by Mark Evanier
1978
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
Marvel Comics/Simon and Schuster
DEVIL DINOSAUR
no. 1
April 1978
Art: Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia
Marvel Comics
DEVIL DINOSAUR
Unused page
1978
Art: Jack Kirby
FANTASTIC FOUR
Storyboards
1978
Art: Jack Kirby
Marvel/DePatie-Freleng
Animation
THEN THERE WAS ANOTHER cartoon company—Ruby-Spears Productions. Kirby started with design work for the Saturday morning adventures of a hero in another of those postapocalyptic worlds, Thundarr the Barbarian (1980–81). The proprietors, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, loved what Kirby did and kept him on retainer for the rest of his professional life.
There, he found even more to like about the animation business, above and beyond the fact that it wasn’t the comic book business. Everyone treated him well. Roz would drive him to the studio twice a week, and all the young artists on staff would line up to greet him. Over and over, it was “Mr. Kirby, I have to tell you, your work is the reason I got into drawing.”
Jack liked that. He liked that Ruby-Spears gave him the title—mostly ceremonial, but it was on a business card—of Producer. When he had his first heart attack, he especially liked the health benefits he’d obtained through his employer and the Animation Union. Had he remained in comics, he believed, the cost of the bypass surgery would have wiped out his family, plunging them into serious debt. Jack would have died before he’d have let that happen.
By then, Kirby had done something amazing—for him, at least. Something he’d never done before. He’d stopped drawing comics. Late in 1978, there came a day when—reprints, aside—no new comic with art by Jack Kirby was on sale or soon to come out.
Readers of the day didn’t seem to notice. And it didn’t bother Kirby one bit. He’d gotten out of comics. He was a TV producer.
The Crusher Presentation piece for a proposed cartoon series.
1981
Art: Jack Kirby and Ruby-Spears Staff
Ruby-Spears Enterprises
Animation drawings
1981
Art: Jack Kirby
Hanna-Barbera Productions
THERE WOULD, OF COURSE, be more comics. The old method of distributing them—the one Kirby had always found so corrupt and so inefficient—had crashed. No one could make money that way any longer, not even Marvel. But a new method had emerged, predicated around the die-hard fandom that the medium had developed. This system sold direct to comic book shops, a burgeoning trend across the U. S. and around the world. It made new companies possible which, in turn, made new kinds of deals possible.
One such new company was Pacific Comics, founded by Steve and Bill Schanes of San Diego. They approached Jack, offering every single thing DC and Marvel had once told him could never be offered to a creator: copyright, creative control, royalties . . . everything. Jack had a comic he’d invented for another new publisher, one who’d been unable to secure the final financing to print. It was called Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers. It was his version of Star Wars, which people were saying was Hollywood’s version of a Jack Kirby comic to begin with.
The Schanes brothers published it, as well as another book Jack came up with for them, Silver Star. Jack also drew a book called Destroyer Duck for another new firm, Eclipse Comics. None of these books lasted, but then neither did the companies publishing them.
Jack even worked for DC again. The new management, Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz, wasn’t like the old management. They didn’t mind publishing DC Comics that looked like Jack Kirby had drawn them. When Kahn took over, one of the first things she did was look at old sales figures and order a revival of The New Gods. She even saw its merchandising potential when she was working a deal with Kenner toys for a line of heroes and villains action figures. DC and Kenner had quite enough heroes for the endeavor, but a paucity of good, colorful villains. That was before someone suggested Darkseid. Perfect. Other elements of the old Fourth World were incorporated into the mythos of the toy line, which eventually led to them turning up on television.
Yet another case of Jack’s ideas making money for everyone but Jack? Not this time. Jenette and Paul had instituted a deal at DC—part of the changing face of comics—whereby creators of new properties would share in the revenues. It didn’t apply to earlier inventions like Kirby’s Fourth World, but Kahn and Levitz had a brainstorm: If they hired Jack to do new development art on those properties, they could grandfather him in. One life-changing day, Jack received something he hadn’t seen in his previous two stints at DC or his last two at Marvel. It was a royalty check, the first of many. The amounts weren’t huge but the principle sure was.
CAPTAIN VICTORY AND THE GALACTIC RANGERS
no. 1
November 1981
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Pacific Comics
SILVER STAR
no. 1
February 1983
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Pacific Comics
Kahn and Levitz were proud that they’d “done right” by Kirby, and rightly so. They also arranged to reprint Jack’s Fourth World books, and asked him to do a graphic novel that would wrap up his unfinished epic. Was this possible? It wasn’t, and Jack knew it wasn’t. He simply hadn’t gotten far enough into his masterpiece to be able to cut to the chase and end it in the allotted pages.
He meant no, but said yes. Kirby’s gratitude to DC for the royalty deal, coupled with his usual reticence to say, “I can’t make that work,” got the better of him. The making of The Hunger Dogs was rocky and rough, and no one, Jack included, was that thrilled with how it ended—without a bang, without a whimper, without even decent sales on the reprints or the grand finale. If the Fourth World hadn’t flopped the first time around, it did so the second. This time around though, DC didn’t mind a lot, and neither did Jack. He shrugged and said, “Someday, New Gods will be a hit. You’ll see.”
