Jack Kirby Collector #88 Preview

KIRBY COLLECTORS!

guest curator Glen David Gold on the genius of Kirby JACK FAQs 8

Mark Evanier’s 2023 WonderCon

Kirby Tribute Panel, featuring Marv Wolfman, John Morrow, Paul S. Levine, and Steve Leialoha

INNERVIEW 19

more with Marv Wolfman

GALLERY 24

some fan service, mostly in pencil

INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY 32

Sean Kleefeld casts a spell on Witchboy’s design

EU EXHIBIT 34

a Kirby exhibition in France

INNERVIEWS 38

the Simon legacy lives on CUTTIN’ UP 40

comic collecting carnage

INNERVIEW 42

the King of monsters speaks

FOUNDATIONS 43 a Boy Explorers story

KIRBY OBSCURA 56

splash panels supreme

COLLECTOR COMMENTARIES 58

Mike Mignola, Patrick McDonnell, and others talk collecting Kirby

KIRBY KINETICS 73

Norris Burrough’s artistic journey

COLLECTOR COMMENTS 78

Front cover inks: MIKE ROYER

Front cover color: GLENN WHITMORE

COPYRIGHTS: Ant-Man, Avengers, Black Knight, Black Panther, Captain America, Crystal, Cyclops, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Dragon Man, Eternals, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Hulk, Human Torch, Ikaris, Inhumans, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, Khanata, Krangro, Machine Man, Mad Thinker, Medusa, Moonboy, Mr. Fantastic, Mr. Little, Nick Fury, Nova, Prester John, Princess Zanda, Puppet Master, Rawhide Kid, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, Taboo, The Glob, Thing, Thor, Ulik, X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Atlas, Barri-Boy, Demon, Dubbilex, Farley Fairfax, Himon, Jason Blood, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, Losers, Metron, Mister Miracle, Mr. Vince, Newsboy Legion, Professor Volcanum, Rodney Rumpkin, San Diego Five-String Mob, Superman, Virmin Vundabar, Witchboy TM & © DC Comics • Captain Victory, Dream Machine, Friend of Fandom characters, GODS Portfolio, Kirby Unleashed TM & © Jack Kirby Estate

• Destroyer Duck TM & © Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby estates • Black Magic, Boy Explorers, Fighting American, Speedboy TM & © Joe Simon and Jack Kirby Estates • Private Strong TM & © Archie Comics • Dream-Boat, Roxie’s Raiders TM & © Ruby-Spears Productions • 2001: A Space Odyssey TM & © Warner Bros. • ShieldMaster, Spyder-Fly TM & © Jim Simon.

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions!

[above] Cover pencils for Black Panther #3 (May 1977), featuring the ultimate collector, Mr. Abner Little.

Guest Shot

Genius on Bristol Board

by guest curator Glen David Gold

My father, an obsessive collector of clocks and watches, has a saying: “There is no substitute for information except money. The reverse is also true.” I have over the last thirty years put together a small, but pretty cool collection of Jack Kirby artwork, mostly with information, sometimes with money. Kirby was the first artist whose work I recognized, and then the first artist whose work was so distinct, I could tell who had inked him. It’s a little tough sometimes to discern if Gene Colan is being inked by Sinnott or Syd Shores—not so tough with Jack’s work.

Jack’s was also the first work I saw in person. At the 1973 Berkeley Con, I was nine years old. A dealer had the double-spread from Fantastic Four Annual #1 for the knee-buckling price of $75, roughly the same price as reading copies of FF #51-102. I don’t think I even coveted it—I was more interested in buying all the comics I needed in order to understand the Marvel Universe. And 1973, age nine, what a perfect time to do so—it wasn’t too bonkers yet. The feeling of getting familiar with every crisis every character went through was like researching my own family tree—if my family also had super-powers and some of them ate planets.

Many years later, when I was 29, I finally had a job that paid more than minimum wage, and I discovered at my local comics shop three publications that opened a door for me: Comics Buyers Guide, Jerry Weist’s Comic Art Price Guide, and this very magazine. The CBG was great for revealing the current marketplace for artwork, the Guide was educational about connecting with dealers, and TJKC was a sign to me that I wasn’t alone in my feeling—still hard to fully describe—that there is just something different about Kirby artwork.

The best way I can put it is: a sign of great art is that it’s never finished. We keep needing to discuss it, to pull it out of storage and look at it again to better understand why it speaks to us. I love that Colan art, but there’s a reason there aren’t 88 issues of The Gene Colan Collector. At a certain point, you kind of crack the code. Kirby, though….

And though the desire is encoded in my DNA, I do admit there’s

a curious leap from “Wow, this is good artwork” to “I want to own that artwork.” There are whole dissertations written on the psychological desire to own things (I recommend Werner Muensterberger’s Collecting: An Unruly Passion), but in brief, having Kirby in the room with me means I am belly-up to genius; to immortality. Here is work that will outlive us.

Of course, no matter how close my nose gets to the page, I’ll never actually be that genius, nor will I fully understand it. Every once in a while, even decades into it, I get a jolt, as when Erik Larsen explained to me how Kirby’s crazy perspective causes the viewer to get pulled into his scenes.

I have written extensively about Jack here, in mainstream magazines like Playboy, and in museum catalogs of his work. But I haven’t ever told tales of Kirby collecting. The process of pursuing, buying, owning, and selling things that have a mysterious meaning to you is a powerful one, and the path to having a trophy on the wall is more roller coaster than scenic drive.

When I finally had a little money in the bank, I was thirty—it was 1994, and having a little money was still a viable way of getting artwork. I didn’t intend to make it an open-ended pursuit. No, I was rereading my old comics and figured that it would be fun to own just one page of artwork from my favorite series. So I called a dealer and asked the most inadvertently hilarious question of my collecting career: Did he have any pages from the Galactus Trilogy?

Hah-hah-hah. I didn’t know.

One of the strange things about collecting Jack’s art, as opposed to almost any other comic artist, is that much of his A+

Glen’s favorite piece of original art is the inked version of this Devil Dinosaur #4 two-page spread.

artwork is unaccounted for. As I recounted way back in TJKC #19, most of his Silver Age covers before May 1965 have gone missing— at this point, 25 years after I started looking, I’ve come to the bleak conclusion that they really did end up in a landfill. And the interiors to many of his most prized storylines (like FF #1, 2, 4, 48-50, 52, 84-87; Hulk #1 and Avengers #4, to start with) have vanished. Which makes the five-star stuff that has shown up—Journey into Mystery #83 and X-Men #1, for instance—that much more special.

