Fully Authorized By The Kirby Estate
$4.95 In The U.S.
CELEBRATING THE LIFE & CAREER OF THE KING!
Characters © Marvel Entertainment Group, Artwork © Jack Kirby & Joe Sinnott
Issue #9, Feb. 1996
Special Fantastic Four Theme Issue!
This issue inspired by the mind-numbing talents of
Jack (king)
Unless otherwise noted, all prominent characters in this issue are TM and © Marvel Entertainment Group. All artwork is © Jack Kirby unless otherwise noted.
Stan
d an
(The Man)
Kirby
Lee
Cover INks By:
Color by:
Jo e Sinno tt
Tom Ziuko
Edited with reckless abandon by: John Morrow Designed with little o r no fo retho ught by: John & Pamela Morrow Pro o fread in haste by: Richard howell Contributed to with a vengeance by: Terry Austin Jerry Bails Al Bigley Len Callo Jeff Clem Jon Cooke Scott Dambrot David Hamilton Chris Harper Charles Hatfield David E. Jefferson James Henry Klein Richard Kyle Harold May Mark Miller Bret Mixon Glen Musial Stu Neft Marc Pacella Phillippe Queveau Edward J. Saunders, Jr. John Shingler Darcy Sullivan Greg Theakston Kirk Tilander Barry Windsor-Smith Curtis Wong (Each co ntributo r Receives o ne free issue fo r their effo rts!)
Assisted nonchalantly by: Terry Austin, Len Callo, Al Gordon, D. Hambone, Chris Harper, Richard Howell, Richard Kyle, Mark Miller, Marc Pacella, David Penalosa, Steve SHerman, Joe Sinnott, Greg Theakston, Mike Thibodeaux, Barry Windsor-Smith, & of course, Roz Kirby. Igno red completely by: Irving Forbush
Stuffed into envelopes by: Glen Musial, Ed Stelli, Patrick Varker, Jon Blank, and all the other Kirby fans in Raleigh, NC. Thanks, gu ys!
Jack Kirby at the 1971 San Diego Comic Con. (Photo by Jim Klein)
(Our back cover is Jack’s original, unpublished cover to the 1977 Silver Surfer Graphic Novel.)
The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 3, No. 9, Feb. 1996. Published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows Advertising, 502 Saint Mary’s St., Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. John Morrow, Editor. Pamela Morrow, Assistant Editor. Single issues: $4.95 each U.S., $5.40 Canada, $7.40 outside North America. Six-issue subscriptions: $24.00 US, $32.00 Canada and Mexico, and $44.00 outside North America. First printing. The initial printing of this issue was mailed the week of Feb. 19, 1995. All characters are © their respective companies. All artwork is © Jack Kirby unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors.
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KIRBY
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BULLETINS
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KIRBY
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KIRBY
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A COLLECTION OF CAPTIVATING KIBITZING CONCERNING KIRBY! ITEM! Mighty MARK EVANIER reports that things are still proceeding on Jack Kirby: A Celebration, the tribute book he and Fearless FRANK MILLER are co-producing, and that it’ll be released “When it’s right.” Mark also reports that the expanded version of “The King & I” tribute that ran in COMICS BUYER’S GUIDE has expanded more than he thought—so much so that, to do it justice, he plans to publish it as a separate Kirby biography. Stay tuned for release dates. ITEM! Gregarious GREG THEAKSTON reports that for his planned COMPLETE KIRBY reprint series, he still needs Blue Bolt #4 & #9, Famous Funnies #80, and Justice Traps The Guilty #2. If you know where Greg can acquire these in any condition, call him at (770) 424-5151. ITEM! Don’t you wish they still made comics like they used to? Well, Darlin’ DICK AYERS, artist extraordinaire and former FANTASTIC FOUR inker, is hard at work penciling and inking an upcoming series called DR. WONDER for new kid on the block OLD TOWN PUBLISHING. From preview art we’ve seen, it’s obvious Dick hasn’t lost his touch since his days in the Marvel Bullpen! DR. WONDER will be the first book from OLD TOWN, and Writer/Publisher DAVID ALLIKAS is dedicated to making comics good again by creating a new line inspired by the greatness of the 1960s Marvel books. Look for DR. WONDER #1 this April in comic stores everywhere.
JOHN’S JUKEBOX This is the BIG ONE, Kirby Kooks! The colossal FANTASTIC FOUR THEME ISSUE! It was so big, we added extra pages to hold it all, at no cost to you! (Who says this isn’t the Kirby Age of Galactus-size Giveaways?) If your submission didn’t make it into this issue, don’t worry; we’ll have a Marvel theme issue sooner or later, and try to run it then. Throughout this issue, we’re paying tribute to those great Marvel books of yesteryear by pilfering the look and feel of some of what made the House Of Ideas what it is today... er, what it was in 1970. While Jack hasn’t received the credit he deserves for his contributions to Marvel, and there are different opinions on “who did what,” a big part of Marvel’s appeal in the 1960s came from how Stan Lee’s hucksterism made you want to be part of the Marvel Comics family. So here’s to Stan; without his salesmanship helping make Marvel a success, Jack might not have had the opportunity to create so many lasting characters. Long Live The King!
John Morrow, Editor • 502 Saint Mary’s St. • Raleigh, NC 27605 • (919) 833-8092 • FAX (919) 833-8023 email: twomorrow@aol.com
ITEM! Things are looking promising now that TJKC is being distributed to comic shops worldwide through Diamond Comic Distributors and Capital City Distribution. Orders on #8 were good, and #9 is doing even better. We’re hoping the increased circulation will result in more submissions and the continuation of our color covers. But if your local shop doesn’t carry TJKC, show them a copy and ask them to look for it in Diamond’s PREVIEWS magazine or Capital City’s ADVANCE COMICS. And if you got this copy of TJKC at your local store, consider subscribing directly from us. Not only will you save money, but you’ll get your issues sooner (in a different custom Kirby envelope each issue), and leave copies in stores for new readers to discover. ITEM! Just a reminder: THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR is officially 36 pages for $4.95 (despite this one-time-only 44-pager). But some of you still have credit for our old 16page issues on your subscription, which only equal half of
a 36-page issue. So if your mailing label says you only have 1/2 issue remaining in your subscription, you need to send an additional $2 in the US ($2.20 Canada, $3.20 outside N. America) to even it up to a full issue. While you’re at it, consider extending your subscription at our new rate of 6 issues for $24 ($32 Canada, $44 outside N. America). ITEM! Jaunty JIM STERANKO of SuperGraphics and Manic MIKE THIBODEAUX of Genesis West are continuing work on their Kirby tribute book. It promises to contain a large assortment of previously-unseen Kirby artwork, including many pieces from the Kirby family’s private collections. But to fill the book out, Jim and Mike need more unpublished art. If you have any obscure Kirby art in your collection, including rejected covers and pages or nice convention pin-ups, please send photocopies of it to Jim at Supergraphics, Box 974, Reading, PA 19603, and to Mike at Genesis West, PO Box 7224, Thousand Oaks, CA 91359. And while you’re at it, make an extra copy and send it to us at TJKC! ITEM! We’re proud to announce that TJKC subscriber RICHARD KOLKMAN is our choice to compile the updated Kirby Checklist for us. For those of you who haven’t heard, we’re working on an up-to-date checklist of everything Jack ever had published (including reprints and interviews). As a starting point, we’re using the existing one from Blue Rose Press’ THE ART OF JACK KIRBY, in cooperation with AOJK author RAY WYMAN. Richard has a thorough knowledge of Jack’s work, the requisite computer skills and hardware, and he’s proven his mettle by sending us reams of corrections to the existing AOJK list. In exchange for all the hard work ahead for Richard, we’re extending him a lifetime subscription to TJKC! But although Richard is compiling the information, we’ll be calling on all our volunteers to double-check our work. And you can still contribute yourself. Keep sending lists of errors and omissions from the AOJK checklist, or if you’ve got an accurate list of your own to contribute, write us! ITEM! Didja catch the A&E NETWORK’s Stan Lee BIOGRAPHY episode on TV Dec. 26th? Although it was a little vague about what Jack contributed to the Marvel Universe, it was nice to see him get so much air time. And kudos to MARK EVANIER for adding some balance to the piece. If you missed it, look for a rerun later this year.
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ITEM! Be sure to check out our KIRBY COLLECTOR HOME PAGE on the World Wide Web! TJKC subscriber and webmaster RANDY HOPPE put it together for us and keeps it updated. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is: http://www.mordor.com/thehop/kirby. The TJKC Home Page includes biographical information on Jack, so uninformed visitors can learn about who he is and what he accomplished. It also includes a synopsis of each issue of TJKC published to date, and samples of Kirby art and articles from each issue. And we’ll put a copy of the updated Kirby Checklist online for free downloading once it’s completed, so everyone can have access to it. If you’ve got a Web Browser and Internet access, be sure to check it out, and let us know what you think. ITEM! Don’t forget that you can still make donations to the educational fund that was set up in Jack’s name shortly after his death. Send to: The Jack Kirby Educational Fund, Temple Etz Chaim, 1080 Janss Rd., Thousand Oaks, CA 91360.
KIRBY COLLECTOR CHECKLIST These Issues Of TJKC Are Available – See Page 42 TJKC #1: This 16-page INTRODUCTORY ISSUE features rare Kirby posters, articles on a 1978 Kirby traveling display and the MARVELMANIA PORTFOLIO, Jack’s original OMAC concept sketch, an unused THOR page, and more! $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #2: A 16-page GENERAL INTEREST issue with rare 1970s SANDMAN pages, a fan’s phone conversations with Jack, MARVELMANIA PORTFOLIO plates, unpublished FANTASTIC FOUR panels, a page of the Jack Ruby ESQUIRE story, other rare art, and more! $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #3: A 16-page CAPTAIN AMERICA theme issue with a JOE SIMON interview, more MARVELMANIA plates, convention sketches, 1960s & 70s CAPTAIN AMERICA pages before they were inked, and more! $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #4: A 16-page GENERAL INTEREST issue, with a MIKE ROYER interview, more MARVELMANIA plates, THOR pencil pages before being inked, unused ATLAS #1 cover pencils, Euro-Kirby fandom, and more! $2.50 U.S. $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #5: A 16-page GENERAL INTEREST issue featuring transcripts of Jack’s 1972 speech at VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, unpublished FANTASTIC FOUR pencils, how Kirby used real people in his comics, essential Kirby collectibles, unpublished KOBRA pencils, and more! $2.50 ($2.70 Canada/Mexico, $3.70 outside N. America) TJKC #6: A 36-page FOURTH WORLD theme issue featuring interviews with MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN, more of our MIKE ROYER interview, the NEW GODS portfolio, the story behind HUNGER DOGS and Jack’s original ending to NEW GODS, and unpublished art, plus FOURTH WORLD pencils before being inked! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America) TJKC #7: A 36-page KID GANG theme issue with an unpublished 1987 interview with Kirby, overview of the S&K KID GANGS, plenty of unpublished art from BOYS’ RANCH, BOY EXPLORERS, JIMMY OLSEN, DINGBATS OF DANGER STREET, X-MEN, and more! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America) TJKC #8: An all-star CONVENTION theme issue with transcripts from the KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL at the ’95 SDCC (with JOE SINNOTT, MIKE ROYER, MARK EVANIER, and TONY ISABELLA), convention memories, essay by JIM STERANKO, CAPTAIN AMERICA pages before they were inked, convention sketches, and more! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America) AND ON SALE RIGHT NOW: TJKC #9: If you’re reading this, you already know what’s in this FANTASTIC FOUR Theme Issue! $4.95 ($5.40 Canada/Mexico, $7.40 outside N. America)
Fantastic Tidbits Morsels of FF info by Steve Sherman, Richard Kyle, and Richard Howell
What’s In A Name? Jack’s father’s name was Ben. His oldest daughter’s name is Susan (born in 1945). If Jack wasn’t directly involved in the FF’s creation, isn’t it a weird coincidence that two of the FF share these names?
Where’d Everybody Go? Here’s the number of lasting characters (ones that reappeared after their first use) created during each of Jack’s nine years on the FF : 10, 8, 4, 7, 15, 7, 1, 0, 1. After four years of establishing the book with villains and supporting characters, that magical fifth year brought a surge of new characters like The Inhumans, Silver Surfer, Galactus, Black Panther, etc. The number tapered off in year six, and except for Annihilus and Agatha Harkness (which some think was Stan’s idea), no notable new characters appear in the last three years of the strip. What’s the explanation for the absence of new characters after that sixth year? Maybe Jack simply refused to create any. “Him” in #67 was the last one Jack created before the drought. He didn’t like Stan’s characterization on the Silver Surfer, and he may have felt similarly about the dialogue on the “Him” storyline (there were some odd discrepancies between the art and the words on those issues). I’ve heard Jack had hopes for the Him character to be used in a more adult magazine format (perhaps like the two later 35¢ Spider-Man tryouts). It’s plausible that in the Him storyline, Jack saw more characters that weren’t being handled the way he wanted, so he refused to create any new ones after that. (This would be about the time he began formulating his ideas for what would later become his Fourth World series.)
Witchy Woman
Brace yourself; this unused page from FF #100 was incompetently inked by the purchaser, right over Jack’s pencils! Not content just to butcher the art, this genius wrote supposedly funny captions in the word balloons (which we’ve eliminated in the interest of good taste). May his dog get fleas...
An unpublished page from FF #94 shows an early version of Agatha Harkness, and she looks a lot like Rosalind Kirby! Jack must’ve decided no one would believe a witch could be as lovely as Roz, and opted for the look that finally appeared in #94.
unused page shown here demonstrates one of the original, more leisurely-paced 6-panel pages. Apparently the page count was changed partway through, and Jack had to go back and redraw certain multipage sequences, condensing them to fit on single pages.
Doubling Up What was with all the 9-panel pages in FF #100, and the choppy pacing? Was this a Marvel hatchet job, a lá FF #108? The owner of one of the 9-panel originals says it isn’t pieced together, but it appears #100 was originally going to be a double-size anniversary issue. The
(this page and next) Jack’s storyboards from “The F.F. Meet Doctor Doom” episode of The New Fantastic Four animated series.
F.F. AT PEACE IN H.Q. -- SUE ASKS BEN ABOUT COPY OF “HULK?”
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GREENSKIN IS SILLY...
REED PLAYING CHESS WITH HERBIE
HERBIE SAYS BEN HAS ORANGE SKIN
REED SAYS HERBIE WAS DEMONSTRATING LOGIC
SHEESH!
CAN’T READ A COMIC BOOK IN PEACE
HERBIE SENSES DANGER...
BEN SCOFFS.
CIRCUITS ARE REACTING
DOCTOR DOOM’S JET COMES INTO VIEW...
HOVERS OVER BAXTER BLDG...
DROPS GLOWING CABLE
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CABLE WRAPS ITSELF AROUND BAXTER BLDG...
