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover by JOE SIMON and JACK KIRBY!

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Contents

THE OLD(?)

The Kirby Vault! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 (is a boycott right for you?) KIRBY OBSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 (Barry Forshaw’s alarmed)

ISSUE #59, SUMMER 2012

JACK F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 (Mark Evanier on inkers and THE WONDER YEARS) AUTEUR THEORY OF COMICS . . . .11 (Arlen Schumer on who and what makes a comic book) KIRBY KINETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 (Norris Burroughs’ new column is anything but marginal) INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY . . . . .30 (the shape of shields to come) FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 (ever seen these Kirby covers?) INFLUENCEES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 (Don Glut shows us a possible devil in the details) INNERVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40 (Scott Fresina tells us what really went on in the Kirby household) KIRBY AS A GENRE . . . . . . . . . . . .42 (Adam McGovern & an occult fave) CUT-UPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45 (Steven Brower on Jack’s collages) GALLERY 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 (Kirby collages in FULL-COLOR) UNEARTHED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54 (bootleg Kirby album covers) JACK KIRBY MUSEUM PAGE . . . .55 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) GALLERY 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 (unused DC artwork) TRIBUTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64 (the 2011 Kirby Tribute Panel) GALLERY 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78 (a full-color SOUL LOVE story) UNEARTHED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 (Kirby’s Someday Funnies) COLLECTOR COMMENTS . . . . . . .90 GALLERY 4 (DIGITAL BONUS!) . .100 (a grayscale version of Gallery 3, not in the print edition) PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110 Front cover inks: JOE SINNOTT Back cover inks: DON HECK Back cover colors: JACK KIRBY (an unused 1966 promotional piece, courtesy of Heritage Auctions) This issue would not have been possible without the help of the JACK KIRBY MUSEUM & RESEARCH CENTER (www.kirbymuseum.org) and www.whatifkirby.com—thanks! The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 19, No. 59, Summer 2012. Published quarterly (didn’t say which quarters) by and ©2012 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 ©2012 TwoMorrows Publishing, a division of TwoMorrows Inc. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is ©2012 Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is ©2012 the respective authors. First printing. PRINTED IN CANADA. ISSN 1932-6912

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(above) Unfinished Thundarr The Barbarian illo, circa 1980. TM & ©2012 Ruby-Spears Productions • Scan courtesy Rand Hoppe at the Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org) COPYRIGHTS: Alicia, Avengers, Batroc, Black Knight, Captain America, Crystal, Daredevil, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Dracula, Fantastic Four, Fin Fang Foom, Giant-Man, Hulk, Human Torch, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, Moonboy, Mr. Fantastic, Nick Fury, Rawhide Kid, Rhino, Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, Thing, Thor, Ulik, Wolverine, X-Men TM & ©2012 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Bat Lash, Batman, Big Barda, Darkseid, Deadman, Demon, Forever People, Hunger Dogs, In The Days of the Mob, Jimmy Olsen, Joker, Kanto, Losers, Manhunter, Mister Miracle, New Gods, OMAC, Orion, Robin, Shazam, Spirit World, Superman TM & ©2012 DC Comics • Shield, Wizard TM & ©2012 Archie Publications • Green Hornet TM & ©2012 The Green Hornet, Inc. • Mickey Mouse TM & ©2012 Walt Disney Productions • Alarming Tales, Young Romance TM & ©2012 Joe Simon Estate • Big Bang Theory TM & ©2012 Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady • Man-Lizard TM & ©2012 Don Glut • Spirit, Gerhard Shnobble TM & ©2012 Will Eisner Estate • From Hell TM & ©2012 Alan Moore • Two-Fisted Tales, “My World” TM & ©2012 William M. Gaines Agent • Thundarr TM & ©2012 RubySpears Productions • Beardley Bullfeather, Kirby Collages, Night Fighter, Soul Love, True Divorce Cases TM & ©2012 Jack Kirby Estate • Hot Wheels TM & ©2012 Mattel

Boy -O-Boycott? T

Opening Shot

by editor John Morrow

(below) The Avengers has topped $1.4 billion in box office gross worldwide at this writing. To paraphrase Robert Downey Jr. in the commercials, let’s do a rundown of the characters’ origins: Nick Fury? Kirby. Thor? Kirby. Hulk? Kirby. Captain America? We’ve got a Simon & Kirby. Iron Man? Kirby got the ball rolling on the design for Don Heck. Black Widow and Hawkeye? Kirby drew their earliest appearances.

here’s been a small (but oft-times vocal) minority of TJKC readers that never much cared for the oversized tabloid format we started back with issue #31. Much like the pushback that Barry Windsor-Smith got over his tabloid-sized Storyteller series (one of the most beautiful comics series ever produced), some readers flat out hated it—not because it didn’t present the Kirby material gorgeously, but because (and I’ll quote what I’ve heard all too often), “It’s too hard to store it.” “Really?” I always thought. “You’d give up seeing Kirby art at near actual-size, just to make it easier to store in your long boxes?” Such, I guess, is the mentality of comic book collectors—and since they’re the very ones who’ve kept TwoMorrows in business for close to 20 years, even when I don’t agree with their opinions, I have to respect them. This issue is proof that sometimes, when a small group of fans is persistent, they can get their wish. With this issue, we’re back to the standard magazine-size of our first thirty issues. After adjusting to the old format while creating last issue’s “Wonder Years” double-length book, I realized I could enjoy working in the smaller format again. But another reason for the change is economic; the US Postal Service continues adding shipping surcharges for oversized packages, and it’s simply no longer economically feasible to ship copies to subscribers without dramatically increasing our subscription rates—something I’m loathe to do to our longtime readers. So to compensate for the smaller page size, you’re getting (for as long as we can afford it) 16 extra black-&-white pages, and best of all, a 4-page color section in each issue. I know from experience that our readers will let me know what they think of this new (old) format! While this issue focuses on some rarities from the “vault” of Jack’s life and career, I’m sure most Kirby fans are well aware of the recent slate of Marvel films, based largely on characters and concepts Jack created or co-created. As I write this, the Avengers film is now the #3 grossing movie of all time, and still playing at many theaters. It’s currently cleared nearly $1.4 billion (that’s with a “B”) worldwide, and the DVD release is still months away. But even before its box office debut, the initial ruling

in the Marvel/Disney vs. Kirby Estate lawsuit went Marvel’s way, with the judge deciding that everything Jack did in the 1960s was “work for hire,” and thus the Kirbys have no claim to anything Jack created. There’s an appeal announced, but for now, that’s the way things stand. And it has a lot of people a tad upset—which leads into the notion of small groups of fans making a difference. On July 30, 2011, Steve Bissette called for a boycott of all Kirby-derived product from Marvel. You can read the full blog post here: (http://srbissette.com/?p=12761). As Steve so eloquently put it:

“Jack Kirby always, in his life and in his work, trumpeted the power of the individual to act against power. It was Jack’s message, in all his work: the power of the individual to change the world. So, change the world, those who grew up reading, loving, enjoying, creating, earning livings from Kirby’s work and all that followed. Rationalizing not taking action is playing the corporate game. “Speaking only for myself: I’ve had it. I’m done with Marvel and all Marvel Kirby-derived product, period. No movies (I was planning to see Captain America this weekend; that’s forever off the table), no more comics from their Kirby legacy, nothing. Bringing greater public shame/ pressure to bear may or may not yield results, but removing further investment in their exploitation of the Kirby legacy— which is, undeniably, 85%+ of Marvel’s pantheon—will send a message.” Right afterward, Tom Spurgeon, on the Comics Reporter website on August 1, sided with Bissette over Marvel’s continued treatment of the Kirby legacy (http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/go_read_steve _bissette_on_jack_kirby_and_marvel/): “What remains most troubling about what Marvel has done and continues to do to many of its contributors and their families is how deeply unnecessary all of it seems. Marvel has resources out the wazoo. They have plenty of publishing money to provide royalties to a creator or an estate on work republished, even more movie money to make payments to creators for use of their characters in a movie, and tons of accrued cultural capital to properly give folks credit for a storyline or character without damaging the allprecious brand.” More recently, on February 7, 2012, comics creator (and co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies) James Strum wrote an impassioned article at Slate.com, giving his reasons for specifically boycotting the 2

By now, you may or may not’ve seen The Avengers. I don’t fault you if you did—the previews made it look like a lot of fun—but I applaud you if you didn’t. Me, I won’t be seeing it—at least not until such time as Marvel decides to treat Jack even remotely equal to how they treat Stan Lee. I also haven’t, and won’t, see the recent Captain America, Thor, or Hulk movies. I won’t be buying any archive or masterwork collections of these characters either. It just doesn’t feel right to me to financially support projects that put money in Marvel’s pockets, when they can’t see fit to offer even a token payment to Jack’s family, not even on comics reprints. Never forget: DC Comics, for all its faults, still manages to pay royalties to the Kirby family when they reprint Jack’s work. They list him on the books as creator when they print new stories of his characters. And back in the 1980s, under Jenette Kahn as publisher, they even found a way to cut Jack in on royalties for the Super Powers toy line that was being developed, even thought they had no legal requirement to do so. My $10 movie ticket or $30 book purchase won’t make a dent in Marvel’s bottom line—I know that. But I can instead use it to buy an old Kirby issue to support a back issue dealer, or Titan Books’ recent Simon & Kirby “Crime” collection, or even DC Comics’ new Spirit World reprint. And I can always donate to the Kirby Museum, of course. As might be expected about a publication with the name “Jack Kirby” in its title, we sometimes get accused of unfairly bashing Stan Lee. So let’s be clear: Stan’s position, based on his recent courtroom deposition, and his appearance in Jonathan Ross’s In Search of Steve Ditko documentary, is that he’s unequivocably the sole creator of all the Marvel characters. His stance is that Kirby, Ditko, all those guys, while great artists, were just taking orders, and doing exactly what Stan told them to do. And I’m sorry—that’s just not fair, nor accurate. Comics is a collaborative medium. That artist, especially at Marvel in the 1960s, was just as key to the creative process as the editor/writer/dialoguer. Whether or not Jack (or Stan’s) contributions were “work for hire,” is irrelevant to the question of who did what in the characters’ creation—something Arlen Schumer discuses in his “Auteur Theory” article in this issue. Recently, on April 25, 2012, reporter Eric Larnick of The Huffington Post was covering the press junket for Stan’s new documentary, and questioned him about Kirby as co-cre-

ator, and if he’d be credited in the Avengers film:

KIRBY KREDITS Our pal Jason Hofius researched how Jack Kirby has been credited in the latest Marvel films, and while there were no credits for him at the start of any of the films, there was a small reference in the end credits. Each sequence started with the top actors, key personnel like directors of photography and editors, before listing full cast credits and stunt performers, and then the credit for the creators. So they were fairly early in the credits each time. Here is the wording of the credits from the past five films:

(http://news.moviefone.com/2012/04/24/s tan-lee-jack-kirby-avengerscredit_n_1450146.html?ref=moviefone) Stan seemed rather annoyed at such a question intruding on his latest moment in the sun—I guess I’d be too—but at least the word is getting out that there was someone else involved in the creation of the classic Marvel characters. Likewise, I continue to hope that Marvel (now Disney) will one day step up and do right by Jack’s family, and all the other heirs of the creators who gave Marvel such a rich catalog of characters to draw from. History would indicate it’s an uphill battle, but as long as we continue to hold Stan, and Marvel, and Disney accountable in whatever small way we can, there will always be a reason for them to do something. Maybe they never will. Maybe only a future court battle will make something happen. But as long as Jack’s work continues to capture the imagination of the public—well, you can call it Stan-bashing or Marvel-bashing if you like, but I’ll keep trying to balance the scales in whatever small way I can. I hope you’ll join me. H (A personal aside: You’re reading this in July, and this issue was supposed to be out in April. Alas, some family matters hit right after last issue shipped, pushing me behind schedule. Then, in February—just as I was about to start this issue—my gall bladder decided it wasn’t happy where it was, and attempted to reenact a very memorable scene from the first Alien movie. If you saw my brief appearance in the Jack Kirby: Storyteller documentary of a few years ago, you may’ve noticed how wide-eyed and goofier than usual I looked. That was filmed almost ten years ago at the San Diego Comic-Con, on the day I was released from the SD emergency room, all doped up on pain meds from my only prior gall bladder attack. The docs aren’t sure why it waited this long to recur, but all I know is, two ERs and one ambulance ride later, I found myself waking up with several incisions in me, and a nurse showing me photos of some nearly 1" diameter boulders that they pulled out of me. I feel great now—all those unexplained, stress-induced pains I’d had in my upper abdomen the last several years are gone. But let’s just say the recovery period didn’t go so well, and leave it at that. Pile on the time I had to spend coordinating the LEGO Festival we organize every year, and you now know why this one’s so late. I’ll be spending the next few months getting fully caught up on my TwoMorrows work backlog, so you won’t see issue #60 till late this year or early next. But never fear, as soon as I get my schedule back in order, I’ll be right back on TJKC, and I already have the next five issues planned out.) 3

Iron Man (2008) Based on the Marvel Comic Book by STAN LEE DON HECK LARRY LIEBER JACK KIRBY The Incredible Hulk (2008) Based on the Marvel Comic Book by STAN LEE AND JACK KIRBY Iron Man 2 (2010) Based on the Marvel Comic Book by STAN LEE DON HECK LARRY LIEBER JACK KIRBY Thor (2011) Based on the Marvel Comic Book by STAN LEE LARRY LIEBER JACK KIRBY Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) Based on the Marvel Comic by JOE SIMON and JACK KIRBY Jack’s name is there, so that’s a great step. However, there’s a big difference between “Based on the comics by...” and “Created by....” This short-changes both Stan and Jack, by equating the contributions of guys like Don Heck and Larry Lieber—both of whom are on record as not considering themselves creators of the characters—with Lee and Kirby. But it’s certainly a more convenient way to offer up some credit, especially in light of past and pending legal proceedings.

Avengers movie. If you haven’t already, check it out (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/02/the_avengers_why_i_m_boycotting_marvel_s_movie.html)

Kirby got a clever credit on the March 1, 2010 episode of The Big Bang Theory sitcom, which featured a cameo by Stan Lee, playing himself. The character played by Steve Paymer is “Judge J. Kirby.”

Barry Forshaw

Obscura quantities of vintage material by the King make a welcome reappearance (for instance in such handsome volumes as the Titan reprint series), the soubriquet “Obscura” becomes harder to justify. Having said that, however, there is still a way to go yet, as I will prove in this latest missive. Read on, and you will hear about some remarkable Jack Kirby work which may be new to you, but absolutely demands a place in your collection— if, that is, you are a bona fide, card-carrying hardcore Kirby collector. And if you aren’t, why you reading this magazine?

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

WILL THE WELL RUN DRY?

Alarming Tales #2 has only been reprinted in Shocking Tales digest #1 in October 1981. But hopefully it’ll be included in an upcoming Titan Books S&K “Mystery” collection, similar to the new “Crime” volume that’s out now.

There is a built-in hazard in writing a column called Kirby Obscura. Editor John Morrow and I were younger men when he suggested that I might be the man to tackle such a tricky job, as I was clearly more interested in the lesser-visited byways of Jack Kirby’s Olympian career than in his massive successes, such as his celebrated run on the Marvel superheroes line with Stan Lee before relations soured (not that I don’t enjoy such later work—how could you call yourself a Kirby aficionado and not love that period?). But as John shrewdly noticed, what really charged my cylinders were the much less familiar sciencefiction, fantasy and horror tales Kirby produced for a variety of publishers which might be said to fall in both the early and late Captain America periods—that’s to say, after The King’s original work on the character with Joe Simon and his later revival with Stan Lee in The Marvel Age. For me, it is the short, beautifully turned tales which do not feature returning characters, that seemed to give Kirby a chance to really expand his imagination both in terms of his visual imagery and (when he was involved in the writing process) his other, more diverse creative impulses. Today, these concise pieces are something like that first kiss we always remember—you may enjoy equally pleasant experiences as the years roll on, but it’s that first rush of pleasure that really stays with you. So I was more than happy to say yes to John when he suggested inaugurating this column— but I have to say that even in that long-ago, prehistoric period, something occurred to me: this was a job with a built-in obsolescence. Sooner or later, I would have covered everything by Kirby which might be described as ‘obscure’. And, what’s more, as greater

A LIVING, BREATHING THING... If we’re talking obscure, Alarming Tales #2, published in November 1957 by Harvey, should qualify by any definition of the word. The short-lived series of titles that Simon and Kirby created for the company in the mid-to-late ’50s are largely forgotten by all but comics historians, and are rarely mentioned in any consideration of Jack Kirby’s career—which is a great shame, as among the pages of these neglected books are some of the great glories of this non-pareil illustrator. If the cover for this issue of Alarming Tales (while striking) does not suggest the guiding hand of Jack Kirby, that’s because it is, largely speaking, a Joe Simon creation. But regarding this cover, I realize that I have to tread carefully, as the provenance of this creation has been a subject of some debate. A man stands in swampy water, clutching a lantern. In the black sky above him, a series of green glowing fireballs rain down from the sky. One of them has fierily burst open, and out of it, arms stretched towards the observer, is a grinning green gargoyle (‘.... from outer space,’ shouts the blurb, ‘a living breathing thing burst out of the fire balls!’). While the inking hand is clearly that of Joe Simon, one might be forgiven for thinking that the initial pencils were the work of the King—but scholarship by Harry Mendryk at the Jack Kirby Museum has revealed that Joe Simon appears to have lifted the threatening alien figure from an earlier panel by an alumnus of the Simon and Kirby studio, Mort Meskin (from Black Magic #5, in fact).

DON’T FRIGHTEN THE CHILDREN To the English eye, what strikes one about this cover is the distinctly non-sinister face of the alien gargoyle. Don’t forget that the Comics Code logo is clearly to be seen (albeit hidden behind the ‘g’ of the word ‘Alarming’), so we are now firmly past the period when threatening creatures from outer space could have appropriately frightening features: hence the rather ridiculous, idiotic grin of the creature, notably unthreatening. The reason I say that such a thing will be intriguing to the English reader is the fact that during this period, we in the UK became familiar with the artistic censorship visited upon reprinted American horror comics, whereby monstrous pre-code faces were crassly redrawn to make them as inoffensive as possible—and no DC redrawing of a Kirby Superman face was ever as crudely done as these attempts to shield British schoolchildren from corrupting American horrors. The ludicrous grin on the alien’s face 4

looked exactly like many such to be found imposed on English reprints of (say) Fawcett horror comics.

IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE THAT COUNTS However, the above is something of an academic point where English readers are concerned, as we never saw this less inspired cover offering from Joe Simon. What we did see, however, were the glorious interiors, most of them vintage Jack Kirby, which appeared as back-up strip in the 68-page anthology books reprinted in Britain. For a start, we encountered that strange Harvey convention: a splash page of splash pages. An unnamed man in a brown suit (Who is he? The figure’s presence is never explained the book) gestures at reproductions of the various Kirby splash pages and tempts us to read on to see what these intriguing illustrations were the preludes to. And the very first story is a classic example of the delicate but immensely inventive Kirby fantasy that was the hallmark of this period. The piece is called “Hole in the Wall,” and shows a balding middle-aged man reaching into the black hole that has appeared in the cracked wall of his rundown apartment. Where his wrist makes contact with the hole, it appears to have vanished in a yellow glow. As so often with the Simon & Kirby tales of this period, this is a gentle character study, about an ageing, unsuccessful reporter who has been turning out a series of uninspired travel articles. He is treated with contempt by his colleagues, and incurs the wrath of his boss, who fires him for his bad travel pieces. But his travels are soon to get very interesting. Obliged to move to a cheaper apartment with cracked windows and icy conditions, the ex-journo tries to sleep, wrapped in his scarf.

THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY What follows is a classic Kirby journey into the unknown, as the eponymous hole in the wall begins to show a new world to the aging

protagonist. First of all, it is a series of bizarre objects that shower forth, in exchange for a shoe that the hero throws into the hole (this is an opportunity for Kirby to create some bizarre surrealistic machinery of the kind he was so good at). Needless to say, at some point, the hero will have to investigate further and step into the whole. You won’t discover from this article what he finds (no spoilers here), but if you’ve read the wonderful Race for the Moon story “The Face on Mars,” you’ll know that this kind of step into another dimension can result in some cosmically surprising results—certainly as rendered by the always inventive Jack Kirby, who had no peer in this area.

INNOVATIVE DESIGN When I last read Alarming Tales #2, I had to be particularly careful, as the copy I have is in an immensely fragile condition, showering about the room as one reads it, shards of yellowing 50-year-old parchment. Ironically, this very process—which leaves a little less of the crumbling comic each time one reads it—makes the experience of immersing oneself in Kirby’s fantastic world that much more precious. A piquant two-page space exploration strip by Bill Draut follows, before we encounter something really special: a story called “The Big Hunt.” When I first encountered this story in a black-&-white British reprint, what struck me most was the fact that I had never seen the logo for a strip incorporated into the artwork before (remember that in Britain we had never seen Will Eisner’s experiments in this field in The Spirit). A man in a pith helmet takes aim with a futuristic weapon at a bizarre, transparent creature whose body spreads across the whole splash panel—and in the center of the creature’s body are the words of the title. I can remember as a boy, that this audacious move struck me as a fairly radical experiment in the comics medium—and I loved the fact that it was difficult to make out exactly what shape the creature was (Kirby’s skill at creating otherworldly 5

in front of it. Robots in the comics of the 1950s and 1960s were plentiful, but never had I seen one with such an impressive amount of detail in its design—the imagination on display here was clearly something very unusual indeed. The actual thrust of the piece itself was something readers had seen a thousand times before: a machine achieving a kind of consciousness and humanity, before an inevitably tragic ending, but this is a genuinely poignant, moving piece in which the melding of writing and breathtaking artwork dovetail together with complete precision. Reading this tale and its predecessors again for this article had left my chest and thighs covered with flakes of elderly, crumbling comic book, and has made me aware that unless I replace it soon, I may get (at the most) two or so more readings from this fragile object in the rest of my life. But, hey, this was the American copy of the book that I first acquired many years ago—and I am really loathe to part with it. Sentiment! You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

SIMON WITHOUT KIRBY It’s hardly surprising that on the cover of Joe Simon’s fascinating autobiography, My Life in Comics, there is an image of the red-white-andblue avenger Captain America punching a grimacing Adolf Hitler—the UK publishers Titan Books (who have done such sterling work in making this kind of material available) will be well aware that it is a good time for readers to be reminded who co-created the durable superhero as a new big budget movie appears. But the other half of the cover design consists of a vintage black-&-white photo of a cigar-chomping illustrator at a drawing board—no, not Jack Kirby, but his business partner and fellow artist Joe Simon, who was to do so much splendid work with Kirby over the years. The fact that Joe Simon was not too far away from one hundred years of age but lived to see his most famous creation become the subject of a major film is heartening—and readers of this journal will be well aware that the late Jack Kirby saw virtually nothing of the sprawling canvas of his characters now leaping across the big screen. Joe Simon puts down the secret of his longevity to the fact that he really never stopped working, and to some degree, the book itself is a homage to the Jewish work ethic, crammed full of pithy anecdotes which extend right across the entire history of comics right up to the present day (Zelig-like, Joe Simon has been present at many of the most seismic events in the history of the medium). He is not modest about his own achievements, but there is no sense of self-aggrandisement (British readers do not respond well to breast-beating self-advertisement); by the same token, he is remarkably frank about people who he feels have finessed their own careers by utilizing (uncredited, of course) the talents of others: It is no surprise to see that Simon reserves some of his scorn for Batman co-creator Bob Kane and the talented but much-disliked Superman editor Mort Weisinger. Simon’s insights into the creation of the fondly-remembered work he did with Jack Kirby (such as their horror book Black Magic, the splendidly tongue-in-cheek Fighting American and, of course, the original shieldslinger Captain America) are greatly entertaining, and the sheer amount of information about his sadly missed partner alone make this book essential reading for readers of this magazine. If perhaps (and surprisingly) we do not learn as much as we would expect to about Jack Kirby’s character, that is perhaps a reflection of the fact that Kirby himself appeared to live for his work and his astonishing output was largely devoted to feeding his family; while clearly a great instinctive artist (using the word ‘artist’ in its broadest sense), the real thinker in the Simon/Kirby duo was undoubtedly the former—it’s unlikely that Jack Kirby could have produced a balanced and encyclopaedic book about his life in this fashion. Several mysteries that admirers of the duo might expect to be cracked go unsolved (such as to who exactly did what at certain points in the partnership), but Joe Simon’s My Life in Comics is a truly diverting—and instructive—read. H

creatures, of course, was unequalled by any other artist in the field). The tale itself owes something to Ray Bradbury’s classic “A Sound of Thunder,” though the hunter here does not take a trip back in time but into another dimension, courtesy of a strange egg-shaped inter-dimensional machine. And like Bradbury’s tale (not to mention the various comic adaptations and rip-offs of that original piece) there is a sting-in-the-tail twist ending which may be dispatched rather too quickly (the story itself was only four pages long) but doesn’t undercut all the atmospheric evocation of another world.

ENTER THE FIRE BALLS The title story, “The Fire Balls,” is probably the weakest in this otherwise exemplary book, but having said that, it’s still a million miles more accomplished than most similar fare being produced at the time—not least for its spectacular artwork. The splash panel is striking enough, with glowing oblongs of red and yellow hovering above a farmer and his wife as a horse rears in panic; but the tale itself is a relatively straightforward alien visitation piece. What sets it above most such fare is a sudden exhilarating rush of pulp poetry that invariably surfaces in so many Simon & Kirby pieces of this period. Here, that moment happens when after fruitless attempts to discover the composition of the fireballs, one of the fiery objects suddenly swoops down and engulfs a man in the crowd—and proceeds to use him as a conduit announcing who the visitors are (they are, in fact, inhabitants of the sun). The panels in which the hapless bystander is turned into a virtual microphone for the alien visitors are splendid Kirby stuff, with the man’s face darkened despite the reddish radiance that envelopes him.

SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST In fact, the best piece in the issue is probably the wind-up story “I Want to be A Man.” Encountering a crisp black-&-white reproduction of this tale in a 68-page reprint as a boy (and having no idea that the artist whose work I was looking at was Jack Kirby), what struck me most was the towering, complex robotic figure reaching down to the human walking

Barry Forshaw is the author of The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (available from Amazon) and the editor of Crime Time. He lives in London. 6

Mark Evanier

Jack F.A.Q.s A column of Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

We start this time with some questions from Michael Wohl:

Ditko walks into the Marvel offices to pick up work. Ordinarily at this point, he and Stan would sit down and decide what the next Spider-Man or Dr. Strange story should be about so he can go off and pencil it, but Stan can’t. Maybe he’s too busy. Maybe he’s home sick. Whatever the reason, Ditko can’t leave with a plot to draw, so someone—maybe Stan, maybe Production Manager Sol Brodsky—decides to give him something to ink so he can earn some money the next few days, by which time Stan will be ready to start him on the pencils of a story. That issue of Sgt. Fury (#15) is sitting there, ready to be inked, but no one has been assigned to it yet. George Roussos, working under the name “George Bell,” had been more or less the regular inker on the book, but it was around this time that Stan became unhappy with his inking and DC, where he did the bulk of his work and all his penciling, began making noises like, “If you work for Stan, you don’t work for us.” And Roussos is antsy that someone there will figure out Bell is Roussos and vice-versa. So George has stopped working for Marvel for a while. Maybe it’s getting late to get someone else started on that issue of Sgt. Fury, so Ditko will also be doing the company a favor by getting it done. But I’ll bet you the main reason is that Ditko needs something to do and Stan isn’t able to work out a plot with him at that moment. Not long after this, Steve takes over the entire plotting of Spider-Man and “Dr. Strange.” He never again inks someone else’s pencils at Marvel since it’s never again necessary for him to wait for Stan in order to start working on an issue. Anyway, I’ll wager it was something like that. “Casting” inkers, as you call it, was not a big deal at Marvel back in the sixties because there usually weren’t a lot of choices. They worked with a small talent pool and if you want to draw up a little chart, you can see that there were times when Stan had available to him the services of about four inkers—like Frank Giacoia, Chic Stone, Vince Colletta and Mike Esposito—and whatever Don Heck and Dick Ayers might do when they weren’t penciling. Wally Wood was in there for a while too, but once Roussos departed, there weren’t many more options for a while. An awful lot of the inking assignments on Marvel’s books then were simply a matter of who was available at the moment and who needed work. Stan tried to steer certain inkers to the major comics, selecting them because he thought they were right for the material. Colletta did not ink Kirby on Thor because Stan felt Colletta was the best inker for Kirby pencils. Whether he was or was not, the line of thinking there was that Colletta was the best inker for Thor.

I have read all the articles and opinions about Vince Colletta and seen the examples of how he took shortcuts and erased parts of Kirby’s pencils that seemed too difficult to ink. I wonder if you could tell us who you liked to see inking Jack and also how did Kirby feel about this? And while we’re at it, how did Stan “cast” inkers? How did he decide that Sinnott should ink this book while Giacoia should ink that one? And why did Steve Ditko ink an issue of Sgt. Fury over Dick Ayers? aking the last question first and working backwards... I have no direct knowledge on why Ditko inked that Sgt. Fury but I can give you a pretty good theory. Imagine the following.

(below) Splash page from Fantastic Four #39 (June 1965). Note the extra space between the inker’s first and last name, and how it’s all offcenter. It originally was lettered with Frank Giacoia’s full name, but he didn’t want Marvel’s competitors to know he was working for them, so had it changed to the pseudonym “Ray.”

Stan’s favorite inker for a time was Giacoia. My sense from interviewing most of these guys over the years is that he was also the favorite of the pencilers... the guy they were happiest to have inking their work. Later when Joe Sinnott was lured back with a page rate increase, Sinnott and Giacoia were the two guys who got all the ink work they could handle. They were the two guys Stan and Sol (Sol had some say in this) felt could ink any penciler and any strip, though there were certain strips they liked having them on—Sinnott on Fantastic Four, for example. When they had the “split” books—Tales of Suspense, Tales to Astonish and Strange Tales—Giacoia was more likely to be assigned to stories in them. Frank, though a tremendous talent and a very nice man, had occasional deadline problems. When it was possible, Stan preferred to assign him to the 10-page stories in books like that as opposed to the 20-page stories in other titles. (One thing I always found interesting is that like some other inkers, Frank often called on friends to help him with jobs when he was behind. His run inking Gene Colan on Daredevil has a lot of that with whole pages inked largely by others, though it looks like Frank

did some work on every page, especially when rendering the title character. Those issues are full of help from Mike Peppe, Joe Giella, Mike Esposito and others and he did this on most jobs he did for Marvel. The big exception is when he inked Kirby. He almost never let anyone touch Jack’s pages. Fantastic Four #39 where Wally Wood inked the Daredevil figures is not an exception to this since it was Stan who enlisted Wally, not Frank.) So Stan would try to steer FF to Sinnott, which would usually be no problem since Jack was prolific and the book was usually well ahead of schedule. If Joe had time to ink something else, they’d give him something else to ink, but for much of the sixties, Joe was also inking for Archie and doing work for Treasure Chest so some months, it was all he could do to squeeze in Fantastic Four. And Colletta would get Thor which, being Kirby, was usually ahead so it could wait until Vince had time to get to it. And there were a few other books with preferred inkers but basically, it was a question of who needed work at the right moment. If you look carefully at the credits of Marvel comics in the sixties, you may notice that the inker’s name is often not lettered by the same person who lettered the rest of the names there. Sometimes, the spacing is a dead giveaway that they hadn’t designed the credit box for a name that short or that long. That means that when the credits were lettered— probably but a matter of days before the job was given to an inker—they didn’t know who that inker would be. They either expected it would be someone else and had that name lettered in there and later had to change it... or they didn’t have anyone in mind so they left it blank and filled it in later. If you’re curious as to whether this way of doling out jobs meant that Stan ever had to give a job to someone he didn’t think would do a great job, the answer is yes. Many times. There were two factors at work there. One was a simple matter of deadlines. You have an issue of something sitting there in pencil. If it’s going to get to press on time, it’s going to have to be inked in the next two weeks. Ideally, you’d like Inker A or Inker B or Inker C but they’re all tied up and unavailable. So you settle for Inker W. Everyone who ever edits any significant number of comics occasionally has to settle for Inker W or Letterer Y. The other factor was keeping people working. This was especially a concern in comics back in the era where (top) Kirby in the Marvel offices in the mid-1960s. Courtesy of the Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org). the Talent Pool was all guys who’d grown up in the Great (above) Tales of Suspense #77 splash (May 1966). Frank “Ray” Giacoia even seems to Depression (the one in 1929, not the current one) and downplay his brush-heavy style here, perhaps to make it less recognizeable to DC Comics. 8

member of the creative team. (I am obviously talking here about replacing Colletta on Jack’s work for DC in the early seventies.) The other time, I won’t mention the inker’s name since I heard this story third-hand, but Jack happened to be up in the office and he saw some inked pages going through production. He didn’t care for what he saw, feeling that the inker was using lines that were too thin and fragile and that he’d lost the power in the drawing. In this case, Jack was not the editor and I don’t think he asked to have the inker replaced. I believe he told Stan to tell the guy to be bolder and to try harder... but Stan responded by immediately rotating the inker to another, non-Kirby assignment. Sol Brodsky was the one who told me this story. When I asked Jack about it, he couldn’t place the name of the inker I was talking about but he asked me, “Was this the guy who made everything thin that should be thick and everything thick that should be thin?” For the most part, Jack didn’t voice an opinion of how his work was inked. He liked some more than others but generally accepted anyone. Some of it was that Depression Era mentality. He didn’t want to be responsible for someone else losing work. Some of it was that he felt his work was strong enough and complete enough that it was unlikely that any professional inker could hurt it much. And some of it was that he was just plain disinterested in the inking. He liked telling stories and as long as the story was there on the paper, Jack was happy. He respected someone like Joe Sinnott or Frank Giacoia but was a bit insulted at the suggestion that his work “needed” Joe or “needed” Frank. I don’t want to dwell on the matter of Colletta’s replacement because I think too much is made of it. Editors replace inkers and artists every day and when Vinnie was Art Director at DC, he probably made many decisions that some guy was the wrong guy for a given assignment and instituted a change in personnel. As I’ve written elsewhere, Jack had a number of reasons On Fantastic Four Special #5 (Nov. 1967), Marvel forgot to change the inking credit for installing Mike Royer in place of Colletta. Jack didn’t like from Joe Sinnott to Frank Giacoia, who clearly inked this issue. Colletta’s shortcuts. He didn’t like what he believed was a security breach with Colletta showing New Gods work-inwere perhaps a little more concerned with always having work than progress around the Marvel offices. He wanted someone local, as someone who hadn’t lived through that. If you rely on freelancers, as Royer was to him. And he had an unpleasant conversation with comics did and still do, it’s a good idea to keep buying from people Colletta about these so they don’t drift away. You never know when you might need matters that convinced them. There was also a kind of understanding: “We don’t pay well him Colletta was the but we’ll try to keep the work flowing steady.” wrong guy for the job. And it was a matter of simple human decency. Stan, like most Frankly, as I look editors of the day, was well aware that the folks who were doing at that work, I am less work for Marvel were relying on that money to pay rent, buy groceries, pay doctor bills and so forth. Once someone was “in,” it seemed cruel to not keep them in and to keep them earning. Obviously, there were times when there was no work or someone had become too unreliable or their output was too far from what was needed... but to the extent possible, he tried to have work for those who expected it. What did Jack think about the assignment of inkers? As I’ve explained here before, he rarely thought about it at all. I only know of two times in In Tales of Suspense #69 (Sept. 1965), a switch his life that he complained about how his work was from regular inker Mickey Demeo (a.k.a. Mike being inked. In one case, he actually asked to have Esposito) to Vince Colletta meant abbreviating the inker replaced... and Jack was the editor of the Vince’s first name to fit the space. Colletta likely books so he was only doing what editors do all the lettered his own name, as evidenced by the letters’ different style and lighter weight. time, which is to decide they need to swap out a

bothered by Colletta leaving things out than I am by what I see as a simple incompatibility of artists. Not every inker can ink every penciler. Frank Giacoia came closer than most and even he was occasionally placed on the wrong pencils. Take a look at the work he did inking Neal Adams on the Green Lantern/Green Arrow strip. It’s not either of them looking their best. Joe Sinnott, I believe, is one of the two-or-so best inkers to ever work in comics but I don’t think his approach meshed with Adams on the two issues of Thor they did together. I thought the one issue of Captain America where Wally Wood inked Gene Colan was an example of two brilliant artists who worked in wholly-different ways, fighting it out in every panel. I liked the art of Kurt Schaffenberger and that of Alfredo Alcala. But when DC had the latter ink the former on a mini-series once, I thought the resultant art was a lot worse than what either man could have done on his own. My own favorites at Kirby inking were many—certainly Sinnott and Giacoia and later, Royer. I really, really, really (three reallys) liked what Bill Everett did on Thor. I liked Chic Stone and Dick Ayers on certain books... and George Roussos on Sgt. Fury. There are others— all a matter of taste.

Recently, the publisher of this magazine did a special issue that contained a book-length essay and historical overview of the Fantastic Four. It was called Lee and Kirby: The Wonder Years and it was written by Mark Alexander who, sad to say, passed away from a heart attack in 2011. He was 56. (Send your questions to Mark via his website, www.newsfromme.com) I have received a number of questions asking me about the book, about his conclusions, his history, etc. Basically, people want to know how I feel about it. I am glad John Morrow published it. I wish more people would write about Jack and about his work... and I say that knowing full well that the more he gets written about, the more often people will write factuallyerroneous things about him. But Jack had a firm belief that the truth would in time rise to the top of any morass. So when there were lies out there, it was just a matter of waiting them out. Mark has a lot of opinions in his book about content. I agree with some, disagree with others. Reading the classic Lee-Kirby issues, he perceives a lack of enthusiasm by Jack, and to some extent Stan, settling in at one point and ending the greatness. I think it came later than he did but that’s just two Marks liking different things. Mark said some nice things about me in the book and thanked me for the help I gave him. It wasn’t all that much and I wish I’d given him more because I think he misunderstood some things I told him. Here are two examples... On page 147, he writes: “Mark Evanier told us that he has all the Stan Lee plot outlines from the astounding Dr. Doom/ Silver Surfer story cycle that spanned FF #57-60. These plot outlines prove that at this majestic phase Stan was still making solid Pete Von Sholly spotted Kirby’s original, erased positioning of Batroc’s leg (top) on the art to Tales of Suspense #75 (March 1966), and moved the Ayers-inked leg back to its original position (bottom). He contributions to the storylines.” thinks Ayers may have changed it from Jack’s layouts. “Although this was supposed to be ‘laid out’ by No, I didn’t tell Mark that. I told him I Kirby and penciled by Ayers, I think Jack got carried away here—there’s a lot more Kirby than Ayers in had seen a few of them and that they did not this image.” After the change, Pete says, “Not a huge difference but the negative space around the figures show Stan contributing much by this point. is better composed—not chopped up as in the final and the overall composition feels cleaner to me.” 10

On the next page, Mark writes, “In July 1969, when Mark Evanier was visiting Kirby for the first time, Jack got a phone call from Stan Lee. According to [him], ‘We got to listen in on Jack’s end of a plot conference which lasted only a minute or two—though after it, Jack made a point of telling us that, on earlier issues, they’d spent more time talking.’ During Evanier’s first visit, Kirby was drawing FF #97. Jack and Stan were still plotting the book jointly at this juncture, and Kirby’s tenure on the series was only five issues away from being over.” No. I don’t think a phone call that lasts a minute or two, not all of which was spent talking story, amounts to joint plotting. There are other points where Mark’s version of the Lee-Kirby collaborative relationship doesn’t coincide with mine. I’m not claiming he’s wrong so much as trying to make it clear that I don’t endorse his understanding. In a future column when I have more time, I want to address the topic of “plotting” because I think some people use wildly varying definitions of what it means. To some, it means saying, “Hey, let’s bring back Mole Man in the next issue.” To others, it amounts to figuring out all the events that comprise the story and even working out what occurs in each panel. Many editors engage in a certain amount of the first definition—and some even in the second—without believing they’re entitled to a plotting or co-plotting credit. But that’s for another column. Next question? H

(below) Original art to Fantastic Four #12 (March 1963), showing a detail of Stan Lee’s margin notes.

ally happiest working more or less independently of other writers. The King was essentially a creator, an artist who plotted stories as he drew, with the natural flow that came easily to him. However, there are many who believe that Kirby’s best and certainly most commercially successful work was in collaboration with writer Stan Lee. There has been a good bit of ink used discussing just who did what in that process. In conventional comic production involving a separate writer and

Scan courtesy Heritage Auctions.

artist team, the writer usually provides the artist with a full script to work from. Lee is famous for having instituted the Marvel Method, wherein an artist would plot a story based on the sketchiest of outlines provided by the writer. Once the story was drawn the artist would supply the writer with explanatory notes in the page’s margin, whereupon the writer would fill in the final script. Lee believed that his artists were strong plotters and allowing them creative freedom would result in a better story. Certainly, in the case of Jack Kirby, he was correct. Recently, I saw a film clip of Stan Lee looking at Jack Kirby’s original artwork for Fantastic four #12 for the first time since it had been published. One of the first things that caught Lee’s eye were the margin notes in the panel borders, which he initially assumed belonged to Kirby. Lee started to explain the Marvel Method of writing, wherein he would give Kirby a rough idea of the plot, Kirby would elaborate the plot, pencil the book and deliver to Lee with Kirby’s notes for scripting in the margins. Halfway through his explanation, Lee realized that the margin notes were his own, written as reminders to him, prior to final scripting.

Margin Notes rom what we know about Jack Kirby, he was gener-

This exchange raises an interesting question. Just when did the process known as the Marvel Method actually begin, and what was the nature of the creative process prior to its inception? Several comic book historians allege that in the beginning, Stan Lee provided his artists with full scripts. Lee’s brother, Larry Lieber has stated in interviews that he wrote full scripts for Kirby as well. However, Kirby and several of his co-workers 27

claim that the King seldom followed scripts to the letter, either using them as a jumping off point or discarding them completely. This would partially explain Stan Lee’s need to write margin notes for himself on Kirby’s artwork. If Kirby had initiated the story or concept or changed the direction of the story given him, Lee would require more than his original script as a guide. He would, in effect need to re-script the story after receiving it from Kirby in order to accommodate the artist’s alterations. The fact is, there are very few existing examples of anything resembling a Marvel script. Until we are presented with a complete Lee/Kirby or a Lieber/Kirby script and a story to compare it to, we cannot be sure how completely Kirby followed their scripts. What we do have is a fair selection of original art from that period, including the page from Fantastic Four #12, the issue that Lee was perusing on camera. If we study Lee’s margin notes, we generally see that they say more or less what he will later elaborate in the balloons above: The scribble below saying “50 G’s, Enough to flatten, et cetera” has become two balloons spoken by separate characters. On this page in Fantastic Four #20 (below), we still see Lee’s margin notes, so we can assume that the Marvel method has not yet gone into effect. What we do see is something exceedingly interesting. Notice that the third panel is drawn by another artist, which is almost certainly Steve Ditko. This is a case of a last minute change being made in the story prior to printing. Comic Book historian Bob Bailey states that Kirby was probably not available to make the change and Ditko was on hand. Therefore, he re-did the panel. The earliest Fantastic Four page scan that I can find with Kirby’s notes is from FF Annual #2, appearing in the summer of 1964. Comic Book historian Nick Caputo concludes that Jack Kirby’s margin notes first appear in The Avengers #6, dated July 1964. If one looks at the notes in the upper margin, it is clear that it is Kirby’s lettering. Thus we can probably date the beginning of the Marvel Method to this approximate period. Nick Caputo also says that artist Dick Ayers claims that he in fact was the first artist to provide notes for Stan Lee early in 1964, as this Giant-Man panel (next page, top) from that year suggests. What’s also interesting about this panel is that we again see alterations done on the original art, this time as an obvious overlay pasted-up by Ayers himself.

CAPUTO: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Stan took over the hero strips three months earlier, providing plot synopses for Dick Ayers and Don Heck for the first time. Before this they were working from full scripts provided by Robert Bernstein, Ernie Hart and Larry Lieber. Stan’s notes are seen in Avengers #5, so apparently sometime between the May and July 1964 dated issues, Jack began adding notes, likely at the request of Lee. I’ve seen Bill Everett’s notes on the original art of Daredevil #1, which appeared three months earlier, so it is highly likely that Heck and Ayers began around the same time or earlier.”

(above) Fantastic Four #20, page 17 (Nov. 1963), featuring a Ditko-drawn panel. Scan courtesy Heritage Auctions.

The question still remains: What precisely was the method used for constructing stories prior to the inception of the “Marvel Method’? In most cases of other artists, one can be fairly certain that full scripts were used. Kirby is another case entirely. The King was a born storyteller and a prolific generator of concepts. Many people have pointed out that Kirby’s stories for Marvel often bore similarities to stories that he had crafted earlier, such as “The Magic Hammer” which appeared in Tales of the Unexpected #16,

where Kirby used a version of Thor’s would have even taken that direction. hammer prior to the creation of the Instead of talking about knocking Lee/Kirby character. There is also a down buildings, Kirby’s talking about marked similarity between a 1950s eating planets.”2 Kirby Green Arrow story, “The War Even Lee has pointed out the That Never Ended,” and the origin of artist’s inventiveness. In a 1968 interIron Man, which Kirby had a hand in view in Castle of Frankenstein, Mr. Lee prior to Don Heck’s involvement. described his relationship with Kirby, Based on the evidence, I believe stating: “He just about makes up the that Kirby was involved in plotting plots for these stories. All I do is a stories from the beginning of his time little editing... He’s so good at plots, with Marvel. It looks like he was pretty I’m sure he’s a thousand times better much the company’s defacto art directhan I.” tor, as Lee worked with him on nearly We’ll give Kirby historian and all of the first appearances of characbiographer Mark Evanier the last ters. Kirby was known and respected word. It is probably not a great leap for his ability to generate concepts and of logic to apply this description to ideas. Stan Goldberg, best known for other Kirby plots as well. his work as an Archie Comics flagship “As for who plotted the monster artist, as well as being Marvel’s 1960s stories scripted by Larry Lieber, that’s colorist, noted in an interview with Jim one of those cases where Stan says TM & ©2012 Marvel Characters, Inc. Scan courtesy Heritage Auctions. one thing and Jack said another. Amash in Alter Ego magazine that “Jack Apparently, Jack would give Stan a lot of plot ideas and then Stan would sit there at lunch, and tell us these great ideas about what he would select what he liked from the verbal pile. Based on talking was going to do next. It was like the ideas were bursting from every with Stan, Jack, Larry, Don Heck, Sol Brodsky and Don Rico, I pore of his body. It was very interesting because he was a fountain of would say that Jack plotted some, Stan plotted some and a lot were ideas. Jack was one of a kind, and the comics industry is what it is Stan polishing a Jack idea. Then the whole thing was handed to today because of Jack Kirby.”1 John Romita, another Marvel artist who worked extensively Larry, who would write a script. And then Jack would fiddle a lot with Kirby, stated in an interview with Amash: “When Jack got a with the scripts.” chance to knock the stuff out, and use some of his own characters, Sounds like a reasonable explanation to me. H Stan didn’t hold him back. Jack used to surprise Stan with new char1 Jim Amash’s Stan Goldberg interview quotes from Alter Ego #18 acters almost every time he turned in a story. Take Galactus, who 2 Jim Amash’s John Romita interview quotes from John Romita and All That Jazz devours planets. I don’t think any other editor or any other artist

(top) Dick Ayers margin notes on the Giant-Man story in Tales to Astonish #52 (Feb. 1964). (above) Avengers #6 (July 1964) margin notes by Kirby. Scan courtesy Heritage Auctions.

What’s The Point

Of A Round Shield?

Incidental Iconography hile Captain America was not the first patriotic superhero, he quickly became the most popular. The cover of Captain America Comics #1 expressed a widely held, but largely unspoken, sentiment in the U.S. at the time—recall that the issue debuted months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the country’s formal entry into World War II. But while the original design for Captain America was by Joe Simon (see his original sketch at right), Jack Kirby became more associated with the character and returned to detailing his exploits several times throughout his career. Jack remained remarkably (for him) consistent in how he drew Cap, but he did make several design changes to the iconic shield, most of which have gone unnoticed. The original shield design, by Simon, was largely triangular in shape, with a scalloped top. It featured three stars and seven red, white and blue stripes. The splash page of that first issue sports what is basically just a somewhat tighter version of Simon’s original sketch. Though the number of stripes varies a bit throughout the first issue, Jack generally kept things consistent. The first issue of Captain America Comics was wildly popular and garnered a lot of attention—including from John Goldwater, the dominant partner in MLJ Publications (now known as Archie Comics) whose own patriotic hero, The Shield, had debuted a year earlier. Simon notes in his autobiography that Goldwater was “admittedly upset that Captain America had far surpassed his hero” and he objected to the shape of Cap’s shield because he felt it was too similar to The Shield’s chest insignia. Martin Goodman, who

published Captain America Comics, was leary of legal action. Simon quotes him as saying, .”.. lawsuits are expensive and we’d better go over there to talk to him.” To avoid a lawsuit, they agreed to change the shield to a circular design. (Interestingly, they found themselves in Goldwater’s offices again the following year when he threatened to file suit over a villain in Captain America Comics #6 called The Hangman, feeling it infringed on the MLJ character of the same name. That Goodman backed down a second time and promised to never use the character again speaks volumes to the relationship between the two publishers.) What seems to go unnoticed by many fans, however, is that the convex circular shield that debuted in Captain America Comics #2 is not the same design they’re familiar with. Throughout Jack’s work on the stories in the 1940s, he drew Cap’s shield with two red bands and two white bands. All of the shield artwork after the company became formally known as Marvel in the 1960s displays two red bands and only a single white band. A minor distinction, perhaps, but it does have an impact on the overall visual. The round shield became more of an offensive weapon as well. Cap does backhand one crook with the triangular shield in his first issue, but the shield was largely incidental in that fight; Cap’s fist would have been there if the shield wasn’t. With the round shield, he begins to use it as a battering ram and large, blunt object, eventually throwing it for the first time in Captain America Comics #4. It’s thrown a second time in #6, and becomes something of a regular tactic beginning in #8. Jack came back to Captain America in the 1960s in the pages of Strange Tales. In issue #114, a villain called The Acrobat poses as Cap using a three color band shield. As noted at the end of the story, it was a test to see if fans wanted a return of the original character, who later made his famous return in Avengers #4. In both Strange Tales and Avengers, while readers see a three-colorband shield for the first time, it’s still not what they’re likely most familiar with. Unlike the four-color-band shield from

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

Jack Kirby’s longtime friend and partner Joe Simon died December 14, 2011 in New York City at the age of 98. Joe was born October 11, 1913 in Rochester, NY. Shown above are Jack and Joe, having fun at the Harvey offices in the late 1940s. The duo co-created numerous iconic characters of the Golden Age, including Captain America, the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos, Fighting American, and others, as well as pioneering the genre of Romance comics. They also ran their own company, Mainline Publications, but after it folded in the late 1950s due to distribution problems, the official partnership between Joe and Jack ended, although the pair continued to work together on occasional projects like The Fly and Sandman. Joe’s autobiography was published in 2011 by Titan Books, and is highly recommended. Our condolences go out to Joe’s son Jim and the rest of the Simon family for the loss of this multitalented man. We’ll have more about Joe in an upcoming issue devoted to the Simon & Kirby team.

Hollywood didn’t stray too far from Jack’s basic shield design when they made the 1979 Cap TV movie starring Reb Brown, but they did incorporate it as the WINDshield of Cap’s motorcycle.

Courtesy the Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org).

the 1940s, in the early 1960s Jack largely drew Cap’s shield as completely flat, not convex. This seemed to change in Avengers #7. Although there are a few instances of a convex shield in #6, it seems to increasingly become the norm beginning in the following issue. Chic Stone inked both stories, so this doesn’t seem to be an instance of Jack making alterations to his drawings based on what the inker was doing, as was the case with Joe Sinnott inking the Thing over in Fantastic Four. I suspect that Jack had simply drawn the convex shield almost accidentally and editor/defacto-art-director Stan Lee liked it, asking Jack to draw the shield in that manner more regularly. That would explain why it switches from flat to convex and back to flat again throughout the next several of Captain America’s appearances, as Jack may have needed repeated reminders. He took a short break from the character in late 1965, his last Cap story appearing in Tales of Suspense #68 with more than a couple of flat-looking shields. When Jack returned to full penciling duties in Tales of Suspense #78, the convex shield had become the norm and it only appears flat from a few odd angles. It should be noted, too, that the convex shield became Jack’s default ultimately. Certainly when he returned to Marvel and Captain America in the 1970s, his pencils clearly show he was regularly drawing a convex shield instead of a flat one, and even his sketches for fans from that period and later show that Jack embraced the idea of a convex shield. Despite seeming like the single, most iconic element of Captain America’s character since his second appearance, his shield actually spent roughly a quarter of a century undergoing modifications and adjustments by Jack himself—not sweeping changes, but noticeable ones that enhanced the very image of the shield. Jack’s final design on this has remained in place for decades since, even when the shield is passed from one character to another. And it’s worth noting, too, that even Hollywood hasn’t sought to tamper with the iconography that Jack came up with here. It might be a fairly simple design, but that it hasn’t changed since Jack touched it last says how powerful those nuances were. H

(above) Jack made great use of Cap’s shield as a graphic device on the contents page of the Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles Treasury Edition (1976). 31

Shield-Wizard Comics #7 (Summer 1942, inks by Irv Novick, and starring The Shield, MLJ’s less popular predecessor of Cap). Was this S&K’s payback for getting bumped off Captain America ?

