Kurt Busiek: Getting to the Bottom of Topps Comics

Interview conducted by e-mail, with questions devised by Eric Nolen-Weathington and John Morrow.

Kurt Busiek needs little introduction to readers of today's comics. He made his first major splash on the scene as writer of Marvels, taking a more realistic view of many of the Lee/Kirby characters and events of the 1960s. He's gone on to handle a slew of other Kirby-related characters, including work on the Topps "Secret City Saga" characters in the 1990s, of which we were privileged to examine some of his preliminary materials for the series. Kurt is continually winning industry awards for, among other things, work on his creator-owned series Astro City. Our thanks to Kurt for taking time out of his busy schedule!

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: When did you first become aware of Jack Kirby's work? Did his work stand out for you at the time?

KURT BUSIEK: I probably read Kirby stuff early on, back when I was reading comics occasionally, running across them at friends' houses and such. The first time I became aware of his work, though, I wasn't even aware of his name yet. I'd recently started reading comics regularly, and had issues of both Fantastic Four and Marvel's Greatest Comics. I didn't realize that Marvel's Greatest Comics was a reprint magazine. In my confused youthful mind, I was trying to figure out how the people at Marvel knew to put the really great FF stories into Marvel's Greatest Comics, and the just-okay ones into Fantastic Four. What did they do, I wondered, if the story being done for Fantastic Four came in and was one of their greatest? Did they switch it into the other book?

So even then, I knew the Kirby stories were better. I just didn't know why.

This page was used as page 2 of Captain Victory #3 (Mar. 1982), but was actually part of the original Kirby story that was drawn in the mid-1970s. © Jack Kirby.

TJKC: Were you influenced by his writing style at all, as far as plotting and dialoguing go?

KURT: As far as dialoguing, not so much—though I get a kick out of Kirby dialogue. As far as plotting goes, though, I'm probably enormously influenced, even if it's just subconsciously. When I'm having trouble pacing out a story visually, one of my tricks is to ask myself, "Okay, if this was a Kirby story, how would it play out on the page?" That usually solves whatever problem I'm having.

TJKC: In my opinion, your greatest talent lies in characterization—getting to the heart of what makes your characters tick. How do you feel about Kirby's characterization? Do you consider it a strong suit or a weak one in his work?

KURT: I think Kirby's characterization is the bedrock his work rests on, and one of the strongest aspects of his work. His characters are bursting with personality, projecting whatever essential emotion or attitude is right for their personality and that story moment through their body language, their facial expressions, their visual design, and more.

The one piece of advice Kirby ever gave me was that a comics creator could do anything, no matter how strange, cosmic or bizarre, and if the characters just reacted to it like they should, like real people, then the audience would believe in it. I think that's how he worked in everything, never forgetting who the characters were, and what their essential human (or at least emotional, in the case of the non-humans) center was.

TJKC: How did you break into comics?

KURT: I had been writing fan letters for years, and writing for the fan press—plus, Scott McCloud and I had been doing comics for ourselves, practicing and learning by working with each other, since high school. I interviewed Dick Giordano, then the editor-in-chief at DC, for a college term paper on publishing, and after the interview was completed I told him I was hoping to become a comics writer when I graduated school.

He invited me to submit some script samples, so I did. I wrote four sample scripts—a Flash, a Supergirl, a "Superman: The In-Between Years" backup and a Brave and the Bold teaming Batman and Green Lantern—and sent them in. Dick parceled them out to the editors of those books, and as a result I got a tryout on a Superboy script (that didn't go anywhere) from Julie Schwartz, and an invitation to pitch "Tales of the Green Lantern Corps" backup ideas to Ernie Colón. Ernie liked a couple of the GLC pitches, so he hired me to write one of them, and that was my first bigtime sale, in Green Lantern #162.

