OPENING SHOT

JACK KIRBY: ANIMATED!

OPENING SHOT ................2 JACK FAQs ...................8 Mark Evanier’s 1996 interview with Jon B. Cooke STONE AGES .................19 The Thing’s rocky evolution INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY .....24 how a fantastic “4” evolved FOUNDATIONS ................26 another S&K Link Thorne story

INNERVIEWS

Steve Gerber ..................34 Joe Ruby ....................39 John Dorman .................48 Jim Woodring .................56 Tom Minton ..................58 Rick Hoberg ..................66 KIRBY OBSCURA ..............54 they loom large KIRBY KINETICS ..............63 one more trip to the cinema INFLUENCEES ................72 Evan Dorkin speaks COLLECTOR COMMENTS ........78

Front cover inks: EVAN DORKIN Front cover colors: TOM ZIUKO Special thanks to: JON B. COOKE

COPYRIGHTS: Captain America, Fantastic Four, Galactus, H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot, Hulk, Journey into Mystery, Magneto, Rawhide Kid, Red Skull, Thing, Thor, Watcher TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Bat-Mite, Big Barda, Darkseid, Granny Goodness, Hawkman, Kalibak, Kamandi, Klik-Klak, Losers, Mr. Miracle, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Sandman, Sandy, Super Friends, Superman, Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics • Herculoids, Mindbender, Scooby-Doo, Shaggy, Space Ghost, Space Stars, Teen Force TM & © Hanna-Barbera • Beavis and Butt-Head TM & © Viacom International Inc. • Tron TM & © Walt Disney Studios • Planet of the Apes TM & © 20th Century Fox • Popeye TM & © King Features Syndicate • The Soda Thief © Evan Dorkin

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ISSUE #85, WINTER 2023 Collector

[above] Kirby pencil drawing, done around the time he began his career in animation at DePatie-Freleng.

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 29, No. 85, Winter 2023. Published quarterly (he said animatedly) 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: $53 Economy US, $78 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

Mark Evanier JACK F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

[below] Some DePatieFreleng New FF storyboards that were pieced together for Fantastic Four #236’s “new” Lee/Kirby story, without Jack’s knowledge. [next page, top] Jack’s design for H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot.

Mark Evanier interview

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke on May 5, 1996 Transcribed and copyedited by John Morrow and Mark Evanier

JON B. COOKE: Did you get Jack involved with animation? MARK EVANIER: More or less. The first thing Jack did in animation that didn’t date back to working for the Fleischers, was the Fantastic Four cartoon show DePatieFreleng did in 1978. I was working at Hanna-Barbera at the time, and they developed the show initially. Iwao Takamoto was the art director there, and I heard they were having artists imitate Kirby’s stuff. I went to Iwao’s office and asked him about it, and I said, “Why don’t you get Jack Kirby to do this artwork?” Iwao said, “Oh, we’d love it, but he works in New York, doesn’t he?” I said, “Jack’s out here in Thousand Oaks,” and I don’t remember if I gave him Jack’s number, or called Roz and gave her the number, but the next day Roz drove Jack down to the studio and Hanna-Barbera hired Jack to do presentation art for this Fantastic Four show which they were pitching to NBC. NBC accepted the show, and at that point Marvel decided they wanted to do the show with DePatie-Freleng instead of HannaBarbera. There was no contract, just a sort of handshake understanding. What ultimately happened was that a deal was made. DePatie-Freleng had developed a Godzilla show for NBC, and Hanna-Barbera had this Fantastic Four show, so they swapped. Doug Wildey had developed the Godzilla show, and he had the choice of staying at DePatie-Freleng and doing Fantastic Four, or going to Hanna-Barbera and doing Godzilla, at the same time that both studios put in an offer for Jack’s services. So Doug chose to stay with Godzilla and he wound up with an office at Hanna-Barbera right next to mine JON: Was Jack involved in concepts on it? Was H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot his idea? MARK: The name H.E.R.B.I.E. was not his, he had another name for the robot. I don’t know who came up with the idea of putting in a robot. At that point, the Human Torch had been optioned to Universal; every-

