In July, 1975, Marvel Comics readers who turned to the Bullpen Bulletins page running in that month’s books were greeted by the following banner headline:
Assuming you weren’t a Marvelite of especially recent vintage, “‘Nuff said!” was pretty much on the money, at least in regards to the identity of “The King”. In the context of Marvel comics — and maybe of American comics, period — there was only one person that phrase could possibly be referring to. Still, if any confirmation was needed, it was immediately forthcoming via the latest edition of publisher Stan Lee’s monthly column:
As noted by Lee in his column, the news of Jack Kirby’s return to Marvel had first been announced several months earlier, at “the Mighty Marvel Con, which was held at Easter time” (for the record, the specific date of the announcement was March 24). So fans who’d been lucky enough to attend that convention, or had read reports of it in one fanzine or another, had known about this development before the rest of us.
Some of those well-informed fans may even have recalled a couple of fanzine articles that had appeared in the early fall of 1972, reporting on Kirby’s alleged intention to leave DC to return to Marvel then, a whole three years earlier. Coming not very long at all after the final issues of two of Kirby’s “Fourth World” titles for DC Comics, Forever People and New Gods, had arrived on stands, it wasn’t hard to imagine why the artist/writer/editor would be disgruntled with his then-publisher… but, given that he still had three years to go on his DC contract, and the company evidently planned to hold him to its terms, a return to the House of Ideas wasn’t in the cards at that time.*
The next semi-formal discussion of the possibility of Kirby’s coming back to Marvel didn’t happen for another couple of years, and when it did, the participants managed to keep it out of the fan press; only in later years would we learn any of the details, such as those recalled by Roy Thomas, then the editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics, for an interview published in The Jack Kirby Collector #18 (Jan., 1998):
…when I was out there -southern California] in the summer of 1974 for the San Diego convention, several people — Jack and their son Neal and probably [Jack’s wife] Roz and maybe someone else — got together with me to my surprise to talk about the possibility of Jack coming back to Marvel then, about a year before he actually did. It didn’t quite come to anything just yet, but it was obvious that within that three or four years, the bloom was definitely off the rose at DC… And all I could say to Jack was, “The only thing between you really is that Stan was a little hurt about the way you left, but that’s not a big deal. And the Funky Flashman stuff [in Mister Miracle #6] bothered him a little bit, because it seemed, to Stan at least, some somewhat mean-spirited.” …But I said, “We can get past that. Stan would love to have you back; he never wanted you to leave.”
Within a couple of months of this conversation, Roy Thomas had resigned from his EIC role at Marvel, and so understandably, wasn’t privy to the subsequent conversations between Kirby’s and Marvel’s representatives — and, inevitably, between Kirby and Lee themselves — that must have occurred over the next nine months. To the best of my knowledge, neither of those men ever shared the details of those conversations, nor, to date, has anyone else. But whatever had to be said by either man, or both, must have been said…. and so it was that in March, 1975, Jack Kirby signed a new, three-year contract with Marvel Comics. He still had work for DC Comics he was required to complete — indeed, his last pencilled issue of Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth (which was by that time being written and edited by Gerry 
Conway) didn’t ship until the following January — but the same month that brought the Bullpen Bulletins announcement of his return to Marvel, July, 1975, also brought his first new work for the company since 1970: a cover for Marvel Treasury Edition #7, featuring the Avengers (see at right; inks by Frank Giacoia).
As best as I can recall half a century on, my younger self was pleased by the news that Jack Kirby was returning to Marvel, though that pleasure probably didn’t rise to the level of excitement. I had been all in on the ambitious project with which Kirby’s tenure at DC had begun, back in 1970 — the interlocking “Fourth World” tetralogy of titles that included Forever People, New Gods, Mister Miracle, and, however improbably, Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen — and had been sorely disappointed when DC publisher Carmine Infantino pulled the plug on the enterprise after just two years. While I’d bought and mostly enjoyed one of Kirby’s subsequent series for the publisher, The Demon (for as long as it lasted, anyway) I hadn’t taken to his other ongoing titles — Kamandi, OMAC, “The Losers” in Our Fighting Forces — at all. It would be fair to say that as far as I was concerned, if DC wasn’t going to let Kirby complete his saga of the god-war between New Genesis and Apokolips, I’d just as soon see him back at Marvel, which is where I’d first encountered his work, and where it still seemed to me (as it did to Stan Lee) he “belonged”.
Of course, what I really would have liked to see Kirby take back on upon his return to Marvel was Thor — my favorite of his Silver Age collaborations with Stan Lee, and a title which had sorely missed both the King’s seemingly boundless imagination and his sense of epic grandeur. But, evidently, that wasn’t going to be in the cards, at least for the present (though the artist would at least grace us with multiple covers for the series during this era, beginning as early as August, 1975 with the Giacoia-inked number for issue #241, shown at left). And if he wasn’t going to be returning to my second choice, either (that would have been Fantastic Four), then Captain America — the venerable feature that Kirby had co-created with Joe Simon thirty-five years earlier, before Marvel even was “Marvel” — would make a more than satisfactory runner-up..
Cover to Captain America #186 (Jun., 1975). Art by Gil Kane and other(s).
Granted, I might have felt a little differently about Jack Kirby’s coming on to write and edit, as well as draw, Captain America if his run had started immediately following that of writer Steve Englehart, who over the past few years had more or less redefined the Living Legend of World War II for the early 1970s — most dramatically by having the hero give up his star-spangled identity for a time following his disillusionment at witnessing a surrogate for Richard Nixon kill himself at the end of the “Secret Empire” storyline.. Or perhaps I should say I would have been more apprehensive had Kirby’s stint begun right after Englehart’s penultimate issue, Captain America #185. That’s because in his actual final story, published in #186, Englehart had effectively lobbed a narrative grenade into the series’ current status quo, as well as its recent history, by revealing that Cap’s partner, the Falcon, had in fact been a sleeper agent of his arch-enemy, the Red Skull, ever since that character’s introduction back in 1969. The man who’d we’d known for over five years as Sam Wilson, idealistic social worker, was nothing but a false personality that the Skull had superimposed on that of “Snap” Wilson, a ruthless small-time criminal.
