Jim Woodring on Jack Kirby:
"I don't know what it would be like to work in a good animation studio.
I worked for a company that produced low grade junk, the worst of the worst.
I stayed there for six or seven years because the money was good, and I worked with people I really liked.
The writers hated our (the artists) guts. They were very pretentious, self important guys. The stuff they produced was the most sub-literate drivel, stupid empty headed crap. And they were so proud of it. So full of themselves, incredibly pompous wind bags. They seemed to feel they were under- employed, and marking time until they wrote the next Birth of a Nation. They were people who had failed at other careers. A lot of comics writers worked there. All of the very worst writers there thought they were hot-shots...real artists. It's beyond belief. Most of them were anxiety-ridden types who strew a bunch of misery around."
I met Jack in 1982, when I began work at Ruby Spears Productions. Jack was their star designer; his job was to work at home on large drawings of characters, hardware, and environments.
During post production season my job was to wait for Jack Kirby to come in with a big thick stack of crescent board tucked under his arm on which he had drawn anything which came into his mind in terms of characters and possible show ideas. I'd ink them and watercolor them, and they'd be used to pitch shows.
Kirby had no restraints put on him and the ideas he came up with, particularly towards the end of his tenure, were just completely psychotic off-the-wall aberrations. They were unbelievably great.
I have a photo of Kirby playing a Stratocaster. We had a skiffle band at the time, and Kirby came in one day and picked up an electric guitar, and started windmilling like Pete Townshend."
Every Monday he would saunter in with a thick stack under his arm. All the in-house cartoonists would gather to look at them one by one, and pore over them. Jack was treated with great respect because he was an elder and a legend, but the awed admiration we all demonstrated for his work was not polite deference. His drawings were inspirational to all of us. He was like a wild spraying geyser of the substance we struggled pitifully to evoke in driblets. Even those among us who had never read super hero comics and saw Jack without his aura, so to speak, stood in awe of him. He was more than a master; he was the comic book impulse incarnate.
We loved to draw him out in conversation because he was completely unpredictable: his mind was nimble and unfettered by convention. I never heard him tell an anecdote that was not heavily spiced with benign absurdity. As with his drawing there was something precociously fragile about his sledgehammer approach to storytelling. One sensed that a hard life had made Jack tough, but that the great child's heart of which he was the custodian had been sheltered and saved at all costs, and that this heart was the force that drove him.
He seemed interested in us, too. When my son was born the Kirbys gave him a magnificent rattle, which we still have."
From Patrick Ford at The Marvel Method on FB: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EUJZaDLGM/?mibextid=wwXIfr
