kirby: king of comics

Kirby: King of Comics - PDFDrive.comMarvel Comics
Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
Liam Flanagan (revised edition) Production Manager: Alison Gervais Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the 2008 hardcover edition: Evanier, Mark.
Kirby : king of comics / by Mark Evanier. p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8109-9447-8 (hardcover with jacket) 1. Kirby, Jack. 2. Cartoonists—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN6727.K57E93 2007 741.5092—dc22 [B] 2007016321
This is a revised and expanded version of the book first published in 2008.
ISBN for this edition: 978-1-4197-2749-8 eISBN: 978-1-61312256-3
Text and compilation copyright © 2008, 2017 Mark Evanier Introduction copyright © 2008, 2017 Neil Gaiman Cover design: Paul Sahre and E. Y. Lee
Revised cover design: Mark Evanier and Chad W. Beckerman Title type for revised cover: Todd Klein
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Marvel Comics
June 1944 Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
DC Comics
Harvey Publications
Prize Comics
Crestwood Publications
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I NEVER MET JACK KIRBY, which makes me less qualified than a thousand other people to write this introduction. I saw Jack, the man, once, across a hotel lobby, talking to my publisher. I wanted to go over and be introduced, but I was late for a plane and, I thought, there would always be a next time.
There was no next time, and I did not get to meet Jack Kirby. I had known his work, though, for about as long as I had been able to read,
having seen it on imported American comics or on the two-color British reprints that I grew up on. With Stan Lee, Kirby created the original X-Men, the Fantastic Four (and all that we got from that, the Inhumans and the Silver Surfer and the rest), and the Mighty Thor (where my own obsession with myth probably began).
And then, when I was eleven or twelve, Kirby entered my consciousness as more than the other half of Smilin’ Stan and Jolly Jack. There were house ads in the DC Comics titles I was reading that told me that “Kirby Was Coming.” And that he was coming to . . . Jimmy Olsen. It seemed the least likely title Kirby could possibly turn up on. But turn up on Jimmy Olsen he did, and I was soon floundering delightedly in a whirl of unlikely concepts that were to prove a gateway into a whole new universe.
Kirby’s Fourth World turned my head inside out. It was a space opera of gargantuan scale played out mostly on Earth with comics that featured (among other things) a gang of cosmic hippies, a super escape artist, and an entire head- turning pantheon of powerful New Gods. Nineteen seventy-three was a good year to read comics.
And it’s the Iggy Pop and the Stooges title from 1973 that I think of when I think of Jack Kirby. The album was called Raw Power, and that was what Jack had, and had in a way that nobody had before or since. Power, pure and unadulterated, like sticking knitting needles into an electrical socket. Like the power that Jack conjured up with black dots and wavy lines that translated into energy or flame or cosmic crackle, often imitated (as with everything that Jack did), but never entirely successfully.
Jack Kirby created part of the language of comics and much of the language
of super-hero comics. He took vaudeville and made it opera. He took a static medium and gave it motion. In a Kirby comic the people were in motion, everything was in motion. Jack Kirby made comics move, he made them buzz and crash and explode. And he created . . .
He would take ideas and notions and he would build on them. He would reinvent, reimagine, create. And more and more he built things from whole cloth that nobody had seen before. Characters and worlds and universes, giant alien machines and civilizations. Even when he was given someone else’s idea he would build it into something unbelievable and new, like a man who was asked to repair a vacuum cleaner, but instead built it into a functioning jet pack. (The readers loved this. Posterity loved this. At the time, I think, the publishers simply pined for their vacuum cleaners.)
Page after page, idea after idea. The most important thing was the work, and the work never stopped.
I loved the Fourth World work, just as I loved what followed it—Jack’s magical horror title, The Demon; his reimagining of Planet of the Apes (a film he hadn’t seen) with Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth; and even loved, to my surprise, because I didn’t read war comics but I would follow Jack Kirby anywhere, a World War II comic called The Losers. I loved OMAC, “One Man Army Corps.” I even liked The Sandman—a Joe Simon-written children’s story that Jack drew the first issue of, and which would wind up having a perhaps disproportionate influence on the rest of my life.
Kirby’s imagination was as illimitable as it was inimitable. He drew people and machines and cities and worlds beyond imagining—beyond my imagining anyway. It was grand and huge and magnificent. But what drew me in, in retrospect, was always the storytelling, and in contrast to the hugeness of the imagery and the impossible worlds, it was the small, human moments that Kirby loved to depict. Moments of tenderness, mostly. Moments of people being good to one another, helping or reaching out to others. Every Kirby fan, it seems to me, has at least one story of his they remember not because it awed them, but because it touched them.
I did not meet Jack Kirby. Not in the flesh. And I wish I had walked across that room and shaken his hand and, most important, said thank you. But Kirby’s influence on me, just like Kirby’s influence on comics, was already set in stone, written across the stars in crackling bolts of black energy dots and raw power, and honestly that’s all that matters.
— NEIL GAIMAN SEPTEMBER 2007 LONDON
P. S. In a perfect universe you would walk around a huge Kirby museum and stare at Kirby originals and also at the printed and colored versions of Kirby’s art, and Mark Evanier would stroll along beside you, telling you about what you were looking at, what it is, when and how Jack did it and why, because Mark is wise and funny and the best-informed guide you could have. He knows stuff. But this is not a perfect world and that museum does not exist, not yet, so you will have to settle for Mark Evanier on the pages of this book.
NEIL GAIMAN is a critically acclaimed and award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy short stories and novels, graphic novels, children’s books, and films. Among his many awards are the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, as well as the World Fantasy Award, four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, six Locus Awards, the Harvey Award, and the Eisner Award. He is the author of The New York Times bestsellers Stardust, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and Sandman. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.
CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN no. 4
October 1958 Art: Jack Kirby DC Comics
TALES OF SUSPENSE no. 14
February 1961 Art: Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
July 1962 Art: Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko
Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
October 1971 Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics
Art: Jack Kirby and Neal Adams Eclipse Comics
Self-portrait from Marvelmania International 1969
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer Color: Tom Ziuko
This was Mike Royer’s first inking assignment over Kirby pencil art.
PREFACE
JACK KIRBY DIDN’T INVENT the comic book. It just seems that way. It’s 1939 and he’s still a few years from establishing himself as one of the
most important, brilliant innovators of an emerging form. He isn’t even Jack Kirby yet. He’s Jacob Kurtzberg, from the Kurtzberg family on Suffolk Street in not the best part of New York. At age twenty-one he’s trying to do the most important thing he believes a man can do: provide for his family, bring home a paycheck. Nothing else matters if you don’t manage that.
Much of the work in comics is done in “shops”—cramped quarters where artists toil at rows of drawing tables. The money isn’t good, but it’s good for a young man whose neighborhood has yet to see evidence that the Great Depression is ending. It at least beats selling newspapers or several other alternatives he’s tried.
So Jacob joins the throng of young artists wandering the streets, all toting large black portfolios crammed with samples. Most of the samples are variations (or outright plagiarisms) of the newspaper strips that had initially moved each to pick up a pencil. Eventually, the young men all seem to wind up working for Victor Fox . . . at least for a few weeks, until something better comes along.
Legend has it that Fox had been an accountant for Harry Donenfeld, publisher of Detective Comics and Action Comics. One morning, the story goes, sales figures came in on the first issue of Action, which featured a new strip called “Superman” by Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster. Fox saw the numbers, quit his job, rented an office in the same building, and by close of day was hiring artists as the head of Fox Comics, Inc.
A great story. It’s probably not true, but it’s a great story. Fox is an old-time hustler/financier who’s spent years sprinting from one
dubious enterprise to another. Most of the early funnybook publishers are like that—hardscrabble entrepreneurs lacking both class and capital. What will turn some of them into multimillionaires—and, ipso facto, into legitimate businessmen—is if they get their fingers on a smash hit. Say, if someone sends them a Superman or if Bob Kane walks in with the beginnings of something called Batman.
Or if, in years to come, they hire Jack Kirby. Victor Fox will not be so fortunate, even though most of the great creative
talents will pass through his office, some at full sprint. At first, he buys stories from a studio run by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. After Eisner goes off and creates the Spirit, Fox sets up his own operation, placing ads in The New York Times classifieds to recruit a staff. His artists could work at home, but Fox feels that since he’s paying them, he’s going to experience the joy of treating them like dirt every day.
So they sit there, eight a.m. to six p.m. or later, filling up illustration boards —young men like Bill Everett (who would soon create the Sub-Mariner), Joe Simon (who, with Kirby, would create Captain America and dozens of other hits), and Charles Nicholas Wojtkowski (who had already created Fox’s anemic star super hero, Blue Beetle).
