CAPTAIN AMERICA
no. 112
April 1969
Art: Jack Kirby and George Tuska
Marvel Comics
Galactus
THOR
no. 160
January 1969
Art: Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta
Marvel Comics
Presentation art
1976
Art: Jack Kirby
Silver Star
Presentation art
1975
Art: Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby
1992
Photo: Greg Preston
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 51
June 1966
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
Marvel Comics
Editor: Charles Kochman
Editorial Assistant: Sofia Gutiérrez
Designers: Mark LaRiviere and E. Y. Lee
Liam Flanagan (revised edition)
Production Manager: Alison Gervais
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the 2008 hardcover edition:
Evanier, Mark.
Kirby : king of comics / by Mark Evanier.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8109-9447-8 (hardcover with jacket)
1. Kirby, Jack. 2. Cartoonists—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN6727.K57E93 2007
741.5092—dc22
[B] 2007016321
This is a revised and expanded version of the book first published in 2008.
ISBN for this edition: 978-1-4197-2749-8
eISBN: 978-1-61312-256-3
Text and compilation copyright © 2008, 2017
Mark Evanier
Introduction copyright © 2008, 2017 Neil Gaiman
Cover design: Paul Sahre and E. Y. Lee
Revised cover design: Mark Evanier and Chad W. Beckerman
Title type for revised cover: Todd Klein
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All characters, their distinctive likenesses, and related elements are ™ and © 2017. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission:
DC Comics: this page (center), this page, this page (left), this page (right), this page (left and middle), this page, this page, this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page, this page (left), this page; The Estate of Will Eisner and the collection of Denis Kitchen: this page; Jackie Estrada: this page; David Folkman: endpapers and this page; Steve Gerber and the Rosalind Kirby Trust: this page (right), this page; Gilberton Publications: this page; Hanna-Barbera Productions: this page; Rosalind Kirby Trust: this page–this page, this page–this page, this page, this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page, this page, this page, this page; Samuel J. Maronie: this page (lower right); Marvel Characters, Inc.: this page–this page, this page, this page, this page (left), this page (center and right), this page (left and center), this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page; Alex Ross Art LLC: Back cover (Kirby’s Kingdom originally appeared on the cover of Comic Book Creator no. this page, Spring 2013, TwoMorrows Publishing); Greg Preston: this page; Ruby-Spears Enterprises: this page–this page; The Estate of Joseph H. Simon: this page (left), this page; The Estate of Joseph H. Simon and the Rosalind Kirby Trust: this page (right), this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page
CAPTAIN AMERICA
no. 5
August 1941
Art: Jack Kirby and Syd Shores
Marvel Comics
STAR SPANGLED COMICS
no. 28
June 1944
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
DC Comics
BOY EXPLORERS
no. 1
May 1946
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
Harvey Publications
YOUNG ROMANCE
no. 1
September 1947
Art: Jack Kirby
Prize Comics
BLACK MAGIC
no. 1
October 1950
Art: Jack Kirby
Crestwood Publications
BULLSEYE
no. 1
August 1954
Art: Jack Kirby
Mainline Comics
INTRODUCTION BY NEIL GAIMAN
PREFACE
ONE: IN THE STREETS
TWO: PARTNERS
THREE: JACK WITHOUT JOE
FOUR: FACING FRONT
FIVE: WITHOUT A COUNTRY
SIX: SOMETHING ELSE
SEVEN: GODS ON EARTH
EIGHT: LEGACY
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
The Sandman
Sketchbook drawing
1981
Art: Jack Kirby
I NEVER MET JACK KIRBY, which makes me less qualified than a thousand other people to write this introduction. I saw Jack, the man, once, across a hotel lobby, talking to my publisher. I wanted to go over and be introduced, but I was late for a plane and, I thought, there would always be a next time.
There was no next time, and I did not get to meet Jack Kirby.
