Jack Kirby Collector #61 by TwoMorrows Publishing

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Former COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor JON B. COOKE returns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured throughout his career, ALEX ROSS and KURT BUSIEK interviews, FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, remembering LES DANIELS, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his beloved, a talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new ALEX ROSS cover, and more!

JOE KUBERT double-size Summer Special tribute issue! Comprehensive examinations of each facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert School. Kubert interviews, rare art and artifacts, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, anecdotes, pin-ups and miniinterviews by faculty, students, fans, friends and family! Edited by JON B. COOKE.

NEAL ADAMS vigorously responds to critics of his BATMAN: ODYSSEY mini-series in an in-depth interview! Plus: SEAN HOWE on his hit book MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY; DENYS COWAN on his DJANGO series; honoring CARMINE INFANTINO; Harbinger writer JOSHUA DYSART; Part Two of our LES DANIELS remembrance; a big look at WHAM-OGIANT COMICS; ADAMS cover, and more!

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ALTER EGO #120

ALTER EGO #121

ALTER EGO #122

JOE JUSKO shows how he creates his amazing fantasy art, JAMAR NICHOLAS interviews artist JIMM RUGG (Street Angel, Afrodisiac, The P.L.A.I.N. Janes and Janes in Love, One Model Nation, and The Guild), new regular contributor JERRY ORDWAY on his behind-the-scenes working process, Comic Art Bootcamp with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, reviews of artist materials, and more! Mature readers only.

MARC SWAYZE TRIBUTE ISSUE, spotlighting FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America)! Salutes from Fawcett alumnus C.C. BECK and OTTO BINDER, interview with wife JUNE SWAYZE, a full Phantom Eagle story from Wow Comics, plus interview with 1950s Dell/Western artist MEL KEEFER, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and a SWAYZE Marvel Family cover art from the 1940s!

X-MEN SALUTE! 1963-69 secrets, rare ‘60s BRAZILIAN X-MEN stories, lost ‘60s XMen “character sheet” by STAN LEE, ROY THOMAS on the 1970s revival, art and artifacts by KIRBY, ROTH, ADAMS, HECK, FRIEDRICH, and BUSCEMA—plus the MARVELMANIA fan club story, interview with Golden Age writer ED SILVERMAN, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, and JACK KIRBY’s unused X-Men #10 cover!

GOLDEN AGE JUSTICE SOCIETY ISSUE! Features on JOHN B. WENTWORTH (Johnny Thunder), LEN SANSONE (The Atom), and BERNARD SACHS (All-Star Comics inker), art by CARMINE INFANTINO, PAUL REINMAN, MART NODELL, STAN ASCHMEIER, BEN FLINTON, and H.G. PETER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more! Cover homage by SHANE FOLEY to a vintage All-Star image by IRWIN HASEN!

Farewell salute to the COMICS BUYER’S GUIDE! TBG/CBG history and remembrances from ALAN LIGHT, MURRAY BISHOFF, MAGGIE THOMPSON, BRENT FRANKENHOFF, “final” CBG columns by MARK EVANIER, TONY ISABELLA, PETER DAVID, FRED HEMBECK, JOHN LUSTIG, classic art by DON NEWTON, MIKE VOSBURG, JACK KIRBY, MIKE NASSER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

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BRICKJOURNAL #25

BACK ISSUE #66

BACK ISSUE #67

BACK ISSUE #68

BACK ISSUE #69

MEDIEVAL CASTLE BUILDING! Top LEGO® Castle builders present their creations, including BOB CARNEY’s amazingly detailed model of Neuschwanstein Castle, plus others, along with articles on building and detailing castles of your own! Also: JARED BURKS on minifigure customization, AFOLs by cartoonist GREG HYLAND, stepby-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, and more!

“Bronze Age Team-Ups”! Marvel Team-Up and Two-in-One, Super-Villain Team-Up, CLAREMONT and SIMONSON’s X-Men/New Teen Titans, DC Comics Presents, SuperTeam Family, HANEY and APARO’s Batman of Earth-B(&B), Superman/Captain Marvel smackdowns, plus art and commentary by BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, GIFFEN, LEVITZ, WEIN, and a classic GIL KANE cover inked anew by TERRY AUSTIN.

“Heroes Out of Time!” Batman: Gotham by Gaslight with MIGNOLA, WAID, and AUGUSTYN, Booster Gold with JURGENS, X-Men: Days of Future Past with CHRIS CLAREMONT, Bill & Ted with EVAN DORKIN, interview with P. CRAIG RUSSELL, “Pro2Pro” with Time Masters’ BOB WAYNE and LEWIS SHINER, Karate Kid, New Mutants: Asgardian Wars, and Kang. Mignola cover.

“1970s and ‘80s Legion of Super-Heroes!” LEVITZ interview, the Legion’s Honored Dead, the Cosmic Boy miniseries, a Time Trapper history, the New Adventures of Superboy, Legion fantasy cover gallery by JOHN WATSON, plus BATES, COCKRUM, CONWAY, COLON, GIFFEN, GRELL, JANES, KUPPERBERG, LaROCQUE, LIGHTLE, SCHAFFENBERGER, SHERMAN, STATON, SWAN, WAID, & more! COCKRUM cover!

TENTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! Revisit the 100th, 200th, 300th, 400th, and 500th issues of ‘70s and ‘80s favorites: Adventure, Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers, Batman, Brave & Bold, Casper, Detective, Flash, Green Lantern, Showcase, Superman, Thor, Wonder Woman, and more! With APARO, BARR, ENGLEHART, POLLARD, SEKOWSKY, SIMONSON, STATON, and WOLFMAN. DAN JURGENS and RAY McCARTHY cover.

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Contents

THE COLOR

Jack Kirby: Writer! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 (the “!!” effect) BOBBY BRYANT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 (Jack’s best sound effects)

ISSUE #61, SUMMER 2013

WHACHUTALKINBOUTKIRBY? . . . .5 (don’t ask, just read it...) JACK F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 (Mark Evanier takes you to the first Comic-Con) INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY . . . . .12 (an Eternal search for designs) GALLERY 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 (art from Kirby-scripted issues) OVERVUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 (how JFK’s death affected Jack) JACK KIRBY MUSEUM PAGE . . . .27 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) GALLERY 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28 (True Life Divorce pages) COVER SHOT: MECHANOID . . . . . .35 KIRK KIMBALL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36 (top ten Fourth World cover blurbs) KIRBY OBSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 (Barry Forshaw’s amazing finds) KIRBY KINETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 (Norris Burroughs on Jack’s NEW GODS art and compositional skills) INFLUENCEES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44 (Todd McFarlane spawns Jack) GALLERY 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45 (it’s Gerber, baby!) UNEARTHED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58 (Kirby’s OUTLAND adaptation?) KIRBY AS A GENRE . . . . . . . . . . . .64 (let’s go to Science Fiction Land) FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 (an unused STUNTMAN story) RETROSPECTIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 (where Kirby stopped at Marvel) UNEARTHED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 (who “wrote” the FF storyboards?) NUTZ & BOLTZ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77 (Jack vs. Stan’s Silver Surfer GN) INNERVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .84 (1990 Kirby interview from ARK) COLLECTOR COMMENTS . . . . . . .91 PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .96 Cover colors: JACK KIRBY (“Mechanoid” and Kirby Unleashed mailing envelope art) The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 20, No. 61, Summer 2013. Published as close to quarterly as possible by and © TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Single issues: $14 postpaid ($18 elsewhere). Fourissue subscriptions: $50 US, $65 Canada, $72 elsewhere. Editorial package © TwoMorrows Publishing, a division of TwoMorrows Inc. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is © Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors. First printing. PRINTED IN CHINA. ISSN 1932-6912

(above) In TJKC #56, we showed Jack’s concept piece for She-Demon, with full notations. Here’s an additional moneyshot meant to help sell the 1979 idea. TM & ©Jack Kirby Estate.

COPYRIGHTS: Captain Victory, Frog Prince, Jericho, Kirby Unleased envelope character, Mechanoid, Satan’s Six, She-Demon, The Twin, Tiger 21 TM & © Jack Kirby Estate • Abel, Batman, Darkseid, Flash, Forever People, Goody Rickels, Granny Goodness, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hawkman, House of Secrets, Jimmy Olsen, Joker, Kalibak, Kamandi, Lex Luthor, Losers, Metron, Mister Miracle, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, OMAC, Orion, Penguin, Robin, Super Powers, Superman, Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics • Black Bolt, Captain America, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Eternals, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Machine Man, Mad Thinker, Nick Fury, Psycho-Man, Puppet Master, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Strange Tales, Sub-Mariner, Thing, Thor TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Black Magic, Messiah, Stuntman TM & © Joe Simon and Jack Kirby Estates. • Destroyer Duck TM & © Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby Estate. • 2001: A Space Odyssey, Outland movie TM & © Time Warner. • Outland comics artwork © Jim Steranko. • Prisoner TM & © ITV. • Alien TM & © 20th Century Fox. • Lord of Light art © Barry Ira Geller.

Opening Shot Terms like “artist,” “scripter,” “writer,” “illustrator,” don’t encapsulate what Kirby was: A “storyteller!”

(next page, top) Jack at work in his studio, July 23, 1991. Photos courtesy of & © David Folkman.

(below) Jack worked with Joe Simon on several screenplays in the 1940s and ’50s, including Fish In A Barrel, and Messiah (first page shown here).

The

“!!” Effect by editor John Morrow

a trained In the same way he writer or novelist didn’t approach drawing will pick up Kirby’s prose like anyone, he didn’t and say, “This guy is raw approach “concepting” I will never, and untrained,” and miss like anyone else. ever say that Kirby the whole point of what was a great “writer.” Jack is doing. I will say Kirby was a great WRITER. It’s the same word, but in my head He was better able they mean two different to get his ideas across things. by drawing shapes with a In the same way pencil, than by punching he didn’t have His writing keys on a keyboard. time or interest was as big, punchy, for drawing and powerful as his photo-realistic artwork!! images, he didn’t have time or He came from inclination to Germanic ancestry, fuss around with Wagnerian with “floweringoperas in his head, up” his writing. which he played out He had deadlines on paper. His writing/ to meet; way dialogue/ words on a more than any page may not appeal other artist or to the general public, writer. Even much the way opera when he wasn’t does not appeal to writing the the masses. Opera is actual words in an “acquired taste,” the balloons, he and one that to this was doing much day is for a more of the writing, mature, knowledgetaking that able audience, not deadline off the your average guy on “writer’s” the street. shoulders. Think back: The first time you saw Kirby’s artwork, wasn’t it rather off-putting, with square fingers and knees, and all of his long-haired blond characters looking virtually the same? most of his women looked alike too—THE SAME Big, buxom body type. Beginning comics readers dismiss his art with “This guy can’t draw,” in much the way that Neophyte comics readers will dismiss his dialogue as “this guy can’t write.” But as you get into it, in the same way you learn to appreciate his art style as visual shorthand, you learn to appreciate his scripting/ dialogue as verbal shorthand for telling a powerful story.

You can’t tell me his next-issue blurbs don’t leave you with anticipation for next month, or his cover blurbs don’t make you want to buy that issue...

TM & © Simon & Kirby Estates.

(below) Jack’s grandson Jeremy Kirby is raising funds for a coffeetable book that will include a never-before-seen play by Kirby titled “The Frog Prince.” See more at: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ 1478125734/personal-look-into-the-life-ofjack-kirby-the-king

TM & © Jack Kirby Estate.

(right) David Folkman watches Jack in his studio, following a swim in the Kirbys’ pool in 1981.

Kirby had an odd, operatic style to his writing, with a lot of purple prose, inexplicable “quotation marks,” & exclamation Marks!! I call it...

As an experiment, I opened up a copy of Jack’s unpublished novel “The Horde” and randomly selected the following paragraph:

What powerful instruments are the souls of women. How finely honed they must be... great prongs of divine material, exquisitely sensitive to each murmur of the universe... vibrating to each ripple that widens across the face of the unknown. The truth had been revealed to him that night and he had cast it aside as a woman’s restless dream. Instead of weighing its significance, he had given himself to the opportunity afforded by her wakening. In the strength and warmth of their limbs they found release from the raging night. It might well have been their final act of love, for the others that followed developed into quick and desperate snatches in a sudden and terrible collapse of their pattern of existence. The Communists had not waited for spring. They followed hard upon the winds, with riders and horses more than equal to the icy hazards. Mongol riders on Mongol horses. The unexpected news reached the scattered tribes when the exhausted survivors of the initial raids found their way to the camps of their nomadic brothers. Do you still think he couldn’t put words together effectively?! In the end result, what’s important about comic book Writing is to convey a story effectively and powerfully. Kirby’s words are there to supplement the art, since he viewed comics as a visual medium. he’s not as polished or technically proficient as MANY comic book writers. But they are not as polished or technically proficient of an artist as Kirby. Let’s see HIS CRITICS create an entire comics story by themselves. I daresay any issue of New Gods, Demon, Eternals, or Devil Dinosaur would stand up Well against any solo story they did, and would withstand the test of time more favorably. Only his true writer/artist peers like Will Eisner, Frank Miller, Steranko, and harvey Kurtzman (who walked in his shoes) are qualified to judge Jack’s “writing.”

TM & © DC Comics.

(Y’know those excessive “quotation marks” Jack put around words? Is it possible it began as his unlearned shorthand for the letterers, to tell them to make those words italic? But since that’s a non-standard designation for it, the letterers didn’t know he meant “italic,” and lettered the actual quotation marks, so it stuck. Knowing Jack, he didn’t go back and look at the published books much. Just a thought...) H

Pete Von Sholly spotted the change to Darkseid’s shadow on the cover pencils of Mister Miracle #18 (Feb. 1974). His raised fist was whited-out by DC Comics, eliminating a very powerful statement that Kirby wanted in the finished version. (DC also added the white “eye” on Darkseid, and Barda’s word balloon.) 3

Bobby Bryant

The Sound & The Fury name. Also the name of a cooking spray. PFOOOMM: Sound of Orion’s Astro-Force being fired. Is the P silent or not? Anybody? PLOWP: Sound of Big Barda knocking aside a group of workmen. Combine “plow” and “plop.” She’s the plow, of course. RRROATTA: Sound of Sonny Sumo tearing down a wall. A conventional “roar” gets Kirbyfied. RRRONTCH: Sound of a four-armed, yellow DNAlien ripping through a stone wall. Also the sound of Kalibak’s club hitting Orion. A combination of a “rip” and a “crunch”? SKKATTTCH: Sound of Kalibak’s club breaking in half. SNOK: Sound of Scott Free being caught in a leg-snare. Also the sound of two members of the Deep Six being slammed together. SPAK-SPONG-SPOK: Sound of Big Barda ripping loose a Civil War cannon that had been secured to the bed of a delivery truck. Really does sound like heavyduty cables snapping; this is what you’d hear right before an elevator falls. SPINK-FFPOP: Sound of a DNAlien’s cocoon/egg snapping back after it has been stretched. SSSPPEEOOW: Sound of the Outsiders’ super-motorcycles leaping across a chasm. “Speed” combined with “yeow”? STOOFF: Sound of Orion punching a shark-creature. A punch that sounds more like the creature’s surprised exhalation of breath. TZK TZK TZK: Sound of bullets tearing up pavement. An unusual choice; again, maybe some real WWII combat influence? TZOM: Sound of an Astro-Force blast hitting a member of the Deep Six. That maddening question: Is the T silent? UNKK: Sound of Stompa kicking a rifle out of someone’s hand. Again, more like a grunt of surprise than the impact of Stompa’s Size 50 booties on metal. VRAUUUU: Sound of a planet-sized “impacter” crashing into a sun. Until somebody actually crashes a planet-sized impacter into a sun, we won’t second-guess this one. WAK-WAK: Sound of Granny Goodness’ truncheon hitting her flunkies. Kirby was remarkably consistent in using the WAK sound every time an Apokolips bad guy used a truncheon on some poor sap. ZOF ZOF ZOF: Sound of the Super-Cycle’s stun cannon when the vehicle is in “fort” mode. A soft sound, consistent with the non-fatal nature of the blasts. ZOFFOW: Sound of a Bug being tossed into a group of other Bugs. ZZZEEEIINNGG: Sound that Lightray’s “techno-active” cube makes as it grows. Yeah, sounds both techno and active. ZZZSSSH: Sound of one’s molecular structure being “broken down and converted to white-hot energy.” Like cold water being poured on a hot griddle, the sound of something just going up in smoke. H

ow many Es in ZZZEEEIINNGG? And is the P silent in PFOOOMM? Jack Kirby’s comics came with no soundtracks, but they were all filled with silent sound effects, from the softness of footsteps to the screams of exploding stars. You couldn’t hear them, but they were all right there on the paper. You had to pronounce them phonetically to get

TM & © DC Comics.

the effect: “PAH-FOOM.” Or just “FOOM”? All the sound effects listed here are taken from Kirby’s Fourth World books for DC in the early 1970s (New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle and Jimmy Olsen). Why? Because those comics are compiled in handy-dandy trade paperbacks, and because Kirby served as editor/writer/artist on those books, ensuring that all the FTOOMS and WAPOWS originated with him alone, not with another collaborator such as Marvel’s Stan Lee. I have omitted the usual POWs, BAMs and BOOMs to focus on the more unusual sound effects, the ones that make your spell-checker melt. Herewith, a sampling of Kirby’s silent sound designs:

BAWWW: The sound a statue makes as it dispenses Funky Flashman’s allowance. Evokes a baby (Flashman) crying for his candy. BBBROWWM: Sound of Kalibak’s club breaking down a wall. Evokes rolling thunder; Kalibak = a force of nature. BLOWWFFF: Sound of a shock grenade going off underwater. Really does feel like a muffled explosion. BRANNGANNGANG: The shock wave Big Bear experiences inside Happyland’s “Shoot the Robot Bear” game. Nice echoey effect, like the inside of a giant bell. CLAK: Sound of a phone being hung up. That’s all. Just a phone being hung up. But it’s a KIRBY phone, so it’s like a normal phone plus 50 percent. FEZOMP: Sound of a para-demon getting an energy shock. Evokes something sharp and electric but also something heavy and solid. FFWAP: Sound of Slig’s Mother Box self-destructing. A hard, tight sound, like infinitely wound rubber bands snapping. GLOMP-GLOMP-KRAAKLE: Sound of electrodes latching onto Scott Free’s metal coffin and charging up for a “controlled atom blast.” Nobody but Kirby would have come up with this one. KAF KAF KAF: Sound of heavy-caliber rifle shots tearing up a brick wall. Interesting: a coughing sound? Something Kirby might have experienced in World War II? KRAASHKRINKLE: Sound of Stompa kicking out a thick glass detention-cell window. A crash and a crinkle. KRAKANNKKLE: Sound of atomic damper rods shattering against Superman’s chest. A brittle sound; the rods break like icicles against Supes. KRONTCH: Sound of a granite block crushing Scott Free’s empty stunt shackles. Evokes a giant beer can being crushed. OONNFF: Sound of a marble pillar being thrown onto a group of bloodthirsty citizens. Sounds more like an “oof,” an exclamation of surprise? PAF: Sound of an Apokolips gun curling Big Bear’s hair. PAM: Sound of Flippa Dippa kicking someone with both feet. Also a woman’s 4

TM & © DC Comics.

An appreciation of Kirby’s sound effects, by Robert L. Bryant Jr.

WhachUtalkinboutkirby?

That Is Strong Talk... Whoever You Are by Mike Breen

Quick Quiz - can you identify the sources of all these typical Kirby Quotes? 1. It’ll sure give him something to talk about with his fellow “shut-ins!” 2. That is strong talk... whoever you are! 3. My wrath can easily reawaken their fears! 4. Easy! Don’t borrow trouble before it starts! 5. Fate has granted you a reprieve,________! ... Now speak... or give battle! 6. And now the word is... GO! GO! GO! 7. I absorbed it, stored it, and now... I’m returning it! 8. _______ now has all of eternity to scheme in a much larger domain! The universe itself!

was stumped the first time I was presented with these. #1 has got the trademark quotation marks around a very singular expression. #3 could be any number of bad guys, from Darkseid to any number of less memorable ’70s villains. #4 I would have sworn was from “The Losers”—it just sounds like Sarge giving the benefit of his experience to Gunner. #5 I thought was a typically aggressive challenge from someone like Orion, and #6 has got to be from Kirby’s ’70s run on Captain America, hasn’t it?

Last 4 TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

1st 6 TM & © DC Comics.

(previous page) Pencil detail from Jimmy Olsen #145 (Jan. 1972, top) and Mister Miracle #7 (Feb. 1972, bottom); note Jack’s designation in the margin.

All images these 2 pages TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

implausibly space-bound Baxter Building to Doom’s spacecraft, which is towing it. Except... there is no mention of the Sub-Mariner’s effort being valiant or last-ditch or muscle-straining or lung-bursting or desperate. It’s not described—at all. Come on—everybody raves about Steve Ditko’s finest moment, when (in Spider-Man #33) Spidey strains to lift that heavy machine off himself. Personally, as much as I admire the very skilful artistic continuity in that scene, I find it hard to ever re-read it because the dialogue is so over-the-top. Is anybody really going to convince me that the person who (over)wrote that scene would have restrained themself here with only ten words of dialogue, and left the pictures to tell the story? Actually, it’s only eight words of dialogue (from “And now the word is...” to “It worked!”), with the same word, GO, re-used three times, but you get the idea.

