Comic fans (Marvel fans) peep this...

[Blaze500]

why is that yall praise stan lee all the time when this man

gets absolutely no credit?

 

[Black Cac]

Shut up

 

[Blaze500]

Shut up

its a honest question?

 

[Orbital-Fetus]

is that Kirby?

 

[Black Cac]

its a honest question?

It's an honest answer

 

[Blaze500]

is that Kirby?

yep...its sad that he doesnt get the credit he deserves today

 

[GoonbergScandal]

Yeah Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had a major beef with each other over character rights and storylines between Marvel characters.

 

[KravenMorehead™]

Jack Kirby Interview | The Comics Journal

Jack Kirby Interview
BY Gary Groth May 23, 2011
From The Comics Journal #134 (February 1990)


Captain America #8, 1941​

It’s accurate enough to refer to Jack Kirby as an American original, but it’s hard to know where to place the emphasis — on American or original. He’s certainly both, in spades. Renowned as one of the handful of true artistic giants in the history of comic books, it’s difficult to come up with encomiums that have not become commonplace. Although I had known Jack for some time and spoken to him not infrequently prior to conducting this “formal” interview, it was not until I read over the transcript that I understood just how thoroughly Jack is a child of his time and place. Growing up on the Lower East Side shaped his life and his work which, combined with a robust imagination and seemingly inexhaustible energy, substantially shaped the trajectory of the American commercial comic book. A dubious contribution to the American comic book, you may think, until you realized that it wasn’t Kirby’s fault that hacks and no talents, aided and abetted by opportunistic publishers, have been ripping off his work and plagiarizing him wholesale for decades. Though the refined eyes of the aesthete may consider Kirby’s work crude, ornery, and anti-intellectual, the fact remains that he combined the virtues and limitations of his class with a stubborn genius to produce a body of comics work that has remained consistently true to its source and is unparalleled both in quantity and quality. This interview was conducted in three different sessions over the summer of 1989 at the Kirby’s comfortable home in Thousand Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles. Jack’s wife, Roz, sat in on the interviews and helped recall with precision key points in Jack’s career. My thanks to them both, specifically for helping assemble artwork illustrating this interview, and more generally for their friendship over the last half dozen years.

All images written and drawn by Kirby unless otherwise noted.

GROWING UP ON THE EAST SIDE​

JACK KIRBY: I don’t know where your father comes from, but where I came from, everybody was an immigrant. My people were from Europe. My family came from Austria, both my mother and my father. We lived on New York’s Lower East Side. The value of money was different then. We paid $12 rent a month, and a nickel was worth maybe the equivalent of a dollar today. It was very hard for a young man to get a nickel from his mother, but somehow you managed. When I visited New York, somebody thought it would give me a big thrill if he took me down there where I grew up, and I’d be thrilled by the sight of my humble origins, and I hated the place. I wanted to get out of there! [Laughter.]

GARY GROTH: Now this is the Lower East Side. Exactly what street?

KIRBY: It was on Suffolk Street. It was right next to Norfolk Street, and I went to school at P.S. 20.

GROTH: Why did you hate the place?

KIRBY: I hated the place because I… Well, it was the atmosphere itself. It was the way people behaved. I got sick of chasing people all over rooftops and having them chase me over rooftops. I knew that there was something better, and instinct told me that it was uptown, and I’d walk every day from my block to 42nd Street where the Daily News was, where I could be near the Journal, the Hearst newspapers. I’d run errands for the reporters. My boss was playing golf [in the office], and he was shooting golf balls through an upturned telephone book, see? That’s the kind of job I wanted! [Laughter.]

GROTH: Was this a poor neighborhood?

KIRBY: Where I came from, Suffolk Street? It still is, and Norfolk Street next to it still is. The whole area is extremely poor.

GROTH: What did your father do?

KIRBY: My father worked in a factory like everybody else’s father.

GROTH: And your parents were immigrants?

KIRBY: My parents were immigrants. And the place for all immigrants was the factories. They were the source of cheap labor. The immigrants had to make a living. They had to support their families, and they did it on very little, and so we had very little… You know, we couldn’t wear the best of clothes. I always wore turtleneck sweaters and knickers when I could get them. There were two of us, my brother and I. My brother is gone. He passed away, so I’m the only one left in the family. He was a younger brother. He was five years my junior. He was bigger. He was about 6’ 1”, very broad kid, and when I came out of school, I’d be jumped by all these guys, and he’d see my feet sticking out of this pile and dive in. And he’d pull me out from under this pile, and he’d whale in to them.

GROTH: Now, when you say you were jumped and your feet were sticking out of a pile of bodies, it sounds amusing now, but I assume it wasn’t amusing then.

KIRBY: It’s not even amusing now that I think about it. You know, the punches were real, and the anger was real, and we’d chase each other up and down fire escapes, over rooftops, and we’d climb across clotheslines, and there were real injuries.

GROTH: This was a tough neighborhood.

KIRBY: This was the toughest!

From “Street Code,” lettered by Bill Spicer From Silver Star, inked and lettered by Mike Royer ©The Jack Kirby Estate​

GROTH: Can you explain what you mean by that? Were there gangs?

KIRBY: Yes, there were gangs all over the place. Some of my friends became gangsters. You became a gangster depending upon how fast you wanted a suit. Gangsters weren’t the stereotypes you see in the movies. I knew the real ones, and the real ones were out for big money. The average politician was crooked. That was my ambition, to be a crooked politician. I’d see them in these restaurants, and they’d all hold these conferences. I’d see politicians who were supposed to be on opposite sides of issues all together at one table.

GROTH: Did this disillusion you about morality or politics in America?

KIRBY: If America gave anybody anything it is ambition. Bad things would come out of it because some guys are in a hurry, but that doesn’t mean they’re evil or anything, it just means they fall into bad grace somehow. It was hard to find work. A friend of mine was going to go out to get a job because his mother told him to get a job, so he said, I’ll go out and draw pictures and they’ll pay me for them. And his mother said, “No son of mine will become an artist. You’ll sit around with berets in Greenwich Village and talk to loose women.” Of course, mothers were very conventional, everything was very conventional. You had to have approval.

GROTH: There were very strict social conventions.

KIRBY: Very strict social conventions, and you adhered to it, and I think it gave you a lot of character. When a man said something, he meant it. He wasn’t kidding around. There were no jokes involved. Nobody was in the mood to joke unless you hit a guy with a baseball bat.

GROTH: Can you describe the social context a little more? The kid gangs that were running around: did they have their own turf? Did they run in real gangs?

KIRBY: They ran in gangs because they lived in certain places. Everybody who lived on Suffolk Street would be the Suffolk Street Gang. Everybody who lived on Norfolk Street would be the Norfolk Street Gang.

GROTH: Were there ethnic divisions?

KIRBY: Well, there were ethnic divisions, yes. Yes. Italians were predominantly Catholic. Some gangs were Irish, some gangs were black.

GROTH: Why was there such violence?

KIRBY: There was violence because first of all, there were ethnic differences and names. If you were small, they called you a runt, and you had to do something about that even if there were five other guys. There were a lot of ethnic slurs, there had to be, and I think in that respect that through the fighting, through the adversity, we began to know each other. I had never seen an Irishman. I’d never seen an Italian. My family had never seen an Italian. My family came from Central Europe, see, and they saw Germans and Austrians. You had to grow up sometime. The fellows who grew early, they were in jeopardy. They became the cops and the crooks, and the crooks became the gangsters. The crooks became the Al Capones.

GROTH: Were crooked politicians and gangsters looked on with disfavor?

KIRBY: They were looked on as acceptable, but with fear. Gangsters —

GROTH: Why were they — ?

KIRBY: — it wasn’t a matter of morals. It was what they wanted, how fast they wanted it. Now Capone ran Chicago. He ran the politicians. He ran the entire city. Yet his mother would come out and slap him around for not going to church on Sunday.

GROTH: Were they actually looked up to?

KIRBY: Yes, they were looked up to and feared. I think you can be looked up to out of fear just as much as you in look up to a man because of his ability or his promise. Adolf Hitler. I wouldn’t call Adolf Hitler a corporal, OK? Adolf Hitler was looked up to. He was revered almost like a God because he was feared. Adolf Hitler took all of Europe, and my generation had to confront Adolf Hitler.

GROTH: Did you yourself get in a lot of fights when you were a kid?

KIRBY: Yes. They were unavoidable.

ROZ KIRBY: And your brother got into a lot of fights.

KIRBY: Yes. As I said. my brother was a big kid.

GROTH: A tough kid?

KIRBY: He was as tough as anybody else, but he was young. He was five years younger than myself. My mother wanted my brother to wear nice clothes and be a big style kid. Well, can you imagine a big style kid with a lace collar and velvet pants and long, curly hair — blonde hair that came down to his shoulders? I’d get into fights because of my brother, and I got into fights because of his velvet pants and his lace collar, and my brother being a younger boy did the best he could, but I had to whale into these guys. I had to really whale into ’em, and I did. And it was a common, everyday occurrence. Fighting became second nature. I began to like it. And I love wrestling. When I went into the Army. I took judo. Out of a class of 27, just me and another fellow graduated. There was nothing wrong with me. I loved it.

GROTH: Now these fights in your neighborhood — these were serious, knock-down, drag-out fights.

KIRBY: Oh yes, they were. Not only that, but they were climb-out fights. There was a monument store. There was a store that built funeral monuments, and we used to run over those monuments. We used to hop from monument to monument chasing each other. For all I know, the may still be on Suffolk Street.

GROTH: Now, what do you mean by a “climb-out fight”?

KIRBY: A climb-out fight is where you climb a building. You climb fire escapes. You climb to the top of the building. You fight on the roof, and you fight all the way down again. You fight down the wooden stairs, see? And, of course, I didn’t win all of them. You fought fair. If the other guy wants to fight and you knocked him out, you did your best for him. You didn’t want to hurt him any more. There was one time they knocked me out and laid me in front of my mother’s door. And in order for my mother not to be shocked they readjusted my clothes and they saw that nothing was rumpled and I looked very comfortable next to the apartment door, so when my mother would open the door it wouldn’t be that much of a shock.

GROTH: Were you actually knocked unconscious?

KIRBY: Well, yes.

GROTH: Were you ever seriously injured? Broken bones, or…

KIRBY: No, I don’t think so. I was pretty good, to be frank with you, but against five guys…you know, it didn’t really faze me.

ROZ KIRBY: You were like Captain America.

KIRBY: Yes. Captain America would try to fight 10 guys. 1 said, How do you fight 10 guys? The fights in Captain America were very serious. If you looked them over. they’re real fights. I’d say, “What happens to this guy while Cap fights the other four?” And I would figure it out like a ballet. It would really be a ballet.

GROTH: Do you feel that your immersion in this violent world as a kid shaped these themes in your drawing and moved you in that direction?

KIRBY: Well, it helped me live. It helped me stay alive.

GROTH: I mean, do you think it affected the way you drew and the way you…

KIRBY: Oh, yes. You can judge it for yourself. You can see my early books on Captain America. I had to draw the things I knew. In one fight scene, I recognized my uncle. I’d subconsciously drawn my uncle, and 1 didn’t know it until I took the page home. So I was drawing reality, and if you look through all my drawings. you’ll see reality. When I began to grow older, I grew less… You don’t really grow less belligerent.

GROTH: [Laughing.] Right.

KIRBY: It stays inside you, somehow, and it always has its uses.

GROTH: What kind of recreational activities did you engage in as a kid? I mean, did you play stickball, or…?

KIRBY: Yes, I played everything. I played stickball. I played baseball. 1 played left end on my high school team.

GROTH: What was your relationship with your parents like?

KIRBY: My parents loved me. My father used to carry me around on my shoulders. I know my father loved me. All families love their children, and we were good boys.

GROTH: Did you enjoy school? Were you a good student?

KIRBY: I was a good student in the subjects that I wanted to be good in. The curriculum in my section was excellent. I have a good sense of history.

GROTH; Now, can you tell me what your family life was like? Were you close?

KIRBY: My family life was close. They were a wonderful family.

GROTH: I understand that as a kid you were something of a bookworm.

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: You had to sort of hide that fact from the other neighborhood kids. It wasn’t considered—

KIRBY: I did.

GROTH: How did you come to be interested in reading in such a tough neighborhood?

KIRBY: I came out of school one day, and there was this pulp magazine. It was a rainy day, and it was floating toward the sewer in the gutter. So I pick up this pulp magazine, and it’s Wonder Stories, and it’s got a rocket-ship on the cover, and I’d never seen a rocket-ship. I said, “What the heck is this?” I took it home and hid it under the pillow so nobody should know I was reading it. And of course, if the fellows caught me reading it or doing anything academic outside of school…

Marvel Stories (November 1940) illo ©Pure Imagination​

GROTH: Now, you read pulps. Did you also read newspaper strips?

KIRBY: Yes I did. I loved the newspaper strips. I loved Bamey Google . I think that’s what brought me into journalism. The comics are so large and colorful. The pages are extremely large, and I used to love that. And Prince Valiant, of course, it was astonishing to see this beautiful illustration in the newspaper, and it was so different from the ordinary comic.

GROTH: Let’s talk about how you learned to draw, I understand that at age 11, you began getting how-to-draw books at a local library and started —

KIRBY: Yes I did. In fact, I was drawing for a small syndicate. I was drawing editorial cartoons for the syndicate, and I drew a thing called “Your Health Comes First.” I was called in once for drawing an editorial cartoon when Chamberlain made that pact with Hitler. “Where does a young squirt like you,” he says, “get the nerve to do an editorial cartoon on Chamberlain and Hitler?” And I told him I know a gangster when I see one, see? Hitler was gobbling up all of Europe.

GROTH; Now what year would that have been? Would that have been around ’38?

KIRBY: Even earlier. That was around ’36. I was drawing any kind of comic strip art.

GROTH: What actually started you drawing? What gave you the idea you could draw?

KIRBY: I wanted to. I felt that I could. I’d been drawing all along because I felt anybody could do that. All human beings have the capability of doing what they want, what they’re attracted to.

GROTH: I think at the age of 14 you enrolled at the Pratt Institute.

KIRBY: Yes, I did.

GROTH: Can you tell me how you went about doing that? You were a kid in a tough neighborhood enrolling in the Pratt Institute. That’s got to be pretty unusual.

KIRBY: I went to the Pratt Institute, but I didn’t go there for long. I didn’t like places with rules.

GROTH: How long did you go to Pratt?

KIRBY: I went to Pratt a week. [Laughter.] I wasn’t the kind of student that Pratt was looking for. They wanted patient people who would work on something forever. I didn’t want to work on any project forever. I intended to get things done. I did the best drawing I could, and it was very adequate — it had viability, it had flexibility. The people in the art class kind of sympathized with me, and yet they couldn’t abandon their own outlook toward art.

GROTH: Would you say the Pratt Institute represented a fine art outlook?

KIRBY: Yes. It was a fine art outlook, it was a formal outlook, and it was a respected outlook. I respected it too. I had very high respect for the Pratt Institute, but I thought that I had done my best, and that was not their version of the best.

GROTH: So, after Pratt you taught yourself how to draw.

KIRBY: I taught myself how to draw, and I soon found out it was what I really wanted to do. I didn’t think I was going to create any great masterpieces like Rembrandt or Gauguin. I thought comics was a common form of art and strictly American in my estimation because America was the home of the common man, and show me the common man that can’t do a comic. So comics is an American form of art that anyone can do with a pencil and paper.

GROTH: It’s a democratic art.

KIRBY; It’s a democratic art. It’s not a formal art, I feel a fine artist is never through with his work because it’s never perfect to him.

GROTH: Don’t you think you achieved a sort of perfection in your own work?

