Jack Kirby Collector #82 by TwoMorrows Publishing

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #82

MANY WORLDS of JACK KIRBY

$10.95

The

WINTER 2022

82658 00459

THE

MAN

ORL YW D

ACK K

WORLD VIEW Teach the world to sing Jack’s praises. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 MAN OF THE WORLD Will the real Jack Kirby please stand up?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

ISSUE #82, WINTER 2022

C o l l e c t o r

PAST WORLDS A classic Link Thorne story. . . . . . . 14 OTHER WORLDLY Wakanda explored by Jerry Boyd. . 22 DOG-EAT-DOG WORLD Kirby’s dogs of war!. . . . . . . . . . . . 26 WORLD CLASS Norris Burroughs teaches Kirby Kinetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 BEST OF BOTH WORLDS Before & after of pencils & inks . . . 32 HIDDEN WORLDS Kirby’s secret societies. . . . . . . . . . 38 ONE WORLD The evolution of Ego, The Living Planet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 STRANGE WORLDS Obscure Kirby from Earth to space. . 44 PRIMEVAL WORLD Secrets of the Savage Land. . . . . . 46 HOLLYWORLD/ WORLD OF DIFFERENCE. . . . . . . . 52 ART WORLD Kirby on display, 1975 and now. . . 53 WORLD STAGE Mark Evanier’s trans-Atlantic talk with Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Ross. . . 60 COLLECTOR COMMENTS. . . . . . . . 78 Front cover “Galactic Head” painting: JACK KIRBY COPYRIGHTS: Absorbing Man, Agent 13, Ant-Man, Attilan, Avengers, Beehive, Black Panther, Blastaar, Bucky, Captain America, Dr. Doom, Ego, Eternals, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Giant-Man, Grey Gargoyle, Hercules, Hulk, Ikaris, Inhumans, Iron Man, Jungle Action, Ka-Zar, Kala, Kraven, Leader, Loki, Mole Man, Negative Zone, Odin, Olympia, Patsy & Hedy, Pluto, Prester John, Rawhide Kid, Recorder, Red Skull, Savage Land, Sgt. Fury, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Strange Tales of the Unusual, Strange Worlds, Sub-Mariner, Tales to Astonish, Thor, Two-Gun Kid, Tyrannus, Watcher, Wundagore, X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Boy Commandos, Darkseid, Deadman, Demon, Desaad, Forager, Forever People, Habitat, Hawkman, House of Mystery, Jimmy Olsen, Kalibak, Kamandi, Lightray, Losers, New Gods, Newsboy Legion, Orion, Steppenwolf, Super Powers, Superman, Wild Area, Witchboy, Young Love TM & © DC Comics • Link Thorne TM & © Joe Simon & Jack Kirby Estates • Bombast, Captain Glory, Chip Hardy, Master Jeremy, Night Glider, Secret City Saga TM & © Jack Kirby Estate • 2001: A Space Odyssey TM & © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc • Doc Savage TM & © Conde Nast • Tarzan, Tarzan At Earth’s Core, The Land That Time Forgot TM & © ERB, Inc. • Destroyer Duck TM & © Steve Gerber & Jack Kirby Estates

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions! C’mon citizen, DO THE RIGHT THING! A Mom & Pop publisher like us needs every sale just to survive! DON’T DOWNLOAD OR READ ILLEGAL COPIES ONLINE! Buy affordable, legal downloads only at

www.twomorrows.com or through our Apple and Google Apps!

& DON’T SHARE THEM WITH FRIENDS OR POST THEM ONLINE. Help us keep producing great publications like this one!

