Jack Kirby Collector #82

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #82

MANY WORLDS of JACK KIRBY

$10.95

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WORLD VIEW Teach the world to sing Jack’s praises. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 MAN OF THE WORLD Will the real Jack Kirby please stand up?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

ISSUE #82, WINTER 2022

C o l l e c t o r

PAST WORLDS A classic Link Thorne story. . . . . . . 14 OTHER WORLDLY Wakanda explored by Jerry Boyd. . 22 DOG-EAT-DOG WORLD Kirby’s dogs of war!. . . . . . . . . . . . 26 WORLD CLASS Norris Burroughs teaches Kirby Kinetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 BEST OF BOTH WORLDS Before & after of pencils & inks . . . 32 HIDDEN WORLDS Kirby’s secret societies. . . . . . . . . . 38 ONE WORLD The evolution of Ego, The Living Planet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 STRANGE WORLDS Obscure Kirby from Earth to space. . 44 PRIMEVAL WORLD Secrets of the Savage Land. . . . . . 46 HOLLYWORLD/ WORLD OF DIFFERENCE. . . . . . . . 52 ART WORLD Kirby on display, 1975 and now. . . 53 WORLD STAGE Mark Evanier’s trans-Atlantic talk with Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Ross. . . 60 COLLECTOR COMMENTS. . . . . . . . 78 Front cover “Galactic Head” painting: JACK KIRBY COPYRIGHTS: Absorbing Man, Agent 13, Ant-Man, Attilan, Avengers, Beehive, Black Panther, Blastaar, Bucky, Captain America, Dr. Doom, Ego, Eternals, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Grey Gargoyle, Hercules, Hulk, Ikaris, Inhumans, Iron Man, Jungle Action, Ka-Zar, Kala, Kraven, Leader, Loki, Mole Man, Negative Zone, Odin, Olympia, Patsy & Hedy, Pluto, Prester John, Rawhide Kid, Recorder, Red Skull, Savage Land, Sgt. Fury, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Strange Tales of the Unusual, Strange Worlds, Sub-Mariner, Tales to Astonish, Thor, Two-Gun Kid, Tyrannus, Watcher, Wundagore, X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Boy Commandos, Darkseid, Deadman, Demon, Desaad, Forager, Forever People, Habitat, Hawkman, House of Mystery, Jimmy Olsen, Kalibak, Kamandi, Lightray, Losers, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, Orion, Steppenwolf, Super Powers, Superman, Wild Area, Witchboy, Young Love TM & © DC Comics • Link Thorne TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estates • Bombast, Captain Glory, Chip Hardy, Master Jeremy, Night Glider, Secret City Saga TM & © Jack Kirby Estate • 2001: A Space Odyssey TM & © Warner Bros.

Entertainment Inc • Doc Savage TM & © Conde Nast • Tarzan, Tarzan At Earth’s Core, The Land That Time Forgot TM & © ERB, Inc. • Destroyer Duck TM & © Steve Gerber & Jack Kirby Estates

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(above) Color guide for page 59 of the 2001: A Space Odyssey Treasury Edition (1976).

That book’s coloring is credited to Marie Severin and Jack, and this definitely looks like Kirby’s idiosyncratic use of color.

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 29, No. 82, Winter 2022. Published quarterly (at least lately!) by and © TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Single issues: $15 postpaid US ($19 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $49 Economy US, $72 International, $19 Digital. Editorial package © TwoMorrows Publishing, a division of TwoMorrows Inc. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies.

All Kirby artwork is © Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors. Views expressed here are those of the respective authors, and not necessarily those of TwoMorrows Publishing or the Jack Kirby Estate. First printing. PRINTED IN CHINA. ISSN 1932-6912

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Teaching the World(s) to Jack Kirby contributed this Captain America drawing to the 1986 “Voice For Children” lithograph (it measures 25.25” x 33.25”) for the Child Welfare League, with only 205 copies made. It was signed by 64 creators, including Kirby and Stan Lee. The original traveled across the US several times, covering over 170,000 miles.

A 1987 edition also included Kirby’s Cap drawing, but with different characters than 1986’s version.

All characters © the respective holders

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ost fans my age and older probably remember the 1971 “Hilltop” television commercial for Coca-Cola, with its ear-worm ditty, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony).”

Besides its feel-good vibe, it really did make me want to buy “The Real ThingTM” with my lawn-mowing money, instead of joining the Pepsi generation.

That spirit of togetherness blossomed for a more serious cause in We Are The World. That 1985 song raised funds for the charity USA for Africa (which was inspired by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? project in the UK) by bringing together the top names in pop music of the time, to provide hunger relief for that impoverished nation. (DC and Marvel both joined in, with their respective 1986 Heroes Against Hunger and Heroes for Hope comics for African famine relief—Jack Kirby even contributed to DC’s effort.)

(Thanks to Sean Kleefeld for the details on this!)

On April 22, 1990, ABC-TV aired The Earth Day Special, and soon thereafter, recycling efforts within the United States skyrocketed—to the point that it’s now commonplace in most cities to have regular recycling pickups in addition to conventional trash collection.

Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, much of the world rallied around the common goal of combating terrorism.

More recently, people joined in during the early © Coca-Cola months of the Covid pandemic, with celebrities like The Office’s John Krasinski putting on his weekly Some Good News webcast to bring a little light and hope into those dark days, and the casts of beloved television shows reuniting over Zoom calls to entertain us all while we were stuck at home.

In an age where we’ve managed to politicize something as crucial as taking a vaccine to protect humanity, I’m heart2

ened to have these high-profile examples of people coming together for a common goal. And if you’re reading this editorial, I assume you’re here to carry on that tradition, by coalescing around our mutual respect and admiration for Jack Kirby.

When I started this mag in 1994, it was my attempt at doing what I could to give my favorite comics creator the credit he deserved, and to “teach the world to sing” Kirby’s praises. But I never imagined, after all the conflict Jack experienced with Marvel in the 1980s, that I’d actually see the day he would get creator credit for his Marvel work—let alone see it interpreted as it’s been done in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But here we are, having achieved exactly that, and his recognition just continues to grow.

Heck, Jack’s name was an answer on the game show Jeopardy recently! And as I’m about to send this issue off to the printer, the big-budget Eternals film is set to debut in a few days. I must admit I’m lukewarm to the teasers and trailers I’ve seen so far, so I’m not rushing out to my local cine-

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by editor John Morrow

plex to see it. But regardless of how closely it follows (or doesn’t) Kirby’s concept, it’s spawned yet more acclaim for Kirby in the public eye. Two lengthy pieces about Jack appeared on the CNN.com website just yesterday, which will go infinitely further in spreading the word about Kirby and his genius, than this modest publication can—and I couldn’t be happier about it!

Even so, I’m personally proud of my small part in keeping Jack’s name before the public, lo these last 28 years. Except for finally uncovering copies of his preliminary Spiderman (no hyphen) presentation and early pages (before Steve Ditko revamped the character), and Jack’s unaltered pencils for Kobra #1, I’ve gone far beyond what I thought could be documented of Jack’s life and career, and presented more of his publicly unseen art than I ever dreamed possible. I’ve easily got enough issues in me to make it to that arbitrary TJKC #100 (and beyond) that my inner fanboy wants to reach—and even if those Spidey and Kobra pages never pop up, knowing Kirby, some equally amazing stuff that’s been squirreled away will continue to appear.

Most of CNN’s worldwide audience won’t care about much of the minutiae we present here, but that’s okay. Just their knowing the name “Jack Kirby” is plenty important— especially when “Stan Lee” has, so far, been the moniker most associated with Marvel’s cinematic success. Whether The Eternals is a hit or a flop, it’s served an important purpose; every article I’ve read about it

has mentioned Kirby, and most have elaborated that he was directly involved in creating all the Marvel hits that came before it.

If it wasn’t clear before, it is now—the war’s over, folks. In 2014, Disney surrendered, and Kirby won—and we’re only now beginning to see the spoils of that victory. There’s still plenty of life left in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it’ll all inevitably tie back to Jack. So now, unlike in 1994, I’m firmly convinced that he’ll be forever entrenched in the history books—and I don’t just mean comics history books.

So take a bow, Kirby kooks, and never forget that you, I, and all the other Kirby fans and historians out there are on the winning team—having celebrated Kirby and his achievements, even when no one outside our little world cared. All our years of hard work and dedication finally paid off when Marvel/Disney settled with the Kirby family, and now Kirby receives creator credit on everything. Just as importantly, as Jack always wanted, his family is financially taken care of, due to his lifetime of hard work.

Based on recent legal moves being made by Marvel, it looks like we’re about to see a “world within worlds” of who did what, this time pertaining to Stan Lee’s work with Steve Ditko (and Larry Lieber, and Gene Colan, and Don Heck, and...). So let’s double-down and continue to refine the historical record to make it as correct as possible, for all the Marvel creators. There’s still plenty to be discovered in Kirby’s multiverse of creations, and I’m honored to be able to provide this forum for everyone to present “the real thing”: the facts about Jack and his influence on the entire world of comics.

[This issue’s “Many Worlds of Kirby” theme was suggested by Stefano Pavan. And on the subject of “worlds,” thanks to Richard Kolkman, we now know where Kirby got his atomic structures for the collages in Fantastic Four #75-76 and #110: the 1958 World’s Fair main attraction “Atomium” in Brussels. As discovered previously by Richard, although Kirby left FF with #102, a leftover collage got repurposed in #110, with a John Buscema illo of Reed added.]

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(left) The Microverse from Fantastic Four #75 (June 1968) was visually inspired by Atomium from Expo 58. The above collage that finally appeared in FF #110 in 1971 (long after Kirby departed the book) was culled from images of that World’s Fair construct, as published in magazines like Popular Mechanics. We’d assume this collage was originally created for FF #75.

From the September 30, 2021 episode of the game show Jeopardy. And the contestant answered it correctly (in the form of a question, of course)!

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Will the Real Jack Kirby Plea JACK KIRBY: There are no failures in life— just people who quit too soon. I believe everybody has the same potential. I have the same potential to play the piano. Given time I could be Paderewski, but I have no inclination to play the piano.

Given time, I’ll never be Paderewski! [laughter] And it won’t matter to me, see.

(above) 1986 photo by Albert DeGuzman. (below) Jack’s draft card, from Oct. 16, 1940, discovered by Alex Jay. (next page, top) A 1937 “Black Buccaneer” strip by “Jack Curtiss,” one of Kirby’s many early pen names. (next page, bottom) One of the few existing WWII Simon & Kirby originals, from Star-Spangled Comics #19 (April 1943).

MARK BORAX: You directed your energy in a different channel.

JACK: Something captured my interest and I stayed with it.

MARK: For a long time.

JACK: For a very long time. Now I’m doing a different facet of it, and I’m doing it for people that I want to do it for—Ruby-Spears. I’m having a fine time. They’re fine artists, we have a good relationship. They like the work, and I give ’em whatever they ask for. It’s the professional thing to do. I’m content.

MARK: How many hours a day are you putting in?

JACK: I don’t measure it in hours.

I don’t measure it in time at all. I measure it in solving a problem. I’ll take whatever idea we share, and make certain it’s practical for animation and exploitation. You’ve got to have both considerations these days. With the experience I’ve gotten in the comics field, I can do TV and animation. I can give ’em a certain type of drawing, and the animator can tear it down for animation, and it’ll be good.

MARK: This isn’t the first time you’ve worked in the animation field.

JACK: Oh, I began in the animation field. I began doing Betty Boop and Popeye. I was an in-betweener with the Fleischer Studios.

MARK: What did an in-betweener do?

JACK: At that time, it took sixteen pictures for a character to take one step. So they divided this step, say, between three guys, and I’d put in the in-between action of that particular one step. I’d do three or four pictures of that step, and when they put all of them together, they’d have a clean movement of the foot. I can tell you that Fleischer did some beautiful animation. In fact, Fleischer and Disney took as much pain with their animation—they were the two main studios of the day, and extremely popular. Working with Fleischer was, I think, my first job. But they were gonna move to Florida, and I had to make the choice of staying in New York or going with them. I talked to my mother about it, and of course she wouldn’t let me go.

MARK: [laughter] You were in Brooklyn?

JACK: No, I was still on the East Side, and, mothers being sacred, why, you took whatever word they handed out, and that went for anybody—Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Irish mothers. Even Al Capone’s mother would ball him out in the middle of the street, somewhere, for not attending church that week. When I asked my mother if I could go to Florida with Fleischer, she says, “You can’t— there’s a lot of naked women down there.

They’ll pull you in and I’ll never see you again!”

MARK: And of course the thought of being pulled in by naked women severely depressed you.

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ase Stand Up?

Jack Kirby interviewed by Mark Borax Conducted at the 1986 San Diego Comic-Con and originally published in Comics Interview #41

JACK: [laughter] I rather enjoyed what I was thinking.

MARK: But you didn’t go.

JACK: Instead I found a small syndicated house which sent out weekly comic strips to 700 newspapers. They did editorial one-panel cartoons, and they gave me a one-panel column called “Your Health Comes First.” So I became “Dr. Whatever-It-Was.” I did home remedies. I mean, nothing that would alarm you.

MARK: So you started in the field as a quack—.

JACK: It was my first quack. In order to make this little syndicate look larger, each cartoonist had about three different names, see. So I was Jack Cortez, and Jack Curtiss—then I became Jack Kirby. Jack Kirby sounded great ’cause I loved Flash Gordon and Rip Kirby, so I remained Jack Kirby.

MARK: It wasn’t kosher to keep your Jewish name in those days?

JACK: No! That’s wrong! I was never ashamed to keep my Jewish name. In fact, seeing a documentary at the San Diego Convention earlier this week startled me, because at that time having a pen name was par for the course. I was Charley Nicholas for a time when I was doing the Blue Beetle for the Boston Globe. It didn’t bother me one bit, didn’t bother my mother, my father. I brought the dough home from whatever job I had. If I wanted ten bucks I hadda ask my mother. I was almost 18 in ‘38 or so. Hitler was coming on the scene, and he was an artist, you know. If they hadn’t panned his work... Hitler was just a guy coming out of a bar, ya know.

And somebody said, “Well, your work stinks.” His work really did stink—he was a bad artist.

MARK: And the rest of the world had to pay for it.

JACK: It’s true! If somebody had given the guy a compliment, there would have never been a Fuhrer.

MARK: He might have been a comics artist.

JACK: There probably would never have been a war. Except he came along at the right time. The newsreels used to show everybody going to buy an ordinary lunch with their money in wheelbarrows. The German people were miserable. Hitler came on the scene—in fact, in one of my comic books I quote Hitler; in Glorious Godfrey of the New Gods. He’s looking at this crowd and it amazes him. He says, “The entire crowd, while I was talking to them, had the same expression—it never wavered.”

I think we have some association with baboons. If you watch baboons—the most dangerous animal in Africa—you’ll find 5

called Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain had just given Czechoslovakia to Hitler, okay? And the boa had Hitler’s mustache. I showed it to my boss at the syndicate and he says, “How dare a 19-year-old like you do a cartoon like that! What do you know?” I says, “Well, I was raised in an area where you had a lot of gangsters. I know what gangsters do. Hitler’s gonna want war. You start jumpin’ around and giving him what he wants, he’s gonna feed on your weakness.” And Hitler wanted more and more until there was a face-off.

MARK: Like Dr. Doom.

JACK: And Dr. Doom would take advantage of that. If you’re backing off—he’ll follow, see. It doesn’t matter what the style is. Dr. Doom has a very sophisticated style, but he’s still a gangster and he’s gonna close in on ya in some manner. Hitler closed in, to a place where the others couldn’t back away anymore and still retain face. So we had a war, and the war took all my friends.

Here I was getting married and no one was around. I’d walk on the boardwalk at night. Joe Simon was riding a horse for the Coast Guard on the beach because the Nazis had submarines in the Hudson River, and they were blowing up our ships. They’d send saboteurs in on rafts, but the jerks wouldn’t go in and blow up anything ’cause they heard about Broadway! They’d go in and see our best shows. You’d find a German standing in the Burlesque line.

I remember I couldn’t get in to see Oklahoma ’cause the Germans were standing in front and they got in to see the best shows. At any rate, the FBI used to pick these guys up ’cause they were the only guys on line talking German. [laughter] It was a funny part of the war. Finally, I got drafted, and I felt half good about it because everybody was gone. I went for the War like everybody else, you know.

Combat infantry, PFC. It wasn’t a pleasant thing. When I came back, Joe came out of the Coast Guard, finally, and we got him off the horse. We went back to Harvey, and then we went back to a lot of publishers. We did things for DC and we went on to publish our own books. We worked for Crestwood. We did Black Magic, which

the leader jumping up and down on a rock while the tribe gathers around him. And the tribe won’t move a muscle! While that baboon pounds on a rock and shrieks!

MARK: Hitler at the Nuremberg Rallies.

JACK: Right! And at a signal from the leader, this baboon tribe will all go out and kill a leopard.

MARK: Which could normally wipe out any three of them.

JACK: Of course. But in force, the baboons make up a terrible beast.

That’s what the German people became at that time.

MARK: So the capacity for great good and evil is inherent in everyone?

JACK: Of course. I was dating my wife at the time Hitler was coming on, and I did this editorial cartoon which showed Neville Chamberlain patting a boa constrictor, and the boa had a bulge

(above) Early 1930s photo of Jack [top right] at a Boys Brotherhood Republic meeting. (right) Very rare 1945 Boy Commandos decal set, courtesy of Heritage Auctions. All of these images may not be 100% Kirby, but much appears to be—and possibly done expressly for this project after returning from WWII.

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was some of our best work. I did Fighting American for Crestwood. During the McCarthy period I had fun commies, I had Rhode Island Red. I had a fading’ old actress named Theda Barracuda.

MARK: Who played Cleopatra.

JACK: Yes! Like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

MARK: With William Holden in the swimming pool— she shoots him in the opening scene.

JACK: In this case, she wants to give him the kiss of fire, and he says, “Well, the kiss of fire didn’t do much for my old man, an’ it ain’t gonna do much for me.”

Fighting American says that. I had a lot of fun with satire. I think it was one of the few times when satire was done for mainstream comics, and oh—I remember the Russian Superman wanted to fight Fighting American because we gave him a good uniform. He wanted the uniform, and the Russians gave him a second-rate uniform and he couldn’t stand it. It was like long underwear. Fighting American had a classy uniform, which was like Captain America’s. Well, the Russian Superman was driven wild. He wound up in Greenwich Village with a lot of girls—wearing a yo-yo hat, having a great time. He defected, became a beatnik, surrounded by girls.

MARK: Just what your mother wouldn’t let you do, down in Florida.

JACK: I had to do it vicariously. [laughter] Joe and I published our own line. We had Foxhole, we did stories with people who were actually in the services, we listed their rank and serial number to give it realism. And all our stories were realistic stories. We did the romance book, ’cause we appreciated girls, and we knew that they ran the world! The romance books sold very well, except the field was going downhill. So Joe left the comics and I went [pause]—to Marvel. Marvel was gonna close up on the afternoon I came in. I pulled ’em out.

MARK: They kept the doors open for you?

JACK: They kept the doors open and we went on to doing the kind of thing that saved that particular company.

MARK: You and Stan Lee? JACK: Yeah. [pause] EC—the best company going—the one that was making the most money; they went out of business. Everybody was hanging on. Timely sold out to Cadence, I left in the middle to go back to DC, do the New Gods, and I did what I’ve always done—go from company to company, just do my best for each place.

Going to Marvel became an effort on my part to galvanize the company. It was incumbent on everybody else who remained there to do the same thing. Ditko did it, Johnny Romita did it, Marie Severin was there, and she did a great job.

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Drew Geraci wrote us: “In the Fantastic Four Omnibus Vol. 1, there’s this pin-up that I firmly believe was originally the splash page to FF #4, chapter 3, because the way it’s laid out is unusually cumbersome.”

While at a glance it seems viable that a story page was repurposed as this pin-up, on closer examination, I’m skeptical. If it’s from the same issue, why not just keep it in the story? And it doesn’t exactly work, as Reed’s not attacking someone with a gun in the story, and he’s using a different arm in both. Likewise, the Torch pin-up in FF #3 could conceivably have been meant to follow page 18 of that issue, but again, it’s not a great fit—and the Thing pin-up from #2 doesn’t work at all as a story page. What say you, readers?

MARK: You all saved a sinking ship?

Princeton’s chapter of the Merry Marvel Marching Society visits Stan Lee in New York in 1964. [left to right] Bob Keener, Tom Tulenko, Clayton Lewis, Tim Tulenko, and Stan Lee.

JACK: We sure as hell did! And all the way we didn’t know what was gonna happen. We were in comics, that was what we wanted to do, and we saw to it that everything was fresh and new. Steve Ditko, I think, was the one that in my estimation developed Spider-Man, kept him going, and kept him selling.

MARK: Was Steve doing a lot of the plotting of the original book, or was Stan doing all of it?

JACK: The artists were doing the plotting—Stan was just coordinating the books, which was his job. Stan was production coordinator. But the artists were the ones that were handling both story and art. We had to—there was no time not to!

MARK: ’Cause you were putting out so many titles each month ?

JACK: I was doing almost all the

titles! So Spider-Man was given to Steve Ditko, and he did a wonderful job, he developed it, he made people interested in it. There was no time for the artist not to do it.

Actually, the Hulk was gonna be discontinued after the third issue. Everybody was kind of on a downer, okay? So in comes these college guys from Columbia or NYU, and they got a list of college names—and they say, “The Hulk is the mascot of our dormitory.” I knew right away we’d got the college crowd—which we never had before! This was the beginning of the ’60s, you know. There we were, with a growing Hulk. I began to feel, “Keep the sonuvabitch going!” We were doing a good job of it. We’d put every conceivable type of situation into whatever story we had, to keep it from being static. To make it different each issue so that people would follow it, and that’s how the other characters came into the stories. We got the Inhumans, we got the first black man in comics.

MARK: The [Black] Panther.

JACK: The [Black] Panther. I got to hemming and hawing: “You know, there’s never been a black [super-hero] in comics.” And I brought in a picture of this costumed guy which was later modified so he could have a lot more movement. Actually, at first he was a guy with a cape, and all I did was take the cape off and there he was in fighting stance, unencumbered. The Black Panther came in, and of course we got a new audience!

We got the audience we should’ve gotten in the first place. We began to accumulate new readers and Marvel got back on its feet and then—[pause] I left.

MARK: Well, Jack, there was a bit of time between the point where Marvel got back on its feet and you left.

JACK: Yes. There was a long period where we didn’t know what was gonna happen. Nobody could call the shots, but it was moving and that was good enough.

There was the potential of continued movement. Then I went back to DC and I began a novel.

MARK: The New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle.

JACK: I felt that comics were a legitimate form of literature, a valid medium—why not do a novel? And see what it’s like. I felt I would define our own society. The Greeks defined it with their own gods, the Norsemen defined it with theirs. I says, “What the hell?”

MARK: Kirby might as well define it with his own gods.

