Jack Kirby Collector #82 Preview

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #82

MANY WORLDS JACK KIRBY

$10.95

The of

WINTER 2022

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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

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(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

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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.

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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

began looking for people other than gangsters. I got Galactus—where I suddenly found myself confronting God! Like God! I’d never seen a character like that myself!

Suddenly—there he was—I drew him. And he’s about three or four stories high. He’s standing on the Empire State Building.

I got the Silver Surfer, and I suddenly realized here was the dramatic situation between God and the Devil! The Devil himself was an archangel. The Devil wasn’t ugly—he was a beautiful guy! He was the greatest of all the archangels. He was the guy that challenged God. MARK: That’s the Surfer challenging Galactus.

JACK: And Galactus says, “You want to see my power? Stay on Earth forever!”

MARK: He exiled the Surfer out of Paradise.

JACK: And of course the Surfer is a good character, but he got a little bit of an ego and it destroyed him. That’s very natural.

If we got an ego it might destroy us. People say, “Look at him—who does he think he is? We knew him when.” They throw tomatoes at you. Of course, Galactus, in his own way, and maybe the people of his type, are also doing that to the Surfer. They were people of a certain class and power, and if any one of ’em became pretentious or affectatious, they would do the same thing. We would do the same thing. If a movie star walked past you and gave you the snub, you’d give him a hot foot just to show him, “I paid my money to see you—and that’s what you’re living on.” You’re not just a face in the crowd—you’re a moviegoer, you plunk your dough down, and

KIRBY GOES TO COLLEGE Reader and ace photographer Kendall Whitehouse recognized the source the fictional college depicted on the splash page of Fantastic Four #35 [previous page] was visually based on—a building from New Jersey’s Princeton University. Knowing Jack had mentioned college students adopting the Hulk as their dorm mascot, I asked him to scan all the early Marvel comics letter column missives for any from college students, that might explain how that came to be. Here’s what he found.

“After pouring over many letters pages, I couldn’t find any letters from students at Princeton. Stan and company were certainly pleased by the mail they were receiving from college students.

Many of these were selected for publication on the Fantastic Four Fan Page around this time, but I didn’t spot any from Princeton.

“However, watching Danny Fingeroth’s WonderCon@Home presentation on ‘Stan Lee Goes to College: Remembering Stan’s ’60s Campus Talks’ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPsAlRvol-w], I discovered some pivotal information on this topic. On Danny’s panel were brothers Tom and Tim Tulenko, both Princeton ’67 graduates who co-founded the Princeton chapter of the M.M.M.S. Right around that time, in November 1964, they saw FF #35 and were surprised to see Blair Hall—the very dorm in which they lived—shown in the magazine.

“They reached out to Stan, and actually went to New York to see him. You can hear the Tulenko brothers tell the tale in the video at the link above. Once I knew their names, I discovered this article from the Princeton Alumni Weekly which also tells the story: https://paw.princeton.edu/article/heros-welcome-stan-lee-princeton “As you’ll see from the video and/or the article, this contact eventually led to Stan’s appearance at Princeton on March 10, 1966.

“Tim apparently sent Stan a postcard of Blair Hall to inquire why it was selected to represent State U. You can see Stan’s letter in response in the article (which has the wrong date listed—it was January 1965, not 1964). Stan says he asked Jack why he drew Blair Tower and received the reply (in Stan’s telling), ‘Gee, I dunno.

I saw a picture in Life Magazine that looked kinda good, so I used it for the reference. I don’t know what school it was!’

“A little further investigation—courtesy of the Life Magazine archive in Google Books—shows a photo of Blair Hall on page 87 of the September 23, 1946 issue, that was almost certainly the reference image Jack Used. You can view it at the upper right.

“My interest is in the aesthetic aspects of Jack’s illustration.

I’m fascinated by how he altered the reference image to make it work better than an exact literal rendering of the building. H

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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.

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I noted in an earlier issue of TJKC, no Black person I knew then or later saw the Black Panther coming. As a small Black kid, I had no priorities outside of being a good son to my two wonderful parents, a good grandson, a friend to classmates and neighbors, and a good student. And having days of fun-filled playtime was essential, of course. But Black grown-ups had ‘real priorities,’ none I really understood. They were doing things large and small to advance Civil Rights— sometimes risking their lives, reputations, properties, businesses, and the health and welfare of their families.

A Black super-hero? Not a priority. But outside of the Jim Crow states (and other states where Jim Crow mindsets had some sway, as well), Kirby and Lee had made the creation of the Panther a priority of their own.