WRONG. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Every single one of these quotes, unbelievably, is from the same source: Fantastic Four #6, published date September 1962. I think this might be an opinion that some people will have trouble accepting—Fantastic Four #6, right at the birth of the Marvel Age of Comics, was scripted by... Jack Kirby. I’ve been over and over it, and I’m convinced. Look for yourself. Ideally, dig out a copy of Marvel’s Essential Fantastic Four, Volume 1, so you can compare it to the issues either side of it. I’ll wait while you find some version of it. Please, try to read this issue as though you were reading it for the first time, without any assumptions. Ready? Here we go, specific pages first, then general comments: Page 1: One title, one splash panel, one smaller panel, no captions, only four word balloons. TWELVE exclamation marks. Just look at the first word balloon, quoted in full: “It’s the Human Torch! Heading for the Fantastic Four’s skyscraper headquarters!!!” Apart from the fact that this is a single sentence, so the exclamation mark after ‘Torch’ is wholly incorrect, the last three exclamation marks get a line of their own—they don’t even fit on the same line as the dialogue! What has experienced Kirby-letterer Mike Royer said about a certain someone’s overuse of exclamation marks? Who else would put an exclamation mark in the middle of a sentence? Page 4: The source of quote #1—who but Jack Kirby would describe one boy, and the other kids in a hospital ward, as “him (and) his fellow ‘shut-ins’”? Page 5: The Torch mentions an ‘ill-wind blowing’ in panel 4, and then the caption of panel 5 picks up the theme... very badly. ‘Ill-wind... cyclone... harsh gust... gentle zephyr touching placid waters...’ What? Okay, I kind of get what the writer is trying to say, but does this sound like Stan Lee? Whether you feel that Stan Lee’s dialogue is melodramatic and overblown, or polished and professional, nobody (not even me, and I’m not a fan of Stan the Man) would describe it as... awkward? Clumsy? Doesn’t this sound more like somebody attempting to match Stan Lee’s writing style, rather than the ‘man’ himself? Page 12: Apologies for the juvenile attitude, but is this the first time Sue Storm’s time-of-the-month is graphically depicted? Check out that mood-swing—hostile and aggressive to mooning and maudlin almost in-between panels. In Panel 4 (looking like she’s ready for an actual physical fight), she calls her little brother a ‘brat’—the only other time (I can find) that she does that in the first thirtyodd issues is when she is being controlled by the HateMonger. Sophomoric humor aside, does anybody else think this reads like someone felt they had to include this sub-plot, but they were never truly comfortable with it? That they would rather have wrapped it up decisively and moved on? Page 19: Dr Doom’s ‘little’ jest about the sun receiving the FF “...warmly...”. Ho, ho, Victor. The Comedy Store called to confirm your stand-up booking... not. Again, Stan Lee’s sense of humor, or clearly someone else’s? Pages 20 and 21: The source of quote #6, “And now the word is ... GO! GO! GO!” Most of these two pages are taken up with the SubMariner’s valiant, last-ditch, muscle-straining, lung-bursting, desperate effort to leap from the

General points I can’t find anywhere in this issue where the script is at odds with the art—there is NO ‘failure to communicate’. It’s almost as though one person had done both script and art. There are no redundant captions spelling out what is already clear in the pictures, or obvious contradictions between the dialogue and what is happening in the pictures. Jack Kirby (as is clearly seen in the handwritten dialogue on original art published in this magazine) used a great many pregnant pauses, or ‘...’ in his dialogue (see also several... of the quotes... which introduced this article). Compare this issue to FF #5 or #7, and you can see how ‘clean’ and ‘finished’ the dialogue is in those issues compared to this one. I would be very interested to hear Mike Royer’s thoughts on this. There is no obvious evidence that Stan Lee even edited this issue, never mind wrote any of the dialogue. I cannot find a single caption or word balloon that is clearly, unequivocally in the Stan Lee-style. There are none of his trademark mannerisms—Ben Grimm does not even waste a single thought-bubble bemoaning his monstrous fate, even though this is still the first year of the FF’s publication and this theme is done to death in every other issue. There are no obvious displays of scientific ingenuity by Reed Richards, and the Fantastic Four are largely sidelined by the plot— the Sub-Mariner traps them, gets double-crossed by Doom and then saves them. Without him they would all have perished. There is no clear-cut victory for the heroes, unlike all of the issues around it—in #3 they win because Johnny blinds the Miracle Man, in #4 because of a combination of Johnny, Ben and Sue’s actions, in #5 because of Reed and Sue, and in #7 because of Reed’s scientific ingenuity. Here, they fail in all their efforts and watch Namor save the day. Stan Lee loved fancy techno-babble names, didn’t he? But, check out Dr. Doom’s nuclear-powered micro-magnetic attractor device, capable of lifting the entire skyscraper HQ of the FF—it’s called (in quotes!) a ‘Grabber’ by Dr. Doom, by the Sub-Mariner (who even borrows Doom’s quotemarks—page 16, second panel!) and by Reed Richards. Nothing fancy—it is just a ‘grabber’ throughout the issue. Compare this to the following issue (“Kurrgo, Master of Planet X”), with its atomic scanners and portable self-contained TV receivers (how quaint and dated that sounds considering today’s technology). This issue introduces the Sub-Mariner’s problematic fish-like and ‘Aqua-Man’-like powers and abilities. He describes incredibly co-operative 6

(trained?) porpoises as his ‘subjects’, and displays the abilities of an electric eel. These abilities were never recognized, or ret-conned from existence, in Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and subsequent Marvel continuity stories. On several other occasions Jack Kirby has depicted a character with abilities not recognized elsewhere, or interpreted certain powers in a very individual way—see the early Spider-Man/Human Torch, Kirby-orchestrated battle where Spidey displays Quicksilver-like super-speed. And again, principally, there are all of the quotes at the start of this article, which are all so archetypically Kirby. Like I said, I’m absolutely convinced. But this raises several more serious questions. First: How far removed was this from the normal Lee/ Kirby ‘collaborations’? People who knew him best say that Jack Kirby never wrote dialogue over anybody else’s plots, so it is reasonable to assume that Kirby plotted this issue himself as well. If, as is claimed, Stan Lee was both plotting and dialoguing the bulk of Marvel’s output at this point, why would he have given up both jobs for this one issue? Apart from any other consideration, this would have cost him some healthy freelance pay on top of his editorial salary, wouldn’t it? Can it be that he was only actually giving up the dialoguing job, and that Jack Kirby had already established himself as the plotter of these stories? Did Stan even lose any income, as his name is still there in the credits? Why only this one issue? Did Kirby insist on being given the chance to complete the job, and then the sudden Marvel expansion tied him down to layout (and plotting?) work on other titles? Did he, as I believe, continue to plot and direct the book from this point onwards, until his frustration with inequitable pay and credit led to his refusal to do so in the late Sixties? Second: A number of ‘armchair-critics’ were quick to condemn Jack Kirby’s writing style when he went to DC in the Seventies. A much-heard opinion was that Kirby needed Stan Lee’s ‘polish’, whether through editing or dialogue. None of these critics appear to have even noticed this issue. Maybe habit and custom has led too many people to accept this issue as part of the early Lee/Kirby run on the Fantastic Four, and they have not sat down and really read the story properly for so long, that the belief that it is by Lee and Kirby is ingrained. I’m still convinced that this is all the work of Jack Kirby. Civilized debate and differences of opinion are welcome. To close out this piece, here are the actual sources of the quotes which launched this contentious rant:

Page 8, panel 1: Subby again, sounding for all the world like he’s doing Fourth-World try-outs for Darkseid on a bad day. 4. Easy! Don’t borrow trouble before it starts! Page 11, panel 4: An anonymous policeman, possibly a combat veteran like... ooh, I don’t know... resists the stereotype and, confronted with a potential super-villain and an invasion from a legendary undersea race, does not immediately call for the Mayor, the National Guard or any assorted super-heroes (like he would have done in any Stan Lee stories), just: “We’ll alert the entire force—in case we have to take him!” 5. Fate has granted you a reprieve, (Submariner)*!... Now speak... or give battle! Page 14, panel 7: Reed again. I thought the title of Chapter 2, ‘When Super-Menaces Unite’ was cheesy and typically Kirby, but how would you describe this... ‘When ScienceGeeks Talk Tough’? *I’ve just noticed—either side of this issue, in #4, and again in #9, the title ‘Sub-Mariner’ is hyphenated, as it would be throughout his published career. But not in this issue. Remember what I said about Stan Lee not even being involved here as Editor? 6. And now the word is ... GO! GO! GO! Page 20, panels 4, 5, 6 and 7: Namor again, and discussed in some detail earlier. Still sounds like Kirby’s Cap to me—maybe the recently-revived Subby, in spite of his memory problems, was subconsciously aping the style and language of a surface-dweller he respected. Or maybe the same person wrote both! 7. I absorbed it, stored it, and now... I’m returning it! Page 23, panel 1: Subby yet again, one last time, but then he is the main protagonist in this story, not the Fantastic Four. A perfect combination of words and pictures highlights Dr. Doom’s downfall, while spotlighting Namor’s one-time-only electric-eel powers. 8. ______ now has all of eternity to scheme in a much larger domain! The universe itself! Page 23, panel 6: Caption. But if someone told me this was Metron of the New Gods describing one of the promethean giants lost trying to locate the Source, I’d believe it. How is ‘The universe itself!’ a complete sentence?

Conclusion I think it is very important to establish the truth of Lee and Kirby’s working relationship, and the degree of their collaboration. I am very tired of hearing, even in the pages of this excellent publication, from people who believed too many ‘Bullpen Bulletins Pages’, and still insist on trying to describe Lee and Kirby as the Lennon and McCartney of comics. They were not. I honestly believe there is no collaboration here. This is pure Jack Kirby, without even the benefit of an editor who might have restrained the use of exclamation marks, or corrected the misspelling of ‘vigilence’ (page 3). I also think that this is not an isolated case of Kirby being allowed, for one issue only, to plot, draw and dialogue a story himself. I think this issue was still very close to the normal working routine, and the only difference was that Jack Kirby filled in the word balloons himself. H

1. It’ll sure give him something to talk about with his fellow “shut-ins!” Page 4, panel 4: Reed Richards, believe it or not. Apart from the trademark Kirby quote-marks around that singular expression ‘shut-ins’, when, at any other time that Stan Lee put words in his mouth, has Reed Richards used a contraction like “It’ll”? 2. That is strong talk... whoever you are! Page 6, panel 6: Namor, the Sub-Mariner. I am dying for somebody to verbally confront or insult me in real life, just so that I can respond with this line. That dismissive “... whoever you are!” is the bitchiest insult imaginable. An absolute favorite, and it so fits as the title for this article. 3. My wrath can easily reawaken their fears! 7

Mark Evanier

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

This question’s from Jan Bradshaw:

I only went to one day of that first one... Saturday. Early that morning, four of us drove down there. My then-collaborator Steve Sherman was behind the wheel of his Plymouth. I was in the passenger seat. In the back were Steve’s brother Gary and our friend, cartoonist Bruce Simon. Steve picked me up at my house at 8 a.m. He pulled up out front and I ran out and jumped in, not noticing that my father’s car was not in its usual place in the driveway. My father was not up and out of the house at that ungodly (for a Saturday) hour. He was sound asleep inside. It wasn’t until I got home that night that I learned his car had been stolen overnight. That has nothing to do with the con or Jack, but it was all part of that surreal (for me) day. We made it down to San Diego by around 10:30 as I recall. I believe Jack and his family just came down for the day also and they got there around Noon or 1 p.m. Shel Dorf, the most visible founder of the convention, kept coming up to me before their arrival, nervously asking if I had any word. In the era before cell phones, that was a much sillier question than it is now. The main thing I remember was the sense of excitement that the con existed at all. Most reports say there were 300 attendees. I had the feeling there were more... but not many more. Whatever the turnout was, it was minuscule compared to a Comic-Con of this century. Today, there are more people than that at the con dressed as Zatanna. The big event of the convention was a talk by Jack and pretty much everyone attending the con that day was there for it. They may even have closed down the Dealers’ Room so the dealers could attend. I would guess about 200 people turned out to hear Jack. We were not in a meeting room. The hotel’s basement was undergoing extensive renovation and to go, say, from the Film Room to the Dealer’s Room meant passing a lot of temporary plywood walls and walking on painters’ plastic sheeting. I don’t think there even was a formal room for panels. There was a large lobby-type area there in the basement and a small platform about six inches high. On the platform, there was an easel with a drawing pad. About fifty chairs had been set out in rows and most folks stood or sat on the floor. I asked a teenaged fan to give up his seat for Roz and he looked at me like no one in the history of mankind had ever suggested

You wrote that Jack attended every Comic-Con International except one during his lifetime. What do you remember about the first one? he first one was the first real comic book convention in San Diego. Matter of fact, I believe it was the first multi-day comic convention west of the Mississippi River. It wasn’t called Comic-Con International then. They had to go through several names before we got to that. We convened at the Golden State Comic Book Convention, held August 1-3, 1970 in the basement of the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego. That convention was preceded by a one-day “dry run” event in the same place on March 21 of that same year. The big comics guest of honor that day was Mike Royer, who was then working for Warren Publishing on Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, as well as working for Gold Key Comics and with Russ Manning on the Tarzan newspaper strip. At the time, Mike was still a year or two away from becoming Jack’s full-time inker, though he did ink a few random pieces for Jack either shortly before the one-day con or shortly after. You all know the famous self-portrait of Jack at the board. I did not attend the oneday affair and neither did Jack. He and Roz were present for at least a few days of every one of his lifetime except for the year he had his heart attack. He was probably the first important person in comics to support the convention and the only one I ever heard who accurately predicted how big it would become. He said to me back in the days when attendance at the annual events seemed stalled at about three thousand, “This convention will someday take over the entire city. It will be the place where Hollywood comes to sell the movies they made last year and to find out what they’re going to make next year.” That’s not an exact quote but it’s close. I didn’t believe it at the time but now, every year, there’s a moment when I especially recall it. It’s when I’m driving through San Diego, en route to that year’s congregation, still a mile or two from the convention center. I see banners and welcoming signs and people in costume and I think, “Just like Jack said...”.

(above, l to r) Kirby gives the keynote speech at a 1967 convention in New York. Photo by Mark Hanerfeld.

(right) Jack drew this quick sketch for Bob Beerbohm’s wife in the 1980s. Bob has posted a fact-filled treatise that every Kirby/Lee fan should read on the Kirby Museum’s site at: http://kirbymuseum.or g/blogs/dynamics/2012/02/11/goodman-vs-ditko-kirbyby-robert-beerbohm/

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anything of the sort. A few minutes before he was scheduled to speak, Jack asked me to get up there and introduce him. Whereupon I looked at him like no one in the history of mankind had ever suggested anything of the sort. Today, I do panels in front of thousands of people at Comic-Con but back then, the idea of being before a crowd—even one that small, even for twenty seconds—terrified me. After all, no one knew who I was so I figured I’d get up there and everyone who’d convened to see Jack Kirby would wonder, “Who’s that clown?” Which is certainly what I would have thought. I probably need to supply some historical context here. This was August of ’70. The news that Jack had left Marvel rocked the comic book industry the previous March... though in those days before the Internet or publications like Comics Buyers Guide, it hadn’t travelled as far in that time as it would today in two minutes of Twittering. Many who showed up at the con were unaware Jack wasn’t still happily banging out stories for Fantastic Four and Thor. One kid who’d brought his favorite issues of those and other Marvel titles to get signed asked me, “Does that mean he’s not allowed to sign these?” Apart from Jack, Steve and myself, there was really only one other person in attendance who was even vaguely in the comic book industry. His name was Mark Hanerfeld. Lemme tell you a little about Mark... He was a very sweet guy who loved comics, especially DC Comics. A year or so later, he was an assistant editor at DC, working mainly with Joe Orlando. He did not work out

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This Black Bolt pencil piece was used as the cover of Marvelmania Magazine #1 (1970), just as Jack left Marvel for DC Comics.

(above) A photo of Mark Hanerfeld, from a New York convention in the mid-Seventies, and (below) dressed as Abel at a Halloween party. Top photo by and courtesy Mark Evanier.

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in that position but everyone around loved him... and Orlando immortalized him in comics. When it came time to design a host for the House of Secrets book, Joe based the look of that character, Abel, on Mark Hanerfeld. At the time, Mark was hanging around the DC offices as a kind of unpaid intern. This was in the days before every company in America discovered the financial convenience of having unpaid interns do things that otherwise would require paying someone a salary. Mark had been publishing the most important fanzine then disseminating news of the industry, The Comic Reader. That had led to him visiting the DC offices often which in turn led to them giving him little odd jobs. Sometimes, they paid him a few bucks; sometimes, they didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter to Mark. Mark had a source of money from his family. I don’t mean he was wealthy. He wasn’t by any definition. But he seemed to always have sufficient funds to buy two copies of every comic book that came out plus plenty of old issues, and he didn’t need just then to find a paying job. Thus he was able (no pun intended) to hang around the DC corridors and to occasionally assemble a letters page or do research. Steve and I had met him when we first visited the DC offices in July of ’70 and we became instant friends. It was hard to be in the same room with Mark and not be his friend. 9

that Jack was now a DC editor, writer and artist with these great new books in our future. I came up with an idea or two, then went over to the edge of the platform where Jack was standing with Shel Dorf. “All set, Jack?” Shel asked. “I’ll introduce you.” Motioning to me, Jack said, “I want Mark to introduce me.” Shel then turned to Mark Hanerfeld and told him, “Jack wants you to introduce him” and without missing a beat, Mark bounced up on stage and did just that. It was the wrong Mark but I was kinda relieved. He did a better job than I would have done. Jack gave a decent speech, I suppose. The crowd seemed to love it and they clapped and cheered a lot. I never knew Jack to be comfortable in front of an audience. He got stiff and serious. He wasn’t even that great when folks sitting in his studio hauled out a camera or microphone. I thought he was a creative genius and one of the most decent human beings I ever met, but he wasn’t good at public speaking or being interviewed. Steve Sherman and I were sitting on the floor not far from him. At one point, Steve decided to help Jack lighten things up by asking him a question about Victor Fox, the owner of the comic book company/sweatshop where Jack did some of his earliest work. A few weeks earlier, Jack had told us a hilarious anecdote about Fox, and Steve was trying to “cue” that story. Jack responded like he didn’t know who Steve was and then told the tale quickly and without any of the humor it had had when he’d related it in his studio. At the end, Jack was called upon to step to that easel and draw for the crowd—something he also did not do well. You want to

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As I said, he loved comics and he loved conventions. He had been trying to convince DC that this new comic convention he heard about in San Diego was worth their attention. He suggested they send out a representative to tell the fans there about all the great new comics (like Jack’s) that DC had coming out. No one at DC thought this was worth spending a nickel on... so Mark assigned the duty to himself. He went out to San Diego on his own dime to represent DC, bringing stats of upcoming covers and other visual aids. He also arranged for DC art to appear in the convention’s program book. I believe the first time the Forever People, Orion and Mister Miracle were seen in print was in that program book. (Jack’s first Jimmy Olsen was a few weeks from coming out and then Forever People #1 didn’t get to newsstands until the first week in December.) Mark did a presentation and answered questions as the Official Representative of DC Comics. There was no one else there talking about any other company. I was nervous about getting up in front of that tiny crowd and introducing Jack. I asked him what he expected me to say and he replied that I should just tell what he was doing now and who he was. Jack wanted to avoid a flurry of questions about “Why’d you leave Marvel?” and he thought (wrongly) that I could say something that would deflect them. I went off to one side to gather my thoughts and to try and figure out some way to quickly explain who I was and to remind all

(top left) Jack’s 1970 cover to the first San Diego Con program book. (above) Jack’s quick sketches were much better in pencil than in marker.

At the 1988 San Diego Comic-Con. [l to r] Roz Kirby, Patti (?), Jack Kirby, Julie Schwartz, and Simone Welch. Photo courtesy Julie Schwartz. 10

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know what I think is the worst Kirby artwork ever? Anything he had It was quite a day and unlike Jack, I did not imagine what it to draw in front of an audience. The onlookers loved it though and would all lead to. Since then, I’ve attended every San Diego Con and there was a minor sensation when someone asked him to draw what they’re all fun... but there was something extra fun about that first Dr. Doom looked like under his mask. Jack drew Stan Lee. one. What was it? I really can’t describe it. You had to be there... but That was not a random insult of Stan. It was always Jack’s conan awful lot of it had to do with Jack “King” Kirby showing up. You can tention that under his iron mask, Dr. Doom was actually a very think of it as one more thing he did before anyone else in comics. H handsome man with one tiny scar that so horrified him he viewed his entire face as hideous. Jack thought Stan was a very handsome Mark Evanier blogs incessantly at www.newsfromme.com. You can man who was, at the time, hiding under an array of bad toupees. send him your Kirby questions via that site or just stop by and read it for And that’s about all I remember of the speech. what he hopes is your own pleasure. The other things I recall of that day are: — Hanging out with Mary Skrenes, who I’d also met at the DC offices the same day I met Mark— which by the way was the same day I met Marv Wolfman and Len Wein and Julie Schwartz and Neal Adams and Dick Giordano and Murray Boltinoff and Murphy Anderson and Joe Kubert and Nelson Bridwell and Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino and about ninety others. Mary was then planning to publish a small-press comic art magazine and was present at the con on behalf of it. She would later write comics for DC and Marvel, some of them in tandem with Steve Gerber. — Roz had me sit with Jack while she went off to get food or use the ladies’ room or something. My assignment: Help deflect the many folks who wondered if Jack could maybe do them “just a little sketch” of the Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Nick Fury, Dr. Doom and the entire Marvel Tabernacle Choir. There were several kids who didn’t want drawings from Jack. They wanted to show drawings to Jack—their own, amateur-but-hopeful work. The quality ranged from Promising all the way down to Apply-atSears but Jack gave encouragement and compliments to every one of them... with more encouragement and compliments going to the more-deserving. — Steve, Gary, Bruce and I trying to find someplace to eat in San Clemente, where we ducked off the freeway on our way back. It was around 9 p.m. on a Saturday night and the only thing we could find that was open was a Jack-in-the-Box. Gary kept suggesting we should drop by President Nixon’s “Western White House” there and demand he whip us up some omelets. — And getting home and finding out that my father’s car had been stolen. The 1975 New York Comic Art Convention sported a cropped version of this Kirby piece on its cover.

Greek God...

...To Hippie!

