Imaginary Worlds - How Jack Kirby Made His Mark on Marvel

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

The production design of the film Fantastic Four: First Steps is an homage to the early ‘60s comics created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. While Kirby is best known for his bold, fist-popping drawing style, he was also a great storyteller who redefined what comic books could be. He was appreciated by hardcore fans at the time, but he never got the same media attention as Stan Lee and wasn't compensated for the fortunes his characters made. I talk with Kirby experts Charles Hatfield, Mark Evanier, Randolph Hoppe, and Arlen Schumer about where we can see Jack Kirby's influence on comics like The Fantastic Four, Thor, The Hulk, Captain America and Black Panther. And I explore Kirby's childhood at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, where every day was “clobberin’ time,”and he first learned how to use a garbage can lid as a shield. This week’s episode is sponsored by ButcherBox, Hims and ShipStation. ButcherBox is offering our listeners $20 off their first box and free protein for a year. Go to ButcherBox.com/imaginary to get this limited time offer and free shipping always. Start your free online visit today at Hims.com/IMAGINARY Go to shipstation.com and use the code IMAGINARY to sign up for a free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Please welcome the Fantastic Four. Fantastic Four First Steps comes out on July 25th. Herbie, how's that sauce looking? Okay. That is fantastic.

And it has been a long time coming. The movie rights to the Fantastic Four used to be owned by 20th Century Fox. When Disney absorbed 20th Century Fox, Marvel was finally able to bring the Fantastic Four into the MCU. But the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been very uneven for the past few years. They squandered a lot of goodwill among the fans, including me. So the studio is betting on the Fantastic Four. They are going to move them front and center in the next phase of the MCU. I am cautiously optimistic about this new

film for one big reason. They are introducing the Fantastic Four in an alternate universe where it's basically the 1960s, except with more advanced technology. Why the 60s? The Fantastic Four has a special place in the history of Marvel comics. The comic book launched in 1961, before Spider-Man, the Avengers, or the X-Men. They're known as Marvel's first family.

And when I was a kid, I loved Fantastic Four comics. I remember in the 1970s going to Newberry Comics in Boston and picking up original issues by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby from the 60s. Back then, they were considered cheap old comics. If I only had the foray to keep them, they would be worth so much right now. I looked it up on eBay. At that age, I also didn't know who Jack Kirby was. I just knew that there was somebody drawing Marvel Comics whose style I really liked. In 2018, I did an episode about Kirby. I want to replay it for you, but I've also revised it with new material and updates on

what's happening with some of the intellectual property that he developed. The Fantastic Four was particularly important to Kirby because he felt a close kinship with Ben Grimm, the streetwise member of the Fantastic Four who became the rock monster known as the Thing. Just like Kirby, Ben Grimm grew up in the Lower East Side, on a fictional street called Yancey Street, which is a stand-in for Delancey Street, where Kirby grew up. In fact, New York City just put up two commemorative signs on that street corner, saying Yancey Street and Jack Kirby Way. Mark Avenir worked as an assistant to Jack Kirby in the 1970s.

One topic you heard when you were around Jack was World War II stories. Number two was about his days as a street fighter kid in the Lower East Side. He had tons of stories about them, and of course a lot of them turned up in the Fantastic Four when Ben Grimm was fighting a thing called the Yancey Street Gang. The difference of course is that Ben Grimm was a big hulking monster and Jack was a little five foot four shrimpy guy who had to fight with his fists a lot. That poverty environment never left Jack. It never left most of those guys in that era. It never left my father that remembering how tough they had it when they were 11. A very powerful thing among Jewish kids of that era was, I have to provide for my family. I have to bring

money home. My father's salary does not meet our needs, so I have to go out and make $3 this week. In fact, Jack Kirby's granddaughter has stated that her grandfather named the character Ben because that was his father's name. The actor playing Ben Grimm in the new film, Eben Moss Bacharach, has said that he used that biographical material to influence his performance. And here is Kirby himself in a 1990 interview. Now Ben Grimm talks and acts just like I do.

