Jack Kirby Collector #70

1

82658 00099

8

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SEVENTY 95

All characters TM & © DC Comics.

$10

Contents

THE

KIRBY: ALPHA! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 (first of a two-parter, as Jack takes us to Infinity and back again) FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 (famous Kirby 1sts & The Black Owl)

C o l l e c t o r

ISSUE #70, WINTER 2017

INNERVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 (Jack muses to fans in 1971) TIKI ROOM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16 (Kirby’s extraterrestrial moia art) GALLERY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31 (starting points for Jack) JACK KIRBY MUSEUM PAGE . . . .41 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) KIRBY OBSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . .42 (prophesies and pilots) WELL TAYLORED . . . . . . . . . . . . .44 (the late Stan Taylor makes the case for Kirby on Spider-Man) INSPIRED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 (Kamandi via the Secret City) KIRBY KINETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61 (planting the cosmic seeds) INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY . . . . .64 (Devil’s in the details) TEKNIQUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 (a down-to-Earth look at just how Jack drew) JACK F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 (Mark Evanier moderates the 2016 WonderCon Tribute Panel, with Steve Sherman, Charles Hatfield, and Paul S. Levine) COLLECTOR COMMENTS . . . . . . .92 PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .94 (one final trip to the Tiki Room) Cover inks: MIKE ROYER from Kirby Unleashed Cover color: TOM ZIUKO This issue dedicated to the memory of historian & researcher STAN TAYLOR

COPYRIGHTS: Beautiful Dreamer, Ben Boxer, Big Barda, Big Bear, Black Racer, Buzzard, Captain Marvel, Cyborg, Darkseid, Demon, Desaad, Dr. Canus, Dr. Fate, Esak, Forever People, Granny Goodness, Green Lantern, Guardian, Highfather, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Infinity Man, Jimmy Olsen, Kalibak, Kamandi, Lightray, Losers, Manhunter, Mark Moonrider, Mister Miracle, Mother Box, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, OMAC, Orion, Sandman, Sandy, Scott Free, Serifan, Strange Adventures, Super Powers, Superman, Tuftan, Vykin, Wonder Woman, Young Romance TM & © DC Comics • Alicia Masters, AntMan, Avengers, Big Man, Black Bolt, Bucky, Captain America, Crystal, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Octopus, Eternals, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant Man, Green Goblin, Heimdall, Human Torch, Ikaris, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, Kro, Living Eraser, Magno-Man, Molten Man, Moonboy, Mr. Fantastic, Odin, Peter Parker, Sentinels, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, The Enforcers, Thing, Thor, Thorr, Tinkerer, Vision, Vulture, Wonderman, Young Allies TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Bullwinkle TM & © Jay Ward Productions and Classic Media, Inc. • 2001: A Space Odyssey TM & © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. • Mr. T, Roxie's Raiders and all associated characters TM & © Ruby-Spears Productions • Black Owl, Bullseye, Fighting American, My Date, Pvt. Strong, Silver Spider, Spider Spry, The Fly TM & © Joe Simon and Jack Kirby Estates • The Spider TM & © the respective owner • Bombast, Captain Glory, Chip Hardy, Kamandi of the Caves, Night Glider, Sky Masters, Surf Hunter TM & © Jack Kirby Estate

Man, Eternal, Deviant—the three species since the beginning of time, according to Kirby. Page 4 pencils from Eternals #2 (Aug. 1976).

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 24, No. 70, Winter 2017. Published quarterly by and © TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Single issues: $14 postpaid US ($18 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $45 Economy US, $58 Expedited US, $67 International. Editorial package © TwoMorrows Publishing, a division of TwoMorrows Inc. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All Kirby artwork is © Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors. Views expressed here are those of the respective authors, and not necessarily those of TwoMorrows Publishing or the Jack Kirby Estate. First printing. PRINTED IN CHINA. ISSN 1932-6912

1

Opening Shot

To Infinity... & Back? by editor John Morrow

I

n TJKC #69 and again in this issue, Steve Sherman (Jack’s 1970s assistant) said Kirby taught him a very important lesson:

together in brotherhood and you become one solid force of good.” Jack—whether off the top of his head, or as something he’d previously dwelled on—utilized that advice he gave Steve Sherman, saying “...of course there could be a solid force of evil too. These same people can have equal, evil counterparts.” If left to his own devices, would Jack have eventually used this different perspective to come up with an anti-Infinity Man, linked to a team of Apokolips teens? Perhaps he’d be the physical manifestation of the Anti-Life Equation? Or just maybe, that’s the direction he would’ve ended up going with the Black Racer, a character that so occupied his creative fancy that his muse forced him into New Gods #3, despite originally having an entirely different story in mind for that early issue.

Or for that matter, how about a Jimmy Olsen story that clearly explained the new Newsboys weren’t the sons of the originals, but their clones (something that seemed pretty obvious for a plot thread, and was retconned in after he left DC)? If the Evil Factory were set up

by Apokolips, doesn’t it stand to reason that at some point, Jack would’ve tied in the Cadmus Project or the Hairies as having something to do with New Genesis technology?

These questions remain maddeningly unanswered, leaving us to form our own opinions. But the key is to do like Jack says: look at it from a different perspective.

So here’s the first of two issues focusing on flipped concept themes: “Kirby: Alpha,” followed by next issue’s “Kirby: Omega.” Beginnings and Endings—or if you will, Life and Anti-Life. The two concepts flow together—Jack viewed the loss of free will as equivalent to Death, demonstrating it as early as Captain America (an alpha male) battling the Nazis (the end of freedom), and living the concept himself, risking his life in WWII for it. Less dangerously but just as harrowing in his career, he fought against tyranny in his creative endeavors, with the same credo: You ain’t living if you can’t think and speak for yourself.

When he switched from Marvel to DC in 1970, Jack dreamed of starting a West Coast DC office, with him overseeing a line of books that he’d brainstorm, then hand off to others. It didn’t come to pass during his lifetime, for reasons you’ll read about this issue, but you could argue that DC’s recent move West is the fulfillment of that dream. The “New 52” is sort of the expanded Fourth World series he was shooting for in 1970. Fittingly, the recent series Infinity Man and the Forever People (#1-9, 2014-2015) was part of the New 52, and took a stab at explaining the origins of those characters, which Jack never got around to. But despite its valiant efforts to capture Jack’s spirit, I felt it fell victim to the same problem as the 1988 mini-series, focusing too much on trying to update a classic—by nature, classics hold their value over time, and don’t really need much updating. (DC’s on their new “Rebirth” kick now, getting back more closely to the original versions of their characters. Hopefully Jack’s quintet from Apokolips will likewise eventually get that treatment.)

We’ll take a darker look into the flip-side of creation, at death, destruction, and endings in Kirby’s career—and Kirby’s fascination with occult conspiracies and the paranormal—next issue. ★

“You don’t have to come up with anything new. Just look at things from a different perspective.”

Let’s put that to the test, shall we? There’s a boatload of obvious examples where Jack did this, like the Prisoner- and Star Trek-inspired story arcs in Fantastic Four, and TV’s Sea Hunt as the basis for Jack’s unused Surf Hunter comic strip. But that’s the low-hanging fruit. The more remote, obscure cases are harder to spot, but much more satisfying for research. And what we’ve uncovered in this issue and next, has me more excited about Kirby scholarship than ever.

One of Kirby’s earliest comics was Captain Marvel Adventures #1.

Jack never did another story of the Big Red Cheese after that 1941 issue, but he did bring the Shazam! concept back in the 1970s, albeit from a different perspective—and he did it twice: with Infinity Man and OMAC. Think about it. Both of those characters share the same basic beginning with Captain Marvel: Lesser person/people swap(s) places with a supremely powerful superbeing, to help mankind. Though the Forever People weren’t exactly ordinary (except perhaps in Supertown), they did say a magic word (TAARU!) before becoming Infinity Man, and Brother Eye sent down a metaphorical lightning bolt to transform Buddy Blank into OMAC. It’s the same basic premise as Billy Batson’s schtick, just from a different perspective.

Therein lies a key to understanding the genesis of Kirby’s concepts, as you’ll see throughout this issue and next.

To me, the two pivotal characters in the Fourth World, and the most undeveloped, are Infinity Man (symbolizing life) and the Black Racer (symbolizing death). Did Jack intentionally leave them openended? Did he just never get around to fleshing out such broad concepts? Or did he hesitate because they scared the life out of him? (He was said to be afraid to finish his novel The Horde because he saw things coming true as he wrote it, and was concerned his apocalyptic ending would likewise.)

We never got to see how the Forever People first “became” Infinity Man (imagine how awesome a “Pact-” or “Himon-”style origin story for the Young Gods would’ve been), or what the planet Adon (where the Forever People ended up in their final issue) was like. Why did only Mark Moonrider & Co. have a giant shared Mother Box, while everyone else on New Genesis had the standard iPhone-size, personal model? What did TAARU mean, and when and where did the kids first learn that ritual to summon Infinity Man? Indeed, Jack got sidetracked between Forever People #3 and #11, forgetting to bring Infinity Man back into the book till its final issue, with IM ultimately became a foil to transport his beloved young characters off where no one at DC would tamper with them. Undoubtedly he had more in mind for the character, at least at first, but never got the chance to live it out on the comics page.

In a 1970s interview from the fanzine Train of Thought, the questioner felt that Jack’s message with the Forever People was “join 2

Foundations

Famous Firsts (& 2nds) Compiled by Marvin Taylor, with a tip of the hat to Harry Mendryk and Ray Wyman, Jr.

ere are some firsts and records set by Jack Kirby, as compiled by reader Marvin Taylor. We at TJKC also want to recognize historian Harry Mendryk for his informative article “Simon & Kirby Firsts” (http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby/archives/ 3699) for helping us verify some of Marvin’s information, and Ray Wyman Jr.’s book The Art of Jack Kirby, which accounted for some of these entries.

Fans are encouraged to dispute any of these, as there could be examples that pre-date these which we weren’t aware of:

• than a decade before clones in Jimmy Olsen) • First two-page spread (Captain America Comics #6, 1941—if not the first, they certainly popularized and mastered it)

H

• First time artists names were used on a cover to promote the comic (Adventure Comics #80, Nov. 1942) • First cosmic hero (Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four #48, March 1966) • Most “Captain” characters drawn (seven—can you name them? Try, then see next page*) • First comics wedding (Fantastic Four Annual #3, 1965) • Most #1 issues drawn (100) • First Silver Age team (Challengers of the Unknown, actually created well before publication)

• First romance comic (My Date #1, 1946—or Young Romance #1, 1947, if you think My Date doesn’t qualify) • First cover featuring a real person in cartoon form (Hitler, Captain America Comics #1, 1941) • First Kid Gang (Young Allies #1, 1941—or the Newsboy Legion in Star Spangled Comics #7, 1942, a truer representation of the genre) • First all-new Annual (Fantastic Four Annual #1, 1963) • First use of clones in comics (“The Cadmus Seed” in Alarming Tales #1, 1957, more 3

• First Cold War hero (Fighting American, 1954) • First Vampire in comics (Captain Marvel Adventures #1, 1941) • First Werewolf in comics (Marvel Mystery Comics #14, 1940—see previous page) • First Zombies in comics (Captain America feature in All-Winners Comics #1, 1941, below) • Most covers in a row (Fantastic Four #1-101— until Sergio Aragonés beat him on Groo) • First African-American hero (Black Panther, Fantastic Four #52, July 1966) • Most pages in a year (1158 pages in 1962) • Most pages in a month (142 pages in Sept.

1947) • Most covers published in a year (102 covers in 1964) • Most covers published in a month (11 covers each in Oct. 1976 and Jan. 1977) • Most different titles drawn (well over 100) • First Marvel Silver Age hero (Dr. Droom, Amazing Adventures #1, 1962) • First Mutant heroes (X-Men #1, 1963) • First baby born to heroes (Fantastic Four Annual #6, 1968) • First crossover series (Fourth World, 1970-72, crossing over to five DC titles) • First Big Head character (Dr. Chuda from “Lightnin’ & The Lone Rider,” Famous Funnies #74, 1940) • First floating heads cover (Avengers #9, 1964) • Most characters created (over 1540 including Ruby-Spears animation concepts) • First super-hero graphic novel (Silver Surfer Graphic Novel— Sable isn’t exactly a super-hero, is he?)

Marvin also compiled a list of early Marvel characters that had predecessors with the same name—an example of Jack (or Stan Lee) following Kirby’s advice about looking at things from a different perspective: • Spiderman (a 1938 comic called Little Giant Movie Comics supposedly has a 6page story featuring a character of that name; but the issue’s so rare, we’ve been unable to uncover any art from it) • Dr. Doom • Dr. Strange • Daredevil (the 1941 comic had a blind character named Nitro) • Wonderman • Iron Man • Hulk • Electro • Lizard

• Thing • Hercules • Power Man • Ghost Rider • Destroyer • Sandman • Scorpion • The Owl • Thor • Vulture • Banshee • Captain Marvel • The Angel • The Beast • Cyclops • Marvel Girl • Marvel Boy • Metallo and many more!

And finally, the Latin word “Excelsior” (meaning “Ever Upward”) first came to prominence in an 1841 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (and was later used by Bullwinkle Moose in Season 2, Episode 18 of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, first airing on October 15, 1960).

The Amazing Fantasy #15 quote “With great power comes great responsibility” has its origins dating back to Volatire, who said on May 8, 1793 (translated from French): “They must consider that great responsibility follows inseparably from great power.” It’s also a paraphrase of what was said by Pa Kent in the 1948 Columbia Superman movie serial starring Kirk Alyn: “And because of these great powers, your speed and strength, your x-ray vision and supersensitive hearing, you have a great responsibility.”

So perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun. But Kirby did his best to make some famous firsts. ★ And now we proudly present one of Kirby’s earliest super-hero characters; the Black Owl, from Prize Comics #8 (Jan. 1941). Script and pencils by Kirby, inks

by Kirby or Joe Simon.

* Captains America, Glory, Victory, Storm (The Losers), 3-D, Marvel (Shazam!), and Nice (TV)!

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Innerview

Interview with Jack Kirby

by G.J. O’Hara & John Millinder, originally published in Stan’s Weekly Express #74, April 15, 1971

(next page, top) Jack drew this cartoon announcing the birth of first child Susan on December 6, 1945, at the time Simon & Kirby were working on Stuntman. Shown (l to r) are Alfred Harvey, Joe Simon, and Jack. (next page, bottom) Vince Davis photo of Jack taken at the April 1971 Disneyland Con put on by Jerry O’Hara. (below) 1978 New Year’s greeting book for Jack’s synagogue.

[Editor’s Note: The following was sent to me by Richard Kyle over a decade ago, and sat in my files until I felt I had the right place to run it in TJKC. It was conducted at the midway point of Jack’s Fourth World series; Kirby’s mention that the books were confusing readers—a message that would’ve been conveyed by Carmine Infantino—likely signals he was entering the start of Infantino curtailing the creative freedom Jack had at the beginning of his DC era.

Stan’s Weekly Express (“WE”) was a weekly comics adzine published from 1969 to 1973 by Stanley Blair of Houston, Texas. The following interview was labeled “Part One” when it appeared in issue #74, but collector Ken Stringer says Part Two was not in #75, and Jerry O’Hara can’t recall if it ever ran. If you know the whereabouts of the second part of this interview, we’d be grateful to see it!]

(On February 28, 1971, John and I drove out to Jack’s house in Thousand Oaks, California.

John had interviewed Jack previously the year before, but I had no idea what to expect.

Our main objective was to entice Jack to the Disneyland Convention for all three days, and to make a tape up for the local radio stations in order to get some coverage for the con. We both figured it would be a mere fan-pro meeting of exchanging menial courtesies, and that both parties would inevitably suffer out each other for the span of an hour or so... but we soon learned otherwise.

Jack took us through his spacious abode out onto the back patio by his swimming pool. Behind Jack’s house is a wide-open prairie of hills and gulleys, and John and I commented on his “sparse” surroundings as we began to break the ice. Jack is a very likable guy, and it wasn’t long before he had us at ease and we started discussing everything from politics to art.)

G.J. O’HARA: I think what the trouble is, Jack, parents nowadays just don’t recognize the comic book as a literary achievement.

JACK KIRBY: They never have, and I think that we’re losing a lot of good artists because of that. An artist in comics wants to feel like he is doing something worthy of himself.

Until recently we hardly ever received recognition. I remember back in the ’40s they wanted all of us to draw everything like a photograph. Hell! Why should we be artists if we’re all going to draw alike? That’s our pride— the fact that no two artists will draw the same. We may like each other’s style, but we all strive towards individuality.

JOHN MILLINDER: You really feel then that what you’re doing is important—can the comic book, or rather has the comic book ever been loudly applauded by the literary world?

KIRBY: (grins) Back in WWII, I was getting threatening letters every day from the Nazis, saying they were going to kill me. (shrugs) One guy told me to pick out my favorite lamp post because he was going to hang me from it.

O’HARA: (astonished) You’re kidding me... they actually threatened your life! Did anyone ever try to kill you? Man, I’d have been worried every time I answered the door!

KIRBY: (indifferent) I never took them to heart. Hell, a guy has to overlook that kind of stuff during a war. We 14

are great. We all have an opportunity to speak our mind—we can reach our fans this way.

MILLINDER: Can we expect some good talks from you? I can’t believe that you’re really so involved. I mean, artists always struck me as “being interested” and “expected” to talk on comic-related fields.

KIRBY: We’re all people, right? We’re all ‘human beings’ with ‘human emotions,’ right?

Why shouldn’t I be just as concerned as anybody else? I love kids—I hate to see them being abused or misused as much as anybody else. If a comic book can be of social value— and I definitely feel that it is, or I wouldn’t have stayed in the field this long. There’s other things that I’ve done. I’ve written for television. I feel involved in all the arts; then why shouldn’t we use it? Pictures convey better than anything else. They eye seeks ‘visual’ comprehension—the comic can deliver it.

O’HARA: I’m really pleased with this talk, Jack. Do you mind if we quote you on some of the things we’re talking about? I think your fans would appreciate this sort of an insight.

all got letters like that. Oh sure, some of them hit pretty hard, but you see, we were “involved” then. We believed in what we were doing.

The world was facing a crisis, and if we could hit home by ridiculing Hitler and the Japanese—make some kid laugh, lend strength to some soldier—it wouldn’t have made any difference if they did kill us off.

KIRBY: Do whatever you want. (shrugs) I’m just an average guy like anyone else. If my fans want to know my private views on current topics? That suits me fine.

MILLINDER: Do you feel that way about Vietnam now? I mean, how does the world situation strike you?

MILLINDER: Do you have any new ‘runs’ planned for DC? You’re doing four titles now that are doing tremendously well. Some of it is pretty heavy stuff with this DNA principle, and this ‘skin-cell’ production.

KIRBY: It scares me. The war isn’t like the last one. There’s no real patriotism for it—the world seems to get more intolerable as we go along. There’s a lot of “beautiful” people subject to hardships and— I worry about my kids like everyone else. I wonder what kind of world we’re shaping for them. We’ve got the bomb scare; the war; the pollution; inflation; and I’m damn worried!

KIRBY: We’ve got a lot more planned at DC, and I think fandom will like it. I understand that some of it is confusing to readers—the conception will expand however, and I’m sure the reader will eventually catch up. Like I said, I want to move into a better comic book form.

O’HARA: (quietly) I can’t even watch the news anymore. It gets to me.

O’HARA: I bet Marvel regrets losing you.

KIRBY: Exactly! I run the same gamut. You just don’t know anymore.

KIRBY: That doesn’t concern me. (shrugs) I gave Marvel a lot of material, a lot of ‘new runs.’ It’s up to them what they do. I’m happy to be with DC.

MILLINDER: Do you think kids are different than they were back in the ’40s?

KIRBY: Different? Why? Hell no, they’re not different. Kids are just as beautiful, just as much good Americans as they ever were. Parents don’t give kids enough credit. We can reach kids—sure—when Carmine [Infantino] was on TV the other night they threw a lot of stuff at him about “Poisoning Minds.” Carmine wasn’t prepared for it, so he didn’t have any good arguments. I’d like to write my comics about today’s topics. I’d like to reach the reader and show him the entire picture—drugs above everything else.

O’HARA: I’ve got a bookstore, Jack. I’ve noticed a lot of new DC collectors lately. I’m always being asked for your new titles.

Distribution seems to be terrible in my area. I always thought kids collected series in runs. I’m finding out that a lot of them collect the artists, and not the titles.

KIRBY: I’m glad to hear that. Does a collector want a title, or does he want me? I’m the guy that does the work. I feel good, and I’m appreciative of my acceptance. You refer to me as the “King of Comics.” I thank everybody in fandom that gave me that title—I intend to be deserving of it. I know a lot of good artists and writers that are equally deserving of it. Bill Eisner is a great friend of mine, and our association goes way back to the War when I was in the Army. There’s plenty of guys that I respect; and some that I don’t, either.

O’HARA: Did you see the recent Spider-Man? They touched on the subject kind of lightly. I noticed they didn’t have the “Comics Code Approval” on the cover—does that...?

KIRBY: (disgusted) How do you cover the drug problem and everything else in one issue? Marvel is [expletives here] and I don’t think ‘he’ [ie. Stan Lee] really impressed anybody.

O’HARA: Since we’re really getting pretty hairy now Jack, what can we expect from DC in the future? Does anyone override you or your policies?

MILLINDER: I can’t think of anyone else more deserving, Jack. You are the King!

KIRBY: I’m the Editor, Jerry. I do what I want to; but there’s a lot of problems in trying to make a more “now” comic. I have a few things planned for the early future, but they’re not out for release yet— you’ll be the first to know when they are. I think that these conventions

KIRBY: (quietly) Thank you, John. (sheepishly) I work hard at my work, and I love what I’m doing. I appreciate the praise. ★ 15

Little Humans &

Tiki Room

(below) Jack in the late 1960s, courtesy of Jeremy Kirby.

he most cutting edge artists are experienced archaeologists, digging beneath the loam of mainstream society and uncovering the unique symbols of the collective unconscious that remain buried perpetually from century to century. Over the passage of time, these symbols can morph into startling new forms. Jack Kirby, as a cutting edge artist himself, was no exception to this rule. Indeed, Kirby could very well have been one of the most accomplished archaeologists of the 20th Century.

Jack Kirby uncovered the greatest pantheon of modern day gods since the poets of ancient Greece. Even people who have never heard of Kirby know the names of the mythological beings that erupted from his imagination: Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, The Avengers, The Silver Surfer, The X-Men. All of these characters have recently been transformed into blockbuster Hollywood films, solidifying their hold on the collective unconscious of not just the United States, but

T

16

a fair share of the rest of the world as well.

With the exception of Captain America (created by Jack Kirby and his long-time partner, Joe Simon, during the 1940s), all the characters mentioned above were born while Kirby worked for Marvel Comics in the 1960s.

After parting ways with Marvel at the dawn of the 1970s, Kirby moved to Marvel’s rival, DC Comics, where he created characters who are far more obscure but nonetheless represent the pinnacle of his prolific career: The New Gods, Mister Miracle, The Forever People, The Demon, Kamandi, and OMAC. There were other characters that Kirby produced in that time period as well, but the titles mentioned above are the ones in which Kirby amped up his fascination with the mythological and analyzed the meaning of gods and demons in a deeper way than he’d ever attempted before.

The purpose of this particular article is not to analyze Kirby’s epic sagas, however, but to shine a light on five of his more obscure short stories, plus a single chapter from one of his later super-hero titles produced in the 1980s, and by doing so highlight Kirby’s little known status as a “Tiki artist”—an “extraterrestrial Tiki artist,” to be more specific—as well as his significant contribution to America’s fascination with moia and/or extraterrestrial imagery.

“Tiki Culture,” a microtrend on the ascendency today, is a revivified American subculture that draws heavily upon Polynesian mythology and Tiki art objects in a freewheeling, highly stylized manner that owes more to the imagination of American kitsch than the Polynesian art forms that spawned it. Tiki Art, and what’s now known as “Tiki Culture” in general, originally emerged from the Hawaiiana craze that became so popular in midcentury America. This trend was reflected not only in the Tiki-themed bars and restaurants such as Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s that sprouted up all over America as early as the 1930s, but also in popular music (e.g., the 1950s “Exotica” albums of such

Giant Gods musicians as Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and Arthur Lyman) as well as in television shows such as Adventures in Paradise (1959-1962) and Hawaiian Eye (1959-63).

Though this trend began to wane in the late ’60s, and was almost completely dead within twenty years, by the mid-’90s various pop culture magazines like Juxtapoz and Tiki News—and affiliated “lowbrow” artists such as Shag and Doug Horne—began to revive the discarded Tiki obsession in their pop surrealist paintings, the style of which owe an obvious debt to comic book imagery of the 1950s and ’60s (a period during which, inarguably, Jack Kirby was the reigning king of comic books). One can’t help but notice, after studying many of the paintings that have recently sprung from this resurrected form of American kitsch, that the most common recurring image is that of the moia statues of Easter Island.

The moia statues have held a hypnotic fascination for Americans for a very long time, mainly due to the mystery surrounding their construction. Although speculations and theories are rampant, no one—not even the self-proclaimed experts—know for certain how such monoliths were created by the primitive people who ostensibly lived on the island at the time of their construction. In this sense, the fascination that surrounds the moia statues is similar to the perennial enigmas surrounding Stonehenge in England, the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and UFOs.

The Extraterrestrial Tiki Art of Jack Kirby,

by Robert Guffey

is not interested in science unless it comes wrapped in a rousing good story. While not skimping on the rigors of scientific research, Heyerdahl manages to combine a tale of romance and intrigue with prose that’s both graceful and literate.

This was a unique approach at the time, perhaps even more so today. Most scientists are not able to arouse wonder while also following the rigors of pure research. It was this combination of the rational and the imaginative that aligned perfectly with the schizophrenic attitudes of postwar America.

Heyerdahl’s first success was Kon-Tiki, his 1948 bestseller chronicling his journey to Polynesia in a makeshift raft in order to demonstrate that pre-Columbian South Americans were indeed capable of long sea voyages. Aku-Aku was his follow-up success.

The evocative title, Aku-Aku, is a Polynesian word meaning “guardian spirit.” Though he begins the book by stating that he has no “aku-aku,” by the end of the book Heyerdahl is having a chapterlong conversation with his aku-aku while bathing beneath a waterfall on the island of Rapa Iti. Heyerdahl succeeds in maintaining his scientific skepticism in the face of the natives’ many superstitions; however, one can tell from the final chapter that Heyerdahl is now a little more willing to consider the possibilities of the native viewpoint with regard to the intersection of reality and legend.

It’s this intersection that most fascinated Jack Kirby. If any single motif recurs throughout Kirby’s oeuvre it is the connection between the mundane and the divine. It’s this unique juxtaposition that defined the success of Marvel Comics in the 1960s. At the beginning of the 1960s DC Comics was still the most successful comic book company in the world. Their heroes, such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, were much larger than life. They were one-dimensional characters who lived in fictional cities several levels removed from the real world. Kirby’s early Marvel super-hero stories placed his modern gods in a recognizably authentic world—mostly New York City, where Kirby had lived and worked for much of his life, except for a minor interlude called World War II during which he served under General Patton’s Third Army, Fifth Division—and invested in them genuine human qualities and weaknesses. His gods all had Achilles’ heels, most of them of an emotional nature. The Silver Surfer (as he first appeared in The Fantastic Four, not as he was

“Let us imagine ourselves taking a ten-ton boxcar and turning it upside down, for the wheel was unknown in Polynesia. Next we capsize another boxcar alongside the first one, and tie the two firmly together.

Then we drive twelve full-grown horses into the cars, and after them five large elephants. Now we have got our fifty tons and can begin to pull. We have not merely to move this weight, but drag it for two and a half miles over stony ground without the slightest injury being done to it. Is this impossible without machinery? If so, the oldest inhabitants of Easter Island mastered the impossible […].

Thor Heyerdahl, Aku-Aku, 1958

America’s relationship with the moia statues deepened considerably in 1958 with the publication of Thor Heyerdahl’s bestseller, Aku-Aku. Chapter One, entitled “Detective Off to the End of the World,” begins with the sentence, “I had no aku-aku,” which successfully establishes the sense of exotic mystery that permeates the entire book. Heyerdahl chronicles his real life expedition to Easter Island to uncover the enigmas surrounding not only the statues, but also the long lost people who built them. Newsweek called the book a “fascinating scientific whodunit.” Just from the title of Chapter One alone it is obvious that Heyerdahl is very aware of the pulp conventions of popular entertainment, and frames his story with these conventions in mind. His tale is one half detective story, à la Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and one half H. Rider Haggard lost civilization adventure story, à la King Solomon’s Mines or She. At some point or another Heyerdahl must have realized that the general population 17

reinterpreted by other writers in subsequent books) was a being of pure energy who desperately wanted to know what it was like to be human. The Mighty Thor was an Asgardian god who ended up trapped in the body of a crippled doctor in order to be taught a lesson about humility. The Fantastic Four, despite their outrageous abilities, were very much a dysfunctional family (the type of family that wasn’t even allowed to be portrayed on television shows at that time, as evidenced by such sitcoms as Leave It To Beaver and My Three Sons). The Hulk was a god who simply wanted solitude. Captain America was a god pulled out of time and forced to adjust to a world that was very much alien to him. Iron Man, like Achilles, was a god who could die at any moment thanks to a single physical imperfection (in this case, his weakened heart). The X-Men, a band of persecuted teenage mutants, were a new breed of god, tortured by the terrible Cassandra-like responsibility they bore as the emissaries of the future.

Thor Heyerdahl was fascinated by this juxtaposition of the divine and the mundane as well:

beings is now fully engrained in American consciousness, though it’s not evident how all of these disparate elements became stitched together. On the surface, the connections among them are tenuous at best. But the connections are buried deep in the minds of many Americans, even if they’ve never consciously thought about them before.

Picking up three random issues of Nick Camara’s San Diegobased Tiki Magazine (the tagline on each cover reads, “Celebrating the ‘ISLAND’ Lifestyle”) bears some telltale signs of these connections.

The main logo that appears on the Table of Contents page of each issue is a stylized Easter Island head. Webster’s defines a “Tiki” as “a wooden or stone image of a Polynesian god,” though even this definition is not entirely accurate, as some figures now referred to as “Tikis” were meant to represent ancient ancestors that were considered sacred but were not necessarily “gods.” These three particular issues (Spring/ Summer Vol. 8 No. 1, Spring/Summer Vol. 8 No. 2, and Summer/ Fall Vol. 9 No. 2) contain no less than six separate images melding Tikis (including the moia statues) with extraterrestrial beings.

