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   M   i  s   t  e  r   M   i  r  a  c   l  e   T   M    &

   ©   2   0   0   2   D   C   C  o  m   i  c  s .

 It’s thegreat Kirby 

 “BUST-  OUT!!” 

C o l l e c t o r

THE NEW   84

$995

BIG pagesDON’T TAKE LESS!

ONLY

GREAT

ESCAPES

NO. 35

SPRING2002

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THE NEW

C o l l e c t o r

ContentsOPENING SHOT  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2

(why was Kirby always running from something or another?) 

UNDER THE COVERS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4(Steve Rude and Marshall Rogers out- line their respective covers this issue) 

JACK F.A.Q.s  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6(regular columnist Mark Evanier answers a pair of Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby) 

BAD GUISE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11(just who was Kirby’s greatest villain?) 

WRITER’S BLOC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12(author Michael Chabon offers up a few words on Kirby) 

HOUDINI & KIRBY  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14(a brief look at each man’s approach to the artistry of escape) 

KIRBY AS A GENRE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16(Adam McGovern finds the Kirby in a few of his favorite things) 

INNERVIEW  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18(Marshall Rogers chats about Mister Miracle, Kirby, and Batman) 

GALLERY  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26(death traps, dwarfs, and bathing Bardas, all shown in pencil) 

TRIBUTE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44(the 2001 Kirby Tribute Panel, featuring the late John Buscema, John Romita,Mike Royer, Will Eisner, and some guy named Carson) 

DECONSTRUCTING HIMON  . . . . . . . . .58(three different writers take apart one of Kirby’s finest tales: “Himon”) 

IN CLOSING  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72(an examination of Kirby’s second Mister Miracle series) 

COLLECTOR COMMENTS  . . . . . . . . . . .76(escape the humdrum letter columns of other mags by perusing these missives about our last issue)

PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80(on the way out, take a quick look at Jack’s final Mister Miracle page)

Front cover inks: MARSHALL ROGERSBack cover pastel art: STEVE RUDEFront cover color: TOM ZIUKO

Photocopies of Jack’s uninked pencils 

from published comics are reproduced 

here courtesy of the K irby Estate, which 

has our thanks for their continued support.

COPYRIGHTS: Batman, Bekka, Ben Boxer, Bernadeth,Big Barda, Bruce Wayne, Darkseid, Female Furies,Forever People, Funky Flashman, Granny Goodness,

Himon, Houseroy, In The Days of the Mob, Jimmy Olsen,Joker, Kamandi, Kanto, Komodo, Lashina, Losers, MadHarriet, Madame Evil Eye, Metron, Mister Miracle,Morgan Edge, Oberon, Orion, Renzi, Scott Free, ShiloNorman, Silver St. Cloud, Stompa, Superman, The Lump,Tigra, Virmin Vundabar, Young Scott Free TM & ©2002DC Comics. • Annihilus, Black Panther, Captain America,Daredevil, Devil Dinosaur, Eternals, Falcon, FantasticFour, Galactus, Human Torch, Invisible Girl, JasperSitwell, Moonboy, Mr. Fantastic, Nick Fury, Dum-DumDugan, Silver Surfer, Thing, Thor, Ultron TM & © 2002Marvel Characters, Inc. • Jacob & The Angel, JupiterPlaque, Stereon, Street Code TM & ©2002 Jack KirbyEstate.

 #35, SPRING 2002

(above) Uninked pencils from Mister Miracle #5, page 4.Characters TM & ©2002 DC Comics.

The Jack Kirby Collector , Vol. 10, No. 35, Spring

2002. Published quarterly by & ©2002

TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Drive,

Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092.

John Morrow, Editor. Pamela Morrow, Asst. Editor.

Eric Nolen-Weathington, Production Assistant.

Single issues: $13 postpaid ($15 Canada, $16elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $36.00 US,

$60.00 Canada, $64.00 elsewhere. All characters

are trademarks of their respective companies. All

artwork is ©2002 Jack Kirby unless otherwise

noted. All editorial matter is ©2002 the respec-

tive authors. First printing. PRINTED IN CANADA.

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ack Kirby was running from something all his life.Okay, I know that statement might sound strange to any

number of longtime Kirby fans, but bear with me a

minute, and I’ll explain what I mean.This issue is all about the theme of “escape” in

 Jack’s work, and so it naturally will feature lots of Mister Miracle, Kirby’s super escape artist; butwhile the rest of the issue will deal with some of the “close calls” that character experienced onthe comics page, I want to delve into what mayhave made Jack so inclined to submerge him-self in this particular brand of escapism calledcomic books—what I term “The Great KirbyBust-Out!” (to borrow a line from the cover of 

 Mister Miracle #9).Escape was a part of Jack’s life, from

beginning to end. To demonstrate mypoint, I’ve compiled a list of what I consid-er to be Kirby’s top ten biggest real-lifeescapes, in chronological order:

 Escape from the Lower East Side (1930s).As a son of Jewish immigrants, Kirby spent

his childhood in one of the poorest neighborhoodsin New York. Daily gang fights were the norm, as fewkids on his block had much else to live for; but Kirby sur-reptitiously kept his imagination and artistic talent alive andflourishing through reading, movies, and drawing, and insteadof following in his father’s blue collar footsteps, used his talents

to find a way out of the slum.

 Escaping anti-Semitism (1940s).Early in his career, Jack chose to legallychange his name from Kurtzberg to Kirby (muchto his parents’ dismay). Although he neverturned his back on his faith and ancestry, heopted for the new name for commercialreasons, undoubtedly feeling it couldhelp him avoid any anti-Semitic back-lash in his search for work.

 Escape from death (World War II).After enlisting in the Army,

PFC Jack Kirby was assigned tonumerous life-threatening sit-uations as an advance scout.

The experience would be great fodder forfuture comics stories, but he barely lived totell them. After scraping by alive in Patton’sarmy, he was discharged with frozen feet, andnearly had them amputated. WWII was a profoundinfluence on his life—as anyone who met Jack in person (and

heard a war story or two) canattest—and unlike a stagemagician’s act, his death-defy-ing feats were the real thing.

 Escape from a dying industry(1950s).

After the end of hisMainline company (and partingways with Joe Simon) as thecomics industry looked to be

collapsing, Jack picked up what-ever work he could find. Hemay have seen the writing on

the wall much earlier, because from the late 1940s-onward, he was constantly pursuing his dream of land-ing a coveted syndicated newspaper comic strip. The

opportunity finally arose with Sky Masters, and itspromise of a better, more secure living and greater

prestige; but the strip waned after an impressivestart, and Jack found himself trapped backworking for a comics page rate just to survive.Arguably, the desperation of the situation ledto the development of the Marvel Universe,

which in turn helped save a dying industry,but it also propelled Kirby squarely

back into it. So in some ways, hisescape to newspaper syndication led

him right back to a trap of his own making.

 Escape from New York(1969).After more than 50 years

living in the city of his birth,Kirby uprooted his family

and moved to theother side of the

country. Jackclaimed the

Californiaclime was

betterfor hisdaugh-

terLisa’s

asthma,but no

doubt thefreedom of 

being 3000 milesaway from an edi-tor made the

decision all theeasier. Thechange inscenery

appears to have started new ideas brewing in his mind,

which would lead to some of his most mind-bogglingconcepts making their way to the comics page.

 Escape from Marvel and Stan Lee (1970).Perhaps the biggest career move he ever made, the

switch to DC Comics meant he was leaving behind thesuccess of 1960s Marvel Comics, for a chance to prove

(next page, bottom) The final

panels of several comics Jack 

“ran from” (usually not of his

own choice): Eternals, Forever 

People, Jimmy Olsen, Our 

Fighting Forces, Captain 

 America (in pencil), and Devil 

Dinosaur .