The first thing I heard in 1994 was that I should have started ten years beforehand. Prices were outrageous. Good Fantastic Four pages were $1500! Now, the 1990s look like a Golden Age—you could find artwork at comic book shops, conventions, ads in the CBG, and of course at the Kirbys’ house itself, where 1970s books broke up, the pages sent into the biosphere, with frequency. A complete issue of Black Panther or The Eternals was $4200 (only $3800 if it didn’t have a double-splash).

For those of you who wish for a time machine, I have bad news for you: since there were pages everywhere, at all times, you—like all the rest of us—would have passed on a bunch of things, reasoning you could always find a better Silver Surfer Graphic Novel page later. You would have looked at a 1970s Captain America cover at a dealer’s table and put it back, because surely a 1960s cover would eventually shake loose. Or you could be the biggest bonehead of all, like me, and buy a complete 1970s book like Eternals #16, and sell it off piece by piece, like parting out friezes off the Parthenon.

Maybe the biggest actual loss between then and now isn’t the price of pages, so much as how you found out about artwork: the grapevine. Sure, there are Internet discussion groups, but it’s not quite the same thing. I’m not alone in thinking the ’net provides a faux intimacy while preserving a distance that makes it feel like we’re poking out heads out of silos, rather than sharing what we know.

So right now, I’m sharing stories of how I acquired certain pieces in my collection. Buckle up.

JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #72, PAGE 9 (left)

1994. Even though stuff is out there, no one including me wants anything that’s available, and anything I want is either lost or locked away in impregnable collections. Because I realize there’s a lot of cool artwork I’ve never seen, and don’t even know to ask about, I slowly accumulate a complete prehero collection, a mix of mostly reprints and a few original 1960s books. I start inserting Post-its® on the best pages. One page in particular catches my eye. If I could only have just one panel page from a pre-hero story, it would be this one. I have no idea where it is.

There’s this ancient archaeological tool called the “telephone,” and it used to be that you could use it to call other collectors or dealers to ask them what they knew—what books were missing, who had stuff, what was coming up at auction. Conrad Eschenberg, Rich Donnelly, Albert Moy, THR Gallery, the Mannarinos, Mitch Itkowitz, and Scott Dunbier all helped me understand the shape of the playing field. Conrad was particularly helpful, telling me where a few things were, and telling me what books he wanted to complete. Among many, many books was Journey into Mystery #73, “When the Spider Strikes.” He was missing two pages. He had no idea where they were.

I said, if I found him a page, would he help me find the page I was looking for?

“Sure,” he laughed. I’d been in the hobby for, what, a couple of weeks? He’d been looking for those pages for over a decade and hadn’t had any luck.

The next San Diego show I’m at, I am joined by a guy whose name I will not mention. Let us call him Kosmic Kid. He is not a collector, more of a cartoonist, but mostly he just hangs out at the local comic shop and talks about how nothing good has happened since Wally Wood left EC. He is trying to make a persona but it isn’t really working, so

Mark Evanier

JACK F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

2023 WonderCon Kirby Tribute Panel

Held on Saturday, March 25, 2023 at the Anaheim Convention Center

Featuring (left to right) moderator Mark Evanier, Marv Wolfman, John Morrow, Paul S. Levine, and Steve Leialoha

Transcribed by Stefan Dogaru, and copyedited by Mark Evanier and John Morrow. You can view video of the panel at: Part one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YcALjHLFgo Part two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDSi_zFSaRA

MARK EVANIER: Jack Kirby was, among other things, someone who never stood on pretenses. They called him “The King,” but he never talked to you like he was a king. He talked to you like an equal, or maybe like you were more important than he was. If you came to the San Diego Con any time before Jack passed away, except for one year when he was in the hospital, he was there at the convention, and he would talk to anyone about anything. And while you were talking to him at his table, he would stand up, because you were standing up. Even though he was much older than you were, if you were standing up, he gave you the courtesy of standing up and talking to you, and he was not a tall man. Unlike certain people who are short, Jack was willing to bend his neck with you. There are certain people you meet who won’t do that. He acknowledged you were tall—and if you were showing him artwork, he treated you like an artist. If you were showing him writing, he treated you like a writer. And if you were just someone who loved his comics, he kept saying, “Thank you, I thank you,” over and over again, because he was very grateful to everyone who loved his work. You could learn a lot being around him and you just felt smarter, and more creative you might

not be smarter or more creative, but you felt that way in his presence. He never put people down. Marv has been nodding throughout this, because he knows that was the case. Folks, this is Marv Wolfman. [applause]

I guess you know what he’s done. This is John Morrow, publisher of the Jack Kirby Collector. [applause] He has a new book he’ll show you in a moment. This is Paul S. Levine, who has been the attorney for the Jack Kirby Trust, and the Rosalind Kirby Trust, and also— they keep changing the name of it, but he’s a lawyer that I wish Jack had twenty years earlier in his life. [applause] And on the far end is the eminent artist, Mr. Steve Leialoha. [applause] We’re going to talk a bit about Jack and we’ll take questions later. John, why don’t you show them what you brought?

JOHN MORROW: Okay. It won’t actually be in stores for about two more months. We got some pre-release copies in just for the show. We originally did a Captain Victory Graphite Edition, which was this nice re-presentation of Jack’s first Captain Victory issues, but reproduced from his pencil art. And a few years later, we did a Silver Star Graphite Edition, which is all six issues of Jack’s Silver Star reproduced from his pencil art. Here to continue the

[below and throughout]

A flurry of photos from the San Diego ComicCon, from Shel Dorf’s archives. Frame 1 shows Marv Wolfman peering over Jack’s head as Mark Evanier looks on. Frame 3 includes (left to right) Steve Leialoha, Marv Wolfman, Jack Kirby, unknown female, Roz Kirby, Len Wein, Mark Evanier, and Marty Pasko. All are from the 1979 Comic-Con, except frame 6 is Jack with Len Wein in 1978.

tradition is—this one’s really fun—a Destroyer Duck Graphite Edition. It’s in hardcover, it’s beautiful, it’s all five issues of Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby’s really fun, crazy and bitingly funny Destroyer Duck series. Mr. Evanier did the introduction for it, which outlines the history of what was going on, and talks about his friend Steve Gerber, who was one of the most unique and creative writers ever in comics. And in an interesting little twist, Mr. Leialoha here, I believe, did some beak corrections on Destroyer Duck in this? [Steve Leialoha laughs]

STEVE LEIALOHA [left]: adjustments. Probably my major claim to fame is, I put little tiny rivets on the logo.

MORROW: Oh, really? Well, good job on the rivets. Those are really nice. [laughter] So we have a few copies of it here at the convention. But [pointing to Evanier] this gentleman clued me in on all kinds of amazing things about Steve Gerber I didn’t know, and I’m just thrilled to death that we were able to get this thing produced, and Mark helped a whole lot on this book, so….

EVANIER: While we’re on the subject, I’d like to clear up something. Mr. Leialoha, did you ink the cover of Destroyer Duck #1?

