The late Stan Taylor’s book-length Jack Kirby biography, now available free at The Kirby Effect: the journal of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center. Complete with colour scans and archival pictures. The last chapter posted was 1st June 2019, and it looks like it sees one new chapter posted every four months or so. As such the online book is currently only missing the final few chapters…

22 – Allegory Of His Life
23 – Why Did The Fourth World Fail?
24 – Once More Into The Breach
25 – Animated
26 – The Animated Artist

Picture: Jack Kirby at the board, from Kirby: King of Comics.

This spurs a fascinating historical “What If? idea” What if… Stan Lee had said to Jack Kirby one day at Timely in the mid 1950s: “Jack, forget these capes-and-tights heroes. They’re over. The kids want monsters and mystery. So I found us the secret sauce for our new Yellow Claw title, it’ll have new types of monster… and these monsters are gonna get us past this new freakin’ Comics Code and let us scoop up all the homeless readers of EC’s horror comics! Take a read of these here Lovecraft stories… yeah yeah I know, ya heard he’s supposed to be about indescribable monsters… but you’re Jack Kirby, you can draw anything…”

Of course it didn’t happen that way. In the end we got the superpowered capes-and-tights heroes vs. the superpowered monsters, and quadruple the fun. But it could have just gone toward creepy mystery monsters — before being swept away by TV and cheap paperbacks.