Which late era Jack Kirby signatures are legit? 0

[PatrickG]

I've seen debate here over the 1991 pin collection. While this is certainly a different style of pen than Jack used in the 70s, there's been a line advanced that his 90s works are forgeries by Roz. Jeremy Kirby meanwhile stands by the 1991 pin signatures as authentic.

The point has been made that his 80s signatures tended to have a wobbly quality with a harder right lean but the problem I have with this line is that it starts with a presumption: that the 80s signatures represented an authentic deterioration and Kirby farmed out 90s signatures.

My problem with this is that it seems just as plausible to me that the "deteriorating" 80s signatures were farmed out during a period when he was quite busy and the 90s signatures were Jack resuming personal signing. His art, to my eye, didn't deteriorate in ways consistent with the 80s signatures and it strikes me he might have been better compensated for the 90s signatures and taken it more seriously to do them personally, whereas the deteriorating 80s samples might have been well wishes to fans where letting Roz take over wouldn't have seemed as... well... fraudulent as selling autographs to the pin company or Dynamic Forces that weren't his.

If the pin collections are forgeries, they certainly look more like Kirby's signature to me than the more widely held "authentic" 80s samples.

And even there, the difference between pens could account for part of the difference as he seemed to use cheap pens for impromptu signed books whereas the pin collection looks to be signed with a more expensive pen.

Another awkward possibility is that if he did farm out the pin collection autographs to family, he might have only done so with PART of them. There were 1500 autographs there. If he was running a mill operation with family, it stands to reason it would be faster if he split the cards into stacks and signed part of them to get through the process faster.

[PatrickG]

I decided to share one sample from an art tour and a few samples from different pin sets.

The last one is high number and sure looks different to my eye from the others with a "4" shaped J.

The next to last has a loop at the top of the J and is also high number.

If I had to guess, at least the last 500 were farmed out but I'm less certain about the earlier ones.

I think I lean towards the conjecture that he split the stack in two or thirds and did the low numbered ones...