The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine! by John Shingler
title to the extent that the Fantastic Four became secondary characters in their own book. Instead, the Silver Surfer and the Inhumans became woven into the fabric of the Fantastic Four’s world, transforming the Fantastic Four into an extended family. The Fantastic Four remained central to the action, and everything seemed to flow naturally, as various lives overlapped and became interconnected. This, to me, was the greatest accomplishment of Lee and Kirby on the Fantastic Four— not the introduction of characters like the Silver Surfer or Inhumans but what was done with them after their initial stories were over, and the way in which they were able to continue appearing without crowding the Fantastic Four out of their own book. The final point I want to emphasize is perhaps the most important one. Whenever I think of the Fantastic Four, my mind keeps going back to a quote from an interview that was published in The Jack Kirby Collector #7. When Ken Viola asked how he approached a blank page, Kirby responded:
hen I first read that The Jack Kirby Collector was devoting an entire issue to the Fantastic Four, I felt compelled to offer several of my thoughts on Kirby’s tenure on that title. Having been a regular reader since FF #10, I have a considerable amount of childhood memories and adult feelings of nostalgia associated with each and every issue of Kirby’s Fantastic Four. First, I disagree strongly with the commonly-held assumption that the best issues of the Fantastic Four were also the high points of purely creative output in which the Inhumans, “I feel the story first. I know those people first, and I the Silver Surfer, Galactus, and the Black Panther were put them down as I’d like them to live on those introduced. To me the best issues of the FF are the pages. My stories are very sincere. My stories are stories that immediately followed these events, people stories and there are elements that are very, very in issues #53-63. Introducing great characreal. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, and I’ve done ters does not amount to much unless they stories on a wide range of subjects.” are developed correctly after their initial story is over. Lee and Kirby recognized This approach is what I love most about that these characters were huge and that Kirby’s work: The fact that his stories were they demanded space of their own in full of people living their lives within a comic which to tell their stories. Since Marvel book format. It explains the lasting appeal of his was limited in the number of titles it work on the Fantastic Four, regardless of the could publish at the time, these stories villain, the plot, or the setting. When I think had to be told in the pages of the FF. of my favorite moments in the Fantastic Four, Rather than disappearing completely I always think first of Ben talking on the teleafter their initial stories had ended, phone on pages 4-5 of FF #22, Reed tinkerthese characters remained in supporting ing with the “world’s first fully-automated roles, often providing the substance for dish washer” on page 2 of FF #44, the basesubplots. Their role within the pages of the ball game that opened FF #54, Ben readFantastic Four sparked major stories involving ghost stories in FF #58, Ben eating ing old villains and also served as the thread wheat cakes and Johnny making toast in to weave together other story elements that FF #67, the house cleaning at the beginwould otherwise have been disconnected or ning of FF #80. I always loved the fact that resolved in an inferior manner. For example, they took time out to take a bath and clean the presence of the Silver Surfer on Earth and up after their initial encounter with Galactus his trusting of humanity directly resulted in Dr. in FF #49, and the sequence where Ben and Doom stealing his powers. In the middle of this epic, Johnny take a tour of the Baxter Building attention shifts to the Inhumans escaping from the Great in FF #78 is still a classic. I also recall Refuge. At the time I felt sure that in the next issue we would see all the little touches, such as Ben trying This original Black Bolt battle Doctor Doom, but this was far too obvious for to find parking space for the Fantasti-Car in FF #10 of this Kirby. Instead, Reed tricks Dr. Doom into flying into the barrier and the Torch and Wyatt drinking coffee from a thermos in Dr. Doom that Galactus put into place to prevent the Silver Surfer from FF #54 while searching for the Inhumans in a ship provided by marker sketch leaving the Earth. When the Fantastic Four return home, they the Black Panther. These moments defined the Fantastic Four as measures battle a new and improved Sandman, resulting in Reed being humans, living their lives within the pages of a comic book. 18" x 24". sucked into the Negative Zone. As it turns out, the Inhumans Moments like these are more important than the battle scenes escaped just in time for Triton to rescue Reed. This kind of plotting and the cosmic scale of many of the stories. Moments like these are and interwoven story elements is mostly missing from today’s comics. what added the depth and texture to the Fantastic Four that made it It is an ability that I think came from a natural feeling Kirby had for fresh, innovative and real. It is precisely moments like these that are the characters he created. This approach to plotting always surprised far too often missing from today’s comics. the reader, who never knew what to expect next, and the sequence of When I look back over Kirby’s tenure on the Fantastic Four I am events never felt contrived or unnatural. The use of the Negative Zone amazed at the evolution in storytelling and panel layout. Despite in this story and the brief appearances of the Watcher and the Black changes in the art and the story lengths, formats, and structures, Panther in the Dr. Doom story also illustrate how previously estabdespite shifts in emphasis and the introduction of major new characlished concepts and characters continued to play key roles in the ters, Kirby’s Fantastic Four always remained first and foremost a conevolving adventures of the Fantastic Four. tinuing story about real people living their lives within the pages of a This brings me to another of Kirby’s greatest accomplishments. comic book. Jack never strayed from this initial simple idea. Even He was able to allow all of these characters to continue to lead their against a cosmic backdrop his characters never ceased to be human, lives within the pages of the Fantastic Four, and to contribute directly and this is what made Kirby’s Fantastic Four truly “the World’s to the substance of the stories taking place without dominating the Greatest Comics Magazine!” 6
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remember how great Superman used to be?” “Yeah, and he used to jump and now he just flies.” “And Batman—remember when the Joker...” “What’re they making Captain Marvel so fat for?” “Hey, wasn’t that old Human Torch vee-ess Sub-Marine-er story terrific?” A few good issues, but always just a few. And so we dreamed, until most of us forgot all about the comic books... And then The Fantastic Four arrived. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who were in on that “Golden Age,” had pursued our dream, too, somehow—but with more fidelity, and maybe even more love. After twenty-five years, somebody had done a comic book strip “right.” The Fantastic Four reversed the pattern of those first great strips. Almost without exception, they had begun at their peak and then slowly declined. Leaping from the hasty womb of a one-page origin, they became grown men before their time and decrepit before they’d reached their teens. But The Fantastic Four was born feeble and grew healthier with every passing issue. Time seemed to turn about and march back along its fading tracks, recalling the great days with the heightened awareness of pleasurable memories. Forty issues after The Fantastic Four began—when almost all of the Golden Age strips had long been over the hill—it really hit its stride. Today, twenty issues after that, it surely ranks as one of the five great comic book strips of all time, and the only one that has ever been done “right.” Without becoming art, it could be no better. And if it became art, it would be far less than it is. The wild, ad lib, fact-defying plots, the quick spontaneity of the drawings, the wonderfully impossible characters, the splendid and absurd dialogue—they would all be destroyed if any of them were taken seriously for a single moment. Somehow, however, out of the jury-rigged yarns and the preposterous characters, something serious and valuable emerges. Like the Fantastic Four themselves, it is the collective effort that makes the strip outstanding, not merely one member of the team, no matter how eyecatching. Unlike National Publication’s revived versions of their pre-war strips, which wearily project all the pre-war values in a pseudo-contemporary guise—like middle-aged women in miniskirts—Marvel’s
Graphic Story Review by Richard Kyle (Originally published in Fantasy Illustrated #7, Spring 1967) © 1967 by William W. Spicer (Editor’s Note: I recently received a letter from a TJKC subscriber Bob Cosgrove, commenting that this article by Richard Kyle was one of the finest examinations he’d ever read of what made the FF as good as it was. I have to agree. Since it was originally written around the time FF #60 came out—just following Jack’s most prolific period of character creation on the book—I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to re-present an extremely literate fan’s views of the FF, formed during the heyday of the series. This article should be viewed in light of the fact that it was written almost 30 years ago, while Jack still had many more issues of FF to go before he left the book.) s a kid, I loved comic books. Action Comics, where Superman was born; Detective Comics, with Bob Kane’s Batman; Marvel Mystery Comics, which featured the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner; Whiz Comics, starring Captain Marvel; and Big Shot and Smash and Blue Bolt and Daredevil—I loved them all. So did all the kids I knew. And one of our dreams in the “Golden Age of Comic Books” was that somebody would do a comic book strip “right.” Not just one episode, or a half-dozen episodes, but fifteen or twenty, at movie-serial length. We all talked about it. We really dug comic book strips, and we wanted one that was as good as it could be, issue after issue. Not a serious, adult graphic story—The Spirit by Will Eisner satisfied us there, in those days—but a comic book strip, with all the wild, dumbfounding plots and the lay-it-on-the-line good-vs (pronounced “veeess” because we’d never heard of that strange word “versus”)-evil characterization, and all the freight-train subtlety of regular comic book strips. But nobody did a comic book strip “right,” not issue after issue, not then. A few good episodes, sure, but always just a few. “Gee,
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A 1/2 page ad from Incredible Hulk #1 (May, 1962). This original art was recently sold at auction, and is one of the earliest remaining pieces of FF art. 7
and he was the solution for every ill that was known to afflict the human race. Such “ordinary” phenomena as the Peace Corps, the drive for full civil rights for all, the struggle to abolish human poverty, the gathering national attack upon crime and political corruption, the belief in the supremacy of the Individual and the inherent goodness of Man, and—above all—the boundlessness of human destiny that space travel surely promises, these all are commonplace in our world. But they were not commonplace when Superman was born, almost thirty years ago. As “The Man of Tomorrow,” he embodied them, exuberantly. As pure science and raw democracy, he smashed through walls of every kind to deliver his message, clobbering evil, bashing hypocrisy, belting corruption. He seemed unstoppable. But he had a fatal weakness, and it was not kryptonite. Today, we are living in Superman’s tomorrow. We are superhumanly strong with the incredible physical strength of science’s machines and the almost unlimited energy of its power sources—but we have discovered in the years since Superman’s creation, that pure strength and raw power are not enough to ensure the triumph of good. They could not prevent the Second World War. They did create Hiroshima. Even as Superman had embodied the virtues of science and democracy, he had to assume their weaknesses as well. Even as his blunt, physical power embodied good, so it must embody evil. In the emotional exhaustion that followed the war, we bitterly turned away from Superman and the comic book characters like him and the ideals they represented. We grotesquely exaggerated their weaknesses as we once had exaggerated their virtues. The nation wallowed in a cycle of disillusionment, self-criticism, self-revilement, despair, and then apathy. In mainstream literature and popular paperbacks, the heroes died away and the anti-heroes took their place. In comic books, the superheroes and the costume heroes—especially the patriotic ones— turned yellow on the magazine racks and were carted off to die in the garbage dumps beside the other waste products of American society. Ultimately, only three of them survived: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, protected from disaster by the immensity of the publishing empire they had created. Horror and crime comics filled the newsstands to overflow, many of them appealing to a sneaking sexual perversity and a cut-rate bloodlust. Some, like the EC magazines, were written and drawn with an almost neurotic intensity and sincerity. In almost every story, the hero was slain or the anti-hero triumphed. A veritable legion of living corpses, vampires, werewolves and ghouls crawled, flapped, leaped, and chomped their way through hundreds of thousands of comic books every month. Instead of, “Wow, did you see the issue where Superman picked up that ocean liner?” it was, “Hey, catch this one. They slice this guy up like a stack of boiled ham. You can even see the blood pop out in little beads.” And yet, while all this was taking place on the dying outer skin of society, the ideals of science and democracy were redefining themselves deep within the living body. So—ultimately—in the first, August 1961 issue of The Fantastic Four, a new sort of Superman returned. It was clobbering time again—but with a difference.
Jack did this pencil drawing of the Thing in 1962 for Jerry Bails to use in his fanzine Alter-Ego.
Fantastic Four genuinely displays the mood and feel of the times. Even as Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster’s original Superman ranged far ahead of the plodding mainstream writers of its generation, so Lee & Kirby’s Fantastic Four has outdistanced the swung remains of those hipsters of yesteryear that the Establishment labels “serious” writers. Why? Three of its leading characters are merely refurbished oddballs from older strips. Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, is a kind of retread of Plastic Man of the ’40s; the Invisible Girl reflects the newspaper strips’ long vanished Invisible Scarlet O’Neill; and the Human Torch is a teenage version of the Golden Age’s prime burnt-out case— yet they are all involved in a wholly contemporary comic book strip that is as modern as mod. Why? The reason, naturally, is Lee and Kirby’s invention of the fourth member of the team—The Thing. He is the strip’s catalyst. No more important than the others, he makes it work. And he makes it contemporary. Without him—without the cheerfully monstrous and incredibly powerful carcass that is at once his triumph and his tragedy, and without his absolutely extroverted and completely direct personality—The Fantastic Four would be just another routine bunch of weirdos with a rock ’n’ roll trio’s name. Without being an imitation, he is the Superman of the ’60s, rehabilitated at last, after twenty years of exile. The original Superman was labeled “The Man of Tomorrow.” He was the physical embodiment of pure science and raw democracy,
Strength vee-ess Intellect Twenty-three years before, in Superman, a tiny baby boy had rocketed to Earth from the stars in a small experimental spaceship constructed by his father, Jor-el, the greatest scientist of the planet Krypton. Jor-el had discovered a fault in Krypton’s molten core and realized the planet would soon explode. But the people of Krypton would not heed his warnings, and the immense spaceships he proposed to construct—ones capable of safely carrying away the planet’s inhabitants—were never built. So, in the original stories, the boy’s parents remained behind to die together in the final destruction of their world. On Earth, discovered and eventually adopted by an elderly, childless couple, the Kents, the boy grew to manhood, concealing his 8
superhuman strength from others. Then, upon the death of his fosterparents, Jor-el’s son took two identities: One, the man of intellect, Clark Kent, the newspaper reporter; the other, the man of physical power and sexual virility, Superman. As the personally ineffectual but professionally capable Kent, he uncovered the evil and crime and corruption that Superman fought, and for which Superman was universally admired. In 1961, the scientist and wartime intelligence agent, Reed Richards; his sometime fiancée, Susan Storm; Johnny Storm, her teenage brother; and Ben Grimm, pilot and war-hero and Richards’ friend, attempted to rocket from the Earth in a spaceship of Richards’ own design. He believed the Free World must reach the stars before the Communist nations, but the Government had not listened, and so he spent his own fortune in the construction of the craft. Unlike Jorel’s son many years before, Richards and his friends could not escape their world. Encountering a radiation barrier, their craft fell back to Earth, the radiation turning each of them into superhuman beings. The slight and scholarly Richards became Mr. Fantastic, an outwardly normal being whose body cells had been completely transformed, enabling him to stretch his arms and legs—all his body—to any length by an effort of will. The muscular and ruggedly handsome Ben Grimm was changed into The Thing, physical strength incarnate, crude and violent and monstrously ugly. The high-tempered, strongly emotional teenager Johnny Storm acquired the powers of the Human Torch, allowing him to turn his body into a mass of living flame which gave him the power of flight. And his sister Susan Storm became the Invisible Girl, first with only the neutral ability to make
herself transparent, and later, with the more positive and womanly capacity to create a womb-like “force-field” that could protect herself and her companions from harm. In 1938, Superman had been born out of the collapse of the 19th century American economic and social system which had endured until the crash of 1929, and it had been born into the rise of Roosevelt’s idealistic New Deal of the ’30s which promised a future of true democracy, where the wealth produced by science would be equitably shared by all, and where each individual guided his own destiny. But in 1961, Reed Richards said of his life after World War II: “I guess things never turn out as we want them to. The girl I wanted was still out of reach, and the world we had fought for was also not yet ours.” However, where Superman was conceived out of the obvious failure of one system, The Fantastic Four was created out of the hidden success of another—out of the final awareness that those ideals of the ’30s had not been false, that their goals had been achieved or were close to realization. It was our embodiment of those ideals that had been false. For, behind the scenes, it was the brain of man which was solving mankind’s problems, not merely his raw physical strength. It was Clark Kent, the man of intellect, who was the real force; Superman was his instrument. Jor-el’s son and the Kents’ foster son— the child of science and American democracy—represented not only the material world, but the visionary world as well. In those first stories, Clark Kent pleaded again and again to be recognized for what he was, the other half of the world’s greatest hero. His hornrimmed spectacles—with their panes of clear window glass—concealed nothing: they characterized Kent, they did not dis-
Namor finally finds Atlantis in this 2-page spread from Fantastic Four Annual #1. 9
guise him. But Lois Lane (Jor-el’s son’s opinion of the rest of us) saw only Superman’s bulging uniform, which she idolized, and Kent’s bookwormish eyeglasses, which she scorned. Her idol was power, but in her world only muscle had power, not intellect, and so she looked no deeper than the symbol of power Superman revealed when he took off his outer clothing, and the symbol of weakness that was a thinking man’s eyeglasses. She never looked at the actual man who wore both of them. Like Lois, we were materialists then, idolizing practicality and brute force and despising theory and intellect—Einstein was a hairbrained joke, Goddard a lunatic—and we could not recognize the truth before us, that beyond the raw power of our machines, which we worshiped, and the materialistic orgies of mass consumption, which we dreamed about, there was a more profound and pure and farsighted ideal. Power and produce were merely its tools. But we could not understand that, not in those days. Eventually, at Hiroshima, we saw the horror of machines whose sole end was power, and in the mass-produced world after the war we wallowed in a tiresome, chrome-plated never-never land of product consumption that became, in a deeper way, equally horrifying. And since we believed that science and democracy were only these cruel or empty things, we turned from them in disgust or cynicism—but all the while, the real ideal was still at work, building the world it had promised many years before. Finally, after those many anti-heroworshipping years of masochistic disillusionment, we could no longer deny the truth of our own vision. And so, it was the then-frail Reed Richards, the Clark Kent of the ’60s (even to the alliterative and descriptive name), who was given Mr. Fantastic’s erectile symbol of virility and power. It was he who assumed the leadership of The Fantastic Four; not The Thing, the Superman of today, whose ugliness emphasized that he still bore the burden of his sins—and that he had lost the pre-war oomph that had made girlish hearts beat faster. The Thing became the tragic clown prince—not the heroic prince—of the world. In the early, hesitant yarns in their magazine, Richards’ leadership was frequently questioned, and often ignored. But slowly—Lee and Kirby built well—order and direction emerged and The Fantastic Four became a team, instead of a squabbling short-order mob. Once wholly bitter and self-pitying, The Thing found love with the beautiful Alicia, the blind sculptress whose stepfather had been the Puppet Master, a smiling villain who could control men through his miniature replicas of their bodies. Rejecting her stepfather and his world forever, the innocent and sightless Alicia accepted The Thing for the basic goodness and gentleness of his character, indifferent to the image the world saw. The Sub-Mariner returned from out of the past, still reflecting his pre-war identity as a king-without-a-kingdom, wildly impulsive, astonishingly strong, subject to violent rages and violent loves; an adult-sized projection, even to the fetal squint, of the egocentric infant— one of the great characterizations in comic books. He was immensely attractive to women, as immature paranoids often are, and Susan Storm was romantically drawn to him—even as she increasingly committed herself to the grownup world of Reed Richards. And teenage Johnny Storm began to find his place within the group. Too emotionally unstable in the beginning, his energies frequently misdirected, he achieved a greater self-control. At last, as a real team, they faced their greatest enemy, Dr. Doom, the embodiment of dark science, totalitarian power and cruelty—the half-mechanical man who loved nothing and hated everything. (And who got away with every crime in the book, bucking the censors of the Comics Code Authority; as the head of a tiny foreign country, Doom was legally entitled to diplomatic immunity. On the day that Dr. Doom came to power, the Marvel Bullpen must have been a
great place to make a laugh-track.) Issue after issue, then, The Fantastic Four battled every villain you could shake a schtick at: Dr. Doom, Sub-Mariner, Red Ghost and his Super-Apes, Puppet Master, Mole Man, the Hulk, Super Skrull, Molecule Man, Hate Monger, Diablo, the Mad Thinker and his Awesome Android, Invincible Man, and a whole mess of others—and finally The Frightful Four, a criminous analogue of the Fantastics themselves. The plots, always competent by comic book standards— for Lee and Kirby have always been professionals—gradually grew more complex. Lee’s dialogue, originally presented with an almost “funny animal” simplicity, one or two balloons to a panel, blossomed into a series of incredibly long exchanges in a Disneyland of bubbles which floated through every panel. In the beginning, The Fantastic Four were rendered in a cartoony style that seemed the antithesis of everything Jack Kirby had ever done. The drawings were introverted caricatures of his work in those great days when he had collaborated with Joe Simon on Blue Bolt and Captain America and Boys’ Ranch and all the other great action thrillers of the Golden Age. Then, Reed put on a little weight, Susan filled out fetchingly—and the old Kirby style re-emerged. Wild, dynamic action began to burst from every panel. Heroes and villains leaped, bashed, dived, rolled, blasted, stretched, ran, flew, swam, slugged and blazed their way out of hundreds of bursting panels and into our laps. It was a nice strip, all right—worth Jack’s unpublished cover to FF #64.
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source—but now, while the others still struggled, the Marvel Age busted out of its bag. It’d been quite a tussle, too. It took 43 issues of The Fantastic Four and two Annuals. In the 44th issue of their magazine—while Joe Sinnott took up pen and brush to ink Jack Kirby’s art, the first inker since Joe Simon to capture so much of Kirby’s exuberance and power—Reed and Susan settled down to a quiet married life of battling even more colossal menaces— and a new storyline began. And that storyline, alone of all those in today’s comic books, belongs to now, not 1939. For there was a third part of Jor-el’s son the Superman never explored. The Kent-Superman conflict made it impossible. Now it was liberated.