It’s not clear where the connection between Tikis and extraterrestrials begins. The earliest example I’ve located is from 1948: Donald Wandrei’s strange Lovecraftian novel The Web of Easter Island, which sports an atmospheric, foreboding cover—drawn by an artist named Audrey Johnson—in which the tiny figure of a human being is dwarfed by godlike, stone monoliths. The reason the book is strange is not due to the Lovecraftian elements (by the late ’40s, these weren’t all that unique anymore), but instead due to the rather unconventional, nonlinear story structure of the book. Its kitchen-sink plot melds a standard Lovecraftian narrator with ruminations on such post-World-War-II esoterica as flying saucers, hyperspace, and atomic energy.

According to Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi, this novel was originally written back in 1932 under the title Dead Titan Waken (Lovecraft: A Life). Wandrei tried to sell the book at that time, but was met only with rejections.

Given the presence of the relatively new phenomenon of flying saucers in the plot, one wonders if the explosion of UFO sightings that occurred in the Summer of 1947 inspired Wandrei to dust off the manuscript and rewrite it for the modern age. Wandrei’s novel is, without a doubt, one of the earliest pieces of popular fiction to employ flying saucers as a significant plot point.

(Another is Bernard Newman’s novel The Flying Saucer, synchronistically published around the same time as Wandrei’s novel, i.e., June of 1948, almost a year to the day after Kenneth Arnold made headlines all over the world upon claiming to have witnessed nine flying saucers hovering over Mount Ranier in Washington state, the event that inaugurated the modern era of UFOlogy as we know it today.)

Other examples from American pop culture that connect extraterrestrial imagery with the Easter Island moia statues include Gil Kane’s January 1952 cover for Strange Adventures #16. This cover features a humanoid, red-skinned alien clothed in a flowing purple cape and a skintight yellow costume (which bears on the chest an emerald-colored sunburst symbol) standing at the base of one of the moia statues. The alien is berating a group of what appear to be four Caucasian Americans while thrashing his fists above his bald head: “You have betrayed the secret of Easter Island! Now— await your doom!”

An uncredited 1955 cover painting for William Tenn’s

“From here I had a splendid view of the countryside, and here I should keep dry if it poured rain. For the moment the weather was superb.

The sun was about to descend behind the silhouette of Rano Kao’s steep volcanic wall at the other end of the island, and red, purple, and lilac cloudbanks had rolled up as a screen before the bed of the retiring sungod. Nevertheless the sun managed to thrust some silver rays through and down onto the breakers far away, which slowly and noiselessly moved shoreward in their unceasing attack on the distant corner of the island. The rays of the evening sun filled the foaming crests with gleaming silver, and silvery dust hung in the air at the volcano’s foot. It was a sight for the gods.

And among a multitude of giant gods I sat, a solitary little human being.” (112)

The above is a brief passage from Chapter Five of Aku-Aku, “The Long Ears’ Secret.” The last two sentences of that paragraph reflect Kirby’s macrocosmic/microcosmic point of view about as well as any other piece of prose to which Kirby could have been exposed in the years just prior to the dawn of what is now called “the Marvel Age of Comics” (i.e., the sudden explosion of creativity that emerged from Kirby’s brain beginning in 1961 with the debut of The Fantastic Four and continuing all the way to about 1967 with the creation of a cosmic character called Him, later renamed Adam Warlock). It’s my contention that this explosion occurred only three years after the publication of Aku-Aku for a reason.

Aku-Aku must have had a tremendous impact on Kirby’s imagination, and the evidence is embedded in the work itself.

Like archaeologists, we’ll have to dig a little beneath the surface to find the hidden clues….

The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island “When we began to dig, the impression was no less astonishing. The famous Easter Island heads were large enough already, standing on the slope at the foot of the volcano. But when we dug our way down along the throat, the chest appeared, and under the chest the stomach and arms continued and the whole of the huge body right down to the hips, where long thin fingers with enormous curved nails met under a protruding belly.

Now and then we found both human bones and remains of fires in the strata of earth down the front of the statue. The heads looked quite different from the pictures in encyclopedias, now that they were standing there with bodies and arms. But this uncovering solved none of the problems of Easter Island….”

Thor Heyerdahl, Aku-Aku, 1958

But first, a history lesson in American kitsch: The intersection between what is now called “Tiki Culture” or “Polynesian Pop,” the moia statues of Easter Island, and extraterrestrial 18

science-fiction short story collection entitled Of All Possible Worlds features a pair of futuristic (by 1955 standards) rocket ships launching up from Easter Island while three of the moia statues sit motionless in the foreground.

Then we have Kirby’s initial contribution to this obscure subgenre: an April 1959 short story entitled “The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island” (which appeared in the DC comic book House of Mystery #85).

This story occupies an important niche in Kirby’s oeuvre.

First of all, this appears to be the last story Kirby created for DC Comics during his 1957-59 tenure there before jumping ship and moving to Marvel Comics.

As mentioned before, Kirby does not return to DC Comics until 1970, over ten years later.

Not only does “The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island” mark the end of an era in Kirby’s professional life, it also marks the beginning of a new one. Upon arriving at Marvel in 1959 (at which time the company was going by the name “Atlas”), after having gotten into a heated legal dispute with an editor named Jack Schiff at DC that exiled him from the largest, best-paying comic book company in the world, Kirby discovered that the only work available to him were the science-fiction/horror anthologies editor Stan Lee was in charge of producing. Because of the stringent restrictions placed upon science-fiction/horror comic books at that time due to the newly formed Comics Code Authority, the subject matter for such books were severely limited: nothing too horrific, nothing too “weird,” nothing too creative. Making a commercially successful book within these parameters was difficult, but taking a cue from the recent success of the Japanese blockbuster film Godzilla (1954), Lee decided to devote half of these books to stories featuring “giant monsters.”

No doubt due to Kirby’s dynamic style, Lee assigned as many of these stories as possible to Kirby.

It’s important to note, given Marvel’s continuing commercial success in a culture that often discards pop icons as swiftly as dross, that the three men most associated with the company’s ascent—i.e., Steve Ditko (writer/artist of Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, etc.), Jack Kirby, and Stan Lee—were all at the end of their rope by the twilight of the 1950s. For various reasons, Ditko and Kirby had been exiled from the best-paying markets in town and were now toiling away on these seemingly insignificant monster tales. Lee was unhappy in his position as the yes-man of the company’s owner, Martin Goodman (Lee’s uncle), and was planning to quit soon any way. The short stories produced by Ditko, Kirby and

Lee (as well as Lee’s brother, Larry Lieber) have a paradoxical devil-may-care attitude while also being highly conventional fare restricted by the most stringent censorship codes in operation in any field of artistic endeavor in the United States at that time. One can almost feel the various frustrations of these men playing about on the edges of these chaotic tales about behemoths eating whole cities, and paranormal entities warping the minds of small-minded neer-do-wells.

Kirby’s “The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island” serves as the template for these stories that gave Stan Lee—and, by extension, Atlas Comics—a desperately needed shot in the arm in the final months of the 1950s and the first few months of the 1960s. Since comics historians mostly agree that the germinal seeds of the later “Marvel Universe” can be found in these Atlas short stories, one could say that such seeds can also be found—on a microcosmic scale—in “The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island.”

19

(below) Page 2 of House of Mystery #85 (April 1959), showing Jack’s fascination with featuring moia imagery in his comics stories.

(below) Researchers excavate a moia statue on Easter Island, revealing there was more to them than just a head. How did these enormous, heavy sculptures get moved there and buried, before the days of modern industrial machinery? It’s easy to see why Jack was fascinated by them. (next page) Tales to Astonish #5 splash (Sept. 1959).

“The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island” draws upon elements that Kirby no doubt came across while reading Aku-Aku, which had become a runaway bestseller in the United States only a year before. The composition of Kirby’s cover mirrors the famous cover of Aku-Aku, which features a lone explorer (meant to represent Heyerdahl himself ) confronting one of the impassive moia statues.

The cover of House of Mystery #85 functions as a phantasmagoric, visual sequel to that image. In Kirby’s version, the stone moia is erupting out of the rocky soil while a pair of explorers run away in fear. One of the explorers is screaming, “It’s not just a carved stone face—it’s actually a giant emerging from the ground!”

Until the publication of Aku-Aku, it was not very well known (in fact, it’s not very well known today) that the moia statues of Easter Island are not just heads. They have bodies that extend deep into the earth. This little known detail is described by Heyerdahl in Chapter Two of Aku-Aku, “What Awaited Us at the World’s Navel”: “…when we dug our way down along the throat, the chest appeared, and under the chest the stomach and arms continued and the whole of the huge body right down to the hips, where long thin fingers with enormous curved nails met under a protruding belly.”

It could very well be that this passage partly inspired “The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island” as well as Kirby’s subsequent moia stories. I say “partly” because the notion of the stone heads having bodies buried beneath the earth wouldn’t immediately lead one to the idea of the moia being sentient as well. It could be that this passage from Chapter Four of Aku-Aku, “The Easter Island Giants,” sparked something crucial in Kirby’s imagination as well: “My own comprehension was insufficient to grasp the ancient Easter Island engineering scheme, and I turned resignedly to the native shepherd who stood by me in silence gazing at the abandoned giants which lay about on the plain. “‘Leonardo,’ I said, ‘you are a practical man. Can you tell me how these stone giants could have been carried about in old times?’ “‘They went of themselves,’ Leonardo replied.

“But for his grave, almost reverent air, I should have thought he was joking, for Leonardo was no less civilized, and more intelligent, than the average man in the world outside. “‘But, Leonardo,’ I said, ‘how could they go when they had only heads and bodies and no legs?’

20

“‘They wriggled along like this,’ said Leonardo, and gave a demonstration by working himself along the rock with feet together and stiff knees. ‘How do you think it happened?’ he asked indulgently.

“I was silenced at once, and as I was certainly not the first white man who had shown Leonardo that he had no comprehension whatever of the mystery, it was really quite reasonable that he should accept the practical explanation of his own father and grandfather. The statues had walked of their own accord. Why set up unnecessary problems when the answer was so simple?”

In “The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island,” which appears to have been both penciled and inked by Kirby (something Kirby rarely did, as he preferred others to ink his work in order to have more time to create new stories) a ship full of scientists (just as Thor Heyerdahl himself was a scientist) land on an uncharted island, the most striking feature of which are three “huge, stone heads” that remind one of the professors “of the stone carvings on Easter Island.” They soon discover that the island “only recently emerged from beneath the sea.” No sooner does the leader of the expedition, Prof.

Spears, discover an ancient tablet inscribed with strange hieroglyphics, than the stone monoliths emerge from the soil and begin chasing the seamen. After taking refuge in a cave, Prof. Spears tells his fellow seamen what the hieroglyphics have revealed to him: “Our pals out there are giant stone sentinels, left here by creatures from another planet. This island was once part of the mainland. Centuries ago, a spaceship landed, and the party built a dome-covered base here. They left the inscription, for any who might see it, then departed… and never returned, for some reason. The purpose of the great sentinels was to protect the party from prehistoric beasts… They were powered by starlight to pursue any living thing. Yes, a certain ray from a distant star motivates the things!”

Now that the island has resurfaced, the sentinels have been brought back to life by starlight. Over the course of the next four pages, the scientists watch as one of the sentinels gets into an epic battle with a great blue whale “stranded in the shallows when the island emerged,” escape from the cave, are chased once again by the sentinel, uncover the underground alien base, figure out how to resubmerge the island, then take off in their dinghy as the trio of extraterrestrials sink once again beneath the roiling ocean waves.

In the 21st Century, an age when comic book stories are needlessly drawn out over the course of several dozen issues or more, such economy of storytelling is rather refreshing.

Tiki, Protector of the Artists “TIKI: God of the artists. To demonstrate that Tiki was indeed the muse of many artists, known and unknown, is one of the humble aspirations of this book. He seems to be perfectly suited to be the long needed protector of the artists.”

Sven A. Kirsten, The Book of Tiki, 2004

Before we move on to the second story, we must pause a moment to reconcile the recurrence of the moia statues in these early works with the widely held assumption that Kirby was merely hired to be the illustrator of these stories, all conceived and written by different staff writers at DC and Marvel.

Some of the writing credits on these works are difficult to determine because they seem to have been done using scripts by others that Kirby extensively rewrote (also, in some cases he supplied the underlying plot). At the time, for one person to both draw and be involved in the writing of a story was a rare occurrence in the DC offices—most editors wanted the process to work as follows: writers would write scripts, artists would draw them, and never would the job descriptions meet. There were, in fact, almost no writer-artists at the company during that entire decade.

Kirby was one of the very few exceptions, and Jack Schiff (below), who edited most of this material, got into arguments with other DC editors who didn’t like the precedent. Nonetheless, at least until their final squabble, Schiff thought Kirby’s track record made him something more than just a guy who should be slavishly illustrating scripts by others.

Kirby was a prolific suggester of new stories, new titles, new concepts.

At the time he was especially eager to sell more work because he wasn’t getting as much as he needed (there was a shortage of openings in the industry as a lot of publishers had collapsed during the aforementioned attempts to ban or censor comic books), and he inundated Schiff with plots and ideas. Sometimes Schiff had him go off and write a script; other times, he said, in effect, “I like that one but I’m committed to give work to my guys.” He had a little talent pool of freelance writers that included Dave Wood, France “Eddie” Herron, Bill Finger, and Robert Bernstein. Kirby barely knew Finger, but the other three were all good friends of his so he didn’t object to them scripting one of his storylines as long as he got the job of drawing it. In the process he would often do rewrites on their scripts, as he almost always did—regardless of the editor’s wishes—when he worked with writers besides himself. Schiff allowed and apparently encouraged this.

Despite the lack of proper credits during this period of comic book history, a dash of deductive thinking can lead us to reasonable conclusions. In this case, the reasonable conclusion is that the recurrence of the Tiki and moia statues in Kirby’s stories can be explained by the fact that Kirby wrote most of his comic book stories, including those that were—due to office politics—credited to editors like Stan Lee.

in origin. In this case, however, they haven’t been built to protect an alien base from harm, but instead are themselves the vanguard of an invading extraterrestrial army from a planet called “Lithodia Rex.” For some reason, these aliens disguised as Polynesian statues speak English to each other while alone, thus enabling our nameless protagonist (a pilot who crash-landed on the island) to overhear their invasion plans: “Even if we have to wait another several centuries, we know that eventually we’ll receive our orders to invade the Earthlings— and take over their planet!” “What will we do with the Earthlings after we conquer them?” “We’ll enslave them! …And turn Earth into a colony of our ‘mother’ planet, Lithodia Rex!” Unfortunately for our protagonist, the aliens notice his eavesdropping and chase him across the island, all the way to the beach.

The pilot stumbles across a native boat and uses it to escape. Upon reaching civilization, the pilot runs to the American military and tries to warn them of the danger: “That’s the story! Just the way it happened! I guess you Navy boys’ll start shelling Easter Island—and destroy those alien creatures—right away!” The Navy, understandably, doesn’t believe the pilot’s story and refuses to bomb the moia

I Was Trapped by the Things on Easter Island!

Kirby’s second moia story, “I Was Trapped by the Things on Easter Island!,” appeared in Tales to Astonish #5 (Sept. 1959). Kirby’s cover and splash page for this story mirror both his previous moia story as well as the cover of Aku-Aku. A lone explorer runs in fear from a trio of Easter Island statues as they emerge from the earth. As in the previous stories, we learn that these statues are extraterrestrial 21

statues on the basis of his outrageous testimony.

Undeterred, the pilot “went to the big brass of other outposts in the Pacific… but the result was the same… always the same! […] Finally, I gave up! It was useless—nobody would believe my story! I went back to my home… located on one of the remote Pacific islands…”.

Defeated, he drifts off to sleep while trying to convince himself that his bizarre experience was the product of a mere hallucination.

Just as we began with the pilot eavesdropping on the aliens, the story ends with one of the moia statues peering through the pilot’s bedroom window and eavesdropping on his exhausted mutterings. We next see the statues walking back into the sea while one of them says, “We can go now! We are safe! He was not believed! Let us return to our island and wait! Whether it be one more day, or another thousand years… when we receive the signal… we must be… ready!”

Representative of Kirby’s obsession with the melding of reality and fantasy, the construction of this particular story may have been influenced not only by the rigorous scientific research of Thor Heyerdahl, but also by a famous writer of fantasy fiction. There are considerable similarities between “I Was Trapped by the Things on Easter Island!” and one of H.P. Lovecraft’s earliest stories, “Dagon.”

Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” stories revolve around the notion that monstrous extraterrestrial beings migrated to Earth millennia ago and have been mistakenly worshipped as gods ever since. “Dagon,” considered to be the first of these stories, debuted in the November 1919 issue of an amateur publication called The Vagrant, and was subsequently republished in the October 1923 issue of Weird Tales. It was also included in Lovecraft’s first posthumous collection of short stories, The Outsider and Others, in 1939. Jack Kirby would have been twenty-two years old at the time of the book’s publication. Since Kirby was a voracious reader of pulp fiction, it’s not at all unlikely that he was conversant with the works of Lovecraft, including “Dagon.”

Here Comes… Thorr the Unbelievable “Universal pandemonium” is a fairly accurate description of the main extraterrestrial danger posed in Kirby’s next moia story, which further connects Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku to Kirby’s imagination in a very straightforward way. This February 1961 story from Tales to Astonish #16, “Here Comes… Thorr the Unbelievable,” takes place on another Easter Island stand-in. (Kirby’s first moia tale takes place on “Giant Island” in the Pacific Ocean, while the second actually does take place on Easter Island.) In “Thorr” the island is unnamed. The main character, an archaeologist named Linus, describes it as “a newly discovered island in the South Pacific.” He further describes it as a “volcanic island which was reported to contain strange stone statues.”

The main purpose of the expedition is to examine these statues.

Like the inhabitants of Easter Island, the “tribe of friendly natives” who live near the statues aren’t certain how they were constructed. “We know only that they have been here for ages,” says the 22

native chieftain, “…since before our first ancestors came to this island.”

Linus gains permission from the chieftain to dig at the base of one of the statues. It doesn’t take long for his pickaxe to strike “something hard—and metallic.”

It’s a door made of a metal “superior to steel.”

Linus opens this door and finds a “small, dark chamber” inside. Linus’ presence in the chamber activates “a flash of electro-magnetic current,” leading the professor to deduce that he’s accidentally set off “an electric eye.” Linus then hears his wife, Helen, screaming outside the weird chamber.

For some reason Helen has accompanied her husband on this expedition despite the fact that she despises the field of archaeology and openly wishes she had married “an exciting man—a private detective, or a soldier of fortune.” As in many of the science-fiction/ horror stories Kirby produced for Atlas during this period, the protagonist of “Thorr” is a passive scientist married to a shrew of a wife whose main purpose is to belittle her husband until the very end of the tale when said scientist proves his masculinity by saving the world in an improbably clever manner.

(One often wonders why these scientists aren’t applying for divorce by the end of the story instead of being overjoyed that they’ve won back the dubious respect of these harridans.) Since such man-hating spouses do not appear in other Kirby stories, one wonders if this element was a weak attempt at some form of character development on the part of the dialogue writer, which most of the times (at least with regard to these Atlas short stories) was probably the aforementioned Larry Lieber.

While in Kirby’s earlier moia stories the connection between the fantastical aspects and Thor Heyerdahl’s real life expedition (as chronicled in Aku-Aku) was implicit at best, here it becomes explicit with the christening of the central alien “Thorr,” a not-so-subtle homage to Heyerdahl and his work. In subsequent stories, this connection grows even more explicit.

aliens that will become so synonymous with the word “extraterrestrial” over twenty years later, in the 1980s, thanks to the cover painting of Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book Communion: “My name is of no importance! But I can tell you something so fantastic that you would never believe it! And yet it is the truth! Every word of it! Those huge stone figures you see… they are not statues! They are slumbering creatures… creatures from another world!”

The native further reveals that, hidden somewhere on the island, is a “parchment, for which I have long been searching!” It “contains words which have the power to bring the heads back to life!” According to the native, he who utters these words will have total control over the powerful alien creatures.

The idea of this “hidden parchment” no doubt came from Thor Heyerdahl’s search for the rare and valuable “rongo-rongo tablets,” parchments inscribed with ancient hieroglyphics that the natives on Easter Island guarded with their lives. Heyerdahl describes his

Back from the Dead!

In Tales of Suspense #28 (Apr. 1962), Kirby published his fourth moia story. In “Back from the Dead!” the storytelling has evolved to the point where the main character is actually granted a surname. Somewhere in South America, criminal Harry Dawes is on the run from the police. He makes his escape in a speed boat: “I’ll head for Easter Island! Nothing there but stone statues!

It’ll be a perfect place to hide out!”

Unfortunately, Harry’s boat soon runs out of fuel, and he’s forced to swim the rest of the way to the island, leaving him with no escape route. At the bottom of page 2, he encounters the moia statues for the first time: “These must be the famous stone heads! It’s strange that no one knows who built them—or how they got here!”

In story after story, Kirby clearly wants the reader to appreciate the importance of this fact.

Harry encounters a lone native whose bald, oversized head somewhat resembles the gray 23

(previous page, bottom) Historian Nicholas Caputo discovered that while the Thunder God’s name was misspelled at the end of his debut in Journey Into Mystery #83, the last panel was originally very different. Apparently keeping Thor as a continuing feature was a last-minute decision

by Martin Goodman, based on sales of other super-hero series at Marvel. (below) This Tales of Suspense #28 (April 1962) scene is directly inspired by Aku-Aku.

zoo.” Harry reacts with terror, but the aliens tell him not to worry because he “will be given a clean cage and be well taken care of.” Harry runs toward the beach and the bulbous-headed native.

He begs the old man to help him, but to no avail.

The native removes the flesh from him face, revealing why his head is so unusually large.

Beneath the synthetic skin lies his true face: That of the stone men from another world. “…as you can see,” says the strange old man, “it is I who am captain of the stone men!”

The final caption reads: “And so Harry Dawes learns his last lesson—that unearthly creatures come in many sizes… and retribution, in many forms!”

It’s interesting to note the tagline that appears in the bottom margin of the story’s final page, a prophetic sign of the transition between the “Monster Age” of the Atlas Comics and the “Marvel Age” that will soon revolutionize the field: “You’ve never read a comic like ‘The Fantastic Four’! Get your spine-tingling copy today!”

The notion that one could buy a copy of Tales of Suspense #28 and Fantastic Four #1 at the same time is portentous, as it symbolizes the end of the old era and the beginning of the new.

search in great detail in Chapter Eight of Aku-Aku, “Into the Secret Caves.” This quest takes Heyerdahl into the claustrophobia-inducing depths of the subterranean tunnels that run throughout the island’s interior. Similarly, “Harry and the strange old native scour the entire island, looking for the mysterious parchment….” Just like Heyerdahl, Harry at last locates the treasure hidden “in a remote cave.” Harry hands the parchment to the native, not believing it will bring the statues to life. But once the ancient words are uttered, three of the statues do indeed pull themselves out of the ground, revealing that the heads have fully formed bodies obscured beneath the earth.

Shaking off his astonishment, Harry naturally tries to recruit the creatures into organized crime: “You’re going to be my new mob! With you backing my play, I’ll be able to commit the greatest crimes of all time! I’ll defy the police—the army—everyone!”

One of the moia statues replies, “Fool! Do you think creatures as mighty as we would serve a puny earthling?”

The idea that the creatures would be compelled to serve the one who resurrected them was nothing but “a hollow legend” the aliens themselves started “so that somebody would bring us back to life!”

At this point one of the moia statues conveniently provides Harry with a detailed autobiography. In a flashback, we see a classic 1950sstyle flying saucer (colored blood-red) hovering in outer space while beaming a cluster of moia stone men down to Earth: “We were flying past Earth when our ship developed engine trouble! Our captain did not know if he could land us safely, so he ordered us to bail out! And so we came to Easter Isle!”

We see the three moia statues burying themselves into the soil and placing themselves in “suspended animation.”

Moia alien #1: “‘But, by the time our captain arrived, he had forgotten the magic incantation to revive us!”

Moia alien #2: “Fortunately, it had been our habit to write the words on a parchment and hide it as a safety measure!”

Moia alien #3: “But we hid it too well!

No one was able to find it for all these years— until now!”

Harry asks the aliens what they intend to do now that they’re alive again. Surprisingly, for once the moia statues do not want to take over the Earth. They just want to go home, which would be fine with Harry except for the fact that they want to take him with them as “an interesting specimen for [their] intergalactic

The Stone Men from Saturn!

This transition is symbolized even more concretely by Kirby’s fifth moia story, “Thor the Mighty! and The Stone Men from Saturn!” from Journey into Mystery #83 (August 1962). In this story Kirby introduces a character who will become one of the major staples of the Marvel Universe, the Mighty Thor. Of course, neither Kirby nor Stan Lee could legitimately proclaim himself as the “creator” of Thor since the character is a figure from Norse mythology that’s well over two thousand years old; however, this particular take on the character was unique, and has since gone on to become the focus of several recent major motion pictures.

Kirby was well-versed in mythology from the very beginning of his career. Thor’s origin story pulls together a number of Kirby’s private obsessions that are present in many of his previous stories, some of which go back as far as the 1940s. For example, Kirby first created a “modern” incarnation of Thor in his June 1942 Sandman story entitled “The Villain from Valhalla” (which appeared in Adventure Comics #75). Though that version of Thor was a villain, nonetheless it demonstrates Kirby’s familiarity with Norse mythology twenty years prior to the publication of Journey into Mystery #83.

The first appearance of Thor in what was rapidly becoming “the Marvel Universe” employs other Kirby motifs, including the use of moia statues as characters. In this origin story, Thor’s first adversary is an invading army of “Stone Men from Saturn,” all of whom are clear variations on the living moia statues we’ve 24

seen in previous Kirby tales. Once again these Stone Men wish to take over the Earth, and this time are stopped by a crippled American physician named Dr. Donald Blake (whose name might very well have been inspired by the main character of Jack Arnold’s 1958 horror/science-fiction film Monster on the Campus, starring Arthur Franz as a very Hulk-like character named “Dr. Donald Blake” who periodically transforms into a raging Neanderthal due to a scientific experiment gone awry).

While on vacation in Norway, the homeland of Thor Heyerdahl, Dr. Blake sees the stone invaders colluding with one another in an isolated forest. Attempting to flee the alien menace, Dr. Blake hides in a “dank” and “gloomy” cave in which “no human has set foot […] for ages.” The physician uncovers a “secret chamber” in which he uncovers a lost treasure: The hammer of Thor, which bestows upon Blake the power of the Norse God of Thunder, enabling the otherwise helpless mortal the ability to stave off the alien incursion.

This is very similar to how Thor Heyerdahl uncovered various lost treasures, including the aforementioned rongo-rongo tablets, from “secret chambers” located in ancient caves beneath Easter Island. It seems evident that Kirby’s imagination, having been inspired by Heyerdahl’s Easter Island expedition four times previously, connected Heyerdahl’s first name with the Norse legends of the scientist’s homeland and overlapped them with seemingly incongruous elements from Polynesian lore. Max Ernst once defined surrealism as the marriage of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table, and Kirby’s unlikely marriage of the Norse God of Thunder and the moia statues is no less surreal at its core. Meanwhile, this thirteenpage origin story manages to also weave in flying saucers, disintegrator rays, atomic force fields, weather control, ineffectual NATO jets, a virtual reality hologram of a giant flying reptile, and an extraterrestrial robot called a “mechano-monster.” For twelve cents, kids really got their money’s worth in 1962.

It’s important to note that, in the end, Thor manages to expel the Stone Men from the Earth through a mistaken impression. The Stone Men assume there are more warriors on Earth like Thor, and therefore decide to flee “this accursed planet.” This plot device, of an invasion being curtailed via a mistaken impression on the part of the aliens, is also used in Fantastic Four #2 as well as in some of the earlier Atlas sciencefiction/horror stories.

Without any apparent knowledge of Jack Kirby’s moia stories or the

debut of the Mighty Thor, Tiki historian Sven A. Kirsten draws his own connection between Norse and Polynesian mythology in his 2004 Taschen book, Tiki Style: [In 1937] Thor [Heyerdahl] was inspired to shift his object of study from snails and giant poisonous centipedes to the origin of the Polynesian race. He had noticed the likeness of the Marquesan stone tikis and petroglyphs to Incan idols in Peru, and for the next ten years he worked on his theory that the Pre-Incan high priest and sun-king Kon-Tici Viracocha, who had been forced to flee Peru by a warring chieftain, was identical with the Polynesian ancestor god, Tiki. Encountering nothing but scournful resistance from archeologists, ethnologists, linguists, and sociologists, Thor set out to prove his theory in practice. He built a pre-Columbian balsa log raft,

25

(previous page, top) Tales of Suspense #28 signaled the end of the Atlas Monster era, and the start of Marvel super-heroes. (below) Jack’s most famous Tikis are the ones from Thor’s debut in Journey Into Mystery #83 (Aug. 1962).

without using a single spike, nail, or wire rope, named it “Kon-Tiki,” and proceeded to let himself and his five Scandinavian crewmen drift on the Humboldt Current from Peru to Polynesia.

After only three months on the open sea, the Kon-Tiki succeeded in reaching the Polynesian shores. The book about the voyage entitled The Kon-Tiki Expedition was first published in Norway in 1948, where it received unfavorable reviews, the whole endeavor being likened to “going over the Niagara Falls in a barrel.” But this criticism did not deter the public’s interest in the intrepid undertaking.

Shortly after publication in England and America in 1950, it became evident that the publishers had a bestseller on their hands. Eventually Kon-Tiki was translated into sixty different languages— the only book other than the Bible to reach this wide distribution. The film shot on the voyage met a similar fate, first being rejected by American distributors because of its technical flaws.

Nevertheless it received the 1951 Academy Award for best documentary and was seen by millions of people. The world had just come out of the trauma of the Second World War and was longing for pacifist adventure.

The unprecedented worldwide KonTiki fever fueled America’s fascination with Polynesian culture. Though “Tiki style” as a term was not in use during the ’50s and ’60s, the vernacular “Kon-Tiki style” was a popular way to refer to Polynesian architecture. Thor and Tiki, the Norse god of thunder and the Polynesian god of the sun, had united to become popular heroes.

