In the seventies, Jack Kirby developed several titles for DC
Comics’ “Speak Out” series, which would skew toward a more adult readership
while tackling topics such as divorce, African-American romance, and street
crime. DC did not like Kirby’s approach, watering down his comics in most
respects and ultimately nipping them all in the bud. Consequently, Kirby’s work
on True-Life Divorce, Soul Love, and Dingbats on Danger Street has become some of the rarest artifacts
from the “King of Comics”.
That does not mean these titles were all that great. The
stories in the anthologies True-Life
Divorce and Soul Love were more
like sketchy premises than developed tales. Dingbats
on Danger Street, a serial about a crime-fighting street gang, was better
developed and more in Kirby’s wheelhouse, but it was also kind of rambling. The
problems were not necessarily Kirby’s fault. He wanted to draw other writers (his
wish list included Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe!) and
artists into these projects, particularly True-Life
Divorce and Soul Love since he
realized that as a non-divorced, non African-American man, he was not the most
qualified to write these magazines for a mostly female audience. DC was not
having that and insisted he write and draw them all before basically vaporizing
the titles.
True-Life Divorce,
Soul Love, and Dingbats on Danger Street may not be as timeless as The Fantastic Four or The Incredible Hulk, but the story
behind them is interesting, and they are fairly fun as ultra-seventies relics
full of charmingly awkward slang and dated décor. So Kirby completists will
still want to check out Jack Kirby’s
Dingbat Love, a funky new hardcover from TwoMorrows Publishing that tells
the history of Kirby’s “Speak Out” work through a series of illustrated essays and
recreates those lost titles in a variety of ways. Some stories are simply
presented as rough pencil art. Some feature period inking and some feature new
inking and digital coloring performed with a relatively light-hand to better
approximate how these comics would have looked during the seventies. Dingbats on Danger Street may supply the
most readable stories, but the most love clearly went into Soul Love, which recreates the whole hypothetical package complete
with period-style advertisements and text stories by publisher John Morrow and
his daughter Lily. Groovy!
