rvel © Ma TM & ters, Inc. c Chara
JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SEVENTY-EIGHT $10.95
WINTER 2020
Contents
THE
SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! 25 YEARS ON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 (a quarter century of this mag) JACK KIRBY AT FLEISCHER STUDIOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 (Kirby’s earliest work was animation)
C o l l e c t o r
ISSUE #78, WINTER 2020
LINK THORNE, THE FLYING FOOL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 (a forgotten S&K hero) HOW SIMON & KIRBY KICKSTARTED THE SILVER AGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 (Challengers or the Flash?) KIRBY OBSCURA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 MARVEL PRECURSORS. . . . . . . . . 22 (he had to start somewhere) SOLID SILVER CONTINUITY. . . . . . 28 (simply the best) A 25-YEAR SEISMIC SHIFT! . . . . . 31 (at this point in Jack’s career...) MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE FALLEN MONSTER… . . . . . . . . . . 34 (heading out the door with Thor) 2019 WONDERCON KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL. . . . . . . . . 40 (Mark Evanier moderates) THE MYSTERY OF MYSTIVAC. . . . 53 (the Mister Miracle mystery) SILVER SURFER GALLERY. . . . . . . 55 SILVER STAR: INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 (Kirby’s final hero examined) CIRCLE OF FRIENDS . . . . . . . . . . . 63 (stories about meeting Jack) THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR. . . . 65 (thanks to those who’ve helped us) EVENT HORIZON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 ( Tom Scioli shares his grand design for the Fantastic Four) GOING MUTTS OVER KIRBY!. . . . . 70 (Patrick McDonnell’s tributes to Jack) THE JACK KIRBY MUSEUM. . . . . . 73 (visit & join www.kirbymuseum.org) THE MONOLITH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 COLLECTOR COMMENTS. . . . . . . . 78 (letters on past issues) Deluxe co ver inks: STEVE RUDE Standard cover inks: STEVE RUDE (new Galactus figure), JOHN ROMITA and JOHN VERPOORTEN (main inks from Thor #170, at right) Standard cover colors: TOM ZIUKO COPYRIGHTS: Ant-Man, Avengers, Batroc, Black Panther, Captain America, Devil Dinosaur, Eternals, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Hawkeye, Him, Hulk, Iron Man, Loki, Magneto, Maximus, Metallo, Odin, Quicksilver, Rawhide Kid, Scarlet Witch, Sgt. Fury, Sif, Silver Surfer, SpiderMan, Strange Tales, Stranger, Sub-Mariner, Thermal Man, Thor, Two-Gun Kid, Vision, Volstaag, Warriors Three, Wasp, Watcher, X-Men, Yellow Claw TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Big Barda, Blackhawks, Cave Carson, Challengers of the Unknown, Flash, Forever People, Green Arrow, Guardian, Jimmy Olsen, Lightray, Lois Lane, Metallo, Mister Miracle, Mystivac, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, OMAC, Orion, Rip Hunter, Sea Devils, Shazam, Slig, Suicide Squad, Superman, The Unexpected TM & © DC Comics • Popeye TM & © King Features • Bullseye, Fighting American, Foxhole, In Love, Link Thorne, Night Fighter, Police Trap, Sunfire TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby estates • Private Strong TM & © Archie Publications • The Fly TM & © Joe Simon estate • Chip Hardy, Flesh Crawl, Galaxy Green, Silver Star, Sky Masters TM & © Jack Kirby estate • Destroyer Duck TM & © Steve Gerber & Jack Kirby estates
The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 27, No. 78, Winter 2020. Published quarterly by and © TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Single issues: $12 postpaid US ($18 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $48 Economy US, $70 International, $18 Digital. Editorial package © TwoMorrows Publishing, a division of TwoMorrows Inc. All characters are trademarks of their respective companies. All Kirby artwork is © Jack Kirby Estate unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © the respective authors. Views expressed here are those of the respective authors, and not necessarily those of TwoMorrows Publishing or the Jack Kirby Estate. First printing. PRINTED IN CHINA. ISSN 1932-6912
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hoto
Pivotal Decisions
25 Years On
by editor John Morrow
Did I do the right thing? Make the right choices? Will I regret this move one day? Here I am in 1996 at one of my earliest convention appearances (that’s Joe Sinnott’s hand on my shoulder!)...
...and accepting the 2019 Eisner Award for “Best Comics-Related Periodical” for Back Issue magazine, in a photo by Kendall Whitehouse.
