Jack Kirby Collector #89 Preview

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR EIGHTY-NINE $10.95

SPRING 2024

Contents

THE

KIRBY CONSPIRACIES! CONSPIRATORIAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 INNERVIEW. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 part two of James Van Hise’s 1984 interview with Jack

ISSUE #89, SPRING 2024

C o l l e c t o r

ANALYSEZ. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 the MCU’s failed TV/film projects JACK FAQs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Mark Evanier’s 2023 Comic-Con Kirby Tribute Panel, with Jeremy Kirby, Bruce Simon, Mark Badger, Jon B. Cooke, and Paul S. Levine ONOMASTICAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 the name game GALLERY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Kirby’s co-conspirators, in pencil INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY. . . . . 34 Sean Kleefeld pictures Joe & Jack in the 1950s PROBLEM CHILD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Will Murray goes muy Loki FACE-OFF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 WAR STAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 FOUNDATIONS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 a never-reprinted S&K crime story KIRBY KINETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Norris Burroughs takes A.I.M. KIRBY OBSCURA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 cat people abound 5-4-3-2-1-G-BOMB. . . . . . . . . . . . 58 was the Hulk’s a Freemason?

TIME KILLER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 the Kang conundrum COLLECTOR COMMENTS. . . . . . . . 78 Cover marker/inks: JACK KIRBY Cover color: GLENN WHITMORE COPYRIGHTS: Challengers of the Unknown, Darkseid, Demon, Desaad, Forever People, Gilotina, Goody Rickels, Kamandi, Lashina, Mad Harriet, Misfit, Morticoccus, OMAC, Stompa, Superman TM & © DC Comics • Adaptoid, AIM, Alicia Masters, Avengers, Batroc, Black Bolt, Bruce Banner, Bucky, Captain America, Crystal, Dr. Bloom, Dr. Doom, Eternals, Fantastic Four, Giant-Man, Gorgon, Growing Man, Hate Monger, Hawkeye, Hulk, Ikaris, Inhumans, Iron Man, Kang, Karnak, Karnilla, Lockjaw, Loki, Maximus, Modok, Nick Fury, Odin, Quicksilver, Rama-Tut, Red Skull, Rick Jones, Scarlet Witch, Sgt. Fury, Sharon Carter/Agent 13, SHIELD, Silver Burper, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, Super Adaptoid, Thing, Thor, Thunderbolt Ross, Wasp TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Black Magic, Fighting American, Foxhole, Speedboy, Strange World of Your Dreams TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estates • Conan TM & © Conan Properties International LLC • Captain Victory, Collages, Comet Feldman, Comet Feldmeyer, Darius Drumm, Elves, Galaxy Green, Secret City Saga, Silver Star TM & © Jack Kirby Estate • Lord of Light © Roger Zelazny • Mandrake the Magician TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc. • Dr. Mortalis TM & © Empire International Pictures • Roxie’s Raiders, other animation presentation pieces TM & © Ruby Spears Productions

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[above] Illo of Darkseid, created at 1984’s San Diego Comic-Con. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 30, No. 89, Spring 2024. Published quarterly (or is it?) 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

1

Innerview

Kirby Interview, Part 2

Conducted by James Van Hise for his article in Comics Feature #34 (1985) • Part 1 appeared in TJKC #87 Thanks to James, and to Jim Van Heuklon for his assistance in facilitating the original transcript

[Based on Jack’s comments herein, this interview took place in late 1984, between his work on Super Powers I #5 and Hunger Dogs.]

those books, I created another army of characters, which is still popular today.

VAN HISE: Why did you leave DC before it was actually completed?

Because you just now came back.

KIRBY: Let’s say there’s a dark side to comics. It involves personalities, differences, a lot of things. It has nothing to do with creating characters and stories. And those things can develop, so you’ve got to meet those things head-on, and I did. I made decisions about those things about as easily as I made decisions about a story.

JAMES VAN HISE: How much were you involved with the creation of a lot of the Marvel heroes.

Were you in on... ?

JACK KIRBY: When I came up to Marvel, they were just about closing up. I had them all. It was a kind of last gasp of the DC thing. When I came up there, I came up there after Classics [Illustrated].

There was nowhere else to go but Marvel. And I found that they were gonna close that very afternoon. I told them not to do it. Marvel was a VAN HISE: When you case of survival. Initially came back to Marvel I did the monster stories after working with DC, or whatever they had. other than doing the I guaranteed them that Eternals, were there I’d sell their magazines. other goals you wanted Detail of Jack’s pencils from Eternals #14 (Aug. 1977), sort of featuring the Hulk.

And I did. They began to to achieve besides doing liven up a bit, I suppose. I knew they were lacking the super-heroes. your own characters?

Nobody had done [them] in many, many a year. After the war, the KIRBY: No. My goals had been achieved. I’m not out to achieve super-heroes kind of faded. And of course, Spiderman is mine. The goals. I’m a guy with a job. Doing my own books wasn’t a goal; I Hulk is mine. They’re all mine. With Spiderman, I couldn’t handle just wanted to do something different. I knew that if I did the same that. I was handling everything else. I was handling the entire line. old thing, that it wouldn’t help DC. My job was to help DC. That’s Spiderman was give to Ditko, who did a wonderful job on it. I develwhat I was there for. In fact, they came out to California to see me. It oped Spiderman. Ditko’s style sold Spider-Man. Ditko’s stories, would certainly have been stupid of me to disappoint them. I didn’t which were wonderful, developed Spider-Man. Ditko did the Spiderwant to disappoint them. I wanted to give them something beyond Man that’s popular with everybody today. It’s Ditko in Spider-Man the stuff they had. The stuff they had wasn’t making it. I had to give that does it. them something different in order to make it, and I had to make it.

That’s a tough thing to do. And so I did it.

VAN HISE: He left Marvel. Did you ever consider taking on the book yourself?

VAN HISE: What chance did they offer you by doing the New Gods KIRBY: No, I got involved in other things. I got involved with the that you couldn’t have accomplished by doing the New Gods at New Gods. I wanted to do something different. I’m an experimenter, Marvel? basically. I wanted to do the first novel in comics. And I did it in KIRBY: There’s a whole ’nother story that I’m not telling you. All I’m the New Gods. In four books, I did the New Gods, the Forever People, telling you is just what I do, editorially. And that whole ’nother story Jimmy Olsen, and Mister Miracle. The DC people came to me here in is a different kind of a story. So...

California. I was still with Marvel. And they said, “Well, Superman is VAN HISE: Is that the story about people basically taking credit for dying, Time magazine says Superman can’t carry the line. Would you work you had done? like to do a Superman?” I says, ‘No, I don’t want to do Superman.’

