Jack Kirby Collector #71

Black Racer TM & © DC Comics.

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SEVENTY-ONE

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Contents KIRBY: OMEGA! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 (does Anti-Life add up?)

FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 (Kirby’s dead ringer) NEVERENDINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 (the Jack Kirby Museum panel at 2016’s Silicon Valley Comic-Con)

C o l l e c t o r

ISSUE #71, SPRING 2017

KIRBY KINETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 (life, death, and identity) SPIRITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26 (love of [anti-?] life) GALLERY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31 (dangling plot threads) HAIR CLUB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42 (Jack’s blonds, from Angel to Esak) KIRBY OBSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . .44 (giants, lost worlds, and sphinxes) END IT ALL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 (endings that happened—or didn’t) KIRBY AS A GENRE . . . . . . . . . . .51 (a Brazilian homage, and BUG!) INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY . . . . .54 (Darkseid, from alpha to omega) INFLUENCEES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 (Walter Simonson talks Ragnarök) TRIBUTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 (San Diego Comic Fest’s Kirby Cafe) JACK F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64 (Mark Evanier moderates the 2017 Comic Fest Tribute Panel) COLLECTOR COMMENTS . . . . . . .94 PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .96 (the true end of the Fourth World) 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 COPYRIGHTS: Angry Charlie, Auralie, Bat Lash, Batman, Beautiful Dreamer, Ben Boxer, Big Barda, Big Bear, Billion Dollar Bates, Black Racer, Buddy Blank, Darkseid, Deadman, Demon, Dubbilex, Esak, Female Furies, Firestorm, Flash, Forager, Forever People, Goody Rickels, Green Arrow, Guardian, Hercules Unbound, Highfather, Himon, In The Days of the Mob, Inferior Five, Infinity Man, Izaya, Jason Blood, Jimmy Olsen, Justice League, Kalibak, Kamandi, Kreetin, Krunch, Lightray, Lonar, Losers, Magnar, Mark Moonrider, Martian Manhunter, Metron, Mister Miracle, Morgan Le Fey, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, Oberon, OMAC, Red Tornado, Seagrin, Serifan, Shilo Norman, Sonny Sumo, Spirit World, Steppenwolf, Superman, Two-Face, Vykin, Weldun, Whiz Wagon, Witchboy TM & © DC Comics. • Alicia Masters, Arnim Zola, Avengers, Balder, Batroc, Black Knight, Black Widow, Bucky, Byrrah, Captain America, Crystal, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, Dr. Strange, Ego, Eternals, Fantastic Four, Frightful Four, Galactus, Green Goblin, Grey Gargoyle, Gwen Stacy, Harry Osborne, Hela, Hercules, Hulk, Human Torch, Inhumans, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, Jane Foster, Kid Colt, Leader, Mangog, Maximus, Mr. Fantastic, Nick Fury, Odin, Puppet Master, Rawhide Kid, Recorder, Red Skull, Sentinels, Sif, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Stone Men from Saturn, Strange Tales, Sub-Mariner, Surtur, Thing, Thor, Trapster, Ulik, Warriors Three, X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Angel, Black Magic, Boy Explorers, Boys' Ranch, Dead Ringer, Foxhole, In Love, Stuntman TM & © Simon & Kirby Estates • Captain Victory, Jacob And The Angel, Prester John, Street Code TM & © Jack Kirby Estate. • Ragnarök TM & © Walter Simonson.

Cover inks: WALTER SIMONSON on an unused New Gods reprint cover Cover color: TOM ZIUKO

In Journey Into Mystery #102 (March 1964), we learned how young Thor had to face death (in the form of Hela) to earn his hammer.

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 24, No. 71, Spring 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

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Opening Shot

Does Anti-Life Add Up? by editor John Morrow

his issue is the flip-side to last issue’s “Kirby: Alpha” theme: it deals with death and endings in the Kirbyverse. So how did Jack interject death into his work? Perhaps the most telling area he delved into was a concept he called Anti-Life, which manifested itself as an elusive Equation, Darkseid’s object of desire in the Fourth World series. Because that was Jack’s most personal work in comics, we’re covering a lot of it here.

While the “Anti-Life Equation” certainly sounds cool and somewhat mystical, a simpler way to refer to “anti-life” (i.e. the opposite of life) is “death.” So why didn’t Jack just call it the “Death Equation”?

Before we get to that, let’s delve into a little history.

The term “anti-life” likely popped into Jack’s head from his prior use of “anti-matter” in Fantastic Four. (Interestingly, the Negative Zone, an anti-matter universe, is the setting for the climax of FF #51’s “This Man, This Monster,” which ends with a pivotal death.) In antimatter, a particle and its opposite anti-particle mimic one another, but have opposite electrical charges (i.e. a proton is positively charged, while an anti-proton is negatively charged). The current scientific theory of anti-matter dates back to the late 1920s and early 1930s, right at the time Jack would’ve been studying science in school, and reading science-fiction in his beloved pulp magazines.

That knowledge must’ve stuck with him, since it crept into his comics work. The Negative Zone played a key role throughout the 1960s Marvel Universe, and was undoubtedly still fresh in his mind when he was formulating ideas for the Fourth World around 1968-69.

But something else had stayed with him all those years: His experiences in World War II.

• Lady Pamela Hawley in Sgt. Fury #18.

• Seagrin, Richard the pacifist in “Glory Boat”, and Avia in “The Pact” from New Gods.

• Original “Mister Miracle” Thaddeus Brown, and Auralie in “Himon” from Mister Miracle.

• Jim Harper (the original Guardian) was revealed to have been murdered in Jimmy Olsen.

• Flower, Klik-klak, Tiny, and Kamandi’s grandfather in Kamandi.

• Panama Fattie from Our Fighting Forces (The Losers) #158.

• Old Manhunter in First Issue Special #5.

• Good Looks’ parents in Dingbats of Danger Street #2. (Jack even interjected death into what originally started as a humorous strip, and took a decidely serious turn.)

• The golden girl Ardina in the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel.

• Esak and Himon in Hunger Dogs.

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FOR GOOD TO TRIUMPH OVER EVIL: • Wonder Man in Avengers #9. (Could also go in the first category.)

• The unknown guy in “This Man, This Monster” in FF #51. (Ditto.)

• Slig (and his Mother Box), Steppenwolf, Kalibak, and Desaad in New Gods.

• Billion Dollar Bates and Infinity Man in Forever People #8.

• Toxl in Weird Mystery Tales #2.

• German Olympic runner Bruno Borman in Our Fighting Forces (The Losers) #159.

As you can see, it was a lot easier to find characters for the first category than the second. And death didn’t really come into play nearly as often in the 1960s as the 1970s.

THE COLD GAME OF THE BUTCHER Jack saw more than enough death in WWII, and while he rarely talked about it, he certainly had to kill his fair share of enemy soldiers.

His wife Roz has recounted how Jack often woke in the middle of the night (sometimes screaming in German) from dreams about the war, so those horrors haunted him throughout his life.

Even in the 1950s, while other publishers were cranking out gory horror comics, Jack chose to focus his stories in Black Magic on suspense and folklore instead of bloody mayhem, with nary a severed body part to be found.

Kirby didn’t have the stomach for it; he valued life, no doubt moreso because of the lives he took during the war. Look throughout his career, and you’ll see he only showed death for dramatic impact, never gratuitously— and always off-camera. It’s no wonder he shied away from using the word “death” to name the overarching concept his breakthrough series would revolve around.

So let’s examine death in Kirby’s post-war comics. How many key characters actually bit the dust in them? I’ve come up with these two categories, each grouped in roughly chronological order:

BRINGING OUT YOUR DEAD Like most people, as Jack aged and matured, his own mortality became more real to him. So he began to express it in his work. Sure, Dr. Doom was a sort of early harbinger of death, but the Grim Reaper truly came to the fore for the first time with Galactus’ arrival—and then Him arguably would’ve destroyed everything. Still, almost nobody ever actually died in Jack’s 1960s stories—he always pulled us back from the brink.

After years of Thor stories (including ones with Hela, goddess of death) at Marvel, Jack wanted to literally kill off that pantheon of characters, but wasn’t allowed to—though he did show a “what if ” scene of Ragnarök happening in “Tales of Asgard.” He attempted Ragnarök twice in Thor—once with Mangog, and then again with Surtur, but both had happy endings. That cataclysmous-interruptus led to him starting New Gods #1 with an Epilogue of it finally happening. He just had to tell that story, even if it meant moving to a new publisher to do it.

Once Jack was at DC, death especially permeated the New Gods, in a way never done in his previous work. Ask yourself: Why, only three issues in, did Jack feel compelled to do an entirely different story than he’d originally planned, and bring in his conception of Death on Skis with the Black Racer?

FOR DEEP EMOTIONAL RESONANCE: • Lady Delilah from Boys’ Ranch #3.

• Bucky from Avengers #4 (setting up his plotline of Captain America being afraid to let it happen to Rick Jones).

• Sue and Johnny’s father in Fantastic Four #31.

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Why start New Gods #4 with the death of Seagrin, a character we’d never heard of before? (Then Slig dies in #5, and Richard the pacifist goes in #6.)

Why, in “The Pact” (#7), did he have Izaya violently kill Steppenwolf before finding the Source wall and inner peace?

Why did Jack title #8 “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin”?

The Prime One in New Gods #9 dies a horrific death, and Desaad and Kalibak both croak at the end of New Gods #11. Jack even revisited the Black Racer for that final, rushed issue after being told it was cancelled. Why the compelling need to bring Death in at the end of it, as his last word on the series?

Even in his later “conclusion,” Orion appears to die at the end of the New Gods reprint #6 new story, and Esak and Himon meet their ends in Hunger Dogs (although Jack easily could’ve had Himon use yet another Follower to fake his death, as he’d done repeatedly in Mister Miracle #9). He sure wasn’t sentimental about holding onto his old characters— although just as how Marvel wouldn’t let Jack kill off Thor to produce the New Gods at Marvel, DC ironically wouldn’t let him kill off Darkseid.

OPERATION: REBIRTH Without a doubt, death was a fact of life in Kirby’s later work—but so was rebirth. Consider: In FF Annual #6, the team’s first encounter with Annihilus (one of Jack’s deadliest-looking character designs ever, and the ruler of the anti-matter Negative Zone) is juxtaposed with the birth of Franklin Richards.

Deadman wasn’t Jack’s own creation, and he was forced by DC to shoehorn him into Forever People. But he couldn’t even keep Boston Brand “dead,” as he gave him a Follower body, and a cosmic cartridge from Serifan to bring him back to life. And the final issues of all the Fourth World books except New Gods (and if you consider Hunger Dogs in its place, it too) end with a new beginning for the characters.

The Eternals heralded the final judgment of the gods on mankind, but there was always the hope that just maybe, they’d find us worthwhile and spare us.

Captain Victory had Capt. Argus Flane, CV’s trainer, pass on his knowledge that “victory is sacrifice.” Then he went up in fla(n)mes, but CV lived on (and had nearly unlimited extra clone bodies to transfer into, for a sort of immortality). Also in Captain Victory, Blackmass was actually Darkseid post-mortem, who still managed to stick around as a disembodied voice, as if evil never truly dies. (I can’t even venture a guess as to the meaning behind the birth of the Fighting Fetus, however...)

Heck, Satan’s Six died and couldn’t even get into hell.

And Kirby’s final comic series, Silver Star, had Darius Drumm become the Angel of Death. No more fatal villain ever existed in Jack’s work, but even as he drew the last page of his comics career, he couldn’t let death stand triumphant.

THE BIPOLAR NATURE OF DEATH IN THE KIRBYVERSE So, what does the dual nature of Jack’s treatment of death tell us about him, and how he viewed the human condition?

Much like antimatter, Jack viewed death and rebirth as inextricably intertwined. One negative, one positive.

Life, and anti-life.

Jack never divulged exactly what the AntiLife Equation was, or what kind of cosmic calculator one would need to compute it. Just as in the Fourth World stories, it was locked away in the recesses of Jack’s own “beautiful mind.”

For sure, he saw a deeper meaning behind the AntiLife Equation than simply dying. Whoever possesses it, had the power to control minds, and rob people of free thought and expression. Hitler, with his tactics, did just that to the German populace, and they mostly fell in line, afraid to express dissent, for fear of being killed. Jack saw that “equation” at work in Nazi Germany, and in his own later life, he had to confront situations that threatened to keep him from being able to think for himself, speak his own mind, express himself—and to him, those things were equivalent to death.

So how do we reconcile these two opposing forces in Jack’s work? Let me give the last word on this to my friend Jon B. Cooke (editor of Comic Book Creator and associate editor emeritus of TJKC): “Ultimately, for me, the message of Jack Kirby is that despite the overwhelming oppression of “anti-life” and how evil can absolutely smother almost all aspects of existence, good finds a way to escape and, at least for the protagonist, prevail. It’s Scott Free escaping Armagetto, being born of Apokolips—the Holocaust, essentially—and making it to the Holy Land. It’s Jack getting out of “Suicide Slum” or emerging from the “Battle of the Bulge” and finding creative refuge and hope in a new endeavor.

It’s never giving up, even in death, because he found his way into that giant drawing of God hanging in his living room.” ★ [Editor’s Note: Jon B. Cooke is co-editor of Kirby100, TwoMorrows’ new book (available in Hardcover and Softcover) celebrating Jack’s 100th birthday with 100 top creators, all honoring the King by discussing and critiquing his key work. It’ll debut at ComicCon International this July, where I’m delighted to be a Special Guest. I hope you’ll join me there to commemorate Jack’s place in comics history.]

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(previous page) The “Cold Game of the Butcher” is probably Jack’s second most well-known line of dialogue (after “Don’t Ask! Just Buy It!”).

From New Gods #4 (Aug. 1971). And Thor #127 (April 1966) first introduced Marvel fans to Ragnarok. (above) The opening scene from Forever People #3 removes any doubt of how much WWII influenced Kirby’s Fourth World.

From Western Love #5 (Prize Publications, March 1950) comes this tale with an ending that’ll keep you guessing. Art restoration and coloring by Chris Fama.

TM & © Simon & Kirby Estates.

Foundations

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Neverendings

SVCC Kirby Panel 2016

#1:”Street Code” was drawn circa 1983, but not published until Argosy V3#2 (Nov. 1990).

Conducted at the Silicon Valley Comic Con, held at the San Jose Convention Center, March 18-20, 2016. Featuring (above, left to right) Bruce Simon, Mark Badger, and Steve Sherman. Transcribed by Steven Tice and edited by John Morrow.

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[Editor’s Note: We start this issue on endings with a new beginning. The Jack Kirby Museum sprang up as an entity a full decade after Jack passed away, but what a valuable resource it’s become.

Director Rand Hoppe has made it his life’s work to archive, both physically and digitally, as many pieces of Kirby art as possible. So while Jack’s no longer with us, thanks to the work of the Museum, a part of him will always be accessible for future generations to learn from. The following panel is an example of the kind of great work the Museum does, traveling around the world to put on discussions and exhibitions of Jack’s work, to educate the populace about him. Hopefully you’ll learn something you didn’t know about Jack here as well. A variation of this presentation was put on at the Kirby: Apocalypse exhibit at Cal State University Northridge in 2015. To see the artwork larger, and accompanied by insightful commentaries, you can still order that exhibition’s catalog at www.idwpublishing.com] MARK BADGER: Hi. This is the Jack Kirby Museum. I’m Mark Badger. I’m a comic book artist who worked at Marvel and DC, grew up reading Jack’s comics, and I got to shake his hand at his 75th birthday in San Diego before he died and say, “Thank you for all your work.” I admit that I’m fairly obsessed with Jack, enough that when I was a kid of twentysomething in Hoboken, New Jersey, and breaking into the business, I’d spend a lot of time in a bar talking about Jack Kirby with a guy named Rand Hoppe—who, about ten years ago, started the Jack Kirby Museum as a way to archive Jack’s work digitally as it comes up for sale, so there’s someplace where it’s all originals at high resolutions for future publications, for editorials, or art historians to write about. It keeps all the xeroxes, the pencils archive, and keeps the name Jack out there because, as you all know, Stan Lee created Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and the Hulk and the Thing. (laughter) Does anybody believe that in this room? Okay, we don’t have to go through that. Introduce yourselves, gentlemen.

STEVE SHERMAN: My name is Steve Sherman, and I met Jack in 1969. I was working at Marvelmania, which was putting out a lot of Marvel geegaws and stuff. This was the time when Jack had just left Marvel and he was going to work for DC. So he asked myself and Mark Evanier if we’d want to work with him to come up with different magazines and things that he had planned to do, so that’s how I met him. I was his assistant 13

SHERMAN: However, his brother Dave was 6' 4", (laughter) so his brother would watch out for him.

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SIMON: Right. If you ever saw the movie Dead End from 1937, which was kind of a precursor to the Bowery Boys—you know, we have street gangs now. Back then they had block gangs, and people would each have their own block, and if you went off the block, you were subject to beatings and all sorts of stuff like that. So it was really street-to-street fighting, and Jack joined something called the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, which was kind of like a boys’ club, YMCA group to try and keep kids off the street and out of the gangs, and that’s really where he first started to do comic strips, for the newsletter of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic. from 1970 to 1976, when he left DC and went back to Marvel. After that we worked on a couple of projects together. We wrote Captain Victory and Silver Star originally as screenplays, and then Jack took that and turned them into comic books. So I knew him up until the time he died in 1994.

BRUCE SIMON: I’m Bruce Simon. I’m an underground cartoonist. I also was working at Marvelmania with Steve. We’ve been friends for almost fifty years, and met Jack at the same time and got to know Jack and his family and hear his stories, and eat with him, and talk with him. We have a lot of stories—Mark can talk more to the art, I can talk about Jack the man as well as Steve. So I think we’ll have some fun. Let’s take a look at these slides.

1 BADGER: Okay. This is Street Code, which is the only autobiographical story he did about growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when it was not Real Estate Central, but it was actually a ghetto or a slum. And there’s photos that look almost identical like this, which of course we don’t have. But at this point Jack had mastered drawing to the point where he can stick everything on the page.

It doesn’t stop.

4 2 BADGER: And this is Jack, older, doing what he does.

SHERMAN: He had that same drawing board for something like fifty years, so it was pretty creased and full of graphite. But, yeah, that’s how he liked to draw. He would just sit down with a pipe in his mouth, grab a pencil, and start working away.

SIMON: Can I just hit that real quick? This was one of the very last things that Jack actually drew for print. It might even be the last story. It’s from, like, 1985. What’s amazing about it is that with a drawing like this, you could say someone would have to do preliminary drawings and all of this research, but the drawing would just flow out of Jack.

BADGER: And when he was probably not much older than the street gang, he was one of the artists that helped start comics.

3 SIMON: This is a post-war page. He was starting to do double-page spreads. He was doing double-page spreads even in 1941. We have a whole different slideshow of just his double-page spreads. But there’s another one from…

BADGER: This is another page from Street Code. Jack was short. How tall was he?

SHERMAN: About 5' 5", 5' 6".

BADGER: He got in fights a lot. The Lower East Side was tough and it was street gang territory.

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4 BADGER: This is a Fifties’ page.

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SIMON: That’s the bar fight from Boys’ Ranch. But nobody else was doing things like this. To open up a comic and see a double-page spread like that was just a total knockout, just another one of his innovations.

BADGER: Somebody wrote, and I think it’s in the catalog, a long article about how this parallels one of the pages in Mister Miracle where the Furies and Big Barda are fighting.

BADGER: After he invented Captain America in 1941, when he was drafted…?

SIMON: Steve, you know this, right?

5 SHERMAN: I guess, drafted, enlisted, you could say; whichever way he was going in. The thing about Jack is, you can kind of think of him today as sort of like a hip-hop artist or rap, because as a young kid he was in the ghetto, and he learned to draw, taught

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himself, basically, how to draw. At the young age of 21 he had a big hit, which was Captain America. So he went from being basically this kid in the ghetto to almost a superstar, because Captain America was so big. They were selling about a million copies or more a month, and he and his partner, Joe Simon, were big deals. In fact, they stayed on Captain America for ten issues and then moved over to DC, where Jack found himself sitting with Jack Liebowitz and [Harry] Donenfeld giving them their own books with their names on it, which only Siegel and Shuster and Bob Kane had at the time.

So he was fairly young when success hit, but then, just as that happened, the war started, and so he was drafted into the infantry. At first they wanted to put him in the tank corps, where you would dig a hole, and as the tanks went over, you’d have your bazooka or something and you would try and shoot as the tank came over the hole. Well, in training he saw a couple guys get squished during that, so he said, “Nah, it’s not for me.” (laughter) So then he tried the flame thrower.

He didn’t like that either. Finally they made him a scout when they found out he could draw, so they said, “Oh, okay, so you’ll be the Scout. You’ll go out, you’ll draw maps of what’s going on,” which is probably the most dangerous job of them all, because he was the first guy to go out into the towns in France and check out where the Germans were, and then mark and figure out where everything was going on, then go back to where everybody was and say, “Okay, we can either go or we can’t go.”

6 SIMON: These pages here, if I’m not mistaken, are from his 1950s war book Foxhole, and he told a lot of his own personal stories in this book. If there’s anything Jack liked talking about even more than comics, it was his war experiences, because he would go—it really was a defining moment in his life. He was wounded. He had frostbite. He was almost killed, I don’t know how many times. It was an experience that really taught him about human nature. It made a gigantic impression. And he was one of the few guys who used his personal experiences in his war comics—a lot of people made war comics like they were just fun and games. Never Jack.

BADGER: When you look through his work, and everybody’s heard lots about fight scenes being one of the big, driving [things] in his work, but he never portrays people as heroically the tough, gritty guys who go off and kill thirty people and they don’t even think about it. There’s always the conditions and the values of it. They hit you, you know? You have somebody who actually understands society a little better than anybody else.

In the catalog for the Kirby exhibition that was in LA, Howard Chaykin does a real nice comparison of these war stories, and these pages specifically, to Harvey Kurtzman’s work, and how Kurtzman was pacing things differently than Jack was, and how Jack was using the time and the space to drive these open settings to layout stories. There was a group of guys at one

6 point. Trina Robbins tells this war story where Jack talks about how he was a feminist before anyone else was. When they were in the War, they found a female spy—I don’t remember if she was Italian or French— who had been working with the Germans, and all the other guys just wanted to kill her and be done with her. And he said, “Nah, you can’t kill the dame. It’s not right to kill the dames.” (laughter) And that was Jack’s definition of feminism. (laughter) It’s better when a real, honest-to-God feminist like Trina tells it. (laughter) 7 SIMON: This is from his last war series, which he did in the mid-Seventies, Our Fighting Forces, and this is near the end of Jack’s contract at DC. The Fourth World books had already been canceled, and they were putting him here, and they were putting him there, and he was really kind of working down the clock on his contract. They gave him this war book and this group of characters that just were random DC war characters. Captain Storm was a PT boat captain, and Johnny Cloud was an aviator, and Gunner and Sarge were infantrymen. They had nothing to do with each other, and they put them into this one group called the Losers. I don’t know why, it made no sense.

They said, “Take these characters, Jack, and do something.” And he took these nothing characters and put them together and used it as a vehicle to tell his own war stories. So it’s really funny, because the protagonists are like ciphers, but Jack used the construct to tell lots of personal stories about his war.

SHERMAN: Oh, that’s a beauty. (laughter) 8 SIMON: By the way, Simon and Kirby also created romance comics. After the war, after the super-heroes wound down, they became a massive hit, selling millions of copies. Nobody had done a romance book before. And they did them amazingly.

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SHERMAN: When they came back from the war, comics were big, and he and Joe decided to go off on their own and start their own company. They would have other 15

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#2: 1972 photo of Jack penciling page 8 from Kamandi #5, the first appearance of Flower.

Photo by David Folkman.

#3: Stuntman #2 (June 1946). #4: Boys’ Ranch #3 (Feb. 1951). #5: Kirby returns home from WWII in 1945. #6: Foxhole #2 (Dec. 1954). #7: Our Fighting Forces #154 (April 1975). #8: In Love #1 (Sept.

1954).

people publish the books, but they were in charge of the editorial and the art and everything. They saw that there was a market for romance comics, so they were the first ones to do it. And they did, they hit big. Jack said he and Joe both thought they were going to be millionaires. They thought there was no end to this, and, unfortunately, as soon as it hit, everybody else started copying it, so the market was just flooded with these magazines.

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SIMON: Pretty soon there were over one hundred romance titles on the stands. Simon and Kirby produced two or three, and they hired people to fill out the books, but all of a sudden there was—because people followed the market, and as soon as they see something sells, boom, there’s a hundred of them.

When Mad Magazine started as a comic book, nobody had a comic book like that, and within two months, there were fifteen different ones on the stands. That’s sort of how the market went. They would kill every trend that would come along—for example, Westerns. 9 BADGER: This is sort of an early Sixties, late Fifties...?

SIMON: Yeah, probably 1960.

10 #9: Rawhide Kid #32 (Feb. 1963). #10: Captain America #107 (Nov. 1968). #11: Captain America #108 (Dec. 1968). #12: Tales of Suspense #85 (Jan. 1967). #13: Thor #155 (Aug. 1968). #14: Thor #155 (Aug. 1968) again. #15: Thor #155 (Aug. 1968) cover. #16: Thor #155 (Aug. 1968) detail. #17: Thor #144 (Sept.

1967) unused cover. #18: Fantastic Four #82 (Jan. 1969). #19: Fantastic Four #82 (Jan. 1969) splash page. #20: Fantastic Four #94 (Jan. 1970). #21: Fantastic Four #94 (Jan. 1970) detail. #22: Darkseid sketch (circa 1971).

BADGER: Jack was sort of cranking out pages at this point, where he wasn’t worrying about the storytelling very much and was sort of—Jim Shooter calls this “full figures in action,” where the greatest thing Jack ever did is give Shooter a Cap book at one point that he used as a tutorial. Jim Shooter was the editor at Marvel through the Eighties, and he would walk people through his storytelling and making sure you saw how Jack established scenes, pace things, didn’t just jump around and do it. It was the fundamentals for storytelling for my generation—sort of the [Mike] Mignolas, all the people who worked best with Shooter.

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SHERMAN: This was—Jack and Joe Simon came up with [Captain America] in 1941 for, at the time, Timely Comics, and this was a big seller. 10 SIMON: It’s interesting. Let me just run it up to the Marvel Age. Gosh, Jack worked for just about every publisher. After the Comics Code came in, comic books as an industry just about collapsed, and the company that was Timely/Marvel/Atlas was down to printing eight books a month. They were about to close up the thing, and Jack Kirby came in and said, “Let me try and build up the business again. I’ll give you some books that’ll sell.” He created the Fantastic Four, and he brought back Captain America after the Fifties—Marvel tried to bring him back in the Fifties without him, and it didn’t make it. Jack brought him back, and along with the Avengers, and—this is kind of out of sequence, but he came back and made Captain America a hit all over again.

11 SHERMAN: But this was Jack’s forte—nobody else was doing covers like this.

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SIMON: They’re still not. I can’t even tell what’s going on on new comic covers.

BADGER: Most of them are just pictures of guys standing there looking tough. And Jack, yeah, he’s done guys standing there looking tough, but he always picked action to show, and he was just constantly putting action right into your face. 12-14 These are from the originals. These aren’t the comics. The color ones are from the actual comics, and eventually, in the end, you’ll see some color and some ones from the comics, and you’ll see why. Jack definitely was working for color and working with really big shapes and not worrying about the fine, detailed drawing.

SIMON: At this point, in the early Marvel days, he was trying to establish an entire line. He was pretty much drawing the whole line, where he would draw as many books as he could on his own, and layout books for other artists to do so they could do more and more books, and he could influence the entire line. He was doing three or four pages a day, and at one point they needed a Captain America issue because something had fallen out, and he [did] a twenty-page story over the weekend, and it [looked] just as good as anything else he ever drew.

SHERMAN: At the time he was living in Long Island. They had a house there, and in the basement was his studio. No windows, just the drawing table, radio, television 16

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set, all of his science-fiction pulps that he loved, paperbacks, and he would just go down there usually around noon, 1:00, and start working until his kids came home around 3:00 or 4:00. He’d take a break, have dinner, and then he’d usually go back to work from 8:00 in the evening to about 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, and then go to bed.

Once a week he would go in to New York City with his pages and drop them off at Marvel, see what’s going on, then head back out to Long Island, and that’s where he would be for the rest of the week, just drawing his books.

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BADGER: So to pick at poor Jim Shooter some more, Jim used that Cap comic, and he was always emphasizing that you could know what was in the foreground, and Jack would never show anything at the foreground. As you can see on these, especially the covers, Jack 15 cropped stuff. Part of what makes his stuff work so well is he puts you as the reader—you’re about two inches away from that hammer, so you’re right over Thor’s shoulder, maybe standing next to him, looking at the bad guy, right? And that’s something almost no other artist does these days. You can look through comics and you won’t find shots like this. It’s something that’s dropped off. It’s just too hard to design your panels so that the reader’s involved within the panels as you go. And it’s part of what makes Jack’s work really dynamically exciting as a reader to be involved with.

That’s a Thor page, with Ego the Living Planet. 16

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SIMON: Which some say he patterned after Stan Lee, and if you look deep into the face, you might... (laughter) Yes! Yes! Look at that face! (laughter) 17 Sorry, this is an unused Thor cover. Look at that city. Look at that whole scene. One of the reasons they probably rejected it is that there was no place for them to put their hype all over it. Like, “Wow, gang, wait’ll you see what happens in this issue!” It’s almost too much to take in in one shot, especially if you laid a logo and junk all over it.

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18 BADGER: This is a Fantastic Four page, towards the end. This is just

an example of Jack using pattern to make—I mean, he’s not drawing realistic armor here. If you look at the movies and they have to make one of Jack’s characters, they always blow it because they’ve got to make it actually exist in the real world. Jack’s just making big leaps.

He’s just patterning the work forever.

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SIMON: It’s really amazing when you think—he broke down the stories as he drew them and explained in the margins, when he sent the penciled pages over, what’s going on in each panel. Most of the time they didn’t even know at the office what was going on until he sent the pages in. And then they would be dialogued by Stan Lee or whoever was assigned to the issue at the time. But he was doing a book a week, twenty pages a week, four different books, an assortment of covers. And he would draw, on his off hours, for his own amusement.

The work ethic and the amazing productivity, when you think about it, it’s absolutely stunning. 19-21 BADGER: At this point it’s sort of the end of the run of Fantastic Four, and Marvel’s sold to Cadence, and Jack goes off to DC, signs a five-year contract, and he moved from New York after he signed the contract?

SHERMAN: No, no, before. This is the time he moved to California, mostly because his wife Roz and his youngest daughter Lisa had health problems, so the doctor said, “You know, you need to get out of New York. It’s too cold. Maybe you should go.” And then he came to California because he had relatives in Orange County, so that’s why— otherwise, he could have gone to Florida, he could have gone to Arizona. But he went out to Orange County. He stayed there for a little bit in a townhouse, and then they moved to Thousand Oaks, and that’s where he was until he passed away.

22 BADGER: So everybody knows who this is, right? This is Darkseid, 17

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the main villain of the New Gods.

SHERMAN: I should say, when Jack went to DC, he really wanted to push comics to the next level. He felt that the 32-page, 12 cents, I think at the time, was just not making it. He really wanted to go for, God forbid, one dollar comics. Because when Jack started in the business, comic books were much bigger than the 6" x 9".

They were actually magazines, 64 pages, and they were, what, about 12" x 9"?

SIMON: Yeah, there was a good half- to three-quarter-inch margin on either side. They were more like a magazine.

23 #23: New Gods #1 (Feb. 1971). #24: Jimmy Olsen #133 (Oct. ’70). #25: New Gods #7 (Feb. ’72).

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SHERMAN: Rather than little, tiny comic books. So Jack really wanted—and he had also seen a lot of the European hardcovers that were coming to the US at the time; because of the comic-cons and things, people were bringing them over. So he saw that and said, “You know, this is really the direction we should be going. We should be putting these books on better paper, better color. They should—.”

