Let's talk about Jack Kirby

I can't decide which Kamandi map legend to make my new screen name.

http://nerdcityonline.com/2010/01/22/jack-kirbys-visual-interpretations-of-god/

Amazing. A Kirby adaptation of the Old Testament would've been something.

this one is more than a little o_O
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4062/4296011324_6331b65011_o.jpg

I've been rereading some Captain Americas from 1968 and really enjoying Syd Shores' inking. Tempted to put him in my top 5 Kirby inkers.

I used to own a Kirby/Shores Cap America page but sold it cos the inking was SO horrible - muddy, brushy, heavyhanded and not at all faithful to Kirby's pencils (compare to similar vintage Cap stories inked by the far superior Frank Giacoia or Joe Sinnott to see just how much style/detail/power that Shores obliterated). I even prefer Colletta over Kirby to Shores.

Shores' career goes back to the 1940s, and prior to the 1960s he was regarded as one of the top artists at Marvel. I don't think he ever really found a 'modern' inking style that suited Kirby's 60s artwork - again, compare this to Bill Everett, another 'lost' Atlas superstar who did some utterly gorgeous inking on Kirby (and Colan) in the 60s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/business/21marvel.html?8dpc

the new TCJ site just posted the journal's 1990 interview with kirby:

http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/

lots of hilariously splenetic quotes about stan lee, unsurprisingly!

GROTH; When did you meet Stan Lee for the first time?

KIRBY: I met Stan Lee when I first went to work for Marvel. He was a little boy. When Joe and I were doing Captain America. He was about 13 years old. He’s about five years younger than me.

GROTH: Did you keep in touch with him at all?

KIRBY: No, I thought Stan Lee was a bother.

GROTH: [Laughter.]

KIRBY: I did!

GROTH: What do you mean by “bother”?

KIRBY: You know he was the kind of kid that liked to fool around — open and close doors on you. Yeah. In fact, once I told Joe to throw him out of the room.

GROTH; Because he was a pest?

KIRBY: Yes, he was a pest. Stan Lee was a pest. He liked to irk people and it was one thing I couldn’t take.

lol

GROTH: You were drafted?

KIRBY: I was drafted.

GROTH: What year would that have been?

ROZ KIRBY: We were married in ’42.

KIRBY: Yeah, I was drafted in ’42.

ROZ KIRBY: I was married to you…

KIRBY: Yeah, I know you were married to me!

I have that issue - was just re-reading it last week

its real interesting but boy he comes off like a crank! do people take the stuff he was saying at face value? i mean this has to be bullshit right:

GROTH: Can I ask what your involvement in Spider-Man was?
KIRBY: I created Spider-Man. We decided to give it to Steve Ditko. I drew the first Spider-Man cover. I created the character. I created the costume. I created all those books, but I couldn’t do them all. We decided to give the book to Steve Ditko who was the right man for the job. He did a wonderful job on that.

:/

that is not bullshit and other people have confirmed it

he did draw the first cover, had previously done The Spider, and was an old man who got somewhat confused. Roz was there basically to be extra memory and nudge him back onto the rails.

that he designed the character/costume/drew the first cover is not disputed

isn't there more material out there confirming ditko designed the costume?

like kirby designed *A* spider-man costume, but not THE spider-man costume

there's at least like five different accounts - Lee, Kirby, Ditko, Simon, Evanier, etc. - they all agree that he created the costume and drew the image that appears on the cover of Spider-man's first comic appearance

not according to ditko, dude.

Steve Ditko: "Kirby had penciled five pages of his Spider-Man. How much pure Kirby, how much Lee is for them to resolve. The splash was the only one with a drawing of Spider-Man. A typical Kirby hero/action shot. But the costume is what is important. I'm uncertain about the abstract chest design. The closest thing to it is the one on Ant-man."

Steve Ditko: "Kirby's Spider-Man had a web gun, never seen in use. The only connection to the spider theme was the name. The other four pages showed a teenager living with his aunt and uncle. The aunt was a kindly old woman, the uncle was a retired police captain, hard, gruff, the General Thunderbolt Ross type (from Hulk), and he was down on the teenager. Next door or somewhere in the neighborhood there was a whiskered scientist-type involved in some kind of experiment or project. The end of the five pages depicted the kid going toward the scientists darkened house."

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_AZaPyN-5kD4/TAz3D1FXQSI/AAAAAAAABaU/Lzh4l7ZI3ks/s1600/2010-06-07_094113.png

http://www.povonline.com/jackfaq/JackFaq4.htm

Did Jack design Spider-Man's costume?

No. Steve Ditko designed the distinctive costume we all know and love. Jack did claim to have presented the idea to Stan Lee of doing a hero named Spiderman (no hyphen) who walked on walls and had other spider-themed powers — a claim which Stan vociferously denies.