Foundations

Obscure Coverage

Kirby covers you probably haven’t seen, featuring art reconstruction and color by Harry Mendryk

Speed Comics #18 (May 1942, inks by Al Avison, and featuring Captain Freedom, another character inspired by Captain America).

Green Hornet Comics #7 (June 1942, signed “Jon Henri”).

Green Hornet Comics #9 (October 1942, with possible inks by Roz Kirby).

Champ Comics #20 (July 1942).

Treasure Comics #10 (December 1946). See more of Harry Mendryk’s painstaking art reconstruction in the new “Crime” volume of Titan Books’ Simon & Kirby Archive series.

Influencees

Devil In The Details?

(below) Pete Von Sholly, himself an accomplished storyboard artist in Hollywood, drew this cover just for our article. Check out his reminiscences of Hollywood at www. vonshollywood.com, and check out his upcoming digital tome from TwoMorrows, Pete Von Sholly’s MONSTERBOOK, available later this year.

[Don Glut is a professional movie director, screenwriter, and author, perhaps best known for writing the novelization of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. He’s done screenwriting for such shows as Shazam!, Land of the Lost, Transformers, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Duck Tales, G.I. Joe, X-Men, and many more. He was also responsible for creating some of the characters and much of the backstory for the Masters of the Universe toy line. He took time out to speak to his friend Pete Von Sholly about his experiences with Kirby.}

might do a sketch of the FF for me. I mailed it to the address listed in the comic book. To my delight he honored both of my requests, which included a very nice pencil drawing of all four FF members.

PETE VON SHOLLY: You almost collaborated in a way with Jack Kirby! TJKC would like to know about that. DON GLUT: We didn’t really collaborate as much as thrash one of my old projects around. I’d met Jack in the early 1970s at the San Diego Comic-Con shortly after he moved to Southern California. This was one of his first San Diego convention appearances. I liked him from the start, a really down-to-Earth, no-pretentions kind of guy. He reminded me of one of the Newsboy Legion or Boy Commandos grown up. I told him I had a project I’d appreciate his looking at and he invited me up to his house in Thousand Oaks so I could show it to him. So, of course, I took him up on his invitation. It was a long drive from my Studio City apartment, but almost all freeway—and worth going the distance. When I arrived, he told me that I’d just missed Jim Steranko, who had just left— and who, in later years, become a good friend.

VON SHOLLY: How did you come to actually know Jack? GLUT: I never knew Jack really well, although we’d see each other at conventions, parties, CAPS meetings and other events. We always talked a bit, but never for any great length of time. He always had a lot of fans—and pros—around him, so I tried not to play the fanboy by monopolizing his time. VON SHOLLY: What project did you and he interact on and was it your own creation? GLUT: It was a project of my own called Man-Lizard. The character was supposed to be Earth’s first superhero, a “Stone Age Avenger,” who lived in prehistoric times, wore a costume made of the skin of a Ceratosaurus and the hair of a mammoth (yes, this was one of those mythical time periods I made up where humans and dinosaur coexisted), and had reptile-based super powers. It would have been the first of its kind— but then Hanna-Barbera later came up with Mightor, and you also had a character similar in some ways, Tyranostar. VON SHOLLY: Was it created for a specific publisher? GLUT: No, it started out as just a fan project when I was still living in Chicago. I wrote and drew the origin story, pretty amateurishly. At that time I didn’t even really think of selling it as a professional feature. People in Chicago, at least the ones I’ve known, don’t generally get such grandiose ideas. It wasn’t until after I moved to California—and even wrote a screenplay based on the character as an assignment for my screenwriting class at USC film school—that I started seeing the potential in doing something professional with Man-Lizard. In the late 1960s I had an “in” at Prestige Publications, the company that put out Modern Monsters magazine. Prestige was going to do an issue of a magazine called Ka-Pow! that Larry Byrd and I created and were to produce—a kind of Creepy or Eerie, but featuring various off-beat superheroes. But although some splash pages and scripts got produced, the magazine never really got started.

VON SHOLLY: I know he sent you a nice Fantastic Four drawing as a result on an early fan letter to Marvel. GLUT: Yes, I was a big fan of Fantastic Four. I mailed Jack a cover I’d torn off of an issue of FF—the one featuring the “Infant Terrible”—and asked him if he would sign it, and also if he

VON SHOLLY: What prompted you to bring the idea up with Jack? 38

Don Glut interviewed by Pete Von Sholly

GLUT: Well, Jack was doing his “Fourth World” books at DC and I thought, given his clout there, that if he liked Man-Lizard, he might be able to place the feature at that company.

GLUT: Well, he probably taught me to think more “out of the box,” to use a current cliché. VON SHOLLY: What are you up to these days? GLUT: Five feet nine inches. Other than that, I’m always busy. I’m finishing up yet another dinosaur encyclopedia supplementary volume, just completed writing a book about Chicago’s Shock Theatre TV show, am doing voice-over acting dubbing Japanese anime and live-action movies into English, working one day prepping dinosaur bones as a volunteer at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and trying to raise money to make another low-budget/ campy/sexy horror movie, this one about female werewolves. Raising money is extremely difficult, especially in today’s economy, and I seem to spend most of my time these days trying to do just that. And I’m no businessman by any stretch of the imagination. Anybody out there care to invest in a female werewolf movie? H

VON SHOLLY: How, and where, did you happen to brainstorm with Jack? At your house? His house? GLUT: His house—specifically, his kitchen. We talked and talked while his wife Roz kept stuffing us both with her great tuna sandwiches. She brought out a plate with what looked like a mountain of them and we devoured them all. I think I may have gotten most of them, and probably the last one, too. VON SHOLLY: Did Jack draw anything or just talk? GLUT: I don’t recall him drawing. I think that would have been something I wouldn’t forget. VON SHOLLY: Must have been fun, no? GLUT: It was indeed fun—very fulfilling (and also just filling). And Jack was just full of these great stories about his past career. As an example of how open Jack was to meeting his fans, as I left his house that day two others were arriving to talk to him about Captain America and his other creations. I wonder how many were scheduled to show up after they’d left? VON SHOLLY: What happened to the project? GLUT: Nothing. I tried shopping it around myself to DC when they had all those First Issue Specials or whatever they were called back in the 1970s. But all I have of Man-Lizard is a sample splash page that Jeff Jones penciled and inked for Ka-Pow! and also that script I wrote as a USC homework assignment.

VON SHOLLY: Was Jack helpful or were his ideas just too different from what you wanted to do? GLUT: During our brainstorming I thought his ideas were very helpful and certainly original. But after I got home and thought about them all, I decided to stay with my own original ideas. What we worked up over those tuna sandwiches was something very far afield of my original ideas and more in the line of New Gods than Man-Lizard. Jack kept repeating that “You can’t just have Tarzan running bare-assed through the jungle anymore,” and my original concepts for Man-Lizard were fairly basic Stone Age heroics—man vs. dinosaur, caveman against caveman, volcanic eruptions, etc. By the time we downed the last of those sandwiches, my project had a race of reptilian humanoids, a throne to be recaptured, World War I-vintage technology (including bi-planes), etc., and poor Man-Lizard just got lost in the shuffle. Jack’s suggestions were all good ones— but for a Jack Kirby book, not the one I wanted to do. My idea was, to put it in “high concept” terms, basically Joe Kubert’s Tor but with a prehistoric costumed superhero. VON SHOLLY: What was your relationship with Jack like? GLUT: We were friends, but not close friends. VON SHOLLY: Did Jack have any particular influence on your life and career?

Did “Man-Lizard” influence Jack’s thinking on Devil Dinosaur? Here’s an unused page for issue #7. 39

Innerview

Little Known Happenstances Interview with Kirby family friend Scott Fresina, by Jerry Boyd

(below) Jack hangs ten in the late 1980s at his backyard pool in Thousand Oaks, California. That’s his grandson Jeremy hanging onto the diving board.

(Entertainment wasn’t limited to the penciled page with the King. His superlative work in the field of sequential art endeared him to millions of admirers over time, and sometimes they connected with the Kirby family, providing Jack and Roz with some memorable moments! And thanks to Scott Free( -sina)’s steel-trap memory banks, here are a few obscure funny stories starring just... the happy couple! This interview was conducted on March 22, 2007.)

accessible. Guys as well known as he was, I was... just surprised that his phone number was listed. Roz used to tell me, “I don’t believe how Jack could do this. One guy would call in... he was autistic, or had a speech impediment—it was hard to understand him. I’ve tried talking to him but it’s frustrating, but Jack would hang on the phone with the guy for an hour!” Jack heard this from the other room and came in smiling, and said, “And that’s not all!” Jack told me there was another fan who’d call him from a psychiatric ward somewhere (laughter) and he’d ramble on about the Negative Zone! Apparently, this guy believed he had pierced the veil! As Jack told me this, I fell out laughing and I finally said, “I think you’re kidding!” Jack answered, “No, no, no! One time he called me, he suddenly stopped and shouted, ‘Oh, no—they see me! I gotta hang up now! I’ll call you later!’”

TJKC: Jack was/is known for his energy. Do you feel that’s an accurate statement? SCOTT FRESINA: He spent a lot of time with us, I gotta tell you! It’d be 9-9:30 at night, quarter to ten, and he had this energy. I dunno, he’d sleep in the day and work in the night, whatever—and Roz’ d come in and clap her hands and say, “C’mon boys, time to go!” (laughter) And Jack would still be talking, God bless him. As we’re driving away, he’d come out to the driveway behind us and wave goodbye. I can still see him. He was super-

A funny anecdote I remember about Jack’s studio (chuckles)... Jack had stopped driving after a while. Roz did all the driving. I don’t think Jack’s eyesight had been failing so much, but he’d had a few minor accidents and fender-benders. But then Roz’s eyesight started to fail. She had these really thick eyeglasses. I can say happily that before she died, she had some eye surgery and corrected it, so she needed no glasses and could see perfectly. But prior to that, Jack told me he was in the studio working, and the car comes bursting through the wall! (laughter) Roz couldn’t see where the wall was and she was bringing the car into the garage and BWWWWOOOWWWWW!! Right through the wall! And there Jack is sitting, drawing, and I had to stop laughing and apologize (to him)! I said, “Y’know, I can’t help it, but whenever you describe something like this, I... just know how you would’ve drawn it!” Roz told me once that they got a letter from a Jesuit priest around the time Jack announced work on “The Hunger Dogs.” Roz said, “We were so surprised to find the priest had enjoyed Jack’s work on The New Gods books! He had taken the vow of silence, and to pass time, he read copies of the New Gods....” He’d read the Fourth World titles in the early ’80s, I guess, so he was set for “The Hunger Dogs.” Jack added, “He made some interesting observations about some of it (Kirby’s concepts). He felt the Mother Box was very prophetic; he saw it as a computer that a life form needs to survive in the immediate environment and that future computers would be there to shield us from different things. He was glad the book was back.” Jack and Roz were sweating out the phone call at first when the guy introduced himself as a priest, but later they were extremely relieved they hadn’t offended the Catholic Church! (laughter) Okay, we’re gonna get a tad risqué here. It’s not too bad. Mike Thibodeaux and I were looking over the unpublished (at that point) pages to Galaxy Green (see Kirby Collector #20). Kirby was showing them to us 40

At The Kirby Household and we couldn’t help but fixate on the lusciousness of the women. They were all large-breasted and we told Jack and he said, “Yeah... yeah. Well, that’s the way I like ’em.” Mike said, “Oooh, I don’t know if Roz would like you saying that.” And Jack smiled slyly and said, “Hey! You’ve never seen Roz in a bathing suit!” (laughter)

TJKC: Don’t forget the Halloween story. SCOTT: Got it. I heard this one—not from Jack; Roz told me this one. At Halloween, they had lots of kids in their neighborhood coming up to their place for treats. One Halloween, a kid was running around in a storebought Ben Cooper Captain America costume—y’know, with the cheap little front mask with the rubber band in the back. And one of the neighbors told him, “Hey, y’know what, little boy? The man who created that character that you’re playing lives right across the street. That’s his house over there....” And the kid’s eyes light up as he lifts his mask up and he says, “You mean Stan Lee lives across the street??!!” (laughter) H

(above) Kirby drew this sketch inside a fan’s copy of the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel. (left) Jack and Roz, up close in an anniversary photo. 41

Adam McGovern

Know of some Kirby-inspired work that should be covered here? Send to: Adam McGovern PO Box 257

Mt. Tabor, NJ 07878

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

a limerick... (laughter) I’ve pared that down, and I think we’re already getting to see inside his head a bit more, such as it is, because he’s still a completely amoral, selfish Demon.

Occult Favorite Demon Knights’ Paul Cornell makes a hit with Kirby’s hero-from-hell Interview conducted by Adam McGovern February 7, 2012 [There have been many epochs of Jack Kirby’s Demon character, coming into being in the fiery fall of Camelot and throwing a shadow through the centuries, only some of which have been portrayed across the character’s many appearances since the early 1970s. Paul Cornell has been as many people to as many fans, enjoyed for his acclaimed prose sci-fi novels, beloved for his memorable TV scripts (especially Doctor Who) and followed faithfully for some of the most unique comics of the last several years, including an epic, moving Captain Britain and MI13, the ingenious and involving first issues of Stan Lee’s Soldier Zero, and a mind-expanding metaphysical thriller tracking Lex Luthor on a quest of cosmic folly in Action Comics. Cornell’s expansive ideas and intense, humane character insight are a rare blend in a breakneck medium, and he brings both qualities, as well as a wicked, earthy wisdom and humor, to Demon Knights, the ensemble book staring Kirby’s Etrigan in a Middle Ages team/militia/unmerry-band whose story owes as much to The Canterbury Tales as it does to Justice League. Cornell skyped from an undisclosed satellite to consider demonic motivation, space-god elocution and the sources of Kirby’s creativity.] The devil’s work-inprogress: Etrigan’s unhurried journey to heroism, in several scenes and covers from Demon Knights, this page and next (all interior art by Diógenes Neves; Issue #1 cover by Tony Daniels, Issue #5 cover by Mike Choi). Demon, Demon Knights TM & ©2012 DC Comics.

TJKC: It’s still a very alien perspective to what the “hero” is supposed to be. CORNELL: Yeah. Those [evil traits] are great qualities for a guest-star; whenever he pops up in somebody else’s book he’s fantastic and interesting. But if you want him as the central character then you’ve got to be able to look inside him a bit more. Also, I’ve always objected to the costume. And I just immediately said, let’s put him in some armor, let’s give him some changes of clothes. TJKC: I figured it was a suitable medieval makeover anyway since it seems more true to Etrigan’s times than Kirby’s kind of puffy spandex did. CORNELL: Well, I always like Kirby’s version of wherever we are. But there’s a few things Kirby did that, drawn by other people, look bad. We’re gonna have everyone else dressing a bit differently now [like teammates Madame Xanadu and Vandal Savage] so why not have Etrigan [too]. I think that’s a lovely name as well; isn’t that just a typical Kirby piece of left-field brilliance, Etrigan, because that name has endured, and it’s not from anything, it’s just an original feat of naming. And you wonder what linguistic tradition, what gets that there. TJKC: He seems to have a good instinct for the period’s phonetics, and it seems to fit the names we know from that period or that lore though it’s strictly intuitive. CORNELL: Well it’s a little Old Testament angel isn’t it? There’s a few things in Kirby lore that take you back to Judaism—I’m thinking particularly of Stan &

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: What are your memories of the original Demon and the character through the years since then? What are your ideas about what was his essence and maybe what went wrong in the past? PAUL CORNELL: I read the whole original Kirby run, quite recently, before I got to do the book. I read all of Kirby’s DC stuff, just because I got fascinated. Since then, I’ve enjoyed Etrigan’s appearances in Hitman, in Sandman… my feeling about the character, and this is something DC editorial shared this time round, was that the rhyming was a good way for writers to be demonstrative of their skills, but actually got in the way of identifying Etrigan as a character. That it puts a dirty great wall up between you and him. And it just feels artificial, because we knew we were going to get him into big medieval fight scenes, and that things were going to take him by surprise. And the idea that he couldn’t shout to the people around him, to warn them, without making at least 42

somewhere. Maybe a winged one. Jack liked him hopping about, I like him suddenly being able to grow them and fly.

Jack with Galactus going “I am that I am”—but Etrigan sounds like he might be one of the Nephilim or one of the lesser angels or something like that.

TJKC: It occurs to me that your conception of Etrigan actually seems a bit closer to humanity than, say, the post-Alan Moore Swamp Thing version; it’s not a matter of getting to “the noble guy we know” because since the mid-1980s he’s been a bit more detached and is very frightening while eventually doing the right thing, while your guy seems to have more difficulty separating from lowly humankind even as he complains about helping them. CORNELL: Well, if we were in a Vertigo book, he’d be a lot more evil (laughs). Neil and Alan were able to say, “Goodness, he’s a demon; of course he’s going to be as evil as you can imagine.” I’m also pleased with what we’ve done with Jason. I think Jason is tremendously put-upon, and is sort of our point-of-view character, our everyman, because he’s got burdens that nobody else has ever had. He wants to be out of this curse as much as Etrigan does, and he hasn’t got the original Jason Blood’s dignity and bearing and strength.

TJKC: You may have just written your next arc, it would be a good revelation! CORNELL: Oh, I’m not gonna go there (laughs); theological issues are basically off the table. And of course at this point that’s the most well-worn territory of all—there’s very little blasphemy left to be done (laughter).

TJKC: I kind of get a read from him as the resentful character who somehow deserves his misfortune, but then again, he’s only had a few hundred years to deal with it at this point. You mentioned reading the rest of Kirby’s DC canon… CORNELL: When I brought Darkseid into Action Comics, it was, oh, I get to play with the crown jewels. There’s something tremendous about the New Gods. I think it was such a conscious effort of mythmaking; he was creating this whole new cosmology of his own and sort of giving it to DC, and it’s the golden thread through DC ever since.

TJKC: Did you do a lot of thinking about how this Etrigan fit within the continuity we’ve known before? CORNELL: None whatsoever (laughs); it feels like an entirely new universe. TJKC: This book certainly gives the feeling of how rough Etrigan might still be then—and it’s certainly not the noble Jason Blood we know from the Kirby era. CORNELL: No, but I suspect he may get there, in all those centuries. But we haven’t jettisoned all previous continuity, and [we’re guided] by what makes the best story; I loved Matt Wagner’s Madame Xanadu run, and I’ve kept certain things about it, as we’ll see in Issue 8, which is the love story of Xanadu and Etrigan. We could say that by the time he goes through all those centuries he’ll be the Etrigan we all know and love. But at the same time we’ve got freedom to work with him. Though there are boundaries of

TJKC: Yes it’s funny that they are the pantheon of the DC Universe, but it fits with the space-age messiah that is Superman to begin with. CORNELL: It would have been nice if Kirby had just got a straight run on Superman as well. TJKC: Which legend has it he was too modest to accept. CORNELL: I don’t quite believe that, I gotta say; I think maybe he was offered creative freedom and leapt at it. And Jimmy Olsen was just a book where he could exercise that freedom. It’s amazing that that’s where Darkseid first appeared, in quite an offhand panel as well, like he just walks into the DC Universe (laughter). I love the way Darkseid talks, his inappropriate speech marks—which are tremendously alien; it’s like he’ll take quite an obvious concept in written English and put quotation-marks around it because to him it’s slightly over there, it’s one of those strange things Earth-people do. TJKC: I’m a fan of the much-maligned quote-mark abuse. It’s almost as if Kirby was acknowledging there was only so close you could translate the arcane concepts of these characters. CORNELL: Yeah, I think it makes Darkseid slightly scarier! TJKC: It’s almost like some system of linguistic accents we don’t understand. CORNELL: Absolutely. I used them in Action Comics [and was criticized], but if I was really [making fun of it] I would’ve had Darkseid do scare-quotes in the air. (laughter)

taste in what people are after for a character. DC staff would physically prevent me from giving Batman a gun (laughter). And if Etrigan developed much in the way of an unselfish conscience that would be a very bad idea. Mike Carey in Lucifer and Marv Wolfman in Tomb of Dracula made us interested in lead characters who manage to avoid doing a selfless thing throughout their entire runs; that’s a work of great writing and I’m trying to apply something of the same to Etrigan, to give him good reasons to do stuff which goes in the direction of being heroic while having entirely selfish reasons for doing so. I also gave him wings which he never had, just because it suits the look, and… there’s certainly a gargoyle in his design

TJKC: DC had approached you about doing just a Demon comic and you suggested an ensemble. CORNELL: I love writing teams and wanted someone for Etrigan to bounce off—and it was a profound 43

pleasure to have these meetings where they said, “Do you want to give us a wishlist of all DC’s immortal characters that might have been around then?” TJKC: I admire the thought that went into which characters show up and how they interact. The balance of familiar and new characters, and the unusual proportion of women team-members, and the full perspective of the medieval world with the Muslim mathe-magician Al Jabr. CORNELL: The diversity is entirely deliberate. People say, “Oh you’ve gotta let this stuff arise naturally”; it doesn’t arise naturally, you’ve got to do it deliberately; you can’t just leave a comicbook out in the rain and gay people will grow in it (laughter). Not if you want to represent all aspects of life, and I do think everybody should have a superhero who is like them.

RANDOM ACTS OF KIRBY Being a supplemental survey of the latest parallel-Kirby artifacts in print, sound and pixel to come across the dimensional transom.

Monster Mashup Rob Wuest’s self-published Monsters Among Us had me at page 6, when a single caption starts with “Meanwhile” and ends with “suddenly.” A page later, the scientist-father hero is prepping his special super-tech device to convert a two-dimensional apple painting to a 3-D fruit for the sake of ending world hunger, and when his son says he hopes it works, replies, “It has to, Bobby”—meaning, don’t ask us how it works, but it “has to” move the story of the 3-D ray accidentally hitting a Ditko/ Kirbyesque monster comic along. Wuest knows well the imperatives of midcentury genre comics, and the strictures of the late-1950s society the book is set in, with the starring family’s mom merrily bringing platters of food while dad and junior well-meaningly destroy the world. If Lee & Kirby’s FF were the sophisticated city-émigrés who symbolized Ike & Kennedy-era cosmopolitanism, the Kraushaars (ouch-arr!) in Monsters Among Us, secured in a standard small-town house, are the successful suburbanites with all modern—and future—conveniences. They prove a bit inconvenient as the monstrosities from the second dimension begin to rampage, to the apocalyptic glee of artist Stefano Pavan (whose brilliant Kirby-app graphics graced my stage production “Norrga the Thunderer” last summer). The Kraushaars attend a local Martin Luther King guest-sermon for the right dawn-of-the-’60s civic-chic celebrity cameo, and come away with a renewed lesson about standing with their fellow man and woman, against, um, giant monsters. It’s both a hilarious comment on super-adventurers’ clueless remove from the concerns of real-life heroes putting their lives on the line, and a touching point about how comics, then and now, tap our need for largerthan-life humans who are even bigger than the problems we made in the first place. We haven’t reached the future we expected and most of those old comics aren’t as good as we remember, but in both period detail and creative possibilities, Monsters Among Us gets it right. [http://www.monsters-among-us.com/]

(above left) Giant-size man-things: Wuest & Pavan’s monsters break into comics. (top right) The ever-popular Mister Miracle sawn-in-half trick, and others from Maxwell’s. (bottom) Remember kids, tattoos are good for you: Cheese Hasselberger’s Fin fan-art. 44

Channel Kirby The Kirby spirit transmits in all media, most lately streaming through the audio ether, supercharging the online continuum and phasing into the physical realm. The “Kirby Enthusiasm” exhibit took over the walls of Hoboken, NJ’s legendary band-bar Maxwell’s from the Saturday of New York Comic Con to the end of 2011, covering the walls with psychedelic, punky, experimental and straight-ahead conceptions of Kirby befitting the venue’s stage, and featuring an all-star lineup from Pete Von Sholly and Dean Haspiel to Frank Espinosa and Miss Lasko-Gross. The pop-art of Kirby-enthusiastic bands accompanied the opening night, though the King’s own namesake outfit Kirby Krackle was booked elsewhere. Still, KK’s third and finest disk, Super Powered Love, is available in all formats and universes, with pop neoclassics, punk anthems, Rap & B themes and ukulele ballads telling the strong and true stories that are every fanboy and girl’s heart’s desire. Find out how to get it at http://www.kirbykracklemusic.com, see my full review at http://blog.comiccritique.com/?p=1109, and while you’re wasting company time in a good cause, check out writer and publisher Nat Gertler’s “A Buck for Jack” campaign at http://abuckforjack.com. This is one fan acting alone and trying to make a difference, donating a single dollar for every big-budget movie he’s seen that wouldn’t exist without Kirby, passing it on to the nonprofit Kirby Museum (also benefited by the Kirby Enthusiasm show and spotlighted elsewhere in each issue of this pub), and asking all fans to do the same—not boycott the often-excellent multimedia incarnations of Kirby’s concepts, but just ensure the recognition of his own contribution and the prominence of his original work—which, for this King, is the most proper of royalties. H

