by Mark Evanier
(What did Simon think? Joe agreed he’d developed a character by that name—the same character as the Silver Spider, which he and Kirby had turned into the Fly. But Joe insisted Jack was not involved in the character’s spidery days.)
Regardless, it was either Lee or Kirby who suggested doing Spider-Man, and Kirby began on the first tale of such a hero, similar in some ways to the character who would become famous under that name but different in many others. This one was, like Billy Batson and Captain Marvel, a young orphan who transformed into a muscular adult, in this case via a magic ring.
Jack was a few pages into it when the decision was made to abandon his work and start fresh with Steve Ditko as artist. Lee would say that this was because he decided Jack was making Spider-Man too heroic and muscular. Kirby would say this was because he was too busy and Ditko needed work. Neither account makes a lot of sense.
Kirby was always too busy. Besides, he wasn’t even trying to draw the kind of lithe, less muscled hero that Lee later said he’d envisioned. Jack was drawing something more like the Fly, and he only drew his Spiderman for a few panels on the discarded pages. They could have easily been redrawn. Moreover, neither account explains why the orphan became older, why the magic ring and transformation were dropped, why the origin changed, or why Ditko was told to design a completely new costume. Lee would say, “Jack could never draw Spider-Man the way I wanted him to look,” but Ditko drew a cover for the first appearance, and Stan rejected it in favor of one by Jack.
What would explain it all is if someone at Goodman’s was worried that what Kirby was doing was coming out too much like the Fly. (Ditko, in one of his few public statements on Spider-Man, later wrote that he recognized the similarities and so informed Stan.) John Goldwater at Archie was known to be quite litigious, as was Joe Simon, and Goodman may just have been afraid of a lawsuit. Neither Lee nor Kirby, however, ever recalled that as a motive for the major course correction.
However it changed, it changed. Lee and Ditko did the first Spider-Man story. Goodman hated it and cancelled the comic before receiving any sales figures. Subsequent reports, bolstered by reader mail and Stan’s enthusiasm for the property, would prompt him to launch a Spider-Man comic the following year—the same month, in fact, that he declared The Incredible Hulk a flop and cancelled that book. Talk about a guy who was slow to realize when he had a hit on his hands.
Spider-Man would quickly become Marvel’s biggest success. What Kirby contributed would be arguable and argued over, but Jack felt he’d contributed at least something, for which he received neither pay nor acknowledgment.
IN THE MEANTIME, Tales to Astonish got its super-hero feature in 1962: Ant-Man, a shrinking super hero who could communicate with insects. Kirby drew the first stories, asking all the time if they could be assigned to anyone else. Though his mettle never allowed him to concede he could not make an idea work, he came perilously close with Ant-Man, a character he found too ineffectual. “A super hero should stand for strength,” he later remarked. “No one fantasizes about being the size of an ant.” Years later, Jack would be both incensed and amused by a scholarly article that suggested that because he was not tall, the Marvel hero with whom he most closely identified had to be Ant-Man. In truth, it was probably the character he cared about the least.
Solo adventures of the Human Torch were added to Strange Tales in 1962, drawn for a time by Kirby. And later, in 1963, Tales of Suspense received its super-hero feature: Iron Man, written at first by Larry Lieber and drawn initially by Don Heck. However, Lieber was working from a plot Stan had given him, and Heck was drawing from a cover and some concept sketches by Kirby. Stan wasn’t happy with the first story so he immediately turned the art chores over to . . . Kirby. Jack was the answer to all problems.
Other innovations followed. Goodman, with one eye on DC’s sales, thought war comics were due for a comeback. Stan had been telling him that he and Kirby had found a “new approach” to comics, a new way of making them exciting. The publisher wondered if this “new approach” would work for a war comic, and Stan said, “It would work for anything.” That was how Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos came about. From 1963 to 1964, Jack drew eight of the first thirteen issues, tapping into his endless cache of World War II memories and fashioning the lead character, the cigar-chomping Sgt. Nick Fury, on himself. Asked about it on one occasion, he explained, “Nick Fury is how I wish others saw me. Ben Grimm [The Thing] is probably closer to the way they do see me.”
