Posted in: Avengers, Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Marvel Comics, Music, Pop Culture, Stan Lee, Vinyl, X-Men | Tagged: jack kirby, She Trinity, silver star, Sue Kirby, Susan Kirby
Did you know that Jack Kirby’s daughter, Susan Kirby, was a pop star in London in the swinging sixties? We didn’t until this weekend.
Article Summary
- Jack Kirby’s daughter Susan was a 60s pop star and member of She Trinity.
- Susan Kirby wrote and played for hits like ‘Wild Flower’ and toured Europe.
- She was also part of the successfully settled legal suit against Disney over her father’s character ownership rights.
- Susan is remembered fondly by family and for her own creative talents.
Former 30th Century comic store owner Will Morgan made quite the find the other day which sent me down a rabbit hole. He posted to Facebook, “In addition to comics, I sometimes flog vintage mags on my eBay page, and was surprised to discover this item about Jack Kirby‘s daughter in the women’s mag Petticoat for Oct 1st, 1966.”
And it was a feature on the sixties Canadian/British girl band, She Trinity. Including one Sue Kirby. “Top American cartoonist, Jack Kirby, does too much “ideas” recruitment round the house for his Captain Marvel comic series, his daughter Sue tells us. Sue (right) is a member of the all girl pop group the She Trinity and says every time she pulled a face at home Dad would say: “I think I can make a groovy monster out of that one” and rush for his pen to sketch it down. Fortunately, Sue’s well out of father’s way at present. She’s busy popping round Britain as the group’s rhythm guitarist. “I’m also glad to be away from those hundreds of people who say: ‘Why can’t you draw like your father ?’ ” Sue said she’s hopeless at art, but, to make it quits, we bet dad couldn’t sing. “That’s the trouble,” she replied miserably. “He can !”
That’s right, she was the rhythm guitarist in She Trinity, before she left the group. The British press believed that she, like others in the group, were Canadian. And no one, looking at acres of Jack Kirby coverage we’ve had over the decades, seems to have pointed out that this Sue Kirby, and the Susan Kirby who Jack Kirby named Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four over, were the same person.
A teenager at the time, Susan Kirby answered an ad and moved from Long Island, New York to join a band, Lady Greensleeves, before they took a trip to Britain’s swinging sixties in 1965 looking to make a name for themselves, and using a few of their contacts. They joined with members of The Missfits to create She Trinity and were signed by Columbia Records. The band had limited chart success, and the record label treated them as a gimmick… invisible women, one might say. But they did make it into John Peel‘s KMEN’s British Pop Top Ten charts, based on NME and Melody Maker charts, when he was broadcasting in Southern California.
But Sue Kirby is the sole credited writer early single Wild Flower in 1966, and as a co-writer Union Station Blues. They toured Europe extensively, and they would play shows opening for, and playing alongside the likes of The Who, The Kinks, The Tremeloes, Hot Chocolate and The Hollies. Sue Kirby, it seems, was dismissed from She Trinity relatively early on. “She was actually kicked out,” band member Shelley Gillespie said. “She was very young and very immature, and … enough was enough.” The final version of the band broke up in 1970, but not before they had forced The Beatles to release their song Yellow Submarine in the UK, when they had originally planned not to, because She Trinity had a cover version out in August 1966.
As for the “Captain Marvel” references in that Petticoat article, Marvel Comics wasn’t a big thing in Britain in 1966, looks like the hack in question presumed Marvel Comics meant Captain Marvel.
In 1983, Jack Kirby also had Susan Kirby write a birthday song from a character, Tracy Coleman, which he illustrated in Silver Star #1 published by Pacific Comics.
Susan Kirby was also part of the successfully settled legal suit against Disney over ownership rights to the X-Men, the Hulk, the Avengers, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Black Panther, Silver Surfer, Loki, and more, for what has been estimated to be around $35 million.
Susan Kirby passed away a few years ago. Her niece, Jillian Kirby, told me “As an Aunt, she was so loving and validating. So funny! A great sister for my dad and sister in law for my mom, Connie. We miss her so much… she deserves to be acknowledged for her talent, but to me, personally, she was a warm, loving Aunt. The best sense of humor! So much fun! And, Sue Storm was named after her! As my dad said it was a little bit of commentary on her personality when she was younger! Guess that’s a little youthful sibling talk. We were very saddened by her death.”
And you can hear Susan Kirby playing, and singing, Wild Flower from the original single, uploaded to YouTube, almost sixty years after it was released.
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