The original King Kong was released on March 2, 1933 in New York City and to the full United States on April 7. It was immediately a massive hit, earning about $90,000 opening weekend. That's about $2.3 million in today's money. The studio executives wanted to capitalize on the film's success as quickly as possible and green-lit a sequel, demanding that it get into theaters before Christmas. And indeed, the same production team managed to pull together the hour-and-nine-minute Son of Kong in a matter of months, and they were able to release the sequel on December 22!

To no surprise, Song of Kong isn't as good as the original. But it's far better than it has any right to be -- the idea of a sequel wasn't even on the table when King Kong was first released and they managed to still complete the entire picture with some amazing special effects fast enough to get it released the very same year!

OK, but what does this have to do with comics?

Well, to help promote Song of Kong, they produced a comic strip to run in newspapers. (They had actually done the same with King Kong ealier in the year, but I want to focus on the sequel.) The story is, obviously, an abridged version of Ruth Rose's film script. The original artwork was handled by Glen Cravath, who had been a movie poster artist for several years at that point. The strip ran for six weeks, but it's unclear what markets it may have hit. As far as I can tell, none of the original survives. (Allan Holtz's American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide doesn't even list it.)

However, it was translated and adapted in Spain to promote the movie there. Artist Tomás Porto reworked Cravath's originals, supplementing and expanding several sequences with his own art, making the entire thing over twice as long! This Spanish version does a better job representing the movie and argueably makes a more emotional ending, leaving the ape's saddened face visible as the water rises up instead of just his hand as is shown in the movie.

Porto had a fairly long career as a cartoonist after this, while Cravath only continued for about five or ten years, mostly working on Frank Buck (probably ghost-) written strips.

In any event, we do have Porto's Spanish-language version of the Son of Kong strip and I thought I'd run that here today...

I was saddenedly to hear of the passing of Will Murray over the weekend. He was a deeply influential writer/researcher of comics and comics history, and I delieberately patterned some of my work directly off his. I never had the chance to meet him in person, but we did chat via email a few times; he was kind and generous with his time and resources, going so far as to provide me with scans of some obscure articles he had written years earlier.

In light of his passing, I thought I'd re-run this appreciation post I wrote back in 2012. My condolences and best wishes to his surviving friends and family.

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A co-worker and I were chatting this morning and, at some point, he asked what my next book was going to be about?

"Blackstone, the comic magician detective," I answered.

At which point he laughed, amused at the consistency with which I can find topics so obscure and esoteric that no one else is writing about it. He continued to point out that I also tend to go into great detail on these topics, probably much moreso than anyone else cares about. I agreed, saying that was more or less deliberate on my part.

He then proceeded to tell me about how he was a Doc Savage fan growing up, and he had 100-some of the novels. And how he was recently reading a book about the history of Lester Dent and his famous creation, and noted how the author of that piece also went into great detail about this character that no one today was all that familiar with, much like I do.

I asked if he was talking about Will Murray. After a split-second of surprise that I would know that name, he affirmed that he was indeed talking about Murray, a noted Doc Savage fan who's actually gone on to write several Doc Savage novels as well.

I'm not a big Doc Savage fan myself, but I've been familiar with Murray's work for many years now. I don't recall exactly when I first read something by him, or even when/where I started seeing his name with any regularity, but I do know that I've read any number of articles and such by him that have delved into the depths of comic book and pulp histories. I pointed out to my co-worker that I had actually used Murray as a sort of template for my own authorship.

But he wasn't the only one. As much as he knew about the medium, comics weren't his forte. Two other authors whose work was influential to me, in terms of how I've approached what passes for my writing "career", are Peter Sanderson and Greg Theakston. Sanderson is perhaps best known as one of the primary writers for The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and Marvel Saga. Theakston is best known as an illustrator, and is one of the go-to guys for prepping for reprint Golden Age comics for which usable art is no longer available.

I recall being in awe of Sanderson because, when I first heard of him, his title was Marvel Comics Archivist. That sounded liked an incredible job, and one which I hoped I could land one day. (Sanderson turned out to be the first and only person to hold that position. I believe he was let go during the Marvel's bankruptcy in the 1990s and the position was never filled again.)

I actually wasn't aware that Theakston did any artwork at all until 1999 when I saw his cover for The Golden Age of Marvel Comics. Prior to that I had only read research articles by him, primarily about Jack Kirby. I tell a lie; I did some of his art in his self-published Pure Images series, but those were largely text pieces with only a few pages of his original art. Regardless, I knew him more as a comics historian than anything else.

Murray, Sanderson and Theakston were/are three writers who would dig deep into the annals of comic history and cover their subjects with a depth and precision that I wasn't seeing anywhere else. Other writers who were trying to do the same type of thing came across as fanboys who wrote a little better than average. These guys, though, researched and wrote almost as if they were writing for academic journals. They wrote with a love of their subject, of course, but they also wrote intelligently and covered territory no one else seemed to be covering. These were the guys who had the most direct impact on my sense of what writing ABOUT comics should be. Much of my writing -- for Jack Kirby Collector, MTV Geek, Drawn Word and my own work -- is modeled off theirs.

Will, Peter, Greg -- if you happen across this, thanks very much. One of my goals in writing about comics is to have the same impact that you had on me. I'm quite confident that I'm not there yet, but that's part of why I keep coming back day after day.

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.