JACK F.A.Q.s Mark Evanier Jack Kirby 100th Birthday Panel

Held at the Baltimore ComicCon on Sunday, September 24, 2017

Featuring Tom King, Walter Simonson, Mark Buckingham, Jerry Ordway, Dean Haspiel, John K. Snyder III, and Rand Hoppe. Transcribed by Steven Tice, and copyedited by Mark Evanier and John Morrow of people were not his equal, and he didn’t care. If you came up to Jack with the worst artwork in the world—and, believe me, I did [laughter]—he would give you encouragement. He would tell you, “Keep at it. Keep drawing.” The only two things that would make him give you a negative critique of your work was, number one, if he thought that it was derivative, that you were just copying other people. I tell folks that if I had emerged from my association with Jack able to perfectly replicate Jack Kirby artwork, he would have considered me a colossal failure, because I wouldn’t have created anything.

[above] Jack hard at work in his home studio in 1971, and a portrait of the artist as a young Thing [right]. Read the story behind this drawing at https:// kirbymuseum.org/ blogs/effect/2015/ 06/02/the-summerof-jack/

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Baltimore Con panelists: (back row, left to right) Tom King, John K. Snyder III, Dean Haspiel, Rand Hoppe, and Mark Buckingham. (front row) Walter Simonson, Mark Evanier, and Jerry Ordway. Photo by Kevin Shaw.

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Tom King has just embarked on a new Kirby-related project titled Danger Street, which combines all the characters that appeared in DC’s First Issue Special #1–13 into one mini-series— including Kirby’s Atlas, Manhunter, New Gods, and Dingbats.

MARK EVANIER: I have it in my contract that any place I go, I get to do a panel about Jack Kirby. [applause] We have some people here with lots of good things to say about Jack. I’m not going to waste any of your time telling you that Jack Kirby was a fabulous artist. There are only about 50,000 comic books downstairs that you can look at to come to that conclusion yourself.

I was privileged to know Jack, to work with him for a brief time. I was his utterly useless assistant for a couple of years, meaning that he didn’t need assistants, but he was nice enough to say, “Oh, here’s something to do, and here’s some money, Mark.” My two major contributions to his work were to get out of the way—and I think I deserve a lot of credit for that [laughter]—and to help him get a better inker.

He was an amazing man, and I’ll just tell you, those of who never had a chance to meet Jack, he was a darling man. He was polite, he was honest, he was a nice person. He stood on no ceremony. [He was] “Jack.” If you called him “Mr. Kirby,” he would correct you, and he treated everyone as an equal. Obviously, a lot

And the other thing is if you were lazy. Jack was a strong believer in hard work. One of the many things I learned from him—I learned lots of stuff from Jack about writing and drawing. I learned an awful lot of stuff from Jack about being a human being—not that I can always apply it. He was just such a decent man, being kind to people—in some cases, I thought too kind with people he shouldn’t have trusted—but I learned that he was a very, very hard worker. One day, a life-changing day, I thought to myself, “You know, you’re never going to be able to have the imagination of this man, but it might be possible to work just that hard, to be dedicated to producing work, and producing not just for the reason of getting a paycheck, or not just even for the reason of having people say, ‘Wow, you do great work’—for the self-satisfaction you get from creating something.” And all of these people up here write and draw, and they’re all very talented people, and they probably have that same quality of, they finish the work, and they go, “Wow, I did something I’m very proud of here.” And sometimes you finish it, and it gets mauled in the production process. It gets inked badly, or colored badly, or printed badly, or distributed badly. You can still get a certain pride in the fact that you did your part of the job right, to the best of your ability, and that was Jack all the way through. He was just an amazing man, whose presence I feel every time I go to a comic book convention; he’s all over the room. He’s everywhere. You look around and you see his influence. Not only do you see the characters that he launched, but you see people doing his style, and you see people who have picked up the superannuated storytelling that he popularized. Jack told exciting stories. They were all exciting, they were all interesting. This is the reason that we keep going back to his work again and again. You all go back to it and reread it and reread it, and the twelfth reading, you suddenly see something that wasn’t there before, and you go, “Wait a minute. Did somebody sneak in in the middle of the night and doctor my copy? That wasn’t there when I read this story before.”