Celestials, Capt. America, Falcon, Devil

Dinosaur, Moonboy TM & ©2002

Marvel Characters, Inc. Forever People,

Superman, Jimmy Olsen, the Losers

TM & ©2002 DC Comics.

(inset) Convention sketches of

Barda and Mister Miracle

done for Al Milgrom.

2

 Opening Shot 

JJ

The Great Kirby “Bust

(background) A map of New

 York’s East Village, highlight-ing where celebrities grew up,

including Kirby (as shown

below).

(top) An artist’s representation

of Kirby’s neighborhood (at the

corner of Suffolk and Delancy

streets) as it stands today;

Jack’s home would’ve been to

the left, where a parking lot is

today.

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imself without a collaborator to share the credit with. From this point on, with rarexceptions, Jack wrote and edited his own stories (usually sending in completely letterednd inked work), and never again worked “Marvel method.”

scaping DC (1975).Although what waited for him back at Marvel ended up no better than

hat he was leaving behind, Jack chose not to renew his contract atC Comics when it expired. The failed Fourth World experi-

ment and a string of unsatisfying post- New Gods series leftim looking for somewhere, anywhere else to ply hisade. For better or worse, Marvel Comics was the only

ther game in town, so he jumped ship yet again inopes of a better situation.

scaping the comics industry entirely (1978). Just when things seemed hopeless in the comics field he helped

ioneer four decades earlier, the animation industry came calling.With higher pay, more respect, and much-needed health benefits as he

ntered his declining years, Jack ironically ended his career where it began;nly instead of doing in-betweening for Popeye cartoons, he was a muchought-after concept man (creating thousands of ideas that will likely never beeen by the public), and scoring a major hit with Thundarr the Barbarian.

scaping the “Big Two” (1980s). Jack’s final major foray into comics, rather than for DC and Marvel, wound

p being for independent publishers. Freed of the constraints of company-wideontinuity and editorial dictates (which he experienced one last time on DC’s 1984

Hunger Dogs Graphic Novel), Kirby produced wild, frenetic work like never before.ome loved it, some hated it, but no one could deny his unchained imagination was working at full speed on such projects asaptain Victory and Silver Star.

scape from obscurity (1990s).After years of no new Kirby work on the stands, and a gradual lessening of attention being paid to Jack (including smaller

rowds at conventions, where younger readers flocked to the Image creators), Jack experienced a resurgence of popularity in the1990s. The debut of Phantom Force (with Kirbyconcepts combined with Image inkers) and the Topps Secret City Sagabooks, as well as the release of The Art of Jack Kirby (and not one, but twofanzines devoted to Kirby) helped bring him back to the forefront of fans’minds (although his place in comics history was undoubtedly assuredanyway).

Is it any wonder then, that Jack was destined to make his mark in afield of escapist entertainment? While he may never have mastered theintricate escape techniques of a prestidigitator like Houdini, he certainlyworked his own brand of magic in comics; and the personal chains thatencumbered him throughout his life and career were every bit as difficult

to surmount as anything David Copperfield and co. have ever dreamedup for their acts.★

-Out!”

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teve Rude didn’t waste a second when we asked him if 

he’d ever done a Mister Miracle #1 cover recreation that we

could run on this issue’s back cover. Although he hadn’t, he

immediately offered to give it a shot. (We thought Steve was a

particularly appropriate choice since, on the the original cover of 

#1, Mister Miracle is saying the villains “are in for a RUDE shock.”)

We assumed “The Dude” would do a traditional pen-&-ink

version, and were totally stunned

when a gorgeous pastel drawing

arrived less than a week later.

Steve had this to say about the

creation of the piece:“Some of you may be

familiar with a magazine

called Step-by-Step . Though

I collected it solely for 

“Methods of the Masters,” a

section devoted to vintage

illustrators, I have yet to

learn a thing from any of the

Step-by-Step articles. Maybe

I’d have to be there watching 

over the artist’s shoulder, or 

physically work alongside them,

but for me these articles just don’t 

seem to work.

“With that in mind, I’ll describe the process of the Mister Miracle

#1 recreation. It was rendered 

in Nupastel, a hard, stick-

like chalk, and done on orange Canson paper. I began by enlarging a copy of the actual Kirby

cover and transferring it onto the pastel paper. I juggled some elements around since there were

no logo or word balloons to worry about, and began to apply the main colors throughout.

“Pastel is a new medium for me and is best suited to painting large images where you can

use broad, suggestive strokes. Eventually, you hone-in on details with smaller and smaller 

strokes. This is more difficult than it sounds. Pastel smears easily. Like

all mediums, its drawbacks work side-by-side with its charms. At one

 point I dragged my sleeve along an area I’d spent an hour on and smeared 

the whole thing. I finally realized the baggy sleeves I was wearing were

the culprit. Instant wipeout. Pastelists have a thing against fixative for some reason, but it’s the

only sane way to work

with the stuff. (I rolled 

up my sleeve after that 

incident.)

“For the budding

illustrators out there, know

that mediums don’t make an

artist. Practice and accumulated 

knowledge do. As Andrew Loomis once

said, the principles apply to all art regardless of the

medium used; be it oil, acrylic, watercolor, or

a stick dipped in mud.

“Problems arise in all mediums as anartist struggles to improve. This situation

usually applies throughout our entire lives.

Our job is to become smarter than the medium, and 

not let technical things interfere with the fundamentals

that make a good picture.”

Marshall Rogers took the more conventional route for this issue’s front cover, inking a xerox

of the Kirby pencils shown on the previous page. He had this to say about the experience:

“How does one approach a legend’s work? Jack is so definitive in his linework that there

is little room for interpretation, and yet I consider his style to be representative of form

rather than absolute.

“I also feel an artist should bring something of himself to his work. With this in mind,

and a personal preference to an “organic” rather than “plastic” look to inks (as I talked about during

this book’s interview), I inked the cover you see on this issue.” We originally toyed with the idea of adding one of Jack’s photo-collages to the front

cover’s background, but after seeing the color work Tom Ziuko added to it (not to mention

the spiffy “planet” detailing by Tom’s pal Scott Lemien), we thought the white background

aided our goal of making it look like the cover of one of those 25¢ 1970s DC 52-pagers

(think Jimmy Olsen #148, among others).★

SS

5

(left) Kirby cover for

Mister Miracle #1, inked

by Vince Colletta, and a

detail of the word balloon

that provoked us to get

Steve Rude to recreate it.

Mr. Miracle TM & ©2002 DC

Comics.

(below) For those who

didn’t get enough “Rude”

in Steve’s pastel interpre-

tation, here are a couple

of fan commissions he

did in the 1990s.

Mr. Miracle, Big Barda TM &

©2002 DC Comics. Artwork ©

Steve Rude.

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 A column answering Frequently Asked Questions about Kirby

 by Mark Evanier 

Once again, we attempt the seemingly-impossible: We shall

endeavor to answer not one but two Kirby-related queries in one

long, rambling reply. The first comes from Kirk Groeneveld, whowrites:

“I’m not Jewish, but I wonder how Jack Kirby’s faith interfaced with

his continuing theme of hidden races being genetically manipulated.

 How did he feel about the assignment to “Have the FF meet God” in

Fantastic Four #48-50?” 

And the second comes from someone who signs their e-mail

“Washing2000lb,” which I guess means their name or their locale

is Washington. Anyway, he, she or it writes:

“What’s the deal with Mister Miracle? Everyone says it was based on

Steranko but that Big Barda was based on Roz taking care of Kirby.

Wouldn’t that make Jack Mister Miracle?” 

irst, to Kirk: I’ve always been skeptical about that “meetGod” anecdote, as I see absolutely nothing in those issues to

suggest that Galactus represented a view of the Almighty on

the part of either Mr. Lee or Mr. Kirby. Think about it: Galactus

was an intergalactic force who created nothing, gave life to no one

and left each world he visited a barren, lifeless wasteland. How

does he

relate to

any inter-

pretation of 

God that has

ever been

enshrined in any

book, any teaching,

any religion? Last I

heard—and I doubt this has

changed—God was supposed to foster life, not destroy it for his

own enrichment.