KIRBY: Yes, I did. I achieved perfection, my type of perfection — visual storytelling. Storytelling was my style. I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is now universal. I get letters from people of my own status.

GROTH: How did you teach yourself how to draw? Did you use books?

KIRBY: I used any method I could, really.

GROTH: Did you go outside and sketch from life? I’m trying to find out how you actually learned to draw, how you learned anatomy.

KIRBY: My anatomy was self-taught. I feel everybody has that ability. I drew instinctively. Mine was an instinctive style.

GROTH: Did you ever in your life think of taking any formal art training?

KIRBY: No. I tell young people that it’s advantageous to study art…

GROTH: Did you learn anatomy, where muscles are, and how they connect, and so on?

KIRBY: I searched it out, and I made my own muscles and I made my figures as powerful as Icould.

GROTH: How did you learn perspective?

KIRBY: You learn perspective… well, if you’re brought up in the city, if it doesn’t look right you’ll know it. But, if you grow up in a city and see the city, you’ll get a city as it really is with all the detail that you remember. If you’re drawing a Western town, you can duplicate that Western town from instinct alone. Some artists may take it from other illustrations or duplicate what you’ve drawn, but it will never have that gut reality that’s instinctive in the artist.

GROTH: What artists did you admire in your teen years?

KIRBY: I admired them all. I admired anybody who could make a buck with his drawing. [Laughter.]

GROTH: You must have had an eye for quality work.

KIRBY: I like quality work. Comics like Prince Valiant. I loved Milton Caniff and his work. Everybody did. If a man was good he was universally liked.

GROTH: Were you a very independent personality as a teenager?

KIRBY: Yes, I was.

GROTH: Where do you think you got that? Was that from your father?

KIRBY: No, just growing up on the Lower East Side.

GROTH: Did you see a lot of movies when you were a kid?

KIRBY: Yes. I was a movie person. I think it was one of the reasons I drew comics. They galvanized me. When Superman came out it galvanized the entire industry. It’s just part of the American scene. Superman is going to live forever. They’ll be reading Superman in the next century when you and I are gone. I felt in that respect I was doing the same thing. I wanted to be known. I wasn’t going to sell a comic that was going to die quickly.

GROTH: I understand you got a job with a small newspaper syndicate when you were 18.

KIRBY: Newspaper Features.

GROTH: What were you doing for them?

KIRBY: I was doing editorials. Like I said I did “Your Health Comes First”. I did another daily comic. On each comic strip I put a different name: I was Jack Curtis, Jack Cortez… I didn’t want to be in any particular environment, I wanted to be an all-around American. I kept Kirby. My mother gave me hell. My father gave me hell. My family disowned me.

GROTH: You actually changed your name to Kirby?

KIRBY: When I began doing the strips.

GROTH: Why did you change your name exactly?

KIRBY: I wanted to be an American. My name is Kurtzberg.

GROTH: Why didn’t you think Kurtzberg was an acceptable American name?

KIRBY: I felt if you wanted to have a great name it would be Farnesworth, right? Or Stillweather. I felt Jack Kirby was close to my real name.

GROTH: You’re Jewish. Was there anti-Semitism back then?

KIRBY: Yes. A lot of it. They were confrontational days when people of different backgrounds had to live together. And it hasn’t changed. There’s anti-Semitism today.

GROTH: Were you an Orthodox Jew?

KIRBY: My father was Conservative. We were never Orthodox, but we were Conservative. I went to Hebrew school. It was above a livery stable, the Hebrew school.

Until the day I die I’ll never forget that wonderful table we used to sit at. Hebrew school was a rough place. An airplane flew over one day and I ran over to the window and everyone was pushing and shoving each other, and some guy really shoved me out of the way — I knocked him clean out.

GROTH: How old were you?

KIRBY: I was about 12. Because I wasn’t bar mitzvahed yet. They had to pick him up. But, I was so eager. That was such an innovation to hear the sound of the motor of an airplane flying overhead. I just had to get there in front. I was attracted by everything that seemed to be new and advanced. I saw the Time Machine.

GROTH: Did you see Chaplin’s films?

KIRBY: Yes. I saw the Chaplin comedies, Buster Keaton. I saw the Marx brothers on a stage when they weren’t even in the movies.

GROTH: Was this on vaudeville?

KIRBY: This would be vaudeville. I’d go to the Academy of Music on 14th Street in New York. It might still be there for all I know. The Marx brothers came on stage and they did their act. I saw them in the movies. I loved the Marx brothers. I wanted to go to California and my mother said, “No, you can’t go to California.” Of course standards were different in those days — the mother was unassailable.

(continued)

PRE-WAR CAREER​

GROTH: You worked at this newspaper syndicate when you were 18; after that you worked as an assistant to Max Fleischer.

KIRBY: Yes. I was in the Fleischer studio.

GROTH: How did that come about?

KIRBY: I applied for it, and I was never really turned down for anything. I just did things as well as I could, and I was accepted. Then I went to work with the Fleischer brothers, and they did animation. It was an assembly line. In order to draw a figure taking a full step I would draw six pictures and then pass it along to some other fellow. Then he would make the other step. This long table — lots of people working at that table…It was a factory in a sense, like my father’s factory. They were manufacturing pictures.

GROTH: You didn’t like that?

KIRBY: I didn’t like that. I wanted to do my own.

GROTH: How long did you work at the Fleischer studios?

KIRBY: Not very long. I’m an individualist. I always felt that I wanted to do what I wanted to do.

GROTH: Which animated features did you work on?

KIRBY: I worked on Betty Boop and Popeye.

GROTH: You were an in-betweener. Can you tell me what an in-betweener did?

KIRBY: An in-betweener penciled in the action in between a full step. In other words the man before you would begin knowing the full step. It might take three or four pictures. The in-betweener would draw the in between steps. He would draw the segment of taking that step. Animation was done in this type of way. The right way. It still is the right way in many places. I work for animation houses [now] but in an individual sense. I would conceive a story, I would conceive characters, everybody else did the animation.

GROTH: You must have visited your father’s factory?

KIRBY: Never. But I did see other factories.

GROTH: What factory did your father work in?

KIRBY: It was a garment factory.

GROTH: It’s funny, my father is roughly your age and he grew up in New York, too.

KIRBY: I would admire your father because like myself he was the right guy for the right time.

GROTH: You both grew up in New York at the same time.

KIRBY: Yes, and we might have been drafted together. That was a horrible thing to be drafted because you began to meet people that you didn’t like. You found yourself in trucks with people from different parts of the country. Now remember, this was a time of very little communication. There were very few people who owned automobiles so nobody traveled back and forth across the country unless it was by railroad. Planes wouldn’t do it.

GROTH: You were drafted?

KIRBY: I was drafted.

GROTH: What year would that have been?

ROZ KIRBY: We were married in ’42.

KIRBY: Yeah, I was drafted in ’42.

ROZ KIRBY: I was married to you…

KIRBY: Yeah, I know you were married to me!

ROZ KIRBY: We were married in ’42, and you were drafted next year, ’43.

KIRBY: Middle of ’43. Yeah, because I took basic training down in Georgia at that time. After taking basic training I found myself on the bus going to Boston to a POE—port of embarkation. Who’s sitting next to me in the bus but Mort Weisinger of DC.

GROTH: Did you know him at the time?

KIRBY: I knew Mort very well. I knew everybody at DC.

GROTH: Now you were drafted when you were 26. Can you describe your comic book career prior to your being drafted?

KIRBY: I was doing very well. I was doing Captain America.

GROTH: You went from the Fleischer studio to where?

KIRBY: I went from Lincoln to Fleischer, from Fleischer I had to get out in a hurry because I couldn’t take that kind of thing. I began to see the first comic books appear. I can remember them hanging from the newsstands.

GROTH: I think you worked for Victor Fox. Would that have been the next place you worked?

KIRBY: Victor Fox was another syndicated house.

GROTH: What did you do for Victor Fox?

KIRBY: I did comic strips.

GROTH: You assisted on something called “Blue Beetle” I believe.

KIRBY: Yes, I did the “Blue Beetle” and a thing called “Socko the Seadog”. I had already met Joe Simon.

GROTH: And “Abdul Jones”.

KIRBY: Yes. I did a variety of strips for small syndicates.

GROTH: Can you explain how you got these jobs?

KIRBY: I just went up and applied for them and got them.

GROTH: Just knocked on doors?

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: Did you work in their studio?

KIRBY: Yes. It would be like a loft really. They were large lofts, plenty of space.

GROTH: How many people would be working in one of these places? Would it be a whole row of artists?

KIRBY: Yes. Maybe five or six people, sometimes more. It depended on how big a company it was and who the artists were. They were beginning to discover comics just

like we were except they were exploring the business end of comics. Now the business end of comics is an entirely different type of thing.

GROTH: Was this a nine to five job?

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: Were you paid per piece or per hour?

KIRBY: I was paid per week. A flat weekly rate.

GROTH: And you were expected to turn out an adequate number of pages?

KIRBY: Yes, they wanted a certain amount of pages so they could pass them to the next fellow.

GROTH: Did you pencil from a full a script?

KIRBY: I’d try to be innovative. I’d give them my version of it. They’d pass my version along to be completed. Somehow it always worked.

GROTH: Tell me if I’m wrong — the studio created these comics and then sold them as a package to publishers who requested them from the studio.

KIRBY: Yes. Sometime they’d have their own magazines like Jumbo, they’d publish them in association with others.

GROTH: When you were working for studios would you create things out of whole cloth or were you given specific assignments?

KIRBY: We created things out of whole cloth. I was creating things all the time. Joe [Simon] spent a lot of time with the Goodmans who owned…

GROTH: Actually, I meant when you were working in a studio.

KIRBY: Oh, before Joe I was improvising my own material all the time.

The Dreamer featured one of Will Eisner’s takes on Kirby ©1986 Will Eisner​

GROTH: The studios were owned by Victor Fox and Eisner and Iger — were these the people…

KIRBY: These were the business people.

GROTH: And these were the people you dealt with directly?

KIRBY: Yes. I dealt directly with them. They told me what they wanted done, gave me space in which to work.

GROTH: What was your attitude to comics like when you were working in the studios?

KIRBY: I felt the comics grew because they became the common man’s literature, the common man’s art, the common man’s publishing.

GROTH: What was working in a studio like?

KIRBY: Well, the Eisner-Iger studio — they were very energetic people, they were fine business people, making phone calls all over the place to people I’d never heard of. They were running a business. They wanted things done a certain way. Victor Fox was a character. He’d look up at the ceiling with a big cigar, this little fellow, very broad, going back and forth with his hands behind his back saying, “I’m the king of the comics! I’m the king of the comics!” and we would watch him, and of course we would smile because he was a genuine type. You’d see his type in a movie, and you’d recognize him.

GROTH: How old a man was he at that time?

KIRBY: At that time he would have been in his 40s.

GROTH: Do you know what he did before that, where he came from?

KIRBY: No, I don’t.

GROTH: He was supposed to be something of a crook. Did you ever have any bad experiences with Fox?

KIRBY: No. I don’t think Fox sharked any of the people who worked with me. We were small fish to Fox. He was a man with big ambitions. I think he moved to Canada, never heard from again. Maybe he wanted to become king of Canada and never made it.

GROTH: What was he like to work under as a boss?

KIRBY: He was very good to work for as a boss. Fox never bothered you. Fox liked production. We turned out the amount of pages he wanted, and he’d publish them. Like most of the fellows we got along fine. I couldn’t picture myself liking a guy like Fox, but I did. I genuinely liked Victor Fox.

GROTH: Did you ever see Fox socially?

KIRBY: No, I never saw Fox socially. You couldn’t, there was too big a gap. Fox would never mingle with a guy like me. Like I said. Fox was ambitious.

GROTH: What was working for Eisner and Iger like?

KIRBY: Eisner and Iger were energetic, efficient, and they weren’t out to be friendly, they were out to produce. Eventually, we all became personal friends. It was time for thorough professionals. Eisner and Iger wanted to expand like everybody else. They were in business — I was part of that business and I had to produce for them. So I did my best to produce.

GROTH: Did you deal directly with Iger or Eisner or both?

KIRBY: I dealt more with Eisner.

GROTH: How did you hook up with Joe Simon?

KIRBY: Going up to these offices we’d meet up, a lot of us also going to do business with these people. I had never met a guy like Joe. I had never met a guy from Syracuse, New York. I’d never met a guy who wasn’t a New Yorker. Joe looked like a politician. I said, “Gee, isn’t that wonderful?” Joe was an impressive guy. He still is. He got square deals for us, where in the past to get a square deal was an unknown quantity. Comics as a business became a real thing for all of us. I never knew anything about living with lawyers, but if you don’t live with a lawyer, you’re going to be on the bottom of the pile.

GROTH: Back then when you were working for the shops, and then you hooked up with Joe Simon did you and he create —

KIRBY: Yes we created jointly.

GROTH: Now. When you did this, you apparently weren’t aware of the financial ramifications — that people were going to make a lot of money on these things.

KIRBY: Oh, we were aware of it, but I didn’t know how to do business. I didn’t know where to begin to do business. I was a kid from the Lower East Side who’d never seen a lawyer, who’d never done business. I was from a family that like millions of others where doing business was concerned I was completely naive.

GROTH: Had you ever thought of going to the publishers and saying, we think this work is worth more than you’re paying us to produce it?

KIRBY: We didn’t know the value of it because Joe got the sales figures. I began to learn about sales figures. Comics were new and spreading very fast. I was just getting paid a page rate.

GROTH: Were you aware that the companies were making a lot of money on these, and you were just getting a page rate, just a fixed rate?

KIRBY: Yes. I accepted that fact because I was bringing in more money. Don’t get me wrong — the more money the books made, the more money I received, and I was feeling great. My purpose was what my father’s purpose was — to make a living and to have a family. I was going to do the right thing. My dream to me was to have money to support it and to live in the kind of house I liked.

GROTH: Did it dawn on you that the publishers you were working for were making a whole lot more money than you were off your work?

KIRBY: I didn’t care. I couldn’t conceive what they were doing in those offices. I couldn’t conceive of working with accountants. I couldn’t conceive of working with sales people. I couldn’t conceive of distribution. I couldn’t conceive of it because I couldn’t envision it. I’ve never run a business, I’ve never run a big business, and comics were growing fast. Superman had that kind of a business. They had every kind of accoutrement you could use for a big business.

GROTH: Did you resent the publishers?

KIRBY: No, I didn’t resent them. In fact, I got along well with them. When I wanted a little more money, they gave me a little more money.

ROZ KIRBY: They threw you bones.

KIRBY: Yeah, they threw me bones, and the publishers liked me.

GROTH: I bet.

KIRBY: I got along well with them.

 

[KravenMorehead™]

GROTH: When you and Joe Simon worked together in your studio was it just the two of you or did you employ other people?

KIRBY: We had a letterer.

GROTH: Would the companies give your studio scripts, which you would then illustrate?

KIRBY: I never took their scripts. DC would send me scripts, I’d throw them out the window.

GROTH: Why was that?

KIRBY: I don’t like anything that’s contrived. I conceive, they contrive. OK?

GROTH: [Laughter.] That’s good.

KIRBY: That’s why my book sold. Captain America was real. When Captain America got into a fight with a dozen guys he could lick those guys, and anybody who read the book can see how he did it.

GROTH: You only had a letterer working with you in the studio?

KIRBY: Yes, I had a letterer.

GROTH: Why didn’t you hire five more artists and crank up production?

KIRBY: I didn’t think that way. We had artists who inked for us and who lettered for us, but I worked on the stories myself.

GROTH: The business part of Simon and Kirby had been Simon?

KIRBY: Yes, Joe was the business side.

GROTH: Were you a legal partnership?

KIRBY: Yes, we were a legitimate partnership.