I read the whole Fourth World series maybe twice a year or something, and every time through I go, “Wait a minute, I was in the room when that page was done, and I didn’t notice that.” His stuff is so rich and so exciting that people want to continue it. They want to draw his characters, they want to tell more stories of his characters, they want to try to blend their imaginations. Our imaginations get stimulated by Kirby stories. You want to take that to the next level, and it’s very exciting to just look at Kirby work for the first time, to see someone who just discovers him and is just enraptured by him. Since he passed away, I have had people come to me constantly and try to say to me the thing they wish they could have said to Jack, and it’s a very personal thing, usually. It’s not just, “Yeah, I thought the comic book was really neat.” It was always, “That story meant a lot to my life,” or, “That series caused me to become a writer, or an artist, or a sculptor, or a sign painter,” or whatever it was, because he inspired a lot of people. And I keep doing these panels because I want to keep on sharing this good fortune I had to know him with others.

These people are all going to talk about what Jack meant to them, and, if we have time, we’ll answer whatever questions you may have about him, and I bet there’ll be plenty. This is Mr. John Snyder, folks. [applause] This is Mr. Tom King. [applause] Mr. Walter Simonson. [applause and cheers] Mr. Jerry Ordway. [applause] Mr. Mark Buckingham. [applause] The mover and shaker behind the Kirby Museum, which is doing wonderful work to preserve Jack’s stuff, and you’ll undoubtedly have spent some time already in their booth picking through stuff, this is Mr. Rand Hoppe. [applause] Mr. Dean Haspiel. [applause]

Immediately following, in the same room we’re going to be talking about Len Wein. That will overlap with Kirby in some ways. Well, Tom, you get to talk first. I have this all programmed in my mind. Tom is doing the new Mister Miracle series for DC, which many of you have probably picked up, and the ones of you who haven’t, should. Talk to us. What does Jack mean to you?

WALTER SIMONSON: I haven’t seen that series yet, but I will say I’ve met several people here at the convention who’ve said, “Have you seen the new Mister Miracle series? It’s great!”

EVANIER: Actually, [DC Comics] sent me Xeroxes or it. I haven’t seen a printed copy yet. How many issues are out—two? That’s all I’ve seen so far, because DC stopped sending me—if you’ve ever worked for DC Comics and you want them to stop talking to you and stop sending you free comics, testify against them in a lawsuit. [laughter] So, anyway, I’m back now working with them, so...

TOM KING: When I close my eyes and see comics, I see Jerry Ordway’s pictures, and Walt Simonson drew the first comic that brought me in. I have John’s work on the wall over my desk. Anyways—

SIMONSON: We’re all really boring. [laughter]

KING: So, confession time. When I was a kid and I read Kirby comics, I hated them. When I first came to Eternals, I thought, “This is big and blocky and—I want John Buscema or even Jim Lee.” I wanted stuff that was fast, and cool, and sexy. I was like, “I don’t get this.” And I didn’t understand Kirby until I went to college. When I was in college, I would cheat on things—don’t tell—but, by turning it into comics, I was taking classes and doing dinosaurs and Calvin and Hobbes and that kind of sh*t. So I was taking a class on World War II, and I was like, “Oh, comic books are in World War II; easy paper to write.” And so I went to the library and read every comic I could from the Golden Age during World War II, and after a while it was like The Matrix, where I could see the code instead of the comics, because there was a formula. You start to see the formula, and what they’re doing is like, “Oh, Batman’s at the circus again and they have to find the bad guy.” And it bored me. But I would notice that the comics that always sort of stopped the wheel from turning, that I’d have to stop reading, were always Kirby comics. There was something he was doing that was storytelling on another level. His comics were still interesting fifty years later. [baby in audience starts babbling] Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. [laughter] That kid gets it. Yeah, there’s something about that. So I sort of understood that there was something deeper here. It was the storytelling. And once I saw that, I started revisiting Kirby, and I realized that he’s just like the foundation of modern pop culture society or whatever, and we don’t understand that because we’ve been in pop culture, so when we see the foundations, it gets a little confusing, because it’s raw and it’s tough.

