Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!

Mark Evanier's comics resume is the sort which might well elicit the low, admiring whistle of even the most jaded of devotees or practitioners. Among other accomplishments, he crafted the long-

running (and much admired) CROSSFIRE and DNAgents titles for the now defunct Eclipse Comics; the criminally underrated BLACKHAWK series of the early 1980's; added the word "mulch" to the fannish lexicon while aiding and abetting cartoonist Sergio Aragones on the frankly hysterical GROO THE WANDERER; and is -- even as we speak -- adding yet another notch to his gun belt (again in tandem with the aforementioned Mr. Aragones), re: the dead-on-target FANBOY.

Mark got his start in the industry by serving as Jack "King" Kirby's assistant, back when the latter titan was working on such titles as MISTER MIRACLE and THE NEW GODS for DC Comics. If there's any man alive better qualified to discuss Jack Kirby's work and/or worldview: I've never seen or heard of him.

CHEEKS: The late Jack 'King' Kirby was a (self-described) "scrapper," who grew up on New York's Lower East Side, in "extreme poverty"; a social milieu where violent kid gangs would "chase each other up and down fire escapes, over rooftops [...] and there were real injuries"; and where there were "very strict social conventions, and you adhered to [them], and it gave you a lot of character. When a man said something, he meant it." [THE COMICS JOURNAL #134]

To what extent -- if any -- do you believe that said background informed Mr. Kirby's storytelling approach to the character of Captain America, back in the 1940's?

MARK EVANIER: I think that had everything to do with everything Jack did. He really was amazingly equipped to do heroic comics, as he had very firm (but not fanatical) beliefs in what was right, and a solid sense of self-preservation. More to the point, I think Jack used his brawling days as an emotional reference point for comic book battles, the same way an actor will draw upon a past sad memory when he has to play a sad scene.

When Captain America punched out the Red Skull, that was

Jack punching out a street punk. (His World War II experiences would

later be even more dominant in this way.)

CHEEKS: As a follow-up to the previous question: do you think Mr. Kirby "saw" the character any differently twenty years later, anent his revival in the 1960's; a decade which saw many of the core moral and/or ethical beliefs with which he'd been raised challenged, or even (in some cases) supplanted? Why? (Or why not, as the case may be?)

MARK EVANIER: I think Jack constantly saw Captain America in the context of his [Kirby's] world at any given point. Jack was very much aware of whatever was current in politics and he adjusted his view of Captain America accordingly. In the forties, there was a certain blind

acceptance of the kind of patriotism that makes a guy dress in the

flag. In the sixties, there was a justifiable skepticism... of the

person, not the flag.

CHEEKS: If Jack Kirby were alive and chronicling the Captain's adventures today -- in these days of Ken Starr; "Monicagate"; an electorate increasingly polarized along political lines; etc. -- do you think he might have taken a more openly "political" approach to the character; a less political one; or opted for (essentially) the same straightforward "adventure" approach he'd employed during (say) his '70's tenure on the strip?

MARK EVANIER: Jack didn't consciously theorize about such things. He just did what he felt was right at the time. I can only guess that he would have felt very strongly about his politics, which were pretty liberal, and that it would have been on his mind. How overt he would have allowed it to be in his work, I can't say.

CHEEKS: You were responsible for a marvelously entertaining Falcon "one-shot" in MARVEL PREMIERE, back in the 1970's. How would you have approached the assignment of an ongoing FALCON series, given the opportunity? Straightforward "superhero"-ish adventures? A more urban, "street-level" approach, a la your later work on CROSSFIRE? A mixture? Or something else entirely?

MARK EVANIER: I don't know. That issue was done as an issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA when Steve Gerber was writing/editing the comic, but they decided to save it for a stand-alone story. So I didn't approach it with the notion of an ongoing series at all, and never spent any time thinking about it. I don't think I would have been the person to write an

ongoing series, so the answer is that I probably would have passed on

such an assignment.

CHEEKS: It's something of a unfortunate truism that the comics industry today has -- by and large -- all but lost the ability to "reach" its one-time "core" readership (i.e., kids and/or casual readers); an increasingly serious problem which has beset the industry as far back (by some accountings) as the 1970's.

What was it that craftsmen such as Jack Kirby knew -- whether by instinct, or calculation -- that so many of today's practitioners have forgotten?

MARK EVANIER: I think, by and large, Jack was not a comic book reader. He almost never looked at comics by others unless required for some assignment, and often didn't look at his own after publication. For

that reason, he thought of himself as a storyteller, not a comic book

storyteller. So it was mostly a case of having lots of things to say

about matters other than comic books.

"PANNING FOR SILVER: Captain America" (STEVE ENGLEHART) (Page 3)

"PANNING FOR SILVER: Captain America" (TONY ISABELLA) (Page 4)

"PANNING FOR SILVER: Captain America" (KURT BUSIEK) (Page 5)
"PANNING FOR SILVER: Captain America" (MARK WAID) (Page 6)

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