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o r a quarter-century (!), I’ve been producing this magazine on a regular basis. Since 1994, it’s consumed countless hours of my life, and more than once, I’ve stopped to ask myself, “Self, is this the best use of your time and the remaining years of your life, or should you be focusing on something much more lucrative?” Kirby himself must’ve been plagued with that same question, but inevitably reached the answer I have: “As long as I can support my family, the satisfaction I get from my job is just as important as making more money.” So for this Silver Anniversary issue, I’m dropping some extra coin on a very satisfying fifth ink color (metallic silver, of course), and a special silver sleeve Deluxe Edition for those who chose it over the Standard Edition. Alas, due to the ongoing trade dispute between the US and China, the addition of a 30% tariff on our printing means, for the foreseeable future, I’ll have to cut 16 pages from the usual format to keep our cover price the same. But in spite of some very frustrating business decisions I’ve been forced to make, my day job is a pretty nice gig. I get to produce work that I enjoy, and am immensely proud of—just as Jack did for twice as long as I’ve been cranking out this mag. I could’ve spent this entire issue documenting my own personal journey that brought me here, but this mag has never been, and never will be, about me. It’s about Jack Kirby, the man who influenced several generations in ways that we’re only beginning to see now. So rather than deflect any more attention away from him, let me just point 2
you toward our 25th Anniversary book, The World of TwoMorrows, which I’m co-editing with Jon B. Cooke. If you’ve ever wanted to know the nitty-gritty history of how I started TJKC, and ended up with what fans half-jokingly call my publishing “empire,” WOT should be out at the same time this issue ships. It’s filled with photos, memorabilia, and behind-the-scenes details of how TwoMorrows evolved from a 16-page hand- xeroxed fanzine about Jack Kirby, to what it is today. And now, let’s take a journey through Kirby’s own history, with stops along the way to see what kind of pivotal decisions he had to make. I’ve learned a lot from Jack’s successes and failures—most notably that, just like in comic books, even your defeats can come back around as eventual triumphs. I hope you can take away something valuable from this trip as well. H
Kirby’s Bad(?) Business Sense
A lot has been said about how, as good as Kirby was at creating comics, he was equally bad at the business end of things. Sometimes you just make the wrong choice in a situation, and other times you have few options when life throws you a curveball. Over the course of 25 years of documenting his history, I’ve found a lot of key moments where things might’ve turned out differently. Here’s a list of some of those instances—decide for yourself if these were good or bad choices Jack made: • Waiting to get drafted into the infantry in WWII, whereas Joe Simon enlisted in the US Coast Guard and Stan Lee in the Signal Corps, serving stateside • Forming Mainline Comics with Joe Simon, at a time when comics were in a major sales downturn in the 1950s • Signing a napkin contract with Jack Schiff for the Sky Masters newspaper strip, rather than having a legal professional handle the negotiations • Moving to Marvel in the late 1950s and continuing to work without a contract throughout the 1960s • Not walking out of Marvel with Steve Ditko in 1966 • Siding with Marvel in Simon’s 1960s Captain America lawsuit; was there bad blood between Joe and Jack that kept Kirby from discussing it before taking Marvel owner Martin Goodman’s offer? • Taking a loan from Goodman in 1969 to fund his family’s move to California • Moving to DC in 1970, without written guarantees from Carmine Infantino • Burning bridges by parodying Stan Lee as Funky Flashman in Mister Miracle in the 1970s • Moving back to Marvel in 1975, without written guarantees from Marvel
In the 1930s, young Jack Kirby had dreams of being a movie star, hoping to move to Hollywood and become the next John Garfield in gangster films. Thankfully, his mom wouldn’t let him, or he might’ve missed out on a career in comic books. So the closest he got to being on the Big Screen was accepting an offer to use his art talent animating cartoons in 1935— and there begins a long series of pivotal choice made by...
Jack Kirby at Fleischer Studios by Jim Korkis • Originally published online at: http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/in-his-own-words-jack-kirby-at-fleischers/
I (far right) Jack Kirby, age 18 in 1935. (right) Kirby’s try-out (under his given name, Jacob Kurtzberg) to do in-betweening on the Fleischer Studios’ Popeye animated shorts.
(above) Max Fleischer with Betty Boop.
n a short biography of Jack Kirby written by Jack himself that appeared in the Merry Marvel Messenger (the official newsletter of the Merry Marvel Marching Society fan club) in 1966, it states: “Frustrated by bad spelling, I turned to bad drawing and improved both enough in my late teens to land a job in a small syndicate servicing weekly newspapers. “From there to Max Fleischer animation studios— where, for negligible wages, I learned that the human body, in motion, has value and beauty. When Popeye and Betty Boop took the initial steps to throw their pies, it was my job to complete the movements and speed of the action. This operation was called in-betweening. When comic magazines blossomed as a field, I leaped in and drew for anyone who would let me tell a story.” While most of Kirby’s peers in his neighborhood saw their future as policemen, politicians, or gangsters, Kirby wanted to be an artist, but only lasted less than a week at art class at Pratt University because his father lost his job. Kirby dropped out and needed to find paying work. He started doing some artwork for Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate. He also got a job as an in-betweener at the Fleischer Studios in New York sometime in 1935, supposedly earning around fifteen dollars a week. It can be debated that this was his earliest formal art training that taught him about movement and exaggeration. Working in the same room during that exact same time as an in-betweener was cartoonist John Stanley, who would go on to later fame on the Little Lulu comic books among other credits, so it is probable that the
two artists met. Around the same time Sheldon Mayer, Harry Lampert and Gill Fox, all of whom would make an impact in early comic books, were also working there. Stanley left in 1936 to work with Hal Horne on Mickey Mouse Magazine. By that time, Kirby was also gone. He saw there was labor unrest at the studio and left well before the strike of May 1937, and the studio later relocating to Miami, Florida in 1938. He was not working there in 1939 as many sources state because he would have had to be living in Florida. In the summer of 1940, he and his family moved to Brooklyn, New York where he met Rosalind Goldstein, whom he would later marry in 1942. Kirby did admit that one of the benefits he got from working at the animation studio was that he smuggled out large quantities of pencils and erasers, which he used for many years drawing newspaper strips and comic books. Certainly his working on Popeye cartoons inspired the work he did on the comic strip Socko the Seadog done under the name of “Teddy” (below).