(above) Color guide for page 59 of the 2001: A Space Odyssey Treasury Edition (1976). That book’s coloring is credited to Marie Severin and Jack, and this definitely looks like Kirby’s idiosyncratic use of color. The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 29, No. 82, Winter 2022. Published quarterly (at least lately!) by and © TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. John Morrow, Editor/Publisher. Single issues: $15 postpaid US ($19 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $49 Economy US, $72 International, $19 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

OF TH

WORL

Will the Real Jack Kirby Plea JACK KIRBY: There are no failures in life— just people who quit too soon. I believe everybody has the same potential. I have the same potential to play the piano. Given time I could be Paderewski, but I have no inclination to play the piano. Given time, I’ll never be Paderewski! [laughter] And it won’t matter to me, see.

(above) 1986 photo by Albert DeGuzman. (below) Jack’s draft card, from Oct. 16, 1940, discovered by Alex Jay. (next page, top) A 1937 “Black Buccaneer” strip by “Jack Curtiss,” one of Kirby’s many early pen names. (next page, bottom) One of the few existing WWII Simon & Kirby originals, from Star-Spangled Comics #19 (April 1943).

MARK BORAX: You directed your energy in a different channel. JACK: Something captured my interest and I stayed with it. MARK: For a long time. JACK: For a very long time. Now I’m doing a different facet of it, and I’m doing it for people that I want to do it for—Ruby-Spears. I’m having a fine time. They’re fine artists, we have a good relationship. They like the work, and I give ’em whatever they ask for. It’s the professional thing to do. I’m content. MARK: How many hours a day are you putting in? JACK: I don’t measure it in hours.

I don’t measure it in time at all. I measure it in solving a problem. I’ll take whatever idea we share, and make certain it’s practical for animation and exploitation. You’ve got to have both considerations these days. With the experience I’ve gotten in the comics field, I can do TV and animation. I can give ’em a certain type of drawing, and the animator can tear it down for animation, and it’ll be good. MARK: This isn’t the first time you’ve worked in the animation field. JACK: Oh, I began in the animation field. I began doing Betty Boop and Popeye. I was an in-betweener with the Fleischer Studios. MARK: What did an in-betweener do? JACK: At that time, it took sixteen pictures for a character to take one step. So they divided this step, say, between three guys, and I’d put in the in-between action of that particular one step. I’d do three or four pictures of that step, and when they put all of them together, they’d have a clean movement of the foot. I can tell you that Fleischer did some beautiful animation. In fact, Fleischer and Disney took as much pain with their animation—they were the two main studios of the day, and extremely popular. Working with Fleischer was, I think, my first job. But they were gonna move to Florida, and I had to make the choice of staying in New York or going with them. I talked to my mother about it, and of course she wouldn’t let me go. MARK: [laughter] You were in Brooklyn? JACK: No, I was still on the East Side, and, mothers being sacred, why, you took whatever word they handed out, and that went for anybody—Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Irish mothers. Even Al Capone’s mother would ball him out in the middle of the street, somewhere, for not attending church that week. When I asked my mother if I could go to Florida with Fleischer, she says, “You can’t— there’s a lot of naked women down there. They’ll pull you in and I’ll never see you again!” MARK: And of course the thought of being pulled in by naked women severely depressed you.

ase Stand Up?

Jack Kirby interviewed by Mark Borax Conducted at the 1986 San Diego Comic-Con and originally published in Comics Interview #41

