Jack Kirby Collector #78 by TwoMorrows Publishing

rvel © Ma TM & ters, Inc. c Chara

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SEVENTY-EIGHT $10.95

WINTER 2020

Contents

THE

SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! 25 YEARS ON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 (a quarter century of this mag) JACK KIRBY AT FLEISCHER STUDIOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 (Kirby’s earliest work was animation)

C o l l e c t o r

ISSUE #78, WINTER 2020

LINK THORNE, THE FLYING FOOL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 (a forgotten S&K hero) HOW SIMON & KIRBY KICKSTARTED THE SILVER AGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 (Challengers or the Flash?) KIRBY OBSCURA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 MARVEL PRECURSORS. . . . . . . . . 22 (he had to start somewhere) SOLID SILVER CONTINUITY. . . . . . 28 (simply the best) A 25-YEAR SEISMIC SHIFT! . . . . . 31 (at this point in Jack’s career...) MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE FALLEN MONSTER… . . . . . . . . . . 34 (heading out the door with Thor) 2019 WONDERCON KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL. . . . . . . . . 40 (Mark Evanier moderates) THE MYSTERY OF MYSTIVAC. . . . 53 (the Mister Miracle mystery) SILVER SURFER GALLERY. . . . . . . 55 SILVER STAR: INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 (Kirby’s final hero examined) CIRCLE OF FRIENDS . . . . . . . . . . . 63 (stories about meeting Jack) THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR. . . . 65 (thanks to those who’ve helped us) EVENT HORIZON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 ( Tom Scioli shares his grand design for the Fantastic Four) GOING MUTTS OVER KIRBY!. . . . . 70 (Patrick McDonnell’s tributes to Jack) THE JACK KIRBY MUSEUM. . . . . . 73 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) THE MONOLITH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 COLLECTOR COMMENTS. . . . . . . . 78 (letters on past issues) Deluxe co ver inks: STEVE RUDE Standard cover inks: STEVE RUDE (new Galactus figure), JOHN ROMITA and JOHN VERPOORTEN (main inks from Thor #170, at right) Standard cover colors: TOM ZIUKO COPYRIGHTS: Ant-Man, Avengers, Batroc, Black Panther, Captain America, Devil Dinosaur, Eternals, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Hawkeye, Him, Hulk, Iron Man, Loki, Magneto, Maximus, Metallo, Odin, Quicksilver, Rawhide Kid, Scarlet Witch, Sgt. Fury, Sif, Silver Surfer, SpiderMan, Strange Tales, Stranger, Sub-Mariner, Thermal Man, Thor, Two-Gun Kid, Vision, Volstaag, Warriors Three, Wasp, Watcher, X-Men, Yellow Claw TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Big Barda, Blackhawks, Cave Carson, Challengers of the Unknown, Flash, Forever People, Green Arrow, Guardian, Jimmy Olsen, Lightray, Lois Lane, Metallo, Mister Miracle, Mystivac, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, OMAC, Orion, Rip Hunter, Sea Devils, Shazam, Slig, Suicide Squad, Superman, The Unexpected TM & © DC Comics • Popeye TM & © King Features • Bullseye, Fighting American, Foxhole, In Love, Link Thorne, Night Fighter, Police Trap, Sunfire TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby estates • Private Strong TM & © Archie Publications • The Fly TM & © Joe Simon estate • Chip Hardy, Flesh Crawl, Galaxy Green, Silver Star, Sky Masters TM & © Jack Kirby estate • Destroyer Duck TM & © Steve Gerber & Jack Kirby estates

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 27, No. 78, Winter 2020. 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, $18 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

hoto

Pivotal Decisions

25 Years On

by editor John Morrow

Did I do the right thing? Make the right choices? Will I regret this move one day? Here I am in 1996 at one of my earliest convention appearances (that’s Joe Sinnott’s hand on my shoulder!)...

...and accepting the 2019 Eisner Award for “Best Comics-Related Periodical” for Back Issue magazine, in a photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

o r a quarter-century (!), I’ve been producing this magazine on a regular basis. Since 1994, it’s consumed countless hours of my life, and more than once, I’ve stopped to ask myself, “Self, is this the best use of your time and the remaining years of your life, or should you be focusing on something much more lucrative?” Kirby himself must’ve been plagued with that same question, but inevitably reached the answer I have: “As long as I can support my family, the satisfaction I get from my job is just as important as making more money.” So for this Silver Anniversary issue, I’m dropping some extra coin on a very satisfying fifth ink color (metallic silver, of course), and a special silver sleeve Deluxe Edition for those who chose it over the Standard Edition. Alas, due to the ongoing trade dispute between the US and China, the addition of a 30% tariff on our printing means, for the foreseeable future, I’ll have to cut 16 pages from the usual format to keep our cover price the same. But in spite of some very frustrating business decisions I’ve been forced to make, my day job is a pretty nice gig. I get to produce work that I enjoy, and am immensely proud of—just as Jack did for twice as long as I’ve been cranking out this mag. I could’ve spent this entire issue documenting my own personal journey that brought me here, but this mag has never been, and never will be, about me. It’s about Jack Kirby, the man who influenced several generations in ways that we’re only beginning to see now. So rather than deflect any more attention away from him, let me just point 2

you toward our 25th Anniversary book, The World of TwoMorrows, which I’m co-editing with Jon B. Cooke. If you’ve ever wanted to know the nitty-gritty history of how I started TJKC, and ended up with what fans half-jokingly call my publishing “empire,” WOT should be out at the same time this issue ships. It’s filled with photos, memorabilia, and behind-the-scenes details of how TwoMorrows evolved from a 16-page hand- xeroxed fanzine about Jack Kirby, to what it is today. And now, let’s take a journey through Kirby’s own history, with stops along the way to see what kind of pivotal decisions he had to make. I’ve learned a lot from Jack’s successes and failures—most notably that, just like in comic books, even your defeats can come back around as eventual triumphs. I hope you can take away something valuable from this trip as well. H

Kirby’s Bad(?) Business Sense

A lot has been said about how, as good as Kirby was at creating comics, he was equally bad at the business end of things. Sometimes you just make the wrong choice in a situation, and other times you have few options when life throws you a curveball. Over the course of 25 years of documenting his history, I’ve found a lot of key moments where things might’ve turned out differently. Here’s a list of some of those instances—decide for yourself if these were good or bad choices Jack made: • Waiting to get drafted into the infantry in WWII, whereas Joe Simon enlisted in the US Coast Guard and Stan Lee in the Signal Corps, serving stateside • Forming Mainline Comics with Joe Simon, at a time when comics were in a major sales downturn in the 1950s • Signing a napkin contract with Jack Schiff for the Sky Masters newspaper strip, rather than having a legal professional handle the negotiations • Moving to Marvel in the late 1950s and continuing to work without a contract throughout the 1960s • Not walking out of Marvel with Steve Ditko in 1966 • Siding with Marvel in Simon’s 1960s Captain America lawsuit; was there bad blood between Joe and Jack that kept Kirby from discussing it before taking Marvel owner Martin Goodman’s offer? • Taking a loan from Goodman in 1969 to fund his family’s move to California • Moving to DC in 1970, without written guarantees from Carmine Infantino • Burning bridges by parodying Stan Lee as Funky Flashman in Mister Miracle in the 1970s • Moving back to Marvel in 1975, without written guarantees from Marvel

In the 1930s, young Jack Kirby had dreams of being a movie star, hoping to move to Hollywood and become the next John Garfield in gangster films. Thankfully, his mom wouldn’t let him, or he might’ve missed out on a career in comic books. So the closest he got to being on the Big Screen was accepting an offer to use his art talent animating cartoons in 1935— and there begins a long series of pivotal choice made by...

Jack Kirby at Fleischer Studios by Jim Korkis • Originally published online at: http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/in-his-own-words-jack-kirby-at-fleischers/

I (far right) Jack Kirby, age 18 in 1935. (right) Kirby’s try-out (under his given name, Jacob Kurtzberg) to do in-betweening on the Fleischer Studios’ Popeye animated shorts.

(above) Max Fleischer with Betty Boop.

n a short biography of Jack Kirby written by Jack himself that appeared in the Merry Marvel Messenger (the official newsletter of the Merry Marvel Marching Society fan club) in 1966, it states: “Frustrated by bad spelling, I turned to bad drawing and improved both enough in my late teens to land a job in a small syndicate servicing weekly newspapers. “From there to Max Fleischer animation studios— where, for negligible wages, I learned that the human body, in motion, has value and beauty. When Popeye and Betty Boop took the initial steps to throw their pies, it was my job to complete the movements and speed of the action. This operation was called in-betweening. When comic magazines blossomed as a field, I leaped in and drew for anyone who would let me tell a story.” While most of Kirby’s peers in his neighborhood saw their future as policemen, politicians, or gangsters, Kirby wanted to be an artist, but only lasted less than a week at art class at Pratt University because his father lost his job. Kirby dropped out and needed to find paying work. He started doing some artwork for Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate. He also got a job as an in-betweener at the Fleischer Studios in New York sometime in 1935, supposedly earning around fifteen dollars a week. It can be debated that this was his earliest formal art training that taught him about movement and exaggeration. Working in the same room during that exact same time as an in-betweener was cartoonist John Stanley, who would go on to later fame on the Little Lulu comic books among other credits, so it is probable that the

two artists met. Around the same time Sheldon Mayer, Harry Lampert and Gill Fox, all of whom would make an impact in early comic books, were also working there. Stanley left in 1936 to work with Hal Horne on Mickey Mouse Magazine. By that time, Kirby was also gone. He saw there was labor unrest at the studio and left well before the strike of May 1937, and the studio later relocating to Miami, Florida in 1938. He was not working there in 1939 as many sources state because he would have had to be living in Florida. In the summer of 1940, he and his family moved to Brooklyn, New York where he met Rosalind Goldstein, whom he would later marry in 1942. Kirby did admit that one of the benefits he got from working at the animation studio was that he smuggled out large quantities of pencils and erasers, which he used for many years drawing newspaper strips and comic books. Certainly his working on Popeye cartoons inspired the work he did on the comic strip Socko the Seadog done under the name of “Teddy” (below).

The Fleischer Studio’s assembly line, and one of the Popeye drawings used in their animation.

I did get to meet Kirby briefly and ask him about his time at like anybody else in that room. the Fleischer Studio, when John Cawley and I were having breakfast “So who the hell was I? And that was before going in to man our table at a San Diego Con. Kirby’s wife always the question I tried to ask myself, and when I didn’t get the Roz rightly cut the conversation short so that Jack could have his right answer, I tried something else. breakfast, and told me to contact him later. Unfortunately, I never “I admit that there was some fascination to it, but it wasn’t the did. uppermost thing in my mind. What was in my mind was to do what Some of those remarks are incorporated into the following was required better than eight other guys could do it. It was tougher remembrance that Kirby shared in the 1971 limited edition comics than you might think. fanzine Train of Thought: “I applied for the job. I think I saw an ad. “I had to duplicate what was being done by someone else and I I showed them some sample drawings and they needed an in- had no training on how to do that. So I had to figure out how to do betweener. I got the job and it the best way possible so that it thought it was a good opportunity. would look better than the other I am not knocking it. guys. “They didn’t pay well, especially “I used to define the human by today’s standards, but whatever figure for myself. When I used to you made in those days counted have to draw creases on an arm, I for a lot. Things were cheaper back could feel the muscle flex or I could then. I never knocked the money. I draw out that arm to its extreme. just knocked the life. [It was] nice to play around with “Fleischer Animation, like any the human figure like that. I did animation studio, was a factory. some extreme drawings, and It’s a factory with long rows of maybe that’s where all the motion tables. That’s what I was doing at format in my later artwork comes Fleischer’s. I was sitting at one of from. And I just like that sort of those long rows of tables with lights thing anyway. underneath. They’d give me this “I left Fleischer’s still with in-between action. no idea how they really made the “An in-betweener penciled in drawings move. I had to get out in the action in-between a full step. a hurry because I couldn’t take that In other words, the man before kind of thing anymore. I began to After leaving Fleischer’s, Kirby teamed with Joe Simon to create Captain America. you would begin knowing the full see the first comic books appear. I step. It might take three or four pictures or sometimes more. The can remember them hanging from the newsstands.” in-betweener would draw the in-between steps. He would draw the In 1942, Kirby legally changed his name from Jacob Kurtzberg segment of completing that step. Animation was done in this type of to Jack Kirby, although he always insisted he did not do it to hide way. I would finish the action on some sheets of paper and I would his Jewish heritage. So his work for Fleischer was done under his give them the sheets of paper. That was my importance. I felt that original name. H I was well treated at Fleischer’s. It was a good organization, a big (In 1978, DePatie-Freleng got the rights to produce a Saturday morning organization, and I was just a seventeen-year-old kid. cartoon show based on Marvel’s Fantastic Four comic book. They wanted “It was an assembly line. This long table—lots of people a “Kirby” look to the project and writer Mark Evanier called the animation working at that table… It was like my father’s (garment) factory. director to let him know Kirby My father worked in a factory with long rows of tables with sewing was available. Kirby agreed to work on the project because machines on them. My father used to sit by them and turn out his his work on the series would quota of merchandise. count toward the number of “That’s what I was doing at Fleischer’s. I was sitting at one of pages still required on his these long rows of tables with lights underneath. They were manMarvel contract before he could leave. That experience led to ufacturing pictures. I didn’t like that. I wanted to do my own stuff. Kirby developing concept art for I’m an individualist. I always felt that I wanted to do what I wanted animated series produced by to do. I might have done well if I had gotten into the story aspect, Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears but I just couldn’t wait for that. I just didn’t want to be a nothing for many years.) 4

After Kirby met Joe Simon and collaborated on the Blue Bolt comic book at Fox Features, the pair decided to form a true partnership, which lasted almost two decades. Following their 1945 military discharges, instead of returning to Marvel or DC (home of their WWII-era hits Captain America and Boy Commandos), they worked for Harvey and Prize Comics, creating strips like...

Here’s a story from Airboy Comics, V4 #5, June 1947 (featuring the first appearance of the Flying Fool). Restoration and color by Chris Fama. Since Titan never reprinted the “Link Thorne” stories in their Simon & Kirby Archives volumes, we’ll be running them all in chronological order over the next several issues.

Simon & Kirby scored big by creating the Romance Comics genre in the late 1940s, but as the 1950s wore on, the comics field was in a slump. In the midst of an anti-comics backlash, Joe and Jack unwisely chose to start Mainline Comics. Their new company failed, and they parted ways. Kirby chose to reach out to DC Comics, picking up whatever work he could, and bringing with him a leftover Mainline concept, that in hindsight shows...

he team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby gets credit for a lot of firsts, including the first kid gang strips, exemplified by the Newsboy Legion; the first successful comics aimed at the love magazine audience (Young Romance); and numerous other pioneering efforts. I want to make a radical proposal. Simon & Kirby also kickstarted the Silver Age of Comics. How can that be, you ask? Run with me here….

(above) Which comic—Showcase #4 or #6—really launched the Silver Age of Comics? If it was the former, the Flash sure took his time getting his own series, as opposed to the Challengers, who moved with almost lightning speed!

The universally accepted trigger for the Silver Age was the appearance of the updated Flash in Showcase #4, September–October 1956. This led to a wave of new incarnations of Golden Age DC superheroes, culminating in the Justice League of America, whose sales directly inspired Marvel Comics to follow suit with The Fantastic Four. Yet the character’s revival did not result in a Flash comic book until 1959, twoand-a-half years after the new Flash’s debut. By any standard, that’s a slow transition from tryout to established title. More to the point, before The Flash resumed its interrupted Golden Age numbering, subsequent Showcase features had already broken out into their own books. As important as the Flash’s revival was to what came afterward, I submit that “Challengers of the Unknown,” which first appeared in Showcase #6, cover-dated January–February 1957, was just as important as the Flash, if not more so, in the comic book comeback that defined the Silver Age. Two consecutive Challengers tryouts appeared before the Flash popped up again in Showcase #8. The Flash did not return until Showcase #13, with his last tryout running in #14, a year-and-a-half after the Scarlet Speedster’s appearance. By that time, there had been four Challengers issues, then the feature received its own title, coverdated April-May 1958. That’s right, Challengers beat the Flash to its own title—and by a solid year. Flash #105 was cover-dated February-March 1959. By the time it

appeared on America’s newsstands, the bi-monthly Challengers of the Unknown was already up to issue #6! It’s clear in retrospect that DC was hesitant to launch new super-heroes in the early 1950s, a time when the comic book industry was under fire from parents’ groups. Launching new titles was an expensive and risky venture—as witness the final titles emanating from the Simon & Kirby studio, all of which were painfully short-lived. The Flash appeared sporadically four times before DC management felt confident enough to award him a title of his own. By contrast, Lois Lane was given her own title only six months after her final Showcase appearance. Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #1 was cover-dated March-April 1958, the month before Challengers #1. No doubt Superman’s success on TV motivated that decision. Even though Lois Lane beat out the Challengers by thirty days, DC’s confidence in the Kirby strip appeared to be much stronger. Only three months passed from their final Showcase appearance to their first issue. Overlooked

...How Simon & Kirby Kickstarted the Silver Age by Will Murray

Challengers to DC, along with several other concepts, including two super-heroes, Night Fighter and Sunfire. At a roundtable discussion with Jack Liebowitz and DC’s team of editors in the Summer of 1956, various ideas were shot down. In particular, Mort Weisinger was resistant to Simon & Kirby, whose Boy Commandos had outsold most of the DC line in the previous decade. “After the war,” recalled Julius Schwartz, “Mort made certain that it wouldn’t happen again. Simon & Kirby were not going to package work on the outside for DC and neither was anyone else. He wanted everything we published to be under strict editorial control, especially his.” Hopeful of bringing the hit team of Simon & Kirby back to DC, Liebowitz was determined to acquire one property. Challengers was it, but not before Mort Weisinger insisted that the feature be retitled Challengers of the Unknown. Since it was Jack Schiff ’s turn to edit the next scheduled issue of Showcase, the job of overseeing the project fell to him. Kirby wanted to continue writing the strip, but DC insisted that one of their house writers handle scripting, so Dave Wood got the job. No doubt Kirby revised the storylines as he drew each story. Simon’s son, Jim, confirms this account. “Joe told me he and Jack put together Challengers of the Unknown for their Mainline Publications. When they closed Mainline, Jack took the pages to DC. DC didn’t want Joe further involved because Joe wanted to be in charge. He never saw a penny, never got credit. Both Jack and Joe were scrambling to support their families; somehow Joe let Challengers slide.” This is in sharp contrast to Jack Schiff ’s flat statement that: “Challengers was a product of an office discussion and my concept: We hired Kirby to draw.” Simon recalled it this way: “The comic business was shaky because of the heat over the Senate Committee investigations. There just wasn’t a lot of work or a lot of money there. I think that the last thing we did together was at DC: Challengers of the Unknown. I went somewhere else and Jack stayed there a while and went to Marvel.” In another interview, Simon explained another reason behind his thinking, telling Jim Amash, “Well, in the first place, it was really a one-shot. I didn’t know if DC was going to continue it or not. So I got this lovely job with Harvey, who treated me like royalty.... We didn’t get any money for the title or for anything there. That’s comic books.”

by many is this salient fact: Kirby’s “Challengers” was the chronologically earliest Showcase tryout to prove popular enough to earn its own title. Only one thing could propel that move: Sales! From the beginning, Showcase was devised to overcome a problem with launching new titles. Owing to the vicissitudes of publishing comic books, at least three months passed before solid sales figures were in. If a publisher produced a dud title, he was typically on-press with issue #4 and deep into creating #5 before he realized it. Cancellation was expensive. By first trying out a feature in Showcase, this commitment might be only an issue, and a determination to continue could await final sales figures. This is why, until the Challengers debuted, every new strip featured in the magazine was effectively a one-shot. If sales were promising, but inconclusive, a second tryout story would be floated. “Challengers of the Unknown” was a product of the Simon & Kirby studio, which went belly-up late in 1955, in the wake of the failure of their creator-owned Prize Comics title Fighting American, which lasted only seven issues, as well as due to the bankruptcy of their own outfit, Mainline Comics. Had that title continued, Fighting American might have gone on to be acclaimed as the beginning of the Silver Age super-hero revival. But that’s another story…. Although Joe Simon’s role in the Challengers’ inaugural episode is grossly underreported, he was the co-creator on the strip. “Simon & Kirby created the Challengers of the Unknown,” Simon said flatly. “By ’53, we were doing Mainline and we were also getting other books together, such as The Challengers of the Unknown. We did that in our shop while we were waiting on sales figures on our other books. After Mainline folded, we started shopping it around, along with other features.” Under its working title, Challengers, the feature was developed for Mainline, which published four titles between 1954 and 1956. In fact, it was the final Simon & Kirby co-production of their professional partnership. Simon confirmed this to me, as well as to others. That makes Challengers contemporaries of Bullseye: Western Scout, Foxhole, Police Trap, and In Love. After the studio split up once Mainline collapsed under the severe economic pressures created by the anti-comics hysteria of the mid1950s, as well as the allure of the new medium of television, Simon & Kirby learned of new opportunities at National Comics, and took 14

Since no deal offered provided for ownership rights or royalties, Simon understandably bowed out. Kirby went ahead by himself that October. A second Challengers story was commissioned to go with the first, but internal evidence indicates it may have been started before the feature had been retitled. The timing was perfect. Showcase was floundering about, seeking viable properties after its disappointing start showcasing ordinary heroics such as Mort Weisinger’s flop, “Fire Fighters” starring Fireman Farrell, and Robert Kanigher’s one-shot centering on a World War II Navy demolition team, “The Frogmen.” Breaking format for the first time, two consecutive issues of Showcase carried the new Challengers feature. According to Simon, only one episode was produced with Mainline in mind. Apparently, DC was excited enough about Challengers to push both stories out fast. Equally likely, sales of those solo-strip issues proved disappointing. Nothing appeared to catch on, so a decision was made to run new features in sequential issues to test reader reaction across more than one month, the better to gauge future potential. Comic book historians are often so hyper-focused on super-heroes that they sometimes neglect other trends that are equally, if not more, significant. Before resurrected super-heroes became a four-color tidal wave, a vanguard of fresh new heroes preceded them. Nothing like Challengers of the Unknown had been seen before in comics. But if one dug into the pulp magazine era, their progenitors could be found. Doc Savage and his group of eccentric experts appears to be the template. Operating from his skyscraper headquarters, possessing a fleet of advanced air and sea craft, which carried them around the globe, they battled menaces ranging from super-scientific threats to the world, to surviving dinosaurs in lost lands. Simon & Kirby both read Doc Savage Magazine and were familiar with the format, which included the idea that Doc, like the Challengers, operated from a public headquarters and responded to public and private appeals for help. The concept was not, as some have claimed, an updating of their kid gang strips. At least, Simon did not see it that way. Contrarily, Kirby acknowledged the parallels, even if they were not necessarily inspirational. “I believe they were the forerunners of many of the adult teams of comic heroes that we have today,” he allowed. “We did use three or four characters in unison, and I believe that strips today like The Fantastic Four or Challengers of the Unknown are probably the descendants of that type of strip.” Simon & Kirby’s band of death-cheaters survived

an air crash that should have been fatal. Realizing that they were living on borrowed time, they dedicated themselves to investigating unusual mysteries and tackling global threats in the Doc Savage tradition. Led by Korean War pilot Ace Morgan, the Challengers included master skin diver Prof. Haley (Harrison in the earliest adventures), Olympic wrestler Rocky Davis, and circus daredevil Red (sometimes called Rod in their origin story) Ryan. While they lacked a super-human leader like Doc Savage, they operated exactly like their pioneer pulp predecessors. No one commanded or controlled them. The Challengers were free agents. Drawn to danger, they plunged in without regard for their personal safety, having survived certain death in a plane crash. Believing themselves to be living on “borrowed time,” they continually risked their lives to plunge into the unknown. Small wonder they were also known as the League of Death Cheaters. As nominal leader Ace asserted on that first cover, “Anything out of this world is our specialty.” “The Challengers are a suicide squad,” Kirby once declared. “They are the men who take the risks. These are the kind of guys who travel through time as casually as you and I go to the corner store… The same goes for space travel. The Challengers gave me a chance to do all these things without 15

(above) The United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which held public hearings on April 21, 22, and June 4, 1954, squashed Kirby’s hopes of launching new super-heroes like Night Fighter and Sunfire. (below) Original art for the cover of 1954’s Police Trap #2, a casualty of S&K’s failed Mainline company.

