The following is from last week's "Who's Lying Anyway?" (a regular column on Broken Frontier that's a spoof of "Lying in the Gutters" and rumor columns in general).

quote:
Long Live The King.
In light of the above story, it’s time to break out the Secret Emergency Report that all rumor columns have just in case something happens. Each of we rumormongers have taken one story known only to those In The Know In The Comics Biz in order to run it when the column looks like it might run a bit short that week. In my case, this story is something that not only has plagued the minds of fans for the last two years, but is also something that is vaguely topical in light of the recent announcements not only of Bryan Hitch resigning an exclusive deal with Marvel that’s expected to run until 2006, but also that the long-awaited Ultimates hardcover may not end up including the extra story pages and material that have been promised since the very start of the series due to deadline constraints. It’s the story that many Comics Pros whisper in darkened corners of conventions to each other to keep each other in line. It’s the story that Wizard magazine has been too scared to run for fear of reprisals from Marvel Comics. It’s the story of The Curse of The Ultimates.

Our story begins last year when Mark Millar, Bryan Hitch and some random unnamed guy attempted to contact the ghost of dead Jack The King Kirby via the unsettling medium of Ouija Board, as Mark explained when he wrote about it for his departed column on Comic Book Resources, “in an effort to contact the co-creator of the Marvel Universe and hear his thoughts on the industry at the moment.” However, things did not actually go exactly as Mark said they did in that column… Bryan Hitch explains:

“After we’d spoken to Roz [Kirby’s wife], we were all pretty amazed and happy to leave it at that. But after a couple of minutes, the glass moved again without any of us touching it. I was convinced it was Millar taking the piss somehow, until it spelled out J A C K. It was actually Kirby himself! He told us that Roz had mentioned that we were looking for him, and he thought he should say hello.

“Mark and I went to pieces. I kept trying to ask about his inspiration for all his great ideas, but Millar kept interrupting, asking if the Hulk could beat Thor in a fight, or if Mr. Fantastic could change his penis size during sex. I was kind of embarrassed, but Jack took it all in his stride. The real problem came when Mark asked what Jack thought of our book.

“Just like when we were talking to Roz, the glass spelled out B E E U S E L F S. He seemed sad that we were working on a revamp of a decades-old idea instead of doing something original, which kind of made sense – This was Kirby after all. Mark got kind of huffy after that, though, and started talking about royalty checks and sales figures on the book. Jack kept spelling out D O S N T M A T E R, but that just made Mark more mad. Eventually he snapped and told Jack that he didn’t care what he thought, adding for emphasis that he thought Devil Dinosaur was gay.

“That was when the trouble really started.”

Mark Millar, no stranger to Trouble, didn’t notice any change at first: “I was busy planning my own creator-owned Millarworld titles to see anything weird happen to begin with. But then I kept getting these calls from Hitch the Bitch. ‘I’ve lost my pencil.’ ‘I’ve lost the script.’ ‘I’ve lost my fingers.’ So we started missing deadlines.”

Hitch again: “I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I was going mad. I’d put things down one minute, and the next they’d be gone. This went on for about two or three months before I realized what was happening. The clincher was when I came into my studio one morning to find it completely empty except for a perfectly-rendered Kirby version of Ultimate Giant-Man being eaten by Devil Dinosaur sitting on the drawing board, with the caption ‘Don’t Fuck with The King’.”

That’s right. Jack Kirby had seemingly made it his afterlife’s mission to stop The Ultimates from ever coming out again.

This wasn’t the first time that Kirby had interfered with current comic creators since his untimely death. Bald Scotch anarchist writer Grant Morrison, no stranger to magical bullshit, was also affected by a run-in with The King:

“When I was planning Marvel Boy at the end of ’99, I thought it’d be a good idea to try and tap into the latent Marvel Universe energy using a magical ritual that involved jerking off over a copy of Fantastic Four Annual number one. So, y’know, I was prepared for something to happen that night, but not to be visited by a pissed-off Jack Kirby, mad at me for the way I’d used Orion in my run on JLA. Somehow I had accidentally invoked the spirit of the most creative mind in comics to come after me and scare me in my jammies. He hung around for a few days until I promised to try and do something interesting with the X-Men again, which is why I ended up on that book for three years. He didn’t like the rut they’d fallen into.”

Mark Millar again: “So, Kirby’s ghost is haunting Hitchy and hiding everything he needs to draw the book. He’d find it again eventually, and maybe get a page done or something before something else would go missing. Deadlines were flying past, and we kept having to come up with excuses: Hitch was sick. I was sick. The Hulk fight in issue 5 was so exciting it was taking longer to draw. Whatever. By the time we were getting around to starting issue 8, Hitch had had enough, and called in Paul Neary.”

The full explanation of why Neary took over the inking of the book with the eighth issue had remained a mystery to fans… until now. As Paul explains, himself: “I’ve been in the business for a long time, doing a lot of different jobs: Penciler, Inker, Editor-in-chief of Marvel UK, and because of the last one, comics exorcist. We did a lot of work that shamed the good name of Marvel over at Marvel UK, and I’d had to deal with Kirby before. I wasn’t surprised when Bryan called and asked me to help.”

The exact nature of what Neary actually did is still shrouded in mystery, although apparently bringing Stan Lee in to bless the penciled pages pre-inking was involved. As a result of this, things are slowly returning to normal, and The Ultimates is planned for a relaunch at the beginning of next year that will finally see the book return to a regular schedule. Bryan Hitch is philosophical about the whole experience:

“On the one hand, it’s annoying that it looked like I was this really slow artist who couldn’t make a deadline. But on the other hand, how many artists can say that they merited personal attention from Jack Kirby? I’m optimistic about the future now, as long as can stop Millar from saying anything else stupid for the next three years or so.”

Sadly, at time of writing, Mark Millar has already complained publicly that he doesn’t watch Smallville because it is “too gay”, thus invoking the wrath of the ghosts of Siegel and Shuster.
:lol: