In the photo above, the fellow on the left is Steve Sherman, who was my partner back when I worked with Jack Kirby. The lady on the right is Rosalind Kirby, who was Jack's partner from the moment they married until…well, I was going to say "the day he died" but it was more like the day she died, a few years after him. I'm the tall guy in the back.
Had Jack not left us in the physical sense, he would have been 94 years old today…and probably coming up with fresher ideas and concepts than any hundred guys in their twenties. As I've said so many times I've even started to get sick of hearing me say it, he was the most amazing forward-thinker and visionary I've ever met. And I've met some pretty incredible people.
A lot of us, as we get older, develop a new appreciation and perspective on our parents and other older figures of our youth. We discover that Uncle Nate's advice, which sounded so patronizing or foolish when we were 15, wasn't as silly as it sounded then. Or maybe it was wrong but it had its value in leading us towards something that was very right. In Kirby's case, I have given up counting the number of times in the last few decades when I read something or saw something and had to pause and say, "Gee, Jack sure saw this coming."
Or sometimes, I figure out what the hell he was talking about. Jack had this odd, disconnected way of speaking. His mind raced from one concept to another, from Topic A to Topic Q without bothering to get there via Topics B through P. Some folks never quite understood him or perhaps chose not to. Those who did always came away energized and proud. He was a creative person who made you feel like a creative person. He was also a very nice man.
Every year at the Comic-Con in San Diego, at least one person comes up to me, shakes my hand and says something like, "I never got to meet Jack but at least I can shake a hand that shook his." There are actually quite a few in that convention hall that shook Jack's for he was very accessible to everyone when he was around. He went to conventions not to make money and not even for the ego-stroking of so many grovelling before him. That kind of thing meant nothing to Jack and you impressed him most by talking to him like an equal. He liked meeting people, especially young people. He liked connecting with his readers and getting a sense of who they were and how they thought. And he thought (correctly) that he had valuable wisdom to impart and wanted to throw it out there for those who stood to inherit the world.
I'm sorry on so many levels he's not still with us…but of course, it's hard for me to go anywhere these days — and certainly not into a comic shop or convention — without feeling him all around me. And I'm pretty sure he knew that was how it would be.
Below is a documentary that was made a few years ago to go on a DVD release of, I think, the Fantastic Four movie. Or one of those. It's in five parts that should play one after another in the player I've embedded below. Mine is the first voice you'll hear and then you'll see me weighing about a hundred pounds more than I do now. Then a few seconds later, there's an old photo of Jack and that's a young me sitting next to him at some convention.
But forget about me. The thing you should take away from this is that so many important folks in comics said what they said about him…and the documentarians could easily have found a hundred more. I used to say, "If Jack Kirby isn't your favorite comic book artist, he's probably your favorite comic book artist's favorite comic book artist." This runs a little more than an hour but it's a pretty good overview of the man and what he meant to a lot of us…