Ben Grimm is a natural guy. He certainly does the things that I wish that I could do. He can tear an ash can up like we do paper, you know, and he can rescue people in manners that we can't. He can rip off the side of a building and maybe get the tenants out because it's going to explode. Ben Grimm can do it. Other people, it would take many, many hours. So let's look back at an artist that many comic book fans believe is truly responsible for creating characters that have dominated the MCU and beyond,

even if he didn't always get enough credit or compensation. This is the sound of a happy kitchen in my apartment. Oh, is that the steak sizzling? Yeah, it's going to be delicious. We recently got a delivery from ButcherBox, so we invited a friend over for some steaks. ButcherBox delivers great quality meat and seafood straight to your door, including 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. All ButcherBox proteins are sourced from partners who meet strict animal welfare and sustainability

standards. That means no antibiotics or added hormones. Ever. ButcherBox is committed to high standards, from how the animals are raised to how their team supports workers and reduces environmental impact. Plus, every box ships free. And the verdict on the steaks? That was amazing.

Yes, the meat is super tender. It's so good. It's so good. This was the best steak I've had in a while. Yeah, that's to me too. Best steak I've had in a long time. Even better than the restaurants, frankly. Yes, totally, yeah. Right now, ButcherBox is offering our listeners

$20 off their first box and free protein for a year. Go to ButcherBox is offering our listeners $20 off their first box and free protein for a year. Go to butcherbox.com slash imaginary to get this limited time offer and free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com slash imaginary. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. In the early days of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee was kind of like an editor who talked with the artists about what kind of stories and characters they were gonna create. Then the artists would sit at their desks,

plot out the narrative, figure out the emotional beats, and draw the comics, sometimes inventing characters that Stan had never seen until the artist gave him the drawings. For instance, the villain in the new Fantastic Four film is a character that Kirby created called Galactus. The costume design in the movie looks like it's going to be very faithful to Kirby's designs. Arlen Schumer is an illustrator and comic book historian. The urban legend goes that sometime in 1965, Stan Lee says to Jack Kirby, maybe in a phone call,

hey, Jack, have the FF fight a really big villain next month. He goes home to his basement studio in Long Island, and he comes up with the Galactus Silver Surfer trilogy of 1966, which in three issues, Kirby creates those three characters, along with this character, the Watcher. But Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the two biggies. When you pick up the actual comic book of that trilogy, they all say, written by Stan Lee, drawn by Jack Kirby. Stan Lee did write the narration and dialogue, and he had a unique, quirky style

that was the voice of early Marvel comics. So he got the credit, written by Stan Lee. The artists got a drawn by credit, but a lot of them felt that they should have gotten a story by or characters by credit. And in the media, it seemed like Stan was getting all the credit. Some of the artists quit, but Kirby stuck it out for years. In 2009, Kirby's descendants sued the company.

This could have been a groundbreaking case that could have redefined how much corporations should give to the original creators of their IP, but before the case could have gone to the Supreme Court, Marvel settled with Kirby's estate for an undisclosed amount. If Jack Kirby is responsible for developing all these characters that have become pop culture icons, I wanted to know where's the artist in the work? What can we learn about the man himself through the characters? To understand Jack Kirby,

you have to go back to his childhood. So I did, sort of. On a cold spring day, my producer Stephanie Billman and I visited the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It's a few blocks away from the building where Jack Kirby grew up, but his name was Jacob Kurtzberg.

Our tour guide was Jason Eisner, no relation to Will Eisner, another legendary comic book artist that I did an episode about. Jason brought us up to an apartment that was once owned by a Jewish family to give us a sense of what Kirby's childhood home might have been like. The apartment was tiny. I mean, today it would feel tight for one person, but entire families lived in these apartments, sleeping anywhere they could. Jason pointed out the window to a very wide street and told us that there used to be a very noisy elevated train there. And then under that elevated train was like the red light district for, you know, New York City.

So you wanted a taste for anything. You'd come on down to the Lower East Side and find it. OK. And that all that kind of criminal element, I think, was something that the neighborhood related to constantly. So tell me about I know that he famously got into so many brawls as a kid in this area. What was it like for kids growing up here? You know, I think that that spans the gamut.

But from all the sources, all the different sources from around the time, the big fear among the progressive reformers and everything was that those kids were going to be lost to the streets. That was a big fear. You know, they're going to go into crime. You know, if they're going to be a newsboy, that's the first step into being a gangster. You know, you're going to be lost to the street. Now, I mean, there was truth to that. I think that the period of time in which Jack Kirby was living down here was a really wild moment for the Lower East Side. Like there's a lot there's a lot going on. What about also like running through on the rooftops?

