Jack Kirby Collector #77

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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #77•SUMMER 2019•$10.95

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with ERIC POWELL•MICHAEL CHO•MARK EVANIER•SEAN KLEEFELD•BARRY FORSHAW•ADAM McGOVERN•NORRIS BURROUGHS•SHANE FOLEY•JERRY BOYD

STARRING

JACK KIRBY•DIRECTED BY JOHN MORROW•FEATURING RARE KIRBY ARTWORK•A TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING RELEASE

Monster, Forager TM & © DC Comics • Goom TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Lightning Lady TM & © Jack Kirby Estate

New Gods TM & © DC Comics.

Contents

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Monsters & Bugs!

OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ( something’s bugging the editor) FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 (S&K show the monsters inside us) RETROSPECTIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 (from Vandoom to Von Doom)

C o l l e c t o r

ISSUE #77, SUMMER 2019

INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY . . . . . 23 (you recall Giganto, don’t you?)

KIRBY KINETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 (the FF’s strange evolution) INFLUENCEES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 (cover inker Eric Powell speaks) GALLERY 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 (monsters, in pencil) HORRORFLIK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 (Jack’s ill-fated Empire Pictures deal) KIRBY OBSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 (vintage 1950s monster stories) JACK KIRBY MUSEUM . . . . . . . . . 48 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) POW!ER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 (two monster Kirby techniques) UNEXPLAINED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 (three major myths of Kirby’s) BOYDISMS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 (monsters, all the way back to the ’40s) KIRBY AS A GENRE . . . . . . . . . . . 64 (Michael Cho on his Kirby influences) ANTI-MAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 (we go foraging for bugs) GALLERY 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 (the bugs attack!)

UNDISCOVERED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 (a blue bug in Sweden) JACK F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 ( Mark Evanier moderates a panel on Kirby’s monster influence) COLLECTOR COMMENTS . . . . . . . 94 PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Co ver inks & color: ERIC POWELL COPYRIGHTS: All-Widow, Dragorin, Darkseid, Demon, Dingbats of Danger Street, Farley Fairfax, Forever People, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, Kliklak, Lightray, Lupek, Man Who Collected Planets, Mantis, Mister Miracle, My Greatest Adventure, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, Orion, Prime One, The Bug/Forager, The Howler, The Negative Man TM & © DC Comics • Ant-Man, Avengers, Black Talon, Blip, Bucky, Captain America, Challengers of the Unknown, Colossus, Creature from Krogarr, Destroyer, Devil Dinosaur, Diablo, Dr. Doom, Dragoom, Fantastic Four, Fin Fang Foom, Gargantus, Giant-Man, Giganto, Goliath, Gomdulla, Goom, Gor-Kill, Grogg, Groot, Hulk, Human Torch, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, It, Klagg, Krang, Loki, Man in the Bee-Hive, Metallo, Modok, Mongu, Monster at My Window, Monster in the Iron Mask, Monsters on Mercury, Monsters on the Prowl, Monstrollo, Moonboy, Mr. Fantastic, Mr. Morgan’s Monster, Mummex, Ninth Wonder of the World, Orogo, Rick Jones, Scarecrow, Shagg, Sporr, Spragg, SubMariner, Swarm Queen, Taboo, The Weed, Thing, Thing From the Hidden Swamp, Thor, Triton, Trull, Vandoom, Where Monsters Dwell, X The Thing That Lived, Xemnu TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy, Phantom of the Opera, Six Million Dollar Man, Wolf Man, TM & © Universal • Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Island of Lost Souls TM & © Paramount • Avenger, Justice Inc. TM & © Street & Smith or successors in interest • Black Magic, Fighting American, “A Husband for Tracy!” © Joe Simon and Jack Kirby Estates • Chimichanga , Lulu the Bearded Girl, The Goon TM & © Eric Powell • The Fly TM & © Joe Simon Estate • Green Hornet TM & © Green Hornet, Inc. • Tales from the Danksyde TM & © Rick Becker & Vince Dugar • Close Encounters of the Third Kind TM &© Columbia Pictures • Damon Hunter/The Raven TM & © RubySpears • Thunderfoot, “Street Code”, Unknown Insect Man, Captain Victory, Egghead, Dr. Mortalis, Mindmaster, Lightning Lady, Insectons, Moon-Bear, Secret City Saga TM & © Jack Kirby Estate • Blue Bolt, Gorgo, Heaven’s Gate, Legend of Bigfoot TM & © the respective owners

From Demon #13 comes this incredible pencil page, showing that even as Kirby was relying on old monster films for inspiration, the series was anything but a copycat. Thanks to Eric Powell for his stunning inking and coloring on our cover!

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 26, No. 77, Summer 2019. Published quarterly by and © TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Single issues: $12 postpaid US ($18 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $48 Economy US, $70 International, $20 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

Something’s Been Buggin by editor John Morrow

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ay back in TJKC #13, I attempted an issue based partially on Kirby’s monster comics; but the theme was “Monsters, magic, and mystery”, so in that humble early attempt, I didn’t have the space (or at that early point, the expertise) to do justice to Jack’s work in the monster genre. And it’s bugged me ever since.

That material isn’t as near and dear to my heart as Kirby’s super-heroes or Kid Gangs, and it’s not as commercial (as the super-heroes, anyway). So poor old Goom, Googam, Gomdulla, Grottu, Grogg, and all the others whose names didn’t start with a “G” have been waiting to emerge from a bottomless pit of comics history obscurity, biding their time before they could strike against mankind (or at least Kirby fandom) until I finally found a “hook” to wrap a Monster issue around, and get inspired to take another, hopefully more definitive hot shot at them.

That hook came in the form of my buddy Pete Von Sholly, who knows as much about monsters and horror as anyone. He pitched me the idea of a monster-themed issue last year, by offering up some suggestions for strips and characters that I hadn’t realized would fit the traditional category of “monster.” Inspired, the gears in my brain started turning, and I realized that I had been limiting my conception of what a “monster”

was. It was only a short hop from the origins of Groot and Fin Fang Foom, to Jack’s delving into how scary bugs and insects could be—especially if they were irradiated, turned giant-size, or were part of a cosmic infestation.

Entomophobia (also called insectophobia) is an unrealistic fear of bugs. As a kid, giant southern cockroaches were regular visitors to our Alabama home in the sweltering summers, and to this day, while I can squash anything from a spider to a wasp with nary a flinch, the sight of a roach makes me break out in a cold sweat. (But I still kill the little creeps.)

Did Kirby suffer from entomophobia? Growing up in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1920s, it’s a safe bet there were no regular visits from an exterminator, and Jack likely encountered cockroaches (and worse) that would give mine a run for their money when he turned on the kitchen light at night.

Consider Joe Simon’s recollection in his book The Comic Book Makers, about how early in their careers, he took Jack out to lunch at a 2

ng Me Numerous images in this and every issue are courtesy of the Jack Kirby Museum and whatifkirby.com— thanks, Rand and Tom!

restaurant to discuss teaming up as a creative duo. As Jack started eating a fruit cobbler dessert called a Brown Betty, he suddenly turned ashen, saying, “What’s in this?” When Simon told him it was raisins, Kirby exclaimed, “I can’t eat anymore!” and later admitted the raisins resembled the crawling insects that infested the tenement where his family lived.

Just like me (and maybe you?), Kirby hated bugs!

Whether it was a diagnosable psychiatric condition or just an aversion, he managed to channel that to develop a veritable army of insect antagonists throughout his career, from his early Blue Beetle strip in 1940, to the 1950s “Silver Spider”-based Spiderman (no hyphen), along with 1959’s The Fly and Spider Spry with Simon, as well as 1962’s “The Man in the Ant Hill” (who became Ant-Man alongside The Wasp) and “The Man in the Beehive” (who didn’t become Bee-Man, but Simon co-opted that name a few years later)—plus all those earlier Atlas monsters based on insects.

Jon B. Cooke has opined that Jack may’ve picked up on at least a couple of mass media items that would’ve kept creepy crawlers at the back of his mind, while raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Silent Spring

by Rachel Carson is a 1962 book on the harmful effects on the environment of pesticide overuse. It led to pesticides becoming a major public issue after a CBS-TV special about them was broadcast on April 3, 1963, and the ensuing publicity eventually caused the total banning of DDT. Another key influence for Jack may’ve been the 1971 independent film The Hellstrom Chronicle, a cross between a documentary and a horror movie. It argues that insects, with their intelligence, teamwork and instincts, are battling humans for supremacy of our planet—and we humans won’t stand a chance in the end. One only has to look at the opening Forager sequence of New Gods #9 to see how this could’ve inspired Kirby. (And even earlier, his character Mantis started life as a concept drawing from the mid-1960s, before New Gods was fully formed.)

I personally was introduced to Kirby’s work via his most sympathetic insect character, Kliklak from Kamandi #12. Later, Jack extrapolated on militaristic bug colonies to their fullest in his 1980s series Captain Victory, with its evil Insectons and their queen bee, the Lightning Lady. Even his prose novel The Horde dealt with a Chinese army attacking from underground, swarming out of their subterranean strongholds like ants to conquer the world.

After assessing all this, I finally had what I felt could be an interesting issue on Monsters & Bugs, so then it was a matter of what to include. Will Murray agreed to update his near-perfect 1984 article about the Atlas monster comics. And in a nice bit of serendipity, Tom Kraft of the Jack Kirby Museum had separately planned a panel discussion on the topic of Kirby’s monster movie influences, unaware of my plans for this issue’s theme. As the opening slide on his presentation, Tom even used the same Demon #13 splash page that Eric Powell so generously inked (and creepily colored!) for this issue’s Creature From The Black Lagoon homage cover. (Spooky!) From there, the rest all came together, and very nicely, I might add. I hope you agree when you read it.

But if you don’t, this issue still has value. Just roll it up into a tight cylinder, grasp if firmly in your hand, and swat the first flying or crawling creature you see. You just might be saving the Earth from being overrun by an alien horde, set on world domination. H (previous page) September 1939’s issue of The Avenger pulp magazine contained the story “The Monster Bug”, which was later adapted by Denny O’Neil and Kirby in DC Comics’ Justice Inc. #3 (Oct. 1975). Here are Jack’s pencils from that issue.

The Avenger pulp novels were first written by Paul Ernst under publisher Street & Smith’s house pseudonym “Kenneth Robeson.” The character appeared in The Avenger magazine from September 1939–September 1942, and in Clues Detective magazine from September 1942–May 1943. The character disappeared until writer Ron Goulart took over as “Kenneth Robeson” and wrote twelve more Avenger novels, published in 1974-75 by Warner Books.

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Foundations

Here’s a never-reprinted story from Young Brides #7 (V2, #1), September 1953. “A Husband For Tracy” shows that sometimes, we have to fight the monsters inside ourselves. Restoration and color by Chris Fama.

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In Memoriam: GREG THEAKSTON (1953-2019) Greg “Theakstonized” much of Jack’s early work, delighting fans with his various reprint series, all in glorious black-&-white. His dedication to Kirby’s legacy inspires my work. - Chris Fama

GET A FREE COPY! Help us find a few missing pages, and better scans of others. Anonymity will be respected.

JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

In cooperation with DC COMICS, TwoMorrows compiles a tempestuous trio of neverseen 1970s Kirby projects! These are the final complete, unpublished Jack Kirby stories in existence, presented here for the first time! Included are: Two unused DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales (Kirby’s final Kid Gang group, inked by MIKE ROYER and D. BRUCE BERRY, and newly colored for this book)! TRUE-LIFE DIVORCE, the abandoned newsstand magazine that was too hot for its time (reproduced from Jack’s pencil art—and as a bonus, we’ve commissioned MIKE ROYER to ink one of the stories)! And SOUL LOVE, the unseen ’70s romance book so funky, even a jive turkey will dig the unretouched inks by VINCE COLLETTA and TONY DeZUNIGA. PLUS: There’s Kirby historian JOHN MORROW’s in-depth examination of why these projects got left back, concept art and uninked pencils from DINGBATS, and a Foreword and Introduction by ’70s Kirby assistants MARK EVANIER & STEVE SHERMAN! SHIPS OCTOBER 2019!

(160-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-091-5

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Retrospective

(above) The cover for Tales to Astonish #34’s “Monster At My Window”, and the [spoiler alert] twist ending to the tale, are a prime example of the best of Kirby’s Atlas monster stories. (next page, bottom) It’s Von Doom... er...

Vandoom himself!

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here were giants in those days, back around 1961—real giants, and their names were Thorr, Oog, Grottu, Gorgolla, Shagg, Fin Fang Foom, Lee, Kirby, and Ditko.

corporation names: Zenith, Vista, and Atlas, and had no umbrella company logo. And Marvel wasn’t the only comic outfit cashing in on the B-movie-

inspired nuclear monster fad. Even Batman and Tomahawk were tangling with aliens and other-dimensional creatures in their own magazines. Well, maybe Dell and Gold Key ignored the trend; and over at the American Comics Group, where Richard Hughes suffered in the same writer/editor position enjoyed by Stan Lee at Marvel, the focus was on the supernatural with a sprinkling of aliens and dinosaurs. No monsters allowed.

In truth, it wasn’t until 1959 that the true Marvel Monsters began materializing. Marvel at the time was on shaky ground, its super-heroes long gone, and was sustained by the likes of Kid Colt, Outlaw; Millie the Model; and a number of colorless supernatural titles written by Stan Lee and others and drawn by a train of obscure artists. A company purge in the summer of 1957 killed off most of the supernatural comics, including the company’s first title, Marvel Tales.

They roamed the four-colored forests of Tales of Suspense, Journey into Mystery, Strange Tales, and Tales to Astonish with impunity, towering over their peers, hurling their bombastic challenges to a frightened, insignificant humanity until, one by one, they died out; those atomic dinosaurs, supplanted by the new masters of the comic book jungle, the Marvel super-heroes.

It was an older, more simple time before the Marvel Universe had taken over the global consciousness–– yes, even before the fabled Marvel Age of Comics. This was a formative era unto itself, long after the Golden Age of Comics, which might be called the Marvel Age of Monsters. Of its glory I will sing.

Of course, Marvel Comics wasn’t called Marvel Comics back in the early Sixties. Publisher Martin Goodman copyrighted his titles under a maze of different

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Then Jack Kirby wandered over from DC, where he had produced Challengers of the Unknown (who battled countless giant monsters), and began doing some of the science-fiction stories for Strange Tales and Journey into Mystery (two survivors dating back to the early 1950s) as well as Strange Worlds, Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense (all three of which were launched in September 1958).

Next thing you know, the four-color pages were bursting with “I Unleashed Shagg Upon the World” (in which the Sphinx comes to life), “I Created Sporr! The Thing that Could Not Die!” (about a veerry big amoeba), and the unforgettable “Creature From Krogarr!” Stan Lee never showed this kind of imagination in his pre-1959

changing and the pace kept accelerating. With an eye to increasingly alarming headlines, Kirby used all of this for story fodder.

“The monster phenomenon got started primarily just because people were concerned about science,” he recalled. “People were concerned about radiation and what would happen to animals and people who were exposed to that kind of thing.”

But Kirby wasn’t alone. That same year, a self-effacing young artist named Steve Ditko came over from Charlton and lent his unique talents to the revitalization of several titles by drawing solidly imaginative short features. Initially, he also inked many Kirby stories, and for decades afterward, Stan Lee would tell fans Ditko was his favorite inker on The King. When Lee set Western artist Dick Ayers to inking Kirby, he found a perfect match, as far as style and efficiency was concerned, freeing up Kirby to turn in more simplified pencils which Ayers would embellish as co-artist. This also freed up Ditko to concentrate on his own stuff. And it saved the career of Dick Ayers, who was about to leave comics for the post office.

“I enjoyed the monsters,” Ayers told me. “They had terrific names––Sporr and Fin Fang Foom and all that.”

“An inker like Dick Ayers would be bold and stark,” Kirby once observed, “and you’d find the style in a bold and stark attitude, and of course, that’s interesting.”

Another new recruit was Don Heck, who stepped in to fill the empty shoes of the prolific and versatile Joe Maneely, who had just died, and whose covers had given Marvel its house look prior to Kirby taking over cover chores.

“It was the summer of ’58 or somewhere around there,” Heck told me.

“I can remember the first job I did and it was tough after having not done any comics for over a year. It was one of these Mysteries. I used to call [Stan] all the time [about] these five-page stories, you know?

Some of that Mystery stuff was really poorly written. Oh, God. How do I get intrigued enough to get this thing off the ground?”

By the beginning of 1960, Stan Lee had weeded out the also-rans from his stable, trained a small group of replacements to work from his plots and brother Larry Lieber’s scripts, and established a new house look to his four surviving fantasy titles, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense, and a new entry begun in 1961, Amazing Adventures. Lee didn’t bother

scripts, so I would guess it was Kirby, whose mother was born near Transylvania and who told him some pretty wild legends when he was a kid, on whose doorstep we can lay the credit—or blame. For Kirby had been doing stuff like this for DC’s mystery titles, occasionally recycling concepts and plots for Marvel.

“I always enjoyed doing monster books,” he told Gary Groth.

“Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge––what kind of monster would fascinate people? I couldn’t draw anything that was too outlandish or too horrible. I never did that. What I did draw was something intriguing. There was something about this monster that you could live with. If you saw him, you wouldn’t faint dead away.

There was nothing disgusting in his demeanor. There was nothing about him that repelled you. My monsters were lovable monsters. I gave them names—some were evil and some were good.”

This was a time when the Universal monster movies were first showing on TV, leading to the launch of Famous Monsters of Filmland early in ’58. Baby Boomers liker myself were discovering the unbridled charm of monsters. In day-to-day reality, the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and the Space Age were converging. The world was

I Remember... Vandoom, Master of Marvel Monsters

by Will Murray • This article originally appeared in Comics Collector #3, Spring, 1984, and is revised and expanded for this appearance.

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to give them separate identities or slants. In fact, if you stripped the covers, which contained the indicia, you couldn’t tell one from the other. He was essentially publishing a weekly fantasy magazine with interchangeable contents.

Each issue stabilized into roughly this line-up: Jack Kirby, usually inked by Dick Ayers, led off with a monster epic of anywhere from seven to 13 pages; next would be a moody five-pager by Don Heck (or occasionally Paul Reinman or Joe Sinnott); and Steve Ditko usually closed out the book with a gentle thought-provoker of the same length. Stan always wrote the Ditko story. He plotted the others, which his brother, Larry Lieber, anonymously scripted.

Lieber is the unsung hero of the monster era. When Lee had to let go of his staff scripters in 1958, he brought in younger brother Larry and trained him to write monster stories. I interviewed Lieber, and he recounted his collaborations with Stan and Jack: “Actually what [Stan] did do was he liked his own plot, so he made up all the plots and he would give me a brief plot. Now remember I was

just learning to write, so he’d give me the synopsis and I’d go home and sit in the park in Tudor City or wherever and break it down and try to figure out the story and put in the dialogue, and then he’d go over my dialogue and captions. He was very good. I learned how to write. If you’ve never written before, you don’t know anything about the rhythm of a line. At any rate, I was writing those stories and what I remember about them that probably is of interest is that Jack Kirby was so fast. He could draw about six pages a day or something. And I was very slow as a writer. I was learning and I had to be very careful.

Kirby was just very fast so I was always hurrying to feed Kirby stories. He needed them. I just remember Saturday night running to the post office on 42nd Street, which was open on Saturday and Sunday, and getting it out to Jack. Whew! Oh, boy! Now he’ll have a story. Jack would just turn that stuff out, and he was drawing all the monsters.”

Although Lieber wrote full scripts, he did not invent the infamously overblown monster names like Korilla and Rombuu.

“Those, Stan made up,” Lieber insisted.

For slightly more than four years, this tight little team wove their magic and birthed their magnificent monsters.

But they were nice monsters.

They might wreck an entire city, but they never ate anyone or drank their blood. For all the havoc they raised, you never saw dead bodies or even seriously wounded victims. I doubt if anyone ever had nightmares over them or lay awake wondering if he might suffer the fate of the hero of Lee and Kirby’s classic “Monster At My Window.” No, these were monsters that made a young mind think; sometimes, they even made you feel….

Interviewed on Station WBAI in 1987, Kirby told host Warren Reese, “Well, I don’t think that monsters are ever mysterious. Monsters in human or inhuman form are living things with problems which vex them sorely in some way, and therefore they’re inevitably involved in some sort of conflict in which anybody can get hurt.

I don’t think monsters zero-in on anyone in particular, and I think that’s why they are generally pitied more 14

than feared, and I felt the same way about them. I felt that monsters in some way have problems.”

As Jack saw it, many were misunderstood monsters, hounded by humanity for reacting violently to unwarranted attacks or the violent encroaching of civilization. And that’s why so many young readers sympathized with them, as they did with the reptilian protagonists of the hit 1961 monster film, Gorgo.

If you wished, you could break down the Marvel Monsters into various phyla, species, and sub-categories, but to me there were only three broad classifications that mattered. Some Marvel Monsters were gray, some were green, but most were brown. Actually, these last were a rich, orange-brown, a color I call “Thing-brown” because it’s the precise hue given Ben Grimm in the early Fantastic Fours. I suppose you could call the gray monsters “Hulk-gray” and the green monsters “Hulk-green” after the coloration of The Incredible Hulk in his first few issues, but that would be ridiculous. Besides, the best Marvel Monsters were always Thing-brown. Take my word for it.

Whatever their colors, their number and variety were legion. There was Fin Fang Foom, who terrorized Red China. So what if he looked just like Grogg, who preceded him? Both were Chinese dragons, weren’t they? And Goliath, an orange-brown amphibian behemoth—he looked suspiciously like another aquatic orange-brown behemoth, Gargantus, who appeared in Strange Tales #80 the same month Goliath surfaced in Journey into Mystery #63, and who spawned a sequel story. When Marvel later reprinted the Goliath story in Where Monsters Dwell, Goliath was renamed “Gigantus,” and when the Gargantus yarn and its sequel were reprinted, he was renamed “Gigantus” and “Gargantus, respectively, furthering the confusion. Marvel might as well have not bothered—Lee and his team were always repeating themselves. After all, there were only so many monsters a writer could dream up, especially under the restrictive Comics Code.

Vampires were out, for instance; werewolves

condemned as verboten. But mummies were acceptable.

Trouble was they weren’t very monstrous, so about once a year, Lee published a story about a giant mummy climbing out of the pyramids. There were Mummex, King of Mummies; Gomdulla, the Living Pharaoh; and the unnamed mummified thing from “When the Mummy Walks.” It was explained in each case that the mummies are huge because they were actually from other planets and had slumbered in suspended animation until the time was right to awaken and conquer.

It wasn’t very plausible, but this was why Stan Lee insisted on calling his masterpieces “fantasy” instead of science-fiction. Fantasy doesn’t have to make sense; it just is.

You had to ignore a lot of logic when you consumed a Lee/Leiber/Kirby epic. They took two approaches to creating their creatures. There was the “It Came From Outer Space” approach involving aliens, then there was

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(previous page, bottom left) Journey Into Mystery #77 (with a little Goom thrown in for good measure) was Jack’s reference when he drew this illo from the Valentine’s Day sketchbook he created for wife Roz in the mid-1970s. (below center) 1970s reprints in titles like Where Creatures Roam (here reprinting TTA #31), were many readers’ first exposure to these classic creatures.

(below) Though Kirby long predicted Marvel characters would make it to the Big Screen, it’s doubtful he thought Groot would be a breakout star when he drew him for TTA #13.

the “Science Spawned It” approach. Atomic or natural accidents usually caused the latter. You could accept a conquest-bent Martian who spoke English and shrugged off H-bombs, but when delta-rays bombarded an ordinary scarecrow in Strange Tales #81, it became 40 feet tall, spoke (“I... can... think... can... speak... I am alive!”) and laid waste to a city while punishing the evil banker who foreclosed on his builder––before he came to life! Well, that’s hard to swallow.

But not if you’re eight years old and reading comics for the first time. Why, then you’ll even accept monsters made of smoke (Diablo), water (Gor-Kill), fire (Dragoom, an alien Human Torch), and wood (the infamous Groot). In fact, I count five or six animated tree-creatures, two giant gray ants (Grottu and Krang), and scores of robots and any number of variations on King Kong (Gorgilla and Bruttu come to mind especially). And let us not forget the alien brute known as Goom, whose son, Googam, showed up in a sequel story. These

blundering behemoths usually had three things in common. No matter their origin, earthly or cosmic, they spoke understandable Bad Guy English and wore swim trunks.

(Only the rare Kirby dinosaur lacked a loincloth.) Thirdly, conquering the Earth was their universal fixation.

These monstrous marauders proved so popular that by 1960, Lee and Kirby broke format and started telling longer cover stories, as befit behemoths who often dwarfed their cinematic inspirations such as King

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showed on the cover of Tales to Astonish #21. You had to buy the book to learn he was a talking steam shovel animated by an alien’s spirit––a blatant steal from Theodore Sturgeon’s classic story, “Killdozer.” Kirby’s design for the giant alien menace in “Klagg! His Mission: Destroy Mankind!” was so clunky that I’m surprised that Lee let it pass. Then he had Kirby’s cover clumsily redrawn to conceal the fact that The King had drawn a completely different creature!

Then there was the Walking Totem, who walked despite his lack of legs. He appeared twice in Strange Tales and once in The Rawhide Kid during that dark period when monsters sneaked into all the Western titles. And who can forget the story Lee recycled so many times, the one in which a flying saucer lands and everyone starts hunting for an alien, not suspecting he’s really that nearby oak tree, craggy hill, or in my favorite variation: “We never dreamed!

The spaceship itself was the alien!” This was the cover story to Strange Worlds #1, the book that is believed to have kicked off the Lee/ Lieber/Kirby era of Marvel Monsters.

Obviously, it wasn’t easy coming

Kong and Godzilla.

Krang the giant ant and Xemnu, the Living Hulk starred in the first of these Kirby epics. Soon, the more popular monster epics spawned sequels. Sales presumably drove such unlikely encores, but the sheer necessity of conjuring up fresh creatures every week might also explain this innovation. In later years, Kirby admitted that it was a challenge.

“Doing those stories was very hard,” he related to Greg Theakston. “It was difficult to keep coming up with different monsters each issue; hard to keep it interesting and not silly.”

When they tried to be different, Lee and Kirby went all-out.

Their most original creature was “Zzutak, the Thing That Shouldn’t Exist,” whose design was based on Aztec architecture! It was one of those rare later stories combining Kirby’s pencils and Ditko’s impressionistic inks. “What was X, The Thing That Lived!“ in Tales to Astonish #20 (July 1960, right) was undoubtedly the result of the unending deadline pressure on all concerned. This yarn told the strange story of comic book writer Charles Bentley, whose imaginary monsters come to life. When he creates the horned “X” to defeat them, he discovers that this new marauder cannot be defeated. What now? Kirby took a whopping 18 pages to tell this yarn–– something rarely repeated in the monster era.

But sometimes they went too far, as with “Trull, the Inhuman” and the creature in “We Found the Ninth Wonder of the World” (above). They had the distinction or being the only cover-featured monsters Lee was afraid to show up front.

The “Ninth Wonder” cover just showed part of a face peering through a stockade fence. That was so you didn’t know it was just a giant tortoise. Only Trull’s eyes 17

becoming like the stone monster. I don’t know; maybe I’m wrong. He became very angular and strong and simplified.

I often thought that maybe it had started because of all the monsters he was doing, which gave him such leeway to draw that way.”

The middle of the book is where Don Heck, or occasionally Joe Sinnott or Gene Colan, served as a bridge between Kirby and Steve Ditko. Poor Heck rarely got to shine. He almost never got to do cover stories, and when Lee did relent, it was invariably a giant lizard tale. (“I Found Rro” and “I Saw Droom, the Living Lizard!”) Even then, Kirby or Ditko did the cover, and sometimes redrew Heck’s splash page, as Kirby did with a story Heck thought his worst pre-hero effort, “Orogo! The Nightmare from Outer Space!” in Journey into Mystery #57 (next page, top right). Heck didn’t get much respect, but he drew great robot stories as “I Was Face-To-Face with the Forbidden Robot” (Tales to Astonish #11) and “I Made The Hulk Live” (Strange Tales #75). And his scratchy, shadow-clotted inks fit the inevitable ghost stories perfectly.

Even Paul Reinman, whose following is in doubt, produced a minor classic of his own: “The Pretender” (Tales to Astonish #31), about a man who discovered evidence an alien had landed on Earth and taken human form as a first step toward conquest.

In the last panel (at right) the man gazed upon a photo of the alien’s new body and realized that it’s too late. The face is that of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Silly in retrospect, it was perfect for 1962.

