Jack Kirby's Storyboards for 'Fantastic Four' (1978).

Before Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created Mickey Mouse, they produced their Alice Comedies and cartoons starring 'Oswald the Lucky Rabbit'. Three of Disney's animators at the time, had the idea of starting a business of their own and created a new character, 'Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid'. Rudy Ising, Hugh Harman and Friz Freleng successfully managed to sell their cartoon to Warner Brothers and started a new series of animated shorts, apply named the 'Looney Tunes'. But while Harman and Ising left in 1933, Freleng went on to direct many famous cartoons,introducing us to popular characters like Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Tweety and Sylvester and many others.

In 1963 Warner closed their cartoon studio and Freleng, together with Warner's former animation producer Dave dePatie, started their own company DePatie-Freleng, which became successful after they came up with the 'Pink Panther' and created the animated opening titles for Blake Edwards' comedy by the same name, which starred Peter Sellers as inspector Clouseau.

Above: Jack Kirby, the 'King of Comics', as always, working at his drawing table. Below: David De Patie (left) and Isadore 'Friz' Freleng (right) in front of their new company DFE Films.

In 1978, DePatie-Freleng created a new cartoon series of the 'The Fantastic Four' for Marvel, based on their popular comic book characters (actually, one of the Fantastic Four team members, the 'Human Torch', was replaced by a newly created character, 'Herbie' the robot, as Universal Studios was already working on a TV movie starring the Human Torch at that time).  For the new cartoon series, which ultimately only lasted twelve episodes, the stories were written by Robert Stitzel, Bob Johnson and Roy Thomas. While these animations are only so-so, the pre production work is truly amazing, as all storyboards were done by none other than Mr. Jack Kirby himself! Freleng by the way, sold DFE Films right after in 1981 to Marvel. While Depatie remained working there until his retirement, the studio was renamed to 'Marvel Productions'. Marvel used it mainly to produce animated TV shows of their popular characters 'The Incredible Hulk' and 'Spider-Man' in the 1980's.

While not complete, I'll post the first series of Kirby's pencil storyboards today, created for the seventh episode in the cartoon series titled 'The Olympics of Space' (click to enlarge). Check my next posts for more!