Jack Kirby Collector #72

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SEVENTY-TWO

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All characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Contents Fight Club!

Opening Shot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 (put up your dukes!)

FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 (fightin’, flying’ Ted O’Neil)

C o l l e c t o r

Issue #72, FALL 2017

Influencees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 ( Scott McCloud tries to understand Kirby’s work) WAR Room . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 ( the effect of WWII on Jack and his contemporaries) Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 (Kirby Kowards spotlighted) Kirby Obscura . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 (meet Mr. Zimmer) Rootin’ Shootin’ . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 (Marvel’s kid cowboys hit the trail) KIRBY KINETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 ( Rawhide Kid, bantamweight scrapper) Write-in Fightin’ . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 ( the Kirby Kontroversy in Marvel’s 1970s letter columns) Great Lengths . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 (mad about the Madbomb) Incidental Iconography . . . . . 60 (the Thing took his lumps) Ink Fight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 (which Kirby inker, inked the most?)

Police Dept. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 (a Metropolis police story) Innerview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 (Jack’s second American revolution) Anti-Fight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 (Jack’s summer of love, 1967) Teknique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 ( quiet Kirby, via Dean Haspiel) Kirby As A Genre . . . . . . . . . . . 76 (accepting the Kamandi Challenge) Jack F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 ( Mark Evanier moderates the 2017 WonderCon Tribute Panel) Jack Kirby Museum . . . . . . . . . 82 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) Collector Comments . . . . . . . 92 Parting Shot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Cover inks: D EAN HASPIEL Cover color: TOM ZIUKO Happy 100th JACK “KING” KIRBY! COPYRIGHTS: A.I.M., Agent 13, Alicia Masters, Angel, Avengers, Batroc, Black Widow, Bucky, Captain America, Champions, Daredevil, Defenders, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Doom, Eternals, Fandral, Fantastic Four, Galactus, GiantMan, Hellcat, Hercules, Him, Howling Commandos, Hogun, Hulk, Hurricane, Iceman, Ikaris, Iron Man, Iron Mask, Kid Colt, King Kobra, Loki, Magneto, Nighthawk, Odin, Power Man, Purple Phantom, Quasimodo, Rattler, Rawhide Kid, Red Guardian, Red Raven, Red Skull, Ringmaster, Sgt. Fury, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, SubMariner, Thor, Two-Gun Kid, Valkyrie, Volstagg, Wasp, Watcher, X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Ben Boxer, Big Barda, Boy Commandos, Commando Yank, Darkseid, Forever People, Funky Flashman, Kamandi, Losers, Mark Moonrider, Minute Man, New Gods, OMAC, Orion, Phantom Eagle, Red White & Blue, Spy Smasher, Star-Spangled Kid & Stripesy, Terrible Turpin TM & © DC Comics • Black Owl, Foxhole, Stuntman TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estates • 9-Jack-9, Dekko, Destroy, Understanding Comics, Zot! TM & © Scott McCloud • Roxie’s Raiders and all associated characters TM & © Ruby-Spears Productions • The Shield TM & © Archie Comics • Black Cat Mystic TM & © Harvey Comics • Miss Victory, Ted O’Neil, Yank & Doodle, Yankee Girl TM & © the respective owners.

For all the people who wrote letters to The Eternals in the 1970s, wanting Jack to make them part of the Marvel Universe, this mid-1970s commission piece likely makes them really, really happy!

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 24, No. 72, Fall 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, $67 International, $19 Digital. 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

Put Up Your Dukes! by editor John Morrow

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his may be picking a fight, but I’ll go out on a limb and say it: “In the long run, Kirby’s work at DC Comics in the 1970s will be more influential than his work at Marvel in the 1960s.”

This may sound like blasphemy to some, I know—especially to seasoned Marvelites. But hear me out, brothers and sisters, as I justify my preachings, like Glorious Godfrey in Forever People #3.

This issue, along with our new book Kirby100, will debut at Comic-Con International 2017 (or the San Diego Comic-Con as it was known its first several years). Jack Kirby had a knack for predicting the future. He was the first person to accurately envision what an event like Comic-Con could, and would, become—and he did it early-on, after one of the first events, back when it was only 300 attendees hanging around in a dingy hotel basement, or carousing around its swimming pool. He knew that, one day, it would be about more than just fans showing up to buy old comic books. Sooner or later, the major comics companies would catch on, and show up to promote their wares, and understand the importance of catering directly to their most serious fan-base—which of course, they did, exactly as Jack predicted, when no one else could see it.

Jack could find the potential in even the slightest germ of an idea, and imagine where he could take it, if the environment was right. So it stands to reason, then, that Kirby, though he created great material in the 1960s at Marvel, would likewise build on that inspiration, and do even greater work at a later time when he could do it his way.

This only makes sense. Everything Jack created at 1960s Marvel Comics, no matter how pure it was when he put it down on bristol board with a pencil, ended up filtered through someone else’s sieve by the time we fans saw it. Whether it was Stan Lee’s dialogue, or Vince Colletta’s sometimes great, sometimes not-so-much inking, or publisher Martin Goodman’s creator-unfriendly policies that got in the way, we never experienced “pure” Jack during the 1960s. All this

interference meant he had to be holding back at some level. Don’t get me wrong—it was stupendous, unprecedented work. But it was, at some fundamental level, compromised by Kirby’s lack of total control.

Cut to DC Comics in 1970. Jack made a deal with Carmine Infantino to leave Marvel, be his own editor, bring a batch of ideas that he’d refused to turn over to the so-called “House of Ideas” (mostly Jack’s as it turned out), and unleash them at DC. He was even allowed after a few issues to bring on his own inker in Mike Royer, which resulted in the closest to pure Kirby pencils as was possible in the published, inked art.

At the beginning of his tenure there, at least, he was allowed to cut loose, and like pasta on an Italian mother’s wall, toss his best ideas out and see what would stick. During that period, he threw more figurative linguine around than any creator before or since. For starters: • A band of super-powered hippies who, instead of battling evil, ran away from it. Check.

• A technologically advanced dropout society that counter-balanced a government “project” experimenting with cloning, at a time when that term was hardly known. Check again.

• How about a super-escape artist from an evil planet with touches of Oliver Twist? Or its twin planet, where godlike beings live in an idyllic society in which everyone has purpose and is treated justly (just don’t mention the lowly bugs that are forced to eke out their existence on the surface below their gleaming city)? Check-a-roonie.

Even after being reined back in by DC’s publisher after that first unbridled year or two, we still got (in no particular order) Merlin’s pet Demon, a new take on the Atlas legend, rebirths of 1940s characters Manhunter and Sandman, and a last boy on Earth struggling through a world populated by talking animals who treat people like cattle—plus all the myriad smaller concepts folded into each of those strips.

This is the stuff that legends are made of, and I predict that, even if Warner Brothers manages to ruin most of these concepts in their current frenzy to make DC compete with Marvel at your local cineplex, sooner or later these DC ideas will successfully make their way into the collective mindhive of the general population’s pop culture consciousness. (Say that three times fast!)

I even predict a Kirby concept as seemingly inconsequential as the Dingbats of Danger Street will eventually make its way into either a DC film or TV series. It may be as a cameo, or as supporting characters, or (dare I hope) as full-blown stars (c’mon, Krunch and Non-Fat would rock on-screen!), but they will be there, and after only one published Kirby appearance. You can’t say that about many Marvel one-offs, even ones 2

by Jack, so remember: You heard it here first! And if that applies to the little ideas like Dingbats, how much stronger were the big ones at DC? Let’s compare Marvel vs. DC Kirby concepts in headto-head creative match-ups:

(left) Jack drew this amazing Cap sketch in 1970 at a get-together with a friend. It was a gift for his 18-year-old daughter, who still cherishes it to this day.

• Inhumans vs. New Gods? No contest. The gods win, hands-down. The Inhumans leader would be screaming for mercy against Orion.

• Lockjaw vs. Angry Charlie? Charles would totally be in charge of Crystal’s bulldog. The pooch’s name was a Kirby retread anyway, while Angry Charlie is a bona fide original. (I digress, but anytime my wife or daughters drag me kicking and screaming to our local Charming Charlie’s jewelry store, I always call it “Angry Charlie’s,” and they think I’m weird—which I probably am, but still...)

• Captain America vs. OMAC? Sorry old soldier, but your tour of duty would finally be over.

• Ka-Zar vs. Kamandi? Even with Zabu’s presence, I’d give odds to Tuftan & Co. winning that creativity cat fight.

• The Howling Commandos vs. the Losers? War was a way more realistic hell at DC. • The gangsters in Fantastic Four #90-93 vs. In The Days of the Mob? Those Skrulls tried to act like Mafiosos, but DC had the real thing.

Capeesh?

• What about Jack’s last Marvel mystery work vs. Spirit World? “Toxl” kills anything in those final Marvel titles (except for the altered Chamber of Darkness #4’s “Monster” story, which would’ve been better if left alone—once again, that was Jack’s work being filtered to its detriment).

• The cosmic wonderment of Fantastic Four vs. Jimmy Olsen? It’s not a fair comparison, as Olsen ran far fewer issues, so we can only guess at what Jack would’ve come up with next. (But if you compare early FF to Olsen, it’s a slam-dunk in Jimmy’s favor.

The late Don Rickles’ appearance in Olsen alone tips the scales creatively.)

(previous page) Writer, poet and artist Russell Payne decided that since there was a Funko POP VINYL figure of Stan Lee, there needed to be one of Jack Kirby. So he spent an evening using Photoshop to create one. If you’d like to see it produced for real to celebrate Jack’s 100th birthday, flood Funko’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/originalfunko [Russell can be found on twitter (@russell_payne) or at his website (www.rabid.oneuk.com)]

• Last but not least, Darkseid vs. ...oh, let’s just say, any of the Marvel villains Jack created? He’d still win out, even over Galactus or Dr. Doom—in the creative realm, he’s the Ultimate Nullifier of all of Jack’s past bad-guys.

And don’t miss Kirby100, our book celebrating Jack’s 100th birthday. The hardcover is almost sold out, so don’t delay!

If you’re reading this while you’re at Comic-Con, there’s a good chance the person to your immediate left or right has never read a comic book, and never will. But they likely know the Avengers (even Ant-Man, probably the least-regarded super-hero of Jack’s 1960s Marvel tenure), and keep going back to theaters and Netflix to see the next adventure of those characters Jack created, and buy all the plastic tchotchkes Mighty Marvel manages to produce each year.

Once DC’s New Gods are done right on-screen, it’s going to be as mind-blowing to movie fans as it was to comics fans in 1970. They may not know exactly what to make of them, but they’ll know they’re onto something remarkable. And they’ll know Darkseid scares the crap out of them like no villain ever has.

At the end of the day, maybe it’s a silly argument. Both companies’ characters and concepts have already influenced pop culture, even as DC’s are just now beginning to make a major mark. But check back with me in, say, 2027, to find out if I’m right—and see if Kirby was correct in his predictions about Comic-Con. If he was, by then the event should be so huge, that movie and multi-media companies will have the largest booths, and people and exhibitors and events will be spilling beyond the convention center, out into the streets of San Diego, in a manic display of how comics have morphed into something widely accepted, which even non-comics people will pay crazy prices for a ticket to, and wait in long lines for... ...hey... wait a minute... H 3

Foundations

For a six-page filler in Prize Comics #8 (Jan. 1941), this one packs a lot of punch, with great art, welldetailed aircraft, and a compelling (if rushed) subplot. Be sure to check out page 2, panel 6, for a nice artistic touch where Major Dabney’s arm literally rests on the panel border.

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Influencees

Scott McCloud Interview Conducted and edited by Jon B. Cooke, and transcribed by Steven Tice

[Scott McCloud is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking 1993 book Understanding Comics, wherein he explored all aspects of the fundamental make-up of comics, from defining them to analyzing how they’re formed.

McCloud created the fondly-remembered sci-fi super-hero series Zot! in 1984, and in 1986 produced Destroy!!, his Kirbyinspired parody of super-hero fight comics.

He’s also done work for DC Comics, was author of the 1988 Creator’s Bill of Rights for comics creators, an early champion of mini-comics, and conceived the idea of the 24-Hour Comics challenge.

This interview was conducted on April 18, 2017, and edited by Jon B. Cooke.]

(above) book that (below) The Utilitas zothmade us all think: ecas fermentet bellus Understanding Comics, saburre. Perspicax and (below) Jack’s syrtes spinosus cirplace in it. ut cumgrediet (next page, top) A quiet moment from Fantastic Four Annual #5 (1967), featuring a subtle conciliatory message from Stan to Jack, in the midst during a tumultuous year between the duo.

Below is the calm before the storm starts in McCloud’s Destroy!!

TJKC: Do you recall the work?

Was it his DC work in the ’70s or was it Marvel?

McCLOUD: No, the first stuff that I encountered was prime Fantastic Four, so we’re talking sort of the full-bloom of the Joe Sinnott years, and not the earliest stuff. The earliest work to me seemed more primitive, and it still does, actually. I mean, the very early Fantastic Four doesn’t feel to me like he had quite hit his stride, and I wasn’t really ready to enjoy the New Gods era. Things like Devil Dinosaur (which, I suppose, hadn’t even come out yet) was an acquired taste later on. [laughs] But right now I think my favorite Kirby periods are still probably the mature FF issues and work like New Gods, which I think of as the mature, pure, and post-Marvel Kirby.

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: When do you recall first encountering Jack Kirby’s work?

Scott McCloud: Very early. I got into comics when I was about 14, I think, in middle school. Maybe 13.

My friend Kurt Busiek got me to read a big stack of comics, and I think it was probably within a year or two when I ran into Kirby’s work, possibly through Kurt, possibly through people like Rich Howell and Carol Kalish and the gang at the MillionYear Picnic, the legendary store in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, which Kurt and I encountered after a year or two of frustrating trips to our local convenience store. There we found the mother lode. [laughs] We grew up to Lexington, Massachusetts, so we were a couple of bus stops away, but Cambridge was Mecca for us.

And I would say, within the first couple of years, with the guidance of Kurt, who was, I think, always a little ahead of me in plumbing the history of the stuff, I came to recognize that Kirby—who, at the beginning, looked a little raw to me—had a lot on the ball and was really the source of some of the stuff I was enjoying from people like John Buscema.

TJKC: Did you acclimate yourself to the material? Did Kirby become a favorite?

McCLOUD: Well, by the time I was in high school and especially college, I was thinking of it more sort of as an ecology of styles, and I was very interested in going back to the source, the trunk of the tree, and I think I had come to recognize that Kirby was the trunk of the tree. By late high school I was also discovering American independent material, and my local library had a copy of the Smithsonian Book of Comic Strips, so the early comic strips were blowing my mind. I had found Eisner’s The Spirit. So I wasn’t as enthralled to the Kirby stylistic universe as any kind of be-all and endall. I was getting into a lot of work by the end of high school, and my favorite comics were the contemporary comics being done, like the new X-Men comics. That, for me, was the top of the form. [laughs] Kurt and I were really into Claremont’s X-Men, starting from the very beginning of, like, the Cockrum stuff.

TJKC: When Jack went independent, did you pick up Captain Victory and that stuff?

McCLOUD: Yes. We were following Destroyer Duck and that sort of thing. But again, pretty early on I developed a kind of altitude on the form, so it wasn’t that I was a fan of any one artist. I was more just trying to understand how the medium worked. That stuff kicked in very early. I was a very pretentious nerd from a very, very early age. I had all kinds of froofy, pretentious ideas about the form and trying to deconstruct comics. That stuff came quite early on.

The first comic Kurt and I did was this 60-page comic book called The Battle of Lexington, 10

where a bunch of super-heroes beat each other up in our hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts, in the process destroying the high school and that sort of thing. By the time that was even done, I was already trying to figure out whole-page compositions and getting turned on to Neal Adams’ Deadman and weird stuff like that. Things were changing fast, I guess is what I’m trying to say. So Kirby, to me, was this avatar of a particular approach to comics that I was seeing in contrast to other approaches, and it stayed that way. It wasn’t like I was following Uncle Jack onto Destroyer Duck, but I was more looking at it as, “Well, this is an interesting mutation,” and you have creators’ rights, and the stuff’s going on at Eclipse, and all that sort of thing. And I guess I saw Kirby past a point as being a kind of avatar.

The later stuff I saw as lovably nutty. You know, it just made us laugh, as it seemed a little unhinged, frankly. Things like Devil Dinosaur seemed a little crazy, and Destroyer Duck, too. It was getting kind of nutty.

And we appreciated it, but Kirby’s significance for me was in his compositional ideas during his prime and the way that everything kind of followed from that. I just saw him as the granddaddy of everything that was out there in the super-hero world, that if you plucked him out, that just the entire, the phylum and species and genus of that whole evolutionary line would just vanish in thin air. Without Kirby, there would have been no Buscema. There would have been no playground for people like Ditko. Gene Colan, as different as he was, was still working in that world. Jim Starlin was still working in that world. He just started everything in the American super-hero tradition, and I guess because I was getting interested in other kinds of comics, that became more clear to me. Because I saw that there was an alternative, I realized that it all just came from Kirby. The whole 11

modern super-hero sensibility, the Marvel sensibility, certainly, just flowed right out of Kirby. (below) One of the most charming comics ever produced (and a favorite of TJKC editor John Morrow), Zot! looked fabulous in color, but really hit its stride after issue #10 when it reverted to black-&-white. Note how Scott (consciously or not) evoked the Kirby dynamics—and a flopped version of Kirby’s tilted camera angle—of the cover of Avengers #4 (March 1964, next page) for his Zot! #1 cover below.

TJKC: Now, did you see him as transcendent of the super-hero realm, or do you basically just view him as the granddaddy of all super-hero artists? I mean, you’ve written Understanding Comics and Making Comics. How do you view him in the pantheon of comic book communication?

McCLOUD: I think that many, many generations of artists still walked around with Kirby as their beating heart, and, at a certain point, they were just unaware of it. They thought that because they didn’t draw big, blocky fingers that they weren’t still working inside of Kirby’s framework. But, you know, Kirby built the house. Marvel was the house that Jack built, and just about everybody working within that was working within his structure—as Kirby, to a degree, was working within Eisner’s milieu. You know, the Eisner awareness of the page, Eisner’s dynamic contrasts, Kirby was still working in that architecture, as well. But just the use of diagonals, use of overlapping, exaggerated

poses, page layouts, depth of field… all of these things were just so fundamental. Later on, when I got How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, I was impressed by how clearly John Buscema was explaining everything, and I thought, “Wow, this is really a great explanation of the way Buscema makes comics.” But now I look at it and I realize, no, it’s just an explanation of the way Kirby made comics. Buscema, a tremendously talented guy, one of the very best, was basically refining the dynamics that Kirby had introduced.

TJKC: You said that Jack was a contrast. A contrast to what?

McCLOUD: A contrast to what was happening in Europe, a contrast to what was happening in the undergrounds, in the comic strips, all of the different material that I was discovering. And, by the time college comes around, Japan becomes my obsession, and he was a contrast to that, too. So the things that make Kirby significant for me now are highlighted by how very, very different the approach was in, say, the Franco-Belgian school and Hergé. Their approach to motion, for example. It’s virtually nonexistent. Those motion lines that Kirby used so operatically and with such panache, they’re just a couple of little, tiny diagrammatic zip ribbons in a series like Tintin. They don’t do it. They just don’t do it at all. And the primacy of the foreground figure, as well, you don’t really see that in European comics. It’s really helpful to compare them, to compare the approaches.

You know, Kirby dominated the American style for many, many years. I think now that there may be something that Kirby was a subset of. When you compare American comics to Japanese and European comics, one of the things that stands out is that, across all genres, there’s that sense of the lone protagonist, and the idea of figure and backdrop. And, weirdly enough, that almost theatrical kind of approach is something that dominates in the comic strips, in the undergrounds, in the super-hero books, and everything; it’s the idea that you are performing for an audience.

And one of the interesting things is that American comics characters, for about a century, almost never turn their back on the audience, something that characters did do in Japan and Europe. So I got to thinking that maybe there’s a bit of theater left in the American DNA, because we started in theater, right? We started in Vaudeville, the original strips were just little paper theater on boxes, and so that was something that Kirby did, too, but he wasn’t the only one. That was true of the strips. That was true of the undergrounds. That idea of the lone hero sort of venturing out, and the idea that the whole world is his backdrop, was something that was very American. And so, Kirby was just part of that, but within that, again, it’s just… I’m sorry, I’m looking at evolutionary biology right now, so I’m thinking in terms of phylum, species, and orders, and genus, and all that sort of thing. Almost all the popular species that came out of American comics in the late 20th century were part of Kirby’s evolutionary phylum.

TJKC: This is an old question that fanboys can sit around and throw at each other: Do you think Jack Kirby was a genius?

McCLOUD: Sure, yes, in the sense that, you know, I think of that word as somebody who sees patterns and

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intuitively tries for something that’s never been done.

I think it was Schopenhauer who said (I may get this wrong) something like, while the master hits the target that no one else can hit, the genius hits the target no one else can see. And that’s certainly something that Kirby did; he aimed for something that nobody was aiming for. The ground just shook when he was at his peak, because he was trying for things that nobody else even thought you could try for. And, yes, I think that’s certainly a kind of genius. He was an intuitive kind of genius. He was different than Eisner, who was very consciously mapping out possibilities and pointing them out to us, very consciously. Jack, as near as I could tell, was not doing so consciously. He was doing so in a very intuitive way. He was a little superstitious, I believe. I think he had his lucky drawing board, things like that. And I think he was the kind of guy who would wake up in the morning and ask his characters what they wanted to do—which is something I associate with more intuitive artists.

TJKC: And Ernie Bushmiller. [laughter] McCLOUD: Yeah, Ernie definitely did that. Ernie’s a very oddball case, obviously. But, yes, I think, by almost any measure, a genius is somebody who creates a style out of whole cloth and the authority of that style was so powerful that it influences generations and generations. That’s Genius 101 right there. You do something that’s never been done and then everybody else wants to do it after you. [laughs] That’s, like, Beethoven territory.

TJKC: You were a professional working in independent comics when the Jack Kirby “art fight” came to the fore. You were producing Zot! at the time, right?

McCLOUD: Right, I assume you’re referring to the battle to get his original art back, and then the sort of rights struggle, regarding how much he contributed to Marvel, that kind of grew out of that?

TJKC: Right.

McCLOUD: Well, I knew whose side I was on. There wasn’t a whole lot of ambiguity there. You know, it’s useful to go back to Eisner’s The Dreamer and his portrayal of the thinly-veiled Jack Kirby character, who, when the mob comes up and tries to sell the shop towels as a kind of crooked racket—it’s obviously a very corrupt thing—and Eisner’s trying to manage the situation and little Jack Kirby comes up and tries to beat the guy up right there on the spot. [laughs] He had an extremely strong sense of right and wrong, and you could tell he was royally pissed off at the way he had been treated by Marvel. And we were pissed off on his behalf, too. I wasn’t actually raised to be a rabble-rouser. I came from a very sort of pastoral, suburban kind of a family that wasn’t inclined to make a big fuss, so I wasn’t leading boycotts or anything like that, but it was pretty clear who was right. Kirby clearly created so much value for the company, and the guy was getting screwed over, and he’s being screwed over to this day every time somebody thinks that all those Marvel characters were created by Stan Lee alone. Kirby’s getting screwed all over again, and it sucks. [sighs] There’s not a lot to do about it now; that horse left the gate a long time ago. It’s certainly a sign of a very unfair world. Stan made some genuine contributions in his day. He wrote some great stories, he helped create some great comics, and he deserves credit for that. But I give Kirby the lion’s share of credit for that whole period. Without Kirby, it just wouldn’t have happened. Without Stan… I don’t know.

Kirby still would have made an enormous difference.

TJKC: Did you meet the man?

McCLOUD: Once. I tried to ask him about some of his compositional techniques, which I thought were really interesting, and I got some genial answer about how, you know, he really hated Nazis. [laughter] And Captain America fought Nazis, and I realized that he was of that generation that wasn’t going to put on airs, put on a beret and start talking about, you know, all that froofy artist stuff.

He was just a workin’ Joe craftsman. He just wanted to tell stories.

TJKC: Did you get interested in his life?

McCLOUD: Nah. I’ve always been a very lazy historian. You know, I research the stuff that’s relevant to what I’m doing, so no. To me, it was all on the page. I was very interested in what was going on within the page, but as soon as you stepped off the page, mostly that generation you just had a bunch of guys who didn’t even want to talk about it. They were actually very hostile to the whole idea of talking about art.

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TJKC: It could be characterized that his work was full of rage, the exposition in it. He went through World War II and had horrific experiences during the Battle of the Bulge… Is there any sense that you can look at the work and have any opinions about the man from it? Does it speak of him?

McCLOUD: I didn’t see the rage. I’m not contradicting you; I think you might be right. I think that might be an astute observation. But, as a reader, I didn’t see it. Actually, the one biographical piece of information that I had, that I know about Jack, through a story that Mark Evanier tells, doesn’t paint that portrait at all. I see him as a family man and somebody who was justifiably angry at the way he was treated, but probably spent most of his energy trying to just be a regular guy and take care of his family. I mean, when I think of Jack’s anger about the rights struggles, I see them entirely on behalf of his family. I get the feeling he had an enormously strong attachment to his wife and children.

He really cared about that stuff, and the Evanier story which for me is a real talisman of how to be happy, how to enjoy the world, is that one about him going to the Paul McCartney concert with his kids. How many kids did he have?

TJKC: Four.

McCLOUD: His kids were big Beatles fans and he goes to a Paul McCartney concert.

Well, it turns out that McCartney was a fan of his, so he goes to this concert. His kids loved the Beatles and he actually gets invited backstage. And Paul McCartney, in front of Jack’s kids, tells Jack Kirby how much his work meant to him, what an enormous fan he was, shakes his hand, makes it very clear that Jack was a hero to Paul McCartney in front of Jack’s kids. Driving back to Thousand Oaks, up the Ventura Highway, the 101, Jack in the car says, “You know what? I think we should go to Big Boy. I’m gonna have a slice of chocolate cake.” [laughter] For me, this is somebody who, at his heart, knew the secret of being happy. When something like that happens, you can’t bottle it, you can’t catch it. You can’t even think about it without it vanishing. You can’t look directly at it. Find some other small pleasure, and use that small thing to kind of nail that feeling to the floor, you know? That’s how you do it. You catch the big happiness with a small happiness.

The little things. I think when Kirby wasn’t at the drawing board, he was in the world. I don’t know why, but that story just really speaks to me, and I think it was a powerful ethic of that day that, yeah, you had your job; yeah, you had your art; you had your whatever, you had your stories; but the rest of the day, you were a man and you raised your family, and you brought home the bacon, and you did the backyard barbecues, and you just tried to be a person.

You might be right about his war experiences. He may have been haunted by that stuff.

But I can’t help thinking that, in his mind, we won! [laughs] We actually killed some Nazis, and we came home, and we won. And I just, I think that must have meant something to him.

I really don’t know for sure. But I find somehow 14

that being a regular guy was a real value to his generation, and from what little I know of him, I don’t see any evidence that he was different from them. I really liked that Evanier story and it really stuck with me.

TJKC: What’s the story behind Destroy!!?

McCLOUD: Well, you know, it’s funny, because Destroy!! is the kind of thing you do as sort of a retrospective on, like, when you’ve been making comics for a little while and you want to get something out of your system.

But, in fact, it was only a year-and-a-half after I started making comics that I had done ten issues of Zot!, and I recognized how much of an influence Kirby had on me, and that there was something that I was chasing… that kind of arms race of dynamics that I realized that I was one of those artists who was always trying to punch the reader in the face, always trying to demonstrate my power of composition and trying to create things that were explosive and impressive, and I guess I was thinking that maybe that was a high that I didn’t want to keep chasing, that it was unhealthy. That probably I was never going to create anything that had as much impact as Kirby, so rather than just give up and turn away, I figured I would make one last, crazy, bold run at that red cape and see if I could take all of that desire to do something big and explosive, and just put it in one book. And then I could rest easy. I could turn away for a kind of primal scream therapy, and I figured I could pursue my quieter comics more easily. By then, I was deeply into manga, deeply into what I considered to be maybe a more fertile ground of the small, formal explorations that I was finding in manga. And I figured if I could get the more testosterone-based stuff out of my system, that might free me up to go in that other direction.

TJKC: So were you exorcising Kirby from you?

McCLOUD: To an extent. I still wasn’t getting rid of him as an influence, but I realized that there was this unhealthy chasing after, kind of playing King of the Hill. I realized almost every artist in the super-hero realm was playing King of the Hill with Kirby, and guess what? He was still the king. [laughs] None of them could beat him on that hill. He was always going to stand as sort of the biggest, loudest, most dynamic of all of them. They couldn’t scale that rocky peak. And I wasn’t going to, either. I wasn’t going to knock him off that hill. But with Destroy!!, I thought that it was healthy for me in one big comic to do everything I could to sort of out-scream Kirby, you know? [laughs] And then I could rest easy, right?

Because I did everything I could, and now I could move on. This was as loud as it was going to get for me. It was the loudest comic I could make. And then I could go on to the quiet stuff.

TJKC: What was Destroy!!?

McCLOUD: Destroy!! was a 32-page, oversized comic, a huge comic, the size of one of those Treasury Editions that they used to make, and it was a non-stop fight

scene. It was nothing but two guys beating the crap out of each other for 32 pages and destroying all of Manhattan, back before some terrorists in a cave got the idea of trying to do that to the World Trade Towers.

This is 1985. Its origin story started with a Marvel comic called Super Boxers by Ron Wilson.

Super Boxers had been criticized as having nothing but senseless violence, which instantly made me want to go find it, because I loved the idea of something being as pure as that, and I was actually disappointed to find that it had a story, plot, and characters, like every other comic on the stands. [laughs] And I thought, “Well, if he won’t do a comic that’s nothing but senseless violence, I will.” So I did it. [laughs] I thought it would just be fun. This was the comic that was lurking at the heart of so many other comics, you know, and I’m just a big fan of things that are pure. My friend Brian Dewan had a phrase, a compliment that he would sometimes use of calling something what it is, “full throttle.” It was full throttle; it’s not trying to be 15

(previous page, bottom) No story exemplifies the perfect flat-out fight scene better than Kirby’s Iron Man/ Sub-Mariner battle in Tales to Astonish #82 (Aug. 1966). And Scott McCloud channeled it beautifully in Destroy!!.

(below) Kirby pencils and inks on a piece for Marvelmania. Color by Tom Ziuko. (next page) Like Kirby, Scott McCloud saved some of his best character designs for villains, such as the memorable Dekko (from Zot! #3) and 9-Jack-9 (from #24).

anything else but what it is. So that’s what I tried to do with Destroy!!. I tried to create something that just was what it was—full throttle.

TJKC: How did you sell the idea to Eclipse? How did you pitch it?

McCLOUD: Well, Eclipse was very tolerant of us pretentious writer/artists, and pretty much whatever it was that we had in mind, they were willing to give it a shot. And certainly it didn’t seem like something that would be impossible to market, though it wasn’t easy to market because, of course, stores, retailers didn’t know what to do with this big, oversized thing. So it seemed like marketable content but a very unmarketable format, and I think, sure enough, they ran into some difficulty with stores who didn’t know where to put it.

There was a normal-sized 3-D version, which I don’t remember if I signed up for it eagerly or if they had to talk me into it, but that, I guess, was a little easier to sell, and 3-D was something of a craze in those days, so that may have been a compromise that the normal-sized 3-D one helped offset whatever losses there were from printing this big, oversized thing. But we’re talking literally now 32 years ago, so my memory may be hazy on this.

TJKC: What did you think of the result of the 3-D? McCLOUD: It was delightful. Well, it was produced by the legendary Ray “3-D” Zone.

He did the 3-D conversion, which, if you think about it, is no easy feat. You have to do a lot of additional drawing in creating those two different parallax views. But, no, it’s lovely. He did a great job. I’m sorry we lost Ray a few years back.

TJKC: Did you work on regular comic-book-sized paper or did you actually draw it really large?

McCLOUD: I did it that much bigger. So the actual Destroy!! pages were 17" x 24.” They’re big! It was fun to have a printed comic the same size as the original art.

TJKC: And did that get you any attention?

McCLOUD: Well, you know, I was already getting attention just for being one of the independent creators at a time when there were only so many of us. This is at a time when you could count on two hands the number of titles at any of half-a-dozen independent companies.

It wasn’t a very crowded field. It may have helped my reputation as having some goofy, extreme ideas. Zot! was getting a fair amount of attention. It would get nominated here and there for things. It was in-between the color issues of Zot! and the black-&-white ones, so I suppose I was a little rootless, but what seemed like a long period to me where I was doing things like moving office furniture, it was really just the blink of an eye. Zot! was only gone for a couple years. In the Spring of ’87, Zot! comes back. Destroy!! was in ’86. You know, the color issues of Zot! basically run from ’84 to ’85, so Destroy!! comes out in ’86, Zot! comes back in ’87. Really, it was just a relatively brief period where Zot! wasn’t being published. But Zot! comes back as a black-&white, and then I’m off in my sort of manga-inspired run with Zot!.

TJKC: And would you characterize Zot! as a super-hero?

McCLOUD: Well, sure.

I mean, he is a super-hero. But I have a pretty expansive definition of super-hero, anyway. You know, I think of Scott Pilgrim as a super-hero book. Yeah, but the super-hero elements faded more and more, and it became more just a story about ordinary

16

teenagers, especially towards the end. So the purging that was Destroy!! really set the stage for the quieter stories that started to take over in Zot!.

TJKC: Right. Obviously you would then go on to working on Understanding Comics, correct?

McCLOUD: Yes. There was a period, I was making mini-comics and doing various little experimental things, but Zot! led pretty directly into Understanding Comics, which came out in ’93.

TJKC: And Jack’s in here, right?

McCLOUD: Jack, well, there were images of Jack Kirby, absolutely, in Understanding Comics.

I had redrawn some panels to talk about his forms of composition. And there’s some Kirby panels that show up for one purpose or another, though I don’t have any essays on him. The things that I was discussing in Understanding Comics were just general ideas about the form, and then I would use Kirby as a handy example, for instance, but it’s certainly not any kind of historical collection. There aren’t a lot of biographical details or anything like that.

there, and Kirby’s dynamics are certainly in there, I just see it as part of a tapestry of styles that I’m drawing from. The funny thing is that even today, if you pick up an American comic book, you’re going to see people who are still working through a lot of Kirby’s compositional ideas. It doesn’t mean that any of them understand those ideas. [laughs] It doesn’t mean that any of them have ever quite figured out what was important in Kirby. I think David Mazzucchelli probably does. I think Buscema certainly grabbed about two-thirds of them along the way. But the truth is, when people think they’re imitating Kirby, they often miss the really good parts.

One of the most exciting things about Kirby for me, in his prime, was his levels of depth and occlusion, and the way that everything in a Kirby scene swarms towards this vortex of the reader’s gaze. And you would have characters, and glasses of whiskey, and tomahawks, and rocks, and bats, and everything would just be sort of swarming in and getting in the way of each other, like they were all eager to take the stage and follow your gaze so that you would have, like, as many as seven or eight levels of overlapping. You have this wonderful hierarchy of depth through occlusion and foreshortening. So there was always a sense of a journey of depth going on in those compositions. But also, in addition to that, there was a sense of chance. That is, it’s like the panel border was a snapshot that would catch the world unawares. And there wasn’t a sense that people were staged. There wasn’t a sense that they had any awareness at all of the audience, and I liked that. At best, he did that. He didn’t always do it, but I liked it when he did, so that there was that sense of accidental composition. Nothing is an accident in a comic, right? The artist put it all there deliberately. Everything he drew, he drew consciously. He put it there. But Kirby had a way of creating a sense that, in fact, that’s just where things happened to be when he captured it with his pen. And there’s a real magic to that. If you can capture that, if there can be something just sort of poking a little bit into the panel because it just happened to be in frame when the camera clicked, then you’re creating a world that feels alive, and a world that feels like it’s still happening beyond the panel borders.