LEIALOHA: I did not. It’s amazing to me that people can’t tell who this is, but there you go.

EVANIER: There is a self-proclaimed Jack Kirby expert who claims that Neal Adams did not ink the cover to this comic, even though the publisher Dean Mullaney watched Neal ink it [laughter]—and that Steve Leialoha inked it, and that when Steve or I mention that Neal Adams did it, Steve and I are lying, and we’re covering this up. [laughter]

LEIALOHA: I remember—

EVANIER: Apparently he also thinks Q’Anon inked it. I don’t understand it. [laughter]

LEIALOHA: —Neal also did the color, too.

MORROW: And, and if I may, we’ve got Neal’s

[below] Jack’s cover pencils for Destroyer Duck #1 (1982), showing the manslaying mallard’s original brass knuckles (well, brass flipper tips, I guess?). This is one of the many revelations you find in TwoMorrows’ new Destroyer Duck Graphite Edition, now shipping and in stores.

that from Jack’s influence?

WOLFMAN: In a way, yes, it was. One of the thoughts that I had— let me backtrack. When I did the Teen Titans, everyone thought we were doing DC’s version of the X-Men, and I kept saying, “No, we’re doing DC’s version of the Fantastic Four. Because every issue of The Fantastic Four would have a brand new concept.” There’d be all these incredible characters, so many characters came out of it, and he kept coming up with new ones, and new ones, and new ones, and new ones. And that’s what I loved as a fan, and I said, “I’m going to do as best as I can to do the same sort of thing.” I’m not going to only use old characters that DC had. I had to keep coming up with as many new characters as I possibly can. That was 100% the influence of Jack, and Stan, and The Fantastic Four.

who wasn’t Jack Kirby. Is that your observation?

WOLFMAN: Yeah, I would agree. I think they wanted Jack because the Marvel stuff was so popular, but they didn’t understand his artwork. Which is surprising to me, because Carmine [Infantino] is a brilliant artist. Totally one of my favorites of all time, but he didn’t get someone else’s art that wasn’t in the Dan Barry style. Dan Barry did the Flash Gordon comic strip, and others. And he was sort of like the god of how to draw the way DC drew at the time. Everybody is dead, so we can say nasty things about them. [laughter]

EVANIER: And by the way, we should mention a lovely man named Joe Giella, who passed away last week. A guy who was in comics from about 1945, until I guess 2015 or so. 2010, something like that. As nice a man as you could meet. As nice a man as ever had the function of inking other artists, and preserving their work, and he worked very hard on that stuff.

WOLFMAN: Can I interrupt you for just a second? About Joe. Having had the success of calling Jack and going to his house, we found out that Joe lived not far away from that, and so we called again, and again, “Yes.” They had us come up; no sandwiches though. [laughter] We got to spend the entire afternoon speaking with Joe about comics and art, and all that stuff. I don’t remember any of it, unfortunately. My memory is bad, but we had a great time and that was—again, here’s somebody letting some kids into their house to talk about comics, which I’m sure he would have much preferred drawing, or watching TV, or something else.

EVANIER: In comics, if I learned one thing, it’s that inkers never give you sandwiches. [laughter]

WOLFMAN: Why didn’t you tell me? I would have eaten first. [laughter]

EVANIER: You and I talked once—in this book I’m actually going to finish about Jack, I have a long quote from you about why DC should not have been changing Jack’s Superman.

EVANIER: When Jack was working for DC in the early ’70s, you were one of his few allies on the staff. I think at one point, the only two people that he felt were on his side at the company were you and Nelson Bridwell, defending him when people wanted to change stuff and—.

WOLFMAN: I was the first person at DC to see the first issue of the New Gods, because I was an unpaid intern at the time in summers, so you can tell how long ago it was, because I would not be an unpaid intern ever again. But they let me into their world, and one of my jobs was to open up the mail from the artists—not the fan mail, but the artist mail—and so the package came in from Jack, and I got a chance to open it and just stare at it, because it was just gorgeous pencils. I mean, unbelievable. No inks, just beautiful work.

EVANIER: And do you think it was appreciated in the office for what it was?

WOLFMAN: No, because it didn’t look like a DC comic at the time. There was a very clear DC look and it was—Jack’s stuff shouted at you, and the DC stuff of the ’70s, ’60s or ’70s, sort of took you on a trip, but that’s about it.

EVANIER: When my friend Steve Sherman and I went to DC the first time, we were there ten minutes before Sol Harrison, who was the head of production there, sat us down and tried to get us to get Jack to draw more like Curt Swan. He thought that was the way comics ought to look, not that Marvel garbage, you know? And I think if not for Marv and Nelson—and not many other people up there—Jack would have been forced to draw more like somebody

WOLFMAN: Yeah, I don’t remember what I said, but they shouldn’t have. [laughter]

EVANIER: Marv was one of the few in the office who advocated for leaving it alone—and they didn’t want to leave it alone, they didn’t want to leave anything alone.

WOLFMAN: Well, Superman to them, didn’t look like Superman— despite the fact that Gil Kane’s Superman didn’t look like Wayne Boring’s Superman, who didn’t look like Joe Shuster’s Superman. You know, so what?

EVANIER: Well, they weren’t thinking of them as those artists’ renditions, they were thinking of them as the approved DC version that DC Comics created.

WOLFMAN: Yeah, every company that I’ve worked for in one way or another, has this term called “On Model.” And certainly in animation, where all the stuff should look the same—it doesn’t matter where you work. Marvel, I have to admit, at the time though, really encouraged individual looks to the different artists, and Stan too— with the different writers, he actually didn’t want people copying his stuff. He wanted them to go off on his, or on her own, and say what they wanted to say.

EVANIER: Mr. Leialoha, how did you feel when you saw Jack Kirby’s work being redrawn like that?

LEIALOHA: Well, as a young fan, I always found it disconcerting that there would be—it went from being inked by Vinnie Colletta, to being a Murphy Anderson face, and they really did not match up. So it’s just weird, and wrong. But just really weird. To me, it stood

Murphy Anderson [left] and Jerry Siegel at the 1983 San Diego Con.

out like a sore thumb.

