Stuart Immonen, a fine comic book illustrator, defends our old pal Vince Colletta and offers up an example of an unpublished romance comic page pencilled by Jack Kirby and inked by Vince. Stuart notes that almost every face on the page was redrawn by Colletta and says, "Whether this was an editorial request or Colletta's own pursuit is a question I can't answer." Well, I can answer it so I'll tell you all the story…
Among the projects Jack wanted to do when he went to DC in 1970 was to take comics into a magazine format. What he had in mind was something that would have resembled the then-popular National Lampoon with full color and advertising and a glorious budget along with more "adult" (but not necessarily sexy) subject matters. DC wasn't in a position to do that and he wound up assembling a couple of cheaply-produced black-and-white magazines, instead. Some weren't printed and the ones that were got cancelled before the first issues had even registered any sales figures. One of the ones that wasn't printed was the book Stuart's page was from…a book that would either have been called Soul Love or Soul Romance, had it been published.
The idea, which was not Kirby's, was to do a romance comic all about black folks. Jack felt that a white, Jewish guy in his fifties was the wrong person to be editing, writing and drawing such a book but he gave it his all. He used copies of Ebony as reference when he drew the people and I thought he did a great job. All but one of the stories was given to Vince Colletta for inking and at some point, the work in progress was shown to a magazine distributor who was said to have special expertise in product for the intended market. He said that the people Jack was drawing were too "realistically black" (I believe that was the phrase) and that the potential buyers would be turned off by this. On the advice of this alleged expert, Colletta was instructed to redo all the faces and — this is a quote — "Make the men all look like Sidney Poitier and the women all look like Diahann Carroll."
The retouchings Stuart shows on his page are what was done for that reason. Frankly, I think they look awful and not particularly like Sidney and Diahann, even. They're especially devoid of humanity and expression. He's right though that it's very tough to white out a face on an inked drawing and then to do a new drawing on top of that white paint. It also destroys the drawing underneath so if the retouch is badly done, there's no going back. The art is pretty much gone forever. (Also, I should mention that I believe some of the retouching was done by members of DC's Production Department.)
The book was to include a pull-out poster and someone decided it should be of singer Roberta Flack, who was popular at the time. More importantly, she was recording for a company that had corporate ties to DC Comics. Ms. Flack's publicist wanted to see the comic book in question before permission would be given for the poster so stats were sent. I'm not sure if what was sent was before or after Colletta's retouchings but reportedly either Flack or her flack (i.e., publicist) hated the whole comic. That opinion prompted DC, which was already losing its taste for the whole project, to simply give up on it.
Lastly, based on my mail and a few comments on websites, I guess I didn't make it clear: Kirby, as editor of his DC books, fired Colletta as the inker because (a) Colletta was a security leak, showing the work around the Marvel offices, (b) Colletta was leaving things out and taking too many shortcuts for Jack and (c) Colletta basically told Jack that for what he was being paid, he would not put more effort into the work. And I guess there was also (d) — Jack wanted an inker who would take direction from him instead of those in the New York office. Mike Royer, who replaced Vinnie, was everything Jack wanted.