I had known his work, though, for about as long as I had been able to read, having seen it on imported American comics or on the two-color British reprints that I grew up on. With Stan Lee, Kirby created the original X-Men, the Fantastic Four (and all that we got from that, the Inhumans and the Silver Surfer and the rest), and the Mighty Thor (where my own obsession with myth probably began).
And then, when I was eleven or twelve, Kirby entered my consciousness as more than the other half of Smilin’ Stan and Jolly Jack. There were house ads in the DC Comics titles I was reading that told me that “Kirby Was Coming.” And that he was coming to . . . Jimmy Olsen. It seemed the least likely title Kirby could possibly turn up on. But turn up on Jimmy Olsen he did, and I was soon floundering delightedly in a whirl of unlikely concepts that were to prove a gateway into a whole new universe.
Kirby’s Fourth World turned my head inside out. It was a space opera of gargantuan scale played out mostly on Earth with comics that featured (among other things) a gang of cosmic hippies, a super escape artist, and an entire head-turning pantheon of powerful New Gods. Nineteen seventy-three was a good year to read comics.
And it’s the Iggy Pop and the Stooges title from 1973 that I think of when I think of Jack Kirby. The album was called Raw Power, and that was what Jack had, and had in a way that nobody had before or since. Power, pure and unadulterated, like sticking knitting needles into an electrical socket. Like the power that Jack conjured up with black dots and wavy lines that translated into energy or flame or cosmic crackle, often imitated (as with everything that Jack did), but never entirely successfully.
Jack Kirby created part of the language of comics and much of the language of super-hero comics. He took vaudeville and made it opera. He took a static medium and gave it motion. In a Kirby comic the people were in motion, everything was in motion. Jack Kirby made comics move, he made them buzz and crash and explode. And he created . . .
He would take ideas and notions and he would build on them. He would reinvent, reimagine, create. And more and more he built things from whole cloth that nobody had seen before. Characters and worlds and universes, giant alien machines and civilizations. Even when he was given someone else’s idea he would build it into something unbelievable and new, like a man who was asked to repair a vacuum cleaner, but instead built it into a functioning jet pack. (The readers loved this. Posterity loved this. At the time, I think, the publishers simply pined for their vacuum cleaners.)
Page after page, idea after idea. The most important thing was the work, and the work never stopped.
I loved the Fourth World work, just as I loved what followed it—Jack’s magical horror title, The Demon; his reimagining of Planet of the Apes (a film he hadn’t seen) with Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth; and even loved, to my surprise, because I didn’t read war comics but I would follow Jack Kirby anywhere, a World War II comic called The Losers. I loved OMAC, “One Man Army Corps.” I even liked The Sandman—a Joe Simon-written children’s story that Jack drew the first issue of, and which would wind up having a perhaps disproportionate influence on the rest of my life.
Kirby’s imagination was as illimitable as it was inimitable. He drew people and machines and cities and worlds beyond imagining—beyond my imagining anyway. It was grand and huge and magnificent. But what drew me in, in retrospect, was always the storytelling, and in contrast to the hugeness of the imagery and the impossible worlds, it was the small, human moments that Kirby loved to depict. Moments of tenderness, mostly. Moments of people being good to one another, helping or reaching out to others. Every Kirby fan, it seems to me, has at least one story of his they remember not because it awed them, but because it touched them.
I did not meet Jack Kirby. Not in the flesh. And I wish I had walked across that room and shaken his hand and, most important, said thank you. But Kirby’s influence on me, just like Kirby’s influence on comics, was already set in stone, written across the stars in crackling bolts of black energy dots and raw power, and honestly that’s all that matters.
— NEIL GAIMAN
SEPTEMBER 2007
LONDON
P. S. In a perfect universe you would walk around a huge Kirby museum and stare at Kirby originals and also at the printed and colored versions of Kirby’s art, and Mark Evanier would stroll along beside you, telling you about what you were looking at, what it is, when and how Jack did it and why, because Mark is wise and funny and the best-informed guide you could have. He knows stuff. But this is not a perfect world and that museum does not exist, not yet, so you will have to settle for Mark Evanier on the pages of this book.