Yes, I know a few “scholarly” essays have sought to read

between the panels and make the case, but I remain uncon-

vinced. My suspicion is that Stan said to Jack—or maybe Jack

said to Stan—“Let’s have the FF fight someone who’s supremely

powerful” and somehow, that suggestion was later recalled as,

“Let’s have them meet God.” Obviously, just because a comic

book character has awesome might, it does not mean that he in

any way corresponds to his authors’ vision of you-know-who.

 Just what was on Stan’s mind, I can’t say. He does not recall

individual issues well and the one time he and I discussed that

story arc, he didn’t have much to say about it. Neither did Jack,

but I did come up with a theory as to what he was thinking at the

time he worked on

that little epic. To

explain it, I need to

detour and answer

the question from

Washing2000lb....

Almost every-

thing Jack wrote

(or plotted) hadautobiographical

elements. In some

cases, they were so

obscure and dis-

guised that even he

didn’t recognize

them in the final mix.

But just as an actor

utilizes personal

sense memories in

acting, Jack used his

own emotional expe-

riences throughout

his work. When he

drew a scene that

involved anger, he

was usually thinking

about something that

had once angered

him, and so forth. In

some cases, the ref-

erence points are

even slightly visible.

Here’s one example

of many: Last issue

in this magazine,

there was a mention

of Jasper Sitwell, the

young, college-

educated S.H.I.E.L.D.

agent, as clearly

being based on

Dudley Do-Right.

Jack F.A.Q.sMark evanier 

(next page, top) Photo of

Roy Thomas and Flo

Steinberg, circa 1965,

shortly after Roy started

working at the House of

Ideas. The similarities

between the Rascally

One and Jasper Sitwell(see inset) are pretty

evident. Photo courtesy

of Flo Steinberg.

Jasper Sitwell, Nick Fu ry, Dum-

Dum Dugan TM & ©2002

Marvel Characters, Inc.

(next page, bottom)

Jack did a later, less

flattering parody of Roy

as Houseroy, flunky to

Funky (Stan Lee)

Flashman.

Funky Flashman, Houseroy

TM & ©2002 DC Comics.

FF

6

(below) A 1980s fan

commission drawing,

featuring Galactus.

Galactus, Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four

TM & ©2002 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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(Acclaimed author Michael Chabon was born in 1963, and grew up

reading comic books. He’s penned several books, but the one of most 

interest to Kirby fans is undoubtedly The Amazing Adventures of 

Kavalier & Clay , the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel dealing with the

Golden Age of Comics and escape artistry as its themes. In the midst of his extremely hectic schedule these days, Michael took time out to

conduct the following interview in March 2002, via e-mail.)

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: What were the first Kirby comics

you read? Did you read Mister Miracle when Kirby was working

on it in the 1970s?

 MICHAEL CHABON: Absolutely. Mister Miracle was my favoriteof the Fourth World books. I was a devoted reader of DC books

in the very early ’70s, as a seven- or eight-year-old. I really didn’t

care for the Marvel books. I suppose they went over my head.

Writer’s Bloc 

12

(this page) Mister Miracle

battles the Lump from

Mister Miracle #8, the

issue that made Chabon a

lifelong Kirby fan.

Mister Miracle, The Lump TM &

©2002 DC Comics.

(next page, top) Dust jack-

et for the hardback version

of Michael Chabon’s The 

 Amazing Adventures of 

Kavalier & Clay, featuringhis character The

Escapist—a character

who, according to pub-

lished reports, is getting

his own series from DC

Comics soon (gee, maybe

they’ll team him up with

Mister Miracle!).

©2002 Michael Chabon.

(next page, bottom) Panel

from Kirby’s autobiograph-

ical story “Street Code,”

done in pencil. Kirby fans

who’ve never experiencedthis remarkable 10-page

story can read it as part of

TwoMorrows’ trade paper-

back Streetwise , available

elsewhere in this issue.

©2002 Jack Kirby Estate.

(next page, left) Photo ofMichael Chabon by Patricia

Williams.

© Patricia Williams.

A Few Words From

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They had a frenetic, sweaty quality to them. The DC

books were cool and mannered and the values

were easy to comprehend. Little kids really

do believe in truth and justice and the

American way.So I didn’t know from Kirby. Then

all of a sudden those banners started

appearing in the DC books: “Kirby Is

Coming!” and then, finally, “Kirby Is

Here!” I had no idea who Kirby was. I

thought it might be a character—some

vague association chiming in my mind

with the Rip Kirby newspaper strip. Then

my dad brought me home the first few

Kirby Jimmy Olsen books. That was always a

book prone to bizarre flights of fancy, but—

whoa. I don’t think I knew quite what to make of 

Kirby at first.

The book that really, truly, permanently blew my mind was the issue of  Mister 

Miracle in which he fights the creature from the Id [#8] ; a big, pink, comatose but

sentient wad of bubblegum. There’s this incredible double-page spread of the

Female Furies killing time in their barracks. That panel just completely unhinged

me. The dynamic layout, the wealth of figures and the variety of their costumes,

the air of violence and sexuality, the bizarrely stilted dialogue. From that point on

I was a confirmed Kirbyite.

TJKC: Did any characters or scenes from Mister Miracle influence your novel? For

instance, could a parallel be drawn between Joe Kavalier’s mentor Bernard

Kornblum, and Himon from Mister Miracle? How about between Joe Kavalier’s

own escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, and Scott Free’s escape from Apokolips?

MICHAEL: There may very well be underpinnings of Mister Miracle in my book.

I’m sure there are; but if so, I was totally unaware of them at the time. You couldtoss in that the ‘fictional’ character of Max Mayflower who trains the Escapist is a

bit like Thaddeus Brown, the original Mister Miracle. And I guess that makes

Sammy Oberon!

The surest connection, and the one that I really was conscious of, was between

my guy and Jim Steranko. It was reading about Steranko’s first career as an escape

artist that encouraged me to develop the motif of Houdini and escape artistry that

was very lightly emphasized in the first few drafts. And Steranko also underlies

Mister Miracle. So that’s the strongest link, I think, between my book and JK’s.

TJKC: Your novel features a who’s who of Golden Age comics creators making

cameo appearances, from Stan Lee, Joe Simon, and Gil Kane to Will Eisner and

others; but Kirby seems conspicuous by his absence, not actually appearing as a

character in the novel. Was this intentional, and if so, why?

 MICHAEL: Well,

I guess I just sort

of felt as if this

book was, in a

way,  for  JackKirby, or of 

him—as much

as, in a very

different way, it

was for and of 

my dad (to whom

I dedicated it).

Having him also

appear in it

might have

seemed like too much, somehow.

TJKC: On page 100 of the hardcover edition, it’s revealed that Sammy Clay’s

mother fell in love with Sammy’s father in “Kurtzburg’s Saloon” on New York’sLower East Side in 1919. In what other ways was the novel inspired by Kirby’s

own escape from his Lower East Side upbringing?

 MICHAEL: There was no direct inspiration from Kirby’s life; not really, except

insofar as Kirby’s history mirrored so closely the history of my own grandparents

and great-grandparents, many of whom settled in the Lower East Side, too.

TJKC: An underlying theme of Kavalier & Clay seems to be “Comics are escapism,

but there’s no getting away from real life.” Is that an accurate assessment, and is

there a message there for comics fans?

 MICHAEL: I don’t see it that way. I might restate it thus: “Comics are escapism,

and thank God, because without escapist art there really would be no getting

away from real life.” By the way, I believe that all great literature is, in part,

escapist. When you inhabit the life of a fictional character or characters, you aregiven a taste of what it might feel like to be somebody else—to escape, if only for

a moment, the prison of your own consciousness.

