Search Results for: jack kirby

My old pal Andrew Paquette sent me a couple of questions about Jack Kirby. Here's the first one…

Did Kirby ever express a preference for his Marvel, DC, or earlier work? I ask because they are so different from each other. Lately, I've been buying copies of Popular Romance and Justice traps the Guilty. The stories and art are very interesting, but so different from the superhero comics that it is difficult to compare the two.

It made me wonder if the non-fiction nature of many of those titles (Headline Comics is another) was Joe Simon's influence, and Kirby didn't care what he was drawing, or if he did have a preference and was later disappointed that the non-superhero genres died out after Marvel hit the scene with his superhero creations.

First, I assume you mean Young Romance. One of the many fascinating things about Jack was that he loved all genres and among the zillions of comics he did, there weren't many he did not enjoy because of the content. How he was treated by the publishers and editors was another matter but I don't think you're asking about that kind of thing.

What I think he was happiest doing was the work where he could write and pencil and have the stories come out the way he wanted them. He really did not like a brief period in the seventies when DC had him drawing scripts by others, especially on Sandman, which he thought was a terrible comic.

Because of his background, he had a slight preference for war comics but beyond that, he was fine with anything as long as it came out roughly the way he wanted it to. Science-fiction, western, humor, romance, ghost comics, super-heroes…they were all pretty much enjoyable to him. Some were preferable at certain times because he thought one kind was more commercial and it made him happy to do a comic that sold well.

He was proud of the Marvel books of the sixties because he considered them so much his creation, albeit work that sometimes frustrated him because of things Stan Lee did. When I met him, I asked if he had a favorite story and he named "Mother Delilah," a story he'd done for Boys Ranch. Later on, his answer to that question was "The Pact," a story for New Gods. Here's the other question from Andrew…

This leads to another question: what was the difference between running his own studio at Prize and Crestwood compared to Marvel? From what I've read, I'm surprised he went to Marvel at all, though I'm glad he had the opportunity to create that stable of characters.

Jack did not go back to Marvel in the fifties because he wanted to. He went back there because it was the only place he could find that was then willing to buy work from him. He would have much preferred to have his own studio or be part of something like the Simon-Kirby operation but by that time, publishers weren't willing to do business on that basis. They all wanted the work created by writers and artists working directly for them under the supervision of in-house editors.

When I went to work for Jack in 1970, he had a fantasy — and he kinda knew it was a fantasy — that DC would let him produce his work for them on that basis. As it turned out, they wouldn't even let him control the coloring in California and they fought for the longest time having someone like Mike Royer letter and ink the work out here. They clung to the idea that the office created the comics and I think (and Jack thought) that was one of the reason sales kept going down, down, down.

Thanks for the questions, Andrew. If anyone else has any, read the box below…

Someone who signed their message "Comicspies" wrote to ask me…

In a 1974 radio interview with Jack Kirby, Jerry Connelly asked Jack what his influences were and he responded: "The masters in comics, certainly, are the ones in the newspaper field: Milton Caniff with Terry and the Pirates and Alex Raymond, who did Flash Gordon. There were the fellows who did the funny strips, too. They all influenced me because their product had such appeal."

Who were Jack's favorite artists who specialized either specialized in humor (like Walt Kelly) or both adventure and humor storytelling (like Segar)?

Elzie Segar — who for anyone reading this who doesn't know, did the Thimble Theater newspaper strip which was later renamed in honor of its main character, Popeye the Sailor — was the one Jack mentioned most often. He loved Al Capp's work, though not the man himself. He loved Billy DeBeck's Barney Google and pretty much anyone who was on the funnies page back in the thirties. I don't recall him ever mentioning Walt Kelly or anyone who came along in the forties or after except Charles Schulz. He did like a number of guys in comic books who combined humor and adventure like Jack Cole or Dick Briefer. (Briefer was a friend and he worked with Jack on some early comics.)

One cartoonist Jack sometimes named as an inspiration was Will Gould — no relation to Chester Gould, who did Dick Tracy. Will, who I knew through a brief telephone-only friendship, did funny strips in the thirties along with a hard-boiled detective comic strip called Red Barry. I think Jack favored Red Barry over the humor work but he admired the guy in both genres. Will was very flattered when I told him Kirby was a fan of the work he'd done long, long ago.

That's all that comes to mind. I wish I could give you more names but by the time I worked with him, Jack rarely looked at what other contemporary artists were doing. He respected anyone who created anything that was popular, especially if it was highly original…but I don't think he paid much attention to newspaper strips in the seventies…or even to most comic books unless there was a specific reason for him to read one of them.

Gary Cundall sent me this, inspired — I assume — by the photo I ran here yesterday…

Did Carl Barks and Jack Kirby know each other? If they did, were you ever around them when they were hanging out? Do you know what they thought of each other?

