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Jack Kirby was an American. Americans were a problem for Heavy Metal publisher Len Mogel, especially if they were artists. Len truly believed that no American comic creator could possibly compete with
the French artists whose work we reprinted from Pilote, Metal Hurlant, and other sources. Though his contempt for the work of Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson, and even Art Spiegelman (but, strangely enough, not Richard Corben, whose work Len had first seen in a French publication) was a palpable thing, Len realized that there were times when such home-grown talent was a necessity. The fledgling line of Heavy Metal books had been launched into the stratosphere when Walt Simonson and Archie Goodwin had produced Alien: The Illustrated Story, a comics version of the hugely-successful film. Other movierelated publications, though not as financially impressive as Walt
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of attempts to come up with a second motion picture that would be produced by Len Mogel and directed by Al (Yellow Submarine) Brodax with a score written and performed by Paul McCartney. Stymied in our attempts to secure the rights to a series of humorous science-fiction stories written by Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson and unimpressed with a couple of scripts by Dan (Alien) Obannon, we were all excited when Bhob Stewart brought in an unproduced movie script by James Agee, the man who’d given the world The Night of the Hunter and The African Queen. Reading what I hoped would be an undiscovered jewel written by a multitalented, decades-gone Pulitzer Prize-winner proved to be a sad experience. The script seemed to have no structure of any sort. It was a stream-of-consciousness effort with no coherent story and characters that seemed to wander around without any purpose. It came off, played out inside the theater of my mind, as something concocted by a first-year film student who had no clear idea about what he wanted to communicate to his audience. Wanting a sure-fire commercial property to follow up on our initial successful film, I said no to the Agee script, seconding the thoughts of my on-staff compatriots. The situation was no less dire when one of the true heroes of my life—Ray Bradbury—submitted some of his poetry to Heavy Metal. For years, I had read and been amazed by the short stories and novels of Ray Bradbury. Just reading his Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 had taught me more about writing than I could possibly have gleaned from any college-level courses. I’ve long felt that his “Picasso Summer” is in the running for the honor of being the finest short story ever concocted. And it’s not as if poetry was an unknown element in my life. The words bounced around by Poe, Noyes, Shelley, Frost, and so many others had introduced me to an alternate method of speaking and thinking. Ray Bradbury, too, had charmed me with an actual bit of poetry that he had created as an acknowledgment of man’s first having set foot on the moon. When Julie Simmons handed me a batch of poems by Ray Bradbury and requested my thoughts about them, I was prepared to be bowled over by the same sort of mastery of words that I had seen in “The Lake,” “There Will Come Soft Rains,” “The Machineries of Joy,” and in so many other examples of his writings. It was a bitter disappointment when the words of the poems proved to be clunky and earthbound. The voice of Faye Dunaway in her persona of Bonnie Parker reading the sadly banal words written by the real partner of Clyde Barrow popped into my mind. Although I didn’t want to admit it at first, the examples of poetry put together by one of my heroes seemed to have too much in common with the uneducated striving and preordained failing that an untalented and sorrowful young woman had demonstrated almost fifty years earlier when she’d written a poem that had—only for reasons involving her notoriety—actually seen print. I felt horrible when I gave the poems back to Julie and rendered my opinion. To this day—with those words only a dim memory—I often think that there had to have been a failing in me that caused me to be unable to appreciate what truthfully might have been several rare examples of genius.
In the Summer of 1976, Jack had even taken a stab at adapting the British TV series The Prisoner for Marvel Comics. Partial inks and letters by Mike Royer. 59