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TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com
Contents
THE NEW
KIRBY OBSCURA! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 (Simon & Kirby are back!) UNDER THE COVERS . . . . . . . . . . . .3 (are you ready for some football?) JACK F.A.Q.s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 (Mark Evanier examines whether Lennon and McCartney ever worked Marvel Method)
ISSUE #52, SPRING 2009
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GALLERY 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 (unedited last pages from some of the final issues of Jack’s comics) KIRBY OBSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . .16 (Barry Forshaw goes Negative) UNEARTHED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 (we’ve got Fish In A Barrel) INNERVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 (a 1972 interview with Jack) JACK KIRBY MUSEUM PAGE . . . .27 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) ADAM McGOVERN . . . . . . . . . . . .28 (Joe Casey, Glen Brunswick, and others on the Kirby influence) INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY . . . . .31 (ve vant to drink your blood) INFLUENCEES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 (Steve Englehart speaks) GALLERY 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36 (savor these unused Thor pages; you’ll need them in a moment) ORIGINAL ART-IFACTS . . . . . . . . .45 (let’s go find Galactus!) JOURNEY INTO MYSTERIES . . . . .46 (trying to make sense of THOR #168-170) KIRBYSCURA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 (how Jack casts a shadow) HIYA, HAI-YAH! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 (a hard-hitting look at Kirby’s unused Bruce Lee comic) NUTS & BOLTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58 (a glimpse at Kirby’s work in commercial illustration) UNEARTHED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 (Kirby Masterworks questions) FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 (a Kirby Western Tale) CROSSUNDERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 (Kirby was big in 2008) TORCH BEARERS . . . . . . . . . . . . .68 (DC’s Dan DiDio interviewed) KIRBYIONAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70 (Kirby, the CIA, & the Lord of Light) COLLECTOR COMMENTS . . . . . . .78 PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 Front cover inks: DON HECK Front cover colors: JACK KIRBY Back cover inks/color: JACK KIRBY The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 16, No. 52, Spring 2009. Published quarterly by & ©2009 TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Single issues: $13 postpaid ($15 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $50 US, $60 Canada, $84 elsewhere. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All artwork is ©2009 Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is ©2009 the respective authors. First printing. PRINTED IN CANADA. ISSN 1932-6912
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(above) Page 9 of “King” Kobra #1 (Feb. 1976); this issue had wholesale art and text changes, but note how the “obscured” face in panel 3 has been restored to Jack’s original version. Inks by D. Bruce Berry. Kobra TM & ©2009 DC Comics. COPYRIGHTS: Aquaman, Arna, Batman, Brute, Challengers of the Unknown, Count Dragorin, Darkseid, Death of the New Gods, Demon, Devilance, Dingbats of Danger Street, Dr. Canus, Dr. Fate, Esak, Final Crisis, Firestorm, Flash, Forever People, General Electric, Glob, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Highfather, In The Days Of The Mob, Jed, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, Kobra, Losers, Martian Manhunter, Negative Man, New Gods, Oberon, Red Tornado, Robin, Sandman, Shilo Norman, Super Powers, Superman, Witchboy, Wonder Woman TM & ©2009 DC Comics • Balder, Captain America, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Doom, Eternals, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Hulk, Ikaris, Iron Man, Karnilla, Loki, Machine Man, Magneto, Moonboy, Odin, Secret Invasion, Sgt. Fury, Sif, Silver Surfer, Sub-Mariner, Thermal Man, Thor, Warriors Three, Watcher, Wolverine TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Bruce Lee art, Captain Victory, Cover hero, Football art TM & ©2009 Jack Kirby Estate • Black Magic, Bullseye, Fighting American TM & ©2009 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate • Fish In A Barrel, Western Tales TM & ©2009 Joe Simon • The Avenger/Justice Inc. TM & ©2009 Conde Nast • Blue Bolt TM & ©2009 respective owner
Mark evanier (below) Though Sgt. Fury #18 (May 1965) credits Dick Ayers as the artist, Kirby drew this splash page, and the final, pivotal page of the issue, demonstrating his input into other artists’ books. (next page) Did Simon & Kirby work “Marvel Method” on books such as Black Magic? Here’s the cover to the Sept. 1952 (Vol. 2, #10) issue. Sgt. Fury characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Black Magic Characters TM & ©2009 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate.
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Jack F.A.Q.s
A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby by Mark Evanier reader named George Parker asked me to weigh in on a discussion that seems to pop up every twenty minutes on one message board or other. Someone likens the team of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby to the team of John Lennon & Paul McCartney, and suddenly folks are arguing over whether Stan is John and Jack is Paul or Paul is Jack and John is Stan and does that mean Don Heck is Ringo and Flo Steinberg is the Walrus? Most analogies only go so far and stop. This one doesn’t make it to the Negative Zone and barely gets halfway across Abbey Road. The first place it breaks down, of course, is that John and Paul didn’t have a clear division of work. Both wrote lyrics. Both wrote music. There was nothing one did that the other did not, whereas Lee and Kirby had somewhat different job descriptions and skills. Also, though they might not have felt so at times, both Beatles received sufficient accolades and cash for their work while Lee and Kirby were both grossly underpaid and their fame was confined to a small niche audience. It has only been in the last few years that Stan Lee
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has become the household name that he certainly deserves to be. But you can draw some comparisons, largely in the way each duo reinvented the area in which it worked, kickstarted an industry and set the model and bar for countless others. And certainly in both alliances, you have some fuzziness over who contributed what. We know that Paul largely did “Yesterday” all by himself and that it was Jack’s idea that Galactus have a silver herald on a gleaming surfboard, but there are many instances where the men involved couldn’t say... or agree. Of most Beatles songs, you can only declare, “That’s by Lennon and McCartney,” and you can’t go much farther than that. True, you can say that with “It’s Getting Better” on the Sgt. Pepper album, Paul wrote the lines, “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better / A little better all the time,” and then John interjected the part that goes “It couldn’t get much worse.” But it’s still by Lennon and McCartney. Even on a song where one guy did 80% of the work and the other did 20%, it’s still a Lennon-McCartney creation. And the only reason we know who did what on that song was because it was one of the instances where recollections and anecdotes agreed, which is not always the case. The story of John and Paul is one of two guys working increasingly apart. Early on, they wrote in the same room, practically in each other’s faces, about as “together” as two songwriters could be, and the recording sessions went in much the same manner. Then by ’64 or ’65, they were moving more into individual efforts but contributing snippets and amendments to each other’s drafts as per the above example. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, they went their separate ways. Which is where I see the strongest Lee-Kirby parallel. Throughout the sixties, Stan and Jack moved slowly apart. In fact, they split on very close to the same timetable as John and Paul. Kirby told Lee he was leaving Marvel in March of 1970. McCartney announced the following month that the Beatles would be splitting up. Leading up to both severances were periods of growing and laboring apart. The early Lee-Kirby collaborations were closer than the later ones. Early on, Jack would come into the office and they’d talk through ideas, sometimes with Jack sitting at a drawing table, batting out sketches. The depiction of Stan and Jack at work in Fantastic Four #10 was pretty much accurate, except for the part about Doctor Doom walking in on them. That almost never happened. (One other quibble with sequences like that is that they conveyed the erroneous impression that the comics were written and drawn by Lee and Kirby working together in an office each day. Actually, Jack did his work at home and only came in for a few hours once a week, if that often. Stan did much, often most of his scripting at his home and primarily handled editorial and administrative work at the office, sometimes only coming in two or three days a week.) Whatever the level of closeness was, it lasted only so long. As Marvel expanded, Stan got busier and Jack cut back on his visits to the office. With so many pages to produce, Kirby could ill afford the time to take the train into Manhattan, nor did it fit with his personal schedule. The busier he got, the more nocturnal he became. His peak creative hours were late at night, after Roz and the kids were asleep and he could forget about family responsibilities and live
