Stuart Immonen,
a fine comic book illustrator, defends our old pal Vince Colletta and offers up
an example of an unpublished romance comic page pencilled by Jack Kirby and
inked by Vince. Stuart notes that almost every face on the page was redrawn by
Colletta and says, "Whether this was an editorial request or Colletta’s own
pursuit is a question I can’t answer." Well, I can answer it so I'll tell you
all the story...
Among the projects Jack wanted to do when he went to DC in 1970
was to take comics into a magazine format. What he had in mind was something
that would have resembled the then-popular National Lampoon with full
color and advertising and a glorious budget along with more "adult" (but not
necessarily sexy) subject matters. DC wasn't in a position to do that and he
wound up assembling a couple of cheaply-produced black-and-white magazines,
instead. Some weren't printed and the ones that were got cancelled before the
first issues had even registered any sales figures. One of the ones that wasn't
printed was the book Stuart's page was from...a book that would either have been
called Soul Love or Soul Romance, had it been published.
The idea, which was not Kirby's, was to do a romance comic all
about black folks. Jack felt that a white, Jewish guy in his fifties was the
wrong person to be editing, writing and drawing such a book but he gave it his
all. He used copies of Ebony as reference when he drew the people and I
thought he did a great job. All but one of the stories was given to Vince
Colletta for inking and at some point, the work in progress was shown to a
magazine distributor who was said to have special expertise in product for the
intended market. He said that the people Jack was drawing were too
"realistically black" (I believe that was the phrase) and that the potential
buyers would be turned off by this. On the advice of this alleged expert,
Colletta was instructed to redo all the faces and — this is a quote — "Make the
men all look like Sidney Poitier and the women all look like Diahann Carroll."
The retouchings Stuart shows on his page are what was done for
that reason. Frankly, I think they look awful and not particularly like Sidney
and Diahann, even. They're especially devoid of humanity and expression. He's
right though that it's very tough to white out a face on an inked drawing and
then to do a new drawing on top of that white paint. It also destroys the
drawing underneath so if the retouch is badly done, there's no going back. The
art is pretty much gone forever. (Also, I should mention that I believe some of
the retouching was done by members of DC's Production Department.)
The book was to include a pull-out poster and someone decided it
should be of singer Roberta Flack, who was popular at the time. More
importantly, she was recording for a company that had corporate ties to DC
Comics. Ms. Flack's publicist wanted to see the comic book in question before
permission would be given for the poster so stats were sent. I'm not sure if
what was sent was before or after Colletta's retouchings but reportedly either
Flack or her flack (i.e., publicist) hated the whole comic. That opinion
prompted DC, which was already losing its taste for the whole project, to simply
give up on it.
Lastly, based on my mail and a few comments on websites, I guess I
didn't make it clear: Kirby, as editor of his DC books, fired Colletta as the
inker because (a) Colletta was a security leak, showing the work around
the Marvel offices, (b) Colletta was leaving things out and taking too
many shortcuts for Jack and (c) Colletta basically told Jack that for
what he was being paid, he would not put more effort into the work. And I guess
there was also (d) — Jack wanted an inker who would take direction from
him instead of those in the New York office. Mike Royer, who replaced Vinnie,
was everything Jack wanted.
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