Oh, yeah. I mean, like kids when they hung out, hung out on the fire escapes, they played on the rooftops, you know, the roofs were also a place, I mean, it was a strategic place in a fight. You know, you'd get to the rooftop and you had the high ground, you know, and you could just be thrown whatever it is you found, you know, at your enemies, maybe at the police. So there was also some stories about how

he would take charcoal that he found on, like, just around, and he would draw on the tenement walls, like on the, in the hallways. Is that also something typical that kids would like draw on the walls or like something like that? Yeah, I think there's all kinds. There's graffiti. If they like to draw, they draw

and they're gonna draw on everything, you know, and they will be unstoppable. And I mean, Jack Kirby was so prolific. I mean, he, yeah, he was probably, he was probably hated by the super, you know? And I can imagine this is the super here, right? We're in the super's house. And she'd be like, what's the matter with you, Jack?

Give him some paper, you know? So yeah. They said he couldn't afford paper. Like it was something so he would just, he was so curious that he would draw on the actual walls. His, and then his, the super would get, go to his mom and say, okay, you can't have him drawing on the walls. And his mother was actually really impressed

when she saw what he was drawing. So she was just like, okay, don't do that. Yeah, and Stephanie, by the way, just winked. I saw it. Having read a lot of Marvel comics, those images of fights in the alleyways and chases on rooftops feel very familiar to me. Randolph Hoppe runs the Jack Kirby Museum and Research

Center, which is a website. It's a virtual museum. He says Kirby's childhood was perfect training for drawing slugfests. And Kirby really took to the fighting and started analyzing it. And he noticed that when he was in the midst of it, the time would slow down and he would, he could kind of see what was going on. Even to the point where he got on a subway, went up to the Bronx just to see if they fought

any differently up there. What would make Kirby's Heroes stand out was that every punch they threw packed a wallop. People make lots of jokes about Kirby in a way because of the huge fist that's on the drawing and then it goes to an arm and then the fist is two times larger than the character's head. I remember as a kid trying to copy that style of the giant, Kirby's giant fist, and then the arm and the body flying, you know, like in deep perspective.

And I was just like, why does this never look right? Yeah, it's something that he developed after at least 25 years of drawing every day. So, and then he had no formal training, right? Not really, no. The joke was that he went to Pratt, I believe it was, for a week or a day. And he would say that he drew too fast for them.

The sadder story is that he was in art school and then his father lost his job, so he couldn't go to art school anymore. And he had to go and get some work to help support the family. Jack understood anatomy as well as any artist who's worked in comics. He just didn't let it stop him from drawing an interesting body. Mark Avenir, who worked as an assistant to Kirby, thinks that Jack Kirby had such a unique

style with big blocky figures, thick black lines, and action moving in 3D space, because Kirby didn't have academic training. If you look at a lot of DC comics, especially the 50s when they kind of pasteurized the product down quite a bit, the way you know the emotion that's going on in some character's mind is to read his word balloon and see what he says. And he will probably tell you, I'm really annoyed or I'm despondent or whatever the thing. He will just tell you what's going on with him. And Jack's people acted with their whole bodies. And that made the moments that were tender or sad

or quiet all the more effective. The contrast was more extreme. And I think that was quite intentional on this part. Charles Hatfield wrote a book about Kirby called Hand of Fire. It's the same thing with the so-called Kirby crackle, which is that kind of dot or kind of smudges, those dot patterns that represent fizzing energy. It's Kirby's way of inking. Initially, I think it came from his inking.

It also became part of his pencil drawing, where he's trying to energize the surface. So in Kirby, you don't have a solid drop shadow that's a solid chunk of black. Instead, the shadow is broken up by a bunch of stuff. And therefore, the page has all this fizzing energy of just like mark making. It's like chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk.

And that is the energy of the violence that the characters feel inside them psychologically. But it's also just a desire to make pages fun to look at. And I think that with Kirby, it's trying to hit realism as a target, failing, frankly, and then revving it up to a point where the pages just often feel like they're on fire. Kirby's big break came in 1941.

This is back when everyone was trying to copy the success of Superman and Batman. He collaborated with a guy named Joe Simon to create Captain America, whose alter ego was Steve Rogers. But Steve Rogers didn't come to earth from another planet. He wasn't a billionaire crime fighter. Steve Rogers was a scrawny, scrappy fighter from the Lower East Side, like Kirby, at least until Steve Rogers got the super soldier serum.