body thinks they took him out because they didn’t want to have a character on fire, but actually it was a legal problem. Universal was developing a TV movie. But basically, they tried an experiment. Usually in animation, you write a script and then a storyboard artist turns it into a series of panels. What they tried was having Jack storyboard first and then they’d add the dialogue at a later time, and it didn’t really work. There are a couple of reasons. One of them was that Jack did not have the experience with storyboards to do that job well. The second problem was that because it would have limited animation, you have to have the right amount of dialogue during a speech, to make up for the fact that they aren’t moving very much. So you can’t really storyboard it and then figure out later how long the dialogue is going to be. It has to be done the other way around. And also, Stan Lee dialogued most of them, and he was not at that point that proficient at writing for animation. So the method really didn’t work. The people on the production staff, mostly a man named Lew Marshall, had to re-storyboard the thing and try to turn this into a real storyboard by animation standards. There was a lot of wasted effort. JON: Did Jack come up with the stories himself? MARK: Most of the stories were adapted from old [comics stories]. My understanding is, they gave him a little synopsis, and he would sketch out the storyboard before any dialogue was written. JON: Did Jack work with Stan at all on the Fantastic Four show? MARK: Oh yeah, absolutely. They probably had a number of meetings, and on the phone. DePatie-Freleng had an office on Van Nuys Boulevard, and Jack probably came in once or twice a week and met with them for an hour or two. JON: How long did he work at DePatie-Freleng? MARK: Well, the show lasted one season. JON: Had he left Marvel by that time? MARK: I think what happened was, they gave him a leave of absence. He was ready to leave. Prior to this thing coming into his life, Jack had told me that when his contract was up, he was going to leave Marvel and not go back. They suspended his contract, or otherwise let him out of it, so he could work on that show. That may have been one of the reasons that he chose to go with DePatie-Freleng as opposed to Godzilla at Hanna-Barbera, because he could fulfill his Marvel contract. JON: Was he giving up on comics at that time, or just giving up on Marvel? MARK: Well, at that point it was kind of the same thing. His options were DC or Marvel; there were no other publishers out there that could pay him enough; there were really no other publishers out there at that point. He didn’t want to go back to DC. I think he was pretty much giving up on comics. JON: Do you know the circumstances behind his storyboards being published in Fantastic Four #236 [left]? MARK: The circumstances were that it was the anniversary issue, and they called Jack and asked him for a brand new story for that issue. He declined. At that point, he wanted nothing to do with Marvel, and for some reason they decided to

create a fake Jack Kirby story. They took his storyboards and traced them, without his knowledge or permission. JON: And what was his response? MARK: He was quite upset. He did not feel it was his work, but it was being billed as his. They were not paying him for the work. They had created a Jack Kirby story out of nothing by using his work. His name was being utilized without his permission. On the John Byrne cover, if you look, Stan Lee is in the scene, but there’s a blank spot where Jack had been in there, and Marvel at the last minute decided they didn’t have the right to do that, and they erased him. It was not a very nice thing to do. I think it was done more out of ignorance than malice. I think they just thought, “Hey, we own this material, why can’t we create a Jack Kirby story?” JON: Before you found that opportunity for Jack at Hanna-Barbera, had you discussed the possibility of him working in animation? MARK: Not really. It actually didn’t even dawn on me, nor was I really sure what Jack could do in animation. Most animation jobs are done in the studio. You report to work every day, and Jack was not equipped to do that. He couldn’t drive, and he really wasn’t the kind of guy to go to a studio every day. It really didn’t dawn on me. We had a dinner meeting, which I vaguely recall was just before or after Christmas of 1977. Some things were going on with Jack and his Marvel relationship. He was having a lot of problems with the office back there. He wasn’t getting along with them, and they weren’t getting along with him. I had been asked by Marvel to intervene, to work with Jack on his stuff for Marvel, and I felt that was not their place to be asking me. If Jack wanted to ask me, that would be fine. JON: The relationship was just breaking down. MARK: Well, yes. He just wasn’t getting along with them. One of the problems was, there were a lot of guys in the office who were just dying to write stories for Jack to draw. But anyway, he didn’t feel he had much of a future at Marvel. He felt he’d kind of gone backwards in his career, and his eyes were starting to bother him a bit at that point. He worried he wasn’t going to be able to keep up the same amount of pages at that rate that he was expected to draw. At dinner, I didn’t discuss animation. I wasn’t involved that much in animation myself. I was working at Hanna-Barbera doing their comic book line. I had met Iwao because he was my official superior over the artwork I bought; that’s how I knew him. JON: Was that a real anxious time for Jack? MARK: I would think it was. Jack was always very concerned with making a living, and doing his best work. I think he felt after so many years working in the comic book industry, there was no place for him to go. That’s not a happy thing. JON: Did you introduce Jack to Joe Ruby? MARK: I think I did. Steve Gerber thinks he did. As far as I know, I did. I was working for Ruby-Spears on a show called Thundarr the