GROTH: Speaking about the period before World War II when you were working in comics, did you pal around with other artists? What was the social environment like?

KIRBY: We palled around. I knew Mort Meskin very well. All the artists knew each other. I was social with Joe [Simon] of course. We were very close.

GROTH: Were you all obsessed with comics?

KIRBY: Yes, we were obsessed with comics. I remember when I met Roz we went out with Joe and his girlfriend. We were taking them to Times Square and, the crazy thing about it was that there was trouble in the air, and yet the young people didn’t give a damn. If you saw Brighton Beach Memoirs you may have seen the houses. They were two story houses. I saw Roz, and I scared away about five guys.

GROTH: Was that around 1940 when you met?

ROZ KIRBY: When I met Jack, he asked me if I wanted to go to his room and see his etchings, and I did, but imagine my surprise when he really did show me etchings! [Laughter.]

KIRBY: Let’s face it, I was rather naive.

GROTH: In romance and business. [Laughter.]

“X-Men” in X-Men #1 (September 1961) by Lee & Kirby, inked by Paul Reinman ©1961 Marvel Comics, Inc.​

KIRBY: No, I wasn’t naive in romance. [Laughter.] My character never changed. She had about five boyfriends, and one was a piano player, and I stood behind him and said, “It would be terrible if the piano lid closed on your fingers. That would be painful wouldn’t it?” I said, “You belong in Hollywood out West, you play too well.” And he took the hint.

GROTH: You were in Brooklyn at this time?

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: When did you move from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn?

KIRBY: I was beginning to make money, Brooklyn was great. Brighton Beach was great.

GROTH: Was the Simon and Kirby studio in Manhattan?

KIRBY: Yes, it was in Tudor City.

GROTH: Up to this point what was your social life like?

KIRBY: We’d go to theaters. We’d see movies. We saw Sammy Kay.

GROTH: Were you a real fan of big band music?

KIRBY: No, not really. But I felt that was the thing to do. I took her horseback riding — a thing I’d never done in my life. I wanted to prove to her that I had a lot of class. I was very sincere. I wanted Rosaline, and I was going to do anything to make her my permanent babe. I brought riding boots and went horseback riding, and I almost fell off a horse.

ROZ KIRBY: He got these horses that were slow…

KIRBY: We got some very bad horses. [Laughter.] I never went riding again. I was terrible at it.

GROTH: Did you go dancing?

KIRBY: Yeah, we danced pretty well. We were average.

ROZ KIRBY: Then he was drafted.

GROTH: Had you been out of the New York area before the war?

KIRBY: I was down in Georgia for basic training. I met real Southerners. I met Texans.

GROTH: That must have been exciting.

KIRBY: It was exciting for me.

Panel from “Face in the Storm” from Airboy Comics Vol. 4 #10 (November 1947) ©Pure Imagination​

GROTH: You were drafted in ’43—

KIRBY: I came home in ’44. I was drafted in the late autumn of ’43. I trained in Georgia and there was one pig walking in the middle of the road.

GROTH: You were in the Army. right?

KIRBY: I was in the combat infantry. I went to Liverpool first. Then they shipped us to Southampton, which is the port of embarkation for Normandy. I got to Normandy 10 days after the invasion. All the guys on that landing were still laying there.

GROTH: Did you arrive on one of those landing crafts?

KIRBY: Yes. I arrived on an LST. When I got there, they were laying in heaps.

GROTH: What beach did you land on?

KIRBY: Omaha.

GROTH: Did you think you’d be drafted?

KIRBY: I figured I would, but I didn’t know when. I was a married man. That’s why I didn’t get drafted earlier. The crazy part about it was I got drafted at 480 Lexington Ave — that’s where DC was.

GROTH: [Laughter.] I guess you could say that you were drafted twice. How did you take Army life?

KIRBY: I didn’t like Army life. I didn’t like taking orders. I didn’t like discipline. I didn’t like being yelled at. You’d get 10 years for punching a sergeant so I couldn’t punch a sergeant.

GROTH: But you thought about it.

KIRBY: No, I kept my temper. By the time I saw the Germans, I can tell ya’, boy, I was fairly happy. I let it all loose.

GROTH: You came back to the U.S. before the war ended?

KIRBY: I came home from the hospital. I had trench foot— I slept out in the snow for six months and if you sleep out in the snow that long… It was cold mud, cold snow, cold wind… It was cold. So my legs became like elephant legs and there were guys in the ambulance whose legs turned black. My legs were a deep purple. The guys in the ambulance whose legs turned black, they fell off. I had purple legs? I wondered how they were going to cure purple legs! I was sore as hell. I was miserable, I was miserable. I was the most dangerous guy alive I think. And Murray Boltinoff walks into my hospital room with Mort Weisinger — they were editors from DC. I was in Paris at that time. My legs were a real nice blue. I said, “What are you guys doing here?” They said, “Come on outside Jackie, you’ll see Paris” — they didn’t know what was wrong with me. They were having a great time in Paris. “You ought to see the broads here, they’re great!” And I looked at these guys and called them every name in the book. They were so scared they got out of my room. I’m talking back to editors — and I’m an artist!

GROTH: Was this in England or France?

KIRBY: This was in England. We were all headed home. I got to a tug, a hospital tug, that rocked back and forth across the entire ocean. I was so sea sick…it took us nine days— the Queen Mary took them in two or three. They brought me the best meals I ever saw. Those hospital people treated us wonderfully. They brought me meals I hadn’t seen for it seemed like years and I couldn’t eat them. There was another frustration.

GROTH: You just showed me a pencil story you drew in the early ’80s that was the only strictly autobiographical story I have ever known you to do. Why did you draw that and why had you never done an autobiographical story before?

KIRBY: This is an experiment for me to test my storytelling abilities. At that time I told what I knew. To be frank with you, I’ve never told a lie to anybody. And what I’ve drawn was always the truth. It might be a very, very fantastic situation. This might be a repeat of what I might have told you before, but I never lie. The situation, even as far out as I can make it, will always have that…

GROTH: Core of truth?

KIRBY: Yes. It will have the sound of truth or the sight of truth. And the characters will always act according to what they are and what they would really do in real life.

ROZ KIRBY: He wants to know why you never did a story about yourself until 1984.

KIRBY: I don’t think anybody would have believed it. So many things have happened to me that they’d say it all couldn’t have happened to one person. Who would think that I would be walking through French towns or meeting with the SS or French farmers? Who ever thought that I’d be going up to the Bronx? Who ever thought that I’d be going to Brooklyn — I went to Brooklyn and met Roz. That’s where I met my wife. Let me say this: most of the guys who lived on the East Side stayed there. It became part of them. But for some reason that I can’t understand, I hated the East Side, I hated being poor.

I hated to fight all the time just to enjoy my day. Fighting wasn’t the kind of thing that I enjoyed, but I grew to enjoy it because I did it so long. In the Army when we had judo classes, out of the class of 27 just me and another guy graduated. Yes, I grew to enjoy it because I knew I could do it well. I tried to do everything well.

GROTH: One of the things that I was so impressed with in that story was your ability to convey the commonplace. The streets were grubby — you could almost feel the dirt and smell the garbage — more so in that story than in your super-hero work. Did you feel that you could portray a more realistic city in that autobiographical story?

KIRBY: Yes, I could. I would draw that city exactly as it was. I remember it exactly as it was, brick by brick: the garbage in the street and the things floating down to the sewer; the people sitting around a lamp post late at night conversing in their own languages. There would be grandmothers, there would be mothers with ‘kerchiefs on them and shawls and cheap dresses. There might be a few old men, grandfatherly types. Your father was always playing cards somewhere in some building with a group of men his age. But he would never join your mother sitting around with the neighbors. Every father was his own man. He did what he wanted. If your mother went shopping, your father never went with her. He was away working. I think fathers got used to the way of life where they associated with other men who worked in the factories and when they came home that’s the kind of surrounding they felt familiar with.

GROTH: Now when you were drawing superheroes like Captain America and The Fantastic Four, did you feel that you couldn’t put that kind of living detail in the type of stories you were telling? Could you not concentrate on character as you did in that autobiographical story?

KIRBY: There was no time to do it. I had to work fast. I would draw three pages a day, maybe more. I would have to vary the panels, balance the page. I took care of everything on that page — the expressions of the characters, the motivation of the characters — it all ran through my mind. I wrote my own stories. Nobody ever wrote a story for me. I told in every story what was really inside my gut, and it came out that way. My stories began to get noticed because the average reader could associate with them.

GROTH: How did you feel about other people inking your work? Would you have preferred to ink yourself, or did you not care after it was penciled?

KIRBY: No, I didn’t care. The technical side of it never bothered me. In fact, some of the inkers had a variety of styles, and it kind of pleased me to see my work done in various ink styles. The people who worked in comics were terrific guys. I had a good association with them, and I enjoyed comics for that very reason.

GROTH: Let me take up where I left off, around 1945 when you got back from the war. I believe you renewed your partnership with Joe Simon.

KIRBY: I renewed my partnership with Joe Simon, but Joe didn’t want to do comics any more. That period is hazy to me.

GROTH: Well, around 1945 I think you did Boys Ranch. Did you do the romance books with Joe Simon?

KIRBY: Yes. We created the romance field.

GROTH: Can you tell me how you came about creating the boy’s genre, Boy Commandos, Boys Ranch?

KIRBY: Essentially, they were inside me. The gang business never leaves you. It was either a gang or a club. In drawing people by the bunches I would get a variety of people. A lot of the other cartoonists were concentrating on one particular person and making him acceptable to the public whereas I would diversify and do groups.

GROTH: Did someone ask you to do that?

KIRBY: No, nobody ever asked me to do anything. Nobody knew what to do. When comics were brand new, nobody knew what kind of comics to make. So you were mostly on yourown.

GROTH: I think you did Boys Ranch — I forget the publisher you did that for — but did you conceptualize it and then offer it to a publisher?

ROZ KIRBY: Joe did that.

KIRBY: Yeah. Her memory is sometimes better than mine.

GROTH: Did you write Boys Ranch as well?

KIRBY: Yes. I wrote Boys Ranch. I always wrote my strips.

GROTH: How did you collaborate with Joe Simon? What did you do and what did he do?

©1950 Joe Simon & Jack Kirby​

KIRBY: Joe did a lot of the business. Had I stayed at Joe’s side all the time while Joe operated we’d have never gotten any pages done. We got an office in Tudor City — I worked in the office with a letterer, Howard Ferguson. When Howard passed away there was another letterer to replace him. Joe did a lot of inking, and he worked when he could, but business had to be done with the publisher. Somebody had to be a bridge to the publisher. Joe is an impressive guy, and he felt that this was his function, and that’s how he became good friends with Artie and Martin Goodman. We collaborated well. Joe and I got along very well. It was very, very strange for people so different physically to collaborate so closely. Joe is 6’ 1”, a big guy and quite different than I am. But Joe’s deal was really commercial art. That’s the field he came from. Joe was a college man. He’s got a fine mind. Of course, after we came back after the war Joe gravitated to commercial art. He never went back to comics.

GROTH: Can you explain how you developed the romance genre?

KIRBY: The romance genre was all around us. There was love story pulps, and there was love story sections in the newspapers. There was love stories in the movies. Wherever you went there was love stories! That’s how we got our new material, and it suddenly struck me that that’s what we haven’t done. We haven’t done any romance stories! There it was right in front of our eyes hanging from the newsstand. A love story! A romance story! So Joe and I sat down one night and came up with the title. Young Romance, and Young Romance sold out.

GROTH: Would Joe have gone to a publisher and say, We want to do a romance comic, will you pay us for it? Or would you actually do the comic and then show it to a publisher?

KIRBY: We did it both ways. We did it as it was feasible. We did it as the situation arose. We did it all the ways you mentioned. We’d go up together, sometimes just one of us. Sometimes in order to convince the publisher, I’d draw up the presentation page. I’d draw up three or four pages, and then the publisher would get the idea of the kind of thing we were trying to sell. Then we’d either go up together or Joe would say, “Finish up that page, I’ll go up and talk to them and you meet me there.” I’d meet him there with this finished page and we’d show them what we were trying to accomplish.

GROTH: At this point you were still being paid by the page.

KIRBY: Yeah, we had a page rate. Each comics house had a different page rate. There weren’t many. Marvel wasn’t even in existence — there was Timely, Atlas…

GROTH: National.

KIRBY: National was there. Jack Liebowitz was still the head of the organization. We talked to him. I knew Jack Liebowitz well, but as a young boy. Jack Liebowitz was a fine old man, and he treated me very, very well. If you were to talk to a young fellow you’d try to be fatherly and friendly and Jack was like that. I have very fond memories of talking to Mr. Liebowitz, as I called him. I’d show him the work that we’re doing and the

kind of thing that we’d been doing. Sometimes we’d go up together and sometimes we’d go up there singly. It was a matter of getting around the field. The field was static in a way at that time. There were very few other mags, maybe one or two. But the field was growing all the time.

GROTH: As you approached the ’50s I believe comics started concentrating on horror.

KIRBY: Yes, we did horror, we did Westerns.

GROTH: Did you ever do horror? I know you did romance…

KIRBY: I did a couple of monster stories.

GROTH: Wasn’t that in the late ’50s? In the late ’40s, I don’t think you ever did horror. You did Westerns and romance…

KIRBY: Yes. We did Westerns and romance and gangster stories.

GROTH: Do you remember why you didn’t get into horror? Was it that you didn’t have an affinity for horror?

KIRBY: No, I didn’t have an affinity for horror. But I knew that commercially it was viable. That’s why we both finally did it.

GROTH: You did monsters which isn’t really quite the same.

KIRBY: No, we didn’t do horror in the sense of haunted houses or people with masks the way you might see them today; something lurking in an anteroom. Our stories were more like peasants sitting around a fire. We had the “Strange World of Your Dreams”. Ours didn’t run to bloody horror. Ours ran to weirdness. We began to interpret dreams. Remember, Joe and I were wholesome characters. We weren’t guys that were bent on the weird and the bizarre. We were the kind of guys who wouldn’t offend our mother, who wouldn’t offend anyone in your family, and certainly not the reader. So we knew that we had to depart from adventure and that there were other ways to go and we came up with the “Strange World of Your Dreams”.

GROTH: [Holding comic]: Strange World of Your Dreams — this is published by Prize.

KIRBY: That was our own company.

GROTH: Can you explain how you started your own company — was it mostly Joe Simon? Do you know how early it started? These are as early as ’52.

KIRBY: I think it started with the romance stuff. It was mostly Joe because he was more knowledgeable about lawyers and copyrights and things like that.

GROTH: Where did you get the capital? Did you actually publish them?

KIRBY: Yes, we actually published them. The whole trouble was we were undercapitalized. We published for a little while, but we didn’t get many issues out.

GROTH: Did Joe handle all the business aspects such as distribution?

KIRBY: We both did, and that’s how I began to learn about it. But Joe would handle it a lot more adeptly than I did.

GROTH: Was this Joe’s idea to start the company?

KIRBY: Both of us decided if the other publishers could make money at it, why were we feeding them? And he was right. We had good stuff, and we were innovative, and why not do it for ourselves as well as for the publishers.

GROTH: How long did the company last?

KIRBY: Not too long. A couple of issues.

GROTH: I think you published five titles.

KIRBY: Something like that.

GROTH: Why do you think the company failed?

KIRBY: We were undercapitalized, and we just couldn’t continue. We ran into a lot of bad luck. Wertham gave all comics bad press so it cut your audience down. People were afraid to be seen with a comic less they be labeled as less intellectual than the next fellow who was reading deep books.