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SIMON: If you’re familiar with Tintin and Lucky Luke and Moebius and Lieutenant 28 Blueberry, he saw those and went, “Why aren’t we doing this, you know? They were so popular in Europe, it has to work here.”

23 SHERMAN: So that’s why

#26: New Gods #7 (Feb. 1972). #27: Forever People #8 (April ’72). #28: Mister Miracle #11 (Nov. ’72).

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when he did the New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle, and Jimmy Olsen, he wanted to tie them all in so basically he was doing a novel, so that at some point you could publish it all in one big book—which, to the people running DC at the time, just blew their minds. They couldn’t understand, why would you do that? We’re in the business of selling 12-cent comic books every month on a newsstand. What do you want us to do?

24 SIMON: This is from when he went to DC, he started work on Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen comics, which was the squarest comic around. Jack took it on because nobody else was working on it at the time, and he didn’t want to take work away from anybody. And he brought back the Newsboy Legion, a kid group of his from the early 1940s, and these were the sons of the original group working with Jimmy Olsen. And God knows [why], but this is called the Whiz Wagon.

This was the car they would travel around in. What lunatic would design a car like that, that 30 he would have to draw over and over and over again in the adventure? (laughter) He designs this, it’s the coolest thing. Who would draw anything that they would have to do five times an issue? He did. What a mind-blower. I mean, it’s just—this is like nothing that DC was expecting.

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SHERMAN: And, for a guy who drew this stuff, Jack couldn’t drive a car. The few times he did, he would just be on another planet.

He’d be daydreaming. One time he went over the curb, another time I think he hit a mailbox, and finally his wife said, “You’re not driving anymore. I’ll drive you.” (laughter) And that was it for his driving.

BADGER: How did he get to lunch?

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SHERMAN: Roz would drive him.

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25-26 BADGER: Yeah, this is New Gods. This is the best fight scene in comics, ever. Just in terms of pacing and rhythm, there only ends up being a couple of punches in it, although when you get that top panel, you’re like, well, okay, that’s going to destroy the whole world in one punch. It’s Jack not worrying about drawing the figures, but giving you those motion lines to create energy—one of the things Jack does better than anybody else.

27 SIMON: Oh, wait, stop, because this is funny. This is Darkseid fighting the so-called heroes of this book, the Forever People, a group of teenage super-heroes. And just by his force of will, he starts talking to them like a General talking to his troops, and he’s talking to one of the characters, Big Bear, in the middle, and he tweaks his nose just to show that he can, how powerful he is.

Then he disappears and just leaves them standing in the dust. I just love the casual way he treats the hero. Look at that. I mean, he’s intimidating, but then he goes, [twisty noise].

BADGER: Yeah, he pulls off the tweaking. That’s another thing; other artists would try tweaking the guy’s nose and they’d go, “Oh no, that’s going to be impossible to draw.” Jack pulls it off, and it just works perfectly.

This is Mister Miracle. 28 SIMON: Look at that angle. I mean, look at where you must be in that scene to be able to take that scene… unbelievable.

29 This was a throwaway three-page filler in the back of a book, and this character is one of the New Gods— never seen again. He did a bunch of these. He was so prolific with ideas that he would do these three-page bursts. And you said, “What a concept! Look at this guy. Look at this force!” Never saw him again. Jack probably forgot about him the minute he finished drawing it.

BADGER: I still think that’s the best horse in all comics.

It has no relation to any real anatomy on a horse at all. (laughter) I dearly love Jack’s work, but he’s no longer worrying about what anatomy is by this point. I mean, it’s all just about drawing the direction and the force of the energy and the shapes. The basic shapes are roughed in as three-dimensional volumes, and then he fills out how to make the energy flow from form to form.

30 This we move from the New Gods to the Demon.

DC, being DC, ended up canceling all of the Fourth World stuff.

SIMON: Except for Mister Miracle. Mister Miracle went on for another nine issues.

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BADGER: So they said, “Well, you’ve got a contract, so come up with some new stuff,” instead of relaunching, rebirthing the characters. So

Jack did the Demon, Kamandi, and OMAC. This is 31 Witchboy, one more concept that they’ve relaunched and rebirthed as some other stuff.

32 SIMON: And these were totally different concepts than the Fourth World. The Demon was the world of magic and sorcery and the paranormal, and Kamandi was kind of a take on Planet of the Apes, and OMAC was the world of the future, his take on what would happen in the world ahead. It’s just amazing. These concepts were insane. He could come up with one after another.

BADGER: And then he could blow things up. (laughter) I think this is actually from 2001, so this is Jack back at Marvel. 33 34 This is Kamandi. The two-page spread, he’s sort of the master of doing that. The weird thing about Jack is, all this blackness comes directly out of Milton Caniff, and this sort of being a kid, looking at Caniff and Roy Crane.

#29: New Gods #7 (Feb. 1972). #30: Demon #14 (Nov. ’73). #31: Demon #7 (March ’73). #32: OMAC #8 (Nov. ’75). #33: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1976).

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#34: Kamandi #8 (Aug. 1973).

SIMON: Right, Terry and the Pirates and Wash Tubbs.

BADGER: It gave him a way to draw things and 19

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#35: In The Days Of The Mob #2 (1971). #36: Early 1970s. #37: Circa 1966. #39: Spirit World #1 (1971). #40: Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966). #41: Date unknown. #42: Fantastic Four #62 (May 1967). #43: Jimmy Olsen #134 (Dec. 1970). #44: Captain America #211 (July 1977).

turn them into these block-like shapes that he then turned into patterns. So DC tried doing some 81⁄2" x 11" newsstand magazines.

This was In The Days of the Mob. 35

and said they looked like toilet paper. (laughter) They hardly got any distribution, and so, even before the second issues came out, they just canceled it, and said, “Nah, we’ll stick to comic books.”

SHERMAN: The interesting thing about those books is, there were two, In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World, and both of these magazines—In the Days of the Mob came out before The Godfather, and Spirit World came out before The Exorcist. So had DC not canceled them after the first issue, they would have really hit the right market. But they were just not really in the business of distributing magazines.

SIMON: Oh, you can talk to this. 36

SIMON: Yeah, DC just had no confidence in these magazines. They were barely distributed.

SHERMAN: There were also a lot of political things going on at DC at the time. One of their consultants was William Gaines, who had published EC Comics and Mad Magazine, and he still held a grudge against Simon and Kirby and everybody else in the comics industry who had gone against him and started the Comics Code Authority, which basically killed his comics line.

So he was not about to be of any help 37 for Jack. When DC said, “Well, let’s do magazines,” Gaines was kind of like, “Enh, I don’t think so.”

SIMON: It would be competition for Mad Magazine on the stands, as well.

SHERMAN: Right. Plus, Jack saw these as being color magazines on slick paper, selling for a dollar at the time, which you could get. When DC published it, they published it on the worst paper they could find, in blue ink. Jack saw the printed copies

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SHERMAN: This is Jack at home coloring in just something he did for fun for himself. The reason he’s shirtless is because right outside of his studio door in Thousand Oaks was his swimming pool. So just for exercise, he would jump in the swimming pool, swim a few laps, dry off, and then go back to work at the board.

BADGER: The amazing thing to me is that Jack as an artist is not derivative of anybody. I mean, he’s doing science-fiction stuff that’s all drawn together and smashed up into these shapes, and there’s some sense of him looking at the real world and thinking about it, and then he sort of transforms all this stuff into his patterns and his shapes, and uses it to build his worlds with.

37 This is a drawing he did for Don Heck, who was an inker and a penciler, another artist. Heck had inked a couple of drawings of Jack’s for some proposal or something, and this was done as a thank you present.

It’s currently owned by Andrei Molotiu, who’s an art scholar and a comics artist who does abstract comics. He’s compared it to, on one hand—on the left, is Pablo Picasso, whom you may have heard of. 38 SIMON: What comic did he draw? (laughter) BADGER: And on the right is Piranesi, who did

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this 18th century etching. He was an architect who did a lot of drawings of prisons and just making things up. So you look at those and go, “Oh, those are amazing, but those don’t look like Jack Kirby.”

And then you look at that and you go, “Whoaaaa! When did Jack see that stuff?” At that point in time, Life magazine was printing a lot of art pieces, so you could see abstract expressionism, you could see cubism and the like. Jack was taking those magazines and doing what with them, boys?

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SHERMAN: [Martin] Goodman also published regular magazines, and Jack would get them all, and then he’d cut them up and put collages together. This was from Spirit World #1, and he would cut these up and, instead of drawing, see what he could do just using images and photographs. By the way, the back of that woman’s head is my mother’s, and she’s driving our family car at the time. I took that picture and gave it to Jack, and he cut it out. 39 40 And this was from Fantastic Four. Basically, he would just take things, cut them out, glue them down, glue them over each other, cut a piece out here, cut a piece out there— like a jigsaw puzzle, and then overlay a drawing.

Basically 39 what you’re looking at is maybe a precursor to computer images, because if Jack had a computer at the time, he probably could have done this on a computer.

entertainment and relaxation at the end of the day: “After drawing four comic book pages, I’m going to sit down and watch some TV and I’m going to cut some stuff up and put it down and move it around.” (laughter) The amount of energy that was there is just astonishing.

43 This is from one of the Jimmy Olsens. That’s the Whiz Wagon in the middle. We’re going to go quickly through this. We’re almost out of time. We’re going to give you five minutes for questions. Tell the story about the magazines.

SIMON: Life magazine was canceled in 1972, which was one of Jack’s—a lot of people don’t remember Life magazine, but it was a bedsheet-sized magazine, that’s what we used to call it. It had a circulation of millions. It was a picture magazine. Before color TV, people wanted to see the world in color, and they covered 43 news and art and everything in the world. And when it was canceled, Jack said, “Oh, my God! What am I gonna do? I don’t have Life magazine anymore!” My parents subscribed, and we had ten or fifteen years of it stuck in a storage room that we would just throw back there. When I heard that, we just loaded them up in the car and took them over to Jack’s so he’d have stuff to cut up for the rest of his life. (laughter) And he was very happy.

41 SIMON: Right. But it’s just cutup magazines with paste, and a drawing he would do on another page, and they would combine them. His collages were in color.

They would screen them for blackand-white because they couldn’t do four-color printing, for the most part. And then they’d lay comic book color over it, so most of the time they printed like a mushy mess.

42 BADGER: This is the mushy mess. This is what they did for a Fantastic Four collage, the mushy mess. And you can see what we lost out on.

But at the booth we’ve got a print from one that he was just doing as entertainment. This 41 was his

44-46 BADGER: This is a late Marvel work. He went back to Marvel after DC and he wasn’t well accepted, and all of the people who thought they knew what comics were thought this guy didn’t know anything about doing comics, and were bad-mouthing him in the office. He was out in Los Angeles, and it wasn’t a very happy time, although some amazing work, obviously, was done.

And then, finally, comics in America started catching up with

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Europe, and Pacific and a few other people started publishing mainstream artists doing their own work. 47 This is from Silver Star that Steve was talking about writing, and it’s basically the Angel of Death going in to wipe out a city, and that’s the visuals for it. It’s an amazing William Blake-level image.

SIMON: For his late work, I think it’s an incredibly powerful image. Do we have a couple questions for the end, folks?

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AUDIENCE MEMBER: I love Jack’s Seventies stuff that you guys were talking about, when he worked for DC. I guess most of you may know this already, but I don’t know. You were alluding to how Stan Lee didn’t really create, like, the Hulk, Spider-Man, and stuff like that. Can you explain to some of us what’s obvious to a lot of other people?

#45: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1976). #46: Devil Dinosaur #1 (Apr. ’78). #47: Silver Star #6 (Jan. ’84). #48: Hunger Dogs (1985).

SHERMAN: Well, I think what a disservice that Stan did to Jack was in the credits: Listing him as penciler, because it just made it seem like, “Oh, this guy just sat there and we gave him stuff, he penciled it,” where his entire career, Jack was a writer and penciler. I mean, that’s what a cartoonist is. They write and they draw. And so Jack would sit home and come up with these concepts and bring them into the office and show them to them, and then Stan would be like, “Oh, okay, okay.” And Jack would write in the margins what the story was, and a little bit of dialogue. So really all you had to do was just fill it in.

48 I think what Stan did is he sort of gave the characters voices, which Jack didn’t have time to do.

And it was also a time thing, because Jack was also creating all these books and turning them out, and he just didn’t have time to write dialogue, so he would just have to quickly indicate, “Here’s what’s going on, here’s what’s gonna happen,” and leave it at that.

BADGER: And with that, we’ve gotta wrap it up.

If you want to ask more questions, if you want to see the catalog for the exhibit, which many of these images were taken from, we’re in Artists Alley.

Thank you. (applause) ★

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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.

Annual Memberships with one of these posters: $40*

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If we say so ourselves, our Kirby Digital Archive is amazing, and allows us to help publishers and scholars around the world. We'd like to take this moment to thank those who have recently helped us build it: Bechara Maalouf, Tod Seisser, John Hom, Lisa Kirby, Steve Robertson, Albert Moy, Steve Donnelly, Hans Kosenkranius, Metropolis Collectibles, Mike Burkey, Alex Jay, Gordon Bartik, IDW, and those who wish to remain anonymous!

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*

And, of course, thank you to all those who have helped over the last 11 years!

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

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

Marvel—14” x 23”

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Galactic Head— 18” x 20” color

Incan Visitation—24” x 18” color

An ongoing examination of Kirby’s art and compositional skills

Life, Death & Identity mong other things, Jack Kirby was fascinated with the notion of personal identity and its relationship to life and death. Clearly, when it came to the notion of the super-hero, identity was crucial. What was a hero? What qualities constituted heroism? What was worth living for?

Dying for? Kirby’s talent was holistic. He crafted character with image in the story in one seamless process. His characters embodied archetypes that were clear in design and motive and served the story’s structure as integral parts. Kirby often focused on issues related to free will and in particular the loss of volition. There was also the distinct feeling that death, the total loss of identity and free will, was a distinct possibility in his storylines.

One of the most powerful Kirby stories dealing with identity was that in Fantastic Four #8. At this point, the Thing is still struggling with his dual identity as a Man/Monster.

On several occasions, he has reverted back to his human form, but only for brief minutes after which he returns to Thing-dom.

Obviously, few people could stay sane under such circumstances. Ben Grimm manages to maintain some sort of equilibrium and fairly consistently functions as a team member.

(A good analogy might be to imagine Jack Kirby being in the front lines in France in 1944, dealing with the fact that he, like any soldier must learn to become a killer, but also function as an efficient member of a battalion.)

In this Kirby/Lee story, the Thing meets Alicia, a blind woman who will become his girlfriend for the foreseeable future. She is the step-daughter of the Puppet Master, a villain who manipulates people using radioactive clay models, and she is also a sculptor with great sensitivity. Alicia is shown here impersonating Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, who lies unconscious on the couch. The Puppet Master has taken over Ben Grimm’s consciousness and will use him to infiltrate the FF’s headquarters with Alicia pretending to be the Invisible Girl. Alicia is literally the puppet of her father, who manipulates her in the service of his plan. She seems to have no will of her own until she has separated from her father.

The Puppet Master’s plan fails, when Mr. Fantastic uses a potion to momentarily turn the Thing back to human form. As Ben

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Grimm no longer resembles his puppet, he regains his free will. This addresses the notion that it is easier to control another’s nature when they are closer to a state of brutality.

Ben then formally meets Alicia and a bond instantly forms between them. At first she recognizes his voice, but his body has obviously changed.

Alicia’s blindness makes her pure.

She is able to see the goodness in the heart of the Thing. Kirby uses Alicia’s blindness and her resemblance to the Invisible Girl, as well as utilizing Ben

Grimm and his inhuman embodiment as the Thing, to focus on issues of identity and the perception of reality. When the Thing’s will is usurped by the Puppet Master, he only regains his volition when he is turned back into Ben Grimm, his true self. Or is it? Alicia (shown here again impersonating Sue Storm) is initially drawn to him as the Thing, and is at first unable to recognize him in human form. Does she love the Thing, or Grimm, the man within?

Now, this is a significant story for several reasons other than the various plot twists. There has clearly been a good deal of ink spent to discuss just how much plotting Stan Lee did for Kirby’s Marvel output, an especially controversial topic when covering the early days when few Kirby notes are seen on the original art pages. There exists a plot breakdown by Stan Lee for this particular story that is purported to be the closest thing to a full script submitted by Lee as writer, to Kirby as artist/interpreter.

I’ll use the words of Kirby scholar Mike Hill to colorfully explain how suddenly, the claim that this synopsis was clear evidence of Lee regularly initiating storylines became somewhat questionable: “In Pure Images #2, Greg Theakston presented a transcription of the same synopsis, conspicuously missing the last page. He reserved comment while devoting a page of the article to comparing the last four panels of “Voodoo on Tenth Avenue” in Black Magic #4 (1951) to the nearly identical last three panels of Fantastic Four #8 (1962). Oops, Lee chose the wrong story to synopsize. Although it would be amusing to see how he would have outlined the plot on that “missing” last page, it’s safe to say he had no prior input into a story whose plot Kirby reused from an eleven-year-old story in his own repertoire.”

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In the Black Magic story, Mrs. Dolman uses the magic she learned from Alvarez to make a doll in order to kill her husband.

Her spouse’s doctor discovers her administering the fatal pin thrust to the doll. In the scuffle between the two, the doll falls to the floor and Mrs. Dolman goes out the window to her death. The final panels of the respective stories both show a zoom-in shot of a broken puppet or doll at someone’s feet.

Again, in both tales, Kirby is commenting on the nature of identity. He is also commenting on the practically selfinflicted death of an individual driven by their own toxic ambitions. However, in the case of the Fantastic Four story, the story is also about resurrection. Alicia has arrived to unite the two halves of Ben Grimm’s divided soul, and from that moment forward, he will regain his humanity even while remaining the Thing. With Alicia’s love, Ben Grimm’s anger and resentment gradually softens into some sort of resignation to his condition. With the acceptance of the life he had to face, Ben would begin to develop a sense of selfrespect and even was able to rediscover his gargantuan sense of humor. Originally introduced as a sullen and surly character, the Thing would gradually morph into the tough guy with a soft heart. At that point the Fantastic Four truly became a family. ★

In the Black Magic story discussed there, Kirby tells the story of Mrs. Dolman, who learns the secret of Voodoo Doll witchcraft from a “Brujo” named Alvarez.

Note Kirby’s consistent use of hands of different sizes holding dolls in juxtaposition with various figure poses and positions in the sequence of panels on page three of this story. This technique visually elucidates an extremely effective graphic subtext about manipulation.

As noted, what is most striking is the similarity in comparing the final pages of these two stories, separated by more than ten years. In the final page of the FF story, the Puppet Master is holding a puppet of himself as monarch of the world, and gloating over his power. Outraged, Alicia tries to wrest the doll from his grasp. In a wonderful sequence of nine panels, we see the doll knocked from the Puppet Master’s hand, and as he tries to retrieve it, he trips over Alicia’s outstretched wrist and crashes through a window to fall seemingly to his death.

Apparently an accident, the implication is that the fallen puppet is responsible for the villain’s death.

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ANTI-?

Love of Life

Spirited

(below) Highfather condones the union of Scott and Barda, from Mister Miracle #18 (Feb. 1974).

(bottom) Jack’s rendition of Jacob & The Angel, with color by Randy Sargent. (next page) Pencils from the Mister Miracle #9 story “Himon” (July 1972).

irby’s Fourth World series of books (New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle, and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen) has been critically acclaimed because of its conceptual and intellectual sophistication and universal themes presented in a highly imaginative and unique context. It is considered by many to be the creative apex of Jack Kirby’s career. Each book in the series represents a universal symbol or archetype within the human psyche. They speak to us each as individuals on an unconscious level.

New Gods, Kirby’s ultimate fusion of science-fiction and mythological themes, symbolizes the universal and eternal struggle within all of us between the positive and negative forces in our own nature.

New Genesis and Apokolips, Highfather and Darkseid, and most significantly, the battles constantly raging within Orion himself, are all reflections of our own internal struggles. The Forever People, Kirby’s New Age book, symbolizes the individual’s yearning for the ideals of peace and community, aspirations of the younger generation in a time of war. Mister Miracle symbolizes the individual’s quest for freedom.

The entire Fourth World series represents the archetypal journey of self-discovery, self- realization and knowledge in the classic tradition of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. They all confront the most fundamental questions: Who am I? What is my nature? Where is my origin? What is my purpose? They chronicle the different aspects of the individual’s evolution as a spiritual being.

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Scientists, Mystics, The Metaphysical Nature Of Power And Spiritual Concepts In Kirby’s Fourth World Epic,

by John Misselhorn

The Merging Of Physical And Spiritual Realms Perhaps the most fascinating and intriguing element in the Fourth World mythos is that Kirby postulated a touching or a merging of the physical and spiritual reality, and a meeting of scientific and religious ideals through both mystical and technological means.

Science and faith, technology and religion, are concepts and disciplines that may seem mutually exclusive in our presently limited consciousness and comprehension of reality. Increasingly the advances of theoretical and experimental physics are rapidly approaching religious and spiritual precepts traditionally based on faith alone.

Kirby dealt with these apparently irreconcilable ideas over 35 years ago in his Fourth World Epic. For him they were not antithetical, rather they were merely aspects of each other; one an extension and creation of the other. They were related and interconnected, part of the same unity of being. Kirby envisioned an interconnectedness between the physical universe represented

by New Genesis, Apokolips and Earth (the two former planets being in a different physical dimension from Earth, accessible only through an inter-dimensional door called the “Boom Tube,” a kind of technological worm hole) and the eternal, spiritual realm, the fountainhead of all creation and life sustaining energy, which he called “The Source.”

Kirby conceived of The Source as residing somewhere beyond the limited bounds of space-time, elements which are conceptions of a purely physical universe, but perhaps also encompassing and embracing the physical plane. The assumption underlying this writer’s entire interpretation of Kirby’s concept is that The Source is non-physical in essence, but is also the origin of all things physical. The essence of all living physical beings returns to The Source upon the death of its physical form, implying that each individual essence is itself immortal and eternal like The Source. The physical wall of The Source, located on the planet of New Genesis, is the communicative portal, the point of contact and fusion between two planes of existence which are part of one reality.

Highfather The Mystic Highfather possesses a direct mystical connection with The Source, symbolized by his Wonder Staff, previously a war staff—an instrument of death, now an instrument of peace, revelation and inspiration to his people. There is no suggestion of technology; his is a pure mystical relationship. Highfather is the spiritual master, the great teacher. Through The Source, he guides his followers. The Source speaks only through him. Highfather himself is but an instrument; he allows 26

the wisdom and guidance of The Source to flow through him to his people. Thus, it is really The Source which guides, instructs, teaches and protects. The power and right of choice, however, remains with each individual; that is the “Life Equation.”

Highfather, previously Izaya the Inheritor, a warrior, represents the man who had attained his spiritual enlightenment and intimate connection with the divine through rigorous trials and experience.

This connection is his inheritance. New Gods #7 chronicles his journey as he discovers his purpose. Highfather is also the leader of New Genesis, but his authority is spiritual in nature and derives from his intimate connection with The Source. Highfather doesn’t exercise power over others in a crude political sense. He is not a ruler; he is a teacher, implying that all can attain his level of enlightenment. The criteria for legitimate authority is spiritual development; there is a spiritual foundation of authority. There is also the metaphysical nature of authority because of Highfather’s association with the origin of reality: The Source.

itual enlightenment.

This is what Himon attempts to teach his followers secretly on Apokolips. But The Source itself remains a great mystery; Himon speaks of “the riddle that powers the Mother Box.” Himon teaches young revolutionaries on Apokolips how to build a Mother Box so that they can contact The Source and learn about the concept of freedom, but as he emphasizes, the choice is always theirs. They must consciously choose freedom. Scott Free has to choose freedom from Darkseid in order to learn about The Source and Mother Box, and he must find the inner courage to choose to escape from Apokolips.

Darkseid denies his subjects the knowledge of how to construct a Mother Box. He keeps them in a state of perpetual ignorance and suppresses even the opportunity to dream of freedom. Even if they do manage to build a Mother Box, it is just a dead, hollow shell because their low consciousness and inability to conceptualize freedom prevents them from contacting The Source. It is Himon’s mission to raise the consciousness of the few inhabitants of Apokolips

The Scientists: Himon, Metron And Esak Himon, the Apokolips revolutionary, as related in Mister Miracle #9, is the discoverer and inventor of the Mother Box, the living computer which facilitates a connection between living creatures and The Source. Himon is also the moral man, the scientist with a conscience who fights for social justice and change. He perceives himself as “a visionary” and “a dreamer.”

Himon is also the great technician; Highfather is the spiritual master and understands the spiritual truth of The Source. Himon “linked the Mother Box to The Source, discovered the X- Element and pioneered the Boom Tube.” Himon represents the merger, the fusion of science and technology with the spiritual realm, the divine. He discovers a means of communicating with the divine, spiritual realm of The Source through technology. The point of connection between physical and nonphysical is facilitated technologically by the Mother Box. Furthermore, The Source being the fountainhead of all creation, all life and all energy is itself a living essence, a living universe unto itself.

In short, “The Source lives.” It is The Source which bestows upon the Mother Box, a machine, its quality of being alive.

The energy and essence of The Source pervades the Mother Box and reaches out to living beings. An important function of the Mother Box is to bring the love, comfort and protection of The Source to all who use her as would a mother to her young. So the Mother Box is not mere technology alone.

Because it is “powered by The Source,” one must want to contact The Source in order for the Mother Box to function. It is the mind and the spirit of the builder/user and their wish to connect with The Source which activates it. Thus the Mother Box only works for one who sincerely seeks spir27

who wish to learn of freedom and evolve spiritually. Darkseid denies all independent dreams, creativity and imagination, components necessary for spiritual progress. Darkseid fears all that he can’t control, so he fears freedom. As the main protagonists in this saga evolve spiritually, they move closer to understanding The Source, and the fundamental elements for initiating this development are the ideals of freedom, peace and love.

Metron is morally and spiritually an evolving character. Initially, at least, Metron represents intellectualism without moral or spiritual foundation or conscience. Indeed, perhaps Kirby believed this to be the curse of modern civilization. Metron’s moral ambivalence is seen in New Gods #7. He struck an evil bargain with Darkseid; in return for access to the X-Element by which he could build his inter-dimensional Mobius Chair for exploring the cosmos, he agreed to develop an inter-dimensional portal for Darkseid’s war effort against New Genesis in the “Great Clash” of the gods. But Metron is also Himon’s student.

It is apparently only through long association with Himon, who recognizes the implications of this technology, that Metron is consequently also able to come to this realization and evolve. Indeed, Metron’s all consuming obsession is to understand the secret of The Source.

Metron becomes an effective mentor and teacher to Scott Free during Scott’s brutal upbringing and education on Apokolips, counseling him to resist the mind controlling social conditioning and to avoid

the mind rotting drugs. Both Metron and Himon encouraged Scott Free to think independently, to recognize his inner yearning for freedom and find the courage to escape Apokolips in Mister Miracle #9.

Metron, however, was not as successful with young Esak.

In many ways this saga is about the declining search for truth and a warning as to what happens when technology alone is emphasized at the expense of any moral or spiritual foundation. Himon understood this, but Metron was only in the process of learning this during his tenure as Esak’s mentor. Metron left his young ward too soon. Young Esak’s education was incomplete when his disfiguring accident occurred. In his anger and resentment he turned his technological skills to the service of Darkseid. But ultimately all can attain spiritual connection with and redemption in The Source.

Orion asks The Source to heal Esak in Hunger Dogs.

Darkseid: The Metaphysics Of Power Darkseid is truly one of the most terrifying villains created in the annals of literature. In the creation of this character, Kirby departed somewhat from the Marvel conception of a villain in the 1960s: the sociopath who has turned against humanity because of some injustice perpetrated by society, causing a fundamentally flawed character to become a twisted, insane personality filled with rage, hatred and megalomania, and to choose evil actions as revenge and reparation.

Sometimes Marvel villains were ambiguous and sympathetic creatures, such as the pitifully tragic Moleman. Of course this is an oversimplification; not all Marvel villains had the same motivations. Darkseid has something in common with the irredeemably evil Red Skull. But the Skull is so psychologically unbalanced that one could never envision him as a ruler, unlike Darkseid who governs the planet of Apokolips. Kirby’s characterization of Darkseid is highly complex. One is tempted to compare him with Dr. Doom, the evil genius who also rules over his own kingdom and lusts for world domination. But one gets the distinct impression that Doom is unconsciously resentful that he may be inferior in intellect to Reed Richards, and he is certainly resentful of the lack of public recognition for his brilliance— all very human flaws. Furthermore, as we shall see, Doom’s megalomaniac ambitions pale in comparison with Darkseid’s horrific vision of the universe. One might also be tempted to compare Darkseid to Galactus. Both possess power on a cosmic or existential level. Galactus destroys and devours whole planets in order to feed on their life energy and sustain himself; Darkseid can erase any matter from existence itself with his Omega Effect. But Galactus is driven by instinct. Darkseid’s motivations cannot be defined in mere human terms; Darkseid is an entirely different creature.

While Dr. Doom demanded unquestioning obedience from his subjects to his authority, Darkseid sought no less than to control the very minds of all living creatures. While other villains sought to dominate by means of force, Darkseid desired to preempt and control the very human capacity and right of choice itself, a vital component in the idea of freedom. If the idea of choice no longer exists in the minds of living beings, force becomes irrelevant and unnecessary. Darkseid intended to accomplish his nefarious objectives through the discovery of the Anti- Life Equation, the power to control all independent thought and individual free will in the universe. The Equation itself or fragments of it apparently reside, either dormant or active, in the minds of specific living beings. An important element in the plot of the series centered on Darkseid’s efforts to discover the 28

Equation. If one cannot chose, one cannot evolve as a spiritual being. All inhabitants of the cosmos would remain in the same state of consciousness as Darkseid himself, or indeed lower. All would become a reflection of Darkseid except that he could direct them to his own will. He would deny them the very knowledge and experience of freedom and love. All living beings would become images in the mind of Darkseid.

The Anti-Life Equation would allow Darkseid to determine the evolution of all life in the universe; he could define reality itself. The concept of the Anti-Life Equation is first introduced in The Forever People #1 and defined and described fully in New Gods #1. Its implications are explored further in subsequent issues of The Forever People.

Kirby implies that the power of the Anti-Life Equation may even extend to control over the very laws of the universe when Darkseid roars that he “will shut down this universe to all life except the will of Darkseid” in Mister Miracle #9.

Darkseid seeks power at a metaphysical level. Kirby’s conception of power is metaphysical in nature because Highfather is leader of New Genesis by virtue of his connection to the origin of all reality, and Darkseid seeks to manipulate and control all reality.

Despite a plot convoluted by editorial interference, and a conclusion that may not wholly reflect Kirby’s intended finale, Kirby’s character development in the graphic novel Hunger Dogs is brilliant. In the Fourth World series, Darkseid was never able to harness the power of Anti-Life. In Hunger Dogs Darkseid abandons the quest for the Anti-Life Equation, but he condemns and ridicules the use of mere technology alone to enforce his will and attain his purpose of domination. Yet he turns his attention wholly to the destruction of New Genesis through technology. He unleashes Micro Mark, a cyber virus engineered by Esak, which produces genetically mutated monstrosities to ravage the surface of New Genesis. It is a small consolation. It was just a toy in the game of war.

Darkseid recognized the inadequacy of dominating and ruling by technological superiority alone, and understood the necessity of manipulating the minds and emotions of his subjects, reiterating the Machiavellian precept that fear is the most effective component in the ideology of the tyrant.

The struggles are all resolved in Hunger Dogs.

Himon becomes the true antagonist and perishes. It is a dirty battle of deadly technologies on a decaying planet.

