Jack Kirby, Charlie Chaplin and Louis Armstrong

August 28 is the 100th birthday of comics great Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg, whose work remains in print 23 years after his death and whose creations are more widely known than ever due to their adaptations in movies and TV.

In the days before World War II, the United States experienced an explosion of pop culture due to the invention of the movies, the phonograph and cheap colour printing.  These media, with no pedigree, were developed by hardscrabble entrepreneurs who used them to appeal to the same lower classes that they came from themselves.  Being disreputable, these media were open to anyone; talent and productivity were all that mattered.  Kirby found a home in comic books, Chaplin in films and Armstrong in music.

The three had childhoods of poverty in common.  Kirby grew up on Manhattan's lower east side, perhaps the most densely populated place on Earth at the time.  Violence was a daily occurrence, as rival gangs of kids fought to protect what little they had.  Kirby's parents were uneducated immigrants and Kirby's father worked in factories for the garment trade doing piece work.  Chaplin was the son of two music hall entertainers in London.  His parents divorced, his father died of alcoholism and his mother suffered from mental illness.  Chaplin spent time living on the street and in a workhouse for the indigent.  Armstrong's parents did not cohabit and he was born in the black ghetto of New Orleans during the worst days of institutionalized white supremacy.  He spent some time in a reform school for black children.

Kirby benefited from a stable family, even if his father was not the best provider.  However, while Chaplin and Armstrong had role models, Kirby was sui generis.  Chaplin's parents and an aunt were all performers.  Armstrong lived in a city where marching bands  performed almost daily, publicising events and accompanying funerals.  Even his reform school had a band.  There were no artists in Kirby's family and the lower east side was not a place where art was valued.  Kirby found a science fiction pulp magazine in the street.  He was fascinated by the art and stories in it, but hid it, knowing his interest would mark him as different and make him a target.

Each of the three was professionally supported by mentors.  Chaplin's half-brother Sydney helped negotiate his contracts, making Chaplin rich and owner of his films by 1918.  Armstrong was mentored by King Oliver, one of the leading jazz cornet players.  Armstrong later worked for decades under the management of Joe Glaser, a tough man who kept Armstrong in the good graces of the gangsters who ran the venues that Armstrong played and made sure that Armstrong was fairly compensated.  Kirby partnered with Joe Simon, another comics creator a few years older and with a better head for business than Kirby had.  These mentors allowed the three to focus on their art. 

Each of the them changed their fields through the power of their work.  Before Chaplin, film comedy was either the polite society comedy of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew or the raucous, high-speed slapstick of Mack Sennett.  Chaplin kept the slapstick but slowed it down to focus more on character.  Throughout his career, he introduced elements of pathos and social commentary that added further dimension to his character of the little tramp.

Jazz before Armstrong was an ensemble art.  With his recordings in the 1920s, Armstrong made jazz the art of the soloist.  His vocals added both humour and emotion to pop singing and influenced all the singers who came after him.

Kirby's initial innovation was his dynamic posing of characters, bringing a much greater sense of motion to the static comics medium.  However, his innovations went beyond drawing.  His working class roots powered series like The Newsboy Legion and the comics he did after the war, showing characters struggling against poverty and prejudice.  Kirby's time in the infantry in World War II left him aware of giant forces that buffeted individuals and threatened their survival.  In the 1960s, he used that experience to expand comics' subject matter beyond Earth, reducing humanity from the dominant species to one beset by cosmic super beings with their own agendas. 

With Simon, Kirby co-created Captain America and after being swindled out of profits by the publisher, they moved to a competitor where they got a better deal.  After the war, Simon and Kirby had a studio employing other artists and sold work to a variety of publishers.  During this time, the two created the genre of romance comics, as well as working on crime, horror, western and superhero comics.  Kirby's work on these titles, though not as well known as his later work, is some of his best.  He was free to write and draw what interested him, and his stories are filled with fully developed characters struggling against social forces.

After the war, the careers of Kirby, Chaplin and Armstrong diverged.  Chaplin's politics alienated the public and the government during the cold war and he went into exile in the early 1950s, making just two more films.  Armstrong continued to be popular until his death, touring the world and continuing to record.  Kirby went through a fallow period in the 1950s when television and a panic over juvenile delinquency both reduced the demand for comic books.  Simon and Kirby split up, leaving Kirby to freelance in a shrinking market.

