Kirby

by Mark Evanier

  For a man said to be so far ahead of his era, Jack would joke that he sure had rotten timing. He’d crusaded long and hard for the industry to cut writers and artists in on the windfall of good sales and on the adaptation of their properties into other media. That had now become the norm . . . but it came too late to apply to his most lucrative work of the sixties and never brought great wealth to him and, more important, to Roz.

  Jack had fought for his reputation and won that battle, too. Now, here he was, being offered hefty sums just for his signature or a sketch . . . and he could barely do either.

  Presentation Piece

  c. 1977

  Art: Jack Kirby

  San Diego Comic-Con

  At the August 1975 Inkpot Awards ceremony at the El Cortez hotel (from left to right): convention chairman Richard Butner, artist Russ Manning (behind Butner), cartoon voice legends June Foray and Daws Butler, artist Jim Starlin (behind Foray), Jack Kirby, artist Gil Kane (behind Kirby), artist Jim Steranko, Stan Lee (behind Steranko), Will Eisner (The Spirit), Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, animation director Bob Clampett, and cartoonist Dick Moores (Gasoline Alley).

  Photo by Jackie Estrada.

  THE MORNING OF SUNDAY, February 6, 1994, Jack Kirby awoke early and slipped quietly out of bed. Though the most convenient bathroom was immediately adjacent to the bedroom, he walked to one at the other end of the house so as not to disturb Roz. Typical of Kirby.

  On his way back he walked outside, brought in the morning Los Angeles Times, and carried it into the kitchen. That’s probably where he was when the pain hit and hit hard.

  Moments later, his wife of more than half a century awoke with a start. Something, she could sense, was terribly, terribly wrong. She rushed about the house, calling his name, desperately yelling “Kirby,” which was the way she often addressed him. When she found her husband unconscious on the kitchen floor clutching the morning paper, she called 911. Then she sat down at the breakfast table and cried, because she knew the paramedics weren’t going to be able to do anything. She knew it was all over. Everything.

  Before nightfall, everyone in and around the comic book field was phoning everyone else to ask: Did you hear, did you hear? Jack Kirby died. Heart failure, they said.

  He was seventy-seven years old.

  Hanukkah card

  1975

  Art: Jack Kirby

  When comic fan David Folkman sent the Kirbys a Hanukkah greeting, he hadn’t expected to receive a reply. But they sent back a card to which Jack added a small drawing. A copy of this would later hang on the wall of Kirby’s studio and he’d tell people, “It’s a Jewish Thing.”

  HALF THE INDUSTRY TURNED out for the funeral, and the other half was present in spirit. Stan Lee was there in both capacities, sitting quietly in the back throughout the speeches, then departing without saying much of anything to anyone. Roz wanted to give him a big hug, right in front of everyone to show that what was done was done and that there was no bitterness left dangling. But Stan, quick as ever, was in the parking lot by then, gone before she could get near him.

  Roz Kirby survived her husband by almost four years, most of them spent welcoming Kirby fans into her home and fielding accolades on his behalf. She continued to attend the convention in San Diego, where the assemblage stood and clapped for her as it had once applauded Jack.

  DC announced the reissue of New Gods and the other Fourth World titles in new collections. It wasn’t because Jack was dead. It was because fans kept asking about the work, indicating an eagerness to buy. Roz liked that, liked it a lot. It had always eaten away at her, as it had with Jack, that those books were ever viewed as failures.

  In September of 1995, bowing to pressures within and also from outside the company, executives at Marvel Comics granted her a modest pension—enough to cover the mortgage, groceries, and medical expenses, with a few dollars left over to bank. Informed that it would expire when she did, she vowed to live forever and get as much as she could out of the firm.

  Roz did her best, but on the day she died, December 22, 1998, she’d only managed to drain Marvel of about twenty-seven months worth of pension checks. That was one week after a friend visiting the DC offices called to tell her that the Fourth World reprints were selling well. She began crying and said, “Finally, it’s a hit.”

