In 1970, I had…well, not a hand but about half a knuckle in the launching of the Mister Miracle comic book by Jack Kirby. Some time ago, a reader of this site named Joe Wainright wrote to ask me about the coloring of that hero's costume and lately, I've seen a couple of different websites where folks discuss it or misunderstand what happened. So here's the story but first, here's Joe's e-mail to me…
I don't understand why Mister Miracle's costume was one color on the cover of Mister Miracle #1 and a different color inside and from then on, but then he was totally uncolored on the cover of #3. Later, I saw Kirby's original design of the character and the coloring of that was completely different. Didn't Kirby himself do that coloring? Why was it changed? I also read that you designed the final coloring. Can you clear this up?
I'll try. First, we start with the yellow costume above. In either late 1968 or early 1969, Jack was becoming increasingly unhappy with the way he was being treated at Marvel, specifically that he was receiving no financial compensation or credit for his serious contributions to the stories and to the creation of ongoing characters. To try and address this problem, he took some time and created a whole bunch of new characters. A lot of his presentation pieces for them are around. Jack drew them, inked some of them himself and engaged his friend and fellow Marvel artist Don Heck to ink some of them. Jack colored them all.
At the time, Jack was receiving quiet inquiries from other publishers — not all of them then in the comic book business — about maybe creating a new line of comics for them. So Jack did these drawings as part of a two-part plan. Part One was that he'd show them to the folks at Marvel and say something like, "Hey, look! I've got a bunch of ideas or new characters and I'll be glad to sell them to you but I have to have a much different working arrangement with you than I've had in the past!"
Part Two was that if he didn't get that better deal from them, he might use the drawings to make that better deal with another publisher.
Well, Part One didn't work. The people then in charge at Marvel would not discuss any changes in "the deal." They wanted the new ideas but they wanted them on the old terms so that never happened. Part Two did not succeed with the new publishers who'd courted Jack. They either didn't have the necessary funds and infrastructure to get into comics or only wanted to get into comics if they could buy material on the same terms as Marvel.
But the drawings were a key factor in DC hiring Jack away from Marvel in early 1969 and most of the characters from the presentations would wind up in the books he initially did for DC. It's important to understand that Jack did not consider either the designs or his plans for the characters firm. They were concepts he would rearrange and reconfigure into what he did for DC. For example, he had the idea for this epic continuity that he initially called "The New Gods" but he wasn't set on which of the characters he'd created and which additional ones he would create would figure into "The New Gods" and which of the characters he'd concocted would appear in standalone series that were unconnected to "The New Gods."
Mister Miracle and The Black Racer were at one point unconnected to the epic in Jack's mind but he later decided to fold Mister Miracle into "The New Gods" and the guy in charge at DC who hired Jack, Carmine Infantino, urged him to put The Black Racer into that world. Eventually too, "The New Gods" went from being the umbrella title of all the books in that epic continuity to being the title of one of those comics and — seemingly from out of nowhere — "The Fourth World" became the umbrella title.
When Jack did the drawing of the guy in the yellow suit, that may have been the visual for Mister Miracle or — and I think this is more likely — that may have been the visual for some other idea he had and he later decided to use it, sans gun, for his idea for Mister Miracle, the Super Escape Artist. Jack was always rearranging ideas in his mind and marrying this one to that one. Mister Miracle did not arrive at his final form until Jack finally wrote and drew the first issue of this comics…and even then, the hero continued to evolve.
Kirby finished that first issue and sent it back to the DC offices in New York. He did not send them the drawing with the yellow outfit to use as a guide because that wasn't the finished version of the character he now had in his mind. He planned to later work out color schemes for Mister Miracle and all the other characters in the new books he was creating for DC but the folks at the firm said something like, "Oh, don't bother. We'll handle those here."
DC had a Production Department and they were very proud of it. A man named Sol Harrison headed it up and the coloring was supervised by a man named Jack Adler. Both had been in their jobs a long time. Both were considered to be very good at those jobs. Both of them felt (as did others in the office) that the coloring done at DC was the best in the business and that the coloring over at Marvel was really lousy. Neither one was a particular fan of anything at Marvel, including Jack's artwork and the way other artists incorporated elements of his style.
Infantino, who was running DC then, kept asking Jack for suggestions on how to improve the DC line. When Jack suggested that they look at Marvel books to see how comics should be colored, he made instant enemies of the Production Department. Jack just plain thought that Marvel coloring — especially as done by Marie Severin and Stan Goldberg — was superior, at least for the kind of thing he did. Around the DC offices, that was heresy.
It would not be inaccurate to say that for the length of Jack's stay at DC, he never liked the way his work was colored and the persons doing or overseeing that coloring weren't too fond of the Kirby work they were coloring. This was probably not unrelated to the many changes they found it necessary to do to Jack's work there.
Anyway, Jack didn't fight them on most of what they did but when they sent him an example of how they were coloring Mister Miracle's costume, that he felt had to be changed. That was the purple design you see at the top of this post in the right-hand image. I was working for Jack then, teamed with a fine fellow named Steve Sherman. Jack asked us to come up with a new color scheme for the hero and he did a quickie drawing of him. We Xeroxed it about a dozen times and Steve colored half of them different ways and I colored the other half with different ideas.
Neither of us recalls which of us came up with the one Jack selected but he picked one and shipped it back to New York, just days before Mister Miracle #1 was ready to go to press. He probably picked the one he thought was acceptable and the least different from what New York had done. It wasn't that much of a change but Jack felt it was necessary.
The issue had already been colored and color-separated and they'd probably made the printing plates by then…but Infantino agreed to go with what Jack wanted and they spent whatever it cost to change the color scheme on the cover. They said it was too late to replace the purple costume on the inside but I suspect they just didn't want to spend the money.
As of the second issue, the red costume was used and nowadays when they reprint #1, they adjust the colors on it as they did in the image you see at left in the second pair of images, a few paragraphs above this one.
As for why Mister Miracle was completely colorless on the cover of #3…I have no idea. At the time, Jack asked and he got all sorts of double talk that he took to mean no one there knew why, either. He told us, "It looks like their infallible Production Department screwed up."