That’s a tremendously important aspect of where I think Kirby’s

TJKC: No, but his presence is here.

McCLOUD: Sure. Actually, in Making Comics in 2006 I talked a little bit about what I think of as the different nations of comics, the Franco-Belgian school vs. the American school vs. the Japanese school. In there, I think, Kirby’s influence is more felt. But he was a recurring character in my books because he’s a recurring character in comics. He’s tremendously important.

TJKC: You know, I did not go through the index very thoroughly, but I did check out how many times Eisner is referenced, and Eisner’s referenced 13 times and Jack is referenced 11 times, so…

McCLOUD: [laughs] You know, for the kind of book I was making, that sounds about right.

TJKC: You hold Jack in high esteem?

McCLOUD: I do. I’m one of Jack’s kids by blood and I’m one of Will Eisner’s kids by choice. That is, when I first fell in love with comics, Jack just sort of became part of my bloodstream, but Will Eisner created a world that I journeyed to, one that I chose. So there’s always going to be a little Kirby in me, but I am not of Kirby’s tribe by choice. There was no confirmation ceremony. There was no pledge of allegiance to the Church of Kirby or anything like that. I went another way. I took a different path. I followed Eisner and I followed Art Spiegelman (which, of course, is something else again).

And then, when the Web came into the picture in the ’90s, I became obsessed with technology. And I suppose nowadays I’m more of an internationalist. I’m still working on that.

TJKC: What do you mean by “that”?

McCLOUD: Well, if you look at my graphic novel The Sculptor, there are elements of manga, there are elements of the kind of world-building that you find in European comics, and there are elements of the journey of the lone protagonist that I associate with American comics. So hopefully, while some Kirby is inevitable in 17

magic was, and I almost never see that in any of the people who think that they’re following in his footsteps.

and everything about that page, every aspect of the composition, it’s just pure music, because there’s point and counterpoint and complexity, but also clarity. Clarity and complexity are a wonderful combination, and he could do that. You always knew where the form was.

It really highlights what a travesty that awful movie was. [laughs] You have a guy who can stretch, and you don’t see that as a compositional opportunity? Come on, people! Kirby understood this is a gift to composition. And there was always, of course, a deep structure, too.

I love the elemental aspect of the Fantastic Four. I know he did that with Challengers of the Unknown too, but it’s so clearly earth, air, wind, and fire. And he stretched his ambitions out to the four corners of the world. He took every opportunity to fill out that map of possibilities, and I loved that about him.

TJKC: What you just said reminded me exactly of when Jack went to the four-panel grid for Fantastic Four in the latter part of his stint on the book, when he wasn’t contributing much in the way of characters and concepts—like the gladiator story arc, on the gangster planet, and stuff like that. [Scott laughs] Especially with the lighter tone scenes, with the funny interactions between Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm… you just described it so perfectly.

McCLOUD: If I were to think of one page, just one single page, there’s the one [FF #87, below] where the team is storming Dr. Doom’s fortress, and Mr. Fantastic stretches his arm and gets inside a lock and unlocks it and pulls the arm back. It is one of those four-panel pages,

TJKC: Do you think his artwork, he as an artist, is going to be remembered beyond his marketable characters? Beyond the idea of the Marvel Universe? Do you think it can be separated?

McCLOUD: Well, as long as there’s a vital comics culture, he’ll be recognized as a force, as a formative character. As long as anyone is writing about music, surely we’ll still remember Louis Armstrong, because anyone who really understands that period understands how those Hot Five recordings just set the path for so much of what came after.

TJKC: Where did you meet Jack? Was it San Diego?

McCLOUD: It was at a party at the top of a building in San Diego. It may have been a bar and it would have been in the ’80s. It was a brief conversation, but, you know, I got to shake the man’s hand and tell him that I loved his work. I was just another in a long receiving line, that’s all. It was something I got to do to Moebius and something I didn’t get to do for Osamu Tezuka. Some you get to meet, some you don’t. I didn’t have a meaningful relationship with him. It was just that one time, as opposed to Eisner, who became a friend, and who we saw one another on many occasions. Like I say, I was more Eisner’s kid. But, you know, Eisner’s innovations and Kirby’s innovations intertwined a lot in American comics, certainly. But in the end, they went in very different ways.

Both became idiosyncratic, I suppose, but [Will] certainly became more like theater. There’s that theater versus movies thing. Eisner became a lot like theater. At the end, his graphic novels are like stage plays, and I think in many ways that maybe he was returning to ocean, you know? Vaudeville, where they were all born, the early strips and all. New York theater. H

18

War Room

The Four-

Color War T

(above) Kirby depicts President Franklin Roosevelt in a retelling of Captain America’s origin in Tales of Suspense #63 (March 1965). (right) A 22-yearold Jack Kirby at the 1930 New York World’s Fair. (below) Before serving in uniform, Kirby and Joe Simon bolstered US morale stateside with Boy Commandos #2 (Spring 1943).

his is, by no means, a comprehensive history of the Second World War, but a brief history of the greatest war man has ever fought. It has seemed that, in the past, many articles have done a great job reporting the World War II-inspired comic books that came out, while interviews have provided testimonies by Golden Age artists and writers who lived through or during the war. This article is an attempt to combine the comic book history with the history of World War II, to perhaps give a better insight of the period, and into the minds and hearts of the generation that endured the hardships… both on, and off, the battlefield.

The Great Depression was in its death throes by the late 1930s: Roosevelt’s New Deal provided social and economic relief to a nation struck with a tragedy that had lasted just over a decade. The Roaring Twenties had ended in a fiery Stock Market Crash on October 24, 1929, known since as “Black Thursday.”

The economy plummeted, farmlands dried up, and businesses cut back due to overproduction, causing countless numbers of employees to be laid off. While President Herbert Hoover maintained hope that the economy would improve, it wasn’t until Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the Presidential office in 1932 and eventually launched his New Deal, where numbers

19

The Effect of World War II on Jack Kirby and His Contemporaries,

by Christopher Irving

of jobs were created, that the Depression started to look, well, less depressing.

It was also in the 1930s that the comic book, originally containing reprints of daily comic strips (starting with Famous Funnies #1 in 1934), first took form as an inexpensive kind of juvenile escapism. Eventually, reprint material would be succeeded by original material, which was then joined by a new genre: The super-hero, or “mystery man,” in the guise of Superman in Spring 1938’s Action Comics #1. The new brand of American optimism was hugely apparent in the New York World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1940, where “tomorrow” was previewed in the vast theme park constructed over a former ash dump. Superman even had a presence of his own at the Fairs, in both issues of the New York World’s Fair comic books, sold at the fair, as well as a “personal appearance” by a costumed actor. Also appearing in the 1940 issue of the World’s Fair comic book were Red, White, and Blue, who first premiered in All-American Comics #1 in April 1939. Red Dugan, Whitey Smith, and Blooey, could be considered some of the first patriotic characters in comics.

“Bill Smith was a nice, young man, [and] had a goal of becoming an illustrator for

The Saturday Evening Post,” artist Harry Lampert said. “When I started doing work for National Comics, Bill Smith was there doing Red, White, and Blue. To my knowledge, he hadn’t done anything prior to that. I was doing everything extra, and I was doing his lettering. When he broke into The Saturday Evening Post, with beautiful illustrations, he left the strip, and I took it over.”

While the American people had endured their hardships, the Germans were still recovering from losing World War I a decade earlier. On June 28, 1919, the defeated Germans had signed a peace treaty that disarmed the country, stripped them of their colonies, and forced them to take full blame for the World War. On top of that, Germany had been forced to pay the Allied Nations reparations originally set at $56 billion dollars. In the end, an eighth of Germany’s territory was lost to the Allies, with areas cut up piecemeal. Then, by 1929, Germany was struck with a Depression of its own.

Germany and the United States of America were two nations, both in similar straits: Each had endured their hardships, and each required leaders to rise them out of those hardships. For America, it was the polio-stricken Roosevelt… for Germany it was a disgruntled artist with a shrill voice named Adolf Hitler. Taking advantage of the low morale of the populace, Hitler’s National Socialist, or Nazi, party took control of Germany, with Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.

Soon becoming a dictator, Hitler preached antisemitism and racism, blaming the “inferior” Jewish people for the loss of World War I. “Hitler was an opportunist,” Jack Kirby, cocreator of Captain America and comics legend, reflected in 1992. “He knew that people were about to revolt because things were so bad by then. At that time, the common man felt downtrodden; it was the same for Americans, we were feeling the same pressures back then, but we had Roosevelt and they had Hitler.”4 “I figured that I was for the war because Hitler needed to be stopped, but generally speaking I would normally have been a pacifist,” Alvin Schwartz, a prolific Golden Age writer whose primary credits include Superman and Batman, reflected. “I certainly wasn’t a superpatriot. At the age of five, I remember asking my grandfather (World War I was just over, and there were still bad feelings about Germans), ‘Why is it that, just because somebody by accident happens to be born in Germany, and somebody by accident happens to be born in the U.S., why is it that we’re better than they are? Why am I better because I’m an American?’ It was not just what country was better, but the idea was that we were Americans, and therefore we’re better than anyone else. In other words, I didn’t have that kind of patriotism. I was born without it.”

Meanwhile, Fascist Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy, and began to pursue an African empire, first invading Ethiopia. Over in Tokyo, Japan, the now-militaristic government decided to expand into China, launching a war in July of 1937.

All three nations would eventually come together, and produce the greatest and bloodiest war that mankind has ever known.

Germany’s invasion of Poland on September

1, 1939 caused both Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany, although President Roosevelt cited The Neutrality Act, hoping to prevent America’s involvement in another World War. However, Roosevelt did amend the neutrality bill to permit arms shipments to Allied countries on a “cash and carry” basis.

It was amidst this fervor caused by the impending war that comic book company MLJ debuted the first-ever super-hero to wear an American flag-inspired costume. The Shield launched in Pep Comics #1, dated January 1940, and was written by Harry Shorten and drawn by Irv Novick. The Shield—the first in a long line of patriotic super-heroes that were to come when America itself was on the cusp of joining World War II—was G-Man Joe Higgins, who relied on his red, white, and blue costume to fight criminals and spies.

“This uniform, of his own secret construction, not only is bullet and flame-proof, but gives him the power to perform extraordinary feats of physical daring and courage,” the caption in Pep #1 read.

“Wearing his shield, he has the speed of a bullet and the strength of a Hercules. With these powerful forces, he shields the U.S. Government from all enemies. The four white stars on the field of blue signify to what he has devoted his life—truth, justice, patriotism, and courage.”

20

Given his missions by J. Edgar Hoover (the only other person who knew his identity), The Shield fought villains with names like The Strangler and The Hun. Aside from the amounts of violence meted out on the foreign enemies, there was a fair share of Good Girl Art injected in the strip as well.

The birth of The Shield may be considered by many as testimony to America’s inevitable journey into the war, as Germany and Japan kept on with their plans of conquest.

On April 9 of 1941, after a pause in battle, the Nazis again struck, this time seizing Denmark and Norway. Germany would continue to take the war across Europe, invading France with the Italians. France fell under Germany and Italy, surrendering on June 22, and causing Hitler to set his sights on Great Britain.

With Great Britain rejecting Hitler’s plea for peace, the Battle of England began on August 9, 1940. Despite England’s terror-bombing by Nazi aircraft, and a plea from Prime Minister Winston Churchill for American aide, it wasn’t until September that Roosevelt granted fifty World War I American destroyers to Britain for naval bases in the Western Hemisphere. It is possible that Roosevelt, hoping to procure the Presidency for a third term in 1940, held off intervention for political reasons.

Whatever the political motivations, the Axis had become a threat not only to Europe, but to the whole world. On September 27, 1940, Japan joined the Rome and Berlin Axis, forming the three-tier Axis Powers that would terrorize the world for the next few years.

FDR’s campaign pledge was “I will never send an American boy to fight in a European war,” and he tried to keep the U.S. from direct involvement. On March 8, 1941, Congress passed FDR’s bill to “lend-lease” war supplies to nations that would further the defense of the U.S. by fighting the Axis powers.

Nazi Germany cemented the war with the U.S. when, in September of 1941, they fired on an American destroyer and forced FDR to allow any U.S. ship to fire on any Nazi craft. Apparently, the Nazis had the same qualm, as the U.S. destroyer Rueben Jones was torpedoed on October 31, killing 100 Americans.

Heroes At War: The Comics Industry’s Reaction To Impending War Around the same time as the Lend-Lease Act came into operation, Timely Comics had premiered their own patriotic hero, who was to prove the second-most resilient of the flag-adorned characters that would later populate comic racks. Captain America Comics #1 hit the stands, dated March of 1941, and featured the chain-mail armored hero slugging out Hitler on the cover. Born out of the duo of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Captain America was the first super-hero to have his own first issue before first trying out in another title.

Hailing from the S&K studio, Captain America was the product of a 4-F soldier named Steve Rogers who, in a desire to serve his country, is given the “Super Soldier

Serum,” a miracle drug that grants him augmented strength and abilities. With his partner Bucky Barnes, and donning a red, white, and blue chainmail costume, Captain America fought spies, the most notorious of which was The Red Skull.

“The American flag is unbeatable for color combination and appeal,” Kirby reflected. “So that was a must. The chainmail business was strictly the warrior theme carried to modern times. The wings suggested themselves because they indicated the speed with which he moved at all times. Everything on the costume was symbolic of the character himself. He was a patriotic character: a speedy, hard-hitting type of hero.”7 “We were always trying for new characters,” Joe Simon said. “Captain America was a wartime thing, a patriotic thing, and we had the greatest villain you could think of: The Nazis, and Adolf Hitler… It was not the first patriotic hero in comics but it was the best. The kids ate it up.”1 “I believe it was a spontaneous reaction on my part and my partner Joe Simon,” Kirby said.

“We discussed it at the time. There was patriotic fervor everywhere. It was just the climate for that kind of thing.

Captain America was a super-hero of his own, specific type… My style was particularly adaptable to that kind of super-hero, and it went very well.”7 The cover created quite a stir for the creative duo, as Simon recalled: “I liked the idea of having it political, and having Adolf Hitler on it, because that was about the best villain we could get in those days. Actually, it caused us a few problems with the American Nazi groups. They threatened us. We had police sent over to watch our office.”1 The spade-like, triangular shape of Captain America’s shield caused friction between Timely and MLJ, who produced The Shield, which it was outselling.

“They were way ahead and we were just trying to maintain a competitive edge,” Gil Kane, then a young artist on MLJ’s The Shield, said of Simon and Kirby’s Captain America. “It wasn’t a matter of anything [but] that there was an audience and a possibility of reaching them 21

(above) Jack Kirby during Basic Training at Camp Stewart near Savannah, Georgia.

Kirby was drafted into the Army on June 7, 1942 and assigned to Company F of the 11th Infantry Regiment. (center) Hitler tries to get revenge in Tales of Suspense #67 (July 1965) for his smackdown on Cap’s debut cover (below). (previous page, bottom) Foxhole #1 cover art (Oct. 1954), newly colored by Randy Sargent.

(above) Splash page from Battle #67 (Dec. 1959). (next page) A 1942 sketch done by Kirby during Basic Training.

through a patriotic character when the war started.”

Simon recalled: “Martin Goodman [head of Timely] was very upset; he didn’t like lawsuits, and John Goldwater [of MLJ] had threatened to sue him because Captain America was outselling his character, like, 20 to 1. So Martin brought me in there and we had a conference with John Goldwater [of MLJ Comics]. I suggested to Goldwater that we’ll change the shield to round to be more unique. Anyway, he had to agree to it, he couldn’t argue against it.”1 According to Simon, Goldwater then tried to woo he and Kirby away from Timely and Martin Goodman.

Simon and Kirby did stay with Captain America and Timely for ten issues. Both men were eventually drafted into the War. Interestingly enough, many of the patriotic super-heroes debuted before America’s direct involvement with the War. Captain America seems to be the spark that set many of the others off. Needless to say, 22

the American people surely knew that war was inevitable, and many comic book publishers decided to capitalize off of the new trend.

Two of the more interesting patriotic characters were Yank and Doodle, twins Rick and Dick Walter, who were too young to enlist. The two boys decided that, since they couldn’t fight for their country on foreign shores, they would squash spies and conspirators on American shores.

They wore identical costumes, reminiscent of Bucky’s, that differed in the “Y” and “D” printed on each one’s shirt. Premiering in Prize Comics #13, August 1941, the twins were created by Paul Norris, an artist who would later inherit the Jungle Jim comic strip. The most interesting development in the Yank and Doodle strip would come two years later, in September 1943’s Prize Comics #34.

Long-time Prize Comics super-hero and early Jack Kirby character The Black Owl decided to join the Army, and his old school chum took over the role, eventually becoming a crime-fighting partner of Yank and Doodle’s. The interesting angle was that the old school chum was Walter Walter, Yank and Doodle’s father! Other artists to eventually draw the strip included Gil Kane, Jack Alderman, and Fred Guardineer.

A super-hero duo very similar to Yank and Doodle were The Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy.

Where Yank and Doodle were two sidekicks playing super-hero, the Kid and Stripesy were a sidekick playing super-hero, and a super-hero playing a sidekick. The Star-Spangled Kid was rich Sylvester Pemberton, who employed the services of his family chauffer Pat Dugan as Stripesy, in his fight against spies. The Kid and Stripesy were created

by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, and drawn by Hal Sherman. Debuting in Star-Spangled Comics #1, October 1941, it wasn’t until #18 that an origin was given for the unlikely duo.

Holyoke Comics, the company that had, at one point, printed Fox Comics’ Blue Beetle, came up with the first female patriot, Miss Victory, in the pages of August 1941’s Captain Fearless #1.

Originally drawn in the super-heroic vein by Charles Quinlan, Miss Victory was Washington stenographer Joan Wayne, who eventually rose to flying special War Department missions. Later, female artist Nina Albright revamped the series, giving Miss Victory a sexier costume with a lower neckline, and establishing her as more of a fighter pilot.

Fawcett Comics, the exceptional company that produced Captain Marvel and Spy Smasher, brought out their own patriot with Minute Man, the “one man army,” in 1941’s Master Comics #11. Jack Weston was an army private who donned the red, white, and blue costume of the Minute Man (sans the mask in his earlier appearances) to fight the Nazi scourge.

The longest, continuously running patriotic super-hero, Wonder Woman, first appeared as a backup in December-January 1942’s All-Star Comics #8.

When psychologist and literary critic William Moulton

Marston wrote an article attacking comic books, All-American publisher M.C. Gaines contacted Marston and challenged him to create a psychologically beneficial comic book.

Marston created Wonder Woman, a heroine from an island of immortal Amazon women, who went to America to praise peace and reform evil-doers. Marston, who signed the strip “Charles Moulton” at first, infused Wonder Woman with a degree of feminism, patriotism, and supplication/bondage in the stories. Drawn

by Harry G. Peter, the strip would later provide fodder for psychologists of the 1950s.

Marston was also the inventor of the lie detector, which was Wonder Woman’s primary weapon, in the form of her magic lariat, in her fight against Nazis and criminals.

Interestingly enough, 50% of all of National/ DC Comics’ circulation was sent to G.I.s in Europe, perhaps in a move to boost morale.

The amount of American civic belief in the government and the nation may seem far-fetched by today’s standards but, when one considers the government’s salvaging of the economy and job market after the Depression, it is not surprising.

“Naturally, we had all been concerned about the war,” Red, White, and Blue and first artist on The Flash, Harry Lampert said.

“After Pearl Harbor on December 7, I was in the Army the following February 6 or 7, exactly two months after. I think that, at that time, everyone was 100 % for the war. Before the war, there was a divergence of opinion, with most people supporting the Allies. But after Pearl Harbor, there was no question about it in anybody’s mind.”

Despite any misgivings he may have had about the war earlier, President Roosevelt had no choice but to approach the Senate about declaring war the next day. Needless to say, unanimous approval only took fifteen minutes. In accordance with the Axis Tripartite Pact (where Germany, Italy and Japan worked together against one another’s enemies), both Germany and Italy declared war on America on December 11.

Stateside, America called its young men in through the Draft, for those who didn’t enlist, and prepared industry for war production. Since so many fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers were sent off for Basic Training and to fight in foreign nations, more than six million women found themselves working in factories. On the upside, the need for heavier arms and weapons helped bring American industry further out of the slump of the Depression, as new factories had to produce 300,000 aircraft, 86,000 tanks, 5,000 cargo and 86,000 warships by the end of the war.

Every industry was hit by the Draft, including education, which lost roughly 350,000 teachers to either the Draft or wartime employment. A large number of comic book writers, artists, and editors went off to war, or knew they would soon be sent for. Those who enlisted did so despite any hurtles that came their way; even high-schoolers dropped out of school and lied about their ages. A prime example of a young man determined to fight in the Second World War is that of Jack Sinnott, brother of famed Marvel penciler and inker Joe Sinnott.

“You had to live in World War II to appreciate the spirit people had then,” Joe Sinnott reflected. “Jack wanted to go in so badly, and had just gotten over rheumatic fever. He and I had been in bed for three months, from September to Christmas, 1942. His developed into rheumatic fever (I just had the strep throat with pleurisy and scarlet fever). They only had sulfur drugs in those days, there wasn’t any penicillin. The next month, he got his draft notice and reported to the draft board. He could barely walk, but he passed the physical. Jack’s doctor wrote up a slip for him and had said ‘Jack, they’ll never take you. Show this to the draft board, because you still have rheumatic fever in your knees.’ Jack, when he left the doctor’s office, tore up the note, because he wanted to go to service.

He passed the physical and never said anything about his knees. Three times in basic training, he was hospitalized because

“REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR”: AMERICA IS DRAGGED INTO WAR While the American government was doing its best to keep out of direct involvement in the war, negotiations with Japan had fallen through.

In retaliation of Japan’s invasion of Indochina in July, Roosevelt had cut off all trade with them.

On November 26, 1941, Japanese Premier Tojo and his Japanese envoy were told to get out of Indochina and China, despite Tojo’s threats of war. It should not have been a surprise that the Japanese would retaliate, and war warnings had been sent out. However, the Japanese surprised everyone by focusing on the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor, off the Hawaiian islands, on December 7, 1941, in an attempt to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

In the ensuing bombing, roughly 188 aircraft were destroyed, and roughly 2,400 Americans were killed. The battle was perhaps one of the nation’s most devastating defeats, and one The United States of America would not forget… or forgive.

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of his knees.

Because of that, he missed going overseas with his company, which wound up in England, and he was put in a replacement depot, and wound up in southern Italy as a replacement infantry. He was thrown into the Battle of Cassino, and fought through the mountains, up through the Anzio Battle which lasted for four months. He continued on to the Battle for Rome and its liberation on June 4, 1944. That was the case of a guy who really wanted to serve, and paid the supreme sacrifice, as they say. I’ve always said that many soldiers did die in vain because, even though we won the war and everybody was for it, it was sad.”

“The Army works into its own way, and you go the way the wind blows you,” Harry Lampert said. “I was inducted at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Because of my background in animation (I had worked at Fleischer Studios for five years), they had me scheduled for the training film lab, under Signal Corps.

Everybody’s getting shipped out of Fort Dix, and I stayed for about three weeks there, and knew all the ropes. One night, my brother comes over and we have a night on the town, and we get back, and I see I’m scheduled to go to a place called Camp Crowder in Missouri. I got there and started training; they gave all these aptitude tests. My mechanical aptitude was not that good (I’ll be honest, to this day, that my wife is the handyman in this family). They made me a clerk but, because I couldn’t type, they made me a supply clerk and I had to go to supply school. I was a pretty good student.

“One bright day, I got orders that I’d be on a train. It was so secretive that no one knew where I was going, and when you got off the train to take a break, MPs were there with rifles. I said ‘My God, where the hell are we going?’ Thirty-six hours on the train, and we were on Drewfield. Drewfield was as different from Camp Crowder as you can imagine. Camp Crowder was a brand new camp with beautiful barracks. When we ate out of the dining room, we ate out of china dishes. It was beautifully done, and then I came into Drewfield, and it was just the opposite. We were in hutments (or tenthuts), and they were made for four people, and they double-decked it for eight people, and they’d put two cots in-between, so it became ten people.

The little tent was really supposed to have four, or eight maximum. You ate out of mess kits, and the dining facility was an outdoor area, where we had to stand outside in line. They had a penchant for mixing Jell-O with your gravy. Then, where you ate was in little, screened-in huts, and you’d have to go twenty-five yards to get there, and it was always raining. They didn’t have the normal type of latrines…

I wrote home that it was ‘really the Army.’ It was entirely different.

“I’m classified as a supply clerk, and they found out I could draw. Drewfield was an airbase with a detachment of the Signal Corps Aircraft Warning unit, which was the beginning of radar.

They found out I could draw (with my mechanical aptitude), and had me drawing mechanical diagrams. The lieutenant would pencil it out for me, and I’d draw it on a window shade, which they’d pull down as a visual aide. I drew plotting maps for people who did the observing, a map about the size of a ping-pong table. I got there in the latter part of May, or early June, and in July and August, I started submitting Droopy to the camp newspaper.

“I started doing that around August, and there was then a big alert. The whole camp was on alert, and we didn’t know what it was. All of a sudden, I’m not taken. I found out that this alert was for people to go to the invasion of North Africa. This was at about September, and I went into the orderly room and said ‘I don’t know how I missed this one, but I don’t know if I’ll miss the next one. I want to go home and say goodbye to my girlfriend and family.’ They gave me a ten-day furlough, so I went to New York, kissed my girlfriend goodbye, and I said that ‘Next time, they won’t bypass me.’

When I come back, I find that a Major Mitchell of Army Intelligence wants to see me. It turns out that they were going to do a newspaper for Aircraft Warning Volunteer civilians, and it was called The Volunteer. I was recommended by the editor of the newspaper there.

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I said, ‘If that’s what you want me to do, I’ll be happy to do it, sir!’ At that time, I sent my famous letter to my girlfriend. Adele, to this day, says she never got a decent proposal. I sent a letter that said ‘It looks like I’ll be here for a few months. If you come down here, we’ll get hitched.’ She did and, sure enough, that’s what happened. That was the beginning of my work as an artist. I was Private, First Class, and they skipped over Corporal and made me a Sergeant. Later on, I got promoted to Staff Sergeant.”

Like Lampert, Shelly Moldoff, the second artist behind Hawkman and, later, a ghost for Bob Kane on the Batman strip, also had his artistic abilities put to use.

“I was drafted in ’44, and went to Camp Crowder, Missouri, in the Signal Corps,” Moldoff said. “I went through a training program, and they put me in the drafting class. From there, I went to the Signal Corps Photographic Center, because of my background, and ended up in the animation branch, where we worked on training films and other things for the Army, and Armed Forces. While I was at Crowder, I did special services for the company, like posters, and a comic strip for the newspaper. I never really left comics: I left my finger in it. The strip was called Chowderhead, and was about a misfit in the Signal Corps. He [was the one who] had to climb telegraph poles…

“I ended up in Long Island City, at the Signal Corps Photographic Center, and was discharged after two years. I wasn’t really out in the ditches. Because of my eyes, I was in limited service. As a matter of fact, of all the fellas I was with in the drafting class in Missouri, I was the only one that was kept out and sent to the Long Island Photographic Center. The others were all sent to Hawaii, and they had a ball. It was the tail end of the war, and they were in the drafting section, and sat out the next year-and-a-half in Hawaii and had a ball. Meanwhile, I was in the city, and I worked—they had us really working, on staff, on films and everything.

I met some wonderful people there: Peter Arno; Charles Addams, who did the cartoons for The New Yorker magazine. There were a lot of talented people, and it was quite an experience. There were key Disney people there, at the studio.

“At the Photographic Center, they found that visual aids were very helpful in teaching, and at Camp Crowder, I did

many visual aids on the proper way to hold a gun and take off a gas mask. When they’re looking at the cartoon, the G.I.s were able to grasp them quicker. I did an awful lot of those at Camp Crowder.”

Superman and Batman writer Alvin Schwartz was recruited to use Superman comics as an instructional aid for soldiers, although he never enlisted or was drafted.

“During the war, they were doing Superman comic strips in basic English to teach Navy illiterates how to read. The guy in charge of this was an Admiral, who had a desk in Washington. He was somebody who had a lot of political pull. This guy couldn’t write for beans, so who do you think was doing it?” Schwartz laughed.

“They never drafted me! Nothing ever happened, since my status never changed. I sat there all through the war, because without me, the Admiral would have all that sh*t to do!”

“I tried to enlist in the O.S.S. (Office of Special Services), where you dropped behind the lines, and helped the French resistance. They checked me out, and discovered that I had asthma. I’d had asthma since I was nine; it didn’t often show, but it did then. I think that with that on my record, they wouldn’t have taken me, anyway.”

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(previous page, top) Joe Sinnott in the 1960s. (previous page, bottom) Foxhole #2 splash (Dec. 1954). (top left) Harry Lampert working on Droopy. (lower left) Sheldon Moldoff working on comics during the War. (above) Foxhole #6 (Sept. 1955) splash page.

(below) Jack showed his vast knowledge of WWII in this pin-up from Sgt. Fury #2 (July 1963), with inks by Dick Ayers. (bottom) Joe Kubert in his military garb, in from the Notre Dame in Paris.

Not all comic book veterans worked on instructional matter, however, as a good deal also went to the frontlines. Joe Gill, later writer for Funnies, Incorporated, and head writer for Charlton Comics (arguably, the most prolific comic writer ever, averaging 100 comic pages a week), was with the Navy at wartime.

“I was on a 300-foot converted yacht, that had been used by Josephine Davies,” Gill recalled. “It had executive quarters with marble bathtubs. It had been a sailing vessel, and the sails had been taken off when it was loaned to the Coast Guard. It was on weather ship duty, on patrol off Greenland. We had only one radar operator, and a martinette Lieutenant [Junior Grade] Executive Officer named Ridorg Mann, who liked to play for laughs at someone else’s expense. I was on the bridge, at night, to get a radio-direction-finder position.

It was a little overcast, and was the only way to get a position. A radio directional-finder has a loop antenna; you stand there by the radio and take the loop until you get the most powerful signal, and then you lay the

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bearings that you get out on a chart, and where they intersect is where you are.

“We’re close to North Africa, and this radar operator, Joe Naud, called on this radar, and gave a bearing and the details (I think he said it was 26,000 yards, bearing 3 1 5), this was on intercom, so everyone on the bridge could hear it. Mann crossed over on the bridge and said ‘It’s another one of your seagulls, Joe!’ Joe had made mistakes, because it was a primitive radar. Joe ignored him and gave a bearing, and each time Mann would get his laugh at Joe’s expense by saying that it was a seagull. Finally, the range was getting closer and closer. All of a sudden, out of the darkness, bright lights came on. They were the landing lights of a bomber at masthead height, right over the ship. It came across, and the motors were loud. It made the pass and kept going. There was dead silence on the bridge, and then Joe and I said, ‘There goes your f*cking seagull!’”

Jack Kirby, the artist responsible for Boy Commandos and Captain America, was an infantryman in Europe.

“I was drafted June 7, 1943,” Kirby said. “I found out the same way as everybody else: They sent a telegram. You get two free telegrams from the Army: One to tell you that you are drafted and one to tell your wife that you are coming home in a casket. Sure, I was drafted, but I didn’t mind going. You didn’t complain about it because it was the thing to do. All my friends were gone, even Joe. You did this sort of thing without asking questions. It was your duty—but, I can tell you that I wasn’t happy about Basic Training. I was at Camp Stewart, Georgia during the Summer; it was always hot and humid. I hated it there and they always gave me a hard time. I am not a guy who likes to be disciplined. I hate discipline of any kind except the kind of discipline I make for myself, like when I draw… but Army discipline I wasn’t ready for.”4 As for the comics industry, it continued to chug along, despite losing a fair amount of talent. While some artists and writers qualified as 4-F, failing the military physical check-up, others were simply too young to enlist, as was the case of Joe Kubert.

“I think the war was one of the things that allowed me to get in, learn my craft, and compete with the guys that didn’t get out,” Kubert, who had been working in comics before the war erupted, told. “Nobody knew what the situation was and what was happening. I only knew that I was lucky and was getting opportunities, not because somebody else wasn’t getting the jobs.

I also worked on Will Eisner’s Spirit. Will was in the war at the time, and Lou Fine was working on it up in Stanford, Connecticut.

Somehow, I was fortunate enough to get the job inking up there. I was still in high school, and was fifteen or sixteen at the time. I never thought ‘Will was in the Army, and

they need guys,’ it just worked out that way. In retrospect, it was lousy to the guys that were in the Army, but was very fortuitous to guys like me in getting in.”

travel 500 years into the future to learn how to protect America from bombing raids. In All-Star #11, the first issue after Pearl Harbor, the JSA members join the military in their civilian guises and, for a short time, operate as the Justice Battalion of America. Timely countered the JSA with their own, short-lived All-Winners Squad, in an adventure most likely written by Batman and Green Lantern’s Bill Finger.

An interesting and mature take on the super-hero’s position as soldier was presented in Spy Smasher #10 from January 1943. In a story drawn

by Alex Blum, titled “Why I Did Not Kill Hitler,” Spy Smasher mistakenly assassinates a Hitler double and, in an effort to boost German morale, Hitler fakes his own death, branding himself a martyr.

Presented with an opportunity to kill the real Hitler, Spy Smasher declines, realizing that Hitler’s “sacrifice” would only further the Nazi cause.

AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT LOOKS AT THE WAR Despite the tragedy of the war, entertainment took Technicolored, patriotic, and even sentimental slants at the war.

With 60 to 100 million Americans a week attending the movies (in a population of 135 million), the patriotic tones were reinforced, and the Nazis and Germans made more grotesque and stereotyped.

Everything from cartoons to The Three Stooges featured parodies of Hitler and his cronies. Wartime music varied from swing to crooner music, such as acts like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, along with bandleaders including Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman.

Comic books, of course, continued with the patriotic trend.

The government sent performers overseas to raise troop morale. Not only were the likes of Bob Hope risking life and limb to travel to dangerous areas and entertain troops, but also musicians and actresses. Jack Kirby recalled seeing a certain German starlet perform: “The bullets are flying all over and the earth is coming up and some guy crawls over to me and says ‘Grab three guys. There’s a truck waiting seven miles down… Get into the truck and see Marlene Dietrich.’ And this is an offensive and the world is going up. There’s no world; it’s going up all around ya. And you’re scared sh*tless.

And I says, ‘You’re outta your head.’ And he says, ‘Go ahead, do what I tell ya.’ I says, ‘I’ll be glad to.’ I pick out three guys and I tell them and they don’t believe me, and I start to crawl, so they follow me. Then about a mile away we’re able to get up and walk and we see the truck already and we get up on the truck and the offensive is getting even worse. So the truck takes us to a church and they sit us down and we’re all sleeping in there in the damn benches. And in the middle of the church Marlene Dietrich comes out and I’m able to see her through one eye and she comes out in G.I. underwear and she’s doing a song and dance. And what happens is that the offensive gets even bigger. Seven miles away they’re now shelling the church, and they’re blowing up everything around us… She ran out, everybody ran out, and we went back to the line. I saw Bing Crosby, too. And I never lost respect for those performers because I never thought they’d come that close.”2 While most of the major patriotic heroes had been established before the war, one who came out shortly after Pearl Harbor was Commando Yank, in Fawcett Comics’ WOW #6, dated July 1942. The blue-clad Yank was war correspondent Chase Yale who, armed with two .45s in the European Theater of Operations, would single-handedly take out Japanese and Nazis. The feature, which originally came out of the Harry “A” Chesler shop by artist Charles Sultan, featured the artwork of artists such as Phil Bard, Carl Pfuefer, and Dan Barry.