That “priority” began with an emissary of Wakanda using some highly developed technology to respond to his government after conferring with the Fantastic Four (#52, Aug. 1966, right). And that communicator followed an incredible sky conveyance [below right], a gift from the African king in question. Wow. Readers were seeing something very different, perhaps radical, since most Black characters in comic strips or comics never got close to operating advanced tech. But this was just an opening. Once we get to visit the land of the Black Panther, the eye-popping visuals really kick in. The king of that land had a rising totem [below left], fashioned beautifully by our ‘King’ Kirby, who’d weaned us on such incredible visuals in the land of the Inhumans, on the moon of the Watcher, the labs of the Leader, Dr. Doom, A.I.M., and others. And as T’Challa readied himself

for the contest to come, the vast technical underground jungle, a system of metal pillars, intertwining tubes, cables, coils, and all-systematic-marvels-Kirby greeted our eyes and the fabulous foursome (along with Wyatt Wingfoot) who came to see it.

Like his namesake, the Panther uses his terrain to his advantage to negate the foursome’s great powers.

He nearly “wins,” though Jack and Stan couldn’t let their flagship comic heroes get beaten that easily by a newcomer (and that makes sense, since the Panther would quickly become an ally and friend). Stan, as was his habit, rarely edited or wrote one of his heroes getting defeated by another.

Daredevil and Cap fought to the usual Marvel standstill in Daredevil #43, and even mismatches (DD vs.

Thor in DD #30, or DD vs. SubMariner in DD #7) just went to show how the Man Without Fear could prove his courage against unbeatable odds. And that was just in Daredevil’s title. It was pretty much the same across the board.

Believe me, I checked.

After the splendiferous “stand-off ’’ (the Panther wasn’t technically beaten either—Jack and Stan were building him up, and it wouldn’t have gone over well to have him go through a humiliating beating), the larger scenario was revealed. In FF #53, the land of Wakanda was a proud, beautiful country, and the foursome from New York and Wyatt Wingfoot, who’d been the monkey wrench in the battle for his friends, were treated to a tribal dance (traditional) and then the sights of the underground jungle continued and continued and continued to impress.

Jack’s affinity for “worlds within worlds’’ was… another world. Not only did he play on jungle king legends of the past, which the Thing sarcastically played up in Stan’s dialogue, but also in the dialogue was a

Deep Within the Heart of

AfricA The Wakandan Nation Explored by Jerry Boyd

(top) The first panel featuring the masked Panther in FF #52 (July 1966) has an uncharacteristically blank background, and a completely obscured face. Was this by Jack’s choosing, or alterations made at Marvel? (next page, bottom) Kirby’s collection of National Geographic magazines undoubtedly came in handy for this depiction of an African tribal scene.

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Kirby’s Dogs of War!

By Dwight Boyd

(right) Long before the Fourth World, Kirby had a warhound in 1957’s Alarming Tales #1.

(next page) Dabney Donovan’s Demon Dog from Jimmy Olsen #143 (Nov. 1971). (bottom) Steppenwolf goes to the dogs in 1984’s New Gods reprint #6.

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orlds within worlds… King Kirby gave us “The Micro-World of Dr. Doom,” the Negative Zone, the kingdoms outside the realm of eternal Asgard, an expanded look at the submerged Atlantis, the world of the Bug, the Hairies, the Evil Factory and even… the world of dogs! “Dogs, you say?

Did I miss one?” you’re asking?

In the world of dogs, Kirby kept it to the verbiage of the New Gods. So, no, you good readers missed nothing.

“Dogs,” “pups,” and all terms dog-related on the worlds of the ultimates, usually meant putdowns.

And I was only really aware of this in recent re-readings of all four Kirby Fourth World titles. Before that, I was clueless. After all, Conan the Barbarian, over at Marvel, and his fellow Hyborian Age swordsmen, thieves, pirates, wanderers, and so on routinely called each other (also in many an insult) “Stygian dog,” “Cimmerian dog,” “Hyperborean dog,” “Turanian dog,” “Nemedian dog,” “Hyrkanian dog’’ (and the worst, in my opinion: “dog son of a dog mother’’—

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wow!), and the list goes on, depending on wherever our hero traveled on those famed sandaled shoes of his. Roy Thomas let slip his “dogs of war’’ a lot, also.

