by Mark Evanier
The New Gods was the cornerstone title, focusing mainly on Orion, a warrior of New Genesis but also, as would be revealed, the estranged son of the master villain. Just a few years later, Star Wars would be the grand hit of Hollywood—and some of Kirby’s readers noted similarities. In New Gods, Orion had called upon a power called the Source in confrontation with his father, Darkseid. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker called upon a power called the Force when he battled his father, Darth Vader. Kirby would not suspect plagiarism, but would fume that he had been unable to get his version made into a movie. Star Wars, he felt, had proven what a good, commercial idea it was.
Lastly, there was Mister Miracle, the super escape artist, who was inspired by a previous career of Jim Steranko, a “new generation” comics creator who’d become a Kirby friend and champion. But it was also inspired by Jack’s own feelings of confinement in his own career, and his eternal grasping for some way of breaking free. A few issues in, Miracle got a lady friend who’d later become his bride . . . the beautiful, bountiful Big Barda. A woman of spectacular physique, Barda was based on a Playboy layout of singer Lainie Kazan. At least, that’s where the visual came from. The spirit and personal strength were pure Roz.
Jack had intended to begin the books, pass them on to others under his supervision, and move on to bigger ideas. Infantino, however, wanted Jack to stick with the titles so he did, turning them into the foundation of an intense and highly personal epic. For reasons unknown, the umbrella title became “The Fourth World,” or sometimes, “Kirby’s Fourth World.”
Proud as he was of his world, Kirby sweated its reception. Some readers found it too sprawling, with new concepts introduced at a dizzying clip. The operatic dialogue put some readers off as well, but early sales were encouraging. The trouble was the books weren’t likely to be the Marvel-destroying hits that so many were expecting of him.
Just when Jack thought he was finding an audience, DC had a major price hike, its comics rocketing from fifteen cents apiece to twenty-five. That was a huge increase to buyers in 1971. Martin Goodman undercut with a twenty-cent price tag on all Marvels and better terms for distributors. Sales across the DC line plummeted—a brilliant chess move by Goodman. (But it didn’t negate problems he was having with the new owners. Soon after, he was squeezed out of his own company.)
MISTER MIRACLE
no. 1
March 1971
Art: Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta
DC Comics
MISTER MIRACLE
No. 4
October 1971
Art: Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta
DC Comics
Big Barda
Pencil sketch
1980
Art: Jack Kirby
MIKE ROYER
From the early seventies on, Jack’s favorite inker—the one he’d first try to hire when an inker had to be hired—was Mike Royer. At first, it was in part a geographic advantage: Kirby was in Southern California, and so was Mike. So was almost no one else who could have done the job . . . and Jack wanted, as much as possible, to keep his work away from East Coast editorial types who’d tamper and tell the inker to soften Jack’s eccentricities of style.
But Jack soon came to appreciate Royer in other ways, especially the fact that Mike decided to ink as opposed to reinterpret. “I kept seeing other artists trying to make Kirby work look like their work and impose their viewpoints,” he once explained. “Not a one of them was within ten miles of Jack as an artist. I used to ask, ‘Why don’t these Kirby inkers just ink Kirby?’”
When Royer became one of those Kirby inkers, that’s what he did. Some of that was because of the necessary pace. Jack was very fast and Mike’s job description required that he keep up with him, matching him page for page and also lettering the work, to boot. Many artists couldn’t have done it at all, let alone so well. It was faster to ink what was there, but that wasn’t the main reason he remained as anonymous as he did. Royer kept his changes subtle and let the Kirby shine through, much to the delight of most readers.
In his post-Kirby career, Royer went all Disney on us, specializing in Winnie the Pooh and other fuzzy creatures who lived in quite a different art style. Still, he insists that every job taps into things he learned while embellishing Jack Kirby. Some of that falls under the general category of Art Tricks, but a lot, he says, is attitude and approach. Attitude, mostly.
Above and following image
KAMANDI, THE LAST BOY ON EARTH
no. 12
December 1973
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
DC Comics
Mike Royer and Jack Kirby
Photo: David Folkman
1972
The Demon
Sketchbook drawing
1981
Art: Jack Kirby
After months of dwindling sales, DC surrendered and dropped the price to twenty cents. Some books began to recover, but not Jack’s. His was a wide and complex—to some, confusing—narrative, and once you dropped out, it was tough to get back in. He had produced pilot issues for two new titles he wanted to edit with others doing the writing and drawing, but DC decided they wanted him doing the new titles instead. New Gods and Forever People were “suspended” (read: canceled) and Mister Miracle soon followed. Jack was crushed. “One of the worst days of my life,” was how he described the day of the call axing the first two. At least for the time being, his Fourth World would be an unfinished symphony, a novel without its final chapters.
The two new books were Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth and The Demon. Neither was quite his métier, but they ventured where DC thought the market might be heading.