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

ack was, as I’m sure you know, a very prolific creator. He produced powerful and memorable comics for decades on end; one of the reasons we can see an ongoing magazine like The Jack Kirby Collector is simply because there is such an enormous volume of work to examine. All of which is to say, somewhat apologetically, that despite being a Jack Kirby fan for over a quarter century myself, I only just got around to reading his 1976-78 Eternals run for the first time this year. The character designs for the Eternals, particularly the males, are almost stereotypically Kirby: Lots of bold lines punctuated with circular elements, together forming some very modern art style costumes. It’s particularly noticeable on the male characters; just look at all the figures surrounding the Uni-Mind sequence. But what’s more striking to me is that, despite some fairly complex designs and having little editorial oversight, Jack remained amazingly consistent in how he drew everyone’s costumes. A large part of where this column comes from is that Jack had a tendency to remember character designs in broad strokes, and he tended to unintentionally modify them over time based around a handful of key elements. But with the Eternals—from the simple design scheme of Sersi to the unnecessarily fiddly Ikaris—there’s very little variation from their respective introductions through the end of Jack’s run on the book. I kept jumping back and forth between early and later issues, thinking that I must be missing some details. That said, there are a couple minor changes to Ikaris. The character was first presented to readers in Foom, Marvel’s in-house fanzine of the time, several months before the first issue debuted. That image was then used in the corner box of the series, but Ikaris remained in street clothes in the story until #3. In a sequence there, his very short, classic Greek-style haircut is blown around when he leaps out of a plane and afterwards, he’s shown with more flowing locks which grew to a more Kamandi length over the next ten or twelve issues. The only other real change I can spot is that the lightning bolt motif on his front tunic becomes fully connected between issues #7 and #9, and it disappears from the back of his tunic entirely in #17. His midriff belts shrink a bit from the original Foom drawing, but they remain remarkably consistent once Jack starts drawing the costume in the story. These changes are barely noticeable, and are

especially surprising given Jack’s penchant for not worrying about visual details. It’s not just Ikaris either. The only real differences seen in Thena’s and Makarri’s headgear are the level of detail Jack put in, depending on how much of a close-up he was depicting. And the Celestials themselves don’t see any alterations. (Though, to be fair, Jack didn’t draw any one Celestial more than a few times and tended to only show their heads to emphasize their size.) Part of the reason for Jack’s consistency here showed itself to me when I was at a recent convention while in the midst of reading The Eternals. There were several original art dealers selling some Kirby work in booths next to one another. They ranged from the Sandman of the 1940s to Silver Star of the 1980s. I’d never really studied that many Kirby originals from that wide a time period in one viewing before, and I caught something that does not show up well, even in high quality scans: confidence. It seems a strange notion to suggest Jack was ever not supremely confident, especially in his artistic capabilities, but over the decades there was a pretty clear increase in his ability to throw down a line exactly where he wanted. I’ve heard anecdotes from other creators who claim he was just tracing what he already saw on the page, or that he wouldn’t bother with layouts and just started working in the upper left and somehow finishing in the lower right with a perfectly paced story. But as I think back on it, those people were commenting on work Jack was doing in the 1970s. I don’t see evidence of that in his earlier work. It wasn’t bad, by any means, but you could see some effort go into the page. There are sketch marks still visible, and rough layout notes, and small indentations where a line used to be before it was erased. I saw almost none of that in his later work. It looks as if the lines just appeared on the page. Jack didn’t seem to need to plan his work any more; he had been doing comics for so long, it must have been a form of muscle memory that allowed him to draw almost autonomically. I suspect that speaks to why there were so few visual changes in the Eternals, even with their complex designs. And although I haven’t done an extensive analysis, I suspect that holds for most of Jack’s Fourth World books as well. By that point in his career, Jack knew exactly how they should look and was pretty happy with those designs from the outset. The characters he’d been coming up with previously would land on their iconic looks almost incidentally while he worked out the story. Working on the Eternals, they were much more deliberate right from the start with nothing incidental about them! H

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Since changes to the Eternals’ cast were so minimal, here’s a look at Sersi’s first appearance from Eternals #3 (Sept. 1976)—a simple, elegant design. 13

Gallery 1

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Art from some prime Kirby-scripted issues

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(this page) Sometimes little needs to be said, as these power images will attest, from OMAC #1 (pencil art and finished cover, Sept. 1974) and Our Fighting Forces #151 (Oct. 1974; Jack hand-colored this stat of the finished cover). (next page) Page 13 pencils from Super Powers (1st series) #5 (Nov. 1984). Jack had Greg Theakston ink on overlays to preserve the pencil art. (page 16) Kirby knew war firsthand, and used that to good effect writing the “Losers” strip. Pencils to Our Fighting Forces #153 (Feb. 1975). (page 17) Early issues of Kamandi were often fairly copy-heavy, as Jack put a lot into his new concept. Pencils here are from #5 (April 1973). (page 18) Jack could fit the equivalent of two regular pages of action on one doublepage spread, with room left over for corny dialogue and sound effects! Pencils from Captain America #199 (July 1976). 14

TM & © DC Comics.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

During Kirby’s 1970s tenure at Marvel Comics, he felt, rightly or wrongly, that there were those in the Marvel offices that were out to sabotage his work, by making editing changes and stacking the letter columns in his comics with negative comments. He also felt pressure from Marvel to bring his Eternals series into regular Marvel Universe continuity, rather than have its characters operate in their own world—something he felt strongly about. Here’s cover pencils for his final Eternals issue (#19, January 1978), showing Marvel’s inclination at the time to clutter covers with unnecessary word balloons and captions—which weren’t written by Jack.

Overvue

Poetry In Motion Jack Kirby and the Death of JFK, by Kevin Ainsworth Mark Evanier said the following in his column in TJKC #46: “One time we got to talking about the assassination of President Kennedy. That event had an impact on everyone who was around at the time, at least on their personal lives, so I was not surprised to hear Jack say that it had a profound effect on him. My little eyebrows shot up, however, when he said that it had a major impact on his work.” ark then mentioned the comics Jack would probably have been working on when JFK was assassinated and asked what that impact had been, which may have inadvertently answered another question I have been wondering about for years. What had Jack been producing prior to the death of John F. Kennedy? For starters he had produced 24 issues of Fantastic Four. These had all been tightly plotted and scripted one-issue stories with a beginning, middle and end. At the end of each of those comics, one has a satisfaction that one has read a story with a lot of twists and turns and a sense that a lot has happened within the twenty-odd pages before the resolution. There was no sense that the ending had been rushed or that there was no ending prior to the final page. Jack did two separate Hulk stories in Fantastic Four in that comic’s first couple of years. The first one in issue #12 is tightly plotted and written and paced. The Fantastic Four do meet the Hulk, but the battle is in the style of other Fantastic Four and Hulk comics Jack was doing at the time. The story is paramount and the art is subservient to telling the story. In Fantastic Four #25 and 26, this is turned on its head. The story is secondary to the art. And I have always wondered why this was. What on Earth happened over twelve months to produce this complete turnaround? Looking back from the vantage point of today, those two comics are not out of place because we are used to those types of battle over a whole issue, or more than one issue, from Jack. Generations have grown up with it being the norm. Yet looking forward from before those issues, they are not typical. They are totally out of place to what Jack produced before and for a while afterwards. Why? Why are Fantastic Four #25 and 26 so revered, and why do they have such a reputation? The answer, I think, is found in the composite interview, circa 1989, with Jack and Roz in TJKC #46, where Roz says:

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

(above) President John F. Kennedy at Rice Stadium on September 12,1962, when he challenged Americans to put a man on the Moon. He was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963.

“I remember when he used to draw the Hulk, he would have the expression on his face. Or the Thing, as he was drawing, he would act out, the expressions all came out on his face, he was acting them out while he was drawing. But I always felt he was the Hulk anyway, because he would sometimes be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He could be very sweet and then he would lose his temper and break a couple of walls. That is the way he would get his frustrations out. Jack has very strong hands, and especially back in New York he would take his fists and kick it into the wall.” (Roz Kirby, Page 9, TJKC #46) We know that Stan often did not know what Jack was going to draw until it arrived, and Roz confirmed that Jack used to act out his characters. He would, in acting terms, become that character. Yet why did she mention the Hulk and the Thing? Why did she mention them together in virtually the same sentence? Jack had not drawn the Thing regularly since 1969 and had not drawn the Hulk regularly since 1966 when he had been doing very rough layouts for the series. The last time he had drawn the Thing and the Hulk together was in FFs #25 and 26. What was it about those two comics at that time which had imprinted itself in her mind, so that those were the two characters she thought of in an interview conducted between 1989 and 1992, nearly 30 years after the event? Why those two characters when Jack had created and drawn several hundred in the period since then? This is very important when we look at Fantastic Four #25 and 26, which are the two issues Mark Evanier thinks Jack would have had on his drawing board when JFK was assassinated. The story starts off in a similar style to previous Fantastic Fours and Avengers, but then it suddenly changes. Perhaps Fantastic Four #25 had always been intended to be an Avengers/Hulk crossover but as just a single-issue story? This would be in keeping with previous FFs and Avengers where a lot of story had been packed into one issue (including the Hulk teaming up with Sub-Mariner against the Avengers in issue #3). But then JFK is shot and it all changes. I wonder if page 6 or 7 of Fantastic Four #25 is the page Jack was working on when JFK was shot? Because page 7 is where it all changes. Reed Richards, the leader and the Fantastic Four’s version of JFK, suddenly collapses with a fever 21

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

before them while the police are helpless to stem the panic or deal with the situation. Their words of authority are hollow. Is it a coincidence that the second panel on page 9, following the peoples’ panic and policemen’s inability to cope, contain two television cameras with a reporter commenting on the carnage happening in front of him? (And I wonder what Jack’s original idea for what he might be saying was, before the character became “the Commissioner” in the published comic?). Television is a very strong motif running throughout this story in a way it never had previously. The battle between the Thing and the Hulk is broadcast live on television, as had been the shooting of JFK and subsequent events. On page 15 Jack shows us Reed watching the battle on television and desperately trying to get the strength to intervene, to do something, anything. But he is helpless. All he can do is watch, in the same way as all Jack could do was watch helplessly as JFK was shot in front of his eyes on television. The brutality of the Hulk is shown by how he manhandles the Torch and is willing to use him as a living weapon (or not-so-living weapon if Sue had not intervened). Look at the art. Johnny would have been killed. This is no “harmless” comic book fight—the type we had been used to up to then; this is real and violent. Then we come to the battle between the Thing and the Hulk. This is unique. There had never been a fight like it before. We had seen fights, but usually only for a couple of panels as part of the dynamics of movement of the unfolding story. You only have to look at all the previous issues of Fantastic Four or Avengers #1-4 to see what I mean. But this is a very different fight. It is raw and savage and primal. Forget Stan’s dialogue and captions, as he was still producing a comic book for young people. Just look at the art—page after page after page of the Thing and the Hulk being vicious to each other. It’s not the stylized dynamism of fight scenes that we have become used to from Jack. It’s gritty and it’s real and it’s vicious. Just look at how the Hulk constantly manhandles the Thing. Look at how he wants to physically harm him, to do him damage. Mark Evanier was asked in his column what his earliest comic book reading memory is. Mine is sitting as a little boy and looking at this fight scene in the black-and-white British reprint comic called Wham—more specifically page 14, where the Thing is holding on for dear life to the top of the building while the Hulk is shaking it, like a man would shake an apple from a tree. Look at how the Hulk catches him, the physical positioning of one character being in a position of strength while the other is in a position of weakness and physical danger, and then look at how the Hulk just smashes him underground. I was too young to read the words when I first saw that comic. All I could do was look at the pictures, but something about those pictures burnt itself into my memory. That fight in Fantastic Four #25 is not a well-constructed story; rather it is Jack pouring out his grief and rage at the shooting and death of JFK. He is creating not just a record of his own grief and rage, but also the grief and terror of a nation, caught up in something beyond its experience and understanding—something where people could not see a future or how chaos could not triumph. Forget the wrestling you see on television, the staged shows.

All images these two pages TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

and is possibly dying while the other members of the Fantastic Four looking helplessly on as there is nothing they can do but watch and wait. Is this not a parallel with JFK being suddenly shot and then rushed to hospital? All the people could do was helplessly watch and wait. On page 7 the Hulk arrives in the city and chaos erupts. While Reed is stricken and dying, anarchy and destruction is happening in the city—destruction, panic and fear courtesy of the Hulk. Previously the Hulk had been hiding in the southwest and only fought the Army. Suddenly, for the first time, he is in the middle of New York and on a rampage. Is this a parallel for the insecurity and fear the people must have felt seeing their President shot down on television? Nobody was safe anymore. The Hulk represented that chaos and fear and potential breakdown in society that people may have thought was going to happen. When he confronts the Hulk, the Human Torch is brutally manhandled in a way he never had been before. The people of the city were panicking and fleeing fearfully from the chaos and destruction

Forget boxing with its rules. Think back to fighting as a child. Think back to a situation where anything was fair to win a fight. True wrestling, one on one, is the most primal of sports. There is no hiding or escape. There is only victory or defeat. And in such a fight a person draws up emotions and rage to do anything to win that fight. It is pure emotion and nothing else. Then look at page after page after page that Jack drew with the Thing and Hulk going at each other, hammer and tong— wrestling physically with each other, pure primal rage and emotion. Then think of Roz’s quote. Perhaps Jack only meant to draw a brief fight when he first conceived the story, but the death of JFK intervened and Jack used it to pour out his grief. Look at the end of issue #25. For the first time there is no well-constructed ending. The story finishes mid-battle. Look at the final page. The Hulk is suddenly triumphant, the Army is ready for a futile battle, the people are cowering in fear and terror, Reed and Sue watch helplessly on the television (that television motif again on pages 20 and 22) while the Thing clambers unsteadily to his feet—his unshakeable determination all that stands between the city/society and anarchy and destruction. Issue #26 starts where #25 finishes with the Thing and Hulk in battle, and we are treated to more of the same. In many ways #25 and #26 are just one continuous story, one continuous battle. It is very different from anything that has gone before. It is almost as if Jack had become carried away and suddenly had to create a break between issues. How much of that break is down to Stan’s dialogue in making it more of a cliffhanger (not that Stan had any choice in that)? Imagine his face when the art for Fantastic Four #25 arrived. He could potentially have run a filler issue of some sort; after all, the end of Fantastic Four #24 did not mention the Hulk, and nobody would have known. Fantastic Four #25 was drastically different from anything Marvel had published before. It was radically different from anything any comics company had published before. Yet, give Stan his due because he decided to use Jack’s art and story. It was radical and he would probably have been justified in not using it and sticking to formula, but he took the chance. He recognized something and went with it, and with that instinct was born a classic comic, and also the modern comic book that we now recognize and accept as the norm. It would be interesting to see what dialogue, if any, Jack had in mind for the art. Stan had to use dialogue to make it suitable for his comic book audience, which is what he did brilliantly, but that dialogue, with often flippant and witty comments therein, is often at odds with the art below it. Yet Stan had to do it that way in order to use Jack’s art at that time in what was still seen as “children’s comics.” I think we can tell some of the effect it had on Stan by the fact that he could not think of a grand title for the comic, but opted instead for simply “The Hulk vs. The Thing.” The story continues in the same vein in FF #26 with the continuation of the battle between the Hulk and the Thing. Unusually, the splash page is a direct continuation from the final panel of issue #25. In fact, it’s a continuation of the final page of issue #25. Take away the pasted in heads of Reed, Sue and Johnny and the recap captions, and it might just as well have been continuously drawn from the previous issue. In fact, if you read the two comics together, it looks as if Jack has just drawn one extra large comic, which was just randomly split in two when the page count of the first issue had been reached. This is very important. For the first time in the history of the Fantastic Four comic, and probably the history of any comic that Jack had drawn up to that point, the story structure went out of the window. Jack, who was probably the greatest technical storyteller in comics who ever lived, threw his technique out the window. It is like whatever muse took him in its grip refused to let go. I think that muse was the effect of JFK’s assassination upon him. 23

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Look at Roz’s description of Jack at his drawing board, living through the characters of the Hulk and the Thing. Then imagine all the rage and grief coursing through him at the events of the few days when JFK died. He poured that rage and grief out into Fantastic Four #25 and 26 through the battle between the Thing and the Hulk. Their ongoing battle became the personification of what was raging within him. Far more than that, though, it became his personal record of what was happening to the Nation in those few days. He not only captured his own grief and rage but also the fear and chaos and helplessness gripping the Nation itself. The ongoing television motif is strongly to be seen in issue #26 as well. Look at the first two panels of page 3. The cameras and reporters are now up on a roof, where Jack used to love sitting

(above and next two pages) Jack Kirby drew this three-page story “46 Hours and 36 Minutes in the Life of Jack Ruby”, about the killer of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, for the May 1967 issue of Esquire magazine. Inks by Chic Stone, and we’re guessing Kirby colored this himself. 24

as a child watching the city below, while in the second panel Reed and Sue are seeing on their television what the cameras in panel one are filming. Looking at the flow of Kirby’s art there is an argument for saying that issue #25 does not really end until page 7 of issue #26. That is where the fight between the Hulk and the Thing comes to an end and the Hulk goes underground. From that point it becomes a slightly more traditional comic again. We no longer see the frightened crowds that had been so evident up to that point, nor do we see much of the Army. The television motif vanishes and the battle between the Hulk, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers takes place in isolated parts of the city. Reed Richards, who in issue #25 had been the representative of JFK the leader in that period between being shot down but not yet dead, makes a miraculous recovery on page 11 of issue #26. The pure primal scream that Jack let out in the battle between the Hulk and the Thing may have subsided, but the rage and grief were still there, hence the massive battle between the Hulk, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers. Page after page of battle poured out from Kirby’s pencil as he mourned JFK. Once again the muse took hold and story technique went out of the window, because once again the physical end of the comic—that is, the number of pages needed for it—came too quickly. Once again he was unprepared for the ending and had set nothing up for it. If anything, he could easily have carried on for another issue, but that was not the norm in those days and would have been an issue too far for that time. So a very sudden ending was concocted. From out of nowhere, in the midst of battle on page 22, Rick Jones suddenly pulls out an “emergency gamma-ray treated capsule” which he pops into the Hulk’s mouth, and which conveniently transforms him back to Bruce Banner after he has jumped into the Hudson River. The story ends as suddenly as it had begun.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Thinking back to periods of my life when I experienced intense personal loss and grief, I know how long the process of mourning can last. I also know that there are periods when we can experience flashbacks of emotion that overwhelm us again. Likewise I think that the death of JFK was not a short-term effect on Jack. Look at Fantastic Four #27 where the plot thread of the Sub-Mariner is picked up again. Here we see Namor attempting to deal with the loss of his throne and people by looking towards what he regards as his one true love, Sue Storm. To fill the black hole formed by his loss, Namor kidnaps her, prompting Reed Richards to go after them to rescue her. This sounds like a fairly standard plotline and one that Jack had used many times before. Yet he had never before handled it like he did in this issue. Reed Richards, the Mr. Reliable and Logical Leader of the Fantastic Four, acts totally out of character to how we have seen him act before when Sue has been in danger. Instead of going to rescue her with Ben and Johnny, he is determined to go after her alone and face Namor man-to-man. Why does Reed suddenly act like this? What drives him? It is the thought that he has lost her forever to another man that drives him. An overwhelming loss and grief leads to anger and rage and totally irrational action from the Marvel world’s most rational man. This leads to another multi-page battle, this time between Namor and Reed Richards. Once again Jack lets his muse of grief take over his pencil and produces page after page of raw art and primal emotion, as Reed Richards refuses to be beaten by Namor. His “loss” fuels his rage and nothing will stop him. Where the Hulk versus the Thing was primal physical wrestling, Namor versus Reed enables Jack to be more creative in putting his own grief onto paper. Look at how creatively he uses the human rubber band that is Mr. Fantastic. Look how much punishment Namor inflicts on him, but no matter what he does, Reed keeps bouncing back—literally! Finally Sue gets to choose Reed over Namor as the man she loves, and so that plot 25

Jack was still making observations of the state of the Nation in issue #26. The Fantastic Four and the Avengers constantly get in each other’s way and do more harm than good in the battle against the Hulk. If the Hulk represents the chaos that attacked the Nation in the wake of JFK’s assassination, then Jack was saying that only by working together as a Nation could we overcome it. Perhaps there are echoes of the death of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby here. One part of the Nation, the police, had him in custody where the truth of what happened could be found out, while another part of the Nation in Jack Ruby took its own revenge live on television, and the truth was lost. In the same way, just as one member of the Avengers or the Fantastic Four has the Hulk in his grasp, a member of the other team interferes and the Hulk escapes.

thread which had run through Fantastic Four since issue #4 was finally laid to rest— grieving, loss and moving on to a new start in life. So Fantastic Four #25, 26 and 27 are three issues full of raw emotion and art. Many people express their grief through poetry, but Jack’s poetry was his art and those three issues still sing to us even now. I would love to see the art to those comics before they were inked. When I was younger I harboured a secret wish that Chic Stone had inked Fantastic Four #25 and 26, but now I think that George Bell was the perfect inker to capture the raw, naked emotion contained in that art. There would have been a time lag between Jack producing the art for Fantastic Four #25 and 26 and the comics being published and sold. There would then have been a time lag between sales figures and public feedback via the many letters sent to the Letters’ Page. The impact of the story told in two issues would have been positive and convinced Stan and Jack that Fantastic Four could do multiple issue stories and still sell well. I would hazard a guess that the time lag between publishing Fantastic Four #25 and 26, getting feedback, deciding longer stories were viable, producing the art, and then publishing them would probably coincide with Fantastic Four #38, 39 and 40, which was the first regular ongoing story.

So one effect of the death of JFK on Jack was the invention of the ongoing story told over multiple issues that we are so used to today, but which ran counter to the way comics had been produced over the decades before. Where he previously had to tell an ongoing story over several different comics, in a subversively creative manner but getting round the formula of the time, he was now free to tell a story over several issues of the same comic. Another effect was the liberation of Jack’s art. Fantastic Four #25 and 26 is like a genie being released from a bottle, where once it was out, it could not be put back in. Once he experienced the catharsis and emotional freedom produced through such art, he could not go back to the art-subservient-to-story-in-one-issue that he had done before. When Marvel tried one-issue stories at the end of the 1960s, Jack’s heart, it seems, was not really in it. He might have produced stories similar to FFs #1-24, but he could not go backwards. When writers, or poets, or songwriters suffer profound personal experiences, they are able to draw upon them in their work. Some of the greatest poems, or songs, or works of fiction have come from some deep personal tragedy. Jack’s form of expressing himself was his art. What he produced following JFK’s death was not only an outpouring of grief in his work, but also visual poetry. It is why those two issues of Fantastic Four stand out and made such a lasting impression at the time and afterwards. They touched a collective chord within people in a deep and meaningful way, something they continue to do to this day. JFK’s death unleashed the poet within Jack. He switched from just storytelling through visual art, to visual art as poetry. H 26

www.kirbymuseum.org Calgary Expo - Year Three!

Newsletter

Thanks once again to the generous support of Museum member Steve Coates, the Kirby Museum attended the Calgary Comics & Entertainment Expo in Calgary, Alberta. Last year Steve brought awesome artist Steve Rude to our booth, while this year we were joined by Erik Larsen! In addition to drawing commissions for his many fans, Erik produced a special Kirby tribute print for the show (below). We have some of the prints available on our website, too. Thanks, Erik! Steve, on the other hand, produced slideshows of Kirby covers and spreads, and had them both Rand Hoppe, Erik Larsen, and Steve Coates running during the whole show. Steve also offered buttons, covers and spreads that were “saved” from Kirby comics in the dollar bin. There was also a Kirby tribute panel on Sunday, with Erik, Tim Lasiuta, Michael Cho (a contributor to Jason Garrattley’s Kirby-Vision blog on our website), Kyle Stevens from the nerd rock band Kirby Krackle, and me, Rand.

Website Changes

The Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center is organized exclusively for educational purposes; more specifically, to promote and encourage the study, understanding, preservation and appreciation of the work of Jack Kirby by: • illustrating the scope of Kirby’s multi-faceted career, • communicating the stories, inspirations and influences of Jack Kirby, • celebrating the life of Jack Kirby and his creations, and • building understanding of comic books and comic book creators. To this end, the Museum will sponsor and otherwise support study, teaching, conferences, discussion groups, exhibitions, displays, publications and cinematic, theatrical or multimedia productions. Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center PO Box 5236 Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA Telephone: (201) 963-4383

Board of Trustees Randolph Hoppe rhoppe@kirbymuseum.org David Schwartz Tom Kraft John Morrow store@twomorrowspubs.com All characters TM © their respective owners.

I recently changed the software that runs the Museum’s main website from Drupal to WordPress. Also, rather than having an installation of Wordpress for each of our blogs, now they all run off of one installation. So now instead of having Drupal and something like six WordPress installs, the Museum is running only two instances of Wordpress. It’s much easier to manage behind the scenes. I’ve also moved (well, some are still being moved) all the articles and exhibits from the main site over to the Kirby Effect, so the news on the home page is all about the Museum’s activities and news about Kirby and his work is on the Kirby Effect. Another change is that the archive of pencil photocopies on the Museum’s site that were available for browsing, with some available only to logged-in Museum members, has been put on hiatus. But I hope most of you have seen Museum Trustee Tom Kraft’s What If Kirby website, where Tom’s been posting scans from the Museum’s Original Art Digital Archive project. The good news is that Tom is developing a new Museum site that will replace What If Kirby, and provide a richer experience for viewing the Kirby Museum’s digital archive. Thank you, Tom, for all you do! TM & © Erik Larsen

TJKC Edition Summer 2013

Brick & Mortar/Pop-Up Update Thanks to the generosity of Kirby fans, we are almost at 75% of our $30,000 goal. Special thanks to donors who fed Mother Box at Wondercon Anaheim, MoCCA Festival and the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. Stay tuned for more information!