Jack’s villains for Roxie’s Raiders.

Stone AgeS Sample Headline The Rocky Evolution of the Thing!

by Will Murray

[above] A sketch done for Lucasfilm historian Jonathan Rinzler. [below] There was no shortage of Things at Marvel/Atlas prior to Benjamin J. Grimm’s debut in Fantastic Four #1 [top]. [right] The Thing’s first pin-up, from Fantastic Four #2. Very dinosaur-like! ne of the most memorable and enduring characters to emerge out of the early Marvel Universe was Benjamin J. Grimm, better known as the Thing. But he was not a character who was created, so much as discovered—one who rapidly evolved over the course of the first few years of The Fantastic Four. “In my plot synopsis,” said co-creator Stan Lee, “I asked Jack to draw a big, burly, grotesque creature that I called the Thing. I had no idea how Jack would draw him. I just said, ‘Let’s get a real monster in there.’ But, like so many characters, the Thing just kind of took over.” In his earliest appearances, the Thing was a brutish man-monster cursed with a sour and sulky personality. Over time, Lee and Kirby pushed away from that original portrayal, in part perhaps because once the Incredible Hulk appeared on the scene less than a year after the FF’s 1961 debut, many readers decried the Hulk as a mere carbon copy of the Thing.

Certainly, the two Marvel monsters displayed similar personalities and speech patterns, including a fondness for the exclamation, “Bah!” Both were ordinary men mutated by radiation into becoming inhuman monsters with superhuman strength.

A ROCK-SOLID DESIGN (EVENTUALLY)

While the Hulk retained an outward semblance of his human form, the Thing became a walking lump of misshapen muscle, whose appearance often changed from issue to issue––sometimes panel to panel! His hair and ears disappeared beneath his ugly reptilian hide. The Thing also lost some digits on his hands and feet after being transformed. The Hulk did not.

“I thought I should do something new with Ben Grimm,” revealed Kirby. “If you’ll notice, the beginnings of Ben Grimm was, he was kind of lumpy. I felt he had the power of a dinosaur and I began to think along those lines. I wanted his skin to look like dinosaur hide. He kind of looks like your outside patio, or a close-up of dinosaur hide.”

The chief difference distinguishing Marvel’s first heroic monsters is that the Hulk could transform back into Bruce Banner through various means, while Ben Grimm was stuck being the Thing except for the occasional spontaneous reversion, which gave him hope of an eventual cure for his mutated condition. Grimm hated being the Thing, while the Hulk’s irradiated brain lost all memory of his human identity and at times despised “puny” Bruce Banner as if he were another person entirely.

Almost from the beginning, Jack Kirby tinkered with the Thing’s outward form. Originally, he resembled a great number of Kirby monsters that had stormed through the pages of Strange Tales and Tales of Suspense. Colorist Stan Goldberg painted the Thing the same brownish-orange tones as many of those lumbering creatures.

Over the course of the first year of The Fantastic Four, the Thing evolved from an animated lump of brownish-orange clay into that of a figure who appeared to have the thick skin of an alligator.

“It takes about four issues to get a superhero’s looks the way he will end up,” explained Kirby. “I took

INK VS. PENCIL

the liberty of changing him. At first he looked a little pimply and I felt that was kind of ugly. What I did was give him the skin of a dinosaur. I felt that would add to his power. Dinosaurs had thick plated hides, and of course, that’s what the Thing had.”