TALES OF SUSPENSE
no. 39
March 1963
Art: Jack Kirby and Don Heck
Marvel Comics
SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS
no. 1
May 1963
Art: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Marvel Comics
SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS
no. 7
May 1964
Art: Jack Kirby and “Geo. Bell”
(George Roussos)
Marvel Comics
THE AVENGERS
no. 4
March 1964
Art: Jack Kirby and George Roussos
Marvel Comics
Goodman still wanted a book like DC’s Justice League of America, so Stan and Jack gave him The Avengers. They gathered together (originally) the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp, and Ant-Man (soon to be Giant-Man) in his various sizes, forming a team of disparate, often bickering heroes. As with Sgt. Fury and other strips, Kirby drew the early issues before handing them off to another artist—in this case, Don Heck.
The most memorable early issue of The Avengers resurrected Captain America and placed him into the pantheon of Marvel super heroes. The star-spangled defender had endured the loss of Simon and Kirby back in the early forties, lasting until an industry-wide trend away from action heroes in the late forties. A brief revival attempt in the fifties had floundered—it wasn’t time for the super heroes to return.
Now that it was, back he came. Another resurrected Golden Age character, Bill Everett’s Sub-Mariner, ventured into chilly arctic waters and came across a block of ice containing the long-frozen form of the “real” Captain America. The Sub-Mariner ripped the frozen crypt free from the iceberg, and it was set adrift toward warmer waters. The Avengers chanced to find it, just as the hero was thawing out.
The science was ridiculous—Stan and Jack would each later blame the other for it—but the character’s impact was undeniable: Captain America was back in all his patriotic glory—and drawn by Jack Kirby! The hero quickly came to dominate the Avengers comic, and soon received his own strip in Tales of Suspense (1964).
Goodman asked for two more titles: a team that might replicate the sales success of Fantastic Four, and another acrobatic hero who might sell as well as Spider-Man. (“Martin was making progress,” Kirby remarked. “He went from imitating others’ successes to imitating his own.”)
For the former, Lee and Kirby came up with The X-Men in 1963, which introduced the concept of mutants into the Marvel repertoire, eventually to great advantage. It was another franchise—a simple premise through which dozens of new characters could be introduced and hit the ground running. The two central themes of Marvel superherodom converged once again: Having great powers could create great problems, and it was occasionally hard to tell the heroes from the villains. Some mutants were good, some were bad, many weren’t certain.
Again, the recollections of the two men would diverge as to how the strip came about, Stan claiming the concept originated with him, Kirby saying he had the idea. By now, that was the norm. So was Jack starting a book, drawing it until it had worked up a good momentum, then handing it off. X-Men would pass through many hands after it left his—some able, some not so able. The comic was even cancelled for a time before others would revive it, add new mutants onto the Lee-Kirby superstructure, and wind up with one of Marvel’s top-selling books from the eighties to the present day.
THE AVENGERS
no. 1
<
br /> September 1963
Art: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Marvel Comics
THE X-MEN
no. 1
September 1963
Art: Jack Kirby and Sol Brodsky
Marvel Comics
THE X-MEN
no. 2
November 1963
Art: Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman
Marvel Comics
THE X-MEN
no. 8
November 1964
Art: Jack Kirby and Chic Stone
Marvel Comics
THE X-MEN
Unpublished cover intended for no. 10
March 1965
Art: Jack Kirby and Chic Stone
For the acrobatic hero, Stan brought forth Daredevil in 1964, with Jack’s old friend Bill Everett as artist. Kirby did the early covers and seems to have aided with a few plot ideas, including the design of a “billy club” that the hero used to great, heroic advantage. Later, Jack’s old friend from Sky Masters, Wally Wood, would redesign the character into a more successful property, and others would build thereupon.