As they all race to finish at least three pages per day, Fox strides up and down the aisles with the posture of Groucho Marx, clutching his latest sales figures and muttering, “I’m King of the Comics! I’m King of the Comics!” Then he pauses at some artist’s desk, glances at work that as a former seller of junk bonds he’s eminently qualified to judge, and yells, “That stinks! Work faster, you son of a bitch!”
No one’s producing masterpieces . . . but then Fox isn’t paying for masterpieces. “I’d draw a big cloud and a teensy airplane and that was the panel,” Jake (soon to be Jack) would later recall. One time, he fills most of a panel by writing “Wow” across it, like a sound effect. Fox, pacing about, stops and asks, “What the hell is that?”
The young artist looks up at him and says, “That, Mr. Fox, is ‘Wow!’” Fox studies the panel for a few minutes, shifting the cigar from one side of
his mouth to the other. “I don’t get it.” “It’s part of the story,” Kurtzberg explains. Fox nods in understanding, then calls all the other artists in the place to stop
working and gather ’round Kurtzberg’s drawing table. “Jake here is going to tell you about ‘Wow.’ Go on, Jake. Tell them about ‘Wow!’”
Jake stammers out an explanation having to do with filling panels with energy and excitement, and how a word like “Wow” reaches the kids on their own level. And of course, all the artists understand that “Wow” is just Kurtzberg’s way of getting out of drawing a panel. Each of them nods, returns to his table, and immediately writes “Wow” across the next panel—no matter what’s supposed to be in there.
Fox is pleased. He’s not only publishing comic books, he’s publishing comic
books with a lot of “Wow” in them. Eventually, the King of Comics tires of getting up in the a.m. to let in the
artists. He calls his crew together and asks who among them was ever a Boy Scout. “I was,” announces Al Harvey, a production artist who would soon establish the comic book company bearing his surname. Fox hands him a key and tells him, “From now on, you open up.”
Thereafter, Fox breezes in around eleven to begin berating his staff. But each morning before he arrives, the one-time Boy Scout and other artists take turns imitating their employer, pacing between the drawing tables repeating, “I’m King of the Comics!” Forever after, Kurtzberg and Bill Everett would greet each other with that impression.
CUT TO: It’s the mid-sixties. Call it 1965. The Marvel Comics Group is publishing
The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The X-Men, among others. Jacob Kurtzberg has long since become Jack Kirby, the preeminent artist of action- adventure comic books. At the moment, he’s Marvel’s star illustrator and co- creator of a new Renaissance for the comic book business. He’s also the instrument of change for yet another catchpenny publisher who’s becoming wealthy. In this case, the firm is well on its way to becoming a multibillion dollar empire and a fixture of American popular fiction.
The shops long behind him, Kirby works at home and comes into New York City once a week to drop off pages at the Marvel offices. Less often, if he can manage it . . . because when he’s on the train he’s not drawing, and that’s what Kirby is still all about: providing for his family. He wants to do great stories and express himself and share his incredible imagination with the world, and all that is fine. But being a good provider is still Job One for him and always will be.
On one office visit he runs into Everett and they exchange Victor Fox impressions, a quarter century after the fact. They’re just discussing where to go for lunch when Editor in Chief Stan Lee walks up and shows Jack a new Bullpen Bulletins house ad. “I’m gonna give you a real buildup, Jack,” Stan says. “See here? I’m calling you the King of the Comics!”
Kirby and Everett fall over laughing. “No, no,” Jack protests. “Make Bill Everett King of the Comics!”
Everett will have none of it. “Jack is definitely King of Comics,” he argues. Lee sides with Everett, so Kirby is stuck forever with the nickname. For a long time this truly modest man is embarrassed by it. Eventually, so many are calling him “King” that he comes to accept it. Who knows? Maybe a little promotional gimmick will translate into higher take-home pay.
It is, of course, the perfect title for a book about Kirby, but Jack would have wanted everyone to know it was meant with a twinkle. Everything else about him was vested with power and planet-rocking explosions and cosmic energy and changing the world around him, leaving nothing the way he found it.
But the nickname? The nickname was only meant by Jack or accepted when it came with a twinkle. Always with a twinkle.
Marvel Bullpen Bulletins Writer: Stan Lee
April 1967 Marvel Comics
ONE
IN THE STREETS
“Super heroes have a way of arriving just when they’re needed and so did Kirby. Every time the comic book industry needed someone to kick it in the butt or in a new direction, along came Jack. He was like the cavalry with a pencil.”
— WILL EISNER, COMICS CREATOR
THE FUTURE JACK KIRBY was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, the son of Benjamin and Rosemary Kurtzberg, who resided on Essex Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Another brother, David, followed two years later, by which time the Kurtzbergs had moved to a slightly larger (but still cramped) Suffolk Street tenement house.
Their parents had migrated from Austria some time around the turn of the century. “My father had insulted a member of German aristocracy,” Jack recalled. “The German, who was an expert marksman, challenged him to a duel. My father knew he’d be killed, so he decided to emigrate. All the relatives chipped in for the tickets.” Benjamin, a tailor by trade, obtained intermittent employment in New York garment factories, often getting up before dawn to walk to work.
Even putting in relentless hours, Ben Kurtzberg had trouble making ends meet. “From the time I was old enough to deliver papers,” Jack recalled, “I was aware that the income was necessary. It was that way in all the families in our neighborhood. Whatever you could bring home counted.
“But I was terrible at selling papers,” he continued. “You’d have to go to this building and pick up your papers from the back of a truck. I was the shortest guy and the other boys used to run right over me.” He fared slightly better with an array of messenger jobs and sign-painting chores, but as each ended, he was back with the newsboys, jostling to claim his bundle. It was a metaphor for his life ahead.
The money helped the Kurtzbergs buy groceries, and his parents would allow
him a few nickels for his own entertainment and enlightenment. Enlightenment, mostly. Young Jakie, as most called him, avidly read pulps, eagerly followed (and copied) newspaper comics, and frequently spent all afternoon at the local cinema. As he later explained, “The pulps were my writing school. Movies and newspaper strips were my drawing school. I learned from everything. My heroes were the men who wrote the pulps and the men who made the movies. Every hero I’ve written or drawn since then has been an amalgam of what I believed them to be.
Above and following page Childhood sketches
Art: Jack Kurtzberg (age 17) 1934
Childhood sketch Art: Jack Kurtzberg (age 18)
December 28, 1937
“At times, I felt like I was being raised by Jack Warner. My mother would come and get me. She’d go to the doorman, and he knew which kid to drag out of the balcony. Even then, I’d plead with him, ‘Just let me see this next scene again.’ Those scenes still appear in my work.”
Jakie soon became a member of the Suffolk Street Gang. “Each street had its own gang of kids, and we’d fight all the time. We’d cross over the roofs and bombard the Norfolk Street Gang with bottles and rocks and mix it up with them.” Years later, in the Fantastic Four comic books, Ben “The Thing” Grimm —an obvious Kirby self-caricature—would fight a running battle with a mob called the Yancy Street Gang. The references to Jack’s childhood—and skirmishes with the gangs of his childhood—would be unmistakable.
Then there was the Boys Brotherhood Republic, one of many organizations of that era founded to put restless youths on the road to solid citizenry. Young Kurtzberg was already well onto that path but he signed up because, as he later put it, “It was a good place to make friends. In my neighborhood and with my height, I needed all the friends I could get.” Jakie and his new acquaintances launched the club’s mimeographed newsletter, The B.B.R. Reporter. It wasn’t much of a publication—the members had to practically beg family and neighbors to buy it—but it did feature the earliest published cartooning by the future Jack Kirby. (The staff photographer, Leon “Albie” Klinghoffer, became a lifelong Kirby friend . . . right up until 1985 when Palestinian terrorists hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro and executed a wheelchair-bound American tourist. The world was outraged at the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, and Jack was more outraged than anyone over the loss of his friend.)
A meeting of the Boys Brotherhood Republic. Jack Kurtzberg is at top right.
1935
1983 Art: Jack Kirby
Lettering: Bill Spicer
All his life, Jack Kirby wrote and drew what others wanted. Sometimes, it was a matter of an employer choosing to put out westerns or war comics. At other times, it was Jack deciding some subject was what the readers wanted and would buy. Rarely though did Kirby have the luxury of following his personal muse. There were personal scenes and moments of autobiography, but they were generally confined to the subtext.
In 1983 a man named Richard Kyle decided to invert the process. Kyle, one of the “founding fathers” of comic book fandom, was operating a bookshop in Long Beach, California. It had been one of the first in the nation to feature contemporary (as opposed to back issue) comic books prominently, and to import foreign efforts. Kirby, an occasional patron and in-store guest, heartily encouraged the business. That was where the industry was headed, he predicted.