KIRBY: It’s part of that. When other people interfere with your work, The guy said, “But you’re doing a good job.” I said, ‘I like to do my you apply at another company. own books. I like to do my own writing. I’d like to do something new.’ I says, ‘What’s your worst book?’ It was Jimmy Olsen. I says, VAN HISE: When you did the Eternals, was there a reason why the ‘Give me Jimmy Olsen.’ I took Jimmy Olsen and incorporated Jimmy only established Marvel character you used in it was Nick Fury?

Olsen with the god books. And of course, Jimmy Olsen sold very Because even when the Hulk appeared, it was actually a robot Hulk. well. All the books connected with the New Gods sold well. And from KIRBY: Well, it was a gimmick. It was the Hulk because I felt it was 3

KIRBY: No, I haven’t followed it at all. I don’t know what Marvel’s doing. Somebody now has his own concept that’s probably different from mine, and it doesn’t interest me. The only thing that interests me is what I’m doing.

It’s not a matter of being so-so, it’s a matter of my interpreting the other guy. My main purpose is not me, it’s you.

Whereas the other artist is satisfying maybe his own way of drawing.

Maybe he wants to be a good artist. Maybe he wants to be a good storyteller. Maybe he wants to be a good inker. That’s his own ambition. My ambition is to touch people, and make them read my book.

a different way to use the Hulk. If I used the ordinary Hulk, it would have been an entirely different type of approach and an entirely different type of story. I didn’t want that. I wanted an approach where the Eternals were the main characters. Therefore, if I used the Hulk as the Hulk himself, he would have maybe been adding to the cast, and I wanted a Hulk story in which the Eternals were the principal characters. A robot Hulk is a robot Hulk to be contended with, not part of the main cast. The Hulk himself would have had to have been part of the main cast.

VAN HISE: You were doing stories that were very large in scope and involved things that were affecting the whole world. The only other Marvel character they were seeing was Nick Fury. How come the other Marvel characters aren’t being affected by these global-spanning events?

KIRBY: The Eternals was a different type of story. Sergeant Fury had his own context. I never gave him a mystic touch. There was never any mysticism. It was out-and-out spy stuff. There was a place where I had to be clever. This was the place where I started being clever. The Eternals was the place where I started being mystic. What I sincerely think is moving in the root cores of all of us—that’s a big subject. I had to be sincere about it.

It was a little take-off on Chariots of the Gods, too. Chariots of the Gods [1968, by Erich von Däniken] left a question of mystery, and I felt that might be a possible scenario, that maybe gods did come down. What if gods did come down? And that was my scenario, about what might happen. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps they’re still here, stored in a chamber where they have an atomic pattern. And when the atomic pattern is reactivated, they’ll reappear, and then life might get very interesting. [Editor’s note: Sounds like the Secret City Saga, above right.]

VAN HISE: When you left Marvel and the Eternals, you didn’t come back to comics for a while; why is that? Because it was a while before you did anything for Pacific or anything like that.

KIRBY: I was out in California. I was doing animation. I’d done concepts. I did some storyboarding on the Fantastic Four [below, from the “Blastaar the Living Bomb Burst”episode, which aired on April 12, 1978].

But that was the only time I ever did it. I remember it was very thorough stuff. It wasn’t sketching. I basically did concepts and ideas. I created characters. I give a valid reason for their creations. I created machinery. I gave a valid reason for their kind of personality.

Devil Dinosaur—I used to get a lot of flak on Devil Dinosaur.

VAN HISE: Have you followed at all what Marvel has done with the Eternals concept?

4

ANalysEZ

Heaven’s Gate Double Down The failure of Marvel Studios’ Inhumans & Eternals, dissected by Michael James Zuccaro

A

s a decades-plus personal friend and business associate of Jack’s, I was most compelled to strongly defend what was haphazardly done to these two specific TV/movie adaptations of two super groups he was so instrumental in creating: The Inhumans and The Eternals. Both of these, in my opinion, had incredible potential, had they stuck much closer to the source material Jack created. The Heaven’s Gate of my title is in reference to the 1980 United Artists Western directed by Michael Cimino, which was the quintessential Hollywood Bomb that nearly took down the studio at the time, long before Sony acquired it.

Let’s start with first Marvel misstep, 2017’s The Inhumans.

Birthed in the pages of The Fantastic Four, like the MCU’s The Black Panther, this had great expectations to be another big success for Disney/ABC/Marvel in the footsteps of HBO’S Game Of Thrones.

They took a very unique launch by showing the pilot episode with IMAX footage in theaters, first on the biggest screen, down to the

smallest screens: your phones and tablets. It started out interesting, but then took a death spiral for a multitude of reasons. First, the costumes weren’t as Kirbyesque as they should have been. Second, the bleakly stark sets. Third, the absence of Kirbyesque machinery and devices— Medusa with her most unique of super-powers, her manipulable hair, was way prematurely given a crewcut via decree by Maximus The Mad. Whose brilliant mistake was that, I wonder? Most likely, this story element was a nod to Samson and Delilah.

I have only good things to say about casting and the Hawaiian location. Like the cast of the second and third Fantastic Four movies (we’ll just forget the unreleased 1994 Roger Corman fiasco), I would like to see this cast get a second shot at bringing the Inhumans to life, with better writing, costumes and sets. Bottom line here: failure was due to not sticking very closely to the original Kirby incarnations.

When the movie was shown here in Hollywood, they had a life-size model of Lockjaw on display. Sadly, Disney most likely has a warehouse full of languishing Lockjaw plush replicas (as shown in the photo at left) that didn’t sell, and went right down the pop consumer chute.

And now to the Giant-Size Marvel Misstep: 2021’s The Eternals.

Prior to its release, Disney/Marvel did an excellent tribute to Jack at the Walt Disney World® Resort, with an extensive exhibit including his drawing board, and promotional banners of the characters throughout the park, as shown back in TJKC #78. Most impressive and respectful was putting The King next to Mr. House of Mouse himself, Walt Disney, on the marquee!

However, I take umbrage with those theme park banners that read “Disney Legend.” Let’s be clear; Jack was a Marvel Legend and DC Legend! I don’t believe possession of a major chunk of one’s life’s work gives one permission to rewrite history.

After this promising and proper due, with an exhibit and art of the original Eternals as Jack envisioned them, it all goes in reverse!

The plot, characters, and technology bear little resemble to Jack’s original run.

The plot was slow, jumbled, confusing, and lacked the breakneck action Jack was famous for.

8

Mark Evanier

JACK F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

2023 Comic-Con International Kirby Tribute Panel Held on Sunday, July 23, 2023 at Comic-Con International: San Diego Featuring [left to right] moderator Mark Evanier, Jeremy Kirby, Bruce Simon, Mark Badger, Jon B. Cooke, and (not shown) Paul S. Levine Transcribed by S.E. Dogaru, and copyedited by Mark Evanier and John Morrow • Photos by Chris Ng and John Morrow

[above] The 9th volume of Fantagraphics’ complete Pogo reprints goes on sale Summer 2024, edited by Mark Evanier. [right] Mark Evanier’s two-part biography of Jack, published in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1059–1060 (March 4 and 11, 1994). [next page, top] The program book for Jack’s surprise 70th birthday party at the 1987 Comic-Con International. [next page, bottom] While some ComicCon attendees could be considered strange desert people, these aren’t them—but instead, a 1980s animation concept by Jack.