Eventually, he landed at Marvel, where his best remembered work was done, designing and co-creating The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Iron Man, The X-Men, The Avengers, The Inhumans, The Black Panther, Nick Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D, Thor and hundreds of villains and supporting characters.  While Simon and Kirby's partnership was one of equals, Kirby's work with Stan Lee was not.  Lee was Kirby's employer, and his position as editor and dialogue writer meant that he controlled Kirby's income and could alter Kirby's stories without Kirby's knowledge or approval.  Lee's lack of interest in writing stories from scratch meant that Kirby created the characters and plotted the comics, but Lee's editorial changes eventually caused Kirby to leave.

At DC, Kirby created the purest work in his post-Simon career, writing and drawing The Forever People, The New Gods, and Mr. Miracle.  The three series were part of a single epic, built on Kirby's recurring theme of gods interacting with the human world and explicitly dealing with the threat of fascism.  After questionable editorial decisions cancelled those titles, Kirby created Kamandi, The Demon and Omac.

Returning to Marvel after being disappointed at DC, Kirby created Machine Man, Devil Dinosaur, and The Eternals, another series about humans witnessing gods in conflict.  When editorial direction forced his hand yet again, Kirby moved into the animation business where, thanks to the union, he received vacation pay and benefits for the first time in his career.  While Chaplin and Armstrong built up bodies of work that continued to generate income for them, Kirby did not own his comics work.  He was paid once for each page he created.  He received no bonuses for creating new series or characters. Only his last few comics series, done for new publishers, allowed him to own his creations.

While movies and jazz were looked down on by cultural elites early in their existence, there were perceptive critics who saw the value of work by Chaplin and Armstrong.  Eventually, the popularity of movies and jazz caused mainstream publications to pay attention to them.  Comic books never achieved the level of popularity as those forms, so Kirby is not as well known.  However, he is easily as influential and as important a creator.

The level of contemporary comics criticism has improved in recent years but no one has done Kirby justice yet.  His art has attracted much comment, but Kirby is far more than the way he drew.  Yes, his abstract conception of human anatomy is visually powerful, but his evolving style, compositions, panel-to-panel continuity and themes have yet to be fully plumbed.  In truth, Kirby is too big for comics criticism as it currently exists, as few are equipped to deal with both the artistic and literary aspects of his work.

Like Chaplin and Armstrong, Kirby's work transcends pop culture due to his perception, his technique, and the depth of his emotional involvement.  One hundred years after his birth, Kirby's work is there for anyone with a desire to be entertained or for anyone who cares to go deeper and understand that Jack Kirby was one of the most important creators of the 20th century.

Jack Kirby's 98th Birthday

August 28 would have been Jack Kirby's 98th birthday.  While Kirby has been gone since 1994, it's still a day to celebrate for a variety of reasons.  First, Kirby's influence on popular culture is probably larger than it's ever been.  The Daily Herald reports that movies featuring characters created or co-created by Kirby have grossed $6.7 billion world-wide.  That doesn't count TV shows, toys and comics that are still being made based on his work.

Another reason to celebrate is that this is his first birthday since his estate received a settlement from Marvel and Disney for his creations.  While the amount is unknown, one hopes that it was significant given the earning power that Kirby's creations are still showing.  Marvel, which for years downplayed Kirby's role, is once again celebrating him now that the legal battles are over.

Charles Hatfield, author of Hand of Fire, an analysis of Kirby's work, has curated an exhibit of Kirby originals at the California  State University Northridge Art Galleries that runs until October 10 entitled Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby.  If you're in the area, I would urge you to see it.  As powerful as Kirby's work is in print, the originals are more forceful.  Hatfield says, "The catalog is a monster: 20 essays on Kirby, most of them short and punchy, interleaved with more than a hundred images, most shot from original art. It's a joint publishing venture between the CSUN Art Galleries and IDW, under Scott Dunbier's eye and with design by Randall Dahlk, who designed IDW's incredible Kirby Artist's Editions. It's in production even now."

If you are in the mood to immerse yourself in Kirby's drawings, Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter has put together an online gallery of his work that spans a good portion of his career.  And if you're looking for a more personal reminiscence, you can't go wrong reading Mark Evanier, who had the great fortune to work with Kirby and know him for around 25 years.