JACK: No—our gods. Who are our gods? [pause] There’s a Darkseid somewhere, who’s too big for us, and who’s in a position to say, “I want it all.” You know there are guys like that—and they’re evil guys. They’re not thoroughly evil but they’re evil, because they’re in a position to grab it all.

MARK: And Darkseid operated on a much more powerful level than Dr. Doom. Darkseid wasn’t a frustrated artist like Hitler.

JACK: No, no—he was above a Hitler—and there always were people like that. He was a cosmic type of character, and so I made them all cosmic characters. I felt that maybe, somewhere deep in the Universe, there is a war where people have all these powers. Who’s to say there isn’t? The possibilities are that there are. I

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began looking for people other than gangsters. I got Galactus—where I suddenly found myself confronting God! Like God! I’d never seen a character like that myself!

Suddenly—there he was—I drew him. And he’s about three or four stories high. He’s standing on the Empire State Building.

I got the Silver Surfer, and I suddenly realized here was the dramatic situation between God and the Devil! The Devil himself was an archangel. The Devil wasn’t ugly—he was a beautiful guy! He was the greatest of all the archangels. He was the guy that challenged God. MARK: That’s the Surfer challenging Galactus.

JACK: And Galactus says, “You want to see my power? Stay on Earth forever!”

MARK: He exiled the Surfer out of Paradise.

JACK: And of course the Surfer is a good character, but he got a little bit of an ego and it destroyed him. That’s very natural.

If we got an ego it might destroy us. People say, “Look at him—who does he think he is? We knew him when.” They throw tomatoes at you. Of course, Galactus, in his own way, and maybe the people of his type, are also doing that to the Surfer. They were people of a certain class and power, and if any one of ’em became pretentious or affectatious, they would do the same thing. We would do the same thing. If a movie star walked past you and gave you the snub, you’d give him a hot foot just to show him, “I paid my money to see you—and that’s what you’re living on.” You’re not just a face in the crowd—you’re a moviegoer, you plunk your dough down, and

KIRBY GOES TO COLLEGE Reader and ace photographer Kendall Whitehouse recognized the source the fictional college depicted on the splash page of Fantastic Four #35 [previous page] was visually based on—a building from New Jersey’s Princeton University. Knowing Jack had mentioned college students adopting the Hulk as their dorm mascot, I asked him to scan all the early Marvel comics letter column missives for any from college students, that might explain how that came to be. Here’s what he found.

“After pouring over many letters pages, I couldn’t find any letters from students at Princeton. Stan and company were certainly pleased by the mail they were receiving from college students.

Many of these were selected for publication on the Fantastic Four Fan Page around this time, but I didn’t spot any from Princeton.

“However, watching Danny Fingeroth’s WonderCon@Home presentation on ‘Stan Lee Goes to College: Remembering Stan’s ’60s Campus Talks’ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPsAlRvol-w], I discovered some pivotal information on this topic. On Danny’s panel were brothers Tom and Tim Tulenko, both Princeton ’67 graduates who co-founded the Princeton chapter of the M.M.M.S. Right around that time, in November 1964, they saw FF #35 and were surprised to see Blair Hall—the very dorm in which they lived—shown in the magazine.

“They reached out to Stan, and actually went to New York to see him. You can hear the Tulenko brothers tell the tale in the video at the link above. Once I knew their names, I discovered this article from the Princeton Alumni Weekly which also tells the story: https://paw.princeton.edu/article/heros-welcome-stan-lee-princeton “As you’ll see from the video and/or the article, this contact eventually led to Stan’s appearance at Princeton on March 10, 1966.

“Tim apparently sent Stan a postcard of Blair Hall to inquire why it was selected to represent State U. You can see Stan’s letter in response in the article (which has the wrong date listed—it was January 1965, not 1964). Stan says he asked Jack why he drew Blair Tower and received the reply (in Stan’s telling), ‘Gee, I dunno.

I saw a picture in Life Magazine that looked kinda good, so I used it for the reference. I don’t know what school it was!’

“A little further investigation—courtesy of the Life Magazine archive in Google Books—shows a photo of Blair Hall on page 87 of the September 23, 1946 issue, that was almost certainly the reference image Jack Used. You can view it at the upper right.

“My interest is in the aesthetic aspects of Jack’s illustration.

I’m fascinated by how he altered the reference image to make it work better than an exact literal rendering of the building. H

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this guy lives off it.

that kind of thing.

MARK: If things were different, would you like to be doing some of those characters again?

MARK: You view life as a struggle—a constant challenge?

JACK: It was a struggle, especially for a little guy. I took it as it came.

When I was courting my wife, dating her, there was about five guys in love with her. One guy was a piano player I grew up with, and I’d say, “Gee—you play real well!” and this guy would say, “Thanks,” and I’d say, “Wouldn’t it be a tragedy if all your fingers were bent backwards?” And he would get the idea. [thoughtful pause] That’s a sad picture! [laughter]

JACK: I would do something different. I am doing something different. After I—I feel very lucky I got the time to develop to the point where I can pick and choose my characters. I can develop new characters. I began to grow with the knowledge that somewhere out there was a gap that I reach into and pull out characters that nobody’d ever seen before. Which I did! I pulled ’em all out, and they were coming thick and fast. Darkseid, Orion, the Black Racer, Kamandi. I did my work on Kamandi—I satirized McCarthy’s period. You’ll see reality in the reflection of whatever I do. Not reality in the negative sense, not sleazy or anything. If I did the future of New York you’d love it, because it would be so positive that you’d say, “I’d love to live there.” Because I’d have a great time.

I don’t believe in having a sleazy time. In fact, when the psychiatrist talked to me at the end of the war, he says, “You sonuvabitch— you had a real good time there, didn’t you?” I did. I really did.

Ordinarily a lot of guys found it miserable, but—maybe I innately like being in this kind of thing.

MARK: Sounds like a little bit of the gangster in you, Jack!

JACK: Well, it’s the place where you live, it’s the environment.

MARK: New York was a struggle?

JACK: Yes, but strangely enough, the school curriculum was excellent! I had Shakespeare in the 8th grade. I took five years of French, and during the War I was able to communicate with the Maquis— the French Resistance Forces. I did that on the walkie-talkie, you know. That was my job, I was a runner. Still to this day, I just talked a little with Moebius at the convention—that’s a lot of fun. I was also able to talk with the Germans because I’m Jewish. I’d stand in front of ’em and they’d call me every name in the book. Some of those German prisoners were still arrogant! They’d call me names.

MARK: On the radio?

JACK: No, no—for real. I would stand next to ’em and listen to what they were saying, when I would bring some of ’em back as prisoners.

I was a PFC with Patton’s army.

In front of Metz. That’s where Patton got stuck. 3rd Army. It was a terrible place. We were giving the Germans such a hard time. They hated us because they were pros at it and we were jerks and they couldn’t predict what we were gonna do. So we gave ’em a devil of a time. They’d even get drunk and come out running. It got so my lieutenant would wave ’em past to the artillery guys, and the artillery guys would flick ’em like chickens, for souvenirs.

MARK: Your work certainly deals with battle and conflict.

JACK: It always did, ever since I was a young boy. I would wait behind a wall and three guys would walk past and I’d dash out and kick the bejabbers out of ’em.

And then I would run!

MARK: You were a real scrapper on the East Side?

MARK: Since so much of your work thrives on conflict, do you think that, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, there was a conflict between you and Stan that lent a kind of dynamic to the work you created together?

JACK: I had to be. You got so you liked it.

MARK: Like the Bowery Boys.

JACK: Or the Newsboy Legion.

You had to do that, and you got to a point where you enjoyed it. I took judo in the Army and out of a class of 27, just me and another guy graduated.

JACK: There was never a conflict between me and Stan. I understand Stan very well. There are times when—uh, I feel that he’s cheating himself.

MARK: Really?

MARK: In what way?

JACK: My lieutenant was hanging by boards, which they nailed his shoulders to. The whole class was like that, except for me and this other guy. So we got diplomas.

Judo expert. I just happen to like

JACK: By not enjoying life. By not being the guy he really could be. See—I mentioned this yesterday to him. I know his brother Larry has nothin’ to prove; he knows who he is. Larry Lieber’s a 10

wonderful guy, you could talk to him and you’ll both have a great time. Stan is different, in many, many ways. Why, I don’t know. I’m not a guy who’s gonna stop long enough to define it. There are many ways I feel that Stan is cheating himself, by hiding somewhere.

He’s hiding. That’s the feeling I get.

MARK: You were talking to him about this yesterday, at the convention?

JACK: Yes. MARK: Was it just the two of you alone?

JACK: It was me, him, and Jim Shooter. I told him that he should be more like Larry and just relax and have a great time.

MARK: What did he say?

JACK: He agreed! We got along amicably.

MARK: That’s great!

JACK: Yeah! The only thing is—I’m trying to get my pages back and I can’t understand why there’s such a struggle. Or why there’s a struggle over who did what or who created what. There’s no reason for that, ’cause Stan and I know. Nobody else knows. And if Stan would only come out of that hiding place and just tell it to the world, see—everything would go great.

MARK: Jack, even though each of you, in your own hearts, know who did what...

JACK: We know!

MARK: ...do you think that time has obscured some of—?

JACK: No! It hasn’t obscured it. He knows it. I know it.

How we’re gonna prove it, I don’t know.

MARK: Do you think there’ll be a resolution to all this soon?

JACK: I don’t think so. I think that people don’t change.

They can’t change. Sometimes, it’s too late. And you’ll just go on being what you are, and I’ll go on being what I am because I’m just like that. It’ll be something that, maybe lawyers will resolve for us. Human beings remain human beings. I can predict anything that Stan will do, and...

MARK: He can predict what you’ll do?

JACK: Possibly, he can. He knows I’m a right guy, and I’m not gonna hurt him in any way, and vice versa.

MARK: Apart from the working relationship, do you miss the friendship you guys had?

JACK: No, because I make a lot of new friendships all the time. I know I can’t change Stan. I say my piece, he says his piece, and I let it go at that.

MARK: You know, the whole world would probably like to see the two of you guys shake hands.

JACK: We did, yesterday! But it resolves nothing. I could shake hands with Stan till doomsday and it would mean nothing, see. It would mean nothing—it would mean that the dance went on, that’s all. But beyond that the situation’s still the same. Somebody else will have to arbitrate. I’ll leave it to wiser heads. I don’t say I

have the wisest head in the world. I’ll leave it to people with patience. I’ll try to have patience myself in the hopes that something positive will come out of all this.

Whatever I want out of this is half gone already, and whatever’s left I’m willing to be conciliatory about.

MARK: What’s a positive thing that could come out of all of it?

JACK: A change in Marvel. A change for the younger people. I think they’re not giving the younger people time to grow, to develop as editors, writers, artists. One guy told me, “I got the Captain America book—and you watch what I do with it!” Three weeks later he’s working on another book. So how much time has he got to develop his Captain America style?

MARK: What could Marvel do to change that?

JACK: Help the guy, like we did in the old days. There doesn’t have to be that much pressure on people.

Marvel itself isn’t getting its full share of what it should get. They’re cheating themselves. If they did get their full share, if they allowed growth—loyalty alone won’t get them sales. They’re screwing themselves. I don’t say that in a demeaning manner, I say that strictly as a business failure.

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(previous page, top) A young Jack in the early 1940s, when he was courting future wife Rosalind. (previous page, bottom) A 1944 sketch from memory, sent home during the latter part of Jack’s World War II military service. (above) Unused cover for Young Love #66, circa 1955, with lots of non-Kirby retouching. You can read Harry Mendryk’s analysis of it at: https:// kirbymuseum.org/ blogs/simonandkirby/ archives/4578

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MARK: Of course, they’re also making money.

JACK: On toys and movies. On magazine sales they made more in the old days. Captain America used to sell 900,000 a month. The other books were selling over 500,000–600,000 a month. Green Lantern was doing that. Why were comic books so exciting? Because guys were giving their full share.

MARK: And you could feel it in the product?

JACK: Oh, yes! When Captain America was in a fight, it was me doing a ballet. Fantasizing myself beating five or six guys, when in real life, of course, I’d get smeared! [laughter] But in this fantasy life which I dramatized, I would sock one guy while the other guy slid under the table and the third guy fell against the stove. And then they would come back and there’d be follow-up movement—and that was exciting. The reader caught that. Now they’ve made comics a serious thing instead of play. reaching out to Doctor Strange—.

MARK: Do you read any of the current comics?

MARK: To touch his hand.

JACK: Occasionally, when I’m not busy.

JACK: Of course, I would do it in the Classical mode, which is nudity.

The kind of Doctor Strange nobody’s ever seen.

MARK: Did you see Dark Knight?

JACK: Yes. Frank Miller’s a fine artist and he’s doing a fine job. He’s gonna experiment, he’s gonna dare. He’s a guy with a lot of guts, and he’s gonna risk it in a positive way because he’s got the talent to do it. Something good is gonna come out of whatever he does. I would never worry about Frank if I was an editor. Whatever he gave me I would publish immediately. I’m a big fan of his. He’s one of the few lucky ones who’s getting a chance to grow. John Byrne is getting a chance to grow.

MARK: Wow. JACK: I would call it “Strange Strange.” [laughter] Of course, I’m joshing—that’s my way of having fun.

MARK: You want to go out fighting when you go, Jack?

JACK: Yes, I will. I’ll probably get blown up by a machine I’ll fool around with. I was a lousy mechanic, okay?

MARK: On Superman?

MARK: You don’t want to die in your sleep?

JACK: Of course. He’s a lucky guy. It took Leonardo da Vinci twelve years before he became a Master and made the Mona Lisa. Twelve years!

JACK: I never will. I know it.

MARK: You’re too much of a go-getter?

JACK: Nah, I’m a figure-outer. In fact, I’m figuring out how not to die.

I just figured a way where I could live 200 years, and come back.

MARK: So the companies aren’t giving their young talent enough time to flourish?

JACK: That’s right. In ten years we got the Sistine Chapel, see? Give me ten years, you know what the heck would come out of me?

MARK: Tell me.

JACK: No, I’m not gonna tell you!

It’s my own thing. I’ll tell your great grandson!

MARK: What?

MARK: So in the year 2125 we might see a whole different version of the New Gods?

JACK: I don’t know. You’d get a whole post office wall, murals and everything.

JACK: Yes, ’cause I’ll be back and nobody’ll know how I did it.

MARK: You can come do that at my house.

MARK: Cause you’ll use a different name.

JACK: I had a proposal like that yesterday. [laughter] Somebody wanted me to do a naked Doctor Strange.

JACK: No—I’ll use Kirby. I’ll always use Kirby, I like it. I’ll come back and tell your great-grandson what a great guy you were for paying some attention to me.

MARK: A naked Doctor Strange!

JACK: Well, I suggested it, because I felt it would be in keeping with what was done in the Vatican.

MARK: You suggested the naked Doctor Strange?

(previous page) Captain America #102 pencils (1968). See this issue’s gallery for more!

JACK: Yeah, because it would be difficult, like the Sistine Chapel.

Somebody from another dimension

(above) Kirby at home in the 1980s. (left) A delightful 1976 drawing by Jack, for his granddaughter Tracy—apparently in conjunction with a family trip to Disneyland.

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We’re back with more of Simon & Kirby’s Link Thorne work, this time from Airboy Comics Vol. 4, #7 (August 1947), with art reconstruction and coloring by Chris Fama. This story wasn’t included in Titan’s S&K reprint volumes. We’ll continue with another installment of the complete Link Thorne stories next issue.

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I noted in an earlier issue of TJKC, no Black person I knew then or later saw the Black Panther coming. As a small Black kid, I had no priorities outside of being a good son to my two wonderful parents, a good grandson, a friend to classmates and neighbors, and a good student. And having days of fun-filled playtime was essential, of course. But Black grown-ups had ‘real priorities,’ none I really understood. They were doing things large and small to advance Civil Rights— sometimes risking their lives, reputations, properties, businesses, and the health and welfare of their families.

A Black super-hero? Not a priority. But outside of the Jim Crow states (and other states where Jim Crow mindsets had some sway, as well), Kirby and Lee had made the creation of the Panther a priority of their own.

That “priority” began with an emissary of Wakanda using some highly developed technology to respond to his government after conferring with the Fantastic Four (#52, Aug. 1966, right). And that communicator followed an incredible sky conveyance [below right], a gift from the African king in question. Wow. Readers were seeing something very different, perhaps radical, since most Black characters in comic strips or comics never got close to operating advanced tech. But this was just an opening. Once we get to visit the land of the Black Panther, the eye-popping visuals really kick in. The king of that land had a rising totem [below left], fashioned beautifully by our ‘King’ Kirby, who’d weaned us on such incredible visuals in the land of the Inhumans, on the moon of the Watcher, the labs of the Leader, Dr. Doom, A.I.M., and others. And as T’Challa readied himself

for the contest to come, the vast technical underground jungle, a system of metal pillars, intertwining tubes, cables, coils, and all-systematic-marvels-Kirby greeted our eyes and the fabulous foursome (along with Wyatt Wingfoot) who came to see it.

Like his namesake, the Panther uses his terrain to his advantage to negate the foursome’s great powers.

He nearly “wins,” though Jack and Stan couldn’t let their flagship comic heroes get beaten that easily by a newcomer (and that makes sense, since the Panther would quickly become an ally and friend). Stan, as was his habit, rarely edited or wrote one of his heroes getting defeated by another.

Daredevil and Cap fought to the usual Marvel standstill in Daredevil #43, and even mismatches (DD vs.

Thor in DD #30, or DD vs. SubMariner in DD #7) just went to show how the Man Without Fear could prove his courage against unbeatable odds. And that was just in Daredevil’s title. It was pretty much the same across the board.

Believe me, I checked.

After the splendiferous “stand-off ’’ (the Panther wasn’t technically beaten either—Jack and Stan were building him up, and it wouldn’t have gone over well to have him go through a humiliating beating), the larger scenario was revealed. In FF #53, the land of Wakanda was a proud, beautiful country, and the foursome from New York and Wyatt Wingfoot, who’d been the monkey wrench in the battle for his friends, were treated to a tribal dance (traditional) and then the sights of the underground jungle continued and continued and continued to impress.

Jack’s affinity for “worlds within worlds’’ was… another world. Not only did he play on jungle king legends of the past, which the Thing sarcastically played up in Stan’s dialogue, but also in the dialogue was a

Deep Within the Heart of

AfricA The Wakandan Nation Explored by Jerry Boyd

(top) The first panel featuring the masked Panther in FF #52 (July 1966) has an uncharacteristically blank background, and a completely obscured face. Was this by Jack’s choosing, or alterations made at Marvel? (next page, bottom) Kirby’s collection of National Geographic magazines undoubtedly came in handy for this depiction of an African tribal scene.

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very intriguing backstory for the young prince. Yes, there were the evil, greedy invaders (see MGM’s 1930s Tarzan series for some despicable baddies), but out of the conflict comes a steely-eyed young hero, who took the finances from the Vibranium mound and enriched his nation.

Unspoken and unneeded was the terrible colonization experienced by many African nations and tribes—Kirby and Lee’s T’Challa and generations of warriors had never been bowed, or broken.

The FF are bowled over by the riches, the tech, and for Sue Richards, the fashions (!) found in this impressive underground jungle. This “jungle” is inviting and another high point for the mastery of Kirby and Sinnott during this period. Just the lounge scene in a spectacular splash in FF #54 [right] blew my little eyes out of my little head—Kirby was way past the Phantom’s cave and Tarzan’s treehouse.

Klaw happened to return in that epic origin issue that uncovered some of the Panther’s secrets—what timing, right? Battle is joined and T’Challa triumphs, as does the world’s most fabulous foursome over Klaw’s creations of sound, appropriately enough—jungle creatures! In FF #54, the camaraderie shared by the victors increases and Johnny and Wyatt take their leave via just-another-oneof-those-astounding-Kirby-traveling-machines. The Wakandan nation has never seen better artistry, even though it’s been decades—no knockdown to the Black Panther movie’s CGI sets, but Kirby/Sinnott’s visuals have never been topped.

With Jack losing interest in Marvel and the sociopolitical aspects of US race relations playing a part in T’Challa’s early history, the scenes from Wakanda came in shorter sequences. In FF Special #5, we see armed warriors at the watery perimeter of the kingdom and in Tales to Astonish #98-100, we get a few precious glimpses more.

The Panther replaced Captain America in the Avengers and Roy Thomas and others added to the African Avenger’s greatness.

WAKANDA 1977 In ’77, I was a teenager and I was delighted that Kirby chose to take on the Black Panther when he made his return to Mighty Marvel! Still one of the biggest names (or perhaps the biggest still!) in the comic magazine industry, it was a joyful salute, I felt, to Black comic fans the world over for the creator of the hero to do a BP solo comic! By this time, my Black comic-reading friends and I were mature enough to feel an even greater appreciation for what the King was doing—he could’ve done whatever: gone back to the Inhumans, demand control of the Silver Surfer and Galactus, perhaps do a “worlds within worlds’’ set-up on Mt. Olympus, adding to the wonderment of the Greek gods in general, and Hercules in particular, Asgardian-style. But he didn’t. He continued to impress with the world-within-worlds of The Eternals… and the Wakandans.

Black Panther #1 was cover-dated January 1977.

The Panther and Mr. Little were nowhere near Wakanda, but they were in the midst of adventure, the type Indiana Jones would have a few years later.

King Solomon’s Frog was the objective; Mr. Little was a new, ambitious supporting character; and Princess Zanda was a beautiful African foil. T’Challa took on all challenges and won. The dialogue was right out of Mister Miracle and his high-concept period following DC’s directives to Jack to go easy on the god-versusgod struggles of the earlier issues. Apparently, Kirby 23

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wasn’t interested in T’Challa’s love interest (first shown in the Avengers #73), the ManApe, or others created outside of his vision.

Adventure spilled into other adventures as Zanda, T’Challa, and Mr. Little staved off death, imprisonment, and other perils crafted by new villains—created by Jack.

In the sixth issue, we’re introduced to N’Gassi, the wise old regent (a lot of Marvel rulers have someone like that), who tells armed traitors about “shattering the structure of the Panther Cult.” General Jakarra is the short, slight leader of the treasonous faction, and the envious wannabe has his own plans for the Vibranium mound. Of course, T’Challa learns of this treachery and returns with Mr. Little to his native kingdom, explaining the Panther Cult and its first Black Panther, his ancestor Bashenga, and a brief origin of the sacred mound.

In Black Panther #8, readers are greeted with the spectacle of a Wakandan ritual battle between those who’d lead the nation.

Kirby was mindful not to put the technological wonders from the ’60s into this tale,

because in FF #53, T’Challa said he was the one who had it built.

Jack’s art was still fantastic, even though it’s tough not to imagine how it’d have looked if Joe Sinnott inked it. Mike Royer didn’t disappoint, of course.

In this issue, we got to meet the family. T’Challa had one conniving cousin and a jealous close friend in the pages of the Avengers.

