Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Under what circumstances did this happen, if it actually happened at all? What was Bates's rationalization?

Jeez, as great as some of those seventies guys were, they sure were egotistical.

I've never heard about this before. Any details?

I never heard of such a thing.

Maybe this is just a rumor? There are quite a lot of those in comicdom.

I never heard of this either.  Kirby lived on the West Coast at the time so did Bates and Kirby have any contact at all?

I never heard of this one, either.---Al

Maybe Cary Bates just called Kirby "Jack."

Do you have a source?  :?

Here is what I found from an interview from thsi site:

on doing comics the Marvel way...

MAGGIN: A story-telling artist can pull it off, though.  Jack Kirby was different.  He knew what to do with Stan Lee's story ideas.

BATES: Oh, yeah, it works if you have someone who knows what he's doing.

So I think this is nothing but a rumor, and I am about to close this thread and delete it unless someone can offer up some proof pretty fast. If no one can post any proof by Saturday, this thread is out of here.

I *THINK* it was in a LEGION OUTPOST fanzine from 1976, which may be collected in the recent reprint of BEST OF LEGION OUTPOST:

http://www.milehighcomics.com/cgi-bin/backissue.cgi?action=list&title=09999999535&snumber=1

They also had, as I recall, an article containing speculation about non-humanoid Legionnaires (this was a great many years before the introduction of "creature" Legionnaires like Tellus and Quislet).

According to my Google research, Kirby was nicknamed "Jack the Hack" in the 1970s, after Stan Lee was given all the credit for the characters they created. This would mean "hack" not in the most derogatory manner, as in "partisan hack," but hack as in:

   1. One who undertakes unpleasant or distasteful tasks for money or reward; a hireling.
   2. A writer hired to produce routine or commercial writing.

Since Jack Kirby was not credited for many of his creations, he was not paid for them. He continued to work because he had to, and his most famous work was considered work-for-hire hackery.

Still, I've found no reference to Cary Bates having said it, but it was apparently a common nickname on both sides of the street during that time.

I guess the mystery is solved.

Source for that "Jack the Hack" nickname quote?  

Kirby was very vocal in interviews and public appearances at least by the early 80s about his contributions to the Marvel comics of the 60s and many people (especially fan/writers like mark Evanier) also had alot to say on the matter.

Google: "Jack the Hack" Kirby

Then pick one. I remember IGN comics being one of the sources, but that was not the best one.

Sources = less stress

The Jack the Hack nickname was common in the 1970's but it sure wasn't meant as a good thing!

Some quotes, NONE by Cary Bates, but made by others:

On Captain America and the Falcon:

"Issues 193 through 214: The bizarre and ill-fated return of Jack Kirby to Cap as writer/artist, this time. At the time we all called him "Jack the Hack," but history has shown that Kirby's run was much better than my friends and I thought at the time."

http://spaces.msn.com/obsessedwithcomics/blog/cns!CBFE22C7C48E5EB6!472.entry

The dreaded John Byrne writes of himself:

"My career has shown some interesting (and unexpected) parallels to Kirby's, albeit on a somewhat less spectacular scale. (I didn't help create the whole Marvel Universe, after all!) Right now I seem to be passing thru something akin to the 'Jack the Hack' period of the 70s -- which means, I suppose, I should anticipate being 'discovered' by a new generation of artists who will somewhat sycophantically elevate me to levels as just unrealistic as the depths to which the previous generation sought to condemn me! Fun, ain't it?"

http://fanboyrampage.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_fanboyrampage_archive.html

from Comics in Context #95: The Crypt, The King, and The Credit:

"We were reminded that a time came when people at Marvel and DC "were openly mocking" Kirby's work. This is a period which I witnessed, when comics pros were referring to Kirby as "Jack the Hack." (I wonder if any of those people would admit to that now.)