Again, Arlen Schumer. All the fighting, all comes out of Kirby using the garbage can lid as a shield, like Captain America. Oh, did he really do that? Yeah, that's where it all comes from. You know, throwing the garbage can lid like a shield. And he appears in the spring of 41, seven months before we go to enter the war with Pearl Harbor.

And he's literally an overnight success. What was interesting about that first Captain America movie they made in 2010 or whenever is that they actually paid homage to the reality that they would dress up actors as Captain America to stump for war bonds. And this is all happening like immediately after he's created. Series E defense bonds. Each one you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guy's gun. I don't think it's a coincidence that two Jewish guys created Captain America, who was

famously punching Hitler on the front cover, back when a lot of Americans didn't want us to enter the war. You might have seen that image because people tend to post it online whenever Nazism rears its head again, which it seems to do a lot lately. And for Kirby, punching Nazis wasn't just a fantasy. Here he is again in that old radio interview. I once had six Nazis calling me up and they said, well, we're waiting for you downstairs and we're gonna beat the daylights out of you, for writing these stories about Hitler.

These were New York Nazis and they had a camp on Long Island. By the way, if this was a Marvel comic, there'd be an asterisk with an editor's note saying, see episode 57 of Imaginary Worlds, Man the High Castle, where I talked about the history of American Nazism, especially on Long Island. And so I said, hold on guys, I'll be right down. And of course I'd take the elevator down,

but there was nobody there. I looked in the street and of course they wouldn't be there. And I didn't feel disappointed and I felt disappointed. It didn't matter to me one way or the other. You know, if they wanted to fight, well, what the heck? I would do it. Baseball season is in full swing, but one thing I will not do

is wear my Red Sox cap around New York. Then again, I don't wear caps very much because I have a very thick head of hair. But I do know some guys who wear caps not just to support their favorite teams, but to hide a thinning hairline. Hims offers a range of prescription treatments that can be a home run for your hair regrowth. You might be able to see results by the time your team is in the playoffs. Get started from the comfort of your home. Fill out an intake form and a medical provider will determine if treatment is right for you. If prescribed, your treatment is sent directly to you for free. No insurance is needed and one low price covers everything from treatments

to ongoing care. Start your free online visit today at HIMS.com slash imaginary. That's H I M S dot com slash imaginary for personalized hair loss treatment options. HIMS.com slash imaginary. Individual results may vary based on studies of topical and oral monoxidil and finasteride prescription required. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. After the war, the comic book industry went into a slump, partially because comics were being attacked for spreading juvenile delinquency. Kirby drew anywhere he could. Eventually he joined up with Stan Lee and

Stan's cousin Martin Goodman. Their company, Atlas Comics, was falling apart. They renamed it Marvel Comics and started cranking out superhero after superhero. Part of the Marvel formula was to have the characters set in the real world, not Gotham or Metropolis. They had real world problems and they even dealt with real political issues, although in a comic booky way. It was during this time that Jack Kirby brought back Captain America.

As we know from the movies, Captain America is frozen, defrosted, and then joins the Avengers. In the early 40s, Jack Kirby created this character it's frozen, defrosted, and then joins the Avengers. In the early 40s, Jack Kirby created this character in a place of youthful optimism. But now, Kirby was a veteran who had been to hell and back. During World War II, he served under General Patton,

and this new incarnation of Steve Rogers is a man out of place. It's a theme that got picked up in the movies. with a mission, sir? I am. Trying to get me back in the world? Trying to save it. Randolph Hoppe thinks this may have been how Kirby felt as a veteran. A lot of those guys, my dad included, I mean they just you just didn't it was like you know let's just get the GI Bill get that that house with a picket fence and and and have this happy family and they really did not talk about that stuff. But Kirby did. He was deeply, deeply affected

by it and I think that's where Captain America's kind of deep affectation of not having acclimated to the life for the last 15 years or whatever it was at the time and suddenly coming out of it and still, you know, realizing his buddy has passed away and the world has changed. I can kind of get that. The other ex-soldier character that Kirby created was Nick Fury, who ran the spy organization SHIELD. In the MCU, Nick Fury is played by Samuel L. Jackson, but in the comics, the character looks like a tall, muscular version of Kirby, with a shock of white hair over his ears, always smoking a cigar, just like Kirby. In fact, Kirby's son Neil has said every time he looked at a drawing of Nick Fury, he saw his father.

