Imaginary Worlds - Jack Kirby's Marvels

Episode Date: May 3, 2018

Avengers: Infinity War brought together characters from across the Marvel universe, but many of them already shared a common bond -- their creator Jack Kirby. While Kirby is best known for his intense drawing style, he was also a great storyteller who worked with Stan Lee to redefine what a comic book character could be. But their relationship was fraught. I talk with comic book experts Charles Hatfield, Mark Evanier, Randolph Hoppe, and Arlen Schumer about where we can see Jack Kirby's influence on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And I explore Kirby's childhood at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. Last year, I was in Los Angeles moderating a series of panels with industry executives, and I hadn't been out to LA in a while, certainly not talking to industry people. And I was struck by how often they were throwing around the term IP, which is short for intellectual property. I mean, intellectual property is like a wonky term you'd come across maybe in a Hollywood reporter article. But these execs were throwing it around like it was sexy. Well, we own the IP. They've got great

IP. They're sitting on IP that they don't even know what to do with. And I realized what was going on is that they were talking about the way that Marvel had changed the entertainment industry. Because Marvel was sitting on a goldmine of IP, but only Marvel understood that IP was gold. But there's another conversation that's been happening for a while among Marvel fans about that golden IP. Who created it? Because if you read the Avengers or Black Panther comics back in the 60s, they all said, written by Stan Lee. But those four words, written by Stan Lee, are probably the most controversial words in the history of comics. Now, back in the 60s, when all these superheroes were created, Stan Lee was more like an editor who would talk to the artists

about what kind of stories and characters they were going to create. And then the artists would go home, plot out the narrative, figure out the emotional beats, check back with Stan for notes, and then draw the entire comic, sometimes inventing characters that Stan Lee had never seen until the artist gave him the final drawings. They even included notes as to what they thought the dialogue should be, but Stan would fill in the dialogue and the narration, which he was really good at doing. I mean, he was the voice of those characters.

Therefore, he got the credit written by Stan Lee. The artists got a drawn by credit, but a lot of them felt they should have gotten a story by credit, even a characters by credit. And in the media back then, Stan Lee was getting all the credit for Marvel's success. Some of the artists quit, like Wally Wood, who had a big hand in creating Daredevil, and Steve Ditko, who many comic book historians believe is the true creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. But there was one artist that stuck it out for years. And he's the artist that a lot of Marvel fans believe is truly responsible for creating a lot of the IP that dominates the Marvel Cinematic Universe today.

Jack Kirby. In fact, after Marvel was bought by Disney, Kirby's family sued. And this could have been a groundbreaking case that would have redefined how much money corporations should give to the original creators of their IP. But right before the case could have gone to the Supreme Court in 2014, Disney and Marvel settled with Kirby's family for an undisclosed amount of money.

But if it's true that so many of these characters that we've become so familiar with over the last 10 years are really the creation of Jack Kirby, I wanted to know, where's the artist in his work? And what can we learn about the man himself by looking more closely at these characters? Alright, so to understand Jack Kirby, you have to go back to his childhood. So I did. Sort of. On a very cold, early spring day, my producer Stephanie Billman and I visited the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan,

which is just a few blocks away from Jack Kirby's childhood home, back when his name was Jacob Kurtzberg. Our tour guide was Jason Eisner, who was no relation to Will Eisner, the other great legendary comic book artist that I did an episode about last year. Jason brought us up to an apartment that was once owned by a Jewish family to give us a better sense of what Kirby's childhood home might be like. And the apartment was tiny. I mean, today it would feel pretty 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 said that used to be a noisy elevated

train. 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. Okay. 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 like 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 like, 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 throwing 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 in the hallways. Is that also something typical that kids would like draw on the walls or like just something like that? Yeah, I think there's all kinds. There's graffiti. If they like to draw, they draw and they're going to 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 on style. He was probably hated by the super you know yeah you i can imagine this is

the super here right we're in the super's house and she'd be like what's 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 so he would draw on the actual walls his 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, OK, don't do that. And Stephanie, by the way, just winked. I saw it. And as someone who grew up on Marvel Comics, those images of fights in the alleyways and chases on rooftops felt very familiar to me.

Randolph Hoppe runs the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center, which is actually a website. It's a virtual museum. And he says Kirby's childhood was perfect training for drawing superhero slug vests. 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 could kind of see what was going on. Even to the point where he got on a subway and went up to the Bronx just to see if they fought any differently up there. But what made Kirby's character 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, you know, it goes to an arm and then, you know, 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? 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. Marc Evanier worked as an assistant to Jack Kirby back in the 70s, and he thinks that Kirby had such a unique style, these big blocky figures and thick black lines and action going in and out of space, because Kirby didn't have academic training. He was entirely self-taught. If you look at a lot of DC comics, especially the 50s, when they kind of pasteurize the product out quite a bit, the way you know the emotion that's going

on in some characters' 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 is. 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. So Kirby's big break came in 1941. This is back when everyone was trying to copy the success of Superman and Batman. And he collaborated with a guy named Joe Simon to come up with Captain America, whose alter ego was Steve Rogers.

