Thanks to Kirby Historian Stan Taylor for sending in this excerpt from the Jack Kirby biography he is working on. Stan has been an incredible resource for Kirby fans, students, and historians over the last few decades — his knowledge of the subject is comprehensive, and he is incredibly generous in terms of sharing information like this. Stan has done an amazing job putting together his research, and he approaches the subject with a genuine objectivity and a sense of humor you won’t find in a lot of typical comics research. In fact Stan is a lot like Jack Kirby — simply put, he’s a class act. Having a chance to meet people like Stan Taylor is one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed studying Jack Kirby’s work so much, and one of the main reasons I do Kirby Dynamics is to say thanks to people like Stan Taylor for graciously sharing their research over the years with all of us. This weblog is my small way of giving back to the real pioneers of Kirby scholarship.

In answer to a reader’s question about Jack’s time in animation, here is some of Stan Taylor’s research on the subject. Thanks again to Stan for sharing this with all of us. I broke it up into a few parts so you all can take a moment to reflect on each segment. Stan also sent in the images.

The Beginning of Kirby’s Animation Career, by: Stan Taylor, part 1

In 1978, Marvel had leased to an animation company the rights to produce a new animated Fantastic Four series. Mark Evanier had gotten a job writing for Hanna-Barbera’s comic line.  He heard through the underground that Hanna-Barbera wanted a “Kirby” look and feel for their new cartoon.  Evanier took it upon himself to go to the animation director and tell him that Jack Kirby was available if they really wanted a comic feel. A quick phone call from Hanna-Barbera Studios and Kirby was back where he had begun, working for an animation studio.  Kirby and Marvel agreed that his working on the FF series would count toward the pages required of his contract so they had no problem, plus it took him away from the nitwits in the office who were jealous of him.

Hanna-Barbera was a low budget animation producer who had figured out a way to make cartoons on a shoestring. Where they used to make a cartoon on a 35,000 dollar budget, with TV, they were now slated only 3-4 thousand dollars an episode.  To keep within these tighter budgets, Hanna-Barbera adopted the concept of limited animation (also called semi-animation) practiced and popularized by the United Productions of America (UPA) studio, which also once had a partnership with Columbia Pictures. The UPA style of limited animation was adopted by other animation studios, and especially by TV cartoon studios such as Hanna-Barbera Productions. However, it was implemented as a cost-cutting measure rather than an artistic choice. A plethora of low-budget, cheaply made cartoons over the next twenty years effectively reduced television animation to a commodity, despite UPA’s original goal to expand the boundaries of animation and create a new form of art.  Character designs were simplified, and backgrounds and animation cycles (walks, runs, etc.) were regularly re-purposed. Characters were often broken up into a handful of levels, so that only the parts of the body that needed to be moved at a given time (i.e. a mouth, an arm, a head) would be animated.  The rest of the figure would remain on a held animation cel. This allowed a typical 10-minute short to be done with only 1,200 drawings instead of the usual 26,000. Much of the actual work was shipped out to Japan where labor was a mere pennies a week. Toho Studios, the largest Japanese animator, had entered into a contract with UPA.

Suddenly Jack was out from under the yoke of deadlines and assembly line comic creation. Due to behind the scenes fighting, the project ended up over at the DePatie-Freleng studios, a working partner of Hanna-Barbera.  D-F had started out as Warner Bros, animation studio when Fritz Freleng, David Depatie and others separated from Warners. Oddly, in 1981, D-F was sold to Marvel Comics. Stan Lee, who had recently moved to California to oversee Marvel’s cinematic properties, was brought in to help produce the toons while Kirby oversaw the art direction. Jim Shooter was upgraded to Stan’s publisher position. Under a strange agreement, the character of the Human Torch had been licensed to a different film company, so the Torch was replaced in the cartoon by an irascible robot named Herbie. Some have speculated that it was a nod to Star Wars because of some similarities to R2-D2, others say that standards and practices rejected the Torch after a child had been burned while imitating the earlier cartoon.  Neither seems to be true. The loss of the Torch really weakened some of the stories, especially in the visuals where the Torch’s flame was so visually exciting.