What was the deal with the cover of Thor #144?
People keep asking about this because they see online or in some magazine, an unpublished cover by Jack Kirby that's still in pencil and they ask, "Did Stan Lee really reject that beautiful cover?" Or they ask if Jack got paid for it or if it's true that it wasn't used because the inker refused to ink something so elaborate. Here's what happened…
First, you have to know that back then, a lot of time was spent designing the covers for comics. They still spend a lot of time on that but now there's less of a committee, office-based approach to it. What would happen then — this book was from 1967 — was that a rough cover sketch would be generated and approved in the office. This might be done before the art inside the book was completed. Once in a while, it was done before the comic was even written.
But at some point, a sketch would be designed and it would be approved by whoever was in charge of approving cover designs. At DC during many of those years, it was Carmine Infantino, who also usually did that rough sketch himself. At Marvel, it was Stan Lee for a long time. Stan would work with an artist who might or might not have been the person who drew the insides of the comic and/or the person who would do the finished art for the cover.
At both companies, it sometimes seemed easier to not have the finished art produced by the guy drawing the insides. They'd generate a pile of cover sketches for different books and then assign them to one artist. That meant it wasn't necessary to deal with a lot of different hands, and the artists doing the interiors weren't interrupted to draw covers. This is why you see periods at DC when it felt like Nick Cardy was drawing all the covers or times at Marvel when they all seemed to be by Gil Kane. Also, they thought the skills and styles of Nick and Gil were more commercial than some of the interior artists.
In the early sixties, Jack Kirby usually did the rough sketches for the many covers he did for Marvel. He and Stan would sit down and he'd rough something out and Stan would kibitz and Jack would go home with several approved roughs from which he'd pencil the final art for several covers — some for comics where he did the insides, some for which he didn't. As the sixties wore on, Kirby did fewer and fewer of the preliminary sketches for two reasons.
One was that he was coming into the office less and less, sometimes even mailing in his work or having his neighbor, Frank Giacoia, deliver it. And the other reason was that Marvel was expanding. As they did, they hired more artists (like John Romita Sr., Marie Severin and Herb Trimpe) to work in the office so they were there when a cover sketch was needed. Stan didn't have to attend to that task during the hour or so during the week when Jack might have been around.
And come to think of it, there may have been a third reason. Over at DC, Infantino was hired as Cover Editor in late 1966 to try and improve the look of their covers. That was when he began doing most of the rough sketches. Previously, each individual DC editor had worked with the artist of his choice but now Infantino was designing them all or supervising their designs. As DC's covers got better, Marvel felt they had to expend more energy on their cover designs. From that point on, Kirby rarely did his own cover designs. One of the few was the cover of a Tales of Asgard special and I printed his rough for it in my book on Jack, Kirby: King of Comics.
Most of the time, he worked off sketches generated by staff artists in the office. The cover of Thor #144 started with a sketch that is since lost to time but it was probably done by Marie Severin with Stan's input and approval. Jack followed the sketch and in this case, he seems to have delivered it along with other pages on an office visit. If you click here, you can see the pencil version of that cover that he handed in.
Stan looked at it and said something like, "Gee, this is pretty busy and you can't see our hero very well and he doesn't look that heroic." I'm speculating here a bit but he probably uttered something like that. His problem was not with Jack's artistry. If it had been that, he would have parts of the same cover redrawn either by Jack or someone else. He just decided that the cover scene which looked fine as a smaller rough sketch didn't look as good when it was a larger, more detailed composition. So he then looked at the schedule or asked someone, "Do we have time to start over?"
This is something that Stan asked about many covers. He was rarely totally satisfied with any of them and it was almost never because of the skill of the artist. It happened at DC, as well. They'd look at almost every cover and try to figure out some way to make it a little more exciting or punchier or clearer. Often, captions or word balloons would be altered or added. Sometimes, they'd cut apart or photostat elements and rearrange or resize them. If you see the original art to covers of this period, you will frequently see pasteovers or changes.
Stan often decided the hero could be in a more dynamic pose. He would frequently have one of the staff artists (most often, Romita) redraw some faces to make them more "on model" or to have the expressions be more intense. Often, some body part of the hero would be redone to make the pose more dynamic. Often, background details would be softened or erased to make the main characters stand out more.