Cover to Captain America #189 (Sep., 1975). Art by Gil Kane and Mike Esposito.
It was an extremely audacious move — and, given that the Falcon held the distinction of being Marvel’s first costumed Black American superhero, probably an ill-advised one — though of course there’s no knowing how Englehart might have eventually resolved the storyline, has his originally planned several-month sabbatical from Captain America not turned into a permanent exit. Nevertheless, in the end it was up to the three different writers who worked on the title in the six-issue interval between Englehart’s and Kirby’s tenures — and, among those three, mostly up to Jenny Blake (aka Tony) Isabella, who scripted issues #189-191 — to deal with the development as best as they could, ultimately establishing the Falcon’s new status quo as his now being “two men” — a more-or-less integrated personality who bore the memories of both “Snap” and Sam Wilson, but had determined to follow the life path of the latter. Looked at from a certain angle, that was actually an interesting premise that might have yielded some unique internal conflicts within the character… though, in the end, very few Marvel writers would deign to even acknowledge the matter prior to its ultimately being retconned away, decades down the line. In this aspect, at least, Jack Kirby would prove to be no different than the scribes who would immediately follow him in the late 1970s.
But, of course, in October, 1975, all that still lay in the future. In the present, with the dust still settling on the chaos of the last six months, one could only strap in and hope for the best as Jack Kirby’s first new Captain America story since 1969 got underway…
Some fans might have wondered how prominent a role the Falcon would play in Jack Kirby’s Captain America, anyway; after all, the character hadn’t been a part of the series when Kirby had last worked on it, and Stan Lee’s Soapbox column hadn’t mentioned Sam Wilson, either. As for this issue’s cover (for which John Romita provides the inks, incidentally), the Falcon’s name has been left out of the title logo for the first time since issue #134, back in 1970… and while the hero does appear within the illustration, it’s as a relatively small figure that virtually fits between the legs of the Star-Spangled Avenger.
But this opening splash page (which also lets us know that the veteran Marvel pro Frank Giacoia is the issue’s inker) reassures us that nothing much (if anything) has changed since the previous issue, so far as the status of the Cap-Falc partnership is concerned. The Falcon gets billing right there with Cap under “Stan Lee Presents”, and while the name as well the figure of the hero are slightly smaller than those of the senior member of the partnership, they’re not dramatically so. (For the record, the Falcon’s name would return to the cover logo as well with issue #194, and would appear on every Kirby issue of the monthly Captain America title thereafter, with the exception of issue #200.)
Cover to FOOM #11 (Sep., 1975). Art by John “Jack” Byrne and Joe Sinnott.
In an interview published in the 11th (Sep., 1975) issue of Marvel’s in-house fanzine FOOM, Kirby was asked if he found working on Captain America different than before, due to the hero “working with a sidekick, the Falcon, instead of as a loner”. The King replied:
How do I view it? Of course, the Falcon is an addition to the strip. I’ve been looking over the past sequences of the Falcon, learning more about him. I feel, like Captain America, that I’ve learned to work with him as a team. And that’s what I’m doing. If the character does it, I will do it. I feel the Falcon is a very valid super-hero. He’s a strong type, and a team operation is just as effective as a single, if it’s really good, and that’s what I’m trying to make it.
Again, anybody worried that Kirby intended to simply ignore what had been going on in Captain America since he was last involved with the title could find some reassurance in how the second page — the first “real” page of the story — leads off with a reference to the Falcon’s recently concluded criminal trial. We’ve even got Falc’s long-established love interest, Leila, on hand — proof that Kirby had indeed been “looking over the past sequences” of the character. That said, the flat statement that our heroes have now simply opted to put the memories of their recent ordeal clean out of their minds might warrant the raising of a concerned eyebrow, at the least.
While I’m pretty sure it blew right past me in 1975, it strikes me now in re-reading this sequence that while the artificially-enraged Falcon resorts to a racial epithet, Captain America never does. That might indicate that, as far as his co-creator is concerned, Cap is simply too noble to ever resort to such, even when in the thrall of a mind-control ray. But it might also simply reflect Kirby’s understanding that between these two men, one actually has a legitimate reason to feel racially-based resentment, and the other doesn’t. It’s an interesting question, though one which can probably never be answered definitively.
Thankfully, by drawing on their “superb discipline,” the two heroes are able to break free of the insidious “mind-wave” almost immediately. Less fortunately, by this time Leila, too, has succumbed…
Cap finds himself helpless to stop the rampaging horde — there are just too many of them, and they’re too out of control. He just barely manages to avoid being crushed; but when the crowd finally thins out a little, he becomes aware of something else that, in its way, is just as terrifying: “…in his brain is a shrill, rising scream!”
A moment later, a damaged sign detaches from the wall of a building and falls, threatening to crush an old woman standing beneath. Cap starts to rush to her aid, but the Falcon swoops past him and saves the woman first. With the most immediate danger thus averted, the duo begin to compare notes…
The plane eventually arrives at a remote military installation, which the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent refers to as “Madbomb Control”…
Having escaped the rammers, Cap and the Falcon now find themselves at a dead end… at which point the walls on either side begin to close in on them…
Yep, that is indeed Henry Kissinger, who at the time of this story’s original publication was the U.S. Secretary of State under President Gerald Ford — a position he’d held since September, 1973 (when Richard Nixon was still the nation’s chief executive), and would hold onto until the January, 1977 inauguration of Jimmy Carter. While it may seem odd to feature Kissinger in a Captain America story, given Cap’s history with the Marvel Universe version of his former boss, it should be remembered that Kissinger was never implicated in the Watergate scandal — and if there were already people calling him a “war criminal” around this time, their voices were relatively muted in comparison with those of later decades. Rather, the Henry Kissinger of 1975 was an international celebrity, known perhaps as much for escorting Hollywood starlets as for his diplomatic accomplishments.