NEIL GAIMAN is a critically acclaimed and award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy short stories and novels, graphic novels, children’s books, and films. Among his many awards are the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, as well as the World Fantasy Award, four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, six Locus Awards, the Harvey Award, and the Eisner Award. He is the author of The New York Times bestsellers Stardust, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and Sandman. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.
CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN
no. 4
October 1958
Art: Jack Kirby
DC Comics
TALES OF SUSPENSE
no. 14
February 1961
Art: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Marvel Comics
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 29
August 1964
Art: Jack Kirby and Chic Stone
Marvel Comics
THE INCREDIBLE HULK
no. 2
July 1962
Art: Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko
Marvel Comics
THE X-MEN
no. 14
November 1965
Art: Jack Kirby and Wallace Wood
Marvel Comics
THE NEW GODS
no. 5
October 1971
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
DC Comics
KAMANDI, THE LAST BOY ON EARTH
no. 1
October 1972
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
DC Comics
THE DEMON
no. 1
August 1972
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
DC Comics
DESTROYER DUCK
no. 1
1982
Art: Jack Kirby and Neal Adams
Eclipse Comics
Self-portrait from Marvelmania International
1969
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Color: Tom Ziuko
This was Mike Royer’s first inking assignment over Kirby pencil art.
JACK KIRBY DIDN’T INVENT the comic book. It just seems that way.
It’s 1939 and he’s still a few years from establishing himself as one of the most important, brilliant innovators of an emerging form. He isn’t even Jack Kirby yet. He’s Jacob Kurtzberg, from the Kurtzberg family on Suffolk Street in not the best part of New York. At age twenty-one he’s trying to do the most important thing he believes a man can do: provide for his family, bring home a paycheck. Nothing else matters if you don’t manage that.
Much of the work in comics is done in “shops”—cramped quarters where artists toil at rows of drawing tables. The money isn’t good, but it’s good for a young man whose neighborhood has yet to see evidence that the Great Depression is ending. It at least beats selling newspapers or several other alternatives he’s tried.
So Jacob joins the throng of young artists wandering the streets, all toting large black portfolios crammed with samples. Most of the samples are variations (or outright plagiarisms) of the newspaper strips that had initially moved each to pick up a pencil. Eventually, the young men all seem to wind up working for Victor Fox . . . at least for a few weeks, until something better comes along.
Legend has it that Fox had been an accountant for Harry Donenfeld, publisher of Detective Comics and Action Comics. One morning, the story goes, sales figures came in on the first issue of Action, which featured a new strip called “Superman” by Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster. Fox saw the numbers, quit his job, rented an office in the same building, and by close of day was hiring artists as the head of Fox Comics, Inc.
A great story. It’s probably not true, but it’s a great story.
Fox is an old-time hustler/financier who’s spent years sprinting from one dubious enterprise to another. Most of the early funnybook publishers are like that—hardscrabble entrepreneurs lacking both class and capital. What will turn some of them into multimillionaires—and, ipso facto, into legitimate businessmen—is if they get their fingers on a smash hit. Say, if someone sends them a Superman or if Bob Kane walks in with the beginnings of something called Batman.
Or if, in years to come, they hire Jack Kirby.
Victor Fox will not be so fortunate, even though most of the great creative talents will pass through his office, some at full sprint. At first, he buys stories from a studio run by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. After Eisner goes off and creates the Spirit, Fox sets up his own operation, placing ads in The New York Times classifieds to recruit a staff. His artists could work at home, but Fox feels that since he’s paying them, he’s going to experience the joy of treating them like dirt every day.
So they sit there, eight a.m. to six p.m. or later, filling up illustration boards—young men like Bill Everett (who would soon create the Sub-Mariner), Joe Simon (who, with Kirby, would create Captain America and dozens of other hits), and Charles Nicholas Wojtkowski (who had already created Fox’s anemic star super hero, Blue Beetle).