Kyle was also dabbling in publishing, resurrecting the defunct pulp adventure title, Argosy. Having heard Jack speak for hours of his childhood, Kyle decided to commission a story—not a super-hero story or a war story or any particular genre. Just a story, based on any of Kirby’s many anecdotes. He also suggested something then unprecedented: printing from the pencil art without an inker coming between Jack and the audience. Kirby agreed and produced “Street Code,” a tale that instantly supplanted all that had come before as the personal favorite of both its creator and, especially, his wife Roz. She kept the double-page spread framed and on her wall where she could see it often, especially after Jack passed away.
His eyes were troubling him at the time. There would be little Jack Kirby art after, and sadly no opportunities to commit similar memoirs to paper and panels. Still, there was that one story . . . and though his Argosy didn’t last long on the newsstands, Kyle never regretted the investment. He—and we—will always have “Street Code” to show for it.
When he wasn’t reading or fighting, Jakie was drawing the visions he saw in his head. Many came from the newspaper strips he came to love and follow. And when he didn’t have paper, he’d draw on whatever was around: “I’d get the Daily News and the Journal,” he recalled. “Sometimes, we’d get them out of the neighbors’ trashcans, if they hadn’t been used to wrap fish. I’d read Barney Google and Jiggs and Maggie, and then I’d sit down and draw Barney Google and Jiggs and Maggie.” As major influences, he would later cite Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, and Hal Foster, along with editorial cartoonists like C. H. Sykes,
“Ding” Darling, and Rollin Kirby. For a time, he really wanted to be Rollin Kirby but would ultimately settle for the surname.
“I’d doodle on the floor of the tenement. I’d stay there all day until the janitor came in and found me and beat the hell out of me.” His parents finally realized that the lad was not about to stop drawing and, though strapped for cash, they began buying him large pads of onionskin drawing paper. Jakie filled each tablet so rapidly that they began to ration them.
With parental approval, he dropped out of school, just shy of the twelfth grade. That was how critical it was to the family to have that weekly paycheck coming in. He would traipse around Manhattan with art samples, praying to land something that paid before his father ordered him to forget about drawing and apply at some factory.
By now, Jacob had become Jack. At least, everyone outside his immediate family was calling him that. He could feel himself changing in other, more meaningful ways. “I wanted to break out of the ghetto,” he recalled years later. “It gave me a fierce drive to get out of it. It made me so fearful that in an immature way, I fantasized a dream world more realistic than the reality around me.”
He may also have fantasized the tale of his one day at Pratt Institute, a story he told often in later years. Details changed with each telling, but essentially involved him landing a few minor illustration jobs—minor in both importance and salary. These jobs, he said, turned around his father’s attitude about there being money in drawing. It was arranged for Jack to enroll in the famed art school, but the very next day Ben Kurtzberg lost his latest tailoring job, and his son had to quit art school.
With or without a day of Pratt on his résumé, Jack continued searching for work. For a time, he and his father took on a pushcart concession, dragging a wobbly wagon to outlying areas of Manhattan to sell day-old baked goods. Jack decorated their “storefront” with hand-painted cartoons and, as he later explained, that paid off: “The other vendors saw them and asked if I’d paint signs for them, which I did. I made more money painting signs than hauling the pushcart around, but either way it wasn’t much.”
Finally, he found work drawing. Well, not exactly drawing, but it was near people who did.
In the spring of 1935, Jack answered a newspaper ad for artists. It led him to the heart of New York’s Times Square and the Max Fleischer animation studio, producers of the Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. There, Jack started at the bottom-feeding job in the house—opaquing cels. It paid poorly, the work was
uncreative, and Jack didn’t get along with his bosses. “Too cocky, too eager to move up” was the rap on him. Cartoon studios expected you to starve for years while you learned your craft and advance to the good positions over time.
Young Kurtzberg couldn’t wait. He insisted on auditioning over and over, practically every week, for the next rung up . . . and in record time, he did advance to clean-up work. Then it was on to assistant animating, another position that didn’t pay well and involved little creativity. In animation, you drew what you were told, copying other artists’ drawings and working in other artists’ styles on stories and characters you didn’t create. The whole oppressive factory atmosphere further convinced him he might be fighting his way up the wrong ladder.
The Max Fleischer Studio, located at 1600 Broadway near Times Square in New York. Kirby later called it, “A great place to get out of.”
One of young Kurtzberg’s try-out drawings for an assistant animation job on Fleischer’s Popeye cartoons. The first cartoon he worked on in that capacity appears to have been “Clean Shaven Man,” which was
released in February 1936.
The rumors solidified those feelings. Word was that the studio might go on strike . . . or to avoid a strike, the Fleischers might up and move the whole thing to Florida, a right-to-work state. The latter was what happened, but by that time Jack Kurtzberg had departed.
While making the rounds, he’d met a man named H. T. Elmo who operated the Lincoln Features Syndicate, an outfit that sounded more impressive than it was. Seeking escape from the Fleischers, Jack bombarded Elmo with samples and landed a position with a meager salary—less than what he’d made drawing Popeye—but with a scale of lucrative-sounding bonuses if his output boosted the syndicate’s receipts.
It was a job drawing comic panels for syndication, though just barely. Lincoln offered low-priced wares to papers that either could not afford the product of larger syndicates, or who operated in cities where larger papers had locked up all the popular strips. To this end, Elmo paid low fees and instructed his artists to replicate what the big boys were selling. Can’t get Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for your newspaper? Then why not try our Curious Customs and Oddities? Until Kurtzberg came along, what Elmo offered were pretty much the exact same features as the majors but without the quality.
To maintain consistency as artists came and went, and to make Lincoln seem more professional, each feature carried a permanent, spurious byline. “Brady” illustrated Our Puzzle Corner and “Lawrence” was responsible for Laughs from the Day’s News!, but neither artist existed. One feature—a panel of medical facts called Your Health Comes First—was signed “Jack Curtiss,” a name Kirby would use on several early projects, including many of the political cartoons he drew for Lincoln.
For Jack, it was a period of many firsts, chief among them the first time he saw his comic art receive professional reproduction. It was also the first of many instances where he’d look at his employer—at the only job he was then able to secure—say, “I’ve got to build this place into something,” and throw himself into the task.
It was his spin on the American Dream: You make your boss rich and he’ll take care of you. All Jack’s life he believed in that, no matter how many times the bosses got rich and he didn’t.
LAUGHS FROM THE DAY’S NEWS! 1936
Art: Jack Kirby Lincoln Features Syndicate
Political cartoon 1939
Art: Jack Kirby Lincoln Features Syndicate
Night and day he labored—a slave for Lincoln, producing more work than Elmo thought humanly possible. Most of the time, Jack wound up drawing at home in the Kurtzberg family flat, working on the kitchen table as his mother scurried around him, cooking and cleaning. Often, she’d be urging him to clear the table so she could set it for dinner, and he’d be pleading for another five minutes so he could finish one more panel. “It was even noisier there than at the Lincoln offices,” Jack recalled, “but at least at home there was someone to bring me soup.” The kitchen seat seems to have been a source of comfort to him. In later years, when he could easily have afforded a more conventional artist’s setup, he often opted for a straight-backed wooden chair, not unlike those from his mother’s kitchen.
Jack was so prolific that Elmo decided to try marketing several daily strips, all drawn by Kurtzberg in different styles and under different names. Jack Curtiss drew The Black Buccaneer, a swashbuckler strip. There was also “Cyclone” Burke by “Bob Brown.” That one was a cross between Smilin’ Jack and Buck Rogers. He even went back to drawing Popeye in a fashion . . . a knockoff by “Teddy” called Socko the Seadog.
Jack loved the diversity of the job as he vaulted from world to world, spending his mornings drawing pirates and his afternoons in outer space. He especially enjoyed doing political cartoons. As busy as he was, he always took out time to follow the news and to formulate strong, often prescient opinions. He was the first of his crowd to proclaim that a war against that Hitler fellow was in America’s future.
But he sure didn’t love the take-home pay. Elmo was unable to place most of the strips for long or at all, and not one of the promised bonuses ever materialized. It was yet another first in the life of Jacob/Jack Kurtzberg/Kirby: He could write, he could draw, he could create the best comics out there with a volume and speed that stunned everyone. But he couldn’t seem to make a deal that would turn his glorious creativity into great take-home pay. Either he’d work for men who didn’t know how to exploit what he gave them, or for men who did and wouldn’t share. Eventually, Elmo started downsizing and Jack, while continuing to draw the features that survived, redoubled his efforts to find someplace else to work.