(above) 1957 Challengers panels from Showcase #6, and Fantastic Four panels from FF #1 (1961) below. Consider the similar group dynamics between the two: Both teams have a Professor/Doctor type, both teams have a Rocky strong man, both teams have a blonde pretty person (yes, some gender reassignment here from Ace to Susan), and both teams have a red guy (Red Ryan and the Human Torch). Both Doctors even have the same characteristic pose in their introduction to the story (see page 26 of this issue, top). Susan appears to have the blonde element of Ace Morgan, along with the passive female element from the Challenger’s female co-star, June Robbins, who has a strong resemblance to Susan Storm. (Thanks to Alex Grand, whose own article appears elsewhere in this issue.)

risk to myself. I made it as realistic as possible.” The team were modern-day giant killers. Most early stories revolved around threats and challenges involving colossal monsters and advanced aliens, apparently reflecting the box-office success of the first wave of giant monster movies that commenced with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953, which was followed by Them and Godzilla the following year. The pioneering 1956 science-fiction film Forbidden Planet may also have been influential. Although Jack Kirby left Challengers after only twelve issues, with this strip he inaugurated one of the dominant comic book trends of the 1950s: The actionadventure team. “In comics we have action teams,” he once observed. “Now, an action team has a lot more leeway than, say, a hockey team. A hockey team can only play one game; an action team can play any kind of game, with any kind of villain. We have a broader field in which to tell a story and it gives enough room to tell very, very interesting stories.” If DC’s swift attempts to clone the feature are any indication, Challengers of the Unknown must have sold like crazy in its own title. After experimenting with two concurrent outer space strips, “Space Ranger” and “Adam Strange” (neither of which spawned dedicated titles), Showcase offered “Rip Hunter, Time Master” in its 20th issue. Written by Jack Miller and drawn by Ruben Moreira, the premise was similar to Challengers of the Unknown, except that its quartet of scientific adventurers wore no uniforms, and one member was a woman, while another was her teenaged brother. The strip’s format was built around the Time Sphere, giving Rip Hunter and his crew a different franchise than the daredevil globetrotting Challengers. Otherwise the basics were the same––four ordinary adventurers pitting themselves against weird and super-scientific menaces. One might speculate that Jack Kirby had some input into this series, or at least the protagonist’s name. Rip Carter was the leader of Simon

& Kirby’s Boy Commandos. Surf Hunter was the hero of an unsold newspaper strip Kirby created in 1956. A Time Cube was featured in an early Challengers sequence. Like the Challengers, Rip Hunter’s adventures were full-length 24-page stories divided into chapters—an unusual approach in those days of 32-page comics. DC rarely did this, and it’s tempting to give Simon & Kirby credit for this innovation, especially since their Mainline title, In Love, was launched featuring twentypage stories broken into three chapters. However, “The Frogmen” had been Showcase’s first foray into long stories. Reportedly, Kirby had to persuade DC staff to forgo the typical three-story format that they relied on. The gamble succeeded, although for Challengers, it held only through the Showcase run. Once in their own magazine, two-story issues became common. A month after Rip Hunter debuted, Showcase’s companion title, The Brave and the Bold, shook itself out of its limited Robin Hood and Viking Knight format and offered Robert Kanigher’s “Task Force X,” the Suicide Squad. Drawn by the art team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, the Suicide Squad was a governmentorganized variant on the Challengers consisting of four members: Leader Colonel Rick Flag, Jr.; girlfriend Karin Grace; astronomer Dr. Hugh Evans; and physicist Jess Bright. They battled the same kind of bizarre menaces as did the Challengers, many of the Big Monster variety. Only Flag wore distinctive togs––his Air Force officer’s uniform. Despite six tryouts, the Suicide Squad never managed to break out into their own title––but Rip Hunter was awarded his own book early in 1961. By that time, yet another band of daredevils, the Sea Devils, had debuted in Showcase #27, July–August 1960, and had proven their popularity, receiving their own title in the Summer of 1961. Yet another quartet, this group was dedicated to underwater troubleshooting. Dane Dorrance led the band, which consisted of siblings Judy and Nicky Walton, backed up by the inevitable muscleman, Biff Bailey. Otherwise, it was the same fare: Ordinary heroes battling extraordinary monsters. No super-heroes. No supervillains. Just monsters and weird menaces—and purple scuba suits, apparently in emulation of the Challengers’ simple jumpsuits. No doubt the ratings success of TV’s Sea Hunt was an equal inspiration with the Challengers. By contrast, DC’s second super-hero revival, Green Lantern, launched in 1959, did not graduate to his own book until 1961. Aquaman and the Atom soon followed. Super-

heroes were beginning to surge. But DC wasn’t done with adventure strips. “Cave Carson, Adventures Inside Earth” was yet another Challengers of the Unknown clone. Like the Sea Devils, they operated in a limited environment. In this case, the team consisted of a trio of spelunkers––cavers, to you. Otherwise, it was identical fare: Explorers in civilian clothes vs. monsters and aliens. In every case, these new DC action teams romped through “book-length” stories in emulation of the Challengers template. By coincidence, DC relaunched Quality Comics’ Blackhawk on the same day that the first Showcase Challengers tryout appeared on newsstands. Jack Schiff edited both. The Blackhawks were a seven-man paramilitary team that had fought in World War II and subsequently took on post-war military threats. Once Schiff got the title up and running at DC, Blackhawk and his band segued into a new formula of battling cosmic menaces and giant creatures. The fresh approach took hold around the time Challengers of the Unknown received its own title in 1958, and it’s hard not to see a connection with Kirby’s work and the shift to science-fiction. “If you remember back to the 1940s and ’50s,” he wrote in his introduction to Marvel Monsterworks, “the imagination of the world was fascinated with reported sightings of flying spacecraft and the unknown effects of radioactivity. What type of life existed on other planets? Were they non-human? Would the effects of atomic radiation or scientific experiments create a non-human creature? Perhaps, monsters having human characteristics could be mutated in the laboratory. Those were the questions of that period.” The first UFO sightings dovetailed with the initial wave of science-fiction films that drew from the expanding public concerns of the Atomic Age, which soon segued into the Space Age, which was inaugurated in the Autumn of 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik I and II, followed by the first American satellite, Explorer I, in January 1958. Suddenly, science-fiction was everyday reality. Kirby aimed to exploit that global shift in consciousness. “Challengers was like a movie to me,” Kirby pointed out. “The science-fiction pictures were beginning to break, and I felt the Challengers were a part of that genre. I began to think about three words which have always puzzled me: What’s out there? I thought, what’s really out there? […] Then I began to draw characters from outer space, characters from beneath the earth, characters from anywhere that we couldn’t think of. The Challengers were us contending with these very strange people.”

Ironically, Kirby was forced off the strip due to a dispute with his editor, Jack Schiff, over a newspaper strip that also reflected the international push into space then in ascendancy, Sky Masters of the Space Force. Had Kirby continued, no doubt the Challengers would have become increasingly involved in NASA’s fledgling space program. Instead, he moved over to Marvel, where he continued exploring Atomic Age/Space Age themes, particularly the radiationspawned giant monsters which ultimately led to The Fantastic Four, The Hulk and so many others. During that transition, Simon & Kirby briefly reunited for a space strip called “The Three Rocketeers,” which debuted in Harvey’s Race for the Moon #3 late in 1958. But the book folded before the Challengers-like trio of space troubleshooters could gain any traction in the marketplace. Except for common dinosaurs, giant monsters were relatively rare in comic books until September 1958, when Strange Worlds #1, Tales of Suspense #1 and Tales to Astonish #1 all appeared—two with Kirby covers. This kicked off the big monster cycle. Soon, belligerent behemoths were cover-featured in everything from My Greatest Adventure to Batman, all edited by Jack Schiff. Even Tomahawk got into the act! By 1960, giant monsters were hotter that talking gorillas. It all went back to Challengers of the Unknown and a revival of early-1950s radiationspawned monster movies, which were enthralling a new generation of kids via TV late-night reruns. This was another Jack Kirby innovation of the early Silver Age. A year later, super-heroes were full flower. The Justice League of America had migrated from The Brave and the Bold to their own title. But even super-heroes were showing early signs of peaking. Despite several Brave and Bold appearances, Hawkman did not achieve his own title during this transitional period. So what was the trigger for the Silver Age of Comics? Was it the Flash and all the super-heroes who followed? Then what about the Challengers of the Unknown and the four heroic teams they spawned? If we want to be honest about it, we have to admit that the Silver Age of Comics was built on two parallel tracks, one of which caught on quicker than the other. In this particular case, the super-heroes were slower to get out of the gate, but showed greater endurance over the long haul. Most of the Challengers clones did not survive the 1960s. DC still struggled to make Cave Carson a going thing as late as 1964, switching him from The Brave and the Bold to Showcase, 17

Jacques Cousteau

Rocky Marciano

Challengers Inspirations? by Will Murray & Mark Clegg While I readily recognize the Doc Savage inspiration in Challengers of the Unknown, I have always wondered if the strip might not have also been inspired by something else, some then-contemporary film or concept. Then one day I read the following Facebook posting by researcher Mark Clegg, which I quote with his kind permission: “On December 31, 1954, Joe Simon, 41, is probably commiserating with his brother-in-law Jack Oleck, 40, one of the main writers for both Mainline and EC. Wondering what to do in the future, do they look back on the “Silver Spider” proposal they did with C. C. Beck for Harvey at the beginning of the year, even though Harvey ended up passing on it? Oh well, maybe someday. Did he and Jack already have their “Challengers of the Unknown” concept worked out? World Heavyweight Champion Rocky Marciano, 29, defended his title on May 15, 1953 in a rematch against Jersey Joe Walcott, 39, who this time was knocked out in the first round. On May 29, 1953, Edmund Percival Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. Published in 1953, Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau described his underwater world research in his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure (Subtitle: A story of undersea discovery and adventure, by the first men to swim at record depths with the freedom of fish). On December 12, 1953, test pilot Chuck Yeager, 30, set a new speed record at Mach 2.44. The flight though had not gone entirely to plan, since shortly after reaching Mach 2.44, Yeager lost control of the X-1A at about 80,000 ft (24,000 m) due to inertia coupling, a phenomenon Chuck largely unknown at the time. With the Yeager aircraft simultaneously rolling, pitching, and yawing out of control, Yeager dropped 51,000 feet (16,000 m) in less than a minute before regaining control at around 29,000 feet (8,800 m). He did manage to land without further incident.” What if their Boy Explorers had grown up to become Chuck (or Neil Armstrong, another prominent flyboy of the day who’s the splitting image of Ace Morgan), Jacques, Edmund, and Rocky? What if they shared a flight that had a “severe incident”? From the standpoint of timing, and the unity of Mark’s examples, I must say that this is a brilliant observation, and almost certainly true. All four Challengers had real-life counterparts then making headlines. In further support of Mark’s premise, I must point out that Jack Kirby seems to have co-created the Fantastic Four in a parallel way. In April 1961, the Soviets sent the first man into space. Less than a month later, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was followed by American Alan Shepard. The world was electrified, and a challenging new profession was born: Astronaut. Three months later—precisely the production window for Marvel Comics––The Fantastic Four braved the ultimate frontier. The FF were the Space Age successors to the Challengers.

Neil Armstrong

Edmund Hillary

changing artists yet again and finally putting the foundering crew in colorful uniforms. None of this worked. Rip Hunter, Time Master was the first to fade away, folding in 1965. Sea Devils was cancelled in 1967. After being turned into faux super-heroes in a desperate attempt to salvage their fading fortunes, the Blackhawks disbanded in 1968. I’m tempted to put forth the Metal Men as the ultimate expression of the adventure team trends, but Metal Men may be too unique a strip to fall into any convenient category. They popped up in Showcase early in 1962 and had their own book within the year. Reportedly their Showcase tryouts outsold Superman. In their own title, the Metal Men never again achieved those same soaring circulation heights, its title fading out at the end of 1969. Defying that counter-trend, Challengers of the Unknown continued into the next decade, finally expiring in 1971. But the title feature was soon revived, first with Kirby reprints in 1973, and continued in new stories in Super-Team Family lasting until 1977. In retrospect, the title might be considered the last enduring success to emerge from the Simon & Kirby studios. Challengers of the Unknown is not normally considered one of the most significant titles of the 1950s, but I’m absolutely convinced that it was a key development in the early Silver Age of Comics. And it presaged the cosmic trend of Kirby’s 1960s Marvel work. “Challengers of the Unknown came from their own particular time,” he once explained. “They were post-war

characters. What the Challengers of the Unknown were saying was, ‘Where are we going now?’ That was a question asked in all those stories. In the Challengers, I put them into new gimmicks and the machines that we already had, but I took them two or three stages ahead as to what we might have. I would take them five years ahead. If we had certain generators, I would make a super-generator of some kind, and have my story revolve around that. What would it do to human beings? Perhaps it would summon aliens from some foreign planet and give us the power to do that.” Consider this as further proof. In 1961, when Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman instructed editor-writer Stan Lee to emulate DC’s best-selling Justice League of America, Lee huddled with Jack Kirby. By all rights they should have produced something along the lines of The Avengers, starring their classic Golden Age characters like Captain America, the Human Torch, and the SubMariner. Instead of copying the JLA model, they produced a super-hero version of Challengers of the Unknown, which they called the Fantastic Four. The origin and basic formula was virtually identical. Four ordinary human beings survive a near-fatal event, in this case a failed space launch. They come out rededicated and transformed into a global threat-fighting action team. Cerebral Reed Richards paralleled Prof. Haley. Hotheaded Johnny Storm mirrored Red Ryan’s colorful personality. And what was Ben Grimm but a physical twin of Rocky Davis? In that first issue, their astronaut jumpsuits were colored blue. They switched to wearing multicolored versions when they fought the Mole Man, so that they resembled the Challengers, but with individuallycolored two-toned outfits. In their first stories, the Challengers sported twotoned outfits before changing to straight purple. A coincidence? I doubt it! In the

next issue the FF were, inexplicably, in civvies. When Lee finally succumbed to reader demand to put the four into super-hero-style uniforms, Kirby drew yet another variant on the Challengers’ togs, and Stan Goldberg colored them a heroic blue. Kirby once observed, “If you notice the uniforms, they’re the same... I always give them a skintight uniform with a belt... the Challengers and the FF have a minimum of decoration. And of course, the Thing’s skin is a kind of decoration, breaking up the monotony of the blue uniform.” These carryover elements, I submit to you, are no coincidence. Kirby knew that Challengers of the Unknown was a breakout title, and one of the hottest properties of the 1950s comic book scene. Since he had been forced to leave the book he co-created, he appears determined to continue with the concept in another format, this time with a dash of super-powers to fit publisher Martin Goodman’s directive to Stan Lee calling for a new team of super-heroes. In fact, in an early issue of Challengers of the Unknown, Rocky Davis is shot into space, only to return to earth imbued with superpowers… just like the FF would soon be. “I wrote the Challengers,” explained Kirby. “I wrote everything I did. When I went back to Marvel, I began to create new stuff.” Asked if he had been planning to turn the Challengers into super-heroes, Kirby replied, “The issues I did were still formative… but they were heading for the super-hero image when I left.” I guess you could say that Simon & Kirby not only kickstarted the Silver Age with Challengers of the Unknown, but their ideas help jumpstart the Marvel Age of Comics as well. Don’t believe me? Here’s Jack one last time on the importance of Challengers of the Unknown. “Yes, they were always precursors to the Fantastic Four—except the Fantastic Four were mutations,” he declared. “Stan didn’t know what a mutation was. I was studying that kind of stuff all the time. I would spot it in the newspapers and science magazines. I was a student of science-fiction. Stan Lee doesn’t think the way I do.” H

Acknowledgments: Monster Masterworks. Marvel Enterprises, 1990 The Art of Jack Kirby by Ray Wyman. Blue Rose Press, 1992 Jack Kirby: The Comics Journal Library Volume 1, edited by Milo George. Fantagraphics Books, 2002 Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier. Harry N. Abrams, 2008 Jack Magic: The Life and Art of Jack Kirby by Greg Theakston. Pure Imagination, 2011 “Kirby Speaks.” FOOM #11. September 1975 “Jack Kirby: Creator” by James Van Hise. Comics Feature #50, December 1980 “Super-Heroes: The Language That Jack Kirby Wrote” by James Van Hise. Comics Feature #34, March, 1985

“Jack Kirby” by Max Borax. Comics Interview #41, 1986 “A Conversation with King Kirby” by Claudio Piccinini. Comics Interview #121, January 1993 “1972 Comic Art Convention Luncheon” by Steve Sherman. Jack Kirby Collector #8, January 1996 “More than Your Average Joe.” Transcribed by Glen Musial. Jack Kirby Collector #25, August 1999 “Clocked Out: Borrowed Time Runs Out” by Douglas Toole. Jack Kirby Collector #49, Fall 2007 “Simon Says!” by Jim Amash. Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #76, March 2008 “Jack F.A.Q.s” by Mark Evanier. Jack Kirby Collector #52, Fall 2008 “Hour 25 Interview” by J. Michael Straczynski and Larry DiTillio. Jack Kirby Collector #68, Summer 2016 Jack Schiff quote. History of the Comics Vol. 2, No. 1, January 1991

(above) Challengers #3, where Rocky takes a trip through space and comes back with superpowers, including flame, super-strength, body reshaping, and invisibility. Compare the 1958 Challengers panels on the left to 1961’s Fantastic Four on the right. (Special Thanks to Jim Simon, Mark Evanier and Marc Svensson for sharing their recollections of Simon & Kirby’s involvement with Challengers of the Unknown.)

By the late 1950s, the dispute with editor Jack Schiff over the Sky Masters newspaper strip resulted in Kirby being blacklisted at DC Comics, so he decided to return to Marvel and work with Stan Lee. There, before striking gold with a slew of characters and concepts in the next decade, he produced a wealth of lesser-known work best described as...

(next page, top) Barry at age 10—when he first discovered Jack Kirby.

ANNIVERSARIES

hen anniversaries roll around, it’s inevitable that we begin to think about our first encounters with whatever it is we are celebrating. And as we’re talking Jack Kirby, I can clearly remember exactly when I first saw his work—although I didn’t know it was his. When I marveled at the splash panels from DC’s Challengers of the Unknown #4, “The Wizard of Time,” I was sure I was looking at the work of the great Egypt and, finally, comics artist Wally Wood with which I was already familiar, even at the tender age looking up at an of ten (me, that is, not Wood). Who knew it was Wood inks over Kirby pencils? amazing futuristic city. Or even that the pencils/inks method existed? It was in a school playground As Derek tempted me in Liverpool under a slate-grey sky, and although American comics found with these riches, I did my their way frequently into this port city as ships’ ballast, I always seemed damnedest to get the book to miss out on the best ones. I had a school friend named Derek, who I from him: I offered trades, suppose might more accurately be called a ‘frenemy’, as he had a way money, undying friendship—all of tormenting me with the full-color US comics he was always able to no avail. And when the book to obtain. In that Merseyside playground, as we formed ragged turned up as a black-and-white lines before going into class, Derek showed me pages featuring reprint in the UK sometime later, I still a group of athletic-looking figures in jumpsuits (who were, I had to get the original—which I finally assumed, the eponymous “Challengers”) in three dynamic ended up buying in its country of origin, full-page action scenes: Riding a chariot through the streets courtesy of a comics shop in San Francisco of ancient Rome, being forced to build the pyramids in near the Golden Gate Bridge. I have now had rather too many anniversaries since that first encounter with the greatest of all comics artists, but the anniversary that this magazine celebrates with this issue is the perfect opportunity to raise a glass of wine to Mr. Kirby—and to the tireless John Morrow (who I finally met on his recent trip to London) for his sterling efforts over the years in keeping this journal so vividly informative and entertaining. I’m actually dictating this piece with voice recognition software—which means I can raise a physical glass of wine (as opposed to a metaphorical one). I’m doing so now—honestly!

KOLORING KIRBY

What’s your opinion of re-coloring comics? When classic comics material has new color applied to the original plates for reissues, are you happy with this? Or would you prefer the original, more limited color palette that 1950s comics were locked into? The latter, after all, is more authentic. Personally, I am more than happy with the new procedure if it is well done—as, for instance, is currently happening with the re-coloring of the matchless material

Obscura

by Barry Forshaw strides between not one, but six gesticulating versions of the alien creature that is to figure in the tale—and while the Martian (when it appears) is not horrific, it is certainly strange enough to warrant the keen attention of readers starved of such things in this post-Code era. Actually, the piece itself is fairly standard fare with a very familiar revelation that was used frequently in (for instance) EC comics, and not least by the overworked Stan Lee himself. But the story is full of striking design ideas with the alien creatures often threatening to burst out of the frame (a typical Kirby trademark). And while the monster is bizarre enough in Kirby’s most inventive style, there is another alien creature who pops up at the end of the piece which is even stranger—again something casually produced as a one-off by Kirby but which other, lesser artists might parley into a complete story. We are reminded once again that Kirby’s imagination was limitless.

in the EC Archives editions of Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. And if you want more proof that the procedure can be highly successful (if done with skill and intelligence), look at one of the great Jack Kirby science-fiction stories from 1957, DC’s Tales of the Unexpected #17: “Who is Mr. Ashtar?” This was one of the stories that absolutely leapt out for British readers when it appeared in the 68-page shilling reprints of DC and Atlas material. The splash panel shows a house detective in a darkened room looking around for the missing hotel guest of the title, unaware that he is suspended on the ceiling above him. (Every indication suggests that “Mr. Ashtar” is an alien, but Kirby and his unknown writer have an ace up their sleeves in this regard.) But we’re talking about recoloring, so take a look at the reprint of the story in The Jack Kirby Omnibus, Vol. 1 [far left]. This handsome book reprints all of Kirby’s solus SF/fantasy stories from his late 1950s DC days—you’ll notice (the original comic is shown smaller) that this dramatic splash panel, with all its crosshatching and detail, is far clearer in the reprint. And there is one significant improved detail: Mr. Ashtar’s sinister eyes in the original comic have been colored green like the rest of his floating figure, therefore vanishing and making no impression, whereas in the Omnibus reprint, the enlarged pupils are left white, which makes for a more striking image. This is only one detail, but if you’re an admirer of the art of Jack Kirby (and what reader of this magazine isn’t?), you’ll find a better representation of this classic SF tale in the reprint than in the original. That said, you’ll also still need the original book, which (apart from Kirby’s story) sports an excellent Jim Mooney piece, “The Impossible Voyage,” in which a Disneyland-style ride into space proves to be the real thing— it’s also the subject of Ruben Moreira’s eye-catching wash-colored cover.

THE THING IS HERE!

The very next issue of this book from one month later has equal appeal. Looking at the cover of Strange Tales #79 (December 1960), it’s not hard to see why comics readers of the day would have been inspired to pick this one up. This eye-catching Kirby/Ditko collaboration features a monstrous, partly hidden creature clawing itself up over the edge of a cliff while two men cower in fear. Back then, readers might not have been overly-familiar with the name “Jack Kirby,” but we recognized the style, and we had to see what new monster he had devised, only hinted at on the cover. In fact, when we see the creature inside, it’s something of a disappointment—and that’s because the handling of the cover story itself has been handed by Stan Lee to a second-tier talent, the efficient but uninspired Don Heck, whose creatures all tend to look the same (whereas Kirby would always come up with something different). But the issue remains collectible for The King’s contribution, even though it isn’t the cover story. In fact, he is given the tale “I Was in the Clutches of the Living Shadow,” and the grotesquely shaped creatures menacing the hero are a demonstration of just why Kirby is the most highly regarded of comics artists. As ever, the movement of human figures throughout this tale is granted a dynamism that no one else—not even Ditko (who handles the second story, “The Ghost of Grismore Castle”)—can match. What’s more, we are given a few more bizarre creations when we are shown the alien invaders transforming themselves. The Kirby/Lee monster cycle was to run out of steam and inspiration before they found the winning super-hero format that would transform their fortunes, but there is still much to enjoy for Kirby admirers in books such as this. H

PROWLING MARTIANS

In the days before giant rampaging monsters hijacked such Atlas/Marvel titles as Strange Tales, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were wont to use a little more imagination in their fantasy tales. Strange Tales #78 (November 1960) proves the point. The cover alone demonstrates that we are in for something different: While a crowd shrinks in horror from a monstrous inhuman shadow on a wall, a sinister human figure walks towards the viewer, adjusting his tie—and it doesn’t take the fact that the figure is completely colored red to tell us that he is the masquerading alien of “A Martian Prowls Among Us,” the title story. The splash panel for the piece is one of the strangest of Kirby’s inventions. An ordinary looking man in jacket and trousers

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.

Sample Headline Marvel Precursors

Coming back to Marvel Comics was perhaps Jack’s most pivotal decision, for better or worse. But starting with the Fantastic Four, much of this key 1960s workbyhas distinct... John Morrow

by Alex Grand

t is important to see what Kirby worked on before his work with Marvel that would strongly suggest his contributions went beyond simply just drawing, and that he brought many important ideas and concepts into his collaborations with Stan Lee, co-creating Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man, the X-Men, Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and villains such as Galactus, Modok, Rama-Tut, the Lava Men, Skrulls, Impossible Man, Magneto, the Sentinels, Puppet Master, Ringmaster, and Immortus.

Thor

The Mighty Thor was created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1962 in Journey into Mystery #83. 1 Although this Thor is the most famous, Jack worked on a couple of other Thors before this version. Jack had a long relationship with the Norse gods and reportedly loved their stories as a child. His first Thor was for DC Comics, in Adventure Comics #75 (1942), “The Villain from Valhalla.” 2 He would then return to the character in 1957 for DC’s Tales of the Unexpected #16 (1957), “The Magic Hammer.” 3

The Magic Hammer story in 1957 is interesting because we get a prototypical Mjolnir held in Thor’s hand, which matches the hammer Thor held in his 1962 Marvel debut. Another cool precursor from this issue is that Thor’s hammer is tested against a tree in the 1957 DC issue. 4 Jack Kirby would have the Marvel Thor do the same thing in his first appearance in Journey into Mystery #83. 5 The plot of the 1957 DC issue revolved around Loki stealing Thor’s hammer. This 7 8 same plot would be used in Journey into Mystery #92 (1963), 6 where Loki would steal Thor’s hammer, causing a great deal of mischief. Another fun fact is that the first villains to fight Marvel’s Thor in Journey into Mystery #83 are the Stone Men from Saturn, 7 and that these Stone Men have origins in Jack Kirby’s fascination with the Easter 4 Island Stone Men which he first used for DC in House of Mystery #85 (1959), 8 then later in 1961 for Marvel’s Tales 5 to Astonish #16. 9 22

11 A most interesting thing about the Thunder God’s first Marvel appearance is that the Stone Men were from Saturn. Why Saturn? Well, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon worked on a similar plot for Fawcett’s Captain Marvel Adventures #1 (1941) where Captain Marvel was referred to as the “Thunder God” as he fights aliens from Saturn. 10 A key plot point in the old Thor comics from the 1960s was the love that Thor had for Jane Foster, and this romance point also appears to have a fun precursor in Young Romance #14 (1949) where a woman fantasizes about a handsome Viking lover—note the headdress on the right side of the sample panel shown above. 11

Iron Man

Iron Man has a fascinating set of Jack Kirby precursors. The first Iron Man story was credited to Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck and Jack Kirby, with Kirby having first drawn the cover image, before the interior story was drawn by Don Heck. The key plot point from Iron Man’s first appearance is Tony Stark’s heart condition, which is 12 only controlled by wearing his iron suit. 12 Two years before this, Jack worked on a story with Stan Lee called “The Thing Called Metallo!” (1961) in Tales of Suspense #16. In this story, a man in a strong Iron Man-style suit has a similar heart problem. 13

There was an earlier 13 Metallo in DC’s Action

Comics #252 (1959, top), 14 written by Robert 15 Bernstein. This villainous Metallo is a criminal in an iron body with a kryptonite heart—note the facial similarity to Marvel’s Tony Stark. There was a rumor of Robert Bernstein and Jack Kirby having discussed this story when Kirby was working at DC during the late 1950s, which could make Metallo a literary ancestor to Iron Man. Another feature in Iron Man’s first appearance in 1963 was that Tony Stark was forced into making weapons for his Asian captors while trapped during the Vietnam War. 15 Jack Kirby worked on a similar story with Dave Wood in 1958 for Adventure Comics #255, during his Silver Age revamp of Green Arrow in “The War that Never Ended!” when Oliver Queen was trapped by Japanese and forced to make them weapons while in captivity. 16 23

Ant-Man

Ant-Man first appeared in Tales to Astonish #27 (1962) as a one-shot sci-fi character, and was brought back as a super- hero in issue #35 by Kirby and Lee. Hank Pym explored the microscopic world, as well as 17 demonstrated that he retains his full human strength concentrated in a smaller body. 17 Kirby used the shrinking man and sub-atomic universe idea before his work with Marvel in “The Menace of the Micro-Men” story he did with Joe Simon for Archie Comics in The Double Life of Private Strong #1 (1959). 18 Kirby also has an ant-based strength precursor in Harvey Comics’ Black Cat Mystic #60 (1957), in a story he produced with Joe Simon called “The Ant Extract.” 19 In 1956, Jack Kirby wrote and drew Yellow Claw #2 for Marvel Comics, where he shows the villain’s army of men that were made ant-sized by a shrinking machine. 20 Going back even farther to 1940, we have an early Joe Simon/ Jack Kirby collaboration in Blue Bolt where the hero of the series is shrunken with a ray that compresses his atoms, and he becomes a small soldier. 21 Yeah, I know. That goes waaaaay back, but it can always go farther.

