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Contents

THE

JACK KIRBY: ANIMATED! OPENING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 JACK FAQs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Mark Evanier’s 1996 interview with Jon B. Cooke

ISSUE #85, WINTER 2023

C o l l e c t o r

STONE AGES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 The Thing’s rocky evolution INCIDENTAL ICONOGRAPHY. . . . . 24 how a fantastic “4” evolved FOUNDATIONS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 another S&K Link Thorne story INNERVIEWS Steve Gerber. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Joe Ruby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 John Dorman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Jim Woodring. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Tom Minton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Rick Hoberg. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 KIRBY OBSCURA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 they loom large KIRBY KINETICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 one more trip to the cinema INFLUENCEES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Evan Dorkin speaks COLLECTOR COMMENTS. . . . . . . . 78 Front cover inks: EVAN DORKIN Front cover colors: TOM ZIUKO Special thanks to: JON B. COOKE COPYRIGHTS: Captain America, Fantastic Four, Galactus, H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot, Hulk, Journey into Mystery, Magneto, Rawhide Kid, Red Skull, Thing, Thor, Watcher TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. • Bat-Mite, Big Barda, Darkseid, Granny Goodness, Hawkman, Kalibak, Kamandi, Klik-Klak, Losers, Mr. Miracle, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Sandman, Sandy, Super Friends, Superman, Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics • Herculoids, Mindbender, Scooby-Doo, Shaggy, Space Ghost, Space Stars, Teen Force TM & © Hanna-Barbera • Beavis and Butt-Head TM & © Viacom International Inc. • Tron TM & © Walt Disney Studios • Planet of the Apes TM & © 20th Century Fox • Popeye TM & © King Features Syndicate • The Soda Thief © Evan Dorkin All other characters, concepts, and related properties shown here are TM & © Ruby-Spears Enterprises, Inc. (or successor in interest), including but not limited to: All American Hero, Animal Hospital, Captain Lightning, Centurions, CHimPS!, Col. Blimp, Cover Girls, Crusher, Dragonflies, Dragonspies, Eagle, Father Crime, Flash-Cat, Four Arms, Future Force, Gemini, Gloria Means, Glowfinger, Goldie Gold and Action Jack, Hassan the Assassin, Heartbreak High, Hidden Harry, Human Slitha, Human Tank, Jake, Lave Man, Little Big Foot, Lost Looee, Metallum, Micromites, Mighty Misfits, Monsteroids, Ookla the Mok, Pie-Eye, Power Planet, Rogue Force, Roxie’s Raiders, Sidney Backstreet, Skanner, Small Kahuna, Street Angels, The Bad Guys, The Outcast, Thundarr the Barbarian, Thunder Dragons, Tiger Shark, Time Angels, Turbo Team, Turbo Teen, Turbo Teens, Undersea Girl, Warriors of Illusion, Yogi Finogi.

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The Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 29, No. 85, Winter 2023. Published quarterly (he said animatedly) 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: $53 Economy US, $78 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

Mark Evanier

JACK F.A.Q.s

A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

[below] Some DePatieFreleng New FF storyboards that were pieced together for Fantastic Four #236’s “new” Lee/Kirby story, without Jack’s knowledge. [next page, top] Jack’s design for H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot.

Mark Evanier interview Conducted by Jon B. Cooke on May 5, 1996 Transcribed and copyedited by John Morrow and Mark Evanier

JON B. COOKE: Did you get Jack involved with animation? MARK EVANIER: More or less. The first thing Jack did in animation that didn’t date back to working for the Fleischers, was the Fantastic Four cartoon show DePatieFreleng did in 1978. I was working at Hanna-Barbera at the time, and they developed the show initially. Iwao Takamoto was the art director there, and I heard they