wholly in the story of the moment. When you’re getting to bed at 5 or 6 AM, it’s tough to be in New York for a noon story conference... which Stan couldn’t spare much time for, anyway. When Jack did manage to time his life so he could get into town at a decent hour, it usually meant losing a day. He’d try to get there by 11 AM in the futile hope he could meet with Stan and be off before the office emptied for lunch. But Kirby and trains ran late and most of the time, he’d get there just in time to go eat with whoever was around. (Stan Goldberg, who colored most of Marvel’s books for a time and drew Millie the Model, likes to tell the story of going to lunch with Kirby. He, Jack and inker Frank Giacoia had to cross a treacherous intersection together and Goldberg told Giacoia, “You walk on one side of him... I’ll walk on the other. If he gets hit by a car, the whole company goes under.”) Back from eats, Jack would get to visiting with the staff while he waited for Stan... and then he’d find out that Stan was running behind; that Heck or Ayers or Wood or some other artist was waiting for his story conference, which somehow had to go first. Often, Jack would wind up in that other artist’s story conference, tossing out ideas for an issue of Daredevil or The Avengers or some other comic he wouldn’t be drawing. Kirby was glad to be of aid to a fellow artist and found it hard to decline, but he resented when he felt he’d helped write a comic with neither credit nor pay. So there was another good reason not to go into the office. Eventually, the in-person story conferences became so infrequent that it didn’t make much difference when in 1969, Jack moved himself and his family to California. That was a year before he left Marvel and by then, though he may not have known it, I think it was inevitable that Jack would stop collaborating not just with Stan but with any other writer. Jack actually never viewed himself as the kind of artist who drew scripts by others. Some of us think of him that way because we first knew of him as the half of the Lee-Kirby team who drew. But before he began working with Stan, the norm for Jack was to either be heavily involved in the writing or to do it alone. That was how it had worked in the Simon-Kirby shop. When that operation dissolved, Jack had to grab whatever work he could get... and if that meant drawing without writing, fine. Much of the time, it meant contributing to the writing—devising plots and/or rewriting scripts— but for strictly artist pay. At DC on the mystery comics, the Green Arrow feature and Challengers of the Unknown, Jack occasionally wrote, but more often plotted and then rewrote. When he first told me this in 1970 or thereabouts, I was skeptical. In ’69, I met and talked with Whitney Ellsworth, who’d been DC’s editor-in-chief throughout most of the forties and early fifties. One of the things he’d told me about his company was that writers wrote and artists drew and that they never, ever did that weird thing Marvel did of having the artist participate in the plotting of a comic. He didn’t say Kirby hadn’t done that during his time at DC but it made me wonder if Jack was exaggerating to say he had. Later though, others who had worked for DC concurrently—including Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky and Arnold Drake—all told me that, yes, Jack had probably done just what he said he’d done, plotting and rewriting stories without pay and occasionally writing one for pay. That never happened with most of the artists who worked for the firm, particularly those who toiled for editor Mort Weisinger. But Kirby’s editor, Jack Schiff, made an exception for Kirby. Among those of us who analyze uncredited comics and attempt to determine authorship, there is much debate over certain stories. Did Kirby write them? Or did he rewrite someone else’s scripts so thoroughly that he largely obliterated the other writers’ styles? On some, we’ll probably never know. When he went to work for Stan Lee, it was a little different. Jack asked about writing scripts but that was Stan’s job... and what Stan couldn’t handle went to his brother, Larry Lieber. Still, Stan was glad to have Jack’s input into the writing... which brings us to the famous “Marvel Method” of creating a comic. Do I need to summarize that method? Maybe I do. Previously in comics, the norm was for the writer to type out a whole script, telling how many panels would be on a page, what the artist should draw in each and the writer would also write out the words that would go in the caption and word balloons. This was all done before the artist had any involvement. With the “Marvel Method,” a plot would be devised, the artist would break down the story from the plot, drawing it all out in pencil, and then the scripter would devise the copy after the art was penciled.
No one is quite certain how and when this sequencing of tasks was first employed in comics. The writer Robert Kanigher—who, by the way, hated working that way—said that schedule problems occasionally necessitated it back in the forties. Many tales of Steel Sterling and other MLJ strips drawn by Irv Novick were, he said, written via this procedure. He surely was not the first to do it like that. When comics were produced in “shops”—studio arrangements where many writers and artists worked in the same room—every possible division of labor was employed, including this one. (I asked Jack once if they’d ever worked that way in the Simon-Kirby studio. He said, approximately, “I can’t recall doing that but we must have at some point.”) The method came into its own when Stan began using it on almost all his writing work of the sixties. Lee and Kirby seem to have worked plot/art/script on Rawhide Kid stories that predated Fantastic Four #1 by about a year and quite likely before that on short stories for the romance or monster comics. Stan Goldberg has said that he worked art-before-dialogue with Lee on Millie the Model at least a few years prior to the advent of Fantastic Four. But the way Lee did it, particularly with Kirby or Ditko, was not quite the way that would later be employed by others at Marvel and other companies. Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and others who followed Stan at Marvel were more likely to write out a plot with little or no involvement by the penciler. As Roy noted once on a panel we were on, “There were some artists you could [co-plot] with but most you couldn’t. Not every good artist was Kirby or Ditko.” In fact, some writers would later supply very detailed plots to the artists, even to the point of a suggested panel-by-panel breakdown and some rough drafts of possible dialogue. That wasn’t how Stan usually did it. He usually plotted comics in tandem with whoever would be penciling or doing layouts. Either that or if he was comfortable with that artist’s sense of story, he’d leave them to do it on their own or after the briefest of conversations. The idea might start with either man and 5
Gallery 1
Hit the road, Jack
ack Kirby, with his city boy upbringing, was about as far from being a cowboy as possible. But considering his early love of movies, he undoubtedly saw more than his fair share of Western films, where the heroic cowboy always rode off into the sunset at the film’s end. That image must’ve stuck with him, as you’ll see on the pages that follow. Presented here is the last page of several of Kirby’s final issues of his various runs on comics. While the last panel on his final issues was often edited or redrawn for publication (particularly on books that were being cancelled), we’re showcasing what Kirby originally had as his last shot on some of his many strips. In some cases, there’s a “next issue” blurb for a following issue that was never published (a giveaway that Jack wasn’t aware he was ending the series until after the story was drawn, which gives readers a taste of “what might have been” if he’d stayed on the series). Other times, it’s clear that Jack knew he was calling it quits, and he utilized a parting shot of the story’s leads walking away from the reader. It’s interesting to note that, on first issues, he tended to make the final panel a straight-on shot of the character looking directly at the reader, to lure you to buy the next issue. But on ones where he decided (or was told) to hit the road, the characters are generally walking away, cueing the reader that the show’s over, and imbuing a sense of melancholy. ★
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(this page) Final panels from: (top row) Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #148, Captain America #214, Forever People #11, Silver Surfer Graphic Novel (middle row) Black Panther #12, Machine Man #9, 2001: A Space Odyssey Treasury Edition, Manhunter #1 (bottom row) Demon #16, Dingbats of Danger Street #3, OMAC #8, Atlas #1 TM & ©2009 the respective owners.