As powerful as Kirby's images are, single images don't address his strength as a storyteller.  I've just finished reading Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate by Brian McDonald.  It's an excellent book on story structure and one of the best books on story creation I've ever read.  In his first chapter, he talks about structure in a way that illuminates Kirby as a writer.

Often when I listen to how people evaluate stories, I hear them talk about dialogue.  When they talk about "the script" for a film, they are often talking about the dialogue.  Or when they mention how well a book is written, they most often mean the way the words are put together -- the beauty of a sentence.

When people speak of Shakespeare's work, they almost always talk about the beauty of the language.

These are all forms of "visible ink."  This term refers to writing that is readily "seen" by the reader or viewer, who often mistakes these words on the page as the only writing the storyteller is doing.

But how events in a story are ordered is also writing.  What events should occur in a story to make the teller's point is also writing.  Why a character behaves in a particular way is also writing.

These are all forms of "invisible ink," so called because they are not easily spotted by a reader, viewer or listener of a story.  Invisible ink does, however, have a profound impact on a story.  More to the point, it is the story.  Invisible ink is the writing below the surface of the words.  Most people will never see or notice it, but they will feel it.

Kirby often worked with collaborators, sometimes by choice and sometimes not.  However, in telling the story pictorially, he was writing the story.  The contents of each panel, the continuity from panel to panel, the choice of "camera" distance and angle, the composition, the character poses, the facial expressions, the use of black ink, etc. all told the story before the dialogue was added.  As McDonald would say, it was the story.  As distinctive as Kirby's images are, it is also his imagination and his storytelling that make him worth remembering and studying.

Jack Kirby Makes Disney and Marvel Blink

Next Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States was to announce whether it would hear an appeal from the Jack Kirby estate over the estate's copyright claims.

Today, Marvel and the Kirby estate jointly announced that they have reached a settlement.

“Marvel and the family of Jack Kirby have amicably resolved their legal disputes, and are looking forward to advancing their shared goal of honoring Mr. Kirby’s significant role in Marvel’s history.” 

I hope that more details emerge.  From my perspective, I hope that Jack Kirby receives co-creator credit on the various comics he spearheaded with Stan Lee.  Furthermore, I hope that the estate receives royalties on Kirby reprints, Kirby designed merchandise and the flood of superhero movies that are being made using characters that Kirby designed and co-created.

There are people who are constantly commenting on various news sites that Kirby's children and grandchildren had nothing to do with creating the work and so don't deserve anything.  My response is that Robert Iger and the stockholders of the Walt Disney company had nothing to do with it either, yet they're making money from it.  Why do their rights trump Kirby's family?

I congratulate the Kirby family for their persistence.  If Jack and Roz Kirby were alive, they would be very proud that their family stood up to one of the largest entertainment conglomerates on the planet and made them acknowledge the value of Jack Kirby's work. 

It's nice to get a happy ending.

Supreme Court to Rule on Jack Kirby Case?

Updated at the bottom.

Readers of this blog know of my interest in creator rights and the work of Jack Kirby.  Kirby was one of the most prolific comic book artists of the 20th century.  It's not just that he turned out an enormous amount of work, it's that he created more characters - both heroes and villains - than anyone else.

At the time he did his work, the comic book business was run by people with questionable ethics and business practices.  As a result, Marvel does not have a clear title to the characters Kirby created and Kirby's children have fought in court to recover the copyrights to their father's work.  So far, the courts have ruled in Marvel's favour.  However, the issue is not yet resolved and the Supreme Court of the United States will soon decide whether to hear the latest appeal.  In the corporatist time we live in, I'm skeptical that the court will rule against Marvel and Disney, but there is still a chance.

The Hollywood Reporter has the latest on this case and it is worth reading.

If you create material that you pitch to broadcasters or studios, you own the copyright to your work.  While the thrill of a sale can be overwhelming, don't lose your copyright without fully understanding the repercussions.  It is the single most valuable part of your creation.  If Jack Kirby owned the copyright to his characters, his life would have been very different and each of his four children would be multimillionaires.  Instead, Disney is not paying the estate when they reprint Kirby's work or when they make blockbuster movies featuring Kirby's characters.

Creative people need to understand what happened to Jack Kirby (and Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Bill Finger) in order to prevent it from happening to them.  Educate yourself.