were having artists imitate Kirby’s stuff. I went to Iwao’s office and asked him about it, and I said, “Why don’t you get Jack Kirby to do this artwork?” Iwao said, “Oh, we’d love it, but he works in New York, doesn’t he?” I said, “Jack’s out here in Thousand Oaks,” and I don’t remember if I gave him Jack’s number, or called Roz and gave her the number, but the next day Roz drove Jack down to the studio and Hanna-Barbera hired Jack to do presentation art for this Fantastic Four show which they were pitching to NBC. NBC accepted the show, and at that point Marvel decided they wanted to do the show with DePatie-Freleng instead of HannaBarbera. There was no contract, just a sort of handshake understanding. What ultimately happened was that a deal was made. DePatie-Freleng had developed a Godzilla show for NBC, and Hanna-Barbera had this Fantastic Four show, so they swapped. Doug Wildey had developed the Godzilla show, and he had the choice of staying at DePatie-Freleng and doing Fantastic Four, or going to Hanna-Barbera and doing Godzilla, at the same time that both studios put in an offer for Jack’s services. So Doug chose to stay with Godzilla and he wound up with an office at Hanna-Barbera right next to mine JON: Was Jack involved in concepts on it? Was H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot his idea? MARK: The name H.E.R.B.I.E. was not his, he had another name for the robot. I don’t know who came up with the idea of putting in a robot. At that point, the Human Torch had been optioned to Universal; every-

body thinks they took him out because they didn’t want to have a character on fire, but actually it was a legal problem. Universal was developing a TV movie. But basically, they tried an experiment. Usually in animation, you write a script and then a storyboard artist turns it into a series of panels. What they tried was having Jack storyboard first and then they’d add the dialogue at a later time, and it didn’t really work. There are a couple of reasons. One of them was that Jack did not have the experience with storyboards to do that job well. The second problem was that because it would have limited animation, you have to have the right amount of dialogue during a speech, to make up for the fact that they aren’t moving very much. So you can’t really storyboard it and then figure out later how long the dialogue is going to be. It has to be done the other way around. And also, Stan Lee dialogued most of them, and he was not at that point that proficient at writing for animation. So the method really didn’t work. The people on the production staff, mostly a man named Lew Marshall, had to re-storyboard the thing and try to turn this into a real storyboard by animation standards. There was a lot of wasted effort.

JON: Did Jack work with Stan at all on the Fantastic Four show? MARK: Oh yeah, absolutely. They probably had a number of meetings, and on the phone. DePatie-Freleng had an office on Van Nuys Boulevard, and Jack probably came in once or twice a week and met with them for an hour or two. JON: How long did he work at DePatie-Freleng? MARK: Well, the show lasted one season. JON: Had he left Marvel by that time? MARK: I think what happened was, they gave him a leave of absence. He was ready to leave. Prior to this thing coming into his life, Jack had told me that when his contract was up, he was going to leave Marvel and not go back. They suspended his contract, or otherwise let him out of it, so he could work on that show. That may have been one of the reasons that he chose to go with DePatie-Freleng as opposed to Godzilla at Hanna-Barbera, because he could fulfill his Marvel contract.

JON: Did Jack come up with the stories himself? MARK: Most of the stories were adapted from old [comics stories]. My understanding is, they gave him a little synopsis, and he would sketch out the storyboard before any dialogue was written.

JON: Was he giving up on comics at that time, or just giving up on Marvel? MARK: Well, at that point it was kind of the same thing. His options were DC or Marvel; there were no other publishers out there that could pay him enough; there were really no other publishers out there at that point. He didn’t want to go back to DC. I think he was pretty much giving up on comics. JON: Do you know the circumstances behind his storyboards being published in Fantastic Four #236 [left]? MARK: The circumstances were that it was the anniversary issue, and they called Jack and asked him for a brand new story for that issue. He declined. At that point, he wanted nothing to do with Marvel, and for some reason they decided to 9

[previous page, top] Some of Kirby’s last produced Ruby-Spears work, for The Centurions: “Let The Games Begin”, first airing October 1, 1986. [previous page, bottom] Sadly blurry repro of one of Jack’s Goldie Gold boards. • [this page] Funny animals, and a compelling villain.

was a positive one? MARK: I would say so, yes, definitely.

through animation overseas and whatever else has happened, and you see it gets very diminished. You get very disappointed with the finished results, but you figure having Jack Kirby involved certainly increased your odds of doing a good show. H

