Robert Steibel is back with another installment of his column about Jack Kirby: Behind the Lines. Here he looks at pencils from Fantastic Four # 61.
I’d like to do a little group participation experiment with you first. Let’s go ahead and look at an enlarged scan of each Kirby penciled panel one-by-one in sequence (I broke one horizontal panel in half so each image has the same size). When Stan Lee received this entire 20-page story (plus the cover) this is how the art would have looked to him before he added text to Jack’s story – first Stan would read Jack’s entire book (looking at Jack’s art and referring to Jack’s directions in the margins to get the gist of the entire book) then in the next phase Lee would go back and add his own text to Kirby’s story. You can see when these photostats were made Lee had already completed that phase of the process – notice where Lee added empty word balloons. The letterer would have worked off a Lee type-written script and filled in those spots.
I encourage you to look at Jack’s artwork and read Jack’s notes for yourself; think about how you would add text to this imagery if you were the “Guest Editor of the Week” when this book was published in 1967. Or better yet, imagine Marvel is reprinting this material in 2014 and you won a contest and have been selected to add the captions to the story for a nice pile of money. Reflect on how long it takes you to come up with the captions for each panel, and you can compare your own ideas to Lee’s text later.
Elsewhere:
Tom Spurgeon on MIX 2013.
A good "where are they now" blog on the great Weirdo magazine.
Two from Chris Randle. First on Co-Mix by Art Spiegelman and then on the anniversary of Comic Book Confidential.
Denis Kitchen on Gweek.
Nobrow is opening a US office and has a mission statement.
And MTV Geek, which covered a good amount of comics, has closed its doors.
