Ok Story Time.
my wife and I did attend the Comic Fest in San Diego March 3-8 and found it to be quite small but nice. A few of the guests did cancel but I did get a few thing signed by Bill Sienkiewicz as well as found a few interesting new pieces here and there.
One person who I met and ended up have several long chats with was a person named Barry Ira Geller. Barry is not really involved in comics but as he says he is a facilitator and takes ideas and tries to put together a team of talent to accomplish what ever goal they wish to do.
In the last years of the 70's Himself, Ray Bradbury , Buckminster Fuller and others came up with a plan to make a theme park for Sci-Fi. To get the funds for such an undertaking Barry got the idea to produce a movie based on the book "The Lord of Light" by Roger Zelany and use those profits for the theme park. The book portrays the Hindu God's as an Alien race who has contact with early man.
To pitch the idea to investors Barry contacted the legendary Jack Kirby who agreed to produce several pages for the project. Jack penciled the drawing and Disney artist Mike Royer inked them.
As with most such projects the timing was bad as the economy was in a recession toward the end of Jimmy Carters term and Ira could not find enough people willing to invest so the project stalled. So in Nov of 1979 the US Embassy in Iran was seized and hostages were taken. Unknown to Barry or Jack the CIA got a hold of one of the prints Kirby made to be used in the sales pitch to investors and using it built up a fake production company that was then used a cover for a CIA operation inside Iran to rescue 6 Americans that had escaped becoming hostages with the help of Canada. The truth of this CIA operation did not come to light until 2000 and later become the basis for the Movie Argo.
The people who made Argo did not wish to negotiate with Geller or the Kirby heirs to use Jack's work so in the movie they had Ben Affleck's character Tony Mendez showing the Iranians penciled storyboards.
Here are a couple of prints I got from Barry that show the Kirby art that actually convinced the Iranians the film production project was real.
sorry I am going to have to put up links to my website cause photobucket is having major problems since they revamped it.
http://ryan.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=431774
http://ryan.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=431775
Here is also a good writeup on the art
https://www.laweekly.com/jack-kirbys-psychedelic-artwork-from-the-fake-movie-in-argo-resurfaces/