We thank our new and returning members for their support: Michael Micciulla, Robert Walker, Cary Appel, Martin O’Connor, Brian Fox, Patrick Watson, Vincent Antonelli, Rick Hull, Michael Minney, Philip Hester, Jason Atomic, Sean Kleefeld, David Marshall, Suzette Chan, Dave Hermary, Rob Palser, Dennis Huot, Purple Gorilla Comics, Richard Shewry, Kyle Johnson, Andrew Stien, Mark Morys, Daniel Harmon, Allan Harvey, Ryan O’Reilly,Jeffery Wilkie, Jim McPherson, Michael Schumann, Benjamin Haerter, Antonio Iriarte, Laura Knechtel, Alex Cox, Bernard Brannigan, David Schwartz, Lawrence Maher, Russell Payne, Richard Pineros, Peter Buxton, Christopher Harder, Christopher Horan, Richard Pontius, Christopher Boyko, Mike Altman, Tom Brevoort, Melvin Shelton, Philip Miller, Don Rhoden, Glen Garry, Bill Kruse.

We also welcome our new members who joined us in supporting the Science Fiction Land Kickstarter: Clark Jarvis, Tim Kirk, breht, Beverly , Stephen Loiaconi, Jon Stobezki, Jonathan LeVine, Scott Zrubek, Jason, Christopher White, Ruth Wilson, Christopher Longworth, Jonathan Spear, Earl Aagaard, Gail Perrin, Teresa L. Thompson, Bill, Brian Zacher, max franz, Justin Ishmael, David Lloyds, James Gosling, TheEdge, James Kennedy, Steven Smith, Eric Wayne Norlander, Chad Shipley, Dan Nelson, Annual Memberships Jim Rohrich, Brian Alvarado, Christopher Burns, Edmund Boys, Corie Schweitzer, Joseph Dickerson, with one of these posters: $40* Liam Garvo, Michelle Smore, Dylan Reiff, Kevin A. Jackson, Joe Foxton, Jon Eliassen, Carol Roberts, Adam Muto, Candace Uhlmeyer, Brad Czernik, Franklin Crosby, gaile t. brown, Roger Kim, John Idlor, Karim Ghoul, Fran Keegan, Red Dutchman, Noel Murray, wayne , Konstantin Goreley, Pamela Duke, Alex Valero “Danda”, Christopher J Dennis, Christopher Finch, brendan sheehan, John Gamble, David H. Adler, Scott Early, Lunaro, Doug Burns, Dr. Christopher Kovacs, Sean Captain America—23” x 29” Strange Tales—23” x 29” Kelly, Connor Salisbury, Jane Walentas, Kristin Bass 1941 Captain America—14” x 23” Super Powers—17” x 22” color Peterson, scott Levine, barbara leddy, Claudio Bottaccini, Rakesh Mital, David Lieberman, Ron and with one of these posters: $50* Judy Smore, Christopher Martens, Shirley Silver.

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

Thanks to Steve Coates, Russell Payne (Kirby Museum hero of the Bristol International Comic and Animation Expo!), Lisa Rigoux-Hoppe, Mike Cecchini, and Richard Bensam for their help with conventions and more. Of course, I thank my fellow Trustees Tom Kraft, John Morrow, and David Schwartz. And many thanks to the Kirby Estate. —Rand Hoppe

Marvel—14” x 23”

Galactic Head— 18” x 20” color

Incan Visitation—24” x 18” color

Gallery 2

Kirby hit the ground running Jwhenack he went to DC Comics in 1970, with a head full of ideas and a new publisher that, on the surface at least, was willing to give new things a try. One of his ideas was a slick glossy color magazine about a hot topic of the day: Divorce. True Life Divorce was sort of an anti-romance comic, and Jack drew five complete stories intended for it: • “The Maid” • “The Twin” • “The Model” • “The Other Woman” • “The Cheater” plus, he had his assistants Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman prepare two filler features: • “The Babies” (a photo-feature about trouble among young couples)

The idea was scrapped, and “The Model” was used as a springboard for Soul Love, a black romance mag, which was also soon scuttled. But here is one of the True Life Divorce stories, partially inked by Vince Colletta.

TM & © Jack Kirby Estate.

• “Hollywood Divorce” (a twopage article by Mark and Steve)

TM & © Jack Kirby Estate.

COVER SHOT: This 1978 reproduction of Jack’s 1976 “Mechanoid” painting is very faithful to the original coloring. Flip and compare it to this issue’s cover scan from circa 2008, and you can see how much the Dr. Marten’s dyes Jack used have faded over time. 35

Top Ten Kirby Blurbs When the OLD blurbs died, there arose the NEW BLURBS! And now I, Robby Reed of dialbforblog.com, have selected the TOP TEN greatest blurbs from the covers of Kirby’s DC Fourth World titles. The blurbs were written and pencil-roughed by Kirby, and most if not all were finished by Gaspar Saladino. Enough talk! Activate BLURB TUBE!

All images TM & © DC Comics.

Kirk Kimball

10. FOREVER PEOPLE #1 February-March 1971 BOOM! In one fell swoop, DC went from “Lois exposes Superman’s identity!” to the breakthrough blurb seen on the left. “They belong to sunrise and get up at mid-day?” Dig it, man! Cosmic hippie super heroes! 9. NEW GODS #2, April-May 1971 In one small yet sinister space, Kirby summarizes his entire Fourth World theme in a single blurb! The planetary name “Apokolips” invokes frightening Biblical imagery of the end of the world, while jagged electrical bolts add a touch of menace. 8. MISTER MIRACLE #2 May-June 1971 This issue introduced a sadistic, freaked-out orphanage head mistress named Granny Goodness, and her deadly little “X-Pit.” Toto, it’s possible that we are not in Kansas anymore. 7. JIMMY OLSEN #142 October 1971 The (big) vampire bit! Like we’ve never seen it before! Oh, come on, is that even possible? Yes! Under the 36

reign of King Kirby, ANYTHING is possible! And if you’ve read the story, you know that this blood-sucking little blurb does NOT lie! NOTE: If you haven’t read the story, there’s probably something wrong with you, mentally. 6. JIMMY OLSEN #139, July 1971 “Defoliants in my succotash?! Landmines in my lunchbox!? TWO Rickles!?!?” What happened to Jimmy becoming a giant turtle-boy? Either I’ve suddenly lost my mind, or this is one of the whackiest and zaniest blurbs ever written. Holy hockeypuck! 5. MISTER MIRACLE #3, July-August 1971 “The PARANOID pill? Buy it but don’t SWALLOW it?!?!” Yikes, gosh, and holy moley! Alien mood-altering drugs, on a cover blurb!?!? Talk about pushing the envelope. Toto, HELP! We’re so far from Kansas now, we’ll NEVER get back! 4. HOUSE AD FOR JIMMY OLSEN #136, October 1970 “Prepare for events new to all your past experiences!” Quite a bold statement! And in this case, quite a TRUE statement, too. There really had never been anything like Kirby’s Fourth World before! Or since, for that matter. Well, at least Kirby WARNED us. 3. FOREVER PEOPLE #4, August-Sept. 1971 Meet Desaad! This blurb brazenly declares that this villain (named after the Marquis de Sade) is not only a SADIST, but that he LOVES being a sadist! Happiness is a warm torture rack! Envelope pushed (whipped?) to the limit. 2. FOREVER PEOPLE #3, June-July 1971 Here’s Kirby’s dire warning that authority figures can sometimes use value judgments to justify their lethal actions! Number two on our list, this is probably the single most existential comic cover blurb ever written! 1. JIMMY OLSEN #141, September 1971 Reader, I bet you knew this one would top the list, because it beats them ALL! No promise of action, no dramatic question, not even a friendly request. Just one simple order, direct from King Kirby: BUY IT! An expanded version of this article can be found online, at Robby Reed’s Dial B for BLOG site, at www.dialbforblog.com/archives/401.

Barry Forshaw

Obscura the design of the buildings, with the familiar stylizations that are Kirby’s trademark; (2) there are the fireballs raining destruction, complete with Kirby Krackle (and no regular reader of The Jack Kirby Collector will need that particular phrase explained); (3) there are the striking designs of the costumes of the doomed figures—costume designs, in fact, that are not seen again in the story, showing how prodigal Kirby’s casual invention was in such areas—creating a new and imaginative costume for a character was something he did page after page, panel after panel—without ever once repeating himself; (4) the rendering of the physical positions of the characters, where his mastery of the human form (and willingness to exaggerate for dramatic effect) looked like no other illustrator.

TM & © Simon & Kirby Estates.

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

WALKING ON WATER Next up in Titan’s S&K Library series is “Horror” in October, which will include stories from Black Magic and Strange World of Your Dreams published from 1950 to 1954—320 pages, with more great art reconstruction by Harry Mendryk.

We printed “This World Is Ours” in TJKC #45. Black Magic #24 hasn’t been reprinted yet, but “Master of the Unknown” was rerun in House of Mystery #225 (1974).

For many readers of this magazine, Jack Kirby walked on water. But we all need backup— and The King’s miraculous abilities were often finessed and developed by the highly talented people he worked with. Principal among these, perhaps, was the late Joe Simon—and it is heartening to note that Simon lived as long as he did (far outliving his cigar-chomping, workaholic partner) so that he might see the duo’s prodigious achievements celebrated in the first few volumes of Titan’s Simon and Kirby library, with their magnificent artwork sumptuously reproduced and restored by Harry Mendryk. The “walking on water” notion mentioned above was prompted by my re-reading of a wonderfully inventive book that the team produced for Harvey in January 1958, the third issue of Alarming Tales. On the cover, the strapline “Before our very eyes... they walked on water!” heralds an image of an eerie, scarlet-colored lake on which two men stare in amazement at a remarkable sight: a young boy and an elderly man are walking on the surface of the water. The man is an interesting post-code, “softened” creation; recognizably human, but given a bizarre blue complexion to suggest his supernatural nature. Four years earlier (in the team’s vintage Black Magic days), the old man would have been considerably more grotesque, but the tactics employed here were a canny way of negotiating the rigorous demands of the Comics Code (nothing too frightening!) while still suggesting to youthful readers that they were being offered something strange and disturbing. The cover, in fact, is the work of Joe Simon solus rather than Jack Kirby, but so symbiotic was the team’s relationship that it certainly suggests Kirby’s influence in conjuring the image.

TM & © Harvey Comics.

THIS WORLD IS KIRBY’S However, the splash panel of the first story, “This World is Ours”, could only be Jack Kirby. Essentially utilizing only two colors, orange and blue, we are shown a scene of massive futuristic destruction and Armageddon. In the foreground, terrified figures, dressed in costumes that suggest another planet (or the far future) stagger towards us, while behind them their city is destroyed by plummeting fireballs. It’s worth looking at this image for a minute or two, if only to figure out just why it could only be Kirby. Four reasons: (1) there is

CLASSIC CURTAIN OPENING The story begins with a man chipping at the wall of a prehistoric cave which dates back at least a million years and discovering two living giants from a vast Atlantis-style civilization (what we see of these powerful giants and the civilization that produced them is sometimes reminiscent of—or, more precisely, predicts—character and backdrop design that Kirby utilized for the Asgard scenes in his Thor days. To their human discoverer’s dismay, the two gigantic revivified figures have only the worst, most megalomaniac aims and are convinced they can use their powers to take 38

TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estates.

over the society they have been awakened into. They are, needless to say, in for a rude shock. This is classic stuff, delivered with all the panache that Kirby was such a casual master of in his all-too-brief Harvey period. And what makes the books of this period so collectable is the exemplary package that Simon and Kirby would put together for each individual book, even when Kirby was not drawing the whole issue. After this splendid Kirby opener, we have the title story (“They Walked on Water”)—illustrated not by Kirby but by the subtle and stylish Doug Wildey, who turns in a typically sensitive job, nicely contrasted with its flamboyant predecessor. The third story, “Get Lost”, is a wonderfully atmospheric piece drawn by the equally talented (if little-known) Ernest Schroeder, and continues the pleasing contrast of artists that the book has established. Wildey returns for the fourth story, “The Strange One”, in which a spectral figure makes an unwelcome visit to an American family on a strange mission of abduction. It’s another excellent piece, but there are some signs of interference from the draconian Comics Code Authority: the unearthly visitor is drawn with a simple straight line for a mouth in every panel, something the highly talented and imaginative Wildey would simply not have settled for (Wildey attempted—long before Neal Adams—some subtle and flexible expressions for the human face that had never been tried in the comics medium before). It seems clear that the spectral figure would have had a more disturbing face which was not acceptable to the ludicrously straight-laced censors of the day. To some degree, this issue of Alarming Tales is a Doug Wildey special, as he also provides the impressive final story, “The Man Who Never Lived”. It’s interesting to note, though, that while the latter artist drew the great majority of this book, Simon & Kirby were savvy enough to know that it would be a good idea to open the issue with a dramatic, large-scale Jack Kirby spectacular to set the tone. And—frankly—who is to say they were wrong?

TM & © Simon & Kirby Estates.

AN EYE FOR AN EYE If you think this column is all about simple, unalloyed praise for Jack Kirby, I’m about to disabuse you of that idea—but, don’t worry; it will only be a little modest criticism. Case in point: the cover of Black Magic #24 (Prize), which is a particularly collectable issue, for reasons which will become clear. Starting with the striking cover (which is another example of how The King was not exactly telling the truth when he said that his horror work with Joe Simon always steered away from the overtly gruesome). Here we are shown a grotesque, monstrous figure with a green, mutilated face (not, unfortunately, to be seen in the story it illustrates; as with Stan Lee’s Atlas horror line, there was often far more grisliness to be found on the lurid covers than within the pages of the books, unlike EC Comics). A malevolently grinning figure is looking into a room in which two men gaze in dread at a corpse which has had its eyes gouged out (although the face of the dead man is discreetly turned away from the viewer, with no bloody

sockets to be seen). “I— I was afraid we’d find him this way! He’s dead! And he has no eyes!” gasps one horrified onlooker, while the other replies that the eyes now belong to something “Out of its grave—a thing with empty sockets which are now sporting this guy’s baby blue eyes!” While this undead thing is gruesome enough to grace a typical 1950s horror comic (the issue is dated January 1954), I’m about to make a statement which may horrify dedicated Kirbyites: wouldn’t this cover have been better drawn by Stan Lee’s go-to-guy for his jolting horror covers on such books as Adventures into Weird Worlds and Adventures into Terror? Bill Everett, one feels, would realize that the crucial thing regarding the undead “eye thief” would be the contrast between its rotted flesh and the unblemished stolen eyes. Everett would no doubt have drawn the eye thief in a much larger close-up, and enlarged the eyes, stressing their blueness against a darker color—perhaps outlining them in a bloody red. But such speculation is only for those of us who like to pour over comics that are over half a century old. Like me. And, perhaps, you. The title story, “An Eye for an Eye”, is a lively EC-ish tale of vengeance from beyond the grave, although the last panel with the aforementioned ghoul sporting its stolen baby blues is distinctly unhorrific compared to the cover (what’s more, the whole point of the image—that of these stolen blue eyes—is rather undercut by the fact that the colorist has rendered them red. But that’s probably enough about stolen blue eyes).

BORROWINGS After an unexceptional but stylish piece by Bill Benulis, we have a second Kirby tale in the issue (you may remember that I said that this was a particularly collectable issue—although that isn’t just because it has two stories drawn by The King). “Alive After Five Thousand Years” is proof—if proof were needed—just how good Kirby was at macabre material, such as the 39

splash panel here, which shows a hideously mummified face illuminated by a torch. In fact, the story itself is one of two rip-offs in the issue—basically, this is a five-page version of the classic Boris Karloff/Karl Freund film The Mummy, and its best sequence is a version of the one in the film in which a member of an expedition is driven mad by the sight of a walking mummy. This is followed by a piece illustrated by the talented Al Eadeh, who (as is usual in his work for Simon and Kirby) shows little sign of the gothic inventiveness of his work in such Atlas books as Marvel Tales and Suspense, but the piece adequately fills two pages.

EARLY DITKO Black Magic #24’s wind-up is the item that makes this an issue that collectors eagerly seek out—early work by the great Steve Ditko, who would, of course, subsequently top share many a book with Jack Kirby when the two were both working regularly for Stan Lee after the Comics Code had set down its Draconian, emasculating rules. “Buried Alive”— while demonstrating that even in 1954, Steve Ditko’s unique ability to conjure sinister atmosphere was fully formed—is the second rip-off tale of this issue; it is, in fact, an uncredited synthesis of two stories by the great Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, cheekily filching elements of both, but still allowing the young Ditko full rein for his morbid talents. Looking at the book as a whole, one has to register several reservations, but if you opt to have any issues of Black Magic in your collection, this one definitely deserves consideration.

TM & © DC Comics.

AN UNGUESSABLE SECRET TM & © DC Comics.

Whenever some little-known piece by composers such as Beethoven and Mozart is discovered residing in a dusty attic somewhere, it is invariably dusted off, played and recorded to great acclaim—even though (if the truth be told) these are really not major discoveries but simply add a little to the pictures we have of great talent. All of which is appropriate to celebrating one very minor but illuminating story illustrated by Jack Kirby during his DC period (before everything went sour): the cover story (“Master of the Unknown”) for an early issue of House of Secrets (#4, May/June 1957). Frankly, it’s hardly an essential part of the Kirby legacy, but it is drawn with the usual non-pareil professionalism which Kirby— even in his most rushed moments—could effortlessly call upon. What’s more, in the era when the revelations in these short fantasy tales could, frankly, be seen coming a mile off, the twist ending of this one is genuinely unguessable (and don’t worry—you’re not going to read it in this review). The cover of the comic (not by Kirby, but the talented Ruben Moreira) appears to give the revelation away—but doesn’t. In an isolation booth familiar to viewers of 1950s American television quiz shows, a strange purple-hooded figure is being asked a question. But it’s not about Shakespeare’s plays or the population of India. The smart-suited interviewer says: “Your category has been the supernatural! Now for $100,000 can you tell us why your hands are like a lion’s claws?” Brandishing these leonine appendages, the mysterious figure in the booth replies: “That’s one question I will not answer!” But eager readers of the tale in the 1950s would have had to wait for the last story to see the answer to the question. It is preceded by a humdrum piece, “The House of Human Cards” (illustrated in pedestrian fashion by Jim Mooney), while Mort Meskin follows up with an utterly ludicrous piece called “The

Amazing Visions of Abel Innes”, in which a hilariously unlikely scheme by aliens is detailed to very little effect. Things improve with the penultimate tale drawn by the excellent Bernard Bailey, “House Haunters, Inc.”, which is nevertheless constrained by the unflinching edict of the Comics Code that the frightening creatures shown in this film featured here should not be frightening (given that one of the characters in the piece is supposed to drop dead from a heart attack at the face of a clown-faced alien, young readers in the 1950s would have been well aware—even if they had not known of the existence of the Comics Code behind that symbol on the cover—that something was up, and that they were being short-changed. But we get our money’s worth with the final story, “Master of the Unknown”. The splash panel, much more busy than the more simple cover (and this time drawn by Jack Kirby,) shows the same hooded figure surrounded by technicians, police and cameras, being asked where the longlost continent of Atlantis is—and he is promising to give the exact longitude and latitude. The piece itself, as I said earlier, is relatively routine stuff, and no great argument can be placed for the value of Kirby’s art—he simply isn’t given an opportunity to let his imagination run riot. But in a way this allows him to demonstrate the quiet skill of his compositions and mise-enscène; no other illustrator could make fairly uneventful panels so pleasing to the eye. Ironically, the story also demonstrates some of the constraints that Kirby was under before his move to Atlas/Marvel—we have one panel (and only one) in which the Cyclops is discovered on a remote island—but the legendary figure is only seen in extreme longshot in a 2-inch panel; we can be forgiven for thinking wistfully of that incredible rock-wielding Cyclops he was shortly to draw for Stan Lee’s monster books over at the competition. But really, the tale is all about its build towards that unguessable final panel—and I’m glad to say that on my last re-reading of this book I had forgotten the revelation. And if when you’re reading it you’re able to second-guess the ending, then (to quote Stan Lee in his Atlas horror days) you can go to the head of the class. H Barry Forshaw is the author of The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (available from Amazon.com) and the editor of Crime Time. He lives in London. 40

An ongoing examination of Kirby’s art and compositional skills

adopted him. To be assured that his ideas would not be meddled with while developing what would be his magnum opus, Kirby insisted that he be allowed to write, draw and edit these stories alone. He had been working for the company for more than a year, when suddenly all of his various plot threads and concepts seemed to jell in one glorious moment. It was as if Kirby, essentially on his own for the first time, had been treading water for the first several months of his tenure with DC, attempting to find his footing. In New Gods #5, as Mike Royer fortuitously took over inking chores from Vince Colletta, the latent power of Kirby emerged. The vast conflict on a cosmic scale that was the Fourth World saga had been building in intensity, and this series of three books beginning with #6 would define and explain the awesome depth of the field that Kirby was exploring, as the War of the gods spilled onto Earth and then to the vastness of the great oceans. The story entitled “The Glory Boat” in New Gods #6 begins with the spectacular demolition of a freighter by a demonic whale-like creature. The two-page spread (left) showing the boat’s destruction is an amazing display of a cataclysmic fragment of time, as the Leviathan’s battering ram smashes through the hull, flinging scores of bodies into the sea. The viewer’s eye, sweeping down the shape of the protruding tusk, immediately focuses on the ram and the figure suspended above it. The serrated spine of the ram draws the eye to the rent in the ship’s hull, and the lettered sound effect “KKKRRAAKK!” sweeps the eye rightward to the other suspended figures. In this tableau, we can imagine the entirety of this horrific incident, from impact to penetration, to the ejection of human and other debris. Like Melville’s Moby Dick, the sea beast here is a personification of destructive nature. It sets off a tale of division, loss and finally redemption within a nuclear family that represents the whole of humanity. The battle later waged aboard the small wooden vessel is also cataclysmic. The panoramic first panel on page 21 (next page, top) is a whirling maelstrom of violence, as Orion savagely smashes his Deep Six foes. The hero’s three-quarter back shot used here is one of Kirby’s favorite action poses. It is so effective, because although the striking right arm is actually obscured by the diagonal rotated torso, the impact is suggested more by the extended left arm and by the sweep of the curving motion lines that indicate the right arm’s trajectory. Kirby uses the motion of the lanyard attached to

The Peak Although opinions differ on the subject, many of

Kirby’s fans believe that the King reached his artistic peak in 1972 with a sequence of three issues of The New Gods from issues #6 through #8. Kirby had recently returned to DC Comics in 1970, after the “glory days” of ’60s Marvel came to an end. The artist was bursting with concepts that he had held in check during his gradual estrangement from Marvel. Kirby had become preoccupied with the idea of the death of the elder gods as represented by Thor’s Asgardian pantheon, and the emergence of a new race of god-like beings. He also clearly wanted to explore the relationship of the new younger gods to their elders, as

TM & © DC Comics.

well as the relationship of the son to his more powerful father. In the Marvel series, the thunder god had often been at odds with his father, Odin, lord of the Norse gods. Kirby seemed interested in the classic and archetypal transition of the son inheriting the father’s power, portraying Thor often times at odds with the establishment that Odin had built. Interestingly, these would be concepts that would also later be explored by such filmmakers as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and John Milius in the 1970s and ’80s. In the case of his new main character Orion, Kirby wanted to examine the portrayal of the hero torn between the twisted legacy of his real father, Darkseid and the positive light of Highfather, the god that had 41

All images these two pages TM & © DC Comics.