Four relatives, four Black Panthers are added to the storyline, four (as called in BP #9) Black Musketeers. (I was never big on the name, but okay…) Three men and a woman—they even got four distinctive outfits—we’re talking Jack Kirby, right? T’Challa returns and he and his brave family members stop General Jakarra, a much worse threat than ever, since he exposed himself to the Vibranium and became a monster.

Kiber the Cruel followed up—another power-mad baddie, but in the King’s style, a very interesting adversary. And with a cliffhanger at the end of BP #12, Kirby ended his time on the first Black super-hero.

Jack layered this African kingdom wonderfully by adding characters, backstories, new villains, new challenges, and even new ancestors of the present monarch. It was a satisfying run. The Wakandan nation was beautifully delineated above the tech jungle and below.

We didn’t get to see it all, but with Kirby’s imagination, there’s always more, because his imagination always promised and delivered more.

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(previous and this page) Scenes from Black Panther #7 (Jan. 1978), as Kirby adds a new backstory to Wakanda, during his 1970s return to the character.

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Kirby’s Dogs of War!

By Dwight Boyd

(right) Long before the Fourth World, Kirby had a warhound in 1957’s Alarming Tales #1.

(next page) Dabney Donovan’s Demon Dog from Jimmy Olsen #143 (Nov. 1971). (bottom) Steppenwolf goes to the dogs in 1984’s New Gods reprint #6.

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orlds within worlds… King Kirby gave us “The Micro-World of Dr. Doom,” the Negative Zone, the kingdoms outside the realm of eternal Asgard, an expanded look at the submerged Atlantis, the world of the Bug, the Hairies, the Evil Factory and even… the world of dogs! “Dogs, you say?

Did I miss one?” you’re asking?

In the world of dogs, Kirby kept it to the verbiage of the New Gods. So, no, you good readers missed nothing.

“Dogs,” “pups,” and all terms dog-related on the worlds of the ultimates, usually meant putdowns.

And I was only really aware of this in recent re-readings of all four Kirby Fourth World titles. Before that, I was clueless. After all, Conan the Barbarian, over at Marvel, and his fellow Hyborian Age swordsmen, thieves, pirates, wanderers, and so on routinely called each other (also in many an insult) “Stygian dog,” “Cimmerian dog,” “Hyperborean dog,” “Turanian dog,” “Nemedian dog,” “Hyrkanian dog’’ (and the worst, in my opinion: “dog son of a dog mother’’—

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wow!), and the list goes on, depending on wherever our hero traveled on those famed sandaled shoes of his. Roy Thomas let slip his “dogs of war’’ a lot, also.

In Jack’s final war of the gods, there were real dogs: Steppenwolf’s Dog Cavalry, the demon dog of Dabney Donovan, the dogs on leashes held by the guards that kept the new arrivals in line as they were shoved into Granny Goodness’ orphanage, etc.

Let’s look at the King’s verbiage pertaining to dogs, shall we? In no particular order: “The pups have angered me, Desaad!—Put me on the defensive! A great feat!”

[Darkseid to Desaad in Forever People #6, shown at left]

“You dogs of Apokolips are eloquent when destiny favors you!!”

[Orion to Slig in New Gods #5]

“No, no! I don’t want to go in there! Let me go, you dogs!”

[The young Orion to his father’s guards in New Gods #7]

“You sly dog.’’

[Granny Goodness to Kanto in Mister Miracle #7]

“You tricky, young dogs! You won’t get far! When I jerk this igniter, you die!”

[Justifier to the Forever People in Forever People #3]

“All hail to the eternal optimisms of New Genesis!

The dogs of war—beware!”

[Orion to Lightray in New Gods #9]

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“How my heart leapt when I saw you commanding your dog cavalry! Think, Steppenwolf— think hard!”

“You’re nervous, dog! You missed!

But, of course, your gun is useless against the supernatural!”

[Izaya the Inheritor to Steppenwolf in New Gods #7]

“I’ll take your darling demon dogs, Granny!”

[Sect member to Bates’ guard in Forever People #8]

[An aide to Granny Goodness in Mister Miracle #5]

“Curse me for a flea-bitten war-hound, if Darkseid himself can match you for insidious planning!”

“Do you hear that, New Genesis dogs?

Desaad will soon attend to you! And you would quail if you knew what keeps him busy right now!”

[Apokolips guard to the captive Forever People in Forever People #4]

[Orion to Lightray—The Hunger Dogs]

(above) Darkseid’s Dog Cavalry, New Gods #1 (1971). (right) Original caption announcing the 1985 Hunger Dogs graphic novel. (below right) Another “sly dog,” from New Gods #11 (Sept. 1972). (bottom) Jack at home in the 1980s.

“These are tanks of chemical defoliant packaged in the form of a—a dog!”

“A demon dog—the symbol of their destruction!—As our own is forecast in the prophecies we’ve inherited!”

“Hunting dog of Apokolips! When I get my hands on you… oww!”

[Vykin the Black to Devilance in Forever People #11]

“This should scatter you barking dogs!”

[Jimmy Olsen and Superman, respectively, discover Dabney Donovan’s mechanized monsters in Jimmy Olsen #143]

[Big Bear to Bates’ guards in Forever People #8]

“Sleep—You dogs!”

In the King’s god-war, dogs were here and there. Jack’s battlegrounds left out racial and ethnic slurs used by soldiers and warriors of times past (of course) but made plenty of room for the combatants to “dog’’ each other out (if you’ll pardon that slang term used during my high school days). And we could see the actual dogs used, also.

Kirby’s world within worlds set up its own god-speak. And what did all this prove? It proved the man just loved dogs… and gods.

[Sonny Sumo, armed with the Anti-Life Equation in Forever People #6, to attacking Justifiers]

“You’ll pay for this, you savage dog! Aaaaa—” “Enjoy the ride, Gole!’’

[Gole and Orion exchange ‘pleasantries’ in New Gods #6]

“Mad-dog hippie! You’re holding back this tonnage with your bare hands! You must be stronger than a bull elephant!”

[Escaping Justifier to Big Bear in Forever People #6]

“You know me well, New Genesis dog!”

[Shaligo, the Flying Finback, to Orion and Lightray in New Gods #6]

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GOING DEEPER INTO SPACE n this forum, I’d like to spend a bit more time discussing deep space. This term, as we have seen, refers to the use of structural elements in a composition that create the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface. The most significant tool for achieving this illusion is perspective. Most commonly, the artist draws a horizon line or vanishing point and arranges his figures along receding lines called orthogonals, that converge at the vanishing point. An example of this would be a set of train tracks that appears to

join at the distant horizon. 1 In this Captain America panel from Tales of Suspense #62 (Feb. 1965), the orthogonals are the planes of the desk, which meet at

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the horizon line which is just above Cap’s head. Kirby uses the figures on the left to emphasize that line and to lead the eye to Captain America.

The line of Cap’s shoulders directs the eye to the figure draped over the desk, whose position emphasizes the edge of the desk leading to the seated figure of the warden at extreme right. He is the panel’s focal point. Kirby also uses the size of the overlapping figures to create the illusion of deep space.

This technique is extremely effective when setting mood for some of the simplest panel compositions. For instance, this panel from 1969’s Fantastic Four #85 of Dr. Doom menacing a subordinate clearly creates a claustrophobic techno space. 2 The orthogonal lines of the equipment completely hem in the cowering figure.

Kirby is not a stickler for precision when it comes to perspective.

1 Often the orthogonal lines to his vanishing point don’t line up perfectly. He gives us just enough of a suggestion to create the illusion of space. Just as he doesn’t rely too heavily on anatomical correctness in his figures to the detriment of their dynamism, he also never lets perspective overrule the impact of his drawings. For example, in the case of 2 this particular drawing, the orthogonals do not converge on the cowering figure at the right, but the effect is still successful because the shapes of the machinery at the vanishing point lead the eye back to the figure.

Linear perspective in painting was essentially invented in 1413 by Filippo Brunelleschi. As the

Renaissance unfolded, various artists refined the techniques he’d introduced.

The complex compositions included elements in the foreground, middle ground and background, and their spatial relationships to one another were determined with minute precision.

Deep space is also often discussed in relation to film. In its infancy, the art of filmmaking was closely aligned to stagecraft, in that shots were framed very much in the limited way that a stage is presented to its audience.

Viewed as a panorama, the stage is set in such a way that the actor’s positions are blocked out to prevent them from overlapping each other, enabling them to be seen by the theatergoers.

Gradually, cinematographers acquired camera lenses that permitted them to keep background and foreground elements in focus simultaneously. As a result, one could film actors at greater distances from one another, as well as including background elements.

Early comic books usually used simplistic middle ground shots with very little experimentation. Kirby, an 3 avid filmgoer who studied movies for artistic techniques as well as inspiration, began to incorporate what he had seen and internalized into his earliest work. He began to design his panels for maximum impact, as in this large panel from Captain America #7, circa 1942.

3 The extreme foreground figure of the Black Toad has virtually leaped out of the page and into your face. The orthogonal lines of the room lead backward, accentuating the momentum of the forwardly mobile pose of Captain America. Bucky runs behind, pushing Cap forward, and the supine figures draped below give him further momentum. The fact that the vanishing point is well below

the panel border also gives Cap even more upward thrust.

Kirby is rightfully famous for this sort of forced perspective.

Generally, the more he utilized background and foreground elements to create a three-dimensional space, the more successful was his use of this technique.

4 In this panel from Journey Into Mystery #118 (July 1965), Loki is being buffeted across the length of his cell by an Asgardian prison guard. His position between the horizon line and the orthogonals of the floor insures that he is moving forward and outward with maximum force.

Something else to notice in this panel is that Kirby has created a sort of three-dimensional grid, using the stones on the walls and floors, which create coordinate points from floor to ceiling in panel space. This is a good way of breaking up space into intervals called lattices so that the figures and objects seem optimally placed in the panel. A lattice is a mathematical physics term for a regular configuration of points, particles or objects throughout an area, essentially a slice of space.

5 If we look at this diagram, we can see how the spheres in the cube occupy the space. The area that each sphere takes up is a lattice. Similarly, we can break up Loki’s cell into a series of coordinate points from wall to wall and ceiling to floor that create a sort of framework. We can see how the choices that Kirby makes in the placement of even minor portions of his figures and objects within the framework may impact the entire drawing.

This degree of compositional precision goes a long way in creating realistic, dynamic deep space compositions. By using the planes, curves and edges of objects, Kirby 5 can create a ballet of swirling kinetic energy that focuses the eye precisely where he wants it to go. 6 For instance, look at the amazing intricacy of this Rawhide Kid #29 splash page (Aug. 1962), and how the eye will always rest on the Kid who is, as usual, trying hard to avoid the chaos that always

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they are fairly small and in the rear of the panel, the composition lets us see them first. The sidewalk grid anchors us in panel space/time, creating a stage set that moves from back to front and from past to present.

It is the yellow-hatted running figure of the boy in the middle ground that makes this possible, because he brings the reader’s eye to the rear lattice containing the FF. They in turn bring the eye to the policeman leaning against a lamppost and then back to the middle lattice, where we see a group of eager shoppers waiting to get the latest issue of the magazine that we are reading. Finally, in the foreground, a very enthusiastic boy is holding open the letter’s page of the magazine we are reading.

These events/moments happen in the back to front space/time continuum created by the lattices on the page. Like much of Kirby’s work when understood and explained, it seems deceptively simple—but that is the genius of the King of Comics.

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6 manages to find him.

When the eye enters the panel, it sees the spotted black shadow accentuating the shape of the bar. The bar is made up of panels which suggest virtual lattice shapes that break up the space. The figure of Apache Joe firing his pistol is framed by the panels of the bar, as are the figures dancing on the table. In fact, all horizontal and vertical lines created by furniture and floor boards create lattices that visually enclose the figures. Even the circular table shapes make up more lattices that define the dimensions of the panel.

These lattices support the figures, giving them more depth and solidity than they would have without the background. We can see, as in many similar Rawhide Kid splash panels, the Kid is enveloped in his own space, his own lattice by the circular table and curved chair, but the encroaching violence of the other figures will soon disturb his solitude. This is the sort of multileveled compositional structure that makes Kirby’s best work a four-dimensional space/time continuum. We can literally see a time lapse in the panel, from the firing of Joe’s gun to the reactions of the dancing figures, to the Kid musing in the chair, and finally to the observers at the bar whose positions bring the eye back to the Kid. 7 This last page has to be a sentimental favorite, from issue #11 of The Fantastic Four (Feb. 1963), the comic book that first put Kirby on the map for me. Here, we see the four heroes in the background moving towards the viewer, and although 31

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[this spread and next] Captain America #102, pages 15 & 18 (1968) Syd Shores interpretation of Kirby’s pencils is a mixed bag for me.

On the one hand, you can clearly see he was faithful in his inking of Jack’s work, not leaving out any details.

On the other hand, I’m not a fan of his work stylistically. It doesn’t have the bold approach and crisp linework of contemporaries like Joe Sinnott and Frank Giacoia—and even Vince Colletta’s inks, despite his omissions, gave the work more flair and personality.

I’ve always felt Giacoia was the ideal inker for Cap during this era—if only he’d been able to keep up with Kirby’s voluminous output during this prime stage.

Still, these Cap pages are a highwater mark in Kirby’s career, that I think don’t get the level of respect they deserve.

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by John Morrow

Twice-told Kirby covers, with commentary by Shane Foley

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Super Powers II #12, cover (1985): While certainly well past his prime, this is a remarkable example of what Kirby could still accomplish, at the tail end of his career. While an argument could be made that some minor modifications may’ve been needed, this is virtually a complete redraw of Kirby’s original by inker Greg Theakston.

It doesn’t suffer from details being omitted, but instead by them being altered completely. While the finished cover is a commercially acceptable image for a lightweight toy tiein comic, this level of “correction” seems totally unnecessary and inappropriate.

(That Kirby required Theakston to ink on vellum overlays to keep the pencil art intact, may’ve played into Greg’s desire to make it more his own art.)

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(below) Kirby first introduced the Negative Zone as “Sub-Space” in Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966). (next page) New Gods #2 (May 1971) depicted Jimmy Olsen’s “Wild Area” in this fabulous full-pager.

(next two pages) Some of the many worlds that revolve around Earth-K! Outer/Inner Limits: New Genesis and Apokolips, the Bug Colony, Asgard, Olympus, Microverse, Dimension Z, Zero Street, the Negative Zone, Microworld, Sub-Atomica.

Down to Earth: Olympia, the Beehive, the Kallusians’ city, Attilan, Savage Land, Atlantis, Wundagore, Habitat, Wakanda, Avalon, Netherworlds (Pluto’s and Kala’s), Subterranea, Tyrannus’ underworld.

Kirby’s Secret Societies What?

“Yet another hidden super-civilization? How many more secret cities are there on Earth?” said my friend, when we discovered the Inhumans came from “Attilan.”

(Or did he say that when we first read X-Men #44 and discovered the non-Kirby Red Raven’s secret city?

Not sure now—but the point is the same.)

And we have to admit—he’s right! There were, and still are, lots of ’em! And our Mr. Kirby was often their chief architect.

THINKING ABOUT IT, THERE ARE BROADLY TWO TYPES OF ‘SECRET/HIDDEN’ CIVILIZATIONS. Outer/Inner Limits: These exist on a different dimensional plane, where no aircraft, submarine, mining company, rock climber, or bush walker can accidentally spot them. Contact with them is only when they decide to knock on our door, or (in some cases) when a scientist accidentally finds them. Asgard and Olympus, as well as New Genesis and Apokolips, can be counted amongst them, alongside the Fifth Dimension (Strange Tales #105—Human Torch), Dimension Z (Tales to Astonish #49—Ant/Giant Man) Zero Street of the Night People (Captain America #201), etc. It seems the funky ones—the ones with no really dramatic name or memorable character—fade from interest, while others with powerhouse names (such as the Microverse from Fantastic Four #16, which got a massive facelift when Kirby’s Sub-Atomica was introduced in FF Annual #5, with Psycho-Man) become staples to be revisited again and again. But since these are in parallel/alternate/different dimensions, they are the first type and not what my friend was exasperated about.

Above/Below Ground: These are firmly on Earth, so that we wonder, with my friend, how they’ve missed detection til our heroes come along. And yes, there were lots of them. Mole Man’s Subterranea was there right at the start of the Marvel Age in FF #1—a bit out of the way so it could easily be missed by the rest of us. But then in Hulk #5, we discovered a second underground world of Tyrannus. Then Iron Man found Kala’s Netherworld in Tales of Suspense #43. So before the new Marvel was two years old, Jack Kirby had

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by Shane Foley

established three separate subterranean civilizations.

(And to celebrate, that same month that Iron Man went underground—July 1963—Kirby went sub-atomic and created the Microworld of Dr. Doom in FF #16!)

Atlantis was hinted at in Fantastic Four #4 (May 1962), then fully revealed as a vibrant and alive underwater culture in FF Annual #1 (Sept 1963). And so it continued, as other hidden cities and cultures emerged, such as the Kallusian city—alien in origin but firmly planted at the North Pole—in Avengers #14 (March 1965). That same month, the X-Men found Ka-Zar’s Savage Land at Antarctica. And all were rendered superbly and probably concocted by Mr. Kirby. No doubt I’ve overlooked more than a few.

Six months later, or thereabouts, a new batch of Kirby’s hidden worlds was conceived.

The FF discovered the Inhumans’ city of Attilan (FF #47, Feb. 1966). A few months later, Wakanda was found (FF #52, July 1966), then Prester John spoke of fabulous lost Avalon in FF #54 (which, as far as I remember, remained lost). Meanwhile, Thor discovered the towering Wundagore (Thor #134, Nov. 1966) and the FF went on to find the Beehive (FF #66–67, Sept.– Oct. 1967). These last two are huge installations rather than whole civilizations, but surely large enough to be on the same scale as any hidden city.

Just as Kirby’s “Sub-Space/Negative Zone” concept was of a quality far above all previous ‘other dimensions’ and largely pushed them out of Marvel existence, so too these new ‘secret societies’ largely eclipsed most of what had come before. Only the old ones that developed (Atlantis, the Savage Land) had a chance against these new, powerfully and evocatively realized creations of the Master.

KIRBY LOVED LOST AND HIDDEN CIVILIZATIONS. Why so many? What’s their fascination?

First, of course, they’re simply fun, and follow in the great traditions of adventure stories such as those

by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan and many others), H. Rider Haggard and so forth. To a point, we easily accept the need to have a ‘suspension of disbelief ’ in these cases for the sake of the wild ride of the narrative!

But secondly, just as super-heroes are dramatized, almost caricatured versions of heroism—all exaggerated and costumed so as to be instantly recognizable in a shorthand kind of way—so too are their villains and locales. When we think about it, there’s nothing sillier than a villain dressed in an instantly recognizable costume, when being incognito would be much wiser. Even bully-boy gangsters with their classic sunglasses, black suits and big, black cars can all hide behind looking the same as each other. But such things work in the context of our larger than life, often symbolic little adventure stories.

And it’s ditto for previously undiscovered cities, societies and civilizations.

For sure, in the past, much of the world was an unexplored, strange and foreign place, with lots of room in the imagination for new and strange peoples. And so secret places and peoples were a natural.

But as exploration and surveillance have made our planet so much smaller and known—during Kirby’s career and to this day—is there a place for such things?

One way around it is to make the earthbound adventures into space romps, such as what many comics and the Star Wars movies do. It seems to me that, since the dark mysterious corners of the earth are not so mysterious anymore, they are often now being replaced by whole planets that are dark and mysterious. What are the intergalactic travels in Star Wars except journeys to deepest, darkest Africa or the exotic Indies with a futuristic garnish?

But what about if we need to stay on Earth? Can it work anymore?

bogged down in explanation. But some writers have the knack of being able to skilfully go to greater depths, incorporating insight and social commentary cleverly integrated into their fantasy realm, often even using it to enhance the adventure the reader is wanting.

Kirby was one of them!

Kirby more than any other, many of us believe, was a master at devising stories with elements that gave even the most outlandish scenario an atmosphere of relevance, and it seems to me that being more meaningful, even mythological, is where, in 1970, he wanted to go.

We all know how the Fourth World of the New Gods was, to an extent, an allegory of the times Kirby lived in (New Genesis was the free world, engaged in a conflict with a totalitarian, à la Communist/Nazi one—where the war was waged on neutral territory, Earth being somewhere like Vietnam) and so some of his ‘secret societies’ also took on a measure of greater meaning than simply a place for an adventure.

The ‘Wild Area’ in particular, introduced in Jimmy Olsen #133, was a weird, obviously very big, and mostly shunned place surprisingly close to Metropolis, that was revealed to have two hidden societies within it, as well as contact with an evil third. The discovery of Habitat began our involvement with the vast saga of Kirby’s New Genesis/Apokolips war, but was on the fringes of it, like the people it dramatized—the young of the late ’60s and ’70s who were bikers or who decided to ‘drop-out.’

Kirby may not have developed the themes much, but it was clear he wasn’t simply recycling old ideas, but basing these on what he saw around him. This alternate society, in its wonderfully drawn and conceptualized Habitat, was (a bit confusingly, I feel) introduced alongside the hidden Project (later renamed Project Cadmus in other hands), a massive covert Government research station doing DNA experimentation. The problems (and stories) came from its counterpart (the Evil Factory or Brigadoom, situated in far-off Scotland) interfering again and again. In one sense, these places were simply more ‘secret societies,’ but in another, they were a maturing of the concept and had more relevance to actual events in the real world.

One amazing example of using a ‘hidden civilization’ for more than simple adventure purposes was the Bug Colony in New Gods.

Existing on New Genesis, this, of course, is a ‘type 1’ civilization, and was addressed in my article “Bugs in the System” in TJKC #77, so need not be discussed further here. But a better example of using such ideas as a ‘dramatized symbol’ could rarely be found in comics, and the fact that it remains incomplete at Kirby’s hands leaves us all the poorer.

Had the entire Fourth World not been cut short, I wonder how much deeper Kirby would have taken his symbolic approach in all the various elements he concocted, since he grasped far more than most of the impact and potential of many of the ideas and directions scientific experimentation was heading?

IN OUR COMICS WORLD, THE ANSWER IS, OF COURSE, YES. On the one hand, all that needs to be done is the addition of ‘cloaking devices’ and ‘perception filters’ as the excuse for them not being found until now. In the wonderful world of comics, that can be accommodated.

But there’s more of course.

All living societies, past and present, have subsets of cultures amongst their own, or living somewhere close—groups of dissidents or strange religious bodies or ethnic minorities—which are often feared due to their other-ness or different traditions. How natural for these to be dramatized in comics and adventure stories into a powerful and symbolic presence—often a threatening one. What is Atlantis but a neighbor like this? As well, there are always rumours of amoral scientists, not far away, secretly working away at developing new and potentially offensive versions of life as we know it, threatening the very stability of life on Earth. What are Wundagore, or the Beehive, but dramatizations of such fears? Are there Communist or Terrorist cells right here amongst us, plotting to undermine our way of life? What are any of the secret cities but caricatured versions of these? Are there peoples who have withdrawn from us, fearing what we do and the direction our governments are taking us? We see dramatizations of these as well. Alternately, are there hidden societies working for our benefit, unrecognized by us, against the foolishness of our war efforts, and for our ultimate good? So perhaps, secret cities and civilizations are, for the main, basically dramatized versions of what we find strange and unknown amongst us.