But my favorite of the Marvel crew had to be Steve Ditko. In those days, be inked his own pencils in a creepy, crepuscular style similar to the one Joe Kubert used around then. It was perfect for haunted-house and ghost stories (Ditko did the best of these), retold fairy tales (to which he was partial, judging from his non-Marvel work), countless time machine quickies, and flying saucer stories. If Kirby was King of Monsters, Steve Ditko was Emir of Aliens. Take “Haag, Hunter of Helpless Humans” (Tales of Suspense #37), which was one of the rare cover epics Ditko did. Haag was a big green alien

up with a brood of new monsters every month. New plots, either.

Lee and Kirby developed a handful of formulas and played them over and over like disc jockeys on a rock ’n’ roll high. The monster appears, he crashes about while humanity reels and the rock-jawed nominal hero cogitates desperately, then is destroyed by a) the hero’s cleverness, b) a bigger monster, c) germs, even bigger alien monsters, or some other deux ex machina, or d) he wasn’t really a monster after all, but a hoax designed to force the superpowers to lay down their nuclear arsenals.

There was always a Stan Lee moral at the end, usually something about the Brotherhood of Man or God. But the true point was the sheer exuberance of Jack Kirby.

An aspiring artist at that time, Larry Lieber loved collaborating with Kirby during this formative period.

“I saw in Jack a kind of beauty,” he told me.

“Some people of course didn’t like his stuff because it was very exaggerated, but I saw a beauty in that if he drew rocks, he made them interesting. There was such simplicity and design. He designed his poses and he designed everything. I was really a big admirer of Jack Kirby.”

Lieber pointed to one of their collaborations as seminal in The King’s artistic development. “I Created the Colossus,” appeared in Tales of Suspense #14 in 1960, and was sequeled in issue #20 (above). It was the story of a giant stone statue brought to life by aliens, which then rampages about the old Soviet Union, teaching tyranny a lesson in brute force. Decades later, the character was revived as It, the Living Colossus.

“I have a theory about Kirby,” Lieber stated.

“Now I could be wrong, I never discussed it with Jack. If you look at the early books, Jack draws in more or less a normal style. As he was doing these monsters more and more, particularly when he did Colossus—he had to draw this creature of stone; it’s almost like to make him look like stone, he had to draw it in a different way. If you look at that Colossus thing or the Stone Man or whatever he was, and if you look at his later style, they’re similar. His style became angular and strong and exemplified. After a while I began to think, maybe slowly, that his people were almost 18

with a jocular face, button nose, and—touch of touches—two face tentacles forming a sort of Fu Manchu mustache! No mere monster, Haag had a personality, thanks to Ditko’s marvelous ability with faces.

Ditko’s stories were unique, so I suspect he plotted many of them himself. They could only be described as out of the Brothers Grimm by way of O. Henry and Rod Serling. One of the strangest was “The Secret of the Black Planet” in Tales of Suspense #28, when an escaped convict stumbled across what he thought was a rocket resting on its tail-fins, only to have the rocket stand up on its living fins and open a rather Freudian maw between its legs. I’m surprised this got past the Code.

Stan Lee doubtless recognized Ditko’s special qualities, because with the seventh issue, he converted Marvel’s last new monster book, Amazing Adventures, into the all-Ditko Amazing Adult Fantasy. No Kirbyesque epics, just five-pagers like the eerie “In Human Form”, and the touching “I, Gargoyle,” about a hideous man who discovered acceptance with a blind underground people. Along with The Fantastic Four, this was Lee’s first attempt to reach a more mature reader, and was heavily influenced by the hit TV show The Twilight Zone, which also sought a sophisticated audience.

The amazing thing is that these modest tales included a splash page not part of the storyline, so they were actually four-pagers. Yet Lee and Ditko managed to tell a satisfying story in that restricted format!

The beauty of Ditko’s work was that he stretched himself and was not afraid to reach into his own soul and depict his own feelings of hope, despair, pathos, and humor. He was the only Marvel artist to do humor. Lee called his work “off-beat.”

This is why Amazing Adult Fantasy is my favorite title of the Marvel Age of Monsters, and why every story carried the byline “Lee and Ditko.”

“I think I was prouder of the ones I did with Ditko,” Lee told me.

“I tried to make those the more O. Henry ones. I liked them the best. I liked working with Ditko on that stuff.

He was wonderful! It’s funny.

When The Twilight Zone TV show came out––and there were two others shows like it, One Step Beyond or something––I used to get letters from some of our readers. ‘Hey, I just saw The Twilight Zone, and they used one of your stories from issue so-and-so.’ You’d always hear that stuff.”

My favorite Steve Ditko story, and one that will live in my memory until the day I die, appeared in Journey Into Mystery #78 (right). Titled “Monsters on Mercury,” it was the quintessential Ditko five-pager. A group of US astronauts (in T-shirts, a nice touch) was encamped on Mercury. Huge green aliens with wise faces, looking like headmasters on steroids, appeared, observing silently, but did not attack. The astronauts felt their minds being probed. Tension mounted, and they hummed Christmas carols to resist the intrusion. Then the aliens placed a draped cone near the camp.

Fearing a bomb, one brave guy ventured out and uncovered... a crude Christmas tree. The Earthmen and the smiling aliens made friends. “And so,” Lee wrote back in 1962, “millions of miles from Earth, two alien races meet and join in brotherhood, inspired by a symbol of peace and good will which has endured thru the ages!” I wonder if Lee and Ditko knew, when they did this story, that it could mean so much to those of us young enough to take it to heart unreservedly?

Looking back, I find that my favorite Lee/Kirby monster story was not one of their epics, but a quiet yarn in Tales to Astonish #30 called “The Thing from the Hidden Swamp.” It was about a plain girl who went on a cruise and still couldn’t get a date. Then she stumbled on a spaceship stuck in a bog and the alien monster who owned it. Frightened, she nevertheless agreed to handle the controls while the huge Thing-brown alien pushed from outside. Against all logic, they succeed, she at the controls and he pushing from the rear as if trying to restart a stubborn truck. The alien promised the girl a reward, but flew off, apparently without doing anything. Only later did she realize her plain features had become beautiful—never mind how, Lee didn’t explain that part—but this was the work of the grateful space monster. Ditko had done a similar story only months before in Tales of Suspense, but I didn’t know 19

(previous page, bottom) “Zzutak” in Strange Tales #88 (Sept. 1961) used a similar plot to “What was X, The Thing That Lived!“ in the Tales to Astonish #20 (July 1960).

it then and don’t care now. This (at left) is the version I love.

Favorite stories aside, the single issue of all the titles that most encapsulates what the Marvel Age of Monsters means to me was Tales to Astonish #17. That was the issue with a perfect little Ditko story about an evil old man whose wishes—much to his eternal regret—came true, “Beware! Of the Ghastly Glass!” and a nice Heck yarn, “I Dared to Enter the Haunted Room.”

The lead story (below) was the wonderful retelling of Frankenstein, “Vandoom, the Man who Made a Creature!” It was about a misunderstood waxworks artist named Vandoom, who constructed a Thing-brown wax monster so huge, he had to cut a hole in his roof for the head, which he covered with a dropcloth so as not to scare his fellow Balkan villagers. When lightning struck the head, the brutish creature came to life and fled the town just one step ahead of the torch-carrying villagers. For once, this Lee/Kirby critter didn’t have a name or the power of speech. Before the townspeople could kill the thing, Martians decided to invade Transylvania, and Vandoom’s monster tore into them, foiling the invasion. His vital life- force spent, the monster collapsed in a heap––the ultimate Misunderstood Marvel Monster. The villagers were aghast. They almost destroyed the very creature who saved them. In atonement, they helped Vandoom build another monster.

The chillingly atmospheric story ended with Vandoom standing on his storm-lashed roof, looking at the draped head of this new creation, wondering, “What if another bolt of lightning brings life to this one... who knows what the result may be next time!... Who knows!” Vandoom’s creature never returned.

The promise was enough.

Like so many of these stories, this one was laid in Transylvania, and evoked Jewish legends of the animated clay monster called The Golem.

This was no coincidence.

“My mother was a great storyteller,” Kirby explained. “She came from somewhere near Transylvania and she told me stories that would stand your hair on end. I loved my mother and I loved those stories.”

For Stan Lee, Boris Karloff ’s 1931 portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster was the template for many of these scabrous and horny-handed brutes. “I always thought that the monster in Frankenstein was more sinned against than sinner. All he did was wander around, groping for friends, constantly being persecuted for the way he looked. I mean, people took one look at him and attacked him with torches.”

The reason this issue is so symbolic of what Marvel meant to me back then was that when I found that particular issue, it was not only coverless, but missing the first page, so I didn’t

know which magazine it was or the lead story’s title, or even what dark motive inspired Vandoom. I only knew that this was an impossibly old issue of one of the Marvel titles, which invested it with a special magic that would have evaporated had I found a complete copy. It might have been dropped from a Ditko flying saucer. I was pleased to finally read the entire story when it was reprinted in Where Creatures Roam a decade later, and then astounded when I found a copy of the original. Where Creatures Roam printed for the first time the Ditko-inked version of the cover. Dick Ayers had reinked Vandoom’s monster for its first cover appearance!

At the time I first began collecting comics, in the final weeks of 1961, my chief interests were the popular Superman and Batman. I only bought the Marvel titles when I had spare change. Marvel then was a comic-book backwater, an insular world so remote from everything else on the newsstand, that it’s hard, even now, to think that those issues with their flat interior colors (entire panels were done in red or yellow for atmospheric effect and to speed up production), yet richly three-dimensional covers, could have been produced by people at all like those at the other comic-book companies—if by people at all. Lee, Kirby, Ditko—they seemed as much a fantasy as Rommbu or the Wommelly. That’s why, so many years later, I look back upon them so uncritically and with such affection.

When I first entered the Marvel Age of Monsters, it was already a waning world, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

Around the time The Fantastic Four debuted in the summer of 1961, the multi-part lead stories were replaced by two shorter yarns, at least one drawn by Kirby. Tales like “The Death of… Monstrollo” and “Orogo, the Unconquerable!” were so cramped that I’ll bet that Kirby was forced to squeeze 13-page Larry Lieber scripts into the new seven-page format. His stupendous monsters no longer fit, and were being phased out for simpler stories of suspense and the supernatural. This is where I came in, around the time the FF were first encountering the returning Sub-Mariner; but theirs wasn’t

20

really a super-hero book at first, especially in its first two issues before the Four got their costumes. It was more a monster-vs.-monster experiment. The Hulk had yet to be created, Henry Pym didn’t merit a second thought, and there wasn’t a hint of Spider-Man to be found in the pages of Amazing Adult Fantasy. But, by the end of 1962, that would all be changing— although even in The Fantastic Four, Lee and Kirby wouldn’t drop the security of their monster slant for another couple of years—and a new era of giants came into being: Heroic ones.

As Kirby told The Comics Journal in 1989, “The monster stories have their limitations. You can just do so many of them. And then it becomes a monster book month after month, so there had to be a switch because the times weren’t exactly conducive to good sales. Comics run in cycles. I knew that with the interest fading in monsters and Westerns, it might be the right time for a gang of super-heroes, this go-round The Fantastic Four.

And I knew that to make sales grow, I’ve got to feed in new characters.”

Stan Lee once told interviewer Charles Murray an illuminating story about Kirby’s transition from monster-of-the-month to the new super-heroes vs. creatures approach: “I remember on the very first issue of The Fantastic Four, I’d suggested in the synopsis a monster, and Jack drew a hundred monsters. I said, ‘Jack, it’s more dramatic to have one monster that the reader worries about, than a hundred monsters.’ The trouble with Jack is that he is so imaginative, he tries to put every idea he can think of on every page. He tries to make every page a whole new original thought and action. That isn’t good story. You have to build up a mood. You’ve got to take one idea and stretch it over a few pages and milk the most drama out of it. It’s a matter of pacing.

Jack goes too fast. You don’t have a chance to catch your breath reading his stories.”

You don’t see much of these early roots in today’s Marvel titles. Fin Fang Foom and Groot still soldier on.

It’s too bad, because the Marvel Age of Comics wasn’t so much a revolution as a tentative adapting of pre-tested ideas and artists to a fresh new direction. When publisher Martian Goodman told Stan Lee to come up with a group of super-heroes, Lee was so unsure of bucking the monster trend that he included a poorly conceived Strange Tales reject, The Thing, into the mix. When he proved popular, Lee and Kirby launched The Incredible Hulk, about a hero who was also a monster.

A month before Bruce Banner got hit by gamma rays, scientist Victor Avery swallowed an immortality potion and turned into “The Midnight Monster” in Journey into Mystery #79. He was a thick brute who looked

like a rougher version of The Hulk from Incredible Hulk #1, except that he was neither green nor gray. The very name was taken from Xemnu, The Living Hulk, who had twice appeared in Journey into Mystery more than a year before, although Marvel bad guys named Hulk can be traced back as far as a Stan Lee story in a 1955 issue of Cowboy Action. “The Midnight Monster” was an updating of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was also an inspiration for The Hulk. Both Lee and Kirby had grown up on the original Universal movie monsters, and so they combined Frankenstein’s monster with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, giving Bruce Banner the curse of transforming into the Hulk at night, just like Universal’s Wolfman. Like Frankenstein’s monster, The Hulk had no memory of his prior existence.

According to Jack Kirby, part of the impetus toward The Hulk came from this forgotten man-monster.

As he told interviewer Leonard Pitts. Jr., “I did a story called ‘The Hulk’––a small feature, and it was quite different from the Hulk that we know. But I felt The Hulk had possibilities, and I took that little character from the small feature and I transformed it into the Hulk that we know today. I was experimenting with it. I thought

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(above) This very cinematic climax from the 1961 “Vandoom” story clearly shows Kirby’s affection for the movies. But the sympathetic creature got a Marie Severin makeover when the story was reprinted in Where Creatures Roam #4 in 1971 (below).

let’s hear Jack explain it: “I thought I should do something new with Ben Grimm,” he explained to Greg Theakston. “If you’ll notice, the beginnings of Ben Grimm was he was kind of lumpy.

I felt he had the power of a dinosaur and I began to think along those lines. I wanted his skin to look like dinosaur hide. He kind of looks like your outside patio, or a close-up of dinosaur hide.”

The ultimate evolution of The Thing was mistakenly interpreted as rocky, but in many later interviews, Kirby called it something else. “Dinosaurs had thick plates, and of course that’s what the Thing had.” If the Marvel Monsters had survived their era, no doubt a later generation would have resembled that angular look.

By 1963, a new breed of heroes had usurped the pages of every Marvel monster title, and only Steve Ditko’s backup stories remained as a gesture to continuity. Even they passed into the night eventually. Marvel became so good, I stopped reading Superman and Batman.

But sometimes, late at night, I miss those striding behemoths and think back to those days when I was in the third grade and there were monsters lurking at the drugstore. In a small part of my heart of hearts, it will always be 1962, when The Fantastic Four was an aberration, a pleasant upstart; The Incredible Hulk was a mere excuse to avoid creating a new monster every two months; Captain America still slept in ice; and Tales to Astonish, Amazing Adult Fantasy, along with the others, were Marvel Comics. H

The Hulk might be a good-looking Frankenstein…The Hulk was Frankenstein. Frankenstein can rip up the place, and The Hulk could never remember who he formerly was.”

Kirby misremembered the Midnight Monster’s name—not surprising, since there were multiple Hulks in this pre-hero era, including one who was a precursor to Iron Man. He appeared in Tales of Suspense #16’s “The Thing Called Metallo” (above), who was known as The Hulk until he renamed himself Metallo. Of course, it’s possible that the Midnight Monster was created as The Hulk and when the idea for the Bruce Banner Hulk occurred, the inspirational story was relettered to remove the valuable name. The printed story shows signs of this.

And there were more offspring of the monster period. When sales figures came in, Lee revived the hero of a lackluster Tales to Astonish story, “The Man in the Ant Hill,” and The Ant-Man took over that title. (Inker Dick Ayers later claimed that he suggested to Lee that the pre-costume Henry Pym deserved further adventures.) There were rumors that the protagonist of “The Man in the Bee Hive” would be reimagined as The Bee-Man, but it never happened.

(It could have been worse; they could have brought back Ditko’s The Worm Man.) The same month Dr. Doom appeared in The Fantastic Four, a furry alien with a similar rivet-studded faceplate appeared in “The Monster in the Iron Mask!” (Tales of Suspense #31, right). On the cover, he was green with a gray mask, increasing the resemblance, but inside he was brown. But for the whim of colorist Stan Goldberg, perhaps Dr. Doom would be wearing Thing-brown robes today. Precursors to Magneto, The Sandman and other Marvel supervillains were first field-tested in the pre-hero titles. And let’s not forget Amazing Adventures’ short-lived mystic hero, Dr. Droom, who preceded Dr. Strange by two years. Their origins were uncannily parallel.

Many of Kirby’s unique monster designs were constructed on a similar foundation, which were also the building blocks for The Fantastic Four’s Thing. But

Acknowledgments

“A Look at the Life and Career of Jack ‘King’ Kirby.” William A. Christensen & Mark Seifert. Wizard #36, August 1994.

Creators of the Super-Heroes. Thomas Andrae.

Heroes Press, 2011.

Don Heck: A Work of Art. John Coates.

TwoMorrows Publishing, 2014.

Jack Kirby: The Comics Journal Library Volume 1, edited by Milo George. Fantagraphics Books, 2002.

“Jack Kirby in the Golden Age.” James Van Hise. Golden Age of Comics #6, November 1983.

“Stan Lee Interview.” Charles Murray. Fantasy Advertiser International #55, May 1975.

Jack Magic: The Life and Art of Jack Kirby by Greg Theakston. Pure Imagination, 2011.

“Kirby on WBAI Radio: 1987.” Warren Reese. Jack Kirby Collector #65, Spring 2015.

“Marvel Mania.” Dan Geringer. The Palm Beach Post, January 29, 1972.

“Kirby takes on the Comics”. Howard Zimmerman. Comics Scene, March 1982.

“Monster Master.” Will Murray. Comics Scene #49, September 1995.

“Stan Lee Looks Back.” Will Murray. Comics Scene 2000 #1, Spring 2000.

“The Captain America Panel.” Jack Kirby Collector #64, Fall 2014.

“The Inker Who Saved Marvel Comics.” Will Murray & Mark Voger.

Comics Scene #48, November 1994.

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From No Name...

Incidental Iconography

...to Big Name!

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

by Sean Kleefeld

J

ack Kirby, of course, spent a fair amount of his career drawing monsters, from what would become stalwarts like Fin Fang Foom to lesser known creatures like Kraa the Unhuman! I might be inclined to say it was genre in which Jack excelled, but really, was there a genre in comics in which he didn’t? Today, though, we’re going to look at what is arguably his most iconic monster creation: Giganto.

If you’re unfamiliar with the creature by name, you might be relieved to hear he’s never named in the comics Jack drew—indeed, Jack only drew him in one issue— his name only came years later, presumably based on the “gigantic” descriptor Stan Lee used repeatedly in the monster’s debut issue. So what qualifies this character as “iconic”? Simple: He appears on the cover of Fantastic Four #1 (above).

Before getting to how Jack drew Giganto, though, I want to point out that, while the Mole Man shows up repeatedly throughout Jack’s run on the FF, it is only in that first issue that he commands a slew of monsters. In the rest of Mole Man’s appearances drawn by Jack, he relies on an army of Moleoids. Not only is Giganto never again drawn under Jack’s tenure, but neither are any of the other monsters from Monster Isle. In fact, Giganto disappeared entirely after its 1961 debut until the creature was revisited by John Byrne in 1984’s FF #264 (top right).

Looking at Fantastic Four #1, there are eight drawings of Giganto including the cover (all shown here). Two of these are just close-ups of the creature’s clawed hands, and one is a small silhouetted shot that may have been “fixed” if not entirely drawn by someone else, like Sol Brodsky. All of these occur on page 16 (right). Sol went back and made substantial changes to how the Human Torch was drawn in FF #3, so it’s

not unreasonable to think he made changes here too. (Check out Will Murray’s excellent piece back in TJKC #38 for how Sol altered the Torch’s appearance.)

That leaves us with five drawings to examine, none of which show the creature’s lower half. We clearly see that Jack gives Giganto a relatively consistent-looking, spikey, chitinous armor. Despite the monstrous appearance, though, Giganto does not appear to have any teeth. The inking on one panel on page 16 might suggest some large, flat teeth and, in some reprints, these are indeed left white; but given that all the other panels show Giganto’s mouth wide open with no teeth visible at all, that one instance seems to be more an instance of a minor misinterpretation of Jack’s pencils, than even an accidental design change on Jack’s part.

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The beast’s eyes, as seen on the cover, are generally left blank, tying into the notion of the Mole Man and many of his subservients being nearly blind from living underground for so long. It seems likely to me that the addition of pupils on pages 14 (above) and 16 is likewise not part of Jack’s design, given how rudimentarily they’ve been added.

They’re literally just dots in the monster’s eyes; they really don’t look like Jack’s handiwork at all. These are so simply drawn in that it could even have been Stan himself who added them; although why this change was not carried through on page 24 (right) or the cover is anyone’s guess.

The one interesting change that does appear to be deliberate is the loss of Giganto’s claws. Throughout the story itself, Jack draws the monster with sharp claws— this makes a great deal of sense given how the monster tunnels under the ground. We see this in every instance of the interior drawings, even though the claws’ specific length seems to vary from panel to panel—most notably, on page 14, when the claws are as long as Giganto’s actual fingers! Indeed, the drawing on page 14 seems so strikingly different in style to the other illustrations that I have to wonder if it was inked by someone else. The shading inside Giganto’s mouth also suggests another hand in the inks here, I believe. It almost feels like a different

monster entirely, which is particularly noteworthy given that it’s basically the same pose as what’s on the cover.

The cover is markedly different than the rest of the issue. Not only have the claws been completely removed (perhaps because they were deemed too frightening for a cover?), but the way Jack draws Giganto’s hands, some of the fingers appear to have trimmed fingernails instead.

The bottom two fingers of its right hand in particular seem to have fingernails drawn in, although this is never emphasized in the coloring. This has led to later artists alternating between the two takes— although John Byrne did seem to “explain” this by drawing some instances with longer fingernails that appeared to have broken off, suggesting that they only appear to be claws when they’re especially long, and are trimmed/ worn down by the creature’s digging through large swaths of earth. This is, however, very much a retroactive explanation for different artists alternately referring back to either the cover or the interiors. Jack’s initial design very clearly showed Giganto with long, sharp claws and these were only removed for the cover, which Jack would’ve drawn last.

That said, given that Giganto is very heavily featured on the cover of Fantastic Four #1, it is not surprising that this specific image is how many identify the creature’s appearance.

The cover has been homaged dozens of times, and has been reprinted seemingly ad infinitum. Had Giganto not appeared until the second issue, the claws would likely be a much more regularly seen part of his appearance, and he wouldn’t be as well known from his incidental cover shot. H

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(bottom) This panel from Fantastic Four #1 is a bit ironic, in that FF #1 signaled the start of the Marvel super-hero universe, and the end of the Atlas monster era. As these creatures run, in the next panel the Human Torch seals them underground; so perhaps that’s where Goom, Sserpo, Fin Fang Foom, and their ilk ended up once their stories were no longer being chronicled by Jack.

An ongoing examination of Kirby’s art and compositional skills

I

1

THE FANTASTIC FOUR’S STRANGE EVOLUTION recently picked up an issue of CNET magazine (Winter 2017), which featured an interview with Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman. The interviewer, Connie Guglielmo, asked Mr. Boseman, “What do you think that it says that Black Panther was created in 1966 by two white men—Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby?” Boseman replied by first stating unequivocally, “Yes, the idea came from Stan Lee.” At this point, even after the near miraculous development that finally compelled Disney/Marvel to grant Jack Kirby co-creator status, most people, like Boseman, still believe that Kirby was merely the visual interpreter of Stan Lee’s creative concepts. Few members of the general public are even aware of what has become known as the “Marvel Method,” wherein the artist is plotter, or at very least co-plotter of a story. The average modern fan doesn’t really understand the complex and painstaking process of visual storytelling, and has no concept of the degree to which Jack Kirby has contributed to the language of sequential syntax as applied to the panels of a comic book page.

By the point in time that the Black Panther was created in Fantastic Four #52, Kirby was routinely bringing concepts to Lee in the form of complete stories, including characters like the Panther. Less the creative initiator, Stan Lee was often times just glibly filling in balloons based on Kirby’s margin notes.

In the end, it is most instructive to study The Fantastic Four, where the Marvel Method was essentially refined. If we do so, we will better understand the Lee/Kirby partnership and how it evolved.

Fantastic Four #1 is the comic that set off the process.

I was eleven, sometime in 1963 when I picked up Fantastic Four #12, only because it featured an appearance by the Hulk, whose first few issues I’d already seen. I was hooked on the self-described “World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” straightaway.

My obsession has never really let up, with the exception of a few years surrounding puberty and an excursion into rock ’n’ roll performance. It’s something I still struggle to attempt to explain.

I know that I am not alone here. Scores of comic 25

aficionados agree that FF #1-102 is the greatest run of comic books ever. There is a powerful alchemy within those pages that is indescribable.

Another thing that several people have pointed out is how peculiar those first few issues appeared to be when initially encountered. FF #1 is one of the weirdest comic books I’ve ever seen. What has become clear to me is that the things that make this book and much of the run so striking and unusual are essentially inseparable from the process that went into its making. Furthermore, despite all of the legends spouted by various participants, insiders, third-hand observers, and comic book historians, we will never really know for certain what that process was.

Of course, we all know that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee are the official creators. Their names are even on the first page, but the story around the process is still as muddled as is possible. There are also reasons to believe that publisher Martin Goodman was involved in initiating the concept, but the notion that the FF are simply Marvel’s answer to National Periodical’s Justice League just doesn’t quite sit right with me. So, basically, we can speculate 2 about who did what and why it turned out the way it did, and in the end, most of what we will decide can only be speculation. The only thing that we can be certain of is that it is a Monster Comic, created at a point in time when monsters were coming into their own in the media. It is also predominantly a Kirby monster comic.

I specify Kirby because all of the early monster stories that it most closely resembles were signed Kirby/Ayers, meaning inker Dick Ayers. Stan Lee did not sign those stories, which means that Stan Lee probably did not write them. FF #1 is very much like one of those stories.

I discovered Kirby pretty early in my life, and was instantly excited by his style. I was eight or nine and someone had a battered copy of Strange Tales #75 featuring “Taboo, Thing from the Murky Swamp.” I had a strong visceral response to the weird creature depicted. Kirby had created a swamp thing, a creature composed of a bog. It was like the Blob squared. It was probably the first monster comic I’d ever seen and I instantly knew that the power of the story had not only to do with the art, but also in the way that it was constructed. It was entirely cinematic, cut like a colossal film in miniature.

Despite the size of the comic page, the art was monumental.

At that time, around 1960, monsters were in vogue. Several people have noted that the Aurora plastic model of Frankenstein, on the market in 1962, was probably an inspiration for the Hulk. As mentioned, I picked up a copy of Hulk #1 when it came on the stands in 1962. “What’s this? A monster as the star of his own mag? Far out!” Months later, just about the time the Hulk was discontinued, I stumbled on FF #12, featuring that very creature as a guest star. “Wow, here’s a super-hero team with a monster hero in it as well!”

It didn’t take long for me to make a connection between those early monster stories like Taboo and my new favorite comic. Having started with issue #12, I was curious enough to want to look back at earlier issues. A friend of mine owned a copy of #4 and although I instantly loved the re-introduction of the Sub-Mariner, I saw how comparatively primitive it was compared to the 1963 stories. 3 Still, the story had the epic scope and continuity of a Kirby tale. What a shock then to finally lay my hands on Fantastic Four #1.

My immediate response was that it reminded me of Kirby’s own Challengers of the Unknown (except that super powers, plus a monster were wedded to the team concept), and he and the rest of the gang were behaving in completely destructive, irrational ways. It was as if the creators were throwing everything against the wall to see what would stick, and because of the success of what they’d been publishing up to that point, monsters were sure enough going to be a big part of it. Looking at that first issue, it did not seem possible to imagine that the series would become what it did two years later.

Now the similarity to the Challengers has been pointed out by numerous comic book historians. For example, Chris Tolworthy in his online essay “The Case for Kirby” [http:// zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/index.html] writes about a particular insider industry 26

account relating to the matter: “According to an anecdote that is widely repeated (but I have been unable to trace its source), when the Fantastic Four became a sales success, somebody at DC made a large size poster of the cover of Challengers issue #3 (right). They put it on the wall at the DC offices, without comment.