JACK: [laughter] I rather enjoyed what I was thinking. MARK: But you didn’t go. JACK: Instead I found a small syndicated house which sent out weekly comic strips to 700 newspapers. They did editorial one-panel cartoons, and they gave me a one-panel column called “Your Health Comes First.” So I became “Dr. Whatever-It-Was.” I did home remedies. I mean, nothing that would alarm you. MARK: So you started in the field as a quack—. JACK: It was my first quack. In order to make this little syndicate look larger, each cartoonist had about three different names, see. So I was Jack Cortez, and Jack Curtiss—then I became Jack Kirby. Jack Kirby sounded great ’cause I loved Flash Gordon and Rip Kirby, so I remained Jack Kirby. MARK: It wasn’t kosher to keep your Jewish name in those days? JACK: No! That’s wrong! I was never ashamed to keep my Jewish name. In fact, seeing a documentary at the San Diego Convention earlier this week startled me, because at that time having a pen name was par for the course. I was Charley Nicholas for a time when I was doing the Blue Beetle for the Boston Globe. It didn’t bother me one bit, didn’t bother my mother, my father. I brought the dough home from whatever job I had. If I wanted ten bucks I hadda ask my mother. I was almost 18 in ‘38 or so. Hitler was coming on the scene, and he was an artist, you know. If they hadn’t panned his work... Hitler was just a guy coming out of a bar, ya know. And somebody said, “Well, your work stinks.” His work really did stink—he was a bad artist. MARK: And the rest of the world had to pay for it. JACK: It’s true! If somebody had given the guy a compliment, there would have never been a Fuhrer. MARK: He might have been a comics artist. JACK: There probably would never have been a war. Except he came along at the right time. The newsreels used to show everybody going to buy an ordinary lunch with their money in wheelbarrows. The German people were miserable. Hitler came on the scene—in fact, in one of my comic books I quote Hitler; in Glorious Godfrey of the New Gods. He’s looking at this crowd and it amazes him. He says, “The entire crowd, while I was talking to them, had the same expression—it never wavered.” I think we have some association with baboons. If you watch baboons—the most dangerous animal in Africa—you’ll find 5

ST PA

We’re back with more of Simon & Kirby’s Link Thorne work, this time from Airboy Comics Vol. 4, #7 (August 1947), with art reconstruction and coloring by Chris Fama. This story wasn’t included in Titan’s S&K reprint volumes. We’ll continue with another installment of the complete Link Thorne stories next issue.

WORL

BEST

OF BOT

WORL

Before & After

[this spread and next] Captain America #102, pages 15 & 18 (1968) Syd Shores interpretation of Kirby’s pencils is a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, you can clearly see he was faithful in his inking of Jack’s work, not leaving out any details. On the other hand, I’m not a fan of his work stylistically. It doesn’t have the bold approach and crisp linework of contemporaries like Joe Sinnott and Frank Giacoia—and even Vince Colletta’s inks, despite his omissions, gave the work more flair and personality. I’ve always felt Giacoia was the ideal inker for Cap during this era—if only he’d been able to keep up with Kirby’s voluminous output during this prime stage. Still, these Cap pages are a highwater mark in Kirby’s career, that I think don’t get the level of respect they deserve.

by John Morrow

Twice-told Kirby covers, with commentary by Shane Foley

EN IDD

WORL

(below) Kirby first introduced the Negative Zone as “Sub-Space” in Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966). (next page) New Gods #2 (May 1971) depicted Jimmy Olsen’s “Wild Area” in this fabulous full-pager.

(next two pages) Some of the many worlds that revolve around Earth-K! Outer/Inner Limits: New Genesis and Apokolips, the Bug Colony, Asgard, Olympus, Microverse, Dimension Z, Zero Street, the Negative Zone, Microworld, Sub-Atomica. Down to Earth: Olympia, the Beehive, the Kallusians’ city, Attilan, Savage Land, Atlantis, Wundagore, Habitat, Wakanda, Avalon, Netherworlds (Pluto’s and Kala’s), Subterranea, Tyrannus’ underworld.

Kirby’s Secret Societies What?

“Yet another hidden super-civilization? How many more secret cities are there on Earth?” said my friend, when we discovered the Inhumans came from “Attilan.” (Or did he say that when we first read X-Men #44 and discovered the non-Kirby Red Raven’s secret city? Not sure now—but the point is the same.) And we have to admit—he’s right! There were, and still are, lots of ’em! And our Mr. Kirby was often their chief architect.

