Quote:
Beardguy57 said:
Wasn't Jack Kirby the one who created and drew CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN?


 Quote:
the G-man said:
He created it. And he drew some of them. However, other writers and artists took over the series.


There's actually a big event in Kirby's life regarding his departure from CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN.

The Challengers first appeared in SHOWCASE issues:
6 (Feb 1957)
7 (April 1957)
11 (Dec 1957)
12 (Jan 1958)

After which Kirby drew the first 8 issues of CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN when they spun off into their own series. (May 1958-June 1959)

The reason Kirby left DC at this point is precisely this:

Kirby had been marketing several newspaper strips, to get out of the then-dying comics industry, and into a more lucrative syndicated newspaper strip. Among them Johnny Reb (a Civil War period series) and SKY MASTERS (about a group of space explorers. )
Of the strips Kirby had going, SKY MASTERS was particularly successful, and was growing in popularity.

But editor Jack Schiff at DC, who helped broker initial sale of the SKY MASTERS strip to a syndicate, had wanted a percentage of Kirby's royalties from the strip. When Schiff wasn't cut in, he pursued a lawsuit against Kirby.

I initially thought the lawsuit asserted that the SKY MASTERS strip was too similar to the DC-owned CHALLENGERS characters (that Kirby created !), i.e., that SKY MASTERS was a copyright infringement on the CHALLENGERS characters.

But it may have just been about Schiff wanting a settlement for the percentage he was shorted of.

Schiff won the lawsuit, after which according to alternate versions, Kirby either refused to work for DC from that point, or Schiff fired Kirby and no longer let Kirby get any work at DC.

In any case, Kirby quit working for DC in 1959, and (post-Comics Code, with limited publishers, many publishers recently driven out of business due to the Code) Kirby began working almost exclusively for Marvel.

Until Infantino welcomed Kirby back to DC in 1970.




Many have noted the similarity of CHALLENGERS to the later FANTASTIC FOUR series.

An interesting tribute to this is John Byrne's WHAT IF story (issue 36): "What if the FF had not gained their powers?"


Which essentially turns the FF into the Challengers of the Unknown.




Kirby did not work again for DC until the moment Jack Schiff retired from DC. At which point, in 1970, Kirby met with publisher Infantino and signed a contract with DC, and soon after was publishing his Fourth World series ( FOREVER PEOPLE, NEW GODS, MISTER MIRACLE and JIMMY OLSEN).