The Incredible Hulk

The Hulk, created in 1962 in Incredible Hulk #1 by Kirby and Lee, was an extension of the monster comics tradition that Marvel had before its super- heroes. However, there is one precursor Jack worked on, that it appears he brought with him or inserted into Hulk #1. A key point from the first Hulk issue is the 23 initial set-up in the Army base with the impending Gamma bomb explosion. As the military men, including Dr. Banner, are huddled up and watching from far away through the bomb shelter window, Bruce notices a young man in the field and runs out to save him. 22 This sets Bruce up to be blown up and irradiated by the Gamma bomb, turning him into the Incredible Hulk. Oddly enough, this is the same set-up from the February 18–22, 1960 daily strips of Kirby’s Sky Masters Of The Space Force newspaper strip, when Sky Masters is testing a bomb with the same construction as Hulk’s Gamma bomb, and runs out into the field to save a boy who unwittingly walked into the blast radius. 23 Of course, in the 1962 Hulk issue, there was a different conclusion than in Sky Masters. 24 24 24

X-Men

With the X-Men, there are a great many Jack Kirby precursors, considering Jack did mutant stories well before Uncanny X-Men #1 (1963). In 25 X-Men #1, Kirby and Lee get it off to a strong start by introducing the concept of being a mutant, born with a super-power that sets you apart from other humans. Professor X gets five mutants together to form a team. 25 In 1957, Jack Kirby worked on a story in Black Cat Mystic #59 involving five mutants who were born with powers, abducted and raised by the government for research—they get together and escape the government at the end of the story. 26 Going back further 26 to Yellow Claw #2 (1956), we have an even earlier story where the word “mutant” is clearly stated, and a group of six gifted mutants are used and abused by the villainous Yellow Claw against the world, with a very powerful reality-bending effect. 27 Even the X-Men’s artificial intelligence robots, the Sentinels (created in 1965 for X-Men #14, with a cover designed by 28 Jack Kirby), have a precursor in 1957’s Showcase #7, in the “Ultivac” story. Ultivac was an artificial intelligence robot that was constantly getting smarter and more aware, similar to Master Mold of the Sentinels. 28 Magnetism is an awesome power for any character to have, and this was the distinct power of the X-Men’s first and most famous villain, Magneto, who premiered on their first cover. Magneto in 1963 was a mutant, and would have a Jack Kirby/Stan Lee precursor in Strange Tales #84 (1961) about a monster with magnetic powers, also named Magneto. 29 Jack’s work with magnetic monsters goes farther back than this, however, to his time at DC Comics in My Greatest Adventure #21 (1958) in “We Were Doomed by the Metal-Eating Monster.” 30

Fantastic Four

That leads into the Fantastic Four part of the discussion, which is most important, considering it started off the Marvel Silver Age in its first issue in 1961. Roy Thomas said in an interview in Collectors Dream #5 (1978) that Jack brought over the spirit and group dynamic from the Challengers of the Unknown and put it into Fantastic Four. Shown here is a clip from the interview. 31 Roy was Editor in Chief at Marvel in the early 1970s after Stan left the position to be publisher, and was also a writer at Marvel when Jack and Stan were in the middle of their 1960s Fantastic Four run. It is also important to note that Roy wasn’t there during the early 1960s when the FF were created, but his input is still very 25

June Robbins in Challengers

Sue in Fantastic Four

Prof Hale in Challengers

Reed in Fantastic Four

interesting. He was also well read in Golden and Thinker and his Awesome Android in FF #15 (1963), Silver Age DC comics up to the point he started and this scientist with his semi-living android servant work at Marvel, and has been documenting comhas a Jack Kirby precursor in his 1950s newspaper tryics history for decades. That same Roy Thomas out strip, Chip Hardy. 35 is shown here crediting Jack’s group dynamic What about time travfrom Challengers of the Unknown as being critiel? Wasn’t that a Fantastic cal in forming, with Stan, the Marvel knack for Four thing? There actually depicting various personalities and depth. 32 was a Jack Kirby precursor As for the teams’ origins, both the 1957 to the Fantastic Four time Challengers and the 1961 Fantastic Four travel adventures in a story start as a primordial mundane group that go using a Time Machine to through a near-death transformative expego back to ancient Egypt, in rience, where they vow to stay together and Challengers of the Unknown #4 take on a large range of possible adventures. (1958). This same set-up was In the Challengers, the near-death experiused in Fantastic Four #19 (1963) ence causes them to take a vow of advento go to a similar time and place. 36 It’s very cool how they both turism, and overcome all superhuman conflicts as a team. The Fantastic Four utilize glowing yellow objects in 36 take a similar vow after the cosmic rays a square shape. It gives the two 33 that created their crash are shown to give stories a sense them super-powers. of Jack Kirby Of course, a lot of people say, what about getting continuity, even effects or getting powers from cosmic rays, or from a though they trip to space? After all, that’s the main takeaway for were produced Marvel’s first Silver Age super-hero comic, right? Didn’t for different Ben Grimm scream this? 33 companies, as Well, that does happen in some stories worked on both teams were subject to Egyptian captivity. or created by Jack Kirby before Marvel. In 1959, Jack Kirby’s An interesting side note on the villain Sky Masters of the in that 1958 Challengers issue; he is called the Space Force has some 34 Time Wizard and he has the same costume strips specifically design as another Marvel time-traveling villain named Immortus, about the unknown effects of who premiered in Avengers #10 “Cosmic Radiation” on humans in (1964) with a cover done by Jack space travel. 34 Kirby. It’s the same costume! 37 Reed Richards wasn’t the After the Inhumans debuted first stretching character of a fanin Fantastic Four #45 (1965) by tastic foursome that Kirby co-creKirby and Lee, their origins were ated; he did the same in Adventure further explored in Thor #146 Comics #84 (1943) with the char35 acter Stretcho (which was coinci(1967). In that issue, it shows that ancient man, after having been dentally or not, the nickname the evolved by Kree aliens, Thing gave Mr. Fantastic later). took refuge The main difference is that this from other caveold quartet were villains! Even the men on their Puppet Master, a villain who preisland of Attilan. miered in Fantastic Four #8 (1965) Something has a Jack Kirby precursor in Black neat here, is Magic #4 (1951) for Prize Comics. that Attilan was Equally compelling is how the referred to as the Fantastic Four fought the Mad

Other Precursors

“Island of the Gods” in caveman times in Simon & Kirby’s “Tuk Caveboy” strip in Captain America Comics 38 #1 (1941). That strip could also be seen as an unintentional sneak peek, as there is a small mention that “Tuk” means “Avenger.” Captain America reappeared in comics in Avengers #4 (1964) with a four-panel flashback of jumping from an airplane on a dropped bomb to prevent a 39 disaster, causing his twenty years in suspended animation. 38 This is very similar to Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s Double Life of Private Strong #2 (1959) depicting the patriotic hero doing a similar thing. 39 (My buddy Wiley found this one.) With Detective Comics #64 (1942), Jack Kirby and Joe Simon had left Timely Comics behind, and one of their new DC strips was “Boy Commandos,” about a WWII squad of young men who fought the Germans in some relatively violent scenes. Jack Kirby would bring this magic and plotting to co-creating the comic Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos #1 (1963). Note they have similar introductory splash pages. As Kirby grew over 20 years, so did his characters in this apparently same or similar story. These established heroes would go on to fight interesting villains, and there were a good number that had Jack Kirby precursors. We already mentioned Immortus above, but there are a few others. The Lava Men in Avengers #5 (1964) have a Jack Kirby precursor in his Volcano Men from DC’s Tales of the Unexpected #22 (1959). The Ringmaster was another villain that fought the Hulk in Incredible Hulk #3 (1962), and he also has a precursor by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in Captain America Comics #5 (1941). In Tales of Suspense #94 (1967), Captain America would fight and meet MODOK, who is astoundingly similar and likely based on earlier Kirby characters in a similar creative vein, such as Marto, a 1940 villain from Blue Bolt by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon.

No, it was all Steve Ditko, who even had his own rejected version of the cover. I consider this costume and character to be Steve Ditko’s visual Mona Lisa. To be clear, the Peter Parker Spider-Man was a clear product of Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, especially Ditko’s art design, costume, web shooters, Peter Parker look, etc., complementing Stan’s sense of comedic dialogue. However, does this mean that the idea for Spider-Man was entirely all Ditko and Lee? Not exactly: Steve Ditko has stated in his essays that Jack Kirby had worked on the Fly with Joe Simon for Archie Comics in 1959, and had proposed a “Spiderman” character to Stan. Ditko pointed out to Stan that it was too similar to the Fly character, so Stan turned the character over to Steve Ditko to gestate. There are online blogs that catalogue the history of Joe Simon with a theoretical Spiderman character that he wanted to create, which translated into the Fly with Jack Kirby in 1959. Looking at the respective first appearances in Adventures of the Fly #1 (1959) and Spider-Man in 1962, there is very little comparison. However, there were a few interesting elements that did carry over. 40 Spider-Man was an ostracized orphan named Peter Parker, raised by his Uncle Ben, who got bitten by a spider, and then could climb walls and lift an incredible amount of weight. The Fly was an ostracized orphan named Tommy Troy, adopted by a man named Ben, who saw a spider shortly before getting the powers of a fly, and could climb walls and lift an incredible amount of weight. There were more differences than similarities, but the bare bones are oddly similar. One can’t really study comic book history without running into Jack Kirby. Jack was there at the ground floor of comic books, first with Joe Simon, then later with Stan Lee, contributing greatly to various genres including super-heroes, romance, horror, crime, Westerns, science-fiction, and newspaper strips. He had twenty years of incredible comic book creativity and financial success before he joined up with Stan Lee and jointly created many key factors in Marvel’s Silver Age, starting in 1961. I think Marvel in the 1960s wouldn’t have been anywhere near the same—or nearly as good— without him and his earlier legacy characters, and it only makes sense that today, current Marvel comic books clearly display:

Spider-Man

Often times in Silver Age Marvel comics, Jack Kirby would create a costume or look on a comic book cover—like he did with Iron Man or Immortus—then the dialogue and interior art would be done by other people. In the case of Spider-Man’s cover to his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962), which was definitely drawn by Jack Kirby, does this mean that Jack Kirby designed the costume? 27

As the 1960s flowered, Kirby’s imagination had reached new heights, and his storytelling skills were unprecedented. His plotting and page compositions were groundbreaking, telling fully cinematic stories on the static newsprint page. This “Silver Age” of comics still stands as the most influential era in comics history, largely because Kirby chose to create a...

Solid Silver Continuity

by Norris Burroughs

he Silver Age pretty much coincided with my upbringing. I was ten years old in 1962, and began to absorb whatever aspect of the art world that caught my attention. Being a kid often in a candy store, I started noticing some comics on the racks with images that seemed to leap off their covers. (Nearly everyone who has described Kirby’s work has used that analogy at one time or another.) The first ones were Kirby monster books that seemed a bit intimidating at my tender age. I cautiously read some of these at various friends’ homes. Then, as the TV Western craze began escalating, I picked up some issues midway through Kirby’s run on Rawhide Kid. I started noticing that the artist had a way with panel transition, very much like the way a film was cut. It was his sense of continuity that was remarkable. A few months later, Incredible Hulk #1 was the book that started my obsession with continuity in earnest. In that series, Kirby was exploring the Jekyll and Hyde aspect of human nature and he was playing with different ways for that transition to be depicted. Kirby had the first Banner-to-Hulk shift happen dramatically at moonrise, and used shadow and light to his greatest advantage. The drama of change back to humanity

was just as suspenseful. We see on page 11 of the first issue the Hulk fling young Rick Jones aside like a rag doll, but in the nick of time at sunrise the boy is saved. Banner regains his humanity in a masterful series of four moment-to-moment panels. 1 Later in the issue, Kirby shows a three-panel tier of only Banner’s hands changing moment by moment into those of the Hulk. 2 He then cuts to the crash of the Jeep and the ominous figure of the creature’s head emerging from the wreckage to

magnify the power of the sequence. I quickly grew entranced with this technique of rendering moment-to-moment or action-to- action sequences. Most comic book stories were told using simple subject-to-subject continuity, each panel changing the subject it focused on. That editing method usually made the story move faster, but often didn’t add much exploration of nuance and character. By controlling the pacing of the action, Kirby was playing with the perception of time. For several months, I moved back and forth from Kirby Westerns to the continuing saga of the Hulk. I would eagerly search out examples in Kirby books where he would emphasize sequential time changes that were most often moment-to-moment panel transitions. Working with other editing and framing techniques that were common to cinema, Kirby was striving for greater control over the impact of his storytelling. I noticed that Kirby began to experiment more with the distinct silhouette-like shape of the Rawhide Kid, utilizing it to place a powerful black spotted image on the page to visually propel the action and narrative. 3 Notice the precise

positioning of the Kid’s shape in this six-panel sequence that uses the black spot as a visual device to move the reader’s eye. Notice in panels five and six how the Kid’s blackness anchors the other figures to the ground plane, while also tying the panels together in explosive syncopated action. In the 62nd issue of the Two-Gun Kid, the King reached an apex with this nine-panel slugfest. 4 Here, Kirby again uses the Kid’s black silhouette to ground the intertwined figures in the center of nine film strip-like panels/cells. The reader’s eye naturally focuses on the dark mass, and everything else in the panel will be peripheral to it. In the first panel, the Kid stands astride the heavier figure of Moose, restraining his great mass. In the second panel, as he appears to be down, we see very little of the Kid’s actual body, but the leg near Moose’s head psychologically prepares us to see his great mass driven back in the third by the Kid’s rising blow. In the fourth panel the Kid’s figure emerges with full force. His shapes in panels four through six are a hieroglyphic of intention as the Kid draws his fist back, strikes down, and then upwards. There is no background here, not even a floor plane, so the twisting figures are stark against the white page. The Kid’s mostly black shape easily out-maneuvers the bigger man as he weaves in and out, totally dominating Moose. This was a sequence to study and remember. 29

At about this time in 1963, I discovered the Fantastic Four. I was swept away. Months after its publication, I came upon issue #4 featuring the reintroduction of the Sub-Mariner. 5 Page nine immediately stood out for the power and ingenuity of its lower panel sequence. Normally, this would be a moment-to-moment or action-to-action segment, but in this case, it was a radical departure from convention, as it was actually a subject-to-subject sequence. Kirby’s camera eye was showing us the end result of three separate actions by Prince Namor. In 1964, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee brought Captain America back from the dead (or more precisely, suspended animation). Kirby often spoke fondly of his creation, explaining that he enjoyed drawing Cap taking on a large group of adversaries. Kirby would break down the fight sequence in a series of moves and counter-moves. In his mind’s eye, he could visualize the action, knowing instinctively, strategically how he himself would react in such a situation. Because he had once been a street brawler, his fight scenes always rang true. In this page from Tales of Suspense #85, Captain America is fighting a single formidable adversary, but Kirby shows us graphically how he would dispatch such a

5 foe in his incomparable nine-panel film strip way. 6 In the first panel, the combatants rush each other. You can see how Batroc’s backward leg in panel one brings the eye to his upward kicking leg in the second panel. In panel three, Batroc’s legs again bring us into the frame as Cap left crosses and fells him with his shield, but the fallen Frenchman’s leg sweeps Cap off his feet in the fourth. Our hero counter-moves with a downward right chop to Batroc’s head and a right hook to the body. Panels seven and eight show the terrific propulsion of Captain America smashing forward and then upward into the helpless Batroc, who is clearly bested by panel eight. In those frames, Batroc’s body is mostly gone, obliterated by the force lines that Cap’s blows are creating. In the final panel, we see more of Kirby’s narrative genius as he shows us the totally dominant Captain America circling the fallen figure of Batroc like a pacing tiger. When we recall that Batroc is a master of the French kickboxing martial art Savate, it makes perfect sense for Kirby to use the character’s legs prominently. These are the subtle touches that we often don’t pick up on, but are subliminally so effective. It is these sorts of sequences which demonstrate so clearly that Kirby’s work had all the power of a cinematic spectacle, because he thoroughly understood how to follow image with image. That the King was consistently able to capture the peak moments of explosive action was the reason his art was often even more powerful than film. H

6 30

By 1965, Marvel Comics was officially a cultural phenomenon, being lauded in newspaper articles, TV, and on college campuses. Kirby’s style was the Marvel style, and even lesser titles had the propensity to become breakaway hits with his involvement. This was a pivotal year for Kirby, as Steve Ditko left Marvel, asking Kirby to join him in solidarity. Jack, with a family to support, chose to stay despite his issues with the company, and proceeded to give comics...

A 25-Year Seismic Shift! (below) For this pivotal story for Sgt. Fury #18, Kirby was enlisted to draw the key first and last pages only, but received no credit for it.

ccording to Greg Theakston’s Complete Jack Kirby, Volume 1, Jack Kirby’s first art produced intentionally for a comic book—as opposed to reprints of newspaper strips reprinted in comic book form—was published in May 1940. It was Crash Comics #1 featuring the five-page “Solar Legion.” He was 22. So what was Kirby doing exactly 25 years later?

by Shane Foley

25 years after May 1940 brings us to May 1965. At this point, Marvel is revitalized and the second phase of the Silver Age was beginning. Not only was Kirby the master of having revolutionized the art of comic storytelling in such areas as dynamics in art and theme matter; not only was he a joint architect with editor Stan Lee in bringing about the new Marvel style of comics; but he was now poised to revolutionize himself—again! Marvel released twelve new comics dated May 1965—and Kirby was involved with ten of them! • Fantastic Four #38: cover + 20 pages • Thor (Journey into Mystery) #116: cover + 21 pages • X-Men #11: cover + 20 pages • Avengers #16: cover + 20 pages layouts • Tales of Suspense #65: cover + 10 pages (Captain America) • Tales to Astonish #67: cover • Sgt. Fury #18: cover + 2 pages (1 & 20) • Strange Tales #132: cover • Kid Colt #122: cover • Two-Gun Kid #75: cover Only Spider-Man and Millie the Model didn’t have any Kirby touch! Ten covers and 93 pages (with only 20 or 22 of those pages being rough layouts)—a massive workload. But in the middle of this massive workload, there was a revolution in both art and storytelling happening. Through Kirby’s career, most stories had been relatively short. Even the longer crime stories and love stories usually ran for only fifteen pages. By now at Marvel, the page count per story had increased, with 20 to 22 pages—a whole issue—being the norm. But things were beginning to evolve further. When Ant-Man was changed to become GiantMan, editor Stan Lee roped Kirby in for the transition. Kirby hung around for the second story as well, but this time (Tales to Astonish #50, Dec. 1963) the story was continued—not just a subplot thread, but a genuine cliffhanger ending: A first for Marvel. Lee must have liked the idea, because later the same month, he did something similar with Don Heck on Thor (Journey into Mystery #99, then #100). The very next issue of Journey into Mystery (#101), Kirby returned to Thor as a regular assignment. He’d begun the feature in Journey into Mystery #83, but then, as with Ant-Man/Giant-Man, Iron Man, and the Human Torch, he did only irregular issues. But now, with this issue, dated February 1964, the strip was his—and he immediately celebrated with another two-part story. The Fantastic Four soon also experimented with a two31

part story with the Hulk in issues #25 and #26 (April/May ’64). A couple more extended Thor stories followed in the coming months (#105–106 in June/July ’64 and #110–111 in Nov./Dec. ’64). June /July that year saw Lee with Don Heck produce the first two-part Iron Man story (in Tales of Suspense #54–55), then in November that year, Lee and Ditko did a two-part story in Spider-Man (#18–19). But still, it was usually strong subplots that linked the major features, not cliffhanger endings. But experimentation was in the air. Clearly, editor Lee liked the idea of more serialized stories. In conjunction with Steve Ditko, longer serialized stories were the order of the day when the Hulk strip was revived in Tales to Astonish, and Dr. Strange also began long, serialized plots. The experiment must have been deemed a sales success, and momentum continued to build. March 1965 saw Lee and Kirby begin a Thor story in Journey into Mystery #114 which would continue well beyond a mere two issues. Then suddenly, at Kirby’s 25th year mark, the floodgates opened! Continued stories were no longer occasional—they became the norm. Fantastic Four #38 ended sensationally with the FF defeated, unconscious and powerless: “To be continued.” The next issue was continued too. And the next. And the next. In fact, for the following year (to issue #50) there was only one issue (#43) that wasn’t continued. A feeling of “epic” was in the air! Thor was the same. Not only did Thor also lose this month (in #116) but his stories now seemed to flow effortlessly into each other, with subplots stronger than ever and cliffhangers abounding. Captain America had been involved with minor ten-page stories since beginning in Tales of Suspense #59 (stopping poor old Iron Man from having Suspense called Iron Man, as Journey into Mystery had become Thor), but this month saw the last of those, with the following month beginning a three-part story, followed by another, and so on. Also this month, Jack did his final full 32

pencils on X-Men. But he wasn’t gone from this title; he still did six more months of plotting and layouts. And what did he start with the following month? A two-part story (the Juggernaut) followed by the three-part introduction of the Sentinels. His last issue brought back Magneto and it too was continued—though left in the hands of others. With the X-Men requiring less time of Jack, and his brief return to Avengers layouts over, his schedule was filled by taking over the Hulk next month, and introducing SHIELD in Strange Tales the month after that. It wasn’t long and he was only doing “layouts” rather than full art on both features—though we know he was doing the heavy lifting as far as the plotting went. And we see that most of these stories were continued from issue to issue. And as we now know, it wasn’t too much longer before Jack refused to do layout work, with the unpaid plotting required—and new Marvel hires like Roy Thomas came aboard to take up the slack, right at the 25-year mark. In a happy coincidence, this change in storytelling is highlighted on Kirby’s major books by a change in his regular inkers. With #38, Chic Stone left Fantastic Four, and five issues later (after a brilliant Frank Ray/Giacoia issue and four Colletta issues), Joe Sinnott arrived as regular inker. With #116, “Thor” began to be inked by regular “Tales of Asgard” inker Vince Colletta, and gave the feature its distinctive look. The change in story style was matched by a change in polish! Then, to compound this coincidence further, just as these inkers arrived, Kirby reinvented himself! His “cosmic” phase was about to begin. It was an extraordinary period where, within the next two years, the Kirby who had already rewritten the rules for emotional and powerful sequential art was about to evolve beyond anything anyone could have foreseen—in short order, he was Don’t STEAL our almost unrecognizable. Digital Editions! Figures began to bulk C’mon citizen, DO THE RIGHT up and become more THING! A Mom and more massive; his & Pop publisher like us needs already amazing creevery sale just to survive! DON’T ativity reached a new level of boldness and expression; Kirby Krackle evolved from DOWNLOAD OR READ ILLEGAL COPIES ONLINE! an occasional use to a device that could regularly represent power in any form, from Buy affordable, legal downloads only at water to gas to electricity to the cosmos; and given more time (and money?) on each www.twomorrows.com page (since he stopped doing layouts for multiple books and concentrated on only or through our Apple and Google Apps! three), his work began to show a detail and completeness never seen before. But all this has been addressed many times before. & DON’T SHARE THEM WITH FRIENDS OR POST THEM ONLINE. Help us keep Kirby had been the master of comic art and story for 25 years—but all that was producing great publications like this one! foundation for genius that was still to come! H 33

(these pages) Journey Into Mystery #119’s “Tales of Asgard” story, and the Kirby laid-out Avengers #16. Whether doing full pencils or roughs, he told a full story with his margin notes.

In 1968, Kirby took a loan from Martin Goodman to fund a move from New York to California, ostensibly because his asthmatic daughter needed a more conducive climate—but he undoubtedly needed the change as well. Not feeling properly credited, appreciated, or compensated for his creations, he quietly made plans to leave Marvel Comics, and closed out the 1960s with some of his least-inspired work of the decade—serviceable, but nothing groundbreaking. He was saving his best ideas for another time—and another company. But...

(right and below) Unused page from Thor #169. Long after it was rejected, Kirby added much greater detail to the backgrounds—either for his own amusement, or to increase its resale value.

here’s this book that I keep reading over and over—pawing at it, actually, like a curious dog. It’s a Marvel trade paperback, The Essential Thor, Volume 4, reprinting, in black-&-white, Jack Kirby’s final year or so on the book (Thor #167, cover-dated August 1969, to #179, August 1970). It also goes far beyond Kirby’s exit, with fill-ins by Neal Adams, into the early issues of John Buscema’s long run, past Stan Lee’s departure as regular writer and ending with the first few Gerry Conway-scripted issues. The book covers about 29 issues total, spanning maybe two-and-a-half years, wrapping up the 1960s and speeding into the ’70s. Only about 29 issues—but what a difference, if you jump from the first story in the reprint volume (the Lee-Kirby-Vince Colletta “This World Renounced!”) to the last (the ConwayBuscema tale from 1972’s Thor #195, “In the Shadow of Mangog!”, in which the only real connection to 1969 is Colletta’s penwork on the inks). It’s fascinating to watch Buscema transition in as the book’s permanent artist and to see Lee transition out as its permanent writer (he retains an editor’s credit on the Conway issues reprinted here). How could Thor survive losing both its captains? By losing only one at a time, over a long period of time. It basically worked the same way on Fantastic Four. What’s most “essential” about this Essential collection is that we have, under one cover, Kirby’s last year on Thor, one of his masterwork titles. These issues were done when Kirby’s relationship with Marvel was fatally fraying and when he was readying to make his leap to DC. His distraction shows in some of the work; did Lee notice? Whether he did or not… it was an odd year for both the book and the team that produced it.

Mean

Let’s examine these final issues one by one.

Thor #167, August 1969 Cover Date

A John Romita cover? Signed by JR? It’s clear why Lee rejected Kirby’s rather dull version [shown at left], but it’s a sign of the bumpy months to come. The story finds Odin sending Thor on “a mission most grave”— to find the planet-killing Galactus. “It could take an eternity, my love,” sighs Sif in a lovely Colletta-textured splash page. Two pages later, we get another splash featuring Loki and Karnilla the Norn Queen—it looks great, but story-wise, it adds little. (By this point, Kirby was holding back new ideas and new characters and using more “pin-up” splashes to pump up the issues.) The main action here is just as advertised on Romita’s cover. Loki waits for Thor to transform into

while, Back At The Fallen Monster… by Robert L. Bryant Jr.

Dr. Don Blake upon a rooftop, then attacks without mercy, easily grabbing the magic cane, but all-seeing Odin calls foul and zaps Loki back to Asgard. Page 18 is another cool splash, this one showing Galactus devouring another world, his great hands clouded with—smoke? Energy?— while the black skies fill with refugee ships.

Thor #168, September 1969

“Galactus Found!” proclaims the Kirby cover, as the space god’s hand lunges for Thor and the reader. “Could take an eternity”? Well, I suppose you could argue that for kids, the month-long wait between issues was almost an eternity. But you have to wonder—did Kirby miss an opportunity by not stretching the search over two or three issues? It would have been a chance for Thor to find sidebar-type stories on strange worlds, or to encounter fleets of ships fleeing Galactus (as the Thunder God did once before). The preparation for Thor’s odyssey takes longer than the mission itself. The Odinship departs Asgard on page 2; Thor is inside the hold of Galactus’ worldship by page 7. “Could take an eternity”! Takest thee a chill pill, warrior woman. But this issue marks a major short-term change, because it’s the beginning of Colletta’s several- issue absence as inker, resulting in a far different look for the book for months. The inker here is George Klein, whose DNA is closer to Joe Sinnott than to Colletta. And someone—maybe Klein, maybe someone in the Marvel production office—has used generous amounts of Zip-A-Tone on many pages. (I think it works more often than not; the looming side of the guard’s head on page 1 is a study in cross-hatching, a pleasure of textures.) Much of this issue is devoted to setting up the threat for the next few books—the Thermal Man, birthed at “a secret atomic experimental center in the mysterious Orient.” Sounds promising, but it’s really just another Big Bad Communist Robot on its way to crush “the accursed free world!” Who needs a rampaging robot when we have Galactus, the space god who must be found even if the quest “would take an age”? We don’t want Thermal Man; we want Galactus. But we must visit with Thermal Man for five pages while he escapes the Reds, is recaptured, packed aboard a missile, and shot off to America. Back to Galactus! He wants to talk to Thor about his secret origin—who he is, how he came to be. The fans are salivating now. Yesssssss. We get six panels of secret origins. In flashback, the Watcher sees a starship

crash “ages upon ages ago” on a “far-distant planet,” and he spies the plague-pocked, blotchy hand of a dead crew member. It’s only sort of a teaser, though. More later. Back to Thermal Man! He’s made his way to New York, interrupted the regular TV broadcasts and drawn the attention of Thor’s pals Balder and the Warriors Three. Fight coming! And more secret origins.