TJKC: Can you elaborate on the theme of “escape” in the novel? An example that

seems to fall under the theme is Joe Kavalier’s journey to Antarctica during the

war to escape his past and his brother’s death.

 MICHAEL: I read this sequence as more in the nature of an escape in itself; that

is, Joe is locked away in this great frozen box of death, a trap that kills everyone

but him, and he alone escapes; and yet, at the same time, learns that the trap of 

memory, of guilt and remorse and shame, is one that he cannot escape, not even

by taking revenge.

TJKC: Another is the Escapist’s secret identity of Tom Mayflower; of course, the

Pilgrims escaped persecution on their ship, the Mayflower.

 MICHAEL: Interesting. I just wanted

something that sounded super-WASPy.

TJKC: Help us get into your mind as a

writer. Are those types of occurrences

coincidental or planned? Do you con-

sciously set out to develop these ideas

from the start, or do they evolve, and

come to you as you write? What are

some other areas in the novel that tie

into the “escape” theme?

 MICHAEL: Theme is absolutely the

very last thing I consider. I start with a

character, a setting, or a story idea; aninteresting event or episode or sequence

of events. Then I start writing, and I try

to use my ability to manipulate language

to the utmost, hoping to make these

characters, this setting, this story, come

13

Michael Chabon

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GREAT EVASIONS

hose keeping score will remember that an all-humor column

was promised for this space; the amount of material to go

through, and the small avalanche of other verbiage I have

unloaded on this issue (check out my Simon/Cap summation

and my Mister Miracle discourse, plug, plug), have pushed that

theme to next time. So this issue we’ll revisit some favorite

types of comics, and particularly-admired specific series,

covered in our run to date. The timing was right as these

books came to my attention, came to a sad close, or ran very

pertinent current story arcs—and if my previously-announced

timing was off, well, it’s a poorly-kept secret that I aspire to

professional comics scripting, and if I’m really serious aboutpursuing that career I gotta start missing some deadlines.

Wonders Never Cease As we did in our inaugural column examining Tom

Scioli’s 8-Opus , we begin our return to roots by spotlighting

some of the indie newcomers whose emulation of the King

shows how fundamental his style is to the vocabulary of

comics, and how spontaneous is the positive reaction to it

not only in the halls of entertainment giants mindful of its

salability, but the hearts and home studios from which the

next generation of creators will come.

 A fan counterpart to the professional cast-of-thousands

Kirby tribute Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Comics 

Magazine , Modern 

Myths is an exuberantand enjoyable homage

to the Lee/Kirby hey-

day masterminded

by California-based

writer and artist

Juan Gonzalez. As

Erik Larsen did

with the WGCM 

project,

Gonzalez laid

out the entire

first issue

for himself

and other artists

to complete; like Larsenand then some, he plot-

ted and wrote the whole

thing himself, without a

collaborator. The result

is an introductory tale

of the “Wonder

Warders,” an FF-like

team of super-

scientists protecting

humble human

lives in struggles

of cosmic scale.

Characters walk 

a line between

postmodernarchetype and

too-recogniz-

able pastiche,

but all are done with love and

some hit the heights of Kirby’s own wordplay

(like the Thing-esque enforcer “David

Goliath”). Some of the artists are more ready-for-prime-time than

others, but the design is inspired throughout, with many a close

approximation of Kirby’s great sense of psychedelic tech and space-

operatic costumery. Gonzalez chooses the exhilarating, joined-in-

progress narrative structure of a Lee or Kirby tale—we feel as if

we’re coming in on issue #15 of a classic series—and while this

sometimes makes the smoothness of the exposition slip out of his

hands, it necessitates a brevity which is usually executed well.

Gonzalez’s storytelling instincts, while action-packed, tend more

toward dramatic reconciliation than bombastic fisticuffs, and this is

one of many refreshing approaches that make him and most of his

cohorts talents to watch. (For a copy, please send $2.50 [$3.70 in

Canada] to: Juan Gonzalez Publishing, 1112 Orchard St. #1, Santa

Rosa, CA 95404 [email: [email protected] ].)

Goodnight, Bitter PrinceWelcomed in our very first column, we must now bid a fond

farewell to Walter Simonson’s take on Kirby’s Fourth World saga,

Orion . Fourth World continuations seem to be as short-lived as they

are frequent, and that’s too bad in the case of this elegant and

A regular feature examining Kirby-inspired work, by Adam McGovern

Adam M  c Govern

Know of some Kirby-inspired work that should be covered here? Send to:

Adam McGovernPO Box 257

Mt. Tabor, NJ 07878

16

T(right) Simonson splash

page from Orion #5. Ahh,

Walter, how we’ll miss ye.

Characters TM & ©2002 DCComics.

(below) Chapter splash for

Modern Myths .

©2002 Juan Gonzalez.

(next page, top) Example of

recent Black Panther art by

Jorge Lucas.Characters TM & ©2002Marvel Characters, Inc.

(next page, bottom) Lucas

pays homage to Kirby’s

 Annihilus (right) in this

panel from The Ultron 

Imperative (inked by Mike

Royer).

Characters TM & ©2002 MarvelCharacters, Inc.

As A Genre

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Conducted by Jon B. Cooke, transcribed by LongBox.com Staff 

(Marshall Rogers burst on the otherwise dull comic book

scene of the mid- to late 1970s, and caused a sensation

with his work on Batman in Detective Comics, Dr.Strange  for Marvel Comics, and others; but it was his

4-issue revival of Mister Miracle that impressed Kirby

  fans, and is still fondly remembered. This interview

took place by telephone in March 2002, and was copy-

edited by the artist.)

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: How far back do

you recall Jack Kirby’s work?

 MARSHALL ROGERS: I grew up with Kirby’s work.

He’s probably the reason I wanted to get into comic

books.

TJKC: What work

specifically?

 MARSHALL:

Everything, but it wasn’t

until he started working

with Marvel that I knew

what the man’s name

was. Then, once I real-

ized who the guy was

drawing that work, I

realized I had probably

first read him when he

had done either the

Shield or the Fly. I don’t

remember exactly which

of the two, but Jack’swork was so distinctive

that even as a young kid,

I recognized it: “Hey,

this is the same guy that

did the Fly.” I went back

and I checked it out and

looked at the art and

realized, yeah, this was

the same guy.

TJKC: What was it about

 Jack’s work that was

compelling?

 MARSHALL: Thedynamics, I guess, would

be the best way to say it.

 Jack brought the work

to life for me. It made it

seem more than two-

dimensional to me. One

thing that I remember

noticing was when some

villain would uproot a

building from a New

York City block, the pipes

and the guts of the

building underneath

were dangling down, as

compared to Superman;

when he lifted a building

up, it had this nice clean

flat surface, you know—

as if it was a toy placed

on a chess board or something—but there was always rubble and

 junk coming out of Jack’s buildings whenever they were lifted up.

TJKC: Were you into his Atlas monster work? Did you look at

those—like Tales of Suspense, Strange Tales, you know—the pre-Marvel hero stuff?

 MARSHALL: A little bit, but I don’t honestly remember seeing it

straight off the shelves. I was collecting comic books as a young-

ster, but I didn’t get right in on the very beginning of Marvel. I

ended up running around the neighborhood trading to get back

issues, so I don’t remember exactly if I started out with some of 

the monster books and had seen them, or had picked them up

during trades, etc.

TJKC: Have you looked at the monster stuff since? Did you find

anything of interest in there to this day?

(above) Photo of

Marshall Rogers from

the late 1970s.

(right) Rogers pencils

and Terry Austin inks

on a page from

Detective Comics 

#468, featuring Bruce

Wayne’s encounter

with an old Kirby

character, Morgan

Edge.

Morgan Edge, Batman,

Bruce Wayne TM & ©2002

DC Comics.

