In honor of Jack Kirby's birthday tomorrow... What kills me is that it's not like there were bad Kirby covers, just some that were more stellar than your a run-of-the-mill, just-plain-amazing Kirby cover. Not to mention that Kirby was a storyteller -- the covers for his books were, by and large, afterthoughts!

This is why Kirby is still the King!

One of the interesting things about the Super Powers books -- particularly the second series which is all Jack Kirby's art -- is that Jack is working with a huge cast of characters that were fundamentally not his. He was working with Superman, who readers had seen him work on in brief stints before, but also Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, Dr. Fate, Hawkman, Flash, Red Tornado, Firestorm, Green Arrow, Joker, Penguin, Lex Luthor and Brainiac. And while Jack imbues the story with his typical storytelling oomph, the characters themselves don't feel quite comfortable. I think because they're fundamentally not his style of character design.

If you look at a Jack Kirby designed character, they tend to have a certain style about their design. Even if they don't have the weird squiggly line elements or some of the other hallmark-Kirbyisms, they still fit within his ouvre. But Superman and Batman? Not so much. Jack would never have designed characters that look like that; they're just not his style.

But because all these characters aren't designed in a way that matches Jack's own design sensibility, they feel a little stiff. A little off. They're just not a good fit for Jack, just as Spider-Man never seemed like a good fit.

That said, some characters worked better than others. I was struck, actually, by how well Jack's Martian Manhunter looked. Of the entire Justice League, his costume design is probably the closest to something Jack might have come up with, and I really think that shows in his artwork. Manhunter just feels better in the story.

Which is further enforced by the fact that Manhunter plays a more significant role in the series than many of the other heroes. The whole story starts off from Manhunter's perspective, and even though the Leaguers split up to tackle different simultaneous threats, Manhunter is able to jump back and forth between them... apparently faster than either Flash or Superman.

In reading this, my thought process went something as follows: "Huh, it says Jack only drew these and didn't write them like the first series. But Manhunter plays a pretty big role here, and he's clearly the character that Jack is most comfortable with. I bet these were done in the old Marvel method, where Jack started with a loose outline and 'wrote' the story while drawing it, allowing Paul Kupperberg to just step in and script the final dialogue."

Makes sense, right? That's how Jack worked through much of his career, and he had just written the previous Super Powers mini. So I jumped to the interwebs to see if I can find somebody who's already confirmed my suspicions. And one of the first links I stumble across is from Kupperberg's own site!

"Well, great! I can get an answer directly from the source!"

But as I'm scanning through this post, I come across this passage...

Jack stated that he had been the writer of everything he ever drew. Stan was the dialogue man, but the stories came from Jack. Everything... including, apparently, my fully-scripted Super Powers miniseries, which he followed to the letter.

(Kupperberg's emphasis.)

Kupperberg goes on to wonder how someone could take such a broad, sweeping statement as fact. Particularly when he had clear evidence to the contrary. He had a full script for Super Powers that Jack drew. For at least that one series, Jack's input was strictly in conveying the visuals that Kupperberg had written out.

It's a minor piece to Kupperberg's overall point in that post, but he's quite clear how he and Jack worked on that story together. Kupperberg wrote the script; Jack drew what was in the script. But that means my guess that Jack chose to focus on Martian Manhunter because he was more comfortable drawing that particular character design? Complete bunk. The focus on Manhunter was Kupperberg's decision.

It's noteworthy here not because it lends to any great resolution to the Lee/Kirby debate or whatever. It's noteworthy because a logical-sounding series of deductions made in the absence of direct and complete evidence was proven as invalid. For as much as Jack spent his later professional years working on creator-owned comics and doing all the writing and drawing himself, there's at least one outlier incident where he sat down and just banged out a series that someone else wrote. "You want Martian Manhunter on page one? You got Martian Manhunter on page one!"

The moral of the story is: when you're digging through comics history and trying to fit all the puzzle pieces together, they don't always fit in the way that would make the most sense!

In 1969, Jack Kirby contributed costume designs to the University Theater Company at the University of California, Santa Cruz for a production of "Julius Caesar." The designs were typical Kirby, with artistic flair that you just don't get anywhere else. More interestingly, the designs were indeed used and there are a handful of photos from the show (though I can't find any good reproductions of them online).