Of course, even if one accepts the notion of representing Henry Kissinger as a respectable public figure, one might still question just why America’s top foreign-policy official is overseeing the effort to thwart what appears to be an internal security threat. The answer, I suspect, is that Jack Kirby simply thought he’d be more fun to draw (and, with his famous German accent, write) than any other higher-up in the real-life Ford administration.
Secretary Kissinger goes on to explain how the next Madbomb, a somewhat larger model code-named “Dumpling”, was responsible for the destruction of River City, a metropolis of 200,000 people. Cap and Falc speculate aloud what one as big as a barrel might do to a major American city like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles… but Kissinger tells them that they’re thinking too small…
(In the last panel above, the word-balloon “pointers” for Cap and Kissinger seem to have gotten switched up; the dialogue makes more sense when read that way, in any event.)
And so ends the first installment of Jack Kirby’s “Madbomb” saga. It’s unquestionably different in style and tone than the Captain America stories that had immediately preceded it — but, back in the fall of ’75, that didn’t seem so bad at all to my eighteen-year-old self, especially in regards to the artwork (sorry, Frank Robbins fans). You certainly couldn’t say that Kirby wasn’t delivering the sort of larger-than-life, ultra-kinetic superheroic action that he’d practically invented… and for this first time out of the gate, maybe that was all that was needed.
The “Madbomb” story arc would continue for the next seven months, reaching its climax in Captain America‘s milestone 200th issue. That book would come out in May, 1976 — a month or so shy of America’s actual 200th birthday, but close enough for Marvel to get away with hyping the book as a “Special Bicentennial Issue!” Would Cap and Falc succeed in saving the country from descending irrevocably into madness? Well, seeing as how we’re all still here in 2025, looking down the barrel of next July’s celebration of the United States Semiquincentennial, the odds seem pretty good… although, on second thought, do you think that maybe the Madbomb was on an extended time release? That would explain a lot, actually. But, one way or the other, I hope you’ll be back next May to see how this story turns out.
*The fanzine articles appeared in Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector #94 and The Comic Reader #89. For more details regarding this episode, see pages 120-121 in John Morrow’s Old Gods & New: A Companion to Jack Kirby’s Fourth World (TwoMorrows, 2021).
It must have been humiliating for Jack to return to Marvel, bearing in mind the contemptuous way the company had treated him during his last stint. Yet, he still gave it his all and created some wonderful comics over the next three years. Starting with a bang right here.
I still remember my excitement and anticipation on the day I picked up this issue along with Howard the Duck 1 from Mill Road Newsagents, Cleethorpes. I was 13. Such sweet pangs of nostalgia!
I was 13 in October 1975 too, but got my comics from the Treasure Island Naval Station Navy Exchange – one of the clerks therein called me “the comic-book kid”.
I was also 13 in October ’75 and I can still remember grabbing this comic off the shelf at Martins’ Newsagents in West Heath, Congleton. Actual regular issues of American Marvel were still few and far between back in those days and there was a sense of elation at having obtained this particular one. Daft as it sounds, I felt that somehow I’d achieved something important and worthwhile.
I’ve had a framed copy of the cover on the wall of my den for at least a decade, but had entirely forgotten the actual story until reading Alan’s article in bed this a.m.; my Sunday morning guilty pleasure.
I was 12 when this issue came out and my feelings about it now are pretty much the same as back in ’76. The Englehart/Buscema issues (#153-#181) were – and still are – among my favourite comics and that was how I wanted to see Cap’s adventures depicted. The squiggly Robbins issues didn’t work for me — the art change from Sal was too jarring – and although Kirby’s art was an improvement on Frank’s, it was his scripting that left me cold. King Kirby is undoubtedly a legend and the Marvel Universe would not have existed without his creative genius, but his scripting was always his weak point. As a reader who enjoyed the more cerebral Gerber/McGregor/Englehart/Moench approach to comics, I found Jack’s juvenile ramblings a real retrograde step. While he had lost none of his creative juices by the time he returned to Marvel in the mid-70s, his idiosyncratic scripting style seemed strictly Golden Age. Endless bombastic statements, every one of them followed by an exclamation mark. Trivial plots that disregarded all that had occurred since he left in 1970. A complete lack of character development. If nothing else, Jack’s 70s work shows just how important Stan was during their Silver Age collaboration.
Like Neil I was underwhelmed, and a little appalled, at switching from Englehart (&others) to Kirby. Though it’s not as jarring as the jump from Don McGregor and Billy Graham to Kirby on Black Panther. At the time, with no experience of Silver Age Marvel, I kept wondering why people thought Kirby was a genius.
That said, looking at it decades later I’ll probably enjoy the energy and imagination better — the Madbomb is a horrifying idea and the effects here are good. Then again, the idea Kissinger thinks he should run Cap and Falcon through a danger room scenario when they’re racing the clock is … stupid. While I appreciate Kirby’s work much more than I did at the time, none of his post-New Gods work (except Eternals and Kamandi) impresses me, now or then.
According to the Jack Kirby Collector (https://twomorrows.com/kirby/articles/2970s.html) Kirby was determined to write/draw/edit everything himself and stay as far away from the established MU as possible. There’d be no chance of a collaborator taking all the credit this time. As detailed at the link, this did not work out.
I do think Thor would have been a better choice, simply because Bronze Age Thor wasn’t a particularly standout era so fans might have had less to complain about.