I just happened to be around at what I believe was the only time they met. It was at some Comic-Con International — don't ask me which one — and while Barks was not an announced guest, he and his wife showed up for a day and sat at a table where Bruce Hamilton was selling the kinds of things, including Carl's work, that Bruce used to sell. Carl was not mobbed because I don't think most people who would have killed to meet him knew he was in the hall so I was sitting there, talking with the Barkses.

Jack and Roz strolled by and I don't think I was the person who did the introductions. I think Bruce did that. Carl and Jack met and if I'd had a cell phone at the time, there would be a photo here of that moment. I would describe the interaction as cordial and mutually respectful. They were two men who wrote and drew comic books but very different comics for different publishers. They were about as far apart as two people could be and still be technically in the same profession and it wouldn't have surprised me if neither had ever read the other's work.

But they were both aware of the great reverence in which so many people held each other and that was pretty much all they had in common. So small talk was exchanged and each wished a long life and prosperity to the other and then Jack and Roz headed on to the table where Jack was stationed. That was that.

A lot of folks assume that everyone in comics knows everyone else in comics even though it's an industry where many people work alone in their own homes or studios and mail, FedEx or e-mail their work to the office. Even if they go to conventions, they don't meet everyone. At the very first meeting of C.A.P.S. in 1975, I introduced a writer and artist to each other. They'd worked "together" for 20+ years through an editor and had never actually met.

In the early days of conventions, it was customary to put all the professionals on one panel — there usually weren't that many around — and often, they were folks who'd never met or even worked for the same company. I moderated one where Gil Kane and Julius Schwartz — who had worked together a lot — got to talking about DC Comics and how it was run and such. An artist seated next to me whispered in my direction, "I have no idea what these guys are talking about." He'd drawn a lot of comics but he'd never worked for DC, didn't know anything about the people Gil and Julie were discussing. And then when I started asking him about his work for other houses, Gil and Julie were whispering to each other, total disinterested in anything he was saying.

Kirby and Barks knew of each other and each knew the other had loads of fans. That was about it between them.

Jack Kirby would have been 107 years old today but if he isn't with us, his influence still is. It's not just that characters he created or co-created are continued in comics and expanded into TV shows and movies. It isn't even that darn near everything he wrote and/or drew in comics keeps being reprinted, often in expensive editions which lovers of his work snatch up. It's that everywhere I look — and not just at comic conventions — I see his influence.

For years after he left us in 1994, I would say, "If he wasn't your favorite artist, he was probably your favorite artist's favorite artist." I should probably add another generation in there and say, "He was your favorite artist's favorite artist's favorite artist." And I should probably also point out that the writing was, to Jack, always vastly more important than the drawing. I have never met anyone who had so many ideas, let alone so many good ideas.

You can see how good he was in all those comics, all those reprints. What you may not see — though maybe you can — is what a wonderful human being he was. He was nice to almost everyone, even a few people he probably should have crushed like the bloodsucking mosquitoes they were. Everyone who was fortunate enough to meet him has a story of how approachable he was, how he always made time for others, how if you showed the slightest smidgen of creative ability, he would encourage you.

I love most of the people I've known in comics but Jack was in a class all by himself. That's me in the Red Skull mask in his studio in 1969. I was learning a lot from that man then and I knew it but it was a decade or two later than I began to realize that it was a lot more than I realized at the time.

Daniel Klos wrote to ask…

For much of his career, it seemed that Jack Kirby mostly used a six-panel grid in his page layouts. But when he returned to DC in the mid-1980s for issue 6 of that New Gods reprint mini-series, as well as the Hunger Dogs graphic novel, his page layouts became much more experimental, largely eschewing any underlying grid system. Did Kirby ever discuss this change and why he made it?

Yes. He said DC had asked him to saying that his simple grid layouts were "old-fashioned." He didn't like it but to make the company happy, he tried some different panel arrangements on some pages. I don't have an exact quote for you but he said (to me) something like, "A good artist can make the contents of the panels interesting. Anyone can divide the page into weird shapes."

From Steve Aldred comes this question…

I do have a question for you that I hope you can answer, it relates in a way to the question a few weeks back about Joe Kubert's covers for Jack Kirby's final Kamandi issues after he returned to Marvel. When Jack Kirby came back to Marvel in the mid 70's he was soon doing a lot of covers for them across most of their superhero titles.

Was this simply to let the wider Marvel readership know that Kirby was back at the company or was there another reason for it? As with Kubert's Kamandi covers, I never thought that they were the best of Kirby's work especially where he had been asked to draw some of the newer characters that he was obviously not familiar with.

Marvel had Jack doing covers because the folks in charge then — and this would have included Stan — felt that Jack was their best choice for the job. Simple as that. He did not design most of them. In most cases, he was given a sketch that had been generated in the office and approved there…something drawn by Marie Severin, Dave Cockrum, Al Milgrom or one of about a half-dozen others. When a cover featured characters that Jack didn't know, they'd send him reference — or at least, they were supposed to. He told me that often, the reference material was insufficient or missing altogether. And they were almost never for stories he knew.