The cover speaks for itself: Anyone who sees it knows where the Fantastic Four came from.”

The cover described shows Rocky, one of the team who bears a striking resemblance to Ben Grimm, emerging from a crashed space ship with the sudden ability to shoot flames from his hands.

Be that as it may, if you study it carefully, there is something about the entirety of that first issue of the Fantastic Four that does not feel to be made of whole cloth, but has a patchwork quality to it, almost as if it were passed from hand to hand. Lee’s stamp is definitely on the book, even if as with the “Marvel Method”, he was just suggesting dialogue or demanding story alterations. The tension between he and Kirby might even infuse the saga with the ambivalence of two men squabbling over the book’s direction. More specifically, this creative tension between the two is probably somewhere at the core of the book, and the stories are likely steeped in it. Is there anything that we might notice about the characters as related to their creators?

also a notion that we can explore, with the characters developing as per the co-creators’ relationship? Kirby must have felt diminished having to return to Timely/Atlas/Marvel after being at the top of his game with Simon. Kirby would sometimes speak about his feelings of social inadequacy due to his Lower East Side upbringing. He was also well aware of the way artists in general were treated as hired hands and viewed as lesser beings by management. We would later see how he would be verbally disrespected by New York Herald Tribune journalist Nat Freedland in the writer’s description of him as a “middle aged man with baggy eyes and a baggy Robert Hallish suit.” This description, further elaborated by suggesting that Kirby might be mistaken for the assistant foreman in a girdle factory, would be contrasted by Freedland’s description of Stan Lee as an Ivy League hipster and dashing Rex Harrison lookalike. This was known to have rankled Kirby as well as his wife Roz to no end. In light of this, we can imagine that Ben is a stand-in for Kirby, Reed is Lee, and Sue and Johnny are the world.

One seemingly important subplot that is presented in the origin sequence is that Ben Grimm is jealous and resentful because Sue prefers Reed to him. 2 This love triangle aspect of the story is something that Kirby would be quite familiar with, having written numerous Romance comic stories. At any rate, the love triangle/ jealousy thread is subsequently deemphasized and does not come up again until midway through the third issue.

Then there are panels in pages that look as if they have characters that have been added after the fact. Look at the figures of the Thing in panels one and five of page seventeen that begins this article. 1 In both cases the drawings are crude and not well formed.

Panel one seems to have been designed without sufficient compositional space for a figure in the right, and the Thing is squeezed in that corner.

In his essay, Tolworthy goes on to suggest that the FF’s origin was tacked on to a story that was first written about a team of scientists investigating something. Ben is not even part of the original story, and is added later. Here, Tolworthy summarizes what he perceives the story to be, based solely on the cues given by the art, divorced from whatever changes were made to the script later.

“The story art shows a monster from underground attacking military bases (shades of Godzilla, a monster awakened by nuclear tests). These bases, judging by the art and the context, are probably nuclear bases: They are power plants in deserts, protected by soldiers; this was the height of the Cold War. The soldiers look French, and France had just started underground testing. The art shows circular cave-ins, similar to ones caused by underground atomic tests. The team later wear radiation suits. The story ends with a mushroom cloud explosion.”

These are certainly reasonable observations. The story does seem disjointed as if it were cut and pasted by someone or some committee’s whim. Again, I will stress that the fact that it’s a complete hodgepodge is a portion of its charm and a source of fascination. However much Kirby’s original intention behind the crafting of the story has been subverted, he has also clearly been a party to its mutilation. Who has decided to add the Human Torch?

Probably Goodman, but again we’ll probably never know for sure.

In the end, the story can have no single author because the very reason for its being is unclear. What was it at inception? What was it then changed into, and for what reason or reasons? Was it necessary to take an existing story and cut it into a super-hero origin

Here in the FF, we had four characters in some sort of dysfunctional familial relationship, and the story seemed to be mostly about how they weren’t getting along. The team was always in danger of breaking up, with members constantly flying off the handle.

There were generally two reasons for this. First, one of the heroes was a hot-headed teenager who was literally on fire. The second reason was that another of them had been transformed into the massive grotesque Thing, with super-human strength and resentment to spare.

Now, it is not hard to imagine that Ben Grimm might be the personification of Kirby’s sublimated anger and frustration over the state of his career. Kirby has said on several occasions that he is the Thing. He would even later do an entire satirical imaginary story where Lee was Reed and he was the Thing (What If? #11). Is this

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Moore as a boy, and he had a similar reaction to it. Of course, the group was still arguing about something or other. Ben throws a punch at Johnny but smashes a wall instead after Johnny makes mean-spirited comments to him.

4 This incident also reminds us that the Thing is still jealous that Reed and Sue are together. Again, Lee’s dialogue seems to deemphasize the point or soften its impact. As is usual in the stories so far, an appearance is made by some sort of huge Kirby-style monster.

We also see the first time that the Torch is drawn to resemble his 1940s counterpart, although the drawings are almost certainly not Kirby’s. The figures are probably done by Sol Brodsky who also inks the issue. One can easily see that the Torch’s flame trail in panel four is part of the original drawing, as compared to the redrawn body to the right of the Thing.

On the final page, the Thing’s resentment of what he perceives as the Torch’s grandstanding causes young Johnny Storm to abruptly quit the team. 5

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saga? Was there such a hurry to get this issue on the stands that they couldn’t have taken the time to put the story in a more satisfactory sequence?

Stan Lee’s explanation of the team’s creation is generic and similar to all of his various pronouncements on these matters related to the creation of the Marvel characters.

“I tried to make the characters different in the sense that they had real emotions and problems.”

Lee is seldom very specific about the problems he is discussing.

Kirby’s description about the process is more in depth. As a man who has crafted literally thousands of stories, he is not vague or reticent.

“The idea for the FF was my idea. My own anger against radiation. Radiation was the big subject at that time, because we still don’t know what radiation can do to people. It can be beneficial, it can be very harmful. In the case of Ben Grimm, Ben Grimm was a college man, he was a World War II flyer. He was everything that was good in America. And radiation made a monster out of him— made an angry monster out of him, because of his own frustration.”

Notice that again, Kirby is singling out and identifying with Ben Grimm, the man inside the monster.

Still, neither of these explanations is sufficient to totally explain what finally appeared in Fantastic Four #1. Even though Kirby’s version is more compelling, it does not really fully account for what the final product became. All speculations considered, be they Justice League wanna-be, inter-company golf game, Challengers rip off, Golden Age throwback and then some, the story will forever defy explanation.

Issue #4 begins with the remainder of the team quarreling because the Torch had left during the previous issue. This is when the series really gets going in earnest, because the Torch is wandering in the Bowery and discovers the derelict Sub-Mariner. We can speculate that Goodman or Lee has suggested this in order to bring more of the 1940s Timely characters into the mix, or we can alternately imagine that Kirby is primarily responsible. At any rate, the revival of that iconic Golden Age character allows Kirby to inject not only an actual love triangle, but also reintroduce an entire cast of characters from a lost undersea race of beings. Brodsky is still redrawing the Torch here, although the picture of him on the cover is Kirby’s for sure.

It is in this story that Prince Namor falls madly for Sue Storm, and the Invisible Woman responds somewhat favorably, creating

By the second issue, the concept was more or less in place.

However, monsters were still dominant. It is fairly easy for the reptilian shape-shifting Skrulls to get the gullible humans to believe that the FF are no damn good, because the group spent much of the first issue proving the point with their reckless destruction of property. Part of the alien nature of the book is the inking of the art

by George Klein. (We can thank comics historian Michael Vassalo for finally identifying him as the inker with certainty.) There is a craggy look to Klein’s inking in those first two issues that sets a certain sinister tone. The art itself is somewhat sparse and much of it is unpolished. Even at this point in Marvel’s history, readers were more used to the conventional style of Dick Ayers’ inking on most of Kirby’s work. The psychological tone of the second story is also dark and foreboding.

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By issue #3, the decision was made to give the group costumes and have them live in New York City. Despite all of this, the story is still really strange, off-putting and weird in an inexplicable way.

This was the first FF issue seen by acclaimed comics writer Alan 28

the first true romantic tension of the book. Kirby and Lee would spread that infatuation over two years and bring a good deal of soap opera flavor to the series.

predominate in sci-fi and super-hero comics for decades. An evil lord of minions, Doom’s model would oft be repeated in Kirby’s own later characters Magneto and Darkseid, as well as influence other creations like George Lucas’ infamous Darth Vader.

And so, in the sixth issue of its flagship title, the Marvel Crossover Universe came into being. 7 Having appeared in backto-back issues, the two superstars of villainy came together in a story called either “Captives of the Deadly Duo” or “The Diabolical Duo Join Forces” depending on whether you follow the blurb on the cover or on the splash page. In this story, Doom and Sub-Mariner team up to defeat the Fantastic Four, but they have a problem. Like everyone else in the book, they can’t seem to get along with each other. When Doom betrays him, Prince Namor saves the day and reestablishes himself as comics’ first anti-hero. Between the two villains, they would each appear in eleven of the first thirty issues, and their backstories would continually weave into and nourish the emerging Marvel Universe. More and more as the series progressed, it seemed to be becoming about the villain’s journey as well as the hero’s. Clearly, what set the FF apart from the beginning was that both hero and villain were struggling with the monsters within them, and their turmoil would define the dynamics of interaction. As it was in the beginning, starting out as a monster book, it would reach its greatest moments as an exploration of the monster within the man, or conversely the man within the monster.

So, this is the secret.

In the end, the Fantastic Four is predominantly a Kirby monster book, whose plotlines for better or worse were co-opted (or augmented if you prefer) and partially reconstituted by Stan Lee and the prevailing forces of fandom and the marketplace. Kirby’s epic and cinematic storytelling was melded to Stan’s hipster jive talk, particular sense of humor and singular knack for promotion. Lee knew Kirby was Gold, but he insisted that he could make it better with his gift of alliteration. For a brief moment, it seemed to be working. The two were in concert for a millisecond.

When the series caught on, they worked hard to keep it going, Lee in particular knowing in his best P.T. Barnum way how to work the vein. There was a wild, wacky enthusiasm that lasted for a few glorious years, until the schism between the two men grew too wide. Communication breakdown eventually ensued.

We can study the flaws and all of the coulda, shoulda, woulda and what ifs, but what’s the point? The FF was what it was, and its like will never be seen again.

By the way, if there is any doubt remaining here about the Fantastic Four being a monster comic book, we need only consider the fact that by a wide margin, the comic fan’s favorite FF issue is #51, entitled, “This Man, This Monster.” H

Issue #5 is crisply and stylishly inked by Joe Sinnott, which makes the comic appear smoother and less suspect. It also has Kirby penciling the modern Torch inside the book for the first time, as this Chapter 4 splash page, set aboard a pirate ship displays with exceptional vitality. 6 Johnny is in-your-face here as he tears a fiery loop through a sail. This panel gives a powerful cinematic impression that the FF were entering the next level of sophistication. This issue introduces Dr. Doom, arguably the most significant villain the Fantastic Four are to face. Sinnott’s inking also gives the book a more gothic flavor, appropriate to the subject matter, bringing the look up a notch in quality. Oddly, Sinnott would perform a similar service in the late ’60s, ushering Kirby’s art into the Cosmic/Techno phase.

Doom is another monster, albeit a human one, establishing a sort of “Man in the Iron Mask” theme melded to an ambiance of Eastern European folklore and wizardry. The Dr. Doom story in FF #5 is quite similar to the Challengers of the Unknown appearance in Showcase #6, both in the plot and the choice of villain. The COTU story “The Secrets of the Sorcerer’s Box” has the heroes pitted against Morelian, a wizard who like Dr. Doom lives in an ancient castle and uses the Challs in order to open an ancient box of treasure for him.

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Doom is presented as a former colleague of Reed Richards. He appears to be equally brilliant and charismatic. He is insanely jealous of Richards’ success and functions almost as Mr. Fantastic’s negative mirror image, or a species of evil doppelganger.

Kirby and Lee even wrote themselves into issue #10, wherein they are used by Dr. Doom to lure Reed Richards into a trap. Doom then proceeds to switch bodies with Richards, making the point of their dual identities even stronger.

This is also the first we see of the fabled team of Stan and Jack appearing in the book, as they are used as characters to advance the plot. Just what are we to make of this cameo appearance? It certainly sets the tone for things to come. Right here was the origin of the myth of the Bullpen, of Stan and Jack working together in the office, dreaming up new characters and ideas. And here was a touch of levity as well, the breaking of the Fourth Wall by bringing characters of fantasy and their creators together on the stage/page. Kirby and Lee would do this several times over the years, most humorously in FF Annual #3 when they are comically barred from attending the wedding of Reed and Sue. Doom would come to typify a certain kind of villain that would 29

Influencees

Eric Powell Interview The creator of The Goon talks with Eric Nolen-Weathington

(right) Powell’s 2005 Monsters on the Prowl cover, featuring Kirby super-heroes vs. Kirby monsters. (below) One of Kirby’s own MotP covers (actually a 1974 John Romita-altered version of Kirby’s cover to Tales to Astonish #34), along with Eric himself, and his creator-owned Lulu the Bearded Girl and her pet monster Chimichanga.

(next page, left) Pencils for the cover of Arkham Asylum: Living Hell #6, featuring Eric’s favorite Kirby monster: Etrigan! (next page, right) Page one of Marvel Monsters: Devil Dinosaur #1, which Eric drew as an homage to Kirby’s cover for Devil Dinosaur #1 (bottom).

[These days, many comic book artists have an almost homogeneous style; intricately rendered, but lacking the stylistic panache of a Walter Simonson, Mike Mignola, or—yes—Jack Kirby. So when a talent like Nashville-based cartoonist Eric Powell burst onto the scene in 2002, it didn’t take long for the industry to take notice.

After winning the 2004 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for “Best Single Issue/Single Story” for The Goon #1, Eric’s gone on to numerous other awards in both the comics and horror fields.

Powell wears many hats, from creator to self-publisher, and even a breathtaking inker over Kirby’s pencils on this issue’s cover.

The Kirby influence is always there, as you’ll see in this e-mail interview conducted in May 2019.]

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: You’ve been into comics and scary stuff since you were a little kid, to the point you wanted to be a special f/x make-up artist when you were in your teens. What is it about monsters, and horror in general, that grabbed your attention? And why do you think there’s been such a resurgence of horror comics the past few years?

ERIC POWELL: That’s a hard question to answer. What makes people like Justin Bieber? That’s truly horrifying. I dunno. I’ve always liked monsters. I’ve always been drawn to sci-fi and horror fiction. It’s just in my blood, I guess.

And I feel like we horror comic fans have been lucky recently, because it seems to me that comics of all genres are kind of taking off right now. Pretty sure that, in my lifetime, this is the

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moment where more voices are being expressed and heard through comics. That’s nothing but a good thing for growing our industry.

TJKC: You’re a few years younger than me. Were you old enough to see any of Kirby’s comics on the newsstand, or did you come across them later? Do you remember the first time you saw his work?

POWELL: Younger?! You must be sooo old! I kid! Dude, I can’t see anything, and I forget anything I’ve heard ten minutes later. Let’s commiserate on our misspent and lost youth. Ow, my back! What was the question? Oh, yeah… My uncle was a comic reader, so I’m sure my first exposure to Kirby was through some of his old comics. But it was when I started reading his groundbreaking run on Fantastic Four that I started to appreciate and really recognize his pop-art genius.

Kirby’s Fantastic Four #1 cover. What about the others? Did you go through the old Atlas monster comics to find inspiration? Have you read much of that stuff?

POWELL: I’ve read some of the stuff here and there. But when I was a kid collecting, it was hard to come by. Luckily, through reprints and digital comics it’s becoming easy to find. I do remember having to search on the Internet to find reference for a couple of those monsters. A couple on those Marvel Monsters covers were pretty obscure.

TJKC: What aspect of Kirby’s work do you connect with the most as an artist?

POWELL: The bold power of it. As an artist that tends to be somewhat heavy-handed, I really appreciate the raw power of his work.

Subtlety and nuance were not what he was going for. It was all about the energy of the art.

TJKC: As part of that series you also co-wrote, with Tom Sniegoski, and penciled a Devil Dinosaur story, which also featured the Hulk.

How did that story come about? Were you a fan of Devil Dinosaur?

POWELL: It’s funny, Tom and I had spoken beforehand about trying to pitch a Devil Dinosaur book to Marvel. When they contacted me about doing it, I had to ask Tom to come along. The Hulk got thrown in just because I wanted to draw the Hulk. I had inked a few Hulk issues, but had never gotten to draw him before.

TJKC: In 2006 you drew several covers for the Marvel Monsters event, which featured several of the Atlas-era monsters created by Kirby. What do you think about Kirby’s monster designs? Are there any specific ones you enjoyed drawing more than the others?

POWELL: I love Kirby monsters. My favorite Kirby monster fest was his run on The Demon.

I love the big meaty fingers, squared claws and heads. There’s no mistaking a Kirby monster.

TJKC: The opening splash page of the story is an homage of Kirby’s cover for Devil Dinosaur #1, and it seemed like you were emulating Kirby’s panel layouts to some degree as well.

Is that the case?

TJKC: One of those covers is an homage of 31

(right) Pencils for the cover of Dark Horse’s Universal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horror collection. Universal’s depiction of the Frankenstein monster influenced Kirby’s original design of the Hulk, a look Eric went to for his version of the Hulk in the Devil Dinosaur one-shot. (below) Not quite a monster, but perhaps more monster than man, Darkseid didn’t make it into Eric’s Bizarro story for Action Comics (written

by Geoff Johns and Richard Donner), but he did make it into Eric’s sketchbook. (next page) Up top is another cover from the Marvel Monsters series of one-shots, this one loosely based on Kirby’s cover to Tales of Suspense #25. Down low, Cap comes face-to-reallybig-face with MODOK for the first time, and Eric presents his take on the brainy one in his pencils and ink wash for the cover of Super-Villain TeamUp: MODOK’s 11 #1.

POWELL: I don’t know if I was emulating Kirby’s page layouts as much as we kind of have the same approach to page layout—meaning my page layouts are highly influenced by Kirby. So, yeah, I guess I was emulating Kirby’s layouts… but I do that on all my books.

TJKC: You went with the original Kirby-drawn Hulk design as the basis of your Hulk. Was that just an additional nod to Kirby, or do you prefer that look for the character? What about that design do you find appealing?

POWELL: Absolutely. I love the square-headed, low brow Frankenstein version of the Hulk as Kirby originally drew him.

TJKC: There tends to be a lot of humor in your creator-owned books, some more than others. How does that affect your approach to designing monsters?

POWELL: It really depends on the mood I’m going for.

More often than not, I tend to go a little goofy, which

gives you a lot of room with how you want to present a monster. But if you want to invoke a real sense of dread, you can’t go goofy. You have to play it a little more photorealistic. Big, googly muppet eyes aren’t gonna make you feel any of your characters are in danger.

TJKC: Kirby wrote and drew a lot of horror and monster books throughout his career, and like you, his stories tended more towards the adventure, suspense, and fun side of that coin than the dark, grim, and shocking side. Kirby was very conscious that it was mainly kids reading his books, and worked with that in mind. You’ve done a couple of series targeted at kids as well, with Chimichanga and Spook House.

What was your motivation to do those particular projects, and how does your approach to the storytelling and creature designs differ when working on them?

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POWELL: Well, the market has changed quite a bit. We aren’t targeting kids anymore. And my work has been a little all over the place. From super adult, gritty content like Big Man Plans, to the kids’ books you’ve mentioned, my heart is with the kid stuff. Childhood is a terrifying and magical time. The harsh reality hasn’t set in. The fantasy that adults know what they’re doing and will take care of things is still in place. You’re not jaded and still think literally anything might be possible. I absolutely love the idea that some comic I’ve done will be a part of someone’s memory of this time. Yeah, kids’ books aren’t necessarily what I’m known for, but I love doing them.

TJKC: As a publisher and not just a creator, you’re doing what Kirby probably wished he could have done his entire career. Technology has made it much more accessible and viable today. But we all know Kirby wasn’t the greatest businessman. If he were still around today and looking to start his own publishing house, what advice would you give him?

POWELL: I often think about the fact that Kirby never got to take advantage of the creator-owned environment we have today. It’s a real shame. As far as advice… I’d tell him he should really do a bunch of creator-owned projects for Albatross Funnybooks! Ha! But, really, I’d tell him what I’d tell anyone wanting to do their own thing: Keep your rights, and get a good attorney with a background in entertainment. H (above and right) We can’t end without mentioning that this year marks the 20th anniversary of The Goon! Eric is celebrating by relaunching the series through his Albatross Exploding Funny Books publishing house. It’s available at comic book shops of discerning taste now, so go check it out! And for more in-depth coverage of Eric’s life and career, we recommend TwoMorrows’ own Modern Masters book on him (available now), as well as the upcoming Comic Book Creator #21. Knife To The Eye!

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Gallery 1

Commentary by Shane Foley

(this page) Count Dragorin and Lupek, as revisited by Kirby for his ‘Black Book’ gift for Roz: When Kirby’s desire to do a Dracula comic was scuttled, he did Dragorin and a whole cast of monster film characters instead, in what is one of the wackiest stories ever done. I wonder which character from Oklahoma these two became? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ll have to find Jimmy Olsen #142–143 to find out. It’s too wayout Kirby complicated to go into here!) (next page) Forever People #9, page 18: A bandaged face is spooky enough, but notice how, in panel 2, Kirby adds power and rage by cleverly arranging the bandages to form a contorted, angry face! The harsh shadowing on the face in panel 3 continues the drama, even as the impossibly thickened body mass evokes unstoppable strength.

And the detail in panel 4 is stunning pencil work! (following spread) Demon #10, page 6: (It’s numbered ‘5’ here) Dramatic Phantom of the Opera pencils by Kirby, filled with his trademark ugliness! But maybe a key point of this page is comparing these pencils to the inked version on page 89 of this issue, where we see the thought and care that Mike Royer put, not only into his expert inking, but into the lettering. Note how Royer has made a separate balloon for the second ‘Look!’ and placed it over to the right side for better balance. And note his beautiful title and ‘Chapter Two’ lettering artistry!

Demon #6 cover: An effective, simple layout of power and mystery. The horse turning its head back in fright is drawn to perfection, adding to the drama! Jack’s stylized blacks surely have their origins in the shapes created in old black-and-white photos, such as many of World War I, and in films like 1941’s The Wolf Man, which helped generate this and many other story ideas.

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(next two pages) Captain America Annual #3, story page 24 (numbered 34 in the comic): Showcasing Kirby at his most creative and moody. The reader never quite knew who were the goodies or baddies until it’s revealed that Cap is defending the wrong party. This real horror story, in a UFO setting (very trendy for the mid-’70s, though out of sync with the Marvel Universe), with the sequence where the alien’s nature is revealed—of which this page is a part—is truly suspenseful and horrifying.

Damon Hunter proposal sheet: Doesn’t the mind just boggle at Kirby’s incredible creativity when looking at this undeveloped “The Raven” concept? It appears he’s just throwing out ideas for four potential major villains as well as using the griffin idea. And don’t they all look so terrific? And what’s this?

Kirby has a pic of the hero asleep and the griffin ‘Garp’ asleep on his chest with his tail tickling Damon’s nose. Horror, action and humor packaged in such a small space!

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(above) Spragg: A second sketch from Roz’s Black Book—and a surprise revisiting of Kirby to such a throwaway character, this time from the pre-Marvel monster book era. I wonder if Kirby drew Spragg because his image was one of the first he found when looking back through old books—or whether there were events in his life at the time he was drawing the original story, that he remembered every time he looked at it? Now this guy is a true ‘monster’! (next page) Triton pin-up from Fantastic Four Annual #5: Surely one of the most powerful depictions of this Inhuman ever done, and a superb example of Kirby’s slashed anatomy working to perfection. Is he a monster? Maybe his appearance was inspired by the old Creature from the Black Lagoon movie, but Triton was ever one of the least monstrous of the Inhumans (I find Gorgon much more ‘monstrous’) and no more ‘monster’ than the Thing. H

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HorrorFLIK

The Empire Strikes out Interview with Michael Zuccaro

(right) A letter Jack sent to Michael Zuccaro, two years prior to their first meeting at the 1975 Miami Comic-Con. (below) The Stephen Spielberg-produced Gremlins got an Empire knock-off called Ghoulies. (bottom) Head of the Family is a 1996 B-movie black comedy released by Full Moon. The similarities to the Simon & Kirby story from 1954’s Black Magic 30 (V4#6, reprinted in 1973 by DC Comics with a new Jerry Grandenetti cover) are unmistakable.

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ack in TJKC #11, we ran a short feature on Kirby’s work with film producer Charles Band at Empire Entertainment. In May 1995, I had sent a letter to Mr. Band, asking for background on two Jack Kirby concepts that had apparently evolved into renamed films at his later company, Full Moon Productions. In response, he briefly visited the TwoMorrows booth at the 1995 ComicCon International saying in passing, “Sometime I need to tell you what happened with those,” but he never responded to our repeated attempts to get details on the situation.

So we asked Michael Zuccaro, who was Jack’s initial contact with Band, to offer up his own recollections of the experience.

“My ill-fated two-pic deal with Jack Kirby at Empire Pictures started with my subscription copy of The Hollywood Reporter, where I read a 1986 front page story about film producer Charles Band.

In it, he was quoted as having a love for comic books—and if you love comics, you can’t not love Jack Kirby.

“Therefore, I took it upon myself to approach Mr. Band in hopes of him doing my script NOCTVRNVS that Jack embellished (formerly entitled Forever Amore—see TJKC #11 for my story behind that project).

Band was very much intrigued and requested a meeting at his Empire Entertainment office in Hollywood. Jack and I took the meeting with him and his girlfriend/ producer/then-wife (now ex-) Debra Dion.

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“While Mr. Band liked Forever Amore, he didn’t have the budget for it, but wanted Jack and me to produce a couple of Jack’s ideas: Mindmaster and Doctor Mortalis.

“Mr. Band is known for producing his low-budget B-movies in reverse, which apparently by sheer volume has served him well. He starts with the last step, the movie’s poster (i.e. 1985 Gremlins knock-off Ghoulies, with a creature head popping up from a toilet seat, and the tagline “They’ll Get You In The End!”) and seeks financing by talking up the poster.

“He proceeded to do just that after getting Jack and me some ‘good faith’ money, and following another front page Hollywood Reporter article announcing the deal, he took out full-page ads there and in Variety.

“The plan was for Jack and me to go to his film studio in Rome to produce the two films. After months of delays, Empire Pictures filed bankruptcy [in 1988]. Years later, Band re-emerged, his new company re-Banded as Full Moon Productions. In 1992 and 1993, it released what to our eyes were identical projects to ours, renamed Mandroid and Doctor Mordrid—with no creative input from us or money from Mr. Band.

“I felt bad and responsible for Jack’s name being exploited, because if not for me, he and I wouldn’t have felt fleeced. I asked Jack if he wanted to sue, and if so, I would split legal fees.

“Scrapper that Jack was, he said, ‘Let’s get the bastard!’

“I got an attorney that said it was a slam dunk because it wasn’t

one, but two films. But because these films also went direct-to-video, we were in a David vs. Goliath situation, having to sue Paramount as well, as they were the distributor to the video stores.

“Then sadly, Jack passed away in early 1994, and our attorney didn’t want to put Roz through the stress, and talked her and me out of it.”

While the “Egghead” character on the Dr. Mortalis presentation art was previously used in Kirby’s Captain Victory series, Jack offered up his original concept art for consideration in Topps Comics’ brief 1993 line of comics based on his ideas, and both visuals eventually made it into print as different characters at that company. H

(above) Issue #3 of Topps’ Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga (July 1993) features a character identical to the bandaged man from the Mindmaster presentation. Color art above is by Steve Ditko.

Mindmaster, Dr. Mortalis TM & © Jack Kirby Estate.

Ghoulies, Mandroid, Dr. Mordrid, Head of the Family TM & © Full Moon Productions.

Gremlins TM & © Amblin Entertainment.

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MINDMASTER SYNOPSIS Dr. Taylor, an eccentric genius working at The Institute, the radically innovative “think-tank,” has invented a large, new kind of robot which can be thought controlled. Before he can perfect his invention, an accident occurs which makes it necessary for him to astrally project his mind into the experimental machine. The out-of-body experience leaves him debilitated and disfigured. His skin becomes an oozing discolored mass. He is treated by his colleagues who wrap him in bandages to conceal his disfigurement.

Dr. Taylor’s nemesis at The Institute is a religious fanatic named Cauldwell. Cauldwell will stop at nothing to destroy Dr. Taylor’s revolutionary research, which he considers blasphemous. Therefore, he kidnaps his helpless rival and holds him hostage. Dr. Taylor, however, still maintains control over the mammoth robot. But each time he is forced to activate his power, his physical condition deteriorates further.

