Continuing with our theme today, which seems to be brilliant men who smoked cigars…
My friend and one-time employer Jack Kirby died thirteen years ago this morning. It's a cliché — but perfectly true — that not a day goes by that I don't find myself thinking about him and, usually, talking about him with someone. I always knew I was privileged to have been around him as much as I was but I'm still coming to realize just how privileged. A lot more than I imagined at the time, probably even more than I can now begin to grasp.
This seems like the right day to make the following announcement…
As many of you know, I've been working on a biography of Jack that might be described as "authorized" and/or "official." I don't think of it either way. I'm thinking of it as Mark setting down every possible thing I've learned from or about Jack. Anyway, this book in its present state is huge. It makes the Encyclopedia Americana look like one of those take-out menus they hang on your doorknob…and it's still growing. I recently came across a trove of info about employees in the Simon and Kirby studio and I haven't even been able to begin sorting through that material and incorporating it into the book.
I finally decided that the endeavor was getting too large and taking too long…so I'm turning it into two books. Jack is just too big a topic for one book.
The first will be a very nicely printed art book with a simpler but quite complete version of the Kirby biography. The volume will also be loaded with rare Kirby art, all of it in reproduced in full color, much of it shot from the original artwork. That needs a bit of explanation. Many of the pieces will consist of black-and-white artwork in pencil or ink but we'll be printing them in color so that you can see all the pencil marks, corrections, smudges and in some cases, notes in the margins. There will also be plenty of pages that print Jack's art in pencil form and, of course, color pieces and some things you've seen before but not in the way we're going to present them.
This book will be called Kirby: King of Comics and it will be released in October of this year by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., which is one of the world's most prestigious publishers of high quality art and illustrated books. It'll be a hardcover volume, 9" by 12-1/2", all in color and with a gatefold and all sorts of nifty features that we hope will make it worthy of its subject.
Later on — and don't ask me when but it'll be another year or two at least — I'll publish the gargantuan, Galactus-sized bio for the hardcore Kirby fan…the kind of person who wants to read every little detail of the man's extraordinary life. As soon as fresh data stops coming my way, I'll wrap that one up but in the meantime, you'll have the first book before this Christmas. I'll tell you more about it over the next few weeks.