Highfather, the positive force, is detached from the story, aloof and above the battle. He triumphs at the expense of the planet of New Genesis, but Supertown, the celestial city of the New Gods and their civilization is saved; a new planet will be found by Metron during his explorations. On Apokolips, devastated by the frag-

ments of the exploding New Genesis, Darkseid is left alive, alone and powerless amidst the ruins and ignorant rabble. Even defeated, evil always remains latent, ever ready to challenge us once more in our journey of self-discovery and spiritual evolution.

Throughout the Fourth World series the characterization of Darkseid is enigmatic. He exhibits concern for his son and sworn enemy, Orion, the warrior and champion of New Genesis. During the epic confrontation of Orion and Kalibak—Darkseid’s other son—in New Gods #11, Desaad, Darkseid’s twisted underling, artificially enhances Kalibak’s power at the expense of Orion. In order to protect his son, Darkseid erases Desaad from existence with the Omega Effect. Perhaps even Darkseid possesses the capacity and potential to feel love. It is the concept and significance of love in the Fourth World series that we next examine.

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(previous page) From New Gods #4 (Aug. 1971). (above) Cover pencils from Forever People #5 (Oct. 1971), as Sonny Sumo is the first to show the true power of the Anti-Life Equation. (next page) Like something out of a Simon & Kirby romance book, Scott and Barda finally acknowledge their true feelings for each other, in Mister Miracle #18 (Feb. 1974).

with his father, Highfather. The resolution of the series is the completion of this stage in his journey. It is quite interesting that Kirby advanced the introduction of the institution of marriage into the super-hero genre: first Reed Richards and Sue Storm in the Fantastic Four and then Scott Free and Barda in Mister Miracle.

Orion’s evolution is also complex and involves reconciling the divergent and antithetical aspects of his own psyche, derived ostensibly at least from the dualism of his origin and his life experiences.

Son of Darkseid, he was reared to value peace. Simultaneously he was the archetypal warrior, champion and protector of New Genesis.

Beyond being the official defender of noble ideals, he was consumed by his all-encompassing hatred of Darkseid and Apokolips even before he was aware of his origin and paternity. This hatred blinded him to everything in life except the destruction of his enemy. But his journey of love began with the wise counsels of Highfather who first bestowed the gift of love upon Orion, his enemy’s son. Highfather had accepted the ultimate sacrifice by relinquishing his own son in New Gods #7. It continued when Orion began to abandon his solitary warrior existence and accept the friendship of Lightray. But Orion is only able to finally reconcile his violent, negative side with the peaceful, positive aspect of his personality after he finds acceptance and love from Bekka, Himon’s daughter in Hunger Dogs. She loves him and accepts his whole being.

Hitherto, Kirby had concentrated on and portrayed the competing, conflicting attributes and particularly the violence of Orion’s character. Orion becomes an integrated, whole person when he is loved and in turn learns to give love, something he had been unable to feel or even conceptualize previously. Orion learns to love, and a new plateau in his evolution is reached. His quest to rescue his mother, who was imprisoned by Darkseid, represents his yearning for a whole family. Orion, the greatest warrior of the New Gods, needed the experience of female relationships to complete himself.

It is significant that Orion did not kill his father, Darkseid as he was rescuing his mother and Bekka from the devastated Apokolips.

Throughout the New Gods epic he had been madly obsessed with terminating Darkseid’s existence, but now he was only concerned with the safety of his mother and Bekka; he had changed because of love.

This is the beginning of Orion’s own spiritual mastership.

Where previously his evolution had been stifled by his own anger, hatred and violence, now all antagonistic elements are finally reconciled and submerged by the positive, uplifting ideal of love.

No one on Apokolips evolves spiritually because there is no love. It is a stagnant society, its inhabitants living in ignorance, the legacy of oppression.

Throughout the saga of the New Gods we witness monumental struggles. But the final message of the series is that one’s salvation is gained through understanding and integrating the meaning of love. ★

A Resolution In Love: Orion And Scott Free The voyage of Orion and Scott Free (Mister Miracle) is central to the Fourth World epic, and in it they evolve as beings and reach a higher plateau in their spiritual development as individuals. It is essentially a quest to find meaning in life. Indeed this meaning is found, through love. Scott Free is reared on the brutal world of Apokolips. After his escape, he lives as Mister Miracle in exile on Earth, constantly fleeing the minions of Darkseid who relentlessly pursue him. His flight from Apokolips had broken “The Pact,” an arrangement between Highfather and Darkseid to end the “Great Clash” by which they would exchange their sons in return for peace.

Darkseid’s son Orion was reared on the peace-loving planet of New Genesis and Highfather’s son Scott Free was reared on the war driven wasteland of Apokolips.

Scott Free’s escape allowed Darkseid to resume his dreams of conquest and slavery. The battleground would be Earth. Because freedom is a prerequisite for further evolution, Scott Free had to consciously choose to escape the slavery of Apokolips. It is also a prerequisite to cultivating love, which cannot exist freely in a world of suffocating regimentation. During his many struggles he finds Barda, a warrior of Apokolips. They met on Apokolips and were members of Darkseid’s military elite. Barda too finally flees that world to be reunited with Scott on Earth where they can discover their love. They would both eventually return briefly to Apokolips in order to confront their inner and outer demons. Finally they married in Mister Miracle #18, the final issue of the series. Scott along with Barda returned to the planet of his birth, New Genesis, to be reunited

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Gallery Unresolved endings and future starting points for Kirby, as chosen by John Morrow

You can sometimes learn as much about Jack’s thinking process by what he didn’t put on the page, as what he did. Here’s a look at some of the frustrating mysteries he left behind—often because he hadn’t gotten to the point of figuring them out yet himself.

Since Jack left plenty of opportunities for others to pick up where he left off, let’s explore some of the mysteries that remain from his own series, where he served as both writer and artist. I didn’t follow all the post-Kirby material, so if I’ve missed something important to continuity a future creator did, my apologies…

Magnar from Jimmy Olsen #147 [right] and Seagrin from New Gods #4 [above and below] were two fascinating throwaway characters.

Orion obviously knew Seagrin.

Wouldn’t you have loved to see Jack draw a “Tales of the New Gods” story dealing with him, so we could’ve learned his backstory?

Meanwhile, Magnar showed that not everyone on New Genesis was immune to arrogance, and had a personality completely unlike any previous New God.

We at least got two short stories each of Fastbak and Lonar. Imagine what other fully-formed characters Jack could’ve created off-the-cuff, had he gotten another year on the Fourth World...

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With this final page from Forever People #10 featuring both the departure of Deadman, and a plug for Jack’s new Demon series, how did it not occur to him to make Boston Brand part of Etrigan’s new book? He would’ve been a perfect fit, at least as a guest-star.

But that’s only one of the missing links from the Fourth World. How did the Forever People first meet? How did they first join together to make Infinity Man? What’s Lightray’s backstory, and could he and Mark Moonrider have been brothers? Did Lightray, Orion, and Metron grow up together, starting as kids? Was Metron even born on New Genesis? Who were Highfather/Izaya’s parents? The possibilities—and mysteries—are endless.

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According to the credits boxes, New Gods #11 was plotted by Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman. Forever People #9 had a “Synopsis prepared by” them, and “Research” was done by them for Forever People #11. Just what did that entail? I will making a point to solve this mystery in person this summer at Comic-Con, when I ask them both in person.

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Why did we never get to see that story of “The Mister Miracle To Be” (noted at the end of MM #9)?

After such a pivotal epic as “Himon”, you have to figure Jack originally intended #10 [right] to feature a followup story of what happened to Scott Free immediately after he escaped Apokolips for Earth, but before the events of Mister Miracle #1—perhaps told in flashback.

What did Thaddeus Brown do before he met Scott Free? How’d he meet Oberon?

Had his earlier career as escape artist somehow tied in to the greater Fourth World epic? And why did Kirby abruptly add Ted Brown, Thaddeus’ son, into the series in issue #10? Did Jack originally have him in mind as playing some pivotal role? He was said to have been killed in Korea is issue #1—surely Jack would’ve eventually done something with that plot thread, or else he wouldn’t have bothered to mention it.

Also, Scott left Apokolips empty-handed; where’d he get his literal bag of tricks in #1, and what other part of his “inheritance” (left by “parties unknown”, but undoubtedly Metron) was in it other than Aero Discs and a Mother Box? Come to think of it, what happened to that bag after the first two issues? What if it fell into the hands of someone else, like a villain? I’m sure Jack would’ve gotten around to telling those stories, sooner or later, if the series had lasted.

Instead, due to a likely DC mandate (Carmine Infantino is on record saying kids felt the epic was too confusing), Jack abruptly switched gears to a very bland, generic story, which only serves to get the main cast back from Apokolips once and for all, and which contains just a few references to the Fourth World (passing mentions of Apokolips, a Boom Tube, and Scott saying, “By Darkseid’s Demons!”). The magic was gone, one issue after perhaps the best he ever created.

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Then there’s “The Real Big Barda” (as mentioned at the end of Mister Miracle #14, above). With that title, you would assume Jack—still smarting from the cancellation of his magnum opus—would’ve been looking for any opportunity to continue telling that story, anywhere he could. So what better avenue than exploring Barda’s backstory on Apokolips, before she followed Scott to Earth in issue #4, in her own sort of “Himon” story?

Instead, without warning, we get Shilo Norman (?!) as the headliner in #15, with the “Real Big Barda” idea relegated to a minor Chapter 4 title heading, that is meaningless in the context of the story—he just threw it in, because he’d promised that title at the end of the previous issue. My suspicion is that DC told Jack ‘no’ when they saw that next issue blurb—that bringing back in Fourth World mythology would just be confusing to readers, so he had to scrap the idea. Then DC threw him a bone, and allowed it for #18, since it was the final issue anyway.

Interestingly, in the Hebrew Bible, Shiloh was a major site of pilgrimages for Israelite worshippers (for a time, it housed the Ark of the Covenant). As the last of the Fourth World books left standing, Mister Miracle was the final pilgrimage for fans of the series.

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Just how did Jack view the term “Fourth World”? Why were Kamandi and Demon originally labeled as part of the Fourth World by Jack, even as late as Demon #3’s cover, long after New Gods was cancelled? Kamandi #1 and #2 covers say “Fourth World” in pencil form (shown here). Would he have tied them into the New Gods epic eventually? The cover of Forever People #11 (below) and Mister Miracle #10 (done right after the cancellation of the other books) still have the “Fourth World” blurb. And Jack knew the Demon was coming at the end of Forever People #10 (although did he know at that point the Fourth World books were being cancelled?).

Are we overthinking it? Did Jack view it a different way? Perhaps this indicates that Jack thought of it as a more general, personal term, designating one of the different eras of his career, and this was simply signalling that he was reaching a new era for himself and his body of work. Like: Kirby’s First World = Golden Age/pre-war work, his Second World = 1950s work, his Third World = 1960s Marvel work, which leads to his own personal Fourth World of work at DC in 1970. (That would make his mid-1970s Marvel work his Fifth World, and his animation career his Sixth World...)

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Whatever the case, tying in the Fourth World series to Kamandi would’ve, sooner or later, caused the manifestation of an animal (obviously a snake) as Earth AD’s Black Racer—and that would’ve been a sight to behold. And as stated before, Deadman, with his Follower body activated

by Serifan’s cosmic cartridge, would’ve been a natural way to tie-in Fourth World to The Demon.

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Kamandi #29’s credits read, “From an idea suggested

by Steve Sherman,” showing that even his assistant was looking for ways to keep continuity with Jack’s previous work. It’s an inspired idea: Even if DC wanted to act like the Fourth World never happened, they couldn’t deny one key component of it: Superman. So bring him into Kamandi, or at least the mystery of what happened to him After Disaster. After his uniform appears at the end of Kamandi #29 [previous page], where did it end up? And how’d it get there to start with? You know, given a chance, Jack would’ve found a way to tie it in to Darkseid & Co. What happened to the runaway “animals” (humans) that ingest brainaltering Cortexin at the end of Kamandi #16? Did Rise of and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes ape it? Just what caused the “Great Disaster”? DC later retconned a Morticoccus virus, contracted by the Legion of SuperHeroes’ Karate Kid and brought back from the future, which caused worldwide destruction, leading to Earth AD. But I think Jack would’ve shown us his version involved a great war on Earth between the forces of Apokolips and New Genesis to be the cause of “...the holocaust that was devouring my world with jaws of flame” (above) from Kamandi #16.

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The final issue of OMAC (#8) had a cliffhanger; Jack was going to continue it, but left DC, so a hastily prepared last panel was substituted for Jack’s next issue teaser.

Once he was gone, other creators picked up where he left off, attempting to retroactively combine Jack’s future Earth with ones from other series such as Hercules Unbound (which even featured an appearance by OMAC villain Dr. Skuba).

Letter columns in Kamandi hinted that there was a connection with OMAC in Jack’s mind, and in Kamandi #50 (by other creators), OMAC is tied into the backstory and Buddy Blank was officially shown to be Kamandi's grandfather, who was killed as an old man in Kamandi #1.

John Byrne’s 1991 OMAC four-issue series tied up a few loose ends left from previous series. In 2007’s Countdown to Final Crisis, Buddy Blank is shown as a professor at Jack’s DNA Project from Jimmy Olsen (now called Project Cadmus), who takes his blond-haired grandson to safety at the "Command D" scientific facility as the Great Disaster starts, where Brother Eye rescues them from starvation.

Had Jack planned for Buddy Blank to be Kamandi’s grandpa from the very beginning in OMAC #1 (right)? We don’t know for sure, but as Buddy gets caught in “Section D” in his first issue, that’s a definite hint Kirby left behind... ★

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Angel to Esak

Hair CLub

ack Kirby’s stock female heroine, like the zaftig Big Barda, had a known real-life inspiration, wife Roz, but the real-life source for his stock long-haired blond hero type remains a mystery. Surely, one joking colleague must have one day asked ever-busy, ever-drawing, everdreaming Jack, “Why do you keep making pretty boy heroes with long blond hair?”

Kirby, the short, dark-complected Jewish tough guy, had no qualms about modeling his other comics-hero type after himself. See the Boy Commandos’ Brooklyn, the Newsboy Legion’s Scrapper, and Ben Grimm for such examples. An idealization of otherness or wish fulfillment would hardly account for the insistent recurrence of these long-haired blonds.

I believe that this stock long-haired blond character, whose almost-pretty visage Kirby could not seemingly keep himself from drawing, may have been inspired by a tragic wartime encounter: On a scouting mission, Kirby met a young German boy, at the wrong place and the wrong time for both of them, and killed him, fearing the child’s potential threat to raise an alarm, sacrificing the child to save both his own life and the lives of his fellow soldiers.

An account of such an incident does not exist*, not in his many told and retold war stories, not in his recurring nightmares of the war, which might have been shared only with Roz, if they were shared at all. Such a deed may have been too shameful to ever share. Kirby did not live as long as others of his Greatest Generation have, some of whom, only in their lingering final years, have been able to unburden themselves, clearly and straightforwardly, of similar horrors. But Kirby had pencil, paper, and an extraordinary power to transmute his experiences, his knowledge, and his beliefs through his drawing talents and his imagination into comics stories that endure. Two particularly powerful uses of this stock figure, one early and the other his last, support my theory.

Did a hitherto unknown wartime tragedy haunt Jack Kirby’s postwar comics work, inspiring the creation of Kirby’s most moving and personal stories and multiple, longhaired blond heroes?

Chris Beneke’s wild hypothesis begins here!

the end, however, Delilah sacrifices herself for Angel, saving him and the others from an ambush.

Her death in Angel’s arms is first revealed in a panel’s background, with both faces in profile, with the fewest possible identifying details. The story’s final panel shows the back of Angel kneeling before the prostate Delilah, with both faces unseen; their faces can only be imagined.

The death and the grief are observed, by others, from a distance.

If my hypothesized original incident is infantryman Kirby, as parent-figure, betraying the unknown German boy, the innocent child-figure, and saving himself by sacrificing the child, then this Boys’ Ranch story, created within a decade of the war, presents a precise reversal: The child-figure Angel is betrayed by the parent-figure Delilah, who then makes the ultimate sacrifice, her life for her child’s.

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Esak Kirby’s most creative decades kept the unknown dead German boy alive, even allowing him to grow into many imagined manhoods. These subsequent longhaired blonds are among Kirby’s most popular characters—Thor, an immortal god, and Kamandi, an ultimate survivor, the last boy on Earth!

Captain Victory might chronologically be the last of these blond creations (he died and was replaced by a clone), but there is one other, Esak, who is a peripheral figure in the original Fourth World stories, but assumes a dominant and heartbreaking role in Kirby’s ending for this most personal series.

Angel His early masterpiece with Joe Simon, “Mother Delilah” from Boys’ Ranch #3 (Feb. 1951), stars Angel, the first and most aptly named of these longhaired blonds, though this name is also ironically intended, his girlish locks and pretty face belying a quick, bad temper. This story’s title character is a mother-figure who is deemed unworthy of maternal pursuits because of her euphemistic evening vocation as a gambling queen.

But Delilah and Angel are drawn to each other and engage in a dangerous fantasy, pretending to be mother and son. Delilah disrupts Angel’s fantasy and betrays him by cutting his hair, which, as in the Bible’s story of Samson, destroys his strength. In * [See TJKC #20, page 55 for a possible account involving a German bicyclist—Editor]

Esak had appeared in two prologues—once as a young scholar sharing Metron’s Mobius Chair, once scolding Highfather with giggles—and one three-page back-up story, where his life was saved by Fastbak in a life-or-death contest with the Black Racer. There, Esak seemed more amused than genuinely frightened. Esak is grotesquely transformed when he reappears in The Hunger Dogs.

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Esak was named, like other New Genesis denizens, after an Old Testament character, Isaac (meaning “he laughs”). The Bible’s Isaac is a miracle child born to a barren Sarah and an aged Abraham. God later asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as proof of his faith. Isaac’s life is spared after Abraham passes this test, and Isaac, through his son Jacob, becomes the patriarch of the Jewish nation.

The original ending, “On the Road to Armagetto,” presumably included the deaths of both Orion and Darkseid and spared Esak, who, in Royer’s recollection [TJKC #6], leaves on the Mobius Chair and becomes, like his biblical namesake, “the hope of the future.”

DC could not accept the deaths of Orion and Darkseid, however.

The subsequent scramblings and rewrites produced a prelude, the 48-page “Even Gods Must Die,” concocted after the revised graphic novel finale, The Hunger Dogs, and that finale incorporated and resequenced most of the pages of the original 24-page ending, subtracting the Orion/Darkseid deaths and adding the death of Esak.

Volume Four of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus restores Royer’s work to the pages that he inked.

Thumbnail-sized black-and-white versions show the original sequencing, along with the two tacked-on Esak death pages, but do not reproduce the original pencil pages—which may have never actually been drawn—that show the Orion and Darkseid deaths and Esak’s happier ending. Kirby inconsistently delineated Esak in his off-frame, unnamed appearances early in this story and coloring errors in this definitive volume further fail to clarify this role of Metron’s mimic, the pygmy, Esak!

In death, Esak’s face returns to its beautiful, peaceful form [previous page, lower left]. Orion’s cradling arms surround this dead face, which otherwise fills the frame. This image might be the portrait that soldier Kirby waited forty years to find the courage to draw.

The soldier Orion, like Kirby, sacrificed the child Esak, like the German boy, an accidental casualty of a senseless war. This final, most straightforward rendering by Kirby, the artist, of the actual scene that he had witnessed, may have brought Kirby, the man, peace.

Esak’s namesake from the Bible did not die in sacrifice, however.

Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is seen by God as an ultimate proof of faith and his faith is rewarded by Isaac’s life being spared.

Does the death of Esak, while resolving Kirby’s guilt over a decadesold wartime tragedy and ending his line of long-haired blond heroes, also signal a loss of faith? Or faith’s failure? Or both? ★

TheKirby’s Last Pretty Boy Captain Victory, if he was not an actual Orion descendant, may have served as an Orion surrogate for Kirby’s creative urges after the original Fourth World series ended. The conflation within Captain Victory of the bitter fighter raging inside the pretty-faced long-haired blond may have prepared Kirby for Esak’s jarring transformation, an outward manifestation of inner ugliness. Kirby may have grown to accept that the dead German boy had been a genuine threat, even a future Nazi.

In The Hunger Dogs, Orion confronts the deformed Esak, now serving Darkseid with Metron’s science, and shoots him. “You came here to die, didn’t you?” Orion asks.

“I suppose I did, but I thought I belonged here,” states Esak. “No. This is my environment, not yours! Had you stayed on New Genesis, this would never have happened!” Esak dies and Orion begs the Source: “See him not as a bitter pawn surprised in fatal defeat, but only as a child, fallen upon cruel days.”

Originally drawn for comics-page size, Jack had to extend Royer’s inked art to fit the Hunger Dogs graphic novel format.

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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

MORE WORK FOR MR. LEE n the Atlas/Marvel presuper-hero era—when giant monsters with outlandish names ruled the roost—one suspects that life had become slightly easier for hard-working editor/writer Stan Lee. Despite the entertaining attacks by such creatures as Groot (the pre-Guardians of the Galaxy iteration, when he was just a marauding ambulant tree), the stories swiftly became lodged in a repetitive by-rote idiom—bloodless, victimless assaults by gigantic menaces that always ended with the defeat of the invader. And—let’s face it—the real appeal of the stories was the superb draughtsmanship and imagination of Jack Kirby, default renderer of this trend. The follow-up non-monster stories in each issue would be clever bijou fantasy/SF pieces illustrated by Steve Ditko (the tales, in fact, which Lee has intimated that he enjoyed writing most). But the immediate postCode issues of such books as Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales—when gruesome horror had been banished by the Comics Code—sported miscellaneous pieces in a variety of fantastic genres which

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were probably better value for money than the subsequent monster books—and certainly suggested that Stan Lee in his writing and editing had to do more creative work before cliché set in. Take, for instance, Strange Tales #69 from June 1959 (left). Not only did this issue contain a bumper five (count ’em) five stories (with an entry each by Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and a cover by the latter), but the stories were ingenious, entertaining and—more to the point—quite unlike each other. The reader of such books back in the day didn’t quite know what they were getting (that was certainly the case with this British schoolboy, encountering the stories from this book as backup in British 68-page reprints; readers such as myself did not see the cover illustration by Kirby until we tracked down the original American book years later).

FIVE STORIES, ALL DIFFERENT The cover for this issue is strangely low-key but effective, with a white-coated scientist climbing into a coffinlike box in a cavernous laboratory, surrounded by futuristic machinery. And if you are in any doubt that Kirby is the artist responsible for this, just look at that machinery: various futuristic design patterns that Kirby frequently used for such apparatuses can be seen, although (as usual) it is subtly unlike anything he used before or after. The cover is also an illustration of the very text-heavy approach that Stan Lee took in this era: no speech balloons, but three text boxes—the usual “The strangest tales ever told”, plus “Could man survive the threat from the 5th dimension!” (with an incorrect exclamation mark rather than a question mark), and “The man in the iron box! What was his dread secret???” (with three question marks this time, perhaps to make up for the absence of one in the first text box).

The first story (the “iron box” piece) is efficiently enough illustrated (if no more) by Bob Forgione, and has one of the Stan Lee’s favorite plots—one he was to use on several occasions: the selfish individual who puts himself into suspended animation hoping to wake in a better future world. Inevitably, of course, that’s never the case— with the usual poetic justice dispensed here by aliens from another world. The second story, “Rocket Ship X200”, is another variation on a Lee favourite: the despised, under-regarded character who, by one action, saves the world and replaces the disdain with acclaim (in this case, an ageing rocket pilot who saves the Earth from an extra-terrestrial invasion). The piece is a stylish effort

by Don Heck in the days before his work became slapdash and hurried. There are some really nicely designed panels here, along with some unusual spaceship designs.

JOE SINNOTT, PRE-KIRBY The third tale is drawn by the man who was to become one of Kirby’s most celebrated inkers, Joe Sinnott, and is a fairly predictable time travel story called “Journey into Nowhere”. It’s nothing special, but it’s different from the stories that surround it in the book, and readers will have felt by now that they were getting their money’s worth. And that’s certainly the case with the best drawn piece in the issue, “The World That Was Lost” in which a strangelooking, hairless individual in a wheelchair charters a boat to take him to the watery location of lost Atlantis. Modern readers will quickly spot the twist in the tale before it happens, but the real pleasure in this piece lies in the fact that it’s Jack Kirby delivering the beautiful, clean design and draughtsmanship—even in the throwaway panels (such as the expensive house of the mysterious millionaire, as well as the inner details of the house: busts and colonnade, etc.). The striking Kirby design work here makes almost everything else in the book look by-the-numbers—except, of course, for the final story, “The Threat from the Fifth Dimension”, drawn by Lee’s other star artist, Steve Ditko—in which a man is plagued by strange one-dimensional creatures. Interestingly, looking back on this book from over the decades when I first encountered it as a boy, it is this Ditko story which has stayed with me rather than the Kirby, although the King’s effort is probably the more striking piece. Frankly, there is nothing in the book that will be a revelation to modern readers, but Kirby fans will find this issue well worth their while.

WHEN WAKES THE SPHINX! Famously, the presence of a gorilla (preferably talking) on the covers of DC science-fiction comics of the 1950s and ’60s always helped shift shedloads of product—but there was another image which had some mileage in that era: Sphinxes, no less (should the plural be ‘Sphinges’?).

Mystery In Space (#36, 1957) sported a striking cover with Egypt’s famous ancient artefact—relocated to the moon. And I remember as a schoolboy that one of the few issues of Wonder Woman that reached British shores was the Amazon being menaced by an airborne sphinx (as rendered by Andru & Esposito). But you’re reading The Jack Kirby Collector, so let’s get onto talking about the giant stone figure as drawn by The King appearing on the very next issue of Strange Tales after the one discussed above, issue #70 from August 1959. In some ways, this is another ‘halfway house’ issue of the book—gigantic world-crushing monsters had not yet taken over the title, and there was a refreshing variety of fantasy and SF tales in each issue. But the cover significantly shows the Sphinx pulling itself ponderously from the sand to menace terrified onlookers. And, of course, Kirby (inked by Christopher Rule) rendered it more dramatically than anyone else would have done, with a gigantic granite paw extended towards the viewer almost in 3-D fashion. In fact, the title tale, “When Wakes the Sphinx!” is dispatched in splendid style by Kirby’s stablemate Steve Ditko; other stories in this issue are drawn by the efficient but workaday Paul Reinman (a very

pedestrian rip-off of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds) and Carl Burgos. The first piece in the issue is “A Giant Walks the Earth”, and it’s the issue’s Kirby offering. The impressive splash panel shows a towering figure, torso in the clouds, straddling a city. It’s a typical Stan Lee tale of an unhappy protagonist who learns that life isn’t as bad as he thought it was—the hero is a short man who takes a serum to transform himself into a giant, but learns the error of his ways by the time of one of those cozy final panel summings-up that Lee was so fond of.

Some might wonder why the internal imbibing of a serum managed to enlarge the central character’s clothes to the same giant size that he was—but modesty had to be respected. No nude giants! Although a ray machine might have been a better way of accounting for the growth of the giant’s clothes, but the pleasure of the tale remains undimmed. Apart from that splendid splash panel, this is Kirby utilising his most confident and immediate style. If you ever doubt the man’s ability, note the fact that every single panel in the story has maximum impact—not to the detriment of the tale; in other words, not by overkill, but simply showing how ahead of the pack Jack Kirby was. And even looking at this piece some 58 years after it was drawn, that statement remains unchallengeable. ★ 45

end it all

Risky Business

Shane Foley remembers some BOLD and not-so-bold ENDINGS in Kirby comics! (and some that NEVER happened)

(below) Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965). (next page, bottom) Peter Parker attends college in Amazing Spider-Man #31 (Dec. 1965), with art by Steve Ditko.

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The ’60s ne of the most wonderful aspects of Marvel Comics

in the early-to-mid ’60s was that there were stories where there were real changes in the status quo of some of the books. I’m not talking about changes that were done to try to bolster sales on weaker sellers—such as changing Ant-Man to Giant-Man in Tales to Astonish, or upgrading Iron Man’s armor in Tales of Suspense. I’m talking about taking steps to move away from what I would presume were ‘safe’ positions in top-selling strips.

And Kirby was in the thick of some of these, and perhaps even the instigator.

Perhaps the willingness to step out like this was due to the belief that the whole comics industry wouldn’t last much longer, so, “what the heck, let’s try it.” Or perhaps much of it came as a natural progression from the more “mature” new characterization that Lee, Kirby and Ditko had introduced into Marvel in the early ’60s—a progression that increasing sales soon demanded be stemmed. (Roy Thomas relates in Alter Ego #70, page 15, a meeting with Stan Lee in the later ’60s, where he and Gary Friedrich were told that generally, from that point on, there were to be no more radical changes.)

Whatever the reasons and impetus for this, Kirby and Lee seemed to be in perfect sync in their early work, with major changes in their characters’ status quo being initiated—requiring ending generally accepted staples in super-hero concepts—to move the characters forward and make them come alive!

Here are some examples: 46

FANTASTIC FOUR #35 (FEB. 1965) At story’s end, Reed and Sue actually got engaged.

They really did.

The subplot of the romantic triangle involving the Sub-Mariner was over and the strip’s main man got his girl. Rarely did this sort of thing happen. Richard Kyle in a 1967 article, reprinted in TJKC #8, commented on the impact of this event. And the engagement wasn’t terminated in a plot of super-heroic proportions. They married! Why did Kirby and Lee do this? It was risky, because this effectively removed Reed from being an available bachelor in any upcoming storyline, and any editor knows that doing this removes a lot of potential romantic tension. For young readers, marital problems just aren’t the same! (Early Beatles PR even tried to hide the fact that John Lennon was married, to keep the girls more interested!) Maybe Kirby and Lee thought having Johnny and Ben still unmarried left potential enough in the group dynamics? I wonder whose idea this was?

Whoever—the creative pair were, at this time, in sync. The following month (FF #36) saw the official engagement, then Annual #3 (on sale the month of FF #43) featured the wedding. Truly, it was the end of an era and the ushering in of a new one. It seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do now, with the benefit of hindsight.

But at the time, they and their publisher could not know it was a good thing to do. But they took the risk! The single life of two of the FF came to an end!

THOR #124 (JAN. 1966) Thor tells Jane Foster that he is Dr. Don Blake! He really does!

Did this happen very often—that the tension in the strip, and plot elements that result due to the problems of maintaining a secret identity, are dispensed with? I don’t think so. And I sure didn’t think so as a kid reading. But it was logical. It made sense. I always groaned that Tony Stark didn’t confide more in Happy or someone, to make his Iron Man secret identity more work-

TALES OF SUSPENSE (CAPTAIN AMERICA) #95 (NOV. 1967) Cap is quitting? We all knew that wouldn’t last long. But in doing so, he is revealing his secret identity to the whole world?

Really? Yes—he really did!

That was a momentous read for me as a young reader. It had depth and impact. No tricky plot that made it all a set-up. No imaginary story. It was a big, bold, dramatic event that really happened in Cap’s life. Perhaps in this case, editor/scripter Lee simply went along with what plotter/artist Kirby wanted, because in just 15 months, when Kirby was no longer chief story architect, the status quo was restored, and Cap had a secret identity again. To me, TOS #95-96 almost feels like Kirby’s last Cap story—as if he wanted his involvement to end there. The following story with the Panther and Zemo was a cracker, for sure, but once Kirby was obliged to do an extra ten pages per month in Cap’s own title, no story there (to me) had any real spirit in it. But this one did. It felt like the end of an era.

able! But, for an editor, isn’t this a risky change?

This change meant ending a tried and true fundamental in the concept of the strip—a major facet in many such strips. Who thought of it? Kirby? Lee? Whoever did, it was done, and Lee, as editor with final say, okayed it. Then twelve months later, Jane was entirely gone (in a story that was not very convincing, but that isn’t the point of this piece) and the whole tenor of the strip changed irrevocably, having ended its main earthbound connection. What a risky milestone event in a good selling title—a comic-book cliché dispensed with, so the new direction could be set free.

