Mitchell Senft sent me an e-mail with that subject: "How Kirby Worked" and then further asked…
Did he use any notes for the story at hand?
Did he breakdown a page either with thumbnails or on the board? If I recollect, I read somewhere that he he would just start at the top left of a page and start drawing.
I can't quite turn this into a question but I recently reread both his New Gods (the book, not the concept) and Eternals runs. The former struck me as having the rhythm of a monthly while the latter flowed much more smoothly. Am I imagining something? Was something going on that I've picked up??
Jack Kirby had an amazing story sense and it was sometimes hard to tell, when he suddenly started telling you a plot or a concept, if that was something he'd come up with at that moment or something he'd been carrying around in his head for some time. I am absolutely certain that he could do both. There was almost nothing put down on paper before he began composing a page he was drawing for publication.
Over the years, I've had dozens of people come to me and say, "Let's assemble a book of Jack's rough sketches and outlines and plot notes" and I have to tell them that there are almost none. And the few things in the category that do exist were almost always produced because his publisher or editor insisted on seeing a "rough" or an outline. If they hadn't demanded that, Jack would never have done one.
My then-partner Steve Sherman and I were sometimes used as a kind of "sounding board" for stories Jack wrote and drew when he went back to DC in 1970. We'd sit in his studio next to his drawing table. Jack would be sitting at the drawing table but not drawing as he told us the entire plot of the issue he was about to do next…and we'd make invaluable suggestions like, "That sounds great, Jack."
I would have loved to have given Jack an idea to make his story better but there was very little room for that. What he told us was complete and it did sound great…so the few suggestions of ours that got in were pretty trivial. And one of our other big contributions was that at the proper moment — when we'd done whatever Jack asked us to do that day and he needed to focus on putting a story on paper, we'd leave. Steve and I should get a lot of credit for leaving. We were very good at it.
Jack would start committing his story to paper…and what he put down might have been pretty much what he told us. Or on our next visit when he let us read the story in pencil off the original art, we might have wondered how the heck he got from what he'd told us to what he then wrote and drew. If it was significantly different and we told him that, he was genuinely surprised. He didn't know how he'd gotten there either.
He never wrote any sort of outline on paper for himself. A couple of times, I wrote one down for him but only based on his ideas. When Jack did the first issue of Kamandi, Carmine Infantino (he was the head of DC at the time) wanted to see an outline first…I suspect so he could make some comments and then pretend he'd co-created the new feature. At least once or twice later on, he claimed he was the sole creator of Kamandi and when people ask me about that, I give this reply: "I did a lot more on that first issue than Infantino did and I don't think I deserve any kind of creator credit."
Basically, what I did was this: When Jack told us the plot of Kamandi #1, he had me take notes on it, then I went home and wrote up an outline which Jack then sent east for Carmine's approval. Once that was secured, Jack followed it pretty closely. As far as I could tell, the one bit of input that Infantino had was to insist on imagery of a wrecked Statue of Liberty — a fresh, clever idea if you'd never seen the movie, Planet of the Apes.
But outline or not, Jack worked from what was in his head. He would start roughing out sequences on the illustration board, designing with light figure placements, working out how the story would flow from panel to panel. He did a fair amount of erasing during this stage to get things the way he wanted. Then once he'd designed each panel lightly on the page, he would do the finished penciling right over his light roughs.
He did very little erasing in the "tightening" phase…and when he did, it was not because he thought the drawing could be better but because he decided that other things should be happening. If we were present, he might hand a page to Steve or to me and say, "Erase those three panels" because he'd decided he wanted something different in them.
He did not always start on page one. He'd start drawing sequences and then jump around and rearrange pages and fill in between those sequences. Occasionally, he'd omit an almost-finished page here and there to arrive at the story he wanted to send in. These were all pages where he knew roughly what each caption and word balloon would say but he hadn't written the copy in. He would do that as the final step.
The line you read about how he'd start at the upper left hand corner and just draw from there is a line I said on a few occasions. I was talking about him drawing one of those amazing double-page spreads he'd do. It was like the drawing was all there already but in invisible ink which only he could see…and then as he went over those lines with his pencil, they became visible to everyone.
I hope this is the kind of answer you were seeking. I'm not sure I completely understand the question about the New Gods having "the rhythm of a monthly" but a key difference between the work Jack did for DC then and what he did for Marvel when he went back there in '75 was that at Marvel, he was his own editor, deciding what should be in each issue.
At DC, he had the title of Editor and much latitude came with it…but Carmine Infantino had definite ideas of which of the many ideas Jack had told him should appear in each issue. Left to his own devices, Jack would have introduced new characters and new concepts in a different order, perhaps dwelling more on one before introducing the next. The character of The Black Racer, in Jack's mind, was a standalone comic unrelated to Darkseid and the Fourth World…but Infantino wanted it in there and he wanted it in New Gods #3 so Jack complied.
At Marvel, he got some direction — like, he was told they wanted a Hulk guest appearance in The Eternals — but he got less of that kind of order and he didn't have to comply as totally. In that case, he was able to make it a Hulk robot instead of the man/creature himself. Perhaps that kind of difference is the answer to your question.