“The Girl in the Grave” is from The Strange World of Your Dreams #1 (August 1952). It’s by Simon, Kirby & Mort Meskin ©Pure Imagination​

GROTH: In this comic Strange World of Your Dreams there’s a story that says “For dramatization analysis by Richard Temple.” Was there really a Richard Temple?

KIRBY: No, there was no Richard Temple. It was a pen name. We had to manufacture an entire company.

GROTH: You apparently hired some people like Mort Meskin, who I see is in here. Did you do the hiring?

KIRBY: We both did. We both did everything. I was in the office I think more than Joe. I did a lot of hiring and a lot of business with the other artists. Mort Meskin was a fine artist, and he helped the circulation of the magazine.

GROTH: Did you enjoy doing that? Because previously you had just been an artist and now you were…

KIRBY: Yes, I did. Life began to broaden a bit. I was growing, and I was learning how to do business.

GROTH: Do you happen to remember why you did a book called The Strange World of Your Dreams?

KIRBY: First of all nobody had that title. You got to remember that in the conventional world that we lived in, raw horror would never have been accepted. We might not have gotten on the newsstands. The newsstand was still selling magazines being put out by Dell, which was a fine company, but they were all conventional. We had to be within that circle just for prestige’s sake. They were all prestigious companies. So to gain that same prestige we printed stories within that same framework. Had we done straight horror at that time it would have been an adolescent move. Let me put it that way.

GROTH: I’m looking at a book called Justice Traps the Guilty, 1945, and it’s published by something called American Boys Comics, out of Buffalo, New York.

ROZ KIRBY: That was part of Joe’s corporation.

GROTH: But this was as early as 1945. Did you and Joe immediately start your publishing company when you got back from the war?

KIRBY: I believe so.

GROTH: Did you have an office at 1790 Broadway?

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: Well, if that’s true it sounds like the company lasted for a while because Your Dreams was published in ’52 at the same address of 1790 Broadway. That’s seven years.

KIRBY: To me it might have seem like a very short time right now. That period to me is very nebulous. You got to remember I’m 71 now, and you’re talking about a young fellow that’s 23. That goes way back.

GROTH: It seems to me that you probably would have published more than five titles. But you don’t remember specifically how you went under?

KIRBY: Things just went bad. They just went bad. You come to a point where you say, we can’t lose any more. Let’s go back to making some money.

GROTH: Did you also publish Young Romance?

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: I didn’t know you published it yourself.

KIRBY: Yes, we did.

GROTH: So you published romance, this weird un-categorizable genre of dreams, and you also published a crime comic.

KIRBY: Gangsters were a big thing then.

GROTH: Did you write a lot of these?

KIRBY: I wrote most of them.

GROTH: Now, Jack, did you write the story, “I Was a Come-On Girl for Broken Bones, Inc.”?

KIRBY: Yes, I did. [Laughter.]

GROTH: Since you worked for yourself you didn’t have to give the art to a publisher. Do you have any idea what happened to all the original art?

KIRBY: God, I don’t know.

ROZ KIRBY: We had a lot of the romance pages and Joe had some romance. And I gave pages back to someone to return back to the authors.

GROTH: I understand you actually originated a book called My Date.

KIRBY: Yes. My Date was the open door to the romance books. It was then that it hit us. After we published My Date it suddenly occurred to me that we were missing the big thing. Romance was making all the money. My Date was more of a teenage book — young people dating girls, dropping girls, gaining girls.

GROTH: You did that for Hillman.

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: Who was Hillman?

KIRBY: Hillman was another publishing outfit, and if I remember correctly we did quite a few things for them.

ROZ KIRBY: Something about an alligator?

KIRBY: Something the alligator, about a real alligator. It was a funny alligator. I forget what the heck his name was. It was a satirical cartoon about Charlie Chaplin as an alligator.

GROTH: You did that for Hillman?

KIRBY: I think that was for Hillman.

GROTH: What was Crestwood Publishing?

ROZ KIRBY: Crestwood was a publishing house that Joe and I worked for. Remember comics were beginning to make a lot of money, and there were new publishing houses being born, and a lot of them faded away like Victor Fox.

GROTH: Were there better or worse companies to work for or were they all pretty much the same?

KIRBY: The idea was to make as much money as you could, and we tried to work for the companies that were paying the most. Of course, Joe and I felt that the way to make the most money was to put out your own books, and we tried that but we didn’t have the capital to sustain them, although we had very good titles and very good stories, but you still had to pay the piper — distributors and what not.

GROTH: I understand you started your own company called Mainline Comics in 1954?

KIRBY: Yes, we did.

GROTH: But you had already started another company prior to that — was that American Boys’ Comics? [Looking at comic.]

KIRBY: Yeah, I did that with Joe.

GROTH: This says “Simon and Kirby, editors and artists’’ and the address is 1790 Broadway. But the cover says Prize Publications —

ROZ KIRBY: A lot of them used different names.

KIRBY: Yeah, that was another company. Most of them faded. They also had tax problems, things like that. They would break their companies in to four or five segments.

GROTH: How did the public backlash against comics in the early ’50s affect you?

KIRBY: It didn’t affect me at all. I was a poor boy making money.

GROTH: What were your feelings about that at the time?

KIRBY: I ignored them. I knew the stuff I was doing was done well and that I could write as well as any other guy. And I did. I knew that Joe was a good businessman.

I was fairly good in business. I was growing up with Joe. Remember Joe was older and Joe knew a lot more tricks than I did. So I began to learn the tricks of the business.

GROTH: Were you worried that the comic book industry might collapse because of all this? Was that a concern?

KIRBY: Yes, it was a concern. In fact, it was a concern to all the publishers. Remember that comic books didn’t enjoy the same prestige as, say, Collier’s magazine or the Saturday Evening Post. In the ’50s if you went to a newsstand and bought a Saturday Evening Post they’d say, “There goes a good American.” If you bought a comic book — “That guy, he shoots pool.” Of course, Dr. Wertham didn’t help any. We got very bad press. Comic books weren’t considered, well, it’s like trash TV is today. Trash TV will probably reach a point where it’s very acceptable.

ROZ KIRBY: That’s when you went over to Classic Comics.

KIRBY: Yeah. Joe and I split up. I did Classic Comics, and they didn’t like the way I folded Cleopatra’s skin. It was run by perfectionists, and I was not the guy to work for perfectionists, so I left soon after. I couldn’t be that fussy or that perfect with my figures or my costumes. I felt that the story was very, very important, and all of it had to mesh to make any sales.

 

[KravenMorehead™]

GROTH: How did you feel about the Senate Subcommittee Hearings? Did you think that was a witch-hunt, or did you think there was any validity to the public’s concern?

KIRBY: I didn’t feel one way or another about it. I was only hoping that it would come out well enough to continue comics, that it wouldn’t damage comics in anyway, so I could continue working. I was a young man. I was still growing out of the East Side. The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it.

GROTH: Were you very political?

KIRBY: I wasn’t then. I was very concerned with comics. I’m political now. I knew this much — that everybody voted Democrat down my way. If you were poor, you voted Democrat and if you were rich you voted Republican.

GROTH: How did you feel about communism then?

KIRBY: Oh, communism! That was a burning issue. It was an outrageous issue. To be termed a communist would damage your whole family, damage your whole world — your friends wouldn’t talk to you. I’m talking about other people — because I wouldn’t go near the stuff. Sure, I was against the reds. I became a witch hunter. My enemies were the commies — I called them commies. In fact, Granny Goodness was a commie, Doubleheader was a commie.

From Kirby’s sketchbook, reproduced in Jack Kirby’s Heroes and Villains Granny Goodness ©DC Comics​

GROTH: What was it about communism that you didn’t like?

KIRBY: Well, it was a radical concept to me. Like any other American, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to study all its facets. All I knew about it was it was foreign to democracy. And here I was, I had been fighting for democracy and always aware of two political parties and brought up in that kind of atmosphere. Anything radical was dangerous to me, as it was to the average American. Nobody knew where a thing like that would lead and we were always afraid of chaos. So communism became the doorway to chaos, and the doorway to chaos was the doorway to evil. Your family might be hurt. Your friends might be hurt. You didn’t want to see a thing like that.

GROTH: How did you feel about McCarthy?

KIRBY: I didn’t like McCarthy. I didn’t like his methods. I liked this other fellow — he was a gray-haired man from Maine I believe. He sat opposite McCarthy and challenged him. Walsh was his name.

GROTH: Was he the one who asked McCarthy if he had no shame?

KIRBY: Yes. He sounded more logical to me, more temperate. You didn’t feel like the stormtroopers were going to knock on your door the next day when you listened to this guy. When you listened to McCarthy, you knew they were going to drag you away, or your parents. McCarthy sounded like a threat, and if you didn’t fit certain specifications as an American —he laid down the specifications, he laid down the rules. That’s what put the fear into everybody, because all of us are afraid that we’re not going to fit certain rules. McCarthy put the fear of the devil into the entire public. When Walsh began to talk, he began to make sense. He talked not exactly like a statesman but a rational human being. McCarthy was a hunter. McCarthy didn’t care who he shot in the woods. But he was getting prestige. He wanted something, and he was going to get it any way he could even if he cut you down. Walsh wasn’t like that at all. Walsh was a man who discussed issues and who discussed McCarthy’s demeanor. Walsh was a guy who threw cold water on McCarthy and reminded him he was just a politician with just the ambitions of a politician, and he was never going to be a Hitler. It was reflected in the newspapers to me that the public was regaining its confidence because there was going to be chaos and that was a big fear.

GROTH: In 1954 you and Joe Simon started Mainline Comics.

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: I think you did five titles then folded and sold the books to Charlton. Can you talk a little bit about that? How did that come about? That was at the height of the comic book hysteria.

ROZ KIRBY: Mainline had Headline comics and had Guilty.

GROTH: And Black Magic?

KIRBY: That was getting close to the horror books, but they were more potent. Black Magic was like The Twilight Zone and that was very successful.

GROTH: You also created Fighting American.

KIRBY: Yes. Fighting American was the first attempt at satire in comics. It was a satire — of Captain America. It was very, very funny. I still get calls on it today from people who pick it up on occasion, and it’s a genuine laugh.

GROTH: Did you enjoy doing that?

KIRBY: Yes, I did. I like a good time like anybody else. It was my try at satire. I feel that I’m an intelligent person; I can handle it correctly. And I did. I felt I knew satire, and that’s how it came out. That’s how I got Doubleheader. I got Uncle Samurai out of that, and I got a Hungarian called count Yuscha Liffso. It was a period when I really enjoyed doing the comics.

GROTH: I think Mainline comics lasted two years from ’54 to ’56.

KIRBY: Yes. Like I say, we were undercapitalized. Although we made money, we didn’t make enough money to…

GROTH: That period was especially bad for comics. So you and Joe must have broken up around ’56.

KIRBY: Around ‘56. In fact, the other companies were having trouble too. But they could sustain themselves. DC could sustain themselves because of their classic stuff. And Marvel could sustain itself.

GROTH: Then you collaborated with Wally Wood on a newspaper strip called Skymasters.

KIRBY: Skymasters was a daily.

ROZ KIRBY: Everyone makes this mistake. Wally Wood had nothing to do with the collaboration.

KIRBY: It wasn’t Wally Wood. I collaborated with two guys — theWood brothers.

GROTH: Wally Wood had nothing to do with it?

KIRBY: He had nothing to do with it. The Wood brothers lived in New Jersey. I couldn’t reach the Wood brothers—they said send it to our mother and she’ll forward it to us. And that’s how we did business. Strangely enough the strip came out very well. But the Wood brothers kind of broke things up.

GROTH: How did you meet the Wood brothers?

KIRBY: We’d meet up at publishers offices, places where I would hold discussions. We had 300 papers.

ROZ KIRBY: The reason the strip didn’t last is because the Wood brothers kept disappearing.

KIRBY: I couldn’t reach the Wood brothers. I had to send them postcards. I had to keep in touch with their mother. These guys were eccentrics.

ROZ KIRBY: One got in trouble with the law.

GROTH: Did you really need the Wood brothers?

KIRBY: I needed the Wood brothers for the syndicate. That’s how we began at the syndicate. My trouble was that I would have to explain to the newspaper syndicate what happened to the Wood brothers. [Laughter.]

GROTH: Didn’t Wally Wood ink it?

KIRBY: Yeah, he inked a few weeks of them.

GROTH: Was Wally Wood related to the Wood brothers?

KIRBY: No. I began to think everyone was named Wood.

GROTH: In your entry in the Encyclopedia of Comics it refers to dikk, Dave, and Wally Wood, which gives the impression —

KIRBY: No. dikk and Dave were the Wood brothers. They were extremely eccentric so doing business with them was very rough. It was one of the reasons that the strip didn’t succeed. The strip was very, very good. It was accepted by 300 newspapers, which was a lot of papers. [Looking at a strip.] As you can see I did the moonwalk two years before NASA sent these guys to the moon. I did it in a serious vein. They wore white coveralls over them, but this is what they wore underneath. So I did it correctly. Of course, you can see Wally Wood’s influence.

art credited to Kirby & Wally Wood ©The Estate of Jack Kirby​

GROTH: Who colored this? It’s really nice.

KIRBY: I did.

ROZ KIRBY: Jack likes to color. [Looking at another piece.] I inked that.

GROTH: You did?

KIRBY: Yeah. She inked it. She’s very good. Roz is one of the finer inkers in the field. [Laughter.]

GROTH: Did you enjoy working on a daily strip?

KIRBY: Yes, I did. I enjoyed working on any story. I’m essentially a storyteller. You name the subject, and I’ll give a good story on it. That’s why when I came back from the war I did some war stories for DC. And they did very well. The magazine sold.

GROTH: Did Skymasters have a Sunday page?

KIRBY: Yes, it did. We had 300 papers, but I had a hard time with the Wood brothers. And a heck of a lot of aggravation.

GROTH: How long did the strip run?

KIRBY: About two years.

 

[KravenMorehead™]

GROTH: I believe you started the Skymasters strip in ’57. And I believe you also created Challengers of the Unknown for National in ’58. So how did your affiliation with National come about? Did you just drop by the offices and look for work?

KIRBY: Yes. I felt National had always been a respectable house, a prestige house. I liked the people who ran the place. I liked the publisher. I liked the people who worked for them. I always liked DC — they were fair, which was very rare in comics. [Laughter.]

GROTH: When you say they were fair — you still didn’t get to own the strips you drew…

ROZ KIRBY: We thought they were fair. [Laughter.]

KIRBY: All right, I’ll qualify it. I’ll just say that nobody in the field had a contract from anybody. And DC wasn’t the only publishing house in the field. There was also Timely and Dell and a lot of others.

GROTH: But still at that time they owned everything you did, they paid a low page rate, they kept the original art.

KIRBY: Yes. They did. But the idea was the artist came from a poor section of the city… I was happy because I made enough money to give to my parents. I made enough money to get married on. I made enough money to enjoy myself a little more than I would have if I didn’t have enough money.

GROTH: Who did you deal with at DC? Did you have an editor that you dealt with directly?

KIRBY: They had several editors. I dealt with Mort Weisinger, Julie Schwartz, and Murray Boltinoff.

GROTH: Can you distinguish between the editors? Did they have different approaches?

KIRBY: They were different personalities certainly, but they were all great to get along with. We’re still good friends. Mort Weisinger is gone. When we first moved to California, Mort Weisinger came to visit us.

GROTH: What kind of man was he? I understand he was a tough taskmaster.

KIRBY: Everybody was a tough taskmaster. Mort Weisinger wasn’t a particularly tough taskmaster. He was trying to do an editor’s job. Comics have a caste system — an editor has to act in a certain way, an artist has to be humble, right? An artist has to be humble, an editor must be officious, and a publisher must be somewhere out in the galaxy enjoying godhood. It was a caste system, pure and simple. And it was accepted that way. Nobody thought of contracts, nobody thought of insisting on better deals.