It's a really minor part of Jack's overall career, and it frequently gets overlooked, so I thought I'd run the text from an article from the May 3, 1969 issue of Peninsula Living which talks about the production and how Kirby got involved. Scans of the article and several of Jack's designs can be seen over at the Kirby Museum site. Almost ironically, the last sentence of the piece is about Stan Lee, who did nothing more than relay director Sheldon Feldner's letter to Jack.

Caesar Seen Marvel-ously
GET A GOOD GRASP on your sense of reality, friends!!! Honest!!! It's true!! Brutus and Dr. Doom have nothing in common!! SSKATATCH??!!! Julius Caesar and The Mighty Thor are not look-alikes!!!??? The Fantastic Four never visited Shakespeare -- via Time Funnel -- on his set at the Globe!!!

No. NO!! Back to REALITY!!

Sheldon Feldner offers a pleasant, smiling kind of reality, until he starts to explain things about comic books, especially MARVEL-type comic books, and Caesar, and assorted other exotica, the nature of which will presently be manifest. And then it becomes a kind of 4-D super-R-E-A-L-I-T-Y (! ! !) that brings us back to the point of beginning. Hold on.

This is about Sheldon, and Caesar, and Marvel, and Shakespeare.

And most particularly, it is about "Julius Caesar," a play by Shakespeare, which will be presented by the University Theater Company at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Thursdays through Sundays, May 15-25. (Reservations, telephone 429-2934 in Santa Cruz.)

Sheldon is director. The "Caesar" he's putting together is far from the traditional. The idea is to emphasize the concept of the play, its essential reality, by translating it into technical terms.

A fundamental idea in Shakespeare was that when the world of man was about to undergo chaos, the heavens signaled it -- for example, the storm in "Caesar," before the assassination. So an appropriately wired dome will hang over the stage to flash lightning in storm, or change color to bode a universe of blood.

It is important, Sheldon feels, to show the division between the public and private lives of man, the political and the personal. And so, closed-circuit television will be used, with monitors in the audience. Viewers will see scenes as "political" events on television -- the riots in the streets of Rome, for example -- as well as on stage.

A laser-like device will create Caesar's ghost and when it speaks, the voice will be broken down into an oscilloscopic image and projected on a huge screen. Talented students produced a tape combining electronic music and sounds of the riots at the Democratic convention to run with the civil war and riot scenes.

And then, having conjured up all these electronic marvels, Sheldon faced a terrible problem: the costumes. Sandals and togas certainly wouldn't be suitable. Modern dress wouldn't be, either. Besides, it's been done.

"So I was taking a walk one night," says Sheldon, who joined the University staff last fall as a fellow in Merrill College, "and I thought of Marvel Comics."

Sheldon has had previous experience with Actors' Workshop and Stanford Repertory Theater. "Last year I worked in summer stocK with a guy who was a big Marvel Comics buff. It's a cult. He turned me onto it, and I was hooked."

So the next thing he knew, Sheldon was writing this letter to the president of Marvel: "Dear Sir: I think I'm crazy, but..."

"Marvel Comics ARE different," Sheldon says. "They're not the Superman or Batman type. They're not the Bugs Bunny type.

"No, all the characters in Marvel Comics have some sort of identity crisis. "Like. Captain America, for example. He was a World War II hero. After the war, his sidekick was killed by Red Skull. And he always blamed himself, because he didn't tell his sidekick to jump off the rocket in time.

"Then he was frozen alive in a glacier. But years later, he was brought back. Here he is, a 50-year-old super-hero, and he can't relate to the new generation of young super-heroes.

"All the 'Marvel Comics heroes have something like that wrong with them.

"They're anti-war super-heroes. In one of last month's issues, a whole army marched by wearing peace symbol arm patches.

"Marvel characters use Robert Frost poetry sometimes, and one magazine recently ended an episode with a poem by Keats.

"Anyway, my letter. It turned out that Stan (The Man) Lee, president of Marvel, is a Shakespeare buff. And so is Jack (King) Kirby, who finally designed our costumes.

