Captain America TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR EIGHTY-FOUR
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SUMMER 2022
Contents
THE
STEVE SHERMAN TRIBUTE ISSUE! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 JACK FAQs Mark Evanier’s August 6, 2020 conversation with Steve Sherman. . . 4
ISSUE #84, SUMMER 2022
C o l l e c t o r
TRIBUTES Neal Kirby. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Lisa Kirby. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Mark Badger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Greg Williams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Bruce Simon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Diana Mercer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Glen David Gold. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 FOUNDATIONS More unseen Link Thorne. . . . . . . . 40 INNERVIEW Steven Brower interviews Steve. . . 48 KIRBY OBSCURA Before Groot was cute . . . . . . . . . . 50 MOB MENTALITY Steve speaks out about Kirby’s In The Days Of The Mob. . . . . . . . . 52 KIRBY KINETICS Up on the roofs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY Crazy Quilt patchwork design. . . . . 66 GALLERY: STEVE’S JOBS. . . . . . . . 68 COLLECTOR COMMENTS. . . . . . . . 78 Front cover inks: D. BRUCE BERRY Front cover colors: TOM ZIUKO COPYRIGHTS: Avengers, Black Bolt, Black Panther, Bucky, Captain America, Crystal, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Groot, Hulk, Human Torch, Invisible Girl, Journey Into Mystery, Lockjaw, Mr. Fantastic, Orogo, Red Skull, SpiderMan, Starhawk, Sub-Mariner, Tales to Astonish, The Martian, Thing, Thor TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Ben Boxer, Boy Commandos, Country Boy, Crazy Quilt, Demon, Flower/Spirit, Green Arrow, Guardian, In The Days Of The Mob, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, Kobra, Lois Lane, Losers, Manhunter, Newsboy Legion, OMAC, Orion, Rodney Rumpkin, Sandman, Sandy, Spirit World, Strange Adventures, Supergirl, Superman, Warden Frye, World’s Greatest SuperHeroes TM & © DC Comics • Star Wars TM & © Lucasfilm • Lone Ranger and Tonto, Incredible Hulk TV show © Universal Pictures • Truck Shackley & the Texas Critters TM & © Krofft Entertainment • Boy Explorers, Link Thorne, Stuntman TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estates • King Kobra © Jack Kirby & Steve Sherman • Beardsley Bullfeather, Captain Glory, Captain Victory, GODS plates, Jupiter Plaque, Kirby Unleashed, Silver Star, Uncle Carmine’s Fat City Comix TM & © Jack Kirby Estate • The Fly TM & © Joe Simon Estate • Savage Humor © The Print Mint • The Curse of Frankenstein © Hammer Films • Spats and Splats © Barry Siegel • Conan TM & © Conan Properties International, LLC. • Tarzan TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. • Pee-Wee’s Playhouse TM & © Shout! Factory • O.G. Readmore TM © ABC Television • Beakman’s World, Men In Black TM & © Columbia Pictures • Happy © Bacchus Films • Star Trek TM & © Paramount Pictures
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[above] Jack drew this sketch inside Steve Sherman’s copy of Origins of Marvel Comics.
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The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 29, No. 84, Summer 2022. Published quarterly (you betcha!) 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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Mark Evanier
JACK F.A.Q.s
A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby
[below] A photo from the filming of Spats And Splats, an 8mm silent comedy made by Barry Siegel, and starring LA Comic Book Club members. You can see the film here: https://youtu.be/ LXrYncpxIfI [left to right] Steve Sherman, Rob Solomon, Mark Evanier, Barry Siegel, Jules Kragen, Bruce Simon, Gary Lowenthal, and Sandy Friedlander. (Jules and Sandy were friends of Barry’s from school, and not members of the LA Comic Book Club.) Steve played the role of “Head Tough” and served as cameraman for the 1970 film. Mark Evanier was the hamburger-flipper.
was the vice president. Rob Solomon was the secretary or the treasurer. Mike Rotblatt was whichever one Rob wasn’t. We had a bunch of fun people in it— Bruce Schweiger, Steve Finkelstein, Bruce Simon, Barry Siegel—a lot of people, some of whom are still friends today, and some of whom haven’t spoken to each other for reasons that flowed from the comic club. One day this fellow named Steve Sherman joined the group, with his brother Gary. I don’t know how he joined or exactly when—we’ll get to that—but we became good friends. Shortly after that, Steve and I were both hired by a company named Marvelmania. We’ll tell you about that. That was around 1969, and some of you who sent money to Marvelmania are probably still waiting for your posters and decal sheets. Shortly after that, Steve and I were hired as the assistants to this man named Jack Kirby. Steve, like me, feels a great obligation to talk about our time with Jack because we were witnesses to a very important time in the life of a very important man in the comic book industry—probably the most brilliant guy who ever worked in the comic book industry, and certainly one of the people without whom there would not have been a comic book industry. So, I invited my friend Steve, who I’ve now known for over half a century, to join us here, and we’re going to talk about what it was like to hang around with Jack Kirby and work with him. Steve, come on in here now. Hello, my friend! How long have we known each other?
Mark Evanier’s conversation with Steve Sherman Conducted online on August 6, 2020
Transcribed by Steven Tice Copy-edited by John Morrow and Mark Evanier [Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, panels such as this one were featured online rather than in-person at conventions. You can view the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5f19VvIApE]
MARK EVANIER: Greetings! My name is Mark Evanier, and I am very pleased to have this guest on here today. In the late Sixties, around ’66 and ’67—there are fistfights still going on over what year it was—we started a club in Los Angeles called, brilliantly, the Los Angeles Comic Book Club. It met every Saturday at Palms Recreation Center, which is still over there on Overland Avenue in West LA, and I was the president of it. Rob Gluckson
STEVE SHERMAN: At least fifty years, probably 51, maybe even more. MARK: Do you remember when you first came to the comic book club? STEVE: Oh, sure, sure, sure. It all came about because Gary Owens did that show on Channel 13 about comic books, the history of comics. [My brother] Gary and I saw that and they showed Hollywood. They showed where the bookstores were. So, we said, “Oh, let’s go down there and take a look.” So we went, and we went into Bond Street Books, and they had Guts [#5 from 1969 shown above], the fanzine that the Glucksons put out. And there was a little ad that said, “Saturdays we meet at the Palms Recreation, blah, blah.” We lived in West LA, so we said, “Let’s go.” One Saturday afternoon 4
we went there, and it was just amazing. [Mark laughs] I liken it to— not having been in a fraternity, this was our fraternity, because I still know most of these people fifty years later. We had a blast. We really did. When you think about it, how much fun we had—I mean, we made movies, we had the Evening of Imagination before there were comic-cons. We insulted each other. We made fun of each other. [both laugh] And, of course, we read comics. I even remember the first time Sergio Aragonés showed up. He showed up at the Palms Recreation Center, and we were like, “Wow! Sergio Aragonés! What a great guy!”
hobby, and it wasn’t one of those, “Hey, look how much these old comics are worth” shows, and there was a minimum of “pow/bam/zap” or whatever. People are still looking for a copy of that—it’s a lost special. Gary [right] spent years calling KCOP saying, “Search the warehouse. You must have a copy of that someplace. It seems to be lost.” STEVE: Warehouse? I don’t think KCOP had a warehouse! [laughs] MARK: I think KCOP was a warehouse, or is one now. So, Steve and his brother Gary showed up at the meeting, and we met every Saturday in the afternoon and we played games. We used to play a version of Jeopardy that I designed which was like Jeopardy with comic book characters and comic book subjects. You know, it was like, “I’ll take Jack Kirby Inkers for twenty.” Things like that.
