Jack Kirby

After watching UCLA's impressive victories over California and Stanford, I have come to the following inescapable, undeniable, irrefutable conclusion: The Bruin players have finally begun listening to Steve Lavin. The Bruin players have finally stopped listening to Steve Lavin. Take your pick. RONALD LEVINE Van Nuys To all you fair-weather UCLA fans who have castigated Steve Lavin all season (and me for defending him), do him a favor. Stay off the bandwagon.

When Marvel Comics' newest superhero flick, "Fantastic Four," opens Friday, Lisa Kirby hopes to see her father's name in big, bright letters. Her father was artist Jack Kirby, who, along with Stan Lee, created Marvel's flagship foursome. Comic book fans may also remember Kirby, who died in 1994, as the co-creator of such icons as the Hulk and the X-Men. Yet many accounts of the Marvel movies manage to focus solely on Lee's contributions to the Marvel universe.

Steve Sherman, 50, is a puppeteer and writer who co-owns the Puppet Studio, a Hollywood company that creates three-dimensional characters for film, television and commercials. 1. "The History of Animation: Enchanted Drawings," by Charles Solomon It's a big book about cartoons. It's one of those books you can look at over and over again, with pictures and stories, like a big coffee table book. It contains all the different characters and styles dating back to the early 1900s.

Walt Disney Co. may not get full ownership of many of Marvel Entertainment's most famous superheroes if new copyright claims by the family of the late artist Jack Kirby have merit. Four children of Kirby, who co-created a number of Marvel's best-known superheroes in the 1960s including the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Thor and the Hulk, have served 45 "notices of termination" to Marvel, Disney, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures. The notices seek to regain copyright control of certain characters.

Dave Cockrum, the illustrator for the landmark 1970s overhauling of the X-Men that turned a relatively obscure Marvel Comics title into a 1980s publishing sensation and eventually a major film franchise, died Sunday. He was 63. Cockrum, of Belton, S.C., died after a long battle with diabetes and related complications, according to a statement from Clifford Meth, a family friend and an organizer of fundraisers to assist the artist and his family during his protracted medical care.

"Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" performs an act of what superhero comics fans might term "retcon" - or retroactive continuity - by returning to the beginning of the superhero industry and telling the tale again with a number of previously invisible heroes suddenly added to the story: the men and women who created superhero comics. Superhero comics has always been a bit of an oddball, a niche genre with a small but fiercely devoted fan base and a penchant for stories about flawed, outcast heroes who struggle not only to save the world but find their place in it. Sean Howe's book traces the byzantine histories of the colorful characters on the comics pages and in the Marvel offices, from the inception of the superhero in the 1930s through the modern era, and finds the real and the fictional equally laced with epic triumphs, tragic reversals of fortune, backstabbing and melodrama.

Who's been the most lucrative creative force in Hollywood in this short century? You could make an argument for Stan Lee, the irrepressible P.T. Barnum of comic books who, in the 1960s, put pen to paper and came up with Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil and the Hulk -- a colorful parade of properties that in the last six years has grossed $1.6 billion at the box office.

For most of its 56-year history, the comic book has been treated as an unloved stepchild by critics of the graphic arts and literature. Ron Mann's "Comic Book Confidential," which is screening at the Nuart Theater, is the first documentary feature on the subject. Anyone who is interested in the comics should plan to see it, but anyone who knows much about them will probably be disappointed by its lack of depth. "Confidential" includes interviews with artists representing the superhero genre (Will Eisner, Jack Kirby)