A Brush With Mike Royer - Part 1

Interviewed by & © John Morrow

(Mike Royer is the current leader in our poll of favorite Kirby inkers, and no wonder! He inked the bulk of Jack's output from 1970-1980, a peak Kirby period. At age 53, Mike is temporarily living in an apartment in Moorpark, CA while his house in Simi Valley is being repaired from last year's massive earthquake damage. After fourteen years as a staff artist for the Disney Studios, Mike is now a Disney freelance Product Designer/ Character Artist, with most of his work being on Winnie The Pooh. I spoke with Mike on February 6, 1995 - the one year anniversary of Jack's death.)

THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: How well did you get to know the Kirbys?

MIKE ROYER: The relationship I always had with Jack and Roz was that, when I was working with Jack it felt like extended family. And when I wasn't working with Jack, things were in a state of limbo. Then when we did something together again, it was as if the period in-between had never existed. I spoke with Roz the other day and told her this interview was coming up, and I said I'd try to behave myself and not insult anyone. (laughter) I think the world of Roz. I think she was the strength and the reality ground in Jack Kirby's life. I sometimes joke to my wife when we drive places, because I'm constantly thinking about the work I'm doing for Disney... I'm always creating ideas... and I sometimes miss where I'm supposed to turn off the freeway, etc. She's constantly reminding me of my speed, and I turn and look at her and say, "I'm gonna have to make you my Roz Kirby." Because as long as I've known the Kirbys, Roz always did the driving. Now I understand why. I'm not trying to say what I do with Winnie the Pooh is the same as Jack's Captain America and Forever People, etc., but the creative process does go on all the time. Roz took care of the things that insured they got from point A to point B safely, while Jack's mind was completely involved with creating. I remember meeting with them at a restaurant in Burbank for lunch, and Jack asked me if I wanted to ink Silver Star. We sat there and Jack was explaining the story of Silver Star and I'm thinking, "How the hell is he gonna get all this information into one comic?" I subsequently found out that he had told me about all six issues - he had it totally worked out! Talk about the genius of Kirby... he had it all worked out before he'd drawn even one page of the first book.

TJKC: Did you grow up reading Jack's stuff?

MR: Yeah, but I really wasn't aware it was Jack Kirby. I have fond memories as a kid enjoying books like Boys' Ranch, Stuntman, Boy Commandos. Once I decided I wanted to draw, I set my sights on newspaper adventure comic strips. But sometime around 1964 I was exposed to comic books again and got a real kick out of the chutzpah of Marvel Comics. I was familiar with Kirby, but I had never made the connection that this was the Kirby from my youth until I started getting involved with comic fanzines, and the light bulb went off and I realized this was the guy whose stuff I'd loved as a kid. The real "adventure" now seemed to be in comic books, and I wanted to be part of it.

TJKC: From that, how did you get started in comics?

MR: I moved to California in 1965. Six months before that I sent some sample comic book pages to Russ Manning, whose work on the Magnus comics I really, really liked. He wrote back and said, "If I ever needed an assistant, you would work." So I packed my bags and moved to California and metaphorically moved into his backyard and said, "Well, I'm here!" (laughter) Out of the kindness of his heart, he gave me work.

TJKC: How'd you start inking Jack's work?

MR: One night in the late 1960s, about 8:00 in the evening, the phone's ringing in the kitchen. I pick it up, and the voice says (in Kirby accent), "Hello, Mike Royer? This is Jack Kirby. Alex Toth says you're a good inker." (laughter) And Jack says there's a bunch of stuff he's doing for Marvelmania, and he wanted to know if I'd be interested in inking it. So it was Alex Toth that mentioned me to Jack Kirby. I had seen reproductions of his pencils in fanzines and I thought, "Why doesn't anyone ever ink Jack's pencils? Why are they interpreting and changing them?" So I drove to Jack's and he showed me what he'd like me to ink, and I said, "Well, do you want me to bring this to you tomorrow?" And he says, "Why don't you sit here and do it now?" So I sat there at Jack Kirby's drawing board and I inked this page of him sitting at his drawing board with all his Marvel characters flying off the board, which became the artwork that accompanied his biography in the Marvelmania membership kits.

TJKC: Which other Marvelmania stuff did you ink?

MR: I just inked a lot of the stuff that went into the magazines and brochures. None of those big posters. It was through Marvelmania that I met Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman.

TJKC: Tell me about the transition from Marvel to DC.

MR: I remember one evening getting a phone call from Don and Maggie Thompson saying, "It's just been announced that Jack has left Marvel and he's gone to DC. What do you know about it?" And I said, "I don't know anything!" A few hours later I got a call from Jack saying he'd just landed at LAX and he wanted me to know that he had switched to DC, and that he wanted me to ink the books but they had to control them back east. So he couldn't designate who he wanted to ink for him.

TJKC: Let's talk about your work habits. Before you ink a page, do you read the entire story first? How fast did it go?

MR: From Jack I'd get a complete book. I'd read the book, then sit down and letter the whole thing. My goal was to letter a 20-page book in one day. I never made it because Jack would allow more room for the lettering than was necessary because he wasn't working the Marvel method anymore. He was putting in balloons and dialogue. I tried to break up the long paragraphs into separate balloons that would occupy the same design area in the panel. By the time of Hunger Dogs, I felt comfortable enough to put in backgrounds and machinery and blacks. On average I inked three pages a day. There was something about what Jack had on the paper... all I had to do was finish the statement he made. The only part of me that went into it was making sure the eyes were on the same level, etc., because Jack worked so fast that sometimes things like that might be askew. On one of the Black Panthers I actually did five pages a day because the deadlines were piling up. My wife (at the time) assisted me; she filled in the blacks. Jack's paper was perfect to pencil on, but incredibly difficult to ink on. I don't know if he got a good deal on the paper, and I'm not being critical, but there was a period of about a year where before I would ink the pages, I literally stood at the ironing board and ironed the pages. In putting all the detail on the paper, the fiber was so worn out that every stroke I put down would bleed. I ruined a couple of irons that way with carbon clog. But it was something I did willingly, because I always felt that the original should be perfect.