EVANIER: For those who don’t know about this, the first things Jack did for DC when he went under contract with them, he drew the first issues of New Gods, Forever People, and Mister Miracle, in that order, and then he started on Jimmy Olsen. You always have to remember when you’re talking about comics, they don’t come out always in the order that they were done, and sometimes an issue that was drawn in January, and an issue in July, come out the same time in December. And so, Superman was in the first Forever People, and it didn’t bother them at that point when it came in, and then Jimmy Olsen started coming in with Superman, and suddenly, one day, they said, “These aren’t right, we’ve got to fix this. It looks like a Marvel comic, and we can’t have Superman looking like he’s one of those lousy Marvel comics.” So they had some people in the production department working with Vince Colletta, who was inking the stories, and they did a few pages where they fixed the faces, and they looked at those couple pages and they went, “This is not right, we can’t put that out.” They had done very lifeless, bad imitations of the Curt Swan version, which they didn’t think it was the Curt Swan version, they thought of it as the official version. So, Nelson Bridwell, who was assistant editor on these books, said, “Why don’t we send them back to Jack to redraw?” And that was heresy, because in DC,

the artists did not correct what the production department did, the production department corrected what the artist did. So they gave the books—the first issue of Forever People and the first two Jimmy Olsens—to an artist named Al Plastino, who was not drawing for DC at the time. They had taken him off drawing Superman because they thought his work was old-fashioned. I think he was doing the Batman newspaper strip at that moment-—and so you know, well, “We can’t have Jack Kirby draw Superman, he doesn’t look like this, let’s get the guy who started drawing Superman in 1946 to fix it.” He redrew those three issues, pasted over, or completely wiped out what Jack did, and redrew it. Thereafter, except for the two issues Mike Royer inked, you had some combination of Vince Colletta and Murphy Anderson. Sometimes Murphy fixed the pencils and then Colletta inked it. Sometimes Colletta inked the book and left Superman and Jimmy Olsen heads for Murphy Anderson to ink. Murphy Anderson was the guy who worked in the DC offices—he had a drawing board there, and he was tapped often to do art corrections that were beyond the ability of the production department.

I was present at a San Diego Con the first time Murphy Anderson came to one, and he made a point of going to Jack and apologizing for that. Jack did not blame him for doing what he was told to do. Jack certainly knew about people who forced you to do stuff in comics that you didn’t want to do. He had a lot of it in his life, and Anderson was very relieved that Jack didn’t blame him. He said, “If they’d let me ink the whole book, it wouldn’t have jarred so much, and I would have changed your work a lot less than they made me change the Supermans.” He said that, and Murphy was a very nice man. [to Wolfman] You obviously had a lot of interaction with Murphy Anderson.

WOLFMAN: I worked with Murphy. The terrible story was, when I was an assistant editor, we had to make changes over Murphy’s John Carter for some reason. Joe Kubert wanted it differently and redrew the faces on it, and I had to let Murphy know that his faces were changed, and Murphy was one of the biggest John Carter fans in the universe. I mean, he loved all the Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff, and it really was a crushing thing. But back then, they just changed everybody, and they didn’t think of it as negative, that’s just the way it was.

EVANIER: John, since we’re on the subject of the Superman heads thing—you’ve been shepherding a lot of articles about that over the years. It is my observation that the tampering with Jack’s work is now pretty universally regarded as an enormous editorial blunder. Is that your opinion too?

MORROW: [dramatic pause] Yes. [laughter] I’m sorry, I’m still reeling from the fact that this man sitting next to me was—well, I know Mark saw New Gods #1 in pencil first, but Marv saw New Gods #1 in pencil first before anybody else in the offices, and he also watched Jack draw the Galactus Trilogy. I’m just like… I—I—I’m not worthy. That’s awesome. [laughter]

EVANIER: You publish a lot of Jack Kirby’s pencil art in the Jack Kirby Collector. What

An unpublished Kirby Jimmy Olsen #147 cover, inked by Murphy Anderson for TJKC #42. Jack’s pencils are shown in that issue. Color by Tom Ziuko.

Sample Headline Innerview More With Marv

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

MARV WOLFMAN: Brooklyn, New York. I lived there until I was 13, then we moved to Flushing, Queens, NY.

TJKC: What is the etymology of your last name? And did you get much ribbing over it as a kid?

MARV: No idea. My parents never really talked about those things. As for ribbing? Kids. Weird name. So, of course—and lots of howling.

TJKC: How’d you and Len Wein first meet?

MARV: I had a letter published in Mystery In Space which included my home address. Ron Fradkin, a comics fan who lived in Levittown, Long Island, got my phone number and called, as he felt we lived near each other and thought we could get together. In truth, Flushing and Levittown were nowhere near each other, but due to the power of unbelievable coincidence, my sister lived in Levittown and I was actually going to stay with her while my parents went on vacation. So the next day I took the train to Levittown and met Ron and his close friend, Len.

TJKC: What was your first in-person encounter with Jack Kirby, and was Len there for it as well?

MARV: Len had previously met Jack—I don’t remember how—and said he was going to Jack’s house, and did I want to come? I obviously said yes, and afterward we visited Jack either together or separately. It was pretty amazing for a young comics fan to meet someone like Jack. He and Roz could not have been nicer.

TJKC: In your essay that ran in New Gods #1 (“A Visit with Jack Kirby”), you stated

[below] As editor of Marvel’s Nova comic, Marv likely chose Jack to draw the covers of #5 [Jan. 1977, below] and #7 [March 1977, next page]. Jack also drew #4’s cover (bottom).

Marv Wolfman interview conducted by e-mail in October 2022 by John Morrow (Thanks to Richard Kolkman for suggesting some of the questions for Marv)

Photo by Scott Edelman

that you followed Jack’s work from Boys’ Ranch and Bullseye to “Green Arrow” and Challengers of the Unknown. Since those didn’t always have credits listed, when did you first become aware of Jack by name?

MARV: I don’t remember everything, but I do remember always reading, but never much liking, the Green Arrow stories in the back of Adventure Comics. They were quiet, unimportant, unimaginative stories, but I still read them. But then, suddenly, there were several issues in a row where everything changed: Giant fifty-foot arrows. Aliens. Excitement. The art became dynamic and the stories powerful.

I loved those, and later learned they were written and drawn by Jack Kirby. These stories opened my imagination. Sadly, Jack didn’t do many issues, and the series went back to being dull again. Without knowing who drew the stories, I figured out that the same artist then drew Challengers of The Unknown. I don’t remember how I learned the artist’s name, but I became a huge fan long before I even knew who he was.

TJKC: Were you a big fan of Jack’s 1960s Marvel work?

MARV: I was already a fan based on his work on Archie Comics’ The Fly and the Double Life of Private Strong. His work on The Fly’s double-page spreads was incredible. I had never seen anything like it before. So yes, I was a long-time fan, long before he did The Fantastic Four. I will say, however, I never bought or read the Marvel monster comics he drew. I’m not even sure I ever saw them.

TJKC: Can you describe how you both managed to arrange that first visit to Jack’s East Williston home, and what year was it— 1964? 1965? Did you call ahead, or just ride your bikes over and show up unannounced?

MARV: I don’t remember, but I assume Len set it up. Jack and Roz were expecting us. In fact, Roz made a lunch for us before we met with Jack. I also don’t remember how we got there; did we bike over, or did someone drive us, is sadly lost to time. I lean toward riding our bikes. Sorry.