  Then she sighed and added, “Well, Jack always said it would be.”

  Odin

  Gift to Mike Thibodeaux

  1988

  Art: Jack Kirby

  Marvel Comics Super Heroes Commemorative stamps On July 25, 2007, the United States Postal Service issued sixteen postage stamps depicting Marvel characters. Eight stamps featured art penciled by Kirby: The Thing, Captain America, Silver Surfer, and the covers to Amazing Spider-Man no. 1, The Incredible Hulk no. 1, Fantastic Four no. 3, Captain America no. 100, and The Uncanny X-Men no. 1. The previous year, a similar set of stamps featuring characters from DC Comics included one, Green Arrow, drawn by Kirby.

  HAD SHE LIVED ANOTHER ten years, Roz would have seen Jack Kirby truly come to be viewed as one of those Gods on Earth he always drew. He never thought of himself that way, but others did.

  Talent from several generations seem to gain inspiration from his work, and it wasn’t just inspiration to draw comics like his or even to draw at all. Writers, filmmakers, artists of all kinds find something there, something that spurs on the urge to create.

  To several generations, Jack Kirby was comics. Other creators came and went, or did their breakthrough work in one or two brief spurts. Kirby was always there, breaking through in the forties, breaking through in the fifties, really breaking through in the sixties, and continuing through the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, producing vast amounts of important work right up to the very moment he physically could not do it any longer. Shortly after he passed away, when industry-wide sales took a decided slump, the question, “What does the business need?” was routinely answered, “It needs Jack Kirby. That’s what it needs.” Others remarked, “When Kirby died, he took comics with him.”

  He didn’t, of course. He left them and everyone around them so much better for having known him. He was the guy who took comics to new levels of imagination . . . and then took those new levels of imagination to still newer levels of imagination.

  THERE WERE TIMES JACK even seemed to know that. One weekend in the seventies, he appeared at a comic art festival sponsored by a Los Angeles public library. It was an odd mix of folks who worked at the library, intermingling with folks who wrote and drew comics. All seemed uncertain just why the comic book people were even there.

  After the event, which mainly consisted of people autographing comics, the library staff and the guests all mingled in a tiny anteroom for wine, cheese, and small talk. The head librarian turned to the man next to her, who happened to be Kirby, and asked him if he thought comics mirrored reality. Jack said, “No, comics transcend reality.”

  The answer startled the librarian, and she said, “If you were to mirror reality, then perhaps others could begin to understand it.”

  Jack popped a piece of cheddar into his mouth and fixed her with a stare he’d learned either on the streets of New York or on Omaha Beach during World War II. “Madam,” he said, “when you mirror reality, you see it all backward. When you start transcending it, that’s when you have a real good shot at figuring out what’s going on.” Then he went over to Roz and told her he was ready to leave.

  Roz drove him home where the Once and Future King sat down in his throne: an old, straightback kitchen chair parked in front of the crummiest old drawing table you ever saw. Then he lit a cigar, sharpened a pencil, and went back to work. At three a.m., he was still in that chair, doing the two most important things in his life: transcending reality and earning a living.

  Untitled illustration

  1972

  Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer

  For a self-published art folio, Kirby needed a drawing. So he took a leftover Marvel
page that was still in pencil, erased portions of an image of Galactus, and redrew it into a generic character.

  EIGHT

  LEGACY

  “No one drew heroes like Kirby. No one drew villains like Kirby.

  No one did splash pages like Kirby. No one.”

  — GUILLERMO DEL TORO, FILMMAKER

  YOU’RE READING THE SECOND edition of Kirby: King of Comics. When the first was published in 2008 minus this new chapter, Jack Kirby was a fairly famous guy and his work was even more famous. And loved. And imitated. He was a great source of inspiration and remains so—and not just for those who yearn to do the kind of comics he did.