MARK EVANIER: I look forward to this more than any panel at this convention. This is panel number ten for me at this convention; I’ve got four more after this one. [applause] This is my favorite because, first of all, it’s nice to be in a room full of people who appreciate Jack Kirby. People who appreciate Jack Kirby are some of the smartest, brightest people in the world. [applause] As many of you know, I spent twenty years of my life with Walt Kelly’s daughter. And when Roz Kirby passed away and I went to the funeral, I brought Carolyn Kelly with me. I introduced Carolyn to [Jack’s daughter] Lisa Kirby.

So we had the DNA of the greatest funny animal artist in the world meeting the DNA of the greatest super-hero adventure artist in the world. And I was thinking, if you could somehow clone these two things and cross-pollinate them, we’d grow a new Wally Wood. [laughter] So we are going to talk about Jack for as long as they let us have this room. Let me introduce you to the panel here, folks: this is Jeremy Kirby, Jack’s grandson. [applause] This is my longtime friend, and cartoonist, and Kirby expert, Mr. Bruce Simon. [applause] Another great artist, and another Kirby scholar, Mr. Mark Badger. [applause] This is the great comics historian and the author of probably the best book I’ve seen on comic book history—if you haven’t seen the Charlton Companion, get that book. That is one of the best researched books I have ever seen about comics.

This is Jon Cooke. [applause] And the attorney who represented Jack for a while, and later 10

represented the Rosalind Kirby Trust, and full disclosure, represents me, Mr. Paul S. Levine. [applause] We will be joined shortly by Tom King, who’s off somewhere polishing his many Eisner awards. [laughter] I will try to keep my opening remarks fairly brief, because we’ve got a lot of panelists here, but I want to read you—I got an e-mail this morning from Jim Van Hise. Is Jim here by any chance? Okay. I need my glasses to read the incredibly tiny type on this. “Over on Bob Beerbohm’s Facebook page, I mentioned your [Comics Buyer’s Guide] obituary for Jack, and we talked about how Timely screwed Simon and Kirby out of their royalties on Captain America. Someone posted he doesn’t believe that story because Jack never mentioned it in any interview, and claims it was just something Joe Simon made up. Perhaps something for your Jack Kirby tribute panel today?”

Joe Simon did not make that up. The fact that Jack never said it in an interview does not mean it didn’t happen. There’s lots of stuff about Jack Kirby that he never said in interviews. There were a bunch of quotes that I was fortunate enough to be present for, and was able to remember. One was his prediction for the future

the fact that some kid who was reading comics didn’t know what he’d done—that mattered a little bit, but what mattered more was his income, his ability to provide for his family that was harmed by the fact that he was not able to get the kind of deal that he felt he was entitled to, and that a lot of people later at Marvel would’ve given him gladly, if they’d been in charge at the time. Remember that the last straw that drove Jack away from Marvel in 1969, was a lawyer who basically said, “We don’t need you, anybody can do what you do. All you do is just draw what Stan told you to draw.” That lawyer not understanding what Jack did, was damaging to Jack and was also damaging to Marvel. Jack didn’t really care that much about people saying he was a great artist. He wanted people to recognize that he created properties, which at that time, he predicted would be worth billions of dollars. People laughed at him, and guess what they’re worth now?

Anyway, we have with us Jeremy Kirby. Jeremy, would you like to say anything about recent documentaries that are around?

JEREMY KIRBY: Yeah, absolutely. I would like to thank every single person in this room, obviously, for being here.

You guys are awesome, and it really inspires us to keep my grandfather’s legacy alive.

of the San Diego con. You know that one, right? And the story when he read in some fanzine of some kid who was taking over a Kirby comic like Captain America, and he wanted to do stories “in the Kirby tradition.” And Jack said, “The kid doesn’t get it. The Kirby Tradition is to create a new comic.” [laughter] And so I was there for that. I sometimes see people say, “Well, we can’t possibly know what happened between Lee and Kirby in those rooms, because it’s just those two men were there, and nobody else was there.” In the same way, “We can’t possibly know who shot Abraham Lincoln. You can’t possibly know, you weren’t there when Adolf Hitler allegedly did all those terrible things.”

There’s such a thing as history. If you don’t trust observers and scholars and data and things that were written contemporaneously, you’re more or less giving up the whole concept of history. One of the reasons that I have some of the viewpoints I have on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby—which I am finishing soon—is that I think I’m the only person alive who ever worked for both men. I spent an awful lot of time talking to them. And both of them were different men when they didn’t have a tape recorder running and a microphone shoved in their face in public. Stan Lee, when he was interviewed in public, was trying to project a certain image, not just so much for the fans, but for whoever owned Marvel at the time and would buy it next. This is an important thing to remember. People sometimes say, “What do you mean Stan never gave Jack his credit? In those Bullpen pages, he said Jack was a brilliant artist.” Yeah, but the people who ran Marvel at the time, the people who Jack counted on for a fair deal in his employment, did not understand what Jack had done, and what he had contributed to that company. And that was the thing that pissed Jack off. That was the issue, it was not 11

EVANIER: Yeah, he was a neat guy. I wish there was an interview someplace of Jack that captured his real sense of humor. The minute you put a camera on him, he froze up. He was very concerned about saying the wrong thing, and didn’t want to offend anyone. He’d tell us those stories when Roz and the kids were out of the house.

BRUCE: He was very funny. I mean, he had a very incisive wit, and mostly because he was such a terrific judge of character. He had dealt with a lot of characters.

EVANIER: Yes. Anybody else? Yes, John.

start that crusade, folks. [laughter] But they got along great. When Jack went to DC though, Steve Ditko sent him a letter, and it was a 12-page handwritten letter that just said, “You’ll be sorry.” And he told him all this—how much he felt DC had ruined the Creeper and the Hawk and Dove. Jack phoned Ditko, and they had a couple of long phone conversations about that. A lot of things that happened to Jack at DC, he went, “Ditko said this would happen. He was right about this.” They respected each other greatly. They didn’t talk politics, though. [laughter] Anyone want to add to that?

you guys really regret Jack never got to do?

MORROW [from audience]: This is for the hardcore Kirby fans up there. Is there a character or storyline that never got finished, that

EVANIER: I would like to have seen the real end of the Fourth World series.

