(above) From Roz Kirby’s private sketchbook, circa 1979, here’s Tana Nile.
Retrospectives
Jack Kirby’s Pulp Fiction
by Richard Kolkman
(right) Steve Rude’s cover painting for the 2000 TwoMorrows book Streetwise, featuring autobiographical comics stories, including Jack’s own “Street Code.”
(below) Is this an example of art worlds within art worlds? Fritz Lang’s influential 1927 film Metropolis drew its artistic influences from German Expressionism, Art Deco, Bauhaus, and Cubism. In Jack’s unique architecture, sense of exaggeration, cubist Kirbytech and machinery, and even the shiny Surfer himself, those same artistic influences are evident.
There are worlds within worlds—depending on where one looks. But before we explore other worlds, let’s get down to Earth. Growing up in the Lower East Side was a tough life. Constantly looking over his shoulder, Kirby became encoded in the “Street Code.” Once, young Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby) was walking down the street in a rain storm, and discovered a life-changing book.
As Kirby remembered in 1990, “I came out of school (P.S. 20) one day, and there was this pulp magazine. It was a rainy day, and it was floating towards the sewer. So I pick up this pulp magazine, and it’s Wonder Stories [Quarterly, V2#3, Spring 1931] and its got a rocket ship on the cover, and I’d never seen a rocket ship. I said, ‘What the heck is this?’ I took it home and hid it under my pillow so nobody should know I was reading it.” And soitantly, if the other street kids caught him reading such highbrow stuff, they would have clobbered him.
But what was a pulp? How did it get there? Readers’ imaginations had been sparked by science fiction since the 19th Century novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. The first “pulp” magazine, named for its cheap pulpwood paper, was Argosy, published in 1897 by Frank Munsey. What followed was an avalanche of adventure,
detective, romance, and science fiction pulps. Amid this torrent was Weird Tales, which mixed sci-fi with the supernatural, from 1923 to 1954. Also, Martin Goodman (Timely/Atlas/Marvel) started his publishing empire with Complete Western Book in February 1938.
And what of Wonder Stories Quarterly? In 1908, Hugo Gernsback (the man who coined the term “science fiction”) began publishing Modern Electronics, and others from there; including Wonder Stories Quarterly V1#1 in 1929. The issue Kirby found that day was the seventh issue of that title (V2#3).
Kirby’s accounts of this pivotal event have fueled confusion and speculation: which pulp did Kirby first discover? For years, it was like the paradox of Schrodinger’s Cat. The pulp appears to be different issues, depending from what point of view you’re looking. Steve Rude portrayed Kirby’s pulp discovery on his stunning painted cover for Streetwise, a book from TwoMorrows in 2000. And Kirby’s statement, “I’d never seen a rocket ship” belies his environment. Kirby always admired the retro-futurism of newspaper comics—the bold and colorful adventures of Buck Rogers (1929) and Flash Gordon (1934). Kirby always said: “The comics were as close as the nearest ash can.” Also, as an inveterate moviegoer, Kirby might have witnessed the mechanical pageantry of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Here are some other details about that fateful day (from Jack Kirby Treasury, V1): “The cover was amazing! I’d never seen anything like it—space ships, and futuristic cities. At that moment, something galvanized in my
Incidental Iconography
An ongoing analysis of Kirby’s visual shorthand, and how he inadvertently used it to develop his characters, by
Sean Kleefeld
hile development of The Black Hole traces back to the first half of the 1970s, it wasn’t really moved through the studios too aggressively until after Star Wars became a runaway hit, and suddenly everyone wanted to have their own space epic. Many studios tried to knock out something quickly and cheaply to cash in on the trend before it dissipated (an unnecessary concern, in hindsight), but Disney put its massive financial weight behind The Black Hole. It turned out to be the most expensive film Disney made up to that point, and licensing deals were struck up with a number of companies to produce toys, games, coloring books, and comics.
One thing Disney was able to do themselves was to leverage the Treasury of Classic Tales comic strip they produced to run an adaptation of the story. They experimented with the basic comic strip idea in 1950 and 1951, and those had been judged successful enough to produce it as a regular weekly Sunday comic beginning in 1952, using a rotation of artists. Typically, they would adapt one of their movies (both animated and live action) over the course of either 13
or 26 weeks. So getting an adaptation of The Black Hole here wasn’t unusual. Getting Jack Kirby to draw it, however, was.
The story, of course, follows that of the movie, as do the general designs and aesthetics, so Jack’s primary storytelling skills brought to the table for this project were in his panel layouts and overall pacing. You may then ask why I’m bringing this up in the framework of a column in which I talk about how Jack designed his characters.
For most people, Jack’s version of the characters were actually the first ones they saw. The comic strip launched on September 2, 1979, well before the movie’s December opening, and even before the Gold Key comic book adaptation that came out in November. (The art for that, as an aside, was by Dan Spiegle.) So while they’re not Jack’s original designs, they will have been the primary version most people saw for the months leading up to the movie.
Likely the first thing you’ll notice in looking at virtually any of Jack’s art for this strip is that the human characters look nothing like the actors. This was very deliberate. Given that Spiegle’s versions
(below) Yellow
and
A regular column focusing on Kirby’s least known work, by Barry Forshaw
THE UNACCEPTABLE
JACK KIRBY
Those of us who grew up in the 1960s are finding that nostalgia for the reading material of our youth is a tricky business. If we enjoyed James Bond novels of Ian Fleming, a lot of the attitudes of the books are now considered unacceptable and liable to give offense; in fact, the Ian Fleming estate has now issued sanitized versions of the books, carefully removing all the elements which might upset the easily shocked or easily offended. And Fleming is not alone in this retrospective reworking: the writer Roald Dahl has enjoyed similar posthumous editing—even the great Mark Twain has not been exempt from such tinkering. But surely, I hear you say, the work of Jack Kirby won’t attract retrospective censorship, will it?
