Craig Yoe of the Arf Lover's blog has a short but nice interview with Coop.
My first exposure to Kirby (other than the cruder Golden Age stuff in Feiffer's book) was in an issue of Kamandi. My first reaction to his art was something like "THIS IS WRONG!!" My tiny kid brain couldn't process the crazed concepts and gonzo unconscious pop-culture pilfering of Kirby's writing, and his art (at his peak then, just before the beginning of his "Baroque Era" return to Marvel) curdled my brain like cottage cheese. I don't know if I'm allowed to count him as an influence, but I definitely see him as a Picasso of comics, a Colossus who invented whole genres single handedly, moved through several significant stylistic periods, each influencing countless artists, and was such a unnatural creative force that it is almost impossible to find someone else as significant in the history of comics.