I have to say, the contrast between the spectacular Kirby artwork, and the wonderfully imaginative stories is such a contrast to the mean-spirited mutiny taking place in Jack’s letters columns by the “staffers” who are trying to hijack (if you’ll excuse the pun) his book from right under his feet.

Here’s a handful of pages. Another book I owned as a kid, and I remain totally blown away by that double-splash. In the 1970s, if you were a fan of visual entertainment, there was simply nobody on planet Earth doing this type of stuff in comics. Just totally innovative, dynamic storytelling. Jack clearly at his peak, despite a handful of cowards in NYC trying to create a fake “controversy” they hope will result in him leaving Marvel… which he will do in a few issues. There are so many amazing pages in this book, I’m going to have to live dangerously and post a few extra. If Marvel has a problem, y’know, just email me and I’ll take them down. On page 7, I love the composition of panel 5. half of Cap’s face, and Donna Maria behind him. The “My God” line from Cap. So much more beleivable thatn Stan Lee’s 60s gibberish.

There’s just so much wonderful variety in the imagery, the crackle lights up the pages with energy, and as always, Jack has an infinite number of ideas in terms of putting the characters through their paces. To me, books like this from the 70s stand up right there with his very best work. What an honor it was to buy books like this off the spinner racks when the greatest artist to ever work in the medium was still at the top of his game. And I’m so lucky I did not read the letters columns — I had no idea that there was so much hatred for Jack in the Marvel offices at the time. I had probably just turned 12-years-old when this came out, and I think it might have hurt me as a impressionable little kid to know there were backstabbers at my beloved Marvel that were trying to fire this truly exceptional artist.

Wow, this phony “controversy” created by some insipid Marvel staffers in the 1970s now gets a big giant yellow box at the top of Jack’s Captain America letters page. At least they didn’t spell it “The Kirby Kontroversy Koninues.” This whole thing is much more outrageous than I thought. How these staffers were allowed to do this is mind-blowing. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Has there ever been a comic book where for over a year, some glorified interns used the letters column to try to get the writer, artist, editor of a book fired? And this is all nonsense. It’s what Daniel J. Boorstin called a “pseudo-event.” I encourage you  to check out his book.

This is totally made up and fake event. The staffers started this “controversy” themselves by publishing all those letters asking to get Jack fired. Don’t post letters asking to have a co-worker fired and there would be no controversy.

It’s the same thing tht happens in our current politics on both sides. If you hate someone or want to get someone kicked out of office you create fake controversies then laugh while Rome burns.

By the way, how would you, my reader, feel if every month in your business newsletter, your co-workers were publishing letters from anonymous ”fans” demanding you be fired!? How would you feel about that?

I’m sick of reading these things. You can read it if you want to. I will say one thing, thank God an advertisement fills up a quarter of the page: that’s 2 less letters the “staffers” could have posted begging Marvel to fire Jack, put Cap “back in the “Marvel Universe, and of course, bring back Rediwing…

Boy, I wish I had been able to get ahold of this comic when I was a kid. It’s really spectacular. I wonder if someone at Marvel contacted Jack and asked him to “return” Cap to the so-called “Marvel Universe” (which I call the ”Kirby Universe) hence you have the return of the Red Skull. I hope Jack did it on his own, not because he placated the fake rebellion going on in the letters columns, but because he wanted to bring back one of his old creations. Some random pages from the book. Love that page 11 splash. You have to think Jack’s wife was an inspiration for Donna Maria.

I don’t recall seeing the original art for this cover. If anyone out there has it please send it in.

Thanks to a reader for sending in this link:

Spot the Swipe Contest: Lightboarding or Tribute… Re-Using the Art of Jack Kirby.

This image is in my K-Files. Looks like it might be a fairly cleaned up scan of the original artwork, but I’m not sure.

This will be my last post suggesting the Kirby Museum create an archive for Kirby original art scans (to supplement the current HD scan archive) submitted by students, fans and collectors.

Here’s a random image from my files. It’s a poor scan but you can see the wear of the paper on the edges. You can see the white-out. Note the 2 red Captain America titles in top. It gives you a feel for what the original art looks li. The whole image is all on one board. This thing must look spectacular in person.

This is a photograph of that beautiful Captain America 2-page spread I posted here recently. Wouldn’t the Kirby Museum want this scan and encourage readers to send in scans like this?

People photoshop their scans so notice this image below has been changed. I would assume by the owner of the art.

Both of these scans can have value. Marvel may never publish this image in black and white. Art like this can end up in some billionaire’s vault never to be seen again. Why not take advantage of the fact that comic art is changing hands right now and people are sharing their images? Collect and catalogue it in 2013 so if a future student of Kirby in 3013 wants to discuss this image, boom, scans like these are in the Museum archives to compare and contrast with the published art.

Okay, that’s it for my suggestion. I’ll post a few move 60s covers, then wrap up the 70s Captain America run.