by John Morrow
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TM & ©2009 DC Comics.
Fish In A Barrel
Unearthed
Reviewed by John Morrow
(right) The cover and (middle) first page for Fish In A Barrel, circa 1955. (bottom) A Kirby Bullseye sketch from 1980. Fish In A Barrel TM & ©2009 Joe Simon. Bullseye TM & ©2009 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estate.
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ish In A Barrel is, according to a letter Joe Simon sent me back in 2000, “a dramatic piece by Joe Simon. Jack had a copy since he signed a release.” However, the dual byline on the cover leads me to believe Jack at least had some input into it. Joe further said it was copyrighted in a book titled Characters, so if anyone has further information on that book, please send it in. The version in Jack’s files is a 60-page, three-act script for either a television/movie screenplay or a stage production, dramatizing the story of how Simon & Kirby had Crestwood’s books audited in the 1950s, and discovered that the publisher was withholding royalties that were rightfully Joe and Jack’s. The piece was written around 1955, according to Harry Mendryk, who blogged about it at http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonand kirby/archives/category/z-archive/200703. Interestingly, the version in Joe Simon’s files is 77 pages long, so I assume Joe revised it somewhere along the line. Simon recounted the real-life version of events in a short chapter of his book The Comic Book Makers, and the title refers to the old expression, “It’ll be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.” For the screenplay, a lot of dramatic license was taken. “Jay Duncan” is the name of the young artist who was taken advantage of by Cooper Publications. Duncan had been fired by his boss Martin Cooper, and gone on to start his own publishing company. Instead of comic books, the bone of contention is payments for “kiddie books” like the Little Golden Books of old. The particular property at issue is Bullseye the Sharpshooter, whose cover shows “a heroic, colorful marksman aiming a bow and arrow at the reader.” The background of the cover is described as a huge target, and the subtitle reads: “He Never Misses.” Jay Duncan’s own publishing business has failed, and he’s enlisted accountant Paul Kurtz to help him get his old job back, using unpaid royalties as leverage. But Duncan doesn’t realize that his accountant has more in
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mind than the job and a few missing payments. It’s a really compelling read, with palpable tension between the characters, and a satisfying resolution. Although the character of Bullseye is only mentioned briefly, he serves as the catalyst for all the back-and-forth negotiations between the main characters.
There’s a temptation to read between the lines, and try to draw parallels between the characters in the screenplay and real-life people Joe and Jack encountered. In addition to the obvious (Paul Kurtz and Myron Rosenthal are stand-ins for S&K’s own accountant Bernard Gwirtzman and attorney Morris Eisenstein), Martin Cooper could easily be seen as a doppleganger of Martin Goodman, the head of Timely/Marvel Comics, who fired Joe and Jack in real life over a dispute on royalties for Captain America. It’s interesting to note that the name “Kurtz” was chosen, since Jack’s real last name is “Kurtzberg”. More interesting is the interplay between artist Jay Duncan and Shelly Meyers, who is Martin Cooper’s righthand man, but played both sides of the fence by befriending Duncan, and claiming to look out for his interests (something that comes back to haunt him in the end). Here’s hoping that Joe Simon will allow this to be reproduced in one of the upcoming Simon & Kirby books by Titan Publishing; it’s worth every Kirby fan’s time to read. ★
Innerview
Train of Thought Part 2 Interview from Train Of Thought #6, circa 1972 Submitted by William Cavitt
(below) The original announcement that local San Diego fans would be appearing as characters in Jack’s Jimmy Olsen strip. This appeared in an early 1970s San Diego Con program book. Courtesy of Shel Dorf.
[Editor’s Note: This year, Comic-Con International: San Diego celebrates its 40th anniversary, and the con is inviting back all the founding members who volunteered their time and effort to launch what’s become the country’s biggest comics convention. Shel Dorf was the convention’s founder, and got to know Jack Kirby well after he moved from New York to California. Shel in turn befriended numerous young comics fans in the Southern California area, and took them to meet Jack at home on several occasions. The following interview came out of one of those visits, and the questions here were asked by Shel Dorf and/or several of the various fans who were visiting Jack’s home that day. Lacking proper credits when it was published circa 1972 in Mike Towry’s fanzine Train of Thought #6, we can only thank Shel Dorf and some or all of the guys who would become the San Diego Five-String Mob in Jimmy Olsen: Scott Shaw!,
John Pound, Bill Lund, Roger Freedman, Barry Alfonso, and the aforementioned Mike Towry. Mike, if you’re out there, Comic-Con’s trying to find you to appear this year, so get in touch; we want to feature a Five-String Mob reunion photo here!] TRAIN OF THOUGHT: Do you like what Peter Max does? JACK KIRBY: Yes. Oh, I’m crazy about it. I think Peter Max has taken a greater step than Picasso. I think Peter Max has really taken a realistic stance as far as art is concerned. He’s made art less harsh, and art more rich, and given it more form and more grace. I just can’t explain the kind of admiration I have for Peter Max. TOT: Do you think that it’s legitimate, though, that he merchandises his art? KIRBY: Sure it’s legitimate. That’s where Peter Max lives. That’s where you live. I mean if exploitation is available to you and you don’t want to use it, that’s fine. If exploitation is available to you and you want to use it, why not? If you feel that it’s going to help you in some way, you exploit. If you feel that you’re going to get nothing from it, or if you want something else from it, you just don’t exploit it. TOT: Would you ever want any of your characters to be exploited? KIRBY: Yeah, they’ve been using Captain America to promote a chain of pants stores. They’ve been putting him on shirts and such to sell pants. TOT: Captain America to sell pants? He should sell leotards. KIRBY: Listen, you can keep talking, but you’ve destroyed my ego. But, of course, I think it’s right. They exploited something that they felt would help their business. They picked him up and used him just like you would a pencil. TOT: Would you care to expound upon your work at the Fleischer studios? KIRBY: Yes, Fleischer animation studio, like any animation studio, is a factory. It’s a factory with long rows of tables. It looked just like my father’s place. My father worked in a factory with long rows of tables with sewing machines on them. My father used to sit by them and turn out his quota of merchandise. That’s what I was doing at Fleischer’s. I was sitting at one of these long rows of tables with lights underneath. They’d give me this in-between action. I would finish the action on seven sheets of paper, and I would give them the seven sheets of paper. That was my importance. TOT: What would have happened if you’d have gotten into the story writing for the animation and the design aspect? KIRBY: Probably I might’ve done well, but I just couldn’t wait for that. I just didn’t want to be a nothing, like anybody else. TOT: How did you get the job at Fleischer’s? KIRBY: I applied for it. I showed them some sample drawings, and they needed an in-betweener. I got the job. It was a good opportunity—I’m not knocking it. TOT: Did they pay well? KIRBY: No, at least not according to today’s standards, but whatever you made in those days counted for a lot. I mean I could get into a movie for 50¢. You couldn’t get into the washroom today for that. So whatever I made then counted. I never knocked the money, I just knock the life. I felt that I was well treated at Fleischer’s. It was a good organization, but it was a big organization and I was just a 17-year-old kid. So who the hell was I, and that was the question I always asked myself. I’d say, “Who the hell are you?” and when I didn’t get the right answer I 19
Adam M cGovern Know of some Kirby-inspired work that should be covered here? Send to: Adam McGovern PO Box 257 Mt. Tabor, NJ 07878
These interviews were conducted by e-mail on 11/11/08-11/12/08 with Joe Casey; 11/13/08 with Andy Suriano; 11/11/08 with Glen Brunswick; and 11/11/08 with Dan McDaid (all vowels translated from the British).