CAPTAIN VICTORY AND THE GALACTIC RANGERS
no. 1
November 1981
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Pacific Comics
CAPTAIN VICTORY AND THE GALACTIC RANGERS
no. 1
November 1981
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Pacific Comics
MARVEL STARTED PAYING royalties too, though they called them something else and didn’t make them retroactive. Sales were strong and there were toy deals and TV shows and movie projects for most of the major characters, so a lot of money was being made. The total amount of it going to the Kirbys: zero.
Jack, of course, was unhappy. Who wouldn’t be? He couldn’t even walk into a toy store with his grandson. All the Hulk playthings on display, many of them sporting Jack Kirby drawings, made him physically ill. Roz would calm him down and then she’d pick up a magazine, read what Stan Lee or the folks currently doing the Fantastic Four comic were making, and Jack would have to calm her down.
Both were just managing to get more philosophical than upset about it when a war broke out. It wasn’t as large as the one Jack had fought in Europe, the one he always told anecdotes about. Still, to hear him tell it, it came equally close to killing him.
This war was about original artwork. For years, most of the comic book companies declared they had the right to keep the originals or throw them away. Since the art wasn’t worth much at that time, no one argued the point.
Then, in the seventies, with comic conventions and collecting on the rise, the art did have value, and people began to argue the point. DC decided that publishers had no legal claim on original art, so they, and most companies, began returning the pages to artists. Jack got most of his back when he worked for Marvel in the seventies. There was still, however, the matter of all the old Kirby pages, thousands of them, t
hat the company had in their warehouse.
So a dispute erupted. It probably didn’t have to, but it did. Lawyer types at Marvel wanted Jack to sign a special form, different from what other artists had to sign, to get back his pages.
Jack really wanted those pages. He’d just had the heart attack and was panicking that he had no real nest egg to leave Roz and his kids if he died, no way to support them and himself if he lived and couldn’t work. Pessimism from his ophthalmologist figured into it, as well.
It was that old sense of duty to put bread on the table . . . now, understandably, stronger than ever. The artwork could yield a substantial sum, but he still felt he couldn’t sign the release. Part of the problem was they were telling him to sign, and then they’d tell him how many pages he’d receive.
A long-held concern was now front and center—one high among those who had driven him from Marvel in 1970, causing him to refuse the contract they offered him then. It was the concern he’d vanish, that history would say Stan Lee created the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the X-Men, et al., no mention of anyone named Kirby. That had seemed likely in the days when DC expunged the names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster from anything having to do with Superman. Closer to home, Jack had a thick folder of articles and press clippings that gave Stan sole credit. During one period, Marvel even reprinted the Simon-Kirby Captain America stories and decided Joe Simon never existed.
If they could do it to Jerry and the Joes, they could do it to Jack—or so he’d worried. He believed the release form would make that revisionism not only possible, but probable.
So Jack brought his own lawyers into it. Threats were exchanged, most of them hollow. Tempers erupted. The impasse went public, and most of the industry rallied around Kirby. There were petitions, editorials in magazines like The Comics Journal, and formal debates. There were folks yelling at one another at conventions, and Marvel got some very bad press. Writers called the company “The House That Jack Built,” and made it look damned ungrateful.
Stan Lee did his best to stay out of it all, but he was particularly hurt by remarks made by Jack and others, and also by articles proclaiming how much he was making as contrasted with his former collaborator. Stan was still an executive in the company, still important there. In 1986, when New World Entertainment acquired Marvel, it was just like when Perfect Film had acquired the firm in ’68: The buyers wouldn’t buy if a long-term contract with Stan Lee didn’t come with it.
But Stan, as he always had, claimed to have no power to help Jack in this or any of his other clashes with the company. A lot of people didn’t believe that. Kirby certainly didn’t believe it . . . but he came to believe that Stan believed it.
In the end, Jack signed something that was not the special form, and got back some 2,100 pages—more than he’d expected. They would serve their intended purpose, paying the living expenses of the Kirby household, especially after its breadwinner died.
The day the package arrived in 1987, two friends helped Jack open and catalogue the contents. “Hey, I got a good one,” Kirby chuckled now and then as they came across an especially memorable page.
There was a cover that had been inked by his old friend and colleague Bill Everett, who had died fourteen years earlier. According to Jack, the cause of death was “alcohol and comics, not necessarily in that order.”
Kirby stared at the page for a long time, looking past the drawing on it, trying to connect with the man who’d laid down the fine inkwork. “Bill was a great guy,” he said. “I hope people remember him.”
Then he paused, laughed a little laugh and added, “I was right. We should have made Bill King of the Comics.”