"Marvel has about a dozen magazines, and authors. Stan Lee wrote back, said he'd ask his artists and see if anyone was interested. And Kirby, who recently moved West to live in Irvine, was.

"An assistant and I drove down, and stayed at Jack's overnight. We watched 'Spartacus' on TV and talked about Roman armor. But mostly, we listened to Jack talk about "Julius Caesar.'"

Kirby was the creator of Captain America and the Silver Surfer, but no longer draws them, Sheldon said. Currently, he is doing The Fantastic Four and Mighty Thor magazines. Again, he created the characters.

"All the comic people I've talked to, talk about their characters the way a puppeteer talks about his puppets. They know their characters aren't real people, but they talk about them as if the were. Talking about the Mighty Thor, Jack would say, 'Oh, he wouldn't do that because...'

"Talking about Thor, Jack said he doesn't draw authentic Norse armor, but tries to get the essence of it. I said that was what we wanted to get at, too -- something that could be both ancient and modern."

Kirby talked a great deal about color and its use, Sheldon recalls, as well as the use of expectation -- in the sense that the title page of a comic book starts off with the climax that it will build up to out in back.

Kirby very definitely had some of his own ideas about staging "Julius Caesar," and many of them will be reflected in the production. The conspirators all throw open their robes after the assassination, wearing them over the shoulder. Inside, the robes are all blood red. The very cut of the robes is modeled after the silhouette of the vulture.

Another of Kirby's ideas is the costume Caesar wears when he first comes on. It is traditional for him to wear civilian clothes. But Kirby has him come on in military attire like some sort of fantastic creature.

"But, why not?" Sheldon asks. "This way, the people have every reason to believe he may install himself as a dictator."

The costumes for the cast of 50 are being made primarily from military surplus materials. The cloaks are old army blankets which had been consigned to the rag bin. Old GI longjohns were converted into tights for the plebians. Headgear is made from old helmet liners. "We're using a lot of vinyl and plastic," Sheldon says, "with no attempt to disguise the materials."

Overseeing production of the costumes is one of Deena Ferrigno's chores as technical director, and it's no small chore. A full-time University employe [sic], she shares responsibility for the production with Sheldon.

"This is the first time I've had to do a show that somebody else designed," she said. "The first time I saw them, I wondered, "What are they supposed to look like from the back and from the side?" And then I thought, 'Our students aren't built like that.'"

But somehow or other, the costumes are being made -- complete in back and front, though of materials of sometimes dubious origin. "Like those soldier costumes," Deena said. "They're decorated with some kind of sliced sponge. We got it in this old warehouse. I don't even know what it's for..."

How well is she doing? They look good, but perhaps the final verdict should be reserved until opening night. Kirby, who has visited the campus once already, is coming back for the opening.

Seeing the production is going to be his principal reward for the costume designs.

"I asked about paying him," Sheldon says, "but he said not to worry about it -- we couldn't afford him. He felt that because it was for college students, that it was a contribution he wanted to make.

"Stan Lee is the same way -- loose, friendly, inertested [sic] in other people."

The Blue Beetle was originally developed for Victor Fox's comic book Mystery Men Comics in mid-1939 by Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski, who went by the pen name Charles Nicholas. The character was created after Fox was sued by Detective Comics because his Wonderman character allegedly was too similar to Superman. The case had only just started when Nicholas created the Blue Beetle, and the book debuted about four months after Batman suggesting that Beetle was created as a Batman clone that was far enough removed to keep Fox from getting sued again. (Though influences from the Green Hornet are clearly evident.)

With Wonderman off limits during the lawsuit, Fox turned to Blue Beetle as his company's cornerstone character. The book sold reasonably well, and in the tail end of 1939, Fox decided to try to emulate Superman's media saturation by putting Beetle into his own comic strip. He began putting out ads to this effect in November of that year.

You'll note that the ad highlights Nicholas as the creator of the strip and, indeed, when the strip debuted in early 1940, it had Nicholas listed as the creator. However, it was actually the hand of a young Jack Kirby who did the strip. He makes no attempt to mimic Nicholas' style and, while the artwork in the strip is hardly Kirby's best, it is very classically idetifiable. While Kirby had done several other comic strips previously, this was his first superhero.

