Interview: Mark Evanier on ‘Kirby: King of Comics’
If the entertainment industry was a baseball team, Mark Evanier would be the utility infielder. A quick glance at his resume and you’ll see a career that spans the worlds of comics, television, film and animation, and a creator who’s found success playing a variety of roles in the creative process.
He began his career working with the late, great, comics creator Jack Kirby, and their friendship endured beyond their initial professional association. Evanier’s name can be found on the writing credits of television series such as Welcome Back, Kotter, as well as various animated series, including Dungeons and Dragons, Thundarr the Barbarian and Garfield and Friends. His portfolio of comics work includes a longstanding partnership with Sergio Aragones on Groo the Wanderer and the current, ongoing DC series The Spirit, based on the popular Will Eisner character.
Evanier also acts as administrator for the official online home of Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip, and maintains a regularly updated blog about comics, film and the entertainment industry as a whole on his website at www.povonline.com.
I spoke with Evanier about the recent release of Kirby: King of Comics, the biography of Jack Kirby he authored, as well as his work with The Spirit and Pogo. We even found some time to talk a bit about his experience at AnthroCon, and his introduction to the world of "Furries."
COMICMIX: What are you up to today, Mark?
MARK EVANIER: Today I’m working on the foreword for the collection of Jack Kirby’s O.M.A.C. comic that DC’s going to publish. I had to do some proofreading and finalization on a new Crossfire story that’s going to be published, and I’m working on the Garfield cartoon show today. See, if you do enough different things, you don’t do any of them well. But they’ll think you’re versatile.
CMix: Kirby: King of Comics, your biography of Jack Kirby just hit shelves. Can you tell me a little about your relationship with Kirby? How did the biography project come about?
ME: Well, we first met in July of 1969, and a few months later he asked me to become his assistant. I worked for him for a couple of years and then I left and we stayed friends. Then we had a fight, and then we became friends again.
Jack was kind of my brilliant, eccentric uncle for a while there, and early on in our association he gave me a clue that he’d like me to be a historian of his, also. One of the things that intrigued me was that he wasn’t telling me what to write or what not to write. Jack was very committed to the truth. He was kind of obsessive and he always thought that he would come off well in any history if people just wrote the truth.
I always knew that I was going to write stuff about him, I just didn’t know what form it would take or when I’d write it. But then, after he passed away, his widow said to me, "Listen, when are you going to write a book about Jack?" I said, "Oh, do you think this is the time?" She said, "Yes, please do it." I agreed to do it and she helped me a lot and gave me all of Jack’s personal papers and effects and such.
I’ve been working since Jack passed away, which is 14 years now, on a humongous-sized book about his life. It’s still a few years off in the future, so when the Harry N. Abrams Company asked me to do an interim book to tide people over, I took a look at what I was doing and realized the massive book I was writing was getting too mired in minutia to the point where I thought a lot of ordinary civilians wouldn’t be able to make their way through it. So I thought I’d do a sort of simplified version first.
A few years back, DC released the super-thick, super-cheap 
to lead into the company’s massive Infinite Crisis event. In addition to recapping the years’ worth of hints that led to Crisis, the issue also contained some crucially important events, including the death of Ted Kord (Blue Beetle).
I covered a handful of new series debuting this week in my 
, one of the more puzzling series to come around lately.
The other day I was talking to James Kochalka, creator of Superf*ckers and the upcoming 
children’s books, and he mentioned how difficult it is to find superhero books for his kids. Such offerings are mostly limited to comic book adaptations of cartoon series that were adapted from comics, he said, and “they’ve been pretty bad.”
With the recent and much heralded conclusion to 
, the continued strong run of 
It used to be, if you wanted to reach for the comic art form for your sex education you had to send a couple bucks to those want ads in the back of the cheesy magazines for “Comics – the Kind Men Like!” That stuff was a bit distorted; well, in the case of the ones that featured [[[Popeye]]], I’d have to say they were quite a bit distorted.
is a sweet and sensitive series that focuses on the psychological aspects of sex as much as – actually, more than – the mechanics. The story is about a young couple, Makoto and Yura, who met through an arranged “marriage meeting.” This is sort of a counseled dating service, but one where the ultimate intent of marriage is upfront. The two 25 year olds dated, liked each other, got married, and only then discovered they were both virgins with a lot of understandable insecurities and a lack of any clue.
You can understand why Joe Hill waited so long to publicly acknowledge that his father is famed writer Stephen King. For several years, Hill used that shortened version of his name (Joseph Hillstrom King in full) so that he could test himself in the fantasy/horror writing world without the spectre of his father lurking about.
The news of Mike Carey writing a fantasy/horror comic set in Japan sounded too good to be true, and when 
debuted more than a year ago it struggled to live up to that promise.