(Between FF #35 and Thor #124 was Avengers #16. Kirby drew it and the couple of issues before, but since he was no longer the primary plotter on the series, I wonder if the idea of the drastic line-up change was editor Lee’s, with Kirby brought in to do the heavy lifting of getting it plotted and on paper. So I have ignored it, even though its premise fits perfectly here.)

FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5 (NOV. 1967) Two of the FF heroes were not only married, but now going to have a baby? Really? At the height of the FF’s sales, they bring in a concept like this? Yes—they really did. Unbelievable!

Everyone who has children knows that a lot of freedom ends when parental responsibilities begin. So now, not only was some of the FF’s romantic tension gone (though, despite the odds, the Kirby/ Lee team wrote in quite a bit of fun-to-read marriage difficulty), but

FANTASTIC FOUR #50 (MAY 1966) There was another change to the status quo in both Spider-Man and Fantastic Four—one with far more risk for Spider-Man. In Spider-Man, Ditko and Lee had decided that Peter Parker would end his school life, grow a bit and go to college. Thus, the hero was growing older and more mature. This meant an injection of new blood in his supporting cast and, as editor Lee and plotter Ditko must have theorized, it worked well. But they couldn’t have known for sure they wouldn’t regret losing some elements of Parker’s school life that had worked so well for the last few years. They went ahead anyway, and it worked. Either Lee or Kirby—probably Lee, I would think— then decided that Spider-Man’s similar-aged sparring partner, Johnny Storm, should also go to college. So a few months later, in Fantastic Four #50, he did. But this didn’t work nearly as well in the FF, mainly because it removed the Torch from whatever scenario the rest of the FF were involved in. Eventually, after just a few months, the whole idea was forgotten and Johnny’s education was left in limbo. The move to have him growing a little older didn’t take root either. Kirby plotted and drew him as a maturing young man (witness FF #97—though FF #99 was a step backwards), but almost every writer after that wrote him as little more than a childish idiot.

So was this a risky ‘end’ of an era for the Fantastic Four? It had the potential to be, but the status quo was quickly, and quietly, restored.

Johnny’s school life had played little part in his Fantastic Four stories (unlike his earlier Strange Tales solo adventures) so when his college life was overlooked, it was easy not to notice. And ‘ending’ of sorts, but a minor one.

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(top) Jack’s pencil storyboards for the October 21, 1978 episode of the Fantastic Four cartoon series, entitled “The Fantastic Four Meet Doctor Doom.” (next page, top) Mike Royer’s inked version of a Kirby pencil drawing done on March 17, 1983, which shows Doom only has a small scar. You can see a video of Jack actually drawing this piece at: https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=Z6hX21EYFyY (below) Shane Foley inked, and Randy Sargent colored, this unused FF #94 illo, and created what could’ve been that issue’s cover.

having the difficulty of plotting a reckless adventuring life while considering a baby’s safety was being introduced! But, for a while at least, the Kirby-Lee team handled it all very well. After a period of being the Fantastic Three, with Sue in ‘confinement’, the baby was born in Annual #6 and Crystal was there to take Sue’s place. This brought to an end the idea that only the four astronauts from FF #1 could be part of the team. Then when Sue came back into play (creating all those debates about whether the book should become the Fantastic Five!), the baby was cared for by Alicia.

What a great way to get Alicia naturally more involved in the strip. That the Kirby-Lee team could have continued this subplot well is apparent to me. But they didn’t.

The baby was named in #94—14 months after his birth!—getting a name that simply must have been inspired by the letter writers (you can’t tell me that either Kirby or Lee remembered the Storms’ father’s name was Franklin!) and in that story he got a Nanny with a difference! Great idea. But then, Kirby was gone. But what nerve on the part of Kirby and Lee, to introduce such a real life element to the strip, at the risk of ending much of the freedom that simple comic stories require!

It must have been somewhere around this time that the meeting Roy Thomas remembers happened.

That means that perhaps most of the examples above, if thought of a little later, probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground, no matter whether Lee or Kirby had thought of them. It meant the time for bold experiment was over.

And there are certainly at least a few possible examples of Kirby wanting to change things—ending an older concept that he felt no longer worked so that a new tack could be taken—which editor Lee refused.

FANTASTIC FOUR #85 (SOMETIME BEFORE APRIL 1969) In a letter of Comment to TJKC #16 (July ’97), reader John Parret wrote of some of his friends’ visit to the Kirby home in New York, and he stated, “(Jack)... showed them his drawing board and one of the pieces he was working on for an upcoming Fantastic Four. Dr. Doom’s face was to be revealed and only slightly scarred, not horribly disfigured, as Doom saw himself.”

Other factors in this story make it probable that the page was a projected one for Fantastic Four #85. So, was Kirby’s intention to end the mystery of Doom’s scarred face and show it? We know from a later, non-Kirby story (Thor #182-183) that Lee had a different idea and envisaged Doom with massive scarring. We know from later comments from Kirby, and a sketch that Jack was video-recorded drawing [see top right], that Kirby saw Doom as having minimal scarring, but massive ego!

Whether the page that the fans mentioned survives or not—indeed whether FF #85 is certainly the issue in question—is not known. But it certainly sounds like something Kirby would do—to end an old subplot, and to move it forward to new places.

But the status quo was deemed necessary to be maintained, and the sequence was not produced. It was an ending that wasn’t to be.

THOR (LATE ’60s) Is this one true at all? Did Kirby really want to end Thor, so the old gods could be replaced by the new? Did he really believe that, in a money-driven business like comics, a successful title would be cancelled, for the sake of a possible better storyline? Kirby fans have all heard that before—and we’ve equally heard it debunked.

But what a big, bold ending that would have been!

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THOR (LATE 1969) This one is definitely true. Kirby wanted to reveal a heroic side to Galactus. This meant ending his role as one of Marvel’s most powerful bad guys. Perhaps this amazing turnaround was not to be permanent, but editor Lee deemed this not a good move for the character and vetoed the already drawn story. I always wondered how this story got so far, then to be rejected. If Kirby had the editorial blessing from Lee to do whatever story he liked, how is it then fair to reject 14 pages of it? Or did Kirby draw a story idea that Lee had already rejected? Or were both men finding communication in the relationship increasingly difficult and this was the straw (or one of them) that finally broke it? This is a clear example of how a working relationship that once worked so well (as in the earlier examples above) now was hardly working at all.

feel it would have been preferable if only one of the FP exchanged places with Infinity Man, rather than all of them, so that the book’s stars were still there during the action of the story. As it was, all the stars with any personality disappeared, just as the crisis hit, to be replaced by an almost robotic super-type. But ending, or at least limiting, the role of the strip’s main super-hero figure was something that Kirby was certainly willing to do when he saw the need. And I regret that we never saw what Kirby had in mind to do down the track.

The ’70s The first two of these are not ‘risky’ endings, by any means, but they are endings nonetheless.

INFINITY MAN AND THE FOREVER PEOPLE After Forever People #3, Infinity Man vanished, not returning until the last issue of their strip. Evanier and Sherman acknowledged this in the letters column of FP #8, saying ‘no-one noticed’. We do see though that, in FP #8, after the storyline begun in #3 was over, the two members of the group who thus far had no powers evident were shown to have them. Vykin the Black became Vykin the Sonic Hammer (though this was in a page deleted from the story, shown in TJKC #6), and Mark Moonrider showcased his Megaton Touch (what a fabulous name!). Had these powers been envisaged by Kirby from the outset? Or was he course-correcting as he went? Did he mean for Infinity Man to permanently have a more restricted role in the book? Or was he simply sidelined for a short while so the FP themselves could be showcased in a different way for a while? The series didn’t last long enough for us to know how Kirby was going to handle things, but it seems to me that Kirby felt the book needed finetuning if it was to continue smoothly. The heroes themselves needed to be stronger, so they didn’t always need to all disappear when trouble came.

This didn’t mean they needed super-powers, but Kirby certainly thought that was the way to go, to avoid always calling Infinity Man. And surely something needed to be done about Infinity Man himself, because he had no character at all.

Perhaps this was coming, we don’t know. I certainly

MERLIN AND THE DEMON Another ending Kirby initiated in an attempt to help a series flow better, and one which is more certain than the example above, was when he decided, after #6, to stop having the Demon issues narrated by Merlin. According to a letters page comment, this was deliberate. And after #7, there was no narration at all. A small thing to bring to an end on Kirby’s part, but one he felt was necessary and about which he had no hesitation in bringing about for the good of the strip. In this regard, Kirby was a great editor of his own stuff.

THE END OF KIRBY AS A TEAM PLAYER! Kirby’s greatest risky ending, with pros and cons that will be forever debated amongst Kirby devotees, was his post-’60s decision to not work with another scripter again (except for the few necessary times). Furthermore, and just as risky, he would rarely work under any sort of editorial direction beyond his own. He probably didn’t see it as risky at all—but the well earned freedom to create as he pleased, convinced that his success at Marvel, which was frequently in more roles than acknowledged, was enough to guarantee further success.

Did it work?

On the surface, the answer appears to be no. In his years at DC in the early ’70s, the only strip that flourished seems to have been Kamandi. But there were clearly other factors at play, which must have frustrated Kirby no end.

The raising of cover prices about a year after Kirby’s defection to DC, with Marvel manipulating things and finally trumping DC sales across the board, was surely a case of abominably unfortunate timing for Kirby. Also there is the fact that sales of both New Gods and Mister Miracle were clearly not as poor as supposed when they were cancelled, since both were ordered by new management to be reactivated just when Kirby was returning to Marvel. It surely must have felt to Kirby like the cards were stacked against him.

So maybe, if circumstances had been a little less problematic, it was a risk that would have paid off well.

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Returning to Marvel in the mid’70s saw Kirby with the same deal— and many wonder at the wisdom of it. Eternals was risky, because it ignored, even undercut, the Marvel Universe which published it. Would the readership accept it? Many did— many more did not—and the title lasted only 19 months. Captain America and Black Panther were squarely within the Marvel Universe, but they acknowledged it no more than Eternals did. And neither acted or spoke much like the characters they had developed into in the years previously. SHIELD was mentioned—but it was no SHIELD that was anything like the regular Marvel SHIELD. When asked to include a bit more of the ‘old’ Marvel world, Kirby responded with a terrific Red Skull story in Cap, but an abominable Hulk riff in Eternals. The Eternals book died, and we hear that Kirby’s Cap wasn’t a good seller either.

So the question comes—if Kirby’s books, with the possible exception of the later Machine Man, were not selling as well as hoped, why would he not ask for someone like Evanier or Sherman (who were not credit-stealing ‘writers,’ but assistants he trusted) to plot out for him an acceptable Marvel inclusive Morgaine Le Fey returned for Jack’s final issue of The Demon (#16), but Merlin was nowhere to be found. story to at least keep the diehard world (maybe answering nothing, in the same way as his Superman fans (and editors) happy? The Hulk story in Eternals was not a good issue of Kamandi answered nothing, but nonetheless acknowledging compromise and Kirby, as an editor, should have known that. it), then he could have inspired a boost in sales to keep the book Thinking mainly of the Eternals, why wouldn’t he listen to those alive another year or two. around who could have advised him wisely? Would it not have been worth it to keep his title alive? Why could he not even attempt to So, was ending his being agreeable to be part of a writer/artist respect the team under another editor a successful risk to take? mindset of Overall—yes! the current There is the ‘no’ part of course, described above. readers, and JANUARY 1972—FOREVER PEOPLE #6 But mainly, I think the answer is yes. to offer Pure conjecture and self indulgence on my Yes—in that Kirby was finally able to go where he wanted and some compart, but I’ve always thought that Forever produce the kind of work that was scripted the way he wanted. And promise to People #6, which consisted almost entirely of yes, in that there was now no confusion over who created what in his gear enough Darkseid’s slow but inevitable revenge on books. It was all Kirby! It wasn’t his doing that terribly unfortunate of his work the young, interfering Forever People, was a circumstances in the early ’70s curtailed his most personal and to the buytremendous, well told tale, with masterly thoughtful creations of the Fourth World. Had those factors not ing public? I emotion and depth. I do think, however, that come to play, he may well have had his greatest successes ever—with am conthe outcome, where the FP were simply not a shred of creator confusion in sight. And had he another year or vinced that thrown back in time, was relatively poor, more, who knows how much more quickly the villainy of Darkseid if Kirby had even though Darkseid’s reasoning to Desaad and the heroes of New Genesis may have guest-starred in other DC listened to was beautifully worded by Kirby. But if there mags, and become as well loved and accepted as Doctor Doom and such advice was ever to be a time when Orion needed to the Fantastic Four back at Marvel. They—and Kirby—deserved it, and probe spurred on to even greater action against because they are every bit as good, if not even better! duced an Apokolips and his father—where his sense In so many ways, it was a very risky thing to do—for Kirby to issue or two of outrage reaches an unstoppable peak— end his association with Marvel at the height of his success. And that an episode like this, but where the FP are many would say it didn’t work. But I think the alternative would acknowlactually obliterated, would be the perfect have been worse for him, and in the long run, it was an ending that edged the catalyst! A brilliant ending—to spark a final had to be, and showed us so much of the true Kirby genius that we rest of the battle! But that’s just me. would never have seen otherwise. ★ Marvel

A Great Ending that Never Was

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

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

Down to Earth, as It Is in Heaven (this page) Building rainbow bridges: Two of the super-spirits from Canuto's cosmic canon. (next page) The ground floor of Forager's crossdimensional journey (left), and a Forager/Sandman encounter (right) lent exclusively by Michael for this magazine!

(Following page) Scattered scenes of Forager thinking outside the cocoon and having remembrances of super-struggles past.

TM & © Hugo Canuto and DC Comics, respectively.

Kirby’s deities got their hands dirty, as befits the dust and clay the Hebrew God formed humans from, and that that God’s earthly representatives later used to make champions like the Golem. The successors to those champions, superheroes of the type Kirby perfected, were like gods who mixed with humans on their behalf. And they were as flawed as those clay-footed mortals can be, even when, as often happened in Kirby’s case, these characters were literally gods, from the canons of real-world culture—Thor, Hercules, etc.— or from Kirby’s own visionary imagination. Whenever Kirby created a god who stayed on-high, that entity was suspect in actions and motives—Galactus, the Celestials. Kirby wanted boots on the ground (and capes and helmets), and he left a mythos that any other creator can come to and continue a conversation with face-to-face.

The divinities of indigenous South American belief in our own world were a pantheon for the everyday person, and the superhuman race collectively known as “The Bug” in Kirby’s Fourth World cosmology were a literally underground society; humanoid insects evolved from bio-weapons in an ancient space-war and dwelling, despised, in warrens of the planet the “New Gods’” gleaming airborne city floats above. The Orishas stand up for the underdog, and The Bug are the underdog, even in heaven.

Brazilian artist Hugo Canuto is bringing the gods who crossed from Yoruba lands in Africa to a “New World,” into the world of comics as well, in an ambitious graphic novel expected in Summer 2017; one of comics’ first families, writer Lee, artist Michael and color-artist Laura Allred, are bringing the Bug back to life in a six-issue series starring main character Forager: BUG!, starting at DC and Gerard Way’s “pop up imprint” Young Animal this May. The divine hand of Kirby is discernible in each, as are the new universes it always pointed to. I spoke by email with Canuto and with Lee & Mike in February, to find out what mystic places these creations are coming from, and leading.

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: The Orishas are a spiritual transplant, just like Africans and Europeans and Asians were a physical transplant to the Americas. Jack Kirby brought Yahweh and Thor with him from Europe, and remade them in an image of his own. By doing a comic on the Orishas, does it take them farther from their authenticity, or is this what is needed to make them more true to themselves, by being re-ignited in a new world’s imagination?

HUGO CANUTO: When we talk about Orishas, unlike other deities like Thor or Zeus, they are part of a living religion that exists on two continents and in dozens of countries, in different ways—Candomblé, Santería, Umbanda. Its adherents live the myths and interpret their meanings, considering themselves “sons” of certain Orishas; that is, they identify with the archetypes.

In Brazil, due to the enslavement process that added different nations and peoples in the same territory, Yoruba deities, who were worshiped in only one city in Nigeria, were aggregated and organized, in the 19th century, into a unique pantheon, giving rise to our Candomblé.

The purpose of our work is to bring comics’ pop language to this tradition, in a non-religious work, but one that deals with [that faith’s] narrative and mythical aspect, retelling millennia-old stories that survived the diaspora of its peoples 51

and spread across two continents. I believe that in this way it is possible to reinterpret Orishas to an audience that hasn’t had contact with these myths, while representativeness and diversity is celebrated through the history of kings, warriors and black gods.

TJKC: Do you see a natural kinship between the schematics and embellishments of Kirby’s design, and the markings and structure of African and Native South American ritual and culture?

CANUTO: Jack Kirby’s work was always marked by a creative and personal reinterpretation of the elements of the outside world, laden with symbolism.

[We have only] to analyze his work in The Eternals, from the first pages—compositions referring to low reliefs, the use of rhythmic geometric forms as adornment of armor, references to ancient Sumerian sculptures and cave paintings in the concept of the Celestials...there is a beauty in the construction of its panels, narrative rhythm and flat colors that refers to an extremely far-flung art of ancient peoples.

The epic and expressive compositions of the pages somehow closes a cycle and meets the old low stone reliefs of the Mayas or Aztecs; his characters wear masks that refer to those of West Africa. As with these peoples, there was no pretension to the realism of form, to the portrait, but [rather] to the synthesis of expression.

I [earned a degree in] architecture before my work in comics, and what I loved the most as a child, when reading Thor or New Gods, was the conception of their cities. Asgard, Olympia, Wakanda, Atilan and New Genesis; true machines of dwelling in surreal forms, situated in the sky or embedded in mountains.

TJKC: How much of the Orishas’ ancient story speaks through contemporary fantasy, and how much does current pop feed back into ancient folklore and belief?

CANUTO: When I launched my first project, The Mayrube Song, a fantasy epic inspired by the peoples that made up Latin America, it was because I believed there was much to be told about the myths of non-European peoples, beyond stereotypes. Taking Yoruba mythology to comics is a way of presenting the tradition and the mythical universe of a whole people, full of heroic journeys, witches, sacred objects and divine worlds. We can not forget that if Africa is the cradle of Humanity, then it’s there that were also born the first stories, sagas and beliefs. The archetypes represented by Orishas are present in other cultures, arriving in our days through pop culture, diluted but still active, be it in the heroes of the cinema, comics, TV series or books.

[Follow Canuto’s sagas at: https://hugocanuto.com/gallery/contos-de-orun-aiye-tales-of-orun-aiye/] THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Forager has the look and moves of an uncommonly impish character by Fourth World standards, but actually has a very tragic background. This mix is one of the main makings of fairytales.

How will you draw on those qualities?

MICHAEL ALLRED: He’s the untried youth with a legacy beyond his knowledge or understanding. Makes for a phenomenal character arc. Because of that I think we’re also able to draw on characteristics that make the reader identify and empathize with him.

LEE ALLRED: Kirby created his own Mowgli character with Forager: a child raised in feral nature, red in tooth and claw, yet who feels some innate spark, some higher ideal that tells Forager he is different, more than what he seems to be. Yet when finally returned to his true heritage, he doesn’t fit in there either. A child of two worlds, and yet of none. That’s the tragedy of Forager, the mythic resonance. BUG! will be his journey to find his true place in life.

TJKC: Forager is more of a fanciful figure than a fighter—he’s ready to battle 52

MICHAEL: Kirby always drew from his own underdog upbringing, and look how high he pushed himself. We all struggle to varying degrees; part of the human experience. Fiction provides a safe place to imagine being somewhere tragic or dangerous while remaining relatively safe in reality. Forager’s lowly origins tap into that potential for an incredible arc of the lowest of the low to possibly finding exaltation.

But how close can he actually climb? His story begins at a lower point than most could imagine, but he could also find his ultimate stature beyond our own reality as well. That spectrum gives us a gigantic playground to romp in.

LEE: The dichotomy of subterranean bug colony and the floating sky city of New Genesis reminds me a lot of “The Cloud Minders” episode of the original Star Trek. I wonder if that was Kirby’s idea-spark? It’s a rich and fascinating theme and definitely plays out as an undertone to our BUG! series. One I’d love to explore even deeper should BUG! extend past its first sixissue arc. (Keep those cards and letters coming, folks!)

TJKC: One thing that always surprised me about the way that Forager’s “pilot” issue in New Gods wasn’t picked up quickly (indeed, not ’til 2017 ) was that Kirby seemed to be handing DC a Spider-Man of its own. Forager is, in more ways than that, an uncharacteristically Ditko-esque creation for Kirby—based on physical litheness and embodying a social concept. Do you find him unique in the Kirby pantheon?

and to sacrifice, but in his two appearances in the Kirby canon (New Gods #9 and 10) we see him raiding for food, running away strategically, and warning more-powerful potential allies rather than initiating violence. Do you find that a defining and appealing aspect of him?

MICHAEL: I do see the Spidey connection.

And I believe Kirby when he said he planted the original seeds and provided the initial inspiration for Spider-Man. I found the recent article in The Jack Kirby Collector fascinating and just.

I’ve created and co-created so many things, that everything Kirby said on the subject sounds very, very credible. So, with that, I don’t find Forager particularly unique or

MICHAEL: Absolutely. He has a kind soul. His instincts are to help, serve, and provide. But he has a scrappy side that stirs things up too.

LEE: That splash panel in New Gods #10, where Forager’s scampering off with the Earth food—that’s what I’m basing my take on.

Forager’s really unlike any other Kirby character.

There’s just something irrepressible about him.

Something kinetic and fun. Impish is the perfect word. He’s too good-natured to be mean or mischievous, too noble to be irresponsible. Still, he’s young and impulsive and seems to enjoy tweaking the noses of his opponents just a bit.

TJKC: It always fascinated me that Kirby conceived a paradise with an underclass—and one we’re meant to root for. The Norse Gods had the trolls, etc., but the trolls had a more-or-less traditional role as expendable, none-too-savory laborers. Kirby upended the stereotype, with Bug society looked down on unfairly by the gods of New Genesis. Is that unique, born-underdog status something that interests you in developing this book?

out-of-character to the Kirby Pantheon. What’s most impressive to me is that Kirby’s creative fuel was burning so brightly that a phenomenal character like The Bug was so powerfully introduced, and then almost as quickly lost in the stampede.

LEE: There’s a similarity between Forager and Spider-Man, but only superficially so. They’re both based on creepy crawly critters, and they both leap lithely around.

Both are misunderstood 53

underdogs. But one big, big difference is their respective personalities. Forager’s too happy, too positive to go moping around “woe is me” like a certain arachnid. Forager’s irrepressibly upbeat.

TJKC: The two of you and Laura had a rapport on the later issues of FF [the “Future Foundation” series’ second volume] that held a special charm and wonder, while not avoiding worrisome and weighty risks of existence. How do you conceptualize and compose together, and how would you describe (or explain!) the magic that happens?

MICHAEL: Well. Laura and I pretty much learned how to make and publish comics together and have an intimacy that is beyond explanation. And you can’t over-exaggerate the impact and influence a big bruddah has on his lil’ bruddah.

Because of Lee, comic books were always a major part of my life from Day One. They were always there. Lee always brought home the best stuff. It was always a thrill digging through his stacks of comics and having it all spill into my brain as it developed, possibly warping it beyond repair. There’s an unspoken bond there. It’s just a natural flowing river of enthusiasm.

LEE: I call Mike and I “the Simon and Simon brothers of comics.” Mike’s the upscale Allred— he hangs with the Hollywood and rock music crowd. I’m very much the down-market Allred.

Spent a lot of years wearing a hardhat, doing pick-and-shovel construction work for the Air Force. Possibly some of this “you got chocolate on my peanut butter” two-different-worlds mashup is what makes Allredx3 books so Allred-y.

One thing I do in scripting for Mike is pepper the script with art reference JPEGs pasted in so he won’t have to waste drawing time hunting up the references himself. I also draw ludicrously lame stick figures showing character actions, poses, suggested layouts, etc.

MICHAEL: We were asked to bring something to Young Animal and almost every idea had Forager involved somehow. I even pitched him as an intergalactic bus driver at one point. To our great surprise, everyone at DC loved it—even insisting that no [other character] pull focus from Bug as the star of his own book. It’s been a blast finding out how popular this underutilized character actually is. We’re not alone!

LEE: Everyone who’s seen the finished BUG! pages say Mike’s really bringing his art to a whole new level. I’m really having to scramble to keep up with him! If you’ve liked our previous Allredx3 books, you’re going to love BUG! ★

From Alpha...

...To Omega!

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

by Sean Kleefeld

lot has been written about Darkseid already, including in this magazine. You’ve no doubt read about the character and his quest for the Anti-Life Equation, and the symbolism and metaphors people have read into that. But what I haven’t seen anyone do previously is take a look at how Jack Kirby evolved Darkseid’s visuals over the time he worked on the character; and, fortunately, since that what my Incidental Iconography column is all about, I get to delve into that today.

I suspect that, even if you’ve read Jack’s entire Fourth World saga all the way to Hunger Dogs, and gone through Jack’s Super Powers titles, you’re likely thinking that Darkseid didn’t change under Jack’s hand. That the character’s simplistic design meant Jack

just above the biceps multiple times (left). I thought perhaps this may have been the result of a slight misinterpretation on Jack’s pencils on the part of inker Vince Colletta at first, but several of the instances where this occurs, I find it unlikely Colletta would have made that “mistake” repeatedly, over several issues, if Jack himself hadn’t drawn that in.

The other thing that begins to crop up, and ultimately dogs Jack’s renditions of Darkseid for pretty much the rest of his career, is whether the character should be drawn with a tunic or not. His earliest appearances show a short tunic coming below his belt with tight shorts underneath. But at the end of Forever People #2, the tunic disappears, leaving only the shorts. While Jack seems to prefer the tunic version, judging by the frequency he draws the tunic versus just a pair of shorts, he waffles back and forth on this point over the next couple of decades—sometimes within a single issue.

Another minor, but variable point, is how Jack depicts Darkseid’s gloves. They’re generally drawn very short, whether they’re skin-tight, slightly flared, or so loose that they bunch up around his wrists.

Interestingly, this is a detail that Jack seems to remain consistent with at least within the context of a single issue, and it’s only in looking at his body of work collectively do many of these differences start to pop out.

A

was able to keep a high degree of visual consistency with him over the years. While Jack was certainly more consistent in his drawings of Darkseid than most other characters, he still showed a surprising amount of variability.

Darkseid’s first appearance is essentially a cameo in Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #134, where his face appears in a video monitor in a small panel that provides little detail. We get a slightly better view in #135, but it’s not until Forever People #1 (above) that we see Darkseid in full. And there he stands, dressed as you know him with his blue tunic, thigh-high boots, gloves, open-faced helmet… but also a cape and slacks. The cape is most obvious, and doesn’t detract much from the overall visual, but the slacks—clearly evident by the seams running down the sides of Darkseid’s legs—seem a little too humanizing for such a grandiose character. As do the details of the spats on his boots. Fortunately, these all seem to be forgotten about by the next issue.

However, in that same issue, we see Jack add another detail: sleeves. Even though he’d already clearly established Darkseid went with bare arms, several panels in Forever People #2-4 depict him with either short sleeves or some kind of light shoulder armor. These are generally just colored the same as his arms in production, so it tends not to be overly evident, but there are clearly horizontal cuts drawn 54

There’s one final curiosity that I’d like to point out: Jack’s design for Kenner’s action figure (previous page, bottom). While the basic design elements are largely all there, two changes exist: Darkseid’s belt is widened to become a harness of some kind, and Jack removed Darkseid’s helmet to reveal a “tight half-hood which ends inside [a] stiff leather collar about [his] neck.” He didn’t seem to envision the figure would have a removable helmet—Jack made ample notes about the toy functionality—just that was no longer part of the character design. This makes this design perhaps farthest removed from the basic Darkseid visuals that readers are familiar with, I think, primarily by giving Darkseid a neck. His helmet design allows his head to visually rest directly on his shoulders, giving the character a weight and gravity befitting him, but this “tight half-hood” seems to reveal something of a weak point between Darkseid’s head and torso. Kenner seemed to recognize that by ultimately keeping

their figure design much closer to the character’s first appearances (including the cape!).

As with many of Jack’s character designs, he continually modified Darkseid’s appearance as he drew.

While the character pretty much always maintained that stern, craggy face with all of those wonderful Kirby squiggles, his even seemingly simple outfit changed over time while, as always, maintaining an iconic overall look that artists continue to call back to even now, decades after Jack last drew him. ★

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(above) You can see how Jack’s interpretation of Darkseid evolved as the second Super Powers miniseries (1985) wore on.

From the cover of the first issue (left) to the splash page of the fifth (above), note how his signature villain’s menacing look changed to one of weariness (despite the inkers’ best efforts to keep him more fiendish looking)— perhaps reflecting Jack’s own physical state as his comics career was coming to a close.

Influencees

Simonson Sez Walter Simonson interviewed by John Morrow on February 23, 2017

(below) Jack’s unused pencils for the cover of the 1984 New Gods reprint series. (next page, bottom) Walter’s Ragnarök #1 Variant Sketch Cover from 2014.

[Editor’s Note: We interviewed Walter Simonson way back in TJKC #14 (Feb. 1997), and this one took place exactly 20 years later. Back then, Walter discussed his “Beta Ray Bill” Thor work for Marvel at length. In the two decades since, he has produced his remarkable Orion series, which I view as the finest post-Kirby take on the Fourth World, and further explored mythology with his current IDW series Ragnarök. This interview was conducted on February 23, 2017, edited and transcribed by John Morrow, and copy-edited by Walter Simonson.]

was a later Kirby pencil piece, and you prettied it up nicely.

WALTER SIMONSON: It was kind of all there. I’ve inked Jack maybe six or seven times now, and I feel the results have been mixed. I’ve done a couple I’ve been really happy with. The very first one I did is probably my favorite, but I like how the Black Racer came out. I did a Fighting American for Mitch Itkowitz for a Kirby portfolio [Kirby Masterworks]. That was inked on tracing vellum; I just had a large xerox to work off of. The only change that I made: There’s a spacecraft or small flyer in the background, and it’s behind Fighting American’s right leg. And Jack had somehow drawn the two halves, so they didn’t quite line up. One side was a little higher than the other, so I fudged that. (laughter)

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: First of all, thanks for inking this issue’s Black Racer cover. Anytime you ink Jack’s stuff, it’s always a beautiful combination. That

TJKC: It’s amazing you remember that from that long ago. I think that was from 1979.

WALTER: Well, I like that drawing. I thought that inking came out really nicely. I still remember doing that, ’cause mostly you’re thinking, “Am I changing Jack Kirby?

Nobody liked Vinnie Colletta for that, so maybe that would be a bad idea...” (laughter) The only one I actually inked professionally for mainstream comics during Jack’s career was a Devil Dinosaur cover [#8, Nov. 1978]. Apparently, Erik Larsen has it hanging on his wall now. He got it from Jack at some point. Curse you, Erik! (laughter) TJKC: Starting with Orion, then going to your Judas Coin book and your more recent stuff, I feel like your work is reaching a career peak, sort of in the way Jack’s did between 1968-1972.

WALTER: Well, I appreciate that. I am having a good time.

TJKC: Our theme this issue is Death and Endings in Jack’s work. I thought it was particularly appropriate to interview you because of your current Ragnarök stories.

Are you done with that series?

WALTER: Oh, no. I would like to be on it at least as long as I was on Thor at Marvel. What I’ve just finished is the second story arc, and I have another arc in mind after this, where Thor goes to Helheim. #12 just went out to the printer. I manage to get about four issues a year done. I put more lines in my stuff now than in the old days, which is ridiculous. You’re supposed to simplify as you get older. (laughter) All I can really tell you is that Thor is no deader at the end of the twelfth issue than he was at the beginning.