Cut-Ups

Kirby’s Collages In Context by Steven Brower (This piece originally appeared in Imprint, the daily design blog from Print magazine, and can be found online at: http://imprint.printmag.com/illustration/jackkirby%E2%80%99s-collages-in-context/ ) ack Kirby had choices to make, especially considering he could do it all: writing, penciling, inking, coloring. Along the way he found it prudent to concentrate on what he could do best: dream big and render those flights of fancy in graphite. Why then would he choose to break his stride and search through various magazines in search of the right image, rubber cement in hand? Kirby’s entrée into the world of collage did not begin with the Fantastic Four, or even by his own hand. Richard Hamilton included a (Simon &) Kirby Young Romance splash page in his seminal 1956 collage “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” launching both Pop Art and Kirby into the fine art world. “High” culture had begun to give sway to pop culture through the most democratic of visual art forms, collage. True, its origins could be traced back to ancient Japan, and examples exist during the thirteenth century in Persia, spreading to Turkey and eventually Europe by the 1600s. The modern version that first captured the public’s attention was created in 1912, when Pablo Picasso glued newspaper clippings into a Cubist painting. The artist’s and general public’s fascination with collage had begun. Artists of the Russian Constructivist, Bauhaus, Dada and Surrealist movements pushed the form further. When Henri Matisse’s eyesight began to fail, he turned to cut paper collage, producing “Jazz,” celebrating the other 20th century TM &©Jo art form that employed improvisation and spontaneity as a Jack Kirb e Simon & y Estates main ingredient. During the Abstract Impression movement of the 1950s, Rauschenberg, Reinhart and Motherwell explored the medium further. Artists more widely known for their other talents, such as William S. Burroughs, John Cage and Louis Armstrong all created collage. In comics, the ever-inventive Will Eisner employed the technique in The Spirit in “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble” in 1948. However this featured a single aerial cityscape with drawn figures and captions on top, to connote flight, rather than fully realized collaged elements. If anything, as dramatic as the effect was, this could be seen as a shortcut on the part of the artist, as much time was saved rendering architecture. Never one to take the easy way out, Jack Kirby was the first in comics to utilize collage as entirely something new and explore its full potential, despite the crude printing techniques of the time. Beginning in 1964 with the Fantastic Four, Kirby created collages to convey fanciful scenes of cosmic dimensions. These early comic collages were used to further the storytelling and appear to be created concurrently. However, according to former assistant and Kirby biographer Mark Evanier, by the 1970s Kirby would often create collages from his collection of photographic magazines such as National Geographic and Life, whenever the mood struck him, and make good use of them at

(above) “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” by Richard Hamilton, 1956. (below) “Compotier avec fruits, violon et verre” by Pablo Picasso, 1912. (right) Rodchenko, Russian Constructivism. All collage images TM & ©2012 the respective owners.

der the entire Negative Zone storyline in the Fantastic Four in collage, a pursuit he abandoned due to his page rate, the speed of his pencil and the printed result. Still, he would continue with this new passion through the 1970s, carrying the technique over to DC. Kirby’s Fourth World comics featured myriad collages, and significantly he began to create even more sophisticated works for his intended new line of magazines, Spirit World and In The Days of the Mob, both originally planned as four-color publications. Removed (above) Max Ernst, Surrealism. (right) Collage by Louis Armstrong. (bottom right) Robert Rauschenberg, 1963. (below) Will Eisner “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble” from The Spirit, 1948.

a later date. Considering that he was one of the fastest artists in comics, and worked upward of 70 to 80 hours a week at the drawing board during this period, why would Kirby slow himself down to create a collage, which no doubt was more time consuming? Scissors, X-Acto knife, and rubber cement were no match for the lightning speed of his hand. It is yet additional evidence of Kirby’s unbridled creativity and imagination, as well as the compulsive need to create at all costs, spending time composing these collages in what little spare time he had. Similarly, Louis Armstrong somehow found time to create over 500 collages while touring 300 plus dates around the world. Despite the rudimentary printing of the time, these early collages captured the imagination of many of my generation. Somehow we were able to see past the murkiness and peer into a universe we hadn’t experienced before. At the dawn of the space age, along with Sputnik, the Mercury flights and high-powered telescopes, we were able to view galaxies heretofore unimaginable. Reportedly, it was Kirby’s intention to ren46

from sequential storytelling and employed rather as illustration, these collages stand on their own as singular works of art. Kirby was so passionate about this art-form, that when he was asked if they should bring anything, he would request visitors to his home bring periodicals as fodder for his collages. Louis Armstrong did likewise. Kirby in comics, and Pushpin studios in advertising in the 1960s, presented impressionable young minds with vibrant and exuberant visual art that influenced the psychedelic art movement soon to follow. Significantly, psychedelic artists such as Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse and Wes Wilson all used collage in their work. As author James Romberger pointed out in his article “Undiscovered Particles” in the Jack Kirby Quarterly #15, a Merry Prankster poster heralding an acid test, replete with music provided by the Grateful Dead, featured Kirby’s Thor upfront, center. (For more musical co-opting of Kirby imagery, see page 54 of this issue.) Kirby’s interest in collage was so keen that in the early ’70s, he desired to create fumetti comics, comprised entirely of photographs with captions, but could receive no support from DC. Ever ahead of his time, these became popular at the end of the decade in the United States with comic adaptations of films such as Star Trek, Grease, Saturday Night Fever, Rocky II, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Battlestar Galactica, although the medium had been popular prior in France, Spain and Latin America. Kirby’s infatuation for collage reached its zenith during this period. Spirit World in particular reveals his passion for the medium (pun intended). In a 50page publication (including front, back and inside covers) a total of 13 pages are given over to partial or full-page collages incorporated throughout, including a 16" x 21" tipped-in folded poster. This includes the fumetti “Children of the Flaming Wheel” which features as models friends of assistants Steven Sherman and Evanier in a 3-page story, with Sherman as photographer. Originally intended by Kirby to be printed in color, he wisely chose monochromatic colors of blue and purple for maximum effect. The poster is worthy of closer examination. Entitled “SOULS” it is composed in a clockwise manner, with large, eyeless heads leading the viewer in a circular motion, with smaller figures punctuating the spaces between. A disembodied eye

(top right) Fantastic Four Annual #6, 1968. The margin note in Kirby’s handwriting describes the Negative Zone: “It’s both weird and beautiful.” (right) SOULS Poster, which was folded and tipped into Spirit World. (above) Raoul Hausmann, “Portrait of the Artist,” 1923. 47

(top left) Fantastic Four #48, 1966. (top right) John Heartfield, 1935. His anti-Nazi message undoubtedly would’ve resonated with Kirby. (above) Sgt. Fury #13, Dec. 1964. (below) Kirby’s comics collages influenced others: The New People, Dell, 1970. (left) Kirby created two DC magazines, Spirit World and In The Days of the Mob, originally intended to be printed in four-color throughout. After DC reneged, he had to reconfigure both as single-color interiors with only four-color covers. This image is from Spirit World, which DC just reprinted.

floats below a half obscured castle, four headless women walk single file in Victorian era gowns, ghostly figures peer out from three windows, and a drawn nude male figure, back to the viewer, merges with a large rock formation. All this is printed in a single color, purple, which adds to the intended eeriness. What is interesting is the variation in tonality that creates the illusion of foreground and background. Considering the source is all found material, one gets a glimpse into how carefully constructed these collages are. Although rhythmic, Kirby’s approach to collage appears to have been careful consideration as opposed to unfettered spontaneity. Kirby’s collages have little in common with Cubism or Dadaism in execution, such as those by Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray or Kurt Schwitters, but the affect of Surrealism is in clear evidence. Following the staid 1950s (at least by popular perception) the 1960s saw a return to the dreamlike qualities of Surrealism both through mainstream culture through advertising and counter-culture imagery as well. Perhaps Kirby’s collages come closest to the work of courageous anti-Nazi artist John Heartfield, whose pointed political work was intended not only to be responded to viscerally, but also told a story. Then again, there are Kirby collages in existence where the original motivation remains mysterious. Unfortunately the origins of Kirby’s interest in collage are unknown. Conceivably his awareness did indeed begin with his inclusion in Hamilton’s groundbreaking piece. Certainly artists such as Picasso and Matisse were household names during his early years. What these works do provide is yet another glimpse into the mind and genius of Jack Kirby, the cosmic imagination that tirelessly explored new areas of creativity and expression, with the singularity, passion and inventiveness only an artist of his stature could bring. Today, thanks to improved technology, both digital and printed, we can view his collages closer to the spirit in which they were created. H

Gallery 1

The

King Of Collage irby’s first published collage art appeared in Fantastic Four #24 (cover-dated March 1964).

• FANTASTIC FOUR #24, March 1964 (first published collage art, 2 panels) • FANTASTIC FOUR #29, Aug. 1964 (1 collage page) • FANTASTIC FOUR #32, Nov. 1964 (1 collage page) • FANTASTIC FOUR #33, Dec. 1964 (1 collage page) • SGT. FURY #13, Dec. 1964 (1 collage panel) • FANTASTIC FOUR #37, April 1965 (1 collage page) • FANTASTIC FOUR #39, June 1965 (1 collage page, shown at right)) • FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #3, 1965 (1 collage page) • JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #120, Sept. 1965 (1 collage panel) • FANTASTIC FOUR #48, March 1966 (1 collage page) • FANTASTIC FOUR #51, June 1966 (1 collage page) • THOR #131, Aug. 1966 (1 collage panel) • THOR #132, Sept. 1966 (1 collage page) • FANTASTIC FOUR #55, Oct. 1966 (1 collage panel) • FANTASTIC FOUR #62, May 1967 (2 collage pages) • FANTASTIC FOUR SPECIAL #6, Nov. 1968 (2 collage pages) • THOR #160, Jan. 1969 (1 collage page) • THOR #161, Feb. 1969 (2 collage pages) • THOR #162, March 1969 (2 collage pages) • FANTASTIC FOUR #89, Aug. 1969 (1 collage page) • MARVELMANIA PORTFOLIO, 1970 (right) (collage of astronaut riding spacecraft) • SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN #134, Dec. 1970 (2 collage pages) 49

(above) When Kirby returned to Marvel in 1975, he continued using collage, as here for his adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (right) Fantastic Four #39, 1965. (below) Marvelmania Portfolio, 1970.

height of the Pop Art hysteria. He would continue creating collages for the next two decades, with his final piece produced specifically for comics appearing in the 1985 Hunger Dogs graphic novel (at last, finally being reproduced in full-color with quality paper and printing). Friends and family say Jack found the art of collage relaxing and therapeutic. Fans found them fascinating in print, but until recently, his collages have brought only modest prices on the original art market (and generally only are in demand if they were published in an actual comic book). That seems to be changing, as even his unpublished collages (such as “Goddesses” shown on page 52 of this issue) are fetching higher prices—sometimes more than the cost of pages from some of his less popular comics series. In that spirit, we present the following checklist of Kirby’s published collage work, in chronological order of the date of publication.

K Jack would’ve likely produced and handed in the artwork to Marvel in late 1963, at the

Comics.

Kirby Estate

(above) Here’s the original collage Kirby created, that was used as the background for the cover of Forever People #2 (April 1971). There’s lots of great detail and a sense of movement and action that doesn’t come across on the published version (the large neon sign is completely obscured). Seeing it without the line art overlaying it gives you a much better sense of what Jack envisioned—a scene of a city in total ruin. (left) By contrast, here’s the collage for the background of Forever People #3 (June 1971). There’s scarcely anything going on in the background, other than a sort of “cloud effect,” and a face on the far right, which got covered up when the line art was added. Apparently Jack envisioned the Justifier appearing through the clouds, but the final printed cover doesn’t allow this to come across effectively. 50

• SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN #136, March 1971 (1 collage pg.) • SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN #137, April 1971 (3 collage pgs.) • NEW GODS PORTFOLIO, April 1971 (Darkseid collage, Metron collage) • FOREVER PEOPLE #2, April 1971 (cover collage) • NEW GODS #2, April 1971 (cover collage) • FOREVER PEOPLE #3, (above) Kirby’s first, very modest attempt at collage in comics, from Fantastic June 1971 (cover collage) Four #24 (March 1964). • NEW GODS #3, June 1971 (cover collage) • SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN #138, June 1971 (cover collage, 2 collage pages) • SPIRIT WORLD #1, Fall 1971 (6 collage pages, collage foto-feature, and 16" x 21" collage poster) • IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB #1, Fall 1971 (cover collage, 3-page text/collage feature) • SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN #141, Sept. 1971 (3 collage pages) • NEW GODS #5, Oct. 1971 (1 collage page) (above) Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #134, Dec. 1970. • FORBIDDEN TALES OF DARK MANSION #6, July 1972 (below) Kamandi #9, “Tracking Station,” Sept. 1973. (one collage page meant for Spirit World #2) • WEIRD MYSTERY TALES #2, Oct. 1972 (4 collages meant for Spirit World #2) • WEIRD MYSTERY TALES #3, Nov. 1972 (1 collage page meant for Spirit World #2) • KAMANDI #9, Sept. 1973 (2 collage pages) • 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Treasury Edition), 1976 (4 collage pages) • CAPTAIN VICTORY AND THE GALACTIC RANGERS #1, Nov. 1981 (1 collage page) • BATTLE FOR A THREE DIMENSIONAL WORLD #1, 1982 (1 collage panel) • CAPTAIN VICTORY AND THE GALACTIC RANGERS SPECIAL #1, Oct. 1983 (2 collage pages) • DC GRAPHIC NOVEL (Hunger Dogs) #4, 1985 (2 collage pages) • COMIC ART TRIBUTE TO JOE SIMON AND JACK KIRBY, Oct. 1994 (set of 50 trading cards, Card #44 is an untitled collage) • SPACE COLLAGE, 2000 (20" x 18" poster of 1979 collage)

Jack’s final comics collage, from Hunger Dogs, 1985.

Spirit World #1, “Nostradamus,” 1971. 51

Goddesses collage, unpublished, circa mid-1960s. Jack pasted this together over an artboard containing some unfinished Tales of Suspense cover pencils, shown on page 64 of this issue.

(left) Unused collage, planned for the Contents/Index page of the unpublished In The Days Of The Mob #2, circa 1971. As Keith Veronese points out, “Of particular interest is the 9/30/71 inventory stamp on the back, proving that Kirby did have the bulk of In the Days of the Mob #2 finished at the time In the Days of the Mob #1 was published.” (right) We assume this unused collage was meant for the never-published Spirit World #2, circa 1971. However, the subject matter doesn’t exactly look like it belongs in a “mystery/occult” magazine,

originally leading us to wonder if this was for some other experimental magazine. The early “X” number (X-136) lent itself to that as well, but Rob Steibel, on the Kirby Museum site, says: “I think this is the unpublished collage that was supposed to be the inside back cover of Spirit World #2. Jack’s text at the top of the page says, “Inside back cover,” then the notes for the caption are, “The two faces of the twentieth century and beyond!” The caption notes at the bottom say, “You’ll see them both in the National ‘Speak Out’ series!”

Unearthed

Bootleg Album Covers

Submitted by Fred Janssen

ack

Here are three bootleg album covers released in the early 1970s, with a slight(!) Kirby influence—can you name the source material? They’re accompanied by a rockin’ piece of Kirby pencil art, done in 1985.

TM &

J 2012

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Kirb

www.kirbymuseum.org Many of you may remember our previous appeal for funding to help build a temporary physical location for the Jack Kirby Museum. If not, you can read it here: http://twomorrows.com/blog/tnt/help-us-build-a-physicaljack-kirby-museum-in-new-york-city/ We’d like to update you as to the progress of this project. We’re proud to say that 2012 is shaping up to be the most successful year that the Jack Kirby Museum has ever seen... and we’re barely halfway through it! Thanks in part to increased awareness of Jack Kirby’s creative legacy generated by The Avengers, which is on its way to becoming one of the highest-grossing films of all time, we’ve seen a substantial surge in donations and public support for our plan to open a gallery in New York City. In addition to an influx of new members and a rise in donations, we’ve finally got people in the public eye talking about Jack. But we haven’t met our goal yet, and we still need more funding if we’re going to open before the end of the year. As of this writing, the Museum’s “Brick and Mortar Fund” has raised almost $10,000! What’s most impressive about that number is that $2,000 of that came in the first few weeks of the A rough repro of a 1977 Kirby Thor Avengers release. Many of these donations came through people hearing about us and our projects via sketch, sans helmet wings. Do you social media. While we still need at least another $20,000 to make the physical location a reality, we have a better copy for the Museum? aren’t just appealing for funds. Many of you have blogs, Twitter feeds, or even just Facebook accounts. If you can’t donate money, please donate your voice. Spread our fundraising link around, “like” us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Tumblr, and let folks who are excited by Avengers know about the guy who helped make those characters live in the first place. For the first time in a long time, the non-comic reading public is talking about Jack Kirby. This article about Jack from the Wall Street Journal even interviews founding Museum trustee, Randolph Hoppe: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304371504577406340354873960.html Keep Jack Kirby’s name on everyone’s lips all summer long, and you’ll help us give the King his due.

Newsletter TJKC Edition Summer 2012 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

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

Donors to the Brick & Mortar Fund (some thanks to Nat Gertler’s “A Buck For Jack” campaign):

New and returning members since TJKC #57: Joel Kelly, Bruce Bennett, Martin O’Connor, Liza Berdnik, Patrick/Sarah Titus, Patrick Watson, Cary Appel, Rick Hull, Peggy Clements Jason Atomic, Michael Minney, Phil Hester, Sean Kleefeld, David Marshall, Michael Gerlich, Daniel Harmon, Andrew McAdams, Allan Harvey, Jeffrey Wilkie, Ryan O’Reilly, Jerrod Draping, Gabriel Aldort, Jack Walsh, Doug Pratt, Guy Dorian, Jim McPherson, David Clayton, Jeffrey Pidgeon, Dave Hermary, Andrew Richmond, Edmond Deighton, Nigel Blaikie, Wendell Lowder, Antonio Iriarte, Dylan Winslow, Bernard Brannigan, David Schwartz, Lawrence Maher, Russell Payne, Don Rhoden, Richard Pineros, Christopher Harder, Christopher Horan, Peter Buxton, Christopher Boyko, Mike Dyer, Mike Altman, Melvin Shelton, Tom Brevoort, Phil Miller, Jon Mastantuono, Don Rhoden, Gordon Bartik, Jacob Weisfeld, Ted Royer, John O’Connor, Anthony Suarez, Cindy Chen, Bill Kruse, Dusty Miller, Gary Fehily, Douglas K Tursman, Lex Passaris, Daryl Palumbo, Mike Gartland, Joseph Turner, Max Wilker, Rob Steen, David Lawrence, Ramunxto Andia, Rob Henry, Homer Frizell, David Rodriguez, Charles Kremenak, Kevin Padden, Jeffrey Lazell, Kate Senger, Darryl Aylward, Kris Reiss, Tod Seisser, Kevin Goring, Clay Fernald, Robyn Fernald, Gary Rudolph Panucci, Scott Rowland, Jefferson Sergeant, Tom Kraft, Mark Badger, Mark Boyd, John Armitage, Juan Diaz, Mark Buckingham, Steve Sherman, Andrei Molotiu, David Mandel, Ed Grekoski, Jason Gonzalez, John Simms, Robert Cosgrove, Bill Morrison, Chris Kettler, Jamal Caliste, Miguel Cima, Mike Kanterovich, Renee Tervalon, Thomas Mott, Bill Benecke, Daniel Ferranti, Lar DeSouza, Mark Miller, Max Weremchuk, Enzo Marcello Crescenzi, Matt Webb, John Sagness, Andrew Barbero, Chris Elliott, Dave Hermary, Dennis Huot, Ken Loo, Kyle Androschuk, Michael Little, Michael Pavlic, Noel Edey, Scott Redding, Selena Coates

Joel Kelly, Steven Prince, Martin Bartolomeo, Grant Bond, Rachael Wells, Courtney Booker, Bruce Bennett, Tara Donahue, Paul McRae, Barbara Brennan, Glen Brunswick, Ryan O’Reilly, Gary Fishman, Nigel Wilkinson, Timur Hassan, Richard Mancini, Jay Baker, Kumar Sivasubramanian, Eric Johnson, Richard Bretschneider, Matthew Schuler, Howard Fein, Abhay Khosla, Karl Heitmueller, Kevin Knodell, Jared Moshe, Marie Antoon, Daniel Shahin, Rosemary Vargas, Benjamin Fischer, David Hannum, Richard De Angelis, David Holland, Steve Niles, David Clayton, Stephen deStefano, David Howlett, Jack Briglio, Jeffrey Lester, Ferdinand Orbeta, Stephan Meyer, Mark Selan, Mark Foo, Instafiction , Jamieson Wilson, Neill Cameron, Candace Gansen, Mats Engesten, Ross Mack, Eric Parfait, Nat Gertler, Alison Cichowlas, Carl Walker, Liza Petruzzo, Brian Moon, Brett Cook, Taylor Lilley, Richy Chandler, Elucreh Hallulat, Susanna Sällinen, Daniel Barlow, Anthony Collett, Ain GMBH, Luke McElrath, Chris Jones, Bryant Kotyk, Michael McGee, Richard Levinson, Corey Blake, Christopher Day, Richard Tommaso, Niki Anis Ab Karim, Greg Matiasevich, Tim Swezy, Terry Anderson, Steven Kaye, Scott Davis, Cormac O’Connor, David Hine, Joshua Meeks, James Pyke, Radishcake Yarns & Fibers, Gregory van Eekhout, Joshua Mayfield, Barry Kelly, Jackson Hoppey, Jessi Sensabaugh, James Maxwell, Brian Covey, Fabian Rangel, Oliver Staley, Rudy Walalangi, Al Ewing, Nathan Jones, TJ O’Neill, Scott Bachman, Timothy Dedman, Chris Bridges, Ed Saul, Brekke Ferguson, Ronald Hill, John Thompson, Laura Martin,Richard Pace, Inderjeet Lalli, Ryan J Davis, George Khoury, Alex Kennedy, Richard Woodall, Billy Beechler, Ben Parrish,Jason Velez, Rob Hyndman, Critical Hits, Clifford Johnson, Joseph Jackson, Chad Maupin, Andrew Waterfield, Jeff Pidgeon, Ben Zwolinski, Rick Remender, Simon Alexander Fraser, Kyle Baxter, Steven Hark Hirsch, Scott Biel, Zachary Zimmerman, Ross Campbell, Gavin Nanson, David Ingersoll, Chris Ecker, Craig Oxbrow, Ryan O’Reilly, Ismael Canales Garcia, Jeff Pidgeon, Dennis Rasch, Samuel Newman, Anonymous NetworkForGood, Lois Dilivio, Arlen Schumer, Ken Wong, Dave McKenna, Jonathan Redpath, Andrew Van, Frederic W Cook & Co, Robert Katz, Christopher Harder, Nat Gertler, Off The Wahl Productions, Glenda Hoppe, Antonio Iriarte, Don Rhoden, Paula de Aguirre, Margaret Kranz, Claire Kranz, Weep, Jeff Thompson, Jean Cecchini, Stan Lee, Leighton Connor, Robert M Lee, Donald Driscoll, Michele Pagano, Tom Field, Lee Cheow Hee, Joan Mongeau, Lon Levy, Lance Suarez, Albert Eijkenaar, Michael Hawthrone, Shana Kaska, Giancarlo Malchiodi, Pierre Comtois, John Schettino, Gary Picariello, Frederic Manson, Pedro Gonzalez Espejo, Antonio Serra, John Cole, Murray Lock, D C Reeder, Andy Patterson, Carl Conrad, James Nigro, Peter Ramberg, Andreas Preller, Ger Alanguilan Jr, Jason Captain America—23" x 29" Cunnigham, Ben Adams, Jonathan Witmer, K S Addison, John Tomko, 1941 Captain America—14" x 23" Robert M Morrow, Lynda Bowen, Kenneth Carter, Scott McCloud, Douglas Pratt, Charles Anderson, Kate Fitzsimmons, David Keogh, Eric Teall, Heidi MacDonald, Nat Gertler, Tom Kraft, Bob Heer, Elijah Spector, Cédric Jeanneret, Steve Coates, Ken Wong, Bastien Iarriaga, Cheese Hasselberger, Harrry Mendryk, Andrew McAdams, John Sagness, Lawrence Maher, Stephen Baumann, Don Rhoden, Bernard Brannigan, Joe Fallon, David Clayton, Lois Dilivio, Patrick Barrett, John Arocho, Dusty Miller, Ferran Delgado, Michael Cline, Sarah Baker

Annual Memberships with one of these posters: $40*

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

with one of these posters: $50*

Generous folks fed the Mother Box for the Brick & Mortar Fund at these events: Asbury Park Comic Con, MoCCA Festival, Calgary Comics Expo, Mike Carbo’s New York Comic Book Marketplace, WonderCon, Image Comics Expo, Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Festival, Hoboken Artists Studio Tour, Kirby Enthusiasm @ Maxwells in Hoboken, New York Comic Con

Marvel—14" x 23"

Galactic Head— 18" x 20" color

Incan Visitation—24" x 18" color

Build A Museum, brick by brick!

Gallery 2

UNUSED At DC

The unseen and unused pages from Kirby’s 1971-75 tenure at DC Comics.

Below: OMAC presentation piece, circa 1973.

ome were discarded because of a shortened page count, and

S Jack needed to lose a page. Other times he just miscounted.

Art from the Jack Kirby Museum’s Original Art Digital Archive (www.kirbymuseum.org).

Page 57: Demon #2 rejected page, 1972. Page 58-59: Demon #1 unused pages, 1972. Page 60: Unused Mister Miracle #7 cover, 1972. Page 61: Jettisoned Mister Miracle #12 page, 1973. Page 62: Manhunter concept drawings, circa 1974. Scan courtesy Jeremy Kirby. Page 63: Page from the never-published story “The Maid” drawn for True Divorce Cases #1, 1971.

Some are concept drawings to sell the idea, never intended for the public. Either way, these are a fascinating glimpse into Kirby’s mind and working process in the early-to-mid 1970s.