Of course, not only flag-clad heroes got to beat on the Axis, as characters from the minor Blue Beetle to Superman were frequently seen manning machine guns, slugging Nazis, or advertising war bonds on their covers. It seemed Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini were fair game for the union-suit wearing crowd. It was not uncommon for stories to revolve around the hero or heroes striving to raise money for the war effort, or foiling spy rings in America.

The Justice Society of America, in All-Star Comics, were sent to defeat spy rings preaching Nazism on their first official adventure together in All-Star Comics #4 (they had met over dinner the issue before). In the course of the super-team’s career, they would raise $1,000,000 for war orphans, foil Nazi spies in foreign countries, and

THE ALLIES ON THE UPSWING The beginnings of the war, as America recovered from the shock of Pearl Harbor, were dark times for a nation that had thought the darkest over with the Depression. German U-boats continued to rule the oceans, sinking five Allied vessels every day. The Germans continued to invade Russia, with the Japanese defeating Allied forces in the Pacific by taking Guam, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and 11,000 American soldiers held prisoner.

Upon the Allies’ organization, the Axis Powers would have the force of three major nations, plus twenty-three smaller countries to contend with. It was decided by both the Americans and British to focus on Germany before Japan, as they were the more powerful of the two nations. Deciding to drive the Germans out of the Mediterranean before then forcing them out of France (which would take Nazi forces away from the war-ravaged Russians), the Allies launched “Operation Torch” in November of 1942. Led by General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, American and British troops succeeded in the surrender of more than a quarter million Germans in Tunisia that May. The Axis Powers were left with one less leg when, in the Summer of 1943, the Allied forces invaded Sicily, causing the surrender of Italian forces on September 8. Unfortunately, Mussolini was rescued by German soldiers at the last possible minute. On April 28, two years later, Mussolini would be executed in Milan, his body spat upon in the street, and his corpse buried in Potter’s field in an unmarked grave.

Also that year, the American Navy, equipped with state-of-theart radar and directional finders, won the Battle of the Atlantic.

Newly invented torpedoes and depth charges were able to destroy the once-elusive U-boats. Joe Gill was part of the sea war, serving on a Coast Guard weather boat in 1945, as recounted here earlier. Gill was nearly a casualty one eventful night on the South China Sea. “We were steaming alone, unescorted,” Gill recalled. “At one o’clock in the morning we were torpedoed. I was on watch, sitting at a desk, facing the four operators in front of me at their positions.

The torpedo hit the stern of the ship, but blew it in the least vulnerable part of the ship. When they build a ship, they have the drive shaft going from the engine, back along the bottom of the ship to the screw, right along the bottom. The ship has a typical round shape but, as it hits the stern, it narrows just ahead of the rudder.

Since the ship is not broad at all, they pour about thirty tons of concrete to stiffen the steel hull. The torpedo that hit us was an acoustic torpedo, which followed the noise of the propeller. It hit us in the stern, where that concrete was. It blew the ship up in the air, with the stern being blown up clear of the water, which put the weight of the ship on the bow. The force of the explosion bent the ship five or 27

six feet off-level. When the bow hit the water, that bent the bow. Now we had a ship that was broken in three loosely held-together pieces.

“We were alone, and needed a tugboat. The officers put together a 600group, quoted message to be sent to any Navy radio station, to relay that we get a tugboat as soon as possible. That message had to have a priority assigned to it: ‘Urgent’ was the most favored priority. If it was ‘Urgent,’ then a Navy station would take a message. If it was less than ‘Urgent,’ it would have to wait until there was no ‘Urgent’ traffic. In order for it to be ‘Urgent,’ the originating unit had to be in combat, and we weren’t in combat at all. This was a damage report, and a plea for help. The book-happy Navy Flag Commander made it an ‘Operational Priority.’ Stations wouldn’t accept the message, because it wasn’t ‘Urgent,’ it was ‘Operational Priority.’ There was a Navy First Class Operator, Porter, who tries to get the message off, but he can’t, and he unsuccessfully sent it to a decoy station that asked him to repeat it: It was a Jap station! Finally, Porter gave up. He couldn’t get the message through, and he’d been trying for too long. I took his place, and I sent what they call a ‘Q’ signal between operators, telling the shore station that I had an ‘Urgent’ message. I had an ‘Operational Priority’ message, but I changed it to ‘Urgent’ on my own. Nobody else knew it. The shore station told me to go ahead and send it. I sent the 600-word message, and got a ‘Roger’ that they’d gotten a message, and then I sent a correction that changed the ‘Urgent’ back to an ‘Operational Priority.’ We got the tugboat a few hours later, and nobody ever knew that I had done this. I had commanders standing around, and an Admiral coming in every once in a while, and I was sending the message in illegally, but I corrected it! I just made a little mistake, I sent the ‘O,’ and forgot to put in the ‘P.’ I was a f*cking hero, and nobody knows it!”

As the Allies continued the ground war by frequent bombings of Germany, the Russians reclaimed most of their land from the Nazis. As if the Nazis weren’t taking enough of a beating by the Russians, the Allies prepared an invasion of France, spearheaded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and code-named “Operation Overlord.” “D-Day” was on June 6, 1944, as American, British, and Canadian troops landed in northern France, invading beachheads on the shores of Normandy.

While the Nazis had the Allied forces of America, England, and Canada invading them from the West, cutting a swath from France as they liberated, the Russians were coming in from the East, working their way to Germany through Poland. Most of Belgium, Luxembourg, and France were recovered by Allied forces by the end of the Summer.

“They invaded Southern France August 15, 1944,” Joe Sinnott said of his brother’s company. “Jack was in A Company, 15th Infantry, and Audie Murphy was in B Company.

They fought side-by-side in the same

battalion. After the invasion of Southern France, they raced right up the Rhone Valley, chasing the Germans. [Hitler’s] 19th Army was trying to get back into Germany and preserve what they did have.

“Jack’s battalion happened to be next to Montelimar, and they were the only American troops that prevented the German 19th Army from crossing. They held them up for nineteen hours, until they finally pushed through the battalion. The first battalion got the Presidential Unit Citation for their action at Montelimar, but Jack was killed the last day of the battle. He was 20 years old, and a sergeant of the infantry. The last letter we got from him was very ironic, when he said ‘We’re chasing the Germans up the Rhone Valley, and there’s talk that we might be home for Christmas.’ Every time Mother heard Bing Crosby’s ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas,’ she completely broke up. You don’t ever get over those things. My mother was upset for the rest of her life; he was her firstborn. Jack and I were like peas in a pod. I miss him until this day, and that was [over seventy] years ago.”

Also among the soldiers that landed on the shores of France was Jack Kirby, who disembarked about ten days after the initial invasion. “The bodies were still there,” Kirby recalled in 1987.

“They didn’t clean it up. It looked like a mess. And we went across France.”2 The cruelty of the Nazis was not only seen on the battlefield, as the invading Allies soon learned. While cutting a swath through France, they came across Nazi concentration camps, where other nationalities (primarily Jewish) were sent as prisoners to live in inhumane conditions. Of the camps liberated was Dachua on April 29, 1945. Sgt. Henry “Hank” DeJarnette, of the 222nd Rgt., 42nd Division, recalled the day decades later: “It was a day that young men vomited and cried at the sight and smell… We couldn’t believe what we were seeing—the inhumanity of man to man, the torture, disease, starvation.”3 Eleven million people, including Jews, African-Americans, and homosexuals, were massacred in the concentration camps. Prisoners were gassed in shower stalls, forced to bury their dead, and made to work with little or no sustenance, eventually dying of starvation or disease, if not gunned down by Nazis for sport. Many American troops who were present at the liberation have been diagnosed with PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, since seeing the horrors committed.

The April 29, 1945 edition of the 45th Division News read “We Have Seen Dachau. Now We Know What We Are Fighting For.” Despite the American soldiers’ discovery of the Nazi horrors, the homefront was left in the dark over the severity of the concentration camps, as letters and news reports were censored and controlled. To this day, students in schools are not taught, in detail, of the Holocaust. A Roper poll in 1994 showed that one-fifth of the American high school students surveyed believed the genocide a hoax.3 Decades later, in the 1980s, cartoonist Art Spiegelman would chronicle his father Vladek’s experiences in the concentration camps in Maus and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, earning the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a comic book.

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END OF THE “THOUSAND YEAR REIGN”: The Death of Adolph Hitler and Fall of The Third Reich Feeling like a cornered animal, Hitler decided that German forces would have to be wiped out with one final salvo of Nazi might.

Hitler threw a quarter of a million men, his final reserves, against an American position in Luxembourg. A bulge of eighty miles long and fifty miles deep was driven into allied defense on December 16. Among the armies trapped was General Patton’s Third “Lucky” Army. Upon word that the Allied army was ringed in by Nazi forces, an unknown G.I. was quoted as saying, “So they got us surrounded—the poor bastards.” The Allies had beaten Hitler back on Christmas Day, and drove the Nazis back to the Rhine within a month. Although the way to Germany was now clearly open, and the Nazi forces were exhausted, American casualties were the bloodiest in history: 55,000 killed or wounded, and 18,000 taken prisoner.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had their hands full with numerous American invasions of Japan’s territories in the Pacific. The American Marines were “island hopping,” taking over island by island so that American planes would have a base of operations in bombing Japanese cities. With the advance starting in the Fall of 1943, nearly 1.5 million Marines had been deployed by late the following year, around the same time as the Battle of the Bulge.

February 7, 1945 saw the meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in the Russian city of Yalta. The conference over the fate of Germany after the war didn’t result in Roosevelt’s return home until the 27th of that month. Japan and Germany continue to be invaded by Allied forces.

The greatest blow to America came on April 12, when the exhausted President Roosevelt, resting at his home in Warm Spring, Georgia, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Roosevelt, who had recently started an unprecedented fourth term, had led the American people out of the Great Depression, and had served as an inspiration throughout the war with the Axis powers. More than a president passed away that day, as a nation went into mourning over the loss of their strongest symbol. Vice President Harry S. Truman took over the position for the remainder of the war.

“I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay or a bull fall on you,” Truman said on his first day in office, “but last night the moon, the stars, and all the planets fell on me.”

The eerie parallels between Hitler and Roosevelt’s leaderships came to a head when, on April 30, Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun committed suicide in an underground bunker. Not only had Hitler started his leadership of Germany at roughly the same time as Roosevelt the Presidency, but both died within a few

weeks of each other. Nazi radio in Hamburg presented a more heroic reason behind Hitler’s demise, claiming he died “fighting the Bolshevists in Berlin.” One can’t help but wonder if Hitler, like his counterpart in Spy Smasher #10, thought his death would brand him a martyr and incite the Nazis to turn the tide of the war. Whatever the case, the Russians found a charred body on June 6, which may have been Hitler’s, although there has been no strong evidence. Berlin shortly fell to the Russians on May 2, and the new German government surrendered to the Allies on May 8.

With both Italy and Germany defeated, all that was left was the Japanese. All attempts at taking Japan by traditional invasion had proven very costly, however.

The Marines suffered 25,000 casualties in the invasion of the island Iwo Jima early in 1945, while the Okinawa invasion a month later resulted in 40,000 American 29

(previous page, top) Joe Gill during his WWII Navy service. (previous page, bottom) Kirby splash from Sgt. Fury #1 (May 1963), (above) This pencil page from Our Fighting Forces #151 (Oct. 1974) recalls Jack’s own experiences being bombed during World War II.

(above) The never-produced Roxie’s Raiders animated series of the 1980s was set during the 1940s, giving Jack an opportunity for another shot illustrating FDR. (below) A Losers spread from Our Fighting Forces #152 (Dec. 1974) shows liberating WWII towns in France was no easy task. (next page, top) Mickey Spillane in Air Force regalia.

casualties, with 80,000 civilian casualties.

Truman was ready to launch an invasion of Japan, but the successful detonation of an atomic blast in Alamogordo gave the Allies a new weapon to fight the Japanese with. On July 25, Truman issued a declaration from Potsdam, demanding Japan’s surrender by August 3, stating that they would face an atomic bombing if they did not. With Japan rejecting the Potsdam Declaration three days later, Truman ordered the B-29 The Enola Gay to drop the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. 60%, or 4.1 miles of the city, was destroyed, immediately killing seventy thousand, with another seventy thousand dying of radiation poisoning. On August 8, Russia officially declared war on Japan, in time for Nagasaki’s bombing the next day.

World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945, when General Douglas MacArthur received the Japanese surrender on the battleship Missouri. With the war’s demise, troops came home to parents, wives, and even children born while they were overseas ending the lives of the enemy. Many of the troops faced problems upon their return, including housing and job shortages; in the end, the Fifties would be considered idyllic compared to the Depression and War of the Thirties and Forties.

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COMING HOME: The G.I.’s Return to the Homefront “When I came home, the biggest problem was housing, which was very difficult to get,” Harry Lampert said. “Things were good for me. National Comics was good to me, and all of a sudden, my whole persona changed to humor.”

Lampert would continue to do humor strips for National/ DC Comics, including “Ton O’ Fun,” as well as “Cotton-Top Katie” and “Winky, Blinky, and Noddy.”

He eventually left comics and started his own advertising agency. In retirement, Lampert was a master bridge player and instructor (he released two illustrated books on the subject), and toured the convention circuit with a reprint book of his Droopy, The Drewfield Mosquito strip. “He’s carrying that around with him wherever he goes,” Sheldon Moldoff chuckled. “I have to say to him ‘Remember the Flash?’” Lampert died in 2004, while Moldoff passed in 2012.

“I came back and went back into the comics for a short period of time,” Mickey Spillane, a fighter pilot in the Army Air Corps, remembered. “A lot of guys came in that elected not to go into the military and decided to stay out, and they tried to take over our stuff. We wiped them out because they weren’t very talented.

“Comics collapsed with the end of World War II, though it took a while to trickle down. By January or February of ’46, it was getting very difficult to get assignments. I found out that something very important had happened during the war. I saw it come out, and that was the advent of reprints. They were reprinting only the heavy duty stuff like Moby Dick and literature pieces. I said, ‘This is going to be the next big event in the book field, going from reprints into original paperbacks.’”

Spillane, as many know, went on to pioneer in the original paperback industry with his “Mike Hammer”

novels, following the exploits of the tough, two-fisted private detective. The prototype for Mike Hammer was Mike Danger, an idea Spillane once bandied about with his friend Joe Gill, who had a character named The Drifter. Spillane spent his final years in South Carolina with his wife and five cats, and continued to write on a typewriter. He passed away in 2006.

The patriotic hero faced challenges of his own with the war’s demise: With the Axis powers gone, there were no villains left to fight. It may not have been a problem for characters like Batman and Superman to go back to fighting mere gangsters and super-villains (as they’d had those villains to fight before the war).

Characters custom-made for World War II, like Captain America and The Shield, found themselves against enemies beneath their expertise.

Coupled with the decline of the post-war comic book market, and the burgeoning popularity of different genres, the super-hero was soon becoming a thing of the past. While publishers like Fox Comics switched to “Headlight” comics, where female anatomy played a huge part in the story and cover art in an attempt to drawin the older G.I.’s who read comics in the service, many other companies like National/ DC switched primarily to Western, horror, or science-fiction comics.

“There was a big drop in circulation,” Alvin Schwartz said.

“There was a move away from that kind of reading. I have an article, ‘The Real Secret of Superman’s Identity,’ which appeared in Children’s Literature, A Journal of the American Language Association, edited at University of Connecticut and published by Temple University Press. At UConn, where I lectured on Superman, I pointed it out that the people who felt most dispossessed felt most protected by Superman. The most unprotected person was a G.I. who would have been drafted, and was sitting in the trenches during the war. To the poor, and the dispossessed, Superman became a hero. In the post-war prosperity that followed (Superman particularly), the super-heroes no longer had the same type of attraction. I think there was a natural drop-off… Superman, in a sense, was kind of a degraded messianic symbol. People could relate to that idea.”

Alvin Schwartz eventually left comic books, writing The Blowtop, a novel that has been viewed as the first conscious existentialist novel in America, possibly influencing Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and predating the Beat movement. Schwartz continued to write, selling his books through the Internet, and posting on his webpage www.wfcomics.com/alvin on a weekly basis, up until his passing in 2011.

Despite the lack of interest in patriotic super-heroes, the Harry “A” Chesler line featured two adventures of Yankee Girl in July ’46’s Red Seal Comics #17, and Dynamic Comics #23 from November ’47.

Yankee Girl was young Lauren Mason, who recited the mantra “Yankee Doodle Dandy” to become the super-powered Yankee Girl. She literally only lived through those two adventures, consigned to comic book limbo until AC Comics revived her for their FemForce title decades later.

The other flag-wearing heroes were gradually diminished from newsstand racks. Between 1946 and 1949, Yank and Doodle, The StarSpangled Kid, Miss Victory, Commando

Yank, The Shield (who was usurped by the red-headed teenager Archie Andrews), and Captain America all disappeared. While Captain America and Bucky would briefly return with The Human Torch and Namor as “Commie Smashers” in the 1950s Marvel/Atlas books, it would be decades until many more of the characters would ever see print again. The only remaining flag-wearing hero would be Wonder Woman, who was the only one who didn’t suffer a printing hiatus in her sixty-year existence, due to DC’s agreement that she stay in print to retain ownership.

Although World War II may have been responsible for some of the most culturally rich entertainment in all of history, it was the costliest war in history. 20 million casualties were suffered, and about $1 trillion spent on man’s killing of other men. With the vast amount of WWII veterans passing away with each day, the memories of those lost fade more and more. Even after more than seventy years, the loss of lives can still be felt by the living.

“My last memory [of my brother]?” Joe Sinnott began to recall.

“He was home on furlough in late June, 1943. We had a great time, and he was supposed to be home for fourteen days, but got his calendar mixed up a bit and went back three days before he should have. I remember him leaving with a neighbor. Jack had to report to Camp Upton in New Jersey, and our neighbor lived there at the time. They were going home, after coming up for the weekend that Summer, and took him back to Camp Upton, instead of his taking the train. I can remember him getting in the car.

We lived on a little farm, up in a hamlet of West Camp, New York. We lived on a little dirt road.

I remember him getting in the car, with his suntan uniform on, and he waved to everybody. We had, counting Jack, seven children, and my father and mother. I can remember it like it was yesterday.”

Sinnott paused, his throat choking up.

“We all waved to him,” the always-joyful Sinnott started to break up.

“It’s hard to talk about.”

“It was like it was yesterday, really.” H This article would not have been possible but for the support of the artists and writers interviewed. Joe Sinnott was also a veteran of WWII, serving with the Seabees on Okinawa, and today enjoys his retirement.

Since this article was written, Joe Gill died in 2006, and Joe Kubert left us in 2012. Jack Kirby himself passed on February 6th, 1994.

1 ” More Than Your Average Joe: Excerpts from Joe Simon’s Panels at the 1998 Comicon International: San Diego” Held by Mark Evanier, transcribed by Glen Musial, and edited by John Morrow. The Jack Kirby Collector #25, Aug. 1999. Pgs. 33-49 2 The Jack Kirby Collector. “Jack Kirby Interview,” by Ben Schwartz. Feb., 1999. Pgs. 19-33 3 The American Legion. “We have seen Dachau, now we know what we are fighting for.” August, 1994.

Pgs. 30 & 31, 48.

4 The Jack Kirby Collector. “Jack Kirby on: World War II Influences,” by Ray Wyman, Jr. #27, Feb. 2000.

Pgs. 16-23 5 History of World War II: Armed Services Memorial Edition. Francis Trevelyan Miller, Litt.D., LLD. Universal Book and Bible House; Philadelphia, PA. ©1945, by Ann Woodward Miller.

6 The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People. Chapter 27: “Waging Global War, 1939-1945.

D.C. Heath and Company, Lexington, Massachusetts. ©1996 7 Comics Buyer’s Guide #1401. “Kirby on Kirby 1974: An Interview With the King of the Comics,” by Jerry Connelly. September 22, 2000. Pgs. 42-45

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Gallery

Kirby Kowards

When the going got tough, these characters got gone! by John Morrow While Jack populated his stories with thousands of heroic figures, he also had his fair share of characters who turned tail and ran, rather than duke it out face-to-face with their adversaries. The Mad Thinker let his android doing the heavy lifting, and Puppet Master relied on his dolls. The Skrulls chose to be turned into cows, rather than face the FF. Norton of New York and Buddy Blank both lived timid existences that didn’t involve any day-to-day derring-do. And many of Jack’s villains (especially the Nazis) were portrayed as lacking courage—so here’s a few of my favorite Kirby Kowards.

(below) After throwing poor Houseroy to the wolves, Funky Flashman covers his tracks in this incomplete pencil photocopy from Mister Miracle #6 (Jan. 1972). Kirby got a bit carried away with this overly-broad caricature of Stan Lee, but in turn created one of his most memorable cowards in comics. (page 33) Volstagg (a take-off on Shakespeare’s Falstaff) took every opportunity to avoid conflicts, but still managed to save the day, often unwittingly. Pencils from Thor #162 (March 1969). (page 34) Is there a more irritating Kirby coward than The Watcher? With access to near-limitless technology, this bulbous-headed ninny choses to sit back and simply watch things unfold, avoiding all involvement—y’know, unless someone needs an Ultimate Nullifier or something. Show some consistency, Oatu!

Here are pencils from What If? #11 (Oct. 1978), featuring the original Marvel Bullpen (including Jack) as the Fantastic Four. (page 35) To the Forever People, peace and love meant leaving the real fighting to Infinity Man— which, when you think about it, was a total cop-out. But for a series where the main characters spend their time running away from trouble, it sure was fun. Pencils from Forever People #11 (Oct. 1972), the final issue. (page 36) Don Daring was a different kind of coward—claiming to be brave (right down to his name), but letting Fred Drake do the actual heroics, both as his Hollywood stuntman, and as Stuntman the super-hero. Here is an unused page from the never-published Stuntman #3 story “Jungle Lord,” circa 1946.

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33

34

35

36

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(page 37) Storyboards from the 1978 Fantastic Four animated series episode “The Menace of Magneto.” Like most Kirby villains, once Magneto is on even terms with his opponent, he completely chickens out. (You can view the episode online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_gu4pfFeLQ)

(above) In New Gods #6 (Dec.1971), Richard, a conscientious objector, bickers with his World War II veteran father, who questions Richard’s courage. Jack, a Normandy veteran himself, likely knew any number of contemporaries whose families were similarly divided over the Vietnam War.

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Obscura

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

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

by Barry Forshaw

M

bered)—to its gruesome, blooddrenched period as one of Harvey’s pre-eminent horror comics featuring the wonderfully Gothic artwork of Bob Powell and others, it was always a distinctive book. Up to, that is, its anodyne late period books which nevertheless have some well-written and subtle fantasy and science-fiction stories.

But Black Cat (or Black Cat Mystic or Black Cat Mystery... even Black Cat Western, to give it all its sobriquets) is a book that had more identities than the average costumed character.

Meet Mr. Zimmer

any a comic book title has had a chequered history—and undergone a variety of often seismic changes. Captain America’s Weird Tales, anyone? Now, there was a title that was never going to stay in print for long! Similarly, how about Plastic Man, post-Jack Cole, turning into a humourless semi-horror title? Or Wonder Woman’s period without powers? The Blackhawks and the Challengers of the Unknown (both in their winding-down phases) re-kitted in ludicrous super-hero costumes? Or Richard Hughes’ memorable Adventures into the Unknown ill-advisedly retooled as a woeful super-hero book? But surely a contender for the most protean of comic books is the decadelong run of Harvey’s Black Cat (and I use the word ‘protean’ knowing that all readers of The Jack Kirby Collector have wide vocabularies). From its super-hero days—with its fishnet-stocking-wearing super-heroine of that name (one of the few characters the late 1940s who is not fondly remem-

Kirby Cometh

To readers of this magazine, of course, Black Cat’s real glory days are those of its post-Code period (with horror forcibly off the menu), when the accomplished duo Jack Kirby and Joe Simon took over the title and delivered some remarkably inventive and beautifully drawn, fantastic tales.

All of which might lead you to think that I am about to extol the virtues of the book—and, yes, I am—but not without a few qualifications. The editor of this journal, John Morrow, has never asked me to be upbeat in my pieces, and seems perfectly happy for the odd caveat to be inserted, so one will follow in this piece. Let’s take a look at Black Cat Mystic #58, published in July-September 1956. The cover is a striking one showing a transparent ghostly figure with beard and goggles entertaining two enrapt children while their parents look on, unable to see the spectral apparition.

Jack Kirby, of course, could delineate a ghostly figure to rival the most creepy, but that’s not his brief here, and while ‘Mr. Zimmer’ (we learn his name in the book) may be spectral, he is not menacing—in fact, he’s a storyteller, 40

less to say, he turns out to be friendly—and not only that, he is a child who is eventually gathered up by his robot parents (a robot child, in fact) and taken home. Kirby was later to re-jig the concept for an early Challengers of the Unknown adventure. The design of the creature is unlike any robot you may have seen—and, what’s more, unlike other robots designed by Kirby. The man was so spendthrift in his creative ideas that he was never obliged to repeat himself, and the piece undoubtedly has its modest rewards for the Kirby aficionado. This tale can also be found in the Titan Simon & Kirby Science-Fiction volume mentioned above, and the larger format and better quality paper does it greater service (the original has a washed-out look)—although it is interesting that the impeccable art restoration with new colors

by Harry Mendryk has him opting for a dark cobalt blue for the robot, making it even more menacing, but losing some of the detail in Kirby’s original piece.

clearly being introduced as a continuing character by S&K. And Mr. Zimmer, to some degree, is what’s wrong with the book. As the splash panel says: ‘Listen to the clock strike midnight... it’s time to meet Mr. Zimmer.’ We realise that he has narrating duties in the first piece in which he is introduced, “Read To Us, Mr. Zimmer!” This brief tale may have perfectly efficient illustrations (when did Kirby ever deliver anything less?), but the sketchy story is desperately underwritten and Zimmer, let’s face it, is not a particularly interesting character.

Through a glass darkly

He doesn’t reappear to introduce the next story in the book, “Mystery Vision,” which has its central character happening across a pair of discarded spectacles after a road accident—spectacles, in fact, which give him an insight into the real character of those he is looking at (inevitably, innocent-looking figures show their true sinister colours when viewed through the glasses—the tale is reminiscent of a memorable Robert Q. Sale horror piece from the Atlas horror days, “The Last Look,” except that there the horrific results of looking through the supernatural glasses ends with the death of the protagonist; in the S&K piece, the spectacles are just broken). This tale is more assured than the first in the issue, and suggests that Kirby and Simon were settling into their new role at Black Cat with a little more authority than in the weak first story, although the second piece is still, frankly, nothing to write home about.

I first read the book in a low-grade US copy (which I still possess), but both that story and the next appear in the wonderful anthology Simon & Kirby Science-Fiction from Titan Books— which, for some reason omits the opening story. But it’s the very next story in this issue of Black Cat where things get (slightly) more interesting.

Help!

The final story in the issue is another interesting curio—not as accomplished as other science-fiction outings that Simon & Kirby would deliver in future issues of this magazine and in their other science-fiction titles (such as Race for the Moon), but still cherishable. The splash panel—with the word ‘Help!’ in a large shocking font—shows a group of dark silhouetted figures approaching the viewer, holding what we can quickly assume are torches—and that’s not all the reader can assume. Which leads to another spoiler warning here: The menacing alien presence in the story is, we quickly intuit, not the small, fragile looking alien we finally see, but us, the human beings who terrify him. It’s a charming fragment, and the height-challenged alien (as unthreatening as the visitor in the film The Man from Planet X) is a rather winning creation, delineated in just a few lines; something, in fact, that only the master of economy Kirby could really do, using the very minimum of resources to convey the idea that he was aiming at. Once again, the artwork can be seen to advantage in the Titan reprint volume.

Gismo!

Before discussing the next story, I have to ask you, dear reader, a question. How committed are you to the Jack Kirby cause? I’m assuming that as a reader of this magazine you’re no casual admirer, so I don’t have to do any proselytizing regarding the reputation or achievement of The King. All of which is a prelude to saying that I am not going to make too much of a case for this particular issue of Black Cat Mystic for the story “Gismo!”—neither book nor story is something that is likely to convert the unconverted. But for the Kirby admirer, slight though the piece is (and it is slight), there are pleasures to be found. Let’s enumerate a couple of them. The splash panel shows a young boy standing in the shadow of a large nonhuman form, and this is another one of those Kirby pieces in which (spoiler alert!) a threatening-seeming alien or monster turns out to be benign. That said, it’s a charming version of the familiar notion, and refreshingly without the preaching with which Stan Lee concluded such tales (with a final cosy line or two about tolerance and similar virtues).

When the young boy first discovers the eponymous ‘Gismo’, it turns out to be a towering blue-hued robot that comes crashing through trees and appears (for a couple of pages at least) to menace the boy and his mother, knocking down doors and resisting shotgun blasts. But need-

Codicil

Finally, then, does it matter that nothing in this issue is really Jack Kirby at his very best? (Certainly not Mr. Zimmer.) Personally, I’d say not at all—chippings from the Kirby woodblock are still fascinating, and any admirer of the artwork of the man who was possibly the greatest single illustrator in the history of the comics medium should have this in their collection, either as the original book or in its handsome reprint form. H 41

Rootin’ Shootin’

by Will Murray Where can you find cowboys by Kirby?

Mosey over to check out appearances of the cowpokes in these issues, buckaroo:

Kid Colt: Gunsmoke Western #65-67, 69-71, 73 Kid Colt Outlaw #93, 95, 96, 119

Black Rider: Gunsmoke Western #47, 51 Kid Colt Outlaw #86 The Black Rider Rides Again! #1

Rawhide Kid: Rawhide Kid #17-32, 34, 43

Two-Gun Kid: Gunsmoke Western #62-64 Two-Gun Kid #54, 55, 57-62

(next page, bottom) Two-Gun Kid #62 (March 1963).

N

Marvel’s Kid

ot many fans realize it, but when the Marvel Age of Comics really took off around 1964, not all of the heroes were new creations or Golden Age retreads. One had been cavorting in his own magazine since 1948 making him, at that time, Marvel’s longest-running continuing hero.

Not many realize this—because the character was Kid Colt.

Despite their importance to the company, Marvel’s Western characters have been notoriously ignored. In fact, it was the Atlas-era cowboys, probably more than anything, which kept that company afloat through the grim ’50s.

Kid Colt got his start in Kid Colt, Hero of the West dated August 1948. A commercial title change to Kid Colt, Outlaw came with issue #3. The comic continued, unbroken, to March 1968, and the character was so popular that he simultaneously appeared in a second venue, All-Western. Under shifting titles, All-Western featured Kid Colt until, as Gunsmoke Western, it expired in 1963.

The artist responsible for about 95% of the zillions of Kid Colt stories was Jack Keller, who doesn’t appear to have done much Marvel work that didn’t feature that heard-riding character.

Kid Colt was not really an outlaw. He was born Blaine Colt, of Abilene, Wyoming. A hot-tempered teenager, he was so fast on the draw that he never wore his guns for fear of having to kill during unavoidable gunfights: The “No-gun Kid” they called him. But when owlhoot Lash Larribee guns down Blaine’s father Dan, the lad straps on his father’s Colt Peacemakers and in a fair fight, annihilates Lash. One of Lash’s boys tells the sheriff it was cold-blooded murder. Because Blaine was consid-

42

ered a gunshy milksop, his account was not believed. So he fled on his gray pony, Steel, and became the Robin Hood fugitive in the red shirt and white cowhide vest known as Kid Colt.

Other than taming down his preCode origin, the Kid Colt who got his start in 1948 is the same Kid Colt whom I first encountered, flushed with enthusiasm for the then-new Marvel line, in 1964. This is more than can be said for his two companion Kids, the TwoGun Kid and the Rawhide Kid. The debut issue of Two-Gun Kid was dated March 1948.

Technically, he predates Kid Colt by five months. But this is not the same Two-Gun Kid Marvel was publishing in the early ’60s. I discovered this fact by accident when, while trading comics with a friend back around 1965, I scored a 1960

Cowboys

black stallion, Thunder, also had a dual identity. He pretended to be a swayback nag whenever lawyer Hawk rode him.

Lee gave the job of drawing the new Two-Gun to no less than Jack Kirby, who had briefly handled the old version in his final issues. Before that, Al Hartley and John Severin were most identified with the strip. Later, Dick Ayers did the post-Kirby honors.

A similar transformation happened to The Rawhide Kid. That title ran 16 issues from March 1955 to September 1957. The original Rawhide was a whip-wielding ranchhand who wore a buckskin jacket and rode with a kid sidekick named Randy Clayton. Somewhere along the line, he got a new black outfit with a Texas Ranger-style buttoned tunic. The Comics Code had forced him to toss away his trademark whip.

But in August, 1960—a year before The Fantastic Four—Lee reactivated the title.

Superficially, the new version seemed to be the same character, except his blue-black outfit suffered minor changes and the character was drawn as a bantam-sized redhead where Bob Brown and Dick Ayers—the original artists—had depicted a strapping blond six-footer who was known only as The Rawhide Kid. The revamped character’s real name was Johnny Bart and, like Kid Colt, he was a fugitive. The lone survivor of a wagon train attack, Johnny was adopted by an old ex-Texas Ranger named Ben Bart, who taught him to shoot. When Bart was bushwhacked, Johnny went gunning for his killer, acquiring a powerful rep as a fast draw.

copy of Two-Gun Kid. To my amazement, this TwoGun Kid wasn’t the masked town-tamer I know, but a blonde cowpoke all duded up in black. Worse, he sang in the saddle like Roy Rogers. I couldn’t figure it out.

What had happened was that the original TwoGun Kid, after running in his own title from 1948 to 1961, had been canceled. But in 1962, Stan Lee, as he was doing with characters like the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, had revived the name, but revamped the character.

The first Two-Gun Kid was a footloose cowboy who rode a horse he called Cyclops. Kid’s real name was Clay Harder, and he earned the nickname TwoGun Kid when, after Bull Yaeger and his cowpokes shoot his father in an attempt to steal the family ranch, Clay went gunning for the killers. His wizardry with twin guns defeated the entire bunch, and a friendly sheriff dubbed him the Two-Gun Kid. He took the name to heart and rode the West hunting owlhoots. I guess it was a living.

When Lee reactivated the title, he transformed the outdated singing cowpoke into a cross between the Lone Ranger and Daredevil—except Lee hadn’t yet created the Man Without Fear. Matt Hawk was the town of Tombstone’s peaceable lawyer. But at night he dons a black gunslinger’s outfit much like that of his earlier namesake—except he also wears a brown cowhide vest with black domino mask to conceal his identity. Hawk fought outlaws as an unofficial lawman, aided by strongman Boom-Boom Brown—a character anticipating Sgt. Fury’s Dum-Dum Dugan. Two-Gun’s 43

Later, Johnny drew first in a gun fight and was accused of murder.

Instead of standing trial, he turned fugitive.

He got the nickname Rawhide Kid because he grew up in Rawhide, Texas.

Jack Kirby had once boasted that one of his Rawhide Kid issues had actually outsold the rest of the Marvel line.

I can believe it.

This strip was among Kirby’s best work of that period. His Rawhide Kid was an angry whirlwind—riding, shooting, fighting in stories of such violent fury that they make his early Fantastic Fours seem as slow as Millie the Model.