The Human Torch: Personification Of Passion & Emotion In the past, as the third—and junior—male member of the team, Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, had always played a relatively smaller part than Mr. Fantastic and The Thing. But a man is not only the intellectual and the physical, he is also the emotional, in all its guises. As the personification of passion and emotion—the seemingly “logical” ability of the Torch to fly is actually psychological in origin; burning heat and dreams of flying have always been associated with sexual desire—the human Torch’s own life had been restricted by the personal struggles of Mr. Fantastic and The Thing. Now he was liberated. Freed of their old conflicts, the team faced out into the world. Almost for the first time, they found friends as well as enemies there. Before, there’d been The Watcher, a corporeal symbol of the scientific universe, benevolent but reluctantly impersonal. And there had been the SubMariner, almost friend and almost enemy. The other super-beings they encountered—those not guesting from other Marvel comics for publicity purposes—were virtually all enemies. Now they met the Silver Surfer, once the starroving vanguard of the Universe’s greatest and most fearsome power, and now wholly committed to Earth and humanity; the Black Panther, a majestic African king; a reborn Prester John; Wyatt Wingfoot, Johnny’s American Indian roommate, and three times bigger than life—all friends, more than The Fantastic Four had ever known. Even though their enemies were still strong, and new dangers arose from their continuing exploration of the The big free-for-all that led up to the marriage of Reed and Sue—from FF Annual #3. unknown, they had put that old and narrow world of selfthe 12 cents—but it was seldom really extraordinary. obsession behind them. Issue after issue, they reached into tomorrow, At that point, two remarkable things happened, and for the first rather than yesterday. And as they did, Johnny Storm fell in love— time in comic books a comic book strip was done “right.” Clark Kent with a girl from a hidden world as old as emotion itself, and as modern married Lois Lane in Fantastic Four Annual #3, and—in the following as tomorrow. issue of the monthly—Jack Kirby found an inker almost as compatible If intellect is the source of power today, emotion will be its source as Joe Simon. They have all lived happily ever after. tomorrow. For creativity is the product of emotional insight, not With the wedding of Reed Richards and Susan Storm, the intellect—intellect merely serves the emotions. For tens of thousands thematic conflict of Superman, begun twenty-seven years earlier, was of years, mankind had to place its faith in physical power, simply to finally resolved. The Thing—Superman—had long been loved by survive the brutality of mature. For a very few years, it has had to Alicia for his own essential qualities, not because of his physical depend on intellect to use that power wisely. Tomorrow, safe from strength alone, as Lois Lane had once “loved” Superman, or in spite nature and itself, mankind will be free to release that hidden world it of it. And now Susan Storm gave her love to Richards—Clark Kent— has carried within itself since its birth. And tomorrow, the creative recognizing at last that the real master of power was intellect, as Lois man, the first true man, will be king. Here—in a “kid’s” 12¢ comic Lane never could. At that moment, The Fantastic Four ceased to be an book—is his symbol; Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, “The Man of imitation, no matter how indirect. Even as the Great Society and the the Day After Superman’s Tomorrow.” Pepsi & Pot Generation had returned to the ’30s for their inspiration, And so, The Fantastic Four, still in the control of its creators, as pushing gussied-up New Dealism and anachronistic protest songs, Superman never was, has been done “right”—the first comic book “The Marvel Age of Comics” had returned to the Golden Age for its strip that has—and probably the last... 11
mute (whose name harkens back to one of Kirby’s first super hero art assignments, the Blue Bolt). On that cover (obviously favored by Stan the Man himself as he appears clutching that same number in the “Cool Cat” publicity photo found, if memory serves, in the FOOM by Jon C. Cooke (with thanks to Ed Fuqua for filling in some blank spots) issue devoted to Lee), there stands the grim Black Bolt, limbs outstretched revealing his pleated artificial wings, with a strange force he First Cosmic Age of Kirby, which began in the forty-fourth issue emanating from his “tuning fork” mask gear. This was one dude to be of the Fantastic Four, was ushered in by those incredible beings reckoned with. called the Incomparable Inhumans, a family of characters that It was this same character’s incredible dilemma which gave rival any real-life royal dynasty for oddness and sheer originality. Kirby’s concept resonance which transcends the genre. Few heroes in These super-men and women were a part of a new cosmic mythology comics are as tragic as Black Bolt. His continuing despair that a mere Kirby was creating in “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine,” a whisper from his lips will cause unspeakable destruction to the very mythos that, combined with the epic happenings in the Mighty Thor, subjects he lives to serve, his affliction earlier causing his only sibwould forever expand the possibilities of adventure comics, exploring ling’s madness, and his unresolved love for his cousin Medusa, add a questions of cosmic (and moral) importance never before examined Shakespearean dimension to the opus not often found in funny books. in our ill-considered art form. Black Bolt and his subjects, while helpBlack Bolt’s curse of speechlessness is the essence of the characing to pave the way for Galactus, Ragnarok, and the Fourth World, ter’s appeal. (Talk about your strong, silent type!) It is, too, his broodprove a potent enough concept worthy of examination. ing nature, the aftermath of his Having to open for one of voice’s fury having driven his the greatest Cosmic acts in A Black Bolt own brother insane, which adds comics history (the advent of drawing done for dimension to the character. Galactus and his sullen herald, Marvelmania. As a group, the Inhumans the Silver Surfer) is daunting are truly awesome. Well, at least when we consider the Kirby some of them are. Others can be Inhumans stories. They were rather one-note, but all but one overshadowed by the Marvel are most unusual. The aforemenversions of God and Jesus Christ, tioned brother Maximus (the for heaven’s sake! The cloak and original Mad Max maybe?), dagger intrigues of the Attilan effete, conniving, and cursed Royal Court pale in comparison with lunatic genius, is pure to the awesome indifferent omnistereotype. His motivation is potence of that ultimate consheer lunacy. And beyond that, sumer, Galactus, but to relegate he simply giggles a lot. His the Inhumans to also-ran status power, it seems, is confined to does Kirby’s concept a disservice. the cranium. These Inhumans were New Kirby’s taken a rap for Characters, archetypal yet alien, poor female character developconcerned not with the defeat of ment, as his “girls” usually serve a nemesis super hero team or a as (yawn) victims or hostages in bank heist to fund world conhis superhero stories. While the quest, but with simple survival in a world of hostile prejudice, and argument is certainly not withthe threat of their own fantastic out merit, there is an exception powers to themselves. Their to be found in Madam Medusa. struggle was fundamentally with She was the first Inhuman to their own superhuman race, and encounter the Fantastic Four, they shunned the attention of even before her super-human mankind, including the curiosity pedigree is revealed, and she of the Fantastic Four. Yet in spite proves an impressive foil to the of their shyness, they became FF as the central member of the regular co-stars with the team for otherwise dull Frightful Four. the most pivotal time in the Medusa is the only interesting book’s history. character in the super villain They became virtual family doppleganger team of Fantastic to the super hero group, with the Four rivals. (The other “frightful” young Crystal actually replacing three are second-rate bad guys Sue Richards as team member from Strange Tales: the Wingless for a time (while Invisible Girl was on maternity leave). They Wizard (and his Wonder Gloves!), the Sandman (okay, from Spiderremained to the very end of Kirby’s phenomenal 102-issue consecuman), and Paste-Pot Pete (a.k.a., the Trapster)). Her red, super-powered tive run on the book. They became co-stars, especially before and hair, and her confident, regal manner rates her as no girl, but a woman during the introduction of the Silver Surfer to the series, with Triton able to stand her own beside, this Kirby fan easily imagines, Big Barda. and, separately, Lockjaw joining the team for extended visits. At times (As near as I can figure, Medusa is the only other Kirby female that I the book became more about the inhabitants of the Great Refuge would call sexy, besides Missus Miracle.) But the promise of her than it did the tenants of the Baxter Building. development as more than a femme fatale was stunted with the comAs epitomized on the classic cover of Fantastic Four #46, these ing Inhumans saga. She became merely, alas, a romantic interest for new characters possessed a majestic nobility. These folk were strange. Black Bolt and so thus one-dimensional as a good guy. And very cool. And the coolest was the enigmatic Black Bolt, the tragic The sudden change in her portrayal came after the second arc of
An Inhuman Act
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account for the epic unleashing of Black Bolt’s power against the Negative Zone in a nearly year-long build-up that culminated in issue #59. But subsequent plots rarely varied, and while the Inhumans were always a welcome addition to the series, the annoying presence of Maximus grew tiresome to at least this reader. It was during the introduction of the Inhumans that Stan Lee titled his magazines “Marvel Pop Art Productions.” One easily speculates that it was then, Lockjaw appeared in the 1970s FF Animated Show. Shown here are Jack’s storyboards from the “Blastaar” episode. when Stan’s great marketing abiliFrightful Four stories, and it served as catalyst for the introduction to ties came into full flower, that Kirby was left to plot the stories more our subjects. While it started off as rather hokey (with her as the his way, without Lee’s forced character development and soap operatics, auburn-haired damsel in distress in the clutches of the classic Kirby leading to the creation (via the “Marvel Method”) of the great epics to monster, Dragon Man), it revealed something far more important: follow. (One can surmise further that Jack created the silent King of The strange race of super-beings called the Inhumans. She was being the Inhumans in mild protest to Stan’s verbose and endlessly wordy pursued by her Satyr-like cousin, the ornery Gorgon (an odd choice of dialogue.) name considering Medusa’s mythological namesake was a Gorgon), Whether as a final contract commitment or a fond adieu to his to be returned to the Great Refuge (located in various stories in the beloved characters, Kirby ended his crowning career at Marvel with a Andes, Himalayas, and the Alps — story details were not a priority flurry of Inhumans stories, though they were rather lackluster. In the with Kirby and Stan Lee), a fantastic city full of fantastic beings, each first four issues of Amazing Adventures (inspired only by the best Chic endowed with fantastic powers through, we eventually learned, Stone inks ever), and his only issue of the Silver Surfer (#18, featuring Terrigen Mist therapy and the prehistoric meddling of Kree scientists. an unexceptional run-in with the Kree-created race), Kirby left his In no time, we were introduced to a wide array of bizarre family memhome and went on to bring up new gods and great wonders from his bers: Crystal, the exquisite elemental whose main power it was, it astonishing imagination. He obviously loved the characters, regardseemed, to capture Johnny Storm’s heart; Karnak, a philosophical less of their inability to carry their own title, and he left them a history Karate expert with nominal personality; the aforementioned Gorgon that overall remains vibrant with every reading. Maybe it was in the whose cloven feet could knock down buildings; Triton, the fascinatunresolved Cain and Abel conflict between the brothers, which evening, self-sacrificing fish-man who endlessly seeks human company; tually caused their saga to become passé with comic readers, or maybe and, finally, the best Inhuman character after Black Bolt and one that it was the group’s diversity and alien nature. Regardless, the was pure Kirby, Lockjaw. Inhumans’ greatest hour came under the guidThis creature, blessed with the power to ance of their creator, and as is true for most of inter-dimensionally transport himself and comhis Marvel creations, Kirby’s presence was sorely panions from one end of the galaxy to another missed. Nothing is memorable to me about the (or across an ocean as it usually turned out), Inhumans since, save for a vague recollection of was a good-natured, friendly bulldog who just a wedding or two. Neal Adams redeemed Roy happened to be the size of a Miata. The loveThomas’ insipid Social Relevance take on the able pooch was drawn in such an endearing family with stunning drawings, but the majesty style by Kirby that it was a perfect complement was gone. My subsequent feeling about the to increasingly inspired characterizations of the group is a mild frustration that more isn’t done Thing that Jack was turning in. When I think of with the concepts, as ripe and fertile as any in the greatest of Kirby at Marvel, I think not only comic books. Thank God Jack’s original stories of the obvious (the Silver Surfer, Galactus, Thor, are there to read time and again. At least, and Captain America), but I also think of Lockjaw, a as usual, he got it right. creation Jack obviously loved. Because, as in the Before I go it must be mentioned that best of Kirby’s myriad of creations, the beast so the very first appearance of the Inhumans clearly represented an aspect of the artist’s own proved not only a turning point in the conceppersonality; in this case, Jack’s view of himself tual powers of Jack Kirby but also in the quality as pugnacious, if loveable, and well, a not quite of his finished artwork. After years of suffering handsome fellow. (There were other characters, under mostly substandard and sometimes such as Maximus’ “evil” Inhumans, which Kirby downright crude inks, Jack found one of his rendered in this final Inhuman stories, but best embellishers in the arrival of Joe Sinnott to these were the creation of Gary Friedrich and the series, both producing a spectacular run of Marie Severin from the first Hulk Annual, and work rarely matched in comic art. Joe added a Splash page to Amazing Adventures #1. without exception nearly non-dimensional, and softness to Jack’s harsh faces, giving even the hardly worth a mention.) android Dragon Man an added compassion. The template for all the chapters of the Inhumans’ relationship And he captured Jack’s urgent style as few before or since. with Reed Richards & Company was set with the initial arc in issues Under the explosion of his pure imagination, Kirby’s layouts #44-48: Maximus seizes the throne from Black Bolt, intending to flourished. Full page panels became more prominent. Collages more enslave the Great Refuge and force them to perform his mad designs, involved. Energy more infectious. His remaining five years at Marvel the Fantastic Four team up and help Bolt regain power, and Max would become a true renaissance, a Cosmic Age, setting the standard retreats in a sulk. This is the legend at its simplest and does not all super hero comics follow to this day. Kirby was unleashed. 13
figure of Galactus appears even more powerful because of the preparation we’ve had. Specifically, “The Coming of Galactus” prepares us in two ways: first, by following the Surfer’s progress through space toward Earth, and second, through two apocalyptic signs which strike terror into the New York City populace—the sky fills, first with flames, then with floating rocks or “debris.” These unexplained phenomena inspire general panic in the streets, provoking memorable confrontations between Johnny, Ben, and a fearful crowd. (The brief “fight” between Ben and a bare-knuckled civilian is particularly droll, in comic contrast to the huge, operatic conflicts to come.) Afterwards, the omniscient being known as the Watcher appears at the Baxter Building, and reveals that the “fire-shield” and the orbiting debris were his own unsuccessful attempts to conceal the Earth from the Silver Surfer, “the advance scout for Galactus.” Even as the Watcher speaks, the Surfer negotiates the barrier of debris, and lands, conveniently enough, on the roof of the Baxter Building. Though Ben quickly dispatches the Surfer with a single punch, the greater danger, Galactus, arrives suddenly—announced by a full-page photo montage which shows the opening of his spherical craft. The chapter ends as he disembarks, in a costume as odd and as elaborate as any heretofore seen in comics. The cumulative effect of hearing about Galactus prior to his arrival, then finally seeing him in the chapter’s last panel, underscores his size, power, and menace. Man, what a stunner that last page must have been to readers in 1966!
The Galactus Trilogy: An Appreciation by Charles Hatfield y vote for the Definitive Marvel Story, the one that best distills the most exciting ingredients of vintage Marvel comics, would have to go to what we now call The Galactus Trilogy, a threeissue story arc which originally appeared in Fantastic Four #48 (“The Coming of Galactus”), #49 (“If This Be Doomsday”), and #50 (“The Startling Saga of the Silver Surfer”) in 1966. In this radically inventive story, Jack Kirby, along with scripter Stan Lee, discarded conventional superheroics in favor of a mythic approach which, for better or worse, changed superhero comics forever after. As a wellspring of future comics, it has a claim to being one of the most historically significant moments of Marvel’s Silver Age; as a story in its own right, it remains impressive, not only for its epic scope, but also for its narrative economy, its surprising subtleties, and its humanity.
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Enter the Silver Surfer—and Galactus The Galactus Trilogy is remembered, obviously, as the story which introduced two Marvel icons, the godlike Galactus and his herald, the Silver Surfer. Among comics fans the story enjoys fame for its unprecedented sense of scale: Galactus intends to devour the Earth’s energy, not because he is evil or malicious, but because he is a force “above good or evil,” to whom the Earth’s inhabitants are simply beneath notice. Besides Galactus himself, of course, the Silver Surfer is a remarkable creation, one who unpredictably blossoms from a mere functionary of the plot—a cold, enigmatic harbinger of doom—into one of Marvel’s most noble, articulate, and tormented heroes. Much of the story’s drama in fact stems from the Surfer, who makes a strong impression, both as a dramatic device to introduce his master and, eventually, as a character in his own right. The Surfer, as eccentric a figure as any the FF had encountered, was a brilliant narrative stroke on Kirby’s part. Without the Surfer the story would have little dramatic oomph, for the reader needs something to prepare the way for Galactus, something or someone to foreshadow his coming on a more human, more accessible scale. The Surfer allows us to approach the menace of Galactus obliquely, to imagine what kind of being would need a herald this awesome to prepare for his coming. Re-reading the story’s first chapter, “The Coming of Galactus,” I’m still startled by the dramatic power of the climactic splash panel, as Galactus steps forth from his craft, uttering his now-familiar lines:
The Question of Authorship If the Silver Surfer, Jack Kirby’s brainchild, is the cornerstone of this suspenseful first chapter, then Kirby should be recognized as the Trilogy’s chief architect, the one who conceived the story, shaped it, and brought its abstractions to vivid life. Stan Lee himself, in his book Son of Origins of Marvel Comics, credits Kirby with creating the Surfer: According to Lee’s account, Kirby penciled the first chapter of the Trilogy after a brief story conference with Lee, in which the two agreed on the broad concept of a huge, godlike being threatening Earth with destruction. When Kirby eventually delivered the pages, Lee was startled to see an unfamiliar figure on a flying surfboard, upon which Kirby matter-of-factly explained that a being as powerful as Galactus ought to have a herald, a being to come before him and pave the way for him. (This idea, of course, makes no practical sense, but perfect dramatic sense.) Lee recalls being intrigued by, even “wild” about, the Silver Surfer, whom Kirby had created on his own, out of whole cloth. Now, given that the Surfer is crucial to the dramatic structure of the Trilogy’s first chapter—and later proves crucial to the resolution of the plot—Lee’s account of the character’s creation inadvertently says much about the central role Kirby played in writing The Fantastic Four. By inventing the Surfer, Kirby in effect plotted the story: he provided the dramatic device which drove the story; he paced the telling; he even provided the character who, ultimately, would steal the show, in “The Startling Saga of the Silver Surfer.” In the Kirby/Lee collaborations, as this example suggests, much of the “writing” is in the art. Character design and movement, facial expressions, the composition of panels, the relationships between panels—all of these crucial storytelling elements are the province of Kirby the cartoonist. To these elements in Kirby’s art one can sense Lee as scripter responding, sometimes playfully, sometimes seriously,
“My journey is ended! This planet shall sustain me until it has been drained of all elemental life! So speaks Galactus!” What makes this such a powerful moment, and such a wicked cliffhanger, is not simply Kirby’s composition of the panel (Galactus with arm outstretched, towering over even the giant figure of the Watcher). After all, Kirby often used full-page or near full-page drawings for effect. Rather, it’s the way this panel fulfills the suspense maintained throughout the first chapter, without letting up a bit. The 14
but always adding a new layer of complexity to the total work. In the case of the Silver Surfer (a character for whom Lee has great affection, and who has inspired some of Lee’s best writing), the combination was fortuitous, and no doubt Lee’s scripting in the Galactus Trilogy influenced Kirby’s subsequent treatment of the character. But the point remains that, based on the evidence of Lee’s own recollections, Kirby dreamt up the Silver Surfer—and by extension, the plot of the entire story. By the mid-60s, then, Kirby was not simply breaking down FF stories according to plot outlines provided by Lee (if indeed this ever was the case—hard evidence is difficult to come by), but was in fact inventing new characters and plotlines as it suited him. The Galactus Trilogy, arguably, represents a new peak of creative ambition and freedom for Kirby the storyteller, as his control over plot, character, and theme grew stronger. He didn’t write the thing alone, but he conceived and structured it, and provided Lee with a complex and brilliant foundation for scripting.
The Idea of Gods This question of authorship matters. Giving credit where it’s due allows us to read the vintage Kirby & Lee Fantastic Four within the broader continuum of Kirby’s work, a continuum which, obviously, includes both pre-Marvel projects such as The Challengers of the Unknown and postMarvel work such as the Fourth World. If the Fourth World, with its concept of rival gods fighting to decide the fate of humanity, fulfills a certain promise first implied in Kirby & Lee’s X-Men (as I have argued elsewhere), then it also recalls the essential conflict in the Galactus Trilogy— the struggle between the godlike Galactus and the Silver Surfer, who acts as humanity’s intercessor in an almost (ahem) Christlike manner. In fact there is a fundamental similarity of structure between many An awe-inspiring shot of Galactus, shown here from Fantastic Four #75, page 4. Kirby-authored or co-authored comics such as the early X-Men, the Galactus Trilogy, the Fourth World, and The Eternals. In each case sion of this thesis, see The Comics Journal #167, April 1994.) rival groups of superbeings are locked in conflict, with the fate of This is the sort of conflict mapped out in the Galactus Trilogy. humanity as the ultimate stake. Humanity, then, is the fulcrum, the Galactus seeks raw power to feed his hunger, but the Silver Surfer pivot on which these comics rest: Magneto, for example, seeks to rule defends humankind from him: “You must not tamper with other over humankind as homo superior; Darkseid seeks the secret of Antiworlds! You cannot destroy the entire human race!” Galactus, of Life (total control) in the minds of human beings. They are opposed course, is indifferent to the fate of humanity as such, but, determined by superbeings who protect and defend humanity. (For more discusto bring the Surfer back under his control, eventually recognizes that 15
“Perhaps we are not as powerful as your Galactus... but we have hearts... we have souls... we live... breathe... feel! Can’t you see that?? Are you as blind as I?”
humanity is the key: “The humans! Of course! By imperiling them, I shall force you to surrender!” The Silver Surfer/Galactus conflict, important differences notwithstanding, does bear a striking resemblance to the father/son conflict which animates Kirby’s later New Gods series. With Darkseid trying to achieve absolute dominion over the universe, and his son Orion traveling to Earth to protect Darkseid’s human targets, New Gods obviously echoes the central conflict of the Galactus Trilogy, albeit in a grimmer, less assured, perhaps less anthropocentric universe. Though (as Earl Wells has recently argued) there are startling differences in tone and emphasis between the Kirby/Lee collaborations and the Fourth World, there are enough structural similarities to point to a common author. (For Wells’ own, somewhat different interpretation, see The Comics Journal #181, October 1995). The core concept behind much of Kirby’s later work—godlike beings interacting with humans within a superhero milieu—stems from what was established in this first Galactus story.
