It's reasonably well-known, at least in comics circles, that Jack Kirby was actually born Jacob Kurtzberg. But like so many other creators in those days -- Stan Lee and Bob Kane probably being the most notable examples -- Jacob Kurtzberg legally changed his name. But today's question is: when?

Fortunately, Gary Groth interviewed Jack about exactly that back in 1990...

GROTH: I understand you got a job with a small newspaper syndicate when you were 18.

KIRBY: Newspaper Features.

GROTH: What were you doing for them?

KIRBY: I was doing editorials. Like I said I did “Your Health Comes First”. I did another daily comic. On each comic strip I put a different name: I was Jack Curtis, Jack Cortez… I didn’t want to be in any particular environment, I wanted to be an all-around American. I kept Kirby. My mother gave me hell. My father gave me hell. My family disowned me.

GROTH: You actually changed your name to Kirby?

KIRBY: When I began doing the strips.

GROTH: Why did you change your name exactly?

KIRBY: I wanted to be an American. My name is Kurtzberg.

GROTH: Why didn’t you think Kurtzberg was an acceptable American name?

KIRBY: I felt if you wanted to have a great name it would be Farnesworth, right? Or Stillweather. I felt Jack Kirby was close to my real name.

"The strips" refer to some of Jack's earliest professional comics work. After leaving the Fleischer animation studios in 1936, he began working for Lincoln Features Syndicate, working on a variety of knock-off strips under a variety of pseudonyms. He went over to the Eisner-Iger Studio in 1938, and worked on both strips and books, again, under a variety of pen names. For Associated Features, he drew The Lone Rider in 1939 under the name Lance Kirby and for Fox Features in 1940, he drew Blue Beetle as "Charles Nicholas." The name "Jack Kirby" first appears in print in late 1940 as he and Joe Simon worked on Blue Bolt #5.

This would suggest Jack changed his name sometime in 1940 or later, and Mark Evanier's biography of him backs this suggestion up. In fact, Evanier notes that Jack didn't change his name until after he got married in 1942 and his wife Roz had to change her name too. Further evidence in the book can be found in an October 1943 newspaper clipping that notes that the Jack Kirby who did Boy Commandos is "an army private at [Camp] Stewart, in the 845th Battalion under his real name, Jack Kurtzberg." And it stands to reason he wouldn't change his name while he was still in the army fighting Nazis, so that pushes any legal changes back to July 1945 at the earliest. Well after he'd left doing comic strips and was a marketable name in comic books.

So if we're that late into his career, and clearly throwing Jack's own recollection out of the water, that doesn't really answer much. "Sometime after 1945" still leaves almost half a century until Jack's death in 1994. I would guess that the legal name change was Roz's doing, likely after getting yet another check made out to "Jack Kirby." Their first daughter, Susan, was born late in 1945 -- did they have to change her name too, or was that something they took care of before she was born?

Here's something I don't get... If he didn't change his name until sometime after mid-1945, that would mean he worked at the Eisner-Iger studio as Jacob Kurtzberg. And yet at no point can I find any reference of Will Eisner saying, "Of course, when he worked for me, he was still going by Jacob Kurtzberg..." or anything like that. Even in Shop Talk, where the two of them are sitting together expressly talking about that studio and their time together there. Maybe my research skills aren't as sharp as they could be, but that seems like a striking omission on Eisner's part.

Unless perhaps he was going by "Jack Kirby" for several years informally, and just didn't legalize until sometime later. I know Stan Lee took this approach, changing his name decades after first using the pen name. This might account for why Jack mis-remembered when he changed his name -- everyone started calling him Jack Kirby in the late 1930s, so he was, for his purposes, no longer Jacob Kurtzberg. That it took a few more years (and probably Roz doing most of the paperwork) to get it officially changed was just some paperwork he had to sign. He was Jack Kirby regardless what it said on his tax forms.

The Blue Beetle was originally developed for Victor Fox's comic book Mystery Men Comics in mid-1939 by Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski, who went by the pen name Charles Nicholas. The character was created after Fox was sued by Detective Comics because his Wonderman character allegedly was too similar to Superman. The case had only just started when Nicholas created the Blue Beetle, and the book debuted about four months after Batman suggesting that Beetle was created as a Batman clone that was far enough removed to keep Fox from getting sued again. (Though influences from the Green Hornet are clearly evident.)

With Wonderman off limits during the lawsuit, Fox turned to Blue Beetle as his company's cornerstone character. The book sold reasonably well, and in the tail end of 1939, Fox decided to try to emulate Superman's media saturation by putting Beetle into his own comic strip. He began putting out ads to this effect in November of that year.

You'll note that the ad highlights Nicholas as the creator of the strip and, indeed, when the strip debuted in early 1940, it had Nicholas listed as the creator. However, it was actually the hand of a young Jack Kirby who did the strip. He makes no attempt to mimic Nicholas' style and, while the artwork in the strip is hardly Kirby's best, it is very classically idetifiable. While Kirby had done several other comic strips previously, this was his first superhero.

The Blue Beetle strip debuted in The Boston Evening Transcript on January 8, 1940. As far as anyone's been able to actually prove, that's the only paper it ever actually ran in. Kirby seemed to be largely left to his own devices with the strip. Aside from the Blue Beetle himself, Kirby seemed to be using his own cast of characters. Even with little continuity established in the comic book at this point, Kirby seemed unconcerned that it even existed.