Here, Kirby is referring to the group of prehistoric creatures known as Thyreophora, meaning “shield bearers.” Think Stegosaurus or Ankylosaurus, the so-called “armored” dinosaurs which are covered in horny plates called scutes. Modern animals such as turtles and armadillos are also protected by shells which are covered by clusters of scutes, as are alligators and crocodiles, whose scutes are embedded in their thick skin. So when the artist used the term “plate,” he meant scutes. Kirby assistant Steve Sherman once called the Thing’s scutes “scales,” which implies that Kirby also used that term as well. And Mark Evanier recalled FF inker Frank Giacoia’s opinion that the Thing’s outer form suggested a “reptile.”

Stan Lee had the identical understanding. The first time Dick Ayers drew the Thing was for the Human Touch story in Strange Tales #106 (March 1963), “The Threat of the Torrid Twosome.” Under a panel featuring the Thing, Lee scribbled a note to Ayers which said: “scales like reptile—not lines” [above]. Evidently, the artist’s pencil version of the character was not in keeping with the look Kirby had established at that time.

Clearly, the cosmic rays that transformed Ben into the Thing did not turn him into living rock. Presumably, if one could pry off the assorted scutes, some version of the human Ben Grimm would be uncovered.

Ironically, the first foe the Thing ever battled was a giant rock creature on Monster Isle in Fantastic Four #1. The difference between the two brutes is clear and distinct. One is definitely rocky, and it ain’t the Thing!

A procession of inkers, ranging from George Klein in the beginning to Sol Brodsky, Dick Ayers, Joe Sinnott, and others, all interpreted Kirby’s pencils through the filter of their own artistic sensibilities. Because pencilers and inkers did not typically communicate with one another, they were on their own trying to figure out the Thing’s actual structure.

Because of this, it’s difficult to trace the evolution of the Thing from issue to issue, especially after Ayers took over inking with issue #6. Ayers liked to render the Thing as if he was covered in lumpy hide.

But that was not how Jack Kirby penciled the character over the years 1962 and 1963.

A glimpse of the unadulterated Kirby Thing first appeared on the cover of Fantastic Four #7, which Kirby himself inked. There, the character takes on the beginning of his ultimate form. Only his head is depicted, but it is clearly encased in thick, bony plates of differing shapes. I once asked Ayers why he didn’t follow Kirby’s pencils faithfully on that character, and this was his response:

“Stan put the Thing in there—much to my chagrin. I didn’t like drawing him. When I first started inking the Thing, I had him looking like he was made of mud. Then somebody made him look like he was chiseled little bricks. I could never figure out what he was. To this day, when I draw the Thing, I have these damn squares to contend with.”

Ayers’ solution was to simplify and homogenize the figure, keeping the Thing in line with Kirby’s earliest depictions.

“When I saw it for the first time,” Ayers said in another interview, “it looked like a rug of blocks or something, not even like an alligator, so I made it nice and soft.”

A panel from Fantastic Four #15 survives in pencil form [see next page], showing the so-called “rocky” Thing before Ayers sanded down his hard edges in that issue. The difference is dramatic.

It should be noted that the Steve Ditko-inked Thing of the previous issue differs from the Ayers interpretation. Although it is more impressionistic, the skin pattern shows greater complexity in some panels. This makes it difficult to determine when the more complicated Thing design was introduced by Kirby. But the cover to FF #13, which was supposedly inked by Don Heck (but looks to me more like Vince Colletta) is definitely the angular version. I’m inclined toward the belief that Kirby introduced his new version of Ben Grimm with issue #12, where he first faces off against the Hulk. But it might have been earlier. The Thing figure apparently inked by Kirby himself on the cover of #11 is more sharply rendered than the Ayers’ version inside. It’s possible that after the brief reversion to Ben Grimm in FF #11, the new version of the Thing manifested on page 10 of “A Visit with the Fantastic Four.” However, the art is ambiguous, thanks to Dick Ayers’ inking. It may be that Kirby tinkered with the character’s looks until he arrived at a final construction he thought worked. This process probably commenced with FF #7, the first monthly issue. Going monthly may have motivated Kirby to treat the series as one that might last.

THE REAL DEAL The authentic Thing next surfaces on the cover of FF #18 [left]. Though the interior was finished by Ayers, George Roussos inked the cover and the Thing is again revealed in all his angular glory. This was also the case with the next two issues. Roussos was the inker whom Ayers complained had made the character resemble bricks.