by Mark Evanier
But he sure didn’t love the take-home pay. Elmo was unable to place most of the strips for long or at all, and not one of the promised bonuses ever materialized. It was yet another first in the life of Jacob/Jack Kurtzberg/Kirby: He could write, he could draw, he could create the best comics out there with a volume and speed that stunned everyone. But he couldn’t seem to make a deal that would turn his glorious creativity into great take-home pay. Either he’d work for men who didn’t know how to exploit what he gave them, or for men who did and wouldn’t share. Eventually, Elmo started downsizing and Jack, while continuing to draw the features that survived, redoubled his efforts to find someplace else to work.
But where? The top-end syndicates were impossible to crack, and the low-end ones like Lincoln paid close to nothing. There had to be some other place a guy with Jack’s imagination could go and get paid for writing and drawing comics . . .
And there was. The place was those new things they were selling on newsracks and in candy stores: comic books.
These comics started as reprints of newspaper strips. Someone would repaste the panels—not always in sequence—and the publisher would offer sixty-four pages in color for a dime. The magazines were so successful that all the popular strips were quickly locked up. That’s where all those aspiring cartoonists with the portfolios came in handy.
The work Jack did for Lincoln Features Syndicate was signed with a wide array of names, some of which were originated by others. In later years he remarked, “I was not only creating characters to draw, I was creating the guys who drew them.”
Samples of Kirby’s strips for Lincoln Features. Even Jack wasn’t sure which of these actually made it into newspapers.
1936–1939
ACTION COMICS
no. 1
June 1938
Art: Joe Shuster
DC Comics, Inc.
If you wanted to publish comic books in the late thirties, you couldn’t get the rights to Wash Tubbs or Jungle Jim. What you could do was hire, for example, those two kids from Cleveland, Siegel and Shuster, to whip up the adventures of their new creation, Slam Bradley, just for comic books. Slam was just different enough from Wash Tubbs to not be actionable. Or you could pay young Bob Kahn (who’d later change his name to Bob Kane) a few bucks a page to draw his Jungle Jim facsimile, Clip Carson. Both appeared in magazines from the company that would soon be known as DC Comics.
None of the first comic book artists could match Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon for anatomy or Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant for sheer brilliance of drawing, even when tracing them directly. But many of the artists could tell a quicker, punchier story in pictures . . . and their work, designed for the comic book page, seemed more organic. Stories weren’t reassembled from daily strips, and therefore weren’t endlessly recapping what someone said six panels earlier.
The form hadn’t quite found itself. No one had yet really thought how to design a comic book page in any way other than to replicate the reconfigured newspaper reprints. But then, Jack Kirby hadn’t started drawing comic books yet.
He did in 1938, arriving at the studio of Eisner and Iger about the same time the first issue of Action Comics was arriving on newsstands. It featured that new strip Siegel and Shuster had created about a guy who could leap tall buildings in a single bound and jumpstart an entire industry . . . Superman. Jack would later call it, “The moment I knew comics were here to stay.”
The Eisner-Iger shop packaged comic book material for several publishers, some overseas. Jack felt instantly at home in the surroundings, and especially with the page format. Newspaper strips were small and confining, and they advanced their storylines in halting baby steps. Then as later, he thought in big pictures.
Eisner-Iger was a great place to learn. Kirby and the other artists swapped pointers, critiques, and ideas. There was also much to be gleaned from Will Eisner who, though only six months his senior, seemed like an adult and a solid role model.
Eisner was an elder statesman of the industry, having been in it for almost two years. Later, when he went off to write and draw The Spirit as a comic book section for newspapers, he’d be the other great innovator of the form—the guy besides Kirby leading the way, making comic books different from strips. When Jack first met Eisner, he was more impressive as a businessman. He had an office. He had a staff. He didn’t pay very well but he’d figured out the money end of comics for himself, a knack most artists (not just Jack) would never quite master.
