Jack Kirby Museum Given 50+ Pages Of Original Art By Richard Howell

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Jack Kirby Museum Given 50+ Pages Of Original Art By Richard Howell

The Jack Kirby Museum is given over fifty pages of original Jack Kirby art by Richard Howell

Article Summary

• Jack Kirby Museum receives its largest original art donation yet: 50-plus Jack Kirby pages from Richard Howell.
• The Jack Kirby Museum gift spans Marvel, DC, Boys’ Ranch, animation art, and an unpublished What If? cover.
• Richard Howell says donating the Jack Kirby art ensures the pages will be seen, studied, and preserved publicly.
• Jack Kirby Museum plans a 2027 exhibition, online archive access, and highlights new support through future bequests.

The Jack Kirby Museum and Research Centre has received its largest donation of original Jack Kirby artwork to date, more than 50 pages from the Kalish/Howell collection, gifted by comic book writer, artist, editor, and Claypool Comics co-founder Richard Howell. The collection was originally compiled with his partner and Marvel’s first Direct Sales manager, Carol Kalish, who died tragically young in 1991 at age 36. The gift spans key periods of Kirby’s career. It includes industry-defining Marvel work from the 1960s on Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Thor; mid-1970s DC material from 1st Issue Special; Kirby’s return to Marvel on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Devil Dinosaur; early 1980s animation concept art for Hanna-Barbera; two original stories from the 1950 Boys’ Ranch series; and pencil art for an unpublished cover to What If? #10, the first Marvel Comic to feature Jane Foster as Thor.

One highlighted piece is page 12 from Fantastic Four Annual #4 (1966), with inks by Joe Sinnott and lettering by Sam Rosen. Another is that unpublished What If? cover art from 1978. “Jack Kirby has been an inspiration in my own comic art and storytelling for as long as I can remember,” Richard Howell said. “I want these pages to be seen and studied, and giving them to the Jack Kirby Museum was the right way to do that.”

Museum director Rand Hoppe called the donation “a significant addition to our permanent collection” that will “provide a strong foundation for our upcoming exhibitions and programs in the years ahead.” Selections will appear in a 2027 exhibition, with the works also destined for the Museum’s online archive, currently in development. In a related development, the Jack Kirby Museum has been named a beneficiary of a trust established by another longtime collector who prefers to remain anonymous for now. The Museum notes that gifts of original art—whether during a collector’s lifetime or through a will or trust—are how it builds its permanent collection and keeps Jack Kirby’s work available to researchers and the public. Anyone considering a donation or bequest can contact Rand Hoppe at info@kirbymuseum.org or (201) 204-0532.

Jack Kirby was born in 1917 on 147 Essex Street, a tenement building on the Lower East Side of New York City, as Jacob Kurtzberg. By the time he died in 1994, he had created or co-created many of the cornerstone characters and concepts of the Marvel and DC Universes, including the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men, Hulk, Captain America, Silver Surfer, The Eternals, Darkseid, Fourth World, and New Gods, amongst hundreds of others. His storytelling and visual style helped define the look and language of comic books across genres such as superheroes, crime, war, romance, and science fiction and continues to ripple through comics, film, television, and popular culture.

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