Trok’s flying battle-ax to further emphasize the violence of the melee, as it snakes off the page following the direction or the adversary that Orion has struck, and reenters the panel as a wedge shape that helps to further anchor the panel. Kirby is again dealing with larger, archetypal forces in this story. He is working more increasingly with symbolic elements, as he develops the underlying nature of his characters. Their positions in the broad scheme become more defined as the saga progresses. Kirby is leading up to his ultimate conception of the Source, which he will elucidate in the following issue, #7’s “The Pact.” “The Pact” is the story that brings the elements of the Fourth World together in one multi-faceted arc. The breadth of this story has been a template for scores of imitators. The protagonist, Izaya, is a warrior turned prophet of Biblical proportions who is first seen relaxing with his lady, Avia, in a garden that represents an Eden-like paradise. The murder of the lady at the hands of a villain precipitates a conflict that tears the universe of the New Gods asunder. This double-page spread on pages 6 and 7 (below) is a high point in Kirby-style Apocalyptic mayhem. It screams “War” as fluently in visual terms as the warrior on the page does literally. The bolts of energy that weave around the page tie the various elements together. Initially leading the eye to the flying figures at above right, their firepower slices down and back to the leftward stream of krackle leading to the gesture of the massive upraised arm. The canvas seethes with Kirby Krackle, a sure sign that the King is in high gear. This scene is very near to complete abstraction, and yet it is a vivid and hyper-real depiction of devastation. As the war escalates, there is so much mayhem within this issue that we are nearly unprepared for its peaceful resolution, as young Orion, armed with a dagger, confronts his stepfather-to-be. Izaya, who has become Highfather, soothes the enraged boy and gets him to surrender his weapon, as well as his distrust. The page (next page, bottom) is dominated by the symbolic use of hands, which Kirby, as a visual storyteller, has consistently employed to the greatest effect. Orion enters the room poised to strike, but Highfather stops his hand in mid-stroke. Highfather stands, and we see his hand holding his shepherd’s staff. Next we see his outstretched palm, which dominates the panel, extended toward Orion, who still shrinks back with uncertainty. Finally, we see the two hands together as Orion relinquishes his weapon. Again, literally and symbolically, Highfather can now turn his back on the boy, knowing that Orion is intrigued enough to follow him. The boy has left his tormented past, including his dark father behind, and has been adopted by the positive nurturing of New Genesis. The blurb in the last panel informs us that we will move forward once more, proceeding to “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin,” and this is where the series reaches another climax of conflict between man and demigod. The titular Turpin is a man 42

of such overwhelming spirit that he can stand uncowed against Orion’s fierce half-brother, Kalibak. Turpin’s remark, upon seeing the ferocious Kalibak atop a building, is, “King Kong on a rooftop is no more dangerous than a nervous punk with a pistol. The idea is to give as good as you get.” Kirby is doing yet another riff on the pivotal fantasy epic King Kong that I have previously noted as a consistent source of inspiration for the artist. Turpin, a stand-in for Kirby, is as relentless as the King himself. Taking enough punishment to fell ten lesser men, Turpin just keeps on coming, astounding Kalibak with his tenacity. Orion reaches Kalibak before he can kill Turpin, and the two antagonists carry their conflict to a huge sign high above the city’s rooftops (right). This is an incredible four-panel face off, with the panels mirroring the grid-like structure of the girders that the two warriors straddle. The figures in the upper tier of panels are so full of restrained kinetic energy that they threaten to burst out of their holding outlines. Kalibak’s vicious kick to Orion’s chest is an explosive release of the seething pent-up force in the first panel. At this point in Kirby’s career, he is really beginning to push the envelope of abstraction, particularly as it relates to his dynamic figure work. One can clearly see that his art is still grounded in anatomy, but it is becoming more expressionistic, as more and more squiggles and bold slashes replace recognizable bone and sinew. The style that Kirby is using is so individualistic and yet so powerful that it practically defies logic and analysis. In the words of Chrissie Harper, “What made

a lot of Kirby’s stuff work, I don’t believe can be formalized. Actually a lot of it shouldn’t work if looked at in that way.” As small as they are, the last two frames give us a wonderful illusion of the deep space of a cityscape. It is the scale of the buildings in comparison to the sign and the figures that creates this illusion of depth. This is something that Kirby does so well. He is capable of creating the total sense of an environment by using small details to suggest the mood and surroundings that he places his characters within. In the nick of time, Lightray snatches Orion from the rooftop, as a tremendous bolt of energy fells Kalibak. We have the feeling here that all the opponents have suffered terribly and no one appears to have won. Even Orion has shown us the face of the darkness inside of him. Kirby again shows us the perspective of someone who has faced war at close range and understands its often ugly and senseless nature. What we know for certain is that there is more here in the conflicts of the Fourth World than merely the bluster of battle. At this point, it was abundantly clear to even his most strident critics that Jack Kirby, by himself, was capable of writing a multifaceted story, weaving complex scenarios with realistic characters in relationships, as well as crafting an enduring mythology. Kirby also displayed a powerful and distinctive voice for writing narrative as well as dialog. These stories have stood the test of time and have become the stuff that will continue to invite further attention well into the foreseeable future. H (previous page, center) Kalibak was never as charming as in this 1970s drawing by Jack. 43

Influencees

Todd McFarlane by Jorge Khoury (Around Christmas of 2012, I was able to interview comics artist Todd McFarlane about his first art book, The Art of Todd McFarlane, for my column in Comic Book Creator #1. What you won’t find in that magazine is this passionate discussion by McFarlane on the subject of Jack Kirby. The influence and history of Kirby played a key part in the creation of Image Comics in 1992, when McFarlane and six other artists departed Marvel to make their own comic books and legacy. From that point on, that pivotal move showed us all that the future of comics books is for all artists to put their destiny in their own hands.)

Spawn #226, cover by McFarlane.

KHOURY: What sort of an influence was Kirby to you? magnificent careers and just left one at a time, and they were McFARLANE: I’ll give you my chronological on Kirby. I grew up on replaceable at the time. What then was going through my mind was, comic books in the mid-’70s, right? When I first got introduced to “What if four or five people left at a time?” That would leave a lot Jack Kirby’s art style, I think it’s kind of odd artwork and not very bigger impact than just an individual—I mean, if you think of it as a sexy. At that point you got John Byrne and Neal Adams and George baseball or sports analogy: If one player quits the team, you can Pérez—those guys are awesome. Then I eventually break into the always bring in another player. But what if your top four guys left? business and I start to then pay attention to some of the old vets and Then it would be a way bigger impact. start looking at their work—Wally Wood and Russ Heath and Gil So the history of his business career also helped conspire some Kane—and Kirby obviously falls into that. of the motivations I had moving forward with Image Comics. H And what happens now is I get beyond the drawing style and I start to appreciate: A) now the guy has to do deadlines, the staggering amount of pages Jack Kirby did is amazing; and then B) I start to look at his storytelling. Again, go past the art style, look at the storytelling—and Frank Miller kind of falls into this with his Daredevil run—again, it wasn’t the most detailed, sort of interesting style, but his storytelling was magnificent. Then, all of a sudden, I go, “Wow.” There were very few times I ever looked at anything Kirby did where I just felt like he didn’t put the information on the page. And I go, “So you can talk about whether you didn’t like the squiggles on the knee or if you thought his women’s cheeks were too puffy—whatever you want to do about the style… but from a storytelling, constructing, and just from a volume pointof-view, it literally is unprecedented.” So, all those guys from that era, at first I turned my nose up at because I was just a silly 16- or 17-year-old kid, when everything was about, you know, Britney Spears and I didn’t know The Beatles, right? He becomes The Beatles and Elvis Presley—he’s that guy that you just go, “Wow.” What he did during his career, at that point is humbling. So, later on, when I got to meet him and talk to him, and eventually got to ink a couple of his pages, I’m like, “Oh yeah, wow! I’m literally dealing with the King!” Right? Jack “King” Kirby. These are big moments here. But I also read the history of what happened to him, as you mentioned, and some of the other guys—Gil Kane and that—and it was part of the reason why, when I decided I wanted to leave Marvel, that part of my motivation was trying to see if I could glom on to a couple of other artists and we could start a coalition instead of just leaving one at a time. I read (above) A Kirby-centric page from Todd’s new book, The Art of Todd McFarlane. too many of these stories where For an in-depth look at the highs and lows of Jack’s career, don’t miss Comic Book Creator #1, shipping now from TwoMorrows. artists like Kirby had these 44

Satan’s Six TM & © Jack Kirby Estate.

Photo by Anna Peña; copyright Todd McFarlane Productions. Spawn TM & © McFarlane Productions

the Kirby Influence

Gallery 3 Steve Gerber’s February 18, 1983 panel breakdowns and partial dialogue for Destroyer Duck #3

All Destroyer Duck images TM & © Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby Estates

After leaving DC Comics in 1975, Kirby almost universally refused to work with any writers, with one exception: Steve Gerber. In Jack’s files are copies of several Gerber scripts he drew for various projects in the 1980s. The most high-profile is, of course, Destroyer Duck, which helped fund Gerber’s legal battle with Marvel Comics over ownership of Howard the Duck. Here’s some examples of how Jack very faithfully interpreted another writer’s ideas on that strip. Above is Gerber’s cover description.

Here is colorist Petra Goldberg’s color guide for page 14 of Destroyer Duck #2 (January 1983). On the next page, you can see Kirby’s original pencil art, before inking by Alfredo Alcala.

For a book where the writer gave Jack such specific instructions, there were a surprising amount of false starts on pages Jack drew. Here are some unused/ unfinished pencil scenes from Destroyer Duck, including what looks like a possible homage to Steve Gerber’s infamous Defenders elf, making a cameo appearance.

(right and next page) Jack had something else in mind initially for the 6th panel of page 1 of Destroyer Duck #4 (Oct. 1983), but then decided to frame the panel differently, as seen in his final pencils on the next page. 54

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(these two pages) When Jack turned in the art for Destroyer Duck #2 (Jan. 1983), he was apparently one page short. So he redrew the scene from the first panel on the pencils shown at far left, enlarging it to a full-page for page 18 (below). He then drew a replacement panel (left), and incorporated it back into what became page 19. Note that, instead of reusing the exact poses for the full-pager, he drew an entirely different scene.

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Unearthed

Jack Kirby & Outland by John Workman

(below) Kirby had prior experience adapting sci-fi films to comics, in 1976’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Treasury Edition (page 22-23 pencils are below).

henever I think of Jack Kirby, chances are that my mind will also wander to critic/screenwriter James Agee and novelist/short-story-writer extraordinaire Ray Bradbury. This happens because, though I have a deep respect for each of them and despite the fact that their works had profound and true impacts on my life, I wound up offering each of those worthwhile gentlemen a rejection slip. In each case, my “thanks-but-no-thanks” proffered to every one of those men of genius was a part of my duties at Heavy Metal magazine during the time from late 1977 to mid-1984 when I was that publication’s art director. I learned long ago to approach any listing of credits (whether at the end of a theatrical film or in the only-occasionally-read-by-the-public listings that appear in magazines and books) with suspicion. Some parts of such credits are, in reality, pure baloney, as anyone who has seen a film directed by Alan Smithee knows. Such was the case with my job title during a part of the Heavy Metal days. I really was the art director under editors Sean Kelly and Ted White. After that, I was the art director-production manager-co-editor-writer-artistdesigner-letterer and everything else that involved getting at least one (and sometimes more than one)

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(right) Original movie poster for the 1981 film Outland, starring Sean Connery.

nationally-distributed magazine produced each month. At some time during those post-Ted days, the success of the theatrical Heavy Metal film brought the magazine’s handful of honchos—publisher (and not-really-editor) Len Mogel, submissions editor (and actual co-editor) Julie Simmons, music editor (and producer of the Dossier Section) Lou Stathis, contributing writer (and editor of the revered Castle of Frankenstein) Bhob Stewart, and me—together in Len’s office for an ongoing series

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Jack Kirby was an American. Americans were a problem for Heavy Metal publisher Len Mogel, especially if they were artists. Len truly believed that no American comic creator could possibly compete with

the French artists whose work we reprinted from Pilote, Metal Hurlant, and other sources. Though his contempt for the work of Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson, and even Art Spiegelman (but, strangely enough, not Richard Corben, whose work Len had first seen in a French publication) was a palpable thing, Len realized that there were times when such home-grown talent was a necessity. The fledgling line of Heavy Metal books had been launched into the stratosphere when Walt Simonson and Archie Goodwin had produced Alien: The Illustrated Story, a comics version of the hugely-successful film. Other movierelated publications, though not as financially impressive as Walt

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of attempts to come up with a second motion picture that would be produced by Len Mogel and directed by Al (Yellow Submarine) Brodax with a score written and performed by Paul McCartney. Stymied in our attempts to secure the rights to a series of humorous science-fiction stories written by Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson and unimpressed with a couple of scripts by Dan (Alien) Obannon, we were all excited when Bhob Stewart brought in an unproduced movie script by James Agee, the man who’d given the world The Night of the Hunter and The African Queen. Reading what I hoped would be an undiscovered jewel written by a multitalented, decades-gone Pulitzer Prize-winner proved to be a sad experience. The script seemed to have no structure of any sort. It was a stream-of-consciousness effort with no coherent story and characters that seemed to wander around without any purpose. It came off, played out inside the theater of my mind, as something concocted by a first-year film student who had no clear idea about what he wanted to communicate to his audience. Wanting a sure-fire commercial property to follow up on our initial successful film, I said no to the Agee script, seconding the thoughts of my on-staff compatriots. The situation was no less dire when one of the true heroes of my life—Ray Bradbury—submitted some of his poetry to Heavy Metal. For years, I had read and been amazed by the short stories and novels of Ray Bradbury. Just reading his Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 had taught me more about writing than I could possibly have gleaned from any college-level courses. I’ve long felt that his “Picasso Summer” is in the running for the honor of being the finest short story ever concocted. And it’s not as if poetry was an unknown element in my life. The words bounced around by Poe, Noyes, Shelley, Frost, and so many others had introduced me to an alternate method of speaking and thinking. Ray Bradbury, too, had charmed me with an actual bit of poetry that he had created as an acknowledgment of man’s first having set foot on the moon. When Julie Simmons handed me a batch of poems by Ray Bradbury and requested my thoughts about them, I was prepared to be bowled over by the same sort of mastery of words that I had seen in “The Lake,” “There Will Come Soft Rains,” “The Machineries of Joy,” and in so many other examples of his writings. It was a bitter disappointment when the words of the poems proved to be clunky and earthbound. The voice of Faye Dunaway in her persona of Bonnie Parker reading the sadly banal words written by the real partner of Clyde Barrow popped into my mind. Although I didn’t want to admit it at first, the examples of poetry put together by one of my heroes seemed to have too much in common with the uneducated striving and preordained failing that an untalented and sorrowful young woman had demonstrated almost fifty years earlier when she’d written a poem that had—only for reasons involving her notoriety—actually seen print. I felt horrible when I gave the poems back to Julie and rendered my opinion. To this day—with those words only a dim memory—I often think that there had to have been a failing in me that caused me to be unable to appreciate what truthfully might have been several rare examples of genius.

In the Summer of 1976, Jack had even taken a stab at adapting the British TV series The Prisoner for Marvel Comics. Partial inks and letters by Mike Royer. 59

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comic by declaring that the Ladd people would like to see the words-and-pictures print version drawn by Jack Kirby. Julie Simmons and I were to head for Hollywood where we would get to see Outland in not-quite-finished form. We would also meet with Jack Kirby and talk about the possibility of his drawing (and probably writing) Heavy Metal’s Outland. I had a few days in which to give some thought to other possibilities. I used that time to look at a ton of Kirby comics. Jack Kirby had been one of my heroes since the first days of my comics reading. The people that he drew, like those of Alex Raymond, Alex Toth, Carmine Infantino, Wally Wood, Al Williamson, and so many others, were better than any human being could ever be while still maintaining a true humanity that made it possible to accept them as real. Years later, when I routinely saw one artist after another nonchalantly offer panels in which those things that they enjoyed sketching became islands of acceptability among seas of mediocrity represented by those things that they didn’t like to This pin-up for Pacific’s 1983 Captain Victory Special #1 looks to have been drawn earlier than ’83. draw, I would think of Kirby and how he made everything that he put down on paper look new and Archie’s opus, still made money, and all of them had been illusand exciting and overwhelmingly dynamic. The most mundane trated by Americans. When Len announced that we’d be doing a example of human action, when filtered through Kirby’s hand and comics version of an upcoming science-fiction movie called Outland, eye, became thrilling beyond belief. it meant that I’d have to get ahold of yet another red, white, and blue But... artist (maybe even an artist/writer). ...something happened around the time that he returned to A fellow named Jeff Walker tried to make that job a bit easier for Marvel after his few wondrous years at DC in the early 1970s. me. A long-time comics fan (who later made regular appearances on Kirby’s artwork had been adversely effected years earlier in 1967 comics-related shows during the early days of the Sci-Fi Channel), Jeff when the decades-old standard size of original art had been reduced had been involved in the creation of some movie-related collectible from 12x18 inches to 10x15 inches. He was able to overcome that magazines before becoming an employee of The Ladd Company, the financially-caused restriction and to continue to amaze his public. producers of the upcoming Outland. What happened in the years following his return to Marvel remains I read the script to Outland and thought that, though it wasn’t a mystery. His artwork became a parody of what it had been. When in the same league as Alien, it still had possibilities, both as a movie he later moved from Marvel to Pacific, things did not improve. and as a comics story. For some reason, though, I couldn’t get a feel I thought that maybe the problem was in the inking of his for what the drawn version of Outland might look like. When I spoke work. Perhaps some impressionistic inks might bring me the Kirby to Jeff about the movie, he locked in the visual part of the Outland that I needed. Trying to imagine what Kirby’s recent work would 60

have looked like if it had been inked by other people was frustrating. I looked at Bullseye and Boys’ Ranch and various 1950s war comics that Kirby had drawn. Fighting American and the Wally Wood-inked Challengers of the Unknown threw me further into a consternation that wasn’t relieved by observing pages from The Fly, Young Love, Black Magic, and the early Captain America. All of those fantastic pages from the past looked as if they’d be at home inside the covers of Heavy Metal. The same thing couldn’t be said about Kirby’s more recent efforts. Because he’d done such an incredible job in inking such diverse pencillers as Carmine Infantino, Dick Giordano, and Ramona Fradon (and, later on, the really-difficult-to-interpret Gene Colan) I thought that maybe my old friend Bob Smith just might be able to work real magic with Jack Kirby’s drawings. When I spoke to Bob about that possibility, he seemed unsure of what the visual result of a Kirby/ Smith collaboration would be. I still had no solution to my problem. Deciding that a look at Kirby’s 1960s material—just to renew my acquaintance with that great stuff—might help, I pulled out a few piles of Marvel Comics. I’d nearly forgotten about the strange Kirby/Toth/Colletta combination that made up X-Men #12, but it pointed me toward a possible solution to my problem. Kirby’s layouts for other people in the Nick Fury stories in Strange Tales took me straight to the first few that featured finished art by Jim Steranko. The artistic combination created by the two men was not as strong as their individual achievements had been or (especially in the case of Steranko) would become, but it was still amazingly wonderful. Maybe a Kirby/Steranko team was the answer to my problem. I figured that Steranko could even do Stan Lee duty by taking care of the writing of the final dialogue, basing it on what Kirby had roughed in on his layouts. I decided to give this idea some careful thought and to make my final decision after talking with Jack Kirby. Julie Simmons and I flew out to Los Angeles. The movie on the flight was The Verdict. When Paul Newman’s down-and-out lawyer miraculously won out against the powerful forces that were doing their best (or, actually, their worst) to defeat him, the entire plane erupted in applause. That none-too-dignified clapping served to remind me of the power of movies …. and of writing, music, poetry, and comics. But I still had no clue as to how I was going to make Outland the comics story into a strong and independent piece of work that would stand on its own while defiantly stepping outside of the shadow cast by its cinematic cousin. Though I was free to completely ignore the desire of The Ladd Company to have Jack Kirby produce the comic that would promote their movie, I had to admit that I was doing everything that I could to put the pencil in Kirby’s hand and to set him down at his drawing table. When we arrived at the Los Angeles airport, we were met by Julie’s parents. Matty Simmons and his wife had moved to the West Coast after Matty’s co-production duties on National Lampoon’s Animal House had brought them great wealth and made real Matty’s intent of working in the movie business. Matty drove us in his Mercedes Benz to their home in Beverly Hills. The Simmons house was situated next door to Tony Bennett’s. Our meetings with the Ladd Company people and with Jack Kirby were set for the next day. With time to kill, Julie and I decided to use her mother’s car (with the license number Natlamp 2 in tandem with Matty’s Natlamp 1 ) for a drive into downtown Los Angeles. The slight feeling of surreality that began with the knowledge that I was flying out to the West Coast to talk to Jack Kirby was heightened by my sitting behind the wheel of a Mercedes Benz and driving through Beverly Hills past insanely expensive houses inhabited by people that I’d seen often in movies and on television. Moving past Bob Hope’s gigantic homestead nudged that feeling up a few more notches. All these years later, the only thing that I remember about driving through downtown Los Angeles was how surprisingly easy it was to get around. I’d expected to find cars

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everywhere and to be caught in some kind of enormous traffic jam. Compared to the normality of making one’s way around mid-town Manhattan, Los Angeles seemed serene and devoid of traffic. When we returned from our drive, Julie’s parents were ready to take us out to dinner. This presented a problem. Never one to enjoy wearing a suit, I hadn’t packed anything that would be appropriate in an upscale restaurant. The closest thing that I had in my luggage to any kind of jacket was a ratty old black coat that my uncle Bob had given me. I had ideas of popping into a men’s clothing store and acquiring a jacket and a matching pair of pants, but when I put on my uncle’s coat, Matty declared that I looked fine and that we should all head out to the restaurant. The mode of dress of most of the people in the restaurant and the multiple Rolls Royces in front of the place made me certain that I’d be tossed out way before we could be seated. That didn’t happen. After we had ordered, Matty began talking about the glories of the movie business. He told me that if he were my age, he wouldn’t even bother with magazines and publishing; he would go directly into TV and film production. I’ve never really regretted ignoring his advice. Back at the Simmons home after our dinner and conversation, we watched a TV movie about the 1970 Kent State shootings. I was unprepared for the emotional responses to the less-than-great movie from Julie and her mother and for the outright anger that Matty displayed toward the villains of the film—the governor of Ohio and the leader of the National Guard unit that had fired on the students. It seemed strange that a group of people who had such direct knowledge of methods used to influence a mass audience should succumb to the machinations of a cloying version of what had by then become