TJKC: I’ve only read through issue #11 at this point, and I assumed it was a 12-issue mini-series. The way #11 ended, I figured the next issue was it, and it’d end with a big bang and Thor dying. You just ruined it for me! (laughter) WALTER: Oh, sorry. (laughter) TJKC: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looked like the 56

beginning of issue #1 of Ragnarök was intended to evoke the beginning of Jack’s New Gods #1.

WALTER: It is “the old gods died…”gambit. The difference is that I told the classic story of Ragnarök in the first four pages specifically about the Norse gods. Jack’s version was a little more circumspect.

What we learn as we go along is that events didn’t quite go down as they did in the classic version of Ragnarök, at least as far as my book is concerned. In my version, when Ragnarök happened, Thor was in fact not there. Because he was not there, the Midgard Serpent was not killed. Consequently, the bad guys won, the Greater and Lesser enemies are still alive, and the gods are all dead, and that’s why everything is a mess.

op kind of organically. Weezie [Walter’s wife Louise Simonson] has a really cool idea for how that might work over a period of time. So did Mike Mignola. ;-) TJKC: In Ragnarök, you use the term “The Aftertime” to denote the period after Ragnarök took place. Is that off the top of your head, or is that term used in actual Norse mythology?

WALTER: I may have grabbed it [from the myths], but it could just be my invention. I probably needed some specific descriptive term. In the classic version, when Ragnarök ends—if you go back and read “Völuspá,” the poem that really covers a lot of Ragnarök, it’s very beautiful, very short and quite lovely, and very terse—once the gods are all dead and their enemies are all dead, the only creature left out of all these creatures that fought in the battle is Surtr. Everyone fought their opposite number and killed each other— Thor fought the Midgard Serpent, Odin and Fenrir, Tyr and Garm. In Surtr’s case, he fought Frey. Frey had once had a magic sword that was essentially undefeatable. In the run-up to Ragnarök, Frey had given that sword away for love, and that sword didn’t show up again in Ragnarök.

Mythology’s not like comics with tight continuity. So Frey fought Surtr with a stag’s antler, which wasn’t good enough. In the end he dies, but he’s not able to kill Surtr. So whether or not it’s that Surtr can’t survive with everyone else dead—the myths aren’t real clear about that—he takes his sword of fire and flings fire across the Nine Worlds and everything goes up in a big conflagration. In the poetry, Surtr is never spoken of again. I kind of read that as he perishes in his own conflagration. But the stars fall, the heavens go dark, the earth sinks into the ocean.

After a time, the earth rises back up out of the ocean, the earth is once again green. A single man and woman survive, they were hiding in a deep forest. And it turns out some of the children of the gods were in the highest halls of Asgard, which were not burned in the final conflagration. These young godlings come out and find the golden chess pieces in the meadows where their parents used to play. And things kind of start over again; new gods develop, and there’s a very cryptic last quatrain of the poem I’ve seen interpreted in a variety of ways. One of those ways is a dragon rises up out of the depths; it might’ve been Nidhogg. It has corpses attached to its wings, or it actually has wings made of corpses. And it rises up and then sinks down again. The suggestion there is that, as in this new world man and women and gods have survived, evil also has survived. So perhaps it’ll all start again.

That’s the story in the myths basically. In my story, I try to find an approach to the myths that I haven’t come across anywhere else.

The idea is, Ragnarök occurs, but because Thor is not there, the gods lose. So we have an unfamiliar post-Ragnarök world in which to tell new stories.

TJKC: In issue #2 you did a great effect: As each character got killed, you drew a “slash” symbol through their face.

WALTER: (laughing) I think I got that from Death Race with Jason Statham. It was a really good action movie. They had a big display with each driver’s statistics. As drivers die, they’d run a big red “scriiitch” through each one. It was a great graphic idea, so I was like, “I’m totally stealing that.”

TJKC: For those not familiar with your new series, Ragnarök has taken place, and an evil force has destroyed all the Asgardian gods. Thor manages to rematerialize, but he’s barely hanging on, and wants revenge. It’s not clear if he’s actually alive or sort of an Asgardian zombie.

WALTER: At the end of issue #3, Thor meets the troll Javokk, who makes a remark something like, “There’s living blood in him.” So it’s an open question whether Thor is actually dead or not. I tend to think he’s not really a Draugar, one of the walking dead, at least not yet. How he manages to talk with no lower jaw, I have no idea. (laughter) But he’s a god, he’s a guy in a comic book. I don’t have to solve those problems. (laughter) TJKC: And he can still eat golden apples without a lower jaw. (laughter) WALTER: Yeah, maybe he has to have his squirrel [Ratatosk] spit them into his gullet. (laughter) I hadn’t thought about leaving him jawless as long as he’s already been jawless. I didn’t have a story to give it back to him, but I just started off that way, because I thought it looked really cool. It was kind of creepy. I do have some ideas about giving him back his lower jaw now although I’m just not sure it would look as good.

I’m going to let that devel-

TJKC: In issue #7, there’s a beautiful two-page fight scene between Thor and the black elf Regn. It’s four panels per page, which is a deviation from the rest of your layouts in the series. I tend to filter everything through Kirby, but it reminded me of the two-page battle between Orion and Kalibak in “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin” in New Gods #8. Were you consciously or subconsciously channeling that at all?

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(above) Marvel Premiere #26 Kirby/Colletta cover. (below) Simonson’s inks (top) vs. Wood’s (bottom).

WALTER: Well, I didn’t go back and look at them. I read the New Gods and know them quite well, but I don’t remember the breakdowns like that. I got a lot from Jack when I was younger and I devoured his stuff—I think I embedded it so deeply in my subconscious, that if I never saw another Kirby comic, I would still have all that information inside me. The reason I did it that way—maybe Jack had the same idea; I don’t know if he thought about it the same way, we never talked about storytelling the couple of times I met him—in my case, these two guys are fighting, and I didn’t want any moment of the fight to be any more important than any other moment. It was all this kind of fluid motion like a dance. I chose to run equal size panels to emphasize that each moment has the same weight as the moment before it, and the moment after it, until something changes. So I wouldn’t be surprised if I got that from Jack; I don’t know that he would interpret his own work in quite that same way.

TJKC: The idea of Thor being brought back leads me to Hercules Unbound, which had another mythological hero resurrected, and was one of your first series, back in 1976.

WALTER: That’s the first book where I did just layouts, and didn’t actually finish the art myself. It was a tough gig, following José Garciá-López.

[Wally Wood] was doing the finishes, so Denny O’Neil asked me if I’d be interested in doing layouts for Woody to ink. That’s why I took it: it’s like, “Check this off your bucket list: Got to work with Wallace Wood.” I know Woody liked the layouts I gave him. He was very happy with them, but he also quit after two more issues. (laughter) TJKC: I was going to ask how you felt about Wood’s kind of overpowering inking, but if you were only doing layouts...

WALTER: I expected it to look like Woody by the time it was done. I was delighted to do it, and I knew what the score was. Back then—maybe not as much now—I was making an attempt to, not homogenize stuff, but to keep it consistent. I did layouts for Thor in 1977 and ’78 for Len Wein writing and finishes by Tony DeZuniga. John Buscema 58

had been penciling it up to that point, and for at least the first few issues, I tried to do Buscema-esque layouts.

I’m not saying I was successful at that, but that’s what I was trying to emulate, so the book would not feel like there was a hard jolt between issue #259 and #260, my first issue. That was true on Hercules as well: I did not try to go back and draw like José Garciá-López: I wish to God I could, but I did my own layouts. With Woody inking it, I just figured it’s going to look kind of the same, no matter what. It did change radically when Bob Layton took over the inks, and I inked a couple of issues, and it looked way different then as well.

TJKC: On Hercules Unbound, there was an effort to tie-in Kirby’s continuity from OMAC and Kamandi, and you brought in the Atomic Knights, and joined together the alternate futures that DC had. You even included Dr. Skuba, the villain from Kirby’s final issue of OMAC that ended so abruptly. Were you pushing to get that Kirby continuity incorporated?

WALTER: Whatever we did, we just did for fun. I’ve forgotten Skuba in the book. But we did do the Atomic Knights because DC had several threads of stories that were post-catastrophe. Cary Bates wrote that issue. As a kid, I’d read the “Atomic Knights,” and I kinda enjoyed it. I had questions about how the guys inside the armor would survive the radiation with all the slits in the helmets for their eyeballs to look out of, and stuff like that. (laughter) I just thought they were kinda cool, so we did an Atomic Knights story for fun. We weren’t really thinking, “How can we tie all the post-apocalyptic stories from DC into one unit?” I am not as big about tying a lot of things together into one story, because it seems like the sum of the parts rarely equals the whole.

TJKC: You say you’re not a “continuity guy,” but for a project like the Judas Coin [right], that starts at the Crucifixion of Christ and then travels across all of DC’s continuity—past, present, and future—you must’ve really done a lot of research to make it all jell.

WALTER: I did. But I was just trying to tell small stories that ‘fit’ with the established continuity for each of the characters I was writing in that book. For me, continuity is a good servant, but a poor master, a paraphrase of a sentence from the work of P.D. James. So I don’t try to do stories to fix continuity or to make continuity work especially. I am completely aware of it, as much as I can be. There are people who are much more continuityfocused that I am, but I do try to keep it in mind. I did a story a good ten, fifteen years ago for DC. Denny O’Neil had done a story about the “Sand Superman” back in

the early 1970s—“Kryptonite Nevermore,” with that famous Neal not wrapping up that thread when he got off the book, and let me Adams cover. Denny did a years’ worth of stories, so I went back and pick up on that? He did, and I was able to kind of move out of his did a revisit of that story, or a renewal if you will, in whatever modcontinuity and into my own, but in a way that hopefully made it ern version of the DC Universe that existed at the time I was doing relatively seamless. it. Since that time, I’ve seen people try to tie that story in as the TJKC: Your first five issues of Orion are, to me, the best continuation opening salvo of some re-do of DC continuity. I can certainly say of the Fourth World anyone’s ever done, and a better conclusion to when I did the story, I did not do it with the idea that they would Jack’s original run than Jack was able to do himself with Hunger remake the DC universe and Superman based on this 64-page story, Dogs. You went beyond all the prophesies of Orion and Darkseid or whatever it was. (laughter) having their final battle in Armaghetto, and actually showed it.

In Hercules Unbound, there were a lot of questions that had not Kirby kept talking about it and talking about it, but never did it— been answered; when Hercules first shows up, he was chained to a and who knows if he would have, since it was meant to be an ongoing big rock, and had been for some time. Cary Bates and I knew a little series. You took what his ending could’ve been, did it, then continued in advance that the book was going to be cancelled, so we tried to work out a story that would tie everything together as much (above) Jack did a fine string of 1970s Thor covers just prior to (bottom left) The as we could. Then you’d at least have these twelve issues Walter’s first run on the book. prophesy Jack set-up that would feel like a complete unit, as if it’d been planned for Walter to finish. (below) Simonson’s Orion vs. Darkseid, for all the marbles! that way from the beginning—which it hadn’t. DC was going to cancel the book with issue #11. Cary and I had this idea of how we could bring the series to a conclusion, but it really needed to be a two-part story. So we talked to DC, and the memory I have is that Jenette Kahn and Joe Orlando and Paul Levitz got together and decided to grant us the extra issue, to do the two-part story to wrap it up as neatly as we could. I’ve always been grateful to them.

TJKC: Jumping to Orion, when you started that series, did you sit down and read all the Kirby Fourth World books, then spend a weekend jotting down ideas?

WALTER: I did. I read John [Byrne’s] books as well; there was a new run when John took over and I was coming in right after that. I did not go back and re-read all the various New Gods spin-offs and one-offs and various series that were floating around—I just read Jack’s and John’s.

John had a storyline about Tigra not being Orion’s mom, and I thought that was a really cool idea. I was doing covers for John on that run, and so I asked John, would he mind

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had been, in regards to fascism, where he was a World War II vet, and fought in Europe. A lot of his villains, a lot of the Apokolips stuff, had echoes of Nazi Germany. The guards march by, and they’re goosestepping, and a lot of other things suggested the Nazi model was really the epitome of evil for Jack. I remember one of my lessons from Civics class in 11th grade, about states that were fascist, and how they were structured. The simple version was, the will of the people is subordinate to the will of the state. That seemed to me to be the essence of the Anti-Life Equation, as I got it from Jack.

Once I got the Orion/Darkseid battle out of the way, I felt free to go elsewhere, but it was not an elsewhere where I felt unguided. I felt Jack was my spirit guide for what I wanted to do. I did model my idea for the Anti-Life Equation on my idea of fascism, and what I saw as the fascist underpinnings of Apokolips that Jack did quite deliberately.

TJKC: There’s a couple of moments in Orion that really stuck out for me. In #7, there’s a scene where Kalibak is wearing what’s called a “Thunderbelt” from the old gods to increase his power. [Walter laughs] Was that a nod to Wally Wood’s THUNDER Agents and Dynamo?

WALTER: Oh, no, that’s a Norse myth! In the Norse myths, Thor has a belt that doubles his strength. When he goes out and kicks Giant ass, he puts on his gauntlets and his belt. I used it briefly in my run on Thor, I think. The belt itself is out of the Norse myths, directly. So that was meant to be an artifact of the time before the old gods died.

TJKC: There’s another scene in the first five issues, where all the gods of New Genesis are flying together in one big mass to Apokolips, to see the final battle. I remember a similar scene in Eternals where Zuras was calling them all together to form the Uni-Mind. Were you thinking of that at all when you drew that scene?

WALTER: I don’t think so. I read the Eternals and enjoyed it, and I remember the UniMind. But I don’t think I was really trying to channel Jack or emulate him on that score other than trying to make something big. The story itself dictated getting all those guys over there to hang out as

on from there.

WALTER: Well, that’s like with Beta Ray Bill, I wanted to go places the book hadn’t gone, so readers wouldn’t know what to expect.

Everybody that knew the Fourth World stuff was focused on, “Well, Jack never got to conclude the series; he never got to bring it to its final fight in the firepits that he talks about in the last issue of New Gods.” Everyone was kind of hung up on that—well, they still are, because of course Jack never did get to do it. But I just thought, for the book I was going to do, I’d like to have that set aside in a way, so if I did that story—and of course, you could argue that’s not what Jack would’ve done, ’cause he might have actually killed one of the guys, and I don’t have a clue what Jack would’ve done. But I thought, if I do that and have the “final fight” in the firepits, then you don’t know which way this book’s gonna go. I figured, let’s make this sooner rather than later, so that’s the first story I did, and after that it was clear sailing, and no one’s quite sure where I’m going to go. That’s what I was trying to do.

witnesses, and they weren’t coming over to Apokolips to fuse together into one entity. It wasn’t a deliberate homage.

TJKC: That’s why I’ve always felt yours was the best post-Kirby version of those characters. I mean, you solve the Anti-Life Equation.

Kirby hints at it, but you actually solve it, harness it, show it in practice, and the good and bad that comes from that. You came by our booth at Comic-Con that year and gave me some hints about what you had planned for Orion, and where you would go with it.

[Simonson laughs] I really was astounded; I had no idea where you could go with it after ending Jack’s original storyline. Obviously Jack gave future creators a lot to work with in the original series, but you took it and ran with it, in areas he probably wouldn’t have taken it.

WALTER: He might’ve gone somewhere else. I did try to derive as much as I could from Jack’s work. There was so much of his stuff, especially in relation to Apokolips, that seemed like how Jack’s life

TJKC: You ended your run on Orion with the revelation that Mister Miracle had the Anti-Life Equation all along, which was ironic since he was the one seeking his freedom, but secretly had the power to enslave the universe. You obviously put a lot of thought into this, but did you always view the series as being closed-ended and needing to wrap-up with that plot, or if sales had warranted, would it have gone on indefinitely?

WALTER: Oh, I’d have gone on with it if sales had justified it, absolutely. Thor I did for four years. I could probably have done five—I see five as kind of the ideal time to be doing a book. I’ve never done a book for that long. In the case of Orion, it wasn’t selling, but I had a great time doing it. I kind of felt I understood the Fourth 60

World universe. That kind of stuff really appeals to me and spurs my own imagination. I probably wouldn’t have told that story right then if the book wasn’t ending. When they decided to cancel the book, Mike Carlin and Joey Cavalieri and Paul Levitz all took me out to lunch, and told me they were going to cancel the book. I was very flattered, because usually when they cancel a book on you, your publisher and your editor and your group editor don’t take you out to lunch to tell you.

They just don’t. (laughter) I asked for a few more issues; I could see Paul blanching at the number, so I was able to cut that down. I’d had the idea for Scott Free in mind; I liked the irony. And it also came out of a question Weezie [below] had asked. It’s nice to live with one of comics’ best editors ever, because she’s forced to look at my stuff.

One of her questions about the Fourth World which she never understood was: Scott Free is a guy who basically was born in Heaven, then shuffled over to Hell, raised in Hell, brutalized, and then when he comes out, he’s this nice guy. Of the Kirby characters in that universe, he probably has the fewest internal conflicts. Mostly they’re external; he’s trying to get away from the war. How is that possible?

I wrote the introduction to the second volume of DC’s Fourth World reprints several years ago, and in it, I posited my own theory.

Kirby’s Fourth World books are about this great cosmic war, and one of the things I admire most about it is each book is one puzzle piece.

Jack wrote a braided storyline through four different comics. I saw New Gods as this great war from the point of view of the major players, the major warriors. I saw Forever People as the war from the point of view of the young, for whom war is still kind of an exciting game—to them, it’s not just as Darkseid says somewhere, “The cold game of the butcher.” Scott Free I saw as the Conscientious Objector, who did not want to fight—and this is a book that was being done while we were still in Vietnam. And then Jimmy Olsen was the war as seen from the ordinary person’s point of view, and how it affected them at the mortal level. So Scott was this Conscientious Objector to me, but he also was this very mellow guy. He enjoyed escaping, as he’d done from Apokolips. But this guy—after all, Orion is Nature vs. Nurture, one of Jack’s themes. Orion was born in Hell, but gets to be raised in Heaven, and he’s this really crabby guy! (laughter) And Scott Free was raised in Hell and really brutalized, and he’s pretty mellow.

How did that work out?

So in a sense, the idea of Scott possessing the Anti-Life Equation and having to live with it, and suppress it forever—or at least as long as he’s alive—that’s where the idea came from.

It made him the mellow guy he is; he’s not

mellow in the ordinary sense. To me, he carries this internal conflict that in some ways is more deadly than any of the other characters in the Fourth World actually carry. He needs to be almost a Zen master.

TJKC: When you ended Orion, you basically put everything back to the status quo, so the next creator to tackle it would be starting with a clean slate. Was that a specific company mandate?

WALTER: No. I just do that. You have your time to play in the sandbox, and you put together the castles you want to put together. When you leave, the next guy comes in and kicks down your castles, and starts building his own. So I don’t mind; I didn’t kick my castles down, but I left them standing in a way that somebody else could come in and build their own, and start from scratch. I don’t usually like leaving broken toys behind me if I can help it. ★

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(below) Kirby was hitting his stride on the Fourth World, just as DC forced him to pull it back. Below are pencils from Forever People #8, where readers are getting closer to solving the mystery of the AntiLife Equation—first with Sonny Sumo, then with Billion Dollar Bates. (previous page) Orion #4 (Sept. 2000) shows a Billion Dollar Bates clone horrendously being used to harness the Anti-Life Equation.

Going Kirby Commando

Tribute

very year, early-days-of-Comic-Con-throwback San Diego Comic Fest delivers a café environment with a different pop culture theme. Last year, it was Ray Harryhausen. The year before: Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. The inaugural 2012 show saw a tribute to George Clayton Johnson’s Laguna Beach Beat Generation hangout Café Frankenstein.

This year, the festival’s fifth, proved to be something extra special as the café exploded and crackled with imagery by the King in honor of The Kirby Centennial.

Yes, Jack Kirby (who would have turned 100 on Aug. 28) provided the theme, the narrative thread and plenty of memories and anecdotes for 2017’s Comic Fest, held across Presidents’ Day Weekend from Feb. 17 through 20 at San Diego’s Four Points Sheraton.

(The Kirby-themed outing also marked the Southern California festival’s first year at the new venue; previously, it had been held at the Sheraton Town and Country at Hotel Circle.)

With “the Kirby Café,” Comic Fest founder Mike Towry (right) and his sturdy staff—which included Comic Fest chairman Matt Dunford, staffer Eduardo Duran, Artist Alley director Benjamin Montag, graphic artist Katie Stapko and Souvenir Book editor Jay K. Blue—put on one hell of a Kirby Kracklin’ experience, replete with walls and walls worth of Kirby eye-candy, including posters featuring covers of every phase of the iconic artist’s storied career, from his Golden Age Captain America books in the 1940s through his creator-owned Captain Victory & The Galactic Rangers and Silver Star titles for Pacific Comics, which emerged from San Diego back in the 1980s.

The reason for the Kirby Centennial theme was a no-brainer for Towry, a founding father of Comic-Con International: San Diego in 1970 (then called San Diego’s Golden State Comic-Con).

“Decades later,” Towry said, “there continues to be a special place in my heart and mind for Jack ‘King’ Kirby, both as my still-favorite comics creator and as a wonderful person who was so generous with his time to a group of young fans from San Diego.”

Amid a robust holiday weekend’s worth of exhibiting and programming in every direction, the festival entertained some key Kirby conversation on each of its three days. On Saturday, February 18, Kirby Collector contributor and Kirby biographer Mark Evanier interviewed Mike Royer at a noon spotlight on the ’70s Kirby inker. Entertaining a packed Palm A room, comics historian/artist Arlen Schumer also presented his “visualecture” “The Centennial of the King of Comics, Jack Kirby,” that day.

Royer reappeared from 10 a.m. through noon on Sunday, February 19, for back-to-back panels “Jack Kirby: The Creator” and “Jack Kirby: The Man,” alongside moderator Evanier and fellow youthful Kirby acolyte Steve Sherman.

The Kirby programming closer Monday, February 20, appropriately threw the spotlight on the people Kirby loved the most: his loyal fandom. “When Fans Met Jack Kirby” engaged attendees in a light-hearted tribute by Towry with Roger Freedman, Phil Yeh and William R. Lund sharing their memories of meeting the King back in the day. It was, after all, Towry, Shel Dorf and a few other San Diegobased fans who paved the way for the creation of Comic-Con in 1970 after a group phone call and a visit to the King of Comics, who was freshly moved to California and temporarily living in Irvine, California.

“The first Marvel comic I ever read was Jack Kirby’s X-Men #1,” Towry recalled. “I was just a little kid at the time and my family was driving up to Los Angeles for an event, and my mother decided to buy me a comic to help keep me occupied.”

Towry added how, years later, he had found his new favorite comic after stumbling onto a copy of Fantastic Four #5.

“After reading that, my favorite comic immediately became Fantastic Four, my favorite villain Doctor Doom, and my favorite comic artist Jack Kirby.”

E

(above) Michael Aushenker at Comic Fest, holding the article he wrote about Jack for the Thousand Oaks, California newspaper.

Photo by Dean LeCrone.

(below) Jack loved cake, and so did his fans at Comic Fest, who all got a slice in honor of his 100th birthday.

Photos throughout by Peter Csanadi and Michael Aushenker.

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at San Diego Comic Fest 2017 (On a related sidenote, cartoonist Batton Lash and his wife, Comic-Con International organizer Jackie Estrada, hosted a centennial tribute at Comic Fest to Kirby’s erstwhile boss, pioneer graphic novelist Will Eisner, who ran the Eisner & Iger studio where Kirby was briefly employed during the Great Depression.)

In the center of all of Comic Fest’s Kirby madness stood the Kirby Café, prefaced in the hotel’s lobby by a monumental Kirby-esque Stone Sentinel (as seen in the monster-book pages of pre-Silver Age Marvel and The Mighty Thor’s exploits in Journey Into Mystery), designed by Robert Maya.

At the Comic Fest, Kirby Café creator Wendy Wildey discussed pulling the Kirby Café together the day before the festival, hanging those orb-popping 24" by 36" posters, which were digitally cleaned up by Phil Haxo.

“People told me they are seeing things that they just loved,” said Wildey, who put much thought into every aspect of the café’s presentation. Stepping inside the Kirby Café, overseen by Towry, even the most casual Kirby fan got a jolt from bold, bombastic artwork culled from the King’s different career phases. Wildey designed the café’s atrium to hold Kirby’s more personal and World War IIrelated Golden Age work, such as Captain America #1 and Boy Commandos, while through the internal window, “you see the future, the universe beyond” in the form of his Silver Age cosmic creations covering the walls deeper inside the room, including Silver Age covers for Fantastic Four, X-Men and The Avengers. A larger-than-lifesized Lord of Light figure towered behind the makeshift stage where some of the programming was held.

“All of the Silver Surfer covers where he’s actually flying are on the ceiling,” Wildey said.

Also looming overhead: that unforgettable boxed-woman-throwing image of OMAC #1, from Kirby’s Bronze Age period at DC Comics. On an easel stood the Planet of the Apes-evoking Kamandi #1.

Wildey, who had met Towry at the first Comic Fest in October 2012 and married him in June 2013, admitted that she was no Kirby scholar but she learned a lot while readying the Kirby Café.

“Mike helped me identify the key points,” Wildey said, also

The annual grassroots gathering themed their programming after the Kirby Centennial,

by Michael Aushenker

crediting Montag, who had designed the festival’s poster and commemorative t-shirt.

“I spent New Year’s Eve taking videos of the room,” Wildey continued, recalling the beginnings of the process of converting the Four Points’ café into a Kirby Café, adorned with more than 160 pieces of Kirby art. “What I was afraid of was letting people down.

Kirby is at the heart of so much. I wanted whoever walked in there to identify with something they loved.”

Between the panels and the parties, the Kirby Café was pretty packed a great deal of the time throughout the holiday weekend. San Diego resident Alex Acosta felt that Wildey’s efforts were a Kingsized success.

“The display of covers was especially successful in showcasing Kirby’s versatility as an artist,” Acosta said. “In addition to his regular super-hero work, it was nice to see a glimpse of the romance and Western titles he worked on during the super-hero drought of the early to mid-1950s.”

“It was a great choice by the organizers of the event to devote the cafe to Kirby’s 100th birthday,” Acosta said. “After all, an opportunity such as that was only going to come once.”

And in creating the Kirby Café, were there any Kirby creations that caught neophyte fan Wildey’s eye and heart?

“I fell in love with Devil Dinosaur,” Wildey said with a wide grin. ★

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Mark Evanier

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

(below) Comic-Con began as a one-day mini-con on March 21, 1970 at the U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego. It raised funds for the first full event: San Diego’s Golden State Comic-Con on August 13, 1970, with Jack as guest. Here’s Scott Shaw’s flyer for the first full Con. (bottom) Kirby signing at the 1986 Comic-Con, flanked by Roz Kirby.

(right) Neal Adams inked this Jimmy Olsen #141 cover, producing a unique blend of the two artists’ styles.

claim the honor?”

[Note from Mark Evanier: Mega-dealer Bud Plant appears to be #5.]

2017 San Diego Comic Fest Panel Held Sunday, February 19, 2017, at 10am. Featuring Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman, and Mike Royer. Transcribed by Steven Tice, and edited by John Morrow and Mark Evanier.

ROYER: In the old days that you’re talking about, the year that I got an Inkpot [Award], I’m standing at 2:00 in the morning at an all-night party, and there’s a hand on my shoulder that says, “Well, we got ours, kid,” and I turn around and it’s Burne Hogarth.

MARK EVANIER: Good morning! I’m Mark, that’s Steve, that’s Mike. This is very strange; they’ve scheduled two panels back-to-back with us, and one of them is “Jack Kirby: The Creator” and the other is “Jack Kirby: The Man.” The first point we have to make is, you can’t separate those two. There’s no way, so we’re going to just view this as a two-hour panel, on Jack the Creator, and we’ll talk about all sorts of stuff. I hope you have lots of questions, because you will never have a better chance to get them answered.

I read last night on Facebook, someone was commenting how much they love this convention. And they said, “It reminds me of the great days of the El Cortez Hotel, when you could sit by the pool and talk about comics with Jack Kirby.” Now, I haven’t checked the pool here, (laughter) but I’ve got a hunch Jack ain’t out there.

At the original San Diego Cons, you could talk to Will Eisner, you could talk to Jack Kirby, you could talk to Burne Hogarth, you could talk to Ray Bradbury.

EVANIER: It’s kind of amazing, to realize how long the conventions have been going, and how we have now metamorphosed into the “old pros” at them. I see conventions say, “We’re going to have a lot of the founding members of comics like Joe Kubert and Mark Evanier.” (laughter) And I’m like, “Wait a minute!”

People argue about the dividing line between the Golden Age and the Silver Age, and when did the Silver Age end? It’s real simple. The Silver Age ended when I got into the business. (laughter) I was the line of demarcation. 1970, that was it. It’s as good a dividing line as any, really, when you come right down to it. You can argue it’s when Jack went to DC: 1970—or the first issue of Conan came out: 1970—or when the corporate takeovers of DC and Marvel were finally fully executed: 1970. There it is again, 1970. The business was over, and we didn’t know it. (laughter) We’re going to answer every question we can during this time here, but let me start by saying, as an

MIKE ROYER: You could sit at the pool and play movie trivia with Harlan Ellison.

EVANIER: That’s right. At this convention, I believe the people who have been in comics the longest are us— (laughter) which startles me.

At this convention, Bill Stout is in the Dealer’s Room, Jackie Estrada is over there, and there’s a fellow named Gene Henderson walking around— (whispering) there’s a birthday party for Gene a little later— and I think the four of us, those three people and me, are the only people who’ve been to every San Diego Comic-Con in its existence. (applause) We’re gonna put a picture of them on my blog in the next day or so, and say, “Anybody else want to 64

Photo by Peter Csanadi.

overview, the three of us are colored by personal affection for Jack and an enormous sense of gratitude. All of you owe Jack something.

Anybody who’s in comics owes Jack something. We have a little larger debt, because the man not only gave us inspiration, he gave us work.

He transformed our lives, he taught us stuff. Roz made sandwiches for us. We swam in his pool. Jack had a great pool.

understand that when Mike came aboard, working for Jack, it wasn’t just that he was the best choice. He was the only choice. If Mike had not been interested in doing the job, or had been unavailable, the next choice was someone in New York. And no matter who that person was, that took away Jack’s control. One of the many reasons that Jack loved Mike’s work was that Jack was the editor of the books when Mike inked them, and Mike sent the pages to Jack when they were done, not to the office. Anybody in New York—if it hadn’t been Vince Colletta, if it’d been Frank Giacoia—they would’ve turned the books in to Carmine [Infantino] or Sol Harrison in New York. Jack would not have seen them until they were printed and those people would have felt that they were working for Sol Harrison or Carmine or whoever it was back there, not for Jack. One of the 23 reasons why Vince Colletta was removed from the job, was that he was not willing to take editorial direction from Jack.

Mike was not only willing to take editorial direction from Jack, Mike’s loyalties were to Jack and not to DC. Plus, the fact is, Jack wanted a guy who could do all of it. You and I can all name wonderful inkers who could not have inked as fast as Jack drew, and Jack needed someone to letter the books. Mike was a great letterer. The mere fact that the books were lettered and finished in Los Angeles was a major victory for Jack. When he finally convinced DC, “I want my own guy in Los Angeles; I want this guy Mike Royer to do it,” the DC people kind of said, “Okay, fine, we’ll let him try his guy. It’ll get screwed up, and he’ll come crawling back to us, and we’ll have proved”—which was the DC theory at the time—“that we make the books. The editorial office makes the books.” And there was a tendency at that point, when the material came in from the freelancers—when Curt Swan turned his work in, or Bob Brown or Irv Novick, any one of those guys—no matter even if they’d worked for DC for thirty years, the production department went, “Okay, we’ve gotta fix this somehow.” They would do a little tampering with everybody’s work. They did less of it with the guys who were in the office since when they’d tamper with Neal Adams’ work, he’d come storming out in the hall and yell at them. Jack wasn’t there, and the only person who was really an advocate for Jack was a fellow named Nelson Bridwell.