There was instant mutual respect. Eisner envied Jack’s feisty determination and thought the man drew like he talked. He was powerful and direct, but also unique and quirky. There was envy of how Kurtzberg would attack a page, producing exciting visuals no matter what the storyline . . . and follow with another page and then others, all at an amazing clip. And he was so confident. If you asked Kurtzberg “Can you handle this?” the answer was “Yes” before he’d even heard what it was you needed him to handle. “Eight pages in a day? Sure, I can do that.”
THE DIARY OF DR. HAYWARD JUMBO COMICS
no. 2
November 1938
Art: Jack Kirby
Fiction House
Will Eisner
Kirby called him, “My friend, teacher, and boss—not in that order.”
1941
Jack envied Eisner’s skill at assembly, his ability to run a company . . . even the way he dressed. Later, like everyone else, he would envy The Spirit. “The best comic of the forties,” Jack called it. “No question.”
Eisner and Iger ran a service called Universal Phoenix Syndicate that mainly supplied a British comics magazine called Wags. For them, Jack drew three features: The Diary of Dr. Hayward by “Curt Davis,” Wilton of the West by “Fred Sande,” and The Count of Monte Cristo by our old friend “Jack Curtiss.” The material was also seen in America in Jumbo Comics, published by Fiction House.
Off Jack went to other houses, showing samples, pitching new ideas. One publisher, just getting his first issues together, commissioned gobs of work, promising a high rate. Jack spent a month handing in pages, being assured that the financing to pay him was there. It was always just another few days before there’d be checks.
Of course, there were no checks . . . just, one day, an empty, hastily vacated office and no trace of the “publisher” or all the work Jack had done. In later years, when a script called for him to draw a scene of raw, agonized anger, it would be a handy moment to reflect upon.
Still, he never lost heart; not for a second. His Wilton of the West pages, shown at the Associated Features Syndicate, got him the job of producing a Lone Ranger imitation dubbed Lightning and the Lone Rider. Trying to sound like a cowboy star himself, he signed the strip “Lance Kirby.”
Lone Rider debuted in papers on January 3, 1939, to limited success. The first storyline was set in the old west, and then, without explanation, the continuity jumped to the present day. Didn’t help. The syndicate decided maybe Kurtzberg was the problem and replaced him with Frank Robbins, who couldn’t do anything with it either. (Robbins’s Johnny Hazard, much admired by Jack, would later become one of the longest-running newspaper adventure strips.)
All over New York, Kurtzberg scurried, trying to find someone to buy his artwork and ideas. He heard that Bob Kahn, an artist he’d met at Eisner-Iger, had sold Harry Donenfeld’s company a new strip called Batman. So Jack tried over there, only to get the same answer he heard so often: “Sorry, we have all the material we need.” Finally, at the suggestion of some other artists, Jack did what they all did sooner or later, usually sooner. He went over and enlisted in the sweatshop of Victor Fox, King of the Comics.
“They’d hire anyone over there,” Bill Everett once explained. “They didn’t even look at your samples. The mere fact that you had samples meant you were probably a good enough artist to work there.” Everett only lasted a few weeks, but Jack was on staff for months, many of them spent drawing a lackluster newspaper strip about Fox’s star attraction, the Blue
Beetle. It was the first super hero he ever drew and easily the dullest, but one has to start somewhere.
BLUE BEETLE
Syndicated newspaper strip
January 1940
Art: Jack Kirby
Fox Features Syndicate
BLUE BOLT
no. 3
August 1940
Art: Joe Simon
Novelty Press
LONE RIDER
Syndicated newspaper strip January 1939
Art: Jack Kirby
Associated Features Syndicate
Fox paid low but the money was there, what there was of it. It was a place to get out of, and Jack tried like hell. At nights, he’d produce pages of The Solar Legion, a comics feature he’d sold to an entrepreneur named Bert Whitman who, in turn, sold it to Tem Publishing. Then Jack would put in a sixty-hour week working for “the King.” When Fox hired Joe Simon to supervise the writers and artists, the new editor was instantly impressed with Kurtzberg’s productivity.