But where? The top-end syndicates were impossible to crack, and the low- end ones like Lincoln paid close to nothing. There had to be some other place a guy with Jack’s imagination could go and get paid for writing and drawing comics . . .
And there was. The place was those new things they were selling on
newsracks and in candy stores: comic books. These comics started as reprints of newspaper strips. Someone would repaste
the panels—not always in sequence—and the publisher would offer sixty-four pages in color for a dime. The magazines were so successful that all the popular strips were quickly locked up. That’s where all those aspiring cartoonists with the portfolios came in handy.
The work Jack did for Lincoln Features Syndicate was signed with a wide array of names, some of which were originated by others. In later years he remarked, “I was not only creating characters to draw, I was
creating the guys who drew them.”
Samples of Kirby’s strips for Lincoln Features. Even Jack wasn’t sure which of these actually made it into newspapers. 1936–1939
ACTION COMICS no. 1
June 1938 Art: Joe Shuster DC Comics, Inc.
If you wanted to publish comic books in the late thirties, you couldn’t get the rights to Wash Tubbs or Jungle Jim. What you could do was hire, for example, those two kids from Cleveland, Siegel and Shuster, to whip up the adventures of their new creation, Slam Bradley, just for comic books. Slam was just different enough from Wash Tubbs to not be actionable. Or you could pay young Bob Kahn (who’d later change his name to Bob Kane) a few bucks a page to draw his Jungle Jim facsimile, Clip Carson. Both appeared in magazines from the company that would soon be known as DC Comics.
None of the first comic book artists could match Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon for anatomy or Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant for sheer brilliance of drawing, even when tracing them directly. But many of the artists could tell a quicker, punchier story in pictures . . . and their work, designed for the comic book page, seemed more organic. Stories weren’t reassembled from daily strips, and therefore weren’t endlessly recapping what someone said six panels earlier.
The form hadn’t quite found itself. No one had yet really thought how to design a comic book page in any way other than to replicate the reconfigured newspaper reprints. But then, Jack Kirby hadn’t started drawing comic books yet.
He did in 1938, arriving at the studio of Eisner and Iger about the same time the first issue of Action Comics was arriving on newsstands. It featured that new strip Siegel and Shuster had created about a guy who could leap tall buildings in a single bound and jumpstart an entire industry . . . Superman. Jack would later call it, “The moment I knew comics were here to stay.”
The Eisner-Iger shop packaged comic book material for several publishers, some overseas. Jack felt instantly at home in the surroundings, and especially with the page format. Newspaper strips were small and confining, and they advanced their storylines in halting baby steps. Then as later, he thought in big pictures.
Eisner-Iger was a great place to learn. Kirby and the other artists swapped pointers, critiques, and ideas. There was also much to be gleaned from Will Eisner who, though only six months his senior, seemed like an adult and a solid role model.
Eisner was an elder statesman of the industry, having been in it for almost two years. Later, when he went off to write and draw The Spirit as a comic book section for newspapers, he’d be the other great innovator of the form—the guy besides Kirby leading the way, making comic books different from strips. When Jack first met Eisner, he was more impressive as a businessman. He had an office. He had a staff. He didn’t pay very well but he’d figured out the money
end of comics for himself, a knack most artists (not just Jack) would never quite master.
There was instant mutual respect. Eisner envied Jack’s feisty determination and thought the man drew like he talked. He was powerful and direct, but also unique and quirky. There was envy of how Kurtzberg would attack a page, producing exciting visuals no matter what the storyline . . . and follow with another page and then others, all at an amazing clip. And he was so confident. If you asked Kurtzberg “Can you handle this?” the answer was “Yes” before he’d even heard what it was you needed him to handle. “Eight pages in a day? Sure, I can do that.”
THE DIARY OF DR. HAYWARD JUMBO COMICS no. 2
November 1938 Art: Jack Kirby Fiction House
Will Eisner Kirby called him, “My friend, teacher, and boss—not in that order.”
1941
Jack envied Eisner’s skill at assembly, his ability to run a company . . . even the way he dressed. Later, like everyone else, he would envy The Spirit. “The best comic of the forties,” Jack called it. “No question.”
Eisner and Iger ran a service called Universal Phoenix Syndicate that mainly supplied a British comics magazine called Wags. For them, Jack drew three features: The Diary of Dr. Hayward by “Curt Davis,” Wilton of the West by “Fred Sande,” and The Count of Monte Cristo by our old friend “Jack Curtiss.” The material was also seen in America in Jumbo Comics, published by Fiction House.
Off Jack went to other houses, showing samples, pitching new ideas. One publisher, just getting his first issues together, commissioned gobs of work, promising a high rate. Jack spent a month handing in pages, being assured that the financing to pay him was there. It was always just another few days before there’d be checks.
Of course, there were no checks . . . just, one day, an empty, hastily vacated office and no trace of the “publisher” or all the work Jack had done. In later years, when a script called for him to draw a scene of raw, agonized anger, it would be a handy moment to reflect upon.
Still, he never lost heart; not for a second. His Wilton of the West pages, shown at the Associated Features Syndicate, got him the job of producing a Lone Ranger imitation dubbed Lightning and the Lone Rider. Trying to sound like a cowboy star himself, he signed the strip “Lance Kirby.”
Lone Rider debuted in papers on January 3, 1939, to limited success. The first storyline was set in the old west, and then, without explanation, the continuity jumped to the present day. Didn’t help. The syndicate decided maybe Kurtzberg was the problem and replaced him with Frank Robbins, who couldn’t do anything with it either. (Robbins’s Johnny Hazard, much admired by Jack, would later become one of the longest-running newspaper adventure strips.)
All over New York, Kurtzberg scurried, trying to find someone to buy his artwork and ideas. He heard that Bob Kahn, an artist he’d met at Eisner-Iger, had sold Harry Donenfeld’s company a new strip called Batman. So Jack tried over there, only to get the same answer he heard so often: “Sorry, we have all the material we need.” Finally, at the suggestion of some other artists, Jack did what they all did sooner or later, usually sooner. He went over and enlisted in the sweatshop of Victor Fox, King of the Comics.
“They’d hire anyone over there,” Bill Everett once explained. “They didn’t even look at your samples. The mere fact that you had samples meant you were probably a good enough artist to work there.” Everett only lasted a few weeks,
but Jack was on staff for months, many of them spent drawing a lackluster newspaper strip about Fox’s star attraction, the Blue Beetle. It was the first super hero he ever drew and easily the dullest, but one has to start somewhere.
BLUE BEETLE Syndicated newspaper strip
January 1940 Art: Jack Kirby
Fox Features Syndicate
Art: Jack Kirby Associated Features Syndicate
Fox paid low but the money was there, what there was of it. It was a place to get out of, and Jack tried like hell. At nights, he’d produce pages of The Solar Legion, a comics feature he’d sold to an entrepreneur named Bert Whitman who, in turn, sold it to Tem Publishing. Then Jack would put in a sixty-hour week working for “the King.” When Fox hired Joe Simon to supervise the writers and artists, the new editor was instantly impressed with Kurtzberg’s productivity.
Like Eisner, Simon was another seasoned veteran of the comic book industry. He’d been in it more than a year in fact, mostly drawing comics for a shop called Funnies, Inc. But before that, he’d worked as a newspaper art director, a photo retoucher for Paramount Pictures, and as a magazine illustrator, so he’d been around. He knew how to do comics, too. Simon even looked at an artist’s samples before he’d hire him.
Side by side, they made a most unusual picture: Simon was 6'3" and weighed in at 150 pounds. Kirby weighed about the same but was almost a foot shorter.
Joe was four years his senior and unlike Jack in many ways but like him in others, starting with their fathers’ professions: both tailors. Simon would later explain, “One of the reasons Fox hired me was because I was wearing a very smart suit that my father had made me. That was where Jack was at a disadvantage. My father made suits, but his father only made pants.”
Simon didn’t mind that Kurtzberg was moonlighting from Fox. How could he? He was moonlighting himself, doing a comic for Novelty Press called Blue Bolt, starring a space hero he’d created while at Funnies, Inc. In fact, Joe was way behind on his deadlines, and since Jack was so fast and eager for extra work . . .
In Blue Bolt, you see the team begin. The first story, done before he met Jack, was all by Joe. The second, published in an issue cover-dated July 1940, is signed by Simon alone, but some of the pages within were by Jack. By the fifth story, they’re clearly working on the same pages—mostly Jack penciling, Joe inking—and the first page is signed “by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.”