Kamandi was Jack’s spin on Planet of the Apes, a movie he’d heard much about but had not seen. Asked for something to parallel that film, Jack conjured up what was left of Earth after a good, old-fashioned nuclear holocaust and populated the world with a young human protagonist and a lot of people with animal heads. The book was a modest success that would continue until Jack left DC and for a while thereafter—not an industry-changer, but not a flop either.
The Demon was a horror book to the extent Jack Kirby could do a horror book. Despite the title character’s grotesque appearance, it was a work of power and energy and it came with a whole new Kirby mythology, this one derived from Merlin the Magician by way of King Arthur. Readers lost interest early and it was gone in sixteen issues—another blow to Jack’s spirit and his rep.
DC management was in grand panic to find something that would sell. The old distribution machine was broken, and the ever-diminishing number of comics the distributors could sell were mostly Marvel’s. Every time Jack got off the phone with New York, he’d turn to Roz and make the same joke about having fled a slave ship only to wind up on the Titanic.
New titles were being invented, released, and then axed with dizzying turnover. If Kirby seemed to be getting more of his books canned than anyone else, that may have been because he was creating more new ones than anyone else. One heartbreaker—because the vision it offered of the future was so downright fresh and bizarre—was OMAC, a hero whose name was an acronym for “One Man Army Corps.” It was another idea Jack had had at Marvel and withheld. Done there, OMAC would have been Captain America in an era yet to come.
There were other books that came and went with little notice. Jack drew three issues of a new “kid gang” he created—the Dingbats of Danger Street—but DC only printed one.
OMAC
no. 1
September 1974
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
DC Comics
FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL
no. 6
September 1975
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
SANDMAN
no. 1
Winter 1974
> Art: Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia
DC Comics
Kirby even reteamed with Joe Simon for one comic: Joe was also conjuring up features for DC and, like everyone else, seeing them shot down like skeet. Some were Simon-Kirby retreads like new Young Love stories and old Black Magic ones. Joe also tried a kid gang, and DC killed his after one appearance, too. Then he proposed an innovative twist on the good name of Sandman and someone mused, Hey, maybe if Simon and Kirby get back together, the old magic will reignite. It was worth a try, so Jack drew Joe’s Sandman script and maybe there was a tiny spark there. They put it out in 1974 as a one-shot, but it sold well enough to prompt a few more.
Simon was on the outs with the company by then, so the few more were written by another writer, Michael Fleisher, who was much in favor with DC editor Joe Orlando. Kirby didn’t like the scripts, but what really scared him was that Orlando and Infantino loved them. If Jack reupped his soon-to-expire contract, he’d be writing less and drawing more scripts like those. The ongoing comic didn’t sell to readers, but it sold Jack on the idea, once and for all, that he didn’t belong at that company. (Time-Warner management would soon look at the overall sales and decide that Carmine Infantino didn’t, either.)
Not that life was all bad. Jack’s favorite labor of the period was a tour of duty on an extant war strip called The Losers, an assemblage of characters from cancelled DC combat titles. Kirby didn’t like the jerry-rigged premise, and he especially hated the title, Losers being the last thing he would have called a band of Americans fighting in World War II. But it was an assignment and a chance to dip into his bottomless supply of combat experiences . . . so all in all, not a bad gig.
In 1975, when his contract was up, he returned to Marvel, viewing it as the better of two depressing choices. They welcomed him back and let him write/draw/edit his own comics, on his own. Some were all new, like The Eternals, a Kirby extrapolation on the Chariots of the Gods theory that aliens had visited Earth in prehistoric times. It was a speculation that had long interested Jack, even if he didn’t accept it as probable. In a playful mood, he’d argue, “Can you prove it couldn’t have happened that way?”
Some comics he worked on were adaptations. Jack was charged with the seemingly impossible task of converting Stanley Kubrick’s classic science-fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey into a seventy-one-page tabloid comic book version (1976). Somehow he managed, though there was little of his own vision in the storyline, and he described it as “an honor, but not a lot of fun.” What made it work was that the art—probably the best he did during this period—captured the visual imagery of the motion picture better than anyone had dared expect. It led to an ongoing anthology title—which, in turn, led to an original spin-off book, Machine Man, about an android fleeing a superannuated military industrial complex of the future.
And some comics were old friends revisited. Jack returned to Captain America in 1976, and did a new series of The Black Panther (1977), taking both off in new, Kirbyesque directions. Many readers (and some in the office) were bothered that those directions did not coincide with the tidy inter-continuity of the Marvel Universe. Others disliked Jack’s writing style or felt his art was getting sloppy. That eye was really starting to bother him by now, making drawing more painful and skewing his perspectives in odd slants. His inkers would do what they could to compensate, but it was becoming obvious to anyone who looked past the surface excitement: Something was wrong.
