Kirby's Green Arrow

During the fifties, Jack Kirby did a brief, frustrating stint as the artist and creative impetus of Green Arrow, which was then one of DC Comics' second-string features.  Jack had no love of the character and neither, from what I can tell, did anyone else for a few decades.  But it was work at a time when he needed it so he signed on and attempted — without his usual success — to "build it into something."  That was the way Kirby approached almost everything he touched: I have to build this into something.

Though comic sales were then in the toilet, Jack's attempts to revamp the strip were met around the office with an attitude of, "No, we like it the way it was," and his rather modest proposed innovations were tempered.  One of the problems was that Green Arrow had been co-created by a burly, egotistical DC editor named Mort Weisinger who had never liked Kirby's work or the notion of artists doing anything more than drawing what they were told to draw.  Weisinger was not then the editor of the strip — Jack Schiff was — but Weisinger wielded enough influence over it to keep it more or less the way he wanted it.

For a relatively short time, Jack was doing that strip, the occasional story for DC's mystery anthology comics and his ground-breaking book, Challengers of the Unknown.  Then he got into a business squabble with Schiff and was bounced out of DC and told his services would never be welcome there again.  And for twelve-or-so years, they weren't.  During that time, he worked at Marvel, where Stan Lee was a bit more receptive to the Kirby style and to allowing Jack to try and build things.  That worked out quite well…

If you'd like to see what Jack did with Green Arrow — trying and failing to make it a better strip — DC now gives you that opportunity.  You can now purchase, for about six bucks, a slim volume that contains every Green Arrow story Jack Kirby ever did…and you get a foreword by me, to boot, and a "new" Kirby cover.  It's a drawing Jack did of his western archer hero, Bullseye.  With the blessing of the Kirby estate, Mike Royer, one of Jack's favorite inkers was commissioned to take that drawing and alter it to be Green Arrow.  The whole thing is a nice, inexpensive package that you might want to seek out.