Terror on the Island of Living Stone!

It seems as if this culmination of Kirby’s Aku-Aku obsession exorcised the image of the moia from his imagination for several decades, as they do not return to Kirby’s drawing board* until the November 1985 issue of Super Powers, a six-issue limited series featuring the major characters of the DC Universe such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc. This series was created in collaboration with writer Paul Kupperberg, one of the rare times Kirby willingly worked with another writer in the latter half of his career. In the third issue of the series, entitled “Time Upon Time Upon Time” (the cover features the far more Kirbyesque title, “Terror on the Island of Living Stone!”), a trio of heroes—Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and Dr. Fate—travel back nine hundred years into the past of Easter Island to fight the vanguard of an alien race called the M’MTNEK who resemble the moia statues that have not yet been created. In this variation, the moia aliens have imprisoned the inhabitants of the island, which they plan to use as a base from which to

control the entire world. The juxtaposition of the “primitive” and the futuristic that always occurs in Kirby’s moia tales is perfectly encapsulated at the top of page 14 where we see two disparate images placed side by side: On the left we see an idyllic image of the Easter Island natives going about their simple lives amidst thatched huts, while on the right we see a domed flying saucer decorated by Kirby’s seemingly random geometric shapes—his shorthand for “alienness.”

Inevitably, our trio of heroes subvert the nefarious plans of the M’MTNEK by using Dr. Fate’s magical abilities to transform them into immobile statues.

Green Lantern: “Amazing! You realize what you’ve done, don’t you, Dr. Fate?”

Dr. Fate: “I have merely eliminated a threat to our world’s past,

* See the end of this article for one other we found! — Editor.

26

my friend.”

Wonder Woman: “Uh-huh… and created one of the world’s greatest mysteries in the process!” (And, if Kirby’s earlier stories are to be believed, unknowingly created a menace to escaped convicts and seafaring scientists of the late 1950s and early ’60s.)

Though this 1985 Super Powers tale marks the final time that Jack Kirby drew the moia statues, the influence of his peculiar version of the enigmatic and legendary Easter Island icons continue to resonate in other comic books neither written nor drawn by Kirby. (left & right) Super Powers II, #3 pencils (Nov. 1985). For his final DC work, Jack came back to a familiar motif.

Phantoms of the Past Artists create what they care about, what they love, what they want others to see as well. The link between humans and god-like aliens, the mundane and the metaphysical, is a theme that spoke to Kirby. On one level this theme can be interpreted metaphorically. Clearly, Kirby believed that, similar to gods, no human being is truly mortal. “My characters never die,” Kirby said during his April, 1990 Hour 25 radio interview. “It’s my own view toward humanity itself. We never really die. You live on in your son, or you live on in somebody else. I don’t know the answer, but somehow I feel that our lives are endless.” On another level, however, I suspect that Kirby is thinking aloud through his artwork. He’s daring us to consider a possibility that for him was far more than just a fictional conceit.

In the late 1970s, Kirby created a cosmic science-fiction epic for Marvel Comics entitled The Eternals, a recapitulation and culmination of themes he had explored previously in such comic books as Black Cat Mystic, Race to the Moon, The Fantastic Four, Thor, and The Fourth World series: the juxtaposition of microcosm and macrocosm, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, human and divine.

As early as 1957, Kirby was already toying with the notion that humanity had encountered extraterrestrials during its ancient past (a notion that now fuels whole television shows on the History Channel) in such stories as “The Great Stone Face” from the horror anthology Black Cat Mystic #59. In this five-page tale, a trio of explorers discover a giant “stone face” in a cavern deep in the heart of Africa. One of the explorers, an elderly professor, comments that the sculpture “isn’t ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, or of any known origin.” The professor is certain, naturally, that the African natives could not have carved the statue with their primitive skills. Nonetheless, soon after making this comment, members of the local “Kaziri” tribe fix the explorers’ stalled jeep without any apparent difficulties. The professor says in astonishment, “They handle modern tools like expert mechanics!”

A few panels later the explorers stumble upon a tribal ceremony in which a village shaman dresses up in a crude representation of an astronaut’s space suit. The professor concludes, “These people once made contact with beings from outer space!”

Soon, the explorers uncover an underground structure hidden beneath the cavern that houses the stone face: “We hurried down immense silent corridors and gargantuan rooms which honeycombed the interior of the cliff. It was like a vast underground city… and we scurried in its corners like intruding ants….” In a scene eerily similar to Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, the trio find the body of a gigantic alien astronaut sitting motionless in a colossal control room. From the perspective of this room we can 27

only see the torso of the pilot. The head, however, is visible from the cavern above.

It turns out that the great stone face isn’t a statue at all. The professor concludes that the pilot has been in “suspended animation” for thousands of years. As they flee from the cavern, they glance over their shoulders and see “those great immobile eyes [come] alive to watch as we [run]… eyes that still wait and watch the world… for what?”

Exactly a year later, in the September 1958 issue of the science-fiction anthology Race to the Moon, Kirby and inker Al Williamson produce a prescient sciencefiction epyllion that contains several ideas that won’t find their way into the consciousness of mainstream Americans for at least forty years. In a short story entitled “The Face on Mars,” four astronauts discover a sculpted face the size of a mountain located on the surface of the red planet. They crawl through the right eye of the massive sculpture and find themselves in “a lush, green, sunlit countryside.” One of the astronauts, Ben Fisher, is separated from his compatriots and somehow ends up in the middle of an interplanetary war. He watches, stunned, as a metropolis populated by gargantuan Martians are attacked by a fleet of android soldiers from an unknown planet that exists between Mars and Jupiter. In response, the Martians launch a doomsday missile that blows the unknown planet into a billion pieces. Unfortunately, the detonation also poisons the Martian atmosphere, killing off all the inhabitants.

We soon discover that everything Ben Fisher is seeing is merely an echo of the past, a three-dimensional, virtual reality recording that has been left behind to teach future civilizations about the final fate of the Martians. As Fisher says, “In that statue is a visual history of a race’s heroic death—and the triumph of a surviving memory.”

In the concluding panel we see the astronauts making repairs on the exterior of their ship while floating through the debris of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Fisher’s colleague, an astronaut named Brennan, remarks, “There’s a theory that these asteroids are pieces of a planet that blew up between Mars and Jupiter!” Fisher replies, “It must have been the home of monsters—to have suffered such a fate!” The final caption reads, “I didn’t explain it all to Brennan!

He and all mankind would learn it, someday—from the Face on Mars!”

That this story manages to prefigure the ideas of fringe science writer Richard C. Hoagland and his popular 1987 nonfiction book, The Monuments of Mars; that it manages to prefigure as well the transgressive theories of astronomer Tom Van Flandern regarding his “Exploded Planet Hypothesis” as put forth in his 1993 book Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets: Paradoxes Resolved, Origins Illuminated; that it mirrors so closely the climax of a big budget Brian DePalma science-fiction film (i.e., Mission to Mars) that won’t be released for another forty-two years (in March of 2000); that it includes such beyond-cutting-edge ideas as virtual reality as far back as the late ’50s—all of this is remarkable enough, but that it succeeds in accomplishing this farrago of invention in only five pages is more impressive still.

Let’s now flash forward eighteen years to July of 1976 when Marvel Comics debuts Kirby’s science-fiction series, The Eternals. In the letters page of issue #1, for the first time without the veil of fiction to obscure his true meaning, Kirby writes about this recurrent theme regarding the intersection between humanity and ancient alien civiliza-

tions. In a brief essay entitled “Will the Gods Return Someday?” Kirby writes: If [the Gods] truly exist, I believe they will [return]. Of course, I speak of Gods in the historical sense, the kinds of beings who step ashore from places unknown and impress us with their very images, their manner of communication, and, above all, their display of transcendent power.

The Aztecs, who outnumbered the forces of Cortez by astronomical odds, were completely cowed by the sight of the Spaniard’s horse and the effects of his cannon. Were they overcome by their own fear of the supernatural—or were they awed by what they viewed as the fulfillment of their own prophecy—the return of Quetzalcoatl and his band of superbeings, whose memory survived antiquity?

In my own recollection of the early jungle pictures, there was nothing more stupefying to the chattering natives of remote areas, than the sudden appearance of the movie’s hero, whose “big white bird” had crash-landed in the center of the village.

Sure, they made him a God. And, if it had really happened, those natives would still be weaving tales about him today.

However, my point is, how often has this kind of thing happened in our past? How many of these so-called Gods have stumbled upon this boondock planet called Earth? How many of them have inspired the potent myths which not only laid the groundwork for man’s many religions, professions, and sciences, but have left man with a massive mystery on his hands—one that just won’t go away…

With the daily accumulation of new artifacts all over the globe, and the simultaneous input of UFO “flapology” on a worldwide scale, humankind is straining its “group memory” to dredge up a proper picture of the ancient past […].

The compelling quality inherent in this type of theme has led me to project its mystifying questions into comic magazine storytelling. It’s natural for myself and for the comics fan who dearly loves the world that lies between fantasy and fact […]

Still, despite the fact that I’ve contrived my own version of those momentous confrontations of prehistory, I take them from the […] questions of today.

What did happen in those remote days of men’s early struggle for civilized status? What is the true meaning of the myths which shared a global similarity among diverse peoples? Did beings of an extra terrestrial nature touch down among us and influence our lives to this present day? And then, the all-important question of the lot—are these beings in some cosmic orbit which will lead them back to us someday?

The excitement generated by this last question is undeniable. It leads directly to ourselves, and to how we will react to their arrival. The grab bag of possibilities is a limitless spectrum of spine-tingling visions. They inspire everything from elation to paranoia.

At any rate, we can do nothing but sense the air of this century and look aloft, or listen for sounds not made on this world—or read The Eternals for the vicarious thrill of anticipating, in story and pictures, the astounding experience of coming to grips with the kinds of creatures we imagine the Gods to be […].

In the letters page of The Eternals #2 (August 1976), in an essay entitled “Gods, Myths, and UFOs,” Kirby expounds even further: 28

Isn’t it strange that our mythical Gods and Goddesses live “up there”—as opposed to the terrible spirits and demons who reside in the hot, fiery core of the regions “down there?” Can it be that some part of us has its roots in deep space? Are we descended from a species that is not planet bound? There, again, is the eternal question! Why is there this mass obsession with the sky?

On the very first page of The Eternals #1, the omniscient narrator (Kirby himself?) asks: Is Man alone in the universe? Every myth and legend to emerge from the distant past points to a strange visitation from the stars!!! Beings of great power have been on this Earth— and then departed! Who were they? What did they do here?

Where have they gone? These awesome questions create the background for this exciting new saga of a day which lies ahead… the day of answers… The Day of the Gods.

The cover of The Eternals #2 even bears a blatant reference to Erich von Daniken’s nonfiction book, Chariots of the Gods, a bestseller from the late 1960s that attempted to prove that the “gods” of Earth’s ancient past were actually astronauts from other worlds, the evidence of these alien visitations embedded in the petroglyphs and cave paintings and icons of primitive cultures. Just beneath the tagline and the title “When Gods Walk the Earth! THE ETERNALS”, we see the following caption: “More Fantastic Than CHARIOTS OF THE GODS!” Since Kirby himself was the editor of the book, it’s reasonable to assume that he chose the cover copy. It’s as if he’s attempting to nail home the message that his stories do not inhabit a world of pure “fantasy” alone, but instead (as he wrote in the letters page of issue #1), a “world that lies between fantasy and fact.”

This world view is exhibited in many other Kirby works produced in the 1970s. For example, consider the 1978 Silver Surfer graphic novel written and drawn by Jack Kirby, with dialogue provided

by Stan Lee. On page 94 we see a sequence in which the Silver Surfer, an alien being trapped on Earth, attempts to seek refuge among the less “civilized” societies on the planet, hoping to live among them without causing fear. But the caption tells us: “Even those who now build icons in his image, greeted him at first with spear and arrow— with hate and fear! He passed amongst them once!

And so is LEGEND born!” In the corresponding image, we see that a tribe of African natives have built a Tiki-like icon of the Silver Surfer out of wood, thatched leaves, and bamboo. The chieftain appears to be kneeling before the Silver Surfer icon, abdicating his authority to this surfboardriding deity. It’s as if Kirby has managed to compress the essential essence of his moia stories from the ’50s and ’60s into a single panel.

In Captain America Annual #3 (January 1976), Kirby writes and draws a story entitled “The Thing from the Black Hole Star!” in which he uses elements from the established Marvel Universe to make a point about the reason no official disclosure is forthcoming with regard to the link between human and extraterrestrial. After climbing aboard a UFO and defeating an alien menace, Captain America reports his experiences to “a toplevel security committee.” The three members of

the committee, two gentlemen in suits and a uniformed General, tell Captain America that they’re calling “this inquiry to a close!”

Captain America: “That’s it, then—you’re closing the book on this incident.”

General: “Officially, there’s been no incident, Cap… only your prestige has earned you this hearing. You got it… and now, it’s over.”

Captain America: “I… see….”

General: “Do you—? Aliens are easy for you to understand. You’ve fought Kree and Skrull alike.

Consorted with a living… God [Thor]… But what does the average man know—or care—of Galactus, or the Watcher… or any of the myriad nightmares we’ve discovered these past few years? And if the average man did know… good Lord, man, just imagine the panic… the terror… We downplay UFOs because we have to, Cap… to preserve mankind’s collective sanity… but who knows, maybe someday we’ll be able to meet these aliens on their level. Someday, but not today…”

Captain America: “Let’s hope so, General.”

29

(below) Splash page pencils from Eternals #7 (Jan. 1977). Jack delved into the ancient Incan legends for his von Daniken-inspired series which, despite outward appearances, was a major departure from his earlier Fourth World work.

In the final panel of the comic book, we see Captain America looking up at the sky (or he could just as easily be staring at the reader) as he finishes his thought: “Because we’re not alone in the teeming firmament… look to the stars, Earth. Look to the stars!!!”

It seems evident, when putting the above dialogue in context of Kirby’s entire oeuvre, that these passionate sentiments spoken by both the General and Captain America might very well represent Kirby’s own point of view. Here Captain America is asking the question that Kirby has been asking throughout his career: When will human beings evolve to the point of being able to accept their link to the transcendent, the numinous, the otherworldly? This theme is made explicit as well in the concluding panel of the last issue of The Eternals. As The Celestial (a member of a giant extraterrestrial race responsible for the creation of many different types of life on Earth) strides away across a barren, mountainous landscape, the final caption reads, “Thus […]

The Celestial moves on—perhaps dwelling on a distant time when men have gained the stature to face them eye to eye—and know all!”

Though at first glance Kirby’s moia stories may seem to be a minor footnote in his career, the fact is that (as in many of Kirby’s stories) the truth about the macrocosm can be found in the microcosm; the truth about the transcendent can be found in the mundane. As Thor Heyerdahl wrote in Aku-Aku: “And among a multitude of giant gods I sat, a solitary little human being.”

Not only do the moia stories reveal secrets about Kirby’s private cosmology, what one might call a secular form of postmodern metaphysics, but they also contain certain telltale signs and evidentiary clues pointing in the direction of a very definite conclusion regarding the true authorship of Kirby’s most famous characters and stories, a pantheon of modern day myths that have come to be known worldwide as the “Marvel Universe,” a universe generated almost entirely by the promethean imagination of a single man.

In the aforementioned essay entitled “Gods, Myths, and UFOs” (from The Eternals #2), Kirby writes:

This passage is fascinating, as Kirby demonstrates enough awareness of his themes that he cleverly places his own creations on the same level as the moia statues, and himself as the unknown creator of those legendary icons. He puts himself in the position of a secular god whose true name has been lost by the future world of 2540 A.D. It’s appropriate, therefore, that Kirby’s own version of the moia should contain clues about the convoluted genesis of a modern day pantheon of mythic figures.

Though the recent Hollywood adaptations of the 1960s Marvel comic books have introduced Jack Kirby’s work to a whole new generation of potential readers, at the same time they threaten to overshadow his legacy and unfairly transfer to others the credit to which he’s due. In light of this possibility, it’s important to set the record straight as often as possible. And given the fact that Tiki was known in Polynesia as the God of the artists, it’s appropriate that—in Tiki’s infinite wisdom—he would now come to the aid of Kirby, one of the most prolific and influential artists of the Twentieth Century, to help establish the true pedigree of the work Kirby left behind.

Let’s not allow Kirby’s name to fade into the mists of antiquity, as the names of the true creators of the moia have been lost to the vicissitudes of time. After all, from the perspective of potential eternals like us, 2540 A.D. is really only a few moments away. ★ Works Cited Evanier, Mark. “Introduction.” The Jack Kirby Omnibus Volume One. New York: DC Comics, 2011.

Evanier, Mark. Kirby: King of Comics. New York: Abrams, 2008.

Gutenberghus Group. “The Mystery of Easter Island.” Walt Disney’s Uncle $crooge Adventures #3 (January 1988): 1-18.

Heyerdahl, Thor. Aku-Aku. New York: Pocket Books, 1958.

Joshi, S.T. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick: Necronomicon Press, 1996.

Kirby, Jack. “Back from the Dead!” Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Tales of Suspense Vol. 3. New York: Marvel Comics, 2010.

Kirby, Jack. The Eternals Omnibus. New York: Marvel Comics, 2006.

Kirby, Jack. “The Face on Mars.” The Simon and Kirby Library: Science-Fiction. London: Titan Books, 2013.

Kirby, Jack. “The Great Stone Face.” The Simon and Kirby Library: Science-Fiction. London: Titan Books, 2013.

Kirby, Jack. “Here Comes… Thorr the Unbelievable.” Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Tales to Astonish Vol. 2. New York: Marvel Comics, 2008.

Kirby, Jack. “I Was Trapped by the Things on Easter Island!” Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Tales to Astonish Vol. 1. New York: Marvel Comics, 2006.

Kirby, Jack. “The Stone Men from Saturn!” Essential Thor Vol. 1. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005.

Kirby, Jack. “The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island.” The Jack Kirby Omnibus Volume One. New York: DC Comics, 2011.

Kirby, Jack. Straczynski Interview. Hour 25. Pacifica Radio. KPFK, Los Angeles. 13 April 1990.

Kirby, Jack. “The Thing from the Black Hole Star!” Captain America and The Falcon: The Swine.

New York: Marvel Comics, 2006.

Kirby, Jack and Paul Kupperberg. “Time Upon Time Upon Time.” Super Powers Vol. 2 No. 3 (November 1985).

Kirby, Jack and Stan Lee. The Silver Surfer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.

Kirsten, Sven A. The Book of Tiki. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2003.

Kirsten, Sven A. Tiki Style. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2004.

Lovecraft, H.P. The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. New York: Del Rey, 1971.

Despite the numerous “saucer flaps,” and the intriguing speculations concerning artifacts of dead civilizations, it is the opinion of this writer that the true revelations which will lay bare our beginnings are still matters for the distant future. Our capabilities for achieving the truth are unfortunately too limited in this age. The hope lies with the evolution of instruments forged in the technical tinker shops of today. When they’ve reached the proper stage, they will guide our hands to the truth.

Of course, that will be an important time for our descendants. What this simple truth may promise for mankind will be their affair. We shall be phantoms of the past, perhaps adding to the complex and mysterious collage that man leaves behind him in his passage through the years.

How ironic it would be to witness the somber rituals of a Spider-Man cult in 2540 A.D.—or to be present at the “strength Olympics” held in honor of the Hulk. New myths created in the Twentieth Century, and scattered by the printing press throughout the world, may well enlarge the giant puzzle that is humanity and make things much more difficult to decipher. (above) One final instance of Kirby moia statues: from Forever People #11 (Oct. 1972). See page 94!

30

Gallery Beginnings and starting points for Kirby, as chosen by John Morrow

(left) The version of this art that ran on the cover of TJKC #8 in 1996 was inked

by Steve Rude and colored

by Tom Ziuko. Here’s Jack’s original hand-colored version (inked by Mike Royer), showing his idea of a futuristic football stadium (for NFL Pro magazine). I like to think of it as cosmic fans heading to the pre-game show at New Genesis’ Supertown Stadium, where Orion’s playing quarterback. (page 32) 2001: A Space Odyssey #1, page 17 (Dec. 1976). In Kubrick’s film, the “New Seed” was a nebulous concept, and Jack does his best to flesh-out the idea, while staying true to the movie. It’s nicely dialogued, but after a Treasury Edition and seven issues all ending with this new beginning, it’s easy to see why Jack gave the series a reboot with Mr. Machine, and let it transform into Machine Man. (page 33) Here we see, in pencils from OMAC #1 (Sept. 1974), the lead-in to the birth of the title character. Nebbish Buddy Blank is a throwback to characters like Peter Parker and Chip Hardy (as detailed in Stan Taylor’s article elsewhere this issue)—he’s ignored by girls and picked on by bullies. But fans likely missed a subtle in-joke referencing Jack’s own beginnings in comics, as Kirby channels his days working for “Mr. Fox” at Fox Features in the late 1930s, where Victor Fox (below) would pace around saying, “I’m the King of the comics!”—a moniker eventually given to Kirby himself.

31

32

33

(above) For 1988’s History of the DC Universe hardcover, the company enlisted Jack to write an essay on his Fourth World series. Titled “Even the Gods Have Flaws,” Jack opined, “Yes, that was the premise for the saga-type super-series which I created for DC Comics on a broad canvas of four magazine titles.” Jack also produced this full-page illo of his characters—and a particularly nice one, considering how late in his career it was done. Steve Rude added the finishing touches with inks, cleaning up a few of the weaker elements, to produce Jack’s final take on his signature creations. Steve Oliff’s colors are shown on the next page.

For that same book, Jack and inker Mike Royer contributed the above figure of Darkseid for the massive fold-out jam drawing of DC’s main characters.

34

35

(this spread) After pondering the thousands of drawings Jack did for animation in the 1970s-80s, I’ve always wondered: How did each project begin? For new concepts, he’d go off on his own and conceptualize ideas to propose to the studio on giant art boards. But for established series like Thundarr, where did his involvement start?

Mr. T was a series that Ruby-Spears produced, airing on NBC on Saturday mornings from 1983 to 1986. The items here show how the process worked once a show made it to air.

Storyboard artist Jim Woodring (after getting a script from an episode’s writer) would send Jack a handwritten description of the main characters, props, and settings. From there, Kirby would visualize those descriptions, creating a plethora of images for animators to use as a guide when producing the final, simplified art.

Inset are still images from the finished episode, to give an idea how much (or little) of Jack’s designs made it through the animation process.

36

In an interesting bit of synchronicity, Jack’s ship in the bottle was named the “Argo” when it aired.

The episode “Mystery of the Ghost Fleet” originally aired on Sept. 29, 1984.

View the episode at: http://watchcartoons online.eu/watch/mister-tepisode-17-mystery-ofthe-ghost-fleet/ And for fun, compare these designs to the shipmates in this issue’s 1941 “Black Owl” story!

37

In the beginning, Jack’s Fourth World books were 15¢, and had 22 pages of story. When DC increased the cover price to 25¢ and 26 story pages, Kirby had to quickly come up with some fillers and pin-ups.

So Jack, being Jack, took the opportunity to expand characters’ backstory with features like “Young Gods of Supertown” and “Young Scott Free,” and even introduced a couple of new gods (Lonar and Fastbak).

The result is, fans got these bonuses: • New Gods #5: “Fastbak” (4 pages) • New Gods #7: “Vykin” (2 pages) • New Gods #8: “Beat the Black Racer” (Fastbak - 3 pages) • Forever People #4: Pin-ups (4 pages) • Forever People #5: “Lonar” (4 pages) • Forever People #6: “Raid from Apokolips” (4 pages) • Forever People #7: “Lonar” (2 pages) • Mister Miracle #5: “Young Scott Free” (4 pages) • Mister Miracle #6: “Young Scott Free” (2 pages) • Mister Miracle #7: “Young Scott Free” (4 pages) • Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #142: “Hairie Secrets Revealed” (2 pages) • Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #143: “The Alien Thing” (2 pages) • Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #144: “The Torn Photograph” (2 pages) • Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #146: “Arin, The Armored Man” (2 pages) • Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #148: “Genetic Criminal” (2 pages)

So we ended up with an extra 43 pages (roughly two extra 22-page issues) of Kirby Fourth World art, because DC increased their cover price and page count. Nice work, Carmine Infantino! (these two pages) Pencils from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #144’s back-up (Dec. 1971). (page 40) Splash page pencils from “Young Scott Free” in Mister Miracle #6 (Jan. 1972).

38

39

40

www.kirbymuseum.org Jack Kirby Pencils And Inks Artisan Edition We’ve been proud to be helping IDW with its ongoing Artist Editions featuring Kirby original art (New Gods, Mister Miracle, Thor, Fantastic Four, and more), but by the time this sees print, you should also have seen Jack Kirby Pencils And Inks Artisan Edition, featuring reproductions of Kirby’s pencil art from his photocopies, sideby-side with the completed Mike Royer inked and lettered original art! A dream project of our Trustee Tom Kraft for some time, this unprecedented book gives you the opportunity to compare and contrast Kirby’s and Royer’s work on the key first issues of Kamandi, The

Newsletter

Last Boy On Earth, The Demon, and OMAC, as well as some additional pieces.

Thanks to the Kirby Estate, Mike Royer, DC Comics, and IDW, we’ll be offering a limited number of copies with an exclusive to the Kirby Museum cover, as well as an even more exclusive Mike Royer-signed tip-in sheet. You’re keeping an eye on our website, Twitter feed, and Facebook page, right?

TJKC Edition Winter 2017 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.

Vintage Posters stock getting even lower!

Become a member now, and we’ll strive to give you the best of what’s left of the vintage posters the Kirby Estate donated to us for fundraising purposes!

Strange Tales just sold out, and more will follow soon...

Annual Memberships with one of these posters: $40*

SOLD OUT Captain America—23” x 29” 1941 Captain America—14” x 23”

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

with one of these posters: $50*

Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center

We thank our new and returning members for their support!

Glen Brunswick, William Turner, Steve Sherman, Corinna DeJong, Guy Dorian, Philip Atcliffe, Harry Mendryk, Ian Matthews, Richard Harrison, Lex Passaris, Douglas Peltier, Josh Blair, Steve Roden, Brian Hurtt, Ralph Rivard

We also thank our Board of Trustees & Advisory Board for their support & help!

TRUSTEES: Rand Hoppe, Tom Kraft, Mike Cecchini ADVISORS: John Morrow, Charles Hatfield, David Schwartz, Mark Evanier

And of course, thanks to John Morrow and TwoMorrows Publishing, as well as Lisa Kirby and the Kirby Estate!

PO Box 5236 Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA Telephone: (201) 204-0532 All characters TM © their respective owners.

Marvel—14” x 23”

Galactic Head— 18” x 20” color

Incan Visitation—24” x 18” color

41

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

Barry Forshaw Barry Forshaw is the author of British Gothic Cinema and The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (available from Amazon) and the editor of Crime Time. (www.crimetime.co.uk) His next book will be American Noir; he lives in London.

Obscura

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

by Barry Forshaw

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE o readers only familiar with an era in which writer, pencilers, inkers, editors, and even colorists are given automatic credits on comics, it must seem strange to hear of a time when such fully justified niceties were few and far between. Although (as I’ve said before) I first encountered the work of Jack Kirby in bulky British shilling reprints in the 1960s, the situation was the same then as it was for American comics enthusiasts of that period—it was difficult to identify who was responsible for the books we read and relished, much as we wanted to. It seemed that someone called ‘Bob Kane’ was responsible for Batman (although the black-and-white reprints we were reading in the UK by that stage had very little to do with the farsighted Mr. Kane— we didn’t know that he was canny enough a businessman to keep his name on the product he’d co-created, unlike his colleague Bill Finger, only recently given his due). As for Superman, we were reading stories written well after the Siegel and Shuster heyday, and their names had long since stopped appearing on the books (this, remember, is before such comics industry giants as Neal Adams and Jerry Robinson succeeded in getting back for the Man of Steel’s creators some money and credit commensurate with their achievement, after they had been famously stiffed by their employers).

Some creators’ names, however, had started to appear fitfully on their work.

There were a series of writers and artists getting credits on the two flagship books of the American Comics Group, Adventures into the Unknown and Forbidden Worlds, and we had no reason to suppose that such unlikely names as ‘Lafcadio Lee’ and ‘Kermit Lundgren’ were just two of many pseudonyms for the hardworking man who produced the lion’s share of the inventive stories for the company’s editor Richard Hughes. (The illusion was maintained with fanciful drawing of these fictitious writers.) We youthful comics fans accepted without question the credit for the company’s stellar artist Ogden Whitney, whose signature was always

T

42

appended to those very striking covers that were the hallmark of the ACG group.

As for writers with other companies—who knew who they were? They were invisible.

Who, for instance, was aware that Otto Binder was coming up with some of the most ingenious problems for Superman—or that the aforementioned Bill Finger was providing ingenious exploits for Gotham City’s most famous detective? Horror stories appeared in British reprints which we were later to learn were culled from the Atlas group, and it seemed clear that at least two men were responsible for the writing, if not the art. One almost unique credit in several of the Atlas chillers was “Story by Hank Chapman.” And there was often a shared credit between various artists and somebody called “Stan Lee.”

DITKO AND KIRBY IN TANDEM Credits for illustrators back then? That was a different matter. While enjoying the artwork of one very stylish (and anonymous) artist in DC’s science-fiction and fantasy books (you probably know who I mean), there was never a

signature to tell us that this was the work of Jack Kirby. In fact, as Mark Evanier has pointed out, during this period at DC, The King’s name never appeared on a single one of his assignments, not even on his superb run on Challengers of the Unknown. House of Secrets #3 (from March/April 1957) was a typical DC outing of the era, but for collectors of this magazine it has two attractive features. There’s a cover by Jack Kirby himself, in which a reclining figure of Cleopatra (drawn in none-too-seductive fashion—this was the era of the Comics Code, after all) reaches from a couch towards the startled modern-day hero. The image flags up a story called “The Three Prophecies,” which was to be illustrated by the man himself. The first tale, “The Mystery of Cell #246,” was a very workaday piece by Jim Mooney (a capable enough artist whose work never really rose above the efficient), while the second, “The Bad Luck Charms,” sported artwork by the more distinctive Bernard Bailey. It was, however, the third piece—the title story—in which Jack Kirby’s work appeared.