If you are looking at the history of Jack at DC, make sure you include the name of Nelson Bridwell, who was the only guy in the New York office who had Jack’s back, who was warning him of what they were doing to his stuff. Nelson was a very brilliant, clever man who was treated at DC exactly the same way Alan Brady treated Mel Cooley [on the Dick Van Dyke Show]. (laughter) They yelled at him, they called him names, they demeaned him, and did not recognize the fact that he was the smartest guy in the building, by far.

ROYER: We became—some more than others—extended Kirby family. 90% of the work I did was not for Marvel or DC. It was for Jack. I worked for Jack. He’s who I wanted to please.

EVANIER: We all wanted to please him. For those of you who didn’t hear the interview I did with Mike yesterday, I always want people to

ARLEN SCHUMER (from audience): Did everybody treat him that way? Not just [Mort] Weisinger, but everybody?

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Jack Miller

Jack Schiff

Julie Schwartz George Kashdan Murray Boltinoff

Irwin Donenfeld Mort Weisinger

Robert Kanigher

Nelson Bridwell

EVANIER: Pretty much... well, other people treated him nicer, because they were nicer than Weisinger, but nobody recognized that this was a guy who, and I’m not exaggerating...

(left) Mike Sekowsky’s twopage spread from Inferior Five #6 (Jan. 1968), with DC staffers identified. Photos shown here are Mort Weisinger (above), Bridwell and Sol Harrison (below). At left are caricatures of Jack Miller and Harrison abusing Bridwell in Inferior Five #6.

MIKE CATRON (from audience): Let me tell you about my friend Nelson. I worked for DC for about a year, and Nelson was across the hall from me. And you’re right; he was the subject of derision and mocking, by just about everybody on the staff. I had a great affection for him, but he was a pretty private guy, so I can’t say he was a really close friend. But he’s everything you said he was. He was not just well-versed in comics, he was wellversed in literature and history, and he was some kind of savant, I think. He was never treated well, and I think we relied on him tremendously, but he was never appreciated. I always thought that was a tragedy.

There were people who recognized that. Paul Levitz [understood] what Nelson knew, and that sort of thing. He wasn’t hated or anything like that, but there were certain people who seemed to go out of their way to treat him like that.

SCHUMER: He was an historian.

EVANIER: He was an associate editor.

He was the reprint editor, and you could say to Nelson, “In what issue did Batman first put gas pellets in his utility belt?” and he could tell you the issue number and the exact panel. But here’s the thing, and I’m not exaggerating. I had just read Canterbury Tales when I first met Nelson, and we started talking about [author Geoffrey] Chaucer, and he quoted me the entire first six pages of Canterbury Tales. He was that brilliant, and he had that kind of a memory. I have an aversion to using the word “nerd” to apply to those of us who know a lot about comics. I think it’s kind of a stupid, self-deprecating, needless thing. In a world where the #1 movie is Iron Man, isn’t everyone a nerd? (laughter) But Nelson looked kind of funny. He was an oddshaped man. He had these strange noises that came out of him. He’d walk down the hall and you’d hear these strange noises, and you were trying to figure out what part of his body those noises came from. (laughter) He snorted and sniffled, but he was just this brilliant... if Jack had met Nelson a few years earlier, I would tell you that he based that Quasimodo character in Fantastic Four on him: The brilliant brain trapped in the monster body.

EVANIER: Nelson was Jack’s spy in the office, and the one guy who understood what Jack was doing, and really appreciated it. He was always belittled by people. As Arlen [Schumer] mentioned, Mort Weisinger didn’t treat him very well.

Nelson was a very clever man—he wrote for Mad Magazine. He was the first fan to ever write for Mad Magazine.

He had a great sense of humor. If you read the Inferior Five, there’s an issue, I think it’s #5 or #6, [that takes place] in the DC offices, and it’s full of little digs that are sometimes too subtle for you to get them. He took the entire DC Comics staff apart—he roasted them in one of their own comics, and a lot of people did not get the jokes. When Weisinger 66

was “retired”/ousted, they had a farewell luncheon for him, a little roast. And Nelson got up—(turns to Steve Sherman) did you ever hear the tape of this? He turned into Don Rickles, ripping Mort Weisinger a new one. (laughter) Now that he was no longer working for him, he just ripped him to pieces. And it was brilliant, and hysterical.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is there a transcript of that?

those, so they promised Bruce plenty of work. Jack was very conscientious about taking care of his inkers, and making sure they had work. Bruce Berry had ordered a wife; he’d made a deal for a wife from one of these firms that sends Russian women over to marry you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh, like Trump. (laughter) EVANIER: Yeah, that’s right! (laughter) There was no way Jack was going to abandon Bruce Berry when he was trying to build a family. So Marvel promised to give Bruce steady work, and then they didn’t. They sent him a couple of brief jobs to be inked overnight, because you can’t really... and Mike had this problem when he worked for them at one point. There was a period where he went to work for Marvel and they just kept saying, “We sending something out tomorrow, we’re sending something out in a couple of days.” Because the

EVANIER: Someone played me the audio of it. I’d love to get a copy. I don’t have a copy of it; it was bad audio, but it was so clever.

ROYER: Can I interrupt, and go back to something you brought up?

The people at DC were positive that I would fail, and what was interesting is I had been doing some stuff with Jack for Marvelmania, and he called me one day and says, “I’m going to New York. I can’t tell you what it’s about, but you’re part of it.” Two days later I got a call from Maggie Thompson saying, “What’s this I hear that Jack’s left Marvel and gone to DC?” and I go, “Beats me!” When Jack got back, I believe he called me from LAX airport, and said he had left Marvel, and gone to DC, that I was part of the package, but they wouldn’t accept it. And it’s so funny that I proved them wrong— to their chagrin, I didn’t flop. And then when he went back to Marvel— as an example that they started to trust me, because Marvel of course didn’t want me, they wanted to control stuff in New York, so it took another five issues—in that interim period, I inked Steve Ditko and a whole lot of people who were at DC at the time. So I like to think that, not only to their chagrin did I prove that they were wrong, they trusted me enough to give me other people, until Jack called and informed me that finally, I would be working on the Marvel books.

EVANIER: When Jack went back to Marvel, he wanted Bruce Berry to letter and ink his work, and Marvel did not want Bruce Berry. I don’t know to what extent it was that they didn’t like his work, or because they didn’t want to lose that control. It was probably a combination of 67

(below) D. Bruce Berry’s inks for the final page of the 1985 Hunger Dogs graphic novel. Berry never inked any of the original Fourth World books, but since Royer was unavailable, he got the nod to do Hunger Dogs based on his 1970s work on Kamandi and OMAC.

polite, but wanted this over with. So I got off the phone and I thought, “Wait, he probably thinks this is one of those old reprint checks for $4 or something.” So I called him back, and he said, “Why are you bothering me?” And I said, “Just listen for a sec. I just have to get this off my conscience. It’s a lot more money than you think. Now, if you don’t want to look into it, that’s your business, but I think you’re doing a stupid thing for your family to not call and at least see how much money it is, and to see if you want it. Goodbye.” Click.

He calls me back the next day, and they had something like $8,000 for him. (audience gasps) Which is probably about what he made for all the inking he did for Jack in the first place. And he called and apologized, and thanked me for that, and said he made a couple of house payments or something. I thought to myself, once again, Jack kind of took care of Bruce. If Bruce had been inking—name another book. That book would probably not have been reprinted as much as Kirby work has been. Almost everything Jack ever did has been reprinted.

ROYER: When DC was finally ready to acquiesce to his wishes and bring me into the fold, Jack was concerned that Colletta wouldn’t continue to have the body of work he was used to. That’s Jack. Jack was the family man. As Steve and I talked the other night, Jack was absolutely the purest total artist and family man you ever would encounter in your life. He wanted me to ink his books; that was his idea in the beginning. But he didn’t want Colletta to be out of work. That’s the part of our panel that’s “Jack: The Man.” EVANIER: I was in fairly good touch with Nelson. Nelson said, “Every time Jack calls me, he says ‘Is Vince okay? Has Vince got enough work?’” Vince never had enough work; there was no such thing as enough work for Vince Colletta.

ROYER: Alex Toth would always say he hated to run into Colletta, because Colletta’s mantra was “Ten Pages a Day!” guys in-house had first pick.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I thought that was Jack Kirby’s mantra.

ROYER: Yeah, it’s a variation of “The check is in the mail.” The work is in the mail.

EVANIER: No, Jack’s was “Fifteen A Day!” (laughter) And Jack’s were good. (laughter) Nelson once called me up and said, “Colletta has managed the trifecta.” And I said, “What’s the trifecta?” He said, “He’s now been banned from Kirby, Neal Adams, and Alex Toth, the three best artists in comics.” (laughter) If you had to name the three best artists in comics, that’s not a bad list. I think Gil Kane also said he wouldn’t let him near his pencils, and a few other people. Not everybody did that, because these guys grew up in the Depression, and were always very respectful of each

EVANIER: They get it to you eight weeks late, and you’ve got to keep to the original deadline. Bruce finally got out of doing comics altogether.

I don’t know if you know this. Bruce has passed away now, but about eight or nine years ago, DC called me up and said, “We’ve got reprint money for Bruce Berry. We don’t know where to find him.”

Richard Kyle gave me Bruce’s number. He was living back in Chicago.

I called him up and he said, “Mark, if this is about comics, I don’t talk about comics anymore. I put that behind me, I have nothing to do with that. I appreciated all the support I got from you guys back then, but that’s a closed chapter in my life. I don’t want to be interviewed, I don’t want to talk about that stuff.” And I said, “Well, I just want you to know that DC Comics is sitting there with some money for you. Just call them up and see how much they’ve got.” He said, “I don’t care what it is. Thank you very much. Goodbye.” He was 68

other’s need to make a living. Colletta, to say something on his behalf a little bit, he was a guy who got paid about what he delivered. They didn’t pay him for masterpieces.

They paid him the lowest rate.

ROYER: When I started in this business—and this is in defense of Vince—Sparky Moore told me you get your first job on your ability, and every other job after that on your dependability. Vince was an incredibly reliable guy. If he was given a book on Friday and they needed it on Tuesday, they got it Monday afternoon. Now that has nothing to do with the quality of the work, or what he may’ve been best suited for. I still remember how much I liked the way, in romance comics, he inked long blonde hair. So I don’t have anything bad to say about Vince, it’s just that he was not right for certain artists.

EVANIER: I always thought the problem with Vince on Jack was miscasting, more than it was his effort.

Everyone in this room can name two great artists who didn’t go well together. I love this penciler, I love this inker. Together? It would’ve been better if either one of them had done it by himself. That happens in comics.

it at the same time as the March issue of Thor.” No. He was sometimes three months ahead on one book, and six months ahead on another book. They don’t match up all the time. You can’t look at the on-sale dates and know when he did them. You can get a little clue if you look at the serial numbers, but even that doesn’t tell you always. We all know, as Kirby experts, Fantastic Four #39 had Daredevil in it, and Wally Wood inked the Daredevil figures in it. That was because, when Jack penciled that issue, Daredevil had the old costume. Jack was way ahead on Fantastic Four. He may have drawn that issue before Wally Wood even started on Daredevil and changed the costume. The first issues of the New Gods, Forever People, and Mister Miracle were given to Vince five months before they went to press, I think.

Those books were not inked over a weekend.

ROYER: Mark touched on the attitude the people east of the Hudson River had. They finally trusted me enough, that when Jack went back to Marvel, to send me work. I

ROYER: Jack called me on the recommendation of Alex Toth, who in essence told him I would be a good inker for him. I never inked Alex, because we both knew that I would be wrong to ink Alex.

EVANIER: Alex thought everybody was wrong to ink Alex. (laughter) ROYER: Alex was the kind of a guy you had a relationship with that was on and off.

Sometimes more off.

EVANIER: I turned my relationship with Alex off at one point, and realized I should’ve done it years earlier.

The thing was, Colletta had been inking all the romance books at DC. He had a deal that gave him “X” number of pages, and then half of the romance books were cancelled, and the other half went mostly reprint. So DC owed him a lot of work. I think one of the reasons Colletta became Jack’s inker was because DC had this obligation to him. Another reason was that he was a loyal paisan, but another reason was, they liked the way he inked Jack. As long as Mike Royer was doing the work, Sol Harrison still wished it was Vince Colletta, partly because of the control in the office which he liked to have, and partly because there are people who just like what Vince did.

Yeah, he was super-reliable. He’d get it back in three days to you. Frequently that’s offered as an excuse: “He was always saving deadlines.”

That didn’t happen very much. And if ever there was a guy whose worked didn’t have to be inked overnight, it was Jack’s, because Jack was never late with anything. Another thing people sometimes don’t get when they look at the history of Marvel or any big company, is that issues that came out at the same time weren’t all done at the same time. They think, “Okay, here’s the March issue of Fantastic Four. Jack must’ve done 69

(previous page) This Tales To Astonish #90 cover (April 1967) loses none of its impact with Vince’s delicate inking—a great example of the Kirby/Colletta combo working well. (previous page, bottom) Wallace Wood inked and altered Jack’s Daredevil figures in Fantastic Four #39 to show his new costume. (below) From Spirit World #1 (1971), Colletta’s moody brushwork delivers on images with hair, shrubbery, rocks, and other organic objects.

(this spread) Pencils vs. Royer inks (and letters!) for the Forever People #8 splash page. (right) Mike Royer is immortalized by the US Postal Service for his contribution to this Green Arrow postage stamp, which debuted at Comic-Con 2006. (next page, bottom) Early Royer solo work for Marvelmania Magazine.

had a continuity of work, so obviously they trusted me, but I was still “that kid on the West Coast.” I inked a couple of Ernie Chua Batmans in Detective Comics. I still have the inner-office memo from Julie Schwartz saying, “Nice job, kid.” (laughter) EVANIER: I grew up in West Los Angeles, and I never thought I’d work in comics, really. Because every interview I read about professionals back then said you’ve got to live in New York, and be able to commute to the office and come in and pick up work. And I thought, “Well, okay, I guess I won’t work in comics.” That changed a lot, and there were two factors that changed that prejudice about working outside of New York. One

was Jack. Once Jack was out there...

STEVE SHERMAN: ...everybody was.

EVANIER: Yeah. The other was the Philippines. When they suddenly were sending work to the Philippines, sending it to Los Angeles didn’t seem like that big of a deal. And then a few years later—here is one of the great brags I have of my career. When you look at the big achievements I’ve done, I was the very first person to ever deliver a job to DC

by Federal Express. (laughter) I sent something back to them, and they called me and said, “What is this?”

And I said, “This is Federal Express.”

And they said, “When did you mail this?” And I said, “Last night.” And they said, “It’s here now?!” I said, “Obviously.” (laughter) And they said, “What did it cost you to get this to us overnight?” I said, “$15.” They said, “Oh, we’ll never use that.” (laughter) And that narrowed it down, and of course along came the Internet.

Anyway...

We’re wandering away from Jack here a little bit, but again the point was that Jack, another frontier he blazed was living outside New York and working for comics. He made it more possible for other people to do that, because there weren’t that many people before Jack. Dick Sprang lived outside New York and worked for comics; I think Charles Paris for a while did, and a few other guys like Jim Mooney.

ROYER: Jack was the pioneer. Before Jack came west, there was no Dark Horse Comics in Milwaukee, no Image in Portland. Of course, probably a prejudice the New York companies had, was that on the West Coast was the offices for Western Printing and Lithography, which had some people in New York, but the bulk of all their comic books was drawn on the West Coast. I guess the obvious resentment or neglecting of Western by the New York publishers is [due to] that, the Dell comic books outsold everything that DC and Marvel produced. So let’s just pretend they don’t exist.

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EVANIER: When Russ Manning was doing Tarzan for Western, sometimes with Mike involved, that book outsold everything at DC at the time. It outsold Superman. When Russ inquired about getting work from DC at one point, they treated him like, “Well, if you’re ever in New York, maybe we’ll give you something to ink as a tryout.” They didn’t respect the professionalism. And the point I made on the panel with Mike yesterday was, when Mike first inked Jack’s work, Mike was not a beginner. Mike had worked for Warren on Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella. He’d worked on the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon shows for Grantray-Lawrence. He did the Spider-Man show and the Marvel Super-Heroes show. He’d done some stuff for Cartoons magazine. He’d done record album covers, stuff for Western Publishing; you’d done Magnus, Robot Fighter for them.

ROYER: I even wrote a couple of them.

EVANIER: Yeah, and he’d worked for Disney on a lot of things at that point. I’m leaving out a couple of other credits here, and he was a seasoned professional of what, eight years, seven years, something like that? And they treated him like, “Well, if you didn’t work for us, or you didn’t work for Marvel, you’re a beginner.” That was amazing.

ROYER: Of course, a lot of people still think I’m a beginner. (laughter) EVANIER: Steve—Mike told a story about how he found out Jack was going from Marvel to DC. Let’s tell the story of how we got involved.

SHERMAN: Let’s see. We were working at Marvelmania, and I say “working” loosely,

(laughter) because it really was just a bunch of us from the L.A. Comic Book Club going in there and helping to roll posters and stuff envelopes and things like that. And I guess you had contacted Don Wallace first.

EVANIER: Steve and Mike will tell you, they’ve been around me long enough to know that my life abounds in amazing coincidences, things that would never happen to anybody else. There was a science-fiction convention at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica on the July 4th weekend of 1969. It was called Westercon.

I did not attend it because I had just gotten my first professional assignment for Laugh-In magazine. I sold a bunch of articles for Laugh-In magazine, and I was actually even drawing a piece—that’s why that magazine’s no longer around. (laughter) So I didn’t go to the convention. A bunch of our comic club members did. Steve, did you ever hold office?

SHERMAN: No. EVANIER: Steve was a member of the club, anyway. And his brother Gary, and our friend Bruce Simon.

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(this spread) Two pages from Fantastic Four #97 (April 1970 cover date), the issue fans saw when they visited Jack on July 8, 1969 (the Tuesday after Westercon). So Jack drew these #97 pages in early July, and was plotting #98 then as well. The Apollo 11 moon landing occurred a week later on July 16, so Jack would’ve been drawing #98 just after that. Did Stan instruct Jack to riff on the moon landing in that phone plotting session, or did Jack head off in his own direction?

SHERMAN: And don’t forget I was all of, oh, twenty. Everybody else was, like, 17, 18, 19.

EVANIER: I was 17.

SHERMAN: Yeah. So it wasn’t—when you say the L.A. Comic Club, it wasn’t like a bunch of [older] guys; it was kids, basically.

EVANIER: Yeah. We’d get together every Saturday at Palms Park, and we would just talk and argue about comics. We would have these vitriolic debates over who was the best inker for John Buscema and who drew the best Batman.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Have things changed in forty years?

EVANIER: No. (laughter) One time this kid comes into one of our meetings. It was the only time he was ever there, and he walks in, and he says, “Why are some people allowed to work in comics? There are some guys who are so sh*tty and untalented and terrible that I can’t believe they hire them.” And we said, “Well, who do you mean?” “Well, Joe Kubert, for one thing.” (laughter) And we drove this guy into the street in tears. This guy left after the meeting crying, and angry. I mean, you tolerate all viewpoints, but some things you just can’t put up with. (laughter) And we would play games. We played a game—the club was called the L.A. Comic Book Club, but its unofficial name was S.M.A.S.H.—we came up with this when we were 14, the “Society for Magazine Appreciators of Super Heroes.” (laughter) So what we’d do some weeks is we’d play a game of S.M.A.S.H. Jeopardy!. I would make a Jeopardy! board where the categories were, like, the Comics Code, Batman villains, and we’d play games.

Steve over there is nodding at all this.

So some of our club members were at this convention, and they met Jack. Jack and Roz had shown up at this science-fiction convention not as guests.

They’d paid admission. He and Roz had only been in Southern California for a few months. They were renting a house down in Irvine, California, and they were trying to find local artists, because Jack still had this idea that at some point he would create something like the old Simon and Kirby shop and work with other artists. So it got around the convention, Jack Kirby is here. None of our members had ever met a comic book artist at all, let alone Jack Kirby. I, at that point in my life, had met three comic book creators. I had met a man name Ken Landau, who had done a lot of comic books in the Fifties for ACG and stuff like that. His son happened to be in my class at high school. And I’d also met Bob Kane, (hiss from audience) and I’d met Jerry Siegel. So I’d met one comic book artist. (laughter) And when I tell people, it’s a little glib but I say, “I met the co-creator of Batman, the co-creator of Superman, and then the co-creator of everything else.” (laughter) So all these club members went over to Jack and they ask him, “Oh, will you come to our club and speak?” Roz said, “Why don’t you come down and visit us? Why don’t you bring your Board of Directors down?” So they said, “Sure” and they made an appointment to go down to Irvine. One of them was a guy named Rob Solomon, who was the secretary of the club. Another was a fellow named Bruce Schweiger, who was the Special Projects Manager. Another was Mike Rotblatt, who was the Treasurer. And I went along because I was the President of the club. They picked the following Tuesday to go down to Irvine.

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None of us drove, and these other three guys were all in high school half-day. So the plan was that I would meet them outside Hamilton High School.

Mike Rotblatt’s mother would pick us up there and drive us to Irvine. I took a bus down to the Pico-Robertson newsstand where I bought the new Marvels for the month. I opened them up, and there was an ad for Marvelmania International, this new fan club, this new merchandising thing that was selling posters and decals. Or at least, they were taking your money for them, and occasionally delivering one. They didn’t fill half the orders. The Post Office Box was in Culver City, California. I was five miles from Culver City and I thought, “My gosh, Marvel’s opening an office out here?” I went to a pay phone and I asked for Marvelmania International. They connected me with this place, a man answered and he said, “Oh, yeah, you’re a local comic book fan? Well, come on down to the office. We want to meet the local comic book fans. We’re starting up this new big fan club and stuff.” I said, “Well, I have to go to Irvine right now to meet Jack Kirby.” And for a second I thought he’d go, “Who’s that?” But he said, “Oh, yeah, give Jack my best, and come in tomorrow.” I said, “Where are your offices?” He gave me the address, and he was three blocks from that phone booth.

So the bunch of us drove down to meet Jack.

We got to the address in Irvine and Mike’s mother dropped us off and said she’d be back for us in a couple of hours. We knocked at the door and there was no answer so we worried, “Did we get the wrong house?” We peeked in the window and there were a bunch of Marvel comics on a pile so, okay, we had the right house. Five minutes later, Roz drove up and Jack got out of the car holding an unlit cigar. We introduced ourselves very nervously. I introduced myself first and then I said, “This is Robert Solomon.” Jack turned to Rob and said, “It’s your fault! You hired him!” And Rob went, “What?” This was the first of many times in my life that I didn’t know what the hell Jack was talking about. (laughter) He kept saying, “You hired him!” Well, Rob was in high school. He’d never had a job. He never hired anybody but you could tell Jack thought he was saying something brilliant and funny and clever. He was laughing at his own joke, and we didn’t get it. And finally I thought, “Wait a minute.”

Being comic book fans, we had read the Statements of Ownership of certain old Marvel books, and some listed: “Robert Solomon, controller.” There was a guy named Robert Solomon on the staff at Marvel and we occasionally joked that our Rob Solomon was the same Robert Solomon, and asked him, “Were you really employed

by Marvel for your pre-natal work?” (laughter) So I said to Jack, “Robert Solomon hired Stan Lee?” and Jack said, “Yes!” (laughter) Then he said to me, “You know your comics, young man.” (laughter) That was the joke.

We talked to Jack for a while and every so often he would say something like, “So then Martin Goodman did this,” and my friends would look blank, and I’d go, “Martin Goodman is the publisher of Marvel.” And again, Jack would turn to me and say, “Yeah! You know your comics!” He was so impressed with that.

While we’re sitting there, the phone rings, and it’s Stan Lee. It’s time to plot a Fantastic Four and Jack says, “Excuse me,” and he takes

the call right in front of us, so we saw the entirety of the next Fantastic Four plotted in about ninety seconds. It consisted of Jack saying, “Yeah, I’m going to do this story about so-and-so and so-andso. Okay, I’ll try to make it interesting. Thank you.” (laughter) Something like that. I don’t remember it exactly. But I thought, “That’s how a comic’s plotted?” Well, with Lee and Kirby, it was. Jack had on his drawing table that day the pencil art two-thirds completed for an issue of Fantastic Four. I think it was #97. It was the one with the Monster from the Lost Lagoon. We looked at these pencils, and we were like, “Aahhh!” He had a lot of other pencil pages around and we could not believe how good the pencil art was. We’d never seen Jack Kirby pencil art, ever. As you know, it’s kind of jarring. You’ve all seen this stuff. You kind of think, “Gee, even with the best inkers, lots of stuff never made it through to print.” Mike did as good a job as anybody could, but there’s something in Jack’s raw, pure pencils—.

ROYER: Oh, yeah. No matter how good you might be, you just—you can finish a statement, but you really can’t plus him. Nobody asked, 73

but my two favorite Jack Kirby inkers are Joe Sinnott and me. (applause) Now, that sounds immodest, and the basic difference between us is that Joe Sinnott inked Jack “MGM.” I inked Jack “Warner Brothers.” (laughter)

little bit of an artist. A very little bit of an artist. I was making a few bucks doing some drawings for magazines and such. It was something I never really pursued, but if people were going to pay me for it, I would do it. And my friend said, “Oh, Mark here draws fanzine covers. He’s an artist.” And Jack went, “Yeah? Here, why don’t you finish a panel for me, kid?” And I thought, wait a minute now. He wanted me to sit at his drawing table, just as he had Mike sit there and ink that one first piece, and he wanted me to finish a panel, penciling a panel. And I thought, I’m not good enough to finish the art of the worst guy at Marvel, let alone the best guy, but Jack said, “No, no, just draw a hand on that figure.” At first, I thought I would ruin an entire page but then I thought, “Wait a minute. Jack’s got an eraser.” (laughter) And Joe Sinnott’s inking the book. So how bad can it be?

So I drew the hand in, and I assume after I left Jack erased it and did it right. But when that issue came out, it was not inked by Joe Sinnott. It was inked by Frank Giacoia, and I thought to myself, “Sinnott refused to ink it when he saw that hand.” (laughter) I gave Jack some of the fanzines I had written, and I thought I’d just leave them and he might look at them later but he said, “Roz, take them on a tour of the house” and he sat and read a story that I had written in one of these fanzines. He said to me, “Hey, you’ve got some ability.” He had told me the guy at Marvelmania didn’t know anything about comics. He said, “That guy needs someone like you.

He doesn’t know—he keeps thinking that we do Billy Batson Captain Marvel.” So the next day I went to Marvelmania and he hired me because Jack had called him and said, “Get this kid. He knows comics real well.” And then, I in turn got them to hire Steve and a lot of other guys who worked there until we realized the depths of the larceny that was going on, and we got the hell out of there.

One of the many people they stiffed was Jack. Those giant posters that Jack did, which you’ve all seen—he never got paid for those.

And one day Jack got fed up with all the lies and stalling, and he comes down to the office, and the guy in charge was in Rome at the time.

Now, why was he in Rome? Steve, tell them

EVANIER: Yeah, that’s a good analogy. And Vince Colletta was like Roger Corman. (laughter) ROYER: Yesterday at Barry Geller’s Lord of Light panel, he was showing all the phony stuff that was originally Lord of Light that was remade in Argo, logos put on it, and the stuff that was supposed to be in the film that actually showed Jack’s work, and for some reason it never appears in Argo. And I said, well, if they did use it, Stan would want to make a cameo in the film. (laughter) AUDIENCE MEMBER: Before we leave the subject of Marvelmania, I’d like to say I have an indirect connection. My brother-in-law, Jerry Nolan, used to print all of the Marvelmania stuff in Culver City there.

EVANIER: Wow. On La Cienega Boulevard, he had a place—the Quickprint Brothers, we called them, across the street. It was a little print shop that did a lot of the Marvelmania stuff over there. Yes. SHERMAN: And we’re very sorry you never got paid. (laughter) By the way, Mark and I plan to resurrect Marvelmania International.

We’re going to have color catalogs, posters. Of course, we’re not going to deliver any of it. (laughter) ROYER: But do you remember the series of super-villains that Jim Steranko penciled for Marvelmania? He came and stayed at our house for a week, so Steranko’s in my house for a week, and we literally changed our entire life. We got up at 1:00 in the afternoon and went to bed at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.

But he penciled those pieces at my house and then asked me to ink them, and then he said, “When I get the originals back, since you put me up for a week and put up with a whole lifestyle change, you can have the originals.” And then, a couple years later, when I sold a couple of them to raise some money to begin my 16mm collecting days, he said, “How come you sold that stuff?” (laughter) EVANIER: The premise we’re going to use for this, where we take orders for things and don’t fill them, is what is now called “crowdfunding.” (laughter) So Jack had on his drawing table, this Fantastic Four issue.

And I, at that point in my life, was a 74

why he was in Rome.

SHERMAN: Star Trek.

SHERMAN: Because he had gotten the brilliant idea that he was going to build a theme park called “Rome B.C.,” which would recreate ancient Rome, and what he was going to do was buy the sets from a movie that was shot in Spain of the Roman Empire. Now, what he didn’t realize was, he didn’t know that the sets were made out of chicken wire and plaster, and you can’t move them.

They’d fall apart. He didn’t have a dime to his name, but he was going to build an amusement park in Rome, Italy. And he bought these little soldiers and little Roman men, he had it on his desk, and he would line them all up and have them all set up. And I remember one time I came in there and I leaned on his desk and they all fell over. (whiny voice) “Aw, you ruined my Romans!” (laughter)

EVANIER: He did Star Trek postcards and others. These were the kind with the lenticular coating. And it had not gone well, but he had done a bunch of Marvel things for kids, a new audience, and he had gotten all these brochures that Marvel had saying, “We’ve got 75 million readers,” or whatever the number was then. He thought, “Well, maybe I can do something with Marvel characters” and he flew back to New York and made a big pitch to Martin Goodman and Chip Goodman. At that moment, as I understand it—I’m putting a few things together here—Marvel had been acquired by Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation, a guy named Marty Ackerman, who was the man who drove the Saturday Evening Post into the ground. He was complaining, “Why don’t we have merchandising?” like DC did. They thought Wallace was the answer, so they gave him a license for almost no money in advance for this Marvel material, and to create a licensing division.

Marvel didn’t own it. They were licensing it to him to do, and he had this incredible thing which could have made him a multi-billionaire if he had exploited it properly, but he didn’t know what he was doing and he had no capital. It takes money to start a business. He didn’t have money. And it also takes some knowledge.

He didn’t have a lot of knowledge. So there was this brief period when Marvelmania was the business of the moment. He was then going to flee and start another

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Was Marvelmania not connected with Marvel Comics in New York?

EVANIER: No. All it was was a guy who was a promoter.

This can get real long and away from Jack, but essentially this man, his name was Don Wallace. He had been a promoter and he had been a salesman. He was always trying to start a company, and he would start a company and it would go bankrupt, and he’d flee the sheriff and open another company someplace else. And at one point he had done a thing with 3-D postcards. He had done this—.

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(previous page) Jack surveys his SpiderMan Marvelmania poster art in his home studio. Also shown is the Marvelmania membership card, with Don Wallace’s signature. The “Keeper of the Green” looks to be “Dick Peckham”; that name ring a bell to anyone? (bottom) A 1971 late ad, attempting to liquidate leftover Marvelmania posters. (below) Fab Kirby/Sinnott Silver Surfer drawing from Marvelmania Magazine, lovingly colored by Randy Sargent.

(this spread) The full slate of Marvelmania posters, as originally conceived by Jack.

