Mark Rouleau sent me this question…
Ok, so as the kids these days say, "unpopular opinion!" I don't care for any of the inkers who inked Kirby, including Kirby. I've come to this conclusion after seeing so many of his uninked pencils in various locations. 10 out of 10 times I prefer the uninked pencils. There's so much detail, texture, and finesse in the pencils that I cringe whenever I see it compared to the final, inked versions. Also, it seems like any inker who inked Kirby always used a heavy hand. Not sure if it was just the style of the time, or if something else was going on.
So I guess my question is, is it even possible for DC or Marvel or whomever to publish uninked Kirby issues? I'd love to see (for example) The Demon done entirely in pencil, especially as the hardcover version has several teaser pages of just that. I realize that, the comic book biz being the way it is, my odds of seeing such a thing are about the same as you appearing in a nationwide cole slaw ad, but is it possible? Thanks for any insights you have, thanks for the blog.
Yes, it's possible but not with a whole lot of stuff. Most of the work that Jack did prior to around March of 1971 was never copied in the pencil stage. He did not own a copier and even if he'd wanted to spring for one, it was nigh impossible (or maybe even just impossible) to find one that could copy pages the size of comic book original art.
DC and Marvel had big photostat cameras and with great trouble and expense, they could make copies of artwork if, for example, Jack needed a copy of a page from one issue as reference before he could draw the next issue. Any time you see a copy of a pencil page by Kirby or anyone from this period, it was probably made on one of those stat cameras for such a reason. And it was a rare survivor because most of those stats were thrown away when they'd served their immediate purpose.
So when Jack (or anyone) mailed pages into the office, if those pages were lost in the mail, there was no backup. Or if the office mailed them to an inker. Or if the inker mailed them back. It was a source of constant worry for publishers and every so often, something did disappear.
When I was working for Gold Key Comics, an entire completed issue of Bugs Bunny that I wrote vanished en route to the printer because, I suspect, some mailman should have turned left at Albuquerque. Fortunately, the company then worked so far ahead of publication that there was time enough to wait a few weeks to see if it would turn up.
And then when it didn't, I had Xeroxes of my scripts and they were able to have the whole thing redrawn. Interestingly, the artist who'd drawn those scripts the first time asked if someone else could do the redrawing, even though he'd be paid in full again. He just thought it would be too boring to draw the same scripts twice. I was kinda flattered by the implication that it wasn't boring to draw my scripts once.
Anyway, I'm rambling here. The fear of something getting lost in the mail lessened a bit for Kirby in early 1971 when his son Neal was working for a company that sold copiers that could copy pages up to 11" by 17", which was the size DC and Marvel comics were drawn then. It would not have worked before 1968 when the art was larger.
Jack got his copier about the same time Mike Royer took over as his main inker from Vince Colletta, though there was no connection to that change. When Jack finished an issue, his penciled pages would be fed into the copier in his studio, one by one, and copied onto 11" by 17" copier paper. Jack might do it. His wife Roz might do it. One of his kids might do it. Steve Sherman, who assisted Jack along with me might do it. I might do it.
I was always nervous doing it. The pages did not lie on a flatbed for copying. You fed them into a slot and they traveled through the machine, bending around rollers and — 99% of the time — they were ejected from another slot while the copy came out of yet another slot. The penciled pages were curled a bit but they could easily be flattened.
1% of the time, they jammed and it was necessary to open the machine and do delicate surgery to extract the page, hopefully intact. A few times, they were not intact and Jack had to redraw a ruined page. That never happened when I made the copies but that was just dumb luck. I know I would not have been blamed if it had happened but I was still jittery whenever I had to feed Jack's pages into the beast. Some time later, he got another copier that was more reliable.
A lot of those copies no longer exist. Some were thrown away. Some were given away. Some were stolen. No one attached a great value to them at the time because, well, even Jack with the greatest imagination in the world never imagined anyone would want to publish them.
They were just tossed in a box and if Jack later needed to refer to a page, he'd fish around in the box until he found it or have someone else do it. As far as I know, no copies were ever needed to help reconstruct a page that had gotten lost. All the ones we know of have been entrusted to the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center which scans and restores what can be restored.
Some of them have been printed in various places — mainly The Jack Kirby Collector magazine and in two books…
They are Captain Victory: The Graphite Edition from TwoMorrows and Jack Kirby: Pencils and Inks from IDW. There may be others in the future but keep in mind that full books do not exist in pencil of many of the comics Jack drew. When he drew double-page spreads on one sheet of paper, as he usually did, those pieces of paper did not fit into his copier.
Like you, I'm an enormous fan of Jack's art in pencil and have been since I first saw it in his studio in July of 1969. I think most of his inkers have done as fine a job as humanly possible but, yeah, there's something amazing about the raw pencil art. I wish more of it had been preserved but we should be glad we have as much of it as we do.