  There was never a shortage of such people. Even as far back as Jack’s first tour of duty on Captain America, there were writers and artists who aspired to succeed him on some book, working the fertile ground he’d invariably leave behind. Jack, who understood so much about the world, didn’t quite get why a person with genuine talent would want to do that. He once read in a magazine that a popular up-and-coming artist would be taking over a Kirby-launched book, an artist who said he’d insisted on doing it “in the Kirby Tradition.”

  When Jack read that, he shook his head. “The kid doesn’t get it,” he remarked. “The Kirby Tradition is to create a new comic!”

  Most of Jack’s work remains amazingly available to inspire new generations. Almost everything he did—including comics considered flops on first publication—has been reprinted over and over, often in expensive hardcover volumes. With each reissue, the Fourth World he created for DC Comics has become an even greater hit . . . just as Roz always said Jack always said it would be.

  But still there were gnawing loose ends in the Life of Kirby, one being that he was unable to leave his widow or children financially secure—at least not to the extent he felt they should have been, given the enduring (and growing) value of his work.

  Had Jack lived until 2009, he would have seen Marvel purchased by the Walt Disney Company for four billion dollars—that’s billion with a “b.” And he would have seen a raft of smash–hit TV shows and movies based on Marvel properties including Captain America, the Avengers, Thor, X-Men, and Iron Man. Several of those movies are high on the list of the Highest Grossing Movies of All Time.

  Jack would not have been surprised. Four decades earlier, he’d told the management at Marvel this would happen. They nodded, then behind his back joked about how he was useful but delusional. That they didn’t see what Kirby saw was why Martin Goodman sold the company for, as Jack you may recall put it, “less than the value of Ant-Man alone.” In 2015, a high-budget movie of Ant-Man was released. To date, it has grossed $520 million.

  That no one named Kirby received even a tiny taste of all that cash felt unjust, especially considering the wealth and fame that was being showered upon Jack’s collaborator, Stan Lee. Stan had Executive Producer credits and salaries on most of the movies, cameos in all, and the kind of ancillary offers that come to someone hailed as the creative force behind such lucrative enterprises. Meanwhile, the heirs of Lee’s main co-creator went unpaid and sometimes, that co-creator went unacknowledged . . . or was mentioned only at the bitter end of the end-credits, down near where they thank the guy who catered the wrap party.

  In the eyes of Roz, her four kids, and many of us close to Jack, that was an even greater injustice.

  Not every wrong in this world can be righted, but this one could be.

  A little history. Despite that sentence in the U.S. Constitution that says that copyrights are supposed to expire someday, Congress has repeatedly voted to extend them—which raises a good question: If valuable properties no longer lapse into the public domain, that greatly benefits the owners of those copyrights . . . like, say, Disney or Marvel, right?

  Then what about the creator who parted with a copyright, thinking it would only be good for fifty-six years? Shouldn’t that creator share in the unanticipated bonus as well? To balance the scales a bit, a provision was made for such authors. During a limited “window of opportunity” and under certain circumstances, these creators or their heirs could reclaim ownership of that copyright.

  In 2009, not long after Disney’s acquisition of Marvel, California attorney Marc Toberoff, acting on behalf of the heirs of Jack Kirby, filed forty-five notices for copyright reclamation on Kirby’s share of 262 of Marvel’s most famous properties. The timing was not because of Disney. The family had been waiting patiently for the “window” to open, doing so per the expressed wishes of their late parents.

  At first, an amicable settlement seemed reachable and talks were held. Then Marvel unexpectedly ended the talks and filed suit against Lisa, Neal, Barbara, and Susan Kirby, arguing that Jack’s work for Marvel fell into the category of “work for hire.” If so, they could not reclaim those copyrights because it would mean Jack had never owned them in the first place. Determining whether this was actually the case was complicated by Marvel’s inability to produce any legal paperwork from the time period during which the major characters had been launched.