MARK: How many people do you remember were in that club meeting that day? STEVE: Maybe twenty, I would think? MARK: I thought it was more like forty. STEVE: Maybe forty. It’s hard to remember.
STEVE: SMASH.
MARK: Sergio remembers it being, like, five or six people, which I’m telling him, “No, it wasn’t.” We had a decent turnout for him that day. He was our first, and I think only, real guest speaker.
MARK: We also called the group SMASH, which stood for Society for Magazine Appreciators of Super Heroes, and I think I may have come up with that—
STEVE: I think so. But there were five people crowded around him, so that’s probably what he remembers.
STEVE: Probably. MARK: —in my stupider moments. The club was a lot of fun for a couple of years there. And there were no comic-cons. There were very few comic-cons anywhere then, but none in California. This is pre-San Diego Con.
MARK: Let me clarify here for people what Steve was probably talking about. Gary Owens, the great disc jockey, personality, did a show on Channel 13, KCOP local here, about comic book collecting. It was a special they did one evening, and it was a local station, but it somehow made us feel empowered because it was talking about our
STEVE: No. I think the only one was the science-fiction con in Santa Monica, which was the first one I went to. MARK: That was the Westercon. The Westercon was at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica in 1969, and that’s where some of our members of the club met Jack Kirby, who had come down. Jack and Roz had just moved to southern California. They were living in Irvine at the time in a home, which was their temporary lodging until they could find a house to buy. Jack wanted to meet the local comic fans, and this was the closest he could come to a convention. And he and Roz showed up there, paid admission, walked in, and some of our officers who were at the club—I think Rob Solomon and Mike Rotblatt and Bruce Schweiger and such—met him there and said, “Oh, Mr. Kirby! Would you come speak at one of our club meetings?” And he said, “Sure.” He never did, but he said, “Sure. Why don’t you guys come down to our house in Irvine one of these days?” That’s how I wound up going down to see Jack Kirby. I
[left] A sketch Jack did for Gary Owens. Non-locals probably know Gary best as the announcer with his hand over his ear on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. [above] The ad that ran in TV Guide for Gary’s TV special on comics, courtesy of Mark Evanier. Sadly, no video copy of the show has yet been found.
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for the Phil Seuling convention, and we were supposed to go have a meeting with Stan Lee, but he had to postpone it, so we’re just kind of wandering around New York.” And he said to us, “Are you going to visit the MAD offices, the MAD magazine offices?” We said, “Gee, we hadn’t thought about that. Where are they?” And he said, “Right here!” [both laugh] He was standing in front of them. So, he took us in and gave us a tour, and on the way in, we passed this little sad-faced man who was leaving with an art portfolio, and I went, “That’s Wally Wood! What’s he doing here?” And Sergio took us in and we met Al Feldstein and Jerry DeFuccio, and Nick Meglin, and Bill Gaines, Leonard Brenner, and John Putnam, and Angelo Torres was there. And we got this grand tour of MAD magazine we hadn’t counted on. STEVE: Yeah! It was mind-blowing. MARK: And at 3:00 o’clock, we went over and met Stan. STEVE: Yeah. That was something. MARK: What do you remember from the meeting with Stan? STEVE: I just remember it was a very, very small office. I was surprised. Marvelmania had bigger offices than Marvel had. It was just like the front room had the tables and I think Johnny Romita was there, and Marie Severin was there, and maybe one other guy was there. MARK: Herb Trimpe. STEVE: Yeah, and Herb Trimpe. MARK: And Tony Mortellaro were there, and a guy named Allyn Brodsky was working there as an editorial assistant. In the back was John Verpoorten and Roy Thomas, and Stan’s secretary, whose name escapes me at the moment, and they
took us in to meet Stan. Do you remember the first thing he said to us? STEVE: No, no. MARK: He said to us, “I’ve been so busy these days I haven’t had a chance to look at the comics lately. If you ask me what’s going on in Iron Man this month, I couldn’t tell you.” We understood that meant, “Don’t ask me about anything ‘comics’.” STEVE: “Don’t ask me about comics,” yeah. “Don’t ask me comic book stuff.” And then we told him about Marvelmania and all that, and he was like, “Hmm.” Very concerned. He said, “Well, I’ll look into it.” Because we said, “This guy’s going to give you a bad name if you keep going with him.” And he was like, you know—he was very personable. He was wonderful. He was Stan Lee. I mean, what more could you ask for? MARK: Very charming. STEVE: Very charming, and he was great to us, and he said, “Give 11
[previous page] The Marvelmania Magazine #1 announcement of Kirby leaving Marvel Comics. [above] Stan Lee’s response to Steve’s letter, detailing how the Marvelmania debacle played out. [left] An early 1970s Kirby sketch.
[right] A photo Steve took inside the Marvel Comics offices on his 1970 trip there with Mark Evanier. [below] A 1965 Steve Ditko sketch that ran in the Comic Reader #42. [right] Jack Kirby in 1971. Photo by Vince Davis. [bottom] A view of the dealer’s room at the Statler Hilton hotel during those early 1970s Seuling Cons.
my regards to Jack when you see him.” And we said thank you and we left. The only other place I remember is we went to Warren. We went to the Warren offices, and looked around for a while. [MARK EVANIER INTERJECTION: I didn’t correct Steve during this interview but I never went to the Warren offices. Mike Royer had arrived in New York and moved into the hotel room with us. Steve and Mike went to the Warren offices the afternoon I took a train to Hartford to visit my grandparents.] MARK: We spent a day with Steve Ditko. STEVE: We did. That was wild, because he was sooo nice, so ordinary, and so open. And we were going like, “I thought he was supposed to be this recluse,” but, no, he was just really, he was a sweet man, and you just go like—well, there you go. You can’t always believe what you hear. My God, that convention was the biggest one I had ever seen. You looked out, there was a balcony, and you looked out on the main floor, and it was miles, just like comic books and original art. I had never seen so much original art in my life. Just stacks of it, and it was just like, where did this come from? Because all I had ever read in the fanzines and stuff was, “Oh, it’s all been destroyed. There’s no more original art anywhere.” You know, “They burned it.” And here there was all this original art. It was very expensive, ten dollars a page. [laughs] MARK: Yeah. Somebody brought in every page of Tower original art, every single page that was in the THUNDER Agents comics, and they put it on the table, ten bucks apiece. It looked like a White Sale at Macy’s. [Steve laughs] Everyone was looking through it, “Where’s the Wood? Where’s the Wood? Where’s the Gil Kane?” Were you with me? I was in the elevator at one point, and there was a slightly older gentleman, an adult, and he was taking a couple of fans up to his room to show them artwork. And I somehow got in the conversation, and he said, “Hey, do you want to see my artwork?” And I didn’t know who he was. He didn’t have a badge on. So I said, “Sure.” I figured out maybe if I saw his artwork, I’d know who he was. And he takes us into this hotel room, and he takes out his portfolio, starts pulling out Frank Frazetta pages. [Steve laughs] And I go, “Oh! Mr. Frazetta!” This is Frank Frazetta. It was a very strange couple of days. I met my friends Marty Pasko and Alan Brennert there for the first time. I met Gary Groth there. I met Tony Isabella in person. We had been corresponding. He has been my friend for a long time. I met him there that day. It was amazing. I met, like, everybody whose comic books I ever read in my life right there. STEVE: And we flew on a 747, which you can’t do anymore. MARK: But, remember, we flew on the second 747 of the day. The first one left without us. Let’s see if you remember this, Steve. 12
house to remind me of Jack: Artwork by Jack, and pictures of Jack, and things like that. And when I look at them, I remember the guys at DC, the guys in the merchandising division saying, “No one will ever merchandise these characters.” The guys there who said, “Why would anybody do merchandise of Mister Miracle? We’ve got Batman!” Now there’s a Mister Miracle doll, and these characters are getting on TV—and the early issues of New Gods have now been reprinted, what, like nine times? STEVE: Oh, yeah. MARK: In hardcovers. STEVE: Those fat hardcovers. MARK: Exactly the way Jack wanted them to be someday. Deluxe printing, good paper, good coloring—well, better coloring. And he said that they would do that. He said, “Someday these comics will be in hardcover,” and nobody believed him. They considered those failed books. Now they wish they had a hundred issues of New Gods to reprint, because it sells every time they reprint it. And I look at that stuff and it reminds me how right Jack was so many times. STEVE: Yeah. I mean, how could you fault the guy? He’d been at it his whole life. He knew exactly. He’d been a publisher. He knew what sold. He knew what the audience would read. He had an innate sense of what to do. These guys kind of second-guessed him all the time. I used to think, “Yeah, maybe if he had done something else besides New Gods or Forever People, maybe that would have—”. But then you go, “—but they’re still printing it! They’re making a movie out of it!” So, he was right all along, you know? What are you going to do?