(right) We don’t have to beat you over the head with the Kalibak references—but where’s the fun in not? Chuck Amok (corner) meets his match, from Charlatan Ball #1. TM and ©2009 Joe Casey and Andy Suriano
(below) Un-“Pact”: A group of Fourth Host impersonators mix their Kirby metaphors, from Charlatan Ball #4. TM and ©2009 Joe Casey and Andy Suriano
(next page, bottom) Tough crowd: Magician Chuck Amok prepares to disappear. TM and ©2009 Joe Casey and Andy Suriano
(next page, top) Star-crossing lovers Barock and Zoe ride the, um, silver diving-board? TM and ©2009 Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid
(following page, top) Another powerful pinup of the bruiser with the Kenyan-sounding name, Barock! TM and ©2009 Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid
(following page, bottom) Deities in drag: The Jersey Gods do their part to cure our oil addiction in this Michael Allred alternate cover. Jersey Gods TM and ©2009 Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid
As A Genre A regular feature examining Kirby-inspired work, by Adam McGovern
KIRBY INCOGNITA ack Kirby was known for taking his readers and his artform to unprecedented heights, sailing the currents of cosmic spectacle and piercing the horizon of near-divine insights. As befits the fearless explorer, he also crashed the spaceship and detoured into some logical black holes from time to time (did somebody say Fighting Fetus and Goozlebobber?)—but as anyone who’s ever opened the wrong Egyptian tomb or picked a bad necronomicon to recite will tell you, these are worthy adventures too. At least they are to two intrepid creative teams turning some of Kirby’s wackier traditions into whole new genres and essential reading at Image Comics—Joe Casey (yes, Gødland’s Joe Casey) and Andy Suriano on the ongoing Charlatan Ball, and Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid on the juststarting Jersey Gods.
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That Rabbit’s Dynamite Tom Scioli, Casey’s collaborator on the over-the-top-and-throughthe-ceiling cosmic odyssey Gødland, once told me he felt they were holding back. On Charlatan Ball (a surrealist farce signaled by even a title that looks like a typo), Casey, at least, is holding back not so much. It’s the story of, well, that’s a good question, but there’s this D-list strip-club stage magician who gets yanked out of our reality as a pawn in the quantum chessgame between a bunch of actuallymagic space warlords, in a nightmare dimension-shuffle of worlds where anything can happen, including the infatuation of a 50-foottall warrior goddess and the mutation of the fake magician’s hatrabbit into a murderous man-bunny (a kind of Red Queen and March Hare as if Martin Goodman had told Kirby to jazz up Lewis Carroll and paid him in dope). Casey’s free-associative narration, Suriano’s Wagnerian hotrod art, and Marc Letzmann’s hallucination colorpalette make it unlike anything in comics. TJKC asked Casey and Suriano what the hell is going on… THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Gødland expands on the Kirby contributions that are most fondly remembered and widely emulated—the idealized heroics and inspiring cosmic spectacle. Charlatan Ball seems like an attempt to squeeze value from the Kirby that no one’s
in a hurry to claim—the grotesque techno-ogres from Atlas Monsters to MODOK; the speaking-intongues story structure or writing style of a Sandman or Devil Dinosaur. These may access some primal fairytale narrative juice and unlock some visionary ways of thinking… or not, though it seems to be working that way in Charlatan Ball. Is there no road into Kirby that doesn’t lead to genius, and are some routes more bumpy than others? JOE CASEY: There can definitely be bumps in the road, at least in this case. Certainly Charlatan Ball has been a bit more of a headscratcher for a lot of readers, even those who embrace Gødland fairly unconditionally. Let me put it this way... if Gødland is my New Gods, then Charlatan Ball is definitely my Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers. I love both of those Kirby books, so obviously these things are all subjective. But in all honestly, on a purely conceptual level, the Kirby aspects of the series come mainly from my collaborator/co-creator, Andy Suriano. I just come up with wacky concepts like the Gang of Four Gods and Donnarama and Andy goes to town on the designs. And he’s definitely got a Kirby thing to his art. For me, I was trying to bring a bit of my Peter Milligan/Brendan McCarthy influence. Freakwave, Rogan Gosh, Mirkin the Mystic... all great, underrated classics of the medium that really affected me as a reader. But then again, I think McCarthy has more than a bit of Kirby in him, too... so it’s all part of the Great Chain. TJKC: Books like Gødland and Charlatan Ball deal with the most exaggerated characters possible, from the lowliest loser like Chuck Amok in Charlatan Ball, to the loftiest icon like Iboga in Gødland— and yet they seem more true-to-life than many comics with much grittier and everyday settings. What’s to be learned by both reader and creator from these extreme types of characters and worlds? CASEY: Characters have to be relatable to the reader, no matter how big or small they’re meant to be within the reality you’re creating. Yeah, they may be extremely exaggerated, but in Charlatan Ball especially, I don’t have any real inclination to write them as unknowable. That’s part of the fun of it. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to
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realize more and more that, while the world is certainly complex, it’s not quite as complex as I imagined it would be when I was a kid. Most things can still be broken down into components of basic humanity. So that point of view definitely bleeds into how I write these characters I’ve co-created. TJKC: With any fully-rounded writer there’s bound to be some overlap, but is it safe to say that what Gødland is to the FF and quantum science Charlatan Ball is to, like, The Demon and metaphysics? CASEY: I would refer back to my New Gods/Captain Victory analogy. But to be completely serious, the overlap [with Kirby] is my own imagination and how far I can stretch it. I’ve said it many times before, but that’s the real lesson, the real inspiration I take from Kirby and his body of work. I really think that’s the lesson he wanted other creators to take from him... for all of us to do our own thing. Art styles aside, it’s about digging deep within yourself to try and bring out something that’s unique to you. Certainly your influences will inform those things, but I don’t think anyone but Scioli and I could’ve come up with Gødland; likewise for Suriano and me with Charlatan Ball. TJKC: How much is Charlatan Ball created with the coloring in mind, and how much of a role do you or Andy take in overseeing it? Certainly Gødland is one of the books most talked about for its color even though it’s got a cult-star penciler, and Tom Scioli has told me how he started to evolve his art with that color in mind over time. The colorist on CB almost feels like a third storyteller in ways that aren’t all that common in comics today (much less in Kirby’s lifetime), so how does it figure into your own brainstorming of the book? CASEY: The coloring is hugely important, and it’s something that Andy and I are pretty intimately involved with. On Charlatan Ball we’ve got a great colorist in Marc Letzmann. He’s extremely collaborative. There have been times, especially early on, where Andy did pretty detailed color guides to establish the look and the tone (and how certain characters are meant to be colored). For my part, I’m usually in there pushing for more Photoshop-y effects to help enhance the storytelling—for a book that deals with magic, it’s only natural to use all those technological tricks to sell the different spells and demonstrations of powers.
