Today, as many of us gather in San Diego for the fiftieth Comic-Con in this town, my thoughts lean towards a man I was privileged to know named Jack Kirby. It is a privilege of the ongoing variety since I continually realize it was an even greater privilege than I previously thought.
I really hope that when I write about him, as I so often do, it comes across as me wanting to share my good fortune with you, not me bragging that I knew him and you didn't, nyah nyah. If you'd had extraordinary access to any of the great thinkers of the century (any century), you'd feel an obligation to share with the world, everything they said and everything you'd observed. Well, I did and do.
He was a true visionary in every sense of that overused label — not always right, not always prescient…but right and prescient enough to set him way ahead of all the bogus visionaries who are right and prescient about as often as one of those Magic 8-Ball toys.
And one of the things Jack was right and prescient about was this convention. In its earliest days — 1971, 1972…around in there — he said something about it which I was there to hear. I remember it vividly and I also remember how we around him nodded in concurrence even though we thought it was kinda looney at the time.
Lots of things Jack said seemed looney when he said them. When in the sixties he told the folks running Marvel that Thor, X-Men, Hulk, Fantastic Four and all those properties he co-birthed would someday be the basis for smash-hit motion pictures, they thought he was outta his friggin' mind.
What he said about Comic-Con is being quoted a lot this week because, as things turned out, it wasn't looney at all. Not the least bit looney. He may have said this in other forms to other people but I think all the ones I see quoting it are quoting me quoting him and a few are getting the words wrong. Here is exactly how I remember it. Referring to the city of San Diego, Jack Kirby said…
The day is going to come when we're going to take over this town every year. This will be where Hollywood comes to sell the movies they made last year and to find out what they're going to make next year.
End of quote. That's either precisely what he said that day or very, very close. It's certainly very, very true.