Tribute

2011 Kirby Tribute Panel Transcribed by Steven Tice, and edited by John Morrow • Photos by Chris Ng Held Sunday, July 24, 2011. Moderated by Mark Evanier, and featuring Walter Simonson, Erik Larsen, Richard Kyle, Mike Royer, and Jonathan Ross. MARK EVANIER: This is the Jack Kirby tribute panel. Guess who I am? [laughter] One of the neatest things at this convention that I’ve learned is that I can patch my iPad into the projection screen here. I want to show you a photo that I found too late to put into my book on Jack. [pause, laughter] This is Steve Sherman, who’s sitting over there. Steve Sherman, ladies and gentlemen, [applause] and myself, and I think this may have been Jack’s Irvine house. Roz, I am sure, took this photo, and this was in—Lisa Kirby gave me every photo she could find of Jack; I prowled

Mark Evanier

(below) Unfinished version of the cover for Tales of Suspense #92 (Aug. 1967). Kirby pasted a collage over it; see page 52. (next page, bottom) One positive side effect of the Marvel/ Kirby lawsuit is this unused FF page surfaced during depositions.

through them and prowled through them, and somehow I missed this one the first time through and found it when I reorganized the photos to give back to her after the book went to press. I think I’m 17 in this?

article about comics, and in the early seventies he had a bookstore in Long Beach, which was the center of intelligentsia in Southern California for people who understood what comics could be. He imported foreign comics, one of the first people to do that. Any time you went to his store, there were great writers and artists hanging around and talking. Just to go there was like a mini-comic-convention, but with really smart people. This is Mr. Richard Kyle. [applause] I’ll be asking Richard to relate the story of a project he did with Jack that you all are familiar with. And a person I’ve known even longer than I have known Richard, and who was another one of those people who was often hanging around the store, Mr. Mike Royer, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] Another artist who I admire tremendously— many of you have seen a brand new book that is reprinting his Thor work off the original art and—is it the exact same size you did it? The exact same size it was done. This is Mr. Walt Simonson. [applause] And rushing here from another meeting, so he will probably be late and may not get here much before the panel ends, but I Steve Sherman asked British TV personality and devout comic fan Jonathan Ross to join us, and he says he will, and we’ll talk about stuff until he gets here. Let me take this off the screen. We’ve got a couple more photos here, if I can remember how to do this. Here’s one with Joe Simon. [Mark flips through several photos on-screen] In the background you can see this was a traveling exhibit that Neal Kirby put together of Jack’s original art at a couple of conventions, and it looks like a San Diego con from the badge they’re wearing. Let me introduce you to the publisher of the Jack Kirby Collector, Mr. John Morrow. [applause] This is the trustee, curator of the Kirby Online Museum, Mr. Rand Hoppe. [applause]

STEVE SHERMAN: Probably, and I’m probably 19. You look happy! [laughter] EVANIER: Jack looks happy, that’s the nice part. It’s a good shot of him in his natural habitat, at the drawing table. We do these panels every year because I spend an awful lot of my time at this convention talking about Jack, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. You walk around that room downstairs and you see his influence everywhere. And I don’t mean just, you see a lot of people in Galactus masks, or Thor merchandise, or Captain America memorabilia. What you see is Jack’s definition of comics, which transcended those things printed on cheap newsprint. You see that definition of comics all over the room, and… the oddest things remind me of him. There were people downstairs doing this sciencefiction-y dance last night, and I—don’t you just love the fact that nobody in a costume seems to be able to take a picture anywhere, except right where we want to walk in the aisles? [laughter] But they’re doing this science-fiction number, and I remember—Steve, do you remember how Jack had this thing about dance as a… “comics as dance”? SHERMAN: Right. EVANIER: I thought of it, kind of shrugged and thought, “Okay, that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” but some of the things Jack said didn’t make a lot of sense at that moment. And there’s “comics as dance,” they’re doing an interpretive ballet in the aisles at a comic convention, and it is comics, somehow, on a strange level. So we’re going to talk about Jack for a while. I’ll start it by asking everybody in the audience who has a Kirby-related announcement about something that they’re publishing or producing to offer it. Let me introduce to you the dais at this moment. On the far side is one of my favorite collaborators and a gentleman who has become an amazing artist in this business with his comic The Savage Dragon. This is Mr. Erik Larsen. [applause] And I’ve known this next gentleman for an awful long time, and I asked him to come here. One of the themes of the convention this year is fifty years of comic fandom, and Richard was a pioneer of comic fandom. There are some who credit him with being the first person to use the term “graphic story” in an

RAND HOPPE: I received some phone calls recently from a movie studio in Hollywood. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the story, but Jack did some drawings for a theme park movie project called The Lord of Light back in the eighties, I think? Or seventies. And apparently the story is that those drawings were used to get hostages out of Iran by the CIA, because the CIA created a fake movie production company, and went to Iran looking 65

course, I started loving his work in the mid-sixties. I didn’t really get to know Joe Simon for a bunch of years, and now Joe and I have been able Steve Saffel to work together on a whole lot of projects. The most recent one is Joe’s autobiography, which is a very intimate look. It starts in 1905, when Joe’s father arrives in the United States, and runs basically through earlier this year. So this is as intimate a story as you’ll ever have about the comic book world. Joe gave me two of the best moments, really, I’ve ever had, just a couple of days ago. One was when I called him from the booth, and there was an artist there who had wanted to work on something with us, as well, and I handed the phone over to this artist, sort of putting him on the spot. And he started talking to Joe, and they talked for a couple of minutes. And yesterday I saw that artist, and I said, “Dave, did I put you on the spot? I know I just handed you the phone.” And he was like, “Well, yeah, you did, but I’ve been going around the last two days saying, ‘I talked to Joe Simon!’” [applause] And that was Dave Gibbons. [laughter] In that same phone call, I said—we had made some arrangements through Paramount, and the night before I called him, Joe saw the [Captain America] movie. And he loves it. [applause] And that just made my convention. After those two moments, I was sort of like, “Yeah, okay, the rest of it’s going to be fun, but what the heck.” Working with Joe is such a privilege, I just love it. So thanks, Mark. [applause] EVANIER: Does anyone else have an announcement of any importance here? Yes? RUSSELL DALTON (from audience): Well, a somewhat Kirby-related book that I just wrote. I’m writing a divinity book, Marvelous Myths: Marvel Superheroes and Everyday Faith. I go into some detail about how the Jewish immigrant values of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created a moral universe in which villains were redeemable, people could have everyday problems but still live out heroic lives, and, basically, they’re giving out drawings, but you basically get a free copy at the Christian Comic Art Society booth on the end of the 900 aisle. It’s sitting there with the [Jack] Chick tracts and the graphic Bible.

for locations—that was the cover. So these Jack Kirby stories were used. Well, the story was unclassified, and it was optioned by George Clooney, and I think Ben Affleck, and they’re shooting the movie [Argo] in a few weeks. [applause] Apparently Jack is going to be a character in it, where they visit Jack’s house. I don’t know if that’s really going to happen, but that’s what they were saying. I’m at booth 1504. This is the first time we’ve had a booth at San Diego, and it’s going well. Come on down, join the museum, and let’s talk Rand Hoppe about that. [applause]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I love Chick tracts! [laughter] EVANIER: Steve? SHERMAN: Neal Kirby wanted to be here, but he couldn’t make it because of family issues, but it’s no secret that there’s a lawsuit going on, and he just wanted me to say that he appreciates everyone’s support, and he reads all the blogs and stuff, and he just wants to say thank you to everyone just for the support. [applause]

EVANIER: This is Joe Simon’s editor, collaborator, agent, manager, cohort. Mr. Steve Saffel. STEVE SAFFEL: I only met Jack a couple of times, and was just so impressed by him, and Roz, they were just kind, good people. But, of

EVANIER: Are there any Kirby relatives in the room? [pause] Jeremy? 66

Jeremy Kirby, ladies and gentlemen. [applause]

into the business. He encouraged every single new person who came to him, including some I think he should’ve done us a favor by discouraging. [laughter] He was just an amazing man. Let me introduce our new panelist. When I mentioned on my blog that I was getting Jonathan Ross on here, several of my readers in the UK acted like I had gotten the Beatles together again. [laughter] This man hosts TV shows over there the way I host panels here. I hope he gets paid. And he’s the star of a show that’s on YouTube all the time, if you can’t get those shows, called Penn and Teller Fool Us, which I think is one of the greatest shows ever. We don’t care about that, we care about the fact that he’s a devout comic fan, Mr. Jonathan Ross. [applause]

MIKE ROYER: Mark, you should point out that all of us who had the pleasure of working with Jack, in essence, became family. EVANIER: This is true on a very wide level. I never felt that I worked for Jack. I felt like I was semi-adopted, like everyone who came to Jack, even for a short period of time. One of the amazing things about him was that he treated everybody like Mike Royer family, even somebody he met at a convention for ten seconds. You were part of his world until you proved undeserving to be there. Yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’d like to expound on that for a minute. The first comic con I went to was in 1975 at the El Cortez, and there was no security, and Jack and Roz were wonderful. They would walk to the coffee shop down the street trailed by a bunch of kids just picking at Jack’s brain and stuff while he’s eating. [some laughter] He was just so gracious. I’ve got your book, it’s wonderful, and the thing that I got, mostly, is just he had this great work ethic. He just wanted to support his kids. There was no ego involved, and that’s—I’ve met him probably three or four times at different conventions here, and he was always wonderful. I think this room should be packed and it should be in a larger room.

EVANIER: I remember one time I was standing next to Jack at a convention, and when Roz had to go use the ladies room, she’d turn to me and say, “Here. Stand next to him and say no to everybody.” [laughter] A man came up, very earnest, very nice, and he said to Jack, “You are my favorite comic book artist of all time, after Gil Kane, of course.” [laughter] Jack did not flinch. He did not look like he’d just been slapped in the face. He was completely appreciative of that. And he said, “Yeah, Gil’s great. Isn’t Gil terrific?” No ego. It was not an act, I’m sure. I have people come up to me all the time and they go, “Oh, your work is almost as good as these other five people.” And I go, “Yeah, those five people are really good,” even though I don’t think they are. [laughter] He did not feel that he was in competition with other people in comics, and that was not a matter of ego, that he was above them. He just felt that he was doing his own—I hate the term “doing your own thing.” He was working in his own arena, on his own material. He was competing with no one but himself. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Trying to do the best he can? EVANIER: Yes, that’s right. And he was so happy with the success of younger people. He didn’t feel threatened by new people getting

(this spread) Like the FF page on the previous spread, two unused 1962 Hulk pages also surfaced, during Larry Lieber’s deposition in the Marvel vs. Kirby lawsuit. You can see more of these unused Hulk pages in TJKC #41. 67

Unused cover pencils for The Comic Reader #100 (Aug. 1973), and the final version that was used (below). Art from the Jack Kirby Museum’s Original Art Digital Archive (www.kirbymuseum.org).

be glad to bring it over some time; some of them are quite rare pieces, and I always let the guys from the Kirby Collector scan it all. There’s one thing I might just say, I made a documentary called In Search of Steve Ditko, I don’t know if anyone saw that one. [applause] Prior to that, many, many years ago, before I had the kind of clout in TV that I had in that period to get that off the ground, one of the determining factors that allowed me to make that is the fact that they knew that Steve Ditko was alive, of course. And I had suggested a Kirby thing, but because they knew there was no chance of us speaking to Jack, for a mainstream TV channel, that seemed to be an issue. But, many, many years ago, when I first started in TV, I tried for about three years to get those people interested in making a Jack Kirby documentary. I went to meet Melvyn Bragg, who you might know as Lord Melvyn Bragg in the UK. He was in charge of a very popular arts magazine show for years, called The South Bank Show. You’ve probably seen some of them over here on PBS, South Bank Shows. And I kind of got quite close to him committing to doing the Kirby, and in the end they pulled it because, of course, they said, at the time, “No one’s going to watch a Jonathan Ross

JONATHAN ROSS: I apologize for being late, I was stuck behind people with capes outside the Omni hotel, [laughter] which isn’t a bad place to be. But I guess Mark invited me because he knows what a devoted Kirby fan I am, and always have been. My son, who is here as well, his middle name is Kirby. I named him after the greats, Harvey Kirby Ross. I wanted him to be Wolf Cthulhu Kirby Galactus Ross [laughter], but my wife said, “Idiot.” But he tells it well, “That’s what my name was going to be!” But he’s so proud his name’s Kirby. Like most kids, he loves comics, but he’s kind of equally excited about videogames and stuff like that, but certainly he loves and admires Jack’s work, and he feels very honored to have borrowed your family name, so thank you for the love. And I also have—I don’t know whether to talk about it, but I also have a huge collection of Kirby artwork I’m lucky enough to have. I’ve spent far too much money, and I always lied to my wife about exactly how much. [laughter] I’ll 68

show about comics on TV.” They couldn’t see the bigger picture, they couldn’t see what Jack had created, what he meant to so many people, and just what an influence he has been on not just American popular culture, but globally on popular culture. I’ve had a very interesting, wonky, roller coaster career, as some of you may know, but that’s probably my only actual regret, that I never got to persuade anyone to finance that Jack Kirby documentary.

ROSS: It was pretty positive. I mean, it was on BBC 4, which is one of the minority BBC channels, which I think they’re thinking of shutting down—which is a shame, because they do so much great stuff. Some devout Stan Lee fans came to me, and they were angry at the way I grilled Stan about not sharing—in my opinion, never sharing—the love, never sharing the credits properly with Steve and Jack for that period, there. And we had a fairly fine conversation on camera, I know you’ve seen it, in which I—and I respect Stan a lot, I think Stan, he’s a great talent, there’s no two ways about it. But I do think that he achieved his status on the shoulders of great talents, to be quite frank. In particular, Jack, specifically, but also Steve, and maybe some of the other guys from that period, there. And I still think it’s a shame that, for whatever reasons, he can’t see that how many of us see that. But I wouldn’t take away from his contribution, because it’s massive and magnificent, and those books are great because they were Jack and Stan together, and Steve and Stan together, and that’s the way I always think of them. They were “Jack and Stan,” “Steve and Stan,” and not the other way around—which, by the way, is how he chose to word it on the pages. So that would probably be the only kind of, not so much negative, but kind of critical feedback we got from that. Some people thought we shouldn’t have gone and knocked on Steve’s door because he’d made it clear to us that he didn’t want to speak to us, but I just couldn’t resist, I’m afraid. And he was very charming and sweet with Rand Hoppe at the online Jack Kirby Museum has done a us, and he told tremendous job tracking down all of Jack’s original me some inter- costume designs for a 1969 Julius Caesar play. Find all the esting things details at: http://kirbymuseum.org/caesar about Spider(below) 1983 Thing drawing. Man that I think I’ve shared maybe with you, and some people, but this probably isn’t the place. I don’t want to take up time talking about Steve when we’re here to talk about Jack. EVANIER: You can talk a little about Steve. [laughter] Anybody in this room who’s interested and a fan of Steve Ditko? [applause]

ROSS: I think he was one of the best inkers, in that early period of Marvel, that Jack ever had. EVANIER: We were at Bob Kane’s funeral. There were four people there who were in the comic business. There was myself, Stan Lee, Mike Barr, and Paul Smith. And Kane’s family treated us like, “Oh, the comic book industry has sent its emissaries.” That we were delegates the industry had voted. We just all came on our own. And with Stan there was this very long period of lowering Mr. Kane into the ground. The elevators weren’t working right on the thing, and I’m standing there waiting on it. And Stan Lee, so help me, he turns to me and says, “You know, Steve Ditko was the best inker Jack ever had.” [laughter] And I was like, did I miss something? [laughter] And we started talking about that. And I think Stan recognized Jack was the greater contributor, because Jack did more books and was involved with more characters, but I think he personally enjoyed his collaborations with Ditko more because he felt more like there was a give-and-take between them, whereas Jack would just say, “Okay, fine,” and go home and do it. And he loved Ditko’s artwork, he loved Ditko’s inking, and he said, “I wish that I’d had two Steve Ditkos— one just to ink Jack all the time, but I couldn’t spare Ditko for that.” ROSS: Did Jack ink his own work much? EVANIER: Not very much. He didn’t like inking stuff. AUDIENCE: Roz inked his stuff. 69

EVANIER: Wow. What was the reaction like to the Ditko documentary? What kind of response did you get?

EVANIER: Let the record show that, for the fourth time at a panel at this convention, somebody else has trashed Vince Colletta without me prompting them. [laughter] ROSS: His covers weren’t too bad. He was obviously getting paid more on the covers. The covers he put a little of the work in, but the interiors… I mean, I’ve got so many pages of Jack’s stuff inked by Vince, where you almost cry when you see how much has just been erased—just been rubbed out. ERIK LARSEN: Well, a lot of the earlier inkers would do that. A lot of the early Joe Simon stuff would just, it would have this static line around it to begin with, and, looking at the original art, it’s interesting to see that that’s the process a lot of inkers would go through. They would start with this static line around it. Because, these days, generally, if you’re outlining something, you start with a brush, and Erik Larsen then you’re coming in and putting the details in with a pen, and that was the exact opposite of how things were being done there, where they would outline everything with a pen and get that dead line going, and then come in with a brush afterward and add all the meat to it.

(above) Jan Capodiferro attended the 1975 New York Comic Art Convention, and had Jack draw this sketch of Thor, Jan’s favorite hero, for the princely sum (at that time) of $25. He also purchased one by Neal Adams (above right). Jan asked Kirby why he drew Thor smiling, to which Jack replied, “He is happy to see you.” (below) A mid-1970s Kirby sketch of the Hulk.

EVANIER: Roz inked a few things, assisting him. I think it’s overexaggerating to give Roz the inking credit on that. What he would do with that is, when he had to ink something, Roz had had—when Jack met Roz, she was working in fashion layout design and doing artwork. She was very handy with a pen at doing little patterns and such, and he would give her the pages after they were penciled and lettered, and give her a static pen, a pen with a very static line, and she would outline everything, then he would take a brush and go in and heavyup the lines. And I think he obliterated about 85%

ROSS: But it’s interesting, of all the artists, the one artist whose work survived no matter who inked it would be Jack, because there was something about the energy, and the composition, and the kind of directness of that work, as well as the complexity of some of the concepts on the page, that he didn’t cover up. Even the most, I mean, you look at the very early books. Who inked FF #3? EVANIER: Sol Brodsky. ROSS: Sol Brodsky. And some of it was not too bad, and some of it was just awful, just awful inking. It looks like it’s by someone who’s never read a comic book, never mind ever inked one before. The eyes on the Miracle Man—and still the book is a beautiful thing, and a powerful experience to read, because the art was just so great. EVANIER: It always surprised me when I first met Jack that he didn’t care that much about who inked him, and I think, to a certain extent, he felt it was like an insult to tell him that his work needed a certain inker. He thought that the story, if the story was all there, he said, “No professional inker ever ruined a comic.” And I think later on he moved away from that because he had so many fans who visited him and told him, “Oh, I really like it better when it’s Joe Sinnott. I really like it better when it’s Frank Giacoia.” At some point that became Mike Royer. Jonathan, do you know everyone on the panel? 70

of what she did going over it, but it helped him to—I think what it did is it stopped him from redrawing everything when he inked it. Every line that isn’t a static line on that page is Jack, and a brush, and “heavy-ing” things up, and putting in black areas and shadows. ROSS: It’s a shame he didn’t go back and do that over Vince Colletta’s stuff. [laughter, applause]

ROSS: I think I’ve met everyone. [shakes hands with panelists] Oh, my God, no, wait, I’ve never met Mike Royer! I can’t believe I just shook Mike Royer’s hand! [laughter] Mike has always been, I’m not just saying this, but Mike has always been my favorite Kirby inker. Always. [applause] I’ve read that you used to say you didn’t want to ink all those books, in the Fourth World period, when they were coming your way, and Jack was saying, “I’ve got another one for you, and another one for you, and another one.” I’m so glad he bullied you into it, [laughter] because I love that stuff.

WALTER SIMONSON: Thanks for coming. I’m out of here. Thanks a lot. I’m done. [laughter, applause] ROSS: But I also have a page of Orion vs. Darkseid, which was inked by Joe Sinnott [below], and it’s fascinating to see Sinnott’s inks on Fourth World pencils, as well. It’s a really interesting thing. It doesn’t work as well, to my eye, but it’s a lovely thing to see.

ROYER: It’s really funny, I guess I’m the only inker that really kept up with his output, and I kind of evolved this theory just talking to some fans yesterday. When Jack and I would talk about old movies, we both loved the Warner Brothers films from the thirties and forties. He, luckily, saw them firsthand. I had to wait for TCM. [laughter] But people ask me who my favorite inker on Jack was, and I’ll say, “Joe Sinnott.” Who was, I think, the most faithful to him? I would say me, because I inked Jack Kirby’s Warner Brothers drawings as a Warner Brothers inker, and Joe Sinnott was MGM. [laughter, applause]

Walter Simonson SIMONSON: I’ve got one. It’s about Jack and Joe, and I just wonder if this story is true. You would know it, Steve would know it, because I’ve heard this or I’ve told it a million times, and it’s a fabulous story, but this is from back, I presume, in the forties, in the shop days. The idea where Joe Simon apparently told Jack he wasn’t being paid to erase. Have you heard this story? EVANIER: Yes, yes.

ROSS: You know, I have them, it’s interesting to compare, I wish I had a picture to show them, but I have some of the work that you’ve, you know, I have much of the work you’ve done. I have one, a beautiful book, which is not just one of the most beautiful examples of Kirby art ever, but also, I think, one of the best examples, one of the best of your inking. I’m lucky enough to have all of Kamandi book #6, which was the death of Flower. About a third of the way through, there’s a beautiful lush landscape scene shot from above down into a valley, and the trees, and the rocks, I mean—[to Larsen] you have a whole Kamandi book, as well.

SIMONSON: Is that true? EVANIER: I believe it is true. SIMONSON: Awesome. Did you tell them the story? Because that’s just a great story. EVANIER: I think you just told it to them. [laughter] SIMONSON: Well, I didn’t set it up. I didn’t set it up. EVANIER: The story, as I recall, was that Jack had drawn a page, and he decided he didn’t like it, and he started erasing on it. Which he did a lot. He would draw pages over and over to please himself. They were perfectly fine by anybody else’s standards, and Joe walked in and said, “What the hell are you doing?” And Jack said, “Oh, I’m going to, I can do this better.” And Joe wanted Jack to do as many pages as possible. He said, “Jack, you’re not getting paid to erase this, you’re getting paid to draw it.” [laughter] And one time when we were working with Jack, he was drawing an issue of Jimmy Olsen, and there was a pose where Superman was flying out at the audience in a pose that I’m sure you’ll all recognize—it was a pose that Jack used over and over when you had a character kind of flying straight at you with his hands up, and I said, “Oh!” I was just being a snotty kid who occasionally said things I shouldn’t have said. I said, “Oh, you’re using that pose again.” And Jack went, “What?” He grabbed it and started erasing that panel. And it was perfectly fine. I wasn’t saying don’t do it, I was just kind of trying to show off that I recognized he’d been using something like that, and he took it out immediately. Again, this was during the period of Jimmy Olsen, when he knew that they were going to be redrawing Superman. He was redrawing something that he knew Murphy Anderson was going to redraw. But he put a maximum effort into every single thing he did when it was humanly possible. You had a question?

LARSEN: I’ve got a sick amount of Jack Kirby artwork. ROSS: We’re like two young men in the restroom comparing the size of our... [laughter]

AUDIENCE: How did he feel about Murphy Anderson and Al Plastino doing that, and do any of the original drawings of Superman with his face, and his chest emblem, exist? I would love to see that. EVANIER: Well, let me tell you—I was going to answer this in the Kirby Collector. Let me tell you a story here that I’ve never gotten quite right. People don’t understand this. Jack sent in—the order that Jack did his work for DC, you can figure out by looking at those little X numbers on the page, and I think John has printed a guideline to them. It’s very close to the order he did them in. Those are the billing numbers for when he was paid for them, which is almost identical to the order he did them in. There might be a one item variance occasionally. And I believe the very first thing he did for DC 71

Vince Colletta ever did was rushed and at the last minute, he had six months to do those books. They did them, the first issue of Forever People had Superman in it. Some people there at DC looked at it and said, “This is not quite right. Vinnie, can you try to fix it when you do the inking?” And some people in the office, the production staff, had gone over some of the pencils and they had modified the work. They had tried to do the Superman emblem over in the pencil stage and make some corrections, and Vinnie did more. Mr. Colletta—I happen to think he gets a bum rap an awful lot, but I think he was frequently asked to do stuff that was above his pay grade. And he came back with this Superman, and more people in the office worked it over, and it was a committee-created Superman. And finally the books were all done. They looked at it and said, “You know, we ruined it.” Someplace out there, and I have seen it, there’s a set of stats of the book before Al Plastino got to it, and it’s not Jack, either. It was inked by Vinnie, and it was reworked, there were a couple of Curt Swan heads in it that I think someone in the office swiped, or tried to change. And they looked at it and they said, “This is not really working for us. We can’t send it out this way.” I think there was a feeling they couldn’t, at that time, go back to Jack and ask him to repencil those things, because—this was 1970 DC. The office didn’t make mistakes. Only the freelancers did. And so they brought Al Plastino in. Now, the real irony of this, here’s 1970. We want Jack Kirby to help us show how to bring Superman into a new era. Oops! Let’s get the guy who’s been drawing Superman from 1946 to redraw it, an artist who we fired off the comics because we think his work looks old-fashioned. You didn’t see Al Plastino drawing Superman at that time, but he was cheap. And he was a guy who was around, and they wanted to give him some work, and he redrew it. He re-pasted over on those, on Forever People #1 and on the first two Jimmy Olsens, at that point they had them done all at the same time, he did them all the same day, brought them back, and that’s what was printed there. Subsequently, they would tell Vinnie, “Leave the Superman heads, leave the Jimmy Olsen heads, and we’ll have them inked in the office.” And Murphy Anderson was the guy in the office. He was not on staff, he just did his freelance work in the office, and they would go to him and say, “Here, Murphy, we need this cover retouched.” And if a retouch came in that was above the pay grade of the office staff, they’d give it to Murphy. And Murphy’s inking retouches turned up in Lois Lane at that time, and a few other books, as well. So that’s how it came about. It was this committee process, and they redid it.

was a couple of covers for Forever People and New Gods and Mister Miracle, and he did the first issue of Forever People and New Gods and Mister Miracle, and then he went over and started drawing Jimmy Olsen issues. These are months and months before these books went to press. They came in; DC quietly, without showing them to their other editors in the office—they didn’t want this material to leak— gave them to John Costanza to letter, and John brought them back. They were hidden from the other editors, and then they went off to Vince Colletta to ink. When Steve Sherman and I went up to the DC offices in July of 1970 for the first time—and remember, the first Forever People didn’t go on sale until December, so we were way ahead of the press date—Julius Schwartz sat us down. Do you remember this, Steve? Julius Schwartz sat us down and said, “What is this ‘Forever People, New Gods’ thing? What’s going on? Tell me about it.” Now, his office was about eight yards from Carmine’s, and the word was passing by. They wouldn’t even show it to Julie Schwartz in the office, who was their senior editor. So, by the way, if anybody ever tells you that everything that

Here’s the inked original art for the cover of Forever People #1 (Feb. 1971). The Forever People’s figures are on a separate piece of paper that has been glued onto a larger piece with an added Superman and penciled lettering. Inks by Frank Giacoia. Art from the Jack Kirby Museum’s Original Art Digital Archive (www.kirbymuseum.org), courtesy of Joe & Nadia Mannarino.