Kirby and Steranko collaborate on Strange Tales #151 (Dec. 1966). 61

history. I had very definite memories of the real events and, in my college days, had shared the fear held by so many others across the country that those who were in charge of running our government just might be certifiably crazy. That night, I slept in a guest room that also doubled as a storage area and was maybe larger in size than the combination of rooms that made up any of the four floors in our Staten Island house. The next morning, Matty drove us to the Ladd Company offices before heading off to his own space at Universal Studios. He kidded that, in ferrying us to the Ladd Company, he had become the world’s highest-paid chauffeur. On the way to the studio, we passed a coyote on the street outside of the house shared by Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. I remember nothing of the other people in the Ladd office, but I greatly appreciated finding a fellow comics fan among those Hollywood types. Jeff Walker was friendly and outgoing and all for seeing the artwork of Jack Kirby illustrating a comic version of Outland that would appear in successive issues of Heavy Metal. As we were driven to a studio screening room to meet with Kirby and to get a look at the movie, Jeff talked incessantly of Jack Kirby’s art. I thought that maybe, in an attempt to seal the deal, he had gone a bit far in suggesting that Outland might possibly be Kirby’s final comics work. Meeting Jack Kirby was wonderful. Whatever I said to him in way of a greeting was most certainly ordinary and mundane because every gushing thing that I thought of offering to him seemed to be a variation on words that he’d heard a million times before. The thing that I was most aware of as I looked into his eyes was the fact that those eyes were on an equal level to my own. Jack Kirby and I were roughly the same height. The completely unreasonable idea that this man whom I’d admired for years should be eight feet tall and have a profile indistinguishable from that of Steve Rogers had quickly flown by when I became aware of the warmth and kindness and the solid knowledge of his own uniqueness that the man possessed. There was something else, too. Jack Kirby was a tough guy, and he demonstrated

this in the way that is universal among only the real tough guys: he didn’t go out of his way to try to appear to be a tough guy. Years later, Al Williamson would tell me a story of an unarmed Jack Kirby fighting hand-to-hand against a Nazi soldier during World War II. Kirby won. He was a tough guy. Equally tough, but in a very different way, was Jack’s wife Roz. I said my hellos to her, too, and was answered by a familiar twinkle in her eyes. By that time, I’d been married to my wife Cathy for five years or so. I already knew that an artist’s wife becomes an essential part of what he is and what he does. That truth was multiplied many times in the unspoken language that made up the reality of Jack and Roz Kirby. I had a million questions to ask, but we were all quickly ushered into the screening room and told that we would be seeing roughly the first half of the movie in its more-or-less final form. Then we would be driven to another screening room where we would get a look at the rest of Outland in black-and-white with the special effects unfinished. In a much smaller screening room in mid-town Manhattan, I’d already seen a few early examples of those special effects. I was eager to see how those effects looked when integrated into the movie. I also wanted to know how close my script-based visualization of the film had been. With Alien, I had nailed the look of the movie and how it should translate to the comics form. In the case of Outland, I seemed to be flying blind. When the screen went blank and the lights came up, I looked toward Jack and Roz Kirby. “You can draw this,” Roz both asked of and stated to her husband. “Sure,” Jack Kirby said. “Sure.” Outside, in the back of the building, we broke into two small groups. While Julie and Roz (and maybe someone from the Ladd Company) discussed the movie and its possibilities, Jeff Walker, Jack Kirby, and I talked about comics. I managed to tell Kirby of my admiration for his work and to say something that I still hope wasn’t a cliche about what that work had meant to my life. Before too many sentences had passed, we found ourselves talking about the thencurrent state of comic books. It was at that moment that, with a look of disgust, Jack Kirby mentioned his dislike of “knock-letters.” Jeff didn’t seem puzzled by the term, but I—never caring about seeming a bit slow on the uptake when the possibility of learning something presented itself—asked Jack to define “knock-letters.” He told us that he was referring to letters from comics readers that “knocked” the efforts of a comics creator, and he seemed to have been very much aware of every such missive that had ever been sent his way. “But you’re JACK KIRBY,” I thought. “Why would you care what some pimply-faced teenaged comics fan has to say about the merits of your work?” Out loud, I said, “Oh.” The cars that would take us back to the Ladd Company offices arrived, and our talk of the realities of comics creators was cut short. We gathered around a large desk back at the Ladd offices and Jack pulled out a portfolio containing some recent work. Because I could see, by way of my memory, the amazing stuff that Kirby had done over the years, what I observed that day was less than impressive. There were hand-colored character designs that had been done for one of the animation studios. And there were drawings showing super-heroic people in dynamic poses that were not on the same level as the best of what Kirby had done earlier in his life. To demonstrate storytelling ability, Jack had added some relatively recent comics pages from his Pacific Comics work, things that no more than hinted at the wonders seen in decades of unique drawings that had been created by Jack Kirby. I let things ride, telling Jack and Roz and Jeff that we would give some thought to what we’d seen, both in terms of the movie and the contemporary comics artwork of Jack Kirby. Heading in a taxi toward Matty’s office at Universal, Julie and I discussed Kirby and who else we might get to write and draw a

In 1979, Jack adapted drawings for a proposed Lord of Light film and theme park, based on the sci-fi novel by author Roger Zelazny. 62

comics version of Outland. When we stopped at a red light, the young woman who was driving the cab began striking the steering wheel and repeating, “Let me in! Let me in!” Mistakenly believing that we were TV or movie executives trying to find the right person to be a part of some filmed entertainment, the girl turned to Julie and me and told us that she had been in Los Angeles for months in a thus-far unsuccessful attempt to make a living as an actress. While explaining our actual identities and talking further with the girl, Julie took pity on her and gave her Matty’s phone number at Universal. I’ve often wondered over the years if maybe I’ve seen that young woman in TV shows and movies. At Universal, walking toward Matty’s office, we passed a lot of cars parked in spaces that had famous names attached to them. Most of those cars were new and expensive autos, with the exception of an old clunker in a space labeled “ Jon Voight.” Years later, when I saw an episode of Seinfeld that involved an auto supposedly once owned by Jon Voight, I wondered if that particular show’s origins harked back to the rusty conveyance that we’d seen at Universal. Matty was in the midst of a busy day and wasn’t ready to head back to Beverly Hills, so Julie and I walked around the back lot at Universal, seeing a lot of familiar buildings—or the front parts of them, anyway. When we rejoined Matty, he told us that we were heading for a place called Gomillion Studios where we would get a look at the final day’s “rushes” on the movie that he was producing on his own: National Lampoon Goes to the Movies. We sat with younger members of the film’s cast and watched the snippets of film and saw the fine actor Robert Culp really trying hard to rally his fellow actors and make things work. It was more than evident that Culp was alone in his valiant attempt to create a successful movie. Scatman Crothers was visibly perturbed by the inanity of the writing. Robbie Benson could do nothing to improve the situation in which he found himself. The whole thing was a mess, and it was made worse for me when I was invited to the wrap party to be held that very night. What would I say, I wondered, when some cast member eventually asked my thoughts on what I’d seen of the film? I chickened out and got one of the Ladd Company people to change my return flight so that I would be leaving Los Angeles that evening. Back at Matty’s place, I sat beside the pool and placed a phone call to Jim Steranko. Jack Kirby layouts and Jim Steranko finished art seemed to be the way to go. As I began talking to Steranko and explaining things regarding Heavy Metal’s comics version of Outland, I had to stifle laughter when the full silly surreality of sitting poolside at the Beverly Hills home of a movie producer while talking to one of my heroes hit me. That laughter disappeared when Jim Steranko declined the possibility of doing finished art based on Jack Kirby layouts and countered that offer with the idea that he both write and draw Outland all by himself. By the end of the phone call, I had an artist and writer for our Outland. On the red eye flight back to New York (the only time that I’ve ever flown first-class), I decided that my rejection of Jack Kirby was maybe a good thing for Jack and Roz. It would free Kirby to do some work directly for Heavy Metal, a story of his own creation that didn’t have to follow the precedents set down by others. And it would be something both created and owned by Jack Kirby. As a way of explaining my sooner-than-scheduled trip home, I told Julie that I

A page from Steranko’s final version of Outland. ©Jim Steranko.

would be in the HM offices early the next morning getting the ball rolling on Jim Steranko’s Outland and Jack Kirby’s appearance in Heavy Metal. Looking backward from my contemporary vantage point, I’m surprised that I didn’t come up with the idea of having Kirby do the entire art job… but in pencil rather than in the traditional manner of taming those pencils somewhat by having them go through the inking process. I’d admired similar work in pencil that Johnny Craig had done in several of the Warren Creepy and Eerie stories from the 1960s. For Heavy Metal, the brilliant Ernie Colon had drawn a wonderful story in pencil with a corresponding series of overlays done in traditional inked form, simultaneously telling two stories. I’d even tried my hand at such a look in one of my college newspapers in the late 1960s. When I later saw the Jack Kirby story that appeared in penciled form in Streetwise, I thought, “There’s my Outland!”… though the fact exists that, in both versions of that autobiographical tale that I’ve seen, the pages look as if they’ve been stretched side-to-side so that circles become wide ovals. A late-in-life eccentricity of Kirby’s or the fault of someone who scanned those pages? I don’t know. To the surprise of many people (including French publisher Jean Pierre Dionnet), Jim Steranko met each of his successive deadlines on the serialized Outland. Jack Kirby’s appearance as artist/ writer in Heavy Metal joined the long list of those wondrous things that might have been. H 63

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he said. “In this story, life and art imitate each other, and it’s hard to know what is fact and what is fiction, among creators who lived between fantasy and reality and were very much involved in both. I wanted to do justice to these complex characters, to show who these creators are, and write them back into history.” Science Fiction Land, the park, put me in mind of various temporary realities like World’s Fair terrains, and I wondered if Ehrlich was fascinated about reclaiming this lost place of possibility, vivid but never here. “These things were very real to the creators,” he replied. “To the people involved in making the film and building the park, it had to be real to them, and I want to make Science Fiction Land real for the viewer. People like Kirby, and [utopian

Lights On A filmmaker’s quest to uncover the truth of Argo’s story and the way Kirby changed the world

(above) Lord of lightshow: Barry Ira Geller looks back (from the Science Fiction Land documentary). Courtesy of & © Flatbush Pictures (scifilandmovie.com)

(bottom right) Gods and Mad Men: Retro-futurist artist Josh Siegel’s brilliant post-mod design for the new movie poster. See more at http://bigvisual.net/ © Flatbush Pictures

(below) Classified: Actor Michael Parks portraying Jack Kirby, in a scene cut from the film Argo. © Warner Bros. Pictures.

(next page, top) Map of the stars’ home: Kirby’s concept drawing for Science Fiction Land. © Barry Ira Geller.

(next page bottom) Predicting the past: Original newspaper clipping from the Rocky Mountain News, November 30, 1979. © Rocky Mountain News, courtesy Flatbush Pictures.

Every movie fan knows about the scam to smuggle six American hostages out of Iran posing as a film crew, from the real movie made about it, 2013’s “Best Picture,” Argo. And every comic fan knows how they did it—with a full script whose convincing concept designs were drawn by Jack Kirby. Kirby’s images helped sell the seriousness of the sci-fi spectacle that the crew supposedly needed Iran’s “exotic” Near Eastern location for, and these drawings were left over from the most serious of attempts to change the world in a different way: an ill-destined dream to revolutionize filmmaking with an adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s novel Lord of Light (concerning a high-tech prophet’s campaign against a future elite modeled falsely on Hindu gods), and leave its lavish spacey-spiritual sets up as a combined theme-park and laboratory for innovative architectural and cultural ideas, “Science Fiction Land.” This plot failed and its proposal was later used in the hostage-rescue scheme whose success was a secret for 20 years (even from most of its creative team, Kirby included). But now the original version will have a real movie of its own, documentary filmmaker Judd Ehrlich’s Science Fiction Land. I spoke with Ehrlich by phone on May 23, 2013 about his search for the real details of a story that elusively crossed truth and impossibility and deception and hope even before CIA stagecraft was involved, and how he travelled back to find out what happened in a drama whose own players barely knew what was happening the first time. Ehrlich (in-between award-winning other projects) has been working on this film for more than a decade, and a resounding Kickstarter response is expected to finally put his production past the finish line late this year or early next. I wondered what initially interested him, and what has held him for so long. “The project just involves so many different types of people, so many strains in our pop culture, and ideas about who we are as Americans and how we interact with that culture,” 64

Unprecedented SFX were imagined for both movie and park, and Ehrlich aims to simulate scenes and re-create sets. “We’re having a lot of fun playing with what would have been available at that time, in the late 1970s—rather than running to After Effects and the computer to make everything pristine.” For the park, where more than the eye needed convincing, “some trickery was going to be involved,” he adds, for features like magnetic hovercars and monumental holographs. “Even if the tech wasn’t there yet, they were going to make you see it.” Calling back to an earlier topic, Ehrlich pointed out, “World’s Fairs were often facades. Things being not exactly what they seem is a running theme of the Science Fiction Land film. The ‘Canadian Caper’ [hostage rescue] becomes a literal manifestation of this, and Argo is a later, Hollywood interpretation of true events. There are people who view fictionalized versions of history as the way things really happened, and documentaries use plenty of dramatic license too. One reason I’m so interested in making documentaries is that we all have different perspectives and versions of reality. That should be celebrated and looked at, rather then thinking we need to streamline it all to make it ‘fit.’” Kirby’s reality will be explored in ways new to many viewers and perhaps eye-opening even to his most familiar fans. “We’ll show his other work [including earlier godlike conceptions like Galactus] for context, to show his evolution, and we’re working on how to animate [the Lord of Light designs], bring them to life, put them in a 3-D world.” One we’ll all get to travel to perhaps by 2014. The film resonates in the wake of its Academy Award counterpart, but “it has to be right, not kept to an artificial timeframe.” And the more we move into the future, the more relevant this project seems—and the more the past reveals. “As you uncover things in the story, it leads down ten different paths. So many crazy things interconnect in this sort of wild web that we can’t do the typical linear documentary. And the story connects to so many cultural touchstones, it has a huge built-in audience just waiting to see it. That’s all that a filmmaker could want or hope for.” H

architects and conceptualists] Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri were involved, and though there is no Science Fiction Land, their ideas are all around us; they were thinking of certain things decades before anybody else. So even if the dream is not fully realized, it has repercussions.” In an era of renewed millennial expectations for technology’s ability to connect people, the world-bettering intentions of Science Fiction Land reverberate too. “The Lord of Light book was talking about open-source technology, before that term was coined; the idea of making technology of the future available to everybody, to empower many people, not controlled by patent-holders and corporations.” This is important to Ehrlich as a storyteller and fellow creator. “Soon after Science Fiction Land didn’t happen [funding and land deals fell through and various corrupt characters were indicted], EPCOT opened, almost the flipside—on one side, this strain of utopian dreamers, and then this capitalist side. Ironically, the Kirby Universe is now essentially owned by Disney [which has since bought Marvel Comics]. “There would be no Comic-Con, no comic industry, no Marvel blockbuster billion-dollar films without Jack Kirby. Barry [Barry Ira Geller, mastermind of both the Lord of Light film and proposed theme park] understood this, and he approached these geniuses, Fuller, Soleri, Kirby, Ray Bradbury, with reverence. He wasn’t gonna be taking all the money and all the credit.” But he did bring many of his own ideas, and knew who he needed to ignite them and take them beyond even his dreams. Ehrlich “was making this film without Argo for a long time,” he laughed, and feels no need to “set the record straight” on that movie’s storyline—indeed he appreciates the visibility the other project has given his, and he has enough work to do staying true to the times in which Lord of Light would have been made, and the future that Geller was trying to foresee from it.

[To track when the gods return, follow the film’s website at http://scifilandmovie.com/]

TM & © Simon & Kirby Estates.

Foundations The first half of an unpublished Stuntman story (1946). Color by Harry Mendryk on pages 1-2 spread, and by Glenn Whitmore on pages 3-7. The post-war paper glut left a lot of new comics without proper distribution, resulting in quick cancellations. One sad victim was Simon & Kirby’s Stuntman, which made it only two issues at Harvey Comics, with a truncated third issue sent just to subscribers, containing a single story. This is prime S&K superheroics, with all the rubbery Kirby limbs stretched to impossible lengths for the sake of action, and beefy black brush work adding just the right weight to S&K’s lean, lithe figures. The remaining stories stayed unpublished until recently, when TJKC and the Jack Kirby Museum tracked down the art to “Jungle Lord,” which was finally printed in Titan’s Simon & Kirby Superheroes book. The Kirby Museum, whatifkirby.com, and TJKC have also tracked down most of the art from another story, “Terror Island” (featuring the villainous Panda), and proudly present pages 1-7 here. We’re missing pages 8 and 14, so if you have copies of those, please send them in, so we can present the conclusion of this story in a future issue! And if you have any pages for “The Evil Sons of M. LeBlanc” (the other unpublished Stuntman story), send those too! H

to be continued?

Retrospective

Where Kirby Stopped by Glen Gold

ore than any other Silver Age story, the Microverse has always bothered me— maybe because Kirby was on an incredible roll at that point, never leaving concepts alone, but deepening them when he revisited them. The Microverse—a whole new universe!—should have been great. And on its surface, it is great. But something is just plain off about the whole affair, and it’s only now dawning on me what’s wrong—this is the place that Kirby left the Marvel train.

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(below) Splash page original art for Fantastic Four #74 (May 1968), the start of where Kirby stopped.

All images these pages TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Here’s the story: Galactus, starving, looks for the Silver Surfer, who, having developed a conscience, can no longer lead him to destroy worlds. The Surfer hides in the one place no one can find him: the Microverse. An unexpected outcome: this could provide him with unlimited freedom, the thing he so desires, except that it’s ruled by Psycho-Man, who controls emotions. So with the FF, desperate to keep Galactus from eating Earth, on his trail and Psycho-Man waiting to intercept him, this should have been another triumph in the development of the Silver Surfer’s character. It’s not. It’s kind of a mess. Even before we look at the whole plot for these issues, it’s the small things that are a tipoff, beginning with perspective. For a guy whose work is about immediacy, the camera in extreme close-up, Kirby kept making weird choices in the angle from which to tell the story. There are multiple scenes of characters watching other characters through viewers, rather than actually interacting. People keep asking where other people are. Galactus never even faces the FF or the Surfer—he’s never on Earth, but is a face in the sky instead. It’s unclear where everyone is at the end—where does Galactus go, for instance? Well, to eat a planet. But we don’t see his exit. Kirby, in an uncharacteristic mistake of narrative, seems to be seeing the action—most actions of the story, more or less—from the wrong vantage point. This is a repeated problem. In issue #74, for instance, there’s a mysterious missing piece of information. What happened to the Silver Surfer? If you remember the story, you’re saying it’s no mystery—he’s in the Microverse. Which is true, but for one problem—we never see it happening. And it’s unclear exactly how it happens—we’re told about it in weird, unsatisfying waves. And there are moments leading up to his disappearance that suggest we have never gotten the whole story. (An aside, not really part of the article, but: FF #74 page 3, panel 4. What’s going on with the Surfer’s neck? In fact, is that the Surfer or has Kirby drawn the Punisher instead? It sure looks like it.) On page 6 of FF #74, Ben mentions leaving the Surfer “till he gits his moxie back.” On page 7, Ben says goodbye to the Surfer and to Johnny. Got it? He knows where the Surfer just was. And yet, on page 8, he asks the Punisher, “How’s about tellin’ me where the Surfer’s gone to?” Huh? Ben thinks the Surfer is with Johnny, doesn’t he? There must be a missing scene in which the Surfer vanishes. This is only the beginning of a deeper confusion. On page 9, Johnny says the Surfer is “safely hidden” (as if he knows where), and on page 19, Reed refers to the Surfer as being “too well hidden,” but we’ve never seen how Reed knows where the Surfer is, nor even that Galactus is looking for him. With the last line of the issue, Johnny says, “Before he vanished, the Surfer said ‘There are Worlds—Within Worlds!’” I have always read that as something that just happened off-screen, but in re-reading the other weird bits of dialogue, I suspect we’re missing a scene that Lee and Kirby thought was still in the book that explains not only where the Surfer went, but how he went there. For similar reasons, FF #75 is really weird. There’s distraction in the narrative, like Stan was scripting it while two different radios were playing two different ball games. We don’t follow up on Johnny’s comment on the last page of #74, about where the Surfer is. Galactus intuits (he’s Galactus; I’m not asking questions) that the FF know where the Surfer is. But we, the audience, don’t know if the FF know it. That might seem subtle, but it’s a huge deal and an uncharacteristic misfire—usually it’s clear what our heroes are actually protecting, or not. Are they protecting a secret? Or are they only protecting Earth? Reed hasn’t spelled it out. And here’s where the narrative stops making linear sense—only now is the Surfer shown shrinking in size. I’m surprised he hasn’t done it, say, an entire issue ago, like before Johnny said he had disappeared or before Reed mentioned him being hidden. Why now? 74

(above) This caption on page 16 of FF #74 has a different lettering style than the rest of the book; a sure sign of last minute changes.

(above) In FF #75, we see the Surfer hide—an issue after he did it. We’re as confused as Ben (below) in #75.

