Over at the hilobrow website, they're running a series of essays where artists or critics analyze a single panel from some Jack Kirby comic. If you browse around there, you'll find many of interest but I'm going to respond here to one by Mark Newgarden about the appearance in Jimmy Olsen #144 of comic actor Jimmy Finlayson. Newgarden is intrigued by Jack's decision to base a character on the long-deceased Finlayson…a face that can't have been well-known to kids then buying comic books. I can supply some background information here.
Jack didn't much like working on Jimmy Olsen. It was someone else's character, someone's else's book…and when you worked on the "Superman family" comics then, you had to coordinate with a half-dozen other editors who also had Superman (and sometimes Jimmy) in their comics. A nice, wise man named Nelson Bridwell who worked for DC in New York acted as coordinator among all the Superman editors. That meant that Nelson would call Jack up and say something like, "Sorry, you can't have Superman eat cream cheese in your book because in Action Comics, we have a storyline going with an alien mad scientist who's made Clark Kent lactose-intolerant." Or some conflict of that variety. Many at DC hated the way Jack drew Superman and Olsen and his renderings of those characters were being redrawn by others…and Kirby was just sick of the assignment.
My friend Steve Sherman and I were then working as assistants to Jack…and I always emphasize that we didn't contribute that much to his books. Jack wrote 'em, Jack drew 'em and there wasn't much we or anyone else could contribute. We wrote letter pages, worked on projects that never materialized, did some art production work, fetched research and did a little writing. He used very little of what we wrote but at one point, he decided he wanted to have us start writing Jimmy Olsen under his supervision. The idea was that he'd draw a few of our scripts, then suggest to DC that we keep writing it but someone else start drawing it. I didn't think they'd go for it and I wasn't all that interested in writing that comic at that time for that company…but we agreed to give it a try. Jack told us to come up with a story, work out a plot and bring it to him the following week. We'd all talk through it, he'd give his input and send us off to write a full script he could illustrate. That was the plan.
I'm pretty sure it was Steve who came up with the idea of doing something around the Loch Ness Monster, just as I'm sure it was my idea to use Jimmy Finlayson as a character. "Fin," of course, was the foil in many a Laurel and Hardy film and I was a huge fan of Stan and Ollie. Steve and I worked out a plot and when we took it to Jack one Saturday, I took along a still from my collection. It was from one of the best Laurel and Hardy silent movies, Big Business, and it was the best shot I had of Finlayson. This is that still…
We talked through our story idea with Jack…and his imagination was, as always, unbounded. For every one idea we had, he had three. He started with our story and proceeded to change it so much that it was like we'd brought him rat droppings and he'd shaped them into filet mignon. I quickly scribbled down notes and we were assigned to go home, write the script and bring it back the following weekend.
On Monday, Jack finished Jimmy Olsen #143 and at the end of it, he wrote in a "coming attraction" blurb about the Loch Ness story. He sent the issue off, then went to work on an issue of New Gods. A day or so later, Nelson Bridwell called him to say they'd received #143 and needed him to stop work on the New Gods and immediately do Jimmy Olsen #144 since the book was dangerously behind schedule. Jack, who was never late or behind on anything, was baffled how that could be until Bridwell explained it to him. Because of strong sales on Jack's first issues, the comic had upped from eight-issues-a-year to monthly — but no one had told Jack nor had anyone thought to readjust some schedules back in New York.
So he immediately started work on the Loch Ness story and I'm not entirely sure why he didn't have New York change that "next issue" blurb so he could instead use our script later. Maybe it didn't occur to him. Maybe it was that he needed an Olsen idea right that minute and the Loch Ness plot was all worked-out in his head. I assume he figured it would get the issue done quicker if he didn't try to deal with rewriting or fixing what we'd hand in…so he sat down and began writing and drawing it. Fortunately, I'd left the photo in his studio and as you can see, he used it as visual reference. He was probably looking at that still when he drew the above shot of the character based on Finlayson.
On Sunday, Steve and I delivered our finished script. We were a little stunned to find out that Jack was almost finished with the issue. I mean, usually editors at least read my work before they start rewriting it. What he came up with was, of course, much better…and it strayed a lot from the story we'd all agreed-upon the week before. I suspect the end product wasn't much different from what would have resulted if Jack had waited until he actually had our script before he started working on the issue.
Jack was very apologetic and he said he'd give us credit as co-authors, which we told him was not necessary. There's a long, irrelevant story of how he tried to put our names on anyway but they wound up not getting on…which was fine with us since the story was about 95% his. About all I contributed was to suggest Finlayson and to give Jack that still. That the idea to include Fin came from me doesn't invalidate anything Newgarden wrote since it was Jack who had the final decision to put Jimmy in there. I don't think he thought readers would recognize or know Finlayson (unlike the guest shot of Don Rickles in Jimmy Olsen). I think Jack just thought it was a great, expressive face and personality that would make for a good story. For Jack, that was all the reason he needed to do anything.