TJKC: You’d mentioned that you saw Jack working on a Galactus page; do you recall what Fantastic Four issue/page it was? Or could it have been Thor?

MARV: After a thousand years, I can’t remember what specific page he was working on—but as I said in early interviews, where my memories were fresher, we saw Galactus pages for the FF; I assume I was right back then.

TJKC: How many times did you visit the Kirby house in New York? And was it always with Len by your side?

MARV: I think we went between 3–6 times over the years, and yes, Len was there, too. I also believe, on occasion, that several other members of TISOS (The Illegitimate Sons of Superman), our comics group, joined as well. [See Alter Ego #143, page 57 for a list of other TISOS members that might’ve visited at one time.]

Gallery

[right] Mister Miracle #5, page 15 (Dec. 1976)

As Joe Simon said in his interview we ran last issue: “[Steranko] came to my house out in Long Island, opened up his trunk, and a bunch of comic books fell out. It was filled to the top with comic books.” So while we think of him as a top professional, Steranko started as a fan like you and me. Jack heard his tales of days as an escape artist, and at least indirectly formed ideas for Mister Miracle from them.

[next page] Our Fighting Forces #153, page 16 (March 1975)

As a teenager, Kirby rescued a science-fiction pulp floating toward a sewer drain, and was captivated by the stories in it—but in his tough neighborhood growing up, you’d get beaten up if you were caught reading such things. So we’d assume Rodney Rumpkin is sort of an amalgam of sci-fi and comics fans he’d met over the years, who he felt a kinship with for their being ostracized.

[page 26] Demon #7, page 10 (March 1973)

See Sean Kleefeld’s “Incidental Iconography” column this issue for details on how Witchboy was based on a comics fan!

[page 27] Mister Miracle #9, page 13 (Aug. 1972)

While there are superficial similarities in their appearance, I think Himon was more likely based on Shel Dorf because of how he shepherded young comics fans to Jack’s house, while Himon mentored the youth of Apokolips.

FAN SERVICE

Kirby injecting collectors into his work, with commentary by John Morrow

Incidental Iconography

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

With an entire issue focusing on Jack’s fans, it’s almost mandatory that I utilize this Incidental Iconography column to take a look at Klarion the Witchboy. I debated tackling the character, because I thought the anecdote about Jack using the young fan Barry Alfonso as the visual basis for Klarion to be really well-known. Indeed, Barry was interviewed for this very magazine back in #44. But there are a couple of points that I don’t think are emphasized

Barry at all, so I felt it’s worth doing a little deeper dive here.

Barry first met Jack in the fall of 1969, when Shel Dorf took a group—including Barry’s mother—up to visit the Kirby family home in Irvine, California. (This was before they had moved to Thousand Oaks.)

Jack used that group of fans as the visual basis for the San Diego Five-String Mob that debuted Jimmy Olsen

#144, with Barry appearing as Barri-Boy. They only appear for a handful of panels, and there’s only one in which you can really see any details for the character [above]. But that group vanishes in short order and Jack never uses them again. However, a few years later, in The Demon #7 from 1973, Barry’s second comic book alter ego appears in the form of Klarion the Witchboy. Beyond his short stature and skinny build, there doesn’t appear to be much similarity between Klarion and Barri-Boy. You likely wouldn’t guess they were based on the same person just by looking at the comics; however, there is an excellent reason for that.

There are, as you can calculate, four years between those two characters’ first appearances. And when you consider that Barry had just turned twelve when he first met Jack, a significant difference in appearance begins to make sense. Indeed, there are a number of photos of Barry throughout that entire period floating around (several were published in Mathew Klickstein’s See You at San Diego last year) and the 12-year-old kid who’s not tall enough to see over Jack’s shoulder grows enough, that Jack can barely see over the teenager’s shoulder. Beyond that, Barry’s obviously matured emotionally, and it’s even visible in those photos that he carried himself more confidently by the mid-1970s. It’s not an atypical set of

Witchboy drawing from the mid-1970s Valentine’s Day sketchbook Jack drew for wife Rosalind.

EU Exhibit Jack Kirby & the Marvel Super-Heroes

[No one has done more to promote Jack’s life and legacy throughout Europe than my good friend Jean Depelley, and this 2021 Kirby exhibition in France is just one more instance of his tireless work curating Kirby’s art for display. Don’t miss his wonderful documentary Kirby At War, now with English subtitles, and available for free viewing on Amazon Prime at: https://www.amazon.com/Kirby-AtWar-Jack/dp/B086M3SMWR]

France seems to have a special connection with Jack Kirby. After a first important Kirby art exhibition in 2015 during the festival of Angoulême (that I co-curated with Frédéric Manzano), a second in Cherbourg and a third in Bayeux in 2019 (curated by Marc Azéma and I), the latest occurred during Summer 2021, offering an opportunity for passing tourists and fans to discover the decisive involvement of the King of comics in the creation of the Marvel universe.

From July 10th to August 29th, following a Hergé exhibition five years before, the idyllic seaside resort of Port Leucate (near Narbonne, in the south of France) hosted a Jack Kirby exhibition at the Espace Henry de Monfreid, again curated by Marc Azéma and yours truly. This 500m2 exhibition center near the harbor featured a retrospective of Kirby’s work within Martin Goodman’s publishing house, focusing on the different periods of his collaboration with Marvel, from 1940–41, in 1955–56, from 1958–1970, and 1975–1978. In addition to the huge and

richly illustrated explanatory panels on the Marvel heroes, and Jack’s biography covering his entire career (notably with a detailed and illustrated explanation on the Marvel Method’s successive steps during the ’60s, with Kirby collaborating with editor and dialogue writer Stan Lee and the various inkers), the exhibition displayed a large number of comic books, with most of the key Kirby issues from the 1940s to the ’70s, among them:

• Marvel Mystery Comics #25

• Marvel Tales pulp vol. 2, #2

• Yellow Claw #3

• Amazing Adventures #1 (starring Doctor Droom)

• Fantastic Four #1, 5, 46, 49, 51

• Amazing Fantasy #15 (first Spider-Man)

• Journey into Mystery #83 (first Thor)

• Incredible Hulk #1

• Tales of Suspense #43 (fifth Iron Man)

• Tales to Astonish #27 and 35 (Ant-Man)

• Strange Tales #101 (first Human Torch) and 135 (first S.H.I.E.L.D.)