THINKING ABOUT IT, THERE ARE BROADLY TWO TYPES OF ‘SECRET/HIDDEN’ CIVILIZATIONS. Outer/Inner Limits: These exist on a different dimensional plane, where no aircraft, submarine, mining company, rock climber, or bush walker can accidentally spot them. Contact with them is only when they decide to knock on our door, or (in some cases) when a scientist accidentally finds them. Asgard and Olympus, as well as New Genesis and Apokolips, can be counted amongst them, alongside the Fifth Dimension (Strange Tales #105—Human Torch), Dimension Z (Tales to Astonish #49—Ant/Giant Man) Zero Street of the Night People (Captain America #201), etc. It seems the funky ones—the ones with no really dramatic name or memorable character—fade from interest, while others with powerhouse names (such as the Microverse from Fantastic Four #16, which got a massive facelift when Kirby’s Sub-Atomica was introduced in FF Annual #5, with Psycho-Man) become staples to be revisited again and again. But since these are in parallel/alternate/different dimensions, they are the first type and not what my friend was exasperated about. Above/Below Ground: These are firmly on Earth, so that we wonder, with my friend, how they’ve missed detection til our heroes come along. And yes, there were lots of them. Mole Man’s Subterranea was there right at the start of the Marvel Age in FF #1—a bit out of the way so it could easily be missed by the rest of us. But then in Hulk #5, we discovered a second underground world of Tyrannus. Then Iron Man found Kala’s Netherworld in Tales of Suspense #43. So before the new Marvel was two years old, Jack Kirby had

by Shane Foley

established three separate subterranean civilizations. (And to celebrate, that same month that Iron Man went underground—July 1963—Kirby went sub-atomic and created the Microworld of Dr. Doom in FF #16!) Atlantis was hinted at in Fantastic Four #4 (May 1962), then fully revealed as a vibrant and alive underwater culture in FF Annual #1 (Sept 1963). And so it continued, as other hidden cities and cultures emerged, such as the Kallusian city—alien in origin but firmly planted at the North Pole—in Avengers #14 (March 1965). That same month, the X-Men found Ka-Zar’s Savage Land at Antarctica. And all were rendered superbly and probably concocted by Mr. Kirby. No doubt I’ve overlooked more than a few. Six months later, or thereabouts, a new batch of Kirby’s hidden worlds was conceived. The FF discovered the Inhumans’ city of Attilan (FF #47, Feb. 1966). A few months later, Wakanda was found (FF #52, July 1966), then Prester John spoke of fabulous lost Avalon in FF #54 (which, as far as I remember, remained lost). Meanwhile, Thor discovered the towering Wundagore (Thor #134, Nov. 1966) and the FF went on to find the Beehive (FF #66–67, Sept.– Oct. 1967). These last two are huge installations rather than whole civilizations, but surely large enough to be on the same scale as any hidden city. Just as Kirby’s “Sub-Space/Negative Zone” concept was of a quality far above all previous ‘other dimensions’ and largely pushed them out of Marvel existence, so too these new ‘secret societies’ largely eclipsed most of what had come before. Only the old ones that developed (Atlantis, the Savage Land) had a chance against these new, powerfully and evocatively realized creations of the Master. KIRBY LOVED LOST AND HIDDEN CIVILIZATIONS. Why so many? What’s their fascination? First, of course, they’re simply fun, and follow in the great traditions of adventure stories such as those by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan and many others), H. Rider Haggard and so forth. To a point, we easily accept the need to have a ‘suspension of disbelief ’ in these cases for the sake of the wild ride of the narrative! But secondly, just as super-heroes are dramatized, almost caricatured versions of heroism—all exaggerated and costumed so as to be instantly recognizable in a shorthand kind of way—so too are their villains and locales. When we think about it, there’s nothing sillier than a villain dressed in an instantly recognizable costume, when being incognito would be much wiser. Even bully-boy gangsters with their classic sunglasses, black suits and big, black cars can all hide behind looking the same as each other. But such things work in the context of our larger than life, often symbolic little adventure stories. And it’s ditto for previously undiscovered cities, societies and civilizations.

