Lisa Kirby

Barry Forshaw OBSCURA

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. 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,

as any illustrator will tell you, if you haven’t nailed something in the original drawing, all the colour in the world A regular won’t make it work. However, when we saw the splash column focusing panel for “The Martian Who Stole My Body,” with its truly on Kirby’s least grotesque giant marauder (sporting red fins instead of ears known work, and strange antennae that sprouted from its chalk-white by Barry pupils), there was no denying that it was the sudden splash Forshaw of colour on these black-and-white shores that made the most remarkable impact. And that wasn’t 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

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...

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. 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 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? 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

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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.

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

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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

Choosing 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 Crazy-

Quilt’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

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. 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

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!

STEVE’S JOBS

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #84

STEVE SHERMAN TRIBUTE! Kirby family members, friends, comics creators, and the entertainment industry salute Jack’s assistant (and puppeteer on Men in Black, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and others). MARK EVANIER and Steve recall assisting Kirby, Steve discusses Jack’s Speak-Out Series, Kirby memorabilia from his collection, an interview with wife DIANA MERCER, and Steve’s unseen 1974 KIRBY/ROYER cover! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99