We recreated Spidey’s, Hulk’s, and Cap’s posters using Jack’s rejected art. (Yes, we know that Cap logo wasn’t yet in use at the time, but don’t it look purty?) (next page, bottom) The original art, inked

by Kirby, for the Silver Surer poster, the best seller of the line.

one, which ultimately he did. Steve and I worked there for a while, tried to make it as honest as possible, and finally one day we gave up. One night we went in after hours and we went through all the files, and we found out how bad off the company was, financially. We found out how many other names this guy had been operating under. He kept, for some reason, all this incriminating evidence. We also—remember the photos we found? One of the things he had done, when he was doing the 3-D posters, was he decided to do pictures of naked women, and we found all these photos of him with the naked women.

SHERMAN: Uschi Digard.

EVANIER: Uschi Digard. Do you remember who Uschi

Digard was, anybody? [some hands go up] She was a German woman with huge breasts who was in every men’s magazine at the time. We toyed with the idea of mailing those to his wife, but we didn’t do that. (laughter) Instead, we got the hell out of the company and we called Jack, and we called Steranko, and we called Stan Lee, and we called everybody we knew who we trusted, who we thought was going to get screwed here and told them, “Get out of business with this guy. He’s going under and taking us all down.” And we got out of the company.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But the irony is that the material itself was great. The posters were beautiful, the magazine—.

EVANIER: Oh, sure! Because Jack did—I did the magazine, and it wasn’t that great, but Jack did those posters, and the guy had nothing to do with them. But to give you an example— we can get into the weeds on this subject. The original deal was, Jack was going to do eight posters and they were going to put these out, and they were Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom, Thor, Hulk, Spider-Man, the Marvel super-heroes in a group shot, and Captain America. So Jack had done these eight posters but Marvel said, “You can’t have eight Jack Kirby posters. Half of the line has to be other artists.” Wallace had gotten into contact with Steranko, who had come up with two posters, one of Nick Fury, Agent of Shield, one of Captain America. The Nick Fury one was never printed as a poster. But they took Jack’s Captain America away and put Steranko’s Captain America in its place.

They had Herb Trimpe trace the Hulk poster, and you can see in my book the before and after. I don’t think there’s anything in the world that made Jack angrier than that, because here’s a poster that’s his work but

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somebody else’s name is signed to it, and Jack’s getting zero dollars, because he was on strict commission basis.

Trimpe got paid, Jack didn’t. The Romita poster was changed a lot, but it’s still somewhat Jack’s design.

And then, when Wallace was at Marvel’s offices one time, he saw this Black Knight piece of artwork which was a presentation piece that had been penciled by Howard Purcell and it had been inked by Tom Palmer. It was an original piece of art they hadn’t used, and Wallace, not knowing the Black Knight was not a major Marvel character, said, “Oh, that would make a great poster,” and that became the eighth poster, because it was free. That’s why there was a Black Knight poster, and that gives you an idea the depths of knowledge this man had of Marvel history.

So they put out these eight posters, and they didn’t sell at the rates that he thought they should, because he was expecting every poster to sell 10,000, 50,000, whatever. As an example, he thought kids would go nuts for decal sheets, and he designed dozens and dozens of decal sheets of Marvel heroes to sell. He thought this was going to be his big money thing, because kids would keep buying the decal sheets and putting the decals on everything, and then they’d buy more decal sheets. So he went to a company that made decal sheets and he got a price quote from them for how much they’d cost in runs of 50,000, how much in runs of 100,000. They said, “Well, in a 50,000 run, the decal sheets will cost you 52 cents apiece.” So he advertised them in the Marvelmania catalog as a dollar and a quarter plus 25 cents postage. You can do the math. If you sold 50,000 of them, that’s a pretty nice piece of change. When the catalog came out, he had sold 900 of them. He went back to the decal company and said, “Instead of 50,000, how much do they cost if I get 1000 made?” They said, “Oh, those will be $1.40 apiece.” So he’s selling $1.40 decal sheets for a dollar and a quarter. Can you figure out what went wrong with this company? (laughter) He only had two items that were really profitable.

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The magazine made a lot of money, for some reason, I guess because it was priced right. I was not getting paid much of anything, so it didn’t cost much to produce, and the #1 poster, by far, ahead of the others, was that Silver Surfer poster that Jack did—which was colored by Marie Severin, by the way. And everything else made four dollars or lost money, and that’s one of the reasons that company never—.

EVANIER: I think it was the best poster. Or in the catalog it looked the best. I don’t know. The character was popular. Maybe people were yearning for Jack’s Silver Surfer, because they weren’t getting it at that point. I don’t know.

ROYER: When I grew up, as a Jack Kirby fan, I was in love with all the Simon and Kirby books. For a nickel at the trading post down the road, I could get these old DC Kirby things, and I identified his work when I saw it, but I never paid attention, really, to that it was Jack Kirby—but I knew it was this artist, the way most of us knew when a duck was a Carl Barks duck. Now, in the early Sixties, I started getting interested in comic books other than the Dell product, and I see these Marvel books, and I see the signature “Jack Kirby,” and I’m thinking, “This reminds me of something, but there’s something missing.” And then in fanzines, the rare occasion that someone would have an opportunity to print his pencils, I looked at it and I went, “It’s that guy! This is the guy I grew up loving his work! And why doesn’t anyone ever ink him?”

So I’m working for Russ Manning and all these other people in the mid-Sixties, and actually worked on Marvel Super-Heroes, and finished artwork from stats pasted down. I even drew some original Tony Stark stuff, and then, when we did the Sub-Mariner, 80% of that was brand new, and I’m learning from Mel Keefer and Doug Wildey, and Mike Arens, who really became my mentor at the studio. He was Big Mike, and I was Little Mike. And I wound up, before I’d even met Jack, laying out one-third of the Saturday morning Spider-Man shows. So one night I’m walking across the backyard. It’s about 6:00.

The phone rings in the kitchen. I run and I go, “Hello?” [in a Kirby voice] “Mike Royer? This is Jack Kirby. Alex Toth says you’re a pretty good inker.” And I’m going, “Holy crap, what kind of a horrible trick is somebody pulling on me?” (laughter) And I said, “Jack Kirby?” He says, “Yeah, I’m living down at Irvine and Alex Toth says you were a good inker. Would you like to come down and do something for me?” So I always carry a little box with ink, pens, pencils, erasers—you know, the old wire thing you’d stick your brush in, and the bottom where you could put your water. And I always had that in my car, so it just happened to be with me. I meet Jack and Roz,

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why do you think the Silver Surfer sold more?

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and it’s like, this guy is Jack Kirby, but he’s like, Uncle Bill. (laughter) And he showed me the piece, which was one of those early pieces he did for Marvelmania, where he’s sitting at the drawing board, and I say, “Oh! Okay. Can I bring it back to you tomorrow?” And he says, “Well, why don’t you just do it here?” Oh my God. To me, that was like there couldn’t be any worse pressure in the world. It was worse than if your wife caught you with your mistress. It’s like, how do you handle this? So every twenty minutes Jack comes in and is looking over my shoulder. We break for lunch, and Roz has made us sandwiches, and not only is this Jack Kirby, who was one of my top icons—this is extended family on that very first visit. I mean, the Kirbys were just incredible human beings. I met his daughters. And after that I started inking stuff for catalogs and things that Jack would pencil for Marvelmania.

You talk about your career and point to incidents and stuff. My career is so much luck. When the Marvel Super-Heroes closed down production, it coincided with Western Publishing wanting more work from Russ Manning, and Russ Manning told the editors that the only way he could do more work was with my help, but he couldn’t pay me enough that I could make a living.

So Chase Craig at Western Publishing, the editor, called me up and said, “Would you like to come in and pick up some work?” I mean, it’s not the old, “Can I come in and show you some samples?” They figured if Russ trusted me—and so the first thing I did was pencil a Superboy frame tray puzzle that George Wilson painted on the East Coast. And, a few months later, I get a call from the animation studio saying, “We’re going to be doing Spider-Man.” So I went in and met their new business manager or production manager—and to show you how smart the studio was, he had come from the construction trade. (laughter) And I said, “I can only give you twenty hours a week.” After three weeks of working directly with Grant Simmons, the Grant of Grantray Lawrence, he said, “Mike, we got a problem.”

And I said, “What?” He said, “Everybody in house is madder than hell at you.” I said, “Why?” And he says, “You’re doing more in your twenty hours than they do in forty inhouse.” (applause, laughter) And I said, “Then what do I do?” He said, “Bill me for forty.”

But it was just a case of, when Spider-Man was finished, then there was another call from somebody saying, “This is happening,” and then, boom!, there’s the call from Jack, and it’s like—sometimes I wonder. In the whole overall picture of comic books, I’m just one cog in that huge wheel of mechanical wheels running together, but I was lucky to get to work with two of my all-time favorite icons, to work with and ink Russ Manning.

Come by my table and I’ll tell you some really fun inside stories of Grantray-Lawrence Animation and the Spider-Man show. If Lawrence hadn’t insisted on the non-union Trillum voice people in Canada, I would have been the voice of Peter Parker, Spider-Man. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mark, while we’re talking about Mike, can you just share with us how rare Mike’s skill as an inker truly is in the industry of comics? That you have all these other inkers who sort of do their own thing, and you really can’t truly appreciate the original penciler’s intent, the vision of their creation, and how rare Mike is in his skill as an inker.

EVANIER: Well, he’s enormously rare. Now, in fairness,

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(top) The replacement Marvelmania posters by (left to right) John Romita, Herb Trimpe, Jim Steranko, Howard Purcell, and a late poster using Jack’s art from the cover of Captain America #106. (previous page, bottom) In the wake of the Marvel SuperHeroes cartoon show, merchandise such as these “flicker rings” were sold, using Kirby’s artwork (but with no payment for its use). The main image is from Jack’s illo for the Sept. 1966 issue of Esquire magazine, which had a feature on Marvel Comics on college campuses. Through oversight or intent, Jack’s signature was left on the art, making it one of the few times he got credit of any kind on these promo items. (below) Still from a Sub-Mariner segment of the Marvel SuperHeroes show, likely drawn by Mike Royer.

(below) Jimmy Olsen #148 original art.

Murphy Anderson’s heads do stand out on this Colletta-inked page. (next page) Al Plastino inked and redrew the Superman figures on Jimmy Olsen #133.

we’ve got to realize that sometimes when editors give pencils to the inker, they don’t want him to follow the pencils precisely. They may want him to change it. In fact, at Marvel, the way Stan Lee tended to cast people— and there were exceptions to this, but as a general rule—what he wanted from the penciler was panel-topanel storytelling, and what he wanted from the inker was “make the comic look the way I want it to.” You and I might think someone is the wrong guy to draw Spider-Man’s physique or the wrong guy to draw the majesty of Thor’s world. Stan would say, “Let the inker fill that in. What I want is the guy who will give me something in panel one that tells the story, and panel two does the same thing,” and so on. And we would tend to evaluate the finished art and go, “Well, this guy doesn’t draw Spider-Man in the right poses,” let’s say. I

think the main thing that you look for in Spider-Man artists was, does he do those sort of quirky Ditko poses clinging to the side of the wall? Because Spider-Man had a unique way of moving and posing. That wasn’t actually what Stan was looking for. He’d figure, “Well, we can always fix that later on,” or whatever.

In Mike’s case, Jack wanted the New Gods and Forever People and all those books to look like Jack Kirby. As you may know, Wally Wood tried to get the job. Now, at the time Wally applied for being Jack’s inker at DC, Colletta probably already had a lock on it, so that was a moot point. But I suspect that, if they had gone to Jack and said, “Hey, do you want Wally Wood?” he would have said, “No” for a couple of reasons. One, Wally was kind of overpowering and the finished art sometimes looked more like Wally Wood than Jack Kirby.

Secondly, Jack thought, “Wally Wood shouldn’t be inking anybody. He should be doing his own damned artwork, himself. He’s a brilliantly talented man.” And, number three, Jack had some pretty bad memories of Wally Wood as inking Sky Masters way late and finding him in bars to pick up the work.

What Jack wanted—and especially since he had to prove to DC that he could produce the books outside the offices, which they did not absolutely believe for a second was possible—what he was looking for, number one, “I’ve got to be really faithful to what I do, and when I look at the final book, I want to see what I drew, not how they changed the heads or changed the faces or prettied it up or whatever.” Which is just what Sol Harrison wanted.

When Steve and I first went to DC in July 1970, we walked in and one of the first people we saw was Sol Harrison. Harrison sat us down and the first thing he said was, “Can you get Jack to stop drawing those square fingertips?”

They really wished he drew more like Curt Swan.

SHERMAN: They wanted him to draw the DC house look.

EVANIER: Yeah. They wanted somebody who wouldn’t draw like Jack. Mike, as he told you, had that philosophy, and it’s the same reason why, when Mike worked with Russ Manning, you can’t tell the difference in many places. I worked with Russ a lot, and I would sometimes say to him, “Hey, is this Royer here?” And Russ wouldn’t know. He had no idea. And Mike doesn’t know. You can show Mike some of those.

ROYER: Yeah, years later, I look at, especially the early stuff, I can’t tell you what I did.

EVANIER: The one thing that you can tell the difference on is their lettering, because Russ lettered some of them, and Mike lettered some of them.

ROYER: And he actually liked mine better. And I liked his better than mine.

EVANIER: There’s a lineage, by the way, of lettering. Mike learned to letter from Mike Arens.

Mike Arens learned lettering largely from a man named Rome Siemon, who was the house

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would slim an ankle. (laughter) AUDIENCE MEMBER: Speaking of changing faces, how did Al Plastino and Murphy Anderson feel about changing Jack’s Superman faces and anything else?

EVANIER: All right, well, we’ve got about five topics, and we’ll wrap them all up before we get out of here.

People don’t understand what happened with the Jimmy Olsen issues. Jack, the very first thing he drew for DC was Forever People #1. Frank Giacoia inked the cover, and they gave Vince the insides to ink. The second thing he penciled was New Gods #1, then he penciled Mister Miracle #1. Then he did his first Jimmy Olsen. Then he did his second Jimmy Olsen. At some point in there, when they gave those issues to Colletta to ink, they said, “Jack’s Superman looks a little off.

Make it look more like Curt Swan.” And the DC art department, the editorial department—excuse me, the correct term would be the production department—also went in and started fixing Jack’s Superman faces in the pencil stage. They did that a lot, and at times they did that to other people as well as Jack.

As I mentioned earlier, there was always this idea, “We’ve gotta fix something. We’ve gotta fix things.” I’ve told this story. That first time Steve and I went to the DC offices in July of 1970, I hand-delivered the original art to Hot Wheels #5 for Alex Toth. If you remember that issue, he had put black between all the panels, and Sol Harrison looked at it and went, “Oh, we’ve gotta take the black out.” Which, if you understand composition, was like saying,”Let’s completely change the entire composition of every page.” Neal Adams talked him out of doing that. But that was the attitude. In comes the freelancer’s work, and, you know, at DC they respected Nick Cardy and Curt Swan and all these guys who worked there, especially the guys who worked for them a long time, except, of course, for the ones they’d just fired. (laughter) So it’s like, in comes this Curt Swan job and it’s beautiful, and they go, “Let’s see if we can fix this. Let’s see if we can change this.” They weren’t that comfortable with people inking their own pencils at DC because that took away the editorial involvement, you know? If I hire Mike to draw a comic, and he turns in finished art, I’ve had little input into that. If, however, I hired the penciler, and I pick an inker, and I pick a letterer, I am now becoming the point man. I’m the guy who’s coordinating the whole comic, and I can feel like I’m assembling it, and each one is just one of my flunkies doing one stage of it. (laughter) So that’s one of the reasons you saw very few guys at DC inking their own pencils at that time, and the ones who did usually insisted—like Kubert insisted, obviously.

They felt that Jack didn’t draw the right Superman. So Colletta inked, and he tried to course-correct, and they did a few pages. I’m not sure how many pages they did, but at some point they looked at the finished art and said, “This doesn’t look very good.” Nelson Bridwell told me that he suggested, “Well, why don’t you send it back to Jack and have him redraw the Superman face?” But on those pages, they had obliterated Jack’s Superman. The faces had been repenciled, they had been inked and changed. Jack’s pencils had been erased.

And there were also a couple of layers of whiteout there where they tried to fix stuff. Well, Nelson got slapped down because at DC, freelancers didn’t fix what the production department did. The production department fixed what the freelancers did. So they gave it to Al Plastino. I never met Al Plastino. He was a guy who’d worked for DC forever, and the thing that always struck me as odd was that not long before, Carmine had taken him off working on Superman because he thought his work was dull. And now that they’ve got Jack Kirby in here to begin a new era of Superman, what do they do? “Let’s get the guy whose Superman we retired to redraw it.” Plastino revised the first Forever People and those first two Jimmy Olsens, and from then

letterer at Western Publishing, on the West Coast books for years.

So Rome taught Mike Arens, Mike Arens taught Mike Royer, Mike Royer taught me, and I taught Carrie Spiegle, Dan Spiegle’s daughter.

It’s like a history of people lettering. It just goes on.

ROYER: And the best dialogue and narrative lettering I ever did was on my last involvement with Russ on Star Wars and Tarzan, because I love, when I have time, to do Frank Engli lettering. [Editor’s Note: Engli was Milton Caniff’s letterer on Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.] I auditioned to letter for Milton Caniff, and I gave him six daily strips with me talking to Milt like, “Well, this is what I do.” It was just dialogue on six blanks. And, for my money, it was pure Frank Engli. And the price I quoted him was, like, fifty dollars a week less than he’d been paying Frank. And Milt wrote back and he says, “Excellent. I have one more reading and I’ll get back to you.”

Well, that one more reading was Shel Dorf, and Shel said he would do it for one-fifth of what I quoted, so guess who got the job?

EVANIER: So to finish answering your question, Jack wanted a guy to be faithful, he wanted a guy who was absolutely reliable, a guy whose loyalty would be to Jack, and a guy who was workhorse enough to finish what was sometimes fifteen pages a week, because that was what Jack was contracted to pencil for DC. And some weeks he did more than that. Joe Sinnott could not have inked fifteen pages a week.

Frank Giacoia could not have inked fifteen pages a week. Bill Everett could not have inked fifteen pages. I’m mentioning my favorite other Kirby inkers here. There are a couple guys who could have, but they couldn’t have also lettered the book at the same time. So if you sat down and invented the person you needed, it would be Mike. He was perfect for that—and he had to be on the West Coast, and also be someone who wouldn’t be looking at it from the standpoint of, “I’m really working for DC.” Jack was the editor of his books at first in name only, and he became the editor of his books when Mike became the finisher, because Mike mailed the books back to Jack, and Jack looked at them and would occasionally change something.

ROYER: Only one time, to my knowledge, was he upset with something I did, and it was a splash page with Big Barda holding a cannon or something, and I had made her face a little prettier. And his comment was simply, “Don’t change the faces.” (laughter) And I never did after that. It’s just, at that time I was looking at stuff from Bill Draut and some of what the Philippine artists were doing, and I love to draw women, so I prettied up that one face. And, well, Jack was right. It wasn’t Jack anymore. How dare I even here have the gall to want to make the face prettier? So I never did again. I occasionally 81

on, they had the Supermans changed in-house.

Murphy Anderson was working in the DC offices. He was the only guy you probably ever heard of who did artwork in the offices. Curt Swan was not in the office, Nick Cardy wasn’t.

They dropped in, but they didn’t have drawing tables there.

Murphy had a drawing table and they would come to him every so often if some drawing was needed that was beyond the capabilities of the production department artists. Anderson would ink—or in some issues he would correct the pencils. There’s one or two where Anderson repenciled what Jack did and Colletta inked it. In most of them, though, Anderson just inked the Supermans and Jimmy Olsens and Colletta would finish the page. There are two issues in there that I redrew the Superman emblem on for Jack, because the

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one thing in the world I could draw better than Jack was Superman’s emblem. (laughter) And there were two issues which Mike Royer finished because—.

ROYER: Well, I called DC and I said, “If you want to change Jack’s Jimmy Olsens and Supes, send me the model sheets and let me refine them so that they’ll please you, but it’s all inked by the same hand.” And so, on those couple of issues, I did the “fixes.”

EVANIER: And the reason Mike finished those two was because Jack’s Jimmy Olsen sold real well, and they upped the book from eight times a year to monthly, but somehow nobody had told Jack to do more issues. (laughter) All of a sudden, he had to do a bunch of issues in advance, and there was no way to keep Mike busy. When Mike took over the Fourth World books, DC insisted on keeping Colletta on Olsen so they could maintain some control and keep changing the heads and such. Mike was fine with that because he had other work he had to finish up or withdraw from before he could ink Jack full-time.

But then Jack suddenly realized one day, “I’m doing three Jimmy Olsens in a row, and if I keep sending them back there, Royer will have no work.” So he called DC and said, “Royer’s inking the next Jimmy Olsen whether you like it or not. I’m responsible for Mike’s income.” Which was another, again, Jack Kirby the Man looking out for his people. Mike did those two issues and soon, Jack was ahead enough so there would be no lull on Mike’s drawing table.

Murphy Anderson went up to Jack once at Comic-Con—I was there—and he apologized. He said, “I’m sorry.” And Jack didn’t blame him at all. “You’re doing the job you were told to do,” and if Murphy hadn’t done it, somebody else of lesser caliber would. Murphy said,

again in front of me, to Jack, “You know, if they had just let me ink the whole damned book, it would have worked better. I wouldn’t have changed it as much if it was up to me, because I would have just fixed the hair, and fixed the emblem, and made the jaw the same, and the face the same, and kept your expressions closer.” But this is what they wanted. And Jack understood and didn’t have any anger at all. Jack never faulted John Romita for touching up Fantastic Four, or Herb Trimpe, or whoever did it. He wasn’t angry in the least at Herb about that Hulk poster. He just understood that you’re a guy who has to make a living, you work for the company, and you can’t sit there [and say], “No, I won’t do that.”

ROYER: Well, when I joined these two guys a couple days later in New York and went up to the DC offices, I marched into Carmine Infantino’s office and I said, “Carmine, I should be inking Jack, because I do a better job than Colletta.” At lunch, Dick Giordano said, “Mike, you’d better be careful, because you’re going to get a reputation as being cocky. You were right, but...” (laughter) EVANIER: What I recall was, you had inked a couple of pages—Jack had a couple of leftover Marvel pages, and Mike had inked them as samples. There was a Black Panther page, and a Fantastic Four you inked, and a couple others.

ROYER: You have such a marvelous memory!

EVANIER: And he took these pages back to show he could do a better job, and, of course, the problem was, when you went to Carmine and said, “I could do a better job than Vince Colletta,” what Carmine heard was, “You made a stupid decision and you should correct it and bring in me.” Well, they weren’t going to hand the book over to somebody else, because Colletta was a buddy, and Colletta had a deal. And they were happy with what Colletta did. Keep in mind, we all sometimes look at the comics and go, “Why did this guy ink this book?” or “Why did this guy draw this book?” and Colletta did not ink Thor for four or five years over the objection of Stan Lee. Stan said each month, “Hey, great job, Vince. Do the same thing this month. Here’s the next issue.” And he delivered exactly what his editor wanted most of the time. Every so often they’d send Vince back: “Put more backgrounds in.” But all these guys, if you were working in comics in the Sixties and the Seventies and they gave you the wrong book to draw or the wrong book, you did it. There was no such thing as, “No, I’m the wrong guy for this. I can’t ink this guy.” Every so often an inker would beg off and say, “I can’t make sense of this. I’m sorry.

I’m ruining it.” But that was very rare. And then that guy had no other work for a while or something. Arlen?

SCHUMER: So why do you think we get into these arguments all the time to this day? Why do you think many Kirby fans who don’t like Vince Colletta on

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(this spread, top) In Jimmy Olsen #146, Mike Royer “fixed” the Superman faces to keep them on-model. (below) Tom Kraft commissioned Mike Royer to recreate several pages that were originally inked by Colletta. Shown is the published splash page for Jimmy Olsen #143 with Colletta inks; Jack’s original pencils; Tom’s recreation of the pencils on board, for Mike to ink from; and Mike’s final inked recreation. Love that ultra-cool Royer display lettering!

(below) Murphy Anderson did get to fully-ink Kirby on the cover of Jimmy Olsen #145. I’ve wonder: is that circle Jack’s way of showing Superman using his x-ray vision to find Jimmy? (next page) Thor #154 pencils (July 1968), as Mangog pushes our hero toward Ragnarök.

Turn the page to see Colletta’s inks.

anything else give him a pass on Thor?

EVANIER: Well, first of all, it’s very good work if you haven’t seen other Kirby books. If that was the first thing you came to, that’s the thing. Secondly, I think Vince was miscast. I don’t think it was a matter of talent so much as casting. But he gave the book a look which people came to understand was Thor. This is why, when Buscema was penciling the book, they tried to get Colletta back on there, because they thought it was part of the look of that strip. It’s like I said earlier: Stan looked to the inker to be the guy who set the mood of the page and the style of it, and Colletta was the style of Thor. Colletta was capable of inking six books a month. If you go back and look, he never inked six books a month for

Marvel. They didn’t give them to him. Once Colletta had done those Fantastic Fours that nobody liked, he never touched that book again. No matter how late it was, if they had no other inker available, Colletta was not the pick. When Jack had to do an issue of Captain America practically overnight, #112, George Tuska inked it. Not Vince Colletta. You would have thought, “Oh, we’ll give it to Colletta..” No. Vince did not do that much work for Marvel over the years. He could have done a lot, and when they were desperate for inkers, they didn’t turn to him that often. They liked him on a lot of things. They were very happy with Vince, frequently.

Vince was not an ugly presence in the business. He was a guy who was respected on a certain level, and like every artist, he had certain limitations.

ROYER: When Carmine finally acquiesced for Jack to bring me onboard, it came with a stipulation that I had to accept less money than Vince, who, of course, had the lowest rate in the world. (laughter) So I just want to tell you, those first New Gods and Mister Miracles and Forever Peoples, I was paid $15 a page to ink those and $2.50 a page to letter them. (laughter) But I was working for Jack, so the money was like, yeah, that’s... but I was working with Jack! I was getting to ink Jack. And Roz used to tease me about the letters they got saying, “Who the hell is this Mike Royer?” (laughter) Well, it’s because, for the first time, they were seeing undiluted Jack. And I think a lot of why people loved Colletta on Thor, this is my opinion, is that it was the first Kirby book that they fell in love with. It’s like, people walk up to me and they say, “I just loved Devil Dinosaur! It was the best Kirby book!” Well, it was the first Kirby they saw. Correct me if I’m wrong.

EVANIER: There’s a whole legion of guys who love Kamandi and think it was the greatest comic Jack did. How many people love Kamandi? (minimal applause) How many people, of you, that was really your first Kirby book?

SCHUMER: I don’t think that’s true with Thor. It’s not necessarily their first book. It’s a lot of Kirby fans that, like I said, they love Kirby’s work, and they hate Vince Colletta, and everything else, but they give Colletta [credit], based on this idea that somehow the scratchy-scratchy look fits the world of Thor better. That’s their rationalization.

EVANIER: Okay. That’s their rationalization, and you and I might not agree with it, but it’s a point of view. You know, we live in a world where people vote for some pretty odd people to run the government, too. (laughter) It doesn’t make sense to us who they vote for.

SCHUMER: But even when you point out the erasures and the things Colletta didn’t ink, they still say, “But I like him on Thor.”

EVANIER: Well, in some cases, Arlen, it’s like somebody says, “I didn’t like your mother’s

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meatloaf.” Yeah, but it’s my mother’s meatloaf. I have an affection for it that transcends any analysis. And, also, there’s a certain look—there’s parts of those books that I think are really nice. I like some of the textures that Colletta put in at times. I don’t dislike him as a human being, certainly. I met him briefly a few times. I think it was a miscasting more than anything else. I think there was a place for Vince Colletta in the business, and there’s a lot of guys who were forced to be super-hero pencilers who probably shouldn’t have been super-hero pencilers.

SCHUMER: Don Heck.

ROYER: Well, I do think that the bulk of the professional artists, and I do say “professional” in quotes, did the best they could do. And if I meet people who don’t like what I did for Jack, that doesn’t make me dislike them. That’s their opinion. All I know is I did the best I could. And I think there’s a lot of people in the business that that was their mantra: Do the best you can.

EVANIER: I’m an enormous fan of a man named Mike Sekowsky who drew comics, and I knew Mike and worked with him, and I have a theory that no one can ever prove wrong: That if Mike Sekowsky had taken a left turn in his career, if at some point somebody had given him the opportunity years earlier, Mike Sekowsky would have out-Charles Addams’ed Charles Addams.

He was a brilliant, funny cartoonist with a wicked sense of humor. He also at times got jobs that you would look at and go, “By God, somebody has just equaled Jack Davis at doing Jack Davis.” He was an incredible caricaturist. But that wasn’t the job he found himself in.

I interviewed Harvey Kurtzman one time, and he said his worst nightmare was he’d wind up inking super-hero comics for Stan Lee. (laughter) If Harvey Kurtzman had inked Kirby, we might say, “Who was that untalented moron Harvey Kurtzman who’s ruining that beautiful artwork?” Not everybody was Joe Sinnott, and a lot of people were asked to be Joe Sinnott. It’s a tragedy of the business that it tended to treat people all the same.

To get back to this gentleman’s question here, Mike Royer is a very versatile artist. Mike has had an incredible career doing Winnie the Pooh type material, Mickey Mouse. Mike Royer drew a Yogi Bear story for me, you may remember that, and it was a wonderful Yogi Bear story. He had this incredible range and this chameleon aspect of his ability to disappear inside another person’s thinking and understand artwork from the inside. It’s like we say with certain Impressionists that he gets the essence of the character, he understands it on a different level. There’s a lot of guys who did beautiful artwork, but they ink everybody the same. They had the same approach, they had the same feathering technique, the same patterns. You can spot their inking sometimes if they have a certain inking trick they put in the backgrounds, a certain pattern they put in; they apply it everywhere,

and it fits on some guys and it doesn’t fit on others.

Mike was able to recreate himself. Mike’s natural drawing was not like Jack Kirby. When Mike sat down to do a super-hero, a lot of times he would skew kind of [Alex] Raymond. You look at his work for Warren, it’s more the Raymond/Al Williamson school. But he learned how to adjust himself to Jack’s thinking in a way that other people who might have even traced Jack closer didn’t do, because Mike didn’t trace. Mike looked and said, “Here’s what Jack wants there. Here’s what he meant there.” And he read his mind in certain ways. Arlen?

SCHUMER: You mentioned before about changing a Big Barda face.

I know that Joe Sinnott gets accused, as great an inker as he was, “Well, he changed Jack’s faces too much, made them look more like Sinnott than Kirby.” Was Jack aware of Sinnott’s changing faces?

EVANIER: Yes, a little bit. Jack didn’t look at the finished books that 85

SHERMAN: I’d just like to say something about inking.

EVANIER: Will you stop monopolizing the conversation, Steve? (laughter) SHERMAN: Because Mike and I talked about this the other day, and a lot of people think inking is just tracing. “Oh, you just traced what the penciler did.”

But if you look at Jack’s originals, the graphite on that paper is just all over the place, because Jack would draw and his hand would smear it, so if he’s doing fine lines or something, he’d go back and there’d be just gray. Or if he had black, he’d use the side of the pencil and do this. So when Mike got the pages to ink, he had to decipher a lot of what was in there, because it was smeared. Right? There was a lot of graphite just like...

ROYER: I think there was truly an affinity that even I unconsciously had but didn’t consciously realize.

Working with Jack was an incredible experience. I’m the luckiest guy in the world, okay? (applause) There was something you told me about Jack being the consummate artist.

SHERMAN: Yeah, because he didn’t look like it. I mean, he looked like a guy from Brooklyn. But Jack had the soul of an artist. That’s why he could look at where he was coming from, which was the ghetto basically, and see beyond that, because he had the soul of an artist, and he wanted out of that. And so he was able to focus his talents to get him out of that.

What really makes Jack so special, is that he wasn’t just a guy that sat there and drew whatever came along. He really loved what he did. He really loved the medium of comics, and he really put everything he had into it.

