The Case of the Missing Witness

I'm sure that anybody with even a casual interest in Jack Kirby knows that the copyright/creator issue involving the heirs of Jack Kirby and Walt Disney/Marvel has gone/is preparing to go back to court again. I hope this time it works in Jack's favor. Maybe the third time is a charm. The biggest obstacle to overcome - and this is only conjecture on my part - seems to be the lack of credible witnesses on the part of the heirs of Jack Kirby. And I only say this because so many of the artists and writers who were around Marvel in the early-to-mid-to-late 1960's are no longer with us. Long time Kirby collaborator Joe Simon is gone and so is Wally Wood, Don Heck and a host of others. On the other hand, Stan Lee is still with us and it's hard to cross-examine the guy when he's the only guy left standing.

I don't think I'm the only person who has made note of this fact. I don't know all the details of the last Kirby vs Disney/Marvel encounter but if memory serves me right, two of the more knowledgeable witnesses who could talk in Jack's favor - that would be Mark Evanier and John Morrow - were pretty much shut down or discounted because they weren't actually around to witness the creative process involving Jack and Stan. I wonder how this argument will be circumvented this time time around. Because really, how the heck do you dispute anything Stan Lee says if all his contemporaries are sleeping in a pine box in Forest Lawn?


The website 20th Century Danny Boy addresses the Jack vs Stan argument and uses Stan's court testimony vs snippets of Jack's famous 1990 interview with Gary Groth (when Jack was deep in trying to get his original artwork back) as the basis for its point/counter-point. In fact, the DB article makes a point of saying that Stan would never lie under oath. I would only mention (again) that if no one is alive to dispute what Stan is saying then what does he have to lose?

If you link to the Groth interview, I can tell you the reader responses are almost as interesting as the interview itself. Somewhere tucked away in a cardboard box I have that original interview. Unfortunately, so much of the history of comics is "tucked away in a box" as well and most of the younger generation of fans and artists has only the revisionist history of Stan Lee to take as fact. I would encourage anyone who wants to be a student of the game to take advantage of Google or any other resource and learn about the comics Golden and Silver Age.

But I digress. The subject here is [the heirs of] Jack Kirby going up against Disney/Marvel. This is a fight that rivals anything Jack could have drawn on paper and certainly has all the drama of anything he could have written. How it ultimately ends up is beyond me but I would have that a satisfactory conclusion is the result: at the very least that Jack is given credit for his creations and co-creations and the financial rewards that come with it.

One of the more poignant offerings regarding the unprecedented output and creativity of Jack Kirby can be found in one of the recent issues of the Jack Kirby Collector, where one-time Kirby assistant Mark Evanier commented that while Jack could churn out page after page of incredible art and despite his ability to come up with new ideas, Jack was at a loss as to HOW exactly comics could be made to sell more, do more and evolve out of the standard 17 page format that he know doubt felt trapped in. It's all about execution (in the business sense) and I have a suspicion that more than a few artistic powerhouses felt the same way: all this talent but how the heck can it be harnessed?

Probably the inverse is also true. I wonder if Stan Lee or any writer would have been nearly as popular if the Fantastic Four or Thor or the Hulk was illustrated by someone other than Jack Kirby. Can great writing save poor art? Can awesome art save poor writing? It's a valid argument and I'm not sure what the correct answer is. There are some great talents out there. Jim Shooter comes easily to mind. His reboot a while back of Turok and Magnus Robot Fighter went nowhere after only a few issues. And you know I thought the writing on those efforts was pretty good! The art not so much. But that's me. Go back to the mid-to-late 1960's and Wally Wood was illustrating Thunder Agents. Superb artwork, right? We're talking Wally-flipping-Wood, the master of Mad Magazine! But the writing sucked! I guess my point is that Stan Lee could have had a master plan: paste comic books all over the place: on milk cartons, cereal boxes, where ever, and I don't think the FF would have registered a blip on the radar if it weren't for Jack Kirby!!

