Previously, we heard from Ahmet Zappa comments Jack Kirby had made while dining with his father, Frank. Despite the colossal Oddness inherent in this situation, we skipped blithely on by with a promise to come back to it later.
(Let's be honest - there's only 2 more entries in the King Kirby 100, so we won't be getting back to everything during this event. But i've ingested so much Kirby this month, that you can be sure that he'll be a popular topic for months to come.)
But back to the subject at hand-
Yup. That's Frank Zappa & Jack Kirby doing the buddy/buddy bit in Zappa's living room. And this wasn't a singular occurrence. Though rather shocked by Zappa's language in his recordings, Kirby liked the man himself and was a recurring dinner guest at the Zappa house.
Zappa was obviously a Kirby fan, having written a song based on one of his old monster tales*, and even taking out the first rock & roll comic book ads in Kirby's books, like Thor #150:
At one point, they even considered collaborating on a project - Jack Kirby doing a comic strip called Valley Girl, a concept that Frank's daughter, Moon Unit, would go on to popularize later-
It always seems that talking about Kirby & Zappa leads to Kirby & Paul MacCartney, here with Linda...
Younger readers may not remember that Paul MacCartney & Wings had an early number entitled Magneto And The Titanium Man (which also featured the Crimson Dynamo).
It was an odd little song in which thing singer's rivals in love manifest to him as super villains. And when they performed it, the stage looked like this:
Jack wasn't really a fan of their music - he was more big band, and wasn't expecting MacCartney to stop the show at this point and introduce him to the audience. Even with a minor name flub (quickly corrected by Linda) it was a fairly huge thing for the time. Most surprising for Kirby since he was seated next to Kirk Douglas and at first thought the spotlight was for the actor.
But what's really amazing out of that night is this drawing that Jack did for them-
Steve Sherman, one of Kirby's primary assistants and party to arrangements at the event, informs us that this drawing was done in the gap between when Kirby was called and when the car arrived - about 45 minutes.
Amazing.
Now, one might think that all of this lead to the drawing like this:
But that meme actually dates back more than a decade earlier, to 1965 in Fantastic Four #34. A mysterious package has arrived for Ben...
page art by Jack Kirby & Chic Stone from Fantastic Four #34 (1965)
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*("Billy the Mountain" on The Mother's Just Another Band From L.A., performed with Flo & Eddie (Of Turtles fame and Illegal, Immoral & Fattening infamy) after "Spragg, The Living Mountain" (Journey Into Mystery#68))