Enlisting the aid of his daughter, Dr. Taylor thwarts the efforts of his enemy. But not without a tremendous struggle in a spectacular battle between seemingly indestructible adversaries using high-tech weaponry and inexhaustible strength.

DR. MORTALIS SYNOPSIS Dr. Mortalis is an all-powerful wizard, the leader of a secret sect of sorcerers known as The Dark Order. His faithful sidekick, “Egghead,” is a witty half-human, half-computer genius who possesses fantastic special powers.

The source of The Dark Order’s powers are the scrolls of an ancient civilization which lived by a code of magic. These scrolls are the bible of sorcery; and they contain an awesome power of their own, investing the holder with limitless power over all sorcerers.

Dr. Mortalis’ evil counterpart is the maniacal Hazaar. In a multi-dimensional battle, they match their wits and their skills in a contest for supremacy in the realm of magic. The final arena for their cosmic struggle is in a small midwestern town where they involve the local citizens in their fight. The mortals are caught up in events beyond their imagination.

Creatures of all sorts overrun the town in an explosive display of visual effects. One couple, the Whitmalls, become pawns in the monumental confrontation. As the town crumbles about them in a spectacular duel of magical powers, the Whitmalls are forced to take action which will affect the future of the worlds of magic and of mortals.

(left) Synopses from Empire’s promotional material, and the eventual Full Moon films they morphed into. (right) Kirby’s Egghead character from Captain Victory.

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(above) For the 1993 Dracula: Vlad the Impaler card set by Topps Comics, a Kirby Dr. Mortalis illo was repurposed and inked by Mike Mignola, and used on the reverse sides of the nine-card set to form a Dracula puzzle. (left) Some of Empire Entertainment’s promotional material used to sell properties at the (now-defunct) Italian Mifed Film Market, and in the Oct. 22, 1986 issue of Variety. A December 4, 1986 article in The Los Angeles Times said Kirby would begin work “next year” on a movie featuring his new creation, Dr. Mortalis. © Empire Entertainment.

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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

mens along with the Earthman. As he was later to repeatedly demonstrate for Stan Lee’s Atlas/Marvel monster books, Kirby’s inventiveness when creating these grotesque aliens is second-to-none, but that imagination is, of course, also evident in conjuring up the alien environment—such as a jungle overrun with growths of purple vegetation covered by snaking roots, or a gigantic crimson lake with bizarre yellow flowers floating on its surface. The other stories in the issue by DC workhorses Ruben Moreira and Jim Mooney are nothing to write home about, but they are perfectly efficient pieces of work and par for the course for DC fantasy/SF comics of the day.

But—as ever—it’s the Jack Kirby tale that makes this issue collectable.

THE KIRBY IMAGINATION

It’s not a problem that exercises most of us who have tried our hand at illustration (and that includes me—for eight years, I drew for British comics): What you do when your imagination is so prodigal that your right hand can barely keep up with the images that spring to your imagination?

The late Wally Wood was well known for the fact that he considered himself to be—with some justification—the world’s greatest comics artist, but in the wee small hours (and perhaps before he finally took his life), the truth nagged at him: For all his brilliance, Wood had to concede the Number One spot to Jack Kirby. Apart from anything else, it was the sheer operatic range of Kirby’s imagination which extended across everything he drew, from the human figure to landscapes to buildings. And there was one area in which he unquestionably beat all his rivals (including Wood): The creation of bizarre and unusual alien lifeforms. All of which is a preamble to discussing a minor but entertaining Kirby story drawn for DC’s My Greatest Adventure #20 (March/April 1958), “I Was Big-Game on Neptune.” The basic theme here is a very familiar (and well-worn) one—the Earthman captured and spirited into space to take part in a series of games on an alien planet, where he finds himself as prey along with captured specimens from other worlds. In fact, it’s a theme that Kirby used most successfully in one of his Challengers of the Unknown stories, “Captives of the Space Circus.” But here it is given a very lively treatment—and one of the pleasures of the stories is the chance to see the bizarre variety of alien creatures on the run from brutal Neptunian captors. The splash panel alone features five such (mostly humanoid) speci-

KIRBY KONGRUENCES

One of the particular pleasures for the Kirby aficionado is spotting versions of ideas that were developed elsewhere in his work—such as a short SF piece about a future world ruled by animals which was to be developed in Kamandi, and, of course, the Challengers of the Unknown elements that reappeared in the later Fantastic Four. Yet another example? The glorious (albeit brief) period of sciencefiction tales by Simon and Kirby that appeared in Harvey’s Race for the Moon may be found reflected in an anomalous tale in Kirby’s parodic Commie-baiting book Fighting American called “Homecoming Year 3000” (issue #4, October/November 1954). The tale actually has nothing to do with the adventures of the red-white-and-blue patriotic super-hero—mainly because it’s a retooled version of the unsold Starman Zero strip. In his secret identity as Johnny Flagg, Fighting American settles down to sleep one night and dreams an entire science-fiction adventure in which he 46

is a space traveler encountering out-of-this-world, bizarre creatures such as leaping monsters with purple parasites attached to their heads, and a mammoth bird with a lethal pointed beak called the Javelin. The tale is a classic example of lively Kirby SF adventure, and the splash page (with a spaceman framed against a multi-coloured space station and rocket) could have come from the pages of Race for the Moon. It’s another reason for regretting that there isn’t more straightforward science-fiction from the King, but at least this can be enjoyed in the Marvel comics reprint version of Fighting American. As to those bizarre creatures—well, aren’t such things meat and potatoes to the Kirby admirer?

MOUTH OF THE METAL-EATING MONSTER

In fact, the title of the Kirby story in My Greatest Adventure #21(May/June 1958) is only slightly less ridiculous than I rendered it above—it is actually called “We Were Doomed by the Metal-Eating Monster”, and the title is not the only thing that is unlikely about the story. The science of the piece does not repay too close attention, even given the generous slack we have to cut such material. The gigantic alien entity of the title is shown in the splash panel ingesting a variety of metal objects such as typewriters, aircraft engines and even staplers (!)—but it is to move on to bigger metallic goodies to assuage its appetite later in the piece. (The worried hero decides that it’s going to swallow the whole world. But an unanswered question: What happens to all that metal when it goes into the maw of the monster?) Yes, the thing grows in size, but not big enough to swallow the whole world. However, as in so many of DC’s science-fiction tales edited by Jack Schiff rather than Julius Schwartz, it is probably

wise not to look too closely into the actual logic of the piece—Schiff (like the talented Richard Hughes over at ACG) was singularly uninterested in making his science-fiction pieces plausible. Julie Schwartz would work with such writers as John Broome and Gardner Fox in getting things as persuasive in SF terms as possible, but not Jack Schiff.

In any case, what counts here is the Kirby art, and the tale is full of lovely touches that will delight Kirbyites—note the striking design of a red spaceship in the first panel after the splash, and a remarkable panel on page 4 in which lorries, trains, and skyscrapers are being ingested by the ridiculous monster. In terms of sheer design and the dynamism of figure movement in the various panels, it’s a reminder (if reminder were needed) of how Kirby was comfortably the finest illustrator working for DC at time—which makes the fact that he was not particularly esteemed by the head honchos even more bizarre. Did the powers that be at DC have no idea what talent they had at their disposal with Jack Kirby? H 47

www.kirbymuseum.org The Not-So-Secret Stash!

Newsletter

In 2006, we started the Jack Kirby Digital Archive with the ambitious goal of archiving every available piece of Jack Kirby art. The project’s purpose is to create a lasting record of Kirby’s art for everyone to study and enjoy n­ ow and long into the future.

Approximate figures as of March 2019: • 4500 pages of comic book original art • 150 pages of comic strip original art • 7500 pages of pencil photocopies of comic book, comic strip, animation, and sketch art • 500 commissions sketches and other original art

More about the Museum’s Digital Archive

TJKC Edition Summer 2019 The Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center is organized exclusively for educational purposes; more specifically, to promote and encourage the study, understanding, preservation and appreciation of the work of Jack Kirby by: • illustrating the scope of Kirby’s multi-faceted career, • communicating the stories, inspirations and influences of Jack Kirby, • celebrating the life of Jack Kirby and his creations, and • building understanding of comic books and comic book creators.

To this end, the Museum will sponsor and otherwise support study, teaching, conferences, discussion groups, exhibitions, displays, publications and cinematic, theatrical or multimedia productions.

Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center

Recent scans With the passage of time, all original include a new highest resolution art runs the risk of deteriorating or being scan of page 4 of “Street Code”, destroyed in natural or man-made disasand scans of two photocopies of ters. The Kirby Museum is dedicated to Kirby’s 1979 “Moon-Bear” pitch! preserving Kirby’s legacy by building the digital archive. Our efforts are ongoing. Jack Kirby Museum trustees Rand Hoppe and Tom Kraft attend many US comic conventions to scan on-site from original comic art dealers and private collectors who bring their art to the convention for scanning. To ensure an accurate high-quality record of these precious artifacts, we scan at museum-quality archival standards using wide-format Epson 12000XL professional scanners at 600-1200 DPI, imaging both the fronts and backs of the art and saving in the DNG (a RAW, digital negative) format. Many collectors prefer to keep their art close at hand, whether at home, their office or a studio, but want to support our efforts. In these cases we travel to the collector with our scanners.

How can you help?

1) Have your art scanned Annual Memberships at a convention! Contact us via with one of these e-mail at info@kirbymuseum.org, posters: $50* our Facebook page, or Twitter to coordinate bringing your art to a show we are attending.

2) Schedule a visit! We try to group collector visits by area and during conventions.

Typically we are in the Los Angeles and New York areas but can travel to most US cities.

3) Support the Museum! Travel expenses and managing the archive storage and equipment are costly. If you would like to help us in our efforts to build the archives, please consider making a financial donation. A PayPal donate link is available on our web page, and our mailing address is Jack Kirby Museum, PO Box 5236, Hoboken, NJ Captain America—23” x 29” 07030. We are a 501c3 charitable 1941 Captain America—14” x 23” organization. Donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent one of these: $60* allowed by the IRS. 4) Donate original Kirby art! The Museum maintains a small collection of Kirby original art. We are building our art collection through purchase and donations. There may be tax advantages to donating art to a non-profit. Please consider Marvel—14” x 23” Galactic Head— 18” x 20” color discussing this with your tax advisor and estate planner. or this: $70*

Thanks!

Thanks to all who helped us add to the Digital Archive during our May visit to Southern California! Lisa Kirby, Tracy Kirby, Jeremy Kirby, Bechara Maalouf, Aaron Noble, Mark Levy, Scott Shaw!, Steve Sherman, Rich Donnelly, and Andy Ristaino.

PO Box 5236 Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA Telephone: (201) 204-0532 Continued thanks to John Morrow and TwoMorrows Publishing, as well as Lisa Kirby and the Kirby Estate 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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Fighting American print silkscreened in Switzerland 23” x 19”

POW!ER

Two Monster Techniques

by A.T. LeMay

D (below) The origin page from Incredible Hulk #1.

r. Bruce Banner pushes Rick Jones into a ditch and then is hit by the full force of a Gamma Bomb explosion—in this exciting creation of one of Marvel’s most popular ongoing characters, Jack Kirby manages to violate every unwritten rule of cartooning.

All cartoon drawings since the time of the Egyptians have always been done with outline techniques. Jack’s drawing of Bruce Banner being nuked is an impressionistic technique done with power lines that give the impression of a human figure. It was a drawing with pure energy instead of outline.

The story of the Hulk’s origin has been retold at least once a year since issue #1, often by a different artist. Still, I’ve yet to see a more effective technique used to communicate the full impact of the action. What’s more, Jack was working at a severe handicap,

compared to his more modern contemporaries, for comic book reproduction and printing technology in the early 1960s was pretty poor.

In fact, Marvel Brass had originally wanted the Hulk to be gray, but they couldn’t get him to stay the same shade of gray throughout the books, so in Hulk #2 he came back as the Grumpy Greenskin Guy we all know and love; but even with this very limiting printing technology, Jack was pushing the medium like few cartoonists before him or since. Fancy airbrush and computer coloring techniques hadn’t yet been used or invented in the industry, and so Jack was limited to using a #2 pencil and two decades’ experience.

I know that Hulk #1 probably wasn’t the first time Jack used this impressionistic technique to show energy, but it’s one of the finest early examples, and a real step up from the bars of colored light that he used to depict cosmic rays in Fantastic Four #1. One thing is for sure: It wasn’t the last time he used the energy lines. The great thing about Jack is that although he used the impressionistic technique often, he never repeated himself. Also, he never overused the technique. His books were always about character and plot, not special effects. Jack was a master storyteller; like George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry, he believed in a strong storyline, but when the special effects were finally needed, he could provide them better then any effects house.

Jack’s explosions were the best in the industry.

Looking back at the Golden Age of comics, many explosions were almost childish. Take a drawing of the sun done by a six-year-old—any six-year-old— and it will be a circle with lines to represent rays of light extending outward from it. Now remove the round circle in the middle and replace it with a word like ‘POW’ or ‘BOOM’ and you have a Golden 49

experiences with the real thing.)

I always expected energy to look like Jack’s black circles. In science class in high school, I was disappointed when I found out that there were two types of energy—kinetic and poetical— and both are mostly invisible to the human eye. Even when we did get to see energy in my high school science class, it was something as dull as a match burning or water boiling—and even these examples, we were told by my teacher, were not examples of energy but of the effects of energy on matter; for energy in itself is an abstract concept.

For example, E=mc2 (Energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared) is an equation that can never really be conclusively proven true or false. Yet most of Marvel’s Silver Age heroes—the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and even the Hulk, to name a few— would never have existed without this equation. The Silver Surfer actually created a cocoon of solid energy (to hold Galactus for a few moments) that the Thing was able to reach out and touch.

Albert Einstein came up with the E=mc2 formula to try and explain energy. Jack Kirby created his Power Lines and Circles of Confusion to help us see it. H

Age comic book explosion. The explosions drawn in the DC house style were often so clean they never really looked like they would hurt anyone (this may be due to censorship); but in Jack’s explosions we see machinery being ripped apart, fragments and debris being tossed in the air, energy lines and black circles, and characters being thrown head over heels.

I particularly liked the way Jack used little circles, dubbed “Kirby Krackle,” in his drawings. (In photographic jargon, the circles that form when a picture is out of focus or the camera is pointing at a light source, like the sun, are called “Circles of Confusion.” A great explanation of its use in photography can be found in an episode of Adorama TV’s “Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJHlVR4_dEE, shown below.)

I’ve often wondered where Jack came up with his technique for drawing Circles of Confusion. I heard a secondhand story once that a fan had asked Jack why he used all those squiggly lines on his characters. Jack replied, “I put them in once by accident and they looked good, so I kept using them.” Maybe the same is also true for Jack’s energy lines and Circles of Confusion.

Jack’s use of Circles of Confusion is a study in itself. When he left them clear, they served as bubbles in dramatic underwater scenes, such as when Giant-Man pulls the frozen Captain America into the Avengers sub. When blackened-in, these circles became energy that swirled, crackled, and rippled, like when Doctor Doom stole the Sliver Surfer’s power. When the circles were colored and overlapped, they became thick black smoke from a fire or explosion. (Jack’s explosions were never clean; I attribute this to his World War II

© Adorama TV

While Kirby Krackle in its mature form first appeared in Kirby’s work during 1965–1966, comics historian Harry Mendryk has traced the stylistic device back to 1940 in Blue Bolt #5 (below). As inker, Joe Simon may have been partially responsible for the effect. Other early examples (above) include Kirby stories from the late 1950s: Unexpected #18’s “The Man Who Collected Planets” from 1957 (inks by Kirby) and House of Mystery #84’s “The Negative Man” from 1959 (inks by Marvin Stein).

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Unexplained

(below) Pencils from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #144, as the crew prepares to summon Jack’s version of the Loch Ness Monster.

M

Monster Myths

by John Morrow

ythological beasts abound throughout history: Kraken, Griffin, Manticore, Basilisk, Roc, and many others. But Kirby, always on the search for new fodder for inspiration in his stories, took two that had made their way into pop culture, and turned them into characters in his own comics.

Highlands. The earliest report of a monster there dates back to the year 565.

In 1933, road construction on the north shore of Loch Ness involved a lot of drilling and blasting, which some think forced the monster to come out of hiding, and into the open waters. Around this time, there were numerous reported sightings. In 1934, a London surgeon took a photograph that seems to show Nessie above the surface of the water, and it’s kept the creature in the headlines ever since. (That “surgeon’s photograph” of 1934, above, is now known to have been part of a hoax.)

From 1962–1972, the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau conducted a ten-year study, and documented an average of 20 sightings per year. By the end of the 1960s, sonar was used unsuccessfully in trying to track the creature, but in the mid-1970s, underwater photographs that appeared to show a ‘flipper’ were made public, further helping keep the legend alive.

The Loch Ness Monster

In Scottish folklore, the Loch Ness Monster (or “Nessie”) allegedly inhabits Loch Ness in the Scottish

Bigfoot/Sasquatch

Bigfoot (or “Sasquatch”) are said to be hairy, upright-walking, ape-like creatures that dwell in the wilderness (particularly the US Pacific Northwest) and leave large, otherwise unexplained footprints behind.

On September 21, 1958, journalist Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times ran a letter about loggers in northern California who’d discovered mysteriously large footprints. In his column, he joked, “Maybe we have a relative of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas.” Due to interest from readers, he published follow-up articles about the footprints, stating loggers had named the creature “Big Foot,” and a legend was born.

A 1976 faux-documentary titled The Legend of Bigfoot catapulted the creature to pop culture stardom. That same year, the highly watched first installment of a two-part 51

episode of the Six Million Dollar Man TV show (right) aired on February 1, featuring the Sasquatch (initially played by wrestler Andre the Giant, and in later episodes by Ted Cassidy—“Lurch” from The Addams Family).

UFO Phenomena

(below) Thunderfoot concept art, for Kirby’s kindly version of a Sasquatch. (next page, top) A mid1970s pencil piece titled “Encounter In The Swamp.”

Kirby was fascinated with the idea of aliens from other planets and UFOs, from his first exposure to a science-fiction pulp magazine as a youngster. In a June 1982 interview in the Pensacola News Journal (Pensacola, Florida), Kirby recalled rescuing a sci-fi pulp he saw floating down a gutter toward the sewer: “It was, I think, a ‘Science Wonder Quarterly’ by Hugo Gernsback, and it had a wonderful cover, a rocketship, the planet Saturn and all that. Wet as it was, I took it home and stuck it under my pillow, letting no one know that I had it. If anybody had ideas that I was reading a pulp magazine, I’d have gotten my lumps for it.”

Will Murray has tracked down a cover that perfectly matches that description: It’s a Wonder Stories Quarterly from Spring 1931, when Kirby would’ve been 13 years old.

In 1982’s Jack Kirby Treasury Vol. 1, Kirby is similarly quoted as follows by Greg Theakston: “I remember com-

52

ing out of school one day when I was about twelve.

It had been raining. I spotted this magazine floating down the gutter and jumped for it. The cover was amazing! I’d never seen anything like it, space ships and futuristic cities. At that moment, something galvanized in my brain. I kept the pulp hidden in my room and read it dozens of times. It was an early issue of Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories.” Accompanying this quote was an image of the December 1932 issue of Wonder Stories, with a caption stating, “Pulps like this charged Kirby’s imagination…”, but didn’t conclusively state it was the exact cover that Kirby saw. However, when The Complete Jack Kirby Vol. 1 was published in 1997, it contained an edited version of that interview, with Kirby recounting that same experience, saying, “..the cover was amazing! Space ships and futuristic cities…”, and Theakston conclusively stating the December 1932 issue was the one Kirby saw.

Because of this, many have accepted it as fact, but without proof that Theakston got

Jack to specifically identify the December 1932 issue as the correct one (which was published when Kirby was 15 years old instead of “about twelve” as Jack stated in the earlier edit of the interview), I think Kirby’s definitive description of the Spring 1931 cover (when Jack was 13 years old) pins it as the actual issue he saw.

The first well-known UFO sighting occurred in 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane.

Arnold estimated the speed of the crescent-shaped objects as several thousand miles per hour and said they moved “like saucers skipping on water,” resulting in the term “flying saucer.”

Between 1947 and 1969, at the height of the Cold War, more than 12,000 UFO sightings were reported to Project Blue Book, a top-secret Air Force team assigned to investigate the incidents and determine if they posed a national security threat.

The 1970 British science-fiction television series UFO achieved US syndication through 1973, and the craze reached a fever pitch with the release of Stephen Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But while this phenomena may’ve been in influence on Kirby, his work almost took the pop culture hysteria down a potentially darker path.

As has been documented by Jack’s family, members of a UFO

cult, intrigued by his comics, appeared at the Kirby home one day in the 1970s, and asked Jack to accompany them to the desert to wait for a UFO to arrive and take them away. Jack and Roz were polite to the visitors and offered them their hospitality before turning them down. But just who were these visitors?

They may’ve been members of Heaven’s Gate, a UFO religious millenarian cult based in San Diego, California. It was founded in 1974 by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, who claimed to represent beings from another planet, and promised potential members they would be brought to a higher evolutionary “Next Level” of existence.

Thankfully, Kirby declined their request to accompany them. On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group in a house in Rancho Santa Fe, California. They had participated in a mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale–Bopp, which had been discovered on July 23, 1995. H [Much of the historical data here is referenced from history.com] 53

Boydisms

by Jerry Boyd

M

onsters have been a part of popular culture ever since writers, artists, painters, and sculptors found an audience for things that go bump in the night. Most nations have their demons, witches, ghosts, animal-men, and so on as part of their lore.

In the US, Lee and Kirby made Comics Codeapproved creatures (with briefs on, a lot of the time) a staple of their pre-hero line-up, and the many imaginative space aliens, man-made creatures, swamp and plant things, and revived evil giants of legend kept readers glued to Journey Into Mystery, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, and Tales of Suspense, among others.

For this young fan, Kirby’s monsters and heroes came together in one moment in the Summer of 1966. My parents went away for a short vacation, and my brother and I were left with our maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. When my parents returned to get us, the hugs and kisses were added to by two comics they’d gotten me: Fantasy Masterpieces #4 and Amazing SpiderMan Special #3. The Kirby cover for the former and the

Romita splash for the latter knocked me out! I’d never seen a copy of either, and while the adults chatted, my brother and I (he got two 25¢ Harvey comics) were lost in our grandparents’ den.

I knew there’d been some time on Earth long ago because I had grandparents and parents, but these old Captain America and Bucky stories—what was this?!

I was glued to the pages—crudely drawn (though I wasn’t old enough to really know “crude”), but filled with passion, and wildly intriguing.

Stan and Jack had an “It!” story inside—closer to his current style in the Fantastic Four, but less crude than the two Captain America tales (and look—Bucky Barnes, the youngster referred to in more than a few Tales of Suspense yarns—wowwwweee…). I had to devour this, and though I was only an almost-thirdgrader, I had to figure out the words I didn’t know. I had to get into this stuff—and the Spider-Man, as well!

The first Captain America story dealt with “The Menace of Dr. Grimm” and the moody, dark splash page said a lot about the events to come—a foreboding building with strange underlings bringing a victim to it in the darkness. Cap and Bucky were standing nearby, taking it all in. I’d take it all in, also. The afternoon was set—monsters from a 1940s story and another monster from the early 1960s. It was all new to me and I’d love it and more of the same from issues of Fantasy Masterpieces to come! I’ll examine the monsters the Star-Spangled Sentinels battled first.

The Monsters That Haunted Camp Lehigh!

In those less sophisticated days, enthusiastic

comics readers didn’t do a lot of questioning (because most comics houses didn’t have letters columns, for one thing) or stop reading their heroes’ adventures because they instantly (and impossibly, really) became superb sleuths right after first donning their colorful outfits.

But Cap and Bucky always “had a clue” and used the mounting evidence they gathered to its best advantage. They found out who would strike next, where, and how, and by the story’s end, Cap would stand victoriously over the beaten enemies and reveal their insidious plot. Sometimes the duo went aboard ship or overseas to combat the Japanese militarists or fascists in Europe in their strongholds. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby provided plenty of “human monsters” like the Red Skull, the Chessman, the White Death, and the Killers of the Bund to 54

That Menaced The World (Of Marvel)!

by Jerry Boyd

challenge the adventurous twosome.

But we’re concerned with real monsters here, or those who presented themselves as actual monsters for this offering. And some of Joe and Jack’s probable inspirations for said monsters came from the bustling dream factory of Southern California’s Hollywood.

Axis aggressors started Cap and Bucky off, with the youngster drop-kicking Hitler and Goering in the second issue (!), but it was the third issue that placed the powerfully built Private Rogers into a knight’s armor on a film production conveniently photographed near… Camp Lehigh.

(Aside from Steve and Bucky’s “instant deductive powers”, Camp Lehigh was placed where a lot of the action was!)

The chief antagonist was the Hollywood Hunchback, a nice Kirby rendering not too far from Lon Chaney Sr.’s classic portrayal from the Universal Studios’ hit of 1923, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In Joe and Jack’s take, a filmmaker who was messaging the fight against fascism was mysteriously murdered on the set of a medieval-era adventure.

Suspects were lined up. All had reason to get rid of the deceased, of course. The local police questioned them all, including one actor who looked a lot like Boris Karloff, one of Universal’s kings of horror (who shared the throne with Bela Lugosi). Jack did a nice likeness, and the name “Goris Barloff” said the rest.

The Sentinels of Liberty had to keep the homicidal hunchback from doing more damage, and in the end, they unmasked the killer and saved the day. Spoiler Alert: It wasn’t Barloff…

Another ‘monster’ showed up in the same issue. A plundering, murdering Butterfly (!) soared about the confines of a museum.

Captain America Comics #4 saw the first all-out monster cover.

Bucky was strapped to the type of table nine out of ten demented doctors prefer to use for hapless victims. A barely controlled green monster (!) is at the camp mascot’s right, and a twisted, grinning scientist (or assistant) is near our hero, holding a

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(above) The Hunchback of Hollywood (Captain America Comics #3) gave readers a monster derived from the success of Lon Chaney’s grotesquerie from 1923. (previous page, bottom) “Goris Barloff” was one of the suspects in the Hunchback story. S&K did a solid likeness of Boris Karloff (pictured). (bottom) Our heroes also had to contend with the plundering Butterfly in their third issue. (below) Undated Joe Simon commission.

(below) Nazis and monsters merged again on this S&K cover to Mystic Comics #7! (top right) Gorro, a real fright, from Cap #4. (center) The Black Talon from Cap #9, and hoboes become destruction-minded zombies in All-Winners Comics #1. (bottom) A costumed dog-man emerges from his hideout on the moors in a yarn straight out of Sherlock Holmes in C.A. Comics #10.

hypodermic needle near young Barnes’ arm.

An armed Nazi fires his machine gun at the good captain, who smashes through a door to rescue his sidekick [left].

This was “The Menace of Dr. Grimm”, a charming person at times, but a madman at others. After Bucky is injured, Steve Rogers gets him admitted to Dr. Grimm’s. Bucky hears strange noises in the night (naturally) and once word is gotten out to Steve, Cap has to get into the place and set things right, battling that aforementioned green creature (brown in the interior) from the cover.

In C.A. Comics #8, the “Case of the Black Witch” featured a devilish sorceress haunting “the crumbling walls of Hagmoor Castle” as Mr. Simon wrote it.

Conveniently for Pvt. Rogers and Mascot Barnes, they didn’t have to fly overseas to solve this case. Hagmoor Castle (the name spells it all out) was a comfortable distance from… Camp Lehigh.

Cap and Bucky’s ninth issue spotlighted a monster both human, and inhuman.

An artist became a homicidal maniac after the hand of a convicted black strangler gets grafted onto his limb, following a terrible accident. As the Black Talon, the artist is compelled to strangle innocents, and sometimes paint them as they die! The Talon got cover treatment and returned later via the talents of Stan Lee and Al Avison after S&K went into service.

The tenth outing gave readers “The Phantom Hound of Cardiff Moor” with two seemingly super-

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natural creatures: A demon hound that attacked and killed, and a dog-man who talked and walked on two legs! This one was clearly taken from a Sherlock Holmes novel.

And if readers needed more from the superb team of Kirby and Simon, there was more waiting in AllWinners Comics. The first issue’s Cap and Bucky show was called “The Case of the Hollow Men.” Hoboes were turned into kill-crazy zombies in the town of Lehigh… near Camp Lehigh.