Thor #169, October 1969

Better men than I have examined, in the pages of TJKC, this sort of baffling issue. There may be no answers. I won’t rehash what’s been said before about Galactus’ birth, except to note that the inker here is again Klein, that someone still has a supply of Zip-A-Tone in his desk, and that the cover is a pastiche of photostatted interior panels from the issue, which serve as background for an apparently Romita-drawn outline of Galactus, which serves as background for a definitely Romita-drawn Thor figure. It may be the oddest cover ever done for a Kirby comic. But yeah, we really do get Galactus’ secret origin and a flashback visit to his plague- polluted planet Taa, a “now-dead paradise.” We see Galactus as he was when he was only a man (not yet named in this version of the origin). And we get that strange panel on page 14 in which Galactus seems to be stooped and wearing Watcher-type robes. Another panel shows the space god creating “suitable and unique attire which could regulate his energy”—from pure energy he makes his own Galactus helmet, armored tunic and boots. (A little too much information here? 35

(above) As the Galactus origin story in Thor #169 was being developed by Kirby, Marvel sent these states from #168 to Jack to follow from. We’re still trying to unravel the full story of why there is almost a full issue of #169 rejected pages, but more info can be found in the updated, expanded second edition of Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said, available now from TwoMorrows.

Perhaps better left to our own fevered imaginations? I mean, boxers or briefs, Galactus?) The space god has spoken his piece. He doesn’t want to fight. But Thor apparently does. “The heart of Thor is touched! Thou hath meant no harm to living beings! But still have planets fallen by thy hand! Now—what is Thor to do?” Nothing! Odin has seen and heard the secret origin: “I have learned what I must know! Galactus’ time is not yet come!—but there be need of THEE on planet Earth!” And what’s on Earth? Thermal Man! Which takes us to…

Thor #170, November 1969

(above) A major clue is in panel 5: Galactus is walking away with Thor, but wearing the Watcher’s toga, indicating this was probably originally Thor speaking to the Watcher, before it was retouched in the Marvel offices. (right) Steve Rude’s patch art for this issue’s standard cover, as we speculate it was originally Galactus our heroes were fighting, not the heavily redrawn Thermal Man shown on page 1 of this issue. (next page) A Bill Everett-inked detail panel from Thor #172, and an unused page from #170, inked by Rich Buckler before turning pro.

After a cover penciled by Romita and inked by John Verpoorten, we get a new inker, Golden Age great Bill Everett, arguably one of the most faithful embellishers Kirby ever had. Odin-zapped back to New York, Thor is at last free to take on Thermal Man after some hasty explanations from Balder and the Warriors Three. (Don’t ask how Hogun knows that the robot is called Thermal Man and that he’s “powered by an earthly atomic pile.” Or how Volstagg knows that he was sent “to weaken the free world.” Or how Balder knows that not even his creators “dreamed that his power would increase with every passing second.” They read the newspapers, okay?) The Asgardians plunge into battle courtesy of a lovely but totally unnecessary splash page. Fight! Fight! Fight! Nothing works against his Thermal Eye. The Air Force hits the robot with an “implosion” missile. He seems kayoed. The boys decide to stand guard in case he awakens—which spurs Lee’s wonderful caption, “Meanwhile, back at the fallen monster…” Round Two! Thor conjures a typhoon that blinds the robot and a tidal wave that yanks him out to sea. End of Thermal Man. Also end of “continued” stories for a while. One-shots will be on the menu for the next few months.

Thor #171, December 1969

Kirby cover. The Wrecker returns as Everett continues his inking run. The story is a simple one-and-done: While Dr. Blake tries to save the life of a civil- rights crusader who’s been critically wounded by a gunman, Thor tries to stop the Wrecker, who’s escaped a maximum-security hospital in New York. (Great panel of a truck’s engine, belted by the Wrecker’s crowbar, flying out of the vehicle and straight at the reader.) We get a robust battle between Thor and the Wrecker, including a splash page of the crowbar man shattering a brick wall into seemingly thousands of amazingly detailed chunks. (Zip-A-Tone here, or just obsessive inks? Looks like Zip. Owner of the original art, stand you forth.) Thor has to wrap this up fast—“Thou shalt wreck no more!”—to save his patient, who lies patiently on the operating table. The solution involves a subway train, the electrified third rail, and the power of the Uru Hammer.

Thor #172, January 1970

Kirby cover, Everett inks, a new villain, an old flame. Dr. Blake gets a visit from another New York physician, Dr. Jim North, whose trim little mustache suggests he might be a cad, but he’s really a good guy. He hired Jane Foster after her relationship with Thor/Blake ended, or was ended, and just as all doctors do, he has fallen in love with his nurse and his love has made him vulnerable. One Kronin Krask, a “mysterious, ruthless billionaire” with a private army, has 36

kidnapped Jane, and he will kill her unless North performs a “forbidden experiment” for him. And since Blake is a well-known pal of Thor… hint, hint. Krask turns out to be a blubbery man-whale with a spectacular mustache. Jane turns out to still be looking terrific; apparently she was kidnapped while wearing a tight tennis outfit. Krask wants North to electronically transfer his mind into a younger, fitter body so he can live forever. Somehow—we’re vague on this—North used to work with a Dr. Wagnastein (Frankenstein?) who could actually make this work. We’re not clear on whether Wagnastein is dead or alive now, but North has got to make the mind-switch work, or else. Thor arrives at the Krask mansion, skirmishes with his private army, but gets zapped by a machine that coughs up an “hallucinogenic mist.” Just as planned! Krask wants Thor’s immortal body. More threats against Jane. North gives in. “Love! It makes weaklings of you all!” Krask crows. North pushes buttons on machinery and the spectral outlines of Krask and Thor’s “actual egos” slug it out. Winner: The man with the hammer. Krask croaks under the mental and physical strain. Thor puts a comforting hand on Jane’s shoulder—and North’s—but that’s the closest we come to a hug between the former lovers who risked Odin’s wrath to be together.

Thor #173, February 1970

Thor #174, March 1970

Kirby cover, Everett inks. I won’t belabor the whys and wherefores of this giddily goofy tale, but it all leads to Thor impersonating a Thor impersonator at the Ringmaster’s Circus of Crime and to Princess Python asking real-Thor-who-shethinks-is-phony-Thor, “How’s the back, Mike?” There’s a battle with hairy-fisted Ulik as well, but the glory of this issue is in its almost childlike innocence, the relentless top-this showmanship of the crooked Crime Circus performers, the delighted audience (the closeup panel on page 10 is full of what must be Everett faces), and the tossed-off details (yes, that looks like Johnny Storm walking a tightrope on page 9; he’s right below the elephant). And, of course, some of Lee’s most playful dialogue. Ringmaster to real-Thor-posing-as-phony-Thor: “Take it easy with the hammer, Mike! Don’t bust it like you did the last one!” Princess Python to real-Thor-posing-as-phony-Thor: “Y’know, I never realized how groovy you were before! There seems to be something— different about you!” The plot ultimately involves the Crime Circus’ failed plan to steal a giant, barbell-shaped government computer by disguising it as a giant barbell, but who cares? The show’s the thing.

Kirby cover, Everett inks, Mad Scientist, Rampaging Robot, mother love, self-sacrifice to atone for sins. It’s not exactly inspired stuff, but neither was Kirby at this point in the Marvel game. “The Carnage of the Crypto-Man” does what it has to do, but no more. One interesting idea—that the scientist steals half of Thor’s strength to power his robot—is mostly given lip service. We’re told the Thunder God is down to 50 percent, but we don’t really see much evidence of that; he still battles more or less like always. Moving right along…

Thor #175, April 1970

The Kirby cover was discarded and replaced with a similar, but more menacing, version drawn by Marie Severin. Everett is still on inks, but this would be his last Kirby Thor. It’s also a welcome return to a “continued” storyline, and as such, it’s really Kirby’s last notable work on Thor. Odin has taken to his bed for his ritual Odinsleep, and Loki, never a man-god to pass up an opportunity for chaos, has quickly assembled “the forces of evil”—mountain giants, 37

trolls, gnomes, demons—to attack the Golden Realm. Kirby rocks with several pages of gods-on-horseback combat. Loki sneaks into the heavily guarded royal bedroom and throws down his last, best card: “You dare not strike me! Am I not blood of Odin’s blood? Am I not flesh of Odin’s flesh?” Actually, no, according to the origin story presented in a much earlier issue, but Odin’s guards accept this specious argument and let Loki take command. In a splash page, Loki shows he has plucked “the Ring Imperial” from Odin’s finger and now wears the symbol of ultimate power—or the source of ultimate power—on his own twisted hand. All the warriors of Asgard surrender to him. So does Thor. TO BE CONTINUED! This is going to be at least a 40-page story!

knew it would: “To arms—and to horse! Let the battle begin!” the Thunder God cries. Meanwhile, Balder confronts the nasty wizard Igron—wait, isn’t he the same guy who just went to Earth with Loki? Sure he is. Then who— what—? Like Odin’s spells, Lee and Kirby’s continuity fails here. Balder forces Igron, or Igron’s twin, to send him into the Sea of Eternal Night in a suicide mission to rescue Odin. And it works! A good thing, too, because Thor and the Asgardian army are no match for Surtur’s fire and ire. More continuity goofs: Surtur’s great big horns vanish near the end of the story. But the day is won as rescued and revived Odin shuts down the ferocious fire god in seconds. The hungry ground opens up and swallows Surtur like a pretzel. End of three-parter! A big meal of 1960s-style epic before bedtime. And for Kirby’s Thor, bedtime was closer than anyone knew.

Thor #176, May 1970

A Kirby/Everett cover, but surprise: Interior inks are by Colletta, pleasing fans who’d missed the fine lines, but jarring the readers who’d gotten fond of the Everett look. Kirby seems a little uncertain how to proceed here, now that he’s at least temporarily freed from the “one and done” dictum. A battle between the Warriors Three and Loki’s guards goes on too long (six pages), ending with Thor’s friends tossed into the same straw-lined dungeon that the Thunder God now occupies. Halfway through the issue, we get the real threat, the threat far worse than Loki. Still in Odinsleep, stripped of the ring and now tossed into the Sea of Eternal Night, Odin’s protective spells begin breaking down—including the one that keeps the horned fire god, Surtur, trapped underground. (It’s as if Odin functions as Asgard’s immune system—when he goes away, all the realm’s old viruses, no longer held harmlessly at bay in Asgard’s mystic bloodstream, burst back to the surface.) As Surtur’s fire fills the streets and the skies, Loki does what comes naturally—he runs like hell. And Thor is free to fight again. TO BE CONTINUED! Whoa—this is going to be at least a 60-page storyline! The rampaging robots have been forgiven and forgotten.

Thor #178, July 1970

A one-and-done oddball of an issue, as Kirby briefly drops out of Thor to substitute on Lee and John Buscema’s struggling Silver Surfer book (Kirby’s creation to begin with) and Buscema covers for Kirby on Thor. For Kirby, it must have felt like temporarily trading your own child for your neighbor’s kid. Sure, you all know each other, but it’s just… odd. (Your temporary dad doesn’t know you don’t put ketchup on your burgers. Ketchup? On a hamburger? Gee, Mr. Buscema!) The whole issue is sort of like that, as Buscema tries on Thor’s clothes. Colletta’s inks are not a happy match with Big John’s pencils, and the story is basically a placeholder, as Thor accidentally gets beamed to the Stranger’s prison planet and the Abomination, a former “specimen” in the Stranger’s collection, tricks the Thunder God into freeing all the other foul “specimens.” How to beat the Stranger, the alien criminals Thor just set free, and the Abomination all at the same time? Why, by turning back time to the point where it all begins and by making all the bad stuff… not happen. Not very satisfying, but it’s fast—only takes a few panels. Now can we have Jack back?

Thor #177, June 1970

Thor #179, August 1970

Poster-worthy Kirby cover. The inks are not Colletta’s—Klein’s, maybe? Loki and his pet wizard zap themselves to Earth, looking for a hiding place as Surtur flame-broils the Golden Realm. No good— Surtur’s power is so great, Earth already is having July heat in the middle of winter. Back in Asgard, it all comes down to Thor, as we

A Neal Adams cover launches Kirby’s final issue of Thor, a multi-parter that the King never finished. Buscema’s fill-in issue is basically ignored; the action picks up immediately after the war against Surtur as Thor surveys the damage. Inks here are by Colletta, 38

mostly. (More on that later.) Loki and Igron—the other Igron, the one he fled to Earth with; let’s call him Igron-1—have taken up residence in a fancy hotel. Loki has been paying the bills with fistfuls of magic money (a “trifling illusion”). Igron-1 has been laboring over a complex enchantment to be used against Thor when he returns to Earth. Page 5 ends with Colletta inks. Page 6 is inked by John Verpoorten. The difference in styles is startling. Page 14 is also by Verpoorten… as is page 18… and page 20. Some of Kirby’s original art pages reportedly got lost and had to be recreated from pencil Xeroxes, with Verpoorten jumping in on inks and someone other than supple Sam Rosen redoing the lettering. They got the book out, but the switch-offs in inks and lettering give the issue a jumbled, awkward feel, like accidents have happened—you just don’t know what they are. We finally get a look at what Igron1 was making for Loki—a mystic “living mask” that gloms onto Thor’s face much like the “face-hugger” will embrace John Hurt in Alien in 1979. The mask does things to Thor; energy waves and clouds of smoke

interconnect Thor and Loki’s heads. “What sinister sorcery hast thou now performed?” Thor demands. “A trifling matter, really!” says Loki. “I have EXCHANGED… our FACES!” It’s later depicted as more like an exchange of souls, but in this issue, only the faces have been switched. What we wind up with, after Loki steals Thor’s costume, is a Loki who appears to be Thor, a Thor who appears to be Loki. Balder and Sif, of course, don’t buy any of this for a second. Fight scenes! But odd fight scenes. Thor/Loki leaps from a Kirby/Verpoorten rooftop to a Kirby/Colletta rooftop. Thor/Loki zaps a Kirby/Colletta Balder with a blast of magic, then rushes to the side of a Kirby/Verpoorten Balder to see if he’s hurt badly. (Even the art is switching identities here.) Balder’s okay! And now he’s willing to talk: “Mayhap—’twas more than madness in thy words!” Thor/Loki sighs, “There still is hope! There still is hope!” End of Part 1. End of Thor by Kirby. End of an era. The body-switching storyline would run two more issues, both penciled by Adams and inked by Joe Sinnott, a beautiful combo that leads us into the semi-permanent pairing of Buscema and Sinnott starting in #182. The King was gone, but glory was still afloat in the Marvel Universe. It just looked a lot different. H

(previous page) Thor #176 page—or actually, a half-page, as Kirby’s full art was cut in half, to technically turn one page into two, while only paying him for one. (above) Thor #175’s published cover by Marie Severin, and Kirby’s unused version at left. (below) Jack’s final panels from Thor #179, his last issue. There are so many hands involved, either art pages got lost and had to be reconstructed, or Kirby turned it in incomplete.

In 1970, Kirby made two fateful decisions, which would have lasting impacts on his future. One was to leave Marvel for DC Comics, to launch a new concept—an epic tale weaving through multiple comics, which was eventually dubbed the “Fourth World.” The other was hiring two young fans to serve as his assistants—a duo that are still serving as his personal historical raconteurs today, documenting his life and career as recently as at the 2019... Held Sunday, March 31, 2019 in Anaheim, California. Featuring (as shown on next page top to bottom) moderator Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman, Tom Kraft, John Morrow, Paul S. Levine, and Tom King. Transcribed by Sean Dulaney. Copyedited by Mark Evanier.

MARK EVANIER: Hello, I’m Mark Evanier, and this is Steve Sherman, this is John Morrow, this is Tom Kraft over there, and that’s Paul S. Levine. [applause] This is my final panel of the convention. [applause] Thank you. And in many ways, it’s the most fun because it’s fun to talk about Jack. It’s a way of spending more time with him. Actually, you can spend more time with Jack just by wandering through the hall downstairs. I defy you to walk ten yards without seeing some remnant of Jack Kirby somewhere: A character he designed, an artist imitating his style… People with square fingertips. [laughter] Whatever, they’re down there someplace. And it still stuns me—the presence he has in the artistic community, and how I keep running into people who start talking to me about Jack Kirby without knowing I had any connection to him. This has happened to me…. Every two months or three months, someplace, I’m somewhere where I hear someone talking about Jack. They react to a T-shirt design or something like that. I think I told this story on another panel, I was at a Costco one time—they had this thing they were selling, a CD-ROM with the first ten issues of Fantastic Four, Avengers, Hulk, so on… INFANT IN AUDIENCE: Whaa-a-a! EVANIER: Right! [laughter] And I thought, you know, it’s Costco, it’s like eight cents, whatever they charge for these things. I think, “This might be handy to have.” So I have all of my purchases there—I’ve got toilet paper, I’ve got my paper towels; they won’t let you out without one or the other— and this Hispanic kid, about 16-17 years old is boxing up my purchases… [Tom King arrives to join the panel] And this is Tom King, folks. [applause] So, I’m at a Costco, buying a CD-ROM of Jack Kirby’s stuff. It’s got Jack Kirby drawings on it, and this 40

WonderCon Kirby Tribute Panel kid... [Tom King starts chuckling] And what do you make your money doing these days? [laughter] ...and the kid shows me the CD-ROM before he puts it in the box and says, “This is the work of Jack Kirby, the greatest comic book artist who ever lived. Marvel f*cked him over.” [laughter] And I immediately looked to see if the kid could see my credit card or Costco card and had recognized the name, and somehow he made the connection. But no, he had no idea I even knew who Jack Kirby was. [laughter] I told him I had met Jack Kirby, and it was like I’d told him I had met the Easter Bunny. [laughter] It was like, “No, you can’t meet Jack Kirby. C’mon!” [laughter] There are people on the Internet, if you’re on certain forums, who are complaining that nobody knows who Jack Kirby is. These people are wrong, and they are becoming less and less correct as every year goes by, because Jack’s fame is spreading. It is not always spreading at the expense of Stan Lee’s, and I resent the people who think you have to take from Stan to give to Jack. You have to take a few things from Stan, but… [laughter] Robert Kirkman did this documentary on super-heroes—it was on some channel last year—and I was interviewed for it for, like, seven hours or whatever, and of course they used about eleven seconds of me. And when I left, there was one line I said in it that I was sure they’d use, and I was afraid that they’d use it out of context. It’s something that I very much believe, but you have to have some context for it to be a good statement. I was afraid they’d use it without the context and it turned out they didn’t use it at all. But at one point they asked me, “How do you feel about Stan Lee becoming so rich and famous?” I said, “I begrudge Stan Lee nothing except sole credit.” And these guys smiled like, “Ooooh! We’ve got a good quote here.” And then it didn’t make it in. Steve and I had the extraordinary fortune and good luck to know Jack and get to work with him for years, and it was an amazing experience. We were hired by Jack in February of 1970. He and Roz took us to lunch at Cantor’s Delicatessen on the 8th or 9th—I can point out the booth we were sitting in. Jack had potato pancakes, I had a corned beef sandwich… I don’t remember what Steve had, but I remember a lot of completely useless details about things. [laughter] And

Jack told us that he was going to be leaving Marvel— which at first we thought was a joke. STEVE SHERMAN: Yeah. Back then, that was a shock. Like, “What?!” EVANIER: Yeah. And he said, “I’m going to work for DC and I need some assistants. Would you guys like to be my assistants?” Steve and I took a long time to say yes. I think it took, what, a second-and-a-half? SHERMAN: Yeah. EVANIER: At that point, the job was unformed. He didn’t talk about what we were going to do, what we were going to get paid, if we were going to get paid. It was a decision I have never regretted for one second of my life. I don’t think you have either, Steve. SHERMAN: No. In fact, the older I get, the more I realize just how lucky we were to be able to not only know him, but to work with him and hang around him, because he was just a tremendous guy. EVANIER: Steve and I will now demonstrate for you one of the main things we did for Jack. We would sit in Jack’s studio—he would be at his drawing table and we would be sitting, in rather uncomfortable chairs as I recall— turning down coffee. Roz was always trying to give us coffee, which we didn’t like—and Jack would tell us the whole plot of an upcoming story he had. And we would then say, in unison—I would say, “Hey, that sounds great, Jack!” And Steve would say… SHERMAN: “...sounds great, good! Can’t wait to see it!” EVANIER: And we were done. [laughter] And then we would come out [the] next week and there’d be all the pages… for a completely different story! [laughter] We’d say, “What happened to the story you told us last week?” and he’d say, “That’s the story I told you guys.” We’d go, “No it isn’t, Jack.” [laughter] At one point, we were supposed to write an issue of Jimmy Olsen and we came up with this plot about the Loch Ness Monster. Steve came up with the Loch Ness Monster and I came up with putting Jimmy Finlayson in it from the Laurel and Hardy films. So we went out and told Jack the story we had. We pitched it to him, and he added lots of ideas to it. We told him this story and he loved everything we said. I was taking notes like crazy of his contributions 41

(previous page) Jimmy Olsen #139 pencils. (center) Original header stat for the New Gods letter column, which Mark and Steve compiled each issue.

EVANIER: I think I actually have it. It was kind of nice to write a script that was pre-rejected. [laughter] He had forgotten we were assigned to do it. He literally forgot. That’s because his brain was off in other universes. JOHN MORROW: There is this really cute girl Jack drew in that issue, and as a kid, when I saw that picture I thought, “She must be based on some real person.” Do you know the one I’m talking about? EVANIER: I don’t think it was based on anyone—or if it was, it might be based on someone Jack saw for two seconds on the Spanish language channel on TV. [laughter] Jack usually watched the Spanish language channel on TV. One time I said to him, “What are you watching today?” and he said, “A bunch of crying Mexicans.” [laughter] He didn’t want to have a show on with English in it, because he’d start to pay attention to that, but if it was background noise, it was music… it was a comfort thing. It didn’t distract him from what he was doing because there was no English spoken.

to it… and we went back and we wrote the script out, this 23-page story, and we put our hearts into it. We argued a lot about things—friendly arguments. Steve and I, we never had a real argument, did we? SHERMAN: No, no. We were just having fun. EVANIER: So we brought the script out proudly to Jack. Now what we didn’t know was that on Monday morning, Nelson Bridwell at DC, who was Jack’s liaison, called Jack and pointed out to him— nobody had called Jack to tell him that Jimmy Olsen had been increased from 8 times a year to monthly. They had changed the schedule, but no one had bothered to tell the editor, [laughter] and they suddenly noticed they needed an issue of Jimmy Olsen right away. So Jack said, “Well, I guess I’ve got to write an issue of Jimmy Olsen!” and he sat down and he had, vaguely in his head, a story about the Loch Ness Monster. [laughter] He then wrote the story and drew it in five days—23 pages in five days; that’s what he was capable of in his prime—and we brought out our script. It was the first time in my... I’ve done a lot of scripts that people have rejected, but usually they read them first. [laughter] Jack had already written the issue, and drawn it.

SHERMAN: Although, his favorite movie was Gamera, the flying turtle. He would just crack up when the fire would come out of the turtle’s ass. He thought that was the greatest thing he ever saw. [laughter] If the Gamera movie was on, he watched it. EVANIER: Remember we brought a movie out to show him one time? The Valley of Gwangi. SHERMAN: Yes. I had a 16mm print. EVANIER: This was before you could watch a movie on TV. It was a big novelty to watch a movie in your own home. SHERMAN: Yeah, we had the 16mm projector… EVANIER: We sat and watched The Valley of Gwangi, which I had seen eleven times and you had seen fourteen times, and Jack was so excited about it. Someplace, I guarantee you, there is something in that movie that wound up in a comic. SHERMAN: Well, Devil Dinosaur I would guess.

EVANIER: Maybe that’s where it came from, yeah. I’m going to ask Tom Kraft to tell us what’s up with the Jack Kirby Museum. TOM KRAFT: Lots of things. So, as you may know, The Jack Kirby Museum is a nonprofit. We’ve been reaching out to different exhibi-

SHERMAN: And he didn’t give me sole credit, either. [laughter] EVANIER: We looked it over and it was a great issue. It was fine. It was terrific. And he paid us for the script we did, because Jack believed that people should get paid for the work they do. A couple of times, we would arrange for Joe Sinnott to ink something or Mike Royer, and Joe would always offer to do it for free, and Jack would say, “No. You’re a professional and professionals should be paid.” [To Steve] Do you have a copy of that Jimmy Olsen script? SHERMAN: No. 42

tions—there’s one in Paris coming up that we’ve given images to. So part of our mission is to help encourage the study and knowledge of Jack Kirby. PAUL LEVINE: I believe it’s going to be in two different cities in France. KRAFT: Oh, it is? I did not know that. In addition, we’ve been scanning now, for 13 years, Jack Kirby’s art from collectors, dealers—we actually go to people’s houses and sit on their carpet with scanners and scan back and forth. We’ve now amassed about 5000 pages of regular, original art. Probably another 1000 comic strips and commissions. And then we have 7500 images of photocopies that Jack did. And I don’t know if you know, but years ago he had a photocopy machine right in his house, so when he finished up an issue in pencil, he would actually copy it before sending it off to the inker. EVANIER: We made some of those Xeroxes, Steve. SHERMAN: Yes we did. [chuckle] On a very old copy machine. KRAFT: And I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but about three years ago there was a book called Pencils & Inks that I designed and produced along with the Museum and IDW. I’ve been in negotiations with IDW and it looks like there will definitely be another edition of that coming out in the next year, year-and-a-half. I can’t say what it’s going to be, but there’s going to be another book. [applause] And that’s pretty much it for now. We’ll definitely be at San Diego this year. We’ll be right next to the Comic-Con Museum booth this year, and we’re fundraising to get all of these images online at some point. We’re probably going to have a Kickstarter, so keep your eyes open for that. The goal of that is to have a beautiful website where you can

search everything in chronological order of the output that Jack did, so you can cross-reference it with these 12,000 images and scans. And then also host events for education, where it could be almost like a streaming, co-browse or screen-share session where you can ask questions and people like Mark Evanier and John Morrow could actually host these events and people could participate. EVANIER: Okay, thank you, Tom. John, you want to tell us about what you have coming up? MORROW: I’ve got three things, actually. The first one 43

(previous page) Kirby at home with his copier, on which he made photocopies like above from Jimmy Olsen #144’s Loch Ness Monster story. This is the cutie I— John Morrow—recall from that issue, and I’m speculating she was based on Swedish actress and singer Britt Ekland (above).