A cabal of genetically wealthy one-percenters who believe they’re the only true Americans team up with some self-impressed tech bros to create a fanatical cult they keep controlled with misinformation and violent sports/entertainment with the ultimate goal of driving the nation crazy enough to tear itself apart so they can rule over what’s left. Man! I don’t know where Kirby came up with these wild scenarios! What an outrageous imagination! Thank goodness it was just a story.
Kirby’s horror story is nearly prophetic. Alas, there’s no Captain America or Falcon to save the day this time. We’re left to our own devices.
When this first appeared in the mid-1970s, I liked it, but found it less impressive than what Englehart had been doing just before (or even what Isabella had started to do over the summer of ’75).
However, I was in a book store in the mid-1990s when I was on a Christmas break from grad school after getting off work and re-read these stories in a TPB. (This was post-Oklahoma City when public paranoia about the “Militia Movement” was at its height.)
Kirby saw it coming about 18 or 20 years before it started. (You could say the same thing about Kirby’s use of Virtual reality in OMAC back in 1975.) No one was better at “Cultural ‘Name that Tune”” than Kirby, whistle a few bars and he could figure it out.
On Kissinger, I always thought it was Kirby’s comment on Englehart’s end to the Secret Empire story. If that happened in the 1974-1975 Marvel Universe, would a brand new, unelected VP REALLY be in charge?
I always thought it was a shame that some kind of contractual arrangement could not have been made that let Kirby continue Kamandi, OMAC and The Losers at DC while doing Cap and covers at Marvel. but apparently not in 1975 . . . .
Part of the disappointment with Kirby’s 1970s Marvel work was that his eyesight had gotten worse and his art suffered for it; (That Avengers cover has a lot of problems with composition and draftsman ship,)
Another problem was that Kirby went from being unconcerned with who inked his work to wanting people who captured everything.
Mike Royer was a talented artist. His being a Murphy Anderson and a Russ Manning assistant indicates that. However, I don’t think he understood what Joe Sinnott talked about as translating something from a pencil sketch into an inked page.
This kept Kirby from working with more inkers who might have better fit his style (like Palmer, Jansen or Giordano).
River City will never be in trouble with Professor Harold Hill and Marian the Librarian on hand.
76 Trombones for 1976!
I think that S.H.I.E.L.D. agent is the anonymous sympathetic fellow whom Lee and Kirby used a couple of times when Cap got his own title in 1968. He had to give up his beloved (“my girl,” he calls her, but those were different times) when he joined what was then the Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law Enforcement Division.
I always thought of Falcon’s racial slur while under the influence of the Madbomb as the last vestiges of “Snap” Wilson being exorcised from Sam’s psyche. And I also think Jack was better at predicting the future than Nostradamus ever was.
Jack Kirby… “… the CO-CREATOR of most of Marvel’s greatest strips…”. Really, Stan? You want to run that past Marvel and Disney’s legal departments before it becomes problematic?
“King Kirby is back… and greater than ever!” – and we believe that so much that we had John Romita Sr rework the cover to the extent that he should have equal credit as artist. Just like Starlin’s Captain Marvel #29, it’s kind of odd that one of the most iconic images of a character is as much JR Sr as the artist working on the book.
Notwithstanding that, the cover is still one of my favourite Cap images. To me, apart from the powerful design, it summarises the hypocrisy of how Kirby was treated by Marvel (and DC previously, for that matter, with Superman’s face): ‘We’re glad he’s working for us again to the point of touting it on the cover, but we’re still inclined to change anything we don’t like, even if he’s supposed to be his own editor, and… greater than ever’.
Whatever opinion you might have about Kirby’s more ‘straightforward’ characterisations and plots, at least from this issue on, Cap started to look like Cap again. After the last half of Sal Buscema’s layouts, where Colletta and helpers’ bland, rushed finishes did him no favours, then the divisive Robbins’ art, it was a relief that the character looked like himself once more.
One point with the art: Jack Kirby was never one for fussing about the details of costume. The Falcon’s fairly elaborate red, white and yellow boot design, with the fringe of ankle tassels and the claws extending over the foot, is abandoned for a plain, white boot. Starting with the next issue, somebody had the job of retouching these boots, and it was a bit of a game for me to spot the panels where this was missed (or done badly) throughout Kirby’s run.
Back in the seventies, I very much resented the way Jack Kirby ignored the wonderful, in-depth characterization that Englehart had brought to these characters in favour of his more direct, action-oriented stories. Nowadays I often wonder what I ever found so wonderful and in-depth about the previous creators’ work. Cap had supposedly gone through some ‘rising and advancing of the spirit’ but nothing thus far really showed that, and then we had the previously-discussed and very questionable reworking of the Falcon. I find nowadays that I’m more likely to re-read the Kirby issues than a lot of what had gone before.
One character who I thought was very poorly treated was Leila. As a hormonal teenager, I was much taken with her previous strong-willed, militant and sassy persona, and how JR Sr in particular depicted her as so very attractive (hey, I was young, pubescent, I didn’t know about stereotypes and I still like strong-willed women). Yet here she is on page 2 waiting on the men, and I would have expected her to insert a coffee pot where the sun doesn’t shine a long time before anyone called her ‘little Leila’. Next thing you know she’ll have a government post working directly for the President or some such.
Also on page 2, I suspect that note about Steve and Sam ‘putting the trial of the Falcon out of their minds’ was a quasi-editorial insert to cover the fact that Kirby himself maybe didn’t refer to it at all.
Overall, and as others have noted, the mad-bomb plot of wealthy one-percenters turned out to appear somewhat more realistic and prescient than the secret empire’s plan, IMHO.
I’ll disagree with you about Englehart, whose work I still love to reread (though his handling of Sharon was poor). That, as they say, is what makes horse races.