Steve Sherman said that this kind of treatment gives an artist doing his work the "feeling of being screwed while you're doing it," and, he added, Kirby "never wanted to be a hack." Sherman said that Kirby believed that "If you treat people well, you expect to be treated decently in return" and yet he wasn't."

http://comics.ign.com/articles/637/637694p5.html

From Comics in Context #15: Stan Lee and the Mystery of Creativity:

"Spurgeon and Raphael contribute admirable mini-biographies of both Ditko and Kirby within their Stan Lee biography. Kirby comes off at times as very much a sympathetic underdog, or, as the authors put it, "Kirby had become an icon for the mistreated comic-book artist." (p. 224) They point out that during Kirby's return to Marvel in the 1970s, Lee was friendly towards him whereas "the new guard at Marvel. . .referred to him as "Jack the Hack." (p. 180) This is all too true: I was there, though not yet a comics pro, and I heard that phrase myself. I find it sad when the authors quote Mark Evanier, Kirby's longtime friend, saying that the support from pros and fans persuaded Kirby "he would not be forgotten; that the history of comics would not be written with Stan Lee receiving sole credit for creating all those characters." (p. 225) To think that Kirby actually feared he would be forgotten!"

http://comics.ign.com/articles/595/595575p2.html

Interesting stuff.  And a reminder that despite Jack's near-deification after death, he was not always "The King" to everyone.  

I was becoming a major comic book fan in the mid-70s and I can tell you I studiously avoided Kirby's Captain America, Black Panther and Eternals.  At that time, I considered his work ugly and weird, an example of stylization being taken to its furthest extreme.  Back then, guys like Neal Adams and John Buscema got all the love with their comparatively "realistic" styles and, at the very least, their understanding of human anatomy.  In contrast, Kirby's stuff looked to me like one of those useless "How To Draw" lessons at about Step Two...the part where the artist has drawn a bunch of circles and cubes to block out where the head and limbs will go...only with Kirby there was never that magical, cheating jump to Stage 3 where suddenly it all looks human.  More like he drew a face on that tin can "head" and moved on to the next panel.

I have to say the passage of time hasn't done much to improve my opinion of Kirby's work from the mid-70s on, though I'm a huge fan now of his work on the Fantastic Four (where Joe Sinnot's glossy inks gave Kirby's pencils a more "DC" kind of glamour), Challengers of the Unknown, the old Marvel monster books and of course "Jimmy Olsen," where the heads were infamously redrawn (fixed, in my view) by Murphy Anderson. And Kirby's Golden Age stuff on Captain America, viewed beside other art of the era, is still astonishing stuff.

But having said all that, I don't think it was ever fair to call Kirby a "hack." That word to me connotes someone who doesn't care about the work and just turns in any old thing to get his paycheck.  Someone like Vince Colletta, for instance!  Kirby, I believe, always cared about what he was doing and always tried to take the genre in new directions.  His problem was that in the 70s he was running off in a direction most of us had no interest in going.  Sometimes when you run out ahead of the crowd, you get to brag when they finally come running to catch up.  But sometimes they don't follow you at all, and you're left standing out there alone and looking ridiculous.  For my money, Kirby's second tenure at Marvel, his work for the Indies and even silly stuff like "Super-Powers" (as close to hack work as any project ever was) remains a square peg that will never fit comfortably anywhere.

It's funny, I fell in love with Kirby's work as a pre-teen in the 70s (thanks mostly to the Fantastic Four reprints in Marvels' Greatest Comics and his runs on Eternals and Capt. America).  It's weird to go back now and read the letter pages in those comics (and in the 4th World and other early 70s books Kirby worked on).  The polarized views of Kirby's work are amazing, especially at DC where the standard for so long was the Curt Swan, Alex Raymond-meets-Wayne Boring style.  Neal Adams was king for many at that time.  At Marvel, fans of the convoluted cosmic epics and sophisticated melodrama of the post-Roy Thomas school of Marvel writers objected to Kirby parachuting into the gritty, politically-charged (and to my current taste, hopelessly ponderous and pretentious) storylines of Captain America and Black Panther and taking over, injecting a Golden-Age sense of fun and action in his big, chunky style.

I don't think Kirby has been deified enough, especially in a fine-arts sense.

That Byrne quote is hilarious.  Yes Mr Byrne, one day you will be considered equal to Jack Kirby, the man who created Captain America with Joe Simon and co-created The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, The Hulk, The Eternals, The New Gods, The Black Panther, etc etc.  One of the greatest and most influential children's cartoonists of the 20th Century.

Kirby's best work in the period when the seventies-eighties guys derided him, is probably in animation, because when he worked as a concept artist, here all he had to do was contribute raw ideas and let other people handle the details. Thus, things like THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN and CHUCK NORRIS: KARATE KOMMANDOS had stories, but that used the Kirby concepts to tell innovative adventure plots, instead of viewing the characters as an opportunity to be weird.