The Blue Beetle strip debuted in The Boston Evening Transcript on January 8, 1940. As far as anyone's been able to actually prove, that's the only paper it ever actually ran in. Kirby seemed to be largely left to his own devices with the strip. Aside from the Blue Beetle himself, Kirby seemed to be using his own cast of characters. Even with little continuity established in the comic book at this point, Kirby seemed unconcerned that it even existed.

While it's not Kirby's best art, he was more already more adept than most others at the storytelling of a daily strip. In the few sequences I've seen, he's able to run one installment to the next without either clumsily recapping what happened previously or letting readers get lost. Much like how he handled his Sky Masters strip decades later.

Kirby was only on the Blue Beetle strip for a few months, replaced by Louis Cazaneuve. At Fox's studio, Kirby had met Joe Simon and both men, who were independently moonlighting for other companies, saw the advantages of pairing up to become a studio of their own. "Simon and Kirby" was born in the pages of Blue Bolt comics by July 1940.

Fox continued trying to hype Blue Beetle, getting him his own radio show by May 1940 and hosting a "Blue Beetle Day" at the World's Fair in August. That radio program only lasted until September, though, and comic strip died out at the year's end. He never became the media sensation that Superman was. One wonders, though, what might have become of the character had Kirby never met Simon and instead continued on the strip.

Jack Kirby's birthday is this coming Saturday, so I'm going to focus all of this week's posts on him. It's reasonably well-known, at least in comics circles, that Jack Kirby was actually born Jacob Kurtzberg. But like so many other creators in those days -- Stan Lee and Bob Kane probably being the most notable examples -- Jacob Kurtzberg legally changed his name. But today's question is: when?

Fortunately, Gary Groth interviewed Jack about exactly that back in 1990...

GROTH: I understand you got a job with a small newspaper syndicate when you were 18.

KIRBY: Newspaper Features.

GROTH: What were you doing for them?

KIRBY: I was doing editorials. Like I said I did “Your Health Comes First”. I did another daily comic. On each comic strip I put a different name: I was Jack Curtis, Jack Cortez… I didn’t want to be in any particular environment, I wanted to be an all-around American. I kept Kirby. My mother gave me hell. My father gave me hell. My family disowned me.

GROTH: You actually changed your name to Kirby?

KIRBY: When I began doing the strips.

GROTH: Why did you change your name exactly?

KIRBY: I wanted to be an American. My name is Kurtzberg.

GROTH: Why didn’t you think Kurtzberg was an acceptable American name?

KIRBY: I felt if you wanted to have a great name it would be Farnesworth, right? Or Stillweather. I felt Jack Kirby was close to my real name.

"The strips" refer to some of Jack's earliest professional comics work. After leaving the Fleischer animation studios in 1936, he began working for Lincoln Features Syndicate, working on a variety of knock-off strips under a variety of pseudonyms. He went over to the Eisner-Iger Studio in 1938, and worked on both strips and books, again, under a variety of pen names. For Associated Features, he drew The Lone Rider in 1939 under the name Lance Kirby and for Fox Features in 1940, he drew Blue Beetle as "Charles Nicholas." The name "Jack Kirby" first appears in print in late 1940 as he and Joe Simon worked on Blue Bolt #5.

This would suggest Jack changed his name sometime in 1940 or later, and Mark Evanier's biography of him backs this suggestion up. In fact, Evanier notes that Jaack didn't change his name until after he got married in 1942 and his wife Roz had to change her name too. Further evidence in the book can be found in an October 1943 newspaper clipping that notes that the Jack Kirby who did Boy Commandos is "an army private at [Camp] Stewart, in the 845th Battalion under his real name, Jack Kurtzberg." And it stands to reason he wouldn't change his name while he was still in the army fighting Nazis, so that pushes any legal changes back to July 1945 at the earliest. Well after he'd left doing comic strips and was a marketable name in comic books.

So if we're that late into his career, and clearly throwing Jack's own recollection out of the water, that doesn't really answer much. "Sometime after 1945" still leaves almost half a century until Jack's death in 1994. I would guess that the legal name change was Roz's doing, likely after getting yet another check made out to "Jack Kirby." Their first daughter, Susan, was born late in 1945 -- did they have to change her name too, or was that something they took care of before she was born?

