Jack Kirby Collector #91

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR NINETY-ONE

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FALL 2024

Above TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Orion TM & © DC Comics

WE’RE CELEBRATING MY GREATEST VICTORIES IN THIS 30TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE OF TJKC! DON’T ASK, JUST

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“Greetings, creep culturists! For my debut

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issue, I, the CRYPTOLOGIST (with the help of FROM THE TOMB editor PETER NORMANTON), have exhumed the worst Horror Comics excesses of the 1950s, Killer “B” movies to die for, and the creepiest, kookiest toys that crossed your boney little fingers as a child! But wait... do you dare enter the House of Usher, or choose sides in the skirmish between the Addams Family and The Munsters?! Can you stand to gaze at Warren magazine frontispieces by this issue’s cover artist BERNIE WRIGHTSON, or spend some Hammer Time with that studio’s most frightening films? And if Atlas pre-Code covers or terrifying science-fiction are more than you can take, stay away! All this, and more, is lurching toward you in TwoMorrows Publishing’s latest, and most decrepit, magazine—just for retro horror fans, and featuring my henchmen WILL MURRAY, MARK VOGER, BARRY FORSHAW, TIM LEESE, PETE VON SHOLLY, and STEVE and MICHAEL KRONENBERG!” (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

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CRYPTOLOGY #2

CRYPTOLOGY #3

CRYPTOLOGY #4

The Cryptologist and his ghastly little band have cooked up more grisly morsels, including: ROGER HILL’s conversation with our diabolical cover artist DON HECK, severed hand films, pre-Code comic book terrors, the otherworldly horrors of Hammer’s Quatermass, another Killer “B” movie classic, plus spooky old radio shows, and the horror-inspired covers of the Shadow’s own comic book. Start the ghoul-year with retro-horror done right by FORSHAW, the KRONENBERGS, LEESE, RICHARD HAND, VON SHOLLY, and editor PETER NORMANTON.

This third wretched issue inflicts the dread of MARS ATTACKS upon you—the banned cards, the model kits, the despicable comics, and a few words from the film’s deranged storyboard artist PETE VON SHOLLY! The chilling poster art of REYNOLD BROWN gets brought up from the Cryptologist’s vault, along with a host of terrifying puppets from film, and more comic books they’d prefer you forget! Plus, more Hammer Time, JUSTIN MARRIOT on obscure ’70s fear-filled paperbacks, another Killer “B” film, and more to satiate your sinister side!

Our fourth putrid tome treats you to ALEX ROSS’ gory lowdown on his Universal Monsters paintings! Hammer Time brings you face-to-face with the “Brides of Dracula”, and the Cryptologist resurrects 3-D horror movies and comics of the 1950s! Learn the origins of slasher films, and chill to the pre-Code artwork of Atlas’ BILL EVERETT and ACG’s 3-D maestro HARRY LAZARUS. Plus, another Killer “B” movie and more awaits retro horror fans, by NORMANTON, the KRONENBERGS, LEESE, VOGER, and VON SHOLLY!

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Contents

THE

KIRBY’S GREATEST VICTORIES! UPS AND DOWNS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 the editor on Jack’s biggest wins A FANTASTIC FORAY. . . . . . . . . . . . 3 James Van Hise’s Kirby interview

ISSUE #91, FALL 1994-2024

C o l l e c t o r

A PERSONAL LOOK. . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 the 2024 WonderCon Kirby Panel, with Rand Hoppe, John Morrow, Ray Wyman, David Schwartz, Glen David Gold, and Jeremy Kirby THE MAKING OF THE AOJK. . . . . . 17 how Ray Wyman’s Kirby bio came to be JACK FAQs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Mark Evanier on his superb bio, Kirby: King of Comics KIRBY OBSCURA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 devils, maniacs, and slaughter!

PRIVATE VICTORY. . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 the editor shares his personal Kirby successes after 30 years of TJKC ART de TRIOMPHE. . . . . . . . . . . . .38 a gallery of triumphant Kirby art THE AL FATHER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Adam McGovern returns to talk with writer Al Ewing INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY. . . . . 50 the design of Captain Victory JACK KIRBY GETS HIS MARVEL COMICS ARTWORK BACK. . . . . . . 52 and local news was all over the story “DIFFERENT”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 a pivotal Simon & Kirby story KIRBY KINETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 the influence of Golden Age Cap KIRBY’S GREATEST TRIUMPH?. . . 73 you never forget your first COLLECTOR COMMENTS. . . . . . . . 78 Cover inks: VINCE COLLETTA Cover color: GLENN WHITMORE COPYRIGHTS: Big Barda, Blue Beetle, Boy Commandos, Darkseid, Demon, Dr. Fate, Female Furies, Forager, Green Lantern, Guardian, Justice Society of America, Kamandi, Klik-Klak, Mr. Miracle, Mr. Sacker, Newsboy Legion, Orion, Sandman, Scott Free, Shilo Norman, Spirit, Superman, The Losers TM & © DC Comics • Bucky, Captain America, Defenders, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Eternals, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Ikaris, Magneto, Nick Fury, Red Raven, Red Skull, Replicus, Silver Surfer, Skrulls, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, Taaia, Thing, Thor, X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Blue Bolt TM & © respective holder • Scooby-Doo TM & © Warner Bros.

Entertainment • Captain Victory, Egghead, Interpretations of God, Soul Love, Space Collage TM & © Jack Kirby Estate • Ookla, Thundarr the Barbarian, Yay! Team! TM & © Ruby-Spears Productions • “Different”, Black Magic, Boy Explorers, Bulls-Eye, Stuntman, Young Romance TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estates

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(above) Page 8 pencils from Captain America #103 (July 1968)—a much better repro than we had back in TJKC #3 in 1994.

The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 30, No. 91, Fall 2024. Published quarterly (for 30 years—we made 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

Ups and

Downs by editor John Morrow

W

hen asked who won the Sky Masters lawsuit between Jack Kirby and DC Comics editor Jack Schiff, Wally Wood reportedly said, “Stan Lee.” Indeed, that may well have been Stan’s greatest victory, for if Jack hadn’t been blacklisted at DC and shown up at Marvel when he did, it’s a safe bet the Marvel Universe as we know it today wouldn’t exist.

And while we don’t know what Jack would’ve gone on to do instead, he likewise definitely benefited from that happenstance— because at that moment in the comics industry, there weren’t many other avenues for him to pursue. So he knuckled down and gave it his best, as always.

There’s a valuable life lesson to be learned there: even in the midst of adversity, if you hang in there, an even greater outcome is often waiting just around the corner. Jack certainly saw that lesson play out a number of times throughout his life: having a stroke of misfortune, followed by an even greater victory. Just reflect a moment on the circumstances that led to what I feel were Jack’s biggest wins:

winning credit for him through an eleventh-hour settlement with Marvel in 2014.

It’s hard to believe that was ten years ago. Even harder for me to fathom is that with this issue, I’ve turned the corner on thirty years of producing this publication, doing my best to achieve my goal of celebrating Jack’s life and career, and making sure the world knows what he did.

That 2014 legal settlement with Disney was the apotheosis of what I set out to do back in 1994 when I launched the Jack Kirby Collector, and I’m glad my magazine—and I personally, through being deposed, and participating in an amicus brief presented to the US Supreme Court—was able to play a small part in helping Jack finally get creator credit and remuneration for his family. This magazine is the result of a lot of fellow Kirbyphiles who share that same goal, and I’m thankful for every one who contributed to making sure Jack gets his due as the greatest comics creator of all-time, as he so rightly deserves.

Each of Jack’s wins had their ups and downs. But his greatest victory—winning the girl of his dreams, Rosalind Goldstein—looks to have been one victory with no downside, as you’ll see in this issue’s recollections of their life together. Expanding his family with the birth of his four children and subsequent grandchildren, as well as widening his ever-growing circle of friends and fans, was a continued blessing his entire life.

Getting to spend the last three decades plugging away at this magazine has likewise been one for me, with far more ups than downs. Thanks for taking this wild ride with me, and joining me on this 30th anniversary victory lap! H

• Growing up in poverty in the Lower East Side of New York, he went on to score early hits in comics, first with Captain America, and then following up with another mega-seller, Boy Commandos.

• Getting drafted in World War II, he survived combat (and nearly having both feet amputated) before returning home to comics, hitting a wall at Harvey before finding unprecedented success with Joe Simon pioneering romance comics.

• Experiencing the heartbreaking failure of Simon & Kirby’s Mainline Comics company, and the aforementioned legal dispute over the Sky Masters newspaper strip, the fallout from which resulted in his co-creating the Marvel Universe in the 1960s.

• Dealing with frustrations working with Stan Lee and Martin Goodman at Marvel in the 1960s, which led to him moving to DC Comics to launch the Fourth World, apparently the most creatively fulfilling period of his career.

• Having promises broken at DC Comics, his Fourth World epic cancelled, and returning for an anticlimactic stint Marvel in 1975, which resulted in him finding a much more rewarding career in animation, just when he needed it most.

• Being mired in a fight with Marvel Comics over the return of his original artwork, while launching Captain Victory and the direct market for comics, getting an opportunity to conclude his Fourth World saga, and seeing a resurgence in support for him and his legacy that played a big part in resolving that original art battle.

• Passing away in 1994, which led to a pension from Marvel Comics for wife Roz, and a legacy that continues three decades later, through books and publications like the one you’re reading now, and the creation of the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center.

[Throughout this issue, I’m highlighting major victories in all areas of Jack’s life and career. Since winners deserves a trophy, I’ve co-opted the above statuette of Jack, produced by Bowen Designs in 2003, to serve as ours. But for me, the below card Joe Sinnott drew to commemorate receiving my Inkpot Award at the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con, was as good as any award! Jack certainly won big having Sinnott as his inker for so many years, as did I, getting to know a generous, wonderful man like Joe.]

Long after his passing, the ups and downs continued, with Jack’s family fighting a contentious and protracted legal battle with Marvel Comics—including several rulings not going their way—before posthumously 2

A Fantastic Foray

A circa 1986 interview with Jack about the Fantastic Four, conducted by James Van Hise, with thanks to Jim Van Heuklon for supplying the original transcript.

CO-CREATING A UNIVERSE

JAMES VAN HISE: We discussed earlier how you’d made a presentation of the Fantastic Four, the characters, to Stan Lee. JACK KIRBY: Who made the presentation?

you’ve got a good story problem. And in that kind of an atmosphere, you can’t fail, because the person reading it will relate to it, and understand immediately what the problem is. The problem, sometimes, isn’t the super-villain. It’s your own super-strength. It’s your own irritability. The Thing would go berserk as much as the villain.

He’d smash everything up. And I’d feel the same way.

VAN HISE: You did.

KIRBY: Yes. There was a reason for that, because at the time the big topic was radiation. We had just made a bomb, and at the time I was looking to create [supermen], and you’ll find that in all my work, you’ll see the times are reflected there. I don’t contrive stories.

I don’t give you B.S., and I’m not giving you fairy tales. At that time, radiation was the big subject, and the Fantastic Four came out of those times. Actually, it still is the big subject. You got Chernobyl [the Russian nuclear power plant disaster on April 26, 1986]... what’s going to happen with Chernobyl? You got a radiation cloud going all over Europe. Nobody knows the extent of it. Nobody knows the consequences of it. We were faced with the same question. Hiroshima was still fresh. All the bomb experiments were still fresh. They were testing atom bombs.

VAN HISE: In the early stories, you had the Thing a grimmer character, and then his anger seemed to wear off.

KIRBY: All right. A few weeks ago, I saw an article where a baby was born with two heads. Now, think of the consternation of these two growing up with one body.

VAN HISE: There seems to be a parallel between the relationships between the FF and the work you were doing earlier for DC with the Challengers [of the Unknown].

KIRBY: I try to vary my characters. They may be stock [characters].

I won’t deny that. That may be a formula, a personal formula, that I use, unconsciously, just like you might find them in the Newsboy Legion, or in the Boy Commandos. You’ll find that there’s a tough character, and a handsome character. I feel that we’re basically different, in appearance, certainly not in temperament. We all have the capability of doing what each of us does.

In the case of the Fantastic Four, they all adjusted in their own way. Reed Richards was a well-adjusted guy. He could take it in stride. Ben had a different problem. If Reed Richards had been the monster, he might have behaved differently. I can’t share your feelings… I can only feel my own. I can only project my own and hope that other people accept me.

VAN HISE: So once the FF were created, it didn’t deal as much with how their powers were created as with how the powers changed their lives.

KIRBY: That’s the idea, to dramatize that kind of a background with good stories. In other words... I did Sky Masters, a daily strip dealing with space. And I had to dramatize prosaic objects.

VAN HISE: In the first few issues, you did them as superheroes who were different, in that they didn’t have costumes yet. They were ordinary people with extraordinary powers.

KIRBY: I’ve always dealt with ordinary people. Captain America was an ordinary person, until they experimented on him.

VAN HISE: If you were going to encapsulate each of their personalities...

KIRBY: [Reed Richards] was scholarly, but he was caught in an extraordinary situation. Of course, he would react in a very scholarly way. He would use his powers as a brainy guy would. Reed Richards was a brain—a very cool character. Ben Grimm couldn’t be cool. He had to handle an extreme position. He had a face that was certainly extraordinary. People react to that. You may be a very nice guy, but if you have a monstrous face, you’re going to make a very poor first impression. Reed would react differently than Ben Grimm, because he had a different problem. He might have almost poked fun at himself.

Being able to stretch almost a quarter of a mile… he might have found that amusing.

Ben Grimm might have found that annoying.

VAN HISE: But still, those first few issues...

KIRBY: Yes... it has to have time to grow.

And there are changes to be made. As you take that time, you begin to think about the connotations of what you’re doing, and all these different things begin to enter your stories. You try to make your story saleseffective. You gotta think of sales—not only for good stories, but of sales. You have a duty to the publisher, you have a duty to your own prestige, you have a duty to your own credibility, and I had that duty, just as in any job.

The Thing was just an ordinary guy, he went to college, became a flyer, and he had a conventional background, like anybody else. Now he was a Thing. He was a well adjusted Thing, but still, he had the problem of looking and being like a monster, and he had to live with that. And, of course, at times that would irritate him. How’d you like to go into a bowling alley and have the ball crumble in your hands? That would be irritating. If I were super-strong, it might not be all beneficial. And so the Thing had that problem of looking like a monster, and having this super-strength. And therefore,

VAN HISE: In the early days of the FF, before Reed and Sue got married, you had a story going involving the Sub-Mariner.

Was there ever any talk of having the relationship go the other way, having Sue and Namor getting more involved, instead of Sue marrying Reed?

KIRBY: There were veritable discussions. If 3

I’d made the decision to do that, it would have been me. I would formulate the events of the Fantastic Four. I would formulate it in accordance with balance. In other words, if I had one type of story in one issue, I would see that it didn’t remain static—that there was a change in the succeeding issues, so readers would always wait for the next issue. Developments might not be what they expected. And I think that was a sales value in the book.

the Silver Surfer that he couldn’t go into space anymore—and he couldn’t. Galactus could rob him of those powers.

Galactus is a difficult character [to use] because it’s an awesome concept.

I had an atomic cannon in Captain America in 1941.* They almost burned me as a witch!

[Kirby may be thinking of his atomic cannon from 1940s Blue Bolt #3, left, which presages the first sustained atomic reaction at Fermi Lab, Chicago, Illinois on December 2, 1942.] I was the first one to put Hitler on the cover. The Nazis used to send me letters: “We’ll be waiting for you downstairs.”

VAN HISE: Was that direction ever considered, having Sue become more involved with Namor?

KIRBY: No. Because, in ordinary terms, she would have gotten a divorce in a year, living with Namor under the water—under the Bermuda Triangle, maybe, or wherever he had his home. I felt that she would have been happier with Reed Richards. And she was. She was an average girl. She, too, found herself in an extraordinary circumstance. I think it’s hard for a girl to shoulder invisibility. Girls like to be visible.

VAN HISE: What made you establish Doctor Doom as the FF’s supreme villain?

KIRBY: Because he’s a supreme egotist. He’s as intelligent as they are. A guy with a lot of class, too— and he knows it. That’s his nature.

He’s also an innovator in his own way. Think of all those ingenious traps he’s gotten the FF into. He’s a dark reflection of the heroes. H

VAN HISE: In the story “A Visit With The Fantastic Four” [FF Annual #3, 1965], you actually dealt with readers writing in and saying that they felt [she] wasn’t an important part of the group.

KIRBY: She was a very important part of the group. The Invisible Girl represents something that we’re looking for. Invisibility is a very powerful military conception. I can assure you that if invisibility became an actuality, that there would be a war. And the nation that had invisibility would be at war the day that it made it practical. In her own way, she wielded a variety of powers, because we don’t know the connotations of invisibility.

* S&K AND THE FBI

by Richard Kolkman

I couldn’t find an “atomic cannon” in any issue of Captain America Comics, so I think Kirby’s memory may have been conflating things/events here. Remember—the story of a woman lifting the car bumper off a kid in the street (as the inspiration for the Hulk) was recalled two ways by Kirby in interviews: he saw it in person (The Comics Journal #134, February 1990, pages 81–82), and he read about it in the newspaper (UCLA Daily Bruin interview, January 22, 1988).

But we know Kirby wasn’t trying to embellish or lie—he just had a crazy creative mind.

In the 1987 interview reprinted in TJKC #65, Jack also mentioned he included an atom bomb in a Captain America story, but the first actual “atom bomb” story in Captain America Comics was in issue #51, and not

by Kirby. However, the 1944 science-fiction short story “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill, published in Astounding Science Fiction, described details of a secret atomic bomb, and was published while the US atom bomb was under development and top secret, which resulted in a visit to the author by the FBI. This was a pulp story, and Kirby, an avid pulp reader, may have heard about the FBI’s visit to Cartmill after World War II had ended.

Also, the FBI did visit them: In Joe Simon’s My Life in Comics biography, page 110, Joe recounts how American Nazis were upset about Captain America socking it to Hitler and Germans (there was a large NYC “bund” of Germans that had rallies at Madison Square Garden with a giant portrait of George Washington, left).

The publisher’s address would’ve been in the comic’s indicia for the crazy Nazis to find them, and they told them to “pick a lamp post” (ie: for being hanged)—so the FBI visited S&K for that.

VAN HISE: In the Challengers of the Unknown, you used similar characters, or archetypes, to those you used in the FF, but in the FF you gave them super-powers. Why? KIRBY: Super-powers are a show gimmick. Why does a comedian decide to drop his pants on the stage? Or why does a dancer come out and do a certain type of dance? Why breakdancing? The answer is attention. You want the readers’ attention. If you can’t get it with ordinary people, you get it with extraordinary people.

Doctor Doom actually had nothing wrong with him. His was a mental problem. He was a super-egotist. All he had, probably, was a scratch on his face, but he figured, “Why don’t you have a scratch on your face? Why should I be the only one with a scratch on my face?”

And that thought got to him, to the point where he had to wear a steel mask. Actually, he’s very handsome. That scratch was etched on his brain forever, even if he took it off.

I place a balance. I play for fairness. That’s how I got Galactus and the Silver Surfer, because I could no longer draw the Fantastic Four against ordinary human beings. I began to look for fairness.

I came up with Galactus and it scared the heck out of me, because I was up against God. I was up against a god, and there was something beyond the Fantastic Four—and the Silver Surfer, remember, is almost biblical in terms. He is a fallen angel. Galactus said to 4

A Personal Look GETTING THE GIRL

[top right] We neglected to mention that we swiped this panel’s name from Jeremy Kirby’s 2014 book, filled with wonderful Kirby family photos. It’s still available on Amazon.com. [above and right] Jack and Roz Kirby, circa 1940, and how the stoops at Banner 3 Road in Brooklyn, New York look today. [below] Courtesy of Phil Geiger, here’s a photo of the panelists [l to r]: Ray Wyman, Jr.; Rand Hoppe; John Morrow; Glen David Gold; David Schwartz; and Jeremy Kirby.

The Jack Kirby: A Personal Look panel, held Easter morning, March 31, 2024, at WonderCon in Anaheim, California. Featuring moderators Rand Hoppe and John Morrow, and participants David Schwartz, Glen David Gold, Ray Wyman, Jr., and Jeremy Kirby. Transcribed and copy-edited by John Morrow.

RAND HOPPE [in a hoarse voice]: Hi, everybody. It’s 10:30, and we’re gonna start the panel. I’m Rand Hoppe, the director and founder of the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center.

We are a virtual nonprofit, devoted to preserving and fostering the knowledge of Jack’s work. I just wanted to thank the folks at Comic-Con for supporting us for our booth here at WonderCon and at the San Diego Con; they’ve been very generous over the last few years.

I have a cold, thus the mask. So I’m going to pass it over to John Morrow. He and I had the idea that we were going to be at the show, and figured we should have a Kirby panel. And we certainly feel like it’s the kind of panel where Mark Evanier would be, but he’s not here. So we wish him all the best and hope he gets better [from his ankle injury]. And that’s pretty much all I can say right now.

JOHN MORROW: Without a throat lozenge. [laughter] So as Rand said, I’m John Morrow. I’m the publisher for TwoMorrows Publishing, and we publish a magazine called The Jack Kirby Collector. September 17, 1994 was the day I shipped the first issue. So this is our 30th year, and we’ll be doing a 30th anniversary issue.

It’ll be [released] September 18, 2024 because that’s the Wednesday that books show up in comics shops, but we’re within a day [of the actual anniversary].

Welcome on this very gloomy, rainy Easter morning. We’re glad you guys came out so early. We’re going to do our best to brighten things up a little bit, hopefully, talking about two of, I think, everyone up here’s favorite people, Jack and Roz Kirby. Rand, that picture you have up right now. What is the background [behind] that picture [above]?

HOPPE: We’re so thankful that we called Tracy [Kirby] up when Tom Kraft and I were in California. We spoke to Tracy [Jack Kirby’s granddaughter], and she’s like, “Come on, come on and visit!” We had the scanner, because we scan original art and other items to build our digital

5

archive. So we went to Tracy’s place, and she pulled out photo albums and envelopes of photos.

And we just kind of went whole hog on all these photos that she had. This photo [top left], as far as I can tell—there’s like a 2% question that I have? But it does appear to be the stoop of the building where Jack first moved to, when he left the Lower East Side, and he moved to Brooklyn, which is where he met Roz. So there they are, the two lovebirds on the stoop of the building where they met, so it’s pretty great.

Should I go on to the next one...?

MORROW: Sure, we’ll do our introductions here. Rand assembled some nice photos for our intros. Jeremy Kirby is Jack’s grandson, and Tracy, whom we just spoke about, is his sister. We’ve got some nice little shots of Jeremy here [left]. Jeremy is gonna talk about some great memories he has of his grandparents.

Ray Wyman, Jr., to my left, is the author of The Art of Jack Kirby, a wonderful, and probably the first major Kirby biography that was ever done. That came out in 1989, 1990...?

RAY WYMAN, JR: 1992.

MORROW: Boy, are my years off! Ray has a lot of memories of the interviews he did with both Jack and Roz to assemble that book.

Next up is a very close family friend of the Kirbys, David Schwartz. David will tell you how long he has known them, how he first met them, and some very interesting interactions he’s had with them over the years.

Glen David Gold is a great author. He [wrote] a book called Carter Beats the Devil, and I have seen that book appear in the background on more sitcoms, [laughter] when people are doing like, you know, Manhattan apartments for the sets. It’ll be on the bookshelves there, so check it out the next time [you watch New Girl]. Glen is a noted author. He’s also a very well versed Kirby historian and commentator, and has amassed a wonderful bunch of Kirby art over the years. He’s a Kirby art collector, so he’ll have some interesting tales for us as well.

And then that’s me, and this gentleman here with a cold, and we’ve got a couple more nice shots with Jack and Roz. And that’s what we wanted to do with this panel today. We called it Jack Kirby: A Personal Look. We’re not here to talk about who did what, and who deserves credit for what, and that kind of thing.

We really just want to share personal memories of two wonderful people, Jack and Roz Kirby, who we all just loved. And if you’re in this room, I’m assuming you loved one or both of them as well.

HOPPE: This photo was one that we scanned from the family album at Tracy’s house. And then talking to Ray, Ray was like, “Oh, I’ve got some photos, I want to send you some photos.” So here [left] are two photos that look like they’re from the same photo session.

Jack’s got a pistol. [laughter] MORROW: That’s his Jimmy Cagney look.

HOPPE: And since it’s Easter, there’s at least two photos of Roz giving Jack the bunny ears. [laughter] That one and that one [above].

That’s all the visual accompaniment for this particular show. Thanks, folks.

MORROW: To get things rolling, I’d like David to start, if he doesn’t mind. David, what was your first encounter with Jack and/ or Roz? And how in the world did you get from there to here today, knowing him as well as you did?

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DAVID SCHWARTZ: I met Jack for the first time at a Baycon, actually, which is a San Francisco convention.

And I had been talking to, I believe, it was Al Gordon, who’s an artist you may know. Al and I were talking with a group of people, and Jack basically came up and was talking with them. And next thing you know, we were all gonna go to lunch. Jack was saying he was hungry, and we basically all went to lunch. I was probably 19 years old, I could not believe that I was going to lunch with Jack Kirby. I sat next to him throughout the lunch. And that is not at all how I got to know him. [laughter] When I really got to know him, is because I was friends with a couple of people he knew: Mike Thibodeaux, who was his last major inker, on Captain Victory. Mike and I were friends, and Mike was going up there because he was very close with Roz and Jack.

So I really got to know him better when I was going up there with Mike over the years. And then I basically was up there every couple of weeks visiting, and eventually became a really good friend of the family. Then after Jack passed away, Roz was concerned, I believe initially, that people would kind of not be interested anymore in knowing her or hanging out with her, a lot of the comic book people. That was not true at all, and we did a lot of visiting and a lot of bringing people up there. If somebody really wanted to meet Roz or wanted to buy some original art, Mike Thibodeaux and I would go up there—because Roz was not comfortable with people she didn’t know, being up there by herself. And that’s really how I became integrated into knowing them, and becoming friends with Jack and Roz during those years.

in there?” [laughter] And I don’t have an answer for that. But that is a good memory that I have, of going up there and going, “This wasn’t here last week.” And that was just a memory of mine. I’m not sure it relates to them, other than it was at their home.

MORROW: That’s fascinating. And I know I’ve had enough weird coincidences producing the Kirby Collector for thirty years, that I am just amazed at some of the weird things that show up, out of the blue, at exactly the right time when I need them for something, and it’s just inexplicable.