up with the Dracula book before he did. And there were a couple of things like that. STEVE: Well, he was always trying to push the medium. He wanted to make it more than a trifle. Bubblegum was a penny, a candy bar is a nickel, a comic’s a dime. But he wanted to go beyond that. I mean, he really wanted to go back to large-sized comics, 64 pages, a magazine in full color, and they wouldn’t listen to him. They just wouldn’t listen to him.
MARK: And a lot of the books that they told him then, that they thought were great to emulate, nobody cares about today. Let me see if I can finish our list, here. We’ve got a few more. “Did either of you have concerns about the Fourth World being too complex for fans to follow, or did you encourage Jack to stretch its scope even further?”
MARK: He kept looking at National Lampoon and saying, “That’s what comics should look like.” STEVE: Right, right. But DC, they just weren’t in that business. They were in the Superman/Batman business, and they weren’t going to vary at all. They weren’t going to go off.
STEVE: Nah. We never gave him any advice on that, that I recall. MARK: I think a couple times we told him to slow down, he was putting in new characters too fast, but he said, “Carmine wants this in.”
MARK: Okay, here’s the last question that John sent me. We’ve got more questions to talk about after that. “What was the most frustrating part of working with Jack? Likewise, what was the most rewarding part?” You go first.
STEVE: Yeah. Because he was putting stuff in there hoping they would branch out into other books, you know? He was ready to take any of those characters and put them in their own book. MARK: And he was also concerned that he had told Stan some of the ideas, and he was afraid if he didn’t do them, get them in print first, Stan might remember some of them and do some of those ideas.
STEVE: The rewarding part was being around him, and talking with him, and listening to him, and exchanging ideas and listening to his ideas. The most frustrating part was seeing how frustrated he was with the people that he dealt with. That hurt. You felt you had to protect him. And, not that he needed it, but you just felt that he was such a great guy, that they were treating him like this, you’d go, like, “How can you treat Jack Kirby like this? This is Jack Kirby, okay? He created the Marvel Universe. Leave him alone! Just let him do what he does.” But they wouldn’t. And it was very frustrating to see that, that any time he did something, they’d either change it or wreck it. I know when In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World came out, he was just crushed. He was just like, “Oh, man! Look at this! They printed it on toilet paper!” [laughs] You were just like, “Aw,
STEVE: Sure. I mean, look at Thanos. That’s Darkseid, and they beat him to the movies with that one. He was right. People didn’t believe him. “You know they’ll steal.” “No, they won’t, Jack. They won’t steal.” “Oh, yes, they will. Oh, yes, they will.” MARK: Remember one of the first things he told us about was that idea of doing a book of Dracula, a black-and-white magazine, or a color magazine—he wanted it to be in color, a magazine, not a comic book—of Dracula in different time periods. And he wasn’t sure if he had told that idea to Stan or not. So, he was pushing Carmine to put that book out before Marvel did. And [Marvel] came 19
MARK: I remember, after Jack died, talking to Roz; she remembered that day so vividly, because that was the day their lives changed. He really took it hard, because he had all these wonderful plans, and he realized that he could not do any of them at DC.
Jack.” You know? And what’s so funny is that they canceled them, and then a couple months later, The Godfather and The Exorcist come out—maybe a year later. But he was on the right track—they would have had something. But, you know, their brains weren’t geared for that. They were not great businessmen up there at DC, I’d have to say. I mean, they were lucky they had Superman and Batman. That kept them afloat. Because anything else, they would have just, boop! [mimes something going down the tubes]
STEVE: No, no. MARK: And then there was that time—maybe I’m going to jog your memory about this. There was a big distributors convention at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset. Carmine was going to come out for it, and he wanted to take Jack as his date, because he had tickets for two there. Carmine could not get out of New York for some reason. I think there was a weather problem, actually. So he told Jack, “You go. Take Roz. The tickets are under my name.” Roz had come down with a bad cold, so she couldn’t go. So you and I drove out to Thousand Oaks. We picked Jack up. He was wearing a beautiful suit. He was dressed perfectly. And we drove him, you were driving, to the Beverly Hills Hotel. We dropped him off. We went over to my place and played cards and ate pizza until he called and said, “I’m ready to go home, guys.” And we went over, picked him up, and took him home. Now, on the way there he was like this. It was all, “I’m going to tell those guys how to do comics. I’m going to tell them what they should be doing. I’m going to tell them that, I’m going to tell them this.” On the way back, it was like, “Nobody there cares about the comics. Nobody has any interest in—they didn’t know what was published, they didn’t know who I was. I told them I worked for Marvel, they went, ‘Marvel. We’ve heard
MARK: Well, you kind of stole my answer to both questions. That’s actually what I was going to say. Yeah, it was frustrating seeing him be frustrated. Do you remember the day he told us that New Gods and Forever People were being “suspended?” STEVE: Yeah. He was really hurt. MARK: I’ve never felt so sorry for a man in my life. He was so—he was gray. He had actually turned, like, he was pale. STEVE: Yeah. He was so crushed—which was unusual, because Jack usually, he didn’t get crushed like that over comics, over the magazines, because he knew the score. He knew, you know, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But these were really special to him. He was really trying to upgrade the comics. And if you read those today, you can see that he did. I mean, the stories, they’re so rich— the characters and the writing—that you read them today and they still hold up. What more can you say? Fifty years later, they still hold up. That’s what makes them great, really.
