A Brush with Comic Book History

Above left is the cover of Fantasy Masterpieces #4, a reprint title that Marvel put out back in 1966. At the time, it was reprinting the original Captain America stories by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, in part because the publisher was then anticipating legal action from Simon and somehow thought it would help to reprint and re-copyright the old stories without credits. Unlike Simon, Kirby was working for Marvel at the time and he drew new covers for these issues…until he learned they were being printed with the names of Simon and Kirby removed. Jack objected, on his behalf but also on Joe's, and he was basically told to just shut up about it. It became another in a long list of reasons that he chose to leave Marvel a few years later.

He was told that if he wanted to continue with the firm, he would have to sign a contract he found noxious in many ways, including a clause that would have given the company the absolute right to credit or not credit him for anything he had done or would ever do for them. Based on how Joe Simon had ceased to exist, Kirby was certain they would eventually do it to him, and he likened it — admittedly, an overwrought comparison — to how the Russians had erased the name of Nikita Khrushchev from their history books after his ouster. (Simon did sue, eventually settled and his name was eventually mentioned again in Marvel history and allowed to remain on reprints. More recently, he sued again, settled, and now I'm told this credit is contractually guaranteed.)

The cover to Fantasy Masterpieces #4 is interesting because it was one of the last things Jack inked during this period of his career. He generally did not like taking the time to ink what he'd already drawn in pencil, and employers preferred to get as many pages out of him as possible. But what happened here was that Jack did the cover for #3 (which contained the first Simon-Kirby reprints) and Frank Giacoia inked it. After it was completed, someone remarked that it looked like the modern Captain America, not the Golden Age Captain America, and they wondered if Jack could make the covers look more like the 1941 version. Jack said, in effect, "Not in the pencilling. That has to be done in the inking." So to prove it, Jack inked the cover to #4. You can get a better look at the drawing by clicking here, which will show you an enlargement of it that I cribbed from Fred Hembeck's site. It may have been the last time Jack ever inked anything for conventional comic books. Thereafter, Giacoia returned to inking the covers until Jack refused to do them any longer.

The drawing is reprinted as an illustration in the current, highly-recommended issue of The Jack Kirby Collector. Unfortunately, it is erroneously captioned as a Kirby/Giacoia effort, which circumvents the nice bit of history that it represents. We can forgive TJKC editor this error since he makes so few in his fine publication and since he's had his mind on more important matters, lately. Last Monday, he and spouse Pam welcomed a new Morrow, Hannah Rose, into the world. I'll even forgive that the wrongly-credited illo adorned my column in that issue, so people who think I made the mistake are writing me messages that say, approximately, "Evanier, you dip! You should know that cover was inked by Kirby." The things I do not know are many, and include an awful lot of things more important than who inked the cover to Fantasy Masterpieces #4…but I do know that.