The issue that sold so well was probably the one in which Rawhide battled a giant totem pole that came to life [#22, June 1961]. This story would have been more at home in Tales to Astonish, but Marvel’s Westerns enjoyed a brief flirtation with their popular monster formula around 1960. One Lee-Kirby issue of the original Two-Gun Kid [#58, Feb. 1961, shown at right] found the Kid at odds with a giant lizard—but it turned out to be only a giant bison in a lizard suit. Don’t ask how or why. Kid Colt actually encountered a giant green alien straight out of Strange Tales in one wild issue.

The Rawhide Kid’s origin was revised and expanded in issue #45 (April 1965). By this time, Kirby had relinquished the art chores to Larry Lieber, who would become strongly identified with the character as both artist and writer during the book’s latter run.

It turned out that the Kid had two brothers who also survived the Indian raid that claimed his parents. His real name was revealed to be Johnny Clay. One brother, Frank, was a cardsharp. The other, Joe, had become a sheriff to atone for his cowardice in running away from the Indian attack that killed their parents. It was quite a family.

The glory days for the three Kids was roughly 1963-65, when, enclosed in some gorgeous Jack Kirby/ Dick Ayers covers, the trio fought Wild Westvintage super-villains.

Kid Colt seemed to encounter them more frequently than the other two.

He even had one recurring villain, a kind of frontier Dr. Doom named Iron Mask. Colt first encountered Iron Mask in issue #110. He was a blacksmith who encased his head and chest in a bullet-proof iron protector. He was an unbeatable gunman—until

Kid Colt disarmed him with a couple of well-placed shots to his unprotected arms.

Iron Mask—his real name was never revealed—broke jail a few issues later in new blue armor that protected his entire body.

Colt tricked him into fording a river and his suit rusted. Every time Iron Mask came back, Kid Colt figured out a new way of stalemating him. Once, Iron Mask roped a trio of Colt’s old foes, Dr. Danger, Mr. Brown and The Fat Man, together and formed a circus of crime—a favorite Stan Lee plot—but even that wasn’t enough.

A number of Lee’s frontier super-villains were actually revivals of Golden Age Timely characters. In Rawhide Kid #38, Rawhide tangled with the Red Raven, a character loosely based upon the 1940 super-hero. This guy was outlaw “Red” Raven. The Kid put him in jail, which he shared with a dying Navajo medicine man. It seems this medicine man discovered a magic cloth. He sews Raven a pair of crimson wings, makes him exercise his arms and soon “Red” Raven is winging his way to freedom in a purple-and-scarlet bird suit.

Red Raven goes after the Kid. Luckily, Rawhide meets up with the Navajo’s son who arms him with a pair of white wings. After history’s first aerial gunfight, Rawhide burns both sets of pinions.

The Two-Gun Kid encountered Hurricane—another Timelyinspired villain—in issue #70 of his magazine. Outlaw Harry Kane flees into the desert to escape Two-Gun’s wrath. There, he bush44

whacks an Indian witch doctor who is brewing a potion that will impart great speed to his tribe. Thirsty, Harry drinks the brew—despite the unsettling fact that its just been struck by lightning. Kane quickly discovers that he can outrun a cougar and slap leather like greased lightning. That’s right, he’s got super-speed. Dressing in a purple outfit decorated with thunderbolts on his chest, he renames himself Hurricane [right] and goes after Two-Gun. Guess who wins.

Other unusual villains from this period seem to have been variations of regular Marvel bad guys. The Rattler was a green-clad gunman who vaguely resembles Thor’s archfoe, the Cobra. The Rattler fought the Rawhide Kid in issue #37, then having learned his lesson, plagued the Two-Gun Kid four years later. Two-Gun once shot it out with a character who anticipated The Black Panther. He was simply called The Panther, and except for the purple color of his tights, he strongly resembled the African Black Panther, who debuted in Fantastic Four. There was also a Scorpion who fought the Rawhide Kid. If you squinted your eyes, he resembled Spider-Man’s foe of that name, but not by much.

One striking Two-Gun Kid villain was The Purple Phantom. He was kind of a take-off on Dick Ayers’ old M.E. Comics character, the Ghost Rider. Both wore phosphorescent outfits and black-lined capes which enabled them to do ghostly things with their glowing bodies, such as make their own heads disappear or seem to float free. Dick Ayers drew that issue of TwoGun Kid (though the cover’s by Kirby), so this seems to have been Ayers digging into his old bag of tricks.

In 1966, Ayers and Stan Lee revived the original Ghost Rider, with certain changes—among them, giving him a new civilian identity. For the title’s run, the Ghost Rider fought masked super-villains like The Tarantula and Stingray almost exclusively. But the new Ghost Rider never caught on the way the three Kid cowboys did.

Obviously, readers loved Western loners with the word “Kid” in their nicknames. And there was great audience appeal in a hunted character who roamed the West, fighting outlaws and dodging the law, while searching for peace. The obvious inspiration for Marvel’s outlaw heroes was the legendary Billy the Kid, and in the ’50s, the company had a whole corral of such characters—the Western Kid, the Ringo Kid,

the Apache Kid, the Outlaw Kid, and the Kid from Texas. But this formula wasn’t original with Marvel.

In the ’20s there had been a pulp magazine called Wild West Weekly which featured a small posse of wronged cowpokes with nicknames like the Whistlin’ Kid, the Silver Kid, Kid Wolf, the Oklahoma Kid, and others too buckaroo to mention. If you think about it, this misunderstood-hero-on-the-run formula is what drove Spider-Man’s sales for years.

It was probably inevitable, given Marvel’s great success with crossover and team-ups in their super-hero books, that the various Kids would run into one another. Did they ever!

The first occurred in Rawhide Kid #40 (June 1964), where Johnny Clay encountered the Two-Gun Kid. In a typical Marvel mix-up, the Two-Gun Kid goes gunning for Rawhide, but they end up teaming up against a stage-robber who masquerades as a grizzly bear. Yes, you read that right. The two Kids part as friends.

A year later, Rawhide turned up in the pages of Kid Colt, Outlaw #121. Colt’s old nemesis, manhunter Sam Hawk, has slapped him in jail. When Rawhide shows up in town to warn everybody that Colt’s other great enemy, Iron Mask, is on the loose again, Hawk claps him into an adjoining cell.

You’d think that the two fugitive Kids would become friends. Not in the Marvel Universe.

“So you’re Kid Colt!” Rawhide sneers. “You don’t look like much to me!”

“Same goes for you, Rawhide,” Colt retorts.

But when Colt breaks jail, Rawhide follows. They fight for a few pages and then team up to beat Iron Mask. They part friends.

In Kid Colt #125 (Nov. 1965), Colt is forced to help Silas Kane’s outlaws rob a bank. When the robbers ditch Colt, he’s brought in by Two-Gun Kid, who recommends the services of lawyer Matt Hawk (Two-Gun liked to throw a little work his alter-ego’s way). The true culprits are revealed, and the two Kids part friends.

45

(below) Re-“draw,” pardner! The Ringmaster and his Crime Circus debuted in Kirby’s Captain America Comics #5 (Aug. 1941). Here they’re back in Kid Colt #106 (Sept.

1962), and would later surface in Thor also.

(Circus folk must age well.) And was Jack’s 1970s villain Kobra inspired by his cover for Kid Colt #98 (May 1961)?

But you can’t keep a good cowboy down for long. In the early 1970s, when Marvel went reprint-happy, the two orphaned Kids came back in a reprint book called The Mighty Marvel Western.

Because of their rather checkered histories, the reprint editors had their hands full. They reprinted an assortment of original Two-Gun Kid stories with a mask and cowhide vest crudely drawn over the old Kid’s costume. It was rather silly, inasmuch as no one in the stories seemed to take notice of the mask. Later, they stopped doctoring the art and included a note that claimed these were stories of Matt Hawk’s wandering days. But they forgot to change the old Kid’s blond hair to Hawk’s brown locks.

Marvel also pulled a few of the buckskin-clad Rawhide Kid stories out of the files and reprinted them with a spurious note that claimed that at one point in his life, Rawhide found a place where he wasn’t wanted and did some honest ranching. It may even have been true.

Kid Colt, because he never changed, never suffered any such indignity. But in one issue of Mighty Marvel Western, they somehow managed to color his familiar red shirt, blue. Sales don’t seem to have been affected either way.

Except for reprints, the Kids rode into the sunset when The Rawhide Kid was canceled in 1979.

Attempts to revive or integrate them in the Marvel Universe have all stalled. The character was revived in a brief mini-series not long ago, which put a peculiar period to his career. I will pass in silence over the details of Slap Leather.

Westerns have fallen on pretty hard times these days, so it’s not very likely that we’ll be seeing Marvel’s three greatest Western heroes in action any time soon. But you never know. The irony is that these once-important characters are now the most neglected in the whole Marvel Universe. An argument could be made that the first stirrings of the Marvel Age of Comics began with the 1960 revitalization of The Rawhide Kid and the introduction of the new TwoGun Kid in 1962. But in the world of today’s comics, cowpokes don’t get any respect, so the important place Blaine Colt, Matt Hawk and Johnny Bart Clay hold in the history of Marvel Comics is simply ignored. H

After that, about once a year, two of the trio teamed up.

Kid Colt showed up in Rawhide Kid #50 when The Masquerader impersonated the real Colt. The Rawhide Kid turned up in the pages of Two-Gun Kid #85 and, without any preliminary fighting, they teamed up to clear Rawhide’s name.

You’d think by that time, all three Kids would be on excellent terms. Someone should have told writer Gary Friedrich, who scripted “Three Rode Together,” in Two-Gun Kid #89 (Sept. 1967). When Kid Colt finds a wounded Rawhide Kid at the scene of a stagecoach robbery—Rawhide had tried to prevent it—the Two-Gun Kid happens to ride up. He assumes they’re both guilty and takes them in. Funny thing is none of the outlaw Kids seem to recognize TwoGun—or he, them.

This is an example of what is known as comic book discontinuity. Writer Friedrich apparently never boned up on past Kid crossovers. No matter—the plot of this story is much the same as the earlier encounters. The Kids fight. They join forces to capture the real culprits. And they part friends.

There were other team-ups over the years, especially after Kid Colt, Outlaw and Two-Gun Kid were canceled in 1968. Colt turned up in several issues of The Rawhide Kid, riding the outlaw trail, seeking that elusive pardon, and trying to hold onto his trademark.

(top) Rawhide Kid #25 (Dec. 1961)—by Kirby, despite not having Jack’s name on it.

46

An ongoing examination of Kirby’s art and compositional skills

I

Rawhide Kid, Bantamweight Scrapper

discovered Jack Kirby at age nine. One of the first Kirby comics that I was exposed to was The Rawhide Kid. The action scenes were so exhilarating that I had

to figure out how Kirby did it. I studied the sequences over and over, amazed at the creative mind behind them. With the series debuting about a year before the first issue of The Fantastic Four, the smoldering young Rawhide Kid certainly felt like a super-hero in his skintight, ink-black outfit. He was supernaturally fast on the draw and a real scrapper in a fight.

Next to Kirby’s steely-eyed six footers, the Rawhide Kid was a bantamweight; a wiry little black leopard.

As he often did with Captain America, Kirby put the Kid through his paces, regularly pitting him in brawls against multiple foes, and many twice his size. Throughout his career, Kirby’s fight scenes had always taken advantage of the sequential continuity of panels on a comic book page, using a certain degree of follow-through motion from one frame to the next. Kirby seemed to enjoy using a cinematic move/countermove, parry/thrust action to emphasize that the Kid fought strategically in order to outwit and befuddle his mostly larger foes. Sequences like this three-panel exchange [above] became common in the series, as the Kid’s escapades took on an almost slapstick comedic style, with the Kid as a sort of trickster making fools of his opponents.

Lee’s dialogue also often pointed out the size disparity between the opponents.

The lithe black silhouette of the Rawhide Kid inspired Kirby to really explore the limits of kinetic continuity. The positioning of the Kid’s negative shape was like an anchor for the eye, a naturally spotted black to give contrast and motion.

Black spotting is by some considered to be a mysterious art trick, and is often not well understood. In reality it is a reasonably simple concept. It is essentially about the contrast between light and dark. A black shape or dark shadow placed behind or next to another object will push that object forward or better define it. In this case from Rawhide Kid #32 [left], it is the Kid’s black costume that 47

makes him the focus of attention when he is strategically positioned in relation to other figures. This page is in my opinion one of the best composed of the series’ run.

Kirby’s figures are nearly always arranged in a pivotal relationship to one another, and in this case, the eye effortlessly follows the Kid’s reoccurring form across the page. As the eye enters the first panel, it sees the word balloon on the left and then the black shape of the Kid in the air. The curvature of the blanket brings the eye in a circle to take in the entire panel, and the Kid’s legs and the man in the yellow shirt move the eye rightward to panel two. The black stovepipe hat brings the eye to the second appearance of the man in the yellow shirt and the spotted black of the Kid being held by him.

The sweep of the blanket in the lower right corner leads the eye to panel three and the man in the green pants, whose bent right leg points directly to the dynamic kicking figure of the Kid. This panel is perfectly balanced with the interplay of the figures on left, right, top and bottom. Various elements throughout the seven panels make the splayed figure of the Kid in this frame the focal point of the entire page.

The man with the green trousers serves both to bring the eye to this third panel and to take it out. As he is literally being kicked out of the panel, his left leg moves us to panel four, with the kid rising

and striking the man with the red vest. This figure’s left foot points us to the first of the final three panels, which are beautiful examples of sequential action, and well balanced medium shots of the Kid fending off attack and being attacked yet again.

The Kid is almost always on the defensive. An outlaw and a loner, he is on the run constantly. He never looks for trouble but trouble always finds him. In an article in the Jack Kirby Collector #16

by Jerry Boyd, “The King and the Kid,” Boyd notes the similarity in a resting pose the Kid is taking in this splash panel to the reclining figure from a still of James Dean in the film Giant [above].

The splash [left] is from Rawhide Kid #31 (Dec. 1962), “Shootout with Rock Rorick!.” In this deep space composition, the Kid’s figure is beautifully framed by objects in a virtual panel within a panel. The comparison to the James Dean pose is fairly obvious, but what follows in the conclusion of the same story is even more telling.

Kirby has said that to some degree he based his version of the Rawhide Kid on another young rebel actor, Steve McQueen. It is just my good fortune to have stumbled on compelling evidence of this, when I purchased a tape of the 1959 TV series Wanted, Dead or Alive, starring McQueen. On that tape was an episode entitled “The Kovack Affair.” At the end of the show, McQueen’s bounty hunter hero Josh Randall breaks into the office of a crooked gambling boss named Kovak and beats him savagely in order to compel Kovak to surrender his ill-gotten casino holdings. This TV segment is nearly lifted intact by Kirby in the last page of the Rorick story, wherein the Rawhide Kid, in another virtuoso display of sequential action, repeatedly pummels the cowardly rancher Rock Rorick into submission. The physical resemblance between TV’s Kovak and Kirby’s Rorick is unmistakable, and even the names are similar. Both men are burly mustached men with suits and string ties. Both beatings are one-sided, in that the villain is overwhelmed by the savagery of his attacker and is incapable of resistance.

Both Randall and the Kid announce that they enjoyed administering their beatings so much that they wish that their respective villains had held out a bit longer. The final six panels of these sequences are some of Kirby’s best, and notable for the reason that 48

stories, the panel-count seldom goes above six. Secondly, he rarely extended a fight sequence to such lengths in his later work, and certainly not in this condensed form. Was it the pseudo-Western theme of the rodeo in the Kamandi story that inspired him to return to an earlier work for inspiration?

At any rate, it is wonderful to have the opportunity to compare the stylistic differences in two pieces of work separated by more than ten years. As I have said, it was just a stroke of luck to stumble on these examples of Kirby borrowing from a TV series or of Kirby swiping from Kirby. It is always a pleasure to receive a fresh revelation relating to the King’s work, particularly when you have a clear window into his thought processes and inspirations. H Citations

• Kirby, Jack (plot, art); Lee, Stan (text); Ayers, Dick (inks); “Beware of the Barker Brothers,” Rawhide Kid #32, pg. 3, from Marvel Masterworks: Rawhide Kid Volume 2 pg. 159.

• Kirby, Jack, (plot, art); Lee, Stan (text); “Shootout With Rock Rorick,” Rawhide Kid #31, pg. 1, from Mighty Marvel Western #6.

• Ibid, pg. 6.

• Kirby, Jack (art, story); Royer, Mike (inks); “Winner Take All,” Kamandi #14.

• Screen grab from TV series, Wanted, Dead or Alive, “The Kovack Affair,” 1959.

the villain takes one devastating hit after another and is totally incapable of defending himself.

When Kirby abandoned the Rawhide Kid to focus exclusively on super-heroes, he seldom returned to this sort of high panel-count cinematic sequential storytelling style until his reintroduction of Captain America with his astounding acrobatic prowess.

When Marvel decided to reduce the size of the boards its artists worked on, Kirby began to rely even more on larger panels and his work generally became more monumental, the panel count less numerous, and the action on the page generally less continuous.

Strange then, that in issue #14 of Kamandi [1974], Kirby appears to pay homage to this very Rawhide Kid page. If one looks at the final six panels of this fight scene with bison rider Bull Bantam, one sees in the fourth panel something very similar to the composition of panel three on the Rawhide Kid page. Both pages have the figures on the left raising one leg to kick downward. The following panel on both pages shows the back of one figure partially blocking the other. The final two panels of both sequences both show the heroes, Kamandi and the Kid, grabbing their opponents by their upper torsos and knocking them away with a final blow.

Did Kirby consciously return to that Rawhide Kid page, or is this merely a bizarre coincidence? First off, as I have noted, Kirby did very few pages in his later work with so high a panel-count, nine in all. In his Fourth World 49

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by Shane Foley (below) From Captain America #206 (Feb. 1977)—about as negative a letter column as you could assemble. (next page, top right) Was this letter from “Steve Rogers” in Cap #202 real, or a fake by a Marvel staffer? (next page, center) Is this “Kim Thompson” the late co-publisher of Fantagraphics?

M

The Great Kirby

ore than once we’ve heard that Jack Kirby felt the letters pages in his ’70s Marvel books were stacked negatively against his work, with disparaging and critical comments being given greater voice than the positive, supportive ones.

And there are certainly staffers from that period of time (Jim Shooter and Alan Kupperberg, for example, both interviewed online) who have publicly stated they felt Kirby was right in his suspicions.

However, I must admit that, while I knew there were many negative and critical comments on those pages, I had never felt that they were overly so, or that

the opinions printed there were entirely unfair. So I sat down with every book Kirby did in that period, read every letter on every letters page, and counted what was there—rating them as either irrelevant (i.e. comments about something generic like “what the name of Cap’s letters page should be called,” etc.), positive, negative, or somewhere in-between.

I counted the letters in each title and into the Editor-in-Chief periods. (I used cover dates only, acknowledging that these are publication order dates only, months different from true production dates. And I realize, of course, that the demarcation between one editor’s work and another’s is never clear-cut, but it’s the best I could do.)

It is noteworthy that, unless an issue was an Annual, or a Treasury, or one of the first few of a new title where no letters were possible, there was not a single issue without a letter column until April 1978, the month Machine Man and Devil Dinosaur started and just after Kirby himself took control of the letter columns. This will be addressed a little later.

The Marv Wolfman Era (January to September 1976) Marv Wolfman was Editor in Chief when Kirby returned to Marvel, and on his titles dated Jan. 1976 to Sept. ’76. In that period, there were fifteen Kirby books released (Cap #193-201 and Annual #3, Eternals #1-3, as well as Cap’s Bicentennial Battles.) It also includes the 2001 Treasury, which, though released later, was produced as part of Wolfman’s time. (An editorial comment stated that Kirby handed in the work a full twelve months ahead of schedule!)

All regular Captain America issues had LOCs, with 31 letters in all. 23 were positive, three negative, and five in-between.

Eternals #3 had the first letters to that new title and all three were favorable.

So under Marv Wolfman, the letters were healthily in Kirby’s favor. There were two negative things I see that could have annoyed Kirby: First, a letter by Kim Thompson in Cap #194 [next page], pleading with Marvel not to let Kirby edit and script, citing “destruction of one great concept after the other” at DC proving he can’t “develop or script a series.” The answer was to give Kirby a chance first, implying the reader was being quite unfair. But the question could be asked by Kirby: Why was such a comment printed at all? When Roy Thomas or Gerry Conway was to take over a strip, would there be letters published beforehand 52

Kontroversy Letters pleading against them because the letter-writer thought they “killed” previous strips? Perhaps it was published because it represented the view of many (some staffers, we know, were against Kirby being allowed such autonomy), but Kirby probably did not appreciate it at all. And who could blame him?

The second objection by Kirby may have been a letter in Cap #196, and its editorial answer, which seemed to mock Kirby’s unorthodox stressed words. The writer commented of being bothered by something in Kirby’s writing style, with oddly placed italics used throughout the comment. The writer used italics in odd places, and the answer replied in kind:

letters in any issue, with three very critical comments printed. One said, “I suppose it’s fitting that the man who created CA be allowed to destroy him,” and that “hero-worshipping fans have tolerated scripts that would normally be unacceptable in a Marvel magazine.”

Then the page finishes with a letter stating that Cap is currently his favourite comic! The very next issue has a comment complaining about the “drivel demeaning Kirby’s writing abilities.” Not only did the widely disparate comments continue to be published—as opposed perhaps to simply commenting on Kirby’s artistic creativity or his story plots themselves—but nearly every letters page began with a yellow box reiterating the great “Kirby Kontroversy”—as if there was nothing else to talk about except whether Kirby was a good writer or not. So perhaps Kirby seriously wondered if good, solid letters on the actual story content were being ignored in favour of the “Kontroversy,” in which even the most supportive letters still reinforced the subject of Kirby’s validity as a writer. It must be noted, however, that during the second half of 1977, the tide of negative letters to Cap eased off considerably.

Black Panther faired similarly, with only 8 of the 17 letters published during this era being totally positive, while 5 were negative, and a further 4 expressed fears or problems alongside other positive aspects. One letter writer in BP #3 challenged Kirby on his editorial in #1, saying: “No, Mr. Kirby, it is not true that every character must retain the format from which he was created...” and asked for Kirby’s departure. In BP #5, there was another backhanded compliment, saying Kirby’s writing was “…no longer childish.” Again, I imagine Kirby would be concerned about the fact that over half the letters published in these two books during this period expressed less than positive comments, targeting his writing ability rather than the stories themselves.

Eternals and 2001 were quite different. Each there had positive comments that far outweighed the negative (Eternals: 46 positive, 6 negative, and 7 with a bit of both, while 2001 had 26 positives, 5 nay-sayers, and 5 with good and bad to say).

The Eternals letters were obsessed with whether or not the book should be part of the established Marvel Universe. Whether Kirby approved that debate or not is unclear, though I would have thought that the number of writers who asked that Eternals stay separate from established Marvel continuity should have gladdened him.

I’m not sure how relevant this is, but it surprised me that when Goodwin initiated the Bullpen Page credit box for the editorial lineup [below], Kirby was not included as a Consulting Editor until July 1977, even though the others (Thomas, Wein, Conway, Wolfman, Gerber) had been listed there since December 1976!

Some may see this as funny, but I’m sure Kirby, and his admirers, didn’t.

Still, it has to be acknowledged that letters favourable to Kirby’s work far outweighed the number of negative ones.

The(October Archie Goodwin Era 1976 to November 1977) Archie Goodwin succeeded Wolfman as EIC as of October 1976-dated books. His leadership extended well after the October 1977 date cited above, but it was from November 1977 that Kirby himself took control of the letters pages in his books, hence this twleve-month period noted. It is understood that Kirby had great respect for Goodwin, yet under Goodwin’s editorship, the negative comments continued, and if anything, at times, increased.

61 letters of comment to Captain America were published, of which 29 were positive, 11 negative, and 21 wavering with pros and cons—which means 32 contained reservations or were not encouraging. Some (counted amongst the ‘wavering’ numbers) were backhanded compliments like “Jack Kirby has the best understanding of what adventure comics are supposed to present... anyone can tell you that Kirby can’t write worth half a penny, but at least the King has sense enough to know when to have action….” (Cap #203).

Cap #206 contained the most fiercely negative collection of

53

(below) Jack’s nod to complaints about Eternals not being part of Marvel continuity: a cosmic-powered Hulk robot in #16 (Oct. ’77). (next page, top) Despite the California address, Marvel added an opening salvo and negative letters to Black Panther #7. (next page, bottom) Kirby’s original #197 cover didn’t have Cap schizophrenically yelling to himself after all!

The Jack Kirby Era (December 1977 to December 1978) In Black Panther #6 (dated Nov. 1977), while still under Goodwin’s overall editorship, it was announced in the letters page that from now on, mail was going to Thousand Oaks and Kirby would be handling his own letter columns. Then from Dec. 1977, all his titles followed suit—but an interesting thing happened.

Of the 26 comics published under this arrangement (not counting the Panther issue just mentioned and, of course, the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel or What If? #11), a massive 18 had no letters published. Of these 18, 10 were simply house ads for other comics. The

other 8 were editorial text pieces written by Kirby himself, addressing the thematic material of the book in question. So only 8 of his 27 issues contained letters of comment. Even these dropped off drastically in regularity once Eternals was canceled and Machine Man and Devil Dinosaur began, with only four letter columns appearing in any of his titles after April 1978 to the end of the year.

Black Panther had three issues that contained letters. Of the 11 letters in total, 7 were very positive and 1 was very negative. One issue (#7, dated January ’78) even continued the tradition of having the editorial box discussing the divided opinion of Kirby’s treatment of the Panther start the column, so one wonders if the transition for control of the letters columns hadn’t yet fully taken place.

Eternals published seven letters in its two final issues: Two scathing of the “robot Hulk” episode, then one comment in the next issue that praised the story.

Two issues of Devil Dinosaur featured letters pages, with all 11 letters printed being positive, while only the final issue of Machine Man (#9) ever had letters of comment, and all four were positive.

Looking at other Marvel comics published around this period, we see that many books certainly never held back and published extremely critical letters. There were many disparaging and highly critical letters published regarding Steve Gerber’s Omega the Unknown, Don Glut’s early Kull issues, Marv Wolfman’s Nova, Engelhart and Mantlo’s different directions in Skull the Slayer, Tony Isabella’s Power Man and the early issues of Master of Kung Fu, to list just a few examples. In top titles, like Conan the Barbarian, negative and critical letters were frequent, often questioning the quality of the author and artist’s work.

So negative opinions being published were not rare at Marvel. And it has to be admitted that, in Kirby’s books, only once or twice did the amount of negative letters actually outweigh the positive.

Yet, it does appear, at least to me, there was something a bit different—a different tone perhaps—in many of the Kirby lettercols. While it’s hard to be objective in this, perhaps here is a reason: 54

of letters? Perhaps there was no mail on Machine Man’s earlier appearances because none had been forwarded from New York after 2001’s cancellation, but it doesn’t explain the lack of LOCs in the latter part of 1978, since mail was heading Kirby’s way since November (or thereabouts) the previous year. Was he just too busy to handle the letter column, and as such it proved to be taking on more work than he could handle? Or was the amount of positive letters—or at least letters that had content he approved of publishing—far less than he anticipated after all? At this point, we can’t know. H

Perhaps Kirby’s letters pages felt different because his work was different. Because it was different, it therefore invited different—and probably more extreme—reaction. The fact that Kirby wasn’t interested in producing work that even acknowledged most of the Marvel Universe, let alone fit snugly into it, couldn’t help but shine through his work, therefore into the comments on that work.

Kirby’s comics were not standard Marvel fare of the day, exactly as those yellow boxes said. (Although with titles like Omega, Master of Kung Fu, Kull, etc., it’s hard to identify exactly what “standard” Marvel fare was.) And so since published comments came from the relatively small pool of fans willing to put pen to paper, perhaps this was to be expected. And since Kirby was writing core Marvel characters, yet refused to involve himself in those core characters’ lives as developed at that time, he could only expect appreciation to be sharply divided. That sales (apparently) did not reflect vindication of his approach must have grated badly. Could those negative letters comments—fewer in number than might be expected, but certainly harsh at times—really have had a significant impact in this area? Really?

One question is obvious: If Kirby felt the need to take control of the letters pages himself, why didn’t he take the opportunity to publish what he felt was a fairer balance 55

Kirby Letters

a summary of letters in each of the 1970s MARVEL Kirby titles in date order from 1976-1978

1976

January: Captain America #193 (non Kirby letters) February: Captain America #194 Three letters. One said: “I have a plea: Please, please don’t let Jack Kirby edit/ write Cap. Plot and illustrate yes, but anybody who’s suffered through his destruction of one superb concept after the other has got to admit that he can’t develop or script a series.” The answer: “We have no quarrel with your right to your own opinions—we ask only one thing, and that’s fairness. Even the most notorious and hard-hitting East Coast film critics customarily wait until they’ve seen the subject they’re criticizing before they condemn it. Can we ask any less of you? Please, in all fairness to Jack and his return to work on the character which he created, give the book a fair chance. Then let us know what you think, okay?”

March: Captain America #195 Three of the six letters commented on eagerly looking forward to Kirby’s return. One said: “Also, get Stan to script Cap. Taking nothing away from JK, but no one can write like THE MAN.” The answer lamented the impossibility of Stan getting the time, but said, “We can always hope, can’t we?” Another letter said simply: “Happiness is: Reading CA and finding out his creator is back! LONG LIVE THE KING!!!”

April: Captain America #196 Six letters of comment on #193. All were ecstatic about the art. One commented of being bothered by something in Kirby’s writing style. The writer used italics in odd places. The answer: “As yours was the only letter commenting on Jolly Jack’s placement of stressed words with his script that we’ve received, we wonder if anyone else was bothered by them.”

May: Captain America #197 Three letters, all very positive of #193 & #194. (One by Ralph Macchio compared Kirby’s current work favourably to his latter work at DC.) June: Captain America #198 Five letters, mostly positive, two ecstaticly. One asked that Kirby mix up plot elements more than he did at DC—another lamented that the credits weren’t Lee and Kirby.

July: Captain America #199 Four letters. One was full of praise for #196. Another disliked it and stated why. He also objected to Kirby’s ignoring the past thirty issues and stated that the fact that Kirby created Cap did not excuse him from developing what was now “Marvel’s” Cap. The reply answered only one small element written.

Captain America Annual #3

Bicentennial Battles—all complimentary.

Eternals #1 (editorial article only)

Eternals #6 Two letters, one complimentary, one criticizing the offensive ‘Theological’ component.

August: Captain America #200 Five letters. All were complimentary with a couple of provisos. One said, “I don’t know whether I’m getting used to Jack’s style, or he’s toned down a bit.” Another asked Jack to put missing characterization back in, and to stop the “over writing,” which he said would be unacceptable if it was anyone else writing. He then speaks of Jack’s legacy in the business and says, “I’m looking forward to a letters page of the future, where we can just comment on the comic without treating Jack like a demi-god.” Then two letters later, the comment comes that “this was your best writing yet.” The answer spoke of the difference in styles between Kirby and (say) Engelhart. The debate was firing up.

2001: A Space Odyssey #1 (editorial article only)

1977

(RALPH MACCHIO joins MARVEL) January: Captain America #205 Seven letters: five generally complimentary but with reservations (‘Juvenile’ names of the Night People, where are the supporting cast?, where are the baddies we know?).

Eternals #7 Seven letters: all about where Eternals fits within the Marvel Universe.

2001: A Space Odyssey #2 Three letters on the Treasury edition— two very positive, one very critical, though admitting most others will, and did, like it.

Eternals #2 (second editorial article only) September: Captain America #201 Four letters. Two apologized to Kirby, saying they were initially disappointed with his writing and plotting, but that the last two issues were good. One referred to Kirby’s “simplistic” method, which had “improved.”

Black Panther #1 (editorial article only) February: Captain America #206 First letters page VERY negative Six letters: two complimentary—one with a suggestion—three very negative.

One says CA has gone from “downright awful to only slightly nauseating,” then that Kirby stories and art were never very good but now he has “regressed tremendously.” He ends with wanting more of the critical letters published than the usual compliments. Another says, “I suppose it’s fitting that the man who created CA be allowed to destroy him.” He says that Kirby’s “hero-worshipping fans have tolerated scripts that would normally be unacceptable in a Marvel Magazine.” He ends with “Does Jack know how to write in the real world?” Then there is a third critical letter stating, “JK writes as if it was in the ’40s or ’50s.” The answerer disagrees, and that most readers like Jack’s work. The letters page finishes with a letter saying that this is his favourite comic!

Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles Eternals #3 Three letters on Eternals #1. All very complimentary, one by Macchio already launching into the “should Eternals be in the Marvel Universe or not?”

ARCHIE GOODWIN becomes Editor in Chief October: Captain America #202 Four letters: two totally complimentary, with another lamenting again the supporting characters that Kirby has ignored and saying Kirby is writing “1940s comics dressed up in just enough 1970s pseudo-relevance to cover up.”

Eternals #4 Four highly complimentary letters

Eternals #8 Five letters: four short complimentary ones and one (the first critical one in Eternals) that criticizes Kirby’s complete control over his books and sees the need for him to have a co-writer.

2001 Treasury (completed 12 months earlier) November: Captain America #203 Thirteen letters on CA #200. Seven totally complimentary. Two very disappointed! Three had mixed reactions.

And one gave a very backhanded compliment saying “ CA—has become a fun mag once again. Jack Kirby has the best understanding of what adventure comics are supposed to present… (lamenting modern ‘relevance’)… I for one like Kirby’s style of action. Anyone can tell you that Kirby can’t write worth half a penny, but at least the King has sense enough to know when to have action…”

2001: A Space Odyssey #3 Five letters, three totally complimentary, one thinking it (the Treasury or #1?) was so-so, and one that criticized Kirby’s script for the Treasury.

March: Captain America #207 Five letters: two relevant. One is “Kirby is scripting 1963 comics. His art is fine, there’s nothing wrong with his plots.

It’s just his scripting… so why is Kirby a law unto himself…?” The second is, “I had it with all this drivel demeaning Kirby’s writing abilities. Nobody at Marvel, not even Stan himself, has scripted so totally in consistency with Kirby art as Jack has!” And so on.

Eternals #5 Seven totally complimentary letters.

December: Captain America #204 Four letters on Captain America’s

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Eternals #9 Four letters, all about how great #5 was and about Eternals in the MU again.

2001: A Space Odyssey #4 Four letters: all complimentary.

Black Panther #2 Eight letters: none relevant.

April: Captain America #208 Three letters: one full of praise, the other two bemoaning Cap’s lack of participation in the Marvel Universe.

Eternals #10 Five letters: all positive.

2001: A Space Odyssey #5 Four letters: all positive.

May: Captain America #209 Five letters: two totally positive, one loving the art but demanding Kirby be replaced as writer, one wanting Kirby off CA and the Panther to just work on Eternals and 2001, and another wanting Jack to put CA back into Marvel continuity. The answers say, “And so the great Kirby Kontroversy continues...”.

Eternals #11 Four letters: all very complimentary.

2001: A Space Odyssey #6 Six letters, beginning with an editorial that states fans either love Kirby or are enraged by him. Three were totally positive. Two liked what had been done but were skeptical of a continuing book.

One said the book needed a skilled writer.

Black Panther #3 Four letters: three totally positive, one challenging Kirby on his editorial in #1.

“No, Mr. Kirby, it is not true that every character must retain the format from which he was created... I am asking for Kirby’s departure.”

June: Captain America #210 Another letters page beginning with an editorial box talking of the “Kontroversy.” Six letters. One irrelevant. Two totally positive. Two decrying the book’s direction. One, even, wanted Kirby replaced as artist but retained as the “excellent” writer!