For sure, in the past, much of the world was an unexplored, strange and foreign place, with lots of room in the imagination for new and strange peoples. And so secret places and peoples were a natural. But as exploration and surveillance have made our planet so much smaller and known—during Kirby’s career and to this day—is there a place for such things? One way around it is to make the earthbound adventures into space romps, such as what many comics and the Star Wars movies do. It seems to me that, since the dark mysterious corners of the earth are not so mysterious anymore, they are often now being replaced by whole planets that are dark and mysterious. What are the intergalactic travels in Star Wars except journeys to deepest, darkest Africa or the exotic Indies with a futuristic garnish? But what about if we need to stay on Earth? Can it work anymore?

bogged down in explanation. But some writers have the knack of being able to skilfully go to greater depths, incorporating insight and social commentary cleverly integrated into their fantasy realm, often even using it to enhance the adventure the reader is wanting. Kirby was one of them! Kirby more than any other, many of us believe, was a master at devising stories with elements that gave even the most outlandish scenario an atmosphere of relevance, and it seems to me that being more meaningful, even mythological, is where, in 1970, he wanted to go. We all know how the Fourth World of the New Gods was, to an extent, an allegory of the times Kirby lived in (New Genesis was the free world, engaged in a conflict with a totalitarian, à la Communist/Nazi one—where the war was waged on neutral territory, Earth being somewhere like Vietnam) and so some of his ‘secret societies’ also took on a measure of greater meaning than simply a place for an adventure. The ‘Wild Area’ in particular, introduced in Jimmy Olsen #133, was a weird, obviously very big, and mostly shunned place surprisingly close to Metropolis, that was revealed to have two hidden societies within it, as well as contact with an evil third. The discovery of Habitat began our involvement with the vast saga of Kirby’s New Genesis/Apokolips war, but was on the fringes of it, like the people it dramatized—the young of the late ’60s and ’70s who were bikers or who decided to ‘drop-out.’ Kirby may not have developed the themes much, but it was clear he wasn’t simply recycling old ideas, but basing these on what he saw around him. This alternate society, in its wonderfully drawn and conceptualized Habitat, was (a bit confusingly, I feel) introduced alongside the hidden Project (later renamed Project Cadmus in other hands), a massive covert Government research station doing DNA experimentation. The problems (and stories) came from its counterpart (the Evil Factory or Brigadoom, situated in far-off Scotland) interfering again and again. In one sense, these places were simply more ‘secret societies,’ but in another, they were a maturing of the concept and had more relevance to actual events in the real world. One amazing example of using a ‘hidden civilization’ for more than simple adventure purposes was the Bug Colony in New Gods. Existing on New Genesis, this, of course, is a ‘type 1’ civilization, and was addressed in my article “Bugs in the System” in TJKC #77, so need not be discussed further here. But a better example of using such ideas as a ‘dramatized symbol’ could rarely be found in comics, and the fact that it remains incomplete at Kirby’s hands leaves us all the poorer. Had the entire Fourth World not been cut short, I wonder how much deeper Kirby would have taken his symbolic approach in all the various elements he concocted, since he grasped far more than most of the impact and potential of many of the ideas and directions scientific experimentation was heading?

