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20 0 KIRBY’S IMPROBABLE CAREER Jack Kirby’s career succeeded by accidents both happy and unhappy, and was scarred here and there by unfortunate or ill-timed decisions and plain hard luck. Biographical accounts paint him—despite his commercial successes, artistic clout, and widespread influence—as a man little used to taking care of his own business dealings. One has a sense of Kirby being shepherded through the business by colleagues and family, and often in particular by his wife Rosalind , or Roz. In any case, though Kirby’s was a name to conjure with among comic book fans, his relative fame did not translate dependably, much less automatically , into financial security and comfort. When not part of the Simon and Kirby partnership, he most often lived the emblematic life of the comic book freelancer, dependent on publishers’ whims. Even Simon & Kirby often had their backs to the wall. Frankly, Kirby’s career path looks like a series of patch jobs. It is difficult to outline and synopsize. Because of his freelance jobbing and the variousness of his undertakings and associations, his working life does not sort into neat patterns . In this Kirby is much like most comic book freelancers: his career seems to have been jerry-built, a hodgepodge determined by (often unanticipated) needs and opportunities and thus marked by both sudden hairpin turns and gradual attritions. Although comics was his vocation, Kirby did not, could not, shape his career with anything like professional foresight, and many career moves that would turn out to be momentous for him over the long haul were made without forethought or grand ambition. He did try, in the late fifties , to secure a newspaper comic strip, a more lucrative and respected job that could have lifted him out of the life of a comic book journeyman—but those attempts were short-lived. Until the late sixties, he seemingly had no inward sense of his own resources and potential as a solo act, nor any propensity for long-term planning. Despite the occasional commercial ambitiousness of the Simon & Kirby shop—the two tried self-publishing in 1954—it was not until Kirby’s Improbable Career 21 the launch of the Fourth World in 1970 that Kirby undertook a solo project with a firm publication plan and long-range structural ambitions (short-circuited when the Fourth World was preemptorily scrapped). Still, it’s tempting to divide Kirby’s working life into a series of distinct phases, if only to appreciate the vast, sprawling scope of his career. Of course these putative phases cannot be firmly separated, for in most cases Kirby was not conscious of starting a new phase, and, again in most cases, each new phase overlapped with the previous, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, due to the vagaries of freelance work and in some instances to time lags between the creation and publication of the work. The discreteness of these phases, then, is no more than a useful fiction: a mere piton for the sake of the climb. With that caveat in mind, we can break Kirby’s career down roughly into six sometimes-overlapping periods, the better to show what he accomplished and under what circumstances: 1. Early Kirby, prior to 1941: This phase includes Kirby’s juvenilia and first few years of professional work, initially as an animator’s assistant at the Fleischer Brothers studio (1935–c. 1937) and then as a comic strip and comic book artist working for various syndicates and shops: Lincoln Features (1936–39), the Eisner -Iger shop and its Universal Phoenix Syndicate (1938), Associated Features (1938–39), and Fox (1940). During this period Kirby apprenticed in various genres—fact-based cartoon panels, humor, westerns, science fiction, historical adventure—attempting different styles and imitating various then-popular newspaper strip cartoonists (notably Milton Caniff, creator of the very popular Terry and the Pirates). This formative period bleeds into the next: 2. Simon & Kirby: This is the phase—the long and life-changing period, rather —of Kirby’s business and creative partnership with fellow cartoonist Joe Simon , from 1940 to roughly the mid-fifties. Kirby’s professional successes, early and late, would have been impossible without the relative stability provided by this partnership, and indeed the Simon & Kirby team, one of the most successful of the comic book’s formative era, warrants its own study. For present purposes, the Simon & Kirby period may be roughly divided into prewar, wartime, and postwar subperiods. The two artists’ association began with their meeting...

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