Well, the answer is: not yet. Recent hardback reprints of the King’s work on a futuristic strip in which the main protagonist is an Asian super-villain—the notorious Yellow Claw—arrived intact, complete with the classic stereotypical accoutrements of the East: drooping mustache, pale yellow skin, long fingernails, and embroidered silk costume. It was probably wise, in fact, to point out—as the introduction to the reprints does—that these unfortunate notions of the “yellow peril” are very much of their time, and need to be seen in context. In fact, of course, although the Yellow Claw’s various battles with American society take place in
OBSCURA
the 1950s, his creators— Stan Lee, Al Feldstein, Joe Maneely, and Jack Kirby— would have known that the character was essentially a photocopy of Sax Rohmer’s malign genius
Fu Manchu. The Claw’s opponent in the short-lived comic series would not be a Sherlock Holmes-like Scotland Yard Inspector in the vein of Rohmer’s Nayland Smith, but a young Chinese FBI man, Jimmy Woo—and including this character was something of a clever stroke, setting a good Chinese protagonist against an evil one. As for the strip, while the stories are almost always too brief to develop either character or plot, there are still flourishes of Kirby’s imagination, such as the giant menacing figure of Temujai, the Golden Goliath from issue #2 (“See the man who is a thousand feet tall!”). This monstrous ploy of the Yellow Claw, prone to grabbing helicopters in his gigantic palm, is a precursor to the towering threats of Marvel’s pre-superhero giant monster era, and the all-too-brief appearance of the robotic threat looks forward to the more grotesque characters that were to follow. As in almost every encounter between the super-villain and his FBI opponent, it’s the latter who comes out on top, with the Yellow Claw threatening revenge next time they meet—and readers of the series will wonder why the Claw doesn’t dump his niece, the beguiling Suwan, who betrays her megalomaniac relative to Jimmy Woo in story after story. But let’s put this all into perspective—the misdeeds of this villain are hardly essential reading for the average Jack Kirby aficionado. But if you’re reading this column, you are clearly someone who is interested in “Kirby Obscura”, and Kirby’s super criminal is certainly that. And given the current climate of censorship of the unacceptable, he is likely to remain thoroughly obscure.
Barry Forshaw is the author of Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide and American Noir (available from Amazon) and the editor of Crime Time (www.crimetime. co.uk); he lives in London.
Barry Forshaw
Claw #2 (Dec. 1956)
Fighting American #2 (July 1954).
Reed Richards recognizes the threatening voice emanating from the night sky as that of his former college acquaintance, Victor von Doom—a disgraced dabbler in both science and sorcery—and a short flashback to Doom’s disastrous attempt to contact the nether world is presented, followed by his exile. Two years into the future, a fuller origin would be revealed in Fantastic Four Annual #2.
Once that heavy web-like net envelopes F.F. headquarters, the story kicks into high gear. Sue Storm offers herself as a hostage and the F.F. are whisked away in a shark-faced––or is it demon-faced?––helicopter to Doctor Doom’s castle, where, spawned upon his throne, Doom explains
what he has in store for them.
At this point, they are not yet enemies. Doom is after the treasure chest of Blackbeard the pirate. He wants the F.F. to go back in time to obtain this treasure for himself. With Sue as a hostage, the other three agree, and off they go in yet another three-panel sequence where the yellow panel on which they stand illuminates, taking them back into the past.
Three-Panel Action
It isn’t long before they’re having an uncharacteristic adventure in olden days, disguised as men of that time. In another three-panel sequence, Ben Grimm is given a black beard and eye patch to help disguise his ugly countenance. Gathering at a tavern, the trio succumb
Foundations
Here’s a classic Simon & Kirby story from Justice Traps the Guilty #6 (Oct. 1948)—previously only reprinted in 2008’s Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics. Art restoration and color by Christopher Fama.
KIRBY TECHNOACTIVE
As a child born early in the 20th century, Jack Kirby was fascinated by science and technology. He vividly remembered as a boy coming across a copy of Hugo Gernsback’s pulp magazine Wonder Stories. On the cover there was a picture of a rocket ship, something Kirby had never seen before. The magazine was filled with science fiction tales that sparked his imagination. From that moment forward, he became an avid reader of such literature.
Other creative minds were paying attention to sci-fi literary concepts. In 1930, the science fiction novel Gladiator, written by author Philip Wylie, was published. Its main character had gained superhuman strength as a result of his father’s scientific experiment. It is not too far out to speculate that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s 1938 creation Superman was inspired by this story.
With the success of Superman, the demand for similar characters drove Kirby to enter the growing comic book industry. Throughout his career, Kirby continually turned to science fiction-based ideas as inspirations for his stories.
In his deeply probing and insightful book on Kirby, Hand of Fire, author Charles Hatfield speaks of the King’s work in context of the notion of the technological sublime. This is a term coined by Leo Marx in his book The Machine in the Garden, to indicate a quasispiritual haze given off by any particularly visible and impressive technological advance. From Hatfield’s perspective, “The technological sublime is a favored mode of Kirby’s: the use of high-tech motifs to represent vast forces that not only are ineffable and awful, but also may result in shock, estrangement or madness.”