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Simon & Kirby scored big by creating the Romance Comics genre in the late 1940s, but as the 1950s wore on, the comics field was in a slump. In the midst of an anti-comics backlash, Joe and Jack unwisely chose to start Mainline Comics. Their new company failed, and they parted ways. Kirby chose to reach out to DC Comics, picking up whatever work he could, and bringing with him a leftover Mainline concept, that in hindsight shows...
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he team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby gets credit for a lot of firsts, including the first kid gang strips, exemplified by the Newsboy Legion; the first successful comics aimed at the love magazine audience (Young Romance); and numerous other pioneering efforts. I want to make a radical proposal. Simon & Kirby also kickstarted the Silver Age of Comics. How can that be, you ask? Run with me here….
(above) Which comic—Showcase #4 or #6—really launched the Silver Age of Comics? If it was the former, the Flash sure took his time getting his own series, as opposed to the Challengers, who moved with almost lightning speed!
The universally accepted trigger for the Silver Age was the appearance of the updated Flash in Showcase #4, September–October 1956. This led to a wave of new incarnations of Golden Age DC superheroes, culminating in the Justice League of America, whose sales directly inspired Marvel Comics to follow suit with The Fantastic Four. Yet the character’s revival did not result in a Flash comic book until 1959, twoand-a-half years after the new Flash’s debut. By any standard, that’s a slow transition from tryout to established title. More to the point, before The Flash resumed its interrupted Golden Age numbering, subsequent Showcase features had already broken out into their own books. As important as the Flash’s revival was to what came afterward, I submit that “Challengers of the Unknown,” which first appeared in Showcase #6, cover-dated January–February 1957, was just as important as the Flash, if not more so, in the comic book comeback that defined the Silver Age. Two consecutive Challengers tryouts appeared before the Flash popped up again in Showcase #8. The Flash did not return until Showcase #13, with his last tryout running in #14, a year-and-a-half after the Scarlet Speedster’s appearance. By that time, there had been four Challengers issues, then the feature received its own title, coverdated April-May 1958. That’s right, Challengers beat the Flash to its own title—and by a solid year. Flash #105 was cover-dated February-March 1959. By the time it
appeared on America’s newsstands, the bi-monthly Challengers of the Unknown was already up to issue #6! It’s clear in retrospect that DC was hesitant to launch new super-heroes in the early 1950s, a time when the comic book industry was under fire from parents’ groups. Launching new titles was an expensive and risky venture—as witness the final titles emanating from the Simon & Kirby studio, all of which were painfully short-lived. The Flash appeared sporadically four times before DC management felt confident enough to award him a title of his own. By contrast, Lois Lane was given her own title only six months after her final Showcase appearance. Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #1 was cover-dated March-April 1958, the month before Challengers #1. No doubt Superman’s success on TV motivated that decision. Even though Lois Lane beat out the Challengers by thirty days, DC’s confidence in the Kirby strip appeared to be much stronger. Only three months passed from their final Showcase appearance to their first issue. Overlooked
...How Simon & Kirby Kickstarted the Silver Age by Will Murray
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Sample Headline Marvel Precursors
Coming back to Marvel Comics was perhaps Jack’s most pivotal decision, for better or worse. But starting with the Fantastic Four, much of this key 1960s workbyhas distinct... John Morrow
by Alex Grand
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t is important to see what Kirby worked on before his work with Marvel that would strongly suggest his contributions went beyond simply just drawing, and that he brought many important ideas and concepts into his collaborations with Stan Lee, co-creating Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man, the X-Men, Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and villains such as Galactus, Modok, Rama-Tut, the Lava Men, Skrulls, Impossible Man, Magneto, the Sentinels, Puppet Master, Ringmaster, and Immortus.