In Jack’s final war of the gods, there were real dogs: Steppenwolf’s Dog Cavalry, the demon dog of Dabney Donovan, the dogs on leashes held by the guards that kept the new arrivals in line as they were shoved into Granny Goodness’ orphanage, etc.

Let’s look at the King’s verbiage pertaining to dogs, shall we? In no particular order: “The pups have angered me, Desaad!—Put me on the defensive! A great feat!”

[Darkseid to Desaad in Forever People #6, shown at left]

“You dogs of Apokolips are eloquent when destiny favors you!!”

[Orion to Slig in New Gods #5]

“No, no! I don’t want to go in there! Let me go, you dogs!”

[The young Orion to his father’s guards in New Gods #7]

“You sly dog.’’

[Granny Goodness to Kanto in Mister Miracle #7]

“You tricky, young dogs! You won’t get far! When I jerk this igniter, you die!”

[Justifier to the Forever People in Forever People #3]

“All hail to the eternal optimisms of New Genesis!

The dogs of war—beware!”

[Orion to Lightray in New Gods #9]

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GOING DEEPER INTO SPACE n this forum, I’d like to spend a bit more time discussing deep space. This term, as we have seen, refers to the use of structural elements in a composition that create the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface. The most significant tool for achieving this illusion is perspective. Most commonly, the artist draws a horizon line or vanishing point and arranges his figures along receding lines called orthogonals, that converge at the vanishing point. An example of this would be a set of train tracks that appears to

join at the distant horizon. 1 In this Captain America panel from Tales of Suspense #62 (Feb. 1965), the orthogonals are the planes of the desk, which meet at

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the horizon line which is just above Cap’s head. Kirby uses the figures on the left to emphasize that line and to lead the eye to Captain America.

The line of Cap’s shoulders directs the eye to the figure draped over the desk, whose position emphasizes the edge of the desk leading to the seated figure of the warden at extreme right. He is the panel’s focal point. Kirby also uses the size of the overlapping figures to create the illusion of deep space.

This technique is extremely effective when setting mood for some of the simplest panel compositions. For instance, this panel from 1969’s Fantastic Four #85 of Dr. Doom menacing a subordinate clearly creates a claustrophobic techno space. 2 The orthogonal lines of the equipment completely hem in the cowering figure.

Kirby is not a stickler for precision when it comes to perspective.

1 Often the orthogonal lines to his vanishing point don’t line up perfectly. He gives us just enough of a suggestion to create the illusion of space. Just as he doesn’t rely too heavily on anatomical correctness in his figures to the detriment of their dynamism, he also never lets perspective overrule the impact of his drawings. For example, in the case of 2 this particular drawing, the orthogonals do not converge on the cowering figure at the right, but the effect is still successful because the shapes of the machinery at the vanishing point lead the eye back to the figure.

Linear perspective in painting was essentially invented in 1413 by Filippo Brunelleschi. As the

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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.

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by John Morrow

Twice-told Kirby covers, with commentary by Shane Foley

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(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

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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.

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Incidental Iconography

An ongoing analysis of Kirby’s visual shorthand, and how he inadvertently used it to develop his characters,

by Sean Kleefeld

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f we’re going to focus on the worlds of Jack Kirby, it only makes sense that we take this Incidental Iconography column to look at Ego, the Living Planet! While the character was given some broader attention in the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, his portrayal by Kurt Russell was a fair bit removed from how Jack originally illustrated him.

I think it’s important to point out that I’m very deliberately choosing the

word “illustrated” here instead of “drew.” Because while Jack created the character, his first appearance in 1966’s Thor #132 [left] was not a drawing, but a collage! As far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s the first character Jack designed using collage.

(Possibly the only one, but Jack was so prolific, I’m not about to make that claim!)

Kirby was no stranger to collage by this point, of course—he’d been using it in his Marvel super-hero comics, notably in both Fantastic Four and Thor. So by the time he was working on creating Ego, he already had a well-established collection of materials to work with. But it turns out that Jack didn’t have to go far for at least the basic face of Ego; it was likely delivered to his doorstep, in fact. Ego’s face was literally cut from the cover of Life Magazine—the March 4, 1966 issue to be specific [above]. The issue would have only been a couple months old when Jack was working on Thor #132, and would likely have been pretty readily on hand.

The photo, by Gjon Mili, is not of an actual person, but of a bronze bust of an unidentified Roman, circa the first century. Life’s managing editor used it to kick off a series on “The Romans,” and posited he lived in Herculaneium and likely saw military service under Claudius, although that seems to be as much creative speculation as anything else.

The bust resides in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy.