Eternals #12 Five positive letters: one disagreeing with a previous writer in #8 who wanted Kirby to have a co-writer.

2001: A Space Odyssey #7 Four letters: three positive, one saying it is boring.

July: Captain America #211 Another letters page beginning with an editorial box re: Kirby’s handling of CA. Four letters: two about how Kirby has improved, one with suggestions, and one stating how great Kirby is.

Eternals #13 Four letters: two irrelevant, one complimentary, one long one about Kirby’s lack of characterization.

2001: A Space Odyssey #8 Five letters: four positive, one negative.

Black Panther #4 Five letters: one irrelevant, four with both positive and negative comments.

Finally this month (August), Kirby is listed among the “Consulting Editors” on the Bullpen Page, even though the others (Thomas, Wein, Conway, Wolfman, Gerber) had been listed there since December 1976.

August: Captain America #212 Four letters: one complimentary, three with reservations.

Captain America Annual #4 Eternals #14 Three letters, all positive, with one wanting the debate re: the MU to stop.

2001: A Space Odyssey #9 Three letters: two wildly favourable, one questioning the point of the title.

September: Captain America #213 Four letters: one about Redwing, three very favourable.

Eternals #15 Three letters: two very favourable, one irrelevant.

2001: A Space Odyssey #10 Three letters: One with an odd question, one totally favourable, one favourable of artwork but not of writing.

Black Panther #5 Five letters, all totally favourable of the art, one saying the writing is especially good, one saying it’s bad, and another saying it’s no longer childish.

October: Captain America #214 Four letters: three totally favourable, one mildly so.

Eternals #16 Three letters, all very favourable.

Eternals Annual #1 (editorial comment only) November: Eternals #17 Three very favourable letters.

As of the following issues, future mail is to go directly to Kirby.

Black Panther #6 Four letters: three critical, one positive.

As of this issue, mail goes to Kirby direct, and there’s an editorial about that and future possibilities in the strip.

December: Eternals #18 Two letters, both critical of the Hulk episode. And an editorial by Kirby about the strip.

1978

January: Eternals #19 Five letters, all with genuine questions, and one that loved the Hulk story.

Black Panther #7 Yet another editorial box regarding the divided opinion on Kirby’s treatment of the Black Panther. Four letters: Three very favourable, one deriding both writing and art.

March: Black Panther #8 Three letters: two with suggestions, one talking of his love/hate relationship with the book, loving both versions of the Black Panther.

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April: Machine Man #1 (editorial comment only) Devil Dinosaur #1 (editorial comment only) May: Machine Man #2 (editorial comment only)

www.twomorrows.com

Devil Dinosaur #2 (editorial comment only) Black Panther #9 (no letters page, unpaid ad only) June: Machine Man #3 (editorial comment only) Devil Dinosaur #3 (editorial comment only) July: Machine Man #4 (no letters page, unpaid ad only) Devil Dinosaur #4 (editorial comment only) Black Panther #10 (no letters page, unpaid ad only) August: Machine Man #5 (editorial comment only) Devil Dinosaur #5 Seven very positive letters.

September: Machine Man #6 (no letters page, unpaid ad only) Devil Dinosaur #6 Four letters, all very positive.

Black Panther #11 Four letters, all very positive.

October: Machine Man #7 (no letters page, unpaid ad only) Devil Dinosaur #7 (no letters page, unpaid ad only) What If? #11 November: Machine Man #8 (no letters page, unpaid ad only) Devil Dinosaur #8 (no letters page, unpaid ad only) Black Panther #12 (no letters page, unpaid ad only) December: Machine Man #9 Four letters, all positive.

Devil Dinosaur #9 (no letters page, unpaid ad only)

[right] As Jack was handling the letter column in Eternals #18 (Dec. 1977), he chose to include his personal reflections on the series to encourage people to write-in.

February: Silver Surfer Graphic Novel

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Great Lengths

Mad About the Madbomb!

by Gary Picariello

Pencils from Captain America #193 (below, Jan. 1976) and #200 (right, Aug. 1976)—the beginning and the end of “The Madbomb Saga.”

Sources:

Jim Shooter, Website, JimShooter.com KirbyMuseum.Org, Rob Steibel, ’70s Kirby RealmofRyan.blogspot.it, Ryan Harvey.

J

ack’s return to Marvel in late 1975 has been covered to varying degrees in the Jack Kirby Collector, Jack Kirby Museum and elsewhere. Make no mistake, Jack did a lot of work in the brief time he was back at the House of Ideas, pumping out in short order the [limited] series for Black Panther, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Devil Dinosaur and The Eternals among others, in addition to a whole lot of covers for books ranging from Marvel Two-in-One to the Avengers. Jack’s first work of note was his return to the book that started it all: Captain America. Jack hit the ground running, kicking things off with the multi-chapter action/adventure melodrama “The Madbomb!” Like a precursor of things

to come, Jack’s Madbomb tale was met with a combination of hoots and hollers, applause and brickbats, and I can’t help but think that the reception to this first effort may have set the tone for all the stories that followed during the duration of Jack’s second stay at Marvel.

Fasten Your Seatbelts!

Quicker than you can say “Jack’s Back!,” Kirby’s first issue puts Cap and Falcon in the middle of the maelstrom: Madbombs of increasing size are triggering brain-wave attacks across the nation, turning normal people into raging, mindless mobs. The US government has found a photo of “Big Daddy,” an enormous Madbomb that could destroy the whole US. It is timed to go off on the first hour of the Bicentennial!

We’re left hanging as to who might be behind the Madbombs, but the next issue shines a spotlight on William Taurey and the Royalists, an upper class terrorist cell that believes in restoring the elitist aristocracy and class system that ruled the Thirteen Colonies before the Revolutionary War. Taurey also has a personal vendetta against Steve Rogers’ ancestor from the Revolutionary War. A colonial soldier named Steve Rogers killed Taurey’s ancestor in a duel during the War, and Taurey wants vengeance against that Steve Rogers’ modern descendant! Who needs subplots when you can get all this action for a measly 25 cents?

The Once & Future King?

It’s been noted elsewhere (perhaps in The Comics Journal) that in the span of five years at DC, Jack went from being “The King” of the New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle and Kamandi, to that of a “journeyman” artist fulfilling his page rate on such individualized efforts as The Sandman, Atlas and Richard Dragon.

And yet Jack was a survivor! His approach to Captain America was hardly pedestrian. He took the kernel of an idea about mind control and milked “The Madbomb” for eight crazy months, making pitstops along the way to talk about politics, true love and Rollerball, before finally reaching the Bicentennial climax in the frenetically-paced 200th issue—which, like a lot of Kirby books, finds itself short of space, and literally squeezes in the climax onto the last page when another five or so couldn’t have hurt.

But I digress.

One Of The Great “What Ifs?”

Like I said earlier, the fallout from the Madbomb tale was mixed. Some loved it, some hated it, and I won’t be the first person to note that Marvel’s editorial staff seemingly went out its way to create controversy by fixating on Jack’s refusal to play in the Marvel Universe. Typical of many critical letters is this one: 58

“The meandering, meaningless Madbomb series was just too long and got too far off track to be interesting. Long, long stories have to be firmly plotted with each chapter progressing the story...”

Or this one: “...Keep Kirby as a co-plotter and treat us readers to a [writer] who can develop Jack’s ideas into a powerful and coherent script.”

An observation by Jim Shooter on his website JimShooter.com puts an intelligent spin on the use of letter columns when he comments, “Jack’s titles got plenty of positive mail, too, especially early on, but because the people putting together the letter columns [then] used a lot of negative letters, that had the effect of generating more negative letters! ...Show the readers that negative letters are likely to get printed and you’d get lots of them.”

Shooter continues, “...I cannot imagine what the people putting the letter columns together were thinking. Were they trying to be ‘fair and balanced,’ and show that some people were disappointed with what Jack was doing? Was it that they, themselves, were disappointed with what Jack was doing and weighted the letter columns to express their POV? Putting together a negative letter column is stupid, amateurish and/or malicious.”

That said, Jim Shooter was not yet Marvel’s Editor in Chief when all this kicked in. By the time he was in a position to do something about the negative feedback, Jack was on the brink of leaving Marvel again.

Regardless, after wrapping up the eight-chapter Madbomb saga, Jack dealt with all the criticism by turning 180 degrees and creating a kind of mini-epic format lasting just three issues, and it was the template for everything that followed: One issue to set the stage, one issue to reach a climax, and the third to allow for some type of resolution that segues into the next adventure. Check it out: No sooner do we get introduced to the Night People, than in comes Agron the Unliving! Then we’re off and running to Argentina and the Red Skull, and for cryin’ out loud, gimme a second or two to oggle Donna Maria what’s-her-name in issue #205 before Cap goes blind fighting the Night Flyer!

The irony of it all is that several months/issues later, the shorter story format that Jack settled on got criticized as well and was similarly addressed (with plenty of negative comments) in the letters column.

The Long & Short Of It

I enjoyed Jack’s output during “Marvel II” and I still think it holds up well even now. But I consider the Madbomb saga a grand experiment that failed. It was Jack’s attempt at testing the waters of long-form storytelling. Consider, after Madbomb, the longest story arc Jack wrote may have been for the Bicentennial Battles Treasury Edition. “King Solomon’s Frog” (Black Panther) on the other hand lasted four issues (with the cast of characters sticking around a while longer). Conversely, none of the stories in 2001 ran more than two issues. Ditto for Devil Dinosaur. At least Jack wasn’t writing single issue self-contained stories, which was the format a lot of his later work at DC fell victim to.

There’s no doubt that Jack was a bottomless pit when it came to new stories and ideas, but the thought of something longer? That may have been too taxing even for Jack’s imagination! H

Catch Your Breath

In Jack’s last issue of Captain America (#214), Jack’s run on Cap is referred to as a “rollercoaster ride” from start to finish. But let’s hypothesize for a minute and wonder what would have happened if the Madbomb were a resounding success—a story that resulted in bags of [positive] letters and increased readership for the title and a new wave of popularity for Jack. I still don’t think Jack would have integrated his stories into the Marvel Universe per se, but I think the length of his stories might have been different. Again—and this is conjecture on my part—but perhaps we would have seen longer and more fleshed-out tales to astonish.

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He Took...

Incidental Iconography

...His Lumps!

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

by Sean Kleefeld

W

ith this issue, we’re taking a look at what is arguably Jack Kirby’s most iconic bruiser: Benjamin Jacob Grimm, the Thing. The classic rocky exterior Ben is most famously known by didn’t really get solidified visually until three or four years into The Fantastic Four, and as this roughly coincides with Joe Sinnott taking on inking duties on a regular basis, a lot of credit has been given to him for refining that look. Sinnott does indeed deserve a great deal of credit, but that was actually closer to what Jack had been trying to do for a few years anyway.

Part of the problem with the Thing’s visual is that the first several issues of The Fantastic Four feature a rotating crew of inkers.

Dick Ayers was the first inker to stay on more than two issues, picking up in issue #6 after Joe Sinnott had to bow out after a couple pages. (Compare the close-up of the unmistakably-Sinnott Sue on the bottom of page two with a close-up of the unmistakably-Ayers Sue two pages later.) The Thing’s appearance for those first several issues, then, is a little amorphous as a result.

Whatever Jack had penciled proved to be a little confusing for anyone trying to ink the character, and so different inkers took different approaches. Ayers later noted in an interview for Alter Ego #31 that, “I hated the Thing, because I couldn’t figure out what he was made of… With those chiseled blocks, I can’t figure— is he part alligator or what?” That he was colored an unnaturally bright orange probably didn’t help in that regard.

Back in Kirby Collector #33, Glen Gold put forth another discovery about the character: That, at least as early as FF #15, Jack had been drawing the Thing with a more hardedged, blocky exterior. Two paste-ups on the original art were covering Jack’s original pencils, showcasing a design much closer to what we’re familiar with. It was actually Ayers who had provided the softer version of the character by feathering in shadows that Jack had drawn as more solid.

Ayers wasn’t the only one modifying Jack’s pencils in that manner though. I was recently able to examine some original pages inked by George Roussos and Chic Stone (from issues #27 and #31)

and found similar changes. Roussos more or less followed what Ayers had been doing, whereas Stone ignored the indicated shadows entirely, inking only the rocky outlines. Jack’s pencils, still visible underneath the inks, clearly show he had intended to depict Grimm in a much more jagged, angular fashion, and it was his series of inkers that were softening the character’s look.

Interestingly, the first inker to really get to the lines that Jack put down was Vince Colletta in FF #40 [above]. The Thing that we see in that and his subsequent issues is much closer to the pasted-over pencils from FF #15. When Sinnott finally takes over in #44, he initially takes the same approach, adhering very closely to Jack’s pencils. It’s only over the course of his next several issues that we begin to see the classically stylized version Sinnott became so well known for.

Now, Will Murray pointed out back in Kirby Collector #38 that the cover inking on FF #7 seems to be the closest in style to Jack’s pencils from FF #15, surmising that it was Jack himself who inked that cover. Given also that Sinnott was one of the most faithful (circles, top to bottom) FF #5 inked by Sinnott, FF #6 inked

by Ayers, and FF #7, inked by Kirby himself. (below) Jack’s final FF appearance of the Thing, in pencil from the story that eventually ran in issue #108. (left) FF #1.

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to Jack’s pencils (at least originally) and the Thing we see in FF #5 does not have the full craggy rock skin, I think we can reasonably assume that Jack really made the transition from a more lumpy design to the more chiseled look between #5 and #7 (assuming the cover to that issue was done last). With the Thing appearing to look a bit different between #6 and #7, and Ayers inking both of those issues, it would seem that Jack made his most significant change in approach between the two. As Murray points out, this could well be because of trying to visually differentiate from the Hulk (which would have been created, judging by the job numbers, around the same time as FF #5) and/or taking cues from some of the monsters Jack designed over in Journey Into Mystery (the Stone Men from Saturn of #83 were created almost simultaneously to FF #6).

Ultimately, while Sinnott does still deserve a great deal of credit for refining the Thing’s look— as well as maintaining it for essentially the next decade-and-a-half across a score of pencilers—the transition from his original lumpy look to the more familiar craggy appearance is still largely on Jack’s shoulders. H

Ink Fight Compiled by Richard Kolkman

Ever wonder who’d come out ahead in a battle of Kirby’s major inkers, for most pages inked? Here’s a tally in descending order, as determined by Richard Kolkman from information in the Jack Kirby Checklist: Gold Edition.

• Joe Simon (or Jack with Joe): 3774 • Dick Ayers: 2858 • Mike Royer: 2678 • Vince Colletta: 2218 • Joe Sinnott: 1584 • D. Bruce Berry: 1028 • Jack Kirby: 839 • Chic Stone: 812 • Frank Giacoia: 801 • Mike Thibodeaux: 359

• George Roussos: 359 • Paul Reinman: 272 • Simon or S&K Studio: 229 • George Klein: 228 • Roz Kirby: 222 • Greg Theakston: 220 • Steve Ditko: 218 • Arturo Cazeneuve: 211 • Syd Shores: 203 • Bill Everett: 184

Of course, quantity of pages doesn’t necessarily equate to quality of inking. So a more faithful or detailed inker like Joe Sinnott or Mike Royer deserves extra props for keeping up with speed demons like Dick Ayers and Vince Colletta, who arguably didn’t put as much into a page.

The #1 spot going to Joe Simon may be a little misleading, as some of those pages were inked by Joe, some

by Jack himself, some a combination of the two, and some with assistants. They cranked out pages, and each

• John Verpoorten: 167 • Christopher Rule: 164 • Wallace Wood (not including Sky Masters): 157 • Reed Crandall: 140 • Al Avison: 139 • Sol Brodsky: 117 • Alfredo Alcala: 104 • Don Heck: 104

jumped on whatever needed doing, so that total can’t be accurately allocated to either guy. (The lower total labeled “Simon or S&K Studio” are additional ones that can’t clearly be attributed to Joe alone, so can’t be definitively added to his tally, but likely aren’t Jack at all.)

Since this is a list of comics pages only, we didn’t include comic strips like Johnny Reb & Billy Yank (which Jack ghosted the pencils for, and were inked by Frank Giacoia) or Sky Masters (which could’ve upped both Wally Wood’s and Dick Ayers’ totals). H 61

(top left) Kirby’s note to himself for a Thing image idea, scribbled on the back of the original art for Strange Tales #141, page 5 (Feb. 1966). Does anyone know what issue this Thing scene appeared in? (above) Thing pin-up from Strange Tales #127 (Dec. 1964) inked by Chic Stone.

Police Dept.

Police Story

My name is Bert Faraday—retired Detective Bert Faraday.

Submitted as evidence throughout this report: Images from New Gods #8 (April 1972).

A policeman’s account of his part in the New Genesis/Apokolips struggle for power in Metropolis, as told to Jerry Boyd

who happened to be on a roll in Major League Baseball at the time. Life was pretty good and in ’68, I made Detective and my wife and I had our first child.

My brother-in-law Pete was a cop in New York City.

(Funny thing, I never could locate that place on the globe in our home.) Pete was a hoot to talk to! He said that his town was overrun with colorful super-powered characters that kept large parts of the city under construction.

Debris was everywhere, he’d swear out, after one of their battles with a sworn enemy, bank robbers, gangsters, some group that called itself ‘Hydra’ (you got me!), and so on. He said he couldn’t keep up with the number of ‘masks’ flying over, running through, or swinging above his city’s streets, but he couldn’t and wouldn’t knock their help. I told him that’s the way we Gothamites felt about the Dynamic Duo. He said, “Who?” Pete had never heard about our beloved Batman and Boy Wonder any more than I’d heard about some jokers (no pun intended) called the Avengers. That’s usually when an argument would start. The Caped Crusaders were every cop’s heroes in our burg. We’d take insults from the taxpayers all day long if we had to, but if they had any negative sentiments about Robin and Batman, well... you know. Pete felt the same way about the ‘capes’ in his area. We never let things like that bother our mutual love of baseball and our friendship, though.

Around 1971, I was starting to feel the family should have a new locale. I wanted to make more money and meet some new people and so did my wife, Auralie. Metropolis, some sixty miles away, was looking for experienced detectives and they were paying very well. Added to all that, the Gray Sox were in a horrendous three-year slump. We decided to move. It was a good time to plant new roots. Arkham Asylum couldn’t seem to keep any of its kooky inmates behind bars for long and the Gotham area was just getting more dangerous.

In Metropolis, I was assigned to ‘Terrible’ Dan Turpin. It seemed this outfit called Intergang was getting sophisticated/futuristic weapons and they were attempting to put a stranglehold on the law in the city. On one occasion, we acted on an anonymous tip and confiscated a room-size computer (for lack of a better term!) that no one in our police labs could figure out. They sent for a top guy in Central City—I think his name was Barry Allen—and he just shook his head in disbelief of the thing. Turpin was irritated by the whole Intergang mess. It was definitely more than an old-timer nearing retirement needed.

Apparently, Intergang had heavyweight protection from the city’s biggest newspaper, of all things. The Daily Planet, bought out by this louse named Morgan Edge, downplayed Intergang’s activities as just another crime consortium the police couldn’t control or capture. That really

In 1959 though, I had just started my career as a police officer in Emery, a quiet suburban area outside of Gotham City. Gotham had its problems (like any other big town), but between Commissioner Gordon, Batman, Robin, and Batgirl, things were pretty much kept in check. Another costumed crimefighter, the XXX Elas Elongated Man, got his career going in the Sixties, I believe, and that also kept the lid on crime. I enjoyed my years in Gotham, for the most part. The commute to my precinct wasn’t bad and I was a huge fan of the Gotham Gray Sox,

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turned us cops off. We found other papers to buy. It was rare to go around the station and see a copy of the Planet in ’70-’71.

Still, the paper’s ace newshound Clark Kent was popular with the force. One of the boys in Homicide told me that Kent had been aiding the police since 1938! (I was sure he had his dates mixed up.)

It was a lot of hard work keeping up with Intergang, but it was very exciting and just what my career needed. Auralie and my son, Willik, made lots of friends in our beautiful neighborhood of Shuster Heights, and I quickly got promoted by Turpin. At times, life in Metropolis reminded me of Pete’s comments about N.Y. living (which no one else I’d met in ‘Metro’ could spot on a map! Go figure!). Going to the job usually included a fleeting glance of Superman flying through the steel canyons of the downtown area. There was another guy, the Golden Guardian, who kept order down in ‘Suicide Slum’. I saw him a few times in action. My Uncle Hyman, who’s always lived in Metropolis, used to tell me about the Guardian when I was younger, but this guy couldn’t be the same one.

Once, Auralie said she saw an armored black guy flying through the night sky on skis(!) but this ‘sighting’ happened after her weekly bridge party and those girls loved their cognac, y’know...

The guys I worked with turned out to be a bunch of decent Joes. When time permitted, we’d get together to see the Metropolis Marvels (who’d taken over as the best team in baseball) in a double-header. I tried my best to involve one of our quieter co­-workers, Dave Lincoln, in the gang, but he always declined. I think he took his job even more seriously than Turpin or the rest of us. Poor fella.

He always looked like the world could end at any minute. I think he might have been a part of ‘O’Ryan’s Mob’. When I asked Turpin one day if Lincoln was a member of a special task force dealing with Intergang and Apokolips (weird names, huh?), Dan said he wasn’t sure. There was definitely an O’Ryan’s Mob, though, and they seemed to be the good guys. They weren’t confused by the enemy’s high-tech activities and brought as much muscle to their tussles as this Apokolips outfit did. One time, a detective unit and a S.W.A.T. team showed up at a crime scene. We found several Intergang henchmen cowering in the corner behind some sophisticated weaponry. They were too scared to use ’em! Some of ’em mumbled that some guy named O’Ryan punched his way through their hideout walls and told them, “To your knees! It is Orion XXX O’Ryan of New Genesis!!”

And on their knees is where we found them.

(I told Pete over the phone that I believe the O’Ryan Mob and this New Genesis group were some transplanted New York-type heroes that were out lookin’ for new cities to wreck! XXXXXXXXXXX we got e biig laff We had a big laugh over that one.)

I almost collared a couple of loonies from this Apokolips junction, but they turned, ran, and (I swear this is the truth!) jumped into a shimmering tunnel of light that swallowed them up and disappeared!

The entire city and its outlying communities were in on pieces of this struggle in ’71 and ’72. There was a kid reporter for the Planet, Jimmy Olsen, who brought back news of ‘evil factories’ and other scary projects. There were some wild hippie types that sped through some heavy traffic by ‘dispersing their molecules’! Out in the country-

side, there were some strange sightings at the place old Mr. Miracle XXXXXXXX used to perform, and so on. My fellow detective, Jake Kertzburg Kurtzberg, spotted a tall guy with ‘a face like gray marble’ near the docks. Jake got ready to question him (anybody who fits a description like that has gotta be guilty of something!) when the sky suddenly got dark and (Jake guesses) sea winds whipped up and knocked him backwards. The suspect was never apprehended.

Auralie wanted to leave the city as ’7l ended. “Anything that’s bigger than Superman,” she used to mutter around the house. We stayed ’cause we liked the area in spite of the problems, and things seemed to calm down. Or maybe they got quieter, I dunno. Maybe O’Ryan and his ‘Unstoppables’ took a vacation. Superman, his pal Olsen, and their crowd vanished for a time, too—it seemed. Then, this ‘muscle factory’ named Kalibak showed up, Commissioner Matt Kiernan told me later. (Our family was on vacation in Canada at the time.) Turpin was nearly killed in the shoot-out, but our boys came through and gave this mad dog Kalibak the ‘electric chair’ right there on the spot. The tourist trade went sour after that... and it got worse!

Kiernan said a plague of ‘bugs’ just took over! They were everywhere—big ones with two legs holdin’ jagged axes and stuff! Some scientific gizmo a suspect called Lightray rigged up got rid of ’em and there was an APB (All Points Bulletin) for some nut named Mantis (who allegedly instigated the riot). He’s still on our list. Lightray made some kind of deal with the police and got off, according to our reports. (‘Mantis’ sounded like a hippie name to me.)

It’s funny, I was watching “Beginning of the End” on TV in Montreal when the news reports of the bug invasion cut in from the States. In the film with Peter Graves, a swarm of grasshoppers takes over a big city. I had trouble believing the guys’ stories about it when we got home. I think they were ribbin’ me. (After all, none of these 63

The Man Behind The Shield

When I was a kid growing up in Emery, I looked up to the neighborhood cops on the beat and so did all my friends. There was something so strong and confident about the men behind those gleaming shields that they wore so proudly on their chests. I just knew that one day I’d be a big city policeman.

Whenever our family would visit Uncle Hyman and the rest of the Dabney clan in Metropolis (our cousins), good ol’ Uncle Hy would play to my career dreams by showing me newspaper clippings of the heroics of Patrolman Jim Harper, the pride of their bowery area nicknamed ‘Suicide Slum.’ Harper had movie star looks (to me he resembled screen star Randolph Scott), size, and the toughness to lick any of the roughest mugs on his side of town. A few years after the Big One he disappeared, leading some to suspect he was the costumed Guardian, another one-man army that collared the criminals in that area.

My uncle and I speculated that Harper had either just chosen to retire early, go into private detective work, or get into a safer line of employment.

In the ’70s though, when I was on Turpin’s force in ‘Superman Town’, I got wind of reports that the ex-patrolman in question had been gunned down by vengeful hoods in the late ’40s. Our precinct (out of respect for his great work as a cop, and because cop killers on the loose are always bad for business) put some top investigators on the case, but we got some unexpected help from the sons of the Newsboy Legion (whose dads had been good buddies of Harper’s during wartime) and Jimmy Olsen, the Planet’s well-known cub reporter.

These kids actually helped break the case! In addition, a new Guardian (with the same outfit, shield, and fists like thunder!) showed up in town and he periodically helped us out with Intergang and a real brute named Ugly Mannheim. It seemed that Jim Harper’s memory inspired others to stay vigilant against hoodlums, just as he inspired me to become a cop back in the ’40s.

And that golden shield the Guardian used? I’ll be darned if it doesn’t remind me of a cop’s badge. H

creatures could be found later—living or dead!)

I think it was a Hollywood movie stunt cooked up by Orson Welles.

Auralie, Willik, and I’d decided we’d leave the East Coast heat and snows for the West Coast in ’74. I had my eye on Coast City. My cousin, an ex-wrestler named ‘Angry Charlie’ claimed that Green Lantern had everything under wraps out his way. I visited Coast City and Charlie and I hit the Super Bowl for fun. I scoped out the area, the schools, and found an ideal community about fifty miles away from the big town. I decided I’d have my papers transferred out by Turpin (who understood) as soon as I got back to Metropolis.

I found a nice apartment complex one day and went to the beach just to clear my head.

I chuckled at Auralie, who I knew was having a tough time with our talkative second child, Terry (nicknamed ‘Gabby’). I knew I’d miss the Gray Sox, the Marvels, the guys, Bats, Supes, and the Kanto family across the street from us.

For the family’s sake, however, we had to go until the JLA had done in this Apokolips thing.

As the afternoon went on, I had a pleasant chat with a stranger named Jack Kirby.

It turned out he was from New York City (I couldn’t believe my ears!) but he and his family were now living in Thousand Oaks. We discussed a television show that was broadcast the night before. Dr. Terrence Thirteen said that the whole U.F.O. phenomenon in Metropolis was a scam and he was prepared to prove it. I told this Kirby guy all about the crazy goings-on from my point of view and he smiled gently and said he knew all about them. That struck me as being unusual—I didn’t think the New Genesis/Apokolips battles had made news out west. (The Daily Planet and the rest of the media kept a pretty tight lid on those events during that time. Police reports were sealed.)

This fellow Kirby was the kind of person you could open up to, you know, and I did. I had never confided 64

to anyone before just how much the struggle for power between the Guardian, Superman, Intergang, the O’Ryan Gang, Apokolips, and Jimmy Olsen had affected me. It seemed under control at the present, but I’d been really scared. Kirby tilted his head back and removed his cigar from his mouth. “The whole conflict will work out. Earth will survive, I assure you,” he said with a knowing smile.

I couldn’t believe this guy’s attitude! Here, a large American city had been regularly invaded by space goonies from other worlds (or maybe New York!) and he was just calmly sitting there, sketching something that I couldn’t figure out, and telling me everything was going to be just fine! (I was thinkin’ it’d probably take the whole blamed Justice League, the Teen Titans, and the Metal Men to stop that war!)

“How d-do you know... everything... in that area... i-in that war... won’t wipe all of us... out e-eventually?” I sputtered. He grinned easily again and spoke very humbly. “It’s simple, Bert.

The war won’t destroy us ....because I’m going to keep our world around. As for the war itself...

I’m not sure yet how... I want it to end. I’m still working out the details in my head.”

He shook my hand and left. His wife was at their car, waving and calling for him. I sat there, stunned. I mean, this guy sounded like he was in charge of all ‘the gods-that­-be’, y’know what I mean?! I should’ve notified the Thousand Oaks P.D. about that fella. Kirby knew something he wasn’t telling. That bird should have been investigated. H

Innerview

2nd American Revolution Jack Kirby interviewed by James Van Hise

[This interview was originally published in Comics Feature #50, December 1986.] (below) Pin-up from the Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles Treasury Edition (1976).

W

orking in the industry for nearly 50 years, Jack Kirby is the history of comic books personified.

His creations and collaborations read like a Who’s Who of the four-color world: Captain America, Fighting American, Green Arrow, Challengers of the Unknown, Fantastic Four, Thor, X-Men, The New Gods, Kamandi, and Captain Victory form an unending creative chain beginning in 1940 and leading right up to the present. He laid the foundations so well that most of his creations con­tinued in other hands after he moved

65

on to new projects. Outside of super-heroes, he also did the definitive work in romance, western, crime, horror, and war comics. Although primarily active as a creative con­sultant in the animation industry today, comics is still a realm that Kirby loves well. He sees bold experimentation chiefly coming from outside of the Big Two: “I don’t see a lot of new comics, but from what I have seen, the independents are doing fine. When I compare them to the mainstream companies, I don’t see any difference—they’re all doing well. The independents are actually doing better. They’re trying new things and some of them are overtaking the so-called mainstream magazines. They’re putting a lot more atmosphere into it—a lot more philosophy, if you want to call it that. It’s kind of like get­ting individual opinions from a crowd. Sometimes you’ll be standing in a park and somebody will be speaking, and the crowd will be muttering and everybody will have a different opinion, and of course they’re all entitled to their opinions, but they’re seeing new avenues. The older companies have their own morass and can’t seem to find their way out of it.

“Comics are very different from what people think they are. Some think of them in terms of the old, staid comic magazines and they’re actually very different because the new ones have broken through. The independents are going to pull way ahead because they represent all the new young people that are coming out of these times.

“Whatever we think of as real or per­sonal, it all comes out in our stories. Comics is the second American Revolution and the young person realizes that. We’re a country of ideas. A country of innovators. A very young person can have an idea as valuable as an old person—maybe more so. Comics is a catchall of ideas and they’re coming through in the indepen­dents. The old magazines are getting worn down—they have to make new universes, and they’ll have universes replacing universes. Sometimes I won­der if they rest on the seventh day. But it’s the newer and younger people whose work I look at.

“I’ve never followed anybody, though,” Kirby adds. “I just run with the pack. I’ve found that whatever you want to do is the right thing. I’ve never followed any one style. I’ve always done what I wanted. I can only say that I speak for myself. Any other artist will tell you the same thing.” H

Anti-Fight

Kirby’s Summer of Love

by Eamonn Murphy and David Penalosa

(below) The pencils for this Tales of Suspense #93 splash ran back in TJKC #43.

“Make Love, & War”

[Editor’s Note: In another of the continued string of Kirby Koincidences I’ve encountered in nearly 25 years of producing this magazine, two contributors approached me, unbeknown to the other, wanting to write about Jack’s output during the 1967 “Summer Of Love”—when an estimated 100,000 hippies flocked to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and took up temporary residence; “dropping out” of mainstream society, holding rock and art music festivals, complete with free love and psychedelic drug usage.

It received widespread media coverage, and undoubtedly “squares” like Lee and Kirby were aware of its influence on the youth of America. So for this 50th Anniversary of that countercultural watershed event, let’s drop out of all this fighting for a few pages, and turn on and tune in to what Kirby work might’ve been influenced by it, and how.]

by Eamonn Murphy

The “Summer of Love” happened fifty years ago in 1967. Sergeant Pepper, released on June 1, was blasting out of every speaker. Flowers were in the hair and everywhere, their scent mixed with another strange, sweet odor. The counterculture was launching in Haight-Ashbury.

All super, but what was on the newsstands? More importantly, what did Jack Kirby have out in the world that season? Not as straightforward as you might think, this question. The cover dates are misleading because they lag by several months. I am indebted to Mike’s Amazing World of Comics (mikesamazingworld.com) for accurate info on what was out there at the time, namely: Tales of Suspense #93-95 featuring Captain America, Thor #144-146, Fantastic Four #66-68 and FF Annual #5. That’s a grand total of 198 pages of comic book action—not bad for one artist over three months.

Tales of Suspense #93-95

Obviously it wasn’t all peace and love in action-orientated super-hero comics. The ten-page Captain America stories of this era were usually all about fighting. Steve Rogers would pause occasionally to mourn Bucky or moon over Agent 13, but in general Nick Fury kept him busy busting bad guys. Tales of Suspense #9394 was no exception, a classic two-parter in which Cap went up against A.I.M. and Modok.

“Into the Jaws of A.I.M.” opens with a fantastic splash page of Cap underwater, heading straight at you wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D. long-distance mini-cruiser. He finds the A.I.M. sub he’s after but they gas him, capture him and hold him with a magnetic field. As Cap is not metallic, there’s no real reason a magnetic field should hold him, but never mind. Agent 13 frees him with her anti-polar coveralls. On page 5 Cap dives forward and punches out two bad guys, then goes into a forward roll and lashes out with his feet to get another.

“You put four of them out of action in as many seconds!” Agent 13 cries. Perhaps she’s crying because she can’t do sums: There were only three. The A.I.M. agents are being commanded by a stern, mysterious voice from their control panel. They recapture Cap and 13 and the story closes with her sinking into the floor and Cap helpless, about to be shot!

In the next issue (“If This Be Modok!”) another A.I.M. agent reminds the would-be shooter they can’t do anything without permission from Modok, and Cap is saved—not only that, but the agents decide to rebel against their new leader. Modok wants to study Cap, so they send him down, hoping to kill the tyrant while he‘s distracted. On page 4 Cap meets Modok, a new villain at the time, but another Kirby creation destined to become a Marvel mainstay. He’s a little troll of a man in 66

tists’ H.Q. is called the Beehive and it’s full of complex machinery, the likes of which he was the master.

One of life’s great mysteries is how mad scientists can undertake huge construction projects in remote areas that must need hundreds of skilled engineers and thousands of lesser workers, masses of heavy machinery, and tons of concrete—and keep it all secret!

The Fantastic Four don’t feature all that much in FF Annual #5 either. In the main story (“Divide and Conquer!”) Reed stays home to take care of Sue because she’s pregnant. Psycho-Man is building a giant mind ray to subdue mankind, but component five has been delivered to the wrong address. Alicia Masters is unlucky again. Reclaiming the missing part, PsychoMan defeats the Thing with an imaginary monster by using his fear ray. Component five secured, he goes to a remote Caribbean Island where he’s built a top secret base without anyone knowing. (There’s a shortage nowadays of scientists and engineers. Are they all off building top secret bases in remote locations for mad villains?) The Thing and the Torch come along later to help the Inhumans and the Black Panther save the day.