Film References

If Captain America and his young sidekick were Timely Comics sensations (and they were), then Universal Pictures’ monsters were just as sensational, in their corner of American popular culture.

Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man were the movie house’s biggest attractions, and their earlier effort, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was remade by a rival studio in the early 1940s. (The unfortunate, misshapen Quasimodo of the novel and film was revamped by Jack in 1967 as a dangerous, computerized monster brought to life by the Silver Surfer.) Universal was often up and down in the 1930s profit-wise, but took a chance on a re-release of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1938, seven years after they rocked the movie world. It worked. Audiences lined up and

down and around streets to take in the chillers! The delighted studio chiefs immediately began pre-production work to “bring back the dead” and invent new shockers!

The Bat-Man, Captain Marvel, and others took on vampires, inspired

by Bela Lugosi’s bloodthirsty Transylvanian count Dracula.

Jack and Joe wrapped up a few mummy-types on the cover of Cap’s eighth issue. The Phantom Hound was clearly taken from “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, a Universal thriller in the series starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. Was the talking dog-man of the tale a piece on the Wolf Man? The old castles, dark mansions, twisted doctors, warped trees, and hideous assistants that peopled the surrounding areas outside Camp Lehigh were in movies, pulps, and radio shows of the period.

“The air itself is filled with monsters!” Elsa Lanchester, as author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, said this unforgettable line at the beginning of Bride of Frankenstein (Universal, 1935). It surely was just that in the ’30s and ’40s, and the Sentinels of Liberty did their share in ending the threat of malevolent monsters as they worked to halt the would-be world-conquering endeavors of Axis aggressors.

(right) Strange Tales #94 gave us “Save Me From the Weed!’” a story that’d be “smoking” (I couldn’t resist) in times to come! [See next page] (above) Coincidentally, page 3 from the Weed story was on eBay, and this Kirby big hand sketch was on the back! We can only conclude the King was testing out some angles for the opening page. And once again, it’s that old-time radioactivity (a friend of monsters everywhere) that gets things going…

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with a cannabis twist. We created three Ganja Ghouls to host and narrate the stories named The Ripped Creeper, The Grim Reefer, and Dabbarella.

Along with the anthology format of their tales, Richard also created a character called The Weedwolf, whom has a running series appearing in each issue.

While working on the third issue of Danksyde, we were in need of another story to complete the book, which led me to review works by other horror comic masters of the past such as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. While perusing their vast body of works online, I came across a story called “Save Me From The Weed” which originally appeared in Strange Tales #94.

The plot of the story is a radiation leak from an experimental lab contaminates a harmless plant in a nearby garden and animates it to life with evil consequences. It was a perfect story plot to co-opt for our purposes, and a real honor and privilege to utilize the works of comic masters Kirby and Lee in a new hybrid form.

Novel invention gave rise to a whole new character, The Evil Weed, who appears again in Danksyde #4, in a battle of the titans “Budzilla vs. The Evil Weed”. The character has all the hallmarks of a great super-villain, and now has a permanent place in our pantheon of cannabis characters, so stay tuned for further adventures.

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Vince and Rick, tell us a little more about how you got Golden Frog Press started and how you men met.

VINCE DUGAR: I started making the comics with Pat Ryan, a friend of mine. I’m Old School—I consider my stuff to be totally under the Underground Comix heading, even though they’re alternative press stuff, of course. Our stories have an over-the-top theme with a cannabis twist.

RICK BECKER: I met Vince at a comic convention in San Jose, California in 2013. We had our tables across from each other. As time went on, we started talking and I showed him my portfolio—I was selling my artwork. We hit it off, of course, and he told me about what he was doing. The first issue of his Drive-Thru Bud was already out. He showed it to me and I liked it a lot! He said he was looking for artists and I was happy to join up.

The Horror Of… The Weed!

An alternative artist friend of mine, Rick Becker, gave me a copy of a comic he drew some years ago. The comic was similar to, what was called in the 1970s and even the late ’60s, a ‘stoner comic’ where marijuana consumption (or sometimes selling!) set all events in motion. They were always lighthearted and done by longhaired counter-culture greats, and since I enjoyed them then, I decided to check Rick’s book out—and I was glad I did! In this particular one, the creators, Becker and writer Vince Dugar, brought a Kirby monster into their anthology series and gave it a cannabis slant, appropriate for a creature called “the Weed”! I wanted them to talk about it and my interview with them follows this brief intro of their company, Golden Frog Press, by Vince Dugar.

TJKC: Did you both love comix in the 1970s?

BECKER: I loved the undergrounds and I still do.

DUGAR: Absolutely. It was one of the happiest periods in my life!

I read Zap, Freak Brothers, Richard Corben, and the head shops around me sold those great comix. They were amazing; [I] still think they’re amazing!

TJKC: All rivers somehow flow to Jack Kirby in one way or another.

Were you both fans of the King?

DUGAR: Oh, hell yeah! [laughs] I loved him so much! I think I love him more now than before! Some of the super-hero stuff was great; it did get a little redundant after a while, but it was always so powerful! He was so good! His being a master of sequential storytelling makes his material stand out over time. Just a master—he made entire universes and gave his characters so much drama and great situations to act out in.

I will admit that I won’t go there. I respect and love his work, but with our stuff, I find much more freedom in doing what I’m doing in going into cannabis-related areas and characters.

BECKER: I think I first saw Jack’s stuff when I picked up The Fly by Archie Comics. I loved his style right away. I bought the first two issues off the stands. I got a few of the monster books from Atlas; I don’t believe they were Marvel yet, but they kind-of blurred together.

The impetus for doing so was to celebrate the legalization of recreational Cannabis in California, which had been Federally prohibited since the 1920s-30s (Age of Prohibition).

My vision was to create cannabis-themed comic book stories in the spirit of the Underground Comix titles of the 1960s/70s/80s, such as Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix, which delved in adult subject matters censored from the mainstream media.

Our first series was titled Tales of the World Famous Drive-Thru Bud, which adapted characters from Pat Ryan’s pot labels (such as Super Skunk), into a comic story format and narrative. Pat and I had so much fun drawing and writing the stories, that we needed extra assistance to keep up with the production of our ideas.

After completing Pat Ryan’s Tales of the World Famous Drive-Thru Bud series, Richard and I embarked in a new direction of storylines, which gave rise to Tales from the Danksyde, an homage to 1950s Horror Comics, but

TJKC: Yeah, that was the knock on them for a long time. The thinking among fans I knew was that if you had five issues of Strange Tales, Journey Into Mystery, Tales to Astonish, and Tales of Suspense, you had 50-75% of them.

BECKER: That’s it. However, I tried them again later when they got 58

reprinted and they’re a lot of fun. Fin Fang Foom was a favorite—a classic. I think I read that one later on. This one stood out to me because of the Commies and Taiwan.

It had a different kind of story and purpose.

DUGAR: I came across this story where a couple’s walking on some frozen ice and sees this frozen Cyclops under it. The monster’s hand is breaking out of the ice and the girl is recoiling in horror!

TJKC: Yeah, and the guy is talking… doesn’t notice this giant hand! [laughter] DUGAR: Right! I saw that one around 1970… a reprint, and I had to have it.

TJKC: Me too. It was the first issue of Where Monsters Dwell.

DUGAR: Sounds about right!

BECKER: I got that one also, I believe. Loved those reprint books.

TJKC: On to The Weed. This thingy came from Strange Tales #94. It’s a natural for a cannabis-themed comic, but how did you guys get to it?

BECKER: We were coming up with weed-based characters. Vince suggested a parody of Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man, with a more comical and cartoony approach than I wanted.

I wanted to do more of a straight werewolf story. He liked what I drew and said, “Let’s go with that!” We also came up with Budzilla, which speaks for itself.

Vince found the Strange Tales story and said, “Let’s copy this!” I was hesitant, but I thought about it and said, “Wait! I get to do Kirby! [laughter] Yeah!”

DUGAR: I google stuff to get some ideas, but I like to be as original as possible in our parodies. I saw, or we both spotted the Stan and Jack story, and had to do it.

We learned how great Stan’s storytelling was—he gets the readers into it on the first page, and Jack’s art—the perfect complement!

TJKC: And the story you guys did…?

DUGAR: I only had to change ten words! The story was just perfect the way it was! Stan Lee, man! Richard [Becker] blew me away! He took that story, did a great “Kirby” and brought the story back, and I don’t think anyone’s ever done that in the Marvel Universe before!

TJKC: Certainly not with cannabis consumption!

BECKER: The cannabis twist we came up with is the part that makes it ours.

TJKC: Any other Kirby monsters that are favorites of you guys?

DUGAR: Amazing! All of them were amazing! And some are still being revamped today in new Marvel Comics. That’s staying power.

BECKER: Kirby did one story called “Sporr”—kind of like the Blob. It had eyes and talked, giving it more personality, as I recall. I really liked that one.

I came up with the Glob in Danksyde #3, and Sporr was similar to it.

TJKC: And then you men brought back the Weed!

DUGAR: Rick did that one! He brought back the Weed and it worked. It was a big monster battle with our Budzilla!

BECKER: I wrote that one from an artistic set-up. Vince loved it and put in the words. We work well together. Most of the stories are his. For “Return of the Weed”, it seemed to me that [the two monsters] would be natural enemies. Budzilla came out of a Godzilla place—the big monster craze of the 1960s. Vince put the dialogue in but I did the plot for it.

TJKC: Did you men learn anything about Kirby/Lee monsters in the process of doing your own stories?

DUGAR: Yes, definitely. What I’ve learned from working with Rick is the Lee/Kirby methodology. We toss ideas back and forth, and say, “This is cool. Let’s use that.” And you kick it back and make it better and better until it’s shining like a diamond.

BECKER: Our creative process is fun, and I guess something like Jack and Stan’s way of doing things. They had so many stories to do, they had to have a solid way of communicating and still get what each man wanted on paper, more or less. H Vince is looking for a Kickstarter sponsor to crowdfund a fully colorized Danksyde paperback edition featuring the first four issues, and new material as well. Vince says,“To recap our studio partnership, I am the Art Director, Writer, Publisher, and Self-Publisher of the series, and Richard’s prolific talents are in full artistic force in every story, which he manages to change styles and visual feel from story to story—a true master of the medium!” Copies of all of Golden Frog Press’ output can be found on DriveThruBud.com and Mr. Becker does commissions of his stuff and Jack’s. He can e-mailed at: rbecker3000@yahoo.com

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(previous page) Artist Rick Becker’s take on the Kirby-Ayers splash page from the Weed story. He wouldn’t change much for this adaptation for Golden Frog Press. (left) Tales from the Danksyde—this one gave us the origin of terror-storyteller The Ripped Creeper. His yelp yarns have a cannabis twist in ’em!

The Weed returned also, to face Budzilla (bottom)! (below) Where Monsters Dwell brought Jack’s monsters back for the 1970s.

My Favorite Monsters

If you were privileged to be a Baby Boomer during the late 1950s and into the ’60s, monsters, space aliens, man-made creatures and their ilk made your world an exciting one, coming to you in movies, TV shows, comic mags, toys, models, board games, film monster magazines, puzzles, etc.

“It Lives!” was my first Lee/Kirby/Ayers monster in Fantasy Masterpieces #4 as mentioned (originally produced for Strange Tales #82), and that tour de force kept me entranced enough to seek out more issues of FM as the title progressed. Other standouts were “Spragg” (Journey Into Mystery #68), “Zzutak” (Strange Tales #88), “Zarkorr” (Tales of Suspense #37), and “The Creature from Krogarr” (Tales to Astonish #25).

But for poignancy, there’s only one at the top of the heap, and that’s “Mr. Morgan’s Monster” (Strange Tales #99). MMM looked similar to a certain Hulk to come, and he was a last try at robotics in a future where sophisticated robots were needed, but not completely realized by the tech-wizards of that time. The automatons just weren’t working out. They were dangers to their human masters or unattractive or dysfunctional. One man kept his creation… and kept it hidden when a law was issued to destroy all robots. Mr. Morgan’s monster obeyed his master, remaining motionless in a sub-level area beneath Morgan’s home. One night, those aliens-whojust-can’t-leave-Earth-alone show up and cast their eyes on obtaining Morgan’s robot. The robot wants to obey standing orders and stands its ground, physically defying the invaders’ best efforts. The tumult alerts the local citizenry who fail to realize that an invading armada was forced to flee because of the monster’s defiance. Mr. Morgan and his lady show up and the scientist bemoans his creation’s state, hurt that it wouldn’t obey his instructions to remain hidden. The monster, prostrate on its front side and “dying”, sheds a tear… I almost did, as well.

Jack and Stan could get a lot of humanity, when needed, in the most inhuman scenarios. This is an unsung moment of quiet genius.

Incredible!

What is the true origin of the Incredible Hulk? Jack described it this way to a fan just ahead of me in a convention line in 1977: “The Hulk was a reaction… the kind of reaction anyone can have when he or she is seriously threatened. Anger and fear can come together and then that person transcends himself or herself.

The anger becomes action and power. The individual can easily forget himself and do something he didn’t think he could do. It’s like a soldier who throws himself into battle. He doesn’t care anymore… he just fights until he wins…”.

Stan explained it like this to a panel questioner at a con in ’89: “Our jolly green giant was like the monsters onscreen you see at the movies. They weren’t always menaces until they were provoked. Some just wanted to be left alone in their caves, swamps, or spaceships, wherever. The Hulk just wanted peace and quiet, like most people. But people saw him and screamed, the police and Army came, and he was forced to fight for his survival. He was a menace on his own at times, but he was also a great hero. I was proud 60

of the way we handled it…”.

And some “true believers” surmise that a late-night horror movie showing on TV featuring the late 1950s The Amazing Colossal Man may have been part of it. In it, Col. Glenn Langan gets hit by the fallout from an atomic bomb and changes size until he’s quite a big ’un.

In the sequel, it turns out he survived a fall from atop a dam and is suitably disfigured, starring in The War of the Colossal Beast.

Did Lee and/or Kirby catch it one night on the channel that gave New Yorkers the very popular horror movie host Roland/Zacherle? Or did either of those Marvel madmen see The Beast of Yucca Flats (which starred the hulking pro wrestler Tor Johnson)? This film also had a sequence where the main character was bombarded by radioactivity, shredding his clothes, and turning him into… you get the idea.

Lee and Kirby got a lot of radioactive characters into their stories. Daredevil, the Sandman, Dr. Octopus, the Vulture, and of course, the Radioactive Man all got going via some exposure to unpredictable radioactive waves. In early ’93, Jack may have been subtly jabbing Stan’s penchant for characters that got their start that way, when he told a group I was part of, “I thought everyone was going to get radioactive!”

After gamma ray bombardment, Dr. Banner’s alter ego got bits of his new look and feel from Universal’s Wolf Man (the full moon changed the good doctor into Big Greenie early on); the protruding brow, flat head, and green skin hailed from Frankenstein (though few really knew what Frankie’s movie skin tone was at the time the films were made); and the growl and lumbering gait was a carryover from Big Frankie as well, unintended or not. Stan said to a Los Angeles small press paper in 2010 that Hulky owed some of his persecution to Frankenstein, who ran away from “a mob of fools, the real monsters of the story.”

But despite his monstrous roots, the Incredible One felt no kinship with his fellow creatures. The Toad Men came from outer space (Incredible Hulk #2), but between Banner’s scientific wizardry, Rick Jones’ pluck, and the Hulk’s brawn, they never really had a chance.

Jack and Stan never gave them a chance to regroup for a rematch, either.

The not-so-jolly green giant took on the local New Mexico policemen, the US Army, and the Soviet Premier’s top Communist agents, some as human as Banner and others as monstrous as his other self.

In the Hulk’s fourth issue, Mongu exited from one of those fantastic Kirby spaceships and demanded a battle with Earth’s mightiest champion—with “the fate of the world in the balance” (to cop one of Lee’s favorite

phrases). The giant looked like he’d give the Hulk one helluva battle.

At this point in the run, Stan and Jack had decided to have Bruce Banner set up a “I-have-to-become-the-Hulk” machine for emergencies such as these.

The good doctor might’ve spent his time more wisely building a “I-have-tostop-becoming-the-Hulk” machine, but publisher Martin Goodman probably wouldn’t have let the creative duo get started on that one.

The Hulk and Rick meet the menacing Mongu at a remote, designated battlefield, but sadly for those of us who wanted a spectacular slugfest between these gigantic antagonists, disappointment was in store. Mongu was just a sophisticated robot operated by Soviets and they were no match for the enraged Hulk. Still, Jack’s design for Mongu, a one-shot wonder, wasn’t a waste. Mongu’s face and hair always reminded me of the mighty troll-warrior, Ulik, who showed up to take on Thor in his 137th issue in 1967. Ulik’s savage mien blended into Kalibak’s savage countenance for the New Gods a few years later. If Kirby liked his design for the brutish

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(previous page, bottom) Mister Morgan’s Monster tries to obey his master in this instant classic. (below) Dr. Robert Bruce Banner explains his desperate plight in Avengers #5.

Mongu and tweaked it twice later, then we have what old-time theater operators used to call “a monster triple feature”.

Challenge Of The Incredible Hulk!

Old Jade-Jaws was the

(right and above) The Hulk battles Thor solo in Journey Into Mystery #112 and then Giant-Man in Tales to Astonish #59.

Truly, this behemoth needed some anger management training classes! (below) From Hulk #5, the machine Banner made controlled the Hulk’s changes… for a time.

Thanks to Messiurs Dugar and Becker for their input on this feature!

perfect foil for the growing super-hero universe Kirby, Lee, Ditko, Heck, Sinnott, and the other Founding Fathers of Marvel were establishing. As a menace, he could and did square off against the Fantastic Four (in their twelfth outing, setting up another day’s rematch against the Thing, Marvel’s first man-monster), Spider-Man (ASM #14), his fellow Avengers (#1-3, 5), SubMariner in Avengers #3, Mighty Thor (JIM #112, a terrific one-on-one battle previously unrecorded in the sensational Avengers #3), Giant-Man (TTA #59), etc.

In years to come, Big Greenie would trade blows with Hercules, the Silver Surfer, the X-Men, Captain Marvel, and whoever else Stan, Roy, Gary, etc. could put in his way!

The Hulk didn’t need a lot of setup to move his stories along, either! He could just walk down the streets and— wait for it—the cops, or the army, or a soaring super-hero from above or a devilish world conqueror would spot him, and... there we have it! The Leader wanted him under his control, and so did other sinister super-villains and evil combines.

Jack and Steve took over the art chores in Astonish, trading off here and there, though Steve shaped the character to his needs. The Hulk got more muscular, the face grew less intimidating (to me, at least), and the metabolic rate became a greater concern. The Hulk would power up to a certain degree when enraged, meet a peak, and then power down, becoming Banner again.

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He couldn’t remain the Hulk for days and days, as some writers would do for him in decades to come. He didn’t grow more powerful and still more powerful for hours and hours; he’d eventually calm down and return to his human side.

Jack provided layouts for other artists, and the look of the Hulk in the mid-1960s largely became the Kirby look, added to by product art. The Hulk was on his way to becoming a true superstar. Jack’s images of the jade giant were on t-shirts, pennants, bubble gum card boxes, and cards and stickers.

The Hulk actually scared me when I first saw him take on the Thunderer in JIM #112. He was truly a ragefilled, intimidating force, and it looked bad for Thor!

However, the next time I’d encounter ol’ Greenskin was in a small drug store outside of Times Square in New York City, and there he became a friendlier sight. My family had traveled up to Fun City in ’65 to see the New York World’s Fair. My little eyes kept looking up to see Dr. Strange, Daredevil, Spidey, or the Human Torch moving through the skyscrapers in the summer sky.

No such luck, of course. But one night, my aunt took my younger brother and me to see Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins. The coolness of the air-conditioned theater was a big treat in and of itself, and the movie was superb!

After that, as we got ready to catch a bus back to her apartment, we stopped into that store and there was the cover to Tales to Astonish #73, a magnificent put-together of a Kirby Hulk scenario with an “Adam Austin” Sub-Mariner rectangle below! This was the new world of the Hulk and I loved it! Subby by Gene Colan (the artist’s actual name) was no slouch either!

Jack would keep his hands in things, creating iconic covers (TTA #77 inked by John Romita, for example) that would provide an indelible-incredible image that would go a long way in Marveldom. It’d be used for house ads, the bubble gum card box in ’66, and a lot more.

Hulky was, this time, here to stay! As Stan did with all his titles, the jolly green giant got a formidable villain corps. The Leader, Boomerang, the Abomination, the Lords of the Living Lightning, etc. replaced the nearly forgotten Toad Men, the Metal Master, the Gargoyle, Mongu, and other baddies of yore.

Monsters, heroes or heels, were a part of the Marvel fabric, and readers couldn’t get enough!

The King’s fantastic masterpieces show up in trade paperbacks, and Groot’s a movie-star nowadays! The Hulk’s not doing bad himself in films. Old fans or new, we fans of old Marvel can find enough creatures, space aliens, undersea invaders, giant insects, swamp things, ancient mummies, and Golden Age gremlins and Codeapproved characters conjured up by King Kirby to keep us busy for lots of days and (scary) nights to come! H

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Kirby As A Genre

Covering Fire

Columnist Adam McGovern talks with King of cover-art Michael Cho on what meets the eye and burns beneath the surface of Kirby (right) The mark of Kirby “becomes overt when I’m drawing Kirby characters,” Cho says. “I’ll draw Captain America with Kirby pencils and Giacoia inks in mind, because that’s the version of that character I see in my head.” (below center) “I love all eras of Kirby,” Cho says.

“People draw the line at different points. Some people don’t like Captain Victory. I love Captain Victory!”—and this image inked over Kirby’s sketch makes that truer than ever.

M

ichael Cho has given the comics artform a brand new past. The dynamic drama and elegant, endearing mood he brings to the medium, like a pulp storybook, makes you feel as if the optimistic, exhilarating heyday of North American pop culture is unfolding afresh, a timeline do-over with many of the mercenary and malicious tendencies of mass entertainment filtered out and the creativity, common hope and social daring brought forth all the farther. A distinguished book-cover and magazine illustrator (The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Random House, Penguin Classics), Cho’s first love was comics, and comics loved him back, first gaining him acclaim for his webcomic Papercut and then for his New York Times bestselling debut graphic novel, Shoplifter (Pantheon, 2014).

He’s now one of the most in-demand cover artists for both Marvel and DC, where his images are welcoming in a new generation of comics fans and steering classic super-hero mythos to its next future.

When we first met at New Jersey’s East Coast Comic Con this May, it didn’t take a Cosmic Cube or Source Wall to

guess that he’s a connoisseurial Kirby fan, though the breadth of thought he’s put into Kirby’s artistry, and the extent of the mark Kirby has made on Cho’s own work, were two of many pleasant surprises from this most modest of virtuosos. We soon sat down to share his story, and to see how his artistic eye casts Kirby’s own saga in a highly original light.

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Looking at your art I could easily guess you were a Kirby fan, but I’d never call you a Kirby disciple. How does an artist as distinctive as you are incorporate and advance from a model as definitive as Kirby?

MICHAEL CHO: I’m not a Kirby imitator in the sense that I try to draw exactly like Kirby; there have been a lot of those in history. Nobody can really be Kirby, but a lot of people can copy the surface mannerisms. I do consider [Kirby] the single greatest influence; if you boil down all the influences that have become distilled in me, the biggest piece of the pie-chart,

(next page, top) Before and beyond: Cho says it was common for cartoonists in his home base of Toronto to practice their inking over images scanned from (blush) The Jack Kirby Collector; this diptych shows his “translations” of Kirby, in which Cho preserves the King’s personality while making the image even more his own. (next page, bottom) One giant step for the classic Hulk (with a look back to the 1960s Marvelmania t-shirt and Aurora model?) in this art for the Marvel Style Guide

by Cho.

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CHO: I’m of two worlds. That sounds like a Kirby quote, like Orion should say that. [laughs] When I was growing up, the first thing that hit me as an influence artistically was comic books, specifically super-hero comic books. I wanted nothing more than to read my copy of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, and learned all the tricks and tips from that. I loved super-heroes unequivocally, because I was a 12-year-old. [laughs] Then when I was 16 I started to drift away from super-hero comics—around that time were Watchmen and Dark Knight, which were amazing transcendent books for that era, and after that, I sort of was looking for what’s next. I discovered the work of the Hernandez Brothers, and Charles Burns, and Dan Clowes. And those guys were a huge influence on me, they’re the other side of me.

So I drew a lot from the idea that comics are not just a genre, they’re a medium, so they can tell all kinds of stories. Sometimes I was conflicted because I’d see some people who would say, “The only real comics are super-hero comics, and you guys are fools for trying to make this autobiographical stuff about working in a coffee shop and living in your parents’ basement, it’s boring.”

And then other people would say, “No man,

when I’m drawing super-heroes, is definitely Kirby. But I try not to copy surface mannerisms… but the actual thinking behind it. There is in me a lot of the mechanics and the underlying thinking behind Kirby—if I can say that without claiming that I’ve processed him like an algorithm or something! I did take a lot of time trying to understand how Kirby works, and his dynamics, and figuring out what the real underlying principles were in an intuitive sense. Because his work is very intuitive. I tried to internalize that in me, so that it doesn’t come out as an obvious homage, but it is coming from the same direction and the same place.

Kirby’s [style] is what unlocks super-heroes for me. It’s the Rosetta Stone. And not just in a visual style; also the morals, the ethics, the character, and the personality, the scope of super-hero work.

I’m hopeful that what I do goes in its own direction, but that’s the bedrock.

At the same time, I also don’t think that Kirby should be the be-all and end-all. That is a mistake Kirby himself would not want you to think. I recall him saying something like, the future of comics, the next new thing in comics isn’t coming from, y’know, guys in short shirtsleeves and ties at a Bullpen; it’s coming from two kids in a garage—who are hammering out a new thing. So we should always be part of the spirit of Kirby, that restless innovation, but not beholden to some model in the past that Kirby set and only recycle that. What Kirby would have wanted is for everyone to add their own voice.

TJKC: To look at your art, I’d assume that a kind of charm and humaneness is important to you—it’s obvious in a book like Shoplifter, which has such warmth and human interest. People are called “cartoonists” for a reason, but the best aspects of “cartooniness” have only recently been coming back to comics. What do you feel is the role and the value of charm and “innocence” in comics?

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the real stuff is writing literate comics, and these people who are making super-hero comics, all they’re doing is just playing with toys as grownups.” And I could not pick either path, ’cause for me there was value and problems with both.

I loved super-hero work, but I did not see them as only a place where it should be dark like Watchmen and Dark Knight; I thought the genre had a place for that, but ideally, at its best super-hero comics are all-ages adventure, like Indiana Jones or Three Musketeers.

So I didn’t see anything wrong with, or debased, or limiting in drawing super-heroes. [I thought] that super-heroes could hold multitudes, that you could tell a meaningful story in super-hero comics, as Jack Kirby did all the time. That’s all-ages storytelling, with layers for adults, and for children; there’s enough pounding of people, and spectacle, [laughs] but there’s also morals, and in the best stuff, there is a deep subtext that goes to the heart of what myth is, and what archetypes are, in our storytelling and our culture.

So if you see charm, and a kind of whimsy in my work, it comes from that other side, of viewing super-hero stuff without disdain but at the same time wanting to incorporate something more. I wanted to bring in other stuff which is just, you know, life, experience; not that super-heroes are all there is to comics.

learned to be a conceptual artist and painter. But I did not take any illustration courses. Therefore what I learned was thinking: How to approach problem-solving visually.

Instead of learning technique, at art college, when you go through a more contemporary art program all they teach is concept—how to go back to first principles.

That’s a lesson I still use to this day. Like, whenever I get an assignment, I don’t think, “How cool would it be if I rendered this with sparkle effects?” I sit there and I go, “What is the meaning behind this assignment? What is the point of this?”

And then, “How could I strip away everything else, and highlight the meaning?”

And subsequent to that comes, “What is the approach that I have to use to get that meaning across?”

And so I try not to be beholden to a style or a technique, but rather to an idea. And that leads me down a lot of different paths. So sometimes I’ll do something and think, “Y’know what?

This should look like a ’40s WPA poster,” or, “This should look like a movie poster,” or, “This would look great as a pharmaceutical package,” [laughs] and these are all skills that I use in my other part of my life, as an editorial illustrator, where I’m given an article and I have to come up with a concept, a visual metaphor that best encapsulates that. So when I draw comic book covers, I try not to just go, “Okay, what’s the best ‘comin’ atcha!’ shot?” I try to think what would make this stand out and also highlight the theme and bedrock sentiment in this issue or this series. So, sometimes, I’m not sitting there worrying about, “How do I compose a group shot featuring the Justice League of America?” I’m thinking, “What is the concept behind the Justice League of America—is it friendship? Is it protection of other people? Is the message that people can live in harmony? Is the message: Fun?” That’s where all these different approaches come from, and these disparate influences come into play. By my training and my thought process, I try to approach this like an illustrator.