Universe, going all the way back to the late-’50s, up to Jack’s death in 1994, and even Stan’s quotes beyond that. I’m very, very proud of this book. It’s gotten incredible buzz. It’s now officially the fastest sell-out we’ve ever had at TwoMorrows. It was released January 2nd and we just sold our last copy down at the booth, and it’s completely sold out now. We are going to go back to press on it, for those of you who missed the first printing.

is the new Jack Kirby Collector, which is so new it’s not going to be in stores for two months. We’ve just got a couple of copies at the booth downstairs, at our lucky booth, number 1313. [laughter] Not sure how that happened this year, but the theme of this one is “Fathers and Sons.” Now I don’t have a son, but I have two daughters—one of whom is about to start applying to colleges and looking for, against my better judgment, a career in graphic design. [laughter] So I thought, “What better thing to do than have my daughter actually do some of the layout on the issue?” So I assigned two of the articles to her in this issue and I thought she came through with flying colors. I’m very proud of her for that. The second thing—and I mentioned it last year at San Diego— is we’re doing a book in October called Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love. For those of you who are familiar with Jack’s history—and I see Steve snickering up here—Jack did some proposed magazines in the early ’70s for DC Comics that have never been published. One is called Soul Love, which is sort of a Blaxplotation romance kind of magazine; one called True Divorce Cases, which is an anti-romance magazine, all about people getting divorced; and then he did one that is very near and dear to me: A series called The Dingbats of Danger Street. Now, it takes a very refined sense of taste to appreciate the Dingbats, [laughter], and I feel I have that sense, so I’m extremely proud. There are two unpublished Dingbats stories that no one’s ever seen, which we’re going to put in this. We worked it out with DC Comics to allow us to compile these into one nice, deluxe full-color hardcover. Some of the stories will be in pencil, some will be in ink, some will be full-color. We’ve commissioned Mike Royer to ink one of the pencil stories as well, and it’s a knockout. It’s beautiful. The only trick with that is we are missing two Soul Love pages. And there are a few other pages that we’d like to have better quality reproductions of. So if you guys have access to good photocopies, or you know somebody who has the originals, please get in touch with us. The last thing I wanted to mention: For the 75th issue of The Jack Kirby Collector, I did a book called Stuf’ Said. Hopefully most of you have already seen this. It’s a chronological account of Jack’s and Stan’s quotes about working with each other, creating the Marvel

TOM KING: I’ve already read it and it’s fantastic. I can’t recommend it enough, it’s a great book. MORROW: Thank you, sir. But that’s what we’ve got going on right now, and just carrying on with the Kirby Collector. SHERMAN: I’d like a round of applause for John, because Kirby Collector is up to #76, and I remember—what was it, 25 years ago? This kid called me [John laughs] and said, “I want to put out a Jack Kirby Collector. Can I interview you?” And I said sure, sure. MORROW: Oh, I want to mention that. You guys all like The Jack Kirby Collector. You guys love the Jack Kirby Museum and what they’re doing. These two guys—and [pointing to Mark Evanier] especially that one down there who’s moderating this panel—we all owe them such a debt of gratitude. You know, they have day jobs. Their whole lives do not revolve around giving us interviews for Kirby fanzines and helping promote a non-profit museum. [to Steve and Mark] Anytime you call on them for help—they are always… they will drop whatever they’re doing and be as helpful as a human can possibly be. Anything about Jack Kirby, they are always willing to help out. I just want to give Mark and Steve a huge round of applause. [applause] EVANIER: Steve and I are both very good at things that don’t pay money. [laughter] I do convention panels, I blog… If there’s no money in it, I’m terrific at it. [laughter] You know, it ties into what we were talking about earlier: How fortunate we were to be the witnesses to Jack Kirby, to be around him. And Jack said to me, the second or third time I met him, he called me and wanted me to be his Boswell. I didn’t know what that meant at that moment. I thought Boswell was the guy who helped out Charlie’s Angels. [laughter] But he wanted me to write a book someday about him. You were around, Steve. Did you ever hear Jack try to spin anything? SHERMAN: Never. Never. EVANIER: He never told me what to write. He never tried to dictate. 44

He never said, “Oh, don’t put this in any book you write, Mark.” Never said that. Jack was a very strong believer in the truth and he always believed he would come off fine if people just told the truth. And truth does not always mean 100% complimentary, because Jack had shortcomings. We both have about a dozen stories about memory things where he was just off in different places. SHERMAN: Yeah. But he always came back around. EVANIER: Yeah. Or sometimes he would be a word off. Jack would tell us a story about Captain America that didn’t make any sense to me until I realized, all you do is take out the word “America” and put in “Marvel” and the whole story would be completely accurate. Or he’d tell me a story about Don Heck and I’d think “That doesn’t sound right.” That was until I’d realize that if you replaced it with Dick Ayers, the story was absolutely accurate. He just got nouns confused occasionally, which I don’t consider lying. It’s certainly not trying to be deceptive. I don’t even consider it that much of a mistake. LEVINE: Because we’re all allowed to have “senior moments.” [laughter] EVANIER: Yes, and that’s it. So, Steve and I both—I’m sure Steve would agree—feel a certain obligation to pass on our good luck to others. SHERMAN: Which brings me to the Torah. You can Google that. Just this paragraph I would like to read, since this goes on the record, right? MORROW: Absolutely.

EVANIER: Tell them what book you’re reading. SHERMAN: I’m reading… This is by Joe Simon. My Life In Comics, which I thought was interesting. I mean, a lot of people think it’s full of… bull crap, but… [laughter] this is what Joe writes: “Seuling’s conventions were held at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Carmine and I attended one [a] short time before The Sandman came out. Jack Kirby had flown in from California with his assistants—Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman. Roz wouldn’t let Jack travel alone. I drove us all to the hotel and put my car in a garage. Jack was selling his drawings when someone lifted his wallet. It had all of his money and credit cards 45

(previous page, top) Kirby’s warriors illo used for the cover of Kirby Unleashed, which was designed and assembled by Evanier and Sherman. (above and next page) Forever People #6 pencils.

EVANIER: I wasn’t even there. [laughter] I was not present for any of that. And I remember Steve calling me right afterwards and telling me his version of what had happened, which was basically Jack and Joe sitting around in their underwear all night talking about comics. [laughter] SHERMAN: Right! I mean, Mark and I had our own rooms. We had flown in from LA… EVANIER: No, I did not fly in. I was not present for this. I was not at this convention at all. I had not met Joe Simon at this point. SHERMAN: Ah! EVANIER: I met Joe Simon a couple of years later when he wrote a letter to a fanzine attacking me unmercifully for something I had done, which I did not do, because he had confused me with Greg Theakston. [laughter] I faxed him a letter explaining this and he faxed me back a full apology and invited me out to lunch the next time I was in New York. I liked Joe very much and I found him accurate a lot—and at some points arguable at other times. SHERMAN: Jack never said anything bad about Joe Simon, that I recall. EVANIER: Um… There were one or two things said, but always said in response to bad things that Joe was quoted as saying about him. [Steve laughs] Jack never volunteered anything bad about anyone. He’d get mad if people were attacking him, or in one case, Roz. These guys had an awful lot of history, and not all of it was pleasant. There were legal problems over the years, there were cases where they remembered things very differently or understood things very differently. When they divided up the assets of their partnership, each felt the other got something they shouldn’t have gotten. Joe was very sweet to me—very nice and very helpful in writing some of the things I’ve written. Like you said, the guy would drop anything to answer questions, and what he told me directly usually checked out. I think you sometimes have to attribute some of these discrepancies to memory loss or what Paul just described as “senior moments.” And also, when reconstructing something from years ago, Joe probably remembered honestly that I was there for

that Roz had packed for him, so I had to make all of the calls to the Diners Club and the banks and so forth and so on. We went to get the car, but the garage was closed for the night. We checked in there at the hotel and all slept in the same room. One of the guys laid down on a cot next to me and took his teeth out and put them in a glass. [laughter] The next day, we fixed it so Jack got some money. After the convention ended, he flew back to California. That was the last time I saw him.” Now I would just like to say that, [pointing to his teeth] unfortunately, these are real. My parents were Amish and didn’t believe in braces. [laughter] So, Mark…? 46

this, but I had not met him at the time. I was not on that trip whatsoever. We did go back earlier and stay at the Statler Hilton in 1970, where we roomed with Mike Royer and heard dirty stories all night from him. SHERMAN: Right. [laughter] My memory of that is a little fuzzy, mainly because the drinking age in New York at the time was 18 and I was 20. [laughter] The drinks were a dollar apiece, so there were a lot of Long Island iced teas that I had.

1970’s unused DC horror concept, roughedin by Jack and penciled by Steve Sherman.

EVANIER: And I’ve never had a drink in my life, so I remember stuff. SHERMAN: Yeah. He remembers more than I do. EVANIER: Anyway, Paul Levine is up here. Paul is the attorney for the Rosalind Kirby Trust… LEVINE: Also known as the Kirby Estate.

or how, but he knew what was going to happen. He was a very prescient man. Let’s talk to Tom King a little bit. Thank you for joining us, Tom.

EVANIER: People shorthand it as the Kirby Estate. Anything new to report, Paul? LEVINE: Well, you’re not going to believe this. So, I’m sitting at an event hosted by my investment banker where I have my retirement account, and I sit down next to a guy. We start to chat and he tells me his name is Peter Burke, and he tells me that he worked with Ray Wyman after Ray and Jack were writing a novel called The Horde— which they’ve now turned into a screenplay, and we’re going to see if we can do something with that. The world is incredibly small.

KING: My pleasure. EVANIER: You are… I want to recreate the interview we did in Baltimore, if it’s all right with you. KING: Yeah, of course. I have some movie stuff news. I have a Nondisclosure Agreement, so I can’t say too much, but I was meeting with the people working on the New Gods movie and it is... they are… it’s very Kirby-centric. They’re like, “Tell me about Kirby. How does New Gods relate to his life? What is this a metaphor for? What does this mean? What does this mean?” There’s Kirby everywhere. They’re super into making this movie and making it a tribute to Jack. So, I can say that it has a little momentum now and that they want it to be a love letter to Jack. That’s their intention.

SHERMAN: I have a question. Has anybody shown any interest in Captain Victory or Silver Star? LEVINE: Yes. They are published by Dynamite, Nick Barrucci’s company out of New Jersey. SHERMAN: Any film? LEVINE: No, not that I’m aware of.

EVANIER: Great. That’s terrific. I went to the premiere of the Justice League movie. I do not go to super-hero movies. The last one I saw was the first X-Men movie, which I disliked intensely, and I would have walked out on had I not been sitting next to Stan Lee at the screening. [laughter] And I think I told this story: I was determined to stay in the theater until I saw Jack’s name at the end. Everyone else had exited, and it was the staff of Stan Lee Media that was having this special screening. I was, at that point, the vice-president of creative content for Stan Lee Media, which is kind of like fact-checking for Donald Trump. [laughter] I was sitting in the theater, determined to see Jack’s name. I know Jack’s name is on the end of it and I’m sitting there—and everyone has left. The ushers are picking up pop-

SHERMAN: That’s odd. You would think... EVANIER: Yes, you would. SHERMAN: ...that’s Hollywood I guess. EVANIER: Well, The Eternals is apparently actually going to become a movie. And who would not be surprised about this? [Evanier and Sherman in unison] “Jack.” It’s amazing how many things happen that Steve and I are kind of amazed by, that Jack wouldn’t have been. He knew everything that was going to happen. He didn’t know exactly when sometimes 47

never increase in value. It’s a reprint of a reprint.” [laughter] So, yeah. Early Avengers and then I just started reading—because back then I didn’t realize the difference between old comics and new comics. I totally bought into there’s one complete story that they had planned for 30 years to execute exactly like this. So I started reading the early stuff as Marvel Masterworks.

corn boxes around me and saying, “You know, they’re not going to show the movie again.” I said, “I know, I know. I’m staying until the end of the movie. Do you mind?” And if you stayed until the actual end and saw it, it was like “How small can we make Jack’s name and still put it on this movie?” And I was very angry. I walked out of there fuming… I get angry once every... how many times have you seen me angry, Steve, in all the time we’ve known each other?

EVANIER: You have a favorite Kirby character, or body of work? KING: Well, Mister Miracle stands out, but, um… [chuckles from audience] “favorite” one… There are those mid-Fantastic Fours from #40–60? That era… I just think that’s poetry in comic form.

SHERMAN: I can’t remember. LEVINE: Zero. EVANIER: I don’t get angry, and I was very angry. I saw Stan ahead of me and I turned and went the other way because I didn’t know what would come out of my mouth if I spoke to him. And I have not been back to see any of them. I went to the Justice League movie because they invited me to the premiere and they said Jack’s name is on it. And if you saw that film, you saw that Jack had a big full-screen credit and the audience was cheering at the premiere, all cheering his name. I felt great, and I’m not going to any more movies. [laughter] I got what I wanted out of that screening. Anyway, [to Tom King] tell us what was the first Jack Kirby thing you remember liking?

EVANIER: Now, did you ask to do Mister Miracle or did they suggest it to you? KING: They suggested it to me. EVANIER: What was your reaction? KING: They had taken a book away from me. I was with Dan Didio and they wanted me to do another Vision, a self-contained story, and I think it was just “give me anything and just leave me alone.” It was like the famous—I know it’s apocryphal—Kirby Jimmy Olsen story, “Just give me a book that’s not succeeding.”

KING: I think it would be that, like, big book of Marvel? The blue one… [below] I’m 40, so it’s probably 1993, in the early ’90s, and it’s the history of Marvel Comics. It was the first history of comics I had ever read and I read it like it was the Zapruder film. I just went back and forth. And they had a reprint of “This Man, This Monster” in the back—like, the seven best issues of Marvel they reprinted in the back, oversized. And I read and memorized every single word. So that was my first Kirby and where I got into it.

EVANIER: Which is not exactly what he said. KING: Right. But that’s what it’s become. And Dan threw out “Atomic Knights” and “Mister Miracle.” [a few chuckles from audience] I know, Atomic Knights. Pretty cool. I love Murphy Anderson. But then I was, like, “With Mister Miracle, you’ve got the New Gods, you’ve got that mythos… You can do something just transcendent with that.” So I chose Mister Miracle.

EVANIER: And where did you go from there in terms of reading Kirby?

EVANIER: What was it about the characters that you felt connected with something you wanted to write?

KING: I found The Eternals was still on the shelves in old back issues. I read The Eternals that way. And then… I was a huge Avengers fan. You know how when you’re a kid, you just pick one? So I picked Avengers and I bought the Marvel Masterworks reprint—I remember it was the first graphic novel I ever bought, and my grandfather was incredibly disappointed in me because, like, “That will

KING: It started with me with the romance aspect of it. The Big Barda/ Scott relationship. I just happened to be going through being madly in love with my wife. My wife just sort of saves my life over and over again. And I… EVANIER: How tall is she? [laughter] 48

KING: [chuckles] She couldn’t wear heels to our wedding, so… [laughter] So that’s where I started. And getting deeper, what really started to interest me was the idea of “The Pact” is so messed up. It’s so crazy that God would give his son to the Devil to achieve peace, and that his son would have to grow up with that legacy of knowing “my father gave me away to be tortured in order for a good cause.” And then he grew up to be this performer, right? As a compromise, you’re a type of performer—it’s just entertainment on the page, so I could relate to it like that. So, Mister Miracle took that weird pain of his relationship with his father, with Granny Goodness and all that, and he made… He’s got a huge smile on his face. What’s behind all that? How did that come to be? EVANIER: And what kind of reaction have you gotten? I know the book is quite acclaimed and is selling very well. What kind of reaction to the content? And I’d like you to relate the answer to Jack in some way. KING: [chuckles] It’s the top selling graphic novel in the country and it made a lot of people… A lot of people come up to me and they say, “It touched me and I cried.” But in terms of relating it to Jack... I think a lot of people hear about the New Gods. They hear that, sort of—like I always think of The Comics Journal. Like, the artsy-fartsy Top 100 comics of all time, and one of two super-hero stories was the New Gods. It’s always considered the one super-hero story that transcends the entire genre. And then people dip in and it’s like getting a fireball to the face, and they just don’t understand what’s going on. It’s as if—I do a lot of Beatles analogies—you started the Beatles by listening to the White Album and hadn’t listened to anything else. [chuckling] You just wouldn’t get… this is pure id. These are people without editors, they are just people experimenting with the form. It’s like seeing Picasso if you’ve never seen Raphael. You’re like, “What does this even mean?” And I think people are like, “I just don’t understand it,” and I simplified the metaphor for them and they’re now, “Okay, now I see what this is about.” EVANIER: Okay, that’s very good. KING: Whew! [laughter] EVANIER: That’s a great answer. Thank you. [applause] I didn’t bring you here to put you on the spot. KING: I get a lot of questions about Funky Flashman. This

is a major trip. EVANIER: You know, Funky Flashman started out to be somebody else. Remember, Steve? It started out to be the guy who ran Marvelmania. SHERMAN: Oh, right! Right, right, right. EVANIER: And we suggested Mister Miracle have a manager who was a con artist who kept getting him into stupid trouble, and Jack—right on the spot—said, “We’ll call him ‘Funky Flashman.’” Jack always had a name—you could describe any character in the world and Jack had a name that sounded like he had spent weeks working on it. I don’t know where these names just came out of. And he went off and he… as I said earlier, sometimes he’d start out with one story and wind up with a completely different one. And, he wound up with a completely different one. SHERMAN: Yes. [chuckles] Yes, he did. I remember the first time that we saw it. We went over to the house and he showed it to us and we—at least I said, “You’re not going to publish this, are you?” [laughter] Jack laughed and said, “Oh, yeah!” [laughter] EVANIER: And remember he told us how proud Carmine was of him for it? SHERMAN: Yes. KING: It’s vicious. People think it’s a parody or it’s funny, but it’s… SHERMAN: It’s vicious. KING: It cuts right to the bone. SHERMAN: But funny! 49

(previous page, top) We think we’ve found the inspiration for Funky Flashman’s last name! Juxtaposed with Steve Sherman’s photos from the Marvelmania offices is Jack’s Galaxy Green proposal art. Note the heading: “If you see a

MAN, FLASH

Galaxy Green” For the source of the word “Funky” and Richard Kolkman’s genius discovery of why Kirby decided to parody Stan in the first place, see page 121 of the expanded edition of Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said. (above) A Kirby penciled and inked Spider-Man, done for Marvelmania. (previous page, bottom) Tom King’s intro to Kirby, and his award-winning comic series The Vision.

KING: But it is funny, yeah.

to say, “Well, they agree on this part, this part and this part. And here’s what this one said and here what that one said, and these two things don’t match up because somebody’s memory is askew.” I find not that much difference between the accounts of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby about who did what, if you pick Stan’s most generous explanation of the situation and Jack’s most generous explanation of the situation. So, Paul, you can talk a little about Jack’s credit on SpiderMan, can’t you?

EVANIER: I wrote one page in that issue—the only page of New Gods Jack did not write in this period. He was accidentally a page short. When he showed us the story, we noticed there was a page missing. And with Jack, once a story was over he couldn’t remember a thing about it. If you said to him 20 minutes after he finished a Forever People, “What was the issue about?”, he had no idea. He didn’t want to go back and add another page to that story, so he had me do it, which is very scary. But anyway… What do they want to know about Funky Flashman?

LEVINE: I can indeed. So, one day I’m in my office—this is probably 1983 or so. I had just started representing Jack. And he informs me he has been told Carolco, which was an independent production company, was going to be developing a movie based on Spider-Man. “Oh? Okay. Are you going to get a credit? Are you going to get some money?“ Money, not so much. Credit? We’ll see. So I talked to the lawyers at Carolco. I made sure that when the movie was released it would say, “Based on a character created by Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby.” I can’t remember which order. It may have been Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. In any event, cut to 20 years later. Sony finally comes out with the movie after the movie has gone from Carolco to XYZ to ABC to RFW Productions and all kinds of machinations. At the end of the day, Sony—to their credit—honored that original agreement that I had made with the lawyer at Carolco. And if you watch the movie, you will see that it says “Based on a character created by (I think) Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby.”

KING: I think people think of Jack and Stan’s relationship as “Oh, they’re just two friends who kinda fought.” I don’t think they realize how acrimonious it got at the end. They don’t realize… Because Jack is like, “Jolly Jack.” They think of him, like, Santa Claus can’t get mad at the elves. They don’t realize this is a man who really felt wronged, and there was very little between him and his heart. He couldn’t keep his emotions out of his art. EVANIER: I know of a couple of cases in real life where somebody’s parents separated and hated each other, and the child fantasized that the parents had made up somehow at the end. Everything was all right and harmonious… and they really had a harmonious, normal childhood because their parents really loved each other. I sometimes liken the way some people fantasize about the legacy of Stan and Jack’s relationship in that way. It was not that happy at the end. KING: I actually have a question about that for you. So, like you said, Jack was into truth. There was an interview where he took sole credit for Spider-Man. He was like, “That was me.”

KING: No Stan Lee? EVANIER: Stan Lee’s in there too. LEVINE: No Stan Lee. I don’t think so. SHERMAN: How did Stan let that go? LEVINE: All I can remember for sure is that Jack’s name is listed as a co-creator of Spider-Man.

EVANIER: He also sometimes would say it was Steve Ditko. He used the terms a little differently. Stan Lee took the position that if he said, “Let’s do a character named ‘Fred,’” he had created ‘Fred’ right at that moment, and no matter what anyone else added to it, he was still the creator of ‘Fred.’ Jack’s position was, [Jack] walked in one day and said, “Let’s do a character called ‘Spiderman.’”

EVANIER: And that’s using a definition that Stan advanced all the time, which was, “The first person to suggest it is the creator.” It’s a nod to that. The design of the costume was Steve Ditko’s. Jack was quoted in one interview saying he designed the costume. He got confused. He remembered doing the cover, which he did. And he remembered doing the cover for Spider-Man #1. And I don’t buy the story that he was taken off Spider-Man because he made him too muscular, because the character Jack was doing—that version of Spider-Man—was supposed to be muscular. But when they file for copyright claims, you don’t limit your claim. You claim everything and settle for what the court will give you.

SHERMAN: And he had the logo.

LEVINE: Or you settle for what you settle on if you don’t go to court.

EVANIER: And he had this logo that had been done back when it was a Simon & Kirby project—which Joe Simon says was a Simon project [chuckles], and C.C. Beck, who drew it, says was a Simon & Kirby project. So you have to sort these things out. You know it’s possible—and yes, I’m finishing up my big Jack Kirby book—it’s possible to put all these accounts together and find certain commonalities and understand what happened between them, especially if you understand how some folks use words like “written by” or “created by” in different contexts. It’s also possible

EVANIER: Yeah. So, Jack had a claim on Spider-Man. People can argue how much it was, how valid it was. But he definitely contributed something. Even Steve Ditko told us that. I spent a couple of days with Steve Ditko in 1970 when his memory was a little fresher than it was later on, and he told us that Jack had contributed a lot to Spider-Man. Jack was not a great interview. Jack told us some very wonderful, funny stories over the years. At the very first San Diego Con, 50

which Steve and I were present for, the big thing on Saturday afternoon was Jack gave a speech—a chalk talk. And Jack in front of an audience was… not great. He lost his sense of humor. He wouldn’t be funny. He gave very serious answers. Steve tried to prompt him—you remember this, Steve? You tried to prompt him to tell one of his funniest stories. We’re sitting on the floor in the front, and Steve puts his hand up in the Q&A and Jack calls on him like he’s a stranger, [Steve laughs] and says, “You there, sir. What would you like to ask?” And Steve asked him to tell the “King of the Comics” story.

coup. Good work, Jim!” He hangs up, turns to us and says, “Who the hell is Will Jordan?” [laughter] And I told him Will Jordan was this impressionist who was on the Ed Sullivan Show a zillion times.

SHERMAN: Right. Yeah, yeah.

SHERMAN: That’s right, you did.

EVANIER: And Jack told the worst version of that story—Steve is nodding in agreement. The bare bones were true, but he took all the color and fun out of the story. He was not a good interview. Stan was a good interview. We’ll give that to Stan. He was a terrific, charming interview. I’ll tell you an interesting thing. One of the reasons Stan got such good press in the ’60s was that he had all of these interviewers coming in from college newspapers and other places writing about Marvel Comics, and every one of them applied for a job. They all wanted to work for Marvel. They were buttering up the guy with hiring capacity. [laughter] And, generally speaking, that was the person they interviewed. Jack was at his home drawing Thor at the time. But Stan was a good interview. He was very good at making you comfortable. Steve and I went to meet him in 1970. Remember that day, Steve?

EVANIER: Steve is my witness. Will Jordan did impressions of Ed Sullivan. So now, Stan goes, “I’ve got to get some work out of here. I’m going to write the Bullpen Page up right now and tell the world about you great guys. I really like you.” [Sherman laughs] So, as we leave he’s rolling paper into the typewriter to write the Bullpen Page. The Bullpen Page comes out three months later, and the first item is about how “Mark Evanier and ‘Sturdy’ Stevie Sherman visited me in the office and we were yakking up stuff about comics and they’re great guys and terrific.” The second item, you can look this up, is “We had a great time at the ACFA meeting a couple of months ago. Will Jordan was performing. He’s the great guy you saw on the Ed Sullivan Show…”. Verbatim! [laughter] The same thing I told him about Will Jordan was there! And if he typed it right after he typed the piece about us, he sent it to press four days before the event. He didn’t wait for reality to catch up with the Bullpen Page. He wrote how great Will Jordan was—and that was my introduction to Stan Lee. Then we walked around the Bullpen for a couple days, marveling at all of the insulting caricatures of Stan and everyone else on the walls and stuff like that. [laughter] I’ll tell you one more thing, and then I want to ask Mr. King a few more things here. Stan only came in on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I think it was. And they had all these semi-pornographic cartoons on the wall. John Romita had taken several of the recent romance covers he had drawn and taken stats of them, and the covers were exactly the same as they were published except the women were all nude on

SHERMAN: Yes! EVANIER: When we walked in, remember the first thing he said to us? He said, “I’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t had a chance to read any of our comics. If you were to ask me what was in Iron Man this month, I couldn’t tell you.” And Steve and I looked at each other knowingly saying, “Well, he’s saying don’t ask him what’s in Iron Man this month.” [laughter] And we had this wonderful, charming time with him, and in the middle of it Jim Warren phones in. I don’t know how interested you folks are in this kind of stuff, but Jim Warren calls in the middle of it because they were doing a thing the following Saturday at ACBA, which was a comic book professionals society which was going to better the lot of the writers and artists of comics, and the president and vice-president and officers of it were Stan Lee, Carmine Infantino, and Jim Warren. [laughter] Seriously. And Jim Warren says to Stan on the phone—we didn’t hear Jim Warren’s end of it—“I got Will Jordan to entertain at the party Saturday night. I just hired Will Jordan!” And Stan Lee says, “Hey, that’s great. Will Jordan will be terrific. That’s a real

(previous page, top) Our spider-sense was tingling when Paul Levine mentioned Kirby’s credit on the 2002 Spider-Man film. Upon viewing the DVD of it, there’s no mention of Jack anywhere, just the Lee/Ditko credit shown here. We asked Paul for a follow-up, and he commented: “All I know is that I’m certain that when I saw the Sony film in a theatre, Jack got ‘co-based on’ credit. I’m certain that I’m not dreaming about this...”. Did the credits change for the DVD release of it? (previous page, bottom) Kirby at a 1974 San Diego Chalk Talk. (this page) Photos by Steve Sherman from Mark and Steve’s 1970 visit to the Marvel offices, including (above) Larry Lieber and John Romita, and Stan’s Bullpen announcements about it.

latest drawings he’s put up. And the visitor turns around the corner… and it’s Larry Leiber! [laughter] He sounded just like Stan when he’d speak in the lower registers. Tom, we’ve got a few more minutes here. What would you like to do in the future with Jack Kirby characters, Mister Miracle or otherwise? Is there something you want to tackle there? Some loose end you want to tie up? KING: [hesitates] It has some connections to the New Gods movie thing. I want to make sure that’s done right. So as much as I can affect that and make it “not crappy,” that’s my New Gods focus. Mister Miracle turned out so well, I kind of don’t want to mess with it. You know? I’m sure someday I’ll have spent all my money on original art and someone will say, “Hey! Mister Miracle II!” and I’ll sell out. But for now I want to leave the New Gods alone. I did one Kamandi issue and it was a joy. So yeah, besides someday going to Marvel and doing all those characters. EVANIER: Well, you did a wonderful job with Mister Miracle and if you tackle another Kirby thing I think you’ll probably do just as good, if not better.

