Two questions from Ben Sternbach, the first of which is…
On your blog, you mentioned that you left your job with Jack Kirby just before they started putting Assistant Editor credits into his comics. I did a search and it looks like that happened as of Kamandi #4. Is that right and why'd you leave?
That's about right. I worked a little on the first issue of Kamandi, did nothing whatsoever on #2 or #3 and left while #3 was in production. The whole premise of having Steve Sherman and myself helping Jack out was that he had all sorts of expansion plans where he'd edit comics he didn't write or draw. He also wanted to launch comics in new forms, some of which would require a staff that could do editorial and production work under his supervision. Those projects would have required assistants.
But by the time we got to Kamandi, it had become obvious that DC was never going to really allow a comic to be edited outside their New York offices. They didn't even like the fact that someone in Southern California was lettering and inking Jack's books. They grew to like Mike Royer for his talent and, as I've mentioned many times, his uncanny professionalism. The man was never late with anything. But they really didn't like the fact that he lived out here and turned his work in to Jack and not them.
I'd been thinking that Jack barely needed one assistant, let alone two, and I was uncomfortable that he kept forcing money on us when we really weren't doing that much. If it had been DC's money, that might have been different but it was Jack's. At about the same time, I was getting real busy. I had gone from writing comics to be published overseas for the Disney Publications Department on the lot to writing Disney comics for Western Publishing (i.e., Gold Key) to be published in this country.
One day, my editor there — a very wonderful man named Chase Craig — said to me, "Y'know, if you could write more scripts for us, I could probably use everything you could produce." And he dangled a couple of tempting books at me like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. So the decision was easy. I still saw a lot of Jack and Roz; just not every week.
Ben's other question:
You implied that the decision by DC to redraw Jack's main characters on the Jimmy Olsen comic was done behind his back. I read an interview with Dick Giordano, who was an editor there at the time, and he said Jack was informed of it and agreed. Which of you is right?
I am (mostly) and Dick agreed with me about this when we discussed it on a panel at…a Mid-Ohio Con, I believe. Some convention. Jack was told that they wanted to make "minor adjustments" on the way he drew Superman. He said fine. The folks who inked Jack's works were always making little adjustments on characters' costumes when he was inconsistent or forgot some detail. But he was not told that they were having other artists redraw the faces and sometimes body parts, as well; that the Superman in the book would be an Al Plastino Superman or a Murphy Anderson Superman instead of the Jack Kirby Superman that readers were expecting in a comic sold with his name on it. Steve and I told him that after we read it in a fanzine.
The thing is: Jack wanted to be a good soldier for his new employer and he kept thinking they were about to take him off that comic anyway because he'd never wanted to do it in the first place. He thought all those other projects pending…the ones that, when it became clear they were never going to happen, caused me to quietly withdraw.
So he went along and didn't object much. Maybe he was a good enough sport that he convinced some folks at DC he was fine with it. Or maybe someone fibbed to Dick, who had no direct contact with Jack during that period. But come on! How could any artist with any pride not be pissed to have that done automatically to his work issue after issue?
Retouching artists' work was pretty common back then and Jack never had a problem when Stan Lee would have someone in the office (usually, John Romita) retouch a few faces here and there if he didn't like the way the main artist drew them. Jack even did some redraws on other artists' work there before Marvel had John Romita on staff. But imagine, Ben, if you were hired to draw…let's say Batman. And the editor decided, "I want to keep Sternbach on the book but I hate the way he draws Batman…so every time he hands in an issue, have somebody redraw all the Batman drawings in it."
For more on this topic, read this article I wrote some time ago.