Some of the most interesting things you can do, are to not draw the standard comic book cover. And there is a lot more freedom, particularly for a lot of the stuff I do, variant covers, where they just want something that is unique and stands out.

The most interesting [thing] you can do is to throw out a lot of comic book history, and then try and approach it completely fresh, from a different angle, as if you were a book designer, or if you were making a movie poster, or that you were planning this to be an album cover, or a pharmaceutical package. I do find that fascinating, and a whole different well to pull water from.

TJKC: I see as much of industrial design, package illustration, magazine imagery, etc. as I do comics in the approach that you take, and not just Midcentury but Deco. Did you just gravitate to those naturally, or was there any reason you were particularly exposed to that stuff?

CHO: I’m an illustrator by trade. So I went to an art college, where I

TJKC: When you said “all-ages,” I thought of it in two senses—not just any age of reader, but all eras of storytelling. You mentioned archetypal and mythic sources, which are such a basis for Kirby…

CHO: Oh yes, that well never ends. You can always find more stuff to draw from in Kirby. I also love that Kirby’s characters, they express themselves through action. Comics (left) Like Cho, Kirby also used his illustration skills beyond comics, as in this 1966 illo done for the NBC-TV show Captain Nice. (next page) In this editorial from Monster Menace #2 (Jan. 1994), you can see where Kirby’s head was at while doing his Atlas monster strips.

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are a really intimate medium. The intent of the creator in a movie is processed through thirty different people, the cinematographer, the actor, the writer...it’s filtered through all these different sources. In comics, man, the intent of the creator comes out in how they draw a cup on a table! And how they draw trees; how many hatch-lines they put on this face; everything gives away the personality and the intent of the creator. And I love seeing different eras of Kirby just to figure out, “Where was his mindset?” Y’know, “Okay, the figures are getting massive here, he’s really confident, he’s really set”; and, “Okay, in this era he’s young, and all the figures are kinda wiry, there’s a little bit more of, ‘I’m a brash young guy, but I’m worried about my place in the industry’”; and the later stuff where he’s just out in left field, and he doesn’t give a damn. [laughs] He is doing his thing and he doesn’t care where the industry is right now, he is fully confident in his abilities. I love seeing all these different eras, and try to analyze through the marks that he’s made on paper, where his head is at.

TJKC: Before you were noting how the characters express themselves in action, and this is a speculation about how he expresses himself in gesture.

CHO: Yeah, and the construction, the kind of visual language, the foreshortening he uses, like in the Simon & Kirby stuff, the feathering, where they’re telling people, “Hey, this is the ’50s, even though comics are on the decline, we’re still putting in all the work”; and then by the time the ’70s come around, Kirby is like, “This is my visual language, it’s nothing like reality, it’s a completely plastic reality, and you are now in my head, and seeing how I think—I am not trying to appease your sensibilities of what a location should look like, I am just giving you me, 100 percent unvarnished.” For all that he created, as accessible as it was, there’s an echelon of artists, whether intentional or not, [who] don’t need to please the audience, or to come to the audience; the audience comes to them.

The artistry in [Kirby’s] books is something that people… people on their first pass, they don’t like; it’s weird. But it grows on them. It takes time, but they get it. And that’s the mark of a really great artist, when the audience sits there and goes, “I am willing to invest the time to figure out why this guy’s work appeals to me. I can’t quite see what he sees in these images,” and then there’s that turning point where the light switch goes on and you go, “Aw, man, this guy’s a genius!” Bob Dylan’s voice is off-putting. But the fans come to him, because [they think], “There’s power there; something powerful in there that I can look into. I don’t like the voice right now, it’s kinda grating, I don’t get the harmonica, it doesn’t sound like anything else, but man, there’s some power in the words, and I just wanna figure this out.” And along the way they say, “Y’know, the voice is really good, the voice fits the music. This works, as a whole it works really well.” That’s an artist: He’s just doing his thing and the audience will come to him.

TJKC: Not “I’ll give the people what they want,” but “I’ll give them something they’ve never seen, and they’re going to like that better than anything.”

CHO: That you can’t get from anybody else. I love that about Kirby.

TJKC: I always found it funny that two of the most psychedelic artists were him and Ditko, [laughs] who came by all their hallucinations organically as far as we know.

CHO: When you picture these guys, with their short-sleeved shirts and their belts tied high above their waists and sitting at a drafting table and coming up with more psychedelic imagery than guys who dropped acid in that era could ever come up with, it’s fascinating!

TJKC: Yeah, they’re just like tuned to the infinite somehow.

CHO: I honestly think Kirby is like that. I think he’s just the perfect channel. It happens very rarely in history, but there are some artists, like William Blake, where it’s like they are a conduit for something. Whatever their working process was, whatever their brain patterns were, they were perfectly set in the right time and the right place with the right mindset, to channel the will of the universe. And Kirby is definitely mainlining something crazy big.

I often tell people, 99% of the comic artists who are popular now, won’t be remembered a hundred years from now; Kirby will be. They’re gonna remember the guy who made the myth. The guy who made the stories larger than life. He will be considered the greatest outsider artist, a man who was the modern myth-maker. Who dreamed the biggest dreams and put them down in a format that was considered completely debased, and yet turned that into something that could channel the universe’s biggest energies. H 67

(previous page, top) Cho’s variant cover design for Marvels Annotated #2 takes us back to the roots of Marvel’s family tree and traces their emotional evolution: “I was just trying to put Johnny as the character who is most satisfied with his transformation…and the Thing is the tragic figure, Sue is the calming figure who’s trying to bind them together, and Reed is the one who is… the architect of the tragedy.”

Bugs In The System

Anti-Man

by Shane Foley

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(below) Panels from “Tales of Asgard” in Journey Into Mystery #124 and #125, showing the Swarm Queen and her swarm in action.

ho were the New Genesis “Bugs”? When they were first introduced in New Gods #9 and 10 in 1972, the Bug society that Jack invented was really violent and interesting, while at the same time really confusing to 15-year-old me. Why? Because these Bugs lived on New Genesis—the planet of the comic’s good guys. Yet they were despised and even killed by those good guys!

So what sort of goodies were these New Gods? Why are they trying to exterminate these Bugs, as though they were bad guys living on their planet? And if these Bugs really were baddies, why were they on New Genesis at all? Shouldn’t they be part of Apokolips? And it got more mystifying! As the story progressed, we saw some of these Bugs weren’t really bad guys at all—particularly the Prime One and Forager himself. Were there more like them? And then, to complicate matters more, suddenly Mantis—definitely a big-gun bad guy—was there in the Bug society!

What goes on here?

As the story further unfolds, we see that the Bugs’ society is multi-layered. There is desire amongst some (Prime One and Forager at least) to be on equal footing with the “Eternals” (their name for the New Gods

of Supertown). But this desire is not shared by the colony’s supreme leader, the All-Widow. She wants a more violent approach, preferring that of Mantis from Apokolips, who stirs the colonists to rebellion and invasion.

This all smacks of a story that has deep and unexplained thinking behind it, and one that I believe Jack was going to explore further but never could.

I see three distinct story elements in the situation of the Bugs.

1) The Bugs themselves are a strange, sciencefiction society, enlarging on one Jack introduced years earlier in “Tales of Asgard” (Journey Into Mystery #124125), based loosely on the way insect colonies seem to work. It is a violent society, complete with the death ritual forced upon the Prime One, and all the strangeness that encircles that—perfect sci-fi fodder for Kirby to visualize!

2) There is the clear notion that Forager is not really a Bug at all, but something different. As Orion was not from New Genesis, and Scott Free was not from Apokolips, neither does it seem that Forager is from the Bug society. (See pages 10 and 18 in New Gods #9).

Where was Kirby going to go with this? Editor John Morrow has this recollection: “Richard Kyle long ago told me his theory, after talking to Jack, was that Forager was Orion’s son from an affair with someone, and that’s why he didn’t fit in; he got shuttled off to the Bug colony to keep it secret. It was just his theory, not something specific Jack said, but based on conversations with Jack, and his own reading of the Fourth World stuff.”

Orion having a child from an affair? Wow! ’70s super-hero comics under Kirby certainly went places no

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others did! However close this memory is to what Jack would have eventually put on paper, it’s clear that the identity of Forager was a future plot element that was never completed.

Although... as I write this, it occurs to me there’s a second way of interpreting these clues about Forager’s identity. But since it depends on having the following third aspect undergirding it, I’ll leave that until later.

3) The third aspect is the mythological/ allegorical one. The point here is not only “Who were the Bugs?” but “What or who did they represent?” We ask that because Jack called his Fourth World “An epic for our times.” Clearly, from interviews he gave, Jack meant that to mean “An epic new mythology for our times.” Many times we’ve read of Jack stating that, as Thor and the Asgard world dramatized that of the Norsemen and were relevant to them, so he wanted to do an updated mythology, with techno-gods more in keeping with our modern lives.

Such a view was written into the series itself at times, such as New Gods #10, page 22, panel 4, where Orion says, “But the gods are ever near—a part of men’s lives! Giant reflections of the good and evil that men generate within themselves!”

Can we find evidence in New Gods #9 and 10 that indicate this approach to the Bugs gives us a clue as to who they were?

After discussion with Prime One that points to Forager’s difference with most of the colony (pages 9 and 10), they then discuss attempting to communicate with, and cooperate with, the Eternals. But there are two obstacles. First, they have to overcome the Eternals’ contempt. Note it is the prejudice of the Eternals—the series’ good guys—which needs to be overcome! The second is the fear of the Eternals—rising from the feeling of inferiority—that dwells within the bugs. “How can I hope to talk to this Eternal if I’m a Bug? He would stamp me to death without mercy!” says Forager at one point (New Gods #9, page 18, panel 2). I ask again, why would the good gods be so merciless and prejudiced against other sentient beings that share their planet?

Stan Taylor, writing in 2000 on what was the ‘kirby-l’ chat site, in an unpublished (as far as I know) examination of the allegorical nature of the backdrop to the Fourth World, was the first to make sense of it for me. He explained how so much of Kirby’s “Epic for Our Times” parallels the world as it became after WWII—where there was the free world (New Genesis) in “indirect skirmish” (Taylor’s words) with the Communist blocks (Apokolips), with wars fought not on their home soil, but in lands like Vietnam (Earth in the Fourth World narrative). This makes sense of Himon, who represented the creativity that free thinking fostered within the Communist lands that were not only under severe pressure, but which had fostered so much of its power in earlier times. Metron was 69

(above) A pencil panel from New Gods #9, where some of the good guys are being surprisingly nasty! (left and below) More bugs from New Gods #9.

(below) The All-Widow does what all widows do (in the bug world, at least), in superb pencils from a disturbing situation in New Gods #9, page 19. But Kirby adds an undertone of political intrigue, as she’s secretly in cahoots with Mantis from Apokolips (right and bottom).

the knowledge that was freely used by both sides, hence his being “something different” and at times in the service of Darkseid, and so on. Taylor goes into much more detail and makes a great case.

This means, of course, that New Genesis is no heaven.

It’s simply a type of the free world: The West! Therefore, in the ’70s when Kirby wrote, it had a younger generation that questioned the status quo (like the Forever People), it had its Morgan Edges and Glorious Godfreys (those who used various forms of the media to persuade people of ‘a better way’, all the while being in the service of the enemy), and (to get to the point for this piece) it had peoples distinctly underprivileged and prejudiced against. In the West, they were Jews or Aborigines or Africans or anyone from an ethnic background that wasn’t the majority or in power. To quote Taylor, “The hypocrisy of the West belittling Communist countries for not allowing freedom for all, while we have a permanent underclass right here in our own country, is shown in the Bugs’ story arc, highlighted by Orion’s own prejudice.”

Suddenly, it all made sense. Of course that’s who the

Bugs are: Anyone who is ignored and looked down upon and impoverished and frustrated by the ruling classes! Such people exist in the “free world” everywhere. Situations like this breed fear, such as Forager admitted. They breed violence within the confines of their own world, hence the violence of the Bug society. And they breed a frustration that is ripe to be manipulated and turned into a powder keg of violent uprising! In Hunger Dogs, Orion uses such a situation for the benefit of the oppressed. But here, Mantis uses it for his own ends, with the promise of a new home for the Bug colony, but with his true intentions clear to some others.

The Prime One counsels Forager, “Mantis seeks to draw us into a war between Eternals! We will be used as weapons—not equals! Do you see the importance of that?” Forager certainly does: “Yes! No

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matter which of the Eternals win, they shall still regard us as Bugs!” (New Gods #9, page 17).

Suddenly, we see why the AllWidow wants Mantis to win—because this way she keeps her power. When all become equal, she has no such assurance. How true to life this is!

Suddenly, the frustrations and vision of Forager are more real—he’s that immigrant kid or that Jewish girl who dreams of reaching the stars, side-by-side with like-minded people, yet disregarded because of his or her background. How many like that had Kirby seen in his life? How many had never advanced beyond fighting in the streets amongst themselves? How many never found an avenue like Kirby did to escape his birth environs (only to find a new limitation—that of management verses the workhorses—but that’s a different story)?

The Bugs are the underclasses in every society, which point the finger of hypocrisy at every society that denies them the same privileges others enjoy.

And who is Forager?

Perhaps, to take the allegory a bit further, he is “different,” not because he is not a true Bug, but because he’s one of the relatively few who actually think! In every society there is the lowest common denominator—the ones that gutter-level television and advertising are pitched at—the ones that go along with the crowd for whatever pleases the appetites at the moment, and who regard very little outside the confines of their own experiences; the ones who swallow every word from glib radio and television commentators and shock-jocks. The crowd!

Perhaps Forager is different, not because of his pedigree, but because of his mindset. Perhaps he’s the dreamer, like Jack was, who desperately looked beyond his reality to a new and better one—and would do anything to make it happen.

Perhaps!

I wonder what other stories Jack had percolating in his mind about the future of Forager and the society of Bugs? Would he simply make a ripper sci-fi yarn out of it? Or did he have more insight to allegorize Kirby-style onto the page? It’s a pity we’ll never know... H

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(top and left) Forager’s identity comes to the fore in panels from New Gods #9 and #10. (above) Kirby must have loved the idea of a human/insect hybrid race—using them first in Thor, then New Gods, and also later in Captain Victory. This is a model sheet of his Insectons, as printed in Captain Victory #1.

Gallery 2

Bugs!

More commentary by Shane Foley

(above) By the time Kirby came to draw Ant-Man at Marvel, he’d already sired a host of creepy-crawly heroes. And seen in this issue of TJKC, the insect world continued to be a constant source of inspiration for him. This pic of The Fly (from the 1959 series with Joe Simon) is his memory of the character as drawn in Roz’s ’70s sketchbook. Jack and Joe were also involved with the Green Hornet via covers, and an unused newspaper strip (left). (next page) Unknown – undated.

Do we know what this incomplete sequence was drawn for? Who this guy is? Is he a goodie? A baddie? I’d like to know! All we can see is—he looks powerful, mysterious and insecty!

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(above) New Gods #10, page 1: Kirby’s bug designs go into overdrive—as does his incredible ability to depict raw power—the creativity of sheer genius! It always amazes me how complete Kirby’s pencils were, when one would think ‘x’ing such blacks as in the rocks would be the first shortcut he’d make to keep up with his prodigious output.

(next page) New Gods #10, page 5: Kirby’s chef’s hats (their ‘toques’) always make me laugh—not sure why. Again, as for the page shown previously, inker/letterer Royer decides a heavy border needs to be added—and it works perfectly, even as he adds a word or two that Kirby accidentally left off at the top. (You’ll have to compare it yourself!)

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(above) Captain Victory #3, page 16: (Numbered 18 in the published issue) Kirby’s penciling becomes more simplified while keeping all the power and tension it always had. This Insecton monster ramps up the scale of previous insectoid stories, before the plot veers off wildly, to the Lightning Lady Queen showing more of her colors.

(next page) Kamandi #12, page 4: Why are we not surprised our editor’s favorite insect Kliklak is here? Who would have ever known that Kirby’s beloved Fourth World had been ripped away from him, when we see the sheer creativeness and inventive storytelling that he brought to the Kamandi series? And who would know how effective an emotional scene Kirby generated when this giant grasshopper came to its end a couple of issues later?

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Undiscovered

A Blue Bug in Sweden

by Dr. Christopher W. Boyko

T (above) Victor Fox’s 1939 ad offering the strip.

he Blue Beetle strip debuted in The Boston Evening Transcript on January 8, 1940. As far as anyone’s been able to actually prove, it only ran in a handful of papers, and just in the US—until now.

Here are several installments of Blå Skalbaggen (“The Blue Bug”) by Jack Kirby, which ran in issues of Jules VerneMagasinet, published weekly in Sweden.

JV-M was primarily a pulp/sci-fi mag, with much US product translated into Swedish.

It ran Superman Sundays in color on the inside front covers, Jungle Jim Sundays in color on the back cover, and Smokey Stover and Blue Beetle strips inside (later, also Barney Baxter and Popeye)—all in Swedish, of course!

I’ve discovered the Blue Bug in 1940 issues #3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 (I think 1940 only had 11 issues, from what I can tell). From 1941, I’ve found them in issues #2, 3, 4, 6, and 7. The next issue after week 7 that I have is week 14, but by that point the Kirby art had ended and Mr. Beetle was being drawn by much more unskilled hands. H

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Mark Evanier

Jack F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

Jack Kirby’s Monster Influence Panel Held Saturday, April 21, 2018 at the San Diego Comic Fest.

Featuring Mike Royer, Tom Kraft, and Mark Evanier.

Transcribed by Tom Kraft.

Copyedited by Mark Evanier.

Photo by Phil Geiger.

“Whatever movie I was watching I would see it about seven times, and my mother would have to get me out of the theater.

I believe the naturalism and the drama that were inherent in the pictures left an impression on me that I wanted to duplicate.

I tried to duplicate that faithfully.”

Jack Kirby interviewed by Will Eisner, February 1983

MIKE ROYER: You know Mark, at first I thought this “Jack Kirby, Monster Influence” panel would be about all the guys who tried to draw like him.

MARK EVANIER: No, it’s all the guys who employed him. [laughter] Not everyone who employed Jack cheated him badly.

I’m Mark Evanier, this is Mike Royer, that’s Tom Kraft. In the audience, we have another person who worked with Jack Kirby when Jack worked for the Ruby-Spears cartoon studio on Thundarr the Barbarian. Buzz Dixon is sitting back there. [applause] Buzz worked on the Destroyer Duck comic book as well and he has got a spotlight in this room in two hours?

BUZZ DIXON: I believe so.

EVANIER: Alright, Buzz will correct all the stuff we get wrong. The premise here is, Monster Influence. Jack Kirby was influenced by monsters. One of the fascinating things which I’m sure we’ll be talking about in the next hour, is that if you look at the early Marvel super-heroes, an awful lot of scenes in there, are very similar to scenes that were in horror and mostly science-fiction movies that came out in

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the early ’60s. Jack used to take his son Neal to every matinée that had “The Amazing Colossal Anything” in it. [laughter] As a result, if you’ll look at the first issue of The Hulk, and you watch The Amazing Colossal Man, you see certain similarities.

For years, there was a guy who’d come to these conventions, and would lecture about the influences of monster movies on Jack. And his big finale, his big coup d’état, the big moment when he made like he’d liberated the entirety of comic book research, was to compare the character Ray Milland played in The Man with X-Ray Eyes, to Cyclops in the X-Men, and he did this for years and years until some of us pointed out that X-Men #1 came out two years before The Man with X-Ray Eyes. [laughter] We destroyed that theory completely, whereupon he developed the theory that the movie was inspired by the comic book. [laughter] So, Tom, this panel was your idea.

Would you tell us the thesis on which you operate here?

TOM KRAFT: The thesis is monster influence—it takes him from being a young person and being influenced by comics, and by the monster movies, mostly Universal films, which were Frankenstein and Phantom of the Opera and so forth. So it’s comparing the two, and how he was influenced as a young person. 1 Because he grew up on the Lower East Side in the slums fighting, his only escape from all that reality was to go to the movies.

So, when he was very young he would go to these movies.

2 This is an image from Frankenstein when it came out in 1931, and these are the types of theaters that he would go to. 3 In interviews, he would talk about seeing these movies seven times in a row, and he wouldn’t leave, and his mother had to come in to the theater and drag him out, cause he just wouldn’t leave.

Mike, you’ve had a lot of influence on The Demon and other comics that Jack did, plus you have a lot of experience in the movies, theater and so forth.

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ROYER: Well, I was a Saturday matinée kid. I lived in a very small town and theaters were operated by an old time exhibitor who every chance he could get, whatever the occasion was, he would rent the inexpensive, old Universal and Columbia and Paramount horror movies. So I was raised in a different time on the same kind of movies that inspired Jack, but if you think about Jack and everything he did, every one of his life experiences was channeled into his creative endeavors. And these films obviously had a great influence on him.

There were people who write about sitting with Jack and talking about his war experiences; we never talked about war experiences.

Maybe it’s because I had a young family, he had a family and we had those things to talk about, but when we did talk about movies it was Warner Brothers films from the ’30s. And even they did a couple of pseudo-horror movies, starring Humphrey Bogart, etc.

But I think the films definitely had a tremendous influence on him and it may not have shown as much in a lot of his early work as it did in his Demon, but I think in doing The Demon, it just opened up that reservoir of memories, and the experience of seeing something seven times in a row. And then he put on paper his version of it. And it became something in its own way, totally unique, but based in his experience of sitting in that darkened theater watching those images on the screen.

run there, that Mr. Infantino, who brought him into the company, might not be there very long unless the company had a dramatic turnabout. So, the frustrations Jack had, were that he didn’t think DC knew how to sell a book, and they didn’t think he knew how to do the right kind of comics, and it was not a very good match, because the company was operating out of desperation, doing, I think, some very foolish things.

Well, at one point, the office more or less decided that the coming trend in comics was not super-heroes, but monster books.

Ghoulish things, Swamp Thing-type comics, and Infantino asked Jack to come out with a ghoulish monster book of some sort. I think Carmine claimed he said to come up with some sort of “demon,” and Jack said he was the one who applied the word “demon” to it.

That’s one of those arguments you can never resolve, and both people went to their graves believing that they said “demon” first.

But we went to dinner that night: Steve Sherman, myself, Jack, Roz, and the kids. I remember this more vividly than anyone should; Mike will tell you I have a real good memory.

ROYER: Oh boy.

EVANIER: We went to a Howard Johnson’s restaurant where I had a hot turkey sandwich, and for dessert, a scoop of orange sherbet with a cookie in it. Usually when we went to dinner with Jack, he’d look at the menu and decide what he wanted and then Roz would tell him what he was going to eat. And he’d go, “Okay, fine.” And he’d eat whatever she said. This time he was absorbed in thought and she ordered for him and we were just sitting there talking, and Jack was com-

Well, I may be crazy as a loon.

pletely quiet, like he was in another plane of existence. He just sat there thinking and thinking and thinking. And then the waiter brought the entrées. We stopped talking and Jack said, “The character’s named The Demon. His name is Jason Blood.” He went on to tell us the whole first issue, the whole premise. If it was somebody else you would have thought he must have spent a month working out all those details, cause he had the next issue, and the next issue. He had villains, some of which I don’t think he used. He had storylines already figured out. And we just kind of sat there chewing and listening to this thing.

EVANIER: No, you’re right.

Actually, you’re crazy as a loon, but you’re right about that. [laughter] I was actually present at the moment of the creation of The Demon. Jack had been working with DC and the New Gods was selling decently, but those books were not the Marvel destroying hits that DC was hoping for. I am trying to finish up my big giant huge biography of Jack this year, and one of the points I’m trying to make to people about that era, is that DC was a company that was in deep trouble when Jack joined it. Jack was aware fairly early on in his 80

“This is fabulous, this is so much better than the Fourth World stuff, Jack’s gotta do this book, and we’ve gotta launch it monthly,” which they didn’t do that with New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle. Jack had begged them to make those monthlies from the start, because he thought that the day of the bi-monthly had passed in comics; that kids would not warm up to a comic when it took them two months to get the next issue. But the Demon was launched as a monthly, and Kamandi was launched as a monthly, and then New Gods and Forever People went away.

That cleared time on Jack’s schedule because they weren’t gonna trust these two new books to anybody else. Anyway, that’s how The Demon came to be, and I thought it was a wonderful comic. I didn’t actually like it at the time, but a little later, I said, “What am I thinking? This is a great book.” And Mike did his usual fine job on it, as he did on everything he did for Jack. They’re reprinting them now and they’ll reprint them forever.

We got back to his studio and he said to me, “Get out the Prince Valiants.” He had these Hastings House books of Prince Valiant reprints, and he said, “Look for the sequence where Prince Valiant puts the duck skin on his head in disguise,” and I found it (right).

Meanwhile, he was at the drawing board, drawing the rough of The Demon. I showed him the Prince Valiant panel—it was an inside joke that I still don’t quite understand. He wanted to use that as a reference point, and the Prince Valiant duck mask became kind of the model for The Demon. He drew the whole first scene and The Demon was created, right there.

It was obviously not completely out of thin air. It was obviously a distillation of a lot of different ideas he’d been kicking around for years and years. One of the things that I perceived about Jack’s creativity, was that a lot of it involved taking two things that nobody else in the world would have thought to put together, and doing what we now call a mash-up. He would take two items, something he’d seen here, and something he’d seen there. This is not a real example. It was like if he went, “Oh look, there’s a guy on a surf board. Oh, there’s an Academy Award,” and he got the Silver Surfer, or something like that. He would put things together in his head, and I’m assuming, that in a labyrinth of antecedents we could never find, The Demon was two or three things from his past, put together in enough of an odd way to be an original creation. At that point, he was going to do the first issue of this new book and then turn the book over to somebody else to write and draw.

I think the writer would have been me, and the artist would have probably been one of the Filipino artists that DC was just then engaging, but he sent the book back, and the people in the office went,

ROYER: And I love the fact that they’re reprinting these forever.

Especially things like The Demon and some of the other books because when they send the reprint check, I don’t have to split it with Vinnie Colletta’s estate. [laughter] EVANIER: Do you know, just off to the side, do you know about my conversation with Bruce Berry? Did I ever tell you about that?

ROYER: You called him to tell him that DC had all of these reprint checks and they wanted to send them to him.

EVANIER: Yeah, cause Bruce Barry had vanished, and through a fella named Richard Kyle, I found Bruce’s current address and phone number and I phoned him. Bruce got out of comics, and didn’t want to look back. He didn’t want to be interviewed, he didn’t want to talk about them, and when I called him he said, “I want to thank you for the work you gave me, and all the help you gave me, but that’s not my life anymore, I have nothing to do with it, I don’t want to talk about it, I want to put it behind me.” And I said, “Well, DC Comics is looking for you, and they’ve got some reprint money for you.” And he said, “Well, thank you very much, but I don’t want to get involved in that,” and he basically kinda hung up on me. And I thought, “He thinks this is like $40 or something like that,” which at one point it would have been. So I called him back, and he was a little bothered and

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(right) Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein went from creepy to comical over time.

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he said, “Don’t you understand?” I said, “Listen, I want to say one thing, and then I’ll leave you alone for the rest of your life, Bruce. It’s a lot more money than you think it is. You owe it to your family to at least find out how much it is.”

And, he said, “Okay...”. And he called me two days later. They were sending a check for $12,000 or something like that; it was some amount way, way more than he thought. And he apologized to me for being abrupt, and I never spoke to him again. [laughter] ROYER: We’re segueing here, but Bruce was an interesting guy. On his own, doing his own thing, he was a very talented illustrator. He could do things that looked like they were done by Old Masters at the turn of the century. And when he started inking, when I told Jack that I wanted to stretch my muscles on other things, Jack simply said, “Ink it like Mike,” and I think Mike Thibodeaux and Bruce Berry misunderstood what Jack was saying. He was saying, basically, “Finish my pencils, finish my statement.” And I think they were intimidated by what I’d done, and they tried to imitate what I’m doing. And I really think both of those artists were capable of much better work.

EVANIER: Well, one of the problems, Mike, was that they were forced into the mold of working as fast as you did, and being as productive as you were, which of course as we all know, is not humanly possible. There is no way that anyone could have lettered and inked everything Jack was doing by themselves. You couldn’t do that; I mean, I know you did it, but it’s not possible. [laughter] And that was the problem. If Bruce had the same amount of time that Frank Giacoia got at a job, it would have been a lot better—and if somebody else had lettered it, cause Frank didn’t letter. Both Frank Giacoia and Joe Sinnott, who inked as many Kirby pages as anyone in the world, said to me, “I can’t believe that Royer not only inks all that stuff, he letters it too; that’s not possible. I think you were hoaxing us. I think you had another guy in the closet someplace doing half the work, because…”.