“With component four in my possession, nothing can stand against me!” proclaims Psycho, wrongly as it turns out. What happened to component five? Like Agent 13, he’s lost count. Editing yourself isn’t easy, not even for Stan Lee. The art is a bit sloppy on the Silver Surfer yarn, but squeezing the extra pages for an Annual into your monthly schedule can’t be easy, even for Kirby. In “The Peerless Power of the Silver Surfer!”

a flying Kirby-esque wheelchair and has an absolutely enormous head, perhaps a metaphor for Stan.

To celebrate peace and love, Cap retires in TOS #95 (“A Time to Die... A Time to Live”). There’s action on page 1-2, a great splash page showing Cap‘s shield coming straight at you and shattering a door. Then Steve Rogers takes Agent 13 to dinner and decides he’s sacrificed enough of his life to duty and is owed some “me” time, as we say nowadays. On page 6 he bops his final baddy. Of course, it doesn’t last and he’s back in action next issue when others try to fill his shoes and get hurt.

Fantastic Four #66-68 & Annual #5

In the summer of love and peace, the Fantastic Four were surprisingly peaceful. We associate Kirby with slam-bang action, but the three issues on the stands in June, July and August of 1967 represent one of the quietest times in the group’s history. Except for Reed, laboring in the lab, they don’t have a lot to do.

Alicia Masters had been kidnapped by a scientist in FF #65 while they were busy fighting Ronan the Accuser. Now in #66 (“What Lurks Behind the Beehive?”) they’ve realized she’s missing and Reed uses his “Heat Image Tracer” to capture images from the heat image trace they left behind. It shows Alicia walking through a wall with her captor. In the next issue he duplicates the wristband the man was wearing so they can follow. The last few pages of FF #67 (“When Opens the Cocoon!”) in which they rescue Alicia are pretty much it for action. In fact, Alicia and the Fantastic Four are unnecessary to the story, which is about a band of scientists creating a new life form and being destroyed by Him. They kidnap Alicia to sculpt his likeness, but that’s a poor pretext for getting her involved, really. I think it was a story Kirby wanted to tell and he put it in the World’s Greatest Comic Magazine because it just about fit. Apparently Stan took this yarn in a different direction than Jack intended and some say Jack didn’t bother creating anything new thereafter. He just recycled the Silver Surfer, Galactus and Doctor Doom, interspersed with a few one-shot movie spoofs, until he left.

All his new ideas he saved for DC. The art is terrific, Kirby at his peak, perhaps. The mad scien67

he (the Surfer, not Jack) finds the Thinker’s old computer Quasimodo who is yearning for human form. The Surfer grants his wish in a dramatic splash panel full of Kirby Krackle (later sold as a blacklight poster, shown at left), and then the ingrate tries to kill him. I thought the figures were out of proportion in too many panels, but Jack’s art was getting that way—more about spectacular effects, crackle, glow and mighty machines than human beings, who were starting to look all the same. That’s why I put his peak a bit earlier in the Chic Stone years when there were several figures in a panel and they all looked well-proportioned. I still like the ’67 work. I just think the ’65 work was more skillful and more subtle.

FF Annual #5 also features “This is a Plot?” It’s both scripted and drawn by Kirby and shows Stan and Jack in the Marvel Bullpen working together to come up with a story. According to John Romita Sr. (interviewed in Comic Book Artist #6), neither one took any notice of what the other one said. That’s probably why they fell out in the end.

Fantastic Four #68 has no fights at all, unless you count the Torch giving another teenager a hotfoot and Crystal lifting them all in the air. The Thinker disguises himself as Doctor Santini, a man recruited to help Reed change Ben back to human form. It’s a good story, but peaceful. Love, too, features strongly: Between Reed and Sue, Ben and Alicia and Johnny and Crystal.

sceptre at either end, they channel their energies into it while zooming around the cosmos as imagined by Kirby, which is lovely, as always. The winner of the battle will claim the Odin Sword, which villains are always trying to draw while he sleeps the Odin Sleep in the Odin Bed wearing the Odin Pyjamas.

At the start of Thor #145’s “Abandoned on Earth!,” Thor hands Brona and Magnir over to the New York cops. Odin descends a few pages later and casts them into limbo. He has beaten Forsung but it hasn’t put him in a good mood, and when Thor says he would like to stay on Earth and help mortals, Odin flies into a rage (an Odin Rage, presumably) and takes away the enchantment from Thor’s mallet, leaving him only his natural strength. Balder and Sif are whisked back to Asgard. Disenchanted, Thor runs away to join the circus.

Unfortunately, it’s the Ringmaster’s Circus of Crime and in Thor #146, he is hypnotised and made to help them steal a giant golden bull from a New York museum.

The Thor stories only took up sixteen pages at this time, as there was a back-up strip called “Tales of Asgard,” five pages in which Kirby first drew his version of the ancient Norse legends, then quickly moved on to make his own. Not much peace and love here as Thor, Hogun, Fandral, and Volstagg battle the forces of the Mystic Mogul, Master of Zanadu. After a large build-up over several issues, he’s dispatched in one panel with a ‘bolt of temporal force’ from his rival Alibar the Vagabond. I think Kirby was keen to get on with the Inhumans back-up strip which started in the next issue.

There were no hippies or drop-outs in any of these stories. Thor met some in issue #154 the following year and found them “fair misguided.” Whirling mighty Mjolnir to emphasize his words, he spake thus: “’Tis not by dropping out... but by plunging in... into the maelstrom of life itself that thou shalt find wisdom. There be causes to espouse!! There be battles to be won! There be glory and grandeur all about thee… if thou wilt but see! Aye, there be time enow for thee to disavow they heritage. Thou mayest drop out fore’er once Hela herself hath come for thee, but so long as life endures, thou must live it to the full. Else thou be unworthy of the title… Man!” The words are Stan’s, of course, but the pictures match, so maybe Kirby agreed with the sentiment.

It’s apt that Lee and Kirby were hitting their peak in 1967 along with the Beatles, for they have many similarities with Lennon and McCartney. They started working together in the late Fifties, earned kudos in the Sixties, peaked about ’67, and split acrimoniously in 1970. Kirby and Lennon went on to do interesting solo work but never hit the commercial heights of the collaboration years. Lee and McCartney went on to make piles of money.

However, you will search the newsstands in vain for The Stan Lee Collector, and he doesn’t have a museum, either. So there.

Thor #144-146

And so to Thor #144. The cover is one of Kirby’s worst, but that’s because the great one was rejected, supposedly too detailed for the inker.

Magnir, Brona and Forsung, known collectively as the Enchanters, had popped up to menace Asgard in the previous issue, beautifully inked by Bill Everett. This issue and the ones that follow are “embellished” by Vince Colletta, but not even he can subvert completely the power coursing through Jack‘s pencil.

The fight scenes with Balder, Sif and Thor battling Brona and Magnir on a rock flying over New York look terrific, and there‘s a great splash on page 10 of Thor pummelling Magnir. While they were thus engaged, Odin was dealing with the eldest Enchanter, Forsung. Gripping the Odin 68

“What Were They Smoking?”

by David Penalosa

Although it was a half century ago, I can still remember very clearly how I felt in the Summer of 1967. I recall walking down the street with a spring in my step, the sun on my face, and exclaiming out loud “This is a great summer!” There was just something in the air. I could feel it! All across the country, young people were coming together and celebrating. It was the Summer of Love. “Peace and love” and “Flower Power” were the mottos of the exponentially growing youth movement. George Harrison recalled: “That period felt special because there was a great upsurge of energy and consciousness. All the things that were taking place—with fashion, and with filmmakers, poets and painters—it was like a mini-Renaissance.”1 Kids were listening and dancing to new kinds of music. They were smoking marijuana and expanding their consciousness—and they were also taking lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD, a.k.a. ‘acid’) and having their minds blown wide open. For the first time in the nation’s history, the act of intentionally altering one’s consciousness through the use of powerful psychedelic drugs was a form of mass entertainment. For many, it was also an act of joyous liberation, a spiritual journey, and an act of rebellion against what many saw as the narrow mindset of the older generation, the so-called “Establishment.” At the heart of the youth culture was a blossoming counterculture.

Throughout America, many young people were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out.

I, on the other hand, was eleven years old and a Boy Scout in 1967. I was reading Marvel comics exclusively that summer. The collaborations of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were radically expanding the boundaries of the artform—and the Kirbyverse blew my mind wide open. “Make mine Marvel!” was my motto. Marvel of the 1960s was not the multi-billion dollar entertainment giant it is today. Back then it was still a relatively small comic book company, but that irreverent upstart brought about a comic book Renaissance. The best Marvel comics by far were the ones penciled by Jack, who also created the characters, and plotted the stories.

Stan edited the books and wrote the dialogue.

Marvel comics were not just for children. Marvel was considered hip in 1967. College students and hippies read them. Ironically, whenever the guys at DC or Marvel tried to be hip by using what they considered to be contemporary lingo, the results were consistently embarrassing. The world Jack drew in 1967 didn’t look particularly up-to-date. His men still wore fedoras. What made Jack’s art so cool were his choreographed action scenes, his original designs, and a cosmically mythic reality—the Kirbyverse, erupting from his ceaselessly imaginative mind. Yet, for all of its unbound creativity and seeming relevance to counterculture aesthetics, Marvel was really more a part of the Establishment, than not. Marvel’s surprising popularity

with the counterculture prompted Stan Lee to clarify in several interviews: “I’m not a hippy.”2 In the late ’60s Stan sported a beard, so perhaps that fact wasn’t obvious to everyone. Middle-aged Jack Kirby certainly wasn’t any kind of a hippie either, but working night after night on his drafting table down in the Kirby family basement, he created a separate reality that was as revolutionary and as mind-expanding to comics as the Beatles’ Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were to rock ’n’ roll.

In fact, the pinnacle of the Beatles’ creativity, the period from 1965 to 1968—Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, and the “White Album”— roughly coincides with what I consider to be the peak period of Stan and Jack’s creativity. Does that mean Stan and Jack were smoking pot when they worked on the Frightful Four story arc (FF #36-38), and then dropped acid around the time of the Galactus trilogy (FF #49-51)? A lot of their stuff was definitely out there! At a 1993 gathering of fans held at Comic Relief in Berkeley, Jack told me “When I was drawing those scenes out in space, I was out there too, experiencing it.” And all of us were out there as well, experiencing it with him. Friends of mine who attended university in 1967 told me years later that they read Marvel comics back then, and figured Stan and Jack were getting high. “We just assumed they were doing the same things we were doing” a Yale graduate told me. It was a common assumption. I have never read anything suggesting Jack tried mind-altering drugs.

Considering his documented anti-drug comments, it is safe to say he never did.3 Stan never did either, but he reportedly came close once. According to author Sean Howe, a Marvel staff member tried unsuccessfully to convince editorial assistant Denny O’Neil (a self-described hippie) to drop a dose of LSD into Stan’s coffee.4 That would have been interesting (Excelsior!!). Stan has stated for the record that he has never smoked marijuana, and his knowledge of illegal drugs appears limited.5 He did not understand the difference between the mind-altering drugs popular in 1967 (marijuana, LSD and other psychedelics) and physically additive narcotics.6 Stan and Jack were tripping in the late ’60s, but they were tripping without drugs.

Ironically, the same cannot necessarily be 69

(above) In 1967, 50 year old Kirby still drew NYC’ers with fedoras, while the Beatles (left) sported more up-to-date threads.

(below) David Crosby of the Byrds (later of Crosby, Stills, and Nash) reads Avengers #22 (Nov. 1965).

The Mighty Thor #144, and Tales of Suspense #93 were on the comic book spinner rack that month. Stan and Jack’s characters were gods and mortals in complicated relationships, traveling through mysterious dimensions of time and space.

The Thing’s girlfriend, the blind sculptor Alicia Masters, was mysteriously transported across space to the Citadel of Science. At the Citadel, Alicia was given a drug in liquid form. She found it “so soothing!” It made her feel as though all of her troubles were “just melting away!” Once under the drug’s influence, Alicia’s hosts (a group of ethically challenged scientists) told Alicia of their project to create one perfect human being—the forerunner of a “supreme human race.” They succeed in creating that being, but they were not able to see him, for he radiated a blinding power. “No human eyes can look at him,” she was told. They wanted the blind Alicia to go to this perfect being, run her hands all over his body, and then sculpt a replicate image.

Elsewhere on Earth, Thor and his fellow gods Balder and Sif were battling the Living Talisman and the two Enchanters— Brona and Magnir. While in Asgard, home of the gods, Odin the All-Wise and a third Enchanter named Forsung, had both grabbed hold of the scepter of power. This caused the release of cataclysmic forces, which instantly merged into a blinding burst of all-consuming flame. In the words of Stan Lee: “Vying for possession of the scepter, within the blazing center of the ensuing careening fire-ball, are lordly Odin, and Forsung, the Enchanter. So overpowering, so uncontrollable, is this violent upheaval of limitless energy, that it shatters dead planets as if they are ant hills, as the heat of its passing leaves new burning suns in its galaxy-wide wake.”

Observing this spectacle from the eternal realm, a god remarked: “The battle will rage beyond all time—beyond the furthest range of thought itself!” Pretty trippy stuff (maybe Denny dosed Stan after all).

And finally, Captain America used a long distance underwater mini-craft to go directly “Into the Jaws of A.I.M.!” and save his girlfriend, Agent 13 of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TOS #93). Once Cap was in range of the bad guys’ giant submarine, A.I.M. shot a cylinder into the thin skin of his mini-craft. The cylinder instantly pumped in a mind-altering drug in gas form. Within seconds, the red, white and blue Avenger was in a state of “total helplessness,” [left] plunging “into an all-engulfing sea of night! Drifting deeper—deeper into a nameless, silent limbo.”

Somehow, this drug enabled Cap to travel seamlessly through space, from his mini-craft, directly into the giant sub. At the end of the episode, the mysterious Modok manipulated Agent 13’s will (mind

said of the characters they created. Although Stan and Jack had conservative attitudes towards drugs, many of their characters engaged in various methods of consciousness transformation, including the consumption of their own imaginary, mind-altering drugs. They did not refer to them as them as drugs, but as potions and gases.

The mind-altering drug culture of the late 1960s did not directly influence Stan and Jack—Stan and Jack directly influenced the mind-altering drug culture of the late 1960s. Author Charles Hatfield observed that Jack’s art was “imbued with a visionary quality,” that “infused the retrograde science-fiction of Marvel comics with a newness befitting its era. This is why the Marvel of the Sixties appeals strongly to fans of so-called psychedelic art and design. Kirby inadvertently provided a graphic accompaniment to the psychic unstitching, the mind-bending excess of that era.”7 It should not be surprising therefore that the image of Jack’s Thor [above] appeared on sheets of blotter acid (individual doses of liquid LSD dropped onto blotter paper), and on a poster for an “acid test” party held by the Grateful Dead and the Merry Pranksters in San Francisco.

In June 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience had their US debut at the Monterey Pop Festival; the Beatles released their masterpiece album Sgt. Pepper and performed “All You Need is Love” in the first worldwide television broadcast.

Fantastic Four #66, 70

control happened frequently in Marvel comics), as she began “to sink—to descend through the floor itself.”

It was a real cliffhanger. I would definitely have to buy TOS #94 next month!

The remainder of that summer saw equally thrilling and mind-blowing adventures from Stan and Jack.

Frozen in suspended animation for nearly twenty years, Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America) didn’t have an easy time adjusting to life in 1960s America. He mourned the loss of his sidekick Bucky Barnes, and was at times crippled with survivor’s guilt. On more than one occasion Rogers had been dosed with mind-altering drugs, causing him to hallucinate wildly and think he was back in WWII.8 Some of these hallucinations were terrifying, and I assume, greatly aggravated his suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). No longer living in the familiar surroundings of his former 1940s world, nor really a part of the current 1960s world, the Avenger was like Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones, out of place—a square peg in a round hole, and a metaphor for how many of the Greatest Generation felt during the period of immense social upheaval of the late 1960s.

In Tales of Suspense #95, Steve Rogers took a big step towards trying to live a normal, well-adjusted life, when he proposed marriage to Agent 13. It started off well enough. He took her to a very nice restaurant. He was so happy and excited, he couldn’t contain himself, and blurted out: “How does a fella propose to someone he knows only as ‘Agent 13’?” It went downhill from there. Agent 13 (we didn’t yet know her name was Sharon Carter) had taken an oath when she joined S.H.E.I.L.D. Marriage was out of the question as long as she was serving.

Rogers was crushed!

Driving home, he was consumed with bitterness: “Duty! It’s always been duty! It was such devotion to duty that caused the death of Bucky Barnes! And—it’s her devotion to duty that’s keeping the two of us apart!” During the Summer of Love, Captain America found love to be just beyond his grasp. Rogers could have really used some professional help around this time. By the end of the summer he was fed up with his unsatisfying life, so he hung up his costume and dropped out of the super-hero business. “The time has come for Captain America to finally die so that Steve Rogers can begin to live.” The last panel of TOS #95 was a nearly full-page illustration of Rogers sitting in his darkened living room, overwhelmed with flashbacks. He was a “tortured adventurer—a man at the crossroads of his life—desperately seeking to find his true identity—ever haunted by the spectre of a thousand yesterdays—a thousand battles—a thousand foes! A man whose weary troubled soul must find an answer to one ever-present, haunting question: How does a man gather up the threads of a lifetime and walk away from his past?” It was subplots

like these that kept the anachronistic Captain America interesting and relevant in 1967. Besides the gripping melodrama, Captain America’s exploits that summer contained some of the greatest action scenes Jack ever produced for the series.

The Thunder God dropped out that summer too.

Odin the All-Father punished the rebellious Thor by stripping away his magical powers. This mess wouldn’t get sorted out until the fall.

For the Fantastic Four, the Summer of 1967 ended with Alicia finally coming face-to-face with the “one perfect human being”—the god-like Him (a.k.a. Warlock, below). She found Him in a cocoon, feeling helpless and alone.

Alicia comforted Him for a short time, until he came out of the cocoon to meet his human creators. That didn’t go well for the creators.

Him knew the scientists had evil intentions, so he destroyed them.

Him said (I’m sounding like a Bizarro!): “Some day a half-remembered legend may tell of the time a cocoon burst open—proving in one cataclysmic moment, that the child—is father to the man!”9 The FF got Alicia out of there just in the nick of time!

Like Galactus of the previous year, Him was a god-like being who existed on a scale that dwarfed humanity. Marvel super-heroes kept bumping up against beings and distant realms that were far beyond 71

(above) Cap’s trippin’ in this scene from Tales of Suspense #95 (Nov. 1967 cover date).

(above) Looks like Marvel had someone redraw the hippies on Jack’s pencils before sending him xeroxes from Thor #154—then an inker changed them further. Stan Lee recognized the importance of portraying his growing youth audience accurately.

their comprehension. Reading these stories as a kid, I sometimes experienced momentary feelings of cosmic vertigo. Scott Jeffery observed that Jack’s art provided a “cosmic scope” to the stories’ narratives that “implied unimaginable vistas of evolutionary development that made humans seem a transient and insignificant stage by comparison.”10 As Johnny Storm, the Human Torch observed in 1966: “I traveled through worlds—so big— so big—there—there aren’t words! We’re like ants— just ants—ants!”11 The connection between the Kirbyverse and the counterculture grew in the years following the Summer of Love. In 1968, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention took out full-page ads in Thor #149 and Fantastic Four #72. The ads appeared in those comics because Jack’s comics were the hippest comics at

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Marvel. His imagery had inadvertently become a paradigmatically visual element of the youth movement.

Hippies smoked hashish in Nepal under a giant image of the Silver Surfer. The image of Jack’s Thor appeared on Fillmore Auditorium rock concert posters and his half-brother Loki was prominently featured on a Led Zeppelin poster by Peter Blake (the creator of the famous Sgt. Pepper album cover). Some of Jack’s Marvel art was re-colored, enlarged, and sold as psychedelic blacklight posters. In one poster the Silver Surfer flies through the microverse in a state of ecstatic joy: “Never will I be trapped. Never will I be confined again! At last I am free!”12 In a Thor blacklight poster, Don Blake lays on a bed, stripping his mind of earthly thoughts, while Thor—his immortal form—floats above him in the cosmos.13 For many, the Kirbyverse was an expression of the psychedelic experience.

In Thor #154 (1968) the Kirbyverse and the counterculture met face-to-face at last, when the long-haired god encountered three long-haired hippies in an alley.

It’s interesting to note that in Jack’s original pencils the hippies smiled while they told Thor they “don’t groove” his “scene.” The hippies came off as likable, if misguided misfits. Stan rejected Jack’s portrayal and had another Marvel bullpen artist redraw the hippies’ faces with scowls. Stan’s ham-handed editorial change made the interaction much less interesting. The hippies now just came off as three shallow jerks. It was a missed opportunity that alas, Stan was probably incapable of taking advantage of. His “hip” dialogue was always more late ’40s sock-hop than late ’60s be-in. One can only imagine how fun it would have been to see Jack’s hippies actually speaking in the proper vernacular: “Whoooah! Where’d you come from man? Faaaaar-out! I must be trippin’!” etc. Had the scene hinted, even with the utmost subtlety, that the hippies were high when they encountered the Thunder God, that page would have forever stood as an iconic moment in comic history. Stan Lee was not a hippie, nor did he likely “get” the hippies.

By the end of 1969 Jack had stopped drawing Captain America.

The great epic dramas of the Fantastic Four and Thor were a thing of the past, as those comics had regressed back to the single-issue story format. It just wasn’t the same anymore.

Jack wanted to bring about Ragnarok—the final destruction of Asgard, so that he could create new gods for a new era.

Stan didn’t go for the idea and Marvel continued to stagnate.

Meanwhile, the age of peace and love experienced its own kind of Ragnarok in December 1969 at a free concert held in Altamont, California. The concert promoters hired the Hells Angels for security.

When the outlaw bikers started to throw bottles at people’s heads, some people high on LSD decided acid would bring the Angels out of their violent state of mind. It didn’t. The acid added psychotic fuel to their rage. 14 An Angel committed a murder right in front of the stage, just as the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger began singing “Sympathy for the Devil.”15 It was the end of a decade and the end of an era.

In 1970, the Beatles broke up and Jack left Marvel. The Marvel Age and the Age of Aquarius ended in tandem. For many years following the breakup of the Lennon/McCartney and Lee/Kirby teams, there was considerable controversy surrounding the issue of who-contributed-what in those collaborative partnerships.

The 1970s saw rock music move away from psychedelica; Stan Lee moved from editor to publisher at Marvel, and Jack Kirby moved to DC Comics where he created the New Gods of his “Fourth World” series.

“There came a time when the old gods died!”16 Jack’s artwork strongly suggested the gods of New Genesis arose from the ashes of Asgard. The Kirbyverse was now in its post-Ragnarok era. Jack was the artist, writer, and editor of the Fourth World. At last the King of Comics was the sole creator—god of his own universe.

The new decade brought countless changes to American society, but some aspects of the late ’60s counterculture continued on into the early ’70s. In a way, one of Jack’s new DC books, The Forever People, could be considered an example of this.

Unlike the lame hippies Thor ran into in the late ’60s, the Forever People of the early ’70s were hippie gods who starred in their own Jack Kirby comic book. Jon B. Cooke wrote about the meta-flowerchildren on the Jack Kirby Museum webpage:17 “The Forever People is Jack Kirby’s statement about his hope that the young people of his day, the hippies, would deliver the rest of us from a violent, selfish world. Hippies were a huge demographic in the U.S., who (to wildly generalize) were virtually united against the Vietnam War, demanded the voting age be reduced to 18, heavily into drug use (particularly pot and LSD) and advocated free love.

Nowhere was the hippie movement bigger than in the Golden State, where Jack and his family had recently moved. Jack also personally encountered any number of young people with increasing frequency.

The San Diego Comic Convention and other shows were being held so, perhaps for the first time, Jack had regular—and ever-growing— larger-scale dealings with the longhairs.”

In Forever People #2 (1971, above), Jack drew and wrote a scene that more than any other, suggested a reference to a psychedelic trip. On page 11 Serifan handed a boy named Donny a capsule called a cosmic cartridge. Serifan told the boy, “They’re sensitive to the universe—to its largest and smallest limits.” Donny didn’t swallow the capsule, but merely held it in the palm of his hand. The effect was instantaneous: “I’m everywhere at once! I see everything and everything moves, and makes a kind of beautiful noise!” Serifan replied: “Harmony is the word, Donnie! You’re listening to all there is!” The last panel looked like what one could imagine Jack would have seen, had he ever tripped. The cosmos revealed itself to Donny in unfolding vistas of endless Kirby Krackle. Far-out! H

1

It was Twenty Years Ago Today. BBC. 1987.

“I’m not a hippie, I’m not a conservative. I don’t know what the hell I am!” Stan Lee. Rolling Stone.

September 1971.

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3 “I believe that any sort of stimulant or irritant used for any sort of motivation—it’s kind of a wild thing without guidelines—I won’t hang anyone up on a gallows who uses drugs, but I won’t respect them, either.” Jack Kirby. The Jack Kirby Collector #42.

4 “In the fall of 1965, Roy Thomas recruited fellow Missourian Dennis O’Neil to work as Marvel’s second editorial assistant; within a matter of weeks, one of the magazine editors tried to enlist O’Neil in a scheme to dose Stan Lee with LSD. ‘He was going to supply a sugar cube of acid,’ said O’Neil.

‘My mission, should I have chosen to accept it, would have been to drop it into his coffee.’ O’Neil, a self-described ‘hippie liberal rebel’ who had been lectured by Lee for wearing a T-shirt depicting a cannabis plant to the office, nonetheless declined.” Howe, Sean. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

2013.

5 Derrick Deane: “Did you ever try marijuana?” Stan Lee: “No.” “Stan Lee Talks Spider-Man, Jessica Alba, Batman and Marijuana.” Cinemaniax. Web. March, 2014.

6 Stan Lee defied the Comics Code Authority when he did a Spider-Man story arc about illegal drugs.

Stan conflated additive pills with hallucination inducing drugs. The Amazing Spider-Man #96-98. 1971.

“People read into the fact that I called the character Mary Jane, but honestly, I had no idea it was a nickname for marijuana. I never understood why people take drugs. They’re habit forming and they can kill you. I didn’t need anything to pep me up.” Stan Lee. Cinemaniax. Web. March, 2014.

7

Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. 2012.

“The Maddening Mystery of the Inconceivable Adaptoid.” Tales of Suspense #82. 1966.

“If the Past be Not Dead.” Captain America #107. 1968 8

9

Fantastic Four #67. 1967.

10

Jeffery, Scott. “The Silver Age Super-hero as Psychedelic Shaman.” Web.

11

Fantastic Four #50. 1966.

12

Fantastic Four #76. 1968.

13

The Mighty Thor #159. 1968.

Schou, Nicholas. Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World. 2011.

14

Gimme Shelter. Directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. 1970.

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16

Kirby, Jack. New Gods. 1970.

17

Cooke, Jon. “The Forever People.” Jack Kirby Museum. 2010. Web.

(left) For more on Flower Power’s influence on comics and pop culture of the 1960s and ’70s, look for TwoMorrows’ new book Groovy this November, written and designed by Monster Mash author Mark Voger.

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Quiet Kirby

Teknique (below) OMAC #2, page 7. (next page, top) Forever People #9, pages 10 and 11. (next page, bottom left) Devil Dinosaur #4, page 19. (next page, bottom right) Fantastic Four #95, page 8.

[This issue’s cover inker, Dean Haspiel, is known for his work with Harvey Pekar on American Splendor, the graphic novel The Quitter, and The Fox with Mark Waid at Archie Comics. This article was originally published on the blog Graphic NYC on February 9, 2010, as “Jack Kirby Makes Me Stupid.” More of Dean’s work can be found at www.deanhaspiel.com.]

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hat can be said about the “King of Comics” that hasn’t already been said by fans, academics, and much better artists and writers than I will ever

by Dean Haspiel Photo by Kendall Whitehouse

be? What can be discussed that isn’t already empirically evident in his work? Jack Kirby was, simply put, the best American cartoonist that ever lived—and he had the best collaborators in Joe Simon, Stan Lee, Joe Sinnott, and Mike Royer. ’Nuff said.

So, rather than prove how great his characters were and how awesome his page layouts are, and how incredible his action is and how mind-blowing his imagination was (just pick up a Kirby comic or collection or Google his name and you’ll see what I mean), I’d prefer to take a very brief look at quiet Kirby: The stuff that stuck with me long after Kirby’s infamous knock-down, drag-out fisticuffs between gods and monsters burned their cosmic brawls into my mind’s eye.

1) OMAC: One Man Army Corps was Kirby’s re-imagined answer to a future Captain America done at DC Comics. I think I must have read those first two panels over-and-over again until I felt drool slide down my chest. I still can’t get over how brilliant this idea was. It made me feel dumb and happy, all at the same time, like a galactic bong hit.

2) Who knew Jack had it in him to write so eloquently about the fashion faux pas of a super dame named Beautiful Dreamer of The Forever People while exploring new ideas and bringing the drama? Two perfect pages that brandish fun narrative sans sucker punch.

3) I only own one original piece of Jack Kirby art and it’s this page from Devil Dinosaur, a short-lived comic series about the first human boy and his pet dinosaur. Alas, neither of the lead characters are featured on this page, but even when Kirby was writing a transitional page, he couldn’t help himself.

4) Despite some of his outlandish yet ofttimes super-prescient concepts (Ego the Living Planet, The Negative Zone, Mother Box, and The Source, anyone?), Jack Kirby knew it was a priority to entertain while delivering emotional truths. He didn’t seem so concerned with the wiring of plausibility, but more with the nuts and bolts of what makes us tick. And, with that in mind, Kirby cleaned our clocks with his big ideas and made them attainable for young boys and girls to grasp and mull over. Kirby made people think in ways that could ignite the atoms of genius and melt lesser minds. For a long time, some jaded folks declared, “Comics are just for kids.” Maybe so. But comics keep us young. And if Jack Kirby makes me stupid, I don’t want to be smart. H

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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

(This page, top) Badass classic drafting from Ivan Reis (pencils) and Oclair Albert (inks), with (below) painterly atmospheres

by Marcelo Maiolo, from Kamandi Challenge #5.

(Next page, top) Sheeps’ and Wolves’ clothing designs by Steve Rude for issue #8, and (bottom) pulse-quickening stateof-pop-art pencils by Dan Jurgens (issue #7).

(Following page) Blistering remodel-sheet for Kamandi’s mutant mate Renzi by Philip Tan (for issue #6)!

Characters TM & © DC Comics.

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

Last Boy Standing Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth is one of Kirby’s great wonders and mysteries. The longest-running series Kirby had as a solo creator in the 1970s, it has survived as an oddity in the decades since, with occasional tentative reappearances and a devoted cult. Kirby posed many a challenge for the rest of the comics artform to live up to, so it’s only fitting that, for the King’s centennial year, DC has thrown us back (or forward) into the world of Kamandi, for a year-long series which relays from one creative team to another each issue, with a cliffhanger the next team needs to think their way out of. At this point, Kamandi is like the Velvet Underground of comics—a hundred people remember it, and every one of them is a writer or artist who wants to make their own version. So the 12-issue Kamandi Challenge is only fair, giving 14 teams (counting prologue and epilogue) a shot.

At this writing, four issues have come out, starting with a breakneck intro by Dan DiDio and Keith Giffen and first chapter by Dan Abnett and Dale Eaglesham, each dynamically reinterpreting Kamandi’s strange bunkered upbringing and his deadly first days in the world of talking animals. Peter J. Tomasi and Neal Adams followed that, with Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Connor’s issue proceeding from these foundation-setting early chapters to break new, dangerous ground, including Kamandi picking up a new ally, Vila, who shows us how plants evolved in this carnivorous dystopia. The premium crazy of Palmiotti and Connor’s episode was picked up by James Tynion IV and Carlos D’Anda, with Kamandi and Vila on a whiplashing odyssey from tropical cults to an eerily mechanized arena. By the end of the saga, we will have traveled all over the maps that Kirby left behind (and in a number of cases never got to himself) of “Earth A.D. (After Disaster).”

Lushly illustrated and audaciously written, each stage of the Challenge has been triumphant so far, and by the time you read this column several more rounds will have expanded the medium and Kamandi’s world. I had a chance to speak with some of those piloting the airship, mutant bat, giant fury-road unicycle, etc.— path-blazing writers Marguerite Bennett and Steve Orlando, Kirby reincarnators Keith Giffen and Steve Rude, and star image-makers Dan Jurgens and Philip Tan—about the shifting shape of things to come.

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THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Steve, you’re no stranger to post-apocalyptic sagas of the food-chain upended (as in Image Comics’ Undertow); was Kamandi either an influential comic to you as a reader, or a grail to contribute to as a creator?

STEVE ORLANDO: Kamandi, and the King’s contributions in general, have long been an inspiration to me—the breadth of the stories, the furious creation and innovation, and redefining how comic book storytelling works. The historical context of the King’s DC creations, the pace at which he was creating new characters and concepts that are still being mined today, is endlessly inspirational.

And, you mention a grail—I hesitate to use that word, because that implies things are sacred, untouchable. But then you say “contribute to,” and I agree. For me, it’s an honor to be able to build from and contribute to these creations the King offered us—to help them grow, evolve, and continue the legacy he started.

TJKC: Philip, your style is to grit what Kirby’s was to gleam, but you share a sense of raw immediate energy—what strengths does this project play to, and in what ways did it stretch your creative arsenal?

should be playful, fun and full of drama. I mean, if you can’t have fun with Kamandi, chances are you won’t have fun at all.

PHILIP TAN: Initially, I shared sketches with Steve [Orlando] that went with an approach that was closer to animation and high-contrast cel-shading.

But while that is a lot of fun, in the end I ultimately felt like it lacked the raw energy we got from what Jack Kirby delivered back then. Not to say I want to copy how Kirby approached his visuals completely, but more like finding elements in my style that will give the same atmosphere!

TJKC: Dan and Marguerite, did either of you come to this project with ideas you wanted to try out, or was it better to just jump in and improvise your span of the cliffhanger?

MARGUERITE BENNETT: Oh, I think the fun was in the challenge! I tried not to plan anything at all until the moment the script before mine was in, and then got to read the whole adventure up until my role. You have to think on your feet—just like Kamandi. [laughs] Writing for Dan was also tremendous, and I hope I walk the line between the glorious golden Kirby era and giving the audience something adventurous, daring, funny—and just plain fun.

JURGENS: The main idea is for it to be fun and larger than life. Philip Tan drew the issue before me and set us up with some great stuff that we get to carry over. I certainly want to make sure I do justice to it.

TJKC: Dan, you’re a peer of Kirby in some ways, having inherited many of his characters, as well as handling much of the DCU; what was your approach to this most eccentric of concepts from the most classic of comic artists?

DAN JURGENS: I can’t really draw like Jack but I can certainly try to evoke the sense of imagination and power he had in his work. It

TJKC: Steve, you revere the Kirby canon while having a very distinctive design style of your own; how do you sync your imagination to that of Kirby’s and also carry his ideas forward?

STEVE RUDE: Jack Kirby has always been the number one artistic influence throughout my three decades of illustrating comic books, so any work I do involving his creations is always a welcome challenge. It’s hard to underestimate what his work has done 77

for allowing me to cleave my own path in this great and always demanding field of illustrative stories. It’s also important to be “one with the writer.” Keith [Giffen]’s script demanded some good solid digging, so my first move was heading right for my encyclopedias. I needed to familiarize myself with the many themes that this story needed to be illustrated properly. I always try to call and talk to the writer and editor. They might provide things that I never would’ve thought of.

adventures, he’s just not somebody I ever wanted to write. So I had to find a way to incorporate Kamandi into the kind of story I enjoy telling.