I believe that Jack Kirby was what I'd call a method cartoonist. One of the reasons why his characters are so relatable is that he actually did put himself into a lot of them as he drew them. I think that sometimes he felt that he was Nick Fury and other times he was Ben Graham. As I mentioned earlier, there were a lot of parallels between Kirby and Ben Graham. But Charles Hatfield always thought of the Thing as being in the same category as the Hulk, the other famous monster slash hero that Kirby had a hand in creating. When you get to the Thing and the Hulk, you really arrived at a new conception of what a superhero can be, a grotesque blocky golem like character infused with

pathos filled with ungovernable anger great fury And even though Kirby superhero comics remain kind of bright moralistic and positive there's a lot of angst and a lot of ferociousness kind of embedded That's something that superheroes might have always had potentially in them

because the characters are freaks and outliers. But boy, Kirby really turned up the juice on that quality. I think when people respond to the character of the Hulk, for example, as they have so positively in films like Thor, Ragnarok or the Avengers films, they're seeing filmmakers, they're capping some of what Kirby infused those characters with.

So sad. Shut up. I lost my hammer! Why? You're not even listening! Stop kick-stuff! What are you crazy? Yes!

You know what? Earth does hate you. Again, here's Kirby from that old radio interview. My idea for the Hulk didn't come from any fancy, full place or anywhere. It came from a mother whose child was crawling out from under the fender of an automobile. The kid wasn't any was only two years old. This panicked the mother when she saw her child under the car. So the mother ran to the back of the car and she lifted up the entire car from the back because she had that strength of desperation. When I saw that, it suddenly dawned on me that there was a

character there that's inside all of us. That when we become enraged, that we can bend steel. I've done that myself. That's how the idea for the Hulk came about. Hulk came about. Jack Kirby was never very interested in the lone hero type characters. He liked to develop teams, but they were never super friends. This also came from personal experience. He grew up in a neighborhood that was incredibly crowded. People were getting on each other's nerves, and the neighborhood was divided by ethnic groups and gangs.

But in World War II, he served with all these different guys from across the country that he never would have met otherwise. He was impressed by how they could work together towards a common goal and a greater good. So Kirby had a knack for developing superhero teams that were mismatched, dysfunctional, but got the job done.

Like the Avengers. What are we, a team? No, no, no. We're a chemical mixture that makes chaos. We're a time bomb. You need to step away. Why shouldn't the guy let off a little steam? You know damn well why.

Back off. Oh, I'm starting to want you to make me. Charles Hatfield says there's another Kirby trait which we've seen in the MCU. Kirby loved to mix different elements of sci-fi and fantasy that shouldn't go together like magic and science. He was not the first comic book creator to do that, but he was good at it. You can look at the lineup of the Avengers, a book that he started or co-started, where you have a mechanical iron man and a Norse god and a shrinking ant man and so on, and see this kind of reckless blending

of all these conventions from different genres. When we look at Kirby's influence on these characters, the part where it gets really interesting for me is when we move away from Kirby's life experiences into his escapist fantasies. Kirby did not have a lot of schooling, but he read everything he could, and he was particularly interested in science. So he liked to imagine himself not just as a tough street fighter, like Steve Rogers or Ben Grimm, or a hardened veteran like Nick Fury. But he liked to imagine himself as a brilliant inventor like Reed Richards, the leading man of the Fantastic Four, who also looks a bit like Kirby,

with a shock of white hair above his ears. But Kirby's ultimate fantasies led him into the Cosmos. He created the Silver Surfer and helped to develop Thor, a tall, blonde, regal god-like figure that was very different from Kirby. Charles Hatfield says Kirby was particularly interested in blending the ancient with the futuristic, like on Thor's home planet of Asgard. When you're reading a Thor comic by Kirby, Thor, Odin, Loki, and all the rest in the mid-60s, you're seeing a kind of science fiction comic in which the gods of Asgard look into computer monitors

or similar instruments. Look at the production design of the movie Thor Ragnarok. The head of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, called it a quote, love letter to Jack Kirby. And the director, Taika Waititi, took Kirby's graphic imagery from the comics, which look like computer circuits designed by ancient Aztecs, and put them all over the film. The flip side to Asgard is Wakanda, the home of Black Panther. Jack Kirby often liked to create hidden worlds that few people knew about. And like Asgard, Wakanda is a blending of the ancient and the futuristic.