Steve jotted these notes before discussing the idea of King Kobra with Jack. More details and Steve’s full script were revealed in TJKC #22. [next page] An example of the major art changes DC instituted for Kobra #1—and all done by Pablo Marcos, whose style was a pretty jarring departure from Jack’s.
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[these pages] From the first actual San Diego Comic-Con in 1970, here’s photos by Roger Freedman of Jack’s “chalk talk” that Mark and Steve describe here. As you can see from the finished art on the previous page, drawing in front of an audience never produced Jack’s finest work—compare it to the illo on page 1 of this issue.
convention is going to take over San Diego. It’ll be our town, and it’ll be where Hollywood comes every year to sell the movies they made last year and to find out what they’re going to make next year.” You were present when he said that, right? STEVE: Oh, yeah! He said it more than once, too. MARK: People doubt me on that. No, he actually said it, and he was right. We went to the first San Diego con together. Let’s go back to that for a minute. Because we were there the day Shel Dorf brought 111 people to Jack’s studio and imposed on their hospitality quite a bit that day. But Jack was sitting there telling these guys to do the convention, to make it about more than just comics, because to Jack comics were about more than just comics. Remember how he used to talk about how comics could be comics in movies, and comics in TV, and comics even in dance. There could be freeform dance which takes the energy of comic books and puts it on the stage. And then we drove down on the Saturday of the first San Diego con in 1970. You picked me up at my house. I remember I was so ready to get out of the house, I didn’t notice my father’s car was missing from the driveway because it had been stolen overnight. [Steve laughs] When I came back, there were police there. But it was you, Gary, Bruce Simon, and me. And we drove down to San Diego very early. We got there about 10:00 AM at the US Grant [hotel], and we spent the day at the convention. And there were, like, 300 people there, and we thought that was…
Hanerfeld had come down, and he announced that he was the DC representative, so suddenly he was doing a DC panel previewing what DC was having coming out. Mark’s the guy who went back to New York afterwards and told everybody, “You’ve got to come to this convention in San Diego next year.” He’s the one who started the trend of people coming out. And Mary Skrenes was there that day. STEVE: I remember Mary. Yeah. MARK: And Shel was coming up to us every twenty minutes saying, “Have you heard from Jack and Roz? Have you heard from Jack and Roz? They’re not here yet.” And there were no cell phones in those days, so it was like, how can we hear from them? Who would they call? [laughter] STEVE: “We don’t have a cell phone! It’s not invented yet!” [laughs] MARK: They don’t have a cell phone. Who would they call? And finally, Jack, I think, was supposed to speak at 2:00, and he arrived in plenty of time. It wasn’t even a hall. It was like the foyer, they’d set up a few chairs. Most people were going to sit on the floor, and on a landing they had a drawing pad for Jack. He was going to give a talk there in the hallway, basically. And Jack came up to me just before it was going to start, and he said, “I want you to introduce me, and tell them that I have left Marvel for DC,” because this is August of 1970. The new comics aren’t out yet and most people don’t know yet that Jack has left Marvel. His Marvel books are still coming out. “And tell them I don’t want to discuss that. I’m not
STEVE: Amazing. MARK: …huge! And we spent a lot of the time there with Mark Hanerfeld, who was there. Hanerfeld was like the official DC representative, only he wasn’t. STEVE: No. But he was. MARK: He was just in town. DC hadn’t sent anybody out, but 23
TRIBUTES
A Talk with Greg Williams Steve Sherman’s business partner interviewed by Bruce Simon
[As much as Steve loved comics and cartoonists, his first love and interest was the world of puppetry, formed as a child in the early 1950s while being exposed to early television’s tsunami of children’s programming like Bob Clampett’s Time For Beany, Bil and Cora Baird’s Life With Snarky Parker, Hope and Morey Bunin’s Lucky Pup, The Adventures Of Cyclone Malone, Howdy Doody, Rootie Kazootie and on and on… Greg Williams began his puppetry career at age 15 with Los Angeles’ famed puppeteer Bob Baker, appearing all over Southern California, along with performing at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in downtown LA. Greg went on to work with Jim Henson writing a best-selling series of books featuring the Muppets, published by Random House. Greg is also an accomplished historian and award-winning author of what is generally acknowledged as the definitive history of Tinseltown, The Story Of Hollywood: An Illustrated History. Greg was Steve Sherman’s creative and business partner for 40 years, as well as being a close friend and confidant. Their joint concern, Puppet Studio, located in North Hollywood, is one of the premier designers, creators and performers of puppets, marionettes, walkabout figures, and what have you—for television, motion pictures, theme parks and, most recently, entertainment on cruise ships. Over their careers, Greg and Steve had credits in motion pictures such as Men In Black I and II and Mighty Joe Young, television shows like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Beakman’s World, D.C. Follies, ABC Weekend Specials, concert tours for Cher and Katy Perry, countless commercials, and live entertainment. Greg was kind enough to sit down for a talk about Steve, their friendship, and their 40-year collaboration.]
When I left Bob’s employment, I didn’t know if I would continue in the field, even though I had been producing puppet films for the education market. One day, I got a brochure in the mail about a Krofft puppet school and I auditioned. Over two hundred people tried out. Steve and I, total strangers, were accepted into a summer workshop in 1981 of thirtyfive people. The workshop then reduced down to twelve puppeteers, including me and Steve. What cemented our relationship was that we loved the same puppeteers and their characters going back to Edgar Bergen and his vent figures. Most importantly, we loved to make each other laugh. We laughed a lot. That got us through the tough times. The Kroffts immediately put us to work on their TV shows. Steve did the drummer’s hands for the puppet band, Chuck Shackley and the Texas Critters, on the Barbara Mandrell Show. I did the puppetry and voice for Grandma Fudge on a short-lived Oral Roberts variety show. Steve and I were in business together by the next year. We had our studio and offices at Hollywood and Vine the year after that. We worked off and on for the Kroffts ever since.
O.G. Readmore © ABC Television
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BRUCE: There are so many different areas of puppetry; you and Steve worked on feature films and television series, entertained live, and created figures for theme parks and cruise ship shows. You obviously have to be extremely versatile in the creation and execution of these various assignments; can you tell us some of what’s involved in these different areas of expertise?
GREG: Puppetry combines both the skill and timing of a performer and the knowledge of puppet-making. It helps to be strong in both areas because you can build to facilitate the performance. Steve never stopped drawing, so he was perfect for our designs and presentations. He really had a distinctive style and could nail a character in a sketch. I come from a long line of craftspeople, so fabricating came naturally to me. BRUCE: The Puppet Studio building in North Hollywood consists of offices, workshops and a soundstage. What was a typical day working with Steve when the studio was hopping?
BRUCE SIMON: Greg, this is obviously a sad time and a time of transition for you and Puppet Studio. I met you in early 1984 when you and Steve were working on the ABC Weekend Specials with O.G. Readmore at the old ABC studios in East Hollywood. Can you talk a little about how you became a puppeteer, how you two met, and came to your creative partnership?
