GALLERY 1 (twice-told Marvel covers)

TSUB-MARINER, SILVER AGE CATALYST he Fantastic Four was a series that from its outset focused on the discord that could occur within the boundaries of a team. The disparate powers they had attained put a stress on the bonds that held them together. By the end of third issue, the group had already broken up. The Thing’s jealous rages in particular were driving a wedge between the members. Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, was literally a hot-headed teenager and he had little patience for the bickering. It had gotten so bad that by issue #4, the boy would retreat to a hideout in a Bowery flophouse. 1 It was unlikely that he would have returned home any time soon, had it not been for a chance encounter with a character whose reappearance would accelerate the process of development of an astounding universe of super-beings. With totally good intentions, Johnny would throw the dazed Atlantean derelict into the waters of New York harbor and thereby restore his memory. Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, emerging from the mists of amnesia, would pose an enormous threat to the Fantastic Four and their world. Instead of gratitude, Namor bore only resentment towards Johnny and humanity in general, because in his eyes, they were guilty of destroying his undersea kingdom. The Torch had no choice but to return home and alert his teammates to the danger Namor posed, thereby reuniting the team against a common foe. Without the Sub-Mariner’s emergence and lively interaction with the Fantastic Four, the series could easily have stagnated, had it continued to dwell on the disharmony built into the group from its inception. The charismatic Sub-Mariner first appeared in 1939, as a prominently featured character in Marvel Comics #1. An anti-hero from the get-go, Prince Namor was the bi-racial son of American Naval Captain Leonard McKenzie and the Atlantean princess Fen. His creator, Bill Everett, conceived him as a proud aristocratic being, harkening back to antiquity. “Namor,” after all, is “Roman” spelled backwards. He debuted as a Total War adversary of all surface dwellers. His natural foe was, of course, the Golden Age version of the Human Torch, who was also introduced in the same issue. As elemental adversaries representing fire and water, the Sub-Mariner and the Torch clashed regularly. In Human Torch #5 [above], published in Fall 1941, Namor, under the spell of a treacherous Atlantean woman, developed a Napoleon complex and tried to conquer the world. After causing a good deal of damage as well as putting much of 1 New York under water and probably drowning thou-

Mark Evanier JACK F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

(right) No inker captures the fluidity of Jack’s work as faithfully as Mike Royer, as evidenced by this pencil sketch Jack bound into his personal volume of Golden Age Captain America comics in the 1960s.

(next page, top) Announcement for the May 11-13, 2018 popup exhibit in New York, curated by the Jack Kirby Museum.

(below) Chase Craig, hard at work at Western Publishing in the 1960s. MARK EVANIER: My name is Mark Evanier. You don’t need to be told that; this is the Jack Kirby panel. Who else would it be, right? And this is Mr. Mike Royer. [applause] This is Mr. Jim Amash. [applause] This is Mr. Rand Hoppe. [applause] Now, for those of you who don’t know who any of us are, Mike was Jack Kirby’s inker from about 1972—. MIKE ROYER: —in print. But from late ’68. EVANIER: Well, you took over regular inking in... ROYER: We’re gonna start arguing, any minute. [laughter] EVANIER: ...he inked Jack’s stuff for a long time. He did an amazing job of it. There are people still thanking me for my role in salvaging Jack Kirby’s pencils from the person who would have inked them if Mike had not been available. And he did an amazing amount of work—it was not just the fact that he did it well. That would have been enough. In this business, doing it well is a great thing. But he was the most reliable person you could have asked for. Mike has missed in his life, zero deadlines on anything. Were you ever late with anything for anybody? ROYER: No. EVANIER: All right. And that’s not just bragging. I worked for a man named Chase Craig for years, who was the editor at Gold Key/ Western Publishing Company, who did the Dell and Gold Key Comics, the Disney comics, and the Warner Brothers comics, and I asked him one time, “If you had to bet your life on some freelancer turning in the work on time, who would you bet on?” He said, “Two people: Dan Spiegle and Mike Royer. That’s it.” And I learned a lot from Mike about meeting deadlines. ROYER: I got a mortgage from Bank of America on the strength of a letter from Chase Craig at Western Publishing. He said, “We set our clocks by Mike Royer. If we could only get more work out of him.” So they were convinced I

could make the payments. EVANIER: And that was important, because when Jack was doing the New Gods and those books from DC, there was some rooting interest against him in New York, not because they had anything against him personally, but they didn’t like the idea of someone working for the editor in California as opposed to the office in New York.

Held Saturday, June 15, 2019 at Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina. Featuring (left to right) Mike Royer, moderator Mark Evanier, Jim Amash, and Rand Hoppe. Transcribed by Steven Tice, and copy-edited by Mark Evanier and John Morrow.

They didn’t like that Jack could pick his own inker, and they hadn’t picked the person. And they just had the idea that the company created the books. So when Mike took over, they were just waiting for him to fail. They were waiting to be able to say, “We’ve got to get rid of that Royer guy. He can’t meet a deadline and the work’s lousy.” And they were not able to say that, and Jack was very, very happy. And we were very happy to have Mike inking his work also.

And Jim Amash is another inker person. He’s done a lot of comics for Archie and other places, and he’s a historian, and a friend of mine, and a friend of the Kirbys, and I just wanted him on the panel because I don’t get to see Jim enough because he doesn’t come to Comic-Con. This is my excuse to see my friend Jim.