From the beginning of his career in comics, Kirby’s work was larger than life, combining the vitality of the figure in motion with an ability to design and render elaborate machinery with exceptional compositional skill. His fascination with human nature, and ancient as well as modern cultures—including their folklore and mythologies—also enriched his storytelling abilities. In Hatfield’s words, “The blending of the archaic occult and futuristic technological is a notable Kirby fixation.”
It wasn’t long before the future King found a partner in artist/ businessman Joe Simon. The team created Captain America—a character whose strength had been enhanced by scientific means— as well as creating mythological and occult-based heroes such as Mercury and The Vision. The latter was a supernatural being who inhabited another dimension and entered ours through the medium of smoke.
1 In 1946, Simon and Kirby worked for a DC Comics publication called Real Fact Comics, an attempt to merge science fact and fiction in imaginative speculation on future technology. Notice that S&K used the term Rocketeers to describe future space travelers. Kirby would later use that word to name a team, The Three Rocketeers, in the 1958 comic Race for the Moon
Also in 1958, Kirby was working on DC Comics’ Challengers of the Unknown, a magazine heavily relying on scientific and technological plot themes that many consider to be a forerunner of the Fantastic Four. In an article called “Challenger of the Silver Age” published in TJKC #83, author Will Murray emphasized the singular influence of that particular comic book. Murray noted that in 2021, comic historian Robert Beerbohm posted on Facebook that he had spoken with former DC publisher Irwin Donenfeld.
Beerbohm wrote: “When I was interviewing Irwin Donenfeld, (DC publisher 1953–1968), one of the many topics we covered and talked extensively about was his idea of a new tryout comic book called Showcase and its impacts regarding Flash, Challengers of the Unknown, etc. From Irwin’s perspective, it was Challengers of the Unknown which had shown the way via hard sales for super-heroic revivals to be possible.”
Starting with the fourth issue, Challengers was inked by the brilliant artist Wallace Wood. Wood’s mastery of depicting mechanical gadgetry was profound. Having served in the Air Force as a paratrooper, Wood was fascinated
with the equipment he worked with, later incorporating its various design elements into his sci-fi illustrations. He used elaborately structured machinery a good deal in his intricate and inventive compositions; his style of embellishment was a perfect compliment to Kirby’s amazing artistry. 2 Their matchless artistic collaboration can be seen on this page from Challengers of the Unknown #4, depicting a futuristic city that appears to be an architectural construction of machinery.
Shortly thereafter, Kirby briefly moved into the arena of newspaper comics. He again collaborated with artist Wallace Wood on a strip called Sky Masters, which focused on the burgeoning Space Program. 3 Notice how in his inking of Kirby’s layout, Wood often uses solid areas of black to sharply define shapes and give them more substance, particularly in things like the tank-shaped Moon Machine. The artist had an uncanny ability to employ black spotting in a way that few others have matched. As Kirby has often mentioned him as one of his favorite inkers, I maintain that Jack was profoundly influenced by the work he did with Wallace Wood.
In 1961, Kirby, working for Marvel with Stan Lee, embarked on a series that took his fascination with spacerelated technology to another level. The Fantastic Four came into being as a result of an aborted trip to the stars, and very much like Sky Masters and the Challengers, their adventures continued to utilize science fiction-based themes. 4 If we look at this panel from Fantastic Four #7 (Oct. 1962), we can easily see a distinct similarity to the composition of the page from Challengers of the Unknown #4 (Nov. 1958).
With the Fantastic Four, Kirby’s talent for dealing with complex relationships between characters expanded to the further complexity of relationships between civilizations, and indeed, between worlds. With stunning regularity, as with incredible excursions such as the Galactus Trilogy, Kirby took the notion of intergalactic interactions as far out as one could imagine, and then brought it back again to the human personal level.
MythTakes When Thor Soared
(below) Based on the 1967 inscription to Len Wein, this discarded pencil page took place prior to Thor #142. Ego only assumed human form in #133, with the Recorder present, so we’d guess this page was originally for a sequence in #134, and was scuttled when Stan felt the strip was getting too far-out (see Lee’s comment in this issue’s interview).
Jack Kirby’s Thor has always straddled two worlds. On the one hand, there was his Asgardian heritage and the many tales that revolved around that—with Odin, Loki, Storm Giants, and so forth. Then there was his earthly life, with Jane Foster, Don Blake, and a host of Midgard villains including the Grey Gargoyle, Cobra and Mr. Hyde, Absorbing Man, and the like. In Journey Into Mystery #97 (the 15th issue featuring Thor), Kirby began the “Tales of Asgard” featurette, where Norse mythological aspects were suddenly in the fore.
The Thunder God’s science fiction exploits examined by John Morrow, with assistance from Shane Foley
After Kirby resumed drawing the main Thor strip regularly in JIM #101, the previous trend of living in two worlds continued, though with the Asgardian/mythological aspects coming more and more to prominence. But over time, celestial Viking ships were replaced by spacecraft, and spears were replaced by super cannons. That’s one aspect of Jack’s nearly decadelong Thor run that played a huge part in the eventual Fourth World’s foundation: when Jack was directing the strip’s focus toward science fiction, and outer space adventures.
With 60 years’ hindsight, it seems like there were a lot of space-bound adventures in Thor (like #134, above), but does my memory hold up to scrutiny? And were those sci-fi stories better left to other strips like the Fantastic Four, keeping Thor firmly planted in its mythological roots?