While I was working on another GLC script for Ernie, I noticed that over at Marvel, they'd kept announcing that Bob Layton was going to be the new writer of Power Man & Iron Fist, but month after month, the book featured fill-in scripts written by Denny O'Neil, the book's editor. So I figured Denny might be open to some deadline help, and sent him a story submission for a one-issue Power Man & Iron Fist story along with a note saying that I was already writing professionally for DC. Denny bought it, so I pitched another, and as things worked out, Bob Layton never took over the book, and I wrote it for about a year.

TJKC: Marvels was what really put your name on the map. The story was told with a man-on-the-street realism that hadn't really been used at Marvel before. What was your thinking when taking grandiose, larger-than-life stories, particularly Kirby and Lee's introduction of Galactus, and showing them through the eyes of mere mortals? Did Alex Ross' work make it easier to convey? Would you have been able to tell the same story with Kirby art?

KURT: Showing the Marvel Universe through the eyes of the man on the street was, more or less, a way to do two things: First, it gave us a narrative hook that would tie together all the things Alex wanted to paint, from the original Human Torch to Gwen Stacy, and second, it was a perspective that took advantage of Alex's breathtakingly photorealistic art. I'd written a couple of stories prior to that from "normal human" viewpoints and liked it, but I think taking advantage of how "real" Alex made the Marvels look was a big reason we chose it—
and sure, the same approach could have been taken with Kirby's art, though I don't think it would have worked out the same, just as a straight retelling of the Galactus Trilogy by Alex wouldn't work out the same as the original. Both would probably be good, and have their own strength and power—but it wouldn't be the same.

Steve Rude's preliminary art for the Thor series he's doing with Kurt. Thor © Marvel Characters, Inc.

TJKC: You use a similar stylistic approach in Astro City. I'm thinking specifically of your "First Family" storyline where Astra runs away from "home, sweet fortress" so she can be a "normal" kid. Do you think Kirby and Lee could have pulled off this type of story in the FF? They did have the Thing return to normal a few times, but it usually involved a super-villain trying to turn him against the others. Do you think a more down-to-earth story like yours would translate to their style?

KURT: Why not? Kirby did Boys' Ranch with Joe Simon, after all, and plenty of romance comics that delivered more down-to-earth stories beautifully; but I don't think it's really a matter of whether their styles could accommodate the kind of story I told, so much as their creative instincts leading them somewhere else. If they'd done a story about a kid trying to find a place in a real world after growing up in a bizarre, super-heroic environment, it'd probably be very, very different, just because they're different creators and have different approaches.

I do think a more realistic style, like Brent [Anderson]'s, suits Astro City well. That's not to say that a Kirbyesque approach couldn't work—but it'd certainly play differently.

TJKC: In Astro City, you've created archetypal heroes for the most part. How does your take on these archetypes differ from Kirby's, particularly with characters like the First Family and The Silver Agent?

KURT: I'm not really sure what this question means. I'm kind of assuming it's taking "archetypal" to mean "a copy of a preexisting famous character," and that's not what we do in Astro City. The First Family, for instance, is built around the archetype of a family—not specifically the Fantastic Four, but Henry, Jane and Bridget Fonda as a generational family of actors, or even something like the Forsyte Saga. Uncle Julius was inspired in part by Uncle Charlie in My Three Sons. We made them a family of explorers as a nod to the FF, but even there they've got similarities to other such groups, like the Robinsons in Lost in Space.

So we weren't so much trying to do "our" Fantastic Four as "our" super-hero family. The question that started that whole story rolling had nothing to do with the FF—it was, "What must it have been like for Bridget Fonda, growing up? Henry Fonda was a famous actor, and when Jane and Peter came along, there must have been some expectation that they were just getting work because of their name; but they turned out pretty well—particularly Jane—so by the time Bridget Fonda was growing up, it was almost expected of her that she'd have acting talent, that she was part of a dynasty. What would that be like as a super-hero story?" And that's what gave us the story of Astra, growing up as a super-hero, on the inside looking out.

I suppose we could have made them something other than a family of explorers—making them a super-powered law-enforcement family like a generational Irish-American cop dynasty could have been fun, too. And with all the assumptions that everyone in Astro City is simply lifted from some Marvel or DC character, I'd probably go in some direction like that today, just to make sure that they wouldn't be mistaken for an FF pastiche. But Alex and I worked them up early on, and Alex wanted to Kirby 'em up, and I couldn't see any reason not to.

