On the anniversary of the day Jack Kirby left this world, his longtime friend and colleague Mark Evanier has announced his planned two-volume biography of the King. The first volume, says Evanier, "will be a very nicely printed art book with a simpler but quite complete version of the Kirby biography. The volume will also be loaded with rare Kirby art, all of it in reproduced in full color, much of it shot from the original artwork.

That needs a bit of explanation. Many of the pieces will consist of black-and-white artwork in pencil or ink but we’ll be printing them in color so that you can see all the pencil marks, corrections, smudges and in some cases, notes in the margins. There will also be plenty of pages that print Jack’s art in pencil form and, of course, color pieces and some things you’ve seen before but not in the way we’re going to present them. This book will be called Kirby: King of Comics and it will be released in October of this year by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., which is one of the world’s most prestigious publishers of high quality art and illustrated books. It’ll be a hardcover volume, 9" by 12-1/2", all in color and with a gatefold and all sorts of nifty features that we hope will make it worthy of its subject."

Mark is also seeking "interesting and special Kirby art to include in the book… I’m most interested in pieces that are either historic or early… I’d like to locate the original art to some early pieces and especially to things that weren’t done for Marvel, or were done for DC in the forties or fifties. I’m also trying to find intricate pencil pieces and one or two really spectacular pages from the Fourth World material."  Please contact Mark if you have anything along those lines.