I agree with you that these were not the best Kirby work. My admiration for Jack's skills is huge but I don't think he drew many memorable covers after about late 1967 when Marvel increasingly began giving him roughs by other artists. This was not long after Carmine Infantino took over as the guy in charge of covers at DC. Previously, each DC editor had supervised the designs for his or her comics, usually working with the artist who would do the finished art or at least, the pencils for the finished art.

There was some panic at DC around 1966 when Marvel was gaining in sales. Most of the folks in power at DC then thought the Marvel books were badly-written and badly-drawn — or at least, nowhere as good as the concurrent DC product. They had to come up with an explanation for why readers were increasingly opting for Marvel over DC and Infantino supplied one they could accept: Marvel's covers, he said, were simply more exciting.

DC's too often had the hero standing around uttering word balloons that described the premise of the story. Marvel's had the heroes in action. Here are two covers that were on newsstands in February of 1965. Which one do you think would attract more buyers?

That was why Infantino was brought into Management and assigned to design or at least supervise all their covers. In response, Marvel began having more and more covers designed in the office — this at a time when Kirby for personal reasons was trying to cut back his trips into town to the office.

So more and more, Marvel covers started with Stan Lee working with an in-house artist — most often then, Marie Severin — to generate a sketch that would be finished (usually) by someone else. As good an artist as Jack was, I don't think you got the best out of him by having him draw a cover that someone else had laid out…especially a cover for a story he hadn't read and in which he had no emotional involvement.

What he handed in was always workmanlike and professional but he just didn't have the same level of inspiration even when it was for a comic where he'd written and drawn the insides. Even in those cases, he usually drew the cover long after he'd finished the story and it had left his mind. Jack was always about the story he was doing now.

Also, I think that at the time — and this had nothing to do with Jack — comic book covers from most publishers were getting too cluttered with word balloons and blurbs and story titles and logos that distracted from the art instead of enhancing it. I don't recall many exciting covers by anyone in the mid-to-late seventies, a topic we've discussed at those "Cover Story" panels I moderate at comic conventions. As my amigo Sergio Aragonés has said, "If you need to put a lot of words on a cover, it's not a very good cover."

But I agree with you: I don't think Jack's covers during the period we're discussing were him at his best.

What I wrote here the other day about Jack Kirby doing layouts at Marvel in the sixties quickly brought a whole lotta questions. I'll start with this one from Paul Dushkind and also give some of the back story…

I'm surprised to read that Jack Kirby refused to draw layouts after a while. I knew that his workload got smaller as time went on. You've created the impression that he aspired to lay out for other artists later, when he was at DC. Can you elaborate on this?

It's pretty simple. As Marvel expanded their super-hero line in the sixties, they needed more artists who could draw super-heroes in the new style and who could work — as Stan was insisting everyone work on the comics he was ostensibly writing — from a rough plot. Except that by then, Jack was generally supplying all or most of the plots on the comics they did together.

Very few artists who sought work at Marvel then could do what Kirby and Ditko and just a few others did, which was to take one of Stan's rough plots — which could be as sparse as one or two sentences and have originated with the artist in the first place — and turn it into 10 or 20 pages of penciled art for which Stan could then write dialogue. Joe Orlando quit after just a few stories because he'd pencil the story out, bring it in and Stan would make him (he claimed) redraw half the story. There was nothing wrong with the pictures Joe drew. They were just the wrong pictures, Stan felt. He didn't like the way Joe had developed the story they'd discussed.

Joe quit because he felt what Marvel paid then wasn't sufficient for drawing a story and then redrawing half of it. Some of the other guys didn't work out from Stan's viewpoint. He wasn't happy with what Carl Burgos or Bob Powell handed in, for example, which is why those two men didn't stick around longer. A few other artists who were given a few pages to "try out" didn't even last to the end of those stories and their samples were not paid-for by Stan or published.

For about two years, Stan dealt with this problem by having Kirby "lay out" a story which meant Jack applied his formidable plotting skills to it too. Stan may have had trouble dialoging a story Powell penciled on his own but the results were better (and easier) when Kirby laid it out and Powell penciled over those layouts.

It also helped "teach" some artists how to pace a story Marvel-style and get in swing with the characters. When Stan asked Alex Toth to take over from Kirby penciling X-Men, Alex couldn't just jump in and do it. He was unfamiliar with the strip, the characters and the ongoing storylines…and also, Alex wanted to understand the kind of storytelling Stan was seeking. So at Alex's request, Kirby laid out Alex's first story…which turned out to be Alex's only story because he was not comfortable doing the kind of work Stan was seeking.