And this man, Rand Hoppe, he operates the Jack Kirby Research… what’s it called? RAND HOPPE: Museum and Research Center. EVANIER: The Museum and Research Center, which is doing Herculean work to catalog Jack’s work, to make copies of it. Have you scanned anything interesting here at the convention yet? HOPPE: We’ve scanned two pages. One was a Kamandi page, and I can’t remember the second one. EVANIER: And so they are building a library of great scans of Jack’s work, and that’s a wonderful thing. We all feel charged with the idea of spreading the word of Jack, that as long as I am able to breathe, I will be telling people about this wonderful man who was in my life for not enough years. I work with and have met a lot of incredible people, talented people. I’ve worked with Sid Caesar. I’ve worked with Bob Newhart. Jack Kirby is the most amazing, talented person I have ever met in my life. [applause] As I get older and older, the more I really come to appreciate the privilege it was to be around Jack, and just sit with him and talk about anything—and not just about comics. ROYER: People ask me what it was like inking Jack’s pages, and I can’t remember the nuts and bolts. I had to do three pages a day, letter a whole book in less than two days, and rule the borders, and have three pages of display lettering. What I remember is sitting in the kitchen with Jack and Roz, eating homemade chocolate cake, and drinking milk, and talking about Warner Brothers movies. EVANIER: Jack liked Warner Brothers movies. Jack’s life was a Warner Brothers movie. ROYER: People have asked me, “What’s the basic difference between Joe Sinnott and Mike Royer?” And I loved Joe Sinnott, since the first work I ever saw when I was a kid was the free Buster Brown comic books. And, if you’re familiar with the dichotomy of the movie studio system in the Golden Age, Joe Sinnott inked Jack Kirby “MGM.” I inked Jack Kirby “Warner Brothers.” EVANIER: That’s a good analogy. One of the interesting things about Jack’s inkers, since we’re talking about inkers: When I first met Jack, which was in July of 1969, I naturally asked him who his favorite inker was. I assumed he would say Joe Sinnott or Frank Giacoia, who I thought were the two best guys who had inked him at that point. And Jack said, “Everybody’s good.” And we actually kind of had a small argument about this—I mean, I didn’t argue with Jack, but there was a difference of opinion. He thought every inker was fine. “Any professional inker can do the job.” Because the thing that interested Jack about the job was telling an exciting story, and he didn’t think even a bad inker, what I would consider a bad inker, could ruin the story. And he also came out of a tradition where, the other guy’s got to make a living. He was a Depression-era kid, and he was very conscious of everyone’s need to make a living. It was always fine, whoever it was. He only asked, ever, at Marvel, for them to replace one inker, and he asked very politely—not demanding this, just, “Could you maybe put him on somebody else,” and that was Dan Adkins, who inked a couple of Captain Americas. So when he took on Mike, initially, the reason he wanted Mike had a lot to do with geography. He wanted someone who worked for him, because Jack would write a book, draw a book, send it off to New York, and never see it again. He was ostensibly the editor, but somebody would letter it there, and it would go to Vince Colletta to ink, and then Colletta handed it in

to the DC production department. A man named Nelson Bridwell would erase the pages, and if Nelson said to Vince Colletta, “Gee, you left out the backgrounds. Shouldn’t you put those in?” Vince would say, “No,” and Nelson had no authority to overrule him, because people in the production department were fine with it. Jack was not happy with Colletta for a number of reasons, and they didn’t necessarily relate to what was on the page. It had also to do with him showing the work around at Marvel; Jack didn’t want them to see what he was doing. So he had a meeting with Colletta, and they had some sort of argument. I heard Jack’s version of it. I never heard Colletta’s version of it. I don’t know exactly IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, what was said, but at the end of that meeting, Jack stormed into Carmine Infantino’s office CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS and said, “I want my own inker. I want my own guy, who works for me, hire this guy, Mike ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL FORMAT! Royer, whom you initially rejected.” Mike went up there and tried to get some work, and they wanted their guy. ROYER: I had lunch with Dick Giordano, the year that Steve [Sherman] and you and I all went back to New York. EVANIER: That was 1970. ROYER: I went into Infantino’s office and I said, “I should be inking Jack. I’m better than Colletta.” And at lunch, Dick Giordano says, “Mike, you’re getting the reputation of being cocky. You said the truth, but…”. [laughter] EVANIER: So they gave in to Jack, figuring, well, maybe Jack will learn a lesson. He’ll stop complaining about our production department. DC’s production department did not like Jack. Jack did not like their coloring. He made the mistake of telling them that he thought KIRBY COLLECTOR #81 the coloring on the Marvel books was better than the coloring on the DC books. That “KIRBY: BETA!” Jack’s experimental ideas, characters, and series (Fighting American, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, and others), was sacrilegious back then, and they really had it in for him. So they said, “Okay, we’ll give early Stan Lee and Jack Kirby interviews, mysteries behind the Jack his inker, and his inker will fail. He’ll either do a lousy job of it, or he won’t get the books creation of the Hulk and Magneto, ideas that needed more thought, 2019 Heroes Con panel (with MARK EVANIER, MIKE done in time, and then we can yank it back, give it back to Colletta or whoever we want.” And Mike, fortunately, didn’t fail. He met every single damned deadline, which was very ROYER, JIM AMASH, and RAND HOPPE), a pencil art gallery, UNUSED JIMMY OLSEN #141 COVER, and more! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 difficult—he did a very excellent job. Joe Sinnott and Frank Giacoia both told me they (Digital Edition) $4.99 were impressed with Mike’s inking, and could not believe that he did it all by himself, and https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_57&products_id=1562 neither one of them could have done the job just in terms of time restraints. Neither of them could letter. And it’s Jack Kirby work. He’s not the easiest guy in the world to ink because he puts a lot of stuff on the pages. Everyone was impressed, and Mike was a hero for that. Now, the thing I wanted to mention, I don’t know that I’ve ever said this to Mike before, is that Mike was the