• Avengers #1 and 4

• X-Men #1 and 4

• Daredevil #1

• Sgt. Fury #1

• Thor #131

• Tales of Suspense #59 (Captain America)

• Captain America #100

• Amazing Aventures vol. 2, #1 (the Inhumans)

• Astonishing Tales #1 (Ka-Zar)

• Silver Surfer #18

with other Western, War, Monster, and Romance titles from the early ’60s, as well as Kirby’s ’70s first issues, including:

• 2001 (both Marvel Treasury Edition and the actual comic book)

• Machine Man #1

• Black Panther #1

• Eternals #1

• Devil Dinosaur #1

• Captain America #193

• Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles

• the Silver Surfer graphic novel and French editions going back to the late Sixties.

[throughout] Jean Depelley pictured at the Port Leucate, France Kirby exhibition, and many of the sights attendees were greeted with upon entering the Espace Henry de Monfreid.

The Simon Legacy Lives On INNERVIEWs

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: What was the evolution of your ShieldMaster character?

JESSE SIMON: ShieldMaster was created in 1998 by my father, Jim Simon. Jim, son of Joe Simon, had the idea, wrote a treatment, and brought it to his father. Jim had previously worked with Joe, helping out with Prez, The Outsiders, Sandman (’70s version), Green Team, Jove The Unborn, as editor of Sick magazine, and so on. Joe loved the idea of ShieldMaster so much that he did some prototype art of the character and proudly hung the prototype of ShieldMaster on his living room wall. That prototype art of ShieldMaster was Joe’s last professional work, previously unpublished until recently.

TJKC: Does ShieldMaster tiein at all to Private Strong or any of the Simon and Kirby characters?

JESSE: ShieldMaster is its own property and is completely unrelated to Private Strong or any Simon and/or Kirby characters. Jim has established his own world where ShieldMaster exists, and even a place called Shield Dimension. I have been developing new concepts with my father regarding the ShieldMaster universe, new characters, and a lot of interesting ideas. As all the readers of this publication, I am a massive fan of the Simon and Kirby characters and would love to do a crossover event. I have been working on it for some time now, and have gotten permission from the estates to include everyone’s favorite characters for a one-shot special. I am talking about Fighting American, Bulls-Eye, Stuntman, Boys’ Ranch, and so much more! The Simon estate even gave me permission to use the Fly, who has not been seen in almost thirty years! These characters, as well as Joe and Jack, will be inside the oneshot and contribute to the story. I have recruited legendary artist Joe Rubinstein and have been working with him very closely on a sure to be iconic cover. I do not want to give away more than that, as it should be a genuine surprise for the fans. I am aiming for the one-shot to be released in Fall 2023/Winter 2024, but follow us on social media to be the first to get updates and photos.

TJKC: Will this be an ongoing series, and if so, what will its frequency be?

JESSE: Yes, I’ve made ShieldMaster a bi-monthly book, coming out the first of every other month. Jim and I are constantly coming up with new ideas and building off of one another.

TJKC: This one’s for Jim Simon—do you have any especially fond stories of seeing your dad and Jack Kirby working together, or fraternizing outside of the studio?

Joe Simon’s son Jim Simon and grandson Jesse Simon interviewed about their ShieldMaster character

[above, left to right] Jim, Joe, and a young Jesse Simon, and [below] Jim and Jesse in front of Joe’s 1998 illo of ShieldMaster, which they used for a variant cover of ShieldMaster #1 [below].

[top right] Variant cover for ShieldMaster #3. Keep up with all the latest on this character by following the ShieldMaster Facebook page, and the Instagram “ShieldMastercomics”.

© Jim Simon

[right] Fighting American #3 (Sept. 1954).

[below] Tales to Astonish #29 (March 1962).

[next

ollecting comic books has drastically changed since I started back at the end of 1961, during the Christmas school vacation.

In those days, back issues were tough to come by. There were no mail order opportunities. You could certainly find older kids who might still have back issues and buy them for a nickel, or do some swapping—but even that was completely random. If you wanted to start collecting back issues of Superman in 1961, you would have a tough time finding anything older than a year or three. There was no systematic way of acquiring older comic books.

I remember going into a new barber shop and finding two 1952–53 issues of Captain Marvel Adventures, a 1948 Airboy, and a coverless Fighting American #3 on the reading table with various copies of Life and Look magazines. They were a revelation. I swapped them for new titles with the barber. He was happy to have modern comic books, and I was thrilled to read the adventures of characters that were published around the time I was being born.

I remember passing a different barbershop on my way to get my weekly comics and seeing a 1961 issue of Tales to Astonish (#29) in the window. Kirby’s cover to “When the Space Beasts Attack!” caught my eye. I got up my courage and managed to buy it off the barber. He probably thought I was crazy. You see, back in those innocent days, back-issue comic books were not valued. When people sold them, it was usually for a nickel. Nobody thought they were worth anything—or ever would be. And that was why so many were simply thrown out as valueless, or came to almost as sorry fates.

by Will Murray

Cut It Out!

Cuttin’ up Comic Collecting Carnage C

Brace yourself. I’m going to reveal one of the terrible things that we used to do with our precious comic books in the early 1960s. As Jack Kirby might have put it, it will curl your hair, your toes, and probably curdle your brain.

I have a brother named Danny. He and I both read the same comic books. I was more of a collector. He just read them. I bought all the DCs and stored them in order. They were “keepers.” Everything else was disposable junk. I bought as many Marvels as I could find—distribution of Martin Goodman’s comic books even in a big city like Boston was spotty back then—as well as the occasional Charlton and Gold Key title. But I didn’t keep them for long.

I don’t really remember how it all began, or where we got the idea, but at some point––and I doubt that I was the first kid of the 1950s or ’60s to do this––I took a pair of scissors to some of my non-keeper comics and cut out the more attractive figures. With these, we would play.

Most of these were 1962 to 1964 Marvel Comics. I suspect I did this because the bold figurework of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko made great “cut-outs,” as we called them. By comparison, Charlton titles made for poor cut-outs, unless it was a Steve Ditko-drawn issue of Gorgo, in which case it was happily dismembered. Over a period of a few years, my brother and I accumulated separate cardboard boxes of these colorful cut-outs, with which we would have childish fun. Some of these, like full figures of the Human Torch flaming on, were especially prized as “rare.” In other cases, we struggled with which figures to cut out when equally good ones were printed on opposite sides of the same page—or when two cool super-heroes overlapped. Isolate the complete character? Or take the one behind him so that part of figure #1’s leg was incorporated into figure #2? This proved so hard to decide, that sometimes we would cut both overlapping figures as one image. I remember struggling with a Ditko tangle in Amazing Spider-Man #2, where Spidey and one or two of the Terrible Tinkerer’s green aliens overlapped so much, I had to extract them as a unit; otherwise I would be left with maimed pieces of figures.

Need I state the obvious? Cover figures made the best cut-outs.

page] Marvel Tales Annual #1 (top, 1964) and Double Life of Private Strong #2 (bottom, Aug. 1959).

INNERVIEW The King of Monsters Speaks

GLENN KOLEEDA: What were the earliest monsters?