JON: When you look back at some of that stuff, do you see Jack in there? MARK: On some of the Thundarrs, yeah, I can see Jack’s designs. If I were told that’s somebody imitating Kirby, I would not be shocked, but yeah, I can see some of Jack’s designs there, absolutely. Some of the villains on Thundarr, especially. JON: Did you write for Jack on any of those shows? MARK: I wrote on Goldie Gold, and I wrote on Thundarr. JON: Did you write for Jack, so to speak? Did you write to his strengths? MARK: The only thing, on Goldie Gold, I wrote one episode where there was a giant office building above the clouds, and I was thinking of the SHIELD heli-carrier that Jack had designed. I said in the script, “Have Kirby design something like this.” [laughs] Steve Gerber was story editor, and he knew exactly what I meant when he saw what I had written. Jack didn’t do the same design of course, but he did something the same way. At the time I was writing a script, I didn’t know for sure that it was going to go to Jack. He could be yanked off at a moment’s notice for another project. It was hard enough getting a script approved that Joe Ruby would like, and ABC would like, without putting in Jack Kirby stuff too. But Jack’s presence on those projects made them more exciting. By the time they get on the air, they’ve gone 18

Stone AgeS

[above] A sketch done for Lucasfilm historian Jonathan Rinzler. [below] There was no shortage of Things at Marvel/Atlas prior to Benjamin J. Grimm’s debut in Fantastic Four #1 [top]. [right] The Thing’s first pin-up, from Fantastic Four #2. Very dinosaur-like!

The Rocky Evolution of Sample Headline

the Thing!

ne of the most memorable and enduring characters to emerge out of the early Marvel Universe was Benjamin J. Grimm, better known as the Thing. But he was not a character who was created, so much as discovered—one who rapidly evolved over the course of the first few years of The Fantastic Four. “In my plot synopsis,” said co-creator Stan Lee, “I asked Jack to draw a big, burly, grotesque creature that I called the Thing. I had no idea how Jack would draw him. I just said, ‘Let’s get a real monster in there.’ But, like so many characters, the Thing just kind of took over.” In his earliest appearances, the Thing was a brutish man-monster cursed with a sour and sulky personality. Over time, Lee and Kirby pushed away from that original portrayal, in part perhaps because once the Incredible Hulk appeared on the scene less than a year after the FF’s 1961 debut, many readers decried the Hulk as a mere carbon copy of the Thing. Certainly, the two Marvel monsters displayed similar personalities and speech patterns, including a fondness for the exclamation, “Bah!” Both were ordinary men mutated by radiation into becoming inhuman monsters with superhuman strength.

by Will Murray

Almost from the beginning, Jack Kirby tinkered with the Thing’s outward form. Originally, he resembled a great number of Kirby monsters that had stormed through the pages of Strange Tales and Tales of Suspense. Colorist Stan Goldberg painted the Thing the same brownish-orange tones as many of those lumbering creatures. Over the course of the first year of The Fantastic Four, the Thing evolved from an animated lump of brownish-orange clay into that of a figure who appeared to have the thick skin of an alligator. “It takes about four issues to get a superhero’s looks the way he will end up,” explained Kirby. “I took

A ROCK-SOLID DESIGN (EVENTUALLY) While the Hulk retained an outward semblance of his human form, the Thing became a walking lump of misshapen muscle, whose appearance often changed from issue to issue––sometimes panel to panel! His hair and ears disappeared beneath his ugly reptilian hide. The Thing also lost some digits on his hands and feet after being transformed. The Hulk did not. “I thought I should do something new with Ben Grimm,” revealed Kirby. “If you’ll notice, the beginnings of Ben Grimm was, he was kind of lumpy. I felt he had the power of a dinosaur and I began to think along those lines. I wanted his skin to look like dinosaur hide. He kind of looks like your outside patio, or a close-up of dinosaur hide.” The chief difference distinguishing Marvel’s first heroic monsters is that the Hulk could transform back into Bruce Banner through various means, while Ben Grimm was stuck being the Thing except for the occasional spontaneous reversion, which gave him hope of an eventual cure for his mutated condition. Grimm hated being the Thing, while the Hulk’s irradiated brain lost all memory of his human identity and at times despised “puny” Bruce Banner as if he were another person entirely. 19

Foundations

Here’s still more of Simon & Kirby’s “Flying Fool” work, “Face In A Storm” from Airboy Comics V4, #10 (Nov. 1947), with art reconstruction and coloring by Chris Fama. Look for the final installment of the complete Link Thorne stories next issue!