While it's not Kirby's best art, he was more already more adept than most others at the storytelling of a daily strip. In the few sequences I've seen, he's able to run one installment to the next without either clumsily recapping what happened previously or letting readers get lost. Much like how he handled his Sky Masters strip decades later.

Kirby was only on the Blue Beetle strip for a few months, replaced by Louis Cazaneuve. At Fox's studio, Kirby had met Joe Simon and both men, who were independently moonlighting for other companies, saw the advantages of pairing up to become a studio of their own. "Simon and Kirby" was born in the pages of Blue Bolt comics by July 1940.

Fox continued trying to hype Blue Beetle, getting him his own radio show by May 1940 and hosting a "Blue Beetle Day" at the World's Fair in August. That radio program only lasted until September, though, and comic strip died out at the year's end. He never became the media sensation that Superman was. One wonders, though, what might have become of the character had Kirby never met Simon and instead continued on the strip.

This Friday is Jack Kirby's birthday, so I'm going to take the entire week to talk about the King of Comics.

To beging with, let's highlight a little-remembered side of Kirby. He's of course widely known as a comic book artist, and rightly so. But he also dipped into the comic strip market more than a few times as well. So what I thought I'd do today is showcase some samples of comic strips done by Jack Kirby. He never saw much success with these -- indeed, many were never even published -- but it is, as I say, an aspect of Kirby's career that is frequently overlooked.

So here are examples of thirteen different strips he worked on, plus one editorial cartoon. Enjoy!

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Better or Worse?
https://ift.tt/7IeYGAu

Kleefeld on Comics: The Problems with Digital Badges
https://ift.tt/x0im7Bq

Kleefeld on Comics: Are We Having Fun Yet?
https://ift.tt/KvGIu34

Kleefeld on Comics: August 1972 in Comics
https://ift.tt/610GVjp

Kleefeld on Comics: Bradbury's First Comic Adaption
https://ift.tt/XOKyP0Q

Tomorrow is Ray Bradbury's birthday so let's take a look at his comics work. Dark Carnival is a short story collection by Bradbury. In fact, it's his first short story collection. In fact, it's his first book of any kind, although most of the stories collected in it had been published elsewhere. The book was first published in October 1947.

In early 1951, EC Comics published The Haunt of Fear #6, whose lead story was an adaptation of Bradbury's short "The Handler" which appeared in Dark Carnival. Writer/editor Al Feldstein "borrowed" the plot from the book and reworked it a bit for the Graham Ingels-drawn story "A Strange Undertaking..." This was done without Bradbury's knowledge, and the tactic was repeated more than a couple times over the next year before Bradbury found out. He then famously wrote a very cordial letter to publisher Bill Gaines reminding him that he hadn't been paid yet.

What I thought might be interesting, though, is reproducing here the original version of the story from the January 1947 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales with a spot illustration by Lee Brown Coye. Coye was as well-known for his horror illustrations as Ingles was for his horror comics, and did a fair amount of work illustrated various H.P. Lovecraft pieces. Although interestingly, a Lovecraft piece immediately follows Bradbury's in Weird Tales but it wasn't Coye's work. Bradbury editted most of his stories a bit for Dark Carnival so this is probably slightly different than the version Feldstein read when he adapted it.

Anyway, here's the original published version of what would become Bradbury's first story to be adapted into a comic book...

"What happened in August 1972," you ask? How about this...

• While the last issue of Jack Kirby's Forever People hit the stands, so did the first issue of his latest creation, Kamandi. DC also published Swamp Thing for the first time...
  
• Marvel kicked off two new titles of their own: Night Nurse and The Cat, the latter debuting the first appearance of the title character who would later become known as Tigra...
  
• Archie's new series: Archie at Riverdale High...
• The fourth comic convention in San Diego, later to become known as Comic Con International, took place from August 18th - 21st! It was the first time to be held at El Cortez Hotel, which was the show's primary location for the rest of the 1970s. Bob Clampett, Harry Harrison, Jack Kirby, Mel Lazarus and Roy Thomas were guests.
• John Barrett, Bud Plant and Robert Beerbohm opened the first Comics & Comix, about a week after the convention. Though it was not the first dedicated comic book shop to open, it helped paved the way for a number of other shops and shop owners, notably Beerbohm and Plant. (Beerbohm passed away in 2024 but Plant is still active to this day.)
• Yours truly was born on August 20. (Happy birthday to me!)
  
• Snoopy, Come Home was released in theaters on the ninth. It featured the first appearances of Woodstock and Franklin onscreen.
• Ben Affleck -- who later went on to play Daredevil, Batman and George-Reeves-playing-Superman -- was born on August 15.
  
• Fantastic Four #125 was released. This was the last issue of the title where Stan Lee is credited as the writer until #296, the 25th anniversary issue. (OK, strictly speaking, this last item is a little bogus. The issue is cover-dated August 1972, but it actually hit newsstands a couple months earlier. The issue that was actually released in August, though, isn't especially note-worthy, so I'm going to include #125 here anyway. 😊)
  

Lots going on, so I don't really have a legit post for today, just today's Zippy comic strip...