(next page) Kirby

pencils from Mister Miracle #6, featuring

Jack’s thinly veiled

parodies of Stan Lee

and Roy Thomas.

 All characters TM & ©2002

DC Comics.

18

INNERVIEW  Marshall Rogers Inte

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MARSHALL: I guess, really, the mon-

ster genre was not my favorite genre,

but I looked at everything and any-

thing that Jack did at one point, that I

could lay my hands on.

TJKC: You were born in 1950, right?

MARSHALL: That’s right.

TJKC: So, generally speaking, you

started picking them up around ’62?

Were you about 11 or 12 years old?

MARSHALL: No, I was reading comic

books earlier than that.

TJKC: I meant the Marvel stuff specifi-

cally. You said you didn’t get in on the

ground floor necessarily.

MARSHALL: I just missed it because a

friend of mine had Amazing Fantasy

#15 that Spider-Man first appeared in.

Then I ended up buying the second

issue of Spider-Man, but it wasn’t like

I was hitting the newsstand every

week to get them, so it was hit and

miss in the beginning.

TJKC: Did you find Fantastic Four 

compelling the minute you encoun-

tered it?

MARSHALL: Yeah, and actually X-Men

was one of my favorite titles. That wasthe one I think I really glommed onto

because I always felt I had large feet

and I really related to the Beast.

(laughter) I wanted to be able to walk

up the sides of a building. That was

one of the things about Jack’s work,

particularly in the beginning, that I

think was the most attractive thing to

me. The situations were more down-

to-earth. They weren’t as fantastic as

the DC stuff. It was Jack creating

characters that would walk up the

side of a building or shrink to the size

of an ant. It was more basic fantasyelements rather than the fantastical

type of elements. The Fantastic Four 

was certainly a departure from that,

but his other stuff was even more compelling to me,

and Thor would not necessarily be included in that.

I think the work of his I found most compelling

were the simple fantasy elements, like shrinking

down to a real small size or being able to swing

around a building as if you were on a jungle vine.

TJKC: Did you also clue into Stan Lee’s contributions

to it?

MARSHALL: In the beginning I was attracted to the

artwork. I realized Stan’s name from the signatures.When I got a comic book, I would basically flip

though the pages just to see the artwork and then

go back and read the story later on. Particularly

with Jack’s work, you could tell what the story was

without having to read the captions.

TJKC: The X-Men was a title on which he later did

quite loose breakdowns. Could you still see the

Kirby through the guys who inked and finished the

penciled stuff?

 MARSHALL: I could, and I was able to quickly tell

as soon as Jack stopped contributing to it as a

ghost, because the layout and dynamics just took a

vast turn, and became very different.

TJKC: Prior to Marvel, did you collect comics? Did

you save them or were you a reader? MARSHALL: I was a reader.

TJKC: And once you got bit by the Marvel bug, did

you continue to read DC comics or did you pass

them by?

 MARSHALL: I always went back to  Batman, hoping

to see that “something” that I’d always wanted to

see, but—.

TJKC: You didn’t see it.

 MARSHALL: No, I never did, you’re right.

TJKC: So did you remain with Marvel pretty much

throughout your teen years?

 MARSHALL: Well, I don’t know; about 15 or 16 I

started getting interested in girls and losing interestin comics. Then once I got into college, I started to

take up the interest again. It coincided with a serious

interest in getting into the business.

TJKC: Were you losing interest in the comics just as

 Jack was getting into the Galactus trilogy, for

19

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Gallery On the following pages are a plethora of pencils from various Mister Miracle issues, as follows: Issue #5 (pages 26-28),

#6 (pages 29-33), #7 (pages 34-37, including a “Young Scott Free” story), and #8 (pages 38-39 and 42-43).

Our centerfold (pages 40-41) features the two-page spread from Mister Miracle #11, inked by Mike Royer.

 All characters TM & ©2002 DC Comics.

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 Held at Comicon International: San Diego on July 22, 2001

(Featuring Will Eisner, John Buscema, John Romita, and 

 Mike Royer, moderated by Mark Evanier, transcribed by

 Brian K. Morris)

 MARK EVANIER: Good afternoon. Welcome to the

Eighth Jack Kirby Tribute Panel, and my eleventh panel

of this convention. (applause) I’m probably Mark Evanier

and I’ve made a rule that I do not go to any convention

that will not let me host a Jack Kirby Tribute Panel.

Actually, in some cases, that’s superfluous because we’ve

been talking about Jack on half the panels I’ve done here

so far. I just did a Russell Myers panel and we brought

him up in there, too. Jack was an amazing gentleman.

You all know that, and many of you had the pleasure of 

knowing him and meeting him. Let me introduce the

dais of people we have assembled and I’ll talk to them

about Jack for a while, then we’re going to show a video-

tape that is not one of the happier moments of Jack’s life,

unfortunately, but which is part of the historical record.

It is a two-part tape, the first part of which is Johnny

Carson libeling Jack Kirby, and the second half is Johnny

Carson apologizing to Jack Kirby. (applause)

 Jack liked pretty much everybody in comics. I don’t

44

TRIBUTE  2001 Kirby Tribute Panel

(top to bottom) The panelists:

the late John Buscema, John

Romita, Mike Royer, and (next

page) Will Eisner.

(right) Pencil page from Mister 

Miracle #6.

 All characters TM & ©2002 DC Comics.

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remember ever hearing of a writer or artist he didn’t

like, the lowest being those people whose books

he felt were highly derivative or who he felt were

just imitating or tracing other people’s works.

That certainly did not apply to any of these

gentlemen. He could not mention Johnny

Romita without the phrase, “the guy who

saved Spider-Man.” When Jack went over to

DC, one of the things he very much wanted to

do was a very sophisticated romance comic.

Eventually, the idea got dumbed down into that

True Divorce Cases/Soul Love thing which we didthat Jack never really understood. Through it all, he

kept mentioning how much he wanted to get this man

to work with him. He truly admired his work; Mr. Johnny

Romita, ladies and gentlemen. (applause)

Another artist for whom Jack never had anything but the highest regard was

the gentleman who followed him on the  Fantastic Four and Thor . My first ques-

tion, when we get to him, will be, “Just what’s it like to follow Jack Kirby on

Fantastic Four and Thor ?” (laughs) Those of us who felt a certain loss when Jack

left those books were more than delighted to see the expert handiwork of 

Marvel’s supreme penciler, Mr. John Buscema. (applause) And if you said to Jack,

“Who do you really admire in comics?”, the first two names heard would be Bill

Everett or this gentleman, whom he especially admired, not only as an artist but

as a role model. I think Will was almost a father figure, in a way. He was in the

business about an hour before Jack. (laughs) And we’re going to talk about that a

little bit. But actually, this man finally achieved something the other night when

he actually won an Eisner Award. (laughs, applause) Is that your first Eisner? I’ve

got three of them, and that’s your first?

WILL EISNER: I hate to tell you what it took to get one. (laughs)

JOHN ROMITA: You didn’t know the right people. (laughs)

EVANIER: So you’ve finally done work that lives up to the standards of Will

Eisner. (laughs)

EISNER: I lied about my age. (laughs)

EVANIER: And here to my left is a gentleman that Jack handpicked as his favorite

inker for the last twenty years of his life. I don’t think people realize how hard this

man worked. To ink everything Jack Kirby did, alone... well, a lot of people couldnot have done that, even badly. To ink it and letter it so well under those time

constraints for that rotten money was an amazing achievement. We owe an awful

lot of thanks to Mr. Mike Royer. (applause) Let me also introduce in the audience

a couple of people very briefly. When I was working for Jack, I had the pleasure of 

having as my friend and colleague and partner and co-conspirator, a gentleman

who did an awful lot of work for Jack personally and professionally, and was a

lifelong friend of the family, Mr. Steve Sherman. (applause) And Jack’s other

favorite inker in the last decade or two of his life, and a very close member of the

Kirby family—I mean “family” in the very best sense of the word because he was

practically almost blood over there, Mr. Mike Thibodeaux. (applause) I also do

see one other person here. Jack had an amazing ability to get into trouble, usually

not of his own making, and he had two attorneys throughout most of the Eighties

and Nineties who were dealing with these problems. One was a man by the name

of Steve Rohde who is now a high muck-a-muck in the ACLU. He spends one hour

a week making money as a lawyer and fifty hours a week protecting civil rights.