In lieu of being able to ask Stan, Jack, or The Recorder for their take, let’s analyze Jack’s Thor run for answers.
En-Garde, Asgard!
For the year following his debut in JIM #83, while Loki (and briefly, Odin) did appear in #85, the extremely powerful Thunder God was mostly fighting Communists and random Earth villains. [A sidenote: Stan portrayed Communists as villains in his comics as often as Jack did Nazis in his. Someone needs to do an article comparing the two men and why they fixated on those political parties—any takers out there?]
Joe Sinnott took over drawing the strip for several issues while Jack was busy creating other new series for Marvel, and when Kirby returned to depict Thor’s battle against the lackluster Lava Man in #97 (in what looks to be more like layouts than full pencils), he begins “Tales of Asgard” as the back-up strip, with much fuller penciling than the lead story.
Was the addition of “Tales of Asgard” due to readers demanding more of Thor’s backstory, or was it Jack (or Stan) just sewing mythological oats? It’d be great to be able to look at letter columns from JIM #83–97 to see what the response to the “Thor” feature was, but alas, Journey Into Mystery didn’t get a letter’s page until issue #109.
That may be just as well. I suspect there was a tepid response to those initial Kirbyless Thor outings. Jack was Stan’s go-to guy for starting or revamping strips, and he brought Jack back to stay, beginning with the lead story in JIM #101 (Feb. 1964), and “TOA” continued through Thor #145 (Oct. 1967)—just shy of 50 installments.
Stan also knew he had a good thing going with someone like Jack on board to steer the story direction. As he
said in Comic Book Artist #2 (1998), “...90% of the ‘Tales of Asgard’ stories were Jack’s plots, and they were great! He knew more about Norse mythology than I ever did (or at least he enjoyed making it up!). I was busy enough just putting in the copy after he drew it.”
JIM #102 ends with this Lee blurb: “And so we leave one of the most colorful of all super heroes as he hurtles back thru the centuries to one of the weirdest adventures of all time! But that’s a tale for next issue...” It’s clear Stan had no idea what the next issue would be about at that point, and I’d argue that this is where the strip took its complete turn toward more mythological storytelling, compliments of Kirby. In #103, Asgard became intrinsically part of the lead stories, as the Enchantress and Executioner traveled from the Rainbow Bridge to menace Thor in Midgard.
But it wasn’t just an Asgardian focus that shifted the book’s trajectory. It’s obvious that as Jack was kicking Fantastic Four into high gear by introducing the Inhumans in issue #44 (Nov. 1965), Thor was undergoing a change. That same month, in Journey Into Mystery Annual #1, Thor met Hercules for the first time, and JIM #122 also transported the Absorbing Man to Asgard (sure, why not?). This smacks of Jack’s input, while the Mongolian “Demon” (with more “Commie” background characters) screams of Stan’s involvement. It feels like, at this point, Stan still wasn’t sold on fully committing to keeping Thor off-planet. Unlike the FF’s seemingly well planned story-to-story and issue-to-issue progression, Thor’s trajectory felt more haphazard and disjointed because of it.
However, I’d argue that once Stan backed off and let Jack explore the universe, it led to Thor’s best arcs, where Kirby looked to science fiction for inspiration. And I’ve got a methodology to back that up!
The Space Equation
Using my own evaluation system (where an issue gets an “E” for an Earth-focused story, an “A” for an Asgardian one, and “S” for a science fiction one, plus combinations thereof), I found that over Jack’s run on Thor, it’s overwhelmingly focused on earthly adventures (55%), then Asgard (38%), and sci-fi is lagging far behind (just 7%). But in my version of Kirby-math at least, [S>E+A], as I feel those 7% of stories, with their science fiction focus, are highly underrated, and some of the best of the batch. Lending more credence to this, is that Thor’s space epics were being created at the same time Kirby was crafting mind-blowing, fan-favorite story arcs in Fantastic Four, further stretching his, and readers’, imaginations.
Let’s dig in and see what Thor epics Jack was managing to pull off, while simultaneously forging unforgettable stories in
the Fantastic Four (and to a lesser extent, in Tales of Suspense with Captain America). [Note that while cover dates aren’t an exact determiner of what month Jack was drawing a story, they should be close enough to make these overlaps on the mark.]
Thor’s Epics vs. The Fantastic Four’s
THOR #126–130 (MARCH–JULY 1966)
More mythological than sci-fi, it’s the first true Thor epic. The Thunder God loses a fight to Hercules, Pluto dupes Herc into signing a contract to be banished to the Netherworld, and Thor battles to save Hercules from his hellish fate. “Tales of Asgard” in Thor #128 even gives us a glimpse of what Ragnarok would be like.
Created at the same time as:
FANTASTIC FOUR #48–50 (MARCH–MAY 1966), #51 (JUNE 1966)
The iconic Galactus Trilogy, and “The Man, This Monster”.
Radio Active Lee/Kirby 1967 Interview
[Mike Hodel (left, circa 1984) briefly hosted a science fiction program on New York’s WBAI radio in the late 1960s, where he interviewed Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (in this episode entitled “Will Success Spoil Spider-Man?”) in 1967. Soon after this interview, Hodel moved back to his native Los Angeles, where he hosted “Hour 25,” a science fiction program on KPFK radio from 1972 until his death in 1986. The show continued, often with guest hosts such as Harlan Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski, and, since 2000, “Mike Hodel’s Hour 25,” named in his memory, has continued to be broadcast via the internet at www. hour25online.com]
of the other books, too. Jack and I don’t do them all, although we do the Fantastic Four and Thor. Spider-Man has been a success since he started, and, luckily, I don’t think he’s been spoiled yet, so we just have our fingers crossed.
