For this last installment of “Comics in Context” before Christmas, I was considering a good number of possible topics. There is the wonderful new Disney film Enchanted, which combines live action, computer animation, and good old traditional hand-drawn animation. There’s the new DVD set Walt Disney Treasures: The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, collecting the cartoons featuring Disney’s cartoon star before the creation of Mickey Mouse. There’s Fantagraphics’ new second volume of their Popeye reprint series, featuring the debut of my favorite E. C. Segar character, J. Wellington Wimpy, and IDW’s first volume of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates. And now that the Broadway stagehands’ strike is over, I could go see the stage version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

I promise you that I will get to all of these subjects early next year. But last week, I unexpectedly received a review copy of a book whose publication will be one of the landmark events of 2008 in the world of comics. This is Mark Evanier’s long-awaited Kirby: King of Comics, a beautifully produced art book devoted to the career of the late Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Captain America, and so many more, that also serves as his biography, which Harry N. Abrams, Inc. will publish in February, 2008. For me, Christmas came early this year.

The visual excitement begins even before you get to the book’s title page, with several pages of art showing Kirby’s work at its peak, that serve as the equivalent of an overture to a longer piece of music. The initial page, showing a determined, powerful Captain America, his fist clenched, hurtling towards the reader, from Captain America #112 (April 1969), carries the balloon, “And so, a legend lived again!!”, which is equally applicable to this book about Kirby. Across from the title page is one of Kirby’s astounding collages, this one showing Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four entering the otherdimensional Negative Zone in Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966). (Evanier reveals later in the book that Kirby originally intended to portray Negative Zone sequences entirely through collage, but this proved to be impractical; see Evanier p. 171). Reed marvels that “I’ve done it!! I’m drifting into a world of limitless dimensions!!” and this seems an apt description of the incredible worlds of fantasy that Kirby envisioned and captured in his art. And at the bottom of the title page is a small picture of the Thing, whose personality, as the book later tells is, Kirby based upon his own. The text hasn’t even begun, and yet the reader can already see how much careful thought went into putting together this book.

It was wise for numerous reasons to select Neil Gaiman to write the introduction. As regular readers of this column know, Gaiman wrote the recent revival of Kirby’s Eternals (see “Comics in Context” #194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199), such demonstrated both his admiration and his genuine understanding of Kirby’s work (as opposed to those who claim to be Kirby admirers and then proceed to twist his characters out of shape). Moreover, Gaiman, with his high standing among readers of graphic novels, can attract the attention of those among them who may know little about the superhero genre in which Kirby spent most of his career, or even disdain it, and alert them through this introduction that Kirby deserves their attention.

Gaiman starts his introduction by protesting that “a thousand other people” would be more qualified to write the introduction, since he never met Kirby, and recounts how he once could have spoken to him in a hotel lobby, but had to catch a plane, and never got another chance to meet him (p. 11). Yet this too makes Gaiman a good choice to write the introduction. Evanier knew Kirby better than nearly anyone; Gaiman represents everyone–comics professionals and fans–who only knows Kirby through his work. Since Kirby passed away in 1994, there is already an enormous audience of fans of Kirby’s work who will never have the opportunity to see or meet him at a convention, especially when one considers the higher profile that comics have been receiving in mainstream culture in the early 21st century and the extraordinary commercial success of recent films based on Kirby co-creations, notably the X-Men and Fantastic Four movies. Though Gaiman is a Boomer who grew up reading Kirby’s Silver Age comics, anyone who has discovered and come to admire Kirby’s work over the last dozen years or so can identify with the feelings he expresses in this introduction.

“It was grand and huge and magnificent,” Gaiman enthuses about Kirby’s imagination (p. 12). You can sense the excitement that Kirby’s work inspires in Gaiman from the way that these adjectives burst forth in rapid succession. Gaiman’s comparison of the visceral power of Kirby’s art to rock music is well taken. As a student of Gaiman’s oeuvre, I was pleased by his unexpected revelation that Kirby’s Thor series is “where my own obsession with myth probably began” (p. 11). Gaiman also notes his fondness for the 1974 Joe Simon-Jack Kirby version of DC’s Sandman, and its “influence on the rest of my life” (p. 12). And, yes, the main illustration for Gaiman’s introduction is a handsome 1981 Kirby drawing of the 1940s version of the Sandman. Its not the 1974 Sandman, who was the ruler of a dreamworld and thus had a clearer influence on Gaiman’s own Sandman series: you can find the cover of 1974’s Sandman #1 on page 184. But the ‘40s Simon-Kirby Sandman had a dream motif, as well, so his presence on the page is appropriate.