Jack didn't like doing this kind of work but he felt he was helping the company — he still felt that if Marvel succeeded, he would reap some of the financial benefits — and he was also helping artists who needed help. When John Romita (Senior) was assigned to take over Daredevil, he drew the first few pages of his first issue like the romance comics he'd been doing for DC Comics. That wasn't the kind of storytelling Stan wanted in his super-hero books so he called on Jack to lay out the rest of the issue and all of the next so Romita could learn on the job.

Kirby did a number of stories this way for The Avengers and The X-Men and for Hulk stories in Tales to Astonish, Captain America stories in Tales of Suspense and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Strange Tales. In a few cases, he veered more into complete penciling on key pages or the occasional panels.

But while he was always willing to help a fellow artist, Jack wasn't willing to do this forever for what he considered insufficient pay. He felt that to plot and layout a story was at least 50% of the important work on one of those pages — maybe more than 50% — but he was never paid close to that fraction. It was more like 25%. The publisher was unwilling to pay more for a penciled page that was laid-out by one guy and tight-penciled by another than he was for a penciled page that was wholly the work of one guy. And you couldn't pay Jack 50% of the money allotted for penciling and then expect anyone good to finish the art for the other 50%.

So Jack kept cutting back on his willingness to do such work and finally, after about two years, refused altogether. When he went to DC, he wanted to work with other artists but not in the same way, though we did experiment with one story for which Jack did layouts and Mike Royer did finished art. It was "The Psychic Bloodhound," which was intended for Spirit World #2 but which wound up being printed in Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion #6. It turned out to not be a good way to divide up the work or the money and it was never attempted again.

I received a few more questions about Jack's layout work and I'll get to them in the next few days.

Nick Stuart wrote to ask…

I've often read that at Marvel during the 1960s, Stan Lee deliberately crafted a house style for the artwork modeled on the work of Jack Kirby. In some instances, I've even seen people give the impression that there were a bunch of artists working at Marvel during that time who were nothing more than Kirby clones.

While Kirby's influence on the look of Marvel during those years is fairly evident, I also felt there was quite a bit of variety in the artistic styles of the Marvel artists of the time, more than was sometimes given credit for. To what extent do you feel other artists were told to "draw like Kirby", so to speak?

People get confused about this. The best way for me to explain this is to make clear that Stan did not tell artists to do work that a layperson would mistake for Jack Kirby artwork. He was not looking for forgers. What he did want was for everyone else to pick up on Jack's way of staging action: The "camera" angles, the way of cutting between long shots and close-ups, the techniques of making even scenes of two people standing in a room and talking interesting.

He wanted them to look at how Jack posed his figures and exaggerated emotions and anatomy; how he framed shots so that the characters related to one another in the same shot. If John was falling in love with Marsha and vice-versa, he didn't draw one panel of John and then another panel of Marsha so that their dialogue balloons could convey how each felt about the other. He drew them in the same panel with the proper body language and expressions to tell us how they felt about each other.

I remember Jack once giving a critique of the art samples of an aspiring artist. He said, "Your people never look at each other."

A number of artists came to Marvel after working for other companies — or Stan's in earlier times — where they were given a full script. In a full script, the writer decided how many panels should be on each page, what was shown in each panel and all the lettering — dialogue, captions and sound effects — had been composed. There were a number of variations in how the famed "Marvel Method" worked but they usually involved the artist, not the writer, deciding what to show in each panel and then the copy was written later.

Stan thought Jack was the master of this. You could look at one of his penciled pages with no lettering on it and understand, if not the plot then at least the dramatic tensions in the scene.

So to make clear: He didn't want his other artists to draw hands like Jack drew or faces like Jack drew. He wanted them to lay out the pages and tell the story the way Jack drew. Sol Brodsky, who had a lot to do with who drew what at Marvel in the sixties, told me that Stan would often turn down an applicant for penciling work by saying, "Too DC!"

That generally meant he thought their staging was dull. If he thought someone had promise, he'd either assign them to work over Kirby layouts, at least for a few jobs. After Jack refused to do that kind of work anymore, he'd tell them to study the way Jack "told" a story in pictures. Some got it, some didn't.

This came to me from John Parkinson…

I've tried to ask this question before but maybe it didn't get to you or you're not interested, but I'm dumb enough to keep trying.

When Jack Kirby returned to Marvel he didn't pick up books (with the exception of Captain America) he was once most identified with. He did do covers for those books though. So was he never offered say Fantastic Four or was he simply not interested in revisiting those characters?

If Jack had been allowed to do whatever he wanted then — this is when he came back in 1975 — he would have written, penciled and edited all-new books which did not crossover into other comics and he would have avoided characters that were under the creative control of others. He basically wanted to be left alone. A lot of this had to do with his experiences doing Jimmy Olsen for DC. The editorial office there was constantly criticizing the way he handled the established characters…and even one he created (Morgan Edge) once that character began appearing in other books.

Jack understood the power of the "Marvel Universe" concept having been a key architect of it. He just felt that he could make his strongest contribution at that moment by going to new places with new players, plus he also felt a lack of respect from some of the people he had to deal with on the Marvel editorial crew at the time. The less he had to engage with them, the better off he felt he would be.