Which is so adaptable, kind of Afro-futurist aesthetic that the Black Panther film represents. I have great things to show you, brother. The entire suit sits within the teeth of the necklace. Strike it. Anywhere. Mm-hmm. Not that hard, genius. You told me to strike it.

You didn't say how hard. Arlen Schumer showed me concept art that Kirby created when he first pitched the character that would become Black Panther to Stan Lee and Martin Goodman who ran the company. He doesn't look anything like what you think of the Black Panther. His costume and cape are more like Captain Marvel, but the crucial element is that he's a fully exposed black man. There is no mask.

He's like a black Superman. Now, how does he wind up a year later, published in 1966, with a full face mask? Well, we also have a surviving piece of evidence that shows the Black Panther with a half mask like Batman, and that was rejected. Now, we don't have any written paperwork explaining why it was rejected, but all evidence points through. Either Lee or Goodman were afraid that their

southern distributors in 1966 in the middle of the civil rights movement that putting a black man on the cover they couldn't get away with. Arthur C. Clark once said that advanced technology may seem indistinguishable from magic. I feel that way sometimes if I order something online and forget that I ordered it. Then I see it sitting in my doorway a day later and it seriously feels like magic like oh yeah I remember wanting that thing and poof it's there. If you run an ecommerce business you know very well that packages don't arrive by magic. But it will feel that way if you use ShipStation. You can deliver a better customer experience with scalable features that help you ensure

accuracy, get shipments out the door faster, and keep customers happy with automated tracking updates that come with your company's branding. With ShipStation, you can sync orders from everywhere you sell into one dashboard. It's the fastest, most affordable way to ship products to your customers with discounts With ShipStation, you can sync orders from everywhere you sell into one dashboard. It's the fastest, most affordable way to ship products to your customers, with discounts of up to 88% off UPS, DHL Express, and USPS rates, and up to 90% off FedEx rates. During the time with this spot, another 1,400 packages were shipped with the help of ShipStation. Upgrade to a smoother shipping experience, go to ShipStation.com and use the code IMAGINARY

to sign up for your free trial. No credit card or contract required, and you can cancel anytime. That's ShipStation.com slash code IMAGINARY. As I mentioned before, Stan Lee was the public face of Marvel. He gave really snappy quotes to journalists. He did great rapport with the readers. When I read Marvel Comics as a kid, I always enjoyed reading his notes in the back, which he called Stan's soapbox. Kirby was not comfortable doing stuff like that, although that didn't mean he wanted to be out of the spotlight completely. Did he talk to you about Stan Lee and the frustrations

of Stanley taking too much credit? Incessantly. Yeah, he talked about it a lot. When Mark Avenir met Jack Kirby in the early 70s, Kirby let Mark in on a secret. DC Comics was wooing him. Kirby was ready to leave Marvel, and he wanted Mark to be his new assistant at DC. It was one of the most important yeses I ever said in my life. But DC didn't give Kirby the kind of relief that he was hoping for. I mean it was a big coup that they stole Kirby away. They put all these ads in their comics saying, Kirby is coming, the great one is coming. But DC had also created a culture among their employees that was very anti-Marvel.

There was this kind of shockwave through the company going, wait a minute, we don't like his work. That's not the style we want for DC. And so he had some hostility there. And I don't think anybody intentionally sabotaged him, but you can get into an environment where you can't be yourself, you can't do your own work. And when people aren't really rooting that strongly

for you to succeed. when people aren't really rooting that strongly for you to succeed. At first, Jack Kirby was given a huge canvas to work from. He created an interlocking comic book series called The New Gods. They included characters like Darkseid, who eventually appeared as the big villain in Zack Snyder's Justice League film. And if you're not familiar with The New Gods, you might be more familiar with them soon. Warner Brothers just announced that they're producing an animated series

based on the New Gods. The show is gonna focus on a character called Mr. Miracle. Charles Hadfield thinks this is another character inspired by Kirby's childhood. Scott Free or Mr. Miracle, given that he escaped a kind of hell, a hellish upbringing, speaks to some of the rough and tumble tenement world that Jack Kirby lived in as a very young boy,

or even as an adolescent. And Mr. Miracle is kind of like that. He's raised in a hellish orphanage that was not Jack Kirby's situation, but he's raised in a kind of hell and a densely impacted and punishing environment. And he has to find within him a voice, which is the Kirby source, the capital S, an almost, dare I say, godlike voice that will provide him with a tolerable human way out and some kind of freedom.