Before Jack came back to Timely/Marvel, Stan had several "go-to" guys and perhaps the most prolific was Joe Maneely. Maneely died a tragic death when he fell in front of an on-coming train. You can say all you want that if Manleey hadn't died and Jack hadn't came back to Marvel, that the FF and other books would have still reached unheard of heights. But I'm not so sure! And keep in mind that Stan - as an editor and relative of Martin Goodman - had the mechanics via Goodman's publishing machine to get the books on the racks. But not even that could save Marvel at the time! Like I said, it's all about execution.

I remember back in the late 70's Jack was supposed to have had the financial backing to put out a line of comic books (Thunderfoot and others). An interview with Jack in Comics Scene shed some light on Jack's mindset but it had nothing to do with the business-end of publishing. Jack was all for giving artists a chance and keeping them on a book in order to let their talent develop, but in terms of execution, he was shooting blanks.

It wasn't Jack's fault. The guy was a creator. He was a producer. He needed a salesperson like Joe Simon or Stan Lee in the same way that they needed an artist like Jack!

I was thumbing through an old copy of Jack Kirby's "second coming" of Manhunter and I thought, "Ya know, you could have given this guy any name besides Manhunter and it would still work." Manhunter was relegated to an issue of 1st Issue Special and then what happens, we readers only get the first part of what I would imagine was at least a two-parter! And then on top of that, Jack ups and goes back to Marvel Comics! Did I forget anything? Oh yes, I think right around the same time the great Walter Simonson did his revamp of the same character, probably to much better results and which allows me to segue to another subject......

A Few Words on (Jack's)Writing

What really jumps out at me, and I mean no disrespect, is that at that stage of Jack's tenure at DC I feel like his writing was firmly aimed at whatever 10-12 year old kids were out there reading comic books. This is not a bad thing mind you. Because back in the early-to-mid 70's there actually were young kids reading comics! Does anyone that young read comics any more? Now we're all in our 30's and even older!

But I digress. We'll get to Manhunter in a minute or two. Getting back to Jack's writing, maybe it was a DC thing, but that last tier of books: SandMan, Dingbats of Danger Street, a handful of others -- they were perfectly suited to someone not quite on the verge of puberty! But then a crazy thing happened: I noticed an ever-so-slight shift in the quality of Jack's writing when he came back to Marvel in that his books "read" a little bit older. The Madbomb Saga in Captain America, The Eternals. At least at the onset it seems like Jack knew who his audience was and they were a bit older than what he was dealing with at DC. This is not to say that Jack was not writing some awesome stuff early on at DC. The New Gods was not meant for kids! Neither was the Forever People or even the Demon! It's just that somewhere along the line Jack decided to go in the other direction and a lot of great stories (IMHO) suffered for it.

So What Happened?

Smarter heads than mine will figure it out. All I know is that about a year into Jack's stay at Marvel he again went retro and started writing for 10 year old kids again. Actually, if memory serves me correctly, after the Madbomb Saga - which zipped along for seven issues and got hammered by fans and pro alike, Jack did an about face and started churning out these turbo charged mini-chapters in Captain America and Black Panther. I don't think any story arc (if you can call it that) lasted more than two issues at most. And than Jack got hammered for that! My own theory: readers wanted stories that were immersed in the Marvel Universe and Jack didn't or couldn't or wouldn't go there. Personally, I think Jack could have taken all the books he was doing at the time and cross-pollinated them without any problem. He could have taken Captain America and stuck him in the Eternals, He could have taken Black Panther and guested him in CA. I think the fans would have jumped over the moon and everyone would have gone home happy.

Well it's all wishful thinking now. Heck, I enjoyed all of Jack's books. His writing never bothered me until he started putting everything in quotes ("  ") and even then it was just a minor annoyance!

Maybe one of these years when Mark Evanier publishes his ultimate Jack Kirby book, we'll all learn what Jack was thinking!

So there I was: at a local weekend garage sale the other day where I was rifling through some old boxes of comics. We've all seen them, been there and done that: oblong and nondescript cartons which - if you're lucky - will be full of surprises. In this case, all the comics were a quarter each and I walked out the door with a few gems: Jack Kirby's Omac #1, a handful of well-worn Kamandi's and a few 1st Issue Specials including issue number 5 which boasted a revamped version of Kirby's Manhunter!All great stuff and hey - how can you lose when the books are a quarter a piece?