GROTH: Did you assume when you did a book — any one of the many books you’ve done — did you assume that the publisher owned it? Or did you think about it a little later and think, wait a minute, I did this and I didn’t have a contract, and I don’t see why he should own it 100 percent.

KIRBY: No, I was growing up and becoming aware of those things. Joe Simon knew about those things.

GROTH: At the time you just assumed that the publisher owned it?

KIRBY: Yes. I assumed that he took it, OK? [Laughter.] I assumed that he took it, and I didn’t have the means to get it back. In other words, I didn’t save my money for a lawyer. I was a very young man, and saved my money for having a good time.

GROTH: I understand that sometime in the mid-’50s Bernie Krigstein tried to start a union among comic book creators. Were you aware of that?

KIRBY: I was aware of it. It was something that I knew would fail.

GROTH: But you didn’t go to any meetings?

KIRBY: No, no. Unions almost had the connotation of communism.

GROTH: You were wary?

KIRBY: Everybody was wary. Remember, this was a time when communists marched through the streets, waving flags and shouting. The unions did the same thing so you began to associate them. I’m speaking now as a human being, not as a businessman — the unions are great. The unions are great for the working people because they protect you, but I didn’t see them that way as a young man. First of all, the papers would connect them with thee communists — labor unions were communists.

GROTH: Of course, the papers had a vested interest in doing that.

KIRBY: Yes.

ROZ KIRBY: Also at that time each artist was making his own deal. Jack said, “Well, I make more money than them.” Everybody can’t make the same.

KIRBY: I was doing very well — my books were selling. Whatever I drew sold.

GROTH: When you say you were doing very well, what does that mean? What was your page rate in the ’50s?

KIRBY: Thirty-five to 50 dollars for a complete page. It depended on who you worked for. Some paid less. Some paid more.

GROTH: Would that include the writing?

KIRBY: Yes, I gave them a complete page. Joe would ink it or someone else would ink it. I’d get somebody to ink it, or I’d ink it myself, and I’d get a certain amount from the publishers. That’s how it was with Challengers of the Unknown.

From “The Wizard of Time” in Challengers of the Unknown #4 (Oct.-Nov. 1958) written and penciled by Jack Kirby, inked by Roz Kirby & Wally Wood ©1958 DC Comics​

GROTH: Can you tell me how you came about creating Challengers of the Unknown?

KIRBY: Challengers of the Unknown was a movie to me. The science fiction pictures were beginning to break, and I felt that the Challengers of the Unknown were part of that genre. I began to think about three words which have always puzzled me: What’s out there? OK? What’s out there? I didn’t care about the East Side any more. I didn’t care about Earth or anything like that. I thought, what’s really out there? Then I began to draw characters from outer space, characters from beneath the earth, characters from anywhere that we couldn’t think of. The Challengers were us contending with these very strange people. A guy would suddenly make a potion that would render him into a superman and he would begin knocking down buildings with his bare fists. How do you contend with a guy like that? How do you stop him? Sometimes I did it in a very clever fashion, not by direct confrontation. Sometimes I did it by direct confrontation. I found ways to knock him out, I found ways to hold him, I found ways to weaken him. The fun of doing comics was finding this variety of ways in which to conclude a comic. I’m not the sort of fellow who does the same thing all the time. I began using a lot of science fiction apparatus. I came out with the atom bomb two years before it was actually used because I read in the paper that a fellow named Nicola Tesla was working on the atom bomb. I said, “Great idea, I can use it in a story.”

GROTH: Looking back on it, do you see the Challengers as a precursor to the Fantastic Four?

​

KIRBY: Yes, there were always precursors to the Fantastic Four — except the Fantastic Four were mutations. When people began talking about the bomb and its possible effect on human beings, they began talking about mutations because that’s a distinct possibility. And I said, “That’s a great idea.” That’s how the Fantastic Four began, with an atomic explosion and its effect on the characters. Ben Grimm who was a college man and a fine looking man suddenly became the Thing. Susan Storm became invisible because of the atomic effects on her body. Reed Richards became flexible and became a character that I could work with in various ways. And there were others — mutation effects didn’t only affect heroes, it affected villains too. So I had a grand time with the atomic bomb. [Laughter.]

GROTH: Before we get to The Fantastic Four and your ’60s period at Marvel, you also helped Joe Simon with The Fly and Private Strong. Can you tell me how that came about? Joe Simon apparently had left comics for a few years.

ROZ KIRBY: Joe called Jack.

KIRBY: Yes, he had. I’ve always been a friend of Joe’s, and I did The Fly and Private Strong with him. It was my last shot with Joe because he went back to commercial art.

GROTH: Why did he go back to comics for that brief period?

KIRBY: It was like a reflex action — you go back to comics. But Joe is older than I am, and I think a lot more grown up in his ways. He quit comics and began doing commercial art. There were things arising in comics that weren’t exactly wholesome. But I stuck to it — it was the only thing I knew. I had to deal with that, and it hurt me in many, many ways. In many ways it still hurts me. Thinking back on it I just didn’t know what else to do.

GROTH: Do you remember at what point in your life you realized that you were devoting your life to comics and that comics had become a career? I suppose it must have dawned on you at some point that you were a comic artist and that your identity was that of a comic artist.

ROZ KIRBY: His real dream was to make movies.

KIRBY: I wanted to make movies and was doing comics… In fact, later on I was dealing with producers and people who actually made movies — I still do. What I really wanted to do is make movies. If I made a movie it would be a good one. If I made a movie and there was money to be gotten for that movie, I can tell you it would be a terrific movie. Steven Spielberg did what I couldn’t do. [Laughter.] Somehow he made it and I didn’t.

GROTH: Well, the movies’ loss is comics’ gain. Let me ask you this: you were doing Challengers around ’57 or ’58 and you also started working for Marvel around this time. Was there an overlap when you worked for both companies or did you go from DC to Marvel?

ROZ KIRBY: He never worked for both at the same time.

KIRBY: I’d work for one and the situation would deteriorate, and I’d go back to the other, and I bounced back and forth like a yo-yo between Marvel and DC.

GROTH: Do you remember why you left DC for Marvel in the late ’50s?

KIRBY: [Pause.] No, I can’t really remember. I don’t exactly know what the circumstances were.

GROTH: I just want to clear one thing up—did you write the Challengers, too?

KIRBY: Yes. I wrote the Challengers. I wrote everything I did. When I went back to Marvel, I began to create the new stuff.

“I Saw Diablo! The Demon from the Fifth Dimension!” penciled by Kirby, inked by dikk Ayers in Tales of Suspense #9 (May 1960) ©1960 Marvel Comics, Inc.​

GROTH: Now I think you started doing monster books for Marvel. Did you enjoy doing those?

KIRBY: I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge — what kind of monster would fascinate people? I couldn’t draw anything that was too outlandish or too horrible. I never did that. What I did draw was something intriguing. There was something about this monster that you could live with. If you saw him you wouldn’t faint dead away. There was nothing disgusting in his demeanor. There was nothing about him that repelled you. My monsters were lovable monsters. [Laughter.] I gave them names — some were evil and some were good. They made sales, and that’s always been my prime object in comics. I had to make sales in order to keep myself working. And so I put all the ingredients in that would pull in sales. It’s always been that way.

GROTH; When did you meet Stan Lee for the first time?

KIRBY: I met Stan Lee when I first went to work for Marvel. He was a little boy. When Joe and I were doing Captain America. He was about 13 years old. He’s about five years younger than me.

GROTH: Did you keep in touch with him at all?

KIRBY: No, I thought Stan Lee was a bother.

GROTH: [Laughter.]

KIRBY: I did!

GROTH: What do you mean by “bother”?

KIRBY: You know he was the kind of kid that liked to fool around — open and close doors on you. Yeah. In fact, once I told Joe to throw him out of the room.

GROTH; Because he was a pest?

KIRBY: Yes, he was a pest. Stan Lee was a pest. He liked to irk people and it was one thing I couldn’t take.

GROTH: Hasn’t changed a bit, huh?

KIRBY: He hasn’t changed a bit. I couldn’t do anything about Stan Lee because he was the publisher’s cousin. He ran back and forth around New York doing things that he was told to do. He would slam doors and come up to you and look over your shoulder and annoy you in a lot of ways. Joe would probably elaborate on it.

GROTH: When you went to Marvel in ’58 and ’59, Stan was obviously there.

KIRBY: Yes, and he was the same way.

GROTH: And you two collaborated on all the monster stories?

KIRBY: Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything. I used to write the stories just like I always did.

GROTH: On all the monster stories it says “Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” What did he do to warrant his name being on them?

KIRBY: Nothing! OK?

GROTH: Did he dialogue them?

KIRBY: No, I dialogued them. If Stan Lee ever got a thing dialogued, he would get it from someone working in the office. I would write out the whole story on the back of every page. I would write the dialogue on the back or a description of what was going on. Then Stan Lee would hand them to some guy and he would write in the dialogue. In this way Stan Lee made more pay than he did as an editor. This is the way Stan Lee became the writer. Besides collecting the editor’s pay, he collected writer’s pay. I’m not saying Stan Lee had a bad business head on. I think he took advantage of whoever was working for him.

GROTH: But he was essentially serving in a capacity as an editorial liaison between you and the publisher?

KIRBY: Yes, he wasn’t exactly an editor, or anything like that. Even as a young boy, he’d be hopping around — I think he had a flute, and he was playing on his flute.

GROTH: The Pied Piper.

KIRBY: Yeah. He’d come up and annoy me, and I told Joe to throw him out.

GROTH: Stan wrote, “Jack and I were having a ball turning out monster stories.’’ Were you having a ball. Jack?

KIRBY: Stan Lee was having the ball.

GROTH: You turned out monster stories for two or three years I think. Then the first comic that rejuvenated superheroes that you did was The Fantastic four. Can you explain how that came about?

KIRBY: I had to do something different. The monster stories have their limitations — you can just do so many of them. And then it becomes a monster book month after month, so there had to be a switch because the times weren’t exactly conducive to good sales. So I felt the idea was to come up with new stuff all the time — in other words there had to be a blitz. And I came up with this blitz. I came up with The Fantastic Four, I came up with Thor (I knew the Thor legends very well), and the Hulk, the X-Men, and The Avengers. I revived what I could and came up with what I could. I tried to blitz the stands with new stuff. The new stuff seemed to gain momentum.

“The Invasion of the Lava Men” in Avengers #5 (May 1963) by Lee & Kirby, inked by Paul Reinman ©1963 Marvel Comics, Inc.​

GROTH: Let me ask you something that I think is an important point: Stan wrote the way you guys worked — and I think he’s referring to the monster stories specifically here — he wrote, “I had only to give Jack an outline of the story and he would draw the entire strip breaking down the outline into exactly the right number of panels. Then it remained for me to take Jack’s artwork and add the captions and dialogue which would hopefully add a dimension of reality to sharply delineated characterization.” So he’s saying that he gave you a plot, and you would draw it, and he would add the captions and dialogue.

ROZ KIRBY: I remember Jack would call him up and say it’s going to be this kind of story or that kind of story and just send him the story. And he’d write in everything on the side.

KIRBY: Remember this: Stan Lee was an editor. He worked from nine to five doing business for Martin Goodman. In other words he didn’t do any writing in the office. He did Martin Goodman’s business. That was his function. There were people coming up to the office to talk all the time. They weren’t always artists, they were business people. Stan Lee was the first man they would see and Stan Lee would see if he could get them in to see Martin Goodman. That was Stan Lee’s function.

GROTH: Where were you living at the time, in ’61-’62?

KIRBY: We had a house on Long Island.

GROTH: Did you deliver your work to Marvel?

KIRBY: Yes, I did. Once or twice a month. I worked at home.

GROTH: What were your working hours like?

KIRBY: I worked whenever I liked to.

ROZ KIRBY: Mostly in the evening. He helped me during the day with the children.

KIRBY: It was a wonderful routine because I could do whatever I liked to do during the day. I didn’t have to work in an office. I could work at home. I could work at my leisure. I worked ’til four in the morning. I worked with the TV and radio on — it was a great setup. I was a night person and still am.

GROTH: Can you tell me give me your version of how The Fantastic Four came about? Did Stan go to you…?

KIRBY: No, Stan didn’t know what a mutation was. I was studying that kind of stuff all the time. I would spot it in the newspapers and science magazines. I still buy magazines that are fanciful. I don’t read as much science fiction as I did at that time. 1 was a student of science fiction and I began to make up my own story patterns, my own type of people. Stan Lee doesn’t think the way I do. Stan Lee doesn’t think of people when he thinks of [characters]. I think of [characters] as real people. If I drew a war story it would be two guys caught in the war. The Fantastic Four to me are people who were in a jam — suddenly you find yourself invisible, suddenly you find yourself flexible.

ROZ KIRBY: Gary wants to know how you created The Fantastic Four.

GROTH: Did you approach Marvel or —

KIRBY: It came about very simply. I came in [to the Marvel offices] and they were moving out the furniture, they were taking desks out — and I needed the work! I had a family and a house and all of a sudden Marvel is coming apart. Stan Lee is sitting on a chair crying. He didn’t know what to do, he’s sitting in a chair crying —he was just still out of his adolescence. I told him to stop crying. I says. “Go in to Martin and tell him to stop moving the furniture out, and I’ll see that the books make money.” And I came up with a raft of new books and all these books began to make money. Somehow they had faith in me. I knew 1 could do it, but I had to come up with fresh characters that nobody had seen before. I came up with The Fantastic Four. I came up with Thor. Whatever it took to sell a book I came up with. Stan Lee has never been editorial minded. It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories. Stan Lee was a guy that knew where the papers were or who was coming to visit that day. Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, OK? I’m essentially something else: I’m a storyteller. My job is to sell my stories. When I saw this happening at Marvel I stopped the whole damned bunch. I stopped them from moving the furniture! Stan Lee was sitting on some kind of a stool, and he was crying.

GROTH: Now did the success of The Justice League of America over at National have anything to do with creating The Fantastic Four? Did that prompt you to create the F.F.?

KIRBY: No. It didn’t prompt me. I felt an urgency at the time. It was an instinct. Here you have an emergency situation — what do you do? The water is pouring in through a big hole in the wall — you don’t stop to put adhesive bandages around the wall to shore it up. You get a lot of stuff together and slam it against the wall and keep the water out. That’s what I did.

GROTH: Who came up with the name “Fantastic Four”?

KIRBY: I did. All right? I came up with all those names. I came up with Thor because I’ve always been a history buff. I know all about Thor and Balder and Mjolnir, the hammer. Nobody ever bothered with that stuff except me. I loved it in high school and I loved it in my pre-high school days. It was the thing that kept my mind off the general poverty in the area. When I went to school that’s what kept me in school — it wasn’t mathematics and it wasn’t geography; it was history.

GROTH: Stan says he conceptualized virtually everything in The Fantastic Four — that he came up with all the characters. And then he said that he wrote a detailed synopsis for Jack to follow.

ROZ KIRBY: I’ve never seen anything.

KIRBY: I’ve never seen it, and of course I would say that’s an outright lie.

GROTH: Stan pretty much takes credit in an introduction to one of his books for creating all the characters in The Fantastic Four. He also said he created the name.

KIRBY: No, he didn’t.

GROTH: The next character, if I remember correctly, was The Hulk. If I remember correctly you drew a six-issue run of that, then it was cancelled for a little while, then Steve Ditko started it in an anthology book called Tales to Astonish. Can you talk a little bit about how you were involved in creating The Hulk?