DAREDEVIL
no. 1
April 1964
Art: Jack Kirby and Bill Everett
Marvel Comics
STAN LEE WAS ON a creative high, energized especially by his collaborations not only with Kirby, but also with Steve Ditko on Spider-Man and a new magician character, Dr. Strange. The “Marvel Method” of plot first, then art, and then script, allowed Stan to produce hundreds of pages of comic book script per month, filling them with verbiage that was colorful and loaded with personality. It was even at times somewhat sophisticated, at least by comic book standards. He aimed just over the readers’ heads, and they loved it. Equally ingratiating was the chatty ambience of Marvel’s letter columns, cover copy, and house ads. The DC product of the day often read like your uncle was telling you a story. With Marvel, you were on a first name basis and your buddies—Smilin’ Stan and Jolly Jack—were there to entertain you.
He got the best out of his people, Stan did. He certainly got it out of Kirby and Ditko, encouraging styles and imaginations to run free. Not so long before, Jack had been lectured at DC for not conforming to the “house style.” Now, his was the “house style.” Jack was the guy other artists were told to emulate.
Don Heck, who was one of those other artists, would remark, “Stan wanted Kirby to be Kirby, Ditko to be Ditko . . . and everyone else to be Kirby.” Often, Stan would break in a new artist by having Jack do rough layouts for him, hoping it would be a learning experience. Sometimes, Jack taught more directly. Heck himself spent several evenings in the breakfast room of the Kirby home, being served coffee and danish by Roz while Jack coached him on how to make his art more dynamic.
Kirby’s output during this period was staggering, not just for quantity or quality, but for quantity of quality. Marvels carrying dates of 1962–64 featured 3,130 interior pages of Kirby art plus 285 covers—roughly the equivalent of a book a week. Often, on a comic where he did not do the interiors, he’d draw the cover and, in so doing, design a villain or other new character who’d appear within.
His value to the company was immense; his compensation was not. He later told of cornering Goodman in a hallway and reminding him how he’d weathered low pay when the company could not afford more. Rates were going up but not, Kirby believed, commensurate with profits. He also reminded Goodman of the old deal to pay Simon and Kirby 25 percent of the profits on comics featuring Captain America and any other new characters they created. Jack wasn’t even expecting that much on the new books, but he was expecting something.
Just what Goodman promised him, we’ll never know. Kirby later said it was significant, but it was also not on paper. Almost nothing about Jack’s working relationship with Marvel was on paper—not even, at the time, any delineation of what rights he had or was giving up to the material. Jack didn’t much like that, but he didn’t see an alternative.
So Jack hunkered down and kept working. From epic to epic he raced, and once he finished a drawing or story, it often went completely out of his head. Several times he forgot a character design, and it was necessary for the inker to retouch a costume so that it matched the previous issue. In stories continued from issue to issue, Jack sometimes forgot how the last chapter had ended, which led to the next story not linking up precisely.
He worked seven days a week, “chained to the board” (his term) in a dark, cramped basement cubicle he called “The Dungeon.” There were no windows, and when he became engrossed in a story, he usually lost all track of time. Roz would wake up at seven a.m., realize that Jack had never joined her in bed, and find him in the Dungeon, finishing his sixth page since the previous morning. Another artist producing work that detailed might have struggled to manage three a day.
The long hours were not without their effect, and in later years Roz would visibly shudder as she recalled a very real fear that Jack would literally work himself to death. Even when he had the flu, he would insist on dragging himself to the board, at least for a few panels.
He began to have problems with one eye—a condition that would be a constant concern. It would be years before it impacted his drawing, but he didn’t know that at the time and it worried him greatly. If he couldn’t see, he couldn’t draw . . . and if he couldn’t draw, he couldn’t bring home that all-important paycheck.
