For some reason, about once a week I get this question from someone. In this case, it's from Mike Frank…
Would you know if there has been any consideration to putting out a "restored" edition of Jack Kirby's New Gods? One that had all the faces returned to what Kirby originally drew?
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the faces Jack drew on his characters were altered when New Gods was originally printed. Nope. What Jack drew is what the inkers inked and what the inkers inked is what was printed. What was changed was the way Jack drew Superman and Jimmy Olsen (and in a panel or two, Perry White) in the issues of Jimmy Olsen that Jack wrote and drew…and Superman in his guest appearance in Forever People #1. I explained a little bit about this in an item which I posted here in 2003, I said…
DC recently issued the first of two volumes reprinting Jack's Jimmy Olsen stories, just as they were originally published. There is no way to actually restore what Jack did — only a few stats of a few panels have survived — but there was once talk of having someone (probably Steve Rude) redraw the redraws into more of a Kirby style. In fact, I somewhat instigated such discussions before finally becoming convinced that it was impractical. You really wouldn't be resurrecting what Jack did since those drawings are lost and gone forever. You'd just be trading one set of non-Kirby drawings for another. It might have a certain commercial appeal but it wouldn't exactly undo what was done to the work in the first place.
I should add one other thing which I may also have said here before. To the extent we're concerned with how Jack Kirby would have felt about his work being altered today — and some folks who claim to be his devout fans clearly don't care about this — he was very clear. He didn't like his work being "tampered with" then and he wouldn't like it now. I don't claim to be an expert on how Jack would have felt about some things today but on this point, he was as clear as clear could be. He didn't like being rewritten. He didn't like being redrawn. He tolerated a certain amount of that then because as a working professional back then, you had to tolerate a certain amount of that. But on anything more serious than fixing a spelling mistake, he never said, "Oh, I'm so glad they changed that."
I believe he would have been fine — even pleased — to have his work receive better coloring than it did then. He didn't like anything the DC colorists did then and certainly did not regard the coloring as his work. About the only time he even got to approve any part of the coloring on the books he ostensibly edited for DC was when he got them to replace their color scheme for Mister Miracle, which he thought was awful, with one that Steve Sherman and I worked up. When he asked them to change some of the other character color designs which he disliked, the Production Departments simply refused.
This is not to say he would have liked all of the recolorings that have been done on recent reprints; merely that he would not have objected to the whole idea of the work being recolored. And what he would have liked best was if someone could have colored it the way Stan Goldberg or Marie Severin colored his work at Marvel in the late sixties. He liked mostly flat, bright colors that separated the planes of his work, giving the panels a feeling of depth without calling too much attention to the coloring itself. He would not have liked what some current-day colorists do which is to try to add details or special effects to the basic drawings in color and/or to redefine the contours of the anatomy.
Anyway, there are more reprintings of New Gods and the other Fourth World comics ahead. I believe that that series — which Jack was told at the time had limited commercial appeal — will be in print in some format for the rest of my life and beyond. One of these days, I think DC Comics should hire me to write a special foreword which will be saved for the 100th Anniversary Edition. Because there will be one.