SCHWARTZ: I want to just conclude this thought: at the time, Jack and Roz, from the 1960s, were—if people found them and were interested in Jack’s art, they invited people into their home. And this is long before there was really any benefit to them financially for doing that.

People weren’t coming up there to buy original art, they were just coming up there because of their excitement and their thrill of what Jack’s work was doing during those years. And they were so welcoming, and so nice, and there are so many stories of professionals and other people today who went up there, and you know, Roz made them lunch. And they were just such warm and

MORROW: Are there any particularly poignant memories you have of interactions with Jack, or with Roz after Jack was gone?

SCHWARTZ: A couple of things about Jack: Jack used to, whenever everybody came up to the house—and as I said, both Mike Thibodeaux and I would bring up people sometimes who were buying art, and they were obviously fascinated with being up there. Jack had a hallway, and the whole house was full of his artwork.

And he would take people on this tour where he would basically go through the hallway and everywhere else, and show them the artwork and tell them stories about each piece that he had. And it was usually a pretty similar story, because he was used to culling around and doing it. And I remember, right after Jack passed, when people would come up, I was thinking to myself, “I’ve heard those stories so many times, I can do that tour!” I don’t believe I ever did. But that was something I remember very well.

One thing I want to note, which is really just a memory I had. I mean, I don’t believe it’s accurate at this point, because I don’t believe in the supernatural.

But after Jack passed, they had a flat file out there in the room that had the artwork in it. I knew that flat file in and out, because I was up there a lot looking through art, and when collectors were maybe interested in buying something, I was looking through it. And for about two years after Jack passed, every time I was up there, I would find at least one, if not more, pieces of artwork in those flat files that I had never seen before; at least, I didn’t remember seeing them. And I always thought to myself, “How are these new pieces getting 7

[above] Jack and David Schwartz in Jack’s studio, early 1980s. [below] We first showed this actual page from the tabloid rag Weekly World News from April 16, 1996, back in TJKC #13. Perhaps this fine piece of journalism explains how Kirby art kept showing up, seemingly from nowhere after Jack’s passing. Do you believe in the supernatural now, David? © The Weekly World News

[below] Page 3 pencils from The Demon #16 (Jan. 1974), which could send any impressionable tenyear-old to therapy!

Marvel’s Greatest Comics #51 (right, from Sept. 1974) reprinted 1967’s Fantastic Four #68, and Origins of Marvel Comics likewise debuted in 1974. [next page] 1979 Space Collage by Kirby.

wonderful people. We’ve all heard, “You don’t want to meet your heroes”? These were heroes you wanted to meet. They were just wonderful in terms of their ability to be inclusive of anyone who was a fan of Jack’s and really cared about his work.

MORROW: Great, David, thank you. If you don’t mind, we’re going to jump down to Glen. Glen, if you can recount it, what was your first interaction with anyone with the last name “Kirby.” [Glen laughs] GLEN DAVID GOLD: So, it dovetails with Dave’s story today. My first exposure whatsoever—I got three stories in the same month, when I was about ten.

Origins of Marvel Comics. A reprint of the Fantastic Four in Marvel’s Greatest Comics at the peak from FF #68 [right]—The Mad Thinker, absolute peak of the sort of, like, chrome-looking Kirby. And then also, I got a copy of Demon #16, from my therapist. [laughter]

And I saw, “All three of these things are by the same guy?”.

So I saw Jack in 1961, 1968, and 1974.

I couldn’t believe this was all the same incredibly intuitive and interesting art by the same creator... I knew I had to know more, and that kind of set me off into collecting Kirby art.

As far as in-person, I was at the San Diego Convention in 1993, which turned out to be Jack’s last. And I was standing by his table, and he just sat down on the other side of it, and there was nobody in line to talk to him. I got a good five minutes with him, and I’m hoping I still remember every minute of it. But the shorthand version of it is, I asked him very quickly, how he felt about his art selling for so much money, when to a large extent he couldn’t really participate in the sale so much. And he said to me—I can’t really do his voice justice, but imagine asking the Thing that question, and this gravelly, wonderful voice just said, “Kid, you ever hear of a guy named Peter Paul Rubens?” [laughter] It took me a minute to kind of catch on: “Well, that guy, when he was making art, couldn’t sell his art for a suit. Now, you can’t touch a Peter Paul Rubens for less than two million bucks. If people are saying my art is that valuable, it means I’m like Peter Paul Rubens, but with one difference: I always kept my family fed.” [applause] Yeah, it was a very elegant, lovely answer to give some kid who asked that question.

Very shortly thereafter, I was wondering where to get artwork from him. Occasionally an ad showed up in the Comics Buyer’s Guide, and I looked at one, and it was Dave, I believe, who had taken out an ad with some 1970s art. Dave invited me to go to the Kirbys’ house. It was shortly after Jack had passed, and I think it was about six weeks later, so I actually got that tour [from David]. I remember you and Mike would stand and say, “Jack used to say something here...”.

SCHWARTZ: So I did get to do that tour! [laughter] GOLD: Yeah! “We can’t do it justice. But it was something like this...”. I got the docent tour, and it was quite wonderful. It’s also when I met Roz for the first time, and she was everything you say; a very welcoming and lovely woman.

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MORROW: The first time we went to the house—this was after Jack passed away, and Roz invited me and my wife Pam up, and of course you’re terrified you’re gonna say something wrong or embarrass yourself. We walked in, and Roz said two things: “Are you hungry?

And did you bring your bathing suit?” [laughter] And I guess with so many years of anytime anybody comes over, that was a thing you do; you jump in the swimming pool, right? Who here swam in the Kirby’s pool? [laughter as numerous hands raise from the audience and panel] Well, there you go.

drive a car with my grandfather and grandmother, driving down to Comic-Con, it was just an amazing time. The house really came alive a few days beforehand, and it was wonderful.

MORROW: We interviewed your sister for the magazine, and she showed us some elementary or middle school projects that she did, that her grandfather contributed some drawings for. Did Jack ever help you out with any school projects? And also, these things keep popping up from other family members—nephews, cousins, second cousins seem to have gotten Bar Mitzvah drawings or things like that. Do you remember anything?

SCHWARTZ: My kids swam in the Kirbys’ pool. When my daughters were seven, eight years old, they were swimming in Roz’s pool. Not sure if my son swam in it, but my two daughters I know did.

JEREMY: Tracy was much more studious. She took her projects a lot more serious than I did. [laughter] I was a “C” student through and through. But yeah, there’s a lot of family members, friends of family members, especially recently, that have been going through attics.

I don’t know why. He would draw a lot of things for people’s weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, Bat Mitzvahs. There was one recently, it was an Iron Man that he drew back in the ’60s. It’s amazing, I can’t believe they are finding it now. But yeah, he’d do that quite a bit for anyone that asked. I wish I had asked more. But normally at Hebrew School, Sunday School, he’d come up and do, you know, little doodles for everyone. That’s probably where I saw them the most.

MORROW: Well, why don’t we make that a nice segue into the only one up here whose last name is actually “Kirby.” Jeremy, how many times did you swim in that family pool?

JEREMY KIRBY: Not enough. [laughter] The pool was great, the whole house... it’s fun listening to everyone else’s memories. To me, the house was almost like a third person. You know, it’s like... I still have warm feelings about the home itself, as much as I do with my grandmother and my grandfather. So when you bring up the pool, it’s just so many good memories. Walking through the house, I saw the ugly couch back there. That’s gold—I’d give anything to be able to sit back on that couch now, but at the time, you don’t think it’s special.

But no, it’s great. I still have artwork. Most of the work I still have is not what you would think. It’s not Marvel, it’s not DC. It’s stuff like a space collage [above]. It’s stuff that I have fond memories of. So I still remember where it was on the wall, what room these things were in, how I would show people these different things. So it’s kind of that, it’s a feeling you get—so yeah, it’s all good memories. Some of the fondest memories were in summertime, right before the San Diego Comic-Con, just going to the house. We’d usually have Julie Schwartz there, and we’d always drive with him, he’d

MORROW: We very fortunately got sent a copy of some drawings that Jack did for his rabbi, as “Super Rabbi.” [laughter] I ran those in a book I did called Old Gods and New, and it just blew my mind when those came in. Things just keep popping up out of nowhere— like the guy didn’t have enough to do all day long drawing comics pages, right? He was doing collages, doing personal drawings for everybody who asked, it seemed like.

Ray, I want to know how you and Jack first happened to cross paths, but also, did Jack ever do any drawings for you? I’ve never really asked you that.

RAY WYMAN, JR: No, and I never asked. You know, I never was for9

ward. I was actually kind of hired as a writer. And so my story is very non-Kirby. I used to work in commercial writing, as a business writer, and I did a lot of work for investors and stuff like that. And I got to know this guy named Kurt Koch, who owned a company, who was also an investor in a company called Artnet. And if you were around the [San Diego] Con around 1989, 1990, you might have seen the Artnet booth, and Glen Kolleda with these little pewter statues and stuff like that. And that was the group that hired me to write The Art of Jack Kirby. There’s a really long story I’m not gonna get into right now, but basically, I was selected out of a group of writers. There were, I don’t know, five of us that went through an interview process, and Jack picked me. And they said, “Okay, great, you’re going up to the Kirby house.” Now, I never saw Jack, never saw pictures of him, vaguely knew about him. But I was going to learn about him, because I was a journalist, to write this book. I was definitely aware of the artwork, and I was definitely aware of his career and Marvel and stuff like that. So I was prepared.

But the thing is, when you hear these stories off in a distance, and you’re not really indoctrinated into the comics field, you have this imagination. You know, it runs away with you a little bit, and you think you’re going over to a castle, or a mansion, you know, or something like that. And that’s kind of what I had in my mind. I drove my 1977 beat-to-hell Cadillac up to Thousand Oaks, and went to the bottom of the road. And it started to look like, “Wow, this is like a regular neighborhood,” you know? [laughter] And I drove the Caddy up there, and there was this vertical driveway that from Jack’s street, went straight up. You know, what I always thought was kind of crazy, is he went down to the street every Sunday to pick up the Sunday [Los Angeles] Times for as long as they lived there. That’s

a hell of a walk, like picking up a log, you know, going down the street to get [the paper].

So anyway, I walked up the street, out of breath.

Sorry to say, I was not very prepared for the hike I took, and got up to the house. And lo and behold, it’s a ranchstyle house. It’s like a regular house, you know, and I’m like, “Whoa.” So I go over and I knock on the door, and this little guy goes, “Hey, you must be the writer.” [laughter] My appointment was at noon, and Roz came out, “Oh, you’re here!” And I was expecting, like, an assistant—somebody with an attitude, maybe, too much coffee or something like that? No, it was Jack, right there.

And they brought me into the kitchenette to sit down [for lunch] and talk about the book and what they wanted.

And it was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which I like for lunch. And Sanka, which I do not like. [laughter] My mom drinks Sanka.

MORROW: But you drank it anyway... [laughter] WYMAN: Yeah, and gratefully too. You know, the funny thing too is, the way you guys talk about Jack? It’s like, yeah, she asked me if I brought my swim trunks. Like I was gonna do that, you know? [laughter] “You want lunch, and did you bring your swimming suit?”

And then I got the tour. And I want to ask the panel: What was your favorite art piece in the tour? I have one. Anybody?

GOLD: I love the Dream Machine.

WYMAN: Oh, the Dream Machine, yeah. You know what mine was?

God with his back turned against everybody. Do you know that one?

It’s this huge... there’s one of God’s face.

MORROW: That was my favorite, with those eyes that just follow you everywhere you go.

Ray and Jack in an outtake image from the Art of Jack Kirby photo session.

WYMAN: That was really cool. But there was this other one where God has his back turned to everybody [below]. And there’s all these humanoids with no hair and naked, and they’re in groups. Some of them have erected a pyre. Some of them are fighting with each other and killing each other. Some of them are sitting down and having a seance, I guess. And there’s one guy in the foreground, and he’s yelling at God. And I was like, “Wow, what’s this about?” And [Jack] goes, “Oh, well, God turned his back on everybody. We want his attention, but we’re never going to get his attention because he has to turn away from us because he’s a father, he’s got to let us go and do our own thing.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up; I was just like, “Whoa, this guy is deep.” [laughter] And actually, after that tour,

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Rand, and I got a copy of Demon #1 signed at that show in 1972, or 73, whenever it was, at the Phil Seuling Con. And in front of me, there was a guy with Captain America #1 getting his signed. And there was also a guy right in front of me who had Spider-Man #42. And he gets up to Jack with his Spider-Man #42, and Jack looks at it and goes, “But I didn’t do this.” And the kid or whoever it was in line goes, “I don’t care.” And Jack signed Spider-Man #42. [laughter] MORROW: That is awesome. Well, I don’t think we could make it a personal remembrance of Jack without some mention of war stories. Okay, not just on the panel—who in this room ever heard Jack tell a war story? [several hands raised] And maybe we need to turn to Ray for this one, because you actually interviewed Jack, getting him on the record for his war stories. And some of them you seem to feel like, maybe were actually true? [laughter] Jack was a great storyteller.

I thought, “Oh, I am in so much trouble.” I’d never interviewed anybody. Keep in mind, all the work I had done before was about entrepreneurs, guys who owned businesses, corporations, and stuff like that. I’d done a lot of financial news, did a lot of newsletters about companies, all kinds of investors and stuff like that.

And to be suddenly turned on to a creator like this with so much depth—you can tell in five minutes, you know, if you’re talking to somebody with deep thoughts, and Jack was like that right off the bat. So yeah, that started my three-year journey to get The Art of Jack Kirby done.

MORROW: I’m going to turn to Rand here, who probably wasn’t prepared for this, but your own personal first interaction with Jack—you’ve not really told this very frequently, I don’t think.

HOPPE [left]: No. Fifty years ago, I went to the Phil Seuling Comic-Con in New York. And if I understand my memories correctly, there was an anteroom off the ballroom that was all Kirby. That’s where Jack was set up. And I did go and I went into that room with my pal.

I said I was 13. But yeah, we went in there and [Jack’s son] Neal was there, Roz was there, there was all kinds of activity and art set up on tables. And my friend and I were just absolutely gobsmacked by being able to stand there and watch Jack draw. And we never asked him a question or spoke to him. [laughter] There was nothing intimidating about it, but we were in such awe, that we just enjoyed the heck out of the experience. So that was the first time that I had been around Jack, and there were a few other similar experiences. There was [1975’s] Miami Con where I got my New Gods #1 signed, and I had Neal Adams sign a Green Lantern/Green Arrow comic. It was like, Jack’s gonna be at it, I lived in Fort Lauderdale, I’m gonna go to this show, right? And, yeah, it was great. I mean, I was such a fan. If he was gonna be somewhere and I could go, I would go.

SCHWARTZ: Can I add to that? I was there as well,

WYMAN: Yeah, there’s a couple of them I think were actually true. You remember the one where Jack’s unit is on the side of the road, and [General] Patton rolls up and stops near them? And he looks up and goes, “What are these guys doing here? They’re supposed to be dead.

They’re messing up my map.” [laughter] Now, I don’t know how true it is. But I know that Patton was rather flamboyant. He was the guy with the shiny helmet [below]. He actually did polish his helmet. The dude did do that, [and] he wore the ivory handle guns and stuff.

The guy was flamboyant as hell, as proven by history.

So the idea that the guy would be stopped and yelling at the guys who are in front of him, saying, “What the hell are these guys...?” There’s that, and then there’s the story about getting shot at with an 88 [German 8.8cm Flak anti-aircraft gun, bottom]. Anybody remember that?

This is [like] the scene in Saving Private Ryan where they’re behind a brick wall and the brick wall is vanishing, because they’re using an anti-aircraft gun and it’s an 88 long barrel gun with great big old shells. He described that to me. He said, “Yeah, they were shooting 88s at me.” And he also described high-speed mosquitoes going by his head. I mean, there’s some stuff in there that was just like, “Whoa,” you know?

But there were other ones that are a little bit more fun, like the Wagner guy. Anybody remember that, with the piano, that he’s being held at gunpoint by...?

SCHWARTZ: Didn’t he tell some of the stories in the Our Fighting Forces comics?

MORROW: There’s one called “Kill Me with Wagner.” [Our Fighting Forces #151, Nov. 1974] WYMAN: Right, the one with the piano.

SCHWARTZ: There was also one about a race where two different soldiers were racing. And I believe I heard at one point the Jack had said something relatively like that happened. You know which one, I think it’s...

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[left] Shane Foley sent in this image of a John Buscema layout page for Savage Sword of Conan #76 (May 1982). Though it clearly has no Kirby art on it, and Jack had moved on from mainstream comics by that point, someone decided they didn’t care, and got Jack’s signature on it, subsequent to it being drawn. How many non-Kirby items did Jack autograph in his lifetime?

[below] “Kill Me With Wagner” pencils from Our Fighting Forces #151 (Nov. 1974). [next page] Jack knew his German weaponry, as shown in these pencils from Our Fighting Forces #152 (Jan. 1975).

MORROW: “Mile-A-Minute Jones.” [Our Fighting Forces #159, Sept. 1975] Yeah, and supposedly those “Losers” stories were at least somewhat semi-autobiographical. I mean, he took liberties with things and stuff. But I hear accounts of some of Jack’s war stories, and there’s one in particular, where I’m like, “This sounds ridiculous.”

He’s on the front lines. He’s getting shot at and all of a sudden, the commanding officer comes up behind him, grabs them, and goes, “You guys go get on that truck.”

And they took him somewhere, two miles away from the front line. And there was Bing Crosby and...

SEVERAL PANELISTS: Ava Gardner? No, Marlena Dietrich!

MORROW: ...yeah, Marlena Dietrich putting on a little song and dance show. And they’re sitting there covered in blood and mud, just miserable, because they’ve been out in the woods for a week, and they’re hungry. But they made them go watch this USO show. And then: show’s over, get back on the truck, go back and fight again—and I thought that sounded just ludicrous. Then I did a little bit of research and, yep, that actually was a regular occurrence. So I think we’ve got to take Jack at face value on so many stories.

WYMAN: Yeah. The other one, too, is the dude with the long shot, that guy they called “Tex” who was from Texas, who could use a rifle, and he shot a German across a field. They were on a scouting mission, and the guy goes, “I betcha I can get that German over there.” And he shot the guy and the guy goes down, and then all of a sudden the rest of his squad comes out and starts shooting at them, and they’re only two guys, so like... yeah, well, I’m not gonna say exactly how he said it, because we’re supposed to watch our audience, since there may be people under 18 here. [laughter] So I’m not going to use the word that Jack said. But he did say, “Yeah, we got the heck out of there.” [laughter] MORROW: Anybody else on the panel have a particular memory of Roz that stands out? Jeremy, you’ve probably got 300 memories of Roz that stand out, but she was obviously very nurturing, but very protective of Jack. I assume she was of her grandkids as well, right?

JEREMY: Absolutely, especially when you were interviewing my grandfather. If you asked a dumb question, she would get to it way before it got to my grandfather. She was very protective over him, you know, and wanted to make sure that someone wasn’t leading him astray or purposely trying to get him, you know—I’m not sure, maybe with ulterior motives. She was just very, very protective. Over the family, just very loving, very caring, but it was very much matriarchal, meaning if you ask my grandfather, “Do you want to do something?” “Ask Grandma, that’s what we’re going to do. Where’s Grandma want to eat?

Because that’s where we’re going,” you know. Everything was about making her happy. If she was going to the grocery store, he needed to be there to make sure that she was protected, and okay, and everything else. My grandma did the same—she was very much—I would say, the

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sun in the solar system [which] all the planets were revolving around. You would think it would have been my grandfather, but it really wasn’t. It was my grandmother, and we all just kind of, in a good way, revolved around that. And it was very warming and heartening, and it was wonderful.

WYMAN: And he took out the trash. [laughter] SCHWARTZ: And also, Roz was the business person for the most part, at least in the later years.

Anytime anyone came up there to buy any original artwork from Jack, or anything needed to be negotiated around any kind of people coming up who were fans, Roz was always the person you went to, and made sure she was happy with whatever was being discussed in terms of financials.

WYMAN: Yeah, that’s true. When I was doing The Art of Jack Kirby, Roz ran all of the processes that we were using to assemble the book, and took care of who I was meeting. At some point I was on my own, but a lot of the photography work, cover work, all that stuff was decisions that Roz made.

You know, I was just an employee. [laughter] MORROW: Well, since this panel is a personal look at Jack, I’m going to throw out this question here, and I’m going to let you guys take a second, because you haven’t prepared for this. What is one really nice personal memory, or personal story you can conjure up? Either that actually happened in a real life interaction with Jack or Roz or someone in the family, or a personal story that Jack created for one of the comics that really struck you, or really hit you in the chest—and that was where you knew, “Wow, this guy is for me. This is the guy I’m gonna follow as a comic book artist.”

WYMAN: This is not what we rehearsed. [laughter] MORROW: No, it’s not.

GOLD: I did a lot of research into Jack’s war stories when I was writing an essay, about trying to understand—because Jack Kirby effectively gave Captain America PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] when he came back. I was interested in the discussion of what it was like to actually be a soldier. And I more or less copied out every really interesting quote from every story he wrote there. I was just looking for this on my phone, I don’t actually have it, but this is [the gist of what] he told. He said once when he was in World War II, he walked through a place where a bomb had fallen in the center of a bunch of German soldiers. And he said the bottom halves of the bodies were vaporized. But the rest of them kind of were out like this, like the petals of a flower. And he said, “You see all kinds of interesting designs like that when you’re an artist.” And to me, the idea that you can create anything beautiful, and anything that engages people that comes from a place of trauma, is the type of thing that I think is what’s really engaging. I think that’s where Silver Age Marvel came from. And I think that’s one of the reasons why it was so interesting, was that Jack knew how to take things when the world was starting to feel a little horrible. And he knew how to give it back to people in a way that engaged them, and made them feel hopeful. And I thought that is the type of thing I’d like to try to live up to.

SCHWARTZ: Because he was invited! [laughter] WYMAN: Every week, for like three years, every week I was up there.

And at some point, I stopped recording the conversations because it was more private, you know, and we would start talking about God. And he knew I was Christian. Well, he knew I was a confused Christian, I was a confused Buddhist Christian. [laughter] But we started talking about religion on a really broad level. And I said that, well, one of the problems I have with Christianity is the way they do certain things and don’t do certain things. And he goes, “Well, yeah, but that’s what everybody does.” Like I’m a confused child, you know? But then we started talking about the Christian story. And he says, “You know, if I was gonna write that, that would be what I would do. I would have God die or leave. Come down on the planet, live with humans, die, and go back up to heaven.” And I’m going, “Holy mackerel.” And he goes, “Oh yeah, it’s plausible.” And I’m like, [Ray gasps] “Whoa....”. [laughter] And I asked him too; I said, “Do you ever talk to your rabbi about that kind of stuff?” And he says, “Oh, yeah. All the time. He tells me to get out of the room!” [laughter]

WYMAN: After I finished The Art of Jack Kirby, I kept on going to the house. I don’t know why. It was a habit. [laughter] 13

MORROW: That was an interesting story to tell on Easter morning... [laughter]

we would send a stack of comics around to the different tents and cabins, and I decided that the next year, I was going to add some comics to that pile, so I would participate. I had one dollar, and I bought a Flash 100-Page Super Spectacular, a Superman with a weird cover where there’s eight Supermen hanging by ropes and nooses and stuff. And then there was this kid with a grasshopper.

That just seemed really interesting, and so I bought that. And then again, it was a rainy day, and we were listening to the AM radio and reading the comics. And that comic with that grasshopper is just the best thing I’ve ever read. It was, you know, action-packed, and it was emotional. And I mentioned that to my tentmates, and they knew all about Jack, and they just started telling me about all those other comics in that stack with those—you know, this was [when] the Avengers/Defenders War was going on. And they were like, “Yeah, you know, all those super-heroes, Captain America, Fantastic Four, blahblah-blah? Well, that’s all Jack Kirby.” Oh. And then they started telling me about the Fourth World. I was like, “Oh, geez.” So that was [when] I got hit by that lightning bolt—just reading that great Kamandi comic [issue #12, Dec. 1973].

WYMAN: Well no, I thought it was appropriate!

MORROW: It was, very appropriate! That’s great. Rand, I know the answer for you. But what was the first story where, you knew, “Okay, I’ve gotta follow this Jack Kirby guy”?

HOPPE: Well, I was somewhat aware of Marvel Comics and super-heroes from the [Marvel Super-Heroes] TV show, but I was at summer camp, and we had a giant stack of comics that would go around. It was sleepaway camp, so if it was raining or whatever,

MORROW: The reason I knew Rand’s story, is because that’s the same story for me, the KlikKlak story. When the grasshopper... spoiler alert: he didn’t make it out at the end of that story... that hit me. That was when I knew. And then I went backwards, and found some more Kamandi issues, and there was a story with a character named Flower in there, [Rand concurs] that likewise just threw me for a loop. And I think I was permanently hooked at that point.

Jeremy, how about you?

Any particularly poignant, personal story from your grandparents?

JEREMY: Stories? I have a ton, obviously. I would go back to the war stories. If you want to know what ones were mostly real, firsthand, it would be if he would repeat what they said in German, because he spoke German. If he was telling me a war story, and he said what the person said to him or whatever he overheard, in German, that’s going to be one that’s very much firsthand, something that he would reminisce and remember quite a lot. So I do remember those, because I didn’t know—I don’t speak German, 14

but he did quite well.

More so than a memory, I would say one of the things that shows you the type of person he was is that, we’re at a comic-con now, at a panel about Jack Kirby, and we’re not talking about the art, we’re talking about the person. I think that really goes to show the type of person that he was, because there are so many amazing things that you could say about him as a person. And that’s what makes me feel good inside. One day, I hope someone can say a third of the amount of things about me, you know—what else [matters]? To me, that’s my grandfather.

MORROW: I think we are almost out of time, but we’re gonna open up the floor real quickly. Do you have any questions? Right here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can somebody please tell the Wagner story? I didn’t know that one.

MORROW: Do we have time for the Wagner story?

Real quick?

WYMAN: Yeah. The Wagner story is where Jack is being held at gunpoint by three Germans; I think it was three Germans, something like that. And they’re telling him that, “When this guy is done playing Wagner, we shoot you.” [murmurs from audience] He didn’t say this in German, though. [laughter] And so Jack grabs the guy that’s closest to him, shoots him through the head, and then turns the gun on the guy that’s over there and shoots him, and uses the gun to shoot the guy on the piano before he finished Wagner. So he goes, “Yeah, and then I walked out.” [laughter] So that’s the short version.