Update: The Hollywood Reporter says that the actors, writers and directors unions are filing briefs in support of the Kirby case being taken up by the Supreme Court.  The article points out that the case could have repercussions for the music industry as well.

Anniversaries

For a short month, February has a lot of anniversaries, and this February marks several milestones.

February 8 was the 100th anniversary of the release of Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur.  First performed in vaudeville by McCay, it was not the first animated film by McCay or others, but it was arguably the most influential of the silent era, as it inspired many other cartoonists of the time to try their hands at animation.
February 2 was the 100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin's debut on film in Making a Living.

That was followed on February 7 by the release of Kid Auto Races at Venice, the first film where he wore the costume of his tramp character.

February 1 was the 120th birthday of director John Ford and February 6 was the 20th anniversary of Jack Kirby's death.  Both of these men continue to occupy my thoughts and their work continues to occupy my attention.

Jack Kirby's 96th

Jack Kirby, 1946

Jack Kirby, who passed away in 1994, would have been 96 years old today.  Here are a selection of links to celebrate Kirby's life and work.
Mark Evanier, who knew and worked with Kirby, reminisces.
Tom Spurgeon prints a large variety of Kirby artwork.
WhatifKirby.com has a gallery of over 1000 pages to see.
Kirby's granddaughter, Jillian, has a photo album on Facebook that includes many family photos.
Rob Steibel examines a Kirby page from Thor.
And here are tumblr posts tagged Jack Kirby.

A Discussion of the Kirby Copyright Decision

I'm sure some of you have your eyes glaze over every time I bring up Jack Kirby or copyright. However, I keep mentioning it as intellectual property, more than factories or natural resources, has become one of the most valuable assets in the world today.

The decision against the Kirby estate in its attempt to recover copyrights on many of the Marvel characters is a warning to anyone who creates for a living.

At the Center for Cartoon Studies, a graduate school program in comics located in Vermont, Stephen R. Bissette, cartoonist, publisher and creator rights advocate, discussed the Kirby decision with lawyer Oliver Goodenough, a professor at the Vermont Law School. The audio runs an hour and covers issues like nepotism, work-for-hire, risk, ethics and the history of employer-employee relations in the comic book field. I recommend it highly.

Jack Kirby's 94th Birthday

August 28 would have been Jack Kirby's 94th birthday. Mark Evanier, who worked with Kirby, has his birthday tribute here, including an embedded documentary on Kirby made for the DVD release of one of the Fantastic Four movies. Tom Spurgeon prints a great gallery of Kirby artwork and Mark Seifert has a gallery of Kirby originals to enjoy.

I wish that we could be celebrating the success of the Kirby estate's attempt to recover copyrights, but the recent court decision that went against the Kirby estate is now being appealed. Perhaps there will be better news for Kirby's next birthday.

Kirby Estate Loses Copyright Battle

I am sure that this judgment will be appealed, but a Federal court has ruled that the work Jack Kirby did for Marvel was "work-for-hire." This is despite the fact that the legal term was not part of the copyright law at the time Kirby co-created characters such as The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, The Silver Surfer, Thor, etc.

Here's the Associated Press story and here is Deadline Hollywood's.

While I am sure that there is a celebration occurring in the Disney and Marvel boardrooms as a result of this ruling, it's a questionable victory. When the artists at Marvel realized that the company was not going to compensate them beyond paying them by the page, they simply stopped creating new characters. Image Comics exists because a group of artists realized they would never be fairly compensated for their work at Marvel and so they formed their own company. Marvel's treatment of their artists has been consistently bad. See this article on the recently deceased Gene Colan.

Corporate copyright is strangling creativity, not promoting it.

Kirby's case and the ongoing litigation regarding the Superman copyright are just more evidence that anyone who creates something without securing ownership is a chump. It's one thing to be hired onto an ongoing project or series to make a contribution, but quite another to originate an idea and only be paid a regular salary or a flat price.

Stop giving your ideas to corporations. Own them and control them. Or else there will be more Jack Kirbys, Jerry Siegels, Joe Shusters, and Gene Colans ad infinitum.

Why in hell should stockholders and executives who weren't born when the work was created be profiting from it when the people who created it and their heirs get nothing?