JACK KIRBY: There were monsters in the pulp magazines that preceded the comics. Before super-heroes, it was straight sciencefiction. They used innovative illustrations (like theatrical monsters) in order to sell magazines. Don’t forget that the idea was not only do first rate artwork and to utilize first rate imaginative ideas, but to sell the magazines! The pulps let us sell our illustrations and the pulp magazine itself. Also, they required only one illustration per story, and, of course, a painted cover.

GLENN: Why do you think so many collectors and fans think that Fin Fang Foam stands out above the rest?

JACK: Fin Fang Foom was a monster with human qualities. When a monster is given these qualities, it acquires equal status with any human character, and therefore becomes interesting in that manner. The interesting part of this is that the reader knows the monster is not human (and can’t be classified as such), yet it is portrayed in a human-like manner. Fin Fan Foom was like this, sort of “semi-human.” He had clothes and was angered by insults. In acknowledging Fin Fang Foom, we acknowledge something that is very fearsome in us. It’s similar to Dracula, who is human too, or semi-human in his own way. We acknowledge him in a human fashion, yet we are frightened of him. It’s our vulnerabilities that sell magazines—because the writer asks himself what we are afraid of, and puts an image in place of that question, and it becomes a monster. If it’s a good one like Dracula, it becomes a classic. It’s always been done that way. Dracula is an excellent case in point. The peasants would sit around the fire and tell the stories. The writers would record the stories, and that’s how the classics were born. We still read these stories today.

GLENN: What were the inspirations for some of the monsters you came up with in the Fifties and Sixties?

JACK: The initial inspiration was always storytelling and the way the monster frightens us. Readers are always intrigued by the monster’s behavior, like King Kong, which is an eternal classic. We tried to do the same thing with our monsters. There wasn’t a person of that period who didn’t see Godzilla, re-runs of Frankenstein, or all the other great horror classics.

GLENN: Was this particular period a time when monsters were popular?

JACK: Monsters were always popular! Your best bet in storytelling is to create a new monster, and, if it’s good, nobody will ever forget it. You’ll have readers eternally.

GLENN: Do you have any favorite monsters?

JACK: I like them all. I like a monster who is well drawn, well written, and well acted. I like a monster whose creator wants to reach out to me, in some fashion. If I’m fascinated with his creation, my reaction will fulfill his ambition.

GLENN: Tell me about inker Dick Ayers.

JACK: He had a very good, strong line. I rarely did it myself because it took me from my writing and drawing. Others had thin, crisp lines, and Dick had good, strong lines. The inker could sell your work as well as you could, thereby making it as impressive to the reader as possible.

GLENN: What about your early Silver Age work at DC?

JACK: It was mainly science-fiction concepts. I did a lot of

young heroes, like The Challengers of the Unknown. They were a fighting team. The basis of the art is always the same, it’s storytelling art. That’s what comics are... they allow you to tell an entire story in twenty-some pages. Comics allow you to do a “silent movie”of sorts. I always try to bring the story to an exciting climax. If I insert a monster into that climax, I do it in a variety of ways. Is that monster victorious? Is he defeated? Does he wander off and become a fable? King Kong, for instance, is an undying myth. One sees King Kong ripping up the jungle, aiming his fist at the world. This great ape monster will never die.

GLENN: I know you’re planning some new Kirby monsters for the 1990s. Which monsters do you think will be popular?

JACK: I think any one of my monsters that was part of a well written and well told story would work today. Those old monsters sold a lot of comic magazines. Back then, the comic business was a shaky affair at best. Those were the very beginnings of Marvel. There were two dominant publishers, and I bounced between both of them. My new monsters will be drawn in various and different ways in order to maintain interest in the stories. Of course, the public might grow to like one monster more than another; then I will concentrate on him. There’s a million stories left to be told. Monsters have a mystery all their own. You have to interpret that mystery, and that’s the bottom line. H

Another drawing from Roz’s Valentine’s Day sketchbook.

Interviewed by Glenn Koleeda • Originally published in Comic Book Marketplace #21, Jan.–Feb. 1993. ©1994 Gary M. Carter. Used with permission.

Foundations

Here’s Simon & Kirby’s Boy Explorers story “The Isle Where Women Rule” from Terry and the Pirates #3 and #4 (April–June 1947). Art restoration and color by Christopher Fama.

Barry Forshaw

OBSCURA

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.

SPLASH PANELS SUPREME

“Nasty Little Man!”

and “The Angel of Death” were reprinted in DC Comics’ Black Magic #3 (April-May 1974, below) and The Jack Kirby Omnibus #2 (2013).

“The Mysterious Mr. Vince” was reprinted in The Jack Kirby Omnibus #1 (2011).

I am about to make a statement which will probably get me disbarred from every Kirby appreciation group, official or unofficial. I bow to no one in my appreciation of The King, the finest illustrator ever to work in the comics field. But—are you ready for this?—the New York-born Titan was not always able to triumph over indifferent scripts in which cliché took over from inventiveness. Examples of this? You’ll find them frequently in the Kirby monster books, delivered in profusion for Stan Lee’s Atlas/Marvel line. The early tales in such books as Journey into Mystery, Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense did not solely rely on city-crushing gargantuas that were almost invariably brought down by something trivial at the end of the tales—the early stories were inventive and unusual, with a variety of fantasy and sci-fi themes at the center, not just legions of gigantic monsters-for-thedisposal-of. The last time I took a traversal of the entire range, I have to admit that I grew tired of the standard house plots that Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber relied upon again and again, as soon those creators ran out of inspiration. And, let’s face it, Kirby’s work, too, began to show a certain repetitive-

ness—particularly notable in an artist whose invention was so prodigal that he could hardly bear to repeat himself. But before the Marvel super-hero revolution took off with Fantastic Four, Kirby was clearly running on empty with Fin Fang Foom’s endless progeny. However—and here is the sentence that may get me back into those Kirby fan groups that might have disowned me after the preceding—there is one thing Kirby never stinted on and never lost his inspiration for: his amazing splash panels! Look at any one of them from the beginning to the end of the run of the monster books, and you’ll see that he always delivered the goods in setting up a story.