With the Silver Agent, probably the closest Kirby character to him is the Guardian, since both of them are cops translated into super-heroes. But I don't know that that resemblance even occurred to us when we started out with him—we wanted a generalized Silver Age "pure" hero, à la Barry Allen or Hal Jordan, and so we built him around this whole "serve and protect" metaphor.

I don't know if that answers your question—Kirby had a few super-hero families, including the FF and the Inhumans, but we weren't intending conceptual parallels, just some surface nods to the best-known super-hero family in comics; and the Silver Agent's underlying archetype is "neighborhood cop on the beat," but everyone takes him as a Captain America stand-in. It's a similarity, to be sure—and one I'm plenty conscious of—but more a surface similarity than an archetypal one.

I try to get at the roots of whatever characters I use in Astro City, and I expect I do that deliberately and analytically, while Kirby did it more on instinct and emotion—but I'm not really the guy to authoritatively say how Kirby's creativity worked. I only saw the end result of it.

TJKC: How did you become involved with the Kirbyverse? Were you approached by Topps, or did you seek this out?

KURT: Neil Vokes and I worked up a proposal for Jonny Demon— which we eventually did at Dark Horse—but we showed it to Jim Salicrup at Topps while we were looking for a publisher, and he asked us to do TeenAgents. That led to Victory and Silver Star, which got abruptly canceled, so it didn't lead to any more. Though I'd have liked to do more—we were talking about doing a Tiger 21 series when the line collapsed.

TJKC: You started with TeenAgents. What did you have to work from? That is, how far had Jack developed the concept? How much was involved on your end creatively?

KURT: All we had to work with was a single drawing Kirby had done of four kids in odd costumes, with the name "Teenagents" written on it. Whatever it was Kirby had intended them to be had been long lost, but they looked neat, and Jim thought we could do something with them. So Neil and I worked up names and powers for them, tweaked the costumes a little, and built a series concept out of it, trying to remain Kirbyesque without repeating any actual Kirby concepts. Our villain, for instance, Lord Ghast, was a cross between King Lear and Lorne Greene from Bonanza, with three super-powered daughters all from different human mothers. We wanted him to appear Kirbyesque without being Darkseid or Doom or anyone else Kirby had already done.

We did have one other piece of reference—the Omni-Bus, which we found in a stack of xeroxes in Jim's office. It was apparently an early sketch for what eventually became the Mountain of Judgment, but we thought it would make a great vehicle for the Teenagents, so we asked if we could use it.

I really have no idea what Jack's Teenagents would have been, or what they were created for—I have this vague idea that maybe they were non-super-powered espionage agents in the future, like The Mod Squad with science fiction, but that's just me projecting; I don't know anything for sure.

Pencils from Silver Star #6, page 2 (Jan. 1984), showing Darius Drumm as the Angel of Death. © Jack Kirby.

TJKC: TeenAgents was quite different from the typical Kirby Kid Gang comic. For one thing, there were girls in the group. Did you try to incorporate some of that Kid Gang feel into the story, or was the concept too far removed from those old stories?

KURT: We were definitely trying to make it a super-Kid Gang book, along the lines of X-Men or Forever People—again, without duplicating anything that had already been done. The girls were there in the original sketch—so that was Kirby, not us—but if you mean something like Boy Commandos or Newsboy Legion—no, we weren't thinking in that direction.

TJKC: How about Silver Star? I assume you read the series, but did you read the screenplay Kirby wrote as well? How did you prepare for the series?
KURT: I read the series when it came out, and liked it a lot. I also read the screen treatment Kirby wrote, which was very cool, full of a lot more information about how the Silver Star concept worked. I tried to soak in as much of Kirby's initial work on the series as I could, and build my portrayal on that—but the impetus for the Silver Star project didn't actually start with Silver Star. I'd seen John Woo's The Killer, and loved it—not just the movie but the tagline on the poster: "One tough cop. One ruthless killer. Ten thousand bullets."