Hands raised in supplication, face upturned to the Surfer’s empty, glowing eyes, Alicia gives visual emphasis to this verbal plea, and, fittingly, we see her from his perspective, as if sharing his vision of her. Following this, at the bottom of the same page, a triptych of panels shows the Surfer wrestling with his own feelings. His hand reaches out—as if to smother Alicia’s plea? No, to caress her face (“At last I know...beauty!”). Then he withdraws his touch, once again asserting his loyalty to his master: “I am what I must be! I SERVE GALACTUS!” The last panel in this triptych shifts our angle of vision once again, moving from Alicia’s beautiful, still profile in the first two panels to a frontal view which repeats the earnest look of supplication shown above. Again, we stand almost behind the Surfer, sharing his angle of vision, but this time he turns his head away from Alicia’s pleading face, as if to avoid facing the crisis of conscience which her words have awakened. From stolid indifference in the panels above (“Destroy is merely a word! We simply change things!”), Kirby has moved the Surfer toward not only greater moral awareness but also emotional turmoil, confirmed by his verbal denial, “Say no more! Do not build up your hopes!” Lee’s florid, melodramatic scripting is right on the money here, expertly underscoring the emotional intensity of Kirby’s drawings: The collaborative effort is outstanding, creating a quietly intense exchange in the midst of the large-scale spectacle which Galactus provides. This scene turns out to be the real turning point of the plot, as Alicia’s courage eventually convinces the Surfer to do the unthinkable: To defy his master by standing up for the human race. At the end of the second chapter, the pivotal moment comes in an extraordinary panel in which Alicia, eyes downcast, almost despairs of changing the Surfer’s mind (“How could I have been so wrong about you...”), while the Surfer, his glowing eyes raised as if catching sight of some higher principle or objective, radiates newfound moral determination: “Perhaps, human... you were not totally wrong..!” In fact he
The Human Touch Yet, though the Galactus Trilogy is usually remembered for its grand scope, what makes it work are its low-key, true-to-life elements: its mundane details, its bemused observations of human nature, its comic and at times pathetic recognition that people will be people, even in the face of the apocalypse. For instance, when Reed retreats into his laboratory to figure out what’s going on (#48), he neglects his own comfort and appearance, going for hours on end without food or rest and even growing beard stubble. Sue, predictably, takes a maternal interest in his well-being, but also displays a certain peevishness about being ignored, snapping at Ben with uncharacteristic severity: “Men! You always side with each other!” Later, as Galactus prepares to assemble his elemental converter (#49), Ben and Reed take time out to clean themselves up, while Johnny looks on incredulously, yelling, “Galactus is planning to tear our planet apart, and you’re makin’ like a TV shaving commercial!!!” Such mundane details in the face of imminent destruction give the story credibility, depth, and color. By dint of long familiarity with their characters, Kirby and Lee were able to present the Trilogy’s cataclysmic premise from a distinctly human point of view. From Reed’s astringent leadership style (“Now stop thinking with your mouth and settle down, boy!”) to Ben’s bluff, defensive humor (“If I wuz to take what just happened serious, I’d probably end up blowin’ a gasket, or somethin’!”), the story’s characterization rings true, verbally and visually, and wins us over. It’s not realistic, mind you, but it’s entirely convincing within the established parameters of Kirby and Lee’s giddy soap-opera style. The emotional appeal of the characters offsets the Trilogy’s relative lack of dynamic, complicating action. Indeed, the plot must have posed a formidable challenge to Kirby the storyteller, because it is essentially about waiting around. The FF are overpowered, thoroughly humbled, and reduced to passively watching as the world teeters on the brink; it is the interventions of the Watcher and the Silver Surfer which finally turn the tide.
Storm Center: Alicia & The Surfer In fact, the most dramatic conflict in the story centers on the Surfer’s discovery of “conscience,” a discovery prodded, not by the FF’s resistance, but by Alicia Masters’ passionate words: “Look at the city below you! Look at the people! Each of them is entitled to life...to happiness...Each of them is...human!” In typical mid-60s Marvel fashion, Alicia’s blindness becomes her greatest moral and rhetorical asset, as she compares it to the Surfer’s own inability to truly see the people doomed by his master’s hunger: A mid-1980s commissioned drawing of the Silver Surfer. 16
result of her pleading—the Surfer’s battle with Galactus—ultimately provides no more than a stalling action, it serves the plot both logically (delaying Galactus until the Torch can return with the “Ultimate Nullifier”) and dramatically, as the FF become supporting players in the Silver Surfer’s own “startling saga.” While Johnny’s epic journey to Galactus’ home planet (to obtain the Nullifier) provides ample spectacle and mystery, it is the Surfer’s quiet dialogue with Alicia which provides the moral and dramatic center for the story.
Learning to Think Big The Trilogy balances these extremes for a reason: in a sense, the story is really about learning to think on a different scale, a cosmic scale, while maintaining a sense of humanity’s uniqueness and importance. Kirby and Lee present a dramatic argument for the stature and significance of humankind: On the one hand, we are reduced to puny insects by Galactus’ power and implacability (“If petty creatures are wiped out when I drain a planet, it is regrettable... but unavoidable!”); on the other hand, as the Watcher warns Galactus, human beings are “less puny than you think,” and, with the Watcher’s aid, are capable of surprising feats of strength and courage. Lee’s script repeatedly stresses the humans-as-insects analogy. For example, Ben’s first attack on Galactus is repulsed with what Reed calls “cosmic insect repellent” (a noxious fog, released by a small capsule, capable of felling Ben in an instant). A moment later, after his own assault is just as easily brushed aside, Johnny offers this humbling comparison: “He turned his back to me... I’m beneath his notice! The same way I’d ignore a flea, after I’d brushed it away!” Similarly, Johnny collapses in shock after completing his journey to Galactus’ home world, his mind reeling with sudden awareness of the scope of the cosmos: “We’re like ants... just ants... ants!!” Yet antlike humankind, exemplified by the FF, is capable of startling the magisterial Jack’s uninked pencils from Fantastic Four #76, page 20. Galactus, as when Ben wrecks his “elemenradiates in a quite literal sense: Kirby underscores the moment with tal converter” and Reed knocks him from the Baxter Building’s roof. impact lines, which focus our attention on the crucial import of this These disturbances, of course, only annoy Galactus, and he deals with one small panel. Taking flight on his surfboard in the next two panels, them summarily, not by marshaling the full force of his power, but by the Surfer reveals his change of heart, his intentions made explicit by summoning a dwarflike “watchdog,” the half-robotic, half-organic Lee’s dialogue: “I have found something... something worth protectcreature known as the Punisher, who proceeds to pummel both Ben ing! Even though it means I must do battle with...the master!” In the and Reed unmercifully. (As in his later stories of Darkseid and the midst of the Trilogy’s visual and rhetorical fireworks, it is small New Gods, here Kirby does not force his godlike villain into direct moments such as these which most reward re-reading. physical confrontation, which would trivialize the character, but Kirby himself observed that he “had to back away” from Galactus allows Galactus to deal with the FF remotely, through instrumentalito resolve the story, and it is the humble figure of Alicia Masters who ties which merely suggest the full scope of his powers.) The Punisher supplies the needed resolution. Alicia, more than anyone else, raises forces the FF to retreat into Sue’s force field, whereupon Galactus powerful, vocal opposition to what Galactus represents. Though the recalls his watchdog and gets on about his business. Nonetheless the 17
FF display great courage—they do not despair, but persist in their hope of defeating Galactus, for, as Reed reminds Sue, “There’s always a chance, darling... so long as we’re alive!” As the Punisher episode suggests, however, the real potential of humankind cannot be shown in a physical contest between the FF and Galactus (an absurdity, given the mismatch between their levels of power), but only through the moral force of Alicia’s argument to the Surfer, an argument based on the idea that, no matter how seemingly insignificant, “we all matter! Every living being...every bird and beast....” It is this insistence on our significance, counterbalanced by Kirby’s spectacular demonstrations of our relative weakness and microscopic stature, which drives the story. How can humanity matter, in the face of such gigantic figures, such huge interstellar distances, such cosmic absolutes? We do matter, the story insists, in the grander scheme of things—somehow we do. In the end, the Surfer’s willingness to defy Galactus, coupled with the Watcher’s willingness to intervene on our behalf, begins to influence even Galactus’ view of humanity, as suggested by his cautionary final speech, just before he vanishes in a flash:
ly. Since then, we’ve seen a plethora of Galactus stories— stories, such as John Byrne’s anticlimactic “Trial of Galactus,” which flail about helplessly, trying to recapture the essential mystery of this once-awesome idea, but inevitably fall flat. The Galactus Trilogy, after all, is a story in which the nominal heroes are essentially powerless, nearly eclipsed by larger characters and concepts. This sort of storytelling gambit works only when a master like Kirby handles the materials; otherwise, it’s narrative poison, leading to leaden, uninvolving stories in which abstract ideas are made all too literal, sublime conceits are trivialized through toofamiliar usage, and histrionics overwhelm the reader’s engagement with the characters. This doesn’t happen in the Galactus Trilogy, because Kirby breaks down this story carefully, masterfully, dividing a large-scale conflict into smaller, more comprehensible encounters and juggling multiple plotlines with apparent ease. Unfortunately, few subsequent storytellers have managed this kind of dramatic balance. Even during the Kirby era, no subsequent FF story would again achieve the Trilogy’s perfect balance of cosmic menace and smallscale, human drama—nor could Kirby’s Fourth World achieve this, because its characters lacked the comfortable, old-shoe familiarity of the FF, a familiarity which imbues the story’s quiet moments with a remarkable emotional power. On rereading the Galactus Trilogy, it seems obvious that the FF are lived-in characters, formed over time, the sort of characters who win us over no matter how incredible or absurd the situations they face. The breathtaking innovations of the Galactus Trilogy appeared against the backdrop of several years’ worth of Fantastic Four stories, a backdrop which rendered its cosmic excess credible and compelling. Although the Galactus Trilogy may have proven a hard act to follow, the story itself represents the Kirby/Lee collaboration in its finest hour. I would call it the peak of Marvel’s Silver Age, a comics story of extravagant beauty, imaginative daring, and bravura storytelling. The Fantastic Four have never been better, nor have superhero comics ever surpassed the Trilogy’s blend of humanity and spectacle.
“...at last I perceive the glint of glory within the race of man! Be ever worthy of that glory, humans...Be ever mindful of your promise of greatness! ...For it shall one day lift you beyond the stars... or bury you within the ruins of war!! THE CHOICE IS YOURS!!” Thus, Galactus’ visit becomes a kind of wake-up call for all of humankind: if this godlike creature can recognize potential greatness within our helpless, scurrying, insectlike species, then the importance of humanity is powerfully reaffirmed—in spite of the story’s vast, intergalactic scope. As the Watcher suggests, “Do they not possess the seed of grandeur within their frail, human frames?” Thus, despite Johnny’s helpless realization that we are “like ants” in the greater scheme of things, the Trilogy offers a deeply anthropocentric, humanistic vision of the universe, one in which humanity glimpses its potential to grow into godlike creatures, creatures such as the Watcher and Galactus. Taken as a whole, the three-issue sequence introduces a new sense of scope, a new range of ideas, into the humanistic world of the Marvel superhero, and thus prepares for subsequent comic books which would posit humanity’s significance, and project its future, on a larger scale—most notably, Kirby’s own Fourth World titles, which in their overarching structure set an important precedent for most subsequent superhero comics. Indeed, the seeds of the present-day Marvel and DC “universes,” as such, can be traced to the epic sense of scale which the Galactus Trilogy introduced to comics.
Repercussions Sad to say, familiarity trivializes the cosmic, rendering even the grandest visions dull by repetition. Would that the Watcher’s words to Reed Richards had proved true: “Try to fathom the cataclysmic forces which have been unleashed! For you shall never see their like again!” Unfortunately, we have seen their like, again and again, in scores of mainstream comic books. A proliferation of comic characters, such as Eternity, Thanos, the Guardians, and so on—not to mention such Kirby creations as Darkseid and the Celestials—have made the “godlike” a mere matter of routine. To see comics in which Galactus is finally defeated by Earth’s heroes, or, worse yet, trades punches with some other giant demigod(!), is to witness the exhaustion of once-great ideas, the literalizing and trivializing of grand, almost metaphysical conceptions. Some of this was due to Kirby himself, or the Kirby/Lee collaboration. Perhaps Galactus, as Marvel’s greatest non-character (how can you call power personified a character?), should have been retired permanently after the Trilogy, never to be confronted again, but this didn’t happen: Kirby and Lee summoned him back repeated-
A 1975 drawing of the Silver Surfer. 18
the framework not only for Seale and Newton of the Black Panther Party, but also for Kirby and Lee for T’Challa, the Black Panther.
The Black Panther:
Breaking The Stereotypes
An Archetype, Not A Stereotype
The Black Panther is an Archetype, or the original, which represents an excellent example of a black man. He is not a stereotype; he didn’t fit the image of how a black man was/is perceived. His identity makes him an excellent role model; he is an educated black man from Africa. In July of 1966 (the publication date of FF #52), the AfricanAmerican was still referred to as a “negro,” an incorrect classification which leads to identity confusion because there is no geography associated with the term. (An Italian is from Italy, a German from Germany, but where is a negro from?) T’Challa is African and is from Africa. Another stereotype-breaking concept is the fact that T’Challa is a wealthy African king. It is of high probability that Kirby did research on African History. An African King is not a far-fetched reality. One of
by David E. Jefferson he Black Panther is one of the greatest supporting cast members of the Fantastic Four. He is perhaps the most revolutionary archetype Kirby ever developed, and the historical question that must be surveyed is, “What was the inspiration behind the Black Panther?” There was a group organized in the mid- to late-1960s called the Black Panther Party (depicted in a recent film produced by Mario Van Peebles called Panther). The Party was formed by the late Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966. Ironically, Fantastic Four #52 (July 1966, the first appearance of T’Challa) predates the formation of the Black Panther Party. Did Kirby prophesy the coming of this group? No, there are historical events that preceded the formation of the Black Panther Party.
T
The History Of The Panther From 1965 through 1966, the symbol of the Black Panther had received international attention as a result of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. This was an effort by the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) to bring freedom by way of the ballot to Lowndes County, Alabama. At that time, it was out in the open that the Democratic Party’s Official Motto in Alabama was “White Supremacy.” Black people (who made up more than threefourths of the population) were denied the power and the right to vote by way of economic reprisals and outright bloodshed. As a result of the efforts of the SNCC along with the local community, an independent party was formed. By law—and probably due to the high level of illiteracy in Lowndes County— a symbol had to be used for the party. The symbol chosen by Stokely Carmichael and the SNCC was a Black Panther (it was Carmichael on June 16, 1966—during the Meredith March— who made the controversial call for “Black Power”). The symbol of the Black Panther was articulated by the SNCC and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and later reiterated by Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party: “The Black Panther is a symbol of strength. It is an animal that doesn’t bother anybody; but when it is backed into a corner and can go neither left nor right, it springs; and when it springs, IT DOES NOT STOP!” The Lowndes County Freedom Party, Carmichael, and the SNCC provided
Unpublished Black Panther splash, sold to a fan at the 1976 Baycon. 19
Ham was African—or physically, he was black, if you will.
Strength Of Character It should be clear that the Black Panther is a revolutionary character. What is ironic is that his Shakespearian hamartia, or tragic flaw, is not in his character, but in how he has been characterized. Once such inconsistency is discovered in the fact that, like the Lowndes County Freedom Party’s symbol, T’Challa’s mask is not for concealment of his identity, but a sacred symbol of his power. In Avengers #64 and #74 (1969 and 1970) he used it to hide his identity, perhaps being ashamed of something that he had no cause to be ashamed of. Historically, this was after the March on Washington (8/28/63); by ’69 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated and “Black Power” and Vietnam were the central themes of the movement. At the same time, T’Challa is more so an integrationist than a separatist. Dr. King once had a discussion with Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura of Star Trek) and told her he was a fan and urged her not to quit—her presence on the show added perspective to “the Dream” of blacks and whites reaching the stars together. In the interest of racial harmony and integration, the Black Panther, being the first Black Avenger, was a triumph that should have made the covers of Jet and Ebony (or at least in the Marvel Universe it should have). Instead, T’Challa hides who he is. Kirby was quite consistent in his handling of the Panther; he only donned his mask and costume when it was time to use that “power.” Even Kirby did not fully utilize the Black Panther’s abilities to their fullest potential. This is elucidated in Tales of Suspense #97-99 (Jan.-Mar. 1968) and Captain America #100 (Apr. 1968). The Black Panther is considered to be on an equal power level with Captain America. However, in Tales of Suspense #97, Captain America overcomes an impossible ambush—even overcomes falling off a roof with his foot—but the Black Panther, in contrast, senses an ambush but still gets shot. Why is this relevant? In Fantastic Four Annual #5 (Nov. 1967), the Black Panther states in battle with Karnak of the Inhumans, “Nothing...save one with the speed of the bounding cheetah!” T’Challa’s speed is one of his greatest assets. The cheetah is the fastest landbound animal, having been clocked at speeds reaching 70 miles per hour. (A race horse with a rider travels at about 45 mph and a human being at 20 mph.) Clearly, in speed, the Black Panther is second only to Quicksilver. With that speed comes his weakness; the cheetah is agile and can turn on a dime, but it can only maintain that great speed for short distances—about 300 yards, which is more than enough to outrace its prey. In FF #52, the Black Panther leaps into the Invisible Girl’s force field before she can close it around her. This ability alone puts him on a higher power level than Captain America. The Panther never should have been shot in Suspense #97 and he should have been able to swat Cap before he could even raise his shield. Despite these shortcomings, the Black Panther is an archetype, and Kirby’s handling of him is excellent. My first exposure to the Panther was a reprint of FF Annual #5 in Giant Size Fantastic Four #5 (May 1975). In that story the Black Panther never appeared unmasked. Even though the caption said he was a chieftain and he ran with tribesmen, I didn’t make the connection that he was black. This was probably because I was a child at the time; Black Bolt wasn’t black, and the Tarzan stereotype was that the white man even rules among “the savages.” It was great that despite the mainstream powers of Black Bolt, the Thing and the Torch, it was the Black Panther who saved the day by smashing Psycho Man’s Power Suit. Unlike Tarzan, this shows that Africans in general and Wakandans in particular are not “savage,” and do much more than swing through trees.