(below) A 1983 commission of The
(next page) Ahh, to be one of Jack’s “pals” in the 1960s, and to have received an amazing sketch like this one.
MIKE HODEL: Who goes around saving maidens, preventing banks from being robbed, and committing deeds of that type, under an alter ego for the name “Peter Parker?” How about “Tony Stark?”
Would you believe “Reed Richards?”
“Stan Lee?” “Jack Kirby?” Well, except for the last two, they’re all superheroes and they belong in Marvel comics, and they are written and drawn by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. And Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby are going to be answering questions about their superheroes. And I guess the first one would be addressed to Stan Lee, and it’s the title of this program. Stan, will success spoil Spider-Man?
STAN LEE: [chuckles]
Well, I don’t think anything could spoil old Spidey, as we lovingly call him. Just have to correct one thing you said, though. You said that, except for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the others are superheroes. We like to think of ourselves as superheroes, too. I might add also that there are other artists and other writers who do some
HODEL: I ran across Marvel comic books about six or eight months ago, and one of the things that drew me to Marvel comic books, and Spider-Man in particular, is a panel that showed Spider-Man swooping down on some bank robbers, and they said, “Whoops, here comes Spider-Man!” And he replies, “Who were you expecting? Vice President Humphrey?” Now, this is not a line you expect to find in a comic book, and it sort of symbolizes your whole approach to the field, which is offbeat and interesting. Was it your idea, Stan? Where did it come from?
LEE: Well, I guess, in that sense, it was my idea, since I write the dialogue. In a nutshell, our theory is—although maybe I shouldn’t give the theory in a nutshell, because then I don’t know what we’ll talk about for the rest of the half hour. But, at any rate, in a nutshell, our theory is that there’s no reason why a comic magazine couldn’t be as realistic and as well-written and drawn as any other type of literature. We try to write these things so that the characters speak the way a character would speak in a well-written movie, well-produced television show, and I think that’s what makes our books seem unique to a person who first picks them up. Nobody expects, as you say, that sort of thing in a comic book. But that’s a shame, because why shouldn’t someone expect reasonable and realistic dialogue in a comic book? Why do people feel that comic books have to be badly written? And we’re trying to engage in a one-company crusade to see to it that they’re not badly written.
HODEL: Jack, you drew and invented, if I’m not mistaken, Captain America, one of the earliest superheroes, who’s now plying his trade in Marvel comics. How did Captain America come to be, and does he have any particular relationship to your other superheroes?
JACK KIRBY: I guess Captain America, like all of the characters, came to be because of the fact that there is a need for them. Somebody needed Captain America, just as the public needed Superman. When Superman came on the scene, the public was ready for him, and they took him. And so, from Superman, who didn’t exactly satiate the public’s need for the superhero, so spawned the rest of them. The rest of them all came from Superman, and they all had various names, and various backgrounds, and they embraced various creeds. And Captain America came from the need for a patriotic character, because the times at that time were in a patriotic stir. The war was
Stan & Jack interviewed on New York’s WBAI radio on March 3, 1967 by Mike Hodel • Transcribed by Steven Tice, copyedited by Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas, and originally published in The Stan Lee Universe
(right) Stan and Jack at a National Cartoonist Society event in 1966.
Fly, Jack’s less successful precursor to SpiderMan.
coming on, and the corny cliché, the war clouds were gathering, and the drums were beginning to beat, and the American flag was beginning to show on the movie screens. And so Captain America had to come into existence, and it was just my good fortune to be there at the time when we were asked to create superheroes for the magazines that were coming into creation then, for the new magazines.
HODEL: Well, Captain America fought valiantly against the Axis from 1940 until after the war. Then what happened? When did he die off or go into hiding until he was revived by Marvel Comics?
KIRBY: Well, I believe that Captain America went into hiding like all ex-soldiers. I know I went into hiding. I didn’t show my face for quite a few years. In fact, I went out to Long Island with my wife and I got happily lost there and never found my way back to Manhattan. And so, feeling like I, myself, am Captain America, because of the fact that his feelings are mine when the drawings are created, and because his reactions are my reactions to the specific situations in the story—why, I have no compunction to say that we both were hiding for all those years, and were quite happy about it.
HODEL: Now that Captain America is back in the fight, has there been any talk about sending him to Vietnam? They could certainly use him.
KIRBY: Well, that’s Stan Lee’s department, and he can answer that. The editor always has the last word on that.
LEE: Well, the Secretary of Defense and myself just haven’t yet made up our minds. [laughs] I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll be sending him to Vietnam, really, because... it’s a funny thing. We treat these characters sort of tongue-in-cheek, and we get a lot of laughs out of them, we have a lot of fun with them. I somehow don’t know if it’s really in good taste to take something as serious as the situation in Vietnam and put a character like Captain America—. We would have to start treating him differently and take the whole thing very seriously, which we’re not prepared to do. The time that Jack talks about, when Captain America was first created, the books were written a little bit differently then. There wasn’t this type of subtle humor. The stories were very serious, and at that time I think it was okay to have Captain America fighting the Nazis and so forth, because they were done very seriously. But right now, I don’t think I’d feel right writing the stories about Vietnam.
them—have hang-ups. You have one character, one superhero, who is blind, named Daredevil, otherwise known as Matt Murdock. You have Spider-Man, Peter Parker, who is perhaps the most guilt-ridden teenager I’ve ever run across. And there are many others. How did you decide that these were going to be something more than superheroes, that they were going to have problems of their own?