I agree about Kirby writing Leila.
At the link I provided above it says that despite Kirby’s I Edit Myself agreement, he got edited once his stuff arrived at the Marvel offices. Sometimes by admirers who felt his stuff wasn’t good enough and wanted to improve it, sometimes by jackholes who resented him for not being interested in playing well with others. I’m guessing that wasn’t an issue this early in his run though.
“Also on page 2, I suspect that note about Steve and Sam ‘putting the trial of the Falcon out of their minds’ was a quasi-editorial insert to cover the fact that Kirby himself maybe didn’t refer to it at all.”
Agreed. That caption simply does not read like Kirby prose.
Much as I loved Kirby’s silver age Marvel work, and his early bronze DC work, I felt he was out of step with mid ’70s Marvel. He had returned as if nothing had happened in the interim. His work looked much the same (but a noticeably weaker) than his seminal art for the Fantastic Four.
Imagine if the Beatles had recorded their first two albums then vanished, only to return in 1975/76 with their third album. Great stuff, sure, but it would have sounded very dated in that time frame. After all, hard rock, acid rock, glam rock, and progressive rock had all come and (mostly) gone, besides the evolution of R&B into soul music, and disco and punk were on the scene. Early ’60s Beatles pop and rock n roll would have sounded quaint, along with the short haircuts combed forward, not to mention suits and ties, and guitars held much higher up than the norm in 1975-76.
So it seemed with Kirby: his sensibility was largely passe. This important architect of comics had opened the doors for others to develop in other directions at Marvel and DC, with creators bringing vastly different influences to their work (O’Neil-Adams, Wein-Wrightson, Englehart-Brunner, and Goodwin-Simonson, to name only a few noteworthy collaborative teams).
I absolutely loved Kirby’s Silver Surfer one shot with Stan Lee in 1978, but it was silver age sensibility all the way, and a great shot of nostalgia. Even Joe Sinnott’s fine inks could not hide the fact that Kirby had slipped a bit artistically (due to age/eyesight problems, as stated on this blog elsewhere).
It was sad to see this maverick creating the Fourth World at DC, only to have it shut down on him and then to be saddled with backups in Our Fighting Forces featuring the Losers. That was *not* a top tier DC title, and I’m sure his paycheck reflected that, too.
Lightning didn’t strike twice for Kirby at Marvel: Devil Dinosaur, Machine Man, and The Eternals didn’t hold a candle to his prior decade’s creations. It was evident when reading his 2001: a Space Odyssey Marvel Treasury Edition that he either did not understand Stanley Kubrick’s film, or that he didn’t *care*, using it as a jumping off point for his own concepts.
Kirby would have been better off doing licensed art for Marvel merchandising (with a lot better pay for a lot less work) instead of returning to Captain America. But he did, and after a few years went over to animation, and we know the rest of the story.
I thought some of Kirby’s concepts and characters in his 1970s Marvel works were brilliant. Their is a scene early in the “Madbomb” story where CA &F are talking to an Army BG, who probably started off as an officer around the end of WWII and might have served as an NCO or junior EM in that war as John Vessey who was Chairman under Reagan about 8 years later had. It is nice work with a real emotional reality .
Someone mentioned The Losers. That sold really well. That and Kamandi were Kirby’s best selling DC books. He had a feeling for the War stuff and Kammandi was a master class in “world-building” (as was OMAC, although that did not sell as well).
Eternals had its moments (although to seemed to re-visit too much from The Fourth World). I really liked his first CA Annual (although, it’s unrealistic premise washatit was the first time Cap dealt with ETs.
A quick Google search yields multiple sources which say this:
“Failed to boost the line: By 1974, Kirby’s new creations for DC, including his “Fourth World” books, were already experiencing commercial struggles. His tenure on The Losers did not reverse this trend. Publisher Carmine Infantino, having lost faith in Kirby’s ability to devise a successful series, assigned him to the low-selling book to fulfill his contract.”
I may be off base here, MoB, but this sounds like a quote from Google’s AI. If that is the case, then please note for future reference that I’d prefer for you (and other commenters, as well) to refrain from using such, going forward. If we’re going to quote someone around these parts, let it be someone human. 🙂
I hear you, Alan, but it does succinctly corroborate the gist of multiple sources on the matter. Not a fan of A.I. myself.
Not to belabor the point, MoB, but the phrasing of the AI response implies that the Fourth World books were still around in 1974. That’s misleading at best, given that the Fourth World basically died in the summer of ‘72 (though the shell of Mister Miracle held on through most of ‘73). To my mind, being “mostly” accurate simply isn’t good enough.
It’s been documented that GL/GA “sold” better than official records due to enterprising people diverting some of them and selling them to fans who hadn’t gotten the latest issue on their local spinner racks. I’ve read speculation the Fourth World stuff suffered from the same problem.
It definitely suffered from Marvel’s reprint line, which pitted Kirby’s early Bronze Age output against the classic Kirby/Lee stuff, with the latter winning fans’ dollars.
Marvel’s Greatest Comics was a great way to read those classic FF stories that many had missed the first time around, just like Marvel Tales for Ditko’s and Romita Sr’s Amazing Spider-Man issues.
Our Fighting Forces (Featuring The Losers) went monthly in 1975 with issue #154 (Kirby’s Fourth issue)., when Joe Kubert and Archie Goodwin had edited that book it had been bi-monthly. DC tended to keep good but not great selling books (Justice League, Flash B&B at 8 Times a year in that period, where Our Fighting forces and Kamandi were both monthly.0
I looked even more closely: Our Fighting Forces (featuring the Losers) sold on average 112,000 copies per issue in 1975. For context, DC used to cancel any title that sold under 250,000 copies per issue only two or three years previously. Price increases and sales slumps had hit the Big Two in 1974-75, causing cover prices to increase and page count to go down from 24 pages (in 1972) to 17 pages (in 1975). The amount of ink used on interior pages was markedly lower as well. Those beautiful solid black areas now appeared like a mid gray. Even as a pre-teen I saw the difference. The crisis continued until direct sales became a temporary fix which nevertheless made comics much more of a niche market in subsequent decades.