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Thor
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The Mighty Thor was created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1962 in Journey into Mystery #83. 1 Although this Thor is the most famous, Jack worked on a couple of other Thors before this version. Jack had a long relationship with the Norse gods and reportedly loved their stories as a child. His first Thor was for DC Comics, in Adventure Comics #75 (1942), “The Villain from Valhalla.” 2 He would then return to the character in 1957 for DC’s Tales of the Unexpected #16 (1957), “The Magic Hammer.” 3
The Magic Hammer story in 1957 is interesting because we get a prototypical Mjolnir held in Thor’s hand, which matches the hammer Thor held in his 1962 Marvel debut. Another cool precursor from this issue is that Thor’s hammer is tested against a tree in the 1957 DC issue. 4 Jack Kirby would have the Marvel Thor do the same thing in his first appearance in Journey into Mystery #83. 5 The plot of the 1957 DC issue revolved around Loki stealing Thor’s hammer. This 7 8 same plot would be used in Journey into Mystery #92 (1963), 6 where Loki would steal Thor’s hammer, causing a great deal of mischief. Another fun fact is that the first villains to fight Marvel’s Thor in Journey into Mystery #83 are the Stone Men from Saturn, 7 and that these Stone Men have origins in Jack Kirby’s fascination with the Easter 4 Island Stone Men which he first used for DC in House of Mystery #85 (1959), 8 then later in 1961 for Marvel’s Tales 5 to Astonish #16. 9 22
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11 A most interesting thing about the Thunder God’s first Marvel appearance is that the Stone Men were from Saturn. Why Saturn? Well, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon worked on a similar plot for Fawcett’s Captain Marvel Adventures #1 (1941) where Captain Marvel was referred to as the “Thunder God” as he fights aliens from Saturn. 10 A key plot point in the old Thor comics from the 1960s was the love that Thor had for Jane Foster, and this romance point also appears to have a fun precursor in Young Romance #14 (1949) where a woman fantasizes about a handsome Viking lover—note the headdress on the right side of the sample panel shown above. 11
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Iron Man
Iron Man has a fascinating set of Jack Kirby precursors. The first Iron Man story was credited to Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck and Jack Kirby, with Kirby having first drawn the cover image, before the interior story was drawn by Don Heck. The key plot point from Iron Man’s first appearance is Tony Stark’s heart condition, which is 12 only controlled by wearing his iron suit. 12 Two years before this, Jack worked on a story with Stan Lee called “The Thing Called Metallo!” (1961) in Tales of Suspense #16. In this story, a man in a strong Iron Man-style suit has a similar heart problem. 13
There was an earlier 13 Metallo in DC’s Action
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Comics #252 (1959, top), 14 written by Robert 15 Bernstein. This villainous Metallo is a criminal in an iron body with a kryptonite heart—note the facial similarity to Marvel’s Tony Stark. There was a rumor of Robert Bernstein and Jack Kirby having discussed this story when Kirby was working at DC during the late 1950s, which could make Metallo a literary ancestor to Iron Man. Another feature in Iron Man’s first appearance in 1963 was that Tony Stark was forced into making weapons for his Asian captors while trapped during the Vietnam War. 15 Jack Kirby worked on a similar story with Dave Wood in 1958 for Adventure Comics #255, during his Silver Age revamp of Green Arrow in “The War that Never Ended!” when Oliver Queen was trapped by Japanese and forced to make them weapons while in captivity. 16 23
In 1968, Kirby took a loan from Martin Goodman to fund a move from New York to California, ostensibly because his asthmatic daughter needed a more conducive climate—but he undoubtedly needed the change as well. Not feeling properly credited, appreciated, or compensated for his creations, he quietly made plans to leave Marvel Comics, and closed out the 1960s with some of his least-inspired work of the decade—serviceable, but nothing groundbreaking. He was saving his best ideas for another time—and another company. But...
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(right and below) Unused page from Thor #169. Long after it was rejected, Kirby added much greater detail to the backgrounds—either for his own amusement, or to increase its resale value.
here’s this book that I keep reading over and over—pawing at it, actually, like a curious dog. It’s a Marvel trade paperback, The Essential Thor, Volume 4, reprinting, in black-&-white, Jack Kirby’s final year or so on the book (Thor #167, cover-dated August 1969, to #179, August 1970). It also goes far beyond Kirby’s exit, with fill-ins by Neal Adams, into the early issues of John Buscema’s long run, past Stan Lee’s departure as regular writer and ending with the first few Gerry Conway-scripted issues. The book covers about 29 issues total, spanning maybe two-and-a-half years, wrapping up the 1960s and speeding into the ’70s. Only about 29 issues—but what a difference, if you jump from the first story in the reprint volume (the Lee-Kirby-Vince Colletta “This World Renounced!”) to the last (the ConwayBuscema tale from 1972’s Thor #195, “In the Shadow of Mangog!”, in which the only real connection to 1969 is Colletta’s penwork on the inks). It’s fascinating to watch Buscema transition in as the book’s permanent artist and to see Lee transition out as its permanent writer (he retains an editor’s credit on the Conway issues reprinted here). How could Thor survive losing both its captains? By losing only one at a time, over a long period of time. It basically worked the same way on Fantastic Four. What’s most “essential” about this Essential collection is that we have, under one cover, Kirby’s last year on Thor, one of his masterwork titles. These issues were done when Kirby’s relationship with Marvel was fatally fraying and when he was readying to make his leap to DC. His distraction shows in some of the work; did Lee notice? Whether he did or not… it was an odd year for both the book and the team that produced it.