But Steve Rogers wasn't from another planet like Krypton. 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 that made him big and strong. Arlen Schumer is an illustrator and comic book historian. And he says it's no coincidence that two Jewish guys created Captain America, who was famously punching Hitler in cover after cover, back when a lot of Americans didn't want us to enter the war.

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. But not everybody loved Captain America. This is Jack Kirby from a radio interview from about 30 years ago. I once had six Nazis call me up and they said, well, we're waiting for you downstairs. And we're going to beat the daylights out of you, you know, for writing these stories about Hitler. These were New York Nazis and they had a camp on Long Island. By the way, if you had just read that in a Marvel comic, there would be an asterisk right now with an editor's note saying,

see episode 55 of Imaginary Worlds, Man the High Castle, American Nazis on Long Island. And so I said, hold on, guys, I'll be right down. And, of course, I take the elevator 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 a fight, well, what the heck. I would do it. 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

to keep working. And eventually, he joined up with Stan Lee and Stan's uncle Martin Goodman. Their company, Atlas Comics, was about to go under. They renamed it Marvel and started cranking out superhero after superhero. And the Marvel formula was to have the characters set in the real world, not Gotham or Metropolis.

And they also had real world problems. They even dealt with real life political issues, but you know, in a comic book way. And eventually those qualities would make the Marvel characters very adaptable to film. It was also during this time in the early 60s that Jack Kirby brought back Captain America. In the comics and in the movies, Captain America is frozen, accidentally, and then defrosted to join the Avengers. But he's also a man out of place. And that really reflected what Kirby had gone through. I mean, he created this character in a place of youthful optimism. But Kirby was now a veteran who had been to hell and back. In fact, in the war, he actually served under General Patton. And that definitely

informed the way he developed this new incarnation of Steve Rogers. I went under. The world was at war. I wake up, they say we won. They didn't say what we lost. We've made some mistakes along the way. Some very recently. You here with a mission, sir? I am. Trying to get me back in the world? Trying to save it. Again, here's Randolph Hopi. 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 house with the picket fence and have this happy family. And they really did not talk about that stuff. But Kirby did. He was, you know, he was deeply, deeply affected by it. And I think that's where

Captain America's kind of, you know, deep affectation of, you know 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 realizing his buddy has passed away and the world has changed. I can kind of get that. The other ex-soldier that Kirby created was Nick Fury, who ran the spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D. In the movies, Nick Fury is played by Samuel L. Jackson, but in the comics, he looks like a tall, muscular version of Jack Kirby, with a shock of white hair over his ears like Kirby, always smoking a cigar like Kirby. In fact, Jack Kirby's son Neil has said

every time he looks at Nick Fury, he sees 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 Grimm. Ben Grimm was the streetwise, tough-talking member of the Fantastic Four who turned into a rock monster called The Thing, who was also very fond of cigars.

And Arlen Schumer actually found this quote from Kirby. And it says, according to Kirby himself, the way The Thing talks and acts, you'll find that The Thing is really Jack Kirby. He has my manners. He has my manner of speech. And he thinks the way I do. He's excitable, very active among people, and he can muscle his way through a crowd.

I'm that sort of person. You got problems, you take a good look, pal. How bad could it be, right? Charles Hatfield wrote a biography about Kirby called Hand of Fire. And he always puts the Thing in the same category as the Hulk, the other famous monster-as-hero character that Kirby had a big 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's 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 of films like thor ragnarok or the avengers films they're seeing filmmakers they're tapping some of what Kirby infused those characters with. Thor's sad. Shut up. I lost my hammer.

You're not even listening. Don't kick stuff. What are you, crazy? Yes. You know what? Earth does hate you. Again, here's Jack Kirby from that old radio interview. I got my idea for the Hulk when I created the Hulk.

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 more than two years old. And this panicked the mother when she saw her child under the car. And so the mother went to, she 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 it suddenly dawned on me that there was a character there and that that's inside all of us that when we become enraged and we can bend steel unenraged, that we can bend steel. I've done that myself. There it was, right in front of me. That's how the idea for the Hulk came about.

Now, Kirby was never that interested in the lone hero type characters. He really liked to develop superhero teams, but they were never super friends. And this also came from his personal experience. I mean, of course, he grew up in this neighborhood that was incredibly crowded. Everyone was always getting on each other's nerves. And the Lower East Side was divided by ethnic groups and ethnic gangs. At the same time, he was amazed when he got to World War II, and he served with all these different guys from around the country that he never would have met otherwise, working together towards a common goal.

And so Kirby was really good at developing these superhero teams that were both charming and dysfunctional, like the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers. And that's another quality that translates really well to film. 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 a 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 see in the movies. Kirby really loved to mix different sci-fi and fantasy elements that really shouldn't go together. I mean, that's kind of the nature of comic books in general. It's always sort of like a weird mashup, but Kirby was particularly 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. But 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 to his fantasies. Like, Kirby didn't have a lot of schooling, but he read everything he could. 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, you know, this 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 remarkably like Jack Kirby with the shock of white hair above his ears. But Kirby's ultimate fantasies led him all the way into the cosmos. He created the Silver Surfer, and he said he liked to imagine himself as Thor, this tall, blonde, Nordic god-man.