LEE: Well, it was just the idea of trying to make them realistic, as we mentioned before, trying to write them a little bit better. It seems to me that the best type of story is the type of story a reader can relate to. The average superhero published by some of the other companies, you can’t really relate to them because they’re living in a vacuum. They just have a superpower, they can fly through the air or whatever, and that’s it. Other than that, they’re two-dimensional. Now, in order to make a person three-dimensional, he has to have a family life, he has to have personal problems, and so forth. I’ve said this so often that it’s almost becoming a cliché with me, but what we try to do is, we know that these superhero stories are really fairy tales. They’re fairy tales for older people. We think of them that way. We don’t really write them for young kids.
And what we ask the reader to do, and hope he will do, is accept the basic premise, the basic fairy tale quality, such as the fact that Spider-Man does have the proportionate strength of a spider if a spider were his size, and that Spider-Man does have the ability to cling to walls, which, obviously, nobody does. However, once we accept that basic premise, that fairy tale quality, we try to make everything else very realistic. The idea being, what would a real person do? How would he react? How would his life be if he had the proportionate strength of a spider and could cling to walls? Wouldn’t he still have sinus trouble, possibly, trouble with girls, a sick relative that he was worried about, have to worry about his school marks, and so forth? So once we get beyond the fairy tale quality, we try to write realistic stories. We try to have the characters speaking in a realistic way. To me, I feel that this gives it a great deal of interest. You have the combination of the fantasy mixed with the most realistic story you can get, and, well, we’ve found sort of a winning combination.
HODEL: All of these superheroes—not all of them, but many of
KIRBY: Well, a prizefighter can win the championship of the world, and go home and be very inadequate at home, inadequate enough to
(next page, top) For $1, you could order this 8" x 10" photo of Stan by mail, from ads in Marvel’s July-Aug. 1968 issues.
(below) Original art from Thor #141 (June 1967), an issue Jack would’ve been drawing just prior to this interview. On the back of this page is Stan’s rough scribbles for the hodgepodge cover of this issue (next page, bottom).
have a lot of family trouble.
HODEL: Which may be one reason for his fighting.
LEE: [chuckles] Very good.
HODEL: You’ve also created something unique in comic books, that I know of. You’ve come up with an antihero, a physicist by the name of Bruce Banner who periodically becomes the Hulk. He destroys things a lot, as somebody said to me. What made you think that an antihero who goes around tearing down bridges and buildings and things like that, could sell comic books?
LEE: Actually, I think we knew when we started that he could sell comic books better than anybody. I don’t think it’s that we’re this brilliant. Don’t forget, we’ve had
so much experience that we’d have to be stupid not to have learned by all these years of experience. And we get a lot of fan mail, and you learn a lot by what the readers write, and we learned that the villains are usually at least as popular as the heroes are. They have a great appeal.
KIRBY: Well, what makes you think that Boris Karloff can’t be a great star in movies? It’s the same analogy, I imagine.
LEE: Right. And what happens is, after a while, we have a lot of trouble, by trying to humanize our heroes and giving them faults and failings. We do the same with our villains. We try to give them understandable qualities and reasons why they are the way they are. We’ve even had villains who reformed and became heroes. One standing joke among our readers, and among the artists and writers who work with us, our so-called bullpen, is, after a while, we don’t know who the heroes and who the villains are. There’s such a fine line, you see, dividing them. Well, when we started with the Hulk, we just knew he had to be popular because he had everything in his favor. It had the Jekyll and Hyde format. It had the idea of a monster who was sympathetic, the way Frankenstein really had been in the first movie. Frankenstein’s Monster, that is. He wasn’t bad, he was misunderstood. All he wanted to do was be left alone. I would have bet my bottom dollar the Hulk would have to be well-received, and he was. And he still is one of our most popular characters, probably the most popular one with our college readers, college-age readers.
HODEL: That’s what I was going to ask. You say your books are aimed not at children, but at young people and adults. Is there any way that you can check for magazine sales and so forth as to what your readership is?
LEE: No, our only check, really, is through the mail. Which is a very good check, because we get thousands of letters a week. I would guess we must get almost as much mail as the Beatles, and we don’t even sing. And by reading all this mail, a monumental task in itself, we’ve learned a lot about who our readers are, what they like and dislike, and almost half of our mail is from college students and college-age people.
HODEL: What do they like, and what do they not like?
LEE: Just what you’d think they like. They like whatever we do that seems to be original, unexpected. They like the degree of satire we put into the books. They’re mad for the quality of artwork, which I think is far superior than has ever been presented in any other comics over the years. They like the realism, which it’s always a difficult thing to say, because somebody who isn’t familiar with our books would think, “This guy must have flipped. He’s talking about comic books, and he’s talking about realism.” But
Mark Evanier
JACK F.A.Q.s
A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby
Stan & Jack WonderCon Panel
(above) Mark and Danny led a lively panel at this year’s WonderCon, to a sizeable crowd. Each has written a definitive book about Kirby and Lee, respectively (right).
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Danny’s 2023 book
Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin is currently available. And in 2011, he co-edited TwoMorrows’ own The Stan Lee Universe with Roy Thomas, after spending the better part of a week researching Stan’s archives at the University of Wyoming, where Lee donated his papers.