ALL WRITERS MUST USE THIS ELEMENT IN THEIR STORIES TO SOME DEGREE, EVEN THOSE MAKING NO ATTEMPT TO GO BEYOND TELLING A RIPPING YARN. A truly alien culture would not be understandable to any reader who wasn’t a serious student of sociology, and the story would be 39

Returning to Marvel in 1975–76, Kirby’s creativity was firing on all cylinders again with his amazing Eternals concept, where he took the nonsense of The Chariots of the Gods (interesting though it was and is) and made a powerful comics scenario out of it. Its Olympia was not in a different dimensional plane like the already established ‘Olympus,’ but hidden on Earth, nor was his ‘Lemuria’ the Lemuria of Sub-Mariner’s world. His Lemuria, in particular, in Eternals #8–10, with its denouement in #12, is a perfect example of using the hidden civilization concept as a metaphor for comment.

Here, Lemuria was painted not as a one-dimensional evil society, but as a culture with all the social classes of any in real life, and one which had to deal with a massively disempowered but problematic underclass. It’s a story with depth, character and commentary on

the real world, using the backdrop of a wonderfully realized ‘hidden civilization’ to make its point. In Eternals #12, when two of the Deviants—the Reject and Karkas—are able to leave Lemuria and go to Olympia for sanction, the Reject’s pessimistic comments about it being “just another place” (as opposed to an almost heavenly place where his problems will automatically be solved) were beautifully written by Kirby, showing a real depth of understanding of someone in the Reject’s position. (To my mind, this story arc is as powerful a work of sheer genius as anything in New Gods. Simply stunning!)

But, as with the Fourth World, the plug was pulled early on the 40

wonderful tapestry of the Eternals.

How Kirby was able to continue the high quality of his creative work after having such magnificent creations as his Fourth World and Eternals discontinued—as well as having them taken out of his control and able to be plundered by others at will—is inconceivable! The man’s resilience and work ethic was stunning!

After Eternals, the ‘secret societies’ in his stories understandably returned to a more basic storytelling level. Kirby’s imaginings

always held a depth and inspiration that most can’t reach, but still, the likes of ‘Zero Street’ (Captain America #201–203) or the hidden Samurai City of Black Panther #6, while really interesting and often very insightful, weren’t of the caliber of the Wild Area or Lemuria.

How appropriate that one of Jack’s last projects— albeit one he didn’t work directly on—was one called “The Secret City Saga!” [left] Perfect!

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Incidental Iconography

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

by Sean Kleefeld

I

f we’re going to focus on the worlds of Jack Kirby, it only makes sense that we take this Incidental Iconography column to look at Ego, the Living Planet! While the character was given some broader attention in the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, his portrayal by Kurt Russell was a fair bit removed from how Jack originally illustrated him.

I think it’s important to point out that I’m very deliberately choosing the

word “illustrated” here instead of “drew.” Because while Jack created the character, his first appearance in 1966’s Thor #132 [left] was not a drawing, but a collage! As far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s the first character Jack designed using collage.

(Possibly the only one, but Jack was so prolific, I’m not about to make that claim!)

Kirby was no stranger to collage by this point, of course—he’d been using it in his Marvel super-hero comics, notably in both Fantastic Four and Thor. So by the time he was working on creating Ego, he already had a well-established collection of materials to work with. But it turns out that Jack didn’t have to go far for at least the basic face of Ego; it was likely delivered to his doorstep, in fact. Ego’s face was literally cut from the cover of Life Magazine—the March 4, 1966 issue to be specific [above]. The issue would have only been a couple months old when Jack was working on Thor #132, and would likely have been pretty readily on hand.

The photo, by Gjon Mili, is not of an actual person, but of a bronze bust of an unidentified Roman, circa the first century. Life’s managing editor used it to kick off a series on “The Romans,” and posited he lived in Herculaneium and likely saw military service under Claudius, although that seems to be as much creative speculation as anything else.

The bust resides in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy.

Interestingly, despite Jack using the face pretty directly from the photo (only modifying the eyes slightly so they’re not completely in shadow), the particular cuts he made change the figure’s appearance considerably.

His full beard has been cropped to a goatee, and his large and pronounced forehead is absent. These are likely more practical decisions than anything; the photo as it appears on Life already crops the bust’s head so that both the top and left sides are noticeably incomplete. Perhaps fortunately, the figure’s features are so well chiseled that cutting along those contours presents an almost self-evident way to utilize this face.

Then, adding the various other photos in a generally circular pattern around the face, Jack recon42

textualized the face as the front of a planet. I have been unable to find where the distinctive hex-bolt pattern comes from (I’m guessing it’s tire tread, probably from a mid-1960s ad) but he almost certainly pulled other images from that same copy of Life. I believe the string of bubble-like blobs are actually cotton balls from a Johnson & Johnson ad, and the speckled piece under the “I am Ego!” word balloon seems to be the top of a bowl of tartar sauce from a Campbell’s “Cooking with Soup” ad—not to mention some of the more generic background textures coming from various rocks and mountains in some of the issue’s photos.

For Ego’s next two appearances in Thor #133 [above] and #150, Jack simply draws the character. He’s set up the character as fairly amorphous, though, able to change his entire landscape (and thus, features) to deal with ‘invaders’ like Thor and The Recorder, so Jack essentially just keeps the main features of the Roman bust—a heavy brow, long nose, and goatee—and fills in a planet-ish shape around that with a mix of various textured terrains (in one case simply resorting to nothing but Kirby Krackle).

Conceptually, the idea of a face in a celestial body wasn’t new. Many cultures from around the world have a “man in the moon” concept dating back centuries, each one claiming you’re able to see a person, or at least their face, in the shadows visible on the moon’s surface—although naturally people’s different perspectives from different portions of the globe meant they were frequently interpreting the shadows they were seeing on the moon differently.

One of the most famous interpretations was the first one committed to film by Georges Méliès in 1902 [top right]: the shot of a rocket crashing into the man in the moon’s eye from Le Voyage dans la Lune. Jack had almost certainly seen that image, if not the entire movie itself, as a collection of Méliès prints were brought to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936, resulting in a number of screenings of the film over the ensuing decades.

When Ego appears next in Thor #160, Jack once again re-presents Ego in collage form for the first page [above], and then resorts to drawing him throughout the rest of the issue. Jack not only uses the same basic technique here as before, but he re-uses many of the same source photos.

And while they all get re-used in a similar

manner as Thor #132, the execution is different. We see more of the bust’s full beard, the tire tread is considerably less prominent, and the cotton balls are less of a string and more of a bunch. They feel much less cohesive as a single entity here, although that is almost certainly in part due to the collage not being colored at all.

For the remainder of Jack’s drawings of Ego, he returns to the basic face structure surrounded by alien landscape textures, with the exception of the very last panel [bottom]. In that, Ego manifests himself in humanoid form to thank Thor, keeping the same basic face, but placed on a body wearing a Roman toga, hearkening back to the source of the character’s design.

Subsequent artists have all taken the same basic cue of an ever-changing landscape on Ego’s surface, only drawing the face with any consistency. (Although a few have taken an even broader approach that could be summed up as “just draw a face on a weird planet.”)

Given the virtual impossibility of Jack being able to replicate the original collage without making it literally an exact copy, it’s interesting that that limitation was then turned into an inherent characteristic.

Today, though, with the Internet and digital image editing, it would be interesting if another artist returned to rendering Ego in collage, using different photos of that same Roman bust and similar background textures.

What I find particularly interesting in Ego’s design here is that, despite the primary aspect of the character’s image being lifted wholesale from an artist from roughly 2000 years earlier as captured by another artist in an entirely different medium, it still looks and feels very much like a Jack Kirby design. Even though Jack was working and creating in a mode outside his usual pencil and paper, and directly borrowing imagery from others, he still created something totally his own, and it endures in the same form to this day.

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(previous page, top) Marvel Spectacular #4 from 1973 [left] reprinted 1966’s Thor #133, but used an unaltered stat for its cover, showing what Kirby’s original version looked like compared to the published 1960s version [right].

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

by Barry Forshaw

Barry Forshaw is the author of Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide and American Noir (available from Amazon) and the editor of Crime Time (www.crimetime. co.uk); he lives in London.

BACK TO EASTER ISLAND

As the theme of this issue is “The Many Worlds Of Jack Kirby,” I’m going to take you to a place which was a favourite locale of The King, and one whose bizarre statuary provided a constant source of inspiration for his illustrations: Easter Island, in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the point of the Polynesian Triangle.

As I’ve said before in these pages, the evocative (and enigmatic) statues on the desolate island have clearly been a long-term source of inspiration for comics artists and writers—not least Kirby, who clearly liked the notion that the statues would unexpectedly pull themselves out of the ground (thereby proving that they were not just heads and shoulders) and offer a threat to both the protagonists of his stories and the entire world. Personally, I’d argue that his most imaginative exploration of the idea is in “The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island” in his relatively short period at DC working for editor Jack Schiff. House of Mystery #85 (April 1959) with its Kirby cover showing an Easter Island-style stone menace emerging from the earth. But it’s interesting to compare another version of the same idea by Kirby, this time created for Atlas/Marvel and Stan Lee: “I Was Trapped By The Things On Easter Island” (inked by Christopher Rule) from the SF/fantasy anthology book Tales to Astonish #5

(September 1959).

But before considering that tale, an aside: while The Jack Kirby Collector is dedicated to a celebration of Kirby (we’re all fans, aren’t we?), we always make a point of being objective. And in that spirit, it should be noted that the cover illustration for Tales to Astonish #5 is one of the more routine Kirby offerings with the unshaven hero running in panic from the gigantic stone figures; but the composition is nothing like as dynamic as the DC version of a similar tale. The splash panel [below] is, in fact, more effective, with the Easter Island statues crouched and leaning towards the hero. In fact, the real rewards for the Kirby enthusiast are not in the splash panel or the cover—but in individual panels spread throughout the tales.

LOOK OUT FOR THE PANELS

Proof of that last statement? Take, for instance, the very first panel of the story [above], with the hero awkwardly

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creature with its white suit, rectangular orange face and flowing hair that looks like it is bursting into flame? It’s hardly a surprise that a crowd of human beings are looking on in wonder. The tale itself is slight, but, in fact, it has a premise which is not overused—without giving it away, I can safely say that it isn’t the shopworn ‘alien invasion’ narrative.

The rest of the issue is unmemorable, but this piece alone is worth the price of admission. And bear in mind that design—an alien creature in a comic won’t have the cultural respectability of a Saul Bass credit sequence, but there’s no denying that there is a considerable talent at work.

stepping out of his boat. The composition shows the kind of dynamic approach to the human figure that was Kirby’s specialty—as does another panel on the same page, revealing the protagonist lying prostrate on the ground after his plane crashes.

The first shot, too, of the statues demonstrates Kirby’s mastery of what to put in the frame, with the three statues and the small figure of the hero forming an almost abstract composition. The tale itself is pretty routine as the hero attempts to persuade skeptical Army authorities that the island statues are in fact alien invaders awaiting a signal to take over the planet, but the five brief pages of the piece are exactly the right length. Even the unlikely penultimate panel—as one of the statues looks in on the hero falling asleep, doubting even his own story, does the trick in storytelling terms. Although even at this early date, Atlas/Marvel was more concerned with characterization than its rival DC, there is no denying that the imagination of the latter company’s writers was a little more successful in terms of invention—Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber (also responsible for some of the stories) quickly fell into a repetitive pattern, and nobody could really make much of a case for the plotting in these pre-hero books. The art, however, is a different story, and Jack Kirby enthusiasts know that attention must be paid to this slight offering.

JUST THE COVERS

Occasionally throughout the years in which the “Kirby Obscura” column has been running in John Morrow’s magazine, I’ve tried to draw attention to books which are notable only for Jack Kirby’s covers in which he did not illustrate the main story. Here’s a choice example: the cover for Strange Worlds #4: “Manhunt on Mars” (June, 1959, with inks by Christopher Rule; the tale itself in the issue is actually drawn by John Buscema, later to become a mainstay of Stan Lee’s artistic bullpen). This is a classic example of Kirby’s mastery of science-fiction art (his command of design we can, of course, take for granted), as a blue-suited spaceman stands behind a rock and we see him nervously surveying several spindly green-skinned aliens emerging from a yellow-hued spacecraft (illustrating the story “I Was The First Victim Of A Manhunt On Mars”). As with so much of Kirby’s work, it pays to just take a look at the more subtle elements, such as the fact that the real interest of the panel lies exactly in the center: underneath the logo with the spaceman’s head, the alien spaceship and the aliens are all contained in that strip of image. But there is also the unusual design of the rock against which the astronaut is crouching—Kirby simply would not have delivered an unimaginative rendering of the rock; here it looks like something out of a painting by Salvador Dali. As Stan Lee at Atlas/Marvel and Julius Schwartz at DC both knew (working in the same period), the way to get us schoolboys shelling out our shekels for their titles (as opposed to the titles by the competition) was to come up with an arresting cover image. And as the cover for Strange Worlds #4 demonstrates, Stan Lee had an ace in the hole with his most prized illustrator.

And although the two men had their un-comradely differences, throughout his career, Lee always paid tribute to the massive impact of Jack Kirby’s artwork.

DESIGN BY KIRBY

Have you seen the Alfred Hitchcock films Psycho, North by Northwest or Vertigo? If the answer is no, my question would be: why not? And if yes, I’m sure you will remember the very striking design work of their title sequences by the great Saul Bass, who was to the title sequence what Ray Harryhausen was to stop-motion animation. In fact, many people’s awareness of design came from Bass’ work, which is still being imitated today—that jagged rendering of a human arm from The Man with the Golden Arm is still being imitated in many areas of popular culture. But there is another creator whose remarkable skills with design are undersung (except in the pages of this magazine): Jack Kirby.

The artist’s concepts of design—his buildings, landscapes, characters, and costumes were simply the most creative that the comics industry had ever seen—and what’s more, his inventiveness was so prolific that these design concepts would often make a single appearance before he moved impatiently onto the next concept that had leapt into his teeming imagination. Much as I love his work in all of the areas mentioned above, I have a particular affection for his unique alien creature creations, which left every other artist in the field standing (even the great Lou Cameron, whose surrealistic monsters seem to have stepped out of the canvases of Goya or Dali). Proof? Take a look at the splash panel for “Poker Face” from the little seen comic Strange Tales of the Unusual #7 (December 1956). Have you ever seen anything like that bizarre alien 45

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(above) The Baxter Building, from Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965). (right) Wonder Stories Quarterly from Spring 1931, when Kirby was 13 years old.

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ith Stan Lee, Jack Kirby brought to life a multitude of fantastic otherworldly locations. Not all of them were of his own creation, of course. Prince Namor’s Atlantis and Thor’s Asgard were legendary lands he co-opted for modern storytelling purposes.

In other instances, it can be difficult to tell if a Marvel Universe idea emerged wholly from Jack Kirby‘s dungeon inkwell or from Stan Lee’s office brainstorming, with or without Kirby.

There is an increasing tendency among comics historians to give Jack Kirby more and more credit for creating the Marvel Universe, and I have to agree with that tendency even if we can’t always confirm specific details.

Given the absence of documentation by the co-creators, establishing facts are unknowable.

A classic example is the skyscraper headquarters of the Fantastic Four. The concept was borrowed from the 1930s pulp hero Doc Savage, who operated out of a thinly-disguised Empire State Building. Whereas Doc had only the 86th floor for his scientific laboratory and office HQ, Kirby gave the F.F. the top five floors of Manhattan’s fictitious Baxter Building, including an aircraft hangar and a fully-operational ICBM nested into one corner of the structure.

It was preposterous, but 1960s kids like me swallowed it without hesitation.

So if the F.F.’s skyscraper headquarters was a borrowing from Doc Savage Magazine, who was the borrower?

In separate interviews, both Lee and

Kirby admitted to reading Doc Savage’s globe-spanning adventures back in their Depression youth. Both men were highly skilled at taking existing concepts, twisting them, updating them and providing their distinctive modern spin. Simon and Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown was an updating of Doc Savage and his group of experts. Elements of the Fantastic Four and the X-Men show a clear Doc Savage influence. Absent some hard documentation, one would be hard pressed to credit either man at the expense of the other. For all we know, the Baxter Building could have emerged out of a brainstorming session with both men almost simultaneously exclaiming, “Hey, remember Doc Savage? He had his headquarters in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan. Great! Let’s use that.”

I put this question to Lee once and he deflected by saying he had considered three possibilities, a New York City subway tunnel, a brownstone or a skyscraper.

He claimed that the skyscraper was his decision. Lee never liked admitting some of his ideas weren’t entirely original.

The important thing to remember was that both men read many of the same pulp magazines and writers growing up. In separate interviews, they often cited identical influences.

GETTING PULPED Jack Kirby credited his discovery at the age of twelve of a pulp magazine as a pivotal moment in his creative development. He remembered that it happened while walking home from school.

“I found a science-fiction book floating down the gutter, because some guy didn’t want to be seen with it,” he recalled. “I saved it just before it went into the sewer. It was a copy of Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories. It had a rocket ship on the cover. I had never seen a rocket ship before. I’d never even thought much about outer space, the planets, the Moon. Who gave a damn? It was my first collision with a question. ‘Gee, why couldn’t there be things like that?’ I had to hide the book or I would have been declared the village idiot. They thought that

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by Will Murray

In interviews, Lee evoked his famous name often—as did Kirby.

Which brings me to the resurrection of Ka-Zar and the creation of the Savage Land during the early years of the Marvel Universe.

BIRTH & REBIRTH No doubt shared memories of Burroughs’ works were uppermost in their minds when Lee and Kirby collaborated on the X-Men #10 story that revived Martin Goodman’s old jungle hero, Ka-Zar the Great, in 1964.

kind of thing was crazy.”

For a man who always considered himself to be a simple cartoonist, Kirby looked to two other media for equal inspiration.

“The pulps were the written word, and the movies were the visual world,” Kirby told Wizard magazine. “I learned from them both. I learned to write dramatically from the pulps. My heroes were the writers of the pulps and the actors of the movies. I merged them both. I read all I could and saw all I could, and when that became limited, I went further. There are more dimensions to everything then we can imagine. I live by the fact that this is a dimensional world, nothing is cut and dried. I won’t accept it that way, and that’s how I work within it. I loved science-fiction in general, and I still enjoy it to this day.”

In later years, Kirby would tell fans that he collected classic pulp magazines the way they saved his comic books.

As for Stan Lee, even in old age, he could rattle off the titles of the pulps he enjoyed as a boy, which included Doc Savage, The Skipper, Weird Tales, G-8 and His Battle Aces, and above all, The Spider, whose histrionic characterization greatly inspired his development of the formative Spider-Man. One writer both men read was the person Ray Bradbury called one of the most influential writers of the 20th century: Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan of the Apes.

It would have been difficult not to have stumbled across Burroughs’ work when Lee and Kirby were young. ERB’s adventure novels were immensely popular.

Tarzan films were being released almost continually, with an ever-changing gauntlet of actors playing the part of the savage Ape Man.

Ka-Zar had been around in one form or another since 1936. He starred in his own pulp magazine [right] for three issues, disappeared for two years, then was revived for the first issue of Marvel Comics in 1939. The character continued in Marvel Mystery Comics until 1942, before vanishing once more.

If one counts his pre-Timely Comics pulp career, Ka-Zar is the oldest extent Marvel character, predating both the Human Torch and the

(above) Kirby tackles Tarzan, in both 1971 card game packaging for Mattel, and a 1974 illustration, potentially for taking over DC Comics’ own Tarzan comic.

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Sub-Mariner by more than three years.

In the mid-1950s, a knockoff called Lo-Zar briefly swung through the pages of Goodman’s Jungle Action comic book [left].

No origin was ever offered, but he operated in Ka-Zar’s old stamping ground of the Congo. As with all incarnations of Ka-Zar, Lo-Zar was a strapping blond.

Martin Goodman seemed fond of the character Ka-Zar. Or perhaps he simply understood the commercial appeal of a Tarzan imitation in an era when an endless parade of Tarzan books and merchandise flooded forth. He kept resurrecting him, but the character rarely lasted long in his own magazine.

It was Goodman himself who directed Stan Lee to revive the character in 1964. Steve Ditko once told me that Ka-Zar was on a menu of Timely/Marvel characters Goodman had asked Lee to find slots for in his split-feature anthology titles. The Hulk and SubMariner were the others. Ditko chose the Hulk. Gene Colan got Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner. Namor took over as lead feature in Tales to Astonish, dislodging Giant-Man. Inasmuch as “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” replaced the Human Torch in Strange Tales, there was no available spot for a Ka-Zar strip. So it fell to Lee and Kirby to satisfy Goodman by reimagining the character for the Baby Boomer generation in the same way they had previously brought back Sub-Mariner in the pages of The Fantastic Four—as a guest-star.

I’m glad they did it this way. Together, Lee and Kirby produced one of the most electrifying issues of The X-Men assembled during their too-brief collaboration on the title. It was a masterpiece of electrifying action.

It was a strange place for a jungle hero to resurface. The X-Men were dedicated to locating mutants around the world, recruiting

them to their fold.

Ka-Zar was no mutant.

In fact, as Kirby reimagined him, he wasn’t a creature of the African jungle anymore.

“The Coming of Ka-Zar” was a rip-roaring wonder of an adventure story.

Television broadcasts of a wild man wearing only a loin cloth and accompanied by an obedient sabertooth tiger in the inhospitable Antarctic wastes raise the question: could he be a mutant? Cerebro detects no mutants in Antarctica, but Professor X sends his X-Men anyway. If this primitive man is not a mutant, why go all that distance? Well, the X-Men are bored and want a new mission.

So the X-Men travel to the South Pole, where they discover an underground lost world in which dinosaurs still roam a tropical jungle hidden beneath the frozen continent. Never mind that the story was a head-scratching departure from the usual X-Men fare. Kirby let himself go in this one.

The original Ka-Zar was a typical Tarzan knockoff who can communicate with animals. Orphaned when his parents were stranded after a Congo plane crash, he was raised by his surviving father, who became delusional after an injury. After John Rand was murdered, young David is rescued by a friendly lion he called Zar. Instead of palling around with apes like Tarzan, Ka-Zar became attached to lion friend, Zar. His name translates as “Brother of Zar.” In Ben Thompson’s Marvel Mystery Comics feature, Ka-Zar equates to “Brother of the Lion.” Zar means lion.