MORROW: This sounds like a great comic book war story. But don’t forget, Jack was in an actual war with live ammo and people shooting at him. So this very well could be absolutely true.

[above] Jack in his art room with Jeremy. Note the manila envelopes full of pencil photocopies. [previous page] Kamandi #12 pencils (Dec. 1973)—an issue that had a big impact on his legacy!

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Was there an art room specifically for your grandfather in that house in Thousand Oaks?

were very glad I found. [laughter] It was in with all the xeroxes. And that’s just a random memory I have from back then.

JEREMY: Yeah.

HOPPE: That was not the studio, though. That was the art room; the studio was where the fireplace was, and the window, with the drawing table next to the window.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And was it like a shrine? Or could you guys just go in there?

SCHWARTZ: The art room was not where Jack did his drawing. He did his drawing in the studio room.

JEREMY: It was probably the only door that was locked, [laughter] but we could go in there. And yeah, like David said, there’s this giant, probably two-ton metal monolith that held all the art in it, and then there was a closet. The closet, they would keep me busy, because I was just an annoying brat, like any eight-year-old. They’d have me go in and put all the comic books together. So there’s 1970s Captain America comics, Captain Victory from the ’80s, and then all the DC stuff. So that was the art room.

MORROW: [It was] like a den, I guess. It had a window that looked out over the pool in the backyard. It was a very modest, but very pleasant and comfortable house up in the mountains in Thousand Oaks. The view from the beautiful backyard was amazing. Yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’ve always found looking at Jack Kirby’s art, particularly his rendition of 2001, the Eternals, and the Fourth World, to be a very immensely spiritual experience, just looking at it. He was drawing things that were so enormous—even with Galactus, you felt you were in the face of God, right there. And I’m just curious—to anyone who knew Jack Kirby, how did Jack Kirby see his artwork in terms of how it might relate to his spiritual path?

SCHWARTZ: It wasn’t like a museum, it was a functional room where it was storage. Around the house and in the hallway was more like a museum. This was a functional art room where they just had all of the art there. In the closet, there were a bunch of xeroxes, and they were in the manila envelopes that they sent the original art back in, and they had taken the art out for either sales, or somewhere else. And these manila envelopes had xeroxes, and I was going through some of the xeroxes one day, and found the original cover to Captain America #197, [murmurs from audience] which they

WYMAN: I just ran across a quote: “The mind is a very expansive thing.” That’s a Jack Kirby quote. I’m sort of running through my old notes...

15

WYMAN: So yeah, Jack had a very large mind about stuff like that. Very deeply layered.

HOPPE: And there’s that story about him finding the [Hugo] Gernsback pulp magazine with the Frank Paul art on the cover, when he was like 12 years old, in the gutter on the Lower East Side— and he kind of had his mind blown, I think would be a way to describe it. And I think that he appreciated that experience, and in his art, he wanted his audience to experience that as well.

WYMAN: Some people take drugs to do that. [laughter] MORROW: He smoked a cigar... [laughter] We’ve got about a minute-and-a-half here. Glen, you’ve done some great analysis of Jack’s work. Do you have anything to add to that one?

GOLD [to audience questioner]: Did you read Charles Hatfield’s book on Jack? It’s all about this. One of the things he said—I think what he was saying—is that, Kirby restored the definition of “awe” being a combination of wonder and fear. [That’s] pretty good. I think what I took away from his work, was constantly trying to come together with that feeling of love, respect, and fear he would have for something that’s so much larger than yourself.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: [That was by] Charles Hatfield? What’s it called?

GOLD: Hand of Fire [below].

MORROW: Last question. Anyone else?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If Jack gave you guys any advice, what would it have been, throughout your life...?

MORROW: “Don’t go into comics,” I’m sure. [laughter] “It’ll break your heart, kid!” right?

Anybody else? Did Jack give you any profound advice?

JEREMY: Do you what makes you happy, if it doesn’t make anyone else sad. [audience murmurs approval] MORROW: Oh, that’s beautiful.

WYMAN: Own your stuff. Don’t sell it. He said that the Kevin Eastman: “Own it, don’t sell it.”

MORROW: Good advice. With that, we’re gonna wrap-up real quickly. The Jack Kirby Museum booth is #410. TwoMorrows Publishing is #1209. Thank you guys so much for spending this morning with us.

We appreciate you coming out, and hope you enjoy the rest of the show. [applause] H

MORROW: Wait, did you say “expansive” or “expensive”? [laughter] WYMAN: Ex-pan-sive. [laughter] Expansive, big, and he said, “It can go anywhere.” And there was another Jack Kirby quote that’s out of my tapes. It says, “You know, eventually we’re gonna go and find out everything that we can find out, and learn that we will never learn everything.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ahhhh.

[above] Mike Royer commented about this amazing 12 ½" X 20 ½" piece he produced, based on the pencils from Fantastic Four #75, page 4: “Usually when I post something, it is a recent commission sale, but after doing a Galactus 9" X 12" for a fan/collector, I was looking at the scan of Jack’s uninked pencils I had used as a basis for the collector’s piece, and just couldn’t stop thinking about how it could look if I did the complete page, with my inking over Jack’s marvelous pencils, via lightbox, leaving out the lettering and extending the top to show all of the helmet... and then, channeling Jack, fill all the empty areas as I felt he may have done. I DON’T have any old FFs, so I don’t know if this full page was originally inked by the great Joe Sinnott, or someone else. That makes this NOT a recreation, but my humble attempt to give homage to Jack’s great creativity, which makes this a really cool ‘pin-up’, IMHO. I had some real enjoyment working on this piece because I was doing something for myself. I guess this is the first Kirby/Royer piece I actually DID for myself.”

16

The Making of the Art of Jack Kirby The effort to create an iconic book for a legend, by John Morrow

J

access to many other people who truly wanted to help.

“I was also introduced to one of the most impactful stories I’ve heard about Jack’s influence,” says Wyman. “Kevin and his co-creator, Peter Laird, were fans of Jack’s, on the verge of showing their creation to other publishers. They went to see Jack at one of the conventions for advice. Jack told them, ‘this is great kids, publish it yourselves and own all of it.’ And that’s what they did.” The success of their 1984 TMNT comic led to a financial windfall that put Eastman in a position to help with the funding of Ray’s book.

By March or April 1991, Wyman and his helpers started to say out loud what they felt in their hearts. “We all wanted to make sure that Jack was around to see this book. A lot of people didn’t realize that Jack’s health was in decline, so we pushed harder. But if it was not for Kevin’s help, there was no way we could have finished the project.”

And that, says Ray, included the cover, which received mixed reviews from some Kirby fans, but was intended to have meaning to a much wider audience.

“Jack and Roz wanted Kevin to do the cover,” says Wyman.

“Jack wanted that symbolism, because he felt that Kevin and Peter represented the new age of storytellers who owned their creations.

And looking at the impact of today’s democratized publishing, wouldn’t you know that Jack was right again?”

ack Kirby left an indelible mark on an unknown number of fans, artists, and storytellers, but up till his retirement, he was mostly only known within the comics industry. That began to change with The Art of Jack Kirby, independently published under the Blue Rose Press label in 1992, and written and researched by Ray Wyman Jr. It was the first book about Jack written for a mass audience, instead of just our insular comics fan community.

Its detailed biography, exhaustive bibliography, and near full-size printing of Jack’s best covers made it a definitive resource.

It included the first true timeline of Jack’s work, which served as the starting point for what has become the Jack Kirby Checklist: Centennial Edition. Other than Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman’s much smaller-scale Kirby Unleashed portfolio, this was the only major biography of Jack published while he was alive, and that he had direct involvement in. But with the abundance of publications about Kirby and his work that proliferate today, The AoJK tends to get overlooked by many readers.

So, to enhance its public profile, I asked Ray if there were any details about it that weren’t in this issue’s WonderCon panel. With his help, I was able to recap how it come about.

The Book That Roz Kirby Started

Ray recounted that Jack’s wife, Roz Kirby, had been approached by different people to create a book about her husband’s work. One was Glenn Kolleda, who had grand ideas about commemorating Jack’s work in a series of sculptures, lithographs, and a hardcover book.

“Roz later told me that the book was the biggest thing about the Kolleda project that she liked,” says Wyman. “She wanted to get something done for Jack that could stay up on bookshelves ‘long after we’re all gone’ as a testament to what he did. And she had a few ideas about what she expected from the book.”

For example, according to Ray, Roz told Glenn that she and Jack wanted someone outside the comic book industry to write the book. “During the interviews, Glenn told me that they were looking for a fresh set of eyes who could write for non-fans and fans alike.

I was a comics reader, and I recognized Jack’s name, but that was about it. Another writer I met wrote for Rolling Stone magazine and said he hadn’t read a comic book since he was twelve.”

In late 1989, after presentations and test ideas, Roz and Jack, along with Glenn to a lesser degree, selected Ray as their writer. But then, after nearly a year of work, Glenn abruptly left the project (see Jack Kirby Collector #69, “The Kolleda Incident”).

“After that business was done,” says Wyman, “Roz called me and said that she and Jack wanted me to finish the book. And she gave me the phone number of ‘a very nice young man’ who she said would like to help.” That nice young man turned out to be Kevin Eastman, co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The Greatest Reward

In September 1992, Wyman picked up the first copies of the book from a printer in Los Angeles, and delivered them to Roz and Jack in Thousand Oaks. Ray recalls his co-researcher, Catherine Hohlfeld, and a few other helpers were present. “Everyone was at the table, thumbing through pages and chatting about things they liked,” says Wyman. At some point, Roz leaned toward Jack, who was quietly and carefully turning each page. “I heard Roz say, ‘Are you alright?’ And that’s when I realized there were tears in Jack’s eyes. Then we all started crying. Joyfully. With Jack.”

A three-stop book tour through Southern California stores concluded in March 1993. The entire tour was conducted via a rented van that Ray drove with one of his helpers. That victory lap had its share of memorable fan encounters, but Ray concedes “The Art of Jack Kirby was never just a book for fans to commemorate a great artist. It was for the artist himself, so that he could see how we would go on celebrating his greatest work.”

And as fulfilling as the entire experience was, one thing stands out above all others to Wyman: “The greatest reward is knowing that Jack saw it with his own eyes.” H [Ray recently uploaded a digital version of his book to Google Books for the benefit of researchers and fans who don’t have the $500 to drop on a used paperback edition, or even more on the original hardcover or slipcased edition. He’s also busy on several Kirby projects. One is an up-and-coming podcast based on his many interviews with Jack titled “Conversations with Jack.” He’s also working on a companion book of the same title that covers what Wyman calls “Jack’s many dogleg topics” that had no other place to go than into Wyman’s extemporaneous notes.]

A Reptilian Rescue

Perhaps due to being a comics outsider, Wyman recalls initially receiving only limited support from other historians within the medium. With Kevin Eastman’s help, Ray gained 17

JACK F.A.Q.s

A column answering asking Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

A LEGACY WORTH DOCUMENTING

[below] Prior to writing Kirby: King of Comics, Mark first documented Jack’s career on a much smaller scale in the 1971 Kirby Unleashed portfolio, and even earlier in Marvelmania paraphernalia. [next page] Jack’s pencils for page 12 of What If? #11 (Oct. 1978), a fanciful tale wherein the original Marvel Bullpen (Stan Lee, Jack, Flo Steinberg, and Sol Brodsky) became the Fantastic Four. Jack usually only came into the Marvel offices on Fridays in the early 1960s, but he would’ve had ample interaction with those three—more than enough to depict them convincingly. See last issue’s “Incidental Iconography” column for Sean Kleefeld’s analysis of Jack’s ability to capture their likenesses.

Mark Evanier on Kirby: King of Comics [This time around, instead of Mark moderating a panel, TJKC editor John Morrow asks Mark questions about his book Kirby: King of Comics. It stands today as the most authoritative overview of Jack’s life and career (at least, until Mark’s upcoming full Kirby biography is published), and helped cement Kirby’s legacy in the age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This interview was conducted by e-mail in June 2024.]

JOHN MORROW: I’m not sure I’ve ever asked you: What was the first Kirby work you ever saw (even if you didn’t know who he was at the time), and if it’s not the same work, what was the first time you were aware of it being by this guy named “Jack Kirby”?

MARK EVANIER: I have no idea. It was either something he did for DC—”Green Arrow” or Challengers—or some of those monster stories he did for books like Tales to Astonish or Strange Tales. I don’t recall being particularly impressed by anything until Fantastic Four came along and I had a name to go with an art style, and then I was able to apply that name to the earlier material. I believe the first Fantastic Four I read was issue #11 with The Impossible Man, and I loved that issue until shortly after, when I picked up the earlier issues in secondhand book shops and realized #11 was one of the weaker ones. But you know how that is. A lot of Jack’s earlier inkers looked fine to us until Sinnott and Giacoia came along.

JOHN: Our readers already know that you were Jack’s assistant in the early 1970s and have been a family friend since then. But how did Kirby: King of Comics come about?

MARK: Well, almost from the point when I began to see Jack and work with him regularly, he said he expected me to be his biographer. I remember he said I could be his “Boswell” and when he said that, I didn’t know what it meant. I had to go to a library and look it up. I told that to someone a few years later and they said, “He wanted you to be like the guy on Charlie’s Angels who sent the ladies on their missions?”

But Jack liked that I was so interested in the history of comics and in the folks who did them. I’ve 18

always been way more interested in the writers and artists than in the characters. The very first time I met Jack, he was impressed that I knew as much about comics as I did. I owe a certain amount of my relationship with him to that.

I’ve always been interested in Jack and one day, my friend Charlie Kochman called to say his company, Abrams Books, had a hole in their publishing schedule. I believe a book covering the works of a major artist (not a comic book artist) had fallen out for some reason, and Charlie thought a book full of Jack Kirby art would be a more than adequate replacement. I had been working on my long, long bio on Jack for some time and I knew that for a myriad of reasons, it would be a long time before I could publish it... so an art book with a lot of biographical material seemed like a good stopgap.

JOHN: You’ve said Roz gave you access to old files— what depth of research materials did the Kirbys have in those files? Invoices? Receipts? Journals/diaries? I know Dick Ayers kept a very detailed log of all his work over the years; did Jack have anything like that?

MARK: Jack, alas, had nothing like that. There were check stubs, notes, some correspondence... stuff like that. In the weeks after Jack’s funeral, I drove out to Thousand Oaks a half-dozen or so times and spent a great many hours helping her with matters she had to handle, including some outreach from Marvel and some of the business matters she had to deal with. I don’t remember which visit it was but she said, “You ought to write that book about him” and she gave me some boxes of stuff to take home and go through on the condition that I would never share them with anyone. I could use them for source material in what I wrote, but that was it. Then she, and later, whoever the family’s lawyer was at the moment, started asking me to delay the book because of then-pending legal matters. But no, there was no list of what he wrote or drew or when he wrote or drew it. I copied what I felt I should copy and returned the materials to her a few weeks later.

JOHN: You’ve had access, not just to family members, but to numerous industry figures who worked with Jack, Joe Simon, and Stan Lee over the years. Who were

some of the most influential and helpful in providing details that only “insiders” would know, vs. what the general public knows (or assumes they know) about Jack’s career? And what are some public/ fan perceptions that you were hopefully able to dispel through this book?

MARK: Steve Sherman and I made a trip to New York in 1970. We went back a week before that year’s New York Comic Con, which we of course attended, and spent the week visiting people and comic book companies. We were then still working for the Marvelmania outfit, so that gave us access to Marvel, and we were then Jack Kirby’s assistants on his DC work, so that opened doors at DC. Also, Jack arranged for us to spend a day with Steve Ditko and for me to spend a few hours with Wally Wood. It was an amazing week of

information overload.

One thing which I think I’ve written about is that before that trip, I was a little, shall we say, “skeptical” when Jack told us, “I created this” or “I actually wrote that.” I’d been around show business enough to know that some people lie or at least exaggerate; that they claim credit for the work of others. I’m not saying I didn’t believe Jack, but this was still early in our relationship, and I hadn’t yet come to appreciate what an honest man he was. He got confused at times about names or dates and he wasn’t always using the same definition of words like “writing” or “creating” that others were, but once you understood the way he spoke, he was pretty damn honest, and I came to realize that on that trip. I talked to—and this is a very partial list—Ditko, Wood, Don Heck, Bill Everett, John Romita, Joe Kubert, Marie Severin, Al Williamson, Larry Lieber, Gene Colan, Carmine Infantino, Nelson Bridwell, Julie Schwartz, Dick Giordano, Joe Sinnott, Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas, John Verpoorten, Murray Boltinoff, Neal Adams, Frank Frazetta, Herb Trimpe, and I’m leaving a lot of people out.

Those were just the ones I first met on that trip. And of course, Stan Lee. Absolutely no one had anything bad to say about Jack, and many of them confirmed that Jack had done all those things he told us he’d done.

Heck and Everett went on and on about how Jack had helped them in so many ways with the comics they did for Marvel in the Sixties. They believed Jack had done everything he told us he’d done.

They were a lot of help in my quest to learn as much as I could about Jack. So were other folks I met later like Don Rico and Gil Kane and Mike Sekowsky and Frank Giacoia.

Gil could talk for hours about Jack and the sheer brilliance of the man.

And I got to spend a lot of time with Stan Lee and even work with him on some things. I have a great many mixed feelings about Stan but to me, he said a lot of things about Jack that I wish he’d said in public, or at least into a tape recorder.

As for dispelling myths, I want people to understand that Jack was not a comic book artist. He was a comic book creator—a writer and artist who sometimes wasn’t allowed to do all the writing or get credit or pay for what he wrote. I sometimes hear people compare what Jack did with the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four with what John Buscema did with the character in that 1968 comic, and they might say, “Well, I liked what Buscema did better.” That’s fine. I don’t believe in arguing taste. But I don’t think some of those folks understand that Jack and John did not have the exact same job descriptions on those jobs, that there’s a major difference between 19

designing a character and redesigning a character. And also that to some extent, they weren’t both doing the same character.

I’ve also gathered data and quotes from folks then in positions of authority to debunk the notion that Jack’s work in the Seventies didn’t sell well. Sometimes when a comic gets canceled, it’s because the readers didn’t want to buy it, and sometimes when they didn’t buy it, there are reasons beyond the powers of the creative forces. And sometimes when a comic gets canceled, the person who canceled it simply made a stupid decision. I believe the history of the comic book industry is littered with bad decisions. [above] In addition to the DC Archives and Marvel Masterworks reprintings of Jack’s work, there are numerous other important Kirby book victories.

Jack Kirby’s Heroes & Villains is a printed version of the oneof-a-kind Valentine’s Day pencil sketchbook Jack drew for his wife Roz in the mid-1970s.

See this issue’s letter column to help us document the variations in its different printings. [next page] Pencils from New Gods #6’s “The Glory Boat”, produced while Mark was Jack’s assistant.

The cancellation of the Fourth World has to be one of the worst decisions in comics history. [below] The photo Sergio Aragonés was happy to find in Mark’s book, shown here enlarged from the background of Greg Preston’s wonderful photograph.

JOHN: What were some of the high points of working on Kirby: King of Comics? Either during the research of it, the final production period, or the promotional/ post-release phase? Conversely, were there any low points or roadblocks that you hit along the way to final production of it?

MARK: Well, most authors will tell you that the biggest high point is when the book is published and you finally hold a finished, printed copy in your hands. This is invariably followed closely by a big low point when you begin seeing things you wish you could change. I also loved Joe Simon’s reaction to it. I sent him one of the first copies I received and he phoned me to say he loved it. I’d included a note that I would soon be back in New York to sign copies at the New York Comic Convention and Joe asked—it was his idea, I swear—if he could sit with me and sign copies. I should have put Joe at the top of the list of people who gave me insight into Jack and his history.

JOHN: What was the total time it took to produce, from signing a contract and beginning work on it, till publication?

MARK: I don’t remember. It took way longer than we expected, in part because we had to replace the first book designer who was employed. I ended up doing way more of it than we’d planned.

© Greg Preston

JOHN: Did Stan Lee provide any recollections for the book, either directly, or things from your past conversations with him that were helpful?

MARK: I didn’t interview Stan especially for the book but every time we were together, we invariably talked about Jack. The “big” book—the one I’m still working on—has more of that.

JOHN: I assume Stan saw the final book. Did he offer any opinion of it to you?

MARK: Stan told me he’d seen it and that it was wonderful and terrific and I’d done a superb job on it. But I knew by then that Stan talked that way to everybody about everything and that he probably hadn’t read it.

JOHN: Were there any instances where your closeness to and fondness for Jack and Roz,

had you feeling conflicted about some aspect of Jack’s life that you were covering in the book? For instance, I didn’t know how touchy a subject the Jack Schiff/Sky Masters lawsuit was, until after I covered it in an early issue of the Jack Kirby Collector, and Roz told me afterword that it bothered her.

MARK: I wasn’t going into the kind of detail about Jack’s career that would have brought up some touchy issues. I did feel constrained about avoiding some areas that the folks handling Kirby-related legal matters at the time wanted me to avoid.

JOHN: If you can narrow it down, what were a few things you had to edit out for space or other reasons, that you wish could’ve remained in the final published book?

MARK: Well, this may amuse you. For a few months, I was shuffling illustrations around, deciding to run this drawing instead of that drawing—that kind of thing.

My best friend in the world, Sergio Aragonés, would visit me and I’d show him some work in progress. At one point, I was planning to include a great photo I had of Jack with Sergio, but I finally decided to omit it. Sergio had seen the book when it was in, so when I gave him a copy, I apologized to him for leaving it out. A day or two later, he called me and said, “It was nice to see my photo in the book!”

I told him he was wrong; that I’d taken that photo out of the book. He insisted there was a photo of him in the book and he offered to bet me serious money that this was so.

I went over and over the book and I was certain he was wrong.

Well, it turned out he was right. On one of the early pages of the book, there’s a great full-page photo of Jack in his studio. It was taken by the fine photographer Greg Preston and if you look real careful at it, you can see a photo on the wall behind Jack of him with Don Rico and a couple of other artists. One of those artists is Sergio.

JOHN: I’m aware of two editions; the original 2008 hardcover version, and the smaller format paperback from 2017. The 2017 edition says it’s expanded and revised—what were the changes for that later edition, and is it still in print?

MARK: I cleaned up some sloppy language, fixed a few errors, stuck in some new drawings, and added a new chapter to update Jack’s story. As far as I know, the second edition is still in print, but I really haven’t paid attention to that kind of thing. I assume everyone who wants a copy can find one. [Note: It’s still widely available on amazon.com and from book retailers.]

JOHN: Did the success of Kirby: King of Comics directly lead to the idea for your 2014 book The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio [above]? Or had you planned all along to one day do an S&K book?

MARK: No, the family of Joe Simon or its representative approached Abrams Books about doing a collection of art from the Simon & Kirby studio, and I was asked to assemble it and write some of the text. It was not my

idea, but I was delighted to be asked.

JOHN: How are you progressing on the “ultimate” Kirby biography you’ve been working on for several years? Do you have a publisher lined up, or is it not to that stage yet?

MARK: It’s coming along. I have no idea when it will be done but I don’t expect any more Kirby-related legal matters to delay it. When I think it’s close to done, I’ll figure out who’s going to publish it. And when it finally does come out, people will understand why it took so long... I hope. H

OTHER LITERARY VICTORIES [above] Simon & Schuster’s 1978 Silver Surfer graphic novel was Kirby’s first copyright ownership of a story featuring a Marvel character. Marvel apparently didn’t keep good records on this, as the 1997 re-issue was reportedly produced without the Kirby family’s permission. [below] Titan’s Simon & Kirby Library is a remarkable series reprinting Jack and Joe’s best Golden Age work, lovingly restored. And TwoMorrows’ own Best of Simon & Kirby’s Mainline Comics takes up where Titan left off, finally collecting the duo’s hard to find self-published material from the 1950s. What other comics creator has nearly their entire career’s output still in print?

21

OBSCURA STANDING THE TEST OF TIME

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

Black Magic #31 and #32.

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

by Barry Forshaw

and the creatures who have laid waste to the human race are particularly bizarre Kirby creations: rotund bodies with multiple limbs, strange protruding ears, mottled red skin, three eyes, and a disturbing “reveal” of a second layer with what looked like octopus suckers. The two male heroes are tattered and bloody, and one of them is dissuaded from taking a potshot at the aliens, when—to their horror—they discover that the aliens have prepared literal slaughterhouses for the human victims—and one wonders if the two Jewish creators of the tale were thinking of the death camps of then-recent history. There is a beguiling blonde girl in a torn dress who turns out to be (spoiler alert!) a “Judas goat”, designed to lead human victims willingly to their destruction. When the hero is finally persuaded to join her in her hideous task, the final panel is one of the bleakest in all of Simon & Kirby’s stories. But having said that, it remains one of the most memorable pieces in the whole run of Black Magic, and makes one wonder why the team did not turn their hand more often to SF in this book (such a move was in the cards for Jack Kirby when he later worked for Stan Lee at Atlas/Marvel).

SCIENCE-FICTION SLAUGHTER

The various attacks on Simon & Kirby’s distinctive horror comic for Prize, Black Magic, were (as in most censorship initiatives) hardly considered or accurate—one or two gruesome images from the covers were sufficient to bring down the wrath of moral guardians. And had the title been more sciencefiction oriented, it’s doubtful that the book could have been saved from banning—after all, EC Comics tried to prolong the life of their intelligently written SF titles by removing the word “weird” (no longer acceptable under the strictures of the Comics Code) and creating a new title, Incredible Science Fiction. The ploy was unsuccessful; the title went down after only a couple of issues. All of which is a prelude to noting that Simon & Kirby’s Black Magic very rarely traded in science-fiction, but one distinctive tale did—and was, in fact, as grim as anything in their more overtly horror-oriented books: “Slaughter-House!” (from Black Magic #31, Vol. 5, No.1, July/Aug. 1954). This is a particularly unremitting piece, and was notably well written, as, in fact, were all the duo’s later SF books for Harvey. The tale begins in the aftermath of an alien invasion (“in medias res” is the fancy expression!),

MANIACS, KIRBY-STYLE

Since you’re reading this column, there’s a question I’d like to ask you. When you read about one of the more obscure Kirby items I write about (the column is called “Kirby Obscura”, after all), does it send you back to the books?

Or—because many of them really are obscure—you can’t refer to them, as you don’t possess them?

In fact, apart from the condition of your bank balance, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have virtually everything I discuss, as most of The King’s work—even the more esoteric items—has now been reprinted in handsome volumes.