Interestingly, despite Jack using the face pretty directly from the photo (only modifying the eyes slightly so they’re not completely in shadow), the particular cuts he made change the figure’s appearance considerably.

His full beard has been cropped to a goatee, and his large and pronounced forehead is absent. These are likely more practical decisions than anything; the photo as it appears on Life already crops the bust’s head so that both the top and left sides are noticeably incomplete. Perhaps fortunately, the figure’s features are so well chiseled that cutting along those contours presents an almost self-evident way to utilize this face.

Then, adding the various other photos in a generally circular pattern around the face, Jack recon42

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A regular column focusing on Kirby’s least known work,

by Barry Forshaw

Barry Forshaw is the author of Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide and American Noir (available from Amazon) and the editor of Crime Time (www.crimetime. co.uk); he lives in London.

BACK TO EASTER ISLAND

As the theme of this issue is “The Many Worlds Of Jack Kirby,” I’m going to take you to a place which was a favourite locale of The King, and one whose bizarre statuary provided a constant source of inspiration for his illustrations: Easter Island, in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the point of the Polynesian Triangle.

As I’ve said before in these pages, the evocative (and enigmatic) statues on the desolate island have clearly been a long-term source of inspiration for comics artists and writers—not least Kirby, who clearly liked the notion that the statues would unexpectedly pull themselves out of the ground (thereby proving that they were not just heads and shoulders) and offer a threat to both the protagonists of his stories and the entire world. Personally, I’d argue that his most imaginative exploration of the idea is in “The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island” in his relatively short period at DC working for editor Jack Schiff. House of Mystery #85 (April 1959) with its Kirby cover showing an Easter Island-style stone menace emerging from the earth. But it’s interesting to compare another version of the same idea by Kirby, this time created for Atlas/Marvel and Stan Lee: “I Was Trapped By The Things On Easter Island” (inked by Christopher Rule) from the SF/fantasy anthology book Tales to Astonish #5

(September 1959).

But before considering that tale, an aside: while The Jack Kirby Collector is dedicated to a celebration of Kirby (we’re all fans, aren’t we?), we always make a point of being objective. And in that spirit, it should be noted that the cover illustration for Tales to Astonish #5 is one of the more routine Kirby offerings with the unshaven hero running in panic from the gigantic stone figures; but the composition is nothing like as dynamic as the DC version of a similar tale. The splash panel [below] is, in fact, more effective, with the Easter Island statues crouched and leaning towards the hero. In fact, the real rewards for the Kirby enthusiast are not in the splash panel or the cover—but in individual panels spread throughout the tales.

LOOK OUT FOR THE PANELS

Proof of that last statement? Take, for instance, the very first panel of the story [above], with the hero awkwardly

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

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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

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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.

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(below) David Folkman’s poster for the exhibit, held November 5 to December 31, 1975 at the Museum of Cartoon Art.

Kirby On Display: 1975 [Editor’s Note: Back in TJKC #1, we showed the tour book for a traveling art exhibit that took temporary residence at the Museum of Fine Art in my hometown of Montgomery, Alabama in 1977. It included one piece of Kirby original art—the first I’d ever laid eyes on. At the time, I wasn’t aware of any other museum exhibit featuring comics art.

I now know that in 1975, not only was there another exhibit of comics art, but one exclusively featuring Jack’s work, as David Folkman elaborates here.]

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(top right) As shown in this photo with Mort Walker’s son Brian, the Museum of Cartoon Art opened in 1974 (thanks to a financial contribution from the Hearst Foundation) in an historic house on Canal Street in Stamford, Connecticut, near where the Beetle Bailey creator lived. It relocated to Boca Raton, Florida in 1992, and was renamed the International Museum of Cartoon Art in 1996 before permanently closing in 2002.

by David Folkman

’d like to answer two questions posed way back in issue #1 (Sept. 1994) of The Jack Kirby Collector. Under the headline “The Kirby Clone,” John Morrow pondered the legitimacy of an 81/2 " x 11" black-&white Kirby portfolio that he “had never heard of before.” When he received it, he first thought it was a “poor man’s version” of the Kirby Unleashed portfolio from 1971.

Upon closer inspection, he realized, “this copycat could stand on its own.”

Neal Kirby, who was Jack’s son and my best friend, and I arranged with Mort Walker, founder of the Museum of Cartoon Art, which was located in Greenwich, Connecticut, to exhibit a collection of Jack’s artwork.