INNERVIEW

A Chat with Steve Gerber Conducted by Jon B. Cooke on April 30, 1996 • Transcribed and copyedited by John Morrow

[Steve Gerber (September 20, 1947–February 10, 2008) is probably best known within comics as the creator of Howard the Duck, but his work for Marvel also included Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown (created with Mary Skrenes), and many other properties. While engaged in a legal battle with Marvel over ownership of Howard the Duck (which made him a vanguard in the fight for creator’s rights), he approached Jack Kirby and several others to donate their services producing the benefit comic Destroyer Duck. This interview took place after Gerber had settled that dispute, wherein he reflects on his experiences with Jack Kirby at the Ruby-Spears animation studio.] JON B. COOKE: What was your earliest exposure to Kirby’s work? STEVE GERBER: I really had associated Jack with the few issues of The Fly and Private Strong he did—the revival of The Shield. The Shield stuff I liked quite a bit, actually. JON: Do you still agree with your Fantastic Four #19 Fan Page letter (October 1963), that you’ve never seen a worse artist combination than Kirby and Ditko? STEVE: [laughs] Yes. [laughs] They were wonderful separately, and

absolutely awful together. Ditko is one of Kirby’s worst inkers of all time. For two artists who were so wonderful separately, I never thought the combination worked at all. JON: Did you get a chance to work with Jack at Marvel, when he came back? STEVE: No, not at Marvel. JON: You left Marvel in 1978? STEVE: Yeah, I left a little after he came back. All the stuff he was doing at that time, he was doing alone: Black Panther, Machine Man and all those things. JON: So you first met Jack when? STEVE: I think 1979, when he came to Ruby-Spears to work on the Thundarr series. JON: His job was replacing Alex Toth? STEVE: Probably not replacing. Alex did the initial designs for the series. I don’t know if Alex was ever contracted to do more than that. It doesn’t work the same way in television that it does in comics. Somebody’ll be brought in to do a particular presentation piece for the network, and that’s the beginning and the end of their job. They may have nothing whatsoever to do with the series after that. I suspect Alex was brought in on a basis like that, so that when he left, he may have gone on to something else altogether. JON: Did you work closely with Alex? STEVE: No. I never met Alex. JON: In your initial concept, what did Alex have to work from for Ookla? STEVE: Well, I don’t remember exactly the words I used, but I gave a description of the character. He’s about eight feet tall, big and hairy, a little bit like an ape, a little bit like a bear—doesn’t talk, afraid of water, whatever. And I just tried to give an impression of the character, the same way I would describe a character for a comic book artist to draw. JON: And Alex came back with a really classic Toth-like, quintessential design. How would you characterize your experience working in animation? STEVE: Oh brother. When I first went to work for Ruby-Spears, a friend of mine named Gordon Kent worked there. He came up to me and said, “Don’t expect it all to be like this.” [laughs] What had happened was, I’d come in and sold the first series I’d ever proposed to anybody. The producers saw it about 85% the same way I did. The network saw it about 85% the way he did, and while we certainly had conflicts with Standards & Practices—anytime you do an action show, that happens—the show basically went very 34

smoothly and turned out a lot like what I had in mind. It never happened again. [laughter] JON: What other shows did you work on? STEVE: Oh, no! For that very reason, I will never tell you! [laughs] It was five or six years before the next satisfying experience in animation came along, and that was story-editing G.I. Joe. JON: Was Larry Hama involved in the animation side of that? STEVE: Not really. He worked very closely with the toy company on the East Coast, but had almost nothing to do with the animation end of it. JON: What was so gratifying about working on G.I. Joe? STEVE: It was two things. It was a syndicated series, not a network series, so we didn’t have Standards & Practices to deal with. We had an incredibly intelligent producer by the name of Jay Bacal; he was a Harvard graduate, and younger than I was. If anything, he was pushing me to kick at the seams of the envelope a little more. It was some of the best stuff I’d ever

[previous page] Thundarr concept work. [right] Since Steve enjoyed Jack’s 1959 revival of The Shield, he must’ve really loved this Alfredo Alcalainked concept drawing for Ruby-Spears.

INNERVIEW

John Dorman Interview

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke on May 10, 1996 • Transcribed and copyedited by John Morrow [Animation veteran Tom Minton summed up John Dorman (June 29, 1952–January 29, 2011) thusly, following Dorman’s passing: “In addition to being a prolific and experienced creative talent, John Dorman was a near-mythic character with an epic sense of the absurd. He was much more than a storyboard artist or art director, as anyone who worked for him in the early to mid-1980s can attest... John defined ‘intense’ and could be tough to please, but ultimately took the people he believed in more seriously than he did himself.” From storyboard artist to art director, his influence in animation cannot be overstated. Here, he discusses what he did to make Ruby-Spears such a remarkable place to work, and his own experiences with Jack Kirby.]

