INNERVIEW
Kirby on Kirby: 1974 Jack Kirby interviewed by Jerry Connelly on September 18, 1974
(below) Kirby pencils from page 6 of Captain America #101 (May 1968), and the published version (opposite). (next page, bottom) Jack’s 1960s unused redesign for Cap.
[Jacob Kurtzberg was born on New York’s Lower East Side on August 28, 1917, to parents who had recently emigrated from Austria. He grew up to become Jack Kirby, a legend in the world of comic books, introducing to that world such seminal characters as Captain America; The Boy Commandos; The Newsboy Legion; Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth; and OMAC, the One-Man Army Corps. A prolific artist and writer, Kirby was virtually a one-
man comic book factory who created most of his own stories, then illustrated them in his distinctive muscle-bulging, action-crammed, panel-packed style. When he died in 1994 at the age of 77, he was revered by comics fans of all ages as the “King of the Comics.” I was privileged to interview Jack Kirby on the evening of September 18, 1974, in a live, 60-minute radio broadcast in the studios of KNJO, Thousand Oaks, California. What follows is a condensed version of our conversation.] JERRY CONNELLY: Let’s talk about Captain America, probably your most famous creation. Captain America was first published in March 1941, about eight months before the United States got into World War II. On the cover of that first issue, you showed Captain America slugging Adolph Hitler right in the chops. Was Captain America created specifically to fight World War II? JACK KIRBY: Yes, I believe it was a spontaneous reaction on my part and my partner Joe Simon. We discussed it at the time. There was patriotic fervor everywhere. It was just the climate for that kind of thing. Captain America was a superhero of his own, specific type. There were many other super-heroes that were being developed at the time, and Captain America was the first to have a patriotic theme. My style was particularly adaptable to that kind of super-hero, and it went very well. CONNELLY: How did Captain America’s powers differ from those of Superman? KIRBY: Captain America was a super-acrobat. His powers weren’t that extreme. He couldn’t stop a locomotive, but he could certainly get out of the way fast enough. [laughs] And that did the trick for him. He was as dramatic as I could make him. If he got into a fight, it was with 50 guys. If he jumped from a roof, he just knew how to roll right and avoid injury. He was a man with super-reflexes. He couldn’t fly. He didn’t have any of the super-powers of the ultimate super-hero. The ultimate super-heroes had super-powers that were extraordinary. The only thing extraordinary about Captain America were his reflexes, his intuitiveness, and his incisive sizingup of the situation. His mind was very facile, and his muscles went right along with it. CONNELLY: What was the origin story? KIRBY: It was a scientific experiment in which a certain chemical caused physical changes that were necessary to change a subject that the scientists had selected. The subject, of course, was a 4-F. [laughs] He was in pretty bad shape, 22