Kurtzberg was Kirby, now and forever. The change was no big deal for Jack, and it certainly wasn’t because he wanted to conceal his Jewish heritage— though if you wanted to see steam come out of his ears, suggesting that would make it happen. It was just a desire to sound like a professional. “Kurtzberg” didn’t sound like a famous writer and artist. “Kirby,” he thought, did.
Simon and Kirby. It had a nice sound to it. As a team, they were a perfect fit. Joe was a good artist, but Jack was better .
. . not only better than Joe but better than just about anyone. At least, Jack was faster and more willing to park his keister at the drawing table for long,
marathon stretches. Then again, Jack didn’t like to ink and Joe didn’t mind it. Joe was also a genius (Jack’s opinion) at designing covers and opening pages, and making the product look professional.
Not that there was ever a finite division of labor. Sometimes they swapped functions and there would be plenty of jobs where neither man could tell quite where the other left off. To the eternal question of who did what, Jack had a simple answer: “We both did everything.”
True enough, but there was one area where Simon truly outstripped his partner—the business side. Joe knew when to stand and when to advance. He left Fox, his tenure having lasted an arduous three months, and set up shop in an office on Forty-fifth Street. Immediately, he was landing new accounts and urging Jack to come be full-time with him. No, said Jack. As Simon would explain, “He was making a lot more money with the work he was doing with me, working evenings and weekends, but it was all freelance. The Fox paycheck was steady and guaranteed, and he couldn’t bring himself to gamble on the freelance work being steady.” This was in spite of all the work they did for Novelty Press and Prize Comics and for the new company Al Harvey was starting up.
Simon was, like Eisner, that rarest of talents—an artist with some acumen. He could read a contract and negotiate good terms . . . skills in which Kirby was worse than merely deficient. More important, Simon knew how to converse with publishers, speak their language, and gain their trust. When Victor Fox met him, he’d hired Joe on the spot as his editor in chief. Soon after, Simon met with a publisher named Martin Goodman and was promptly offered the same title at an even better salary.
Goodman was of a breed rapidly approaching extinction: He was a publisher of pulp magazines. “Martin believed he had his finger on the pulse beat of the country,” recalled Don Rico, one of his later editors. “From where I sat, he was just a guy who knew how to shovel product onto the stands and make a buck. He usually arrived on the tail end of a trend. Martin got into pulps just as the pulps started to lose popularity.”
In the summer of ’39, Goodman’s line of pulps was in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission (he’d snuck in reprints without labelling them as such), and he was desperate for something else to publish. Hearing that comics were the coming trend, he issued Marvel Comics no. 1, its contents prepared by Funnies, Inc. Cover-featured was a fiery, crime-fighting android named the Human Torch, created, written, and drawn by Carl Burgos. Equally exciting was the Sub-Mariner, an undersea antihero conceived and rendered by Bill Everett.
Goodman’s line went by many names, of which Timely Comics was the
most common. He soon added a second title—Daring Mystery Comics, which featured work by Joe Simon, mostly on a strip called The Fiery Mask. Then Goodman, eager to cut Funnies, Inc. out of the loop, hired Simon directly. The deal seemed like a good one, including profit-participation on whatever new books he launched. Joe offered to share it with Kirby. Jack liked the terms but still couldn’t bring himself to leave whatever feeble security the weekly pay from Fox represented.
Joe needed Jack as much as Jack needed Joe, so it was arranged for Goodman to pay Jack a regular salary. For its time, it was a pretty good salary, and when Goodman wondered, Why so high?, Simon assured him: Kirby was great and would produce so many pages, the weekly guarantee would seem like a bargain.
Jack had what he wanted. He joined Simon and from then on, for the next sixteen years, they’d work together. Until very near the end, only a little thing like World War II would separate them . . . and even then, not for long.
CHAMPION COMICS no. 9
MARVEL COMICS no. 1
CAPTAIN AMERICA no. 9
Marvel Comics
TWO
PARTNERS
“The team of Simon and Kirby brought anatomy back into comic books. Not that other artists didn’t draw well . . . but no one could put quite as much anatomy into a hero as Simon and Kirby. Muscles stretched magically, foreshortened and shockingly. Legs were never less than four feet apart when a punch was thrown. Every panel was a population explosion—casts of thousands: all fighting, leaping, falling, crawling . . . speed was the thing. rocking, uproarious speed.”
— JULES FEIFFER, THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES
THE MONDAY MORNING AFTER he left Fox, Jack was in the Timely offices producing pages for Daring Mystery Comics and proving Simon right about his skill and speed.
The first new comic he and Joe cobbled up for Goodman was a fast flop: Red Raven, an anthology fronted by a flying hero with that name. Still, the one and only issue was notable for two backup stories Kirby seems to have done without Simon. Comet Pierce was another Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers clone, but Mercury was something new—the tale of a god walking the Earth, interacting with mere mortals. It was a theme Kirby liked well enough to return to again and again for the rest of his career. After Mercury, he waited an entire month before he used it again . . . in Marvel Boy, a strip for Daring Mystery Comics.
Next came The Vision, which appeared in Marvel Mystery Comics. The Vision was an unearthly being who traveled between dimensions, usually materializing in billows of smoke. Comics historian Ron Goulart later described the character thusly: “He never smiled and had no eyeballs. A staunch pessimist, he would end each caper with a gloomy soliloquy, such as ‘The world seethes with terror and evil! It is time for me to hurry to where I am most needed!’ All in all, not an easy guy to warm up to.”
Where did that idea come from? Kirby would offer this explanation: “Joe and I used to sit around with these big cigars. The room was always full of smoke, and one day we decided to write the smoke into a story.”
But something else was in the air—the mounting fear that the United States was heading for war. “Writing superhero comics,” Simon recalled, “we were always looking for that great villain. It was becoming hard to think of a better villain than Adolf Hitler.” The most natural thing in the world was the creation of a hero who could, as he would on his first cover, punch der Führer in the face.
RED RAVEN no. 1
Marvel Comics
January 1942 Art: Jack Kirby Marvel Comics
Simon would later claim to have had the initial notion for the star-spangled hero and to have worked out the format and costuming before Kirby was involved. Jack would recall contributing from the outset. Either way, Simon was soon marching into Goodman’s office with sketches and a pitch that extolled the glories of patriotism. Kids on the street, he told the publisher, were already playing soldiers, firing pretend weapons at a pretend Hitler. Why not put that into a comic book? Goodman saw the spiritual, if not the economic sense of it all. He’d take the unprecedented gamble of starting Captain America in his own title.
But with things so volatile in the news, it had to get to press in a hurry. Simon wanted to call in a whole squad of artists to draw it, but Kirby, with his usual “I can do anything” attitude, insisted he could pencil the whole book in the allotted time. Joe was skeptical, but he allowed Kirby to go ahead.
“I was lucky I did,” he later remarked. “The other guys would have been fine, but there was only one Jack Kirby.” Simon pitched in with a little penciling, and he and every artist he could round up did the inking. The result was one of the most exciting visual experiences to date in comics.
Captain America wasn’t the first comic book hero to dress like Betsy Ross had color-coordinated his wardrobe. The Shield, a product of the MLJ company, preceded him by more than a year. But the Shield didn’t have what Captain America had, which was Simon and Kirby busting clean through the panel borders and right off the page. It was the book other publishers would wave at their editors and ask, “Why don’t our comics look like this?” And did it ever sell.
Of course, the timing helped. The first issue reached newsstands on December 20, 1940. Just nine days later in a fireside chat, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the U.S. of A. that war was imminent and that America must be “the great arsenal of democracy.” If ever there was the moment for a patriotic super hero, that was the week.
SHORTLY AFTER THAT FIRST issue was sent off to press, Joe and Jack found themselves involved with a rush job on another Captain. Fawcett Comics had a new super hero, the creation of writer Bill Parker and artist C. C. Beck. “Even then,” Kirby would later recall, “everyone had the sense that this might be the character who could knock out Superman.” The concept was simple but effective. A young, fresh-faced newsreader named Billy Batson had only to utter the magic word—“Shazam!”—and a bolt of lightning would transform him into the heroically empowered figure of . . . Captain Marvel.
The good Captain had appeared in Whiz Comics to great response and the Fawcett brass wanted a whole issue of him on the stands ASAP. That was more than Parker and Beck could manage, but one of the editors there, France “Eddie” Herron, had worked with Simon and Kirby back in their Fox days. He knew how good and how fast they could be.
CAPTAIN AMERICA no. 1
Marvel Comics
no. 3 May 1941
CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES no. 1
March 1941 Art: C.C. Beck
Fawcett Publications
At first, Joe and even Jack balked. It wasn’t a violation of their agreement with Timely. They could and did do occasional jobs for other houses, though it seemed prudent not to remind Goodman of that. Still, there was so much to do and so little time . . .