BYRD MEN The real name of the author of the original trio of Ka-Zar novels is not known for certain. The byline was Bob Byrd. Was he a real person? Well, if he was, he wrote very few stories under that name. A Robert L. Byrd sold a pair of short stories to an obscure and short-lived publisher in 1934. World Man Hunters printed one of them, but the other was orphaned when a companion magazine, World Adventurers, was cancelled that year.

The byline Bob Byrd resurfaced a year 48

after the demise of Ka-Zar the Great magazine in another Goodman title called American Sky Devils. “Scourge of the Sky Hellions” was the name of the story.

When Ka-Zar’s first pulp adventure, “King of Fang and Claw,” was adapted by artist Ben Thompson for Marvel Mystery Comics #2 in 1939 [above], the feature proudly proclaimed, “From the famous character created by Bob Byrd”—a strange boast for an obscure author and his failed character, but publicity is where you find it.

After that, Bob Byrd vanishes forever.

Decades later, it was discovered that the 1938 American Sky Devils novel was actually a reprint of Flying Blackbirds, a 1932 boy’s book by an author named Henry Thompson Burtis. Does this mean Burtis originated the Ka-Zar novels? He’s a good candidate, but there’s no solid proof. Bob Byrd might be a rarely-used house name a capricious editor recycled one last time.

The byline appears calculated to evoke the fame of Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who was renowned for his explorations of the North and South Poles in the 1920s and 1930s.

HIS PLACE IS... SAVAGE For Ka-Zar’s triumphant return in The X-Men, Kirby replaced Zar the African lion with a sabertooth tiger named Zabu more in keeping with the prehistoric world ultimately called the Savage Land. In this incarnation, Ka-Zar’s name means “Son of the Tiger.” Like Tarzan before him, Ka-Zar repeatedly refers to himself

as the Lord of the Jungle.

Later, he will be dubbed Lord of the Savage Land.

The Savage Land was not an original concept—not by a long shot.

Fantasy writers had been writing about prehistoric jungles hidden all over the globe since before the time Jack Kirby had been born.

In this instance, it’s pretty clear that Lee and Kirby combined Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan with another series by the famous author. But who was the prime mover, Lee or Kirby?

In 1988, I asked Lee what he had read growing up. Here is his answer in part: “In terms of popular writers, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells. Burroughs was much better than he was given credit for. I read the Mars books as well as Tarzan. The way he would do a chapter and then leave off and go to something else and then leave that off––there were always cliffhangers––he had four or five cliffhangers going at the same time. He would keep coming back to them and I’d think, ‘How can he keep it all in mind?’”

Kirby gave Greg Theakston a nearly identical response: “I read a lot. I read classics, and a lot of popular stuff, too–––a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan, the Pellucidar series, the Mars books. H. G. Wells was a favorite. Mostly escapist stuff.”

I don’t know if Stan Lee was familiar with Pellucidar, but if you read ERB, it was hard to miss it.

Pellucidar was Edgar Rice Burroughs third most successful series after Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars.

Pellucidar was a weird realm in the hollow center of the Earth first discovered in the 1914 novel, At the Earth’s Core. It was lit by a central motionless sun, which produced perpetual daylight. Six sequels followed. Like Burroughs’ Mars books, the series changed protagonists often. Explorer David Innes was the original hero of Pellucidar. He and inventor Abner Perry reach the inner world via the “iron mole,” a tank-like vehicle designed to tunnel into the earth.

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(top left) Ka-Zar’s second comics appearance in 1939’s Marvel Mystery Comics #2. (previous page, bottom) The published cover to X-Men #10, and the original unused version. (left) A remarkable Kirby envisioning of the Savage Land from X-Men #10 (March 1965).

exploration machine equipped with a drill or screw in front, right on through to Cave Carson’s Mighty Mole.

Other surface men later explored Pellucidar, as well as a native Pellucidarian named Tanar who got his own novel, Tanar of Pellucidar. He was essentially a subterranean caveman, and not a true Tarzan type.

The native inhabitants of Pellucidar range from dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops, to survivals of later eras, including Smilodon–– that’s “sabertooth tiger” to you––as well as woolly mammoths and mastodons.

Native tribes include black-skinned ape-men who live in trees and gorilla-like beast-men who are simple farmers. There are also creatures not known on the surface world, principally the Mahar––an intelligent race of pterosaurs who rule over Pellucidar and its inhabitants, which included their Neanderthal servants, the Sagoths.

One famous Burroughs epic, Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, was a crossover featuring David Innes and the Lord of the Jungle. The two team up and travel to Pellucidar by dirigible, entering the hollow land through a large opening at the North Pole, where the Ape Man tangled with various dinosaurs. This novel, probably more than any other, was the inspiration for relocating Ka-Zar to Antarctica.

Jack Kirby soon left the X-Men and never developed the Savage Land or Ka-Zar further. That was left to Lee and artist John Romita in the pages of Daredevil, when it was revealed that his birth name was Kevin Reginald Plunder, otherwise Lord Plunder. Like Tarzan, the updated Ka-Zar was British. The original incarnation was an

ordinary American.

In X-Men #10’s “The Coming of Ka-Zar,” the only explanation the semi-articulate Ka-Zar gives for his presence in the tropical jungle under the ice is that he fled some bad surface men and found refuge in this savage subterranean land over which he claims to rule. His English is as broken as Johnny Weissmuller’s.

INSPIRATIONS THAT TIME FORGOT Burroughs had also written a trilogy about a similar lost world in Antarctica. Caspak was an island ringed by cliffs whose interior was heated by an inland sea, producing a protected tropical climate.

In this encapsulated realm, evolution has run amok.

Different sections of Caspak shelter dinosaurs from certain eras, while mammals from other periods roamed elsewhere. Thus, an explorer might stumble across Allosaurus and Pteranodons in one spot, while sabertooth tigers and mastodons prowl elsewhere. Primitive tribes of Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, modern humans, and unclassified “missing links” also dwell in Caspak’s vast volcanic hollow.

The trio of books were entitled The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss. In its first appearance in X-Men #10, Lee referred to the Savage Land by another name entirely—the “World That Time Forgot.” This could be no coincidence.

It wasn’t until Ka-Zar’s return in the 1965 Daredevil #12 story “Sightless, In A Savage Land!” that the place received its formal name.

Essentially, the Savage Land is a combination of Pellucidar and Caspak.

When the X-Men first set foot there, they encounter a savage tribe of warriors mounted upon two-legged flightless birds resembling primitive ostriches. These are the Swamp Men, who kidnap Jean Grey and take her to their walled fortress. In hot pursuit, the X-Men encounter pterodactyls, brontosaurus, and finally a Tyrannosaurus Rex. At one point, Ka-Zar faces off against MaaGor, the killer, who is described as the “last of the man-ape tribe.”

At the climax, Ka-Zar gives a classic Tarzan yell, which summons a stampede of mastodons to batter down the Swamp Men’s walled fortification, going the original Lord of the Jungle one better. Tarzan commanded only apes and elephants.

Ordering the X-Men back to the surface, Ka-Zar directs his mastodon army to block the tunnel entrance with boulders, thereby sealing off his underground jungle from intruders. In the final panel, Lee promised that this was not the last Marveldom would see of the World That Time Forgot.

No doubt that if Kirby had explored the Savage Land further, other fantastic tribes would have been discovered and more natural wonders revealed. For example, Lee never explained how it could be daylight in the Savage Land, given the unavoidable fact that it existed beneath the Antarctic shelf. Did sunlight filter through the ice in diffused form?

In retrospect, I wonder if Goodman and Lee had been considering putting Ka-Zar into 50

the Human Torch’s slot in Strange Tales, but changed their minds when Kirby pitched “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” instead? Spies were hotter than jungle lords in 1964.

LAST HUR-RAH ON KA-ZAR It’s almost forgotten today, but Kirby returned to the Ka-Zar feature in 1970, finally fulfilling Martin Goodman’s dream when he and Stan Lee revived the character as the lead feature in Astonishing Tales.

Unfortunately, the King never got to develop the Savage Land in depth. Kraven the Hunter abducts Zabu from his home turf, spiriting him away from the Savage Land to New York, where Ka-Zar tracks him. Alas, Kirby departed Marvel for DC after only two Ka-Zar installments. Other creators carried on the storyline, bringing Ka-Zar back to his realm and further exploring it.

Again, the question of whose idea it was to borrow all these Burroughsian elements hangs in the air unanswered, and are probably unanswerable. Even if Lee never read a Pellucidar novel, his use of the phrase “The World That Time Forgot” virtually proves that he read at least one of Burroughs’ Caspak novels, and was inspired by it.

Or does it?

Simon and Kirby had also played with the idea in a 1941 Vision story which appeared in Marvel Mystery Comics #22. There, the Vision goes to Antarctica to locate a missing ship, where he encounters a sorcerer who lures the Vision to his own realm, a tropical world known as the Land Where Time Stands Still. Some have suggested that it’s a precursor to the Savage Land, and modern Marvel lore claims it’s identical to it, even though the story clearly states that the Land Where Time Stands Still exists in another dimension.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that another Lee/Kirby realm, Atillan, the Great Refuge of the Inhumans, was a place-name first mentioned in Captain America Comics #1, back in 1941. It was a fabulous island of evolutionarily-advanced people evoked but never visited in Simon & Kirby’s short-lived strip, “Tuk, Caveboy,” who also coexisted with mastodons and sabertooth tigers during the Stone Age. Blond-haired Tuk was befriended by a tree-swinging, Tarzan-like CroMagnon hunter named Tanir––not to be confused with Burroughs’ Tanar. Tuk is the earliest example of Jack Kirby borrowing heavily from ERB, who set several of his novels in the Stone Age, or among modern survivals

of Neolithic peoples. Kirby’s strip is literally a pure, unadulterated Burroughs story as interpreted by the King.

A sound case cannot be made for the prehistoric Atillan being identical with the Inhuman’s ancestral home. Tuk never reached that fabled spot before the strip was discontinued.

Instead, he journeyed to Atlantis.

It seems that Kirby dropped the unique name in favor of the more familiar Atlantis. Stan Lee could never claim the name Atillan as his! Tuk was printed before Lee started writing for Timely. We can safely credit that one to Jack Kirby, who was probably the sole writer.

Like the Baxter Building, creator credit for the Savage Land may remain forever obscure. Over the decades, it has been the battleground for many cataclysmic encounters, and other super-heroic engagements. While not as elaborate as Asgard, neither is it as intriguing as Atillan. But the Savage Land has endured long enough to become as significant as any other imaginary realm in the Marvel Universe.

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

Jack Magic: The Life and Art of Jack Kirby, Volume One. Greg Theakston.

Pure Imagination Publishing, 2011.

“Stan Lee Looks Back” Will Murray. Stan Lee: Conversations, edited

by Jeff McLaughlin.

University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

(previous page, bottom) Unused Kirby layouts for John Romita to follow when penciling Daredevil #13 (Feb. 1966). (below) Splash page from Astonishing Tales #1 (Aug. 1970).

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by John Morrow

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he IMDB (Internet Movie Database) has Jack Kirby listed as having appeared on episodes of Starsky & Hutch and S.W.A.T. in the 1970s. Is this our Jack Kirby, or some bit actor with the same name?

I watched the April 21, 1976 Starsky & Hutch episode “Bounty Hunter,” and his name is in the credits [see screen capture at right], but I didn’t find anyone that looked even remotely like him, particularly in a police uniform. (I guess it’s remotely possible the episode on Netflix was edited and Jack didn’t make the cut, as I don’t recall a character named “Officer Day” in it.) Jack’s also listed as playing “Clerk” in the February 17, 1975 (or possibly February 24) episode of S.W.A.T. I haven’t seen.

We know he had a cameo as a police sketch artist on the Incredible Hulk show on March 30, 1979 [top left], and as himself on Bob (the short-lived show where Bob Newhart played a cartoonist) on January 29, 1993 [lower left], but was he pursuing

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an acting career as an alternative to comics at one point?

Former assistants Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman both doubted these listings, with Steve responding: “As far as I know, that is a different Jack Kirby. The only shows I know of are Incredible Hulk and Bob. Jack wouldn’t have the patience to stand around all day as an extra.”

However, Ray Wyman Jr. confirmed to me that, years ago, Jack had pitched numerous ideas for the TV show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. None got used, but Jack got to a third pitch with DS9 co-executive producer Ron Moore on one idea.

How Cap’s Shield Yielded T

he Stan Lee Wikia Wiki (https://the-stan-lee-wikia.fandom.com) mistakenly gives Stan Lee credit for the idea of a round shield for Captain America—before Lee even began his comics career. The truth is, John Goldwater at Archie Comics called Martin Goodman on the carpet about Captain America Comics #1’s triangular shield looking like The Shield’s chestplate, as conveyed by Joe Simon in The Comic Book Makers. So Joe and Jack modified it for issue #2 to placate Goldwater and avoid getting sued, and Jack discovered it was more useful that way, as a throwing object. But did Cap actually throw it in Captain America Comics #1-10 before S&K left the book? Glen Gold took on that research task and found: “He throws it once, issue #4, ‘The Fake Money Fiends,’ but it doesn’t seem to have been a thing he relied on then.”

Stan Lee was the first person with a story in print where Captain America throws his mighty shield, as young Lee’s first comic book credit was writing a two-page text story in Captain America Comics #3 [1941, left]. But the ricochet effect was a pure Kirby invention, having first been used by Jack in Avengers #5 [above].

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(below) David Folkman’s poster for the exhibit, held November 5 to December 31, 1975 at the Museum of Cartoon Art.

Kirby On Display: 1975 [Editor’s Note: Back in TJKC #1, we showed the tour book for a traveling art exhibit that took temporary residence at the Museum of Fine Art in my hometown of Montgomery, Alabama in 1977. It included one piece of Kirby original art—the first I’d ever laid eyes on. At the time, I wasn’t aware of any other museum exhibit featuring comics art.

I now know that in 1975, not only was there another exhibit of comics art, but one exclusively featuring Jack’s work, as David Folkman elaborates here.]

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(top right) As shown in this photo with Mort Walker’s son Brian, the Museum of Cartoon Art opened in 1974 (thanks to a financial contribution from the Hearst Foundation) in an historic house on Canal Street in Stamford, Connecticut, near where the Beetle Bailey creator lived. It relocated to Boca Raton, Florida in 1992, and was renamed the International Museum of Cartoon Art in 1996 before permanently closing in 2002.

by David Folkman

’d like to answer two questions posed way back in issue #1 (Sept. 1994) of The Jack Kirby Collector. Under the headline “The Kirby Clone,” John Morrow pondered the legitimacy of an 81/2 " x 11" black-&white Kirby portfolio that he “had never heard of before.” When he received it, he first thought it was a “poor man’s version” of the Kirby Unleashed portfolio from 1971.

Upon closer inspection, he realized, “this copycat could stand on its own.”

Neal Kirby, who was Jack’s son and my best friend, and I arranged with Mort Walker, founder of the Museum of Cartoon Art, which was located in Greenwich, Connecticut, to exhibit a collection of Jack’s artwork.

The “portfolio” was the exhibit’s companion booklet Neal and I indeed “cloned” from Kirby Unleashed, originally compiled and annotated by Steve Sherman and Mark Evanier; Neal was business manager of the company they founded, which was called Communicators Unlimited.

The booklet, titled KIRBY: A Collection Of The Artistry Of Jack Kirby, was published by the museum in November of 1975. I carefully cut and pasted galleys of type and art from the original Kirby Unleashed portfolio, redesigning the pages to fit the smaller, 16-page format.

Among the new material that John reprinted was a “Scrapper”-like sketch, accompanying an ad proclaiming Neal “exclusive agent” for Jack’s originals. The sketch accompanying this piece is scanned from Jack’s original pencil drawing. The Bristol paper he drew on appears to have been formatted for an 11" x 14" comic book page; Scrapper is 7" high. I originally reproduced the image using a line art photostat (look that word up in your lexicon of graphic terminology).

The second question posed

by John concerned two posters, each measuring 19" x 26,” which he purchased at a convention in 1977 for 50 cents each. He reprinted them both—Captain America and Silver Surfer. He 53

asked, “Does anybody know if these were authorized by Jack, or were they a ‘bootleg’ product?”

In 1975 Jack and Roz were invited to attend Creation Con in New York City. Jack was given a room to display his art and to sell posters, which I designed and had printed locally. They were reproduced from Jack’s originals and printed on fairly thin paper in two formats: 23" x 29" and 14" x 23.” We sold them for a dollar each. In answer to John’s question: No—these were not bootleg products!

The poster of the contemporary Captain America was reproduced from a photostat I made from a pencil drawing Jack drew for me in 1974, on a 12" x 24" piece of Strathmore Cold Press illustration board. Using the same image, I designed Jack’s personal stationery and fan cards. The image has been reprinted many times throughout the years, notably in this very publication.

(David Folkman is Design Director of Hogan’s Alley, the magazine of the cartoon arts.)

(right) A 1966 collage

by Kirby, measuring 21" x 15". As Jack’s acceptance into the art world has grown over the years, so has the appreciation for his collage work— and the accompanying prices for original pieces such as this.

TJKC reader Ted Krasniewski sent us some salient commentary about Kirby’s collage work.

After unsuccessfully attempting to put together an essay about Jack delving into this medium, Ted realized, “I wasn’t sympathetic enough to [the] material.

“I’d discovered two things: that all those ‘split’ covers Jack did for Marvel back in the 1960s qualified as collage work (I hadn’t been willing to call it that when I started); and that Jack’s ‘legitimate’ collages seemed to allow him a freedom that his regular work didn’t.

The linework that entirely occupied him was without color; the collages brought that color back.” Though pieces like this have suffered from inks fading and paper yellowing over time, and deterioration and staining from the rubber cement Kirby used to glue them to the artboard, their aged patina gives them a “new” personality all their own.

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(below) Ticket booth for the 2010 Fumetto Comics Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Kirby On Display: Now!

by Rand Hoppe & Tom Kraft

A MOVABLE FEAST? ince its founding in 2005, the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center has participated in a number of Jack Kirby exhibits in the US and Europe. Our efforts towards building our Jack Kirby Digital Archive have led us to have wonderful relationships with art dealers and collectors. We’re so happy that we are considered a go-to resource for curators and scholars. To date, we’ve helped these exhibits and displays:

S

We were instrumental in finding artwork to be loaned to a large exhibit of Jack Kirby artwork at the 2010 Fumetto Comics Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland [left]. While curators Dan Nadel and Paul Gravett found some Kirby art collectors willing to lend their art to the show, they did not have enough to fill the building that at the time housed a significant Picasso collection! We helped Kirby Krypt-keeper Tom Morehouse and our own Tom Kraft to step in and make the show glorious.

Our Digital Archive was a big help to a wonderful Jack Kirby display that was curated by Jean Depelley and Fredric Manzano and mounted at the January 2015 Angoulême International Comics Festival in France.

(bottom) Pop-ups such as this one near Kirby’s old New York stomping grounds are an affordable way for the Jack Kirby Museum to educate and enlighten the public about his genius.

The Comic Book Apocalypse show at UC Northridge curated by Charles Hatfield in 2015 featured our print of the spread from Kirby’s autobiographical Street Code, and an interactive iBook Pencils to Inks we developed for our Comics Combatives Pop-Up [right].

OUR OWN POP-UPS In 2017, the year of the Kirby Centenary, we helped with the loan of original artwork by Tom Kraft and Bechara Maalouf and the participation of inker/letterer extraordi-

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www.kirbymuseum.org Combatives: Stories told by Pfc. Jack Kirby Pop-Up also with help from MadeinLES. Comics Combatives focused on Kirby stories and art filled with dynamic combat and action. Again, we featured talks and lectures from the likes of Arlen Schumer, John Morrow and Guy Dorian, Sr. We also hosted a dramatic reading of the play The King and Me by Ger Apeldoorn. We converted the PBI to digital on an iBook.

In August 2017, for a few days surrounding what would have been Kirby’s 100th birthday, we hosted our first Pop-Up at One Art Space in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood. We were recommended to One Art Space by art dealer Frank Giella, son of comic book inker Joe Giella. Frank’s brother Dan is One Art Space’s owner, so it was a comics family fest! This show featured PBI, large prints on the walls and oversized, readable comics. Again, lectures and talks were offered.

Mário Freitas [left] and Mike Royer at the 2017 Amadora BD Festival in Lisbon, Portugal.

naire Mike Royer to the Amadora BD Festival in Lisbon, Portugal curated by Mário Freitas. [above] In 2013, thanks to a connection made by Crosby and James Romberger, we were able to host our own first Pop-Up. Eric Ho’s Made in the Lower East Side was an organization devoted to re-activating dormant storefronts in Kirby’s boyhood New York City neighborhood. We became one of eight non-profits they were sponsoring, and created our week-long Prototype: Alpha that November on Delancey Street [right]. We hosted lectures and talks. We premiered our “paper-based interactive” (PBI) display of flipping between photocopies of Kirby’s pencil art, the inked and lettered original art, and the colorful printed end-result. Our map of the Lower East Side was a hit with locals, with some discovering they lived in a former Kurtzberg residence. A large print of Kirby’s Dream Machine was also a big hit, as was the huge print of Kirby’s Marvelmania Silver Surfer art that could be seen from the Williamsburg Bridge.

In November 2015, we mounted our three-week Comics

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www.kirbymuseum.org

The 2015 Comics Combatives Pop-Up documented Kirby’s war experiences, both on and off the comics page.

We were thrilled to be able to feature Kirby’s 2001 comics in A Jack Kirby Odyssey at our next Pop-Up at One Art Space in 2018. We exhibited original art for the first time, built a large monolith, produced a huge readable version of Kirby’s movie adaptation Treasury, and made large-size readable prints of all of Kirby’s pencil art photocopies. We

JOIN THE KIRBY MUSEUM AND HELP OUR CONTINUING EFFORTS! 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:

Annual Memberships with one of these posters: $50*

•i llustrating the scope of Kirby’s multi-faceted career, •c ommunicating the stories, inspirations and influences of Jack Kirby, •c elebrating the life of Jack Kirby and his creations, and •b uilding understanding of comic books and comic book creators.

(above) Tom Kraft with the Museum’s monolithic facsimile of Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Treasury Edition, and examples of original art in the A Jack Kirby Odyssey Pop-Up (below).

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

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

or this: $70*

Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center PO Box 5236 Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA Telephone: (201) 204-0532

had lectures and talks, offered dramatic readings of “Norton of New York,” ”Intergalactica,” and “The New Seed” stories from 2001 #5, 6 and 7 with musical accompaniment, held a comedy improv Fake Church of the Fourth World, and hosted a podcast with Jacked Kirby.

By the time you read this, we will have hosted a week-long Kirby, Eternally—from Ragnarok to Rebirth at One Art Space in November 2021. We expect it’ll be our best yet, and look forward to displaying more original art, and hosting additional talks, lectures, readings, podcasts and more!

Board Of Trustees Tom Kraft: President Ra ndolph Hoppe: Treasurer/Acting Director Mike Cecchini: Secretary All characters TM © their respective owners.

