by Mark Evanier
Jack was never the least bit mad at Trimpe, who’d just done as his employer had ordered. But the published poster (following image) became a gnawing symbol to Kirby of just what his relationship with Marvel was all about. He’d created something that was potentially profitable for him . . . but he hadn’t received a cent and someone else’s name was signed to work that was essentially his. It wasn’t the specific slight that drove him off but when the dust cleared, he had about half of one foot out the door.
The Hulk
Poster for Marvelmania International
1969
Art: Herb Trimpe
Marvel Comics
HITTING BRICK WALLS LIKE that drove Jack to distraction, and from there to Southern California. In early 1969, the Kirbys moved west. The main reason was daughter Lisa’s asthma and her need to live in a drier climate. But Jack had another reason for hauling his battered drawing table cross-country. (It was the last thing the movers loaded on the truck in New York, waiting patiently as he finished an issue of Thor. And it was the first thing unloaded in California. They set it up, and Jack started drawing Fantastic Four while the moving men went and got the bed out of the van.)
Kirby had hopes that being close to Hollywood might bring him entry to the movie business. There was nothing concrete, but it had dawned on him that kids who’d grown up on his work would soon be old enough to run the studios. Maybe one of them would think, “Hey, let’s get that guy who did that comic I loved.” It was worth a try, at least. Film seemed like the next logical outlet for his creativity, and besides, he had to go somewhere.
Soon, he found one possible avenue of escape. Or maybe it followed him out from New York.
Carmine Infantino was a highly respected artist and an old friend. He and his brother had even worked in the Simon-Kirby shop at one point. Since then, he had become one of DC’s star artists, particularly on the super-speedster, the Flash.
DC had also been sold—to a company called Kinney National Services. Eventually, it would all morph into Time Warner, but in ’69, DC Comics had new corporate owners who were unhappy with their new acquisition. They had bought what they thought was the number one comic book company, and now Marvel had, by some measures, usurped the title.
A major overhaul of the company was needed, which meant new management. Infantino was that new management. Naturally, when you’re the guy in charge and the competition is thumping you, you want to hire away their key men. On a trip to L.A., Infantino met with Kirby and attempted to lure him over.
Kirby asked about DC’s two senior editors, Jack Schiff and Mort Weisinger. Schiff was still angry over the Sky Masters brouhaha. Weisinger’s antipathy dated back to the days when Simon and Kirby had refused to take editorial direction from him. In fact, one of Infantino’s first acquisitions was a weird new comic called Brother Power, the Geek—a Joe Simon creation. Weisinger had raised holy hell in the office and gotten it cancelled as of its second issue.
Infantino explained that a complete editorial restructuring was underway. Schiff, in fact, had retired two years earlier, and Weisinger would soon follow.
Kirby told of how he’d been led to believe there was an “understanding” between DC and Marvel not to raid talent, especially him. It flowed, did it not, from the fact that Independent News (i.e.: DC) distributed Marvel’s wares?
Not a problem, Infantino said. The two firms were no longer in business that way. Perfect Film’s holdings included a magazine distributor, and now that they owned Marvel, the deal with Independent had been allowed to expire.
The turn of events thrilled Kirby, but he was still hesitant . . . not quite ready yet to give up on Marvel. “Take your time,” Infantino said. The door was open.
Jack worked some more for Marvel and fought some more with Stan. There were more articles about how Stan had single-handedly created all the Marvel heroes. There were more pages that had to be redrawn because Stan would decide he wanted something different from what Jack had penciled. Stan thought Jack was getting sloppy with his plotting. Jack thought Stan was getting sloppy with his dialoguing.
There were other tensions, including a dustup over the Silver Surfer comic that Stan had been doing without Jack. The book wasn’t selling, and Stan assigned Kirby to do one issue to launch a new direction. This rekindled anger over how the character had been removed from his creative purview.
Stan’s theory was that the Surfer had not worked as a lead character because he was too much the pacifist. He should be more powerful and aggressive, Lee reportedly told Jack. And they intended to rename him “The Savage Silver Surfer.”
This was, to Kirby, an utter inversion of how he saw the hero, but he saw no reason not to give Stan what he wanted. In the story he crafted, the Surfer, previously a character of infinite peace with a love of mankind, vowed to make the world aware of his power and to battle them on their own terms. A few months later, when it was announced that Kirby was joining the competition, some readers who’d been unaware of the behind-the-scenes battles wondered if the Surfer hadn’t been speaking for Jack Kirby, albeit through Stan Lee dialogue.
Above and following image
SILVER SURFER
no. 18
September 1970
Art: Jack Kirby and Herb Trimpe
Marvel Comics
ALL THIS TIME, KIRBY was working without a contract. The old one with Goodman, which just called for a certain amount of work for a certain amount of money, had expired. Everyone at the new Marvel was just too busy to address his need for a new contract.
Finally, the first week in January 1970, a contract arrived in the Kirby mailbox—the new owners had new lawyers and the new lawyers had new demands. Although the terms under Goodman’s ownership had not been good, these were worse—no raise, no credit, not even any security. Marvel could do just about anything they wanted to him, including fire him whenever they felt like it. If he signed, he could never sue them for anything they’d done to him in the past or anything they’d do to him in the future.