Within a relatively short piece Gaiman manages to sound themes that will resurface in the rest of the book, such as the lack of appreciation Kirby’s creativity received from some of his publishers. Notably, Gaiman directs the reader’s attention to the “small, human moments” in Kirby’s work, that contrasted with the epic scale of his fantasy, particularly “Moments of people being good to one another, helping or reaching out to others” (p. 13). Now take a moment to try to think of any similar moments in new superhero comics from 2007. I drew a blank, too. Many artists attempt to copy the visual flash of Kirby’s work, but how many contemporary comics pros match the emotional substance?

The best part of Gaiman’s introduction comes in a postscript at the end, in which he wishes there were a museum of Kirby art and that Evanier would be there to give you a guided tour. (There is the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, mentioned in Evanier’s acknowledgments page, but so far it exists only online here). Gaiman notes that a physical Kirby museum does not exist “yet” but that Evanier’s book will serve as a substitute till then (p. 13).

When I interviewed Evanier about Kirby: King of Comics for Publishers Weekly’s online newsletter Comics Week, he also compared the book to a museum exhibition of Kirby’s art. I like to think of Kirby: King of Comics as the coffee table book published to accompany a museum retrospective of Kirby’s work that exists only on the printed page. Every phase of Kirby’s artistic career, starting with childhood sketches, is visually represented. Drawings of his world-famous characters are here, but so are relatively obscure creations like Stuntman and the Western hero Bullseye. Whereas other writers might have given short shrift to the period between the Golden and Silver Ages of superheroes, Evanier demonstrates how creatively productive a period the 1950s was for Kirby. Many of the celebrated iconic images that one would expect are here, like a cover reproduction of the cover of Fantastic Four #1 (November 1961) (p. 115) and, amazingly, the original artwork for the monumental splash page to “This Man, This Monster” in Fantastic Four #51 (June 1966) (p. 146), with the quietly distraught Thing, standing with sculptural stillness amidst a driving rain that serves as a metaphor for his inner grief. But so are other familiar pages from comics of the 60s and 70s, reproduced from Kirby’s original penciled artwork, as well as art from every decade of his career that even a longtime aficionado like myself finds new and surprising. Unlike the authors of other Abrams coffee table books on art, Evanier does not delve much into critical analysis. But as the reader moves through Kirby: King of Comics, he can see for himself how Kirby’s art evolved over time from brilliant promise to unquestionable mastery of his artform.

Catalogues for museum retrospectives are also usually written in academic prose, but not this one. A writer for television, film, comics and more, including his popular blog (http://www.newsfromme.com/), Evanier is a well practiced, witty and skillful storyteller, an artist of anecdotes. In Kirby: King of Comics Evanier quickly sets an informal, entertaining tone, establishing a personal bond with the reader. Gaiman is right: reading this book is very much like having Evanier escort you through a Kirby show, spinning the tale of the great cartoonist’s life.

Indeed, Evanier sets the tone as early as his masterful preface, which starts out recounting an anecdote about the days back in 1939 when the twenty-one-year-old Jack Kirby saved away in the comics sweatshop of publisher Victor Fox. Then, suddenly, it’s as if Evanier had caught the reader in a judo hold and flipped him over, because the tale of the tyrannical Mr. Fox unexpectedly transforms into an explanation for the title of Evanier’s book and of why Jack Kirby, however much he deserved it, could never take his nickname as comics’ “King” entirely seriously.