(above) New Gods #5 cover pencils. Please, oh please, Warner Brothers, don’t screw up the New Gods movie! Just follow Jack’s comics, and you can’t go wrong!

them. He had done paste-overs to make them all naked. [laughter] And there were all of these caricatures that Marie Severin had done of Stan. They were taken down when Stan was in the office, but they’d put them up on Tuesdays and Thursdays. [laughter] So we’re hanging out in the office when all of a sudden—and the office had all of these room dividers. SHERMAN: Yeah, it was like half-walls. EVANIER: They didn’t go all the way up. All of a sudden, we hear Stan’s voice coming in, saying “Hi, I’m just dropping in…” and everybody freezes. John Verpoorten leaps for the wall and starts tearing the stuff down. [laughter] Romita’s hiding his drawings, and Marie is hiding hers, and Herb Trimpe is pulling down the 52

KING: I just remembered one more thing. This is a small story. When I first realized Kirby was a genius—now when you asked me that question I was thinking “When did I...?”—it was in college. I went to Columbia and I would do this cheat on school where they’d ask me to do an essay and I would do a comic book essay. I did a class on dinosaurs, so I did “Dinosaur Representation In Calvin & Hobbs.” [laughter] So I did a class on World War II and you had to write your thesis and I did “Comics During World War II.” So I went to the New York Public Library and they had all the Golden Age comics on film, microfiche. And after a while… at first it’s exciting, but you realize they were just repeating the same stories over and over and over again. How many times did Batman save a circus? Thousands of times. And I started to notice how good the Kirby stories were. They were just on another level, and it was only in the flood of reading all this stuff that came out at the same time that I was, like, “Oh! There’s a rawness to his actions, scenes are moving, the story makes you want to turn the page…”. That’s when it really clicked for me, to jump back to a question from 45 minutes ago. EVANIER: Tom, you just gave us a fabulous ending for the panel. We’ll all be outside talking. So, let’s get out of the way so the next panel can get in. Thank you very much. [applause] H

In 1972, Jack’s Fourth World books at DC Comics are still breaking new ground, but DC, unhappy with their sales, cancels New Gods and Forever People, takes him off the Jimmy Olsen book, and leaves only Mister Miracle on the stands. As he prepares to launch new titles Kamandi and The Demon, Kirby hastily rearranges his planned stories to get “Himon” into print in Mister Miracle #9 before the series is forced away from his epic vision, and leaves behind...

The Mystery of Mystivac (below) Original art from Mister Miracle #12, courtesy of Heritage Auctions. But unlike what the cover blurb promises, there’s no “Speed Trap” in this issue.

by Glen Gold

aybe the most frustrating question you can ask a fiction writer is, “Is this autobiographical?” That’s because the answer sounds swampy: “It’s all made up, but of course my imagination is guided by what I experienced, and I’m not necessarily in control of that process, and now that you mention it, that talking rabbit does sound a lot like my dad, but no, really, it’s all made up.” Also, sometimes there is no relationship between life and fiction except coincidence. I have written a couple of articles about finding autobiography in Jack’s super- hero work. I think his feelings about leaving Marvel are reflected clearly in Silver Surfer #18 and his depiction of PTSD in Captain America is a pretty obvious nod to the effects of combat on any veteran. But this time I’m not 100% sold on my analysis, which I present in the spirit of finding the face of a saint in your morning toast: It’s there if you squint right. Maybe. Pop quiz, and keep your books closed: Who exactly was Mystivac, the villain in Mister Miracle #12? If your answer was “an alien pretending to be an Asian idol masquerading as a robot working as a chauffeur for Colonel Darby whose power is having his voice obeyed, but also he ‘operates ballistically, like a hand-gun’ and has claws that go SNIK,” I bow down to you for keeping track. One thing he isn’t? “The SPEED Trap,” even though that’s promised on the cover. But if Jack had another five pages, I’m sure Mystivac would have also been a speed trap. Mister Miracle #12 is a great-looking book, but it veers and careens weirdly, even by Fourth World standards. Eight of the first nine pages are about Scott and the Female Furies engaging with the United States Navy—first a trap as a publicity stunt, then beach shenanigans when it’s implied that the sailors might have paid a little too much attention to the women bathing without having first asked for consent. But the remainder of the book lurches into a totally different storyline, when the rich Colonel Darby bets (unwisely, of course) against Scott in a battle against the aforementioned Mystivac, almost as if Kirby was going one direction, then something 53

Above shows Kirby’s tendency to end one subplot in the next-to-last panel of a page, then introduce a new one in the final panel, as a lead-in to turning the page and moving the story forward.

else caught his attention. I have a theory based on a little excerpt, noticing a storytelling tic Kirby has. It’s, of course, a genius kind of tic. This is mostly noticeable on five-panel pages, but it applies elsewhere: When Jack is telling a story with various subplots, whenever one temporarily reaches a resting point, it generally happens in the penultimate panel on that page, leaving the final panel to introduce something new for the reader to follow, meaning it will get them to automatically turn the page. Jack does that here on page 3, where the A plot with the Navy takes a break, and the B plot, Mystivac, is introduced. We get a further page of Mystivac before returning to the Navy for a while, and it’s like that page and a panel never happened. The two stories don’t at all intersect. Which is fine—it’s unclear what drama Jack expected to get from the Navy sequence as laid out, as there are no mysteries dangling, no foreshadowing, no secrets to explore. My hunch is that Jack sometimes drew sequences that worked independently, then figured out how they might relate. I think he drew page 3 to the penultimate panel, then came back later to figure out what B plot would go in that final panel. I think Mystivac arrived fully formed, and it took Jack a minute to design an introduction that at least somehow made it seem like the two plots were related (uh… Darby is watching the Navy demonstration through binoculars? All right, sure). I think the story really gets going in the strangest way possible for a high-tech book of super-hero traps when Mystivac disables Mister Miracle in that time-honored tradition of hobbling escape artists: With… a… phone call. “You want to DIE, Scott Free! You WANT to die! Do not turn death away! —WELCOME HIM—go to him—Death is your FRIEND—!” The illustration of the heavy-lidded eyes on Mystivac as he intones this is especially eerie—and hey, it’s in the last panel, which means we have to turn the page to see Scott’s response, which is “YES—I—I want to die! Living is futile—I-I want to DIE! —to DIE!” When I first read this, it struck me as peculiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Was it the image of Mister Miracle on a phone? No, turns out he’d been on the phone occasionally, as early as issue #3. The answer was actually in Mark Evanier’s afterword to the Omnibus Edition. “…one afternoon, as he was working on Forever People #11, [Jack] received a very disturbing call of the good news/bad news variety. The Good News: ...Kamandi and The Demon looked like sure hits. The Bad News: In order to make sure Jack could keep on doing both sure hits, a decision had been made to ‘suspend’ Forever People and New Gods. Jack was devastated.

Actually, ‘devastated’ doesn’t begin to describe it… He was grey and his voice had the solemn tremor of someone struggling to remain strong while announcing that a loved one had died.” Did he actually say “I-I want to DIE!—to DIE!” then? No. But he drew it—drew it in a book he started shortly after that: Mister Miracle #12, the only Fourth World book not cancelled, the only character not a failure. Of course, one bad phone call doesn’t mean that it gets immediately transformed into fiction. You have to consider context. And the context in this story is that Colonel Darby is a capitalist with a bet he wants to pay off. “This ‘escape’ chap has a unique faculty! HE NEVER FAILS! I may reap a huge profit by proving that he CAN!” So it’s a matter of money and success and fame and being a proven bet. Hmm. Sounds familiar. Someone more schooled in psychology could unpack this if necessary. My amateur analysis would just note that it’s interesting that Mister Miracle is being both bet on and against. Scott himself is supposed to get a cut of the payoff, but only if he wins, of course. It feels like a strange kind of anger on Jack’s part, not just at the DC bigwigs for canceling his beloved books, but also betting on his remaining characters—on him—to keep defying death. “We’re sportsmen,” Darby explains at one point. “Well-able to exercise our whims and fancies!” Mister Miracle’s battles are only about “saving” them from “boredom.” After Scott (spoiler) wins, Jack makes sure that the terms of the fight don’t pollute his heroism. Ted says “Let’s NOT collect the winnings on this act!” to which Scott and Barda cry, in the last image, “On to the NEXT one! THE SHOW MUST GO ON!!” That’s a simple exclamation on the surface, but is Jack talking about them? About his own next ones? I don’t know, but Jack is saying the point isn’t the money, the capital, the sales figures, the fame. The point is the work. I think we can all agree on that. If you aren’t sure, I’ll have Mystivac come by to persuade you. H (above) Kolossal Kirby Koincidence or true inspiration? 1972’s Mystivac has blades that come out from his knuckles and make the sound SNIK, just like Wolverine in his 1975 debut…

After his DC contract is up, Kirby moves back to Marvel Comics in 1975, producing new series including Black Panther and The Eternals, but office politics cut his stay short. One high point is his final collaboration with Stan Lee: A new graphic novel of his creation The Silver Surfer. It reaffirms the character’s importance to Jack’s legacy, even as he chooses to leave mainstream comic books for good, and explore the field he started in: Animation.

David Blumberg recalls attending Phil Seuling’s New York Comic Art Convention at the Commodore Hotel on July 3–7, 1975: “I was a dealer so I had access to being the first one on line when Jack was signing. He signed the program book, with many other famous artists. He also signed my Strange Tales Annual #2 and did not recall that he worked on that book, as it was a Spider-Man crossover. The signature was on the splash page. All I can say is that he was a really nice, down-to-earth guy and had no problems with his ego, which is the sign of a true legend.” David created a tribute piece of the Surfer, titled Jacob Kurtzberg 1968/ Jacob Blumberg 2018, incorporating his background art with Kirby’s foreground figure.

(left) For the Silver Surfer graphic novel, Kirby provided Stan Lee with typewritten descriptions of the action and motivations in each panel he drew, by which Stan wrote the dialogue (above) and indicated for the letterer where to place it on a photocopy of Jack’s pencil art (below).

(above) Just for fun, here’s a rough 1977 Silver Surfer sketch, which we’re printing in silver ink.

The Silver Surfer is quintessential Kirby, and the character’s influence was strong throughout the remainder of Jack’s career. Here’s a 1980s animation drawing, that he modified to include his iconic hero.

RetroFan: The Pop Culture You Grew Up With! If you love Pop Culture of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, editor MICHAEL EURY’s latest magazine is just for you!

RETROFAN #8 (NOW BI-MONTHLY!)

RETROFAN #8 features interviews with the Sixties’ grooviest family band, THE COWSILLS, and TV’s coolest mom, JUNE LOCKHART! Plus: MARS ATTACKS!, MAD MAGAZINE in the Seventies, the FLINTSTONES turn sixty, ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL, HONEY WEST, the POPEYE PICNIC, the SMILEY FACE fad, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, MARTIN PASKO, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, and SCOTT SHAW! Edited by MICHAEL EURY. (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships March 2020

RETROFAN #1

Please add $1 per issue for shipping in the US.

RETROFAN #2

RETROFAN #6

RETROFAN #7

RETROFAN #9

Interviews with MeTV’s crazy creepster SVENGOOLIE and Eddie Munster himself, BUTCH PATRICK! Call on the original Saturday Morning GHOST BUSTERS, with BOB BURNS! Uncover the nutty NAUGAS! Plus: “My Life in the Twilight Zone,” “I Was a Teenage James Bond,” “My Letters to Famous People,” the ARCHIE-DOBIE GILLIS connection, Pinball Hall of Fame, Alien action figures, Rubik’s Cube & more!

Featuring a JACLYN SMITH interview, as we reopen the Charlie’s Angels Casebook, and visit the Guinness World Records’ largest Charlie’s Angels collection. Plus: an exclusive interview with funnyman LARRY STORCH, The Lone Ranger in Hollywood, The Dick Van Dyke Show, a vintage interview with Jonny Quest creator DOUG WILDEY, a visit to the Land of Oz, the ultra-rare Marvel World superhero playset, and more!

NOW BI-MONTHLY! Interviews with ’70s’ Captain America REB BROWN, and Captain Nice (and Knight Rider’s KITT) WILLIAM DANIELS with wife BONNIE BARTLETT! Plus: Coloring Books, Fall Previews for Saturday morning cartoons, The Cyclops movie, actors behind your favorite TV commercial characters, BENNY HILL, the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, 8-track tapes, and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships May 2020

RETROFAN #3

RETROFAN #4

RETROFAN #5

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), SEA-MONKEYS®, 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 way-out 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!

Interviews with MARK HAMILL & Greatest American Hero’s WILLIAM KATT! Blast off with JASON OF STAR COMMAND! Stop by the MUSEUM OF POPULAR CULTURE! 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!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

SUBSCRIBE NOW! Six issues: $67 Economy, $101 International, $27 Digital Only

TwoMorrows. The Future of Pop History. TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

DON’T RISK A SOLD OUT ISSUE AT BARNES & NOBLE!

SUBSCRIBE TODAY!

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

During his restless late 1970s stay at Marvel, Kirby was still cooking up new concepts in hopes of finding other avenues to support his family. He developed several properties like Captain Victory and Thunderfoot for his own “Jack Kirby Comics” line which never materialized. But in 1981 when Pacific Comics offered a new Direct Market for comic book distribution, and creator-ownership of characters, Jack had several concepts ready to help save the industry.

Give That Man...

Incidental Iconography

...A Silver Star!

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

ne of the benefits of looking at Jack’s later creations is that we have a great deal more of his work preserved in pencil form, as he began making copies of them before sending them off to be inked. This gives us some greater insight into his process, as we can compare Jack’s originals against what was ultimately published to see exactly what changes may have been made by an inker or production artist after the pages left Jack’s drawing table. One such case, of course, is Silver Star. The original Silver Star sketch that Jack made is dated January 1975 and features a very patriotically themed hero. 1 (Hardly surprising with America’s bicentennial the following year already receiving a fair amount of media attention.) Although the basic form of the hero looks much like how the character ended up (indeed, the very pose is virtually identical to the one ultimately used on the cover of Silver Star #1), he’s colored in a decidedly American flag motif, complete with red and white stripes running across his chest and torso. The “Silver Star” name is almost entirely in reference to the military medal and is not really conveyed through the costume at all, except perhaps by a star

2 emblazoned on the character’s belt buckle. This one concept drawing eventually got worked into a screenplay that Jack co-wrote with Steve Sherman, the first draft of which they finished in 1977. With that treatment, Jack created some additional sketches of the title character. 2 Two of them show how Jack removed the patriotic motif, and started veering towards a more monochromatic look—one fairly light and airy, and the other more covered in shadow with a large star belt buckle. In both these cases, Jack retains some form of gauntlets and some headgear that covers everything but the character’s face.

What’s interesting, though, is that one of the two pages of art that Jack included when he submitted the screenplay to the Writer’s Guild of America West (WGAW) was another sketch he had done back in 1975. The design was almost identical to his original character sketch—down to the very pose—with the only notable exceptions being the loss of the stripes and the star and wing design on the belt buckle. 3 The screenplay, obviously, never went anywhere in Hollywood and the idea sat in a drawer. A few years later, Pacific saw some success with Jack’s Captain Victory book in 1981 and asked for something else. Jack pulled out his Silver Star concept and ran with it. The first most people saw of Silver Star was the cover to the first issue, where Jack re-uses the same pose once again. 4 This version has two minor changes from what he had included with the screenplay: The shoulder padding is removed and a star—completely absent in the previous version—was added to the character’s forehead. Interestingly, though, this design does not appear anywhere in the issue. As part of the character’s origin, we see Morgan Miller being wrapped/fitted with a “mess of thick silver fabric” to act as shielding from the power within him. Throughout the first issue, Jack draws his outfit as a simple, skin-tight silver suit, but with a number of seams visible to indicate the almost bandage-like approach with which he was covered. Considering that Jack had already drawn Silver Star several times before this, showcasing variations on his final costume, in this first issue it was clearly not intended to be anything but just an initial body-wrap that was tied to his origin. And indeed, beginning on

the first page of the second issue, we see Silver Star in his more familiar design. What has dropped from Jack’s earlier designs is, not surprisingly, one of the more subtle ideas he had originally drawn in. Many of Jack’s early verbal descriptions of the character note that his power “glowed within him like a Pulsar!” This gets visualized somewhat in the early drawings, too, as there appears to be something of a glowing effect emanating from the central vertical stripe down Silver Star’s chest. This effect can even be seen on the cover of the first issue, but that seems to be the last time Jack drew it in that feature. For the remainder of the series, Jack’s design remains fairly consistent. Looking at the pencils, there are a few instances where he might forget Silver Star’s eye shield/mask, or draw the character with regular gloves instead of banded gauntlets, but those problems are infrequent and only appear in the final issues of the series. D. Bruce Berry was able to fairly easily make correc3 tions in the inking for consistency. The only other variation Jack seems to make with the costume is Silver Star’s belt buckle. It was originally shield-shaped, tying into the patriotic version of the design Jack first drew in 1975. Jack apparently considered this design element of little consequence, though, as he changes it in his art regularly, sometimes drawing it as an upside-down shield, a diamond, or a triangle. In the last panel of the series, he even omits the belt buckle entirely! But here again, this is generally adjusted in the inking. Based on the character sketches that Jack apparently discarded in order to return to his original design, and the fact that he kept it remarkably consistent for the year he worked on the series (several years after he had put aside the concept!), it seems as if this was one of Jack’s character designs that really clicked with him. While there is some simplicity to it that obviously would have made it easier to recall, that he kept the helmet, in particular, unchanged, suggests to me that he really liked what he came up with here, right out of the gate. H 62

Kirby’s Silver Star was his final original creation to get a regular comic book series, but real-life drama was taking hold for Jack. A behind-thescenes battle was raging with Marvel Comics, over the return of his original art, and creator credits. Kirby finally chose to go public with the fight after seeing an ad in Variety magazine erroneously listing Stan Lee as creator of Captain America.

Jack Kirby always chose to treat his fans and fellow pros graciously, at convention appearances, and even hosting them in his own home. So when he ended up fighting a very public battle against Marvel Comics in the 1980s over the return of his original artwork, it’s no wonder the level of public and industry support he received was unprecedented, thanks to his lifetime dedication to his family, fans, and his...

Circle of Friends

A few Kirby encounters, recounted

My family knew Jack and Roz when I was a kid; we belonged to the same synagogue, Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks. Here’s the card he made for me at my Bar Mitzvah. I first met Jack when I was around 11 or 12; our Rabbi took me to his home for a visit since I was a lover of comic books and loved drawing. His home was amazing, full of his collages and artwork everywhere. Jack became friends with my dad and we visited him many times over the years. He’d always take a look at my artwork and give me advice, autograph new comics, and Roz would make us sandwiches. I never heard him complain about how poorly the industry was treating him during this time. Instead he spoke about gods and aliens, the goodness in people, and that somewhere out in the universe, “there’s a lot of traffic.” He would occasionally add that I should read less comics and get a nice girlfriend instead. There isn’t a day that doesn’t go by when I don’t think of Jack and Roz. Jack inspired my own successful career in design, but more importantly, he taught me how to treat others with kindness and humility. Dan Rosenberg I moved to Thousand Oaks with my family when I was 10, in 1980. We joined a synagogue, Temple Etz Chaim, and that’s where I attended religious school. One day (it must have been between 1981 and 1983, as I had my Bat Mitzvah in 1983 and then no longer attended religious school), a man came to draw for the kids. I think it was a Sunday, during Sunday School. It was the grandfather of a girl, Tracy, who also must have attended the religious school. I don’t think Tracy was in my grade, so I wasn’t really friends with her, but my mother and her mother were friends. Anyway, this man came and drew my picture. I didn’t really know who he was—remember, this was 1980, well before the Internet, and before the explosion of what Marvel is today. I remember my mother telling me that Jack Kirby, the man, was a famous comic book artist. I don’t remember anything else about being drawn—did I wait in line? Did he make conversation with me? I have no recall, as I was likely 11 or 12, and am now 48! I had that picture tacked in my room, on my bulletin board, for years. When I left home in 1987 to go to college, it got boxed up with all my other childhood memorabilia. That box got moved around to different houses, and states, without getting unpacked. Last year, my son (now age 15) got really into the Marvel Universe, and I remembered the picture. I dug it out of the box. I can’t believe how well it held up. While it’s faded (the original paper was a sky blue) and the edges pinpricked from my various pushpins over the years, the drawing itself is perfect. I wish I had realized back then how amazing it is to have a picture drawn of me by Jack Kirby, because I would have taken much better care of it. As it is, now that I have unearthed it, I got it framed professionally with special glass to protect it from further damage. And it’s hanging proudly in my living room. I love the picture—it’s me as a super-hero. I told my son that one day that drawing will be his, and he can tell his kids that it is a picture of Grandma Becca as a super- hero, drawn by the great Jack Kirby. Becca Barr 63

(above) Jack contributed this Destroyer Duck illo to the 1982 FOOG (Friends of Old Gerber) benefit portfolio, to help Steve Gerber fight Marvel Comics for o wnership of Howard the Duck. (below and next page) Fan sketches.

Meeting Neal Kirby and his father at the New York Comic Con (sorry, not San Diego) in the summer of 1972 was the beginning of a lasting friendship. On my visits to California, I often stayed with Jack and Roz at their Thousand Oaks home. In 1975 I received in the mail a small envelope containing what I thought was a traditional Chanukah card from the Kirbys. Upon opening the card [below], I was delighted to find a rendering Jack did of the Thing, wearing a Jewish prayer shawl and yarmulke. I sent Jack several enlarged copies of the drawing. He signed and framed one and hung it in his studio. As Jack would tell friends and visitors, “It’s a Jewish Thing.” David Folkman In 1966 I discovered comic books and Jack Kirby became an immediate favorite for his FF and Cap work! Two of that year’s other favorites for me were Gil Kane for his Atom, Green Lantern, and Hulk, and Will Eisner for his two Harvey Spirit issues. Cut to

20+ years later—20+ years of being a major comics fan! It was my first (and it would turn out, only) time at San Diego and I was hoping to bump into some of my long time favorites in person. Suddenly, there was Gil Kane walking right toward me, tall and looking very much as if he’d been drawn by Gil Kane! I grabbed my camera and took a quick shot of him just as he passed. But I was still walking ahead slowly as I did so and I accidentally bumped into a sweater-wearing Jack Kirby and knocked him right into Will Eisner, who was dressed to the nines! When I realized what I had done— and who I had done it to—I quickly mumbled apologies and scrambled away. Lesson learned: Be careful what you wish for. You might get it! Steven Thompson

Kirby’s decision to retire in the late 1980s was largely due to health reasons, although even into the 1990s, new projects based on his concepts, like Phantom Force and Topps’ Secret City Saga, could be found. Before he died in 1994, Jack saw Ray Wyman’s The Art of Jack Kirby published as the first extensive biography done on him, but he had no way of knowing that his passing would lead me to start...

the Jack Kirby Collector by John Morrow

The photo above was taken by me at the 1991 San Diego Comic-Con, during my one brief meeting with Jack, long before I had any desire for a career in publishing. In 25 years producing this magazine, countless individuals have helped me with its content—from sending in art from their collection, to writing articles and inking covers. While I can’t possible list everyone who’s helped me, here’s my own personal list of some of the TJKC “family”—those individuals who’ve gone above and beyond, without whom I could never have kept this publication going for 25 years: Mark Alexander Jim Amash Jerry Boyd Robert L. Bryant Jr. Norris Burroughs Comic-Con International Jon B. Cooke Jean Depelley Paul Doolittle Shel Dorf Shelton Drum Mark Evanier Chris Fama Shane Foley Barry Forshaw Mike Gartland Russ Garwood Glen Gold David Hamilton Charles Hatfield Rand Hoppe Richard Howell Roz Kirby Lisa Kirby Sean Kleefeld Richard Kolkman Tom Kraft Richard Kyle Marty Lasick Adam McGovern

Mark Miller John Modica Hannah Rose Morrow Lily Morrow Pamela Morrow Glenn Musial Eric Nolen-Weathington Mark Pacella Steve Robertson Mike Royer Steve Rude David Schwartz Steve Sherman Joe Simon Joe Sinnott Ed Stelli Tom Stewart Mike Thibodeaux Maggie Thompson Patrick Varker Rich Vitone Ray Wyman Tom Ziuko A nd so many others who’ve contributed art and articles to TJKC; I couldn’t have done it without you. Let’s keep it going another 25 years!

And here’s to the outstanding array of talented artists who’ve provided inks, colors, or paintings over Jack’s art for our covers—a veritable who’s who of comics, all for the love of Kirby: Neal Adams Dan Adkins Mike Allred Murphy Anderson Terry Austin Dick Ayers D. Bruce Berry Steve Bissette Bill Black John Byrne Paul Chadwick Giorgio Comolo Darwyn Cooke Shane Foley Frank Fosco Frank Giacoia Dick Giordano Al Gordon Dean Haspiel Don Heck Alex Horley 65

Richard Howell Klaus Janson Karl Kesel Ladronn Erik Larsen Mike Mignola Al Milgrom Frank Miller Kevin Nowlan Jerry Ordway George Pérez Eric Powell Reedman David Roach Marshall Rogers Alex Ross Mike Royer Joe Rubinstein Steve Rude P. Craig Russell Randy Sargent Mark Schultz Tom Scioli John Severin Walter Simonson Joe Sinnott Paul Smith Ken Steacy Jim Steranko Dave Stevens

Dave Stewart Chic Stone Mike Thibodeaux Bruce Timm Alex Toth George Tuska Trevor Von Eeden Pete Von Sholly Matt Wagner Glenn Whitmore Bob Wiacek Al Williamson Barry Windsor-Smith Bill Wray Tom Ziuko Ray Zone

His

Legacy

In black holes, gravitational forces are so strong that light cannot escape. This phenomenon creates a boundary beyond which events cannot affect an observer outside of it. Similarly, Kirby continually drew readers into his world through his masterful storytelling, and even a quarter century after his passing, the pull of his work is so strong that fans and pros can’t get away from it—leading to one professional’s work that can only be called an...

ack Kirby knew that everything he did was leading up to things he could never imagine. The Kirby vision was made for a series of crescendos, and a new culmination (with infinite further possibilities radiating outward) was reached toward the end of 2019, with Tom Scioli’s Fantastic Four: Grand Design. The two-issue, 80-page epic followed on from the format of fellow Pittsburgh icon Ed Piskor’s X-Men: Grand Design books, though Scioli’s point of departure was the oeuvre of cosmic sagas and family dramas he’s been accumulating since the 1990s. Space-odysseys like The Myth of 8-Opus grounded him in the landscape of Kirby, and groovy reality-benders like GØDLAND (with Joe Casey) and Final Frontier took him to the stratospheric vantage-point where he could see beyond to where Kirby’s imagination was heading. In Fantastic Four: Grand Design he captures the wonder of the original Lee & Kirby cornucopia while reflecting the multiverse of possibilities in later runs, alternate versions and other media—“whatever could make a richer recipe,” as he puts it—supercolliding decades of storylines we’ve seen while illuminating dimensions of it we never grasped, and exploding out into novel concepts that it naturally leads to but we’d never see coming. It’s like a 100-part event comic (and really, what else was the first 100 or so issues of FF?) in two compact bursts, reading like both a CGI blockbuster and an indie film about the personalities at the nucleus of the myth: “It was always there, so just bring it up to the surface,” Scioli says of the world’s greatest dysfunctional family’s internal issues as portrayed here.