Beakman’s World © Columbia Pictures
GREG WILLIAMS: I fell into puppetry by getting my first job ever cleaning the party room at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. I got backstage for performances when employees failed to show at performance time. I was promoted from running scenic (the theater was fully equipped with a fly gallery and multiple layers of sets and curtains), to running the light board and, one day when a puppeteer didn’t show up, I was pushed on stage. 30
Thinking about Steve Sherman by Bruce Simon
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ributes are always better given to the living while they can be appreciated, but I’m afraid we didn’t have the luxury of time in Steve’s case, as he left us quickly and unexpectedly—one of those cases of entering the hospital for one thing and, in a rapid course of events, having everything go south. I spoke to him by phone a couple of times a day while he was in the hospital, until his phone stopped picking up—a terrible, sad day. I’m perhaps being a little more personal that I probably should be here, but I’d like to just share some things about Steve and our friendship of over 50 years, beyond what he did professionally. When Steve and his younger brother Gary showed up on that Spring night in 1968 at Palms Park in West Los Angeles for an event we optimistically called The Evening of Imagination, the members of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club had no idea of the momentous events that would follow. Not quite the driving of the Golden Spike, but something important and lasting to us, at any rate. The Evening of Imagination was an evening event comprised of such antediluvian delights as 25-year-old comics exhibited in thick plastic bags and Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast being played from a reel-to-reel tape recorder, all designed to inveigle and attract new memberships to our Club, which met every Saturday at Palms Park to sell and trade comics, after a raucous meeting of adolescent oneupmanship disguised as parliamentary procedure. Steve would sit back and watch amusedly, as he was a few years older than the median age of our tribe—and Gary, being a few years younger, joined right in, loudly, joyously. For as reserved as Steve was, Gary was decidedly not. Steve had talents that made him the go-to guy in our circle; his father Eli was an electrical engineer and had taught Steve how to do just about anything about everything; this guy knew how the world worked, and in a practical sense, Steve could MacGyver his way in and out of any situation. Cars, cameras, printing; anything with moving parts or arcane instructions, Steve could master—a handy thing amongst a crew of dreamers, doofs and dullards. Secondly, Steve drove! His trusty Duster opened my world up beyond bikes and buses and shoe leather, as he made it possible for multitudes of adventures like ferrying me, Gary and Mark Evanier to attend the first San Diego Con, for just one example; and mundanely, but just as memorably, scouring art and paper stores in Downtown Los Angeles for the large sheets of two-ply Bristol board Jack preferred, as he detested the cheap paper DC provided him. It was an honor to source and trim the boards to their proper dimensions for Jack to use. When Marvelmania International, the successor of the M.M.M.S. as Marvel’s official fan club, opened an office in a tiny business court on La Cienega Boulevard in 1969, just about the 32
I was Hugh Grant in Notting Hill [right] Long before Mighty Joe Young, Steve learned about gorillas, working with Jack on Kamandi.
[The above title comes straight from Steve’s wife Diana Mercer, who used it to describe her role as a sometimes bemused observer, looking into the world this magazine is about. As an outlier, she knew Steve not as Jack Kirby’s assistant, or even as someone in the entertainment industry initially. I don’t know if Steve ever met Julia Roberts, but as you’ll see, his first encounter with Diana was just as fortuitous as Hugh Grant’s with that actress in Notting Hill. This interview was conducted over Zoom on April 12, 2022, and transcribed and copy-edited by yours truly.] THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Where and when were you born, and how’d you end up in California?
[above] Steve and Greg with Dee Wallace Stone between takes on the 1983 TV movie Happy, starring Dom DeLuise.
he was home early most days and didn’t have much to do. So we started writing back and forth. I wasn’t paying much attention to it, because I’m not moving to California. Then a sentence became a paragraph, which became several paragraphs—and again, I’m not thinking much of it, because we lived so far apart. It took us a few months before we even talked on the phone. That was October; by December we’re on the phone, and in February 1998 he came out to visit. Pretty much as soon as he arrived, I knew: “This is the guy.”
DIANA MERCER: I was born in 1964; I’m 58. I did all my schooling in Indiana, and then I moved to Connecticut to practice law. Then I met Steve on America Online, and that’s how I ended up in California. TJKC: [laughs] Was this in the early days of AOL? DIANA: This was before even chat rooms and stuff. They used to have profiles; you could fill out your profile, and search them. I had dated a guy named Steve Sherman in college, so I searched for all the Steve Shermans. There were 27 of them, and I wrote an email to each of them. One guy wrote back, “I’m gay, leave me out of this.” [laughter] And Steve wrote back and said, “I’m not the guy you’re looking for, but I saw your AOL profile, and I like bad horror movies too.”
[above] Diana shared, “He had a big crush on Antonella Barba from American Idol. That’s the lady with the polka dot lips. We ran into her at IMATS, the make-up artist show. LOL.”
Steve Sherman’s wife Diana Mercer, interviewed by John Morrow
TJKC: How soon thereafter did you get hitched? DIANA: Christmas Eve, December ’98. My grandparents got married Christmas Eve in 1924, so I wanted to be married then, too. TJKC: I’m assuming at the time, you didn’t know anything about comics, or Jack Kirby, or what Steve was doing with his puppetry. DIANA: I didn’t know him at all. I had no idea who he was. This was before Google or any of that, so I couldn’t look anything up. TJKC: Did you have any exposure to comic books growing up? Did Steve share with you that he had a comic book background before all his work in the entertainment industry?
TJKC: Smooth! [laughter]
DIANA: A little bit, but it kind of wasn’t sinking in. I have three cousins and a brother, so the older kids would go off and leave us younger kids to read Richie Rich and Little Lotta comic books in his bedroom.
DIANA: I know! Quite the pick-up line, isn’t it? He was older than me, and he lived far away, but we ended up corresponding. He was in the middle of doing Mighty Joe Young; this was 1997. Normally those shoots were very long hours, but they were shooting near his home, at the Spruce Goose hanger over in Playa Del Rey, and
TJKC: What attracted you to him initially? I’m sure there was some kind of spark prior to him showing up on your doorstep. 35
Foundations
Here’s even more of Simon & Kirby’s Link Thorne work, this time from Airboy Comics V4, #9 (Oct. 1947), with art reconstruction and coloring by Chris Fama, and a character no doubt inspired by the infamous Ma Barker. We’ll continue with another installment of the complete Link Thorne stories next issue.
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INNERVIEW
The Case for Jack Kirby
Steve Sherman interviewed by Steven Brower • Originally published online at: https://www.printmag.com on September 26, 2014 [below and next page, top] Jimmy Olsen and Kamandi are apparently the two Kirby titles where Steve had the most creative input, so here are Jack’s sketches of key characters from those strips, as drawn in his mid-1970s Valentine’s Day sketchbook for wife Roz Kirby. [next page, bottom] Three presentations Steve did with Jack, long before Captain Victory and Silver Star became comic book series. Silver Star dates as early as November 14, 1975—Kirby had just gone back to Marvel in May 1975, so wasn’t putting all his eggs in that one basket.
[2022 Introduction: I never met Steve face-to-face, although I wish I had. His warmth and decency came through on social media—no small feat. Before Facebook, I only knew Steve as Kirby’s assistant and sometimes collaborator during one of my favorite periods of Kirby’s oeuvre, DC Comics in the early 1970s. I had always wondered who Steve was, beyond reading about him in the pages of this magazine. What I did learn through social media is that he was kind and genuine, with no apparent ulterior motives. He shared his knowledge generously and with great enthusiasm. Beyond that, he had a great sense of humor, a friendly countenance, and was clearly a creative soul. I loved watching clips of his puppetry. I was completely unaware that it was Steve’s artistry I was watching with my then young daughter on two of her favorite shows, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Beakman’s World. I did interview him, however, on the eve of the Marvel/ Disney vs. Kirby’s lawsuit’s scheduled appearance before the US Supreme Court. His advocacy and passion for Kirby never wavered. We are all the poorer for Steve’s passing.]