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Jack and Stan began their last great Thor epic in issue #154 (July 1968), with the introduction of Mangog. After this continued story wrapped in #157 (Oct. 1968), issue #158 was a mostly reprint issue, possibly because Jack was visiting California to prepare for his upcoming move there from New York.
[This panel was held at WonderCon 2025 in Anaheim, California on Saturday, March 29, featuring Danny Fingeroth (author of A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee) and Mark Evanier (author of Kirby, King of Comics). The transcript was copyedited by both panelists and John Morrow, and begins with a mention of Larry Lieber’s new novel CHIRPS.]
MARK EVANIER: Larry Lieber was a very important person in the history of comics, and he’s now the last man standing from the original [Marvel Bullpen.]
DANNY FINGEROTH: Is he the last one?
EVANIER: The next person in the office was Roy [Thomas], who wasn’t there for the first couple of years. Can you name anybody else who was in [an early-1960s] Marvel comic?
FINGEROTH: I cannot, no.
FINGEROTH: Oh, okay, in 25 words or less?
EVANIER: Yes. I’ll count. [laughter]
FINGEROTH: I knew Stan a long time. I would say that I had a comfortable relationship with him. Unlike you and Jack, I didn’t know him from the time I was a teenager and being very close family friends. I had more or less a professional relationship with Stan, but anywhere I went that wasn’t Marvel, I was the guy who knew Stan. So I worked with him when I worked for Byron Preiss’ company, when I worked at Visionary Media, I worked with him when I worked for Wizard World and I was his regular moderator for a couple of years, and I had some wonderful, intimate, personal moments with him and [his wife] Joan.
EVANIER: Check out Larry’s novel, I’m sure it’s fascinating. I haven’t seen it yet. Anyway, let’s talk about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I am, I believe, the only person alive who worked for both men over the years, and they were both amazing men in their own way. Danny, why don’t you tell people a little bit about Stan—the Stan you knew, and what was special about him?
EVANIER: So tell us some things that were good about him.
FINGEROTH: Stan loved to give people work. I mean, I think in the history of comics, pre-Marvel, in the Forties and Fifties when Marvel was producing a phenomenal amount of material, you could—if you could hold a pencil, you could depend on Stan Lee to give you work, which led to Stan actually building up the inventory, supposedly a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of material that they didn’t use, which Martin Goodman was not pleased about. The only person I ever figured out who Stan did not have work for, and maybe you can give some insight, was Irwin Hasen, who I loved dearly—Irwin was the co-creator of Dondi, and did a lot of work for DC in the Forties: Wonder Woman and the Justice Society. And anytime I mentioned one to the other, I would get such a deflected—well, I would get a deflected answer from Stan. Irwin would just roll his eyes and go, “Uhhh.” [laughter]
But otherwise, Stan was very generous and people knew they could go to him for work. He was a great cheerleader for comics, for Marvel, for the people he worked with. Clearly there were people, who we shall talk about, who did not get along so well with Stan, but there were a lot of people who did. He must have done something to inspire that loyalty and admiration in people. One of my top ten favorite Stan Lee stories is, he’s out walking—he was famous for taking long walks in Manhattan on his lunch hour, that’s how he got exercise. He wasn’t really
a big exercise guy, but he was fit and thin, and he had a brand new suit on, and he was walking with Stan Goldberg through the streets of Manhattan.
Stan Lee is very proud of his new beautiful suit. And being in New York, a pigeon flies by and poops right on Stan’s jacket, ruining his beautiful new suit. Stan looks up to the sky and raises a fist at the bird, and he says, “For the Gentiles, you sing.” [laughter] How can you not love a guy who improvises like that? The amazing thing is, people will tell these stories, and maybe some that are not very complimentary, and will talk about something that Stan did, but then they’ll go, “That was the greatest thing. I was so inspired by him telling that or saying that.”
He barges into Stan’s office and he says, “Sol Brodsky says I’m not going to get any more work!” And Stan said, “Sol, why did you tell this great artist he’s not getting any more work? He’s one of our best people!”[laughter] So they began planning, when they had to get rid of people, to do it during Stan’s vacations. [laughter] And it
became a thing in the office of, “Oh, Stan’s going to be taking next week off. I wonder who’s getting fired?” [laughter]
EVANIER: Well, he was very nice to his fans in the last years of his life—not the absolute last years, but the period preceding the bad [final] couple of years, which we’re probably not going to get into much. And people were so excited to meet him, and he was so happy to be in a place where, first of all, you could charge that much money for his autograph. [laughter] But also, where people would come up saying, “Oh, I always wanted to meet you, you inspired me.” And he would say to them, “Oh, I didn’t inspire you; you inspired me.”
Sol Brodsky, who was the Marvel production manager during the key years that the Marvel characters were created, told me that Stan hated to fire people. So when it got to the point where there was an artist that Stan didn’t want to use anymore, he would go to Sol and say, “Can you tell him we’re not going to give him any more work?” And the artist would come in to deliver an assignment and say, “Where’s my next job?” And Sol would say, “Sorry, we’re not giving you any more work.” And some guys would just go, “Well, sorry” and go away, but some of them [wouldn’t]. An artist one time was told this, and he goes, “You can’t fire me!”