(top) The surprisingly FF-reminiscent origin-story of Galactus, as seen in Scioli’s opening cosmic canvas. (bottom left and right) The never-ending soap (and shampoo?) opera of Namor, Reed & Sue. (next page, top and center) Sue’s struggles to stay in the picture, as only Scioli has seen. (next page, bottom) Scioli’s tragic, absurd recurring dream of “This Man… This Monster!”

And what wasn’t there is just as automatically yet ingeniously filled in (“There were some really interesting gaps that gave me the opportunity to play,” he remarks of minor matters like how the FF went from rocket-stealing outlaws to beloved role-models, and the answers all make fascinating sense). You’re reading this in a world already never to be the same after Fantastic Four: Grand Design’s November-December 2019 publication, but Scioli and I skyped back in Autumn as the countdown was still underway…

Event Horizon THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: This felt to me like the kind of intricate yet elegant weave of the FF’s entire continuity over 50+ years that we see in the MCU’s synthesis of storylines. How much did you immerse yourself in before it took shape on the page (and how many drafts of roads-maybe-taken did it go through)? TOM SCIOLI: I absorbed all of it, and it’s so vast—you could spend your whole career solving this same problem, trying to tell the whole Fantastic Four story in under 100 pages and as completely as possible. A puzzle that has no solution, and a million solutions; it was really, really fun.

Columnist Adam McGovern queries auteur Tom Scioli about his designs on Kirby’s first family

going in that you’re seeing a condensed version of, like, the “real” story; the real story exists somewhere, not quite in the comics and not quite in reality, some misty land between the two. And so it’s okay to just catch a glimpse of something as it goes by. That makes it seem more real, like a documentary, where of course the story you’re seeing is fragmented. The world that it’s describing is a real world, and this is like, a report on that.

TJKC: Were there any false starts, or parts left out? SCIOLI: There was a lot—with all of these hard cuts you have to make, not only can you not keep everything in, you can’t keep anything in—you have to cut to the bone. The Super Skrull got a panel

TJKC: Now that you say so, what this format really reminds me of is Kirby’s “Jack Ruby” strip from Esquire [a docu-comic that summarized the tale of JFK’s assassin’s assassin]—the brisk, telegraphic highlights of a broader story. Though nowhere near as choppy as Kirby’s was, and it doesn’t need footnotes! So there are even Kirby homages beyond the FF. Speaking of which, the dream-sequence with Lyja— SCIOLI: That’s sort of a dream sequence, but not quite a dream. It’s in this timeless [environment] inside of Galactus’ worldship, kind of like near the end of 2001 when he’s in this weird alien setting and time bends and twists, so those visions [Johnny] sees inside Galactus’ worldship, maybe they’re dreams, maybe they’re phantoms, but they also might be echoes of things that haven’t happened to him yet. TJKC: Funny you should mention that, since I had wondered if that sequence was in other ways a stealth crossover with Kirby’s run on the 2001 comic since the Watcher looks like the New Seed in those panels! Like when you manage to work Devil Dinosaur into one earlier part… SCIOLI: I thought about the Fantastic Four and their importance to Marvel as a whole; when you’re doing a story of the Fantastic Four you’re also doing a story of the Marvel Universe. So much of the non-X-Men part of the Marvel Universe was birthed in Fantastic Four. So having Devil Dinosaur, having the Celestials makes perfect sense—and keeping it Kirby, too. Anything that crossed Kirby’s path is fair game.

instead of a page. I had plans for the Golden Age Human Torch, but he doesn’t even show up. TJKC: Though, I thought it was amazing how we would see flashes of the full fabric, like the single panel where Reed’s fighting in WWII and he catches a glimpse of the original Human Torch, as we remember him mentioning to Ben in FF Annual #4. SCIOLI: And Lyja Storm doesn’t make it into the normal flow of the continuity, but you still see echoes of her existence [in a hallucination sequence]. This form of storytelling is really great because it’s already assumed 67

A lot of the hardest work I had to do in this storywise was, with Fantastic Four we sort of have the middle; Fantastic Four #1 starts with the middle of their story, so I had to figure out, what’s the beginning of the Fantastic Four story, and what’s the end. The middle [of Grand Design] is the part that hews closest to what’s already there; the early [stages], involving the Celestials etc., and how it goes into “the Scioliverse” towards the end, it’s a matter of plugging holes, looking at what I have to work with and seeing where I’m needed. And where I can stand back and be quiet for a moment and let the story tell itself.

pelling across the decades than the way that X-Men or Spider-Man were able to reinvent themselves. I thought, I’m doing a retelling, so let me keep that going, I can really delve into that and really explore it. So it goes for almost the entire book, it’s a tension that goes through the whole thing. It stood out to me. When you think of the great couples in genre history, Reed and Sue get a lot of lip-service, but, as a fan of the comic, I had a hard time finding their great moment, or moments. Whereas I can find great moments of Cyclops and Phoenix, of Scott Free and Big Barda. But I couldn’t find the evidence of the greatness of this couple anywhere in the comics… and if anything, the comics themselves, across the history, support the opposite; that it is sort of a troubled relationship. There’s definitely something there, but it’s not clear-cut and it’s complicated, and, y’know, Namor keeps popping up throughout the history of the comic. And then there’s sequences where Sue files for divorce, so—that’s part of the Fantastic Four. There’s this happy fairytale version of it, which is like the publicity, the public image of the Fantastic Four, fictionally and metafictionally in “our” world, that isn’t borne out in the original documents. So I explored that, I told it straight.

TJKC: One measure to me of a worthwhile, essential revisitation of older comic material, is if the new stuff makes me realize something that was always there that I never noticed, or my brain never put together. In this case one of the things was that I realized the love-triangle between Sue, Reed and Namor was singular among all those early-Marvel soap operas in that, I think it was the only one where the woman character was the focal point; we’re most interested in what her choice is, rather than whether Scott will “win” Jean in X-Men, etc. There’s an individuality, and a personality, that Sue has in your version that she didn’t have from the beginning in the original comics. It seems like no coincidence to me that, long ago now, you and [Joe] Casey created an alternate-FF with a gender-flipped majority in GØDLAND, having three strong smart female family members and the one guy. SCIOLI: That love triangle of Namor and Reed and Sue is so compelling—and you almost forget it ever existed, because it got resolved in the comics, and resolved somewhat early. Some of these other love triangles made it into the 1970s or ’80s; this one didn’t even make it out of the ’60s. That’s an element that Fantastic Four kind of lacks, and made it a little less com-

TJKC: Fantastic Four: Grand Design becomes a kind of higher-dimensional variation on the whole FF canon in a way that X-Men: Grand Design didn’t diverge from its source… what gave you the confidence to do that, and how did Marvel feel about it? SCIOLI: I’ve gotten to a point where I trust my instincts, so when it leads me in some direction that’s, kind of, “whoa!”, I know that that’s a good thing. I’ve taken a bunch of chances in the past and had them pay off, so I took my chances here. Fully expecting the possibility of pushback, but I gotta do it my way, I have to be honest, truthful to the story that is unfolding; do it the way I see it. There were certain things that made so much sense to me that were sort of radical, but I had to do them. Opportunities like this don’t come along every day; this is not the time to pull your punches! With Marvel, it was all just, “Wow, great,” and I think they fully expected that there would be artistic license; there were a couple things here and there, like, my initial drafts had cursing, so there was that; but overall I think Marvel understood that part of the appeal of these Grand Design things is that it’s one artist’s vision; this is “what the Fantastic Four means to me.” 68

meticulous but you’re not over-rendering. It’s a very comfortable way of working. The funny thing is, there are parts where, because it’s such a smaller image-area, things are shorthand, but then as I got comfortable working at that scale, it started getting even more dense; your comfort zone catches up with you. You try a different thing, and are doing things that are uncharacteristic—which is a good thing—but then all of a sudden I’m doing these really detailed drawings that are half the size of what I was doing before. TJKC: It’s interesting you should refer to the one single vision, since on X-Men: Grand Design Ed was working with a canon that has several “definitive” eras, be it Kirby & Lee or Thomas & Adams or Claremont & Byrne &/or Jim Lee, or Morrison or now Hickman; whereas, as great as some runs have been, when people think of the FF they’re thinking of Lee & Kirby first and foremost. Were there any different considerations in formulating a Grand Design based on a canon that people all agree on—did that make it harder or easier? SCIOLI: The X-Men is more labor-intensive… hopefully I’ve made something that can give Kirby & Lee a run for their money, but my thing is very beholden to Kirby. It’s like the only way out is in; the only way to surpass Stan Lee and Jack Kirby is to dive directly into the core of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and break it down on the subatomic level. TJKC: What size did you do the originals for this book? Or even, did you do them as pages, or as individual panels? SCIOLI: I did them as pages; I can see where you might think that—it’s a lot of panels on a page! But no, I did them the normal size I work, it’s like one-and-ahalf-up, roughly 10 x 15-inch image area. So, drawing at same size, different scale. TJKC: I assume that must affect, to a certain extent, the density of detail? Does it make it more of a shorthand? SCIOLI: It’s definitely a sweet spot, because you can make something that’s very detailed without having to get into gratuitous, gilding-thelily… everything looks very tight and

TJKC: They always say that if you do something you like, other people are going to like it, and I guess if you keep yourself interested, that’s what will hold our eyes. This book has the look of being the perfect drawing for each moment you were doing it, adapting your style as you go along, with a fluidity that’s consistent. Also relating to scale, what was your progression of thought as to when to have the tight grid and when to break out of that? SCIOLI: That’s the beauty of working with a lot of small panels; if the reader is willing to go along with you, once they’re along for that ride, you can do a half-pagesized panel and it looks like a double-page splash! TJKC: You said before that the only way out is in, though in some cases it seems the only way out is to stay completely outside. For me, the first real game-changing post-Lee & Kirby run was Millar & Hitch, and of course Hitch is as far from Kirby as it gets with his verisimilitude. It’s funny, because as you said, you can’t go too far from the Lee & Kirby blueprint, but then, the further you get from it, the more it’s something Kirby himself would be interested in reading? SCIOLI: After having done this—who knows if I’ll ever cross paths with these characters again, but I would love to, and I have a million ideas for, taking them into the future. So, okay, this is me saying here’s how I see Fantastic Four as-it-is, but the challenge of, “you’re the guy who does Fantastic Four now,” the regular Fantastic Four series, I would relish that challenge, and it would be a very different comic. It would take it into utterly uncharted territory. H 69

(previous page, top) Crisis of infinite pop references, in this more-than-meets-theeye spectacle from Scioli’s second issue. (previous page, bottom left and right) Scioli makes a positive I.D. with these quintessential Ben Grimm-isms. (this page, top left and right) All “four” one on Scioli’s firstissue cover; our heroes are celebrated in, erm, FF-igy and with Scioli’s updated cultural perception. (this page, bottom) Not known for subtext, Maximus the Mad channels the spirit of ’65!

Going Mutts Over Kirby! by Glen Gold

ou never know where you’re going to find the Kirby influence, and today we’re going to find it in a pretty unexpected place. When Charles Schulz called Mutts “one of the best comic strips of all time,” he wasn’t exaggerating. Artist Patrick McDonnell somehow joins the visual poetry of Krazy Kat with the subtle yet resonant humor of Schulz’s own Peanuts strip. Found in over 700 newspapers, Mutts features the daily adventures of Mooch (a cat) and his friend Earl (a dog) in a suburban neighborhood with their human guardians and an ever-expanding cast of squirrels, deer, bears, birds, and occasional wild animals from Africa. Beyond how funny it is, and how well it captures the complexity—and simplicity—of human/animal relationships, Mutts has a certain spiritual side that deepens the more you read it. Part of that is McDonnell’s clear affection for animals. He does a lot of work on behalf of animal organizations, and his recurring “Shelter Stories” strips are heartbreaking and lovely tales of love found at the rescue. Mutts finds its gentle humor in how we don’t really own the planet, but share it with a lot of wee beasts whose simple needs, if we care enough for them, might actually make us better human beings. But it’s a whole lot more than a cute “funny animal” strip. Mutts is deep, with a Zen, minimalist, Hokusai manga aesthetic, to the extent that Abrams is now saluting its 25th anniversary with a coffee table book called The Art Of Nothing. This is maybe the least Kirbyish title I can imagine, as Jack composed wall-towall everything. McDonnell has long used Mutts Sunday strips’ title panels as a place to salute—and

parody—artists and familiar cultural touchtones. You might find his characters inserted into a Basquiat, Vermeer, Warhol, or cover of a Frank Zappa album. Which means that last April, readers found in the Sunday comics an homage to the cover to Fantastic Four #51. A few weeks later, a second homage, this one to Fantastic Four #67. And amazingly, each of them was inked by none other than Joltin’ Joe Sinnott! What? How did that happen? I asked. It turns out McDonnell has been a Kirby fan since he was a kid. His earliest memory of comic books was the spinner rack at his local luncheonette in Edison, New Jersey in 1964. His older brother gave him and his younger brother orders about who was allowed to collect what— Patrick was told to start with the X-Men. This meant he read about the Stranger, the Juggernaut, then the Sentinels, and because his other brothers were accumulating the rest of the Marvel line, he got to read the Galactus saga month-by-month as it was hitting the stands. He responded immediately to Kirby’s work on a visceral level, but his readership faded as he grew up and discovered girls and music (he’s a Captain Beefheart fan). But then his teen years coincided with Kirby’s arrival at DC, so once again he got to watch a whole world, the Fourth World, unfolding month by month, this time a storyline brimming with the increased sophistication that a teenager would appreciate. “My mind was blown,” he says. “The Fourth World was a nova of creativity.” Above all, there is something in Jack’s prolific nature that still speaks to Patrick. “When you do a daily strip, it helps to have some kind of discipline and love of the medium, and when you look at how much work he did, he lived for his art. His ‘artist well’ never ran dry. His productivity and faith in his connection to The Source is inspiring to any cartoonist, especially one doing a daily comic strip.”

(above) One of McDonnell’s prize possessions: The Orion entry from DC’s Who’s Who series, still in pencil, and personally signed to the cartoonist by Kirby.

McDonnell recognizes how some spiritual aspects of those books would overlap with his own strip—for instance, The Eternals’ storyline leading to the formation of the Unimind. The idea that each of us is a smaller piece of a greater whole would end up a part of his own works’ DNA. Kirby might have brought more darkness into his stories, “but you need the darkness in comics,” McDonnell says. “At least the light always wins.” When he started publishing, Patrick gravitated toward the “less is more” approach of Peanuts. Even if his other artistic influences are more front-and-center (McDonnell co-authored a monograph, The Art of George Herriman, that stood for years as the standard work on the Krazy Kat artist), he never soured on Kirby. “I might aim at how little you have to show to get a feeling across to someone, but Kirby was the opposite. And I enjoy that. When you think of all the concepts he came up with, his imagination, how he draws, even the less-inspired Kirby is better than everyone else’s best work.” A few years ago, McDonnell inked a blue line of an unpublished Kirby Galactus splash. “That was one of the most fun projects I’ve had. And it deepened how I already felt about Jack. I realized how important every line is, how intuitively that work flowed out of him, the details flowing so naturally. I wish I could draw like Kirby. I was looking at the Westerns lately, and he could really draw horses. Horses are hard,” he laughs. “And it made me realize how important the inkers are.” Speaking of which: Joe Sinnott (pictured above in a photo by Jon B. Cooke). “My brother’s friend is a talented artist, James Fiorentino. James knows Joe Sinnott well, and set up a chance to meet him, his son Mark, and daughter-in-law.” After shaking hands with the legendary artist, he learned over the course of an afternoon what a kind soul he was. It turned out they didn’t just have a love of comics in common, but animals too. That day someone suggested Sinnott ink a Mutts strip and he immediately agreed. Patrick says, “The young Marvel Maniac in me was overjoyed. You have to be amazed by how the world works, to be inked by the guy inking the covers of the books I read when I was five years old.” The spirit of Joe Sinnott, age 92, still working and still loving it, reflects another part of Kirby’s appeal to McDonnell. And this aspect also has a bit of philosophical nuance to it. As McDonnell says, when Kirby finished drawing something, he never seemed to look back or get precious about it. Instead, he was always looking ahead. “He was like a Navajo sandpainter—you do the thing and the wind blows it away. You give it to the gods and you’re onto the next one.” H

www.kirbymuseum.org

Newsletter Last of the Viking Statues!

We’re so thankful that a friend of the Kirby family, who wishes to remain anonymous, has donated Jack Photos above thanks to Jeremy Kirby. Kirby’s Viking statue to us for forever safe-keeping. We’ve showcased it at our booths in San Diego and New York. The poor guy lost one of his helmet wings when he fell off the mantel during the Northridge earthquake just a few weeks before Jack died.

TJKC Edition Winter 2020 The Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center is organized exclusively for educational purposes; more specifically, to promote and encourage the study, understanding, preservation and appreciation of the work of Jack Kirby by: • illustrating the scope of Kirby’s multi-faceted career, • communicating the stories, inspirations and influences of Jack Kirby, • celebrating the life of Jack Kirby and his creations, and • building understanding of comic books and comic book creators. To this end, the Museum will sponsor and otherwise support study, teaching, conferences, discussion groups, exhibitions, displays, publications and cinematic, theatrical or multimedia productions.

Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center PO Box 5236 Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA Telephone: (201) 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.

Another great Comic-Con!

Speaking of convention booths, we’d like to thank the folks at Comic-Con International: San Diego for sponsoring our booth this year. Our new location was wonderful, except for being farther away from the TwoMorrows booth! We also appreciate the help we received from Mark Badger, Bruce Simon, and Steve Sherman at the booth for much of the show. Steve, Bruce and Mark also gave a great presentation “A History of Jack Kirby.” We enjoyed visiting with Tracy Kirby and Ray Wyman, Jr., too!

Warrior Women!

Annual Memberships with one of these posters: $50*

In New York, thanks to The Comics Beat’s Heidi MacDonald, we sponsored a panel titled “Gangsters, Lovers, Heroes, Warriors, Gods: Jack Kirby’s Women,”

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

or this: $70* hosted by Elana Levin, with Heidi MacDonald, Jay Justice, Cecil Castellucci, Adrian Melo, and Meg Downey, discussing Kirby’s female characters.

The Scans Just Keep On Coming!

Fighting American print silkscreened in Switzerland

We’re still working hard building 23” x 19” our Digital Archive! Here’s a recent treat that we scanned, thanks to a generous *Please add $10 for memberships outside the US, collector: The original cover to cover additional postage costs. Posters come “as-is” and may not be in mint condition. art for Fantastic Four #77! 73

The

Future

“M

Kirby’s family took on Disney and got Jack credit for his work. Now, his legacy rests on the shoulders of...

The Monolith by John Morrow

arvel and the family of Jack Kirby have amicably resolved their legal disputes, and are looking forward to advancing their shared goal of honoring Mr. Kirby’s significant role in Marvel’s history.”

With that public statement by Marvel and Disney back in late September 2014, steps were put in motion to make sure Kirby would finally start getting some of the credit he deserves. It’s been a slow process to be sure, but think back 25 years, to when I started this magazine. In 1994, Kirby was hardly at the forefront of comics readers’ minds, and was basically unknown to the general public. In the quarter century since then, a lot of people have worked tirelessly to keep Jack’s name in the spotlight, most notably Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman, and Rand Hoppe and Tom Kraft at the Jack Kirby Museum. All modesty aside, I think this publication has also contributed a lot to keeping the historical record of Kirby’s achievements accurate, and visible. But when a monolithic company like Disney gets involved in anything, it’s a safe bet a much larger audience will take notice. Immediately after the 2014 announcement, Kirby’s credit line was added to all of Marvel’s comics featuring his creations and co-creations, and in films showcasing them. Then came Jack’s recognition alongside Stan Lee as a Disney Legend in 2017. Now, the latest tribute to Kirby has appeared at the Happiest Place On Earth. For six weeks (starting in late August 2019), Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park featured an exhibit entitled “Jack Kirby: The Man Behind The Eternals,” in its Walt Disney Presents theatre. This venue hosts, along with character photo-ops, a wealth of memorabilia from Walt Disney’s life, and a biographical film called One Man’s Dream, which runs continuously during park hours. To get to the Kirby display required walking past all of Walt’s historical artifacts, where display cases and Kirby graphics were presented in the large holding area tourists wait in before each showing of the film about Walt’s life. The theater regularly shows a promotional teaser for an upcoming project, and uses this area to promote it—and Disney could’ve easily centered this display around their upcoming Eternals film without showing any actual Kirby art, or even mentioning him. That they gave him a spot on the theater marquee and outdoor signage says a lot about how they’re staying true to what they promised in 2014 about honoring Jack—and doing so alongside that park’s tribute to the company’s founder and figurehead says even more. While I’m sure it’ll happen eventually, to this point I’m unaware of Disney ever doing such a tribute to Stan Lee in their parks. And while some fans have complained that this one doesn’t mention Jack’s 74

involvement with the other Marvel heroes’ creation, we don’t know what legal issues that would entail, though I suspect it would at least require Stan getting equal billing, thereby lessening the focus on Jack. This is also, as far as I’m aware, the first Marvel-related exhibit ever done at a Disney park in Orlando, Florida. A pre-Disney agreement Marvel made with Universal Studios gave Universal exclusive rights to use many of the 1960s Marvel characters in theme parks east of the Mississippi River. (Disney is working on a dedicated Marvel Land for their California parks at present, but no such effort is possible in Florida because of this agreement.) Jack’s son Neal Kirby was involved from the inception of the project, and provided photos of Jack’s drawing board, so an accurate replica of it could be included. I was unsuccessful in my attempts to get more background on who at Disney approved this project, but it appears someone involved knew their “Kirby”: It even included a copy of TwoMorrows’ Jack Kirby Checklist: Centennial Edition in the main display case, to my delight! Barring Disney buying out Universal, they’ll have to stick with newer Marvel properties like Eternals and Guardians of the Galaxy in Florida (they’re building a Guardians roller coaster at Epcot now). Perhaps we’ll see Machine Man and Devil Dinosaur in the Marvel films soon, so they can add that IP to the Orlando theme parks. And maybe if the Eternals film hits as big as Guardians did, we’ll see some kind of ride in Florida based on it; although Disney World looks more like a construction site than a theme park in a lot of places right now. They’ve already green-lit so many current projects, I don’t see them adding anything else major for at least a few more years. As of this writing, the Kirby display has vanished, replaced with one for Disney’s new film Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. Still, just like the Monolith from Jack’s 1970s 2001: A Space Odyssey series, you never know when and where his name and concepts will suddenly appear again. But when they do, you can be sure they’ll have an overpowering presence, at both coasts’ theme parks, and around the world. H

(top) The marquee outside the Walt Disney Presents theater at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park, and outdoor pole signage drawing tourists’ attention to the exhibit. (previous page, center) A large wall mural filled the waiting area, perfect for impromptu photo ops for tourists, like Jack and Roz Kirby, in this early 1970s visit to Disneyland (inset).

(left) The doors to the theater were adorned with blown up cosmic graphics from Kirby’s comics. (above) The film Thor: Ragnarok was hailed by fans for director Taika Waititi’s devotion to giving it a very Kirby feel in its art direction. But eagle-eyed historian Ferran Delgado actually managed to spot at least one piece of the source material! Flip upside-down to see Jack’s original “Robot Head” drawing.

Display photos courtesy of WDWNT (www.wdwnt.com), where fans can stay updated on all the Disney theme parks. 75

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! $1.95-$

DIGITAL

Go online for other issues, and an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all in-stock back issues at HALF-PRICE!

KIRBY COLLECTOR #72

KIRBY COLLECTOR #73

KIRBY COLLECTOR #69

KIRBY COLLECTOR #70

KIRBY COLLECTOR #71

KIRBY’S PARTNERS! Cap/Falcon/Bucky, Sandman & Sandy, Orion & Lightray, Johnny & Ben, Dingbats, Newsboys, plus features on JOE SIMON, MIKE ROYER, CHIC STONE, DICK AYERS, JOE SINNOTT, MIKE THIBODEAUX—even ROZ KIRBY! Also, BATTLE FOR A 3-D WORLD, the 2016 Comic-Con Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, and galleries of Kirby pencil art! Cover inked by JOE SINNOTT!

KIRBY: ALPHA! Looks at the beginnings of Kirby’s greatest concepts, and how he looked back in time and to the future for the origins of ideas like DEVIL DINOSAUR, FOREVER PEOPLE, 2001, ETERNALS, KAMANDI, OMAC, and more! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 WonderCon Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by MIKE ROYER!

KIRBY: OMEGA! Looks at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by WALTER SIMONSON!

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #74

KIRBY COLLECTOR #76

KIRBY COLLECTOR #77

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! Plus: interview with ROY THOMAS about Jack, rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER moderating the biggest Kirby Tribute Panel of all time, pencil art galleries, and more!

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!

MONSTERS & BUGS! Jack’s monster-movie influences in The Demon, Forever People, Black Magic, Fantastic Four, Jimmy Olsen, and Atlas monster stories; Kirby’s work with “B” horror film producer CHARLES BAND; interview with “The Goon” creator ERIC POWELL; Kirby’s use of insect characters (especially as villains); MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, Golden Age Kirby story, and a Kirby pencil art gallery!

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95

Digital Only:

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

KIRBY100

KIRBY100 features an all-star line-up of 100 top comics pros who choose key images from Kirby’s career, and critique Jack’s PAGE LAYOUTS, DRAMATICS, and STORYTELLING SKILLS to honor his place in comics history, and prove Kirby is King! Celebrate Jack’s 100th birthday in style with this full-color, double-length book edited by JOHN MORROW & JON B. COOKE, with a cover inked by MIKE ROYER. (224-page Digital Edition) $12.95

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

Compiles all the “extra” new material from COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES 1-7, in one huge Digital Edition! Includes a fan’s private tour of the Kirbys’ home and more than 200 pieces of Kirby art not published outside of those volumes! (120-page Digital Edition) $7.95

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! (160-page Digital Edition) $7.95

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

Jack Kirby Publications JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST:

CENTENNIAL EDITION

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! (256-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER) $34.95

ISBN: 978-1-60549-083-0 • Diamond Order Code: JAN181989

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID (Expanded 2nd Edition)

After achieving the quickest sell-out in TwoMorrows’ history, we’re going back to press for an EXPANDED SECOND EDITION, including minor corrections, and 16 NEW PAGES of “Stuf’ Said” by the creators of the Marvel Universe! This first-of-its-kind examination, completed just days before STAN LEE’s recent passing, looks back at KIRBY & LEE’s own words, in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and television interviews, to paint the most comprehensive and enlightening picture of their relationship ever done—why it succeeded, where it deteriorated, and when it eventually failed. Also here are recollections from STEVE DITKO, WALLACE WOOD, JOHN ROMITA SR., and more Marvel Bullpen stalwarts who worked with them both. Compiled, researched, and edited by publisher JOHN MORROW. (This book is issue #75 of the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR.) NOW SHIPPING!