SEVERAL PANELISTS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Fourth World, absolutely. [applause] EVANIER: I’d like to have seen the real ending to OMAC. I’ll tell you the thing that I wish I had done. This is a regret. In the period there where I was doing comics for Eclipse, DNAgents and Crossfire and such, Dean Mullaney basically said to me, “We’ll publish any comic book you want. If you think it’s commercial, we’ll gamble on it.” For a moment, I thought if we have the right budget, I want to go to Jack and say, ‘All right, Jack, I love “Street Code.” If you want, I will give you 25 pages a month at a decent salary. I will fund this to do Jack Kirby’s War Stories. We’ll print them in pencil. I will supervise the lettering, and make sure it’s professional and such. Nobody else will touch the stories. They will be exactly what you do, and you draw yourself. Draw yourself and your autobiographical stories.’ And I didn’t do it. I had personal reasons at the time; I didn’t want to get too deeply involved with Eclipse on some things. I really regret I didn’t do that because we would’ve gotten a couple of issues of work that would be the equivalent of “Street Code,” and kind of parallel what Sam Glanzman was doing with the “U.S.S. Stevens” stories.

We just posthumously gave Sam Glanzman the Bill Finger Award the other night for that work—[Sam] is a guy who saw the war and who didn’t write war comics. He used comics to tell what actually happened. Which is very different than how even guys who served in World War II, when they were asked to write war comics, usually didn’t tell what really happened. They told the comic book version of what had happened. Anybody else got an answer to that?

BRUCE: That’s a very good policy all around, by the way. [laughter] EVANIER: Yes, these days especially. Do you have a question?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, were there any of his World War II stories that really stuck out to you?

EVANIER: Jack was doing drawings in the Army. At one point, some senior officer called him in and said, “I have an assignment for you.”

And Jack said, “Oh! Is this going to be something where I’m going to draw the enemy spies in front of the enemy’s lair?” And the guy pulled out this onion skin-type paper. It was a drawing someone had done of the Seven Dwarfs having sex with Snow White. [scattered groans and laughs from audience] It was very tattered, and this senior officer—I don’t know if he was a general, or whatever he was— ordered Jack to redraw it. [laughter] Jack was a good soldier, he did what he was told. [laughter] He redrew this pornographic drawing— it was probably the only real pornographic drawing Jack ever did in his life, because he didn’t want to be demoted, or get sent to the front lines. And the officer thanked him. [Jack] said, “You know, it wasn’t a bad drawing, either!” [laughter] He told a lot of stories— Jack liked to tell Steve and me the kind of racy stories, the ones he didn’t tell to his kids.

COOKE: Just to quickly say, me and John [Morrow] did a book called Streetwise, which included “Street Code,” and Sam Glanzman’s

LEVINE: Or his wife. [laughter] 20

Onomastical

The Name Game Sample Headline A Partial Taxonomy of Jack Kirby’s Names, by Mark Peters

W

hen looking at the work of Jack Kirby, many aspects jump out—some of them literally.

His foreshortened figures are the ultimate 3-D. His mythic storytelling is propulsive 20th century religion. His cosmic perspective could turn an atheist into a believer. But there’s an easily overlooked aspect of Kirby’s work that is of a piece with comics history, while also displaying his penchant for storytelling and power: names.

I’m drawn to this topic because I am a Namor—er, namer.

where it’s hard to know who came up with what.

So, all these names will be from the 1970s, especially from Kirby’s early ’70s work at DC, when he created the Fourth World, a group of comics consisting of The New Gods, Mister Miracle, The Forever People, and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, plus other comics such as The Demon, OMAC, and Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth.

Some names will also come from Kirby’s return to Marvel in the mid-seventies, when he created The Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, and Machine Man, returned to his creations Black Panther and Captain America, and did a mind-blowing adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kirby wrote, penciled, and edited these comics, too.

I originally planned to look at all of Kirby’s names from this period—for characters, places, concepts, and gizmos. But that would have involved thousands of names, and I’m no hero. So I’m going to stick to names for characters, which is somewhat manageable. And I’m going to focus on some specific types of Kirby names that recur through the ’70s: names that spotlight character or appearance, respellings, allusions, alliterative names, and names packed with multiple meanings.

Gouldian Names

[above] Female Furies from Mister Miracle #10 (Oct. 1972). Left to right are Mad Harriet, Stompa, and Lashina. [next page] In addition to more Stompa from issue #10 [top], there’s Gilotina from Mister Miracle #8 (June 1972).

I name products, services, events, campaigns, etc. for companies that need a word nerd’s help cooking up the right moniker. As naming became one of the primary streams of my so-called freelance career, and then a full-time job, and then freelance again, I started thinking about Kirby’s names and how they can be understood.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m focusing on Kirby’s work in the 1970s. After co-creating the Marvel Universe in the ’60s, Kirby was naturally upset at not being given the credit and money that went to Stan Lee, a great editor and hype man who was hardly hands-on in doing the actual comics. So Kirby went to DC Comics and began writing, penciling, and editing his own work.

For this period, and the return to Marvel that followed, Kirby was pretty close to a one-man band, so we know the names came from him, unlike the Lee/Kirby stuff, 23

The most common category of Kirby names might be those that reveal character or describe that character’s appearance; names Kirby himself identified as in the Dickensian tradition of Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. Of course, such names have a tradition in comic strips and books as well, primarily due to Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, which Kirby surely read and enjoyed. Gould’s characters—such as Tess Trueheart, Sam Catchem, Pruneface, Flattop, and Breathless Mahoney, are precursors to all that follows.

Many 1970s Kirby characters are named with creative accuracy. Dr. Bedlam, foe of Mister Miracle, is an evil doctor who creates bedlam. Mad Harriet of Mister Miracle’s Female Furies is a wild-haired warrior who is crazy. New Gods protagonist Orion’s pal Lightray is almost literally a ray of light—he’s based on Balder from Norse mythology, and is cheerful and friendly, where Orion is conflicted and grumpy. Mister Little from Black Panther is a little person, while Stanga from New Gods #6’s back-up is a hermit. You get the idea.

On the stereotypical villain side of things, Albert Von Killowitz is a Nazi war criminal. Ugly Mannheim is self-explanatory, as is Baron Von Evilstein. You can definitely see the influence of Kirby’s war experience in some of these names. It’s hard to blame a Jewish man who helped liberate a concentration camp for some stereotypically evil German names.

Kringey Creetins and Other Respellings

In the omniverse of brands, this is a common method of distinguishing a product and making a name clear while also trademarkable. Think about Lyft, Flickr, Reddit, Getir, and Krispy Kreme.

Two minor Machine Man characters are examples:

Gallery

Conspired Art

Conspiracies in Kirby’s work, with commentary

by Shane Foley [right] Fantastic Four #66, page 4 (Sept. 1967) In a comic universe jam-packed with secret societies and conspiring cabals, Kirby here added yet another one with ‘the Bee-Hive’. Unbelievably complete pencils begin with the evocatively designed ‘Transfer Grid’ (which I presume has steps on the far side for poor Alicia to descend), then reveal the masterminds. Dominating personalities are represented by Kirby with powerful physical frames. It’s interesting to follow Kirby’s plot notes—how things important to him (why Hamilton wore a helmet, how Alicia was affected by the hum of the place) are ignored by scripter Lee, who instead pushes the drama and mystery of these scientists, who had conspired to seem, to the world, to be dead. [next page] Strange Tales #141, page 10 (Feb. 1966) This sequence is so over-the-top, it would do Macgyver proud. Far less complete pencils than the previous page, superbly inked by Frank Giacoia; who would know Kirby was drawing and plotting quickly when he thought this jail escape through? Or had he watched something recently—a movie or TV show—which got his creative juices going? Even with The Fixer (eventually revealed to be working for THEM/Hydra) getting sheeted up to look like a blob, Kirby gets movement and action into his body. And aren’t those gadgets convincing? [page 28] Tales of Suspense #93, page 8 (Sept. 1967) More very complete pencils from the same month as the FF page above.