I met Stan in Summer of 1970, about a year after I met Jack, and I worked with Stan on and off. He kept asking me to write for him a lot over the years, and sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. He also called me an awful lot of times with questions about Marvel history. He’d call me up and say, “What was the name of the lady with the sword, in The Defenders?” I’d go, “Valkyrie.” “Ahh, I should’ve remembered that.” And at least twice, maybe three times, he called me and asked me, “Which is the issue of Spider-Man, where he had to deal with his acne problem?” And I said, “He never did that.” He said, “I read all these articles that said we did that.” I said, “Yes, that’s what you told interviewers, as an example that he had real world problems. You never put it in the comics books.” “Really...!” [laughter]
I met Jack in 1970, and Jack Kirby was the most creative, brilliant person I ever met. I’m not just talking about the way he drew. I’m talking about the way he thought. He was a brilliant, brilliant man. Some people didn’t understand that, because first of all, he had a New York accent, and people sometimes just didn’t think a New York accent could come out of somebody who was that smart. And secondly, Jack had this way of talking about this, and suddenly he’s talking about this, and suddenly he’s talking about this. He
would just veer off; every so often you’d go, “How did we segue from this topic to that topic?” And again, that was not being dumb. That was just, he had so many thoughts in his head that they were squeezing each other out at different points.
Jack could not drive a car. He could drive a car, but he wasn’t allowed to. They wouldn’t give him his driver’s license because he tended to, y’know, he’s driving along, and suddenly he’s in Asgard and he doesn’t look where he’s going and he drives off the road. An amazing, wonderful man. Did you get to meet Jack, Danny?
FINGEROTH: Just for a second. The time I met Jack is when all the Marvel editors went to the San Diego Con in 1983, and I think Jack must’ve been involved in half-a-dozen lawsuits with Marvel. But a couple of people literally dragged me, I was so intimidated—and I’m not usually that way with celebrities... and then my ex-wife and Christie Scheele literally dragged me up to Jack. I think I offered Jack work on Spider-Man. I’m sure I violated 11 different edicts from corporate: “Oh, Jack, anytime.” But I remember what Jack said to me: [in New York accent] “I can tell you’re a real firecracker.” [laughter] I don’t know if it was sarcastic, but I think it was a compliment.
EVANIER: It probably was a compliment. But in 1983, Jack was not involved in any lawsuit with Marvel. There’s a myth out there that Jack sued Marvel; he never sued Marvel. His lawyers threatened a few times because they were threatening him. They threatened to counter-sue, but he never sued Marvel his entire life.
Jack only sued one person in his entire life—that was Johnny Carson. [audience murmurs] And that’s a whole other story we don’t
have time to get into, but he was on the outs with Marvel a lot because at times they were doing things he just thought were not fair and not ethical, and he didn’t like the way the company treated him. And I believe one of the stupidest all-time brain-dead things I’ve seen in the comics industry is for a company to drive away someone like a Jack Kirby or a Steve Ditko or a Wally Wood, or any of these people who gave them all these properties that are now worth zillions of dollars. If Jack asked for a $2 raise at one point, they would clutch their hearts and say, “No.” And the people would think, “Well, Dick Ayers can draw the Fantastic Four just as well, we don’t need to pay Jack $2 more.” And that was the mentality when he started working for them.
FINGEROTH: Was that the mentality in the [mid-1960s] era or..?
EVANIER: It was mostly the mentality of the people who bought Marvel [from Martin Goodman in the late 1960s]. One thing some people don’t know about Marvel—I’m assuming everybody here knows of the famous first Galactus story with the Silver Surfer, where you had Galactus trying to eat the Earth and gets talked out of it. Jack tended in stories he did to put together things that nobody else would associate. A lot of Jack’s ideas were where he read this book, and he saw this TV show, he saw this movie, and he had this conversation with someone, and he took a little piece from each one, and put them all together in a way that made it a brand new innovative idea.
One of the things that drove the first Galactus story was that Jack had been reading all these articles about corporate takeovers, how a conglomerate would come in and they would strip-mine a company the way Galactus did, and they would leave it an empty, burnedout shell. And at the time, Martin Goodman was trying to sell Marvel, and Jack’s worst nightmare was that they do that. That somebody comes in, buys Marvel, plunders it for every dollar they can get out of it, and then leaves it as a worthless hull and destroys the company.
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL FORMAT!
FINGEROTH: Which did eventually happen.
EVANIER: The people who bought Marvel from Martin Goodman didn’t do that to Marvel. They Saturday Evening Post, though; they destroyed the Saturday Evening Post that way, and a few other things.
KIRBY COLLECTOR #94
Jack was just a guy who wanted to keep working. He was very proud of the work he did, but he just kept encountering all these different levels of management that didn’t appreciate him. And Stan, God love him in many ways, was no help whatsoever. Stan had convinced everybody at Marvel that he was the sole creator of everything, and they didn’t want to give Jack any more money, because, “Hey, Stan created it all.” And that’s one of the things that disappointed me about Stan Lee as a human being.
SPACE RACES! Jack’s depictions of cosmic gods and life on other planets, including: how Ego, Tana Nile, and the Recorder took Thor to strange new worlds, OMAC’s space age future, time travelers in Kirby’s work, favorite Kirby sci-fi tropes in his stories, plus: a 1967 LEE/KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, never-reprinted Simon & Kirby story, robotic pencil art gallery, cover inked by TERRY AUSTIN! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=133&products_id=1815
FINGEROTH: How early did that start happening?
EVANIER: The first time Stan started worrying about his job being lost. Is there anybody here in this whole room who believes that Stan Lee wrote all those comics by himself? [laughter] Let the record show no hands were raised. [laughter] The Marvel Method produced some very wonderful comics, particularly when it was someone like Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby who took a
