Were he still with us, Jack Kirby would have been 85 years old today. He's been gone since '94 and still, not a day goes by when I don't find myself talking about or at least thinking about him. Those of you who met Jack know that he had an odd way of speaking, forever making unusual connections and leaping from one seemingly-disconnected topic to another…though if you really thought about it for a while, you could usually figure out the segue and see the brilliance of how he got from here to there. I am still just coming to understand things he said to me in 1971 and being amazed at their wisdom.
Also born on this date was my other great early supporter in the world of comics, Chase Craig. Chase was the executive editor for Western Publishing Company — for their Dell and later, Gold Key Comics — for several decades. Before that, he was a wonderful gag man and cartoonist, as I attempted to explain in this obituary from earlier this year. This is another one of those columns I removed from this site because it's in my new book but I'm putting it back up for a few days, just so you can read about this wonderful man.