Note how perfectly the angle of the baddie in panel two not only gets great emotional turmoil into the character, but that angle leads the reader’s eye, when he’s ready to go to the next panel, perfectly to the face in the screen there. The AIM agents in panel three are clearly seen, but act as buffers for the eye, refocussing attention onto the screen. Panel five foreshadows one of those times when Lee’s scripting was at odds with Kirby’s intention, and to my mind, it doesn’t work. Kirby clearly wants Cap and Agent 13 caught short by the baddie behind them in panel five, whereas Lee had Cap ‘hearing’ the baddie and... take a look at page 9, first panel. It comes across as really silly.

(That page was shown in TJKC #43.)

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Joe & Jack...

...get exposed!

Incidental Iconography

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

by Sean Kleefeld

R

ather than my usual analysis of Jack Kirby’s character designs, I’m going to take a look at something a little different: the cover of Headline Comics #37, circa 1949. If you’re a regular reader of The Jack Kirby Collector, it’s likely a cover you’re already familiar with: a photo of Jack—seated, wearing a trench coat and wielding a pistol—being apprehended by a uniformed police officer, portrayed

by Joe Simon (although you can’t see his face). Photographic covers in American comics are comparatively rare, and seeing Jack and Joe insert themselves into the action even more so, so the question at hand is: where did this come from?

Headline Comics began in late 1942 with “for the American Boy” as a tag line to highlight the intended audience of the Junior Rangers spotlight. Not surprisingly, given the time, they frequently fought badly stereotyped Japanese villains. Once World War II ended, however, the book struggled to find a new footing.

It wouldn’t be until Joe was able to sell the idea of taking over and switching the book to a series of crime and gangster features that things began to improve in 1947.

Joe and Jack took over the book with #23, and tried to showcase the “true famous detective cases” angle by depicting the Valentine’s Day Massacre on the cover and making the lead story “The Last Bloody Days of Baby Face Nelson.” Their approach was successful enough to last through to 1956 when the title finally ended, well after Joe and Jack were regularly contributing to it.

We get to the cover photograph by virtue of the two’s success.

They not only successfully repeated their crime/gangster template over at Hillman with Real Clue Crime Stories, but they also invented the nascent but quickly popular romance genre of comics with My Date Comics. By 1947, they were working on several crime and romance titles and keeping themselves (and other creators working for them!) very busy. This is why Headline Comics switched to using photographs instead of illustrations on the covers beginning with #36; Joe thought it might be faster and more efficient. And while it may have been faster compared to a slower artist that worked for them like Jack Katz, it most certainly would have been a more laborious and time-consuming process than having Jack Kirby bang out a cover! Which is likely why the experiment only lasted for eight issues.

This was an attempt at cost-cutting, so the people shown on the covers are not models or actors. They’re co-workers, friends and family, using makeshift props and borrowed or otherwise cobbled-together costumes. The guns are toys— probably cap guns; there were multiple manufacturers at the time selling many variations as “exact replicas of the real thing” —kept around their studio for drawing reference, which is probably why you never see more than two guns in any of the photo covers. It’s always one revolver and one automatic on the photo covers, because they only ever needed one of each to draw from.

Jack’s costume here, of course, is a simple trench coat, fedora, and gloves. If they weren’t his, it wouldn’t have been at all difficult to come by 34

problem child

The Two Faces of Loki

by Will Murray

[right] Detail from Avengers #1 (Sept. 1963). [below] Splash page from Journey Into Mystery #88 (Jan. 1963). [next page, bottom] A newer, longer-lasting look for Loki from the “Trial of the Gods” in Journey Into Mystery #116 (May 1963).

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hanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, Loki has become popular in a way that neither Stan Lee nor Jack Kirby could ever have imagined back in the early 1960s when they dredged him up from Norse mythology and made him the perennial arch-foe of their version of Thor. Give actor Tom Hiddleston credit for that.

As a personality, Loki has evolved far beyond the one-dimensional trickster god he was when the God of Mischief debuted in 1962.

I was reading Journey into Mystery back in the days when Marvel’s Thor debuted. Although Loki was an intriguing and appropriate villain with an unique costume design, I must confess that I quickly grew tired of him. He was simply overused. If he wasn’t battling Thor directly, he was indirectly antagonizing him by motivating or tricking various and sundry lesser villains into going at the God of Thunder at his behest.

When Lee and Kirby depicted him, Loki was interesting, but for a period in 1963 and into ’64, under Lee’s editorship, other writer and artist teams resorted to him more often than not. It got so that every other issue, and sometimes several consecutive issues, involved the sly and sneaky provocateur.

I was as excited as any ten-year-old baby boomer in the Summer of 1963 when The Avengers and The X-Men simultaneously debuted. They came out on the same day, so it was quite a feast of Lee/Kirby superheroics.

While the X-Men debuted with a never-before-seen nemesis, Magneto, the Avengers were brought into being when an exiled Loki, up to his usual tricks, telepathically influenced the events causing the individual future members into hunting the Incredible Hulk.

Logically, Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man, and the Wasp really didn’t need any excuse to pursue the Hulk.

He was a known menace. But since their efforts were meant to culminate in recruiting the Hulk to the newly-formed team, he had to remain somehow blameless.

At the time, I remember being disappointed that the Avengers did not also introduce a cool new super-villain. Even though Loki had only been around for a year or so by the Summer of 1963, I was already thoroughly sick of the god of mischief.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see the wisdom of the Lee/Kirby choice of Loki to kick off the Avengers series. If you were a reader of Marvel Comics, he needed no introduction, and his motivations were well-established. In that sense, he was the perfect instigator.

Muy Loki

In reviewing the chronology of Loki appearances, I was surprised to discover that when Kirby drew him in Avengers #1, it was during the period where Joe Sinnott was using him in the regular “Thor” stories. Other than drawing the covers, Kirby hadn’t been associated with 36

Foundations

Here’s a never-reprinted Simon & Kirby’s story from Justice Traps The Guilty #4 (June 1948). Art restoration and color by Christopher Fama.

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THE CONVOLUTED SAGA OF A.I.M. ne of the less well known, but more significant comics of the Marvel Silver Age, was Sgt. Fury #13, 1 because it established a relationship between Nick Fury and Captain America as far back as World War II. This issue was published in December 1964, several months after Captain America was rescued from a frozen state of suspended animation in The Avengers #4, dated March 1964.