Here's something I don't get... If he didn't change his name until sometime after mid-1945, that would mean he worked at the Eisner-Iger studio as Jacob Kurtzberg. And yet at no point can I find any reference of Will Eisner saying, "Of course, when he worked for me, he was still going by Jacob Kurtzberg..." or anything like that. Even in Shop Talk, where the two of them are sitting together expressly talking about that studio and their time together there. Maybe my research skills aren't as sharp as they could be, but that seems like a striking omission on Eisner's part.

Unless perhaps he was going by "Jack Kirby" for several years informally, and just didn't legalize until sometime later. I know Stan Lee took this approach, changing his name decades after first using the pen name. This might account for why Jack mis-remembered when he changed his name -- everyone started calling him Jack Kirby in the late 1930s, so he was, for his purposes, no longer Jacob Kurtzberg. That it took a few more years (and probably Roz doing most of the paperwork) to get it officially changed was just some paperwork he had to sign. He was Jack Kirby regardless what it said on his tax forms.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: From Comics' First Interracial Kiss
https://ift.tt/3mlu4rV

Kleefeld on Comics: Kirby's Creations
https://ift.tt/3snQMAt

Kleefeld on Comics: Thoughts on the DC/Webtoon Thing
https://ift.tt/2W4uRSK

Kleefeld on Comics: Elson's Presents Super Heroes Comics
https://ift.tt/3z845aY

Kleefeld on Comics: The Fantastic Four #136 Cover Mysteries
https://ift.tt/2UxUafx

I stumbled across a minor, but curious, mystery a little while ago. Here are the covers for Fantastic Four #135, 136 and 137...

And here are the covers for some French-language Canadian reprints that came out about two months after the originals...

Most of the covers of the reprint series are lifted from the original comics, with just the English translated into French. But for some reason, the issue reprinting Fantastic Four #136 doesn't have use the original cover art, but a panel of interior art.

Now it's certainly possible the original cover art was lost or destroyed. But here's the cover to a British reprint of the same story from about four years later...

It's been modified a bit to accomodate a slightly wider format, but there was clearly some form of reproducible art still around.

Or was there?

On closer study, The Complete Fantastic Four cover might in fact an entirely new piece of art, recreated based on the original. The more you look at the two, the more discrepancies to see: Medusa's left boot, the Torch's flame aura, the placement of Thing's left hand, the number of steps on that dais, the placement of the upper bike rider... There are more issues there than would be touched up for the size difference. Which leads one to think that the actual cover art for FF #136 was lost in the mail, and John Buscema recreated it based on a printed version.

But then again, most of the differences are either in placement or details near the edge. So was this then a heavy re-cut/paste job with a few touch-ups at the edges? It wouldn't be the first time Marvel put a fair amount of time and effort into heavily retouching some cover art for arguably inconsequential changes.

And, in doing some further research, The Complete Fantastic Four issue is an anomoly. Other foreign reprints -- some coming later still -- use the original art...

So if the original cover art was still around (or at least some version of it that could be used in production) there's a fair case to be made that The Complete Fantastic Four version was NOT a re-creation. But it still seems like a heck of a lot of production work just to get the art to fit a slightly different format. It probably would have been faster, and possibly cheaper, to just have Buscema draw a new one.

Getting back to the Canadian cover, it makes sense that if Marvel sent the art up to Canada for that reprint and the cover art was somehow lost or damaged, and they had to scrounge for something quickly. Depending on when in their printing process the cover are became unusable, it might make sense to just grab the nearest available art that would fill most of a cover -- the opening splash page. But, why the strange treatment? Why the odd angle? Why the red border? Why color some of the figures, but not the Human Torch? And why color the figures with the least intense color of the three chosen? Questions I do not have even speculative answers for. Nothing in my graphic design background can figure out how they arrived at any of their decisions here, aside from, "Hey, what's the biggest piece of art we have that we can use for a cover?"

There just seem to be a number of weird (and admittedly inconsequential) questions around this cover.