And 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. In fact, if you look at the production design of the movie Thor Ragnarok, the director Taika Waititi, who called the movie a love letter to Jack Kirby, basically took Kirby's graphic imagery from those comics, which are like computer circuits designed by ancient Aztecs,

and put them all over the place. Now, the flip side to Asgard is Wakanda, the home of Black Panther. Jack Kirby also really loved the idea of a hidden world that few people knew about. And like Asgard, Wakanda is a blending of the ancient and the futuristic. Which is so adaptable, kind of Afrofuturist aesthetic that the Black Panther film now represents. I have great things to show you, brother. Ooh! The entire suit sits within the teeth of the necklace.

Strike it. Anywhere. Mm-hmm. Not that hard, genius! Arlen Schumer actually showed me concept art that Jack Kirby created when he first pitched the character that would become the Black Panther to Stan Lee and Stan's uncle 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 to 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. Now, if you notice

in all the Black Panther movie posters, you know, at every chance they take, he doesn't have that mask on. But Kirby never intended the Black Panther to be fully masked, period. Now, as I mentioned before, Stan Lee was the public face of Marvel. And, you know, Stan Lee had a great rapport with the readers. He gave really good quotes to journalists. This is not the kind of thing Kirby was comfortable doing. At the same time, he didn't want to be completely out of the spotlight. Did he talk to you about Stan Lee and the frustrations of Stan Lee taking too much credit? Incessantly.

Yeah, he talked about it a lot. Mark Avenir met Jack Kirby in the early 1970s. and that's when 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. I mean, he was known as the king of comics, and DC had all these ads saying that the king was 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, you know, people aren't really rooting that strongly for you to succeed. Now, at first, Jack Kirby was given a huge canvas to work from. He created four interlocking comic book series called The New Gods.

Now, you might have read that Ava DuVernay was just chosen by Warner Brothers to direct a New Gods movie. And those characters are unfamiliar to most people, so I'm actually not going to go very deep into them. But if they're developed right, I'm sure there'll be household names in a few years, just like all the other IP that Kirby worked on. But back in the 70s, there were two problems with the New Gods. First, Stan Lee had been the voice of Kirby's characters at Marvel, and Stan was a natural at dialogue and narration. And even fans like Arlen Schumer were disappointed when they discovered how clunky Kirby's dialogue was. 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 he was like, you know, instinctual from the gut, three exclamation points, you know, everything in, you know, italic bold caps. You know how when people on the internet write in all caps, it means they're shouting? Well, you see, all of Kirby's writing was like that. The other problem was that the new gods were not selling very well. Although Randolph Hoppe thinks they may have been selling better than DC realized, the business model was changing back then and distributors weren't getting 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,

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 get 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. They put him on characters he was very familiar with, Captain America and Black Panther. But he made his name creating new characters. In fact, he created more cosmic godlike heroes called the Eternals, which Marvel just announced they are also developing

for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But back in the 70s, Kirby's return to Marvel was not getting a good reception. The man who used to be called the King of Comics was getting a new nickname, Jack the Hack. And by the 1980s, he was fighting the company just to have access to his own artwork. Kirby's hardcore fans couldn't believe he was being treated this way,

but they also couldn't believe he was still willing to work at Marvel. Again, Mark Avenir. The number one motivating factor about him, which you have to understand to understand Jack, was that he wanted to feed his family. It was very important for him to pay the mortgage, to be able to afford groceries, to be able to pay his kids' doctor's 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 should be free from that kind of thing at his age. And he was still struggling with that. Kirby died in 1994. But 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 even now online, the arguments are pretty brutal. And I've noticed that people in both camps often say, look, I'm willing to acknowledge this was a creative partnership between Kirby and Lee. It's the other side that claimed that their guy should get all the credit for these characters.

But this does leave the fans in a strange predicament. Because we don't know who came up with what in those early story meetings. I mean, they weren't taking notes for future historians. They're just trying to crank out comics. And Jack Kirby's family did get a lot of money in that settlement,

although you could argue not as much as those characters are worth. And there's certainly no shortage of people who are talking about how great Jack Kirby was and he's still not around to hear any of that. But personally, I think the best way to honor his legacy is to keep telling the story of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee with the emphasis on the and.

I mean, I think that little word and should be honored as much as the names attached to it. Like when people talk about Lennon and McCartney or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. I mean, there's a whole world inside that little word and. And Jack Kirby loved hidden worlds. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Arlen Schumer, Randolph Hoppe, Jason Eisner, staff at the Tenement Museum, and Mark Evanier, who says we shouldn't go too far in assuming that Jack Kirby identified with every character that he developed.

Yeah, somebody one time wrote this article about how Jack must have identified with Ant-Man 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. Imaginary Worlds is part of the PandaPlay Network.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. you can like the show on facebook i tweet at emalinski and imagine worlds pod you can help support the show by clicking the patreon or gofundme buttons on my site imaginaryworldspodcast.org and if you have fan art to send for our merchandise competition you can email it to contact at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.