THUNDARR shows that Kirby's style transcends just craggy "Kirby wiggles." The cartoons looked almost Alex Toth-level polished, nary a wiggle in sight, but there was just something about the THUNDARR characters that immediately suggest "Kirby" despite the fact they're done in the Hanna-Barbera style. Nobody would ever confuse Thundarr for Birdman.



While I disagree entirely with that entire sentiment (the Englehart CAPTAIN AMERICA had a James Bond-esque spy groove reminiscent of a more contemporary version of Doc Savage - the Secret Empire, the Serpent Crown, the Falcon, and so forth; many critiques can be put against it, but a series with "Tricky Dick" as a super-villain is certainly not un-fun or even predictable) I *DO* agree with the essential stripped to the core point that you just made: that the reason many people didn't "get" Jack Kirby was because it was jarring to go from Englehart style science fiction adventure, to Kirby style acid trippery. It's like drinking a coke when somebody tells you it's a milkshake. OF COURSE people responded badly to it at the time.

In many ways, it was fortuitous you mentioned Kirby's CAPTAIN AMERICA, because Stainless is ying to the King's yang: Englehart managed to revitalize Cap by bringing him down to earth during the whole "Man Without A Country" stuff. Kirby pulled him the other way. Englehart does trippy stuff, to be sure (the guy admits doing lots and lots of LSD and pot in the seventies and eighties, making him one of the few non-liars of the Silver Age :D ) but the reason a moment like "Woman, you must MARRY that TREE!" in "Celestial Madonna" stand out, is not because it is common, but because Englehart's stuff is so otherwise grounded it stands out.

Englehart knew how to make fantasy elements stand out. For all the crazy stuff in his Celestial Madonna climax, Englehart wrote about the real Vietnam he as a veteran knew, down to using real GI patois.  Kirby on the other hand, used art to suggest different worlds where fantasy elements fit right in: notice the Dr. Seuss-esque prehistoric world of DEVIL DINOSAUR.

Englehart was all about Captain America as a guy. The difference between histrionic posturing and suckerpunch powerful raw stuff is the difference between doing a belly flop and a perfect ten dive. Englehart did character-centered stuff, but IT WORKED BECAUSE ENGLEHART WAS TALENTED, he could make things feel real to the reader. Englehart's dialogue is snappy and beautiful and sounds like something people would say in real life. If you want to "get" who Captain America is, read Englehart.

Kirby's dialogue...well...he's the guy that wrote the most horrible self-introduction ever, even by the terrifyingly low standards of exposition-heavy adventure comics: "And ME, young but COOL Harvey Lockman!" Nightwing's critique was that Kirby didn't draw adventure comics in Neal Adamns realism - well, Kirby didn't do ANYTHING naturalistically; not anatomy (though he did give his figures a sense of solidity), not dialogue, not worldbuilding.

Characterization isn't as important for superheroes as it is for other kinds of stories, and you sort of expect gods to talk weird, but if you have problems depicting - my God -  ENERGY realistically, you're in trouble. "Z-Ray." "Beams of Techno-Cosmic Force." "Cosmi-Current." What happened to good old fashoined infrared and laser beams?

But even here when we're talking about the various Kirby beams and rays, we see the strength of Kirby as a creator come the 1970s: he does little things, very subtle things that make us think that something he came up with is weirder than we could possibly imagine. For instance, Orion's "Astro Force."

At first, "Astro-Force" was a straightforward phenomenon: despite the pretentious title, it was pretty much some kind of death ray that came out of Orion's space exercise bike, right? Yes, UNTIL "The Glory Boat." There, Orion says, "They took all of my equipment...but not ALL! I can still CONTACT the ASTRO-FORCE!"

"Contact" the Astro Force? Don't you mean "fire," or "activate?" Just by changing ONE WORD, Kirby suddenly suggested that the Astro-Force was something vastly weirder than we had been led to believe. What IS the Astro-Force, that it can be contacted? I think my mind was just blown.

What you may be seeing there, prhaps is that the lead Thundarr characters were actually designed by Alex Toth, not by Jack Kirby.

Kirby designed the backgrounds and the incidental characters, but the leads are all Toth.

kdb

Uh! Did not know that. The backgrounds in THUNDARR was absolutely amazing - I'm reminded of the giant beached cruise ship on the side that people lived in, but everything was on the side. Amazing! (Especially during that battle with the bat-creatures.)