IN OUR COMICS WORLD, THE ANSWER IS, OF COURSE, YES. On the one hand, all that needs to be done is the addition of ‘cloaking devices’ and ‘perception filters’ as the excuse for them not being found until now. In the wonderful world of comics, that can be accommodated. But there’s more of course. All living societies, past and present, have subsets of cultures amongst their own, or living somewhere close—groups of dissidents or strange religious bodies or ethnic minorities—which are often feared due to their other-ness or different traditions. How natural for these to be dramatized in comics and adventure stories into a powerful and symbolic presence—often a threatening one. What is Atlantis but a neighbor like this? As well, there are always rumours of amoral scientists, not far away, secretly working away at developing new and potentially offensive versions of life as we know it, threatening the very stability of life on Earth. What are Wundagore, or the Beehive, but dramatizations of such fears? Are there Communist or Terrorist cells right here amongst us, plotting to undermine our way of life? What are any of the secret cities but caricatured versions of these? Are there peoples who have withdrawn from us, fearing what we do and the direction our governments are taking us? We see dramatizations of these as well. Alternately, are there hidden societies working for our benefit, unrecognized by us, against the foolishness of our war efforts, and for our ultimate good? So perhaps, secret cities and civilizations are, for the main, basically dramatized versions of what we find strange and unknown amongst us. ALL WRITERS MUST USE THIS ELEMENT IN THEIR STORIES TO SOME DEGREE, EVEN THOSE MAKING NO ATTEMPT TO GO BEYOND TELLING A RIPPING YARN. A truly alien culture would not be understandable to any reader who wasn’t a serious student of sociology, and the story would be 39

EVAL IM WORL

(above) The Baxter Building, from Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965). (right) Wonder Stories Quarterly from Spring 1931, when Kirby was 13 years old.

ith Stan Lee, Jack Kirby brought to life a multitude of fantastic otherworldly locations. Not all of them were of his own creation, of course. Prince Namor’s Atlantis and Thor’s Asgard were legendary lands he co-opted for modern storytelling purposes. In other instances, it can be difficult to tell if a Marvel Universe idea emerged wholly from Jack Kirby‘s dungeon inkwell or from Stan Lee’s office brainstorming, with or without Kirby. There is an increasing tendency among comics historians to give Jack Kirby more and more credit for creating the Marvel Universe, and I have to agree with that tendency even if we can’t always confirm specific details. Given the absence of documentation by the co-creators, establishing facts are unknowable. A classic example is the skyscraper headquarters of the Fantastic Four. The concept was borrowed from the 1930s pulp hero Doc Savage, who operated out of a thinly-disguised Empire State Building. Whereas Doc had only the 86th floor for his scientific laboratory and office HQ, Kirby gave the F.F. the top five floors of Manhattan’s fictitious Baxter Building, including an aircraft hangar and a fully-operational ICBM nested into one corner of the structure. It was preposterous, but 1960s kids like me swallowed it without hesitation. So if the F.F.’s skyscraper headquarters was a borrowing from Doc Savage Magazine, who was the borrower? In separate interviews, both Lee and

Kirby admitted to reading Doc Savage’s globe-spanning adventures back in their Depression youth. Both men were highly skilled at taking existing concepts, twisting them, updating them and providing their distinctive modern spin. Simon and Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown was an updating of Doc Savage and his group of experts. Elements of the Fantastic Four and the X-Men show a clear Doc Savage influence. Absent some hard documentation, one would be hard pressed to credit either man at the expense of the other. For all we know, the Baxter Building could have emerged out of a brainstorming session with both men almost simultaneously exclaiming, “Hey, remember Doc Savage? He had his headquarters in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan. Great! Let’s use that.” I put this question to Lee once and he deflected by saying he had considered three possibilities, a New York City subway tunnel, a brownstone or a skyscraper. He claimed that the skyscraper was his decision. Lee never liked admitting some of his ideas weren’t entirely original. The important thing to remember was that both men read many of the same pulp magazines and writers growing up. In separate interviews, they often cited identical influences. GETTING PULPED Jack Kirby credited his discovery at the age of twelve of a pulp magazine as a pivotal moment in his creative development. He remembered that it happened while walking home from school. “I found a science-fiction book floating down the gutter, because some guy didn’t want to be seen with it,” he recalled. “I saved it just before it went into the sewer. It was a copy of Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories. It had a rocket ship on the cover. I had never seen a rocket ship before. I’d never even thought much about outer space, the planets, the Moon. Who gave a damn? It was my first collision with a question. ‘Gee, why couldn’t there be things like that?’ I had to hide the book or I would have been declared the village idiot. They thought that