I didn’t even meet Jack there; my first encounter with him was that he would turn in a finished half-hour storyboard every week—that he wrote while he was drawing it. He wrote it and drew it. Normally, you had careful scripts, like at DC Comics, where the animation and every scene is figured out. The character is going left to right, with close-up directions. You can almost just follow the directions and do it. Even the visuals are taken care of in the writing. A lot of that is because they had so much product they needed quickly, and there’s not enough storyboard artists, and they had to get other artists that don’t know how to make film, but know how to draw heads, and they know how to draw a close-up. Artists were almost never invited into creative meetings, except to graft a look onto a show, after it had been created. Jack brought a whole different mentality. He came in and his worked just punched its way right through the wall by saying, “I invent this stuff. I write it. I draw it. I do that all faster than any team has ever done, all by myself.” And by the way, Jack was also producing two finished comics a month at the time: Devil Dinosaur and Machine Man, and a storyboard a week for a half-hour episode, and he would design all the incidental characters too. This normally takes a huge body of people, and he’d do everything all by himself. That’s the thing that was really alarming

John Dorman at Filmation studios in 1979. Photo by Tom Minton.

JON B. COOKE: When did you first encounter Jack and his work? JOHN DORMAN: The first time I saw Jack in the industry, was when I worked at DePatie-Freleng. I was hired to draw layouts, and I was supposed to draw storyboards on the Fantastic Four. They said, “You can draw boards, because we only have one board artist, and that’s Jack Kirby.” Now, storyboards are the hardest, most labor-intensive, anonymous, difficult, technically rife portion of animation. It’s a really hard job, so if you can do a half-hour show in five–six weeks, you’re really fast. That’s a very fast artist.

Airbrush over Kirby’s pencil work.

about Jack when I first encountered his work.

worked in my life, and I was given these ideas by divine inspiration, and I had a lot of coffee—it’s impossible! [laughs] You finally go, “Okay, he’s different. He’s different than anyone I’ve ever met.” So if that’s the way it is, should we teach him the technical aspects of storyboards, or should we just shut up, like it, and then try to get the impact of what he wanted across—keep as much as we can, compose things so that it makes film sense? Jack would pick the exact middle pose to draw, so you don’t get a start and a stop for storyboards. So you just fix it, you go through and you redo the stuff. You invent a new division; it’s like a laborintensive repairs division, or technical workbook stage. In other words, you’re turning a presentation storyboard… it’s like if the Hulk suddenly signed with the Dallas Cowboys to play quarterback. All you’d hear the teams talking about was what a problem that one guy is. And he might go, “I’m just gonna pick the ball up and start walking, and we’re not even gonna have plays.” [laughs] And even if the coach says, “No, we have plays now, we’ll throw it.” And he’s like, “No, every time I touch the ball, I’ll just walk to the endzone.” [laughs] Jack was a master of instant gratification. If you put Jack’s work in a room with the work of any ten other artists in the world, everybody’d walk right in the room, right over to Jack’s work and go, “Look at that!” That’s just how it was. After a while, you allow yourself to get consumed in his vigor.

COOKE: Did his storyboards work? DORMAN: Technically, no. I was supposed to draw what he wouldn’t draw, but he drew everything! He was ahead of schedule; the guy was alarming, I guess is the best word I can use. He drew it like a comic book. Whoever’s reading what he’s drawing, will have the biggest impression. Storyboards are, by and large, a blueprint or inter-office memo which tells you what the story is, in a language that’s not English or Japanese or typewritten or word of mouth. At that point, you also have to figure out how many characters per scene so you can control the movement, and limit the amount of movement, and don’t call for unnecessary movement. These are things Jack didn’t pay attention to, because his is impact drawing; it gets a lot across, because of the exaggeration. COOKE: Those restrictions are because of the budgetary limits of animation? DORMAN: Well, if you have a computer screen that you’re watching, the screen doesn’t change shape while you’re watching it. If you have a long, skinny drawing, you have to take the camera and move it along the drawing to display that. Each screen-sized shape is called a field, and Jack would take four fields to do a close-up of a guy’s eyes. So you’d start on an eye and pan over to the other eye, but when you’re reading it, you go, “I know what he means, but this guy with the eyes is nutty.” But I’d never seen a storyboard guy who would write—take a story idea, and make up a whole show out of it. It was alarming! He didn’t sketch, he’d just draw stuff, without putting any reminder notes, or tying any strings to his finger. I ended up inking a lot of Jack’s stuff, finally just going, “Well, what do you do?” I was just overwhelmed with the prolificness, and diversity, and ability, because the guy was really just a remarkable fella. As an artist, if I just never slept and worked as fast as I’ve ever