His former collaborator and partner is now in his own practice and I knew him

mostly as a voice on the phone, dealing with all of Jack’s problems, calling me in

exasperation at whatever stupid thing Marvel was claiming this week. This is Mr.

Paul Levine over here. (applause) I’m going to start with Mr. Eisner—and, by the

way, you all bought this, right? (holds up Eisner’s book Shop Talk to wild applause) I

know you’ve told this story before but you never told it at one of these panels,

about hiring Jack Kirby and his coming to work for your studio—and at some

point, you’ve got to tell the towel story. (laughs) Tell us about the operation that

Jack came into.

EISNER: Well, the company was Eisner and Iger. I former a company with Jerry

Iger who’d been formerly the editor of Wow, What A Magazine that collapsed after

two issues. We owned a shop producing, or packaging, comics. In those days, thepulp magazines were dying and the publishers who were still trying to survive,

were looking for other things to publish. They were publishing comic magazines,

as we called them in those days. They weren’t called “comic books.” Then, as it

came to pass, into my shop comes this kid named Jacob Kurtzberg. Whatever

happened to him, I don’t know. (laughs) He kind of looked like John Garfield to

45

A French Kirby Exhibition (or nearly)!by Jean Depelley and Philippe Jecker 

The 2002 Angoulême International Comics Festival (which took place

last January 24th-27th) was a nice opportunity for European comics fans to

admire a wonderful display of originals from the greatest US comics artists,

and the King was not forgotten!

The CNBDI (standing for National Center for International Comics) is a

one-of-a-kind museum in France, since it presents original comics art only

and has been doing sothese past twelve

years, as well as orga-

nizing important the-

matic exhibitions

focused on the nomi-

nated artists once every

year during the Festival.

 Although it usually dis-

plays a wonderful col-

lection of classic French

Belgium “bande dess- 

inée ” (including art from

Hergé, Jijé, Franquin, and Moebius), US comics are also well-represented,

with samples from the Golden Age of comic strips, EC, underground, and

mainstream super-hero comics. The 2002edition celebrated nominated artist Martin

 Veyron’s sophisticated, Parisian humor, but it

was the US artists’ exhibition that definitely

caught the public interest.

The museum authorities (around

Jean-Pierre Mercier and Thierry Groensteen)

decided to open their holdings, and dis-

played a fantastic selection of art “made in

the USA,” with a very original scenography

created by Marie-Annick Beauvery which

occupied two floors of the CNBDI. First, the

visitor was introduced to American comics

by a comic book store reconstruction (much

different than our French shops!), before

admiring samples of modern independentartists (featuring art by Jill Thomson, Jeff Smith, Mike Mignola, and others).

Then, upstairs began a real feast for the eyes: a wonderful Kirby Torch poster

(statted from a Kirby original)

welcomed the fan! The tone was

set; pages of the greatest artists

were showcased under the

moody lights of the museum,

including George Herriman,

Charles M. Schulz, George

McManus, Robert Crumb, Hal

Foster, Alex Raymond, Burne

Hogarth, Joe Kubert, Jack Davis,

Barry Smith, Jeff Jones, as well

as a special exhibition of Will

Eisner’s Spirit! (Will was attend-ing the Festival as guest of

honor and, by the way, he likes

TJKC! ) In the middle of these

treasures, three wonderful Kirby

pages, intelligently chosen to

show different inkers on Jack’s

work, were presented:

• Fantastic Four Annual #1, page 28 f rom the “Sub-Mariner Vs. The Human

Race” story, inked by Dick Ayers (from which the Torch art had been

swiped for the poster)

• Thor #130 page 5, (not too badly) inked by Colletta

• Fantastic Four #97, page 4, inked by Frank Giacoia

One complaint: the frames made it impossible to read Jack’s margin notesand give a clear shot on the Marvel method, but the art spoke for itself: bril-

liant, energetic and inspiring! If consideration was proportional to the amount

of art displayed, Kirby was really honored in Angoulême as he had as many

pages displayed as Foster or Hogarth, and actually more than anyone else!

   A   l   l   c   h   a   r   a   c   t   e   r   s   i   n   t   h   e   s   e   i   m   a   g   e   s   T   M   &    ©   2   0   0   2   M   a   r   v   e   l    C   h   a   r   a   c   t   e   r   s ,

   I   n   c .

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me at the time. I think he thought he was John

Garfield, and he got to working in the shop. He

was one of the hardest-working guys in the shop,

very serious, and... the towel story. (laughs)

 EVANIER: The story that Jack told me was that

he saw Wow and he wanted to be part of it. He

went to the address in the magazine and it was

out of business. Someone there told him about

Eisner and Iger and sent him up there.

 EISNER: And actually, the shop resembled an

Egyptian slave galley. We were out in the Nile,guys are sitting all around and I’m sitting at the

head, beating the drums, (laughs) but it was such

a new field that, really, anything you did was

innovative. Jack sat on the right-hand side of the

wall and drew in some miniature room. The pen-

ciling guys were sitting alongside the wall—Bob

Powell, Chuck Mazoujian, and George Tuska. At

my big desk, I would sit down and rough out the

initial characters and pass them down the line

and back up, almost like an animation studio.

We were trying very hard to make it profitable

because we were getting five dollars a page for

the work. I was being very innovative from a

production point of view because, in those days,

people were working on salary. They were not

working freelance because I reasoned that if I

was going to get any quality work out of them, I

had to have them on salary. It’s very difficult to

tell a freelancer to change panel three and move

it over to panel five because it’s going to cost

money. The guy who’s getting salary, he’d be very

happy to change it. Jack was very accommodating,

very easy to work with. A lot was going on and

the shop grew. It started out with, maybe, five

people. We were up to about ten or fifteen people

at the time. We got to move to a larger office on

42nd Street, right across the street from the News Building, and we had two offices, two

rooms; one great, wide one where all the artists

worked and a little front room. For the artists, it

was a big office building. Therefore, we decided

we needed a towel service. So we subscribed to a

company that would bring in towels every two or

three days, changing them. Of course, we didn’t

ask questions. Well, one day, I was in the office

and Iger, who was my partner at the time, came

in to me and he said, “Hey, there’s this guy out

there who wants to come in and talk about the

towel service.” He said, “You’re in charge of 

production,” meaning I

was the partnerin charge of pro-

ducing. Iger was

the businessman.

He was maybe

thirteen years older

than me. Therefore,

he was the business-

man. So I went out

and there stands this

guy, straight out of a

Mickey Spillane movie,

with a black hat and a

white tie and a black

shirt, looking like he brokea nose, speaking “like dis.”

He said, “I’m in charge of 

the towel service,” and I

said, “Well, we want to change

the towel service. We’re not

happy with your company because the towels

are not coming out white,” and so forth. “Well,

you know,” he said, “we got the franchise

here.” (laughs) So I said, “Well, I know youhave but I called a couple of other companies

and none of them wanted to take on our

account. They said, ‘It’s not our territory.’”