This wouldn’t be so distracting except that Galactus himself doesn’t fight the FF; for the second issue in a row, he sends surrogates—that fake FF that rises from the sea. I really like that image, and I like the fight scenes, even if Galactus might have better methods of getting the information he wants. By the time the book ends, we find out that no, the FF don’t know where the Surfer is (Johnny’s comment at the end of #74 didn’t seem to ring any bells for Reed for some reason). Now, even given this, #76 could still be an amazing story for us, in that the FF are about to explore a whole new universe. And the Surfer is free, at last, and the FF wants to round him up. Add to that PsychoMan, who very clearly says what he wants: to learn the Surfer’s mission “and take the measure of his power.” To that end, he sends The Indestructible to bring the Surfer to him. Not only that, but the Surfer senses intelligent life and says “I have a GOAL—for I must find it!” And then there’s the Psycho-Man’s ship, right behind him. They’re just about to meet. And then... Well, and then for about five pages, the FF fight that Indestructible thing without making an impact on him. And then on page 18 Galactus decides he’s waited long enough and it’s time to put the bib on with Earth’s picture on it. And then something really really really wrong happens. Page 19—Reed maniacally attacks the Indestructible Android. When I say maniacally, I mean it. Look at his face. How often has he looked like that? Try never. Never in the prior 76 issues of the FF has Reed looked so demented with anger and panic. Reed, who is the brains and the calm and the science of the FF, reverting to kamikaze heroics? That isn’t likely. What happens in response? Something even unlikelier—the Indestructible vanishes (hmm—that seems like a recurrent phenomenon in these issues, what with the Punisher, the fake FF and a lot of other characters leaving without much explanation) at the hand of the Surfer. Wha? Huh? “After eluding you, I returned—to amuse myself at your frustration.” Really? The FF take on an android dispatched to fight the Surfer, not them (really—check it out), who then wipes out the android with a gesture. That’s weird. Then, having seen them fight so well, the Surfer now decides to leave Sub-Atomica and to return to Earth, to Galactus, to do exactly what he said he wouldn’t—find a new world for his former master to eat. Which makes no sense. What’s changed for him? Let’s summarize where we were 5 pages beforehand: the Surfer and Psycho-Man were on a collision course. They were going to meet and each was going to see what made the other tick. The Surfer wasn’t going to give up exploring the Microverse and Psycho-Man wasn’t going to rest until he knew what power he was up against. Then none of that happened. I have a theory. I have no evidence to back it up, so as with my Galactus-eating-Asgard theory [TJKC #59], I’m fine if you want to call it conjecture. I think that when Kirby was midway through FF #76, he got the information that Stan was doing a Silver Surfer book with John Buscema. And I think that whatever he had planned (Psycho-Man’s ability to manipulate emotions colliding with the innocent, recent-toemotions Surfer, causing him to fight with hate, doubt and fear? What would that be like? Would that have somehow led to the Surfer’s origin story?) got throttled down and, head spinning, he decided to back away as best he could. So what if it didn’t make sense? Let Stan dialogue his way out of this. FF #77 is a sad set of fights in which nothing much happens—the Surfer finds Galactus a planet to eat. The FF fight a series of Psycho-Men until Reed shows the real Psycho-Man that there’s this menace (Galactus) out there that the FF need to fight... except they don’t really need to, since Galactus has already eaten another planet and is now sitting half-asleep with the game on, the top three buttons of his tunic undone. The last page is rushed, a ton of exposition, ending with the most awkward threepanel final tier of perhaps the whole FF series. Kirby did some great art and some fine stories after this, but narratively, this set of issues was where the wheels came off. At the same time, Kirby had just launched the Mangog story in Thor, and this, too, was his final great achievement without asterisks in that particular book. I find it poignant that after this, Kirby takes the Thing away again (issues #78 and #79) and that almost nothing happens in either of those issues. And it was the dawning of the random splashes that conveyed nothing. It was almost as if Jack paused to ask himself, “How can I make pages go by without consequence?” H

Unearthed

The Rest of the Story?

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

by David Schwartz

was re-reading Jack Kirby Collector #58, “The Wonder Years” (I can’t tell you how many lunches I’ve spent re-reading old copies of the Jack Kirby Collector) and something caught my eye. Looking at the complete storyboards for the Fantastic Four cartoon, “The Mole Man...” from 1978, I realized Jack seemed to be drawing the storyboards without a script to follow. I worked in animation for a decade during the 1980s and 1990s and the scripts I wrote were always cut up and used by the storyboard artist to show where the dialogue went. This storyboard just has Jack’s notes, the same way that Jack used to leave notes for Stan Lee when working on the Fantastic Four comic. What struck me as odd about this, is that in that same series, Jack storyboarded another episode that was written by someone else. And guess what? That storyboard has the writer’s dialogue under the pictures. Heritage Auctions is selling the original artwork to an episode in the series written by writers other than Stan. Below is an example. Notice how all of the dialogue is included from a pre-existing

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

script. There is none of that in the cartoon presumably written by Stan that’s reprinted in TJKC #58. I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that it’s likely that Jack drew the storyboard included in “The Wonder Years” without working from a script, and that Stan merely filled in dialogue from an already finished storyboard. I don’t know if there’s a way to prove this, but if Stan did write a script, why wasn’t it included on the storyboard the way it was in the other episode of the same show? As an animation writer myself, I can tell you that dialogue is not all there is to writing television animation. Not even close. There is a lot more to writing an animated cartoon than just filling in the dialogue, including outlining the episode, filling in the details of the action throughout the show, etc. I’d be curious as to whether Stan did actually write full scripts for the episodes he’s credited with, or if Jack did the work mostly by himself with Stan just filling in the dialogue later. I wrote animated cartoons for over a decade and the plotting, stage direction, figuring out the proper angles for the action, etc., were all part of the writer’s job description. If Stan just filled in the dialogue after Kirby laid out the story, than in my opinion he was not doing all of the functions expected of a writer in the field. H

NUTZ & BOLTZ

Novel Graphics, Part Two by John Morrow

ontinuing from last issue, here are more examples of the scripting from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s 1978 Silver Surfer Graphic Novel. For the 2011 TwoMorrows book The Stan Lee Universe, Danny Fingeroth traveled to the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center, spending a week exploring Stan’s personal archives, which included materials from the first 20 pages of the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel, with letters from Jack to Stan about the project, Jack’s typewritten notes (in lieu of the type of margin notes he put on pages in the 1960s), plus Stan’s typewritten script pages, and copies of Jack’s pencil art marked up with notations by Stan.

In The Stan Lee Universe, we presented the materials from pages 1, 2, 11, 14, and 15, as well as Jack’s letters to Stan explaining his motivations behind his penciling choices. Last issue we showed pages 3-8, and pages 9-10, 12-13, and 16-17 are presented here. We’ll have the rest of them in a future issue. On the following pages, the top notes are Jack’s, and the bottom ones are Stan’s script. H

All images TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

(above) Jack’s concept drawing for Galactus’ new foil in the 1978 Silver Surfer Graphic Novel. Perhaps still stinging from having the Surfer taken away from him in the 1960s, Kirby went out of his way to document this as his creation, not Stan’s.

79 TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

81 TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

83 TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

INNERVIEW

The Ark Interview Conducted by Paul Duncan, and first published in ARK #33 (1990)

Photo by and courtesy David Folkman.

(right) Jack’s collage for the cover of Jimmy Olsen #138 (June 1971).

PAUL DUNCAN: The first thing I wanted to know was what sort of atmosphere you grew up in. JACK KIRBY: It was very rough. I was born in 1917 and it wasn’t long before that that the immigrants started to pour into New York. My parents came from Austria and

TM & © Jack Kirby Estate.

(below) An early, unfinished Abdul Jones strip, circa 1939.

my surname is Kurtzberg, not Kirby. We lived on New York’s Lower East Side, which was a tenement district filled with people from a variety of countries. Our community was full of people from the same part of Europe. If you kept walking uptown you would find different communities who came from different parts of the world. The immigrants had a tendency to move to where their own kind are, so you had entire districts where people would speak the same language. We lived a pretty poor existence. We had three or four rooms in a tenement and the washtub would be in the kitchen. Conditions were very crowded all the time.

TM & © DC Comics.

(above) Jack and Roz at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1991, the year (and day!) this mag’s editor finally got to meet him.

(Jack Kirby was born in New York City on August 28, 1917 and since then has written, drawn and created hundreds of strips and comics. It is impossible to quantify the enormous contribution Jack Kirby has made to the comics industry. Paul Duncan was driven to Jack’s house near Hollywood by Aimee, and they were immediately made to feel at home with a never-ending stream of drinks and food supplied by Jack’s wife Roz. They were given a guided tour of the house, where every wall was covered in giant pencil, ink and painted artwork of Jack’s favorite characters from his fifty years in the comics business. The true power of Jack’s drawing becomes apparent when his artwork is seen at its original size. Among the pictures on display are some collages (Jack used collage to good effect in Fantastic Four and Thor) for which Jack expressed a fondness. He also had pencil sketches of scenes from his childhood in Depression America and a series of penciled images from The Bible. Jack pointed to a face on the wall and said, “This is God,” and Paul believed him. After the tour, Aimee swam in the pool and played with Jack and Roz’s grandson, whilst Paul sat in Jack’s studio and conducted the following interview. Roz helped fill in any gaps in Jack’s memory. Paul would like to thank Aimee for driving him, Nick Miller for supplying tons of reference material, and especially Roz and Jack Kirby for their kind help and hospitality.)

PAUL: Was there a lot of tension between the people? JACK: Always. At that time there was a lot of animosity between the people of Europe because of the First World War and so on, and all those feelings became sharper when all those nationalities clashed in New York. It was very volatile. I got to know all the nationalities: the Irish and the Germans and so on, in school. We had to fight the Irish every morning, and then play basketball with them later on. PAUL: Did you always fight? JACK: Yes. I had to. We didn’t have a choice. We had to watch out though, and do it away from our mothers. And after the fight we’d have to tidy ourselves up so that we looked presentable. I often took walks because I hated the crowded conditions of the Lower East Side. I just wanted to get away. I used to walk up to 42nd Street to see the cartoonists at a newspaper. I met one called Walter Berndt who would do some work and then play golf in his office. I thought ‘Oh boy! That’s the sort of job I want.’ I went up there regularly to meet the cartoonists and orientated myself to that kind of life. PAUL: Did you always want to draw? JACK: It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to draw cartoons, but I knew that if I tried I would become good at it. I was instinctive and aggressive—everyone was at that time—so if anyone asked I’d say, “I can do it. What’s the job?” You had to be pushy and aggressive to get the job in that environment. You didn’t consider

anyone else. I took on guys that were twice my size without hesitation. I knew where to hit them so that they stayed down.

Cover for Tales of Asgard #1 (Oct. 1968). All the backgrounds figures are inked by Frank Giacoia, but the main Thor figure is inked by Bill Everett.

PAUL: You had a good education. JACK: It’s all a matter of watching other people and learning from that. PAUL: You moved on to work on Betty Boop for the Fleischer Brothers animation studio. JACK: They had a very large studio. I’d draw six Betty Boops and pass them on to the next guy, who’d draw six more and then pass them on to the next guy. One day I suddenly realized that I was working in a factory, which I didn’t like. My father was working in a garment factory and I was working in a cartoon factory, see, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to do what I liked. What sort of cartoons and how many of them should be up to me, I thought. So I began to look for other cartoon work. PAUL: I read somewhere that your mother stopped you from going to Florida when the Fleischer studios moved down there. JACK: That’s right. I always did what my mother wanted. I wanted to go to Hollywood one time, but she stopped me. When I asked her why she said it was because there were a lot of naked women in Hollywood and she didn’t want me to fool around with naked women. So I didn’t go to Hollywood.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

PAUL: But you’re here now. JACK: True, but I’m here legitimately now. She didn’t want me to be like James Cagney, who I thought was a wonderful actor. We loved actors like Cagney and Pat O’Brien, who used to play the fast-talking reporter, and hated the villains like George Raft and Boris Karloff. We took these people on face value when we went to the pictures, even though they were probably all great guys in real life. They probably preferred to drink pop rather than whisky.

premise which is why, I believe, my stories worked.

PAUL: So you were influenced a lot by the movies. JACK: Anything visual. We wanted to escape from the world outside as quickly as possible. I read all the classics at a very early age because I spent a lot of my time in the library. I loved Robin Hood, King Arthur, and all the English classics. If questions were asked in school I’d get up immediately and answer to the amazement of my teachers. I read all the mythologies, and later, in my comics work, I tried to use and add to the mythologies.

PAUL: No matter how grand or imposing the people looked, they had human emotions. JACK: I always thought that it would be presumptuous of me to go beyond people. I’ve given these gods great powers and grand palaces and gardens to live in, but their actions were always human. The Greek and Egyptian legends were the same. Zeus would be angry all the time. He may split a mountain in two, or wipe out an entire continent, but he’d still be angry and feel love for a woman like every other spontaneous human being. The difference was that his actions were superhuman.

PAUL: I love all the Roman, Greek and Norse myths and that’s one of the main aspects of your work that has always appealed to me. Your Fourth World cycle is excellent. JACK: Darkseid, the villain in the Fourth World comics, is interesting because the hero, Orion, is his son. I based that on an old custom where the French and English kings would exchange offspring in order to ensure peace between the two countries. Of course, that’s what Darkseid did with Highfather. So I based all my work on a realistic

PAUL: The myths and legends were the superhero comics, the popular culture, of their day. JACK: I believe they were. Other popular cultures, like horror stories, came from Eastern European people sitting around the campfire at night after a hard day working in the fields. They had to entertain themselves and stories like Count Dracula came out of it. My mother and father used to tell me stories that they heard when they lived in Europe. So I got a rich mixture of Mark Twain at 85

school and peasant stories at home. They were very entertaining and better than going to the movies. Cheaper too! It cost a dime to get in but that was a lot of money in those days—I remember having to fight my old man for a quarter one time.

one seemed to care that much. I see everything in black-and-white, and I draw it in black-and-white. I don’t dance around issues. PAUL: I suppose you heard lots of stories about the Nazis? JACK: Sure. I worked with one fellow who owned a big department store in Berlin with his father and he told me about one day when the Nazis parked a car across the road, got out of the car and just stood outside the door with their hands behind them. My friend was terrified. His father told his chauffeur to drive on, afraid to go into his own store. They went home, packed their bags and came to America. He ended up working for Joe Simon and myself in our studio. I talked to all the refugees coming into the city and that way I got a picture of what was going on in Europe and put it into my work. I even got phone calls from American Nazis, asking me why I drew these stories about Hitler. I’d say that I thought he was a so and so and they’d say they’d wait for me downstairs. There was a big Nazi camp on Long Island and they’d have meetings at Madison Square Garden where the stormtroopers would throw out the cops. They solved the Nazi problem in America later on by grabbing them and drafting them.

PAUL: Money must have been hard to make. JACK: I tried to make money by selling newspapers, but I was lousy at it. I ended up throwing the papers down onto the floor and walking away from them. I didn’t know how to sell them and nobody was interested in buying them. PAUL: After you stopped working in animation you went into newspaper strips. JACK: I did all sorts of things. I remember some one-panel strips called Your Health Comes First where I’d take cures out of medical books and illustrate them; how to cure anything from hives to pimples. Then I did cartoons with editorial comments about the situation developing in Europe because it was around the time that Hitler was grabbing everything he could lay his hands on. I remember I did one about Neville Chamberlain, the English Prime Minister, talking to Hitler, and my boss called me up asking where a squirt like me gets the nerve to make a comment about these people. These were people who were conquering the world. Refugees from every European country were fleeing their homes and coming to America yet, strangely, no

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

PAUL: Most of your stories are about the individual fighting everyone else. At the beginning of your career the hero always had the Government, who were good, backing him up, but in later years the hero seemed to be standing up against authority. JACK: There’s no real question of whether the Government were bad or good. Society decides that. If a guy is going to rob a store, he makes that decision. The cops who are waiting for him don’t decide for him. Society doesn’t decide for him. He knows they are waiting. I thank God that most criminals get caught and we are able to continue our society on a liveable level. PAUL: You always wrote praising the individual, yet the Nazis never saw things that way. JACK: No. They saw the individual as part of the machine, as cogs. And they played rough in order to get their way.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

PAUL: You eventually got drafted into the Army. JACK: Yes. I landed on Omaha Beach ten days after D-Day. When I came back from the War I went back

(above) Pin-up from Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles treasury edition (1976). • (next page) Tiger 21 unused comic strip presentation, circa 1940s. 86

TM & © Jack Kirby Estate.

JACK: I subconsciously retained a lot of those elements in my work when I was dealing with situations that I may actually have encountered. But when it came to thinking about how someone from a different background would think, say someone from the Midwest, I would have to act as if I had come from that background. I’d have to imagine having the money to buy a car, to go out at night and get drunk. I couldn’t really do these things, but I could imagine what I would do had I been in those situations. No matter how outlandish the situations were, the characters would act within the boundaries of my rationale. The best thing about telling stories is injecting yourself into these different situations.

into the comics business and started to create all these new titles. Comics were in a very bad way. PAUL: With Joe Simon, you started and created a lot of romance comics. I don’t think many people appreciate how subtle your work can be. JACK: I just thought that I should do those stories as real as I could. I don’t think they worked as well as they could have and I soon realized I had extended beyond my limitations. Ever since then I’ve made sure that I never went beyond my limitations. PAUL: Your art is renowned for its exaggerated actions which, I think, first appeared in the original Captain America. JACK: Yes. Those were full of large panels and fight scenes of people going through windows and smashing furniture. I always put a lot of action in. The exaggeration came about because I would feel the actions happen to me. I expended all the power and energy I could in carrying out the picture. Of course you can’t hit a picture or anything like that, but I felt I was in those fights, that I was really there.

PAUL: In some ways you’re acting like God in these stories. JACK: I suppose in some way I am—perhaps all storytellers are. I don’t really think so. I’m not putting myself above the other fellow reading my story—I’m trying to communicate with him. And it works because I get letters saying that I’m full of bull and that I don’t know what I’m talking about, even when I think I’m dead right. These letters get printed in the comics so everyone can see the rebuttal. That’s the essence of democracy—there’s always some guy who sees it in a different light. That’s life.

PAUL: Did your body go tense? JACK: Absolutely. I made all the faces and did all the movements. I showed how I would fight—how I would fall over chairs and fly through windows. I would involve myself in those sequences as much as I would involve myself in the other sequences, when the characters were interacting. What I did for the reader was that I never lied to them, just like I’d never lie to any person I met. At the bottom of all my stories is the respect I have for the next guy. I never sell him short. I try to entertain him in a genuine fashion. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do, really. My ideas would progress with each issue, some being more grandiose than others. A lot of characters would be more enriched by these ideas and grew in scope, but they were always real people—real people who lived out the lives I’d given them.

PAUL: The mixture of races and creeds is very noticeable in your work. JACK: All my life I had seen all walks of life, different nationalities, but they weren’t reflected in the comics. That’s one of the reasons I mixed up the nationalities of the Newsboy Legion and all those sort of stories. At that time the newspapers didn’t write about black people. There were no black people being elected. There were no Martin Luther Kings around, see. The only black people I saw were in the Army and on my block. I accepted them like everyone else, but all the orientation was towards white people. I didn’t realize it at the time but I came up with the first black superhero character in comics: The Black Panther.

PAUL: A lot of the work you did was fantastical, but some books, like Young Love, were about real people, the sort of people I assumed you grew up with. 87

PAUL: You started work on a comic of the Sixties TV series The Prisoner, but it never appeared. JACK: It just didn’t work out. In many ways it was an appropriate book for me because it was about the individual trying to break out from the limitations placed on him. There wasn’t any action but it was interesting trying to put a clever psychological ending on it. I gave it my best shot, but it didn’t work out and I moved onto other things. The rights of the individual were always important to me because they were my rights. The politicians on the Lower East Side where I grew up were crooked, but that didn’t mean that I had to grow up that way. At school they told you what were the right things to do, and then you discovered what the world was really like. A child’s thoughts are immature and confined to a district, but when everything becomes unconfined and you start to think in wider dimensions, that’s when I think you mature and become a man. That’s why I think so much of America, because America gives you the chance to do it. If you feel confined by the way people think in New York, then move to Indiana and find out what they are thinking there. It’s a big world and there’s a place for all of us on it. Everyone should try to fulfill their potential and do what they have to do.

editor and publisher, then go out to eat. PAUL: Did you meet all these people, Roz? ROZ KIRBY: I never went out to the offices that much, but I saw the pages Jack would be working on. Sometimes I’d even do a bit of inking, like on Boy Commandos and Green Hornet. JACK: She used to design lingerie when we were dating, so she knew how to handle a brush. I liked to work at night, when no one was around, so that I could be alone with my thoughts. If someone came to visit, then I put my work aside. PAUL: The reason I asked about being lonely is because some artists get worried if there is no response from the audience. JACK: That never worried me. I was only concerned about making a living because I came from that kind of climate. I can go into town and make friends any time I want. I can start a fight or do any damn thing I please. The world is like that for me. I can go over to the hot dog stand and shoot the breeze with anyone who’s around. PAUL: Do you see comics as a serious art medium? JACK: Absolutely. I don’t do anything stupid or invalid in order to make fun of comics.

PAUL: Do you always approach things very spontaneously? JACK: Yes. I always do. I always believe that a gut reaction is a real reaction. You can sit back and think about the plot and the characters, which become more and more convoluted. Then you talk yourself out of it or you make it so convoluted no one knew what was going on. So I always acted spontaneously, and that way I never looked like a fool.

PAUL: In your Fourth World series of comics, you made Superman more vulnerable. Did you have any adverse reaction to that? JACK: Only from DC Comics, who didn’t like me changing the character. They didn’t like the way I’d drawn his head, so they got someone to redraw them. Those sort of things happen in the course of the job. I always give every job everything I can. I never give anyone less than my best, because I couldn’t live with that.

PAUL: When I read your work, I always get a feeling of passion and energy. JACK: That’s right.

PAUL: You moved all the mythology to the present day and played with those concepts, which nobody else has even tried. JACK: There’d be no point in doing mythology unless the reader could relate to it in some way. For instance, what if Merlin was living in the Twentieth Century? Would he be a second-rate magician, or would he try to impress us? How could he impress a sophisticated audience like us? The people in medieval times would be easy to impress.

PAUL: But I always thought it was a pity there were thought balloons slowing it down. JACK: There were all kinds of readers, some of whom were slower than others, so we had to help them along so that they understood it all. Certainly, you’re the type of guy who would get all the meanings and ramifications of the situation immediately, but others would take an hour to work it out. So if we explained everything clearly, we would reach everyone.

PAUL: Do you think of ideas like this all the time? JACK: Yes. I always ask questions. All day, every day. We all live with questions that we never know the answers to. And when we do find an answer, it always leads to another question. I ask questions of the Bible. I don’t think it tells us everything. For some reason we didn’t

PAUL: The danger with heroes is that they act above the law. Did you ever have a moral problem about them doing that? JACK: No, because they always came down on the side of the law. They handed the prisoners over to the cops at the end of the story. Even if it was set on a desert island, they’d find a cop somewhere. PAUL: Did it ever get lonely drawing comics for hours on end? JACK: No, because I always had my own friends, my family and guys to fight and laugh with in the office. We’d go out to lunch together and have fun.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

PAUL: How did you work with editors? JACK: We all knew what we knew and got on with what we thought was our job. My job, as the artist, was to be a salesman. Once the reader picks up one of my comics, they have to keep it in their hands and read it. Every page was balanced and composed so that the reader never got bored. I mixed double-page spreads with crowd scenes, with head shots, with foreshortening. If you had twenty-four pages of people seen from the same angle, no matter how good the story was, you’d bore the reader silly. The editor never pretended it was great literature. He just collected all the cartoons together in one book and facilitated the production. He’s not interested in rewriting the whole damn book. Nobody wants to knock himself out doing his job and do more work than was necessary. I’d turn in my pages at the office, talk to the 88

dig up everything. We only know what has been given to us. When you look at the idea of Noah’s Ark, how big does it have to be in order to carry every animal on the planet? It’d make the Queen Mary look like a rowboat. And what would cause the Earth to flood in the first place?