As I often do, I thought, "Hey, how could you do something like that with super-heroes, something that fun, that kinetic, but even larger than life?" I immediately changed the tagline to: "One bold hero. One brilliant crimelord. One thousand supervillains" and started wondering where it could go as a story. I kicked the idea around with James Fry, and we decided to pitch it somewhere, and settled on plopping Silver Star down in the lead role and pitching it to Topps.

Once we were using Silver Star, we wanted to get him right, but the seeds of the story came before he was part of it.

TJKC: Only one issue of Silver Star was released. What happened?

KURT: Topps' policy of bagging their comics had killed the line. Initial sales were great, but every new project beyond those first specials tumbled in sales, because readers didn't enjoy those first few comics and refused to buy any more sight unseen. Retailers started slashing their orders more and more, and eventually Topps got rid of the bags, but it was too late, and both Silver Star and Victory were dead based on their initial orders. I have no idea if people would have liked them had there been enough copies out there for them to see them and sample them, but most readers never got a chance to see them at all, so we'll never know.

TJKC: Where was the story headed? Did you have more ideas beyond the mini-series?

KURT: Two more issues were completed, and the fourth was under way when the plug was pulled—the whole thing built toward a big showdown on a remote island with Silver Star trying to save the master villain from the army of supervillains that were trying to kill him rather than risk him making a deal with the cops. The master villain was never going to make a deal anyway, and ends up sacrificing his life to make sure his secrets die with him, and to force Silver Star to save his daughter. We did all four plots; I'd have loved to do more Silver Star after the mini—I probably still would—but if I had any specific ideas, I don't remember them.

TJKC: In your preliminary notes for the Victory mini-series, you planned to kill off the Boojum from Ninth Men and Orca from Captain Victory. Granted these were minor characters, but did you have any reservations about killing off Kirby's creations? Did you worry about what his fans might think?

KURT: I was asked to kill off Boojum and Orca by Jim Salicrup—Boojum because he wasn't really a Kirby character (he'd been added to the cast during the Secret City Saga mini-series) and the readers didn't seem to like him, Orca because Steve Englehart was writing a new Captain Victory series, and as of the opening of it, Orca had died at some point in the past and been replaced with a female officer of the same race. I assume Steve did that simply to get more women into the cast, but Jim thought it'd be fun to actually make the transition during the Victory mini-series.

Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn't have killed Orca, but he was dead one way or the other—I was just bridging the gap—and Boojum, as I said, wasn't a Kirby character at all. I wasn't worried about being pilloried by the fans, in any case—I can't see a storm of outrage arising over either death.

TJKC: Also in your notes, you refer to Captain Victory, Captain Glory, and Silver Star as "level-headed, absolutely confident Kirby alpha-males." You also note that all three are soldiers to varying degrees. Obviously, these characters weren't originally intended to be in the same story together. Did you find it difficult to make them distinct individuals, or did Kirby imbue enough personality in each of them to make it work? How much did you have to embellish?

KURT: I didn't see a whole lot of problem differentiating them. Captain Victory was, in essence, a naval captain, an absolute commander with all the authority that goes with it. Captain Glory was more like an Army captain, part of a stronger chain of command. In his original notes, Kirby had intended for Captain Glory to wind up working as an investigator for a female lawyer, so while he was a capable officer, he didn't have the same majesty or air of total authority Victory had; and Silver Star was an enlisted man.

So they were all soldiers, but not the same kind, not with the same experience. I could build off of that to a different sense of each one.

The embellishment, such as it was, was in going back to Kirby's original notes for the Secret City characters. [Editor's Note: See TJKC #21, page 61 for these notes.] He had strong archetypal centers planned for each one—Captain Glory was a soldier, Night Glider was a snooty aristocrat, and Bombast was a blue-collar salt-of-the-earth type who managed to bust every machine he ended up using. None of that really came through in the previous mini-series, probably because it was all set within days of the Secret Citizens awakening in this time period, so Roy [Thomas] didn't have much opportunity to get them integrated into society. I wanted to flesh them out and bring them to life—not with new takes on the characters, but by showcasing what Kirby saw as their essential personas.