COOKE: Did you come on to Ruby-Spears as art director, just as Thundarr was exploding? DORMAN: No, I came on as just a layout artist. I drew storyboards, and then I drew development presentation pieces, and I could ink in stuff, including Jack’s. I found out something unusual about Jack’s art—no matter who inks Jack’s art, it always looks like he penciled it. The only one that altered it at all and could get away with it, was Alfredo Alcala. And his alterations were to make Jack’s anatomy 49

innerview

Jim Woodring Interview

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke on May 6, 1996 • Transcribed and copyedited by John Morrow They did a TV show called Thundarr the Barbarian, and he did some of the character design and some of the show design for that. Right after he did that, I started working there, and they tried to find other things for him to do. They gave him a stab at storyboards, without really telling him how to do storyboards, and he just tried to wing it. He did some really innovative things, like he had a close-up of somebody’s face, to the extent that all you could see was their eyes, and the shot called for the camera panning from the left eye to the right eye while about two minutes of dialogue were spoken. [laughs] He just made up his own rules. JON: Did he come up with the concept for the stories he was storyboarding? JIM: No, he was given a script, like all the storyboard artists were. He looked at some other boards, and from his own take on how it was done, he did his. But it was completely unusable. It couldn’t have been done the way he called for it. He didn’t really understand how to do it.

[Jim Woodring is best known in comics for his self-published magazine Jim, and as the creator of his character Frank, who has appeared in a number of short comics and graphic novels, but he’s also an accomplished fine artist and animator. Jon B. Cooke considers him one of “the top five greatest cartoonists alive,” and here he quizzes Woodring about his tenure under friend and art director John Dorman at Ruby-Spears Productions.]

JON: So what was he primarily doing at Ruby-Spears? JIM: Character design and show ideas. When I started working there, his job was to come up with ideas that might be turned into TV shows. So he would come in every Monday morning with a big thick stack of Crescent board under his arm, on which he had drawn characters and settings and show ideas, and he’d given names to all the shows and all the vehicles and all the characters. They were all really, really imaginative. In fact, there’s a set of Jack Kirby cards

JON B. COOKE: When did you first meet Jack Kirby? JIM WOODRING: I first met him in 1981, when I started working at Ruby-Spears. He already had been hired when I came aboard.

Based on the eye on her palm, this unnamed female may’ve been a character for—or which morphed into—the unproduced Warriors of Illusion project [next page, bottom].

JON: Did you ever talk to him about the business? JIM: Well, I listened to him talk about the business. There was absolutely nothing I had to tell him. His take on the business was pretty personal and idiosyncratic. He didn’t seem to have much awareness about what other people were doing; he was just clued into his work, and some times are better than others. He had that Old World habit of maintaining respect for the office of Editor. He was loathe to say bad things about editors or the people he worked for. When I met him, it was at the very height of that “God Save The King” and “Give Jack Back His Artwork” and all that, and even in the thick of all that, when he had plenty of encouragement to, he never said anything bad about Stan Lee.

out, and that stuff is a lot of the pitch artwork he did for RubySpears. They were quarter sheets of Crescent board, so they were 20" x 30". JON: Did you color and ink a lot of these? JIM: Yeah, I did. I inked most of them, and colored a lot of them. JON: Some of this stuff is outstanding. Like the Warriors of Illusion; did you do the coloring on that? JIM: I did some of the coloring on that. Most of that was done by a guy named James Gallego. JON: You were unfamiliar with Jack’s work prior to that? JIM: Yeah. I was aware of his name, and aware that he was a comic artist, and well regarded. But I couldn’t have told you what he drew, or how he drew.

JON: Was it just Mondays when he’d come in? JIM: Well, he’d come in Mondays with a big stack of Crescent boards under his arm, and we’d all come in and look at them. We’d all stand around and laugh, and point at the various things, and try to make him stay and talk and tell us stories.

JON: So you weren’t even aware of his reputation as one of the Marvel guys? JIM: Not until I’d been working there a couple of weeks. I’d tell people that I ran into, that I was working with him…

JON: Did you go back and look at Jack’s earlier work after meeting him? JIM: Yeah, I did.