I used to listen to Howard Stern during the 90s and he would always argue with his staff, especially his management. But it was all in good fun. So this isn’t me fighting with the Kirby Museum, I’m just kind of asking what I consider to be a legitimate question and giving my opinion. I’m certainly not trying to be rude. The day suggestions are considered rude, we are all truly doomed.

I love the Kirby Museum, or more specifically I love the potential of the project, and maybe no one even agrees with me on this but I’m going to post this “image deleted” image for two more days (today and tomorrow) because I still suggest the Kirby Museum should collect online and collector scans of Jack’s orignal art. If I’m running a Picasso Museum, and a fan sends me a low-resolution scan of a Picasso piece never seen before wouldn’t I be an idiot not to accept that scan? Why not post it on the Picasso Museum site so people could see it; and encourage other people to send in such scans? Am I nuts here?

Below is just a tiny sampling from a few of my folders containing some random scans I gathered in the early 2000s from auction sites and fans. Wouldn’t it make sense to collect these things in case this art is never scanned again? Wouldn’t it be great if the images were organized so people could bypass google and find them at a Kirby Museum? Who knows if all of this stuff will ever surface again? The quality is not great on a few, but they can still be useful to future Kirby students.

I certainly hope people don’t think I’m attacking the Kirby Museum. Quite the opposite, I’d like to see it grow and become bigger and better over the years. And looking at the Museum’s Facebook page, it ain’t like 1000 people are agreeing with me so I suspect the interest in collecting scans of Kirby’s art is pretty much infinitesimal. It’s just a suggestion. I’ve posted over 1300 posts here so you’d hope I cold be forgiven for making a suggestion. Here’s a comment from Facebook:

Patrick Ford: My thought is the Kirby Museum should devote most of it’s resources towards making available the wealth of material they already have. This includes thousands of scans of the stats and photocopies which reproduce Kirby’s pencils before they were inked, as well as nine boxes of papers donated to the Kirby Museum. Any outside contributions are trivial compared to making those photocopies available to all.

I agree 100% with that. I suppose maybe there are copyright issues where showing a whole book could create problems? I also gather there is a plan in place where eventually the Museum will start showing more of their scans? Obviously having all of Jack’s pencil scans up and indexed would be a great resource for fans and students. My only guess is that once they are up and everybody who wants them can upload them, then they won’t have as much potential value. In other words, if the Museum puts all the pencil scans up then less people might buy TJKC, or less people might buy a special book on the pencil scans. etc. I’d love to see all those scans too, and it’s kind of a shame because many people have wanted to look at them for decades, but my guess is the people who made those scans own the scans so they probably want to be careful before simply dumping them all on the internet. That does make some sense to me, but ideally I think the scans all should be available to Kirby students and fans.

I also wish somebody could track down Ray Wyman and work out a way to get him to release all of his audio interview footage with Jack. I think he has like 40 hours or something? Maybe more? I know the publishing industry is tanking right now but I wish TwoMorrows or someone could give him some kind of deal where Wyman can make some money for his work and we could listen to those interviews. There’s got to be tons of interesting stuff in them and what a shame it is that it’s 2013 and that material still hasn’t seen the light of day; and it may be decades before it does and by that time nobody may care.

I also wish someone would release Theakston’s video interview of Kirby. I remain baffled why someone hasn’t packaged that as a DVD or just dumped it onto YouTube. What’s taking so long? I watched it like 10 years ago. It’s been around for decades. Watching that video was one of the most positive experiences I’ve ever had since I started studying Jack. Probably the most positive. You really get to “meet” the guy. Granted, it’s not the greatest interview — Greg does an okay job but he doesn’t follow up on a lot of interesting threads, and kind of prevents Jack from following his own stream of consciousness, and the video quality is pretty poor — but it’s a remarkable video document. You get to hang out with Jack while the sun goes down, he bounces around from subject to subject, he talks about the beginning of his career, he shares a lot of great anecdotes and touches on all sorts of topics, his war stories are great. It totally humanizes Jack. It shows he’s just a regular guy and he has lots of interesting opinions on everything under the sun. Theakston told me there is another entire 2 hours somewhere on Jack’s time at Marvel but one of his associates has that. You’d hope Greg and comics fandom could track that down and share it. And where is Evanier’s book anyway? I love Evanier so I hate to say this, but if the book came out tomorrow, I don’t know if I’ll ever have time to read it. I just wish somehow everyone involved could have gotten that project out there while interest in Jack was at a high point. You can always do a second edition. Tons of authors are doing that, constantly updating their books over time. That’s the wave of publishing’s future.

I love certain aspects of Kirby fandom, but it really is a shame that so many people are dragging their heels in terms of sharing audio, video, and research they’ve gathered. Over the last few years when Jack’s family was fighting Marvel was the time to put this information out there and help put forth the idea that Jack was more than Stan Lee’s drone. I fear as the euphoria of these overrated movies wears off and more and more people who collected comics in the 50s and 60s pass away, interest in Jack Kirby may begin to fade, and if you release the material mentioned above now, it may simply get buried in the already massive pile of digital garbage.