Take for instance, the subject of this paragraph, “Maniac!”, from Black Magic— yes, that book again (#32, Vol. 5, No. 2, Sept./Oct. 1954).

It’s available, strikingly recoloured, in the Simon and Kirby Library: Horror! published by Titan. And that plug is totally objective, even though I once worked for the company (decades ago). But before talking about “Maniac”, I should 22

ularly odd tale. It’s a reminder of a comics phenomenon that had already taken over every DC comics title: the 1950s science-fiction craze. In this odd outing, the hero with a target emblazoned on his chest encounters nothing less than a “Hidden Valley” not a million miles from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Kirby enjoys himself with this one—look at the splash panel in which a terrified Indian runs from a scarlet-hued flying reptile, as the masked hero tries to lasso the thing while standing on a horse. Enough bizarre elements for you? There are more to come in the piece, particularly some bizarre villains who are given the kind of truly grotesque faces that only Kirby could deliver (rather similar to the over-the-top heavies in Fighting American). But perhaps the best thing about these Kirby stories in the Mainline collection is their unfamiliarity—be truthful now, how many of them have you read? But such oddities are now plucked from obscurity by this welcome collection.

Still with Mainline, let’s take a look at another Kirby rarity from Foxhole #2 (December 1954) which leads off with a very striking piece called “Booby Trap”. With its ill-fated, disobedient member of a beleaguered troop in Korea and its violent, unvarnished picture of the horrors of war, this is closer than anything to the kind of war-related material that Harvey Kurtzman was producing for EC in such books as Frontline Combat, and—if anything—it’s as well written, as well as being as cynical and downbeat, as Kurtzman’s work for Bill Gaines. Certainly, there is no sense of war as a glorious adventure, as can be found in other war comics of the day. It’s also particularly interesting as a picture of evolution of Jack Kirby’s style: the blocky, heavy figures here look forward to the illustrator’s work in the 1960s, and they are every bit as dynamic. What the piece lacks is an ironic ending of the kind that Kurtzman would have provided for EC. It’s a simple demonstration that the troop sergeant was correct in warning of booby traps—but it’s a story that will be particularly welcome to those who have yet to discover Foxhole, one of Kirby’s more obscure comics. And once again, let’s not forget that this column is called “Kirby Obscura”! H

point out that this is another one of those “spoiler alert” pieces—so, a warning here if you are going to read the story first. If not, and you don’t mind a key revelation, here goes: The story starts with a particularly impactful splash panel with a blank-eyed lethal-looking madman (coloured entirely red), his arms wrapped around a gravestone saying ‘RIP’. In the foreground there is a Kirby trademark that all fans of his will be familiar with: a human fist grasping an object (in this case a branch).

Clearly with this page, we’re in for one of Kirby’s more gruesome horror outings. The story itself appears to be inspired by John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, with the skinny hero Tom protecting the gigantic simpleton Harry from his tormentors. It’s a poignant piece, and we’re definitely on Tom’s side as he protects his simpleminded companion (Kirby draws Harry as ungainly, but pathetic and in need of care). Needless to say, if you’ve read your Steinbeck, you’ll know that Harry has to die, at Tom’s hands with a “blood-reddened stone” (I told you this was one of Simon & Kirby’s horror stories), but then the real horror comes (along with the revelation I warned you about). After we’ve seen the splattered mess of the dead Harry’s face, we realize that the protective Tom is the real monster—there is a really startling panel showing his now-distorted, horrible face drawn with that macabre touch that Kirby could call upon at intervals. It’s one of Prize’s vintage macabre tales, and delivered with the kind of panache that was routine at Gaines and Feldstein’s market-leading EC horror books.

HITTING THE BULL’S-EYE

How do you read your comics? At intervals so as not to work your way through them too quickly? Or in a speedy, impatient rush when you acquire new things? I’m currently adopting the first option for The Best of Simon & Kirby’s Mainline Comics, and I’m still reading what actually constitutes the bulk of the book, the King’s Western outing, Bulls-Eye. I’m up to “Devil Bird” in the December 1954 issue (#3) and it’s a partic23

Private Victory THE MOST DEVOTED FANBASE

[below] Given the choice today, I’m pretty sure I’d opt for the Gil Kane Spidey cover, but at age 8, Scooby ruled! [right] I had no idea who Don Newton was back then, but his interpretation of the JSA helped convince me to ask my mom for the 4th edition of the Comic Book Price Guide. Newton, of course, went on to draw the 1970s post-Kirby revival of the New Gods. [next page] Jack’s pencils from Kamandi #12, page 13. I knew at the time I read that issue it was something special, but had no idea how it’d affect the rest of my life.

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[The Comic Conspiracy—Episode 417 (airing September 3, 2019) presented this talk with TJKC editor John Morrow about his company’s 25th anniversary, Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love, and Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said. It features Ryan Higgins, Brock Sager, Kevin Sharp, Scott Shea, and Toby Sidler.]

RYAN HIGGINS: All right, on the line with us, we have a very special guest.

This is author, founder of TwoMorrows Publishing, and huge Jack Kirby fan— obviously, major Jack Kirby fan—John Morrow.

JOHN MORROW: Hi guys. It’s a pleasure to be here on the podcast.

HIGGINS: Now, Kevin Sharp here has been singing your praises for quite some time. He was very excited to get you on here. Before we go into the meat of our interview, we always like to ask our guests their secret origin for comic books, how you got into comic books, what you were doing as a kid or an adult or whenever you started reading comics, and then kind of how that relates to what you’re doing today.

And we’ll definitely talk a lot about TwoMorrows here in a minute. But let’s hear your origin story. I want to know what your earliest comic experiences were.

MORROW: My very earliest was from [my hometown] in Alabama, Montgomery, the capital city. I was with my dad heading downtown. He was a pipe smoker and he had to go to the cigar store, or whatever it was, to get some pipe tobacco, and I went in the store with him. I was about [eight] years old and they had these strange little pamphlets on the wall there with all these colorful pictures on them, and I didn’t know what they were. And my dad said, “Go ahead and get one if you want one.” I looked through, and I remember there was a great Gil Kane Spider-Man cover with Spidey sliding down a wall trying to hold on, and the Green Goblin’s there [Amazing SpiderMan #98, July 1971]. So of course, what did I do? I got a Gold Key ScoobyDoo, Where Are

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The editor discusses his personal successes around Jack Kirby and comics on his company’s 25th anniversary in September 2019

You comic, because I was [eight] years old and didn’t know who Spider-Man was!

So I got this Scooby-Doo comic book and took it home, read it five times, and it was like, “Wow, this is really neat.” And then I unfortunately loaned it to this friend down the street and found it the next day; it had rained and it was out in his backyard, just waterlogged.

The cover was missing. It taught me very early on, never loan your comic books to anybody, even your good friends. [laughs] But beyond that, it was just seeing a few random scattered ones here and there and slowly developing an interest. Every year for Christmas, it seemed like I would ask for some comics. I remember I saw my first Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, I think it was the fourth edition [1974]. I was in some weird little bookstore with my mom, and I’m looking around, I was bored, and I went: “Oh, what is this?” It showed how much comics were worth, and I’m like, “I have some of these comics. I’m going to be rich!” Back then, some were worth 50 cents or 75 cents, and I’d only paid 15 cents or 25 cents for them. So I thought, “Wow, this is a good deal.” But I never did quite cash in on that collection and the price guide prices.

HIGGINS: Did they throw all your old comic books away? That’s always the classic story; did you lose some of those?

MORROW: No, bless their hearts. My mom was actually pretty supportive of it. Not that she thought it was ever going to amount to anything in my life necessarily, but she wasn’t against me getting comics. I remember I was home sick from school. I had strep throat or something, and she went to the drug store to get my medicine for it, and then came home with a World’s Finest comic [#201, March 1971, right], where Superman and Green Lantern are teamed up, and Dr. Fate’s on the cover, too. I remember she brought this thing home and I’m like, “How in the world did you think to get this cool comic? This is one I would’ve

favorite work. You just don’t know what’s going to hit you at the right time, right?

MORROW: I think maybe Roy Thomas figured this out, but it’s whatever you’re reading when you’re 12 years old, that will always be your favorite comic.

HIGGINS: Still true.

MORROW: Yeah, I think that’s true.

When I discovered the New Gods—I mean, before that, my first real Kirby comic was a Kamandi comic [#12, Dec. 1973] that I got around ’73 or so. I got it in a trade with a friend. He didn’t want it. He said, “No, I don’t want it. You have to take it.” I didn’t want it, so I put it on the bottom of the stack that I got from him. I read everything else in the stack I traded for, and I got to the bottom. I didn’t have anything else to read.

I said, “Okay, well, I’ll go ahead and read this.” And it was like some kind of weird little switch flipped in my brain.

By the time I finished that, it was like, “Wow!” It wasn’t the art style, though.

It was the storytelling and the story itself, and how attached I got to these characters.

I didn’t know who they were.

One of them was a giant grasshopper, and I was just mesmerized by this.

And after that I’m like, “Let me look a little more at what this Jack Kirby guy does.” From there I started picking up various things and then discovered the Fourth World, the New Gods stuff.

And that is my all-time favorite Kirby work. To this day, I can go back and reread that entire Fourth World series, have a great time doing it, pick up new little tidbits here and there, and still feel just as disappointed at the end of it, that he didn’t get to finish it at the time he was originally doing it.

KEVIN SHARP: Now John, there’s no wrong answer to this question, but just to get you on the record, were you a Marvel kid or a DC kid growing up?

MORROW: Oh, DC all the way, baby. Yeah, I was then, and I still am now. And don’t get me wrong, I love Marvel comics. Well, most of ’em. But if I go hunting through the dollar bins at a comics convention, I’m not picking up old beatup copies of Seventies’ Marvel comics. I’m picking old beat-up copies of Seventies DC comics, just the oddball weirdo things, old Jimmy Olsen issues or something like that. Even the non-Kirby ones, especially in the Seventies, they had the best covers on the DC books, and invariably you would buy one and get it home and open it up and it’s like, “Ugh, what is this dreck in here?” But the covers were so good on the DC books, so I think Marvel was the exact opposite.

The covers, some of ’em were really good, but they didn’t quite have the appeal that DC covers had, I didn’t think. But the interiors on the Marvel stuff was far superior, just quality-wise across the board.

picked out.” And somehow she managed to. I actually still have that comic. I was reminding her of that the other day on the phone, as a matter of fact. How neat it was that she hooked me up there, when I was eight years old. It was great. Comics just kind of always found their way into my hands one way or another. But I can’t say I was ever any kind of Jack Kirby fan early on, though.

His stuff was just too ugly. [laughter] The first time I saw Jack Kirby’s [work], I’m like, “Wow, this guy really cannot draw. What is his problem? Lemme get some of this nice Neal Adams art here right now. This guy can draw!” [laughter] I saw the error of my ways shortly thereafter, though.

HIGGINS: It took me quite a few years to become a New Gods fan. I just couldn’t understand it for a long time. And now it’s some of my 25

SHARP: I feel your pain. I came in a little bit later, so I was having to buy them bagged and boarded at a comic shop, but I would get reeled in by those Neal Adams covers on the Seventies DC books.

And when you get it home, I don’t want to call out any artists by name, but it’s not Neal Adams on the interior.

MORROW: DC had a lot of very workmanlike artists who did fine storytelling. They just weren’t flashy. It wasn’t sexy kind of stuff, like a Neal Adams cover was, and DC had all those great coloring effects and mezzotints and things like that. They would work in pebble board textures and zip-a-tone and stuff like that on the covers. If you’ve ever seen the old Sea Devils issues from the Sixties, oh my gosh, those are such beautiful covers. I mean, they’re almost like paintings because of the great techniques they used when they printed these things. And I have no problem buying an old comic just for its cover. Maybe I grew up not expecting the inside to look that great, but if it’s got a great cover, if it appeals to me, I’ll get it. And that’s kind of the fun of collecting comics to me.

a form, and it’ll be delivered to you. You’re not going to miss any books anymore. That was really the turning point, I thought. Now, with the Internet, and all the online comics places, you can buy stuff—anything you need, you’ll find it somewhere. Now, whether or not you can afford it, is another story.

SHARP: I’m sure you might share my pain, John, on how the value of some of those Bronze Age comics has spiked over the years.

MORROW: I’m astonished. Yeah.

SHARP: Things that I remember haunting the dollar bins or the quarter bins, even, for decades, are now on the back display wall at comic-cons.

HIGGINS: Even some of those Eighties, Nineties books, when those characters get picked up to use in the movies, or they just get old enough, and suddenly those people are back buying comics. I mean, you’ve been working in the industry obviously for a lot of time at this point, so it’s probably a little bit different than a regular collector, but do you read anything currently? Do you go see the movies, the TV shows? Whoever would’ve guessed the world that is comic books now?

MORROW: Yeah, really, when we were coming up reading comics, who thought we’d go to the movieplex and see Avengers: Endgame?

Man, when I saw that movie, that was what I was thinking through that whole movie. It’s just like, how did we get to here from where we started as kids? It’s so weird. We were lucky to have a Christopher Reeve Superman movie, right?

HIGGINS: Now, did you keep reading through high school and college, or did you kind of take a big break?

MORROW: I did. I read nonstop until 1988, I think it was, after Watchmen and Dark Knight came out, which I really enjoyed both of those series. I thought they were great. So maybe it was a confluence of where I was in life at that point, but I was done with college, starting a career, had just gotten married. We were saving up for our first house, and it was not an expenditure I wanted anymore. I wasn’t enjoying comics that much after that, and I just kind of stopped. I said, “No, this is a good stopping point.” And I sold probably 80%, 85% of my comic collection to a dealer to help get the down payment money for our first little house. And I didn’t really regret it at the time. It wasn’t that hard to part with those books, but I kept a few Neal Adams things and a few Jack Kirby things, and I kept all the Fourth World stuff. I just couldn’t bear to get rid of that. But most everything else I had, I got rid of at that point. Sad to say, I’ve had to go back and rebuy an awful lot of those books since then. But it’s been fun tracking ’em down again.

HIGGINS: All the kids that grew up and now are in charge of things.

SHARP: When you walk up, John, with your money and ask for one ticket for the New Gods movie, that’s when you know it’s come full circle.

MORROW: Oh, it’s coming. I know it’s coming. I’m waiting to see. I am crossing my fingers, cautiously optimistic that DC might actually get it right on that one. It’s just mind-boggling that we’re at that point now. But no, I don’t buy many new comics at all. The most recent new thing that I’ve really enjoyed was Walter Simonson’s Ragnarok, I’ve enjoyed that. I don’t frequent my local comic shop very often, maybe once a month, once every two months, something like that, so I can keep an eye on what’s coming out. But most of this stuff just doesn’t appeal to me. And I know I’m going to sound like a dinosaur here, but it seems like most of the up-and-coming artists now, they’re just very homogenous to me.

I look at their styles and they’re extremely talented. Don’t get me wrong. They’re amazing illustrators, but I don’t see that they have that distinctive, very idiosyncratic style like Walter Simonson does, or Mike Mignola, or Eric Powell. I love Eric Powell’s stuff, but he’s very, very distinctive, a one-of-a-kind guy. Nobody else really draws like him. And that’s the thing for me, you can have all the great technique in the world, but if you don’t have a really distinctive style, it doesn’t speak to me so much. And so I can admire it from a technique standpoint, but not necessarily stylistically, if that makes sense. And I think that’s why the new comics don’t speak to me very much.

HIGGINS: That Jack Kirby Fourth World Omnibus that DC put out, I think is beautiful. It’s humongous, right? Much cheaper than buying the original books these days.

MORROW: Absolutely. It’s amazing that we’re in an age where you can see all this stuff collected in formats like that. When we were kids, you would go to two or three different drug stores or 7-11 stores or whatever, just trying to find all of that week’s or that month’s comics, because it was real sporadic with the distribution.

In college, I started ordering from Westfield Comics and I got my comics by mail because we didn’t have a comic shop where I went to college.

That was pre-Internet days, but that was a great simple way to, all of a sudden—what a luxury! You could pick anything you want, fill out

HIGGINS: So many of the big artists these days, if they’re not picked up by Hollywood or they go into video games, all they’re doing is covers. There’s no money in the interiors. It’s so much work for so little money. At the end of the day, they can make more money doing a cover, so anyone that makes it big, they’re just not going to do interior work anymore. This is Marvel and DC, and this is a lot of the independent companies too. It’s everyone. It’s just so hard to get consistent art on even six issues in a row, let alone a hundred. It just does not happen.

MORROW: Yeah, I think that’s quite a testament to the guys that we grew up enjoying. The Kirbys and the John Buscemas of the world, John Romita, Curt Swan at DC. I mean, how many months after 26

months did they never miss a deadline? How many issues did they deliver? And they somehow managed to make a good enough living to support their families.

Maybe that kind of tells you how screwy the economy is these days, what you have to do to support your family these days—that you can’t [with comics]. Somebody like Jack Kirby, he’d crank out, what, 15 pages a week?

Something like that, I think was his DC contract. And you’ve got guys now that can’t do 15 pages a month.

But they’re also putting much more rendering into it than Kirby did. Kirby worked extremely fast, but he could make a living with 15 pages a week.

It’s a very different thing. A lot of the companies have to hire artists from other countries who can work for less, and have a lower standard of living. I sometimes scratch my head wondering how DC and Marvel and Dark Horse manage to produce these beautiful books, when I know what printing costs, I know what the labor costs are, I know what they would have to pay the artist at a minimum. And it seems like a zero sum game. It’s a losing battle unless you score that big Hollywood contract, somebody options it for a film or something like that. And maybe that’s what it all boils down to now. We’ll keep cranking out IP of our own and hope somebody picks up on it and makes a big budget film out of it, or video game or something.

the ball rolling, and God bless him, I love his work, still to this day. But he was the first writer that really, really clicked for me in terms of, “I will buy anything this guy writes, regardless of who’s drawing it.” Prior to that, that was not the case for me. It had to have great art. I can take great art with so-so writing, but I couldn’t take great writing with so-so art. There was no reason for me to buy that book if that were the case.

HIGGINS: Kevin [Sharp]’s given me the big thumbs up there, and that is, I love comic book art. I absolutely love it, but if the story’s nothing, I have no interest in it.

I don’t care what the art’s like. If the story’s great, the

HIGGINS: Yeah, we’ve talked with DC and Marvel kind of on the backend occasionally. They’ve all said, “Hey, we’re profitable at our price points.” They must be printing just enough copies where the cost is cheap enough. And especially Marvel, I know it does not have a ton of—they have some good interior artists, but they’re not taking the big indie guys and making ’em superstars. All the big guys are doing covers or going somewhere else. The money’s going to the writers for a lot of these books. I think it’s not the artists.

MORROW: Well, that’s an interesting twist from when I was growing up. It was the artist [then], right? The writers were certainly important, but they were secondary. They weren’t the superstars. They weren’t the ones that you were flocking to get an autograph from at a convention.

And it really has turned around now.

Now the writers are the ones that command the attention these days.

That’s another interesting switch for me, that I ponder sometimes how that switch happened. I think it’s all Alan Moore’s fault. I think he started 27

[below] Along with “The Glory Boat,” my entry into the Fourth World was with “The Bug” in New Gods #9 (July 1972), shown here in Jack’s pencil art for page 4.

[below] Tom King’s Mister Miracle series is a highwater mark for post-Kirby treatments of the Fourth World characters. [next page top] I never understood the reason for new recurring character Shilo Norman, who debuted in Mister Miracle #15 (Sept. 1973), especially when there was already such a rich supporting cast. But future writers were inspired enough by him to make him a headliner.

art could be “Eh,” but you want that big package, right?

You want both to be perfect. It’s so rare these days, though. I think it’s always been rare, but it’s more rare now because so much of the focus is on writing. And again, like I said, the artists aren’t doing interiors, so it’s really hard to get both. And there are cases where it happens, but it’s not as common as it used to be.

MORROW: I want to mention this, because you get writer/artists, right? And the ones that are really good, they deliver exactly what you’re talking about, the perfect package. But you asked me other new things I read, one of the most recent new things I read was Tom King’s Mister Miracle series—which, I’m a Kirby fan. So I was, “Well, okay, another person trying to do Mister Miracle here.” There’ve been a million of ’em, and I haven’t found any of ’em, other than Steve Rude [and Mark Evanier]’s version, really to my taste. But I got this and I read it and I got the collection. Thankfully, I could sit down and read it as a cohesive unit, kind of the way I think they planned it. You didn’t have to wait thirty days from when one issue ends to see how the next one starts.

Literally, what it says at the end of issue one, bleeds into what it says at the beginning of issue two. Seeing the entire package and reading it in one sitting, which is what I did when I got this thing, I was so engrossed by the first issue, I couldn’t stop.

I just had to sit down and do the whole run. You want to talk about a good combination of writing and art? I’m still trying to digest that book, and I

[next page, bottom] We’ve come a long way from this first ad for TJKC, which ran in the Comics Buyer’s Guide in 1994. For the full story of our history, get the World of TwoMorrows anniversary book, on sale throughout 2024!

read it eight months ago, but the writing was so amazingly different than anything I’ve read in comics before, and the art was so amazingly different from anything I’ve seen in comics before. And it seems like either those two [things] are going to go together just perfectly, or they’re going to clash and be horrible together. And those guys, they knocked it out of the park, I thought.

It’s not Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle, although it’s based on it, right? Jack would never approach a comic like that, but Jack would’ve seen that comic and gone, “This is good comics. These guys are doing their own thing here.” And I can’t speak highly enough of that stuff. I think Tom King is amazing.

HIGGINS: Well, yeah, that is a favorite book of the podcast. And Mitch Gerard is the artist. I mean, they’ve done a lot of work together and they’re doing an Adam Strange book next, which is now my most anticipated book of 2020.

MORROW: Well, there you go. I didn’t know that was coming out, so I’m going to have to search for that next year.

HIGGINS: That should be really good. So I want to talk about the [new] book and I want to talk about TwoMorrows. How many books have you guys published outside of the magazines?

MORROW: Well, I have to keep a database of everything we’ve published and everything we’ve got coming up. I think there’s at last count, 936 different items in my database. But now that includes—what are we up to?—160 issues of Alter Ego magazine, so that’s a big chunk of it. Back Issue is to #116 now, and Jack Kirby Collector’s up to #77. I’m working on #78 now, so that eats a fair amount. But we’re probably at... somewhere between 100-250 [books].

HIGGINS: For listeners that aren’t familiar with the company, if you haven’t seen these, TwoMorrows publishes a ton of books and magazines focused around Golden Age, Silver Age comics into the Bronze Age. Back Issue magazine focuses on the Eighties and the Seventies also. So it’s not modern stuff, but I know I have a big collection of the reprints of Legion Outpost. I have those All-Star Companion books. Those are some of my favorite reference books. If you’re an artist, you have to check out the Modern Masters series. There was thirty-some-odd, I don’t know the number off the top of my head. A ton of these books, single volumes focused on artists—again, older, [but] more modern.

SHARP: Those Modern Masters books are some of the best bargains in comics reading. I mean, it’s like a class.

It’s like an education between the covers, which we’ll come back to that in a few minutes.

HIGGINS: So if you haven’t seen these books at your local shop, definitely check into ’em. But yeah, how’d you get into the publishing end of it?

MORROW: Totally by accident. Everything in my life all seems to come back to Jack Kirby one way or another, whether I mean for it to or not. And really, I grew up being a big Jack Kirby fan, after I discovered him with that Kamandi issue. From there, I worked my way to the Fourth World. From there, I worked my way backwards to the Sixties Marvel stuff like Fantastic Four and Thor, and just grew up being a big Jack Kirby fan. He kind of got out of comics more or less around 1978, ’79. He was

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doing a little bit of independent stuff, and I picked that up, Captain Victory and Silver Star, things like that. But he was working in the animation industry, mostly out of comics at that point. He was getting older, and he was retired in the late Eighties for the most part.

So there wasn’t any new Kirby stuff out there. And then when I gave up comics in ’88 to help fund our first house, that was it. But I had always had this goal that one day I wanted to get out to the San Diego Con and meet Jack Kirby and just shake his hand, because I had been trying ever since I read there was a San Diego ComicCon when I was a kid and saw that Jack Kirby was there—and my best friend and I, every year, from the time I was probably nine or 10 years old, we always tried to plot and scheme some way: “Okay, how are we going to get our parents to get us out to California?” Well, looking back, there was no way in the world either of our parents had the money to take us out to California for a comic book convention.

But we kept trying every year and never got to. And then finally in 1991, my wife and I had just gotten underway on our new advertising agency and we were doing some work for a client, and we hired a freelance illustrator that lived out in California, and had an opportunity to go out there on business, and it’s like, “If we can coincide this with the San Diego Con, maybe I can actually meet Jack Kirby.” We worked it out.

I got there to the convention. I only had an afternoon to spend at Comic-Con, but did manage to meet him. That’s a whole different story of intrigue of what that involved, but I got to shake his hand and talked to him for three or four minutes, and he was exactly the way everybody described him: A super nice guy with no ego, who was more interested in talking about you and learning what you did and where you’re from, than talking about himself, and it was just a wonderful, great experience.

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That was ’91, and I thought, “My life is complete now, I can close the door on comics and I’m done, because I’ve met Jack Kirby and life’s good.” But then he passed away in February of 1994, and my old buddy, Matt, who had schemed with me to try to get out there to Comic-Con, faxed me a clipping from USAToday of Kirby’s obituary. At that point, I’d gotten rid of most of my comics. I hadn’t read ’em in a while and decided, “Okay, I guess I need to get my comics out and reread them.” And I did, all that Spring, and kind of just out of nowhere, I got the idea, “Wait a minute, surely he’s still got some fans out there. I know he’s been retired for ten years...” or whatever.

And I got the issues of Comics Buyer’s Guide right after he passed away, where people wrote in nice letters about him, and all their addresses were in there. So I thought, “You know what? We’re doing advertising and graphic design. We’ve got computer software for doing design work. I’m going to do a little 16-page xerox newsletter about Jack Kirby just for fun, and I’m going to mail it to 125 people who wrote in to CBG where I could cull addresses from, just for fun.” And I figured, if it lasts four or five issues, that’s great. And my wife patted me on the head: “Oh yeah, you go have fun with your little pet project. It’ll be fine.”

We didn’t have kids then. And so it was just a fun little lark to do, and I had no clue that it would ever result in what it is now.

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I had no [idea] the kind of just seismic response—that this little 16-page newsletter that I hand-fed dimes into the Xerox machine at the local drugstore to copy, would take off the way it did. But yeah, we did the first issue, did 125 copies for free, sent ’em out and put a little notice in there. “Hey, have you got Jack Kirby art, or do you want to write something about him? Send it in.” Well, boy, did I get my money’s worth out of that. And every day, the mailbox was just full of orders for subscriptions, and people would send copies of their Kirby sketches that he did for them, or of their original art.

