Pop Culture Roundup: Jack Kirby! The Thing! Colorforms! Disneyland!

Before he became a comic book artist, and long before he co-created the Marvel Universe, Jack Kirby worked as an "in-betweener" for Fleischer Studios, Inc., on an assembly line animating "Popeye" and other characters.

Here's a rare Kirby-drawn sketch of the Sailor Man, signed by Kirby using his pre-fame name Jacob Kurtzberg. Posted on Twitter by the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center.

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Speaking of Jack Kirby, what's the deal with the the ever-changing stature of the Fantastic Four's ever-lovin' Thing? "Kid" Robson investigates.

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Collectors Weekly explores the history of Colorforms...

....a toy whose only two elements are a handful of colorful die-cut vinyl shapes and a shiny play surface upon which those shapes can be placed and repositioned. That’s it—colored forms and something to put them on. Yet despite its simplicity, or probably because of it, more than a billion incarnations of Colorforms have been sold, whether it’s the basic-colored, geometric original, which has been re-released in special 50th and 60th anniversary editions, or the latest 3D Deluxe Playset featuring characters from the children’s TV show “Yo Gabba Gabba!”

I had a pretty cool Batman set...

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BoingBoing presents the lost Disneyland prospectus.

...the extremely high-resolution scans were made from one of the three sets of pitch-documents Roy and Walt Disney used to raise the money to build Disneyland. There are no archive copies of this document. Neither the Walt Disney Company nor the Walt Disney Family Museum have it.