Shortly thereafter, Captain America would be featured in his own ongoing series begin3 ning in Tales of Suspense #59.

Nick Fury was brought into the modern Silver Age timeline in Fantastic Four #21 dated Dec. 1963, 2 and got his own series in 1965 in Strange Tales #135. 3 Now a colonel, Fury was the head of SHIELD, an origination inspired by the popularity of the James Bond films. SHIELD, of course, had to have an adversary similar to Bond’s nemesis SPECTRE. This would be Hydra, whose serpent-like green clad minion shares the space of Kirby’s Strange Tales cover illustration along with Nick Fury. The malevolent Hydra agent dominates the artwork, and though we do not know who is operating the scanner that exposes Nick Fury’s anatomy, we immediately get the sense that Kirby will take us on a journey of futuristic hi-tech action.

Initially, Hydra was said to be a creation of a nondescript businessman named Arnold Brown, but when Brown is killed, we would eventually discover that organization reemerging under the leadership of Nick Fury’s WWII enemy Baron Strucker, with the help of Captain America’s diabolical foe, the Red Skull. Over the next several months we would see various plots and subplots weave and interweave between issues of Strange Tales and Tales of Suspense. I will focus mostly on Tales of Suspense because Kirby was consistently handling the plotting and art

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OBSCURA

Barry Forshaw

A regular column focusing on Kirby’s least known work,

by Barry Forshaw

Barry Forshaw is the author of Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide and American Noir (available from Amazon) and the editor of Crime Time (www.crimetime. co.uk); he lives in London.

[below] Black Magic #23 and #27, both from 1953.

pushed back by a skeletal arm—had a typically eye-catching Kirby splash panel in which the glazed-eyed bearded painter has his brush arm guided by a hooded death figure behind him. As so often in the Black Magic series, it’s the splash panel which makes the impact, although the story is well written. Nevertheless, the final panel—in which the painter realizes that he has foreseen the death of his subject—does not really go for impact. Even in this pre-Code period, Simon and Kirby did not seem to aspire to those final panels in the EC horror stories, so full of the shocking impact that the tale required. Nevertheless, like the entire run of Black Magic, it’s one for Kirby connoisseurs. It’s ironic that the title itself came under fire from the censors who would successfully bring down all horror comics, both in the US and the UK (the British 68-page reprints of Black Magic, which had quite a respectable run, became very collectable when we Brits realized that horror comics had vanished completely in terms of UK reprints).

HORROR ON THE CANVAS

There was a particular balancing act that Jack Kirby performed better than any other illustrator—and it was one that he was obliged to perfect as the Comics Code tightened its iron grip on the comics industry. While the likes of vampires and werewolves were completely forbidden, editor Stan Lee was well aware that comics readers still responded well to bizarre monsters—and hence the long reign of such creatures in the post-Code era.

While these grotesque creatures had to stay the right side of the Code, they could still have a menacing appearance (when, that is, they were not ridiculous, as in the case of the notorious Fin Fang Foom with its elongated torso like a gigantic dachshund).

Jack Kirby’s gift for the grotesque carried him through these years until the revelatory Marvel super-hero era. But there are those of us who really did miss Kirby in full-on horror vein—as, for instance, in Prize Comics’ Black Magic #23 (April 1953) in which Kirby could indulge in a then-acceptable horror trope (one subsequently not to be found when the Code kicked in): a menacing skeleton. “Those Who Are About To Die”—in which a painter unconsciously creates a canvas showing the death of a woman, in which she is

FELINE MENACE

Still with Black Magic—let’s take a look at #27 (or as the book read: Volume 4, No. 3, from November/ December 1953). “The Cat People” shares a title with the famous Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur film chiller of the 1940s, which was noted for its clever use of misdirection and discretion to bolster its shocks. And although those two adjectives could be applied to most of the run of this particular Prize comic (in which actual horror erupted only sporadically), they don’t really describe the action here, which is more in the reader’s face. With its striking splash panel of a monstrous-looking feline woman, her face coloured red, her hands playing the child’s game of Cat’s Cradle, this tale has the hapless hero finding himself lost in a wild and desolate place, and being rescued by a very strange looking older woman who offers him fruit and suggests he spend the night with her and her daughter. In the Jacques Tourneur film, sex was at the heart of the cat-transforming anti-heroine’s problems with sexual desire turning her into a monster, but that’s not in the cards here, although there is a suggestion that the daughter is distinctly seductive. When 56

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[right and next page] Kirby pencil art from Demon #2 (Oct. 1972). “Hermetic” is defined as something relating to an ancient occult tradition encompassing alchemy, astrology, and theosophy, which would seem to apply here. [next page, bottom] Splash page from Tales of Suspense #92 (Aug. 1967). [below] Robert’s stained glass window, based on the Kirby/Sinnott art from the cover of Jack Kirby Collector #43.

Masonic and Hermetic Symbolism in The Incredible Hulk,

by Robert Guffey

“We are entering savage new times.”

—David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, 1983

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1. Jack Kirby’s Secular Gods

n my kitchen hangs a stained glass window of Jack Kirby’s Silver Surfer. The window was created for me by a California artist named Christine Monteath a few years ago. When the early morning light hits the window in just the right way, you might (for a moment) think you were sitting in a church pew beneath a stained glass representation of the archangel Gabriel from Christian mythology.

Once I had seen what wonders Monteath could create out of stained glass in her attic studio, it occurred to me that the Silver Surfer would be the ideal subject for a project like this. A stained glass window would, of course, be the perfect recognition of Jack Kirby’s original intent: to create a pantheon of “new gods,” a phrase considered heretical by some (a phrase that, five years after Kirby dreamed up the Silver Surfer in a modest basement studio on Long Island, became the title of Kirby’s greatest creation of all, the New Gods, the cornerstone of his groundbreaking Fourth World series).

In this third decade of the 21st century, Kirby has at last succeeded in his audacious goal. After all, the most popular and lucrative films of the past two decades have featured mythological beings created (or co-created) by Kirby: Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Avengers, The Black Panther, Captain America, The Eternals, Groot of The Guardians of the Galaxy, The Hulk, Iron Man, Nick Fury and the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Spider-Man, Thor, and The X-Men—an unlikely pantheon of secular god-heroes re-imagined as multi-billion dollar blockbuster franchises.

Considering that Kirby’s phantasmagoric creations have become the backdrop of our Novus ordo seclorum, known and loved across disparate cultures all over the globe, I sincerely felt that Kirby’s posthumous success should be memorialized in an appropriate manner: the aforementioned stained glass window, which represents the ascension of Kirby’s characters into the realm of pure mythology.

As a Freemason, I’ve always been intensely interested in the power of secular myths. One of Masonry’s main purposes, historically, has been to act as a bridge between numerous cultures and religions. No organized religious group has control of any recognized Masonic Lodge, within the walls of which no theology is consid58

ered more valid than any other.