Like Eisner, Simon was another seasoned veteran of the comic book industry. He’d been in it more than a year in fact, mostly drawing comics for a shop called Funnies, Inc. But before that, he’d worked as a newspaper art director, a photo retoucher for Paramount Pictures, and as a magazine illustrator, so he’d been around. He knew how to do comics, too. Simon even looked at an artist’s samples before he’d hire him.
Side by side, they made a most unusual picture: Simon was 6'3" and weighed in at 150 pounds. Kirby weighed about the same but was almost a foot shorter.
Joe was four years his senior and unlike Jack in many ways but like him in others, starting with their fathers’ professions: both tailors. Simon would later explain, “One of the reasons Fox hired me was because I was wearing a very smart suit that my father had made me. That was where Jack was at a disadvantage. My father made suits, but his father only made pants.”
Simon didn’t mind that Kurtzberg was moonlighting from Fox. How could he? He was moonlighting himself, doing a comic for Novelty Press called Blue Bolt, starring a space hero he’d created while at Funnies, Inc. In fact, Joe was way behind on his deadlines, and since Jack was so fast and eager for extra work . . .
In Blue Bolt, you see the team begin. The first story, done before he met Jack, was all by Joe. The second, published in an issue cover-dated July 1940, is signed by Simon alone, but some of the pages within were by Jack. By the fifth story, they’re clearly working on the same pages—mostly Jack penciling, Joe inking—and the first page is signed “by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.”
Kurtzberg was Kirby, now and forever. The change was no big deal for Jack, and it certainly wasn’t because he wanted to conceal his Jewish heritage—though if you wanted to see steam come out of his ears, suggesting that would make it happen. It was just a desire to sound like a professional. “Kurtzberg” didn’t sound like a famous writer and artist. “Kirby,” he thought, did.
Simon and Kirby. It had a nice sound to it.
As a team, they were a perfect fit. Joe was a good artist, but Jack was better . . . not only better than Joe but better than just about anyone. At least, Jack was faster and more willing to park his keister at the drawing table for long, marathon stretches. Then again, Jack didn’t like to ink and Joe didn’t mind it. Joe was also a genius (Jack’s opinion) at designing covers and opening pages, and making the product look professional.
Not that there was ever a finite division of labor. Sometimes they swapped functions and there would be plenty of jobs where neither man could tell quite where the other left off. To the eternal question of who did what, Jack had a simple answer: “We both did everything.”
True enough, but there was one area where Simon truly outstripped his partner—the business side. Joe knew when to stand and when to advance. He left Fox, his tenure having lasted an arduous three months, and set up shop in an office on Forty-fifth Street. Immediately, he was landing new accounts and urging Jack to come be full-time with him. No, said Jack. As Simon would explain, “He was making a lot more money with the work he was doing with me, working evenings and weekends, but it was all freelance. The Fox paycheck was steady and guaranteed, and he couldn’t bring himself to gamble on the freelance work being steady.” This was in spite of all the work they did for Novelty Press and Prize Comics and for the new company Al Harvey was starting up.
Simon was, like Eisner, that rarest of talents—an artist with some acumen. He could read a contract and negotiate good terms . . . skills in which Kirby was worse than merely deficient. More important, Simon knew how to converse with publishers, speak their language, and gain their trust. When Victor Fox met him, he’d hired Joe on the spot as his editor in chief. Soon after, Simon met with a publisher named Martin Goodman and was promptly offered the same title at an even better salary.
Goodman was of a breed rapidly approaching extinction: He was a publisher of pulp magazines. “Martin believed he had his finger on the pulse beat of the country,” recalled Don Rico, one of his later editors. “From where I sat, he was just a guy who knew how to shovel product onto the stands and make a buck. He usually arrived on the tail end of a trend. Martin got into pulps just as the pulps started to lose popularity.”
In the summer of ’39, Goodman’s line of pulps was in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission (he’d snuck in reprints without labelling them as such), and he was desperate for something else to publish. Hearing that comics were the coming trend, he issued Marvel Comics no. 1, its contents prepared by Funnies, Inc. Cover-featured was a fiery, crime-fighting android named the Human Torch, created, written, and drawn by Carl Burgos. Equally exciting was the Sub-Mariner, an undersea antihero conceived and rendered by Bill Everett.