A minor point of clarification, MoB — “The Losers” was the lead feature in Our Fighting Forces, rather than a backup.
Yes, you are correct. “The Losers” was always on the cover as a much like Sgt. Rock, the Haunted Tank, and the Unknown Soldier on some of DC’s other war titles.
Others have made these points, but, while I feel that the Madbomb story is built around a thought-provoking premise, this is the point where I see Kirby’s art begin to slip, due to age and other factors, maybe just from sheer overwork across the decades. I can understand why Kirby may have been disenchanted with DC as early as 1972, but, even after the tragedy of DC pulling the plug on the Fourth World, I do find Kamandi and Omac interesting and worthy of Kirby’s status as the King. But while the occasional late-‘70s Kirby/Sinnott cover on Fantastic Four, most notably the cover for issue #200 of that title, recaptured past glories, I struggle to get into Kirby’s second run at Marvel – this era of Cap, Black Panther, and Devil Dinosaur doesn’t do it for me, even as the occasional panel or splash page reminds us that we’re looking at the work of an idiosyncratic genius. I do remember liking Kirby’s Machine Man at the time, and I did like Captain Victory as well – I’d like to think that getting away from Marvel and DC gave Jack one last shot in the arm to really try and care again, even if at the end of the day Pacific Comics wasn’t necessarily a better company than the Big Two, at least they threw him the bone of copyright and slightly better pay and printing on better paper, until the company inevitably went under.
OMAC started wildly imaginative, then it lost its mojo (https://atomicjunkshop.com/the-world-that-was-coming-fifty-years-ago-omac/). I agree on Kamandi.
Age is a factor that people making the “Stan/Jack accomplished NOTHING once he left his collaborator so obviously Jack/Stan was the real creative talent” ignore. Time takes its toll on all of us — it’s not surprising Stan moved into management and Kirby’s later work lost some of its juice.
My big problem with Black Panther was that T’Challa could as easily have been Generic Action Guy for the first few issues. Kirby seemed more interested in his eccentric Collectors (I must admit any group with a member named Silas Mourner can’t be all bad) than the nominal star of the book. Which may reflect his lack of interest in connecting with the rest of the MU.
Both Omac and Kamandi started strong and lost steam pretty quickly – by the mid-’70s, Kirby was better at starting new series and concepts than he was at sustaining them. He wasn’t going to have another decade-long run like he had on the Fantastic Four, but who could? New Gods #6 and Mister Miracle #9 are arguably the pinnacle of his work, or at least as good as his best efforts for Marvel in the ’60s, but, even if Carmine Infantino and DC hadn’t pulled the plug on the Fourth World, I’m not sure Jack could have sustained that level of quality, or ever finished the story.
With kamandi I disagree on “quickly.” the first couple of years were excellent (the Watergate story and “The Gift” are very good) and there were still some good stories after that.
I read quite a few early issues of Kamandi and while I liked it I felt Kirby was deliberately writing for a younger audience in that one. This is not an insult, but an observation.
Pacific went under circa 1984 because one of the Schanes brothers who ran the company didn’t believe in paying taxes. The IRS helped him to think otherwise. Writer-editor Bruce Jones took perhaps the worst hit, and revamped Alien Worlds and Twisted Tales as Alien Encounters and Tales of Terror over at Eclipse comics…until a flood ruined their warehouse inventory of comics. Double indemnity for Bruce. He ended up going back over to the Big Two, but his creator-owned projects at Pacific like Somerset Holmes and Silverheels never resurfaced.
Fresh out of college I worked for a while for a local magazine whose editor opted for buying booze over paying the IRS. When the bill came due, he decided it was better to pay Uncle Sam than his freelancers.
is may have been the first series that I dropped mid-run. I’ve never been a fan of Kirby’s art (sinnott and Stone inking him helped with that) but I come for the writing more than the art so that’s not why I dropped it. Kirby’s DC work had already taught me I dislike dhis writing and the names he gave characters annoyed me sometimes. I wouldn’t pick up another issue of Cap until he left and avoided Black Pantheras well. I did mostly enjoy Eternals and MAchine Man but they felt more like sci-fi than a regular marvel comic.
I got the entire Kirby run on Cap myself. Strangely, between issues 177 and 193, I’d missed several – I just never saw them on the racks where I got my comics. But starting with Kirby’s run, I got every issue for the next nearly 10 years that I continued collecting the mag. It wouldn’t have occurred to me back then but seems very clear now that once Kirby left Marvel in 1970, pretty much everything he did afterwards, even when using mainstream characters, like Jimmy Olsen, Superman, Cap, Falcon & Black Panther, he placed them all in his rather strange Kirby-verse, wherein things were a bit different from whatever anyone else was doing in other comics at the time. I think his latter-day Silver Age work at Marvel showed some signs of his going in that direction, albeit mostly tampered by Lee’s scripting & editing. I mostly enjoyed his new stories, although not quite as much as I loved the likes of Starlin’s Warlock or Gerber’s Howard the Duck, etc.
As to why Kirby declined to return to either the FF or Thor, I sort of think maybe he had no great desire to go back to those mags and sort of have to compete with his past glories on those mags. Going back to Cap may have been different for him as although Cap was one of his key co-creations, his Golden Age run on Captain America was relatively brief and during his Silver Age runs on Cap, he didn’t draw nearly as many pages featuring Cap as he drawn pages of the FF & Thor. Moreover, the Eternals came off as a sort of extension of his runs on both Thor and his Fourth World series.
