My then-partner Steve Sherman took the above photo in 1970. We had one of those Don Post full-head rubber masks they used to sell in the back of Famous Monsters and we spray-painted it red and took it out with us to Jack Kirby's house. This was a few months after he'd hired us to do, as it turned out, very little on the new comics he was producing for DC. But we thought (correctly) it would amuse him to have the head of one of his favorite villains, the Red Skull, in his studio. That's me wearing the mask. And as I recall, just before Steve snapped the shutter, I said — in a very bad German accent — "So, Kirby…I am told you are a Jew." Jack waited until after the flash had gone off to burst out laughing and reply, "Only my hairdresser knows for sure." Whatever that meant.
Jack would have been 93 today. If you got to meet him, you probably treasure that encounter. If you never got to meet him, I'm sorry you never got to meet him. He was a delightful man with a mind that galloped off in all directions, all of them charging irrevocably towards the future. Even when Jack hauled out an anecdote from his bottomless stash of World War II experiences, he was speaking about the future. I'm sorry he didn't get to spend more time in it. I think he would have liked most of it and I know we would have liked having him around longer.