S a vage

Secrets Of The

L and

by Will Murray

In interviews, Lee evoked his famous name often—as did Kirby. Which brings me to the resurrection of Ka-Zar and the creation of the Savage Land during the early years of the Marvel Universe. BIRTH & REBIRTH No doubt shared memories of Burroughs’ works were uppermost in their minds when Lee and Kirby collaborated on the X-Men #10 story that revived Martin Goodman’s old jungle hero, Ka-Zar the Great, in 1964.

kind of thing was crazy.” For a man who always considered himself to be a simple cartoonist, Kirby looked to two other media for equal inspiration. “The pulps were the written word, and the movies were the visual world,” Kirby told Wizard magazine. “I learned from them both. I learned to write dramatically from the pulps. My heroes were the writers of the pulps and the actors of the movies. I merged them both. I read all I could and saw all I could, and when that became limited, I went further. There are more dimensions to everything then we can imagine. I live by the fact that this is a dimensional world, nothing is cut and dried. I won’t accept it that way, and that’s how I work within it. I loved science-fiction in general, and I still enjoy it to this day.” In later years, Kirby would tell fans that he collected classic pulp magazines the way they saved his comic books. As for Stan Lee, even in old age, he could rattle off the titles of the pulps he enjoyed as a boy, which included Doc Savage, The Skipper, Weird Tales, G-8 and His Battle Aces, and above all, The Spider, whose histrionic characterization greatly inspired his development of the formative Spider-Man. One writer both men read was the person Ray Bradbury called one of the most influential writers of the 20th century: Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan of the Apes. It would have been difficult not to have stumbled across Burroughs’ work when Lee and Kirby were young. ERB’s adventure novels were immensely popular. Tarzan films were being released almost continually, with an ever-changing gauntlet of actors playing the part of the savage Ape Man.

Ka-Zar had been around in one form or another since 1936. He starred in his own pulp magazine [right] for three issues, disappeared for two years, then was revived for the first issue of Marvel Comics in 1939. The character continued in Marvel Mystery Comics until 1942, before vanishing once more. If one counts his pre-Timely Comics pulp career, Ka-Zar is the oldest extent Marvel character, predating both the Human Torch and the

(above) Kirby tackles Tarzan, in both 1971 card game packaging for Mattel, and a 1974 illustration, potentially for taking over DC Comics’ own Tarzan comic.

ORLD

STAG

(above) Jack in his home studio in the 1980s. (next page, bottom) A spooky seance page from Deadman’s appearance in Forever People #9 (July 1972). (below) Neil Gaiman, photographed by Kendall Whitehouse, and Jonathan Ross at the TwoMorrows booth, July 2017 at ComicCon International: San Diego.

JACK F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby worked in the comic book field. We have two amazing men—smart men—with us today. Let me introduce you to them. Here is Mr. Jonathan Ross, the eminent TV presenter, as they call them in his native land. Here is Neil Gaiman, the eminent author and fantasy novelist and purveyor of an entire empire of TV shows and movies and things like that. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining me in your respective time zones. My go-to question at all these panels—and I asked you each this when you were on Kirby panels in person with me at San Diego, but I don’t remember your answers—was “What was the Jack Kirby work that first made an impression on you?” where you were first interested in who had done this, and, “What was your all-time favorite?” which can be the same thing, and in many cases, is. Who would like to go first?

WonderCon 2021 Jack Kirby Virtual Panel Posted online on March 26, 2021

JONATHAN ROSS: Neil?