As they all race to finish at least three pages per day, Fox strides up and down the aisles with the posture of Groucho Marx, clutching his latest sales figures and muttering, “I’m King of the Comics! I’m King of the Comics!” Then he pauses at some artist’s desk, glances at work that as a former seller of junk bonds he’s eminently qualified to judge, and yells, “That stinks! Work faster, you son of a bitch!”
No one’s producing masterpieces . . . but then Fox isn’t paying for masterpieces. “I’d draw a big cloud and a teensy airplane and that was the panel,” Jake (soon to be Jack) would later recall. One time, he fills most of a panel by writing “Wow” across it, like a sound effect. Fox, pacing about, stops and asks, “What the hell is that?”
The young artist looks up at him and says, “That, Mr. Fox, is ‘Wow!’”
Fox studies the panel for a few minutes, shifting the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s part of the story,” Kurtzberg explains.
Fox nods in understanding, then calls all the other artists in the place to stop working and gather ’round Kurtzberg’s drawing table. “Jake here is going to tell you about ‘Wow.’ Go on, Jake. Tell them about ‘Wow!’”
Jake stammers out an explanation having to do with filling panels with energy and excitement, and how a word like “Wow” reaches the kids on their own level. And of course, all the artists understand that “Wow” is just Kurtzberg’s way of getting out of drawing a panel. Each of them nods, returns to his table, and immediately writes “Wow” across the next panel—no matter what’s supposed to be in there.
Fox is pleased. He’s not only publishing comic books, he’s publishing comic books with a lot of “Wow” in them.
Eventually, the King of Comics tires of getting up in the a.m. to let in the artists. He calls his crew together and asks who among them was ever a Boy Scout. “I was,” announces Al Harvey, a production artist who would soon establish the comic book company bearing his surname. Fox hands him a key and tells him, “From now on, you open up.”
Thereafter, Fox breezes in around eleven to begin berating his staff. But each morning before he arrives, the one-time Boy Scout and other artists take turns imitating their employer, pacing between the drawing tables repeating, “I’m King of the Comics!” Forever after, Kurtzberg and Bill Everett would greet each other with that impression.
CUT TO:
It’s the mid-sixties. Call it 1965. The Marvel Comics Group is publishing The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The X-Men, among others. Jacob Kurtzberg has long since become Jack Kirby, the preeminent artist of action-adventure comic books. At the moment, he’s Marvel’s star illustrator and co-creator of a new Renaissance for the comic book business. He’s also the instrument of change for yet another catchpenny publisher who’s becoming wealthy. In this case, the firm is well on its way to becoming a multibillion dollar empire and a fixture of American popular fiction.
The shops long behind him, Kirby works at home and comes into New York City once a week to drop off pages at the Marvel offices. Less often, if he can manage it . . . because when he’s on the train he’s not drawing, and that’s what Kirby is still all about: providing for his family. He wants to do great stories and express himself and share his incredible imagination with the world, and all that is fine. But being a good provider is still Job One for him and always will be.
On one office visit he runs into Everett and they exchange Victor Fox impressions, a quarter century after the fact. They’re just discussing where to go for lunch when Editor in Chief Stan Lee walks up and shows Jack a new Bullpen Bulletins house ad. “I’m gonna give you a real buildup, Jack,” Stan says. “See here? I’m calling you the King of the Comics!”
Kirby and Everett fall over laughing. “No, no,” Jack protests. “Make Bill Everett King of the Comics!”
Everett will have none of it. “Jack is definitely King of Comics,” he argues. Lee sides with Everett, so Kirby is stuck forever with the nickname. For a long time this truly modest man is embarrassed by it. Eventually, so many are calling him “King” that he comes to accept it. Who knows? Maybe a little promotional gimmick will translate into higher take-home pay.
It is, of course, the perfect title for a book about Kirby, but Jack would have wanted everyone to know it was meant with a twinkle. Everything else about him was vested with power and planet-rocking explosions and cosmic energy and changing the world around him, leaving nothing the way he found it.
But the nickname? The nickname was only meant by Jack or accepted when it came with a twinkle. Always with a twinkle.