STEVEN BROWER: Did you read comic books as a kid, and if so, which ones? STEVE SHERMAN: Yes. I think the first comic I ever read was Dennis the Menace when I must’ve been five years old, at the barbershop my Dad took me to. Prior to that I had been hooked on the Sunday comics and cartoons on TV. I was a big fan of the funny animal comics. Later, I came across some coverless ECs being sold at a local store. I started buying the DC line, Superboy, Superman, etc. I saved them all in a wooden Army footlocker. Unfortunately, we moved out of the country for a while, and the footlocker got left behind. My younger brother, Gary, and I started buying again and saving them. In the late ’60s we started buying the Marvel comics. We bought a huge lot of back issues from a high school friend. Kept them all. The first Kirby comic I ever came across was The Fly when it first hit the newsstand. Wasn’t sure at the time who Kirby was, but I liked the comic a lot. BROWER: How did you come to work for Kirby? SHERMAN: Mark Evanier, my brother and I were working at Marvelmania International, which was set up in Los Angeles. We were all members of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club which would meet on Saturdays at a local recreation center... the fellow running [Marvelmania] hired us to roll posters, package envelopes, etc. I first met Jack when I, along with Mark Evanier, Gary, and our friend Bruce Simon, drove to his place in late 1968 or early 1969 in Orange County, which is south of Los Angeles. At that time he was temporarily living in a two-story townhouse. I don’t even think a lot of the furniture had arrived yet from New York. Jack had his drawing table set up in a tiny bedroom. He and Roz were very nice to us. They were looking to buy a house in Thousand Oaks, which is about 40 minutes north of Los Angeles. Jack was doing a lot of the artwork for Marvelmania. It was a nice visit. A few weeks later Jack and Roz drove up to Los Angeles and took Mark and myself to lunch. He told us he was leaving Marvel, and would we like to be his assistants on his new DC titles? Of course, we both said yes. BROWER: What was that experience like? Were you assigned tasks? SHERMAN: It was fun and exciting. We (Mark and I) were given a chance to come up with ideas for magazines and characters for Jack Kirby! Who wouldn’t be jazzed? Jack gave us assignments for In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World. He also allowed us to contribute ideas for Jimmy Olsen. We also came up with designs for different magazines—some Jack’s idea, some ours. Much later I contributed ideas to Kamandi and co-created Kobra with Jack. BROWER: Were you nervous at first? 48
OBSCURA
Barry Forshaw
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.
as any illustrator will tell you, if you haven’t nailed something in the original drawing, all the colour in the world won’t make it work. However, when we saw the splash panel for “The Martian Who Stole My Body,” with its truly grotesque giant marauder (sporting red fins instead of ears and strange antennae that sprouted from its chalk-white pupils), there was no denying that it was the sudden splash of colour on these black-and-white shores that made the most remarkable impact. And that wasn’t all.
A MARTIAN DOUBLEWHAMMY
Ah—Jack Kirby splash panels! Don’t you love them? In fact, I’d go so far as to say that for most readers of this magazine, the aspect that probably instilled in us a love of The King’s work were those eye-filling, full-page panoramas, crammed full of the kinetic actions and impeccable design sense that was his alone. But as my task (as detailed in the job description given to me years ago by editor John Morrow) is not to talk about the more familiar things—such as the Fantastic Four tackling Galactus—but to peer into the nooks and crannies of Kirby’s work, let me talk about something that had a considerable impact on British comic aficionados decades ago (remember, this column is being written only a couple of miles away from the ever-flowing Thames). Up until 1959, the only exposure that comics fans in the U.K. had to American Marvel or DC books would have been in the black-and-white reprints which were the only way we could obtain such material (this was due to the ban on the import of American material). And, ironically, this meant that Jack Kirby sciencefiction and fantasy strips would only be seen as backup to characters who were reprinted here, such as Blackhawk or The Flash (although the three glorious issues of Race for the Moon were reprinted under that title). But in 1959, the embargo on American material came to an end, and suddenly—to the delight of British fans—the wonderful full-colour American books began to be imported (or were made available customised with a British price in place of the cents price). And one of the earliest to appear was Journey into Mystery #57 (March 1960), followed by the succeeding issue of that magazine in May of the same year. And the two stories that blew away readers were a double-whammy—in fact, it was one story carved into two separate entities, “The Martian Who Stole My Body” and “Return of the Martian” (both stories were inked in striking fashion by Dick Ayers with notably bold brushwork). British fans had been impressed by Kirby’s truly bizarre and imaginative creation of alien monsters even when seen in black-and-white—after all,
THE SEQUEL IS THE EQUAL
However, even better was to come with the sequel in the next issue of Journey into Mystery: “The Return of the Martian.” Once again, we had the destructive alien visitor dominating the splash panel, but this time it was the sense of design that impressed as much as the impactful imagery. The tanks which the Martian is ripping to pieces are virtually off the top of the panel, so that they become almost abstract elements in the design—aided by the fact that the title was placed dead centre of the creature’s body (unorthodox for the day). And—even more impressive—two pages into the story, we had the creature bursting out of a prison cell with the image shattering the frame (in a way that Kirby would not have been permitted to get away with in his DC days, where he was obliged to be more conventional). The destruction of a car on the following page was also more violent than was expected in 50
Mob Mentality
Sherman Speaks Out!
Steve discusses Kirby’s experimental magazine line with the Jack Kirby Museum on June 1, 2021
[right] Jack and Roz Kirby at Coney Island in 1941. Murder, Incorporated was active from 1929 to 1941, so Jack knew firsthand what they were capable of. [below, top to bottom] Rand Hoppe, Tom Kraft, and Steve Sherman.