And then just, to talk about what I’m doing now, DC came to me and said—I was like, “I just want something to do,” and they said, “How about the New Gods?“ I go, “Oh my God, the New Gods? Yeah, I can tell these stories.” And my first thought was, you can’t out-Kirby Kirby. You just can’t do it. It’s impossible. I don’t have better ideas than him. I don’t have better dialogue than him. I don’t have that in my head. So what I do is, I try to bring out what was always in the artwork, which is that Kirby told these great, grandiose, galactic stories, and yet somehow they were always a metaphor for some inner personal conflict or a metaphor for—that’s what I saw. They were trying to get at something deeper, so I try to aim at that—instead of going bigger, I went underneath to try to dig at that stuff, because I find that aspect of him to be fascinating.

EVANIER: Okay. Walt, where did you discover Jack?

SIMONSON: I read comics as a kid. Where I grew up in College Park, Maryland, there were virtually no Marvel comics anywhere, there were no Atlas comics. The first comic I ever saw by Jack was an Atlas comic, from I don’t know which one of the monster books in the mid-Fifties. I was visiting my grandmother in Albia, Iowa, which is a long way from here, and there was a drug store beneath her apartment, it had a spinner rack, and there was a story called, “The Glob” or “The Blob,” I can’t remember. [Editor’s note: It was “The Glob” from Journey Into Mystery #72, Sept. 1961, left.] And I’d never seen an Atlas comic, and it was drawn differently. It was colored differently. It was probably Jack—maybe Dick Ayers, I’m not sure who actually inked it. But it was a big rock statue, and a painter was hired by a bearded mad scientist, to come paint the statue with certain magical paints that he had to stir up, and there was the muddy glop that Jack could draw so beautifully, and he painted the statue. He was supposed to be out of there by midnight, and at midnight the statue awoke, and it turned out it was an alien spy from the center of the Earth. And I was like, “Really?” [laughter] And, as a kid, I was like, “Wow!” The castle was like a Frankenstein sort of thing, but the big blob was dripping this paint as it was chasing him, and finally the guy managed to get back to the paint room and grab a bucket of turpentine and throw it on him like Dorothy threw water on the Witch, and the paint all melts off. It didn’t occur to me at the time—later, I went, “So this would be the easiest alien invasion to thwart, ever.” [laughter] Just throw turpentine on it. It’s gonna be fine. But the art was fabulous! There was this Blob guy walking around. First of all, the old Atlas’ were kind of orange and brown. They were so weird. It was unlike anything else I’d ever seen, but I don’t know if there were credits there or not. A million years later, I’m in college, my freshman year. I’m in a dorm room with all my at that time. Jack clearly saw this guy as a god or as somebody above everybody else, and he said that. And I remember reading that, and that actually impacted me as a reader of that book, but also in the way I look at Superman, and why I’ve always tried to humanize Superman so much, because, without that humanity, people would fear him. And I think, in just a couple of panels, Jack set the tone for how people, within his story, here’s how they look at Superman. And it was just a groundbreaking thing to read that and go, “Oh, I get that, but I’d never thought of it before,” because we had George Reeves, or we had just this genial kind of version of him.

SIMONSON: Something else that I’ve seen in Jack’s work, it’s not very often discussed, a little bit here and there—[Jack’s] characters acted brilliantly in his stories. Mostly we talk about the power and the energy and whatever, but the acting in those stories is phenomenal, in terms of gestural quality. They’re still bigger than life a lot of times, but the scene Jerry’s referring to—at one point the champ and Clark Kent are discussing Superman, and he shakes Clark’s hand, and he says—I might be misremembering this. What I remember is, “That’s quite a grip you’ve got there, Kent,” and I think he may even be holding his hand like it’s sore. He’s holding his wrist… it was really just fantastic. It was a whole scene, just a beautiful moment of quietness, and yet it was still very powerful and did set the tone for Superman that was very different from the way he was treated elsewhere. And I think of Kanto in Mister Miracle when Mister Miracle goes back to Apokolips and meets Kanto, and Kanto is this guy who’s dressed in Renaissance garb, and bows and doffs his cap. You could imagine Errol Flynn playing this guy, in some costumed drama. But it had that grace. Even with all Jack’s power, it had that grace and that observation of individual movement that gives character. So a lot of the writing was in the drawing, as well as in the actual words.

KING: Mister Miracle #3 is called “The Paranoid Pill,” and that’s not the proper way to use English, right? You’d say “The Paranoia Pill,” right? It’s the wrong noun/adjective thing, but somehow the Paranoid Pill, that hard D hitting that P, suddenly it becomes poetry.