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Let’s examine these final issues one by one.
Thor #167, August 1969 Cover Date
A John Romita cover? Signed by JR? It’s clear why Lee rejected Kirby’s rather dull version [shown at left], but it’s a sign of the bumpy months to come. The story finds Odin sending Thor on “a mission most grave”— to find the planet-killing Galactus. “It could take an eternity, my love,” sighs Sif in a lovely Colletta-textured splash page. Two pages later, we get another splash featuring Loki and Karnilla the Norn Queen—it looks great, but story-wise, it adds little. (By this point, Kirby was holding back new ideas and new characters and using more “pin-up” splashes to pump up the issues.) The main action here is just as advertised on Romita’s cover. Loki waits for Thor to transform into
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while, Back At The Fallen Monster… by Robert L. Bryant Jr.
Dr. Don Blake upon a rooftop, then attacks without mercy, easily grabbing the magic cane, but all-seeing Odin calls foul and zaps Loki back to Asgard. Page 18 is another cool splash, this one showing Galactus devouring another world, his great hands clouded with—smoke? Energy?— while the black skies fill with refugee ships.
Thor #168, September 1969
“Galactus Found!” proclaims the Kirby cover, as the space god’s hand lunges for Thor and the reader. “Could take an eternity”? Well, I suppose you could argue that for kids, the month-long wait between issues was almost an eternity. But you have to wonder—did Kirby miss an opportunity by not stretching the search over two or three issues? It would have been a chance for Thor to find sidebar-type stories on strange worlds, or to encounter fleets of ships fleeing Galactus (as the Thunder God did once before). The preparation for Thor’s odyssey takes longer than the mission itself. The Odinship departs Asgard on page 2; Thor is inside the hold of Galactus’ worldship by page 7. “Could take an eternity”! Takest thee a chill pill, warrior woman. But this issue marks a major short-term change, because it’s the beginning of Colletta’s several- issue absence as inker, resulting in a far different look for the book for months. The inker here is George Klein, whose DNA is closer to Joe Sinnott than to Colletta. And someone—maybe Klein, maybe someone in the Marvel production office—has used generous amounts of Zip-A-Tone on many pages. (I think it works more often than not; the looming side of the guard’s head on page 1 is a study in cross-hatching, a pleasure of textures.) Much of this issue is devoted to setting up the threat for the next few books—the Thermal Man, birthed at “a secret atomic experimental center in the mysterious Orient.” Sounds promising, but it’s really just another Big Bad Communist Robot on its way to crush “the accursed free world!” Who needs a rampaging robot when we have Galactus, the space god who must be found even if the quest “would take an age”? We don’t want Thermal Man; we want Galactus. But we must visit with Thermal Man for five pages while he escapes the Reds, is recaptured, packed aboard a missile, and shot off to America. Back to Galactus! He wants to talk to Thor about his secret origin—who he is, how he came to be. The fans are salivating now. Yesssssss. We get six panels of secret origins. In flashback, the Watcher sees a starship
crash “ages upon ages ago” on a “far-distant planet,” and he spies the plague-pocked, blotchy hand of a dead crew member. It’s only sort of a teaser, though. More later. Back to Thermal Man! He’s made his way to New York, interrupted the regular TV broadcasts and drawn the attention of Thor’s pals Balder and the Warriors Three. Fight coming! And more secret origins.
Thor #169, October 1969
Better men than I have examined, in the pages of TJKC, this sort of baffling issue. There may be no answers. I won’t rehash what’s been said before about Galactus’ birth, except to note that the inker here is again Klein, that someone still has a supply of Zip-A-Tone in his desk, and that the cover is a pastiche of photostatted interior panels from the issue, which serve as background for an apparently Romita-drawn outline of Galactus, which serves as background for a definitely Romita-drawn Thor figure. It may be the oddest cover ever done for a Kirby comic. But yeah, we really do get Galactus’ secret origin and a flashback visit to his plague- polluted planet Taa, a “now-dead paradise.” We see Galactus as he was when he was only a man (not yet named in this version of the origin). And we get that strange panel on page 14 in which Galactus seems to be stooped and wearing Watcher-type robes. Another panel shows the space god creating “suitable and unique attire which could regulate his energy”—from pure energy he makes his own Galactus helmet, armored tunic and boots. (A little too much information here? 35
(above) As the Galactus origin story in Thor #169 was being developed by Kirby, Marvel sent these states from #168 to Jack to follow from. We’re still trying to unravel the full story of why there is almost a full issue of #169 rejected pages, but more info can be found in the updated, expanded second edition of Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said, available now from TwoMorrows.
In 1970, Kirby made two fateful decisions, which would have lasting impacts on his future. One was to leave Marvel for DC Comics, to launch a new concept—an epic tale weaving through multiple comics, which was eventually dubbed the “Fourth World.” The other was hiring two young fans to serve as his assistants—a duo that are still serving as his personal historical raconteurs today, documenting his life and career as recently as at the 2019... Held Sunday, March 31, 2019 in Anaheim, California. Featuring (as shown on next page top to bottom) moderator Mark Evanier, Steve Sherman, Tom Kraft, John Morrow, Paul S. Levine, and Tom King. Transcribed by Sean Dulaney. Copyedited by Mark Evanier.