No one at Marvel knew about his slowly worsening vision. One day, he met with Stan to discuss an idea that had come up: a “super spy” feature built around Nick Fury, the sergeant from the war comic. This version would be set in the present day, and to differentiate it from the older Fury, Stan suggested giving the character an eyepatch.
Kirby was stunned. Here he was, worried about losing the use of an eye, and a character he viewed as his alter ego had just lost an eye. Life imitating art imitating life he called it.
He increasingly asked Marvel for some sort of long-term financial security—something with health insurance and maybe a pension. “We’ll discuss it,” they told him, but they never seemed willing to actually discuss it. Still, he spoke of “trying to build Marvel into something.” Still, there was a steadfast belief that the company’s financial success would trickle down his way.
SELF PORTRAIT
1966
Art: Jack Kirby
Wally Wood, who was publishing a new magazine called Witzend, asked Kirby to create a self-portrait. This is what Jack sent him.
STRANGE TALES
no. 138
November 1965
Art: Jack Kirby and John Severin
Marvel Comics
FANTASTIC FOUR REMAINED THE keystone book in the Marvel line, and moved from one-issue stories to multi-issue epics. It was the comic where great new characters were introduced, including the monomaniacal Dr. Doom, the supernormal tribe known as the Inhumans, and the character many consider the first black super hero in comics, the Black Panther.
And then there was the Silver Surfer.
In early 1967, Fantastic Four featured a storyline that many regard as the peak of the Lee-Kirby collaboration: the tale of Galactus, an all-powerful being from another galaxy who feasted on planets, leaving them lifeless in his wake.
Articles would later claim that it all resulted from a four-word “plot” given verbally from Stan to Jack—“Have them fight God”—but it’s hard to see how Galactus, who consumed life instead of creating it, resembled either’s notion of the Almighty. Kirby had two allusions in mind. One was a concern prompted by all he read in science magazines, postulating a day when man might encounter beings from another planet and exchange technology. What, he wondered, if we encounter beings who don’t want to exchange technology? What if they just want to eat us?
The other concern was almost prescient with regard to Marvel. In the stock market section of the paper, Kirby was reading tales of corporate raiders who’d acquire a small company, drain it of its assets, and move on, leaving a hollow, inert shell.
Goodman was getting feelers about a takeover, and that made Jack nervous.
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 49
April 1966
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
Marvel Comics
FANTASTIC FOUR
no. 84
March 1969
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
Marvel Comics
JOE SINNOTT
Kirby drew almost exclusively in pencil, leaving it to others to inscribe and embellish his work in ink. At times, those others lacked the basic skills—or in some cases, the patience and work ethic—to serve the work properly. That was when it was merely great, not Kirby great. It became Kirby great when someone like Joe Sinnott was assigned to ink . . . and sadly, comics have never had a lot of someones like Joe Sinnott.
An artist in his own right, Sinnott’s first efforts inking Kirby doubly impressed editor Stan Lee. Not only did Stan think the work looked great but in a then-unprecedented move, readers sent in fan mail praising the art. For a time, Marvel’s spartan page rates forced Stan to use cheaper inkers, but as soon as the budgets were boosted a buck or two a page, he lassoed Sinnott and everyone was happy. Though he did not even meet Kirby until years after they’d done their major work, Sinnott had an uncanny understanding of how Jack composed his panels. Joe knew what to make bold and what to make unbold, craftily separating the planes of each composition to add depth and scope. He could “true up” some of Kirby’s odder ideas of perspective and slick things up without losing an eyelash of emotion.
Joe was also a dedicated worker. On the previous image, Sinnott spent at least two solid hours inking just the gun. Some inkers wouldn’t spend two hours on an entire page.
There is no one “best inker” for Kirby and certainly others—including Joe Simon, Wally Wood, Mike Royer, Frank Giacoia, Dick Ayers, and Chic Stone—have their partisans. But if you’re in a room of Jack Kirby fans and you announce that Joe Sinnott was the best, no one will waste much time in argument.