KIRBY: The Hulk I created when I saw a woman lift a car. Her baby was caught under the running board of this car. The little child was playing in the gutter and he was crawling from the gutter onto the sidewalk under the running board of this car — he was playing in the gutter. His mother was horrified. She looked from the rear window of the car, and this woman in desperation lifted the rear end of the car. It suddenly came to me that in desperation we can all do that — we can knock down walls, we can go berserk, which we do. You know what happens when we’re in a rage — you can tear a house down. I created a character who did all that and called him the Hulk. I inserted him in a lot of the stories I was doing. Whatever the Hulk was at the beginning I got from that incident. A character to me can’t be contrived. I don’t like to contrive characters. They have to have an element of truth. This woman proved to me that the ordinary person in desperate circumstances can transcend himself and do things that he wouldn’t ordinarily do. I’ve done it myself. I’ve bent steel.

“Captives of the Deadly Duo!” in The Fantastic Four #6 (September 1962) by Lee & Kirby, inked by dikk Ayers ©1962 Marvel Comics, Inc.​

GROTH: Was the child caught between the running board…?

KIRBY: He wasn’t caught. He was playing under the running board in the gutter. His head was sticking out, and then he decided he wanted to get back on the sidewalk again. But being under the car frightened his mother. He was having difficulty crawling out from under the running board, so his mother looked like she was going to scream, and she looked very desperate. She didn’t scream, but she ran over to the car and, very determined, she lifted up the entire rear of that car. I’m not saying she was a slender woman, [laughter.] She was a short, firm, well-built woman — and the Hulk was there. I didn’t know what it was. It began to form.

ROZ KIRBY: You also said the Hulk reminded you of Frankenstein.

KIRBY: The Hulk was Frankenstein. Frankenstein can rip up the place, and the Hulk could never remember who he formerly was.

GROTH:Well, this is probably going to shock you, but Stan takes full credit for creating the Hulk. He’s written, “Actually, ideas have always been the easiest part of my various chores.” And then he went on to say that in creating The Hulk, “It would be my job to take a clichéd concept and make it seem new and fresh and exciting and relevant. Once again, I decided that Jack Kirby would be the artist to breathe life into our latest creation. So the next time we met, I outlined the concept I’d been toying with for weeks.”

KIRBY: Yes, he was always toying with concepts. On the contrary, it was I who brought the ideas to Stan. I brought the ideas to DC as well, and that’s how business was done from the beginning.

GROTH: Stan also claimed he created the name. “the Hulk.”

KIRBY: No, he didn’t.

ROZ KIRBY: It’s just his word against Stan’s.

GROTH: There was a period between ’61 and ’63 when you were just drawing a tremendous number of books.

ROZ KIRBY: May I make one point? In all these years, when Jack was still creating things, Stan Lee hasn’t been creating things. When Jack left Stan, there wasn’t anything new created by Stan.

KIRBY: Yeah. Stan never created anything new after that. If he says he created things all that easily, what did he create after I left? That’s the point. Have they done anything new? He’ll probably tell you, “I didn’t have to.”

GROTH: Can I ask what your involvement in Spider-Man was?

KIRBY: I created Spider-Man. We decided to give it to Steve Ditko. I drew the first Spider-Man cover. I created the character. I created the costume. I created all those books, but I couldn’t do them all. We decided to give the book to Steve Ditko who was the right man for the job. He did a wonderful job on that.

GROTH: Did you know Ditko?

KIRBY: I knew Ditko as well as any man could. Ditko is a withdrawn, silent type.

GROTH: Did you guys get along well?

KIRBY: I got along with him. I can only speak for myself. I liked Steve very much.

ROZ KIRBY: We bumped in to him three years ago in New York.

KIRBY: He surprised me. He was very sociable, and we socialized, and he’s very open with people now.

GROTH: What kind of guy was he?

KIRBY: He was a very withdrawn guy. I never bothered him because I felt that that’s the way he wanted it. I talked to him when it was necessary. I believe that Steve was a kind of guy that wanted it that way. He was a wonderful artist, a wonderful conceptualist. It was Steve Ditko that made Spider-Man the well-known character that he is.

GROTH: Do you like his work?

KIRBY: Yes, because it’s got a definite style that you could recognize anywhere. You can point to any picture that Steve makes and say, Ditko did that. It’s individual.

ROZ KIRBY: They all look Polish.

KIRBY: Yeah. All his characters look Polish! [Laughter.]

GROTH: I don’t have an exact chronology of everything you did, but I’d like to go through a few of them. You did Sgt. Fury. Can you explain how that came about? Did you create Sgt. Fury?

KIRBY: Yes. Sgt. Fury was the head of a battalion or something.

ROZ KIRBY: I was downstairs with him in the basement when he was figuring out what the logo should be. If Stan Lee wants to know who created him, he can ask me. I was with him.

KIRBY: I didn’t have to take anybody else’s strip to make sales, and my purpose was just to make sales.

GROTH: How did all those books in the ’60s come to be created? Would someone at Marvel say, “We need another book”?

KIRBY: No. I’d come up with them.

GROTH: You would just come up with them on your awn?

KIRBY: Yes, I would come up with them.

ROZ KIRBY: When he left Marvel and went back to DC Carmine Infantino gave him carte blanche.

GROTH: That was ’72 I believe.

KIRBY: I gave them The New Gods.

©1971 DC Comics​

GROTH: You had what I thought was just an incredibly fertile period for four or five years in the ’60s when downs of characters started to appear in the books you were doing, specifically Fantastic Four, but a number of others as well — can you just talk generally about creating all these characters?

ROZ KIRBY: How can Stan Lee say he created all these characters when he didn’t even know what Jack was going to draw?

GROTH: Did you ever have any occasions where you were running out of space and there was too much story? How did you structure a story so that you didn’t have a problem of ending a story too abruptly?

KIRBY: I wrote a story so that it would gather momentum to an end. Sometimes you can make a very dramatic story which ends quietly — without any dialogue. I never had stock endings. I didn’t believe in stock endings. To make the [reader] happy was not my objective, but to make the [reader] say, “Yeah, that’s what would happen” — that was my objective. I knew the [reader] was never happy all the time. You take the Thing, he’d knock out 50 guys at a time and win — then maybe he’d sit down and kind of reflect on it: “Maybe I hurt somebody or maybe we could have done it some other way” like a human being would think, not like a monster. In other books the guy would knock out the gangs and that would be the end of it. You would see the guys in jail, and that’s it. Or it would say, “Wait until next week.”

GROTH: I always thought that one of the emotional anchors of the Fantastic Four was the tragedy of the Thing.



KIRBY: He was a tragedy. Can you imagine yourself as a mutation, never knowing when you were going to change, and what you’d look like to your folks or people that you love. Everybody seemed to associate me with the Thing because he acted like a regular guy. No matter what he looked like the Thing never changed his personality — he was always a human being despite his physical change. Ben Grimm always remained Ben Grimm. I think that’s why the reader liked him — that touch of reality. You can’t really change a guy unless you injure his brain, or if he sustains some sort of injury in a situation.

From The Fantastic Four #2 (January 1962) “The Fantastic Four Meet the Skrulls from Outer Space”​

GROTH: Do you have a favorite among all the books you did at Marvel?

KIRBY: No, they were all good. Every goddamn one of them was good. There were some that I thought were standouts but they didn’t overshadow the other books. I liked the Planet Ego—that was innovative, using an entire planet as a personality.

GROTH: Can you explain how you worked? I think according to Stan he would give you a plot, you would draw it, and he would write it. Now would you dispute —

ROZ KIRBY: [Stan] would say that he needs the story, and I think they talked two minutes on the phone, and then Jack would go off and write the story on the side of the art.

KIRBY: Stan didn’t know what the heck the stories were about.

GROTH; I’ve seen original art with words written on the sides of the pages.

KIRBY: That would be my dialogue.

GROTH: You would talk to Stan on the phone — what was a typical conversation like when you were plotting the Fantastic Four: what would he say and what would you say?

KIRBY: On The Fantastic Four, I’d tell him what I was going to do, what the story was going to be, and I’d bring it in — that’s all.

ROZ KIRBY: [Stan Lee] would always say “great.”

KIRBY: And that’s all Stan Lee would say, “great.” [Laughter.]

GROTH: Did he ever have criticisms of your storylines — would he ever say, ‘“I think you should go in a different direction’’ or anything like that?

KIRBY: No, no, no, he took them verbatim. If Stan Lee had ever done that I’d’ve been over to DC in about five minutes.

GROTH: I think you were drawing much of the time three books a month, and those books must have been about 24 pages — so you were turning out roughly 75 pages a month. Was that a strain?

KIRBY: No, I like working hard. Not only that, but if you look at some of my old pages, notice the expressions on the people — they’re very real expressions. I was totally immersed in the characters. I penciled fast, I wrote fast. Nobody could have written it for me because they couldn’t have understood the situation or what to do.

ROZ KIRBY: He never wrote the story ahead of time, he wrote while he was drawing.

KIRBY: In other words, I’d never planned a story —

GROTH: That’s my next question. When you were doing a story, say, the first Dragon Man story in Fantastic Four that took place on a campus — would you plot that out in your mind?

KIRBY: No, no, I’d take it from the beginning, then say, what would he do? Here he is, he’s a dragon — this guy is in a mess! He’s really a human being, but he’s a dragon— what would a human being trapped in those circumstances do? Then I’d come up with an answer. I didn’t plan out the entire story. I had to do it panel by panel because I had to think for each individual. Sometime even after I thought it out, the story would come out different because on the way something would happen and this guy would have to make other plans.

ROZ KIRBY: I never remember in all the years that Jack ever erased a panel.

GROTH; Is that right?

KIRBY: Yeah.

GROTH: How did you come up with the Black Panther?

KIRBY: I came up with the Black Panther because I realized I had no blacks in my strip. I’d never drawn a black. I needed a black. I suddenly discovered that I had a lot of black readers. My first friend was a black! And here I was ignoring them because I was associating with everybody else. It suddenly dawned on me — believe me, it was for human reasons — I suddenly discovered nobody was doing blacks. And here I am a leading cartoonist and I wasn’t doing a black. I was the first one to do an Asian. Then I began to realize that there was a whole range of human differences. Remember, in my day, drawing an Asian was drawing Fu Manchu — that’s the only Asian they knew. The Asians were wily…

GROTH: Was your conception of the Silver Surfer what he eventually turned out to be?

KIRBY: My conception of the Silver Surfer was a human being from space in that particular form. He came in when everybody began surfing — I read about it in the paper.

The kids in California were beginning to surf. I couldn’t do an ordinary teenager surfing so I drew a surfboard with a man from outer space on it.

The Silver Surfer ©1978 Stan Lee & Jack Kirby; Silver Surfer ©Marvel Characters, Inc.​

GROTH: How did you come up with Galactus?

KIRBY: Galactus was God, and I was looking for God. When I first came up with Galactus, I was very awed by him. I didn’t know what to do with the character.

Everybody talks about God, but what the heck does he look like? Well, he’s supposed to be awesome, and Galactus is awesome to me. I drew him large and awesome. No one ever knew the extent of his powers or anything, and I think symbolically that’s our relationship [with God].

GROTH:Jack, did you put a lot of yourself into the character of Ben Grimm?

KIRBY: Well, they associated me with Ben Grimm. I suppose I must be a lot like Ben Grimm. I never duck out of a fight; I don’t care what the hell the odds are, and I’m rough at times, but I try to be a decent guy all the time. That’s the way I’ve always lived. Because I have children… In other words, my ambition was always to be a perfect picture of an American. An American is a guy, a rich guy with a family, a decent guy with a family with as many kids as he likes, doing what he wants, working with people that he likes, and enjoying himself to his very old age.

GROTH: I always thought that the Marvel period in the ’60s was your most fertile artistic period.

KIRBY: Yes. Comics to me became more than a livelihood. It just became…

GROTH: Would you call it passion?

KIRBY: Yes, because I did it in a passionate way. I found that I could be creative in a dozen different ways, and I created one thing, and when I finished that I created another. I began to think of various new things to do.

GROTH: Can you tell me why the period in the ’60s was so creatively fertile for you? Were there circumstances that contributed to it, or what?

KIRBY: Marvel was on its ass, literally, and when I came around, they were practically hauling out the furniture. They were literally moving out the furniture. They were beginning to move, and Stan Lee was sitting there crying. I told them to hold everything, and I pledged that I would give them the kind of books that would up their sales and keep them in business, and that was my big mistake.

GROTH:[Laughing.] Right. So you feel that it was that pressure that forced you to create all those characters and to plunge into…

KIRBY: I had to make a living. I was a married man. I had a wife. I had a home. I had children. I had to make a living. That’s the common pursuit of every man. It just happened that my living collided with the times, and the times meant going back to Marvel. I mean, that’s what I did best. I’d be very bad at anything else. Being the creative guy, which I am, I found a way to grease up the Marvel machinery, and I did. The scripts that came out of it are still there today.

GROTH:So it was to a large extent circumstance that compelled you to produce…

KIRBY: Circumstances forced me to do it. They forced me.

GROTH:Was there a sense of excitement during that period when Marvel was starting to take off?



KIRBY: No, there wasn’t a sense of excitement. It was a horrible, morbid atmosphere. If you can find excitement in that kind of atmosphere — the excitement of fear. The excitement of, “What to do next?” The excitement of what’s out there. And that’s the excitement that always existed in the field. What am I going to do now that I’m not doing anything more for this publisher? I can go to another publisher. I have to make a living.

GROTH: That’s an “excitement” born out of desperation.



KIRBY: It was desperation, but it was creative desperation. It was creative desperation because that’s when a man really begins to think hard, and of course it hearkens me back to the creation of The Hulk, which I told you about, and this woman who lifted a car. If you want to do it, you can lift a buildings. I’m not saying you can, and I’m not saying you can’t get a hernia, but I’m not ruling out that you might possibly, if you find the right niche, you might possibly lift that building. Maybe not far. Maybe an inch above the ground. Maybe it’s not a large building, but you can do it. I’ve seen man do everything. I think Man is the kind of animal that is capable of doing anything, whether it’s good or heinous, whether it’s easy or horribly, horribly difficult.

GROTH: When Marvel started to take off — when Marvel was becoming popular on college campuses and achieving a media profile and soon — was there a sense that you were at the center of an exciting creative movement?

KIRBY: No. I knew by then that I was only going to make — I was making a fairly good living. I was making good money, and my marriage was going fine, and I was thinking of moving possibly to a better place. Roz and I, we were young people with plans in our heads. We could plan maybe on another child. Life was moving. If life was moving, and you’re very, very active, it’s a very stimulating atmosphere.

ROZ KIRBY: But it was a little encouraging when we heard about college students taking an interest in all the books.

KIRBY: Oh, yes. Comics was acquiring a wider audience. Of course, it’s universal today, but you can’t acquire a wider audience without being creative. You can’t find that anywhere today.

GROTH: Did you find that fulfilling?

KIRBY: Of course it was fulfilling. It was a happy time I of life. But. But, slowly management suddenly realized I was making money. I say “management,” but I mean an individual. I was making more money than he was,OK? It’s an individual. And so he says, “Well, you know…” And the old phrase is born. “Screw you. I get mine.” OK? And so I had to render to Ceasar what he considered Ceasar’s. And there was a man who never wrote a line in his life — he could hardly spell — you know, taking credit for the writing. I found myself coming up with new angles to keep afloat. I was in a bad spot. I was in a spot that I didn’t want to be in and yet I had to be to make a living. So I went to DC, and I began creating for them.

GROTH: You were getting a page rate at Marvel?

KIRBY: Yes, I was getting a good page rate.

GROTH: Did your page rate increase substantially in the ’60s as the work became more popular?

KIRBY: Yes, it did. My object was to help the publisher to make sales. That was my job. It wasn’t a job of being a Rembrandt.