(For my earlier take on the benefits of ownership, go here. For Heidi MacDonald, a comics news columnist, on the Kirby decision go here. It's worth quoting her conclusion: "Don’t ever create characters for work for hire, no matter how much “back end” you’re promised. In this day and age there is NO excuse for giving up your creations. We may never see another Jack Kirby among us, but let his lessons stand, both the triumphs and the sadness." )

The Benefits of Ownership

Two comics, two creators, two different outcomes.

A couple of things popped up this week which show, by contrast, the benefits of ownership.

Jeff Smith is a former animator who is the creator of Bone and RASL. Bone began in the '90s as a self-published comic book distributed to comics shops. Since then, Smith has collected the comics in a series of graphic novels and a one volume edition. Scholastic Books reprinted the series in colour and later this year, there will be a one volume colour edition.

Smith had a movie deal with Nickelodeon for Bone, but Nickelodeon dragged things out Smith and Nickelodeon parted company. Later, Smith made a deal for Bone with Warner Bros. The experience with Nickelodeon made Smith more demanding, and Warner Bros. agreed to his terms.

Now, Smith's latest comics series RASL has also been sold to Hollywood.

The week, the depositions in the copyright termination case brought by the Jack Kirby estate against Marvel were made public. The case turns on whether Kirby's work was at the direction of the company or if Kirby was a creator who sold his work to Marvel. The waters are muddy as the legal arrangements in the comic book business in the 1960s were shockingly casual.

Regardless of the legal decision and one's own opinion, Kirby is definitely the designer of The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Thor, Ant Man, Nick Fury, The X-Men, and the many villains and supporting characters who filled the stories that he drew for these characters.

Kirby was way more prolific than Jeff Smith in terms of the number of his creations and the number of pages he drew. Yet Smith is a millionaire and Kirby never received a nickel beyond what he was paid for each individual page.

Because Smith owns Bone, he has been able to repackage it and profit from it each time. He's been able to merchandise it and license it to other media. He will be able to do the same with RASL and will be an executive producer of the film.

Kirby owned nothing of what he created at Marvel, unless the termination of copyright suit determines otherwise. Just using the Hulk as an example, the work has been reprinted countless times, been an animated TV series, a live action TV series, two feature films and countless toys, posters, etc. Kirby was not compensated for any of this.

As much as we love animation, it is a team sport. It takes a lot of people and a lot of money to make a film. That leaves animation creators pitching their ideas to corporations in order to get their ideas funded, and the corporations routinely take ownership. A first-time creator has no leverage to gain a percentage of the profits, merchandising or to reserve certain rights. In this regard, animation creators resemble Jack Kirby more than they resemble Jeff Smith.

However, if you can establish ownership of your property and demonstrate that it has an audience, you can continue to control and to profit from your work. That probably means working in a medium other than animation to start with, but given Hollywood's current mindset about sequels and pre-sold properties, it's probably more likely you'll get an animated film made by creating something outside animation than inside it.

Jeff Smith could take advantage of different economic circumstances in the comic book field in the '90s than Jack Kirby had in the 1960s. And with all due respect to Kirby, Smith has a better head for business than Kirby ever had. That's the point. I'd be hard pressed to name anyone who worked in popular culture in the 20th century who was more fertile or prolific than Jack Kirby. Smith, by comparison, is a lightweight. But because Smith maintained ownership of his work, he maintained more control of it and made more money from it than Jack Kirby. That's the benefit of ownership.

Cautionary Tales

Jack Kirby (left) and Jerry Siegel. Both of their estates are in litigation to recover the copyrights to the comic book characters they created.

The comic book business is not the animation business, but both depend on the work of artists whose legal relationship to their creations is often misunderstood or ambiguous. Paul Slade has written a long article on the legal challenges that comics creators have launched against their employers in an attempt to regain ownership of their creations. It brings to mind the quote attributed to Balzac, "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime."

(link via Journalista. Image via Booksteve's Library.)

It's Clobberin' Time!

Rich Johnston, Nikki Finke and the N.Y. Times are reporting that the estate of Jack Kirby has filed for termination of copyright on the characters he co-created for Marvel Comics. Will this have an impact on Disney's intended purchase of Marvel?