This is one of the central reasons Freemasonry has been demonized for so long by the Catholic Church and other organized religions. Wild horror stories about Masonry’s nefarious occult agenda still abound—on the Internet, on photocopied flyers stapled to telephone poles, on crude pamphlets left on the windshields of cars bearing Masonic bumper stickers, and on church bulletin

boards. Secularism can be a scary prospect for a strict system based on autocratic theology. All theocracies are ruled by spreading fear of The Other among their followers. When the devotees of the world’s major religions at last realize how much they have in common, the less power the theocrats will hold over the minds and spirits of the masses.

Membership in Freemasonry requires a belief in a “Supreme Being,” but even an atheist can “agree to an energetic force that permeates the universe,” a “force [that] is not sentient or involved in the lives of men in a conscious manner,” as succinctly stated by a pseudonymous Freemason on a blog called The Burning Taper,

to create an entire comic book story without a script or any preliminary sketches whatsoever.

In the 2007 documentary Jack Kirby: Storyteller, comic book writers Len Wein and Marv Wolfman described watching Jack Kirby work: WOLFMAN: Len and I, when we were kids, went to Jack’s house and we watched him draw… I think it was the end of the Galactus storyline [in The Fantastic Four].

WEIN: The most astonishing natural artist I’ve ever seen in my life! He projected it from his head.

WOLFMAN: It was all there. The whole page was there.

WEIN: I always tell this story, because to this day it blows my mind. There’s a famous issue of Tales of Suspense, a splash page for a Captain America story... [in #92, below] Steve Rogers is in an airport.

He’s not in costume. He’s standing there with his portfolio the shield is hidden in, and there are people walking in front of him in several layers, people walking past him and behind him. He’s waiting for someone to pick him up. Behind that is this huge panoramic window. You can see planes taking off and coming in. I watched Jack draw that. He didn’t lay anything out. He started drawing in the upper lefthand corner and drew that page to the bottom right. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life!

Kirby biographer Mark Evanier, author of Kirby: King of Comics, elaborates further on Kirby’s creative process: “He wouldn’t, like a lot of other artists, plan out the whole thing and figure out his perspective. At the end he would spend some time balancing his darks, his dark areas, his black areas, and tweaking little parts of the drawing, but the basic structure of the drawing just came out of nowhere.”

Kirby’s son, Neal, succinctly describes his father’s working method as follows: “He would just start drawing. It’d be like somebody who, writing a novel, immediately went to a final draft without doing a rough draft.”2 James Joyce (no stranger to esoteric symbolism, as evidenced by his 1939 mythological masterpiece Finnegans Wake) once referred to himself as an “amanuensis,” i.e., “one who takes dictation.”3 Joyce’s implication was that his literary output resulted from a source of knowledge much higher than his own meager consciousness (it might even be fair to describe this source as “an energetic force that permeates the universe,” not unlike The Source that features so prominently in Kirby’s Fourth World series). I would not be surprised if Kirby approached his creative process in the same way as Joyce.

By all accounts, Kirby’s method of producing

which is dedicated to examining Masonic issues facing the 21st century.1 Accepting this definition, an atheist could feasibly swear to the oaths of Freemasonry; therefore, even the “godless,” even those not dominated by organized religion, can pursue a spiritual life.

For this reason, the concept of “secular mythologies” holds special interest for many Freemasons. As I’ve written in the past (e.g., in my first book, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory As Art Form), a great many influential works of literature are imbued with Masonic and hermetic symbolism. Such symbolism can be found in the plays of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Samuel Beckett; the novels and short stories of Jonathan Swift and Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker; the films of Luis Buñuel and John Huston, Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas; the graphic novels of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Hugo Pratt, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison; the international bestsellers of Thomas Pynchon and Umberto Eco, Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling. The psychologist Carl Jung might say that the power of such symbolism has a great deal to do with the unwavering hold these works continue to exert upon the consciousness of the mass audience.

Perhaps it should not be a surprise, therefore, that these symbols are also inextricably linked with Jack Kirby’s modern pantheon of secular deities.

2. Kirby As Amanuensis

I’ve touched upon Kirby’s lifelong obsession with occult matters in past articles such as “The Morning of the Mutants,” which was published in Fortean Times #277 (July 2011). Kirby’s knowledge of esoteric symbolism was the result of either devoted, post-graduate level scholarship or a powerful imagination unconsciously—effortlessly?—plugged into a free-floating multiverse of primal symbols.

Many of Kirby’s colleagues have commented on his uncanny ability 59

[below] The Hulk from Jack’s mid-1970s Valentine’s Day sketchbook for wife Roz. [next page] Is there a deep meaning to the images Jack combined in his collages, or was it just more random and instinctual?

an improbable amount of material, month after month, seemed to be rather similar to the “automatic writing” sessions employed by such devoted surrealists as Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault. According to his family, Kirby produced most of his work in the middle of the night when everyone else was asleep and dreaming; meanwhile, Kirby, the amanuensis, was awake and dreaming, his brain paradoxically resting while on high alert, his hand moving across his modest drawing board like that of a Victorian medium locked in a selfinduced hypnotic trance. Perhaps this alone explains the hermetic symbolism embedded in Kirby’s most intriguing creations such as The Strange World of Your Dreams, Black Magic, The Challengers of the Unknown, The Fantastic Four, The Mighty Thor, The X-Men, Fourth World, Spirit World, The Demon, OMAC, The Eternals, and Captain Victory and His Galactic Rangers… and, of course, The Incredible Hulk, the subject of our current exploration.

3. The Strange Case of The Incredible Hulk

The Incredible Hulk debuted in May of 1962 at the height of the Cold War, the peak of the ongoing battle between East and West, Communism and Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The tenor of the times, perhaps even more so than now, was forged by a struggle between polar opposites. Christian dualism permeated American life from the top down, affecting all human endeavors, including religion, politics, sex, psychiatry, labor relations, everything. Psychotic dualism was the order of the day.