MARK EVANIER: Hello, I’m Mark Evanier, and this is Steve Sherman, this is John Morrow, this is Tom Kraft over there, and that’s Paul S. Levine. [applause] This is my final panel of the convention. [applause] Thank you. And in many ways, it’s the most fun because it’s fun to talk about Jack. It’s a way of spending more time with him. Actually, you can spend more time with Jack just by wandering through the hall downstairs. I defy you to walk ten yards without seeing some remnant of Jack Kirby somewhere: A character he designed, an artist imitating his style… People with square fingertips. [laughter] Whatever, they’re down there someplace. And it still stuns me—the presence he has in the artistic community, and how I keep running into people who start talking to me about Jack Kirby without knowing I had any connection to him. This has happened to me…. Every two months or three months, someplace, I’m somewhere where I hear someone talking about Jack. They react to a T-shirt design or something like that. I think I told this story on another panel, I was at a Costco one time—they had this thing they were selling, a CD-ROM with the first ten issues of Fantastic Four, Avengers, Hulk, so on… INFANT IN AUDIENCE: Whaa-a-a! EVANIER: Right! [laughter] And I thought, you know, it’s Costco, it’s like eight cents, whatever they charge for these things. I think, “This might be handy to have.” So I have all of my purchases there—I’ve got toilet paper, I’ve got my paper towels; they won’t let you out without one or the other— and this Hispanic kid, about 16-17 years old is boxing up my purchases… [Tom King arrives to join the panel] And this is Tom King, folks. [applause] So, I’m at a Costco, buying a CD-ROM of Jack Kirby’s stuff. It’s got Jack Kirby drawings on it, and this 40
WonderCon Kirby Tribute Panel kid... [Tom King starts chuckling] And what do you make your money doing these days? [laughter] ...and the kid shows me the CD-ROM before he puts it in the box and says, “This is the work of Jack Kirby, the greatest comic book artist who ever lived. Marvel f*cked him over.” [laughter] And I immediately looked to see if the kid could see my credit card or Costco card and had recognized the name, and somehow he made the connection. But no, he had no idea I even knew who Jack Kirby was. [laughter] I told him I had met Jack Kirby, and it was like I’d told him I had met the Easter Bunny. [laughter] It was like, “No, you can’t meet Jack Kirby. C’mon!” [laughter] There are people on the Internet, if you’re on certain forums, who are complaining that nobody knows who Jack Kirby is. These people are wrong, and they are becoming less and less correct as every year goes by, because Jack’s fame is spreading. It is not always spreading at the expense of Stan Lee’s, and I resent the people who think you have to take from Stan to give to Jack. You have to take a few things from Stan, but… [laughter] Robert Kirkman did this documentary on super-heroes—it was on some channel last year—and I was interviewed for it for, like, seven hours or whatever, and of course they used about eleven seconds of me. And when I left, there was one line I said in it that I was sure they’d use, and I was afraid that they’d use it out of context. It’s something that I very much believe, but you have to have some context for it to be a good statement. I was afraid they’d use it without the context and it turned out they didn’t use it at all. But at one point they asked me, “How do you feel about Stan Lee becoming so rich and famous?” I said, “I begrudge Stan Lee nothing except sole credit.” And these guys smiled like, “Ooooh! We’ve got a good quote here.” And then it didn’t make it in. Steve and I had the extraordinary fortune and good luck to know Jack and get to work with him for years, and it was an amazing experience. We were hired by Jack in February of 1970. He and Roz took us to lunch at Cantor’s Delicatessen on the 8th or 9th—I can point out the booth we were sitting in. Jack had potato pancakes, I had a corned beef sandwich… I don’t remember what Steve had, but I remember a lot of completely useless details about things. [laughter] And
Jack told us that he was going to be leaving Marvel— which at first we thought was a joke. STEVE SHERMAN: Yeah. Back then, that was a shock. Like, “What?!” EVANIER: Yeah. And he said, “I’m going to work for DC and I need some assistants. Would you guys like to be my assistants?” Steve and I took a long time to say yes. I think it took, what, a second-and-a-half? SHERMAN: Yeah. EVANIER: At that point, the job was unformed. He didn’t talk about what we were going to do, what we were going to get paid, if we were going to get paid. It was a decision I have never regretted for one second of my life. I don’t think you have either, Steve. SHERMAN: No. In fact, the older I get, the more I realize just how lucky we were to be able to not only know him, but to work with him and hang around him, because he was just a tremendous guy. EVANIER: Steve and I will now demonstrate for you one of the main things we did for Jack. We would sit in Jack’s studio—he would be at his drawing table and we would be sitting, in rather uncomfortable chairs as I recall— turning down coffee. Roz was always trying to give us coffee, which we didn’t like—and Jack would tell us the whole plot of an upcoming story he had. And we would then say, in unison—I would say, “Hey, that sounds great, Jack!” And Steve would say… SHERMAN: “...sounds great, good! Can’t wait to see it!” EVANIER: And we were done. [laughter] And then we would come out [the] next week and there’d be all the pages… for a completely different story! [laughter] We’d say, “What happened to the story you told us last week?” and he’d say, “That’s the story I told you guys.” We’d go, “No it isn’t, Jack.” [laughter] At one point, we were supposed to write an issue of Jimmy Olsen and we came up with this plot about the Loch Ness Monster. Steve came up with the Loch Ness Monster and I came up with putting Jimmy Finlayson in it from the Laurel and Hardy films. So we went out and told Jack the story we had. We pitched it to him, and he added lots of ideas to it. We told him this story and he loved everything we said. I was taking notes like crazy of his contributions 41
(previous page) Jimmy Olsen #139 pencils. (center) Original header stat for the New Gods letter column, which Mark and Steve compiled each issue.
