Kirby had no great love for any of the DC books, and didn’t want to boot another artist out of a job, so he told Infantino to just give him whatever book didn’t have an artist it could be the lowest-selling title DC published, he didn’t care. As the story goes, Infantino wanted Kirby to handle at least one existing title in addition to the new books he was planning on creating. When then-DC Comics publisher Carmine Infantino made Jack an offer to come over to DC, Kirby accepted, and brought his new concepts with him.
Instead, there was only one of Jack’s trademark cigars pinned to a wall with a note attached reading “I quit!” Kirby was living in California at the time, far from Marvel’s New York offices, so no one knows who really nailed the stogie to the wall.) (In a famous rumor, no one working at Marvel at the time received any sort of formal memorandum informing them that Jack Kirby, the co-creator of so many of their characters, had left the company. In 1970, an increasingly frustrated Jack Kirby quit working at Marvel Comics. Since there was no creator ownership in mainstream comics at the time, Kirby wasn’t about to turn this newest, extremely personal concept over to Marvel, so away they went into the drawer. During his last few years at Marvel, Jack had been developing and sketching a whole army of new characters and keeping them to himself, out of any Marvel books. This week we’ll take a look at Kirby’s splashy debut for DC Comics, as well as the frustrating circumstances behind its demise.Īs more and more of the plotting had fallen to him on Marvel works like FANTASTIC FOUR and THOR, Kirby reportedly disliked the fact that often Stan Lee’s scripting didn’t properly reflect the direction or tone of the stories as he’d conceived them. But in a way, that opening also served as notice to comics fans that the old days of Stan and Jack, the Lee/Kirby team that had revolutionized comics at Marvel, was blown apart, finished, and in its place was a new world, sprung entirely from the muse of Kirby alone. So begins the first issue of Jack Kirby’s NEW GODS #1, the centerpiece of what many consider the crowning work of his career, the “Fourth World” saga of interconnecting titles for DC Comics.
“There came a time when the old gods died…”
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