JON: Were they floored? JIM: A lot of them, yeah.

JON: I seem to perceive an increasingly bizarre sense of humor coming out of him at that point. Did that permeate his work that you saw? JIM: Oh yeah, especially toward the end of his tenure there. His work got sort of recklessly crazy. The one that I really wish I could find is, he did a drawing of a character named Heidi Hogan, which was a bearded lumberjack in a pinafore dress, jumping off a cliff with a propeller beanie. [laughs] It just looked like pure automatic pilot. He must’ve been thinking of something else entirely, and automatically drew

JON: Were they surprised to find out he was working in animation? JIM: Yeah. JON: What was your impression of him when you first met him? JIM: Well, that he was unusual in a good way. How shall I put it? He didn’t seem to have the kind of adult, pragmatic, hard, dull edge that most other grown-ups did. I think it comes from having such a rich inner life, and putting such value on drawing and imagination, and comics and cartooning. That was his business, that was his life. He just wasn’t a cold-edged pragmatist. He lived for more and better works of fancy.

this nonchalantly insane picture. [laughs] There was another kind of ill-fated project the studio had going called Animal Hospital. I don’t know if he was asked to do it; I suppose he was. He suddenly started coming in with newspaper daily strips. Penciled but not inked, but he had written it, and someone else had lettered it, and it featured all the characters he’d invented for Animal Hospital. It was like five or six days’ worth.

JON: How did he react to the world of Hollywood? JIM: Well, I only saw him at work. I was never up to his house. He had a professional demeanor; a way of being nice that was genuine, but you also knew it was his work face. So I don’t really have much of an idea of what went on in his mind, or how he felt about anything really, because he was pretty superficial when he was in the office. I know that at Ruby-Spears, at a certain point after he’d done all these drawings and none of them had been made into TV shows, he began to be a little frustrated by that. Because he was doing all this work and coming up with really good ideas, and none of them ever went anywhere.

JON: Did he come up with the Animal Hospital concept? JIM: No, that was by Joe Ruby, I believe. JON: What was the genesis for that? JIM: The desire to create a sophisticated post-primetime TV show 57

INNERVIEW

Rick Hoberg Interview

Conducted by Jon B. Cooke on May 20, 1996 • Transcribed and copyedited by John Morrow [Rick Hoberg (born 1952) has had a highly successful career as both comic book artist and animator. He began in the mid-1970s working on Tarzan comics for Russ Manning, and later assisted him on the Star Wars comic strip from 1979–1980. Other comics work includes The Invaders, Conan, and What If...? for Marvel Comics, plus All-Star Squadron, Batman, The Brave and the Bold, and others for DC Comics. He’s been active since 1978 as a storyboard artist and model designer for all the major animation studios, and had the privilege of working at Ruby-Spears while Jack Kirby was in their employ.]

[below] A nice example of Gil Kane’s presentation art, for an unknown character. [next page, top] Rick Hoberg retold Thor’s origin in What If? #10. [next page, bottom] Unrealized R-S pitch The Outcast, set in 1990, featuring Jack’s “Slitha”, an “organic engine of destruction.”

between Clint Eastwood and Bugs Bunny. [laughs] He had this New York/Brooklynese accent and he looked like Eastwood in a lot of ways. And he was always willing to pull a joke, but at the same time was always willing to be serious. He was just a wonderful guy. He inspired a lot of people, including Dave Stevens with his Rocketeer work. Many guys you’ll talk to who had any contact with Doug just loved the guy—a great fella. JON: What year did you get involved in animation? RICK: 1976. Shortly after I started working with Doug, after nine months or so, I ran off and started working on Star Wars stuff for Marvel, and then came back to work for him. We were working on a show called Godzilla, that’s shown even now on Cartoon Network. It was partnered with a show called Jana of the Jungle. Neither one of them were groundbreaking material, but they were a lot of fun to work on, and I know a lot of them won’t admit to it: Will Meugniot worked on it, Dave Stevens worked on it, Bill Wray worked on it. A lot of people in comics ended up working on that show.

JON B. COOKE: When did you first meet Jack? RICK HOBERG: Oh, I met Jack years before I ever worked with him in the animation industry. I’m pretty sure the San Diego Con was the first time. Jack was always the most congenial of people. He was always willing to tell stories and sit with the fans and talk with them.

