An excellent post. I agree pretty much with all your conclusions and have no doubt that Kirby drew these splashes and did not just provide layouts. The Torch figures in Chapters 1 and 3 have poses that prefigure his Johnny Storm figures (especially the pose in chapter 3) and look more Kirby to me than the others, but as you noted, he may not have had a firm grip on the characters look since it wasn’t his.

Certainly Kirby was improving all the time and developing into a better artist month by month.
At Timely he took on about 70 pages a month, a huge step up in production.
A musician improves by practicing scales. He might try to play them while practicing at a faster tempo than he is entirely comfortable with. While this is a proven method to develop “chops” the artists growth will fully display itself when he is able to slow down a bit and work at a more comfortable pace.

To me while the Marvel work has a “punk rock”/ “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” vitality there are more than occasional weak panels, and the drawings isn’t as careful because it couldn’t be. In addition we are looking at Kirby’s pencils through the veneer of the 1941 version of Diverse Hands. Was this about the time Joe Simon told Kirby to throw away his eraser?

Many hands working on Young Allies and yet that was also true of Captain America with very different results.

I picked that Chapter 3 story page purposely because of all the layout features it uses but the circular panals and zig-zag borders can be found throughout the book. Al Avison would use similar panels but seeing how at this time the non-Cap stories to Captain America did not use the zig-zag borders (but they did use circular panels) I conclude that Avison had not yet picked up that panel technique. So yes I agree with you that Simon and Kirby had their hand in the entire book just that Jack was not doing the drawing.

Cosmic Carson was certainly a great piece of work, maybe still a little raw but full of that Kirby energy. And yet Jack did little actual comic book work for Fox comics. Victor Fox called himself the King of Comics but there he was with what would turn out to be the greatest comic book artist and Fox mainly used him for Blue Beetle syndication strip where the format was a hinderance to Jack’s talent. I blame that on Fox, not Simon who had just started as the editor because Joe certainly recognized Kirby’s talent and started using Jack for work outside of Fox.

But I am not sure I agree that Jack’s Timely work did not reach the same level. Kirby’s Captain America shoke the industry and rightly so, nobody else was doing anything like it. That is what makes Young Allies such an anomoly.

Congrats on the book, hopely my copy will arrive via Amazon soon. I agree with you about definite Kirby artowrk under the finished drawings, the problem is that there are soooo many hands doing the inking at this time. Between Avison, Gabrielle, Shores, Nicholas and whoever else happened by, it’s really difficult comparing pages. I find it interesting that on the interior page from chapter three, page three, that the formatting follows S&K’s Captain America stylings, with the ess shaped and zigzag gutters, and scalloped circular panels. All the little background circular shadows and details fit in perfectly with S&K designed pages. The two boys piggybacking with a disguise seen on the splashpage of chapter 5 is another common Kirby bit. Plus the interior pages are lettered by Ferguson. I think that besides the splashes, that many of the pages were laid out for Nicholas by Joe Simon, or Jack.

Stan

I cannot comment about Kirtzman’s layouts, never having seen any examples (EC is not a big interests for me). And yes I forgot about page 82 of TJKC #50, that certainly is an example of an unused Kirby layout. But I still wonder if it is typical of Kirby’s method, perhaps further pages would have shown more detailed portions as well. That certainly is the conclusion from my examinations of Kirby layouts for instance in my serial post The Art of Romance. Examples like Tales of Suspence #74 seems to indicate it was true during the silver age as well. There the splash is so typically Kirby that I doubt that Tusca did little more then ink it. Other story panels indicate that Jack’s layout were probably pretty tight in some cases.