CAPTAIN AMERICA
no. 193
January 1976
Art: Jack Kirby and John Romita
Marvel Comics
THE ETERNALS
no. 1
July 1976
Art: Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia
Marvel Comics
THE ETERNALS
no. 18
December 1977
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Marvel Comics
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
no. 3
February 1977
Art: Jack Kirby and John Verpoorten
Marvel Comics
Something was wrong with the sales, too. Jack wasn’t connecting with the current Marvel readership, partly because he wasn’t connecting with the current Marvel line. Years after, his seventies work would be regarded more favorably and even reprinted, right along with almost everything else he did, time and again. Some would even say the sales figures weren’t as dire as the rumors of the time insisted.
But that was later. Just then, he’d stopped being Jack Kirby, the guy who created, or co-created, so many successful new comics. With the end of his contract in sight, he was Jack Kirby, the guy who did those wonky, unreadable books that didn’t sell so great. “Jack the Hack,” some called him, implying that he’d clearly stopped caring.
That hurt—hurt him a lot—because he was working harder than ever, with less and less to show for it except dwindling hope and eyesight. Even his boundless imagination couldn’t fathom how things might get any better, especially feeling as much hostility from the Marvel editorial staff as he felt. The one person there he thought respected him was the editor in chief, Archie Goodwin. Then Goodwin told him he’d be stepping down in the foreseeable future . . .
There had to be something else. But even Jack Kirby—the man who specialized in thinking of things no one else had ever thought of before—couldn’t figure just what it might be.
BLACK PANTHER
no. 1
January 1977
Art: Jack Kirby and John Verpoorten
Marvel Comics
MACHINE MAN
no. 1
April 1978
Art: Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia
Marvel Comics
DESTROYER DUCK
Unfinished page
1982
Art: Jack Kirby
SIX
SOMETHING ELSE
“There was a big difference between the blues artists and Led Zeppelin, but without the blues artists there would be no Led Zeppelin. Just like without Led Zeppelin, there wouldn’t be Nirvana and Soundgarden. And it was the same with Kirby. He created just about everything that we have now. I even think his later stuff was still great, even if you look at the stuff he did with Pacific. He was an amazing artist, he was inspiring to a lot of people, and I don’t think that stopped with his death; he’s gonna continue to inspire people as long as the comic book medium exists.”
— JOHN DOLMAYAN, DRUMMER, SYSTEM OF A DOWN
KING OF COMICS? THAT had become a joke and not a funny one. A bad joke. Jack was a king whose ascent had taken him all the way from drawing Captain America in 1941 to drawing Captain America thirty-five years later for darn near the same money. He was sick of the business, sick of still being “chained to the board,” sick of a job that led to naught but more of the same—or worse. Nothing was going to change, except that his eyesight would fade as he worked longer and longer hours to draw more and more of the same kind of comic book.
How unhappy was he? He was actually talking about not renewing his contract. That’s how unhappy he was. Jack Kirby, a man who’d been obsessed with earning a weekly paycheck since the day his parents told him to go out and earn money, was thinking of turning down three more years of financial security. If only he had an idea—any idea—how else he might pay the mortgage and buy the groceries . . .
He didn’t. But in 1978, an idea found him.
It was an offer from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio in Hollywood. The people there knew who Jack Kirby was. The building was full of young artists who’d grown up on his work and old-timers who valued the hell out of him. Some were doing Kirby swipes as they designed a proposed new show of the Fantastic Four. Instead of imitations, someone suggested, how about if they get the real thing? It took about two sentences:
“Doesn’t Jack Kirby live in New York, where Marvel Comics has its offices?”
“No, no. He’s out here in Southern California. In Thousand Oaks.”
They hir
ed him, and the money, while not great, was greater than he’d ever made in comics. Better still, the studio wanted him to do more large presentation pieces they could use to sell other shows. Drawing big was a much healthier job for an artist with limited eyesight . . .
. . . to say nothing of limited options. Suddenly, there was air. Suddenly, he wasn’t trapped doing the same thing he’d been doing for four decades, drawing for DC or Marvel, Marvel or DC.
Why not get into cartoons? Besides, he’d worked in animation before, most recently in 1936.
One animation job led to others. The DePatie-Freleng studio wound up producing the new Fantastic Four series and wanted Jack to anchor its art direction. He was wary of working on a Marvel project . . . and with Stan Lee, who was one of the producers. However, he still owed Marvel some months on his contract and this could count against it. So he signed on and got along well enough with Stan, mostly by not talking about what had gone before. The two of them even teamed up again for a Silver Surfer graphic novel.
All that plus one new comics series closed out his Marvel pact. The new series—the last he’d do for them—was Devil Dinosaur, about a prehistoric planet and an anthropomorphic tyrannosaurus rex. Jack had created it on demand, the demand being for a comic that a network might buy for a Saturday morning cartoon series. Aimed at a younger audience, it seemed to alienate the older comic-buying one. It didn’t sell to them and didn’t sell to a network, but Jack had great fun while it lasted.
Like almost all Kirby “failures,” it did not go away. It would all be reprinted and others would revive and extend his creations, often to great success. As Gil Kane put it, “There’s something about a Kirby character . . . other writers and artists just can’t keep their hands off them.” Even Jack’s bad ideas kept coming back.
THE SILVER SURFER
Graphic Novel