ROYER: I’d like to add, Mark, that when I finally got to ink some of the Jimmy Olsens, I don’t know who I spoke to—Jack, or you, or Steve, or somebody—but I said, “Look, I can fix those S’s. I can tweak the Superman and the Jimmy Olsen faces, and at least it’ll all be inked from the same hand.” So the Olsens that I worked from, I made those corrections, if “correction” is the right word. Jack was an impressionist, and he gave his impression of the S, and it was his Superman. But I felt, if I made the changes,

at least there would be a consistency in the finished look.

are throwing questions at him about comics as he’s drawing stuff, and one kid says, “Why do they allow crappy artists like Don Heck in comics?” And there was a pause, and Neal turned to him and said, “You know, if they had put me on those books, with those inkers, and jerked me around like that, you’d be standing here right now asking Don Heck why they let a crappy artist like Neal Adams in comics.” [applause] When Steve and I went to the DC offices, we delivered Alex Toth’s original art for Hot Wheels #5, and Sol Harrison looked at it and went, “We gotta change this. We gotta take all the black out between the panels.” And Neal came in and talked him out of it. Now, Neal did not get credit for this. Neal saved an awful lot of DC comics over the years, and the reason he inked those covers—.

EVANIER: And I think that, if those books had been inked in the first place by Wally Wood, who wanted to ink them, or they’d been inked by Frank Giacoia, who wanted to ink them, they would have been largely fine with Jack’s working on it. ROSS: How did it come about that [Neal] Adams did some of the inking on some of the covers, then? EVANIER: Neal just ran up and he said, “Let me save these.” Neal was a very powerful force in the DC office at that time. He had no official title. He would come up there and do retouches on occasion. He was like a conscience. A lot of why DC comics of 1970 and 1971 and around that period look so good is Neal Adams. They also look good because Carmine [Infantino], whatever else I think of him, he was a great designer—a brilliantly talented artist, and when he was at his full ability to apply himself, and he wasn’t running around looking at sales figures all day, he was a very bright, clever designer, who knew Adams inks Kirby; how to bring in a lot of wonderful detail from Jimmy Olsen new talent on those books, too. #138 (June 1971). SIMONSON: This is a bit about the design element of Carmine. What was the ’zine that DC printed? The Wonderful World of DC Comics, something like that?

SIMONSON: Is that the “Cord” story? EVANIER: The “Cord” story, yes. [Editor’s Note: The Cord 810/812 is the classic car so accurately rendered by Toth on the cover of Hot Wheels #5, below] There was a man on staff at DC named Sal Amendola, who some of you know, and he gave Sal this story and said, “Take the black out. We don’t do that at DC, we don’t put black between the panels. Take them out.” And Sal came to me and he said, “I don’t know what to do about this. I don’t want to deface this.” We talked for a few minutes, and he said, “I’m gonna stall until Neal gets here.” [laughter] When Neal walked in, he went in and showed it to Neal, and Neal went, “Hold on,” and he took the art into Sol Harrison’s office, and came out ten minutes later and said, “Don’t take the black out.” [applause]

EVANIER: The Amazing World of DC Comics.

EVANIER: I also remember, and Mike may have repressed this memory—at that same trip in 1970, Mike went back with us. Mike, Steve, and I shared a hotel room about the size of this table, at the Statler Hilton, which—I’ve stayed there recently—has not been cleaned since. [laughter] And Mike was taking up samples to maybe get the job of inking some of Jack’s stuff at DC. And he took it up to the DC offices, and there was this editorial gang bang tearing it down and saying, “This man is not good enough to work for us.” And it was clearly not the work. It was clearly the fact that they didn’t want Jack to have his own inker in LA, to have that control, and at that time at DC it was kind of a very snotty

EVANIER: You just reminded me of one of my favorite moments in the early Comic-Con years. It’s not even exactly relevant, but I’m going to stick it in here anyway. This was the fourth year of the Comic-Con. We were sitting out at the Harbor Island Hotel, and Neal Adams was sitting by the pool doing sketches for fans, and kids 73

ROYER: You’ve mentioned two people, Carmine and Alex, and I have these memories that just are etched in my brain—and one evening, sitting on the floor at Alex Toth’s, with Carmine, and just sitting there and listening to these guys talk about their experiences, and design, and so on. And I asked Carmine, because I’m twenty-something and just in the business, and said, “Exactly how do they color these comics?” And he said, “It’s magic, kid.” [laughter]

SIMONSON: The Amazing World of DC Comics. One of those has a cover that’s got all of Carmine’s villains, they’re all sitting around a table, and they’re talking. It’s that book, there. There also is an inked version of it, and they’re all sitting around a table, like Captain Cold, and different villains, and so on, Grodd the Gorilla. I was up at Continuity, which was Neal Adams’ and Dick Giordano’s studio. I was there one day. It was a clubhouse for all us young guys in comics, at the time, in the early seventies. They had that cover, and some of the other young guys, some of the gofers and stuff in the office, were kind of making fun of it because it was Carmine. “Aah,” it wasn’t Neal, it wasn’t Jack, whatever it was. They were making fun of it. Now, in the back cover or somewhere in the magazine they had Carmine’s rough of the drawing, which was his rough sketch and this stuff. And Neal said, “No, no, you guys are wrong.” So he says, “Look at this,” and he pulls out the rough, and he shows the negative space of the table, with everybody’s elbows on it, and their hands, and their poses to it, and the entire negative shape of the table, which was a very irregular, white shape in the center of the drawing, that completely holds the drawing locked into place. And you could see Carmine’s design as clearly as if he’d drawn the arrows and said, “Design. Design here.” It made a beautiful drawing. It was less visible in the inks, which I think somebody else had done, but it was clearly, as Mark said—one of Carmine’s best talents was he was spectacular at drawing and designing stuff with shapes. He was a phenomenal shape artist. I’m sorry, I just had to sneak that in. [applause]

“We really like what you did a lot.” ROYER: Well, it was funny. Before Jack left Marvel, we met about me inking stuff for him for Marvelmania. [scattered applause] I mean, this memorable phone call, “Mike Royer, this is Jack Kirby. Alex Toth says you’re a pretty good inker.” I went to his house the next day, I thought I would take the work home, and he says, “Just sit here at the board and do it.” Oh, God! [laughter] And every few minutes he’d come in and look over my shoulder. Talk about intimidation! [laughter] But all of a sudden I was family, having sandwiches made by Roz. Anyway, of course, he came back from New York and he said, “Well, I always wanted you along, but it didn’t work out that way.” So when I went back with Mark and Steve to New York, I walk into Carmine’s office, and I go, “I can do a better job than Vince Colletta’s doing.” And at lunch Dick Giordano says, “Better be careful, Mike. You’re getting a reputation for being cocky.” [laughter]

EVANIER: Dick was one of the people who came up to your afterwards, after that meeting where they were tearing you apart, and said, “I really, really like what you did.” They were very wonderful samples. Now, we’re talked here about inkers ruining Jack’s work, changing it, whatever. One of the few things late in his career that Jack did that came out exactly the way he intended it, because it wasn’t inked, was a story called “Street Code.” [applause] It was in Argosy magazine. We’ve got on the dais, the publisher of that magazine, Richard Kyle. [applause] And before we get into that, Richard, is it true—someone told me last night, you were walking down through the convention wearing dark glasses the other day, and somebody came up to you and said, “Stan Lee. Can I have your autograph?” [laughter] RICHARD KYLE: Yes, it’s true, and I’m wearing the same glasses, but I don’t know whether it’ll work here, but let’s just give it a try. Now, this is me before I become Stan Lee. [puts on glasses, laughter, applause]

attitude. “If you’re not already working for us, you must not be very good.” I had a very memorable art exchange one time with a man named Sol Harrison, the production head, where he actually said to me—he was talking about how crappy the art in Marvel comics was, and I said, “Well, do you think John Buscema and Gene Colan are bad?” “Well, we wouldn’t take that work at DC.” [scattered laughter] And then I said, “Well, Gil Kane’s working for both companies. Are you telling me that the Gil Kane art for DC is excellent art, and the Gil Kane art for Marvel is crappy art?” And he said, “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.” [laughter] The quote was, “Gil knows he can’t get away with handing that sh*t in to us.” So that was the mentality. So Mike’s work was belittled. It was like Carmine would call other people into the office and say, “Tell us why we don’t like this. Tell us why this isn’t good.” And then, after he left the office feeling really dejected, all those people kept coming up to Mike and telling him, [whispering]

EVANIER: Richard, can you tell us how “Street Code” came to be? And could you get a little closer to the microphone? KYLE: I will with your help, because I am a person that has never remembered a date in my life, so I don’t know what the year was. I think it was ’82, maybe… EVANIER: A little before that, but not much before that. I think it was about 1980. KYLE: Oh, okay. In 1980, at the comic convention, I got an Inkpot Award that 74

Richard Kyle

I didn’t expect at all. It really surprised me. So I had talked it over with a couple of people—conceivably, I mentioned it to Mike [Royer]—that Jack’s pencils were really extraordinary. In the earlier days, however, you couldn’t shoot from them. The printing processes of that time just didn’t really allow for good reproduction. The offset, the reproduction that they have now wasn’t there. And Mike had also told me that Jack started his career drawing twice-up—that is, twice the size of the printed page. And once he said it, I started examining it closely. He thought that something had been lost, because Jack was continuing to draw at twice-up, but he was putting them on oneand-a-half time-up pages. But I never could quite catch it, because I could see that there was some similarity. But then DC came out with the digest-sized books, and you can really see it on the digest-sized books. There was another artist, not Mike, who was working, and he tended to oversimplify his line. So, really, the digest size… What’s the war book?

maybe Jack would have finally agreed, but Roz was the clincher. So we signed a contract, and I paid—the agreement was half up front and half when the book was completed. Or maybe it was just all up front, I really don’t know, because I had great confidence in Jack. But I really had no experience with people that are on that level of publishing in the world, and I just didn’t know how closely they would meet deadlines and everything. Well, Jack and I agreed on thirty days, and 28 days later, [laughs] the entire thing was in my hands, and it was just beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. And it wouldn’t have worked for superheroes or anything that was out of size, that particular technique. But, for what Jack was doing, the story about his youth in the Bronx, an incident from his life in the Bronx, it was just really everything I wanted, and it was more. And I had only put a restriction of ten pages, well, eight or ten. Jack immediately took ten. [laughter] But I elected to put that restriction on it because this was toward the tail, toward the end of Jack’s very active career, and I was uncertain whether or not—because he was not quite doing the same things in some of the Pacific comics. He was doing breakdowns and layouts. Apparently, that was just an experiment. I gave him the ten pages when I really wanted to give him a hundred pages and put myself in hock for life. [some laughter] So, anyway, I got the pages, and I was just absolutely enamored of them. And there was an illness in my family, and I had to drop the plans for the magazine, and it was not until, if I’m not mistaken, it was 1991, I believe, wasn’t it, Mark—that I was able to print it, finally?

AUDIENCE: “The Losers”? KYLE: “The Losers.” You could see it in the digest versions of “The Losers,” and it really looks remarkable. In some ways, it is better as art, despite the reduction, than some of the stuff that Jack was doing at the time, because I don’t think that he ever quite made the transition from one-and-a-half to two. But, anyway—. EVANIER: Richard, let me interrupt you for one second. Mike Catron, who is videotaping this, needs to change his tape. We don’t want to lose any important…

EVANIER: It was sometime around then. It was late.

SIMONSON: So if you have any great, evil stories, this is the time to tell them, right now. [laughter]

KYLE: It was a long time. But there was just no way I could do it.

EVANIER: Let’s all cuss. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could I say something? I think Jack would be appalled that Stan Lee is charging fifty bucks for an autograph. EVANIER: I think Jack would be appalled that Stan was charging fifty bucks for an autograph, unless Jack was getting seventy bucks. [laughter] Thank you. Okay, Richard, resume, I’m sorry for the interruption.

KYLE: Well, in any event, I talked to other people about it, and I thought, well, there ought to be a story that was done in Jack’s pencils, because he penciled so tightly and everything, and I didn’t entirely approve of the work that was being done for him. And this was post-Mike. We’re not talking about anything Mike did, because I think that he is the best of all the Kirby inkers. [applause] I really wanted to see what it would look like, with modern printing technology, to shoot Jack’s pencils. So, anyway, I received the Inkpot, and we went into a large kind of a common room there, we were sitting down, and everybody was talking. And by just pure good fortune, I was seated with Jack and Roz. And Jack reminisced a lot about when he was a boy, and I said to him—because I was going to publish a magazine. It had not yet gone out, but I was planning it— I said, “Would you be interested in doing an eight or tenpage story about your youth in the Bronx, just the way it was, without any artifice, without anything, just the way it was?” And it was curious. There was this expression of eagerness on his face, and I told him that I would pay him his current going rate, which I couldn’t afford, but nonetheless. But, anyway, there was this look of eagerness on his face, and he turned after a moment and looked at Roz for her approval. And she was emphatic about it. I mean, she really supported the idea. So, because of Roz—

(previous page) Unused page from Our Fighting Forces featuring “The Losers.” In 1974 at Comic-Con, there was a Kirby Inking Contest, and we’re guessing this page may’ve been a victim of it. (above) Undated Cap sketch. 75

else that would do that. Nobody.

EVANIER: And let’s thank Richard Kyle for what I think is the last great Kirby strip. [applause] Richard I’ve known for a long time, he has always been a class act, and I think that Jack respected him tremendously for the bookstore. He loved that bookstore down on Long Beach. He loved going down there and looking at what foreign publishers were doing. KYLE: Well, one of the… there was a man named Philippe Druillet, who was a French artist, and his technique, the technical aspects of his technique, weren’t Jack’s, but his imagination was Jack’s. Spot illustrations for Marvelmania items, circa 1969; inks appear to be by Jack. Courtesy Heritage Auctions. And there were two books There wasn’t any way I could finance it. And Roz, when I finally pubabout the Adventures of Lone Sloan that came out in hardback and lished it, I did the ad, and I didn’t say anything to the Kirbys about it that we carried, and Jack and Roz came in one day, and Jack was until the first ads came out, and then I immediately told them that. piling up all the books he wanted because he just liked to look at the And Roz said Jack was reading the ad in the Comics Journal, and he other artists, especially the European ones that were just being dissaid he thought it was a good ad. He thought it was the right kind of covered then. And he says, “This is my kind of guy.” I can’t do the ad. So then I said, “You know, I’ve had this for all this time.” She New York accent. I mean, if Mike can do it or something to get Jack said, “Yes, we could have given this project to someone else.” And right, but it’s, “That’s my kind of guy.” [laughter, applause] And so they could have. I mean, here, for nine years or whatever it was, Philippe Druillet, who had a good reputation and sold very well in there was this really remarkable story by Jack that anybody could Europe and all that, nonetheless, he had the recommendation of have taken it and… but she said, “But we didn’t do it.” So I said, Jack Kirby, and I don’t think that could have hurt his sales one bit. “Well, because it’s been all this time, I just wanted to pay you the EVANIER: We’ve got a few more minutes and I’m going to extend original amount over again.” Which I eventually did, but it was a things a little bit longer if you all promise me that when we finish difficult time—but it was this look of eagerness on Jack’s face, just you’ll leave and won’t linger in front of the panel. Jonathan, I always this extraordinary eagerness that you got, and then the kind of selfask people what was the first Jack Kirby work they fell in love with. control of stopping there and turning to Roz, because she was his What did you get over in the UK? advisor and she was just an extraordinary woman. I don’t have any more of a story there, it’s not much of an ROSS: We had very patchy distribution of Marvel and DC comics in anecdote, in a way, but I think it tells you about Jack and Roz, and the UK for many years. In the early seventies, when Jack was at DC, also about their support of me during a very, very long time, when DC came over more readily than Marvel. DC and Marvel books were they didn’t have to. Seven years had passed, at least, and the conusually brought over as ballast on ships, so you would find them and tract would surely be annulled by that, and I can’t imagine anybody 76

they would be warped from the water, which kind of added to the charm. But when I was a kid, we used to have junk shops; I don’t know what you call them over here, but second hand shops, where people would sell off their collections, so I found some Kirby books there. The first book I bought, I think, was Fantastic Four #67 or 68, where Warlock, “Him” first appears, one of those. But it had a great big “3” in black felt tip across the cover, they all had that. I was blown away by that, and I went back and bought as many Marvel books as they had there, as well. They had an FF #3 there with no cover, which I bought, and I still have that copy. And for many years I thought that would be my retirement fund. I didn’t know you needed the cover for it to be worth money. [laughter] But I’ve still got that FF #3. It was the early Fantastic Four stuff, really, which I still think is—for someone to have produced a run of that length, and of that quality, with no actual dips at all. And still towards the end, after book #100 and #101, still remarkable story settings, remarkable character work, as well as remarkable design, that’s a feat which— and I know we have two of the greatest artists working today. I mean, Walt Simonson’s work on New Gods was—and a few others— [applause]—one of the few artists who did really good work on Jack’s characters that Jack would’ve admired. And, also, Erik’s work, which is so informed by Jack [applause], with his work on Savage Dragon. But even so, very few people could achieve what Jack managed to do, and obviously, Stan took credit for. [laughter]

they redid all of my lettering, but I got some very nice compliments from Richard when I inked that, because my whole mindset was, the Kirby that I grew up with as a kid, the Boys’ Ranch, and the Bullseye, and all that stuff, and it was like, “I’m doing Simon & Kirby!” ROSS: I could see, I always felt that was stuff, like talking about “Street Code,” when he was back doing the gangster stuff, that was something obviously, Jack—because a lot of the things he saw on the street informed his work, and his time in the Army. I wonder whether, because he was working in black-&-white, because that was one-anda-half size up—. I’ve seen some of the earlier work. I know the unpublished Soul Love book, that was twice-up, the artwork for that. EVANIER: No, it was 11" x 15,” not 10" x 15.” ROSS: Oh, so it was slightly bigger. And, actually, Vince did do a lovely job on some of that; some of that was lovely artwork. EVANIER: Vince did a better job before they went and gave it back to him. He inked the book, and they gave it back to him and said, “Make the men look more like Sidney Poitier and the women look more like Diahann Carroll.” [laughter] If you see the originals, they’re online in various places, you’ll see an awful lot of white-out on the faces. That’s obliterating not only Jack’s work, but Vince’s, as well. He was kind of victimized. ROYER: I loved his work on In the Days of the Mob. I didn’t care what Jack drew. No matter what it was, there was just this incredible power and strength. Let me tell you how intimidating it was in the old days of Special Delivery for me to open a package from Jack, and the first thing was to be engulfed with the aroma of Roi-Tan cigars. [laughter] And then to look at those pages and go, “God, this is great,” and, “Gee, don’t screw it up.”

EVANIER: Are there any quick questions from someone who’s never asked anything before? MARK MILLER: Hi, Mark. I just want to say thank you. I know it’s a labor of love doing this. EVANIER: Don’t talk about me, let’s talk about Jack. MILLER: Here’s the question. The [Comic-Con Program Book] described [this panel with the phrase] “some still hail as the King of Comics.” With this being the Captain America movie year and the fiftieth anniversary of the Fantastic Four, why aren’t there forty-foot posters of Jack’s portrait hanging in there? And can I write next year’s description?

ROSS: Did he want to work in wash, or did he think about having more texture? Because I wondered about the possibility, I didn’t see it printed in the magazine. I think it was still the pulpy paper, it wasn’t the modern stuff, but Waldenbooks had at the time—I guess Jack might have been influenced by that or inspired by that in some way, and they had a lot of wash work, a lot of tone work in there. Did he intend that in the pencils, or did he…?

EVANIER: You can write next year’s description. I don’t know. I try to always keep this modest because, and I can’t say too much about this, but here’s what happens. If I, in a fanzine 28 years ago said, “Jack usually ate cheeseburgers,” I find myself in a deposition room with someone saying, “Are you sure he ate cheeseburgers and not hamburgers? Are you willing to swear under oath?” I have to be real careful about how I word things these days. Another question. Anybody else? Yes.

ROYER: Well, Mark can probably tell you about the aborted Kirby Comics project. That’s what the Galaxy Green pages were done for. EVANIER: Well, I’ve taken a lot of time here, unfortunately, so we’ll have to continue this on another occasion. I’d like to ask everybody, as we finish here, would you please, instead of coming up to the stage, would you please just leave the room so that the next panel can get in here and they don’t yell at me and give me less time next year? Would you join me in thanking Mr. Erik Larsen [applause begins], Mister Richard Kyle, Mike Royer, Walt Simonson, and Jonathan Ross. Thank you. H

AUDIENCE: I have a question for Erik. What got you into Kirby, and what of Kirby’s work did you kind of consciously bring into your own? Any particular aspects? LARSEN: As much as I possibly could. [laughter] Just the power of it, the storytelling, the design. Kind of everything, as much as possible, really. Every morning I wake up and look in the mirror, and I’m a little disappointed that I’m not seeing Jack Kirby. [laughter] But the first work I saw of his was Kamandi, I think. ROSS: Mike, I’ve always been keen to know. You did some inking on, I don’t know if it was published, In The Days Of The Mob #2, the black-&-white work Kirby was doing when he was at DC. EVANIER: He inked the entirety of In The Days Of The Mob #2. ROSS: Was that published? EVANIER: No.

Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll from the time period of Soul Love. Turn the page to compare them to a story from Kirby’s never-published issue.

ROYER: When it was printed in one of those DC house fanzines, 77

Kirby A Go-Go A never-published Kirby 1971 story planned for Soul Love • Inks by Vince Colletta, color by Tom Ziuko

Gallery 3

Unearthed

Someday, the Stars Will Align by Randolph Hoppe, Trustee of the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center (www.kirbymuseum.org)

The Someday Funnies, featuring Kirby's 2-page story, is on sale now.

while ago, I was digging through a number of 11" x 17" photocopies that Greg Theakston had gifted to the Kirby Museum for its archives. One photocopy of a pencil art panel page was just plain odd. It had no word balloons or sound effects, only rhyming captions along the top of each panel. The lunar imagery evoked both cartoony fantasy and the Apollo moon landings. I had no idea what this page was. Perhaps Kirby was adapting something, so I did some internet searching on some of the key words, with no success. I asked some Kirby friends and scholars. Nothing. Around the same time, James Romberger pointed out an anecdote by Alan Kupperberg on his website about some Kirby space pages he saw Wallace Wood inking in the DC offices in the early 1970s. There, Alan mentioned the pages were for Michel

Choquette’s 1960s project. So I searched the web and found an e-mail address for Michel, who didn’t respond to my query. No worries; who knows whether the address I found was active? I don’t recall the exact timing, but I did eventually find the first page of the story in a loose-leaf binder of 81⁄2" x 11" photocopies the Museum also received from Greg Theakston. Later I learned, through James again, I believe, that the Comics Journal was promoting an article by Bob Levin about Michel Choquette’s Someday Funnies project. I reached out to Bob, who put me in touch with Michel. A preview of the Kirby piece illustrated the Comics Journal #299 article. Nevertheless, this was a moment when the stars aligned, as the saying goes—an “alignment” John Morrow has said happened to him many times producing the Jack Kirby Collector. Two unknown pieces: 1) What is

The script on the pencil version: (“The Ball ad of Beardsl e y” cropped off of photocopy) Bullfeather Or Tune in! -- Cop-Ou t! And Drop-Up! BEARDSLEY: “FAR OUT!” In nineteen hundred and sixty-five, The world was lucky to be alive... Mid shot and shell and protest yell, Beardsley Bullfeather left that hell! BEARDSLEY: “PISH AND TUSH TO ALL THAT SLUSH!” Past Sputnik, and Lunik, and Echo, and Telestar, Past all Earthly dramas that got out of hand... Lone Beardsley had made it beyond all expectations... And, gave vent to emotions inspired by Ayn Rand! BEARDSLEY: “GET YOURS!” (Illegible) by superior, practical fiscal ability... Above the disturbance that troubles the soul... Go to the satellite asleep in it’s vacuum... Bask in the silence of each gaping hole... Then “Moonwalk” and skim cross the gritty horizons... Dance in the Earthlight that shines so serene... See it glisten on novels and cooling martinis As, time, dims the vision of blood on the green.. By virtue of “Apollo,” that project most vaunted, The trip that came later, found nothing upon, That gray, lifeless surface, to betray a lost presence. Bullfeather, his soul, and the Sixties, had gone.

Who steps across history? Who’s mark stamps the years? Whose image leaps forward and then disappears? Who lives and who dies in the turbulent scheme? The questions grow moot as fact fades into dream...

this mysterious photocopy? and 2) What is that Choquette space piece that Alan Kupperberg saw Wally Wood ink? The two mysteries merge to become one, but there’s one important difference. Michel, a man with meticulous records of his project, tells me that he paid Joe Sinnott to ink the pages. So, I reached out to Alan and sent him details from one of the photocopies—he was sure he saw Wood ink those very pages. Maybe some photocopies or vellum were involved and there indeed is a Wood inked version, too, somewhere. Well, The Someday Funnies has been published by the fine folk at Abrams Comicarts who brought us Mark Evanier’s wonderful Kirby: King of Comics, and editor Charles Kochman generously gifted a copy of The Someday Funnies to the Museum at New York Comic Con. Charles mentioned that the Kirby originals exist. It would be interesting to see them, and scan them for our Original Art Digital Archive, of course. So what is this two-page piece? Briefly, in 1965, Beardsley Bullfeather escapes earthly troubles and heads to the moon, where, alone, he dances across the moonscape, reads novels and drinks martinis. But, the later Apollo mission finds no evidence of him. In the last panel of the first page, Kirby writes that Bullfeather expresses “emotions inspired by Ayn Rand!” as he exclaims, “Get yours!” in one of only three word balloons.

Could Kirby’s poetic vignette be a comment on Steve Ditko having left Martin Goodman and Stan Lee’s Marvel five years before Kirby? Ditko’s last Spider-Man comic was cover-dated July 1966. My understanding is that this would mean the comic was on the stands in May, with Ditko’s work taking place in March or so. It makes sense to me that 1965 would have been a serious breaking point between Ditko and Goodman and Lee. However, I’m concerned that this is an insular comic book culture analysis, but nevertheless, with Funky Flashman as my witness, I offer it for your consideration. After having compared the photocopies of the pencil pages with the published work, I discovered significant changes to the captions. Kirby isn’t known as someone who revised his work once it left his board. Also, the book’s endpaper collage includes an apologetic note from Kirby. I asked Michel about the note at a MoCCA Someday Funnies event. He said Jack was originally going to do a piece about the Vietnam War, but changed his mind because it made him too sad. I didn’t ask Michel about the differences in the script. Here’s another opportunity for some wild speculation: Alan Kupperberg distinctly remembers seeing Wallace Wood ink these pages, but Michel paid, and published Joe Sinnott. There are two different scripts. Is there another version with the original script, with inks by Wood? Who knows? Maybe “the stars will align” again, and we’ll learn more. H

The script as published: The Ballad of Beardsl e y Bullfeather or Tune In -- Cop Ou t and Drop-Up!