What did Gil Kane do and what did Kirby do in CHUCK NORRIS, KARATE KOMMANDOS?

Don't know, sorry.

kdb

The credits only say:

Other crew
Alfredo Alcala ....  creative consultant  
Gil Kane ....  creative consultant  
Jack Kirby ....  creative consultant  
Doug Wildey ....  creative consultant  
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165166/fullcredits

Unfortunately, Stainless was often paired with crappy artists.  A problem the King didn't have.  Plus he can still blow your mind as a writer --everything from Galactus to Capt. Victory.  No drugs needed (Kirby was a vet too).  And I think his Cap was very human in the 70s.

This is speculation, of course, but It's not hard to believe that the guy who created a FIGHTING FETUS, for the love of Stan, wouldn't be somehow responsible for something as bizarre as the Super-Ninja ('I'll have my VENGEANCE on you, NORRIS!")?

My favorite part of any given episode of CHUCK NORRIS, KARATE KOMMANDOS was that, like the MR.T cartoon, it started off with a live action portion featuring Chuck Norris giving a sanctimonious sermon about how we can apply this story to our own lives. Yep, how we can apply the lessons of an episode where Chuck finds a secret school of Ninjas on Mt. Fuji, or where he has to recover an army sattelite that crashed on an island of zombies.

My favorite sermon was Chuck saying, "There are some people in this world that believe that all our problems can be fixed with violence." And my irony-o-meter EXPLODED

Weirdest of all was the fact that Chuck talked about the story as if it really happened. "Yeah, now that was one tough scrape there with Super Ninja.." Actually, considering Chuck Norris's reputation...I'm not 100% sure it didn't happen, actually. I mean, this is the guy who once performed a roundhouse kick with such force, the power of the blow travelled back in time and killed Amelia Earhart. A guy who can watch "Sixty Minutes" in twenty minutes.

While I love Kirby's 70s output, my one problem is that it often feels like the fact that the story is set using this character is an INCIDENTAL factor. In all fairness, this is not true of his CAPTAIN AMERICA, which had the spirit of the bicentennial all over it, in contrast to the cynical Watergate-era Englehart Cap.

The best example of this is Kirby's BLACK PANTHER. Something as important to the character as WAKANDA (y'know, the country the Panther is the KING of) is not even mentioned until Princess Zanda threatens to blow the place up in issue #5 or thereabouts, and even then, the place isn't even actually seen; the Panther's Kingdom is almost an afterthought. No aspect of the Panther's skill as a scientist is employed. In fact, Chris Priest later retconned away the Kirby BLACK PANTHER by saying that the Kirby stories were set in an alternate future where the Panther had suffered brain damage...and it's hard to argue with this. Considering the incredible world that surrounded the Black Panther created by Don MacGregor in JUNGLE ACTION, not making use of MacGregor's Wakanda and supporting cast is almost criminal. :D

And Steve has had, not just good, but GREAT artists, too - Dick Dillin in his JUSTICE LEAGUE run, in his DOCTOR STRANGE run, Frank Brunner (whose only other Marvel book was, to my knowledge, Gerber's HOWARD THE DUCK), and for the LOVE OF GOD, Marshall Rogers in DETECTIVE COMICS.

I forget who it was that worked with Stainless on FANTASTIC FOUR in the 1980s, but that guy was pretty good.

Whatever happened to She-Thing? One of the more interesting supporting FF characters. And that story where she and the Thing kissed in that lost city was a love story so beautiful I CRIED.

I have nothing important to add, but I wanted to thank Julian for enough obscure and bizarre references to send me reeling for the rest of the day:

Chuck Norris Karate Commandos (?!!!?!)
Fighting Fetus?!
She-Thing?

And my favorite, "Orion's space exercise bike"! Priceless!  :lol:

Although before this discussion I'd never have thought of Kirby in the same light as Otto Binder, it occurs to me maybe The King had trouble in the 70s and 80s because, like Otto, his genius lay in his ability to generate a limitless stream of amazing but inherently GOOFY concepts, a strength in the hip and fun-loving Silver Age but a definite liability in the often pretentious, pompous atmosphere of the Bronze Age.  In a time when comics read like pseudo-Shakespearean drama as penned by the writing staff of Days Of Our Lives, it's no wonder Kirby's stuff stuck out like a sore thumb.  He peddled oddball fun in a time when readers, and other creators, were totally obsessed with their own self-importance and the "literary value" of funny books that solved all the world's problems between ads for Hostess Ho-Ho's and Duncan Yo-Yos.