But there’s lot more to this preface. On his blog and elsewhere, Evanier has made clear his disagreements with David Michaelis’s biography of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts (see “Comics in Context” #204: “Was It a Dark and Stormy Life?” and I recommend that you read Schulz’s widow Jeannie’s recent criticism of the book). Nonetheless, in Kirby’s case Evanier seems to agree with one of Michaelis’s basic premises, that the artist’s body of work expresses his personality. At his book’s close, Evanier writes that “The stories of intergalactic visitations–of subterranean civilizations and small g gods striding across terra firma–they were all autobiographical, in emotion if not in deed” (p. 218). In contrast with Michaelis, Evanier does not delve deeply into his subject’s psychology. Yet, far more effectively than Michaelis does with Schulz, Evanier vividly portrays Kirby’s personality on the printed page.

Thus, for example, the preface depicts Kirby as a “truly modest man,” “embarrassed” at first by being hailed as “king of comics” by his admirers. In the description of Kirby’s time working for Fox, Evanier shows how Kirby and his fellow artists would find relief from the pressure their dictatorial boss exerted by doing impressions of him in his absence. I’ve been in a situation like that and known people who reacted similarly. This little story gives us an insight into the kind of guy that the young Jack Kirby was, like someone we might have known in our twenties, someone who would have been fun to be around, and, significantly, someone who had the resilience not only to endure a bad situation, but to rise above it through humor. And yet the immensely talented Kirby didn’t turn his resentment of his oppressors into arrogance, but remained “truly modest.”

The preface even provides sharp cameo appearances by its supporting cast. This is the first time I’ve read something about Bill Everett, who went created the Sub-Mariner that same year of 1939, that allowed me to feel why people liked him. And the preface is Evanier’s first step in his book’s generally sympathetic portrait of Stan Lee as a man who genuinely recognized and valued Kirby’s talents–an attitude that was less common from the 1940s into the 1970s than you might have imagined–and yet repeatedly seemed unable to read Kirby’s feelings, thereby exacerbating the rift that grew between them.

Moreover, in the preface Evanier introduces one of the major themes that runs throughout his book. Having grown up in New York tenements during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Kirby knew what poverty was like, and was determined not to let his wife and children fall into it. “He wants to do great stories and express himself and share his incredible imagination with the world, and all that is fine,” writes Evanier. “But being a good provider is still Job One for him and always will be” (p. 17).

Yet standing in the way of Goal Number One for most of Kirby’s career are the likes of Victor Fox, who, Evanier scathingly writes, felt “that since he’s paying [his artists], he’s going to experience the joy of treating them like dirt every day” (p. 15). Evanier’s book shows that for nearly his entire career in comics, Kirby was continually contending against clueless executives and close-minded editors who failed to show him or his work the respect they deserved. In the 1970s even much of the comics readership seemed to desert him. As the book recounts, for much of his life Kirby was struggling simply to support himself and his family. By the mid-1970s Kirby was no longer able to find work in comics. It’s like reading that Vincent Van Gogh only sold one of his paintings during his lifetime. How could this be? From the vantage point of 2007, when Kirby is widely recognized as one of the foremost artists in the history of American comics, this blindness to his greatness seems astounding. How could so many people not see what was right in front of their eyes?

There was something else that was astounding at the start of the first chapter: as artist and writer, Kirby was wholly self-taught. “As he later explained,” Evanier writes, “The pulps were my writing school. Movies and newspaper strips were my drawing school. I learned from everything’” (p. 19). Over and over I’ve seen the admonition that comic book artists shouldn’t just look at comics in learning how to draw, but I suppose that one difference was the illustrative style of comics like Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon in that time. Certainly it’s significant that Kirby said that he learned to draw from the movies: this certainly helps explain his emphasis on action and movement.

On page 20 are nine sketches of famous people of the 1930s that Kirby drew as a boy, ranging from Stalin to Katharine Hepburn. The sketches vary in quality, some are better likenesses than others, and in some one can see Kirby experimenting with caricature. All. the sketches are striking, but they are juvenilia, nevertheless. But on the opposite page is another boyhood drawing, portraying Andy Clyde, a now forgotten comic actor who adopted the persona of an old man. (I know who Clyde is because I dimly remember seeing his Columbia theatrical shorts on TV in my childhood.) This drawing captures Clyde’s screen likeness (complete with old man makeup) realistically, while creating appealingly semi-abstract patterning in much of the linework, and, best of all, conveying through subtle means the personality of a serious, contemplative man behind the comedic facade. This is really good! Later in the book Evanier shows us sensitive, naturalistic portraits that Kirby did of himself (p. 66) and his wife Roz (p. 67) during his military service in World War II: they show a different stylistic path that Kirby could well have pursued, had he not chosen instead to do comics in which there was less time or room for detailed portraiture.

