What entered the collection
The Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center says Richard Howell has donated more than 50 pieces of original Kirby art from the collection he assembled with the late Carol Kalish. The gift is the largest donation of original art in the museum's history. Its range matters as much as its size: the pages cross Kirby's Boys' Ranch work, his 1960s Marvel period, projects for both DC and Marvel in the 1970s, and concept art produced for Hanna-Barbera in the 1980s. That makes the group useful not only as a set of display pieces but as evidence of how Kirby's drawing and production practices changed across publishers and media.
An unpublished Jane Foster image stands out
Among the announced works are pencils for an unpublished cover to What If? #10 from 1978, showing Jane Foster as Thor. The published issue explored Jane finding Mjolnir and becoming Thordis, decades before Marvel's modern comics established Jane as Thor in main continuity. The museum has not framed the unused cover as proof of a direct line to those later stories, and the surviving pencil art should not be treated as such. Its importance is more concrete: it preserves a visually explicit Kirby-era version of an idea that later became central to the character's history.
How the public may see it
The museum plans to select works from the donation for an exhibition in 2027 and says an online archive is in development. It has not announced exhibition dates, a complete checklist or a launch schedule for the digital resource. Those missing details define the next reporting step. For now, the acquisition transfers a substantial body of historically dispersed original art into a permanent institutional collection, where researchers and readers can eventually compare finished comics with Kirby's physical pages rather than relying only on reproductions.