They got to write stories.

We had to do a second photocopying run of another hundred copies of the first issue, and then we had to do a third. I think we ended up doing seven different xerox printings of different quantities of the first issue alone, because people just kept ordering it, and the word of mouth was incredible. We didn’t have the Internet going for us then. It wasn’t in comic shops. It was absolutely grassroots, word of mouth, and from there, it just took off. Issue #6 of the Jack Kirby Collector was my Fourth World special. That was the one [I thought] I was going to end on, and I was going to make it the

best thing ever done on the Fourth World. I was going to find out how he was going to originally end it. I got connections for Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman, who were his assistants in the Seventies when he was doing the New Gods stuff, interviewed them and his inker Mike Royer, and had this great 36-page issue instead of 16— and decided, “Okay, I can’t sit here feeding dimes into a copier anymore. I’m going to have to actually commercially print this thing.”

So we gambled our money to pay for the printing on the thing. We had no idea how many to print, but you couldn’t just do a hundred [at a time]. I don’t even remember how many we printed, but it was probably more like 1000, 1500, something like that. And I figured, “Well, I’m going to be left with boxes of these things.”

But I took a shot on it, [and] sold ’em out. I went to our first [San Diego] Comic-Con as an exhibitor in ’95, right after that sixth issue was done. We did it as cheaply as we possibly could, and back then you could call two weeks before Comic-Con and get a booth and a hotel room. It’s not that way anymore. But we went out there with our six black-and-white issues of the Jack Kirby Collector and a little handmade display I had for our booth. And my gosh, it was this major love fest. Kirby had died [in 1994], so he wasn’t there the year before, and everybody missed him so much, and we were just in the right place at the right time. Our booth was a mob scene. The best moment was when Barry Windsor-Smith came walking up with his entourage, and he’s in his Armani suit with alligator shoes [on].

He had four or five hangers-on following him around, and my wife’s like, “Who is this guy?” And I say, “I think that’s Barry Windsor-Smith.” He walks up to the table, and says, “Are you John?” with his British accent. “I’m Barry and I brought something for you.” And he pulls out this beautiful reproduction copy of an unused Fantastic Four [#20] cover that he had in his collection. And that was when I knew, “Whoa, this thing may have legs.” Because if Barry-freaking-Windsor-Smith takes the time out of his day to make a copy of art from his collection and personally hand-deliver it to me at Comic-Con— when I know he had a million things to do at ComicCon—this is pretty remarkable. I thought, “We may be doing this a little bit longer.” And from there, [since] Kirby Collector did well, we decided to start a sort of Jack Kirby Collector for all the other artists, and that was called Comic Book Artist. My good friend Jon B. Cooke [conceived of and] edited that, and that won five Eisner Awards, five consecutive years for Best Magazine. From there, we started doing—you mentioned the All-Star Companions. We got hooked up with Roy Thomas—I was always a huge fan of his work for Marvel and DC. His big [love] was the Justice Society in All-Star Comics. And he was doing a back section in Comic Book Artist revamping his old Alter Ego fanzine of the Sixties, doing a little section there. We spun that off into its own magazine, that did well, and Roy said he’d like to do a book on the history of All-Star Comics. Okay, “We’ve never done a book before, but let’s give it a try.” We’d been totally flying by the seat of our pants from Day One, and we just kind of figured things out and had the good graces of Jack Kirby fans out there, and everybody loves Jack. By association, we have gotten more great breaks. If it weren’t for Jack Kirby, we would not be doing what we’re doing today, and I never forget that for a single day. He permeates everything we do, even if fans don’t see it.

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HIGGINS: That’s an incredible story.

SHARP: Speaking of Kirby, let’s get to the main event.

The reason John is on the line here is because of this new book, Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said.

HIGGINS: A little play on “’Nuff Said,” right?

SHARP: Yes. The caption underneath says “The complex genesis of the Marvel Universe in its creators’ own words.” John, I want to turn it over to you for a moment here. How would you, as the author, as the chronicler even—I don’t know if “author” even covers what this book is. How would you describe this book to a lay person?

MORROW: Well, if they’ve heard of Stan Lee and they haven’t heard of Jack—and you know they’ve heard of Stan Lee because of the Marvel movies and all the PR, and Stan was a great promoter for himself and for Marvel. I think it’s safe to say, if anybody’s picking this book up and has interest in it, they have some idea who Stan Lee was. They may or may not know who Jack Kirby was. So this book is going to give you an idea of who Jack Kirby was and what he did, but I think it’s also going to give you the most balanced and fair look ever taken at their working relationship, as close as we can to documenting who did what on all of their co-creations for Marvel Comics, from the Fantastic Four to the X-Men, Silver Surfer, the Avengers, the Hulk, Thor, right? Who did what on those?

Well, how do you approach this? That’s what I asked myself: “Okay, what’s the most objective way I can document that history?” And the answer was, let’s put it in their own words as much as we possibly can.

The good news is, first of all, Stan Lee did about three trillion interviews over the years, and I know that that’s [only a slight exaggeration] because I had to review three trillion interviews and decide what to use for the book. But Jack Kirby, he’s an artist sitting in his house all alone, working in the wee hours of the morning, drawing these stories. You wouldn’t think he would be the subject of a lot of interviews, but because Kirby had so many fans, every fanzine wanted an interview with Jack Kirby, and he obliged. He’d be at conventions, he’d do interviews. There are quotes from Kirby interviews in this book where they may have only been in a 50-copy print run, little mimeographed fanzine, but they’re legit interviews, particularly from the time period they were done in, in the Sixties.

And that’s the key to the Stuf’ Said book.

Everything’s done in chronological order. So there’s an

introductory chapter that talks about both Stan and Jack’s histories in the Forties and the Fifties, and how they both ended up together in 1961 to create Fantastic Four #1. But that’s when the fun starts in the book.

Okay, who came up with the characters? Who came up with the names, who came up with the costumes?

Whose idea was it to do [a given comic] in the first place? And there’s a third person that comes into play in this book that a lot of people forget about, and that’s Martin Goodman. He was the publisher of Marvel Comics and the owner, and had a lot of decision making say in what got produced. He was also a relative of Stan Lee, and that comes into play as well, because Stan got some preferential treatment that non-family members at Marvel did not get.

Also, Stan was a company employee, whereas Jack Kirby was a freelancer, so that worked against Kirby as well. [Stan] had a great situation there. But when it comes to taking credit for things, all that needs to be factored in and weighed. And Stan, as kind of the public mouthpiece of Marvel, got the most say, and actually he gets more of the say in this book. One of the things I did when I was designing the book was [to] make sure people know who’s saying what at a glance. Anytime Stan is quoted, it’s all printed in red ink. Anytime Kirby is quoted, it’s all printed in blue ink. So at a quick glance, you can tell there’s a whole lot more red ink in here than blue, because Stan obviously did a lot more interviews.

But there is a lot of Kirby interview quotes as well, and they’re all presented chronologically. So you can see how the relationship evolved from Fantastic Four #1, up through getting to the Galactus Trilogy and how that came to be. We take quotes from the different letter columns and Bullpen Bulletin pages and things like that, and insert them chronologically as well. So you get an exhaustive year by year, month by month account of how the relationship started, how it evolved over time, how it deteriorated, and how things were different after Kirby left in 1970 to go to DC, then came back in ’75—how different the relationship was when he came back in ’75 as well. We go into the fight Kirby had against Marvel to get his original art back in the Eighties, and we cover the relationship, good and bad, between Lee and Kirby all through that period as well.

So if you want the true story of who created what at Marvel Comics and how it evolved the way it did, this book does the trick. I knew it’d be a good seller, but I had no idea how quickly people would latch onto it. [After it sold out], I went back and expanded it, and we’ve got a second edition coming out at the end of September. It has an extra 16 or so pages of additional material we’ve 31

[left] Art I used for one of my handmade stand-ups which adorned our first Comic-Con booth in 1995. The other was a Kirby Captain America. [previous page] The stunning unused Fantastic Four #20 cover that Barry Windsor-Smith presented to me in person in San Diego. [below] The cover art for Stuf’ Said was taken from Jack’s own cover of 1982’s Captain Victory #6.

Never forget: “Victory is sacrifice!”

discovered since then. It doesn’t fundamentally change the story or what you’re going to think about the story, it’s just that the additional material augments it. But a key thing in the Expanded Edition, we have more quotes from Steve Ditko, the co-creator of Spider-Man, because he factors very strongly into this story as well.

Without Spider-Man, Marvel certainly wouldn’t have been as successful in the Sixties, and who knows, they may not have even held on at one point. Everybody thinks Ditko was this reclusive guy who never spoke to the press, but that’s not exactly true. He was that way after he left Marvel in ’66 or so, but before that, he did a fair number of interviews here and there, and he also wrote his own essays in the Eighties and Nineties, that feed back to what was going on in the Sixties. But if you have an interest in Marvel history at all, or in Stan Lee or Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko and how everything evolved, this book is just exhaustive. I don’t think you’re ever going to find anybody else crazy enough to do what I did on this book.

It was a very complicated relationship. And one of the things that’s in the Expanded Edition—a gentleman read the first edition, and he contacted me and said, “I’ve got this photo I took of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” I’m like, “Oh, great, but we’ve got a lot of photos of Stan and Jack. What’s special about this one?” “Well, this was taken at the San Diego Con in 1989, and they’re together, kind of hugging each other,” and I’m like, “Wow, okay!” Things were not great between Lee and Kirby [then]. And by ’89, Jack had finally resolved—not the way he wanted, but just to get it over with—his original art battle with Marvel. That was the Summer that he gave this very scathing interview, partially about Stan, to the Comics Journal [for issue #134, February 1990].

So this picture was taken—as near as I can figure, it looks like literally the weekend before Jack started doing that interview, and the guy tells the story about it in the book, how this picture took place. He was 15 when he took it and saw Jack and Stan there, and talks about how friendly they were to each other, how they genuinely seemed happy to see each other. And then for Kirby to, a week later, start doing this interview where he comes across in a lot of instances as kind of bitter—and deservedly so, based on the way Marvel treated him—it was a very, very complicated relationship.

We get into that in the book, and that part of it saddens me. But documenting this through what both men said, it helps me understand it better. I really do understand their complicated relationship a lot better now. I wish it hadn’t ended up the way it did, but at the same time, there are moments like that photo where you go, in spite of it all, there was still a certain fondness these two guys had for each other, in spite of their differences. And I can take a little solace in that.

Glen David Gold sent this interesting query in: “The Thor #141 cover as published (to replace the one that got rejected) is below. That image drove me nuts. I knew I had seen it somewhere, but no matter how far back I combed, it wasn’t there.

“But I didn’t look ahead. Thor #144 interior page (above)—that’s the source of the #141 cover, isn’t it? They printed covers on a different schedule, right? So Jack’s pages to #144 come in right as the #141 cover needs to be replaced, and they had someone redraw this?”

HIGGINS: Well, I know the Comics Journal spared few punches against Stan Lee. So I always wonder with some of those pieces in interviews, you’re like, “Hmm, I don’t know.” It’s tough to tell.

MORROW: The thing about that controversial Kirby interview that the Journal did is, I remember reading it fresh off the stands when I was [in my late twenties], and I was like, “Whoa, Jack, man, you’ve got an axe to grind here, and wow, this can’t be right.” Because it was totally contrary to the company line that Stan and Marvel always told about how chummy everybody was in the Bullpen, and how great things were, and all this. And Jack laid it on the line and told a bunch of things that people were scratching their heads [over] like, “Wow, maybe Jack’s losing it here. Maybe he’s not supersharp upstairs anymore. This stuff, this isn’t right. This isn’t what we’ve always been told.” But if you go through the Stuf’ Said book, you’ll see early on in the Sixties, Jack was saying those same things in the 1960s and in the ’70s and in the ’80s that he was saying in 1990 in this supposedly ridiculous interview. He maybe wasn’t saying them with quite as rough of a tone, but he was saying a lot of those 32

same things.

So he was not making this stuff up all of a sudden in 1989 or 1990 when we gave that interview. That’s the great thing about Stuf’ Said; you can go back chronologically and see him discussing these same topics in 1965 and ’66. So that sheds a whole lot of new light on Kirby’s side of things, and Stan rightly or wrongly getting so much praise. But I think we’re seeing—well, I know we’re seeing now, things are starting to turn around. Not that Stan doesn’t still get praise and doesn’t still deserve praise, but Kirby’s starting to get closer to what I think his share should be, and I think that’s fantastic. And for whatever small part we’ve had in that, by keeping his name out there since 1994 when a lot of people were kind of like, “Okay, Jack Kirby, great, but who’s the new guy?” Right? It saddens me that [since] Will Eisner passed away, people don’t talk about him as much as they used to, because what an amazing gifted talent. And I think if nothing else, for the last—and this is our 25th year doing this, I started the Kirby Collector 25 years ago this month, actually— 25 years plugging away, documenting Kirby’s life and history, if we’ve had a small part in making sure he’s not forgotten, then my life for the last 25 years has been very well spent. And this book, particularly, I think is a great document to make sure people understand why he was so important, and what he did, and what he really contributed to the Marvel Comics era.

HIGGINS: We were just talking about this an episode or two ago. At Walt Disney World, they had an entire Jack Kirby display in one of their sections for the Eternals, right? Obviously they have a movie coming out, but the fact that in 2019, Disney is devoting part of a theme park to Jack Kirby, is pretty mind-blowing.

MORROW: I really want to go down there just to see the display—I’ve seen the pictures on TV, but just to be there, just to say that, “Okay, it was real. I saw this.”

The Kirby family invited me in 2017 to the Disney Legends Award ceremony where Jack and Stan were both honored as Disney Legends, and that was, to me—I still get chills thinking about it. It’s like, “Wow, okay, we’ve got some parity here.” Both guys were honored exactly the same, and Stan was extremely gracious in his speech there, and he had just lost his wife the week before, too. It was amazing he was able to be there at all. To see how things have come full circle now, from 1994 when I started the Kirby Collector, and seeing that this Eternals movie is going to come out, and that’s 100% Jack’s creation...

Is it going to do well? Is it going to flop? I have no idea, but just the fact that it’s being made, that Disney has enough faith in Kirby’s material there to plunk down the dollars to produce something like that, I think that says a lot. And I think stuff like that Disney World display on Kirby—which I was tickled to see that it has our Jack Kirby Checklist book right front and center in the display. But seeing that they’re not just doing an Eternals display, they’re doing a Jack Kirby display, that means a lot. And Disney’s never been the kind of company that promotes their creators unless their name is Walt Disney. So I think it’s pretty remarkable to see that Jack’s name is being put to the forefront in such a dramatic way. Hey, more power to them. I hope they keep it up, and I hope they take a million other

Kirby creations and promote those as well. We will see, time will tell.

BROCK SAGER: John, I had a question about the Stuf’ Said book. You have a lot of great original art pieces in there, actual covers from the books. There was the Incredible Hulk in there, all this wonderful Kirby stuff...

MORROW: Well, that’s the beauty of having done what we’re doing for 25 years now. We have access to thousands of collectors’ collections of things. So finding material isn’t that big of an issue, finding really rare stuff. A lot of that comes from the Kirby family as well. They gave me access to Jack’s old files, and working with the fine folks at the Jack Kirby Museum—which if you’re not aware of it, it’s kirbymuseum.org, check out their website. They’ve amassed a huge treasure trove of digital images of Kirby’s art. They go to every major convention and scan; the original art dealers all let ’em scan their Kirby art, which is a great repository of history there, because Jack wrote notes in the margins on the side of his pages, so Stan would know the story he was conveying on his pages and would know how to dialogue it.

So reading those notes tell us things 33

[above] An almost break-up from the “Nancy Hale” advice feature in Young Romance #23 (July 1950). This could be seen as a precursor to the True-Life Divorce stories in Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love.

(this page) Along with deluxe fold-outs, Dingbat Love contains a facsimile edition of what Soul Love #1 would’ve been like—including faux ads from that time period, a text feature, and an Alex Ross painted cover, based on Jack’s own idea for it [above]!

about stories that we didn’t know. That kind of material all comes into the historical record, and it really plays into the research. That’s the thing in this book. It wasn’t just researching all these interviews. I had to research art, look at those margin notes that Kirby put on the sides, look at old scripts that Stan had, compare them to what actually saw print, and see where things changed and where they were the same.

But the beauty is that, with 25 years doing this, I’ve got such a wealth of information to draw from. I couldn’t have done that book 10 years ago or 15 years ago, because we’ve amassed so much more stuff since then. And just since the first edition sold out, in the five months it took me to revise it for the Expanded Edition, more material came in that we didn’t have access to for the original edition. So it’s amazing how everything kind of builds on itself. I’m working on a book right now, [compiling] several unpublished DC 1970s Kirby stories that DC chose never to publish.

[I’ve] gotten their permission to publish the stories and also document the history behind them, and why DC rejected them.

HIGGINS: Are they like some of that Implosion stuff or just fill-ins or...?

MORROW: Oh no, this is early Seventies stuff. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with it. Jack did two experimental magazines. One was called In the Days of The Mob and the other one was called Spirit World.

Jack drew two issues of each, but they only published one of each and then just dropped the whole idea.

But he had a vision for a whole line of different magazines that would have some comics 34

content, but be sold on newsstands—not in the comic book section, but as actual magazines. And he wanted them produced full-color, on elaborate gloss paper, sell for a dollar apiece back when comics were going for 15 cents apiece, do a real upscale, high-end thing, because he saw the comics industry was on the way out and he thought this was the future. So DC originally greenlit the project, but then almost immediately lost faith in it because of what it was going to cost.

In addition to In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World, he did two others—well, it started out [with] one called True-Life Divorce. It was sort of an antiromance magazine, stories about people breaking up instead of getting together. This is for 1971 DC Comics.

This stuff is fabulous. These stories are great. He draws the most beautiful, sexy women you’ve ever seen— Kirby is not somebody you think of as drawing beautiful women. They’re always that same stock woman.

Wait’ll you see the pencil work on these females he drew for these divorce stories. But DC got the art in, in pencil, and said—and we go into the history, but part of it has to do with the Catholic church not wanting to promote divorce. Part of it just has to do with DC chickening out at that point, not wanting to pony up the money to do this.

But in that divorce book, one of the stories he drew was about an African-American couple breaking up. And DC said, “Wait a minute. Let’s take this one and develop a whole different magazine, an AfricanAmerican romance book called Soul Love.” By then the idea was getting so watered down, but Jack, true to form: “Okay, if that’s what you want, I’ll do it.” And he did four more stories for that, and they’re pretty good.

There’s so many things that you’ll read about in the book, but the history of the times is a lot of why things did or didn’t get done. They had to redraw the faces of the black characters, because the distributor decided they wanted all the guys to look like Sidney Poitier and all the women to look like Diane Carroll. And so they had Vince Colletta redraw the men’s and women’s faces in these stories.

So the original art has tons of white-out and blue pencil and stuff over it. And then they were going to do a pull-out poster in the magazine of Roberta Flack, the famous singer. But when she saw the work, she decided, “No, I don’t want my poster in this publication.”

They ended up booting that publication, and those pages sat and never got published. So this new book I’m doing has the divorce stories in it, which are great; has the Soul Love stories in it, which are [pause]—you’ll see. [laughter] And Jack also did a title called Dingbats of Danger Street, which appeared in a comic called First Issue Special. They only printed one issue of that. It’s a kid gang group, about four kids in the slums. The first issue was published in there, but he did three issues, and the other two were never published.

So we got DC’s okay to publish the second and third issues of Dingbats of Danger Street, which is actually a personal favorite of mine. And if people are judging based on the first issue, they’re going to be very pleasantly surprised when they read the second one, especially to see how much more serious the tone is, and how gorgeous the art is. We go into the history of why those never got published as well. So it’s a really, really fun book. I’m three weeks late on it, because when people

see what I did to it, they’ll understand why it took so much longer to produce. I’ve got a great surprise in there. I think it’s going to blow people’s minds. But that one hopefully will be out end of November.

The book is called Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love [laughter] because it’s got the Dingbats of Danger Street in it and two different love projects that were never published. It’s crazy stuff.

SHARP: I’ve got one final Stuf’ Said question for you before we let you shuffle off into the night. This book is just incredible. And I’m wondering, looking back on it now, two editions, what’s one thing that surprised you to learn when you were assembling all this? I’m sure there’s more than one, but just for the sake of not losing your mind, what’s a thing that you came away [with] that you really didn’t know before, that caught you off guard?

MORROW: Well, it’s sort of a two-part answer for that I think, but I’ll give you the two parts very quickly.

One is how consistent Kirby was in what he said from the 1960s up until his passing in the 1990s, about how things took place. And the other part of that is how Stan’s story on things wasn’t as consistent. When you read Stan’s quotes in the Sixties about how things are playing out, and then start reading how they changed a little bit in the Seventies—and then by the Eighties and then in the Nineties, subtle things creeped in. And it’s stuff like in the Sixties, he gave an interview [where] he was talking about the creation of the Silver Surfer and Galactus. And I think he said, “I forget who came up with the name Galactus. I think Jack did.” That’s in the Sixties. And then in the Seventies, it’s “Oh yeah, I came up with the name Galactus. It was all mine.” And then he stuck to that from then on. And we touched on that in the book as well, the motivations for some of the things that were said in some of these interviews over the years.

But I think that’s really the thing. I found Kirby to be very consistent in what he said. And I found Stan— I’m not saying Stan’s lying, but different motivations creep in over time. Memories change over time. Stan always said he had the world’s worst memory. I think that’s partially true, but you know how it is. Sometimes you get selective memories, there’s things you want to remember and things you don’t want to remember.

But that’s the beauty of doing that chronological format in the book. You can really start at the beginning of the book and read to the end and go, “That’s not what he was saying 10, 20 years ago.”

HIGGINS: I kind of feel wanted to do But most of all I like Stan Lee is one of Spider-Man. those guys that just had years old, I When I was about 10 ine called to tell the same stories magaz over and over and over. used to read a pulp ed “Master of itl bt su And I think you kind of The Spider and s the Master of get used to, “How can I Men.” Perhaps it wa to my imprest get through this quickly, Men that got me, bu thinking, the tell the story as fast as posof y sionable, preteen wa amatic characsible? I have to just keep dr Spider was the most doing the same interviews tered. He ranked ter I had ever encoun oc Savage and every year, over and over.”

D right up there with r, he wasn’t as So I wonder if some of tte be en Ev . that is just like, “Oh yeah, the Shadow I could just simplify this as well known as the ot hers much as possible.” m e the warm feeling , which gave MORROW: But the best that his fans belonged to an elite [examples are] not even simclub. At any rate, in searching for a tit plifying. There were a couple le superhero, I remembe for our newest of instances we documented red my old pulp favorite—and the in the Seventies where, after tit le Spider-Man it’s clearly been laid out in instantly hit me. I di dn various interviews in the rowing the Spider pa ’t mind borrt of his name Sixties how these characters because everything else about our were created and who was new character woul involved, all of a sudden d be di fferent. I was determ completely in the Seventies, he writes our next production ined to make this essay for some major the most original, most unique co magazine and he says, mic book charac“Yeah, I remember creating ter ever to swoop do wn the pike.

Spider-Man. I was sitting there and I saw a spider crawling up the wall, and blah, blah.” And it’s like, wait a minute. This sounds like Bob Kane saying he saw a bat flying in the window for Batman, and this is the first we ever heard about a spider climbing up the wall prior to that—that was never once mentioned.

Well, Stan’s a creative guy, and a creative writer, and I’m sure he was trying to juice up this article he had to write, and it sounded good. But when you go back and compare it to the historical record, it’s just total hogwash. And there were a couple of instances like that with Stan over the years where he said things and maybe thought better of it later.

But at the time, this was, “Hey, I’m in a major TV [above] “How I interview. What’s something exciting I can say that’ll Invented Spider-Man” interest the listeners?” So he was a promoter and a

by Stan Lee, from great promoter. And sometimes when you promote Quest/77 magazine, things, you shade things a little bit to keep them more July/Aug. 1977. No mention of Kirby— interesting. [Editor’s note: Alex Grand has just released plus the falsehood that a short video examining Stan’s 1972 Marvel Comics conhe came up with the tract, wherein the company formally positions Stan as the name based on the primary creator of their iconic characters, and the comSpider pulp character, pany figurehead—all of which gave Stan an official carte with no mention of Jack initially bringing blanche to take more than his share of credit. Check it out in the idea and name. at: https://youtu.be/8f283uMZlDg ] HIGGINS: Kevin, I know you had a little involvement, too.

SHARP: Well, it was my pleasure to just offer some assistance on the expanded version, but I mean, this is John’s labor of love. I’ve now read the book, John, I believe—well, I read the first edition, I read your Expanded Edition, so I’ve read it twice line by line, and I’m getting no cut of this. So I’m saying this just as a fan 35

[left] Back in TJKC #5, we ran some excerpts from the April 1972 symposium at Vanderbilt University that featured Jack and Stan. If anyone has full recordings, please send them in!

to school, but in a super entertaining class where you want to be there, but I’m absorbing so much information and it’s just fantastic.

Absolutely fantastic.

MORROW: Kevin, you just perfectly described the experience I had writing the book, because, yeah, I’d be like, “Wow, look at all this great stuff,” and I’d have to stop and give my brain a rest for a day or so. And then I’d discover some new tidbit that would lead to another tidbit, and then do a little more research. It’s like, “Oh, I see where this fits now.”

And it was like this amazing, fun jigsaw puzzle to do, but it was exhausting. And thank you, Kevin, for your input on it. After you saw the first edition, you read through it and said, “This is great. There’s a few typos here,” that kind of thing. “If you’re ever going to do an Expanded Edition, I’d like to point ’em out to you.” And that’s exactly the kind of assistance we love.

[above] Jack and Stan’s last work together, in these pencils from the 1977 Silver Surfer graphic novel. Jack sent typed notes in with these pencils, instead of leaving margin notes.

to anybody who’s listening and at all interested in this subject matter, this book is amazing. I learned something new on every page. Just the pictures alone make it worth picking up. But then the text as well is just an invaluable piece of comics history that anyone who’s interested in this at all, I can’t recommend it highly enough. And this next thing I’m going to say is an absolute compliment. I would have to put the book down and give my brain a break because it was like going 36

SHARP: It was a great time working with you on the expanded one. It was like getting an early Christmas present, getting to read the book again, which I know may sound like homework.