Mostly to be a good sport/team player, he agreed to take on Captain America and, later on, The Black Panther. Those were not his choices but that's where Marvel — mainly Stan in this case — wanted him. Also, Jack did not want to displace anyone from their regular assignments. At the time, Captain America had no regular creative team assigned and later when he took on Black Panther, it was because Stan wanted to launch a new series in a new direction. So Jack wasn't bumping anyone off a job there either. He would have had he taken on Fantastic Four or Thor…and as I said, he really wanted to be left alone to do new books.

Joe Frank sent me this today…

Do you really get comments that too much of your blog is Kirby-oriented? To me, you don't "talk about Jack constantly" enough.

I got to chat with him in his later years but that, while a privilege, has a downside. I wasn't smart enough, when he was around, to inquire how he'd have tied up New Gods, OMAC and The Eternals. I was too laser-focused on the Fantastic Four.

That brings me to my question. You were around him for almost a quarter century. Were their any questions that now, in retrospect, you wish you'd have asked him?

Well, I wasn't around him for quarter of a century. From the time I met him until we lost him was 25 years but in the last decade or so, I saw him a couple times a year. I wish it had been more often because it was always educational and enlightening…and even if Jack got off a conversational journey that didn't interest me at first, it always did before long. I didn't feel this way when I was younger but now that I'm older, I wish we'd talked less about comics and more about his view of the entire world.

A lot of my views came not because I was accepting or rejecting some conclusion Jack had reached but because he asked questions and tossed out possibilities, thereby allowing the listener to make up his or her own mind. He just had ways of looking at people and at circumstances in a unique way…a way that no one else could have come up with. There were also things that Jack said to me that I didn't understand at the time and I think — note the emphasis indicating I'm not 100% certain — I understand now but I'd like to make sure.

But no, I can't think of anything I wish I'd asked him about comics. And if I'd asked him how he'd have tied up New Gods, OMAC and The Eternals, that might not have told me how any of those would have happened. I'm sure Jack would have given me answers but then when he got around to doing those issues, even if he'd done them the next day, he might have done something altogether different. That was one of the mind-boggling things about the man — the way he created story and art as a single act and was always revising what he did to replace good ideas with better ones.

He had an amazing brain and I'm glad I got to tap into it as much as I did. It would be sheer greed to long for more.

Much is being written online about the recent Stan Lee documentary and it has rekindled an old debate that many thought had been more-or-less settled. The family of Jack Kirby sure thought so. One of the sharpest comments I've read was written by Rob Salkowitz over at Forbes magazine. I'll quote just this much of it here…

It is no scratch on the creative imaginations of his collaborators to credit Lee with brand-building genius that helped turn those creations into something that echoed far beyond the confines of the comic book industry. Whatever virtues Ditko, Kirby and the others had as makers of awe-inspiring comics, shameless self-promotion was not among them, and that's what was required to catapult Marvel into public notice. It is also enough to cement the reputation of Stan Lee as one of the most significant figures in the history of American comics and American business.

But somehow it was never enough for Stan Lee to be known as a master marketer. He always fancied himself a creator and a storyteller, and never considered comics to be a big enough canvas for his ambitions. According to his biographers, he liked the limelight and needed the money. And having the avuncular and charismatic Lee, who was a career salaryman and never asserted personal claims to ownership over Marvel's corporate property, as the father-creator figure suited both his ambitions and Disney's agenda.

I would quibble with two teensy things Rob says in the above paragraph. Stan didn't like the limelight…he loved the limelight. Becoming rich was important to him but becoming famous was even more important…and he achieved it. Fame in and of itself didn't matter much to Kirby — he was too busy creating — and Ditko didn't even want his picture taken. But Stan, when he was surrounded by cameras and being offered money to sign his name, was just about the happiest human being on this planet.

And secondly, once Marvel largely dispensed with his services, he did make some claims about ownership of those characters. It was a bluff and most knew that but he did seek to gain some leverage by occasionally threatening that battle. And some of the investors in Stan's failed company Stan Lee Media (for which — full disclosure — I briefly worked) thought they were investing in a firm that would someday wrest Spider-Man, The Hulk and the others from Marvel…or at least receive compensation for their value.

And I would also add that even the best salesperson in the world can only do so much to promote an unremarkable product. Kirby and Ditko — and lesser but still vital contributors like Don Heck, Wally Wood, Bill Everett, Larry Lieber and others — gave Stan a remarkable line to sell. But yes, Stan does keep getting credit for what he didn't do instead of what he did.

Mitchell Senft sent me an e-mail with that subject: "How Kirby Worked" and then further asked…

Did he use any notes for the story at hand?

Did he breakdown a page either with thumbnails or on the board? If I recollect, I read somewhere that he he would just start at the top left of a page and start drawing.