JON: Were you at Ruby-Spears before Thundarr started? Did John Dorman bring you on? RICK: I came in just after it started. Actually, Jerry Eisenberg and Larry Huber brought me over, and I began working for John Dorman. John was the storyboard supervisor over there.

JON: Your art took some inspiration from Jack? RICK: Of course. I’m one of those people who in the 1970s subscribed to the three Ks of comics: Kirby, Kubert, and Kane. Jack Kirby is to me the essence of storytelling excellence. His figures literally move on the page.

JON: What were your duties there? RICK: Layout department, basically. I did character design and layout on Thundarr and Plastic Man. Thundarr was a lot of fun to work on. It was a groundbreaking kind of show. Nothing like it had actually ever been done for Saturday morning, in that it was a real straight adventure show, with no funny animals in it per se. We didn’t have any dog sidekicks or anything like that; the nearest thing you had to it was Ookla the Mok, the big Wookie character. It did pretty well; it ran two seasons. At that time, that was good for an adventure show. At that point, they were looked at as almost kind of a break from the comedy shows. Kids were watching Thundarr. The real groundbreaker I was involved in over at Marvel was G.I. Joe. It was tremendously successful. Even though it was syndicated, it was a huge hit, with marvelous ratings. I believe the G.I. Joe show was on for eight or nine years.

JON: How did you get involved in animation? RICK: I was pulled into it literally by Mark Evanier. He gave my name to Doug Wildey, the creator of Jonny Quest, and Doug was producing a show over at HannaBarbera at the time. I went over to see him and got a job from him right off the bat. Doug ended up honing my skills better than any other person I’ve worked with. He was marvelous. Just a wonderful human being. One of the most giving teachers I’ve ever worked with. The guy literally had no qualms about sitting down and teaching you something. That relationship continued until he passed away. We were good friends right up to the end. I saw Doug as a cross

JON: Steve Gerber mentioned being story editor of G.I. Joe as the highlight of his career in animation, along with Thundarr. RICK: It actually had some very good stories. You had a lot of good writers involved in that: Buzz Dixon and Steve Gerber, Roger Slifer was there. It was the first time comic book people were pulled in big time on the writing end. It didn’t rely on any formula of the time. It didn’t rely on having to deal with comedy. You could do a comedy episode, but you didn’t have to have a funny animal or comedy relief sidekick. It just relied on the straight character of the heroes involved, and the 66

remember, he was the guy who designed the original Turbo Teen, which when you think about it, seems like a real Jack Kirby concept—a kid turns into a car. Even though I hated working on the show, it was fascinating to see his ideas were still being put forth in animation, and they actually were used in those shows back then. JON: What do you see as the most “Kirby” of those shows? RICK: Oh, Thundarr. He did quite a few shows. He did an unproduced knockoff of that She-Ra, Princess of Power thing that they did over at Filmation. He was always coming up with, especially, villain designs. He did some design work on The Pirates of Dark Water when it was initially put forward. There’s a lot of stuff he worked on. Jack would do things like design concepts. Sometimes they’d get painted up, sometimes we’d just ink them. In the end, they’d quite

villains; and the villains were total bad guys, which is something that hadn’t been done a lot. It was quite a good show, and I was happy to be involved. I only stuck around for the first season because there were other shows we were working on, like the Incredible Hulk, and the first Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends show. This led us along to breaking ground for further shows, cause at the time, most of the adventure shows being done were still done in these old vaudevillian-style staging methods, with characters were brought on Stage Left, and exited Stage Right, as opposed to cutting it like Hitchcock or Ford. We were approaching the cutting with a more melodramatic flair. Jack actually was doing a lot of real fun designs over at Ruby-Spears. Even though some of the shows themselves weren’t particularly designed in that vein, he was always coming up with real energetic and interesting things. As I

often get Gil Kane to do a real nice comp, and they’d get painted from that. Some of those paintings are quite lovely. JON: Have you seen the trading card set? It’s called Jack Kirby: The Unpublished Archives, but a good fourth of it is Gil’s work. It’s not factually correct, but it’s still fascinating and beautiful. RICK: No, I haven’t at this point. But I think this is why that’s in there. Jack did a lot of the actual designs you’ll see, and Gil Kane ended up doing the compositions they used to help sell the ideas. Jack would be a conceptual artist, but he’s not the one whose art they would use to sell it. Technically, 67