BACK TO BLACK (MAGIC)

However, it’s also notable that a similar exhaustion syndrome could be spotted in Kirby’s groundbreaking run on Prize Comics’ Black Magic horror issues. These tales—for which Kirby sometimes drew only the splash panel, leaving the rest of the story to other lesser talents—were usually as well written as anything in the Simon and Kirby library (although there was nothing as well written and sophisticated as the science-fiction stories in the all-toobrief run in the three issues of Race for the Moon). But some Black Magic stories ran out of steam even before their modest seven pages were over. Nevertheless, there were always those terrific splash panels. Take for instance, “The Angel of Death” (from Black Magic #15, Volume 2, #9, August 1952): The splash is taken up entirely by a grotesque insect of a kind that has never existed on this planet, with its multiple mandibles, its vari-faceted face, and transparent wings. This monstrosity is seen against the background of a burning city, and must have whetted the appetite of readers for the following seven pages in which a prehistoric creature is unearthed and releases a plague upon a town. The first panel of the tale is striking, with a purple-faced dying man struggling his life away on a bed while a relative looks on in distress—but from then on as the creature wreaks havoc, it’s very much Kirby on autopilot. Particularly

Collector:

Mike Mignola

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Do you consider yourself a collector in general?

MIKE MIGNOLA: A collector…? Not really, as I’m not really hunting for stuff—or maybe I’m just a really lazy collector. I always wander past art dealers at shows and look over stuff, and there are a couple artists I’m on the lookout for, but that’s it. I’m not actively searching. These days I set aside a lot of my own art to use in trades for other art, so maybe I’m a lazy and cheap collector.

TJKC: Do you remember how the first Kirby art you saw in person struck you?

MIGNOLA: I don’t remember the first Kirby originals, but I do remember the first time I saw pages from my favorite Kirby story: Fantastic Four #62. It was at some New York Comic-Con and I wandered past somebody, and the way I remember it, they had the whole issue, and the pages were something like $200 each. At the time it was a lot of money, so I figured I could only get one page and I couldn’t decide on which page—they were all so great and it was so much my favorite issue, and I just couldn’t risk getting the

wrong page. So I made the classic mistake. I walked off to think about it, walked once around the room or something, and by the time I came back, they were all gone. Any page from that issue would have been a treasure. That’s the one that got away. That’s the one art buying mistake that still haunts me.

TJKC: Tell us about a piece of Kirby art you own—do you have it on display? Is there a story about how you got it? Do you find yourself getting different things out of looking at it over time?

MIGNOLA: The Demon #10, page 6 [above]—that insane splash page of that Phantom Of The Opera kind of guy screaming, “My face! It took my face-!” I’ve had that page hanging in my various studios for more than thirty years. I don’t have any memory of buying it. It feels like I’ve always owned it—and even though I do own a couple other Kirby pages, that one I think of as my Kirby page. It’s just so wild, so entirely lacking in subtly. I find it very inspiring. Right now it is hanging over my computer, so I see it every day and I will never ever get tired of it. It’s odd, because

Hellboy’s creator interviewed by Glen Gold

Jonathan Ross Collector:

I

t’s odd, but I can’t remember the first piece of original art by The King that I got to see in the actual flesh. It was probably a page I had bought for my collection when I first became aware that these gems were out there and, if you had the cash, gettable. But I do remember with crystal clarity the first time I saw his art reproduced as it had been created, before the inking and coloring and printing on that pulpy paper that gave comic books their peculiar power. It was at a British comic convention and I was 11 or 12. I would save

the money from my after-school job each week, hoarding every penny, going without treats and snacks and even meals (I would save the dinner money I had to spend for school lunches and put that into the kitty), and would then deliberate and plan and spend that money as wisely as possible at the Conventions—or Marts, as they were known—hoping to fill the gaps in my collection. I only bought comic books—no toys, not sketches, no novels. I lived and breathed for my modest collection of primarily Marvel comic books. But at this one Mart, I saw the oversized Kirby Unleashed portfolio.

As I leafed through the pages, my jaw felt slack, my knees weak—well, probably just slacker and weaker, because I was never really a particularly impressive example of boyhood. But the cover— that pantheon of Gods dreamed up by Jack. And then the interior pages—early sketches, reproductions of Golden Age pages, the existence of which I had previously been unaware of. Black Magic, a comic book yet to be reprinted by DC, but now firmly on my wish list. Stuntman! Fighting American! Decades of Jack’s work that I knew nothing about, alongside the Boy Commandos, Challengers of the Unknown, and then, some actual fullsize reproductions of penciled pages. But of course, it wasn’t a comic—and it was expensive! For sale for 2.50 in UK Pounds. I had with me £ 3.50, which represented a whole month of saving. There was no way I could spend almost all my cash on one book, especially as it wasn’t even a comic! But as I wandered around the Mart, it kept calling to me. I returned and browsed again, left it, returned, left it. Finally, helpless and in turmoil and trying my best to walk away again, I pulled the trigger. I had to have it. I had to look at those life-size reproductions of his pencils, I had to read about his pre-comic book stint at the Fleischer Studios, I had to know more about the man whose work had transformed my life.

And although I can’t remember the actual comic books I bought with my remaining pennies that day, I still have it, still cherish it, still love it. I guess my love of and desire to

British comedian, actor, writer, and producer

MY ARTISTIC JOURNEY WITH KIRBY

From nearly the first moment that I picked up a pencil, I began to draw sequentially. Some of that inspiration was as a result of seeing N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations from Treasure Island at age four. The fact that there was a story behind each lush painting impressed itself upon my imagination, because each illustration had a caption below describing its intention. From there, it was a logical jump to comic strips. I’m not quite sure which comic strip or magazine I saw first, probably a Dell Disney or Western, but I quickly began to imitate the storytelling continuity of a series of panels.

What I am certain of is that the first Kirby story I saw was “Taboo, The Thing From the Murky Swamp” in Strange Tales #75 (June 1960). 1 This page shows very clearly why Kirby’s

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL FORMAT!

style etched itself so profoundly on my nine-year-old brain. We see the creature looming from a tall vertical first panel, while its left arm protrudes into the space of panel two, bringing the reader’s eye rightward to the mud-soaked leg of the narrator. I was quick to notice that Kirby used splashes of mud to move the focus around the page, and leading to the final panel that showed the hero enveloped in mud and yanked violently to the right.

I began to haunt my local newsstand, looking for more Kirby comics. I soon found a magazine whose cover was laid out sequentially, something I’d never before seen. It was Rawhide Kid #28 (June 1962), designed with three panels of classic Kirby continuity. 2 Here, we see the artist foreshadow the story by displaying Jelko’s mastery of marksmanship, shooting out a lit match in the first panel, plugging a coin several times in the second, and finally turning his revolver on the Kid. Notice how the hand in panels one and two balance the page by gesturing towards the Rawhide Kid.

THE COLLECTORS! Fans’ quest for and purchase of Jack’s original art and comics, MARV WOLFMAN shares his (and LEN WEIN’s) interactions with Jack as fans and pros, unseen Kirby memorabilia, an extensive Kirby pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER moderating the 2023 Kirby Tribute Panel from ComicCon International, plus a deluxe wrap-around Kirby cover with fold-out back cover flap, inked by MIKE ROYER!

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

https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_57&products_id=1693

KIRBY COLLECTOR #88