Kirby's "Next Issue" captions

[Piekos]

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/0...kirby-teasers/

~N

[Thomas Mauer]

Did Kirby really do these himself? I would have figured this was the letterer's job. The captions they show were in comics lettered by Gaspar Saladino, John Costanza, and a few others.

[Piekos]

Yeah, I thought the same thing. Todd? Tom?

~N

[Piekos]

So far, from what I can tell, Kirby may have penciled in his idea for the captions, but the letterers actually executed it -- often times very different from Kirby's notes.

Which makes the most sense to me.

~N

[Piekos]

Did more poking around. Looking more and more likely that it was in-house letterers at Marvel who did these and not Kirby.

~N

[Todd Klein]

It was part of the lettering, so usually done by the letterer of the story or issue. I took a brief look and saw examples by Costanza and Saladino. Kirby did have a particular style for open lettering with kind of a loose, abstract look that you can see in some of them. There the letterer followed his layout.

[t_orzechowski]

What Todd just said. Jack would have roughed them in.

Of the examples at the link, "Mad Mad Dimension," "CA's Love Story," and "Alamo II" were done by John Costanza; the rest were by Jim Novak. As memory serves, Jack's Marvel books were lettered by those two, both of whom were on the "A"-list for the Marvel style right then. Novak had a crisp body text style somewhat like Gaspar's, and also tended to doing some of the title work on grids. Costanza was looser overall.

"Nazi X" and "Face of a Hero" look like Mike Royer's work. That almost free-form title work of his made me so darn frustrated...! I could never come anywhere close to it. Did Royer ink or letter any of Jack's books for Marvel?... 2001 or Machine Man, maybe?

I should mention that I didn't consult the books for the credits; these are my impressions.