TJKC: Other than your wife filling in blacks, did you use assistants to help meet deadlines?

MR: There was a comics fan who used to come by all the time. I let him fill in the blacks on a Jimmy Olsen. And Bill Stout worked on an issue of Demon with me.

TJKC: Did you get involved in the storylines as you inked them?

MR: I loved them! I really got into it.

TJKC: Did you xerox the pencils before you inked them, in case they got destroyed?

MR: No, Jack made the production copies. The machine that Jack had for years is like the old thermafax copy machines. If you were to tack one of those copies on the wall, in a couple of years it's turning brown. The ones I've got are stuck in a box somewhere. I've got a couple of pages from my very first Mister Miracle with copies of how Barda looked when I made her look pretty, before Jack said, "Don't ever change the faces!" and changed them back himself.

TJKC: Did you ever consider inking on an overlay, leaving the pencils untouched?

MR: That method started on the West Coast. The comics based on animated subjects were drawn by animation artists, so it was very easy for them to pencil on layout paper, and for inkers to work on a lightbox. With funny animals it may not make a difference. But when you're taking somebody like a Jack Kirby or a Russ Manning or a Gil Kane and you're inking their pencils, to put another piece of paper between their pencils and your brush, what you're then doing is just an "impression" of their pencils. To me, if that brush is not dragging through carbon, you're not being true to the penciler's statement.

TJKC: Let's talk about Jack's experimental black-&-white magazines - did you ink the entire In The Days Of The Mob #2?

MR: Yes. I lost my ass on that book. As I recall, there were 3 or 4 individual stories in it. On some of them I spent almost a whole day doing just the title page lettering. On the one story that was printed in Amazing World of DC Comics #1, it was re-lettered. It's not my lettering. I haven't seen it in nearly twenty years, but as I remember, it was some of the purest Jack Kirby inking I ever did. I remember my ego was delighted when Richard Kyle was waxing euphorically about how it was Boys' Ranch, it was 1952 Kirby, and it made me feel good because that's what I wanted to do. Remember when Richard printed "Street Code" in Argosy? I was one of those who encouraged him to print the pencils. I think when he first got the pencils he asked me if I would consider inking them. I didn't want to, because to me it would be ruining their purity.

TJKC: Was Spirit World #2 completed?

MR: Yes, most of it wound up being re-formatted and re-lettered and appearing in things like Weird Mystery Tales.

TJKC: Were you involved with the aborted Soul Love and True Life Divorce books?

MR: Never heard of them until just now.

TJKC: What about Galaxy Green?

MR: Galaxy Green was two pages that were done as a presentation piece. In the late 60s or early 70s, some entrepreneurs wanted to publish something called Jack Kirby's Super World, which would've been in the tabloid format, probably halfway decent printing rather than newsprint. The first page had these really cute girls in Kirby outfits holding these huge, monstrous phallic rayguns pointing right at you as if it were 3-D! There were a couple of pages that Steve Ditko wrote and drew which I lettered. I even did two pages of my own work. Unfortunately, they had everything necessary to publish it except money. (laughter)

TJKC: Why did you leave Kamandi midway through the Kirby issues, only to return later?

MR: I went on a backpacking trip that ultimately went to the top of Mt. Whitney. I'm up there at the highest point in the continental USA, surrounded by all this incredible beauty and feeling mellowed to the max, and I thought, "I don't need this rat race, this constant pressure of three pages every day." So I came back and said, "Jack, I only want to do one of your books instead of four a month." And Jack said, "Well, I need you to do all of them or none of them." So I starved to death for six months! (laughter) There's an issue of Kamandi, I think it's #2, that if you look at it closely, except for the density of the line, it could appear to be reproduced from his pencils. The pencils for that book, I just loved them. It was like, "God these pencils are wonderful, I am not going to slick up ANYTHING!" And so, that book is absolutely, incredibly the truest to Jack's pencils of anything because I literally inked it as if it were pencil lines. But nobody ever said anything, except maybe the Colletta fans. (laughter)

TJKC: I've heard that Jack drew other issues of Dingbats of Danger Street, although only one was published. How many others do you remember inking?

MR: Just one, which I inked when I came down off of the mountain. And that was the last thing I did for months.

TJKC: Which of Jack's books was your favorite to ink and why?

MR: Oh, that's Sophie's Choice! Which kid will you give up? (laughter) Ei-yi-yi! I can tell you my least favorite was Sandman. But it was Jack's least favorite... he didn't even write them. It was at that period where Jack just had to do the pages. There were more promises made to him that were never kept, and he had to keep the pages flowing because he had the mortgage and a wife and a family to take care of. He was a responsible man who believed in the American work ethic, and he kept his word whether or not anyone else did. And, because I had a mortgage and kids to put through school, after that brief period of saying I can only do one a month... well, you know the rest.

(Our interview with Mike concludes in issue #6, where he talks about Vince Colletta, the Fourth World, Jack's final stint at Marvel, the Prisoner and Black Hole projects, the Hunger Dogs Graphic Novel, and more.)

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