COLLECTED KIRBY COLLECTOR VOL. 6

COLLECTED KIRBY COLLECTOR VOL. 7

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

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

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

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

(176-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-094-6 • Diamond Comic Distributors Order Code: MAY192003

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! NOW SHIPPING! (176-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 • (Digital Edition) $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-091-5 • Diamond Order Code: JUN191992

SOUL LOVE #1

FACSIMILE EDITION (ONLY 200 COPIES)

As seen in JACK KIRBY’S DINGBAT LOVE, this is the Kirby magazine that never was! Contains four unpublished 1970s Kirby stories, period ads, and text features, creating the finished magazine meant to exist alongside IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB and SPIRIT WORLD, before DC Comics cancelled the project. ONLY 200 COPIES! ALEX ROSS COVER! (32-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $15 ONLY AVAILABLE FROM TWOMORROWS!

NOW SHIPPING!

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History. TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

KIRBY FIVE-OH!

TJKC #50 covers all the best of Kirby’s 50-year career in comics: BEST KIRBY STORIES, COVERS, CHARACTER DESIGNS, UNUSED ART, and profiles of/commentary by the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! Plus a 50-PAGE PENCIL ART GALLERY and a COLOR SECTION! Kirby cover inked by DARWYN COOKE, and introduction by MARK EVANIER. (168-page trade paperback) $24.95 (Digital Edition) $7.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: MAR151563

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com Don’t miss exclusive sales, limited editions, and new releases! Sign up for our mailing list: http:// groups.yahoo.com/group/twomorrows

Collector

Send letters to: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR c/o TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Website: www.twomorrows.com

Comments

(Make the pivotal decision to write us a letter of comment!)

[25 years is a long time to do anything, but it’s been a great ride—and one I hope goes on another 25! I couldn’t have done it without you, readers—one of whom has a project I wanted to mention. For Real #1 contains “The Oven,” a 20page comics story written and drawn by James Romberger that melds two battles fought in different eras by Jack, and touches on themes of courage, empathy, and PTSD. There’s also a short essay that relates those issues to Kirby’s life. It’s in stores now, or order it at https://uncivilizedbooks.com/ for-real-1-by-james-romberger/] Reading through the new updated copy of STUF’ SAID, something occurred to me. It’s pretty minor, but when you conjecture about the purpose of the Human Torch powers pin-ups in FF #8 & 9, I think you’re right that they began life as proposal images—but I think you’re looking in the wrong place as to what they were originally for. At a guess, I would suggest that those boards were designed to pitch the Human Torch series that ultimately ran in STRANGE TALES. Both of those pages seem to reflect ideas that were used in those early Torch stories, and the lack of an FF costume also fits in that context. And with that, I would guess that the SubMariner pin-up in #11 was for a similar pitch for a Subby series (which didn’t come about at this time). Based on their track record of decades before, a Torch and a Sub-Mariner series were the two lowest-hanging fruits of the FF tree to attempt to spin off. Tom Brevoort, NY (This leads me to more speculation; like, could a Torch series have been proposed BEFORE the idea of doing the FF? It’s weird how that series was completely disconnected from the FF comic at first. Even with Larry Leiber writing it instead of Stan, it seems like Lee would’ve fixed it to be in continuity, and not give Johnny a secret identity—cause if FF came first with the novel idea of no secret identities, why would a later Torch series have them? So what if the Torch series came first, THEN the idea of FF evolved? And if a pre-FF Torch comeback was first proposed, a pre-FF Subby relaunch may’ve been too. The LOCs hint about “don’t be surprised to see Capt. America return” somewhere, so isn’t it conceivable that the original plan was to bring back those three characters just like they did in the 1950s, and then plans changed to do the FF since JLA was selling well? Just some early morning ramblings, before I’ve had my coffee…)

Once upon a time there was a man who built an entertainment empire. He hired writers and artists to do the work for him, and then he signed his name to their work. He didn’t give credit to the artists, didn’t let them sign their names. Yet, his signature was huge and his own name appeared above the title. But this man’s charming smile, avuncular persona and trademark mustache, made him a beloved figure in American culture—while his artists remained anonymous and had no rights to the material they created. This man’s name was Walt Disney. Walt’s name appeared on everything his studios produced regardless of Walt’s involvement, and continues to appear on work he had absolutely nothing to do with to this very day! (Walt Disney died in 1966.) When you consider that Carl Barks created Uncle Scrooge from whole cloth, wasn’t even allowed to sign his name, and Disney’s signature was in the very title of the comic, it shows how abusive companies can be. That iconic image wasn’t even Disney’s real signature! Disney’s abuse of artists dates back to his earliest cartoons which were animated by Ub Iwerks. Wikipedia calls Ub the “creator” of Mickey Mouse. Yet nobody goes to Anaheim to visit “Ubland.” What I found missing in STUF’ SAID is context. You did an incredible and thorough job of researching what Stan and Jack said in print and in public. But there’s not enough context. What did other companies do? What was the policy at DC at that time? Did other creators own their characters? Did they get profit participation? Was their art returned? To paint a picture of Stan Lee as unfairly taking advantage of Jack Kirby, without providing a context of other similar businesses in that time period, is itself unfair. DC, to make the obvious comparison, gave creator credit and a piece of the action to those earliest of creators, Bob Kane and Siegel & Shuster. But that policy ended with 78

Batman and Superman. Comic books grew out of comic strips, so at first DC did what the strip syndicates did and allowed the creators to partially own their strips. DC quickly saw the error of their ways and denied the same rights to the creators of Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkman, etc. Why? Because the rules were changing and the players in the young medium of comic books were figuring things out as they went along. Publishers owned the characters and the copyrights, while the artists and writers were paid by the page. Stan Lee did not invent this system, nor did he profit from it. When people say in articles that Stan took credit for characters he didn’t himself create, the implication is that he benefited from it financially; that Stan got money as a creator and Jack didn’t. That’s not true except in the broader sense that it helped to build Stan’s image (and more importantly, Marvel’s). But Stan never got profit participation in Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, X-Men, etc. the way that Bob Kane and Siegel & Shuster did with the properties they cocreated. That’s a key point in this controversy. David Burd, East Stroudsburg, PA (I appreciate your comments here, but there are a couple of important things to note: 1) Kirby worked as a freelancer. The animators at Disney were on staff and salaried, and got employee benefits that Kirby didn’t. They organized in Unions to get better pay and treatment, much to Disney’s chagrin at times. Kirby didn’t have that going for him, so I don’t think that’s an apt comparison. 2) Stan absolutely benefited from his situation financially; by being in charge of what work he assigned himself, to start, and being able to negotiate directly with Martin Goodman for his own pay raises, to be able to work from home on his writing for a freelance rate, and still get a guaranteed salary as editor. And the $1 million per year retainer he got from Marvel to be its figurehead, as well as his producing credits, were all benefits from his situation with the company. I don’t think STUF’ SAID presented Lee as unfairly taking advantage of Kirby; just of him taking advantage of his own opportunities, without looking out for Kirby. Kirby was in a less advantageous situation as a freelancer, with no contract and no access to publisher Martin Goodman directly. Whereas Stan was his relative, and dealt with him weekly, if not daily, and attended cocktail parties with him. But Stan also, as the book shows, had a tendency to consider only his involvement as the “creation,” and take solo credit—or not go out of his way to offer cocredit until pressed on it later. I’d say it’s more analogous to Bob Kane claiming sole credit for Batman and all its ancillary characters—and getting DC to legally agree to only credit him— when Bill Finger was intimately involved as well. Stan was a very savvy businessperson, at least in terms of making the books commercial

and looking out for his own interests. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if Kirby thought he’d watch his back the way Joe Simon always did, that wasn’t going to happen, and Jack didn’t have the set-up Stan did to look out for himself. I think that’s the main difference between the two.) As usual, the KIRBY COLLECTOR continues its greatness. The cover of #77 reminded me of visiting Kirby and seeing his finished pencils for a doublepaged monster spread inside DEMON #13. I could’ve studied it for hours. As for Jack being inspired by movie monsters, I wanted to add to your list the 1958 film COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK. Mister Morgan’s Monster jogged my movie memory, then I recalled the Watcher from FANTASTIC FOUR—both seemingly familiar to Colossus. Mitch Schauer, Granada Hills, CA Well you did it again: another great issue of the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR! The cover alone, with those great Eric Powell inks (#77), was worth the price of admission by itself! You stuck so many great articles in this issue it’s impossible to comment on everything— but I’ll highlight just a few: The “Monsters” gallery was awesome (personally I would have stuck in that great full-page spread from CAPTAIN AMERICA ANNUAL #3; I think it was on page 23); the full-pager from DEMON #10 was another favorite! “The Empire Strikes Out” added more insight into Jack’s proposed foray as a Hollywood scriptwriter/producer. And it was nice to know he made a few bucks for his efforts (although I doubt it was much). Kirby Kinetics and Covering Fire were entertaining as well. In short—another winner! Gary Picariello, San Vito, Italy While Jack did add new elements to his take on both THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and FRANKENSTEIN in his DEMON run, I liked those issues far less than the ones which book-ended them featuring Witchboy. Those stories, with Klarion and Teekl, were far more unexpected and vital—adding something significantly new to the mix rather than playing with familiar movie tropes from his youth. Jack’s pre-hero work frequently had giant rampaging monsters and alien invasions. What’s impressive is, even with such limited and recurring subject matter, the character designs and twists were generally fun. In the recent reprint volumes, it was also impressive to see some stories beautifully embellished by Steve Ditko and Joe Sinnott. Many of the Marvel hero stories which came later also had monsters and aliens. But, by that time, they were given varied personalities and motivations beyond destruction for its own sake or conquest on a lark. The Impossible Man, in FF #11, was a lighthearted character who was bored. The Watcher, from #13, was alien, yes, but only an observer. He didn’t take sides or act for his own benefit. Certainly, by #48, with Galactus, here was a deadly space being who had a different motivation and method of operation. Still an alien menace, but like none we’d seen before.

Even Tana Nile in THOR—a female invader—or Ego, a malevolent planet, were unique takes on a previously common theme. I enjoyed the Space Phantom from AVENGERS #2, for his odd look and strange powers. Yes, as you pointed out, in several articles, the early FF books were monsters and heroes moving in a new direction. They still used over-sized creatures and invasions from other planets, for a bit, before phasing that out in favor of something more distinctively heroic and characterization-driven. Personally, my favorite of the shift from outright monsters to heroes was HULK #2 with the Toad Men. The plot was fairly standard but the mood and characterization were captivating: The same elements (rampaging monster and alien invasion) but mixed in an intriguing way. The monster at least was willing to fight for us. Plus, we had continuing supporting characters with diverse motivations. Certainly, the lush inks of Steve Ditko, over Jack, made it a wonderfully strange and moody looking issue. Still a favorite. What Jack did to make monsters palatable and welcome in super-hero titles was beyond contemporary; he give them a futuristic makeover. They seemed ultra-modern, from a time yet to come, rather than superstitious folklore of the past. That, I suspect, came from his experience doing them, more traditionally, in the pre-hero books. He understood how to move them forward in a different, more compelling way. The Troll/Asgard War (THOR #137–139) had a touch of tomorrow with the inclusion of Orikal. I smiled at the visual comparison of Jack’s pre-hero covers against grade-B monster movie posters of the day. Did he actually see all of them or just overlap in some common elements? Amusingly, things have come full circle with Marvel Studios turning to past comics for content and approach. As for bugs, it’s kind of hard to comment. Jack’s introduction of Forager and the bug population of New Genesis didn’t get far. Who knows where he would have gone with that, or what the payoff was supposed to be? Even that insect story in Tales of Asgard, while imaginative, was over quickly. Was it something he might’ve expanded on later? No way for us to tell. One tremendous value seems overlooked in Jack’s pre-hero output: Those stories kept him busy and at the company. If not for them, by the time heroes came back as a genre, he could have been working elsewhere. This kept him viable at Atlas/Marvel. Loved many of the covers you reprinted, though still a touch small for my taste. Some were really gems such as STRANGE TALES #80 (Gargantus) and TALES OF SUSPENSE #10 (Cyclops). Even in the KAMANDI stories of Klik-Klak, a giant grasshopper in the role of a racehorse, Jack took a seeming monster and made it a touching helper. His fate was meaningful and touching; something not often associated with monster-size creatures. It initially appeared frightening, but had a warm aspect which we don’t often see when the focus is on the bizarre, rather than loving bonds. Joe Frank, Scottsdale, AZ

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! 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.

#78 Credits:

John Morrow, Editor/Designer/etc. Rob Smentek & John Morrow, Proofreaders THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Rebecca Barr • David Blumberg Robert L. Bryant Jr. • Norris Burroughs Mark Clegg • Jon B. Cooke Mark Evanier • Chris Fama Danny Fingeroth • Shane Foley David Folkman • Barry Forshaw Glen Gold • Alex Grand Heritage Auctions • Rand Hoppe Tom King • Jeremy Kirby Sean Kleefeld • Jim Korkis Tom Kraft • Paul S. Levine Patrick McDonnell • Adam McGovern Will Murray • Dan Rosenberg Steve Rude • Tom Scioli Steve Sherman • Steven Thompson Arianne Wilson 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: Feast your eyes on “The Big Picture!” We give you a glimpse of how Kirby fits into the grand scheme of things, from his creations’ lasting legacy, to how his work tackles big issues like illiteracy. There’s a huge interview with Jack himself, a look at inconsistencies in his 1960s Marvel work, a visual before-&-after showing large and small changes in his comics, the big concepts he conveyed in OMAC, his best double-page spreads, and more! Plus Mark Evanier’s 2019 Kirby Tribute Panel (with Kurt Busiek, Buzz Dixon, and others), a pencil art gallery, and a new cover based on Kirby’s original, unaltered cover art from OMAC #1! #79 ships April 2020!

A 25 Year Celebration! th

THE WORLD OF TWOMORROWS

In 1994, amidst the boom-&-bust of comic book speculators, THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #1 was published for true fans of the medium. That modest labor of love spawned TwoMorrows Publishing, today’s premier purveyor of publications about comics and pop culture. Celebrate our 25th anniversary with this special retrospective look at the company that changed fandom forever! Co-edited by and featuring publisher JOHN MORROW and COMIC BOOK ARTIST/COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine’s JON B. COOKE, it gives the inside story and behind-the-scenes details of a quarter-century of looking at the past in a whole new way. Also included are BACK ISSUE magazine’s MICHAEL EURY, ALTER EGO’s ROY THOMAS, GEORGE KHOURY (author of KIMOTA!, EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE, and other books), MIKE MANLEY (DRAW! magazine), ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON (MODERN MASTERS), and a host of other comics luminaries who’ve contributed to TwoMorrows’ output over the years. From their first Eisner Award-winning book STREETWISE, through their BRICKJOURNAL LEGO® magazine, up to today’s RETROFAN magazine, every major TwoMorrows publication and contributor is covered with the same detail and affection the company gives to its books and magazines. With an Introduction by MARK EVANIER, Foreword by ALEX ROSS, Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ, and a new cover by TOM McWEENEY! NOW SHIPPING! (256-page FULL-COLOR Trade Paperback) $37.95 (Digital Edition) $15.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-092-2 (272-page ULTRA-LIMITED HARDCOVER) $75 Only 125 copies available for sale, with a 16-page bonus Memory Album! HARDCOVER NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH DIAMOND—ONLY FROM TWOMORROWS! GET YOURS NOW!

(288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $45.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-089-2

MAC RABOY Master of the Comics

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, Look for the 1945-49 volume SUPERMAN, and WONDER WOMAN. It was a time when America’s entry into World War II in 2020! was presaged by the arrival of such patriotic do-gooders as WILL EISNER’s Uncle Sam, HARRY SHORTEN and 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!

All characte

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1940-44

ve owners.

OR -COL FULLDCOVER HAR RIES SE nting me f docu ecade o d y! each s histor ic com

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! NOW SHIPPING!

2020

(160-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 (Digital Edition) $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-090-8 SUBSCRIPTION RATES Alter Ego (Six issues) Back Issue (Eight issues) BrickJournal (Six issues) Comic Book Creator (Four issues) Jack Kirby Collector (Four issues) RetroFan (Six issues)

ECONOMY US $67 $89 $67 $45 $48 $67

EXPEDITED US $79 $102 $79 $55 $58 $79

PREMIUM US $86 $111 $86 $59 $62 $86

INTERNATIONAL $101 $135 $101 $67 $70 $101

DIGITAL ONLY $27 $36 $27 $18 $18 $27

ALTER EGO #163

ALTER EGO #164

ALTER EGO #165

ALTER EGO #166

DRAW #36

The early days of DAVE COCKRUM— Legion of Super-Heroes artist and co-developer of the revived mid-1970s X-Men—as revealed in art-filled letters to PAUL ALLEN and rare, previously unseen illustrations provided by wife PATY COCKRUM (including 1960s-70s drawings of Edgar Rice Burroughs heroes)! Plus FCA—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on PETE MORISI—JOHN BROOME—BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Spotlight on MIKE FRIEDRICH, DC/Marvel writer who jumpstarted the independent comics movement with Star*Reach! Art by NEAL ADAMS, GIL KANE, DICK DILLIN, IRV NOVICK, JOHN BUSCEMA, JIM STARLIN, HOWARD CHAYKIN, FRANK BRUNNER, et al.! Plus: MARK CARLSONGHOST on Rural Home Comics, FCA, and Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Justice League of America cover by NEAL ADAMS!

WILL MURRAY showcases original Marvel publisher (from 1939-1971) MARTIN GOODMAN, with artifacts by LEE, KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, MANEELY, BUSCEMA, EVERETT, BURGOS, GUSTAVSON, SCHOMBURG, COLAN, ADAMS, STERANKO, and many others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt with more on PETE MORISI, JOHN BROOME, and a cover by DREW FRIEDMAN!

FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA (FCA) Special, with spotlights on KURT SCHAFFENBERGER (Captain Marvel, Ibis the Invincible, Marvel Family, Lois Lane), and ALEX ROSS on his awesome painting of the super-heroes influenced by the original Captain Marvel! Plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt” on Superman editor MORT WEISINGER, JOHN BROOME, and more! Cover by SCHAFFENBERGER!

MIKE HAWTHORNE (Deadpool, Infinity Countdown) interview, YANICK PAQUETTE (Wonder Woman: Earth One, Batman Inc., Swamp Thing) how-to demo, JERRY ORDWAY’s “Ord-Way” of creating comics, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, plus Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY! Contains mild nudity for figure-drawing instruction; for Mature Readers Only.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships April 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships June 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Aug. 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

ER EISN RD !! AWA NER IN W

BACK ISSUE #119

BACK ISSUE #120

BACK ISSUE #121

BACK ISSUE #122

BACK ISSUE #123

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY ISSUE! A galaxy of comics stars discuss Marvel’s whitehot space team in the Guardians Interviews, including TOM DeFALCO, KEITH GIFFEN, ROB LIEFELD, AL MILGROM, MARY SKRENES, ROGER STERN, JIM VALENTINO, and more. Plus: Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon before the Guardians, with CHRIS CLAREMONT and MIKE MIGNOLA. Cover by JIM VALENTINO with inks by CHRIS IVY.

HEROES OF TOMORROW! Mon-El hero history, STEVE LIGHTLE’s Legionnaires, and the controversial Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years era. Plus SEKOWSKY’s Manhunter 2070, GRELL’s Starslayer, Charlton’s Space: 1999 tie-in, Paradox, and MIKE BARON’s unfinished Sonic Disruptors series. Featuring the BIERBAUMS, BYRNE, GIFFEN, MAYERIK, SIMONSON, TRUMAN, VOSBURG, WAID, and more. LIGHTLE cover.

CONAN AND THE BARBARIANS! Celebrating the 50th anniversary of ROY THOMAS and BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH’s Conan #1! The Bronze Age Barbarian Boom, Top 50 Marvel Conan stories, Marvel’s Not-Quite Conans (from Kull to Skull), Arak–Son of Thunder, Warlord action figures, GRAY MORROW’s Edge of Chaos, and Conan the Barbarian at Dark Horse Comics. With an unused WINDSOR-SMITH Conan #9 cover.

Celebrates the 40TH ANNIVERSARY of MARV WOLFMAN and GEORGE PÉREZ’s New Teen Titans, featuring a guest editorial by WOLFMAN and a PÉREZ tribute and art gallery! Plus: The New Teen Titans’ 40 GREATEST MOMENTS, the Titans in the media, hero histories of RAVEN, STARFIRE, and the PROTECTOR, and more! With a NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED PÉREZ TITANS COVER from 1981!

SUPERHERO ROMANCE ISSUE! Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s many loves, Star Sapphire history, Bronze Age weddings, DeFALCO/ STERN Johnny Storm/Alicia Pro2Pro interview, Elongated Man and Wife, May-December romances, Supergirl’s Secret Marriage, and… Aunt May and Doc Ock?? Featuring MIKE W. BARR, CARY BATES, STEVE ENGLEHART, BOB LAYTON, DENNY O’NEIL, and many more! Cover by DAVE GIBBONS.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships March 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships May 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships June 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships July 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Aug. 2020

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #22 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #23

RETROFAN #10

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: The 1980s

P. CRAIG RUSSELL career-spanning interview (complete with photos and art gallery), an almost completely unknown work by FRANK QUITELY (artist on All-Star Superman and The Authority), DERF BACKDERF’s forthcoming graphic novel commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, CAROL TYLER shares her prolific career, JOE SINNOTT discusses his Treasure Chest work, CRAIG YOE, and more!

WENDY PINI discusses her days as Red Sonja cosplayer, and 40+ years of ELFQUEST! Plus RICHARD PINI on their 48-year marriage and creative partnership! SCOTT SHAW! talks about early San Diego Comic-Cons and friendship with JACK KIRBY, Captain Carrot, and Flintstones work! GIL KANE’s business partner LARRY KOSTER about their adventures together! PABLO MARCOS on his Marvel horror work, HEMBECK, and more!

NOW BI-MONTHLY! Fifty years of SHAFT, Family Affair’s KATHY GARVER and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour’s GERI “FAKE JAN” REISCHL, ED “BIG DADDY” ROTH, rare GODZILLA merchandise, Spaghetti Westerns, Saturday morning cartoon preview specials, fake presidential candidates, SPIDERMAN/THE SPIDER parallels, STUCKEY’S, and more with FARINO, MANGELS, MURRAY, SAAVEDRA, SHAW, and EURY!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Spring 2020

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Summer 2020

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships July 2020

(288-pg. FULL-COLOR Hardcover) $48.95 (Digital Edition) $15.95 • Now shipping!

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com

Order at twomorrows.com

Interactive Catalog

2020

Click on any image to see a preview and order at www.twomorrows.com

CONTENTS American Comic Book Chronicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Companion Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Digital Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Comics Artists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Modern Masters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Jack Kirby Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Magazines:

Jack Kirby Collector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Draw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Write Now (and “how-to” books) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Comic Book Creator/Comic Book Artist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Alter Ego . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Rough Stuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Back Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 RetroFan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 BrickJournal (LEGO® magazine) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

respective owners.

Pop Culture Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 LEGO® Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

How To Order:

• Go at www.twomorrows.com for exact weight-based postage (the more you order, the more you save on shipping—especially overseas customers)! Plus get a FREE PDF DIGITAL EDITION with each PRINT item, where available! OR: • Order by MAIL, PHONE, or E-MAIL and add $2 per magazine, $3 per softcover EDITIONSE book, and $5 per hardcover book in AVAILABL the US for Media Mail. OUTSIDE THE US, PLEASE CALL, E-MAIL, OR ORDER ONLINE TO CALCULATE YOUR EXACT POSTAGE! OR: • Through our Apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play! OR: • Use the Diamond Comic Distributors Order Code to order at your local comic book shop!

DIGITAL

2020

THIS SYMBOL MEANS AN ITEM IS ONLY AVAILABLE AS A DIGITAL EDITION, THROUGH OUR APPS, GOOGLE PLAY, OR BY DIRECT DOWNLOAD AT www.twomorrows.com

SUBSCRIPTION RATES Alter Ego (Six issues) Back Issue (Eight issues) BrickJournal (Six issues) Comic Book Creator (Four issues) Jack Kirby Collector (Four issues) RetroFan (Six issues)

ECONOMY US $67 $89 $67 $45 $48 $67

EXPEDITED US $79 $102 $79 $55 $58 $79

PREMIUM US $86 $111 $86 $59 $62 $86

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History. TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

INTERNATIONAL $101 $135 $101 $67 $70 $101

DIGITAL ONLY $27 $36 $27 $18 $18 $27

Keep the World of TwoMorrows spinning! Get our anniversary book, & 40% off most magazines, by mail!

You’ve probably heard that Diamond Comic Distributors closed in March, leaving small publishers like us with no way to get our publications to comics shops. Then, our distributor for the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain also closed without warning, just as our new issues were about to go on sale. The end result is, we took a huge loss by printing and shipping tens of thousands of copies of six new magazines and our Anniversary book that distributors are not paying us for, and having to dispose of the unsold copies. We hope distributors and stores will eventually reopen, but until then, mail order and digital sales are TwoMorrows’ lifeline, to ensure we stay in business. We have bills to pay on all those existing publications, and plan to keep publishing new ones. So if you’re able to help, please: 1) Purchase our World of TwoMorrows 25th Anniversary book, which is available now in Softcover, Ultra-Limited Hardcover, and Digital Editions. If you’ve enjoyed the material we’ve produced for the last quarter-century, you’ll love learning how we made it happen all these years! 2) Download our new, easy to use 2020 Digital Catalog at: https://www.twomorrows.com/2020InteractiveCatalog.pdf and order some books and mags online. Best of all: We’re currently offering 40% off most magazines! And we’re fully operational and shipping worldwide (my wife Pam and I are packing and mailing all the orders due

to North Carolina’s stay-at-home mandate). If you have trouble ordering online, we’re happy to take your order by phone or email. 3) Pre-order copies of Alter Ego #164, Back Issue #120, BrickJournal #62, Comic Book Creator #23, Jack Kirby Collector #79, and RetroFan #9, all of which will be shipping by mail over the next few weeks. Or please consider: Since BrickJournal #62 and #63 and RetroFan #9 and #10 (and possibly later issues) will not be sold at Barnes & Noble, now is a great time to… 4) Subscribe or renew your current subscriptions! The next issues of all six of our magazines are ready to go to press, and by subscribing, you’re helping us maintain a regular release schedule for your favorite titles. In 1994, I founded TwoMorrows Publishing with the publication of The Jack Kirby Collector #1. I didn’t start out by selling through comics shops or bookstores—only by mail order and subscriptions. And I’m prepared to keep working that way indefinitely, regardless of when stores and distributors reopen. So stay safe, and together, we’ll keep the World of TwoMorrows spinning for another 25 years! John Morrow, publisher TwoMorrows Publishing 919-449-0344 www.twomorrows.com

PRINTED IN CHINA

82658 00392 0

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SEVENTY-EIGHT