But this is the thing about creator-owned comics... at least my creator-owned comics. I like to work with a close-knit team whenever possible, for everyone to feel like they’re somewhat invested in the book. For Marc, this is his first big gig as a solo colorist, so it’s a chance for him to really show off and I want him to have that freedom. Even the letterer, Rus Wooton, is a close collaborator with the different balloon styles and various fonts I ask for. So we’re all creating this comicbook together. It’s one of the rewards of this medium, that collaborative spirit.
escape and not a reminder of how much the world blows. This one, anyway—Chuck Amok goes to some pretty far-out places, hahaha…
TJKC: Andy, what do you get to do, or learn about comic storytelling or universe-building, from cutting loose in this Kirbyish style that you might not get to by following from another model? ANDY SURIANO: To me, the Kirby Universe is limitless. It ranges from a nightmarish American history (I’ll never forget Captain America’s “Bicentennial Battles”), to the rough streets of Dingbats (of Danger Street), to the post-apocalyptic vision of Kamandi. Kirby’s [oeuvre] was like a virtual encyclopedia of the past, present and future. But moreover, [regardless of] the era, each panel was dynamic. Where is that these days?! That sort of storytelling is now endangered by photo reference and this new ideal to strive for realism. Besides, you want monsters or mutants? Nobody drew them better than Jack. Nobody. TJKC: Charlatan Ball seems to bring back as much of the anarchy and caricature of early MAD as it does anything from the superhero sample-book—is there not enough humor and too much perfection in many comics at the moment? SURIANO: To me, Charlatan Ball is two parts Kirby, two parts Jack Davis, a dash of Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, some of my own aspiration to be Eisner…and a whole lot of crazy! Hahaha! As for contemporaries, yeah, I feel like a charlatan myself for saying it because I read some of these books—but if I really wanted courtroom dramas, I’d watch primetime television. The Iraq War? I got the news. Where is the escapism?? A realistic take on superheroes seems like an oxymoron to me. Where’s the fun?? I like my spandex. I guess that’s what I’m trying to do in Charlatan Ball, insert a little bit of energy, give the reader fun stuff to look at. Make each book an experience or
Last Exit to Asgard Cosmic action and modern sex comedy collide like unmatched relatives in Jersey Gods, the epic of budding romance between a suburban yuppie mallrat and an ultraviolent space deity by writer Glen Brunswick, artist Dan McDaid and a cosmic armada of prestige guest-creators (including star backup-story writer Mark Waid with rising indie sensation Joe Infurnari on visuals). The movie-serial mythology and page-ripping galactic force of Kirby are on full display with an affection equal to the manic humor. TJKC talked to Brunswick and McDaid to find out what it all means to them… TJKC: People sometimes wonder how son-of-immigrants Jack Kirby came up with so many Nordic supergods like Thor. But actually, the Asgardians and New Gods are a bunch of immigrants too, fitting in uneasily on Earth. New Jersey’s a big immigrant state, from both within and outside the US (400,000 newbies move here a year, and 400,000 of their predecessors run screaming, true story). Do you agree that those Kirbystyle paragons are really the biggest misfits of all, and was Jersey a particularly good boiling pot to play out their story in? GLEN BRUNSWICK: I don’t know that I’d call them misfits. In many ways, Kirby’s gods are like all immigrants when they come to America. They want a better life, a place to grow, a sense of identity and to be loved. Thor has this massive ego when he comes to Earth, but what is it that makes him whole? It’s when he discovers that Jane Foster loves him. Orion is searching for his identity—his place in the world. He constantly wonders why he is different from the people of New Genesis. Kirby infuses his characters with these very human attributes. In a sense it’s what makes these unfamiliar larger-than-life characters relatable. This is the Kirby legacy that Dan and I are striving for in Jersey Gods. [Series star] Barock doesn’t even realize that he is searching for love when he gets involved in a life-and-death struggle at the Cherry Hill mall. But love is what he finds here and it’s enough to keep him around to pursue the American Dream. And what he finds is that inside he’s not so different from any of us. TJKC: Superhero comics tend to take place in one big New York, regardless of whether they actually call it 29
Influencees
Steve Englehart Speaks could do many things but he couldn’t write, and Stan could do many things but he couldn’t draw. It certainly wasn’t true that Stan just dialogued Kirby’s stories—first, because it wasn’t, and second, because “just dialogue” would not have made us care so much about the characters and their personal situations. On the other hand, we know it wasn’t true that Jack just drew Stan’s stories—first, because it wasn’t, and second, because “just drew” would not have made the characters so heroic and dynamic. But to say either Stan or Jack was secondary is, I think, faith-based rather than reality-based. FF #48-50 would not have been the classic it is without both of them.
Interviewed by Shane Foley
(above) Blurb from the box at the top of Steve Englehart’s Captain Victory #1 script, page 1, and (next page) Paul Gulacy’s cover for that never-published first Topps issue. (below) Kirby Marvelmania button art, circa 1969. Captain Victory TM & ©2009 Jack Kirby Estate. Silver Surfer TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.