So he said, “Look, we don’t want to have

no trouble with you. We want everything

to go nice, see?” (laughs) So he says,

“You tell me what your problem is, I’ll

try to fix it.” So I said, “Well, I want

more towels.” He said, “I can’t get you

more towels. Only four towels.” By

the way, his voice is getting a little

stronger and I’m getting a little

worked up. I was getting a little angry

and suddenly, out of the back,comes Jack. This guy is about 6' 2"

and Jack’s about 4' 3". (laughs)

 Jack says to me, “Hey, boss.” He

always called me “boss.” Even

through all of his life he always called

me “boss.” He said, “Both of you, just a minute. I’ll

take care of this,” and he looks at this guy and said,

“What do you want, you big ox?” The guy looks with

terror at this little guy. Jack says, “Look, we don’twant any of your crap from you. We don’t like your

damn towel service. Now, get the hell out of here.”

(laughs) Now I figure I’m going to be mopping up

the blood off the floor. (laughs) To my amazement,

to my astonishment, this big guy turned around

and walked out. (laughs) Jack says to me, “He comes

back again, call me. I’ll take care of him.” (laughs)

That was Jack. He changed his name very shortly

from Jacob Kurtzberg, or whatever it was, to “Jack

Curtiss.” He was doing the Count of Monte Cristo

story at the time. Then he changed it later on to

another one and became “Jack Kirby,” but it was

always a joy to work with this guy. I always enjoyed

working with him. I didn’t see him after he left and joined up with Joe Simon, I didn’t see him until

many years later, here at this convention, where we

were really going to talk to each other; and this

interview that I tried to do with him  [for Spirit

Magazine #39, conducted circa 1982] , more than any-

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Surely he couldn’t be dispatched as easily asDarkseid did in the Hunger Dogs graphic novel(and with as pedestrian a means as a gun; talkabout a scene that rang hollow. Himon wouldcertainly have utilized a “follower” to stand infor him, as he did so many times before).

Regardless, it’s amazing that a character who

only appeared in one Fourth World issue—andnearly two years after the epic began—could besuch an important part of the tapestry. So for thisissue, we resurrect the “lovable old rascal” whotaught Scott Free his craft by having three writersgive their take on one of Kirby’s most personal (andfan favorite) sagas: Mister Miracle #9’s “Himon.”

How Do You Kill The ManWho’s Died A Thousand Deaths?

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Himontary 

   T   h   a   n   k   s   t   o   A   d   r   i   a   n   D   a   y   f   o   r   t   h   e   l   o   g   o   t   r   e   a   t   m   e   n   t   !

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Charles Hatfieldimon—master of disguise, escape artist par excellence, and

\ above all the “master of theories”—is Kirby’s embodiment

of imagination. A protean genius, Himon has a disconcerting

tendency to “phase” in and out of everywhere, and the power to

shake off bodies like dry husks, thus to sidestep death again andagain. Kirby suggests a prosaic explanation for Himon’s impossible

escapes (apparently he can create convincing replicas or stand-

ins for his own body), but, finally, Himon is a metaphor; every

literal-minded explanation of his powers falls short. He is imagi-

nation personified—the inspiration for designers, craftsmen,

dancers, artists—and his visionary energy threatens Darkseid’s

suffocating, totalitarian world order.

On Apokolips the free exercise of the imagination carries

terrible risks: Himon’s students often die for dreaming. When

young Scott Free witnesses this firsthand, when he sees dreamers

tortured and destroyed, he cracks, and finally, fully, commitshimself to breaking free. For him Himon becomes no longer

merely a source of furtive escapism, but a genuine means of 

escape. The story of “Himon,” then, is about the horrors that

break Scott’s conformism and harden his resolve for imaginative

freedom—as the cover says, the great “bust-out.”

The tale is unpleasant, yet exhilarating. Its setting is a night-

mare, and its pervasive violence is cold,

appalling. After decades of reuse, Apokolips

remains one of Kirby’s best and most fright-

ening ideas: a blotted, smoking, industrialized

hell that makes mythology out of the author’s

formative experiences, fusing Lower East Side

squalor with visions of a thumping, jackbooted

technocracy. “Himon” depicts this worldscapewithout much grandeur but with an astringent,

unsentimental, and brutal clarity. (There are

few dark places in Kirby’s oeuvre that can match

it: the City of Toads, perhaps, from Eternals

 #8-10, or the chilly dystopia of OMAC  #1.)

The story metes out torment and death,

indeed a surplus of outrageous violence, with

steely matter-of-factness.

When I look at the pages of “Himon,”

these are some of the things I see:

I see signs of Kirby’s overarching ambitions

for the Fourth World saga. Page 1’s explanatory

caption links this story with “The Pact” ( New

Gods #7) and assumes a knowing audience

that is following Mister Miracle and New Gods

at the same time. At several points, Kirby

foreshadows how Scott’s escape from Apokolips

will factor into, perhaps spark, a new war; the

darkly prophetic dialogue of Himon and

Metron hints that Scott’s moment of decision

may also be a decisive turning point in the

whole saga. These hints suggest just how

much narrative and thematic material Kirby

was holding in his head at the time, and how

meaningful the larger tapestry of the Fourth

World had become for him at this decisive

point in his career. This was a new and complexundertaking for a yarn-spinner whose work

had most often been driven by the tyranny of 

frequent deadlines, and whose degree of 

engagement (not his work ethic, which was

tireless, but his artistic interest) would so

often vary even within a single month, waxing

and waning according to his imaginative

sympathy with the material. Here his engage-

ment was at its fiercest, and his maintenance

of continuity (so often a trouble spot for

Kirby) most deliberate.

I also see effective scripting. Admittedly,

Kirby’s pounding urgency is often hard to

take—his scripting is prone to overkill—andeven here there are times when his captions

are momentarily confusing; but “Himon”

boasts an elegance and compression that are

rare in Kirby’s scriptwriting, and the cadences

of the text are hypnotic (dig the incantatory

rhythms of pages 1 through 3, or the relentless

(throughout this article)

Scenes from Mister Miracle 

#9’s story “Himon” in pencil.

 All characters TM & ©2002

DC Comics.

HH

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here came a time when the Fourth

World cycle, Jack Kirby’s symbolic war

of cosmic forces, benefited from a

much more mundane contest. A battle for

newsstand supremacy between Kirby’s

then-publisher DC and the other industry

giant of those days, Marvel, led to an

increased page-count for several issues of 

each series in Kirby’s trilogy. This gave his

saga the space it seemed most suited for.

“Himon” in Mister Miracle was one of the

longest episodes of that title’s run (though

it appeared in the first issue after the page-

counts came back down, presumably pro-

duced by Kirby before he saw this coming).

However, this most momentous and moving

story of his career is remarkable not for

spectacular sprawl but expressive economy.

Like “The Pact” in New Gods, “Himon”

flashed back in Kirby’s modern-day mythos

to give the nightmare-fairytale background

of how the saga’s apocalyptic celestial con-

flict—which mirrored the real-life super-

power struggle of the time—came to pass.

The enlargement of the preceding few

issues had serendipitously created the most

favorable conditions for this tour de force,

carving out pages for some establishing

chapters in the life of “Young Scott Free”

(though in a sure sign of Kirby’s concision,

these three installments themselves totaled

10 pages). While lacking the poetry of the

full-length conclusion, their mise en scène is

thoroughly imagined, and they let Kirby

dispense with all needed exposition before

the psychodramatic main event.That finale reads as Kirby’s most

poignant and personal tale, and it can

scarcely be coincidental that it is his most

distinctly Jewish. Himon is a sympathetic

reinvention of a literary icon with infamous

anti-Semitic overtones (Fagin), and his name

is a phonetic equivalent of the Hebrew one

most ridiculed in English (Hyman, a.k.a.

Hymie), though it translates as “Life.” Scott’s

story is clearly a Moses narrative, though

in keeping with the corrupted times it

reflects, the hero is not saved by his family,

nurtured by their enemy, and destined to

become a prophetic liberator, but is insteadsacrificed by his own kind, brutalized by his

foster society, and consumed with rebuilding

his own life as a haunted refugee. The

entire cast’s dog-eat-dog relations recall the

dehumanized pecking order among WWII

concentration camp inmates, or the Darwinian

strife of Kirby’s own childhood in the ethnic ghettos

of early 20th-century America.

