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The Mighty Marvel Bullpen, July 1970.
Photos by Steve Sherman.
It wasn’t until after Marvel Comics: The Untold Story was published that I saw the photographic evidence of that cigar. Please print out Photo #7 and insert it between pages 108 and 109 of the book!Jack Kirby left Marvel Comics 50 years ago.
From Marvel Comics: The Untold Story:March 6, 1970, was a Friday. The ghosts of the sixties still clung. The Beatles, publicly together but having already broken up behind closed doors, released the single “Let It Be” that morning. In Greenwich Village, a few minutes after 12 noon, members of the radical group the Weathermen accidentally detonated a bomb they were building, razing their town house headquarters. Uptown, in Marvel’s offices, Captain America #128, in which a biker gang named Satan’s Angels provided se- curity for an Altamont-like rock festival, was in production. Shortly after Jack Kirby’s pages for Fantastic Four #102 were delivered into Lee’s hands, the phone rang at 635 Madison Avenue. “Jack’s on line two,” Stan Lee’s receptionist called out.A few minutes later, a stunned Lee called in Sol Brodsky, and then Roy Thomas. The just-delivered Fantastic Four pages sat on Lee’s desk, still carrying the scent of the Roi-Tan Falcon cigars that Kirby smoked at his drawing board.The King was leaving Marvel.As soon as the news reached John Romita, he walked into Lee’s office and asked if they’d be canceling the Fantastic Four. No, said Lee—you’re going to do it. “Are you crazy?” Romita asked, but finally accepted. “I did it under extreme duress because I felt inadequate,” he recalled later. “It was like trying to raise somebody else’s child.” John Buscema had an even stronger reaction. “I thought they were going to close up,” he recalled. “As far as I was concerned, Jack was the backbone of Marvel.”Somebody found one of the cigar butts that Kirby had left behind on his last visit to the Bullpen. “Marie Severin made a very elaborate plaque out of it,” Trimpe later recalled, “labeling it ‘Jack Kirby’s Last Cigar at Marvel,’ with fancy scroll work on it.” She hung the plaque on the wall. It read, “Kirby Was Here.”