(So read the opening page of Steve Englehart’s script (above) for his unpublished Captain Victory series. Here obviously is a writer who has great respect for King Kirby. Steve Englehart is well respected for his work as a writer in comic books since the early ’70s. Previous TwoMorrows’ interviews can be found in Comic Book Artist #2, 7, 18 and Back Issue! #8 (mainly regarding his ’70s Marvel work), Comic Book Artist Collection, Volume 2 and Back Issue! #3 and 10 (regarding his Batman work), TJKC #33 and Back Issue! #11 (comments on the Fantastic Four). And he keeps turning up in other Back Issue! editions as books he was involved in keep being covered. Together with great info on his writing methods, the most recent career-spanning interview is on show in Write Now! #12. And no doubt there are a few more I’ve overlooked. This interview came about after I was looking over Steve’s website, found at www.steveenglehart.com (where else?). There is lots of background info there on all his series and it is highly recommended. What really grabbed my eye, and became the springboard for this article, was when I saw that Steve had his unpublished Topps’ Captain Victory scripts for sale. Now these I just had to see. Together with his aborted West Coast Avengers plots, I bought #1. So often, I’ve found that writers don’t seem to ‘get’ Kirby characters in a way that I find satisfying, so I was hedging my bets when I only bought the first script. But to my immense pleasure, I thought his take on CV felt pitch perfect! So in short order, I also bought scripts 2 and 3. Now I want 4, 5 and 6. Pity they don’t exist. This exchange was conducted by e-mails beginning early 2007.) THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: You’ve stated a number of times that your first exposure to Kirby was the Galactus trilogy from Fantastic Four #48-50. Do you think, “This is a Kirby story, dialogued by Stan Lee” or do you think the Lee/Kirby productions are not that easily divisible? STEVE ENGLEHART: I think it’s Lee/Kirby, and the reason is, comics are a hybrid medium. That same art with a different writer would have been a different experience, and vice versa. But Lee and Kirby fed off each other at that time. Jack
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TJKC: A hot topic amongst Kirby fans is the debate about his scripting ability. Some love it. Others hate it. And there are those, like me, caught in the middle. Your letter published in Comic Book Artist #7 mentioned Kirby’s “tin ear”, showing where you stand. Any comments on that? STEVE: I’ve never liked Jack’s scripting. It does not sound like human speech, and IT puts the emPHAsis in the WRONG places. When I was asked to do Captain Victory, I had to go back and plow through all the books, and I discovered that there was a lot of Kirby magic in them, but it was hard to make out behind that tin wall. At one point, I suggested to Topps regarding Captain Victory—and later to DC regarding the Fourth World—that they republish Kirby in English. Meaning, hire a real writer (i.e., me, since it was my idea) to redo the dialogue so as to make clear what Kirby was intending to say, and add personality as Stan used to do. I think particularly with the Fourth World, everyone says “Oh, great classic series,” but very few people actually want to read it. But if you were to do the “remastered” version, of that or Captain Victory or any of his other self-scripted stuff—staying absolutely true to what he was trying to say, but making the words flow like the art—they could all be reborn. Having now pissed off all of Jack’s true believers, I’d go back to your kind introduction where you vouch for the fact that I wrote a Captain Victory you found satisfying. I revere Jack for everything but the scripting, and I’d love to bring his self-written stuff to its full potential, to make those later series as “satisfying” as the FF or Thor. TJKC: We know opinion is divided about Kirby’s scripting. On the other hand, no one can argue that he didn’t have great conceptual ideas. But what about his actual plotting? What do you think of his actual method of story construction? STEVE: His plotting was great. Everything was great except human speech. TJKC: Do you think there are many elements of your approach to writing that are heavily influenced by Kirby’s approach? STEVE: I’m sure there are, but at this point it’s hard to say. Which means, when I was learning my craft, I was influenced by all the great stuff around me, and Kirby was a major figure in that realm—but it’s all evolved into my own style now so I can’t pick out anything unique to Jack, or anyone else. Maybe others can see things I can’t. TJKC: What are your thoughts on Kirby’s Fourth World? Do you think it was a case of “too much, too quick”? Do you think the scripting, more than the torrent of ideas, was a problem? STEVE: Yes, the scripting was a problem; that will always be true for me. But beyond that, imagine a universe where the FF, Thor, and, oh, Spider-Man and Ant-Man had to function as a separate, four-headed entity. You immediately run into problems with one head demanding more attention than another, some series speeding up and others slowing down so they stay in sync—
problems where the structure gets in the way of the story. In fact, those four books I just mentioned did the occasional crossover but they were much more loosely linked than the Fourth World, and even an accomplished scripter would have had to bring all his craft to the table to keep them from bogging down. Secondly, Jack did delight in throwing out high concepts, but (scripting again) he wasn’t so good at maintaining those concepts. Characters came and went with no rhyme or reason, without having accomplished a whole lot—very much with the idea that “Hey, they’re all part of a vast universe,” as opposed to “Hey, they’re interesting individuals in a vast universe.” People were concepts, not people. Now, that’s fixable, and it’s a shame that, in my opinion, finances and ego led Jack to dispense with a professional writer. I don’t want to belabor this, but a pro writer could take the story and art that’s there, add personalities, cross-references, foreshadowing, and make those stories loom a whole lot larger, on the scale of an FF #48-50. TJKC: What was your approach to Mister Miracle when you and Marshall Rogers picked up after Kirby had left? Did you feel honorbound to make it as “Kirby” as you could? Or did you take the view that the editors hired Englehart, therefore it’s an Englehart approach they want? STEVE: Part of being “Englehart” is being true to the guys who came before me. I’m gonna write the best Mister Miracle I can, but it’s going to segue seamlessly from what I’m picking up from. If I want to go someplace else with the character, I’ll start where he is and move him where I want him, and that journey is part of his story and his character arc. So the “Englehart” approach to Kirby—in Mister Miracle, in Captain America, in the Silver Surfer, in the FF—is to figure out what Kirby had in mind and honor that, while I take it new places. I’m not into replicating. TJKC: Any thoughts on Kamandi, OMAC, and the “Losers”? Do aborted projects like “Atlas” inspire ideas that you wish you could develop? STEVE: Kamandi was fun; I did a fill-in issue with Dick Ayers and enjoyed that. OMAC didn’t develop far enough to get a good handle on; people who developed it afterward developed it. And the “Losers” was fun but didn’t really fit against the darker Kanigher/Kubert standard for DC war books. TJKC: Kirby returned to Marvel in ’76 just as you were winding up your first stint there. Did you have any contact with him then? What did you think of his Eternals series? STEVE: I didn’t have any contact with him then. But one of my great fanboy memories is, I happened to be hanging around DC one afternoon in 1970, when Jack was just setting up shop there, between Marvel and the Fourth World, and he invited a bunch of us to go have dinner with him. So there I was, not even in comics yet, having dinner with the King at what seemed his highest point ever. This is old stuff for Mark Evanier, but pretty special for me. Several years later, when I was doing Captain America, Jack and Steranko and I shared a stage at Comic-Con. But those may be the only two times I hung out with him. As for the Eternals—much more successful
than the Fourth World, in part because it was just the one series and so free to go its own way, in part because it was only barely connected to the Marvel Universe and so free to go its own way, and in part because Jack created a solid cast and mythos from concepts he obviously was deeply involved with, personally. But it still suffered from the “Hey, we’re a bunch o’ concepts” approach, as opposed to the “Hey, we’re half a dozen actual people.” TJKC: There were only six issues between the end of your Cap run and Kirby’s return. What did you think of his approach? STEVE: I didn’t like it. It was Jack, doing his creation, so what could you say, but it lost all the characterization that Sal Buscema, Frank Robbins, and I had made the norm over the previous four years. That’d be true no matter who the previous people were.