I can't quite turn this into a question but I recently reread both his New Gods (the book, not the concept) and Eternals runs. The former struck me as having the rhythm of a monthly while the latter flowed much more smoothly.  Am I imagining something?  Was something going on that I've picked up??

Jack Kirby had an amazing story sense and it was sometimes hard to tell, when he suddenly started telling you a plot or a concept, if that was something he'd come up with at that moment or something he'd been carrying around in his head for some time.  I am absolutely certain that he could do both.  There was almost nothing put down on paper before he began composing a page he was drawing for publication.

Over the years, I've had dozens of people come to me and say, "Let's assemble a book of Jack's rough sketches and outlines and plot notes" and I have to tell them that there are almost none.  And the few things in the category that do exist were almost always produced because his publisher or editor insisted on seeing a "rough" or an outline.  If they hadn't demanded that, Jack would never have done one.

My then-partner Steve Sherman and I were sometimes used as a kind of "sounding board" for stories Jack wrote and drew when he went back to DC in 1970.  We'd sit in his studio next to his drawing table.  Jack would be sitting at the drawing table but not drawing as he told us the entire plot of the issue he was about to do next…and we'd make invaluable suggestions like, "That sounds great, Jack."

I would have loved to have given Jack an idea to make his story better but there was very little room for that.  What he told us was complete and it did sound great…so the few suggestions of ours that got in were pretty trivial. And one of our other big contributions was that at the proper moment — when we'd done whatever Jack asked us to do that day and he needed to focus on putting a story on paper, we'd leave. Steve and I should get a lot of credit for leaving. We were very good at it.

Jack would start committing his story to paper…and what he put down might have been pretty much what he told us. Or on our next visit when he let us read the story in pencil off the original art, we might have wondered how the heck he got from what he'd told us to what he then wrote and drew. If it was significantly different and we told him that, he was genuinely surprised.  He didn't know how he'd gotten there either.

He never wrote any sort of outline on paper for himself.  A couple of times, I wrote one down for him but only based on his ideas. When Jack did the first issue of Kamandi, Carmine Infantino (he was the head of DC at the time) wanted to see an outline first…I suspect so he could make some comments and then pretend he'd co-created the new feature. At least once or twice later on, he claimed he was the sole creator of Kamandi and when people ask me about that, I give this reply: "I did a lot more on that first issue than Infantino did and I don't think I deserve any kind of creator credit."

Basically, what I did was this: When Jack told us the plot of Kamandi #1, he had me take notes on it, then I went home and wrote up an outline which Jack then sent east for Carmine's approval. Once that was secured, Jack followed it pretty closely. As far as I could tell, the one bit of input that Infantino had was to insist on imagery of a wrecked Statue of Liberty — a fresh, clever idea if you'd never seen the movie, Planet of the Apes.

But outline or not, Jack worked from what was in his head. He would start roughing out sequences on the illustration board, designing with light figure placements, working out how the story would flow from panel to panel. He did a fair amount of erasing during this stage to get things the way he wanted. Then once he'd designed each panel lightly on the page, he would do the finished penciling right over his light roughs.

He did very little erasing in the "tightening" phase…and when he did, it was not because he thought the drawing could be better but because he decided that other things should be happening. If we were present, he might hand a page to Steve or to me and say, "Erase those three panels" because he'd decided he wanted something different in them.

He did not always start on page one. He'd start drawing sequences and then jump around and rearrange pages and fill in between those sequences.  Occasionally, he'd omit an almost-finished page here and there to arrive at the story he wanted to send in.  These were all pages where he knew roughly what each caption and word balloon would say but he hadn't written the copy in.  He would do that as the final step.

The line you read about how he'd start at the upper left hand corner and just draw from there is a line I said on a few occasions.  I was talking about him drawing one of those amazing double-page spreads he'd do.  It was like the drawing was all there already but in invisible ink which only he could see…and then as he went over those lines with his pencil, they became visible to everyone.

I hope this is the kind of answer you were seeking.  I'm not sure I completely understand the question about the New Gods having "the rhythm of a monthly" but a key difference between the work Jack did for DC then and what he did for Marvel when he went back there in '75 was that at Marvel, he was his own editor, deciding what should be in each issue.

At DC, he had the title of Editor and much latitude came with it…but Carmine Infantino had definite ideas of which of the many ideas Jack had told him should appear in each issue.  Left to his own devices, Jack would have introduced new characters and new concepts in a different order, perhaps dwelling more on one before introducing the next.  The character of The Black Racer, in Jack's mind, was a standalone comic unrelated to Darkseid and the Fourth World…but Infantino wanted it in there and he wanted it in New Gods #3 so Jack complied.

At Marvel, he got some direction — like, he was told they wanted a Hulk guest appearance in The Eternals — but he got less of that kind of order and he didn't have to comply as totally. In that case, he was able to make it a Hulk robot instead of the man/creature himself. Perhaps that kind of difference is the answer to your question.