ROZ KIRBY: It wasn’t that big an increase.

GROTH: Do you remember approximately what it went 10 from the beginning ’60s to the late ’60s?

ROZ KIRBY: I don’t remember what the page rate was.

GROTH: Do you think your page rate doubled during the ’60s?

ROZ KIRBY: I don’t think it doubled.

KIRBY: I don’t think it doubled, but it gradually grew, and it grew faster than it usually did.

GROTH: The sales of the comics grew faster than they ever did.

KIRBY: Yes. And that’s what it depended on. I knew it would depend on the sale of the comics. If sales of the comics began to dwindle, then your salary is going to be stagnant. If sales fall more, they’re going to lower your salary. If it dwindles even further, your salary is going to be a lot lower than you usually make. It goes the other way, too.

GROTH: But it’s by no means certain that if the sales increase substantially your page rate will increase substantially.

KIRBY: It depends on the kind of person you are.

GROTH: Did you have to ask for increases, or did they simply offer them to you?

KIRBY: No, no. I had to ask for them. There’s a class system in the comics.

GROTH: Can you explain that?

KIRBY: OK. The artist is the lowest form of life on the rung of the ladder. The publishers are usually businessmen who deal with businessmen. They deal with promotional people. They deal with financial people. They deal with accountants. They deal with people who work on higher levels. They deal with tax people, but have absolutely no interest in artists, in individual artists, especially very young artists. They’re not going to be that interested in very, very young people. They pat you on the head and say, “How are you, Jackie?” Things like that. But the fact is that very young people were the ones who did the work and enabled these guys to continue the kind of lives they liked. But they never recognize that. They’re humans, too. If they don’t think you’re important, they’ll treat you in that particular manner. Their accountants are more important to them than you are, and yet you’re making the sales that they depend on. It’s an odd set-up, but it exists. A very young person can come up with an idea— well, Superman is the classic example, see? All these businessmen are at the top of the pyramid, but the entire pyramid is resting on two little stones, and the pyramid denies the existence of these stones because it’s so big. It’s loaded with officials, but the little stones are the ones that are holding it up because that’s where the support is coming from, and I was in the same position.

GROTH: Did you see the publisher of Marvel often in the ’60s?

KIRBY: No. Management meant the editor. I’d see the publishers occasionally. They’d come out of their office. I worked at home all the time. I never worked in an office, so I’d bring in my work maybe two times a month, maybe three sometimes. Sometimes I’d come up late, and everybody was leaving the office, and the publisher would come out, and he’d go, “Hello, Jackie.” I’d say, “Hello, Mr. So-And-So.” And of course this guy was Mr. Big. I’d say, “Hello, Mr. Big.” Mr. Big’d come out of his office and pat me on the head. “How are you, Jackie?” And that was it. That was my relationship with the publisher. I think that’s the relationship that publishers today still remember.

GROTH: You think they still have that attitude?

KIRBY: Yes, I do. I think the editor has that attitude.

GROTH: At the time, did you feel that you were being condescended to?

KIRBY: Yes. I was being condescended to, but for the sake of my mother and then for the sake of my wife and then for the sake of my children, I existed in that kind of atmosphere. I hate to be condescended to. I’m not the kind of guy that likes that kind of thing. There are times when you work with people you feel like punching in the mouth.

GROTH: Probably most of the time.

KIRBY: All right, there’s lots of people who work in offices where they have a difficult time. Today we call it pressure, but it’s not pressure. It’s relationships. That pressure can be eased by better relationships, the way I see it. This was a relationship frozen in a ladder-type structure with the publisher on top, and so if you were on the bottom rung, it was quite a thing for the guy on the top rung to say, “Hello, Jackie.”

GROTH: Can I ask you how you were paid? Were you paid on a weekly basis?

KIRBY: I was paid when I brought my script in. I was a freelancer. You get paid on a weekly basis if you worked in the office, and I never worked in the office.

GROTH: So you brought in an issue of The Fantastic Four, and they simply gave you a check?

KIRBY: They’d send the check out. They wouldn’t give the check to me, but I’d get the check the following week. They were prompt with their checks. We never had any difficulty because I was making sales for them, and there was a good relationship there.

 

[KravenMorehead™]

GROTH: How did you feel during the ’60s when Stan became a personality in the books and sort of became the official spokesman and figurehead for Marvel Comics?

KIRBY: Well, Stan became a personality through his relationship with the owner.

ROZ KIRBY: Can I say something? It bothered me a lot when it said Stan Lee this and Stan Lee that. If they wanted to be fair, they could have said, “Produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” But he didn’t have to say, “Written by —.” He didn’t have to take the entire credit. He’d put down drawn by Jack “King” Kirby and all that stuff.

KIRBY: Yes, and he’d be very flippant.

ROZ KIRBY: Jack took it with a grain of salt, but I was the one who was very hurt by it all.

GROTH: I see. Did you ever talk to Stan about the application of credit?

KIRBY: You can’t talk to Stan about anything.

ROZ KIRBY: Every so often he’d put down, “Produced by —”

KIRBY: Yeah, sometimes he did. Stan was a very rigid type. At least, he is to me. That’s how I sized him up. He’s a very rigid type, and he gets what he wants when the advantage is his. He’s the kind of a guy who will play the advantages. When the advantage isn’t his at all, he’ll lose. He’ll lose with any creative guy. And I could never see Stan Lee as being creative. The only thing he ever knew was he’d say this word “Excelsior!”

GROTH: Well, what I wanted to ask you was, what did you think of Stan creating this public personality where everything was stamped with “Stan Lee Presents”? He manufactured himself as a kind of grand figure.

ROZ KIRBY: That’s what he wants.

KIRBY: I think Stan has a God complex. Right now, he’s the father of the Marvel Universe. He’s a guy with a God complex.

GROTH: Did you sort of see it coming in the ’60s when Stan was putting his name all over the place? Did you see this kind of— ?

KIRBY: Well, you don’t have to see a thing like that coming. It was happening, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Stan Lee was the editor, and Stan had a lot of influence at Marvel, and there was nothing you could do about it. Who are you going to talk to about it, see?

GROTH: Was Stan your basic contact with Marvel? He was the one that you — ?

KIRBY: Yes. I’d come in, and I’d give Stan the work, and I’d go home, and I wrote the story at home. I drew the story at home. I even lettered in the words in the balloons in pencil.

ROZ KIRBY: Well, you’d put them in the margins.

KIRBY: Sometimes I put them in the margins. Sometimes I put ’em in the balloons, but I wrote the entire story. I balanced the story…

GROTH: How long were your discussions with Stan Lee when you were discussing the next Thor or the next Avengers or the next Fantastic Four? How long would you talk to Stan about it?

KIRBY: Not much. I didn’t particularly care to talk to Stan, and I just gave him possibly some idea of what the next story would be like, and then I went home. I told him very little, and I went home, and I conceived and put down the entire story on paper.

GROTH: How do you feel when he talks about what a great guy you are, what a terrific co-worker you were, which he does frequently when asked about the good ol’ days?

KIRBY: Why wouldn’t he say that?

ROZ KIRBY: Yeah. Look what Jack did for Marvel.

KIRBY: Why wouldn’t he say that? If I hadn’t saved Marvel and if I hadn’t come up with those features, he would have nothing to work on. He wouldn’t be working right now. I don’t know what he’d be doing now. He wouldn’t be in any editorial position.

GROTH: Do you think he believes that, or is that a public relations facade?

KIRBY: What’s that?

GROTH: Oh, that he thinks you’re a great guy, and he loved working with you.

KIRBY: I say it’s a facade, and what he really means is he loved taking me. I just hope that you don’t find yourselves in a position where you have to deal with that kind of a personality.

ROZ KIRBY: I’d like to say something if I could. Jack created many characters before he even met Stan. He created almost all the characters when he was associated with Stan, and after he left Stan, he created many, many more characters. What has Stan created before he met Jack, and what has he created after Jack left?

KIRBY: And my wife was present when I created these damn characters. The only reason I would have any bad feelings against Stan is because my own wife had to suffer through that with me. It takes a guy like Stan, without feeling, to realize a thing like that. If he hurts a guy, he also hurts his family. His wife is going ask questions. His children are going to ask questions.

GROTH: Were you very — active isn’t the right word — but you were on top of things during that period? Did you know what was going on?

ROZ KIRBY: Of course. Jack was right down there working in what we called the dungeon. We had the basement then, a studio down there in the dungeon. Whenever anybody called, or Jack came to the office, I was usually there. It hurts to this day when my grandson sees Stan Lee’s name and he knows what his grandfather did, and he asks, “Why is Stan Lee’s name all over?” That’s hard to explain, you know.

KIRBY: Yeah. So why shouldn’t I be hurt? Why shouldn’t my family be hurt? I know my wife is sore at me—

ROZ KIRBY: No, I’m not sore.

KIRBY: —because I say these things, but I’m deeply hurt because it hurt my family. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not going to be believed at Marvel. I’m no going to be believed anywhere else unless… Actually, my own fears probably prodded me into an act of cowardice. It’s an act of cowardice. I should have told Stan to go to hell and found some other way to make a living, but I couldn’t do it. I had my family. I had an apartment. I just couldn’t give all that up.

GROTH: Because you didn’t have alternatives?

KIRBY: I didn’t have alternatives, and DC wasn’t that big an alternative. In fact, I began to do as much work at DC as I could.

GROTH: At the risk of sounding partisan, let me ask you this: every time I read something by Stan or see Stan speak publicly, I’m struck by how obvious a bullshyt artist he is. Was he always that way?

ROZ KIRBY: Yeah.

KIRBY: Yes. Yes, I knew Stan when he was a young boy.

ROZ KIRBY: He was Mr. Personality. That’s what he was.

KIRBY: If you ever get to talk with Joe Simon, Simon will tell you exactly what the hell Stan Lee was. He was just a little wise guy, and he came from a family that was upper-middle class, and he could do whatever he liked. He could say whatever he liked. I’ll be frank with you. We considered him a pain in the ass. He grew up to be exactly what we considered him. The only thing that ever bothered me about this thing was not the fact that I couldn’t make a living, because I did. I finally found a way to make a living. In fact, I went to California. I was the first artist in New York—

ROZ KIRBY: No, that comes later. He didn’t ask you about that.

KIRBY: I’m the first artist in New York — wait a minute! — I’m the first artist in New York to go to California, and I went to California because I just about had it with the field. I had it with the field. I had to feel like a man again.

GROTH: What year did you come out here?

KIRBY: Let’s see. I believe that was in ’67. In fact, Carmine Infantino was then editor of DC, and then Mort Weisinger came to visit us. It was wonderful to see somebody from the East.

GROTH: Actually, there was at least one other character I wanted to talk about, which was Thor. Your run on Thor was also an incredibly imaginative period, which lasted quite a few issues.

KIRBY: Yes. I loved Thor because I loved legends. I’ve always loved legends. Stan Lee was the type of guy who would never know about Balder and who would never know about the rest of the characters. I had to build up that legend of Thor in the comics.

“On the Trail of Tomorrow Man!” in Journey Into Mystery #86 (November 1962 ) plot by Lee, script by Larry Lieber; Kirby inked by dikk Ayers ©Marvel Comics, Inc.​

GROTH: The whole Asgardian…

KIRBY: Yes. The whole Asgardian company, see? I built up Loki. I simply read Loki was the classic villain and, of course, all the rest of them. I even threw in the Three Musketeers. I drew them from Shakespearean figures. I combined Shakespearean figures with the Three Musketeers and came up with these three friends who supplemented Thor and his company, and this is the way I kept these strips going by creative little steps like that.

GROTH: Some of the Asgardian landscapes, it seems like you must have taken great joy in…

KIRBY: I did. I took a great joy with inventing new kinds of mechanisms. I invented new kinds of machines. I’ve been a student of science fiction for a long, long time, and I can tell you that I’m very well-versed in science fact and science fiction. I’m 71 years old, and so I’ve seen all this new conception. I used to read the first science fiction books, and I began to learn about the universe myself and take it seriously. I know the names of the stars. I know how near or far the heavenly bodies are from our own planet. I know our own place in the universe. I can feel the vastness of it inside myself. I began to realize with each passing fact what a wonderful and awesome place the universe is, and that helped me in comics because I was looking for the awesome. I found it in Thor. I found it in Galactus.

GROTH: Let me ask you something that’s been on my mind for many years, and that is, I thought Vince Colletta did not do your pencils justice.

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: In fact, he was one of the weakest inkers on your work, and he inked a lot of the Thor books. How did you feel about his work?

ROZ KIRBY: Didn’t you like Sinnott the best?

KIRBY: I liked Sinnott the best. I like Mike Royer. Colletta was a good professional inker, but I didn’t care too much for his particular style.

GROTH: He seemed to mitigate the power of the drawing.

KIRBY: Well, there was nothing I could do about these things at any rate. It was the company that hired these guys, and it was the company that gave them the assignments, and my part in asking for an inker or suggesting an inker was nil. I never made the choice.

ROZ KIRBY: Some of the inkers would actually erase pencil lines.

KIRBY: Yeah. They’d erase my pencil lines. And so I could do nothing about it. I couldn’t make those choices. My main concern was just making a living. I wasn’t going to get temperamental and fight about inkers or anything else. In short, I did what I had to do to supplement my family.

GROTH: Jack said you guys moved out here in ’67.

ROZ KIRBY: Uh… ’68.

GROTH: ’68? So you were still working for Marvel when you moved to California.

KIRBY: Yes.

GROTH: And I believe you left Marvel in around ’70 or ’71, if I remember correctly. You left Marvel somewhere around Fantastic Four #102. You just did a couple of issues past the 100 mark.

ROZ KIRBY: Yeah. That’s right.

GROTH: Now, can you explain the circumstances of why you left Marvel, and why you left at that particular time?

KIRBY: There comes a time when you’ve had a gut-full of everything. I had a gut-full of Marvel, a gut-full of New York.

ROZ KIRBY: And Carmine Infantino came out…

KIRBY: And again, Carmine Infantino also had kind of a gut-full. He was an artist who I thought was out of place either as a publisher or as an editor or anything that merited a higher position.

ROZ KIRBY: He gave Jack the opportunity to do his own work.

GROTH: He came out here and courted you?

KIRBY: Yes. He came out here, and he was very kind to me.

ROZ KIRBY: He came to the house on Passover, and I gave him a matzo-ball soup, and he hated it. [Laughter.]

KIRBY: I guess matzo-ball soup doesn’t agree with everybody.

GROTH: Had you known Infantino prior to his contact with you?

KIRBY: Yes, I did. Infantino was an artist, and he was always a very good artist, and then he became the editor and publisher of DC.

GROTH: Now when you say you had difficulty with Marvel, can you clarify what you mean by that?

KIRBY: I’ll clarify it by saying I’m basically a man. I’m basically a guy from the East Side. I’m basically a guy who likes to be a man, and if you try to deprive me of it, I can’t live with it. That’s what the industry was doing to me, and I had a gut-fall of that. I couldn’t do anything less. I had to get myself as far away.… Well, although Carmine was nice to me, I wasn’t having a great time with him. He was an artist who didn’t know how to be an editor or a publisher. It was his first joust with that kind of—

ROZ KIRBY: But, he gave you the opportunity to do your own work.

KIRBY: Yes, he gave me the opportunity to do The New Gods, and The New Gods was actually a blessing to me because I got off on another course, and The New Gods made sales for DC.

ROZ KIRBY: He had complete control over the writing. He picked his own inker. He could do anything he wanted.

KIRBY: Yeah. Nobody bothered me out here, and I did The New Gods as I saw ’em. I did The New Gods as I felt they should be done.

GROTH: Was it a tough decision to go from Marvel to DC?