But back in the 70s, people had doubts about the new gods. First, Stan Lee had been the voice of all of Jack Kirby's characters at Marvel. Stan was a natural at dialogue and narration. Even fans like Arlen Schumer were disappointed when they discovered that when Kirby got a chance to write his own dialogue, it was clunky. Now remember his description of him as the thing? He moves like me, you know, guttural and instinctive. That was what his writing was like. So people who like Kirby's writing, it's like looking at the glass half full. They see it as, but it's exactly what it was like. You know, instinctual from the gut, three exclamation points, you know, everything in italic bold caps.

You know how when people on the internet write in all caps, it means they're shouting? All of Kirby's writing was like that. The other problem was that the new gods weren't selling well enough. Although Randolph Hoppe thinks they may have been selling better than DC realized. The business model was changing back then. Distributors weren't getting enough accurate information. But either way. They weren't getting good sales numbers. So after, what was it, two and a half years or something like that, they pulled the plug on Kirby's grand, intertwined mythology. That was a serious blow. This was a turning point in Kirby's career.

He realized he would never find the freedom and respect he was looking for. So he went back to the devil he knew, Marvel. But going back was worse than he expected. Marvel put him on Captain America and Black Panther, characters he was very familiar with, but he wanted to keep inventing new stuff. At the same time, his style was becoming outdated. The man who used to be called the King of Comics was getting a new nickname. They were calling him Jack the Hack. For Mark Avenir, this was sad and frustrating to watch. The number one motivating factor about him, which you have to understand to understand Jack, was that that his he wanted to feed his family. It was very important for him to have to pay the

mortgage, to be able to afford groceries, to be able to get pay his kids doctors bills and their dental bills. When you are that successful, you shouldn't be sweating that. When you have made your employer that much money, you shouldn't be worrying about doctor bills. You shouldn't, you should be free from that kind of thing at his age. And he was still struggling with that. By the 1980s, Kirby had left Marvel again.

He worked in animation and indie comics, but he spent a lot of his time fighting Marvel to get access to his own artwork. Kirby died in 1994. A few years earlier, he gave an infamous interview where he bitterly claimed to be the creator of every Marvel character he worked on, shutting Stan Lee out of the creative process entirely. Fans took sides. And I've noticed even today, in both camps, people saying, look, I'm willing to acknowledge that this was a creative partnership.

It's the other side that wants to claim that their guy should get all the credit for the characters. It does leave the fans in a strange predicament. The whole point of the Marvel method and Marvel bullpen was to collaborate and they weren't taking notes for future historians. They were just trying to meet their deadlines. And Kirby's family did get a lot of money in the settlement, although you could argue it's probably not as much as those characters are worth. There's also no shortage of people now talking about how great Jack Kirby was, but he's not around to hear any of it. Personally, I think the best way to honor his legacy is to keep telling the story of

Jack Kirby and Stan Lee with an emphasis on and. I think the word and should be honored as much as the names attached to it like when people talk about Lennon and McCartney. There's a whole world inside that little word and and Jack Kirby loved hidden worlds. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Arlen Schumer, Randolph Hoppe, Charles Hadfield, Jason Eisner, and Mark Avenir, who says we shouldn't go too far in assuming that Kirby identified with every character he developed.

Yeah, somebody one time wrote this article about how Jack must have identified with Antman because he was short. Jack's attitude was, who fantasizes about being the size of an ant? Whose dream is that? And if you're short, that's the last thing you want to be is shorter. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with podcaster J.R. Forrest-Eros about why

Superman fans have split into two factions, the different ideas about how the character should be portrayed. He's always thinking about how to make space for everyone else around him, right? He knows that he's the biggest guy, the strongest guy, he takes up the most space, he has the most powerful punches. And so he's always limiting himself for the good of everyone else. And I think, and again, no wonder the Manosphere doesn't like that vision. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show

that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple podcasts. If you support the show on Patreon at different levels, you get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug or a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest in every episode. Another way to support the show is to recommend it to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. Another way to support the show is to recommend it to a friend, post about it on social media,

or leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at ImaginaryWorldsPodcast.org.