The original Kirby drawing that led to the TeenAgents series. Jack used the name long before these characters, though; you'll find out where next issue! © Jack Kirby.

TJKC: Would you have stuck around with the Kirbyverse afterwards, assuming it hadn't ended? If so, where do you go from there? Any particular ideas you wanted to develop?

KURT: Aside from wanting to do more Silver Star, we were planning a new series called Tiger 21 that would have spun out of the Victory mini. Jim Salicrup wanted to do something with Darren, the black crack addict who'd been saved by one of the Secret Citizens, and who was still hanging around. Readers hated him, considering him an ethnic stereotype, so Jim wanted to fix the problem without killing off the only black character in the series. He thought we should redeem Darren and turn him into a super-hero, and his choice was Tiger 21, another sketch of Jack's that he had.

So over the course of Victory, I was going to have Darren wind up on Captain Victory's ship, the Dreadnought Tiger, and find a set of powersuits intended for use by envoys/ spies on the various planets Victory's civilization had contact with. Darren would have put on one of the suits—the one labeled "Tiger/21," or its alien equivalent—and wound up having super-powers. After the mini, he'd be launched in his own series, going back to New York and picking up his old pre-crackhead life, but having problems due to the fact that the suit gave him the power to do good, but the galactic government that created the suit now thought he was a spy on Earth—their spy; but, well, that never happened either....

TJKC: I've heard you and Steve Rude are doing an upcoming Thor story/series. Will you stick with Kirby's original take on the character, or branch out into something completely different?

KURT: Knowing Steve, it'll probably be very Kirbyesque in its look; and we're certainly informed by the Lee/ Kirby take on the character as much or more than by the Norse legends I used to love to read when I was young. There are parts of the story that take place in the Silver Age—and we'll be staying true to the flavor of the book back then—but above all, we'll be serving the story and the idea behind it, and we'll just have to see where that takes us. It's early yet.

TJKC: Currently you're writing the Avengers and co-writing the Defenders with Erik Larsen, who is a huge Kirby fan. Both titles feature lots of characters Jack had a hand in creating. Do you find that limits you as a writer, that you have to stay true to Kirby's version, or is it better for you to have that touchstone there as a basis?

KURT: I can't say I'm actually consciously trying to keep Kirby's contribution to those characters in mind, so much as just keeping them in character according to their long and storied histories, something Kirby's a part of, but not the totality of. So when I write Captain America, I'm informed by Lee/Kirby, but also by Englehart, Stern, Waid, and more, and the same for all the others.

I like having the history there to work with, and when I work out an approach to a villain, or a character's key motivations, or something along those lines, I often find that, unsurprisingly, the Kirby stories are the ones that establish the essence of the character best—but I'm not singling out those stories.

That was one of the reasons I enjoyed working in the Kirbyverse—the Kirby essence in those characters hadn't been overlaid with years of follow-up by later writers. I got to be the first guy (or at least one of the first guys) to screw them up.

TJKC: You've written a large number of Kirby's characters to date. Is there any particular one you haven't written for yet that you'd like to take a turn at?

KURT: Sure. I'd love to write Kamandi someday, for instance—not any of the various alternate takes on Kamandi that have been done since Crisis, but continuing the Kamandi series that Kirby did, not reconceptualizing or reworking it. I don't know if that'll ever happen, though.

I'd like to do a Machine Man project more in keeping with what Jack did—treating him as a new form of life in a largely-normal world instead of as just one more super-hero in a crowd of them. Something like a cross between Jack's run on Machine Man and Paul Chadwick's Concrete, with a lot of character and humanity and quiet introspection. Not that we could get enough people to buy it to keep such a thing going.

I'd love to do Karkas and Reject from Eternals someday—or a lengthy run on Thor—or OMAC—or a bunch of others that aren't coming to mind right now, probably....

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