ROYER: No, the reason Bruce wound up with Jack was because he helped with some backgrounds one time, because I met him through Richard Kyle and I put “With an assist by D. Bruce Barry” on the credits and...

We segued, and it’s my fault; people ask me what my favorite Kirby book was. And I say, “When I really think about it, it’s The Demon.” And maybe it’s because I identified with the memories that Jack was channeling into his creativity in each of these pages he was penciling, I could tap into that, because in another generation, I saw it in reruns and on television and could identify with it. And Jack’s take on his channeling and his memories, in my opinion was so phenomenal to do his take-off on the Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein and those things, and have it be so exciting, and dramatic. I’m just here to tell you that working with Jack was an incredible time of my life.

KRAFT: Mark, were you involved in any of the stories on The Demon?

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EVANIER: On The Demon? Not really. I was involved in the first two issues of Kamandi and then I got out of there. But Jack’s plan was—this is a strange thing because, Jack kept trying to do comics he would not write, draw all by himself. He wanted to be an editor. He wanted to work with different people. You may remember this Mike, you helped me get Dan Spiegle’s phone number, because Jack wanted to do the first issue of Kamandi and then turn it over to Dan Spiegle and me. I didn’t even know Spiegle at the time, but I gave Spiegle’s number to Jack, he called him. Dan, who lived in Santa Barbara, came down with his samples and Jack loved his work and said, “This is the guy.” And he called Carmine and said, “I’ll do the first issue of Kamandi, get it launched, and then my staff ’s gonna write it,” and the staff meant Steve Sherman and/or me, “and then this guy named Dan Spiegle will draw it.” And Carmine said, “You don’t need this guy Spiegle.”

First of all, DC had kind of a prejudice against people who hadn’t worked for them before. Mike encountered that early on. Russ Manning, they kind of sloughed off when he looked for work from them. They didn’t treat Russ Manning commensurate with his ability or his credentials, because his credentials were not for DC. ROYER: Well, for them the world ended at the Hudson River.

7

EVANIER: Yeah, that’s right, so Russ Manning could have been drawing Superman or something like that for DC at some point, but they didn’t want him, because they had their guys.

So Carmine said to Jack, “You don’t need this Spiegle guy, I’m gonna give you a Filipino,” and we didn’t know what that meant. [laughter] Obviously, two months later, we knew that DC had made a deal with all these Filipino artists like Alfredo Alcala, Nestor Redondo, and Alex Niño and such, to work for them from the Philippines for four cents a page. But we didn’t know that, and when The Demon first came up, there was talk that Jack would do the first issue and Carmine had said, “I’ll give you another Filipino,” and we went, “What is this?” We finally found out what this was all about, but by that time DC did not want Jack editing books he didn’t draw, because they wanted editing to be done in New York. They put up with Jack being his own editor to get his art in their books, but they weren’t going to put up with it to get other people’s art.

I did not like the first issue of The Demon that much. It took a while for me to—my tastes have changed 82

over the years. I loved the New Gods at the time, but I love it a lot more now. I didn’t even really like Kamandi that much when it was first coming out. I worked on the first two issues, and then stopped working for Jack. I bought them and I looked at them occasionally; it just didn’t seem like a great comic to me. And then one day, Julius Schwartz talked me into doing a Superman/Kamandi team-up for one of his comics, and I said yes without realizing, “Oh, I’ve gotta read Kamandi now.” And I got them all out, read them in two days and went, “I was crazy, this is a great comic.”

Anyway we’re moving off... oh, here’s the point, I’ll get us back on the Monster topic. One of Jack’s favorite comic books of all time was Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein. Briefer was a friend of his. Briefer was one of the men who helped ink the first Captain Marvel comic that Jack penciled—the first “Shazam!” Captain Marvel comic, and Dick was a good guy they knew. Jack just loved Dick Briefer... I don’t know how many of you ever saw Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein. It was kind of a comic take; it’s very strange, over the years it got less serious, and got very silly early on.

ROYER: It did this pseudo-Karloff image, but the nose was up on his forehead. I loved those as a kid.

EVANIER: Yeah, so there is some of that Dick Briefer Frankenstein in the Hulk. I can’t give you an example, but if you ever read a Dick Briefer Frankenstein and you read The Hulk, you’d go, “Yeah, I kinda see the connection there a little bit.” It was an inspiration, and obviously the visual of The Hulk took something from Frankenstein.

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KRAFT: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

EVANIER: Yeah, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I have a belief—we all know the story about how the Hulk was gray in the first issue and they thought it looked muddy and they made him green in the second issue. A theory which Sol Brodsky told me, was that Martin Goodman was aware that one of the big advertisers in comics those days were the Aurora models: Monster models, and Frankenstein was featured prominently on them at that point. If you looked through Famous Monsters of Filmland, you’d see Frankenstein was featured on every cover for a while there. I think they just thought Frankenstein was hot again, and The Hulk was close enough if you made him green, so...

KRAFT: Continuing with the movies that he grew up with… 4 The Phantom of the Opera was the first one, it came out in 1925. Jack was only eight years old when he saw that, assuming that he saw that; I assume he did. He seemed to have gone to every movie. 5 Frankenstein was a big influence. At that point, he was 14 years old. 6 Dracula came out that same year—he was 14 years old. 7 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the same year when he was 14 years old. 1931 seemed to be a big year for monster movies, and that one was Paramount Pictures; that was the only one.

8 The Mummy came out in 1932, and Jack was 15. 9 King Kong came out later, Jack was 15.

10 The Wolf Man, that’s the one that came out later [in 1941], he was 24.

11 And then later, the Creature from the Black Lagoon came out in 1954, and he was 37 by then.

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EVANIER: A.k.a. Triton. [laughter]

ROYER: I have a feeling that Tom has demonstrated or illustrated some of the more famous films. But I’m sure that Jack probably as a youngster saw The Island of Lost Souls.

“What is The Law?” [Editor’s note: In the film, when Dr. Moreau’s experiments create a species of beast-men, they learn a code they must live by called “The Law”.] If you’ve seen the film, it’s a great pre-code film. And you can look at that film and say, Jack had to have seen this, cause it’s got all the animals that have been turned into humanoid form. 12 That’s a great film. Other Paramount films like Supernatural, Horror in the Zoo, all kinds of things that I’m sure just went [into his head] and stayed. It’s like him picking that duck mask from Prince Valiant. It was just something that was in there. And he had the ability to defrag that computer and pull those things out without hunting for a password. “I remember such and such...”. There are things that a talent like Jack just absorbed, and they just waited to be released in some new form or another.

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KRAFT: Do you think Jack had photographic memory?

EVANIER: Yes, but it wasn’t developed. [laughter] There are certain artists who remember visuals in a way—when DC and Marvel did that Wizard of Oz adaptation, that big tabloid they did, John Buscema penciled that from memory, having seen the movie thirty years earlier. He did not have stills of all those people. I think the inker, Tony DeZuniga did, but the point was, they said to John, “You want us to get you a print of the movie?” and he went, “Nah, I remember it.” And Dan Spiegle was one of those. When I bought the house that I’m in now, Dan came down for lunch. I was still in the old place and he asked me to show him the new place. So I drove us by the house I’d bought. We drove by at 20 miles an hour and then went off. Dan went home and sent me a drawing of my house. He drew it from memory, he could do that. He was that amazing.

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People remember pictures, and Jack remembered concepts that way. They’d pop in all sorts of places, they’d pop into his speech. There’s a lot of phrases—you look at Jack’s comics and say, “Oh, what does that phrase mean?” I guarantee you it means something. Everything means something; sometimes the segue is a little obscure. He would get these thoughts in his head, and when you talked to Jack, when you’d just talk to him, sometimes he’d say something and you’d have no idea what he was talking about.

here.” He just added onto it, started throwing things in as if he’d been thinking about it for weeks.

At one point, very late in his life, at Roz’s urging, I came up with an idea for a comic I could do with Jack. She wanted me to come up with something that he and I would do together. I thought up the germ of an idea, and I told it to him. I thought it was a pretty good idea but he started building on it, and building on it, and building on it, and pretty soon, it was like if I’d brought to him this idea—I’ve got a guy in outer space who’s got a light saber, and then Jack put everything that was Star Wars on top of it. And my idea was in there, it was buried underneath it. I could kind of claim I created it, but he had added all this stuff onto it, because he always had all these ideas and all these characters.

You have probably seen the drawings, Jack did these pitch drawings of some of the New Gods characters.

They’ve been printed in many places; some of them are in my book on Jack. It’s a drawing of a guy that looks like Mister Miracle, and he’s got a gun (left). Do you know which drawing I’m talking about?

ROYER: And sometimes he would tell you something, make a point about something, and then he’d say, “In other words...” and tell you the same thing from a different access point. I always found that interesting. Jack was this incredible talent that, you talk about Demon being created at dinner. He was always creating. And [Jack’s wife] Roz always drove, because probably Jack would have driven them off the highway because he was thinking; he was somewhere else. I once made a comment to my wife, I said, “Well, you know Roz drives for Jack. Why don’t you drive some?” And she says, “You’re no Jack Kirby.” [laughter]

KRAFT: Yeah, it’s a concept drawing that he did.

EVANIER: I think one of the reasons that Roz drove, is because if Jack was driving, he would feel compelled to run over certain people who remind him of editors. [laughter] No, he jumped around in topics a lot, and he would say something and you didn’t know what it meant and then three days later, you’d go, “I see, he was continuing another conversation from four days earlier” or something like that. There were just these weird connectivities that would happen, and it was your fault if you couldn’t keep up with him. He would just jump from one topic to another seamlessly. And I think Jack had a little camera in his head; it didn’t just work for visuals, something interesting could be said around him. Someone would make an interesting point, he’d see something in a movie, he’d see something on a TV show, he’d read the newspaper, then his whole thing would be [click] “I’m gonna use that,” [click] “I’m gonna use that.” And he probably used 10% of those things, but they were there. Len Wein and Marv Wolfman, when they were kids, took him an idea for a comic they were going to try to sell. If Marv were here, he would tell you the story of how Jack suddenly told them more about their comic then they had figured out. He’d say, “Oh, and this guy’s got a sidekick who does this, and there’s a big giant monster

EVANIER: Yeah. It’s not a concept drawing of Mister Miracle. It’s another character he came up with. That guy was not going to be an escape artist. He was not going to be part of the Fourth World. Jack had this idea for this costume, he had this idea for the way the character might move or certain other things, and he kept rearranging this stuff. The New Gods was always in flux. He would keep changing his mind. I’ve told this story before, but when I was working with Jack, he would tell Steve Sherman and me the plot for the next issue of New Gods. And we would sit there and say, “Hey, that sounds great Jack,” and it did. And then we would make the most important contribution that we made to his work: We would leave. We would get out of there and let him work on his own, and we’d come back and he’d hand us the finished issue and he’d say, “Here, give this a read-through, make sure I spelled all the words right.” I’d look at it, and I’d go, “This is great, but this has nothing to do with the plot you told us last week.” And he’d say, “Oh yeah, it’s the same story I told you.” And, I’d say, “No, it isn’t. This is a different story; it’s a great story, it’s not the same thing.” And he’d go, “Really?” Because he had just changed where he was going along the way.

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ROYER: Well, I’m segueing again from monsters but, he had a monster imagination, so that ties in. I’d been at Disney for a while, and he called me wanting to know if I had time to work on a project with him; if I could fit it in with Disney, it wouldn’t have the same kind of deadlines as when I was working with him full-time. And so we met for lunch at the old Copper Penny, across from the bungalows at Warner Brothers; it’s not there anymore, but we were having lunch, and he’s telling me what I’m assuming is the first issue of Silver Star, and I’m thinking, “God, this is gonna be an involved issue.” No, he had all six issues done in his head. Yeah, I had time for a couple of them.

EVANIER: So this is the thing: If you take away nothing else from us talking about Jack, understand that this man just had an incredible imagination. And it wasn’t just the fact that he drew real neat pictures. He drew real neat pictures, but so did a lot of guys. He was not doing the same job that John Buscema did, or John Romita did, or Gene Colan.

Not to take anything away from them, but when John Buscema sat down to draw an issue of Fantastic Four, he was out to draw a good issue of Fantastic Four, and he did that. When Jack sat down to draw an issue of Fantastic Four, he was out to change the industry, and put in four spin-offs, and take comics

The Abominable Snowman (1957) A kindly English botanist and a gruff American scientist lead an expedition to the Himalayas in search of the legendary Yeti.

Tales to Astonish #24 (Oct. 1961)

Whether he saw them at a movie house, drive-in, or in a TV ad, here’s a dozen ’50s Creature Features Kirby used for inspiration, and where: Them! (1954) The earliest atomic tests in New Mexico cause common ants to mutate into giant man-eating monsters that threaten civilization.

Tales to Astonish #14 (Dec. 1960) Strange Tales #73 (Feb. 1960) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) A giant, radioactive octopus rises from the Philippine Trench to terrorize the North American Pacific Coast.

Tales of Suspense #8 (Mar. 1960) Tales of Suspense #11 (Sept. 1960) Day the World Ended (1955) In a post-Apocalyptic world after an atomic war, seven disparate people find themselves in a protected valley in the home of a survivalist and his beautiful daughter.

Strange Tales #97 (June 1962) Tarantula (1955) A spider escapes from an isolated Arizona desert laboratory experi-

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menting in giantism and grows to tremendous size as it wreaks havoc on the local inhabitants.

Journey Into Mystery #64 (Jan. 1961) Journey Into Mystery #73 (Oct. 1961) The Mole People (1956) A party of archaeologists discovers the remnants of a mutant five-millennia-old Sumerian civilization living beneath a glacier atop a mountain in Mesopotamia.

Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961) Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

(1956) A 400-foot (122-meter) dinosaur-like beast, awoken from undersea hibernation off the Japanese coast by atomic-bomb testing, attacks Tokyo.

Strange Tales #87 (Aug. 1961) Strange Tales #89 (Oct. 1961) Journey Into Mystery #58 (May 1960) Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) Scientists become trapped on a shrinking island with intelligent, murderous giant crabs.

Tales to Astonish #10 (July 1960)

The Black Scorpion (1957) Volcanic activity frees giant scorpions from the earth who wreak havoc in the rural countryside and eventually threaten Mexico City.

Journey Into Mystery #82 (July 1962) The Cyclops (1957) An expedition to Mexico finds and does battle with a mutated 25-foot man with one big eye.

Tales of Suspense #10 (July 1960) The Strange World of Planet X (1958) A friendly visitor from outer space warns against conducting experiments with the Earth’s magnetic field, that could mutate insects into giant monsters.

Tales of Suspense #24 (Dec. 1961) The Giant Gila Monster (1959) A giant lizard terrorizes a rural Texas community and an heroic teenager attempts to destroy the creature.

Tales to Astonish #9 (May 1960)

sourced from imdb.com All properties TM & © their respective owners

“Well, I feel the kind of things we do for comics are films and movies. I see myself competing with the movie camera, and I see myself creating a movie.”

Jack Kirby, 1969 in an interview conducted by Shel Dorf and Rich Rubenfeld

“Well, you’ll find that my art is movie art. If you read my stories, you’ll find my stories are visual movies.” Interview with Greg Theakston, 1987

13 to another level, and to come up with the plots, and to come up with the concepts—it’s not the same input. I run into people now who say, “Well, I liked the way John Buscema did the Silver Surfer better than Jack.” Fine. That doesn’t make him an equal contributor to the Silver Surfer that Jack was, because Jack conceptualized the whole character, and gave him his energy and his reason to be.

he saw on TV in his monster comics, and things like that.

There were a half-dozen jobs he did for Marvel late in the run, which kind of cemented his exit from the company. One of them was a story called “The Monster” that ran in Chambers of Darkness or Tower of Shadows, one of those two books. And he wrote and drew this story, you know the one I’m talking about, right?

ROYER: I remember the typeface, or the title. [Editor’s Note: See TJKC #13.]

EVANIER: It was an eight-page monster story, he wrote and penciled the story, sent it in, and somebody in New York—possibly Stan, possibly someone else—didn’t like the plot and wanted it all changed to a very pedestrian obvious thing. And Jack, with great anger and bitterness, erased the story he loved, that he was very proud of, and turned it into the story anybody would have written.

The second time I visited Jack, maybe the third time I visited Jack, he was still living down in Irvine, California at the time, and Steve Sherman and I went out to see him, and he had just finished erasing this story and revamping the pencils. And you could see, if you look at the original art, you could see the erasures and other things underneath the pencils. And Roz was saying, “I asked him to just put this aside and draw the story they wanted separately, so we could keep this one, and he said he’d like to punish himself for giving them such 14 a good story.” Jack had destroyed his own story; it’s a thing artists do sometimes.

They destroy their own work, because they have to purge some sort of emotion about it in some way. At times, Alex Toth would do the same thing after each panel. [laughter] Jack did that story, and that story was very important to Jack the way he did it. It was a story that in his version had a lot in it about his relationship with Roz: How she had seen through the bad parts of him to love him, in the way the woman in the story loved the monster in his version. I can’t quite make sense of the final version of that story.

ROYER: And back to our theme, growing up with these movies, it’s all cataloged and put away somewhere in here, and at some point, he’s working on something and it’s like, “Wow! Let’s pull this out, this will work.” Now I don’t know if that was the thought process, but it seems to me that it was like that. In the Demon, he wants to do something on Frankenstein, and he’s got all this input in here, and then he turns it sideways or inside-out, but all those influences—I say this too often, but every life experience of Jack Kirby, he channeled it into his work.

EVANIER: And also, he was probably in all those things, influenced by non-monster movies. Just because he was drawing a western, he wasn’t just influenced by other westerns that he did. He had plot ideas, and character ideas from gangster movies, or from non-genre movies. Part of the man’s brilliance, to take things and put them together, was that when you’d think he’s telling a story about Thor and Asgard, in his head he’s telling a story about a relationship between some guy he knew and his brother-in-law, or something like that. There are all these underpinnings, and as I read Jack’s comics today, I keep seeing things that I hadn’t seen before. It’s like someone snuck in and added new elements to the copies on the shelf.

Often, I suddenly see things I recognize from Jack’s life, that I didn’t see were there before. So yes, we can list lots of influences from monster movies in his work, but there’s probably influences from monster movies in his romance comics, and influences from love stories

15

ROYER: At Comic-Con International last year, since we were celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Jack’s birth, I was on four or five panels. And I went to sit in the audience in one that was a generation that followed me in the comic books, all these writers and artists, who talked about what a great human being Jack was. They would find his telephone number in the telephone directory, they’d call him up, and Jack would invite them out to the house. He’d sign their comic books, Roz would make sandwiches. And I almost did something that I know I shouldn’t have done, and so I didn’t do it, and now I regret not doing it. But here’s 12 guys at the table saying, basically, “We all called Jack,” and I wanted to stand up and say, “But I’m the guy that Jack called.” [laughter] Cause I’m walking across my backyard and the phone’s ringing in the kitchen, and I go, “Hello, is this Mike Royer? This is Jack 86

(right) Now it can be told! Mark Evanier confirms that the hand he drew in Fantastic Four #97 is... Johnny Storm’s outstretched palm, in the last panel on page 5! Step aside, George Bridgman!

17 Kirby, Alex Toth says you’re a pretty good inker.” And my first response was, okay, who’s pulling my leg here? I was invited out to the house in Irvine, he wanted me to ink this page, a biography page for Marvelmania. And I said, “I’ll have it tomorrow for you,” and he says, “No, just sit here at my board and do it.” [laughter] So my baptism of fire, as Mark explained to me, was to prove to Jack that it all came from my hand, how I worked under pressure. And I guess I passed the test, because until my comic book work appeared, I did a lot of stuff for Jack that to this day, people think Jack inked.

And I became like all of us who met Jack and worked with him and for him, we were extended family.

some of the fanzines we were working on and I had done covers here and there. I drew well enough to be in a 300 circulation fanzine in 1969. I didn’t draw well enough to do much more than that. Then in a moment that froze me, Jack turned to me and said, “Why don’t you draw a panel in the story?” I just froze, and I said, “Jack, I’m not good enough to draw a panel in a story by the worst guy at Marvel, let alone you.” So then he said, “Just draw a hand on this figure.” There was a figure there that he had drawn the body, and he hadn’t drawn the hand. Before I knew it, he had me sitting in his chair, at the drawing table. He handed me a pencil and said, “Go ahead.” And first of all, hands were the thing I drew worst. But then I thought to myself, Jack’s got an eraser. [laughter] I’ll draw lightly, he’ll fix it up, and if he doesn’t—and I assumed Joe Sinnott was gonna ink the issue—Joe Sinnott will ink this and it will be absolutely perfect. It turned out Frank Giacoia inked that story and I still think Jack erased the hand I drew after we left and redid it. I realized in hindsight, he was not auditioning me to be an art assistant. He just kind of wanted to give me a chance to be part of a comic book. I had just actually started writing professionally like a week earlier, I’d sold my first magazine articles. And he just thought, “I’ll give this kid something.” And the next day, he recommended me for a job at Marvelmania, where I worked for a while and—.

EVANIER: Yeah. He wouldn’t let me borrow the car, but other than that it was fine. [laughter] KRAFT: So, continuing. 13 Based on all the other stuff that you’ve heard, these are a couple of quotes about how he brought movies into his art. We probably have time to read them. 14 So Frankenstein, of course, was a very big influence. 15 Here’s a couple issues, I think all these are inked by you, Mike, right? “Baron von 16 Evilstein” and the “Rebirth of Evil” were a two-part series based somewhat on Frankenstein, but again he took a lot of different concepts and turned it into this crazy guy that was making all different types of life, and wanted to use Jason Blood and the Demon to extract his life force to make other kinds of life, so it was a very different concept, but the basis of course is Frankenstein.

And also, “The Monster in the Morgue,” that one was for the Forever People, that you inked as well, was based on the character Serifan. He had these bullets and Doc Gideon stole one to make his monster that he pieced together from the morgue, alive again.

16 The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the obvious one is Fantastic Four #97, inked by Frank Giacoia.

ROYER: That’s how we met.

EVANIER: No, we met before that Mike, I knew you a year before that. [laughter] I’m sorry.

ROYER: My memory is just terrible—unlike this guy who remembers the telephone exchange that we looked up to call Al Williamson in 1970 from Penn Station.

EVANIER: Here, write this down. When Mike Royer was living in Whittier in 1969, his phone number was 213-944-5509.

ROYER: Yup.

EVANIER: Yeah, this issue was the one that was on Jack’s drawing board the day I first met him. This was in July of 1969. A bunch of fans, myself included, went down to visit Jack at his home in Irvine.

That issue was half-penciled. We were stunned by that issue. We just could not believe how good his pencils were. I was impressed with the stuff printed, but to see it in person, in its pencil stage, without the bad printing and coloring on it—it was just jaw-dropping. The friends I was with had mentioned to Jack that I drew. We took along

EVANIER: I don’t know why I remember that, but that’s what it was.

Now, ask me my social security number. That, I don’t know.

That story was the first thing I saw of Jack Kirby’s pencils; in pencil, halfway done.

KRAFT: 17 Maybe we can find the hand…

EVANIER: It’s not on these pages. If you have the other pages from it, I’ll show you the hand.

87

KRAFT: That’s about it.

EVANIER: No, it’s not on any of these pages. It’s just a guy, walking like this, and he’s got his hand out.

Anyway, that was the kind of person Jack was. When he met someone, anybody in those days, it was kinda like, “What can I give this person?” And he wasn’t thinking of a sketch—there were people who went to Jack and they wanted a sketch, they wanted to come home with a Captain America drawing, or a Thing drawing, something like that. That was like the worst thing you could get from Jack. The best thing was some inspiration, some concept, some thought, a boost in your career. He’d shove you somewhere towards something he thought you should be doing. I owe the man an awful lot, which is why I go to conventions all the time and tell you how wonderful he was.

19 themes, but it’s a totally different type of story than that.

22 Phantom of the Opera, this was a three-issue Demon sequence.

Do you remember this one?

KRAFT: So in this issue, it was called “The Monster from the Lost Lagoon”; very different. He made the monster an alien at the end, and he leaves.

18

ROYER: Oh yeah.

EVANIER: 18 Don’t change the page yet. I’ll show you something interesting here. This story was lettered

by Sam Rosen; the last thing at the bottom, the last page over there says, “Next: Mystery on the Moon.”

That’s not Sam Rosen’s lettering.

This is how we know that when Stan Lee put the dialogue on this story, he had no idea what the next issue was about, because he would have put the title in there if he had.

KRAFT: It had to do with Jason Blood and his girlfriend Glenda, and Farley Fairfax was the Phantom in this issue. 23 And you could see definitely the influence on the 1925 movie. See how similar it is?

ROYER: That was my favorite page, that close-up. It was fun to ink, looking at it was like, “God, this is great, Jack.” I was always seized with two emotions in the beginning working with Jack. I’d opened the package of the artwork and be engulfed in the aroma of Roi-tan cigars, which was intoxicating. And then my conscious thought was, “Don’t screw this up.” It was hard work, but it was fun, because it was finishing Jack’s statement. I don’t think I ever really embellished; I just finished his statement. There are the people that say I just traced his pencils, which is not true. I finished 20 his pencils, and I think Jack appreciated that.

There are people who compare Joe Sinnott and Mike Royer and I say, that’s apples and oranges, it’s silly. Joe Sinnott, if you know old time movies, the Golden Age of Hollywood studios, Joe Sinnott inked Jack Kirby “MGM.” I inked Jack Kirby “Warner Brothers,” or you could say “Universal.” What he put on the page was all that was necessary to sell the story. MGM put tons of gloss and made things gorgeous, so it’s unfair to compare Joe Sinnott and I; we were thinking totally different things. Luckily, Jack was “Warner Brothers.”

KRAFT: And on that last panel, the Thing is saying, “If they ever make this into a movie, this will be a perfect spot for a fadeout.” [laughter] ROYER: Well, the movies did have a great influence on Jack and he once told me that during the day when Adams and Steranko were doing all kinds of weird impressionistic panel layouts and so on, he said, “Mike, each of those panels is like the movie screen. It never changes its shape—it’s what’s going on inside the panel.” And I took that to heart, I think that was a very wise thing to say, that the movie screen never changes. But if you put some exciting stuff inside it, which he always did...

EVANIER: Well, you did some things like Joe, you couldn’t help it. There is a very strange thing with inking, because over the years I interviewed all of the guys like Colan, Buscema, Romita, and I always ask them, “What do you think of your inkers? What did you want?” And some guys would look at an inker and go, “That guy did a great job, he inked it just the way I would have.” And some people would say, “Oh, that guy did a great job, he put in all this stuff I never would have thought of.” There’s a different train of thought there.

Ross Andru loved it when the inker basically just made it his own, or added things or changed things; it was fine.

He felt he learned something looking at the inkers—he had some pretty good inkers. And Gil Kane would look at the comic, and if it didn’t look like Gil Kane, he would think it was

KRAFT: 19 20 The Wolf Man, and this is the classic Mike Royer-inked Demon #6, “The Howler.” And [Demon #3] also has a sequence where [a character] changes, which is very similar to the way it did it in the movie. 21 So again, it’s picking up on some of the

21

88

to say, we used to get together once a month and watch old movies. And when the evening was done, he would just stand up and say, “Get out.” [laughter]

22

KRAFT: We have five more minutes?

ROYER: We’ll take five minutes.

EVANIER: Okay, take five minutes. 24 Dracula, four minutes.

KRAFT: Dracula, the big thing was “The Genocide Spray”, the big Count Dragorin. 25

23

EVANIER: The Comics Code was rewritten to allow these issues.

KRAFT: Right, that was in 1970...

EVANIER: 1971. Literally, Jack sent in the first issue of this, and Carmine said, “We’re gonna have trouble with the Comics Code on this,” but he said we’ll get them to change it. And he did. The Comics Code was rewritten at that point and Marvel came out with Morbius the Living Vampire. They started working on it afterwards, but Jack had done his first. Jack’s was in first. And to his dying day, people said to Jack, “Oh, you ripped that off from Morbius, the Living Vampire and Spider-Man.”

a bad ink job. Jack was absolutely satisfied with what Mike did. He was very pleased with it, in a way he wasn’t with many other people, who he might regard as very talented, because he looked at the page and he saw what he was thinking.