THE NEW GODS
no. 1 (second series)
June 1984
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Thibodeaux
DC Comics
Paul and Linda McCartney
1975
Art: Jack Kirby
In 1975, music legend Paul McCartney was touring with his band, Wings, celebrating a newly released album that included his song, “Magneto vs. Titanium-Man.” The Magneto in question was the master villain from the X-Men, so Gary Sherman (brother of Kirby assistant Steve Sherman) phoned McCartney’s record company and suggested Jack be invited when McCartney’s band played the Forum in Southern California. This was instantly arranged and one night, Jack, Roz, their daughter Lisa, and Gary were McCartney’s guests. They got to meet the former Beatle, Jack presented him with the drawing at left, and McCartney introduced Jack and dedicated the song to him—to the audience’s thunderous approval.
Presentation drawings for a proposed new version of Captain America.
1968
Art: Jack Kirby and Don Heck
Color: Jack Kirby
SEVEN
GODS ON EARTH
“I don’t think it’s any accident that at this point in their history the entire Marvel universe and the entire DC universe are now all pinned or rooted on Kirby’s concepts.”
— MICHAEL CHABON, THE NEW YORK TIMES
JACK KIRBY SPENT the last ten years of his life being flattered. He was semiretired, but receiving accolades was almost a full-time job. King of Comics, indeed.
The positive side won out, as it always had with Kirby. He rarely thought about what he hadn’t gotten, and focused instead on what he had. Oddly enough, the whole brouhaha over his original artwork—as painful as it had been for him and Roz—helped. Having the industry and fandom rally around him erased all concerns that he would be forgotten.
“They never got my name,” Jack said proudly on more than one occasion. His decreasing ability to produce artwork seemed to coincide with a rise in trophies and tributes. His name was everywhere, and he was even able to lease it along with some leftover character concepts to the Topps trading card company for a new, short-lived comic book line. They called it “The Kirbyverse.” Again, there wasn’t much money, but the principle was twenty-four karat.
CAPTAIN GLORY
no. 1, cover
April 1993
Art: Don Alan Zakrzewski, adapting Kirby drawing from 1968
The Topps Company, Inc.
MANY OF JACK’S TRIBUTES came via the annual comic book convention in San Diego. The con had started in 1970 with him as one of its first guests of honor. Apart from the year of his heart attack, he attended every one during his lifetime, watching unsurprised as the event grew ever bigger and more media-diverse.
Early on, it had been the subject of one of those Kirby predictions that few took seriously when he made it. He said the con would grow until it took over all of San Diego. He said that the definition of “comics” would expand beyond those things printed on cheap paper. It would be about comic books as movies, comic books as television, comic books in forms yet to be invented. He said—and this is a quote—““It will be where all of Hollywood will come every year to find the movies they’ll make next year and to sell the movies they found there the year before.”
No one listened at the time. They should have.
Well before Jack’s last Comic-Con International, the one in ’93, the institution had consumed much of San Diego. Hollywood was, like the man said, swarming there to promote current projects and to find the following year’s.
At the big annual award ceremony, a tradition began. Someone on stage would introduce Jack, and the whole damn audience—thousands of people who read comics, created comics, and/or extended comics into other forms—would spring to its feet and applaud the King. They didn’t stand up like that for anyone else, but they stood for Kirby.
At the show itself they lined up to meet him. It was more than a desire to shake the hand that had drawn their favorite comic book, although there was that. There was also a need, in some cases deep-seated, to connect with the man whose work had so inspired them . . . just to make contact, just to be able to say, “I met Jack Kirby.” He was unfailingly gracious to all, standing there for hours, answering questions, deflecting Roz’s constant suggestions to sit. He would
n’t hear of it. His fans stood, so he stood.
Jupiter Plaque
1972
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Color: Jack Kirby
In 1972, NASA launched the “Jupiter Plaque”— an engraved tablet depicting life on Earth and mapping our whereabouts for the benefit of any intelligent life that might someday encounter it. West, a magazine section in the Los Angeles Times, asked several prominent artists, Kirby included, to draw what they would have put on the plaque and to explain why. Surprising all who thought a futurist and visionary like Jack would welcome and embrace alien contact, Jack decided his plaque would strive to scare away potential conquerors. To that end, he drew two gloriously powerful superbeings, suggesting everyone on Earth was a Superman. Mike Royer inked the piece, then Jack provided the color, and a brief explanatory paragraph:
“I see no wisdom in the eagerness to be found and approached by any intelligence with the ability to accomplish it from any sector of space. In the meetings between ‘discoverers’ and ‘discoverees,’ history has always given the advantage to the finders. In the case of the Jupiter Plaque, I feel that a tremendous issue was thoughtlessly taken out of the world forum by a few individuals who have marked a clear trail to our door. My point is, who will come a-knocking—the trader or the tiger?”
Super Players
Drawing for National Football League
c. 1983
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Color: Jack Kirby
The only way in which Jack disappointed was to politely refuse the millions of requests per day for autographs or “please, just a small sketch.” He apologized over and over, explaining he’d entered into exclusive deals to sign prints and special collectors’ editions. That was true, but it was also true that between his vision problems and a baby stroke that affected his drawing hand, a signature was tough and a drawing was an ordeal. At home, he did as many as he could because they represented income for himself and Roz, even though they were painful, even though they took much, much longer than they once had.