Peter and the King

Originally published February 5, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1316

The first time I saw him was on television.

I was a kid, and the local news was doing coverage of a comic book convention in New York, one of the now-legendary Phil Seuling conventions. And there was Jack Kirby himself, signing autographs, talking to the TV reporter about the comic fans. The coverage of the convention made it sound tremendously exciting.

(Comic book conventions are generally reported by TV folks with somewhat more respect than, say, a Star Trek convention receives. Each generates a very distinct, fairly repetitious approach. At Trek cons, the attitude of the reporter is invariably, “Look at the goofy Trekkies.” For every hundred Trek fans who are dressed in perfectly normal attire, there’s always one guy wearing Spock ears and a uniform shirt, and that’s the guy that they always train the camera upon. In short, they’re made to look like idiots. But at comic book conventions, they always intone, “That comic book which you bought for twelve cents in your youth is now going for twelve hundred dollars!” and they’ll zoom in on a display of bagged and up-priced comics. Money, as always, commands respect. Of course, that doesn’t take into account the towns where the news crew comes to the comic con looking to do a story about dangerous adult comics, and skews its coverage accordingly. But I digress…)

As the news report concluded with the information that the convention was going to continue through the weekend, I turned to my father and said, “Dad” (I called him “Dad.” We’re very close.) “Dad,” I pleaded, “can we go?” To my complete and utter shock, he said, “Okay.” It’s not like we lived in Timbuktu; we lived in North Jersey at the time, in a town called Bloomfield (in a small house at 11 Albert Terrace, for those of you who are interested in conducting a walking tour of my youth.) Even so, we didn’t go into Manhattan all that often. But in this instance, we packed up and headed into town the next day as I went to my first comic convention.

Now you have to understand, I got into Marvel comics kind of late. I was pretty much a Superman/Batman reader. Furthermore, my dad wasn’t too big on letting me read Marvels. Characters such as the Thing, or the Hulk, or Spider-Man clashed with his sense of aesthetics. He felt that heroes should look heroic, not be dressed in bug-eyed costumes or look like monsters. The DC stable met this criteria, the Marvels did not. So Marvels were sort of my guilty pleasure. Other kids stashed away National Geographic with pictures of topless tribal women; me, I was hiding a few copies of Fantastic Four. So when it was announced in the pages of “Bullpen Bulletins” that Kirby was departing the hallowed halls of Marvel, although this must have come as something of a mortal blow to long-time fans, this earth-shattering news kind of rolled right past me. Being a newcomer, it just didn’t have the sort of emotional punch that the older, more experienced fans must have felt. I understand it now, of course, but back then I just kind of thought, Oh, good, he’ll be doing stuff at DC, my company of choice.

When I attended my first convention, New Gods was what was hitting the stands. I was totally into it, into the entire Fourth World line. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Even at that age, I was able to tell that the characters’ speech patterns were… odd… to say the least. But it was consistently odd, and when you get down to it, I suppose it was appropriate. Let’s face it, visually no one could possibly mistake a Kirby comic for anything else. And if Kirby’s visual style, with its relentlessly dynamic poses, incredibly involved machinery and so on, was fingerprint-unique, then somehow it made sense that his dialogue would read like no one else’s as well (although, let’s face it, reading Kirby’s dialogue certainly left no doubt as to what it was that Stan Lee brought to the party. The success of Marvel’s early characters was shaped as much by what they said as by how they looked, at least in my opinion.)

So my dad brought me to the convention, and sure enough, there was Kirby. To my eyes, he was about seven feet tall, which was a pretty good trick considering he was seated behind a table signing autographs. Brilliantly, I hadn’t brought any comics for him to sign.

So I had him sign my program, book, I think, and I asked, “Is it ‘Darkside’ or ‘Darkseed’?” Either one seemed a viable way to go.

“Darkside,” he told me briskly, and so I didn’t have to lay awake at night anymore, wondering how the villain’s name was pronounced. And then he nodded to me politely, to indicate the audience was over, and it was time for me to step aside and let the next fan up.

It was one of the greatest moments of my life. It was the first time I was in the presence of a comics professional. The autograph line was orderly, and was–as I recall–composed predominantly of kids. That doesn’t seem to be quite as much the case these days. And Kirby was polite and answered my question in a straightforward manner. You couldn’t really ask for better than that.

Once I grew up and entered the industry, I ran into him again from time to time, usually at the San Diego con.

I think the entire period with the struggle over his artwork was one of the saddest times in the history of the industry. Watching the whole thing was like witnessing a messy divorce, in which all the parties involved work on diminishing the contributions, good will, or entitlements of everyone involved. The Marvel camp endeavored to treat Kirby just like any other freelancer, and that was a mistake, because he wasn’t just any other freelancer. He was a cornerstone to the success of Marvel, and should have been handled in that way. The Kirby camp, on the other hand, in its rush to accord Jack his proper due, occasionally rewrote history, diminishing and even shunting aside any contribution that Stan Lee might have made. I was astonished, for instance, to see the claims that Kirby had been single-handedly inspired to create the Hulk when he had witnessed a frantic mother displaying remarkable brawn by lifting a car off her pinned daughter, an incident that made him realize that anger and/or fear could induce incredible strength. But that couldn’t have been the case, because the first Lee/Kirby Hulk had nothing to do with adrenalized power; it was Jekyll/Hyde-meets-werewolf, with Banner changing to the Hulk at moonrise. The entire strength-from-anger-or-fear angle didn’t occur until the Hulk’s debut in Tales to Astonish.

As is usually the case when extreme positions have been staked out, I suspect that the truth lay somewhere between the two. In any event, it was a rather depressing period, and an unfortunate post script to what was undeniably an incredibly productive and fruitful career.

I have two particularly fond memories of Kirby at San Diego (which I know I’ve talked about in previous columns, but this is the Kirby issue of CBG, and so I might as well bring them up.) The first was at a celebration of Jack and Roz Kirby’s wedding anniversary. “Seduction of the Innocent” was playing, and Jack and Roz stepped out onto the dance floor and boogied in most credible fashion to SOTI’s catchy tune, “King Jack.” It gave everyone watching a warm, squooshy feeling.

And the second was one point where I was walking through the lobby of a hotel, and off in a corner I saw Stan and Jack. They were seated fairly close to each other, on two couches, and they appeared to be chatting. Just… chatting. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it seemed a polite exchange. Even, dare I say it… friendly. When all is said and done, after all the acrimony that occurred, that’s the way I would prefer to remember them.

Thanks, Jack. Especially for the autograph.

Ðámņ. I really thought it was “Darkseed.”

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. Also, if you hurry, you can still get a copy of the February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, featuring his superhero-esque short story, “The Archetype”… a story that started out as a notion for a Superman story until he realized that, if it was published, there couldn’t be any more Superman stories.)