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Fighting American print silkscreened in Switzerland 23” x 19”

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

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

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(above) Jack in his home studio in the 1980s. (next page, bottom) A spooky seance page from Deadman’s appearance in Forever People #9 (July 1972). (below) Neil Gaiman, photographed by Kendall Whitehouse, and Jonathan Ross at the TwoMorrows booth, July 2017 at ComicCon International: San Diego.

JACK F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby worked in the comic book field.

We have two amazing men—smart men—with us today. Let me introduce you to them. Here is Mr. Jonathan Ross, the eminent TV presenter, as they call them in his native land. Here is Neil Gaiman, the eminent author and fantasy novelist and purveyor of an entire empire of TV shows and movies and things like that. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining me in your respective time zones.

My go-to question at all these panels—and I asked you each this when you were on Kirby panels in person with me at San Diego, but I don’t remember your answers—was “What was the Jack Kirby work that first made an impression on you?” where you were first interested in who had done this, and, “What was your all-time favorite?” which can be the same thing, and in many cases, is. Who would like to go first?

WonderCon 2021 Jack Kirby Virtual Panel Posted online on March 26, 2021

JONATHAN ROSS: Neil?

Featuring Jonathan Ross and Neil Gaiman, and conducted by Mark Evanier Transcribed by Steven Thompson Copy-edited by John Morrow and Mark Evanier [Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, WonderCon in Anaheim, California couldn’t take place as an in-person event in 2021, so panels such as this one were featured online at the virtual WonderCon@Home event.

You can view the panel at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlCLCYSazbU]

MARK EVANIER: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. You know what’s applicable to you but we don’t necessarily know. We have today an international Jack Kirby panel because one of our guests is in a time zone where it’s morning, one of them is in a time zone where it’s afternoon, and for one it’s evening. This shows you the global reach of Jack Kirby.

My name is Mark Evanier. In July of 1969, I first met Jack Kirby and I thought I was just meeting my favorite comic book artist, but I discovered I was meeting a man who would be one of my favorite human beings and who would have a major effect on my life. And not a day goes by—not even a couple of hours—where I don’t think about Jack or answer questions about Jack or talk about Jack. When I go to a comic convention it’s ten times as intense because if you walk around a comic convention—back when we used to actually walk around comic conventions, ’cause there were comic book conventions— you saw Jack Kirby everywhere. If you weren’t seeing his artwork, you were seeing characters he designed, you were seeing his influence on other people… So, we started doing these panels, these Jack Kirby Tribute Panels, after he passed, because we were talking about Jack anyway and it was nice to get all the Jack Kirby fans at the convention in the same room at the same time. You found that they were more imaginative people, smarter people maybe in little ways. If they appreciated Jack, they appreciated one of the most amazing men who ever

NEIL GAIMAN: Sure. I know the first Jack Kirby art I would ever have encountered would have been in the black-and-white Power Comics reprints, probably in a comic called Fantastic or Terrific. I don’t remember what was in what. There was a whole line of them—Wham!, Smash!, Pow!, Fantastic, and Terrific, and they were black-and-white reprints of old Marvel comics. That was definitely where I first encountered the Mighty Thor.

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Then, I was given a box of American comics when I was about seven, and there was a whole load of Kirby Fantastic Four—in color—and I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I remember as a kid, the Kirby stuff felt odd. It felt ever so slightly weird. I felt much more comfortable in some of the DC comics. I felt more comfortable looking at someone like Steve Ditko. And then [Jack] came over to DC Comics and I would have been about eleven and I remember picking up Jimmy Olsen and going, “This is weird! This is very, very, different. This is that guy over at Marvel… and I’m liking this.” And then I picked up a copy of the Forever People because it had Deadman in it and I was

a Deadman fan, and I was in love. I remember it was that moment that you tip from, “I like this, I like this, I like this,” to, “I am in love.” I was just in love with everything Kirby did! And at that point I became somebody whose pocket money went on anything Kirby did for the next five or six years.

MARK: So it was Jack’s least favorite issue of Forever People that hooked you. [Jonathan laughs] NEIL: Yeah.

MARK: Because he did that under duress. DC forced him to put Deadman in. He didn’t want to use Deadman at all because he thought, “What’s a dead hero?

What’s the value of a dead hero in this thing?” He actually had Steve Sherman and myself—we were assisting Jack, doing very little—write up an outline which he used about four words of for that issue. And he was very disappointed with that issue but it still came through.

Something still came through for you there.

NEIL: It was the séance. There’s a scene in there where Jack draws this amazing sort of séance where they’ve all linked hands with this mad old lady and the Forever People suddenly find themselves making contact with Deadman. And then they build him an android body and—I had zero interest in the android body, but it’s so funny because one of the things I loved best about Jack was Jack getting creepy, which he did so rarely. So much of what Jack did occurs in daylight! And then you get his Spirit World stuff, you’ve got that issue of the Forever People, and, above all, you get The Demon. I recently bought my first ever Jack Kirby page. I’ve not bought Jack Kirby pages for years and years and even back when… I remember being in [the now-defunct UK comics shop] Comics Showcase in 1986 or ’87 and they had all these Thor pages out. I’m going, “I’d really like one but they’re £50! Whoa, that’s a lot of money,” [roughly $68 US] and not buying them, and…

Lord alone knows what I just spent on a Demon page and it’s got Klarion the Witch Boy and Jason Blood and it’s from one of my very favorite issues. And one of the things I loved about The Demon was that Jack let whatever the creepy thing was that 61

that I went on to famously create, the slightly more creepy stuff—was Jack letting his inner creepy out.

MARK: Okay! Jonathan?

(above) Demon #7 (March 1973) pencils, with the debut of Witchboy. (next page) An unused Kamandi #18 cover (June 1974).

he did so incredibly well come out. And it’s the same thing that happened in Jimmy Olsen where he’d bring on tributes to robot versions of old monsters. You know, everybody talks about Jack and the power with which he would create super-heroes, super-hero costumes, people hitting each other, amazing machines, the Kirby Krackle, the super-science, the… you know, you can look at something like the Mother Box and think about how every phone that we have now has become a sort of failed Mother Box. But I think for me the thing that actually chimed and resonated—which may actually have some kind of equivalence with the kind of comics 62

JONATHAN: We’re not dissimilar really so much, because Neil and I, of course, grew up in the same country, and we’re virtually the same age. Neil, as you can tell, is a week older than me. [Mark and Neil laugh] I didn’t have the Pow!, the Terrific. I didn’t really have them so much, but we used to buy secondhand comics from—I guess it would be a thrift store in America, where people take stuff in to sell it, but we called them junk shops. But they were slightly different. They rarely had clothing but they would have books and they would have objects like vases or record players and old vinyl, and they would have a pile of comics normally, defaced with a big black marker with the price on the front cover—3p they would be—and once you’d read them you could take them back in and swap them and get half the money back towards the next one if you wanted. So I had a random bunch of Marvel comics. It was always Marvel for me, I never really got into DC as a kid. So I loved Marvel generally, I loved the kind of feeling of it being part of a club, but, in particular, I honed in on Kirby’s work and, in particular, The Fantastic Four. And I remember the random issues I had. I had a copy of #3 with no cover, which I held onto. I’ve still got that very copy. I assumed that would one day be my pension fund.

And you can imagine, it’s beat up as hell. It’s got rips all over it and coupons cut. It looks amazing. But I also had issues in the 40s and 50s when the Inhumans appear, when there’s a crossover with Daredevil and the Watcher figures quite prominently, Galactus. And I remember a particular one, the issue of FF that has the Thing on the cover, “This Man, This Monster,” where he’s standing. And I think what I reacted to—what I responded to, rather, that truly resonated to me—was the pathos that Kirby managed to always put into these kind of man-monsters in his comics. He had an element in the Hulk where that was always a bit less subtle to me, but the Thing in particular—I loved the Thing. I loved the way he wrote him. I loved the family unit of The Fantastic Four which, of course, appears in Challengers and other Kirby group books, but I loved that and so I really responded to that.

But later on, the work that I responded to most— like Neil—would have been his DC period. When New

Gods appeared, I felt like this was the most amazing cultural shift I’d ever experienced, and I think possibly it still is. You know, it was this moment where, “Hold on! This is what comics can be,” you know?

Other people discovered underground comix, with its explosion into kind of graphic novels and more adult things, but I felt Kirby managed to do those adult things and certainly create this kind of incredible mythos, this incredibly rich mythology, with those Fourth World books. They’re still my favorite comic books by him, and possibly my favorite comic books by anyone. I mean, the Fourth World books in particular—New Gods, Mister Miracle, which is less central to it—Forever People I loved, although I did kind of respond to Kirby’s being an old guy now, writing, trying to write teen dialogue which was slightly cringy, in the way that Hanna-Barbera cartoons always drew young people wearing a red cravat for some reason. I’ve never seen anyone wearing that in real life.

Encountering that was inspiring, and it was inspiring because you’d look at that and go, “I can’t do this! I’m absolutely not… I can’t be Jack, but maybe I can be me.” And the idea that you could lean into the things that you couldn’t help but do, lean into the stuff that you enjoy, and obviously have the time of your life. I mean, that was the other thing with Jack, is he was obviously having fun! You could see that he was enjoying drawing, and that was actually… that was there! In the same way that you can sometimes look at pages drawn by people and you can go, “Oh, they broke your spirit so long ago.”

With Jack, you could tell there was enjoyment and you could also tell he could take a weird assignment and turn it upside-down and find out what was interesting in it. Do you remember the Superman episode of Kamandi?

MARK & JONATHAN: Yeah.

NEIL: You know, the goofiest thing—let’s do a Superman/Kamandi crossover, and Kamandi is in his own universe. And yet it turns into a weird thing about the inspirational power of putting on a costume

MARK: You never saw Joe Barbera. That’s the problem. [laughter] JONATHAN: As Neil said, I really responded to Kirby’s creepiest one, The Demon. I mean, as soon as he started doing that I started thinking about Agatha Harkness in The Fantastic Four. I remember loving that development and it suddenly becoming a supernatural comic. So he did creepy so well, you’re right, and The Demon is one of my favorites, so I can’t really choose one—but it would be from that ’70s period when Kirby basically revitalized DC completely with all of those books, including Kamandi as well, which I adore!

MARK: After Jack passed away, I got an email… no, actually a paper letter! That’s how long ago that was now. I heard from a lot of people who had grief or problems in coping with the fact that Jack was gone and somehow they figured that, well… “I have to put this somewhere. I’ll send it to Mark Evanier.” And I got a letter from a spot welder, and this guy had an explanation—I wish I still had the letter, I don’t know where it is—explaining how Jack Kirby comics inspired him to become a better spot welder. [Jonathan laughs] And it actually made sense in his context, because he always felt in Jack’s work there was this maximum effort, that everything was 110%, that the story was told fully, and there was an energy there and that inspired him to approach his work with, “I’ve gotta give 110% all the time.” Did either of you ever feel that reading Jack Kirby comics?

Y’know, obviously, it could inspire you to think of stories about weird creatures or monsters or Demons or Kamandis or whatever, but did either of you ever feel that Jack inspired you just as a person to approach your work, whatever you were doing at the moment, better? Or am I asking a question that has no answer whatsoever?

NEIL: [pause] I don’t know who I would be if I hadn’t encountered Jack’s work. It’s like… there would be parts of my life missing. What I loved about Jack’s work, which I think is what I was actually kind of reacting against when I encountered it first as a kid, was the individualism—the fact that nobody else had done this and nobody else could do this. Nobody else could have drawn these people, have invented these people, have given them this dialogue, and have built up something with so much energy and power.

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(below) This 1975 Kamandi #29 page features “Great Scott!”, an expression often used by Superman.

Our dear friend, the late Steve Sherman, suggested this Kamandi story to Jack, who took the ball and ran with it. (next page) Pencils from 1972’s Forever People #10, the second part of Deadman’s guest spot.

and possibly firing gorillas wearing costumes through the air. It was so gloriously mad, so inventive, and so taking the daemon lemon and making a glorious lemonade out of it.

JONATHAN: That’s interesting, Neil, I think, if you look at the massive and indisputable creative energy, force, genius that Kirby possessed. Of course, your career in comics would be marked by your biggest crowning achievement—and you’ve had many, of course, and now you have a whole different fanbase as a novelist as well as a TV person with Good Omens—but you look at Sandman, an incredible achievement by you, an amazing

piece of work and quite rightly lauded and loved by millions. But of course that began, at the founding point, with you reworking, spinning off from, one of Kirby’s lesser, weirder creations, which I imagine probably no one else wanted to touch.

NEIL: [laughter] Yeah! I… MARK: Well, the people that wanted to touch it probably wanted to replicate the original Sandman in some way, for the most part, and not bring anything new to the party. That was the significance.

JONATHAN: I was thinking, as Neil said, the thing about Kirby that made me like him was that Kirby was uniquely Kirby, and if you can take that from his work and say that “I will try and be uniquely me”—which is what Neil did with Sandman of course. In a way, it’s very much in the spirit of the King that you took, not just one of his weirder, lesser creations, but you made it something which is uniquely your own.

NEIL: Well, I always loved the idea that Jack, when going to DC, said, “What is your lowest selling, least popular title?” and when they said Jimmy Olsen, he said, “I will take that.”

MARK: Only that’s not actually true. He could’ve said that.

Knowing Jack, he could’ve…

NEIL: It is apocryphal but beautiful.

What really happened, Mark?

MARK: Well, what really happened there was… and it’ll take the rest of this podcast if I tell the whole story, but DC signed Jack up with really no idea what he was going to do for sure. Originally, he was kind of baited and switched in a way. What DC originally offered him and what the final contract was were quite different. He thought he was getting into something where he wouldn’t be chained—his term—chained to the board to do “x” number of pages per week, and eventually it turned into 15 pages a week.

Because he felt he couldn’t stay at Marvel at that point, and that was his only other place to go, he was kind of forced into it. So they made a deal for him to do 15 pages per week and he was paid commensurate with that. Then the question becomes, “Well, what do we want to have him do with the 15 pages a week?” He had these ideas for the New Gods and the Forever People and Mister Miracle and quite a few other books. If DC had said no to New

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Gods, Forever People, and Mister Miracle, there would have been three other new comics there, there would have been eight other new comics there. Jack was an endless fount of new comics, which was one of the reasons—which worked against him—they felt they could, “suspend”—in other words, “cancel”—New Gods and Forever People, because he’d come up with another book the next day.

And at that point in comics—remember, this was before royalties of any sort and before they even would put creator credits on stuff—a lot of people at DC who were creative wouldn’t even do that.

They just wouldn’t even give a new idea to the company. So they started saying, “Well, let’s put New Gods into Showcase, and we’ll put out three issues bi-monthly and we’ll see how it sells.” But then what was he gonna do otherwise? [laughter] How’s he gonna fill up the 15 pages a week? So they started three comics and that didn’t take it up. Three bi-monthlies—because DC refused to make them monthly—would not take up 15 pages a week.

So DC said, “You’ve gotta take another comic on. We can’t start that many new comics for you.” They didn’t think this out before they signed him. It’s stunning to me how much happened to Jack because people in publishing positions didn’t think ahead. So they said, “Pick any comic we’re doing and you’ll take it over.” And he looked at all the DC books and didn’t like any of them. He just didn’t like them. He didn’t see anything in there that interested him. He did not want to take back Challengers of the Unknown, because that would’ve been moving backwards, so he said, “Look, I don’t have a feel for any of these things. Just pick whatever book doesn’t have a writer or artist on it.” Now, along the way, Jack probably said, “Give me your worst selling book. I’ll make it your best selling book.” I’m sure he said that, because that’s how Jack talked. He was so gung-ho about everything he did—not in a conceited way. He just had a very strong confidence that he could work harder than anyone else and succeed; not necessarily where everyone else failed, but he could succeed.

Jack’s confidence was not, “I’m better than other people.” His confidence was, “I’m good,” with no disrespect to other people. So Jimmy Olsen was a book that, at that moment, did not have a writer or

artist assigned to it, and Jack had been talking about doing… they’d wanted him to do Superman and, simultaneously, there was the fact that they said, “Well, Jack’s ideas about Superman didn’t make sense when he pitched them verbally,” so they thought maybe you need to get him to do a story before they’ll understand what he’s saying. Simultaneous to that, nobody was assigned to do Jimmy Olsen because Pete Costanza, who’d been the artist, had stopped drawing because of illness, and whoever was writing it was not writing it anymore. And simultaneously, Joe Kubert, who was an editor at DC, was saying, “Get Jack to do the Newsboy Legion! Newsboy Legion— 65

into something, the same way he did with, “Oh, I got to put Deadman in this story. Okay, here’s what I’ll come up with for Deadman.”

JONATHAN: On the one hand, I remember hearing some of that before, and reading about Kirby wanting to be more of a writer and editor and overseeing these books, and getting these ideas out there without being a slave to the board, and obviously it would’ve been great if he’d had that freedom. But at the same time, the artwork is so spectacular in that period that, selfishly, I’m glad that Kirby didn’t get the deal he wanted, because we wouldn’t have had those amazing pages. We wouldn’t have had all of that great stuff, including In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World, as you said, and the black romance book which didn’t come out and was recently published by TwoMorrows and you’ve got those great pages floating around—just exquisite art, really him at his finest. But to answer the question, what I get from it in a way is, as I grow older and I look with a greater sense of appreciation at what he achieved, and I look at the work, the work impresses me more now than it did before. Bear in mind, he was probably always my favorite comic book artist of all time. But looking at it now, I’m still struck by just the brilliance of his draftsmanship and the speed with which he can capture a situation, the energy he puts into the page. So for me, I’m getting to where I’m thinking, okay, he was still doing this incredible work in his sixties, and up into his seventies. And so, I like to think I speak for all of the panel here when I say that we can take some solace from that, and despite the fact that we’re all now heading—we’ve all been vaccinated! Have you been vaccinated, Neil?

greatest comic book ever done in history. Bring back the Newsboy Legion.” And Jimmy Olsen seemed like a place where, you know, he was a reporter, so you could kind of figure out the Newsboy Legion might fit in there… so Jack got Jimmy Olsen.

NEIL: No, but I’m in New Zealand where we’re…

JONATHAN: Amazing.

MARK: I have my vaccination card right here. I got shot the other day.

MARK: A completely strange, bizarre choice. But you’re right. He did approach it with, “I can take the worst-selling book and make it into something.” When I met Jack, one of the first questions I asked him, which everybody asked him, was “What do you like doing best? Do you like doing the westerns, do you like doing the crime comics, do you like doing the super-heroes?” And he was happy with anything. If someone had told him, “Do mutant penguins,” he would’ve done mutant penguins. If somebody told him, “Do turtles,” he would’ve done the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles years before Eastman and Laird did, or something like that. So, everything was a challenge, and I think one of the keys to his relationship with Stan Lee was that if Stan gave him a name or Stan gave him a twoline concept, Jack would take it as a personal challenge to build it

JONATHAN: So we’re doddering old folks but we can still create!

Let’s take that from Kirby because he was still producing worldbeating, original, unforgettable concepts into his old age.

MARK: One of the things I always remember with Jack… I’m gonna show a picture here [next page, top]. I’ve got a couple of pictures here. This is me at a comic convention sitting next to Jack. This was about 1972. I think it was a convention at the Disneyland Hotel, and I was planted there by Roz because she had to go do something and it was my job to play bad cop and tell everybody, “No, no. Mr. Kirby will not do a drawing for you of all the Avengers,” [Jonathan laughs] which people would come up and ask for all the time. They 66

all wanted sketches from him. Jack didn’t know how to say no to people, so Roz would say no on his behalf.

She’d interrupt him and say, “No, Kirby. You promised me you wouldn’t do that.” So I had to do that and play bad cop and people hated me. But that picture always reminds me that I am now like ten years older than Jack was when I met him in 1969—maybe more than that even. Yeah, way more than that! And he was starting all those books—New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle—at a time in the business when a lot of other people would have already done whatever innovative work they had to bring to the field. He was still at it and he was working hard. I’ve told this story on other panels but, there was one day when I looked at Jack—this is, you know, ’71 or ’72— and I said to myself, “Mark, you’re never gonna have the brilliance of this man because nobody’s gonna have the brilliance of this man… but it might be possible to work that hard.” As we look on the Internet, we look at reviews and things, people have lots of criticism of Jack’s work—they don’t like the way he drew knees, they don’t like the way he drew fingertips, they don’t like some of his dialogue—whatever it is, I don’t have a problem with that. I kind of flinch when somebody says, “He looks like he was just knocking it out. He wasn’t trying hard.” And I don’t think that was ever the case with anything Jack did. He gave 110% on every single project he ever did and if it isn’t up to his great standards, it’s because his eyes were failing him or he was very unhappy at the company. But the man’s work ethic was astonishing, and I say this as a witness, who would see Jack sitting there at the board night and day when I visited there. He’d go to the drawing table around 11 o’clock

in the morning each day and pretty much stay there until four in the morning. Roz would come in and, I was a witness… Well, I was not a witness to this but she’d come in at four in the morning and say, “Kirby, come to bed!” and he’d say, “Two more panels! I gotta save the universe!” You know, something like that. And he would go to bed at five in the morning.

And during that span, he took time out to eat with his family, he took time out for dinner. He might watch a favorite TV show, but he put in a 12-hour day easily, on all those comics he did, at least! Maybe more than that.

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(previous page) A 1986 fan commission piece. Although late in his career and struggling with health issues, Jack was still capable of flashes of brilliance like this. (below) Don’t get The Bug; get your Covid vaccination instead, so we can have Kirby panels in-person again! Pencils from New Gods #9’s splash page (July 1972).

ing with all of the new trends that were emerging, all of the new ideas that were coming up. I mean, Bowie wanted to work with all the new producers.

Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire would have conversations in the ’70s about, “Have you managed to do a dance routine with a skateboard yet? I almost broke my wrist the other day.” You know, anything could affect their engagement. I get the feeling Kirby was also that way. He wasn’t someone who was looking back and saying, “Oh, I miss the ’40s,” or what was happening in the ’50s, “I loved the ’60s.” He was always looking forward to the next thing, but also was being inspired by it.

He seemed to have a voracious appetite for new culture, new science, new ideas.

MARK: Yeah. Forever People was about that, kind of. In 1970, there were a lot of people who had been in comics who felt threatened by all these new kids coming in—the Len Weins, Marv Wolfmans, Gerry Conways, me…

JONATHAN: Neil Gaiman! [Neil laughs] MARK: That’s right! No, Neil wasn’t around in 1970. He was home reading Forever People #9.

NEIL: I was.

And he would finish a page that you and I would pay good money for and go, “Nah, this isn’t right,” and just start erasing. He would do a beautiful page. A couple of times in my time with him— and I always emphasize that I contributed very, very little to the published comics—he’d hand me a page and he’d say, “Here. Take those panels out.” He’d hand me the eraser and I had to erase two panels of Jack Kirby art because he thought of a better way to stage the scene. And it was never, “I could draw that better.” It was always, “The drawing is wrong.” Not “I can draw the foot better,” or arm, or… the drawing was never changed because it was a bad drawing. It was changed because it wasn’t the right drawing.