Personally, I think the dark truth nobody wants to admit is that Kirby would be no more welcomed by the readers of today than he was twenty-five or so years ago.  Deceased, he's a giant.  Alive, he'd be unemployed.

Deceased, he's a giant. Alive, he'd be unemployed.

Sad but true.

Of course, Kirby did make use of both Wakanda and a supporting cast/family for T'Challa in those classic issues.  King Solomon's Frog is one of my favorite comic epics of all time, so I'm a little biased.  My characterization of the 70s writers above extends to Don McGregor --his stuff largely just leaves me cold today.



Dick Dillin is fun, but the others are mediocre talents (with the possible exception of Rogers' Foozle comics in the 80s).




 :lol: I'm sorry Julian, but I just can't agree with you on this either.  As a weird hiccup in mainstream comics, I will grant you that She-Thing/Ms Marvel was unforgettable --in a campy/ironic way.  Otherwise, an abomination.  Mostly ugly art as well.


And as for Nightwing's comment, all I can say is Long Live the King.  I would start a company just to publish him.

Speaking of "King Solomon's Frog," Kirby has a way, hardly endearing to me at all, of jumping on a book and making it totally divorced from what it was previously.

BLACK PANTHER, for instance, should have been called ABNER LITTLE AND FRIENDS.

It's apparent in the very first page that Abner Little showed up. He gives the Black Panther a ride in his strange and exotic aircraft.

Now...what was THE VERY FIRST THING EVER that we knew about Black Panther? I'm talking ALLLLLL the way back in FANTASTIC FOUR #52 or thereabouts. It was that the Black Panther built, drove and designed strange and exotic aircraft.

That's like, the very first thing we see of the Black Panther; when he gives the Fantastic Four a magnetojet to visit him in Wakanda.

From the Roy Thomas-penned AVENGERS #85 to the MacGregor book, the Panther has driven jet after jet that would give the Thunderbirds a woody. In fact, come Busiek's AVENGERS run, the Avengers Quinjets were made in Wakanda!

So, why would a known jet jock like the Panther bum a ride off some midget? That's like Speed Racer hitch-hiking.

Obviously the function of Abner's copter was to show that Abner Little, as an eccentric collector, has strange and weird equipment. In other words, Kirby had a choice between characterizing the Panther, who lest we forget is the character the book is supposed to be about, and characterizing some character that he just made up, and he picked the character he just made up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the story is awful because Kirby got this detail wrong (nor is my point that "King Solomon's Frog" was awful - actually, I love that story and I thought it was fantastic). I am however, zeroing in on this one detail as being typical of one place where...yeah, I can see where Kirby's detractors would have a point: namely, that when Kirby jumps on a book with an "established" character that he is adding his own concepts to, he shouts "ME FIRST! ME FIRST!" and pushes everything else out of the way like a rich guy with a gun going for the last lifeboat on the Titanic.

You know what's even weirder about this?

FANTASTIC FOUR #52, the Panther's first appearance, was co-plotted by Jack Kirby himself!

"But Julian," you might say, "if Kirby created the Panther, can't he write him however the hell he wants?"

To which I say, "No."

If it was a character or strip closely associated with the original creator, like say TERRY AND THE PIRATES and Milt Caniff, perhaps - but Kirby's creation was (and I hate to use this term) a creation of a "committee:" Roy Thomas, MacGregor, Priest, and others, all of whom have made the Panther who he is today.

In such a case, how a character was in the first appearance, or what the vision of the original creator was, is not as important.

Isn't that more or less what Tom Laughlin always said in the Billy Jack movies, just before he beat the crap out of thugs, corrupt officials, crooked cops, and National Guardsmen?!?!

TELLE writes:



Wow! What's the "smilie" equivalent of a spit take?  'Cause I wanna insert one here.

You dig Dillin over Marshall Rogers and Frank Brunner?!  Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.  Dillin was fine on the Blackhawks but he was always an awkward fit at best on superheroes, much as I loved the "satellite era" of the JLA.  Frank Brunner I suppose you could argue was a Neal Adams clone...sort of...but I thought his work on Dr. Strange was gorgeous.  Marshall Rogers, at least paired with Terry Austin on Detective and later Dr. Strange, was wonderful in my estimation.  He's still in the top tier of Batman artists, and considering that character's artistic pedigree that's saying something.