Here are three unused panels from Fantastic Four #53—the origin of the Black Panther.
many examples is Mansa Musa, who ruled the ancient kingdom of Mali. Mali was located in Western Africa, and he ruled from 1312 to 1337 and was a world leader in his time. His land had the rich resources of gold and salt and he controlled the major trade routes. From this reign came the city of Timbuktu, a world trade center and institution of higher learning. In fact, Musa was a generous ruler and gave out gifts of gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca. (It is said that he gave out so much gold that the price of it went down in Cairo for 10 years.) The kingdom of Mali endured for hundreds of years. It is easy to recognize similarities in disposition between Mansa Musa of Mali and T’Challa of Wakanda. T’Challa likewise gave the FF many gifts and had the resource of Vibranium. Fantastic Four #52 displays Kirby’s application of his readings. In the origin sequence, young T’Challa kneels over his slain father saying, “From this moment forth I live with but one thought--one aim--one destiny...” Klaw shall pay, and revenge must be sought. The quote is a derivative of the Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey’s famous saying, “One God, one aim, one destiny!” Garvey rose to leadership during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and advocated a Back To Africa Movement. Kirby would use this three-petition model in later books. Orion told Metron, “I feel, I anger, I fight!” in New Gods #1. This model was also used in the Forever People #1: “I have heard, I am here, I am the Infinity Man!” Black Panther #7 (Jan. 1978) also contains Kirby’s powerful scripting irony. N’Gassi, T’Challa’s aide, says to the traitorous Jakarra, “Cursed be the day that T’Challa’s father took a second wife! Cursed by Jakarra--the child of that second union!” This quote alludes to The Bible; in Genesis 9:25, Noah says, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” It is both ironic and relevant that Kirby uses this information. Canaan is the son of Ham, who is the son of Noah. It is well known and agreed upon by Bible Scholars that 20
retrieve his panther costume, evokes wonderment and dreams (how unlike the Batman going to his Batcave or Superman going to his Fortress of Solitude!). Jack’s drawing style makes even the most simplistic ideas hit you like a thunderbolt! He really is my grape jelly to Stan Lee’s peanut butter! The first thing I noticed (and at once learned to love and respect Jack for) is the way he handled the Magna-Car in issue #52, and the Wakandan people through both issues. At once, through Reed Richards’ amazement and Ben Grimm’s derision of things African, you had a lot of the stereotypes at once displayed, discussed, and then shattered at the same instant! Shades of Galactus! This had to be quite a chance that Marvel and Lee & Kirby were taking with their most popular book at that time (1966)! I’m all for any medium that allows this society to see the possibilities that we can all be who we want to be. This character taught me to reach for the stars. So many children believe stereotypes, misconceptions, or even bad personal experiences, and just rubber stamp a whole race, creed, or class of people without further inspection. The Black Panther was presented in the best possible light as an equal among superheroes without any character flaws, just like the rest.
What The Black Panther Means To Me by Edward J. Saunders Jr.
ll Jack Kirby fans need to read issues #52 and #53 of the Fantastic Four. In my opinion, they are classics in adventure storytelling and character presentation. The Black Panther was the first black superhero in comics, and one of the most elegant characters in comics to this day. One line stands out in issue #52; the emissary of the Wakandan king says, “...things are not always... as they seem!” This is true of the FF’s adventure in Wakanda, but also of the character of the Black Panther (and of the magazine The Fantastic Four). The Black Panther lends quite a credible role model for AfricanAmerican readers. First and foremost, this character has an extensive English vocabulary that isn’t littered with jive, slang, or dialects. The character is an educated man, an accomplished scientist, an astute businessman, and a just and well-loved ruler of a kingdom. His super-powers are based in herbs, rituals, and training—not a sci-fi explanation that could be taken away or embellished as time goes on. His country has one very valuable resource (vibranium) that isn’t wasted or squandered. He also believes in molding high technology with the environment. (Note the natural jungle covering the technology, and then the technology resembling an electronic jungle). The jungle isn’t laid to waste in lieu of technology or for the sake of modernization (is there a lesson here for our society?). He also believed in holding onto traditions despite the high technology his country possessed. The Black Panther displayed honor, commitment, intelligence (bordering on genius), determination, and humanity. I say humanity because for all of his wonderful abilities, he was adversely affected by the murder of his father—not unlike a certain Batman—by the evil Klaw. There’s one lesson here: Don’t allow hatred, prejudice, bias, etc. to become an obsession or it could be your undoing. One more thing to add: Forgiveness. When the Black Panther realized that the FF defeated his well-laid traps (thanks to Wyatt Wingfoot—an Native American !), he stopped fighting and started talking. (Let’s add diplomacy to the list of abilities!) As you can see, this character has a lot to offer and people can extract a lot of positive things from characters when presented in masterful ways—kudos to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as a team! Now I’ll concentrate on the effect the Black Panther had on me as a person. As you might guess, I am an African-American. I never bought into “getting-back-atwhites” or “go-back-to-Africa” philosophies. My comic book heroes were Captain America, OMAC, Captain Marvell (I was crushed by his cancer), and the Black Panther. I love Jack Kirby because he fleshed out in pencil, characters that had down-to-earth ethics or morals. Even his sultry women were nice ladies underneath their rough exteriors (unless of course they were evil). In just two issues, he gave the Black Panther realism, vibrance, and ACTION! He also expressed sensitivity in how he dealt with Sue in fighting and also in his explanation of what happened to his father. I know that Stan Lee had a lot to do with the story when it came to the Lee/Kirby team, but Jack put the COSMIC PUNCH in everything he did. The Panther Statue coming out of the ground like a huge missile out of its silo, just to Jack’s unused cover to Fantastic Four #52, featuring the first appearance of the Black Panther.
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Presented here for the first time is Jack’s original penciled cover to Fantastic Four #20. The handwriting in the balloons and captions is by Stan Lee.
The Joe Sinnott Interview Interviewed by John Morrow on December 18, 1995 THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? JOE SINNOTT: Right here in Saugerties, NY. October 16, 1926. Seems like eons ago! (laughter) There are quite a few artists who live up here: Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor-Smith, Bob Oskner, Joe Staton, Jim Starlin. But I’m the only one born here. The rest migrated here from other places. I must’ve exploited the great things about Saugerties, and people heard it. I should have kept it quiet! (laughter)
the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City, run by Burne Hogarth. I had a lot of samples that I’d done of syndicated type strips, so I went down and they appeared to be highly impressed with them. They said I was a natural-born cartoonist; I thought they were pulling my leg so I would come to the school. But I signed up, and later on I realized I had a foot up on some of the other students as far as the cartoon field. I took a year of foundation, where we drew anatomy, and the second year I took cartooning. In late 1949, one of my instructors there, Tom Gill, asked me if I’d like to work as his assistant. I learned more from Tom than I did from the school. I was actually doing professional work, and I had someone looking over my shoulder, making sure I did it right. Tom had accounts with Timely and Dell and Fawcett. He was a prodigious worker; he worked all day at the school, and at night he drew his strips. He even had a syndicated strip going. I was doing Kent Black and Red Warrior for Timely. We were also doing some movie adaptations for Dell. He was also working on the Lone Ranger, which I helped him on. It got to the point where I was doing all his work. At first he’d just do the heads to make it look like his work, and later he let me do the heads. I worked with him about nine months while I was still at school. I got married in the meantime, and I decided that if Stan Lee was buying my work from Tom, why not buy it from me? So I went over to Stan, and he gave me work right away. And that was really the beginning, in 1950.
TJKC: Did you grow up reading comic books? JOE: The thirties were a great time for a kid to be growing up, aside from the Depression. When I was eight or nine years old, Terry And The Pirates and Flash Gordon came out. I couldn’t wait from one day to the next to see how Terry was going to get out of some of the exploits he was involved in. We got the New York Daily News, which had Terry And The Pirates. Our next-door neighbor got the New York Mirror, which had Tarzan and Bronco Billy and Mandrake the Magician. Each paper had different strips, so you’d go around to the neighbors and trade with your buddies. It was a great period. TJKC: Did those strips make you want to go into comics? JOE: It’s funny. You had no idea you had a chance of ever being an artist. I drew ever since I was young. Once for my birthday, I got a great big box of crayons. It had an Indian on the front, and I drew that Indian until I could draw it with my eyes shut. (laughter) I think that was the impetus that got me interested in comics. So I copied Terry, and Flash Gordon, and Smilin’ Jack. I used to draw all the time, drawing all the newspaper strip characters. The comic books didn’t come along until later. I really don’t remember reading comic books until around 1939, when I was 12 years old. My favorite early comic book was Action Comics. I used to love Congo Bill, more so than Superman. (laughter) I also loved Zatara the Magician. I really liked Batman, that was my favorite, because it was well drawn. Bob Kane did a great job. And also I liked Hawkman, because it reminded me a lot of Alex Raymond’s style. And the Timely books; we bought them and passed them around until they wore out. I would read the Human Torch and Captain America. Captain America was quite popular.
TJKC: What was your first published work? JOE: I’d only been at the school for a couple of months, and I took my work down to a place called St. John’s. There was a woman editor there who liked my samples, and she gave me a five-page story for a Mopsie comic book. Mopsie was something like Millie The Model at Marvel. It was a five-page filler called “Trudy.” Right after that I hooked up with Tom Gill. The first thing I did for him was Red Warrior for Stan. And I did an awful lot of Kent Blake. The first thing I actually did for Stan was called “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die.” It was a western. It was a three- or four-page filler. TJKC: What did you do between your first official work for Marvel in 1950 and when Marvel really took off a decade later? JOE: I worked just for Marvel. In those days, the stories were short, 5 or 6 pages. There was no continuity, so a story could go in any book; if you did a western for Two-Gun Kid, Stan could put it in Rawhide Kid or one of the other westerns.
TJKC: Do you remember reading Simon & Kirby’s Captain America? JOE: I’m sure I did, but I didn’t know who was doing it at the time. I remember Boy Commandos, but I never really associated the names. I just knew that it was a good comic book, and I liked the characters. I liked the way it was inked, but the names didn’t mean anything to me. TJKC: How’d you get started in comics? What was your big break? JOE: Well, after I came out of the service, I saw a newspaper ad for
Kirby/Sinnott art for a Nostalgia Journal cover. 24
TJKC: What was it like working for Marvel then? How did you get your assignments? JOE: I’d go down to the city on Friday, and Stan would give me a script to take home. I’d start on Monday morning by lettering the balloons in pencil. Then I’d pencil the story from the script and ink it
Worlds. The short stories were a lot of fun to do, because you got a lot of variety. You never got tired or bored because the stories were simple, but quite clever; although it’s often been said of Stan that, back in those days, the stories were all the same, just the names were changed. (laughter) But he knocked those stories out like you wouldn’t believe. It was a real fun time to work, and we had all the work we wanted. The rates were really good for that period, until the Comics Code came into being, and it almost killed comics. That’s when things really went into a tailspin, and Marvel suspended operations for at least six months. TJKC: What did you do once the Marvel work dried up? JOE: Things started getting tough financially, so I went over to DC. I don’t remember who I talked to at the time, but the guy was quite obnoxious. He said, “You guys from Marvel come over here because you don’t have any work, and you expect us to give you work!” He was ranting and raving. I didn’t get any work at DC, but I remember there was somebody else at the office. I think it was Julie Schwartz, but I can’t be sure. He came over to me and said, “Don’t pay any attention to him. Your stuff looks good, but we don’t have any work for anybody.” So I got work at Classics Illustrated. Then I sent some samples to a guy in Ohio who published Treasure Chest books. He had Reed Crandall working for him, and he said I’d fit into their plans. I used to do all the biographical stories for Treasure Chest; the life of Kennedy, and MacArthur, and Eisenhower. I did the Wright Brothers, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb. These were all 64-page stories. It was a real fun book, but it was only distributed in the Catholic schools. It was doing quite well at the time, around 1959-1960. I was doing all kinds of work at that time. Vince Colletta called and wanted to know if I’d pencil romance stories for him. So I was doing five romance pages a day for him for Charlton, and he was inking them. Even when Marvel started back up, I did that for Vinnie for about five years. They were easy to knock out; a lot of heads and clinch shots. Dick Giordano was the editor at Charlton at the time, and we had a good association. Dick and I did a lot of commercial work together, for Radio Shack and General Electric in the early-to-mid 1960s. When Stan called me up and said Marvel was starting back up with the monster books, I told him I couldn’t put all my eggs in one basket. I had a good account at Treasure Chest, and I liked the type of art I was doing there. So I kept the account at Treasure Chest. I was also ghosting some Archie stuff for a friend of mine.
Uninked pencils from Fantastic Four #86, page 17. and leave the balloons penciled. I’d pencil a page in the morning, and ink it in the afternoon. I never burned the midnight oil; I’d start work at 7:45 in the morning, and I’d work until about 4:30 in the afternoon. I always figured if you couldn’t make a living in eight hours a day, you shouldn’t be in the business. I’d bring the story back on Friday and he’d give me another script. I never knew what kind of script I’d be getting. Stan had a big pile on his desk, and he used to write most of the stories himself in those days. You’d walk in, and he’d be banging away at his typewriter. He would finish a script and put it on the pile. Sometimes on his pile would be a western, then below it would be a science fiction, and a war story, and a romance. You never knew what you were getting, because he always took it off the top. And you were expected to do any type of story. The Korean War was on at the time, so we did a lot of war stories. The westerns were the old staples. Then the horror trend came along, and we did the Journey Into Mystery books and Strange Tales and Weird
TJKC: At what point did you become aware of Simon & Kirby? JOE: Through the late 1940s, I saw a lot of the romance books. The Kirby romances really stood out because of Jack’s unique style. It was a very heavy-handed style, and Simon did a great job of inking Jack. That was the first thing. But then I lost contact with Jack’s work, because when you’re working professionally, you’re not really paying that much attention to other people. I would look at a few other comics. I bought the EC books, because of John Severin especially. When Severin drew an M-1 rifle, you knew it was an M-1 rifle; he was so authentic. Stan always used to tell us to buy John Severin’s stuff, because he never draws anything incorrectly. Stan was really impressed with John, and I certainly was. TJKC: How did you start inking Jack’s work? JOE: Up until that point, around 1961 or so, I had never inked anyone else’s work. When Stan called me, I thought I was doing him a favor. I 25
really didn’t have the time to ink it, but I felt I was helping him out of a jam, because he didn’t have anybody to ink it. So it was no problem. It was either a monster book or a western. I’m a little vague on which book it was, I’d have to look up my records. TJKC: Were you ever concerned about getting pigeon-holed into doing only inking? JOE: No. Work to me was work. I was long past the ego stage of wanting to see my art in comics; that happened twelve years before. It didn’t matter, as long as the paycheck came in. From an artist’s standpoint, I was doing my best stuff for Treasure Chest. The Marvel stuff was more of a production line type thing. We did the books quickly. It wasn’t a piece of art, so to speak. TJKC: After inking a few more monsters and westerns, how’d you get put on inks for Fantastic Four #5? JOE: When Stan sent me the pages for FF #5, he didn’t even tell me what it was. I didn’t even know the Fantastic Four existed, because I didn’t go to the newsstands and buy books. When you went to Stan’s office to give him the work you’d completed, he had a rack on the wall with maybe 20 books in it. You’d look to see if your latest book was there, and if it was, Stan would let you take a copy. But you couldn’t take anybody else’s books, so I never looked to see what anybody else was doing. I wasn’t aware the new age was coming. But I couldn’t have been more impressed when I saw it. It knocked my socks off! It seemed like Stan was really hitting his stride as a writer. The characters were so great, even though you saw similarities between the old Human Torch and Johnny Storm, and Reed and Plastic Man. The way he put them together was just unbelievable.
TJKC: I’ve always wondered what you worked on between Fantastic Four #6 and when you came back to the book on #44. JOE: It’s funny. You do so much, you forget what you’ve done. I did a few Thor stories in Journey Into Mystery. (Editors Note: These were in #91, 92, and 94-96.) At the time, the rates at Marvel were terrible, and I was really rushing my work. Not that I wasn’t trying my best at Marvel, but I did the best I could with the limited time we had. My main account artistically was Treasure Chest. Looking back I wish I’d done better work on Thor, but at the time it was just another job, and I certainly didn’t think the character was going anyplace. At the time, I was probably penciling and inking one page of Thor a day, doing three or four pages of romance for Vince Colletta, and squeezing in some Archie after supper. TJKC: From Fantastic Four #44-on, were you strictly a Marvel company man, or were you still doing a lot for other companies? JOE: Oh, no. But Marvel was my biggest account. I did the FF every month, at 18-22 pages a month. It seems like I was always doing another book for Marvel. I was doing odds and ends like Thor and Captain America, inking different people like Gil Kane and Gene Colan. I remember one year I did over 100 covers for Marvel. But Treasure Chest was a steady account until they folded in the seventies.