MARK: And there were some people who were resistant to that because the business did not pay well, but it seemed to be very stable. Once you were entrenched at DC or Marvel, in the ’60s, they felt obligated to keep giving you work. You know, people sometimes ask me, “Why was this lousy artist on this comic in 1973?” Well, he’d been working for the company for 22 years and nobody had the heart to tell him, “Find some other way to feed your family.” They felt an obligation to keep using these people—even if they didn’t have the right book for them—which explains some of the strange casting. But Jack was fascinated by young people. He welcomed them into his studio all the time. We took a couple of field trips—Steve Sherman and the Kirbys and I—to what they then called “head shops,” the places that sold underground comix, and they also sold the paraphernalia for marijuana use and they sold incense and they sold hippie-style clothing and such, and Jack was fascinated by that. In fact, he got thrown out of one of them because his cigar was fowling the air. [laughter] He had a cigar and this place, there’s incense going in all the places and there’s all these strange scents around and they said, you know, “Put your cigar out or get outta here, Mister.” But he was fascinated by underground comix, very thrilled to see that there was a venue then—which was rare—that someone could write and draw a comic book, publish it, get paid for it, and have complete control of the package, own the copyright and do a book that was very personal. What Robert Crumb was doing at the time seemed more extraordinary than perhaps it does now because we have so many personal visions in comic books.

JONATHAN: One of the things that inspires me about him and fascinates me about him—I know there’s only a few other talented folk I’m aware of like this; I mean, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire had this, I think David Bowie had this—was that even when they got older and they’d created work which would have assured them their place in posterity, they were still creating. They were still very much engag-

JONATHAN: Mark, may I interject? You say that but I’m curious.

What did he make of when Wally Wood tried to set up a company which he had some control of with Tower, and when Ditko went to work for Wood with Witzend and tried to bring out Mr. A? When there were these efforts by people even in the late ’60s if I’m correct, to have some ownership and have some sense of control and benefit 68

from the profits that their creations would provide— what was Kirby’s awareness of that or his reluctance to join in with that?

MARK: Well, he was all for that. Jack was reared in an era and had an ethic built into him that the most important thing a human being does in this world is provide for their family. That was number one and he made occasional compromises in what he wanted to do because of that. There’s kind of a sub-theme in New Gods about the two faces of Orion—what he does idealistically and what he does pragmatically. He has a different face for the pragmatic part where he has to, you know, be a warrior and fight and do things he might consider horrendous. But he encouraged fanzines, he encouraged self-publishing…

Wally Wood did not apparently have all that much power on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. He just had the power to write and draw some comics which they used, but Jack felt that that venue of comic books in the ’60s which Tower went through was a rigged game because the publishers controlled it so tightly. And indeed, there’s some stories about Tower Comics and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents being squeezed off the stands because Archie Comics wanted more rack room, and things like that. I don’t know how true they are. He gave great encouragement when Gil Kane started his company called Adventure House Press which did His Name is… Savage! One issue of His Name is…

Savage! and the whole company collapsed.

And that scared Jack a lot, that there was no way to do anything in that field. The first issue of Witzend that Wally Wood published has a drawing that Jack did in it, because Jack had promised to do something for it, and he never was able to find the time to turn down paying work to do something essentially for free, for Wood. He also had a few problems with Mr. Wood’s… I’ll say it in a nice way, “stability.” [laughter] But he was all for that.

He was very encouraging of people who came to him saying, “I want to do comics,” saying, “Do something else.” He encouraged them to explore other things. There’s quite a few stories where people went to Jack and said, “Here’s my writing. Here’s my drawing. I hope someday I can write The Fantastic Four, draw Hulk.”

And he said, “No, no. You can be much more than that. Don’t aspire to do my work. Do your work,” and such. Jack welcomed the new generation wholly and fully into comics and he treated everybody like a full professional, even if they weren’t yet.

Tales of Suspense, and X-Men. JONATHAN: Beautiful work! So I’m asking about who Kirby preferred inking him, but also I’m curious. I know you said you went to these head shops. What did Jack make of the more overtly sexual and the kind of overtly drug culture stories in the underground comic books?

Did he approve of them being that way? Did he enjoy reading that stuff as well or did he find it not for him?

MARK: He did not expect to understand it all and he didn’t understand it all, and he didn’t get the drug references. What excited him was the freedom. The guy who I think most impressed him probably was Richard Corben, because what Richard Corben was doing was

JONATHAN: Yeah. Sorry, Neil, if you’ve got questions, but two questions just occurred to me. One is, you were talking about Wally Wood, and Wally Wood was… as an inker on Kirby’s pages, they’re some of my favorite pages. I mean, the Sky Masters stuff, I think he did some stuff for Marvel over Kirby as well if I’m…

MARK: He inked a couple of covers. On Thor, 69

(these pages) Wallace Wood inks over Kirby on the cover of Journey Into Mystery #122 (Nov. 1965), and on George Tuska (working from Kirby’s layouts) from Tales of Suspense #72 (Dec. 1965). Note Kirby’s extensive plot/margin notes detailing his story, for Stan Lee to follow in writing the dialogue.

(above) Kirby passed on working with Kurtzman, but did use Harvey’s frequent collaborator Will Elder on inks for his rejected 1956 Chip Hardy newspaper strip presentation.

kind of in the Kirby arena. But Gilbert Shelton or Spain Rodriguez or any of the… Crumb, certainly, all these guys. He loved the fact that these guys were writing and drawing what they wanted to write and draw. Even if he didn’t like it, he respected it, and he loved the copyright lines, and he loved the fact that nobody was telling them to draw like somebody else. And that was one of the great things about the underground. You saw all these different styles emerging, and people were telling personal stories. If it was erotica, fine. If it was drug-related, fine. If that’s what they have to say, let them say it.

The freedom of the press thing excited him a lot. Harvey Kurtzman had asked Jack at one point to create a… it was proposed that the two of them create a Barbarella-type script for Playboy. When Kurtzman was doing “Little Annie Fanny,” it was not every month.

They did, like, four stories a year because Mr. Kurtzman was the kind of guy who’d take four months to do a three-page story. But he went to Jack and said, “Let’s do a strip,” and he sent him a copy of Barbarella, which Jack had never seen before, from France. And Jack just said, “I can’t do that.” He said, “Get Wally Wood. He can do that. I can’t draw naked women like that.” He knew what the strip should be. He just didn’t feel that he was the guy to do it.

every letter, then give them to Steve and me to make a letters page out of. And one time he said, “Guys, we’ve got the greatest fan letter in the history of mankind here. This is the greatest fan letter you’ve ever seen.” How could a fan letter be that great? And what it was, was two ladies named Maxine and Alice, who had taken photos of themselves with their faces covered by issues of Forever People and New Gods they were reading, and the rest of them was naked, with their legs posed for Hustler magazine! [laughter] And Jack said, “Now those are fans! Those are real fans!” [laughter] JONATHAN: Mark, Neil and I sent nude pictures of us to Kirby, and we never got an answer. [laughter] MARK: Well, I think that’s self-explanatory, don’t you? [laughter] But he did not put up a barrier against the young people at all. There’s a phrase, a quote he said. I think I may have the wording right. He said, “The world’s gonna belong to the young people soon. I just hope they make room for me to live in it.” He was like that. So encouraging to people, so giving to them. People say, “He treated you really well, Mark.” He treated everybody well. But you know, something like the Galaxy Green strip, I wish, in hindsight, that Jack had had more opportunity to just do whatever he felt like. One of the things I thought of doing at one point is one of those ideas you kick yourself for. When I was doing stuff for Eclipse, I wish I’d just said, “Give me a book and let me do whatever I want,” and gone to Jack and said, “Jack, draw your reminiscences of World War II. Draw the stories you remember.” He did a little of that in that story “Street Code” for Richard Kyle, who gave him a bunch of pages and said, “Draw childhood memories.” I wish he’d had a chance to do more autobiographical stuff. His work was very autobiographical as it was.

JONATHAN: Well, Mark, what about Galaxy Green, that almost got off the ground for him? Wasn’t that gonna be a sexy sci-fi series?

MARK: Galaxy Green was a thing he’d been sitting on for a while and he…

JONATHAN: That was your idea, right?

MARK: No, no. That was Jack’s idea. We were putting together a prospectus for a new magazine that was going to be called Superworld.

And it was going to be a tabloid with comics in it and other things and we said to Jack, “Why don’t you do a comic you would never do for DC or Marvel?” And he had been thinking about Galaxy Green— the basic concept of it—for some time. And… that’s about as erotic as Jack could’ve made it. [laughter] It’s not that…

NEIL: There was that story, the “Losers” story, about the little science-fiction fan, which I always felt had that pathos that Jonathan was talking about. I always felt, more than most people, there was Kirby in that character. The guy who’s reading the science-fiction magazines and imagining this huge and amazing future while being mocked by all of the other soldiers, who then still manages to make something fabulous happen while still feeling somehow fraudulent.

JONATHAN: [laughter] Neil, do you have Galaxy Green?

NEIL: I have no… in my head, obviously, this is kind of like Camberwick Green, only set in the galaxy.

MARK: As I read old Kirby work, it becomes more and more autobiographical to me. Every so often, I will just sit down and I’ll read all of the New Gods books again or I’ll read all the Kamandi books, and every time I find some personal reference to Jack that didn’t dawn on me before, some equivalence to his own life. I think he did a lot of that. I think he could have done more of it. And getting back to what Jonathan asked about inkers, I wish that Jack had had fewer inkers like Wally Wood, who changed the work. I wish he had had more Mike Royers in his life. I don’t understand some of these people—

MARK: It’s a bunch of space amazons who go hunting for men because they’re rare in the galaxy at this point, and they have these phallic ray guns. And he only did two pages of it and he enjoyed doing it. Mike Royer inked it, and it never went anywhere, although it got ripped off by a couple of other people in other venues soon after. I think I told this story one other time, but when the fan mail came in on New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle, they went to a P.O. Box the Kirbys had in Thousand Oaks and Jack would read 70

and Wally Wood’s kind of an exception—who say, “Oh, I really liked Jack inked by this guy because he changed all the fingertips and changed the anatomy…”. I’m like, “How do you like Jack Kirby work because it looks less like Jack Kirby?”

NEIL: My favorite one of those, I have to say, is Barry WindsorSmith inking him in that Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, the first—I dunno, ten pages, where you don’t feel that he’s changing it. You just feel that these two people are meeting and here’s Barry bringing this freight of pre-Raphaelite elegance and beauty, and here’s Jack bringing all of the power and energy, and here is an art style that you could not quite have imagined.

JONATHAN: And of course they were simpatico because, as we know, when Barry Smith first started working for Marvel, he was doing his own kind of crude version of Kirby. You know, that Daredevil cover, those X-Men pages, all that stuff. Was the X-Men [the comic with] Blastaar?

MARK: Yeah. Yeah.

JONATHAN: You told me the story about when P. Craig

Russell inked Ditko on Rom and he really invested so much extra time and energy in that because he wanted the Ditko pages to have the richness and the fluidity and the kind of beauty of early Ditko work, which at that stage Ditko was not really putting into that “for hire” work.

MARK: Well, Ditko was one of those artists who drew mostly in ink. When he penciled for someone else, the pencils were very sparse because that’s the way he penciled for himself. You know, when he drew Spider-Man, there was no webbing in the pencils. He put the webbing on in the inking and added most of the backgrounds 71

(above) Kirby’s story for Our Fighting Forces #153 (March 1975) featured references to supposed pulp stories, but while those names were inspired by ones he read, we couldn’t find any of those actual titles in published issues.

JONATHAN: I could ink 15 pages of Kirby a week if I did it as badly as Vince Colletta.

in the inking and things of that sort. It’s one of the reasons Wally Wood liked inking him because it was not stuff that had to be changed. Wood liked to be in complete control of the light sources in the panel. He didn’t want the penciler putting in shadows because he was gonna change them anyway. But Jack, when I first met him, did not care who inked him. In 1969, when I asked him, “Who’s your favorite inker?” he said, “Anybody’s fine. Anybody’s good.

Any professional could do it.” Because the stuff that mattered to him on the page, any professional inker would capture, which was the whole story.

He didn’t really care that much about the textures, the costumes, and things like that. One of the main things that changed over the years was Jack’s attitude. He came to appreciate Mike Royer in a way he had not appreciated his previous inkers, because he looked at the finished pages and saw more Kirby than he was used to seeing. And he also had so many people telling him how much they liked Mike Royer—personal feedback. And keep in mind that Jack… before the New Gods stuff, Jack was really not the editor who hired the inker. He was at the Simon & Kirby studios but that was a different situation. But at Marvel, he handed the work in and generally did not look at it. He didn’t even read the finished pages after Stan had dialogued them.

MARK: [laughter] Well, I thought Vince Colletta was miscast. I think a lot of the bad art in comics, or art I didn’t like, was miscasting.

JONATHAN: If you look at some of the covers, and you look at some of the black-and-white work that Kirby did, Vince complemented it! It’s quite nice. It’s quite pleasing. But you get the feeling it was just the kind of haste, and the lack of attention to detail and the lack of time he was spending on it that really made some of the Thor pages look so… slight, so lacking in the kind of depth that Kirby had obviously put on the page in the pencil stage.

MARK: Well, you know, given what the business paid, which was not… here’s a little pet thing of mine. People who don’t like Vince Colletta art act like he broke into the office and stole the pages and took them home. Each month, Stan Lee would take the new issue that Vince inked and he’d say, “Great job, Vince. Here’s the next issue to ink.” And nobody would say to him—on occasion, somebody would say, “Hey, you rushed this one. Try to be a little more…”. Occasionally they’d hand an issue to John Romita and say, “Hey, put in more background lines,” you know?

“Add some more black areas.” There’s touch-ups on a lot of those pages. There’s touch-ups on everybody’s pages at Marvel.

JONATHAN: I understand that but I still always found it weird— and obviously he’s somewhat reviled by Kirby fans—but the Vince Colletta pages, in Thor in particular, when you look at the original, you see not only is he not working to capture the energy of Kirby, but he would erase background characters and details, presumably because it was too much work.

JONATHAN: There’s stories about Vince Colletta which we probably can’t go into here, though, of course, about the roles he played in Marvel and what else he supplied to keep his job safe. I’m sure that a lot of it is invented, but it’s kind of a rich and colorful footnote.

MARK: Well, Jack had a very odd attitude about inkers. At one point I told him—this was while we were doing New Gods, this was before Royer—I mentioned how much I loved when Bill Everett inked Thor for a while. And Jack went, “Bill Everett never inked Thor.” And I said, “Yes, he inked Thor for about a year, half a year, something like that.” And Jack went, “No, why would Bill Everett be inking

MARK: I don’t want to attribute that… Vince did a ridiculous amount of work. Vince was very prolific. During the time that he was inking Jack at DC, he was inking the 15 pages a week Jack penciled and he was always also inking about four more books. And that’s not humanly possible. I mean, just the workload… Joe Sinnott said he could never have inked 15 pages of Kirby a week.

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somebody else? Bill Everett is a great artist.” Jack had a box of old Marvels and I rummaged through ’em and I found an issue of Thor that Bill Everett had inked, and I said, “Here. Bill Everett.” Jack had never… if he’d read the credits, it hadn’t registered with him. He didn’t notice that there’s a lot more lines on the page than the previous issue, maybe. I think Everett followed George Klein or whoever it was. Jack was going, like, “Why is Bill Everett inking me? Why isn’t he doing his own work?” He felt the same way about Wally Wood. “Why would Wally Wood ink me when Wally Wood can sit down and write and draw his own comic?”

Jack loved almost all the professionals in the business. The only negative he would say about another professional was that the guy was either lazy or derivative. If you wrote and drew something that was unique and had hard effort behind it, Jack loved it, whether he liked the story or not.

JONATHAN: So how did the Kirbys deal with it when artists appeared on the scene—and I’m thinking here specifically of Rich Buckler and Ron Wilson—who clearly swiped very heavily and directly from Kirby?

MARK: They weren’t wild about that because over the years Marvel lawyers would occasionally assert that they owned Jack’s art style and that they even owned Jack’s image. He didn’t like being drawn into a Marvel comic as he was occasionally, because Marvel’s lawyers would say, “You know, we own your likeness. You drew yourself into a story once. Therefore, we own your likeness.” And how would you feel if somebody said, “We’ve got the right to impersonate you”? So he was bothered by that. On the one hand, his attitude was, “Hey, guys have to make a living. If this is what they do to make a living, okay.” On the other hand, I remember he saw a cover once that was somebody swiping… the whole cover was a swipe. It was like a Kirby panel had been blown up. And Jack said, “Why don’t they just reprint my cover and pay me some money for it instead of paying that guy for it?” So he thought it was a bit of a racket.

I don’t think he understood why people would do that.

“That was money that could’ve gone to put my kids through college. That was money that could’ve gone for my kids’ medical expenses.” So if somebody cheated him out of money, they were cheating his kids out of braces or whatever it was, and as a father… I mean, Jack’s last years, when he felt very mortal because of health problems, were all about, “I’ve gotta leave a nest egg for Roz. I’ve gotta leave money for Roz.” I don’t think a lot of people have grasped how devoted Jack was to his family, and especially to Roz, his wife, who was the perfect—everyone in the world should have a wife who loves them and takes care of them the way Roz Kirby took care of Jack. After Jack passed, Roz came to conventions and people were coming up to her who understood, saying, “Thank you for all that wonderful Jack Kirby work,” because she was responsible for all that wonderful Jack Kirby work. She’s the one who got him to the board every morning and got him to go to bed and took care of him and drove him, because Jack didn’t drive. And the family was his reason for working as hard as he did. So to cheat them out of it, or to do something where Jack could’ve been paid for it, bothered them the way it would bother any of us if we were really obsessed with, “I’ve gotta make this much money this week to do right by my family expenses.” So, you know, that was a very…

JONATHAN: It’s straightforward. His reaction to all this stuff seems to be very… it’s not artistic. It’s not, “Okay, these are my concepts, my ideas. This is stuff that represents me.” This was like, “It’s work. This is work, and they’re taking my work from me.” Whereas now, the creative mindset often seems to be more like—and understandably so, coming from a very different perspective—“Hold on. I’ve created this. This is uniquely

NEIL: How did he feel about Lichtenstein?

MARK: Jack claimed that Lichtenstein came to the Simon & Kirby studios looking for work and he turned him down. [laughter] And he said, “This guy had the last laugh on us. He suddenly was getting hundreds of thousands of dollars for blowing up our work and signing his name to it.” You know, a lot of people think it’s mercenary to judge your income and say, “Well, I should’ve gotten paid for this.” But to Jack it was all, 73

(previous page, top) Steve Ditko’s layouts for page 7, panel 5, of “Just a Guy Named Joe!” in Amazing Spider-Man #38 (July 1966)—showing just how much he added while inking.

And Barry (Windsor-) Smith’s cover for X-Men #53 (Feb. 1969) shows how influenced he was

by Kirby at this early stage of his career. (previous page, bottom) Kirby was in control of the inking for Master Jeremy, a circa 1956 newspaper strip proposal done just as the Simon & Kirby studio closed. (below) As shown on this page from Tales to Astonish #73 (Nov. 1965), Jack was breaking down stories for other artists (in this case, Bob Powell) by providing layouts and heavy plotting notes— all while only getting paid a layout fee and credit. But with few other viable work prospects than Marvel, he soldiered on to support his family.

I’ve gotta do this. I don’t want to do this comic but I will because it’s my job.” Because today, the way the business has changed—and the fact that Neil is not a comic book writer and nothing else—has changed the game plan. Today, pencilers can get rid of the inkers they don’t like. Today they can turn down assignments. Today, once a person has established themselves, they can kind of dictate, to some extent, what they want to do, once they’ve established they have a following. That didn’t matter in the ’60s. Jack had very little power at Marvel to say, “I don’t want to do this book, I don’t want this inker, I don’t want this to happen to the material, I don’t want you to do this to the original art.” Jack was a product of that time and the business was shaped by those guys. I was part of the era [when] that started to change.

Now you’ve had another generation there where it’s changed further and will continue to change. And Jack just wanted to live long enough to reap some of the benefits of the changes he knew were coming. He was very prescient. He knew the business was going to change. He was just afraid it wasn’t going to change in time for him to get any rewards from it.

(above and right) Pencils from Destroyer Duck #1 (1982), as Kirby channels his frustrations over Marvel’s treatment of him over the years.

“Duke” wears a hardhat at work, so well could’ve been a spot welder! [Hey readers, any interest out there in TwoMorrows doing a Destroyer Duck: Graphite Edition of Jack’s pencils?]

mine. How can you take what is mine from me?” Whereas Kirby seemed to be almost much more of a transactional exchange, which I guess is common for men—and women, I guess—from that era, from the ’30s and ’40s.

MARK: Yeah. You know, Jack never stopped being a kid who grew up in poverty. Most of those guys didn’t.

There’s a whole other argument or discussion we could have sometime about the way the Depression affected the way everybody in comics in the ’60s was—and what they put up with that we would not put up with today.

Neil would not take on assignments today the way a Gardner Fox or John Broome did, as, “This is my job.

74

NEIL: There’s definitely a level in which Jack was just ahead of the game in ways that are actually astonishing.

He did know what was going to happen. He called everything correctly.

Jack, I think, alone, had a vision of the current auteur media domination of comics— the way we’ve colonized other media.

[Neil’s grandson] Ash has Jack Kirby people on his underpants, and I just love the fact that you go out and you buy underpants and it’s Jack Kirby Marvel characters.

MARK: I wear nothing else. That’s it. I got ’em on right now.

JONATHAN: We need to see evidence of that, Mark. [laughter] MARK: [laughter] The nice part of doing these shows is

you don’t have to be nicely dressed from the waist down. [laughter] We’ve got a few more minutes here before we hit our time limit on these things. Is there anything else you guys want to say about Jack Kirby? Any thoughts you have that I…?

now that bothers me. No, I just wish and I hope—and I don’t know if there’s an answer. I hope he knew how much his work meant to all of us and I hope he was so… because I know he knew that his work would one day be appreciated and be hanging in museums.

NEIL: I wish I’d got to talk to him. I saw Jack. The only time I’d ever actually seen Jack, it was 1993. I was at the San Diego Comic-Con. I was leaving the convention to catch a plane. I was running late and I got out of an elevator and Paul Levitz—who was publisher of DC— was in conversation with Jack, and I thought, “I should just go over and just say hello, just shake his hand.” And I thought, “Oh, I’m late for my plane,” and I thought, “There’ll be another time. There’ll be another convention. I’ll be here next year.” And I went to San Diego airport, which at that time was a tiny little airport, and waited for an hour or two for a plane that was, I think, about two hours late, while thinking, “I should’ve just gone and talked…”, waiting at the airport, and I could’ve been talking to Jack. And he passed away very shortly after that, and I never got to say my hello. It wasn’t the hello that I cared about. I never got to say, “Thank you.” And I wish I’d gotten to say “Thank you.”