“The Three Prophecies” is another example of Kirby using the splash panel creatively. Handed a story in which two phoney seers outwit each other in unlikely fashion, Kirby realized the splash panel had to show the venal protagonist discovering the traditional pot of gold at the end of a rainbow—and he livens up the situation by incorporating the story title within the rainbow itself. Given that Kirby’s work at DC had to be straitjacketed into the traditional style of the company, it’s a surprise that he was allowed to get away with a flourish like this. This piece, as is the case with so much of Kirby’s work for the company, sports a visual imagination which lifts the tale effortlessly above everything else in the issue (including the Mort Meskin final story “The Mystery of the Martian Menu”). As I’ve said before about some of these less-inspired DC works, there is nothing here to write home about—except that Kirby fans need this story. And if they don’t want to splash out for the original book, it has been reprinted in the handsome volume The Jack Kirby Omnibus Volume One (along with the Kirby cover), with an introduction by this magazine’s Mark Evanier. Signature or credit, however? None.

STILL NO SIGNATURE After falling out with DC’s Jack Schiff and his abrupt move to Atlas/Marvel in the late 1950s (although the Marvel imprimatur had yet to appear on their books—the indicia still read ‘Zenith Publishing’), the Kirby signature was shortly to start appearing—although not in the April 1958 issue of Strange Tales, #68 (“The Strangest Science-Fiction You Ever Marvelled At!”), even though this issue featured a striking cover by the artist as well as a dynamically drawn interior story—far more dynamic, in fact, than the kind of work he was generally permitted to do at DC, where (as mentioned above) it was felt that his individual illustration technique did not really fit with the house style. The cover shows a gigantic orange spacecraft hovering over the earth from which issues the threat: “This is your last warning… Evacuate Earth!” In the foreground of the fearful crowd is a very characteristic young Kirby woman, but it is the rather baroque spaceship itself that could only be drawn by Kirby; it’s the kind of slightly overdesigned invention that eloquently shows something Kirby was to do very often: Build a piece of futuristic machinery with ever more elaborate filigrees and offshoots, clearly just for his own pleasure. In fact, the issue’s first story is drawn by an artist who did sign his work, the efficient Joe Sinnott, and it’s a fairly banal Stan Lee (one guesses) tale of the period in which an alien issues the warning to be heard on the cover prior to invasion. The alien is not taken seriously by anyone he encounters. One might legitimately wonder why the people who ask about the costume the alien is wearing don’t seem to notice that he is in fact a gaseous cloud and hardly likely to be a man in the suit—but logic rarely got in the way of these stories (even on Kirby’s cover, there are several planets visible in the sky over America, one of which appears to be Saturn with its rings—when did you last see

Saturn in the sky over New York or London?). The second story in the issue is by the man who was to be the other great star of the Atlas/ Marvel universe, Steve Ditko, and “The Creatures from the Bottomless Pit” is a lively and inventive piece. And then we come to the main course—the issue’s Jack Kirby story. But it is, frankly, a very modest main course, as we’ll see.

INTO SPACE WITH THE TEST PILOT How much of a Jack Kirby fan are you? Would you shell out for a vintage comic that has a cover by the King and a story which is a mere four pages? Come on, if you’re a real hardcore aficionado, you know it’s worth it, particularly when the rest of the issue is (as mentioned above) festooned with artists such as Steve Ditko and (in the beautifully drawn final story, “Trapped in Tomorrow,”) John Buscema— later to take over from Kirby on a heavyweight Marvel property. And “Test Pilot,” while brief (the final page is erroneously listed as five, but in fact it’s four pages), may be a mere appetite-whetter with its paperthin narrative, but look at the Kirby design that went into it. Take the spaceship in the splash panel seen, vertiginously, from above and looking like no spacecraft drawn by any other illustrator. Then there’s a sense of dynamic panel composition on the page featuring a space battle, with the jump-suited astronaut out-maneuvering a clawed alien vessel: Christopher Rule’s inks render the striking pencil art with maximum impact. You’ll read this tale in minutes, but then you’ll find yourself going back to enjoy the artistry that virtually leaps off the page. ★ 43

Well Taylored

(right) Rough Spidey

by Jack, from unused Marvelmania art.

(next page) Jack inexplicably drew this Marvelmania poster with the X-Men’s Sentinels going after Spidey.

Marvel had regular Spider-Man artist John Romita redraw it, using Jack’s basic layout and main figure pose, but adding more Spideycentric villains (above).

Spider-Man:

ho created Spider-Man? One of the great comic book fanboy debate topics—utterly fascinating because of the three distinct and passionate personalities involved, each having rabid fans ready to lay waste to any who would deny that their favorite was the true creative genius behind this pivotal character. Ultimately, of course, it’s a futile exercise of mental masturbation because we are powerless to do anything about it, even if we could prove it one way or the other. However, not being averse to masturbation, I am going to weigh in with my opinion.

W

A Little History Jack Kirby has stated

by Stan Taylor

The Case for Kirby

clearly time and again that he created Spider-Man, never more adamantly than in a 1982 interview conducted by Will Eisner, and printed in issue #39 of Will Eisner’s Spirit Magazine (Kitchen Sink Press, 1983). Kirby maintained his claim even when close friends and assistants advised him not to pursue it. Can he be believed? Well, his memory was spotty, and he has made other claims that have clearly been shown to be wrong. So as a witness, he leaves room for doubt.

Stan Lee says, “All the concepts were mine” (Village Voice, Vol. 32 #49, Dec. 1987). It is his contention that he singly came up with the idea, produced a script, offered it to Jack Kirby for illustration, and when he didn’t like the look of Kirby’s rendition, he then offered it to Steve Ditko. Can he be believed? Not really. Stan would go so far (or stoop so low!) as to claim that a minor character named The Living Eraser from Tales to Astonish #49 (Nov. 1963) was his creation. This character had the dubious distinction of being able to wave people out of existence with a swipe of his hand. “I got a big kick out of it when I dreamed up that idea,” Lee is quoted. (Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics, page 97.) He further embellished this tale by stating how hard it was to come up with an explanation for this power. The fact is, this ignoble power and explanation first appear in a Jack Kirby story from Black Cat Mystic #59 (Harvey Publications, Sept.

1957). If Lee will take credit for an obvious minor Kirby concept, which nobody cares about, then he certainly would take credit for another’s creation that has become the company’s cash cow.

The third person involved with the Spider-Man origin is Steve Ditko, and unfortunately, the little he has said about the creation of 44

Spider-Man doesn’t help. His earliest mention simply states “Stan Lee thought the name up. I did costume, web gimmick on wrist & spider signal.” (“Steve Ditko: A Portrait Of The Master,” Comic Fan #2, 1965) 25 years later, when Ditko finally expanded on his role, he made it clear that he had no knowledge of who did what prior to his receiving the script from Stan Lee, and then he offered up a weird scenario where, in Stan Lee’s script, there was a teenager with a magic ring, which transformed him into an adult hero (Robin Snyder’s History of Comics), and it was Ditko who noticed the resemblance to Joe Simon’s The Fly, and thus it was changed into the now familiar spider bite origin.

Three stories, offering three variations that don’t quite connect. Kirby says it was all his, Lee claims it was all his, and Ditko says Stan Lee gave him a script based on an earlier Kirby character, that was then changed. Oh, what a tangled web we weave. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Another point of interest that may account for some of the story changes has to do with how the copyright laws changed in 1976. As a result, all the artists working for Marvel in the 1960s were classified as freelancers, and since they were freelancers, they could possibly make future claims for termination of copyrights for any characters they created. (This is the same law that has allowed the Siegel family to claim partial rights to Superman, and Joe Simon to make a claim for Captain America.) One way the companies might protect their claim is by showing that the characters and concepts were created by employees, and supplied to the artists. Since Stan Lee was technically the only employee of the three men involved, suddenly all characters in Marveldom were “his” sole creation and the artists merely illustrators of his tales.

Yet Spider-Man provided a unique problem, because Stan, in a speech at Vanderbilt College in 1972, related how Kirby had first provided a proposal for Spider-Man. Stan stated that after he looked it over, he had a different idea for the “look” of Spidey, and decided that he would offer it to Steve Ditko to draw. He didn’t mention any problem with Kirby’s concepts and plot. It is in later retellings—post-copyright law change—that Stan would stress that Kirby’s proposal, though

rejected, was still based on his (Stan’s) original ideas.

Which brings us to the heart of the debate: Just what did Kirby propose, what was used or rejected, and from whom did these ideas emanate? That first proposal has never surfaced, though Jim Shooter has mentioned seeing it at Marvel in the late ’70s. So what we are left with is the personal recollections of two men whose memories are hopeless, one of whom is now dead, and a third who won’t talk.

The problem here is not that we don’t have eyewitness testimony; it’s that we have conflicting eyewitness testimony. The people involved disagree.

45

So this is how I approached the Spider-Man quandary. Rather than focusing on unprovable statements—by men with obvious agendas—made long after the creation of Spider-Man, I would examine their actual concurrent works to see if I could find a pattern of creation that matched up with the concepts, characters, and plot elements found in Amazing Fantasy #15, plus any physical evidence, and testimony from witnesses independent of the three men.

The eyewitness accounts are important, but only if they can be corroborated by physical evidence, so where I do refer to a specific quote from Jack, Stan, Steve, or whomever, it is not as a statement of fact, but rather as a clue that might lead me to some tangible bit of evidence that might lend credence to a claim.

I guess here is a good time to explain the parameters of my debate. This debate is about which of the three men was responsible for supplying the character, concepts and the plotting, for the creation known as Spider-Man, as presented in Amazing Fantasy #15. All credits for comic book creation derive solely from the first appearance of the character. Events and graphics in issues #2, 3, or #4-on may be important in the evolution of the character, but they have no bearing on creative rights.

We are not debating who in history was the first to come up with a concept such as wall crawling; what we are talking about is who supplied that concept to Marvel for the title Spider-Man. And we are not debating who fleshed out the characters in later issues; we all acknowledge that Lee and Ditko went on to make Spider-Man uniquely identifiable. We also are not debating who drew the first issue; this was Steve Ditko, and that credit is not in doubt. The debate is who supplied the initial ideas to Marvel for the title and character that became known as Spider-Man. After tracking down as many Kirby, Ditko, and Lee stories as possible from the previous five years (I didn’t want to go too far back; if there was a pattern, it should manifest itself within a short period), I then broke down the characters and plot elements, to see if there were any that matched up with Spider-Man’s origin.

These are my findings. In all instances, as to the character and plotting, I was quickly able to find amazing similarities with the work of only one of the three men, Jack Kirby. And in the case of the character, not only did I find amazing pattern matches, I also found what I believe was a written template for Spider-Man that predates Amazing Fantasy #15, and leads directly to Jack Kirby. Surprisingly, my research also has led me to the conclusion that Kirby’s connection to Spider-Man extended beyond that first issue.

If we can’t rely on the first-person testimony, what can we do?

We can do what historians, detectives, and scientists have always done: Ignore the hearsay, mythology, and personal claims and look at the actual physical evidence; in this case, the original comic books, and contemporaneous documentary evidence from unbiased sources. The Confessor in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City said it best: “Look at the facts, look at the patterns, and look for what doesn’t fit. Base your deductions on that.”

Criminal detectives have other words for this: evidence, and modus operandi. Human behavior is repetitive; we are all creatures of habit. We have an m.o.—our method of operation. It is this human trait that detectives use to narrow down the lists of suspects in any mystery.

It has been said, “An artist is someone who pounds the same nail over and over again.” All artists, graphic or literary, have patterns. They repeat aspects, concepts, a style of punctuation, a brush stroke, lines of musculature, the little things that separate their style from the hundreds of others. When trying to identify an unknown artist, one can compare the piece in question with other contemporaneous works to match up these patterns. This method has been used to research everything from Shakespeare’s writings to the art of the Great Masters.

Can this be used on comic books? Yes, it can, and has. Martin O’Hearn is a noted comics historian who specializes in the identification of uncredited comic writers. He matches up subject, syntax, punctuation, themes, and other identifiable patterns, and has had remarkable success in matching writers to their non-credited stories.

Likewise, Dr. Michael Vassallo, in his never-ending quest to index all Atlas/Timely publications, spends endless hours comparing drawing and inking styles to identify unaccredited works of comic art. His goal of identifying the unlisted inker on Fantastic Four #1 and #2 has led him to amass a veritable mountain of inking examples to compare to the actual comic art. What he doesn’t do is blindly accept personal recollections or corporate identifications at face value.

If he did, Dick Ayers or Artie Simek would be incorrectly credited with this work.

The Character The basic concept of Spider-Man is simple: A hero, with the inherent physical attributes of a spider—he can crawl up walls and across ceilings, and he has the proportional strength and agility of 46

an arachnid. He has an extra sense that warns him of danger. He manufactures a web shooter that can be used for catching prey, and used as a means of mobility.

I could find no earlier character from either Lee or Ditko that had any resemblance to Spider-Man—none.

As to Jack Kirby, it didn’t take long to track down a pattern match for the physical aspects of Spider-Man; the surprising factor is just how similar the two characters are.

The very last costumed super-hero book that Kirby produced, prior to Marvel, featured an insect hero able to climb walls and ceilings; had super-strength, the agility of a bug, and, astoundingly, an extra sense that warned him of danger. In The Adventures of the Fly (Archie Publications, 1959), Simon and Kirby introduced The Fly, a hero with the exact same insect-derived properties that show up in Spidey. In fact, the only physical difference is that the Fly can fly. The most interesting aspect for me is the match-up of an “extra sense” that warns of danger. While the other powers (wall climbing, agility, etc.) might be considered generic to any insect, this warning sense is, as far as I know, something totally unique and beyond the norm of the natural attributes of insects. The addition of this unnatural extra sense showing up in both creations is just too coincidental.

It’s been said that the Devil’s in the details, and it’s these small details that in my opinion, make the strongest case for Kirby being the conceptualizer.

Does this physical similarity between The Fly and Spider-Man correspond and bolster any specific claims made by the three men?

Lee’s oft quoted statement that Spidey came about due to his long fascination with the pulp hero The Spider may be true, but there is absolutely no resemblance in either origin, weapons, or powers between the two characters.

Ditko, for his part, has acknowledged that the original concept was similar to The Fly, yet he says it was rejected, and changed because it was too identical to the Fly. So I tried to see where they might have changed the character. Try as I might, I could find nothing significantly different between The Fly and Spider-

Man. Every unique physical element that Spidey possesses first shows up in The Fly. Why, if Lee and Ditko recognized the similarity between The Fly and SpiderMan, didn’t they make some changes?

Of the three men, only Jack Kirby has offered any specific details as to how the physical aspects found in Spider-Man evolved; in the interview published in Spirit Magazine #39, he stated that the basis for Spider-Man started with a character called the Silver Spider, an idea suggested for Simon and Kirby’s own publishing house Mainline.

Yet Mainline never published a title called the Silver Spider, and Jack Kirby stating this doesn’t make it true. Thanks to the publication of Pure Images #1 (Pure Imagination, 1990), we finally got a chance to see and compare the original 1954 proposal of Joe Simon’s Silver Spider. The interesting thing about Silver Spider is that except for the name Spider in the title, there is absolutely no resemblance between Silver Spider and Spider-Man. The Silver Spider does not have the inherent powers of a spider—he does not climb walls and ceilings, nor does he have an extra sense that can warn him of danger. He did not have a web of any sort.

So at first glance, despite Kirby’s claim, there would seem to be no conceptual connection between the Silver Spider and Spider-Man. It was Joe Simon who provided the linkage between his Silver Spider and Spider-Man, and just what role

47

(above) Was Stan Lee really influenced by the pulp hero The Spider for Spidey? (below) Like Amazing Fantasy #15 (previous page), Stan didn’t hesitate to have Kirby rework Ditko’s covers for more oomph. Here’s Amazing Spider-Man #10’s rejected version, vs. the published version with its main Kirby Spidey figure.

Courtesy Nick Caputo.

Man and Kirby’s rendition of The Fly, and a paper trail that lends credence to Jack Kirby’s claims concerning the Silver Spider connection.

As an aside, Simon had rejected a working title “Spiderman” for his Silver Spider project, and showed a logo to Kirby, leaving little doubt as to which of the three people involved with Spider-Man would have been the source for the name.

Yet nowhere in either The Fly or the Silver Spider work can be found a template for the concept of a web being used as a means of mobility, or as MORANDUM #2 a way of capturing prey.

EDITORIAL ME EY Which brings me to a part TO: LEON HARV 54 February 23, 19 of this history that has been BSON FROM: SID JACO overlooked, and herein lies ER RE: SILVER SPID what I believe to be the only existing contemporaneous ought acter: th ar be ch ld on ou s sh ion r Conclus : The Silver Spide ld ce ou an sh ar written evidence that shows ce pe ap an l ar Physica s on his appe r. All conclusion t of the ide gh sp ou undeniably where these n th ma st hu fir a of as ider. My tributes of the sp ry person with concepts originated, and wi in th ll stem from the at ta a human spider is , being who brought the basic appearance of a a long bony face ve ha ld ou sh ms. He Sub-Mariner e th of ce long legs and ar concept of Spider-Man to fa e Th en handsome. more sinister th Marvel. This is the smoking comes to mind. should pretty r gun, as incontrovertible ide sp n ma hu rs of the re wouldPowers: The powe as DNA, and as obvious ider. He therefo sp a of r we po in to the thing hinted at me So te: much correspond No as O.J.’s Bruno Magli s or’ r of flight [Auth tricks, an n’t have the powe h great acrobatic lis shoes. mp co ac uld to but co uld enable him Simon’s proposal] n ropes that wo When Joe Simon ke isil sp of e e th us at by th ken threads almost flight, part submitted his proposal Batman. The sil me or , so an m rz fro Ta d, la ui a swing from a special liq e me th co t ch for the Silver Spider to gh mu mi e in ken threads der would us would become sil o be at als th Harvey Publications for e uld um wo st s co ad s of hi These thre e e spider insect. acceptance, Leon used as a net. Th be o als same way as th uld co a paraof a web, which Jack Kirby played.

Harvey handed it over ” to be used as used in making o have a “poison als t gh mi r ide When Archie Publications asked Joe Simon to human sp to a young editor by produce some books for them in 1959, Joe called in lyzing agent. enemy of l ra the name of Sid tu na a be ld in nemesis shou Jack Kirby to help out. Joe suggested that they rework Jacobson for critiquing Nemesis: His ma .

T..

D. D. The Fly, or Mr. his earlier Silver Spider proposal into a character and approval. In two a spider—-either called The Fly. He handed over a file containing the memos from 1954, initial Silver Spider proposal to Jack. The file also addressed to Leon, Sid made it apparent that he was contained a rejected logo, and editorial memos from not happy with the proposal. “Strictly old hat,” he says, observing Harvey Publications: Memos that would inspire Kirby, and play a that the concept was too generic, possessing nothing special to set it compelling role, when later, Stan Lee would ask Jack for a new apart. In the second memo, Jacobson takes the extra step of suggesting character. More on this shortly.

According to Joe in The Comic Book Makers (Crestwood Publications, 1990), when Kirby asked him about specific powers for The Fly, Joe told him “Hey, let him walk up buildings, and let him fly if he wants to, it’s a free country. Take it home and pencil it in your immortal style.” Kirby did just this, and the result was The Fly. Again, Joe saying The Fly evolved out of the Silver Spider proposal doesn’t make it true. It is when we compare the two stories that we see that the Fly’s origin gimmick is consistent with the Silver Spider’s. In both stories, the young protagonist (both named Tommy Troy) is a beleaguered orphan who gains his powers via a mystical ring that transforms him into an adult super-hero. Yet the super-hero character is different.

Where the Silver Spider has no apparent powers except enhanced strength, and a great leaping ability, The Fly has been granted very specific powers; inherent insect abilities (wall clinging, exceptional agility), a sixth sense, and a stinger gun—none of which was in the initial Silver Spider proposal.

It is this character makeover, this evolved specificity, supplied

by Jack Kirby, that is the borrowed ingredient that later shows up in Spider-Man. So there is a pattern match that is consistent with Spider48

just what changes could be done to make this concept more interesting.

These memos were in Joe Simon’s Silver Spider file, they were unearthed, and originally published in Pure Images #1. The pertinent section of memorandum #2 is shown at left.

There is no ambiguity, vagueness, or doubt; Sid Jacobson suggested that for the Silver Spider to work, it would have to become what we recognize as Spider-Man! It appears as if Kirby later took some of Jacobson’s suggestions to heart when he cobbled together the character of The Fly, for he added the detail of inherent insect attributes (though Jacobson was not specific on these attributes), but his first actual use of the Spider motif shows up with the creation of The Fly’s arch-nemesis.

In an interesting reversal of Jacobson’s suggestion of “natural enemies,” Spider Spry, from Adventures Of The Fly #1, would have those long bony arms and legs, though Kirby gave him a bulbous head and torso (more spider-like). He easily walked up thin silken lines, traps the Fly in a weblike net, and wears a colorful costume complete with a spider icon. More on this character later.

Move forward three years, when Goodman decided to go the superhero route; Kirby is asked to come up with another character, and now the parallels between the Spider-Man creation and the Jacobson memo become undeniable.

Spider-Man would have the natural instincts and powers of a spider; he could walk up walls and across ceilings. He would have the proportional strength and agility of an arachnid. And more importantly, he could emit a silken thread that he could walk across, or use as

a swing. His webbing, a synthesized liquid, which emanated from his costume, was also adaptable as a net in which to ensnare villains, all of this directly traceable to Jacobson’s suggestions.

The addition of the extra sense that warns of impending danger, first seen in The Fly, seems to have been an original Kirby item, since it was not present in either the Silver Spider proposal, or mentioned in the Jacobson memo.

Some may imply that if all Kirby did was rework a Simon project, or follow a Jacobson memo, shouldn’t they get the credit? To some extent I agree, but as I have shown, every facet of Spider-Man’s character that matches up with The Fly is an element that Kirby added to the Fly—nothing was taken from the Silver Spider except the original title, and that had been rejected by Simon. Simon, on his own, had never used the logo, or acted on Jacobson’s suggestions.

Simon and Kirby was a partnership; when they broke up, all unused concepts 49

(above) Splash page from The Fly #1 (Aug. 1959). (left) The Fly gets his insect powers in his first issue (previous page), while Peter Parker invents his web-shooters in Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. 1962).

(below) Historian Nick Caputo noted at his blog (https://nickcaputo.blogspot.com/) about this Amazing Spider-Man #35 cover: “A side by side comparison clearly shows that Ditko's SpiderMan figure was redrawn by Jack Kirby, with inking likely by Sol Brodsky. This cover came up in a phone conversation I had with John Romita some years ago. He recalled he was in the office when Kirby was fixing the cover, and Kirby was joking that he always had to fix Ditko's butts. It's obvious that either Stan or Martin Goodman did not think Spidey's rear facing the viewer was attractive, and Stan had Jack make the change, likely because he was in the office.”

were free game for either man to pursue. As to Jacobson’s role, he was a submissions editor; he looked at a project, accepted, or rejected it, and offered suggestions to make it better. It was up to the artist to decide whether or not to use those suggestions; Simon didn’t on his character, Kirby did on his.

Submissions editors don’t get credit for the creations, but in any history of Spider-Man’s creation, in my opinion, both Joe Simon and Sid Jacobson certainly deserve a large footnote.

Evidence, and m.o.—a series of continuing pattern matches, plus a paper trail that leads directly to only Jack Kirby.

There are some specific detail differences, in these similar powers: The Fly’s super-strength is never explained, it’s just a given. Spider-Man’s is specifically described as the “proportional strength” of a spider—a rather unique concept (and surprisingly never used by any other insect-inspired hero, i.e.

Blue Beetle, Green Hornet, and Tarantula), and specific enough for me to try to track down to see if this might be an addition attributable to Lee or Ditko. But again, the only example I could find of any one of these three men giving a character the proportional strength of a bug prior to the creation of Spider-Man is found in a Kirby story. In Black Cat Mystic #60 (Harvey Publications, 1957), in a story entitled “The Ant Extract,” a meek scientist discovers a serum that gives him the proportional strength of an ant. Because of his new power, the scientist is feared and ostracized by authorities (sound vaguely familiar?)—another small, but novel detail, that shows the evolution of the concept, and is traceable to Jack Kirby.

The mechanical weapon as first created by Kirby has been described by Steve Ditko as a web-shooting gun, and later modified by Ditko into a wrist-mounted web shooter.

Again, not taking this quote as fact, my research found that the only pattern match to a costumeemanated webbing, is found in the Jacobson memo that Kirby had.

There is another questionable aspect to Steve’s memory concerning the “web gun.” In Steve’s article “An Insider’s Part of Comic History” from Robin Snyder’s History of Comics (Vol. 1 #5, 1990) he states, “Kirby’s Spider-Man had a web gun, never seen in use.” Steve then goes on to describe what he remembers of the five-page Kirby proposal. He says that the splash page was a “typical Kirby hero/action shot,” and the other four pages are an intro, involving a teenager and a mysterious scientist neighbor. Nowhere in the five pages are Spidey’s powers and weapons ever shown or described. In fact, according to Ditko, there was no transformation into the hero at all. If this is true, then how does Steve know that he had a “web gun,” if by his own words it was never shown or used?

Perhaps Kirby provided some design sketches or spot illos, but that would be in dispute with Ditko’s written statement that the 5 pages were all he received of Kirby’s Spidey proposal. Either way, the wrist shooter is a wonderful modification and a stroke of genius, but it is still just a modification—the actual idea of a mechanical web shooter, even by Ditko’s account, was Kirby’s. An interesting sidebar, Eric Stanton, a long time studio-mate of Ditko’s, claims that the web-shooter was his idea.

Another anomaly in Ditko’s recollection is that according to his account, there is no mention of any mystical ring that transformed the teenager into a super-hero. In fact, if one accepts Ditko’s account of what Kirby provided, then there was no comparison to Joe Simon’s Fly. In review: Every unique physical aspect of the character we know as Spider-Man can be traced back to only one of the three men involved, 50

Jack Kirby. Not only exact pattern matches, but also a written blueprint that only Kirby had seen. Evidence, and modus operandi...

The next character is Peter Parker, and while he is Spider-Man, the role of the alter-ego is to present a sometimes opposing character to the hero. It is this dichotomy that helps create tension and often times humor. It is this aspect that keeps the hero and the story grounded in some semblance of reality.

Peter’s character is portrayed as a scrawny, nerdy, wallflower science whiz. Taunted by his peers for his lack of athletic prowess and social skills, he is rejected by the opposite sex.

Again after comparing the recent works of the three men, I was able to find a pattern match with only one of them, Jack Kirby.

In the late ’50s, Kirby was looking for work; his comic book work had dwindled and he thought of getting into syndicated comic strips. One of the strips he proposed was titled Chip Hardy. Chip was a college freshman on a science scholarship—a regular ‘boy wonder’ taunted by the other kids. Moose Mulligan, the campus jock, teased young Chip about why he didn’t try out for football, instead of “hiding behind a mess of test tubes.” Other students followed suit and mocked the youngster, labelling all science majors as “squares.”

Eventually, this taunting escalated into a physical confrontation between Moose and Hardy, with young Chip getting the better of it, mimicking exactly the character template and early relationship between Peter Parker, Flash Thompson, and the other schoolmates.

Interestingly enough, at the same time Kirby was creating Chip Hardy, he also created a character for another strip named “Peter Parr.”

Another amazing pattern match is to be found in Tales To Astonish #22 (Marvel Comics, Aug. 1961), in a tale entitled “I Dared to Battle the Crawling Creature,” one of the many Kirby/Ayers monster stories, possibly dialogued by Larry Lieber (unsigned by Lee).

The hero is a high school student, a skinny, dorky, academic sort, laughed at by the jocks for his lack of athletic ability, and taunted by the girls. Typically, by the end of the story, it is the bookworm, not the jock, who saves the world.

Even the visuals of the lead character strongly resemble the Peter Parker character as shown in AF #15.

As to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, I could not find any earlier templates for the harassed, teenage, scholarly hero.

None, and this, frankly surprised me.

There is one aspect of Peter Parker that was consistent to Stan Lee, and that is Peter’s personality. Besides being a science geek (complete with pocket protector), Peter is shown to be somewhat angst-ridden; doubting of his own worth and unable to fit easily into society. His uneasiness with his new-found powers is atypical of Kirby’s heroes.

This inner conflict, and sometimes outer rage, is pure Lee; it is this deeper human psychological aspect that Lee imbued into all of Marvel’s heroes. It is the difference between Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four, and Rocky Davis of the Challengers of the Unknown.

The villain of AF #15 is a colorless petty crook who has assaulted Peter’s guardian—his uncle. His sole purpose is to create the crisis, which forces the hero into action. This match-up is also found in the Fly’s origin. Tommy Troy’s first use of his powers is to bring to justice

a petty crook that had assaulted his guardian. This was both characters’ sole appearance.

As to the characters, are my findings beyond the norm at Marvel at the time? I don’t think so. That Kirby constantly evolved and morphed characters and concepts is not an astounding statement.

His whole history at Marvel is filled with his taking prior concepts and updating them to meet current needs.

Fantastic Four was just an evolution of Kirby’s team concept first shown in the Challengers of the Unknown, then transformed into a slightly different version for Sky Masters of the Space Force, and further refined in Three Rocketeers.

The Hulk is just another retelling of the radiation mutated beast story, first done by Jack in Blue Bolt in 1940, with the added-in element about saving a young kid from a test blast taken directly from a Sky Masters story.

And Thor is nothing more than an updated version of the “god comes to Earth in times of need” theme, first done by Kirby in “Hurricane” (Red Raven #1, Timely, 1940), combined with a character and plot gimmick from a recent Kirby drawn story, “The Magic Hammer” (Tales of the Unexpected #16, DC Comics, Aug. 1957).

That Stan Lee would take these stock Kirby characters and give them distinct personalities, foibles, and conflicts, soap opera-style melodramatic continuities, and hip dialogue, is also not really in doubt.

That the character of Spider-Man as originally created was a Kirby concept is to me irrefutable—even without the Jacobson memo the patterns are obvious; with the memo it’s undeniable.

There is also strong evidence that the templates for Peter Parker’s maligned science whiz character, and some of the supporting cast, was supplied by Jack Kirby.

