2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the King of Comics, and Friday afternoon at New York Comic Con marked a special celebration for the greatest artist of them all. Assembling on stage for the IDW-organized Jack Kirby's 100th Birthday Celebration panel were legends in their own right John Byrne and Walter Simonson alongside IDW President Greg Goldstein and CCO Chris Ryall.

The two cartoonists have been Kirby acolytes throughout their career – not only in their general approach to comics storytelling, but in the way they continued the King's legacy by telling new stories with Kirby-created characters like the Fantastic Four, the New Gods, Thor, the X-Men and countless others. Meanwhile, IDW's execs have worked to grow appreciation for Kirby's work in recent years with an ongoing series of "Artist's Edition" hardcovers reprinting key works from the original art boards.

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Things kicked off with a round of applause for Byrne, making a rare convention appearance, though he quickly tamped down the cheers to focus on the subject at hand. As the panel spoke, Goldstein queued up over 1300 Kirby images on a slideshow – still but a fraction of the King's prolific output.

"I think there are people in Botswana who are the only people who don't know that my first Marvel comic and my first exposure to Kirby was Fantastic Four #5," Byrne explained. "It was so different than DC. DC was bland, to be kind. DC was Superman fighting bank robbers. And that first issue, #5, had Doctor Doom. That face on the cover scared me. I was a sensitive little child...I used to have nightmares...and that Doctor Doom face [terrified me.] It was like nothing I'd ever seen before."

Simonson similarly was taken unawares by his first Kirby: Journey Into Mystery #115. "I was a freshman in college. I found it in the dorm room of one of my classmates...I didn't read the credits, so I didn't see the names. It was not until years later when I loved Jack and followed his work did I go back and read that comic again," he recalled. "Like John said, I read DC stuff like Mystery in Space and Adam Strange, but Jack's stuff was so different and vital."

Byrne said that as he got deeper into Marvel, he had to drop certain DC titles he was buying, slowly turning him into a major Marvel fan even though he had to skip many issues that never showed up on the local stands. Simonson said, "I became a Marvel addict much faster than John" and noted how months after his first exposure he found Journey Into Mystery #120 and 121 together at a shop. Initially he told himself he was too old to be buying comics, so he just read them. Then he rode his bike back to the drug store five times to read them again before finally relenting and buying both issues...and their maddening cliffhanger.

"I'm freaking out on what's happening, and when I go back to college I can't find the next issue. I'm foaming at the mouth, and I write Marvel Comics a letter which thank God I have no copy of this. But I asked if I could buy issue #122 directly from the company, and a few months later a manilla envelope shows up with a pristine copy of Journey Into Mystery #122" with a person note from Stan Lee written in the hand of Flo Steinberg. From there, he was a Marvel head all the way. But to the comedic groans of the audience, Simonson admitted that he stapled the note into the back cover of the book.

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The artists then recalled their moments meeting Kirby in person. Byrne met him twice, both times at San Diego Comic-Con, and he recalled how nervous he was the first time. Byrne had just started drawing Captain America for Marvel, and he was so effusive in praising Kirby, he never really heard what the King said back to him. Simonson also recalls meeting Kirby many times but recalling so little of their specific discussions. For years, he's wondered after a photo taken of the two of them at a later New York convention in the '70s that never crossed his path again.

As for the King's influence on their own work, the men agreed that it's impossible to copy Kirby. Simonson said his goal on his legendary Thor run was to match the unexpected mythological tone of his favorite original issues more so than match their literal stories. "I was trying to bring that excitement to the book that Stan and Jack had. I didn't want to be Jack, as if I had any chance...but I tried to get to stories that were all over the map and 'new' as well as I could...even if I'd been really good at being Jack, I'd only be a second or third-rate Jack Kirby. There's only one Jack, so why not try to be you? But there will always be Jack Kirby under my stuff because I've read him so much and just absorbed it."

In particular, Simonson said that when he first drew Thor for writer Len Wein in the late '70s, he copied the design style of Kirby closely. Having done that experiment, when he finally came to fully write and draw the book himself he knew he could go off on a more personal path having gotten the homage out of his system.

Byrne himself came to Fantastic Four almost by accident when he was originally offered a writing gig, thinking he'd prepare scripts for Bill Sienkiewicz. When that artist went off to do Moon Knight, Byrne, who had only a little writing experience on Marvel Two-In-One, found himself helming the publisher's flagship all on his own. And for a while, some of his classic stories came about similarly by accident. "The only reason the Ego story I did happened was because I wanted to 'fix' a Thor story Rich Buckler had done," he recalled.

Simonson recalled how Frank Miller had once said that Kirby's New Gods were in many ways the first independent comics because they were so personal in tone and approach. "I remember reading Jimmy Olson after there was all this hype of him coming to DC, and it blew my mind...maybe the last comic that really did that," he said. They also discussed much-loved Kirby projects that weren't chart-toppers, including The Demon which Simonson said he'd love to return to as a writer/artist one day, and of which Byrne admitted that his own run on the character was handicapped by DC's unwillingness to let him openly criticize Christian fundamentalism in his stories.

The artists also spent time to praise Kirby's many collaborators such as inkers Joe Sinnot, Chic Stone and even the somewhat reviled work of Vince Colleta, whose work over Kirby on Thor remains Simonson's all-time favorite.

Simonson revealed that before his version of Kirby's Fourth World saga Orion ended, he had planned on doing a major story where the Old Gods hinted in the beginning of the original would return for a war with the New Gods.

"Jack Kirby over the years has wrecked me because for years I didn't know that New Gods, Mister Miracle and Forever People were bi-monthly. I thought he was doing three issues a month, and so I thought I had to do three issues a month!" Byrne joked.