For comics enthusiasts, one of the major publishing events of 2008 will be the long-awaited release this February of Kirby: King of Comics, the art book and biography covering the late Jack Kirby. The prolific creator or co-creator of such series as Captain America, Fantastic Four and The New Gods, Kirby remains one of the greatest and most influential artists in American comic book history. Published by Abrams, the book is written by Kirby’s former assistant and longtime friend Mark Evanier.
“I spend my life, especially around conventions, talking about Jack,” Evanier told PWCW. Indeed, he is surely the foremost authority on Kirby’s life and work. His friendship with Kirby goes back nearly four decades. “In 1969, I was the president of a comic club in Los Angeles. Jack had just moved to Southern California,” and he and his wife, Roz, showed up unexpectedly at a comics convention in Santa Monica. “I was not at the convention,” Evanier continued, but “friends who went called me up and reacted as if Santa Claus had walked in.” The Kirbys invited all the club officers to visit them in the house they were then renting in Irvine, and Evanier went down one afternoon, little realizing it would start a lifelong relationship.
At the time Kirby was still working for Marvel. “He and Roz took Steve Sherman”—another comics club member—“and me to lunch [and] let us in on a secret: ‘I’m going to DC and I’ll need assistants.’ Steve and I thought it over for about eight seconds,” recalled Evanier.
Thus Evanier and Sherman became Kirby’s assistants on his now legendary Fourth World books: The New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle and the revamped Jimmy Olsen. But Evanier contends, “He didn’t need anybody. Jack was a one-man font of creativity.”
Kirby and Evanier remained close friends over the following decades, although, Evanier said, “It was stormy at times. Jack and I had a period when we didn’t speak.”
“Jack kind of defied description,” Evanier said. “I think he was comics’ greatest creative talent. Wherever he went, miracles would happen. He was enormously gifted at creating stories. Jack was the only guy within comics who approached each job, saying, ‘I’ve got to revolutionize the industry.’
“I was working on a biography of Jack before he died,” Evanier said. “I’ve essentially been writing [it] since I met him. I got a lot of interviews out of Jack over the years.”
But the biography wasn’t a top priority during Kirby’s lifetime: “He was busy, I was busy. When Jack passed away, Roz, his widow, sat me down and said, 'I want you to write that book.' ”
Evanier decided to take his time with the project. Finally, his friend Charlie Kochman called him up. A veteran of DC Comics, Kochman now works at Abrams and proposed what Evanier called “a big, beautiful art book” devoted to Kirby’s career.
Evanier said that he does not delve into critical analysis in the Abrams book, but thinks of the book as “a museum on paper,” dedicated to Kirby’s work.
Through reaching out to Kirby collectors, “We’ve tracked down in most cases the original art,” Evanier said, while crediting Abrams’s phenomenal reproduction process for the final look of the book. For example, readers will see an entire Fighting American story, reproduced from the original art, complete with visible whiteout, stray pencil lines and margin notes. In some cases, scans were made from printed comics when Evanier felt there should be color: “Jack’s work was meant to be seen in print.”
Inevitably, any book about Jack Kirby has to deal with the persistent controversy over his collaboration with Stan Lee: how much credit does each man deserve as author of those stories? “I’ve spent years discussing that,” replied Evanier. “I think I’m pretty good at presenting both sides.” Evanier said that he has “examined all the papers” that Kirby had, including “plot outlines, notes, [and] letters from Stan. The dispute is a matter of semantics: how do you define writing a story? What is not in dispute is that Jack was making a lot of plot contributions and was undercredited for his work.” Evanier summed up: “I present this and let people draw their own conclusions.”
For people unacquainted with Kirby’s work, Evanier said he hopes “this book is a wonderful introduction to Jack.” As “for people who know Jack’s work the book will allow them to see his life laid out sequentially through his artwork, what was going on in his world and how his pictures changed.”
The text in the Abrams book runs to 35,000 words and will cover the “whole story” of Kirby’s life. But Evanier also intends to put out a second Kirby biography that will be “just huge,” running “over half a million” words and going into much greater detail on Kirby's life. Evanier cautioned, “You have to be fixated on comics to a frightening degree” to read this second book.
Evanier is stunned by the resurgence in Kirby’s popularity. "There are tons of comics done in the early ’70s that no one is reprinting, yet we’re closing in on the day darn near every major work [of Kirby’s] is being reprinted. Jack endured the pain of having the Fourth World declared a failure. For much of his life the Fourth World was this nagging sore.” But now DC is republishing the Fourth World series in hardcover volumes. “Right now it's a hit, in roughly the format Jack always intended.”
So what might Kirby have thought of the fact that now his art has been displayed in museums? “I think Jack would have thought, ‘I knew that would happen.’ Jack was not surprised by things like that. He knew they were coming.”
To Evanier, Kirby was the comics industry’s prophet. “Jack made an awful lot of predictions that were weird or quirky. I’d sort of nod. And it’d happen—or he turned out to be not as wrong as I thought he was. One of the problems he had... was that he was always a little ahead of everyone else.”
Kirby: King of Comics will surely be a big seller in comics circles, but Evanier says, “This book should be done whether it’s a huge success or not.” Nor does he claim that this book is definitive. “I think there will be many books about Jack. He’s too big a subject for any one author.”