I never expected Andy Clyde, whom I hadn’t thought about in years, to turn up in a book about Jack Kirby. So, too, it is surprising to discover from Evanier’s book that, from boyhood on, Kirby was friends with Leon Klinghoffer, who was infamously murdered by terrorists in 1985. I already knew of Klinghoffer because of something that Evanier does not mention: he posthumously became the title character of an opera: John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer. How strange that two boyhood friends who worked together on a club newsletter ended up as the famous subjects of very different biographical works.

Next Evanier runs “Street Code,” a brief story that Kirby wrote and drew late in his career, in 1983, for the short-lived revival of the pulp magazine Argosy. The story is placed here since it deals with life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the period of Kirby’s boyhood. In introducing it, Evanier observes that Kirby ordinarily “wrote and drew what others wanted” and had to confine “moments of autobiography” to the subtext” (p. 23). “Street Code” is another marker showing an alternate path that Kirby could have taken, perhaps, had he lived long enough, and not suffered physical problems that handicapped his drawing skills, in order to attempt the kind of autobiographical graphic novels that his former boss, Will Eisner, pioneered in the final decades of the last century. Another benefit of placing “Street Code early in the book is that, amidst the many examples of Kirby’s early, immature work, when he was still developing his craft, “Street Code” allows the reader to see Kirby work at his peak, both as artist and as writer. This is where the crude early work, as Kirby learns in the job, is heading, so the reader should study the early work to find glimpses of the greatness that is to come.

The boy protagonist of “Street Code” is never named, but we first see him, pulling on a sweater, reflected in a mirror: it’s a clever signal to the reader that this story is autobiographical, fictionalized though it may or may not be.

I was likewise impressed with the large panel atop the following page, depicting the boy and his mother in their tenement apartment. Kirby shows us the cramped quarters of this impoverished pair, with food cooking atop the same stove used for heating the room, which also holds not only the dinner table but also a bathtub in which the mother, in the foreground, is washing the laundry. Simultaneously Kirby conveys a sense of confinenent and a paradoxical sense of space, filled with detail: this is the private world of these two characters.

Later in the book Evanier will describe Kirby’s scripting of his series from the 1970s onward as being done “in a florid, theatrical voice that did to linguistics what his art had always done to the rules of anatomy and physics” (p. 165). Actually, Stan Lee continually used heightened, operatic language in his scripts; the difference is that he was far better at it than Kirby was. Even so, as I mentioned in my recent columns about The Eternals, Kirby’s scripting is better than he is given credit for. But, apart from his weird mannerism of unnecessarily putting words into quotation marks, “Street Code” shows Kirby’s writing at its best: simple and emotionally evocative.

The first person narration, presumably delivered by the protagonist as an adult, looking back on his boyhood, describes how his mother’s “odd, lingering glance,” which he can nevertheless feel “warm my back” as he leaves the apartment (p. 25). And Kirby shows that glance on her face, too, understated and perhaps weary, but prompted by his description, one can see it is loving, as well. One is so used to Kirby’s prowess in devising spectacular effects that his skill in subtle facial expressions and body language can come as a surprise. But not, perhaps, to Neil Gaiman: this is an example of one of the “moments of tenderness” he mentioned in his introduction.

At the bottom of the stairs the protagonist encounters two bullies, one of whom calls him a “cockroach” (p. 26). I was reminded of Forager in Kirby’s The New Gods, who belonged to a humanoid race that the gods of New Genesis once disparagingly referred to as “bugs.” Later in “Street Code,” when a “block fight” begins, one of the combatants addresses the other side as “y’lice” (p. 30).

A fight ensues between the protagonist and the bullies, that Kirby resents with the same palpable energy and violence as any of his superhero battles. I suspect that through the many fight scenes he drew in superhero comics, Kirby may well have been drawing upon and channeling the rage he would have felt in situations like this in his actual boyhood, and perhaps his anger at the bullies and oppressors he encountered in his adult career, as well.

