“I don’t think it’s any accident that at this point in their history the entire Marvel universe and the entire DC universe are now all pinned or rooted on Kirby’s concepts.”
— MICHAEL CHABON, THE NEW YORK TIMES
JACK KIRBY SPENT the last ten years of his life being flattered. He was semiretired, but receiving accolades was almost a full-time job. King of Comics, indeed.
The positive side won out, as it always had with Kirby. He rarely thought about what he hadn’t gotten, and focused instead on what he had. Oddly enough, the whole brouhaha over his original artwork—as painful as it had been for him and Roz—helped. Having the industry and fandom rally around him erased all concerns that he would be forgotten.
“They never got my name,” Jack said proudly on more than one occasion. His decreasing ability to produce artwork seemed to coincide with a rise in trophies and tributes. His name was everywhere, and he was even able to lease it along with some leftover character concepts to the Topps trading card company for a new, short-lived comic book line. They called it “The Kirbyverse.” Again, there wasn’t much money, but the principle was twenty-four karat.
CAPTAIN GLORY
no. 1, cover
April 1993
Art: Don Alan Zakrzewski, adapting Kirby drawing from 1968
The Topps Company, Inc.
MANY OF JACK’S TRIBUTES came via the annual comic book convention in San Diego. The con had started in 1970 with him as one of its first guests of honor. Apart from the year of his heart attack, he attended every one during his lifetime, watching unsurprised as the event grew ever bigger and more media-diverse.
Early on, it had been the subject of one of those Kirby predictions that few took seriously when he made it. He said the con would grow until it took over all of San Diego. He said that the definition of “comics” would expand beyond those things printed on cheap paper. It would be about comic books as movies, comic books as television, comic books in forms yet to be invented. He said—and this is a quote—““It will be where all of Hollywood will come every year to find the movies they’ll make next year and to sell the movies they found there the year before.”
No one listened at the time. They should have.
Well before Jack’s last Comic-Con International, the one in ’93, the institution had consumed much of San Diego. Hollywood was, like the man said, swarming there to promote current projects and to find the following year’s.
At the big annual award ceremony, a tradition began. Someone on stage would introduce Jack, and the whole damn audience—thousands of people who read comics, created comics, and/or extended comics into other forms—would spring to its feet and applaud the King. They didn’t stand up like that for anyone else, but they stood for Kirby.
At the show itself they lined up to meet him. It was more than a desire to shake the hand that had drawn their favorite comic book, although there was that. There was also a need, in some cases deep-seated, to connect with the man whose work had so inspired them . . . just to make contact, just to be able to say, “I met Jack Kirby.” He was unfailingly gracious to all, standing there for hours, answering questions, deflecting Roz’s constant suggestions to sit. He wouldn’t hear of it. His fans stood, so he stood.
Jupiter Plaque
1972
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Color: Jack Kirby
In 1972, NASA launched the “Jupiter Plaque”— an engraved tablet depicting life on Earth and mapping our whereabouts for the benefit of any intelligent life that might someday encounter it. West, a magazine section in the Los Angeles Times, asked several prominent artists, Kirby included, to draw what they would have put on the plaque and to explain why. Surprising all who thought a futurist and visionary like Jack would welcome and embrace alien contact, Jack decided his plaque would strive to scare away potential conquerors. To that end, he drew two gloriously powerful superbeings, suggesting everyone on Earth was a Superman. Mike Royer inked the piece, then Jack provided the color, and a brief explanatory paragraph:
“I see no wisdom in the eagerness to be found and approached by any intelligence with the ability to accomplish it from any sector of space. In the meetings between ‘discoverers’ and ‘discoverees,’ history has always given the advantage to the finders. In the case of the Jupiter Plaque, I feel that a tremendous issue was thoughtlessly taken out of the world forum by a few individuals who have marked a clear trail to our door. My point is, who will come a-knocking—the trader or the tiger?”
Super Players
Drawing for National Football League
c. 1983
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
Color: Jack Kirby
The only way in which Jack disappointed was to politely refuse the millions of requests per day for autographs or “please, just a small sketch.” He apologized over and over, explaining he’d entered into exclusive deals to sign prints and special collectors’ editions. That was true, but it was also true that between his vision problems and a baby stroke that affected his drawing hand, a signature was tough and a drawing was an ordeal. At home, he did as many as he could because they represented income for himself and Roz, even though they were painful, even though they took much, much longer than they once had.
For a man said to be so far ahead of his era, Jack would joke that he sure had rotten timing. He’d crusaded long and hard for the industry to cut writers and artists in on the windfall of good sales and on the adaptation of their properties into other media. That had now become the norm . . . but it came too late to apply to his most lucrative work of the sixties and never brought great wealth to him and, more important, to Roz.
Jack had fought for his reputation and won that battle, too. Now, here he was, being offered hefty sums just for his signature or a sketch . . . and he could barely do either.
Presentation Piece
c. 1977
Art: Jack Kirby
San Diego Comic-Con
At the August 1975 Inkpot Awards ceremony at the El Cortez hotel (from left to right): convention chairman Richard Butner, artist Russ Manning (behind Butner), cartoon voice legends June Foray and Daws Butler, artist Jim Starlin (behind Foray), Jack Kirby, artist Gil Kane (behind Kirby), artist Jim Steranko, Stan Lee (behind Steranko), Will Eisner (The Spirit), Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, animation director Bob Clampett, and cartoonist Dick Moores (Gasoline Alley).
Photo by Jackie Estrada.
THE MORNING OF SUNDAY, February 6, 1994, Jack Kirby awoke early and slipped quietly out of bed. Though the most convenient bathroom was immediately adjacent to the bedroom, he walked to one at the other end of the house so as not to disturb Roz. Typical of Kirby.