Or sometimes, he'd just decide he didn't like the whole cover scene that he had earlier approved so he'd ask if there was time to start over on a new design. Often, there was not. On my first visit to the Marvel offices in 1970, I saw Production Manager John Verpoorten bring some finished covers (inked and with lettering in place) to Stan for his okay. Stan wasn't thrilled with any of them and one in particular — which looked fine to me — seemed like a particular disaster to him.
Sol Brodsky, who'd previously held Verpoorten's job, later told me that Stan almost always had a little moment of fear about any finished cover, fretting it wasn't good enough. Sol thought the little fixes that would then be ordered were sometimes meaningless but he also thought that some covers were significantly improved by this process.
In the office that day as Stan looked at the covers Verpoorten had brought him, he asked if there was time to do a completely new one to replace the one he thought was so awful. Verpoorten said, "These have to ship in two hours" so Stan settled for ordering some minor alterations on each.
This was all very common. Another thing Stan would sometimes do would to was to "flop" the art to a cover making it into a mirror image. Below is the before-and-after of the cover of X-Men #14 drawn by Jack Kirby and Wally Wood. The mock-up at left shows how it would have looked if they hadn't reversed the drawing. The published version is at right…and you'll notice that no one thought to flip the "1" on the Sentinel's stomach.
Usually, the tampering — or improving or the decision to start anew — would be made after the cover was all inked and lettered and colored and ready to go but in the case of Thor #144, Stan apparently made the decision to scrap the first version when he saw Jack's penciled art. That is why it was never inked and why Jack wound up with the original. He just took it home that day.
A new cover sketch was designed, probably not by Jack, and he penciled it and then Vince Colletta, who was then the regular inker, inked it. If you click here, you can see the finished cover that they went with.
Yes, Jack was paid for the first version — or at least, he should have been. He drew what he was assigned to draw so he was entitled to be paid. If he'd drawn a cover not from an approved sketch and brought it in, Stan could have rejected it without paying him. But it's like if I hire you to draw a cow and you bring in a drawing of a cow and I look at it and say, "Fine but I've decided I want a drawing of a duck instead." I still owe you for the cow drawing I ordered. I need to pay you again to draw the duck. Jack drew two different covers for that issue so he was entitled to be paid for drawing two covers.
And there is no truth to the rumor that the first cover drawing was ditched because inker Vince Colletta looked at the pencil art and said, "No, I won't ink something that busy." That would never have been the reason for abandoning an already-penciled cover drawing anywhere if that was the scene the editor wanted on the book. Colletta might have asked for extra pay over his usual page rate to ink such a complex drawing and he might have gotten it. It would have been cheaper and faster to pay him a few bucks more than to pay Jack to draw a new cover that Vince was willing to ink.
Also, if that was the drawing the editor wanted on the cover, they could have given the job to another inker. John Verpoorten — a fine finisher of Kirby's work — was on staff so they could have had him (or Romita or Trimpe or some other staffer) ink it on company time. Staff artists did not receive one flat fee for their work, regardless of how long it took them. They were paid by the hour.
So, bottom line: Stan okayed a rough sketch of that scene. When he saw it all drawn up in pencil, he changed his mind and decided they could do better. You can decide for yourself if they did.
A couple more things you might like to know about that unused pencil cover. It remained in Jack's files for several years. In 1971, my partner Steve Sherman and I assembled a book of unpublished Kirby art called Kirby Unleashed and we decided to include that piece. Some of the pencil art had faded or gotten smudged, mostly at the top, so I asked Jack to darken it in since we'd be printing from the pencils. Instead, Jack handed me a pencil and said, "You do it!" So I nervously darkened in the Kirby "krackle" at the top of the drawing and some of the large black areas elsewhere. I did very little "art assistance" for Jack when I worked for him and it didn't get much more complicated than this.
Years later, Jack presented the pencil original to his friend, David Folkman who I presume still has it and will never part with it even at gunpoint. In 2000, someone arranged for Jack's favorite inker Mike Royer to trace and ink the drawing and if you click here, you can see a mock-up of the finished cover using the Royer-inked drawing. I think it's a much, much better piece of art but I don't think it would have looked as good on a 1967 comic book cover with 1967 printing. So I think I'm with Stan on this one.