Featuring Jonathan Ross and Neil Gaiman, and conducted by Mark Evanier Transcribed by Steven Thompson Copy-edited by John Morrow and Mark Evanier [Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, WonderCon in Anaheim, California couldn’t take place as an in-person event in 2021, so panels such as this one were featured online at the virtual WonderCon@Home event. You can view the panel at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlCLCYSazbU]

MARK EVANIER: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. You know what’s applicable to you but we don’t necessarily know. We have today an international Jack Kirby panel because one of our guests is in a time zone where it’s morning, one of them is in a time zone where it’s afternoon, and for one it’s evening. This shows you the global reach of Jack Kirby. My name is Mark Evanier. In July of 1969, I first met Jack Kirby and I thought I was just meeting my favorite comic book artist, but I discovered I was meeting a man who would be one of my favorite human beings and who would have a major effect on my life. And not a day goes by—not even a couple of hours—where I don’t think about Jack or answer questions about Jack or talk about Jack. When I go to a comic convention it’s ten times as intense because if you walk around a comic convention—back when we used to actually walk around comic conventions, ’cause there were comic book conventions— you saw Jack Kirby everywhere. If you weren’t seeing his artwork, you were seeing characters he designed, you were seeing his influence on other people… So, we started doing these panels, these Jack Kirby Tribute Panels, after he passed, because we were talking about Jack anyway and it was nice to get all the Jack Kirby fans at the convention in the same room at the same time. You found that they were more imaginative people, smarter people maybe in little ways. If they appreciated Jack, they appreciated one of the most amazing men who ever

NEIL GAIMAN: Sure. I know the first Jack Kirby art I would ever have encountered would have been in the black-and-white Power Comics reprints, probably in a comic called Fantastic or Terrific. I don’t remember what was in what. There was a whole line of them—Wham!, Smash!, Pow!, Fantastic, and Terrific, and they were black-and-white reprints of old Marvel comics. That was definitely where I first encountered the Mighty Thor. 60

Then, I was given a box of American comics when I was about seven, and there was a whole load of Kirby Fantastic Four—in color—and I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I remember as a kid, the Kirby stuff felt odd. It felt ever so slightly weird. I felt much more comfortable in some of the DC comics. I felt more comfortable looking at someone like Steve Ditko. And then [Jack] came over to DC Comics and I would have been about eleven and I remember picking up Jimmy Olsen and going, “This is weird! This is very, very, different. This is that guy over at Marvel… and I’m liking this.” And then I picked up a copy of the Forever People because it had Deadman in it and I was

a Deadman fan, and I was in love. I remember it was that moment that you tip from, “I like this, I like this, I like this,” to, “I am in love.” I was just in love with everything Kirby did! And at that point I became somebody whose pocket money went on anything Kirby did for the next five or six years. MARK: So it was Jack’s least favorite issue of Forever People that hooked you. [Jonathan laughs] NEIL: Yeah. MARK: Because he did that under duress. DC forced him to put Deadman in. He didn’t want to use Deadman at all because he thought, “What’s a dead hero? What’s the value of a dead hero in this thing?” He actually had Steve Sherman and myself—we were assisting Jack, doing very little—write up an outline which he used about four words of for that issue. And he was very disappointed with that issue but it still came through. Something still came through for you there. NEIL: It was the séance. There’s a scene in there where Jack draws this amazing sort of séance where they’ve all linked hands with this mad old lady and the Forever People suddenly find themselves making contact with Deadman. And then they build him an android body and—I had zero interest in the android body, but it’s so funny because one of the things I loved best about Jack was Jack getting creepy, which he did so rarely. So much of what Jack did occurs in daylight! And then you get his Spirit World stuff, you’ve got that issue of the Forever People, and, above all, you get The Demon. I recently bought my first ever Jack Kirby page. I’ve not bought Jack Kirby pages for years and years and even back when… I remember being in [the now-defunct UK comics shop] Comics Showcase in 1986 or ’87 and they had all these Thor pages out. I’m going, “I’d really like one but they’re £50! Whoa, that’s a lot of money,” [roughly $68 US] and not buying them, and… Lord alone knows what I just spent on a Demon page and it’s got Klarion the Witch Boy and Jason Blood and it’s from one of my very favorite issues. And one of the things I loved about The Demon was that Jack let whatever the creepy thing was that 61