“Greetings, creep culturists! For my debut 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!”
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
(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95
(Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships January 2025
CRYPTOLOGY #3
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!
UPS AND DOWNS 2 the editor on Jack’s biggest wins A FANTASTIC FORAY 3 James Van Hise’s Kirby interview 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
(above) Page 8 pencils from Captain America #103 (July 1968)—a much better repro than we had back in TJKC #3 in 1994.
A Fantastic Foray
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?
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: 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: 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,
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: 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: 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: 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
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.
[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.
A Personal Look
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.
[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.
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 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?
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.
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
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
[above] Jack and David Schwartz in Jack’s studio, early 1980s.
[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.
[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.
JACK F.A.Q.s
A column answering asking Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby
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
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
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.
A regular column focusing on Kirby’s least known work, by Barry Forshaw
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!),
OBSCURA
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).
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
Black Magic #31 and #32.
[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.
Private Victory
[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.
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!
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
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
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
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.
ART DE TRIOMPHE
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].
The Al-Father
Adam McGovern talks with fan-favorite writer Al Ewing about Kirby’s influence
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
“Kirby was always somebody—when he was dialoguing his own work, 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,
TIncidental Iconography
An ongoing analysis of Kirby’s visual shorthand, and how he inadvertently used it to develop his characters, by Sean
Kleefeld
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
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.
GOLDEN AGE CAPTAIN AMERICA’S POTENT INFLUENCE
Irecently 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
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.
Kirby’s Greatest Triumph?
by Will Murray
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.
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.
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.
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
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 chain mail-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