51

The coincidences needed for Stan Lee or Steve Ditko to have come up with these exact elements, absent Jack Kirby, is astronomical. If this was all that Kirby provided to Stan Lee, he would deserve co-credit, but there is more to creating a character: One must also come up with a storyline that showcases the new character, and it is here that the coincidences become positively mind-boggling.

The Plot

(above) Science-whiz Peter Parker debuts, a few years after Chip Hardy (right). (below) The loss of a dear friend from Private Strong #1 (June 1959, top) and three years later by Ditko. (next page) A Kirbydrawn Spidey symbol for Marvelmania.

The plot of Amazing Fantasy #15 is simple, yet unique: An orphaned teenage boy receives super-powers via a scientific experiment. After gaining his powers, a loved one is killed due to his inaction.

This remorse leads him to vow to never let it happen again, thus becoming a hero.

Again, after cross-checking stories by these three men, it became obvious that in structure and theme, the basic plot for Spidey’s origin came from one of the three persons involved: Jack Kirby.

The first plot element has to do with an orphaned, older teenager, who gets super powers via a scientific experiment, and this is intriguing. Even though I tried to approach this in an entirely objective manner, I still had some preconceived notions of both Kirby’s and Ditko’s proclivities. Many of these were shattered by my actual findings. One of these was that it was Ditko’s nature to use older troubled teenagers for his heroes, while it was Kirby’s nature to use younger kids.

So strong is Ditko’s aura surrounding Spider-Man, and Hawk and Dove, that I just assumed that it was a Ditko trait, but I was not able to track down a single use

52

of older orphaned teenagers, troubled or not, by Steve prior to Spidey.

What shocked me was how easy it was to find the Kirby template for the orphaned older teenaged hero, and a title that would provide key elements in piecing together the puzzle.

In The Double Life of Private Strong (Archie Publications, 1959, not coincidentally the companion title to The Fly), the hero, Lancelot Strong, aka The Shield, is an orphaned high school senior; and like Peter Parker, his surrogate parents were gentle, compassionate, and supportive. His powers were the result of a scientific experiment—in this case, genetic engineering.

Around this same time, Kirby was also working on the proposed newspaper strip, Chip Hardy, with a teenaged science whiz hero. In fact, from about 1959 on, just about all of Kirby’s youthful heroes would be older teenagers, and most orphaned. Johnny Storm, Rick Jones (both predating Peter Parker) and the X-Men also fit into this mold.

I could find nothing that matched in Ditko’s, or Lee’s (sans Kirby) recent past.

The next element is very important: After gaining his powers, the hero loses a loved one due to his inaction, thus providing the impetus for becoming a hero. This may be the critical element that separates Spider-Man from almost all other heroes—and it’s found in The Double Life of Private Strong. While rushing off to test his newfound powers against a rampaging alien monster, The Shield (Lancelot Strong) in his teen exuberance, ignores and leaves his best friend Spud in harm’s way. After defeating the brute, the Shield returns to celebrate his triumph, only to learn that the monster has killed Spud.

The distraught Shield blames himself, and vows that it will never happen again. Similarly, Spider-Man, in a moment of conceit and arrogance, ignores a thief, only to learn that that same thief would go on to kill his uncle, which in turn, spurs him into action. He then vows that it will never happen again.

So in one book, done less than three years before Spider-Man, Kirby used most of the critical plot elements that would show up a few years later in Spider-Man. Certainly Spider-Man’s is

more melodramatic as one would expect from Stan’s dialogue, but the basic plot mirrors Private Strong. The panels where the boys mourn the loss of their loved ones are almost eerie in their similarities.

So going by pattern matches, it appears we have the hero and villain from The Fly combined with the origin outline of Private Strong.

This cross-pollination of a character from one story and a plot from another is classic Kirby. He had touches of genius, but during the late 1950s to mid-1960s, his heroes, villains and plots were interchangeable. His storytelling was very formulaic. He had archetypal heroes, a small list of stock villains, and a set selection of plots. He mixed and matched these regardless of genres. His approach to comics was sort of a Chinese take-out menu—one from column A and one from column B. Kirby’s touches are repetitive and easily identifiable. This realization led to one of the more unexpected findings. It appears that Kirby did not cross-match The Fly and Private Strong just this once; he did it twice and both simultaneously. This pattern can also be found on The Mighty Thor.

For Spider-Man, Kirby took the basic character traits (insect), and the villain (petty crook) from the Fly, added in the origin gimmick (scientific, older teen), and the dramatic ending (mourning a lost friend) from Private Strong.

For Thor, Kirby reversed himself, taking the origin element (finding of a mystical artifact) and ending (transformation back to hapless human) from The Fly, and the villain (rampaging aliens) from Private Strong, plus adding in a character from an earlier DC fantasy story (Tales of the Unexpected #16).

Interestingly enough, Ant-Man’s first appearance also borrows heavily from the Private Strong story where he is shrunk down and must fight a mad scientist. Thor, Ant-Man, and Spider-Man all appeared on the stands the same day.

“Facts and patterns,” says the Confessor, “plus look for what doesn’t fit.”

Stan Lee and Steve Ditko say they rejected the original plot because of its similarity to The Fly, and created their own. The idea that they would reject one Kirby plot, and then replace it with another Kirby plot, makes no sense; it simply doesn’t fit. These two men had their own influences and patterns, and if they were to sit down and come up with their own origin, it would not have mirrored a recent Kirby plot, especially if they were specifically looking to avoid the appearance of a Kirby plot. A small point of interest concerning Ditko’s claim that it was he who recognized a resemblance between Stan’s first script and The Fly: Steve specifically mentioned that he recalled The Fly as a product of Joe Simon, and since he could not recall Kirby’s role in The Fly, he never make the linkage with Kirby and Spider-Man. But nowhere in The Fly was Joe Simon’s name ever credited, yet the art is easily identifiable as Jack Kirby’s. It seems very odd that a man who broke into the industry with the Simon and Kirby studio (even inking over Kirby on Captain 3-D) and who had been inking over Jack Kirby steadily the last several years, would match up a minor work with an unlisted editor, but not an artist whose work he was most familiar with.

It appears that Stan and Steve took Kirby’s basic idea, added in Peter’s angst ridden personality, some of the supporting cast, and probably the details involving the spider experiment, the wrestler and show business, but the basic plot was all Kirby.

Is this use of a Kirby plot, in a book not drawn by Kirby, unusual for Marvel at the time? No! Iron Man’s origin, from Tales Of Suspense #39, uses a Kirby plot, first seen in a Green Arrow story from 1959 (“The War That Never Ended,” Adventure Comics #255). In both stories the hero is captured by an oriental army, and because of his specialty in weaponry, is forced to manufacture a weapon. The hero tricks his captors and creates a weapon that backfires on the enemy and foils their plans. Yet Don Heck provided the artwork for Iron Man’s first

adventure. Rumor has it that Kirby’s proposal for Iron Man sat around for a little while before it was given to Don Heck to draw.

For whatever reason, the idea that Kirby would plot the origin of a new character is the rule at Marvel in the early ’60s. It would actually be an anomaly if Kirby hadn’t provided the origin.

But it doesn’t stop there, for while I was cross-referencing the plots to see if any matched up with AF #15, I noticed another striking coincidence, and this staggered me! Not only does it appear that Kirby provided the plot for AF #15, it appears that he also assisted in plotting some of the following Spidey stories. The second and third Spider-Man stories have plot elements taken directly from the second and third Private Strong stories. That’s correct; the first three Spidey stories mirror the first three Shield stories.

The second Private Strong story involves the hero tracking down a Communist spy attempting to steal scientific secrets; the villain tries to escape in a submarine that the hero is forced to put out of action.

This is also the plot of the Chameleon story in Amazing Spider-Man #1.

The villain as a master of disguise was used by Jack Kirby in the first, second, or third story of just about every series he did between 1956 and 1963. (I mentioned he was predictable.) It is found in his first Green Arrow story (“Green Arrows of the World,” Adventure Comics #250, DC Comics, 1958), the second Yellow Claw story, (“The Mystery of Cabin 361,” Yellow Claw #2, Marvel, 1958), the third Dr. Droom tale (“Doctor Droom Meets Zemu,” Amazing Adventures #2, Marvel 1961), the second Fantastic Four story, the second “Ant-Man” story, and the third “Thor” story, all preceding Amazing Spider-Man #1. The specific element of a villain impersonating a hero in order to infiltrate, and/or incriminate him in a crime is one that Kirby used often. Prior to Amazing Spider-Man #1, it can be found in Fighting American (“Three Coins in the Pushcart,” Fighting American #7, Prize Comics, 1954), Green Arrow (Adventure Comics #250), and most recently in Fantastic Four #2. This theme would also be used in the test appearance of Captain America in Strange Tales #114.

In the third Private Strong and Spider-Man stories, we are introduced to the recurring pain-in-the-butt authority figure/nemesis— the one who always gets hoisted on his own petard—a Kirby icon dating back to Captain America. In both stories the adult child of that authority figure gets into a jam and needs the costumed hero to save him or her. In Private Strong’s case, it’s the daughter of the general in charge of the base he is assigned to after being drafted. After she gets trapped in a run-amok tank, Private Strong must save her.

In Spider-Man’s story, it’s the son of the editor of the newspaper who hires Peter Parker, and he is trapped in a runaway space capsule that Spider-Man must rescue. Even after saving their offspring, neither of the authoritarian figures considers the hero a particularly positive force, and both think the alter ego character is a bumbling idiot.

What are the odds, if Kirby didn’t assist on the plots, that the first three Spider-Man stories would mirror the first three Private Strong stories? Wouldn’t one think that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko would have their own plotting patterns? Astoundingly, the second issue of Amazing Spider-Man continues in this same vein.

The Vulture story from ASM #2 is interesting because not only does it have plot elements from an earlier Kirby story, but the bad guy is an exact duplicate of the villain from that same Kirby story. In the first Manhunter story (Adventure Comics #73, DC Comics, 1942), Kirby introduced The Buzzard, who, in an uncanny parallel to the Vulture, is a skinny, stoop shouldered, hump-backed, beak-nosed maniac, dressed in a green body suit with a feathered collar that encircles the neck. Both men have the power of flight—the Buzzard by flapping his cape, and the Vulture via mechanical wings and a magnetic unit.

53

silly science.” As identifiable as fingerprints, we all recognize it: scientific plot elements so ridiculous in their implausibility, yet so exciting visually and conceptually, that it’s immediately acceptable: Mr. Fantastic, reaching up and catching a nuclear tipped Hunter missile in full flight, and throwing it miles away into the bay; the Sub-Mariner, in the freezing void of space, leapfrogging from meteorite to meteorite, only to land on Dr. Doom’s spaceship; unstable molecules, and such.

The early Spider-Man stories were full of this pseudo-scientific stuff. In the story involving J. Jonah Jameson’s son trapped in the space capsule, we first see NASA trying to snare the disabled capsule in a net suspended from a parachute. When this fails, Spider-Man, straddling a jet, snares the space capsule with his web and rides it like a bucking bronco, completely overlooking the fact that space capsules orbit far above the range of a jet, and the extreme heat generated during re-entry would fry a human being, even one with spider powers.

This feels like Kirby’s silly science to me; in fact, it is reminiscent of a scene in Sky Masters—where they try to rescue an errant space capsule with a hook attached to a jet—combined with a satellite repair story, also found in Sky Masters.

Another facet of Kirby’s silly science and plotting pattern is the anti-climactic ending, where the scientist hero, in one panel, whips up some bit of gadgetry that defeats a villain who has been beating his brains out for the previous 15 pages.

Challengers of the Unknown’s Professor Haley was good at these instant cures, and the FF’s Reed Richards was the master, but early

Both men’s shtick is to openly challenge the authorities and the media by boasting of their evil plans before they commit them.

The Buzzard goes so far as to actually kill a reporter to deliver his message; the Vulture (in post-Comics Code times) simply throws a rock through J. Jonahs’s window.

The Tinkerer story in ASM #2 has a very interesting hook, a plot element where a radio is doctored and infiltrated into scientists and government officials’ houses in order to spy and/ or control them. This is not some generic scheme, but a very detailed and specific plot element used by Jack Kirby several times. The earliest use is in Captain America #7 (Marvel Comics, Oct. 1941), in a story titled “Horror Plays the Scales.” Kirby again used this element in a crime story from Headline Comics #24, (Prize Publications, May 1947) titled “Murder on a Wavelength.”

The alien aspect of this Spidey story appears adapted from a Kirby “Dr. Droom” story. In his third story, “Doctor Droom Meets Zemu” (Amazing Adventures #3, Marvel 1961), Droom is following a suspicious character and overhears a plan by aliens in which one will infiltrate humanity and lay the groundwork for an alien invasion.

Kirby used this same plot in “Earth Will Be Lost Tonight” (Strange Tales #93, Marvel, Feb. 1962). Spider-Man’s capture and escape method seem to be lifted from a Challs story “The Human Pets” (Challengers of the Unknown #3, DC Comics, 1958).

I could find no matching plots from Lee or Ditko. All of these stories are structured in typical Kirby style, with little characterization, all-out action endings devoid of any of the subtlety, pathos, or irony usually associated with current Lee/Ditko offerings.

And it goes on this way for a few more stories. This similar plotting sequence is a lot like DNA testing; one or two match-ups doesn’t mean a thing, but the odds increase exponentially with each added matched item.

It’s a good time for me to mention something I call “Kirby’s 54

on, Peter Parker stood toe-to-toe with them. In the first Vulture story, from Amazing Spider-Man #2, after getting his hat handed to him, Peter Parker, based on nothing but a hunch, theorizes that the Vulture’s powers must be magnetic and whips up, with his handy dandy screwdriver, in one panel, an anti-magnetic device. How Kirbyish can you get?

Similar elements occur in the first Doc Ock (a super acid) and the first Lizard story (an instantaneous antidote). This kid was good!

Compare this to the atmospheric, cerebral, and quietly ironic solutions and climaxes that Lee and Ditko specialized in on their sci-fi/horror tales of this period.

This deus ex machina-style ending was not part of their repertoire; it simply doesn’t fit.

To Kirby, scientists were scientists; he made no real distinction between the disciplines. In one story the hero was a physicist, the next a chemist; perhaps a biologist or a metallurgist, whatever was needed for the story. Hank Pym, aka Ant-Man, was equal part entomologist, chemist, cybernetician, and machinist. Reed Richards was master of all sciences, and Peter Parker, though a high school student, was equally as versatile.

After receiving the spider powers, this teenager went home and with his Mr. Wizard Home Chemistry Lab created a formula for a web, and the means to propel it.

Then in the Vulture story he suddenly becomes a physics master, and invents an anti-magnetic device. In the Tinkerer tale, he is assisting an electronics genius, and up against the Lizard, Peter’s become an expert in serums and antidotes. This boy was truly amazing! It’s a shame he gave all that scientific knowledge up to become a news photographer. Kirby’s handiwork is all over the early stories.

Thankfully, these pseudo-science elements soon ended, and I’m betting it happened when Jack stopped assisting Stan on Spider-Man plots, and Ditko took over.

So it seems clear that Kirby’s participation with Spider-Man extended further than just a rejected proposal. It appears that he not only created the character, he also assisted greatly in the origin and early storylines and added many early plot elements.

Again, is this out of character? No. Jack Kirby helped Stan with the plotting of several characters even when not specifically drawing them. The plot to the origin of Iron Man, several

of the early Thor stories, and some of the Torch stories from Strange Tales, not drawn by Kirby, have unmistakable Kirby-supplied villains, plots, and dramatic elements.

Daredevil showed some early Kirby involvement. Why wouldn’t Kirby assist Stan on Spider-Man? The early Marvel titles and characters were never considered private domains. Stan certainly had no compunction about Kirby doing the first two covers, or a back-up story.

This brings me to a facet of Spider-Man I hadn’t mentioned before.

The Costume In all my debates concerning Ditko and Kirby, I had always assumed that when Kirby claimed he designed the costume, he was in error; in fact, this was always a sticking point with me. Recently, though, I have had reasons to wonder about that claim. Unlike the match between the Vulture and the Buzzard, there is no direct similarity between Spider-Man’s costume, and any drawn previously by Ditko or Kirby.

55

(previous page) Kirby’s 1940s Buzzard from “Manhunter” vs.

Ditko’s 1960s Vulture from Spidey. (above and below) 1941 use of radio hypnosis from Jack’s Captain America Comics #7, and Ditko’s Tinkerer doing the same in 1963’s Amazing Spider-Man #2.

This particular debate point does not emanate from Kirby’s period of dissatisfaction with Marvel or Stan Lee. In that speech at Vanderbilt in 1972, Stan relates how during the late ’60s, when asked, he could never remember who designed Spidey’s costume. He wasn’t sure if it was Jack or Steve. It was common for Kirby to design costumes for other artists’ characters, such as Iron Man for Don Heck. Heck is on record as saying that Kirby also designed many of the villains that appeared in Heck drawn books.

And, there is this little quote from Foom Magazine #11, 1975. In the middle of an article about Kirby’s return to Marvel after his brief layover at DC, the author states, “It’s not generally known that it was Jack Kirby who designed Spider-Man’s costume.” This isn’t in a fanzine, it’s not a quote from an interview with Kirby, and it’s not in a reference book; it’s right there in an inhouse publication of Marvel’s.

As with all quotes, I can’t guarantee its accuracy, but it seems that at least at that time (1975) the feeling at Marvel was that Kirby had designed the costume, and as mentioned earlier, Jim Shooter says the Kirby proposal was still around at that time.

Another small but aggravating item: Spider-Man has always been drawn with a strange looking spider icon on his back. Fact is, it doesn’t look like a spider so much as a tick or other small single-bodied insect. The spider drawn on the front of Spidey’s costume is much more accurate, showing a double-sectioned body with the legs coming out of the torso section. Why would Ditko use such a different and inaccurate icon for the back of the costume? I can’t answer that question, but the spider on the back of the costume is remarkably similar to the spider icon that appears on the Kirby designed character Spider Spry from the Fly series (yes, him again).

What are the chances that two separate and unique artists would choose such a similar, yet inaccurate depiction of a spider for a costume decoration?

For those that think I might be purposely ignoring elements that point to Ditko, let me say that there are several design aspects that shout out Ditko.

First, the circular design with the webs radiating out from the center as seen in Spidey’s mask and the spider signal can be traced back to a cover sidebar used on some Charlton horror/fantasy titles in 1958. While I have no proof that Ditko designed that sidebar, he certainly would have been familiar with it.

Secondly, and most convincing, is something that was pointed out by the ever observant Simon Russell, from the kirby-l e-list. He observed that Steve Ditko rarely ever gave his characters visible belts and trunks, while Kirby always did. Is this born out by comparison?

Very definitely!

Most of Ditko’s early characters especially showed this trait.

Captain Atom, Spider-Man, Mysterio, and Kraven all have one-piece leggings unbroken by any hint of separate shorts. Kirby, on the other hand, almost always gave his characters belts and shorts.

None of this is very compelling, so I looked to see if Kirby’s and Ditko’s words offered a clue, and if their memories stand up to actual

research.

In his 1990 article, Steve Ditko says that he gave Spider-Man a full facemask in order to hide Peter Parker’s boyish face, and to add mystery. This sounds quite logical, and it’s hard to prove or disprove, but, based on comparison, the idea of a full facemask is not an identifiable pattern.

Kirby’s first hero, The Lone Rider, had a full facemask, as did Manhunter from 1942. Iron Man, Black Panther, and Mister Miracle, etc. would follow. Many of Kirby’s villains had full facemasks, the Red Skull and Dr. Doom chief among these.

On the other hand, Ditko’s Captain Atom, Dr. Strange, the Blue Beetle, all had half-masks, or none at all. In fact, on Ditko’s other

56

young super-heroes like the Hawk and Dove, he does not give them full facemasks, so the idea of a full covering mask is not a telltale pattern with either man.

Also from Ditko’s 1990 article, he states when he was designing the costume, he had to match the costume to the powers. “For example; a clinging power, so he wouldn’t have hard soles or boots…”

In the Pure Images #1 article, he expands “…and since the character crawled walls, no soles were added to his feet.” Later Greg Theakston adds, “Ditko felt that hard soles on the boots wouldn’t be appropriate to a wall walking hero, and Kirby always draws the hard soles.”

These are interesting looks into how individual artists approach a creation, but in this specific case they are wrong factually, and conceptually.

Just two years earlier, Kirby had created a spidery character that was extremely agile, and could easily walk up silken lines. Spider Spry, of The Fly fame, had “soft soled” booties that facilitated climbing. Looking at the actual record, it appears that Kirby almost always gave his nimble, agile type characters flexible footwear that would facilitate climbing and gripping. Besides Spider Spry: Toad, Cobra, and the Beast all had either soft-soled shoes, or bare feet—which brings me to my next observation.

Besides being wrong about Kirby’s tendencies, Ditko is wrong even as to his own design choices, for in the first three Spider-Man stories, Spidey is shown with hard soles on his feet; in fact, rippled-style hard soles similar to those found on the Fly. It may well be that sometime after the first three stories were done, Ditko decided that a crawling hero didn’t need hard soles, and so he changed them, but why claim that it was done specifically to differentiate between his and Kirby’s design choices? Unless the first three issues were somewhat based on Kirby’s designs.

So the few details that Ditko has provided don’t really help; in fact, they raise more questions since some are contradicted by actual comparison.

What about Kirby’s recollections?

Kirby has never, in my research, listed any specific details when he talked about “creating” the costume, but, thanks to Mike Gartland (a frequent Kirby chronicler), I was able to track down an early unwitting mention.

In Excelsior #1, a fanzine from 1968, Kirby is being interviewed. The writer asks, “Did you draw the Vision? If you did, do you remember the powers that he possessed, and could you tell us of these powers?”

Kirby responds, “I created the Vision as a feature of Marvel (Timely) comics. He was the forerunner of the Spider-Man and Silver Surfer eyes.

(Editor’s Note: The huge pupil-less eyeballs both

heroes possess.) If I remember correctly, his powers were of a mystic nature.”

So once again, we have Kirby, in this case unexpectedly, supplying a small detail concerning Spider-Man that is backed up by comparison, for the Vision, a mysterious hero from another plane that did have white blank eyes.

Jack certainly wasn’t saying that Steve Ditko used the opaque eyes based upon Kirby’s earlier use of them with the Vision. This was in 1968, long before the debates about Spider-Man began. Why would Kirby offer up such an unsolicited tidbit while responding to a question about a totally different character if it wasn’t true?

Ditko, to my knowledge has never mentioned where the idea for the opaque eyes came from.

This Kirby quote, on its own, doesn’t prove anything, but it does add to the strange conflicting nature of the debate.

Lastly, it’s been mentioned that Kirby could never draw the Spider-Man costume correctly, which would be strange if he created it. This sounds plausible, but the fact is that Kirby did not draw SpiderMan all that much, and Kirby could never keep the details of any of his costumes straight. His inkers would spend hours making corrections on the costumes. Kirby was a penciler by nature, and little details such as the curl of a spider web, or the shape of a spider icon, was a detail that wasn’t important in the penciling stage; it was simply hinted at. He had the same problem with Fighting American’s stripes and wing chest design, never getting it the same way twice.

Look at the early issues of Thor, and note the costume differences.

By the way, Ditko had the same problem; he could never decide if the webbing detail on the costume curled up or down.

He sometimes had them going both 57

(previous page) Note the similarity between Spider Spry’s forehead symbol, and the one on the back of SpiderMan, drawn here by Jack for Amazing Spider-Man #8 (Jan. 1964). (below) Jack had instinctively been drawing pupil-less eyeballs on characters dating back to the Vision in the 1940s.

But in Spidey’s first appearance, Ditko oddly added pupil dots to this pivotal scene.

(left) As for Jack’s Silver Surfer, here is Steve Rude’s interpretation of what the whited-out and redrawn panel of Fantastic Four #57, page 14 (below), might’ve looked like, based on a fan’s description of seeing it on the original art, as conveyed in TJKC #68.

Thanks, Steve!

(below) Jack designed Iron Man’s original gray armor for Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963) and provided the cover, while Don Heck drew the story.

TOS #48 (Dec. 1963) introduced his new red and gold armor, in another issue featuring a Kirby cover, and an interior story by someone else—this time, Ditko. Who designed the new armor? It’s unclear, but below is a great 1967 sketch that shows Jack was very comfortable rendering ol’ Shellhead that way. (next page) Amazing Spider-Man #1 and Iron Man’s debut were on stands at the same time, with Jack’s fingerprints all over both.

And Tales To Astonish #57’s cover featured both Spidey and Kirby art, to help GiantMan’s flagging sales.

directions on the same drawing, and check out how different the spider icons on the costume front appear, even in the same story.

All of these are fairly circumstantial, and if I was a betting man, I would guess that Spidey’s costume is a hybrid, mostly Ditko, with some Kirby bits taken from Kirby’s original proposal.

Conclusions So much for my actual research; now let me speculate a little further. Here is how I think it went down.

In mid-1961, Martin Goodman noticed that the sales of the Atlas monster books were slowly dwindling, and while looking for a replacement genre, he realized that DC seemed to be having some success with superheroes. He decided that Marvel should take a hesitant step in that direction, and either he or Stan Lee talked to Jack Kirby, who had a 20-year history of creating super-heroes. They decided on a team concept with a twist—the characters would not always get along. Kirby went home and cobbled together a story using parts of

58

his last two team series, the Challengers of the Unknown, and his recent syndicated strip Sky Masters of the Space Force, and he presented it to Stan Lee. Stan added in the personalities, the background details, the speech patterns, and Fantastic Four was born.

Seeing that the FF was selling, but still a little wary of jumping full bore into the super-hero market, Stan next talked with Jack about using an Atlas-style monster as a hero. So Kirby went home, matched together an Atlas-style monster with a Sky Masters plot element dealing with a scientist saving a kid from a rocket blast, threw in his radiation-caused mutation concept he had used since Blue Bolt days, and you have the Hulk. Again Stan added in the soap opera, the personalities, the linear continuity, and the human aspects he specialized in.

Martin, seeing that both series were selling, decided to go balls to the wall into the super-hero genre, complete with costumes, secret identities, and all the trappings.

Stan again went to Jack and asked him if he had any other concepts lying around. Kirby, doing just as he had with the FF, went back to the last two pure super-hero series he had worked on, and mixed and matched aspects from each to create three new heroes: Thor, Ant-Man and Spider-Man. It is possible, in fact probable, that when Kirby presented his Spidey proposal to Lee, Stan had some reservations because his vision of the character was a little different. It didn’t matter because Kirby wasn’t scheduled to draw this feature anyway—Stan and the new artist could make the changes. They could flesh out, and add their own take on the characters—Kirby was too busy. He was drawing the FF and the Hulk fulltime, and was scheduled to render Thor in Journey Into Mystery, and Ant-Man in Tales to Astonish.

All this fits in with the very first account of how Spider-Man came to be. Remember, Stan said that Kirby was too busy and he (Lee) chose Steve Ditko to draw the feature after the concepts were done, and it fits in with Ditko’s first recollections. But does this fit in with what we know about how Marvel worked in the early 1960s?

I think it does. Marvel had a modus operandi also.

Evidence shows that Kirby helped out on just about every new project, even the ones he didn’t draw (origin, plot, and costume design for Iron Man; splash page, cover and plot elements for Daredevil; etc.).

Why wouldn’t Jack be involved similarly in any Ditko projects? There were no separate fiefdoms at Marvel at this time. Kirby certainly helped out with the first two covers, he provided an advertising blurb in the first issue, and he did a back-up story in #8. Jack did cover retouches and corrections. He also did Spider-Man crossover stories in Fantastic Four Annual #1, and in Strange Tales Annual #2, both of which appeared before ASM #5. The Fantastic Four was intertwined with Spider-Man like no other Marvel series.

In the early days of Marvel, there was no sense of separate books; everyone contributed to every series.

It’s amazing, but I don’t think coincidental, that every member of the bullpen was multifaceted: Lee would edit, write, and script; Lieber would pencil, ink, and write; Kirby would pencil, create, and plot; Ditko could pencil, ink, and plot, etc. There seems to have been a true all-for-one atmosphere early on in the bullpen. I actually think this is why these men were the ones

picked when Stan Lee regrouped Atlas in 1958. It was this multitalented nature that allowed Stan the flexibility to create the Marvel method of storytelling.

So, to wrap-up, we have the title of the series, which was likely contributed by Kirby. We have the main character of the series surely created by Kirby, with an assist to Sid Jacobson. And we have the origin, and first couple of stories, most likely plot-assisted by Kirby. We may even have the costume based somewhat on a Kirby design.

How much more does it take to deserve cocreative status?

Nevertheless, I am not on any campaign to get Kirby an official credit on Spider-Man. Ditko/Lee works just fine for me. Yet for historical purposes, I do believe that his contributions should be recognized.

So does this mean that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko are lying? I don’t think so. I think this is an example where each one is telling the truth from one’s own perspective. Jack Kirby was a conceptualist, an idea man; he felt that creation was the coming up of new ideas. Stan Lee is a writer; he’s a word man, and he naturally feels the act of creation starts with the fleshing out of the personality and giving voice to the character.

And Steve is an artist; his idea of creation is the giving of form, and texture, and atmosphere to a shapeless thought. To thine own self be true, and I think they are.

In my opinion, Spider-Man is the classic example of a true collaboration; omit any one of the three men involved and you end up with a weaker, or nonexistent creation.

Without Kirby, I don’t think a “spider” hero would ever have been created. The premise doesn’t fit in with either Lee or Ditko’s thematic patterns. If Lee and Ditko had created it from scratch, we would have had a hero more like the cerebral Dr. Strange, lacking the action adventure facet that Kirby added.

If just Kirby and Lee had worked on the title, we would have invariably seen it head into the allout adventure, or cosmic/ mythic realms of Kirby’s other titles, thereby losing out on the gritty earthiness, and introspective nature Ditko added. The three-part combination helped eliminate the individual excesses, while keeping the best of each.

Just because Kirby’s participation ended quickly doesn’t detract from his role in the creation;

without his character concepts, and strong action-based foundation, Spider-Man might never have found that perfect mix of the psychological and physical aspects. Left to his own devises, Ditko’s characters and stories usually lack the testosterone-based fun fantasies, that pure physicality, that the super-hero genre demands. His characters thought too much, and acted too little.

And without Stan Lee, in my opinion, we would have been without the single most vital ingredient that made Spider-Man the most unique character in comics: Human frailty!