Just a few thoughts on the Return of the King years at Marvel.
Kirby creating his own worlds and not feeling he needed to be enslaved to the DC and Marvel continuities was a big part of his appeal to me at the time.
The Eternals, in particular, should have been separate from the MU. It was too big and grand a concept to be shoehorned into established Marvel continuity. Unfortunately, Jack was pressured into doing so. I was amused by an early Eternals lettercol in which a reader made the point that the strip should be stand-alone, but an editorial minion replied that there was no reason it could not be part of mainstream Marvel continuity, even while the first storyline was contradicting what had earlier been established about Marvel Earth history.
Total agreement. The contortions the letter responses went to to justify including it were fascinating, like a detailed breakdown of why no other superheroes show up when the Deviants attack NYC.
But to blur the edges between the self contained Kirby and Marvel universe, the first appearance of a mainstream character by issue 14 near the end of the run, was the Hulk, but not actually the Hulk, but a cosmic powered “plastic and wire” version built by students. Bizarre!
I agree about the Kirby verse, which was clear to me at the time.
I’ve still got most (if not all) of Kirby’s run on Capt America. The 76 Treasury edition, even a non UK distributed annual, I followed JK to DC then with all his other Marvel titles, back to CA , because I hadn’t read the previous issues , Englehart et al. A mix of lack of interest in the character and patchy UK distribution of the tile would have made that difficult.
I agree , and looking back it’s clearer, Kirby in some ways came back and looked …. a bit dated, given the changes that Marvel comics had had with new writers and artists in the 70s. Ditko’s art also suffered by looking stilted in his return to Marvel – looking at Machine Man (ironically created by Kirby) which i did recently online but that’s another discussion.
Did Kirby as the co creator have the right to do whatever he wanted with the characters (including Black Panther) regardless of previous incarnations? To a point. but the change was jarring (even though I knew less of the previous runs by Englehart and McGregor, at the time). But for Cap, it seems a jump from political intrigue and characterisations to space aliens and monsters (and clunky declarative dialogue).
Great as it was , and I collected a lot of it which I still have, as someone said, it really showed the contribution that Lee made to the original collaborations.
We did get quite a few covers from JK for titles he didn’t do the inside for, he was on autopilot for a lot of those – usually a respectable job but rarely hit the heights say of the FF run covers , but that time had passed.
“Did Kirby as the co creator have the right to do whatever he wanted with the characters” Hell, he had the right to do whatever Marvel allowed him to do. It’s not like Englehart or McGregor had some sort of proprietary claim on Cap or T’Challa, much as I liked their runs.
As far as “dated,” I noticed when I reread Ditko’s Shade a few years ago (and discovered I still liked it a lot) that his sense of fashion seemed to have frozen in the early 1960s.
Yeah, those baggy suits never really went out of vogue for Ditko. The other thing I was going to mention is (not saying that wasn’t a newish trend already at Marvel) Kirby carried over long multi issue narratives from his DC time, in his earlier stint with Lee almost no story had more than 4 issues, eg Madbomb when on for several over the next year.
Particularly in the mid-60s, ’65-67, Kirby created several stories in the FF & Thor that bled into one another over very long runs — the introduction of the Inhumans, for example began in FF 44, although containing plot threads left from their previous tussle with the Frightful Four that ended in 43. The Inhumans story was a full 4 issues but issue 47 ended with a cliffhanger that led into issue 48 in which the Inhumans plot-thread came to a pause as Kirby then commenced with the introductions of the Silver Surfer and Galactus which went on into issue 50, ending about 2/3rds into that issue and then introducing Wyatt Wingfoot as Johnny began college and the mysterious man who would be the main villain in the next issue wherein he was able to transfer Ben Grimm’s powers to himself.
Over in Thor, there were many stories that similarly bled into one another over multiple issues, including the Hercules/Pluto epic and then the fight with the Enchanters and Thor’s powers being diminished for an extended period, leading to his nearly being killed by the Wrecker.
I’ve made the same point about Lee/Kirby continued stories over at Atomic Junk Shop (https://atomicjunkshop.com/daredevil-thor-the-teen-titans-short-notes-from-the-silver-age/). The era reminds me a lot of Claremont and Byrne in the interweaving storylines, except Lee/Kirby stories are operatic grandeur rather than down-to-earth and personal (that is not a criticism).
Yeah, I wonder how much that was due to Kirby gradually doing more of the plotting in some way and both of them just really hitting their stride. Got to admit re reading the very early FFs , they are rather rudimentary in narrative (understandably) then by the mid 40s or so and half century , it’s all happening.
Ditko appears to have started the trend to longer, multi-issue stories during his run on the Hulk in TtA, treating it like one of the adventure comic strips with stories that ran for many weeks or months in the daily papers. Also somewhat like the old serials, with lots of cliffhangers. Ditko then did the same thing in Dr. Strange. But once Kirby got the notion that he could do the same thing in the FF & Thor, he really took off, not only with the multi-issue main stories but multiple subplots that eventually worked their way up to the main plot.
I think by 1966, most Marvel mags were in that mode, with multi-issue stories and subplots, sometimes seeping into other mags, as when Wanda & Pietro made a brief cameo in Thor related to the High Evolutionary and his “New Men” tale, which became a significant factor in their increasingly complex background. No such cameos in any of Kirby’s 1970s series.
Ditko kept his baggy suits, but Dave Berg in his “The Lighter Side of…” feature in Mad magazine stayed with fashion trends in the 1960s and ’70s, but by the early 1980s readers were complaining about Berg’s characters still wearing bell bottoms and hairstyles that were out of date. It’s not uncommon for older creators to “lose touch” with what is trending—so take that, skibidi ohio rizzlers!