[Tom Kraft and Rand Hoppe of the Jack Kirby Museum kept Kirby fans enthralled during the Covid lockdowns, by hosting a regular series of online video chats about Jack. This discussion was streamed live on June 1, 2021, and the transcript was copy-edited by John Morrow. Some deleted comments refer to images we didn’t show here due to space limitations, and would only make sense while viewing the full video, which can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cz2VFiMzpuk&t=5s] RAND HOPPE: Hey everybody, here we are, it’s the Jack Kirby Museum. I don’t know, we’ve been gone for a while, but we’re doing the live thing again. It’s the beginning of the Speak-Out Series! This is it, it’s three events! This is the first one, and there’ll be two more, because that’s what “three” means. [laughter] We’re going to be talking about Jack Kirby’s magazines that he did at DC Comics and what happened... what’s on the screen next? Here today, we’re going to talk about In The Days Of The Mob, and we’re looking forward to having Steve Sherman join us. He’s not in the Green Room right now, but hopefully soon, and we’re gonna go through all the stories that Jack told and it’ll be really fun. These stories are wild—wild, I tell you! I am Rand Hoppe. I am the founding Trustee, acting Executive Director of our small 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center. And who are you? TOM KRAFT: I am, as the name says, Tom Kraft. I am the president of the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center, located in beautiful Hoboken, New Jersey. RAND: It’s true, yep. We’ve been doing some live streams for a while; I guess practically for a year now, I think, since the pandemic hit. We kind of really took to the live streaming and it’s been really fun, and we had a really good time. We did that whole summer of the Fourth World— but we’ll get to that. We’re gonna just do some set-up, some introductory stuff to kind of get moving, and we’re still hoping that Steve will show up in the Green Room. So let’s head off into the world here. So, it’s 1947, and what’s happening is that it’s post-war and—what was it, Stuntman at Harvey [Comics]? It didn’t really happen, so Simon and Kirby, the Joe Simon/Jack Kirby team ended up selling some stuff to Hillman, and Hillman had a comic called Clue Comics, and it was kind of just a boy’s adventure comic. But once Simon and Kirby got there, they started doing crime comics, because crime comics had become a trend. Simon and Kirby did not invent them; was it Lev Gleason or what’s his name: Mr. Daredevil [Charles Biro]? Anyhow, Simon and Kirby did some crime comics and I think this is their first one in Clue Comics [vol. 2, #1, March 1947]: “King of the Bank Robbers,” a True-Clue Crime Story. Now, the interesting thing about this is, that is the name of a chapter of this book, The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury, and that book came out in the late ’20s, and it’s filled with stories about the gangs. Oh, it says Steve is in the backstage... 52
Four gangster story, so we’re still not at In The Days of the Mob, but very soon. [The Godfather] came out in ’69 and it was very popular. It was a book, not a movie; the movie was in ’72. But Mario Puzo was a writer for Martin Goodman and what you would call his “men’s sweat magazines” or slick magazines, men’s magazines, adventure magazines for men, and he wrote this book. He actually lived in the town that I grew up in and mentions it in the book completely at random, so it just seems like a lot of this was just kind of building up to this. [shows DC house ad for In The Days of the Mob, above]. This first showed up in a 1971 Superboy comic that I found online. Steve, do you have any memories at all about the development and the challenges that Jack might have had with Carmine [Infantino] and making this thing happen?
okay Steve, we’ll be with you in a sec. So there’s The Gangs of New York with a lot of stories about the gangs of New York, and one of the stories was “King of the Bank Robbers,” so it makes sense that this is where they got some of their stories from. So they did a few stories in Clue Comics, but then guess what? It turns out in 1947 these things were hot and Simon and Kirby... turned their Clue Comics into Real Clue Crime Stories, and look who’s on the cover? It’s Ma Barker and her sons. Obviously Simon and Kirby knew that story, and thought it would make a great comic, so there’s the mother of crime all the way back then. TOM: I also should mention that Jack Kirby was born in 1917, so he actually was of a certain age when all the stuff was going on. So this was something that he lived through.
STEVE SHERMAN: It’s been fifty years; I can barely remember yesterday. [laughter] As I recall, it happened pretty fast. In fact, I think Jack turned all four of those magazines out in one month. He was doing the [Fourth World] comics at the time. He wanted to do something; he wanted to do dollar comics. He was trying to convince them that they should do bigger packages and get out of that, you know, 20¢ [format], and a lot of what these magazines turned out to be were because the distributor told them what they wanted. The distributor said, “Let’s do crime, let’s do horror”—shocker, whatever you want to call it—“divorce,” and he said the Black community was underserved, “So let’s do a Black romance comic.” Yeah, having Jack Kirby do a black romance comic, wow. [laughter] And so he knocked them out. I think we had a week to do each one. Mark and I wrote one of the text pages in one night. I shot the cover, Jack pasted it up. It was
RAND: That’s true, that’s one of the things about the context, about his interest in these stories, was he knew these people. They were who he grew up with. What did he always say? The easy way to grow up in his neighborhood was to become a corrupt cop or a corrupt politician or a gangster. TOM: Yeah, the gangsters were after getting nice suits. RAND: Right, but nobody messed with their mothers. [laughter] But the Hillman thing didn’t last very long, and they ended up going to Prize, where they did Justice Traps The Guilty. So there’s a story they did there, and Headline Comics #23, I believe, is the first issue they did. [Originally] it was just news stories or adventure stuff, but then it turned into a crime comic with Simon and Kirby... There was a period of time where Simon and Kirby did a significant amount of crime comics. I don’t know how long it really went on for, but I will say this: Get this book [The Simon & Kirby Library: Crime], because it’s beautiful. If you can find it, it’s one of the latter editions of the Simon & Kirby library that Steve Saffel and Harry Mendryk worked on, and it seems like by the time they put this one out, they really knew how to make the reproduction just beautiful. In the ’50s at some point, this book came out: The Story of the Syndicate: Murder Inc. We’re going to talk about this book a little bit later, but in 1951 this book came out, chock full of info. So, Star Trek [right, featured gangsters]—and then soon thereafter, we had this Fantastic Four gangster story which is pretty hilarious, with The Thing. And here’s Steve coming in again... yeah, he’s back! I just brought up these images of Kirk and Spock being gangsters and the Fantastic 53
UP ON THE ROOF t is instructive to note that during Jack Kirby’s boyhood, he often found himself involved in fights that would sometimes even move over rooftops, and from building to building. Seemingly as a result, he was able to use this experience to depict action that took place in such settings. Fairly early in his career, he set the S&K series “The Newsboy Legion” in a fictional area of New York that he called Suicide Slum. 1 Here on the cover of Star Spangled Comics #8, the heroic Guardian leaps across space from rooftop to rooftop. The shot is at a dizzying angle, and we feel a powerful sense of vertigo because our eye level is right below the string of boys that look as if they are about to tumble onto us at any moment. Even early on, Kirby was a master of such perspectives. Among my favorite moments in Kirby’s run of the Fantastic Four comes in issue #49. 2 Galactus is an omnipotent god-like being who appears to be unstoppable, but the Thing, the embodiment of stubborn persistence, refuses to give in. He is seen high above the New York skyline, forcibly deconstructing Galactus’ energy-draining device. One of Kirby’s most potent artistic abilities was to show relative scale and mass. In the small panel, the King gives us a marvelous panorama of cityscape, emphasizing Ben Grimm’s size relative to Galactus and the teeming metropolis far below. The positioning of the huge serpentine object the Thing has dislodged gives the panel even more dynamic energy. When we see Galactus begin to fall in panel four, the intricate network of architectural structures give us the sense that he will plunge a great distance.
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This sense of the architecture of space has always fascinated me, and having internalized so much of Kirby’s work, I find that I often notice similarities in stories that are sometimes separated by decades. In the mid-1970s, Jack Kirby was working at DC Comics, doing his best to find a secure place for himself after the cancellation of his Fourth World epic. One of the projects that he took on was a World War II-based series called “The Losers,” published in Our Fighting Forces #151-162. A critically acclaimed story in this run was “A Small Place in Hell,” appearing in Our Fighting Forces #152 (Jan. 1975). Something in the story’s layout jogged my memory. Where had I seen this before? Then it came to me. The setting of “A Small Place in Hell’ reminded me of one of my all-time favorite
Quite A...
...PATCH JOB!