The “portfolio” was the exhibit’s companion booklet Neal and I indeed “cloned” from Kirby Unleashed, originally compiled and annotated by Steve Sherman and Mark Evanier; Neal was business manager of the company they founded, which was called Communicators Unlimited.

The booklet, titled KIRBY: A Collection Of The Artistry Of Jack Kirby, was published by the museum in November of 1975. I carefully cut and pasted galleys of type and art from the original Kirby Unleashed portfolio, redesigning the pages to fit the smaller, 16-page format.

Among the new material that John reprinted was a “Scrapper”-like sketch, accompanying an ad proclaiming Neal “exclusive agent” for Jack’s originals. The sketch accompanying this piece is scanned from Jack’s original pencil drawing. The Bristol paper he drew on appears to have been formatted for an 11" x 14" comic book page; Scrapper is 7" high. I originally reproduced the image using a line art photostat (look that word up in your lexicon of graphic terminology).

The second question posed

by John concerned two posters, each measuring 19" x 26,” which he purchased at a convention in 1977 for 50 cents each. He reprinted them both—Captain America and Silver Surfer. He 53

asked, “Does anybody know if these were authorized by Jack, or were they a ‘bootleg’ product?”

In 1975 Jack and Roz were invited to attend Creation Con in New York City. Jack was given a room to display his art and to sell posters, which I designed and had printed locally. They were reproduced from Jack’s originals and printed on fairly thin paper in two formats: 23" x 29" and 14" x 23.” We sold them for a dollar each. In answer to John’s question: No—these were not bootleg products!

The poster of the contemporary Captain America was reproduced from a photostat I made from a pencil drawing Jack drew for me in 1974, on a 12" x 24" piece of Strathmore Cold Press illustration board. Using the same image, I designed Jack’s personal stationery and fan cards. The image has been reprinted many times throughout the years, notably in this very publication.

(David Folkman is Design Director of Hogan’s Alley, the magazine of the cartoon arts.)

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(below) Ticket booth for the 2010 Fumetto Comics Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Kirby On Display: Now!

by Rand Hoppe & Tom Kraft

A MOVABLE FEAST? ince its founding in 2005, the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center has participated in a number of Jack Kirby exhibits in the US and Europe. Our efforts towards building our Jack Kirby Digital Archive have led us to have wonderful relationships with art dealers and collectors. We’re so happy that we are considered a go-to resource for curators and scholars. To date, we’ve helped these exhibits and displays:

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We were instrumental in finding artwork to be loaned to a large exhibit of Jack Kirby artwork at the 2010 Fumetto Comics Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland [left]. While curators Dan Nadel and Paul Gravett found some Kirby art collectors willing to lend their art to the show, they did not have enough to fill the building that at the time housed a significant Picasso collection! We helped Kirby Krypt-keeper Tom Morehouse and our own Tom Kraft to step in and make the show glorious.

Our Digital Archive was a big help to a wonderful Jack Kirby display that was curated by Jean Depelley and Fredric Manzano and mounted at the January 2015 Angoulême International Comics Festival in France.

(bottom) Pop-ups such as this one near Kirby’s old New York stomping grounds are an affordable way for the Jack Kirby Museum to educate and enlighten the public about his genius.

The Comic Book Apocalypse show at UC Northridge curated by Charles Hatfield in 2015 featured our print of the spread from Kirby’s autobiographical Street Code, and an interactive iBook Pencils to Inks we developed for our Comics Combatives Pop-Up [right].

OUR OWN POP-UPS In 2017, the year of the Kirby Centenary, we helped with the loan of original artwork by Tom Kraft and Bechara Maalouf and the participation of inker/letterer extraordi-

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(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.

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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 IF YOU ENJOYED for you there. THIS PREVIEW, CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS ISSUE IN PRINT ORthe DIGITAL NEIL: It was séance. FORMAT! 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 KIRBYSoCOLLECTOR rarely. much of what#82 Jack “THE MANY WORLDS OF JACK KIRBY!” From Sub-Atomica to outer space, Kirby’s work from World War II, the Fourth didvisitoccurs in daylight!

And World, and hidden worlds of Subterranea, Wakanda, Olympia, then you get his Spirit World Lemuria, Atlantis, the Microverse, and others! Plus, a 2021 Kirby panel,stuff, featuring JONATHAN GAIMAN, & you’ve gotROSS, thatNEIL issue of the MARK EVANIER, a Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

Forever People, and, above all, (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 you get(Digital The Edition) Demon. $4.99I 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 https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_57&products_id=1649

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