MARK: Yes. JONATHAN: He knew that about comic art, whereas many people are not prescient enough to know, but I hope he… it’s a great shame that he died because Ditko, of course, lived long enough to see the Spider-Man movies, and even though he wanted no part of them, I think it must have been pleasant to see something he had such a hand in, bringing so much joy to so many people and still having the same kind of values that you put into it. And I wish Kirby had a chance to see just how dominant his ideas became in popular culture.

MARK: I think he knew. I asked him one time why he was putting so much detail in the pencils when Vince Colletta might leave out some of those backgrounds and he said, “I’m not drawing it for Vince. I’m drawing it for me.” [Jonathan chuckles] And then he also said, and I swear to you he said this, “Y’know, one of these days someone’s gonna reprint this stuff on MARK: He had lots bigger pages on betof people saying ter paper. There’ll “Thank you” to be deluxe editions in him, not that this hardcover.” I’ve got mitigates your a whole shelf here of regret here. The New Gods reprints. last few years at It makes me smile the convention, it every time I look was fascinating. at it, remembering I’m gonna put up a how the people picture of Jack for a at the Licensing second here. [Editor’s Corporation of note: See the photo at America—which the beginning of this MARK EVANIER JONATHAN ROSS NEIL GAIMAN handled DC’s article.] There’s Jack. stuff—said, “No one A nicer man you will ever merchandise these characters. There’s never gonna be a New never met. He was nice to everybody! At conventions, he would just Gods movie or a TV show.” Hey, guess what! stand there—until he got old enough he had to sit down—and he Jack saw all this coming. I’ve told the story of how he prewould talk to anybody about anything. And if you came up to him dicted exactly what the San Diego convention would become and and started saying, “Oh, Mr. Kirby, I love your work,” he was like, how he was frustrated at Marvel when he was there the first time “Okay, fine. Now let’s talk about you.” He liked knowing about the because he told the executives there, “These characters are gonna people he was with. He would ask you as many questions about you be multi-million-dollar properties in big movies,” and they thought as you had about him. I remember there were kids who’d come up he was demented. They thought he was a “useful idiot.” “Just fill and say, “Isn’t it ‘Dark-SEED,’ not ‘Dark-SIDE?’” and if they seemed the damn pages, Jack, and no, we won’t give you a raise.” He saw all to have emotion invested in the character being “Dark-SEED,” he that coming, and now people look at his old stories and say, “Look! would tell them it was “Dark-SEED.” He was just… he didn’t want to He predicted Donald Trump on this page.” He predicted this would disappoint anybody! And he was so good. I don’t think that some of happen, he predicted iPhones, he predicted… well, sometimes that’s the people who write about Jack these days understand that there is a stretch, but he knew that kind of thing was coming or that kind an affection for the man and an affection for the work that some of of thing was happening. I do these panels in part because I just like us cannot separate because there was so much of him in the work. spending time taking about Jack. He was such an amazing man and I And I don’t know anybody who has spent a lot of time with Jack want people to know that. who doesn’t love the work because it was Jack. He’s not the only Gentlemen, I want to thank you for your time doing this. I person in the comic book business I would say that about, but there know it was a hassle to coordinate our time zones to do this and I was a feeling of family around him all the time. He let everybody in, thank you for carrying the torch of Kirby a lot. Oh, and Neil? I got a including some people I think he should have not let into his world, text message. Jewel Shepard says hello. [laughter] because they were devious or exploited him in different ways. You would have treasured that moment, Neil, for a long time, and taken NEIL: Awww! She’s wonderful. it away with you, because he would have been so nice to you… and MARK: Yes, she is terrific. And we will hope to see you at an actual it wouldn’t matter that you were a writer or at that time maybe a convention one of these days, both of you. I hope we have them. beginning writer. He treated the spot welder well, you know? [laughter] He treated everybody well. Jonathan, you want to wrap up here NEIL: I can’t wait ’til we get to see each other again in real life. before we end this?

MARK: And thank you all for tuning in to this video. Please spread JONATHAN: I was on a flight once near a spot welder who I didn’t the word about it. It’s not often you get to see two smart men like get to say hello to. [laughter] Previously that hadn’t bothered me but this talk about Jack Kirby for an hour. Thank you all.

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 5.99­ COLOR, it showcases Kirby’s art even better! $1.99-$

DIGITAL

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

KIRBY COLLECTOR #74

KIRBY COLLECTOR #76

KIRBY COLLECTOR #70

KIRBY COLLECTOR #71

KIRBY COLLECTOR #73

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!

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!

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.99

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.99

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.99

KIRBY COLLECTOR #77

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 magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.99

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.99

(100-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $5.99

KIRBY COLLECTOR #78

SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! How Kirby kickstarted the Silver Age and revamped Golden Age characters for the 1960s, the Silver Surfer’s influence, pivotal decisions (good and bad) Jack made throughout his comics career, Kirby pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, a classic 1950s story, KIRBY/STEVE RUDE cover (and deluxe silver sleeve) and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (DELUXE EDITION w/ silver sleeve) $12.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

KIRBY COLLECTOR #79

See “THE BIG PICTURE” of how Kirby fits into the grand scheme of things! His creations’ lasting legacy, how his work fights illiteracy, a RARE KIRBY INTERVIEW, inconsistencies in his 1960s MARVEL WORK, editorial changes in his comics, big concepts in OMAC, best DOUBLE-PAGE SPREADS, MARK EVANIER’s 2019 Kirby Tribute Panel, PENCIL ART GALLERY, and a new cover based on OMAC #1!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

More About Jack Kirby:

COMIC BOOK ARTIST BULLPEN COMIC BOOK ARTIST BULLPEN collects all seven

KIRBY COLLECTOR #81

“KIRBY: BETA!” Jack’s experimental ideas, characters, and series (Fighting American, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, and others), Kirby interview, inspirations for his many “secret societies” (The Project, Habitat, Wakanda), non-superhero genres he explored, 2019 Heroes Con panel (with MARK EVANIER, MIKE ROYER, JIM AMASH, and RAND HOPPE), a pencil art gallery, UNUSED JIMMY OLSEN #141 COVER, and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Fall 2021

issues of the little-seen labor of love fanzine published in the early 2000s by JON B. COOKE (editor of today’s COMIC BOOK CREATOR magazine), just after the original CBA ended its TwoMorrows run. Featured are in-depth interviews with some of comics’ major league players, including GEORGE TUSKA, FRED HEMBECK, TERRY BEATTY, and FRANK BOLLE—and an amazing all-star tribute to Silver Age great JACK ABEL by the Marvel Comics Bullpen and others. That previously unpublished all-comics Abel appreciation (assembled

by RICK PARKER) includes strips by JOE KUBERT, WALTER SIMONSON, KYLE BAKER, MARIE SEVERIN, GRAY MORROW, ALAN WEISS, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, MORT TODD, DICK AYERS, and many more! Includes the never-released CBA BULLPEN #7, a new bonus feature on JACK KIRBY’s unknown 1960 baseball card art, and a 16-page full-color section, all behind a KIRBY COVER!

BACK ISSUE #131

THE KIRBY LEGACY AT DC! Explores Jack Kirby’s post-Fourth World Bronze Age DC characters!

Demon, Kamandi, OMAC, Sandman, and Kirby’s Odd Jobs (Atlas, Manhunter, and more). Plus: the SIMON & KIRBY Reunion That Wasn’t! Featuring BISSETTE, BYRNE, CONWAY, GIBBONS, GOLDEN, GRANT, RUCKA, SEMEIKS, THOMAS, TIMM, (176-page TRADE PAPERBACK with COLOR) $24.95 • WAGNER, and more. Demon cover by KIRBY and MIKE ROYER! NOW SHIPPING! (Digital Edition) $8.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-105-9 • NOW SHIPPING! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

Jack Kirby Books OLD GODS & NEW

For its 80th issue, the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR presents a double-sized 50th anniversary celebration of Kirby’s magnum opus! This companion to that “FOURTH WORLD” series (NEW GODS, FOREVER PEOPLE, MISTER MIRACLE, and JIMMY OLSEN) looks back at JACK KIRBY’s own words, as well as those of assistants MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN, inker MIKE ROYER, and publisher CARMINE INFANTINO, to determine how it came about, where it was going, and how Kirby would’ve ended it before it was prematurely cancelled by DC Comics! It also examines Kirby’s use of gods in THOR and other strips prior to the Fourth World, how they influenced his DC epic, and affected later series like THE ETERNALS and CAPTAIN VICTORY. With an overview of hundreds of Kirby’s creations like BIG BARDA, BOOM TUBES and GRANNY GOODNESS, and postKirby uses of his concepts, no Fourth World fan will want to miss it! Compiled, researched, and edited by JOHN MORROW, with contributions by JON B. COOKE. (160-page FULL-COLOR paperback) $26.95 • (Ltd. Edition HARDCOVER) $35.95 (Digital Edition) $12.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-098-4 • NOW SHIPPING!

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID

This EXPANDED SECOND EDITION of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #75 includes 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 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. (176-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-094-6

JACK KIRBY’s

DINGBAT LOVE

COLLECTED KIRBY COLLECTOR VOL. 6

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

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

In cooperation with DC COMICS, TwoMorrows compiles a tempestuous trio of never-seen 1970s Kirby projects! These are the final complete, unpublished Jack ER Kirby stories in existence, presented here for the first time! Included are: Two EISN RD AWAINEE! unused DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET tales (Kirby’s final Kid Gang group, M O N inked by MIKE ROYER and D. BRUCE BERRY, and newly colored for this book)!

TRUE-LIFE DIVORCE, the abandoned newsstand magazine that was too hot for its time (reproduced from Jack’s pencil art—and as a bonus, we’ve commissioned MIKE ROYER to ink one of the stories)! And SOUL LOVE, the unseen ’70s romance book so funky, even a jive turkey will dig the unretouched inks by VINCE COLLETTA and TONY DeZUNIGA. PLUS: There’s Kirby historian JOHN MORROW’s in-depth examination of why these projects got left back, concept art and uninked pencils from DINGBATS, and a Foreword and Introduction by ’70s Kirby assistants MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN! (176-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $43.95 • (Digital Edition) $14.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-091-5

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 270-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 LTD. EDITION HARDCOVER) $34.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-083-0

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. ALMOST SOLD OUT! (168-page trade paperback) $24.95 (Digital Edition) $7.99 ISBN: 978-1-89390-589-4

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

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Comments

(No matter where you are on this big blue planet—WRITE US!)

[First up, I want to correct an omission. The Miamicon 1975 photo of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee shown in JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #79, page 69 (and also used in ALTER EGO #161) was taken by James Van Hise. We’re very sorry about the lack of attribution, James. Now, on to your letters from all over the world:] I thoroughly enjoyed TJKC #79, and it was a startling surprise to see Brother Eye take over as editor on this particular occasion!

I can vividly recall buying OMAC #2 on a cold and dreary Sunday back in late 1974 (the same year I’d started work). This latest futuristic Kirby creation seemed as cold and distant as autumn itself, and I remember being disappointed that I’d missed out on the first issue. I managed to buy a copy from another newsagent a few weeks later.

For the record, it was only those first two issues and #5 that really knocked me out. So I really didn’t care when the series came to an abrupt end after the eighth issue. Let’s face it; even Machine Man had more personality in his little finger, than this guy had in his entire body!

Well, here’s to another 25 years of TJKC! I very much doubt that I’ll be around then, although this concept called “New Bodies for Old” does spring to mind. (Hmm, now there’s a futuristic thought!)

P. Savage, Gosport, UNITED KINGDOM It was a pleasure to re-read TJKC #80: OLD GODS AND NEW. The chronological aspect of the book makes it invaluable.

Despite its brevity, Kirby’s Fourth World spans time. From the ancient Middle East and Europe, to our present time and future, Kirby’s precepts confer an understanding upon “true” stories from history.

For example, Jay Robert Nash’s book AMONG THE MISSING relates the 1815 tale of a Prussian prisoner at Danzing Prison in Weichselmunde [Poland]: “[Diderici] was walking in chains in the walled exercise yard with other prisoners marching ahead of and behind him[on].

“Suddenly Diderici began to fade. According to over 30 prisoners and guards, within seconds he was invisible—then his manacles and ankle irons clinked to the ground. Nothing more was seen of Diderici, who somehow had made a reality of every prisoner’s dream.”

This may have inspired the story of Orion Williamson, who disappeared in 1854, walking across a field, waving to friends.

Have we met Himon before? Was Diderici from outside the world we know?

Richard Kolkman, Fort Wayne, IN [Richard also sent in some corrections for TJKC #79. On page 25, Bob Powell had already

drawn The Watcher in STRANGE TALES #134, not #135. And Richard says the lower image on page 62 isn’t from THE RAVEN, but instead from the 1979 unrealized project MOON BEAR.] I just saw this on the web while looking for something totally unconnected—thought it may be something to file away for a potential article on record covers and labels.

This album by German ‘Kraut Rock’ band, Can, dates from 1970. Can and their musical genre have had a revival of interest in recent years with re-releases—the cover graphic is now even available as a t-shirt.

There are also at least a couple of 1970s reggae labels with a tentative Kirby connection.

Derek Harris, London, UNITED KINGDOM My brother and I have just finished watching the KAMANDI animated short on the new JUSTICE SOCIETY: WORLD WAR II Blu-ray. I have to admit it brought a few tears to my eyes as Kamandi is my all time favorite creation of Mr. Kirby! It was amazing to get to see... I’m not sure if you have had a chance to see it, so I won’t spoil it for you! If it had not been for you and all your hard work in bringing us the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, I don’t think I would have discovered the Last Boy on Earth. Thank you, sir!

Patrick Powell, Collins, GA I have been a keen reader and subscriber of TJKC (through my comic shop) for about 20 years, though this is the first time I’ve written to you.

As many people here in Italy, I love Jack Kirby’s drawings, scenery, kinetics, and his graphic solutions. Moreover I love his imaginative structures, supported by a creative inspiration which is almost inexhaustible. However, just mentioning the above, would significantly belittle Kirby.

It is a paradox: his wonderful panels, his phantasmagoric drawings risk distracting the attention of the reader from text that shows an extraordinary keen and deep author at work. It is possible to read one of his sagas (for example, 78

“The New Gods”) several times, finding in it levels of narrative ability and psychological depth which the reader might have neglected at first sight, being more attracted by drawings delineating the action.

I believe Kirby has nothing to envy of the many other authors celebrated as “mature” and capable of introspection and sensibility.

The topics that can be elaborated on Kirby are countless. I take this opportunity to point out some hints from my personal point of view.

I would start with his vision of science. In the period of Lee/Kirby, the scientific development was thought of in a calm and confident way, for example in FANTASTIC FOUR. The criminal of the moment, like the Mad Thinker or Dr. Doom, was considered as a deviant element that, after their defeat, science would have continued its development in favor of humanity. All this in an optimistic, evolutionary and substantially positive vision. Neither the birth of the Hulk nor mutants would have deteriorated such trust.

In the following Kirbyian period, the feeling is different. There is a noticeable restlessness. It is not a matter of a bad use of science and technology by the villain of the moment, but mostly something that can destroy human beings and the world. Should there be salvation in extremis, there still remains the unpleasant sensation that maybe such good fortune won’t be repeated. The whole world is on the edge of the abyss. Man manipulates powers that can destroy him and that will eventually do it. Let’s think about manipulation of life, from the Fourth World to Armin Zola, or the apocalyptic future of Kamandi. Restlessness remains, even though the Black Panther stops Jakarra on the mountain of Vibranium, or Silver Star halts a transfigured Darius Drumm at the very last moment. The most dramatic and innovative example is pointed out in SPIRIT WORLD with the assault of Toxl’s barbarians against the science citadel—here the disaster happens in a shocking finale! (Is this his very first time, or has something similar happened before in Kirby’s work?)

I notice a similar change regarding aliens: in the time of Lee/Kirby they could be bad or good, but still represented in a spectacular and superheroic way.

Later on it’s presented as worry for something unknowable and maybe threatening. Space Gods

generate a sense of pathos described in a masterly way by Kirby in his ETERNALS #1 and 2. The same pathos is shown in the alien visions of Moon Boy in DEVIL DINOSAUR. Furthermore I am thinking of the alien “vampire” in CAPTAIN AMERICA ANNUAL #3 or of the first contact with Ten-For in MACHINE MAN. With the alien (he or she?) from KAMANDI #30, Kirby, as an exceptional narrator, is capable of keeping the reader in suspense, always at the mercy of a powerful and destructive force, whose purposes are unknown.

A sort of pessimism is also underlined regarding his vision of the future: no more technological paradises, but often fruits poisoned by wars and inhuman technology. I limit myself to remember Agron in CAPTAIN AMERICA, or Hatch-22 in BLACK PANTHER. But it is in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that Kirby exceeds himself. The story of Harvey Norton in #5 is a masterpiece of sensitivity and psychology referred to a man who is not capable of getting used to an artificial and estranging world in which he lives. Furthermore in #7, the post-apocalypse future, with a world condemned beyond all redemption, is represented by an extraordinary empathy and suffering. Kirby was a great narrator!

Along with what I mentioned above, we have to underline Kirby’s exceptional dramatic sense. Among several examples, I am thinking about the masterpiece story of NEW GODS #6, with the Deep Six and the Glory Boat—an authentic psychological drama along with a language and gesture worthy of a real theatrical tragedy. The same consideration can be given to HUNGER DOGS. At this point, it would be a big mistake having a stereotyped reading of Kirby. His incredible capability was to switch from sadness to cheerfulness, from tragedy to comedy.

In the whole of his production, along with drama and breathless feeling, there is always a sort of freshness, lightness, irony. That is the great ability to entertain.

Suddenly, along comes a moment of hilarity, a joke, a comic scene; along with a gloomy Ikaris, there was a joyful Sersi.

Never boring comics, they could involve and make the reader dream, always an enjoyable and exciting read. A refreshment for eyes and soul.

The amazing and adventurous aspect was basic in his point of view. Every story by him was enjoyable, exciting and rousing. This does not mean superficiality, but it shows there are more ways to tell a story, a life.

As a great artist, he was able to thrill a reader moving from one character to the other, from any situation to another, rejecting every cliché and always supported by an incredible fantasy. A genius based on an extraordinary human feeling and poetic inspiration.

In this way, he left us a wide range of situations and characters masterly described.

Moreover, it is amazing that every character, even the most unlikely one, would become in his hands absolutely credible and fascinating. Perhaps the best example comes from Machine Man. This most absurd character risked being reduced to a puppet, but the King was able to tell us his story in a fascinating and credible way. His temper and his mood are Here’s a tentative list of upcoming themes, so start thinking, and get to writing! SEND US YOUR THEME IDEAS! • KIRBY: ANIMATED - From his 1940s start on Popeye and Betty Boop and his work being used on the 1960s Marvel Super-Heroes show, to Fantastic Four, Super Friends, Scooby-Doo, Thundarr the Barbarian, and RubySpears: it’s the ultimate look at Jack’s work in animation!

efficiently described. Even his robotic body, his crazy technological physicality, thanks to Kirby’s genius, has nothing ridiculous, as unfortunately happened later on.

Regarding the humanity of his characters, I would like to point out another aspect. I don’t only refer to his various and wonderful heroes in costume, but to something more modest and real—that is, to the ordinary man as bearer of values, trust and common sense, due to last beyond all challenges. That is the tough farmer, the taxi driver, or the teenager of the poor neighborhood, who is supported by their day-by-day philosophy to fight and go on. We, the people…

It would be interesting to deeply study the common man psychology in Kirbyian work. Here lies his skill at representing, even in just a few words or images, real moods.

Hence the King was not only a visionary writer of fantasy, but also an extraordinary human narrator— and so his characters are much more elaborated and three-dimensional than what many may think. Besides deepness and maturity in Kirby, there was also the freshness of an everlasting young spirit.

I will always be grateful to Jack Kirby. As long as my health and mind support me in my life, I will always remember him with affection, and I will miss his wonderful stories and his fascinating characters that gave me moments of unforgettable emotions.

Federico Pagliuchi, Vigonza (Padova), ITALY A couple of points about STUF’ SAID (TJKC #75).

That Kirby & Lee may have initially considered rendering Sue PERMANENTLY invisible as a consequence of the test-flight is fascinating. It reminds me of the “re-modeling” that Johnny’s flame underwent after his first couple of appearances. That redefinition took place as the FF storyline unfolded—the reader was present to see it occur—while Sue’s re-do happened (IF it happened) before she and her audience ever could meet.

We’re being asked, after all, to give credence to something without real evidence, yes? That the pin-ups were repurposed presentation pieces—okay—but that Kirby didn’t make a presentation piece for Sue because she was conceived as being totally and unalterably invisible? I guess I just take issue with the idea that Kirby would ‘leave the page blank,’ for whatever reason.

Remember “Blue Eyes” [from Starman Zero]? Invisible or not, Kirby showed us something that invited the eye.

Strictly speaking, a heavy workload suffices to my mind as explanation for the delayed pin-up. But the supposition is so seductive! I found myself trying to imagine the crash site scene as it might’ve played out with an unrelentingly invisible Sue. Fascinating!

But what’s this (page 54) about the expression “Marvel Age of Comics” being seen in print for the first time in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #33 (cover-date Feb. ’66)? It’s on the cover of ASM #7, TALES TO ASTONISH #46, and FF #17 (all cover-dated ’63); were you just testing your readership’s attention?

Ted Krasniewski, Jersey City, NJ [Nope, just something I missed in the marathon researching I did for the book. Good catch, Ted!] • VISUAL COMPARISONS - From before & after versions of altered stories and art, to Jack bringing new life to his older visuals, expect the unexpected to be revealed!

• THE KIRBY COLLECTORS - Readers’ stories about what it means to them to be Kirby collectors—from their craziest original art and comics deals, to getting tattoos, Kirby inspired man-caves, and their Holy Grails of collecting!

79

#82 Credits: John Morrow, Editor/Designer/ Proofreader/Art Curator/etc.

THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Mark Borax • Jerry Boyd Dwight Boyd • Norris Burroughs Mark Evanier • Chris Fama Danny Fingeroth • Shane Foley David Folkman • Barry Forshaw Neil Gaiman • Drew Geraci Glen Gold • Rand Hoppe • Alex Jay Tracy Kirby • Sean Kleefeld Richard Kolkman • Tom Kraft Harry Mendryk • Will Murray Jonathan Ross • Tom Tulenko Kendall Whitehouse • Ray Wyman, Jr. The Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org) and whatifkirby.com If we forgot anyone, please let us know!

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NEXT ISSUE: “FAMOUS FIRSTS!” How Jack Kirby was a pioneer in comics: the Romance Comics genre, Kid Gangs, double-page spreads, Black heroes, new formats, super-hero satire, and others! With MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, plus a gallery of Jack’s pencil art from CAPTAIN AMERICA, JIMMY OLSEN, CAPTAIN VICTORY, DESTROYER DUCK, BLACK PANTHER, and more! Cover

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