Mike channeled what Jack had in mind frequently, even if it wasn’t absolutely clear in the pencils, which it usually was—Mike was able to understand, particularly separating the planes of the drawing. He knew what came in front of other things. The only real time I ever heard Jack ever complain about one of his inkers was because he felt the guy inked everything with the wrong line weights. The line was a beautiful ink line, but the background figures were coming forward, and the foreground figures were going back, because he had thin lines on the foreground figures and bold lines on the background, and Mike never made that mistake. He intuitively knew, or maybe it was conscious at times, that this was supposed to leap out at the reader, and that something else was supposed to go back. The colorists had very little trouble figuring out what body parts were part of which figures, because they were all clearly delineated.

Somebody else might have tried to add a lot of their own textures to that face 23 , when obviously it didn’t need it. It was all there. Jack gave Mike everything. And Mike knew how to true it up and ignore construction lines and make the right things bold, and that’s why the figure just leaps off the page.

KRAFT: It was a totally different concept, all about Transilvane, and this miniature planet that had a film projector that was showing off all these horror films. And so, the little miniature people that lived on the planet started adapting the characters in all the horror movies. And he used this one to really bring out a lot of those different types of things.

24

ROYER: What that a bit autobiographical?

KRAFT: Probably yes.

EVANIER: Everything Jack did had some autobiographical element in it.

KRAFT: 26 So here’s The Wolf Man, and then this whole thing with Frankenstein and Wolfman and Mummy and Dracula.

26

ROYER: Unequivocally I would say right now, thanks to this panel and Tom’s visual aids, The Demon was my favorite book. I think it’s because I tapped into the things I grew up with on late night television that Jack saw firsthand. We were all lucky to know or experience Jack in different ways in different times—to rub elbows with his genius. And if we can read sign language, what’s that, we have five minutes, or...?

25

EVANIER: I think we’re done. I think we’re out of time. Well, wrap up things.

ROYER: As a friend of mine used 89

27 28

29

27 The Mummy, I found this issue 28 29 , and this goes back to what you were saying about [his son] Neal in the ’60s, this is probably one of the ones that you referenced to. The Hulk 30 , with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 31 , it’s close but it’s not the same type of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; he gets exposed to radiation.

And in Kamandi, Tiny with Kamandi 32 , it was very similar to King Kong 33 ; in fact, when Tiny comes in and grabs Kamandi 34 , it looks exactly like in the movie when Fay Wray is grabbed 35 .

It’s kind of funny, the second to the last panel 36 , he even brings up the idea that even the ancients with their imaginative movies couldn’t have produced anything like this. So, it’s kind of like a joke, because that was a really close thing to King Kong.

That’s all I’ve got.

30

EVANIER: Thank you all for joining us here. [applause] H

90

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33

35

32 34

36 91

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 KIRBY’S UNINKED PENCILS NS from the 1960s-1980s EDITIOABLE IL (from photocopies AVA NLY preserved in the KIRBY ARCHIVES). Now in FULLFOR O 5.95­ COLOR, it showcases Kirby’s art even better! $1.95-$

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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!

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!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #74

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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!

FIGHT CLUB! Jack’s most powerful fights and in-your-face action: Real-life WAR EXPERIENCES, Marvel’s KID COWBOYS, the Madbomb saga and all those negative 1970s Marvel fan letters, interview with SCOTT McCLOUD on his Kirby-inspired punchfest DESTROY!, rare Kirby interview, 2017 WonderCon Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by DEAN HASPIEL!

ONE-SHOTS! Kirby’s best (and worst) short spurts on his wildest concepts: ANIMATION IDEAS, DINGBATS, JUSTICE INC., MANHUNTER, ATLAS, PRISONER, and more! Plus MARK EVANIER and our other regular panelists, rare Kirby interview, panels from the 2017 Kirby Centennial celebration, pencil art galleries, and some one-shot surprises! BIG BARDA #1 cover finishes by MIKE ROYER!

FUTUREPAST! Kirby’s “World That Was” from Caveman days to the Wild West, and his “World That’s Here” of Jack’s visions of the future that became reality! TWO COVERS: Bullseye inked by BILL WRAY, and Jack’s unseen Tiger 21 concept art!

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FATHERS & SONS! Odin/Thor, Zeus/ Hercules, Darkseid/Orion, Captain America/ Bucky, and other dysfunctional relationships, unpublished 1994 interview with GIL KANE eulogizing Kirby, tributes from Jack’s creative “sons” in comics (MUMY, PALMIOTTI, QUESADA, VALENTINO, McFARLANE, GAIMAN, & MILLER), MARK EVANIER, 2018 Kirby Tribute Panel, Kirby pencil art gallery, and more!

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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!

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The fabled 1971 KIRBY UNLEASHED PORTFOLIO, completely remastered! Spotlights some of KIRBY’s finest art from all eras of his career, including 1930s pencil work, unused strips, illustrated World War II letters, 1950s pages, unpublished 1960s Marvel pencil pages and sketches, and Fourth World pencil art (done just for this portfolio in 1970)! We’ve gone back to the original art to ensure the best reproduction possible, and MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN have updated the Kirby biography from the original printing, and added a new Foreword explaining how this portfolio came to be! PLUS: We’ve recolored the original color plates, and added EIGHT NEW BLACK-&-WHITE PAGES, plus EIGHT NEW COLOR PAGES! (60-page Digital Edition) $5.95

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This final, fully-updated, definitive edition clocks in at DOUBLE the length of the 2008 “Gold Edition”, in a new 256-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER (only 1000 copies) listing every release up to Jack’s 100th birthday! Detailed listings of all of Kirby’s published work, reprints, magazines, books, foreign editions, newspaper strips, fine art and collages, fanzines, essays, interviews, portfolios, posters, radio and TV appearances, and even Jack’s unpublished work!

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JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

In cooperation with DC COMICS, TwoMorrows compiles a tempestuous trio of never-seen 1970s Kirby projects!

These are the final complete, unpublished Jack Kirby stories in existence, presented here for the first time! Included are: Two unused DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales (Kirby’s final Kid Gang group, inked by MIKE ROYER and D. BRUCE BERRY, and newly colored for this book)! TRUELIFE DIVORCE, the abandoned newsstand magazine that was too hot for its time (reproduced from Jack’s pencil art—and as a bonus, we’ve commissioned MIKE ROYER to ink one of the stories)! And SOUL LOVE, the unseen ’70s romance book so funky, even a jive turkey will dig the unretouched inks by VINCE COLLETTA and TONY DeZUNIGA. PLUS: There’s Kirby historian JOHN MORROW’s in-depth examination of why these projects got left back, concept art and uninked pencils from DINGBATS, and a Foreword and Introduction by ’70s Kirby assistants MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN! SHIPS OCTOBER 2019!

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Comments

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

(Don’t make me unleash Sserpo on you—write!)

[I had trepidation about this issue going into it, but now that it’s a wrap, I’ve gotta say it was a lot of fun! Hope you think so too. Now, letters:] I’m doing something very different on my KIRBY CONTINUUM YouTube channel. I’m taking the audio from classic science-fiction films and coupling them with the appropriate images from Kirby comics.

So far, I’ve done THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (Kurrgo, Barada, Nikto), THE MOLE PEOPLE, THIS ISLAND EARTH (starring the Eternals), INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (the Skrulls), FANTASTIC VOYAGE, WESTWORLD (Machine Man, Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt and TwoGun kid) and others. Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9igdMMjVM78&t=2s

Plus, I’ve done many of the modern MCU films. Example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kej77ViCpbs&t=3s

I just wanted the greatest Kirby Curator in the world to know.

Fred Smith, Goose Creek, SC (Words can’t express how cool I thought this was, Fred. Check ’em both out, Kirbyheads!)

First, let me add to the chorus of those telling you how wonderful STUF’ SAID is. I like to think of myself as being fairly knowledgeable about Kirby and all these matters, yet I learned things I never knew from this book/issue! Clearly you put a lot of thought, care and time into this document. Fans and comics historians in years to come will owe you a debt of gratitude for what you’ve accomplished here. In as much as it’s possible at this late date, I feel like we finally have as close to something resembling “the last word” on the subject as we’re ever going to get.

Thank you for this.

On the latest issue, I was sort of surprised to read the transcript of the SDCC 2018 Kirby Tribute panel, and to see my name mentioned by Larry Houston! Larry was my first boss in animation, and I consider him both a mentor and friend. I thought maybe I could expand a bit on what he said about what we were doing on X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES. All of us on the art side had the utmost respect for Jack. Not just Larry and me, but also character model designer Frank Brunner, and Larry’s assistant Frank Squillace.

We were always looking for chances to work in cameos of characters from the wider Marvel universe (whether we were supposed to or not), because we

felt like that sense of interconnectedness, of a wider universe, was part of what made Marvel feel like Marvel. As a result, we ended up doing the first animated appearances of a lot of Marvel Comics characters—a number of them, of course, being Jack’s.

For example, Black Panther: This was just kind of a throwaway bit (the script just called for some kind of “African Mutant Refugee”), but Larry saw an opportunity and asked me to make it Black Panther. In order to not run afoul of Broadcast Standards and Practices or Legal though, we just stuck to the label “African Mutant Refugee #3.” The model was approved and showed up on air, but the fans knew who they were seeing, regardless of any label.

But in the case of Jack’s actual appearance in the show, I think it was just a matter that we had to fill a crowd with aliens. I don’t recall whose idea it was that Jack should be in the audience (in what I guess could be seen as sort of a Doctor Who-type role), but it made sense to us as a little tribute. I’ve attached the model here, drawn by Frank Brunner, with my cleanup. Note how we labeled it, again to get it through any potential objections on the part of BS&P or Legal.

You made mention of Jack’s passing the week after the episode with this appearance aired. I remember the day I heard about Jack’s passing very well! I first heard the news from Larry, and it was like a gut punch to pretty much all of us on the crew. With no Internet in those days, it was probably a long time before a lot of other fans heard the news. Larry did some wrangling, and managed to get an “in memory of” card at the head of the following week’s episode with Jack’s name on it. It was only aired that way the one time, and even that was quite a feat on Larry’s part to get that, given the fact the credit issues with Marvel were still ongoing at that time. But obviously he was able to make a persuasive argument that regardless of any of that, this was the right thing to do.

Mark Lewis, Burbank, CA I just finished reading KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID! I think this is one of the best nonfiction books of the year and is the culmination of all the work you’ve been doing since you began TwoMorrows. This book represents far more than merely nitpicking about story credits from fifty-year-old super-hero comic books. STUF’ SAID! is, at its core, a Rashomon-like study in perceptual psychology.

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Human beings—if told something often enough and with great conviction—tend to believe unfounded claims without first examining their veracity themselves, and this book charts that process of selective perception with the tenacity and attention to detail of a prosecuting attorney or that legendary fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes (often cited by Stan Lee as an early influence, ironically enough). Very well done, indeed!

Robert Guffey, Long Beach, CA As promised, STUF’ SAID was, indeed, an intriguingly detailed exploration of the Lee/Kirby relationship in their own words. Even having followed their work for over fifty years, I saw examples new to me. Plus, the way you presented it was extremely helpful: Color-coded to denote the speaker and in order, mostly, to show trends or patterns of behavior.

You provided much detail, both in their praise for and, later, attempts to undercut the other. Yet even with the same evidence, I draw different conclusions.

You gave Jack a pass saying his statements might, on occasion, be confused, misunderstood or exaggerated.

With Stan, it could be “savvy marketing.”

Though Stan began the credit mess, Jack, in anger, responded in kind. It came down to choosing between personalities claiming it all, rather than their presenting evidence of any kind, or even a detailed explanation.

Stan, I believe, actually instigated the trouble.

In a fanzine called INSIDE INFO #1 (July 1966), Stan was asked, “Did you create or help create all of your heroes? Are there any that someone else completely created?” His response was, “I created all of them for the past ten years. In the ‘Golden Age,’ other people helped, such as Carl Burgos who created the Human Torch 27 years ago.” So six months after he claimed he had no responsibility for what others said, favoring one side in the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, he was at it himself.

If Jack considered “writing” to be the plot and staging and Stan believed it to be basic ideas and dialogue, why didn’t they define their contributions as such, and not claim to have written it all?

Stan, in my view, was really on thin ice. The artists routinely did half of his job, with plotting and pacing, along with all of their own in drawing the story. He does half of his job and claims it all?

As for the finished results, Lee/Kirby books, far more often than not, were excellent. So no question they could back up any cover claims of greatness. But as historians they were lacking.

Stan considered his dialogue as the vital element. Hard for me to accept since so many solo Torch stories and Ant-Man/Giant-Man adventures, even with him writing the dialogue, were awful. Why didn’t the Lee/Buscema Silver Surfer catch on? The first seven issues were

double-sized, so twice as much vital dialogue to love.

The Marvel method was said to be instigated to save time—but did it? If a book was extensively altered at the end when Stan decided to go in a different direction, how much time was really saved?

Better to put the time in early on, and give the artistic collaborators more to work with; or barring that, accept what they come up with and don’t tinker so much at the end—less last-minute revisions. How puzzling that a deadline crunch was said to be behind the Marvel method, yet there seems to have been abundant time for interviews on TV and radio, in newspapers and magazines and at colleges and comic book conventions.

There was nothing wrong with the results of the Marvel Method. Had the credits reflected both parties as co-plotters and given additional financial compensation to the artists, that would have been equitable. But to have them do half the writing job, unacknowledged, and with no extra pay seems a oneway street. Then to deny their conceptual contributions afterwards is the final straw.

Stan insisted the one who came up with the idea was the creator. Yet, if that’s true, why did he treat the Silver Surfer and Dr. Strange, instigated by others, no differently? When he didn’t like the first Dr. Strange story, he wrote dismissively, “T’was Steve’s idea.”

Yet when he wrote ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS, suddenly it was based on Chandu the Magician, which he enjoyed as a kid—much like Spider-Man, which went from the SPIDER, MASTER OF MEN to a crawling fly on his wall. Which multiple-choice “origin” are we to believe?

Again, I don’t question that he was heavily involved with all the characters, but so were his collaborators.

How did he justify withholding credit from them? Often, it was his conflicting assertions that gave him away.

Here, in your examples, two statements of Stan’s really stood out: “I’m not noted for always telling the truth, but at least people usually don’t catch me at it.” [page 119] “I’ve told this story so often, it might even be true. I can’t remember.” [page 151] In a way, he’s acknowledging deceit, but in such a way as to make it seem almost lightly humorous, rather than something of which he was ashamed.

Even some of Jack’s statements don’t hold up as accidental mistakes or momentary memory lapses: “My initial concept [for Spiderman] was practically the same.” “... I drew up the costume...”

With both Stan and Jack—or anyone—when mistakes are repeated, when misinformation is allowed to pass, with no apology or correction, it’s no longer an accident or oversight. If someone was truly regretful of an error, they’d strive to fix it and not repeat it thereafter. It’d be a regrettable fluke, not a pattern of behavior.

Jack spoke out in anger. That doesn’t excuse him, but does explain it. Stan, however, instigated many of the problems and grandiose solo assertions. He used many “outs.” The world’s worst memory was one.

If someone can’t remember, then there’s no hostile Here’s a tentative list of upcoming themes, so get writing!

KIRBY FIRSTS! All the ways Jack was a pioneer in comics and life, by being the first to create or champion characters and concepts!

THE BIG PICTURE! An all-visual comparisons issue, hosted by Brother Eye!

intent, right? Yet, if someone is unsure of their facts, why would they repeatedly go on record?

Another is explaining away a paper trail of past statements. Saying he acknowledged the contributions of Kirby and Ditko to make them feel good? Or that he was willing to say it though he didn’t believe it? Or acknowledging a fact one minute and contradicting it the next? How can any statement or boast be believed under those circumstances?

Stan was usually quite complimentary. Artist A was wonderful. B was imaginative and a pleasure to work with. All positive feedback. But what about when their names weren’t even mentioned? What about when it came time to note they were co-creators or coplotters of the work? Lots of dancing around that. At conventions or on TV, when someone named him as the solo creator, why no clarification?

Also, how does one side of a collaborative team suddenly decide only he deserves the lion’s share of credit? It’d be like judging your own case in a court of law based on self-interest and not the facts.

You said they didn’t have any choice but to go with the expedient Marvel Method. I disagree. They could have released fewer titles. They could have brought in other writers—which they did! Examples: Jerry Siegel, Don Rico, Larry Lieber, “R. Berns,” Larry Ivie, Leon Lazarus, etc. None seemed to work out for long. Like Wally Wood, and later Jim Steranko, they could have had the artists draw and write the work. How do we blame Martin Goodman for Stan’s actions and behavior in his interaction with the artists?

One group I do blame, both then and now, are fans.

The interviewers were star-struck and accepted any claim without question or clarification. So did the readers at home. They picked a favorite and supported them, even when they were in the wrong. A more objective fandom would have challenged questionable assertions such that they would have made them harder to casually claim.

As you noted, the co-credits are now on the comics and films. It’s no longer a shut-out. The brilliant work is reprinted for old-timers and newcomers to enjoy.

Both parties are known and celebrated. But, sadly, the history of the claims doesn’t enhance their reputations.

I long ago conceded I’d never know, for sure, who did what. I take comfort that both sides are named and honored for their efforts. Partisans can still claim their man did it all or the key parts. I’m content to know both added to it and came up with something extraordinary.

I’ll focus on their work and not the inflated claims.

The part that bothers me the most: Telling the truth, from Day One, would have avoided all the needless problems. There wouldn’t have been any less love and admiration for both parties involved.

Joe Frank, Scottsdale, AZ [Your reaction to STUF’ SAID is exactly what I’d hoped; that readers would get an all-encompassing idea of the relationship, and really give it a lot more consideration.

The book completely sold out within three months of release(!), and I’m currently finishing up an expanded Second Edition, with 16 extra pages and minor corrections. It’ll be out shortly after you read this.]

KIRBY: BETA! Jack’s wildest, most experimental stories and concepts.

And if you liked the STUF’ SAID book, get ready for: THE FOURTH WORLD COMPANION! (Coming soon!)

GOT A THEME IDEA? WRITE US! We treat these themes very loosely, so anything you send could get used.

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#77 Credits:

John Morrow, Editor/Designer/etc.

THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Rick Becker • Jerry Boyd Christopher W. Boyko Norris Burroughs • Michael Cho Jon B. Cooke • Jean Depelley Vince Dugar • Mark Evanier Chris Fama • Shane Foley Barry Forshaw • Sean Kleefeld Tom Kraft • Ashley T. LeMay Mark Lewis • Adam McGovern Will Murray • Eric Nolen-Weathington Eric Powell • Mike Royer Pete Von Sholly • Michael Zuccaro 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: It’s our Silver Anniversary Issue!

How Kirby kickstarted the Silver Age with Challengers, revamped old characters for the ’60s, and the lasting influence of his Silver Surfer!

Plus: Pivotal decisions Jack made throughout his career, a Kirby pencil art gallery, classic 1950s story, and more! Standard Edition has an unused Kirby/Steve Rude THOR cover, and Deluxe Edition has a Kirby/Rude Silver Surfer outer silver sleeve! #78 ships December 2019!

Parting Shot

Kirby takes a final shot at his Atlas monsters on the cover of Incredible Hulk Annual #5 (1976).

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A 25 Year Celebration! th

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Published 25 years after the launch of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #1, this special SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE shows how Kirby kickstarted the Silver Age of Comics with Challengers of the Unknown, examines how Jack revamped Golden Age legacy characters for the 1960s and beyond, outlines the lasting influence of his signature creation The Silver Surfer, and more! It includes special shout-outs to the fan and pro contributors who’ve helped publisher/editor JOHN MORROW celebrate the life and career of the King of Comics for a quarter century. And echoing John’s fateful choice to start this magazine in 1994, we’ll spotlight PIVOTAL DECISIONS (good and bad) Jack made throughout his comics career. Plus: A Kirby pencil art gallery, regular columnists, a classic 1950s story, and more! The STANDARD EDITION sports an unused Kirby THOR cover with STEVE RUDE’s interpretation of how it looked before alterations, while the DELUXE EDITION adds a silver cardstock outer sleeve featuring the Surfer with RUDE inks. SHIPS WINTER 2020!

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Relive The Pop Culture You Grew Up With!

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#5: Interviews with MARK HAMILL and Greatest American Hero’s WILLIAM KATT! Blast off with JASON OF STAR COMMAND! Stop by the MUSEUM OF POPULAR CULTURE! Poke fun at a campy BATMAN COMIC BOOK! Plus: “The First Time I Met Tarzan,” MAJOR MATT MASON, Moon Landing Mania, SNUFFY SMITH at 100 with cartoonist JOHN ROSE, TV Dinners, Celebrity Crushes, and more fun, fab features!

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THE CRAZY, COOL CULTURE WE GREW UP WITH! LOU FERRIGNO interview, The Phantom in Hollywood, Filmation’s Star Trek cartoon, “How I Met Lon Chaney, Jr.”, goofy comic Zody the Mod Rob, Mego’s rare Elastic Hulk toy, RetroTravel to Mount Airy, NC (the real-life Mayberry), interview with BETTY LYNN (“Thelma Lou” of The Andy Griffith Show), TOM STEWART’s eclectic House of Collectibles, and Mr. Microphone!

HALLOWEEN! Horror-hosts ZACHERLEY, VAMPIRA, SEYMOUR, MARVIN, and an interview with our cover-featured ELVIRA! THE GROOVIE GOOLIES, BEWITCHED, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and THE MUNSTERS! The long-buried Dinosaur Land amusement park! History of BEN COOPER HALLOWEEN COSTUMES, character lunchboxes, superhero VIEW-MASTERS, SINDY (the British Barbie), and more!

40th Anniversary interview with SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE director RICHARD DONNER, IRWIN ALLEN’s sci-fi universe, Saturday morning’s undersea adventures of Aquaman, horror and sci-fi zines of the Sixties and Seventies, Spider-Man and Hulk toilet paper, RetroTravel to METROPOLIS, IL (home of the Superman Celebration), SEAMONKEYS®, FUNNY FACE beverages, Superman and Batman memorabilia, & more!

Interviews with the SHAZAM! TV show’s JOHN (Captain Marvel) DAVEY and MICHAEL (Billy Batson) Gray, the GREEN HORNET in Hollywood, remembering monster maker RAY HARRYHAUSEN, the wayout Santa Monica Pacific Ocean Amusement Park, a Star Trek Set Tour, SAM J. JONES on the Spirit movie pilot, British sci-fi TV classic THUNDERBIRDS, Casper & Richie Rich museum, the KING TUT fad, and more!

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JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE

In cooperation with DC COMICS, TwoMorrows compiles a tempestuous trio of never-seen 1970s Kirby projects! These are the final complete, unpublished Jack Kirby stories in existence, presented here for the first time! Included are: Two unused DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales (Kirby’s final Kid Gang group, inked by MIKE ROYER and D. BRUCE BERRY, and newly colored for this book)! TRUE-LIFE DIVORCE, the abandoned newsstand magazine that was too hot for its time (reproduced from Jack’s pencil art—and as a bonus, we’ve commissioned MIKE ROYER to ink one of the stories)! And SOUL LOVE, the unseen ’70s romance book so funky, even a jive turkey will dig the unretouched inks by VINCE COLLETTA and TONY DeZUNIGA. PLUS: There’s Kirby historian JOHN MORROW’s in-depth examination of why these projects got left back, concept art and uninked pencils from DINGBATS, and a Foreword by former 1970s Kirby assistant MARK EVANIER! SHIPS OCT. 2019!

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In the latest volume, KURT MITCHELL and ROY THOMAS document the 1940-44 “Golden Age” of comics, a period that featured the earliest adventures of BATMAN, CAPTAIN MARVEL, SUPERMAN, and WONDER WOMAN. It was a time when America’s entry into World War II was presaged Look for the 1945-49 volume by the arrival of such patriotic do-gooders as WILL EISNER’s Uncle Sam, HARRY SHORTEN and in 2020!

IRV NOVICK’s The Shield, and JOE SIMON and JACK KIRBY’s Captain America—and teenage culture found expression in a fumbling red-haired high school student named Archie Andrews. But most of all, it was the age of “packagers” like HARRY A CHESLER, and EISNER and JERRY IGER, who churned out material for the entire gamut of genres, from funny animal stories and crime tales, to jungle sagas and science-fiction adventures. Watch the history of comics begin! NOW SHIPPING!

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MAC RABOY Master of the Comics

Beginning with his WPA etchings during the 1930s, MAC RABOY struggled to survive the Great Depression and eventually found his way into the comic book sweatshops of America. In that world of four-color panels, he perfected his art style on such creations as DR. VOODOO, ZORO the MYSTERY MAN, BULLETMAN, SPY SMASHER, GREEN LAMA, and his crowning achievement, CAPTAIN MARVEL JR. Raboy went on to illustrate the FLASH GORDON Sunday newspaper strip, and left behind a legacy of meticulous perfection.

Through extensive research and interviews with son DAVID RABOY, and assistants who worked with the artist during the Golden Age of Comics, author ROGER HILL brings Mac Raboy, the man and the artist, into focus for historians to savor and enjoy. This FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER includes never-before-seen photos, a wealth of rare and unpublished artwork, and the first definitive biography of a true Master of the Comics! Introduction by ROY THOMAS! ISBN: 978-1-60549-090-8 • SHIPS AUG. 2019!

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SCI-FI SUPERHEROES! In-depth looks at JIM STARLIN’s Dreadstar and Company, and the dystopian lawman Judge Dredd. Also: Nova, GERRY CONWAY & MIKE VOSBURG’s Starman, PAUL LEVITZ & STEVE DITKO’s Starman, WALTER SIMONSON’s Justice Peace (from the pages of Thor), and GREG POTTER & GENE COLAN’s Jemm, Son of Saturn! With a Dreadstar and Company cover by STARLIN and ALAN WEISS!

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LIFE IS DRAWING WITHOUT AN ERASER

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Spider-Man cover by DITKO!

Full-issue STAN LEE TRIBUTE! ROY THOMAS writes on his more than 50-year relationship with Stan—and shares 21stcentury e-mails from Stan (with his permission, of course)! Art by KIRBY, DITKO, MANEELY, EVERETT, SEVERIN, ROMITA, plus tributes from pros and fans alike, and special sections on Stan by MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and even the FCA! Vintage cover by KIRBY and COLLETTA!

WILL MURRAY presents an amazing array of possible prototypes of Batman (by artist FRANK FOSTER—in 1932!)—Wonder Woman (by Star-Spangled Kid artist HAL SHERMAN)—Tarantula (by Air Wave artist LEE HARRIS), and others! Plus a rare Hal Sherman interview—MICHAEL T. GILBERT with more on artist PETE MORISI—FCA— BILL SCHELLY—JOHN BROOME—and more! Cover homage by SHANE FOLEY!

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sary of the “DC Implosion”, one of the most notorious events in comics (which left stacks of completed comic book stories unpublished and spawned Cancelled Comics Cavalcade). Featuring JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, and others, plus detailed analysis of how it changed the landscape of comics!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #20 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #21

BRICKJOURNAL #59

NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOES! Interview with JOSEPH MICHAEL LINSNER (CRY FOR DAWN, VAMPIRELLA), a chat with JOE SINNOTT about his Marvel years inking Jack Kirby and work at TREASURE CHEST, JOE JUSKO discusses the Marvel Age of Comics and his fabulous “Corner Box Collection,” plus the artists behind the Topps bubble gum BAZOOKA JOE comic strips, CRAIG YOE, and more!

ERIC POWELL celebrates 20 years of THE GOON! with a career-spanning interview and a gallery of rare artwork. Plus CBC editor and author JON B. COOKE on his new retrospective THE BOOK OF WEIRDO, a new interview with R. CRUMB about his work on that legendary humor comics anthology, a look at DAVE COCKRUM’s design work for Aurora Models, JOHN ROMITA SR. on his admiration for the work of MILTON CANIFF, and more!

STAR WARSTM THEMED BUILDERS! Travel to a galaxy far, far away with JACOB NEIL CARPENTER’S DEATH STAR, the work of MIRI DUDAS, and the LEGO® photography of JAMES PHILIPPART! Plus “AFOLs”

by GREG HYLAND, “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art with TOMMY WILLIAMSON, Minifigure Customization with JARED K. BURKS, and more!

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Now shipping!

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Ships Fall 2019

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Sept. 2019

KIRBY COLLECTOR #78

SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! How Kirby kickstarted the Silver Age and revamped Golden Age characters for the 1960s, the Silver Surfer’s influence, pivotal decisions (good and bad) Jack made throughout his comics career, Kirby pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, a classic 1950s story, KIRBY/STEVE RUDE cover (and deluxe silver sleeve) and more!

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (DELUXE EDITION w/ silver sleeve) $12.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • Ships Dec. 2019

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