TJKC: Let’s talk about your work habits, particularly during your work over Jack’s pencils on Fantastic Four. How many pages did you ink a day? JOE: I could ink three Kirby pages a day by 4:30. Kirby was easy to ink. A lot of times he would throw in a big machine, and it would take time, just the mechanics of doing it. But we did it on the big pages. I could use a lot of brush; I really worked fast with a brush. At one time I probably worked 90% brush, if not more, with pens only on small heads and hands and TJKC: What do you remember about straight line backgrounds. Jack did inking that first Thor story in Journey these big panels, maybe four panels Into Mystery #83? to a page. He didn’t have the eight JOE: I probably remember that more and nine panels that came later. than anything I ever worked on. When Those early days with the big pages, I got it, I said, “Gee, what a great each one of his panels was like a character.” Especially Dr. Blake slamsplash page, they were just magnifiming that hammer on the ground. I cent. And Jack’s stuff was fully penthought that was a great idea, like Joe’s art (pencils and inks) for a Dr. Doom toy package. ciled; I could really knock them out. Captain Marvel saying “SHAZAM!” I Some of the stuff that I worked on years later was all from breakdowns; thought that was a novel way for the incapacitated doctor to turn into even John Buscema’s work, except the early stuff, the Silver Surfers and this viking god. Stan and Jack just did a tremendous job on it. some of the early FFs. Then John got into breakdowns, and nobody For years, a lot of people thought that Dick Ayers inked it. He’s was looser than John. It didn’t slow me up at all, but on some of the probably gotten five or six reprint checks that should have come to younger guys I worked with, it required an awful lot of work on my me. (laughter) I did the cover and all the inside art. I also did the cover part. Some of them were feeling their way, and some threw everything to #84, with the firing squad scene. I started to do the inside; I may but the kitchen sink in their work. have done two or three panels. I had committed myself to a story that Treasure Chest wanted me to do, a big 64-page story. It came in when I TJKC: You’ve mentioned that with Jack’s Fantastic Four pages, you got got the pages for Journey Into Mystery #84, so I sent them back to Stan the whole book at once. Did you read the entire story before you and told him I had another commitment. inked it? Were the pages already lettered when you got them? JOE: In most cases, yes. Once in a great while, they wouldn’t be, but TJKC: Was this the same commitment that only allowed you to ink a that was very, very rare, because Stan was such a professional. He couple of panels of Fantastic Four #6? always got the work done. Later, I did a lot of work with people where JOE: I don’t think so. It could have been a similar situation, though. the dialogue wasn’t there, and that made it difficult because a lot of 26
the art was vague. You didn’t know what expression was supposed to be on the faces unless you had the script, and they didn’t always send the script. But with the Kirby and Lee combination, they left nothing to be desired. Everything was there, and it was so easy for you. It was just the mechanics of doing it. Of course, you had to be careful. I always felt that I at least did what the penciler put down, but in most cases I probably added to it and made it a little bit better than it actually was originally. Certainly in Kirby’s case, you didn’t have to do any drawing. I did occasionally, but you really didn’t have to. TJKC: When the pencils came in, did the covers come with the stories, or were they sent later? JOE: The cover was generally done first, because it required more production at Marvel than the actual artwork. TJKC: Did that cause you any confusion? Especially on Fantastic Four #44; you wouldn’t know who any of the characters were. JOE: It could have, but it seems like it never did. Later on, when I was working with Buckler or people like that, I noticed some changes were done on covers at the Bullpen, and not always for the better. Sometimes they would make a stat of it and flop it, just to have the characters facing the other way. (laughter) This ruined the original art, so you hated to see corrections done for no particular purpose. It didn’t improve the cover, it actually detracted from it. TJKC: Did you ever use assistants on any of the Kirby stuff? JOE: Never. Not one line. TJKC: I’ve always wanted to know — when you ink an explosion, do you use a ruler for those straight, tapered explosion lines? JOE: Oh, sure. I always used a ruler for those. Originally I used a 659 pen and a #3 Windsor Newton brush. They were the only tools I used other than a compass and a ruler. I never used a french curve; everything I did was freehand. After quite a few years, I discarded the 659 pen because the paper got so bad, and it would dig into the paper so much. I went with the 201 Hunt pen, and I was able to really press down on the Hunt without it splitting or breaking. More uninked pencils from Fantastic Four #86. Note Jack’s request for a deadline extension! I had a certain technique for doing those lines; I would really press hard. I was able to get these things like that. Sometimes I may have overdone it, but I think it was really thick and thin lines, and I always went from the border-in, and creating a style kids loved in those days. flick it, so to speak. I would do it quite rapidly; I was quite fast with the ruler. And I’d use the Speedball pen for those little black dots you TJKC: As a kid I always wondered why his art didn’t look that good in saw in galaxies and fireballs, and things like that. I had a couple of different size Speedballs. the other books! (laughter) Now I know it had a little to do with you. There were a few things I did that I felt were innovative back in But how much “fixing” of Jack’s work did you do when you inked? those days, that were picked up by other people. There was a certain JOE: Well, Stan told me anytime I wanted to take any liberties with Jack’s work, to do it. Originally, I thought I was “fixing” his ears, or way I used to treat dirt and rocks, which I loved to draw and render. I making his women a little prettier, or a little leaner in the hips. But I used to love it when Jack did an erupting volcano, because I loved realized later, that was Jack’s style, I shouldn’t be doing it. Even when getting in there with a brush and doing some heavy inking. I put a lot Jack’s eyes weren’t on the same plane, this was Kirby. So I reverted of detail into stuff like that. Of course, Jack had a lot of detail, but I back, but probably not soon enough. Instead of drawing my Alex probably even added more to his buildings. Jack was so great with Raymond ears, I’d draw Kirby ears. But there were things that I really those bricks he used to put in, and I’d put little cracks in the bricks and 27
inking. I just knew what I wanted to do. Mainly, I was concerned about spotting blacks. I always had good brush control. When I first went to the Cartoonists And Illustrators School, I was working with a pen. Burne Hogarth came along and knocked the pen out of my hand and said, “I don’t want you working with a pen here. We do nothing but brush.” I was 21, and I didn’t know cartoonists used brushes.(laughter) That’s how naive I was. But in those days, when you lived out in the boondocks, you didn’t know what was going on in the comic field. I never knew how artists worked, or their approach to drawing or inking. I thought they used post office pens to ink; that’s all I ever used as a kid. TJKC: Being as objective as possible, compare other inkers’ work on Jack to what you did—for instance, Colletta, Giacoia, and Wood? JOE: Certainly, Wally Wood was a great inker, and a great artist. But I think he overpowered Jack too much; it came out looking too much like Wally Wood. It looked great, but it wasn’t Jack Kirby. I thought that Frank Giacoia was a real professional inker. I thought he did a tremendous job on Jack. I especially liked the way he did Captain America. Giacoia was a little heavier than I was, but I think we used our blacks very similarly. If you look quickly at some of Giacoia’s work and some of my work, maybe in the late FFs, they were fairly similar. Mine was maybe a little finer, with a little more technique, but Giacoia was real professional. Everybody always brings up Colletta, but Colletta was a real professional. He certainly didn’t enhance Jack’s work, but he got the work done, and that’s what Stan wanted. A lot of times, the main criteria was to get the work done. When I go to schools to talk to kids, I often tell them, “If you ever want to be a professional cartoonist, make sure you get the work done first, and then secondly, do it as well as you can in the time that you have.” Have it consistent. Don’t have the splash page a real masterpiece, and by the time you get to page ten, it looks like you’re doing it left-handed. You’ve got to be consistent. And Colletta did get the work done. I don’t think he ever missed a deadline in his life. TJKC: Well, there were some Colletta pages that I thought were really very nicely done. JOE: Oh, I often said that Colletta could do beautiful work when he had to. But he often was given a job, Sue returns in this final uninked page from FF #86. Note the John Romita figures in panel 6. and was always rushed. He was the type that could did spruce up, like Reed’s hair for example. I really got in there and do ten pages overnight if he had to. made it nice, fine, wavy hair. Jack was a little heavier on his pencils. I used a little more finesse than Jack used in his pencils. I fine-tuned TJKC: With you on inks with Fantastic Four #44, the art took a huge him, so to speak. Everything was there certainly; I just made it a little leap in quality over previous issues. Do you think it’s just coincidence slicker. that the stories and characters did too, or do you think Stan and Jack were inspired by the new look? TJKC: When you started on Fantastic Four #44, did you look at previous JOE: I’d like to think that would be so. I know Stan was. Jack would Kirby inkers’ work for inspiration? never comment on my work. Jack and I seldom if ever talked. The JOE: No. I never looked at anybody’s inks, even when I was starting out. only time I ever met him was the 1975 Marvel Convention in New I was very much influenced by Milton Caniff ’s inking style, because of York City. the way he slashed his wrinkles. I liked the looseness of his wrinkles. But then I got into Alex Raymond’s tightness. I think I had a combiTJKC: So you never ran into him at the Marvel offices? nation of Raymond and Caniff. When I was younger, I was more JOE: Never. I never went down to the office. There was one stretch of inclined to be Caniffish in my approach to inking. But I never looked over 20 years where I didn’t go to the office, and I’m only two hours at anybody else’s inking in comic books. I never studied anybody else’s away. Everything was done by mail. I’d talk to Stan once a week, and 28
TJKC: In Fantastic Four, was there one character you particularly liked inking more than others? JOE: Far and away, I liked working on the Thing, no matter what he was doing. Even though he was time-consuming; the mechanics of doing the Thing took time. But he was fun to work on. I loved working on Dr. Doom. I like flowing things; I like capes and robes. I liked the Mole Man because of his flowing tunic. I didn’t like Galactus for that reason—I’m only talking from an artist’s standpoint. He took time to do, and he was so metallic-looking. I never liked Iron Man for that reason. I didn’t like drawing those disks on his shoulders and his chest. TJKC: What about the Silver Surfer, since he’s so metallic? JOE: It’s funny, I liked drawing the Surfer, although you’ve got to be very careful with his egg-shaped head. He’s like drawing Spider-Man. If you’re not careful, you’ve got to use white-out and do it over. As an inker, you don’t want to waste time. You’ve got to be careful with the Surfer, he’s so smooth and sleek. The Surfer, I think, was one of Jack’s greatest creations. I love the way he foreshortened the Surfer’s arms. I liked all the female characters Jack drew. I liked drawing the Invisible Girl. I never thought Stan did enough with her. I loved Crystal. I loved Lockjaw, in fact. I always felt Stan didn’t take advantage of Lockjaw like he could have. I used to like Wyatt Wingfoot, I thought he was a good character. I liked those days when Johnny was in college. They didn’t exploit that enough, I felt. I thought it was very appealing to the college crowd. I loved the Mole Man. I loved doing the craggy caverns underneath the city, and the bowels of the Earth erupting. Jack was great at that. Just fantastic stuff. But it’s amazing when you think of the characters Stan and Jack created. Unbelievable! I’m talking about some of the incidental characters. The secondary villains, for example. The Monocle, and Diablo. You could go on and on.
Splash page from one of Joe’s numerous Treasure Chest stories. never talked to Jack. If there were any notes Stan wanted me to be aware of, he wrote it in the borders or made a special note on a sheet of paper. Jack never made a comment to me directly about the artwork, or what I should or shouldn’t do. But I admire that in him. Jack was very gracious. TJKC: Many people have pointed out that your inking had an effect on how Jack drew. JOE: I really believe that. I could see Jack’s work change a little bit— I’m not saying to my style of inking. I was aware of that fact years ago, but I never gave it much thought. It did cross my mind that there were certain things I saw in Jack’s work that looked similar to my work, the way I treated certain things. There were little things; the way I treated, not so much explosions, but special effects. The way I treated dirt. Little things that didn’t mean anything in and of itself, but in the whole scheme of things it all added up. I’ve always tried to impress upon young people that backgrounds are so important. That’s why I wouldn’t want anybody doing my backgrounds on the Kirby stuff. Later on, when I inked other people, because of the time element, I did get a background person. I had a guy working with me, he was tremendous. What I would do, especially on Thor, was I would do half of the book, and he would do half. He adapted his style to suit mine, but his stuff was just tremendous. I hated it when he moved out on his own, but I encouraged him to. He’s done some real fine work.
TJKC: Was there one character you hated? For instance, did all those grains of sand from the Sandman drive you crazy? JOE: No, I enjoyed the Sandman. The sand didn’t bother me at all. It was the metallic things that bothered me, like Dr. Doom’s mask. Jack drew him differently every time he drew him. In the early issues, he looked like he had a leather mask on with stitches. Then he went to the rivets. He’d have them around the eyes sometimes, sometimes around the mouth, sometimes around the nose. You never knew where they were going to be. TJKC: Did you fix those kind of things? JOE: Oh yes. I tried to be consistent, and keep them where I felt they should be. And as you probably know, a lot of times Jack used to put three fingers on the Thing, and sometimes four. (laughter) TJKC: Poor Joe! You had to sit there and count the fingers on the characters! (laughter) JOE: I remember one time, Buscema drew Reed with three arms! He was stretching all over the cover, and it was hard to see where the arms and legs were coming from. But we figured it out, he had three arms. (laughter) But that could happen with Kirby even.
TJKC: Did inking Jack’s work make you draw more like him? JOE: I don’t think so. Certainly, if someone asks me to draw one of the FF characters, I’m sure a lot of the Jack influence will come out in my drawing. Nobody ever drew the Thing like Jack, but I feel I do a good Thing when I draw him. My Thing is just a little more involved than Jack’s; Jack’s is maybe a little simpler. Same way with Reed; I might make Reed a little handsomer than Jack made him, and make his hair a little finer. But I certainly loved the way Jack did his muscles. When I draw things on my own, certainly I’m not in a class with John Buscema, but I draw like John Buscema. I draw handsome heroes, and I draw fairly beautiful women like John and John Romita. I was often amazed at how similar my art was to John Buscema’s. I always thought that we were a good combination. We worked very well together, especially doing Thor. But back to Kirby, yes, I’m sure a lot of my stuff, unaware to myself, probably came out looking a little bit like Jack’s. I’m talking about pin-ups and drawings like that. But if I was to do a story, it probably would look more like Buscema than Jack.
TJKC: When did you start getting original art back, and how was it divided up? JOE: I forget the exact year. I don’t think I got anything back while Jack and I were doing the FF stories; it had to be after. When I was doing Jack’s work, I was just doing inking, and I really forget the splitup. After Jack, I did what’s called Finished Art. The split-up was a lot different. For example, if it was a 20-page story, it might’ve been 11/9. I never complained about anything to Marvel. I felt even that was an unfair split-up for the inker, because on some of the breakdowns I got, there was nothing there. There were stick figures, and I had to do all the drawing really. 29
watching on a big screen helplessly. When you got the art, were only the figures penciled, and you would just ink those? JOE: Exactly. I never got the collage before I did the inking. TJKC: Is there a single issue of Fantastic Four that you’re particularly proud of? Or is there one where you feel things really didn’t click? JOE: I don’t think there were any that I felt were bad. There were a few covers I didn’t like; I never liked Jack’s montage covers for some reason. I always thought Jack was much, much stronger on his splashes than he was on his covers. Some of the splashes should’ve been covers. Maybe it was the way they were colored; Marvel had some troubles with their grays, especially on the FF covers. But I didn’t feel any of the stories were below mine or Jack’s standards. In fact, even when we got up in the 80s and 90s, I felt the work was still improving; at least the art was. We didn’t have the opportunity to really show off the story like we could have with the old pages. We had the smaller art pages to do, and we had more panels to do. Jack still did a tremendous job, but he needed space for his dynamic layouts. I think going to the small pages hurt Jack a little bit. Looking back, #51 was a great story. Of course, the Inhumans in #47 was a great story. You can start picking them out. Even up in the 90s, with “Ben Grimm, Killer,” that was a good series. I think that’s when Giacoia came on for the first time. TJKC: I wanted to ask you about that storyline. After almost 50 issues, you missed inking Fantastic Four #93. Were you on vacation, or inking another book? JOE: I needed a vacation. I wanted to go down to Phil Seuling’s convention. I think it was the first convention I ever went to. I remember I told Stan I needed a week and a half off, and the FF was coming in. So he said, “No problem” and he got Frank Giacoia. But here again, they were just jobs to me. Looking back, I wish I would’ve done #93, but I didn’t think of those things in those days. But I liked the two that I worked on. I loved the splash on #92 where the Thing has the collar, and he’s in chains. TJKC: I love the art in those issues. It’s almost like a machine did them; I couldn’t believe human hands were able to create art that perfect. (laughter) Every line is exactly where it should be. JOE: People used to come to me and say, “Don’t you think Kirby’s not doing as well as he did?” Just look at #91 and #92 and tell me if Kirby was slipping at all. Wasn’t that great stuff? I look at some of the originals today, and it’s too bad they weren’t still on the big pages. They look great on the small pages, but they would’ve looked tremendous on the big pages.
Sue goes nuts! Uninked pencils from FF #89, page 14. TJKC: What did you think of Jack’s collages? JOE: I never liked them particularly. TJKC: Did they pose any specific problems for you as an inker? JOE: No. I just couldn’t see the purpose in it. I always felt Jack could’ve done better penciling the stuff. Maybe I didn’t like they way they reproduced.
TJKC: You missed inking #96 and #97 as well. JOE: For the same reason. I felt burnt out.
TJKC: When those pages appeared in a story, did you get the collage art with the pencils? JOE: No, I didn’t. I saw a pencil rough, like a thumbnail sketch of what it was going to be. But I don’t recall ever seeing the collage art.
TJKC: Did Marvel’s switch to small-size art as of #68 cause you any difficulties? I imagine you had to use more pen on the smaller size art. JOE: Exactly. And I think it affected Jack. He might not have said so, but it had to. Before that, he had bigger panels and fewer panels. I don’t know why there were more panels on the smaller pages, but it had to restrict him a little in his layout.
TJKC: In Fantastic Four #62, there was one where Reed is floating through the Negative Zone, and the Thing and Invisible Girl are 30
TJKC: When the office made art changes to Jack’s work, were they generally on the pencils for you to ink? Of did they paste them on after the inking? JOE: They could’ve made a change to Jack’s pencils, but I don’t recall any particular incident. I do remember we did the cover of #98, with the story on the Moon. The cover was beautiful when we finished it. We had a lot of blacks on the Thing, and it looked real good. That was one of the rare covers I got back that Jack and I had done on the FF. They whited-out the chest of the Thing, and then outlined some of the stones. They didn’t want it as black as Jack and I had put it. I was really disappointed that they’d done that.
on Fantastic Four. I don’t remember what I was doing at the time, but it certainly wasn’t as important as what I could’ve been doing with Jack. TJKC: You did work together on the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel. How’d you feel about that book? JOE: At the time, I didn’t think it was Jack’s best work. I didn’t think it was up to the usual great Kirby standard. But when I look back at it now... gee, there was some nice stuff in it. There were a lot of pages where there really wasn’t much going on story-wise. It could’ve been much more impressive. TJKC: Hadn’t he evolved a lot since you worked on Fantastic Four together? Hadn’t he gotten a lot looser? JOE: Oh, there was no question about it. That was very evident. He didn’t put as much into it as I felt he could have. Certainly the shots of outer space were tremendous, he did some great special effects. I really enjoyed working on those type pages. But there were some pages that were very simplistic, more so than Jack should’ve done or could’ve done. But what do you think?
TJKC: They put word balloons on it, too. JOE: I hated word balloons. There was no need for them. I always liked symbolic covers. I think Stan liked to put balloons on the covers, but to me, it detracted from the composition. TJKC: Fantastic Four #73 had Thor, Daredevil and Spider-Man as guest-stars. Inside, it’s pretty obvious they redrew Spider-Man. JOE: Jack had a strange way of doing the web. I’ve seen drawings of Jack’s where he inked the character himself, and he never completed the web. If Jack had a weakness at anything, it was drawing the head of Spider-Man.
TJKC: It’s not my favorite thing he ever did. But on most of that later Marvel work, while I enjoy it on a certain level, I can’t get that excited about it. After about 1973, I have a harder time getting into the books. JOE: Well, I’m sure Jack lost a little enthusiasm when he came back to Marvel. Maybe he felt he wasn’t being treated the way he should’ve been. And I agree to a great extent. Why not put him back on the FF? That was still their big book. X-Men hadn’t come along yet, I don’t think. But whatever the case, I always felt there was no combination like Jack and the FF.