Daniel Bonner wrote to ask:

I recall reading that Jack Kirby's Forever People was inspired by/influenced by/a tribute to the shootings at Kent State. Discuss, please.

Not "inspired by." The Kent State Shootings were on May 4, 1970. Jack had already written and drawn the first issue of Forever People not long before that…I would guess about a month before.

"Influenced by?" I don't think so. Jack thought the shootings were one of the most shameful acts ever committed by any government, American or otherwise…but Forever People was inspired by a bigger picture. Jack was acutely aware in the late sixties that "his" generation was slowly stepping (or being shoved) aside by a new generation. It was that way everywhere, including in comic books with the influx of folks like Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Gerry Conway, me and so many others.

I suppose you could say that his vision of the societal changes were influenced by Kent State but also thousands of other things. We talked a lot about what going on in the world then. I was going to U.C.L.A. during much of the time I worked for Jack and he was always asking me about the mood on campus, what seemed to matter to the students, etc. Jack also had a lot of young people visiting him in his studio along with his own kids.

And lastly, I don't think "tribute" is the right word to apply to Kent State, especially if you had Jack's reaction to it. I remember that he was pretty incensed at a statement that Al Capp made after the shooting; something about how the real "martyrs" at Kent State were the guys who fired the rifles. Jack fumed about that for a few days, then made some comment like, "Capp doesn't say those things because he believes them. He says them because they get attention."

Our second question is from Robert Grover…

I have been re-watching the '67 Fantastic Four Hanna-Barbera show and wondered if you ever discussed it with Jack Kirby. It's a fairly faithful adaptation of the comic, down to taking actual issues and using the characters, plots, some designs even. Knowing how the comic industry worked back then, work for hire, etc, it's extremely doubtful Jack received any sort of compensation for the use of his designs or stories.

Given what I've read of the man that must have been a sore point, but aside from the Captain America movie serial this is one of the first instances of his comic book work being adapted for another medium (yes, the Marvel Super-Heroes preceded it by a year or so, but those were such a bargain basement production by comparison they are best forgotten). Did the Fantastic Four give him any sort of gratification? I hope so. Sure, the cartoon is targeted for a younger audience, but it is recognizable from the source material and he is named in the credits. For a man working largely in isolation seeing your name on TV must have been an ego boost. Thanks in advance for sharing what you know.

We did talk about the show a bit…but only a bit because Jack couldn't stand to see things like that. You're right: He received no compensation from it…and to hear him tell it, some pretty rude responses when he suggested to Marvel management that such a thing might be in order. I don't think he received any gratification or ego boost from it either…just the feeling of being exploited and underpaid. I doubt he watched it much. Long after that show was on and off the air, I mentioned to Jack that Alex Toth had done the main design work on it and that came as news to Jack.

Dave Sikula sent me this easy-to-answer question about Jack Kirby…

Your discussion of Jack's work at DC reminded me of The Losers. You mentioned that Kamandi was a book that a lot of people think was some of his best work, but I felt like "The Losers" was wildly underrated. For me, it seemed like an incredibly personal comic (far moreso than, say, Sgt. Fury) that he was really pouring his own wartime experiences into.

From your timeline, I'd guess you'd already stopped working for him by the time he was doing it, but I wonder if you have any impressions of how it lined up with anything he might have said about his service. (I acknowledge here that, like a lot of WWII vets (such as my parents — who met on the hospital ship they were serving on — and father-in-law), he may not have talked about it.

You obviously never met Jack Kirby. If you had, you would have known Jack talked an awful lot about his World War II experiences…to the point where Doug Wildey, if he walked into a room and Kirby was there, would shout, "No World War II stories!" Anyone who was around Jack for any length of time heard them…and though I can't draw a direct line between any I recall and any story Jack did for "The Losers," I'm confident there was at least some connection between every issue and something that Jack actually observed or lived through. He was constantly revisiting his wartime life in wake-up-at-5AM-type nightmares.

Jack did twelve issues of Our Fighting Forces featuring "The Losers" and, Fourth World books aside, they're my favorite work he did for DC during that period. And it was especially impressive because it was a very bad assignment for him. Steve Sherman theorized that the folks at DC sat down and thought, "What book can we assign Kirby to that he'll absolutely hate doing?" I do not concur with this theory but there might have been a little of that.

It was, first of all, a book created and written previously by someone else. Jack didn't like handling or altering someone else's characters. Secondly, the "someone else" in this case was Robert Kanigher, a DC writer who was not shy about dismissing comics by others — especially Marvel's and especially Kirby's — as shit. Thirdly, Jack thought "The Losers" was a horrible name for a comic about a bunch of World War II soldiers and, fourthly, that this was a messy assemblage of a bunch of leftover characters who'd flopped in their own comics, thrown together for no visible purpose.