More than any other character he worked on, Stan identified with Peter Parker. His vision of the everyman as hero made Spidey the most conflicted, the most human, and the most unique hero ever created.

His vision was the perfect recipe for a super-hero in the post-war era. It was an age when the common man no longer felt in control of his own destiny.

Spider-Man was not just fighting bad guys; he was fighting our doubts, our rages, and our feeling of helplessness. Peter, like most people (especially the teens reading his books), was looking for his role in society, and was turned away at every stop. Stan Lee made Spider-Man one of us. This is why Spidey not only continued, he thrived, long after both Kirby and Ditko no longer had any input.

Together we got the perfect blend of Kirby’s solid histrionics, Ditko’s philosophic atmospherics, and Lee’s melodramatic human voice.

It just doesn’t get any better, folks.

Who created Spider-Man? There’s room for all three. ★ (This article was very time and labor intensive and I need to thank some people. First and foremost, Pat Hilger and M.I. for their unselfish access to their books.

Greg Theakston for leading the way. Blake Bell for inspiring me and keeping me jazzed. And the Kirby-l and Ditko-l for their prodding and doubting natures.)

[TJKC Editor’s Note: Stan Taylor passed away in December 2014, leaving behind a full biography of Jack, readable at: http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/effect/looking-for-theawesome-contents/] 59

Inspired

Kamandi & the Secret City

by Shane Foley as anyone noticed before that Jack Kirby’s set-up for the “Secret City Saga” (or, as Roy Thomas named it, “The Ninth Men,” or, as possibly Jack was also going to name it, “The Midnight Men”) is nearly the same as he’d used before for Kamandi?

His notes for the Secret City state: “… mankind, when it reaches a high point of technology every fifteen thousand years, produces a weapon that destroys his civilization on a planetary scale and forces itself to climb painfully and slowly once more to a highly civilized state.”

In Kamandi, he was adamant that it was not a war that changed the world, but a natural event, which is certainly different than the Secret City set-up. But he then continues, in the letter’s page for Kamandi #2: “Does the Earth flip its lid every ten thousand years or thereabouts? Is planetary cataclysm part of some kind of continual adjustment Earth must make in its endless swing around the sun? (snip) ...We could be due for another upheaval, the latest of a great cycle of upheavals which, it is speculated, our world is prone to. (snip) How many New Yorks and Chicagos have gone down the drain in the remote and unrecorded past?

How many times has man been “downed” by some great jolt, made his comeback—and been “put down” again? [If so, man may] try to pinpoint the “moment.” And perhaps, sections of humanity would prepare for it in ways unique to their own regional lifestyle and environment.” And so on.

So in Kamandi, the cataclysm was a natural event. It probably occurred in our near future, with the last one being about 10,000 years ago. There were some people who prepared well for it—Kamandi’s grandfather being one, and, perhaps, the Mutants like Ben Boxer being others. The outcome for the rest, of course, reversed the roles of many animals and men.

In the Secret City Saga, while the event is not a natural one, but one caused by the weaponry of advanced mankind, it was still a regular occurrence, occurring every 15,000 years or so. Again, there were those that prepared for it—this time though, the story is about heroic survivors of the previous cataclysm rising in our time, rather than stories set after the next catastrophe. And this time, of course, there is no reversal of animal and human roles.

Differences for sure, but a very similar premise at the core. Apart from the letter’s page in Kamandi #2, I can’t recall Jack doing much with the idea—even maybe departing from it in Kamandi #16— and so he probably felt like revisiting it years later from a different perspective, to make sure such a good idea wasn’t wasted. ★

H

(top) A 1975 postmarked Kamandi envelope illustration by Jack, on correspondence sent to a fan. (above) Jack’s original Captain Glory illo, and the character’s comics debut in the Secret City Saga by Steve Ditko (above) and John Severin (below).

60

An ongoing examination of Kirby’s art and compositional skills

Kirby’s Cosmic Seeds

I

n the beginning, was “The Source.” All life and ideas flow from it. Kirby conceives a new idea and must decide on an origin, on how it came into being. An origin connects the concept to the passage of relative time, which is life, as we know it.

As origins go, Kirby has always been fascinated by the idea of a cosmic seed. In this 1960 story from Journey Into Mystery #56 (left), we see a dinosaur grow from an intergalactic seed. This is one of Kirby’s pre-hero monster stories, but it’s a great concept and as a bonus, has classic Kirby dinosaurs.

This splash page, inked by one of my personal favorite Kirby inkers Chris Rule, shows an Earth scientist/astronaut on planet X-41, fleeing some intergalactic saurians. The splash is a wonderful wedge-shaped composition with a great sense of propulsion, as we see these creatures chase the protagonist out of the panel. The stage is full of great local planetary scenery, and Rule’s ink line is strong and sure, with sharp precise black spotting. Kirby always grounds his story-scape with believable details. In the case of the splash panel, he gives us a solid background of volcanic rock, and the foreground’s perilously thorny branches also frame the action while counterbalancing the motion of the figures.

As the narrative develops, the scientist brings home some lush red blossoms native to X-41 and extracts some of its seeds. He plants and nurtures them carefully, and the seeds germinate

61

into one of the giant lizards.

In that scene, he gives us background of a skylight, wall shapes and furniture to set a double purpose of providing realistic environment and to strengthen the composition as well. Notice in the second panel how the sofa’s shape creates a lattice-like division of the space, providing a sense of depth between the dinosaur and the man.

Let’s look at the story in Fantastic Four #66, “The Mystery of the Human Beehive,” which is also about creation and generation from a sort of seed. It is a

story somewhat similar to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, wherein a group of scientists assemble in order to create a perfect being. Kirby keeps the story suspenseful by slowly revealing the nature of the threat, showing it to us gradually in stages. Finally, we see the being in the state just prior to its emergence, as Kirby gives us a powerful visual symbolic image of generation through transitions with his depiction of a huge insectoid cocoon pulsing with life. Ben Grimm’s blind girlfriend Alicia in one of her most dynamic appearances reaches out as if to embrace the pod-thing that is covered with spores and nodules.

Later, we see a wonderfully atmospheric page as Kirby shows us a blasted underground cave-scape, wherein the fallen cocoon has entered into its final stage of development.

One of the scientists is attempting to stop Alicia from getting too close to the strange life form, as he realizes the error of what he and his fellow creators have achieved. In the panoramic central panel (next page), Kirby renders the fiery space between the scientist and Alicia in a way that accentuates the distance between them.

In Kirby’s original plot, the scientists are well intentioned if somewhat deluded. Apparently preferring a simpler and less ambiguous good versus evil theme, Stan Lee decided to change the direction of the story, making the scientists intentions selfish and evil. (For more on this, read Mike Gartland’s excellent article “Failure to Communicate, Part Four” in TJKC #24.) In any case, the story’s drama does center on the will of the creators as opposed to the will of the new creation.

62

This is an interesting subject to dwell on as it relates to an artistic creator like Kirby. Sometimes an idea that such a person generates takes on a life of its own, no longer subservient to the will of its author. Some fictional characters outlive their creator (as many of Kirby’s did) and take on characteristics their originator never intended for them to have. In this case, the character Kirby introduced as “Cocoon Man” was renamed “Him” by Stan Lee and was later resurrected in 1972 by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane as an allegorical Christ figure renamed Adam Warlock.

Kirby took the notion of seeding to a whole new level in his 1977 series The Eternals. On this page in issue #7 (right), the omnipotent Celestials, as the uber-lords of creation, use cosmic seeds to bring new life to Earth. In this amazing panel, they hover above the puny humans and lesser godlings that observe them, as they carry their life-seed capsule rods.

This is a beautiful example of the big O composition, as the gestures of the Celestials bring the reader’s eye around and around to clearly see the sheer mass and scale of the huge beings in proportion to the Mesoamerican pyramid and the human-sized figures below.

The page is a textbook Kirby instruction on how to depict scale and the perception of three-dimensional depth.

Kirby gives us several planes to divide the space from bottom to top. The base plane is the circular ground, accentuated by its yellow rim. Above it is the step structure that the human-scaled figures ascend. The level of the lower Celestial and the red rod cuts the space in half and gives the airborne figure the altitude lattice in which to hover. The size and spatial relationships between the figures create the illusion of a believable landscape. There are no random objects in the picture that do not serve to reinforce the illusion. The central image, the life-seed capsule rod, with its studded globe is a powerful symbol of potency.

We can easily make the analogy that Kirby’s pen is the equivalent of the “Rod of life Seed Capsules” depicted here. Kirby’s creative force flows freely from him, as does the irrepressible natural flow of life. As an artist of epic proportions, Kirby lives to create and creates in order to live. ★ 63

Rex is...

...Seeing Red!

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

by Sean Kleefeld

t was a full decade ago that I took a look at Devil Dinosaur in my “Incidental Iconography” from The Jack Kirby Collector #45. In that piece, I largely looked at the notion of Jack drawing his version of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and what he modified from what was actually known (or at least believed!) about T-Rexes at that time. Jack’s reference material—the T-Rex itself—seemed so obvious that I spent much of my research in comparing Jack’s drawings against skeletons and museum reconstructions. What I didn’t realize was that Jack, behind Dave Cockrum and Joe Kubert, was actually the third comic book artist to draw Devil Dinosaur!

Or, more precisely, a primary red Tyrannosaurus Rex that interacted with humans.

I

Cockrum’s figure drawing was used on the box art itself, colored bright red, and the model parts were even molded using red plastic.

Aside from the illustration style, it’s Devil Dinosaur!

But to add an additional layer of pedigree to the character, Aurora knew that their customers were ones who also read comic books. After all, the had acquired those Marvel and DC licenses years earlier, so they had several years of a connection with the comic book industry—which led to taking out a double-page ad in numerous comics in the mid-1970s timeframe that featured Tarzan encountering many of the dinosaurs in the “Prehistoric Scenes” line, including—even spotlighting—the giant, bright red Tyrannosaurus.

And who better to draw a comic featuring Tarzan than the thencurrent Tarzan artist Joe Kubert? It’s by far not Kubert’s best work and Tarzan is pretty minimally included, but the T-Rex breaking out of the single bottom panel is memorable.

Cockrum is perhaps best known for revamping the X-Men, cocreating several significant characters that are still strongly associated with the team. His run on “Legion of the Super-Heroes” is highly regarded as well. Less well-known about his career, however, is that he worked as a designer for the model manufacturer Aurora for several years in the early 1970s.

Aurora started producing mostly airplane models in the early 1950s, but beginning in 1957, they began producing kits of figures, which sold well. They expanded to include media properties, like Marvel and DC characters, in the 1960s. In 1972, a chance meeting at a convention led Cockrum to meet up with some of the Aurora people, who were looking to expand their “Prehistoric Scenes” line.

They were impressed with Cockrum’s design abilities, and he was hired to design their next figure: a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Cockrum’s T-Rex design is, as should come as no surprise, very dynamic and included several joints to allow the completed model to act almost as an 18" tall poseable action figure. But, of more significance for our discussion here, it was also bright red, defying the long convention of coloring dinosaurs in browns and greens.

64

Despite getting the design in 1972, the Tyrannosaurs Rex kit wasn’t actually released until 1975 and the ads ran through early 1976. With Devil Dinosaur debuting in early 1978, it’s hard not to see the timing as coincidental—just a little over two years between when a Kubert-drawn ad runs through many published comics, and a new title bearing a similarly designed character appears in its own title.

Some might argue that Jack famously didn’t look at published comics very much.

He drew his books, sent the art off, and just went on to the next issue with little concern for the final result.

Bear in mind, though, that he had already moved to California by this point, and received many a young visitor eager to meet the man who crafted their favorite stories.

Jack had even drawn many of his “regular” visitors into his stories; most famously, Barry Alfonso as the basis for Klarion the Witchboy in The Demon. With Jack in more regular contact with fans, it wouldn’t be surprising that he came into contact with more published comics, perhaps, though a little later than they would be published. In this context, a two-year gap between an ad and a new character in its own title seems reasonable.

Now, whether Jack actually saw either the model or the ad is something we could almost never say with certainty. I’m sure Jack’s explicit memory of it would have eroded quickly even in the best cases.

But it’s hard not to believe that Jack saw a bright red Tyrannosaurus Rex, drawn by either Cockrum or Kubert, and started wondering what might cause its skin to turn that color, thus launching an idea that would become Devil Dinosaur #1! ★ 65

(above) Splash page pencils from Devil Dinosaur #2 (May 1978), and (left) the two-page spread from that same issue.

Coming Down To Earth

Teknique

(just a little)

by Shane Foley he artists amongst Kirby fans—and probably a lot of not-so-artistic ones as well—are often amazed and a bit daunted by the reports of how Kirby just drew his images directly onto the page with little obvious planning. “He started top left and worked down,” many eyewitnesses have said. “There are no preparation pages to be published,” Mark Evanier has stated. Another said something to the tune of “He’d put a rough head shape here, a foot there—then go for it.” How could he do that? While it’s true that there are many other artists

T

who worked quickly and directly onto the art board— sometimes with lots of sketchy preparation guide lines, sometimes without—few did it with the creativity and dynamism that Kirby achieved. Other masters, like the great John Buscema, would first scribble out a rough layout on light paper, then tighten it a little (often with arrows meaning ‘move this figure up more,’ etc.), then lightbox that onto the art board. This way the action and flow of the page was right before being committed to the art board.

But, apparently, not Kirby. It sounds like he attacked the board and got it right from the very start.

So what preparation did Jack do? Was it all entirely in his head before being committed to paper?

Now, in no way do I doubt the sincerity of commentators paraphrased above, or that they watched gob-smacked as images appeared almost miraculously before them as Jack drew. But I believe we can infer from them a little too much of the miraculous. I believe there were a little more of the usual artistic basics going on in Kirby’s drawing than is often credited. Following are a few clues found in scans of his pencil work.

Example #1 (left) Did Jack draw panel 1, complete it, then move to panel 2? The legend would seem to suggest so. But sometimes, Jack did indeed roughly lay out the whole page before completing panels. An incomplete page from Fantastic Four #80 shows this. Clearly, Jack was planning the action before completing anything.

Example #2 (right) Again, did Jack complete panel 1, then move on to panel 2? In a different way to the point above, the answer is no.

Jack often completed the action and figurework on a whole page before completing backgrounds.

A great example of this is Forever People #6, pages 12, 13 and 14 (shown on the next three pages).

For some reason, Jack copied these pages before he had completed them.

Compare page 12 pencils of panels 1 and 2 to what was published. The pencil copies have empty backgrounds, while the published inks have well designed blacks.

66

67

Compare page 13, pencils to inks (above). In the pencils, Jack has only the bare construction of a door and hallway behind Vykin and no detail on the page’s right. The version that Mike Royer inked was much more complete. This page not only shows Jack leaving background detail for later, it also shows he roughed in basic perspective guidelines like anyone else before rendering detail.

Also compare page 14, panels 2 and 4, pencils to inks. Again, the blacks are absent. The pencil copies on either side of these— pages 11 and 15—have no such omissions.

Why were these three pages copied before being completed? We can’t say. But I’m very glad they were, because it throws just a little light on how Jack worked—ie. before completing his energetic blacks and minor details, he got the main drawing of the story focus done.

Did he always do this? We can’t know—but he certainly did sometimes.

68

69

70

Another example of this approach is seen in Forever People #7, page 4 (left). The copy of the pencils shows panels 1, 2 and 5 are incomplete. (this page and next) Two unused “Losers” pages also show backgrounds incomplete while figure action in the following panels is worked on.

This speedy drawing process served Jack well throughout his career, but perhaps never more so than during his late era animation work, where he could quickly block in simple, but effective figures for storyboards, such as this example from the unproduced Roxie’s Raiders TV series. No detailed backgrounds needed here!

71

72

Example #3 But what about Jack’s figures? How much ‘construction’ did he do?

A good example, found by the same happy accident of Jack photocopying a page before it was complete, is found in the pencils of Kamandi #2, page 4. While everything else is complete—blacks and all—Kamandi’s lower body in panel 4 is not. Just the barest outline of the figure is there. What we’re seeing here is Jack getting the positioning and action of a figure right before committing to detail.

(This looks like just the sort of figurework that Jack did when he drew three pages of action for a fan once. No real figure construction or the like, but a definite blocking-in of shape and movement to get the basic action right before proceeding.)

If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

PLEASE READ THIS: This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our website or Apps. If you downloaded it from another website or torrent, go ahead and read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal download, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, please pay for them so we can keep producing ones like this. Our digital editions should ONLY be downloaded within our Apps and at

www.twomorrows.com

(next page) This article was in the process of being written when TJKC #53 printed the unpublished FF #102, page 9. What a gem! And with a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Because (I presume) this wasn’t copied from a photocopy, more soft lines than usual are preserved.

In panel 1, a square-ish oval is clearly seen under Johnnie’s head. An oval appears under Crystal’s detail as well. There are even some placement lines for Ben’s face.

In panel 2 we see a block to get the position of Johnny’s head right. It looks just the same as the head shapes that appeared on Jack’s Suspense and Daredevil layout pages. We see a similar construction line on Reed’s face in panel 5. What’s that across Crystal’s waist in panel 2? Looks like a tilted line to get her hip angle right to me. And on Ben in the same panel, we can see that Jack originally had Ben’s arms positioned differently.

73

74

(right) Finally, here’s an unused page from Fantastic Four #92 which fits perfectly between pages 4 and 5. Did Jack reject it early in the process because he didn't like it? Or did it get bumped later when the issue's page count was too long? Either way, it's another great example of how he blocked in the story with only some detail, while leaving other details to be completed later. And there, in panel 2, we can see his construction lines to get the angle of Ben's body right before adding the arms.

These examples of underdrawing are ‘construction lines’ in only the most basic sense of the word. They quickly identify a position or flow of action only. There seem to be no figures constructed in the way art books teach—the way we see Steve Ditko or Gil Kane drawing. But they do show a bit of the building up of the drawings and storytelling Jack was doing.

I like these examples. As an artist of sorts myself, I like to see how other guys do things. And of course, Jack is the supreme ideal to aspire to. In practical terms, I ‘understand’ Buscema’s approach to comic page drawing. It makes ‘sense’ to me. I was surprised and delighted when I learned he lightboxed his pencils from loose preparatory roughs. Surprised, because I somehow had the idea that a speed demon like he was went straight onto the page as I’d heard Kirby did. Delighted, because it revealed a systematic approach behind his massive talent that made it all seem not quite so magical.

His brilliant figurework is too lofty an ideal for most artists to aspire to, but nevertheless, there was a practical construction of his work that is easily seen.

But Jack’s approach seemed too daunting. It is entirely impractical

for many to try to emulate it. Yet here, in these few examples, we see just a little of how Jack ‘constructed’ his work. Sure, he approached his work in a way that is impossible for most to do. Nothing will change that. But it’s still great to see that he needed to work with some of the same nuts and bolts that the rest of us do. Yes, he did rough-out page layouts ahead. Yes, he did have to take care to get the underlying perspective right. Yes, he did rough-in figures and action to see if it worked. Yes, he did reposition details after his first rough draft. Yes, he did rough-in circles and squares for heads like everyone else.

In no way does any of this take away from Jack’s genius, because no amount of understanding the mechanics of how an artist constructs his work can ever get into his mind to recreate the original dynamics that were birthed there. And it has to be acknowledged that what has been seen here is minimal. But I like what I found. It seems to bring the processes of Jack drawing just a tiny bit more down to Earth. ★ 75

Mark Evanier

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

(next page, top) In June 1974, the Kirbys received a letter from the University of California, Davis, asking Jack to loan materials for a comic art exhibit that would run from January 8February 5, 1975—making it one of the first museum exhibits of Jack’s work. Based on the note Roz sent with the loaned art on November 18, 1974, we’re taking our best shot at reassembling those pieces to illustrate this issue’s WonderCon panel: “Two hand-colored proofs of ‘Sky Masters’ Sunday strips intended as color guides for printer to follow.” (see page 82) “Penciled page from ‘Thor’ issue, Galactus segment.

Characters: Thor, Galactus, and Odin.” (see page 78) “Penciled page for Losers third Kirby issue.” (see page 79) “Daily strip presentation done for syndication in 1959—pencils done by J. Kirby inks by Wally Wood.”

(Surf Hunter, see page 81) “Substitute page 9 of ‘Forever People’ Million [sic] Dollar Bates episode.

Inks done by John Pound.

Characters: Moonrider, Beautiful Dreamer, Vykin the Black.” (see page 89) “Bulls Eye title splash, 1957. Penciled and inked

by J. Kirby.” (see page 84) “Original collage used in FF Comics.” (see page 85) (right) Steve Sherman with Jack, mid-1970s.

We have announcements. Let me point out to you that the year 2017 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jack Kirby. The Comic-Con in San Diego is going to do a lot of stuff timed with this. The convention people, the same people who run Comic-Con run WonderCon, and a couple of the people from the convention have been asking me how they can maximize their Kirby content, so there’s been some interesting planning going on. But if you are a Jack Kirby fan of any sort, if you go to no other San Diego Comic-Con, you must go to 2017.

2016 Kirby WonderCon Panel Held Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 3:30pm at WonderCon in Los Angeles, California. Featuring Steve Sherman, Charles Hatfield, and Paul S. Levine, and moderated by Mark Evanier. Transcribed by Steven Tice, edited by John Morrow, and copyedited by Mark Evanier and Charles Hatfield.

Be a part of the Comic-Con Program Book!

Submit short snippets of your encounters with Kirby at San Diego (500 words or less), and we’ll share them with Comic-Con for possible inclusion this July! Send to: twomorrow@aol.com with subject line “Kirby Encounter.”

MARK EVANIER: Good afternoon. This is a Jack Kirby panel so I guess that means I’m Mark Evanier. This is my friend Steve Sherman, folks. (applause) This is Professor Charles Hatfield. (applause) This is attorney The Honorable Paul S. Levine. (applause) We have no real agenda here. We spend so much time at these conventions talking about Jack so we’re going to just talk about Jack for a while. If you have questions about Jack, somebody up here will know the answer.

CHARLES HATFIELD: Is there any videotape of interviews with him, or anything?

Join TwoMorrows Publisher & Jack Kirby Collector editor

EVANIER: There are some videos on YouTube of interviews with Jack. This is just my opinion, but I don’t think they’re very good, generally, not because of the interviewers. Jack was not good at being interviewed live. He stiffened up a lot. Steve and I used to hear the funniest damn stories, and then when we got a video camera in front of him and tried to get him to repeat those funny stories, he never could do it well. He just got very—.

at Comic-Con International

STEVE SHERMAN: He just thought he had to be somebody else in front of a camera. He just got worried.

John Morrow July July 20-23, 20-23, 2017, 2017, San San Diego Diego

HATFIELD: Those just might be good to gather together for 2017.

as TwoMorrows celebrates Jack Kirby’s 100th Birthday with the release of our new book

EVANIER: How many people here met Jack? (hands go up) Maybe a fourth of the audience. You know, and you’ll all nod your heads as I say this, that he was a very interesting

KIRBY100 KIRBY100 features an all-star line-up of 100 top comics pros who choose key images from Kirby’s career, and critique Jack’s page layouts, dramatics, and storytelling skills to honor his place in comics history, and prove Kirby is King! Celebrate Jack’s 100th birthday in style with this full-color, doublelength book edited by JOHN MORROW & JON B. COOKE, with a cover inked by MIKE ROYER. SHIPS AUGUST 2017.

(224-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback and Limited Edition Hardcover) $34.95/$45.95

Details and order at

www.twomorrows.com 76

man, perpetually interesting. You had to listen to every second because there would be some pearl of wisdom in there which you couldn’t always understand instantly. You’d replay it later in your mind and go, “Oh, I see what he was talking about.” He would just jump from thought to thought. Sometimes there would be part of one sentence finished in the next thought, and you’d come away feeling, no matter who you were, smarter and more creative, and better if he gave you any sort of approval. You’d feel complimented and enriched. At the same time you’d be aware that this man was in another league, that he was thinking on a different level than you could think, he was doing things on a different level than you could. And he had this amazing way of speaking that jumped from topic to topic, and you had to keep up with him. Sometimes he’d lose me, and I’d go, “Wait a minute, what’s he talking about now?” He’d jump forty years on me without the benefit of segue.

And to this day, I’ll think of something he said to me and I go, “Oh, I get it now, I see what he was talking about there.” I have a pretty good memory, so I can recall things he said to me and get them years later, and understand them. And then, as I get older, I understand them even more. You know how, like if you watch Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons now, you get jokes that you heard, that were there the first time, but you didn’t get them because you hadn’t lived long enough? You weren’t as smart then. I feel smarter thinking about things Jack said to me, now. He used a phrase, “looking at the Big Picture.”

He was always talking about looking at the Big Picture. And he had a way of looking at the Big Picture, and you’d say something to Jack about some little thing, and you would not get the reaction you expected from him because he was thinking on a different level. He was thinking on kind of a cosmic level about what does this mean in the grand scheme of the universe. So if you said to Jack, “Hey, should we go to Roy Rogers for lunch,” he would say, “No, we must go to Du-par’s.”

And the reason was cosmic. The reason had ramifications. Steve is nodding. (laughter)

SHERMAN: Except for the horse meat. (laughter) EVANIER: Except for the horse meat, yeah. And Jack liked that you could go to this Roy Rogers place and they would have ketchup in one dispenser, and they would have barbecue sauce in another dispenser, and Jack would get barbecue sauce for his french fries. And he’d be dipping his french fries in barbecue sauce, and Roz would say to him, “No, no, you’re supposed to put the ketchup on the french fries and barbecue sauce on the sandwich.” And he did it the other way around. They would argue about this—as much as they ever argued, they argued about this kind of stuff. And Jack goes, “I like barbecue sauce on my french fries, and I like ketchup on my roast beef.” We must have gone there a half-dozen times, and it was the exact same discussion every single time. And that was fun for Jack, because that was thinking on a different level. It was such a simple level, because the rest of the time he was thinking of gods, and creatures, and the future, and all sorts of things. I’ve got to read back over the New Gods, because I’m sure, I don’t know where he is, but I’m sure Donald Trump is in there someplace. (laughter)

SHERMAN: No, I just know, he’d go to Du-par’s because of cake. (laughter) EVANIER: There used to be these Roy Rogers roast beef sandwich places which had no relation to the current Roy Rogers chain.

PAUL S. LEVINE: Now, imagine you’re his lawyer and you’re trying to figure out what he wants. (laughter) EVANIER: Paul helped Jack through some very—I wish Jack had had Paul ten years before he did.

LEVINE: Or twenty or thirty.

EVANIER: Yes. There was a period where Jack did not have great legal representation, and to the extent he did, Marvel refused to talk

Steve Sherman

77

one of the turning points in my professional career came one day when I just looked at Jack and realized something. One of the things that was amazing about him was how hard he worked, the amount of hours he put in. He would just stay at that board forever and ever. You hear people talk about how fast he was as an artist and creator, and he was very fast, but his incredible lifetime output had a lot to do with the number of hours he was willing to sit there in front of the drawing board. So I looked at Jack this one day and I said [to myself], “You know, you’re never going to have that man’s ability to think, and you’re certainly not going to have his ability to draw, but you might be able to work that hard.

That is humanly possible. It’s not easy, but it’s humanly possible.” So I started trying to work that hard and devote as many hours to my work, as insignificant as it was. It was one of the most valuable lessons I learned being around that man—to work hard.

He had people coming to him—I’ll let other people talk in a moment. (laughter) But he had other people coming to him, fans coming to him, and other professionals, looking for the secret. And the first thing he would tell them always was the secret is to work hard, and they would go, “Yeah, yeah, but what kind of pencil do you use?” They were looking for shortcuts. They were looking for magic spells that would enhance their output somehow. And the secret was that Jack was a very hard worker.

Having come out of the background he had, the Depression background, he went out to work at a very early age. He worked insane hours for no money, therefore prepping him well for the comic book industry. You look at this guy and you discover how basic his approach to his work was. It was very simple: Work real hard and try to beat the other guy by being better than he is, faster than he is, and working harder than he does.

I am hoping to finish up within the next year this big bio I’m writing on Jack, which is a lot longer than you’d think it was going to be. As I’m organizing parts of his life and putting them in sequence, I’m learning more and more about him. I’m having observations I didn’t have before, crystallizing what I thought about him, and it really is impressive the sheer energy that this man put into his work.

to it. A couple times he asked his lawyer to talk to Marvel about something and Marvel just said, “We don’t talk to lawyers,” and he hit this brick wall, which was one of the 111 reasons he left Marvel in 1969, early ’70.

To know Jack was an extraordinary experience, and when people found out I knew him, they’d ask, “Oh, did you get sketches from him? Did you get autographs from him?” I’d say, “No. I got something much better.” You can get a sketch or autograph from anyone.

From Jack you got inspiration, and you got wisdom, and you got a chance to hear a great mind stimulate you. I’ve told this before, but 78

He was very, very passionate, even in situations where he kind of knew that the work would be stolen from him—when he kind of knew it would be inked badly and printed badly and colored badly, he still gave 110% in everything he did. And that is the piece of Jack Kirby philosophy I give to you to start off this panel. (applause) SHERMAN: When Mark says he worked hard, he did.

But it wasn’t like he didn’t enjoy it. It was the kind of work where he’d look forward to sitting down at that drawing table and working eight, ten hours because he saw all of these stories as movies in his head, and he just wanted to get it down on paper and pick the best drawings that he could to show everybody the films that he saw in his head. So it was, yes, hard work, but it was enjoyable work. It wasn’t—he wasn’t going, like, “Oh, I gotta to sit down and draw this.” It was like, “I can’t wait to sit down and draw this, and I can’t wait to get to the end of it and get all of these pages so that it’s all there, and that’s what I saw.” And then on to the next one, because he had everything going at once in his head. It was just amazing how he kept it all going.

physically, much stronger than you’d think a guy of his height would be. He started scooping up the horse droppings and flinging them into the canyon, imagining he’s hitting the motorcyclists. (laughter) Now, he’s not anywhere near the guy, but he’s yelling, “Take that, you bastards! Take that!” (laughter) And he was having the time of his life. He was disappointed when he ran out of sh*t to fling down into the canyon. (laughter) And he turned to the horse and said, “Got anything else?” (laughter) He was just delightful that way. Steve, I’m going down memory lane today. You got anything?

EVANIER: One time Steve and I were out there working, and Steve and Roz went off to the market so I was there with Jack. At this point his daughter Lisa had a horse in the backyard.