We were talking about the fact that people say, “Oh, Jack worked hard. It was hard work.” Yes, it was hard work, but it was also what he loved, so when he sat down at 8:00 at night and started to draw, he was gone. He was lost. If Roz didn’t tell him to go to bed, he would have been there for 24, 48 hours just drawing, because he was lost in the worlds. He’d say—you know, what he saw in his head were movies, and what he put down on the page, he would grab scenes from those movies and put it down, and he would put it down almost as fast as he saw it. One of the amazing things about him is—all of us growing up as kids, we all loved cartooning and drawing things, and we’d read the books on how to draw and do a layout. And there were other comic artists who would sit there, like Neal Adams would do 81⁄2" x 11" layouts and all this. Not Jack. Jack would take a piece of Strathmore and square it off and start drawing it, and boom, boom, boom, at 8:00 in the morning, he’d have three pages.

much because he didn’t want to see what Stan had put in the balloons sometimes. (laughter) He couldn’t change it by then.

ROYER: Well, while I was at Disney, Jack called me. There was an actors strike at all the studios, and as union cartoonists, we had to honor the picket line, so once a week we’d pick up our work at the Carl’s Jr. across the street, and we’d work at home. But I had extra time, and I met with Jack and Roz at the old Copper Penny Restaurant, which is no longer there, across from the Warners bungalows, and he sat there and he said, “I’d like you to ink Silver Star.” And he’s telling me the story, and I’m thinking, “My God, this is a lot of material.” No, it was, all six issues were done. And I think I did a couple, and then the strike was over and I couldn’t do any more. And working on Silver Star I realized that he and Roz knew all six of those books inside and out, and he never noticed that in one of those two issues, I added a narrative box to one of the strips— because I’m reading it, I’m going, “This doesn’t make sense without the reader being told this,” because Jack and Roz knew it so well, when Jack penciled it and did it, he knew that’s what was supposed to be there. And Jack, if he ever read them that closely when I returned the art to him, never noticed. But I was still working—it was for Jack.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No thumbnails at all?

SHERMAN: No thumbnails. Sometimes on the back he might have started little notes, or next to him on the taboret he’d have a little note on an envelope, something. But that was it. The layouts were all in his head.

ROYER: Well, believe it or not, Jack was responsible for some of what I consider the best work I ever did, which was drawing funny animals.

But Jack taught me not to be afraid of a blank sheet of paper. And remembering how Jack would start at this corner or start here, some of the best things I ever did were with, believe it or not, the Hundred Acre Woods characters, these huge scenes of all those characters 86

doing things, and I just looked at it and Jack is over my shoulder, metaphorically, or however you want to phrase it. And I just started in the middle, and when I was finished, I went, “Holy crap! Did I do that?” (laughter) Because it just took over. And that’s what Jack gave me. And I interrupted you. This man has a lot of insightful things to say, and we’ve been monopolizing.

SCHUMER: Can I just make a plug? Since you mentioned about how you were faced with pages filled with graphite and you had to decide what to ink? Tom Kraft over here with the Kirby Museum, if you don’t know about it, put out a beautiful book called Jack Kirby Pencils and Inks, where on the left side of the page he reproduces Jack’s pencils for the first issues of Demon, Kamandi, and OMAC, and on the right hand page is Mike’s beautiful inks, so it’s a beautiful way to compare what Mike was given and what he came out with. So if you don’t know about Tom’s book, you’re selling it at your table in there?

ROYER: Yeah, and the only criticism I’ve heard of the book is somebody said, “It’s pointless, because Mike didn’t change anything.” (laughter, applause) EVANIER: People always used to come to me and they’d say, “Let’s do a book of Jack’s roughs and preliminaries.” There really aren’t any. In my book I have a cover of Tales of Asgard, a sketch that Jack did. It’s the only cover rough I ever saw of Jack’s, ever. The revised edition of my book is coming out for San Diego this year; it’s got, like, sixteen new pages, and it’s a little smaller page format. We’ve got a much better cover on it, and I’ve added a chapter about the whole lawsuit thing and what’s happened to Jack’s memory in the last ten years. And I added to it the original finished art of that Tales of Asgard cover, so you’ll see one page is the rough layout, and flip it over, the next page is the finished inks version, and it is one of the most stunning original Kirby pages you’ll ever see in your life.

When Jack was drawing, he had an eraser, he did erase. But I don’t think he ever erased because the drawing was bad. He erased because the drawing was wrong.

He would draw a scene, and maybe two or three panels later, he’d go, “Oh, I need to stage this different.” And he would erase because of storytelling reasons. If he drew it, it was right, or it was as right as he was going to get it. It was all about the story with Jack.

I have a theory that, when you went to Jack as some people did and said, “Do me a drawing of Captain America,” he would in his head have to make up a little story of what Captain America was doing. He couldn’t just draw Captain America posed. He would make up a little motivation. He would think, “Oh, Captain America is rushing to diffuse a bomb from the Red Skull,” or whatever it was, he’d make up something, because he had to do it in the context of a story. Which is why I think—this is my opinion—that Jack’s covers weren’t that strong after a while, because as he got more and more into the writing as he got older, I think he was not

that interested in drawing covers because there was never a right time for him to do them. If he drew them before he drew the comic, as frequently happened in the business, he didn’t know what the story was yet. He had no emotional involvement. He didn’t know what the best scene in the story would be yet. If he drew it after the story was finished, that story was out of his head. He had no more emotional involvement in it, and he couldn’t come back and recreate that moment. If he drew it in the middle, it was getting in the way of finishing the story. So I don’t happen to think that Jack’s covers, after 1968 or so, are that wonderful, with some notable exceptions.

I think that he was so into the storylines that it would have been impossible for someone else to dialogue those books. He couldn’t have done his part of them if he wasn’t in 100% control of the story, and people say, “Well, what if we’d had somebody else come in and write the dialogue?” It would not have been the same comic with different words in the balloons. It would have been a totally different story, and probably quite bloodless.

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(previous page) Tales of Suspense #85. Stan couldn’t bring himself to leave this page completely alone, but Jack probably didn’t object too much. (below) When you compare this to Jack’s pencils, you can see how drastically Colletta simplified this Thor #154 page. The basic info is still there, but most of the power and energy of Jack’s pencils is obliterated.

(below) The Jack Kirby Museum previously reported finding this previously unknown “Prester John” presentation as part of a 25-page document titled “Three Presentations” by Jack Kirby & Ted Pedersen.

Kirby was a neighbor of Pedersen’s writing partner in Thousand Oaks, California, and it was Pedersen who introduced Kirby to Ruby-Spears. Jack first used the legendary character in Fantastic Four #54, and Jack got to revisit him on the cover of Marvel Two-In-One #12. (right) Boys’ Ranch #2 pin-up featuring that distinctive inking-style that only the Simon & Kirby strips featured.

ROYER: In my one-and-a-half years I was a product designer and a character artist for Disney, 99% of what I drew, no matter what it was, Jack was over my shoulder—because even if it was one character, it had to be something that was part of a story. There was a story there somewhere.

EVANIER: Now, we’ve got about five minutes here. [Is there] anybody who hasn’t asked a question, or wants to ask about something we haven’t talked about at all? Sir? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Simon and Kirby. Please tell me what the relationship between them was and who did what.

EVANIER: They didn’t even know. (laughter) Joe Simon was a very clever, sharp, shrewd man, who understood business better than most of the people in comics at that time, which was not difficult to do, because most of the great comic book artists were ninnies when it came to business. And he was a very, very good editor. Jack used to always say that Joe was the best editor ever in comics. Joe did some writing, Joe did some penciling, Joe did some lettering, Joe did some inking, and some of it is wonderful. A lot of it is heavily assisted. A lot of it is these two guys passing pages back and forth and

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you can’t tell who did what. Jack was the guy who was willing to sit at the drawing table for sixty hours a week and just keep filling pages up, and Joe kind of knew what to do with it and how to sell it and how to have it inked or ink it. They were very close friends, and they were partners for a long time, until the business changed to the point where there was no place they could have a profitable association with the other, and they went off on their own. And I loved Joe dearly. I thought he was an amazingly sharp, bright guy. What else can I tell you about him?

SCHUMER: Who created Captain America?

EVANIER: I think Simon and Kirby created Captain America. (laughter) AUDIENCE MEMBER: So Simon did some of the artwork and some of the inking? Okay. I would see the names and have no idea.

EVANIER: For a long time there they had a shop with lots of guys working for them, and Simon was more the managerial type than Jack was, and knew more how to handle the contracts in the business, and Jack was more of the “sit there and draw pages all day” guy. But they both did everything. There’s no firm dividing line you

can find, because Joe was a very skilled artist. Like anyone, he just didn’t have Jack’s ability to sit there and fill twenty pages with wonderful work a week.

SHERMAN: And that’s why they got along so well together, because Joe knew what Jack could do, and Jack knew what Joe could do, and they were both very happy doing that. Where Joe said, “You’re good at this, you do that. I’m gonna do this,” Jack said, “I don’t want to do that. You do that. You go talk to the publishers.

You go talk to the distributors. I just want to sit here and draw comics.” And that’s what they did.

EVANIER: Yeah. And there was a man named Ben Oda, who some of you may know as one of the great letterers. Until John Costanza came along, he had the world record for the most comic book pages ever lettered, and he was the letterer for the Simon and Kirby shop for a long time. Ben was this little, quiet man who worked himself to death, almost literally. He worked so hard. I interviewed him briefly, and he just talked about how much he loved those two men, how nice they were. “Nobody treated me nicer,” he said. “And they were fabulous guys, and I loved them dearly, and it was a joy to be with them.” If you went to another comic book company’s office, people wore suits, and they were tense, and they were jockeying for position, and political, and they were yelling at each other, and it was not a very pleasant environment. And then he’d go to the Simon and Kirby studio, which was a place where comics were produced, and everybody was happy, everybody was helping on everybody else’s pages, and it was give and take, and there was a friendliness there.

So one of the things that Joe Simon did was he created the context and atmosphere for that work to be presented. At one point it was Joe who had to drag Jack away from the drawing table. Then later it was Roz. Anybody else who didn’t ask a question yet? This gentleman.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: This may seem like a strange question, but after Kirby started to do his own writing and some people didn’t like it because it didn’t sound like Stan Lee—that’s what I always thought. But I always thought in looking at it, sometimes there was an odd choice in what words were bolded, what words were given emphasis. Is this just me?

what he became as an artist, as a creator, this consummate human being and creator. And we don’t have any artists coming back from Desert Storm or Afghanistan who—if they were even interested in drawing comics, that’s the only life experience that maybe could have inspired them for something. But growing up on the mean streets, and escaping from this, and creating these worlds, and so many things that have influenced creators and people in every field of the arts, whether they will acknowledge it or not, or are even consciously aware of it—it’s like, we owe Jack Kirby one hell of a lot, folks. (applause)

SCHUMER: It’s not just you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And I often thought if you changed it just a little bit, it would be better writing than Stan Lee. EVANIER: Did you ever meet Jack?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No. EVANIER: Well, he talked in that way. (laughter) He emphasized odd words when he talked.

SHERMAN: It’s not a very scientific explanation, but Jack was magical.

Anybody who’d ever met him and talked to him, he was magical.

He really was.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So it’s really Kirby we’re seeing there.

EVANIER: There used to be a story about George Gershwin, the great composer, that he was going to a party, and before the party somebody came in, and there was a piano there, because at a party, Gershwin always sat at a piano and played. Well, the piano was out of tune, someone said, “You can’t have George Gershwin play on this out-of-tune piano.” When the party starts later, Gershwin comes and sits down, plays beautifully, and the person who was there earlier went to the host and said, “Oh, you got the piano tuned.” No. He

EVANIER: Yeah.

SHERMAN: You’re getting Jack Kirby.

ROYER: Well, talking with Jack, he would tell you the same thing from fifteen different entry points. He would say something, “In other words,” and it was just a delight listening to this man who— well, Steve and I agree with this. There will never, ever be a phenomenon like Jack Kirby, who every bit of his life experiences informed 89

just had a magical nature. He could play the piano out of tune and it sounded perfect. Jack had that same weird ability.

I want to say one more thing before we adjourn here. Please celebrate the fact that Jack Kirby’s name is on Marvel movies, that his family got some real compensation finally. (applause) Jack will never get everything he was entitled to, but, boy, has he gotten a lot of it in the last couple years. One of the great joys of my life is that I no longer have to avoid Marvel movies because they made me physically ill to watch when Jack was not getting his name on them. It made me physically ill, and sad, and depressed, to see what was happening. If there’s nothing else, I feel better. (laughter, applause) There will be a Jack Kirby panel at Wonder Con in April, and Steve will be on there, I believe. And at the San Diego Con this year, there will be a number of Kirby panels, and wait until you see who’s on the main Jack Kirby tribute panel this year.

I’ll see you all there. Thank you. (applause) ★

Remember this mysterious page we ran way back in TJKC #21?

Richard Kolkman finally figured out that it’s a rejected pencil page from Jimmy Olsen #143, which would’ve fallen between pages 18 and 19 of the published story. The inking on this is by none other than Jack’s wife Roz Kirby. How do we know?

See if you can spot her name hidden in the inks somewhere.

[On August 1, Abrams ComicArts is releasing an updated softcover edition of Mark Evanier’s 2008 book Jack Kirby: King of Comics, which features a new chapter and additional artwork. It will debut at Comic-Con International this July.]

Photo by Kevin Shaw.

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.”

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Celebrate JACK KIRBY’s 100th birthday!

THE PARTY STARTS WITH

KIRBY100

TWOMORROWS and the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine celebrate JACK KIRBY’S 100th BIRTHDAY in style with the release of KIRBY100, a full-color visual holiday for the King of comics! It features an all-star line-up of 100 COMICS PROS who critique key images from Kirby’s 50-year career, admiring his page layouts, dramatics, and storytelling skills, and lovingly reminiscing about their favorite characters and stories. Featured are BRUCE TIMM, ALEX ROSS, WALTER SIMONSON, JOHN BYRNE, JOE SINNOTT, STEVE RUDE, ADAM HUGHES, WENDY PINI, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE GIBBONS, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and dozens more of the top names in comics. Their essays serve to honor Jack’s place in comics history, and prove (as if there’s any doubt) that KIRBY IS KING! This double-length book is edited by JOHN MORROW and JON B. COOKE, with a Kirby cover inked by MIKE ROYER. (The Limited Hardcover Edition includes 16 bonus color pages of Kirby’s 1960s Deities concept drawings)

(240-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER with 16 bonus pages) $45.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-079-3

SHIPS AUGUST 2017!

TwoMorrows.

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All characters TM & © their respective owners.

(224-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $34.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-078-6 • (Digital Edition) $12.95

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C o l l e c t o r

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERVIEWS WITH KIRBY and his contemporaries, FEATURE ARTICLES, RARE AND UNSEEN KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and presentation of KIRBY’S UNINKED 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. 7

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 #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.

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

COLLECTED VOL. 6

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

“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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

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!

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

THE MAGIC OF STAN & JACK! New interview with STAN LEE, walking tour of New York where Lee & Kirby lived and worked, re-evaluation of the “Lost” FF #108 story (including a new page that just surfaced), “What If Jack Hadn’t Left Marvel In 1970?,” plus MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, behind a color Kirby cover inked by GEORGE PÉREZ!

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

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

(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

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 COLLECTOR #60

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

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!

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

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #61

KIRBY COLLECTOR #62

KIRBY COLLECTOR #63

KIRBY COLLECTOR #64

KIRBY COLLECTOR #65

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!

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!

(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

(100 FULL-COLOR pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #66

KIRBY COLLECTOR #67

KIRBY COLLECTOR #68

KIRBY COLLECTOR #69

KIRBY COLLECTOR #70

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!

KIRBY: ALPHA! Looks at the beginnings of Kirby’s greatest concepts, and how he looked back in time and to the future for the origins of ideas like DEVIL DINOSAUR, FOREVER PEOPLE, 2001, ETERNALS, KAMANDI, OMAC, and more! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 WonderCon Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more!

Cover inked by MIKE ROYER!

(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

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

Digital Only: SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

The entire six-issue SILVER STAR 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!

2017 RATES

(160-page Digital Edition) $7.95

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 KIRBY CHECKLIST pencil work, unused strips, illustrated World War II letters, 1950s pages, unpublished GOLD EDITION 1960s Marvel pencil pages and sketches, and Fourth World pencil art (done just for Lists EVERY KIRBY COMIC, Compiles the “extra” new material from COLLECTED this portfolio in 1970)! We’ve gone back to the original art to ensure the best reproBOOK, UNPUBLISHED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES 1-7, in one duction possible, and MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN have updated the WORK, cross-references huge Digital Edition! Includes a fan’s private tour of Kirby biography from the original printing, and added a new Foreword explaining reprints, and more! the Kirbys’ home and more than 200 pieces of Kirby 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! (128-page Digital Edition) art not published outside of those volumes! $5.95 (120-page Digital Edition) $5.95 (60-page Digital Edition) $5.95

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

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

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Collector

[Lest you think that this issue’s somewhat downbeat tone about death in the Kirbyverse is a sign that this mag isn’t long for this world, fear not! I had a blast on this issue, and feel more energized than ever, what with Jack’s 100th birthday coming up this August. I’d planned to take an issue off while Jon B. Cooke and I finish up our KIRBY100 celebratory book for Summer, but thanks to Jon’s tireless work on it, we’re far enough ahead that I’ll be jumping right onto TJKC #72 as soon as this issue’s at the printer, and it should be out around the same time as KIRBY100. So get set for a full Summer of Kirby!

Now, to your letters on #69:] As someone who has been following your fine publication since Day One, I felt that it was high time I added my comments to your letters page.

As per usual, the cover of TJKC #69 was outstanding and demanded the readers’ immediate attention. A bit like how Kirby would reel you in, once you’d seen one of his books on display, for the very first time. I appreciated you printing the Mr. Scarlet story, but on the whole, one could see why the character was never a roaring success.

Our man in red was simply not in the same league as Captain America or the Newsboy Legion!

Back in 1970, I bought FANTASTIC FOUR #96.

I love the Kirby/Sinnott front cover and I love the story. I’ve re-read it many times over the years.

Then earlier this year, on closer inspection, I finally noticed something particularly odd about the backdrop to the front cover. Those buildings look too uneven! Kirby would never draw torn curtains like that! My God! They’ve tampered with Kirby’s art—again?

So you can imagine my initial shock when I got to see the original cover to FF #96 in TJKC, some months later. Talk about déjà vu! It also became crystal clear, why Stan Lee had directed those major changes to Jack’s work. The simple fast is that over the proceeding years, the FF had steadily become a very tight family unit. So in reality, it just made plain sense to show them

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 Don’t make me start Ragnarök—write to us!

Comments

subdued within the comfort of their own home, rather than within the boundaries of a cold dank laboratory. On this occasion, Stan got it right and Jack got it wrong. Saying that, I still wish that Jack had re-drawn those buildings and that damn torn curtain!

I have enclosed a picture taken in the late ’70s. [below] Behind some unknown English punk rock group, we can see a blow-up of the splash page from MISTER MIRACLE #7. Who were the group?

Who cares? But Jack’s art looks magnificent!

Mr. P Savage, Gosport, UNITED KINGDOM (We found the group Bee Bee Cee listed online.

Apparently, their only release was YOU GOTTA KNOW GIRL (a 7" single) on Rel Records in 1977.

I didn’t find any of the members’ listed in our subscriber database, but I’d bet their drummer “Zokko” had to be the Kirby fan—that must be a sound effect from Jack’s Fourth World comics.)

Mr. Burroughs’ piece was the high point of TJKC #69. It really made a living thing—and occasion for the transfer of inspiration—out of something that, up to now, had been, to me, just part of the textbook data of Mr. Kirby’s career.

Not to mention sparking a serious consideration of the idea of linking Wood’s name with Kirby’s in jointly mid-wiving the birth of Kirby Krackle! Just when I was beginning to feel there was nothing left to discover!

Also thought-provoking was the last page of the “Origin of Loki” (from JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #112); I’ve never heard anyone acknowledge what a savvy move it was to turn the Loki of traditional Norse mythology (a demon with whom Odin shared a bond of blood-brotherhood) into an orphan adopted in infancy by Odin when the latter slew his father in battle. That fresh revision energized everything: Loki got a big, bright share of centerstage spotlight to play in, and his perpetual toe-to-toe rivalry with the Thunder God was off and running.

But read Kirby’s FOURTH WORLD and then look back at that revised mythology in THOR: Doesn’t Loki’s adoption by Odin seem a sort of embryonic precursor to The Pact’s “exchange of sons” motif? As though Jack had continued to turn the theme of adoption round in his head, over the course of a further half-decade, for all

94

In Robert Guffey’s TJKC #70 article “Little Humans and Giant Gods,” I made an editing error on page 21, leaving out a crucial sentence that would have identified the first three paragraphs were from Mark Evanier’s introduction to DC’s 2011 The Jack Kirby Omnibus Volume One. The result made it appear if they were Robert’s own words instead of Mark’s. I extend my most humble apologies to both gentlemen for my mistake. that it might yet be made to yield? Imagine if Jack’s last word on adoption had been the character of Clay Duncan in BOYS’ RANCH! Ted Krasniewski, Jersey City, NJ I’ve only written TJKC twice in all the years I’ve been reading your fine publication. And I am prompted to write now because of the 2016 Kirby Tribute Panel transcript, (#69) where once again Vinnie Colletta is tossed to the lions.

When did Jack Kirby’s pencils become scripture, far too great to alter in any respect? Or maybe it’s just anyone can alter them but Vinnie?

Every inker who ever worked over Kirby’s pencils altered them—they had to. Jack was famous for forgetting what a costume looked like from one issue to another; the inkers fixed it.

Jack’s rendition of Superman was altered in every aspect, because it didn’t fit the DC house style (not to say I agree with that). But let’s just focus on the Superman “S”; it was always altered. Was it because Jack did not have the ability to draw it to spec? No, it was because Jack didn’t want to waste the time it would take to get it to spec—he had stories to tell. That was the most important thing, getting the stories out and on to paper.

Jack’s inkers were always his fixers, fixing costumes, making sure eyes were on the same level, making sure right and left hands were on the right and left arm. Jack made mistakes; anyone who has read this magazine from the beginning has read some of the stories of these fixes.

Did anyone ever notice when you held that issue of THOR in your hand that something was missing? Was the power, grandeur, the epic storytelling still there? Yes, it was. Sure, changes were made to save time—and maybe sometimes it was an artistic choice; the panel just worked better without that silhouette in the background.

Vinnie also made Kirby’s women beautiful. Did Sif ever look better then when Vinnie inked her?

If you want to argue the quality of Vinnie’s inking over George Tuska’s pencils, then I’m with you. If you want to talk about the switch to plastic Letterflex printing plates used at the time, and how they could never reproduce Vinnie’s fine-line inking style and how this caused his printed work to suffer, sure, we can talk about that. The notion that Vinnie Colletta’s inking took anything away from Kirby’s run on THOR just doesn’t hold up to the eye test, not to my 14year-old eyes back then, or now with that beautiful IDW Artist Edition. The defense rests.

Bruce Dodge, Greenfield, NH

(Vinnie’s inking on JIMMY OLSEN is a rare instance where I preferred him to Royer on a book. I think his lighter style worked better on that series, in much the way a lot of people think his style fit THOR well. But I don’t think the guy should’ve arbitrarily omitted details that Jack (or any other penciler) put in. That’s not something that I intentionally “shade” the discussion with in this mag, just my opinion. I present all sides; there just happens to be a lot of people that agree with me—just as there are many that agree with you.)

Thanks for another extremely entertaining issue of TJKC (#69). I particularly enjoyed learning more about Glenn Kolleda and Kirby’s “Jacob and the Angel.” The mini-sculpture has sat on my mantelpiece for many years, below the framed print, and is always remarked upon by non-comic-lovers who call in for the first time (and the new knowledge concerning the dubious nature of the whole enterprise won’t take away the years of pleasure it’s given me). Yes, it was expensive (though I can’t remember how much) and like most, I had assumed that the second project never went beyond the litho stage. And yes, if I ever find one...

There were two articles which lay on the periphery of Kirby-lore; the conversation with Arnold and Bonnie Hano was interesting, giving more colour to the Timely/Atlas/Marvel set-up prior to the Marvel Age itself. However, Barry Forshaw’s “Kirby Obscura” was padded, with its second part having no relevance to the life and work of JK. At the same time that I was working my way through TJKC, I was also reading the new Neal Adams “Superman: The Coming of the Supermen” HC from DC and was very disappointed to see—especially after reading the Comic-Con panel discussion about Jack being routinely credited for his creations now—that nowhere is there any mention of Jack Kirby. To those who haven’t read STCOTS, I would recommend it. It has some stunning Adams art. BUT, although ostensibly a Superman tale (and Siegel and Shuster are rightly and prominently credited as his creators), the book relies just as much on the mythos of Kirby’s Fourth World, and if page 6 of Book Three isn’t an homage to the splash page of NEW GODS #1, I don’t know what is. Even some of the dialogue is reminiscent of the Fourth World’s ‘flippancy in the midst of cosmic mayhem’. But no sign of credit to Jack Kirby.

Loved the Wally Wood piece, and the Comic-Con panel was more exciting than usual, since it’s just happened, with tantalizing hints at what 2017 may have in store. As Bruce Channel said in ’68, keep on doing whatever it is you do to me. Onwards to #70.

Geraint Davies, Swansea, UNITED KINGDOM An interesting mix of subject matter (#69).

My favorite, provoking a great laugh, was Jack’s margin notes on THOR #162 reading, “Something is not kosher on Earth.” I don’t recall that line making it in.

Also got a kick out of the photograph of Joe Simon’s old house. Yes, lots of history was made there.

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!

KIRBY’S ONE-SHOTS! Jack’s best & worst shortest-lived and throwaway comics, characters and concepts!

KIRBY’S WORLD THAT’S HERE! & WORLD THAT WAS! How Jack looked into his crystal ball to predict the future, and a flip-issue going way back to Jack's throwbacks!

But it’s not the house that was magical; it was the owner and his partner.

Liked the look at Kirby/Wood; a tremendous combination. Same with the cover collaboration between Jack and Joe Sinnott. Maybe, if his interest and schedule permits, you could have a series of talks with Joe about FFs #5 and #44 to the end of Jack’s run? In small segments, he could get into specifics or review the issues prior, to see if any jar memories. For that matter, you could ask about Thor’s origin in JIM #83.

If Jack ghosted JOHNNY REB, Giacoia added a lot of his own style. Some of the panels have figures that look like Jack’s, but the finished art covers that up a bit in others.

Packaging Kirby? Thankfully, the collections keep Jack’s stories in print and allow us to revisit old favorites or even discover what we missed. In the latter category, there was no collection I anticipated more than DC’s KIRBY OMNIBUS with all his ’50s fantasy tales. I’d not read most of them. My problem was, unlike Atlas, he didn’t share the book with other artists whose work I loved like Steve Ditko and Don Heck. In the DC anthologies, it would mostly be Jack’s stories amid artists I didn’t know or care for.

I enjoyed the conversation with the various fans about their views on Jack and when they first discovered his work. Being from various eras didn’t matter.

All found something they liked. I got a special kick from David Schwartz’s recollection of FF #58 and, shortly thereafter, #57. It closely echoed my purchase of FF #55, that Summer, followed by #57, then discovering a welcome copy of #56 in the middle of a messy stack at another drug store. It really didn’t matter where or when someone discovered Jack, so long as the fondness was there. That would lead to searching out back issues and following future projects.

Enjoyed Jack’s more realistic art on the unused STRANGE WORLD OF YOUR DREAMS. Also cool: the shot of Habitat from JIMMY OLSEN. I rarely warmed to that series but no denying many wonderful ideas, such as this, were unveiled there.

A question: the THOR #112 Tales of Asgard pencil photocopy was considerably older than many or most we see. Do many pages from that era survive in pencil xerox form? Or is it mostly after Jack moved to California? [It’s a mix of dates for those stats. - John] Interesting to read the 3-D background info material. Candidly, I wasn’t crazy about that project as it seemed more a story geared for the format than an interesting work in its own right. Never a big 3-D fan. I’m more interested in compelling characters than spears coming at me or dodging paddle balls.

Jack’s interview about his then-upcoming Topps books was informative. Great hopes. Fine talent involved but it just didn’t come together. Most instant universes don’t. Perhaps more time was needed to establish the characters, separately, as distinct characters, before bringing them together?

Anyway, a wide-ranging, enjoyable issue, John.

Joe Frank, Scottsdale, AZ 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!

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(below) Utilitas zothe#71 Credits: cas fermentet bellus John Morrow, Editor/Designer/ saburre. Perspicax Highfather stand-in syrtes spinosus cirEric Nolen-Weathington, Proofreader cumgrediet ut THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Mike Allred • Michael Aushenker Mark Badger • Chris Beneke Mike Burkey • Glen Brunswick Norris Burroughs • Hugo Canuto Jon B. Cooke • Peter Csanadi Michael Eury • Mark Evanier Chris Fama • Shane Foley David Folkman • Barry Forshaw Jamie Graham (Graham Cracker Comics) • Heritage Auctions Rand Hoppe • Larry Houston Sean Kleefeld • Richard Kolkman Tom Kraft • Adam McGovern John Misselhorn • Eric NolenWeathington • Mike Royer Randy Sargent • Kevin Andre Shaw Steve Sherman • Bruce Simon Walter Simonson • Mike Towry Tom Ziuko • The Jack 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: Tape up your boxing gloves, as TJKC #72 takes you to Kirby’s FIGHT CLUB, showcasing Jack’s most powerful fights and inyour-face action! We’ve got recollections of real-life war experiences by Jack and his contemporaries from the Greatest Generation, Kirby’s quick-trigger work on Marvel’s kid cowboys, the Madbomb saga, all those negative 1970s Marvel fan letters, an interview with SCOTT McCLOUD on his Kirby-inspired punchfest DESTROY!!, a rare Kirby interview, the 2017 WonderCon Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by DEAN HASPIEL! It ships August 2017, just in time for Jack’s 100th!

Parting Shot

As the world’s biggest Fourth World fan (yes I am; you are only a close second, my friend), this page told me it was truly the end. With Orion’s final declaration of war, and the plug for Jack’s upcoming Kamandi comic, they didn’t need to spell it out for me: The Fourth World was over. Despite a bittersweet few pages in Mister Miracle #18 that brought the old gang back together, it was never again as good as this page from New Gods #11.

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URGENT WARNING FOR OUR READERS! DON’T MISS YOUR FAVORITE MAGS! We are experiencing huge demand for our recent magazines. Case in point: Back Issue #88 & #89 and Alter Ego #141 are already completely SOLD OUT, with other issues about to run out.

So don’t wait for a convention or sale— order now!

BACK ISSUE #96

ALTER EGO #146

ALTER EGO #147

ALTER EGO #148

ALTER EGO #149

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!

Showcases GIL KANE, with an incisive and free-wheeling interview conducted in the 1990s by DANIEL HERMAN for his 2001 book Gil Kane: The Art of the Comics— plus other surprise features centered around the artistic co-creator of the Silver Age Green Lantern and The Atom! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and BILL SCHELLY! Green Lantern cover by KANE and GIELLA!

(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 June 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships August 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Oct. 2017

BACK ISSUE #97

BACK ISSUE #98

BACK ISSUE #99

BRICKJOURNAL #45

“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!

FEMALE LEGO BUILDERS! US Architectural builder ANURADHA PEHRSON, British Microscale builder FERNANDA RIMINI, US Bionicle builder BREANN SLEDGE, and Norwegian Town builder BRIGITTE JONSGARD discuss their work and inspirations!

Plus: Minifigure customizing from JARED K. BURKS’, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, & more!

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Now shipping!

(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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Now shipping!

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #14 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #15 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #16

DRAW! #33

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.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Now shipping!

(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 Fall 2017

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Now shipping!

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