  And so the suit was on and depositions were taken. Stan Lee testified that he was the sole creator of all the characters at issue in the case. Cross-examined by Toberoff about the many times he’d hailed Jack as the co-creator, such as in his forewords for reprint collections, Lee responded, “I tried to write these, knowing Jack would read them. I tried to write them to make it look as if he and I were just doing everything together, to make him feel good.”

  Captain Nice

  Art: Jack Kirby and Chic Stone

  Color: Jack Kirby

  For a rare commercial job, Kirby was engaged to create a promotional poster for “Captain Nice,” a short-lived situation comedy created by Buck Henry and starring William Daniels that ran on NBC from January of 1967 until June.

  FANTASTIC FOUR

  no. 51

  June 1966

  Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott

  Marvel Comics

  The District Court ruled in favor of Disney, holding that Kirby’s contributions qualified as work for hire under the 1909 Copyright Act. The Second Circuit Appellate Court affirmed. But when Toberoff appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, he did not go it alone. The names on the impressive array of amicus curiae (“friends of the court”) briefs supporting the Kirby position included the Screen Actors Guild; the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists; the Directors Guild of America, Inc.; the Writers Guild of America, West, Inc.; and a great many author groups and Pulitzer Prize–winning writers and cartoonists. (Full disclosure: The author of this book sat for two depositions on behalf of the Kirbys and co-authored an amicus brief for the Supreme Court appeal.)

  Of particular note (and perhaps, impact) was a brief from Bruce Lehman, former director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the chief advisor to President Bill Clinton on intellectual property matters. Lehman wrote on behalf of himself and former U.S. Register of Copyrights Ralph Oman.

  The brief by two of the most highly respected experts in copyright law asserted that courts had been misapplying the law, mistakenly ruling some material was “work for hire” when it clearly was not. That error, they wrote, “unfairly strips freelance artists of their termination rights and provides an unintended and unwarranted windfall to publishers.”

  If the highest court agreed, it meant a possible shift in ownership not only of Kirby’s work but countless other million-dollar properties as well. The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “If the Supreme Court grants cert on Lisa Kirby v. Marvel Characters, it could be one of those real freak-out moments for Disney, which now owns Marvel and is planning to release sequels to The Avengers, which grossed more than $1.5 billion worldwide as the third-biggest box office success of all time.”

  To grant “cert” would be to agree that the case had sufficient merit to be heard by the Court. That was to be determined on September 29, 2014, but no decision was necessary. The previous Thursday, Marvel and the Kirby family “amicably resolved the
ir legal disputes,” which is how joint press releases describe an out-of-court settlement. The amount of money paid by Marvel-Disney was undisclosed, but given the value of the franchises involved, it was surely way more than Martin Goodman ever dreamed not just Ant-Man could ever be worth but all of Marvel Comics.

  Great . . . but for most of those who loved Kirby, the more meaningful win was the agreement that Jack’s role in the creation of the comics would forever be properly credited. It was a cause for much celebration, though of course tempered by the timing. If only Jack had lived to see it . . .

  Then again, he was so prescient and so good at imagining up the future, maybe he did.

  FOREVER PEOPLE

  no. 6

  Art: Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta

  DC Comics

  The Forever People comic was in large part about young people coming into an adult world to prepare to someday become its adults. So is this chapter.

  AFTERWORD

  “Tell Jack that after he finishes saving the universe again, he has to take out the trash in the kitchen.”

  — ROSALIND KIRBY, ONE DAY IN 1971

  I FIRST MET JACK Kirby in the pages of some comic I bought in a secondhand bookstore around 1960. And then I met him again for the first time at his home in Irvine, California—a place he and Roz were renting while searching for something permanent. That second first time was in July 1969.

  Those who knew Jack only from the comics knew there was something special about any story with Kirby art. His work fairly crackled with a life-affirming energy. Even with the bad printing and the sometimes-bad inking, it commanded your attention and demanded your involvement. Heroism was much more heroic, villainy was all the more villainous, and love was just plain lovelier.