But again, I love this subject matter anyway, and to see somebody put a package of such love and care together, whether you’re on the side of “Stan did everything, and Jack was just an art robot,” or “Kirby got screwed by the self-promoting Stan Lee,”— it’s not only those two guys, it’s Ditko, it’s Wally Wood, it’s John Severin, it’s Roy Thomas, it’s all of these other voices that come to life in these pages. The way you’ve chosen the quotes, it’s like you’re hearing these people speak and it’s absolutely wonderful.

HIGGINS: John, it was great talking to you. Good luck with the book. I’m now super-excited about that Kirby book coming up, all the unpublished DC stuff.

MORROW: Guys, you will be blown away by this Kirby work. You may love it, you may hate it, this new romance/Dingbats thing, but you are absolutely not going to be bored by it. H

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ZOWIE!

THE TV SUPERHERO CRAZE IN ’60s POP CULTURE

by MARK VOGER

HOLY PHENOMENON! In the way-out year of 1966, the action comedy “Batman” starring ADAM WEST premiered and triggered a tsunami of super swag, including toys, games, Halloween costumes, puppets, action figures, and lunch boxes. Meanwhile, still more costumed avengers sprang forth on TV (“The Green Hornet,” “Ultraman”), in MOVIES (“The Wild World of Batwoman,” “Rat Pfink and Boo Boo”), and in ANIMATION (“Space Ghost,” “The Marvel Super Heroes”). ZOWIE! traces the history of the superhero genre from early films, through the 1960s TV superhero craze, and its pop culture influence ever since. This 192-page hardcover, in pop art colors that conjure the period, spotlights the coolest collectibles and kookiest knockoffs every ’60s kid begged their parents for, and features interviews with the TV stars (WEST, BURT WARD, YVONNE CRAIG, FRANK GORSHIN, BURGESS MEREDITH, CESAR ROMERO, JULIE NEWMAR, VAN WILLIAMS), the artists behind the comics (JERRY ROBINSON, DICK SPRANG, CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA), and others.

Written and designed by MARK VOGER (MONSTER MASH, HOLLY JOLLY), ZOWIE! is one super read!

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MARVEL COMICS In The EARLY 1960s

AN ISSUE-BY-ISSUE FIELD GUIDE TO A POP CULTURE PHENOMENON All characters and properties TM & © their respective owners.

by PIERRE COMTOIS This new volume in the ongoing “MARVEL COMICS IN THE...” series takes you all the way back to that company’s legendary beginnings, when gunfighters traveled the West and monsters roamed the Earth! The company’s output in other genres influenced the development of their super-hero characters from Thor to Spider-Man, and featured here are the best of those stories not covered previously, completing issue-by-issue reviews of EVERY MARVEL COMIC OF NOTE FROM 1961-1965! Presented are scores of handy, easy to reference entries on AMAZING FANTASY, TALES OF SUSPENSE (and ASTONISH), STRANGE TALES, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY, RAWHIDE KID, plus issues of FANTASTIC FOUR, AVENGERS, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, and others that weren’t in the previous 1960s edition. It’s author PIERRE COMTOIS’ last word on Marvel’s early years, when JACK KIRBY, STEVE DITKO, and DON HECK, together with writer/editor STAN LEE (and brother LARRY LIEBER), built an unprecedented new universe of excitement!

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NOW IN FULL-COLOR WITH BONUS PAGES! In 1978, DC Comics launched a line-wide expansion known as “The DC Explosion,” but pulled the plug weeks later, cancelling titles and leaving dozens of completed comic book stories unpublished. Now, that notorious “DC Implosion” is examined with an exhaustive oral history from JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, AL MILGROM, and other DC creators of the time, plus commentary by other top pros, examining how it changed the landscape of comics forever! This new EXPANDED EDITION of the Eisner Award-nominated book explodes in FULL-COLOR FOR THE FIRST TIME, with extra coverage of LOST 1970s DC PROJECTS like NINJA THE INVISIBLE and an adaptation of “THE WIZ,” JIM STARLIN’s unaltered cover art for BATMAN FAMILY #21, content meant for cancelled Marvel titles such as GODZILLA and MS. MARVEL, and more! NOW SHIPPING! (144-page FULL-COLOR SOFTCOVER) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $10.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-124-0

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ART DE TRIOMPHE DISPLAYING ARTISTIC MASTERY

Commentary

by John Morrow

[left] X-Men #2, page 13 (Nov. 1963) I spent hours going backward by date, starting from the earliest known Kirby margin notes from the “Tales of Asgard” story in Journey Into Mystery #103, to see if there were any even earlier ones. The rest of this X-Men issue has a lot of Stan’s notes to himself (likely made while going over the pages when Jack brought them in), but this page clearly shows Jack’s own notes. Inker Paul Reinman erased really well on pages he worked on, but there’s possibly some more Kirby notes on the bottom right of page 2 of this issue, and there may be others.

These are now the earliest Kirby margin notes I’ve found. At top right it says: “Psionic head band magnifies thought waves. Transmit and sends.

Distance no object to thought sending.” Jack’s notes at the bottom say: “McDonnell XV-1 Convertiplane put at disposal of X-Men to fly them to Washington.” Stan used that almost verbatim in the bottom panel.

So I’m assuming having the artist include margin notes was a time-saving idea of Stan’s, that developed from these early instances of Jack doing them. This way, he wouldn’t have to go over every page that an artist brought in. Daredevil #1 (April 1964) pages show Bill Everett’s margin notes. Even earlier, Dick Ayers was including margin notes in the Human Torch story in Strange Tales #117 (Feb. 1964).

This increasing use of margin notes probably led to Stan developing his “Writer’s Test” to try out potential new writers like Roy Thomas, using pages from Fantastic Four Annual #2 with the word balloons whited-out, but Jack’s margin notes included [below].

38

VICTORIOUS [left] Captain America #101, page 9 pencils (May 1968) Cap gets his own mag, and Jack finally gets away from having to do lower-paying layouts for others, and just concentrates on three regular titles ( Cap, Thor, and Fantastic Four).

39

This house ad claims big successes for Simon & Kirby’s Harvey titles, but the post-war glut of comics from loosening paper rationing, caused Stuntman to end with #2, and Boy Explorers to only have issue #1 released. I have no idea if Joe or Jack actually wrote this, but it’s a concurrent Boy Explorers story nonetheless. [next page] Demon #16, page 11 (Jan. 1974) Here’s one last outing with Etrigan, before the book was cancelled and Jack moved on to other DC projects. Look at the power in that punch! [page 42] Eternals #18, page 17 (Dec. 1977) This penultimate issue ended on a cliffhanger, but Jack likely knew the writing was on the wall. Despite Eternals being slated for an Annual (generally an indicator of good sales), by this point he had one foot out the door at Marvel. After being pushed to include the Hulk and Shield in the series, he ended the series his own way—with no connection to the Marvel Universe.

40

LAST HURRAHS

[this page] Boy Explorers text story from Stuntman #2 (July 1946)

41

BOUNCING BACK [right] “The Menace of Magneto” storyboards Jack fulfilled his 1970s Marvel contract quota by doing storyboards for the 1978 The New Fantastic Four animated series. This gave him inroads in the animation field, and would lead to a much-needed career victory for him personally.

This episode aired October 14, 1978, and was dialogued by Stan Lee, but these notes are Jack’s.

42

43 43

44

[left] “Yay! Team!” animation concept (early 1980s) As Jack transitioned fully into animation by 1980, he was an important part of the hit show Thundarr the Barbarian, working at RubySpears and getting job benefits for the first time in his career.

Part of his job there was coming up with new ideas for shows, and this board shows a concept that would’ve crossed over with Thundarr in at least one episode, had it been produced.

Note Jack’s great rendition of Ookla and Thundarr in the first panel. [next page] Captain Victory #3, page 19 (March 1982) One last foray into comics with Pacific led to this series and Silver Star, along with Super Powers and the Hunger Dogs graphic novel at DC Comics, ending his career the way it should have—with Jack doing comics. H

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The Al-Father

Adam McGovern talks with fan-favorite writer Al Ewing about Kirby’s influence INFLUENCING OTHERS

E

ven Jack Kirby couldn’t have predicted Al Ewing— but he’s the logical next step. The visionary writer inhabits the next worlds that Kirby always knew were coming, creating stories on a cosmic canvas, one part mystic theology to one part theoretical physics, that expands the frame that Kirby spent his career pushing further. The Kirby voice is in his head, most persuasively conducted through the character of Taaia (co-created with artist Javier Rodríguez), Galactus’ mom(!) from the previous universe before he was a god; a science-adventurer who speaks in the martial rhythms, ostentatious punctuation and higher-dimensional jargon of the finest Fourth World deities. And the Kirby imagery is embedded in his mind, throughout the masterwork We Only Find Them When They’re Dead (BOOM! Studios, co-created with Simone Di Meo), whose central motif echoes the Prometheans from New Gods #5 (frozen, floating monumental figures who tried to pierce the dimensional partition of the mystic Source), with giant astronautic bodies of mysterious origin hanging in space, whom some form religions around, while others mine and mutilate them for meat and miraculous compounds like 23rd century whaling ships. He’s currently re-creating Thor with collaborator Martin Coccolo, capturing the lightning of pop sagas from the ancient campfire to Kirby’s gleaming mythic New York to new quantum frontiers that canon has always called us onward to. “I still have this urge of what’s the most difficult thing I could do, what’s the most interesting thing I could do—which I guess brings us back to Kirby,” he told me, when we spoke by Zoom from England to New Jersey on Jan. 11, 2024. And there was much more to say about carrying Kirby’s creative model forward.

To a fellow writer, the first compelling question always has to do with the textual dimension of Kirby’s storytelling, which is always first and foremost thought of as quintessentially visual. So I began with a query about Ewing’s shared sense of the cosmic scope and stakes of Kirby’s concepts, and how this is expressed. The answer, fittingly, was epic-length: “I feel like what you’re describing is the poetry of comics.

There’s a dialogue, especially in genre comics and superhero comics, a dialogue with metaphor. There’s that balance between the kind of realism; like, when you’re reading a comic, [do] you want something that you could imagine up on a movie screen, or do you want something that’s more like poetry, more something that can’t really be expressed in words and images but triggers something in the mind—as Kirby said once, to ‘electrocute you in the mind’?

1

“Kirby was always somebody—when he was dialoguing his own work, 2 from what I understand, it was his own poetic cadence at work. He had his own cadence and his own way of having his characters speaking which was… it didn’t feel interested in documentary, something that people could watch on a screen and go, “Oh yeah I believe this”; it was more interested in the stage, in a kind of theatrical mode of expression, where the audience isn’t being asked to believe it outright, they’re being asked to believe the truth of it. Obviously the scale and the spectacle of all these things is expertly conveyed, and in so many different creative ways, like his use of collage. But as well as being a feast for the eyes, it’s also representative of something even bigger.

“My first exposure to Kirby’s art, I picked up a British reprint annual from the ’60s or ’70s; I’ll bring it over to the camera. It’s from, looks like 1969. I found it in a jumble sale, it was as falling apart as it is now when I got it. I kept it in the state it arrived to me in [laughs] without putting it in a bag and sealing it away. I’ve read it frequently. But my first exposure to Kirby’s writing was a comic called World’s Worst Comics Awards. It lasted like two issues; it was by some sort of indie publisher, an early voyage by the indies into snark-based criticism. They were poking fun, but there was an undercurrent of admiration. And it was just a bunch of Kirby balloons divorced from any context. So all you could do—against the wishes of the people putting this thing together—was admire the cadence and the flow and the poetry of it. And even the people who wrote this comic (and I cannot remember their names, which is very telling), referred to it as ‘word jazz.’ And that stuck with me ever since; what Kirby did was word jazz.

“And… yeah, that’s important. And it fits in with other writers like Pat Mills who wrote very declarative, declamatory people, very operatic—people who yell things, and at a certain point, certain particularly powerful phrases get their own balloons, get their own emphasis. It’s not designed to be performed by a human being in a kind of realistic documentary context, it’s designed to be absorbed by the eye as poetry. If it’s meant to be said out loud in your mind, it’s like an actor on a stage projecting to the back row. And it’s kind of vital to take it in that context.

“It’s really jarring in the ’60s when Stan Lee drops the exclamation mark. Suddenly… he has that period, it’s about three issues of Amazing Spider-Man, where he drops the periods as well. So speech-balloons just end with no punctuation. I don’t know if it’s an experiment, I don’t know if it’s a mistake, but it’s horrific, everybody sounds like a robot. And Kirby was the opposite of that, he was just throwing down exclamation marks, extra hyphens—I do the thing when I’m pastiching him of, 48

like, four hyphens in a row, three exclamation marks—y’know, the quote-marks— that’s an exaggeration, but it’s based on a truth, which is that punctuation felt like it was there to force a rhythm, force a meter, force a poetry—rather than as part of the Oxford rules of grammar or whatever.”

With such a panoramic perspective on how Kirby put thoughts together overall, I was also fascinated by how Ewing expanded so grandly from a single three-page sequence of Kirby’s oeuvre (if admittedly, one monumental enough to spark a thousand sagas) in We Only Find Them When They’re Dead:

ing to me—it’s how I win, so I have to do it, but I don’t want to win like this.’

So it’s like Darkseid has been defeated by his own weakness, his own refusal to reject this.

“And now, we’re in the age where it’s being really pushed hard that a replacement for creativity, a replacement for the closest thing humanity has found to any kind of divine spark, is like, ‘Oh yeah, push a button and it’ll come up’— y’know, at the cost of an acre of rainforest or whatever. These [A.I.] things, they use so much energy; energy does not come from nowhere and it does not cost nothing. And the play, from these big companies, is that they’re gonna addict us to this stuff, the tech bros, they’re gonna make it so this horrible, soulless crap is the way it is done, and then they jack up the price, because yeah, it costs a lot more than a human artist would. Even the highest-paid human artist, a) you’re getting much more for your money, and b), the amount of iterations you have to run before you get anything close to… every time, it’s like rolling a dice; the dice has no memory, the machine has no memory, you just keep noodling with the prompts and eventually it’ll spit out something that’s kind of like what you wanted. But good luck getting a sequence. They’ve now, God help us, learned how to make words. I don’t know if you’ve seen the A.I. Calvin & Hobbes… it’s four panels of poorly-drawn Calvin & Hobbes, lettering all over the place; nothing but an insult to a creator who has, more than perhaps any other creator of comic art, close to Ditko levels of doing it his way. Perhaps over Ditko. This is what Kirby was warning against way back in the ’80s. “[Recently] I finally read all of Silver Star. It just gets to this point where… it’s late-period work. But I feel like the less Kirby can rely on his drawing hand, the further out he goes into realms of the mind. Until the moment in Silver Star where everything that is not metaphor just breaks. The plot devolves, the characters devolve, everything devolves around this metaphor of the Angel of Death coming toward the city closer and closer. And it’s almost like Kirby himself is breaking down around this metaphor, but he has to tell it, he has to finish it. It’s an incredible… Silver Star is trying to say something, and it’s trying to say something about breaking down, about coming to the end, about looking into the face of death.

That’s the level you want to be on. A comic has to be about something.

“Kirby lived through some terrible things. So when you read a story like ‘The Pact’ that’s been entirely written and drawn by Kirby, it hits, from a lived experience. And I think it’s important to bring that stuff in. You have to put some part of your own heart into the work, even if it’s superhero stuff, even if it’s bashing the action figures together. Because otherwise, what are we doing here, what are we doing with our lives, if we’re not creating?” H

3

“The original idea was, I was just envisioning these giant Kirbyesque space gods, but they’re dead, and these little sort of, yeah, the autopsy ships, these little kind of mining ships fighting over it. And it was a mix of Kirby and this J. G. Ballard story, ‘The Drowned Giant,’ about a giant that washes up on the shore of a coastal town, and over a couple of weeks it decomposes, and the locals finally break it up and cart it away. But until then people are playing on it, people are cutting bits of souvenirs… and it’s just this weird kind of, ‘How do we react to this…?’ thing of godhood and death. But then, yeah, it was very much inspired by the Space God, who is a recurring figure in Kirby. Even the Asgardians; they’re gods [but] they’re also from space. I think Simonson veered much more towards fantasy visuals; to the extent that when he has his Asgardians pick up modern machine guns, that’s a very strong moment because of the juxtaposition, whereas [for] Kirby it was very much, Kirbytech is woven into Asgard—down to, like, Odin’s hats, half ceremonial, half these weird technological things.

“I guess recently I’ve… I’m kind of coming to the end of this, I feel like I need to evolve it if I’m gonna push it any further, but I’ve been on a kind of religious kick. I’m personally agnostic, but in the sense that I do not claim to know. I’m very turned off by anybody who claims to have spoken to God. You assume that you can know the unknowable. I guess I was a sort of weak, not-really-thinkingabout-it atheist, but [then] the wave of New Atheism where they were just so snotty about it… I don’t wanna be part of a club that would have Ricky Gervais as a member. [laughter] There’s that undercurrent of, ‘This is about my own cleverness, this is about my own being right—the reality of the universe is what I think is right.’ I have a strong desire for some kind of faith—I don’t have any, but that’s not for want of looking for it. And a lot of my comics are kind of about that now. As I get older, it’s this seeking out something. And Kirby led the way on that, in terms of seeking out answers.”

The monumental consequence of Kirby’s scenarios was always ground4 ed in the seriousness of the stakes for fragile, ordinary humans. I find that emotional, organic priority in all of Ewing’s work, and he expounded on that: “Darkseid is almost the ultimate look into the banality of evil… the omnipresence of it, even how it might be defeated by even greater and more horrible nihilism. Like [in] The Hunger Dogs, [it] really resonates now as we see Darkseid looking at this giant machine [to automate the destruction of his enemies] and going, ‘This is disgust-

Swooping back to down to Earth in The Immortal Thor #1 (2023).

The quotable Taaia’s first moment on-panel, in Defenders #1 (2021).

3 Ewing with the prized evidence of his Kirby first contact.

4 A mote in space near the Goddess’ eye, from We Only Find Them When They’re Dead #1 (2020, BOOM! Studios). [TM & © Al Ewing and Simone Di Meo] 1 2

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Captain Victory..

...for the win!

Incidental Iconography LASTING DESIGN

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

by Sean Kleefeld

T

he fun thing about studying Jack Kirby and his work is that, even after poring over it for years, he never ceases to surprise me. I thought I’d take this issue’s theme of his greatest victories and look at the most incredibly obvious creation of his that might be considered a victory: Captain Victory. I figured that, like the last time I went with a shamelessly on-topic character study—covering Silver Star in the silver anniversary issue, TJKC #78!— there would be an interesting and circuitous path that got Jack to the design he was using by the end of the story.

As with most of my research, I started with the publications themselves, in this case Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers #1. Captain Victory is front and center on the cover [right], and his costume is on display virtually in full. As I pulled the entire run of the series out of its long box, I saw the other covers and immediately noted the character’s hair seemed to get progressively longer and more wild, and I assumed we’d be looking at a similar visual development to when Jack developed Ikaris for The Eternals (who I covered back in TJKC #61 if you’re keeping score). But surprisingly, on the very first page [detailed above right], Captain Victory is standing there with long, shoulder-length hair already. The more classical style suggested on the cover never shows up in the story itself. In fact, the only other place I seem to be able to find it is a piece of unpublished cover art.

We have, too, Jack’s pencils available here, and it’s evident right from page one that Jack was intentional with the character’s hair. It wasn’t an incidental running change, or a modification by inker Mike Royer or anything. Jack may have decided he liked a longer hair option

after toying with a shorter hair version, but that was almost immediate from his earliest pencils.

So I started looking at other elements of the character’s design to compare the first issue to later ones, and I found… pretty much nothing. There’s some inconsistency in the Kirby tech drawn into Captain Victory’s belt, but that’s about the equivalent of saying there’s some inconsistency in the Thing’s rock pattern.

The precise shape of Victory’s collar piece seems to amorphously shift from rounded, to square, to hexagonal, to not having any seeming regularity at all. But that happens even from panel to panel throughout the entire series, so I half-wonder if that wasn’t deliberate. Because everything else about Victory’s outfit remains incredibly consistent—even the piping 50

around his shoulders, which seems like precisely the kind of thing Jack would’ve glossed over within a few pages.

Now with all that being said about Jack’s surprising level of consistency with the character (even in a marker drawing for the San Diego Comic-Con [above]), there was at least one change from his early design. In the back of the first issue, we do see a character model sheet [previous page, bottom] which shows the shorterhaired Victory. More notably, however, is that the character is sporting additional white piping on his legs—the final remnants of which can be seen in the white bands across the bottom of his trunks and the tops of his boots. The piping is quite noticeable, and since it’s already vanished by the time we get to his unpublished cover [below], and Jack is so remarkably consistent with the rest of the uniform, I’m inclined to think it was a deliberate, not an incidental, choice.

I’ve mentioned before that if you look at Jack’s pencils from different periods, his linework

Captain Victory #8 (Dec. 1982), page 6 pencils.

seems more confident in the 1980s. Perhaps finally receiving the praise (and commensurate pay!) that he deserved his entire career, while he worked at Ruby-Spears, mitigated the years of feeling dismissed as just a comic book artist; of having editors second-guess what he was doing by requesting inane (to his eyes) changes, or having other artists “correct” his work. Maybe that’s why characters like Captain Victory and Silver Star came virtually fully-formed right out of the gate. It’s almost certainly why later creators who put Victory into Kirby: Genesis or Galactic Bounty Hunters didn’t even attempt to modify what Jack had come up with. H 51

Jack Kirby Gets His Marvel See the video at: https://shorturl.at/aFGLU

FIGHTING FOR WHAT’S RIGHT

The video was archived as part of the Stan Lee papers donated to the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. The art pictured is just a few of the pages Jack received back from Marvel.

Shown are: • Splash page from Incredible Hulk #5 (Jan. 1963).

• Cover of Fantastic Four #71 (Feb. 1968).

• Splash from FF Annual #2 (1964).

• Page from Captain America #108 (Dec. 1968).

• Splash from Journey Into Mystery #116 (May 1965).

• Cover of Thor #146 (Nov. 1967).

[Newscaster Hal Fishman introduces the segment.]

HAL FISHMAN: A man in Thousand Oaks has won a long legal battle involving some well known comic book characters. The man, Jack Kirby, is the artist who brought life to several comic super-heroes, and Sam Chu Lin has this story.

SAM CHU LIN: For Jack and Roz Kirby, these boxes of comic book drawings have special meaning. Jack helped create such multi-million dollar characters as Spider-Man, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, and a host of other super-heroes, and helped Marvel Comics to become the giant it is today.

For over thirty years, with attorneys, the Kirbys battled Marvel to get back the original artwork to provide a college nestegg for their granddaughter and grandson, and their own retirement. The return of seven boxes of that artwork represents sort of a victory.

JACK KIRBY: I’m not a vindictive person. I think what Marvel finally did was a very fine gesture. Sure, it still hurts, and I still feel those hurts, but they’re kind of numb, and I’ve never really allowed them to rule my life or linger in my thoughts.

CHU LIN: These boxes of drawings only represent a partial victory for the Kirbys. Jack Kirby would like to receive creative credit. Marvel has given all of the credit to comic book writer Stan Lee for creating many of its super-heroes, when in fact, many comic book readers will say it was both their creative talents. For the Kirbys, it’s not copyrights or ownership.

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Comics Artwork Back, 1987

Transcript of a television report on KTLA 5 News (Los Angeles), Spring 1987.

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ROZ KIRBY: It has nothing to do with money. I’d like my grandchildren to know that it was their grandfather who created and helped create all of these characters.

CHU LIN: Jack will soon celebrate his 70th birthday. As for an ideal present, Jack says it would be nice if Marvel imitated the super-heroes he helped create, to right a wrong, and be fair. In Thousand Oaks, this is Sam Chu Lin, Channel 5 News at Ten. H 53

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Fighting American print silkscreened in Switzerland 23” x 19”

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Here’s the groundbreaking Simon & Kirby story “Different” from Young Romance #30 (Vol. 4, #6, Feb. 1951), with its allusions to anti-Semitism. It has only been reprinted in the obscure 1998 book Real Love. Art restoration and color by Christopher Fama.

SPEAKING OUT AGAINST INJUSTICE

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GOLDEN AGE CAPTAIN AMERICA’S POTENT INFLUENCE recently came across my old, beat-up copy of cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s 1965 book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, and it instantly brought back another one of the seminal Kirby moments in my adolescent development.

Feiffer’s book was a wonderfully entertaining memoir of his experiences as a young Golden Age comic book fan. Going into the business as an artist, he eventually worked on Will Eisner’s strip The Spirit. Feiffer’s insights on the origins of the industry were priceless, but even better, his book was chock full of Golden Age reprints, and the most thrilling for me was that of Captain America’s origin by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby from 1941. 1

I INFLUENCING OTHERS

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Marvel’s Kirby and Lee had just reintroduced Captain America less than a year before, and in 1965 they’d presented a retelling of the star-spangled hero’s origin in Tales of Suspense #63 [above]. I was thirteen and quickly becoming an avid collector obsessed with studying the how and why of comic book production. I was pleasantly surprised to notice that Kirby had taken his 1941 origin story’s structure and reinterpreted it.

Panel by panel, comparing the two stories, I could see Kirby’s thought process, changing perspectives and points of view to make the story more dynamic. Although the credit box on the first page of the newer version said that the story was by Stan Lee, this was obviously a case of Kirby plotting the story based on the Golden Age version, prior to Lee filling in the dialogue.

I had grown up with, and had irrevocably been influenced by, Jack Kirby’s mid-Sixties artwork. What I was looking at now was an entirely different artistic perspective, an early developmental stage of the same man whose current work I was fixated on.

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shapes and the design of figures extending beyond the borders, and especially the long horizontal panel of Cap’s devastating roundhouse right knocking Lenny across the room. There was something distinctly stylistically different about Kirby’s early work. It had a more elastic quality, which I would later discover came from Kirby’s appreciation of the work of Lou Fine and Reed Crandall. Both of these accomplished artists were powerful proponents of dynamic anatomy, and both were favorites of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

Crandall’s penciling and inking is actually featured prominently on the Butterfly story. Artist Al Avison would also begin working with Simon & Kirby on this issue, and in my opinion would become the King’s best student, taking over main penciling chores when the creative duo left the book after issue #10.

I could tell the reprints from Captain America #3 had been altered for one reason or another, mostly Code-related, and I felt I had to see the originals. I had begun to investigate sources wherein I could get my eager hands on older comics. Fortunately, I discovered a vintage comic book dealer in Queens named Howard Rogofsky, and I purchased a near-mint copy of the book in question for around $35.