Then Fawcett waved a bonus and Jack, the man who never said, “I can’t do that,” proclaimed, “Sure we can do it.”
A hotel room just around the corner from Timely was rented, and for either a week (Simon’s recollection) or ten days (Kirby’s), they would work there or in their office, batting out Captain Marvel pages along with their other commitments. “We’d work most of the night, catch a few hours of sleep, shower, then drag ourselves in to Goodman’s,” Kirby recalled. “I’d even knock out a page or two at the office, when Martin thought I was doing his books.” One time, Kirby was doing just that, roughing in a pose of Captain Marvel, when Goodman wandered in and peered over his shoulder. Without missing a beat, Jack began adding Captain America’s flaglike raiment to the figure, and Goodman departed, none the wiser.
Simon did most of the writing and a little penciling. Kirby did a little writing and most of the penciling. Joe jobbed the inking out to every artist he knew, and some he didn’t, though Dick Briefer (another Fox escapee) appears to have done the bulk of it. The end product was inconsistent and unpolished, but the deadline was met.
Just before the exhausted duo was about to deliver the material to Fawcett, Kirby raised the question of affixing the usual Simon-Kirby credit on it. “I think this thing’s going to bomb,” Joe muttered. Jack agreed, and as a result their names appeared nowhere on one of the biggest hits the industry had ever seen— soon the bestselling comic of its day.
That didn’t bother them . . . much. They had a winner in Captain America. Sales quickly shot past the million mark, ranking the new hero with Superman, Batman, and other giants of the newsstand. “Captain America put Goodman on the map,” Kirby recalled. “His entire line went up fifty percent because of it.”
Still, not everyone loved the flag-draped hero. There were threatening phone calls and anti-Semitic hate mail. The threats were reported to the police, and everyone was puzzled that uniformed officers were so readily dispatched to patrol Goodman’s corridors. A few days later, Simon was startled when the receptionist announced that New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was on the phone, asking to speak to the editor of Captain America. “It was him, no doubt about it,” Simon explained. “He said he loved the book and he said, ‘You boys are doing a great job and the city of New York will make certain that no harm
comes to you.’” Another time, Jack took a call. A voice on the other end said, “There are
three of us down here in the lobby. We want to see the guy who does this disgusting comic book and show him what real Nazis would do to his Captain America.” To the horror of others in the office, Kirby rolled up his sleeves and headed downstairs. The callers, however, were gone by the time he arrived. Years later, he told an interviewer, “I once got a letter from a Nazi who told me to pick out any lamppost I wanted on Times Square, because when Hitler arrived, they’d hang me from it. It was typical of a genre of fans who have long since died out.”
U.S.A. COMICS no. 1
Marvel Comics
Timely Comics
Simon and Kirby did ten issues of Captain America and superhero comics were never the same. This is what Harvey Kurtzman, who would later invent MAD Magazine, had to say about what happened there:
Kirby was the critical element in the Simon and Kirby partnership. He was perfect for the medium. He stripped everything down to essentials. His understanding of mass and movement was uncanny, filling his pictures with so much action that they bulged beyond the borders of the panels. There was such fury and energy in the work that it couldn’t be contained. Kirby was an absolute force.
Before Simon and Kirby, the super hero was, in a sense, realistically oriented. Despite the characters’ superhuman powers, they were not drawn in action in ways that suggested how extraordinary they were. When Simon and Kirby drew Captain America though, they depicted his super-action through opposing lines that clashed and exploded all over the panels. Alongside of Simon and Kirby’s work, everything else was static, pale, anemic.
Joe and Jack were way out in front in making comic books different from strips. They had a bigger canvas and they used it, designing by the page instead of by the panel and forging a new style for a new medium. Before them, almost everyone drawing adventure comics had been replicating five syndicated strip artists—Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, Roy Crane, Milton Caniff, or Chester Gould. Even Joe and Jack had mimicked all five at times.
But now they were Simon and Kirby, and others would want to be, as well. Gil Kane, who would become one of the top illustrators, would remark, “They were the first comic book artists to inspire others with their drawing.”
SIMON AND KIRBY WERE the perfect team . . . but as good as Joe was, he was not the best partner that Jack found for himself, then or ever. It was while working on Captain America that Rosalind Goldstein appeared, and a Kirby-style explosion occurred. Right on the spot.
Roz, as everyone called her, lived in a second-story duplex apartment. The Kurtzbergs, thanks to Jack’s income, had moved into the first floor. One day when she saw Jack playing stickball out in the street, there was instant mutual notice. But here—let Roz tell you in her own words how it happened: Almost the first thing he said was, “Would you like to see my etchings?” I didn’t know what the word “etchings” meant so he explained, “my drawings.” He wanted to take me into his bedroom and I thought, “Why not? His parents are in the next room, my parents are in the next room, what could happen?”
So he takes me to his bedroom and—can you believe it?—he really did have etchings in there. He showed me all these drawings, including pages he was drawing of Captain America. He showed me the first comic books I had ever seen, but I was more interested in Jack. I started wondering what he’d look like in swim trunks. He was quite a catch.
They started dating. “It was the cheapest date in the world because Roz lived upstairs,” Jack recalled. “I’d go up and have dinner with her parents, or she’d come down and have dinner with mine, then we’d go out to a movie together.” On May 23, 1942, Rosalind Goldstein became Mrs. Jack Kurtzberg. Later, when her husband legally changed his name, she would become Mrs. Jack Kirby.
They rented a place in Manhattan Beach for fifty-three dollars a month. “It was a huge apartment,” Roz recalled. “I think he was still trying to impress my folks.” At the time, Jack was making seventy-five dollars a week from his job with Martin Goodman.
Roz became more than his spouse. She was his partner in every aspect of his life, his work included. True, she didn’t write or draw the stories (occasionally, she helped with inking) but she made it possible for Jack to get to the drawing board each day and inspired him to stay there.
She consulted with him on every aspect of his career and acted as a stabilizing voice of reason when, as happened all too often in Jack’s life, that career gave him cause for anger. She cooked for him and dressed him and had four children by him. And when Jack’s umpteenth auto accident caused him to forsake driving, she even took to chauffeuring him about. From the day they married, Jack Kirby was a two-person operation.
AND SPEAKING OF PARTNERS, there was another one in his future. Other artists and writers worked with Joe and Jack, but the most famous
helper was a young man named Stanley Martin Lieber—eighteen years of age and determined to make his fortune as a famous writer of things other than comic books. But since assisting Simon and Kirby was the job he could get, he’d do comics. For a while, anyway.
To save his real name for his real career, he should have just not signed his work. Many writers then did not. But he liked seeing his name in print even if it wasn’t his name, so he came up with a pseudonym: Stan Lee.
Back when he was saving his birth name (Stanley Martin Lieber) for when he would become famous. Over sixty years later, he’s still Stan Lee.
c. 1944
He was hired at Timely via the same selection process that most comic companies used to hire their key office personnel: unabashed nepotism. An uncle, Robert Solomon, was a business manager for Martin Goodman, along with later becoming Goodman’s brother-in-law.
Recalled Stan, “Jack and Joe were virtually the whole staff. Jack sat at a table behind a big cigar and he was drawing. Joe stood up behind another big cigar, and he would ask Jack, ‘Are you comfortable? Do you want some more ink? Is your brush okay? Is the pencil all right?’ And then Joe would go out and yell at me for a while, and that was the way we spent our days. I was a gofer. I’d go for the coffee, for the broom, for Jack’s cigars. They also let me write some copy.”
Stan’s debut was a text story in Captain America no. 3, and before long they let him write actual comics. Joe and Jack took a liking to the young man, though he drove both of them to occasional distraction with his questions and by practicing on his ocarina around the office.
MORE DISTRACTING TO JOE and Jack was an increasing certainty that they were being swindled on the profits they were to receive on Captain America and other books. Goodman was claiming almost every expenditure in his office as an expense to be charged against the budget of Captain America. This reduced his profits (on paper) to near nothing, and he paid Simon and Kirby their shares accordingly. “Hollywood Accounting,” they’d call it in another time and place. “Martin was making a fortune and bragging about it,” Jack recalled. “At the same time, he was claiming his bestselling book was making only a tiny profit.”
It seemed like a good deal to get out of, and a good time to do so. Simon phoned Jack Liebowitz, who ran DC Comics, the industry leader, and was delighted that Liebowitz knew of Simon and Kirby and would welcome their presence in his line. Quietly, lest Goodman get wind of it and boot them out before they were ready, Joe negotiated what would be for a time the richest deal ever for guys who wrote and drew comics. Stan Lee found out and was sworn to secrecy with the promise of being included in the new venture.