This was the old place they had on Lynn Road in Thousand Oaks, and the backyard looked out over this incredible canyon with the most amazing view you ever saw. Jack and Roz had bought this house largely because of the view, little knowing that there were motorcyclists on the weekend going through that canyon all the time, and the canyon echoed up the motorcycle sounds. It was deafeningly noisy out there and it really harmed Jack’s working ability.

They’d do whatever they could to lock the doors, stuff the windows with towels to keep the noise out, but it was very noisy there. So Steve’s away, I’m working with Jack, and he’s got me doing some sort of menial job when suddenly he turns to me and says, “Ah, it’s 2:00 o’clock. I think I’m going to go shovel some sh*t outside.” That’s what he was going to do—go out and shovel the horse pen out, and throw it down into the canyon. (laughter) So I, of course, think, “Hey! Something I can do as well as Jack Kirby!” (laughter) So I said, “Let me do it, Jack! Let me go out and do it!”

He said, “No, no. This is honest work. I want to do this.” So he went out, and Jack was a very strong man, 79

(below) Unused page from Our Fighting Forces #153 (Feb. 1975). This scan is from way back in 1996 for TJKC #8.

Scanning quality back then was much worse than today, so if you’re the owner of this piece, please send us a better image.

SHERMAN: Oh, geez. By the way, that was the house they lived in when one afternoon we were there and the Kuberts pulled up in a giant moving van.

did the outline, Carmine’s comment was, “Hey, you don’t have the Statue of Liberty in here,” which was an important visual in play, so Jack put in the Statue of Liberty. But he talked out the first Kamandi story to me, and I typed it up. I typed up the whole outline, the whole explanation of it, Jack did a few sketches, sent it back to DC. And Carmine came back and said, “Draw the first issue.” And the premise at that point was to set the book to get its launch, and then we’d find a writer and artist to take it over under Jack’s supervision.

So Jack drew the first issue following that outline. I think it was the only time I ever typed anything he followed at all, but it was all his ideas to begin with, so why not? And then Carmine came back and said, “Come up with something like a monster, a demon of some sort.” I don’t know if he had the word “demon.” I don’t know whether the word “demon” came from Carmine or from Jack. More likely from Jack. So that afternoon we went to dinner—Roz, and Barbara, and Lisa, and I think Neal, Neal’s then-wife, and I don’t know who else—we went to this Howard Johnson’s where for some reason, I remember I had a hot turkey sandwich. I don’t know why I remember this. And orange sherbet for dessert. Jack got real quiet and just sat there, very calmly, withdrawn. We were talking about all sorts of stuff not related to comics, and he just kind of zoned out.

Then finally, after dinner, Jack says, “All right, I’ve got it. It’s called The Demon, and there’s this guy named Jason Blood.” He told us the whole first issue, sitting right there. He came up with it between the time we ordered and the time we finished eating, and what he said was very, very close to what the book ended up being. I remember thinking, “Gee, has he been working on this for a month?” Because he had all of these ideas for stories and supporting characters, and I think he came up with them in about forty minutes.

Then we went back to the studio, and Jack said to one of us, maybe it was me, maybe it was you: “I’ve got these Prince Valiant books, the Hastings House books. See if the panel is in there of the goose mask. I want to use that. I’ve got an idea.” We found the panel, and Jack did the drawing that’s printed in the Jack Kirby Collector of the Demon, which was very close to the final version. He wrote out some stuff by hand, sent it off, and Carmine said, “It’s great. New book.” At that point, it was another book that Jack was not going to write or draw. He was going to edit. Then two weeks later we go out and Jack was devastated. They’d said, “Let’s drop New Gods and Forever People and do those books instead.” That was the worst I ever saw him. He was just devastated. He looked like a man who had been punched repeatedly in the face.

EVANIER: A mobile home.

SHERMAN: A mobile home, and Jack was just, I think that’s where he got the idea for the—what was the big bus that he drew for Jimmy Olsen? The Mountain of Judgment? Huge, just pulled into the driveway, and we all came out.

EVANIER: And they were in the neighborhood. The Kirbys did not know they were coming.

SHERMAN: Let’s see. I just remember taking long walks with Jack up the canyon. They lived on a cul-de-sac that went up like that and the house was here, and you could walk up, and then there was just empty land, and then you could walk back down. So on Sundays about dusk or so, we’d go walking up that trail and around, and Jack would puff on a cigar and we’d just talk about stories and stuff, and Jack would just start making up, “Now, what about this? What about that?” And by the time we got back into the house, he had maybe three or four books that he had just talked out. It was just amazing how he could come up with things off the top of his head. One of the other things I remember he said was, “You don’t have to do anything new.

Just come at it from a different angle.” That was a bit of advice that he would say. “You don’t have to sit there and struggle to think of something brand new. Just look at what’s out there and come at it from a different way, and you can come up with something.”

HATFIELD: Can I ask you a question about that?

SHERMAN: Sure.

HATFIELD: It’s actually for both of you, because for example Mark, in that Demon reprint volume DC put out a handful of years ago, told the story of Jack over a burger basically coming up with, and talking his way through, what SHERMAN: I think at that point he knew it was over.

Charles Hatfield turned out to be the EVANIER: Yeah. I think he knew that he’d jumped to the wrong first issue of Demon. So he would often talk out these plots to whoever ship. But he threw himself into the books. Those books, those would listen?

Kamandi and Demon, showed no sign of a guy knocking it out just to EVANIER: The Demon was created in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. get it over with.

I don’t know why I remember this so vividly, but Jack had been—the HATFIELD: So in the case of Kamandi, clearly the best comic of the backstory is that Jack wanted to edit some comics that he would not 1970s—after the Fourth World, sorry—there was a typed outline, write and draw. That was his goal. He wanted Steve and myself to right? That you sort of worked with Jack? He supplied ideas and you write, and then he was looking for other writers, and he wanted set it down, right? some fresh, new artists. I think I have the chronology right, here. We had done the first issue of Kamandi. He said to Carmine Infantino at EVANIER: Yeah, I typed that outline, which was probably 85 percent DC, “I’d like to come up with some new books,” and he wanted Jack. them done, written and drawn by other people. And Carmine, no HATFIELD: In the case of The Demon there was, like, a handwritten fool, said, “Oh! Come up with presentations! Give me all the new Bible. comics you can!” Because at that point Carmine needed new books, and a lot of writers and artists weren’t willing to do that for DC. EVANIER: Yeah, I don’t recall typing one up for the Demon.

They weren’t willing to create new things, because at that point, that HATFIELD: Now, once he’d gotten those things, like an outline or a hadn’t worked out that well for Siegel and Shuster. presentation, was there anything else he committed to paper before So Jack came up with Kamandi, he came up with the idea. Carmine he would actually start on those books? had said to him, “How about something like Planet of the Apes?” And that was the extent of Carmine’s input, except that later, when we SHERMAN: No. Nothing. In fact, he would often ignore that.

80

EVANIER: What he committed to paper was whatever DC required him to. He didn’t do it for his own sake. He did it for them. People always come to me and they say, “Hey, let’s do a book of all of Jack’s cover sketch roughs, all of his preliminary sketches.” There aren’t any. I printed in my book on Jack the cover layout for the Tales of Asgard special he did. Find me another Jack Kirby cover sketch anywhere. It’s the only one I ever saw from the Marvel days, and I only got that because Jack found it in a filing cabinet one day and handed it to me and said, “Here, take this.” That’s it. I’m sure that what happened there was that Stan for some reason said, “I need a sketch to show to Martin Goodman,” or something like that, and Jack did the sketch just to get it over with. If you notice, he didn’t follow it that closely when he did the final cover, either. He just created on the page. People that [ask], “Did Jack ever erase?” Yeah. But here’s the reason he erased. My observation was that he never erased because the drawing was bad. He erased because the drawing was wrong.

He’d look at what he’d drawn and think, “No, the story’s got to go in a different direction.” There was never anything wrong with the illustration itself. He never said, “Oh my God, the head’s too big.”

He took it and erased it right out of the page and he never used that pose again. Now, nobody would’ve complained if he had. It was a great pose. And the drawing that replaced it was just as good. It wasn’t necessarily better, it was just newer. He didn’t want to repeat himself.

HATFIELD: Part of the mystery of his process is that he worked so much, and yet it’s not like he seemed to leave a lot of paper trail or archaeology behind him except the finished boards, right?

EVANIER: Right.

HATFIELD: [Artists] who are working in the graphic novel generation, or working with book advances, or with royalties, who are not noseto-grindstone as consistently as Jack Kirby had to be, they’ve got all [the layers of] their process duly noted. They’ve got all those layers [documented], they’ve got all that stuff, whereas Kirby seems to have burned all the preliminaries up. Well, not burned them literally, but to have eaten them up in the finished product, so that there was very little remaining that would document the process. That’s why I asked if there was a typed outline.

EVANIER: There was a typed outline for Kamandi because Carmine wanted it, but that was unusual. That was very unusual. And the premise at that point—I don’t know if I’ve ever told this story. The premise at that point was that Kamandi was going to be a book that Jack was not going to write or draw. He was going to come up with ideas, and be the editor of it and supervise it. I think either you [Steve] were going to write, or I was going to write, or we were going to write together. We never figured that part out. At that point there were about four artists in Los Angeles who did comic books. Now there’s thousands. I just found out this afternoon that Bill Sienkiewicz lives four blocks from me. There were very few then.

Mike Royer, who was hired to ink and letter Jack’s stuff, was one. I think Mike is one of the best things that ever happened to Jack’s

HATFIELD: Did you ever observe him, let’s say, partly erasing or modifying a drawing once he was dialoguing it?

EVANIER: Yes. In fact, I’ll tell you, there’s one panel, in a Jimmy Olsen story. Jack had drawn Superman in a flying pose. It’s the pose he used repeatedly of the hero flying out at the reader with his hands up like this. There’s a Human Torch cover like that. There’s the cover he did that we used on Marvelmania Magazine with Black Bolt flying like that. It’s a pose we saw repeatedly in his work and I was proofreading the issue, I fixed a few spelling errors and a few words that were missing and then I came across that pose. Being a young kid who somehow didn’t know social graces too well at that age, I said, “Hey, Jack! You used that pose again.” He went, “Oh, yeah? Give it to me.”

Unused Kamandi of the Caves strip from the 1950s—the beginning of Kamandi, but in name only.

81

work. I see heads nodding out there. But the thing that was interesting was that not only was Mike terrific, he was the only choice. There was nobody else within a hundred miles around who could have done that. And this was Los Angeles, California. It’s not exactly a place with no creative people. Unless you watch NBC. (scattered laughter) So there’s this artist named Dan Spiegle, who at that point I had not met. I later met Dan, we became best friends and did 8,000 comics together. But Dan lived in Santa Barbara, which was thirty miles from Jack, forty miles from Jack. Mike Royer got me his phone number. Jack called him, and Dan came down with his work, bringing pages of Korak, Son of Tarzan he’d been drawing for

Gold Key. Jack loved his work and was going to have Dan draw Kamandi. Then one day Jack tells us, “Carmine loves Kamandi. He wants me to do the first issue of it and then we’re going to talk about another artist doing it.” I asked, “Did you talk to him about Dan Spiegle?” and Jack said—now, I have Steve as a witness here—“No, no. Carmine’s going to give me a Filipino.” (laughter) “What?” He said, “Yeah, Carmine’s got a bunch of Filipinos.” (laughter) We didn’t know anything about the Philippine comic book connection at that point. And then two weeks later, we’re talking about the Demon and I asked him, “Do you want us to see if we can find an

When this 5-31-59 Sky Masters strip ran in the British Express Weekly newspaper (right), it was relettered and rescripted for reasons unknown. Thanks to Sean Kleefeld.

82

artist for the Demon?” And Jack said, “Oh, no, Carmine’s got another Filipino for that.” Do you remember, Steve? We were both walking around going, “What’s going on, here?”

There was a fellow named Mark Hanerfeld, who was an assistant editor at DC. He was Joe Orlando’s assistant. He was a good friend of mine. He called me up one day and asked, “How are the talks going?” I said, “What talks?” And he said, “Well, Carmine and Joe Orlando are out in L.A. meeting with Jack about some big secret project. Nobody here knows what’s going on.” I said, “Joe Orlando and Carmine are not out here.”

And Mark said, “Oh, yes, they’re out there. They’re talking to Jack. They’re out there with him.” I called Jack and asked him, “Are you meeting with Carmine and Joe Orlando?” And he said, “No.” I knew the hotel that Carmine always stayed in in Los Angeles, so I called there just to see if he was there. He wasn’t there. He and Joe Orlando were in the Philippines. Saying, “We’re going out to meet with Jack” was the cover story, because an artist who worked for DC named Tony DeZuniga had said to them, “I know a bunch of guys in the Philippines who will draw comic books for low rates.” And they went, “Oh!” They went over to the Philippines and were checking out all this work, and Carmine had tentatively made a deal for all these Philippine artists to draw comics for him. And at that moment, the premise was that somehow Kamandi and Demon would be written in Jack’s office by somebody, us, I don’t know exactly.

And then Filipinos would draw the books. They changed their mind after that but that was a very strange time. That’s how disconnected Jack was from the business sometimes. He didn’t know what was going on in his own comics.

understand how much drawing we want on a page.”

Because there were some Philippino comics that had, like, two figures on a page. So they pulled out a Neal Adams Batman page and said, “No, we want artwork like this.” And Alfredo asked, “Oh! You want artwork with that much on a page?” And he said, “Yes. Now, how many can you do?” And he said, “Eighty.” (laughter) And then he said, “And I won’t make mistakes and do bad drawing like that.” (laughter) “Well, we think this is wonderful artwork.” And Alfredo, who just glanced at the page for only two seconds, said, “His arm is backwards. He’s got a left hand on his right arm.” And Joe or Carmine said, “That’s ridiculous.

Neal Adams doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes, and we have a great proofreading team at DC. They wouldn’t possibly—oh, wait a minute.” (laughter) He found this drawing error on a published comic that had gotten all the way through. So they gave him his forty pages a week. And he—well, you know, if nothing else, Alfredo did not skimp on the detail in his work.

Anyway, I don’t want to monopolize this, as I’m obviously doing. Charles, pardon me, I’m going to ask

HATFIELD: There was this trend [starting in the early ’70s] where DC, and then Marvel too, were hiring all these Filipino artists. Great artists like Alfredo Alcala and Nestor Redondo, people whose names I started to see as a kid, in books at that time. I didn’t realize until years later that they [DC] went there because they believed these artists would work for less, that they could get these artists, at least for a time, to work for less. Which is sad, because these were really accomplished artists, and they had a particular school, a look.

It was lush, it was beautiful, it was great. And it was pennies on the dollar for DC, probably.

EVANIER: There was a story—this is a tiny bit off the subject, but if I ever met a faster comic book artist than Jack, it might have been Alfredo Alcala. Actually, Mike Sekowsky was pretty damn fast, too, but Alfredo was enormously prolific and he’d just crank out stuff like crazy.

So Joe Orlando and Carmine are in the Philippines, and they’d brought along some DC original art to show the Philippine artists what they wanted in terms of how much detail on a page. And they looked at Alfredo’s samples, and there was an interpreter involved in some of this, I believe, and they said, “We’d like you to work for our company. How many pages a week do you think you could handle?” And, since he was penciling, lettering, and inking, they were expecting him to say ten, fifteen.

And he said, “Forty.” And they went, “Oh, no, no, no.

We want to know how many pages you think you could actually help with?” And Alfredo says, “Forty. Maybe fifty.” And Carmine thought, “Obviously he doesn’t 83

(below) A fun non-Kirby find: the unused cover for Sandman #7, the final issue Jack did that remained rarely seen till recently. While not

by Jack, it looks like Mike Royer’s inks, so we asked Mike if he might’ve drawn this.

He’s pretty sure it’s by Ernie Chua (Chan), the Philippino artist who drew so many of DC’s covers during that time period. Mike couldn’t tell if these were his inks or not, but there was an obvious effort to make this art look Kirbyesque to match the interior Kirby story “The Seal Men’s War on Santa Claus.”

(below) We’re unsure if the Bullseye splash that was loaned to UC Davis in 1974 was this one, but since this looks to be inked by Jack, we’re going with it. Also, the fine folks at whatifkirby.com and the Jack Kirby Museum had a lovely scan of it for us to use. Thanks to Tom Kraft and Rand Hoppe!

you. Show me the book you’ve got there. Tell them about it.

HATFIELD: This is the catalog for the exhibition that we did at my school, Cal State Northridge, last fall. (applause) Thank you. Between August and October we did an exhibition of Jack’s work. We had 107 originals in our Gallery there at Cal State Northridge, and we had record attendance for that, actually. It’s the best-attended art exhibition that CSU Northridge has ever had. It drew more than 6,000 visitors in seven weeks, in a gallery that’s usually only open four hours a day and six days a week. But on that last afternoon—Terry, were

84

you there on the last afternoon?

TERRY WILSON (Los Angeles artist, Kirby devotee, and big supporter of the exhibition, from the audience): Yes. HATFIELD: The last afternoon, which was four hours, there were, like, 350-400 people in that room—in the last two to three hours, just to catch that action.

EVANIER: How many people passed through, roughly, for the whole exhibit?

HATFIELD: Six thousand or more [6234, officially], and also a record number of tours. They give tours where they have students and gallery staff acting as docents, and they also have volunteers from the CSUN Art Council, which is a non-profit. They gave a record number of tours—I forget how many, but they must have had 1300 people worth of tours. [The Gallery’s official figures are: 47 tours, involving a total of 1352 people.] Those include classes, community groups, and things like that. So I think they [my CSUN colleagues] were surprised.

I honestly wasn’t surprised, because it was Jack Kirby. People will come to see these things. They want to see them! It was surprising that a number of people came again and again, I guess just to soak it up.

But it occurred to me as we were doing all the events related to the exhibition—Mark came and gave a talk in August, we did a panel discussion in September—that this was an idea whose time was past coming, because two or three people from other institutions talked to me while I was working toward the show, saying, “Hey, I’d like to do a Jack Kirby show at my school. Have you ever thought about that?” I would say [whispering], “Actually, we’re doing one right now.” So it’s something that people really wanted to see, and it just really—it made something very clear to me, which should have been clear already: Jack Kirby was a great artist, a great capital-A Artist, a great American artist, and he’s one of those artists who didn’t have the benefit of the institutions that usually validate or support or patronize great art in our culture. I mean, the one institution where Jack could be validated was in the mass market, in terms of sales. That, and the adulation of fans, of course, later in his career.

But in the comic books, traditionally, your validation was sales. That was your barometer; you knew that you were doing something. And Jack Kirby would say, “My job is to make sales.” All the other institutions that exist to validate artists, whether they

have mass market sales or not, are not institutions that paid any attention to Jack or any comics artists like him in his lifetime.

Museums didn’t invest in Jack. If they had, there already would have been a MOMA show in New York about Jack Kirby. You can bet it already would have happened. But they didn’t invest in that. Centers of culture, the epicenters of higher culture, higher ed, whatever, they did not like, and did not invest in, the kind of work that Jack and his colleagues were doing.

So it [the exhibition] really was a tardy thing.

That’s why panels like that are so well attended—it’s about bloody time, right? That’s why they were all attended. (applause) EVANIER: When you first proposed the exhibit, did you get any negative reaction to the idea of a comic book artist being exhibited like that?

HATFIELD: No. I’ll tell you what happened. It was about five or six years ago and there was a show, in March of 2010, a Robert Williams show. Williams, the great lowbrow artist, the artist, the really uninhibited underground-era artist. There was a Robert Williams show, and he was giving a lecture and signing books, and I went to the Gallery and I met the Gallery Director, a very enthusiastic man named Jim Sweeters, and Jim said to me—I think that very night, or if not that very night, then five days later when I accidentally ran into him again—he said, “How about doing a comic show?” So it was his initiative to make that invitation, without which this wouldn’t have happened. There had been a few other shows at Cal State Northridge that had some comics in them, right? As a small part. For example, there was the Valley Vista show [curated by Damon Willick in 2014], which was all about art in the San Fernando Valley, and it had lots and lots of work in it, [but only a few pages of comics]: A few pages from Thrasher magazine, skate punk comics. The Robert Williams show had a Zap page or a Zap print among all those paintings. [And in 2012 a comics-themed show in the side gallery, Fantastic Blackness, curated

by Adilifu Nama, definitely helped pave the way.]

Jim was eager. By his own admission, he didn’t really know Jack’s work, but he was eager to do it. He was a little puzzled until I finally brought in a bunch of work and showed it to him, and when we actually finally had some original art in house, he said, “Ah. Yeah.” He started to figure out ways that this could be exhibited to advantage, which he was so great at doing. So there was no resistance, because it was really the Gallery Director’s call. It was just a question of, “What can you show me? What do we got? What can we do?” And other teachers, people who teach art and painting at the school, I walked around the gallery with some of them. They were jazzed about this. Okay, so there might have been, at some point in the past, resistance. There might have been people who sniffed with indifference this time, but we never heard from them. We never heard any kind of resistance at all. I mean, to come back to the nut of your question, it was like, “No, it’s going to be a CSUN Gallery show. Great! What’s it going to be? How are we going to do it?” So they [the gallery team] were very

receptive, and I would like to think they’ll be receptive to doing it again, having seen the level of passion that the visitors brought to it.

So, you know, it’s a changing world. Thank goodness.

LEVINE: So it’s 1981, and I had just graduated from law school and started to work for a law firm in Century City, which consisted of my boss and me. And one day my boss comes to the door of my little, tiny office and says, “I’d like you to meet someone.” “Okay.” “Jack Kirby.” I said, “Who?” And he says, “Well, if you’ve read any comic books, you’d know who Jack is.” And I stood up from my desk and shook his hand, and Roz was standing next to him. I still remember this. And I said, “Well, Jack, I have a confession to make. I never read Marvel comic books growing up. I only read DC.” This is 1981, so he had already left Marvel and started to work for DC. And he 85

said, “Kid, you and I are gonna get along just great!” (laughter) EVANIER: Did you ever read any of his Marvel stuff?

LEVINE: I did not. (laughter) To this day, I haven’t read any of Jack’s Marvel stuff. Or his DC stuff, for that matter, but I did make the deal that needed to be made with Paul S. Levine DC in 1981 or ’82, whatever that was. And, of course, I met Mark at the same time, because Mark was with Jack and Roz that day, as well. (below) One type of art Jack made for his own gratification—and to display—was his personal collage work.

Here is one from 1969 that measures 56 inches x 17.5 inches, and was still framed in the Kirby home at the time of Roz Kirby’s passing.

EVANIER: There was one meeting where they brought me in. It was the only time Jack and I ever had strong words, and we were disagreeing about some comic history stuff and things like that, and we had an argument.

We didn’t speak for a while after that. But I think that’s the day I met Paul for the first time.

LEVINE: Of course.

EVANIER: And the thing that impressed me was, what I found fascinating was, Jack was working on one level, looking at the story, who’d done what, and what he’d contributed, things like that. And Paul and the other lawyer in the room was Steve…

86

LEVINE: Steve Rohde.

EVANIER: ...was trying to steer Jack, “Okay, now, we’ve got to rephrase this in legal language.” Certain points that Jack was making had no legal relevance, and then it was necessary to nail down some of the dates. Jack wasn’t great at dates, and who had done what or what time, what book. If you had said to Jack suddenly, “What comic did Mandarin first appear in?” he wouldn’t have known it off the top of his head, or something like that.

And that’s one of the reasons I was there. I was correcting him about, “No, that wasn’t in this book, that was in that book. And that wasn’t Joe Sinnott, that was Dick Ayers,” or whatever it was, I was saying. And he got kind of annoyed at me at that point, and we started arguing about things.

I was impressed that Steve Rohde and Paul were taking this silly stuff and turning it into legal terms.

Comic books didn’t actually fit in with past laws built on precedents, where you look at other cases. When I was dealing with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of animation writers, we had to take what we did as animation writers and put it into the language of coal miners, because most labor law was written for coal miners. So Paul and Steve were trying to make Jack understand. The point to this story, Jack was off on different tangents, and I jumped in there saying, “No, Jack, you’ve got this backwards. That character wasn’t here,” and Jack got mad at me. But Steve kept on top of it, and kept the emotion out of it and focused, and got to a very strong, good resolution of everything. Steve is, by the way, my attorney, also, and handles lots of my deals

and things like that, and is a very good, very honest man. And I like him because I saw what he did for Jack. That’s why he’s my attorney, not because of what he’s done for me—he’s done good stuff for me, but I took him on because I knew how he had handled Jack’s situation with maturity and knowledge. You can wreck a good legal case by getting too emotional about it and letting that get into it.

We have about ten minutes left, here. Is there any stuff that you’d like us to talk about? Yes, sir?

as well as other pages. You probably remember those complete stories.

I could never read those complete stories from beginning to end in the gallery [in a single visit] because my feet would hurt just standing there, to be honest, but I always wanted [those stories] to be there. I take my cues from Mark and others who saw how prescient Jack was; he probably [would not have been surprised]. I mean… I think he lived to tell stories. He might not have lived for [gallery exhibition], but he wouldn’t have been surprised, and I suppose he would have been gratified. The work displays really well. I mean, think about it. It’s relatively small work. We’re dealing with a bunch of objects that are all the same or a very similar size, which, from a distance—like the distance from here to that thermostat [on the wall]—if you squint, they all look the same.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, I’ve got a question for you about the exhibit in CSUN. It was great, by the way. Thanks for doing that. I really appreciate it.

HATFIELD: Thank you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was there, like, five minutes after opening the first day. It was awesome. Do you think that Jack would have enjoyed something like that, or he would have shied from it, or he would have felt it was about time he got his due? What would you think, emotionally, would have been his take?

LEVINE: But he might have said, “It’s about time.” Not in a mean or nasty way, but just because it was, it is, about time.

HATFIELD: Once you get within about two or three strides of the originals, each one hits you with its individuality. It’s kind of [making impact sounds: bam, bam], like that, right? But that was one of the design challenges in the show. We know that Jack wasn’t actually making work to be display pieces. (Though there are exceptions that he made for his own gratification.) But it’s remarkable that the work registers that strongly in that environment, as well as registering with readers with that same power.

HATFIELD: Well, there was some public exhibiting of Jack’s work in his lifetime, and as Mark has often said, Jack really would not have been surprised about most of these things. I mean, the real difficulty is that you hang stuff in the gallery in order to make spectacle, whereas if you’re putting stuff in a book, whether it’s a bound book or a stapled comic book, you’re creating something that has an intimate handfeel. There’s a tension, I think, a little tug-of-war, between putting something on the wall, where it’s supposed to grab people in that “gallery” kind of way, versus all those experiences I remember of having the roughly 7 x 10 inch comic book in my hands as a kid (or even older, going back and rereading those books). So there’s a little push/pull there, and we tried to resolve it by hanging complete stories

LEVINE: I’d can tell you that if you believe in smiling, to this day, he’s especially smiling at the numbers that Charles was just telling us about, the idea that 6,000 people or so went to the exhibit, that would have pleased him to no end. And it certainly pleased the Estate. Lisa and the rest of the kids were just ecstatic.

HATFIELD: Fans would come and I would end up talking to fans and

87

fellow professionals and colleagues of Jack’s in the Gallery, often people whom I didn’t know or had just come to know—but what was really cool was the people who said they had never seen this stuff. They had no childhood recollection, no nostalgia. Like, somewhere in my brain, along my spine, I’ve got Jack Kirby, because I’ve got that nostalgia, right? But people who didn’t have that, who haven’t gone through that kind of formative experience or imprinting, came away looking at some of those things in the Gallery and going, “Wow.” So that was very cool. It was cool to talk to people who were from different generations, backgrounds, and interests, who said they didn’t know Kirby name-wise from Adam, but they were sort of in awe of the work. So that was nice—it was one thing for the fans to validate it, but it was another thing for people to validate it from an art gallery point of view, as in, “Huh, I’m really thrilled by that!” So that was interesting.

went on to do unique, original work. I’ve said this a couple times, but I used to forge drawings a lot. I could forge a reasonable facsimile of a Jack Kirby drawing, and a couple times I did. And if I had somehow come out of my association with Jack magically able to draw just like him, he would have thought I was the biggest failure in the world, because I hadn’t invented anything. He liked people to get inspired by him to go out and do other things. He would have been thrilled that people looked at his comics and went out and became sculptors, or directors, or dancers, or poets, or anything like that.

Steve went on to become a terrific puppeteer. Steve builds wonderful puppets and for a while there we kept getting hired independently on the same projects by weird coincidences. Jack would have loved the fact that Steve had blossomed creatively in that direction. And that exhibit was full of people wandering around who just had a debt to Jack, and not people who drew like him.

I think we’ve got time for one more question. Deadpool!

EVANIER: At the opening night ceremonies, I was struck by two things that would have delighted Jack. Lots of things would have delighted Jack, but two things, especially. One was, when you walked in, there was this giant Silver Surfer blow-up of the last panel from the one issue that Jack did of the Silver Surfer comic, a very historic issue if you know the context of it. Jack would have walked in and seen that and said, “Yeah! That’s the size they should all be! That panel there!” (laughter) And the big, red wall. He would have loved the big, red wall there, the fact that the walls were leaping out at you.

And the second thing was, in that room, that evening—and it was probably true to some extent all the evenings that exhibit was open—was an awful lot of talent.

There were a lot of people in that room, not necessarily people who were comic book artists, but there were filmmakers, there were writers, there were people there who

AUDIENCE MEMBER (dressed as Deadpool): Why did Stan Lee get all the credit?

EVANIER: Why did Stan Lee get all the credits? He hired the letterers.

88

SHERMAN: He was the last guy who did the page before it went to the printer.

EVANIER: Dave, what have you got?

DAVID SIEGEL: Quickly, back in 1979 I went up to Jack Kirby’s home as a private collector to talk about artwork and stuff, commission, and because of him, and you talked about the moment of being with him, yeah, it was very inspirational. It was a real treat being with him. I couldn’t believe, as a private collector, he was my very first artist I’d ever visit, and through visiting, spending time with him, I went up to his place about four or five times. And then, because of that experience, it gave me the insight how to deal with him, and was also a base for me to learn how to deal with other artists.

through drawing. It’s a way of writing. Cartooning is a way of making up stories and stuff like that. When you’re the writer, and the editor, and the person who really guides the work through the production pipeline, a lot of glory accrues to you. And we don’t yet, I think, appreciate what comic artists do, fully, as storytellers.