Over the following two pages, 28 and 29, is an incredible double-page spread depicting the world just outside the protagonist’s tenement: cars race past a wagon slowly being drawn forward by two trudging horses, kids play catch anid the puddles in the street, while along the sidewalk, packed with pedestrians, customers peruse the goods at fruit stands, and a formidable-looking policeman angrily raises his nightstick, apparently shouting at the unseen malefactor responsible for a hurtling bag from above, its contents about to rain down upon the head of an unsuspecting man, seated on the sidewalk, reading his newspaper, while the tenement buildings loom towards the sky, linked by clotheslines that span the length of the street. This panorama of a Lower East Side street, suffused with activity, has just as much epic quality as any of Kirby’s science fiction vistas.

On the following page the protagonist’s battle against the bullies segues into a “block fight.” “Invasion from the adjoining street!” proclaims the narrator, as if he were describing a war between nations. “The face of the enemy was different! His speech was different! His roots were different! All we shared was American birth and clothes–and a fiery hate imported from the ‘old’ country!” (p. 30). Those lines would not seem out of place in X-Men, the superhero series that Kirby co-created that famously centers on the theme of racism. In his book Disguised as Clark Kent (see “Comics in Context” #200, 201, 202, 203), Danny Fingeroth shows how the immigrant experience and the accompanying sense of being an outsider influenced the work of Kirby and other early superhero comics creators. Here is yet another example.

Then comes time for the protagonist and his alliues to perform their combat ritual of rubbing the “misshapen spine” of a boy naned Georgie for good luck. Georgie does not appear to mind, but the ritual troubles the protagonist for reasons he has difficulty defining: “Something inside me was spilling. . . something the Street Code couldn’t touch. . . something only God and my parents knew about. . . ” (p. 33). Was it that the rubbing hurt Georgie, as it certainly does when the protagonist, overcompensating for his sense of guilt, does it? Does the protagonist realize that he and his allies are treating Georgie as some kind of freak? Or does the protagonist sense that Georgie’s deformity–“the terrible thing that nature had done to Georgie’s back”–was a sign of something immense: the universe’s capacity for cruelty? Georgie is actually far from lucky in life.

“Street Code” concludes with the narrator linking his own participation in gang violence to Georgie’s lot in life, as the narrator’s younger self stares directly out of the panel as if looking straight at the readers, confronting us with his epiphany: “I was hurting,” the narrator tells us, “hurting for Georgie and me–and the lousy things we had to do for the Street Code. . .” (p. 33). (Why, look: another reference to lice.) It is as if he feels that by participating in gang violence, he collaborates in the cruelty in the world that Georgie’s misshapen back symbolizes. Through this reminiscence about life on the Lower East Side nearly a lifetime before, Kirby succeeds in finding cosmic significance.

Next come two bits of information in the book to be filed under the heading, “If Only They Had Known.”

Kirby claimed that he enrolled in the Pratt Institute, a New York art school, but had to quit after only one day; Evanier casts doubt on the story (p. 34). Longtime readers may recall that last year the Pratt Institute held an exhibition of the work of nine contemporary alternative comics artists (see “Comics in Context” #122, which I originally titled “Gallery of Gloom”). I wonder if any comics aficionado at Pratt has any idea that Jack Kirby may have just barely qualified as one of their alumni.

Atop page 35 is a delightful surprise: a drawing of Popeye, that forebear of the superheroes, that Kirby did when he tried out to be an assistant animator at the Max Fleischer Studio. Evanier writes that the first Popeye cartoon on which Kirby worked in that capacity was “A Clean-Shaven Man” (1936) (You can see it here). That’s the cartoon for which Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini did the commentary track in Warner Home Video’s recent Popeye Vol. 1 DVD set (see “Comics in Context” #190: “Pop Eye-Con”). If only Paul had known about Kirby’s involvement, he could have mentioned it!

I also quite like the 1939 editorial cartoon that Kirby did for the Lincoln Features Syndicate, demonstrating his opposition to Hitler years before America entered World War II (something else that Danny Fingeroth will find interesting): it shows British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, now infamous for his policy of appeasement, petting a large serpent with the head of Hitler who has just swallowed the nation of Czechoslovakia whole (p. 37).