On his way back he walked outside, brought in the morning Los Angeles Times, and carried it into the kitchen. That’s probably where he was when the pain hit and hit hard.
Moments later, his wife of more than half a century awoke with a start. Something, she could sense, was terribly, terribly wrong. She rushed about the house, calling his name, desperately yelling “Kirby,” which was the way she often addressed him. When she found her husband unconscious on the kitchen floor clutching the morning paper, she called 911. Then she sat down at the breakfast table and cried, because she knew the paramedics weren’t going to be able to do anything. She knew it was all over. Everything.
Before nightfall, everyone in and around the comic book field was phoning everyone else to ask: Did you hear, did you hear? Jack Kirby died. Heart failure, they said.
He was seventy-seven years old.
Hanukkah card
1975
Art: Jack Kirby
When comic fan David Folkman sent the Kirbys a Hanukkah greeting, he hadn’t expected to receive a reply. But they sent back a card to which Jack added a small drawing. A copy of this would later hang on the wall of Kirby’s studio and he’d tell people, “It’s a Jewish Thing.”
HALF THE INDUSTRY TURNED out for the funeral, and the other half was present in spirit. Stan Lee was there in both capacities, sitting quietly in the back throughout the speeches, then departing without saying much of anything to anyone. Roz wanted to give him a big hug, right in front of everyone to show that what was done was done and that there was no bitterness left dangling. But Stan, quick as ever, was in the parking lot by then, gone before she could get near him.
Roz Kirby survived her husband by almost four years, most of them spent welcoming Kirby fans into her home and fielding accolades on his behalf. She continued to attend the convention in San Diego, where the assemblage stood and clapped for her as it had once applauded Jack.
DC announced the reissue of New Gods and the other Fourth World titles in new collections. It wasn’t because Jack was dead. It was because fans kept asking about the work, indicating an eagerness to buy. Roz liked that, liked it a lot. It had always eaten away at her, as it had with Jack, that those books were ever viewed as failures.
In September of 1995, bowing to pressures within and also from outside the company, executives at Marvel Comics granted her a modest pension—enough to cover the mortgage, groceries, and medical expenses, with a few dollars left over to bank. Informed that it would expire when she did, she vowed to live forever and get as much as she could out of the firm.
Roz did her best, but on the day she died, December 22, 1998, she’d only managed to drain Marvel of about twenty-seven months worth of pension checks. That was one week after a friend visiting the DC offices called to tell her that the Fourth World reprints were selling well. She began crying and said, “Finally, it’s a hit.”
Then she sighed and added, “Well, Jack always said it would be.”
Odin
Gift to Mike Thibodeaux
1988
Art: Jack Kirby
Marvel Comics Super Heroes Commemorative stamps On July 25, 2007, the United States Postal Service issued sixteen postage stamps depicting Marvel characters. Eight stamps featured art penciled by Kirby: The Thing, Captain America, Silver Surfer, and the covers to Amazing Spider-Man no. 1, The Incredible Hulk no. 1, Fantastic Four no. 3, Captain America no. 100, and The Uncanny X-Men no. 1. The previous year, a similar set of stamps featuring characters from DC Comics included one, Green Arrow, drawn by Kirby.
HAD SHE LIVED ANOTHER ten years, Roz would have seen Jack Kirby truly come to be viewed as one of those Gods on Earth he always drew. He never thought of himself that way, but others did.
Talent from several generations seem to gain inspiration from his work, and it wasn’t just inspiration to draw comics like his or even to draw at all. Writers, filmmakers, artists of all kinds find something there, something that spurs on the urge to create.
To several generations, Jack Kirby was comics. Other creators came and went, or did their breakthrough work in one or two brief spurts. Kirby was always there, breaking through in the forties, breaking through in the fifties, really breaking through in the sixties, and continuing through the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, producing vast amounts of important work right up to the very moment he physically could not do it any longer. Shortly after he passed away, when industry-wide sales took a decided slump, the question, “What does the business need?” was routinely answered, “It needs Jack Kirby. That’s what it needs.” Others remarked, “When Kirby died, he took comics with him.”
He didn’t, of course. He left them and everyone around them so much better for having known him. He was the guy who took comics to new levels of imagination . . . and then took those new levels of imagination to still newer levels of imagination.
THERE WERE TIMES JACK even seemed to know that. One weekend in the seventies, he appeared at a comic art festival sponsored by a Los Angeles public library. It was an odd mix of folks who worked at the library, intermingling with folks who wrote and drew comics. All seemed uncertain just why the comic book people were even there.
After the event, which mainly consisted of people autographing comics, the library staff and the guests all mingled in a tiny anteroom for wine, cheese, and small talk. The head librarian turned to the man next to her, who happened to be Kirby, and asked him if he thought comics mirrored reality. Jack said, “No, comics transcend reality.”
The answer startled the librarian, and she said, “If you were to mirror reality, then perhaps others could begin to understand it.”
Jack popped a piece of cheddar into his mouth and fixed her with a stare he’d learned either on the streets of New York or on Omaha Beach during World War II. “Madam,” he said, “when you mirror reality, you see it all backward. When you start transcending it, that’s when you have a real good shot at figuring out what’s going on.” Then he went over to Roz and told her he was ready to leave.
Roz drove him home where the Once and Future King sat down in his throne: an old, straightback kitchen chair parked in front of the crummiest old drawing table you ever saw. Then he lit a cigar, sharpened a pencil, and went back to work. At three a.m., he was still in that chair, doing the two most important things in his life: transcending reality and earning a living.
Untitled illustration
1972
Art: Jack Kirby and Mike Royer
For a self-published art folio, Kirby needed a drawing. So he took a leftover Marvel page that was still in pencil, erased portions of an image of Galactus, and redrew it into a generic character.
