Jack Kirby died in 1994. That's far enough back that we now have a whole generation of comic book readers who never had the opportunity to meet the man. If you went to a San Diego Con before that, you could usually have talked with Jack because he was totally accessible to anyone who wanted to talk to him. And if you didn't go to one of those conventions but you passed through Thousand Oaks, California, all you had to do was phone the Kirby home and you'd probably get an invite to drop by, and some of those visits could last well into dinner. He and his wife Roz were enormously gracious to anyone who was interested in his work…too gracious with some who abused the privilege. (There's an amazing interview with Roz — as yet unpublished — that someone conducted shortly after Jack passed away. In it, she let fly with some of the anger she'd developed towards some of the people who exploited Jack his last decade or so, under the guise of friendship or partnership.)
Anyway, there are now a lot of people around who are interested in comics who never talked with Jack, which is a shame. Interviews were recorded with him but they don't give you a real sense of the man because Jack was terrible at being interviewed. Great at drawing and thinking up the wildest stories in the galaxy…bad at being interviewed. One of the reasons Stan Lee got so much of the attention for their collaborations is that Stan, by contrast, is a great interview — glib, funny, able to speak in sound bites, etc. Jack always got very serious and tense when a microphone was in front of him and especially when there was a video camera or an audience larger than about ten people. In everyday life, that magnificent brain of his was known to ramble from topic to topic, often with no visible segue, sometimes changing planets three times in a single sentence. When speaking before a crowd or into a microphone, however, he strained to focus and make logical, direct points…and since that was not the way he naturally thought, what came out was halting and humorless…and it usually wasn't logical or direct, either.
Still, that's all we have left of his actual voice and obviously, I'm mentioning all this because today's video is a short interview with Jack. It's from the 1987 documentary, Masters of Comic Book Art, and the gentleman you'll see introducing it is Harlan Ellison. The whole thing, with intro, only runs a little over five minutes. I don't think you get much of a sense of what Kirby was like…but I'm not sure any piece of film or video exists that does it any better. So take what you can get…