Julian Perez writes:



And in this, if nothing else, Mr Byrne has achieved his goal of being the new Kirby.



 :lol: Maybe you were referring to the USAF's exhibition flyers, but when I hear "Thunderbirds" I picture the Gerry Anderson version, so that phrase above is a hilarious play on words.

Therefore, I'm stealing it.

The exception being that Jack's takes are just as good and many times better than how they were before.

I love Jack Kriby's artwork, it is truly original and extremely powerful!

Artists tend to like his art more than non-artists, since non-creative types tend to only like "pretty art" or "realistic art" and normally can't make sense of "weird stuff" and artwork that is a bit out there and super creative. Not, everyonbe, but most people. Kriby's art was weird, wacky, ugly, but all in a very good way.

Heh heh heh. Thanks! Yeah, that was a puppet joke.

So there's a squadron of fighter planes named after that show where puppets discuss matters of life and death? This is almost as awesome a moment as when NASA named the first space shuttle "Enterprise." Didn't know that, actually. You know those kids that were into model airplanes and all that? That wasn't me. I was more into dinosaurs.

THUNDERBIRDS is a model of great unintentional comedy. My favorite moment was when a remote control model car containing puppets (containing a bomb) runs off the side of the road and bursts into flames. I couldn't stop laughing.

And that episode where they have real normal sized alligators, but put them beside puppets and have the puppets pretend they're giants? GENIUS!



Since we're comparing Byrne to Kirby...

Margaret Mead once said, "be lazy, go crazy."

Kirby and Byrne both took part of her advice. Kirby went crazy, but Byrne got lazy.

Being crazy is a strength when you're a creative type. And while some of the 70s guys may not have dug it, Kirby's CAPTAIN VICTORY is the one comic on the stands in the 1980s that featured a battle with a Fighting Fetus. Of that I'm quite sure.

Being lazy, though, is a much less conscienable crime for an artist. How could a guy like Byrne, who had his flaws, sure, but he could draw one hell of an action scene come Claremont's IRON FIST, suddenly start drawing Wonder Woman, the fantasy of an entire heterosexual male generation, as a thin-necked E.T.-like creature?

You know what they should put on Byrne's tombstone? "Here Lies John Byrne - his old stuff was better."

(Speaking of CAPTAIN VICTORY, what were the exact circumstances surrounding the bankruptcy of Pacific Comics?)



One strength of Kirby were his layouts. He had these enormous splash pages, especially in NEW GODS and in his war comics like SGT. FURY, that made one feel like the panels were too small for what he was showing. I'm especially reminded of NEW GODS #5, where Kirby shows a scene of Forager leading a charge of bugs into the food source. What a picture, what perspective! It was so three-dimensional you could reach right in there (maybe even fall in if your feet trip).

But I have to say, Nightwing is right when he says that Kirby couldn't make his three-domensional figures less indicational. For instance, take the "fanservice" scene where Big Barda showers, somewhere in MISTER MIRACLE #6, right before being attacked by the Female Furies. Now, how off does art have to be when a dame like Barda in the shower can't get a single woof?

Help, I'm an old stick in the mud!

What can I say?  Dillin is a clunky, lovably artless craftsman from another era but Brunner and Rogers are too slick and skilled (too 70s?) for my taste.  Not that I think Kirby was either unskilled or un-slick, especially when paired with a great inker.  Just on a higher artistic plane than most others.  And, okay, maybe a bit eccentric.

Reference was made earlier to retconning Kirby's Panther as a brain-damaged impostor but who's to say that Kirby didn't retcon all previous versions of the Panther (maybe including his own) when he took up chronicling T'Challa's adventures again?  Turnabout is fair play when it comes to retcons, explicit or not.

What's interesting to me about Kirby --something detractors seize on as a fault-- is his distance from these characters.  He's not a continuity-obsessed fan but an adult professional and his approach reflects that.  In the long run, as much as I'm obsessed with continuity and trivia myself, radical change and re-starts are probably healthier in terms of audience renewal.  I certainly was not a reader of the older Panther series (or even of the original FF stories) when I encountered Kirby's series as a kid.  I knew the Panther vaguely from a few issues of the Avengers but that was it.  So my embrace of the "new" version was total and unencumbered.