This acquisition set me on a Golden Age buying spree which lasted until just before I entered High School. At that point, I began to downsize my collection, focusing mostly on fantasy illustrators like Frank Frazetta. When Kirby left off working on Captain America, I briefly followed Jim Steranko’s innovative run before abandoning my fixation on Kirby and Marvel Comics for the next twenty years.

Decades later, I picked up Volume 3 of the Captain America Masterworks editions containing the Steranko issues, and read the artist’s Afterword, which discussed his methods. He had basically

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On the 1941 page, the scrawny figure of Steve Rogers is the focus of the panel, as Professor Reinstein gestures to him from the background. At this point in the story, he has already been inoculated with the super-soldier serum. In contrast, the Tales of Suspense version’s first panel has the two figures of equal sizes, while a complex machine shares the space, indicating the power of technology.

In the second panel of the new version, rather than the closeup of Reinstein from Cap #1, we see Rogers’ figure prominent as he swallows the serum. Seemingly for Comics Code restriction purposes, the injection angle has been eliminated. Reinstein gestures from middle ground as he explains the process to onlookers behind a glass panel in the background. In the third panel, both versions focus on the onlookers, but the newer panel displays a more dynamic array of their figures. Again in the forth panel of both stories, we see Steve Rogers from the back as his musculature begins to expand, but the newer version is decidedly bolder and more dramatic, while also including the reaction of the professor. The difference of the final panel in the modern version is the most radical. Here Kirby incorporates the three final original Golden Age panels into one tableau, which includes Rogers’ completely filled-out frame, Reinstein’s triumphant exultation, and the furtive entrance of the Nazi assassin.

Seeing the comparison of the two books by the same artist, separated by more than twenty years, was like a fascinating glimpse into a time capsule Shortly thereafter, Marvel began reprinting Golden Age stories in a magazine called Fantasy Masterpieces. 2 One such story was called “The Queer Case of the Murdering Butterfly and the Ancient Mummy” [Captain America Comics #3, May 1941]. I particularly loved the way that page 8 was laid out, with the distortion of panel

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served an apprenticeship working over Kirby’s layouts on the Nick Fury series, and had developed a unique artistic approach using Surrealist and Op-art visuals. Now he felt he needed to change his approach when taking on the exalted star-spangled character. Previously, in the description of Captain America from his 1970 volume History of Comics, he described the hero as “a cumulative entity that symbolized the inner reality of man. He was the American Truth.” Therefore in his estimation,“The Zap art style that I’d created for Nick Fury was inappropriate for Comics’ Superpatriot.”

Steranko explained that in this case, his narrative approach would derive from film. He would “construct the series using the same

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techniques that Hollywood directors used for their films: tight answering shots, integrating pan and tracking sequences, cinematic lighting and reaction inserts.”

Regardless of his intentions, I knew that as a boy, Steranko had been an avid collector of Kirby’s Golden Age Captain, and that series had been one of his earliest artistic inspirations. Along with Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Lou Eisner, and Wallace Wood, early Kirby was an essential part of Steranko’s visual DNA. I began to look through his work to see if I could spot instances of such inspiration. 3 The third panel on page 11 of Captain America #110 looked strangely familiar, and it only took me a minute to recall where I’d seen something like it before. 4 It was the Red Skull story from that singular Golden Age issue #3, where Cap and Bucky are standing together in the tall second panel.

Steranko had subtly shifted their stances, but it was obvious to me that his drawing was an homage to that panel laid out by Kirby and probably finished by S&K team artist Al Avison.

One could also see that Steranko had given his version of the hero a retro flavor, making him lither and longer limbed in the way that Kirby had drawn the character in the Forties, rather than the blockier version the King was doing in the Sixties. He had also made the upper fold of Cap’s Buccaneer boot fuller. Even more significantly, Steranko had restored Cap’s partner, Bucky, in the form of Rick Jones. The artist’s early impressions had left an indelible mark on his interpretation of Kirby’s creation. Nothing was more vital than those first inspirational imprints.

There were other things in issue #10 of the Golden Age run. 5 Kirby had put Captain America in a nighttime setting on a nearly airborne motorcycle in the splash panel of the story, “Spy Ambush.”

6 In the double-page spread in the 1969 issue of Captain America #113, Steranko draws a frame as though Cap is leaping off of that

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very same cycle into a melee of Hydra operatives. The moonlit tree in the composition bears an uncanny resemblance to one in the splash from Golden Age issue #4’s story, “Horror Hospital.” 7 My final and most compelling piece of evidence is a Golden Age Cap story, also from issue #10, called “The Phantom Hound of Cardiff Moor.” 8 The double-page spread was an innovation that Kirby had begun to use in issue #6, utilizing various montage elements to foreshadow the story. While the finished art of the remainder of the book would often be completed by assistants, Kirby would nearly always focus his full creative input on these panoramic scenes.

This story, clearly inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel, Hound of the Baskervilles, is a veritable time capsule of Gothic and 1940s period elements, and a perfect visual benchmark for a young fantasy artist to draw inspiration from. Steranko’s obvious homage appeared in the Nick Fury, Agent of Shield #3 story, “Dark Moon Rise, Hell Hound Kill.” 9

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Here, at the story’s climax, was a double-page spread with the fiendish creature and several strategically placed Kirby inspired gnarled trees. Steranko had liberally borrowed ideas present in both the Conan Doyle novel and the S&K comic book dealing with a strange family curse. The stories had also featured the specter of a huge vicious dog covered in luminous paint, prowling a baleful moor in order to frighten and threaten its victims. Steranko had even included the subplot of a hidden Nazi submarine base, giving the story a retro WWII flavor.

At that point, it was quite clear to me from the nature of his late ’60s Marvel output, that Steranko was one of many artists who had fallen under Kirby’s Golden Age foundational artistic spell. H

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Kirby’s Greatest Triumph?

by Will Murray

SETTING PRECEDENTS

SOURCES: “I Don’t Like to Draw Slingshots, I Like to Draw Cannons.”

Shel Dorf. Jack Kirby Collector #37, February 2002.

The Comic Book Makers. Joe Simon with Jim Simon.

Crestwood/II Publications, 1990.

“Kirby on Kirby 1974: An Interview With the King.” Jerry Connelly. Comics Buyer’s Guide #1401, September 22, 2000.

“The Legend of Joe Simon.” Will Murray. Comic Book Marketplace #62, August 1990.

The Tom Brevoort Experience blog. Lee & Kirby. The 1966 Testimony of Jack Kirby, December 11, 2021.

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ne could argue for Jack Kirby’s greatest triumph in the comic book field being any number of different accomplishments, ranging from the creation of the Marvel Universe via the Fantastic Four, to his pioneering of romance as a successful comic book genre. But I would go back further in time. I feel it may very well be the first character Jack transformed into a sales smash.

Prior to Timely’s Captain America Comics, Kirby was just another artist in the burgeoning new comic book field. His style stood out, but so did that of many others, such as Will Eisner, Lou Fine, Bob Kane, and so many more. Kirby had yet to make an impact. Even his early collaborator, Joe Simon, had not yet realized the power of Jack Kirby––at least not as a powerhouse for creating newsstand sales.

Although Jack was the original penciler on the Blue Beetle newspaper strip [below], he was replaced by Louis Cazeneuve for reasons that aren’t clear today. It could have been because Kirby’s cinematic style was not thought to be palatable to newspaper reading audiences accustomed to the more sedate and refined fare of Alex Raymond and Hal Foster.

it has been argued that Jack worked on the cover illustration. Simon insisted that the cover [right] was his work. The figure of Red Raven suggests Kirby. It’s possible that Kirby redrew Simon’s original pose.

Why would Simon not assign Kirby to the Red Raven feature? For one thing, Kirby was busy doing Simon’s Blue Bolt feature and may not have wanted to lose him on that strip. Perhaps it was for reasons related to why Louis Cazeneuve ended up taking over the Blue Beetle syndicated strip. The failure of Blue Beetle in the newspaper market might have been wrongly seen as an issue of an artist who wasn’t a good fit for that mainstream audience. In 1940, Kirby’s selling power in the comic book field had yet to be established.

He had neither created nor been associated with a breakout comics feature. So Louis Cazeneuve who, like Joe Simon, had a newspaper background, once again got the job.

According to Simon, after Red Raven folded, Simon created Captain America on his own, designing the original costume.

“Kirby didn’t design it,” Simon asserted. “I did that with Martin Goodman. We were passing sketches back and forth before Kirby was even in on it. We just gave Kirby scripts, and layouts. Before Kirby got it, we had the costume and everything. That’s all Kirby got.”

While Kirby never confirmed Simon’s recollection and his own statements suggested otherwise, that’s Simon’s story. And I believe it.* The mail shirt was inspired by Fox’s chainmail-clad Blue Beetle, whom both Simon and Kirby had drawn. The round shield came from Simon’s childhood.

Neighborhood kids waged mock sword fights using garbage can lids as shields.

Simon often recounted how Captain America grew out of his search for a patriotic hero to confront Adolph Hitler. He settled on Hitler and his Nazi agents as the main villains, then worked backward to a suitable hero.

Joe Simon told me that his original plan for the first issue of Captain America Comics was to divide the three Captain America stories among three different artists. Since Hitler would be the cover villain, Goodman wanted the book rushed into production.

When he learned of Simon’s intentions, Jack Kirby raised objections.

“Martin was trying to talk me into doing a great effort on the art,” said Simon, “to try to get the first

According to Simon, publisher Victor Fox syndicated the strip for free through his Fox Features Syndicate, but there were no takers. Contrary to Simon’s recollection, the Boston Transcript ran it in 1940.

When Joe Simon packaged his first full comic book for Martin Goodman’s fledgling Timely line, Kirby did not draw the cover feature, “Red Raven,” although 73

issue out before Hitler got killed. Kirby was begging us to let him do the whole book.

He was very unhappy about the whole situation.”

Kirby made his case very forcefully, Simon recalled. He was so persuasive that Simon gave in— but with the understanding that other artists would ink and otherwise assist in production.

“It still wasn’t 1941 Kirby sketch done for young Larry Lieber. all Jack Kirby on the pencils,” added Simon.

“You know, we had other people doing layouts, with myself. Al Gabriele and Al Avison. They were a team working together and I brought them into the organization in 1939–40, I believe. Al Liederman was a friend of mine who worked on the Rochester Journal with me. We brought him in for inking.”

Jack Kirby came through with flying four-colors.

Captain America Comics #1 sold like crazy, nearly topping a million sale. The book was a huge hit for Martin Goodman, bigger than Marvel Comics #1. The Simon & Kirby team had made comics history, incidentally making MLJ’s The Shield look pale by comparison. Goodman and Louis Silberkleit of MLJ Comics had been rivals in the pulp magazine business ever since Goodman bought Silberkleit out after the bankruptcy of his Mutual Magazine Company in 1934. Goodman has been his first editor.

“I thought it was so superior to the other things,” Simon said of Kirby’s bravura artistic performance on Captain America. “Our comics had more life than the others. The others looked like they were on paper. Ours looked like they were real people.”

“That’s because I don’t see it as flat paper,” Kirby told Shel Dorf. “Like I said, I feel that I’m fighting a camera all the time. I

feel that a camera has so much more scope than I have. I’d like to try to get that kind of scope into my drawing. I feel that drawings should be expansive, they should be powerful.”

Beyond such technical prowess, Jack Kirby had broken out of the competitive pack and made a name for himself––something he had not up until that time succeeded in accomplishing.

So when I suggest that Captain America was Kirby’s greatest triumph, I am not referring only to the creation and presentation of the character, but for the young artist’s determination to make a name for himself, and for convincing Joe Simon and Martin Goodman to let him take his shot. Otherwise, Jack Kirby might have only succeeded in showing that he was a strong superhero cartoonist.

After Captain America #1, Kirby would never again go back to being simply another one of the emerging artists of the nascent comic book field. He was a superstar.

In later years, Joe Simon publicly gave credit to Jack as Captain America’s co-creator.

“If Kirby hadn’t drawn it,” Simon explained, “it might not have been anything.”

Captain America became such a smash hit that before long, MLJ’s Shield would begin aping it. Artist Irv Novick brazenly copied Kirby’s Captain America poses––even splash pages. This was probably under instructions from his publisher. Silberkleit had attempted to hire Simon and Kirby away from Goodman— attesting to his recognition of their ability to attract readers.

Despite the fact that Captain America’s original heaterstyle shield generally resembled The Shield’s bulletproof torso shield, Simon claimed that MLJ’s Shield was not an influence on the creation of Captain America.

“None at all,” he insisted. “The Shield was out before Captain America, but it was an ugly costume and pretty dead action. I never read the old Shield, frankly, and never liked the artwork on it. It had no bearing whatsoever. I don’t think we even gave it any consideration.” H * For the record, I’d like to explain why I believe Joe Simon when he says he created the Captain America costume design without Jack Kirby...

Kirby has often said that his concept of a super-hero uniform is essentially a set of longjohns accented by a belt and boots. If you look at the major characters he drew after Captain America, such as the Guardian, Manhunter, Stuntman, and so many others, those were not ornate designs. There were no frills and few extras beyond essential identification elements, such as different styles of masks and headgear.

“I think all of our super-heroes looked alike anyways,” Simon admitted to me. “They all had the same face and the same body, right?

It got to the point where we did so many different super-heroes, that one looked just like the other. The Guardian looked like Captain America and Manhunter looked like the Guardian. They all had the same face.” And they all wore essentially the same outfits.

“Well,” Kirby told the Comics Buyer’s Guide, “super-heroes are called ‘underwear characters’ in the trade. And, of course, that’s what they are. They’re longjohns, and they’re built for action. You’ll never get fouled up with longjohns.”

While Kirby thought of super-hero outfits as glorified long underwear, in actuality

Very Kirby-like Simon & Kirby studio letterhead art, and a less-so Captain America Comics #1 illo [center].

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they were an adaptation of the colorful costumes worn by circus acrobats.

“Acrobats are unencumbered by any kind of flapping material,” Kirby noted. “I’ll never draw a super-hero with material that might get in his way. I always realized that a super-hero has to have extreme freedom of movement, so I’m not going to give him any flouncy costumes. He’s gonna have tight-knit longjohns that are gonna give him the best possible freedom to do what he has to do.

Aesthetically, it’s perfect. It gives you the chance to do the kind of figure you want. You can do the best possible things for the human figure when it’s unencumbered.”

Elsewhere, he stated, “My idea of a super-hero is some guy who can engage in action. And you can’t engage in action in a business suit, so I always give them a skintight suit with a belt. If you notice, the Challengers and the FF have a minimum of decoration.”

Not until the creation of Fighting American did Jack create a character whose costume design would be considered complicated.

And since Fighting American was a response to the 1953 revival of Captain America, it’s understandable that Jack and Joe would want to go all out on the costume design.

Even after that, Kirby’s heroic characters tended to be extremely simple in their conceptual designs. Challengers of the Unknown, the Fly, and even the Fantastic Four all sported very simple ensembles. The only exception during the 1950s was the revived Shield for The Double Life of Private Strong. Even there, Kirby kept his latest patriotic hero as simplified as the American flag motif permitted.

The complex designs that marked Kirby’s subsequent characters evolved as the Marvel Universe grew. Thor was one of the first.

This may sound like heresy, inasmuch as the Captain America design strikes some as quintessentially Jack Kirby. But I think that’s only because he brought it to life and made it work as no other artist ever did—or ever could. It’s really a kitchen sink kind of design.

Joe Simon threw in any patriotic element he could think of. Stars.

Stripes. Chain mail on the shirt, but not elsewhere. The buccaneer boots were not a thing that Kirby tended to draw with his subsequent characters. Why was it necessary to have wings on his helmet? Or have CA’s ears showing? And why did Simon feel Captain America needed a capital “A” on his forehead in addition to the big white star on his chest? Extraneous elements like these were a Joe Simon hallmark. Note that many are present in Blue Bolt’s costume, who Simon created before hiring Kirby to help with the feature.

When Kirby revived Captain America in 1964, he dispensed with one of the circular stripes in the round shield, simplifying it.

Joe once told me that he didn’t care for that change, suggesting that such extras appealed to him, where it didn’t to Kirby. For example, The Guardian’s shield had a blank face. The only design element was its shape—a police badge. That was sufficient design for Jack Kirby.

To be fair to Jack Kirby, he told his side of the story in a 1966 deposition given when Joe Simon attempted to reclaim Captain America from Marvel.

Kirby claimed to have been hired

by Joe Simon when Joe was an editor at Timely Comics in late 1939 or 1940 in order to help develop new comic book characters. Here is an excerpt: “Discussions took place in the old McGraw Hill offices practically every day on the basic creation of characters in the framework in which to present them: what type of villain would they need to face, the personalities involved, and the type of gadget to be used. The characters began to evolve from those discussions; there were sketches made of the characters and their costumes: these were changed and modified until they assumed what we considered the correct appearance of the product we sought. We used Hitler and the Nazis as perfect villains. There was also the matter of remolding a character. We first drew the Captain America shield, for example, as a tricornered shield, and there was a discussion as to whether it should be circular. There were scales to be put in the upper chest part of the figure; it was a popular form for the decoration of a super-hero. The discussions were primarily between Joe Simon and myself in the Timely office.... In the course of the discussions we first evolved a main character and then began to build around him. I suggested the use of a sidekick whom we named Bucky.”

Kirby went on to speak about Hurricane, Tuk the Cave Boy, and the Vision. But these were created subsequent to Captain America. Here he seems to be conflating the genesis of Captain America, who Simon says was created before he was hired as Timely’s editor, since he also mentions the change in Captain America’s shield, which took place after the first issue was published.

Indeed, a 1980s handwritten Kirby account clearly contradicts his 1966 deposition. There, he wrote that Captain America was “Formulated in 1939 by myself and Joe Simon. Created in Joe’s apartment and submitted to Atlas.”

This not only undermines Kirby’s 1966 statement, but is close to what Simon recalled. However, Joe remembered conceiving the character solo and then showing it to Kirby.

There is another intriguing wrinkle. Simon originally considered calling the character “Super American.” According to Kirby in 1966, this was changed to calling him Captain something.

Kirby wrote: “I said, ‘What should this Captain character represent?’ He said patriotism and America. I said, ‘Fine, why not Captain America?’ These are not the exact words of the conversation, but they are the substance.”

If this is true, then a case can be made for Jack Kirby as co-creator simply on the basis of suggesting Captain America’s famous name, even if he didn’t create the costume, but made his suggestion after Simon’s initial conceptualization. Joe Simon, of course, might disagree. I wish we could know the whole truth. H

[above] Kirby or not? From Captain America Comics #5 (Aug. 1941), and [top] a likely Simon Cap figure hawking the Sentinels of Liberty club in an early issue.

75

C o l l e c t o r

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERVIEWS WITH KIRBY and his contemporaries, FEATURE ARTICLES, RARE AND UNSEEN KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and KIRBY’S UNINKED PENCILS NS from the 1960s–1980s EDITIOABLE IL (from photocopies AVA NLY preserved in the KIRBY ARCHIVES). Now in FULLFOR O 5.99­ COLOR, it showcases Kirby’s art even better! $1.99-$

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MONSTERS & BUGS! Jack’s monster-movie influences in The Demon, Forever People, Black Magic, Fantastic Four, Jimmy Olsen, and Atlas monster stories; Kirby’s work with “B” horror film producer CHARLES BAND; interview with “The Goon” creator ERIC POWELL; Kirby’s use of insect characters (especially as villains); MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, Golden Age Kirby story, and a Kirby pencil art gallery!

SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! How Jack Kirby kickstarted the Silver Age and revamped Golden Age characters for the 1960s, the Silver Surfer’s influence in comics, pivotal decisions (good and bad) Jack made throughout his comics career, an extensive Kirby pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, a classic 1950s story, KIRBY/STEVE RUDE cover, and more!

See “THE BIG PICTURE” of how Kirby fits into the grand scheme of things! His creations’ lasting legacy, how his work fights illiteracy, a RARE KIRBY INTERVIEW, inconsistencies in his 1960s MARVEL WORK, editorial changes in his comics, big concepts in OMAC, best DOUBLE-PAGE SPREADS, MARK EVANIER’s 2019 Kirby Tribute Panel, PENCIL ART GALLERY, and a new cover based on OMAC #1!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #84

KIRBY COLLECTOR #85

“KIRBY: BETA!” Jack’s experimental ideas, characters, and series (Fighting American, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, and others), Kirby interview, inspirations for his many “secret societies” (The Project, Habitat, Wakanda), non-super-hero genres he explored, 2019 Heroes Con panel (with MARK EVANIER, MIKE ROYER, JIM AMASH, and RAND HOPPE), a pencil art gallery, UNUSED JIMMY OLSEN #141 COVER, and more!

“THE MANY WORLDS OF JACK KIRBY!” From Sub-Atomica to outer space, visit Kirby’s work from World War II, the Fourth World, and hidden worlds of Subterranea, Wakanda, Olympia, Lemuria, Atlantis, the Microverse, and others! Plus, a 2021 Kirby panel, featuring JONATHAN ROSS, NEIL GAIMAN, & MARK EVANIER, a Kirby pencil art gallery from MACHINE MAN, 2001, DEVIL DINOSAUR, & more!

FAMOUS FIRSTS! How JACK KIRBY was a pioneer in all areas of comics: Romance Comics genre, Kid Gangs, double-page spreads, Black heroes, new formats, super-hero satire, and others! With MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, plus a gallery of Jack’s pencil art from CAPTAIN AMERICA, JIMMY OLSEN, CAPTAIN VICTORY, DESTROYER DUCK, BLACK PANTHER, and more!

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

KIRBY: ANIMATED! How JACK KIRBY and his concepts leaped from celluloid, to paper, and back again! From his 1930s start on Popeye and Betty Boop and his work being used on the 1960s Marvel Super-Heroes show, to Fantastic Four (1967 and 1978), Super Friends/Super Powers, Scooby-Doo, Thundarr the Barbarian, and Ruby-Spears.

Plus EVAN DORKIN on his abandoned Kamandi cartoon series, and more!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #86

KIRBY COLLECTOR #87

KIRBY COLLECTOR #88

KIRBY COLLECTOR #89

KIRBY COLLECTOR #90

KIRBY COMPARISONS! Analysis of unused vs. known Kirby covers and art, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH on his stylizations in Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, Kirby’s incorporation of real-life images in his work, WILL MURRAY’s conversations with top pros just after Jack’s passing, unused Mister Miracle cover inked by WALTER SIMONSON, and more! Edited by JOHN MORROW.

LAW & ORDER! Kirby’s lawmen from the Newsboy Legion’s Jim Harper and “Terrible” Turpin, to Western gunfighters, and even future policemen like OMAC and Captain Victory! Also: how a Marvel cop led to the creation of Funky Flashman!

Justice Traps The Guilty and Headline Comics! Plus MARK EVANIER moderating 2022’s Kirby Tribute Panel (with Sin City’s FRANK MILLER). MACHLAN cover inks.

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 Comic-Con International, plus a deluxe wrap-around Kirby cover with foldout back cover flap, inked by MIKE ROYER!

KIRBY CONSPIRACIES! Darkseid’s Fourth World palace intrigue, the too-many attempted overthrows of Odin, why Stan Lee hated Diablo, Kang contradictions, Simon & Kirby swipes, a never-reprinted S&K story, MARK EVANIER’s WonderCon 2023 Kirby Tribute Panel (with MARV WOLFMAN, PAUL S. LEVINE, and JOHN MORROW), an extensive Kirby pencil art gallery, and more!

WHAT IF KIRBY... hadn’t been stopped by his rejected Spider-Man presentation?

DC’s abandonment of the Fourth World?

The ill-fated Speak-Out Series? FREDRIC WERTHAM’s anti-comics crusade? The CIA’s involvement with the Lord of Light?

Plus a rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other columnists, a classic Simon & Kirby story, pencil art gallery, & more!

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Jack Kirby Books THE BEST OF SIMON & KIRBY’S

MAINLINE COMICS In 1954, JOE SIMON & JACK KIRBY founded MAINLINE PUBLICATIONS to publish their own comics during that turbulent era in comics history. The four titles—BULLSEYE, FOXHOLE, POLICE TRAP, and IN LOVE—looked to build off their reputation as hit makers in the Western, War, Crime, and Romance genres, but the 1950s backlash against comics killed any chance at success, and Mainline closed its doors just two years later. For the first time, TwoMorrows Publishing is compiling the best of Simon & Kirby’s Mainline comics work, including the COMPLETE RUN OF BULLSEYE, plus all of the Mainline stories with S&K art, as well as key tales with contributions by MORT MESKIN and others. This collection bridges the gap between Simon & Kirby’s peak with their 1950s romance comics, and the lows that led to Kirby’s resurgence with CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN and the early MARVEL UNIVERSE. With loving art restoration by CHRIS FAMA, and an historical overview by JOHN MORROW to put it all into perspective. NOW SHIPPING! (256-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $49.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-118-9

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This EXPANDED SECOND EDITION of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #75 includes minor corrections, and 16 NEW PAGES of “Stuf’ Said” by the creators of the Marvel Universe! This first-of-its-kind examination, completed just days before STAN LEE’s passing, looks back at KIRBY & LEE’s own words, in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and television interviews, to paint the most comprehensive and enlightening picture of their relationship ever done—why it succeeded, where it deteriorated, and when it eventually failed. Also here are recollections from STEVE DITKO, WALLACE WOOD, JOHN ROMITA SR., and more Marvel Bullpen stalwarts who worked with them both. Compiled, researched, and edited by publisher JOHN MORROW. NOW SHIPPING! (176-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-094-6

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Comments

(The perfect anniversary gift? Write us a letter of comment!)

LONGEVITY

[I made it—thirty years! I never imagined, back in September of 1994, that we’d be here seeing Jack get credit for his creations, and having them realized on movie screens. But I’m not stopping here; I’ve already got issues planned out through #95, so if you thought you’d be done with me, think again!]

If you have the PENCIL version of Pure Imagination’s 1987 HEROES & VILLAINS sketchbook, please answer these questions, so we can accurately document the different versions for the JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST: 1) Is yours signed and numbered by Jack, and if so, what number?

2) Does it have the inked “Dream Machine” endpapers, of if the endpapers are blank, is there a small loose plate with the Dream Machine image?

3) Does it say “Printed in Canada” on the bottom of the page with Jack’s photo?

E-mail answers to: twomorrow@aol.com Now on to your letters: As a recent subscriber to TJKC, I just wanted to commend you for your outstanding magazine and say how much I look forward to each successive issue.