Kamandi was a fun book. In fact, of all the great stuff Jack produced during his stay at DC, Kamandi was the only one that sustained itself. Think about it: despite Jack's ground-breaking work on the New Gods, Forever People and Mister Miracle, none of them lasted more than 12-18 issues. Same goes for the Demon. And ditto for The Losers. But with Kamandi, Jack kept plugging along. He was on the title for almost for almost 4 years during which time he wrote and drew issues 1-37 and illustrated issues 38-40 with Gerry Conway during the scripts. Which brings me back to the 25 cent copy of Kamandi #38 that I mentioned earlier.

Way back in the day (and on that particular day I was about 14 years old) I knew something was wrong right off the bat: beginning with issue #34, Jack stopped doing the covers for Kamandi. They were subsequently drawn by Joe Kubert. I've since heard different things: by the time Kamandi #34 was published, Jack was either out the door or close to it and the DC brass at the time decided to cut the ties with Kirby. Now you can say all you want, but there are not two drawing styles more diametrically opposed than Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert. And if my memory serves me correctly, Joe did the covers for the last couple of issues of Omac as well. 

At any rate, as a young whipper-snapper at the time, I can tell you that Kamandi without a Jack Kirby cover made for a decidedly less-exciting book!

But I digress. Kamandi #38, written by Gerry Conway and illustrated by Jack Kirby was not a typical Kirby comic. For one thing there was a lot more comic to read. I kid you not. The average comic book at the time was only 17 pages long. I'm not going to say Jack wrote down to his audience but his stories certainly were not word-heavy either. Gerry, on the other hand, tried to cram in a bit more dialogue and got rid of Jack's famous use of chapter-splash pages. Opting instead to place a chapter-heading on a larger panel. And to be honest, as I'm thumbing through this already thumbed-through issue, Conway could have got rid of those chapter headings altogether.

I'm not going to recap the story of this particular issue. You can find it online. What I will say is that Gerry, to his credit, tried to build on Jack's foundation. And Jack, to his credit, worked solely as an artist, illustrating someone else's script. Something he rarely did during the later stages of his career.

Kamandi soldiered on until  1978 until it fell victim to the infamous DC implosion. And Jack Kirby soldiered on as well, creating a host of other characters and titles of which we'll talk about in the blogs to come!

In my humble opinion, there can never be enough blogs, articles or media coverage regarding comic book visionary Jack "King" Kirby! Kirby's been gone since August 1994 and obviously can't fend for himself and Jack's wife Roz passed on a mere four years after he did. So who does that leave in his wake? Well, millions and millions of fans to be sure, but in physical terms there's The Jack Kirby Collector (about as fine a publication as you're gonna find about Jack Kirby) and a smattering of other highly regarded sites like Mark Evanier's newsfromME (which has some great archived stories about Jack). It's all good stuff and I repeat, for my money, they'll never be enough media coverage when it comes to Jack Kirby!

No Excuses

Over the years I've tried to maintain a blog devoted to Jack Kirby. Usually I start off strong and then a week or two into it I crash and burn and come to a grinding halt. It's not for lack of material that's for sure! Everyday living usually gets in the way. And that's not even a valid excuse, because a lot of folks that are much busier than me manage to write every day! Maybe I'll be luckier this time!

What's in a Name?

 A few years ago  I started a great (for me anyway) blog  dedicated to Jack Kirby entitled Jack of all Trades. Before that I had another one that I can't even remember the name of! This time around I'm calling the blog KirbyKingofKings. No religious implications intended. But from a comics point of view Jack is the King of Comics. I think he was the best of the bunch as a creator. There were other artists that could maybe draw better, but Jack was the whole package: he wrote and he drew and you rarely found that combination during Jack's heyday in the 40's, 50's 60's and 70's, much less today!

The Sky's the Limit!                                                                      

So this time around, I'll cover all the bases and maybe get some feedback and contributions as well. The sky's the limit! The bottom line is keeping Jack's name out there. As long as Disney/Marvel keeps pumping put movies that have Jack's co-creations or creations as the foundation, I feel like doing my part in making sure that anybody who reads this knows who Jack Kirby is and what his monumental accomplishments were!

Until next time!
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