Posted in: Comics | Tagged: comicon, Jack Katz, san diego, sdcc, sharky, tank girl, The First Kingdom, Titan comics

Titan Comics Panel Goes Off The Rails With Jack Katz At The Wheel

Published Mon, 22 Jul 2013 12:00:52 -0500

Joshua Stone writes for Bleeding Cool:

The 2013 SDCC is my 11th, and in all those years I have never seen a panel go off the rails like this one did. The goal for the panel was to introduce Titan Comics and their current and upcoming comics, but comic book legend Jack Katz had something else in mind altogether.

At 85 years old, Katz has been in the business since the 1940s writing and drawing such books as House of Secrets, Sub-Mariner, and many more. Titan is rereleasing Katz' long out of print The First Kingdom. After showing a motion video of different book panels they handed Jack the mic and that's where the fun began.

Jack immediately climbed up on his soapbox and started preaching. And just to be clear, everything he said was said with passion and conviction, and much I agree with, but I don't think it was what the people from Titan had in mind. Jack went on a 20-25 minute monologue, attacking Aspartame and how it kills kids brains. He went after society and how people have been dumbed down over the years. He spoke on how fear is pushed into us when we are children and how it holds people back from achieving their potential.

He asked the philosophical question, what is the purpose of the human species. And then he didn't bother trying to offer up his thoughts on it. The next topic was how men keep women down because they are jealous of them.

He talked about his work on The First Kingdom and how he did it to elevate the field and, didn't care about his readership. Jack knew Jerry Siegel (co-creator of Superman) and Jerry would ask him "Don't you want to make money?" Jack said the richest people he knows are in the ground. He wanted to create something important, not just crap.

The entire time Steve White, Titan Senior Editor, had a shocked look on his face and clearly wasn't sure how to handle the situation. The other panelists, Jack Higgins and Dave Elliot, were both doing everything they could not to start laughing as they were clearly amazed by what was going on up to this point. That is until Jack brought the issue of the treatment of woman, and then they joined in.

At this point the moderator broke and tried to bring it back to comics, except the problem was Jack really had not talked about The First Kingdom, so he brought it back to Jack Katz and Jack took off again from there. He discussed about Melanie ankle in and how her theories were stolen by Freud and he got credit for them.

After that they were able to get back to the comics. Upcoming releases of previously available books including Sharky!, by Dave Elliot and Alex Horley; Monster Massacre, which is anthology that had stories and art from Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Dave Dorman, and many more; and the A1 Anthology books, by many authors and writers.

Titan also introduced a number of new and upcoming titles. Titles of intros included Number Crunchers by Si Spurrier; Chronos Commando by Stuart Jennett, which was described as GI Joe vs. Nazis vs. Dinosaurs; a new Tank Girl miniseries called Solid State by Alan Martin; Death Sentence by Montynero and described as a book where people get a virus that gives them superpowers, but the virus also means the person only has six months to live. The story was originally featured in Clint.

Time was running out, and somehow things got back to Jack Katz. Jack said that everything that exists is super computerized, and that we are all in the space explorers club together. Steve White tried to interrupt him so he could wrap things up, and in response Jack stood up and just got louder. One quick thing on the picture of Jack that I included with the article. I took about 10 pictures of him though out the panel, and his expression was the same In every shot.