TJKC: What about other projects of his, like Machine Man, 2001, Devil Dinosaur, and Black Panther ? STEVE: 2001 was another thing he was obviously very interested in; gods and mythology was clearly his passion in those years. Black Panther was kind of like Cap—him doing his creation, very different from the previous version—but it was also like Eternals, in that the Panther’s world didn’t intersect much with the Marvel Universe. Cap was in the center of the MU and stood out because of it; Panther was on the edges. So Panther worked in a lot of ways, because it could. Devil Dinosaur was bad Kamandi. Machine Man was pretty good. TJKC: It seems to me that from 1970 on, Jack didn’t want to listen to any editorial advice. On the one hand, given his age and previous success in the industry, one can understand why. On the other, 33
Journey Into Mysteries
I Can you help us track down any unused pages from this Thor sequence, or published pages with margin notes? If so, get in touch, so we can conclusively solve this mystery! Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.
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Avenger R
t wasn’t all that unusual for Jack Kirby to occasionally end up with some unused pencil pages from his stories. He worked very instinctively, not sitting down to write out a plan of attack for the art in a new issue. He generally worked it all out very roughly in his head, then went full speed ahead drawing pages, sometimes in story “blocks” that he’d combine later. So once in a while, he’d end up with an extra page that needed to be cut, and he’d set it aside, with the thought that he might one day be able to reuse it in another story (something that rarely ever happened, since he’d constantly be off to new ideas). What was unusual was for Jack to end up with the better part of a full issue of unused pages, as with Thor #169 (October 1969). Let’s recap: Thor began a quest to seek out the origin of Galactus back in Thor #160 (January 1969), launching Jack’s final multiissue Thor epic, with Ego, the Recorder, the Wanderers, the Watcher, and Galactus all woven together into what began as a pretty amazing tale. We got a brief look at Galactus’ origin in #162, then took a two-issue detour in #163-164. “Him” returned in #165-166, in a story full of sub-plots about Loki, Karnilla, Balder, and the Watcher, with Odin still searching for Galactus. As Thor battled “Him”, he succumbed to the dreaded “Warrior Madness”, and at the end of #166, Odin punished Thor by sending him on a mission to find Galactus. Thor finally found Galactus in #168, and...
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they sat around talking to each other. And from then on, Jack’s Marvel output was downright mundane. What happened? I touched on this back in TJKC #14, as I’d tracked down a handful of unused pencil pages that seem to have been intended for #169. Since then, this mystery has plagued me, and I’ve been trying to make sense of why there were so many leftover pages, and why the published versions of issues #168-170 were such a convoluted mess. I’ve been struggling to put together some conclusive evidence to support my hunches about it, and the deeper I’ve gotten into it, the more questions have been raised. I’ve finally reached the point where I’m ready to air my theories, and throw this open to our readers, in hopes they can shed further light on the mystery. But to get to this point, I enlisted the help of Shane Foley and Sean Kleefeld to give me their opinions, and their input was invaluable to this article.
Putting #168’s Pieces Together The first step is to try to rearrange Thor #168 into Jack’s original order, so that the unused page 15 (with Balder, Karnilla, and Haag) from the Marvelmania Portfolio falls in the right place, and here’s our best shot at making it fit:
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Re-Assembled
The mystery surrounding Thor #168-170 , examined by John Morrow, with help from Shane Foley and Sean Kleefeld
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Kirby, The CIA and the
Kirbionage
Reprinted from Comic Art Forum #2, 2002 Submitted by James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook
(throughout this article) Some of Kirby’s concept art for the Lord of Light film and theme park. Inks by Mike Royer. All art ©2009 Barry Geller.
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n 1978, Jack Kirby realized that he was not going to be able to follow his dreams any further working for the two major comics companies and began to consider other uses for his talents. He made an arrangement to fulfill the remainder of his Marvel contract by doing storyboards and production drawings for the Fantastic Four cartoon produced by Saturday morning cartoon moguls Hanna-Barbera. This gave him inroads into the animation industry, where he would find employment for the next decade. Kirby had moved to California with the hope of expanding his horizons into film and as his comics career dissolved, he almost immediately got involved in a particularly ambitious movie project. In 1978 writer/producer Barry Ira Geller contacted Jack to collaborate on a film adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s Hugo Award-winning novel Lord of Light. The thirteen extraordinary drawings Jack completed were then inked by Mike Royer and made into a limited number of “Media Kits” by Geller for promotional purposes. The complex structures Jack designed were to have been realized as film sets and eventually function permanently as a theme park, but unfortunately after an initial burst of publicity, the project fell into a legal morass.
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In 1979 during the Iranian hostage crisis, six American diplomats were successfully smuggled out of Tehran. At that time much of the credit went to the Canadian Government for their role in the mission to save the lives of the six Americans, who had survived by hiding in the Canadian Embassy. But 20 years later in an unusual event honoring their fiftieth anniversary, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to honor some of its unsung heroes and revealed that the escape had been part of a covert action executed by their operatives. As the startling details of this story emerged, it turned out that the whole plot hung on Jack’s artwork. The following is an interview with Barry Ira Geller, the man responsible for putting Jack’s work into the hands of CIA spies in this strange saga of real life intrigue, glamour, adventure and Hollywood mayhem.