So there’s a much larger story behind that.

EVANIER: Anyway, we have to vacate these premises.

We will see you at the Kirby Panel at the San Diego Comic-Con. (applause) ★

EVANIER: This is Dave Siegel, folks, who’s been responsible for taking care of a lot of Golden Age artists, helping them get recognition, getting money from companies. (applause) And Jack wasn’t nice to Dave because he thought there was anything in it for him.

He was nice to Dave because Dave was an enthusiastic lover of the work, and that deserved his respect.

Anyway, we are out of time here. There will be another Jack Kirby panel at the San Diego convention. You’ve got something quickly?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why did Stan Lee get the credit for creating all the popular Marvel characters?

HATFIELD: The question’s kind of a gigantic one.

EVANIER: Yeah. The answer is that right now, those characters are created by “Stan Lee and Jack Kirby,” which they should have been saying all along, and I think that, incrementally, people are understanding that Jack did more than just draw Stan’s ideas.

HATFIELD: It probably has to do with [the way we] in our culture say that writers make stuff, and that artists just “illustrate” things that writers make—which is, you know, [makes loud buzzer sound] WRONG. It’s just wrong, right?

And we don’t understand that cartooning is a way of writing 89

(previous page) In his search for details on the Galactus origin in Thor, Glen Gold spotted this color guide for sale, and noticed oddities in Thor’s arm. A look at the original art proves him right; it was redrawn. (below) John Poundinked Forever People #8 unused page.

C o l l e c t o r

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERVIEWS WITH KIRBY and his contemporaries, FEATURE ARTICLES, RARE AND UNSEEN KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and presentation of KIRBY’S UNINKED NS PENCILS from the 1960s-80s (from EDITIO BLE photocopies preserved in the KIRBY AVAILANLY ARCHIVES). Now in FULL-COLOR, it FOR O 4.95 showcases Kirby’s art even better! $1.95-$

DIGITAL

KIRBY FIVE-OH!

COLLECTED VOL. 3

COLLECTED VOL. 6

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

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

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

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

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

Go to www.twomorrows.com for other issues, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

TJKC #50 covers all the best of Kirby’s 50-year career in comics: BEST KIRBY STORIES, COVERS, CHARACTER DESIGNS, UNUSED ART, and profiles of/commentary by the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! Plus a 50-PAGE PENCIL ART GALLERY and a COLOR SECTION! Kirby cover inked by DARWYN COOKE, and introduction by MARK EVANIER.

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!

(168-page trade paperback) $24.95 (Digital Edition) $7.95 ISBN: 9781893905894

(84 tabloid pages) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84 tabloid pages) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

COLLECTED VOL. 7

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

“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 tabloid pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84 tabloid pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84 tabloid pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

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!

(84 tabloid pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84 tabloid pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

LEE & KIRBY: THE WONDER YEARS

#58 traces their history at Marvel, and what led them to conceive the Fantastic Four in 1961. Also documents the evolution of the FF throughout the 1960s, with plenty of Kirby art, plus previously unknown details about Lee and Kirby’s working relationship, and their eventual parting of ways in 1970.

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

“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!

(104 pages with COLOR) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #60

KIRBY COLLECTOR #61

KIRBY COLLECTOR #62

KIRBY COLLECTOR #63

KIRBY COLLECTOR #64

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!

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!

KIRBY AT DC! Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, updated “X-Numbers” list of Kirby’s DC assignments (revealing some surprises), JERRY BOYD’s insights on Kirby’s DC work, a look at KEY 1970s EVENTS IN JACK’S LIFE AND CAREER, Challengers vs. the FF, pencil art galleries from FOREVER PEOPLE, OMAC, and THE DEMON, Kirby cover inked by MIKE ROYER, and more!

MARVEL UNIVERSE! Featuring MARK ALEXANDER’s pivotal Lee/Kirby essay “A Universe A’Borning,” MARK EVANIER interviews ROY THOMAS, STAN GOLDBERG and JOE SINNOTT, a look at key late-1970s, ’80s, and ’90s events in Kirby’s life and career, STAN LEE script pages, unseen Kirby pencils and unused art from THOR, NICK FURY AGENT OF SHIELD, and FANTASTIC FOUR, and more!

SUPER-SOLDIERS! We declassify Captain America, Fighting American, Sgt. Fury, The Losers, Pvt. Strong, Boy Commandos, and a tribute to Simon & Kirby! PLUS: a Kirby interview about Captain America, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, key 1940s’50s events in Kirby’s career, unseen pencils and unused art from OMAC, SILVER STAR, CAPTAIN AMERICA (in the 1960s AND ’70s), the LOSERS, & more! KIRBY cover!

(104 pages with COLOR) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100 FULL-COLOR pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100 FULL-COLOR pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100 FULL-COLOR pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100 FULL-COLOR pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #65

KIRBY COLLECTOR #66

KIRBY COLLECTOR #67

KIRBY COLLECTOR #68

KIRBY COLLECTOR #69

ANYTHING GOES (AGAIN)! A potpourri issue, with anything and everything from Jack’s 50-year career, including a head-tohead comparison of the genius of KIRBY and ALEX TOTH! Plus a lengthy KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, unseen and unused Kirby art from JIMMY OLSEN, KAMANDI, MARVELMANIA, his COMIC STRIP & ANIMATION WORK, and more!

DOUBLE-TAKES ISSUE! Features oddities, coincidences, and reworkings by both Jack and Stan Lee: the Galactus Origin you didn’t see, Ditko’s vs. Kirby’s Spider-Man, how Lee and Kirby viewed “writing” differently, plus a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, unseen and unused pencil art from FANTASTIC FOUR, 2001, CAPTAIN VICTORY, BRUCE LEE, & more!

UP-CLOSE & PERSONAL! Kirby interviews you weren’t aware of, photos and recollections from fans who saw him in person, personal anecdotes from Jack’s fellow pros, LEE and KIRBY cameos in comics, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and more! Don’t let the photo cover fool you; this issue is chockfull of rare Kirby pencil art, from Roz Kirby’s private sketchbook, and Jack’s most personal comics stories!

KEY KIRBY CHARACTERS! We go decadeby-decade to examine pivotal characters Jack created throughout his career (including some that might surprise you)! Plus there’s a look at what would’ve happened if Kirby had never left Marvel Comics for DC, how Jack’s work has been repackaged over the decades, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and galleries of unseen Kirby pencil art!

KIRBY’S PARTNERS! Cap/Falcon/Bucky, Sandman & Sandy, Orion & Lightray, Johnny & Ben, Dingbats, Newsboys, plus features on JOE SIMON, MIKE ROYER, CHIC STONE, DICK AYERS, JOE SINNOTT, MIKE THIBODEAUX—even ROZ KIRBY! Also, BATTLE FOR A 3-D WORLD, the 2016 Comic-Con Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, and galleries of Kirby pencil art! Cover inked by JOE SINNOTT!

(100 FULL-COLOR pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100 FULL-COLOR pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST: GOLD EDITION

Lists EVERY KIRBY COMIC, BOOK, UNPUBLISHED WORK, cross-references reprints, and more!

(128-page Digital Edition) $5.95 A FEW SCRATCH & DENT PRINT COPIES LEFT!

KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

Compiles the “extra” new material from COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES 1-7, in one huge Digital Edition! Includes a fan’s private tour of the Kirbys’ home and more than 200 pieces of Kirby art not published outside of those volumes!

(120-page Digital Edition) $5.95

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

KIRBY’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY GRAPHIC NOVEL presented as created in 1975 (before being modified for the 1980s Pacific Comics series), reproduced from his uninked pencil art! Includes Jack’s unused CAPTAIN VICTORY SCREENPLAY, unseen art, an historical overview to put it in perspective!

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

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was adapted by JACK KIRBY as a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, as his final, great comics series.

The entire six-issue run is collected here, reproduced from his 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

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

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 1972 GODS posters, and four extra Kirby color pieces, all at tabloid size!

(60-page tabloid with COLOR) SOLD OUT • (Digital Edition) $5.95

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Collector

[There’s so much more we could’ve covered about Kirby’s beginnings, including: • Prototypes at Atlas vs. Marvel redux • Jack’s origin(al) pencils, vs. how Colletta changed them in THOR and JIMMY OLSEN • Inhumans vs. Addams Family or Munsters • CAPTAIN AMERICA’S BICENTENNIAL BATTLES reflecting on America’s birth • 1970s Manhunter vs. his 1940s roots • Was Brother Eye based on Jack’s relationship with big brother Dave in real life?

• Were Orion’s helmet ears based on Kirby’s boyhood dog Dutch’s?

• Even Popeye vs. Socko the Seadog!

Like Jack said, think from a different perspective! And don’t be surprised if we readdress this theme again in a near-future issue—especially if you readers want to tackle writing about one of those ideas, or some of your own. Now letters:] Remember a pic I sent a while back (that you printed in TJKC) of a mural in Sydney of Darkseid and Desaad in real Kirby style? Attached is another one my son just found there. Nice, huh?

Shane Foley, AUSTRALIA

The meticulous, hard work that went into the color-coded “X-Files” (Jack’s art production at DC Comics) is appreciated. Except for one small detail (John, you knew I hadda find something): THE SANDMAN #1 (Winter issue, 1974) with production number SK-1/2, is incorrectly listed as being drawn in March 1974. Your educated guess as to where that floating SK number should go, is off the mark.

In the “Behind the Scenes at DC Comic World” page in August 1973 issues of DC Comics, SANDMAN art is reproduced with an announcement of the upcoming special. This was to be published at the end of a resurgence of Simon and Kirby titles like BOY COMMANDOS and BLACK MAGIC. Like PREZ, SANDMAN was a Joe

Send letters to: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR c/o TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • See back issue excerpts at: www.twomorrows.com This lettercol begins with you—so write already!

Comments

Simon-edited book. If we check the “JS Files,” we see that the SANDMAN #1 text page “The Stuff of Which Dreams are Made” is numbered JS-99. The closest numbers I’ve discovered are for July 1974’s BLACK MAGIC #4 (JS-85, 88, 89, 90, 91). August 1973 issues, such as KAMANDI #8, were published in May 1973. This probably means that SANDMAN #1 was drawn no later than March 1973. (I would place SANDMAN #1 SK-112 between X-411 and X-412 in “The XFiles”).

I distinctly remember purchasing SANDMAN #1 off the newsstand on the same day I bought KAMANDI #15 and MISTER MIRACLE #18. These contemporaneous March 1974 issues were published in December 1973. All of the ads in SANDMAN #1 match the other DC Comics March 1974 issues. On the DC Comics subscription form in SANDMAN #1, it states “SUB AD MARCH” in small type beside the ad. At Christmastime in 1973, it was strange to see a new comic with the date “Winter issue” on it.

But even more special was this last fleeting glimpse of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby working together. It remains a great, one-of-a-kind book.

When SANDMAN #2 was published, I was crestfallen.

Richard Kolkman, Ft. Wayne, IN Happened upon the cover of this 1967 sci-fi paperback recently— THE STOLEN SUN, by Emil Petaja— and the image instantly reminded me of this Kirby “Tales of Asgard” page from Nov. 1964 (JOURNEY IN MYSTERY #113). [both at right] While the Petaja novel ship has similar elements to Kirby’s design, those can obviously be chalked up to both artists using the same source material (though Kirby wisely omitted the oars).

And yet… both Viking ships can absurdly fly? That seems almost too coincidental.

Craig McNamara, Shoreview, MN Having read the wonderful book THE WONDER YEARS (TJKC #58) by Mr. Mark Alexander, I can’t help but write to you out of a deep feeling of gratitude. This work is a MUST HAVE for every True Believer out there in the world. And a True Believer I am. That’s for sure. I have been since an early age.

Sadly, I couldn’t be there in the early Sixties, because of not being a citizen of the United States of America.

I was born at the dawn of 1961, on the 14th of February in the middle European country called Austria. A very small country, Latveriasized, one could say, but without a tyrant, neither 92

armoured nor otherwise peculiarly clad (at least not back in 1945). The years crept by, slowly and happily, and finally, the day had come. The day I got hold, for the first time in my life, of a copy of “Die fantastischen Vier” (THE FANTASTIC FOUR).

Lightning struck me, but instead of going down, I felt myself elevated and strengthened. The book was printed only in black and white, the paper was cheap, and the German translation bad. But the magic was there. Other books followed. “Die erstaunliche Spinne” (THE AMAZING SPIDER MAN), “Die Racher” (THE AVENGERS), “Der unglaubliche Halk” (THE INCREDIBLE HULK). It was like a dream, like an intoxication.

Soon, very soon, I turned into an addict. But

there was one thing I still missed: background information!

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck and all the other greats, they were merely names, printed in awry placed credit boxes. No faces, no histories, nothing what I longed so desperately for.

Then, decades later, in the dense jungle of the World Wide Web, I stumbled over your wonderful books—and the haze vanished. MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1960s by Pierre Comtois, MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1970s by the same, and THE WONDER YEARS by Mark Alexander: Three diamonds for my chest of comic book related books.

As for Mark Alexander: I feel so sorry for him. It is so sad, that he had to go so early. And yet, this book alone, this wonderful work of his, would prove that his short life wasn’t a wasted one. Rest in peace, True Believer! I wish I would have had the privilege of knowing you personally. We would have spent hours discussing a time, in which the summers were really longer and brighter...

Now, at the end of my letter, I say once again “Thanks” to you, Mr. Morrow. It is so great having a publisher who treats the art of sequential storytelling in general, and that of The King in particular, as respectfully as it deserves.

Karl-Heinz Pieler, AUSTRIA Congratulations on getting TJKC #68 out dangerously close to on time. I always add an extra month or so, for delays, and yet you made it pretty much on schedule. Hopefully, it’ll continue. I’d love to see issues more often.

This issue had some gems.

I think, for me, the big one was coverage of Jack’s Marvel romance comics. I have none of them, so it was interesting to learn more about them. The checklist, too, was of great value. The only complaint I have was that the twenty-five covers were printed so small as to make reading them, even with a magnifying glass, difficult. I wish more space had been spared for larger, more legible reproduction.

And, it is an oddity to consider: While Marvel superhero books of that time frame have been reprinted, most of these are still rarely seen. However, you’ve provided an excellent road map to go online and search for larger reproductions.

Also enjoyed the look at Thena and, consequently, the ETERNALS. That series was, by far, my favorite of Jack’s ’70s Marvel work. It’s nice to see it getting some additional coverage and analysis.

I’m still surprised it didn’t go over better. As a monthly, self-contained title, it didn’t require the commitment that his Fourth World titles did. It was just one book. I don’t know what the problem was—maybe Here’s a tentative list of upcoming themes, but we treat these themes very loosely, and anything you submit may fit somewhere. So get writing, and send us copies of your art!

FIGHT CLUB! Jack’s most powerful fights and in-your-face action!

KIRBY’S ONE-SHOTS! Jack’s best & worst throwaway characters and concepts!

KIRBY’S WORLD THAT’S HERE! How Jack looked into his crystal ball to predict the future!

lack of a traditional lead, since it was an ensemble cast?

It was a whole world in itself. But, seeing as how it was a Marvel book, maybe the lack of gratuitous crossovers, until the Cosmic Powered Hulk, left people wondering?

Standing on its own merits, as it did so well, may not have pleased those wishing for closer ties to the more established Marvel heroes. I loved it, just as it was. Sad it didn’t continue longer.

Also enjoyed your look at MACHINE MAN; another different type of Kirby idea (though on a more introspective, less massive scale).

After reading the postulation of how Jack could have employed his DC ideas at Marvel, it makes me tremendously glad he didn’t. I don’t think ideas and unique creations are mere variables to be fit, interchangeably, into open slots. Many would have had to be altered considerably. Plus, the main focus would have been on the existing heroes, not the new additions or villains.

I believe, had Jack been on those titles, he’d have dreamed up appropriate foes and situations to fit the specific needs rather than treat unused ideas like a grab bag.

I also wonder, had Jack stayed, whether jumping off the FF and THOR would have been seen as worthwhile, to take on floundering titles in the line?

I didn’t care for their premature cancellations but, otherwise, I mostly enjoyed the Fourth World titles just as they were done at DC. New ideas, characters and concepts given a chance to shine on their own, not, as here, simply to fill an issue of an existing title without a solid direction.

Sometimes, things turn out better the way they happened.

Loved all the Kirby photos, your list of his characters, the full page pencil of Thor and the color sketch of the Thing. As always, the old Kirby interviews were appreciated. Jack in his own words. It’s nice to read what he had to say, unfiltered or spun as to what he really meant or must have been thinking. Just his thoughts as he expressed them. Can’t ask for more than that.

Joe Frank, Scottsdale, AZ (Ahh, but Joe, if we’d shown those Romance covers larger, there’d be less incentive for you to go out and buy them—which honestly, is one of my goals with TJKC. Over the 23 years I’ve been producing this mag, I’ve now had the opportunity to read almost every story Kirby produced. Romances and westerns are the last ones remaining for me, and I’m finding a lot to like there—and hope to share that joy of discovery with as many Kirby fans as possible. Got get ’em, gang!)

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID! Stan & Jack’s comments about their Marvel Universe work!

FATHERS & SONS! Odin, Zeus, Darkseid, and other lousy parental role models!

MONSTERS & BUGS! Atlas Monsters, Thing vs. Hulk, Kong, Frankenstein, Phantom of the Sewers, Howler, Deviants, and other monsters from Jack’s work. Plus Mantis, Forager, Ant-Man, Lightning Lady, and other creepy-crawlies!

GOT A THEME IDEA? WRITE US!

93

(below) Utilitas zothe#70 Credits: cas fermentet bellus John Morrow, Editor/Designer/ saburre. Perspicax Chief Bottle Washer syrtes spinosus cirEric Nolen-Weathington, Proofreader cumgrediet ut THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Norris Burroughs • Nicholas Caputo Jon B. Cooke • Ferran Delgado Jean Depelley • Mark Evanier Shane Foley • Barry Forshaw Glen David Gold • Robert Guffey Charles Hatfield • Rand Hoppe Robert Katz • Lisa Kirby Jeremy Kirby • Sean Kleefeld Tom Kraft • Richard Kyle Paul S. Levine • Harry Mendryk John Millinder • Jerry O'Hara Mike Royer • Steve Rude Steve Sherman • Stan Taylor Marvin Taylor • Mike Thibodeaux Ray Wyman, Jr. • Tom Ziuko and of course The Kirby Estate The Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org) and whatifkirby.com If we forgot anyone, please let us know!

Contribute!

The Jack Kirby Collector is 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.

Submit art & articles by mail, or e-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com

NEXT ISSUE: #71 is the follow-up to this issue’s KIRBY: ALPHA—it’s KIRBY: OMEGA, looking at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, our regular columnists including MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more, including a new cover inked by WALTER SIMONSON! (#71 ships in May 2017. Then we’re off one issue to bring you KIRBY100, our all-star book celebration of Jack’s 100th birthday shipping in August 2017, followed by TJKC #72 in the Fall.)

Parting Shot

One last visit to Jack’s personal Tiki Room—his imagination—comes on this page from Forever People #11 (Oct. 1972), the final issue before cancellation. As this issue signaled a major ending for Jack—the forced disruption of the Fourth World—we felt it was a perfect way to end this issue on beginnings, and segue to next issue’s focus on endings in the Kirbyverse. See you next time!

94

TwoMorrows

The Future of Comics History.

SAVE

15

WHE % N YO ORD U ONL ER INE!

TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Web: www.twomorrows.com

New book by BACK ISSUE! editor MICHAEL EURY!

HERO-A-GO-GO!

Welcome to the CAMP AGE, when spies liked their wars cold and their women warm, good guys beat bad guys with a pun and a punch, and Batman shook a mean cape. HERO-A-GO-GO celebrates the camp craze of the Swinging Sixties, when just about everyone—the teens of Riverdale, an ant and a squirrel, even the President of the United States—was a super-hero or a secret agent. BACK ISSUE magazine and former DC Comics editor MICHAEL EURY takes you through that coolest cultural phenomenon with this all-new collection of nostalgic essays, histories, and theme song lyrics of classic 1960s characters like CAPTAIN ACTION, HERBIE THE FAT FURY, CAPTAIN NICE, ATOM ANT, SCOOTER, ACG’s NEMESIS, DELL’S SUPER-FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA, the “Split!” CAPTAIN MARVEL, and others! Featuring interviews with BILL MUMY (Lost in Space), BOB HOLIDAY (It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman), RALPH BAKSHI (The Mighty Heroes, SpiderMan), DEAN TORRENCE (Jan and Dean Meet Batman), RAMONA FRADON (Metamorpho), DICK DeBARTOLO (Captain Klutz), TONY TALLARICO (The Great Society Comic Book), VINCE GARGIULO (Palisades Park historian), JOE SINNOTT (The Beatles comic book), JOSE DELBO (The Monkees comic book), and many more!

(272-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $36.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-073-1 • SHIPS APRIL 2017!

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

AND NOW SHIPPING:

2017 RATES

MLJ COMPANION

COMIC BOOK FEVER

AL PLASTINO

MONSTER MASH

Documents the complete history of Archie Comics’ “Mighty Crusaders” super-hero characters, from the 1940s to today!

GEORGE KHOURY's “love letter” to comics of 1976-1986, covering all the top artists, the coolest stories, and even the best ads!

Biography of the Superman artist who co-created Supergirl, Brainiac, and the Legion of Super-Heroes!

Time-trip back to the frightening era of 1957-1972, and explore the Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze, when monsters stomped into the American mainstream!

(288-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $34.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-067-0

(240-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $34.95 (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-063-2

(112-page trade paperback) $17.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-066-3

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $13.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-064-9

SUBSCRIPTIONS ECONOMY US Alter Ego (Six 100-page issues) $65.00 Back Issue (Eight 80-page issues) $73.00 BrickJournal (Six 80-page issues) $55.00 Comic Book Creator (Four 80-page issues) $40.00 Jack Kirby Collector (Four 100-page issues) $45.00

LAST SUPERMAN STANDING

EXPEDITED US $83.00 $88.00 $66.00 $50.00 $58.00

PREMIUM US $92.00 $97.00 $73.00 $54.00 $61.00

INTERNATIONAL $102.00 $116.00 $87.00 $60.00 $67.00

DIGITAL ONLY $29.70 $31.60 $23.70 $15.80 $19.80

ALL THE BEST...

Comics History American Comic Book Chronicles volumes: • 1950s • 1960-64 • 1965-69 • 1970s • 1980s Coming Soon: • 1940-44 • 1945-49 • 1990s • Marvel Comics in the 1960s, 1970s, & 1980s

Classic Artists • Jack Kirby • Will Eisner • Carmine Infantino • Sal Buscema • Don Heck • John Romita Sr. • Herb Trimpe • Joe Kubert • Marie Severin • Al Plastino • Joe Sinnott • Dan Spiegle • Vince Colletta

Modern Masters

Companions

• Alan Davis • George Pérez • John Byrne • Michael Golden • Mark Schultz • Mike Allred • John Romita Jr. • Mike Ploog • Guy Davis • Jeff Smith • Eric Powell • Paolo Rivera

• All-Star Comics • Silver Age Sci-Fi • Batman • Superman • Flash • Hawkman • Teen Titans • THUNDER Agents • Fawcett Comics • Quality Comics • Star*Reach • MLJ heroes

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

Plus Horror, Pop Culture, & more!

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: twomorrows.com

URGENT WARNING FOR OUR READERS! DON’T MISS YOUR FAVORITE MAGS! We are experiencing unprecedented levels of reorder activity on our new magazines. Case in point: Back Issue #88 & #89 are already completely SOLD OUT. We can no longer guarantee copies will be available for long after initial release, so don’t wait for a convention or sale— order now!

BACK ISSUE #95

ALTER EGO #145

ALTER EGO #146

ALTER EGO #147

ALTER EGO #148

40 years after the debut of Marvel’s STAR WARS #1, its writer/editor ROY THOMAS tells RICHARD ARNDT the story behind that landmark comic, plus interviews with artists HOWARD CHAYKIN, RICK HOBERG, and BILL WRAY. Also: GEORGE BRENNER, creator of The Clock—”Jazz in Comics” by MICHAEL T. GILBERT—the finale of BILL SCHELLY’s salute to G.B. LOVE—FCA—and more! CHAYKIN cover.

DOUG MOENCH in the 1970s at Warren and Marvel (Master of Kung Fu, Planet of the Apes, Deathlok, Werewolf by Night, Morbius, Moon Knight, Ka-Zar, Weirdworld)!

Art by BUSCEMA, GULACY, PLOOG, BUCKLER, ZECK, DAY, PERLIN, & HEATH! MICHAEL T. GILBERT on EC’s oddball “variant covers”—FCA—and a neverpublished Golden Age super-hero story by MARV LEVY! Cover by PAUL GULACY!

Giant-size Fawcett Collectors of America special with Golden/Silver Age writer OTTO BINDER’s personal script records and illos from his greatest series! Intros by P.C. HAMERLINCK and BILL SCHELLY, art by BECK, SIMON & KIRBY, SWAN, SCHAFFENBERGER, AVISON, BORING, MOONEY, PLASTINO, and others! Plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and an unpublished C.C. BECK cover!

Relive JOE PETRILAK’s All-Time Classic NY Comic Book Convention—the greatest Golden & Silver Age con ever assembled!

Panels, art and photos featuring INFANTINO, KUBERT, 3 SCHWARTZES, NODELL, HASEN, GIELLA, CUIDERA, BOLTINOFF, BUSCEMA, AYERS, SINNOTT, [MARIE] SEVERIN, GOULART, THOMAS, and a host of others!

Plus FCA, GILBERT, SCHELLY, and RUSS RAINBOLT’s amazing 60-foot comics mural!

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships April 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships June 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships August 2017

BACK ISSUE #96

BACK ISSUE #97

BACK ISSUE #98

BACK ISSUE #99

“Creatures of the Night!” Moon Knight’s DOUG MOENCH and BILL SIENKIEWICZ in a Pro2Pro interview, Ghost Rider, Night Nurse, Eclipso in the Bronze Age, I…Vampire, interviews with Batman writer MIKE W. BARR and Marvel’s Nightcat, JACQUELINE TAVAREZ. Featuring work by BOB BUDIANSKY, J. M. DeMATTEIS, DAVE SIMONS, ROGER STERN, TOM SUTTON, JEAN THOMAS, and more.

SIENKIEWICZ and KLAUS JANSON cover!

“Marvel Fanfare Issue!” Behind the scenes of the ‘80s anthology series with AL MILGROM, interviews and art by ARTHUR ADAMS, CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAVE COCKRUM, STEVE ENGLEHART, MICHAEL GOLDEN, ROGER McKENZIE, FRANK MILLER, DOUG MOENCH, ANN NOCENTI, GEORGE PÉREZ, MARSHALL ROGERS, PAUL SMITH, KEN STEACY, CHARLES VESS, and more! Cover by SANDY PLUNKETT and GLENN WHITMORE.

“Bird People!” Hawkman in the Bronze Age, JIM STARLIN’s Superman/Hawkgirl team-up, TIM TRUMAN’s Hawkworld, Hawk and Dove, Penguin history, Blue Falcon & Dynomutt, Condorman, and CHUCK DIXON and SCOTT McDANIEL’s Nightwing. With GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, GREG GULER, RICHARD HOWELL, TONY ISABELLA, KARL KESEL, ROB LIEFELD, DENNY O’NEIL, and others! Cover by GEORGE PÉREZ.

“DC in the ‘80s!” From the experimental to the fan faves: Behind-the-scenes looks at SECRET ORIGINS, ACTION COMICS WEEKLY, DC CHALLENGE, THRILLER, ELECTRIC WARRIOR, and SUN DEVILS. Featuring JIM BAIKIE, MARK EVANIER, DAN JURGENS, DOUG MOENCH, MARTIN PASKO, TREVOR VON EEDEN, and others!

Featuring a mind-numbing Nightwing cover

by ROMEO TANGHAL!

“BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES’ 25th ANNIVERSARY!” Looks back at the influential cartoon series. Plus: episode guide, Harley Quinn history, DC’s Batman Adventures and Animated Universe comic books, and tribute to artist MIKE PAROBECK. Featuring KEVIN ALTIERI, RICK BURCHETT, PAUL DINI, GERARD JONES, MARTIN PASKO, DAN RIBA, TY TEMPLETON, BRUCE TIMM, and others! BRUCE TIMM cover!

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships March 2017

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships May 2017

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships June 2017

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships July 2017

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Aug. 2017

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #14 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #15 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #16

DRAW! #33

KIRBY COLLECTOR #71

Comprehensive KELLEY JONES interview, from early years as Marvel inker to presentday greatness at DC depicting BATMAN, DEADMAN, and SWAMP THING (chockful of rarely-seen artwork)! Plus WILL MURRAY examines the nefarious legacy of Batman co-creator BOB KANE in an investigation into tragic ghosts and rapacious greed. We also look at RAINA TELGEMEIER and her magnificent army of devotees, and more!

Celebrating 30 years of artist’s artist MARK SCHULTZ, creator of the CADILLACS AND DINOSAURS franchise, with a featurelength, career-spanning interview conducted in Mark’s Pennsylvanian home, examining the early years of struggle, success with Kitchen Sink Press, and hitting it big with a Saturday morning cartoon series. Includes rarely-seen art and fascinating photos from Mark’s amazing and award-winning career.

A look at 75 years of Archie Comics’ characters and titles, from Archie and his pals ‘n gals to the mighty MLJ heroes of yesteryear and today’s “Dark Circle”! Also: Careerspanning interviews with The Fox’s DEAN HASPIEL and Kevin Keller’s cartoonist DAN PARENT, who both jam on our exclusive cover depicting a face-off between humor and heroes. Plus our usual features, including the hilarious FRED HEMBECK!

Interview and demo by Electra: Assassin and Stray Toasters superstar BILL SIENKIEWICZ, a look at THE WATTS ATELIER OF THE ARTS (one of the best training grounds for students to gain the skills they need to get the jobs they want), JERRY ORDWAY shows the Ord-Way of drawing, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY take you to Comic Art Bootcamp.

KIRBY: OMEGA! Looks at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by WALTER SIMONSON!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Spring 2017

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Summer 2017

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Spring 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Spring 2017

PRINTED IN CHINA