His
Legacy
In black holes, gravitational forces are so strong that light cannot escape. This phenomenon creates a boundary beyond which events cannot affect an observer outside of it. Similarly, Kirby continually drew readers into his world through his masterful storytelling, and even a quarter century after his passing, the pull of his work is so strong that fans and pros can’t get away from it—leading to one professional’s work that can only be called an...
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ack Kirby knew that everything he did was leading up to things he could never imagine. The Kirby vision was made for a series of crescendos, and a new culmination (with infinite further possibilities radiating outward) was reached toward the end of 2019, with Tom Scioli’s Fantastic Four: Grand Design. The two-issue, 80-page epic followed on from the format of fellow Pittsburgh icon Ed Piskor’s X-Men: Grand Design books, though Scioli’s point of departure was the oeuvre of cosmic sagas and family dramas he’s been accumulating since the 1990s. Space-odysseys like The Myth of 8-Opus grounded him in the landscape of Kirby, and groovy reality-benders like GØDLAND (with Joe Casey) and Final Frontier took him to the stratospheric vantage-point where he could see beyond to where Kirby’s imagination was heading. In Fantastic Four: Grand Design he captures the wonder of the original Lee & Kirby cornucopia while reflecting the multiverse of possibilities in later runs, alternate versions and other media—“whatever could make a richer recipe,” as he puts it—supercolliding decades of storylines we’ve seen while illuminating dimensions of it we never grasped, and exploding out into novel concepts that it naturally leads to but we’d never see coming. It’s like a 100-part event comic (and really, what else was the first 100 or so issues of FF?) in two compact bursts, reading like both a CGI blockbuster and an indie film about the personalities at the nucleus of the myth: “It was always there, so just bring it up to the surface,” Scioli says of the world’s greatest dysfunctional family’s internal issues as portrayed here.
(top) The surprisingly FF-reminiscent origin-story of Galactus, as seen in Scioli’s opening cosmic canvas. (bottom left and right) The never-ending soap (and shampoo?) opera of Namor, Reed & Sue. (next page, top and center) Sue’s struggles to stay in the picture, as only Scioli has seen. (next page, bottom) Scioli’s tragic, absurd recurring dream of “This Man… This Monster!”
And what wasn’t there is just as automatically yet ingeniously filled in (“There were some really interesting gaps that gave me the opportunity to play,” he remarks of minor matters like how the FF went from rocket-stealing outlaws to beloved role-models, and the answers all make fascinating sense). You’re reading this in a world already never to be the same after Fantastic Four: Grand Design’s November-December 2019 publication, but Scioli and I skyped back in Autumn as the countdown was still underway…
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Event Horizon THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: This felt to me like the kind of intricate yet elegant weave of the FF’s entire continuity over 50+ years that we see in the MCU’s synthesis of storylines. How much did you immerse yourself in before it took shape on the page (and how many drafts of roads-maybe-taken did it go through)? TOM SCIOLI: I absorbed all of it, and it’s so vast—you could spend your whole career solving this same problem, trying to tell the whole Fantastic Four story in under 100 pages and as completely as possible. A puzzle that has no solution, and a million solutions; it was really, really fun.
Columnist Adam McGovern queries auteur Tom Scioli about his designs on Kirby’s first family
going in that you’re seeing a condensed version of, like, the “real” story; the real story exists somewhere, not quite in the comics and not quite in reality, some misty land between the two. And so it’s okay to just catch a glimpse of something as it goes by. That makes it seem more real, like a documentary, where of course the story you’re seeing is fragmented. The world that it’s describing is a real world, and this is like, a report on that.