TJKC: Were you aware of how popular Fantastic Four was while you were doing it? JOE: I used to read the letters pages, and for a long time I thought they were writing the letters down at the office. They may have been, but I knew some of the people who were writing in. When all these fans I knew started writing in, I guess I realized it was popular. Stan used to tell me it was. TJKC: Didn’t you win some ACBA awards as best inker in the 1960s? JOE: It was the Alley Award, which I won two or three years in a row. I don’t remember the years. I never won the ACBA award. In fact, I don’t think Marvel fared well in general. If I remember right, DC usually clobbered us. Maybe the fans should have voted! TJKC: What can you tell me about Fantastic Four #108? Were the pencils all pieced together when you got it? JOE: It was all pieced. That story was really mixed-up. (laughter) At the time, I said, “They’ll never replace Jack Kirby. The FF will never be the same.” And with as many good artists as they had on it, it never really was the same. Never. It couldn’t be. Of all the books Jack did, the Fantastic Four was incomparable the way Jack did it. TJKC: Did you follow Jack’s DC work after he left Marvel in 1970? JOE: No, I really didn’t. I’d see New Gods occasionally. Marvel used to send me the books, and a lot of times they would send me DC books too. I used to browse through it, but it didn’t impress me as much as the FF. But I didn’t study it really; it might’ve been more impressive if I had. It just didn’t look as good as some of the Jack I had seen, or at least that’s what I believed at the time. It had nothing to do with my working on it; I’m talking about Jack’s original pencils. But I so associated him with the FF, that I felt nothing could compare with that. TJKC: When Jack went back to Marvel in the mid-70s, did you ever request to ink his work? JOE: I never called Stan and said, “Why don’t you put Jack and I together again?” Stan often told me I could have any book I wanted, but I never asked for anything. I did whatever they sent me. It could be a guy just starting out, or a real experienced guy like Gene Colan or Neal Adams. I did whatever they asked me to do. A lot of the time, I did characters that I wasn’t happy with. I didn’t like the books, I didn’t like the characters. I did them because I was doing a job, I was a good company man. But I never understood why they didn’t put Jack back
Classic Thing vs. new Thing; Joe’s pencils and inks from a Marvel pin-up. 31
TJKC: Why did you stay exclusively with Marvel all those years? JOE: I worked continually for Marvel for 46 years. There was never a year at Marvel where I wasn’t doing something. I’ve always been loyal to anything I’ve been associated with. I always felt I was a good Marvel employee. DC used to call me occasionally, wanting to know if I’d come over and do this and do that. But Marvel told me whatever DC offered me, they’d pay more. They told me I was the highest paid inker in the business, and I believed them. What reason would I have to go over to DC? I was getting paid the best, and I was working on characters I liked—Thor and the Fantastic Four. That was just before they put us under contract, and gave us great benefits and vacation. I had a lot of friends over at DC. Mike Carlin was a good friend of mine, and Dick Giordano was a good friend. A lot of the DC guys I never knew, though. Only just recently did I get to do a piece of art with Curt Swan.
belt buckle anymore.” (laughter) He knew what issue the costumes changed, and when different characters appeared. So when he moved out, I really missed him. He was like a librarian gone astray. TJKC: Tell me what you’re doing now. JOE: I just finished five Spider-Man Sunday pages that Paul Ryan penciled and Stan wrote. I’ve been doing that for three or four years since I retired from Marvel. I’m still working for Marvel freelance. They call me up and want me to do certain things. If it appeals to me I’ll do it. I’ve done a lot of their trading cards, and I just inked a Sergio Aragones 8-page story for Sergio Massacres Marvel. (laughter) I did the Fantastic Four segment. It was real fun, I couldn’t turn it down. I didn’t want to do any continuity, but when they said it was Sergio, I had to do it. The machinery he put in there is a take-off on Jack of course, and I think it looks real good.
TJKC: What did you do? JOE: They’ve got a book out now, I think it’s called the Superman Gallery. It’s a bunch of nice Superman illustrations by different people. Curt had done a close-up of Superman breaking through a concrete wall. Mike Carlin had been asking me for years to work on Curt, and I always turned him down, and this was a good opportunity. But of all the things Curt ever did, I wish he had done a full-figure Superman. Except for the fact that you can barely see his “S” for all the rocks breaking through, it could’ve been anybody. But I enjoyed working on it. I might’ve inked it a little bit too slickly, but it came out fairly well. TJKC: Not counting yourself, who is your favorite penciler? JOE: Favorite penciler is tough. The top four would have to be Kirby, Buscema, Romita, and John Severin. And I’d have to say Gene Colan is a very underrated penciler. I could go on and on. I can’t speak so much for the DC guys, I didn’t follow them as much. But certainly Kubert and those guys were tremendous. Marvel had so many good professionals. Sal Buscema was a real professional, and I always enjoyed working with Sal. I always thought we did a real creditable job on a lot of books: Ms. Marvel, ROM, any character they threw at us. TJKC: What about inkers? JOE: I’ve got to say Frank Giacoia. And I loved the way that John Severin inked his own work. I loved the way he inked his westerns especially; that gritty style. Of course, Dick Giordano has always been a favorite of mine. Tom Palmer’s another favorite of mine. Terry Austin’s a good friend of mine and a great inker. And a protege of mine, Charles Barnett, is doing wonderful things and I expect him to have a great future. But you can go on and on. You hate to mention names, because you’re going to overlook somebody. TJKC: How many children do you have? Did any of them inherit your artistic ability? JOE: I have four; two boys and two girls. Actually, my youngest son Mark was quite good, but he couldn’t do the superheroes. He did humor comics especially well. All the time he was growing up, he had a little table next to mine. He really knew his comics. He got married very young, and he moved out when he was twenty. I really missed him because he could tell me when I was doing something wrong. He would come by my desk and say, “Dad, Thor doesn’t have that
More uninked pencils from Fantastic Four #89. 32
JOE: (laughter) Yes I do. I regret that people don’t know about the stuff that I penciled. Especially Treasure Chest—some of the stories I’ve done that really didn’t get much exposure. But hey, I’m proud of some of my inking. I did two books with John Tartaglione for Marvel: One on Pope John Paul, and the other on Mother Theresa, which I felt were some of the best inking I ever did. It was a labor of love. So I’m proud of my inking, but I’m also proud of a lot of the pencils I’ve done. I’ve done some real fine jobs over the years, on a variety of subjects. TJKC: Why do you think you’re so many people’s favorite Kirby inker? JOE: You hate to say it, but if it’s possible, I think I added a little bit to Jack’s work. If he had any rough edges at all, I think I smoothed them out. I was slick. But I think it was because I could pencil myself. I think that’s the reason his work looked better, because I was able to make things look better, no matter what it was. If it was a car, or a piece of clothing, or a head, or backgrounds. And I never slighted Jack; I tried to do as well as he had given me. I never did fault him in any way. TJKC: How did Jack’s work compare to other pencilers you’ve inked over the years? JOE: No one was ever as consistent as Jack. Jack never left anything to my imagination. There were little things here and there that I did change over the years, but I didn’t have to. Everything was there. Every little button had the thread, you could see the thread holes in the buttons. Everything was so perfect. Kirby, consistently, was the same on every story; it was so detailed. Every black was in there; I never had to add a black unless I felt it needed it to balance the page a little more. It was loose in a sense, but detailed in another sense. You can’t say enough about Jack’s work. A beautiful example of Joe’s sports cartoons.
TJKC: Lastly, what are you most proud of from your years of inking Jack’s work? JOE: The thing that I’m most proud of is the fact that I worked with Jack. He was the greatest comic illustrator of all time, and I was able to do so much work with him. To be associated with him, to be part of his art, is compensation enough for me. I couldn’t ask for anything more.
Christie’s Auction House wanted me to do recreations of some FF covers. They wanted me to do #5, #49, #57, and #100. I only finished #5 and #57. #57 was really exceptional. In fact, Marie Severin colored it for me. She did a tremendous job on it. I do a lot of sports cartoons on the side. I really love baseball. I’ve done a lot of baseball cartoons. I’ve got three up in the Hall Of Fame in Cooperstown.
THE
TJKC: Who’s your favorite baseball team? JOE: The Giants. I’ve been rooting for the Giants for 50 years. When they moved to the West Coast I still rooted for them. In fact, when I was out in San Diego, as luck would have it, the Giants were in playing the Padres! I took in two games. I was staying at the Marriott, and the Giants were staying there! I knew some of them from past years, and I saw all these guys. If I had known it sooner, I’d have been down in the lobby shooting the breeze with those guys.
Q uarterly
“Your first book has been very gratifying and very pleasing. So, I can tell you that I enjoyed it!” — JACK KIRBY
TJKC: What do you do for fun when you’re not inking? JOE: For many years, I managed a men’s softball team. I’m into local sports quite a bit. I coached Little League and boy’s basketball. Also, would you believe I’m a part-time disc jockey? (laughter) Once a month, another fella and I co-host an hour-and-a-half of Bing Crosby recordings over a Poughkeepsie radio station. It goes all the way to New York City, so it covers quite a bit of territory. I have close to 1300 Bing LPs alone, and old radio shows on tape from the 1930s and 40s. And I do Bing drawings for different Bing fan clubs. I do the covers for their fan magazines, and the dust jackets for books they put out on Bing. I’ve done record covers on Bing, caricatures, and fullcolor paintings. That’s a hobby that I really enjoy doing.
That’s what Jack said about our first issue, released back in September 1993... can you blame us for repeating such a terrific endorsement?!? If you haven’t checked out JKQ, here’s your chance! • US: £8.00 for 4 issues • UK: £4.50 for 4 issues • Rest of Europe: £7.00 for 4 issues • Rest of world: £9.00. (UK funds only, payable to: Chris Harper) Very limited supply of back issues - please inquire. (Our latest issue is #6, and features an interview with Dick Ayers!)
TJKC: Since you started as a penciler, do you have any regrets that you’re known so widely as an inker?
C. Harper, 25 Napier Dr.,Tipton, West Midlands, DY4 7NW, UK. 33
cultural anthropology, and internationalism. But Fantastic Four was more than mere phantasmagoria. It was grounded in a very specific Earthly setting, New York City. This was back when artists drew backgrounds more often than not, so the city’s Kirbyized buildings kept the whole thing rooted in reality. Kirby clearly loved and romanticized the town—the men in his 1960s NYC still wore hats and smoked pipes. Still, the city’s presence made the stories seem more real, and thus more meaningful. To many of us, FF was more “relevant” than the comics that would be so dubbed, including Spider-Man. Comics that wanted to be “hip” traded in triviality, and cast a very short shadow. (Most of them were painfully unhip anyway, even if we were to young to tell.) Fantastic Four was all about the cosmos, but we felt in the stories and in Kirby’s grandiose drawings the progress and panic of our time, the huge ambition of our Great Society and the corresponding terror that social change might strip away our (white middle-class) centeredness and privilege. Nothing as specific as Spider-Man (or the later Green Lantern) could encompass the profound emotions of a society questioning itself. FF was a big comic for a generation facing big issues. It continually noted that we (or Ben, or anyone but Reed Richards) couldn’t hope to understand the forces at play, just as we readers couldn’t fully comprehend and process a President’s murder, the drafting of unwilling men to combat, or the Cold War’s machinations. And just as America still struggles to come to terms with the 1960s and the changes it wrought, we grown-up readers may never work out what Johnny Storm saw as he zoomed through the timeless ether, or why Ben Grimm was constantly turning on his friends, or what visions sparked Kirby’s radical machinery designs. We only know we experienced something great enough to linger, and important enough to influence us still.
The FF And The Secret History Of The ’60s by Darcy Sullivan eople who were already into comics circa 1961 and picked up Fantastic Four #1 always remark on how strange it seemed, a perspective nobody younger than them can truly share. In the same way, those of us who grew up in the ’60s reading Fantastic Four probably have a different perspective on the comic than those either younger or older than us. To many of us, Fantastic Four was the myth of our time. Generally, when people talk about superheroes’ mythic quality, they’re talking about the way superhero stories use larger-than-life characters to tell universal stories about the Nature of Man. That’s true of Fantastic Four as well—they are a peculiar nature myth, in fact, representing as they do the family of earth, wind, fire and water—but in the 1960s the stories the comic told seemed specific to that time. To those of us young enough to grasp but not follow world events, Fantastic Four read like an allegory, a secret history of the 1960s. Take Galactus and the Silver Surfer. On the one hand they represent the father and the rebellious son, but to us they symbolized all the terrible dread hovering over us in the 1960s, and the strange mixture of idealism and power needed to stand up to the Establishment. For kids with only an inkling of the Vietnam War and the resistance to it, Galactus’ tale seemed pregnant with hidden meaning. What was that mind-blowing trip the Human Torch undertook to save Earth but a consciousness-altering psychedelic experience? Indeed, rebellious children were all over FF in those days. The weird infant from #24, the Impossible Man, even those no-goods on Yancy Street reminded us readers that youth had different, sometimes unfathomable priorities, and an oftensurprising strength. Sometimes they seemed negative at first, then turned out to be all right after all—just like T’Challa, whose other name, the Black Panther, sounded a bell even for us kids. In this respect, the Inhumans probably struck the deepest chord. Within our world, these stories told us, are other communities that, though strange to us and perhaps confrontational, are not necessarily bad. As proto-hippies, the Inhumans made the burgeoning underground culture intriguing even to us straights. Indeed, Fantastic Four’s general sense of discovery fit right into the zeitgeist of the ’60s. Many comics before and since have emphasized conflict, but few if any have conveyed the same spirit of exploration. What blew us away back then wasn’t the size of the fights but the constant uncovering of vast realms: Hidden Lands, Negative Zones, micro-worlds and the like. No perspective was absolute— another dimension was always whirling above us, beneath us, within us. Fantastic Four embraced the era’s inclinations toward introspection,
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The FF meet Spider-Man, in this Kirby art from a 1970s Marvel calendar.
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Fantastic Four #108: Jack’s Way by John Morrow antastic Four #108 has quite a history behind it. It was originally meant to be Splash p age Missing #102, but supposedly someone at Marvel felt it wasn’t dialogueable. So Marvel ran the art for #103 in #102, and put this art on the shelf for a few months. Then they chopped Jack’s originals up, rearranged panels, added some John Buscema filler art, changed the ending, sent the whole thing to Joe Sinnott to ink, and published it (not so coincidentally) the same month Jack’s New Gods #1 came out at DC. The end result was a real mess that didn’t make much sense. But just how bad was Jack’s original story? Judge for yourself. Presented here is our attempt to put the story back into its original form, using the Kirby art that didn’t make the cut. Mitch Itkowitz came across many of the discarded pencils in the Marvel files a few years ago, and had them returned to Jack. A few panels are still missing (most notably the splash page), and you’ll see those indicated by question marks. Since Jack’s original story and the published version had major differences, we deleted the published dialogue and page numbers to avoid confusion. In quotes (“ ”) accompanying the pencil panels are Jack’s original margin notes for Stan Lee to dialogue by (these are numbered to coincide with the panel numbers). With just the few margin notes here to accompany Jack’s powerful art, it’s easy enough to get an idea of the (continued on page 38)
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Page 2 1. “Even ancients pondered problem that still plagues man today.” 2. “this radiation test will prove date conclusively.” 3. “the rays react.” 4. “This intensity meter places statue at 4000 B.C.” 5. “That fierce face-thank goodness we’ve progressed today.” 6. (From FF #108, Page 1. Panel was cropped when published.) Pages 3-7 (As published in FF #108, pages 2-6.)
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Page 9 1. (From FF #108, page 15, panel 4.) 2.-4. (Missing Panels, probably showing Sue planting a Mini-Camera In Janus’ house.) 5. (From FF #108, page 15, panel 5.)
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36 Page 8 1-3. (From FF #108, Page 7, Panels 1-3.) 4. “Ben says we blew it--the guy got away with a million bucks.” 5. (missing panel.) 6. “Yeah--he’s now number one-on the ten most wanted felons!” 7. “We can’t stay here! Let’s get him--” “Reed says cool it--he’s following a lead.”
Page 10 1.-2.. (Missing Panels, probably showing Sue planting a Mini-Camera In Janus’ house.) 3. “Reed is amazed at mildness of prof, who is complete opposite of ben’s description.” 4. (Missing panel.) 5. “Meanwhile, the prof’s evil brother has been watching--he says richards must be flabbergasted.” 6. “Prof says--why did you have to come after all these years?” “Because you’re a perfect cover brother--”
37 Page 11 1. “I’ve been away perfecting Mega-Power. Now--i’ll gain money-power.” 2. “You won’t talk. the town won’t talk--or it’s curtains!” 3. “stick with me. with mega-power--i may even help you walk again.” 4. “right now i’m gong to be busy in lab. richards didn’t go away without bugging the house.” 5. “i’ve got instruments to trace his bugs and destroy them. now leave me.” 6. “Yes--my plans don’t stop here--i’ll empty that whole city of its money.” 7. (From FF #108, page 7, Panel 6.)
Page 12 & 13 (This page would’ve been split into two half pages, with ads running under them--A practice that got a 20-page story out of only 19 pages of art.) 1-2.. (From FF #108, page 8, panel 2 and 3.) 3. (From FF #108, page 8, panel 6.) 4. (From FF #108, page 9, panel 1.) 5. “What Happened?” “Ben says--reed’s minicamera blew up in our faces--that’s what!” 6. “That was no malfunction-that was mega-power. Listen sue--I have a nutty idea--”
(continued from page 35)
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story he set out to tell originally. Some of the later pages were renumbered more than once, making reassembly a difficult task (apparently, the hatchet job went through several revisions). One Page 14 thing that helped (As published in FF #108, page 10.) immensely in reassembling this story was the fact that Jack worked on a grid. By simply following his standard FF grid from that period, you can tell if panels were falling in the right place on a given page. There were some major differences in the two versions. Just what is going on in the introduction on page 2 is unclear (especially without a splash page to get the ball rolling), and maybe this confusion at the opening of the story is the reason Marvel decided it was unusable. Unlike the published version of this story, Jack’s version dealt with a force called Mega-Power, not Nega-Power, and had nothing to do with the Negative Zone. And the villain Janus doesn’t die in the end (a plot twist that I always thought seemed very un-Kirbylike). This story didn’t break any new ground, but there are some really nice bits that got left on the Bullpen floor; those simple, down-toearth touches like Reed and Sue’s casual clothes on page 2 and the Thing’s sweater on page 8, and Sue taking baby Franklin from Crystal on page 2. These seemingly minor details make the FF seem like real people, and were a big part of the sense of family you felt reading the books. The very lack of this type of storytelling detail is one of the reasons the FF has never reached the heights it attained while Jack was on it. But rather than dwell on the negative, let’s simply enjoy this look at one of Jack’s final efforts on the FF, as he originally intended it to be seen.
Page 16 1.-2. (From FF #108, Page 13, Panel 1-2. Originals were cropped.) 3-7. (From FF #108, Page 14, panel 1-5.)
Page 17 1.-2. (From FF #108, Page 14, Panel 6-7.) 3.-5. (From FF #108, Page 15, Panel 1-3.) 6.-7. (From FF #108, Page 16, Panel 3-4.)
Page 15 1.-4. (From FF #108, Page 11, Panel 1-4.) 5. (From FF #108, Page 12, Panel 2.) 6. “He sees plane! I Can’t leave without a parting shot--”
Page 18 1.-2. (From FF #108, Page 16, panel 5-6.) 3.-7. (From FF #108, Page 17, Panel 1-5.)
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? Page 19 1. (From FF #108, Page 17, Panel 6.) 2.-3. (No Margin Notes Visible.) 4. “She grabs gun before twin can reach for it.” “Reed says--use gun to cover bad twin, sue!” 5. “Reed says to good twin-you’re a fool you know. The criminal’s path is no solution.” 6. (Margin notes are erased.) 7. “Reed touches good twin’s feet with trigger.” (The page number “19” has been erased, but is visible.)
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Page 20 1. (Margin Notes have been erased.) 2. “Who can tell what Mega-power can do?” 3. “Don’t trust him! Get him while you can! I’ll Handle The Girl!” (Note the scalloped corners, indicating this was considered for a flashback scene in FF #108.) 4. (Margin Notes have been erased.) 5.-7. (Missing Panels.)
Collector Comments
Submit Something To TJKC!!
Send your letters to: The Jack Kirby Collector c/o TwoMorrows • 502 Saint Mary’s St • Raleigh, NC 27605 or E-mail to: twomorrow@aol.com
ere’s a tentative list of upcoming issues, and some ideas you could write about. But don’t limit yourself to these ideas—we may run a miscellaneous issue here or there, so anything you write may be published. And as always, send us copies of your Kirby art! Don’t forget: If we publish something you send, you’ll earn a free issue!
H
The response to our first color cover last issue was phenomenal—hats off to Tom Ziuko for his fantastic coloring! We now know what #8’s cover art was originally used for, and you will too—next issue (heh-heh-heh!). Now, some comments on #8:
#10 (Apr. 1996): Humo r Issue
Fighting American, Not Brand Echh!, From Here To Insanity, Destroyer Duck, Lockjaw The Alligator, Earl The Rich Rabbit, Satan’s Six, etc. Or send us your funniest story about Jack! Submission deadline: 3/1/96.