I don't want to get into another "John Byrne is lazy" (or crazy) discussion because I remember how in another thread I was reminded of Byrne's prodigious output and obvious work ethic.  Suffice to say, I still dislike him as a creator, regardless of his draftsmanship.

That's an interesting touch, BTW, the Busiek Wakanda industry thing.  Sometimes continuity can be inserted without intrusion, as a pleasant treat for older/wider read fans.

To address the question posed in the title of this thread.... yes. The exact quote, as it originally appeared in The Legion Outpost # 4 is:



In Bates' defense, it was over thirty years ago, there's always the possibility that he might have been misquoted (although I doubt it), and that period of Kirby's career was disappointing when compared to the days of the Stan and Jack team.  

The article which contains the quote was reprinted in The Best of the Legion Outpost (2004), as was a period interview with Bates from the seventies.

Was this at the point where someone else had to do Superman's faces instead of Kirby?

I don't know about "had to".  More like "required by DC editorial".  Murphy Anderson and other artists altered Kirby's version of several characters' faces in keeping with DC house style as established by Swan, Adams, etc.

Re: the re-done heads...it should be noted that DC also pasted a Swan Superman head over Alex Toth's Superman on that Super Friends tabloid cover, and Toth's style was much more "user-friendly" than Kirbys at the time.  In fact it's fair to say Toth enjoyed respect throughout his career whereas Kirby, as we've discussed in this thread, was at times regarded as a dinosaur or worse.

Anyway, this suggests to me that DC had some sort of editorial edict out there that Superman must look a certain way, and artists who strayed too far from the "house" look risked getting edited.  Interestingly, the same sort of cosmetic surgery never seems to have been applied to Batman or Wonder Woman.  It seems to me that in any case where an artist had a truly distinctive style, one that overpowered the generic look DC wanted for Superman, the pasted heads showed up.

Actually, I can almost see their point.  When your flagship character doesn't wear a mask of any kind, it's rather imperative that his facial features be recognizable at all times.  And let's face it, in recent years artists have been given a great deal of latitude to make Superman look however they like, with mixed results at best.  In the 90s, especially, Superman not only didn't look the same from book to book, he often looked flat out ugly.  And to this day, no image of a mostly silhouetted Superman, with an angry scowl and glowing red eyes, looks anything like any Superman I ever knew.  But they sure do like to draw him that way, don't they?

I recently got a DCCP by Keith Giffen co-starring the Creeper and found the whole thing undreadable and inrecognizable as a Superman comic.

The heavy-handed editorial control over Superman is what made the franchise a success pre-Crisis --I love the Madison Ave look of Swan et al.  But that look and that control are what lead to criticisms of Superman's "blandness" and accusations of childishness.  Arguably the germs of Crisis and John Byrne's revision.

And, oh yeah:  what a meanie that Cary Bates was!

I don't think that was unique to Keith's Superman work.  All of his 1980s layouts can be a bit challenging.

:s:

HA HA! I KNEW IT!

Those that say I've got a bad memory owe me an apology.



There was always something "off" about ETERNALS, as much as I love it (and still love it, for all of its wackiness). That thing was illustrated to me by the seven first preview pages of Neil Gaiman's latest take on the series.

The Gaiman take on ETERNALS begins with Ike Harris (Ikaris) speaking to Makkari, who has forgotten his origins as an Eternal.

"Pardon me, sir, but have you ever wondered about the origin of intelligent life on earth?"

And then he goes into the whole spiel about the Eternals and Deviants and the Space Gods and all that and Makkari slams the door on him, cursing him out as a "darn Scientologist." It was hilarious.

Right then and there I realized what was so "off" about ETERNALS: it was, pretty much in comics form, the beliefs of nearly every single suicide UFO cult. This is SCIENTOLOGY: THE MINISERIES as only Jack "King" Kirby could tell it!



As an artist, I have never really seen any work by Keith Giffen that I've really LIKED since that issue of MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS starring Woodgod.

And his current stuff is just appalling - he went from a competent Dave Cockrum clone to being someone that represents heads as jagged geometric shapes.

Kirby is in many ways a folk artist, filtering all aspects of pop culture through the strainer of highly personalized superhero comics.  He was a lifelong fan of sicence fiction, the occult, and the just plain weird.

I've disliked Giffen since I saw how much he swiped from Munoz/Sampayo in the 80s.  Talk about a hack!  I'd like to see some examples of Kirby visual swipes (not including the cover of Kamandi #1).