TJKC: Were there any false starts, or parts left out? SCIOLI: There was a lot—with all of these hard cuts you have to make, not only can you not keep everything in, you can’t keep anything in—you have to cut to the bone. The Super Skrull got a panel
TJKC: Now that you say so, what this format really reminds me of is Kirby’s “Jack Ruby” strip from Esquire [a docu-comic that summarized the tale of JFK’s assassin’s assassin]—the brisk, telegraphic highlights of a broader story. Though nowhere near as choppy as Kirby’s was, and it doesn’t need footnotes! So there are even Kirby homages beyond the FF. Speaking of which, the dream-sequence with Lyja— SCIOLI: That’s sort of a dream sequence, but not quite a dream. It’s in this timeless [environment] inside of Galactus’ worldship, kind of like near the end of 2001 when he’s in this weird alien setting and time bends and twists, so those visions [Johnny] sees inside Galactus’ worldship, maybe they’re dreams, maybe they’re phantoms, but they also might be echoes of things that haven’t happened to him yet. TJKC: Funny you should mention that, since I had wondered if that sequence was in other ways a stealth crossover with Kirby’s run on the 2001 comic since the Watcher looks like the New Seed in those panels! Like when you manage to work Devil Dinosaur into one earlier part… SCIOLI: I thought about the Fantastic Four and their importance to Marvel as a whole; when you’re doing a story of the Fantastic Four you’re also doing a story of the Marvel Universe. So much of the non-X-Men part of the Marvel Universe was birthed in Fantastic Four. So having Devil Dinosaur, having the Celestials makes perfect sense—and keeping it Kirby, too. Anything that crossed Kirby’s path is fair game.
instead of a page. I had plans for the Golden Age Human Torch, but he doesn’t even show up. TJKC: Though, I thought it was amazing how we would see flashes of the full fabric, like the single panel where Reed’s fighting in WWII and he catches a glimpse of the original Human Torch, as we remember him mentioning to Ben in FF Annual #4. SCIOLI: And Lyja Storm doesn’t make it into the normal flow of the continuity, but you still see echoes of her existence [in a hallucination sequence]. This form of storytelling is really great because it’s already assumed 67
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Going Mutts Over Kirby! by Glen Gold
ou never know where you’re going to find the Kirby influence, and today we’re going to find it in a pretty unexpected place. When Charles Schulz called Mutts “one of the best comic strips of all time,” he wasn’t exaggerating. Artist Patrick McDonnell somehow joins the visual poetry of Krazy Kat with the subtle yet resonant humor of Schulz’s own Peanuts strip. Found in over 700 newspapers, Mutts features the daily adventures of Mooch (a cat) and his friend Earl (a dog) in a suburban neighborhood with their human guardians and an ever-expanding cast of squirrels, deer, bears, birds, and occasional wild animals from Africa. Beyond how funny it is, and how well it captures the complexity—and simplicity—of human/animal relationships, Mutts has a certain spiritual side that deepens the more you read it. Part of that is McDonnell’s clear affection for animals. He does a lot of work on behalf of animal organizations, and his recurring “Shelter Stories” strips are heartbreaking and lovely tales of love found at the rescue. Mutts finds its gentle humor in how we don’t really own the planet, but share it with a lot of wee beasts whose simple needs, if we care enough for them, might actually make us better human beings. But it’s a whole lot more than a cute “funny animal” strip. Mutts is deep, with a Zen, minimalist, Hokusai manga aesthetic, to the extent that Abrams is now saluting its 25th anniversary with a coffee table book called The Art Of Nothing. This is maybe the least Kirbyish title I can imagine, as Jack composed wall-towall everything. McDonnell has long used Mutts Sunday strips’ title panels as a place to salute—and
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parody—artists and familiar cultural touchtones. You might find his characters inserted into a Basquiat, Vermeer, Warhol, or cover of a Frank Zappa album. Which means that last April, readers found in the Sunday comics an homage to the cover to Fantastic Four #51. A few weeks later, a second homage, this one to Fantastic Four #67. And amazingly, each of them was inked by none other than Joltin’ Joe Sinnott! What? How did that happen? I asked. It turns out McDonnell has been a Kirby fan since he was a kid. His earliest memory of comic books was the spinner rack at his local luncheonette in Edison, New Jersey in 1964. His older brother gave him and his younger brother orders about who was allowed to collect what— Patrick was told to start with the X-Men. This meant he read about the Stranger, the Juggernaut, then the Sentinels, and because his other brothers were accumulating the rest of the Marvel line, he got to read the Galactus saga month-by-month as it was hitting the stands. He responded immediately to Kirby’s work on a visceral level, but his readership faded as he grew up and discovered girls and music (he’s a Captain Beefheart fan). But then his teen years coincided with Kirby’s arrival at DC, so once again he got to watch a whole world, the Fourth World, unfolding month by month, this time a storyline brimming with the increased sophistication that a teenager would appreciate. “My mind was blown,” he says. “The Fourth World was a nova of creativity.” Above all, there is something in Jack’s prolific nature that still speaks to Patrick. “When you do a daily strip, it helps to have some kind of discipline and love of the medium, and when you look at how much work he did, he lived for his art. His ‘artist well’ never ran dry. His productivity and faith in his connection to The Source is inspiring to any cartoonist, especially one doing a daily comic strip.”
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(above) One of McDonnell’s prize possessions: The Orion entry from DC’s Who’s Who series, still in pencil, and personally signed to the cartoonist by Kirby.