But for all the things Jack did well, he was not great at being interviewed. He occasionally got carried away or confused. There was one interview where, without realizing what he was saying, he said he'd created Superman. Needless to say, he never really believed that but somehow, that's what came out of his mouth.

This kind of thing most often occurred when the topic veered near an instance where Jack felt he'd been undercredited and undercompensated, and Spider-Man was such a case. In at least one such conversation, he misspoke and claimed he'd designed the costume for the final version of Spider-Man. I'm guessing the gaffe had something to do with the fact that he did pencil the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15 with the first appearance of that costume. There were a number of cases where Jack designed a character on a cover, and then Don Heck or Dick Ayers or someone else drew the interior story, following his design. In this case, however, the cover was drawn after Stan had rejected one drawn wholly by Ditko

Jack knew that. And he also knew what it was like to have someone else claim credit for your ideas. So he very much regretted the error.

hmm well I'll defer to Evanier and claim I'm only half-right then (ie, drawing the cover, doing a rough draft, etc)

Spider-man does bear an uncanny resemblance to the Fly blah blah blah

Happy 94th Birthday Mr Kirby

http://www.bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/08/thor-158-page18-kirby-original-art.jpg

Lot's more great original Kirby pages here (nice to see Jack's pencil notes at the top of the Odin pic):

http://www.bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/08/thor-158-page18-kirby-original-art.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/GnMPF.jpg

Happy Birthday to the King!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6hX21EYFyY

Love that pointy-hatted dude behind Odin. He looks MEAN.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A1yJZKDwIRE

^^^interview w Jack Kirby on his 70th bday. amazingly, Stan Lee calls in at the end and they argue about who did what

also lol at Lee big upping Watchmen and Dark Knight (and uh John Byrne)

really y'all should listen to this, it's very illuminating and kind of heartbreaking

I can not relate how wonderful this is, and I'm only about a third through.

pretty amazing interview

I own a Kirby (and Royer) "Kamandi" page. I could seriously part with everything I own in a heartbeat but never my Kirby page.

also touches briefly on Spiderman creation controversy

love that stan is all like "and i guess people will argue who did what forever"
um motherfucker, the two of you are on the phone. TELL US

http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/426184_10150513246450834_127661820833_8941204_1439079736_n.jpg

Woah, that's just great. Where'd you find it?

I got it from Brian Clevinger (the Atomic Robo guy) on twitter. He got it from novelist Adam Christopher. Not sure where it originated beyond that.

That shot is so good that if it didn't exist, we'd have to make it up.

facebook'd btw

aw!

Has anyone ever did a rough estimate of exactly how many comics Kirby did? Just with what he did at Marvel in the 60s FF-on has to be a couple of long boxes in itself.

The first thing that popped into my head was "probably roughly 100 pages of pencils a month." From 1940 to 1976 or whenever he moved to animation, that would be 43,000+ pages JEEEEEZ.

I doubt he kept up that pace the whole time, but still...

kirby's most productive years as a penciller were, roughly, 1960-1978, when, for some of the time, he might've been pencilling close to 100 pages a month, if you include covers, promotional pieces, basic layouts for other artists etc. but that still strikes me as a slightly high estimate (kirby really only had two 'regular' comic books at marvel for most of the 60s, FF and Thor, tho' of course he started off most of their big titles before others took over.0 during the 40s kirby's career was interrupted by the war, and up to the mid-1950s he was running the simon-kirby shop with joe simon, so for a lot of that time he was working in a more piecemeal fashion - supplying roughs/layouts to be finished in the house style, collaborating with other pencillers, writing scripts etc etc - tho' the 'pure' kirby pages still tend to stand out, esp. when inked by simon himself. by the mid-1950s, and the downturn in the comic bk industry, kirby was actually struggling to keep himself busy - he was drawing less than a comic a month for DC, and so tried his hand at A newspaper strip, with fairly unhappy results. as we know that kirby could, if pushed, pencil an entire comic book in a weekend (as he did with the first issue of Pvt Strong) he was actually UNDER-productive for much of his career!

oh, and great photo - never seen it before

Found this...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kirby_bibliography

Adding just the Marvel stuff in my head counting layout issues, I got like 515 issues there.

That is a whole lot of drawing.

There are probably not too many if any artists in the whole Marvel history that more issues than Jack Kirby. 500+ issues is like doing one a month for 40 odd years.

I'd think John Buscema would maybe be the closest, as he usually had 2 titles going most of the time for years.

Sal Buscema would have worked on a ton too, although probably not as many pencils issues, as he did much more inking in the early days.

i dunno, sal was a pretty regular penciller for marvel for 30 years plus (68-98), that's a lot of pages, maybe even more than kirby

jrjr must've drawn a lot of pages for marvel, by now

http://i.imgur.com/XSmdV.jpg

Love how the Silver Age guys produced all their crazy trippy shit while constantly wearing sharp pinstripes.