That last point is central in distinguishing this

story from much of adventure fiction. The tale is soriveting that the reader might not at first realize how

decisively it diverges from the conventions of its

genre. It is stunning to note, for instance, how little

“action” the story contains—or at least how little in

the forms pop-culture consumers are conditioned

to expect it. There is violence aplenty, but mostly

of the kind we turn to fiction to forget: guerrilla

war-style peasant slaughters; attempted political

executions; senseless torture; petty assassinations;

haggard fugitive flights. In an acute understandingof the essence of terror, we are given scares by much

more than we actually witness: we don’t see the

shocks administered to Auralie; we don’t see Willik’s

club connect with Kreetin; we see few of Himon’s

sentences carried out to the end, and Willik’s fate

Adam McGovern

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Adrian Day“Darkseid, Highfather and the rest of the cast have always been sincere

expressions of my feelings—reactions to all the things I knew were out 

there in the night, like the scrabbling of an unseen army of claws, or 

the beating of wings in nocturnal vigilance over sleepers in repose.” 

 Jack Kirby

’m a survivor,” Jack once said of

himself, then thinking for a

moment quickly revised his state-

ment. “I’m a master survivor!” It was

a defining statement for a man who, in

the latter part of his career, saw survival

as the theme of his most serious work.

It should be no surprise then that when

 Jack chose to align himself with one

of his own creations, the character he

chose was also a master survivor, or

in Jack’s words, “the master techni-

cian, the master of swiftness and tem-peratures, the ultimate escape artist.”

To the best of my knowledge, Jack

never acknowledged any kinship

between himself and the central figure

of Mister Miracle #9, yet the similarities

are striking. They are so striking, in

fact, that not even a quote from Kirby

to the contrary could convince me otherwise. Himon vacillates

between a caricature and a serious portrait of Jack, both physically

and spiritually. Even within the context of the story, the references

made to Himon are equally fitting as epithets for Jack.

Our introduction to Himon has a wonderful mixture of the

farcical and the dramatic. When an attempt is made to exterminate

him in the slums of Armagetto, he appears as a formidable shad-

owy figure in a wall of flame. His humorous side is quickly

revealed when his escape attempt, via Mother Box, lands him

inside a wall due to faulty circuitry. Scott Free comes to his aid and

saves him from being imbedded there permanently. Their relation-

ship in this scene is reminiscent of W.C. Fields and Freddie

Bartholomew in Cukor’s David Copperfield , a story that also played

no small part in the inspiration for the Mister Miracle series.

Even Himon’s most serious moments are tempered by the

mischievous pranks of the trickster. His escapes are underscored

with a sense of humor, when Himon resurfaces in a crowd as a

spectator to his own execution. The elimination of Wonderful

Willik by way of an exploding dinner tray, when Himon avenges

the deaths of his pupils, is something out of Looney Tunes.Through all this, it is an image of Jack that

we see in this unlikely hero.

The meeting between Himon and

Metron, near the story’s climax, reads

like some imagined exchange between

 Jack and a young Roy Thomas. Metron

greets Himon as the “master of theories,”

an appropriate title for Kirby. Himon

calls Metron the “master of elements”

which Roy unquestionably was in his

heyday at Marvel, when the best of his

efforts involved a masterful weaving of 

storylines previously established by Jack.

When Metron declares, “the wonders Ibuild are born in your brain! The roads

that I travel are opened by your massive

perception!”, he makes a statement to

which every writer and artist following

 Jack in the field of comics is heir.

Symbols of Duality in the Fourth WorldOf all the stories within Jack’s Fourth World series, “Himon”

is the most mature and central to the greater theme concerning

the duality of God in the consciousness of man. “Himon” is amasterful allegory about making a choice of which God or power

we will attach ourselves to and the rewards and consequences

that come with either choice. These ideas, which are subtext

throughout Jack’s other tales, are the focal point of the plot here.

Himon and Darkseid represent the opposite sides of that

duality. Scott Free is in the middle, finally confronted with his

moment of decision. This is the theme laid out for us since  New

Gods #1 where the setting for the Fourth World conflict was

established with New Genesis and Apokolips on either side and

Earth (man) as their battleground at the center. The internal

struggle represented by this duality and the dark side of human

nature are very much at the heart of Jack’s story and a key to

understanding Darkseid and what he symbolizes.

As Jack explains, “Darkseid never told a lie. He never desertedhis son. When he meets this old man with his grandson in

Happyland, he says, ‘When you’re asleep and you have a nightmare,

I’m the guy you’re seeing—the other side of yourself.’ Because the

other side of yourself is insecure. It’s villainous, it’s treacherous—

and don’t tell me that there may not come a time, in considering

your life against someone else’s, you would betray him.”

Himon, in counterpoint to Darkseid, is all that is noble within

us. He is an indomitable spirit that, to the frustration of Darkseid’s

minions, proves indestructible. He dares to have an imagination.

He dreams beyond Darkseid, an act that on Apokolips is

unthinkable and perilous. The freedom that he shows Scott Free

is in reality an internal one. Scott’s physical escape is merely that

final act of commitment to a choice he has already made.

The Source of InspirationMany understand the New Gods books to be stories about

war and to be Jack’s statement on the nature of war. Certainly,

those elements are there. When the series was produced, the

Vietnam War was still raging and much of the sentiment of the

times filtered through Jack’s stories. His views on the futility of 

war can be found throughout the  New Gods. Kirby, himself a

veteran of World War II, had seen firsthand the worst in human

nature. Apokolips, without question, is the logical extension of 

the Nazi Death Camp, encompassing an entire planet. Kirby was

also well aware that Scott Free’s infraction of military guidelines

for aero-troopers in growing his hair long would resonate within

the culture of American youth who were in opposition to govern-

ment and war. These examples notwithstand-

ing, Jack’s vision was much broader and the

evils he was attempting to uncover were more

subtle; indeed, more personal.

Kirby saw the fires that feed an Apokolips or

an Auschwitz burning in the normal situations

of everyday life. He saw destroyers like Darkseid,

seeking an equivalent of the Anti-life Equation,

operating at every level of our existence. These

were the themes and convictions closest to

 Jack’s heart when he embarked on his Fourth

World series. Said Jack, “I felt there was a time

that a man has to tell a story in which he felt,

not anybody else, in which he felt there wasno bullsh*t. There was absolute truth.”

In “Himon” and the like, Jack had an

opportunity to tell that truth. It is the convic-

tion that Jack didn’t pull any punches with

these tales that convinces me the inspiration

(above) Next-issue blurb

from Mister Miracle #8.

(below) The “master of

theories” meets the

“master of elements.”

(next page) Himon made

his final appearance in

the Hunger Dogs 

graphic novel, to plague

Darkseid one last time

before his eventual

demise.

 All characters TM & ©2002 DC

Comics.

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Parting Shot Kirby’s final Mister Miracle page (from #18), still in pencil form. Other than some statues, and the flashback scenes in issue #9’s

“Himon” story, this was Darkseid’s only actual appearance in Mister Miracle —on the last page of the final issue of the series.

KIRBY COLLECTOR #35GREAT ESCAPES! MISTER MIRACLE pencil art gallery, MARKEVANIER, MARSHALL ROGERS & MICHAEL CHABON interviews,comparing Kirby and Houdini’s backgrounds, analysis of “Himon”,2001 Kirby Tribute Panel (WILL EISNER, JOHN BUSCEMA,

 JOHN ROMITA, MIKE ROYER, & JOHNNY CARSON) & more!KIRBY/MARSHALL ROGERS and KIRBY/STEVE RUDE covers!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95(Digital edition) $3.95http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_57&products_id=460

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