Marvel Bullpen Bulletins
Writer: Stan Lee
April 1967
Marvel Comics
Credits
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 64
July 1967
Marvel Comics
Self-portrait
FOREVER PEOPLE
no. 4
August 1971
Art: Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta
DC Comics
“Super heroes have a way of arriving just when they’re needed and so did Kirby. Every time the comic book industry needed someone to kick it in the butt or in a new direction, along came Jack. He was like the cavalry with a pencil.”
— WILL EISNER, COMICS CREATOR
THE FUTURE JACK KIRBY was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, the son of Benjamin and Rosemary Kurtzberg, who resided on Essex Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Another brother, David, followed two years later, by which time the Kurtzbergs had moved to a slightly larger (but still cramped) Suffolk Street tenement house.
Their parents had migrated from Austria some time around the turn of the century. “My father had insulted a member of German aristocracy,” Jack recalled. “The German, who was an expert marksman, challenged him to a duel. My father knew he’d be killed, so he decided to emigrate. All the relatives chipped in for the tickets.” Benjamin, a tailor by trade, obtained intermittent employment in New York garment factories, often getting up before dawn to walk to work.
Even putting in relentless hours, Ben Kurtzberg had trouble making ends meet. “From the time I was old enough to deliver papers,” Jack recalled, “I was aware that the income was necessary. It was that way in all the families in our neighborhood. Whatever you could bring home counted.
“But I was terrible at selling papers,” he continued. “You’d have to go to this building and pick up your papers from the back of a truck. I was the shortest guy and the other boys used to run right over me.” He fared slightly better with an array of messenger jobs and sign-painting chores, but as each ended, he was back with the newsboys, jostling to claim his bundle. It was a metaphor for his life ahead.
The money helped the Kurtzbergs buy groceries, and his parents would allow him a few nickels for his own entertainment and enlightenment. Enlightenment, mostly. Young Jakie, as most called him, avidly read pulps, eagerly followed (and copied) newspaper comics, and frequently spent all afternoon at the local cinema. As he later explained, “The pulps were my writing school. Movies and newspaper strips were my drawing school. I learned from everything. My heroes were the men who wrote the pulps and the men who made the movies. Every hero I’ve written or drawn since then has been an amalgam of what I believed them to be.
Above and following page
Childhood sketches
Art: Jack Kurtzberg (age 17)
1934
Childhood sketch
Art: Jack Kurtzberg (age 18)
December 28, 1937
“At times, I felt like I was being raised by Jack Warner. My mother would come and get me. She’d go to the doorman, and he knew which kid to drag out of the balcony. Even then, I’d plead with him, ‘Just let me see this next scene again.’ Those scenes still appear in my work.”
Jakie soon became a member of the Suffolk Street Gang. “Each street had its own gang of kids, and we’d fight all the time. We’d cross over the roofs and bombard the Norfolk Street Gang with bottles and rocks and mix it up with them.” Years later, in the Fantastic Four comic books, Ben “The Thing” Grimm—an obvious Kirby self-caricature—would fight a running battle with a mob called the Yancy Street Gang. The references to Jack’s childhood—and skirmishes with the gangs of his childhood—would be unmistakable.
Then there was the Boys Brotherhood Republic, one of many organizations of that era founded to put restless youths on the road to solid citizenry. Young Kurtzberg was already well onto that path but he signed up because, as he later put it, “It was a good place to make friends. In my neighborhood and with my height, I needed all the friends I could get.” Jakie and his new acquaintances launched the club’s mimeographed newsletter, The B.B.R. Reporter. It wasn’t much of a publication—the members had to practically beg family and neighbors to buy it—but it did feature the earliest published cartooning by the future Jack Kirby. (The staff photographer, Leon “Albie” Klinghoffer, became a lifelong Kirby friend . . . right up until 1985 when Palestinian terrorists hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro and executed a wheelchair-bound American tourist. The world was outraged at the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, and Jack was more outraged than anyone over the loss of his friend.)
A meeting of the Boys Brotherhood
Republic. Jack Kurtzberg is at top right.
1935