BEARDSLEY: “FAR OUT!” In nineteen hundred and sixty-five, When the world was lucky to be alive, Though middle-aged and far from hip Beardsley Bullfeather took a trip. BEARDSLEY: “PISH AND TISH TO ALL THAT SLUSH!” Past Sputnik and Lunik and Telstar and Echo The rocket Bullfeather alone built and manned Flew him free of the laws of both Newton and Congress To indulge in emotions inspired by Ayn Rand. BEARDSLEY: “GET YOURS!” “So do-it-yourself’ and a little ambition Pay off in the end!” chuckles Beardsley, and soon Lands his ship, his visage as calm As the smile on the face of the Man in the Moon. He moonwalks and skims cross the gritty horizons And dances by earthlight that shines so serene By its glow he reads novels and sips cool martinis As time dims his visions of blood on the green Apollo explorers, as might be expected, Found boulders and pebbles, no trace upon That gray lifeless surface of Beardsley Bullfeather. His skeleton, soul, and the sixties were gone

Who steps into history? What’s in a name? If a plot has a hero, who stars in a scheme? Does it matter whose footprint officially marks The start of an era, the end of a dream?

Collector

Send letters to: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR c/o TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • See back issue excerpts at: www.twomorrows.com

Comments

After running this many letters pages, the vault’s nearly empty, so send more!

[Andrew Weiss has uncovered something that’s long puzzled this mag’s editor: Who (or what) was Kirby’s inspiration for the character Flippa Dippa when he resurrected the Newsboy Legion in Jimmy Olsen #133? Andrew recently came across this image while flipping through the November 17, 1967 issue of LIFE Magazine:

The photo is from an article about Bruce Jay Freidman’s play, “Scuba Duba,” starring Cleavon Little as the title character. You can read Andrew’s full examination at this link: http://www.armagideon-time.com/?p=6142 And for the ultimate trip through Kirby’s career, check out the final installment of “Robby Reed’s” amazing DIAL B FOR BLOG site, which goes out with a bang—or in this case, a Boom Tube: http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/600/ Now, since there was no letter column last issue, we triple-dip on issues #56-58 this time:] THE WONDER YEARS was terrific! It made me reread FF #44-47. It seemed like, not only did the readers not know what was going to happen next, but I’m not sure Stan or Jack knew either. I’m sure that book will spark debate for a long time to come! Mac Talley, Santa Barbara, CA What the...? I have just finished reading what I consider the best book yet written on the evolution of the relationship between Jack Kirby and Stan Lee via their seminal offering THE FANTASTIC FOUR; and Mark Alexander is gone?! Mark would often pester me (in the nicest way, mind you) to go back to writing pieces for TJKC. I responded that guys like him were the future of the mag; I wish he were here so I could tell him: “SEE?!” I was right! This issue rightly deserves to be re-solicited as a separate hard-

cover book to be offered in all bookstores, and I’m talking Barnes & Noble, not just comic book shops and supermarkets. What Mark did here was take the time to piece together an informative, unbiased view of the development of not only the beginnings of the Marvel line, but the working habits of two men who, with time and great success, probably didn’t want to deal with each other, but had to. If one thinks about it, this book is not only a revelation on the development of the Fantastic Four, but a reflection on the creation of the Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers, Sgt. Fury, the X-Men and any other creations attributed to the Kirby/Lee team, as these books that followed were invariably developed in the same fashion. The controversy will always be there and I have my opinions and disagreements with some points in this book, but I won’t waste your time with them here. I’m glad Mark doesn’t have to face criticism for this work; but given the circumstances, I wish he could! I never met Mark in person, just as e-mail friends. He would usually mail me with questions concerning whatever piece he was writing and always thank me not only in the mail, but in the printed article as well. He worked hard on these pieces, much moreso that someone like me would ever do; that’s why I knew he would go on with better articles than I could ever write. He did it right, dug up facts to back up his claims, interviewed the right people whenever possible, got help from informed guys like Mike Vassallo and Nick Caputo; and kept revising up until he was satisfied that the work was respectable; and damn if it isn’t! Finally, of course, he went to John with his work, the fairest editor and publisher in fandom. John, this is the best book on Kirby you ever put out—congrats, kid! Mark, if you can read this, you’re my favorite TJKC writer; the tables are turned my friend. Congratulations and rest easy! Mike Gartland, Wallington, NJ Coming off your big Stan & Jack ish, I thought you might be the last, best expert to ask about this (both Evanier and Glen Gold didn’t know): Have you any idea what the actual sales figures were on FF #1 in 1961? Stan makes a big anecdotal deal about how FF was created ‘cuz of Goodman’s fretting over JLA’s numbers, and we think of FF as kickstarting the Marvel Millennium, but no one seems to know exactly how well it did, and how soon. Adam McGovern, Mount Tabor, NJ (I have no idea on FF #1 sales figures, but you’ve gotta think they were better than the other monster/sci-fi series going on then, or they wouldn’t have kept coming up with new superhero stories after that.) 90

Wow! THE WONDER YEARS arrived yesterday in the mail, and was SO impressive. I LOVED the work, and read a good deal of it before retiring. I especially loved how he chose to break up the various periods by inkers and content, and I agree with him on virtually every point he makes about plots, characters, content, the peaks and valleys of the world’s greatest comic. I think one of the best subplots that ran along with the FF was the story of the Frightful Four. And for the most part, they continued to be minor characters that return or have cameos ever since their inception. If the evil FF were formed in #36, like we were shown, and they are major villains in #36, 38, 39, 41-42-43, 57, 61-62-63, 81-82, and finally #94, then that has to be a record that even Doom doesn’t quite match up to. I’d love to see a trade made up of all the appearances of the evil FF someday, even if it was only reprinting the individual pages when they were subplot threads. Speaking of subplot threads, another point made by the author of THE WONDER YEARS is the dangling thread of the University football coach and Wyatt Wingfoot. Now, if Dan Slott (or Kurt Busiek) ever wanted to sink his teeth into a juicey plot point that was left dangling for him to milk, there’s one. By doing some careful research into just what was written, and where Wyatt comes and goes, plus the return of Crystal right in the middle of the football game in #61... well, with a little help from photographer Peter Parker, a love letter to Jack Kirby’s creations could be a very cool thing indeed. Great job, John. Definitely worth the effort to publish it. A must have for every FANTASTIC FOUR fan! Kirk Groeneveld, Athens, OH I know I’m late in relating this, but TJKC #58 “The Wonder Years” was an enjoyable read. It shed light on a few subjects and cast shadows on others. One item that I found interesting was Stan’s synopsis of FF #1. This tells us once and for all that Stan did indeed have a tremendous amount of input into the landmark first issue. However, once the team supreme got underway further down the road there’s no doubt that Stan’s input into the stories was minimal and Jack was making a whole lot up—especially in light of the so-called Marvel Method and Stan’s extremely brief story outlines for each issue. It’s easy to see Jack just going wild and creating storylines and characters left and right. With that said (written), I thought of this the other day: if Stan is the one who wrote the copy for every FF issue, then it was he who dubbed Jack “King.” Why then, if Jack was this creative genius, this “King,” was he not treated as the comic royalty he deserved? I know this debate and gripe session has been going on for decades. However, it strikes me as ironic that the man who Stan himself dubbed “King” got treated like a peasant in comparison to himself!

Having read the wonderful book “The Wonder Years” by Mark Alexander, I can’t help but write to you out of a deep feeling of gratitude. This work is a MUST-HAVE for every True Believer out there in the world. And a True Believer I am, that’s for sure. I have been since the age of ten. Sadly, I couldn’t be there in the early sixties, because of being no citizen of the United States of America. I was born at the dawn of 1961, on the fourteenth of February in the middle European country called Austria. A very small country, Latveria-sized one could say, but without a tyrant, neither armored nor otherwise peculiarly clad (at least since 1945...). The years crept by, slowly and happily, and finally, the day had come. The day I got hold, for the first time in my life, of a copy of “Die fantastischen Vier” (THE FANTASTIC FOUR). Lightning struck me, but instead of going down, I felt myself elevated and strengthened. The book was printed only in black-&-white, the paper was cheap and the German translation bad, but the magic was there. Other books followed. “Die erstaunliche Spinne” (THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN),”Die Racher” (THE AVENGERS), “Der unglaubliche Halk” (THE INCREDIBLE HULK). It was like a dream, like an intoxication. Soon, very soon, I turned into an addict. But there was one thing I still missed: background information! Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck and all the other greats, they were merely names, printed in awry placed credit boxes. No faces, no histories, nothing what I longed so desperately for. Then, decades later, in the dense jungle of the World Wide Web, I stumbled over your wonderful books and the haze vanished. MARVEL COMICS IN THE

1960s by Pierre Comtois, MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1970s by the same, and THE WONDER YEARS by Mark Alexander. It is so sad, that he had to go so early. And yet, this book alone, this wonderful work of his, would prove, that his short life wasn’t a wasted one. Rest in peace, True Believer! I wish I would have had the privilege of knowing you personally. We would have spent hours discussing a time, in which the summers were really longer and brighter. Karl-Heinz Pieler, Siegendorf, AUSTRIA WOW! I am reading a chapter every other day since I received TJKC #58 last week. Each page I savor and hope it will be noticed by fandom for what it’s worth... pure history. The late Mark Alexander should be awarded many prizes for his spot-on analysis, and your publishing firm will standout as THE BEST in covering comics history for all the magazines you publish! John Modica, San Carlos, CA

(I think I’ve made it pretty clear where I stand in regards to the case, between my editorials in TJKC, and my decision to give a deposition to the court. I believe the Kirbys are justified in reclaiming the copyrights that Jack signed away, and that there is plenty of evidence that the work in question was not work-for-hire. The judge in this case felt differently, but I see an appeal has been announced, so we’ll all have to wait and see how things end up. I suspect we won’t know for many years, unfortunately. As for royalties, my understanding is that Marvel stops paying royalties a very limited number of years after a creator dies. So, living creators like Stan Lee and Roy Thomas still earn modest royalties on a book like X-MEN—as they should—while Jack’s family makes none. DC continues to pay royalties to the Kirbys, despite his death.)

I read THE WONDER YEARS (JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #58) cover-to-cover and it is an amazing piece of historical writing. Mark Alexander did a masterful job of explaining the behind-the-scenes context of each of the periods in the evolution of Silver Age FF. A wonderful job. I could not put it down. A shame he passed before getting to hear the praise and positive reaction to his work. It should get an Eisner Award. Scott Valeri, Charlotte, NC I was devastated by the news on the recent legal battle of Kirby’s family vs. Marvel/Disney. The decision against the Kirbys wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it does feel like it is the last nail through the heart for the comics industry I grew up on. I would like to ask—will TJKC be taking any kind of a position over the Summary Judgment? Will you be covering it in depth? I for one feel in need of seeing this as just the beginning of a battle for some sort of restitution for the Kirby family—if not financially, then at least in terms of credit where it is due and greater name recognition for Jack himself—awareness of his great legacy. It was quoted in the transcript of a Kirby Tribute Panel some years back, but I am pretty sure the family said at that time that they see nothing from the many reprint editions of Jack’s work— let alone the movies/toys/digital editions, etc. Is there any way to clarify just whether restitution or royalty—if any—is given, in the various cases? Am I right in thinking, for instance, that Warners has a track record of royalty acknowledgement and payment in place, but that Marvel/Disney does not? This is important because I want to begin to make my feelings known as a consumer. I’d prefer to purchase the Kirby products that help to repay his family, even if only to a nominal extent—the family that he worked to protect and provide for his entire life—in preference over and above those that only line the pockets of the undeserving. I don’t want to feel dirty for buying an omnibus of CAPTAIN AMERICA, say, if it makes a mockery of the message of heroism, as well as the creative inspiration, it enshrines. ILYA, GREAT BRITAIN 91

Here’s my idea for an article or series of articles: How about printing or at least mentioning Jack’s tremendous comic art output? For instance, cover dates for January 1963 give credit to the following by Jack: • FANTASTIC FOUR #10 • THE INCREDIBLE HULK #5 • JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #88 • LOVE ROMANCES #103 • STRANGE TALES #104 The total amount of pages published by Marvel with a January cover date was 166 pages and at least 10 covers! Okay, I know that some of the books were not published monthly and this was not the norm for an average month. My point though is, just the same, Jack turned out incredible volumes of fantastically creative artwork month in and month out for almost a decade. There’s got to be a way to relay how monumentally staggering this man’s output was! The JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST is a resource no Kirby collector should be without. Because of it, I was able to truly see just how much steady work this man was responsible for month after month, year after year! Let’s let the readers see that Jack worked on such a wide variety of books and still maintained an extremely high quality of work. Let’s see that while he was drawing 21 pages of THOR each month in 1967, he was also drawing 20 pages of the FF plus working on STRANGE TALES and TALES OF SUSPENSE each month too, and turning in three NOT BRAND ECHH! stories that year to boot! John Lewandowski, South Boston, VA

I noticed that in CAPTAIN AMERICA ANNUAL #4 (1977), there is a character who looks a lot like a gray Hellboy. He also has two round yellow circles on his head that remind me of Hellboy’s sawed horns. Like Hellboy, he is strong, temperamental, but also gentle (look at page 15 where he is admiring a “pretty, little bird”). Maybe it is not coincidence that on page 20, Captain America calls him “Poor Devil.” What do you think? Michele Pagano, New York, NY 2012 marks my 20th year of thinking critically about Jack Kirby—which means I’ve spent twice the amount of time he worked at Marvel thinking about his work at Marvel. I think I need a new hobby. In any case... A couple of years ago, I asked a bunch of questions about THOR #158 and #159. To my mind they are among the clunkiest, most sievelike bits of narrative Stan and Jack ever did together, filled with false starts, reprinted pages, captions that seemed to contradict the images on the page, etc. Over the last year I’ve developed a hunch that starts with those issues and then goes further, a leap past any evidence that I know of, and I’ve tried to build a case toward a conclusion, but I can’t quite make the final connections. So I’m turning this over to see if you can make any headway on proving or disproving my theory. Here goes: I think that when the Mangog storyline ended, Jack had a new idea that Stan liked a bit... and then really didn’t. And so he stalled and pushed back and finally discouraged

nowhere, in THOR #167 he sends Thor to find and bring Galactus to Asgard to “judge” him. And then—wait. Bring Galactus to Asgard? To judge him? How can that be a good idea? What did Jack have in mind? We’ll never know. By the time Thor arrives, the mission seems to have changed—Galactus is allegedly Odin’s sworn enemy and Thor is to fight him. Galactus isn’t interested in fighting however, and proceeds to talk Thor into unconsciousness (oh, wait, he gasses him, THEN talks him into unconsciousness) for two issues. It’s weird and bad storytelling and it’s obviously not what Jack intended, which was to bring Galactus to Asgard. For judging.

Jack so much that the latter turned back in midstream and instead created the weird mishmash that is THOR #158-169 (yes, I think the fallout lasted a year). I think Jack presented his idea to Stan, or just started drawing it, and when the pages came in, Stan resisted—so Jack whipped up THOR #158 instead, and I’ve outlined my reasons for thinking it was a rush job. What I hadn’t thought of before is that it leads to the only time Jack or Stan asked what happened to a character on the day before he started their story. Think about it— through all the adventures of the Hulk, the FF, Cap, the X-Men, etc., Jack never portrays a day in the life of (say) Bruce Banner before he became the Hulk. Jack had to pad the story out somehow, and after Asgard shots and a Gratuitous Odin Splash (GOS, number IV of VII), p. 19 is a montage of images that refer to (without copying) events from THOR #124-153 (with a nod to JIM #105 or so, the Cobra shot, for reasons that are unclear to me). What’s apparent is that Jack was flipping through old issues. And I’m fairly sure he got to THOR #134 p. 3, saw Galactus about to attack Ego and realized he’d been standing there for 24 issues. When we next see Galactus, in issue #160, it’s like the time passing (and FF #74-77) never happened—he’s on his way to attack Ego (Again? For the first time? Stan seems to be unclear). The fight and its aftermath are pretty terrific, and it’s only in issue #162 that things start to go haywire. Odin conjures up what seems to be the first hints of Galactus’s origin. Who knows what Jack wrote in the margins; Stan says it’s an image of the planet which gave birth to Galactus, and it’s now a husk. There follows perhaps the worst-inked splash of the entire silver age (p. 15), a ruined cityscape (apparently Galactus’s home city) executed in a way so primitive and screwy it must have been... what... blown up from a smaller image? Inked by a nine-year-old? Reworked from whatever Jack actually meant it to show? Is it a reworked version of THOR #163 p. 14? It’s followed by three more pages (pp. 16-18) of Odin projecting images from even earlier that show... what? I have no idea if Kirby meant the images to be from “even earlier”—he didn’t tend to tell stories backward like that. If you don’t read the captions but look at the images, the action’s uncharacteristically unclear. The inking of the techno-details doesn’t look like Colletta and (heresy!) I’m not sure some of the artwork is actually by Kirby but somebody tracing over the art and trying to alter it. A couple of images reflect the origin shown much later, in #168 and #169, sort of, kind of (such as the “Incubator”). One panel is really familiar (p. 17 panel 1) as a kind of salute to the cover of THOR #131. Panel two seems to be similar to the Marvelmania portfolio shot of Galactus. But the weirdest thing is this: on p. 14, Thor says “It hath the seeming of RAGNAROK itself!!!” And Odin replies “Eternal asgard must ne’er suffer such a FATE!” In other words, they worry about Galactus attacking Asgard. Annnd then... and then... nothing. We see the weird, truncated three-page “origin” and Odin seems satisfied that all is taken care of. Hmm. Of course, seemingly out of

Before we abandon that thought, check out THOR #159 p. 5. I’ve mentioned before how weird this page is (Loki skulking for no reason, for instance), which shows Thor approaching the throne room. But now, look at that last panel. Who is that in the background? Among the Krackle. That’s Galactus’s helmet. (If you don’t believe it, look at #162 p. 13 panel 2.) What is Galactus doing in Asgard? Being judged, perhaps? The part of the case I can make is that Jack envisioned an actual assault upon Asgard by Galactus. And he was taking his sweet time to do it. There were small battles leading to larger ones leading to an origin story before the all-out conflict. The leap I can’t quite make is this one: I think I know the outcome of that battle. Ragnarok. No, really. I’ve heard it said here that Jack toyed with ending the Asgardians’ world, and I think Galactus was the engine. Furthermore, and this is just totally trying to put the known puzzle pieces into place, I have a hunch about what was supposed to arise from its ashes: the New Gods. And maybe that’s why Stan couldn’t go there. Jack wanted ownership of the New Gods characters, and his request was denied. So: no New Gods. No Ragnarok. No Asgard vs. Galactus. Please feel free to comment, contradict, whatnot. My next inquiry will be about the moment I believe Jack gave up on the Fantastic Four. Glen Gold 92

I was just hoping you could pass along my appreciation of Robert Guffey’s “We All Live in Happyland” article to him. I thought it was a really great piece with an interesting perspective that I hadn’t seen framed in that way before. It helped to make another stellar issue! Sean Kleefeld, Liberty Township, OH I’m glad my “Casting Call” (TJKC #55) got such interest. However, I stand by my reservations about David Hasselhoff as Nick Fury. He’s a solid actor, as Pierre Comtois pointed out, but had none of the gruffness and toughness (to me, anyway) to make the indestructible agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. come to life. Despite that, I have to agree with you, Pierre—I’d have preferred him to Samuel L. Jackson in the recent spate of Marvel movies, also. Fred Janssen likes Neville Brand—hmmmm... not a bad pick for Nick, and I must admit I never considered him. I was thinking about both incarnations of Fury when I went for William Smith, and he’s the embodiment of Steranko’s Fury to me. Jerry Boyd, Palo Alto, CA I am glad that you included an item on THE HORDE in the latest issue of TJKC (#56). I have been watching the unrest and uprisings unfolding in the Middle East and thinking of how prophetic Jack was with THE HORDE and THE HUNGER DOGS. I was tempted to write to you at the time asking you to do an item on either to show how relevant and far reaching Jack’s thinking was, but you were ahead of me. The uprisings prompted me to re-read THE HUNGER DOGS and I was amazed just how relevant it was to what was happening now. Ordinary people who are hungry and unemployed who have had enough of being downtrodden and ruled over by a tyrannical elite. For Darkseid, read Mubarrak or Gadaffi or any other Middle East dictator. Mubarrak was toppled by the people, whereas Gadaffi had imported thousands of mercenaries (or Parademons) to try to crush the rebellion in Libya. Looking at photos and TV images of the ragtag rebels in Libya on the news, any of them could have been drawn by Jack in THE HUNGER DOGS. They are a visual image direct from that graphic novel. I enjoyed the interview with Michael Netzer and found his remarks on Jack’s words interesting when he said, “Years later when I read criticisms of his writing, it was hard to believe they spoke of the same stories that took me right to the heart of our human experience and mythology. His profound words never fell short of the prolific art they adorned.” I have similar views myself. A man who thought so deeply as Jack would want his words to convey his concepts and ideas in the same way as his art. The two work in tandem. As his art developed, so did his words. Not for him was simple mundane language which serves no purpose. His words become part of the art on the page and complement it, not detract from it. Perhaps they may not always flow in the same way as natural language, but they make us think. How much of his success and continuing popularity is down to his words striking a chord with us as well as his art? For people who want their comics to be easily

and quickly read with a minimum of thought required (which applies to many comics), Jack’s work is beyond them. They will find the language clunky and non-realistic. His art moved beyond realistic to a deeper level and so did his words. And whether we realized it or not, we moved with him, which is probably why we are so devoted and still love his work today and still find it fresh. It is why you are able to do so many issues of TJKC over so many years and show no signs of running out of fresh things to say. He is a deep, deep wellspring of thought and creativity. This is probably why he was so against working with another writer again. He could control the product and make the words fit the picture he was drawing and the concepts he was explaining. No other writer could reach his depth of thought. Kevin Ainsworth, London, UK I love TJKC #57. I photocopied “You Can’t Lose A Faithful Dog” for my niece. She is obsessed by both dogs and memorizing the US States and their capitols. It hit her on all levels. I explained what a “hobo” was to her. Also, I’m inclined to think that Darkseid unused 1980s cover is probably from one of the SUPER POWERS series, probably #5 of the latter series—the Darkseid issue. The 1984 NEW GODS reprints did not have the UPC square on the covers. Richard Kolkman, Ft. Wayne, IN One of the TV channels carried on our cable systems is “RTV,” the Retro Television Network. I noticed a few months ago that RTV was airing NAKED CITY, a show that was on the air between 1958-1963. One of the terrific aspects of NAKED CITY is that it was largely shot on the streets of New York—NYC itself provides the stage, scenery and background actors, which is always visually compelling. So, anticipating a regular, splendid viewing last Sunday, I sat down to watch “Hold for Gloria Christmas” on RTV, which happens to be NAKED CITY Season 4, Episode 1, with an original air date of September 19, 1962. The episode opens as Burgess Meredith, in distress, runs through the streets of New York and stops at the newsstand of Lou Gilbert. As they speak, there is a distance between them which reveals some of the contents of the newsstand. And what does the viewer clearly see in this brief shot? AMAZING ADULT FANTASY #15, the first SpiderMan comic. And, remarkably, to its immediate right, not as clearly evident, but with a swirling Norse God hammer unmistakable to any fan of the era, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #83, the first Thor comic. When police detective Adam Flint (Paul Burke) visits the newsstand later in the

episode, AMAZING ADULT FANTASY has been sold, but JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY is still there, this time in a more clear shot [at left]. As I thought of the significance of this finding, two conclusions emerge: (1) With this show airing about a year after FANTASTIC FOUR #1, NAKED CITY could be the first airing of a Marvel Silver Age super-hero issue on national television; and (2) “Better Living Through TV,” (HONEYMOONERS, Classic 39, Episode 7) really is possible! Len Simon, Washington, DC Thanks again for another superb issue of TJKC (#57). It prompted a few thoughts: 1) Jack’s run on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was mentioned in a footnote to “The Eternal Question,” and is another underestimated run in my humble opinion (with a couple of cracking double-spreads, even though Jack was cutting down on those by this time). With all the re-issuing of his work in hardback, I presume it’s licensing issues which have prevented a collection of 2001 and MACHINE MAN (the only Marvel work not already collected, mostly in hardback, BLACK PANTHER in SC only thus far). 2) Jack was obviously influenced by the popularity of science-fiction in the late ‘60s but sometimes took a while to find his take on some themes—PLANET OF THE APES inspired KAMANDI obviously and that took a couple of years, but 2001 and the ETERNALS (where Jack acknowledged Erik von Daniken’s CHARIOTS OF THE GODS) took a little longer. I see elements of SOYLENT GREEN and THE OMEGA MAN, the other two great Charlton Heston s-f classics in works like the DEMON and THE HUNGER DOGS, but I may be stretching it. 3) The Kobra piece coinciding with my receipt of DC’s THE JACK KIRBY OMNIBUS Vol. 1, collecting Jack’s non-CHALLENGERS work during his ‘50s tenure. I was already thinking about Vol. 2, which will presumably take us to the ‘70s and the non-Fourth World/KAMANDI/DEMON/OMAC/ OUR FIGHTING FORCES one-offs: the FIRST ISSUE SPECIALs, JUSTICE INC, SANDMAN, KOBRA etc. My initial thought was that this would include IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB and SPIRIT WORLD (issue #1 and the material for issue #2 used in WEIRD MYSTERY TALES and elsewhere) but I now see that SPIRIT WORLD (including the material for #2) is to be published as a stand-alone this year. What of IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB? We can only speculate, but at least it’s all getting out there. 4) The Giorgio Comolo tribute painting on the back page is spectacular. 5) On page 26 in the middle of the “Hammer of the Gods” piece, there’s an un-credited drawing (bottom left)—looks a lot like P. Craig Russell. Is it? Geraint Davies, Swansea, WALES (As far as I know, that illo on page 26 isn’t by P. Craig Russell—just a drawing from an old book.] 93