Goodman’s line went by many names, of which Timely Comics was the most common. He soon added a second title—Daring Mystery Comics, which featured work by Joe Simon, mostly on a strip called The Fiery Mask. Then Goodman, eager to cut Funnies, Inc. out of the loop, hired Simon directly. The deal seemed like a good one, including profit-participation on whatever new books he launched. Joe offered to share it with Kirby. Jack liked the terms but still couldn’t bring himself to leave whatever feeble security the weekly pay from Fox represented.
Joe needed Jack as much as Jack needed Joe, so it was arranged for Goodman to pay Jack a regular salary. For its time, it was a pretty good salary, and when Goodman wondered, Why so high?, Simon assured him: Kirby was great and would produce so many pages, the weekly guarantee would seem like a bargain.
Jack had what he wanted. He joined Simon and from then on, for the next sixteen years, they’d work together. Until very near the end, only a little thing like World War II would separate them . . . and even then, not for long.
CHAMPION COMICS
no. 9
July 1940
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
Harvey Publications
Probably Kirby’s first published cover.
MARVEL COMICS
no. 1
October–November 1939
Art: Frank Paul
Marvel Comics
CAPTAIN AMERICA
no. 9
December 1941
Art: Jack Kirby and Syd Shores
Marvel Comics
TWO
PARTNERS
“The team of Simon and Kirby brought anatomy back into comic books. Not that other artists didn’t draw well . . . but no one could put quite as much anatomy into a hero as Simon and Kirby. Muscles stretched magically, foreshortened and shockingly. Legs were never less than four feet apart when a punch was thrown. Every panel was a population explosion—casts of thousands: all fighting, leaping, falling, crawling . . . speed was the thing. rocking, uproarious speed.”
— JULES FEIFFER, THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES
THE MONDAY MORNING AFTER he left Fox, Jack was in the Timely offices producing pages for Daring Mystery Comics and proving Simon right about his skill and speed.
The first new comic he and Joe cobbled up
for Goodman was a fast flop: Red Raven, an anthology fronted by a flying hero with that name. Still, the one and only issue was notable for two backup stories Kirby seems to have done without Simon. Comet Pierce was another Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers clone, but Mercury was something new—the tale of a god walking the Earth, interacting with mere mortals. It was a theme Kirby liked well enough to return to again and again for the rest of his career. After Mercury, he waited an entire month before he used it again . . . in Marvel Boy, a strip for Daring Mystery Comics.
Next came The Vision, which appeared in Marvel Mystery Comics. The Vision was an unearthly being who traveled between dimensions, usually materializing in billows of smoke. Comics historian Ron Goulart later described the character thusly: “He never smiled and had no eyeballs. A staunch pessimist, he would end each caper with a gloomy soliloquy, such as ‘The world seethes with terror and evil! It is time for me to hurry to where I am most needed!’ All in all, not an easy guy to warm up to.”
Where did that idea come from? Kirby would offer this explanation: “Joe and I used to sit around with these big cigars. The room was always full of smoke, and one day we decided to write the smoke into a story.”
But something else was in the air—the mounting fear that the United States was heading for war. “Writing super-hero comics,” Simon recalled, “we were always looking for that great villain. It was becoming hard to think of a better villain than Adolf Hitler.” The most natural thing in the world was the creation of a hero who could, as he would on his first cover, punch der Führer in the face.
RED RAVEN
no. 1
August 1940
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
Marvel Comics
DARING MYSTERY COMICS
no. 8
January 1942
Art: Jack Kirby
Marvel Comics
Simon would later claim to have had the initial notion for the star-spangled hero and to have worked out the format and costuming before Kirby was involved. Jack would recall contributing from the outset. Either way, Simon was soon marching into Goodman’s office with sketches and a pitch that extolled the glories of patriotism. Kids on the street, he told the publisher, were already playing soldiers, firing pretend weapons at a pretend Hitler. Why not put that into a comic book? Goodman saw the spiritual, if not the economic sense of it all. He’d take the unprecedented gamble of starting Captain America in his own title.