There were other troubling clauses, each more onerous than the previous, so signing was out of the question. Jack couldn’t do that to himself, couldn’t do that to his family. He got his attorney involved, but Perfect Film/Marvel still wouldn’t talk to his attorney.
Then a lawyer or exec from Perfect Film called Jack directly. This is Kirby’s account as he described it in 1970: The caller asked when they’d be receiving the signed contract. Kirby said he needed changes. The caller said there would be no changes; take it or leave it. Sign it or get out.
Jack protested: He was too important to the company to be treated this way. The caller told him he was nuts. Stan Lee created everything at Marvel and they could get any idiot to draw up Stan’s brilliant ideas. At least, that’s how Jack would remember the conversation.
Kirby hung up on him, phoned Infantino, and changed companies.
The comic book universe trembled.
Darkseid
Unused page for New Gods
1971
Art: Jack Kirby
FIVE
WITHOUT A COUNTRY
“I admire Kirby’s skill at stirring people, at getting them to drop the habit of skepticism and suspend disbelief. He was a contemporary Homer, spinning tales that entertain and that function as allegories about courage, the battle of good and evil, and the willingness to dream. They illustrate extremes of possibility, and if most of us can’t perform superhuman feats, or wipe out crime in our spare time, we can access some of the daring and pluck Jack’s heroes display, and become heroes of our own lives.”
— DAVID COPPERFIELD, ILLUSIONIST, FROM HIS INTRODUCTION TO THE MISTER MIRACLE COLLECTED EDITION
JACK WAS NEVER THAT happy at DC. Like everything else he did, he did it with maximum effort, but DC wasn’t where he belonged. It wasn’t his company or his style. Some in the office thought as they had in 1956—that a DC comic shouldn’t look like a Kirby comic.
Seeking to avoid another situation lik
e he’d had with Stan Lee, Jack set a condition: He would work with a writer who’d provide a full script—all the plot, all the words up front—or he’d write the script himself. What he would not do is plot and draw a comic for someone else to dialogue. That had long since stopped working for him, both professionally and creatively. “If you don’t fill in the balloons,” Jack explained, “they don’t give you any credit for writing.” He also wanted his stories to remain his stories and not be inverted by someone else.
Jack Kirby filled in the balloons on most of what he did for the remainder of his career, often in a florid, theatrical voice that did to linguistics what his art had always done to the rules of anatomy and physics. Some loved his verbiage. Others hated it. Some who’d loved his work with Stan were just plain bothered by the difference. They wanted him back on Fantastic Four . . . or at least doing comics that read the same.
Having escaped Marvel, Jack also wanted to get away from cranking out comics of conventional size and subject. He thought he had more to say than he could in superhero comics. He also thought that package was doomed. The distribution methods by which comics then reached consumers certainly seemed to be. DC needed to try new formats, he said, suggesting several including slick magazines and graphic novels, as well as closed-end series that would later be collected in books and kept in print. Almost everything Jack proposed would later become viable, but at the time, DC was entrenched in one particular route to market. His second year there, they did let him do two magazine-format books on the lowest-possible budget, but canceled the whole endeavor before they even went on sale.
IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB
no. 1
Fall 1971
Art: Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta
Hampshire Distributors (DC Comics)
TRUE DIVORCE CASES
Unfinished page for proposed magazine.
1971
Art: Jack Kirby
In his first year, he started as writer/artist of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen. The story that circulated was he’d said, “Give me your worst-selling book and I’ll make it your best-selling book.” Jack did talk like that, but Jimmy Olsen wasn’t their worst-selling book.
What did happen was that he was invited to pick any current comic and do whatever he wanted to it. That was how little the company was committed to anything it was then publishing. Jack gave the line the once-over and didn’t see one he wanted. But then Jack was never comfortable taking over someone else’s characters, displacing another voice with his own.
SUPERMAN’S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN
no. 141
September 1971
Art: Jack Kirby and Neal Adams
DC Comics
SUPERMAN’S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN
Unpublished cover intended for no. 133
October 1970
Art: Jack Kirby
Above and following image
SUPERMAN’S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN
no. 143
November 1971
Art: Jack Kirby, Vince Colletta, and Murphy Anderson
DC Comics
Above is what came off Jack’s drawing table. Vince Colletta inked everything but Superman and Jimmy Olsen, and the page was then given to veteran DC artist Murphy Anderson to finish. That meant bringing the characters more in line with “accepted” company interpretations, which were largely in the style of artist Curt Swan. Jack wasn’t happy and a lot of readers weren’t, either.
COLLAGES
Somehow, putting in eighty-plus-hour work weeks at a drawing table did not satiate Jack Kirby’s urge to create imagery. During the ’60s he began experimenting with collages, initially for relaxation but later because he thought he could use them in his work. He would sit for hours, clipping odd pictures and shapes out of magazines, gluing them down on huge boards to create fantasy scenes.