But it was an assignment and it was about World War II. So Jack gave it his all and his all was pretty good, I thought. Sales took a notable hike, so much so that when DC received the first reports, they upped the book from bi-monthly to monthly. When Jack left it and Kanigher returned and put everything back the way he had it before, sales dropped.

What I wish DC had done was to dump "The Losers," give the book to Jack and let him do something more autobiographical, the way they had Sam Glanzman doing those "U.S.S. Stevens" stories based on his own experiences in the war. That would have been, I think, even more wonderful.

Adam J. Elkhadem wrote me with two questions. The second one was about the ranks of the Merry Marvel Marching Society and I'll answer that here tomorrow. Here's the first one…

For years, I've read most of my Jack Kirby comics through TPBs, but have finally started reading them in the original staple-bound editions. I am blown away by how the color shows up on newsprint, especially in the Joe Sinnott-inked Fantastic Four issues. I was wondering if you had any information on who colored these issues. In some cases there are lots of forms and values dictated purely by color. Did Kirby and/or Sinnott play a role in these, or was it someone else (as you know, the colorists aren't among the four credited names at the beginnings of these classic comics, and I've never understood why).

Well, first I'll tell you why. The assembly line method via which comic books were created back then made it difficult to credit the colorist. The credits were lettered by, of course, the letterer. At the point in the process when the letterer was working on the pages, the writer and penciler had both done their work so they knew which names to put into the credit box for those functions.

They also knew who would probably be inking the story since that person was the next one to get the pages to work on…so they'd have that person's name lettered-in. At times, the story might wind up going to a different inker, in which case they'd change the inker credit, usually near the end of the process when the completed pages were being proofread and mistakes were being fixed or the editor asked to have some caption or word balloon changed.

But at the time the credit box was being lettered in, the story was several weeks from being assigned to a colorist. Often, they had no idea who'd wind up doing it so they just didn't bother putting in a credit or leaving space for one to be added later. Later on, the unfairness of that began to really bother people and around 1972, they began to add it in, usually during that proofreading phase.

Now then: The earliest Marvel super-hero comics were mainly colored by Stan Goldberg, who otherwise worked for the company drawing books like Millie the Model. He was the guy who decided the Hulk should be green. He colored most of the books there — not just those by Mr. Kirby — but there were occasional jobs by others. Sol Brodsky, who was the production manager then, told me he colored an issue or two of something now and then, and more than a few covers. He didn't remember specific issues and there are no written records so this information is probably lost to the ages.

It is almost certain that Joe Sinnott never colored anything for Marvel. Jack Kirby recalled coloring a few covers when they were in a jam but no one remembered which ones so, again, that info is probably lost. One thing to keep in mind: Marvel paid very little for coloring then so Stan Lee was not reticent, if the coloring on a cover didn't grab him, to say, "Let's have someone take another crack at that." So whatever covers Jack or anyone colored might have been recolored by someone else.

In the years 1961 to 1964, Marvel tried out a number of editorial assistants who didn't last…who worked there a few weeks and then were gone. It's likely that some of those folks colored something while they were around…but probably not lead stories or major books.

Then Marie Severin joined the staff. In interviews, Marie gave several different dates as to when that happened but I think it was late 1964 or early 1965. She probably colored a few comics on a freelance basis before going full-time for Marvel, whereupon she began to color most of what Stan Goldberg couldn't do, and she did most of the covers. She was also heavily involved in the design of the line art for those covers. As Marvel got busier, others eventually did a lot of the work. Some artists like Jim Steranko and Tom Palmer usually colored comics they worked on. Bill Everett did too, and colored a lot of stories he didn't pencil or ink, as well. He colored many of the issues of The Mighty Thor he inked over Kirby…but not all.

So the best answer I can give you is that Kirby's work at Marvel in the sixties was mostly colored by Stan Goldberg until Marie joined the staff, whereupon she handled a lot of it…and there were occasional jobs by Bill Everett, Sol Brodsky and others. And that may also be the best answer anyone will ever be able to give you.

Jack loved the way his work was colored at Marvel and used to cite Marie as the best colorist ever in comics. When he went to work for DC, he missed her and Stan G. And as far as DC's Production Department was concerned, Jack committed an unforgivable act of blasphemy when he told them he didn't like the way they colored his work. They thought the coloring at Marvel sucked and the coloring at DC was the best ever…and Kirby saw it in just the reverse.

Even though Jack was the editor of his DC books, he had trouble finding out who exactly was coloring them. But we know a lot of them were colored by Jerry Serpe, Tom Nicolosi and Tatjana Wood, and at least a few by Paul Reinman. Most of the covers at DC then were colored by Jack Adler, who was the head of DC's coloring squad. I interviewed Adler at Comic-Con in 2004…at least, I think that was the date. This was years after he'd clashed with Kirby and even years after Kirby had passed away but Mr. Adler was still shocked and somewhat angry that Kirby thought Marvel's coloring was better.