Dave Sikula sent me this easy-to-answer question about Jack Kirby…
Your discussion of Jack's work at DC reminded me of The Losers. You mentioned that Kamandi was a book that a lot of people think was some of his best work, but I felt like "The Losers" was wildly underrated. For me, it seemed like an incredibly personal comic (far moreso than, say, Sgt. Fury) that he was really pouring his own wartime experiences into.
From your timeline, I'd guess you'd already stopped working for him by the time he was doing it, but I wonder if you have any impressions of how it lined up with anything he might have said about his service. (I acknowledge here that, like a lot of WWII vets (such as my parents — who met on the hospital ship they were serving on — and father-in-law), he may not have talked about it.
You obviously never met Jack Kirby. If you had, you would have known Jack talked an awful lot about his World War II experiences…to the point where Doug Wildey, if he walked into a room and Kirby was there, would shout, "No World War II stories!" Anyone who was around Jack for any length of time heard them…and though I can't draw a direct line between any I recall and any story Jack did for "The Losers," I'm confident there was at least some connection between every issue and something that Jack actually observed or lived through. He was constantly revisiting his wartime life in wake-up-at-5AM-type nightmares.
Jack did twelve issues of Our Fighting Forces featuring "The Losers" and, Fourth World books aside, they're my favorite work he did for DC during that period. And it was especially impressive because it was a very bad assignment for him. Steve Sherman theorized that the folks at DC sat down and thought, "What book can we assign Kirby to that he'll absolutely hate doing?" I do not concur with this theory but there might have been a little of that.
It was, first of all, a book created and written previously by someone else. Jack didn't like handling or altering someone else's characters. Secondly, the "someone else" in this case was Robert Kanigher, a DC writer who was not shy about dismissing comics by others — especially Marvel's and especially Kirby's — as shit. Thirdly, Jack thought "The Losers" was a horrible name for a comic about a bunch of World War II soldiers and, fourthly, that this was a messy assemblage of a bunch of leftover characters who'd flopped in their own comics, thrown together for no visible purpose.
But it was an assignment and it was about World War II. So Jack gave it his all and his all was pretty good, I thought. Sales took a notable hike, so much so that when DC received the first reports, they upped the book from bi-monthly to monthly. When Jack left it and Kanigher returned and put everything back the way he had it before, sales dropped.
What I wish DC had done was to dump "The Losers," give the book to Jack and let him do something more autobiographical, the way they had Sam Glanzman doing those "U.S.S. Stevens" stories based on his own experiences in the war. That would have been, I think, even more wonderful.