Stan Lee, editor not only of The Incredible Hulk but the entire line of Marvel comics throughout the 1960s, cites Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as one of the main literary inspirations for the creation of the Hulk.4 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which centers around a doctor who attempts to obliterate his evil side through scientific experimentation, reflected the Victorian obsession with extreme polarities. John Fowles, author of the 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, has this to say about the significance of Stevenson’s novel as it relates to the bipolar mind: This—the fact that every Victorian had two minds—is the one piece of equipment we must always take with us on our travels back to the nineteenth century. It is a schizophrenia seen at its clearest, its most notorious, in the poets I have quoted from so often—in Tennyson, Clough, Arnold, Hardy; but scarcely less clearly in the extraordinary political veerings from Right to Left and back again of men like the younger Mill and Gladstone; in the ubiquitous neuroses and psychosomatic illnesses of intellectuals otherwise as different as Charles Kingsley and Darwin; in the execration at first poured on the Pre-Raphaelites, who tried—or seemed to be trying—to be one-minded about both art and life; in the endless tug-of-war between Liberty and Restraint, Excess and Moderation, Propriety and Conviction, between the principled man’s cry for Universal Education and his terror of Universal Suffrage; transparent also in the mania for editing and revising, so that if we want to know the real Mill or the real Hardy, we can learn far more from the deletions and alterations of their autobiographies than from the published versions… more from correspondence that somehow escaped burning, from private diaries, from the petty detritus of the concealment operation. Never was the record so completely confused, never a public facade so successfully passed off as the truth on a gullible posterity; and this, I think, makes the best guidebook to the age

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detest men who think with their fists.” And yet at the same time Banner’s genius has produced “the most awesome weapon ever created by man,” a weapon so potentially destructive in nature that even one of Banner’s colleague deems it to be “too dangerous” to test. Already, even on pages one and two, the Victorian “tugof-war” referenced by Fowles is evident.

According to James Shelby Downard, the late controversial author of such essays as “King-Kill/33°” (1987) and “Sorcery, Sex, Assassination, and the Science of Symbolism” (1993), the hermetic and Masonic traditions seek to reconcile binary opposites, “the perverse or negative phase of the two basic life-forces, the Yetzer ha-Ra and Yetzer ha-Tov.” Downard explains this outlook further:

very possibly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Behind its latter day Gothick lies a very profound and epoch-revealing truth.5 By 1962, in many respects, not much had changed in the Western mind. The typical American accepted without question the “public facade passed off as the truth,” not unlike the average Victorian who pretended to sympathize with the plight of Dr. Jekyll while secretly rooting for the evil Mr. Hyde. This typical American went about his life, ignoring the ugly truths around him or her, in a manner that could easily be described by Fowles as schizophrenic, neurotic, censorious, confused, and gullible. All of these Victorian qualities are wrapped up in the outer life of The Incredible Hulk’s protagonist, a Reluctant Hero if ever there was one, Dr. Bruce Banner.

Banner is a top flight physicist, a man of peace, whose brilliant mind is owned by the U.S. military. On the very first page of issue #1 [below], General “Thunderbolt” Ross calls Banner “a milksop” with “no guts.” On page 2, Banner tells his fellow scientist, Igor, “I

This theological dualism holds that there are two antagonistic forces (male and female) which become one. Though the Yetzer ha-Tov influences is deemed to be “good” and the Yetzer ha-Ra is said to be “bad,” there exist no absolutes or value judgments in Scottish Rite Masonry, whose dogma contends that “equilibrium is the harmony that results from the analogy of contraries.” 6 This last quotation is Downard’s slightly distorted paraphrase of a passage from Eliphas Levi’s 1854 text, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual: “Everything lives by movement, everything is maintained by equilibrium, and harmony results from the analogy of contraries; this law is the form of forms.”7 The Incredible Hulk, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is a quasi-hermetic/quasi-Masonic satire (disguised as a super-hero adventure) that concerns itself with what happens to an entire society when the “analogy of contraries” becomes upset, and what must be done to balance these opposed influences.

The blatant Masonic symbolism is evident in the very first panel of the debut issue. Banner’s “awesome” and “dangerous” invention is called, in this initial panel, “the incredible G-bomb.”

Most readers would assume that the “G” stands for “Gamma,” since the weapon Banner has created is named “the Gamma-Bomb,” but I suspect there’s a hidden purpose behind relating Banner’s brainchild to the letter “G.” As any Freemason knows, “G” has been the main symbol of the Brotherhood since at least the eighteenth century, no doubt even earlier. Most scholars believe “G” stands for “Great Architect of the Universe” or “Geometry.” According to Albert Pike, who created the higher degrees of Scottish Rite Freemasonry 61

time killer

[this page and next page, top] Kang debuts in Avengers #8 (Sept. 1964). [next page, bottom] From Fantastic Four Annual #2 (also Sept.

1964), Rama-Tut and Dr. Doom face a conundrum.

The Kang Conundrum

by Will Murray

W

hen I was reading Marvel Comics back in the 1960s, there were developments I looked forward to reading, but which never happened. Blissfully unaware that the Impossible Man had been banned from the pages of The Fantastic Four by editor Stan Lee, I waited in vain for his return—as I did for the Molecule Man (another favorite FF foe of mine), and the original Dr. Strange, who battled Iron Man in an early issue of Tales of Suspense [#41, May 1963], only to escape the Golden Avenger, never to be revisited by Lee and Kirby.

Although Iron Man once encountered Dr. Doom in the pages of The Avengers, what I really wanted was to see them face off in a solo story by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but it never happened during the 1960s. When it did finally take place, Lee and Kirby were not involved, and I was no longer reading The Invincible Iron Man. I can only dream of what might have come about if those armored antagonists had clashed earlier.

Previously, I’ve written about the failure of Lee and Kirby to develop arch-mutant Magneto in the pages of The X-Men. But there is another favorite villain of mine, who also was more or less abandoned creatively by the Lee and Kirby team, but developed by succeeding creators, no doubt in ways neither Lee or Kirby ever envisioned.

Here I refer to Kang the Conqueror.

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS IN #8, PRINT OR DIGITAL Kang debuted inISSUE Avengers and even though I FORMAT! was only eleven years old at the time, it was obvious to me that he was a futuristic Dr. Doom, with a really cool blue faceplate and outlandish high-tech outfit that contrasted sharply with Doom’s medieval armor and monk’s cowled robes.

Up until that point, the Avengers were still sorting out their ever-shifting roster. They had not yet acquired a primary antagonist. After Loki had accidentally triggered their formation, he ignored the Avengers and went back to bedeviling Thor, leaving the Avengers strictly alone.

For the second issue, the Space Phantom proved to be a one-shot enemy, and Sub-Mariner was simply guest-starring in issue #3 to stir things up, as he did in practically every Marvel super-hero book up to that time. #89 Baron Zemo dominated KIRBY the firstCOLLECTOR year or so of The CONSPIRACIES! Darkseid’s Foourth World palace Avengers, but he was aKIRBY holdover from World War II intrigue, the too-many attempted overthrows and of Odin, why Stan Lee hated Diablo, Kang & Kirby really Captain America’s arch-enemy, thecontradictions, murdererSimon of Bucky swipes, a never-reprinted S&K story, MARK EVANIER’s Barnes. Once he was disposed of, that was that, as MARV far asWOLFMAN, Lee WonderCon 2023 Kirby Tribute Panel (with PAUL S. LEVINE, and JOHN MORROW), an extensive Kirby and Kirby were concerned. pencil art gallery, and more!

In between Zemo’s first (84-page appearance and his vanquishFULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 ing in issue #15, Kang dropped in from 40th century (Digitalthe Edition) $4.99 in an effort to conquer 20th century Earth. Here, it was

Villainous Conviving

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