Then Goodman found out. Stan would forever deny having snitched, and Joe and Jack would forever not believe him. Still, someone blabbed so Simon and Kirby were ordered off the premises. Goodman installed a brother in the editor job for a few weeks, then stuck Stan behind the desk while he looked for someone permanent. Sixteen years later, when Jack returned to the company, he’d be hired back by its editor in chief, Stan Lee.
ADVENTURE COMICS no. 73
DC Comics
April 1942 Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
DC Comics
DC Comics
SIMON AND KIRBY WERE welcomed to DC Comics, but not by everyone. They’d be running their own studio, hiring artists and sometimes writers, producing stories for the company as outside suppliers. However, some of the inside suppliers objected. The most vocal was an editor, Mort Weisinger, who didn’t like that his company was publishing comics that didn’t go step-by-step under his editorial purview. He insisted on buying scripts from his writers and giving them to Joe and Jack to draw. Joe and Jack insisted on making paper airplanes out of them.
Jack would later recall the period as one of his happiest: “They tried for a while to control us, but we knew how to do comics. Finally, they let us do whatever we wanted. They were thrilled with everything we did, and the readers were thrilled. Weisinger was the only one not thrilled.” Simon and Kirby produced four strips for DC: two original, one revamp, and one revamp that was so different it was virtually an original.
This last was Manhunter, a strip that had been featured in Adventure Comics. The old version was a plainclothes detective in the manner of radio’s Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons. DC was going to drop it altogether, but Joe and Jack thought the name was too good to waste. They did a full teardown making him into a big game hunter who donned a mask and switched to hunting another kind of animal—the human criminal—when a friend was killed.
The plain revamp was Sandman, also of Adventure Comics. This one had started life as a Green Hornet imitation, then turned into a road company Batman, Robin clone and all. Then Joe and Jack came along, adding weirder villains and a dream/nightmare theme. Even Paul Norris, the artist they replaced on the feature, was impressed with how much life and excitement Simon and Kirby could bring to a weary premise.
The two original creations were both kid gangs, a notion Joe and Jack had just begun to dabble in at Timely with a strip called Young Allies—though actually, Jack had been dabbling in it since his childhood. DC’s Star Spangled Comics accommodated the Newsboy Legion, a band of tough street kids, not unlike those who’d once elbowed Jakie Kurtzberg aside when he tried to pick up newspapers to sell. A police officer, who in his spare time liked to put on a superhero suit and call himself the Guardian, kept them out of trouble.
Best of all was the other kid gang, the one that went into Detective Comics, right behind Batman. It was so good that almost immediately Liebowitz decided to give it a book of its own, a distinction only Superman and Batman had then achieved at the company. The Boy Commandos were four teens gathered from around the world by an adult named Rip Carter to form a fighting squadron and
aid the war effort. One was from France, one was from England, one was from the Netherlands, and there was one from Brooklyn who sounded and acted a lot like Kirby. (Every teen gang Joe and Jack did had one member who resembled Kirby. The one in the Newsboy Legion was named Scrapper.) Everyone was impressed by the dynamic stories and art, and even more impressed by the sales. Simon and Kirby were at the peak of their game, the top of their profession. Jack would call it, “The best time of my life apart from one minor detail.” Only to Kirby would World War II be “one minor detail.”
Joe Simon, Martin Bursten, and Jack Kirby For some reason, they’re looking over a Boy Commandos page even though both Simon and Kirby agreed that their friend Bursten, who occasionally wrote for their books, never worked on Boy Commandos.
Above and following pages BOY COMMANDOS
no. 1 Winter 1942
Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon DC Comics
THROUGHOUT MOST OF ’42 and into ’43—with the conflict front, center, and everywhere—Joe and Jack had three obligations in need of balancing: to their country, which needed young men to serve; to their loved ones, who needed more income to live on than Joe and Jack would make as military pay; and to DC Comics, which needed Simon-Kirby strips to print while they were away.
They knew they’d be going. It was just a matter of when. Jack had received a draft notice, and with no small amount of guilt, secured a
deferment as the sole support of his family. He and Joe began to work faster and
faster, the goal being—as he’d put it—“to get enough work backlogged that I could go into the Army, kill Hitler, and get back before the readers missed us.” With several hands assisting, pages of their four strips were produced at breakneck pace.
In early ’43, Simon enlisted in the Coast Guard. He spent most of his service time at the Combat Air Corps in Washington, D. C., doing what he did best: assembling comic books, this time for the military. Kirby kept on drawing, moving for a time into the DC offices. Other artists would stand and watch in amazement at the quantity and quality of what flew off his drawing board. One, Jerry Robinson, said he’d never seen anyone draw faster . . . or better.
On Monday, June 21, Jack reported for duty and was shipped off to Camp Stewart, near Atlanta, Georgia. There, Uncle Sam made a laughable attempt to turn Kirby, a man who could barely drive without running off the road, into an auto mechanic. “My parents weren’t happy I was in the Army,” Jack once explained. “But they liked the idea of me becoming a mechanic. They’d always thought that was a more stable career choice than comics.”
The motor pool and Kirby were not made for each other, and he was soon reclassified as a rifleman. On August 17, 1944, he was shifted off to Europe and assigned to the infamous Company F of the 11th Infantry, under the command of General George S. Patton. His outfit landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy on August 23 to handle operations that remained following D-Day, some two months earlier.
SAVANNAH EVENING PRESS Newspaper clipping October 1, 1943
A drawing Jack sent back to Roz from Camp Stewart, Georgia. August 21, 1943
“The Little Woman.” A drawing Kirby did in his hospital bed in France. November 23, 1944
Roz and Jack A note in Roz’s handwriting says, “Just before he shipped overseas.”
1944
One of dozens of letters Jack sent back to Roz while assigned overseas. He wrote almost every day. 1944
Simon-Kirby letterhead 1947
In October, Company F joined the battle for Bastogne and engaged in weeks of heavy combat with a substantial number of casualties. Not all came from enemy fire. “The weather was brutal,” Jack recalled. “We were losing men to pneumonia and exposure.” Private Kirby, forced to sleep out in a field, was almost among them. By the time his unit was withdrawn, he was practically immobilized by frostbite in his lower extremities. They put him in a hospital in France and he listened as doctors discussed amputating one or both of his feet. More than a month later, both feet were still there and he was able to walk out on them.
In January 1945, he was reassigned to Camp Butner in North Carolina. Six months later, he was mustered out with the rank of private first class, sporting a Combat Infantry Badge, along with the European-African-Middle Eastern Theater Ribbon with a bronze battle star. He’d spent two years in uniform, during which he somehow managed to amass about twenty years’ worth of war memories. For the rest of his life, they’d be dispensed at the slightest relevance and used in stories.
But the experience was more to Kirby than a source of material and anecdotes. It changed him forever, invading not only his conversation by day but also his sleep at night. Even half a century later, he would still revisit the Big One in his dreams, often waking up alongside Roz in an icy sweat. (That was one recurring nightmare. The other, which got worse in later years, involved being out of work and unable to provide for his family.)
STUNTMAN no. 1
Harvey Publications
Harvey Publications
May 1946 Art: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
Harvey Publications
Hillman Periodicals
BACK IN NEW YORK, Jack tried to pick right up where he’d left off but couldn’t. Things had changed at DC Comics. The Simon-Kirby features were losing steam —especially, since there was no more war, the one about kids at war. Worse, there was little enthusiasm for letting anyone, even Joe and Jack, be outside suppliers any longer. The editors there now wanted everything to go through them. Jack drew some stories for DC but mostly marked time, waiting for Simon to be discharged from the Coast Guard.
When that happened, they decided there was no point in taking up with DC again. Jack would keep drawing Boy Commandos while it lasted, but the Simon- Kirby team would start anew with their old buddy, the one-time Eagle Scout, Al Harvey. He was now Captain Alfred Harvey, and he and Joe had been discussing —at the Pentagon, no less—putting out some new comics through Al’s company. He had a special “in” to get supplies of paper . . . a precious commodity in postwar America.
They decided to try two. Stuntman was the first costumed hero Simon and Kirby had created since the Guardian in 1942, and their last until Captain 3-D in 1953. Boy Explorers took the kid gang idea in new, adventurous directions.
Creatively, Simon and Kirby had never been better, but the market, as Simon later put it, “just wasn’t there.” Newsstands were glutted with product, and the new books were returned in their wire bundles, unopened and unpurchased. It was one of the great heartbreaks for All Concerned.