It was my older brother and his friend, who originally introduced me to Jack Kirby in 1969.

Living in England, I had been used to some beautifully illustrated comic strips, such as “The Trigan Empire” by Don Lawrence, or Frank Bellamy’s “Thunderbirds”, but upon discovering Kirby, I was immediately struck by the power and dynamism of his work. The characters, the poses, the sheer energy of American comics were so different from anything I had seen before. I was smitten, and very soon became a rampant collector of the King’s work.

Living in a seaside resort, not many miles from Dartmouth (which Kirby described as the most beautiful place he had ever seen), there was a relatively plentiful supply of American comics on the spinner racks which adorned many shops. However, finding those by Kirby was always a treasure hunt. In my teens, I cycled miles to try and track down those missing issues, often visiting the local market, where they sold secondhand comics, two or three times per day. In time, I managed to work out exactly when the seaside shops would receive boxes of

“remainders” that often proved a great place to acquire those issues that had been unobtainable the previous year. I always remember coming to the end of the Summer in 1975 and finding “The Losers” #151 on a spinner rack— this being the only Kirby issue I had not yet found. The thrill of finding any comic by Kirby has never left me, and in time I managed to amass a complete collection of his work at DC in the Seventies.

I suspect that like many others, my life has been punctuated by the work of Jack Kirby. For me, every comic I bought is a milestone in my life, and the sheer thrill of his work has never left me. I still get that same buzz from his work, and that’s where TJKC comes in.

Over the years, those who originally adored his work fell by the wayside. My brother died recently, and took with him our fondness to share the thrill we once experienced, or discuss many of the lesser-known details of his work and methods. I am saddened by this loss, but with each issue of TJKC, I find myself amongst friends, amongst like-minded people who share my fascination with his work, who revel in what was and wonder what could have been. It’s as if I am a teenager again, discovering the work of the King, but now able to immerse myself in a meaningful conversation regarding Kirby, his work, and his influence on the comics medium.

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR is a treasure trove, providing a deep-dive into the man who will always be the King of American comics. For that, I am grateful. I know my brother would have shared that debt of gratitude.

Nariman Dubash, ENGLAND Theory and speculation in TJKC #89? Fine, for a novelty, but I prefer a more history-based approach, as you usually provide.

Oddly, the article I cared for least, here, was the one you favored most. The G-Bomb article wasn’t a good connection with me. It seemed to suggest Jack was dependent on some sort of mysterious universal energy to channel into his stories. That, to me, makes him a convenient middleman rather than a talented creator depending on his own creativity for his many successes. External channeling versus internal genius.

I’m sure Jack was well read and being religious, knew of many beliefs and traditions.

But that he was exclusively using those notions—and Stan was going along—is beyond my suspension of disbelief.

Same for all the phallic talk here. Or complex religious explanations for what, initially, started out as a combination of earlier monster stories and movies.

The third cabin, with three being a mystical number, is less mysterious as Jack simply drew 78

three houses.

Same with the initials RB for Robert Bruce.

Stan, later, goofed up with Bob rather than Bruce Banner. Got the wrong alliteration and changed it, to cover his mistake.

The piece was educational—with no end of fancy terminology and a roster of learned practitioners—but didn’t convince me of much.

Still, can’t complain as you provided plenty of other more pleasurable material.

Two articles provided a dichotomy. Kang, initially, wasn’t fleshed out much. Loki, in contrast, was seen as overexposed and repetitious. Well, at least by Will Murray. I happened to like the character. I found his many appearances enjoyable and justified as he was the brother of Thor and obsessive in his jealous hatred.

Loki was in exile when I came in. But even there, he wasn’t forgotten. He appeared, a while longer, in “Tales of Asgard.” He showed up, in spirit form, to animate the Destroyer, in the second THOR SPECIAL. His early appearances were reprinted in MARVEL TALES. He was a regular, in Thor episodes, on the animated 1966 MARVEL SUPERHEROES TV series.

I like how Will noted he thought Loki was meant to resemble actor Peter Mark Richman.

There is a resemblance. But who knows if Jack used him or anyone for a model? He could have been casting the role out of his head.

I do wonder, later in the run, why Jack considerably aged Loki? He seemed gaunt and older.

Two other things I liked this issue: More terrific unseen collages and Jack’s margin notes.

As always, it’s great to read Jack’s own words on his efforts and career. One that cracked me up: “I’m not knocking the buck, but I’m not going to pull my pants down in the street either.”

Disappointed reviews for the INHUMANS and ETERNALS live action productions? I can identify.

Never finished watching the INHUMANS. The ETERNALS film, as stated, should have followed Jack’s designs and motivations more closely. The Celestials as evil? Deviants snarling monsters?

Eternals some sort of robots or artificial beings?

It’s like they simply got the names right. Very disappointing and needlessly so. Jack provided an excellent road map.

Loved finally reading the 2023 Comic-Con: International Kirby Tribute Panel.

It was sad to learn about Jack’s grandson, Jeremy, in earlier years, having to deal with slanted, one-sided credits. Thankfully, he shouldn’t have to go through that again, with the crediting situation being properly settled.

I was curious about Steve Ditko’s warning to Jack, before he went to DC, about, “You’ll be sorry.” It was said to be a twelve-pager. So, was it one letter per page or a more defined argument? Was he advising not to go? To find something other than DC or Marvel? Or not trying to dissuade him from anything, but to be wary or alert while there?

Really a treat to see the OMAC #2 page in pencil.

Loved the panel of him staring into the heavens. What a pity Steve was right. Jack’s OMAC could have been a long-term success if given a chance and promotional push. Instead, it remained bi-monthly and management saddled Jack with RICHARD DRAGON, SANDMAN and JUSTICE, INC. Finally, what a laugh to see Jack as a crook on the photo cover to HEADLINE #37. I loved the cover so much that I bought one, twenty years ago, because it was such a riot. I can’t think of anyone less likely to rob a bank.

Joe Frank, Scottsdale, AZ Another KIRBY COLLECTOR was nice enough to come my way today. As always, it’s obvious how much work goes into this mag even as the eventual luster has gone off the rose. That’s what makes good work hard to sustain, yet you continue to put full effort into Jack’s enduring legacy.

Random comments, strictly from my POV: Jack’s KAMANDI work, like the DEMON, lasted about six good issues in my mind.

That’s around the time a steep dive into indifference began.

The writing become more superficial, and the art became less and less impressive until it became barely passable. Do I blame him? Hardly. Not with Carmine standing over him by destroying his magnum opus with his questionable mandates.

I’ve already mentioned that I like Colletta’s work, when he cared and tried. I loved the textures and the grit he put into Jack’s penciling, while also tempering his growing squiggle tendencies and other mannerisms a bit. Yes, Colletta should be lined up and shot for his deliberate negligences, the ones we all know by now.

Ironically, here’s a guy that casually omitted figures out of sheer laziness, yet took time to lovingly render many things he didn’t have to put the time into. Little do these malefactors know that their efforts, or lack of, all eventually come out in the wash.

Royer’s inking is considered by most as having done the best veneer Jack’s penciling ever had. His brush control is the finest I’ve ever seen in the long Here’s a tentative list of upcoming themes, so start thinking, and get to writing! SEND US YOUR THEME IDEAS! • #93: SUPPORTING PLAYERS!—From second-string villains to little guys bringing up the rear, TJKC #93 gives top billing to some of the lesser lights of Jack’s oeuvre!

Almost major badguys like Darkseid’s crony Kanto the Assassin, and wannabe “Loser” Rodney Rumpkin, take

history of inkers. I’ve never seen such superb control of craft and speed. He even surpasses Sinnott for brush precision. But to me, he was also the worst for Jack. Best for staying true for what Jack drew, and the worst for doing the same. Following every exact line Jack drew was entirely double-edged. That face of Desaad on pg. 32, top panel, for example: Royer’s Jack-cautioned judgment to ink things precisely as was drawn was a dire miscalculation.

That Desaad panel was but one example that was decided so poorly, I began to tune out when I saw such scratchy, almost disfiguring results.

Pencil examples from Jack’s prime at Marvel are always welcome, though it’s clear the later bad work is being re-featured as much as the good work he’s done over the decades. They’re examples we’ve seen many times before.

The articles continue to be well-scribed and researched.

Till next time, John, we have you to thank for all this enlightened entertainment from my #1, all time, never-tobe-equaled inspiration.

Steve Rude In December 1977, Italian publisher Editoriale Corno printed CAPTAIN AMERICA’S BICENTENNIAL BATTLES in the comic book magazine CAPITAN AMERICA. Marvel Comics sent to Editoriale Corno the internal pages, and the original Kirby cover!

So it was inked (by Herb Trimpe), photographed and archived, before someone at Marvel asked to modify it. Captain America fighting in the lower left corner has been substituted with colonial soldiers, while in the upper right corner the spaceship in the crater has been moved upward to make room for Cap’s body on the ground.

At the Albert Bryan Bigley Archives [https://bigglee. blogspot.com], I found a picture of the supposed production cover. On the left side, soldiers have been pasted over the original Cap figure. On the upper right side, there should be a pasted piece of paper with Captain America, but again it has been lost and the yellowed original drawing is shown.

Dario Bressanini, ITALY center stage, proving there’s deep meaning to be found in even Jack’s minor concepts—and we’re digging it out this issue! SPRING 2025!

• #94: SPACE RACES!—Cosmic gods and life on other planets, OMAC’s space age future, time travelers, favorite Kirby sci-fi tropes, a robotic pencil art gallery, and more! SUMMER 2025!

79

#91 Credits:

John Morrow, Editor/Designer/ Proofreader 30 years of contributors, Writers/ Artists/Art Curators THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Norris Burroughs • Scott Dunbier Mark Evanier • Al Ewing Christopher Fama • Shane Foley Barry Forshaw • Glen David Gold Phil Geiger • Heritage Auctions Ryan Higgins • Rand Hoppe Larry Houston • Jeremy & Tracy Kirby Sean Kleefeld • Richard Kolkman Tom Kraft • Adam McGovern Will Murray • Alex Ross Mike Royer • Brock Sager David Schwartz • Kevin Sharp Scott Shea • Toby Sidler • Joe Sinnott Jim Van Heuklon • James Van Hise Glenn Whitmore • Ray Wyman and The Jack Kirby Museum (www.kirbymuseum.org) If we forgot anyone, let us know!

Contribute!

The Jack Kirby Collector is put together with submissions from Jack’s fans around the world. We don’t pay for submissions, but if we print art or articles you submit, we’ll send you a free copy of the issue it appears in.

Submit art & articles by mail, or e-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com

NEXT ISSUE: IN THE NEWS! Rare newspaper interviews with Kirby, 1973 San Diego panel with Jack and NEAL ADAMS discussing DC’s coloring, strips Kirby ghosted for others, unused strip concepts, collages, a never-reprinted Headline Comics tale, Jimmy Olsen pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER’s 2024 Kirby Tribute Panel from ComicCon International, and more! Cover inked by syndicated cartoonist DAVID REDDICK! TJKC #92 ships Winter 2025!

Spring 2025 (TJKC #93):

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RETROFAN #25

RETROFAN #21

RETROFAN #22

RETROFAN #23

RETROFAN #24

Meet JULIE NEWMAR, the purr-fect Catwoman! Plus: ASTRO BOY, TARZAN Saturday morning cartoons, the true history of PEBBLES CEREAL, TV’s THE UNTOUCHABLES and SEARCH, the MONKEEMOBILE, SOVIET EXPO ’77, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns

by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Surf’s up as SIXTIES BEACH MOVIES make a RetroFan splash! Plus: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ZORRO’s Saturday morning cartoon, TV’s THE WILD, WILD WEST, CARtoons and other drag-mags, VALSPEAK, and more fun, fab features!

Like, totally! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet the stars behind the Black Lagoon: RICOU BROWNING, BEN CHAPMAN, JULIE ADAMS, and LORI NELSON! Plus SHADOW CHASERS, featuring show creator KENNETH JOHNSON. Also: THE BEATLES’ YELLOW SUBMARINE, FLASH GORDON cartoons, TV’s cult classic THE PRISONER and kid’s show ZOOM, COLORFORMS, M&Ms, and more fun, fab features! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Interviews with Lost in Space’s ANGELA CARTWRIGHT and BILL MUMY, and Land of the Lost’s WESLEY EURE! Revisit Leave It to Beaver with JERRY MATHERS, TONY DOW, and KEN OSMOND! Plus: UNDERDOG, Rankin-Bass’ stop-motion classic THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY, Christmas gifts you didn’t want, the CABBAGE PATCH KIDS fad, and more!

Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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RETROFAN #26

RETROFAN #27

RETROFAN #28

RETROFAN #29

Meet Mission: Impossible’s LYNDA DAY GEORGE in an exclusive interview!

Celebrate Rambo’s 50th birthday with his creator, novelist DAVID MORRELL! Plus: TV faves WKRP IN CINCINNATI and SPACE: 1999, Fleisher’s and Filmation’s SUPERMAN cartoons, commercial jingles, JERRY LEWIS and BOB HOPE comic books, and more fun, fab features! Edited

by MICHAEL EURY.

The saga of Saturday morning’s Super Friends, Part One! Plus: A history of MR. T, TV’s AVENGERS (Steed and Mrs. Peel), Daktari’s CHERYL MILLER, Mexican movie monsters, John and Yoko’s nation of Nutopia, ELIZABETH SHEPHERD (the actress who almost played Emma Peel), and more! With ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, MARK VOGER, & MICHAEL EURY.

Interview with Captain Kangaroo BOB KEESHAN, The ROCKFORD FILES, teen monster movies, the Kung Fu and BRUCE LEE crazes, JACK KIRBY’s comedy comics, DON DRYSDALE’s TV drop-ins, outrageous toys, Challenge of the Super Friends, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns

by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

The BRITISH INVASION of the Sixties, interview with Bond Girl TRINA PARKS, The Mighty Hercules, Horror Hostess MOONA LISA, World’s Greatest Super Friends, TV Guide Fall Previews, the Frito Bandito, a Popeye Super Collector, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

The story behind BOB CLAMPETT’s Beany & Cecil, western queen DALE EVANS, an interview with Mr. Ed’s ALAN YOUNG, Miami Vice, The Sixties’ Wackiest Robots, Muscle-Maker CHARLES ATLAS, Super Powers Team—Galactic Guardians, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns

by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Pop History.

RETROFAN #30

RETROFAN #31

RETROFAN #32

RETROFAN #33

The Brady Bunch’s FLORENCE HENDERSON, the UNKNOWN COMIC revealed, Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat, a Barbie history, RANKIN/BASS’ Frosty the Snowman, Dell Comics’ Monster SuperHeroes, Slushy Drinks, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Magic memories of ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY for the 60th Anniversary of TV’s Bewitched! Plus: The ’70s thriller Time After Time (with NICHOLAS MEYER, MALCOLM McDOWELL, and DAVID WARNER), The Alvin Show, BUFFALO BOB SMITH and Howdy Doody, Peter Gunn, Saturday morning’s Run Joe Run and Big John Little John, a trip to Camp Crystal Lake, and more fun, fab features!

Featuring a profile of The Partridge Family’s heartthrob DAVID CASSIDY, THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN, LEGO blocks, Who Created Mighty Mouse?, BUCKAROO BANZAI turns forty, Planet Patrol, an encounter with SONNY AND CHER, Disco Fever, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet the Bionic Duo, LEE MAJORS and LINDSAY WAGNER! Plus: Hot Wheels: The Early Years, Fantastic Four cartoons, Modesty Blaise, Hostess snacks, TV Westerns, Movie Icons vs. the Axis Powers, the San Diego Chicken, and more!

Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited

by MICHAEL EURY.

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TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail:

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AMERICAN COMIC BOOK ALTER EGO #190 CHRONICLES: 1945-49 MITCH MAGLIO examines vintage jungle

Covers the aftermath of WWII, when comics shifted from super-heroes to crime, romance, and western comics, BILL GAINES plotted a new course for EC Comics, and SIEGEL & SHUSTER sued for rights to Superman! By RICHARD ARNDT, KURT MITCHELL, and KEITH DALLAS.

(288-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $49.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-099-1

SHIPS FALL 2024

BACK ISSUE #155

ALTER EGO #191

ALTER EGO #192

BRICKJOURNAL #86

comics heroes (Kaänga, Ka-Zar, Sheena, Rulah, Jo-Jo/Congo King, Thun’da, Tarzan) with art by LOU FINE, WILL EISNER, FRANK FRAZETTA, MATT BAKER, BOB POWELL, ALEX SCHOMBURG, and others! Plus: the comicbook career of reallife jungle explorers MARTIN AND OSA JOHNSON, FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more!

#191 is an FCA (FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA) issue! Documenting the influence of MAC RABOY’s Captain Marvel Jr. on the life, career, and look of ELVIS PRESLEY during his stellar career, from the 1950s through the 1970s! Plus: Captain Marvel co-creator BILL PARKER’s complete testimony from the DC vs. Fawcett lawsuit, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and other surprises!

MARK CARLSON-GHOST documents the mid-1950s super-hero revival featuring The Human Torch, Captain America, SubMariner, Fighting American, The Avenger, Phantom Lady, The Flame, Captain Flash, and others—with art by JOHN ROMITA, JOHN BUSCEMA, BILL EVERETT, SIMON & KIRBY, MIKE SEKOWSKY, MORT MESKIN, BOB POWELL, and other greats! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more!

LEGO LANDSCAPING! A detailed look at how to create realistic stone and foliage from bricks: ANU PEHRSON’s White Wall from Game of Thrones, and JOEL and JONATHAN NEUBER’s (working!) Pirates of the Caribbean ride! Plus BRICKNERD, BANTHA BRICKS: Fans of LEGO Star Wars, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions

by CHRISTOPHER DECK, and Minifigure Customization with JARED K. BURKS!

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BACK ISSUE #156

BACK ISSUE #157

KIRBY COLLECTOR #92

KIRBY COLLECTOR #93

THIS ISSUE IS HAUNTED! House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Unexpected, Marvel’s failed horror anthologies, Haunted Tank, Eerie Publications, House II adaptation, Elvira’s House of Mystery, and more wth NEAL ADAMS, MIKE W. BARR, DICK GIORDANO, SAM GLANZMAN, ROBERT KANIGHER, JOE ORLANDO, STERANKO, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and others. Unused cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ & WRIGHTSON.

BRONZE AGE GRAPHIC NOVELS! 1980s GNs from Marvel, DC, and First Comics, Conan GNs, and DC’s Sci-Fi GN series!

With BRENT ANDERSON, JOHN BYRNE, HOWARD CHAYKIN, CHRIS CLAREMONT, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, JACK KIRBY, DON MCGREGOR, BOB McLEOD, BILL SIENKIEWICZ, JIM STARLIN, ROY THOMAS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and more. WRIGHTSON cover.

KEITH GIFFEN TRIBUTE ISSUE! Starstudded celebration of the prolific writer/ artist of Legion of Super-Heroes, Rocket Raccoon, Guardians of the Galaxy, Justice League, Lobo, Blue Beetle, and others!

With CARY BATES, TOM BIERBAUM, J.M. DeMATTEIS, DAN DIDIO, ROBERT LOREN FLEMING, CULLY HAMNER, SCOTT KOBLISH, PAUL LEVITZ, KEVIN MAGUIRE, BART SEARS, MARK WAID, and more!

IN THE NEWS! Rare newspaper interviews with Jack, 1973 San Diego panel with Jack and NEAL ADAMS discussing DC’s coloring, strips Kirby ghosted for others, unused strip concepts, collages, a never-reprinted Headline Comics tale, Jimmy Olsen pencil art gallery, 2024 WonderCon Kirby panel (featuring DAVID SCHWARTZ, GLEN GOLD, and RAY WYMAN), and more!

Cover inked by DAVID REDDICK!

SUPPORTING PLAYERS! Almost-major villains like Kanto the Assassin and Diablo, Rodney Rumpkin, Mr. Little, the Falcon, Randu Singh, and others take center stage!

Plus: 1970 interview with Jack by SHEL DORF, MARK EVANIER’s 2024 Kirby Tribute Panel from Comic-Con, neverreprinted Simon & Kirby story, pencil art gallery, and more! Unused Mister Miracle cover inked by MIKE ROYER!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #36 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #37

RETROFAN #35

RETROFAN #36

RETROFAN #37

TOM PALMER retrospective, career-spanning interview, and tributes compiled by GREG BIGA. LEE MARRS chats about assisting on Little Orphan Annie, work for DC’s Plop! and underground Pudge, Girl Blimp!

The start of a multi-part look at the life and career of DAN DIDIO, part two of our ARNOLD DRAKE interview, public service comics produced by students at the CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES, & more!

STEVE ENGLEHART is spotlighted in a career-spanning interview, former DC Comics’ romance editor BARBARA FRIEDLANDER redeems the late DC editor JACK MILLER, DAN DIDIO discusses going from DC exec to co-publisher, we conclude our 100th birthday celebration for ARNOLD DRAKE, take a look at the 1970s underground comix oddity THE FUNNY PAGES, and more, including HEMBECK!

Saturday morning super-hero Space Ghost, plus The Beatles, The Jackson 5ive, and other real rockers in animation! Also: The Addams Family’s JOHN ASTIN, Mighty Isis co-stars JOANNA PANG and BRIAN CUTLER, TV’s The Name of the Game, on the set of Evil Dead II, classic coffee ads, and more! With ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, MARK VOGER & MICHAEL EURY.

Feel the G-Force of Eighties sci-fi toon BATTLE OF THE PLANETS! Plus: The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.’s STEFANIE POWERS, CHUCK CONNORS, The Oddball World of SCTV, Rankin/Bass’ stop-motion Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, TV’s Greatest Catchphrases, one-season TV shows, and more! With ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, MARK VOGER & MICHAEL EURY.

The Jetsons, Freaky Frankensteins, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling’s HOLLYWOOD, the Archies and other Saturday morning rockers, Star Wars copycats, Build Your Own Adventure books, crazy kitchen gadgets, toymaker MARVIN GLASS, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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New from TwoMorrows!

ALTER EGO #188

ALTER EGO #189

BACK ISSUE #152

BACK ISSUE #153

BACK ISSUE #154

JOHN ROMITA tribute issue! Podcast recollections recorded shortly after the Jazzy One’s passing by JOHN ROMITA JR., JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, BRIAN PULIDO, ROY THOMAS, JAIMIE JAMESON, JOHN CIMINO, STEVE HOUSTON, & NILE SCALA; DAVID ARMSTRONG’s mini-interview with Romita; John Romita’s ten greatest hits; plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, & more!

MARVELMANIA ISSUE! SAL BUSCEMA’s Avengers, FABIAN NICIEZA’s Captain America, and KURT BUSIEK and ALEX ROSS’s Marvels turns 30! Plus: Marvelmania International, Marvel Age, Marvel Classics, PAUL KUPPERBERG’s Marvel Novels, and Marvel Value Stamps.

Featuring JACK KIRBY, KEVIN MAGUIRE, ROY THOMAS, and more! SAL BUSCEMA cover.

BIG BABY ISSUE! X-Babies, the last days of Sugar and Spike, FF’s Franklin Richards, Superbaby vs. Luthor, Dennis the Menace Bonus Magazine, Baby Snoots, Marvel and Harvey kid humor comics, & more! With ARTHUR ADAMS, CARY BATES, JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, SCOTT LOBDELL, SHELDON MAYER, CURT SWAN, ROY THOMAS, and other grownup creators. Cover by ARTHUR ADAMS.

BRONZE AGE NOT-READY-FORPRIMETIME DC HEROES! Black Canary, Elongated Man, Lilith, Metamorpho, Nubia, Odd Man, Ultraa of Earth-Prime, Vartox, and Jimmy Olsen as Mr. Action! Plus: Jason’s Quest! Featuring MIKE W. BARR, CARY BATES, STEVE DITKO, BOB HANEY, DENNY O’NEIL, MIKE SEKOWSKY, MARK WAID, and more ready-for-primetime talent. Retro cover by NICK CARDY.

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All characters TM & © their respective owners.

DOUBLE-SIZE ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! The Marvel side includes mini-interviews with JOHN BUSCEMA, MARIE SEVERIN, JIM MOONEY, and GEORGE TUSKA—plus “STAN LEE’S Dinner with ALAIN RESNAIS” annotated by SEAN HOWE! On the DC side: talks with CARMINE INFANTINO, JOHN BROOME, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, JOE KUBERT, & MURPHY ANDERSON—plus a GARDNER FOX photo-feature, and more!

RETROFAN #33

RETROFAN #34

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #34 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #35

Meet the Bionic Duo, LEE MAJORS and LINDSAY WAGNER! Plus: Hot Wheels: The Early Years, Fantastic Four cartoons, Modesty Blaise, Hostess snacks, TV Westerns, Movie Icons vs. the Axis Powers, the San Diego Chicken, and more!

Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited

by MICHAEL EURY.

Take a ride with CHiPs’ ERIK ESTRADA and LARRY WILCOX! Plus: an interview with movie Hercules STEVE REEVES, WeirdOhs cartoonist BILL CAMPBELL, Plastic Man on Saturday mornings, TINY TIM, Remo Williams, the search for a Disney artist, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

DAN JURGENS talks about Superman, Sun Devils, creating Booster Gold, developing the “Doomsday scenario” with the demise of the Man of Steel, and more! Traverse DON GLUT’s “Glutverse” continuity across Gold Key, Marvel, and DC! Plus RICK ALTERGOTT, we conclude our profiles of MIKE DEODATO, JR. and FRANK BORTH, LINDA SUNSHINE (editor of DC/Marvel hardcover super-hero collections), & more!

An in-depth look at the life and career of writer/editor DENNY O’NEIL, and part one of a career-spanning interview with ARNOLD DRAKE, co-creator of The Doom Patrol and Deadman! Plus the story behind Studio Zero, the ’70s collective of JIM STARLIN, FRANK BRUNNER, ALAN WEISS, and others! Warren horror mag writer/ historian JACK BUTTERWORTH, alternative cartoonist TIM HENSLEY, & more!

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #90

WHAT IF KIRBY... hadn’t been stopped by his rejected Spider-Man presentation?

DC’s abandonment of the Fourth World?

The ill-fated Speak-Out Series? FREDRIC WERTHAM’s anti-comics crusade? The CIA’s involvement with the Lord of Light?

Plus a rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other columnists, a classic Simon & Kirby story, pencil art gallery, & more!

Cover inks by DAMIAN PICKADOR ZAJKO!