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

Kleefeld on Comics: Kirby's Comic Strips
https://ift.tt/wI3E1fC

Kleefeld on Comics: Jack Kirby's Blue Beetle
https://ift.tt/JSmnAVv

Kleefeld on Comics: The Storytelling Brilliance in Sky Masters
https://ift.tt/RqNwfZA

Kleefeld on Comics: When Did Jacob Kurtzberg Become Jack Kirby?
https://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2026/08/when-did-jacob-kurtzberg-become-jack.html

Kleefeld on Comics: My Favorite Kirby Covers
https://ift.tt/rs6KaZq

In honor of Jack Kirby's birthday today...
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!

Sky Masters has got to be the most under-appreciated work in Jack Kirby's career. It's got absolutely brilliant illustration and storytelling, particularly for a newspaper strip; the Wally Wood inks from the earlier part of the run are gorgeous; it's also probably one of Kirby's most-ground-in-actual-science works, but still has a grand sense of adventure and exploration. It's a real shame that legal difficulties kept the strip from running longer.

Before he passed away, Greg Theakston probably did the most work keeping any interest in the strip alive and well, having retouched and republished the series multiple times. I think he came out with a two-volume version in 2011. But he also posted some scans on Facebook several years ago that I'd like to examine here.

First, here's a black and white copy of the strip that originally ran on May 31, 1959, taken from the British Express Weekly...

It looks fantastic, I think (even though the Theakston-printed versions are MUCH cleaner) but it's not how it originally ran. It was originally a Sunday strip and thus in color. But, color printing being a little pricier and the daily strips being in black and white anyway, this is how it's generally been seen/reprinted.

So here's Kirby's (slightly cropped on the scanner) color guide to the same strip...

Kirby was, of course, dealing with 1950s newspaper printing technology, so he's mostly using a bright color palette. Lots of yellows and reds; the blues are more on the cyan side. The newspaper folks took Kirby's color guide and made their color plates based on that. Here's what the engravers sent back as a color proof...

You can see they've basically stayed true to Kirby's original, but cleaned up some of the bleeding edges and unified the slight variations from Kirby's watercolors into solid blocks. The only really significant change is in the caption box of the first panel in the third tier; I have no idea why they opted for muted purple-ish color instead of the orange that Kirby specified.

Finally, here's a scan of what was ultimately printed...

You can easily see how muted the overall palette looks on the newsprint, instead of the pristine white board. That's one of the reason why such garish colors were chosen -- subtlety simply did not translate onto newsprint. You can particularly see it in that Earth in the second panel; it loses nuance with each step so that it's just a blue squiggle by the time most readers would have seen it.

It's also noteworthy that there are some differences in the panel arrangements. Kirby designed the strip so what was originally the bottom tier could be discarded if an individual paper wanted to use that space for something else. Another strip or an advertisement, perhaps. So the Sunday Sky Masters was essentially two separate strips. In addition, Kirby has an extra beat panel (seen as the first panel of the third tier in the final published version I have here) that could be added or dropped depending on the specific format the newspaper wanted to run for the piece. You'll note that the printed version here still retains three tiers, despite dropping the "Scrap Book" section -- they've completely reconfigured the strip layout to fit a slightly narrower format. But doing so opened up a little extra space, hence Kirby added the extra beat panel, which is unnecessary for the overall story, but helps with the new layout.

That's one of the things that really impresses the hell out of me with Sky Masters. Kirby has this strip set up so brilliantly that a newspaper could run it in several different ways to fit its preferred format, without losing anything in the overall story. Not to mention (though you can't really see it here in one strip) that he's able to move the action along from day to day with recaps that sound so little like recaps that you won't get bored reading them all in a collected edition back to back like a graphic novel.

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 Jack 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.

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.

This Friday is Jack Kirby's birthday, so I'm going to take the entire week to talk about the King of Comics.

To beging with, let's highlight a little-remembered side of Kirby. He's of course widely known as a comic book artist, and rightly so. But he also dipped into the comic strip market more than a few times as well. So what I thought I'd do today is showcase some samples of comic strips done by Jack Kirby. He never saw much success with these -- indeed, many were never even published -- but it is, as I say, an aspect of Kirby's career that is frequently overlooked.

So here are examples of thirteen different strips he worked on, plus one editorial cartoon. Enjoy!