Interview with Barry Ira Geller by James Romberger JAMES ROMBERGER: The Lord of Light drawings were a great use of Jack’s talents; it’s a shame the project wasn’t consummated. I have to admit being intrigued by a letter in the Kirby Collector about a Bravo show that referred to your project in a strange
Lord of Light context, that of a front for an anti-terrorist task force bent on freeing hostages in a foreign land. The conspiratorial scenarios multiply as one freely conjectures, not the least concept that the CIA are Kirby fans. BARRY IRA GELLER: I agree with your perception regarding the different kind of work I employed Jack for—it was the perfect evolution of his total mastery. Buildings were going to be based upon them—that would have put the Earth on its ears had we been able to do it. Actually, the half hour program was made by WGBH Boston where the CIA’s master spy admitted publicly to ripping off the Lord of Light script and Jack’s drawings to set up a phony production company front in Iran to (successfully) get out six almost-prisoners. This was kept secret all these years. I have the video and will be editing it, and will put it up on my site. It is quite astounding. It turns out my makeup man, John Chambers (Oscar winner for Planet of the Apes) was also the CIA’s chief makeup consultant and gave the script to the spy for whom he worked, Mendez, who was the real Mission: Impossible dude... hahahaha. I was terrified when first seeing the show, but then found “enlightenment”—as I began to acknowledge the wonders of a million coincidences to bring everything up to that point, from me conceiving the project and then getting Jack to do the work, getting Chambers involved, etc... that’s six people alive instead of maybe dead. I am certain Jack would have loved the “Touch of God” relationships here. I miss him terribly to not be able to share the joke. JAMES: Jack never knew of the CIA plan? BARRY: No, Jack never knew since the situation was only “declassified” (crime admitted to) this past year. Had Jack still smoked cigars, we would have shared some big expensive sticks on the humor of it all either way. JAMES: On History Channel last night they had another show about the CIA operative Mendez, on This Week in History. They didn’t show Jack’s drawings but it was obvious they were referring to that same operation to free people holed up in an embassy. They said the film was to be called Argo and that in 1980 they had taken the ads out in Hollywood trade papers about the movie, causing Hollywood to go all abuzz. BARRY: Fascinating. I remember reading about the Argo project. The reason they didn’t show Jack’s drawings (most likely) was that they didn’t want to pay me any release money, or give credit to Jack or myself. JAMES: How did you end up hearing about the CIA plot? BARRY: The Associate Producer of the Bravo show contacted me and I heard about the show afterwards. Like I said, John Chambers had told me he’d done “some” work for the CIA in 1979 in a discussion we had about making Marlon Brando look 20 years younger using some special makeup he’d invented, which he said was used by the CIA. Hadn’t a clue (or anyone else) that his work was so prominently placed. [laughter] The important thing to know about John’s work was that it wasn’t simply makeup; like Bill Tuttles’s work for the Wizard of Oz, it was makeup which became part of the living identity of the character. This is what won him the Oscar, both for Hollywood and, apparently, the government. There are things in the works to find out more about the CIA thing. You will hear about it soon. JAMES: Could you elaborate for me what Jack meant when he said, “I think this film and the way we are conceiving it could contribute to saving the world”? BARRY: The concept of the god’s “psychic abilities” which were turned into, over 1000 years, full blown aspects and attributes, were of awesome nature and I think what Jack appreciated most aside from the obviousness of these being characters perfect for him to develop, was the fact that they were still “real people” (i.e. same kind of emotional problems, etc.). The “save the world” thing I believe was attributed to showing the world that we all have the same psychic capabilities—and through the toy line I was developing (with magnetic levitation) and the buildings of Science Fiction Land, the purpose was to showcase the future in a whole new way— by employing many scientists to develop new technologies in various areas, then showcasing the results. Same thing which got Ray Bradbury and Paolo Soleri working with me, too. JAMES: The prints resemble architectural drawings; were they meant to be literally and faithfully translated into reality? BARRY: Absolutely. You can’t imagine the heart attacks I was giving to a few
engineers. Actually, I knew there would be “real life” engineering problems, but it was my inner joke to always watch their horror and with Jack I always told him to “make it like he would imagine it and not worry about engineering.” He appreciated this. So Jack and I had a ball thrashing out themes. As he knew, I wanted a “Master” design to then give to all others to do their thing with. We laughed a lot when our architectural consultant screamed holy hell about how impossible it was to make the cantilevered floating gardens of “The Chambers of Brahma, Exterior.” JAMES: If the backing had all gone through, what aspects of the realization would Jack have been involved in? In terms of a film, would he have been creating additional production design and/or continuity? BARRY: My offer/deal with Jack was he was “Design General.” Also gave him points in the Gross Profits. This means everyone worked under him. All Science Fiction Land. All film. We designed each drawing to be used both as a set description and theme park description. As I said previously, I was always amazed how he managed to capture the correct POV each time—well, all except one, which I gave him back and it is in The Art of Jack Kirby [by Ray Wyman Jr. and Catherine Hohlfield, 1992, Blue Rose Press–Ed.] as the Angel. JAMES: Do the scale of the little people in the drawings accurately reflect the intended scale? It would’ve been like seeing Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, for real, amped to the Nth degree! BARRY: As far as I can determine, absolutely correct. The scale was close to how I envisioned it on most drawings and talked with architects about. The best example of scale was “The Chambers of Brahma Exterior.” Wow! Yes. I have to admit walking around the city and imagining the giant buildings right there. And there was more: I had gotten Buckminster Fuller along for the ride, and 3M interested in funding a floating dome over the whole thing. 1/2 mile high and 3/4 mile long. Bucky had tried to convince NYC in 1964 [site of the World’s Fair that year- Ed.] that it would float, being warmer inside than out. I believed him. JAMES: I seem to recall reference somewhere to color versions of the drawings; is this how the Media Kit was presented, as color prints? At any rate those are highly coveted items, I’m sure. BARRY: Yes, there was a media “kit” which consisted of colored versions of different rides, the full schemata of the Park and film, geological and an Environmental Impact report which I wrote. The color versions of Jack’s drawings came from a “coloring contest” my production company gave. I still have one. Mendez flashes another (where did he get that? hmmmm) on the WGBH movie. JAMES: I can understand how seeing your ideas used in such a way by the CIA could be frightening, especially given recent events, and perhaps consider yourself a potential target for retaliation by extremists. BARRY: Frightening, yes but I wouldn’t go that far to say terrorists are after me. [laughter] At least I don’t think any may be, anymore than they would be after Mendez. JAMES: It does sound like something Jack might’ve approved. I recall reading his comments about his friend Leon Klinghoffer who was murdered by terrorists during the famous Achille Lauro incident. BARRY: Jack would have loved the whole thing, for sure. Our relationship continued for 17 years or so, and I was always at family gatherings, sedars, etc., and at both funerals. He’d adopted me as a son and writing this wells me up as I miss him quite dearly. JAMES: I’m very interested in what the greats Bradbury, Fuller, and Soleri thought of Jack’s work for you—any comments you can recall? BARRY: Ray Bradbury of course was a big fan, as was Jack of him. Ray’s role was that of consultant to different types of theme rides I’d planned. Bucky Fuller didn’t meet us as yet, only expressed his interest on consulting to 3M in building the dome. Science Fiction Land stopped too suddenly, just as work was in progress to get discussions underway. Soleri was the god of architecture at the time, the true visionary. He saw himself as one, too. He, too, was on board to design different theme rides and I wanted to build an arcology with his help. Visiting him, though, I remember feeling the tragic air as he was aware he was living a dream which wouldn’t occur in his lifetime, which I guess afforded him a degree of arrogance. I did succeed in gaining his trust of my project, although I knew it meant ultimately imparting to him he was one chief in a group of chiefs. But he was a driven man with great vision. Hundreds of student architects from around the world would come to work with him. JAMES: Who else were you tapping for this project? 71