The skill was not unrelated to the manner in which he created stories. Most of Jack’s creations in comics were, at their core, a matter of taking unconnected concepts—notions he’d gleaned from reading or movies or just sitting and musing about humanity—and juxtaposing and/or melding them together in unlikely fusion. His friend Gil Kane called him a “mad chemist,” explaining that Kirby thought of combining things no one had ever combined before, in a way no one else ever could.
Kirby collages evinced much the same flair for mixology: He could look at one section of a fashion layout in a women’s magazine and then at a piece of tail fin in a hot rod publication . . . and he’d realize that the left half of A pasted over the right half of B would yield a pretty decent spaceship. No one else would have seen that picture besides Kirby . . . but then no one else imagined the pictures he drew in pencil before he put them on paper, either.
Though the collages began as sheer hobby, Jack soon became convinced there were storytelling possibilities in the form. He wanted someday to try doing a whole comic book that way with little or no drawing—just people and worlds fashioned out of odd clippings. To that end, he began experimenting in some of his sixties’ comic book pages, superimposing drawn figures against collage backgrounds.
An entire world called the Negative Zone was introduced into the storyline of Fantastic Four because Jack intended to render it wholly through collage . . . a notion he had to abandon because the schedule and low page rate simply did not permit him to expend the necessary time. The way the collages reproduced via cheap comic book printing further soured him on the whole idea.
Still, Jack loved his scissor-and-paste creations and decorated his studio walls with them. Often, when visitors phoned to ask what they might bring him as a gift, he’d suggest piles of old periodicals, especially those with unusual photos. When he lived in Thousand Oaks, California, he’d sometimes lament, “All I can find around here are knitting magazines . . . and you can’t make a good spaceship out of yarn.”
Metron
Presentation drawing/collage
1969
Art and color: Jack Kirby
SUPERMAN’S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN
no. 135
January 1971
Art: Jack Kirby
DC Comics
THE FOREVER PEOPLE
no. 1
February 1971
Art: Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia
DC Comics
DC insisted, so he said, “Give me whatever book doesn’t currently have someone assigned to it.” He hated the thought of kicking a fellow professional off an assignment, especially if the guy’s income might suffer for it. At times, he’d even endure substandard inking on his art because, after all, that inker might need the job in order to feed his family.
As little as Kirby belonged at DC, he belonged less on Jimmy Olsen—a sappy comic about a young reporter who associated with the Man of Steel. The idea of Jack retooling Superman had been suggested, most likely to piss off the hero’s outgoing editor, Mort Weisinger. However, Olsen seemed like a place where Kirby could demonstrate what he’d do with the property.
The trouble was that Superman was DC’s most valuable asset. In later decades, the company would not only tolerate but encourage different interpretations of that asset. But back then, they fretted that Jack’s renditions of Jimmy and his pal didn’t look right. It was like, Give us a new Superman, but make sure he looks and functions like the old one. Jack’s version didn’t, so other artists were brought in to redraw the book’s principals, making for an odd mix of styles on every page: old-style non-Kirby heroes in a new-style Kirbyesque world.
The first Kirby issues sold through the roof, then numbers began a sluggish decline. Jack thought the problem was that readers, as proven by the initial interest, wanted his take on Superman. Due to the retouching, they weren’t getting it. The office consensus was that Jack’s stories were too unusual and disconnected—and they were odd, especially for that book. They ranged from a visit to a planet in a basement where everyone based their lives on monster movies from Earth . . . to a two-issue guest appearance by insult comedian Don Rickles. One Rickles cover
had a sales line that cartoonist Scott Shaw! hailed as the greatest ever on a comic: “Kirby says, ‘Don’t ask, just buy it!’” That pretty much summed up Jack’s run on Jimmy Olsen.
EVEN BEFORE THEY LET Jack leave Superman’s Pal in 1972, he’d begun his major effort—a new universe of characters, pulled mostly from that stack of ideas he’d withheld from Marvel. He imagined up a new order of “gods,” a second generation to the kind he’d left behind in the Thor comic. In this new mythology, they dwelled on a planet that had split asunder. Thereafter, the good ones lived (or left for Earth from) a world called New Genesis. The bad ones inhabited the dank and foreboding Apokolips, the domain of an intergalactic Hitler known as Darkseid.
The überstory weaved through three bi-monthly titles and would have been in more had Jack gotten his way. It was another “franchise,” another way to unleash a bevy of characters in volume, and he foresaw endless possibilities.
THE NEW GODS
no. 1
February 1971
Art: Jack Kirby and Don Heck
DC Comics
THE NEW GODS
no. 7
February 1972
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
DC Comics
THE NEW GODS
The Glory Boat
No. 6
December 1971
Art: Jack Kirby
DC Comics
Pencils prior to inking
The Forever People featured the teenage gods, patterned after the youths that Kirby was observing all around him. In the midst of the Vietnam era, Jack was wholly on the side of those opposing Richard Nixon and the ongoing military action. He saw idealism, passion, and a better future in them and sought to infuse his Forever People with the same hopes, the same sense of responsibility at inheriting a world made dangerous.