It seems that when he was at Lincoln, Kirby believed that if he did right by the syndicate, doing the best work he then could, the syndicate would do right by him. Evanier comments, “It was his spin on the American Dream. You make your boss rich and he’ll take care of you. All Jack’s life he believed in that, no matter how many times the bosses got rich and he didn’t” (p. 37).

I can understand why Kirby thought that. It would seem to be a basic rule of human interaction that if you show loyalty to someone, he or she will show loyalty to you. Treat people fairly and they will treat you fairly. Isn’t that the Golden Rule: do under others as you would have them do unto you?

But Kirby’s idealism continually clashed with the real world of incompetence, insensitivity, and greed. Evanier observes that “Either he’d work for men who didn’t know how to exploit what he gave them”–which seems to have been the case at Lincoln– “or for men who did and wouldn’t share” (p. 38).

Treading his biography of Jack Kirby, I keep thinking if Mark Evanier’s continuing reports at his blog on the Writers Guild of America’s current strike against movie and television studios and producers. The latter side, subscribing to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” has been simultaneously arguing that (A) distributing movies and TV shows over the Internet will be the cash cow of the 21st century, and (B) they can’t pay royalties to the writers of said movies and TV shows because no one will make money distributing them over the Internet. Maybe it depends on which side Two-Face’s coin comes down on.

Well, at least the movie and TV writers have a union that looks out for their interests and can challenge the policies of management. But there was no union for comic book professionals in Jack Kirby’s day, and still isn’t. He was on his own: the man who may be the one true genius in the history of American comic books, continually forced to struggle just to support himself and his family.

Kirby: King of Comics is so full of riches, both in artwork and in biographical information and insights, that it demands more than one week’s installment of this column. So I’m leaving off here, with Kirby in 1939, just about to enter the new comic book industry, and I’ll resume my review at the start of 2008.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Are you still looking for a last minute Christmas present to give a Marvel fan you know–or perhaps to yourself? Why not head over to Amazon.com and order Simon & Schuster’s new Marvel Travel Guide to New York City, which was written by yours truly? This little guidebook will show you just how important New York has been as the primary setting for Marvel stories from 1939 through the present. There are the fictional places, like the Baxter Building, where the Fantastic Four are headquartered, and Daily Bugle Building. and this book sill show you just where they would be located, if they really existed. Then there are the real places where Marvel stories have been set, like when future Daredevil Matt Murdock first met Elektra when they were students at my alma mater, Columbia University, or the time the Statue of Liberty came to life. (That’s right: you’ll have to read the book to find out more.) And then there are real places that Marvel fictionalized, like the art museum called the Frick Collection, which inspired Avengers Mansion. If you’re a Marvel fan and you’re coming to New York for the New York Comic Con or any other reason, you might well want to pick up this book. Using this Marvel Travel Guide, you can spend a day waking around Manhattan and locating the sites–real, fictionalized, and imaginary–of the adventures of your favorite characters.

I am also pleased to announce that New York University’s School of Continuing & Professional Studies will be offering my course, “The Graphic Novel as Literature” in the spring 2008 semester, starting in February, and my new course, “The Superhero as American Icon,” in the summer 2008 semester, beginning in May. But if not enough people sign up for them, NYU will cancel the courses. Let’s prove to them that there really is academic interest in the comics medium!

I’m currently collaborating on another book, and I am working on several book proposals in various stages of development. However, books on comics history pay less than you may think, and teaching a course at NYU for semester doesn’t quite cover a month’s rent. My New Year’s resolution for 2008 is that, partly due to new medical expenses in my family, I will renew the search for a steady full-time or part time job. If you know of any opportunities for a comics historian, reviewer and teacher, preferably in New York City, with Boston as my next choice, please let me know here at comicsincontext@aol.com.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Comments: 1 Comment

One Response to “Comics in Context #207: Royal Retrospective” Blake Bell Says: January 6th, 2008 at 2:33 pm Hi Peter. Let us know when the second part of your review is swinging around. Thanks, Blake Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Δ