My older kids (Matthew, 12, and Johnny, 8) have been raised on Jack Kirby and the Beatles, among other influences. It was a delight to have them read the Jack and Paul McCartney story. Len Simon, Washington, D.C.
#11 (June 1996): Ho llywo o d Issue
The Lord Of Light project, The Black Hole newspaper strip, Ruby-Spears animation work, Marvel cartoons, Stuntman, the Prisoner adaptation, and Kirby works related to Hollywood. Submission deadline: 4/1/96.
When I got to the page about Jack meeting Paul McCartney I could have just kicked myself! About three or four years ago I was reading Goldmine magazine (the record collectors newspaper) and there was advertised the original art for sale that Jack presented to Paul. I don’t know why it was being offered for sale (perhaps Paul gave it to the guy in Wings who was a big comics fan, and he sold it... who knows), but the fact remains that it was up for auction. I kept the picture of it up on my bulletin board for about a year and a half. I finally got rid of it while straightening up the office a couple of years ago. Damn, I would have loved to have sent it to you for publication. If you know anyone who collects Goldmine, they should check issues published between 1992 and 1993 in the “Showcase” sections to find a copy of the artwork! David Schwartz, Agoura Hills, CA (OK, you pack rats! Dig out those old issues of Goldmine and send us a copy!)
#12 (Aug. 1996): INTERNATIO NAL Issue
We need submissions from readers currently and formerly outside the U.S, about anything Kirby! Particularly about discovering Jack’s work overseas and the availability of it there. Submission deadline: 5/1/96. #13 (O ct. 1996): Hallo ween Issue
The Demon, Black Magic, Strange World Of Your Dreams, Atlas Monsters, Devil Dinosaur, Chamber of Darkness, Kirby costumes, the Golden Age Vision, and other spooky subjects. Submission deadline: 7/1/96. #14 (Dec. 1996): THO R Issue
Let’s hear from you, Asgard fans! Submission deadline: 9/1/96. #15 (Feb. 1997): SCI-FI Issue
Solar Legion, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Machine Man, Sky Masters, Race For The Moon, Starman Zero, Eternals, Jack’s work for pulps, & more. Submission deadline: 11/1/96.
I’d like to make special note of Jack’s pencils for Strange Tales #141, page 3. This single page amply demonstrates both Jack’s incredible imagination... and his most loveable goof: First of all, almost any other artist, faced with the task of having to have his characters penetrate a steel door would simply introduce some sort of super-laser that would melt the door like butter (probably in only one panel), and that’s that. But not Jack! Instead, he creates this incredibly complex device that, using diamond tips, cuts a very neat hole through the steel (Rube Goldberg would be so proud!) As a result, an entire page is dominated by the efforts to penetrate the door, and it’s an exciting effort at that. Even without captions, the action is easy to follow, but no less thrilling. We’ve heard time and again from inkers that they often had to correct subtle mistakes in Jack’s art, caused equally by his bad memory for detail as well as the demands from producing page after page of artwork for numerous books day after day. Here, we see in one panel that Jack has accidentally omitted Nick Fury’s most famous badge...his eyepatch! Maybe he suddenly confused S.H.I.E.L.D. with the Howling Commandos? Gene Popa, Hammond, IN
#16 (April 1997): To ugh Gu ys Issue
From Foxhole and Our Fighting Forces, Bullseye to Boys’ Ranch, Kid Colt and In The Days Of The Mob, the testosterone will fly as we cover cowboys, gangsters and soldiers in one issue. Submission deadline: 1/1/97. #17 (June 1997): 1970s DC Issue
Kamandi, Atlas, Kung-Fu Fighter, Manhunter, OMAC, Kobra; we’ll cover Jack’s 1970s DC books (plus more on the Fourth World). Submission deadline: 3/1/97. We’ve got a stellar lineup of comics professionals who’ve agreed to ink old Kirby pencils for our covers, including Steve Rude, Chic Stone, Jerry Ordway, Barry Windsor-Smith, Jim Steranko, and Terry Austin, plus new interviews with Roz Kirby, Chic Stone, Dick Ayers, and more!
Submission Guidelines: When we print something you submit, we’ll send you a FREE copy of that issue or extend your subscription by one issue. We’re looking for:
Another fine piece o’ work, sir. Here’s my usual (small) list of quibbles... Despite what Jack said in that interview and a few other places, he did not do the layouts for the first Iron Man story or for the first Daredevil story. Don Heck did the first Iron Man story (script by Larry Lieber) and Bill Everett did the first Daredevil (with Stan Lee scripting). Jack’s confusion is understandable, I think, because he did work on those characters before they debuted and on some of their early numbers. Also, Don Heck once erroneously confirmed that Jack had done the layouts on the first Iron Man story. For the record: On Iron Man, Jack made a number of plot suggestions (according to Heck), did the first cover, designed Iron Man’s first armor and, of course, penciled a number of early stories, though not the very first. On Daredevil, he seems to have made plot suggestions, although it is unknown how many of them were incorporated in the book. He also did some early concept sketches, one of which was inked by Everett and used on the cover of #1 and again on the first page. (Daredevil #1 was an enormous struggle to get to press. Everett was holding down a full-time job at an art agency at the time and attempting to squeeze in his Marvel work at night. He wound up being very late with the book and handing it in without inking the backgrounds; Steve Ditko reportedly finished them. The first page was obviously an office paste-up using that Kirby sketch that Everett had inked; that opening page was lettered by Artie Simek, whereas the rest of the comic was lettered by Sam Rosen.)
• Rare and unpublished Kirby art • Original articles and essays on Jack’s life and career • Kirby interviews and correspondence • Kirby convention and fanzine art and articles • Photos and personal recollections of Jack • Published and unpublished reviews of Jack’s work, etc. Artwork should be submitted in one of the following forms: 1) Good quality photocopies (color or black-&-white). 2) Scanned images - 300ppi TIFF, JPEG, or GIF file for IBM or Mac. 3) Original materials (carefully packed and insured). Text should be sent in one of the following forms: 1) Typed or laser printed pages with no “fancy” fonts. 2) E-mail via the Internet to: twomorrow@aol.com 3) An ASCII computer file, IBM or Mac format. 4) For previously printed articles, photocopies are OK. We’ll pay return postage and insurance for originals - please write or call first. Please include background info whenever possible.
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It is unknown if Jack designed Daredevil’s costume. Everett didn’t recall this and when I asked Stan, he didn’t remember that Jack had even done those concept sketches (and several early covers). I don’t think the first DD costume looks like a Kirby and it may well be that Everett took those concept sketches and changed the costume as he inked. Jack’s confusion on this matter is again, I think, understandable. He recalled doing layouts for Daredevil and discussing them with Everett; I think he was mixing up the time he did a few issues of Daredevil layouts for John Romita and the time he did Hulk layouts for Everett. Jack was also wrong in that interview to credit Eddie Herron with creating Captain Marvel. Herron was an important writer of the character but the early stories were written by Bill Parker and drawn by C.C. Beck. It should probably be noted that the Jimmy Olsen cover art you printed on page 26 was not a finished drawing by Jack but a rough sketch. Also, in the transcript for the Kirby panel at San Diego, I want to make clear that I did not mean to belittle the talents of Bob Kanigher, who is one of my all-time favorite comic book writers. I just felt that the Losers strip was not up to his usual standard and that Jack did something extraordinary with a very weak premise. I apologize for not making that clearer at the time. Hope it doesn’t sound like I’m looking for mistakes...but you know how these things get perpetuated if they aren’t swiftly corrected. Mark Evanier, Los Angeles, CA (Your efforts are greatly appreciated, Mark. We’re still pretty new to this publishing stuff, and it’s great to have knowledgeable folks like you to set us straight when we make a mistake. We always want to correct our errors ASAP.)
Celebrating the life and career of the King!
BIMO NTHLY!
O N SALE HERE!
Fully Authorized by the Kirby Estate
Posters For Sale! We have extra copies of the FULL-COLOR 17" x 24" promotional poster we give to comic shops that carry TJKC. Help us pay for our press run, and get a beautiful Kirby collectible in the process! Price includes shipping in a sturdy mailing tube. ($7 US, $8 Canada, $10 outside N. America.) See the order form on page 42. Orion, Demon, & Mr. Miracle are TM & © DC Comics, Inc.
The Big Kirby Contest!
I created the “Jam” drawing with Schulz, Meyers and Kirby (TJKC #8, pg. 21). I sent the board around with instructions to each cartoonist to send it on to the next, then back to me. Gad! I was having fun in those days! My collection of Comic-Con souvenir books is in storage, so I can’t tell you which year’s book it was in. The new Jack Kirby Collector is wonderful! I’m delighted it will be distributed in stores. Deserves the widest exposure possible. Bravo! Shel Dorf, San Diego, CA (For those who may not know, Shel is the founder of the San Diego Comic Con, and an awfully nice guy as well. The Jam drawing was from the 1974 SDCC souvenir book—we received a copy from subscriber Jeff Gelb the day after #8 went to press!)
t’s easy! Just tell us what your favorite single Kirby story of all time is (any story Jack was involved in qualifies, whether as artist, writer, or both). There are no wrong answers, but you can only vote once! We’ll print the results in TJKC #13, and randomly draw voter’s names and award the following:
I
Grand Prize Package: • Kirby’s GODS Portfolio • 21st Century Archives Kirby Card Set • • Italian Magazines, reprinting the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel • • New Gods #1 • Argosy Magazine with Jack’s “Street Code” story •
A Note From The Editor We’ve received a number of letters asking when The Jack Kirby Collector would confront the issue of “Who Did What?” in creating the Marvel Universe. Many of you felt this FF issue was the time to do it. A lot of misinformation has been spread about this topic over the years, and rather than add to the confusion, TJKC is steering clear for the moment. At some point in the future, when we can add something constructive to the discussion, rest assured we’ll take it up in-depth. I think most comic fans believe that Stan and Jack both contributed to the creation of those classic Marvel characters. But Marvel has continually neglected to acknowledge Jack’s contributions (and Steve Ditko’s as well). So in conjunction with Dr. Mark Miller’s letter-writing campaign, we’re asking readers to write a brief, polite letter to Marvel Comics, asking that they put “Created by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby” on books Stan and Jack co-created. The address is: Mr. Terry Stewart, Marvel Comics, 387 Park Ave. South, New York, NY 10016. (Those of you who wish to delve deeper into the “Who Did What” topic should locate a copy of Pure Images #1 for Greg Theakston’s excellent account of the behind-the-scenes events that shaped the creation of the Marvel super-heroes. It’s a very credible mix of facts and speculation, and one of the best accounts I’ve seen.)
2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place winners will be randomly awarded Card Sets, Italian Marvel Magazines, or Kirby comics. Very few entrants have chosen the same story, and to prevent anyone from influencing your vote, we’ll only run the final tally. So vote today! NEXT ISH: We explore the lighter side of Jack with our Humor theme issue. It leads off with an interview with the irrepressible Rosalind Kirby (you’re gonna love this one, folks!). The fun continues as we take a look at Jack’s (ofttimes not intentionally) funny characters and stories, plus the all-time funniest tales about Jack. There’ll be belly dancers, pro wrestlers, superhero plumbers, and more yuks than you can shake a stick at. So prepare to laugh until you cry, and be here in early April. ’Til then, Keep Mine Kirby!
KNOW YE THESE, THE HALLOWED RANKS OF KIRBYDOM: Kirby Collector)—A fan dedicated to the Buyer of Issues)—Subscriber who J.K.C. (Jack never-ending pursuit of Jack’s work. F.B.I. (Frantic calls when his issue of TJKC is one day late. Kirby Phile)—One who has first print(Devil Dinosaur Touter)—A Kirby fan so C.K.P. (Crazed ings of every issue of TJKC, and saves the D.D.T. devoted, he thinks Moonboy hung the moon. mailing envelopes they came in. (Generous Nonselfish Professional)—Any (Submittor Of Stuff)—One who has submitted G.N.P. comics pro who volunteers their services to S.O.S. something for publication in TJKC. TJKC due to their love of all things Kirby. of Credit Deliverer)—One who has L.C.D. (Letter sent at least one letter to Marvel Comics, requesting they credit Jack for his creations.
Of Zealots)—A wonderful woman R.O.Z. (Receiver who selflessly puts up with her husband’s fans’ lunacy. The highest honor in Kirbydom.
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Classifieds WANTED: Especially interested in Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko pre-hero Marvel and early Marvel superhero covers, splashes, and pages. Buy-Sell-Trade! Other artists too. Conrad Eschenberg, Rt. 1, Box 204-A, Cold Spring, NY 10516, (914)265-2649. ______________________________ WANTED: The Marvelmania Portfolio. I am willing to pay the highest prices possible. Contact - Brian Postman, #2A, 238 East 24th Street, New York, NY 10010 or call: (212)213-6242. ______________________________ WANTED: “Jack Kirby’s Heroes & Villains” (1987 Ltd. “pencil” edition of 1000 copies, signed and numbered). Contact: Brian Postman, #2A 238 East 24th St., New York, NY 10010 or call (212)213-6242. ______________________________ WANTED: LATE 1940’s-50s S&K Comics: Black Magic, Headline, JTTG, YL, YR, etc. Pre-hero Marvels: Amazing Fantasy, Journey Into Mystery, Strange Tales, Tales Of Suspense, Tales To Astonish. Have many duplicates to swap. Geoffrey Mahfuz, Box 171, Dracut, MA 01826. (508)452-2768. ______________________________ BUYING: Collector seeks to acquire a collection of early 1960s Kirby Marvel Art, to start my instant dream collection, for appropriate instant cash. Let me buy your treasures. Steven Vano, 7 Rollet Drive, Toronto, Canada M6L 1J8, (416)249-6451. ______________________________ FOR SALE: Jack Kirby’s GODS, in original folder, 4 plates and folder handsigned by Kirby. In Good shape. $80, postage included. Jeff Gelb, c/o R&R, 10100 Santa Monica Blvd, 5th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90067. ______________________________ SELLING: Fantastic Four #44 GD, #47 GD, #54 VG, #74 FN-, #79 FN-, $6.50 each; #53 FN, #57 FN, #66 VG+, #67 FN-, $15.00 each; #89 FN, #99 VG+, #108 VF, $5.00 each. Postpaid. Patrick Price, 2614 Lyon Street, Des Moines, IA 50317. ______________________________ WANTED: Chase Cards K4, K5, and KM1 through KM5 to the Comic Art Tribute to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Also Marvelmania magazines or posters by Jack Kirby. Will consider trades. Patrick Price, 2614 Lyon Street, Des Moines, IA 50317. ______________________________
EDE@finaid.santarosa.edu, or write to: 2705 Range Ave. Apt. 139, Santa Rosa, CA 95403, or phone (707)5241583. ______________________________ FOR SALE: 1978 Silver Surfer Graphic Novel by Lee & Kirby. Absolute Mint unread copies. $50 each. Kirby’s GODS Portfolio, slight water damage on upper prints (top 1-1/2”), otherwise nice. $20 each. Phil Schlaefer, 24 E. Campbell Ave., Campbell, CA 95008. 408-378-3667, FAX 408-3786227. ______________________________
If you’re viewing a digital version of this publication, PLEASE read this plea from the publisher! his is COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, which is NOT INTENDED FOR FREE T DOWNLOADING ANYWHERE. If you’re a print subscriber, or you paid the modest fee we charge to download it at our website, you have our sincere thanks—your support allows us to keep producing publications like this one. If instead you downloaded it for free from some other website or torrent, please know that it was absolutely 100% DONE WITHOUT OUR CONSENT, and it was an ILLEGAL POSTING OF OUR COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. If that’s the case, here’s what you should do:
WANTED: For TJKC article (photocopies OK ). Tales Of Suspense (Cap) Marvel Masterworks, Spirit World #1, Marvel 2001 Treasury Edition. Contact Jon B. Cooke, PO Box 601, West Kingston, RI 02892 or call (401)7824571. Email: werpcg@aol.com. ______________________________
1) Go ahead and READ THIS DIGITAL ISSUE, and see what you think. 2) If you enjoy it enough to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and purchase a legal download of it from our website, or purchase the print edition at our website (which entitles you to the Digital Edition for free) or at your local comic book shop. We’d love to have you as a regular paid reader. 3) Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR COMPUTER and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. 4) Finally, DON’T KEEP DOWNLOADING OUR MATERIAL ILLEGALLY, for free. We offer one complete issue of all our magazines for free downloading at our website, which should be sufficient for you to decide if you want to purchase others. If you enjoy our publications enough to keep downloading them, support our company by paying for the material we produce.
COMIC TEST COVERS: New Gods, Kamandi, others. Limited DC cover approvals $10-$25 each. Ray Spivey, PO Box 27274, Austin, TX 78755, (512)338-4971 CST evenings. ______________________________ TAKING OFFERS on Kirby FF/Dr. Doom unpublished inked Pin-Up. Call (212)979-9205. ______________________________
We’re not some giant corporation with deep pockets, and can absorb these losses. We’re a small company—literally a “mom and pop” shop—with dozens of hard-working freelance creators, slaving away day and night and on weekends, to make a pretty minimal amount of income for all this work. We love what we do, but our editors, authors, and your local comic shop owner, rely on income from this publication to stay in business. Please don’t rob us of the small amount of compensation we receive. Doing so will ensure there won’t be any future products like this to download.
SUBSCRIBE to The Jack Kirby Quarterly, the British counterpart to TJKC. US: £8.00 for 4 issues. UK: £4.50 for 4 issues. Rest of Europe: £7.00 for 4 issues. (UK funds only, payable to: C. HARPER) Limited back issues - please inquire to: C. Harper, 25 Napier Dr., Tipton, West Midlands, DY4 7NW, UK. (Our latest issue - #6 features an interview with Dick Ayers!) ______________________________
TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at
www.twomorrows.com
NEED photocopy of Jack’s 1970s Mattel Superman Game Puzzle art and Captain Nice poster art for upcoming issue of TJKC. Send copies to TJKC!
Rare Kirby Artwork For Sale
Unpublished
$2000
FOXHOLE
$2500
Unpublished
$1000
IN LOVE Cover $2000
8 page story
$2500
Call Susan Barrows at (770) 424-5151 2pm-8pm EST Monday-Friday
BLACK MAGIC $1250
WIN A PRIZE $1750
KIRBY ORIGINAL ART for sale: Fantastic Four #32, page 13. Chic Stone inks. Has 1/3 page splash. Large art. $1250. Thor #147, page 11. Colletta inks. 1/3 splash (“Truly Art Thou–Loki!”) $450. Both pieces in fine condition. Call Andrew at 617-6483215. ______________________________ KIRBY FAN interested in collaboration with other Kirby fan(s) to produce a Kirbyesque comic. Contact Juan Gonzalez for details at
POLICE TRAP $1750
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New Gods WHO’S WHO 16”X24”
$2500
Ano ther Tantalizing TJKC Treasure!
Here are jack’s Pencils for an unused FF Pin-Up (Likely meant for reed & sue’s wedding in FF Annual #3, 1965). The Human Torch and the Rock were redrawn (possibly by Marie Severin), and Stan Lee’s handwriting on the art says, “To rch Bigger, Fix Heart.” Jo e Sinno tt generously agreed to ink it (and fix the TOrch and ROck), creating a “new” Kirby/ Sinno tt collaboration for this issue’s cover. Thanks, jo e!
Characters © Marvel Entertainment Group, Artwork © Jack Kirby