ROZ KIRBY: No, because he made more money. They offered him more money.

KIRBY: DC was actually like a haven because I was an individual there. I was able to do something under my own name. In other words, if I wrote, “Jack Kirby” wrote it. If I drew, “Jack Kirby” drew it. And the truth was there, and I began to write and draw, and I felt at last a sense of freedom, and with the sales rising from those books, my freedom became more apparent to me, and I felt a hell of a lot better.

GROTH:When Infantino came out and talked to you, did he offer you all this, or did you actually negotiate for it? Did you tell him you wanted more control over the work?

ROZ KIRBY: He just said we’d like you to work, and Jack said, “Well, I’ll give you three books.”

GROTH: But it was Jack who basically made the suggestion that he do the books, that he have control over them, and so forth.

KIRBY: Yes. That’s what I wanted, and I told Carmine, and he gave them to me. And the books I did for DC were—

ROZ KIRBY: They offered him Superman, but he said he wouldn’t take Superman.

KIRBY: No, I wouldn’t take Superman.

ROZ KIRBY: But he says, “What’s the worst selling book?” and he says, “Jimmy Olsen.” He says, “Give me Jimmy Olsen, and I’ll see what I can do with it.”

KIRBY: I took Jimmy Olsen because it was a dog. It didn’t have the sales of Superman, and I felt the best way I could prove myself was taking a book that was slow and speeding up it’s sales. That’s the way to prove yourself. And so I took Jimmy Olsen, and Jimmy Olsen became part of the series of books that I did for DC, and they all made money. Jimmy Olsen was making money. DC couldn’t believe it. [Laughter.]

“A Superman in Supertown” in Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #147 (March 1972) was inked and lettered by Mike Royer ©1972 DC Comics​

GROTH: How was your relationship with DC during that whole period?

KIRBY: Oh, it was… I had some trouble with them, too.

ROZ KIRBY: Not at the beginning. They let you alone, and they didn’t bother you. When you started doing The New Gods they didn’t bother you.

KIRBY: No, they didn’t bother me when I was doing The New Gods, but there was temperament to contend with, and they had all new editorial people. There was a lot of different temperament to contend with.

ROZ KIRBY: They changed his Superman’s head.

KIRBY: Well, they…

GROTH: They had Curt Swan re-draw all of your Superman heads, didn’t they?

ROZ KIRBY: Now everybody does Superman a different way.

KIRBY: They cut the heads off my Superman, and then they replaced them with a standard Superman head.

GROTH: Did that bother you?

KIRBY: Yes, it bothered me, of course, because a man is entitled to draw things in his own style. I didn’t hurt Superman. I made him powerful. I admire Superman, but I’ve got to do my own style. That’s how I would see it, and I had a right to do that, and nobody had the right to tamper with your work and shape it differently. What if he gave it to an amateur? Think of what an amateur might do to your work. What if this guy thought this amateur had great possibilities, and he wanted to see what he could do with that story? And he picked your story? And you knew damn well what would happen.

GROTH: Luckily, they would never do such a thing. [Silence.] A little joke.

KIRBY:[Chuckling.] Yes. Let me say that all editorial decisions coming down from administration weren’t always wise.

GROTH:[Laughter.] That’s putting it kindly.

KIRBY: Let me put it that way.

GROTH: When you made the decision to go to DC, and I assume you called up Marvel and told them that you were leaving and that you weren’t going to do any more work for them; what was the reaction at Marvel?

KIRBY: First of all, Marvel already had very popular strips going, and they didn’t throw any ropes around me to hold me. It was my decision. They knew I was going to make it anyway, and so I went over to DC to do it.

GROTH: So Marvel didn’t attempt to win you back?

KIRBY: No, they didn’t attempt to win me back.

GROTH: Hmm.

ROZ KIRBY: They didn’t care because they had all these artists waiting in the wings who drew like Jack Kirby. Kirby imitators.

GROTH: How do you feel about the people who don’t merely draw the characters you created, but duplicate your whole style or copy from you directly?

KIRBY: I think they’re betraying themselves. I don’t think they’ll make an impression that way. First of all, they destroy themselves. They destroy their own image. What they do is perpetuate my image. Their storytelling is not going to improve sales, so how could copying my work help them in any way? There can’t be two Jack Kirbys and there can’t be two Carmine Infantinos and there can’t be two Stan Lees.

GROTH: Thank God.

KIRBY: We’re all individuals.

ROZ KIRBY: Actually, we received a copy of a strip from a young fan and copies of Thor — of one of Jack’s old Thors— and then of the new Thor. You lift up the page and they’re actually traced.

KIRBY: Yes. They’re doing that now. They’re tracing my figures and using them in panels, but even if they trace my figures, it only comes out awkward in the panel itself in conjunction with the background and the type of story that it is. I can tell you my figures are well-drawn, and they’re very saleable, but doing it in maybe one or two panels is not going to sell that story, and that’s amateur thinking, and if Rembrandt were doing comic books and I took one picture of Rembrandt’s and put it in a comic book story, it would make the entire story look awkward. The reader would be mystified. He’d lose track of his story and would begin to wonder why this figure was so different from the rest of them. If you distract the reader, you cannot tell the story. You can’t put anything into that story that doesn’t belong there. The artist’s style has to be true to his own imagination, and he has to have his own way of telling the story, and the reader associates all that, and it makes it easier for the reader to absorb. If you put any distraction— you can do it in a movie, you can do it in the theater — if there is any distraction that halts the story or makes it look awkward, it’s like an actor faltering on stage. He’s got to get up as quickly as he can and continue the action without trying to break up the movement of the script. That’s what happens to an inker or a penciller. To imitate somebody else is to inject something into the story that will distract the reader. Once you distract the reader, the story has no point.

GROTH: You were doing The New Gods material for DC. What led you to leave DC?

KIRBY: Like I say…

ROZ KIRBY: Carmine Infantino? [Laughter.]

KIRBY: Like I say, there are people in editorial positions that shouldn’t be there. This seemed to be a period where Marvel and DC were relying on the wrong people in the right positions. These were the people who were wrong for these positions.

ROZ KIRBY: Then, Marvel finally said, well, they offered him even more money than DC, and they let you have the freedom to do the same kind of book that you were doing for DC for Marvel. That’s when you did The Eternals, Space Odyssey and…

KIRBY: Yeah. I did some fine work for Marvel.

ROZ KIRBY: It was still the matter of…

KIRBY: I did my own stories.

ROZ KIRBY: It was all a matter of income, of making more money.

GROTH: Did your relationship with DC deteriorate over the course of your stint there?

KIRBY: Yeah, there was always an editor who would operate in the wrong fashion, but with artists, it was making money for the book, and he was the publisher’s choice. There were some editors who were still affectatious. If a guy is affectatious, he’s going to interfere with your work, and he’s going to want to say that you did the work, but he did the creation. In other words, he influenced the entire —

GROTH: Frankly, I thought your last stint at Marvel was a little half-hearted, The Eternals and Space Odyssey and so forth.

ROZ KIRBY: Yeah, because it was an afterthought. After he did The New Gods, what more could he do?

GROTH: Anti-climactic, right.

ROZ KIRBY: An anticlimax.

“Orion Fights for Earth!” in The New Gods #1 (March 1971) inked by Vince Colletta ©1971 DC Comics​

GROTH: Did you ever sense that it was a little…?

KIRBY: Well, no, I… You can go on with it if you like, or you can change it to something else if you like, but there comes a point when you’ve had a belly-full of the industry itself. I mean, you just throw up and say, “What the Hell!?” I mean, what am I, a man or a thing? I can’t live with this thing, and I couldn’t. What I told them in effect was, “Screw you! I’ll get mine somewhere else.” And I did. I moved from New York. I was away from the office, and the influence of the industry itself. I would sit in my own house and that was my world.

GROTH: Let me ask you this: in the ’70s when you were working for DC and you went back to Marvel, do you think you were more aware of your subservient position to publishers then you were perhaps previously?

KIRBY: Yes, and like I said, I’d had a belly-full of being subservient. I had to find something else to do, and I did. I went to the animation houses [in Hollywood]. I went to new fields. I did what I should have done in the first place. Joe Simon went back to commercial art, and he found his place in life.

ROZ KIRBY: He always wanted to go to Hollywood.

From The Fantastic Four #9 (December 1962) “The End of the Fantastic Four!” ©Marvel Comics, Inc.​

KIRBY: I wanted to go to Hollywood, and I finally did.

GROTH: You’re also a born cartoonist.

KIRBY: I’m a guy who had to perform some way. I had to perform in some way. If not as an actor, I’d perform as an artist. It would have been something that would be outstanding in its own way.

GROTH: Can I ask you who you were dealing with at Marvel when you went back in the ’70s? Did you have an editor that you were dealing with? I ‘m not sure if Stan was very involved —

ROZ KIRBY: Jack just wrote, and he had his own books. He didn’t have an editor.

KIRBY: Yeah.

ROZ KIRBY: Mike Rover did all the inking here. We sent them a complete package.

KIRBY: Yeah. We sent them a complete package.

GROTH: Can you tell me haw your affiliation with Pacific came about?

KIRBY: Well, it came about normally. I began meeting people at conventions. I met the people from Pacific.

ROZ KIRBY: The Schanes brothers.

KIRBY: Yeah, the Schanes brothers.

ROZ KIRBY: They asked Jack if he wanted to do books for them. This was at a time when Jack never got any royalties, and they said he’d have complete control and he would get his royalties.

KIRBY: On Captain Victory I got royalties.

ROZ KIRBY: And they said, do you have another book for us? So. Jack said. what should I do? He had a 50 page synopsis for a TV show or a movie. So I said why don’t you just take this in and break it down into the comic book. So actually Silver Star was the storyboard for a movie.

GROTH: I see. Now how did that relationship work out?

ROZ KIRBY: We had to call every minute [and ask] “Where’s the money? Where’s the check?” “It’s in the mail.” [Laughter.]

KIRBY: She remembers a lot more than I do.

ROZ KIRBY: But, they usually finally got it to us.

KIRBY: Yeah, they finally got it to us, but…

ROZ KIRBY: We’re still friends.

GROTH: Did you find that to be a pretty good…

KIRBY: It was a frustrating relationship because of that kind of thing.

ROZ KIRBY: We had to get on the phone constantly.

KIRBY: In other words, it’s a question of reminding people. I didn’t like to be in that position.

ROZ KIRBY: It was embarrassing for me because I had to handle the whole thing.

KIRBY: And she still does today.

GROTH: Would you consider that to be better than your business relationship with Marvel and DC and how you were treated?

KIRBY: There were no personalities involved. They treated me like a human being. I treated them like human beings. On a personal level, there was no problem. On a financial level, it was a problem of regularity.

ROZ KIRBY: Jenette Kahn has always been very kind to us and when [DC was] approached to do some toys they wanted to do some New Gods figures, and she came in one day — she was at the Beverly Hills Hotel — and we had a meeting with her, and she said, “Look, we know what Marvel always did to you. You were always getting screwed all your life, and we want to be fair. We feel that you created this, and that you should get something out of it.” They were very nice about it. We had nice meetings and they were very fair about it.

KIRBY: And they still are. Jenette Kahn is a fine person. On occasion we’ll get to New York, and I’ll see Jenette Kahn, and we’ll have a wonderful time. So I think the comic field has gained in that respect.

ROZ KIRBY: At least she had heart, let’s put it that way.

KIRBY: With that kind of management, a deal could be made on a humane level.

ROZ KIRBY: We were very close to Julie Schwartz. We love him. He drives us nuts, but we love him. [Laughter.]

KIRBY: I always had good relations with Julie Schwartz, Murray Boltinoff, Joe Orlando.

GROTH: Let me ask you this: Looking over you life’s work, are you pleased with what you’ve done? Are you satisfied?

KIRBY: I know I’ve done quite a bit. I know that in my hunger for making a living, I might have created a few monsters. Maybe that’s natural. I don’t know. But I can tell you that Marvel was my making, and I can tell you that DC never lost anything from any of my work.

GROTH: Creatively, how do you feel about your career?

KIRBY: Creatively, I’ve done well. Creatively, I’ve never done anything—

ROZ KIRBY: You were ashamed of.

KIRBY: Not being ashamed of, but I’ve never done anything bad. I can’t do anything bad. It’s got to be professional. It’s got to look professional. It’s got to read professional. In other words, it serves its purpose by entertaining a reader, see? If a carpenter makes a chair that’s comfortable for the person who’s going to sit in it, he’s done his job. If a train engineer gets a train in on time, he’s going to make someone happy who’s waiting at the station. And if an artist draws the kind of a picture that people are going to enjoy looking at, or he makes a visual story which people are going to enjoy reading, he’s done his job. I can say that I’ve done my job extremely well. My only beef is that a lot of people have put their fingers in whatever I’ve done and tried to screw it up, and I’ve always resented that. I always resent anybody interfering with anybody else trying to do his job. Everybody has his own job to do. If he’s good, he’ll do well, but if he’s mediocre, he’s not going to do as well as he should. I believe that I’m in a thorough, professional class who’ll give you the best you can get. You won’t get any better than the stuff that I can do. In the Army, during the war — which my wife won’t talk about — [Laughter.] I didn’t know whether I’d make it or not, but I can tell you that I did my very level best, OK? And that, scared or not, I did my job, and I would do my job wherever I am. If I had to, say, give up my life for my family, I wouldn’t hesitate a minute, and if I had to do anything for a good friend, I wouldn’t hesitate a minute. I wouldn’t ask any questions at all. I’m that kind of a guy. I’m a guy who’ll do it. If you ask him to do it, and he wants to do it, you’ll get it full measure. I’ve never done anything half-heartedly. It’s the reason my comics did well. It’s the reason my comics were drawn well. I can’t do anything bad. I won’t do anything bad, and I resent very deeply bad people who haven’t got the ability, who try to interfere with the kind of work I’m trying to do because nobody’s going to benefit from it. If you’re a thorough professional, and they won’t let you do a professional job, nobody’s going to benefit from it. The people who produce it won’t benefit. The people who buy it won’t benefit from it. They’re going to get a half-assed product, and I believe that’s what the editorial people in comics at that time bought. They bought a half-assed product, or they created a half-assed product, and that’s what they got in return, they got half-assed returns,

ROZ KIRBY: Have you been satisfied with what you’ve done?

KIRBY: Have I been satisfied with what I’ve done?

GROTH: Yeah.

KIRBY: If I’ve done it myself, I’ve always been satisfied. If somebody interfered, it always created a bad period in my life.

GROTH: What was the most creatively rewarding period in your career?

KIRBY: I believe when I was given full rein on The New Gods. I was given full rein on The New Gods, and I was given full rein on Mr. Miracle. Mr. Miracle was a fine strip. I was given full rein on many other strips, which sold extremely well and made me very happy. I was happy doing them because as a professional, you’ve got to take the credit for it, or you’ve got to take the, beating for it. I don’t like to take a beating without being responsible.

©1971 DC COmics​

GROTH: You don’t want to take somebody else’s beating.

KIRBY: I don’t want to take somebody else’s beating. That makes me unhappy. So right now, I can tell you, I’m a happy man because whatever I’m doing, I do for myself and I do a little creating here and there for others, and they work out very well. I feel like an independent man, and I am. This is the kind of feeling I always wanted. You can rarely get that… Well, I could rarely get that in the early part of my life.

GROTH: I think most people can rarely get that. You have to fight for it.

KIRBY: Yes.

 

[Khalil's_Black_Excellence]

You don't honestly expect anyone to read all that do you?

 

[Blaze500]

Kirby was the real guy behind Marvel..he created all the classic characters we know and love

 

[The Mad Titan]

Kriby was the brains and stan lee was the face.

Also why not just post a link no way im scrolling through reading all that.