TJKC: And how would you define that?

GIFFEN: Good sense of humor, and it plays off of established myths that we all recognize.

TJKC: In books like The Forever People you’ve kept the flavor of Kirby’s concepts while moving them ahead in ways few would dare (but he would). How do you strike that balance?

TJKC: Keith, did you get to do the Kamandi story you always wanted to, or was it better to just jump in with no preconceptions?

KEITH GIFFEN: I’m... not a Kamandi fan. I just did the story based on what I knew.

GIFFEN: It’s Kamandi, it’s Kirby’s Kamandi in this one. You’re catching a baton, and handing it on to the next team, you don’t f*ck with the baton and turn it into a tomahawk. [laughter] But the concept of picking up from somebody’s cliffhanger and running with it appealed to me.

TJKC: Good, maybe you can bring a fresh perspective to it, as an outsider!

GIFFEN: We tried to bring a fresh perspective to it. He may be my least favorite Kirby character, but Kirby is my favorite creator. So he’s still high in the rank of characters. I enjoy reading [Kamandi’s]

TJKC: Marguerite, several of your comics seem to play on the phobia of the feminine embedded in old-school “man vs. nature” stories—the protagonists of AfterShock’s InseXts being predatory giant bug-women we want to win; Animosity starring a “last girl on earth” who’s not at war like Kamandi. What do you see as Kamandi’s classic appeal, and what are the best ways to mess with it?

BENNETT: I think a lot of the fun of playing with the classics is showing that stories that are compassionate are still exciting—you can honor an iconic character and theme while attending to how the world has evolved and grown since its inception. The comingof-age of a young adventurer will always be in season—the quest for answers, justice, and family—and rightly so, but a “modern update” does not need to be dark or gritty or thick with pop culture; it only needs to be cognizant that the world is so much broader and richer than older trends in storytelling (regardless of medium) used to imply. Also, taking some time to quip, joke, laugh and enjoy the journey never hurt anybody! [laughs] TJKC: Kamandi was a hit in its day and a bit of a deep cut now; what do you think attracted readers to it originally, and what strengths did you see in it for interpretation today?

TAN: I think one of the attractions was the wild sense of worlds being created that are very close to ours but missing “us” in it. Every adventure Kamandi goes through is packed with out-of-this-world characters in relatable human drama.

ORLANDO: I think the attraction is largely the same [now as then], honestly. This post-apocalyptic world where our base traits as humans have been extrapolated and played out in animal form speaks to our fears, and it speaks to our base desires. There’s a primal attraction to the world of Kamandi, I think, where in our core we’d like to be wild, we’d like to have other creatures assume the responsibility of civilization while we indulge our more animalistic instincts. And there’s a reminder in each page of Kamandi, in each human beast reaching out from a cage, that we’re never too far from falling apart as a society. As bloodthirst grows across the world, I think stories like Kamandi are a stark metaphor for one of the ends of our current path, a bleak one. But at the same time, they can also be a beacon to propel us towards a better path. H 78

Mark Evanier

Jack F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

(above) The WonderCon panelists, left to right: Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman, Rand Hoppe, Paul S. Levine, and Scott Dunbier. Photo by and courtesy of Nicholas A. Eskey. (below) Steve Sherman, Kirby, and Mark Evanier in 1969.

Most images for this article are courtesy of the Jack Kirby Museum and whatifkirby.com. Thanks, guys!

yesterday for a documentary. We were down in the dealers room, and they said, “Why do you celebrate Jack Kirby?

Why do you honor Jack Kirby?” and I said, “Because for one thing, Jack Kirby is sort of our industry. He’s everywhere. Look around,” and I didn’t think to look for this before I said it, but I looked around, and over there was artwork influenced by Jack Kirby, over there were posters influenced by Jack Kirby, right around me—a 360 degree view around and everything was Jack Kirby-connected in some way. Either his energy or his characters… people swiping his poses… as you go through that dealers room downstairs, just silently count to yourself the Kirby influences you see. It’s not everybody. There are some people making fuzzy bunny sculptures that, maybe, I can’t make the connection to Jack on those. But so much of it is what Jack did, and not just imitations of specific characters. One of the things that Jack was very...

2017 WonderCon Panel Transcribed by Sean Dulaney from an audio recording supplied by Tom Kraft. Edited by Mark Evanier and John Morrow.

[Evanier’s thought is interrupted as staff works to project a photo on the screen in the room]

[The following panel was held at WonderCon in Anaheim, California on Sunday, April 2, 2017 at the Anaheim Convention Center.]

STEVE SHERMAN: I do remember it.

Steve, do you remember this photo? [at lower left] EVANIER: Do you remember who took this photo?

MARK EVANIER: I’m Mark Evanier. This is my friend Steve Sherman, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] We’ll talk a lot about Steve’s role in Jack’s life in a few minutes. This is the Executive Director of the Jack Kirby Museum, Mr. Rand Hoppe. [applause] This is the attorney for the Rosalind Kirby Trust—I finally got the name right—this is Mr. Paul Levine. [applause] And this is IDW Publishing’s Director of Special Projects, Mr. Scott Dunbier. [applause] He’s up here because most of you are probably buying his special projects, which are exciting books that reproduce Jack Kirby art from the original art and… I would just say, Jack knew someone would do that someday. One of the reasons that art was so good was he knew that someday it would be printed with much better reproduction than the cheap little 10-cent, 12-cent, 15-cent comics on the crappy paper.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Jack’s birth. I don’t think we need a reason to celebrate him, but that’s as good a reason as any. I did an interview

SHERMAN: I think it was Roz. What year is this?

EVANIER: I would say that’s 1969. I was 17 years old.

How old were you, Steve?

SHERMAN: I was 20, I think.

EVANIER: I think that was down in Irvine. When the Kirbys moved out to California, they lived for two years… [reacting to a ringing in the room] without cell phones interrupting them… [laughter]. They rented a house in a tract where every house looked like every other house. You had to have the exact [house] number. You could not find the house by its look, because they all looked the same. They were there for a couple of years until Jack accrued the necessary funds, and they found the right place to buy their first home, which was out in Thousand Oaks, California. They lived in another one in Newberry Park, which is right next to Thousand Oaks. And Steve and I went to work for Jack in—I think this is from before we were formally working for him.

SHERMAN: Right.

EVANIER: We actually started working for him formally in February of 1970, and for a month we sat on the biggest story in comics. We knew a month before the whole community did that Jack was leaving Marvel and going to DC. He took us out to lunch one day at Canter’s Delicatessen on Fairfax, and he said, “I’m leaving Marvel. I’m going to DC.” He took us into his confidence. We had to swear secrecy. Stan Lee didn’t 79

know this yet. Nobody at Marvel knew this yet.

Only one or two people at DC even knew it. He said, “I’m going to go work for DC. I’ve got lots of plans there. I need two really bright, creative guys… Since I can’t find them, I’ll take you two.” [laughter] And he said, “Would you guys want to be my assistants?”

And Steve and I looked at each other, and I think it took us half a second to say, “Yes!” We had no idea then of what the money was or what the role really was, because Jack really wasn’t sure at that point what it really was. It was a life-changing moment for me and, I bet, for you as well.

It’s a great era for Kirby scholarship, thanks to these two books, out now: The revised edition of Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics (above) and Jack Kirby: Pencils & Inks by Tom Kraft and the Jack Kirby Museum (below). (next page) A stellar Ikaris sketch, circa 1977.

SHERMAN: Oh yes. You probably wonder why he would hire two nitwits like that to work with him. And I think the first test that he gave us was, we put together the Kirby Unleashed portfolio. Mark and I wrote it, typeset it, color-separated it, picked the paper, picked the printer… did everything.

And I think that was Jack’s test to see if we could deliver something, because he was really looking for help in putting together packages and things. So, he could see that we could put a package together and on time and on budget. I think that was kind of a test for us, wouldn’t you say, somewhat?

EVANIER: Somewhat. Everything Jack gave us was a test for us. [laughter] The association did not yield much in the way of real work, or money.

SHERMAN: No. EVANIER: And I still think it’s one of the greatest things anybody ever asked me to be involved in, which was just to work with Jack. It didn’t matter that there was no money in it. It didn’t matter that a lot of the stuff we did didn’t get published. It was just the fact that we got to spend all of this time with this man and hear him talk to us on a different level than I think he was used to talking to people who read comics, because he was trying to educate us to the business and make us understand. I 80

learned stuff completely unrelated to comics from Jack. [pause] What did happen to us? It’s kind of frightening. [laughter] This photo—which is the earliest photo I think I have, of us together anyway, but certainly with Jack—is in the new edition of my—I did this book in 2008 called Kirby: King Of Comics. And we’re bringing out a new edition, just for this year. It officially goes on sale August 1st, but they are going to have copies at ComicCon [International], and this photo is in it along with 16 new pages of material, including a new chapter about what has happened with Jack’s fame and fortunes since the book came out. It’s mostly talking about the fact that he now gets his name in the credits of these books and his co-creator status is acknowledged and not denied anymore. [applause] I think I’m not the only person in the room who’ll say, [sighs] it was just a nagging, painful thing that Jack was denied the proper credit for so many years, and that his family did not share, to even a microscopic extent, in the wealth that his ideas were generating.

And that was actually very significant.

Jack wanted two things out of his professional career. He wanted acknowledgment for what he had done, and he wanted his family to be financially secure.

That he’d received neither of them at the time he died…

I had a gnawing pain for years that went away one day when finally… yeah, it was too late for Jack and Roz to benefit directly. Yes, maybe the dollar figure—though very impressive—was still a bargain for Marvel. But there was no longer that pernicious, agonizing realization that this empire was built on “Indian land,” to use an expression you shouldn’t use anymore, probably.

I could not sit through the Marvel movies. I had to go see the X-Men movie when it came out and, first of all, I hated it. [laughter] I just sat there going, “Well, that’s CGI. That’s CGI.” I would’ve walked out, except I was sitting next to Stan Lee at this screening [laughter], and at the end of the film, as the credits started to roll, everybody else in the theater got up to walk out, and I said to myself, “I’m sitting here until I see Jack’s name on this screen.” And I sat there, and I sat there… ushers were coming in and cleaning up popcorn boxes around me, and I sat there and they looked at me like, “What are you doing here? Nobody sits through to the end of the credits in a movie theater.” I sat through the end of the credits, and guess where I found Jack’s name? At the very end of the credits, in little, tiny type—less prominent than the guy who drove the catering truck. And I got mad; I got so mad. I walked out into the lobby and Stan was standing there, and I couldn’t talk to him. I just had to leave because I was afraid I was going to say something that would upset everybody in the world, including me. And I didn’t go see any of the other movies after that.

I was in a Costco about five, six years ago, maybe a little longer than that. I’m in line waiting to check out, and of course I’ve got the paper towels and the toilet paper. You can’t get out of Costco without buying one or the other, or both—and I found this thing. It was a CD-ROM containing the first ten issues of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk, Avengers, so and so, for $5.

Well, I thought this might be handy to have around if I want to look up a page, so I bought this thing and I’m standing in line at checkout, and I had not given my

Costco card yet to the lady with my credit card. There was no chance of anyone recognizing my name here. And this little Hispanic kid who was boxing my purchases holds up this Marvel thing I’m buying and he says, “This was drawn by Jack Kirby, the greatest comic book artist ever. They f*cked him out of everything he did.” [applause, mixed with laughter] And I went, wait a minute. I’m being put on here. [laughter] He doesn’t say this to everyone who buys that.

And yet, I had not given them my card yet. Once every twenty years someone recognizes my name and goes, “Groo the Wanderer, huh?

Okay.” [laughter] My jaw just caromed off the linoleum, I was just amazed by that and thought, “Well, maybe Marvel will realize how that makes them look.” And I was fascinated to find, as I worked, that there are more of these people and there were some at Disney after Disney acquired Marvel, who felt like I did. There were people who were uncomfortable to say they were working on a Captain America project for Marvel, because they knew it was kind of damaged goods. There was this great shadow hanging over it. And it is such a personal relief to me… I’m not only happy for the Kirby Estate, I’m happy for me, [laughter] that I don’t have to live with that

anymore. Anyway…

PAUL LEVINE: The biggest regret of my professional career is that I only graduated from law school and started practicing law in 1981, and it was way too late to do anything for Jack about the past. I could only help him make the deal with DC and move forward, but I couldn’t do anything about the past.

EVANIER: Yeah. I met Paul… Paul was working with a man named Steve Rohde, who was Jack’s main attorney for a long time, and they kept bringing me in as a consultant to figure out “what issue did this character first appear in,” “what did Jack sign on a Tuesday,” and things like that. Steve was a little appalled by what he was seeing, and the paperwork he was seeing. Paul is now my attorney and makes my deals and is a man who understands what fairness is, because he has seen what it is not.

I’m going to jump around here on topics. We’ve got a little bit of time here, and then I want to ask you later on to tell us what aspect of Jack you’d like us to discuss. Scott, you’re bringing out these wonderful books. How many people have been buying these IDW volumes and such? The most recent one; what’s the official title of it?

DUNBIER: The most recent Artist Edition by Jack was the Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four Artist Edition. That came out in January.

EVANIER: What’s the one with the pencils and inked stuff?

DUNBIER: That came out in December and that was done in conjunction with the Kirby Museum.

EVANIER: Rand and Scott, would you tell them about the reaction to that book? You’ve all had a chance to see Jack Kirby pencil art in many venues nowadays. In 1969, I’d never seen any comic book in pencil form, and I looked at this work and my jaw, again, off the linoleum. I realized that Jack was working in a medium where everybody’s work was diminished greatly in publication, not just by the printing, but by the process. The inking, the coloring, the camera work… And to now see it all preserved well; are you getting that feedback, that they are amazed to see the artwork in that state?

DUNBIER: Oh, definitely. When we started the Artist Editions, it was something I really wanted to see. I used to be an art dealer. I love original art. I grew up with crappy printing in comics and I remember when I first started getting the Russ Cochran EC reprints and seeing all these beautiful pages in black and white—but even those were not scanned in color, which is the key to an Artist Edition. It gives you something that is as close to the original as you can get.

It’s a facsimile. You can see the blue pencil, the Wite-Out, everything, and at the same size.

You get a real feel for how big art is—how big Jack Kirby drew, especially the older stuff. You know, that Fantastic Four book we came out with in January, that was 12" x 17", which is how big comics were drawn after 1967 or so.

We now call those the “Little Artist Editions,” because the ones that are before that—the Kirby Fantastic Four book that’s coming out at San 81

Diego, is the old twice-up stuff which is 15" x 22". It’s a little bit misleading, because the size that Jack actually drew was about 12.5" x 18", but we print these books with the entire paper so you can see all the margins and notes and coffee stains and whatever on them. So it’s a real revelation to people, I think, when they see these books.

We’re also coming out with another Walt Simonson Thor book, “The Return of Beta Ray Bill.” We just announced a couple of books. In September we’ll be bringing out a Craig Russell book that will collect his Killraven graphic novel and also a Doctor Strange graphic novel he did. And it’s sort of a bittersweet one: We announced yesterday that we are coming out in October with a Bernie Wrightson Artifact Edition with his DC work.

EVANIER: What’s coming up?

DUNBIER: Well, we have—this is the 100th anniversary of Jack’s birth, so we wanted to do some special things. The Jack Kirby Fantastic Four book that just came out in January. Either next month or the month after will be the Forever People book. And that particular one will have a variant cover by Jack on it. It’s a pin-up from Forever People #4. And then in July, we are coming out with the second Kirby Fantastic Four book that I decided to call Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Artist Edition, because if any Artist Edition title deserved the title of “World’s Greatest,” it’s twice-up Jack Kirby.

EVANIER: What’s in it?

DUNBIER: There are four complete issues. It has FF #33 inked by Chic Stone, and then #45, #47 and #60 all inked by Joe Sinnott. #60 is the final issue of the four-part story where Doctor Doom steals the Surfer’s board, which is just phenomenal. And it’s got three fold-outs. It has Marvelmania posters in it of the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom. It has four pin-ups from FF Annual #2 of the entire Fantastic Four. Tons and tons of just great pages and splashes from everything going back to FF #3. We actually have nine pages from #3.

Just in time for IDW’s Artist Edition is TwoMorrows’ new bio of Reed Crandall by Roger Hill, available now at www.twomorrows.com!

EVANIER: Any questions for Scott about his books that are coming out? We’re all happy with them, good. Thank you. [applause] Rand, a lot of the material that you guys are… that’s Tom Kraft over there who works at the Museum with—we’re going to alternate from now on. Either Rand or Tom will be on the Kirby panel. Tag team. The other one has to run the camera.

EVANIER: Wow. Anybody want to ask Scott any questions about his books? Tell us what else you’re bringing out that’s not Jack Kirby.

What’s coming up soon?

DUNBIER: There is one thing I wanted to point out. Did any of you see the Jack Kirby: Pencils & Inks book? That’s the man who designed it, right over there. [points to Tom Kraft, applause]

DUNBIER: Reed Crandall’s EC stories will be out next month.

EVANIER: And I should point out that unlike some people who are

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: $50*

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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: $60*

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.

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Marvel—14” x 23”

Galactic Head— 18” x 20” color

Incan Visitation—24” x 18” color

printing Jack Kirby’s stuff, Scott is in consultation with the estate and does it respectfully and we’re very pleased that he’s ethical about all this stuff.

LEVINE: Everyone at IDW has been terrific.

EVANIER: Rand, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this. When did you start getting interested in Jack Kirby?

HOPPE: I was in summer camp reading a Kamandi comic, [laughter] where he shot the grasshopper.

EVANIER: So, what is your favorite Jack Kirby body of work?

HOPPE: It completely varies, but most often the answer is The Forever People.

EVANIER: And when did you decide to start getting into the preservation and chronicling of Jack Kirby?

HOPPE: Well, there was a time when I decided I wanted to learn how to make a website, and I figured a Jack Kirby website would be a really fun thing. So I actually reached out to John Morrow on CompuServe. [audience “ooooohs” and chuckles] John is the publisher of The Jack Kirby Collector.

EVANIER: CompuServe was a service that ran on an Etch-A-Sketch. [laughter] HOPPE: John didn’t even know what a website was, but I asked him if he wanted a website for The Kirby Collector. So we worked it out and that’s when I started my trail of Jack Kirby work.

EVANIER: And the Kirby Museum has how many images in the library now, roughly?

HOPPE: I think we have… I’m looking at Tom, because he’s better with those numbers.

TOM KRAFT: [from audience] 5,000 original art and 7,500 photocopies.

HOPPE: 7,500 of the pencil photocopies.

EVANIER: I think it should be acknowledged that the pencil photocopies, which are the record of Jack’s pencil work before it was lettered and inked, are preserved because, in part, Steve and I fed those pages into a copy machine in the early ’70s. Jack’s son Neal was working for a copy machine company. Jack was mailing these pencil pages back to the DC offices, and then he would sit down to draw the next issue and he wouldn’t remember what the new characters looked like. Or he wouldn’t remember how the last story ended. He had no record of it.

In the Summer of 1970, Steve and I went back and visited the DC offices and the Marvel offices and the MAD magazine offices, and we hung out with Steve Ditko for a day. We went into the DC offices, and I want to tell this story in front of Steve [Sherman] so he can nod and verify this, because people don’t believe it.

At that point, none of Jack’s DC work had come out yet.

He was doing it, but it was not coming out until later that year, and most of the DC editors had not seen it.

We went to lunch the first day we were there with Julie Schwartz. He took us to a place that was noted for the fact the waitresses wore really short skirts. [laughter] And he sat us down over lunch and he says, “What’s this ‘New Gods’ thing we hear Jack is doing?” Now his office was twelve yards from Carmine Infantino’s and this stuff was under lock and key and almost nobody at DC had seen it. They were so paranoid the ideas would be stolen.

That was on a Monday we did that. On Tuesday, we went to the Marvel offices and there were Xeroxes of New Gods, Forever People, and Mister Miracle—on the wall—because Vince Colletta was showing the stuff around when he came up to pick up work at Marvel. He was showing it and they were copying it. So one day, Jack needed a copy of Forever People #2 so he could finish #3, because he couldn’t remember what something looked like in it. He called DC and said, “Please send me stats of this,” and they didn’t. I called the secretary at Marvel and she took it off the wall and mailed it to him. [laughter] Great security, right?

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(above) A fun loose sketch of the Forever People’s Mark Moonrider, circa 1971, in honor of (and courtesy of) our buddy Rand Hoppe of the Kirby Museum. We’re with him all the way in his appreciation of this under-appreciated gem of a series by Jack.

(below) When you think about it, Kirby was the natural choice for this Champions #6 cover (June 1976), as he was involved in the first appearances of all these heroes. (next page) Is this Jack’s best fight image ever? Daredevil #43 cover (Aug. 1968).

Color by Sarge.

Rand, you go around with the Kirby Museum, you and Tom visit conventions, you set up pop-up museums in different places. What is the reaction you get from— I’m looking now for the kind of person who probably wouldn’t be in this audience, who might blunder into a museum or a campus exhibition because they heard the name Jack Kirby, but weren’t enough into comics to come to comic-cons or things like that.

HOPPE: I think they are generally drawn to the characters we’ll have, clearly. We’ll try to draw people in using Captain America or Thor or the Fantastic Four,

and they’ll come in and then we’ll start talking about the man whose drawing board they came off of. That’s something of a revelation for them. They really appreciate learning that there was somebody, that all these characters came out of his head, through his arm and onto paper.

EVANIER: Is there a question you’re tired of being asked?

HOPPE: Um… “Where is the Jack Kirby Museum?” [laughter] And I have to say, “We don’t have an exhibition space.”

EVANIER: It’s a lot like Jack Kirby.

Everywhere. [laughter] Do you get a lot of questions about Jack, himself?

About the guy, the artist?

HOPPE: No. Not really. More often when I talk about Kirby, it’s with people who already have some knowledge of him. Most of the times they met him at conventions or something. To non-convention people, I’ll talk about his biography… the tough upbringing, growing up on the lower East Side of New York City, and the war stories, and how he ended up being such an important cultural character. And that is pretty impressive.

EVANIER: How many people in this room got to meet Jack Kirby? [audience members raise their hands] Steve, what do you say when people ask what Jack was like?

SHERMAN: Jack was a wonderful guy.

He was just super-nice. He was able to connect with anybody. I mean, anybody could walk up to him, and after about two or three minutes you felt like you knew him your whole life or he knew you your whole life. He was really interested in people. He would listen no matter what. People would come up to him with their drawings and art and Jack would take time to look at it and give them his perception of what it was.

I was thinking about this the other day. The thing about Jack, people would come up and say, “I want to write comics.” And Jack would always say, “Okay. Write a story and bring it back and give it to me.” Nine times out of ten, they wouldn’t. And the tenth time was pretty bad, so... [laughter] And I was remembering one job we had. I was thinking about this. DC at the time was putting out the 25-cent big… filling out the comics with reprints. So, some genius had the idea that they were going to reprint the Romance comics. So Jack said, “Oh! Mark and Steve. You guys could probably do

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that.” So what they sent us were the 6" x 9" silverprints of 1950s Romance comics, and what they wanted us to do was Wite-Out the hair, Wite-Out the outfits, and redo the hair and the outfits.

Now, 6" x 9" is not that big. Plus, it’s on silverprints. So Mark and I sat at his drawing board—we took the Wite-Out and started whiting out. Now, Wite-Out is not very smooth, and after a couple of times, you’d get these real crumbly little pieces. So, here’s these silverprints with all this WiteOut on it, and Romance comics are mostly figures: Close-ups of faces and bodies and stuff. So what you wind up with when you white everything out is eyes… and a mouth… [laughter] some background. So we started to try and fill it in with pencil, and that wouldn’t work because the pencil wouldn’t stick to the Wite-Out. Finally, we looked at each other and said, “Uh-oh. We’re in trouble here.” So we went back to Jack and showed it to him and he said, “Okay,” and gave the whole thing to Mike Royer, and Mike managed to do it in about two days.

With a brush and ink, he just went through there and fixed it.

EVANIER: It was updating, making the stories look like they were current. But the dialogue was still 1957. [laughter] I don’t know about you, but I think relationships in the world changed between 1957 and 1970.

SHERMAN: Plus the art style was so in the ’50s and ’60s, that when you started putting modern hair and clothes on it, it looked weird.

EVANIER: And this is why there are no more Romance comics. This kind of attitude. [laughter] You know, one of the things that Steve and I experienced with Jack is you couldn’t really just work for Jack. You kind of had to join the family. We’d go out and swim in his pool, we went to dinner and had barbecues and things like that all the time. And we’d end up somehow helping Roz clean out the garage occasionally. And Jack… He was just a great guy, and a man who... I never caught Jack, ever, in a lie. I caught him being wrong occasionally, misremembering a fact, things like that, but he never lied as far as I could ever see. And early on, he kind of indicated to me, “I want you, Mark, I want you to be like a biographer. I want you to write stuff about me.” But he never told me what to write.

He never said, “Oh, make sure you tell people that,” or “Make sure you leave that story out of it.” He just figured the truth would do him well if I just wrote what I observed. Usually, when people know you’re going to write about them, they’ll try to spin you, try to put on a show for you or try to sell you on their version of something.

Jack never did really. He just told me what he thought. I just found him amazing that way.

looks at it. Joe comes in, his family and all that. A couple of days later, Jack’s working on… I think it was either Jimmy Olsen or Forever People, one of them—and here’s the War Wagon, [laughter] which is this giant RV, but now it’s got rockets on it… [laughter] guns and all kinds of things. [Editor’s Note: We think Steve means the Mountain of Judgement from Jimmy Olsen] And that was the way Jack—he would just see things and go, “Oh. You know I can use that. I can use this.”

He would just pick things that he would come across and then blow them up into something that you would never imagine.

EVANIER: Remember, he and Kubert had an argument. It was friendly, but it was an argument. DC had printed up paper for their artists to draw on. It was blue-lined so it was ruled off for them. And Jack didn’t like their paper stock. He liked Marvel’s paper fine, but he didn’t like the DC paper stock. So, he was always having trouble with it and Steve and I ended up going out and buying him paper and we’d cut it to size for him and things like that. But apparently this paper stock had been chosen by Joe Kubert at DC. They had given Joe different ones and he liked it. So, Jack says to Joe, “I can’t stand the paper at DC.” Joe says, “It’s great paper. It’s the best paper to draw on in the world,” and Jack says, “No. The graphite all comes off on my hands and all the time my hands get all smudged up.”

SHERMAN: Here’s one way that Jack’s mind worked. When he was in the first house in Thousand Oaks, it had a gravel driveway that went around like a semicircle. One afternoon, we were there and up comes Joe Kubert and his family in the biggest RV you’d ever want to see. It was huge. This thing just took up… Jack comes out, 85

EVANIER: Do you remember that day, Steve? Jack was doing New Gods, Forever People, and Mister Miracle. He wanted very much for DC to let him edit some comics he did not write and draw, and I don’t think he at that point understood how unlikely they were to do that. One of Jack’s battles with DC the whole time he was there, was against the company and the notion that the company created the comics in the office in New York. By being 3,000 miles away, he was at a great disadvantage. They fought like crazy against Mike Royer being his letterer and inker because it was a loss of control for New York. They wanted it done there so the office could act like they were the ones doing the creating. When Steve and I first went to DC, one of the first things that happened was Sol Harrison sat us down—stop me if I get any of this wrong, Steve—he sat us down in his office. We were Jack Kirby’s assistants. He brought us in and he basically said—to us, who had been working for Jack for a couple of months by that point; we’re 17 and 20 years old respectively—“You’ve got to get Jack to draw differently. You’ve got to get him to draw more like we do here at DC.” [laughter] There was this idea like, “This stuff looks like Marvel Comics!” [laughter] You hired Jack Kirby; what a surprise.

DUNBIER: “We thought he would turn into Curt Swan!” [laughter] EVANIER: But they didn’t think Curt Swan was a fabulous artist. What they thought was, “Curt Swan is a guy who can give us stuff we can fix and make into great comics.” That was the attitude. It has to be created in the office. So when Jack wanted to have the comic completely finished in Southern California, they were horrified by that. “Well, you can’t do that.” They finally, grudgingly, when Jack demanded it, let Royer do it, figuring he was going to flop, and he wouldn’t have the books done on time or they’d come in unprofessionally and could be fixed. And they were kind of upset that it came out better that way. Eventually, they came around, because when you lose, sometimes you have to admit it, and they began hiring Mike directly for things. They realized he was a solid professional.

Jack wanted to do some new books for DC that he would launch and would work with other writers and artists on. Carmine was of the opinion that the industry, at that moment, was shifting from super-heroes to monsters and that the future of comics was in things like Swamp Thing and Ghosts and House of Mystery, those kinds of things. So, he said to Jack, come up with something about a character who’s a monster or—I don’t know if he said the word “demon” or if Jack said the word “demon,” but the word “demon” was in Jack’s head. And that afternoon, Steve, myself, Roz, Lisa...

I think one of Lisa’s friends... about nine of us, went to a Howard Johnson’s near the Kirby home for an early dinner. I remember, for some reason, I had a hot turkey sandwich. I don’t know why I remember that, but I did—and a scoop of orange sherbet with a cookie in it. At dinner, Jack would say what he wanted to eat and then Roz would tell him what he was going to eat. [laughter] He’d go, “Fine,” and then he’d go silent. We’d talk about all this other stuff, and Jack is just sitting there not participating. Finally, they bring us our entrées and as we all started to eat, now that we weren’t talking, Jack says, “Okay, there’s this guy called Jason Blood...” [laughter] and he tells us the whole concept for The Demon. And I’m sitting there,

And Joe says, “Oh, you should pencil in blue pencil like I do.” And Jack says, “I don’t pencil in blue pencil.” And Joe says, “You should try it.” Jack says, “I’ve been drawing comics since before you were.

I don’t use blue pencil,” and they started arguing over this whole thing. And also, Joe was inking his own work, so his pencils were very vague. Jack was trying to do a full penciled thing, especially when he didn’t feel the inker was capable of ad-libbing and finishing stuff. And I thought they were going to start a fist fight for about a minute there over the quality of this paper. And Jack stopped—I think he stopped using the DC paper altogether.

DUNBIER: That would be an interesting fight, because, you know, Jack was a tough little guy, but has anyone here ever shook Joe Kubert’s hand? You remember that. [laughing] The guy had a vise grip.

EVANIER: I’d still bet on Jack. [laughter] What do you want to hear us talk about? We’ve got another twenty minutes or so. Anybody have a question about Jack? Yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: One of my favorite stories about comics in general is, Mark, your recounting of how Jack created The Demon in a Howard Johnson’s in the ten minutes between ordering and receiving the burger.

86

missing my mouth with the fork because I’m aghast.

“Did he just come up with this between the time we ordered and the time the meals got here?” He basically did. And then we got back to his studio, he couldn’t wait. He had these reprints by Hastings House of the Prince Valiant strip and he said, “Find me this! There’s a picture in there of Prince Valiant with a duck’s skin on his face.” Either I found it or you [Steve] found it and Jack had already started doing a drawing of the character and now he could finish the face. He didn’t copy it.

He just took an inspiration from it and designed The Demon’s face.

And when it was all done, it was all there. He sent it to New York and they said, “Great, why don’t you do the first issue?” And that’s how The Demon started—out of nowhere. And one of the reasons, I think, that DC decided to suspend both New Gods and Forever People is that they weren’t worried about canceling a Jack Kirby comic, because he could come up with another one over dinner. It was like, “Oh, this isn’t putting Marvel out of business. Let’s have Jack try something else.” He was the only guy who could do that. If you had said to anybody else on the DC staff, “Come up with a new comic for us,” it would have taken several months to do it or to get it to the point where Jack had The Demon all figured out right at that point. [pause] Yes, sir?

announced they were running a 3-D movie Saturday night to be hosted by the horror host Elvira, and if you wanted the glasses, they were selling them for 50 cents each at Seven-Eleven stores in the Southern California area.

LEVINE: And on the glasses...?

EVANIER: No, those glasses had nothing to do with Jack. The 3-D movie they were showing, the glasses, had nothing to do with Jack. Johnny Carson, for some

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The story about the misunderstanding with Johnny Carson, is that true?

EVANIER: Yes. How many people know about this? I’ll try to tell it as quickly as I can, because I shouldn’t be the only one talking up here. Although, I probably will be. [laughter] Jack had designed a 3-D poster. There was a fellow named Ray Zone who is now deceased—a lovely man and a comics historian.

He was obsessed... he was on a mission to get rid of everything in the movies and on television that wasn’t 3-D. He was like, “Let’s turn Casablanca into 3-D!” Everything had to be 3-D. He had written a story called Battle For A Three-Dimensional World which Jack had drawn as a little, small published thing and there were 3-D glasses in it that were designed to go with the poster and the stories that Jack did for this comic.

In Los Angeles one day, Channel 9—the local station— 87

(previous page) We bet “Danny” had a great 1975 birthday! (below) Other than the Hulk, this Defenders #45 cover (March 1977) features characters he had no hand in creating.

reason in his monologue, started making jokes about it every night, about how somebody was ripping off kids by charging them 50 cents for these glasses. It wasn’t an unreasonable price.

I just think Johnny Carson hadn’t been to a store in many years. [laughter] He was talking about how they’re swindling kids out of 50 cents for these crappy cardboard glasses. So on the Friday night show, which was the day before the American Booksellers Convention in Los Angeles, Carson comes out to do his monologue and he had his prop man get him a pair of 3-D glasses to use as a prop. The prop man, who didn’t know any better, had somehow gotten hold of the glasses for the Ray Zone project, which had Jack’s name on them.

And so, Carson did a few jokes wearing the glasses...

LEVINE: They said, “Jack Kirby, King of the Comics.”

EVANIER: That’s right. So, Carson does a couple of jokes about this. I have the video of this. I’ve showed it at San Diego a couple of times. Ed McMahon, Johnny’s announcer, after the joke says, “Hey, have you read what it says on the glasses?” And Johnny pulls them off and says, “Designed by Jack Kirby, King of the comics.” And to Johnny Carson, “King of the comics” means, like, “comedians,” and he’d never heard of Jack Kirby the comedian. [pause] We had. [laughter] And he starts going, “This guy must be king of the con-men.

Ripping these kids off with these glasses. He’s swindling children!” Johnny Carson taped his show at, like, 5 o’clock [Pacific] and it aired at 11:30, New York time. Several people in New York called Jack and said, “Oh, watch Johnny Carson tonight. He mentions you.” [nervous laughter] So Jack gets very excited about this and he turns it on and he was just devastated.

He was just so upset. Jack, a year or two earlier, had by-pass surgery because he’d had a heart attack. It was not well known. They kept it quiet at the time. We had a cover story at the conventions, Jack—that year was the year Jack missed his only San Diego Con of his lifetime.

That night he was so depressed he took a nitroglycerin tablet. That means you’re really in trouble if you are a heart patient. He survived. The next day he’s at the American Booksellers Association and everyone’s coming by going, “Hey! Johnny Carson mentioned you last night! You should sue that bastard!”

is—and this is too long a story to tell you all the details about—but basically, when Johnny came back from his vacation, he read the nicest apology that you can make to Jack, on the air. He even pronounced my name semi-right when he read my letter. Meanwhile, Paul and his people...

LEVINE: And then I get a call. [laughter]

LEVINE: This is the only time, as far as I know, in the history of the Johnny Carson show, where Johnny ever apologized for anything.

I mean, he would acknowledge a mistake... maybe. But he never apologized to anyone for anything in the entire run of the show.