What kids were buying then was crime comics, and Jack liked the idea of doing some. He’d seen tough guys in his neighborhood and read about tougher ones. Joe arranged for work doing gangster stories for Headline Comics, which was published by the Prize Group, and Real Clue Crime, published by Hillman. There were odd jobs for several publishers, but nothing lasting. Not until they invented a new genre: the romance comic.
It came in two steps. First, there was My Date, which was sort of a romance comic, but skewed in a humorous Archie-like direction. That title was for Hillman.
The experience emboldened them. Why couldn’t there be a more serious comic about love and dating and marriage? About boys and girls doing what boys and girls do? They took the idea to Mike Bleier and Teddy Epstein, the men who ran Prize. They were skeptical but said OK . . . if, that is, Joe and Jack were willing to gamble and take nothing up front and everything on the back end.
Joe and Jack were—but just to play it safe, they’d also start another crime book, Justice Traps the Guilty. As Jack put it, “Mike and Teddy didn’t have
much faith in Young Romance”—that’s what the love comic would be called —“so they figured they’d make back on the crime book what they lost on the love book.” Happily, the crime book sold well and the romance book sold better. Young Romance was a smash, as big as Captain America was in its way, and Simon and Kirby were back. Hitmakers once again.
They set up shop, bigger and better than their prewar operation, working in partnership with Prize, aka Crestwood. The first two books were joined by Young Love, Real West Romance, and Western Love. In 1950, they added Black Magic and at the same time came up with a book for Al Harvey called Boys’ Ranch.
JUSTICE TRAPS THE GUILTY no. 8
January 1949 Art: Jack Kirby
Crestwood Publications
HEADLINE COMICS no. 37
September 1949 Headline Publications
Kirby, for a photo cover, becomes a thug—a job, he said “had slightly more prestige in my old neighborhood than drawing comic books.” Joe Simon played the cop.
JUSTICE TRAPS THE GUILTY no. 18
September 1950 Art: Jack Kirby
Headline Publications
Hillman Periodicals
THE STRANGE WORLD OF YOUR DREAMS Unpublished cover intended for no. 5
March—April 1953 Art: Jack Kirby
Black Magic was a horror comic, but one of the milder ones: no bloodshed, no werewolves, no violence. Other companies, like E. C. Comics with its Vault of Horror, were getting into that. Not Joe and Jack. They’d creep their readers out with clever plots and moody art, and be just as effective. There were also heavy psychological subtexts to the material. If someone in the studio came in one morning and described a nightmare and it wasn’t Kirby flashing back to World War II, it became a story. Later, a companion title, Strange World of Your Dreams, would trample even farther on readers’ fears.
As for Boys’ Ranch, it was another “kid gang,” this time set in the old west. It was a comic with a lot of heart and a very special one from Jack’s viewpoint. All the other kid gangs had been him and his friends from the streets of New York, going off on extraordinary adventures. This one, however, was the special dream about growing up in the heartland instead of the tenements. One story in particular—“Mother Delilah” in the third issue—would be his all-time favorite of the hundreds he did with Simon.
Like all the really great comics they created for Harvey, Boys’ Ranch didn’t sell. Six issues and out. A year later, when 3-D comics were all the rage, Al Harvey would call on them to create a super hero for the process. Captain 3-D was a pretty good comic, too, at least for the one issue it lasted. “Joe and I were very fond of Al,” Kirby insisted. “We were frustrated we couldn’t seem to give him a hit. We gave him some of the best books we ever did, but they never quite caught on. None of them.”
Still, everything else they were doing was going gangbusters. The studio was busy, bursting with talent: Mort Meskin, Steve Ditko, John Prentice, Marvin Stein, Bruno Premiani, George “Inky” Roussos, Bill Draut, and others. Joe and Jack usually came up with the stories. They’d write them or give them to someone else like Jack Oleck to write. Sometimes, Kirby would draw the story; other times, just the first page. Simon drew less and less but laid out covers and splash pages—some of the best in the business, Kirby insisted.
They paid their people well and promptly. Ben Oda, who handled the lettering, would call it “The best place in town a comic artist could work.”
“Too good to last” was how Kirby phrased it. There was a crackdown coming, coming from all directions. Psychologists were claiming that comic books, especially the crime and horror ones, contributed to juvenile maladjustment. Legislators were either deeply concerned or jumping on the bandwagon of an easy issue. Parents were hearing what they wanted to hear . . . or maybe it was just that they were afraid not to listen to the doctors and the politicians.
The year 1954 was a bad time to be launching new comics, but Simon and Kirby tried. Another new creation, Fighting American, appeared from Prize. It started out as a pretty standard variation on Captain America—another guy dressed like a flag while he and a kid sidekick beat up on bad guys. With each passing issue though, Joe and Jack took it less seriously, veering off into parody. Readers didn’t seem to know if they should be laughing with it or at it . . . or at least, that was the reason Jack later gave for its failure. That and a shrinking marketplace.
BOYS’ RANCH no. 1
Harvey Publications
Harvey Publications
Mainline Publications
Meskin Harvey Publications
no. 1 October 1954 Art: Jack Kirby
no. 2 December 1954 Art: Jack Kirby
April 1955 Art: Jack Kirby Charlton Press
And it was the worst possible time for someone to be launching a new comic book company but Simon and Kirby tried that, too. Mainline Comics, they called it. Their first four books—In Love, Police Trap, Foxhole, and Bullseye—went on sale just as the Senate Commission on the Judiciary was convening to discuss government regulation of comic books. The timing could not have been worse.
In Love was just more Young Romance under a different name, while Police Trap was a crime comic founded on the naïve hope that if you put “Police” in big letters on the cover, you could get away with publishing a crime comic.
Foxhole was a war book, written and/or drawn by men who’d been there, done that. Jack signed his stories, “By P. F. C. Jack Kirby, 5th Division, 3rd Army.” It was a book he loved. According to Roz, “He would have been very happy to spend the rest of his life just drawing the war stories he told everyone all the time.” He also loved the fourth book, Bullseye, a western hero in the Zorro/Lone Ranger motif.
Fine comics. Wrong year for them. The crusaders were causing newsstands to stop carrying comics, and publishers were closing left and right. Every week, another one gone. In a panic, the majors banded together, formed a self- regulatory bureau, and proceeded to self-regulate crime, horror, and almost anything else that was entertaining out of everyone’s product. Jack said it was like the business got together and said, “You can’t ruin our comics! We’ll beat you to it!”
Only a few publishers escaped having to submit their wares to the Comics Code Authority for approval of content. Mainline wasn’t among the few. Joe and Jack were told, in language Jack felt was quite appropriate for a crime comic, “You either join up or your comics don’t get distributed.” So they joined up and their comics didn’t get distributed. The Code also didn’t save E. C. Comics, formerly the main purveyor of horror and crime. Even laundered, their line went under and their distributor, Leader News, soon followed. That was truly bad news for Joe and Jack’s company since Leader was their distributor, too.
That put Mainline out of business. Joe eventually arranged for Charlton Press, the lowest-paying publisher in the field, to print the already-completed Mainline material and also Win A Prize, a “game show in a comic” that Joe and Jack had been developing for their own firm. Nothing sold well enough to warrant continuance, and Joe and Jack were fast running out of places to work, at least as a team.
It was time to go their separate ways. Simon took a job editing comics for Harvey and could occasionally employ Kirby to draw them. Some of the material was excellent, especially a science-fiction comic called Race for the
Moon, done back when countries really were racing for the moon. But it didn’t last long. Nothing seemed to be lasting very long.
FIGHTING AMERICAN no. 1
FIGHTING AMERICAN
Of all the fifties’ Simon-Kirby creations, Jack enjoyed none more than Fighting American. At arms’ length, it looked like Joe and Jack imitating themselves with an unabashed Captain America knock-off. Up close and personal, it was the two of them having enormous fun, hoping readers would find it infectious.
Super heroes were largely passé. The Golden Age of that genre had passed and its resurrection, which would largely be defined by Jack and his next partner, Stan Lee, had yet to occur. But nothing was selling particularly well, so Simon and Kirby gave it a try, hoping the old form might seem fresh if tongues were planted firmly enough in cheeks. MAD Magazine, after all, seemed to be catching on. Fighting American, however, just got sillier and sillier, prompting one critic to suggest that Joe and Jack were deliberately screwing with a formula they’d invented, just to see if anyone would notice. Apparently, no one did—but for seven issues, Jack couldn’t have been happier . . . unless, of course, the thing had shown a profit.
“The League of the Handsome Devils!” appeared in the second issue (June– July 1954) before things got t

kirby: king of comics

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