This happens in politics too. About twenty years ago, someone wrote a rant to Gen X including most of the stock cliches (stop letting your pants fall down and show your butt crack!) and ignoring that most Gen Xers were over thirty at that point (I’m guessing they were no longer down with saggy pants).
I actually remember reading this one. Probably due to the return of Jack Kirby. I enjoyed Jack’s work for DC. Loved the 4th World and Demon, et al. Of his later work, I really loved Kamandi (sorry Alan) and like Omac at first, but felt the concept ran out of steam (either than or Jack did) as the book went on.
As for Cap, he was never one of my favorite Marvel characters and I hadn’t been reading most of what Englehart had written (not then, anyway), so I had nothing immediate to compare it with, but it goes without saying that Jack was more about action than character development. As someone else said above, I too, would have prefered to see Kirby take over Thor rather than Cap. Kirby’s strength, especially at this point in his career, was huge mythologies with cosmic spanning stories and god-like villains. Thor would have been much more appropriate to that than Captain America.
Still, Kirby was home, and even for a DC guy like myself, that felt “right.” I feel bad that Jack never got whatever it was he wanted in terms of wealth or respect from the comics industry, but certainly he must have felt the love and respect he got from us, the fans. Thanks, Alan!
The fans always gave far more respect than the publishers. This has always been true in the industry. But Kirby is the undisputed King of comics, not only for his prodigious output over a 55 year period (or thereabouts), but for creating so many seminal heroes and villains that only Ditko (barely) approaches him in the latter category. Joe Kubert had a 75 year professional career (1937-2012) and, like Kirby, a prolific page count, but he’s only known for (co-)creating a handful of characters. Same with Moebius. Great work, lots of pages, but outside of Blueberry and Arzach there aren’t many signature characters that most comics fans could cite. In my book these men, along with Will Eisner and Alex Toth, are probably the top of the heap as comics creators.
Moebius worked in Europe, so his business and creative environment was differed.
Eisner was both a creative force and a capable businessman. Toth burned bridges in comics but found a safe place in animation (which Kirby ultimately also found).
Kubert was the most like Kirby in that he remained a creative rather than a business type and stayed within comics. However , Kubert found a niche and Kirby was big enough the publishers felt they had to control him.
Kubert was a shrewd businessman and was a multi-millionaire long before he passed away.
He was (mostly through the Kubert School). It also increased his (already powerful) impact on comics . . . .
Jack’s back!!! Of course, he never really was away, with the amount of reprints of Jack’s work that Marvel put out in the previous 5 years. Jack produced what Marvel wanted, new characters, new situations, a return to Captain America ( whose sales I read had been slipping), saving Black Panther as an ongoing comic, a take on the Silver Surfer and a reprise of New Gods. Jack delivered all this, but not a sure fire hit.
At the time I was a dyed in the wool Marvelite, so did not stray often into DC territory and did not know of what Kirby produced there. But for my current re-readings of my collection (3 months adrift unfortunately, I have just read October 75 dated US comics) his work for DC was more than solid ( eg Kamandi #34; Our Fighting Forces # 160 and Sandman#5, all Oct cover dated). However for an 11 year old Marvelite brought up on the silver age works of Lee& Kirby I was more than disappointed (the FF by Lee/Kirby/Sinnott is my all time favourite comic). But I remained a Kirby fan, and for me, his ensuing work on Eternals (until the Cosmic Hulk debacle) and on Cap, starting with the Swine sequence, plus some issues of 2001 and Machine Man, were right up there with his silver age work.
I feel that Jack Kirby’s “Madbomb” saga was extremely prescient. The idea that the United States might fall victim to a fascist takeover from within, launched by the so-called “Elite” members of American society, rather than at the hands of an outside aggressor, might have seemed far-fetched to most people in the mid-1970s… but in 2025 it sadly is very relevant.
As reluctantly as his return to Marvel in 1975 must have been for Kirby, I am of the opinion that he nevertheless did solid work over the next three years. Kirby was a consummate professional, and I don’t think it was in his nature to “phone it in,” no matter what his personal feelings were.
Reading those back issues (I was born in 1976) I do feel bad to look at the letter columns and see missives harshly criticizing Kirby’s work on Captain America. I’ve heard rumors that some of those letters were actually written by Marvel staffers using aliases, and if that’s true it was the height of unprofessional-ism. Whatever their feelings about Kirby’s current work, they should have recognized that without Kirby there would probably be no Marvel Comics.
Anyway, Alan, thanks for the look at the behind-the-scenes details of Kirby’s return to this series. I was not familiar with the FOOM interview he gave in which he addressed using the Falcon in his new stories. I’ve never seen that cover with the “Jack’s Back” illustration before, either.
Ben, could not agree more. Looks like we were writing our comments on this at the same time! ( Yours being much better worded)
I just want to add that I was struck at some of the ill feeling towards Kirby at Marvel, and in Marvel fandom at the time. He appeared to be blamed for not being Englehart, or McGregor, or even Stan. Kirby was not urbane, not loquacious, not really a marketeer. His art was off trend, and his then current work not taken seriously by the comics cognoscenti. I am glad that now a lot of his work and the inheritance he has left behind is more recognised and respected.
Stan presented and read out aloud some of the pages of Cap#193 when he visited the BBC in London in ’75 ( it was on the BBC1 early evening Nationwide programme). Kirby’s pages looked magnificent on the tv screen…and I did not even realise it was Kirby at the time!!The story, as voiced by Stan, sounded fantastic!!
Finally wanted to say the Kirby and Romita art team (on the cover) always delivered. Both very heavily influenced by Caniff of course…..
I remember hearing about the Stan appearance on Nationwide from a (non-comics enthusiast) schoolmate. He saw it. I didn’t. And he was insufferably smug about it.
Was that for the Roundhouse appearance in London? I would have been 11 or 12 at the time , no realistic chance of going. He might as well have been in Chicago.