And they paid a nice chunk of change for the privilege of making the big mistake. And to NBC’s credit and to Carson’s credit, they did the right thing from the get-go as soon as they realized. [applause]

EVANIER: So, Sunday night, Roz calls me and says, “Can you talk to Jack? He’s so upset.” I talked to Jack and he was the most upset I’d ever known him to be. He was really depressed about it because... suing Johnny Carson was like trying to win against Disney these days—which, come to think of it, they did. [laughter] So I said, “Look. I’ll see what I can do,” and meanwhile, he talked to Paul and people in Paul’s law office and they started working from their end. I started lobbying. Carson was off that week—I got Fred DeCordova, his producer, on the phone and explained to him and he said, “Get me a letter Johnny can read on the air.” Anyway, the bottom line

EVANIER: So a couple of days later, I’m working at NBC at the time on a show and I’m walking through the parking lot and Johnny Carson pulls in, in his little Mercedes, into his parking space. Now when Johnny got to the lot, he was always greeted by a uniformed 88

Burbank policeman who escorted him in, because he got a lot of death threats and crazy mail. The officer was walking over to meet him and I just happened to be in-between him and the cop. I see Johnny Carson and say hello to him, and I think the policeman went for his gun. [laughter] Carson waved him away because I looked relatively harmless, and I said, “Mr. Carson, thank you for reading my letter on the air last week.” I talked to Carson about twenty minutes. He was very nice, very apologetic. He thanked me for getting him the letter real quickly before it became a big industry thing. If he’d delayed two weeks in apologizing, it would have been a very different story. And he was so nice about it to me, and he was genuinely worried that he had hurt Mr. Kirby’s feelings.

LEVINE: I want to talk a minute about a related thing. Talking about giving credit where credit is due. Sometime in the mid-1980s, we got word that then-Cannon Pictures was going to develop a Spider-Man movie; probably 1983, ’84, somewhere in there. And so, when we learned this, I contacted the lawyer at Cannon, and I said, “Please make sure that when the Spider-Man movie comes out, that Jack Kirby gets credit.” And I got a letter or some kind of an agreement which was signed by the people at Cannon acknowledging that if and when the movie was going to be made, that Kirby would get the credit.

Cut to the Tobey Maguire movie released by Sony Pictures. Sony—to their credit—did the due diligence and got all of the paperwork that had gone from Cannon to wherever. It took almost twenty years from the time I made that arrangement to the time the first Spider-Man movie actually came out. And Jack got the credit.

reach a satisfactory out-of-court settlement. And I think that changed the industry a lot in ways that I could explain if we had another hour. I think it helped to lead to the point where Jack got the credit and his family got the kind of settlement they did. I think it was one of the greatest investments Jack ever made. However, that first issue of Destroyer Duck did introduce to the world Groo The Wanderer. So there was a downside to it. [laughter] We’re out of time for this. We’re going to be talking about Jack a lot at San Diego. There’ll be many Jack Kirby panels. They’re going to do some longer ones I think if they’ll let me have the time, because we’ve barely scratched the surface here talking about Jack.

He was a fascinating man and I urge you to get to San Diego this year if you possibly can, if you care about Jack. It’s going to be a Kirby Fest. [applause] H

EVANIER: And I really wish Paul had been Jack’s lawyer twenty years earlier.

LEVINE: So do I. [laughter] EVANIER: Except, of course, you were nine at the time. [laughter] We’ve got time for one more question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was curious if you could talk about when Jack helped Steve Gerber with Destroyer Duck to fund his fight with Marvel?

EVANIER: That’s me again. You got a question for anybody else?

Briefly, Steve Gerber was suing Marvel. They were suing him and Steve was bankrupting himself on legal fees.

Steve and I went down to see Jack and said we are going to do a benefit comic book and Jack said, “I’ll draw a story for it.” So he drew the first Destroyer Duck comic book for no money to help Steve out, and we all pitched in our time and effort to do this, and it helped Steve 89

(previous) Another party drawing, for a lucky guy named Adam. (below) Pencil art for a San Diego Comic-Con promo image, which was later inked by Dave Stevens.

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!

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

“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

COLLECTED VOL. 3

COLLECTED VOL. 6

COLLECTED VOL. 7

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

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 #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

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 #56

THE MAGIC OF STAN & JACK! New interview with STAN LEE, walking tour of New York where Lee & Kirby lived and worked, re-evaluation of the “Lost” FF #108 story (including a new page that just surfaced), “What If Jack Hadn’t Left Marvel In 1970?,” plus MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, behind a color Kirby cover inked by GEORGE PÉREZ!

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

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

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

(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

(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 COLLECTOR #61

“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!

JACK KIRBY: WRITER! Examines quirks of Kirby’s wordsmithing, from the FOURTH WORLD to ROMANCE and beyond!

Lengthy Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, LARRY LIEBER’s scripting for Jack at 1960s Marvel Comics, RAY ZONE on 3-D work with Kirby, comparing STEVE GERBER’s Destroyer Duck scripts to Jack’s pencils, Kirby’s best promo blurbs, Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

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

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

(100 FULL-COLOR pages) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #62

KIRBY COLLECTOR #63

KIRBY COLLECTOR #64

KIRBY COLLECTOR #65

KIRBY COLLECTOR #66

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!

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!

(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 #67

KIRBY COLLECTOR #68

KIRBY COLLECTOR #69

KIRBY COLLECTOR #70

KIRBY COLLECTOR #71

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!

KIRBY: OMEGA! Looks at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by WALTER SIMONSON!

(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

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

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 Kirby WORK, cross-references huge Digital Edition! Includes a fan’s private tour of the biography from the original printing, and added a new Foreword explaining how this reprints, and more!

Kirbys’ home and more than 200 pieces of Kirby art 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) 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 $31 $23 $15 $19

Collector

Comments

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

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(You wanna make something of it? Write!)

[What a heady few months it’s been here at TJKC HQ! I got not only #71 and this issue done on schedule, but worked in a whopping 200+ page book Kirby100, all just in time for Jack’s 100th birthday on August 28. As I write this, I’ve got literally 36 hours to get this issue to the printer, or miss its debut at Comic-Con and release on Jack’s birthday. So if there’s a few more typos sneaking through this time, please be kind! Now, on to your feisty, fightin’ letters:] Attached are a few pics from our comics shop. I decorated one of the windows in the King’s honour. Kirby rocks and rules, still, and forever...

Thomas Kovacs, Amazing Toys Comics & More, Zurich, Switzerland

Congratulations for an enjoyable 70th edition of TJKC. Here are a few observations I’d like to share with you: “Little humans, giant gods” was researched thoroughly and a great read, still just a tad too long if you ask me; I noticed you did some editing in the article, and rightly so, IMO. Just so you know, the quote credited to Max Ernst about “the marriage of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is not from Ernst, but originates from the Count of Lautreamont. By the way, what a great pic of Jack on page 16, bursting with life and attitude in his blue shirt!

Also, very, very much enjoyed “Spider-Man: the case for Kirby” by the late Stan Taylor, a case which was very convincing. It reminded me of some great investigating articles I read in your mag about Jack when it first started all those years ago; I get Kirby’s claims about Spidey all

the clearer now. And although the late Mr. Taylor did fantastic research on the topic, I would like to point out another brick that could have added to his construction, which wasn’t picked up by him: Rawhide Kid #17, dated August 1960 (which was a relaunch of the character) used the exact same pattern as some origin story printed two years later in Amazing Fantasy #15. There’s this father figure called Uncle Ben (Bart) training young Johnny Bart to curb his temper and learn to use his guns wisely; Uncle Ben gets shot down cowardly by a couple of thugs; Johnny seeks and gets revenge on the thugs without killing them; Johnny then turns to being a misunderstood outlaw, all in one single issue with main stories drawn by Jack and inked by Dick Ayers. Now, if this is not a blueprint for the origin story of Spidey, and a Kirby pattern, I don’t what is...

“Kirby Kinetics” and “Kirby Obscura” are amongst my favorite columns of every TJKC issues. Hats off to Norris Burroughs and Barry Forshaw for remaining relevant issue after issue.

Thank you for reading my two-cents. This was my first time writing to your magazine (or any comic by the way!) after 45 years of being in the hobby. At last, the ice is broken!

Pierre Jolicoeur, Montreal, Canada You guys keep coming up with wonderful themes—I enjoyed the “Alpha” and “Omega” issues (#70-71) overall. And it was nice to see the Forever People finally get a front cover and the Black Racer rock out on a cover of his own.

They fit the themes perfectly. I can see why Jack went for a more action-type cover for print. This one was too easygoing, even for Death himself!

I can’t help but imagine what he’d have done with Hela and her passed-on minions in Valhalla!

It’s too bad that Kirby never got to do more of the Fourth World titles. More and more as I investigate the subtle nuances the King put in, and read what others have observed, it truly kicks that DC never let him continue, even if his god-war had been in the back of an anthology title. Highfather was “Alpha” as somewhat explained in NG #7 and FP #7, and Darkseid was clearly “Omega.” We got that in representations-of-a-sort, but never full explanations. Oh, well... I would’ve liked to have had more.

I’m really enjoying the Golden Age reprints, John. The Black Owl had a solid look, as do 92

almost all of Kirby’s characters, and I’d never run across a story of his until now.

Thanks for that.

Looking forward to KIRBY100. And as always, keep up the fine work.

Jerry Boyd, Palo Alto, CA

It was a pleasure to spend some time in TJKC #70’s “Tiki Room” and the sprawling looks back at Kirby’s fascination with ancient giant portraiture. Jack’s monsters graced some of the first comics books I ever owned, and imprinted themselves on me before I could read. What impressed me, though, about the TJKC piece were some remarks on Kirby’s career history in the chapter “Tiki, Protector of the Artists.”

My understanding of the “Marvel Method” is a partnership of mutual accommodation, one side handling the text, the other commanding the imagery. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the implication of what Mr. Guffey writes about Kirby’s manner of working with Mr. Schiff at DC—well before Kirby partners up with Lee— that Jack brought the so-called “Marvel Method” to Stan at then-Atlas? That Kirby in fact first contributed the formula that Lee touts later as his own creation?

Where did the author acquire the relevant information? He doesn’t sound, when he writes of it, as though he were drawing his own conclusion—although he affirms the value of such a resourcefulness in the researcher.

The old legend of Marvel’s nativity—and just which King brought what—seems about ready for a major “reset,” no?

Also enjoyed Mr. Kleefeld’s Devil Dinosaur examination. But look at the last panel of page 9 of “We Were Trapped in the Twilight World” (AMAZING ADVENTURES #3, August ’61) for a red Tyrannosaurus!

Ted Krasniewski, Jersey City, NJ Your magazine is fantastic and I’ve been reading it for years. I currently work for the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the East, in the North-Kivu Province. Incidentally, there is a town on the shore of Lake Edward called Kamandi and it really surprised me—it’s on the top North of the country.

Do you know from where or how Jack Kirby created that name? Is there any possibility that he knew Eastern Congo?

Philippe Beauverd The Captain America statue has been “touring” Brooklyn. Last summer it was at Prospect

Park, then over the fall at the basketball arena at Barclay’s Center. This Winter, Cap has been at a new shopping mall, Liberty View. I wrote about it here, http:// alphabettenthletter. blogspot.com/2017/03/ street-scene-captain-america-at-liberty.html

Attached is a photo with Simon and Kirby’s credit.

Alex Jay TJKC #71 is another excellent issue with many treats, but also quite a few talking points.

1) Is it really necessary, in celebrating Jack’s work, to constantly denigrate Stan Lee’s contribution to their years of collaboration? Volumes have been written about the (changing) nature of that collaboration, and there is no denying that Stan for many years received (and arguably sought) more than his share of credit in the creation of characters and plotlines, but that notwithstanding, he deserves a certain respect as editor, dialogue writer and general cheerleader for what was initially a struggling enterprise. He has undoubtedly been a company man and has benefited from that (more so than the freelancers he employed) for decades longer than his years of creative input, but the constant sniping at him (pgs. 13, 17, 85, 89) and even mockery (p. 74 e.g.) does no one any credit at this point. I’ve also felt for years that Stan didn’t have the power that Martin Goodman had before him as publisher, as Marvel became a part of a bigger corporation, and that certain decisions were made in spite of, rather than because of, him. True, he could have spoken out, but he stayed loyal to the company and, arguably, put security for his own family first by doing that. We could argue the point. (I would also love to know whose decision it really was to end the aging of characters like Peter Parker and the Richards and begin ‘the illusion of change’ at Marvel— Stan, or a business decision from above?)

Your “Opening Shot” on Jack’s record of killing-off characters ties into this too. I would argue that some early examples e.g. Sgt. Fury #18 and Avengers #9 were not down to Jack at all, since, apart from covers, he was not involved in their creation. So, whose ideas were those? Most likely, Stan’s (who as editor would in any case have a say in killing-off characters, again if only for business reasons).

2) Elsewhere, there are also some inconsistencies in your arguments concerning Jack’s plotting and long-term plans. If Jack was “forced by DC to shoehorn” Deadman into

Forever People (p.3), the question “how did it not occur to him to make Boston Brand part of Ertigan’s new book?” (i.e. The Demon—p.32) is easily answered. And the suggestion that Jack would have gone back to dangling plotlines had series not been canceled doesn’t really hold water; it goes counter to Jack’s constant forward motion—he didn’t go back, and was regularly more interested, and distracted, by new ideas. Continuity was not his forte.

3) Vince Colletta, another muchmaligned character, also got his share of brickbats this issue (courtesy of the 2017 San Diego Comic Fest Panel), though he had his defenders. The point was well made that it depends on when you came across his work on Kirby. Looking back, and with the evidence of Jack’s penciled pages, the shortcuts that Colletta took are nothing less than vandalism (though, as is generally acknowledged, he was not paid to create art, but to get things done fast and efficiently).

However, if you came across his work in 1965 on Fantastic Four (briefly) and Thor, you would have thought him an improvement on many inkers who came before him on these and other early Marvel books—George Bell/Roussos, Paul Reinman, even Chic Stone; only Dick Ayers did it for me at the time. In my opinion, Colletta raised the bar just at the time when the storytelling was developing into multi-part epics; Joe Sinnott raised the bar further from FF #44-on, as did Mike Royer later on at DC, in terms of staying true to Jack’s pencils.

4) The one article that disturbed me was “Angel to Esak,” described accurately as a “wild hypothesis” by Chris Beneke. While we are all aware that Jack experienced combat on a bloody scale in WWII, which stayed with him for the rest of his life, the suggestion that he killed a young German to stop him raising the alarm—a “boy,” a “child” (Chris’ words) with presumably long blond hair (if he was the inspiration for the long-haired blond characters listed) is worrying. With hair like that, he would not have been a soldier or combatant, and Jack’s actions would amount to a war crime. Without a shred of evidence, and without Jack or anyone else able to defend, explain or just plain refute, I found it distasteful rather than hypothetical.

Reading these comments back, I’m a little worried about my critical tone this time around—but it stems from the excellence of your publication in raising questions and my love for Jack Kirby’s work. We won’t all agree on everything, but hopefully we can all discuss these things with that uppermost in our minds.

Geraint Davies, Swansea, Wales Issue #70 of the Jack Kirby Collector.

Amazing. I still remember the day in 1996 when I first saw your great magazine. My band was on tour and had a couple days off in Los Angeles so I visited Golden Apple Comics on Melrose.

After browsing the store and going up to the cash register to pay, I noticed a display featuring every issue of TJKC. Wow, what’s this?! I 93

grabbed the latest issue on display (#9 with the FF cover) and went back to my hotel for some downtime, devoured the entire issue in one sitting, and went back the next day to purchase all the other issues. And when I got home from the tour, I immediately subscribed so as not to miss an issue (and haven’t missed one to this day).

From there, I learned about the Kirby-l mailing list and signed up. I made a lot of online friends through that list, but dropped off several years ago for various reasons. One of my favorite regular posters to the list was Stan Taylor.

He always had interesting and insightful things to say in his posts. We would occasionally correspond and even have good-natured disagreements from time to time. So, it was a real treat to see his lengthy article about Kirby’s involvement in the creation of Spider-Man. But it was bittersweet because at the end of the article I learned of Stan’s passing a couple years ago.

Though we never met in person, I thought of him as a friend and am deeply saddened by his passing. So, here’s to Stan Taylor: A real Kirby scholar who will be sorely missed.

Thanks for continuing to entertain and enlighten me all these years with your many fine publications. Make Mine Morrow!

Mark Reznicek Congratulations on reaching 70 issues! It’s good to finally see Stan Taylor’s Spider-Man essay in print. I have difficulties with some of the details, but he makes important connections with Kirby’s earlier work, in particular stories Kirby the freelancer was producing for other companies concurrently with his Atlas monster books.

Taking Stan’s article in concert with the research of Jean Depelley presented in TJKC #66, we can flesh out more of the timeline. Kirby worked up some “pitch” pages for the proposed Spider-Man character and gave them to Lee— Jim Shooter verifies their existence, and Taylor cites Shooter. This was Kirby’s MO for character creation. Based on the proposal, Lee asked Kirby for a five-page story. Kirby turned in the penciled pages and Lee gave them to Ditko to ink. Ditko pointed out to Lee that Kirby’s story was The Fly, and Lee asked Ditko for a different story. Taylor suggests that despite the claim, Lee and Ditko worked from Kirby’s plot ideas (and would continue to do so). Kirby and Ditko each created a cover for Amazing Fantasy #15... whose came first?

[Counter] to his claim that Kirby’s Spider-Man was “too heroic-looking,” Lee then asked Kirby for another story where Spider-Man meets the FF, and a cover to go with it. Depelley makes the case that there were three Ditko Spider-Man stories and a Kirby Spider-Man story lined up for Amazing Fantasy #15-18, and that Lee may have been undecided at that point who would be the regular artist. (Hence Lee’s tale about having to sneak a spider character past Martin Goodman into a title that was about to be canceled can also be laid to rest.) Kirby’s story was relegated to the back pages of the first FF annual months later, but his cover ran on Amazing Spider-Man #1. Ditko (or Brodsky) redrew the fight scene from Kirby’s pages to make it much shorter but still match the cover.

Taylor’s article shows that Kirby plots comprised a minimum of the first three published

stories. I like to think that Kirby’s pitch pages kept the Spider-Man plots going until Ditko was plotting on his own.

Now for the difficulties. At the beginning of the article Taylor dismisses Lee’s claim of “All the concepts were mine.” He then emphasizes Lee’s biggest roadblock to telling the truth: “Since Stan Lee was technically the only employee of the three men involved, suddenly all characters in Marveldom were ‘his’ sole creation and the artists merely illustrators of his tales.” Finally he asks and answers, “So does this mean that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko are lying? I don’t think so.” Taylor says he doesn’t think Lee was lying despite explaining Lee’s reason for lying. We won’t call it lying, then, we’ll call it a corporately-motivated alternate version of reality.

Taylor credits Goodman with monitoring DC’s sales and deciding the time was right for super-heroes, supposedly the impetus behind commissioning Kirby to go home and draw more super-heroes. The trouble with this assertion is that it relies heavily on the scenario developed in the ’70s and popularized by Lee to minimize Kirby’s legal claim, and may be every bit as reliable as Goodman’s mythical golf prowess.

Kirby’s own story, on record (so far) as early as 1968, is that for years he pestered Goodman through Lee to jump back into super-heroes based on Kirby’s experience of the sales of his own books at other companies during the time he was selling stories to Atlas/Marvel. I don’t question Goodman’s reputation for flooding the market with whatever was selling, but I do question a Kirby claim that resurfaces during the Cadence years with Kirby’s name absent.

In addition, Taylor suggests that “human frailty” was Lee’s great contribution to the SpiderMan character, noting that Ben Grimm without Lee’s input is just Rocky from Challengers. This idea is demonstrably false. Taylor was well versed in Kirby romance comics, but sadly was under the impression that the remarkable characterization and pacing came from Simon. We know through various interviews of S&K studio staffers and the very identification techniques cited by Taylor, that many of the lead stories in S&K comics of all genres in the ’50s were written, penciled, inked, and sometimes coloured by Jack Kirby.

It was Kirby who was responsible for the

terrific characterization in his S&K stories; it was Kirby who wrote the squabbling teammates of The Newsboy Legion set in his old neighbourhood; it was Kirby who wrote a character named Ben Grimm who essentially was Jack Kirby.

(Early on, Reed Richards was also Kirby, but when Kirby grew frustrated with Lee, Richards became Lee and The Thing repeatedly rebelled against him.) Further, from Ditko’s accounts of his Spider-Man story conferences with Lee, it was Ditko who wanted to include Peter Parker’s personal problems and interactions with the secondary characters at school, work, and home; Lee wanted to keep Spider-Man in costume and focus on the action. When Ditko’s approach proved successful, Lee took credit for it.

I wish Stan Taylor were still here to discuss this. I think he’d be fascinated by Jean Depelley’s findings.

Michael Hill, UNITED KINGDOM Stan Taylor’s examination of Jack Kirby’s role in the creation of Spider-Man made a very strong case. Taylor persuasively presented the forensic evidence of the pre-history of the character and, as a long-standing fan of the web-slinger, I can now confidently place him alongside all the other amazing Kirby creations and co-creations that we know and love so well. Like many other fans, I had been tempted to doubt Jack’s version of events whenever he claimed to be Spider-Man’s creator. We know how prone to exaggeration and memory loss the King could be. In that respect, Taylor’s work should be a game-changer. I believe that Jack was right all along.

One tiny omission stood out that would add even further credibility to the theory. On page 51, Taylor tells us how Chip Hardy had a campus jock to contend with: Moose Mulligan, who corresponded to Peter Parker’s arch-rival Flash Thompson. This was the place to draw attention to the fact that in Amazing Spider-Man #2, page 3, panel 1, Peter erroneously calls Flash “Moose.” In many reprints, this mistake gets corrected so you need to find the original (at left) to check. Was this a Freudian slip on Stan’s part?

Is it a sub-conscious admission of Jack’s guiding hand, and a very obvious sign that Flash was the new Moose? More concretely, did the scripter speak with Jack during the writing stage, with Kirby absent-mindedly still using this original name and it sticking in Stan’s head for the moment? This extra detail certainly adds support to Taylor’s view that Jack’s involvement with Spider-Man continued long after Amazing Fantasy #15. If Peter Parker was to call Flash the wrong name, it could have been anything, and the fact that he/Stan happened upon the name “Moose” is too big a coincidence.

Stephen Mumford, Durham, UK I was very disappointed with the “Spider-Man: The Case for Kirby” presentation. The author self-promoted his findings as “amazing,” “undeniable” and “irrefutable.” I found them, instead, to be a desperate display of blank-check favoritism.

If isolated elements in a different con94

text had appeared previously, is that, somehow, a smoking gun? It seems, based on this “case,” that every move on Spider-Man was Stan and Steve wronging Jack or desperately needing his undocumented offstage input. How about this alternate theory? Stan and Steve were creative and knew what they were doing.

Jack’s five pages were unused. So, a rare strike-out there. The new team, with a new approach, hit it out of the park. Because someone vainly attempted to play a slot machine first doesn’t entitle him to the winnings of later players who hit the jackpot.

Really, what was the goal here? To correct a supposed wrong? Or to demean the duo that made a quick success of Spider-Man using their own unique approach? Jack had hundreds of legitimate successes; characters where he made brilliant, vital contributions. Why the struggle to attach himself to this one? Is it a sore point that it became Marvel’s biggest success?

Or that he had a shot and it didn’t work out?

The author even escalates the matter from Jack’s old claims. All that would be understandable if new supporting evidence had come to light. But it’s all supposition and wishful thinking, taking an aspect from hither and yon and declaring it as solid, incontestable evidence. It reminds me of the pre-hero books, with similar names or an isolated power, being touted as a clear “prototype.” Creative debt, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Sid Jacobson’s memo did include spider webs. Okay. But it also noted a sinister long bony face and poison to be used as a paralyzing agent. In what issue of Spider-Man were those used? Jack’s rendition didn’t have wrist web-shooters but a web gun. That’s not a “modification” but a different concept. It could shoot a net but wouldn’t be much help going crosstown.

I must need glasses because Steve’s wonderfully distinctive Vulture design didn’t seem “an exact duplicate” of the 1942 Buzzard to me. No wings and a masked face are identical? How’s that? Lacking any creative spark, did Stan and Steve go back twenty years and reread Jack’s Manhunter story for inspiration? It’s really insulting to them to imply they couldn’t and didn’t do it on their own. I wouldn’t like someone to treat Jack in that contemptuous/dismissive manner, and it’s no better to see others, in his name, doing just that to the Lee/Ditko team.

We did see a number of later Spider-Man tales from Jack. Shouldn’t those, if Jack masterminded the operation, be the best stories imaginable? Unfortunately, they mostly involved brawling with the Fantastic Four.

Is The Fox, from Strange Tales Annual #2, a solidly memorable Spider-Man villain? Why no Aunt May, Jonah or classmates involved in those tales? Was Peter’s home, work and school life of no importance? Even in that short brawl with the Torch, in #8, Spider-Man was way out of character as the instigator of trouble.

As for Jack adding “more oomph” to SpiderMan, does anyone seriously believe the patchwork cover to #10 is an improvement over Steve’s original design? If so, why the pick-up of a Ditko Spider-Man on the otherwise all-Kirby Marvel Tales #1 cover? Likewise, why the Ditko patched figure covering Jack’s rendition of

Man, at the expense of Stan and Steve’s achievement. So, if it can’t be Jack as the responsible party, tear the other two down.

And now, to put the redesign of Iron Man in question? Why? Is it that Steve is not allowed to succeed on anything previously a Film by Glenn B Fleming touched by Jack?

Finally, as to the “little he 2017 marks the centennial of American comic book artist and writer Jack Kirby's birth. Kirby [Ditko] has said about the crecreated (or co-created) most of the iconic ation of Spider-Man,” Steve has characters we continue to see in comics and had many essays published, by on film today; Robin Snyder, on the matter.

Captain America, the Avengers, the Fantastic Maybe it’s more a case of Four, the Incredible Hulk, Nick Fury, X-Men, people not knowing of them or, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, the Black Panther, the worse, not paying attention?

Mighty Thor, New Gods, Mister Miracle, Doctor Doom and many, many more.

I was delighted when Marvel finally credited Jack for his In 1991, during my second trip to the many valid accomplishments.

Kirby home, I was able to record part Long overdue. But, it shouldn’t of my talk with the King of Comics. be isolated solely to him. All Jack was open and warm, entirely at ease with the presence of a the writers and artists in that camera, and he talked about his category should receive the life in general and service in the same dignity and treatment.

Second World War. Claiming Jack was overlooked This film has never before been as responsible for Spider-Man Order the DVD at seen in its entirety and serves as www.glennbfleming.com seems mostly a shot at Stan an historical document, showing $20/£12 (includes and Steve rather than something Jack Kirby in his own home, in his postage) or email own studio, talking about his clear and true. Is this something GBFJK.FILM@gmail.com own life, in his own words.

TwoMorrows actively supports for further details. or should a disclaimer have This film is unique. been used?

If the unused Kirby pencil pages ever come to light, I’d love to see them printed. But, Spider-Man in the third FF Annual? For that matter, until such time, or the emergence of compelling eviif Jack designed the costume, as proclaimed in Kirby dence, it would seem best to let the matter rest. It just Unleashed, why was that line removed when it was tends to tarnish Jack’s legacy rather than enhance it. reprinted?

Joe Frank Jack has claimed responsibility for Spider-Man. But where was the evidence? He may well have given (As time’s gone on, we’ve seen that Kirby actually Marvel the name. But that alone doesn’t make him was more involved with Spidey’s beginnings than the creator. Are unused ideas or past career overlap some have led us to believe. And Jack wasn’t one enough to make someone a creator over the efforts of to make bogus claims about his work, so I have two men who directly contributed their own distinctive to believe he genuinely felt slighted about it. That style and concepts? to me means it bears further investigation, and I Jack had been doing heroes for twenty years at think Stan Taylor did an excellent job (despite some that point. Yet, in that one instance, against all odds, large reaches here and there). He’s sadly not here it was Steve, a relative newcomer to super-heroes, to discuss and modify the article, so I let it go as-is, that, along with Stan, made it work. Is that instance so feeling there’s way more valuable info added to the unsettling, so impossible to take, that their efforts must discussion because of it, than anything incorrect or be denounced as tainted, here, at every opportunity? misleading. It was my call as editor; maybe a bad one, That behavior needlessly detracts from Jack’s but the goal IS to correct a wrong, if one exists, not many successes. After all, if someone is willing to to demean Lee and Ditko, both of whom deserve (and take credit for the accomplishments of others, it puts enjoy) immense credit for the character. I don’t think even his legitimate achievements under skepticism. the article was trying to say Jack is the sole creator Kirby fans should be especially aware, as it was done of Spidey, just that he played an integral part in the to him so often. character ever existing. And ask yourself: In light of For any declarations of objective research, it seems what we now know, would Spider-Man exist today if the detectives only want to build Jack up, on SpiderJack hadn’t brought it to Stan Lee to begin with?)

www.glennbfleming.com

Here’s a tentative list of upcoming themes, so get writing, and send us copies of your art!

FATHERS & SONS! Odin, Zeus, Darkseid, and other lousy parental role models!

KIRBY’S World THAT WAS! We set the wayback machine for Jack’s looks at the past!

MONSTERS & BUGS! Atlas Monsters, Thing vs. Hulk, Frankenstein, Deviants, and other monsters from Jack’s work. Plus Mantis, Forager, AntMan, Lightning Lady, and other creepy-crawlies!

KIRBY’S World That’s HERE! How Jack looked into his crystal ball to predict the future!

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID! Stan & Jack’s comments about their Marvel Universe work!

Got a theme idea? Write us! We treat these themes very loosely, so anything you send could get used.

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(below) Utilitas zoth#72 Credits: ecas fermentet bellus John Morrow, Editor/Designer/ saburre. Perspicax Cornerman syrtes spinosus circumgrediet ut THANKS TO OUR Contributors: Jerry Boyd • Norris Burroughs Jon B. Cooke • Jean Depelley Scott Dunbier • Mark Evanier Shane Foley • Barry Forshaw Joe Frank • Joe Gill • Dean Haspiel Rand Hoppe • Larry Houston Chris Irving • Gil Kane • Jeremy Kirby Sean Kleefeld • Richard Kolkman Tom Kraft • Joe Kubert Harry Lampert • Paul S. Levine Scott McCloud • Adam McGovern Sheldon Moldoff • Eamonn Murphy Will Murray • Russell Payne David Penalosa • Gary Picariello Steve Rude • Randy Sargent Alvin Schwartz • Steve Sherman Joe Simon • Joe Sinnott Mickey Spillane • James Van Hise Tom Ziuko • and of course The Kirby Estate The Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org) and whatifkirby.com If we forgot anyone, please let us know!

Contribute!

The Jack Kirby Collector is put together with submissions from Jack’s fans around the world. We don’t pay for submissions, but if we print art or articles you submit, we’ll send you a free copy of the issue it appears in.

Submit art & articles by mail, or e-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com

NEXT ISSUE: Don’t blink or you might miss JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #73, the ONE-SHOTS issue! In it, we cover Kirby’s best (and worst) short spurts on his wildest concepts: ANIMATION IDEAS, DINGBATS, JUSTICE INC., ATLAS, MANHUNTER, THE PRISONER, and more! There’s also an interview with MIKE ROYER on his work with Jack and elsewhere, a rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, panels from the 2017 Kirby Centennial celebration, pencil art galleries, and some one-shot surprises! Sporting BIG BARDA #1 cover finishes by MIKE ROYER! Look for it just in time for the holidays!

Parting Shot

For its 200th issue, Fantastic Four sported a cover by Jack, featuring his all-time classic battling pair, Mr. Fantastic and Dr. Doom. As that illo closed the book on Jack’s FF work, so do we close out this issue.

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ALTER EGO #148

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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!

STAN LEE’s 95th birthday! Rare 1980s LEE interview by WILL MURRAY—GER APELDOORN on Stan’s non-Marvel writing in the 1950s—STAN LEE/ROY THOMAS e-mails of the 21st century—and more special features than you could shake Irving Forbush at! Also FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), BILL SCHELLY, and MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Colorful Marvel multi-hero cover

by Big JOHN BUSCEMA!

Golden Age artist FRANK THOMAS (The Owl! The Eye! Dr. Hypno!) celebrated by Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt’s MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Plus the scintillating (and often offbeat) Golden & Silver Age super-heroes of Western Publishing’s DELL & GOLD KEY comics! Art by MANNING, DITKO, KANE, MARSH, GILL, SPIEGLE, SPRINGER, NORRIS, SANTOS, THORNE, et al.! Plus FCA, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

GREG HILDEBRANDT (of the Hildebrandt Brothers) reveals his working methods, BRAD WALKER (Aquaman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Birds of Prey, Legends of the Dark Knight) gives a how-to interview and demo, regular columnist JERRY ORDWAY, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY’s Comic Art Bootcamp! Mature Readers Only.

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“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!

100-PAGE SPECIAL featuring Bronze Age Fanzines and Fandom! Buyer’s Guide, Comic Book Price Guide, DC’s Comicmobile, Super DC Con ’76, Comic Reader, FOOM, Amazing World of DC, Charlton Bullseye, Squa Tront, & more! Featuring ALAN LIGHT, BOB OVERSTREET, SCOTT EDELMAN, BOB GREENBERGER, JACK C. HARRIS, TONY ISABELLA, DAVID ANTHONY KRAFT, BOB LAYTON, PAUL LEVITZ, MICHAEL USLAN, and others!

ROCK ’N’ ROLL COMICS! Flash Gordon star SAM J. JONES interview, KISS in comics, Marvel’s ALICE COOPER, T. Rex’s MARC BOLAN interviews STAN LEE, PAUL McCARTNEY, Charlton’s Partridge Family, David Cassidy, and Bobby Sherman comics, Marvel’s Steeltown Rockers, Monkees comics, & Comic-Con band Seduction of the Innocent.

With AMY CHU, JACK KIRBY, BILL MUMY, ALAN WEISS, and others!

MERCS AND ANTIHEROES! Deadpool’s ROB LIEFELD and FABIAN NICIEZA interviewed!

Histories of Cable, Taskmaster, Deathstroke the Terminator, the Vigilante, and Wild Dog, plus… Archie meets the Punisher?? Featuring TERRY BEATTY, MAX ALLAN COLLINS, PAUL KUPPERBERG, BATTON LASH, JEPH LOEB, DAVID MICHELINIE, MARV WOLFMAN, KEITH POLLARD, and others!

Deadpool vs. Cable cover by LIEFELD!

ALL-STAR EDITORS ISSUE! Past and present editors reveal “How I Beat the Dreaded Deadline Doom”! Plus: ARCHIE GOODWIN and MARK GRUENWALD retrospectives, E. NELSON BRIDWELL interview, DIANA SCHUTZ interview, ALLAN ASHERMAN revisits DC’s ’70s editorial department, Marvel Assistant Editors’ Month, and a history of PERRY WHITE! With an unpublished 1981 Captain America cover by MIKE ZECK!

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

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BRICKJOURNAL #48

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!

The legacy and influence of WALLACE WOOD, with a comprehensive essay about Woody’s career, extended interview with Wood assistant RALPH REESE (artist for Marvel’s horror comics, National Lampoon, and underground), a long chat with cover artist HILARY BARTA (Marvel inker, Plastic Man and America’s Best artist with ALAN MOORE), plus our usual columns, features, and the humor of HEMBECK!

THE WORLD OF LEGO MECHA! Learn the secrets and tricks of building mechs with some of the best mecha builders in the world! Interviews with BENJAMIN CHEH, KELVIN LOW, LU SIM, FREDDY TAM, DAVID LIU, and SAM CHEUNG! Plus: Minifigure customizing from JARED K. BURKS, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art, & more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Fall 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Winter 2018

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Oct. 2017

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