Incidental Iconography
An ongoing analysis of Kirby’s visual shorthand, and how he inadvertently used it to develop his characters, by Sean Kleefeld
C
hoosing which character I want to research and write about in this column usually ties in with other research I’m doing already. For examples, my piece on the Watcher a few issues ago came about while I was doing a deep dive on the Galactus Trilogy, and my piece on Ego came from a focus on Jack’s collage work more broadly. But when I was looking to select a character for this issue, I wasn’t working on anything that lent itself to studying Jack’s character designs. I opted this time to just scan through a list of Kirbycreated characters and go with one that might strike me as interesting.
I’d gotten only as far as the “C”s when I saw the name CrazyQuilt. “The Batman villain? That’s one of Jack’s characters?” I asked myself. I had first seen the character back in the 1970s when I had copies of Batman #255 (which reprinted Star Spangled Comics #123) and #316, but the only Batman work that I could think of that Jack had done wasn’t until the 1980s. A few internet searches later, though, and I discovered that Crazy-Quilt is actually a latter day addition to Batman’s rogues’ gallery; his first five appearances in the 1940s pit him against the Boy Commandos! Like most of the characters I write about here, there’s some interesting things going on! Crazy-Quit debuted in “Crime in Technicolor,” the lead story in Boy Commandos #15 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby [left and below]. Before losing his eyesight in a gunfight, Quilt was drawn as a relatively stereotypical French artist, wearing an artist’s smock and beret while sporting a pencil-thin mustache. After the incident, he dons a tunic and trousers made in a crazy quilt style, using scraps of primary color swatches. He accessorizes that with a yellow scarf and a blue hat, which I believe is supposed to be a wide-brimmed Panama. Although likely not as commonly known today, crazy quilts first became popular in the late 1800s. It’s believed the style of sewing together a seemingly random patchwork of irregularly cut scraps of cloth was inspired by some of the exhibits at the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia. Most crazy quilts in fact are not quilts in the strictest sense, and are closer to blankets from a functional perspective. That the character would adopt an outfit seemingly created in the same manner and call himself Crazy-Quilt thus makes sense, even though his costume is not quilted as one might expect with, say, a winter jacket. I would like to take a moment to call out CrazyQuilt’s realization that he can only see colors [right]. While this is pretty absurd from a scientific and artistic sense—all any of us see are colors—we do get an interesting panel that gets at trying to show what things look like through Crazy-Quilt’s eyes. The surgeon he looks at is bathed in green and orange, and the lines and spot blacks we typically see outlining the figure are broken up—as if the figure was drawn and inked normally, but then was cross-hatched all over using an 66
A few issues later [#22, left], Swan then brings Crazy-Quilt back again with another modification. This time, the leather straps and mask have been replaced with a full skullcap. The three headlamps remain, but the mask is gone. Given that Crazy-Quilt has no real “secret identity”—he called himself simply Quilt before he was shot—the mask really didn’t serve a purpose anyway. This story also introduces Crazy-Quilt’s “colorscope” that he uses to hypnotize people. Jack picks up the character again with Boy Commandos #24 [right and bottom left]. He largely takes the design updates from Swan’s version, despite it being only about a yearand-a-half since he invented the character. The skullcap piece is now in place, and the individual quilt design is larger than he had originally created it, with none of the pieces containing their own patterns. The only alteration Jack seems to make is just being inconsistent with the belt—about half of the panels that should show Crazy-Quilt’s belt do not. But as you’re likely aware, Jack wasn’t exactly known for being consistent with details like that to begin with. Crazy-Quilt only had two more Golden Age appearances after that: one more issue of Boy Commandos drawn by Swan behind a Carmine Infantino cover (who draws the older leather-strap headpiece instead of Swan’s skullcap), and he takes on Robin the Boy Wonder in Star Spangled Comics #123, drawn by Jim Mooney. He then vanished from the comics pages for nearly three decades before finally returning in Batman #316. He’s only made about a dozen appearances since then, but aside from the hat Jack originally gave him, his basic costume has remained largely unchanged. He had some flared shoulder pads for a bit and they moved his scarf down around his waist for a while, but he’s kept the crazy quilt style tunic and leggings, as well as his mustache, for all these years. I’m honestly not sure what I find most striking in digging back through CrazyQuilt’s design history: that Jack’s basic design ideas have remained in place for three quarters of a century—said ideas being ones he dashed off once and barely ever even glanced at again—or that Jack created the character in the first place! H
opaque white paint. It’s like a more complex version of the dotted line effect Jack would later use to show the Invisible Girl. While I have seen similar artistic approaches in earlier comics on occasion, I’ve never seen it used to the same effect as Jack does here. Now, interestingly, despite Crazy-Quilt returning only three issues later [Boy Commandos #18, left], Jack is not the artist behind the story; the duties here are handled by Curt Swan. The story makes more clear that Crazy-Quilt’s claim of only being able to see colors is really his only being able to see especially vibrant colors. So he devises a headlamp that projects strong red, yellow, and blue lights on everything before him, which he wires up to some controls and battery pack on his belt. The headpiece is little more than a few leather straps, but the lights do mean he has to ditch his hat. The headband also has an attached piece; something like a domino mask that comes down over Crazy-Quilt’s eyes. I find this fascinating in that he’s undergoing a substantial change both to his look and his “powers” in only his second appearance—it’s in fact a multi-page sequence to explain all this—and these were not done by Jack. The other “change” Swan makes to the costume is that he simplifies that pattern on Crazy-Quilt’s tunic and pants. It’s still very much a patchwork of random shapes, complex enough that virtually no comic artist would have the time to even attempt making it consistent from panel to panel, but what Swan does is eliminate some of the simple patterns within each patch of cloth. Jack had drawn some with polka dots, stripes, or a brick pattern, but Swan simplifies things by keeping all the individual patches plain. He also frequently draws them somewhat larger than Jack as well, meaning he has fewer to illustrate overall.
[left] Jack’s illo of Crazy-Quilt with a few more design changes, from Who’s Who #5 (July 1985).
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Gallery
STEVE’S JOBS
Commentary on pencil art for issues with Steve Sherman’s involvement, by Shane Foley [right] Kamandi #29 (May 1975), page 5 And so Jack’s take on “Whatever happened to Superman?” is under way. Though the idea was prompted by Steve Sherman, the way the story is told— evocative, yet explaining nothing about Superman’s actual status in Kamandi’s world—is surely pure Kirby. What strikes me about this page is that, though Jack had drawn tens of thousands of fight scenes to this point, most, like this one, still feel fresh and from a slightly different angle than we’ve seen before. What a powerful and moving figure the ape Zuma is here. [next page] More Kamandi #29, pages 2–3 plus multiple panels Totally in character with other elements of Kamandi’s world, as conceived by Jack, names known to us have their true meanings lost or warped, making for some truly fun story aspects. Since the Superman legend is first told here in “comic strip terms” (page 3), and there are all these references to DC comics (shown here with panels from pages 7, 8, 9,13 and 15)—we, as readers from way back when, may have wondered if Jack was alluding to Superman being a legend only. It was not until the actual costume was revealed (top right panel, from page 18) that we knew Supes was a reality in Kamandi’s past. Other Superman references not shown here are spoken on page 1 (“not a bird or a plane”), 6 (kryptonite), 8 (“up, up and away,” and flying “higher than the tallest building”). And I love Kirby’s concept of the “daily planet” elsewhere in the issue—a massive, spherical rock!
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KIRBY COLLECTOR #84
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