Issue #57 was a fairly exceptional issue, John. The art chosen and the interviews really made the grade. The article on the JFK assassination, for example, is an example of the top-notch writing that takes place with your freelancers. So well conceived and researched was this article, this guy’s work could contend with any major newspaper or magazine in America. The art samples were all worthy contributions as well, as those chosen stayed away from the normally lackluster work of Jack long past his prime (SUPER POWERS and his later Gerber or Image work). Yet the exploding cigar on that SATAN’S SIX page almost had me laughing out loud. I also loved the photos of Jack at the Disney con in 1971 and the original pages from the Colletta-inked JIMMY OLSEN work, whose stylings I’ve always liked in spite of his inexplicable practice of figure and background omissions. With all the pen-hatching that Colletta favored, I wonder how much time was really saved by these shortcut measures. As I write this, the KIRBY COLLECTOR is now 57 issues strong. And in those issues, we’ve seen hundreds of penciled page reproductions and a virtual cascade of unseen art that Jack apparently did in his spare time. With a 7-day work week and 3-pages-a-day schedule, one might wonder if something superhuman existed in Jack. With the routine letdowns and disappointments that come with any job, the world of publishing seemed more about punishment at times than inspiring one to the loftly, conceptual heights Jack always seemed in pursuit of. Imagine creating characters as beloved as your own children, and with a single phone call, being told they can no longer exist. Steve Rude Quick—which Kirby creation am I describing? A energy-based being from another world... given human form... who roams the planet, learning the “strange” ways of earthlings... until the character falls under the control of another creator, who subverts the character’s origin and purpose. The Silver Surfer? Sure—but the character I’m referring to here is Pyra, the alien fireball who appeared in KAMANDI during the last year of Kirby’s run. In retrospect, it seems probable that, with her character, Kirby was trying to do the Silver Surfer as he originally envisioned. What makes it ironic is that in the first issue that Gerry Conway apparently plotted (and Kirby drew), a flashback to Pyra’s home planet shows that all her people could switch back and forth from pure energy to human form at will—in other words, the earlier issue when Kamandi and Dr. Canus created her human body was completely invalidated! Well, at least she retained most of her fiery, haughty personality. The Surfer didn’t fare as well. Craig McNamara, Shoreview, MN Finally found the time to send you some comments on your fine book from last year about Vince Colletta, THE THIN BLACK LINE. He generates a good deal of passionate discussion when mentioned in the same breath as Jack Kirby, and I’d like to say that although he’s

far from my favorite inker, I’m one of those people who think that he added far more to THOR than he took away. I have no personal feelings about Colletta (never met him), and I absolutely did not like his inking over Don Heck, Gene Colan, John Buscema or Kirby’s FANTASTIC FOUR issues (did I forget anyone?); but reading THOR as a kid, the stories that he inked had that PRINCE VALIANT mythic feel that gets described every so often. As much as I loved Chic Stone’s inks, Colletta really made the THOR series stand out and apart from other comics. His inks were the perfect complement to bring out and enhance THOR’s fantasy aspect. I wouldn’t give a fair and balanced opinion though if I didn’t mention that I did notice “glass-paned” skyscrapers in Kirby’s cities. The bad part of it is that I had no idea they were Colletta’s doing. As a kid, I had no idea what an inker did, and my assumption was that Kirby had drawn the buildings that way. Worst of all, I assumed it was because either he was behind on his schedule and had to cut corners to get the job done on time; or that he really didn’t care too much for the THOR strip, and therefore didn’t put in as much effort as he could have. On that subject, I’ve since learned different. It was obviously incorrect and unfair of me to tag Kirby as being responsible for that, but like I said, as a kid, I didn’t know any better. In the past few years, I’ve developed an interest in learning more about the artists and creators who worked on the comics I spent so much time with; this book is big help in that regard. Larry Maher, Chester, VA I found Jack and his family in the 1930 census. Once again the family name was misspelled as Kutzberg but Ancestry.com has the name as Katzberg. I found Jack by searching only the first names of New York City residents: Ben, Rose and Jack instead of Jacob. The census includes Jack’s brother David. 1930 United States Federal Census Name: Jack Katzberg Gender: Male Birth Year: about 1917 Birthplace: New York Race: White Home in 1930: Manhattan, New York, New York Marital Status: Single Relation to Head of House: Son Father’s Name: Ben Katzberg Father’s Birthplace: Poland Mother’s Name: Rosie Katzberg Mother’s Birthplace: Austria Name Ben Katzberg Rosie Katzberg Jack Katzberg David Katzberg

Age 42 38 13 11

They lived at 172 Delancey Street. Jack is on line 41. Alex Jay, Brooklyn, NY (Thanks for sharing the Kirby Family information,

Alex; your continued efforts at researching census data is amazing. And now, here’s a few personal remembrances of fans meeting Jack, some of which have been sitting in my files for years, as I’ve never found an opportunity to run them until now:) Yes, I am sure you are thinking “yet another remembrance of the King”! Well, if you had experienced the rush of actually meeting this man you would understand why. Even the most jaded of us would get weak in the knees or have our brains turn to pools of jelly. (I have met over 500+ professionals. Meeting Jack has been the highlight.) That is the sort of response that Mr. Kirby would invoke simply by being sighted in a crowd. Now just imagine being in his presence and being able to ask most anything of him. Both the heart and mind race when put to this task! I met Jack once at the San Diego Comic Con in 1992. I ran across him while he was on his way to another booth to see his legion of fans. Curiously, he was by himself. He had a stack of cards with black-&-white art of his on them. That art was rendered into limited edition bronze statues. The cards had his autograph on them. One was his signature and the other was a copy of his signature on the art. I saw and stopped Jack (yes, that was rather bold of me indeed). Right then and there time stopped for me. I was basking in the ever-loving glow of Jack. I have to tell you, I was loving every short-lived minute of it. Jack stopped and gave me a few minutes of his time. Oh, my God! A personal audience with the King!!! I got to tell him how much of an influence he has been on my career and life. I got to thank him for all the years of comics material that he produced. I got to tell him how much I appreciated him. After I had my say, he told me a quick story about his run on the FANTASTIC FOUR. He then informed me that he had to get to the booth he had been heading for. I ended up holding up the line that was waiting for him. (Unintentionally, really!) I thanked him for his time, as well as telling him what and how much it meant to me. (A lot!) Before he went along his way, he turned and asked me: “Would you like one of my cards?” Of course I quickly said yes! I always wanted to have his signature. Now I had one given directly to me from his very hand! He then went on his way leaving me in his wake, slightly dazed. That is when the bubble that had contained my timeless moment dissipated. Reality then started to creep back into my world. Curiously there was still no one around me in the immediate vicinity. I almost had to question as to weather or not the past few minutes had happened. Jack was everything everyone who had previously met him had said about him. He was a quiet gentleman who was incredibly giving of his time. If anyone was truly deserving of the title 94

“Legend” it was Jack. I will never forget the kindness that he and later Roz (but, that’s another story) bestowed upon me that day. There is a reason why Jack will always be fondly remembered. I like to consider myself one of those reasons. Richard A. Scott, Aumsville, OR

Richard Sala and Jack Kirby

Here is a photo of Jack Kirby and me at the San Diego Convention in 1992. The dealer’s hall had just closed and Jack and Roz were standing in the nearly deserted and dark lobby chatting with another couple. The friend I was with had a camera and urged me to speak to Jack so he could get a photo of us. I sheepishly approached him and asked. He noticed that my badge indicated I was a guest and asked me if I was a cartoonist. I said yes, and that’s when he grabbed my hand and shook it with gusto—as if greeting a comrade-in-arms. The moment had a lot of meaning for me. The first comic book I remember buying (there certainly were others before, but this is the first one I really remember; I can still see it on the stand at “Nell’s” in Geneva, Illinois!) was TALES OF SUSPENSE #29 with a classic Kirby monster cover and stories. I was in the second grade (!) and from then on I searched for those Kirby monster books. I loved them! Suddenly they were replaced by super-hero books but I recognized the drawing style and by then I knew the name. I bought FF #5 off the stand and Dr. Doom is still my favorite Kirby creation. My all-time favorite Kirby series, though, is THE DEMON. I detect what seems like a real affection for old horror movies (which I share) which runs throughout that series. Anyway, hope you can use the photo sometime. Keep up the great work! Richard Sala, Berkeley, CA Think about how much comics have changed your life. How many friends have you met because of your mutual love of comics, and how have those relationships changed your life? If you’re like me—a lot. I want to talk about one friend in particular, my best friend of more than 30 years. His name is Tony Fornaro. I have Jack Kirby to thank for this life-long friendship. If it wasn’t for Jack’s comics and our mutual love of Jack’s comics, there’s a good chance that Tony and I would have never met.

It was a typically hot summer day in Fresno, California. It was 1972 and I was eleven and in the seventh grade. Comic book collecting wasn’t something you talked about with most of your pals in junior high in ‘72. “Not cool” would be an understatement, or so I thought. In fact, for me, collecting comics was a passion that I believed was mine and mine alone. Who knew that there were thousands of people just like me, silently doing the same thing? I had inherited my brother Bob’s comic collection based on the fact that I saved them from the trash can. Bob was serving in Vietnam and my other brother Steve got it in his head that he was going to clean out our garage. Let’s just say Steve wasn’t a “sort and organize” kind of cleaner. Bob’s shoebox of baseball cards didn’t survive but I grabbed the comics and I’ve been carting them around the rest of my life. Most of them were Marvel comics. I had read a few of them, but now I devoured them all. I soon realized that there were numbers on them and that the stories (for the most part) continued. It was frustrating because there were story holes in my collection. I was determined to find those missing comics—but how? I decided to write Marvel comics. Surely they would gladly sell me back stock. They sent me a post card stating that they were sorry but that they didn’t handle the distribution of back issues. It was signed Mary Mac. Now what? Back to that summer day. The glorious day I stumbled across a bookstore that sold old comics. It was called The Book Stall and it was owned by two very nice older women. My excitement and enthusiasm was apparent and after a few visits, one of the ladies told me that I reminded her a lot of another boy about my age who was also buying comics from them. She thought we should meet. I was curious about this other boy and also curious about what kind of comics he collected. Part of me hoped he didn’t collect the same titles I did. We kept missing each other until finally this woman (whose name I can’t remember and who I would like to thank) set up a meeting day. Tony was a year younger then me but we hit it off like nuclear fission. We became inseparable. He was like the younger brother I never had, but better, because he was also passionate about comics, especially the FANTASTIC FOUR and Jack Kirby comics. To us, Kirby was the undisputed “King.” Tony, like me, got into the FF and Spider-Man from the Saturday morning cartoons in 1967. I remember faking I had asthma to get out of going to catechism so I could watch those cartoons. The first time we met the “King” was on December 9, 1973 at a David T. Alexander convention in the Sheraton Universal Hotel. It was totally by accident. Tony just happened to be with me on our family vacation. My dad was the one who spotted the convention sign. He dropped us off for a very memorable afternoon. Kirby wasn’t listed as a guest, but you can imagine our excitement when we found out he was there. We watched an old Captain America serial and then Jack came out and gave a brief talk about his current Fourth World work to an audience of about 30 people. Tony actually remembers him saying that he was at a stage in his career where he was able to cut corners in his work but that no one would know. After the talk

conversation on the drive home was charged we finally got to meet this man who seemed to with the thought of meeting with Kirby on his be larger than life to us for all these years. We home turf. In our minds it was a done deal. It expected a big “Thing”-sized man, but here was was just a matter of time, and a phone call this short gentleman who was in fact no taller away. then us. It didn’t matter. We were getting our It was at least a month before I got up the picture taken with Jack “King” Kirby. Tony and I courage to make that first phone call, and I was liked Vince Colletta’s inks on Kirby’s pencils, but really, really nervous when I did. Roz answered by this time Mike Royer was inking most of the phone. I soon found out that Roz always Kirby’s work. We told him we liked Colletta’s inks answered the phone. She was very polite, but better, and Jack responded that he really didn’t cautious—until I mentioned I was a friend of care who inked his work, but that he was happy Neal’s. “You’re a friend of Neal’s? How nice of with Royer’s inks. Tony had Jack sign his FF #2, you to call—how is Neal?” From that day forwhich he had picked up that day, and that was ward she and Jack treated me almost like I was the end of our first encounter with Jack Kirby. a member of the family. I didn’t have the guts to Later that day, Tony purchased his first original tell her that I barely knew her son and never saw page of FF art from issue #73 (pp. 14) with Reed him after that first meeting. I talked to both of fighting Daredevil. I still remember how cool it them at least a dozen times over the next few was to look at that original art. Tony eventually years. I can’t remember my exact conversations sold that page and has regretted it ever since. with Jack, but he was always supportive of me My second encounter with Mr. Kirby was at my and my art, even though he’d never seen it. He first San Diego Convention in ’74 at the El Cortez would say things like, “You got what it takes, kid. hotel. Although small by today’s standards, this I can tell just by talking to you.” “Don’t let anyshow seemed huge to me at the time. Tony was thing get in your way. If you can dream it, it can only able to stay for one day, so he missed Kirby happen.” I do remember thinking that this man completely. To be honest, I know I saw Kirby was a philosopher who put his own dreams speak but I don’t remember meeting him. What I down on paper for all of us to see and enjoy. I do remember is trying to raise the two dollars to always looked forward to my conversations with enter the Kirby inking contest. I was out of Jack and with Roz. They were just top-drawer money and desperate. I did a pencil drawing of a human beings. At the end of every talk I would Kirby Thor and tried to sell it. I ran into a guy I inevitably ask them if Tony and I could visit with had bought some comics from in Fresno and he them sometime. Roz would usually say, “Of gave me the money because he liked the drawcourse, we’d love to have you over sometime. ing and thought I could win. I didn’t win, but I got Call us in a couple of weeks when things slow an honorable mention. It was the first time I had down”—or “when we get back into town”—or ever used a brush to ink but I knew that was the some other thing. I just had that feeling that it way the pros did it. Looking at it now, I think I was never going to happen. did a pretty good job for a thirteen year old. It was 1986 and I was driving up to Fresno to In 1984 I had moved to Los Angeles and Tony have Thanksgiving with my family. I had just was working as a checker at a Safeway store in pulled off in Bakersfield at a gas station to go to Clovis. At work one day, a man by the name of the bathroom. A lot of other people had the same Neal Kirby passed a check across the counter. idea. While waiting in line I heard a voice—a Noticing the name, Tony asked, out of the blue, if very distinctive, husky voice. I turned around to his father happened to be Jack Kirby. Neal was find Roz and Jack standing in that bathroom line. stunned, and maybe at that moment realized just I couldn’t believe it. I introduced myself, thinking how well known his father really was. From that that they probably wouldn’t remember me, but meeting, Tony and I were invited out to Neal’s they did. Roz said. “Jack, it’s Jeff, who you talk house in Clovis. Neal was selling his father’s to on the phone all the time. Remember, Jeff, original art from the Fourth World books. Tony Neal’s friend?” Jack remembered and we talked showed Neal the #73 FF page and Neal said that for awhile. They were heading to Neal’s for a lot of his father’s work had been stolen and Thanksgiving. When we parted company, Roz never returned. He didn’t come out and say that this page was one of them but it did make Kirby with a young Jeff Rack and Tony Fornaro, 1973 Tony uncomfortable to think that he might have bought a stolen page. I guess Neal liked us and thought we were good guys, because he told us that Jack lived in Thousand Oaks and that he was listed in the phone book. He told us that fans called him and went by his house all the time. We could hardly contain ourselves. I remember the 95

us in honor of our life-long friendship. Now the hard part: Getting Roz to let us finally come over. I made the call and got Roz. I used everything I could to persuade her to say yes. She finally relented, but only if we could come over that day between 1:00 and 2:00, because they were having other company over at 3:00. It was around 10:00 am at the time. I didn’t know if we could pull it off but of course I said, “Yes.” I called Tony immediately with the good news. He was ecstatic, but he had scheduled to take his car in to get new tires that morning. He was afraid to cancel it because his tires were almost bald. He felt he could make it to my place by around noon. I hung up and waited. At noon I got a call from Tony that he was running late. Time was quickly running out. If he wasn’t at my place by at least 12:30 it was over. Tony arrived at a quarter-to-one and it was at least 40 minutes to Thousand Oaks. I called Roz to tell her we were going to be a little late and she said that it would have to be another day. That was it. Game over. We tried a few more times, but we never did see Jack’s studio. The last time I saw Jack and Roz was in 1993 for a Topps Comics signing at the Shrine In Los Angeles. Although, at best, I was just a passing acquaintance in their lives, they greeted me like I was an old friend. Jack looked good and was excited about his new projects. Roz asked me if I’d spoken to Neal lately and I demurely told her no. Jack’s legacy in comics is indisputable and well documented. Less well documented is the people he brought together and the friendships formed because of his genius and love of this medium. Tony was the Best Man at my wedding and I was Best ALL KIRBY BOOKS & MAGS Man at his. I am Godfather ARE 40% OFF ONLY AT to his son, Paul, and I adore www.twomorrows.com! his daughter, Bridget. We We’re celebrating Jack Kirby’s 95th birthday with a “King”-size are friends for life and we sale on THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine, and all our have Jack Kirby to thank Kirby-related books. Save 40% on print, 10% on digital! for that. Thanks Jack, Online orders only, and sale ends August 31, 2012! wherever you are. WHEN YOU BUY THE PRINT EDITION ONLINE, YOU ALWAYS GET THE DIGITAL EDITION FREE! Jeff Garcia Rack, Valley Village, CA

said. “I’ll have to tell Neal we ran into you. He’ll get a big kick out of it.” I thought to myself, “Yeah; after he figures out who I am.” Even though I thought my cover would surely be blown, I once again asked if we could get together sometime. They said sure and to call them after the holidays. This was the break we needed. I was positive now that we would get to see Jack’s studio. I called them in January but, once again, it didn’t happen. It was August of 1990 and I was living in Santa Paula, California. Tony, who was now living in LA, was turning 30 that week and I wanted to make it a really special birthday. I had taken a latex model kit of the Thing, which looked like a Buscema rendition, and customized it to look more like Kirby’s. I had a plaque made which said: “The Thing, presented to Jack Kirby, in appreciation from Jeff Garcia and Tony Fornaro.” The plan was to take Tony to the Kirbys’ for his birthday and present Jack with this sculpture as thanks from the two of

KIRBY

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Here’s a tentative list of upcoming themes, but we treat these themes very loosely, and anything you write may fit somewhere. So get writing, and send us copies of your art! GOT A THEME IDEA? PLEASE WRITE US! #60: “FF FOLLOW-UP” 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: October 1, 2012. Ships December 2012. #61: “JACK KIRBY: WRITER OF THE KIRBYVERSE” The good, bad, and ugly of the oft-maligned writing skills of the King. Here’s your chance to weigh in! Deadline for submissions: January 2, 2013. Ships April 2013.

#62: “DC ISSUE” Kirby worked longer for DC than Marvel over the years, so here’s a celebration of his best work for the company! #63: “MARVEL UNIVERSE” We do for the rest of Stan & Jack’s creations what THE WONDER YEARS did for the FF! Features Mark Alexander’s groundbreaking “A Universe A’Borning” essay and more. #64: “SUPER-SOLDIERS AND S&K” Kirby created an army of fighting men and boys, from Captain America to Fighting American, Sgt. Fury to The Losers, and Pvt. Strong to the Boy Commandos. We cover them all, including a tribute to Simon & Kirby!

#59 Credits: John Morrow, Editor/Designer Lily Morrow, Scanning John Morrow, Proofreader Rand Hoppe, Webmaster Tom Ziuko, Colorist Harry Mendryk, Art Restoration SPECIAL THANKS TO ALL OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Jerry Boyd • Steven Brower Norris Burroughs • Jan Capodiferro Paul Cornell • Mark Evanier Barry Forshaw • Scott Fresina Don Glut • Heritage Auctions Jason Hofius • Rand Hoppe Fred Janssen • Jeremy Kirby Sean Kleefeld • Tom Kraft Richard Kyle • Erik Larsen Joe & Nadia Mannarino • Adam McGovern Harry Mendryk • Chris Ng Jonathan Ross • Mike Royer Arlen Schumer • Steve Sherman Walter Simonson • Mike Thibodeaux Steven Tice • Pete Von Sholly 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 not-for-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. SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Submit artwork as 300ppi TIFF or JPEG scans or Color or B&W photocopies. Submit articles as ASCII or RTF text files, by e-mail to: store@twomorrowspubs.com or as hardcopies. Include background information when possible.

NEXT ISSUE: #60 is our follow-up issue to issue #58’s THE WONDER YEARS! It starts with a dynamic, never-before published Kirby FF wrap-around cover (and wait’ll you see the flip side)! Also, we present a dual interview between classic FF inkers JOE SINNOTT and DICK AYERS! Then, there’s a rare Lee & Kirby interview, and we compare one of Jack and Stan’s FF Bullpen story conferences, to what ended up on Stan’s script and Jack’s penciled pages. Plus there’s MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, and galleries of Kirby FF art, including pencils from Kirby’s BLACK PANTHER, SILVER SURFER, and more!

C o l l e c t o r

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERNS VIEWS WITH KIRBY and EDITIO BLE A IL his contemporaries, AVA NLY FEATURE ARTICLES, FOR O $3.95 RARE AND UNSEEN $1.95— KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and presentation of KIRBY’S UNINKED PENCILS from the 1960s-80s (from photocopies preserved in the KIRBY ARCHIVES).

DIGITAL

Go online for #1-30 as Digital Editions, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #34

KIRBY COLLECTOR #35

KIRBY COLLECTOR #31

KIRBY COLLECTOR #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #33

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!

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #36

KIRBY COLLECTOR #37

KIRBY COLLECTOR #38

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!

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

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!

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

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!

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

(84-page tabloid magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

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

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!

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

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!

“Legendary Kirby”—how Jack put his spin on classic folklore! TONY ISABELLA on SATAN’S SIX (with Kirby’s unseen layouts), Biblical inspirations of DEVIL DINOSAUR, THOR through the eyes of mythologist JOSEPH CAMPBELL, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, pencil art from ETERNALS, DEMON, NEW GODS, THOR, and Jack’s ATLAS cover!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES, edited by John Morrow 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!

Lee & 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! (160-page trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490380 • Diamond Order Code: SEP111248

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) SOLD OUT • (Digital Edition) $5.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • www.twomorrows.com

Kirby A Go-Go (Grayscale!) The original art from Gallery 3’s 1971 story planned for Soul Love • Inks by Vince Colletta

Gallery 4

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One last rarity—an unused pencil page from Captain America #198 (June 1976).

Parting Shot

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GET 15% OFF WHEN YOU ORDER ONLINE! An exhaustive look at a prolific Golden Age publisher! THE QUALITY COMPANION documents the history of Quality Comics, which spawned a treasure trove of beautiful art and classic characters in the 1940s, including the “Freedom Fighters”—UNCLE SAM, PHANTOM LADY, BLACK CONDOR, THE RAY, HUMAN BOMB, and DOLL MAN—plus PLASTIC MAN, BLACKHAWK, and others now at DC Comics! • Reprints—in FULL-COLOR—nine complete original stories from the 1940s from such rare collector’s items as FEATURE COMICS, SMASH COMICS, POLICE COMICS, NATIONAL COMICS, and CRACK COMICS! • Features Golden Age art by LOU FINE, REED CRANDALL, JACK COLE, WILL EISNER, JIM MOONEY, and others! • Compiles the first-ever A-Z in-depth character profiles of every Quality costumed super-hero! • Provides coverage of character revivals at DC, and more! Written by MIKE KOOIMAN with JIM AMASH! (288-page trade paperback with 64 COLOR PAGES) $31.95 • ISBN: 9781605490373 • Diamond Order Code: AUG111218

The ultimate collection of STAN LEE rarities! THE STAN LEE UNIVERSE features interviews with and mementos about Marvel Comics’ fearless leader, direct from Stan’s own archives! Co-edited by ROY THOMAS and DANNY FINGEROTH, it includes: • RARE PHOTOS, SAMPLE SCRIPTS AND PLOTS, and PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE! • Transcripts of 1960s RADIO INTERVIEWS with Stan (one co-featuring JACK KIRBY, and one with Stan debating Dr. Fredric Wertham’s partner in psychological innovation and hating comics)! • Rarely seen art by legends including KIRBY, JOHN ROMITA SR. and JOE MANEELY! • Plot, script, and balloon placements from the 1978 SILVER SURFER GRAPHIC NOVEL, with comprehensive notes from Lee and Kirby about the story, plus pages from a SILVER SURFER screenplay done by Stan for ROGER CORMAN! • Notes by RICHARD CORBEN and WILL EISNER for Marvel projects that never came to be, and more! (176-page trade paperback with 16 COLOR pages) $26.95 • ISBN: 9781605490298 • Diamond Order Code: APR111201 (192-page hardcover with 32 COLOR pages, foil stamping, dust jacket, and illustrated endleaves) $39.95 • ISBN: 9781605490304 • Diamond Order Code: APR111202

Modern Masters spotlights ERIC POWELL! ERIC POWELL is a sick, sick man. Sick... but brilliant. How else would he have been able to come up with a concept like THE GOON—a smarter-than-he-looks brute raised by carnies, who runs the city’s underworld while protecting it from being overrun by zombies? How could anyone not love that idea? Now’s your chance to take a look inside the sick mind of this Modern Master, courtesy of co-authors JORGE KHOURY and ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. Through a career-spanning interview and heaps of fantastic artwork, including rare and unseen treasures from Powell’s personal files, this book documents his amazing career and details his creative process—it even includes a gallery of commissioned pieces in full-color. Experience the work and wonder of this master of modern comic art in MODERN MASTERS VOLUME 28: ERIC POWELL!

It’s MARIE SEVERIN, The Mirthful Mistress of Comics! MARIE SEVERIN colored the legendary EC Comics line, and spent thirty years working for Marvel Comics, doing everything from production and coloring to penciling, inking, and art direction. She is renowned for her sense of humor, which earned her the nickname “Mirthful Marie” from Stan Lee. This loving tribute contains insights from her close friends and her brother JOHN SEVERIN, as well as STAN LEE, AL FELDSTEIN, ROY THOMAS, JOHN ROMITA, JACK DAVIS, JACK KAMEN, TONY ISABELLA, GENE COLAN, JIM MOONEY, JOE SINNOTT, MARK EVANIER, and others, plus extensive commentary by MARIE herself. Complementing the text are photographs, plus rare and unpublished artwork, including a color gallery, showing her mastery with a painter’s pallette! (176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $24.95 • (Digital Edition) $7.95 ISBN: 9781605490427 • Diamond Order Code: MAY121304 • NOW SHIPPING!

FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom. TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

(120-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.95 ISBN: 9781605490410 • Diamond Order Code: APR121242 • NOW SHIPPING!

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