There is no single person in the history of comic books who created more successful characters than Jack Kirby. There is no one in the history of comic books who received less of his rightful financial due than Kirby. I have no idea how this will play out, but I hope that the Kirby estate realizes millions from this. I'm only sorry that Kirby himself isn't alive to benefit from it.

Kirby, King of Comics

Mark Evanier's biography of Jack Kirby, entitled Kirby, King of Comics, has been published by Abrams. The book is a retrospective of Kirby's career as an artist, starting with boyhood drawings and covering his lengthy career in the comic book industry. Evanier's text is a biography of Kirby.

I like this book a lot and anyone who loves Kirby's work won't need my recommendation to buy it. However, while Evanier's text does a good job of delineating Kirby's background, personality and work ethic, and while Evanier's love for Kirby as a person and a subject comes through, it doesn't begin to do justice to Kirby as an artist. Evanier has stated in an interview that, "I'm very happy that it came out from a very prestigious art book publisher. They're the same people who publish Picasso's work -- and I think that Jack deserves to be on the same shelf as Picasso." As much as I love Kirby, I don't know if I would agree with that. One thing I know, however, is that a book on Picasso would examine his artistic innovations and his place in the larger art world. This book doesn't do that for Kirby.

You can't write about D.W. Griffith at Biograph without talking about how his use of the camera and editing changed the way that movies communicated to an audience. Similarly, Kirby's dynamic figures, his tilted compositions and his page designs had a huge impact on how stories were told in early comic books. Kirby's treatment of the figure continued to evolve over the course of his career and surely the representation of the human figure is a topic of importance in the art world.

There are also sociological aspects to Kirby that are ignored. One of the most curious sides of Kirby's career is that he and partner Joe Simon created the genre of romance comics. I would be hard pressed to name a comic book artist who I think is less suited to romance, yet the books were immensely successful in the late 1940s. Gil Kane once remarked that Kirby's repressed anger showed up in his superhero costumes, which were covered with straps, buckles, and other types of restraints. Kirby's love comics are full of huge, operatic emotions and fit the zeitgeist of the time that produced film noir. I doubt they would have succeeded in any other time period. By the time the domesticated '50s rolled around, romance comics had degenerated into tearful women pining for Mr. Right, something alien to Kirby's sensibility.

Evanier's status as a comics professional is both a blessing and a curse for him as an author. It provided him with first-hand knowledge of Kirby and his contemporaries and access to many people who contributed Kirby artwork for the book. However, his life-long exposure to Kirby blinds him to the aspects of Kirby's drawing that someone new to Kirby would struggle to understand.

Furthermore, Evanier's friendship and professional relationship with Stan Lee restricts him to acknowledging Kirby's problems with Lee but he refuses to take sides. Lee is an immensely charming person with media smarts, but the fact remains that Lee's two most important collaborators, Kirby and Steve Ditko, both broke with him and that Lee became wealthy based on those collaborations while his collaborators did not. Instead, they had to fight for acknowledgment. That does not speak well for Lee, even if Evanier refuses to criticize him.

Mark Evanier is working on a more detailed Kirby biography that won't appear for several years. When that book is published, I will buy it and can already predict that I will enjoy it. Jack Kirby is fortunate to have a champion in Mark Evanier and would have been thrilled to see this book. However, Kirby needs other champions. While the specifics of Kirby's life are important, it's his art that is his main claim on our imaginations. Kirby's qualities as a draftsman and designer are too important to ignore. While anyone writing about Kirby is most likely affected by nostalgia for the man or his work, I believe that Kirby needs an unemotional re-evaluation. There's more to say about Kirby's art than is in the text of this book.

Jack Kirby Bio Coming in October

Today is the 13th anniversary of Jack Kirby's death, and Mark Evanier has chosen today to announce the forthcoming publication of Kirby: King of Comics from Harry N. Abrams this October.

I wrote about Kirby last August. He remains a major influence on innumerable artists, animators and film makers. Mark was lucky enough to work with Kirby and has spent the years since his death researching this biography.

But there's more. Mark, being an extremely knowledgable comics historian, is interested in minutiae that the general public would never care about, let alone understand. He's continuing to research Kirby to the nth degree and will publish a second biography a few years from now for the hardcore comics fan.

I eagerly look forward to both volumes and I'm especially pleased that Abrams is publishing the first book as they are a major publisher of art books. Kirby deserves the best.