PAUL: Earlier, you explained all about your versions of Angels, The Horn Of Gabriel and so on, which hang along the walls of your house. They are very (above) “Jericho”, color by Tom Ziuko. (previous page) Sketch in Jack Katz’ copy of the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel. powerful images. JACK: That power comes from you overawed by technology? the Bible itself, because the writing gives me that kind of vision. I don’t JACK: Not really. I’m afraid of us. I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid of think the Bible gives us wisdom. I think it gives us vision. The Bible Oliver North. I’m afraid of the next guy, because he has the power, says that an Angel appears, but it doesn’t answer any practical quesnot the technology. Technology comes out of him. It doesn’t come tions as to what it looks like, which galaxy it came from and so on. out of a warehouse. People don’t realize that they can do whatever We believe the Bible even though we don’t have all the details. they want once they put their mind to it. PAUL: It just struck me that the old myths and legends were often PAUL: Where does your imagination come from? Is it something you the basis for religions. work for, or is it a talent which only you can have? JACK: Of course. And the new religion is the discussion about how JACK: I know I have it but I don’t know how far I can reach for it. many galaxies there are. We don’t know. And each galaxy is a system Eventually, I reach far enough and I grab it. of stars and planets, so anything could be out there. ROZ: I’ve been married to Jack for the forty-seven years he’s been in PAUL: It’s interesting that you should relate religion with space and comics and I ask him the same question and he always says that it the stars. just comes naturally. JACK: I relate religion to science because everyone I talk to, no matter JACK: I just do it. what religion they have, when I ask them where their God is, they PAUL: So when you draw, can you already see the image in your head? reply ‘up there’ and point to the sky. JACK: Yes. I know what has to go where, when it has begun, and PAUL: Do you think religion is more a series of ideas and moral when it is completed, and I won’t do any more than that. And if you codes rather than something concrete? look at my pictures there’s nothing else you can do to them. JACK: No, religion doesn’t help us at all. We defy religion, just as we ROZ: When he was doing the Fourth World books, I asked him how defy laws in order to remain ourselves. What restrains us is the fear did he remember where one book finished and the others started, of being restrained. and he just did. PAUL: And civilization is nothing but a series of restraints. PAUL: Your work creates a sense of awe, something which is missing JACK: The only way to stop a thing is by extreme violence. They in other people’s work. stopped the outlaws in the Wild West by hanging them in the middle JACK: Thank you. of the street, so that everyone could see what would happen to them PAUL: For that reason, I thought you were the perfect artist to do if they broke the law as well. 2001: A Space Odyssey. In today’s world you can only persuade people by showing JACK: Although I admire Kubrick’s film, I didn’t think that what he them. If you show them they’ll believe you. did with the main character at the end, changing him into a PAUL: Your work is very physical. What about the mental side? star-child, was practical or natural. It would be far more practical to JACK: Mental things are physical terms being decided upon. Like take a gene from the brain and regrow the body so that the deciding whether to make an atom bomb or not. You physically star-child could live forever. work on that until it is done. As an aside, I had the atom bomb in PAUL: We already have test-tube babies. comics two years before it was actually done in real life. Tesla was JACK: Yes, so if it’s in someone’s mind to do it, it will happen. 2001 carrying out experiments and I knew he’d succeed in completing it. was about how endless space is and that’s a concept that the human Whatever you decide to do can be achieved. If we haven’t got the mind cannot deal with. We live in an environment where there is an means or technology to do it now, we’ll have it in the future. end to everything. PAUL: Your work has lots of panoramas of cities and machines. Are 89

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PAUL: You’re thinking about these things in literal terms, not as symbolism. JACK: Exactly. Because the Bible makes it all literal. The Bible says that Noah’s Ark and The Flood physically existed, so they have to be thought of in literal terms.

PAUL: I think that even in the future he would be ahead of his time. JACK: There have been storytellers in all times and we know this because their work has survived. What makes the Bible so intriguing is that it has survived thousands of years and will live on for thousands more.

TM & © Time Warner.

PAUL: I think your work will survive in the future too, in the same way that the Greek and Roman and Norse mythologies have lived on. You’ve seen and done many things. Are you pleased with what you’ve achieved? JACK: We all learn to live with our experiences and make a plus out of it. When we reach middle or old age and look back on our lives, we must be able to see that we did a good job, because we can live with that. That’s the most a human being can do. Being human is living through all the bad things you’ve done as well as the good ones. You know what a good meal tastes like, what a good film or book feels like, what a good home is like. That’s very satisfying. I live in a place where I can fulfill all those things and live a damn good life without breaking any laws. So my job is living my life. PAUL: So does your present life involve any drawing? JACK: I think I’ve drawn it all, though I don’t think I’ve written it all. I’m presently writing a novel which I can’t talk about and there’s also a biography being done by a publisher. The Bible drawings are being brought out in limited editions with sculptures of the drawings accompanying them. I enjoy seeing my work appearing in other media. I’ve done comics. If anyone’s done comics, it’s me. I’m out of that now. ROZ: I don’t think Jack could draw the Kubrick’s star-child evolves, Kirby-style, in his 2001: A Space Odyssey adaptation (1976). The scene in the way they draw now. Everyone in movie was bathed in light, which is why Kirby didn’t indicate any dark shadow areas here. today’s comics looks so wholesome and PAUL: We surround ourselves with walls. idealistic. JACK: Yes. JACK: My characters are grittier and more realistic. My inking style is completely different. My generation is passed because we had limitaPAUL: Do you want to go out there? tions which today’s creators have gone beyond. I have values which JACK: Not particularly. I’m living very pleasantly and it wouldn’t were in vogue when I was creating comics and I will not drop them bother me one way or the other. If I was assigned to do it, I’d go for today’s market. Having said that, it is an evolutionary process along. Did you know that I was going to train with Neil Armstrong? which today’s creators must try to progress for the next generation. I was living on Long Island, New York when NASA phoned me up and asked me to draw the astronauts when they were training for the moonshot. I was going to pull sixteen Gs on the machine and do all that stuff. I asked if I was going to go up with them but they said no, so I said to Hell with them. What’s the point of going through all that hard work and not getting the chance to go up as well? ROZ: We always say that he was born before his time. He belongs to a future generation.

PAUL: When you look back, which do you think is the best work you’ve done? JACK: My best work? All of it. I always felt it was as good, if not better, as anyone else’s. It comes from the urge to beat the other guy. I always felt that I could. And I did. PAUL: Thank you very much for your time. JACK: It’s been our pleasure. H 90

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Comments

(You’ve no doubt noticed an addition this issue: FULL-COLOR THROUGHOUT! After years of pinching pennies to keep this mag going, I think I’ve hit on a formula that I hope will allow us to print full-color, keep the cover price the same, and not lose our shirts. We are holding steady right at the number of copies we need to print to make color feasible, so tell all your friends about TJKC, and help us boost our circulation if you want to see it continue. It does require printing overseas, which incurs an extra month for shipping them here by slow boat, but I’ll do my best to get ahead of schedule to make that happen. Speaking of printing: last issue, our regular printer dropped the ball, and a large portion of the print run ended up with the color centerfold split down the middle, and coming loose from the staples. If you got one of those bum copies, please let me know, and we’ll send you a free replacement, while they last. If you’d like to kick in a buck to help cover part of the postage, that’d be much appreciated, but certainly not required. Before we get on to letters, Marv Wolfman recently responded to a reader’s question about a notice in FANTASTIC FOUR #205, which mentioned that #203 was “...originally scheduled for Jack Kirby to draw, and at the last moment (he) got involved with the F.F. cartoon show, and the plot was given to Keith Pollard as a fill-in.” Marv’s memory was that Jack had indeed originally agreed to draw that issue, working from Marv’s full script, but only because he’d known Marv since the age of 13, and he and Roz trusted him. Jack eventually decided he didn’t want to go backward, so didn’t end up drawing it.) The “Kirby Vault” (#59) has a number of things to commend it. First of all, thanks for the terrific Opening Shot. It was inspirational; it’s great to see Steve Bissette’s initiative. As for the charges of Stan bashing, you’ve given enough space to the opposing viewpoint in recent publications (THE WONDER YEARS and MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1970s, in addition to the last 10 or 15 issues of TJKC) to put that accusation to rest. [Oh, just wait! - Ed.] It was good to see Mark Evanier taking exception to some points in THE WONDER YEARS. Conversely, Mike Gartland’s letter was a cop-out. Norris Burroughs’s KIRBY KINETICS and Steven Brower’s KIRBY COLLAGES article are terrific examples of what could make a Kirby magazine great. It’s also good to read Rand

Hoppe’s thoughts on Kirby’s version of Ditko on the moon, and Glen Gold’s reconstruction of THOR #159-69 hearkens back to the heady days of A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE. I have some issues with Arlen Schumer’s use of the word auteur, but thanks to Arlen for riling up so many people to get a discussion going. Aaaargghh! Barry Forshaw, in a column about Kirby, in a magazine about Kirby, in a review of Simon’s MY LIFE IN COMICS, actually puts this into print: “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.” Jack Kirby was a deeper thinker than many of us will ever know. It comes across in some interviews where he feels the freedom to slip the reins of his usual scripted and self-deprecating replies. The questions Barry needs to be asked are, “Balanced?” and “Why would Jack ever have wanted to write such a book? He was busy creating!” And finally, “Why does producing an encyclopedic book about one’s life suggest deep thinking?” If this comparison MUST be made, TJKC has examined a body of work representing MANY lifetimes of ordinary people that prove the reverse was true. And the guy’s NAME is on the cover! Another suggestion for Casting Kirby that’s been discussed online: Henry Kujawa tracked down Reta Shaw (from MARY POPPINS and THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR) as the inspiration for Granny Goodness. Phyllis Diller is far closer a match to Mad Harriet. Michael Hill, Ontario, CANADA Back in the ’80s I had the pleasure of befriending Vince Colletta. He gave me a SPIDER-MAN page with a demonstration on the back of how he would fix Kirby’s faces and women. He explainined how he smoothed and “improved” Jack's work. [left] Jeff Zapata, via the Internet Similar to the white-haired, bearded professor who seemed to discover both the Kree and the Celestial alien races (FANTASTIC FOUR #64 and ETERNALS #1 respectively), here’s another Curious Kirby Coincidence (or maybe just Recurring Kirby Casting): In STRANGE TALES #141, we get a glimpse of the 91

“thinkers” of the E.S.P. Division of S.H.I.E.L.D., chosen because they “have the ability to throw [their] thoughts further than normal.” A few years later, in NEW GODS #1, Kirby introduces us to four humans whose minds were being probed by Darkseid for clues to the “Anti-Life Equation.” Surprisingly, three of them bear a strong resemblance to the earlier S.H.I.E.L.D. thinkers, particularly the red-headed ingenue and the man with the ever-present pipe. (Maybe the older man wore a toupee for his later appearances.) Well, at least now we know why these particular people were chosen by Darkseid... Craig McNamara, Shoreview, MN TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc & DC Comics, respectively.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Writers write. So should you. Send us a letter!

In TJKC #60, page 65, you remarked that you think Stan thought Alicia was Sue in that FF #66 panel. I think you are just misreading Stan’s writing scrawl! I think he wrote “Isn’t SHE too fat?” On all the pages I’ve seen, Stan’s hurried writing was always harder to read than Jack’s. Here’s a fun thing. I’ve noted how many Cap convention and commission drawings Jack seems to have done—far more, it seems to me, than any other character. And compared to the Hulk and maybe the Surfer, there seemed to me comparatively few FF sketches. So, wasting a bit of time I didn’t really have, I went through EVERY issue of TJKC and counted ’em. Cap, the Surfer, Thor, the Hulk, the Thing and the FF. Seemed to me the first 5 were the most frequent—with the FF added just coz I love ’em. I counted only what has been published in TJKC—I know there are others in JKQ, etc., but I had to set some sort of limit. Head shots, group pics and full figures are all counted. Here’s what I got: Captain America : 54 Thing: 32 Hulk: 23 Silver Surfer: 23 Thor: 21 FF (that’s with at least 3 of the FF): 8 Certainly Cap is way out in front as predicted, but I was certain there were many more Hulks than Thing pics! Bzzzt—wrong! And look—about the same volume of Thors, Hulks and Surfers! I would never have guessed the proportions of one to the other would be so close! I wonder if your sampling is indicative of the proportions of what Jack actually did? After 60 TJKCs, surely it must be somewhere similar. Shane Foley, AUSTRALIA

#61 Credits:

I was talking to a very old friend from my old fanzine days and he mentioned that he inked this rejected page from FF #100. His name is Rick Roe. The late Steve Clement from Inter-fan gave him the page to ink. I saw the page when it was printed in the BUYER’S GUIDE years ago, but didn’t know that Rick had inked it. I don’t know who it got sold to, or how it ended up in BUYER’S GUIDE. Rick had seen you printed the page in TJKC #9 [shown at right]. Jim McPherson, Burbank, CA

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! #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.

stand if you are trying to uncover some truth or help the Kirby heirs get their piece of the action, but it really doesn’t seem that way. In particular, I found the article by Arlen Schumer to be pretty uninformative, very anti-Lee in a juvenile sort of way, and certainly not up to the quality of TJKC. I suppose I will continue buying this periodical no matter what, I really do love Kirby’s work that much, but I just wanted to drop a line to tell you my POV. Keep up the generally good work. Dr. Frank Burbrink, New York, NY (I’m very aware that some readers feel we’re “Stan-bashing” in TJKC, as you’re not the only one who’s expressed it. At the same time, I feel an obligation to promote Jack’s contributions wherever possible, and that often means singling out instances where it’s apparent Jack was doing the lion’s share of the work in the collaboration. As editor, I have to choose what articles see print, and which ones don’t, and I try to do so as fairly, and present as much of both sides of the Lee/Kirby controversy, as possible. If I appear to be leaning too far to Kirby’s side, that might be my own bias showing. It is a magazine about Jack, and I honestly feel he’s never gotten his proper level of credit for his creative work, while Stan’s gotten more than his share. And those margin notes are compelling! But I do try to only present Stan in a negative light (if honest criticism can be considered negative; in most cases, I don’t think it is, as long as it’s done respectfully) when making an attempt to set the record straight on credit for Kirby’s contributions. This issue has a couple of articles that I feel are fair, but point out some pretty important details of the Lee/Kirby books that may make people think twice about them. I guess that can be viewed as anti-Stan, but I don’t know any other way to set the record straight.) #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! #65: “ANYTHING GOES AGAIN!” Another potpourri issue, with anything and everything from Jack’s 50-year career!

SPECIAL THANKS TO ALL OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Kevin Ainsworth • Robert Beerbohm Mike Breen • Robert L. Bryant Norris Burroughs • Paul Duncan Judd Ehrlich • Mark Evanier Danny Fingeroth • David Folkman Barry Forshaw • Barry Geller Steve Gerber • Glen Gold • Rand Hoppe Jorge Khoury • Kirk Kimball • Jeremy Kirby Sean Kleefeld • Peter Koch • Tom Kraft Adam McGovern • Harry Mendryk Steve Robertson • David Schwartz Julie Schwartz • Jim Simon Joe Simon Estate • Mike Thibodeaux Roy Thomas • Pete Von Sholly John Workman • Tom Ziuko and of course The Kirby Estate, the Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org), and whatifkirby.com 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.

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I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoy TJKC. I have been a rabid fan of Kirby’s since I was six and bought CAP #201 off of the spinner rack. However, I find that the quality of your publication is seriously undermined by the constant negative tone regarding Stan’s involvement in the Lee & Kirby collaborations. It seems that there is at least one article in every issue pointing out that Stan was the weaker part of the duo and that Jack was the entire creative force. While this may be true (although the evidence provided is pretty scant and often based off of Kirby’s quotes, a random Lee interview, and some marginal notes on a few pages), I feel that constantly putting down Lee really doesn’t enhance any appreciation for Kirby. In fact, criticizing other creators to build up Kirby is pretty weak—Kirby is a giant already and everyone reading this magazine knows that. I can under-

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Just wanted to say hello and thanks to all involved for the great work that you do here with your publications! Been out of the loop for a few years, but am working on catching up on TJKC back issues (and ALTER EGOs as well). I personally love the tabloid format (goes back to my earliest reading days of MARVEL TREASURIES and FAMOUS FIRST EDITIONS) but I do understand the logistics behind reverting to the magazine size. The King left behind such a staggering amount of timeless work. Yet some things still haven’t changed. Reading through some of the issues of TJKC I see that sadly, “DisMarvel” have continued to NOT give credit where credit is due... the very LEAST that they could do, even without spending a few pennies off the billion dollar-plus industry that Jack Kirby has a lot to do with. I am also saddened to find that Stan Lee, who I could never deny deserves his due as part of the Kirby-Lee and Ditko-Lee team, also continues to hog the credit. Would it really kill him (or his and DisMarvel’s lawyers) to properly acknowledge both Kirby and Ditko’s proper credit? Ah well, my best wishes are with Kirby’s family, and I take comfort that at least there are a few of us who know the fuller picture. I am delighted and amazed at how this company has grown, from picking up TJKC #9 off the stands, to even getting a personal call thanking me for my fan letter to same publication. Keep the Kirby Flame Alive! Gethin Lewis, Philadelphia, PA

John Morrow, Editor/Designer/Proofreader Rand Hoppe, Webmaster Tom Ziuko & Glenn Whitmore, Colorists

NEXT ISSUE: #62 is a deluxe, full-color DC ISSUE! Believe it or not, Kirby actually worked longer for DC than Marvel over the years, so here’s a celebration of his best work for the company. (With full-color, you’ll see the Fourth World covered like never before!) There’s a feature-length Kirby

interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, an updated “XNumbers” list of Kirby’s DC assignments, JERRY BOYD’s insights on Kirby’s work, a look at key 1970s events in Kirby’s life and career, galleries of pencil art including FOREVER PEOPLE, OMAC, THE DEMON, and more, plus a new Orion cover inked by MIKE ROYER! Due to Summer travel and our new printing schedule, it ships November 2013.

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 $4.95 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).

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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!

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

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

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“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!

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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

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) $7.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 • Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

NOTE: THIS IS JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50!

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

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!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

JACK KIRBY: WRITER! Examines quirks of Kirby’s wordsmithing, from the FOURTH WORLD to ROMANCE and beyond! Lengthy Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, LARRY LIEBER’s scripting for Jack at 1960s Marvel Comics, RAY ZONE on 3-D work with Kirby, comparing STEVE GERBER’s Destroyer Duck scripts to Jack’s pencils, Kirby’s best promo blurbs, Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $43.95

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

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!

NOTE: THIS IS JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #58!

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES, edited by John Morrow

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

Each book contains over 30 PIECES OF KIRBY ART NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 5

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

(176-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905023 Diamond Order Code: APR043058

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #61

FANTASTIC FOUR FOLLOW-UP to #58’s THE WONDER YEARS! Never-seen FF wraparound cover, interview between FF inkers JOE SINNOTT and DICK AYERS, rare LEE & KIRBY interview, comparison of a Jack and Stan FF story conference to Stan’s final script and Jack’s penciled pages, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, gallery of KIRBY FF ART, pencils from BLACK PANTHER, SILVER SURFER, & more!

(160-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $7.95 ISBN: 9781605490380 • Diamond Order Code: SEP111248

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #60

“Kirby Vault!” Rarities from the “King” of comics: Personal correspondence, private photos, collages, rare Marvelmania art, bootleg album covers, sketches, transcript of a 1969 VISIT TO THE KIRBY HOME (where Jack answers the questions YOU’D ask in ‘69), MARK EVANIER, pencil art from the FOURTH WORLD, CAPTAIN AMERICA, MACHINE MAN, SILVER SURFER GRAPHIC NOVEL, and more!

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!

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! (160-page trade paperback) $19.95 (Digital Edition) $7.95 ISBN: 9781893905559 Diamond Order Code: JAN063367

(120-page Digital Edition) $5.95

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

KIRBY CHECKLIST

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

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

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

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

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

Lists EVERY KIRBY COMIC, BOOK, UNPUBLISHED WORK and more! (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490052 Diamond Order Code: MAR084008

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

Parting Shot

Ambitious new series documenting each decade of comic book history!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1960-64 & The 1980s

JOHN WELLS covers comics in the 1960-64 JFK and Beatles era: DC’s new GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE and multiple earths! LEE and KIRBY at Marvel on FF, SPIDER-MAN, HULK, and X-MEN! BATMAN’s “new look”, Charlton’s BLUE BEETLE, CREEPY #1 & more!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: The 1950s

1960-64: (224-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-045-8 • Out now! 1980s: (288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $41.95 (Digital Edition) $13.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-046-5 • Out now!

(192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $27.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-051-9 • (Digital Edition) $9.95 • Now shipping!

(256-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $40.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 9781605490540 • Ships Aug. 2013

THE STAR*REACH COMPANION

Complete history of the influential 1970s independent comic, featuring work by and interviews with DAVE STEVENS, FRANK BRUNNER, HOWARD CHAYKIN, STEVE LEIALOHA, WALTER SIMONSON, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, KEN STEACY, JOHN WORKMAN, MIKE VOSBURG, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, DAVE SIM, MICHAEL GILBERT, and many others, plus full stories from STAR*REACH and its sister magazine IMAGINE. Cover by CHAYKIN! MATURE READERS ONLY.

KEITH DALLAS documents comics’ 1980s Reagan years: Rise and fall of JIM SHOOTER, FRANK MILLER as comic book superstar, DC’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, MOORE and GAIMAN’s British invasion, ECLIPSE, PACIFIC, FIRST, COMICO, DARK HORSE and more!

BILL SCHELLY tackles comics of the Atomic Era of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley: EC’s TALES OF THE CRYPT, MAD, CARL BARKS’ Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, re-tooling the FLASH in Showcase #4, return of Timely’s CAPTAIN AMERICA, HUMAN TORCH AND SUB-MARINER, FREDRIC WERTHAM’s anti-comics campaign, and more!

THE BEST OF ALTER EGO, VOL. 2

DAN SPIEGLE: A LIFE IN COMIC ART

This sequel to ALTER EGO: THE BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE presents more vintage features from the first super-hero fanzine, begun by JERRY BAILS & ROY THOMAS. Editors ROY THOMAS and BILL SCHELLY reveal undiscovered gems from all 11 original issues published from 1961-78, including features on Hawkman, the Spectre, Blackhawk, the JLA, All Winners Squad, the Heap, an unsold “Tor” newspaper strip by JOE KUBERT, and more!

Documents his 60-year career on DELL and GOLD KEY’S licensed TV and Movie adaptions (LOST IN SPACE, KORAK, MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER, MIGHTY SAMPSON), at DC COMICS (BATMAN, UNKNOWN SOLDIER, TOMAHAWK, JONAH HEX, TEEN TITANS, BLACKHAWK), his CROSSFIRE series for ECLIPSE, DARK HORSE’S INDIANA JONES series and more, with rare artwork, personal photos, and private commission drawings. Written by JOHN COATES.

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $7.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-048-9 • Now shipping!

(104-page trade paperback) $14.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-049-6 • Now shipping!

SUBSCRIBE! • Digital Editions: 3.95 each, or save with a digital subscription (digital editions are included FREE with a print subscription)! • Back Issue, Draw, Alter Ego & Comic Book Collector are now all full-color! • Lower international shipping rates! $

2013 SUBSCRIPTION RATES: (with FREE Digital Editions)

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MODERN MASTERS: CLIFF CHIANG

Spotlights the career of CLIFF CHIANG (artist of DC’s New 52 breakout hit WONDER WOMAN series) through a career-spanning interview, and loads of both iconic and rarely seen artwork from Cliff’s personal files. There’s also an in-depth look into the artist’s work process, and an extensive gallery of commissioned pieces, many in full-color. By CHRIS ARRANT and ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95 (Digital Editions) $5.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-050-2 Now shipping!

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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

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BACK ISSUE! (8 issues)

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DRAW! (4 issues)

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ALTER EGO (8 issues)

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR (4 issues w/Special)

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BRICKJOURNAL (6 issues)

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